It’s official. The Defense Department will announce the winner of the Air Force’s KC-X tanker contract on Thursday afternoon at 5:10 p.m. East Coast time. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz will join Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn and Pentagon acquisition executive Ash Carter in the Pentagon briefing room to crown either Boeing’s 767-based NewGen Tanker or EADS North America’s A330-based tanker model as the winner. Stay tuned for more coverage.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.