Using the same skill set he employed
during the presidential campaign, President-Elect Trump has crafted another
public drama around a storyline of his choosing. A highly predictable
story arc – a series of subplots that unfold as time passes – is in store for
the public.
Trump has done this sort of thing before.
And unlike any previous president, he is an incredibly successful
impresario/performer in episodic reality television. A substantial
fraction of the electorate follows politics at the level of reality television,
and Trump knows how to reach them.
His early-morning tweet of December 6 was
an attention-grabbing opening scene:
His tweet and subsequent Trump Tower lobby
comments about the Air Force One contract ignited a massive amount of coverage
and comment. But Act One of the story, as seen by the public Trump is
targeting, is that he is criticizing waste in government spending and picking
on something that is actually a perk of the presidency.
Trump’s use of
the word “cancel” in his tweet was his customary dramatic start to a
negotiation, letting the other side know that it has to give something in
exchange for what it thought it already possessed. While the media
nattered over its appropriateness and even legality, the public understood that
Trump was calling on Boeing to do better.
The day after his tweet, Trump kept
the storyline alive by confirming the commonsense interpretation of
what he was up to with the use of the word cancel:
"Well I
think the planes are too expensive," Trump told NBC host Matt Lauer on the
"Today" show. "I spoke to a terrific guy yesterday, the head of
Boeing, and I think we're going to work it out, but you know, that's what I'm
here for — I'm going to negotiate prices."
Here is why I think Trump is going to be
able to save money and in addition accelerate the project’s delivery
date. Boeing first responded to
the next CEO of its largest customer and revealed the current economic stakes:
Boeing on
Tuesday responded to President-elect Donald Trump's criticism over
the cost of a new Air Force One plane, saying the contract is actually for $170
million.
The sunk costs so far do not exceed $170
million, mostly spent on preliminary planning and engineering on a
four-billion-dollar (eventually) contract. The sunk costs so far are much
less than the federal government squandered on Solyndra, by comparison.
This is the perfect stage for Trump’s people to come in and put his
cost-conscious philosophy to work. Trump’s views are being brought to
bear early in the process. There is no half-finished hulk in a hangar
at Paine Field in Everett,
Washington that would need to be abandoned. Quite the contrary: Under
this contract, Boeing and its contractors are mapping out a project that will
take eight more years, because a lot of equipment has to be imagined, scoped
out, planned, and engineered, and then made to work in concert with a lot of
other engineering underway. It’s a huge task, and inevitably, problems
arise. That is how progress is made: by learning from failures. But
it is slow and expensive.
The airframe itself is the least of the
cost. The extensive capabilities demanded of a flying White House is what
is so expensive. While I am not knowledgable about the specifics of the
project, we do know already that a project like Air Force One probably is not
being conducted under strict budget discipline. When you push the
state-of-the-art, incremental improvements tend to get very expensive.
Often one can get 90% of the performance for a small fraction of the
price of the most exotic, custom-engineered new trailblazing technologies.
And it is understandable that nobody wants to pinch pennies when Air
Force One’s capabilities are involved.
Under a regime such as this, contractors,
including Boeing, get to develop potentially very valuable new technologies on
the taxpayers’ dime. This, incidentally, is the sort of thing Airbus
claims is a subsidy to Boeing.
That is why two airplanes can cost four
billion dollars or more.
My guess is that Trump wants to use the
basic approach he used when he saved the foundering Wollman
Rink project in Central Park. Instead of the advanced technology
chosen by the city’s officials (Freon circulated in expensive and fragile
copper pipe – in the name of energy savings), Trump brought in much cheaper
established technologies (circulating brine) that used a little more energy but
were reliable. Trump also got the advice and help of the best people in
the business of building ice rinks. Trump brought in the project in four
months and 25% under budget, not the two years the city had planned for its
next attempt to finish the rink six years after it had been closed for
renovations.
The new Air Force One is incomparably more
complex than an ice rink, but Trump’s approach to the cost and completion
issues of advanced technologies is likely to draw on the pattern of action he
displayed at Wollman.
I would assume that Trump’s people who
review the contract and negotiate with Boeing are going to want to hear the
arguments against using more established technologies that are off-the-shelf or
cost-effective modifications of existing components and systems. There
may be ways of redefining capabilities that are currently demanded. For
instance, the specifications for this Air Force One reportedly demanded four
engines in the name of reliability.
But the new-generation high-thrust
engines are so reliable that old restrictions on twin-engine flight are
disappearing. Twin-engine airliners routinely fly over vast empty oceans
many times a day. The era of four-engine airliners is closing, with the
747-8i and Airbus 380 both languishing as their backlogs shrink. There
would be no economic advantage in substituting a Boeing 77W or 787-10 for the
747 frame, since the four-holers are available and
are being discounted in order to move the metal, as they say in the
industry. But there may well be other specifications that safely could be
relaxed.
If the Trump administration follows this
approach of using more existing systems and weighting cost and speed more
heavily than seems to have been the case to date, it could set up a great
long-term story: bringing in the new-generation Air Force One not just on time
and on budget, but ahead of the old schedule for substantially less money.
If this is the approach taken, expect Trump to highlight every step of
the process, perhaps even visiting the Assembly Building to thank the workers
building the plane and providing irresistible images.
Air Force One is a potent symbol of the
nation and the presidency, right up with the White House. Donald Trump
understands the power of symbols, and he consciously or intuitively grasps that
a whiff of heroism attaches to the plane in popular culture.
In his own life, Trump has demonstrated a
grasp of the symbolic power of a personal airplane as a branding device.
The Trump Organization flies a fleet of private jets, of which the 757
nicknamed Trump Force One is the flagship. This documentary from
the Discovery Channel is actually instructive for understanding how Trump runs
his private airline, demanding a lot and employing people dedicated to getting
it right and on time.
This dramatic storyline of Air Force One
is exactly what is needed to change the behavior of Pentagon weapons buyers.
They need to weigh costs more heavily into the equation and eschew
all the fun of pushing the state-of-the-art. New procedures and other
changes from above are one thing, but getting buy-in from the operating staff
is important. The Air Force One model could become a very valuable tool
in changing the culture of weapons procurement. In addressing military
culture, which values leadership by example, Trump’s use of the president’s
private craft as the example of how to wring out costs is sheer genius.
If this all plays out as predicted here, The Air Force One Story will be
far more than a personal media stunt; it will serve as an effective tool of
reform of our military.
Cost savings on Air Force One: maybe a
hundred million to a billion dollars?
A stronger military delivering weapons
systems on time and under budget: priceless.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/understanding_trumps_air_force_one_political_theater.html#ixzz4SGfTiWpg
