Imagethief was interested to read in the New York Times today an article about the wrangling going on over the  United States Air Force's new monster procurement deal for aerial refueling tankers, one of the biggest defense programs ever. A little back story: There are two consortia bidding for the deal. One is led by perennial American defense contracting heavyweight Boeing. One is led by Northrop Grumman and European aerospace manufacturer EADS (parent of Airbus). Both consortia are, in  fact, thoroughly international.

A couple of months ago, in a surprising upset, the Air Force gave Northrop Grumman/EADS' bid the nod over hometown champ Boeing. Needless to say, Boeing was not going to go down without a fight, and the whole thing has gone into appeals and recriminations, and (joy!) blown up into a multifaceted PR war. Check out, for instance, this relatively recent pro-Boeing blog managed by the hawkish think-tank, Center for Security Policy. Another one of the Center's recent publications is "EADS: Partner or proliferator?" You get the idea. No mention of Boeing's own recent devastating scandal troubles, or the fact that they are reported to have sleepwalked through much of the procurement process. But EADS and their PR proxies will no doubt be reminding everyone they can reach. Imagethief has no horse in this game. He's just a PR voyeur and loves to watch.

Now, in response to a Boeing appeal, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has ordered the Air Force to review the bid, citing some apparent irregularities. I mention this --and go into all the digression above-- because I was interested to see the two reaction quotes, one from each major bidder and both pulled from press releases, that ran in the Times' article. Here they are:

At Boeing on Wednesday, Mark McGraw, a vice president for the tanker program, welcomed the ruling and said in a statement that the company looked “forward to working with the Air Force on next steps in this critical procurement for our warfighters.”

Reaction from Northrop Grumman was subdued.

The vice president of communications Northrop Grumman, Randy Belote, said in a statement: “We respect the G.A.O.’s work in analyzing the Air Force’s tanker acquisition process. We continue to believe that Northrop Grumman offered the most modern and capable tanker for our men and women in uniform. We will review the G.A.O. findings before commenting further.”

Like virtually all press release quotes (identifiable in news stories by the telltale phrase "...said in a statement"; no newspaper will ever admit to taking a quote from anything so grubby as a "press release"), these were never actually uttered by human beings. They are corporate communication (a bad word in Imagethief's book), designed to convey in the trojan horse of allegedly human utterance an institutional point of view and various favorable associations. You can test the ridiculousness of most press release quotes by reading them out loud. Your ear processes words differently than your eye. It's shocking what goes out the door.

There is a large amount of formula involved here, which you can see in the way that both of these quotes try to make the whole affair all about bringing the best to Our Boys and Girls in Uniform. They are referred to in the Boeing statement by the unfortunately jargony word "warfighters". Apparently "airmen" wasn't urgent enough. Or perhaps, like me, they didn't want to offend female military pilots (they can easily beat me up), but thought "airpersons" less than sonorous. If so, Imagethief applauds their progressiveness and refined ear.

In fact, both companies are following an unwritten rule of corporate communication, which is that, financial releases aside, whatever is going on is almost never about the money. It's always about the customers, the people, the partners, the man-in-the-street. Or the airpersons and warfighters, as the case might be. And not at all about something like USD$40-80 billion dollars over the life of the program. There is really no other way either company could have worded their release without seeming crass (short of dumping "warfighters"). That's a shame, because Imagethief would have crawled naked over a mix of crushed beer bottles and Lemonheads to see a quote like this from Northrop Grumman, "They're taking it like sissies. Our airplane kicked their airplane's ass. We're taking the 40 billion bones. Get over it." Not, of course, that I'd write anything like this if I was working for them. I'm just saying, it'd be refreshing.

But, no, everyone was very diplomatic, and made sure to stress that it was all about bringing the best to the airpersons. In fact, I'd say that, convention and sentiment aside, it would be perfectly OK for the companies to be clear that they're in this for the bottom line. The stock market, which has been reacting to the ups and downs of this deal, certainly is. The responsibility for ensuring that our airpeople get the best lies with the Air Force and an organization that no doubt always has the noblest of intentions at hear, Congress. Congress wouldn't judge such an important deal on shallow terms, would it?

In Congress, “Buy America” proponents lead the charge for Boeing, deriding the EADS plane as a “French tanker,” even though it would be assembled in Mobile, Ala.

Oh, well. At least we got over that "freedom fries" thing.