That could make the major European nations far more effective partners for the United States in projecting power and maintaining security around the world in places such as Afghanistan.

However, developing those capabilities would mean that the Europeans would also be formidable rivals for Boeing and other domestic U.S. manufacturers in markets that large U.S. defense contractors have maintained comfortable monopolies or huge superiority in for more than half a century.

And at a time when the U.S. manufacturing base has been so heavily eroded in recent decades, first by Japan and the smaller East Asian industrial tigers, and then by China, losing such an important area of continuing U.S. high-tech global supremacy would have grave national repercussions.

Also, supporters of the KC-45A deal with Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautics Defence and Space Co. have neglected to note what the effects the gravitational power of $100 billion in added investment and revenues in aerospace will be on the U.S. and European aerospace industries.

Boeing and its industry teammates may well be forced to lay off scores of thousands of their most valuable engineers, designers and technicians. Once lost, that kind of experience and expertise is almost impossible to reassemble again. And as we have repeatedly noted in previous columns, it is the accumulation of expertise concentrated in tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and skilled workers that is essential in ensuring efficient completion of ambitious high-tech programs on time and within budget.

Boeing's own negative experience with the Future Intelligence Architecture program of next-generation intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites demonstrated the dangers of taking such work away from a company -- in that case Lockheed Martin -- that had decades of successful institutionalized experience with such systems, and giving it to another corporation that, however impressive and reliable its work was in its own areas of expertise, would have to develop that kind of institutionalized experience from scratch.

In the case of the competing air tankers programs, it is Boeing that has now more than 50 years of successful maintenance and operating experience of such aircraft, and it is EADS that will have to learn these skills from scratch.

Currently, the U.S. aerospace industry has only one-seventh of the employees it had a quarter century ago under President Ronald Reagan. By contrast, EADS will receive the resources to hire and train thousands more engineers and technicians. This one decision therefore would threaten to undermine the Bush administration's long-promised efforts to maintain and expand the traditional U.S. lead in global aerospace and high-tech industries.

Boeing says losing the contract would cost it and its partners the creation of 44,000 jobs in the United States. EADS-Northrop advocates countered that their program would create 25,000 jobs, primarily in Alabama, where the assembly plant for their new air tanker is to be located.

As criticism mounted, they dramatically revised those figures to claim that in fact 48,000 U.S. jobs would be created. As most of the work in actually constructing the huge aircraft would be carried out in Europe rather than in the United States, there is ample cause to be skeptical about these revised figures.

On balance, it appears likely that the U.S. Air Force's contract with Northrop Grumman and EADS will stand. But even if that is the case, political controversy over it is likely to continue. The decision to award it could well become a political football in the U.S. presidential election campaign and in many congressional races.

It is already striking that the issue has crossed party lines, with senators and congressmen from states like Alabama that stand to profit from the contract in favor of it, whether they are liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, while Republicans and Democrats alike from states that stand to lose from the deal because of their reliance on Boeing and its industry partners fiercely oppose it.

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