Page 102 - Five Forces of Americanisation Richard Hooke 04072025 final post SDR1

The UK Defence Industry in the 21 Century
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The Five Forces of Americanisation

Appendix 2

CASE STUDY II
Assessing the Value of IP as leverage: the KC-46 Air Tanker

Cobham’s ability to remain a reliable supplier to all its customers was clearly in doubt over a protracted
period. Clearly, the US Department of Defense (DoD) or Boeing Corporation, its prime contractor on
the KC-46C tanker programme, played an active role in the process of overseeing or even directing
Cobham’s performance and, ultimately, on the company’s ultimate sale.
Having acquired the entire Cobham group a few days before Christmas, 2019, Advent finalised its sale
of Cobham Mission Systems to US$18bn turnover US power management group, Eaton Corporation,
barely eighteen months later, in June, 2021. It is probable that both Boeing and the US DoD would
have found it necessary to approve the transaction. As KC-46C prime contractor, there is also no doubt
that Boeing’s “special measures” oversight team will have been a constant presence in Cobham’s
Mission Systems operations for the last several years. Certainly, Cobham’s Chief Executive devoted a
great deal of his time working in the USA to resolve the difficulties. One would assume that the UK
MoD would also have aimed to maintain an influential oversight role on Cobham’s overall
performance over the last decade.
The story of the KC-46A is a remarkable commentary on the US defence procurement and fulfilment
process: not just how it designs, develops, builds and delivers the end product of extremely lengthy,
complex and expensive programmes into service but how dogged and determined the DoD remains
in pursuing a successful outcome.

The question for the UK here is whether the UK’s position on this programme constituted significant
value that should have been preserved. Value that was not only intrinsic, in terms of the technology
it embodied, developed over decades and supplied to the US Air Force, but also in terms of its uniquely
critical position within a major US defence system used in expeditionary warfare. Most likely a
coalition that would include the Royal Air Force.

The following press coverage provides enlightening insight. I have reproduced Dominic Gates’ words
up to 2019 here since, as a distinguished reporter for the Seattle Times (published in Boeing’s major
civil aircraft manufacturing home US city) and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the 737MAX,
he has followed the story closely since from the outset. Although he retired in March, 2025, the author
has contacted him for further comment, so far without reply.

January, 2019
“The U.S. Air Force on Thursday finally accepted and took ownership from Boeing of its first KC-46A
air-to-air refueling (sic) tanker, though it pointed to flaws in the aircraft’s refueling (sic) systems that
must be fixed.

“Rather than celebrate the tanker milestone — at the end of an 18-year wait that began with a
procurement scandal and continued through a bitterly fought political battle to wrest the contract
away from Airbus — the Air Force issued a short statement critical of the remaining shortfalls in the
tanker’s capability. And actual delivery of the jet to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kan., now
three years late, is still weeks away.”
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(Dominic Gates, The Seattle Times, 16 January, 2019)

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