"The Boeing Company is running more than a year behind schedule and
billions of dollars over cost on a highly classified program to build
the next generation of reconnaissance satellites, forcing the government
to shift an estimated $4 billion from other spy programs, senior
government officials said on Wednesday.
The Boeing project was initially set at about $6 billion, but the
National Reconnaissance Office had to add substantially to that figure
to address what auditors have described as large problems with the
program, the officials said. Even so, the officials said, the
reconnaissance office has had to scale back its expectations for the
satellites' initial performance to well below what Boeing had promised."
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...g-spy-sats.htm
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pentagon adviser Richard Perle came under fire
on Friday for failing to disclose financial ties to Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA
- News), even while championing its bid for a controversial $20
billion-plus defense contract.
Perle co-wrote a guest column in The Wall Street Journal newspaper this
summer praising the plan to lease then buy 100 modified refueling
planes, a year after Boeing committed to invest up to $20 million in
Trireme Partners, a New York venture capital fund in which Perle is a
principal.
"If ever there were an argument that traditional business practices are
ill-suited for defense 'transformation', the saga of the tanker-leasing
proposal would count as People's Exhibit A," Perle and a colleague wrote
in the Journal on Aug. 14.
"It stinks to high heaven," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common
Sense, a Washington-based federal budget watchdog group, of Perle's
failure to disclose his ties to Boeing in the Wall Street Journal piece.
"Mr. Perle's entitled to his own views on the tanker deal," said Peter
Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a
government and corporate accountability watchdog. "We just think that
the public's entitled to know that he has a relationship with Boeing
when he's expressing his views.""
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/031205/arms_..._boeing_1.html