In a Jan. 27, 2003, letter to Rep. Howard Berman, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that Raytheon’s design for the ground-based midcourse’s exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) was not chosen because it was necessarily the best technologically, but because of Boeing’s misuse of proprietary information. The Department of Defense spent $800 million over eight years to determine whether Boeing or Raytheon would win the EKV contract, only to be forced to hastily call off the competition in December 1998 and award it to Raytheon after discovering Boeing employees had misused proprietary software of Raytheon’s. Boeing’s EKV would be kept on as a “hot back-up” and funded at about $4 million per month until three months after the fourth EKV flight test, held in January 2000. No punitive actions were ever taken against Boeing. CDI Research Associate Victoria Samson looks at the contract’s tortuous history.
