I agree. The EADS-NG aircraft met the specs. The Boeing team spent most of their time trying to convince the USAF to change their specs to something Boeing had tooled-and-ready.
Occam,
not sure you have been following this all that closely if that is what you think. there is really only one organization to blame for this mess and it is the U.S. Air Force procurement team.
The original 'lease deal' was the start of it. People are in jail because of that.
then the USAF issued the bid to replace their narrow body tanker.
EADS didn't like it so they complained (you see, they didn't have an appropriately sized tanker, only the 330). So, USAF decides to change the scoring criteria mid competition, effectively giving Airbus credit for bigger, more gas and more pax. none of which were parts of the original bid.
USAF picks airbus. Boeing complains. GAO investigates and finds, wait for it, USAF procurement screwed the pooch, again. the only thing they've done right so far is cancel the current abortion of a competition and leave it for the next admin. which should clean house in the procurement dept as a starting point.
So, I completely disagree that it is as simple as "EADS-NG aircraft met the specs." which specs, the original, the altered to match the airbus tanker specs or the not enough time for Boeing to gin up a 777 or 787 version to compete since the new specs are weighted towards a much larger aircraft than a 767.
Aviation Week has been covering this quite exhaustively. If you are relying on the AP or Reuters for this info, then you are only getting about 10% of the story and that mostly wrong.