The U.S. Air Force plans to allow a defense company to pick its new electronic-attack jet, an unprecedented move that just might herald the end of an era for the most prominent maker of large intelligence aircraft.

Some industry executives and watchdogs said this cedes an inherent military function to a private firm and warn that previous decisions to put a company in charge of an expensive military project have led to failure and wasted money. But Air Force officials say it’s the best way to replace its 42-year-old EC-130H Compass Call aircraft.

“We made this decision after looking at all the options — laying out pros and cons, looking at a variety of different methods that we thought we could work our way through this,” Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force military deputy for acquisition, said in an interview.

While the 14 Compass Call aircraft look like old C-130 cargo planes on the outside, they are filled with highly classified, state-of-the-art electronics gear that allows airmen to disrupt communications on the battlefield below. The EC-130H has been heavily used in both Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 15 years, listening in on al Qaeda, the Taliban, and, more recently, ISIS.

Now they are wearing out and growing ever more vulnerable to advancing enemy weapons. Bunch said the Air Force plans to transfer 10 of the electronic packages — largely made by BAE Systems and installed by L3 Technologies — to new aircraft that can fly further and higher and offer better reliability.

But which new aircraft? Instead of soliciting bids from rival plane makers, Air Force leaders are handing the decision to L3, which will perform the transfer and reinstallation. This appears to be unprecedented.

“I can’t give you an example specifically of a contractor picking the aircraft,” Bunch said.

He’s not alone. Pentagon officials and industry sources say this is the first time in the Air Force’s 70-year history that it will let a defense contractor choose the type of aircraft that will make up a small fleet of new jets.

Return of the LSI

The Compass Call replacement is structured as a “lead systems integrator” program, an acquisition method that grants a contractor the power to make decisions typically made by the military. It’s a twist on previous times the Air Force has used this type of contract to allow contractors to buy subcomponents — like a radar — to go inside a plane.

“You can’t really call an aircraft a subcomponent, but in this case, the real technology stuff and everything else is the guts. It’s what’s inside the EC-130 platform and we’re buying something to carry it,” Bunch said.

Here’s how acting Air Force Secretary Lisa Disbrow defended the decision in January. “Extensive analysis determined this lead systems integrator approach is the most efficient, expedient and cost effective means to re-host the Compass Call capability onto a non-developmental commercial derivative aircraft,” Disbrow wrote in Jan. 31 letters to Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

But programs built on the lead systems integrator, or LSI, model have a record of delays and ballooning costs, like the Army’s Future Combat Systems and the Coast Guard’s Deepwater programs.

“Some observers have expressed concern that LSI arrangements can result in the government having insufficient visibility into many program aspects such as program costs, optimization studies conducted by LSIs for determining the mix of systems to be acquired, LSI source-selection procedures, and overall system performance,” the Congressional Research Service wrote in 2010. The Pentagon and other federal agencies used the LSI model “in large part because they have determined that they lack the in-house, technical, and project-management expertise needed to execute large, complex acquisition programs. It is not altogether clear what all of the reasons are for this insufficient expertise determination.”

One observer went further, calling the use of LSI for Compass Call an “awful idea.”

“Using lead systems integrators is a terrible approach for taxpayers, and Congress has rightfully checked the ability of the government to use this method in the past,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight. “LSIs verge on performing inherently governmental functions and have perverse incentives that we've found usually don't benefit the warfighter.”

However, the Congressional Research Service noted in its report that supporters of the contracting method say it “can promote better technical innovation and overall system optimization. This is largely because private-sector firms often have better knowledge and expertise, when compared to federal government agencies, of rapidly developing commercial technologies that can be used to achieve the government’s program mission and objectives.”

Aircraft integration work — modifying a commercial plane built to carry people into a mobile command center with lots of computers and workstations — is a highly specialized business. L3 has done the job for other Air Force intelligence planes, including the MC-12 Liberty and RC-135 Rivet Joint.

Bunch cited this experience in defending the Air Force approach.

“We’re trusting L3 to make … the decision based on what they’re got to do to rehost the equipment and get a platform that we can sustain in the long term,” he said. “We understand what L3’s rates are for what they’ve modified before. We’ve done a lot of business with them before and they’re actually the ones doing it at the right security level for the Compass Call mission that we have today.”