The " If " Word
Sans, I wrote: " I used the "Uh-oh " title because for one, the above quote underscores the predicament facing the other competitors if the mission assessment weights speed heavily."
I added emphasis on the "if" word, because as others have also recognized, there is no telling how the speed advantage of the S=97 will be weighted*.
Allow me to add the " if" word to the $15M price tag too. One option available to SA would be to just import the new OH-58 "system" into the production version and save the time/expense of doing something new that is unneeded. An uneducated guess is that the SA quote had something like that in mind. An option open to the Army ( and we taxpayers ) is to say to SA: "Sold at $15M, Fixed Price Contract". Where I am going here is that it might be a bad assumption for competitors to assume that the $15M figure doesn't represent some pencil work in Ct.
* Haven't read everything available on the subject, but has the Army mentioned going to a competitive fly-off for this replacement program? Reason for asking is that the payoff for having done that for the UH-1 replacement program ( UTTAS ) was huge. It also made the real differences between the SA and Boeing machines crystal clear. So, if there is a fly-off and the S-97 gets to be a finalist and is a candidate, the Army will ( if they construct the fly-off as they did the UTTAS ) determine for themselves the answer to that question, for that mission.