The former Air Force Secretary says that it’s enough to say that you just want to be friends:

Former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne thinks the service should be pitiless with losing contractors, so they’re not encouraged to endlessly protest important contracts. Excessively kind language, he said, leads the losers to think they only lost by a hair. In the KC-X tanker competition, “We should have been harsher on the loser,” Wynne said during an interview July 28…….

One of the things that I’ve always said is that in order for the tanker contract to go to EADS, in an election year, it wasn’t a close thing, which implies to me that Boeing has a significantly inferior product.

Wynn is strongly implying the same thing.