Defense Secretary Robert Gates must take over the troubled contracting process for the Air Force’s new midair refueling tankers. The current tankers are decades old and the Air Force needs the new planes. But its repeated bungling of the procurement process shows that it is incapable of doing the task on its own. Healthy competition among defense contractors - on both sides of the Atlantic - is the best way to ensure that the Pentagon buys the best possible gear for the lowest possible price. But according to a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office, there was nothing healthy about how the Air Force awarded the $35 billion tanker contract to the team of Northrop Grumman and the European company EADS over rival Boeing. The government watchdog agency did not say which was the best plane. But it accused the Air Force of breaking its own contracting rules.