Boeing just won a hard fought $35 billion dollar Department of Defense contract.

In a surprise twist in a long-running saga, the Air Force on Thursday awarded a $35 billion contract for aerial fueling tankers to Boeing rather than to a European company that builds Airbus planes.

This was a huge deal in 2008, when the Pentagon choose EADS, for Airbus is not an American company, and most of the work, and thus jobs would be offshore. That's your taxpayer dollars going offshore, not hiring American workers, not circulating back through the U.S. economy.

Pentagon officials said decision was based solely on price. Boeing’s bid was more than 1 percent below that of its rival, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the officials said. If the bids had been within one percent, the Air Force would have weighed 92 additional requirements for the plane as a tiebreaker, and some of those were widely thought to favor the larger EADS plane.

This contract eventually will be worth $100 billion dollars and a huge number of good paying jobs, 50,000 directly and over 100,000, eventually, will be in the state of Washington.