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809At first blush, it is fair to ask what idea Dan Hancock of Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems in Forth Worth, Texas, had when he made the statements reported in the 4 September issue of the Oslo Aftenposten. The F-16, produced in Forth Worth, is today in competition with the EFA 2000 Typhoon Eurofighter for an order of 20-30 aircraft under a budgetary allotment of $1.35 billion, which no one knows will be available as planned as from the start of 2000. Hancock told the Aftenposten journalist that “when Norway decides which party is to be awarded the contract, the country is also taking a decision with regard to the future relations with the United States and its defense industry. Simply speaking, this is all about how Norway’s long-term relations with the United States will continue.”
Norway is a small country on NATO’s extreme Northern flank, characterized by an Atlanticist orthodoxy that is especially strong since its estrangement from Europe prevents it from playing any role in the European process. The Norwegians have always shown great loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance under US leadership. The terms employed by Hancock provoked virulent reactions, manifesting both surprise and indignation. A Norwegian parliamentary source of the highest level saw in the statement “inadmissible political pressures on the part of a company from private industry which has no authority of any sort to claim to be in a position to speak in the political area.” Immediately upon realizing its blunder, Lockheed Martin recanted. But the harm had been done -- not that the F-16 had lost its chances, but because of the fact that the statement had transformed the very substance of the competition. An independent observer in Oslo remarked, a few days after the Hancock statement: “Niels-Morten Utgaard is the most listened to commentator in Norway. He is a true?blue Atlanticist, in keeping with the image of the Norwegian establishment. He did not criticize Hancock as much as draw the conclusion that now seems obvious: ‘This fighter aircraft procurement is now a political choice.’ The fact that the Norwegian establishment allows this is in itself much more important than the choice itself.” It reduces to a simple logical dilemma: an admission that the procurement is a political choice constitutes acceptance of Hancock’s logic (the continuation of US?Norwegian strategic links is dependent upon the choice of the F-16); it therefore constitutes an admission that the possible choice of the Typhoon, the alternative to the F-16, is also “a political choice”; finally, it constitutes an admission that Norway -- until now an unqualified supporter of Atlanticism and therefore with no need to chose -- is now faced with having to choose.
The Norwegian case is obviously very interesting. Since there is now an issue of “political choice”, what is the NATO choice? The Europeans -- primarily the British and the Germans -- present the Typhoon as a European aircraft, and as a European aircraft developed under NATO auspices. Is this approach acceptable for the Norwegians? Is not the F-16, the American choice, also a NATO choice? But because there is a “political choice”, the two competitors cannot both claim to be the NATO choice. From that point on, the procurement becomes political, it becomes an imbroglio that is a true reflection of the trans-Atlantic situation, in which the different European and American candidates are allies within NATO and at the same time strategic adversaries. Bringing such contradictions to the light of public scrutiny is a very dangerous undertaking.
The matter is further complicated by certain rumors that swirled around the Norwegian dilemma in September. Independent sources have advanced the idea that, in the spirit of the Americans, “it would be difficult for the Norwegians to participate in the JSF program, if they were to rule out the American candidate in the current procurement.” (Norway participates as an observer in the JSF program, and it is seen as a potential program partner.) This perspective politicizes the issue still further: there is the choice of the F-16 or the Typhoon, and there is the prospective choice of participation in the JSF. According to our sources: “In this spirit, the American position tends de facto to become more radical. The JSF is now presented as an American program in which non-Americans can participate only under conditions that can become draconian, more than as an American program that is becoming international with non-American participants.”
In any event, American statements place the Typhoon in a delicate position (We had already mentioned this probability in Context No. 34, To The Point, p.8). The Typhoon will now have great difficulty in presenting itself as a NATO aircraft; if it presents itself as the European option, it fuels the adversarial atmospherics with the Americans by escalating to the political level what has been primarily a commercial confrontation.
Clearly, the Americans continue to increase the pressure. That is the case in Chile, where they at one time supported their F-16 offer with the prospect of a free trade agreement negotiation after the Fast Track legislation vote -- a prospect which, in the current context of the President’s relations with Congress (exemplified by the Senate’s refusal to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty) constituted “an absolutely surrealist speculation”, in the words of a European analyst. It is also the case with the UAE, where the Pentagon is increasing the pressure for signature of the contract for the procurement of 80 F-16C-60 aircraft from Lockheed Martin, at a time when it is by no means certain that the American national security community will consent to the transfer of the technologies involved. But it is against the United Kingdom -- perhaps unexpectedly but not really illogically -- that the American pressure is the strongest.
Ultimately, the Norwegian affair, indirectly involves very strong pressure on the British, to the extent that the Typhoon offer has been pushed to such extremes that it has become clearly political, with the British being by far the most “political” partner in the Eurofighter partnership. Alongside that, there is the BVRAAM/AMRAAM affair, which exemplifies Anglo-American relations today and the increasingly delicate position of the United Kingdom torn between its special relationship with the US and its European ambitions.
The British want to buy, with their Eurofighter partners, an advanced air-to-air missile for the EFA 2000 -- the BVRAAM (Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missile). The preferred choice is the Meteor, developed specifically to satisfy the requirements of the BVRAAM program by the Matra BAe Dynamics (MBD) Anglo?French group. At that point, the Americans, in August 1999, offer the British a fifty-fifty share in the development of an upgrade of their AMRAAM to BVRAAM specifications. The Americans promise a cost of less than 50% of that of the Meteor and affirm, according to industry and government sources reported in the 13 September 1999 issue of Defense News, that “there is already an implicit promise of access to classified US missile technology.” Even so, the maneuver does a poor job of concealing its aim, which is to counter the development of the European Meteor and, according to BAe spokesman Charles Miller, “to maintain the US monopoly in this weapon area”.
The American proposal is clearly political. It places the British before a dilemma which they are running into more and more: favor the “special relationship” with the US or be European -- and European with real UK participation. For its part, BAe reacted both astutely and constructively: by associating Boeing with the Meteor program (See Infra.) The Blair government has therefore reacted in a way that does not conceal this predicament: by letting it be known that it was delaying the BVRAAM program decision.
The British are thus feeling American pressure in all the areas that such pressure can be brought to bear. They can moreover observe certain realities inherent in any trans?Atlantic cooperation, in the ultra-sensitive technology transfer field. Currently, the merger between BAe and GEC-Marconi Defense, which involves companies in Italy, in France and in the US, has been approved in the UK, in Italy and in France. In the US, on the other hand, the Justice Department is dragging its heels on the matter, specifically as regards the Tracor company, a company which was taken over by GEC-Marconi in 1998. According to an independent European expert: “It is characteristic that it is the Justice Department that is pursuing the matter, without DoD intervention. DoD has not lifted a finger in this affair. It is letting the Justice Department go about its business, just as it did in March 1998 to indicate to Lockheed Martin that it would not countenance the proposed take over of Northrop Grumman. That does not mean that Washington is going to block the merger between BAe and GEC, but the message is clear: this merger does not go down well with the Americans, and they are doing everything that is bureaucratically possible to thwart it, in particular with a maneuver that risks destabilizing the position of BAe in the stock market.” In the meanwhile, BAe has probably been able to gauge the draconian conditions which go along with any acquisition of an American company that works with sensitive technologies, and which are encapsulated in the expression “American Eyes Only”: GEC-Marconi has not been authorized to check out the Tracor research department that are working on the Pentagon “black programs”. The technologies which are under study there must remain in American hands. If GEC?Marconi (and tomorrow BAe) were to contravene this condition, the Pentagon would cancel all pending orders with Tracor. Seven years ago, the France’s Matra experienced the same contretemps with the Fairchild firm that they had acquired. The Pentagon’s message to the British is clear: “No special treatment; no special relationship”.
The constant American pressure and bureaucratic intransigence are to be found in other programs, where there is less an issue of export than of cooperation. That is the case with the MEADS program, the only current major trans-Atlantic cooperation project, in which the relations between the Italians and the Germans, on the one side, and the Americans on the other, are becoming extremely difficult. The view of the Europeans is that the Americans who, on the one hand, preach a voluntarist approach to cooperation and implement certain measures in that direction, on the other hand, persist in reinforcing certain measures which restrict that same cooperation.
Manfred Nordheim, Chairman of Daimler Chrysler-Aerospace for North America, offered this comment on what is increasingly becoming an incredible situation: “It seems as if one hand of the US government does not know what the other is doing.”
This situation is to be found in the field of export controls and in the strategy that is applied to those controls. A European industry source, who knows American industry well, offered this explanation of the Lockheed Martin-Norway incident: “There are indications that Hancock did not act without having received the advice of certain American officials, when he made his statements on Norway. It is very conceivable and highly probable. Quite simply, he took the advice of a hard-line faction of the Administration, and it proved very counter-productive.” In the meanwhile, Hancock has been promoted to the post of Vice Chairman, replacing “Micky” Blackwell, who is retiring.
This disarray can be explained by the splintering of power in Washington, and it is aggravated by the weakness of the current president. It constitutes a considerable handicap in trying to assess American positions in the export sales contracts currently being negotiated. This means that to the tactical maneuvers, which are part and parcel of every negotiation of this type, is added an element of fundamental uncertainty, which tends to play an increasingly intrusive role. This factor of uncertainty is clearly important in trans-Atlantic weapon sales matters. It is an unusual situation, which now constitutes a major factor in the evaluation of any export offers made by the Americans.
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