Posted on 07/13/2002 10:22:41 AM PDT by knighthawk
Next year, people who were not born when the European Fighter Aircraft project started will join the voters’ role. In the same year will be conceived Britons destined, in their sixth-form modern history studies in 2020, to study the project as a lamentable example of indecision, grandiosity and waste.
Nobody under the age of 30 has lived in a time when British and continental governments were not dithering about the project.
Conceived in 1972, born in 1985-86, the sickly child, now 17, has almost expired at least twice, and on Wednesday this week the Prime Minister was forced to deny categorically that Britain’s massive commitment to its survival was again under threat. When the results of the Comprehensive Spending Review are announced next week we may find out. It is likely that a grumbling Treasury has been badgered once again by whizzbang defence enthusiasts into agreeing one more heave in a long line of one-more-heaves for their ruinously expensive toy. The Chancellor will maintain our commitment to buy 232 EFAs.
Here begins an ignorant rant against an immensely sophisticated military project whose proper appraisal can be made — and whose true merits can better be debated — only by defence experts. And that is the problem.
Without years of research and a consuming personal interest in weaponry and strategy, we are outsiders to military chatter. But a fascination with war inclines those who share it towards a general enthusiasm for its toys and an instinctive deference for its practitioners. Its practitioners, meanwhile, sense doubt in the civilian population outside the barbed-wire fence and, for all the venom of their internal scraps, close ranks against the rest of us. They suspect that if we do kill off one of their pet projects then the money saved may be redirected away from defence altogether; and they are right.
I do not quite mean that anybody who knows anything about the defence industry is automatically in favour of every newfangled killing machine that comes on to drawing boards; but I do think it would be hard to be an iconoclast and remain comfortably within “the defence community”; those who do cannot easily draw intelligent laymen into detailed discussion. We end up noticing uneasily and out of the corner of the eye what we suspect are monumental cockups, lazy arguments and extravagant decisions, largely unmonitored by the civilian world.
We must go by hunch.
Mine is that the European Fighter Aircraft has been made obsolete by the ending of the Cold War, that the project has not been well or consistently supervised, that in Germany and Spain a determination not to seem “un-European” has armoured it against attack, and that here in Britain a wish to calm the Royal Air Force’s terror of extinction (after the Royal Navy got Polaris, then Trident, and an ever-expanding airborne role) has added political weight to the EFA’s militarily flimsy case. On the latest estimates the 232 EFAs which the Ministry of Defence makes increasingly desperate attempts to pretend Britain needs, will have cost this country nearly nineteen billion pounds.
No, you did not mishear me. Nineteen thousand million pounds: about £350 from every man, woman and child here.
No estimate of the final cost has ever survived long, however, and no new estimate has ever been less than the one it replaced — except when we decided we could not afford to fit guns to our EFAs. Inexplicably, the gun-struck Ministry of Defence saw them as the obvious economy, and though all the other buyers want guns on their planes, we shall have to make do with coloured smoke.
A pity to disable the guns because the “F” in EFA stands for “fighter”. As the “A” stands for “aircraft” it can be only a matter of time before the MoD decides we cannot afford wings. Still, at least the “E” for European will still be valid, except that France dropped out decades ago, Norway has just quit the bidding, Sweden is involved with a rival (the Gripen, probably better value) and Greece has come up with an hilarious excuse for wriggling out: Athens says it wants to see how much the Olympics cost before deciding. And the Germans, who keep trying to get out and then losing their nerve, show every sign of heartily regretting they ever joined.
That the aircraft (now being remarketed as the “Typhoon”) looks like an airborne camel, and is one of the ugliest things seen in the sky since the first wild turkey took wing, would be immaterial if foreign potentates bought toys on the basis of need. They do not. They want virility symbols. Were this one of those periods when we are on his side, we would probably now be trying to sell this hardware to Saddam Hussein.
Britain has planned to take almost 40 per cent of announced sales of the fighter aircraft: its biggest customer. We have a one-third stake in work on the project, and hope to recoup some of our losses. But except for the recent sale of a handful of EFAs to Austria (a surprise decision, perhaps made for other than defence reasons) the EFA partnership of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain has failed to sell a single aircraft to any country — other than each other.
Saudi Arabian interest has waned, Turkey has cooled, and early hopes that South Korea might buy look forlorn. Chile and Brazil no longer seem likely purchasers.
Australia, once puffed as an intending buyer of up to 100 planes — it was our one big hope — has gone elsewhere. We cannot even get our best friends to take the thing.
The farce is that the Australians have opted instead for a predominantly American fighter, the F35 (or Joint Strike Fighter) in which, through BAe Systems, the British taxpayer also has a stake.
When the EFA was begun it was expected to reach the market long before the F35, but because it is now so hopelessly late, the two have become competitors. They have been joined by the part-Swedish Gripen. We are shelling out for the Gripen, too, via BAe Systems. Three products in a fierce battle for sales — and the British taxpayer subsidising all three.
One of the main reasons for this is that though the EFA partnership has hawked it a “multi-role” aircraft it has so far been able to fund only its development for air-to-air combat. It can shoot other fighter aircraft down with short-range missiles but is not adapted for bombing. Prepare for the military-industrial complex’s next big funding pitch. “Have we come so far only the spoil the ship for this ha’porth of tar?” Ridicule comes easy. The EFA is ugly and over-priced, and I could rest my case there, but that would be unfair. A significant measure of quiet opinion says that, whatever political and organisational shenanigans have surrounded the project, and though we may gulp at the cost, the Typhoon is shaping up in trials (most recently, unannounced, over Afghanistan) as quite a good aircraft, and agile.
For this I must take its pilots’ and expert observers’ word.
The question is: quite good, and agile, for what? Though the Ministry of Defence speaks of its multi-role capability, that is stalled for lack of funds. The EFA is a plane for airborne combat with enemy planes.
Who are the enemy? All the logic of the project used to point to the Soviet bloc. That threat has gone. It is difficult to envisage battles in which we British would want to be involved in dogfights in the sky with sophisticated fighter-aircraft flown by a militarily formidable enemy power — unless an ally in such conflicts was the United States. But if America was involved, why spend more than £18 billion on our own planes? Is Britain likely to go in against Iraq, Libya, China, Russia, alone? Our private wars are almost certain to be little ones, the kind beneath Washington’s notice.
When one puts the question, “which enemy?”, the Ministry of Defence falls back on a grave “who can say?”, as though its was the prudential voice, and we are rash to think we can guess who might or might not attack. The truth is otherwise. It is deeply capricious to justify the haemorrhage of billions according to timetables adrift by decades, with an owlish “who knows?”. If they know, let them tell us.
If they do not, let them at least describe possibilities in terms we find persuasive; let them paint scenes we can imagine.
No, if the European Fighter Aircraft did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent it. The question is, where we go from here? The most recent EFA postponement moves the promise of the first aircraft from June to “later this year”.
At almost any point since about 1990 the case for carrying on has been that, though earlier we might have cancelled, it is too late now. But if we must throw good money after bad, let us throw less of it. It is within our power to cut the number of aircraft we promise to buy. The Chancellor could do that next week. And I bet he doesn’t.
PS: buy American.
The writer is an idiot. Cutting the number of planes changes nothing except how many planes the English get. The "sunk costs" for the development remain the same, and that's what they are really on the hook for, especially since most of that money has already been spent.
That said, the euro-Fighter was always a bad idea and a collossal waste of money, meant only to assuage some fragile egos by showing that they could develop a firstline fighter just like the Americans and the Russians.
That would only be true if they brought Russia into the project ten years ago. Now they've already spent their development money and it's time to start production. There aren't any cost-saving plans around that will save the development money that they've already spent.
The Eurofighter was obsolete on the drawing board.
Funny how that works.
I dunno. I think the Russians can find other target drones that don't cost near as much.
Although I'm a European myself, I've been completely unable to figure out what kind of sense this makes. Well, I guess my thinking is just not sophisticated enough for this continent...
Duh, make that "I live in Europe." I hate being referred to as a "European" ! :-)
Actually, it's the British who are confused about how to refer to 109 (billion or thousand million?), and what the word billion means (109 or 1012?).
Just like they are confused as to whether they are British or Europeans. Whether they want to continue to measure distances in miles or convert to kilometers. Whether they want to continue to use their own money or convert to euros. Whether they want to be free or live in Socialism. I wish they made up their minds--these questions are such no-brainers!
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