Britain and US deadlocked over stealth technology
The US and Britain remain deadlocked over sharing stealth technology, more than a week after a top British official threatened to pull out of the multinational, £143bn (€210bn) Joint Strike Fighter project.
British defence officials are reporting some progress in negotiations, while maintaining their demand for access to specific software codes and weapons systems and threatening to go elsewhere to upgrade their warplanes.
“We have a back-up plan if we do not get a deal that’s sufficiently workable,” a Ministry of Defence spokesman said. The spokesman would not offer more details about back-up plans but noted that the British press had speculated that the Rafale, the latest fighter by French-based Dassault Aviation, was one alternative.
From the point of view of the Joint Programme Office in Washington, where the US military and representatives of eight other partner nations manage the Joint Strike Fighter project, the US government has already been generous with its technology.
“The British have been provided more information than ever before due to their ‘Level 1’ partner stats in JSF development, but not everything,” said spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin.
More than1,000 requests from all allied partners for details about US technology on the project have been approved and only a few were still being negotiated, she said.
Britain says it remains committed to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for which it has already spent £1.2bn (€1.7bn) and plans to buy 150 of the jets when they are ready during the next decade.
But for the first time, Britain is asserting its right to use and maintain joint weapons systems on its own terms, said Lee Willett, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London.
“Ths is not just hot air. The UK are actually backing themselves into a very tight corner and challenging the US to call their bluff,” Willett said. A recent agreement between Britain and France to build a new fleet of aircraft carriers showed “it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the UK has a serious Plan B”, he said.
Britain’s Arms Procurement Minister Lord Drayson and Defence Secretary John Reid have talked about a Plan B for more than a month, fuelling almost daily attention in the British media.
The conflict has turned the “special relationship” between the two countries into the “rancid relationship,” said a Thursday headline in The Guardian newspaper. A headline in Tuesday’s Evening Standard called the negotiations “peace talks”.
Willett said Britain’s fight to control weapons technology had a bearing on many future partnerships with the US military, not just the F-35. The psychological impact in Britain is significant, says Loren Thompson, defence and security industry analyst at the Lexington Institute think tank.
“The British are going to spend billions on this, and they’re concerned they won’t really understand the technology of what they’re buying,” Thompson said. “They don’t want to be treated like a Third World arms dealer. They’re saying, ‘If you can’t trust us, how can we trust you?’.”
In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lord Drayson made it clear that Britain’s allegiance in President George Bush’s campaign against terrorists entitled it to better treatment.
“Our aim is to ensure that future generations of UK and US servicemen and women can continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in pursuit of common goals,” Drayson said.
He said that without direct knowledge of the plane’s hi-tech components, his military would not be able to determine whether the aircraft was “fit to fight”.
Lord Drayson also expressed dismay at the Bush administration’s plans to eliminate a contract with General Electric and British-based Rolls-Royce to make an alternate engine for the plane. The British should have been consulted, he said, because the second engine saved money and would protect the fleet from costly groundings.
He has some allies in Congress who are upset about the plan to eliminate the backup engine.
About 800 jobs in Ohio and hundreds of others in Massachusetts and Indiana would be affected by such a move. Congress is split on the issue, however, and the Pentagon is not backing down. Deputy defence secretary Gordon England said there would be no savings in continuing to have a back-up engine.
Since 2001, Congress has expressed concern more than once about third parties getting access to US arms and technology through British sources.
In 2003, two powerful House of Representatives committee chairmen, Henry Hyde and Duncan Hunter, both Republicans, blocked a waiver that would have made it easier for US companies to sell weapons to Britain and Australia.
Now, Democratic Rep John Barrow said he was struggling to get information about a secret Bush administration review of the proposed sale of British-based Donasters Ltd, a company that makes parts for the Joint Strike Fighter, to a government-owned firm in the United Arab Emirates. He has a Doncasters plant in his district and wants greater congressional oversight of such deals
“More stuff is being sold by the good guys to bad guys posing as good guys than ever before,” Barrow said.
