HOLY ROWS AND WARPLANES
The Israeli aircraft industry hopes to save face by joining US
fighter projects, writes Edmund Owen Jerusalem IT'S BEEN a long, hot summer, and political protest has taken to the streets. Mass demonstrations are the order of the day. Marvellous for hands-on training of police recruits in crowd control, no doubt, but it is a bit much when the Jerusalem Post parades as its main feature 'What to do when the tear gas flies'.
None of the unrest, let it be said, is connected with the Palestinian problem. The two issues that have suddenly come to the boil are quintessentially domestic. One is all about the extent to which the majority of the Israeli population — easy-going, most of them, as regards religious observ- ance — are prepared to be dictated to by the hard-line ultra-orthodox.
For the seventh weekend in a row religious militants have set up protest demonstrations in the city. Two weeks ago they paraded at 18 major intersections; last Friday night they appeared at 24. The bearded, black-coated demonstrators are violently opposed to infringement of the Sabbath in general, and to the showing of films on the Sabbath in particular. Throw- ing bottles and rocks at the police and at passing vehicles (and incidentally breaking the Sabbath themselves with a vengeance), the demonstrators were repeatedly charged by the helmeted policemen, who used water cannon and tear gas to disperse the mob. The next day the media reported that all the cinemas on Friday night had been packed solid — a secular demonstra- tion of a sort, one supposes.
Water cannon and tear gas have been much in evidence in Israel's other major political row. A week after the wafer-thin cabinet decision (12-11) to scrap the Lavi aircraft project, the political repercussions still rumble on, erupting at a moment's notice into mass demonstrations by work- ers understandably fearful for their jobs.
The Lavi aircraft had become in the public perception a symbol of Israel's status as an advanced technological nation. But the recent report by the state comp- troller (a sort of free-ranging public ombudsman) clearly showed up the mud- dled thinking and lack of adequate cost- benefit analysis that preceded the decision, taken by Menachem Begin in 1981, to go ahead with the multi-billion dollar project.
Inevitably, unforeseen problems emerged and costs escalated. The original plan had been to build 300 planes. By the start of 1985 that had been scaled down to 210 — at a cost estimated at 33 per cent more than buying American F-16s off the shelf, or ten per cent more than building F-16s in Israel. By the time the cabinet met to agonise over the project a fortnight ago, the plan was to build only 100 planes, though of course at an enormously in- creased unit cost.
Hopes of recouping the Lavi's develop- ment costs by way of sales were always illusory. Even the Kfir — Israel Aircraft Industry's highly successful predecessor to the Lavi — grossed only $1 billion export sales as against its $2.5 billion development costs. The Lavi was finally calculated to come in at some $3.5 billion, of which at least $1.5 billion — and possibly as much as $2 billion — has already been spent.
Where did the money come from? From the US military aid budget, most of it. It was not only when Washington indi- cated that it was not prepared to continue funding the development of the Lavi that harder-headed elements in the government (notably finance minister Moshe Nissim), the opposition and the military felt free to come out openly against the project. If Israel were to shoulder the remainder of the development costs itself, Nissim foresaw a huge increase in the national deficit, undoing the substantial economic gains of the past two years. Neither did the defence minister nor the military chiefs relish the thought of the heavy drain on their budgets that would result. In any case, there had always been a strong feeling in military circles that the correct decision right at the start would have been to go for the F-16.
Hence the cabinet decision, albeit by a whisker, to scrap, and the mass demonstra- tions of Israel Aircraft Industry workers day after day ever since. Barricaded roads, burned tyres, even the blocking of a runway at Ben Gurion Airport, culminated on Sunday with a mass rally of all 20,000 IAI workers near the Prime Minister's Office where the cabinet were discussing the implications of their decision.
Some 5,000 IAI workers were directly employed in producing the Lavi. Defence minister Yitzhak Rabin has instructed the company to dismiss 3,000. The rest, IAI has been led to understand, can be em- ployed on new military projects and perhaps even on some of the technological- ly advanced projects initially developed for the Lavi which could be used in other weapons systems.
What senior military and aviation indus- try people are really hoping for, though, is practical help from Washington. For exam- ple, the idea is abroad that IAI might continue the research and development programme on the Lavi's advanced avionic technology. The aim would be to use it in the F-16C fighter-bomber, which is to be co-produced with the US in Israel, as well as in a next-generation F-16 (already code- named Agile Falcon), and even in the highly secret ATF — the Advanced Tactic- al Fighter — the new-generation F-15 currently being developed by the Amer- icans for the 1990s.
Agile Falcon is designed to be more manoeuvrable than the F-16, to have a larger engine and to carry more weapons. At the moment, though, it is on General Dynamics' drawing-board. Their proposal, currently frozen with the USAF, is for development and production to be shared by the US-European consortium involved in co-producing the F-16 at present. Now Israel hopes to be admitted to the produ- cers' club, but all turns on whether the project itself is ultimately approved.
As for the ATF, it would take a great deal to asssure Israel a slice of that action. At present US rules forbid any foreign involvement — understandably, since at the heart of the ATF project is state-of- the-art stealth technology, or in other words the capacity to out-manoeuvre enemy radar.
More likely options for Caspar Weinber- ger to consider would be a variety of ways of increasing US procurement of Israeli military goods and services. In particular, the Arrow Anti Tactical Ballistic Missile (ATBM) is an advanced project within sight of deployment and one, moreover, that is defined as a tactical weapon. It would not affect any US-USSR agreement on intermediate or short-range missiles. Unfortunately neither this, nor the range of other potentially attractive US contracts for military procurement that might be on offer for Israel, would do much to placate IAI or the Lavi workers. They might well exacerbate the domestic problem. The mere idea that work might be transferred from Rafael, the Armaments Develop- ment Agency, to IAI has been enough to raise workers' hackles. Warning shots are already being fired in what could well be a new skirmish in the Lavi battle.
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