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WASHINGTON, Jan 5: After losing bids to supply warplanes to two of NATO’s newest members, the Pentagon played its Afghanistan card on Friday, reminding shoppers — including Poland and South Korea — of the job US aircraft have been doing there and urging them to buy American.
“For the fourth time in 11 years, American air power is proving to be decisive in combat,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Tome Walters, director of the Pentagon agency that runs government-to-government arms sales.
Before Afghanistan, US warplanes and their increasingly effective precision-guided bombs and missiles were widely regarded as having proven themselves in Kosovo, Bosnia and the Gulf War since 1991.
“The first question any nation should be asking is how do we link up as tightly as we can with American air power,” Walters added in remarks released by his Defence Security Cooperation Agency.
The statement reflected a continuing US effort to burnish military-to-military relationships with friends and allies for future coalition war fighting as well as an ongoing drive to make sure that NATO warplanes can operate together without hitches.
But it also reflected US disappointment at decisions by the Czech Republic and Hungary to buy the swing-wing JAS-39 Gripen fighter made by Saab of Sweden and Britain’s BAE Systems over lease offers of used Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16s.
In uncommonly blunt terms for a US official — and in what could be construed as a rare swipe at Britain, Washington’s No. 1 ally in its declared global war on terrorism — Walters has all but accused unnamed European governments of dangling the prospect of early European Union membership to clinch the Gripen sales to Hungary and the Czechs.
“Certain countries were able to play the EU membership card very skillfully,” he told the trade paper Defense Daily late last month, speaking of the missed opportunity for US fighters. Both Sweden and Britain are EU members.
PROVEN VERSUS PROJECTED CAPABILITY: In highlighting the performance of US air power in Afghanistan, Walters had his eye on a clutch of other aircraft modernization competitions under way worldwide, including in South Korea, Poland, Austria and Brazil.
Poland, a third new NATO member, is planning to pick among new F-16s, Gripens or the Mirage 2000 built by France’s Dassault Aviation SA to replace aging Soviet-era MiG fighters — a 60-fighter deal valued in the billions of dollars.
In South Korea, Boeing Co. is competing to sell its F-15K — a variant of the F-15E being flown over Afghanistan — against Dassault’s Rafale, Russia’s Sukhoi 35 and the Eurofighter, a joint venture of BAE, Franco-German EADS and Finmeccanica SpA of Italy.
By buying American, friends and allies could tap into the range of high-tech military know-how used in the Afghan campaign, launched in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, said David Des Roches, a spokesman for Walters.
“Basically, what we’re arguing is (we) have a proven capability versus a projected capability” of foreign systems untested in battle, he said.—Reuters
