hankyoreh

Global Hawk (RQ-4) by Northrop Grumman

By Stuart Smallwood, contributor

Global arms trade analysts say South Korea and other countries may be considering the increasingly-troubled Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter F-35 due to heavy political pressure from the United States.

The South Korean government plans to purchase 60 next generation fighters to upgrade its aging F-16 fleet and is currently looking at Boeing’s F-15 Silent Eagle, Lockheed’s F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon. The F-35 has long been considered the frontrunner for their purchase despite the plane’s mounting costs and poor performance.

The Air Force F-35 version currently costs around $160 million per plane. Seoul is budgeting $118.3 million per airplane for the initial purchase and the South Korean Air Force wants a decision made by the end of the year. As of the end of June, ten years into the program, Lockheed Martin had completed only 21 percent of developmental flight-testing. No tests had been done on the plane’s final version.

Andrew Feinstein, global arms industry critic and author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade says South Korea is likely being pressured behind the scenes by U.S. diplomats to purchase the F-35. He says U.S. weapons companies and the U.S. government are so deeply connected that American embassies lobby on the industry’s behalf around the world.

“As the Obama administration has been looking for ways to reduce public expenditure at home, they’ve put almost the equivalent amount of effort into trying to sell particularly the F-35 to foreign companies,” Feinstein says. “The South Korean sale would be in that context.”

Feinstein, who resigned from South Africa’s African National Congress in 2001 due to rampant weapons procurement-related corruption, says that the U.S. has a long history of threatening allied nations if they are unwilling to purchase American-made weaponry. He says this is particularly true since the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 made it somewhat more difficult for companies like Lockheed Martin to simply pay foreign government officials to make deals.

He says the current situation in South Korea may be similar to a 2003 Lockheed Martin deal in Poland. Based on information from insiders of the deal, Feinstein says it is clear American diplomats and Pentagon officials exerted heavy political and diplomatic pressure to ensure Poland chose Lockheed Martin over bids by Eurofighter and BAE. This was because Lockheed’s sales had been flagging and the Polish deal was especially critical.

“The level of political pressure was absurd,” he says. “It really was. They were blatant, blatant threats. They said to them quite explicitly, ‘If you don’t buy the planes from Lockheed Martin we’re going to block everything for you ? your participation in NATO, your relations with the EU and even the United States. It’s all over and we’re going to make hell for you guys.’”

　Cost of the military alliance?　　

William Hartung, director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex, agrees that Washington is very likely pushing South Korea behind the scenes to purchase the F-35, especially since other countries are becoming leery of committing to the airplane.

Hartung says markets like South Korea are an important way to increase revenue for the program, particularly because they don’t need to be subsidized by American tax-payers’ dollars as is the case with weapons purchases by countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

He says these kinds of deals are always sold in terms of maintaining the alliance. Wikileaks documents have shown the American government’s hand in selling the F-35 to Turkey and Italy.

“The bottom line in U.S. arms sales, implicitly and often explicitly, is that a country is not just buying a U.S. weapon but is buying an alliance, formal or informal, with the United States,” Hartung says. “This is a common talking point that arms companies have used to promote and justify U.S. sales, and U.S. officials no doubt make it behind the scenes.”

Hartung says U.S. embassies often serve as virtual marketing arms of companies like Lockheed Martin.　“The Obama administration has been at least as aggressive in helping U.S. companies sell arms to U.S. allies as the Bush administration was,” he says.

He argues the very nature of South Korea’s military alliance with the United States ? particularly in terms of the ongoing U.S. troop presence in the country ? means U.S. companies will always have an advantage in weapons deals, even if they are not always the best product available.

It is also possible that, given the flagging enthusiasm for the F-35 and Lockheed Martin’s need to secure guaranteed contracts abroad (one of the airplane’s selling-points in America was supposed to be that costs would go down as international purchases increased), natural political pressure for South Korea to purchase all things American-made may be even more intense in this case.

“The relationship between the US and South Korea is such that diplomatic, political and military pressure would be far more effective than most other countries,” Feinstein says, noting it might be virtually impossible not to purchase the F-35 in this context.

Feinstein says there is precedent in other countries for making weapons purchases with the U.S. simply to maintain a good relationship.

“The Saudis have about 74 state-of-the-art jet fighters sitting in the desserts of the country rusting away. They’ve never been flown and they’ve just done another 60 billion dollar deal with the US. That’s just to cement their political and military alliance.”

Backroom dealing 　

Hartung says it is important to remember that there are also elements of prestige involved in purchasing what is supposed to be a top-of-the-line U.S. system. Further, buying from the U.S. will allow the two allies to work together more fluidly with the same technology ? assuming the U.S. actually uses the F-35 meaningfully in the future, something that many analysts don’t expect to happen.

Still, there is reason to believe the U.S. has been pushing South Korea into the F-35 deal for some time. In late February of this year, U.S. Pacific Command Chief Adm. Robert Willard said the Pentagon was not willing to give “next-generation” Active Electronically Scanned Array Radar to South Korea for their F-16’s, claiming the Pentagon was leery of such technologies getting into the hands of China. Yet this radar, said to be capable of in-flight targeting of several objects at a time, will be fitted into the F-35 system.

Winslow Wheeler, head of the Straus Military Reform Project in the U.S. says it doesn’t make any sense that it would be a threat to provide advanced technology for the F-16, but not for the F-35.

“They were trying to diddle the South Koreans on the F-16 radar,” he says. “They are simply trying to withhold the opportunity to upgrade the F-16s to make sure the F-35 is going to become the answer.”

The now-cancelled Global Hawk unmanned drone deal between Seoul and U.S.-based Norththrop Grumman further exemplifies how high-level U.S. officials have pressured South Korea to make unwise weapons purchases in the name of the alliance.

Several Wikileaks cables from 2008 suggest the South Korean government was subject to a litany of pressure from U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for East Asia David Sedney and U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow before it cancelled the deal.

In a March 25, 2008 cable directed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vershbow said it was important Rice insist the alliance meant sharing costs on defense spending in her upcoming meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan. He specifically mentioned purchasing the Global Hawk.

“…We are picking up disturbing signs that Lee’s Blue House is pushing drastic cuts in defense spending that could undercut alliance transformation and exacerbate burden sharing concerns on Capitol Hill,” Vershbow wrote. “The cuts could also hinder ROK [Republic of Korea] procurement of new systems, such as the U.S.-made Global Hawk...”

In an April 28, 2008 cable it was reported that DASD Sedney “…expressed serious concerns over the sudden ROKG decision to suspend actions to obtain the Global Hawk…capability for the ROK military.”

Finally, on December 16, 2008 a U.S. diplomatic cable revealed Dr. Kim Tae-hyo, an advisor to President Lee Myung-bak, said to the Deputy Chief of Mission for the American embassy that he hoped the new U.S. administration would be more reciprocal with its efforts toward South Korea:

“Kim claimed that the U.S. was always pressing the ROKG hard on issues like Afghanistan, burden sharing, base relocation, and Global Hawk; and the ROK tried to be responsive.”

Wheeler says he’s not surprised about this kind of activity from the American embassy and expects it is occurring with the F-35.　“That’s standard behavior for the military industry unfortunately,” says Wheeler. “A close and meaningful ally in a fundamental sense would be saying things like ‘well, we have great hopes for this airplane, but we have to wait and see.’ And that’s not what’s happening.”

The Global Hawk deal was finally cancelled after the U.S. Air Force itself gave up on the program due to skyrocketing unit costs and performance failure - a story not dissimilar to what many analysts predict for the F-35.

Feinstein says the U.S. arms manufacturing system is currently constructed in such a way that benefits only the profit margins of the weapons manufacturers - and the politicians and Pentagon officials that support them.

“Pentagon leaders approve these absurd projects because the vast majority of them want high-paying jobs with the weapons manufacturers when they leave government service,” Feinstein wrote in the New Internationalist in December 2011. “Politicians vote slavishly for them because they receive massive political campaign contributions from the companies and fear being labeled anti-jobs. Meanwhile, the companies themselves laugh all the way to the bank, often producing irrelevant or inadequate weapons years too late and for more than double the originally agreed cost.”

Wheeler is hopeful that South Koreans will resist the industry pressure this time. “I think that there’s so much information out there about the F-35 that governments have learned it’s important for them to wait and see and as they do the costs will go up and the performance will go down.”

Ultimately time will tell whether U.S. marketing strategies can overcome the mounting skepticism of the F-35 airplane and convince Seoul to make a purchase they may regret.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]