The Israeli defense industries face a tough export reality
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עברית (Hebrew)
The expected changes in the American defense export structure will put the Israeli defense industries in a very difficult situation “these industries did not make a consolidation effort and now face a mountain of problems” an industry source told i-HLS.
Aviation Week reports that with federal spending caps or automatic budget rescissions, known as sequestration, looking politically permanent for years to come, defense officials are taking their exports push to a new level. No longer content with the long-running bilateral nature of country-to-country foreign military sales (FMS), officials are more often looking to identify and catalyze new consortia of foreign buyers for U.S. weapons and systems.
“Modern weapons systems are becoming more expensive over time . . . and it is becoming harder to afford the development of them over time, for everybody, not just us,” says Richard Genaille, Jr., deputy director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). As a matter of course, the U.S. should be looking for ways to spread development and acquisition costs across a larger number of countries, he suggests.
While the most prominent example so far has been the nine-nation Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) under Lockheed Martin, consortia for such “high-end” weapon systems probably would be few and far in between, Genaille told the ComDef 2013 industry conference this month. On the other hand, with hundreds of developing and emerging nations around the world, “low-end” technology offerings might be better products for groups of countries in Africa, South America and parts of Asia with “limited” defense budgets.
iHLS – Israel Homeland Security
In turn, one of DSCA’s initiatives to that effect is to see if it can put together multinational letters of offer and acceptance (LOA), versus operating under the current policy of one LOA per country. “If we could somehow come up with a tool, like a multinational LOA, where a number of countries would be signatories to it and essentially be acquiring, jointly, a particular capability, then they could potentially afford it much easier then if they decided to do it on a bilateral basis,” Genaille says.
Indeed, a more recent example than the U.S. led JSF—and the even more successful—is NATO’s Strategic Airlift Capability acquisition of three Boeing C-17 Globemaster IIIs. The three heavy airlifters, based at Papa AB in Hungary, have become critical to the 10 nations in its partnership, particularly those withdrawing forces from Afghanistan.
According to Heidi Grant, deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs, her armed service is looking into the possibility of forming an aerial-refueling consortium similar to the NATO C-17 partnership. Meanwhile, the Air Force has identified about 15 weapons and systems that are most sought after by current and potential FMS customers. Officials are trying to work in advance to be ready to push those deals through, instead of starting each FMS case from the beginning, even when the product is the same, she told the conference.
