Israel makes another bid for F-22 jets

[eyl]

If we sell them, the Israelis are just gonna sell the designs to the Chinese.

Exactly. That's the problem and its one the Israelis can only blame themselves for.

*cough* AWACS aircraft *cough*

Are you talking about the Phalcon deal? The US could have quashed it before it was signed, but apparently wasn't that bothered at the time:

When the company bid for the contract in 1996, Israel officially notified the United States that the Phalcon system did not incorporate protected American technology, a contention the Pentagon has never challenged. Though Washington officials say they objected to the sale on strategic and human rights grounds, there were no public complaints.

The deal, calling for delivery beginning in 2000, was concluded in highly publicized trips to Moscow and Beijing by Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister, and Yitzhak Mordechai, the defense minister. In April 1998, the Phalcon sale was reported to Congress in a General Accounting Office review of recent Chinese arms purchases.

Again, there were no public American protests, though officials did say they tried to dissuade Israel from signing.

And lest someone argue that Israel should have known beter, it wasn't the only one selling military technology to the Chinese at the time:

''Better to buy from the Europeans,'' a gloomy executive said. Or perhaps from the Russians, who supplied destroyers, cruise missiles and other heavy weaponry to the Chinese over the last decade with few protests from Washington.

Or, as others here cynically suggest, from the Americans themselves. Israelis point to the continuing export of advanced military technology to China by the United States in the last decade: since the ban by Congress in 1989 on military sales to Beijing, after the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, the White House has issued waivers for some $300 million in exports of satellite and encryption equipment to the country.

Moreover, the United States did not renege on its own deals, Israelis note, fulfilling $36 million in orders placed by China before the ban, including anti-artillery radar systems.

And the main competitor for he Phalcon contract was from another US ally:

Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) was marketing its Phalcon airborne early warning (AEW) system to China in competition with the British defense firm GEC-Marconi

So instead of stopping the deal at the begining, the US waited until the deal was ready for delivery, damaging IAI both financially and in terms of reputation. There's a good dealof susipcion that it was done to damage a competitor to US arms firms, rather than just because of national security issues (it wouldn't be the only case; there were reports a few years ago that the US was threatening to cut aid if Israeli firms did not withdrawfrom bidding for a defense contract in Taiwan (or possibly South Korea, I don't remember exactly) in which it was competing with US arms firms).

As I recall, the Harpy contract was a similiar issue; the US didn't protest the initial deal and then pressured Israel to cancel the service upgrades (which the original contract required it to supply)

[Coyote]

Darn it, eyl, you're ruining the image that international arms deals are all conducted on the basis of gentlemanly agreements and considerations of fairness and propriety-- until eeeevil Israel came along!

Seriously, though, I voted "no" not because of theatrical hand-wringing but rather because from what I know of Israeli defense needs, the F-35 JSF will suit them much better; and being cheaper they'd have an easier time maintaining it. The only reason they'd need a long-range asskicker like the F-22 is to, well, kick someone's ass at long range-- currently, that means Iran. So any F-22 sales to Israel now will just inflame Iran, which is not good for the region at the moment.

And, as Israel proved with the Tunisia strike (long time ago) on PLO headquarters, if they need to reach out and touch someone, their air-refueling capabilities give them sufficient strategic flexibility.

[Medic]

snip

Ah, well, throwaway comment by me gets an essay response. That makes more sense anyway.

I'm still no fan of selling F-22's to anyone else before USAF gets it's 381 because I believe in 1) peacetime attrition and 2) a reserve strong enough to prevent any sort of "surge" situation the US Army is currently in. By "surge" of course I mean that a prolonged, indefinite use of resources at a particular strength isn't possible because either or both the nonrotation of equipment or personnel would come back to bite you in the ass. Either you're operating war-critical assets till they break and that becomes a money-pit or you're screwing over Joe (longer and longer deployments with shorter and shorter rest) because available manpower simply doesn't exist and this threatens the all-volunteer military in the long run.

Needless to say, I don't subscribe to any notion of brushfire wars into perpetuity.

[eyl]

I don't really see what need the IAF has now for the F-22; from my perspective, it seems more urgent to use the money to refurbish/upgrade the ground forces' equipment instead (some of which is fit only as museum pieces)

[brianeyci]

Under Bill Clinton's administration, a staffer said that 85,000 Rwandans would need to die to be worth a single American life. There is a dark truth to this.

Yes, America could maintain supremacy with its current military. No, that is not enough. Democracies will not stand for a 1 to 1 attrition rate, and no it is not because of the liberal media sending home pictures of coffins as much as the right would have you believe. It's because a man making 100k living in the suburbs is literally worth thousands of poor people. True "realpolitik" understand that; cold war dogs understood that (but apparently the point was lost to Rumsfeld et al.) It is an issue of economics, not of Americans being too afraid to lose lives. The F-22 addresses this reality perfectly. If Chinese air-to-air kill ratios ever approached 1 to 1 in say, a fight over Taiwan, America would pull out. And I believe this is the case with the newer Russian fighters against fourth generation American planes.

Liberals do not want to attack conservatives in this fashion, and understandably not because they want to reserve the right to intervene when there's humanitarian or ethnic cleansing. But it's high time the conservotard lie of media commie hippie jizz hombortion reporters destroying the American will to fight be put to rest, preferably with cold hard facts. I see no reason why we can't make exceptions to the economic rule for A. genocide/ethnic cleansing and B. never attacking to seize resources for one's self, a totally different position than never attacking when one will lose resources. This reasoning is ironclad even against the Hitler demon -- if conservotards bring up Hitler, they cannot ignore the fact that green Iowa farm boys back in the 1940's were not worth United States soldier today, a soldier with expensive modern equipment, unparalleled purchasing power and education worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Viewed in this way giving the Israelis F-22 is pretty fucking stupid. Yes, the military is not an old boy's club. Yes, the Americans gave carte blanche to the Israelis to send other technology off to China. But just because the Americans gave the Chinese other technology, that does not mean they should give them the F-22 or allow it to happen.The longer the F-22 is kept proprietary, the longer foreign nations are kept behind, preferably for a half century or more.

[ExarKun]

US should reserve the most advanced tech only for themselves. New fighters, missiles, ships. Don't sell anything until it's old.