TMor,

Your list of squadrons is, I think, the list assuming a full 294 aircraft buy (232 for the air force and 60 for the navy).

If you want eight 20-aircraft squadrons, you need to be able to sustain 160 aircraft available over an extended period, so you need extra aircraft to cover inevitable attrition, aircraft undergoing conversion or major maintenance, trials aircraft, aircraft bailed back to industry etc.

232 aircraft will support an eight-squadron 180 aircraft force. Nine or ten squadrons would require rather more. (The RAF based its 232 aircraft Typhoon buy on a seven-squadron, 137 aircraft force, but expect a longer service life than the AdlA assume).

You might assume that if the AdlA are prepared to list eight Rafale squadrons at this stage, then they believe they have a realistic chance of getting all 232 aircraft. That seems pretty brave, when only 120 have been ordered.

When do they need to order the next batch to avoid a production gap? Or have long lead items already been ordered?

Kovy,

More thinly veiled anti-British nonsense?

“1- They manage to beat the F-15 and the mirage 4000 with the tornado… the briberies might have been really, really … convincing”

No bribes were required for the Tornado IDS to beat the F-15 or the Mirage 4000.

The F-15 came with too many political strings attached, and could not meet certain aspects of the RSAF requirement.

The Mirage 4000 was a good aircraft, with great potential, but had the disadvantage of not having been selected by its ‘home nation’, and the type lacked maturity and its low level capabilities were dubious when the RSAF made its selection. Al Yamamah came too early for the Mirage 4000. Dassault had also done itself few favours in the Middle East at that time.

You say that:

Bae is really a bribery master :
1- They can bribe billions of £ without being caught or worried by UK justice (the most impartial in the world)
2- They can beat the americans and the french at briberies contests
3- They can bribe with the money of other people.

I’d hesitate to point out that while Northrop, Lockheed and Dassault have all been found guilty of bribery and corruption, BAE have not.

1) The Attorney General concluded that there was no case for BAE to answer. More recently, the Judicial Review into the dropping of the enquiry pointed out (in paragraph 47) that:

“According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence. It is unfortunate that no time was taken to adopt the suggestion (referred to in evidence) to canvass with leading counsel the Attorney’s reservations as to the adequacy of the evidence.”

2) I wouldn’t have brought this up, but since you have done so, it must be recognised that Serge Dassault himself was convicted over bribes to the Belgians. Northrop were found guilty of offering bribes in Saudi Arabia. Lockheed paid bribes in the Netherlands and elsewhere. BAE have a long way to go before they can be compared with the Americans or the French.

3) The Al Yamamah deal was a Government to Government contract, between the UK and Saudi Governments. BAE was merely the prime contractor, carrying out the instructions of the principals. The aircraft were paid for in oil, so when cash was needed to pay legitimate and legal commissions, BAE had to provide cash (against the oil). All of the payments made were made at the request of the two Governments.

I know how badly you want to prove that the perfidious Brits have been guilty of bribery, Kovy, but it’s hard to see BAE transfers of Saudi money, to Saudi officials, at the express request of the UK MoD and the Saudi MoDA, as bribes.

Sferrin,

Oh, you mean like the UK government squashing the investigation into the Saudi’s being bribed to buy Typhoons?

No, like the UK halting an enquiry which was launched without sufficient evidence to justify it, after two fruitless years, and with no likelihood of finding evidence of anything criminal. An enquiry into something that was supposed to have happened more than 20 years ago.

1) The alleged bribes were nothing to do with the Saudi Typhoon order – the investigation was into the Tornado/Hawk Al Yamamah deal from 23 years ago. BAE’s competitors at the time were not playing it any ‘cleaner’ than BAE were. BAE were paying legal commissions. Big deal. Just look back at what Northrop had been doing in South Korea in 1984, or at what Lockheed had been up to in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) in the mid 1970s.

13 years before AY, Northrop had been bribing the head of the Saudi air force and a Saudi prince to buy F-5s.

2) There is no case to answer – these were legitimate commissions and there is no evidence that BAE Systems (or the UK Government) did anything wrong. The money was Saudi money, and was released by BAE (as legitimate commissions) with the express approval of the UK MoD.

The recent judgement’s paragraph 47 reads:

“According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence. It is unfortunate that no time was taken to adopt the suggestion (referred to in evidence) to canvass with leading counsel the Attorney’s reservations as to the adequacy of the evidence.”

BAE says that it acted lawfully at all times, though it has been hamstrung in its public response by the confidentiality agreements signed as part of the Al Yamamah agreement.

Sir Raymond Lygo, a former BAE chief executive, told me at Farnborough last time around (if I remember right) that there had been no secret payments.

“There was nothing untoward about the deal whatsoever. I was the one who won the contract and I would have known if anything was going on at the time. Naturally we paid agents, but there’s nothing illegal about that. It was absolutely in accordance with the law.”

2) This is ancient history, and the deal was between the two governments.
These alleged bribes are ANCIENT HISTORY, and relate to the Al Yamamah Tornado/Hawk deal and not to today’s Typhoon deal.

At the time BAE was still partially state-owned, and was only the prime sub-contractor on what was a government-to-government deal. BAE acted with the full knowledge and consent of both governments throughout Al Yamamah, and the payments were approved by the Ministry of Defence. This was effectively an automatic process that was “out of the company’s hands.” Howard Wheeldon, defence analyst at BGC Partners, suggested that the worst that the British Government could be accused of was “a degree of naivety” and that successive governments had “no case to answer.”

The payments were written into the contract in annexes, and were probably required because Al Yamamah was originally paid for on an ‘Arms for Oil’ basis. This meant that there was no ‘money’ available for ad hoc expenses. This was not illegal either under UK corruption law nor the US Foreign Corrupt Practises act. The money was owned by the Saudi Government, and was passed to Prince Bandar, Saudi Minister of Defence and Aviation via Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation (MODA) accounts that were audited annually by the Saudi ministry of finance. Every payment was approved by one or both governments, and, according to Bandar, used “exclusively for purposes approved by MODA.”

3) BAE is squeaky clean in this area anyway
I’m as keen as anyone to kick BAE when it f*cks up a programme, or uses its monopolistic position to charge high prices, but kicking the company for corruption is grossly and grotesquely unfair. I’ve personally heard senior people from BAE’s competitors praising the company’s approach to business.

One Exec from a big US manufacturer told me that: “BAE has a reputation within the industry for knowing that there is a line between bribery and the kind of gift-giving and payments to middlemen that is routine and entirely acceptable in the Middle East, and my take is that they make real efforts to stay on the right side of that line.”

BAE has an external, independent expert committee (including Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Philippa Foster Back, Director of the Institute of Business Ethics, and Sir David Walker, former chairman of Morgan Stanley) that evaluates the company’s ethics and business conduct, and is aggressively determined to prove that the company has never done anything improper when competing for and winning defence contracts.

The company has long-standing anti-corruption policies and training programmes in place, and is committed to never offering bribes or improper inducements (nor using third parties to do so) and any gift worth more than £25 has to be logged and registered, which is why their gizzits to journos are so paltry and meagre!

4) So why was there an enquiry in the first place
It seems clear to me that BAE Systems has been the subject of what appears to be a concerted campaign by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and the Guardian newspaper, whose journalists appear to have stooped to some stunningly shabby and dirty tricks of their own, and which has published numerous articles alleging corruption by the company, and which maintains a ‘BAE Files’ microsite on its website. There has been an entirely unacceptable degree of inappropriate complicity between ‘sources’ within the SFO and the Guardian Newspaper.

And here’s where the real scandal lies. With no evidence of wrongdoing taxpayer’s money should never have been wasted on a mischievous and pointless enquiry.

There should be some grounds for such an investigation. Some indication that such an investigation was warranted. Some indication that our laws were broken. Some indication that corruption took place. No such evidence existed.

Trouble-making by the Guardian and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade isn’t sufficient evidence, on its own.

5) But having launched the enquiry, why was the enquiry dropped?
a) After two years, and millions of pounds of taxpayers money, the enquiry has found NO EVIDENCE of any wrongdoing, and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has said that the real reason that the SFO dropped the inquiry was that there was no case to answer. “My judgement was that a prosecution wouldn’t succeed,” even if the SFO had been given the go-ahead to continue the probe for a further 18 months and to delve into Swiss bank accounts connected to the Saudis.

The SFO have had more than enough time to put up or shut up, and have done neither.

b) The inquiry is thought to have angered Saudi Arabia. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he was certain the right decision had been taken and that had the SFO investigation continued, it would have led to “the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship and the loss of thousands of British jobs.”

c) Continuing the enquiry (into a 20 year old arms deal, and in the face of mounting evidence that there had been no wrongdoing) had started to threaten a current, ongoing deal.

Nevertheless, the official line is that the SFO acted unlawfully in dropping the investigation before they’d wasted even more money, looking vainly for evidence that doesn’t exist, to try and prove that BAE gave bribes in a 20 year old arms deal which was conducted pretty cleanly anyway.

But “Major arms company does exactly what the Government tells it to” isn’t much of a headline-grabbing story, I guess.

As for the relative price of F-22 and Typhoon, Austria paid less than €62 m per aircraft, flyaway. The UK flyaway for Tranche 3 is £42 m (about $80 m, or half the flyaway cost of an F-22….. and rather less than the F-35 looks like costing).

Looks like one of the NAWC-23, Project Gayfeather or VP-46 Littoral Surveillance Radar System (LSRS) pod system Orions, to me.

Who’s is the picture?

First things first.

When will they authorise the next batch, beyond the current 120?

At the time we committed to A400M, what “North American items” were available?

C-17? Marvellous, but too expensive and not really ‘tactical’.

C-130J? Still just a Herc, when we needed more cross section, and more performance – and the J was then a disaster, anyway, with fresh problems emerging every week.

Aurcov,

In this case, USAF should have stated clearly from the beginning that they need a big tanker; in this case the 777 would have been unbeatable, considering its dominance in that class.

1) They didn’t want a BIG tanker, they wanted bigger than a KC-135, sure, but they still wanted a tanker that could support today’s expeditionary operations. And that isn’t another KC-135, by the way, whose limitations are proving increasingly onerous.

They need a tanker that can operate from real world tanker bases while carrying a decent amount of fuel, and that could operate on a towline some distance from base, and that could offload a decent amount of fuel once on that towline. This is what the KC-767 cannot do, because with anything approaching its maximum load of 92 tonnes of fuel, it needs a very long runway (eg not even Mildenhall!). They wanted a tanker whose transport capabilities would not compromise the tanker mission, but which would allow it to support deployments by other types. Here, too, the 767 is at a disadvantage, because of its ‘smaller-than-true-widebody’ cross section, which limits the carriage of military pallets (you can’t fit two side by side) and which restricts the aircraft’s passenger carrying capability.

2) Though the 777 would give superb cargo and passenger-hauling capabilities, and could have carried lots of fuel, its tanker capabilities would have been massively compromised – and the aircraft’s runway requirements would have been even more limiting than those of the 767.

Boeing offered the 767 because it did not have any realistic alternative. Unfortunately, that meant that their proposal was inevitably inferior to the KC-30.

The quality and clarity of your written communication leads me to doubt your claims, Scorps, I’m afraid. You’d dramatically reduce the credibility of any organisation that employed you.

I wouldn’t normally stoop to correcting someone’s spelling and grammar, but when you claim to hold a relatively high calibre position and then write like a half literate hick, it’s perhaps right and proper to do so in order to underline the disparity between what you claim to be, and how you express yourself.

“Except one thing, Sealord I work as a Lobbiest lobbyist on the Hill and I see what goes on everyday. It‘s part of my job, so maybe folks, you might want to rethink some crap, alright, because the ‘Made in the USA‘ thing has been come coming for a very long time.

Oh and before someone asks what type of Lobbying I do I’ll make it simple. For the past two years three other folks and I have been been working with Congress to have the US Navy Ownership rules on aircraft overturned. For the record this is has lead led to some items being allowed to be recovered, for example stuff on Private Land, but the fight is far from over. We plan on submitting a report on how and why the Naval History Center and the Navy Dept. are acting in direct violation of the very act they use when claiming to uphold Navy ownership.

As for this tanker business, today I had a very powerful Senator, who happens to sit on the Military Oversite Oversight Committee, tell me that they plan on freezing the funds.

But then again you armchair folks seem to know more about what goes on in DC then than I do, right?

If you can’t even learn to spell and punctuate, and if the basic rules of grammar can’t embed themselves in your memory, then I doubt that anything else would embed itself in your brain. So even if you have the good access that you claim, I wouldn’t expect you to learn from it, or to be able to communicate it accurately.

Many of the ‘armchair folks’ who you dismiss so readily give every impression of having a much better and more sophisticated grasp of military and aerospace issues than you do.