Also, whatever is bought, I can guarantee you that there will be NO arms race with Brazil in South American, no one can simply afford it! Chile can barely afford 10 F-16 blk50s and Argentina’s economic crisis is bad.

That’s the problem of an arm race, when country buy more than they could afford in a “normal” way.

Strange nose, wonderful wings

So military alliances have nothing to do with it? The reason European defence contractors lose a foreign military contract is becuase the US bribes better and lies better than the European defence contractors? 😮 .

where did I speak of bribes ? Only lies I said :p
From Warsaw Business Journal

by Kamil Tchorek Sean Lavelle ,

After months of bitter criticism from both the media and the government for its failure to meet its offset obligations, Lockheed Martin (LM) strikes back, claiming it has fallen victim to a mixture of prejudice and misunderstanding.

“Criticism of the program is often based on misunderstanding rather than fact,” Philip Georgariou, LM’s director for offset, told the Business Journal in an exclusive interview. “If the facts were known, we wouldn’t be getting the criticism.”

The $6 billion (zł.22 billion) Offset Program was designed to stimulate a decade of American investment into this country in return for Poland’s choice of purchasing 48 LM F-16 fighters. And ever since the deal was announced, it has come in for criticism in a spate of media attacks.

Some projects have failed to materialize at an early stage, such as the Grupa Lotos refinery technology license project, while others have successfully resulted in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), such as General Motors, (GM) relocation of production facilities from Germany to Gliwice in southern Poland. Still though, LM has managed to meet only 22.6 percent of its obligations for 2003.

Understandably, the American side is keen to shift the focus of the public debate on the program away from the dollar value of the projects underway.

“The value of the Offset Program is not measured in dollars, it is measured in business relationships,” says a recent LM statement to the press. And in a recent interview for the Business Journal’s Country Focus USA supplement (June 2, the U.S. Embassy’s commercial counselor, Edgar Fulton, claimed to have computed that 1,000 sets of business relationships have been developed as a result of the offset deal.

But the media allegations are hard to ignore, with one of the strongest being that “there is no American offset, and the circumstances of wasting multi-billion dollar opportunities for the economy by Polish decision makers is the biggest scam in the short history [of post-communist Poland].” Such sentiment is often accompanied by claims that many projects would have been implemented anyway, regardless of the Offset Program, with U.S. engineering firm Pratt & Whitney’s investment in the country’s air industry being one frequently cited example.

And in a slightly less aggressive tone, Michał Kleiber, minister for science and IT, who is in charge of the Polish side of the Offset Program, said the government was disappointed with “the slow pace of launching many projects.”

This is particularly true of IT projects that many say should be replaced with other investments, now on the so-called substitute list. Three such projects in particular created a lot of excitement at the time the list of investment projects was released a year ago and even served to bridge the gap between the two largest domestic IT firms, Prokom and ComputerLand.

These two IT competitors have a long history of rivalry that has on occasion turned somewhat acrimonious. But last year, they agreed to bury the hatchet and jointly establish Tetra, a special purpose company designated to serve one of the offset projects with regards to developing a telecommunications system for the police and the armed forces. Yet, despite recent media reports that Tetra was finally getting off the ground, the issue was not, as expected, on the agenda of last week’s government meeting, which effectively means it is not being launched at all.

And, in addition to the delays in the implementation of Tetra and the related medical registration system (RUM) and emergency services communications system (C2), allegations have been made that taxpayers will eventually have to foot the bill for the offset and for these three technology projects in particular. But Georgariou puts this allegation down to a misunderstanding.

“It is absolutely incorrect to say that the Polish government is being asked to pay for the development of Tetra/C2/RUM,” he says. “They are being asked to commit to purchasing the services of those systems once they are developed. It has been said that Tetra has no Polish partners, but the reverse is true – it has only Polish partners.”

The American contingent is also keen to stress that responsibility for many of the delays should actually be laid at the Polish door. Former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Christopher Hill cites the example of the deal to sell the M-28 Skytruck aircraft, made by the Polish Air Company (PZL) in Mielec, in the southeast of the country, in the USA.

Hill claims that LM spent significant amounts of money on creating the conditions for the aircraft to acquire the relevant American certificates in this country. But when LM’s team of engineers arrived in Mielec to conduct the appropriate tests, they found that the Polish side was not ready for the procedure to start. And Georgariou’s reaction to the government’s criticism echoes Hill’s remarks.

“There was a group of projects that I would like to have gotten done in 2003 but did not for a variety of reasons, all of which were out of LM’s control,” he says. “Projects can fail because of many factors. The business climate changes, companies go bankrupt, the law changes and taxes go up.” These last words being a dig at the government’s foot-dragging on legislation that would lift VAT on offset projects, which according to the American side is a major cause for delays. And he cites more examples of failure on the Polish side.

LM was intending to pay for technology licences at the Lotos refinery, but Lotos “has not reached an agreement about which technologies they were going to use,” Georgariou says, the massive changes in world oil markets over the last two years being given as the key reason why the refinery was taking time to define its strategy.

In total, LM has dropped 12 projects, which if they had been carried through to completion would have had a combined value of $148 million (zł.534 million). However, Georgariou maintains that LM has offered nine replacement projects worth $2 billion (zł.7.2 million) if completed.

When projects do fail, there is a mechanism in place to reverse the setback. LM can choose a replacement project and request the removal of a failed project from their project listing, but they must apply for the approval of all new projects before they are implemented.

Conspicuously, one of LM’s most high-profile successes was the movement of GM-owned Opel production from Poland to Germany. It seems a remarkable coincidence that GM chose to invest in this country’s Offset Program (and was prepared to undergo a row with German unions in doing so) just when LM experienced its most savage public beating anywhere in the world. However, LM sees such questions on this subject as something for GM, its worldwide industrial partner, to answer.

Another criticism heard in the press in recent months has been that LM dictates what projects it is going to undertake. LM officials argue that in the Offset Act there is no clause that is meant to guarantee investment by LM, nor can LM guarantee investment by anyone at all.

The fact is that the arrangement is more complicated: LM puts forward a list of recommendations, from which the Polish government has the final say. LM asserts that when it submitted its proposal for an Offset Program, there was a list of more than one hundred projects on it.

“Those recommendations were based on a wish list that was given us in the terms of reference for the multi-role combat aircraft tender,” says Georgariou, adding, “The government of Poland picked 44 of those that they wanted to do. Any time we wish to replace one on the list, they get to say which one we replace them with.”

LM claims that the complexity of the Offset Program is inherently easy to misinterpret, since in the public eye a ‘failure’ looks like a ‘failure,’ and not a rigorous selection process. And, indeed, unfair criticism of the offset is often used by many as a means of attacking the government by proxy. But while LM’s arguments sound plausible enough and may one day even be accepted by the country’s media, the fact is that this is hardly likely to happen as long as the implementation of the firm’s offset obligations remains below a quarter of the agreed value.

Well, that explains things doesn’t it? I guess that’s why Dassault won the Rafale contract in France. The French naturally bribe and lie better at home. The Rafale is certainly not significantly better than the Eurofighter.

From someone coming from a country which has a law to prevent to buy foreign stuff 😀 😀

So what’s the point of bringing this up in the first place. Do US defence contrators bribe better than Europeans now too? .

If you look at Poland, let’s say that US replace bribe by lies 🙂

US military equipment works. Military Cooperation is easier when allies share the same equipment. It is as simple as that.

YEs, it’s simple when you’re american.

but the jets flight controls actually rely on the ballast it provides’

WTF ??

Do you know why FBW has been made ??

Sameer

I must say that from a western point of view, several countries seems to have a very ambitious program of purchases, specially India and China.

You can be sure that the USAF will shout everywhere in USA that the F-15 isn’t anymore the king of the sky and the Raptor must be granted a huge sum of money immediatly.
Boeing will have a hard time selling it in Singapore 😀

They are the front runners by far. I think Serge Dassault et al can buy new villa’s on the Riviera.

I hope he will use that money in a very wisefully.
I’m fed up to see that m*r*n to use the french military budget like his wallet.