F-35 News

[soultrain]

Raleiam estas ultimas páginas, o que vou dizer é muito sério. Ou muito me engano ou o "fenómeno" que varreu a Europa e o Mundo com o F-105 está de volta, para bom entendedor...

[[]]'s

[soultrain]

The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

By CHUCK SPINNEY

The 21 Dec 2008 editorial in The New York Times, "How To Pay For A 21st-Century Military" purports to advocate tough-minded pragmatism to reform a Pentagon that is clearly out of control. Yet its logic is really another example of the kind of hackneyed thinking that serves to protect the status quo. It also suggests indirectly why the mainstream media are in such trouble.

The editors of the Times present a cut list that includes terminating the F-22, the DDG-1000, the Virginia class attack submarine, the V-22 Osprey, halting premature deployment (not R&D) on ballistic missile defense, cutting nuclear weapons, de-alerting nuclear weapons, cutting two air wings from the active Air Force, and cutting one carrier from the Navy. Some of these recommendations make a lot of sense, but even if one assumes unrealistically that there is no cost growth elsewhere and there are no contract termination costs or base closing costs, the cutbacks would "save" $20 to $25 billion. While $25 billion may sound impressive, bear in mind, the upcoming Defense Department's core budget could be as high as $580 billion in Fiscal Year 2010, according to news reports.

Put another way, even if we believe in the vanishingly small probability of a best case scenario with no cost growth or contract termination costs, these cuts would reduce the defense budget Mr. Obama is about to inherit by only a little over four per cent -- and that would be a reduction from a budget level that the editors say is bloated, because the defense budget was increased recklessly by 40 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2001 (not including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Furthermore, the editors at the Times do not even want to pass on this piddling amount to the taxpayers or Mr. Obama's infrastructure program, because they say that the "savings" should be plowed back into the Pentagon to increase the size of the Army and Marine ground forces, to buy the Navy's littoral combat ship, and to resupply the National Guard and Reserve forces. But then they conclude by observing that the era of unlimited budgets is over and that Secretary Gates must make procurement reform a priority.

This is very peculiar logic. And it is made even more bizarre by what the editors of the Times did not say. Consider please just a few things they forgot to mention:

Omission No. 1: The Times's recommendation to terminate production of the F-22 is a good idea that is long overdue, in my opinion. But included in this recommendation is the idea that we should preserve the F-35 program with a bridge of upgrades to the F-16s. That could be a very long bridge ... because the editors of the Times ignored problems in the F-35 program that threaten to make it an even bigger turkey than the F-22.

The F-35 will cost of over $300 billion, making it the most expensive program in the history of the Department of Defense and the world. Moreover, the F-35 is rapidly becoming the heaviest jewel in the Pentagon's crown of mismanagement. The F-35 has serious technical problems; it is way behind schedule; and is way over cost -- facts apparently lost on editors at the Times. Last March, for example, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported another cost increase of $38 billion, bringing the total estimated cost to $338 billion or 45 per cent more than when the program was approved for its risky concurrent engineering and manufacturing development (i.e., buy before you fly) program in 2001. On November 26, 2008, Bloomberg News reported that an internal team of DoD analysts concluded the F-35 program could cost 40 per cent more than budgeted in the 2010-2015 plan that Mr Bush is about to bequeath to Mr. Obama (and these teams have a track record of underestimating future cost growth).

One of the biggest cost drivers and sources of technical risk in the F-35 is its stealth requirement, but this requirement is a shopworn legacy of the cold war. Set aside the valid criticisms of how well stealth technologies work in the real world or the equally valid criticisms relating to the technical limitations of real-world air defense systems, and just consider where the logic shaping the stealth requirement came from.

The "requirement" for stealth, which is now taken for granted in just about everything, reached a fever pitch during the cycle of threat hysteria that emerged in the mid 1970s and lasted until the Soviet Union collapsed. The Air Force claimed the Soviet Union was ringed by an impenetrable air defense system, made up of dense, overlapping, multi-layered air defense radars. Technologists claimed (falsely as it turned out) that this system was so redundant that it would be impossible to disable it by electronic jamming or to penetrate it at low level, and that the only recourse, therefore, was to reduce the radar reflectivity of our own airplanes. The reduction in reflectivity would in theory shorten the detection range of the Soviet radars. In effect, the idea was to create "holes" in the Soviet's radar coverage that our planes could then fly through undetected. At the time, no one ever claimed that any other country had such a multilayered air defense system, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is clear that no country has yet developed or deployed anything remotely close to the massive overlapping capabilities portrayed by the Air Force's threat inflators during the waning years of the Cold War.

In fact, one reason why the F-22 is so expensive was that it had to be stealthy. Now the editors of the Times say correctly that the F-22 should be terminated because it was tailored to the Soviet threat, which has ceased to exist. But in the next breath, they make the peculiar assertion that we should preserve a far more costly and more troubled turkey, the F-35, even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 can not claim: namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that has ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D program began in 1994.

Omission No. 2: The Times wants to kill the DDG 1000 and the Virginia class submarine, rely on the DDG 51 Aegis destroyers for fleet defense, and plow the "savings" into the littoral combat ship.

Even the Navy wants to dump the problem-plagued DDG 1000. Last July, in a congressional hearing, Navy leaders testified that they intended to truncate the DDG-51 program at 2 ships, nixing earlier plans to buy up to 32 ships. While the editors of the Times recognize this cutback, they say that "Cutting the last two could save more than $3 billion a year." But for how long? In fact, termination creates only a short term saving (again, assuming unrealistically that there are no contract termination costs), because each DDG-1000 is estimated to cost $3 billion, so the best case estimate is a one shot saving of $6 billion, probably spaced over several years.

And what about the Littoral Combat Ship? A case can be made for a low cost combat ship designed to fight in the shallow littorals, if only for attacking pirates. But plowing the money back into the $600 million Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is asking for trouble. Like in the case of the F-35, the editors of the Times forgot to do mention the widely-reported facts this program had turned out to be a grotesque technological, organizational, and economic monster, albeit on a smaller scale than the F-35. It is hard to see how anyone with a modicum of curiosity could miss these problems; all the research you need to do is to google "littoral combat ship" and "cost growth" and your screen will sink under the weight of reports describing of this particular horror story.

If there was ever case for reforming the Pentagon's acquisition process, it is the LCS. This ship, conceived initially as a small, fast, maneuverable and relatively low-cost ship, came unglued in 2007-2008, when it became clear that technical and organizational problems would take years to solve, if they could be solved at all. It is now clear the LCS will cost more than twice as much as its original cost estimate of $220 million per ship, if it ever gets built in significant numbers, which I doubt.

Omission No. 3: The editors of the Times want to halt premature deployment of a missile defense system to save $9 billion, but continue spending for research, even though they acknowledge that after spending $150 billion over the last 25 years the Pentagon has yet to produce anything close to being a workable solution. Of course, they ignored the billions poured into the earlier efforts going back to 1946 when the USAAF began its ABM efforts with Project Thumper. These efforts (the most prominent efforts being Projects Thumper and Wizard, Nike Zeus, Project Defender, Nike X, Spartan, Sprint, Sentinel, and Safeguard) and others continued with varying degrees of intensity, including one other premature deployment fiasco (Safeguard in 1975) until early 1983, when President Reagan unleashed yet another torrent of spending .

The logic of continuing to pour money down a 50 year old missile defense rathole that has no workable weapon to show for it is a little like the logic which induced Sir Douglas Haig to conclude he should try to redeem failure for four months after taking 60,000 casualties in the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916 -- he just didn't get the message, and neither, apparently, have the editors of the Times.

Moreover, many theorists of nuclear war argue that a ballistic missile defense targeted against ICBMs is destabilizing because it threatens the deterrent effects of other nations' nuclear weapons. The Times makes a puzzling recommendation in this regard: The editors say we should reopen negotiations with the Russians to bring about reductions in warheads and that we take missiles off hair-trigger alert. While both these actions would reduce the horror of nuclear war, and would be perceived as mutually stabilizing, they would also be a variance with a vigorous missile defense program, which would make the Russian deterrent less effective. Actively pursuing missile defense would have a more predictable effect of causing the Russians to hedge against our "shield" by fielding more missiles and returning them to hair trigger alert to neutralize the effects of our first strike "sword," which they would see as being made safer by our shield. That a missile defense system is unlikely to work simply makes such an evolution and exercise in madness.

Omission No. 4: The editors of the Times concluded by saying that reforming the procurement system should be a priority and that Gates has to make some tough calls. True to form, they said nothing about the nature of the reforms. Moreover, their recommendations discussed above make clear that they do not even understand what they want to reform. To understand what is needed, one needs to understand what is really driving budgets up record levels while force structure melts down and why forces readiness is hollowing out under the pressure of two very small wars, when compared to the less costly Korean or Vietnam wars (in terms of the total size of the force level operational tempos). In fact, as has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision making process. This process has produced a death spiral having three undeniable outward manifestations:

The first manifestation is the long term trend of shrinking forces made up of aging equipment. This is caused by the central fact that unit procurement costs increase much faster than budgets, even when budgets blow through the roof, like they did in the last 8 years. That means new weapons do not replace old weapons on a one for one basis. Over the long term, the changes have been mind boggling: In 1957 for example, the Air Force had an inventory of over 9,000 fighter airplanes with an average age of around 5 years; today, even though the Pentagon is spending more money than at any time since the end of World War II, that inventory is less than 2,000, with an average age of 23 years. The editors of the New York Times call for reform but would have us continue this evolutionary process by protecting the high-cost F-35, while calling for a reduction of two Air Force tactical fighter force by two wings and one Navy's tactical fighter wing.

The second manifestation of the defense death spiral takes the form of continual pressure to reduce combat readiness. This is due to the high wages of the not-so-all-volunteer force (stop loss is a backdoor draft) and the increased costs of operating more complex weapons that, for the reason stated above, are getting older and more worn out more on average, and hence more expensive to operate. Today, there is general agreement that our military is being hollowed out by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the scales of today's warfighting efforts are miniscule when compared to equivalent efforts at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon had a smaller budget in inflation adjusted dollars. For example, today we are fighting two wars with about 180,000 deployed troops, whereas in 1967 and 1968, forces peaked at over 550,000 deployed troops in Vietnam. In terms of airpower, the Air Force was flying tens of thousands more sorties and was dropping more bombs on North Vietnam that it dropped on Germany in World War II. Bear in mind some other differences from today: in the mid-1960s, the United States was also engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet superpower, and we maintained over a million forward-deployed troops in Europe and other parts of east Asia; we also maintained world-wide sea control with a Navy of more than a 1000 ships, and we keep hundreds of strategic bombers and thousands of missiles on hair trigger alert. Yet we had a smaller defense budget then that we have today.

The third outward manifestation of the Pentagon's death spiral is the corrupt accounting system. As I described in my final testimony to Congress in June 2002, the Pentagon's bookkeeping system is so broken that it can not pass the simple audits required by the spirit of the Constitution and the letter of the law (i.e., the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990). This makes it impossible to produce the information needed to sort out the priorities needed to fix the first two problems. Until this problem is addressed no amount vapid editorializing about program cuts or swaps will result placing the Pentagon on an evolutionary pathway toward fielding a military force that protects the real security interests of the American people.

Bottom line: The Pentagon is in a crisis, the editors of the New Times would unknowingly reinforce it. Readers interested in how we might reform the Pentagon's self-destructive-decision process are referred to my testimony cited in the previous paragraph or the somewhat different recommendations in a remarkable new anthology, America's Defense Meltdown, published by the Center for Defense Information. This new anthology is designed to give President Obama and Congress a guide to placing the Pentagon back onto a pathway toward an effective defense at a cost a nation in recession can afford. Written by retired military officers and civilians with over 350 years experience in the defense business, this book is unique in that it provides a view from the trenches by people who have struggle to reform the way the Pentagon does business.

A ler tudo com muita atenção, esta é a opinião de alguém de dentro, antes que o lobby aqui do fórum fale sem saber, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney é um antigo analista militar do Pentágono, muito conhecido desde o famoso Spinney report. Vive num barco à vela no Mediterrânio e pode ser contactado pelo endereço: chuck_spinney@mac.com.

[Penguin]

Raleiam estas ultimas páginas, o que vou dizer é muito sério. Ou muito me engano ou o "fenómeno" que varreu a Europa e o Mundo com o F-105 está de volta, para bom entendedor...

[[]]'s

O unico operador do F-105 foi a USAF.

[]s

[soultrain]

Raleiam estas ultimas páginas, o que vou dizer é muito sério. Ou muito me engano ou o "fenómeno" que varreu a Europa e o Mundo com o F-105 está de volta, para bom entendedor...

[[]]'s

O unico operador do F-105 foi a USAF.

[]s

err F-105 -1, era o Lockheed F-104 Starfighter o "lápis" como era conhecido aqui na base aérea de Beja.

[Penguin]

O unico operador do F-105 foi a USAF.

[]s

err F-105 -1, era o Lockheed F-104 Starfighter o "lápis" como era conhecido aqui na base aérea de Beja.

Ha uma diferenca importante. O F-104 sempre teve um uso limitado nos EUA. Jah o F-35 sera o espinha dorsal da USAF, USN e USMC.

[]s

[PRick]

Parece mesmo que a melogamania do Governo Bush afetou toda a administração dos EUA, e o Pentagono reflete apenas o quadro caótico.

Os gastos crescentes e sem controle, programas discutíveis como o DDG-1000, Classe Virginia, OV-22, Escudo anti-mísseis, apenas evidenciam a grave crise pela qual a sociedade dos EUA passa.

[ ]´s

[soultrain]

Ha uma diferenca importante. O F-104 sempre teve um uso limitado nos EUA. Jah o F-35 sera o espinha dorsal da USAF, USN e USMC.

[]s

Quer dizer que a USAF, a USN e o USMC tambem recebem "por fora" da LM ?

[]'s

[Bourne]

err F-105 -1, era o Lockheed F-104 Starfighter o "lápis" como era conhecido aqui na base aérea de Beja.

Esse não é o "avião foguete" ou "fazedor de viúvas"

[Glauber Prestes]

err F-105 -1, era o Lockheed F-104 Starfighter o "lápis" como era conhecido aqui na base aérea de Beja.

Esse não é o "avião foguete" ou "fazedor de viúvas"

Esse! Toda força aérea não-pacto de varsóvia (e algumas do pacto também...) queria ter algumas dezenas em suas linhas....

[PRick]

Esse não é o "avião foguete" ou "fazedor de viúvas"

Esse! Toda força aérea não-pacto de varsóvia (e algumas do pacto também...) queria ter algumas dezenas em suas linhas....

É verdade todos os políticos europeus queriam o F-104 , principalmente, por conta das vantagens oferecidas para Lockheed, mas o pessoal novinho não sabe como a LockHeed costumava ganhar concorrências.

http://www.slate.com/id/2614/

The Lockheed Redemption
In the defense industry, failure pays off big.
By James Surowiecki
Posted Friday, Aug. 1, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET

In the Yale University Library, 11 books are cataloged under the heading "Lockheed." Of those 11, nine are cross-referenced under "bribery," "corruption," or "military-industrial complex." Other appropriate subheadings might include "cost overruns," "bailout," and "crash and burn."

For a company whose history, from one angle, looks to be an almost uninterrupted record of malfeasance and incompetence, Lockheed has done rather well for itself. In fact, Lockheed Martin--as the company has been known since its 1995 merger with Martin Marietta--is the world's largest defense contractor, with 180,000 employees and annual revenues of $27 billion. If its proposed acquisition of Northrop Grumman is approved by the Justice Department, it will be a $37 billion corporation by the end of 1998. Given that, one might see Lockheed as an exemplary case of corporate rebirth. On the other hand, one might see it as evidence that in the defense industry, as in Hollywood, it's easier to fail upward than to disappear.

Of course, defense is an industry like no other. Barriers to entry in terms of technology and physical plant are prohibitive, which keeps domestic competitors out of the business. At the same time, national-security concerns keep potential foreign competitors at bay. The Pentagon's interest in keeping its weapons supply free from interruptions, meanwhile, means that no major player can be allowed to go under. Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward. The fact that a small number of contracts can determine a company's profit outlook for a decade places a premium on low-balling bids (which leads, almost inevitably, to cost overruns) and influence-currying. The result is a system with all the vices of both regulation and competition, and few of the virtues of either.

Seen in this light, perhaps Lockheed's record is not quite so dismal. Sure, Lockheed was the company that charged the Pentagon $646 for a toilet seat. But with Grumman charging $659 for an ashtray, how else was Lockheed to keep up? And yes, the Defense Department did pay for C-5A transport planes from Lockheed on which thousands of parts had not been installed. But Northrop bought parts from Radio Shack and put them on MX missile-guidance systems without proper testing.

That Lockheed has been consistently able to convince others--well, OK, to convince the U.S. government--to forget about its record testifies to the power of the human imagination. (It might also testify to the power of Lockheed's millions of dollars in campaign contributions, or to the effect of revolving-door employment in the defense industry.) Lockheed has made historical amnesia into an art form. A short bout of traumatic remembering seems in order.

Ironically, the company's roots are as deep as any in the aerospace and defense industries. Founded by auto mechanic Allan Loughhead and his brother Malcolm in 1916--with, tellingly enough, designer Jack Northrop, who went on to found Northrop Aircraft--the company struggled until it produced the Vega, the plane that Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic. The Vega, together with a series of other sparkling designs, earned Lockheed a place in the high-end market. But the company did not capitalize on its advantages until the mid-'30s, when new management moved strongly into the passenger-plane market and started competing for military contracts as well (including a failed attempt to sell bombers to Germany in 1937 and a successful sale to Great Britain in 1938).

Lockheed's reputation was really made during World War II, when the company built both the C-69 Constellation transport (which became the standard for civil airlines in the immediate post-war period) and, more impressively, the P-38 Lightning fighter. Both planes did what they were supposed to do, and cost what they were supposed to cost. It's not clear whether that's been true of any Lockheed plane since. In 1959, for instance, Lockheed introduced the Electra turboprop commercial airliner. Within a year, three Electras crashed, and within two years, production was halted. At the same time, the company, thanks to well-placed payments to "consultants," sold its F-104 Starfighter jet--rejected by the Air Force--to both Japan and West Germany. Eventually, 175 of the jets sold to West Germany crashed, killing 85 pilots, while 54 of the Japanese jets were lost.

For the next three decades Lockheed found itself building planes no one really needed for more than they wanted to spend. The company tried to sell anti-submarine reconnaissance planes to the Dutch. It sold giant long-distance transport planes to the Indonesians, the Filipinos, the Brazilians, and the Italians. And it sold fighters all over the world. It made these sales, of course, primarily by bribing foreign officials. But that wasn't actually illegal in the United States until 1977. You might call it a creative and aggressive form of marketing. In the 1970s, the chairman of Northrop, which was also bribing its way across the globe, termed this "the Lockheed model."

At home, meanwhile, Lockheed was busy running up $2 billion in cost overruns on the C-5A Galaxy, the first real procurement scandal in defense-industry history. The company was also building the Tristar passenger jet, plagued from the beginning by equipment problems. Lockheed bribed the Japanese prime minister to buy the Tristar for All Nippon Airlines. What made these problems truly noteworthy, though, was that Lockheed only survived them thanks to a $250 million government bailout. The market had spoken, but Lockheed was able to convince the taxpayers to offer up a different answer.

Once it survived the bailout, the company was unable to avoid rebounding. The Reagan defense budgets helped, as did an aggressive marketing plan abroad and, most importantly, the merger with Martin Marietta and the acquisition of General Dynamics' F-16 fighter division. Lockheed helped build the Hubble Telescope--no surprise, really, given how it performed initially--and the space shuttle. It's currently building the F-117A Stealth fighter and the thoroughly unnecessary F-22 for the Air Force, and is bidding against Boeing for the contract to build the Joint Strike fighter, the last great contracting plum of the century.

Perhaps, then, "corporate rebirth" is a fitting tag line. But what's interesting is how similar Lockheed's tactics remain to those it deployed when it was running what was called "the grease machine." In 1995, for instance, the company tried to get the federal government to pay for the costs of its merger with Martin Marietta. That same year, it was investigated by the government on bribery charges related to F-16 sales, and fined $25 million for bribing an Egyptian minister to help arrange a $79 million sale of three transport planes. There's always, it seems, another corner to cut. The difference now is that the company has finally figured out how to make its more unorthodox tactics pay off on the bottom line. The startling fact is that once the merger with Northrop is done, Lockheed will have only one real competitor left. The past is gone. The future's bright. Only universal peace can mess things up now.

[soultrain]

Ui as viúvas vão chorar Prick, era mesmo isso que eu queria dizer...

[soultrain]

err F-105 -1, era o Lockheed F-104 Starfighter o "lápis" como era conhecido aqui na base aérea de Beja.

Esse não é o "avião foguete" ou "fazedor de viúvas"

Esse mesmo.

[Penguin]

Eh curioso, quando faltam argumentos com o pe na realidade, criam-se associacoes as mais estapafurdias. Os paises entraram no programa JSF ha muito tempo. Se comprometeram financeiramente e industrialmente em niveis distintos. Ate a presente data, nenhum dos muitos paises do programa desistiu. Tenho a impressao que alguem so desistira de suas posicoes se nao for entregue o prometido. Provavelmente havera um redimensionamento dos numeros encomendados. Por outro lado, mais paises parecem se interessar pelo programa (Israel, Japao, Coreia do Sul, Singapura, Espanha, etc). Outra ponto eh que os controles atuais das contas publicas sao bem mais sofisticados que nas decadas de 60, 70 e 80 principalmente.

Corrupcao e comercio de armas sempre andaram juntos. Eh provavelmente o mercado mais opaco que existe. Ha casos notorios que envolvem praticamente todos os grandes fabricantes e paises. Tinha um livro (decada de 80) que contava a historia dos mais notorios casos de corrupcao no mercado de armas. Ninguem escapa.

[]s

OBS.:

Aqui um pequeno resumo nos escandalos da Lockheed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals

[Penguin]

Outros casos notorios:

Italia:
- The Agusta affair (com assasinatos e tudo): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/241345.stm
- Agusta scandal + Dassault: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agusta_scandal





Franca:
- Dassault Chief Is Also Convicted: Ex-Head of NATO Sentenced In Belgian Bribery Scandal: http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/12/24/belge.t.php

- Thomson (Thales)/Taiwan (com assasinatos e tudo):
France silent on Taiwan frigates scandal
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2057599.stm

Book delves into frigate scandal - It has been one of France's biggest political and financial scandals of the last generation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3244148.stm

'Detective thriller'

Thierry Jean-Pierre spent two years researching "Taiwan Connection - Scandals and Murders at the Heart of the Republic."
Reading like a detective thriller, the story takes Mr Jean-Pierre from the study of a pipe-smoking intelligence agent in Paris - his main informant - to the skyscrapers of Taipei and the sands of Mauritius.

It begins in the late 1980s, when Taiwan, in a state of chronic alarm about the threat from mainland China, is seeking to upgrade its fleet.

Sensing a rare opportunity, the then state-owned French defence electronics company Thomson teams up with the Naval Construction Directorate (DCN) to talk the Taiwanese admirals out of a nearly-completed contract with Hyundai of Korea.

But the admirals need a good reason to opt for France's La Fayette class frigates, which are still at the design stage and actually fail to meet many of Taipei's own specifications.

That reason turns out to be a massive commission.

Not unusual in itself - but then the commissions start to multiply.

A three-armed lobbying operation is put in place. A middleman called Andrew Wang is paid to oil the wheels in Taipei.

The seductively-named Lily Liu undertakes to buy off opposition to the deal in Beijing.

And in Paris, Alfred Sirven, of Elf slush-fund fame, tries to influence former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas via his girlfriend Christine Deviers-Joncour.

Strange deaths

The cost of all this is monumental. By the time the six frigates are finally paid for, their price has rocketed to Ffr16bn (2.44bn euros), of which nearly a third is estimated to have been the cost of the bribes and commissions.

The question is: where has this money gone? About half has been identified and some of that frozen in accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

But that still leaves FFr2.5bn (380m euros) unaccounted for.

When I compare our old democracy with Taiwan, a country where martial law was lifted a short while ago, I am seized by shame

According to Mr Jean-Pierre, the obstruction of the French political establishment can only raise one suspicion: That some of the missing millions came back to France in the form of the famous "retro-commissions" - the illegal rake-offs used to fund political parties and personalities that were the stuff of a series of trials over the past 10 years.

This would be shocking enough - but there is much more.

Since the signing of "Contract Bravo" in 1991, Mr Jean-Pierre says at least eight people who knew about the affair have died in suspicious circumstances.

They start with Yin Cheng-feng, a Taiwanese naval official who was about to blow the whistle on the commissions. He was murdered in December 1993.

Later Yin's nephew died an unusual death, as did a Taiwanese bank official who acted for the naval dockyards there.

In France, an intelligence agent named Thierry Imbot plunged to his death from his Paris flat.

He had been charged with following the frigate negotiations for the secret service.

Deaths continue

A year later, former Taiwan-based Thomson employee Jacques Morrison also fell to his death from a high window.

He had told friends he feared for his life because he was the last witness to the talks.

More than enough then to justify a judicial investigation into what Mr Jean-Pierre describes as "easily the biggest politico-financial scandal of the last 10 years".

And yet in France all efforts to cast light on the affair are stymied.

In Taiwan, by contrast, the furore generated by the scandal helped bring down the Kuomintang regime in 2000, and the new government has made sure judges have access to all but the most highly-classified documents.

"The reputation of France has been seriously stained," concludes Mr Jean-Pierre.

"And when I compare our old democracy with Taiwan, a country where martial law was only lifted a short while ago, I am seized by shame."

Reino Unido:

- Saudi Arabia and the BAE Arms Scandal: http://www.mideastmonitor.org/issues/0705/0705_4.htm
- BAE in arms deal corruption scandal: http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/06/19/bae-i ... n-scandal/
- Al Yamamah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Yamamah ... llegations

Corruption allegations
There have been numerous allegations that the Al Yamamah contracts were a result of bribes ("douceurs") to members of the Saudi royal family and government officials.

Some allegations suggested that the former prime minister's son Mark Thatcher may have been involved, however he has strongly denied receiving payments or exploiting his mother's connections in his business dealings.[20]

In February 2001, the solicitor of a former BAE Systems employee, Edward Cunningham, notified Serious Fraud Office of the evidence that his client was holding which related to an alleged "slush fund". The SFO wrote a letter to Kevin Tebbit at the MoD who notified the Chairman of BAE Systems[21] but not the Secretary of Defence.[22] No further action was taken until the letter was leaked to The Guardian in September 2003.[23]

In October 2004, the BBC's Money Programme broadcast an in-depth story, including allegations in interviews with Edward Cunningham and another former insider, about the way BAE Systems alleged to have paid bribes to Prince Turki bin Nasser and ran a secret £60 million slush fund in relation to the Al Yamamah deal.[24] Most of the money was alleged to have been spent through a front company called Robert Lee International Limited.

In June 2007 the BBC's investigative programme Panorama alleged that BAE Systems "..paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan."[25]


[edit] 1992 NAO report
The UK National Audit Office investigated the contracts and has so far not released its conclusions - the only NAO report ever to be withheld. Official statements about the contents of the report go no further than to state that the then chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, now Lord Sheldon, considered the report in private in February 1992, and said: "I did an investigation and I find no evidence that the MOD made improper payments. I have found no evidence of fraud or corruption. The deal... complied with Treasury approval and the rules of Government accounting."[26]

In July 2006, Sir John Bourn, the head of the National Audit Office, refused to release a copy to the investigators of an unpublished report into the contract that had been drawn up in 1992.[27]

The MP Harry Cohen said, "This does look like a serious conflict of interest. Sir John did a lot of work at the MoD on Al Yamamah and here we now have the NAO covering up this report."[27] In early 2002 he had proposed an Early Day Motion noting "that there have been... allegations made of large commission payments made to individuals in Saudi Arabia as part of... Al Yamamah... [and] that Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network have received substantial funds from individuals in Saudi Arabia."[28]


[edit] Serious Fraud Office investigation
The Serious Fraud Office was reported to be considering opening an investigation in to an alleged £20 million slush fund on 12 September 2003, the day after The Guardian had published its slush fund story.[29] The SFO also investigated BAE's relationship with Travellers World Limited.[30]

In November 2004 the SFO made two arrests as part of the investigation.[31] BAE Systems stated that they welcomed the investigation and "believe[d] that it would put these matters to rest once and for all."[32]

In late 2005, BAE refused to comply with compulsory production notices for details of its secret offshore payments to the Middle East.[33] The terms of the investigation was for a prosecution under Part 12 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001.


[edit] Threats by the Saudi government
At the end of November 2006, when the long-running investigation was threatening to go on for two more years,[34] BAE Systems was negotiating a multi-billion pound sale of Eurofighter Typhoons to Saudi Arabia. According to the BBC the contract was worth £6billion with 5,000 people directly employed in the manufacture of the Eurofighter,[35] while other reports put the value at £10billion with 50,000 jobs at stake.[36]

On 1 December The Daily Telegraph ran a front page headline suggesting that Saudi Arabia had given the UK ten days to suspend the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE/Saudi Arabian transactions or they would take the deal to France,[36] but this threat was played down in other quarters. A French official had said "the situation was complex and difficult... and there was no indication to suggest the Saudis planned to drop the Eurofighter." This analysis was confirmed by Andrew Brookes, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who said "there could be an element here of trying to scare the SFO off. Will it mean they do not buy the Eurofighter? I doubt it."[37]

There were reports of a systematic PR campaign operated by Tim Bell through newspaper scare stories, letters from business owners and MPs in whose constituencies the factories were located to get the case closed.[33]


[edit] Investigation discontinued
On 14 December 2006, the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith announced that the investigation was being discontinued on grounds of the public interest.[38] The 15-strong team had been ordered to turn in their files two days before.[33] The statement in the House of Lords read:

The Director of the Serious Fraud Office has decided to discontinue the investigation into the affairs of BAE Systems plc as far as they relate to the Al Yamamah defence contract. This decision has been taken following representations that have been made both to the Attorney General and the Director concerning the need to safeguard national and international security. It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.[39]

The Prime Minister justified the decision by saying "Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel and Palestine. That strategic interest comes first."[40]

Jonathan Aitken, a former Tory government minister and convicted perjurer, who was connected with the deals in the 1980s, said that even if the allegations against BAE were true, it was correct to end the investigation in order to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia.[41]

Mark Pieth, director of anti-fraud section at the OECD, on behalf of the United States, Japan, France, Sweden, Switzerland and Greece, addressed a formal complaint letter before Christmas 2006 to the Foreign Office, seeking explanation as to why the investigation had been discontinued.[42] Transparency International and Labour MP Roger Berry, chairman of the Commons Quadripartite Committee, urged the government to reopen the corruption investigation. [43]

In a newspaper interview, Robert Wardle, head of the Serious Fraud Office, acknowledged that the decision to terminate the investigation may have damaged "the reputation of the UK as a place which is determined to stamp out corruption".[44]


[edit] Judicial review
A judicial review of the decision by the SFO to drop the investigation was granted on 9 November 2007.[45] On 10 April 2008 the High Court ruled that the SFO "acted unlawfully" by dropping its investigation.[46] The Times described the ruling as "one of the most strongly worded judicial attacks on government action" which condemned how "ministers 'buckled' to 'blatant threats' that Saudi cooperation in the fight against terror would end unless the ...investigation was dropped."[47]

On 24 April the SFO was granted leave to appeal to the House of Lords against the ruling.[48]. There was a two-day hearing before the Lords on 7 and 8 July 2008.[49] On 30 July the House of Lords unanimously overturned the High Court ruling, stating that the decision to discontinue the investigation was lawful.[50]


[edit] U.S. Department of Justice investigation
On 26 June 2007 BAE announced that the United States Department of Justice had launched its own investigation into Al Yamamah. It was looking into allegations that a U.S. bank had been used to funnel payments to Prince Bandar.[51] On 19 May 2008 BAE confirmed that its CEO Mike Turner and non-executive director Nigel Rudd had been detained "for about 20 minutes" at George Bush Intercontinental and Newark airports respectively the previous week and that the DOJ had issued "a number of additional subpoenas in the US to employees of BAE Systems plc and BAE Systems Inc as part of its ongoing investigation".[52] The Times suggests that, according to Alexandra Wrage of Trace International, such "humiliating behaviour by the DOJ" is unusual toward a company that is co-operating fully.[52]

[Dieneces]

He,he,he...esse Santiago não deixa o pessoal respirar...quando o pessoal que "cantar de galo" , ele vem e corta as asinhas da turma . Não afrouxa , rapaz !!