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RABBI BENJAMIN H. GORRELICK will officiate
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38
Friday, September 19, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
.
(1982-83) as the Israeli ambassador to the
U.S. He had also visited Arens in Jeru-
salem when he was defense minister.
Wilson admired Israel's effort to become
an exporter of high technology. "These
people have got their brainpower, and
that's about all they've got in the way of
a natural resource," says Wilson. "I
thought that assisting the development of
the Lavi would be a good way to help them
get better at technology that they could
eventually export."
Wilson had in mind a novel way for
Israel to use its foreign military sales
(FMS) credits, with which friendly nations
pay for U.S. military aid. These funds,
which come out of the State Department
budget but are dispensed by the Pentagon,
are usually used to buy American wea-
pons. Wilson's idea was to let Israel use
its FMS credits to develop and manufac-
ture its own airplane. The proposal wasn't
without precedent. In 1977 Israel had been
allowed to use $30 million in FMS credits
to build the Merkava. But the tank's cost
pales by comparison to the plane's.
Wilson introduced an amendment to the
1982 foreign aid bill that allowed Israel to
spend $300 million in FMS credits on the
Lavi. Of that sum, half could be spent on
development in Israel; the other half had
to be applied to development in the U.S.
or elsewhere. Although this provision was
Wilson's brainchild, it became known as
the Kemp-Long amendment. "As soon as
I introduced this idea in committee, those
two fellows [Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and
Russell Long (D-La.)] wanted credit for it,"
says Wilson. "That was all right with me."
The Lavi appropriation sailed through
Congress in 1982, as it did the next three
years, in each of which an additional $250
million was allotted for development of the
plane in Israel. Lavi supporters there and
in the U.S. are quick to point out that
these funds aren't extra. More dollars for
the Lavi means fewer for other Israeli pro-
grams. Currently, the Lavi is using up 25
percent of Israel's FMS credits.
The chief American opponent to U.S.
funding for the Lavi is probably Thomas
Jones, chairman of the Northrop Corpora-
tion. Jones has his own pet plane — the
F-20 lightweight fighter, into which he has
sunk $800 million of Northrop's money in
the hope of coming up with a plane that
would be a hot seller to Third World coun-
tries. So far the U.S. Air Force has refused
to buy the F-20, and so no foreign govern-
ment has bought it either. Northrop hopes
it will be chosen for the new U.S. air
defense fighter program. According to
Marvin Klemov, Israel Aircraft's lobbyist
in Washington, Northrop offered to co-
produce an export model of the F-20 with
Israel Aircraft on a 50-50 basis. "Frank-
ly, I couldn't see why any country would
buy the F-20 if it could buy the F-16 in-
stead — an infinitely superior airplane,"
says Klemov. "So Northrop's offer to
co-produce with us looked like fifty percent
of nothing."
Jones has bitterly attacked congres-
sional approval of "offshore" funding of a
fighter that he insists will compete with
American-built fighters for foreign sales.
He once made this complaint — during a
chance meeting in an elevator — to Grum-
man's Kinnear. "I told him that the Lavi
wouldn't be available for sale to foreign
governments before 1995," says Kinnear.
"And if he hadn't sold any F-20's by then,
he'd have to answer to this shareholders."
And what about modifying the F-16 to
Israeli specifications rather than starting
from scratch with the Lavi? Blumkine
answers this question by opening a large
file in which letter after official letter from
the early 1980s discusses the possibility of
working with General Dynamics, maker of
the F-16, to build a version of the plane to
Israel's specifications. In the Israeli view,
General Dynamics wasn't cooperative. It
balked at, for example, the idea of in-
stalling an Elta radar rather than the stan-
dard Westinghouse unit. In April 1982,
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon wrote to
the president of Israel Aircraft that "there
was no reasonable solution with General
Dynamics." In February 1982 the decision
was made to build the Lavi at home.
But even if General Dynamics had been
more amenable, it probably couldn't have
fully met the Israeli need for survivabili-
ty, says Blumkine. "That word means an
integration of lots of technologies," he
says. "It starts with the way you hang
stores [bombs, missiles, and fuel tanks] on
the platform in order to enhance speed. It
means the reduction of your radar signa-
ture. It means changing the whole inter-
face between pilot, machine, and the out-
side environment by providing software
designed for decision enhancement. That
software will deliver information in a ful-
ly CRT'd cockpit that will put in the pilot's
brain a better tactical situation awareness.
Integrating all these elements into a sur-
vivability formula isn't a question of adap-
ting an airframe to your needs. It's a ques-
tion of a whole weapons system that incor-
porates all the experience of the Israeli air
force. Can you transfer this experience to
an existing airframe?"