Engineer Memoirs
A:
I think the relations are pretty good, although occasionally there are problems. There
are a lot of times when the State Department ends up going ahead. The Secretary of
State is the principal foreign policy adviser to the President. All the laws regarding
foreign assistance make it a State Department program. So the Secretary of State and
his department have the deciding voice in most of these matters. Defense may not want
to do this, that or the other thing.
For example, there was a great issue over supplying F16 fighters to Pakistan. Of
course, the Carter administration had refused to even consider this and had offered
A7s and F5s. But the position of the [General Mohammad] Zia [ul Haq] government
was that these planes weren't good enough for the Pakistan Air Force, and that it was
not worth the risks of accepting U.S. aid for planes that were no more capable than
these older planes.
When the Reagan administration came to office, former Senator [James] Buckley, who
became the Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, pressed very hard to
supply F16 aircraft to Pakistan to respond politically to Zia's requests.
The Defense Department's attitude was that they could not disrupt the delivery of F16
aircraft to the United States Air Force and our NATO allies to provide for Pakistan.
They could build planes for Pakistan, but it would take two-and-a-half years to deliver
them.
Buckley never really accepted that. He just kept working away at the problem until he
finally got a commitment to supply six F16s to Pakistan in a year. They worked this
out to take some deliveries that were destined for Europe, so I think that the Defense
Department saved face.
But the point is, the Defense Department was more concerned about preserving the
integrity of the U.S. F16 program than it was about delivering the assistance to
Pakistan. The focus at the State Department was that, compared to reestablishing the
relationship with Pakistan, the impact of diverting aircraft from our Air Force to theirs
wasn't a very important consideration. That kind of thing was repeated every week for
a different country.
Q:
With different circumstances.
A:
Different, but diversions were a big pain in the Pentagon. The State Department never
got excited about them at all.
Q:
You went to DSAA just as Iranian purchases were approaching zero. Or maybe they
had already hit zero.
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