Engineer Memoirs
A:
There were two things that this did. If you were in the early stages of a program and
you got a lot of foreign demand, then you put a burden on the U.S. procurement
process.
The most glaring case of this I can remember was the new M198 howitzer. The
production rate that the Army had arranged for this howitzer was not all that rapid. And
it was going to take two, three, maybe four years to deliver to just the high-priority
units, like the 82d Airborne and one of the Marine divisions that were getting this
equipment.
When the foreign governments started trooping in with requests to buy the M198
howitzer, that caused all kinds of complexities. That caused this diversion syndrome
that I mentioned earlier. The Army just had fits with all these requests for foreign
delivery of howitzers.
I had fits because I was caught between the Army's reluctance to divert these things
and the insistence of the foreign governments that they wanted them. It was my job to
sort this out and make a recommendation. It wasn't up to me to make the decision. The
Secretary of Defense made that. But I had to conduct all the negotiations and tell each
side that they should be more cooperative and so forth. These things were interminable.
Because I got put through the wringer like this, generally I wasn't that enthusiastic
about the knowledge that some contractor had just set out to sell something to
somebody. That was somewhat different from some of my predecessors who saw
themselves as people who should pursue these sales. I don't mean that they hoped that
the sales this year would be higher than they'd ever been.
A prominent example of the motivation of the service to sell weapons systems to
foreign governments occurred with the AWACS, the Boeing E3A, because earlier the
program had been projected to be much larger. Then there was cost growth and a series
of things, and the program came out a certain size. If you looked at the way Boeing had
been planning things, there were a lot of extra planes. So there was interest in foreign
sales.
Iran contracted to buy some. The NATO AWACS program was another way to take
care of the problem. We needed the capability in Europe. But there was a big push by
Boeing--and I think probably the program people in the Air Force--to get more sales
of the Boeing AWACS, to distribute the overhead, and so forth. That was successful.
This illustrates the two viewpoints.
My bosses in the Carter administration generally professed that they opposed all these
sales.
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