Ernest Graves
Q:
And I guess you were opposed to the--
A:
I was mixed. Some of them I felt were a good idea; and some they opposed I thought
were a good idea, but they opposed them anyway because they had this sort of
ideological thing. Others that were being pushed, it was the other way around. For
example, later on in the Reagan administration, when the Air Force was pushing to sell
the F16 to Venezuela, I thought that was a mistake. It was over 0 million, and I
didn't think the Venezuelans really needed the planes. But that one went ahead for a
combination of reasons.
Sometimes I was very sympathetic to the requirements of the foreign government.
Other times I wasn't. I didn't have a bias on it.
Q:
You mentioned negotiations, especially in the context of cases where arms firms had
created or encouraged demand.
A:
There was always a big problem over price because the contractor would quote the
price without any support. They'd always fuzz the issue. If they mentioned support, it
would always be a fraction of what was needed. Then we had the job of persuading the
foreign government to buy enough support and explaining why it was that our estimates
were different from the contractors. Then, if it was a grant or concessionary loan, we
had to come up with the money through the budget process.
Q:
What about the negotiating process itself? What is required to conduct successful
negotiations on an issue like this?
A:
Preparations first. You have to spend a lot of time getting your paper right. It makes
a great deal of difference what you put on the table. It's very easy to lose a lot of points
by putting things on the table that aren't defensible.
You have to visualize the way this document is likely to undergo change as it's
discussed. If there is some requirement that you have, you'd better have it in there at
the beginning, because if you have 20 requirements and you have them all in there, and
the other guy has his 20 in his draft, and then you start seeing if you can compromise,
it's extremely expensive in negotiating capital to have to introduce something later on.
Q:
You certainly never say, "Oh, I forgot, but I need--"
A:
Sometimes you do find big holes. But when you do that, you figure that in terms of the
psychology of it, he's going to make a big fuss that you're just making things worse
instead of better. Then, in order to get a tradeoff, you may have to concede things you
don't want to concede.
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