Engineer Memoirs
attitude of these people was that the Corps has certain standards of integrity and
performance, and it was not going to compromise them just because it was over in
some foreign country.
Q:
I've got a lot of questions regarding the Israeli air base program and your role in that.
As you know, I have a special interest in that.
A:
I realize that.
Q:
But I wondered before I get into that whether it's fair to concentrate there, whether
there were any other programs of major consequence that we ought to discuss first.
A:
I just want to elaborate a little bit more on the relationship with Egypt because this was
quite different. Of course, we'll never know, but when we first sat down to discuss this
whole affair with Egypt, Egypt approached us, as we believe they probably approached
the Soviet Union. They wanted us to provide them a lot of weapons, and they were
very impatient when we told them that they had a ceiling of
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.5 billion, and that
everything had to fit into that ceiling. We went through several repeats of the way in
which, if you have a certain amount of money, you lay out the acquisition program.
At first, they couldn't believe it. But I spent hours and hours working with the
Egyptians on developing their program. I had occasion recently to look at the way in
which they're planning, and the sort of approach that we started back there in the
winter and spring of '79 is still being used.
The Egyptians have become very expert at the multi-year programming that's required.
If you're acquiring--as they did--twenty F16 aircraft and the deliveries are going to
take place over a three-and-a-half-year period, then you have to be looking at how
much money is going to be used each year. You have to program the whole thing. They
were unfamiliar with this, or at least gave the appearance of being unfamiliar. They
learned from sitting around the table with us how to do this.
Q:
Is that a case where they may not be sufficiently sophisticated in their air force to handle
such an airplane?
A:
Well, I think their air force has a way to go. But it's not necessarily just sophistication,
although that may be a problem. But there's a whole work ethic problem.
These American weapons systems are predicated on the proposition that you've got
pilots and crew chiefs and maintenance people that are willing to work hard on these
technical problems. We didn't encounter a lot of that among the Egyptians at the
beginning. In a lot of cases, the Egyptians appeared not to want to work at it. So they
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