COMMENT, Greg Sheridan | February 25, 2008
HERE'S a hot tip. There is not the slightest chance Australia will buy any F-22 Raptor aircraft, and there is almost no chance that we will ditch the F/A-18 Super Hornets that the previous government was going to buy.
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was yesterday polite but dismissive of the possibility of the US selling us the Raptors.
We won't buy the Raptors because the Americans don't sell them to foreign countries, we haven't asked them to sell us Raptors and nor are we likely to, they're too expensive, they don't do the jobs we need them to do and we are committed to an alternative path of phasing out the F1-11s, using F/A-18 Super Hornets as an interim measure and ultimately moving to a fleet made up predominantly, if not entirely, of F-35 joint strike fighters.
The Rudd Government has commissioned a review of the Howard government's decision to buy the Super Hornets, and Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon has said he'll write to the US Congress asking for a change inthe decision not to export theF-22.
However, Fitzgibbons's words are quite precise. He has no intention at present of buying Raptors. He just wants to know whether there is any chance the US would sell them if he did want to buy them.
I asked Gates yesterday how realistic the prospect of selling Raptors was, given that it has not been built for export and, to protect the US's most secret technology, it would need to be virtually redesigned for an export model.
Gates answered with admirable candour that he did not know the answer to that; he did not know if any re-design work would be needed. The matter was on the table because the Australians had raised it. Therefore, he said, "it's an issue I intend to pursue when I get back (to Washington) and see what the prospects are and what we'd have to do if we wanted to get the law changed".
As a follow-up, an American journalist pointed out to Gates the Japanese had raised the possibility of purchasing the Raptor a year ago. If in all that time Gates hadn't been briefed on the technical issues, didn't this "kinda" confirm that nothing much was happening here? "That's a fair comment," Gates said.
Later, on Sky TV, Gates said a little more bluntly that he was "not optimistic" about Congress changing the law to allow Raptor exports.
The possibility that Congress might do this on the basis of a purely hypothetical inquiry from Australia - if we propositioned you, would you say yes? - is pretty remote.
As to the Super Hornets, every person in the official Australian defence establishment knows they have many secret and classified capabilities and that, as part of an Australian system, they would be comprehensively able to defeat any other plane in the region.
The debate is hamstrung in part because the classified capabilities cannot be discussed by those who know them, and those who do discuss them don't know them.
There would be at least a $400 million penalty in breaking the contract for the Super Hornets and there would be a serious cost to Australia's reputation.
But more importantly, everyone associated with air force policy also knows the F1-11s are right at the end of their tether. Even if you believed you could keep them flying into their fifth decade, the decision to scale them down and abandon them has already been taken, and actions have followed that decision.
