Brazil may be about to shorten the planned delay in its purchase of 12 fighter aircraft, or so says the Brazilian airplane manufacturer Embraer, which has teamed up with Dassault to compete for the US$660m contract with a locally adapted version of the Mirage. In January the recently installed President Lula da Silva postponed the purchase in order to have more funds available for social spending, in a year of severe financial constraints. The idea had been to wait until next year; now Embraer says it might happen before this year ends.
This operation will match Chile's purchase, approved last year, of 10 F-16s produced by Lockheed Martin, also line up to compete in Brazil (indeed, the Brazilian line-up is almost the same as for the Chilean deal). This will not be considered the beginning of an arms race; the US has accepted the Chilean and Brazilian argument that it is legitimate renovation of outdated fleets.
ew are likely to point out that it highlights a flaw in the US view of the region's present security needs; a view which it has persuaded the region's defence establishments to endorse.
This says that the new threats are terrorism, drug trafficking, organised crime and the like (see the Special Focus on Washington's recipe for the Central American military). The F-16 and its competitors were not designed to deal with these threats.
Washington has sidestepped this inconsistency because its military aircraft manufacturers argued that if they were not allowed to compete, their competitors would get the contracts. A similar consideration led it to introduce another inconsistency of its own late last year, when Colombia tried to buy from Brazil a batch of Super Tucano light attack planes - turboprops that had been specifically designed to meet the 'new threats'.
The head of the US Southern Command, General James Hill, wrote to the Colombian high command conveying his objections to the deal, and suggestion instead that Colombia spend the money on renovating the (US-supplied) Hercules C-130 transports and the helicopters used in the counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations. Since Colombia would, in any case, have had to use funds provided by the US, the Brazilian purchase was shelved.
The F-16s bought by Chile and their counterparts about to be bought by Brazil (plus those that Peru has been threatening to acquire) are designed for defending against external aggression by well-equipped enemies. The US line is that such a risk no longer exists. This theme, with variants, is unfailingly repeated in conferences and seminars on Latin American security.
Interstate conflict in the region is said to be unthinkable -- though a former defence minister who himself preferred 'unforeseeable, even inconceivable', admitted to us that 'almost unthinkable' would be more appropriate.
It is true that preventive mechanisms have been adopted and are being perfected. But even leaving aside the Central American conflicts (which fit into the 'unrepeatable' Cold War scenario), the last interstate conflicts are hardly in the distant past: the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the Ecuador-Peru war in 1995.
What does seem clear is that, unless they are engaging in an expensive ploy to keep their military happy, the countries buying F16s and the like consider at least some variants of interstate conflict quite imaginable.
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