Israel may drop bid to incorporate own know-how into F-35 fighter

Israel is close to dropping an effort to put its own electronic warfare know-how into Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a mainstay of its future strike force, a Pentagon official said on Tuesday. Incorporating Israel's system into the model being built for it "is not going to happen," said Jon Schreiber, who heads the program's international aspects.

"I think our system will meet their requirements with some tweaking, and I think they're starting to come around to that realization themselves," he told Reuters in an interview. The issue is sensitive because senior Israeli military officials had maintained that their aircraft must incorporate electronic warfare technologies developed by state-controlled Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. An Israeli embassy spokesman referred a caller to the Defense Ministry, which could not be immediately reached for comment.

Dropping plans for incorporating sensitive Israeli technology onto the F-35 would be a significant departure for Israel. Israeli F-15s and F-16s were modified to carry Israeli electronic warfare, radars, munitions and command and control systems. Israel is set to become a kind of trailblazer for the F-35, which is being developed by the United States and eight international partners: Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway. Israel has gone further than any non-consortium member toward acquisition, with plans to buy an initial 25 F-35A's in fiscal 2012 for delivery starting in 2014 and an option for 50 more.

The F-35 is a radar-evading, single-engine aircraft, designed to switch quickly between air-to-ground and air-to-air missions while still flying. The models built for Israel would incorporate Israeli-made data links, radios and other command and control equipment, but not the electronic warfare suite, largely because of the high cost of integrating it, Schreiber said. "They have pretty tight budget constraints and we're attempting to fit their requirements into their budget," he said. Officials from the Pentagon's F-35 joint program office met Israeli procurement officials in New York on Monday to discuss the program, Schreiber added without elaborating on their talks.

"We expect to get a revised letter of request from (Israel) within the next month or so," and anticipate that a government-to-government deal will be concluded by the end of this year or early next year, he said. U.S. instructor pilots would join Israeli pilots to train at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on four of the aircraft built for Israel, Schreiber said. By early 2015, the U.S. instructors would transition to Israel to continue training pilots there. Singapore, the other non-consortium member linked to the program through a special status, appears likely to start buying as many as 100 F-35s a year or two after Israel, Schreiber said.

He expected an agreement to be signed with Singapore within the next month detailing security safeguards for program information as a prelude to "more serious discussions" about acquiring the F-35. "At this point, we don't have any indication from Singapore that they want to put anything unique in the airplane," he said. "They want to go with a plain vanilla airplane." F-35 competitors include Saab AB's Gripen, the Dassault Aviation SA Rafale, Russia's MiG-35 and Sukhoi Su-35, and the Eurofighter Typhoon made by a consortium of British, German, Italian and Spanish companies. Lockheed's chief F-35 subcontractors are Northrop Grumman Corp and BAE Systems Plc. Two rival, interchangeable F-35 engines are under development. One is built by United Technologies Corp's Pratt i Whitney unit; the other by a team of General Electric Co and Rolls-Royce Group Plc.

Posted in: Fighter jet,israel