Ex-U.S. Official: Japan Scheming to Get F-16 Technology Cheap

A former official of the Commerce Department charges in a new book that a Japanese plan to “modify” the General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter is really a scheme to obtain on the cheap, “all drawings and technical data” on the plane and use them “as a vehicle for building a world-class aerospace industry” in Japan.

Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., who served in the Reagan Administration from 1981 to 1986, makes the charge in a book, “Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead,” that is scheduled to be published April 27.

In it, he is critical of President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield and of the State Department, which he accuses of sometimes being “a conduit of confidential information to Japan.” He also calls for more active government intervention to preserve American industry’s strength.

Now a research fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for Peace in Washington, Prestowitz served at the Commerce Department as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, as acting assistant secretary and as counselor to the secretary.

In his book, Prestowitz charges that Japan, far from supporting American pleas for greater “inter-operability” of its forces with U.S. weaponry and aircraft, intends to use the deal to build “essentially” the independently developed fighter aircraft that the Japanese industry had urged the government to approve.

Last fall, in an initial round of negotiations on the co-development plan, Japanese officials, he writes, proposed that as “a sop to buy off the Americans because of trade friction, they would call it (the new plane) a modified F-16 and would pay General Dynamics a royalty of $500,000 per plane.”

In return, he adds, “they expected General Dynamics to provide support for 12 engineers on site and to provide all drawings and technical data on the F-16.”

“The avionics were to be completely Japanese, the fuselage to be made of completely Japanese materials and the engines to be 80% produced in Japan. . . . The weapons, too, were to be made in Japan,” Prestowitz writes.

Although the program, which Japan has estimated will cost $7 billion, was hailed by both the Defense Department and U.S. congressmen as a boon to General Dynamics, Prestowitz writes that, under the proposal presented by Japanese negotiators, the company would receive a total of only $60 million. U.S. negotiators, he says, rejected the proposal out of hand.

Prestowitz cites no sources for the details he presented. But Lt. Gen. James B. Davis, commander of the Fifth Air Force and U.S. Forces in Japan, as well as spokesmen for both the Japan Defense Agency and Mitsubishi Electric Corp., indicated that negotiations on the project had run into a snag.

Nearly six months after Japan’s announcement last Oct. 20 of the co-production plan, no progress has been reported in reaching agreement on a memorandum of understanding needed to launch the project. Japan agreed to the co-development only after more than three years of debate in which former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger finally intervened to urge Japan to “buy American.”

The Japan Times reported April 5 that Japanese electronics and heavy industry firms, which will build under license 130 of the modified F-16s by the late-1990s, were balking at sharing with the United States sophisticated technology that will be put in the new aircraft.

Although Americans expect “a sizable financial return” from the project, the newspaper said in an editorial, “domestic aerospace contractors look on this undertaking as one that will contribute to improving their design and production skills. . . . Few parts or systems seem likely to be directly imported from the United States.”

A Defense Agency official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that Japan had asked for all drawings and technical data on the F-16. Japan, he added, would be willing to use U.S. electronics equipment, but only “if it is cheap and efficient.”

“The same holds for the fuselage,” the agency official said.

Just last Thursday, Gen. Davis backed up Defense Department praise for the co-development program as “further evidence of Japan’s concern for inter-operability.” He acknowledged, however, that “the degree of co-development is in question and will be in question.”

Throughout his book, Prestowitz criticizes U.S. officials in Washington for ignorance of economics, in general, and of Japan, in particular. He also wrote that Reagan showed little interest in trade and, in one crucial Cabinet meeting discussing policy toward Japan, appeared to fall asleep.

“State sees itself as the primary defender of the overall friendly relationship with Japan,” Prestowitz writes. “It knows nothing of industry and little of economics and believes these issues are secondary to political concerns. . . . It often works with the Japanese to ‘control the crazies’ in the U.S. government and is sometimes a conduit of confidential information to Japan.”

Japanese know, Prestowitz adds, that “an appeal to the State Department not to allow some pressing trade issue to rend the fabric of the overall relationship will nearly always be met with sympathy.”

“The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo is even more supportive of Japanese positions than is the department,” he charges.

Embassy Criticized

Prestowitz writes that Ambassador Mansfield, who has served in Japan since 1977, “for years, as the trade deficit grew . . . blocked the assignment of extra commercial officers to Tokyo.”

He also says that embassy officials who write reports critical of Japan “often have difficulty getting them cleared, and those who are constantly critical find themselves assigned elsewhere.”

Few officers in the embassy, he writes, speak Japanese, “and a large percentage of the embassy staff knows little of Japan.”

Asked to comment, a State Department spokesman said Friday: “Mr. Prestowitz is entitled to his opinion, which we do not share.”

Prestowitz offered significant praise only for the Commerce and Agriculture departments and the Central Intelligence Agency in dealing with Japan. Among his comments on other U.S. agencies are these:

- The National Security Council Staff: “an outpost of the State Department.”

- The Defense Department: “schizophrenic . . . generally not pro-business,” although increasingly fearing “loss of U.S. technology leadership.”

- Council of Economic Advisers: “totally doctrinaire on economics . . . never prepared to act when (free trade) cannot be obtained.”

Some Praise

Prestowitz also scores the American mass media for consistently siding with consumers against the interests of U.S. industry and faults Congress for giving second-fiddle to trade by allowing the President to disregard any case on unfair trade if he considers national security interests more important than the case at hand.

Although he criticized a number of other U.S. officials in addition to Reagan and Mansfield, he refrained from identifying them. He had high praise, in general, for Japanese bureaucrats and criticized only one of them by name.

He was Makoto Kuroda, MITI’s incumbent vice minister for international affairs, who Prestowitz quotes as having told U.S. negotiators that if they wanted to save Cray Research, a leading manufacturer of supercomputers, they should nationalize the Minnesota-based firm.

The sharp-tongued Kuroda, wrote Prestowitz, “does not suffer fools gladly--which may account for the discomfort he caused many U.S. officials since he seemed to consider most of them fools.”

He praised Kuroda, however, for “his obvious intelligence” and added: “If you wanted to know what Japan was really thinking below all the layers of politeness, you listened to Kuroda. You might not like what he said or the way he said it, but if you listened, you heard Japan talking straight.”