Julian Moxon/PARIS
A French parliament report on the national defence industry has called for a complete review of France's long-term defence-spending plans to put right what it terms the "brutal and repetitive" reductions in funding over the past few years.
The report, by the parliamentary deputy responsible for defence, Jean-Michel Boucheron, says that spending over the last ten years has resulted in "considerable disorder" within individual programmes because of "delays, cost increases and short-term changes in equipment requirements".
It comes as the defence ministry, under Alain Richard, is carrying out its own review of defence-equipment priorities, for completion by April. This could result in significant changes in purchases of national weapons such as the Rafale multi-role fighter and other defence equipment, including missiles and nuclear weapons. Richard promises that international co-operation projects such as the NH Industries NH90 helicopter will "-not be touched", however.
Boucheron says that the six-year (1997-2002) defence-spending plan introduced by the previous, right-wing, Government is now "largely obsolete". The report blames massive cancellations in 1992, 1995 and 1996 for a "crisis" in funding, leading to drastic reductions in available resources for new spending.
It says that it is time for "bi-annual defence planning", noting that "-only two long-term spending plans have been produced in the past 25 years". Boucheron says that he is "-worried about the unravelling of the major programmes begun in the late 1980s".
The 1998 equipment budget will be set at Fr81.5 billion ($13.5 billion), a reduction of 9.3% on the budget approved for 1997, which the report says reflects a "new and very substantial inflexibility" in the available equipment resources.
It also finds that the proportion of spending on research and development has been reduced by 17% since 1976, representing for 1998 around 31% of the total defence-equipment budget, against more than 45% in the USA.
The report recommends "radical" changes in the way programmes are managed, along with "rapid" rationalisation and restructuring of industry, as well as a stabilisation of orders and programme funding to obtain lower production costs.
Richard says that the cuts already made will not affect any of the major programmes, although there will have to be a "renegotiation" of development costs of the Rafale and probable cancellation of an "intermediate" first export-standard version.
On French industry restructuring, the report, which is the first such study to emerge from the new socialist Government of Lionel Jospin, says that a marriage between Dassault Aviation and state-owned Aerospatiale "seems inevitable-in the long term, Dassault cannot be isolated in Europe".
This contrasts with a recent comment by Dassault president Serge Dassault, in which he criticised as "fiction" the need for the merger solely to counter the increased competitiveness of the restructured USdefence industry. He is against "-solutions which bring nothing to our company".
Source: Flight International
