PSPD in English Peace/Disarmament 2002-04-30   1151

Government Should Announce the Details of the Additional F-15K Bargaining Session.

The Ministry of Defense announced the results of the additional bargaining session for the purchase of F-15 airfighters. According to the MOD the final price is 4,228,000,000 dollars, which is 239 million dollars lower than the price of the interim contract. It reported that the DOD of the U.S. government sent a memorandum guaranteeing the follow-up supply of necessary munitions.

However, the Korean MOD has not announced in what specific area the price has been cut down, nor the details of the follow-up supply of munitions. It has not revealed whether the price cut has brought about any modification to the interim contract. The announcement without details cannot calm the suspicions that options might have been dropped from such areas as armament items, parts, and window maintenance. We cannot shatter the doubt that options in the interim contract were dropped to lower the contract price. The details of U.S. guarantees were not reported; neither the list of guaranteed items in the interim contract nor the final contract specifications have been announced.

Regarding the process of the F-15K airfighter purchase, we have been disappointed at the unclear announcements of the MOD in the 1st and 2nd candidates’ evaluation reports. The first session informed us of the advantages of F-15K, skipping the concrete evaluation scores of the candidates. The latest announcement is a kind of self-praise boasting of the success of the additional negotiation, which cannot be understood nor agreed to without the full information on the previous interim contract.

It is well known that the purchase of F-15K involved several scandals involoving people such as Choi Kyu-Sun, Kim Hong-Gul, and Kwon No-Gap. The prosecution accepted the need for further investigation of the matter. The provisional disposition case filed by Dassault is under way while suspicions about the fairness of the 1st evaluation session have not settled down. In this situation, no citizen would agree with the purchase of the ‘old’ fighters, of which the capability and competitiveness in aerial warfare cannot be trusted in spite of their enormous price. The MOD should announce the full results of the candidate evaluation and the additional negotiations. The government should show its responsibility by resuming the purchase process after the investigation of the prosecution. The president should not commit the sheer folly of stirring up the backlash of the citizens by sanctioning the purchase at this time when his own son, Hong-Gul, is involved in the scandal over the airfighter purchase.

PSPD

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