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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Outsourcing American Military Technology is a Slippery Slope

The unstable international landscape necessitates keeping national security operations domestic.
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Americans have learned a lot about slippery slopes in the last two years. We’ve seen $1,200 stimulus checks morph into a never-ending eviction moratorium and a call for student loan erasure. Legitimate calls for police reform became violent riots. And “15 days to slow the spread” became 17 months (and counting) of isolation, mask-wearing, and at-home Zoom school for most of the U.S. population.

The lesson of the past two years is that government recognizes no limiting principle, except for the ones we place upon it. This doesn’t just apply to major cultural and political discussions of the day; it also applies to technical government policies which receive little attention on Twitter but have huge repercussions for our nation’s future.

One of those little-noticed, big-impact policies is the recent U.S. Air Force decision to consider outsourcing the construction of a “bridge tanker,” a new-and-improved aircraft that refuels airborne jets with more control than that which is offered by current equipment. Right now, French company Airbus is in the running against U.S.-based Boeing. These are two quality, reputable companies with decades of aircraft-building experience. However, the fact that Airbus is French should automatically disqualify it from the contract.

This is nothing personal against Airbus. The simple fact is that national defense should never, ever be outsourced. Today, it’s Airbus, headquartered in a longtime ally and friend. Tomorrow, will it be China—at the risk of their stealing our secrets and technology—because their state-owned companies are the lowest bidder? Next week, will it be Ukraine—today an ally, but tomorrow potentially taken over by corrupt oligarchs or Russia?

Obviously, today the United States would not consider outsourcing military technology to a non-ally. But international relationships change quickly. Take Ukraine, for instance. Ukraine has for years been one of our most reliable allies in Eastern Europe. However, frustration with the United States recently led Ukraine to turn to another global superpower. In July, Ukraine signed an infrastructure deal with China and eliminated previous discussions of Chinese human rights abuses.

The snub to the West is a clear reminder that international relations change, sometimes abruptly. If the U.S. military posits that only an “ally” would be trusted to build our military equipment, they ought to consider the U.S.’s own shifting history of alliances, such as our 1980s alliance with Iraq that turned into warfare just a few years later.

Contracting out military infrastructure with foreign-based companies necessitates a stability that cannot be guaranteed, especially in a post-Covid world. After the global financial crisis in 2008, entire economies collapsed; even Greece, an E.U. ally, defaulted on their debt. Imagine if we had contracted a Greek corporation to build critical defense technology in 2006. At best, two years later, we would have been out billions of taxpayer dollars; at worst, we might have been precariously short of mission-critical equipment in wartime. With the global economy shakily getting back on its feet, setting a standard of outsourcing in today’s economic climate would ignore recent historical precedent.

There are other, more logistical reasons to not outsource specifically to Airbus, even though Boeing’s KC-46 has proven to have its own challenges. First, Airbus is trying to sneak under the outsourcing radar by partnering with Lockheed Martin, the firm that has spent decades making the costly and dangerously incomplete F-35 plane. Second, Airbus is primarily a commercial company, and the Air Force has 738 acutely specific requirements acutely specific requirements in its lengthy certification process. Retrofitting models to meet Air Force certifications presents new engineering challenges, which means higher costs shifted to the Air Force that subsequently burden American taxpayers.

Finally, Airbus’s previous crafts don’t have the maneuverability required by the Air Force. Compared to Boeing’s latest refueling tanker, the Airbus tanker is 40 percent heavier and takes up nearly 50 percent more space on the ground—space that can’t be afforded on tiny runways in the Pacific Islands or in the uncertain future of cold or hot warfare. Moreover, Airbus tankers burn up to 1,000 more gallons of fuel every hour, meaning far higher operating costs over their lifespan compared to Boeing’s aircraft.

Whomever the Air Force taps to build the new bridge tanker, it won’t be the last time the Pentagon is in a position to outsource its defense manufacturing overseas. But we only need to look at our tags and toys to see that when outsourcing begins, there’s no limiting principle. The Air Force would do well to avoid venturing down a dangerous path of contracting out defense technology to foreign-based companies.

Sarah Wall is a public affairs writer who has worked for public policy, law, and accounting firms. She holds a Master’s Degree in Political Management from George Washington University.

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