(Procurement; 05-03; p.5)
Press reports said that by this order about 10000
jobs could be saved. - Assuming that it will need twenty years
up to the complete fulfilment of the contract, one can calculate
a subsidy of 40000 Euro per year and job.
- A sum, the state otherwise only spends on the much scolded German
coal-industry, i.e. mining inclusively specific technology (on
this the state spends three billion Euro a year for 50000 jobs,
equalling 60000 Euro per year and job; these subsidies however
have to be re-negotiated in 2006).
Comparing a military industry with a civil one
might seem odd at first; nonetheless the structural similarity
of lobbyist's arguments is striking: what is military security
within a framework of a widened security notion to the one side,
is secured supply to the other; what is securing a strategically
important industry to the one side, is securing world-wide leading
technical know-how.
Lobbyists of both sides mention that some portion of the subsidies
re-flow to the state as taxes and that jobs will be secured for
a long time because one produces exportable goods.
In the final analysis, these arguments are of
a protectionist nature and known since the times of industrialisation.
Counter-arguments are therefore as long known; namely: forestalling
state-induced structural change by wrongly allocating resources;
keeping the economically not defendable illusion of securing jobs
by protection - that may work for one election period, but in
the long run the costs for the national economy are relatively
higher.
The long period up to the delivery of the first
planes makes it obvious that the decision taken was not based
primarily on security reasons, but on industrial-political ones.
One sees strong parallels with the procurement of the Fighter
90 or Eurofighter, respectively: the then Minister of Defence
Rühe as well put the security argument into the spotlight, while
the relevant was the industrial-political. Or has anybody seriously
discussed deploying German fighter planes for power projection
similar to the American example?
(end of article)
