Will the AWACS Deal Fly?

By Ed Magnuson

Congress may shoot it down, but Reagan sends ft up

When the Reagan Administration proposed selling some $5 billion worth of air weaponry, including five highly sophisticated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, to Saudi Arabia last April, there was little doubt that opposition might be strong enough in Congress to veto the deal. Republican Senators Howard Baker of Tennessee and Paul Laxalt of Nevada advised the President to delay official notification of his intent to make the sale until he had enough votes lined up to support the package. Reagan waited, and last week sent that notification to Congress.

Does that mean that he can win, that opposition to the deal--expressed last June in a letter signed by 54 Senators (including 20 Republicans) and a House resolution co-sponsored by 252 Representatives--has faded? Some members of Congress did assume that the White House must have made a head count and found enough backing, at least in the Republican-dominated Senate, to avoid rejection of the Saudi deal. To block the sale, a majority in both chambers must vote against it by Oct. 30. "He wouldn't have sent this up here unless he felt sure he was going to win," said one Senate aide about the President. However, the Administration has so far not even decided on any specific plan to gain congressional support. Conceded one White House aide: "The legislative strategy group has not focused on the issue yet."

Reagan clearly wants to push the Saudi package while his legislative record still looks invincible and while his popularity is high. His advisers also want to get the initial headlines on the controversial package behind them before Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's visit to the White House next week. Despite predictions by Senate Majority Leader Baker that the Senate, at least, will not vote to block the sale, a close fight looms. The outcome could depend on how strenuously Reagan personally joins the battle. Conceded Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, a leading opponent of the sale: "If this is a no-holds-barred fight, I'm not saying he can't win."

As unveiled last week, the price of the Saudi arms package totaled $8.5 billion. The five AWACS, whose advanced radar enables them to detect aircraft at a distance of 250 miles to 350 miles, and their support facilities account for $5.8 billion of that, and have attracted the most attention. Yet the proposal also includes 101 sets of fuel tanks to extend the range of the Saudis' fleet of 62 F-15 Eagles. Probably the world's best jet fighters, the F-15s will be sent to the Saudis in a sale that former President Jimmy Carter pushed through a skeptical Congress on the promise that they would not be given any longer-range capability than their present 2,878 miles. The new sale also includes 1,177 Sidewinder missiles for the F-15s, the same deadly weapon that U.S. F-14 fighters used to shoot down two Libyan aircraft two weeks ago.* To refuel both the fighters and the AWACS, the Administration also proposes to throw in eight KC-707 tankers. Delivery of the package would not start until 1985.

In preliminary skirmishing, the debate centered last week on military questions. The U.S. Air Force had once boasted of the awesome capabilities of its AWACS as well as its relative invulnerability to air attack when escorted by modern fighters. Now, however, both the Defense and State departments were trying to assure Israel that the electronics-laden craft is no threat to that nation's security. Under Secretary of State James Buckley suggested that the relatively slow (530 m.p.h.) AWACS planes, which are modified Boeing 707 jetliners, could easily be shot down by Israeli fighters if they strayed close enough to Israel's borders to permit their radar to monitor Israeli aircraft. The Defense Department declassified studies showing how well the high ground around Israel blocks airborne radar at low altitudes. The Air Force even gave a team of Israeli military and technical experts a nine-hour flight across much of the U.S. in an AWACS plane last week to demonstrate its limitations.

The Administration also subtly shifted its basic rationale for the sale from the argument that it would give the Saudis the help they need to defend the oil fields to the claim that it would give the U.S. a new chance to inject its own military power into the Middle East. Buckley contended that U.S. military ground crews will be required in Saudi Arabia for years to maintain the complex aircraft. He even suggested that the ground facilities could be used by U.S. forces "if we do have to go in in a hurry" in any future emergency involving oil facilities.

Critics of the sale counter with a few points of their own: that the Saudis' F-15 fighters could protect the AWACS on any snooping mission aimed at Israel, that there is no way to keep any intelligence gathered by Saudi AWACS crews from being given to Israel's more menacing Arab enemies, and that the four AWACS planes now being operated by the U.S. in Saudi Arabia (under an agreement extending through 1984) are the best way to protect the interests of all parties. Opponents also warn that the Saudi government is unstable, and that if it fell, as had the pro-U.S. regime of the late Shah of Iran, the sophisticated weaponry could end up in anti-American hands. Even with AWACS and F-15s, foes of the deal insist, Saudi Arabia's air power would be no match for a Soviet move against the oil sources, while no smaller nation in the region, like Iran or South Yemen, would dare make such a move. Anyway, say opponents, Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani stated in April that Israel, not the U.S.S.R., is his country's main enemy.

In the end, the debate probably will turn on political and diplomatic considerations rather than on military realities. Congress has never used its power to block an arms sale proposed by a President, preferring to give him his traditional leeway in the conduct of foreign affairs. Israel's use of American aircraft to attack a nuclear reactor in Iraq may have strengthened the perception in Congress that the U.S. needs to wield a more even hand in the Middle East. The Administration hopes the sale will not only reward a vital oil supplier but encourage Saudi Arabia to continue to be a moderate ally in the Middle East. The Saudis' recent help in arranging a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon was earnest of those hopes. On the other hand, rejecting the sale would surely insult the Saudis and anger other moderate Arab nations that the U.S. has been courting.

For members of Congress, caught in a fight that most wish had never been joined, the choice of whom to offend in the Middle East is not a happy one. For Ronald Reagan, the Saudi AWACS sale looms as the first test of whether he can translate his legislative prowess in domestic matters into foreign affairs as well.

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Douglas Brew/Santa Barbara and Neil MacNeil/Washington

*The Air Force says a missile was fired at a Lockheed SR-71 spy plane last week in international air space along the coast of Korea, but missed.

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Santa Barbara, Neil MacNeil/Washington

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