A survey carried out just weeks before Denmark' government finally reveals which new fighter jet will replace the ageing stock of F-16s in the Danish Air Force has revealed that
the majority of Danes are against buying a replacement altogether.The survey, performed by Wilke on behalf of the
Jyllands-Posten newspaper, revealed that 53.3 percent of Danes are against splurging out 30 billion kroner (roughly 4.5 billion dollars) on a new fleet of fighter jets. The news has put the Defense Minister, Peter Christiansen, on the defensive,
Børsen reported.
"Times have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when we all were assured that the NATO nations were safe and secure," Christiansen told Jyllands-Posten newspaper, arguing that Denmark must, as fellow NATO nations, intensify its defense effort.
Only 30.8 percent of Danes believe buying new fighters are a good idea, whereas 15.9 percent of respondents claimed to be "unsure." Unsurprisingly, Danish ladies constituted the majority of the nay-sayers, as under 20 percent of Danish women believe the defense investment was justified.
The Danish government is expected to disclose its new fighter choice sometime in May.
At present, the choice lies between three warplane models, namely the Joint Strike Fighter (produced by US Lockheed Martin), the Eurofighter Typhoon (produced by Airbus in partnership with a pan-European consortium) and the F/A-18 Super Hornet (produced by Boeing), with the F-35A Lightning II (Joint Strike Fighter) generally considered top dog.
The US aircraft manufacturer Boeing has lately caused a remarkable stir in Denmark with an extensive advertising campaign with full-page ads in newspapers, radio programs and full-size advertisements at bus stops. According to many observers, this may be one of the largest lobbying efforts ever at home, as the stakes for being selected the supplier of Denmark's new fighter fleet are running high.
Editor Andreas Krog of the web portal
nytkampfly.dk estimated that Boeing has already spent up to 15 million kroner (roughly 2.3 million dollars) in the current campaign, Danish
TV2 reported.
"Denmark may well be a small country buying comparatively few planes, but nevertheless a large sum of money is at stake. Another thing is that if one wins Denmark, one might also win other European countries and create some kind of snowball effect," said Jens Ringsmose, associate professor at the
Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, who earlier dismissed Boeing's attempt to palm off its warplanes as "desperate."
Ike and Orwell Agree!
Oh wise Danes, repeat these quotes among your countrymen, from two men who knew war and weapons well:
Dwight Eisenhower:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
George Orwell, (1984):
The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But
in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
R.C.