Washington has warned the British government that it will be forced to terminate Britain's privileged relationship with the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) if Britain privatizes its defense research facilities. The warning on the NRO came, buried deep, in a scathing report, "Defence Research," released Nov. 10 by the House of Commons Defence Committee. The committee provides independent parliamentary scrutiny of defense issues.

The governments's two-year-old proposals to privatize Britain's defense research facilities, the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), were castigated as "fatally flawed" by the committee, which wants the proposal abandoned.

The NRO provides highly classified data from military satellites to U.S. agencies and shares some of its with Britain. DERA is the primary British focus of classified Anglo-American defense collaboration. Its work includes nuclear weapons research, missile defense and low observable technologies. It employs about 12,000 staff members and has an annual budget of 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) per year. (..)

The Pentagon has made clear to the British government that its proposals for DERA fundamentally jeopardize this cooperation, as stated in an Oct. 1 letter from Jacques Gansler, U.S. undersecretary of defense, to Colin Balmer, the U.K. Defence Ministry's principal finance officer. The letter, quoted in the Defence Committee report, stresses that the proposals to privatize DERA "would produce an environment in which the special National Reconnaissance Office relationship with the DERA, as well as with other special U.S. government relationships, would not be possible." (..)

The report warns that "U.S. concerns must be properly addressed in reaching any decision on DERA's future. If the [U.K.'s so-called Public-Private Partnership to privatize government activities] goes ahead, the Ministry of Defence may be excluded from U.S. technology developments, ... the prospect of the [United States] having to deal with a private sector DERA puts at risk further collaboration." It added: "Without clear and genuine acceptance by the [United States], the public-private partnership must not proceed." (..)

Source: Defense News, 22 November 1999, Pages 1 / 27.