Criteria For Assessing Aid To Egypt Lacking, Study Says

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post
May 13, 2006

Although Egypt has been a top recipient of U.S. military aid for more than two decades, the Pentagon and the State Department still lack specific measures for assessing the effectiveness of the billions of dollars being spent on Egyptian armed forces, according to a U.S. government study issued yesterday.

The study, by the Government Accountability Office, is particularly critical of an absence of U.S. benchmarks for judging how well the aid has modernized Egyptian forces and improved their ability to operate with the U.S. military.

Since the 1979 Camp David peace accords, Egypt has received about $34 billion in U.S. military assistance, making it second only to Israel among recipients of such aid. It continues to absorb $1.3 billion a year, or about a quarter of all U.S. foreign military assistance.

The money, which accounts for about 80 percent of Egypt's military procurement budget, has gone largely toward replacing old Soviet weaponry with U.S. equipment. Just over half of Egypt's military inventory is now U.S.-made, with Egypt's goal being to reach 66 percent by 2020.

U.S. officials justify the big aid program as important in shoring up Egypt as a key Arab ally and in contributing to stability in the Middle East. The flow of assistance is credited with ensuring expedited transit for U.S. ships through the Suez Canal and for U.S. planes through Egyptian airspace.

It is also said by U.S. officials to have encouraged Egyptian support for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. And it has enabled Egyptian forces to function more smoothly with U.S. forces -- a condition that military officials call "interoperability."

But the GAO report says the Pentagon has not defined its expectations for Egyptian military modernization or interoperability, beyond an increase in the ratio of U.S. to Soviet equipment in Egypt's inventory.

"We recommend that the agencies define the current and desired levels of modernization and interoperability the United States would like to achieve," the study says. "This should include establishing benchmarks and targets for these and other goals."

In responses attached to the study, the Pentagon deferred to the State Department, which oversees foreign military assistance programs. State said it will work with the Pentagon to come up with better criteria for assessing Egypt's modernization goals, but it added that specifying interoperability targets will be more problematic. While acknowledging the importance of quantitative measures, State noted that the "qualitative benefits" of the assistance "are perhaps more critical."

The study was requested by Rep. Tom Lantos (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee. Lantos has led an unsuccessful two-year effort to shift some of the military aid to Egypt into economic and political development assistance.

"The GAO study proves what we have long suspected: the Egypt [military aid] program is meant more as a political entitlement program, with no real performance standards," Lantos said in a statement yesterday. "This is a massive military entitlement program on auto-pilot."

He noted that much of the military aid has gone toward financing the acquisition of conventional equipment, such as tanks and F-16 fighter jets, even as the conventional military threat to Egypt has evaporated.