Jerusalem

Government laboratories should be set up in Israel to carry out defence research, according to a report on revitalizing the country's military industries. Weapons development and production, it adds, should be carried out by private companies, rather than government corporations as at present.

The report was drawn up by a defence ministry committee headed by reserve general Moshe Peled. It recommends that Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), Israel Military Industries, and Raphael (the Armament Development Authority), an auxiliary unit of the defence ministry, should be privatized.

But it adds that the research underpinning weapons development should be performed by a new system of government research laboratories.

As the report is classified, Peled is refusing to comment on it. But Yossi Snir, the committee's coordinator, says a summary that appeared in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz last week is “reliable”.

In recent years, Israel's defence industries have been plagued by falling sales, labour disputes over forced redundancies, and a lack of technological innovation. According to Ha'aretz, one problem is the difficulty of attracting highly qualified young scientists.

“Since the 1990s [the trend] is for talented people to leave government research laboratories and move to the flourishing private high-tech industry,” confirms Zehev Tadmor, former president of the Technion, Israel's institute of technology.

There has been a mixed reaction to the proposal to create government defence laboratories, which do not currently exist in Israel. “I'm not sure that we have to separate out basic research,” says Moshe Arens, former defence minister and former IAI deputy director-general. Privatizing the industries would be sufficient to make them more attractive to young scientists, he suggests.

But physicist and former minister of science and technology Yuval Ne'eman says the establishment of such laboratories would be a positive development, not only for defence industries but for Israeli science in general.

“Since nearly all research is performed at the universities, a tradition has become established according to which the amount of research performed in the country is tied to [its] number of students,” Ne'eman complains. Government laboratories of the kind that exist in the United States and Europe could break the link between higher education and research budgets, he says.

The Peled report also calls for a reversal of the long decline in government investment in basic research.