Trump Order Looks to Speed Up, Ease Restrictions Over Military Sales
President Donald Trump this week ordered his administration to reduce regulatory restrictions around sales of weapons and other military items to U.S. partners, saying he wants to speed up foreign military sales and make the process more “transparent.”
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The executive order directs the State Department and the Pentagon to develop a list of “priority partners” for conventional arms transfers and a list of “priority end-items” for potential transfer to those priority partners within 60 days of April 9. The agencies will review, update and reissue those lists annually, the order says.
It also orders both agencies, along with the Commerce Department, to “reevaluate restrictions” imposed by the multilateral Missile Technology Control Regime on Category I items -- which include rocket and unmanned aerial vehicle systems, such as ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles and various drones -- and to “consider supplying certain partners with specific Category I items.” The State Department and the Pentagon also should propose an update to the existing congressional notification thresholds for certain military exports under the Foreign Military Sales and the Direct Commercial Sales programs, and they should implement the 2018 conventional arms transfer policy Trump outlined during his first term.
It also orders the agencies to review and update the list of defense items that can be bought only through the FMS process -- the FMS-Only List -- and review the U.S. Munitions List to “focus protections solely on our most sensitive and sophisticated technologies, and shall establish clear criteria for including an item on the FMS-Only List.” Trump also wants both agencies and Commerce to come up with a plan to “improve the transparency” of the U.S. defense sales programs by creating “metrics for accountability” and securing “exportability as a requirement in the early stages of the acquisition process.” He also called on the agencies to “consolidate technology security and foreign disclosure approvals.”
Within 120 days, the three agencies also will need to submit a plan to develop a single electronic system to track all Direct Commercial Sale export license requests and “ongoing FMS efforts throughout the case life-cycle.”
Trump said the order is meant to make U.S. military sales more predictable and reliable. It notably says the U.S. should “consolidate parallel decision-making” when agencies decide whether to approve sales, a reference to agencies granting simultaneous approvals during the FMS process as opposed to “sequential decision-making where agencies wait for other agencies to make decisions before taking action.”
A White House fact sheet said the order will help create a “rapid and transparent foreign defense sales system that enables effective defense cooperation between the United States and our chosen partners," which “is foundational to these objectives.”
Industry and some lawmakers have long asked the government to reform its foreign military sales procedures, which they say place too many restrictions and delays around exports to allies (see 2402080045 and 2402130040).
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, welcomed the executive order, saying the FMS process “has been broken for many years. It’s too hard to understand and is plagued by bureaucratic delays and lengthy requirements that leave our partners waiting for years.”
Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s new task force on foreign arms sales (see 2501220086), also praised Trump’s action. “Cutting red tape boosts our security, supports manufacturing, and gets vital tech to the good guys,” Zinke tweeted.