The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work?

Last summer when the Pentagon released its plan to fix its sprawling foreign military sales system, it also issued a warning.

Sasha Baker, then a top policy official and one of the co-chairs of the “tiger team” leading the effort, mentioned, pointedly, that they had tried this before. The U.S., she said, has tinkered with its foreign military system “roughly every 18 months for the last 20 years,” like a car in and out of the shop.

The goal this time, Baker said, was to make repairs that would last.

Little more than a year after their recommendations came out, though, it’s not clear whether the U.S. has succeeded.

All prompted by the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon, State Department and Congress launched their own efforts to reform their share of foreign military sales, or FMS. Having finished, they’re reporting different levels of progress.

The Pentagon is still trying to implement many of its recommendations, and a bill to start doing so in Congress hasn’t passed. State was more bullish about its own work but acknowledged a larger issue: Regardless of how fast the U.S. government moves, defense firms are still struggling to deliver orders.

Meanwhile, demand for American weapons has spiked. Total U.S. foreign military sales are already above $80 billion this fiscal year, said Cara Abercrombie, acting deputy for Pentagon policy. That’s higher than the FMS total in FY23 and more than $30 billion over that of FY22. Abercrombie predicted it would continue to rise.

As demand grows, the question now is whether the U.S. government and the defense industry can keep up.

“We’re really now trying to harness [the] bureaucracy,” Abercrombie said.

The wall

That bureaucracy is vast. The FMS system is spread across swathes of the U.S. national security system, including the State Department, Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency once mapped it out inside a government building in northern Virginia — and the chart took up an entire wall.

As Baker noted last year, reforming this system has been a priority for decades. American defense firms are considered the best in the world, but selling to other countries is often so difficult that supply hasn’t fully met demand.

Fixing FMS became more urgent the more America’s partners found themselves in need. The Trump administration opened the spigot of arms sales to Taiwan, facing a more powerful, more aggressive China. Taipei now has some $20 billion in orders that haven’t yet been delivered.

But everyone interviewed for this story agreed that the latest and most powerful spur for reform was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In the months afterward, the U.S. rushed weapons to Kyiv at a volume and pace rarely, if ever, seen.

Doing so involved using new tools and senior leaders in the government giving the process an unusual amount of attention, a senior State official, speaking anonymously per the department’s policy, told Defense News.

Countries suddenly anxious about their own security after Russia’s invasion started asking the U.S. why the system couldn’t move this fast for them as well.

“Many senior officials heard from our security cooperation partners that they were not satisfied with the timelines” at the start of the administration, the official said.

Thus came three efforts to speed those up: one each from the Pentagon, State Department and Congress, led by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

They had similar findings. The FMS system is so diffuse and so technical that it’s hard to monitor cases from start to finish. It doesn’t always speed up the sales that are most important for America’s own security goals, such as those to Taiwan and Ukraine. And America has extremely strict rules on what technology it can share with other countries, even when it’s in U.S. interests to do so.

“There’s been a lot of effort paid to identifying the problem,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who said the different parts of the government agreed, broadly, on the issues. “FMS is a strategic tool of policy that is too slow and too clunky to be as effective as we want it to be.”

‘Faster than that’

The aide was less confident about the solutions offered so far.

“The reform efforts have been granular and bottom-up, rather than big-picture [and] strategic,” the staffer said.

Officials leading those efforts largely agreed, but said that tweaks to the process are still important.

The State official, whose department administers foreign military sales, listed several areas of improvement, many of which were in a set of recommendations released last May.

The department is updating the curriculum for officers that handle security cooperation, so that they can better manage expectations and delays. It’s revised its own policies to make it easier to transfer aerial drones. And the State Department has tried to set requirements that apply to whole regions, rather than separate countries — like an oil filter that fits on a whole class of cars rather than only one make and model.

When pressed, the official couldn’t share statistics to show how much faster cases were now moving, but did say that the speed of aerial drones had increased. Overall, the official argued that the department wasn’t a major delay in the FMS process.

“It takes 98% of the cases 48 hours to go through the State Department,” the official said. “It’s very hard to move faster than that.”

‘Overburdened’

Where cases take much longer is the Defense Department, which has spent the last year implementing its own reforms.

Abercrombie, the policy official, described the progress so far in three main areas.

One is a group of Pentagon leaders that now meets once every quarter — though more often at lower levels — to make sure they’re paying attention to the issue and measuring their progress, almost like a monthly calendar reminder on a phone.

A Defense Department spokesperson said that the secretary and deputy secretary of defense receive quarterly updates on the reform efforts — and that the Pentagon is still studying how to best retool its process.

Another is a new set of meetings between the combatant commands, which work the closest with American allies around the world, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which actually oversees cases.

The goal here, Abercrombie said, is to watch for any new issues — say, with a country or individual case — that may need higher-level attention.

Lastly, the Pentagon is setting up a new cadre of officials, embedded in embassies around the world, like defense attaches, to shepherd countries through the process. This core is meant to help each partner through the highly technical prep work required, making it faster and more accurate.

And it may require more people. The Defense Department is already “overburdened” with the jump in foreign military sales over the last two years, Abercrombie said. It’s deciding whether to hire civilians to supplement the uniformed personnel handling these cases.

Abercrombie didn’t offer specific cases that had sped up in the last year as a result of the changes. Instead, as an example, she mentioned that the Pentagon had recently issued a new “toolkit” meant to help Pentagon officials handle contracting, one of the hardest parts of the FMS process.

If a partner wants munitions that the U.S. buys in bulk, for instance, they need to know when the Pentagon’s deadline is to submit its own orders. Meeting that in time would let the other country add their number to the total and lower the price overall, like shopping at a wholesaler rather than a grocery store.

The toolkit is meant to help with those schedules, though when asked how one didn’t exist before, Abercrombie pointed to how vast FMS is — and how a process can act inefficiently when it’s so far spread out.

“It seems like common sense, but systemically it might not be,” she said.

What’s left

Each of the people interviewed for this story also mentioned the need for help from Congress: specifically raising the dollar number required to alert lawmakers about a sale, for a separate and sometimes lengthy review.

That threshold hasn’t been updated in decades, meaning it hasn’t met the rate of inflation.

Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that, among other provisions, would raise the limit, though it’s since stalled. An aide to Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who sponsored the bill, said that they still expected it to proceed.

“I think it’s a speed bump,” the aide said, particularly amid the war in Gaza when arms sales to Israel are under more scrutiny.

The pause means that any changes from Congress in the near term will be, in the words of the first aide, “granular.”

Regardless of their efforts, a much longer part of the process is actually delivering on orders. Multiple sources told Defense News that firming up the defense industry needs to be an equal, if not higher, priority.

“For the actual process to get something on contract, the worst of those are a year or two years, whereas we’re regularly seeing eight-to-10 year total time frames for delivery,” said the first aide.

As an example, the State official mentioned six long-term contracts that Congress approved this year for munitions labeled critical by the Pentagon. Those contracts will help defense firms move faster, but none of the munitions are, by law, exportable — one instance of higher supply that won’t help address higher demand.

“None of this matters if our industry does not have the production capacity to fulfill the orders in a timely manner,” the State official said.