In an April 9 executive order, the president directed his administration to “improve speed and accountability in the defense sales system.” The order aims to ensure that the United States has a “rapid and transparent foreign defense sales system” that provides support to key U.S. partners and boosts the country’s own defense industrial base. We asked four experts to identify key steps that the U.S. government should take to improve the foreign defense sales process.Read more below.Jennifer Kavanagh Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis at Defense PrioritiesThe United States should be more selective about which countries it sells defense products to, accepting fewer clients to ensure that scarce defense industrial capacity is allocated to best support U.S. national security goals.A more selective process would sell high-demand, low-supply systems — like air defense and precision munitions — only to partners that play a direct role in advancing U.S. security interests. Potential clients and orders should be prioritized according to their alignment with the U.S. defense strategy. Countries might rank highly because they have committed to fight alongside the United States in a contingency or because they can reduce the U.S. defense burden by protecting themselves.This approach would reduce wait times for high-priority clients, limit transactions made more for the sake of revenue than U.S. interests, and increase the strategic value the United States derives from defense sales. Though it would halt sales to low-priority clients, defense contractors would still face demand that far exceeds supply, so their bottom lines should not suffer.Jonathan D. Caverley Professor, U.S. Naval War CollegeOne change the administration should not make is weakening the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program. The executive order’s call for “exportability” as an early acquisition requirement and its view of the “FMS-only” list solely as a means of protecting “our most sensitive and sophisticated technologies”
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In an April 9 executive order, the president directed his administration to “improve speed and accountability in the defense sales system.” The order aims to ensure that the United States has a “rapid and transparent foreign defense sales system” that provides support to key U.S. partners and boosts the country’s own defense industrial base. We asked four experts to identify key steps that the U.S. government should take to improve the foreign defense sales process.Read more below.Jennifer Kavanagh Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis at Defense PrioritiesThe United States should be more selective about which countries it sells defense
