By Emelie Rutherford
The Pentagon is considering buying U.S. weapon systems in advance that it anticipates partner nations will request in the future, a senior official said.
Richard Genaille, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), said last week his office is considering several ways to make its Foreign Military Sales (FMS) efforts “more responsive and more anticipatory.”
“It’s very hard to be responsive when your system is pretty much geared to wait for a letter of request from a country and then take action,” Genaille said at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space exposition. “There’s a certain amount of processing and work that has to be done after a request is received….But there’s a whole bunch of stuff that could be done before that request is received to make it more responsive.”
One of the things DSCA is doing is “trying to find a way to buy things in advance,” he said. A law dating back to the early 1980s called the Special Defense Acquisition Fund might help.
“We’re looking at that as a way to purchase things in advance so that we can use the current processes that we have for acquisition, use them in a way that we anticipate partner requirements and (U.S. combatant command) COCOM requirements…in advance so that they’re ready to go when the requirement hits,” Genaille said.
He said he could not describe this pre-purchasing effort in great detail, because it has not been officially approved by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Genaille said the advance-buying initiative is one of four such FMS reform plans DSCA started last summer that are not yet approved within the Pentagon. They came after Gates directed a security- cooperation-reform initiative that, as Genaille described it, is looking at how the Pentagon can “influence policy more effectively in our part of foreign-military sales and security cooperation.”
“It’s all about being more responsive and doing things ahead of time and doing less case-by-case work,” Genaille said last Monday at the Navy League’s Sea, Air, and Space symposium in National Harbor, Md.
“Our system has a tendency to default to case-by-case, because I think on a case-by-case basis it’s easier to do it that way,” he said. “It’s harder to look more broadly and try to develop broader policies and guidelines that would allow you to address a variety of issues holistically.”
DSCA, as part of the FMS-related reforms, is sending out inter-agency teams of Pentagon and State Department officials to work directly with the combatant commanders and partner nations, to try to predict future FMS capability requirements. It has formed a small working group that is trying to ascertain what the broad FMS requirements might be for equipment, and then develop broad-based policies and guidelines that can make DSCA’s systems faster once the requests arrive.
DSCA also would like the defense secretary to direct the Pentagon’s directorates, in writing, to move equipment requirements that are particularly urgent and sensitive faster through the approval process than under normal circumstances, Genaille said.
DSCA is busier than ever. FMS sales of U.S. weapons to foreign nations is projected to exceed $46 billion in fiscal year 2011, which ends Sept. 30, Genaille said. Popular equipment includes Lockheed Martin [LMT] C-130Js transport planes, Boeing [BA] C-17 cargo haulers, and Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, as well as drone aircraft, missile-defense systems, and intelligence, and surveillance, and reconnaissance equipment, he said.