Provisions in the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) chairman’s mark of the fiscal year 2017 defense authorization bill call for more information about the Defense Department’s role in the foreign military sales (FMS) process, potentially paving the way for further reforms by Congress in future years.
The language, included in Title XII of the mark released by Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) on Monday, would require the Defense Department to brief HASC on the results of efforts to streamline the FMS process. A separate provision calls for the comptroller general to issue a report that evaluates the department’s performance and compares the U.S. arms sale process to that of other nations.
The report and briefing are meant to give House authorizers an “initial look” into the process to identify areas where the Defense Department could be more efficient, a HASC staff member said Friday. “This is something that the committee wants to work on in partnership with the foreign affairs committee going forward.”
Foreign military sales are made through an interagency process in which the departments of defense, state and other government organizations play a role. Defense Department and industry officials, including Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and former head of Air Force acquisition Bill LaPlante, have complained in recent months that the sluggish pace of sales could send foreign nations seeking weapons to China or Russia (Defense Daily, Nov. 13).
HASC is concerned that the process is unnecessarily “slow, cumbersome and complicated,” the language notes. Although the Defense Department has taken steps to try to speed up arms sales by establishing a new Defense Senior Steering Group on Arms Transfers and Technology Review that would improve its decision-making process on technology transfer to foreign nations, “inefficiencies may exist in internal Department of Defense processes that cause suboptimal outcomes such as delays.”
One area where industry is seeing some negative change is the trend toward fixed-price incentive fee contracts instead of the simpler firm, fixed price contracts that foreign nations are familiar with, said John Luddy, Aerospace Industries Association’s vice president national security policy.
“In some instances when we moved from a firm, fixed price to a fixed-price incentive fee contract, that’s created a lot of consternation among a lot of…governments that are not used to that kind of complexity,” he said during a panel on acquisition reform at the Center For Strategic and International Studies on Monday. “From an industry standpoint, those are becoming increasingly important because as the domestic demand for some of our products diminishes, we really need to be making those sales overseas.”
If signed into law, the deputy defense secretary would be required to brief HASC no later than Sept. 30, 2016 on whether department initiatives are helping to speed up the FMS process.
The comptroller general report called for in the mark would assess whether the department is performing FMS duties as expected, reasons why the department isn’t hitting performance targets, whether department-led reforms are working, and how the U.S. process compares to that of other countries. The comptroller general also must brief HASC and the House Foreign Affairs Committee on its preliminary findings by the end of October 2016.
HASC also supports language in the 2016 appropriations bill that directed the Government Accountability office to review the process from an interagency lens, the mark noted.
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), a HASC member who leads the House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, suggested including the reporting requirement in the NDAA, the bill summary said.