Add Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to the host of Pentagon and service officials who would like to see a faster foreign military sales process.
The lag in finalizing a deal with Kuwait for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet aircraft is indicative of the turtle-like pace it takes for the United States government to ink arms sales to foreign nations, he said on Thursday. News sources in May 2015 announced the potential purchase of at least 28 of the Boeing [BA] fighter jets, but so far no order has surfaced.
Unfortunately, that slowness isn’t anything new, Mabus told reporters at the Surface Navy Association.
“You can go back and see statements from [former Defense Secretary] Bob Gates about the long, tortuous process you have got to go through in order to do any of this, to do any international sale whether to an ally or not,” he said. “It’s a very long, very frustrating process for all parties involved.”
“It speaks to the need to do something about the whole process, but I don’t think there’s been any particular slowdown with this program,” he added.
Mabus said he was hopeful that current efforts to speed up sales would bear fruit, but cautioned that past attempts haven’t been particularly successful.
The Navy Secretary added his voice to a chorus of complaints about the FMS process that have erupted over the past couple months. After the Dubai Air Show in November, Bill LaPlante, then the Air Force’s head of acquisition, said he heard from multiple Middle Eastern countries who wanted to buy weapons from the United States but were loath to broker a deal because of the laboriousness of FMS.
That could leave those countries with few options other than to purchase weapons from actors such as China, he said.