U.S. companies want to sell more unmanned aircraft on the international market and need the export-control reforms President Barack Obama’s administration is working on to be enacted, a top executive said recently.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] Chief Executive Officer Wes Bush warned at a Washington conference of the U.S. drone aircraft industry losing its dominance akin to how domestic satellite makers lost sales to foreign competitors because of U.S. law forbidding them from exporting to allies.
“Today the U.S. is struggling to sell unmanned aircraft to our allies, while other nations prepare to jump into the marketplace with both feet,” Bush said during his keynote address at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International North America 2011 conference in Washington. “In a repeat of the satellite example, the thinking seems to be that our allies will neither build their own nor buy them from those who will be motivated by the perversity of our policies to develop them themselves.”
He noted India, for one, said this year it will begin development of its own unmanned attack capability. Dozens of nations have bought unmanned surveillance aircraft.
Bush said the “good news” for unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) makers, like Northrop Grumman, is that the Pentagon is enacting “what is clearly the best export-reform policy, building higher walls around fewer things.” He said Pentagon officials “deserve credit (for) and encouragement” to carry out the reforms.
As part of a multi-stage export-control-reform initiative, the Obama administration last month proposed a new rule for moving some technology exports–with low or no military or intelligence sensitivity–from the State Department’s U.S. Munitions List to the more-flexible Commerce Control List, and also retooling that Commerce list. The White House also has been crafting legislation that would merge the two lists of controlled exports and create a single export licensing agency. The changes are expected to make it easier for defense companies to sell some weapon systems to allied countries.
Bush said recently that this reform initiative “recognizes the clear advantages of solidifying a common capability with like-minded allies.”
“The primary motive for such reforms makes imminent sense: to better support our allies and to codify the technology sharing that occurs every single day on the battlefield and in the joint training that we perform,” he said.
Bush also told the gathering of drone makers that his company believes in 10 years unmanned-underwater systems “will be as important as unmanned aircraft and land-based systems are today.”