An aerospace working group wants some satellite components exempted from U.S. export control restrictions, a change its leader says would benefit national security.
The group plans to compare U.S. commercial satellite components with like foreign components, and then recommend any that perform at or below the basic commercial-performance level–a level defined by the group–no longer be controlled under U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regimes. The reasoning, working group chairman and retired Air Force major general Craig Weston said, is those components made by second-and-third tier suppliers “will not be militarily useful to foreign nations.”
“We plan to make our assessment and recommendations available to the administration, the Congress, and industry so each can then act on it,” Weston said yesterday at a American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) briefing at the National Press Club. Weston chairs the AIAA’s new export-control working group.
Exempting such components from ITAR, he said, would improve sales for the second-and-third-tier suppliers, thus allowing them to invest in research and innovation that benefits the nation.
He pointed to a February report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)–which he called a “wakeup call”–that talks of the impact ITAR is having on the U.S. space industrial base, and the implications for national security.
“There’s an inter-dependency between the U.S. space-industrial base and the U.S. national-security budget, which is the engine that drives industry investment in research and innovation,” Weston said. “In reverse, the U.S. national-security strategy is very dependent on state-of-the-art space technology that can only be maintained by a robust U.S. space industrial base.”
Second-and-third-tier satellite component suppliers are impacted the most by ITAR, Weston said.
“These are the companies that have historically provided much of the innovation within the industry,” he said, noting they “invest significantly more of their internal research and development” compared to U.S. prime contractors.
As these suppliers lose market share in the global marketplace, Weston said “rapidly-emerging foreign industrial capabilities are challenging U.S. space superiority”–which he said is contrary to the intent of ITAR.
“ITAR has not prevented the development of this foreign space capability, it has not seemed to slow the pace of growth of this capacity and has prevented the U.S. from influencing or benefitting from the growth,” he said.
“ITAR has increasingly discouraged open exchanges of ideas and innovations to the point that collaborative efforts with the U.S. are no longer considered as viable or desirable models and are often presumed to be prohibited by foreign companies,” he added.
“Foreign-born talent,” he said, has gone “elsewhere to use their abilities in a much-less restricted research environment.”
“It is in this context that ITAR is adversely affecting national security, and we must begin to reexamine the implementation of this policy,” Weston told the press club gathering yesterday.
Weston, who is heading the AIAA working group on a pro-bono basis, is vice president and deputy director of the Adroit C4ISR Center at SRA International.
The ad-hoc export-control working group formed a month ago and has been having weekly meetings, Weston said.
It will first focus on commercial communication satellites, and provide a report to the administration, Congress, and industry.
It hopes to have satellite component items–a list that could include solar cells, batteries, traveling wave tubes, and visual imagers–successfully taken off the ITAR list and put on the Commerce Department’s less-restrictive list, he said.
Robert Dickman, AIAA’s executive director and a retired Air Force major general, noted yesterday that for some of the satellite components AIAA is looking at, U.S. companies previously had been the main suppliers in the world for them.
“But by virtue of our ITAR policy other countries have been forced to develop the technologies themselves and now have products that are every bit as good as ours,” Dickman said.
Weston lamented how ITAR restrictions have prompted some foreign nations to develop “ITAR-free satellites,” meaning they have chosen to not include U.S. components because of the corresponding ITAR requirements.
“Our U.S. companies are literally being locked out by other nations because our companies are subject to ITAR and other nations don’t want to deal with the ITAR restrictions that are levied on the components they would sell to them,” Dickman said.
The working group has not gone far enough in its study to estimate how much U.S. export sales would increase if the items are exempted from ITAR, Weston said.
George Muellner, AIAA’s incoming president, said he is hopeful the recent increased emphasis on ITAR issues will continue into the next presidential administration.
“This clearly has become a national issue,” said Muellner, who previous worked for Boeing [BA] and served as an Air Force lieutenant general. He cited industry, academic and government efforts–including a multi-agency task force–reexamining ITAR.