THAAD Battery Launcher. (Photo Courtesy of Lockheed Martin)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is making progress on its revamped version of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process, but a Pentagon official involved in the changes says not to expect major shifts in the near term.
“So we’re on time and on target with regards to everything that was tasked to us within” the America First Arms Transfer Strategy, Michael Cadenazzi, the assistant secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, told reporters last week after a Center for a New American Security event. “We have a series of initiatives that are tied to it, the sales catalog, and all those kind of things… and so we’ve delivered our portion of it.”
But because there are so many moving pieces to this overhaul, initial changes are unlikely to roll out until later this year. And even then, the changes won’t be a “one year kind of thing” but rather more incremental, he said.
Cadenazzi’s comments follow US President Donald Trump’s executive order in early February that called for national production interests to be taken into greater account when the US sells foreign nations weapons, as well as prioritizing arms sales for countries who invest more in their own defense spending. In that document, Trump outlined a series of steps that needed to be completed within 120 days, a timeframe that lapsed earlier this month.
