- Historically, the Pentagon has struggled to balance factory capacity with the global demand for US-made systems
- Now, the Department has fused sales authority and industrial base management
- A “single organisation” allows the Department to use foreign capital to build US production capacity and ensure sensitive technology security is baked into the design of a system from the beginning, rather than as an afterthought.
The Department of Defense (DoD) have imbued a new logic into its defence sales protocols by realigning two agencies that had created a lot of friction under the purview of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Instead, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) authority, and the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), responsible for securing sensitive American technologies, will both report to the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment.
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In doing so, the change will establish one single line of authority, avoiding the friction that came with a linear model in which DSCA could spend years negotiating an FMS deal only for the DTSA to delay the agreement in the last minute.
On average, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the DoD takes almost 12 years to deliver the first version of a weapon system.
The development process, the GAO discovered, takes so long because of its rigid, sequential steps while reform efforts so far have mostly been workarounds to the current system. For example, in May 2024, the State Department tried to expedite HIMARS sales to Ukraine with an emergency waiver, which bypassed the standard 30-day Congressional review period.
“Everybody wanted weapons but we couldn’t get it too them fast enough,” Hegseth remarked, unveiling the newly synchronised acquisition process and industrial expansion under the America First Arms Transfer Strategy.
America (industry) first
Now, a new integrated approach will be implemented to bake in these considerations concurrently with the production of the system and while the FMS deal is negotiated from the very beginning.
By creating a “single organisation” in this way, tilted toward sales and the industrial base, rather than fixating on the foreign policy implications, the new process ought to speed up the delivery of weapons systems to the US Armed Forces and its preferred allies, while reinvesting the foreign capital into growing US defence industrial capacity.
Until now, the government has merely drip-fed funds into the defence industrial base over the last few years as the geopolitical environment worsened, which constitutes a hopeless and unsustainable solution to reinvigorating production capacity after decades of relative peace.
“When fragility is exposed,” wrote one Foreign Policy Research Institiute analyst and active-duty Air Force officer, Jesse R. Humpal, “the instinct is to compensate with stockpiles, emergency authorities, and targeted subsidies. These actions may blunt immediate shocks, but they cannot rebuild regenerative capacity. Stockpiles are static and subsidies episodic – neither creates an industrial system designed to surge.”
Drawbacks
While the change does expedite defence sales to match the speed of wartime delivery, centralising oversight under the Acquisition office in order to cut out bureaucratic requirements may reduce external scrutiny.
The GAO previously uncovered the DoD’s failure to routinely conduct end-use monitoring in a report published in December 2025. In some cases, the US’ commercial industry products have fallen into the wrong hands.
In addition, certain human rights considerations may be neglected. Especially given persistent concerns over US defence exports to the Israel Defence Forces, whose military operation in Gaza has come under deep scrutiny among observers. There are concerns that the focus on speed could bypass critical ethical or legal safeguards.
Some global partners may perceive the “America First” shift as making Washington a more capricious and unpredictable partner, leading them to potentially seek alternative supply chains to avoid operational security risks. Nowhere is this more the case than in Europe, with leading suppliers pledging to offer sovereign systems.
