Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told reporters on Friday that on a recent trip to Latin America, she saw the same problem found all over the globe.
Partners in the region were complaining that the arms sales process with the U.S. was just too slow. As a result, some of those governments are taking their business elsewhere, ultimately losing dollars that could be going into the American defense industry.
“Sometimes they do get frustrated and if they have choices, they do look perhaps to acquire the items from different countries, so that certainly is a key consequence and it’s one that concerns me from the standpoint of our own U.S. industry,” James said during a roundtable discussion with press at the Pentagon.
She stressed that each of the countries she visited, from Chile to Colombia to Paraguay, was interested in a different system, but said the same thing about dealing with the Pentagon.
James stressed that not everything is as slow as some of the high-profile weapons or fighter jet deals that make headlines, but acknowledged that the foreign military sales system could be improved.
The Air Force has formed a group led by Heidi Grant, deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs, to try to fix these issues. James said she expects to receive recommendations this summer.
Some reforms being considered include developing metrics for the service to measure its speed and changing training for people in the field, James said.
She asked the group to focus on things the Air Force can change without approval by Congress, but said she expects to get a “mixed bag” of the best recommendations including some that may require new legislation.
“Focus on, what could I do? What can we in the Air Force to at least look at our part of the process and speed it up?” she said.
