EXCLUSIVE: New DSCA director eschews big changes; ‘continuous reform’ instead

SINGAPORE AIR SHOW: In his first interview, the new director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said he plans to pursue incremental and targeted improvements to the agency’s primary responsibility of coordinating the export of American weapons.

America’s defense industry, along with the allies and partners who buy US made weapons, have complained for decades that the US government moves too slowly in approving sales and implementing policies. The State Department has primary responsibility for approving arms exports, with DSCA, a Pentagon agency, having oversight once a deal has been approved.

It has become almost a ritual for the head of DSCA to announce a review of the agency’s policies and the laws governing them or to commit to a wholesale reform effort to “fix” things. But despite a major focus on defense export reforms under both the Obama and Trump administrations, it’s not clear how much things have actually improved; two senior defense company executives said here they still believe DSCA moves too slowly in approving sales.

But the new DSCA director, Jim Hursch, wants to take a different tack.

“So, you know, there have been many reform efforts for military sales over the last 20 to 30 years. And in each case, you know, usually marginal improvements are made; some things get better. But I don’t see it worthwhile to expend a huge amount of energy in the short term on a full-scale review,” Hursch told Breaking Defense on Tuesday.

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“What I think we need to do is continuous product improvement or process improvement, and look for ways as we go along to either do things better, or find new approaches, rather than doing a full-scale reform review that stops everything, takes a huge amount of time and effort away from other things,” Hursch said. “The fact is that most of our processes, particularly in the Foreign Military Sales cases, I think work extremely well.”

He said that most of what he hears when comes to events like the Singapore Air Show is that a country will tell him they have a problem with a particular arms export case. The cases that really get hung up rarely are caught in the DSCA process. Instead, he says, “they’re either foreign policy or they’re technology security policy questions. Neither of those are easy answers, and neither of them will always get solved.”

What has struck Hursch since he took the post six weeks ago?

“So, I think the first thing I’d say, is that I’ve been very impressed with the agency and security cooperation workforce that we have. There are improvements we can make. We need to think about how we better train and prepare folks for these jobs,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s anything that will be, you know, sort of a big surprise to anybody, but I do think that one thing that continues to be an issue that we need to attack from my time when I was director of DTSA [Defense Technology Security Administration] 10 years ago is, that I think we need to continue to work to make sure that our technology security and disclosure processes are working as efficiently as possible.”

In 2021, DSCA oversaw more than 15,000 FMS cases worth more than half a trillion dollars, and finalized over $35 billion in FMS sales, a decline from 2020’s almost $45 billion in cases. But Hursch noted that the three-year “rolling average” of such sales is $47 billion. Because single sales can cause huge spikes from year to year, DSCA has long focused on a multi-year average as opposed to tracking annually.

Hursch thinks the pandemic played a significant role in slowing sales. “Last year was based on COVID impacts that were happening around the world. So other countries perhaps didn’t get as far in their own processes. Several countries were looking to make sure they were taking care of health care issues at home and may have moved their budgets in that direction,” he said.

“And, I think, as we come out of the pandemic, and especially given recent developments in the world, I think we will continue to see relatively high amount of sales. And I think the other thing that needs to be noted is that, you know, American products continue to be the best products in the world.”