Australian Soldiers return fire in a M1A1 Abrams tank during exercise Hamel 15 a sub-mission of exercise Talisman Sabre in Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, Australia, July 14, 2015. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Jordan Talbot/Released)
AUSA 2023 — Army undersecretary Gabe Camarillo has declared 2024 the “year of Army security cooperation,” announcing that his office has launched a review of how to speed up arms sales for partners and allies in a “fundamental way.”
Speaking at an Association of the US Army conference panel about security cooperation, Camarillo said that the desire to clean up how his service processes Foreign Military Sales (FMS) came from watching what happened in Ukraine and understanding clearly how America’s interests are served by being able to arm other nations.
“We feel that security cooperation is a critical link in our national defense strategy, to be able to build partner capacity, to maintain and strengthen alliances, and most importantly, to forge an industrial base capacity that’s able to meet worldwide demand anywhere that we need it,” he said on Tuesday.
The Army doesn’t own the FMS process; that’s largely run out of the State Department and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). But the service plays a role, Camarillo said, and one that is likely to only grow as Army-specific material is seeing increasing demand due to the Ukraine conflict. As evidence, he stated that Army-related FMS deals shot up from $13 billion in fiscal 2022 to $35.2 billion in fiscal 2023.
“My takeaway as Undersecretary of the Army,” he said, “is the Army has pretty good stuff.”
In terms of the review, Camarillo said it is tied into the “tiger team” that Deputy Defense Secretary Kath Hicks launched last year to look at ways to speed the process up. The Army effort is “piggybacking” off the work that’s come from review, which DSCA director James Hursch said during the panel has found 90 different areas to work on improving.
The Army official laid out three points of emphasis: “I asked the team, let’s look at our Army internal processes along a couple of key areas. How do we forge visibility and the right metrics for our FMS processes? Secondly, how do we ensure that we streamline staffing timelines to avoid and reduce and eliminate redundancy where it exists? And third, how do we streamline the tech transfer process?
“I look forward to the outcome of this review, the changes they will hopefully recommend, and the way that it will help streamline our processes to make us better able to be good partners and allies,” he added.
During a question and answer session, the panelists were asked about excess defense articles and if there are ways to smooth that pipeline. Tying back to orders from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to take a look and divest older equipment in the service, Camarillo said the service really needs to get a better handle on the “data” of what it has.
“Sometimes we don’t really know where all of our excess equipment is,” he said dryly to laughs from the crowd. “We have a lot of it, and it’s accumulated over time.”
He continued, “One of the things we need to do is get better data on where it’s at. So I’m working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly and in a digital fashion, to catalog what we currently have — not relying on the clipboard and you know, [a] supply soldier who’s sitting there taking notes and putting it on a piece of paper. So I think we need to first of all, gather the data on what we have. The hope is that that will significantly streamline our processes to identify and process EDA.”
