FARNBOROUGH — The Department of Commerce is dedicated to increased advocacy for the US defense industry in order to push for greater sales abroad amidst international competition, key department officials told Breaking Defense.
William Kimmitt, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, acknowledged during an interview at the Farnborough Airshow last week that he has heard directly from US industry that there are concerns that Europe’s increased defense spending will trend towards non-American products.
“Yeah, we’re hearing that, and we’re hearing not just competition from within Europe, but also competition from Asia as well in Europe,” Kimmitt said. “But we of course think we have the best products to offer. We want to work with partners and allies in Europe, but that’s certainly something that’s come up.”
To help counter that, Commerce has stepped up its role in advocating for US firms — quite literally, helping spread the message to other countries that they should be looking at specific potential defense procurements.
“What I’m hearing is [industry] very much want to help, and sort of help us understand what would be helpful to them,” Kimmitt said.
Hiro Rodriguez, the executive director of the department’s Advocacy Center, emphasized they’re not in a “business development” role, and they stay away from making any suggestions to industry. But once industry has identified a potential sale opportunity, they can go to commerce and ask for help.
“We’ll actually work with the interagency, with State and [the Pentagon], and say, hey, is this something that we indeed support? And there are some requirements — we make sure it’s a US company, there’s appropriate US export content, so it ultimately creates US jobs, and then we also make sure there’s actually foreign demand,” Rodriguez said.
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Once that’s clear, Commerce begins to organize an advocacy campaign to see where it could exert influence on the potential foreign buyer.
“We look for different touchpoints,” Rodriguez explained, noting those can include Kimmitt, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, or Pentagon acquisition chief Michael Duffey taking meetings or writing letters on behalf of the industry partner. “We’ll look for various touch points, and oftentimes it’s those bilateral meetings in country, or when delegations are coming to the Commerce Building, or the State Department. We help coordinate across the entire interagency.”
Commerce has had an advocacy role for roughly 30 years, but according to department figures, there was roughly a 30 percent increase from 2024 to 2025 in cases where the defense industry asked for advocacy support from Commerce, a number that is on track to grow by another 40 percent between 2025 and 2026.
The next step, according to Kimmitt and Rodriguez, is to decrease the time it takes between finding out about a potential advocacy case, doing the approval process, and then taking action.
Previously, it took around six months for that process to get underway — something the officials said industry pointed to when noting lost opportunities. Now, Rodriguez said, the timeline is down to around three months, with an eye on further reductions.
“We’ve cut it down in half, and with the cases that have already started to come to us in the month of July, we are already on time and moving them out and moving them to the interagency for clearance a lot faster,” he said. “We even have interagency partners saying, ‘Let’s go even faster,’ which is great. But we’re setting some standards. We’re going to reassess in about three months to say, “Okay, hey, let’s see if we can go even faster.’”
Kimmitt noted that part of the reason he went to Farnborough was to talk to industry and develop a list of “high priority” programs in competition abroad that may be nearing final decision points.
“It’s helpful for me to know what’s, like, really coming? What’s on deck? Like, what’s ripe for a decision this month, next month? What are the big dollar items? What are the big capabilities that we want to be able to sell to our partners?” Kimmitt described. “It’s really the companies letting us know what they’re thinking about, to help us think about where we should focus.
“I want to bring back the high-priority programs we talked about to Secretary Lutnick’s attention, and just say, look, we have these opportunities here.”