{"id":1411,"date":"2012-09-27T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T20:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=1411"},"modified":"2012-09-28T14:34:54","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T04:34:54","slug":"graph-of-the-week-fms-myths-vs-the-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/graph-of-the-week-fms-myths-vs-the-figures\/","title":{"rendered":"Graph of the week: FMS myths vs the figures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the United States is our biggest ally, as generations of white papers have told us, it\u2019s fair to say we want to be interoperable with their forces in a coalition setting. With this in mind, the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) on behalf of governments of the day has made excellent use of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) framework to procure various platforms and technologies.<\/p>\n

The DMO has been castigated by local industry for relying on the FMS framework at the expense of Australian solutions and companies.\u00a0So I\u2019ve spent the last few months pulling together FMS figures from the US and Australia to try and get a better picture of what the dollars look like.\u00a0Below is a graph of the value of FMS cases between 2000 and 2012 to date as announced by the Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). (A table summarising the major purchases can be found at the end of this post.)<\/p>\n

\"Australian<\/a>Sources: DSCA notifications<\/a>, with historical exchange rate<\/a> and CPI<\/a> corrections.<\/p>\n

In the US, Section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the President to give Congress advance written notification of the intent to sell defence articles, equipment and services. The DSCA prepares and delivers the notifications to Congress only with the approval of the State Department.<\/p>\n

Once Congress has been notified of a proposed arms sale, the President must publish an unclassified version of the notification in the Federal Register. Thus, DSCA announces the details of the proposed deal. This doesn\u2019t cover every single FMS cases that passes through the system but it gives a pretty good indication of the acquisition efforts.<\/p>\n

For one thing, there aren\u2019t near as many as I would have thought. Figures from our own department confirmed that between 2000 and 2011, 714 FMS cases passed through the system. The rough breakdown between sustainment and acquisition was about 50\/50 but by value acquisition is the lion\u2019s share.<\/p>\n

The other fact to come to light that was of the hundreds of FMS cases put to the US, only 10 were not progressed. So once the DSCA makes an announcement that we\u2019re interested in something, we tend to get it, regardless of the competition rhetoric in Australia.<\/p>\n

The pros and cons of FMS are many varied but the moral of the story is:<\/p>\n