US needs to ‘start from scratch’ to rewrite Foreign Military Sales process: CENTCOM chief

Patriot Launchers prepare for a live fire exercise in a central base in Israel, Israel Mar. 19, 2018. (Sgt. 1st Class Jason Epperson, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command)

WASHINGTON — The head of US Central Command is urging the US government to completely scrap the current Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process, warning that otherwise China will sweep in with a much less cumbersome system to woo US partners.

“I think we need to start from scratch with a blank piece of paper on the FMS process,” Gen. Michael Kurilla told lawmakers Tuesday, saying it’s one of the “number one complaints” from foreign partners in the region.

“They have real security needs. If we don’t fill them, China will fill them,” he said at a different point in the House Armed Services Committee hearing. “China shows up with an Amazon catalog. They say, ‘Pick anything in there. I’ll give you financing, free shipping, Prime shipping and no end user agreement.'”

Kurilla said the current process generally involves four “levers”: the Pentagon, the State Department, Congress and the defense industrial base. The Pentagon’s own system needs reform, he said, because it can take up to a year just to negotiate a sale. The State Department is generally fairly quick to do their diplomatic due diligence. Congress can slow things down if lawmakers decide they want to hold up a sale for “whatever reason.”

But Kurilla said the biggest bottleneck is the defense industrial base, which is under-investing in its own production lines and unable to keep up with demand.

“When we have partners come to us and say, ‘We would like to purchase X,’ and we tell them they can get it in 2029 because we don’t have the production capability, that is a concern,” he said.

U.S. Army Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, U.S. Central Command commander, provides testimony at a Senate Armed Services Committee posture hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., March 16, 2023. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. John Wright)

To help solve that particular problem, he urged lawmakers to allow the Pentagon to more often grant defense firms multi-year contracts, in order to ensure the companies are taking less of a risk by investing more into production lines over the long term.

As for overhauling the overall FMS, Kurilla was aware he’s hardly the first to point out the problem. (In 2023, a DoD official tasked with leading a “tiger team” to suggest changes to the process said the Pentagon has tried to reform the system “roughly every 18 months for the last 20 years.”)

For Kurilla, the fact that it hasn’t been fixed yet means it’s time for a clean sweep.

“We’ve had dozens of task forces to look at FMS, and I have not seen much change,” he said.