The U.S. Defense Department announced plans this week to streamline and speed up its weapons sales process. But an expert on the U.S.-Israel military partnership says that may not do much to put American weapons in Israeli hands any faster.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that both the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and Defense Technology Security Administration would shift under the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment.
The agency facilitates sales of U.S. weapons to partners and allies and develops long-term partnerships and training opportunities relevant to those sales. It also identifies and mitigates risks associated with transferring technology to partners and allies, such as exposing valuable intellectual property or unauthorized secondary transfer of those weapons to a hostile country.
Moving both under the Acquisition and Sustainment hub aims to align sales with procurement, the Pentagon stated. It also “aims to consolidate acquisition, sustainment, security cooperation, defense sales, industrial base policy and arms transfer responsibilities under a single organizational authority to strengthen the U.S. industrial base and facilitate burden-sharing with allies and partners,” the Pentagon said.
The move will also help identify security considerations earlier in the process, according to the Pentagon.
The changes come after an executive order last week from U.S. President Donald Trump to “Establish an America First Arm Transfer Strategy.”
The new policy prioritizes arms transfers to partners that are investing in their defense capabilities or who play critical roles in U.S. operations or economic security.
Jonathan Ruhe, fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS that while the changes in Washington have little or nothing to do with Israel, Jerusalem’s complaints, sometimes, about delays in weapons development and transfers are “symptomatic” of a larger problem.
The Trump administration is saying that “we understand that for America to be a reliable partner, reliable arms supplier, we need to be able to get you the things you buy faster and with fewer hurdles and hoops to jump,” Ruhe said.
But “it doesn’t address a sort of the underlying problem, the elephant in the room, which is that it doesn’t change the fact that we, America, our defense industrial base is too small, too high-bound, too fragile to actually produce a lot of the weapons that we’re trying to make it easier to buy,” Ruhe told JNS.
The steps taken this week are “incomplete,” according to Ruhe.
From a U.S.-Israel partnership perspective, there are many more things both sides could be doing to make it easier for Israel to get the weapons it wants.
“But those require thinking outside this box,” Ruhe said. “Right now, all the United States is thinking about is, ‘How do we get our partners to buy more stuff so that we can try to revive our defense industry like Trump has been talking about?’”
