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Lord hopes to loosen weapon export restrictions in next six months

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Visitors walk by U.S. equipment on display at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget on June 21, 2017. (Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images)WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s top weapons acquisition official on Thursday called for another review of what defense technology is , in an attempt to ensure the United States remains a defense technology provider of choice for other nations.Speaking at an event hosted by the Reagan Foundation, Ellen Lord said she has in recent months become “passionate” about .“In the next six months, I very much hope to open the envelope, particularly on some of the weapons technology that we can export,” Lord said.“I am concerned that sometimes we are losing international competitions, because we have — as we have increased our capability, we have not increased the capabilities that we export in a commensurate fashion,” she added. “And we sometimes are having some of our potential customers, typically in the Mideast turn to Russia or China — you see the same thing in India, for instance.”Export control reform is hardly a new issue. In 2018, the Trump administration that it said should increase sales of U.S. weapons abroad; during the rollout, officials used some of the same phrasing about the need to think “strategically” as Lord did on Thursday.And in a process that started under the Obama administration and continued into the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department on the U.S. Munitions List, moving thousands of pieces of technology into categories that allow for straight commercial sales without a government review.RELATEDThe White House will consider whether to reinterpret a longstanding arms control agreement.Many of those technologies that were reviewed are systems that are no longer unique to America, or are so prevalent in commercial systems that to restrict them would be to harm broad swathes of American industry. But Lord’s comments indicated that she feels not enough has been done in the realm of making it easier to export defense items.“We are having a very focused discussion on: Let’s rethink this from a strategic point of view” she said. “A lot of this technology — frankly, the magic sauce is in the manufacturing of it, the technical data package doesn’t always give it to you. So obviously we have to make sure we’re very careful not to have things that could be disassembled and understood and so forth.”Lord also noted a desire to “beef up” the National Technology and Industrial Base, or NTIB, which currently covers Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Countries in the NTIB are considered part of the American defense industrial base, making it easier to collaborate on materiel.The U.S. remains the largest arms exporter in the world. Per data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America of all arms exports from 2015-2019; Russia, at 18 percent, was a distant second.Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.Share:The nominee to be the next Space Force chief said he supports the push to expand the service's pool of National Security Space Launch providers.The House in July passed its version of the annual defense bill, which included a review of JADC2 progress. The Senate has yet to pass its version.“It is a big army,” said Nicholaus Saacks with PEO C3T. “We have to be prepared to fight in a lot of different places.”Using the free tool, satellite operators can visualize objects on orbit, evaluate the risk of collision and coordinate on their decision path.A new agreement formalizes the partnership between both agencies and is a first step toward shifting space traffic management to the Commerce Department.Featured VideoTrending Now

Visitors walk by U.S. equipment on display at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget on June 21, 2017. (Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images)WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s top weapons acquisition official on Thursday called for another review of what defense technology is , in an attempt to ensure the United States remains a defense technology provider of choice for other nations.Speaking at an event hosted by the Reagan Foundation, Ellen Lord said she has in recent months become “passionate” about .“In the next six months, I very much hope to open the envelope, particularly on some of the...

Lord hopes to loosen weapon export restrictions in next six months

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