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At the Hualien Air Force Base in Taiwan, a US-made F-16V fighter jet is preparing to mount weapons | AP Photo

Last summer, the Pentagon released a plan to revive its vast foreign military sales system and warned of the situation it faced.

At that timePentagonSasha Baker, a senior policy official and co-chair of the team leading the effort, said they have tried this kind of effort before and that the United States has "reviewed its military sales system about every 18 months for the past 20 years," like a car going in and out of a 4S shop for an overhaul.

Baker said the goal this time was to make lasting repairs. However, more than a year after their recommendations were submitted, it is unclear whether the United States has succeeded.

Over the past two years, spurred by the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress have each been working to reform their share of power in the Foreign Military Sales system, or FMS, and they have recently reported varying degrees of progress.

The Pentagon is still working to implement many of its recommendations, and Congress has yet to pass a bill to begin doing so. The State Department was more upbeat about its work but acknowledged a larger problem: No matter how fast the U.S. government moves, defense companies are still struggling to deliver on orders as world demand for American weapons surges.

Cara Abercrombie, the Pentagon's acting deputy for policy, said that total U.S. military sales abroad have exceeded $80 billion (about 570 billion yuan) this fiscal year. This is higher than the total military sales in fiscal 2023 and more than $30 billion higher than the total in fiscal 2022. Abercrombie predicts that this figure will continue to rise.

As demand grows, the question now is whether the U.S. government and defense industry can keep up. “We’re really struggling with the bureaucracy right now,” Abercrombie said.

The US bureaucracy related to arms sales is huge. The FMS system is spread across all areas of the US national security system, including the State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the defense industry.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency once created a relationship map that takes up an entire wall at one of its government buildings in northern Virginia.

As Sacha Baker pointed out in his report last year, reforming this system has been a priority for US authorities for decades. US defense companies are considered the best in the world, but it is often so difficult to sell products to other countries that supply cannot fully meet demand.

Fixing the FMS system becomes more urgent as the United States' partners find themselves in need of help more and more. The Trump administration opened the door to arms sales to Taiwan in the face of the rise of the other side of the strait. The United States now has about $20 billion in orders from Taipei that have not been delivered.

Every American bureaucrat interviewed agreed that the latest and most powerful impetus for reform was Russia’s 2022 war on Ukraine. In the months that followed, the United States sent weapons to Kiev in such rare quantities and at such a pace that its own stockpiles of equipment were depleted.

After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the United States urgently provided weapons and equipment to Ukraine

At the same time, after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, some countries in the region suddenly became anxious about their own security and began to ask the United States: Why can't the US foreign arms sales system operate efficiently?

A White House official said, "Many senior officials have heard from our security partners that they are not happy with the arms sales timeline at the beginning of the Biden administration."

As a result, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress have each taken three steps to speed up these processes, led by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

But they soon discovered that the U.S. FMS system was so fragmented and technical that it was difficult to monitor every request and delivery from beginning to end. In particular, it did not always expedite sales that were most important to the United States’ own security objectives, such as weapons sales to Taiwan and Ukraine.

The report said U.S. authorities have extremely strict rules about what technology it can share with which countries, even when doing so is in the U.S. interest.

"We've worked hard to figure out what the problems are," said a Democratic congressional official, who said different parts of the administration can only agree roughly on the issues. "The FMS system is a strategic policy tool that is too slow and too clumsy to have the effect we want it to have."

The US congressional official expressed little confidence in the solutions offered so far. “Reform efforts have been meticulous and bottom-up rather than big-picture and strategic,” he said.

The department official, who oversees foreign military sales, listed several areas for improvement, many of which were included in a package of reform recommendations released last May. The department is updating procedures for security cooperation officials so they can better manage expectations and delays; it has revised its policies to make it easier to move drones out of the air; and the State Department is trying to develop requirements that apply to the entire region rather than to individual countries — such as a part, such as an oil filter, that can be installed on an entire class of cars, rather than just one make and model.

When pressed, the official could not share statistics to show how quickly the reforms are now progressing, but did say the speed of aerial drone deliveries has increased. Overall, the official did not believe the department was a critical link in the FMS process that was causing major delays.

“98% of cases take 48 hours to get through the State Department,” the official said. “It’s hard to get faster than that.”

Taking even longer to process a business was the U.S. Department of Defense, which spent the last year implementing its own reforms.

The Pentagon (Department of Defense) is considered the most bureaucratic department

Abercrombie, the Pentagon policy official, described progress so far in three main areas: One is the Pentagon’s leadership, which now meets quarterly — though more often at lower levels — to make sure they’re paying attention to the issue and measuring progress, almost like a monthly calendar reminder on a cellphone.

A Defense Department spokesman said the secretary and deputy secretary of defense receive quarterly updates on the reform effort and that the Pentagon is still working on how best to adjust its processes.

The second is a new series of meetings between the combatant commands that work most closely with U.S. allies around the world and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which effectively oversees the program.

The goal here, Abercrombie said, is to focus on any emerging issues that might require a higher level of attention — for example, issues related to a country or an individual case.

Finally, the Pentagon is creating a new cadre of officials who, like defense attachés, will guide countries through the process in embassies around the world. The goal is to help each partner nation complete the highly technical preparations required more quickly and accurately.

More people may be needed to complete the system. Abercrombie said the Department of Defense has been "overburdened" by a surge in foreign arms sales over the past two years. It is deciding whether to hire civilians to supplement the uniformed personnel handling those programs.

Abercrombie did not provide specific examples of projects that have been accelerated in the last year as a result of these changes. Instead, she mentioned that the Pentagon recently released a new "toolkit" designed to help Pentagon officials handle contracts, one of the most difficult parts of the FMS process.

For example, if a partner wants to buy American ammunition in bulk, they need to know when the deadline is to submit their own order to the Pentagon. Meeting this in a timely manner will allow the other country to add their quantity to the total and reduce the overall price, just like shopping at a wholesaler instead of a grocery store.

The toolkit is designed to help with those timelines, but when asked how it didn’t exist before, Abercrombie pointed out how sprawling FMS systems are — and how when a process is so fragmented it runs inefficiently.

A Defense News report said everyone interviewed for this story mentioned Congress: Departments need to remind lawmakers of the dollar figure required for sales to undergo a separate, sometimes lengthy review. That threshold has not been updated in decades.

Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that would raise funding limits for approving foreign military sales, but the bill has since stalled. Aides to Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican who sponsored the bill, said they still hope it will move forward.

“I think it’s a speed bump,” the aide said, especially withGaza WarHe acknowledged that any changes in Congress in the short term would be "minor".

No matter how hard they work, the longer part of the process is actually delivering on the orders. Consolidating the U.S. defense industry needs to be an equal or higher priority, multiple sources said.

“The actual process of signing a contract is a year or two at best, and we often see eight to 10 year delivery time frames.,” he said.

The congressional official pointed to six long-term contracts approved by Congress this year for munitions that the Pentagon has labeled critical and will help defense companies turn a profit more quickly, but which are not exportable under the law.

"None of this matters if our defense industry doesn't have the production capacity to fulfill orders in a timely manner," he also said.