While billions of dollars in U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine and Israel have dominated headlines in recent months, these defense partnerships are far from the only ones the United States maintains. In nearly every corner of the globe, security forces are acquiring and employing U.S. weaponry. Accordingly, as the world’s leading arms exporter, the United States carries a unique responsibility to uphold the highest standards in its security cooperation and assistance efforts. Regrettably, a years-long decline in the quality and quantity of public reporting on U.S. arms sales and military aid programs is impeding the responsible management of these transfers, further weakening already fragile oversight and accountability regimes.
The U.S. dominates 42% of the global arms trade, surpassing the next several competitors combined. Amounting to tens of billions of dollars in arms sales and military aid packages each year, these transfers, these arms transfers are among the most profoundly consequential instruments of U.S. foreign policy and play a pivotal role in shaping political, conflict, and human rights environments around the world. Given the broad implications, it is essential that these programs are subject to rigorous scrutiny, accountability, and evidence-based policymaking, all of which hinge on robust transparency.
Transparency ensures that decisions around arms transfers are not siloed among a narrow set of stakeholders, but reflect the views, interests, and expertise of legislators, civil society, and other inter-agency actors. Public transparency also ensures that arms transfer decisions that sacrifice human rights and civilian protection imperatives must be made with commensurate political costs – leaders electing to uphold defense partnerships with predatory or abusive governments will have to defend their decisions publicly and bear the consequences, allowing the public to hold decision-makers accountable. Vitally, transparency also ensures that researchers have access to the information necessary to study the impact of security cooperation and assistance while mitigating its risks and improving its practice.
But despite the clear benefits, already limited public reporting on arms transfers has suffered some notable deterioration in recent years. In some cases, reported data has become less granular and lost much of its methodological rigor. Annual executive branch reports on Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS), for example, have shifted from more detailed (albeit still quite general) breakdowns to aggregated figures, significantly narrowing the insight into U.S. security cooperation. The same is true for the Department of Defense’s annual budget justifications, where proposed funding for military aid programs is increasingly amalgamated, making it impossible to discern exactly how much money is being spent on each individual authority.
In other cases, reporting itself is becoming scarcer. While government reports on arms transfers and military aid programs submitted to Congress could be made available to external parties on a limited basis, the Executive Branch has been making increasingly liberal use of “For Official Use Only,” “Sensitive but unclassified, “or “Controlled Unclassified Information,” designations to constrain visibility into the publications. Also, troubling, the U.S. government has become increasingly lax about the timeliness of its security cooperation and assistance reporting, even in cases when U.S. law requires the provision of reports by certain dates. As a result, many government agencies are often late, in some cases by months or even years, in submitting the required reports.
While the U.S. government often insists that security and proprietary commercial concerns constrain its ability to be more transparent on U.S. arms transfers, the contrast between past and present practice suggests deteriorating transparency is also a matter of political will. Accordingly, the practical barriers to ending the regression of public reporting should be minimal. We know better transparency is possible. In Ukraine, where U.S. arms transfers have immediate consequences for the war effort and where operational security concerns should be most acute, the Biden administration has adopted a far more transparent approach, providing regular and detailed updates on weapons transfers as well as risk mitigation efforts. That level of public candor has enabled both robust public and legislative oversight and also facilitated interdisciplinary engagement in improving the efficacy and responsibility of the aid effort.
The U.S. government should, at a bare minimum, revert back to a better level of detail and quality for several of its key security cooperation and assistance reports. More importantly, the Executive Branch should consider how it can better align the security cooperation and assistance enterprise with the highest standards of public oversight and accountability, especially through an active embrace of transparency. At a time when U.S. arms transfers are reaching historic proportions, it is all the more important that the administration end a year’s long dissent towards secrecy, and recommit, politically and practically, to transparency.
Diminishing Transparency in the US Arms Trade
By Elias Yousif
Conventional Arms
While billions of dollars in U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine and Israel have dominated headlines in recent months, these defense partnerships are far from the only ones the United States maintains. In nearly every corner of the globe, security forces are acquiring and employing U.S. weaponry. Accordingly, as the world’s leading arms exporter, the United States carries a unique responsibility to uphold the highest standards in its security cooperation and assistance efforts. Regrettably, a years-long decline in the quality and quantity of public reporting on U.S. arms sales and military aid programs is impeding the responsible management of these transfers, further weakening already fragile oversight and accountability regimes.
The U.S. dominates 42% of the global arms trade, surpassing the next several competitors combined. Amounting to tens of billions of dollars in arms sales and military aid packages each year, these transfers, these arms transfers are among the most profoundly consequential instruments of U.S. foreign policy and play a pivotal role in shaping political, conflict, and human rights environments around the world. Given the broad implications, it is essential that these programs are subject to rigorous scrutiny, accountability, and evidence-based policymaking, all of which hinge on robust transparency.
Transparency ensures that decisions around arms transfers are not siloed among a narrow set of stakeholders, but reflect the views, interests, and expertise of legislators, civil society, and other inter-agency actors. Public transparency also ensures that arms transfer decisions that sacrifice human rights and civilian protection imperatives must be made with commensurate political costs – leaders electing to uphold defense partnerships with predatory or abusive governments will have to defend their decisions publicly and bear the consequences, allowing the public to hold decision-makers accountable. Vitally, transparency also ensures that researchers have access to the information necessary to study the impact of security cooperation and assistance while mitigating its risks and improving its practice.
But despite the clear benefits, already limited public reporting on arms transfers has suffered some notable deterioration in recent years. In some cases, reported data has become less granular and lost much of its methodological rigor. Annual executive branch reports on Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS), for example, have shifted from more detailed (albeit still quite general) breakdowns to aggregated figures, significantly narrowing the insight into U.S. security cooperation. The same is true for the Department of Defense’s annual budget justifications, where proposed funding for military aid programs is increasingly amalgamated, making it impossible to discern exactly how much money is being spent on each individual authority.
In other cases, reporting itself is becoming scarcer. While government reports on arms transfers and military aid programs submitted to Congress could be made available to external parties on a limited basis, the Executive Branch has been making increasingly liberal use of “For Official Use Only,” “Sensitive but unclassified, “or “Controlled Unclassified Information,” designations to constrain visibility into the publications. Also, troubling, the U.S. government has become increasingly lax about the timeliness of its security cooperation and assistance reporting, even in cases when U.S. law requires the provision of reports by certain dates. As a result, many government agencies are often late, in some cases by months or even years, in submitting the required reports.
While the U.S. government often insists that security and proprietary commercial concerns constrain its ability to be more transparent on U.S. arms transfers, the contrast between past and present practice suggests deteriorating transparency is also a matter of political will. Accordingly, the practical barriers to ending the regression of public reporting should be minimal. We know better transparency is possible. In Ukraine, where U.S. arms transfers have immediate consequences for the war effort and where operational security concerns should be most acute, the Biden administration has adopted a far more transparent approach, providing regular and detailed updates on weapons transfers as well as risk mitigation efforts. That level of public candor has enabled both robust public and legislative oversight and also facilitated interdisciplinary engagement in improving the efficacy and responsibility of the aid effort.
The U.S. government should, at a bare minimum, revert back to a better level of detail and quality for several of its key security cooperation and assistance reports. More importantly, the Executive Branch should consider how it can better align the security cooperation and assistance enterprise with the highest standards of public oversight and accountability, especially through an active embrace of transparency. At a time when U.S. arms transfers are reaching historic proportions, it is all the more important that the administration end a year’s long dissent towards secrecy, and recommit, politically and practically, to transparency.
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