Army plans to launch marketplace to streamline US weapons exports to allies
In the coming weeks, the Army will introduce an online marketplace where the United States’ allies and partners can quickly purchase American-made defense systems.
The Foreign Military Sales Marketplace will be open to 25 foreign nations “in a couple of weeks or a month-ish” and will initially feature unmanned aerial systems and counter-drone technology, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll told reporters Wednesday. The goal is to simplify the service’s current FMS process, thereby speeding up weapons sales to other countries and bringing more business to the U.S. industrial base, he said.
“When you have a marketplace that looks like Amazon, when you have a lot of the weapons — offensive and defensive tools of war — all in one place and everyone can go buy it, it is a completely different way to think about foreign military sales,” Driscoll said during a media roundtable at the Pentagon.
The marketplace was spurred by an executive order President Donald Trump issued in February establishing “An America First Arms Transfer Strategy.” The directive called on multiple government organizations to streamline their FMS processes to make it easier for allies and partners to purchase U.S.-made military systems and, in turn, boost overall sales and production rates of American weapons.
“As the first strategy of its kind, it will ensure that future arms sales prioritize American interests by using foreign purchases and capital to build American production and capacity,” the EO stated. “It will strengthen the United States defense industrial base to ensure it has the capacity to support our military and our allies and partners, especially as we increase burden-sharing.”
The FMS program is a highly regulated and complicated government-to-government process. It requires legal and congressional oversight to ensure that weapons exports to foreign nations comply with international law, as well as rules governing which capabilities can be sold to other countries based on information sensitivity.
Brett Ingraham, the Army’s top acquisition executive, told reporters that Trump’s executive order prompted the service to take a look at its own FMS structure — which he described as the most complex among the military services.
The new FMS marketplace will include systems that have already been approved for weapons exports and be designed in a way that participating countries can log on and quickly order capabilities, Ingraham said. The website will build off of and function similarly to the Army’s drone marketplace launched in March, he added.
“If there’s a $2,000 drone out there that they want to buy, we should not spend six months or a year going to an FMS process to figure out how to do that,” he said. “There are certain things that we should be working through.”
Drone and counter-UAS technologies will be the first systems offered because they are highly sought after across the world. Additional weapons will be added as the program grows, Ingraham noted.
Army officials did not say what countries would have access to the FMS marketplace initially, only that it will be a mix of European and Indo-Pacific nations. In the future, it’s possible that more countries will be given access to the marketplace and that systems built by allies and partners could be purchased on the website.
“It’s also really important that our allies are able to purchase the same things; we need it when we go to conflict,” Driscoll said. “You could almost think about it as a different version of pre-positioned stock. If our allies are using the same type of equipment as us, when we go to a conflict, they can send their people and/or their things with us.”
