As we address the increase of regional powers’ anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, security-cooperation efforts remain a key to dissuade and deter those A2/AD threats while assuring our continued commitment to stability in that region. International collaboration through acquisition programs helps forge trust and achieve force-multiplier synergies as strategic plans evolve that depend on access granted by our global partners.
The rapid accretion of Aegis capabilities in the Pacific theater is but one example of the contribution acquisition programs have made to enduring partnerships.1 As we rebalance to the Pacific, partner nations’ investment in Aegis undergirds this new strategy. The Republic of Korea, Japan, the United States, and soon Australia together represent a combined Navy of 28 Aegis-capable ships in that region, and that capability will grow. As these nations properly prioritize Aegis combat-system procurement and training to firmly establish our combined preeminence in war-at-sea capabilities, potential adversaries should think twice to challenge our access in the Pacific.
That we cannot succeed in these missions alone was recently recognized by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, when he remarked:
. . . [F]or almost seven decades U.S. Naval forces have protected global commons and have maintained the foundation of the world economy. But the reality is while we can do, and have done a lot; we cannot, and should not do it all. Central to our future success is the Navy and Marine Corps’ long history of lasting partnerships across the planet. . . . Helping our international partners increase their abilities and become interoperable with us, helps us all. In an interconnected world, where the burden of security has to be shared: Partnerships matter.2
Return of the ‘1,000-Ship Navy’
Establishing and maintaining partnerships is something the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps do very well and plan extensively for. The vision of the “1,000-ship Navy” remains as relevant as ever. Getting as many partners as possible to collaborate in the maritime domain is essential for our own success and for our nation to achieve its security goals. As military planners look to “set the theater” to dissuade or deter potential adversaries, they are likewise striving to solidify relationships with friends and allies as a key to reaching that deterrence goal. While a number of navies are growing, some pundits claim this reliance on other navies greatly diminishes our ability to influence events and maintain the presence our National Security Strategy demands. In the post–Cold War era, with no rivals able to challenge the U.S. Navy’s ability to control the sea, the missions the Navy must perform have widened, and the demands on it have increased. Success in all mission areas has bred a need for more presence and influence, not less. While history will judge the veracity of the pundits, a reduced Navy force structure makes improving collaboration to achieve the “1,000-ship” effect a priority effort. Today we have a great opportunity to enhance collaboration among our allied and traditional partner navies, as well as those emerging-partner navy and coast guard-type forces.
Operating together with other nations has been and remains commonplace for the U.S. Navy. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s recent publication You Cannot Surge Trust outlines how the experience of our Navy and its close allies in the post–Cold War world, conducting predominantly multinational peace-enforcement or peacekeeping operations, helped build the trust necessary to overcome the barriers of incompatible weapon systems, tactics, training, and communication networks.3 This trust was achieved through various security-cooperation programs. In fact, nearly 200 programs or authorities across the Departments of State and Defense relate directly to security cooperation. And today, under the rubrics of those programs, hundreds of operational interactions occur every year at all levels of our fleets and staffs. Much of the global public sees the tangible aspects of our cooperation in such programs as at-sea exercises, port visits, and combined operations such as Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya.
International Partners
One less-tangible set of interactions that help forge trust is partnering with other nations’ services through acquisition-related security-cooperation programs. These programs improve logistics-planning efforts, coalition interoperability, and contingency planning with regional partners. The partnerships established through government-to-government procurement, training, or support agreements go a long way toward establishing trust, helping forge new partnerships, and improving existing relationships. Partnership acquisition programs are commonly known as foreign military sales (FMS), international cooperative programs, or direct commercial sales (DCS). The FMS and international cooperative programs, overseen in the Department of the Navy by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for International Programs—dual-hatted as the Director of the Navy International Programs Office (NIPO)—promote well-equipped, standardized, and interoperable maritime partnerships around the world. The Navy IPO is singular among the maritime-security-cooperation organizations, because it oversees how acquisition programs support political-military objectives while ensuring that appropriate technology security is implemented before delivery.
The NIPO’s workload is significant, as it processes over 1,000 FMS cases every year. Each of these spurs numerous personnel interactions across the acquisition enterprise. Also involved in these cases are our Navy and Marine Corps regional component commands and our security-cooperation personnel embedded in the embassy country team. Personnel from Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard systems commands and program offices, as well as NIPO country program directors, interact frequently with their international counterparts across all phases of the acquisition lifecycle during the multi-year lifetime of an FMS case.
Many of the FMS cases involve sales of complex weapon systems that require training in the United States and long-term continuous logistical support. The number of interactions associated with supporting 140-plus partner nations in developing requirements, drawing up agreements and contracts, and delivering the materiel, services, and training associated with these FMS cases adds another significantly large number of interactions to complement those led by our fleets.
‘Shared Risks and Benefits’
While there are fewer international cooperative agreements than FMS cases, these programs tend to involve a deeper and longer-term interaction between the partner-nation procurement agencies and our program offices, and are premised on the concept of shared risks and benefits. The programs cover the gamut of defense-acquisition activities, including exchanges of research-and-development (R&D) information, cooperative R&D projects, test and evaluation, loan of equipment, exchange of personnel, and production and sustainment. In addition to millions of dollars of partner contributions that go directly to program offices annually, partner “non-financial contributions” such as use of foreign test ranges, partner laboratories and facilities, partner R&D information, access to partner industrial expertise and capability, and partner personnel participation in joint program-management activities have provided significant benefits to U.S. Navy research, development, test, evaluation, production, and sustainment programs.
These interactions centered on acquisition- and training-related programs are a key source of forging the trust and partnerships we need to collaborate in multinational operations across the maritime commons. Our partnerships are strong today, but current progress and activity is no guarantee of future success. The partnerships that matter, or will matter, need to be nurtured and strengthened, especially among our emerging and non-traditional partners. And strengthening our partnerships through acquisition, if planned well, can provide a return on investment to our own defense programs for many years. Sharing acquisition programs with our partners increases their interoperability and capability while potentially reducing acquisition costs. But the extent of the benefit or return on the investment depends greatly on how and when export requirements or strategies are factored into programs.
In the current budget-challenged environment, there is no better time for both warfighters and acquisition planners to proactively assess and factor partner-nation capability requirements into our domestic requirements, budgeting, and acquisition planning. Building exportability into materiel solutions and then finding ways to fund their implementation would go a long way to yielding “win-win-win” outcomes for our partners, our acquisition program, and the combatant commanders’ theater objectives.
International Frigate Working Group
The win for the warfighter is improved interoperability, trust, access, and influence. One example of how acquisition programs help forge and sustain partnerships that provide credible combat power is the FFG-7 ship-transfer legacy and the International Frigate Working Group (IFWG) it spawned.4 This group of international partners (Australia, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Poland, Spain, Taiwan, and Pakistan) operates most of the 34 Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates the U.S. Navy has transferred via FMS in the last two decades. In its annual meetings, the IFWG brings together the international operators of the Perry class with the Naval Sea Systems Command’s Surface Warfare Directorate responsible for the maintenance and modernization of frigates and other non-nuclear-powered warships. The goal of the group is to ensure their ships remain combat ready by identifying maintenance, obsolescence, and logistics issues that have impact on the class and to discuss alternatives for sustainment and modernization programs. Other forums like this exist for the F/A-18, Harpoon and Standard Missiles, and the Phalanx close-in weapon system.
The win for potential partners is improved interoperability and compatibility with proven, sustained, and “best-in-class” weapons and other systems. The systems are in demand because many of our partners recognize that our FMS and cooperative acquisition programs use the Department of Defense acquisition system, which ensures we apply the same rigor and management oversight for all programs whether foreign or domestic. For example, the transfer and successful exercise firings of many Mk-46 and Mk-48 torpedoes by dozens of partner nations shows how acquisition-program agreements benefit international partners. Another example is the Harpoon missile, where some 30 international partners have purchased variants, most well after U.S. Navy inventories were satisfied. And, as previously mentioned, complementing our own Aegis surface force in the Pacific are the Aegis antiair warfare and ballistic-missile-defense capabilities acquired by Japan, South Korea, and soon Australia, allowing them to augment U.S. Navy forces if needed.
The win for the acquisition program is the potential and actual reduced cost or cost avoidance across the program’s life cycle for us and our partners. The opportunities for win-win-win programs are many, including combined spares procurement, dual sourcing, cooperative development spurred by FMS sales, mitigation of known and future obsolescence, engineering, production-line sustainment, and other industrial-base impacts. All of these can significantly affect the dollar value and percentage of unit cost reduction or provide significant cost avoidance.
There are many instances of programs benefiting from acquisition-program sharing, both FMS and more directly international cooperative programs. For instance, the Navy partnered with NATO countries, as well as other allies and friendly nations, to jointly develop weapon capabilities such as the Evolved NATO Sea Sparrow missile, the Rolling Air Frame missile, and Maritime Missile Defense that have offset Navy Department costs by over $1 billion. The cooperative-development aspects of the P-8 resulted in $408 million in economic benefits across R&D and shared production costs. In the case of the Joint Strike Fighter, eight other countries agreed to provide $4.52 billion in contributions to the program. Cooperative international acquisition programs best represent the win-win-win result. The Joint Strike Fighter and the Evolved Sea Sparrow are both good examples of satisfying partner-nation capability needs, combatant-commander warfighting-interoperability requirements, and U.S. acquisition goals to reduce costs and promote interoperability.
Ship Transfers
Even in the “sunset” phase of an acquisition program, opportunities exist to avoid or reduce operations, sustainment, or disposal costs. For example, transfers of excess ships and aircraft have immediately added capability to key maritime partners while helping the Department of the Navy avoid disposal costs. Transfers of decommissioned mine hunters to Taiwan help maintain the security of the Taiwan straits. Transfer of a decommissioned amphibious transport dock ship to India (the ex-USS Trenton, renamed the INS Jalashawa) improved that nation’s humanitarian-response and disaster-relief capability and directly supported India’s ability to evacuate its citizens from Libya in 2011.5 The last FFG transferred to Pakistan contributed to that country’s ability to lead Combined Task Force 150 in maritime security and related operations on several occasions, more than any other coalition partner.
But for every success story there are many opportunities missed. Too often, acquisition-program agreements fail to take advantage of key chances for economic order quantities to be achieved. The result is not only higher costs, but longer lead times for capabilities the warfighter needs in theater. The requirements, acquisition, and security-cooperation community cannot continue to plan separately, ignoring the strategic leverage that early planning on exportability requirements can achieve. There must be a greater effort to correlate international acquisition program agreements of whatever type (FMS, cooperative acquisition, etc.) with the longer-term operational requirements of the Navy component commanders.
Anticipation
Anticipatory strategies for exports make sense, too, since most DOD acquisition programs are eventually exported via FMS, DCS, or in cooperative acquisition, to one, some, or many other countries. Anticipatory export planning allows closer synchronization of partner capability needs with the Department of the Navy’s acquisition-program delivery schedules. Fortunately, FMS programs are highly scalable and permit great flexibility in satisfying partner-nation requirements. FMS cases are often implemented to support commercially procured systems, giving our partner nations even more flexibility to achieve some level of interoperability with us.
Lack of anticipatory planning is certainly a key part of these missed opportunities, but it alone cannot compel sovereign nations to partner with the United States. There are other reasons, including sudden terminations in U.S. programs, technology transfer considerations, or foreign-nation political decisions, that lead to failure to achieve win-win-win transactions. But in many cases these barriers were not explicitly known until the opportunity arose, without much time to react. How does a military department begin to break this cycle of missed opportunities and maximize its outcomes? How do we inform the technology-security and foreign-disclosure enterprise, as well as our industry partners, on the key actions needed now to deliver partnership capability a few years from now?
While many agree on the importance of anticipatory planning, there is scant guidance on how to plan in advance of requests, especially across the interagency community. Within the Defense establishment, each combatant commander approaches security-cooperation activities in a slightly different manner, and there is no common template for a country-level plan or for a security-cooperation-focused plan or integrated priority list akin to the joint integrated priority lists submitted within the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS). Defense industry corporations conduct detailed anticipatory planning but with far different motives and incentives than the DOD.
The Navy International Programs Office uses a systematic approach toward better coordination between security cooperation and acquisition to anticipate and take actions ahead of foreign-country requests for defense articles or services.6 This type of anticipatory planning informs policy and acquisition leaders and the U.S. defense industry of advance actions that can facilitate faster responses once requests are received and also help shape requests to better meet combatant-commander requirements for coalition interoperability.
The office’s strategic international planning process helps to ensure security cooperation and acquisition professionals deliver the right capability at the right time to the right partners. It allows prioritization of effort based on fluctuating resources and supports DOD security cooperation and acquisition objectives to improve our buying power and provides a repeatable and measurable method to put anticipatory planning into action in a way that incorporates partner-nation needs into programs. It helps to identify the win-win-win opportunities that deliver combatant-commander-desired capability to partner nations while helping to lower costs of acquisition programs.
The Navy IPO will continue to leverage the Navy’s healthy acquisition and training enterprise to help improve current partnerships and forge new ones. This partnering will extend to internal efforts to ensure Navy requirements officers, resource sponsors, and others are aware of the impacts win-win-win international acquisition programs can have for the Navy. These efforts will continue to help reinforce the trust necessary for effective multinational operations to secure the global maritime commons.
1. Brad Hicks, George Galdorisi, and Scott Truver. “The Aegis BMD Global Enterprise, A ‘High End’ Maritime Partnership.” Naval War College Review, Summer 2012.
2. H. R. Mabus, (11 September 2013). www.navy.mil/navydata/people/secnav/Mabus/Speech/NDU_AsDelivered2013.pdf.
3. Gary E. Weir, Principal Investigator, (S. J. Doyle, ed.) You Cannot Surge Trust: Combined Naval Operations of the Royal Australian Navy, Canadian Navy, Royal Navy, and United States Navy, 1991–2003, (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2013).
4. Press Release, Team Ships Public Affairs, 2 May 2013, “NAVSEA to host the fifth annual International Frigate Working Group,” www.navsea.navy.mil/teamships/Sea21_InternationalFleet/Internationalfleet_Frigate_Working_Group.aspx.
5. www.telegraphindia.com/1110311/jsp/nation/story_13698870.jsp.
6. S. J Bowdren, (2012, 06 11), “Creating the Future in Security Cooperation Through Stategic International Acquisition Planning” (G. Sutton, ed.) DISAM Journal of International Security Assistance Management, 6 November 2012, www.disamjournal.org/articles/creating-the-future-in-security-cooperation-through-strategic-international-acquisition-planning-603.
Lieutenant Commander Bowdren is a retired surface warfare officer and leads the Strategy and Plans Directorate at the Navy International Programs Office.