For decades, America has been the world’s leading provider of dominant warfighting capabilities to partners and allies defending freedom across the globe. As President Donald Trump continues to lead with strength by pushing our allies to take on a greater burden for their own defense, U.S. defense sales remain at an all-time high with 43% of the global market share, outpacing our closest competitors by fourfold.
Powered by continued technological superiority and American industrial might, according to internal data that will be released later this year, President Trump has secured deal after deal: 16,000-plus current orders supporting 190 of our global partners total more than $900 billion. That money flows directly to American companies, creating jobs, driving economic growth and funding additional innovation.
In addition to the economic benefits and political commitments they signal, these sales underpin our national security by sustaining production capacity and strengthening our partners to deter and defeat threats in their own backyard.
But only if we’re able to deliver at the speed today’s geopolitical environment demands.
Timeliness is key in delivering weapons systems
Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretaries of State and Defense Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.
Our equipment is the best in the world, and producing the best missiles, tanks, bombs and planes in the world takes time. However, when partners buy from us, all too often, they have spent their money to join waiting lists for weapons to be delivered at unknown or unreliable delivery dates.
The continuation of combined record demand, strained production capacity and extended delivery times will undermine U.S. national security and defense trade. Rather than making America stronger, these lengthy timelines tempt our allies to look to other suppliers who claim they can deliver faster, even if they offer inferior products.
The solution to this dilemma lies in better aligning our diplomatic apparatus with the defense industrial base. American defense firms prioritize meeting U.S. military requirements.
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The War Department dictates what American companies design and produce, and how much we will pay for it. Major defense contractors build these systems at scale to satisfy their primary customer.
Meanwhile, our allies and partners who willingly offer advanced payments must wait patiently, often several years, until we have produced enough systems to exceed our needs and begin to meet theirs.
The consequence is a system where everyone loses: America has a limited number of overburdened production lines making expensive, state-of-the-art weapon systems that take a long time to build, and foreign governments are promised capabilities that they hope will come in time.
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President Trump’s executive order helps change how weapons are produced, delivered
FILE PHOTO: The Pentagon is seen from the air in Washington, U.S., March 3, 2022, more than a week after Russia invaded Ukraine. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo
The president’s America First Arms Transfer Strategy Executive Order, signed Feb. 6, will shift this paradigm. The U.S. government will now proactively sell a full range of defense articles and services to foreign governments based on what America needs to fortify our industrial strength and ensure our warfighters are equipped to fight and win.
That means designing exportability into our systems from the very beginning, and accelerating our arms transfer decision-making processes – something our departments are leading hand in hand.
America needs partners with complementary, not necessarily identical, capabilities. To be complementary, we need partners to purchase and operate the most exquisite systems our companies can produce.
But we also need partners to purchase good enough systems that are inexpensive and more rapidly produced to meet the growing demand for effective weapons and each partner nation’s individual needs in cost, schedule and system performance.
Such an approach will rebalance the burden on our most advanced production lines and create new manufacturing capacity that will be of use to the U.S. military in a contingency.
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At the president’s direction, the defense enterprise is already transforming the way it acquires equipment, providing industry longer-term demand signals, attracting new sources of capital, and building resilience across our supply chains.
This new strategy will only reinforce those efforts, shortening wait times and lowering costs. It makes the Arsenal of Freedom real, where our allies will have capable weapons delivered on timelines they can use to deter threats, not just promissory notes and spots in line.
It creates more business for our defense companies, both new entrants and traditional firms. It revitalizes the American defense industrial base with growth and increased production capacity, and it means unlocking hundreds of billions in additional investment for production lines right here at home to the benefit of the American worker and our national security.
Our military and defense firms will win under the revised system
A greater diversity of systems benefits our military. The America First Arms Transfer Strategy represents a coordinated, interagency effort to expand the defense industrial base to produce a wide range of weapons, demonstrating our industrial strength, maximizing deterrence and winning wars, if necessary.
This strategy will enable arms transfers as a tool to deliver on that need, promoting U.S. competitiveness abroad while revitalizing our manufacturing and industrial might at home. By diversifying the catalog available to allies and using our network of ambassadors and military groups to promote all that American ingenuity and innovation have to offer, we will arm our warfighters faster and strengthen our alliances sooner.
Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and business instinct, our arms transfers will deliver the peace through strength our world desperately needs.
Marco Rubio is the U.S. secretary of State. Pete Hegseth is the U.S. secretary of War, formally the secretary of Defense.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rubio, Hegseth: Trump order arms US allies better, faster | Opinion