Air Force sees spike in overseas weapon sales

DAYTON, Ohio—The U.S. Air Force expects its annual foreign military sales to grow by 60% this fiscal year due largely to increases in F-35 and F-16 purchases.

Air Force Foreign Military Sales officials told reporters Tuesday at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio, that the service anticipates booking more than $46 billion in weapon sales in fiscal 2024, up from $28.7 billion in fiscal 2023.

The first of 14 new F-16 fighter jets from the US land in Slovakia

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Geraghty, director of the Air Force Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate, or AFSAC, said the demand is largely tied to a growing sense of global instability, which is driving U.S. allies to bolster their defense arsenals.

“Business is booming,” Geraghty said. “Our partners recognize that it’s a dangerous world once again.”

Some of the larger deals this year include a sale of up to 40 F-16s to Turkey and modernization kits for another 79 fighters in its existing fleet — a package worth up to $23 billion that has been years in the making. The purchase was approved after several lawmakers tried to block it out of concerns about human rights violations and the potential negative strategic implications of providing jets to Turkey.

The Senate in February voted firmly against the attempt to squash the sale.

Greece was also approved by the State Department in January to buy up to 40 F-35s and associated equipment for up to $8.6 billion. The country signed off on an initial $3.8 billion contract in July for the first 20 of those aircraft with options for up to 40.

Geraghty noted that despite the flurry of new activity in his office, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in manpower to support that work. But efforts in recent years within the Air Force and the Defense Department more broadly to make the foreign military sales process more efficient has helped the office manage that demand.

Last June, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, made six recommendations to reform the foreign military sales process . Among those was a push to streamline the review and release of technology to international partners and a call for more collaboration between the State Department, Congress and other government agencies to reduce barriers.

Much of the responsibility for implementing those reforms lies outside of the military services and within DSCA. AFSAC is focused on improving the parts of its process that it has control over, and according to Deputy Director Shawn Lyman, the office has been able to speed up its processing times in some cases.

“Even with the increase in demand, we’ve been able to accelerate portions of our process that we control and we’re able to go faster,” he said.