Foreign Defense Partners Want Congress to Speed Up Arms Sales

America’s allies, worried that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are burning through weapons stockpiles and slowing resupplies from the U.S., are pushing Congress to loosen arms export restrictions and scale back oversight of foreign arms sales.

A coalition representing 28 U.S. defense partners sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services committees on Friday urging lawmakers to make it easier for allied countries to build weapons with the U.S. and buy American arms as the Pentagon works to refill missile inventories and ramp up production. The Defense Memorandum of Understanding Attachés Group, a decades-old Washington-based organization known as the DMAG, argues that America will need help from allies to keep up with demand.

The lobbying effort lands in the middle of a broader fight inside Washington over whether the U.S. should rely more heavily on defense firms in allied countries to rebuild missile stockpiles and ramp up weapons production, or pursue more protectionist “America First” policies aimed at building up domestic manufacturing.

The DMAG warned that America’s “significant drawdown” of munitions stockpiles and slow replenishment times are “undermining deterrence” — making it harder to keep adversaries in check, in other words.

“Those barriers will further strain our ability to jointly sustain, produce, and field the capabilities that our integrated defense industrial and technological bases must deliver for the war fighter,” says the letter from DMAG Chair Sander Oude Hengel and obtained by NOTUS.

The Pentagon has warned some allies to expect delays for major missile systems after months of military operations against Iran and years of weapons transfers to Ukraine have strained U.S. inventories. Countries including the U.K., Poland, Lithuania and Estonia were told to expect longer wait times, the Financial Times previously reported.

The Iran conflict has consumed more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles and about 1,100 Joint Surface-to-Air Surface Standoff Missiles, known as JASSMs, while replenishment timelines for some missile interceptors could stretch several years, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis.

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget seeks $70.5 billion for missile procurement — a 188% increase over the prior year — as officials pursue long-term framework deals to ramp up production of 14 munitions systems deemed critical. Pentagon officials say contractors will be expected to shoulder much of the upfront cost of expanding factories and production lines needed to meet higher missile production targets.

Washington and European governments, meanwhile, are clashing over “Buy American” policies — and “Buy European” policies that threaten to chip away at the U.S. defense industry’s vast share of the global market.

Thomas DiNanno, the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control and international security, is slated to visit Poland, Romania and Estonia this week to discuss European Union “defense protectionism” and U.S. efforts to streamline U.S. arms sales abroad.

The DMAG represents countries whose special agreements give them greater access to some Pentagon contracts. But those arrangements have faced growing scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties and the Trump administration after the Government Accountability Office in 2024 found that the Pentagon hadn’t done much study of their impact on U.S. industry.

The allies’ group is seeking changes to the federal government’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which govern exports of sensitive U.S. military technology. It also asks Congress to speed up licensing for arms exports and technology transfers to allied nations, expand the use of existing exemptions, and raise the dollar thresholds that trigger the federal government to notify Congress of foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

Under current law, Congress must be formally notified of sales to NATO allies and certain close partners once they exceed $25 million for major defense equipment or $100 million for defense articles and services.

Efforts to prune bureaucracy in the arms sales process have been ongoing under multiple administrations. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is continuing its work with a hearing on Wednesday to mark up related legislation. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February aimed at speeding up foreign military sales as a way to expand U.S. defense manufacturing and production capacity.

Oude Hengel argued that U.S. industry should harness allied supply chains to avoid bottlenecks.

“If you want to do that, and you want to do that fast, given the issues that we all have, including the United States, you really need to get at two or three barriers ASAP,” Oude Hengel told NOTUS. “I think the sense we are getting from the Pentagon right now is that ‘America First’ is not America alone. There’s a clear balance, I think the Pentagon gets it, and there is a strong interest to work with allies and partners.”