Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume 11 Number 3 

Apri I 21, 2020 

Security Assistance and 

U.S. Competitive Strategy: 

Improving Our Game 

by Christopher A. Ford 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 3 I April 21, 2020 

Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive Strategy: Improving Our Game 

Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive 

Strategy: Improving Our Game 

by Christopher A. Ford1 

In this third issue of the T paper series, Assistant Secretary Ford outlines the 

ways in which the State Department applies U.S. arms transfers to enhance the 

capabilities of allies and partners in support of U.S. competitive strategy vis-avis state-level competitors. 

Coming to my current role performing the duties of the 

Under Secretary for Arms Control and International 

Security from two years at the helm of the Bureau of 

International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN), most of 

my discussions of U.S. competitive strategy in this current 

era of great power competition address such questions 

through an ISN prism - such as the challenges of dealing 

with technology-transfer threats. 

This paper, however, will take a broader perspective, 

exploring how we in the so-called "T" family of bureaus -

and, in particular, the Political-Military Affairs (PM) Bureau 

- are also using arms transfers to foreign partners as a tool 

of U.S. competitive strategy. Such transfers have always 

been an important foreign policy and national security tool, 

of course. Nonetheless, it is too little understood how 

much focus we in this Administration have put on such 

transfers, and how this revised and expanded effort is 

contributing to meeting the challenges set for us by our 

senior leaders in documents such as the National Security 

Strategy (NSS) and the National Defense Strategy. 

I. NSPM-10 and the CAT Policy 

One of the cornerstones of our current approach is 

National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 101 

which was signed by the President on April 19, 2018, just a 

few months after I left the National Security Council staff to 

come to the State Department. NSPM-10 forms the 

backbone of our new Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) 

policy. 

But it's worth backing up for a moment. The NSS 

makes clear the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and 

security today is the reemergence of long-term, strategic 

competition with revisionist powers, namely the People's 

Republic of China (PRC) and Russia. It also makes clear that 

economic security is a critical part of national security. 

These strategies recognize the primacy of our security 

relationships in order to magnify American power, and the 

influence these security relationships provide to protect our 

shared interests. 

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non proliferation, and is additionally peiforming the Duties of 

the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director 

for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff 
Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 3 I April 21, 2020 

Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive Strategy: Improving Our Game 

Against the backdrop of a competitive environment for 

security partnerships, our PM Bureau leads efforts to make 

the United States the global security partner of choice and 

to maintain America's status as the preeminent global 

defense exporter. Arms transfers are a key tool for doing 

this, and this is where the CAT policy comes in. The CAT 

policy focuses first and foremost upon protecting and 

promoting the U.S. Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and it 

approaches arms transfers from the perspective of "better 

aligning our policy regarding conventional arms transfers 

with our national and economic security interests." It is our 

objective to build up the DIB - "maintain[ing] technological 

advantages of the United States military" and "increasing 

trade opportunities for United States companies" -thereby 

directly enhancing U.S. capabilities and improving our 

ability to protect and advance the interests and security of 

the American people. All of this serves the purpose not just 

of supporting American prosperity and jobs, but also 

ensuring that we can compete with the global revisionists 

of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Russia in the 

future, no matter what their own DIBs try to throw at us. 

Critically, however, the CAT policy is not just about our 

capabilities. Our transfer policy is also about those who 

receive such transfers, and NSPM-10 directs us to focus also 

upon how to "better equip our allies and partners to 

contribute to shared security objectives and to enhance 

global deterrence." This piece is the key to understanding 

our efforts systematically to use arms transfers - as well as 

training and military capacity-building more broadly, 

though I won't dwell too much on those aspects here - as a 

means for enhancing partner capabilities in ways that 

support U.S. competitive strategy and interfere with our 

adversaries' strategies. 

II. Two Lines of Competitive Effort 

The way I look at things, one can break ourT-family 

approach to competitive strategy into two major prongs: 

1. First, we do what we can to help the United States 

itself "run faster" in strategic competitive terms. Most 

of this figurative "running" depends upon things 

outside the T family's purview, such as the raw 

dynamism and creativity of American enterprise. That 

said, we do as much as we can to help. This includes, 

for example, our efforts to promote foreign sales of 

United States nuclear reactor technology through socalled "123 agreements" in support of that critical 

sector of our economy, our work to build better 

partnerships for U.S. industry, laboratories, and 

researchers through the negotiation of Nuclear 

Cooperation Memoranda of Understanding. and our 

work to reform the Missile Technology Control Regime 

in order to permit reasonable flexibility in being able to 

sell certain categories of unmanned aerial systems. 

2. Second, we work to make our strategic competitors 

"run more slowly" as they try to compete with us. This 

includes such things as combating the PRC's 

systematic effort to acquire foreign technologyincluding nuclear technology- and divert it to military 

applications. implementing and reforming U.S. 

national security export controls and screening visa 

applications to deny our competitors sensitive dual-use 

technology, and building multilateral "coalitions of 

caution" informed by awareness of the threats 

presented by PRC's strategy of"Military-Civil Fusion." 

It also includes our diplomacy implementing the 

CAATSA sanctions legislation in order to deny Russia 

the revenues and manipulative strategic relationships 

it seeks from foreign arms sales. and to warn the rest 

of the world of the dangers of allowing Chinese 

technology companies such as Huawei to build and 

control next-generation telecommunications 

networks. 

I will likely have more to say on this broad framing of 

competitive strategy in a future paper. but it is worth 

emphasizing here that our CAT policy supports both of 

these prongs. It contributes to the first line of effort by 

using arms transfers to promote the health and resilience 

of our defense industrial base, as well as to improve the 

capabilities of our foreign partners, their contributions to 

burden-sharing, and the interoperability their forces with 

those of the United States - especially for those allies 

alongside whom we might have to fight if deterrence were 

to fail. The policy also aims to ensure "appropriate 

protections on the transfer of United States military 

technologies" in ways that we hope will help preserve our 

own military advantages. Additionally, the CAT policy 

requires "restraint in transfers that may be destabilizing," 

such as U.S. sales that might allow recipients to threaten 

other friends; this is the basis of the U.S. commitment to 

preserving Israel's Qualitative Military Edge. 

The CAT policy also contributes to the second line of 

effort, however - the "slow the other side down" prong -

through its focus upon building arms transfer partners into 

better obstacles to adversary strategy. As officials from the 

State Department and the White House explained publicly 

in August 2018 after we rolled out the new CAT policy, we 

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Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 3 I April 21, 2020 

Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive Strategy: Improving Our Game 

are "trying to take a more proactive approach to arms 

transfers" and "prioritizing strategic competition." This 

policy was explicitly "designed in response to a shifting 

strategic landscape that's increasingly characterized by 

great-power competition across the political, economic, 

and military spheres," and it "prioritizes staying ahead of 

this competition by responding proactively instead of 

reactively to the defense needs of allies and partners."2 

This competitive focus upon partner capacity-building 

is intended to allow them to stand up for their own 

interests (and thereby also contribute to our common 

interests) more effectively in regions of the world menaced 

by revisionist intimidation and aggression from those who 

wish all of us ill. Such capacity-building is increasingly 

important in an era in which Beijing and Moscow have 

become conspicuous as geopolitical revanchists on a global 

scale, seeking not merely to expand their national power at 

others' expense, but in fact to obtain hegemony over their 

neighbors and reshape international order around 

themselves. (Nor is this just about "spheres of influence." 

The PRC has actually been seizing maritime areas claimed 

by its neighbors, while Russia now occupies parts of the 

sovereign territory of two of its European neighbors, 

resurrecting invasion and territorial seizure as a grim fact of 

life on the European continent to the first time since the 

defeat of Nazi Germany.) At the regional level, Iran also 

uses force and subversion in support of its own dreams of 

hegemony, while the DPRK openly threatens its neighbors 

with weapons of mass destruction and still mutters 

periodically about "reunification" of the entire Korean 

Peninsula (i.e., presumably through absorbing our military 

ally, South Korea). 

Not for nothing, therefore, do this Administration's 

National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy 

call out countering Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North 

Korean depredations as being the central focus of United 

States planning. In the face of the threats those regimes 

present, other countries have a right to protect themselves, 

and to the degree that we can help them defend 

themselves against such intimidation and aggression, we 

should do so. Notably, this is what we are trying to do 

under the CAT policy as we work to build up partners and 

friends to stand as roadblocks to those countries' own 

strategies. (To the extent that our own transfers can 

displace or substitute for some of the arms transfers that 

both Russia and China use to raise revenues for their 

respective military machines and build client relationships 

that they can thereafter manipulate for strategic benefit, 

moreover, all the better.) 

Ill. Strengthening Partners Around the World 

To give you a flavor for what we have set in motion 

since January 2017 when this administration came into 

office, an overview of our security partnership activities is in 

order. 

In using the various arms transfer and security 

partnership assistance tools available to us, our first priority 

is to support the defense needs of our allies and partners. 

Precisely because and to the degree that those allies and 

partners do in fact face threats from the states called out in 

the National Security Strategy and the National Defense 

Strategy as our state-level competitors, however, this focus 

upon supporting our partners' security needs also has the 

important effect of problematizing the self-aggrandizing 

revisionism of those state competitors. By helping our 

friends be more secure, in other words, we also help 

counter the threatening aspects of our competitors' own 

strategies and contribute to deterring revisionist 

aggression. 

We are providing various European and Eastern 

European partners -who face a modernizing Russian 

military that periodically exercises itself near their borders 

in ways designed to alarm and intimidate decision-makers 

-with a range of missile and rocket systems, and maritime 

patrol assets, and are moving steadily forward in the multinational F-35 Lightning II next-generation stealth combat 

aircraft program, which will provide many of our partners 

with state-of-the-art combat air power for years to come. 

We have also lifted the previous U.S. administration's ban 

on lethal assistance to Ukraine as it suffers Russian invasion 

and partial occupation, for instance, by transferring Javelin 

anti-tank missiles and sniper rifles - both good things to 

have when engaged in a protracted war of attrition against 

Moscow-supported proxy forces and Russian soldiers on 

clandestine assignment as "little green men" killing your 

citizens and occupying your homeland. 

2 We are doing this while continuing to uphold respect for human rights and U.S. nonproliferation objectives. Yet we are also being more 

aggressive than ever in our dipl_omati~ engagements to ensure that the current multilateral institutions and organizations designed to uphold 

these values are not used as fotfs agamst us as we try to advance our competitive strategy. 

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Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 3 I April 21, 2020 

Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive Strategy: Improving Our Game 

All of these various capabilities will contribute in vital 

ways to making Europe stronger and more secure, 

including against Russian threats. If you were in the 

Kremlin and sought to intimidate Eastern European 

countries that used to be part of the Soviet Empire and 

NATO partners who stand in the way of your dreams of 

relitigating the eroded hegemony of your "near abroad," I 

expect that you would find it very problematic how such 

transfers are today helping buttress the security of the free 

and democratic states you seek to bully. 

Similarly, we are providing various allies and partners 

in Asia and the lndo-Pacific with a range of first-rate 

systems - including anti-air and anti-ship capabilities, and 

intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets -that 

will help them better meet their own national defense 

requirements. In helping them meet their needs, we 

support the freedom and autonomy of the entire region. If 

you work in the Chinese Communist Party's leadership 

compound in Beijing and are building up your aerospace 

and naval power projection capabilities in order to displace 

regional U.S. alliances, conquer the thriving democracy of 

Taiwan, and re-establish what one might describe as neotributary relationships over the countries of East Asia, this 

is surely not good news. For our allies and partners in the 

region, however, it is good news indeed. 

In the Middle East, where Iran seeks its own sort of 

regional hegemony, our partners are receiving a variety of 

systems that will better enable them to defend themselves. 

Particularly at a time when Iran's regional provocations 

have extended not just to expeditionary warfare using 

Gods force units and militia proxies but also to transferring 

missiles and missile technology to non-state actors in 

Lebanon and Yemen and even to direct missile and 

unmanned vehicle strikes upon its neighbors' critical 

infrastructure, helping our friends defend themselves also 

helps undermine Iran's belligerent regional revisionism. 

To assist our allies and partners in taking such steps to 

defend themselves, the U.S. State Department has also 

strategically allocated Foreign Military Financing (FMF) 

monies to select partner countries for the purchase of U.S.-

origin defense articles, training, and services. One key 

example is the European Recapitalization Initiative 

Program (ERIP), through which we assist European 

partners and allies as they transition away from Sovietlegacy and Russian-manufactured equipment, to reduce 

the Kremlin's influence over partner and Allied defense 

procurement. Through the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) 

program, the United States also disposes of excess military 

equipment by providing it to Allied and friendly nations on 

a grant or sale basis. 

Another important tool that increases our 

competitiveness, influence, and interoperability with 

foreign partners is the International Military Education and 

Training (!MET) program - a Title 22 global security 

assistance program of approximately $110 million annually, 

that provides leadership and professional development 

training to thousands of up-and-coming young and midgrade officers as well as senior military leaders at the U.S. 

Defense Department's institutions of higher learning within 

the United States. I'll leave a detailed discussion of !MET 

partnerships for another day, but the program is an 

important tool for increasing the professionalism and 

military effectiveness of !MET partner countries against 

shared threats we face, and it is also a great way to build 

lasting relationships. (Notable !MET alumni include 

Jordan's King Abdullah and Nigerian President Buhari.) 

IV. The Security Partner of Choice 

With annual sales for Fiscal Year 2019 at more than 

$170 billion, it should be clear we provide an enormous 

amount of support to our various partners. 

It is easy to see why our partners value this assistance, 

since U.S. industry produces the best defense equipment 

on the planet. And our partners don't just get the 

equipment itself. Unlike many other suppliers, we don't 

provide mere defense articles, but rather defense 

capabilities- including not only the training required to use, 

maintain, and integrate items into the recipient military's 

doctrine and operations, but also the parts and 

components required for long-term maintenance and 

support. 

Moreover, compared to transfers from our major arms 

sale competitors in Moscow and Beijing, U.S. defense sales 

are managed through a process whose policies are clear 

and transparent. As the new CAT policy both 

demonstrates and models, U.S. policies are clear on the 

public record, and all transfers are vetted, including by 

conducting evaluations that account for potential harm to 

regional balances of power, contribution to proliferation, or 

harm to human rights. Unlike the arms merchants in 

Moscow and Beijing, we tolerate no bribes, no monkey 

business, and no shady and corrupt relationships that can -

and will - later be used to manipulate and coerce. 

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Security Assistance and U.S. Competitive Strategy: Improving Our Game 

All of this makes us, in effect, the perfect defense 

supplier for free sovereign peoples resisting threats and 

intimidation from authoritarian revisionist states - and we 

are happy to play that role. 

V. Conclusion 

I hope this gives you a feel for how we are trying to use 

transfers and other tools in a strategically-informed way as 

we reorganize ourselves for competitive strategy in the 

State Department. and in a fashion that not only produces 

benefits for our defense industrial base but will also help 

problematize what our adversaries are trying to accomplish 

with their own competitive strategies. 

The details of our approach in this global effort are not 

fixed in stone, of course. Such efforts must always remain 

a work in progress - in the highest and best sense -for we 

seek to improve our game at every opportunity and to do 

better and better over time. This is also an iterated game 

with an active opponent, so we also need to ensure that 

U.S. efforts adjust appropriately in response to what our 

competitors are doing in reacting to such moves. 

To help us improve how we do this, and to streamline 

our process of adaptation in the future, we are currently 

updating and revising our approaches to both Russia and 

the PRC on a T-family-wide basis. As I have said before. the 

West all but forgot about great power competition for far 

too long after the end of the Cold War. leaving our 

competitors free to take great strides while we were 

preoccupied with other things. 

The State Department is back in the game now. 

however. and we are learning anew how to do this sort of 

thing better and better every day. 

* * * 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis.