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As millions of Americans businesses struggle to survive in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, there is an industry that is doing just fine, thank you: U.S. foreign military sales.
Far from struggling, the U.S. government manage to increase business over the last year compared to years before, according to a State Department official.
“Despite a difficult and challenging year, I am very proud to say that we were still able to adapt and to overcome challenges to meet our mission and actually expand total defense sales for fiscal year 2020,” R. Clark Cooper, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of Political Military Affairs, told reporters in New York Wednesday. “This rose by 2.8 percent, from $170.09 up to $175.08 billion.”
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Cooper was referring both to sales direction from the U.S. government to foreign nation – called government-to-government sales – and sales from U.S. “commercial sector” approved by the government.
The sales included some big ticket items, like 50 F-35 fighter jets destined for the United Arab Emirates for the double-take-worthy price of $10.4 billion alone. Add another nearly $3 billion in high-tech drones heading the UAE as well.
Now many of these deals had been in the works long before the novel coronavirus began festering in China in the winter of 2019, and only now have come to “fruition,” as Cooper pointed out. But he also said that COVID-19 has not slowed the U.S. down in the lucrative business of military defense.
“Everything in the Political-Military Affairs Bureau portfolio — defense trade, security assistance, peacekeeping, demining, et cetera, you name it — it continues to be impacted by the pandemic. But what has not changed are those programmatic needs that are serviced by the portfolio,” Cooper said. “The U.S. Government and industries do continue to honor our commitments to partners, and we’ve been able to do so despite some significant logistical challenges. Our defense industry is fulfilling contracts and timely deliveries continue despite the challenges.”
Potential major foreign sales are posted online, for taxpayers’ perusal, on the website for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, where each sale is also justified as in U.S. interests. The most recent potential deal would send a couple Gulfstream surveillance aircraft to Italy for a cool $500 million.
Earlier this month the DSCA released historical data about foreign military sales over the previous 70 years. Some of the totals were astounding. America’s biggest customer has been Saudi Arabia, which has bought more than $172 billion in American weapons and equipment. The next biggest customer, Israel, has spent nearly $48 billion over the decades. (Iran, in better times, purchased almost $11 billion in U.S. material since 1950.)
PRIMARY SOURCE: The United States as the Security Partner of Choice: Highlights of 2020 and a Look Ahead to 2021 (State.gov)
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