AFSAC briefs DSCA director grant on tremendous growth and strategic developments for the USAF FMS Enterprise

  • Published
  • By Jonathan Tharp, AF Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), Dayton, Ohio – Heidi Grant, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), visited Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on April 9 and met with members of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Air Force Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate (AFSAC) and other AFLCMC directorates, to discuss strategic priorities.

During the meeting, Brig. Gen. Brian Bruckbauer, director of AFSAC, briefed Grant on the 12 percent annual growth rate of the United States Air Force (USAF) Foreign Military Sales (FMS) workload spanning Fiscal Year 2006 to Fiscal Year 2020.  

The USAF FMS portfolio grew to more than 3,200 cases with a total value of more than $225 billion in support of 116 Partner Nations and NATO organizations.
“USAF FMS continues to play a significant role in advancing the U.S. National Defense Strategy Line of Effort to strengthen relationships with international allies and partners,” explained Bruckbauer. “There’s a direct connection between the AFSAC mission and the U.S. National Defense Strategy.”

The AFSAC team also highlighted new developments in USAF FMS since 2018, which is when Grant left her position as Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force, International Affairs.

One of the most important developments was the stand-up of the FMS Construction Division (AFLCMC/WFE), a full-service construction engineering capability within AFSAC that manages a growing global construction portfolio across 16 countries and is valued at $4.4 billion. 

“Construction is a key component of what we call the total package approach for foreign military sales acquisitions by our international partners,” said Dr. Carlos Braziel, chief of the Construction Division.
  Next, the AFSAC and DSCA directors reviewed key FMS case developments across six geographic Combatant Commands (COCOMs).

“There is a lot of FMS work across the COCOMs dedicated to advancing military interoperability between the U.S. Armed Forces and allied armed forces,” Bruckbauer said.

Given the tremendous growth of the USAF FMS portfolio, one of the topics discussed was resourcing strategies to accommodate the increase.

There’s an ongoing analysis of facilities at WPAFB to identify opportunities for expansion or improvement to better serve the 2,000+ FMS workforce at WPAFB. 

The meeting also included discussion on how Non-Program of Record (NPoR) FMS is becoming more common.  There has been an increased interest in developmental and non-standard equipment.  With this development, the USAF is discussing new strategies for resourcing, technical execution, and sustainment of NPoR FMS capabilities.

Bruckbauer briefed Grant on AFSAC’s Data Visualization and Analytics (DVA) capability, which was developed internally in 2019 and continues to make significant progress.

Now the AFSAC DVA Team is working with DSCA, the AFLCMC Program Offices, Secretary of the Air Force International Affairs (SAF/IA), and other FMS agencies to bring the entire world of USAF FMS data into one real-time, automated analytics capability. 

The AFSAC DVA “guru,” Tom Radominski, conducted a live demo of the DVA capability for Grant and highlighted a dedicated DVA server activated at the end of March 2021 to help process all of the data stored in the system.

For questions about AFSAC developments, email the AFSAC workflow inbox via aflcmc.wf.workflow@us.af.mil.