When the Obama administration recently announced a new set of rules governing the export of unmanned aerial systems—more commonly referred to as drones—most headlines latched onto language concerning “potential exports of military UASs, including armed systems.” “Obama administration to allow sales of armed drones to allies,” read the headline in the Washington Post. Which is true, but only to the extent that it’s always been true.
U.S. sales of military drones go back decades, to at least the 1970s. The U.S. has already exported those platforms people now commonly think of as military drones—the Predator and Reaper drones used by the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Air Force in drone strikes overseas—to allies such as Italy and the United Kingdom. So while the Obama administration’s new rules do begin to unify the various policies and controls that govern military drone exports, the idea that U.S. defense contractors are on the verge of a drone export boom is misguided.
“Nine of 10 articles I saw said the floodgates are now open,” says Remy Nathan, vice president for international affairs at the Aerospace Industries Association. “That’s not true.”
Rather than throwing open the floodgates to drone exports, the new drone policy is more of a unifying rule book for those wishing to sell drone technologies abroad. Previously, if a contractor wanted to sell drone technology to another country, depending on the size and scope of the system that company could run up against any number of arms controls or treaties, including the Arms Export Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and the Missile Technology Control Regime, or MTCR.
The exporter would typically have to satisfy each of these and more independently, a process that could take months or years. Steps taken to satisfy one regulator, policy, or international agreement might not satisfy another. The new drone export policy will establish a more unified set of rules and conditions that exporters must meet, simplifying the process.
That’s progress, Nathan says, given how difficult these regulations have been to negotiate in the past. Many were drafted long before the era of armed drone warfare became a widespread phenomenon, and these aircraft often get tangled up in rules that never took drones as we now know them into consideration.
For instance, the Missile Technology Control Regime was ratified by a battery of nations in 1987 to stem the proliferation of nuclear missile technologies as the Cold War thawed. But its language defines any unmanned aircraft weighing 500 kilograms (roughly 1,100 pounds) and with a range of 300 kilometers (186 miles) a “Category I” system subject to very strict controls only lifted on “rare occasions” when the exporter can overcome a “strong presumption of denial.” That is, the government’s default answer is “no,” and the burden is on exporters to change the government’s mind.
None of these many obstacles to export have been lifted by the Obama administration’s new policy. In fact, the administration’s announcement specifically says it will adhere to the MTCR’s “strong presumption of denial.” But a between the lines reading of the new rules suggests that things like the blanket reading of the 300-kilometer/500-kilogram distinction might become slightly more subjective on a case-by-case basis.
As such, it is and will remain very difficult to export military drone technologies—especially those that can be weaponized—for the foreseeable future. But by creating a more unified set of rules and processes for petitioning the government for approval, the administration has allowed for drone technology exports to begin at a trickle, if not the flood predicted by many over the past few weeks.
“It’s a marginal improvement, but it’s significant in that it’s marginal,” Nathan says. “Before, everything was viewed through the lens of “no.” We’ve gone from “no, no, a thousand times no” to “maybe, let’s talk about it.”