By the end of this year Congress may have the key documents it needs to press ahead with legislation to enable space-related export control reform, even if the odds of success are still long. At a meeting Thursday morning of the Export Control Working Group of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), Brian Nilsson of the National Security Council discussed the administration’s ongoing export control reform efforts, including an ongoing review of the items in the various categories of Us Munitions List (USML). That review is intended to determine which items should remain on the USML and which should be transferred to the less-restrictive Commerce Control List (CCL).
“We have all 19 categories in some form of draft,” Nilsson said. “This has been extraordinarily labor intensive.” The focus has been on Category VIII, which covers aircraft and covers the largest number of licenses, followed by categories covering tanks and naval vessels. “The other category in the priority list is Category XV,” which covers space-related items, he said. The goal is to have the administration’s proposals for transferring items for the categories released by the end of this year.
Category XV is a special case, though, because of legislation over a decade ago that placed satellites and related components on the USML. Coupled with the release of its plans to transfer items off the USML, Nilsson said, will be the delivery to Congress of what’s known as the “Section 1248″ report, named after the section of the 2010 defense authorization bill that called for it. The report, analyzing the national security implications of moving satellites and their components off the USML, as due a year and a half ago, although an interim report was provided to Congress this spring. “It didn’t really answer the mail, quite candidly,” Nilsson said of that interim report. The updated report, tied to the review of Category XV, will be ready by the end of the year. “The action-forcing event, from talking to some our colleagues in Congress, will be the 1248 report,” he said.
With the delivery of the Section 1248 report and the proposed transfers of items off the USML, it will then be up to Congress to enact legislation giving the administration the authority to make those transfers. Also attending the working group meeting was Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who spoke as much about his concerns about China than about the specifics of export control. However, asked if he would, in principle, support reform efforts while carving out exceptions for China and other so-called “126.1 nations” subject to arms embargoes, Rohrabacher had a one-word answer: “Yes.”
It’s not clear, though, how well that simple assent will translate to congressional support for legislation required for those reforms. One clue will be how Congress responds to proposed changes to other categories of the USML that will be submitted in the coming weeks. One observer noted that if there’s pushback from key staffers on the administration’s proposals in those categories, the prospects for space-related export control reform—or even export control reform in general—don’t look good. If Congress is more open to those changes in other categories, then the door remains open, if only a crack, for space-related reform.
Meanwhile, the ongoing reform process is having an unanticipated, adverse consequence: delaying ongoing reviews for export control licenses. At a space law conference Wednesday held by the University of Nebraska College of Law, Dennis Burnett, vice president for trade and export controls for EADS, said he had noticed an “uptick” in turnaround times for licenses recently because so much staff time has been devoted to the reform work. That’s particularly the case with categories deep in the review process, like Category VIII. “You’re seeing really big delays” in that category, he said, adding that the turnaround times have been much faster, so far, for Category XV space items.
With elections coming up, Burnett asked, “who knows what happens next year?” That could mean an accelerated pace for the administration’s export control efforts, he concluded. “The administration knows they’re running out of time, and they need to get as much done as they can.”
The word ‘progress’ should put the fear of God into everyone by now. Obama’s regulators indeed have only one year to left to carry out their activist agenda. The world is a much more dangerous place than it was 3 years ago. Recent events like the foiled Iranian plot and the rogue behavior of Turkey and Pakistan prove that out adversaries are turning their guns to us. Now is not the time to give free flight to the leftist fancy of disarmament or to offer export gratuities to despots. Running out of time? Let us hope so. Gridlock is good.
So you are saying that American companies should be prohibited from selling any satellites or equipment related to space technology? You realize that European companies sell the same technology with the logo “ITAR Free”? You realize that ITAR strangles US businesses by preventing them from selling any high-value products? That we are being pushed out of entire markets by ITAR? That it is leaving us with a steadily worse trade deficit, hurthing our high-tech industry? And this is what you consider a “socialist” agenda???
Some questions for both sides of this debate are appropriate.
One point in particular about the inclusion in ITAR of all space-related hardware and software is what that inclusion is a very poor substitute for.
It is useful, at all, only because the US refused to spend the money between 1993 and now to build the sort of Ballistic Missile Defense that would make the technology of the vast majority of the satellites and spacecraft blocked from sale by ITAR useless to our, and our allies, potential assailants. It is the combination of dropping ITAR inclusion for most spaceflight technology *and* the provision of a substantive equivalent of the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) that makes both policy and strategic sense for the US. Not 1 percent of our spaceflight technology will make Iran or China, much less North Korea, more dangerous to us once we fully accept the need for those BMD systems that ITAR inclusion of spacecraft technology has tried to substitute for.
Windy’s objections would be far more obviously flaky than they are today with such systems in assured development and deployment. So, are the advocates of cleansing the Space markets of ITAR intervention willing to back the BMD systems that category XV ITAR is such a poor substitute for?
And Windy,…would *you* be willing to trade the end of this Clinton-era Space market debacle for rapid development and deployment of orbital BMD systems that do not encourage others to take markets away from the US??
be willing to trade the end of this Clinton-era Space market debacle for rapid development and deployment of orbital BMD systems
You present a false choice. The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike. ITAR is utterly irrelevant to that policy debate.
amightywind wrote @ October 15th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
“The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike.”
What a throwback you are. The world is too small now for the big countries to duel it out with nuclear war, and why would China try to nuke it’s largest trading partner?
Just like the SLS doesn’t address any known payload needs, BMD doesn’t address the most likely methods of nuclear weapon delivery – airplanes and ships. Why build a rocket when a cargo container costs so much less?
We should be lobbying Congress to repeal INKSNA, not begging them every year for an exemption to a stupid act.
amightywind wrote @ October 15th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
“he US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike.”
goofy RGO
amightywind wrote:
“be willing to trade the end of this Clinton-era Space market debacle for rapid development and deployment of orbital BMD systems
You present a false choice. The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike. ITAR is utterly irrelevant to that policy debate.”
Windy, the false choice is not between BMD and ITAR. It is between the concept of “arms control” as a whole, and BMD, since “arms control *does*not*work*, unless enforced. That enforcement is what happened when Ghaddafi turned over his nuclear & ballistic missile program to us after Iraq was invaded. He was terrified he would be next.
Competently done multi-layered BMD is a *far* gentler means of enforced “arms control” than is invading another country, not to mention cheaper. It is more appropriately called “shaping the battlefield”, by discouraging the development of the small SRBM, IRBM, and ICBM ballistic missile arsenals that most probable assailants of industrial society around the world could afford.
ITAR *is* “arms control”, through a hope and a wish that keeping our sellers from a market will keep others from advancing their own technology. It will make their technology advance more expensive, to be sure, but no more. When the resulting expense is still inside their expenditure limits, it must ultimately be harmful to us, while not stopping the assailants of industrial society from gaining the advantages of ballistic missiles.
ITAR is thus nothing more than a means to keep less “progressive” politicians from making a stand for BMD that could cost them politically, while still looking like they are “doing something”,…no matter how ineffective it ultimately is.