The State Department’s Andrew Shapiro addressed the Defense Trade Advisory Group Plenary this morning, and the text of his remarks as prepared were released a little while ago. Mostly Shapiro assured his audience of defense industry types that he expected Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales of U.S. armaments to our allies would increase. (This, I suppose, is seen as an antidote to the impact of possible spending cuts by Congress on the Pentagon’s acquisition of arms and equipment.)

But the remainder of his speech hinted at some upcoming initiatives and agency actions. Fist, Shapiro said that proposed rule on third country and dual nationals that DDTC announced last August had been revised on the basis of industry comments and would be published this week. That proposed rule was widely disappointing to the export industry by failing to adopt an equivalent of the Department of Commerce’s rule that last awarded citizenship applies. Instead, it imposed upon defense contractors a broad and unmanageable obligation to snoop on their employees to determine whether too many phone calls to relatives in China suggested that the dual national bore unacceptable allegiances to the country of his or her birth. I, for one, am quite interested to see if the new rule abandons that nonsense.

Second, Shapiro announced that DDTC would gradually push its antediluvian (but highly profitable) registration process into the twentieth century by instituting an electronic registration process and — gasp! — electronic payments of registration fees. Currently, foreign broker registrations require that fees be paid by a paper check drawn on a U.S. bank and mailed (or delivered by carrier pigeon) to the State Department. An elderly aunt of mine has figured out how to receive credit card payments for the handmade crafts that she sells online. How hard can this electronic payment business be for the State Department? If the State Department would like some advice from Aunt Ellen on how to set up this electronic payment business, I’m sure she would be happy to oblige.

[Note to Readers: A busy schedule and some other factors resulted in fairly sparse posting over the past several weeks. More regular posting will resume with this post . . . I hope!]

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