President Trump this week signed a measure to allow U.S. defense contractors to bypass a 33-year-old arms treaty and sell more large armed drones to foreign militaries, a State Department official told reporters Friday.
The Trump administration has chosen to sidestep one part of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) — a 1987 agreement between 35 countries to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons — to allow U.S. firms to sell the drones to foreign governments previously barred from buying them.
The new policy will help U.S. allies and partners meet “urgent national security and commercial requirements,” according to Clarke Cooper, the State Department’s assistant secretary for political-military affairs.
The White House, meanwhile, claimed in a Friday statement that the pact is outdated and gives “an unfair advantage to countries outside of the MTCR and hurt United States industry.”
Currently, only England, France and Australia are allowed to buy larger, armed drones from U.S. manufacturers.
Under the new policy, drones that fly at speeds below 800 kilometers per hour are no longer subject to pact’s strict rules, opening up the international sale of General Atomics’s MQ-9 Reaper and Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk.
Critics of the change say the shift could cause a dangerous increase in ballistic missiles and prompt other countries, including Russia, to undermine agreements and pick and choose rules to their advantage.
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<p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Trump bypasses arms control pact to sell more large armed drones abroad https://t.co/G3wHvHFRgy pic.twitter.com/k6LmQrZWN6</p>— The Hill (@thehill) July 25, 2020
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