Security cooperation in a post September 11, 2001 world: the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Worldwide Conference

DISAM Journal, Wntr, 2003 by Dana J. Lieutenant Clay

In this issue of the DISAM Journal, we have provided several of the speeches that were given at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Worldwide Conference in October, 2002. In addition, many of the presentations can be viewed on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency's (DSCA) website at www.dsca.mil. The following is a summary of the events of the conference.

Lieutenant General Tome H. Walters, Jr., USAF, Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) opened the annual Security Cooperation Conference to an audience of over 300 people representing the United States government, U.S. industry, media representatives and international customers from over thirty countries. He recognized that the past year has been especially busy for the security cooperation community. He offered that the Secretary of Defense has been using security cooperation as one of a larger set of tools to fight the war on terrorism. An example of this is the expanded list of countries the United States is partnering with (India, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics, and Afghanistan). Security Cooperation has been recognized by Congress as an important tool of the war on terrorism, as is evidenced by the increase in foreign military financing from $3.6 billion in 2002 to $4.1 billion in 2003. Lieutenant General Walters also acknowledged that there have been some challenges in the past year, including speeding up processes that were not designed for speed. However, the Security Cooperation community has made significant progress in speeding up those processes in part because of the cooperation between those in the Defense Department and those at State Department, in particular the Political Military Affairs Department. Lieutenant General Walters also mentioned that enough progress had been made on the initiatives revealed at the 2001 conference that Defense News published a positive editorial on those changes. He then went on to outline the vision for the next year, including continuous improvement through business process reengineering, driving down the number of open cases, introduction of the web-based Portal system, continued development of the Case Execution Management Information System (CEMIS) and the use of performance-based management. Lieutenant General Walters thanked all those in the Security Cooperation community for their continued hard work.

Fred Beauchamp and Glenn Lazarus, both from DSCA, followed Lieutenant General Walters. They gave an update on the transition from reinvention to continuous business process reengineering. They discussed the use of Team International among the three military services as well as the impact of new changes to the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation to the security cooperation community. They also announced that Singapore will be the first country to sign up for the Stand-By Letter of Credit announced at last year's conference. Beauchamp also reminded attendees that the Customer Guide to US. Security Assistance Programs, which also contains the Letter of Request Guide, can be viewed on the DSCA website. Beauchamp also provided an update on the workforce initiatives. Lazarus continued the discussion of the transition to business process reengineering by stating that DSCA has examined 151 business processes and identified 45 issues to examine. The goal is to look at them one or two at a time to avoid undue strain on resources.

Freda Lodge from DSCA and Tom Sippel from DSADC followed with an update on the CEMIS and Security Cooperation Portal. CEMIS is on schedule and is being developed in accordance with the formal acquisition process as described in DODD 5000.1 and 5000.2. The Security Cooperation Portal is being tested and will provide users with a tri-service view. It is expected to be deployed in four phases, with each phase providing more functionality. It is expected that user registration will begin in January 2003. Information will be provided to users as to the procedures.

Steve Harris from DSCA then discussed the current effort on the re-write of the Security Assistance Management Manual. The new SAMM will more readily identify what is law, what is policy, and what is done for standardization purposes. It is also expected to use more tables and matrices for a more user friendly format. The draft was sent out in November for coordination and it is expected that the new SAMM will be published in the beginning of May 2003.

A discussion on security cooperation performance measures was then given by Fred Beauchamp. He stressed that the purpose of these measures was to keep senior management informed, not to analyze the information. The security cooperation deputies forum focuses on three core functions (development, execution, and closure) and looks at two to three metrics within each, include the time involved in processing an LOA from LOR receipt to offer, supply discrepancy reports over 1 year old, shipped/delivery not reported, payment schedule variance, deliveries vs. schedules, and open supply complete cases.