Army eyeing four categories for new FMS weapons catalog

WASHINGTON — As the US government designs a weapons catalog for international sales, a senior Army leader said the service will initially promote the sale of capabilities within four main categories — integrated air and missile defense, long-range fires, drones and counter done systems.

“A lot of those capabilities we constantly hear from allies and partners that they want in on,” the head of Army acquisition Brent Ingraham told industry this morning at an Association of the US Army breakfast. While he did not detail which weapons are under consideration in those four buckets, he said they coincide with numerous existing weapons and developmental ones that could eventually be included like the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 (IFPC Inc 2), the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, the Precision Strike Missile, one-way attack drones, and more.

Ingraham’s comments follow President Donald Trump’s early February executive order on foreign arms sales, directing the Defense, State and Commerce Departments to conduct a series of reviews that would lead to a wide-scale restructuring of how America sells weapons abroad. Part of that directive included the creation of a “sales catalog of prioritized platforms and systems” the US will encourage allies and partners to buy from.

Last month, Breaking Defense spoke with Dak Hardwick, the vice president of international affairs at the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), about looming changes to Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and direct commercial sales of weapons.

He explained that in late 2025, the “FMS only list” centering on platforms moved to a “government-to-government list” focusing more broadly on specific capabilities, and it may take time to see what this latest round of changes looks like.

“People that look at that [EO] are maybe interpreting it differently,” Hardwick said. “Is it capabilities based? Is it specific platform based? I’ve even had companies that have called me and said, ‘Hey, is the catalog going to refer to certain subsystems? The early answer to that is, I don’t know yet.”

While Ingraham’s public comments today did not answer those questions head-on, he did shed light on how the service is evaluating its options with plans to push weapons into the four broad buckets.

Service officials, he explained, are weighing international demand, US needs and production capacity to decide what will make it into the initial version of the catalog. Part of that calculus, he added, is looking at current and future force needs and giving industry the “right demand signals” since production lines change based on if the weapon is bound for US inventory or headed abroad. 

“You’ve got capabilities that are slightly different,” Ingraham said referencing changes to platforms based on the customer. The goal, he added, is not to bring production lines to a “halt” on critical weapons in order for industry to produce a modified version for a foreign military.

Hardwick last month explained this a bit more, saying this is a real concern for industry too because certain components and subsystems on weapons need to be swapped out depending on the customer which almost creates personalized production lines.

“It’s really hard to move from one country to another country when you have a manufacturing process. … So prioritization becomes very important,” Hardwick said.

“The US government needs to provide industry stability about what the priorities are in order for us to manufacture at the speed and the scale at which they are asking us to do,” he added.