ITAR Restrictions Prevent Sharing Critical Tech with Closest Allies

The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) treat defense technology exports to the UK, Australia, and other Five Eyes allies with nearly the same bureaucratic burden as exports to non-allied nations. A State Department export license for a technical data package can take 4-16 months to process. Even a single ITAR-controlled component in a multinational system forces the entire program into the ITAR regime, causing allied partners to actively design around American technology to avoid contaminating their supply chains. The real-world consequence is that America's closest allies are choosing non-American defense systems specifically to avoid ITAR. Australia chose the French Naval Group (later switched to UK design) for its submarine program partly due to ITAR frustrations. The UK's Tempest sixth-generation fighter program explicitly sought to minimize US components. When allies avoid American technology, interoperability suffers — the core advantage of the Western alliance in combat is the ability to share data, communicate, and fight as an integrated force. ITAR is actively undermining this. The structural reason ITAR persists in this form is that the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) is chronically understaffed and has zero incentive to approve licenses faster. Each approval carries career risk for the reviewing officer (a leak becomes a scandal), while delays carry no personal consequence. Congress passed the ITAR exemption for Australia and the UK under AUKUS in the FY2024 NDAA, but implementation has been glacially slow because DDTC must rewrite decades of regulatory guidance. Defense contractors also quietly benefit from ITAR because it creates switching costs — once an ally is locked into an American platform, they cannot easily share technical data with third-party maintainers. The deeper issue is that ITAR was written during the Cold War when the primary concern was preventing Soviet acquisition of American technology. The threat model has changed — China steals technology primarily through cyber espionage and academic collaboration, not through allied defense cooperation — but the regulatory framework has not adapted. The 2020 ITAR reform moved some items to the Commerce Control List, but the vast majority of defense-relevant technology remains under State Department control with its slower, more risk-averse process.