Notes on Construction of the FMS and CE Time Series

Foreign Military Sales agreements (FMS) and Commercial Exports Licensed under the Arms Export Control Act (CE) in historical dollars are obtained from the following sources:

 

  1. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts as of September 30, 2003, Published by Deputy for Operations and Administration Business Operations/Comptroller, DSCA. Available at http://www.dsca.mil/programs/biz-ops/2003_facts/Facts_Book_2003_Oct04_FINAL.pdf
  2. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts as of September 30, 1995, Published by Financial Policy Division Comptroller, DSAA. Available at http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/fulcrum_main.pl?database=ft_u2&searchid=0&keyfieldvalue=ADA318133&filename=%2Ffulcrum%2Fdata%2FTR_fulltext%2Fdoc%2FADA318133.pdf
  3. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts as of September 30, 1987, Published by Data Management Division Comptroller, DSAA.
  4. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts as of September 30, 1981, Published by Data Management Division Comptroller, DSAA.
  5. Foreign Military Sales and Military Assistance Facts December 1979, Published by Data Management Division Comptroller, DSAA. http://www.dsca.mil/programs/biz-ops/1979_facts/facts_book_1979.pdf
  6. Military Assistance and Foreign Military Sales Facts March 1970, Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) http://www.dsca.mil/programs/biz-ops/1970_facts/facts_book_1970.pdf

 

This “series” of publications is only sporadically available though more is being made available by DSCA. For instance, the 1969 and 1963 yearbooks were made available on line 5/20/05 but do not report any data regarding FMS or CE.

 

The time series for the selected countries for FMS and CE were constructed in the following fashion:

 

First, FMS and CE data for 1994-2003 were extracted from the 2003 factbook, for 1987-93 from the 1995 factbook, for 1982-1986 from the 1987 factbook, for 1972-1981 from the 1981 factbook, for 1970 and 1971 from the 1979 factbook for FMS only, and for 1965-1969 from the 1970 factbook again for FMS only. Data for the period from 1950-1964 for FMS were constructed in the following fashion. Summary data for this entire period for each country are reported in the 1970 factbook. There are no annual data available for this time period. Since there is no information that allow us to know exactly when FMS or CE actually started or if it was distributed unevenly across this time frame (i.e. mostly in the more recent years), we decided to interpolate data by dividing the total for the entire time period by the total number of years and assigning equal quantitities of sales for each year in the time period. Annual data for CE are reported only from 1972 forward, so we interpolated CE data for the 1950-1971 period using summary data of that entire period reported in the 1981 factbook.

 

Some annual data in these time series remain classified. For the period between 1965-1969 annual data for Saudi Arabia , Jordan , and Israel are not provided. Data were interpolated for these dates in the following fashion. We have summary data for both FMS for 1950-1964 and for 1950-1971. So we can subtract out the 1971 and 1970 date from the summary 1950-1971 data and then subtract those numbers from the summary 1950-1964 data and have a summary measure per country for the 1965-1969 period. Those data are then divided evenly across the five years in question. We already are interpolating these data for CE. In addition, annual FMS data for India and Pakistan were classified for the period from 1950-1969. Summary data for the period from 1955-1969 were provided for both countries in the 1970 factbook. These summary data were used to interpolate annual FMS values for these two countries.

 

All data are recorded in historical dollars. Therefore, all data were transformed into constant dollars using a Gross Domestic Product Deflator. The GDP deflator employed is provided by NASA and can be located at

http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateGDP.html

Data were all converted from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to be compatible with the Greenbook data for economic, military and non-concessional aid that is all in millions of dollars.

 

One final and important note. Time series for each country for FMS and CE are spliced together from a number of different annual factbooks as noted above. This would not normally create problems but it turns out that data reported in different factbooks for the same years (for example FMS for Germany for 1979 is reported in seven different factbooks) vary substantially across the factbooks. We do not know why this is the case and have not received any response about this from DSCA. An analysis of some cases suggests that data for a given year appear to systematically decrease across factbooks as they become more recent. For example, for Germany for FMS for 1979, the data reported are

  • 1981 factbook 623.926
  • 1982 factbook 621.519
  • 1983 factbook 609.625
  • 1984 factbook 589.970
  • 1985 factbook 567.043
  • 1986 factbook 560.148
  • 1987 factbook 543.549

 

This means that the total amount of FMS and/or CE for the 1950-2003 time period for any particular country varies depending upon which set of databooks the time series is constructed from. Our only “solution” is to be consistent and choose all the data for all the time series from the same set of databooks as we have done and as is noted above. One implication is that our summary data for the 1950-2003 time period do not match the summary data for the same time frame noted in the 2003 factbook.