Foreign Military Sales: A Historical Review of Argentina's Purchases.

摘要

Since June 1986 the Argentina Air Force maintains at WPAFB Ohio a procurement office to obtain defense articles under the Foreign Military Sales system. The aim of this thesis is to provide an historical review (1994-2012) of the procurement under FMS and bring some visibility about the procedures and get some managing indicators. The analysis considered three different aspects: the characteristics of the acquisition processes, the time in the procurement system and the relationships between independent variables and the acquisition time through a multivariate linear regression model. The results of the analyses are as follows: the USAF Services has the shortest procurement time, 78% of all acquisition processes initiated resulted in a 92% of fill rate; 68% of all acquisitions were considered Standard; and for both Standard and Non Standard the acquisition median delivery time was around a year. Also, neither the type of the defense article, type of procurements or the U.S. Service supplier influenced the pipeline time. Only the country priority showed a slight degree of linear association with time. The multivariate regression model had an R2 equal to 0.169, showing a weak linear association between variables.