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Lessons Learned from Historical International Spares Pooling Initiatives

• The negotiation of international spares pooling programs for common major weapon systems has been attempted many times since the 1960s, but they have proven to be very difficult to implement.
• Major barriers include (1) security of supply and prioritization of scarce spares assets and (2) configuration management and management of innovators versus laggards. These two challenges can be difficult to overcome unless one partner plays a dominant role in the pooling arrangements.
• Conflicting industrial, technological, and economic interests and objectives were a major challenge, especially for all-European programs or programs in which all the partners were roughly of equivalent size and influence.
• The most successful programs were characterized by a single dominant partner that could establish the ground rules and resource allocation priorities, as well as control aircraft configuration. At the same time, successful programs made major efforts to ensure fairness, equality, and transparency for all partners, based on relative contribution and need.

Policy Measures That Facilitate Spares Pooling

• Successful programs have mitigated the problem of U.S. export control laws and regulations by retaining U.S. ownership of all spares except when they are installed in ally-owned aircraft.
• All aircraft should conform to U.S. configuration standards, with the proviso that the U.S. Air Force pays for the nonrecurring costs of upgrading the aircraft.
• Incentives for the prime contractor to meet international fleetwide performance metrics and priorities require a splitting out of the smaller foreign fleets with separately calculated metrics so that these fleets are serviced with the same priority as the larger U.S. fleet.