The “Jules Verne,” the automated transfer vehicle (“ATV”) being designed by NASA and the European Space Administration (“ESA”) to ferry supplies to the International Space Station is, by definition, a defense article covered by Category XV of the United States Munitions List (“USML”). As such, technical assistance agreements must be in place for each transfer of technical data on the ATV from U.S. contractors to their European counterparts.

NASA has long complained about these requirements in relation to the International Space Station. In December 2006, NASA requested relief from ITAR requirements for transfers of technical data relating to the International Space Station but this request has not yet been acted on by State. The final report by the International Space Station Independent Safety Task Force, released in February of this year, concluded that these requirements jeopardize the safety of the International Space Station.

At the Washington Space Business Roundtable last week, William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, revealed what NASA believed to be a “feasible workaround” if the State Department fails to act on NASA’s request. According to Gerstenmaier:

We are actually training civil servants as a workaround. It’s not truly training unique civil servants, but we are utilizing civil servants more than we would have … if we had some of these restrictions removed.

According to Gerstenmaier, civil servants could, under existing rules, interact more freely with their non-U.S. counterparts.

It’s difficult to understand Gerstenmaier’s position here. There is no exemption for civil servants to export technical data. Perhaps what he means is that the private contractors, aware of the restrictions, will refuse to share information with the Europeans whereas a government employee will either be unaware of the restrictions or will believe that the “I was just following orders” defense will shield him or her from liability for export violations. I’m not so sure I would call that a feasible workaround.

Rumors of disagreements between the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (“DDTC”) and the Defense Department over export controls administered by the DDTC were confirmed today by an article in Defense News. That article reported that the DoD has commissioned a study from Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Services, to evaluate current export controls on defense items:

Spurred by complaints by the U.S. Central Command that export controls were hampering the war effort in Iraq, the Pentagon has hired a think tank to study export-control regulations that impede turning technology over to U.S. allies and the Iraqi military.

Rules block the U.S. military from supplying some allies and Iraqis with sensitive equipment, such as certain kinds of communications gear and night-vision goggles. That means U.S. troops must continue performing dangerous missions rather than handing them off to others, said David Scruggs, a defense industry expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Traditionally, the Pentagon has wanted to safeguard U.S. technology for use by U.S. troops. Now, however, . . . “they’re getting high-level people coming out of the field saying this is hurting us.” Export controls that prevent transferring technology are “causing casualties.”

That’s pretty strong language.

The study is expected to take a year. Reforming current regulations would, of course, take even longer than that.

The Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (“DDTC”) has recently completed a review of registration applications and has reported in a “Message from David Trimble, Director of Compliance” that fifty percent of the registration applications that it received over the past six months were inadequate. One might think that such a staggeringly high figure was evidence that perhaps the DDTC hadn’t provided clear guidance to the regulated community as to how to complete the applications. But DDTC prefers to jump to the mostly counter-intuitive conclusion that this figure is instead simply an indication of the carelessness of registrants.

But even a cursory examination of the registration guidelines, including the sample rejection letter just released for the first time with the Trimble message, reveals that the DDTC’s guidelines for completing these applications are unclear, contradictory and unreasonable. This is a recipe for disaster when many of the new registrants are individuals who are foreign sales reps and who have been required to register as a result of DDTC’s recent reinterpretation of its regulations.

The sample rejection letter is instructive. It indicates, for example, that the DS-2032 registration application can be rejected if it is not typewritten. Typewritten? Is DDTC serious? I do realize that one senior official of DDTC (not Mr. Trimble) once admitted at an industry conference to not having a computer at home, but certainly even that official must be aware that most typewriters are now buried under a decade of debris at municipal waste dumps. What next? Is DDTC going to insist that the transmittal letter be signed with a quill pen using India ink?

But more to the point, where in any DDTC publication prior to this newly-released sample rejection letter, can we find this quaintly archaic requirement to “type” the DS-2032? You won’t find it in the instructions to the DS-2032, nor in the guidelines for filling out that form, nor on the web page explaining registration requirements, nor in the ITAR itself. It is only set forth in the sample rejection letter which appeared on the DDTC website’s page about registration requirements just after the Trimble message was released. (See a cached version of the registration page without the sample rejection letter here.)

No wonder DDTC received handwritten DS-2032s from individual sales reps working out of Croatia or Kuwait. Based on this new requirement, it is now incumbent upon potential registrants either to find a typewriter and ribbon at an antique store or to fill the form out using the full version of Adobe Acrobat and a non-proportional font (such as Courier) which mimics a typewriter.

Then we have the requirement noted in the sample rejection letter that the transmittal letter must be on corporate letterhead. Hmm. Apparently, it has not occurred to anyone over at DDTC that foreign sales reps required to register under new guidelines might be individuals instead of companies. In all events, individual registrants should now gin up some imaginary corporate letterhead to avoid the risk of rejection. Instructions on how to use Microsoft Word to create company letterhead can be found here.

Finally the confusion over what should be a simple matter — how to pay the registration fee — persists, at least in the case of foreign registrants. The newly-revised guidelines indicate that the check must be drawn on a U.S. financial institution. But in the Trimble message, the DDTC contradicts this and says now that the U.S. financial institution requirement is “not required for foreign brokers,” The Trimble message, however, provides no information as to what will suffice for foreign brokers.

Additionally, the Trimble message instructs for the first time that the check must be drawn on a corporate account. This requirement is also not found in the regulations, the instructions to DS-2032, the guidelines, nor the ITAR. How individual foreign brokers are to satisfy this requirement is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a money order would suffice, but nothing on the DDTC website or in the ITAR provides any guidance here.

It seems to us quite apparent that if DDTC would spend as much time issuing clear guidelines as it does complaining about poor application quality, this problem complained of in the Trimble message would, largely, go away.