Data Guide

The Security Assistance Monitor (SAM) at the Center for International Policy tracks U.S. arms sales, security assistance, and foreign military training. This page provides a guide to the SAM datasets and how to use them.

Quickstart Guide:

In the arms sales visualization, start by selecting a country. To compare two or more countries, select each desired country in the dropdown. Use the year dropdown to search and filter years displayed in the visualization.

In the arms sales detail tables, select a country from the dropdown menu. All available data for that country will appear in the table. To search for a specific item or subset of items, type a keyword into the “Reported Item Name” dropdown, and select all desired items. There may be several variations of a single item name due to varied reporting over time. You can also use the year dropdown to search and filter years displayed in the detail table.

Introduction to SAM Data:

SAM maintains three datasets (arms sales, security sector assistance, and foreign military training) at two levels of detail each (summary and detail). Summary data is displayed on the visualizations, while detail data is displayed in the detail tables. It is important to note that total data often does not match the sum of all available detail data. This is because total data is often reported in a different way than the detail data and may include elements that are not reported in the detail data.

Security Sector Assistance data, while maintained in the SAM database, is not currently displayed publicly due to lack of clear summary data available in recent years. Foreign Military training detail data is available upon request.

Arms Sales:

There are two broad categories of U.S. arms sales: foreign military sales between the US government and a foreign government, and direct commercial sales between a U.S. manufacturer and a foreign buyer. Foreign military sales that fall above a certain threshold must be notified by Congress, while direct commercial sales are generally considered proprietary and only a high-level summary of approved export authorizations are provided. As such, “notifications” usually refer to foreign military sales, while “authorizations” always refer to direct commercial sales.

Accordingly, SAM breaks arms sales data into three categories:

Notifications

Congressional Notifications are reporting requirements in the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) that require arms sales proposed by the President to be considered by congress before the sale finalizes. The reporting requirements differ between NATO and five close partners — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Israel — and all other recipients of U.S. arms. Congressional Notifications are reported by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and most are publicly available on their website.

Deliveries

Deliveries are defense-related equipment that leave U.S. ports for other countries, as reported by the Census Automated Export System. It is unclear whether the reported deliveries are direct commercial sales or facilitated by the U.S. government. The end-user is also unspecified. This category has the most data of all the arms sales categories, but likely includes some amount of arms used by civilians, like hunting rifles, and some non-weapon explosives, like fireworks.

All data from 2018 on is collected from the Census AES. A guide to SAM’s use of the dataset, including its benefits and caveats relative to previous delivery data, as well as commodity Harmonized System (HS) to USML category mappings, is available here.

Authorizations

Authorizations are defense articles sales from U.S. private companies to foreign purchasers in compliance with U.S. government regulations and licensing requirements. This Direct Commercial Sales program is implemented by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) within the Department of State. Authorizations are reported yearly in the State Department’s 655 Report.

The Tables

SAM also presents arms sales detail data (Notifications, Authorizations, and Deliveries) as tables, accessible under the “tables” tab above. This can be useful for examining breakdowns of totals shown in the arms sales visualization, or searching for a specific military item name.

What SAM can help with/Reaching Out

Displayed data can be downloaded or shared by selecting the download or share buttons in the bottom right corner of each visualization.

The full SAM database has more detailed data on many parts of the displayed categories above, including defense article type, month, and number of item. For a specialized data pull or an investigative look into a particular country or item, contact SAM Director Ari Tolany a [email protected].

SAM takes data quality very seriously. If you see something that seems incorrect, let us know.

SAM data is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Commercial use of SAM data or its derivatives is strictly prohibited without prior agreement. If you are interested in a project under different license terms, please reach out.