Defence Contractors Editing and Proofreading Services

A technical drawing goes out to a subcontractor's engineering team with a small red stamp in the corner reading "ITAR Controlled." Nobody on the receiving team who is not a US person is supposed to see it, and half the receiving team does not know what that stamp means, whether it applies to the whole document or one dimension on page four, or what they are actually supposed to do differently because of it. The marking exists to prevent exactly the disclosure that is about to happen, and it has failed at that job by being present without being understood.

We edit what defence contractors and their engineering teams produce — export control markings and handling instructions on technical data, technology control plans, past performance narratives for bid proposals, statement of work and technical proposal documents, security classification guides and marking conventions, visitor and foreign national access procedures, and the internal training material explaining export control obligations to engineers who did not sign up to be compliance specialists. Our editors work on the sentence that has to stop a disclosure before it happens rather than explain one afterward.

The handling instruction is what determines whether an export control marking actually changes anyone's behaviour, and its failure is a marking that states a category without stating a consequence. ITAR Controlled tells a reader what regime applies and nothing about what to do differently right now. We work through these so the instruction states specifically who may and may not access the material — by citizenship or clearance status, not by department — since "authorized personnel only" answers nothing for an engineer trying to decide whether to forward an email; so the scope of the marking is stated precisely, given that a stamp on a cover page leaves ambiguous whether one restricted dimension on an otherwise unrestricted drawing controls the whole document or just that dimension; so instructions are written for the specific action being taken — attaching to an email, printing, sharing a screen in a meeting with a subcontractor present — rather than as a general reminder of policy, because the moment of risk is a specific action and the instruction needs to meet it there; so foreign national and visitor access procedures are stated in terms an escort or a receptionist can actually follow, as a procedure only compliance officers understand protects nothing at the door; so training material uses realistic scenarios drawn from how disclosure actually happens — a shared drive, a conference slide, a subcontractor call — rather than abstract statements of the regulation; and so a person unsure what a marking means is told exactly who to ask, given that a marking with no route to a fast answer gets guessed at instead. Instructions written this way are followed by people who are not compliance specialists and were never going to become one.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including technical content, program details and compliance material. We are editors rather than export control attorneys or compliance officers, and we offer no view on classification, jurisdiction or licensing determinations. What we can do is make sure the instruction is followed by the person reading it under time pressure.