Yves here. Even though most readers no doubt know that the military-industrial complex is the moving force behind our regular exercises in nation-breaking, it’s still instructive to have data on the scale of America’s arms scales. The author, William Hartung, notes that US weapons often make their way to our enemies. From the perspective of the arms makers, that’s a feature, not a bug.
By William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of “Trends in Major U.S. Arms Sales in 2017: A Comparison of the Obama and Trump Administrations,” Security Assistance Monitor, March 2018. Originally published at TomDispatch
It’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the latest in high-tech arms and munitions into the most explosive areas of the planet with ample assistance from the Pentagon. In recent years, the bulk of those arms have gone to the Greater Middle East. Donald Trump is only the latest American president to preside over a global arms sales bonanza. With remarkable enthusiasm, he’s appointed himself America’s number one weapons salesman and he couldn’t be prouder of the job he’s doing.
Earlier this month, for instance, on the very day Congress was debating whether to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, Trump engaged in one of his favorite presidential activities: bragging about the economic benefits of the American arms sales he’s been promoting. He was joined in his moment of braggadocio by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the chief architect of that war. That grim conflict has killed thousands of civilians through indiscriminate air strikes, while putting millions at risk of death from famine, cholera, and other “natural” disasters caused at least in part by a Saudi-led blockade of that country’s ports.
That Washington-enabled humanitarian crisis provided the backdrop for the Senate’s consideration of a bill co-sponsored by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. It was aimed at ending U.S. mid-air refueling of Saudi war planes and Washington’s additional assistance for the Saudi war effort (at least until the war is explicitly authorized by Congress). The bill generated a vigorous debate. In the end, on an issue that wouldn’t have even come to the floor two years ago, an unprecedented 44 senators voted to halt this country’s support for the Saudi war effort. The bill nonetheless went down to defeat and the suffering in Yemen continues.
Debate about the merits of that brutal war was, however, the last thing on the mind of a president who views his bear-hug embrace of the Saudi regime as a straightforward business proposition. He’s so enthusiastic about selling arms to Riyadh that he even brought his very own prop to the White House meeting with bin Salman: a U.S. map highlighting which of the 50 states would benefit most from pending weapons sales to the prince’s country.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, the three crucial swing states in the 2016 presidential election, were specially highlighted. His latest stunt only underscored a simple fact of his presidency: Trump’s arms sales are meant to promote pork-barrel politics, while pumping up the profits of U.S. weapons manufacturers. As for human rights or human lives, who cares?
To be fair, Donald Trump is hardly the first American president to make it his business to aggressively promote weapons exports. Though seldom a highlighted part of his presidency, Barack Obama proved to be a weapons salesman par excellence. He made more arms offers in his two terms in office than any U.S. president since World War II, including an astounding $115 billion in weapons deals with Saudi Arabia. For the tiny group of us who follow such things, that map of Trump’s only underscored a familiar reality.
On it, in addition to the map linking U.S. jobs and arms transfers to the Saudis, were little boxes that highlighted four specific weapons sales worth tens of billions of dollars. Three of those that included the THAAD missile defense system, C-130 transport planes, P-8 anti-submarine warfare planes, and Bradley armored vehicles were, in fact, completed during the Obama years. So much for Donald Trump’s claim to be a deal maker the likes of which we’ve never seen before. You might, in fact, say that the truest arms race these days is between American presidents, not the United States and other countries. Not only has the U.S. been the world’s top arms exporting nation throughout this century, but last year it sold one and a half times as much weaponry as its closest rival, Russia.
Embracing Lockheed Martin
It’s worth noting that three of those four Saudi deals involved weapons made by Lockheed Martin. Admittedly, Trump’s relationship with Lockheed got off to a rocky start in December 2016 when he tweeted his displeasure over the cost of that company’s F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. Since then, however, relations between the nation’s largest defense contractor and America’s most self-involved president have warmed considerably.
Before Trump’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, new best buddy to Mohammed bin Salman, was put in charge of cobbling together a smoke-and-mirrors, wildly exaggerated $100 billion-plus arms package that Trump could announce in Riyadh. What Kushner needed was a list of sales or potential sales that his father-in-law could boast about (even if many of the deals had been made by Obama). So he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask if she could cut the price of a THAAD anti-missile system that the administration wanted to include in the package. She agreed and the $15 billion THAAD deal — still a huge price tag and the most lucrative sale to the Saudis made by the Trump administration — went forward. To sweeten the pot for the Saudi royals, the Pentagon even waived a $3.5 billion fee normally required by law and designed to reimburse the Treasury for the cost to American taxpayers of developing such a major weapons system. General Joseph Rixey, until recently the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which granted that waiver, has since gone directly through Washington’s revolving door and been hired by — you guessed it — Lockheed Martin.
In addition, former Lockheed Martin executive John Rood is now the Trump administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy, where one of his responsibilities will be to weigh in on… don’t be shocked!… major arms deals. In his confirmation hearings, Rood refused to say that he would recuse himself from transactions involving his former employer, for which he was denounced by Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren. As Warren asserted in a speech opposing Rood’s appointment,
“No taxpayer should have to wonder whether the top policy-makers at the Pentagon are pushing defense products and foreign military sales for reasons other than the protection of the United States of America… No American should have to wonder whether the Defense Department is acting to protect the national interests of our nation or the financial interests of the five giant defense contractors.”
Still, most senators were unfazed and Rood’s nomination sailed through that body by a vote of 81 to 7. He is now positioned to help smooth the way for any Lockheed Martin deal that might meet with a discouraging word from the Pentagon or State Department officials charged with vetting foreign arms sales.
Arming the Planet
Though Saudi Arabia may be the largest recipient of U.S. arms on the planet, it’s anything but Washington’s only customer. According to the Pentagon’s annual tally of major agreements under the Foreign Military Sales program, the most significant channel for U.S. arms exports, Washington entered into formal agreements to sell weaponry to 130 nations in 2016 (the most recent year for which full data is available). According to a recent report from the Cato Institute, between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry to 167 countries — more than 85% of the nations on the planet. The Cato report also notes that, between 1981 and 2010, Washington supplied some form of weaponry to 59% of all nations engaged in high-level conflicts.
In short, Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway. Every president since Richard Nixon has taken that same road and, in 2010, the Obama administration managed to rack up a record $102 billion in foreign arms offers. In a recent report I wrote for the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, I documented more than $82 billion in arms offers by the Trump administration in 2017 alone, which actually represented a slight increase from the $76 billion in offers made during President Obama’s final year. It was, however, far lower than that 2010 figure, $60 billion of which came from Saudi deals for F-15 combat aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, transport aircraft, and armored vehicles, as well as guns and ammunition.
There have nonetheless been some differences in the approaches of the two administrations in the area of human rights. Under pressure from human rights groups, the Obama administration did, in the end, suspend sales of aircraft to Bahrain and Nigeria, both of whose militaries were significant human rights violators, and also a $1 billion-plus deal for precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia. That Saudi suspension represented the first concrete action by the Obama administration to express displeasure with Riyadh’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. Conducted largely with U.S. and British supplied aircraft, bombs, and missiles, it has included strikes against hospitals, marketplaces, water treatment facilities, and even a funeral. In keeping with his focus on jobs to the exclusion of humanitarian concerns, Trump reversed all three of the Obama suspensions shortly after taking office.
Fueling Terrorism and Instability
In fact, selling weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes often fuels instability, war, and terrorism, as the American war on terror has vividly demonstrated for the last nearly 17 years. U.S.-supplied arms also have a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of America’s adversaries. At the height of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, for instance, that country’s armed forces lost track of hundreds of thousands of rifles, many of which made their way into the hands of forces resisting the U.S. occupation.
In a similar fashion, when Islamic State militants swept into Iraq in 2014, the Iraqi security forces abandoned billions of dollars worth of American equipment, from small arms to military trucks and armored vehicles. ISIS promptly put them to use against U.S. advisers and the Iraqi security forces as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Taliban, too, has gotten its hands on substantial quantities of U.S. weaponry, either on the battlefield or by buying them at cut-rate, black market prices from corrupt members of the Afghan security forces.
In northern Syria, two U.S.-armed groups are now fighting each other. Turkish forces are facing off against Syrian Kurdish militias that have been among the most effective anti-ISIS fighters and there is even an ongoing risk that U.S. and Turkish forces, NATO allies, may find themselves in direct combat with each other. Far from giving Washington influence over key allies or improving their combat effectiveness, U.S. arms and training often simply spur further conflict and chaos to the detriment of the security of the United States, not to speak of the peace of the world.
In the grim and devolving conflict in Yemen, for instance, all sides possess at least some U.S. weaponry. Saudi Arabia is, of course, the top U.S. arms client and its forces are a catalogue of American weaponry, from planes and anti-tank missiles to cluster bombs, but hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid were also provided to the forces of Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh during his 30 years of rule before he was driven from power in 2012. Later, however, he joined forces with the Houthi rebels against the Saudi-led intervention, taking large parts of the Yemeni armed forces — and their U.S.-supplied weapons — with him. (He would himself be assassinated by Houthi forces late last year after a falling out.)
Trump’s Plan: Make It Easier on Arms Makers
The Trump administration is poised to release a new policy directive on global arms transfers. A report by Politico, based on interviews with sources at the State Department and a National Security Council (NSC) official, suggests that it will seek to further streamline the process of approving arms sales, in part by increasing the already extensive role of U.S. government personnel in promoting such exports. It will also remove what a National Security Council statement has described as “unreasonable constraints on the ability of our companies to compete.” In keeping with that priority, according to the NSC official, “the administration is intent on ensuring that U.S. industry has every advantage in the global marketplace.”
In January, a Reuters article confirmed this approach, reporting that the forthcoming directive would emphasize arms-sales promotion by U.S. diplomats and other overseas personnel. As one administration official told Reuters, “We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attaches, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters.”
The Trump administration is also expected to move forward with a plan, stalled as the Obama years ended, to ease controls on the export of U.S. firearms. Gun exports now licensed and scrutinized by the State Department would instead be put under the far-less-stringent jurisdiction of the Commerce Department. Some firearms could then be exported to allies without even a license, reducing the government’s ability to prevent them from reaching criminal networks or the security forces of potential adversaries.
In September 2017, Democratic senators Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, and Patrick Leahy sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raising concerns about such a change. As they wrote, “Combat firearms and ammunition are uniquely lethal; they are easily spread and easily modified, and are the primary means of injury, death and destruction in civil and military conflicts throughout the world. As such they should be subjected to more — not less — rigorous export controls and oversight.”
If Trump’s vision of an all-arms-sales-all-the-time foreign policy is realized, he may scale the weapons-dealing heights reached by the Obama administration. As Washington’s arms-dealer-in-chief, he might indeed succeed in selling American weaponry as if there were no tomorrow. Given the known human costs of unbridled arms trafficking, however, such a presidency would also ensure that whatever tomorrow finally arrived would prove far worse than today, unless of course you happen to be a major U.S. arms maker.
14 comments
Comments are closed.
I think a point often overlooked is that US arms sales are not just a means for the US to spread its influence and fuel wars. Its also the primary manner in which foreign countries purchase influence in the US (and Russia, and France, and the UK). The Gulf States have long recognised that strategic arms purchases have more utility for the influence they buy, than the firepower they purchase. You can see this in the manner that they spread purchases across the major powers, carefully balancing everyone out. The Saudi’s are looking to buy S-400’s at the same time as buying THAADs. Qatar is buying equal amounts of US and European combat aircraft for exactly the same reason.
Its important to remember that when there is no monopoly on suppliers, the buyer has more power than the vendor. There is no monopoly on weaponry. Its the rich arms buyers who have all the leverage. When the US focuses on arms sales as a central foreign policy objective, it is by definition handing over power to rich arms purchasers.
I believe that nations, like individuals, have their own unique karma and destiny (as well as the free will to alter it if self aware).
The Law of Karma is like the Law of Gravity. It does not care one whit whether you believe in it or not, or as the Romans said, “The mills of the gods grind slowly. Though very coarse, nothing slips through.”
Let us see what the future holds.
Like a lot of similar pieces, this one is naive and borderline dishonest.
There are two basic reasons for arms sales. One is that foreign sales keep production lines moving and (with luck) feed through into lower unit costs for your own forces. The second is acquiring and maintaining strategic influence. The US is in a particularly strong position for the latter, since they effectively control the supply of spare parts through the Foreign Military Sales system, and can thus ground any air force which uses their aircraft. Of course the influence is not all one way (as PK says, it’s a buyer’ market and has been for a while) but the essential point is that it’s about acquiring and maintaining political leverage, not fighting wars. Indeed, in the case of Saudi Arabia, there has been a clear understanding since the 1960s (when the British sold Lightning fighters) that what the Saudis were buying was not primarily military equipment but protection and influence. This lasted until the present insane leadership in Riyadh decided to rip up the bargain.
From reading this you might think that all arms sales go to the Arab Middle East, which has never been true. Not only does a lot of US weaponry go to Israel, whose US-made aircraft have been dropping US-made weapons on civilians for decades without any protest, but countries such as Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and most of NATO are also major purchasers. In 1991, when liberal internationalists supported the war to evict the Iraqis from Kuwait, I asked them where they imagined the equipment their armed forces would use actually came from. I asked the same question of human rights advocates who wanted to bomb Serbia in 1999 to “free the Kosovars” and were simultaneously against the “arms trade”. In both cases, as I recall, reactions included, but were not limited to, threats of physical violence and mutilation.
It’s true that small arms are the major killers in conflict today, but the idea that export controls of them would stop wars, is, I’m afraid, naive. Experts will tell you that almost all wars today (Yemen is a good example) are fought with weapons that already exist. In the majority of cases these are not US or Western weapons, which are too expensive and sophisticated, but Kalashnikovs (model 47 and later) which people can be taught to operate in a couple of days, and which are often third or fourth hand, many being Chinese copies I saw plenty of them in Yemen. Certainly, US weapons found their way into the wrong hands in Iraq, which was stupid, but it wasn’t small arms that made the difference. As the article admits, it was mainly vehicles (including the ubiquitous Nissan) driven by deserters from the Iraqi Army.
The article incorporates a common fantasy of solving complicated problems with simple solutions, which we would all like to be true, but unfortunately isn’t.
I would be very interested to hear your complicated solution.
Doesn’t pumping out massive amounts of weapons to be used to slaughter people all over the world simply so your own armed forces can get the volume discount strike you as more than a little perverse?
But I’m not sure that’s really the case at all because since when has Uncle Sugar ever been concerned about the cost of the weapons it purchases? Remember the no-bid contract? And was there ever a war the US declined to fight because we just couldn’t it? Somehow we always fund the funds, but not when it comes to health care, education and the other services a civil society requires – those are always somehow too expensive.
And on top of all that, this is a website which promotes MMT so I’m sure you are aware that taxes do not fund expenditures so there is no need to mass produce arms for other nations to keep prices low for ours.
I said “with luck”, because it often doesn’t work like that. But there are cases (logistic vehicles etc.) where it does seem to have happened, at least for certain countries. I admire your pacifist principles, but I admire much less the many people who flip in an instant from demanding an end to the “arms trade” in general, to demanding that we arm this or that allegedly “friendly” group, or intervene militarily against whoever is the hate figure of the day. Arming groups in Syria, for example, was a stupid idea anyway, for all sorts of political and strategic reasons. But I doubt that increased the level of violence in a country already awash with weapons.
I was pointing out that the article is quite wrong to suggest there’s any shortage of small arms in the world: there is probably a massive surplus, and they are already in the hands of criminal and terrorist groups, not least in Europe. That particular horse left the stable so long ago people have forgotten what color it was.
You are right about MMT, of course, but unfortunately government spending isn’t yet managed on that basis.
I’m guessing that those who want to poke holes in any statement of the problem and discussion of possible changes, that does not involve just throwing up of hands and more of the same, will get the same kind of reference to how “complex” it all is.
Wealth gets generated by “the economy.” Deciders get to decide, whether at the “government” or corporate level, what that wealth gets channeled into. The “politics” is what humans have been doing since the species became “civilized.,” killing and looting and raping and taking other humans’ stuff and the wealth they have in turn extracted. The “complexity” is now the global interlocking manufacture and marketing of ever more complicated (and even simple, like the AK-47, that Northwest Afghanis can make with hand tools not even machine shop stuff) weapons, and all the code and “doctrine” and strategies and tactics that also get fought over, and the mind set that goes along with the creation and perception of “threats” and the countering thereof and attempts to leapfrog to world-dominating ascendancy in the ability to do mass destruction: “Full spectrum dominance,” and all that, in the “Global Network-Centric Interoperababble Battlespace.”
Millions, ever-increasing millions, of humans get their paychecks from the whole operation, the manufacture and marketing and distribution and maintenance and “deployment” and activation and use of weapons of all levels of complexity, and have their “careers” and :opportunities” tied to just more-of-the-same-but-bigger-faster-more-destructive idiocy.
That notation that encourages the sense of futility by telling us that “wars that get fought (at the ground-game level) with weapons that alreadyalready exist” kind of skips over the whole business of how those weapons got to “already exist,” and of course passes over the bit about how stuff like guided antitank and antiaircraft missiles actually do “change the game,” when the armamentarians of some Great Power manage to deliver a bunch of them to “insurgents” in support of some Grand Bit Of Geopolitics or other.
I guess I missed the supposed part of the article that laid out some “fantasy of solving complicated problems with simple solutions.” Sure looks to me a lot more like an accounting and display of some of the pathogenic features of the US part (mostly) of the whole World At War structure that has as its capstone the soon to be more “usable” nuclear weapons, and cyber bombing, and ‘WE don’t do chemical and biological warfare except in defense of our Nation” stuff that one has to expect, going by past practices, is lurking in the dark of some labs where monomaniacal and sociopathic ‘scientists” and policy and military players live — as they have since besiegers lobbed infected human and animal carcasses, and “Greek Fire” and such, over the ‘civilized” walls of “civilized” towns and cities. (We are told that “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho” with sound weapons of some sort — it’s right there in the Holy Bible, the Hebrew part of it at least…)
But we must preserve the Narrative, and the flows of trillions of dollars and other currencies into the machinery that sure looks to be headed toward grinding us humans to radioactive or just high-explosive dust, or full-metal-jacket-pierced rotting carcasses to. Be tossed over other walls…)
Remember the motto of LockheedMartin — “We Never
Forget Who We Are Working For.” And who, exactly, is “who…?”
It’s the idea, reflected in the article, that we could end war by ending arms sales. The idea goes back to the 1930s, and doesn’t improve with age. Anyone who thinks that some of these crises have simple solutions is welcome to post themselves off to the Middle East.
That’s a BS reading of the article. And we aren’t saying the crisis themselves have simple solutions, we are saying that arming the (family blog) out of everybody with a grievance tends to kind of undercut the rule of law, dontcha know?
At best, if people want to kill each other we need to not be the people that supply them with the means.
That’s David’s story and he’s sticking with it.
One also needs to pay some attention to where all the billions of rounds of ammunition of all those various calibers comes from, the ammo that gets spent so profligately in all those readily available War Porn videos one can cue up for one’s viewing pleasure on YouTube. And the unguided artillery rockets, an sexy new guided cannon rounds for all those tanks built somewhere by somebody that track their way over and through the rubble of towns and cities that said tanks, along with air-delivered ordnance, have turned those former, often beautiful human habitations into. On the way to their own fates as death traps for their murderous crews, when hit by an RPG or guided antitank round.
How many swords can you make out of a plowshare, hmmm?
But not to worry, sir, as you know there’s likely zero likelihood that “the global marketplace” will ever produce anything different shot of Armageddon, so the world as you apparently favor it is in little danger of changing…
David highlights a disincentive to buying American. When Allende was turning Chile into a socialist republic, the US, which had supplied nearly all the vehicles used in the country, ceased exporting spare parts and in a very few months Chile’s ability to bring its production to market collapsed.
Pinochet was just the political stage of the economic disruption.
Regarding the weapons falling into the hands of enemies, there was a statistic published with no comment in a recent Harper’s index that the US had sold 175 military helicopters to an Afghan military that had 4 people capable of flying them.
Wonder where the other 171 are going to end up?
As profits for the defence industry.
The added bonus is that they will make additional money by having to pay for consultants and professional trainers to teach the locals how to use complex weapons.
In some cases, they made end up even captured by enemy forces. ISIS for example captured a number of US AFVs manufactured for the Iraqi government. Sometimes said captured weapons end up being used against the American military.
In even more strange cases, American defence contractors have been known to sell weapons for nations that are hostile to the US. They care only about getting rich….
I find it ironic that Lockheed Martin always bills itself as the superior engineering company to the other major defense contractors (clearly open for debate) such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman, but in reality their biggest reason for their success is their lobbying efforts.
Boeing has deeper pockets but their execution always seems like amateur hour, either not doing enough to win or blatantly cheating and getting in trouble for it. Northrop Grumman, seems to throw up their hands and no-bid, when they often lose the lobby wars on the hill.