America's Global Weapons Monopoly

On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns
its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright
spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks
of "the global arms trade."

Let's consider that label for a moment, word by word:

*It is global, sincethere are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry.

*Arms sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we're talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim.

*And trade suggests a give and take among many parties
when, if we're looking at the figures for that "trade" in a clear-eyed
way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers.

How about updating it this way: "the global weapons monopoly."

In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional
Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded
worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8
billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total "trade."
Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008
deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good
gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn't take a PhD in
economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of
weapons sales, the term "global arms trade" doesn't quite cut it.

Consider the "competition" and reality comes into focus. Take a
guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the
planet: China? Russia? No, Italy,
with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other
countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold
War superpower in the "trade," was close behind Italy, with only $3.5
billion in arms agreements.

U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those
Cold War days when the United States really did have a major
competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service's data for
1990, the last year of the Soviet Union's existence, shows global
weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting
for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the
Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals
inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for
most of the rest.

Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more
voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where
the Pentagon could hang out a sign: "We arm the world." No kidding,
it's true.

Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million),
Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion),
the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru
($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in
that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by
presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen.

From the Pentagon's own data
(which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten
nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon,
and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008:

Saudi Arabia $6.06 billion

Iraq $2.50 billion

Morocco $2.41 billion

Egypt $2.31 billion

Israel $1.32 billion

Australia $1.13 billion

South Korea $1.12 billion

Great Britain $1.10 billion

India $1 billion

Japan $840 million

That's more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco,
for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted
to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin's F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or
so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those "buy 10, get the 11^th free" punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop.

To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools
of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything
you like, just not the "global arms trade."

Getting Even More Competitive?

It used to be that the United States exported goods, products, and
machinery of all sorts in prodigious quantities: cars and trucks, steel
and computers, and high-tech gizmos. But those days are largely over.

The Obama administration now wants to launch a green manufacturing revolution in the U.S., and in February, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a new "National Export Initiative"
with the aim of doubling American exports, a move he said would support
the creation of two million new jobs. The U.S. could, of course, lose
the renewable-energy race to China and that new exports program may never get off the ground. In one area, however, the U.S. is
manufacturing products that are distinctly wanted -- things that go
boom in the night -- and there the Pentagon is working hard to increase
market share.

Don't
for a second think that the American global monopoly on weapons sales
is accidental or unintentional. The constant and lucrative growth of
this market for U.S. weapons makers has been ensured by shrewd
strategic planning. Washington is constantly thinking of new and
inventive ways to flog its deadly wares throughout the world.

How do you improve on near perfection? In the interest of enhancing
that "competitive" edge in weapons sales, the Obama administration is investigating
the possibility of revising export laws to make it even easier to sell
military technology abroad. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell
explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see
"wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government
technology exports" in the name of "competitiveness."

When he says "government technology exports," Morell of course means
weapons and other military technologies. "Tinkering with our
antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to
maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our
friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global
security," he continued, "[Gates] strongly supports the
administration's efforts to completely reform our export control
regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper."

The laws that regulate U.S. weapons exports are a jumbled mess, but
in essence they delineate what the United States can sell to whom and
through what bureaucratic mechanisms. According to U.S. law, for
example, there are actually a few countries that cannot receive U.S.
weapons. Myanmar under the military junta and Venezuela while led by
Hugo Chavez are two examples. There are also some weapons systems that
are not intended for export. Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor jet fighter
was -- until the Pentagon recently stopped buying the plane -- deemed
too sophisticated or sensitive to sell abroad. And there are reporting
requirements that give members of Congress a window of opportunity
within which they can question or oppose proposed weapons exports.

Given what's being sold, these export controls are remarkably
minimal in nature and are constantly under assault by the weapons
industry. Bans on weapons sales to particular countries are regularly
lifted through aggressive lobbying. (Indonesia,
for example, was offered $50 million in weapons from 2006 to 2008 after
an almost decade long congressional arms embargo.) The industry also
works to relax controls on new technology exports to allies. Japan and Australia
have mounted campaigns to win the ability to buy F-22 Raptors,
potential sales that Lockheed Martin is now especially happy to
entertain. The reporting window to Congress remains an important export
control, but the time frame is shrinking as more countries are being "fast tracked," making it harder for distracted representatives to react when a controversial sale comes up.

In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is
looking at the issue of "dual-use" technologies. These are not
weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed
computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host
of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as
well as civilian applications. This category might also include
intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web
environments.

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons
manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon's
research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such
technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers
along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles.
But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk.
So the weapons industry and the Pentagon are arguing for "updating" the
rules. If you translate updating as "loosening" the rules, then the
United States would indeed be more "competitive," but who exactly are
we trying to beat?

Weapons Sales are Red Hot

"What's Hot?" is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga's blog entry
for January 4, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon's
Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing
weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable
-- at least when it's about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could
barely restrain himself that day, adding: "Afghanistan is really HOT!"
Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above
freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.

As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration's new
2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security
Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free,
but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at
taxpayers' expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that "means
there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do."

It's not just Afghanistan that's now in the torrid zone. Weapons sales all over the world will be smoking in 2010 and beyond.

The year began with a bang when Wieranga's Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion
in weapons to Taiwan. Even as the United States leans heavily on China
for debt servicing, Washington is giving the Mainland a big raspberry
by offering the island of 22 million off its coast (which Washington
does not formally recognize as an independent nation), a lethal
cocktail of weaponry that includes $3 billion in Black Hawk
helicopters. This deal comes on top of more than $11 billion in U.S.
weapons exports to Taiwan over the last decade, and is certain to set
Chinese-U.S. relations back a step or two.

Other bonanzas on the horizon? Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling
a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a
whopping $7 billion. India, once a major arms buyer from the Soviet
Union, is now another big buy-American customer,
with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new
fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion.

Such deals are staggering. They contribute more bang and blast to a
world already bristling with particularly lethal weaponry. They are a
striking American success story in a time filled with failures. Put in
the lurid but everyday terms of a nation weaned on reality television,
the Pentagon is pimping for the U.S. weapons industry. The weapons
industry, for its part, is a pusher for every kind of lethal
technology. The two of them together are working to ensure that more
of the same will flow out of the U.S. in ever easier and more lucrative
ways.

Global arms trade? Send that one back to the Department of
Euphemisms. Pimps and pushers with a lucrative global monopoly on a
killing drug -- maybe that's the language we need. And maybe, just
maybe, it's time to launch a "war on weapons."