William Hartung - US does 1/2 of all World’s Arms Sales, then Surprised by Global Violence
When American firms
dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d
expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. It’s
good for one or two stories a
year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state
of the business come out.
It’s not that no one
writes about aspects of the arms trade. There are occasional pieces that, for
example, take note of the impact of U.S.weapons
transfers, including cluster
bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the disastrous dispensation
of weaponry to U.S.
allies in Syria, or of foreign sales of the costly, controversial F-35
combat aircraft. And once in a while, if a foreign leader meets with
the president, U.S. arms sales to his or her country might generate an article or
two. But the sheer size of the American arms trade, the politics that drive it,
the companies that profit from it, and its devastating global impacts are
rarely discussed, much less analyzed in any depth.
So here’s a question
that’s puzzled me for years (and I’m something of an arms wonk): Why do other
major U.S. exports — from Hollywood
movies to Midwestern
grain shipments to Boeing
airliners — garner regular coverage while trends in weapons exports
remain in relative obscurity? Are we ashamed of standing essentially
alone as the world’s number one arms dealer, or is our Weapons “R” Us role such
a commonplace that we take it for granted, like death or taxes?
The numbers should
stagger anyone. According to the latest figures available from the
Congressional Research Service, the United States was credited with more than half the
value of all global arms transfer agreements in 2014, the most recent year for
which full statistics are available. At 14%, the world’s second largest
supplier, Russia, lagged far behind. Washington’s “leadership” in this
field has never truly been challenged. The U.S. share has fluctuated
between one-third and one-half of the global market for the past two decades,
peaking at an almost monopolistic 70% of all weapons sold in 2011.
And
the gold rush continues. Vice Admiral Joe Rixey, who heads the Pentagon’s arms
sales agency, euphemistically known as the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, estimates that
arms deals facilitated by the Pentagon topped $46 billion in 2015, and are on
track to hit $40 billion in 2016... read more:
