A Most Costly Trade
Paul Rogers introduces some of the themes in a new book about the global arms trade, Monstrous Anger of the Guns, which he co-edited.
In the month after the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, a little-noticed consequence was a surge in share prices for some of the world’s leading arms corporations. This was maintained in the 18 months that followed, with BAE Systems seeing a 70 percent increase, Sweden’s Saab doubling its price and Germany’s largest arms corporation Rheinmetall, trebling its price. Europe’s military spending went up by 13 percent in a year and overall world spending increased by 3.7 percent to over $2 trillion, with every sign of further increases for the rest of the decade.
If we try to get a handle on how the international arms trade works, we have to start by turning the usual study of war upside down. For the ‘winner’, in those cases where one state can be said to be a winner, then a good war is one that leads to a very quick victory with little loss of life and is replaced by a stable peace. In contrast, for an arms corporation that is a ‘bad war’ with few weapons sales, little scope for replacing weapons and not much of an opportunity to show off the capabilities of new weapons to potential customers.
For the world’s arms industries, a really good war will exhibit several features. First, the war will be long, preferably indefinite, and bogging down into a violent stalemate in which neither side can win and neither side can lose. Why “violent” and not just “stalemate”? “Violent” implies continual use of weapons and a consequent need to replace them for as long as the war lasts.
The war in Ukraine is now in just such a violent stalemate. If Russia was able to make sudden gains that could point the way to defeat for Ukraine then NATO would see its very status as the world’s largest military alliance at risk and immediately increase aid to Ukraine. If it was Ukraine that made the breakthrough then there would be a high risk that Putin would threaten escalation to chemical or nuclear weapons.
In the currently unlikely event of a negotiated settlement, such an outcome would be very good news in preventing further loss of life, wrecked towns and cities and damaged economies but thoroughly bad news for the many arms companies pumping weaponry into Ukraine. This would apply just as much to Russia which has its own booming arms corporations, and it also applies to Iran selling Russia armed drones and ballistic missiles, North Korea supplying munitions, and other companies from around the world successfully feeding armaments into Russia while avoiding western sanctions.
Much the same applies to Israel’s wars on Gaza, where arms are pouring in from Western allies, especially the United States, even while they condemn Israel for the carnage, both there and in the occupied West Bank. The Gaza war is another example of a violent stalemate that helps the armourers. Netanyahu is deeply resistant to any kind of ceasefire and insists that Hamas must be destroyed whereas Hamas has only to survive to claim a kind of victory, with the Israeli assault on the occupied Palestinian West Bank even serving to increase support for the movement.
Furthermore, it is also highly likely that the appalling loss of life and maiming in Gaza and the increasing military suppression on the West Bank will together ensure tens of thousands of new young Palestinian recruits for the cause in the coming decades. It all means a desperate future for the whole Palestinian community but a profitable future for the arms corporations in the years and decades to come.
Gaza is also an example of an experimental war as new weapons are tried out by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). In recent years the IDF has acquired an international reputation for its ability to maintain control of occupied Palestinian territories, as detailed in Antony Loewenstein’s bestseller, The Palestine Laboratory.
Quite apart from the direct human costs of the Hamas assault into southern Israel last year, it was also a technological disaster for Israel because of the failure of what were assumed to be high-tech border controls. The IDF will be anxious to restore that reputation and there is already evidence of that, detailed by Loewenstein in his chapter in a new book on the arms trade just published, Monstrous Anger of the Guns. One area of innovation is with military robots including ‘robotic dogs’, while other developments focus on improved night vision, more effective mass surveillance and identification and new counter-drone technologies.
Israel exports military technologies to over 140 countries across the world, but plenty of other countries are immersed in the same trade. Similarly, they seek to promote sales in the wake of particular wars. After the 1982 Falklands-Malvinas War, the manufacturers of the Sea Dart anti-aircraft missile did this simply by reproducing a standard advert for the missile in military magazines, but now with ‘combat-proven” stamped across it. The advert failed to mention that in the closing days of that war, a Royal Navy air defence destroyer, HMS Cardiff, had mistakenly fired a Sea Dart at a British Army Gazelle helicopter killing the two-person crew and two army communications specialists.
At the global level the international arms trade is notorious for high levels of corruption and is estimated to account for 40% of all corruption in world trade. One of the many examples was post-apartheid South Africa’s decision, five years after the country’s first democratic election, to spend $10 billion on weapons that were not relevant to its defence needs. Andrew Feinstein reported that “in order to get the deal through, at least $350 million of bribes were paid to senior politicians, officials, defence company executives and intermediaries.”
Any country with sizeable armed forces will have its own arms industries, and every country with even small armed forces is well-nigh certain to be involved in the international arms trade. It is a trade that needs wars and needs new threats. It is also a trade that reeks with corruption and badly needs to be brought under control. Given the profits to be made that is a formidable task.
Paul Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University and a co-editor with Rhona Michie and Andrew Feinstein, of Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It, preface by Jeremy Corbyn, published by Pluto Press.
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