The global arms business—manufacture and trade—plays an over-sized role in global and domestic politics. Military spending around the world totaled $1,676bn in 2015,1 nearly $250 for every one of the earth’s 7 billion people.
Arms producers have direct access to the upper echelons of power, shaping policy and exercising considerable influence in how the world is run. Rich governments treat arms makers and dealers with remarkable charity. They help them out with subsidies, favorable export rules and a generosity of spirit and funding that most businesspeople could only dream of. Leaders of middle-income and poor countries who want to buy weapons are feted and lobbied by a slick industry that wheels out defense attachés, government ministers, and even royalty as testament to their political connection and clout, not to mention generous financial subsidies and payoffs. Arms deals can be hugely burdensome on the taxpayers of both the selling and buying countries, and they often maintain an apparatus of secrecy and repression as well. A lot of effort goes into packaging these transactions as something other than what they are.
Why does the arms business possess such influence and clout across the globe? The answer is complex, but one of the key reasons is that arms merchants and their government supporters can turn to a set of time-honed and well-packaged arguments to justify the status quo. They tell us that their products make and keep us all safer. They argue that the defense sector is vital to the economy and job creation. They claim that they are at the cutting edge of technological innovation. All in all, the makers and sellers of weapons have been astonishingly successful in telling a story so deeply embedded in public narratives and political discourse that it is simply taken for granted. The defense industry narrative is like a set of clothes that a politician seeking office—still more so, in office—and the civil servants, academics and journalists concerned with government, put on to go to work every morning.
The inconvenient truth is that each one of the claims is either deeply questionable or simply untrue. It’s not as though there are a few errors or misleading arguments found within a basically sound package—a couple of slips of taste in an otherwise elegant wardrobe. No: the whole collection is flawed. The arms business needs to be undressed. Every rotten item needs to be thrown out. Then, we will find, there is hardly anything left. The arguments are nothing more than myths, enforced by repetition and given weighty authority by the power players who trot them out whenever there is the hint of change that might be to their disadvantage.
The following chapters explode these myths, explaining how and why the arguments made to defend the defense sector are flawed, factually wrong and logically absurd.
SECTION 1: THERE IS NO PROBLEM
In Section 1, we look at the various myths that make the arms trade seem vitally necessary and, at key moments, a positive boon to humanity; that try to argue there is no problem with the status quo.
In the first chapter, we address the myth that higher defense spending equals increased security. Outlining the size and most recent trends in the trade, we demonstrate how arms races have increased militarism, and provide examples of weapons purchases by regimes (not limited to authoritarian ones) that are foremost concerned with their self-protection against their own populations. Further, corruption and waste in the arms business often work against the interests of security: transactions may have more to do with gaining access to public funds than responding to real threats. We also show how increased military expenditure that funds ill-conceived wars may increase security threats: the multiplication of threats that followed US military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq are a good example of this. By over-sourcing our militaries and under-sourcing other sectors, like diplomacy, aid and collaborative efforts to counter climate change, we are failing to address today’s real threats to human security. And, because of this imbalance, the military is used to engage in situations for which it is not actually well-suited, like the public health response to Ebola.
Chapter Two addresses the myth that military spending is driven by a sound analysis of national security. The decisions to build weapons systems, or to sell or buy them, often have little to do with defending the nation. Some arms deals are undertaken in the name of generating economic benefits. Some deals are pure corruption—that is, the kickbacks and access to public funds are the rationale for the deal, and the weaponry is a ruse. We examine Saudi Arabia’s history of arms purchases in depth in this regard. Ukraine provides a different model, where the country’s military assets were sold en masse by corrupt military leaders for private gain in the 1990s, crippling its capacity. And in the fractured independent South Sudan, an arms-purchasing spree following independence was justified in relation to its predatory neighbor, Sudan, but the weapons were turned against the South Sudanese people themselves. A brutal civil war was the result, a far cry from increasing security for the population.
It is also a myth, as Chapter Three demonstrates, that we can control where weapons go after they are purchased, and how they are used. Once a weapon is sold the seller has little control over how it is used. Friends become enemies—the US’ relationship with Afghanistan’s Mujahedin is the most obvious example, but the list also includes Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, not to mention factions in Yemen and Libya. The cycle continues: ISIS was able to arm itself by seizing enormous troves of weaponry the US had recently given to the unstable new Iraqi state it tried to build following the 2003 invasion. Dispersion—weapons seized and taken by new actors—is not unique to ISIS. Somalia and Libya provide further examples. Diversion is yet another way around control systems: arms officially intended for one state can be sold to another (or a non-state actor). Our examples of diversion include pathways through Switzerland, UAE, Jordan, Syria, Burkina Faso, Liberia and Ukraine. And even if the weapons end up in the right place, they can be used for unforeseen purposes—the 1994 Rwandan genocide provides a stark example. Legitimate purchases of guns in the US, too, can cross borders into Mexico, where they empower violent drug traffickers. Those defending the trade may point to the passing of the Arms Trade Treaty by the UN in 2013, and its ratification by nearly the entire globe thereafter, as an example of how these sorts of lessons have been learnt. Unfortunately, the Arms Trade Treaty is full of holes, and is unlikely to have any major impact on the trade at all.
Even when security isn’t the main issue, we are often told that national arms industries are technologically innovative job creators. This is the myth that we dispel in Chapter Four. In Europe, if one factors in the size of subsidies and welfare afforded the defense industry, their contributions pale to nothing: European defense companies are, in fact, dependent on public funds in order to maintain their profitability. They do create jobs, but nowhere near the number of jobs that could be created if such subsidies were invested in other industries. The economics of the industry works differently in the US, where the scale of government purchases creates a unique set of incentives; but even here, the number of good-quality jobs created by defense spending is less by order of magnitude than the jobs created through investment in other sectors such as energy and education. As this all hints, there is now considerable data showing that global defense spending has either an insignificant or negative impact on growth. What is more, increasingly civilian technologies lead new breakthroughs, with military applications focusing on integration and adaptation. Some defenders of the trade may point to the economic impact of ‘offsets’; we show that their estimated economic benefit is chimerical and illustrate it by reference to the over-inflated claims that accompanied a major South African arms deal in 1999. And, as a final kicker, there is now compelling data demonstrating that military spending is strongly correlated with poorer national economic growth: military spending can actually hurt the economy.
The next myth fantasizes that corruption is only a problem in developing countries and marginal to the defense industry as a whole. As our examples demonstrate, corruption in arms deals is corruption between producing and purchasing countries; the willingness of each side makes it possible. The British company BAE Systems provides a study in how this works, but it is not alone. Indeed, the arms trade is hard-wired for corruption for a number of reasons: the linkage to national security; the highly technical and complex nature of the systems, which means that very few people are able to critically evaluate deals; and the close relationship between purchasing governments, the arms industry, middlemen and senior figures in the military and intelligence agencies. The ‘revolving door’ whereby the same individuals circulate between government and the private sector aligns the interests of these actors against those of the public. The trade is also truly global, composed of massive agglomeration of once disparate companies, with long lines of supply that are spread throughout the world, increasing the potential and scope for international corruption.
The corruption enabled by these conditions takes the form of funds paid through middlemen, but also of political contributions, dispersing jobs strategically into multiple jurisdictions, lax oversight and management of contracts, and the use of contractors as intelligence analysts to identify the very threats that fuel their companies’ profits. Real victims suffer this corruption: Gerdec demonstrated this, and we further illustrate the problem with a case study of South Africa.
In Chapter Six we tackle the idea that national security requires blanket secrecy. Secrecy is so widespread that many countries fail to even report how much the military receives in funding. Even where budgets are disclosed, many countries allow for off-budget expenditures—for example Uganda and Nigeria. Secrecy allows for cover-ups and makes accountability impossible. For all these reasons, secrecy more often reduces security rather than enhancing it. Protecting whistleblowers and demanding accountability are not luxuries, they are necessities of functioning democracies.
Together, these chapters explain how the defense industry makes us less safe, our governments and leaders more prone to corruption, and our economies dragged down by wasteful and sometimes useless spending that could far better be used to solve the world’s truly pressing problems.
The first step in changing this is to see the truth clearly, setting aside the myths that have allowed a dysfunctional defense industry to thrive.
SECTION 2: THE ARMS TRADE CAN’T BE BEATEN
In Section 2, we tackle the two myths that keep us stuck.
Chapter Seven looks at the idea that this is simply the wrong time to tackle the arms trade: the world, so the argument goes, is more dangerous than ever, and we don’t have the luxury of critically examining the defense sector when we are confronted with clear and present danger. This is wrong on both fronts. We show how the first decade of the 21st century was, contrary to popular belief, the most peaceful in recorded history. The second decade has proved appreciably more violent, though still far less deadly than previous historical eras. Today’s global security context, which has both reasons for hope and reasons for concern, is precisely the right time to open a debate on the role of the arms producers and traders in portraying—or misportraying—the rationales for how they conduct their business. Indeed, today is always the right time to challenge distortions that privilege the few and increase vulnerability for the many.
In the final chapter, we challenge the myth that there is simply nothing that can be done. While we acknowledge that confronting the arms trade, with its massive political clout and economic influence, is a tough ask, it is not impossible. But once we clear away the myths, we see that there are things we can do now, right now, to begin pushing back against an industry that makes our world poorer and more dangerous.