nuclear-news

Weapons continue to be the big export industry

the U.S. continues to be the leading arms exporter, followed by Russia, France, Britain, China, Germany and Italy.

The region with the greatest growth has been the Middle East, where spending has increased 62 percent in the last decade. 

The Mightiest Merchants Of Death Strategy Page, December 13, 2011: Although arms exports declined a third last year, over half those exports were from the United States.
American sales of weapons and military equipment to other countries totaled $35 billion last year. The three biggest recipients were Afghanistan, Taiwan and India. The $5.4 billion in sales to Afghanistan were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, but the firms supplying the gear were paid, so it’s a sale.   The U.S. has long got the most export sales, despite having the most expensive weapons. …
Most countries, if they could afford to buy American, did so. The others searched for someone offering cheap but effective weapons. The supplier has often been Russia.
Yet Russia arms exports declined 36 percent last year to $7.8 billion.
Russian sales had been stalled for the last few years….
The stall in Russian sales after 2007 arose from a special problem
with China, one of its biggest customers. Over the last decade, about
40 percent of Russian arms exports went to China. That began to shrink
as Russian manufacturers feuded with the Chinese over stolen
technology. The Chinese have been quite brazen of late, as they copy
Russian military equipment, and then produce their own versions
without paying for the technology. Worse, the Chinese are now offering
to export these copies. The Russians tried to work out licensing
deals, without much success. Recently, China signed a technology
agreement with Russia that was supposed to halt the Chinese patent
piracy. We will see. Other Western nations are also finding themselves
victims of Chinese piracy and, like Russia, are getting angrier at the
situation.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to be the leading arms exporter,
followed by Russia, France, Britain, China, Germany and Italy. The
sharp growth in arms exports is largely because, in the past decade,
global defense spending had increased nearly 50 percent, to over $1.4
trillion. That’s about 2.5 percent of global GDP. After the Cold War
ended in 1991, defense spending declined for a few years, to under a
trillion dollars a year. But by the end of the 1990s, it was on the
rise again. The region with the greatest growth has been the Middle
East, where spending has increased 62 percent in the last decade. The
region with the lowest growth (six percent) was Western Europe. The
current recession may get global defense spending stalled at or maybe
even a little below, $1.4 trillion for a year or two. But the spending
growth resumed now that the recession is over in many parts of the
world. http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htproc/articles/20111213.aspx

December 15, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, USA, weapons and war