[News] The Obama Administration Has Brokered More Weapons Sales Than Any Other Administration Since World War II

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-obama-administration-has-sold-more-weapons-than-any-other-administration-since-world-war-ii/ 



  The Obama Administration Has Brokered More Weapons Sales Than Any
  Other Administration Since World War II

By William D. Hartung - July 26, 2016

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 US 
weapons transfers, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the 
disastrous dispensation of weaponry to US 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, US 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 US 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 percent, the world’s second largest supplier, Russia, 
lagged far behind. Washington’s “leadership” in this field has never 
truly been challenged. The US share has fluctuated between one-third and 
one-half of the global market for the past two decades, peaking at an 
almost monopolistic 70 percent 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.

To be completely accurate, there is one group of people who pay 
remarkably close attention to these trends—executives of the defense 
contractors that are cashing in on this growth market. With the Pentagon 
and related agencies taking in “only” about $600 billion a year—high by 
historical standards but tens of billions of dollars less than hoped for 
by the defense industry—companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and 
General Dynamics have been looking to global markets as their major 
source of new revenue.

In a January 2015 investor call, for example, Lockheed Martin CEO 
Marillyn Hewson was asked whether the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the 
Obama administration and five other powers might reduce tensions in the 
Middle East, undermining the company’s strategy of increasing its arms 
exports to the region. She responded that continuing “volatility” in 
both the Middle East and Asia would make them “growth areas” for the 
foreseeable future. In other words, no worries. As long as the world 
stays at war or on the verge of it, Lockheed Martin’s profits won’t 
suffer—and, of course, its products will help ensure that any such 
“volatility” will prove lethal indeed.

Under Hewson, Lockheed has set a goal of getting at least 25 percent of 
its revenues from weapons exports, and Boeing has done that company one 
better. It’s seeking to make overseas arms sales 30 percent of its 
business.


            Good News From the Middle East (If You’re an Arms Maker)

Arms deals are a way of life in Washington. From the president on down, 
significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American 
arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing 
will live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit 
allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the 
staffs of US embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople 
for the arms firms. And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, 
facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to 
transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers’ dime, it is in 
essence the world’s largest arms dealer.

In a typical sale, the US government is involved every step of the way. 
The Pentagon often does assessments of an allied nation’s armed forces 
in order to tell them what they “need”—and of course what they always 
need is billions of dollars in new US-supplied equipment. Then the 
Pentagon helps negotiate the terms of the deal, notifies Congress of its 
details, and collects the funds from the foreign buyer, which it then 
gives to the US supplier in the form of a defense contract. In most 
deals, the Pentagon is also the point of contact for maintenance and 
spare parts for any US-supplied system. The bureaucracy that helps make 
all of this happen, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is funded 
from a 3.5 percent surcharge on the deals it negotiates. This gives it 
all the more incentive to sell, sell, sell.

And the pressure for yet more of the same is always intense, in part 
because the weapons makers are careful to spread their production 
facilities to as many states and localities as possible. In this way, 
they ensure that endless support for government promotion of major arms 
sales becomes part and parcel of domestic politics.

General Dynamics, for instance, has managed to keep its tank plants in 
Ohio and Michigan running through a combination of add-ons to the Army 
budget—funds inserted into that budget by Congress even though the 
Pentagon didn’t request them—and exports to Saudi Arabia. Boeing is 
banking on a proposed deal to sell 40 F-18s to Kuwait to keep its St. 
Louis production line open, and is currently jousting with the Obama 
administration to get it to move more quickly on the deal. Not 
surprisingly, members of Congress and local business leaders in such 
states become strong supporters of weapons exports.

Though seldom thought of this way, the US political system is also a 
global arms distribution system of the first order. In this context, the 
Obama administration has proven itself a good friend to arms exporting 
firms. During President Obama’s first six years in office, Washington 
entered into agreements to sell more than $190 billion in weaponry 
worldwide—more, that is, than any US administration since World War II. 
In addition, Team Obama has loosened restrictions on arms exports, 
making it possible to send abroad a whole new range of weapons and 
weapons components—including Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and engines 
for C-17 transport planes—with far less scrutiny than was previously 
required.

This has been good news for the industry, which had been pressing for 
such changes for decades with little success. But the weaker regulations 
also make it potentially easier for arms smugglers and human rights 
abusers to get their hands on US arms. For example, 36 US allies—from 
Argentina and Bulgaria to Romania and Turkey—will no longer need 
licenses from the State Department to import weapons and weapons parts 
from the United States. This will make it far easier for smuggling 
networks to set up front companies in such countries and get US arms and 
arms components that they can then pass on to third parties like Iran or 
China. Already a common practice, it will only increase under the new 
regulations.

The degree to which the Obama administration has been willing to bend 
over backward to help weapons exporters was underscored at a 2013 
hearing on those administration export “reforms.” Tom Kelly, then the 
deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of 
Political-Military Affairs, caught the spirit of the era when asked 
whether the administration was doing enough to promote American arms 
exports. He responded:

“[We are] advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we 
can to make sure that these sales go through… and that is something we 
are doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world… and 
we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

One place where, with a helping hand from the Obama administration and 
the Pentagon, the arms industry has been doing a lot better of late is 
the Middle East. Washington has brokered deals for more than $50 billion 
in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia alone for everything from F-15 fighter 
aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to combat ships and missile 
defense systems.

The most damaging deals, if not the most lucrative, have been the sales 
of bombs and missiles to the Saudis for their brutal war in Yemen, where 
thousands of civilians have been killed and millions of people are going 
hungry. Members of Congress like Michigan Representative John Conyers 
and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy have pressed for legislation that 
would at least stem the flow of the most deadly of the weaponry being 
sent for use there, but they have yet to overcome the considerable clout 
of the Saudis in Washington (and, of course, that of the arms industry 
as well).

When it comes to the arms business, however, there’s no end to the good 
news from the Middle East. Take the administration’s proposed new 
10-year aid deal with Israel. If enacted as currently planned, it would 
boost US military assistance to that country by up to 25 percent—to 
roughly $4 billion per year. At the same time, it would phase out a 
provision that had allowed Israel to spend one-quarter of Washington’s 
aid developing its own defense industry. In other words, all that money, 
the full $4 billion in taxpayer dollars, will now flow directly into the 
coffers of companies like Lockheed Martin, which is in the midst of 
completing a multi-billion-dollar deal to sell the Israelis F-35s.


            “Volatility” in Asia and Europe

As Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson noted, however, the Middle East is 
hardly the only growth area for that firm or others like it. The dispute 
between China and its neighbors over the control of the South China Sea 
(which is in many ways an incipient conflict over whether that country 
or the United States will control that part of the Pacific Ocean) has 
opened up new vistas when it comes to the sale of American warships and 
other military equipment to Washington’s East Asian allies. The recent 
Hague court decision rejecting Chinese claims to those waters (and the 
Chinese rejection of it) is only likely to increase the pace of arms 
buying in the region.

At the same time, in the good-news-never-ends department, growing fears 
of North Korea’s nuclear program have stoked a demand for US-supplied 
missile defense systems. The South Koreans have, in fact, just agreed to 
deploy Lockheed Martin’s THAAD anti-missile system. In addition, the 
Obama administration’s decision to end the longstanding embargo on US 
arms sales to Vietnam is likely to open yet another significant market 
for US firms. In the past two years alone, the United States has offered 
more than $15 billion worth of weaponry to allies in East Asia, with 
Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea accounting for the bulk of the sales.

In addition, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to build 
a defense relationship with India, a development guaranteed to benefit 
US arms exporters. Last year, Washington and New Delhi signed a 10-year 
defense agreement that included pledges of future joint work on aircraft 
engines and aircraft carrier designs. In these years, the United States 
has made significant inroads into the Indian arms market, which had 
traditionally been dominated by the Soviet Union and then Russia. Recent 
deals include a $5.8 billion sale of Boeing C-17 transport aircraft and 
a $1.4 billion agreement to provide support services related to a 
planned purchase of Apache attack helicopters.

And don’t forget “volatile” Europe. Great Britain’s recent Brexit vote 
introduced an uncertainty factor into American arms exports to that 
country. The United Kingdom has been by far the biggest purchaser of US 
weapons in Europe of late, with more than $6 billion in deals struck 
over the past two years alone—more, that is, than the United States has 
sold to all other European countries combined.

The British defense behemoth BAE is Lockheed Martin’s principal foreign 
partner on the F-35 combat aircraft, which at a projected cost of $1.4 
trillion over its lifetime already qualifies as the most expensive 
weapons program in history. If Brexit-driven austerity were to lead to a 
delay in, or the cancellation of, the F-35 deal (or any other major 
weapons shipments), it would be a blow to American arms makers. But 
count on one thing: were there to be even a hint that this might happen 
to the F-35, lobbyists for BAE will mobilize to get the deal privileged 
status, whatever other budget cuts may be in the works.

On the bright side (if you happen to be a weapons maker), any British 
reductions will certainly be more than offset by opportunities in 
Eastern and Central Europe, where a new Cold War seems to be gaining 
traction. Between 2014 and 2015, according to the Stockholm 
International Peace Research Institute, military spending increased by 
13 percent in the region in response to the Russian intervention in 
Ukraine. The rise in Poland’s outlays, at 22 percent, was particularly 
steep.

Under the circumstances, it should be obvious that trends in the global 
arms trade are a major news story and should be dealt with as such in 
the country most responsible for putting more weapons of a more powerful 
nature into the hands of those living in “volatile” regions. It’s a 
monster business (in every sense of the word) and certainly has far more 
dangerous consequences than licensing a Hollywood blockbuster or selling 
another Boeing airliner.

Historically, there have been rare occasions of public protest against 
unbridled arms trafficking, as with the backlash against “the merchants 
of death” after World War I, or the controversy over who armed Saddam 
Hussein that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Even now, small numbers 
of congressional representatives, including John Conyers, Chris Murphy, 
and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, continue to try to halt the sale of 
cluster munitions, bombs, and missiles to Saudi Arabia.

There is, however, unlikely to be a genuine public debate about the 
value of the arms business and Washington’s place in it if it isn’t even 
considered a subject worthy of more than an occasional media story. In 
the meantime, the United States continues to hold onto the number one 
role in the global arms trade, the White House does its part, the 
Pentagon greases the wheels, and the dollars roll in to profit-hungry US 
weapons contractors.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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