Arms, Aid and the Superpowers
Article Summary and Author Biography
Despite a decline in share (from 85% in the 1960s to 68% now) the superpowers still dominate international arms transfers. If they choose not to sell to a combatant, he is forced into the black or grey market, which offers less advanced systems. Combatants are also affected by human factors, economic constraints, the need for large fast deliveries which only the superpowers can meet -- which is also true of satellite intelligence. Dependency is sustained by the need for modern, major systems, access to technological innovation and the need for support (financial, military, political). Explains how military aid has been a useful foreign policy tool.
Stephanie G. Neuman teaches Third World security issues at Columbia University and is Senior Research Scholar and Director of its Comparative Defense Studies Program. This article is adapted from the authors book, Military Assistance in Recent Wars.
The frequency and intensity of armed conflict in the Third World have provoked a new theory of great-power impotence, the perceived inability of the superpowers to prevent an outbreak of violence or limit its intensity. Recent trends in the global arms trade seem to reinforce this view: the rising number of weapons suppliers, particularly among the Third World countries whose capabilities to produce and transfer arms have grown; the increasing diversity of procurement programs; and the decline of monopolistic military assistance relationships. According to this argument, fewer Third World countries depend on the United States or the Soviet Union for arms supplies; thus superpower leverage is reduced and the political and military independence of the Third World is increased, especially during periods of regional conflict.
Indeed, the relative decline in U.S. and Soviet military deliveries is clear from the statistics. From a high point in the 1960s of 85 percent of market share in world military equipment and services, the superpower share is now about 68 percent.
Economic factors are clearly changing procurement practices. The rising cost of weapons designed and manufactured in the industrialized world is inhibiting the purchases by the poorer countries. Many are opting merely to upgrade present inventories, or are buying older equipment that has been modernized by suppliers in industrial countries or in the Third World itself.
More states are now producing military consumables, such as ammunition and spare parts, to suit a wide variety of weapons systems, not just those in their own inventories. North Korea, for instance, supplies Iran with ammunition compatible with Iran’s U.S.-origin system; Bulgaria is reported to have supplied NATO-standard ammunition to Nicaragua. Converting production lines to manufacture small arms and artillery ammunition of varying caliber is not very difficult or expensive, and can be accomplished within a few weeks. As demand for military consumables has risen, so too have the facilities that produce them. Curiously, this trend suggests that the arms trade is becoming more, rather than less, homogenized even as it grows more diversified...
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