Arms and clients

A Harop drone, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries, at the Singapore airshow in February.-TIM CHONG /REUTERS

The U.S., which sold weaponry worth $66.3 billion in 2011, dominates the global arms bazaar, and its allies in the West Asian region are the most militarised countries in the world.

THE United States arms sales have increased significantly this year, according to the latest data released by American official sources. The annual survey by the U.S. Congressional Research Survey (CRS), a policy research arm of the U.S. Congress, revealed that American arms manufacturers sold a staggering $66.3 billion worth of weaponry in 2011. Most of the arms went to client nations in the volatile West Asian region. The CRS survey put the U.S. far ahead of other major arms exporters such as Russia, France and China.

Washington was responsible for 77 per cent of the arms agreements signed globally last year. Compared with 2010, $21.4 billion more of U.S. weapons sales were registered in 2011. Russia accounted for only 5.6 per cent of the global arms sales last year. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that his countrys arms sales in the first half of 2012 had crossed the $6.5 billion mark. This is 14 per cent more than the sales in the corresponding period last year. Countries such as India, which until recently imported most of its defence hardware from Russia, are now turning towards the U.S. and Western Europe.

In 2011, Russia accounted for more than 50 per cent of Indias arms imports. In the previous decade the figure hovered around 80 per cent. Russia has now found new markets in Latin America and other parts of the world. It has even bagged new orders from Iraq for military hardware.

Russia signed a deal worth $4.2 billion with the Iraqi government in October, thus becoming the second biggest supplier of arms to the country after the U.S. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was one of the biggest recipients of Russian weaponry. Russia is also the main supplier of weaponry to embattled Syria. Algeria and Iran are the other countries that buy significant amounts of Russian armaments. After the ouster of Muammar Qaddafi, the lucrative Libyan arms market is now being monopolised by the West.

The U.S. has clinched deals worth more than $6.9 billion with India, and more lucrative contracts are in the pipeline. Taiwan bought the Patriot anti-missile batteries from the U.S. for more than $2 billion. Beijing has criticised this particular sale, saying that it would only add to the tensions in the region. China is embroiled in territorial disputes over marine boundaries with many of its neighbours. Arms dealers around the world are using the rising military tensions to increase sales in South-East Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. China has been seeking reunification with Taiwan since 1949.

Andrew Shapiro, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, told the U.S. media in late August that 2012 is already a record-breaking year for foreign military sales. We have already surpassed $50 billion in sales in fiscal year 2012. (The fiscal year in the U.S. is from October 1 to September 30.) The bulk of the American weaponry went to developing nations. However, the earnings from the sale of military hardware are estimated to be only around one-eleventh of the total American defence spending (which is around $766 billion).

More than half the money from the defence deals has come from the wealthy Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Saudi Arabia has placed orders for 84 advanced F-15 fighters, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, and other sophisticated weaponry. The UAE chose to invest $3.5 billion in a missile defence systemthe Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence manufactured by Lockheed Martin. It is being touted as an advanced anti-missile shield.

The dramatic rise in the sales of U.S.-made weaponry comes at a time when the region is witnessing political and military turmoil. Pro-Western monarchies are feeling threatened by the Arab Spring. Together with the West, they had succeeded in confining the regime change syndrome to Arab countries that were under civilian, albeit authoritarian, control. But now the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring have impacted most of the monarchies, especially those of Bahrain, Morocco and Jordan. American arms have gone a long way in bolstering these regimes.

Saudi Arabia has been helping the beleaguered Bahraini monarchy to crush the pro-democracy movement there. The Barack Obama administration in the U.S. had announced in the middle of this year that it was going to resume arms sales to the Kingdom of Bahrain. The U.S. had signed a $53-million arms deal with the country in 2011, but could not implement the agreement following protests from some American lawmakers. The deal included the sale of Humvee combat vehicles, missiles and rocket launchers. Human Rights Watch (HRW) had issued a statement criticising the American decision to supply weaponry at a time when the kingdom was witnessing continued deterioration in the human rights situation.

Sophisticated weaponry supplied by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been given to the armed groups fighting against the Syrian government, one of the last secular governments left in the region. The bogey of a nuclear Iran has also been used to whip up fear among the pro-Western regimes in the region. The fact that Israel is leading the chorus for an all-out war against Iran has not stopped the Saudi elite from viewing Tehran as the main strategic threat to their interests. The amount of weaponry sold to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries is estimated to be more than six times the military budget of Iran. U.S. officials have told the media that it is the policy goal of the Obama administration to work with Americas allies in the Gulf in building a regional missile defence system that will protect them from the threat of an Iranian attack. The U.S. wealthy allies in the region are picking up the huge tab involved in assembling a missile shield on a country-by-country basis.

GMI report

In the latest Globalisation Militarisation Index (GMI) report released by the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC), Israel occupies the top spot as the worlds most militarised nation. (The BICC is funded by the German federal government. The GMI defines the degree of militarisation of a country by comparing military expenditures with the gross domestic product and other indicators, such as the budgetary allocations for health and education. The GMI analysis is also based on the data put out by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organisation.)

Israel, which seems to be all set to launch another military attack on the hapless people of Gaza, has been topping the GMI list almost every year for the past 20 years. The second place is occupied by Singapore, another close military ally of the West. The city state has been occupying the runners-up position for many years now. Iran, which Israel is trying to paint as a threat to its survival and to world peace, only occupies the 34th position.

Six of the nations in the GMIs list of top 10 militarised countries are located in the volatile West Asian region. They include Syria (3), Jordan (5), Kuwait (7), Bahrain (9) and Saudi Arabia (10). This is conclusive evidence that the West Asian region continues to be the most militarised in the world.

Irans neighbour Azerbaijan, which is very close militarily to the West, occupies the eighth position. The energy-rich country seems to have used a lot of its oil and gas revenues to buy modern military equipment, mainly from the West. The arms contagion seems to be spreading from West Asia to yet another energy-rich and politically sensitive regionCentral Asia. Azerbaijan and Armenia had fought a brief war after the collapse of the Soviet Union for the control of the Nagorno Karabakh enclave. Azerbaijan lost that war. It may have started preparations for another round.

India and China, which have been both significantly increasing their defence budgets, are ranked 71 and 82 respectively. The U.S. was ranked at 29. Sub-Saharan African and Latin American countries figure low on the GMI list. Only Angola, flush with oil revenues, is an exception, figuring at position 30. The civil war there was over more than a decade ago, but the country faces a secessionist threat in its oil-rich Gabinda province on the border with Congo.