WAR AND MILITARY

War and Military: Government of Hisory

War and Military: Government of Hisory

The United States, which entered into over $23 billion in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreements in fiscal year (FY) 2007 and $32 billion in FY 2008 (see table 1), is the world's largest arms supplier. U.S. exports range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Morocco, Greece, Romania, and Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt, and Georgia. In 2006 and 2007, the United States sold weapons to over 174 states and territories, a significant increase from the beginning of the Bush administration when the number of U.S. arms clients stood at 123. While many of these sales were relatively small deals licensed commercially by the State Department, a number of important new states were added or restored to the U.S. client list, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, East Timor, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan (Krahmann, 2011).

Arms transfers are undertaken for a variety of rationales. On the strategic side of the ledger, weapons exports and military training can be utilized to increase interoperability (the ability to fight together in a coalition) among U.S. and allied forces; to reward partners in the fight against terrorism, including countries fighting alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; to gain access to foreign military bases; and to strengthen allies against internal and/or external threats (Leander, 2010). Politically, arms and training can be used as leverage for everything from gaining preferential access to oil and other strategic resources to persuading other countries to vote with the United States in international and regional bodies like the United Nations and the Organization of American States. In the domestic economic sphere, the arms trade is a source of income and jobs for key localities, a way to lower the costs of weapons purchased by the U.S. military, and a means of maintaining a larger U.S. defense industrial base than would be possible without these foreign sales. Whether arms transfers are the best tools for achieving these objectives is a matter of debate, but there is no question that the United States utilizes them in hopes of achieving these goals (Krahmann, 2011).

Table 1 U.S. Foreign Military Sales Agreements, FY 2002 through FY 2008 (dollars in billions)

FY 2002

FY 2003

FY 2004

FY 2005

FY 2006

FY 2007

FY 2008

$12.0

$12.6

$13.2

$9.6

$18.1

$19.1

$32.0

There is less concern in policymaking circles about the negative impacts of arms sales, from fueling conflict to enabling major human rights abuses. In the case of the United States, this is true despite the fact that U.S. law calls for curbs on sales to countries engaged in a "gross and consistent" pattern of human rights abuses or to countries using U.S. weapons for aggressive purposes.More often than not, these reasonable requirements are set aside in favor of the short-term strategic, political, and economic objectives set out above (Leander, 2007). This tendency has been even stronger since the 9/11 attacks, with limits ...