Posted by William Hartung
at 7:45am, July 26, 2016
As is often the case, I opened
the Monday newspaper curious to find out how the weekend had gone at the
movies. The headline read, “‘Ghostbusters’ Is No. 2 Behind ‘Secret Life
of Pets.’” That meant Universal Studios’ animated film had again been the
big winner, taking in an estimated $50.6 million for a two-week domestic total
of $203.2 million. In the industry, it was feared that China, the world’s
number two market and gaining fast, might not let another hit, Ghostbusters, be
shown, given its paranormal themes. Still, all in all, it had been an
upbeat week for one of the two dominant American product lines that go boom in
the night and also have a remarkable grip on their respective global
markets. The first of those -- think action films, superhero movies, and space operas -- comes out of Hollywood and, in multiplexes
globally, one thing is guaranteed: you’re not going to get the next Avengers
sequel or Fast and Furious 23 from Russia, France, or China.
Not surprisingly, since Hollywood rakes in billions of dollars annually from the rest of the planet
for entertaining us all, weekly news about its business successes and failures
is a regular feature of our world.
And, oh yes, then there’s that
other business, the one that actually makes things that go boom in the
night. I’m talking, of course, about the weapons trade. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung, author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the
Military-Industrial Complex, points out today, it has an almost
monopolistic grip on its global market and, like Hollywood, regularly has
cheery news to offer about the billions of dollars it pulls in from countries
at war or fearing future conflicts. In fact, for a business that --
bottom line -- kills people rather than simply thrilling them with bloody
mayhem, it, too, has a remarkably upbeat sense of itself.
Take Thomas Kennedy, CEO of
Raytheon, a major arms maker, presently cleaning up when, as Defense News reports, it comes to the "missile defense interceptor,
as well as air-to-ground missiles and air-to-air combat missiles fired by
fighter jets” that it’s selling across the Middle East (and in some cases in
Asia, too). The company is projecting a revenue rise of 3%-5% this year
and, according to Defense One, “When investors visiting Raytheon’s factories
ask ‘How’s business?’ Kennedy tends to respond like this: ‘Did you notice you
couldn’t get a parking space?... ‘Where else can you find a factory in
America that you can’t get a parking space?’”
So here’s the puzzle: two
major industries with certain similarities grip their global markets in
similarly overwhelming ways. One is the focus of almost constant
reportage and attention, the other largely avoids notice in our world.
Why is that? Fortunately, TomDispatch can call on Hartung’s expertise
when it comes to the remarkably little known “success” story of America’s
weapons makers to offer the sort of picture of one of this country’s stellar
industries that you won’t find anywhere else. Tom
There’s No Business Like the
Arms Business
Weapons “R” Us (But You’d
Never Know It)
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 U.S. weapons transfers, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the disastrous dispensation of weaponry to U.S. 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, U.S. 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
U.S. 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%, the world’s second largest
supplier, Russia, lagged far behind. Washington’s “leadership” in this
field has never truly been challenged. The U.S. share has fluctuated
between one-third and one-half of the global market for the past two decades,
peaking at an almost monopolistic 70% 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% of its revenues from weapons exports, and
Boeing has done that company one better. It’s seeking to make overseas
arms sales 30% 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S.-supplied system. The bureaucracy that
helps make all of this happen, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is
funded from a 3.5% 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. arms. For
example, 36 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. military assistance to that country by up to 25%
-- 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 U.S.-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 U.S. arms sales to Vietnam is likely to open yet
another significant market for U.S. firms. In the past two years alone, the
U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. weapons in Europe of late, with more than $6 billion in
deals struck over the past two years alone -- more, that is, than the U.S. 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% in the region in response to the Russian
intervention in Ukraine. The rise in Poland’s outlays, at 22%, 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 U.S. weapons contractors.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior advisor to
the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the
Military-Industrial Complex.
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