Watching US grip on global weapons market slowly slip away

Several recent developments suggest that the longstanding dominance of the global arms market by the United States could be poised for decline, including in the Middle East.

Given the way U.S. arms have been used in the region in this decade, a reduction in U.S. sales could be a plus for American security over the long-term.

America’s role in enabling violence in the Middle East is large, not only through cash sales to the Gulf States but through military aid to Israel. Israel has received over $21 billion in U.S. weaponry since the start of the Gaza war, with billions more in the pipeline, but U.S. taxpayers pay for the vast majority of those arms. Egypt and Jordan are also beneficiaries of U.S. military aid, albeit not at the levels lavished on Israel.

In Pentagon-speak, every U.S. arms sale to the Middle East “promotes peace and stability in the region.” But the reality is far different. Saudi Arabia used U.S. weapons to prosecute a brutal war in Yemen. Israel used U.S.-supplied arms in Gaza to kill over 70,000 people (mostly civilians) plus starve and displace an entire population, all of which are considered war crimes, and to catalyze the current Middle East war, where critics say Israel is now engaging in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon.

Proponents of arms sales always claim that they give the U.S. leverage. But if administrations of both parties fail to use that leverage to stop indiscriminate Saudi bombing in Yemen or Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, then what is it actually worth? Perhaps Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud in his first term, when he justified keeping U.S. weapons flowing to Riyadh even after the Saudi regime murdered U.S.-resident journalist and Saudi exile Jamal Khashoggi, saying he didn’t want to cut into the business of “our wonderful defense companies.”

Trump revealed another driver of U.S. arms sales with his exaggerated claim that 500,000 jobs across America were tied to weapons exports to Saudi Arabia. An objective assessment put the figure at about 10% of that.

Trump often plays up the job-creating potential of weapons sales. When de facto Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman visited the White House in 2018, Trump pulled out a map with photos of weapons the U.S. had sold the regime and numbers of how many jobs those sales supported in key states. “Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation, and they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth, hopefully in the form of jobs,” Trump said.

But Trump was not alone. President Barack Obama’s administration agreed to a $60 billion arms package to the Saudis in late 2010. Five years later, the Saudi-led coalition used many of those weapons to bomb schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure in Yemen. Trump is a more vocal arms-dealer-in-chief, but his actions fit a longstanding pattern.

Don’t cry for the big U.S. weapons firms, but their dominance of global and regional arms markets may be about to decline. Arms supplies to Ukraine and Israel, plus intensive bombing in the current war on Iran, have depleted U.S. stocks. So if there is new production, much of it will go to restock the U.S. arsenal rather than for foreign sales. And there are so many deals in the pipeline — including record sales to European NATO nations in the final year of the Biden administration — that the U.S. industry lacks the capacity to get arms to potential clients on any reasonable timeline.

Middle powers like South Korea have moved to fill the gap, for example, in a deal for tens of billions of dollars worth of arms to Poland. Their advantage? They could deliver the arms far more quickly than U.S. firms can.

The other development that could erode U.S. dominance of the weapons trade is the rise of drone warfare. When nations were buying big-ticket items like fighter planes, only a few countries could produce and export them. But drones are simpler and cheaper to make, with Israel, Turkey, and Ukraine all in the market.

The U.S. — tied to big-ticket items that are more profitable for the Lockheed Martins of the world — is lagging behind. Silicon Valley upstarts claim they can reverse this trend by producing low-cost drones of their own. But in practice, they’ve failed to take market share from their foreign competitors.

In Ukraine, early on in its war against the Russian invasion of their country, Kyiv decided that drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and too expensive. So they started making do-it-yourself drones — Chinese commercial drones with bombs and a camera mounted on them.

Ukraine has now built over one million DIY drones. And since they are mostly used as suicide drones to target armored vehicles, they don’t have to be particularly high tech. All of this gives the lie to Silicon Valley’s claims that the Ukraine war is a unique example of the military value of their products.

No one should shed a tear for the U.S. arms giants if countries like South Korea, France, Turkey and Israel take market share from them. But a multi-faceted trade won’t automatically be better. It could morph into a Hobbesian war of all against all, with cheap effective weapons available to both sides of any ongoing conflict.

What is needed, then, is a system to curb the arms trade and replace its (overstated) economic benefits with other forms of trade that don’t enable such human and strategic devastation.