Arms Markets across the World

Mapping the world’s largest military-industrial complexes, their relationships to one another, and their overlapping structures of corporate ownership suggests that their expansion is, in the final estimation, subtended by the violent functions of statecraft itself

ANNA STAVRIANAKIS

In 1934, a US Senate Committee chaired by the Republican Gerald Nye began eighteen months of hearings on the domestic arms industry, investigating the enormous profits it had generated from World War I, amid speculation that the “merchants of death” might soon drag America into another major conflict. The inquiry channelled a popular contemporary discourse which claimed that wealthy industrialists—executives at firms like DuPont, J. P. Morgan, and Pratt & Whitney—were wilfully stoking inter-state antagonism to drive up their margins. “The arms maker has risen and grown powerful,” noted a prominent study at the time, “until today he is one of the most dangerous factors in world affairs—a hindrance to peace, a promoter of war.” Even the Wall Street Journal, in its defence of the Nye committee, felt able to denounce the “vicious system which both admits and tempts men to the commercial development of bad blood among neighboring peoples.” 1

Thirty-nine of the top one hundred arms companies are headquartered in the US, and they account for 49 percent of the revenue of that group.

The notion that private interests are creating global volatility has never left circulation, but has newfound relevance as worldwide military spending reached a historic high of $2.9 trillion last year, to the benefit of weapons makers from Israel’s Elbit and the American “Big Five” (Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Northrop, and RTX), to Germany’s Rheinmetall and the UK’s BAE Systems. 2

Peace activists are correct to point out that the death merchants have been thriving in the 2020s, and that their interests lie in prolonging the destruction in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere—with teams of lobbyists striving to keep policymakers on a constant war-footing. But while the phrase “military industrial complex” was coined to warn that these profiteers could effectively capture the state, and that the primary problem is therefore the privatization of the defence sector, this framework risks neglecting the imbrication of public and private power in the global arms industry today. It is not private actors qua private actors who are responsible for the growth of the armaments industry. Ultimately, military markets are shaped by states: as clients and as owners. Mapping the world’s largest military-industrial complexes, their relationships to one another, and their overlapping structures of corporate ownership suggests that their expansion is, in the final estimation, subtended by the violent functions of statecraft itself….

https://www.theindiaforum.in/international-affairs/arms-markets-across-world

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