"The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business."
In May 2017, President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia to finalize a massive $110 billion sale of “American-made” weapons. The deal was part of his America First initiative. “That was a tremendous day,” Trump said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”
The Trump administration hopes to expand this effort via arms export deregulation.
“We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attachés, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters,” a senior administration official told Reuters.
UNBELIEVEABLE, WHITE HOUSE DEALING DEATH? MAKE POPCORN, GET THE KIDDIES AND MAKE THEM WATCH CHEVY CHASE COMEDY "DEAL OF THE CENTURY" and DR. STRANGELOVE weekend after.
Every president promotes the sale of U.S. weapons. But Trump’s push is especially vigorous and is based on a misleading claim that increased sales will create thousands of jobs in the United States. The truth, however, is that the jobs generated from selling weapons won’t be U.S. jobs but Saudi ones. As William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, explains,
“This will be no different than with the F-35 program, where final assembly of aircraft sold to Europe and Asia will occur in Italy and Japan, respectively.”
He's saying, 'yeah, we manufacture death abroad, sell the arms abroad and tell them to kill the people abroad that we want killed. SAUDIS want YEMEN BACK. Got all the beaches the Saudis DON'T. So we help!
Nevertheless,
defense contractors in the U.S. will make a
literal and figurative killing. Not counting this
Saudi deal, the U.S. has sold close to $200
billion in arms since 2002. We are the top
provider in the global weapons market, responsible
for a third of total worldwide arms exports,
according to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI).
(CLICK BELOW)
Many
KISSINGER types think American arms dominance is
not just a source of revenue but important to our
geopolitical hegemony.
According to this view, losing our supremacy would
jeopardize our security and reduce U.S. gross
domestic product. But this theory was challenged
and debunked by George Mason University
economists Christopher Coyne and Abigail
Hall in a 2013 working paper.
Their main takeaway was that
the risk of negative foreign policy
consequences, such as powerful U.S. weapons
being used to kill large numbers of civilians
abroad, far outweigh any economic benefits.
As SIPRI explains,
“The USA OBAMA delivered major weapons to at least 96 countries in 2011–15, a significantly higher number of export destinations than any other supplier.” How do we assess whether all of these countries are safe bets? A recent study by the Cato Institute provides compelling evidence that the U.S. is actually quite careless about whom it sells to. Authors A. Trevor Thrall and Caroline Dorminey produced an index of the overall riskiness of arms trade deals since 2002 that shows the United States does not discriminate between high- and low-risk customers. “The average sales to the riskiest nations are higher than those to the least risky nations,” they write. “The 22 countries coded as ‘highest risk’ on the Global Terrorism Index bought an average of $1.91 billion worth of American weapons. The 28 countries in active, high-level conflicts bought an average of $2.94 billion worth of arms.”
Selling
weapons to unstable states is dangerous, but so is
selling to countries like Saudi Arabia, the
leading buyer of American arms according to SIPRI.
The precision-guided munitions the Saudis purchased from the U.S., for
example, have been used to kill thousands
of civilians in Yemen. BLEW UP ALL
HOMES, WATER UTILITY, IN A DESERT< DIRTY
WATER< MILLIONS DYING OF CHOLERA NOW.
For the sake of enriching military contractors and
paying lip service to “Made in America,” we too
often enable autocrats to commit murder. And as
Cato’s risk assessment demonstrates, we’re also
arguably sowing seeds of destabilization and
conflict.
The inherent cronyism is problematic as well.
“The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business,” retired Air Force Col. James Burton wrote in his 1993 book The Pentagon Wars, “ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.
The process is dominated by advocacy, with few if any checks and balances.” As Thrall and Dorminey report, banking on arms sales inevitably means offering long-term subsidies to private companies. That taxpayer money could be put to much better use.
*
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