Sunday, September 6, 2009

Congressional Report: US Increases Share of World-Wide Arms Market

An article in the New York Times today begins:

Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world's leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.

The United States signed weapons deals valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.

You read that correctly; despite the global recession, the United States increased it's share of the global market in armament sales by $12.4 billion over the course of one year. The article goes on:

In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations, which remain "the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers," according to the study.

Without a doubt, historians 100 years from now will clearly view the United States as not only the world's leading supplier of weapons and armaments, but also the world's most militarily aggressive country of the past 30 or 40 years. Our permanent military establishment wages war more often and more aggressively than other nations, and sells more weapons globally than other nations. Two distinctions our country could do without. Glenn Greenwald has more on this here.

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