The U.S. government is actively involved in helping U.S. weapons makers sell weapons.

List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ®

The U.S. government is actively involved in helping U.S. weapons makers sell weapons.

Weapons sales are a very big business in the U.S., and U.S. weapons makers put a huge amount of effort into selling violent ways of relating to the world. The U.S. government actively aids the sales process, and weapons profits are higher because the U.S. taxpayer pays part of the sales promotion costs.

A January 4, 2002 Reuters article that was carried in numerous publications such as Yahoo! and Forbe's Magazine, Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell U.S. warplanes. [forbes.com], discusses U.S government efforts to sell weapons:

After losing bids to supply warplanes to two of NATO's newest members, the Pentagon played its Afghanistan card on Friday, reminding shoppers -- including Poland and South Korea -- of the job U.S. aircraft have been doing there and urging them to buy American.

In ways that are largely hidden, rich companies benefit from the violence of the U.S. government, and help promote it. There are people who are proud of this:

John Douglass, the association president and a member of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry, said warming U.S. ties to India and Pakistan, a key ally in the Afghan campaign, may result in new export markets for U.S. military technology there and elsewhere.

"They knew all along how good we were", he said, referring to what he called a widely acknowledged U.S. lead of 10 to 15 years in military technology. "The more you demonstrate it, the more it sinks in."

The head of the U.S. government's sales department is Lieutenant General Tome H. Walters, Junior. He is director of the U.S. government's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) [dsca.old.mil, an official U.S. military site], a large organization.

One of the departments of the DSCA is the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program [osd.mil, official site]. The program "is the government-to-government method for selling U.S. defense equipment [equipment made by U.S. manufacturers], services, and training. Sales in FY98 were approximately $8.6 billion and $12.2 billion in FY99."

The Foreign Military Sales program is an ongoing, aggressive, well-staffed, and powerful organization that promotes weapons sales everywhere in the world. For example, according to a November 5, 2001 article by the Arms Trade Oversight Project of the Council for a Livable World [clw.org], Pentagon Agency Sold More Arms Abroad In 2001; Major Weapon Sales to Israel, Egypt, Italy, Greece Reached $6.3 Billion,

The value of U.S. government-to-government arms sales rose 10 percent in 2001, surprising Pentagon officials who had predicted lesser gains. Weapon deals made under the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program totaled $13.3 billion, compared with the 2000 figure of $12.1 billion, Pentagon officials said.

The sales are so numerous it is impossible to list them here. One example is discussed in a January 4, 2002 Reuters story carried by Forbes Magazine: S. Korea to buy missiles from Lockheed for $299 million. [forbes.com, title expanded for clarity]. A January 4, 2002 BBC article says that the total value of the sale is $800 million: S. Korea to buy U.S. missiles. [bbc.co.uk, periods added to title].

Those wanting a more complete accounting of weapons sales promoted by the U.S. government can read the official U.S. government documents, published September 30, 2000, DSCA (Facts Book) -- Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts [deskbook.osd.mil]. If you have an interest in these, you may want to download them to your computer, because the U.S. government could, at some time, remove them from public access. Note that the top line says, "Document Type: Discretionary - DoD Document". Note also that it is possible to order a CD-ROM with this information. (This document requires a browser that can display frames.)

Note that the above documents do not include the cost of the military programs that help sell weapons. Note also that the U.S. government also maintains a huge effort to buy weapons itself. The cost of this effort, and the cost of the weapons the government buys, is not included in the documents above, of course, which are about promotion of foreign sales.

There is some attempt to make the activities seem logical. There is talk of "Responsible arms sales ..." (See the above link.), but the fact that the DSCA is a sales agency is made obvious, also:

These sales also contribute to American prosperity by improving the U.S. balance of trade position, sustaining highly skilled jobs in the defense industrial base, and extending production lines and lowering unit costs for key weapon systems.

The above paragraph is a common lie that violence-minded people tell themselves: Weapons sales "contribute to American prosperity". In actuality, the foreign weapons sales contribute to the total amount of violence in the world. Sometimes the weapons sold are used for conflicts in which the U.S. becomes directly involved. U.S. weapons makers, for example, were completing contracts to deliver weapons to Saddam Hussein while there was a U.S. military build-up to fight Saddam Hussein in what is called the "Gulf War". All time and resources spent building weapons are time and resources taken away from improving the quality of our lives.

The fact that the U.S. government aggressively promotes weapons sales is not a secret from people in the rest of the world, of course. Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell U.S. warplanes [yahoo.com] was carried by Yahoo! India News. The Times of India carried the story: Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell US warplanes [timesofindia.com]. DAWN, "Pakistan's most widely circulated English language newspaper" also ran the story on January 6, 2002: Pentagon plays Afghan card to sell warplanes [dawn.com]. The article quotes General Tome:

"The first question any nation should be asking is how do we link up as tightly as we can with American air power", Walters added in remarks released by his Defence Security Cooperation Agency.

Note that the general does not say that the first question any nation should be asking itself is how to feed its people, or how to manage its resources well. According to his manner of thinking, violence is a way of life, and the U.S. taxpayer should be happy to pay to promote it.

People in countries outside the U.S. read articles like the one in DAWN, and form their opinions about the U.S. government partly from them. Some of those people are terrorists, who also believe that violence is a legitimate and sensible way of relating to other people and solving problems.

Anyone in the world who can pay to use a computer in an internet cafe can easily see, on official web sites, that the U.S. government firmly and publicly believes in promoting violence. Promoting violence is official policy. It is not surprising that others with fewer resources than the U.S. government adopt the same way of looking at the world. It is this kind of thinking that brought the violence of the World Trade Center bombing to the United States.

Note that promotion of U.S. weapons by the U.S. government is effectively just a transfer of taxpayer money to the weapons manufacturers. If the U.S. government did not maintain a weapons sales department, the weapons makers would have to pay the entire cost of weapons sales themselves.

Note also that there seems to be no security issue in promotion of U.S. weapons by the U.S. government. If they didn't buy U.S. weapons, countries wanting to relate to their neighbor counties by killing people and destroying property would presumably find some other way to do so.

List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ® | Go to top