Take the cash (The UK arms trade)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	The UK arms trade
Date:	20/12/01 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Make money, keep the third world killing each other

Disadvantages: none

I am going to write under the assumption that mankind has basically had some war going on constantly since humanity began. Truthfully the historians can only find 45 years out of the past 3000 when there was not a major conflict being waged. One of my instructors at OCS told us that, and he said his job was to train us to be the best we could be in preparation of inevitable conflicts.

So if it is going to happen anyways we might as well get rich off of it. The United States now sells more than half of all weapons internationally with Britain second and the Russian Federation third. These exports result in high paying jobs in high tech firms. People need to worry about peace and prosperity at home before they worry about what some third world folks are going to do with weapons, and the best way to maintain peace and prosperity at home is with good, secure, high paying jobs.

What we have to also consider is that if we (Anglos)do not sell them guns the Russians or Chinese will. For instance Pakistan and India are both buying 500 Russian and Ukrainian T-92 MBTs after the new Russian tank walked all over the American export tanks and the Chieftain that Britain sells abroad since we do not allow the sale of our sophisticated fire control systems. So now we have to not only worry about some tanks that we don't really fully know, but we have enabled the Russians to foster growth in their arms industries and gave them a real incentive to make advancements in arms rather than fixing their economy peacefully.

In contrast think about the recent concern in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Some pundits, knee jerk morons who don't believe in fighting for the most part, we going on and on about the 200 odd Stinger missles that bin Laden was liable to have in the Taliban, left over from when the Soviets tried to liberate Afghanistan. The US military knew that these stingers were a non issue as the batteries would be long dead and the Tali
ban would have no way to update or maintain them. Now what if we knew that the Taliban had some Chinese missles, could we as easily stated that there was no danger to aircraft at this point? I don't know. The only country that has any notion on tweaking and modifying weapons or use them to the point of being lethal to the west is Isreal.

So we can sell the guns and provide good jobs or we can let the Russians and Chinese produce the weapons. If you know anything about the Chinese miliraty complex yiou would know that the guns would be made by slave labor in prison camps.

It is a lot like the gun control debate in America, a lot of idealists believe that guns should be illegal and there would be no violence. Unfortunately the American nation has been one built by violence and made great by God Guts and guns and when a foreign power landed troops on our soil in 1812 and torched our capital and destroyed hundreds of homes and farms the die was cast that the American public would always be armed. I was amused when the 1980s head of teh Warsaw Pact was interviewed on American TV a few years ago and they asked him if they ever had any plans for invading america and the general laughed and said, "in America 250 million people and 300 million guns, you think I take mmy soldiers there". But at any rate we probaly do not need guns any more but there is no way to collect all the guns that are floating around, and global arms control would be no different. I was teaching in Moscow last year and a kid offered me a T-72 for a "new Red trans-am with t-tops". I told him to tell his father that a tank would do me no good in Russia and he came back the next day and said that they could deliver it to Ireland or Cuba if I wanted. That was odd, but the point is everybody has got guns now so the idealism is really pointless.

I remember being 19 years old and looking out across a desert waiting for T-72s to show up. We all knew abou
t the T-72s stats, the effective range, potentially slightly higher than my M1a1s. But We knew in a pitched battle we would eat them up since they could never target well on the run. We sat around waiting for the armored fist of the Republican guard to come out and meet us.
But what happened? Nothing, absolutely nothing, we were trained to deal with Czechs and Hungarian kids who knew what that t-72 could do but what we came up against was a bunch of idiots who could not even keep their tanks running let alone face us. And that is the reality of the third world. All these Arabs are a bunch of buffoons running around with all their ribbons and medals, given rank based on being descended from abu Bakr rather than knowing anything about warfare. The same with the Saudis and Egyptians. Look at how the Isrealis walked all over them. We can sell those idiots all the guns in the world and they can't do anything with them. sell them some new jets, hell sell them anything in Jane's they want and they will just wreck it or not bother to change the oil and burn it up. So it doesn't matter what weapons the rest of the world has, they are a bunch of idiots who can not comprehend weapons systems and the neccessity to have air land and sea operation synchronized. The Iraqis had 500 beautiful tanks and we were able to blast them from the air because the fools could not counter our helicopters. So folks do not worry about arms sales. There is a great book by Victor Davis Hanson on the rise of Western Power. Basically it wasn't Britains guns that let her take over half the world. It was the training, discipline and ability of the proud men that served the armed forces that made Britain great.

I can't really offer any argument about whether or not it is morally wrong to sell guns to idiots. But I think I have demonstrated that it is not such a big worry, and all this crap about Britain selling all the guns to Iraq and then having to battle their own
weapons is way over stated, think about it, what did happen? But no matter what we can't lose sleep over selling overpriced hardware to rwandans who kill each other instead of dying of aids. It just ain't our problem nor concern.

Don't misunderstand me as saying that we should sell these jerkies whatever they want. We of course do not want to sell aircraft carriers and nuke subs to Madagascar but let them buy all the tanks and planes they want, since we know exactly how to destroy the things we created.

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