Who is selling all the rockets, mortars, bullets, and guns to the factions fighting all the wars?
Answer: China
Russia is so poor it can't even build its own tanks anymore.
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Russia is so poor in part BECAUSE it bought more weapons than it can use. It doesn't cost much to dust them off and ship them to the third world.
Actually it's fairly likely that America itself is selling as well. We really don't regular our arms manufacturers that much.
Sorry, but that last sentence is pretty much untrue. This article gives a pretty good overview of what the process to export arms is, but selling weapons to terrorists isn't a good business plan for American companies.
That said, America is/has been a major supplier of weapons across the world. The Cold War can pretty much be summed up as "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", and we'd hand out M16s, Stingers and training to whoever was fighting Soviet interests. Russia did pretty much the same thing, which is why there's been ~75 million AKMs built since the '50s.
And even if our clients had hearts as pure as driven snow, that didn't mean that those weapons stuck with them. We left tens of millions of dollars worth of hardware in Iraq, and now ISIS is taking over Iraq with captured Humvees and Stinger missiles. We gave weapons to the Mexican military to fight cartels, and those weapons were stolen by deserters or sold outright to the cartels. And now we're handing advanced anti-tank weaponry to Syrian rebels. Here we go again...
Generally speaking Govt. To Govt. Arms Deals are extremely lucrative for the countries that have large munitions businesses. It's also an issue of sustainability on an economic level. Kissenger often armed less than desirable groups to counteract communist ideologies but also to keep American Arms manufacturers busy and with workforces at near to full time.
The Russian external Arms Sales company has been very busy the last few years keeping extremist groups armed. This is both to generate revenue from their outdated weapon systems but also to conveniently destabilize certain GeoPolitical groups who potentially pose a threat to longterm Russian interests. Iran and Hamas are a check on US and European influence in the middle East. Keeping these groups armed adds the advantage of keeping them out of Russia's reacquisition of their breakaway Islamic states. We don't focus on this much in the West but Putin is obviously trying to rebuild the old Soviet block. Arming and backing Iran has kept the Iranian Islamic Groups out of Azerbijan, Chechnya and Georgia.
The Chinese are purely profit driven. Their arms sales have very little in the way of GeoPolitical objectives. They will sell to anyone who pays and doesn't pose an immediate threat to Chinese territorial sovereignty. Keeping tabs on their external arms sales has been hard to keep track of from what I've read though.
Given the number of US based arms and munitions companies who have moved production offshore to places like Argentina it's not unlikely that they are also providing small scale sales to undesirables as well. The Spin that they can't afford to keep production inside the USA is frankly hogwash considering that quite a few used guns sell for more on the secondary market than they did new. Offshoring's biggest benefit is taking the production away from oversight here in the U.S. Where some liberal Senator could start looking into "missing" firearms. Double Dealing is an established Buisness practice and the loss of Communism means that the consumers of firearms and heavy munitions among foreign clientele is no longer Politically safe for those businesses from within US or Canadian borders.
And don't underestimate how many bombs and unspent rounds are just laying around the world in poorly documented depots. The 20th century was a race to arm every nook and cranny of the planet. Keeping track of all that stuff was an afterthought for NATO and the Warsaw Pact participants.
The biggest weapons exporters in the world, at least a few years back, were the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France. Funny thing, that seems like a familiar setup.
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Israel also sells a lot of weapons to a lot of factions around the world. Not specifically to anyone in the middle east (though there were times when it did, attempting to shift the power in certain areas to it's favor that way), but all over Africa. It's quite the local industry.
EDIT: and most of the American weapons in Israel are more given than sold. It's this weird deal where the U.S gives Israel money that it is only allowed so spend on weapons. Often times things are handled more directly with the U.S straight up funding Israeli weapon systems, like the Iron Dome.
And it's not just weapons, either. When I was in basic training, just about all the equipment in the entire camp was leftovers from Vietnam - tents, communication devices, etc. Even the uniforms. Which was smelly.
It's a sweetheart deal, we give Israel foreign aid money which they use to buy U.S. Defense equipment. Then the equipment gets field tested in real world conditions so we can work out the kinks.
It was the Israelis I think who pointed out that the paint on the interior of the original Bradley Fighting Vehicle was made out of something that turned to poison gas when it was superheated (read: hit with an incendiary device). Or at least they wouldn't order the BFV without an alteration to the paint choice.
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It's a sweetheart deal, we give Israel foreign aid money which they use to buy U.S. Defense equipment. Then the equipment gets field tested in real world conditions so we can work out the kinks.
It was the Israelis I think who pointed out that the paint on the interior of the original Bradley Fighting Vehicle was made out of something that turned to poison gas when it was superheated (read: hit with an incendiary device). Or at least they wouldn't order the BFV without an alteration to the paint choice.
As I said, it's a bit more than that. The U.S funds the Israeli army in many ways.
Given the number of US based arms and munitions companies who have moved production offshore to places like Argentina it's not unlikely that they are also providing small scale sales to undesirables as well.
Name them. What US armaments companies have outsourced production?
Honeywell and General Dynamics can't just open up shop in Kenya. Not only are the armaments themselves restricted for export, but the plans and technology behind them are restricted as well.And it's really hard to tell a Congressional committee that shutting down the latest fighter jet or self-propelled artillery will cost American jobs when those jobs have already been outsourced.
The Spin that they can't afford to keep production inside the USA is frankly hogwash considering that quite a few used guns sell for more on the secondary market than they did new.
This doesn't even pass the smell test. If, say, a Remington 700 sold for $500 at gun stores and $750 on the secondhand market, you'd bet that the gun stores and the manufacturers would bump their price up by $250 in a heartbeat.
There are used guns that sell more now than they did when they were first on the market, for the same reason that certain cars command a king's ransom when they're up for auction. They're scarce and they have a lot of history behind them. These are guns like the M1 Garand or oddballs like the Dardick Tround Revolver.
Of course, there's also artificial scarcity in the form of machine guns. If you wanted a full-auto firearm prior to 1986, it wasn't that expensive. There was hardly a price difference between an AR-15 and an M-16. Do your paperwork, pay a $200 tax stamp to get it on the NFA registry, jump through a bunch of other hoops and you've got a select-fire M-16. But the registry was closed in 1986, which means there's now only a finite number of full-auto firearms legal to own in the United States. If you want a civilian-legal M-16 today, you can expect to fork over upwards of $20,000.
There's no voodoo accounting at work. No nefarious plans by shadowy arms manufacturers to undersell their wares.
Double Dealing is an established Buisness practice and the loss of Communism means that the consumers of firearms and heavy munitions among foreign clientele is no longer Politically safe for those businesses from within US or Canadian borders.
It was never safe to begin with. Look at what the Carter Administration did to Gerald Bull.
And it's not so much that we "left tens of millions of dollars worth of hardware in Iraq", as "We equipped the Iraqi army, which fell apart when attacked". Same effect, but the connotations are different.
True enough.
>This< Map Of US And Russian Arms Sales Says It All.
Or, at least some of it.
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Russia is still number one, US is number two,
China is number three.
Everything down to 15 is in Europe except for Israel and South Korea.