Continuing to brag that the US is the “global provider of choice” for arms, Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) Director Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper has issued a statement reporting that the US sold in the realm of $42 billion in weapons to the rest of the world in 2017.
That’s a $10 billion increase over sales the previous years, with the overwhelming majority of the sales taking place in the Middle East, but the Indo-Pacific region also seeing a substantial increase.
Hooper said the US advantage was not just in the arms themselves, but in the provision of training and maintenance capabilities for customers, who he labeled “partners.” He added that he expects the positive sales trend to continue.
This is likely to be the case, of course, because even though the world is awash in weapons the regions with the most sales are also areas of particular US foreign policy interest, and by extension regions full of costly wars, for which US arms makers are only too willing to sell more equipment.
While Krupp did not need the approval of the Prussian and later German government to sell its weapons anywhere in the world there is a lesson in what happened sometimes. During the so-called “Boxer Rebellion” in China a German river gunboat was sunk by a Krupp cannon on the Yangtze river. Kaiser Wilhelm II was furious.
When a Nazi flotilla entered the channel of Oslo in 1940 to capture that city one German ship was sunk by …a Krupp cannon. Adolf Hitler was furious.
Apparently nothing has been learned.