During the FY2008, US arms exportation decreased sharply. The US sold almost 11 billion dollars worth of arms through the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales Program. While that is still a huge amount of money, it was a slump of about 1 billion dollars from the prior year. It would appear that the economic slowdown is affecting things once again.
The importers include Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Egypt, and Poland. Those countries are ordered with Israel spending the most and Poland spending the least.
I wanted to get your take on the US arms exportation business. Do you see anything immoral about exporting weapons to other nations? Is it something that we should avoid doing or are we not doing enough? My take is that every nation desires to be properly outfitted. Every country will try to procure weapons through some medium or another so it makes sense that the US would fill that niche. If we stepped out of the game, Russia would take our place in a heartbeat. They would then have an influx of capital which would have belonged to the US.
Unfortunately we live in a war torn world where countries need and desire weapons. I am ok with the US selling weapons overseas so long as they do not sell to dangerous and unstable nations.
