On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that the United States might sell missiles to India. The missiles in question are harpoon air to ground anti-ship missiles. This deal would net the United States 170 million dollars. Boeing would manufacture the missiles for India if this deal goes through. I must admit that when first learning of this, I was slightly shocked that we would sell weapons to India. I don’t know why but it has always been an odd concept that the United States is the number one worldwide arms dealer. Surely if we stopped selling weapons to other nations, someone else would fill our position. Most likely the Russians would be more than happy to fill the gap. They are already sweeping up every nuclear contract that the United States declines to blacklisted nations.
The Defense Security Cooperation said, “India intends to use the Harpoon missiles to modernize its air force anti-surface warfare mission capabilities and improve its naval operational flexibility.”
Honestly I think that the harpoon missile are fine since they are more of a defensive measure for India. However I do not necessarily agree with all the weapons manufacturing that the United States does every year. What do you think? As a worldwide superpower, should we be outfitting nations such as Africa so that they can conduct warfare?
At the same time, we can’t simply rule out weapons manufacturing in our struggling economy. Weapons manufacturing accounts for 2 percent of the GDP in America. If we gave that up, our economy would take a noticeable beating.
