The US Weapons Market Shatters a Record Set Last Year
In January 2024, the State Department reported a 56% increase in foreign arms sales. It wasn’t enough.
It’s a good time to be a US-based weapons manufacturer. Come to think of it, there hasn’t really been a point in recent memory where that wasn’t the case.
The pain and destruction our armaments have caused around the world hasn’t altered the trajectory of how many bombs and missile systems we ship overseas.
A year ago, this publication reported on the insane rise the State Department disclosed for Fiscal Year 2023, a stunning 55.9% increase to $80.9 billion. According to the fact sheet revealed a few weeks ago, that number has jumped yet again:
In FY2024 the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities conducted under the Foreign Military Sales system was $117.9 billion. This represents a 45.7% increase, up from $80.9 billion in FY2023. This is the highest ever annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners.
In its press release, the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs opted to recycle the ridiculous language from last year’s announcement, stating the following:
For this reason, the United States follows a holistic approach when reviewing arms transfer decisions, in accordance with the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and weighs political, social, human rights, civilian protection, economic, military, nonproliferation, technology security, and end use factors to determine the appropriate provision of military equipment and the licensing of direct commercial sales of defense articles to U.S. allies and partners.
Of course, this professed commitment to only doing business with states that prioritize human rights doesn’t align with how the US government actually operates.
At least four of the nations on the State Department’s list of international weapons recipients have either engaged in gross human rights violations within their own borders or have been documented using America’s weapons to launch airstrikes that have repeatedly killed civilians.
According to the press release above, the US last year delivered a $2.2 billion shipment of M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks to Bahrain, a country America has enjoyed a long friendship with for quite some time.
In July 2022, President Biden met with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Saudi Arabia, emphasizing “the United States’ appreciation for the longstanding strategic partnership with Bahrain, including its hosting of the US Navy Forces Central Command/5th Fleet.”
This is a relationship that has endured for many years. Because the US benefits from the naval base it maintains near the Bahraini capital of Manama, the Pentagon is more than happy to ship weapons to the tiny Gulf nation. Despite its supposed devotion to abstaining from such exchanges with states that fail to guarantee basic rights for their citizens, the US has been sending weapons to Bahrain for decades.
The State Department itself detailed Bahrain’s deeply problematic record by writing the following in a 2023 country profile:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, censorship, and enforcement or threat to enforce criminal libel laws to limit expression; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations; restrictions on freedom of movement and residence within the territory of a state and on the right to leave the country; inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; and serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations.
Some of the other noteworthy examples of Bahrain’s many human rights violations from that same report follow below:
On September 15, Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, released a statement expressing alarm regarding the deteriorating health conditions of detained human rights defenders Abduljalil al-Singace, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, and Naji Fateel. She stated, “Medical negligence and lack of adequate care has left them in a worrying state. Both their detention and the ill-treatment they have suffered in prison violate the rights to free expression, opinion and assembly that must be guaranteed to human rights defenders.”
On June 20, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published an opinion calling for the release of six imprisoned students whom the Group maintained were being held arbitrarily after confessing to crimes under torture and undergoing unfair trials. The students – Ahmed Yusuf, Alaa Ansaif, Husain Matar, Husain Abdulla, Mohamed Baddaw and Sayed al-Khabbaz – were arrested separately, in unrelated cases, between 2013 and 2020. At the time of their arrests, three were children.
On March 15, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published an opinion finding that prodemocracy activist Naji Fateel – who was arrested in May 2013 for protest activities and allegedly was tortured severely for days in 2013, during which time he lost consciousness and twice needed hospital treatment – never should have been arrested and called for his immediate release and an investigation of his arbitrary detention and alleged torture.
The government claimed to hold no political prisoners. According to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), however, the government held an unverified number of political prisoners. International media reported in August that the government held approximately 1,200 political prisoners, most of them in Jaw prison. Charges against individuals identified by NGOs as political prisoners included terrorism, treason, espionage, and attempting to overthrow the monarchy.
The law prohibited any speech authorities considered a challenge to public order or accepted morals. While individuals openly expressed critical opinions regarding domestic political and social matters in private settings, those who shared such opinions publicly, including in traditional or social media, could face questioning. The Ministry of Interior acted on complaints from individuals or groups about certain posts and brought “offenders” in for questioning. Depending on the complaint, investigation, and assessed violation of the law, individuals were released without charge or charged and tried. The penal code allowed penalties of no less than one year and no more than seven years of imprisonment, plus a fine, for anyone who “offends the monarch of the Kingdom of Bahrain, the flag, or the national emblem.” According to an October Freedom House report, in 2022 at least 41 activists and journalists were arrested, detained, interrogated, or prosecuted for speech-related matters, including their online activity.
Al Wasat, Bahrain’s only independent newspaper, was suspended by the nation’s Information Affairs Ministry in 2017.
“Bahrain’s 2022 parliamentary elections, held in November, were neither free nor fair,” Human Rights Watch previously wrote in its own breakdown of the country that year. “All members of previously dissolved political groups were barred from running in the elections.”
At the height of the Arab Spring, the people of Bahrain took to the streets to protest the monarchy of Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The government responded by shooting at protesters. A February 2011 New York Times report indicated that the helicopters responsible for opening fire had been supplied by the US:
(The helicopter appeared to be American-designed, according to an official at Bell Helicopter, who said the aircraft looked like versions that had been sold, unarmed, to Bahrain.)
Two years later, a ProPublica report documented that the US continued to sell helicopters to Bahrain long after these reports hit the newswires and even trained the nation’s military on how to use them. The January 2013 article used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the following document:
Human rights organizations have routinely observed the same types of authoritarian impulses in Turkey, but this didn’t seem to matter to the US government, which approved an F-16 aircraft sale to Ankara last year.
Throughout the years, President Erdoğan’s administration has repeatedly been documented prosecuting journalists, banning political parties, punishing dissidents, and criminalizing free speech. However, it’s the Turkish government’s militarism that should [at least theoretically] be a cause of concern for the State Department.
Back in 2016,
, who runs the Geopolitical Economy Report page on Substack, encapsulated how Turkey blends a repressive and totalitarian style of government at home with an unapologetically dangerous set of foreign policies across the Middle East:Erdoğan has never treated journalists well. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, NATO ally Turkey has in recent years imprisoned more journalists than any other country — including longtime U.S. enemies China and Iran. (This didn't stop the aspiring sultan from boasting "Nowhere in the world is the press freer than it is in Turkey. I'm very sure of myself when I say this.")
Yet Erdoğan is now upping the repression to the next level. His Western-allied regime has redefined dissentious journalists and activists as "terrorists."
On the same day Erdoğan made these remarks, the U.S. State Department released a statement stating "We reaffirm our strong partnership with our NATO Ally Turkey in combatting the shared threat of terrorism."
This is fascinating, considering the country's well-documented support for the extremist groups the U.S. is ostensibly fighting in the War on Terror.
Former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone admitted in 2014 that Turkey has directly supported al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's wing in Syria.
All of this is coupled with the Erdoğan government’s years of brutality against the Kurds, who’ve spent years attempting to carve out an independent nation in the region. Turkey’s past campaigns against the Kurds – a group that the US has long considered a close ally – have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
Saudi Arabia’s appearance on the list should come as no surprise. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the Saudis were the US government’s leading recipient of weapons between 2019 and 2023, accounting for 15% of America’s armament exports.
This alliance has endured for decades, in spite of Saudi Arabia’s impatience for dissent and documented abuse of women. It also wasn’t broken by Saudi Arabia’s brutal years of war in Yemen. In fact, the horrors inflicted upon the Yemeni people by Riyadh only strengthened the friendship between the two nations.
Following the overthrow of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government and the seizure of the capital in 2014, the Houthis – a Shia Muslim group from Northern Yemen – spent years locked in conflict with Saudi Arabia. The devastation that ensued – which killed hundreds of thousands of people – was actively supported by the US military, which armed Saudi Arabia, refueled its jets, and provided the Kingdom with intelligence. Despite the US government’s aforementioned pledge to always consider human rights when contemplating an arms transfer, the State Department did not hesitate in arming the Saudis to the teeth.
Also included in the list is the Israeli government, whose military has now spent more than 16 months turning Gaza into rubble.
In the wake of October 7th, the IDF has pounded Palestinian hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and makeshift shelters, killing thousands of civilians and injuring countless others. As of this writing, the official death toll approaches 49,000; virtually every source reporting from the region notes that the actual total is significantly higher.
For more than a year, the aftermath of nearly every airstrike targeting civilians in Gaza has followed roughly the same pattern.
First, statements by the Israeli military would almost always insist that the repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure were targeting Hamas-operated command centers buried deep underground. Not only was the IDF never able to furnish evidence for these claims, it was also never able to explain why the Israeli military would’ve been justified in endangering the lives of civilians even if credible evidence had been presented to support these claims.
Until the day they left office, senior members of the Biden administration as well as the president himself, repeatedly emphasized that weapons sales to Israel would be discontinued if Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government did not stop its indiscriminate and ceaseless bombing of the two million people in Gaza. Such a commitment was never enacted, but the arms shipments continued uninterrupted.
History has shown that the US government will not hesitate to funnel arms to just about any corner of the planet if it feels that doing so is likely to benefit its long-term strategy in that part of the world.
The State Department’s official policies dictate one thing, but its actions say another.
What a racket!