It comes around to bite you in the ass.

May 30, 2017 12:58 PM

US military admits failures to monitor over $1 billion worth of arms transfers.
It makes for especially sobering reading given the long history of leakage of US arms to multiple armed groups committing atrocities in Iraq, including the armed group calling itself the Islamic State. - Patrick Wilcken, ( Amnesty International’s Arms Control and Human Rights Researcher).
who has previously warned about arms transfers to Iraq carrying a real risk of ending up in the hands of militia groups with long histories of human rights violations. 2015 arms and equipment list (pdf).
posted by adamvasco (11 comments total)

Kind of hard to tell sometimes the difference between Doonesbury comics and real life.
posted by Melismata at 1:24 PM on May 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

We're great at learning from our mistakes, so any strings attached to that $110 billion of arms we're selling the Saudis?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 1:29 PM on May 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

An issue, Burhanistan, since World War I. We don't want to give it up, alas.
posted by Melismata at 1:31 PM on May 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Shocked–shocked!–to find that... well, you know the rest.

Seriously, though, this is something that's been going on since the late 1800s. After the end of the Civil War, when they couldn't find enough market for guns in the US to support the huge manufacturing capacity they had developed during the conflict, the small arms manufacturers of the time (S&W, Remington, et al) were vigorous in developing and supplying markets all over the world. Since the end of WW2, successive American administrations have adopted "military Keynesianism" with a vengeance in order to lessen the effects of the business cycle. I have absolutely no hope that this will change during my lifetime, short of a true Apocalypse.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 3:46 PM on May 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Yeah sure, but on a U.S. military budget, a billion dollars of arms is like, what, one handgun?
posted by sexyrobot at 5:26 PM on May 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

You can't track a billion dollars of anything, unless it's a few very expensive things. Once you transmute that much value into physical objects, some of them will vanish into places you don't want them to go.
posted by Punkey at 5:39 PM on May 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Good news, everyone!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:54 PM on May 30, 2017

Guess we should be glad these armaments are so expensive.

So a billion isn't that much bang.
posted by ocschwar at 7:28 PM on May 30, 2017

To be fair, no one could have seen this coming.
posted by atoxyl at 9:49 PM on May 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the objective of US foreign policy is, and has been for decades, to drum up foreign and domestic demand for armaments and military services. How else to explain the US involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq, let alone Africa?
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:04 AM on June 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yup.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:53 AM on June 1, 2017