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The activities of Airwork Services Limited that provides training, ground support services and pilots to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) under the Saudi Arabian Air Defense Scheme programme from 1966 to 1973 are examined. It is observed that Harold Wilson's government had to increase resources to maintain its relationship with the Saudi government because its objectives proved difficult to reconcile in Saudi Arabia as Airwork struggled to fulfill its responsibilities under the scheme.

A long period of economic and industrial development has allowed developing countries to evolve into newly industrialised countries (NICs). Simultaneously, the development of their major weapon systems has evolved from foreign weapons acquisition to independent development due to establishing research and development (R&D) capabilities. However, competitive pressures in the international arms market has finally led these countries to return to foreign acquisition, consequently rapidly eroding their R&D capability. Balancing foreign acquisition and independent development is a long-term strategic problem for NICs. This study applies the system dynamics methodology to construct a weapon systems development model for Taiwan. This model is used to analyse the impact of acquisition policy. The results here indicate three major possible growth curves for weapon systems R&D capability based on alternative weapon systems acquisition policies.

Research in arms transfers over the past decades has greatly increased our knowledge, but in a somewhat uneven fashion. With the end of the Cold War, arms transfers take place in a new international system. It appears that the most useful research at this stage--and given the limitations on the quantitative information available--should involve factual description of the different stages of arms transfers, the parties, their interests, the legal aspects, and the mechanics of arms transfers; harder information on the economic aspects of arms transfers, including the effects of offsets, of transfer of technology, and of joint development and production; identification of general trends and of characteristics relevant to more general concepts; and elaboration of ways and means to bring arms transfers under better national and international control. Perhaps most important, researchers should show detachment, devoting their efforts more to establishing facts than to presenting opinions.

Since the mid 1980s, the black and gray arms markets have emerged as major forces in the arms trade. Though they are much smaller than the orthodox trade, covert transfers are of great importance, providing the weapons most likely to actually be used in conflict. The totally illegal black market arises in reaction to embargoes. It is antipolicy, the mirror image of official intentions. The state-sponsored gray market, although it receives less attention, is much larger and more destabilizing. The gray market represents policy in flux as governments experiment with new and risky diplomatic relationships. There is much that can be done to bring the covert arms trade under control, especially through more aggressive law enforcement and radical extension of the United Nations Arms Register. Only collective security mechanisms, though, offer any hope of eradicating the covert arms trade.

Arms transfers between sovereign states have become a key and controversial ingredient of international relations. Many historians would argue that American military supplies were instrumental in winning the three critical wars of this century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Critics have advocated increased limits on arms sales on the grounds that they are a cause of war and have led to disastrous, entangling confrontations, including the Vietnam war. The end of the Cold War has witnessed a return to nationalism, not a new world order based on internationalism. The economic pressures to export arms are growing while demand is increasing in the new conflict regions. But many would-be purchasers of advanced arms cannot afford the high costs of modern weaponry. Most regional conflicts today, however, do not use the high-tech wizardry displayed during Desert Storm but rather rely on the traditional instruments of twentieth-century slaughter: small arms, mines, mortars, and artillery.

Revolutionary changes now taking place in the technology of war may have a significant impact on the character of the international trade in arms. Some analysts argue that a Military Technical Revolution is now under way, as military organizations begin exploiting a wide variety of new technologies through organizational adaptation and doctrinal innovation. The result will be fundamental change in the ways wars are fought, just as the blitzkrieg and the aircraft carrier revolutionized warfare following World War I. Among the significant new technologies often identified are information systems, including advanced sensors, communications, and data processing, long-range precision guided weapons, and advanced simulation techniques. If these views are correct, the international trade in arms will undergo a fundamental transformation. While specialized defense hardware will remain, dual-use equipment will become increasingly central to the performance of advanced military forces. As a result, it will become more difficult to track the implications of trade in defense-related hardware simply by monitoring transfers of major weapons systems.

Interest in restraining the conventional arms trade has intensified in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf war as well as in the face of continuing hostilities in Bosnia, Somalia, and elsewhere. Analysts differ considerably, however, over whether the new features of the post-Cold War security landscape create an environment more conducive or more hostile to future arms trade restraint. Developed and developing countries must cooperate on technology transfer and other aspects of the conventional arms trade problem to devise new approaches to replace traditional efforts focused on constraining supply that are virtually doomed to failure in the future. The need for nontraditional approaches is especially strong in the face of the difficulties for both suppliers and recipients in balancing the competing and complex political, economic, and security interests at work in arms transfer decisions. New approaches should be built on the foundations of the initiation of supplier-recipient dialogues, intensified regional arms control efforts, and heightened transparency and confidence building in arms trade transactions.

With the end of the Cold War and superpower rivalry, policymakers will want to know more about more common types of conflict and the transfers of conventional arms needed to fight them. Unfortunately, as interest in arms transfer intelligence increases, the relative amount of money available to track and analyze this trade is likely to remain stable or decline. Improvements in arms trade intelligence are possible, however, if intelligence agencies are willing to risk prioritizing and, arguably, narrowing their focus to those aspects of the trade that have not yet received the attention they deserve. Here key opportunities include defining arms trade intelligence to exclude the proliferation of strategic weapons or the arming of terroxist organizations; substituting unclassified academic analysis for current, less critical classified tasks; and experimenting with market mechanisms to discipline how policymakers task the arms transfer intelligence community

More than thirty years of research on the positive or negative consequences of various military activities for the civilian sector has failed to yield strong and unambiguous evidence one way or the other. This article briefly describes the history of this guns-versus-butter controversy, noting the close relationship between U.S. policy needs and the response of the research community. The article then focuses on the debate over the role that arms transfers, military assistance, and defense industries play in Third World economic growth and development. Finally, it assesses the relevance of the debate for today's post-Cold War world.

Arms transfers to the Middle East have been high on the international agenda since the Gulf war and the end of the Cold War. But the precise nature of recent developments, and the underlying motivations and forces that have produced the current pattern of weapons proliferation in the region, are poorly understood. A close examination of the data suggests that arms transfers to the Middle East have actually declined in the 1990s, following similar patterns manifest around the world. In addition, by shifting the focus away from arms transfers, toward overall changes in weapons arsenals and the relationship between weapons and armed forces, one can gain some insight into the underlying motives that drive regional arms acquisitions. These motives can be regional, systemic, or internal, and they interact in such a way as to enormously complicate the process of security building in the Middle East.

This article examines the impact of the changing structure of the international system on various aspects of the arms trade. The passing of the Cold War allows for comparative analysis of three distinct international systems: the interwar, the postwar or Cold War, and the emerging post-Cold War period. This involves gauging the impact of changing system structure (bipolarity, multipolarity), the degree of ideological conflict at the big-power level, alliance patterns, rates of military technological change, and so forth on such aspects of the arms trade as supplier markets, patterns of supplier-recipient relations, transfer modes, and levels of arms dependency by recipients. The emerging post-Cold War period already appears to evidence some trends in arms transfer patterns reminiscent of the interwar period, specifically those involving the depoliticization and denationalization of that trade. The impact of the military Technical Revolution in an era of contracting global arms transfers is viewed as crucial to the emerging arms trade.

More attention has focused on the issue of arms transfers since Iraq, with an inventory based exclusively on foreign military technology, invaded Kuwait. Political and academic analysts of the issue are handicapped by the absence of an agreed set of data with which to work. Given that different analytical tasks require different data sets, this article reviews the types of data that could be of value. Using the aggregate data that are available, the article tries to identify trends in the trade in major conventional weapons and assess which of these trends are transient--an interim adjustment to the end of the Cold War--and which might be more long-lived. Finally, the article offers a projection of macrotrends over the medium term.

This article examines the administration of Britain's overseas arms trade through a consideration of the role of the main government departments concerned with its control and regulation - the Department of Trade and Industry, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence. Additionally it examines the activities of 'arms-length' public agencies such as the Defence Export Services Organization and International Military Services whose job it is to promote arms sales. It concludes that while the promotion function may (but does not have to) run counter to that of control, the latter is comprehensively and competently administered. If it fails - and it has done so recently - it is because of political intervention and not administrative shortcomings.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) intensified exports of military equipment during the 1980s in a bid to gain a larger share of the world arms market. Among its recipients were Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Algeria and Myanmar. The proliferation of arms coming out of China has forced the US government to consider control measures. However, the activities and motives behind PRC arms trade must be understood thoroughly before an effective policy can be implemented.

The pervasiveness of the international weapons trade is staggering in total dollar amounts. The US, for example, sold $30.7 billion worth of arms between 1987 and 1990. It supplies 35% of the weapons that go to Middle Eastern countries. Despite the change in Russia's defense industry and that country's reduction in supplying weapons to its former communist allies around the globe, there is still an international 'frenzy' in the effort to secure armaments and equipment.

'THE NEW ADMINISTBATION has made it known that it will look favorably upon arms sales, especially to U.S. allies in NATO,' says Tamar Gabelnick, director of the Federation of American [...]

The following 4 figures were omitted from Dr. Shannon Lindsey Blanton's article, 'The Transfer of Arms and the Diffusion of Democracy: Do Arms Promote or Undermine the 'Third Wave', ' [...]