Interesting article on Gulf States weapons procurement. The last third of the article covers the tribal politics that were seldom mentioned in mainstream press.
Nadim Hasbani is a Researcher at the Paris based French Institute of Geopolitics “Institut Français de geopolitique” and an Associated Researcher at the Middle East North Africa Research Group of the Ghent University.
This article was first published in the Defense & Security Analysis magazine, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 73-88, March 2006
This article was first published in the Defense & Security Analysis magazine, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 73-88, March 2006
INTRODUCTION
The Gulf region currently remains the largest defence procurement market in the world. With tens of billions of dollars spent annually on highly lethal and technological weapons, it is a very high value-added market for Western defence industries.
The Middle East, which extends from the Maghreb, through the Mashrek to the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, is far from being homogenous, particularly in terms of its armaments market. However, a distinction must be made between the weight and the characteristics of the major defence markets in North Africa, the Near East and the rest of the Middle East.
Traditionally, Russia has had the monopoly on major Algerian Defence contracts. With the end of the arms embargo, a new Libyan defence market is emerging, but has yet to come into its own. Israel and Egypt are in a league of their own, because of massive US military aid received following the signing of the 1979 peace accords : approximately US$2.3 billion for the former and US$1.3 - US$1.8 billion for the latter . Jordan, since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, is in a similar position. Syria finds itself virtually excluded from the international procurement market, with the exception of the sale of Russian ground-to-air missiles following Bashar el Assad’s visit to Moscow in January 2005. Conventional Syrian weapons are nearly exclusively Soviet, dating from the first half of the 1980s.
The oil monarchies of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - make up the core of the Middle East defence market, with just under 40 percent of the world’s total weapons sales during the 1990s. Combined, its ratio of military spending to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the highest in the world and, on average, is above 6 per cent. This ratio is two times greater than in industrialised countries, where the average is closer to 2.4 per cent. .. ...
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