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Current Trends and Developments in the 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.