US Leads the World in Arms Sales, Profiting Off Death and Destruction

[Igel]

13. In $, that's true for most years.

There have been years in which Russia's trumped the US for sales in $.

But keep in mind that some countries produce cheaper weapons. You can get two or three of a kind of weapon from them for what one costs from the US.

And this doesn't include black and gray market sales, where weapons that are only for deployment inside the country of origin wind up elsewhere in reasonable numbers, but nobody reports that army bases are missing theirs. Those are the weapons that get sold to people that the countries don't want to know are customers.

Note that for the most part, those are the places where there are wars that we really don't like. Not always. But if Yemen didn't have black market weapons, if ISIL and an-Nusra didn't have black market weapons, much of the fighting would be much reduced. (Yes, ISIL and an-Nusra have some US weapons, stolen or captured, but let's not do the whole/part fallacy thing today, where 5% is taken to mean 100% so having some US weapons means that they only have US weapons.)

So per capita, total value in $, and # of weapons don't usually line up to make a nice sound bit. It also means having a sense of nuance and able to handle a set of facts instead of a single fact.