The overall decline in weapons sales worldwide in 2008 can be explained by the reluctance of many nations to place new arms orders “in the face of the severe international recession,” wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and author of the study.

from the Moscow Times

Arms maker Almaz Antei has delivered 15 batteries of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to China, Interfax reported Friday, under a contract that analysts said could be worth as much as $2.25 billion.

China is a major buyer of Russian weapons, and the two countries say they are trying to forge a strategic partnership, though senior Russian officials are privately concerned about an increasingly assertive China.

Russia has delivered 15 S-300 batteries to China, said Igor Ashurbeili, director general of Almaz Antei, which makes the missiles, Interfax reported.

"We have implemented a contract to deliver to China the newest system S-300," Ashurbeili said. He gave no details about the value of the deal. A spokesman for the plant was not immediately available for comment.

In Russia's armed forces, an S-300 battery normally consists of four truck-mounted installations, each with four missiles held in metal tubes.

Analysts said the contracts to deliver the S-300 to China were signed in the mid-2000s and that each battery usually costs about $120 million to $150 million. That indicates that the value of the Chinese contract was about $1.80 billion to $2.25 billion.

"The price for one S-300 battery varies between about $120 million and $150 million," said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of the CAST defense think tank.

The S-300, known in the West as the SA-20, can shoot down cruise missiles and aircraft. The missiles have a range of at least 150 kilometers and travel at more than two kilometers per second.

Russian arms exports rose to a post-Soviet record of $8.5 billion last year, with Algeria, India and China accounting for two-thirds of deliveries. Syria, Venezuela, Malaysia and Vietnam accounted for another 20 percent of deliveries.

Moscow has said it plans to fulfill a contract to supply the S-300, nicknamed "the favorite" in Russia, to Iran, unnerving Israel and the United States.

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see toon at top.,,, and S300..

From the Guardian

Simon Jenkins

...

I say cut defence. I don't mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation "for once in a generation" to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but "whether government needs to provide certain public services at all".

What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne "ringfence" defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?

Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber's "fundamental re-evaluation of their role". He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.

I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent "enemy" lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?

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Gus: cripes!... If we don't arms ourselves to the teeth, who's going to sell weapons to whom?. The weapons manufacturers would have to retool and make toys, for Krissake!!! ... Er... Great idea nonetheless...

See toon at top...

From Time Magazine... (July 2010)

If China's satellites and spies were working properly, there was a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Navy last week. A new class of U.S. super weapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy has been dispatching modified "boomers" to who knows where (they do travel underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they now hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads.

Their capability makes watching these particular submarines especially interesting. The 14 Trident-carrying subs are useful in the unlikely event of a nuclear Armageddon, and Russia remains their prime target. But the Tomahawk-outfitted quartet carries a weapon that the U.S. military has used repeatedly against targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan. (See pictures of the U.S. military in the Pacific.)

That's why alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-foot USS Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay. More alarms likely were sounded when the USS Michigan arrived in Pusan, South Korea, the same day. And the klaxons would have maxed out as the USS Florida surfaced the same day at the joint U.S.-British naval base at Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 additional Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood. "There's been a decision to bolster our forces in the Pacific," says Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There is no doubt that China will stand up and take notice."

U.S. officials deny any message is being directed at Beijing, saying the Tomahawk triple-play was a coincidence. But they did make sure news of the new deployments appeared in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post — on July 4, no less. The Chinese took notice quietly. "At present, common aspirations of countries in the Asian and Pacific regions are seeking for peace, stability and regional security," Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said Wednesday. "We hope the relevant U.S. military activities will serve for the regional peace, stability and security, and not the contrary."

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The United States has informally told Japan it will retire its sea-based Tomahawk cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads, in line with President Barack Obama's policy to pursue a world free of atomic weapons, government sources said Monday.

Washington said the move would not affect the nuclear umbrella, addressing concerns in Tokyo about the step's effect on U.S. deterrence against potential attacks from China, North Korea or other countries, the sources said.

The retirement will probably be stipulated in the Nuclear Posture Review, a new nuclear strategic guideline the Obama administration is slated to submit to Congress next month, they said.

U.S. subs carrying nuclear-tipped Tomahawks called in Japan during the Cold War, but the missiles were later removed for storage at bases on the U.S. mainland.

Their retirement will also likely affect debate in Japan over Tokyo's ongoing investigation into a secret pact with Washington to allow the U.S. military to bring nuclear weapons to Japan, because decommissioning will rule out the possibility of nuclear missiles coming into the country.

Past port calls and passage through Japanese waters by submarines armed with Tomahawks have raised controversy in terms of Tokyo's three nonnuclear principles of not possessing, producing or allowing nuclear arms on its territory.

Washington notified Tokyo earlier this year of its policy to gradually decommission the nuclear Tomahawks, citing the cost for maintaining the missiles, the sources said.

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We trust no-one but our shotgun...

Russia Accuses U.S. of Loose Arms Control

09 August 2010
Reuters
The Foreign Ministry accused the United States on Saturday of breaching its obligations over the nonproliferation of weapons, a sign of strained relations between the two powers.

The charge came after the New START arms control treaty between the United States and Russia suffered a setback last week when the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee delayed a ratification vote until mid-September.

The Russian military said it had successfully test-fired two ballistic missiles from the Barents Sea on Friday, Interfax reported, in another sign of muscle-flexing from Moscow.

The Foreign Ministry said on its web site that the United States had been in breach of several arms-related treaties including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and a treaty on conventional weapons.

"During the START I period, the United States failed to resolve Russia's concerns over how this treaty was being fulfilled," the ministry said, citing a long list of what it called irregularities, including a U.S. failure to provide information on ballistic missiles trials.

In Washington, the State Department dismissed the accusation. "We have met our obligations under START," a spokeswoman said.

The Foreign Ministry also accused the United States of preventing international supervision of its compliance with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

The ministry also said secret information from the U.S. Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory had ended up in the hands of a drug dealing gang in 2006.

"The peculiarity of the incident was that, unlike in several other such cases when nuclear secrets were obtained by foreign intelligence services, now they were found by police with a criminal group connected to the drug trade," it said.

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WASHINGTON — The global economic recession significantly pushed down purchases of weapons last year to the lowest level since 2005, a new government study has found.

The report to Congress concluded that the value of worldwide arms deals in 2009 was $57.5 billion, a drop of 8.5 percent from 2008.

While the United States maintained its role as the world’s leading supplier of weapons, officials nonetheless saw the value of its arms trade sharply decline in 2009. This was in contrast to 2008, when the United States increased the value of its weapons sales despite a drop in business for competitors in the global arms bazaar.

For 2009, the United States signed arms deals worth $22.6 billion — a dominating 39 percent of the worldwide market. Even so, that sales figure was down from $38.1 billion in 2008, which had been a surprising increase over the $25.7 billion in 2007 that defied sluggish economic trends.

The decrease in American weapons sales in 2009 was caused by a pause in major orders from clients in the Middle East and Asia, which had pumped up the value of contracts the year before. At the same time, there were fewer support and services contracts signed with American defense firms last year, the study said.

Russia was a distant second in worldwide weapons sales in 2009, concluding $10.4 billion in arms deals, followed by France, with $7.4 billion in contracts. Other leading arms traders included Germany, Italy, China and Britain.

The annual report was produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. The analysis, regarded as the most detailed collection of unclassified global arms sales data available to the public, was delivered to members of the House and Senate over the weekend in advance of their return to work on Monday after the summer recess.

The decline in new weapons sales worldwide in 2009 was caused by government decisions “to defer the purchase of major systems” in a period of “severe international recession,” wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and the author of the study.

The recession did not halt military modernization and improvements, as nations sought to make their armed forces more lethal despite tight budgets.

see toon at top...

Pentagon to notify Congress of $60bn Saudi arms deal

Black Hawk helicopters, like this US model, are expected to be part of the deal
The Pentagon is set to notify the US Congress of a $60bn (£39bn) weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, reports quoting US officials say.

The deal to sell advanced military aircraft to the Saudi kingdom is aimed at shoring up an Arab ally against Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The arms deal, set to support 75,000 US jobs, would be among the largest yet.

The notification will set off a review where lawmakers could push for changes, impose conditions or block the trade.

Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan said Congressional notification was expected within "the next week or so" but he declined to comment on details of the proposed package.

The BBC's Paul Adams in Washington says the administration is unlikely to encounter much opposition to the sale of weaponry to a traditional ally and will probably argue that it is all part of a strategy to bolster friendly Arab governments in the face of growing strategic threats from Iran.