ALLIES Civil-Military Relations Conference: Arms Trade Panel
On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the conference’s panel on the arms trade.
On the first day of the conference, attendees welcomed Jeff Abramson, Miriam Pemberton, Sam Perlo-Freeman, and Sarah Detzner as participants on a panel that explored the dynamics of the defense industry and global arms trade. Abramson, a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, began the conversation by noting how the war in Yemen, fought on the Saudi side with U.S. weapons, has highlighted the tension between humanitarian concerns and political leverage. Maintaining defense ties with allies, as well as relationship-building with potential security partners, are well-worn but suspect rationales for selling arms abroad. Domestically, keeping the industry base intact can be a winning argument too, although the belief that propping up the defense industry as an effective jobs program has been undercut by recent research.
Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, spoke on military spending trends as well as the U.S. military’s response to climate change. She clarified how the Budget Control Act has restrained spending increases but also pointed out the many ways the Department of Defense can overcome caps through methods such as adding to the Overseas Contingency Operations fund. Pemberton also discussed the imbalance of resources between diplomacy and the military, as well as the future implications of that imbalance. Finally, she noted that while the military has spoken a great deal about climate change, its primary focus remains on adaptation rather than mitigation.
Sam Perlo-Freeman, formerly head of the SIPRI Project on Military Expenditure and now heading up the World Peace Foundation’s Global Arms Trade and Corruption Project, spoke largely on military expenditure trends worldwide and arms trade corruption. He elaborated on the ethical issues behind military grey zones and situations just short of war. He also spoke about the relationship between jobs and military-industrial spending as well as the role of defense systems contractors.
That was a theme picked up by Sarah Detzner, a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and former Department of Defense staffer, who spoke about the possible changes the U.S military could make to address concerns about the military-industrial complex. She discussed several issues in procurement and bidding procedures, highlighting their potential for abuse. One weakness is the revolving door system in which current service personnel end up negotiating on behalf of the government with defense contractors who have far greater experience and expertise, resulting in predictably poor deals. These contractors are often drawn from the ranks of recently retired senior officers who served in related positions, creating clear conflicts of interest. The second issue she drew attention to was the lack of meaningful competition between the leading defense contractors, who often partner on large projects. Finally, she discussed how the congressional appropriation system encourages legislators to promote projects that will jobs to their districts, rather than those that represent the best investments for the force. Detzner proposed several solutions to these issues, namely stronger regulations in negotiation procedures and empowering pushback from service and bureaucratic personnel on big-ticket procurements that are simply impractical.
The panel concluded with a Q&A session with the student participants which touched on key themes in the panelists’ talks, including the revolving door phenomenon, the ethical and political dilemmas in the arms trade, and the U.S. defense budget. The student participants then split into break-out sessions to discuss themes of interest with individual panelists.