Russia last week hinted at supplying arms to North Korea while on Wednesday Australia was found to have earlier covertly signed a deal with Israel to help expand its growing arms industry. Meanwhile, North America’s and Europe’s massive arms industries are flourishing these past two years as they busily pour weapons and munitions into war-torn Ukraine and genocidally rampaging Israel.
How many different types of wars of varying scales of destruction of life and infrastructure are being waged in the world today? How many deaths, maimings, blindings, losses of loved ones, do we wake up to on Sunday mornings? How many churches, mosques, sacred places, schools, hospitals and libraries flattened? How many, every minute, every day?
Understanding the world today is an experience of learning about human affairs, domestic, national and international, affairs that have become so conflict-ridden, so deadly, so nauseatingly cruel. Worse, doesn’t this sheer volume of knowledge and awareness, thrust on us now by constantly invasiveinformation media – from social media ‘chats’ to phone podcasts to news on TV – exhaust us? Our disgust and anger alone, aside from our shock and sorrow, makes us shun this learning, no?
But even if we don’t ‘want’ to learn, as humans, as social beings, as children, parents, as friends, colleagues, neighbours, kin, we ‘need’ to know, don’t we? We simply have to know, for our own security and well-being, emotional and physical.
A military hand grenade weighs 900 grams and its blast is ear-splitting, kills within a metre radius. So we can easily imagine that the child survivor of a 1,000 kg bomb blast in Palestine’s Gazah Strip, does not immediately care about her family or schoolmates in her whole apartment block smashed into rubble around her. She, even if not physically wounded, just cannot hear anything due to the blast effect on her eardrums, and, the concussion has temporarily stopped her brain’s inability to think and even feel.
The introductory paragraph of this week’s column specifies not the tragedy nor cruelty but, the industrious nature of these wars. And directly linked as they are to national and transnational economies (state industries, domestic and global businesses), their industrial productivity is finetuned according to geopolitical interests and strategic calculations by states and between states.
Defence pact
In Pyongyang early last week, visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a defence pact with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea, labelled by the Western powers as a ‘rogue state’) that fully commits the two countries to defending each other in situations of war. North Korea has been in a state of war with South Korea and its allied Western allies (the US, Japan and, indirectly, NATO) since 1952. Russia is struggling with indirect NATO expansionism in its war with Western funded and equipped Ukraine.
On Thursday, in Vietnam, on his second leg of his two-nation tour of Asia, Putin told news media that Russia would begin supplying arms to North Korea. In an op-ed essay authored by him and published in a prestigious Vietnamese newspaper as he arrived in Hanoi, the Russian strongman reportedly discusses the world’s ongoing great power confrontations. He has called for the establishment of a ‘rules-based international order’, a slogan also parroted by Washington, Vietnam’s most destructive enemy not too long ago.
Even though the bulk of its trade is now with China and the West, Vietnam, which defeated the US-Australian-New Zealand (ANZUS) invasion in the 1960s-70s, continues to buy most of its arms from Russia.
Last Thursday, The Guardian newspaper of London revealed that the Australian state of Victoria had confidentially signed a defence industry development pact with the government of Israel in 2022 but had not announced the agreement for security reasons. After The Guardian’s exposé, the Australian Government in Canberra rationalised the defence industry deal as one aimed at boost Victoria state’s fledgling arms industry which would benefit the overall national economy.
Rejecting Opposition criticisms, Government officials argued that Australia needed to take advantage of the industry demand arising from the global conflict conditions. War is good for business, no?
Just months ago, US President Joe Biden reassured a Washington gathering that his latest billion-dollar arms supply tranche to Israel was not, in any way, a drain on the US budget because “99 percent” of the value of that arms supply is ploughed back into the US economy because it comprised on American arms industry output. In addition to sustaining the world’s largest arms industry, it also ensure American jobs, he said.
‘Suicide drones’
Meanwhile, Ukraine is complaining that the ongoing supply of the powerful American F-16 fighter jets would not suffice to resist Russian airpower given that the supersonic aerial interceptors were no match for the successful Russian ‘suicide drones’ that are supplied by Iran. Iran, desperate for sustaining its economy gripped in Western sanctions, has been happy to export its relatively cheap range of sophisticated military drone aircraft to meet urgent Russian needs.
Although Ukraine’s ageing Russian-built strike jets struggle to counter the latest design Russian MiGs and Sukhoi jets, Russia had begun too many of its aircraft. The Iranian drones are an useful stopgap until Moscow’s massive defence industry is able to replace the Russian airforce losses.
Critics in Kyiv are reportedly complaining that the F-16 jets, introduced in the late 1980s are far older than the Ukrainian pilots that are to fly them. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian news media, desperate to revive the morale of a tired nation, have called the promised 85 F-16s as “manna from Heaven”. Is not this a poignant example of how such death-and-destruction dealing military equipment can have spiritual meaning for a people engaged in an intense war?
The Bible becomes a military manual. After all the Hebrew Bible is constantly quoted by Israeli politicians to whip up the Israeli population’s genocidal fervour against Palestinians, a fervour that was born in the very founding of the European Jewish settler colony in ‘the Holy Land’ in the 1940s.
The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, a Swiss think tank which monitors wars worldwide, currently lists 110 ‘armed conflicts’ ravaging the 194 nation states and failed state regions (like Libya, Somalia) in the world today. There are many such expert institutions ranging from Washington to Stockholm to Singapore to Beijing, that monitor and study wars. A definition of an ‘armed conflict’ is fairly simple and most of these thinktanks will have similarly long lists.
A thinktank in Uppsala, Sweden, counts 165 ‘armed conflicts’ large and small, within and between states. Wikipedia, which lists nearly 90 wars, is most instructive for its details about these wars, including the year of outbreak. There are dozens of armed conflicts ongoing since 1948, from Palestine to north-east India, all of them arising from Western colonisation and the forcible demarcations of territory ignoring indigenous demographies.
As these columns pointed out previously, neighbouring India has been battling long-running, low level insurgencies by the north-eastern tribal nations ever since the territories of the Naga, Mizo, Bodo and other communitieswere handed over to the new Indian state by the retreating colonial British. These insurgencies continue in fits and starts given the continuing poverty and population displacement by Indian migrations from India’s Hindu-Hindi or Bengali-speaking heartland.
Sporadic insurgency
Likewise, an organisationally strong but militarily weak Leftist ‘Naxalite’ movement now wages a similar sporadic insurgency (with scores of deaths yearly) across five central Indian states ranging from Bihar to Andhra.
All this continues to nourish India’s massive arms industry, a vital economic sector befitting India’s great power significance. India makes its own military equipment from hand grenades (900 grammes) to nuclear bombs, main battle tanks to aircraft carriers. However, unlike the US, India has not needed to make 1,000 kg bombs. Unlike regional rival China, however, India is not fully self-sufficient in all of the required military technology.
Across the world, depending on their internal politics and degree of intensity of external force projection envisaged, nations are developing their own arms industries. Even less externally aggressive ones are compelled to build up their militaries by the security pressures arising from powerful, grasping, neighbouring states. Others, with corrupt and oppressive regimes, are encouraged by greater powers that want to use such regimes as their own geopolitical tools (like Israel).
The world’s arms industry is one of the world’s biggest, most rapidly expanding economic sectors. Unfortunately so, since these engines of death and destruction become worshipped as the tools of survival and hence are worshipped by the humanity that deploys them. They also then recreate humanity in their own image.
