[jostmey]

Wow. I always knew the US exported arms, so I kind of expected that we were the worst offenders. But whoa! Look at Russia. The country must be depending on weapon exports to keep their economy going, which is simply not diversified enough to weather through the down times.

[throwaway765]

The data is actually sales not exports, the US also exports a significant amount under military aid which doesn't seem to be included here.

For example (and not to make a political point), the graph lists exports to Israel as $35m, but military aid was $2.8b in 2010

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/multimedia/military-spending...

[powertower]

I don't think those values can be interpreted like that.

They are some type of "trend indicator values" that "do not represent real financial flows but are a crude instrument to estimate volumes of arms transfers, regardless of the contracted prices, which can be as low as zero in the case of military aid".

I'm pretty sure the US exports for sale dollar amounts much much more than anyone else does.

There is also the question of the graphed "value" of small arms vs larger systems.

[eldr]

I agree with you, I don't think this graphic (or at least the underlying data) is very useful as an indicator of international military relationships. Of course it doesn't claim to be either.

As a single example, I recently decided that I don't know enough about US-Israel relations and started reading more on the topic. A report[1] I found linked from Wikipedia states that the US has provided Israel with $121 billion dollars (non-inflation-adjusted) since WWII, almost all of it military aid. The graphic shows $35 million in exports to Israel for 2013, the report lists $2.9 billion dollars in military aid in 2013.

If those figures didn't make it onto the graphic, there are probably many others which also don't.

[1] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

[JackFr]

"worst offender" = "arsenal of democracy", at least to Franklin Roosevelt.

[curiouslurker]

I wonder how much of this is AK-47s. It is arguably the most successful arm.

[trhway]

>It is arguably the most successful arm.

depends on the definition of "success" :) I'd say that no number of AKs would have protected the Assad regime the way the S-300/400 has done so far. The Su-27 platform has been kind of AK of multi-purpose fighter planes.

[mc32]

Not very much.

They licensed it to China, what was the Eastern block, etc. And, light arms are cheap, relative to other armament; they're not going to make a dent into those kinds of numbers.

[joshuapants]

Well they haven't made -47s since 1959 so probably 0.

[TaliaNa]

"The country must be depending on weapon exports to keep their economy going" = keeping wars going is good for sales

[classicsnoot]

What about the fact that (before Russia invaded Ukraine) global death rates from conflict go down nearly every year? Could their be an argument made that prevalence of weapons systems reduce outbreaks of conflict, in effect making arms providers 'peace manufacturers'? Not my perspective, just wondering.