Documents Obtained by FAS Shed New Light on US Arms Transfers
by Matt Schroeder
The Federation of American Scientists has acquired two previously unreleased US government reports on arms transfers, one on recent sales of US weapons and the other on arms purchased for the Afghanistan government with US military aid. Both documents were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act.
The first report, which is often referred to as the Section 36(a) report after the section in the Arms Export Control Act that requires it, contains data on, inter alia, Foreign Military Sales, transfers of Excess Defense Articles, grants and loans through the Foreign Military Financing Program, projected arms sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales, and Security Assistance Surveys (including end-use monitoring). The report contains detailed data on transfers of Major Defense Equipment in 2009 and the total value of arms transfers by country in the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2010 (1 October – 31 December 2009). Given recent unrest in the Middle East, data on recent or pending arms sales to Bahrain, Egypt, and Yemen is likely to be of particular interest.
The other document acquired by the FAS is a lengthy (137 page) list of arms procured through the Defense Department’s Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF). The millions of items listed in the report range from “drugs and surgical dressings” to M24 sniper rifles to Russian cargo aircraft. Given that many of these purchases are not recorded in the main annual reports on US arms sales, this document may be the most complete (consolidated) source of data on items acquired through the ASFF.
Without information, without factual information, you can’t act. You can’t relate to the world you live in. And so it’s super important for us to be able to monitor what’s happening around the world, analyze the material, and translate it into something that different audiences can understand.
Russia currently maintains nearly 5,460 nuclear warheads, with an estimated 1,718 deployed. This represents a slight decrease in total warheads from previous years but still positions Russia as the world’s largest nuclear power alongside the United States.
Nuclear weapons budgeting is like agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment.
The United States Air Force has forward deployed about one-third of its B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia, or about half the B-2s considered fully operational at any given time.