13 ms·
World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized
- brandonmenc 12y agoGermany's largest importer is Israel. What an interesting world.
- desdiv 12y ago...Protecting Israel's security is "part of my country's raison d'être," Merkel said in a March 2008 speech to the Israeli Knesset. "For me as German chancellor," she continued, "Israel's security will never be open to negotiation." Partly as a result, Israel gets nuclear-capable submarines from the Germans, as well as any other weapons it wants. This time the Israelis wanted more modern launchers for rocket-propelled grenades and anti-armor weapons, made by Dynamit Nobel Defence near the western German town of Siegen.[0] [0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-weapons-exports-on-the-rise-as-merkel-doctrine-takes-hold-a-870596.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-weapons-e...
- beachstartup 12y agonew century, new alliances, new enemies.
- Xixi 12y agoIt's not necessarily surprising as Germany gives huge discounts on these equipments to Israel. I don't have figures for all deals, but it seems usual for German taxpayers to pay for about a third of the costs. Example: > In 2006, the deal for 2 Dolphin AIP boats was finalized at a total of $1.27 billion, with the German government picking up 1/3 of the cost. http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/germany-may-sell-2-more-dolphin-subs-to-israel-for-117b-01528/ http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/germany-may-sell-2-more-...
- trhway 12y ago>with the German government picking up 1/3 of the cost. probably cheaper than having these people unemployed.
- aint 12y agoInteresting that Ukraine has higher arms export numbers than Sweden, Netherlands and Spain. I never knew Ukraine was an arms exporter at all.
- TaliaNa 12y agoWhat's interesting is that a lot Ukrainian arms exports are to Russia with which it is now at war.
- icegreentea 12y agoThe USSR based a LOT of stuff in the Ukraine, both in terms of operational units, and supporting industry. Most of which was inherited by Ukraine when the USSR was dissolved. While many of the operational units were also dissolved, or traded back to Russia (for example, some Tu-160 strategic bombers), arms export is a pretty sweet way (relatively) for a new country to get some nice cashflow. Wiki says that Ukraine received about 30% of the USSR's arms industry... which is a lot.
- trhway 12y ago>arms export is a pretty sweet way (relatively) for a new country to get some nice cashflow. Ukraine was delivering relatively modern tanks - T-84 - to Thailand about the time when they outlawed Russian language while its army still had the old T-64. Historic lesson - putting your army on modern tanks should be the first step while outlawing a language of a major minority - second - and not otherwise :)
- geoka9 12y ago> when they outlawed Russian language How do you mean? Half of Kiev (Ukrainian capital) speaks Russian as their first language. Half of the Ukrainian army and National Guard (including the volunteers) speak Russian as their fist language. Outlawed, eh?
- trhway 12y agothey made it illegal (outlawed) to have schools in Russian, various government proceedings, etc... - all the achievements of the "Law of the Language", the results of the multi-year completely democratic and lawful process, were scrapped right in a first second by the junta right after the Maidan coup and thus among others sending a clear message of no more democracy for the ethnic Russians.
- walterbell 12y agoImporters: http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html
- davidascher 12y agoThe importer data is way more provocative to me than the exporter data, which met my expectations.
- kpil 12y agoTrue. I have noticed that we in Sweden give away a rather substantial portion of our national gross product in order to fight poverty in other countries. Most of those countries - including India are in this list. The outcome seems to be that we give away money to cater for their poor, while they happily exploit their own workers to out-compete us on every market, while maintaining huge military budgets that they apparently spend on buying things from our most aggressive neighbor. Excellent.
- jigen 12y agoIf you think Sweden gives India any kind of substantial money to reduce poverty, you're seriously mistaken.
- icegreentea 12y agoIndia gets huge amounts of arms import and otherwise support to act as a geopolitical counterweight to China. Both USA and Russia are interested in limiting Chinese influence in South East Asia, and assisting India is a natural way to do so. Oh, also, you should probably think through what the actual goal of foreign support is. Aside from short term humanitarian aid, the stated goal of these funds is to allow systemic uplift. The actual goal is more likely to combination of domestic feel goodism, and permanently crippling the recipient country's ability to uplift on their own will.
- zenpaul 12y agoWow, top 6 importers were surprising: India UAE Saudi Arabia China Pakistan Azerbaijan
- dropdownmenu 12y agoVisualizations like this are always awesome, but it would also be interesting to see the inverse of this chart. Where do countries import arms from?
- TaliaNa 12y agoWhen you hover over a chord you can see both exports and imports for each pair of countries. The arms imports visualization is here: http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html
- Danack 12y agoHovering over a country shows where they import arms from.
- crucini 12y agoWhat are major conventional weapons? Does that include rifles and pistols? Phillipines apparently has less than $1M in exports, yet it's home to Armscor / Rock Island Armory, which sells quite a bit into the US.
- icegreentea 12y agoDoes not appear to include firearms, or even some classes of crew served weapons. The source db is here: http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers you can get 'get everything' query and take a peak at the categories yourself. From a quick skim, its basically every possible type of actual weapon (as in actually kills things) except firearms and crew served machine guns... and I guess grenade launchers. Portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons are on the list. A lot of aircraft and naval avionics is on the list as well.
- yalogin 12y agoAs cool as it looks, its almost impossible to get the finer details with these kinds of visualizations. For example, India apparently exports 10m worth of arms. To find out which countries buy from India is nearly impossible because of the relative scale of the visualization.
- capex 12y agoYou can always google specific information, but visualisations like these help to tell the whole story.
- nols 12y agoBelow is a link to an image from the SIPRI db about countries India exports to. The database they used is pretty easy to use if you want to go more in depth. http://i.imgur.com/qx03P4W.png http://i.imgur.com/qx03P4W.png
- kelvinn 12y agoThis was an interesting way to visualise the arms database. Some patterns are interesting: What appears to be almost 50% of Russia's exports go to India, while what appears to be almost 90% of China's exports go to the countries surrounding India (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a Myanmar).
- ZenoArrow 12y agoYeah, what's up with that? I know India and Pakistan aren't exactly best friends (Kashmir and all that), but they're not at full scale war with each other are they? Why the need for all the arms? India's arms imports in particular are shockingly high, especially for a country with so much need for investment in infrastructure and poverty alleviation. No idea where Bangladesh and Myanmar stand in relation to all this.
- plinkplonk 12y ago"India's arms imports in particular are shockingly high" If you are a country with China for a neighbour, and have experience of having already fought (and lost) a war with China, I bet you would import a lot of arms. India is (among other things) importing arms to defend against China, not Pakistan.
- known 12y agoPatriotism in India is a favorite device of persons with something to sell; A true patriot honors all nations; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India
- jostmey 12y agoWow. 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.
- TaliaNa 12y ago"The country must be depending on weapon exports to keep their economy going" = keeping wars going is good for sales
- classicsnoot 12y agoWhat 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.
- powertower 12y agoI 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 12y agoI 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 http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
- wyager 12y agoI notice there is no US-russia trade. Is this due to trade sanctions?
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoIt may be a factor, but the US and Russia have very few imports overall. They don't need to, because they already produce almost everything they need at home. The graph is difficult to read, but it appears that most countries either have a significant arms industry (and mostly supply themselves and sell to others) or don't (and mostly buy from others). I don't see any countries that have significant amounts of both imports and exports.
- guard-of-terra 12y agoChina both imports and exports if I read correctly.
- hurin 12y agoNo surprise with Russia topping the list. Since 1990 the country's entire economic output has been exploiting what's left of soviet infrastructure and selling natural resources.
- guard-of-terra 12y agoAny countries with totally new economies in the last 25 years? China comes to mind, along with other east asia. But it's natural to exploit what you've already got. And most of Russia's non-military industries turned out not competitive.
- hurin 12y agoWell non-competitive isn't quite correct. Certain industries indeed were non-competitive (i.e. automotive, which btw boomed domestically post 1990), but as a whole they were torn apart by privatization and corruption. One reason being that the way these business and industries transferred into private holdings was always somewhat dubious (and hence the very real risk of losing these holdings with the next change in political winds e.g. Khodorkovsky). Anyone that got their hands on a piece of the soviet-pie tried to get as much out of it putting as little as possible into it.
- remarkEon 12y agoI think showing the types of arms exported by country would be considerably more meaningful. I'd be interested to know if the reason the dollar amounts for certain countries is so high is that they're selling very expensive defense systems and not just a high volume of small arms. And from the source data, it looks like the value is expressed in constant 1990 dollars.
- jdfellow 12y agoWith as popular as Glock is, you'd think Austria would be bigger than a basically insignificant sliver. I suppose if it was scaled by units sold instead of dollar values that may swing it towards inexpensive small arms like Glock pistols. Actually, that may be why USA and Russia are so enormous as exporters: they make expensive heavy arms like tanks, artillery, warplanes, ships, machine guns, bombs, while lots of places "gun guys" (which I sort of am) would think may show up (like Austria) won't because they only make relatively cheap small arms. All of my arms are made in Russia or USA, if that means anything. EDIT: Some other commenters have mentioned the stats don't include firearms and crew-served machine guns. Again, it's all the big stuff.
- bottled_poe 12y ago> All of my arms are made in Russia or USA, if that means anything. As an Australian, I found this statement difficult to parse. The idea of owning a gun is so foreign to me, let alone multiple.
- fit2rule 12y agoAs an Australian, I remember when guns were not something to be feared, but rather used if you need to .. my grandmothers 410 was used to dispatch snakes (dangerous) and rabbits (vermin) on a regular basis, and I remember fondly the bush trips with my uncles and cousins to eradicate invasive swine in the region. Fortunately, Australia is yet to be invaded (unless you count our own ancestors heinous actions against the native owners of the land), or you would perhaps have a different perspective on just how foreign gun ownership can impact your life .. the time may well come, in our lifetimes or shortly thereafter, when Australians are even more subservient to a foreign power than they currently are ..
- EliRivers 12y agoMany nations in which guns are commonplace amongst the citizenry have been invaded, many times. The armies fought, the occupation happened, the vast majority of citizens did not pick up whatever weapon they had to hand to fight the invading army. The prevalence of weaponry amongst the citizenry of the countries involved has no bearing that I can see.
- InInteraction 12y agoHi my name is Natalia, and I'm the creator of this visualization. I want to thank the person who posted it here, and everyone for the discussion. I'd love to hear topics/ideas you are interested in for the future visualizations.
- blumkvist 12y agoHi Natalia. Where did you get the data? Bulgaria's export shows 6m, but a quick google search shows 300m euros for 2014, up from 260 in 2011.
- InInteraction 12y agoData source is SIPRI Arms Transfers Database http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers (the link for the data source is always given below all data visualizations). The latest data available is for the year 2013. Accoutring to SIPRI exports from Bulgaria in 2013 was US$ 6M, you can check it here http://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php http://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php. Please keep in mind that figures are expressed in US$ m. at constant (1990) prices.
- kpil 12y agoHi. Nice! I think it would be nice to be able to group and cluster the countries, rather than just sort them by name. Either geopolitical clusters based on the data, or just by region might make it easier to spot some interesting connections.
- InInteraction 12y agoThanks - it's a great idea. I'm not sure about geopolitical connections, but geographical clusters would make sense.
- rawland 12y agoThank you for the great visualizations! Here some ideas: Personally, I would be interested in sensitivities instead of absolute values to capture trends. Say, * the rate of change of CO2 production per country * ...sensitivities of your given interactions or * money invested in reforestation * change of healthcare expenses per country over time... * expenses for "bio" products vs. "discount"/fast food Thanks again, and have fun! :-)
- rawland 12y agohttp://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html ...quite different!
- jsudhams 12y agoSurprised by the fact that India buys and keeps it. And looks like China buys and give to all the Indian border countries. *Indian here