WASHINGTON -- Next year, for the first time, the United States will produce more combat planes for foreign air forces than for the Pentagon, highlighting America's replacement of the former Soviet Union as the world's main arms supplier.
Encouraged by the Clinton administration, the defense industry last year had its best post-Cold War export year, selling $32 billion worth of weapons overseas, more than twice the 1992 total of $15 billion.
As the administration and the industry look abroad for new markets to offset military spending cutbacks at home, they are raising concern in Congress and a chorus of criticism from arms control advocates.
"Things have moved toward the 'merchants of death' view of arms production," said Randall Forsberg, executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Cambridge, Mass. "It's becoming a commercial business involved in profits and jobs rather than security."
This will be the last year this century that the U.S. defense industry will produce more combat planes for domestic than overseas use, according to a study by Ms. Forsberg.
Next year, 92 combat planes will be delivered to U.S. forces; 97 will go abroad. In 1996, the Pentagon will get just 24, compared with 153 for overseas. Planes are, except for ships, the most expensive weapons and account for more than one-half the value of U.S. arms exports.
The increase in arms exports, Ms. Forsberg said, creates a long-term paradox for the United States: Foreign sales were meant to help keep the U.S. defense industry operating and able meet future threats, but the main source of new threats is likely to come from the proliferation of arms abroad.
"They are going to create the very threats they are insuring against," she said. "Short-term commercial interests are outweighing our long-term security interests."
Joel Johnson, international vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association, countered that, as the United States reduces its overseas military presence and demands that allies accept more of the defense burden, it is inevitable that the allies will need more weapons.
7+ "You can't have it both ways," he said.
New product development
The export of older-model combat planes is overtaking their production for domestic use, he said, as the Pentagon develops such new programs as the F-22 fighter, improved F-18 attack jets and the Commanche helicopter.
Once those new planes go into production for the Pentagon around the turn of the century, the gap between higher exports and lower domestic sales will be corrected, he said.
"The only thing now keeping the [production] lines open is exports," Mr. Johnson said.
Noting that 450,000 U.S. defense workers have lost their jobs since 1991, Mr. Johnson said: "Why do you want to fire people in St. Louis and hire them in Paris?"
Mindful of the controversy, the Clinton administration is forging a new arms sales policy. A senior White House official involved in drafting the policy said it would seek to establish an "international regime" of nations with "a common set of standards" for arms exports.
The intent would be to restrict arms exports to particular regions or countries and bar the sale of certain weapons systems altogether. The official declined to be more specific.
"The object of the policy is to address American interests and, more broadly, the interests of peace and stability," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It is not to cut arms sales by some specific dollar amount, or percentage.
"Clearly, what we want to do is create a policy that restrains those things that ought to be restrained, and, at the same time, doesn't preclude arms sales in those situations in which it remains in the national interest to proceed."
Security, not economics
Testifying to the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year, Defense Secretary William J. Perry said: "The dominant criterion for determining whether any weapons systems . . . are sold to a foreign government still is a national security decision, not an economic decision."
But critics question that assertion.
"The [Clinton] policy and practice, as far as we can see, is a continuation of what the policy under Bush and Reagan was, which was sell, sell, sell," said Sima Osdoby, director of policy for Women's Action for New Directions, a Washington group that is seeking to divert defense spending to social programs. "The real imperative was most sharply articulated during the '92 campaign, when arms sales were announced as a way to jobs, jobs jobs."
Natalie J. Goldring, of the the British American Security Information Council, a Washington-based advocacy and research group, said: "The United States has a special responsibility to lead efforts toward arms-transfer control. Instead, U.S. policy is moving in the direction of less-restricted arms sales."
In a paper titled "In Search of Arms Control," she pointed to Mr. pTC Clinton's support of major arms-sales contracts during the 1992 election campaign and while in office; his loosening of controls on high-technology exports; the taxpayer subsidy of U.S. company displays at foreign air shows; and an Air Force plan to sell up to 360 used F-16s abroad to enable it to buy up to 88 more-sophisticated planes.
U.S. takes arms lead
Until 1990, the Soviet Union led in military sales to an arms-hungry world as it sought to export and defend global Communist revolution. Between 1989 and 1991, as the Soviets retreated from the market, world arms sales fell by 53 percent. U.S. arms sales declined less steeply, by 34 percent, leaving the United States with a bigger share of a smaller pie. In 1991, the United States took the lead in international arms sales and has widened it since.
In 1981, the United States supplied 19.3 percent of world arms exports, compared with the Soviet Union's 39.9 percent. In 1991, according to the latest statistics from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the U.S. share had nearly doubled, to 37.8 percent; the Soviet share was down to 26 percent.
The Arms Control Association, a Washington research and lobbying group, says that the export trend has continued. Last year, the United States supplied about 50 percent of the world arms market; Russia supplied 17 percent.
U.S. arms sales were boosted by the Persian Gulf war, which provided a showcase for advanced U.S. weapons technology, with "smart" bombs disappearing on worldwide TV down the air conditioning ducts of strategic buildings in Iraq. Governments able to afford such weapons lined up to place their orders.
"They said, 'Hmm, U.S. technology seems to blow everything else away, so we will take some of that,' " said William J. Durch, of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based research organization that studies security issues. Sweden, for example, sought in 1992 to sell its most sophisticated attack plane to Finland. The Finns instead bought 64 F/A-18s, worth $3 billion, from Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles.
The United States has even overcome its traditional reluctance to arm the Third World. It increased its share of the military market in developing countries from 12.8 percent in 1981 to 32.3 percent in 1991. Over the same period, the Soviet share dropped from 42.7 percent to 33.3 percent.
Most of the arms-sales growth is in two regions: the Middle East and Eastern Asia. According to the Arms Control Association, the United States agreed to sell $38.7 billion worth of arms to seven Middle Eastern countries -- Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, and July 1, 1993.
One country race
Critics assert that the United States in some areas of the world is engaged in an arms race with itself by supplying weapons to both sides of potential conflicts. Turkey and Greece, historic foes, have been two of this country's biggest customers. But the most dramatic example has been in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia placed a $9 billion order for 72 F-15XPs in 1992. This year, Israel matched that with a $2.4 billion purchase of 25 ultrasophisticated F-15Is.
"The argument that we are continuing the arms race is entirely justified," said Arthur G. Atkins, a fellow with the Arms Control Association.
Questioned why the administration was selling arms to both sides in the Middle East when regional arms-control talks are being held in the gulf state of Qatar, he said, "Their security needs are just not at the same level as the weapons we are supplying them."
Some in Congress express concern that economic considerations are driving conventional-arms sales overseas, jeopardizing national security. Legislation to set standards for U.S. arms exports has been introduced in both the House and Senate.