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Event Recap: Divestment and Transition, July 21, 2021

7/28/2021

1 Comment

 
Pictureclick for video
(first event in series: Exploration of Arms Reduction and Jobs)

​Video of event available at https://youtu.be/0rwErPjE16k 

Panelists discussed their work individually around weapons divestment campaigns, ethical investor advising, and communities finding employment alternatives to the defense industry.

Jeff Abramson, Director of the Forum on the Arms Trade and senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, kicked off the event (3:43) with an introduction of panelists and a recognition that, because there are real people and jobs tied to the arms manufacturing industry, a full conversation about divestment must take into account employment alternatives and ways forward to ensure a smooth transition. 

Lillian Mauldin, founding member of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, then spoke about Women for Weapons Trade Transparency’s efforts to convince the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) to divest from their $52.5 million worth of weapons manufacturers debt and equity securities in their Permanent University Fund as of August 2020 (7:47). She discussed how these investments are currently putting UTIMCO at significant risk of financial, legal, and reputational loss, due to the numerous lawsuits and human rights law violations brought against many of the weapons manufacturers in which UTIMCO is currently invested. She discussed precedent for the implementation of screens to prevent investments in weapons manufacturers; touching on examples of Norway's Government Pension Fund and Eventide Asset Management. Addressing employment concerns brought by some engineering students at UT Austin regarding UTIMCO’s potential divestment, Lillian emphasized that UTIMCO’s investments were purely as a result of their fiduciary duty to the UT System, and not a result of their desire to build relationships with certain companies or funds. Finally, Lillian discussed Women for Weapons Trade Transparency’s plan to take the campaign to the UT System Board of Regents following UTIMCO’s denial of capability to implement policy suggestions aligned with divestment. See also:
  • Women for Weapons Trade Transparency’s UTIMCO Weapons Manufacturer Investments Report (pdf) and 5 minute video presentation

Rich Stazinski, Executive Director of the Heartland Initiative, discussed Heartland’s work to help institutional investors better understand risks of investing in companies involved in conflict-affected and high-risk areas (15:08). He discussed historical precedent for socially responsible investment, including colonial-era Quaker opposition to prisons, Protestant refusal to invest in nuclear weapons in the 1960s, South African resistance to apartheid in the 1980s, and the development of concern with harm to civilians that developed in the 1990s. Rich elaborated on the differences between screening and divestment. Generally speaking, divestment is the act of intentionally selling shares of a company as part of a campaign to reprimand them for a proscribed behavior.  Screening on the other hand is the removal of companies that are rated as poor performers on Environment, Social or Governance (ESG) or other indicators. This often occurs before shares are ever purchased. Rich referenced the emerging gap in investment screening regarding artificial intelligence and surveillance technologies, noting that current screening practices are not considering these new technologies and a diversified weapons market. Since production for these new technologies is often spread widely across multiple vendors, many companies contributing to modern weaponry are not being captured by existing investment screening. When asked by Lillian what could be done to fill in these gaps, Rich recommended that activists develop relationships with technical experts and asset owners so that all parties understand the evolving landscape. Finally, Rich commented on conduct-based exclusion in socially responsible investing practices. He remarked that most funds have relied on UN Security Council (UNSC) arms embargoes as standards for exclusion, but due to the highly politicized nature of UNSC proceedings, these designations fail to screen  actors. See also:
  • Sam Jones & Richard Stazinski, “Advancing business respect for human rights in conflict-affected areas through the UNGPs,” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, June 9, 2021.
  • ​David Kaye and Marietje Schaake, “Opinion: Global spyware such as Pegasus is a threat to democracy. Here’s how to stop it.” Washington Post, July 19, 2021. 
  • Presbyterian Church USA Divestment/Proscription list, 2019

Atlanta-based journalist Taylor Barnes (website) discussed her work covering defense industry workers and defense communities (22:27). Taylor commented that many defense industry workers during the pandemic were surprised to find out that they were designated as essential workers. She described a video of Anthony, a Fort Worth Lockheed Martin worker who was infected with Covid-19, that went viral among F35 manufacturers in Fort Worth Texas after he called into question Lockheed Martin’s care for its employees. Taylor described her solutions journalism coverage of the transition from defense industry to green economy jobs in Huntsville, Alabama; particularly how one one engineer adapted his understanding of jet engines from his time working on fighter jets to create an innovating new wind energy technology. She recounted how a union leader at a Space Force contractor near Huntsville discussed her reporting live on pro-labor talk radio and told listeners,, “transitioning from defense to climate spending is something that actually helps working people, rather than killing working people overseas.” Lastly, Taylor discussed her latest coverage of community concern in Asheville, North Carolina over the construction of a F-35 engine parts plant for a division of Raytheon. The deal was negotiated without public transparency and the town’s residents only had one hour on one day to voice their opposition in a town hall meeting. A coalition of individuals opposing the deal, Reject Raytheon AVL, believes that the green economy will create far more jobs than the military industrial complex. See also:
  • Taylor Barnes, “'Honk for humane jobs': NC activists challenge subsidies for weapons maker,” Facing South/Responsible Statecraft, July 21, 2021; “From arms to renewables: How workers in this Southern military industrial hub are converting the economy,” Southerly, October 27, 2020; and “Trump Administration Quietly Adds Foreign Arms Sale to List of ‘Essential Work’ Some defense workers say their lives shouldn’t be risked to make weapons,” In These Times, May 19, 2020

During the Q&A, guest commentator William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Program of Center for International Policy, discussed the green economic transition as a political issue (41:40). He commented that, in Congress, supporting the military industrial complex for job creation is the path of least resistance. When asked by Lillian how defense contractors and weapons manufacturers play up job creation in their lobbying and advertising, William described how jobs are put up front in defense industry advertising, and how defense industry lobbyists use jobs as a lobbying tool to encourage representatives to support increased funding for these companies. He also outlined his research finding that job creation numbers are often overinflated, in particular those associated with arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

The panel ended with optimistic, forward-looking remarks from panelists. Lillian emphasized the  importance of coalition advocacy and solidarity among those who envision a world in which the manufacture, sale, and use of arms and weapons of war has decreased. Indeed, Rich remarked, “The next generation of advocates are even less constrained by convention than those that came before them. The goal isn’t simply to fix our world, but to build a better new one.”

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In 2018, the Trump Administration Will Continue to Tout the Job Impacts of Arms Exports

12/11/2017

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This is the first blog post in a series looking at an array of issues in 2018 related to weapons use, the arms trade and security assistance, at times offering recommendations.
Hartung
William D. Hartung
​Just as he did throughout his first year in office, during 2018 Donald Trump will no doubt continue to tout the domestic jobs associated with foreign arms deals as a signal achievement of his administration.  The downsides of this emphasis include a relative neglect of human rights concerns, and a failure to gauge the negative strategic impacts of enabling questionable wars and fueling regional tensions.  But there is scant evidence to suggest that the Trump administration will change course as a result.
 
Trump’s penchant for seeing arms sales as a jobs program was clear for all to see in his first foreign trip as president, a May 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia. With great fanfare, Trump announced that the United States would be selling $110 billion worth of weaponry to Riyadh – almost as much as the record levels offered during the eight years of the Obama administration.  But upon closer scrutiny, tens of billions worth of sales that Trump was claiming credit for had been put together under the Obama administration.  Other aspects of the deal involved vague promises of sales that may never come to fruition.  Despite these facts, Trump threw up a nice fat number, and bragged that it would bring “jobs, jobs, jobs” to America. This is not to say that his administration will not seek major new sales to Riyadh, as evidenced by the October 2017 offer of $15 billion in missile defense technology to Saudi Arabia. But the $110 billion figure is a convenient fiction concocted for domestic consumption.
 
Similarly, in a November 2017 trip to Japan, Trump crowed about the “massive” amounts of weaponry Japan was going to buy from the U.S., “as they should.”  And of course, he bragged about all the jobs that would bring to America.  Trump’s number one example was the sale of Lockheed Martin F-35 combat aircraft to Japan.
 
There are two problems with Trump’s boasting.  First, he seemed to be implying that he had something to do with brokering the F-35 sale to Japan.  He did not.  That offer was made during the Obama administration back in 2012. It seems like the only thing Trump truly likes about the Obama legacy is our ex-president’s ample arms sales offers – so much so that he routinely tries to take credit for them.
 
Second, and even worse, Trump has no idea of how few jobs the F-35 deal with Japan will actually create.  As my colleagues at the Security Assistance Monitor have documented, the State Department has licensed a deal under which Japan will spend over $5 billion in exchange for the construction of an F-35 final assembly facility there.  So, the Japanese purchase of F-35s will indeed create jobs – in Japan. Yes, the United States will be exporting F-35s to Japan. But it will also be exporting most of the jobs involved in building those aircraft. Another F-35 final assembly plant is being established in Italy to do much of the work involved in U.S. sales of the aircraft to its European allies.
 
The point that Trump seems to be missing is that most foreign arms sales these days involve “offsets” – investments in the recipient nation that, as the term suggests, help offset the huge costs of importing a modern weapons system.  Under his Plan 2030, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (or MBS, as he is known more colloquially) has decreed that Saudi Arabia’s goal is to produce 50% of the value of any arms it imports in Saudi Arabia, up from 2% currently.  U.S. firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have duly sworn allegiance to this goal, and a recently offered batch of Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky helicopters will be assembled in Saudi Arabia. In another example, Lockheed Martin is helping the UAE develop an industry to produce robotic machine tools that can be used in the defense and aerospace sectors, potentially in competition with U.S. and European firms.  In other words, jobs in the UAE, brought to you by Lockheed Martin.
 
One of the ironies in Donald Trump’s continued bragging about the domestic jobs impact of arms exports is that weapons spending is virtually the least effective way to create jobs.  A study by economists at the University of Massachusetts has demonstrated that almost any other activity – from infrastructure investment to alternative energy production to education – would create one and one-half to two times as many jobs per amount spent as weapons production.  If jobs are the issue, the United States economy would be far better served by a focus on alternative energy technologies, a burgeoning field with a global market many times larger than the market for weaponry. 
 
Things to look for in 2018 include the possibility of a sale of F-35s to the UAE – the first export of this aircraft to any Middle Eastern country other than Israel; more costly missile technology exports to the Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia; and a possible surge in the export of U.S. firearms in line with administration plans to deregulate major categories of these systems as it seeks to carry out the final phase of the Export Control Reform Initiative that was initiated by the Obama administration.  Expect all of the above to be justified in significant part with cries of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” no matter how exaggerated those claims may be.
 
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser to the center’s Security Assistance Monitor.
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Donald Trump and The Death of Diplomacy

4/26/2017

1 Comment

 
This is the fifth entry in a series examining actions during the first 100 days of the new Trump administration and their possible implications on the arms trade, security assistance and weapons use in the future.
Hartung
William D. Hartung
Donald Trump prides himself on being the master of the “art of the deal.”  But if his plans to slash spending on diplomacy are approved by Congress, there won’t be anybody home to make deals with other governments, except for Trump and his inner circle, who have so far shown a shocking lack of knowledge of foreign affairs.

Trump’s budget blueprint proposes to cut funding for the State Department and the Agency for International Development (AID) by 28%.   This steep reduction is being imposed on an agency that is already underfunded, receiving just one-twelfth of the roughly $600 billion per year provided to the Pentagon.  A few years ago, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put this in perspective when he noted that it takes more personnel to operate one aircraft carrier task force than there are trained diplomats in the U.S. Foreign Service.

Trump’s downgrading of diplomacy does not bode well for the ability of the United States to prevent or rein in conflicts, and may actually lead to more, and longer, U.S. military interventions.  Donald Trump’s own secretary of defense, James Mattis, made this very point when he was the head of the U.S. Central Command, asserting in a Congressional hearing that if the State Department budget is cut, “I’m going to need more ammunition.”

With diminished diplomatic tools available, the Trump administration is liable to engage in the kind of unfocused military bluster we saw in its one-off cruise missile attack on a Syrian airfield in response to a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians and its threat of preemptive military action against North Korea if it tested a nuclear weapon.  Meanwhile, the administration is increasing the U.S. presence in Iraq and Syria, stepping up U.S. involvement in the disastrous war in Yemen, and talking about increasing U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan – all the while encouraging U.S. military leaders to “take the gloves off” by easing the criteria for selecting bombing targets, with a noticeable uptick in civilian casualties as a result.  Absent a diplomatic strategy and the personnel to craft one, U.S. involvement in these wars is likely to escalate, with increasingly negative consequences for the United States and its allies.

Another set of policy instruments that the Trump administration is likely to lean on in the absence of a robust diplomatic corps is the wide array of arms and training programs funded and operated by the Pentagon.  These programs have grown dramatically since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.  According to data compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor, Pentagon-funded assistance grew from $1 billion in 2002 to $10.8 billion in 2015.  These funds are spread across dozens of separate initiatives that support arming and training the militaries of over 100 countries.  There have been notable failures, like the lavishing of hundreds of millions in aid on the Saleh regime in Yemen under the Pentagon’s 1206 program, assistance that ended up placing arms in the remnants of the regime’s army that is now fighting along Houthi forces in that nation’s civil war.  

The underlying problem is that these programs have never been adequately evaluated to determine if they are effective in meeting U.S. security objectives.  As the Congressional Research Service noted in a report on the subject, “the assumption that building foreign security forces will have tangible U.S. national security benefits remains a largely untested proposition.”

It is difficult to track the Pentagon’s aid programs under the best of circumstances, but at the moment there is literally no way to know how they will fare in the fiscal year 2018 budget.  Details on how much the Trump administration will spend on Pentagon assistance, and which programs will be favored, awaits the release of the administration’s full budget submission to Congress.  But the fact that these arms and training programs could be implemented in the context of a rapidly shrinking diplomatic corps is cause for concern.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
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Anticipating Trump Administration Arms Sales to the Middle East?

12/16/2016

2 Comments

 
This is the fourth blog post in a series looking at an array of issues in 2017 related to weapons use, the arms trade and security assistance, at times offering recommendations.
Picture
William D. Hartung
As with many other issues, Donald Trump has made conflicting statements about what a Trump administration policy toward the Middle East might look like.  This is particularly true on the issue of U.S. arms transfers to the region.  He has made biting criticisms of Saudi Arabia, far and away the biggest U.S. arms client, even as he and his advisors have targeted Saudi Arabia’s main rival, Iran, as the greatest security threat in the region. How this will play out in the realm of the weapons trade remains to be seen.

It might be hard for a president Trump to outdo the Obama administration’s aggressive sales push in the Middle East.  According to data from the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the United States has offered a record  $198 billion in arms to Persian Gulf nations under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales program since 2009.  Many of these deals are still in the pipeline, and some may fall by the wayside as economic and political circumstances change.  But they represent an unprecedented flood of arms offers to the region.

Recent deals to re-supply Saudi Arabia with bombs and ammunition for its brutal air campaign in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians while involving what Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) has said, “look like war crimes,” have been of particular concern. It’s hard to overstate the devastating humanitarian consequences of the bombing and a parallel blockade of Yemen’s ports.  According to the United Nations, nearly three-quarters of the population is in need of assistance, and access to food, clean water, and medical care is scarce.

In December, the Obama administration took a step in the right direction when it indicated that it would hold up a sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia out of concern for the kingdom’s continuing air strikes on civilian targets.  This had been a demand of non-governmental organizations working against U.S. support for the Saudi-led war. But the policy shift was a halfway measure, as the United States will continue to refuel Saudi aircraft that are engaged in bombing Yemen and not impact other sales, including a more than $3 billion deal on Chinook helicopters sent to Congress just days earlier.

So how will a Trump administration fit into this existing pattern of large-scale arms transfers to the Middle East?  On the one hand, Trump has had harsh words for the Saudis, accusing them of being behind the 9/11 attacks and threatening to end U.S. oil imports from the kingdom.  And some analysts have suggested that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric might actually lead to a reduction of U.S. sales to the region.

A countervailing factor that could lead a Trump administration to make ample arms offers to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies is the strong anti-Iran stance of his key advisors.  His appointee for National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, has implausibly described Iran as the “linchpin” of a “working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.” As for secretary of defense nominee Gen. James Mattis, his response to a question about the three greatest threats in the Middle East and South Asia, was “Iran, Iran, Iran.”

In the short-term, the most consequential arms transfer decision in the region is whether to continue to supply weapons in support of the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen.  Trump has fallen into the trap of seeing the conflict as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, going so far as to claim that Iran’s reason for being involved is as a first step toward crossing the border into Saudi Arabia and seizing its oil assets.  The roots of the conflict are much more complicated.  While Iran has supplied some weaponry to the Houthi-led opposition, the Houthi have longstanding political and economic grievances that predate Iranian involvement.  The Houthi movement is far from being an Iranian “puppet,” and there is absolutely no evidence that Tehran plans to ride its limited support for the Houthi into a surge toward Saudi oil fields, as Trump as suggested.

The Trump administration’s decision about whether to continue to back the Saudis in Yemen will be carried out in the context of growing Congressional opposition.  Earlier this year, a resolution sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) that would have banned U.S. sales of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia almost passed, garnering 204 votes.  Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) organized a letter signed by 64 House members calling on the Obama to reconsider a proposed tank deal to Saudi Arabia in light of its indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen.  And in September, a bipartisan group of Senators sponsored a resolution of disapproval in an effort to block the Saudi tank deal.  The resolution received 27 votes, far from victory but a significant step forward given that a year ago only a handful of members of Congress were raising questions about U.S. arms sales to Riyadh.

The precise shape that a Trump administration policy might take toward arms sales to the Middle East in general and transfers in support of the Saudi war in Yemen in particular is unclear.  Will Trump and his advisors take a hard look at the negative security consequences of flooding the region with U.S. arms, or will their exaggerated view of the threat posed by Iran serve as the rationale for even more weapons deals?
This article is adapted from a longer piece that appeared in The National Interest.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

2 Comments

U.S. Arms Transfers and Military Training in the Middle East and North Africa

3/11/2015

2 Comments

 
William HartungWilliam Hartung
The United States is the largest supplier of weapons and training to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, and is likely to remain so over the next few years. But there has been no comprehensive effort to assess the potential impacts of these transfers, which range from tens of billions of dollars in deals with Saudi Arabia to the evolving program to train and equip a 5,000-strong force of Syrian moderates to fight ISIS.

The need for closer monitoring and control of U.S. transfers to the region is underscored by recent cases such as the use of U.S.-supplied weaponry to put down the democracy movement in Bahrain and the surrender of large quantities of U.S.-supplied weaponry to ISIS by U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. But despite these warning signs, it is likely that U.S. transfers to the region will continue to grow in the context of building and sustaining a coalition against ISIS.

U.S. transfers of arms and training to the region must also be seen in the context of the activities of other suppliers. In the midst of the violence rocking the region, is there a room for a policy of greater restraint in arms transfers on the part of its major arms suppliers, or will such efforts have to await a resolution of major ongoing conflicts like the Syrian civil war?

William Hartung is Director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

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    The "Looking Ahead Blog" features comments concerning short- to medium-term trends related to the arms trade, security assistance, and weapons use. Typically about 500-1000 words, each comment is written by an expert listed on the Forum on the Arms Trade related to topics of each expert's choosing.

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