
World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized - imb
http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsexport.html
======
walterbell
Importers:
[http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html](http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html)

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davidascher
The importer data is way more provocative to me than the exporter data, which
met my expectations.

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kpil
True. 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.

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jigen
If you think Sweden gives India any kind of substantial money to reduce
poverty, you're seriously mistaken.

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InInteraction
Hi 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.

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rawland
Thank 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! :-)

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InInteraction
WOW, thank you for this - brilliant ideas - and I personally love the topics
which means a lot of inspiration while creating for me. Thanks again. Cheers,
Natalia

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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.

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

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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.

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kelvinn
This 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).

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ZenoArrow
Yeah, 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.

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plinkplonk
"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.

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hurin
No 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.

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guard-of-terra
Any 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.

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hurin
Well 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.

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jdfellow
With 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.

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bottled_poe
> 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.

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fit2rule
As 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 ..

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EliRivers
Many 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.

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classicsnoot
Commonplace =/= prevalent. What wars are you thinkint of? No snark, just
curious.

In terms of prevalence, I don't think there is an apt comparison in the
historical narrative for the US. I heard, but cannot confirm, that we blow off
more rounds for target practice than the active conflicts around the globe use
in combat. Even if that statement is incorrect, I can think of no other nation
with an equivalent saturation of small arms.

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hga
Target practice plus bird hunting, which can use a lot of shotshells with
little to show for it if you're not so good at it like me ^_^. I don't think
most other forms of hunting use that very many rounds.

US _civilian_ production is between 13-14 _billion_ rounds per year (military
production at Lake City, I don't know, but we get sold canceled orders and
lots that fail milspec tests but are otherwise good ammo). Rimfire production
alone is 3 billion. For some time a lot of that has been getting stored for
... a rainy day. And if you do the math that's only a bit more than 40
rounds/person/year.

But the number is still very very large. Heck, in one high school academic
year on the JROTC rifle team I probably shot over 2,000 rounds of .22 LR (for
every morning of practice, 3 sighting in shots plus 10 rounds each in two
positions).

As for "saturation", yeah. In the last three years, the number of Missouri
state issued concealed carry licenses (note any state's is good, and many are
cheaper) in my county has almost doubled, to the point where 5% of the age
eligible adults have one. And the 19-20 age range has only been eligible for
about a year, while those getting them are largely the older, age and less
ability to defend yourself + the Baby Boomers entering retirement age is a
major driver.

42-3 states have "shall issue" concealed carry regimes, and California and
Hawaii look to be following soon (it's being litigated, but some large
population counties have already thrown in the towel); the Supremes could
extend that to all states. In the last 4 years, Chicago went from nobody but
the anointed being allowed to own handguns to shall issue concealed carry and
more than a few incidents of legal self-defense with them.... Etc. etc.

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classicsnoot
Point being that if it ever goes Red Dawn whoever is doing the invading is
going to have a rough time of it. We ['muricans] shoot a lot. We even hit
stuff occasionally :|

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hga
Indeed; per the misattributed Yamamoto Isoroku quote, " _You cannot invade the
mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass._ "

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aint
Interesting that Ukraine has higher arms export numbers than Sweden,
Netherlands and Spain. I never knew Ukraine was an arms exporter at all.

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icegreentea
The 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.

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trhway
>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 :)

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geoka9
> 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?

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trhway
they 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.

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geoka9
> they made it illegal (outlawed) to have schools in Russian

This is not true.

> various government proceedings

Always been like that. But the officials could always talk in Russian if they
felt like it.

The rest is just propaganda.

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trhway
>The rest is just propaganda.

ok. Then please do tell us what was so important about the language law that
it was the very first order of business of the Kiev's junta on the very first
moment it came to power.

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remarkEon
I 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.

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dropdownmenu
Visualizations like this are always awesome, but it would also be interesting
to see the inverse of this chart.

Where do countries import arms from?

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TaliaNa
When 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)

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yalogin
As 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.

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nols
Below 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)

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crucini
What 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.

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icegreentea
Does 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.

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brandonmenc
Germany's largest importer is Israel. What an interesting world.

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desdiv
_...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-e...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-weapons-
exports-on-the-rise-as-merkel-doctrine-takes-hold-a-870596.html)

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beachstartup
new century, new alliances, new enemies.

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rawland
[http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html](http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html)

...quite different!

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jsudhams
Surprised by the fact that India buys and keeps it. And looks like China buys
and give to all the Indian border countries. *Indian here

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wyager
I notice there is no US-russia trade. Is this due to trade sanctions?

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PhasmaFelis
It 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.

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guard-of-terra
China both imports and exports if I read correctly.

