World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized

[walterbell]

Importers: http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsimport.html

[davidascher]

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

[zenpaul]

Wow, top 6 importers were surprising: India UAE Saudi Arabia China Pakistan Azerbaijan

[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.

[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! :-)

[kpil]

Hi.

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.

[blumkvist]

Hi 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.

[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.

[throwaway765]

The data is actually sales not exports, the US also exports a significant amount under military aid which doesn't seem to be included here.

For example (and not to make a political point), the graph lists exports to Israel as $35m, but military aid was $2.8b in 2010

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/multimedia/military-spending...

[powertower]

I 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.

[JackFr]

"worst offender" = "arsenal of democracy", at least to Franklin Roosevelt.

[curiouslurker]

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

[TaliaNa]

"The country must be depending on weapon exports to keep their economy going" = keeping wars going is good for sales

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[aint]

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

[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.

[TaliaNa]

What's interesting is that a lot Ukrainian arms exports are to Russia with which it is now at war.

[myth_drannon]

That's one of the reasons for the civil war in Ukraine, an attempt(successful) to dismantle the left-over military industrial complex in Eastern Ukraine that was inherited from Soviet Union (competes with US's military industrial complex). They didn't want to do it peacefully(The EU-Ukraine association pact required shutting down these factories) , Yanukovich refused(his support base came from the East) now all of it lies in ruins (thanks to the US installed junta)

[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.

[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?

[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

[Danack]

Hovering over a country shows where they import arms from.

[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.

[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

[capex]

You can always google specific information, but visualisations like these help to tell the whole story.

[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.

[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 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.

[brandonmenc]

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

[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...

[Xixi]

It'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-...

[rawland]

http://insightfulinteraction.com/armsproducers.html

...quite different!

[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

[wyager]

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

[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.