IT IS EASY to be cynical when military hardware turns up in the wrong conflict. As reported in
The Times, British night-vision equipment has been discovered in Hezbollah bunkers in southern Lebanon. The Government licensed the sale of such items to Iran in 2003, but similar equipment has been supplied to Lebanese and Israeli forces. If the serial numbers on the captured equipment lead back to any British sale, the Government will certainly be embarrassed; no less so than by the fact that weapons for the Israelis in this same conflict were passing through Prestwick airport.
The Government will point out that it will have had an end-user certificate in this sale, which records where equipment will end up. But if it ends up somewhere else, all the Government can do is check its own paperwork and inform the buyer that it will bear the breach of the agreement in mind on another occasion. The cynics will smile. This one is a storm in a pretty murky teacup.
Those who decry the arms trade generally put it down to the greed of manufacturers and the cowardice or corruption of governments that won’t stand up to them. Those who defend the trade speak in terms of maintaining influence over events, of tools of diplomacy: even “if we don’t supply, someone else will” — an argument few of them would ever apply to prostitution or drugs.
But in the modern high-tech era the truth is both better and worse than this. It is better because the regulatory regimes to control the arms trade have made some real progress since the Cold War. The Government has pushed ahead with most of what it promised in 1997, tightening up its own export control procedures. What it has done is never enough for the campaigners, but licensing of deals through the agencies of the Department of Trade and Industry is much improved. There is a new parliamentary committee to scrutinise the system. The British Government has committed itself to regular reporting and taken the lead in establishing an EU code of conduct on arms exports. Last month it sponsored a call at the United Nations to prepare for an over-arching arms trade treaty. There is more diplomatic activity to regulate the arms trade than ever before and Britain has taken an honourable lead.
On the other hand, the situation is worse than ever because modern technology undermines the diplomatic basis of all this activity. It changes the currency of the argument. Night-vision equipment is not in itself a weapon of war, but it is a dramatic “force multiplier”, as the Israelis found to their cost. The classic technologies of ordnance — guns, tanks, rocket launchers, even aircraft — have made only predictable advances over the past thirty years. But the new electronic technologies of communication, detection, monitoring, computing, avionics, guidance, have been genuinely revolutionary. And they can be force multipliers for middle- ranking armies, even guerrilla armies, as much as the high-tech Western militaries who developed them.
George Orwell published 1984 in 1948, working on the fear that “big” technologies would be controlled by governments, and that technology might snuff out democracy. But in that same year the transistor was invented and technology itself began a process of miniaturisation that demo- cratised it for all. High-tech electronics are available increasingly cheaply throughout the rich and poor worlds. Civil technologies in almost all fields are way ahead of military ones, leaving military hardware ever dependent on civil innovation. So in the naming of parts, which parts of a “weapons system” are the most important? Which should be regulated?
The global positioning system of satellites was launched only a quarter of a century ago by the United States to give it a revolutionary military edge. Now, the rest of us use GPS daily and it is as available to the insurgents in Iraq as to the Americans who fight them.
There can be no guarantees that civil technologies will not become part of anyone’s military machine. This is hardly a new problem. In 1954 the French fighting in Indo-China tried to draw their Viet Minh opponents into a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu, calculating that they would be pulled piecemeal into a trap. But the Viet Minh turned the tables by getting there quickly with their equipment, even their artillery, stripped down and carried individually on thousands of bicycles. And, irony of ironies, they were French bicycles, from the huge Peugeot bicycle factory that operated in Hanoi in the 1930s.
Compared with the Viet Minh, the technological prospects for modern guerrilla forces are dazzling. In Washington the Bush Administration has been trying to wring all the benefits out of the “revolution in military affairs” that it believes are now its due. But according to the Israelis, Hezbollah is getting some of the benefits as well; through state-of-the-art monitoring equipment, recording and detection, computer battlespace analysis and sophisticated radio communication. The night-vision equipment is only one small part of what looks like a pretty integrated, high-tech guerrilla operation. Hezbollah is not there yet, but on the evidence so far it appears to have taken a big step to achieve on its own small battlefield what US forces aim to do on a grand scale: to know exactly what the enemy is doing, to move its own forces around quickly and bring them to bear, in numbers, where it counts.
The diplomats are right to keep plugging away on arms trade issues at the UN and in the EU. But like the launch of the Dreadnought in 1906, which revolutionised sea power in a way that undermined 150 years of Britain’s own dominance of the world, many aspects of the revolution in military affairs may soon be available to guerrilla forces operating against the US and its allies. All the arms trade diplomacy in the world will struggle to get to grips with that one.
Michael Clarke is Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London
