By Paul McGeough
Washington: In the coming days, they'll be putting the finishing touches to the pavilions and adding up the orders at the massive Defence & Security Equipment International arms fair which opens in London's Docklands on September 15.
At the front of the queue, writing cheques worth billions of dollars, will be the Persian Gulf monarchies, making the latest payments in an arms-buying splurge set to surge through the coming decade – in a region already coming apart at the seams.
A businessman walks past an Iveco vehicle during the 2013 edition of the Defence & Security Equipment International arms fair in London.Credit: Alamy
Touring the Middle East to tamp down anxiety about Iranian expansionism after the signing of the long-awaited nuclear deal, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that Washington "had agreed to expedite certain arms sales that are needed and that have taken too long in the past".
In the preceding days, Saudi Arabia had signed for $US5 billion ($7.1 billion) worth of Patriot missiles and revealed itself as the likely buyer of 10 Sikorsky MH-60R naval helicopters. Qatar was purchasing French-made Rafale fighter jets for $US17 billion and had its hand up for some of Boeing's F-15 fighter jets. Kuwait was in line for 28 F-18 Super Hornets and the United Arab Emirates was awaiting delivery of $US200 million worth of General Atomics' Predator drones.
A woman tries out a SIGM400 rifle during the Defence & Security Equipment International arms fair in London in 2013.Credit: Reuters
According to military publishing firm IHS Jane's, four of the five fastest-growing defence markets in 2013 were Middle Eastern, with the Sultanate of Oman up 115 per cent on the previous year and Saudi Arabia up a massive 300 per cent.
Saudi Arabia - now the world's biggest arms buyer - spent $US80 billion in 2014, according to an arms report by IHS Jane's and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). In the same year, the UAE put $US23 billion in the pockets of weapons producers. Some analysts are predicting that at Riyadh's current rate of spending, the Saudi Air Force might soon be more advanced than its Israeli counterpart.
But as Iran's jittery neighbours demand even more sophisticated weapons and the US obliges, a law passed by Congress in 2008 ensures that even more weapons have to be made available for Israel, to allow it to maintain a "qualitative military edge" over its neighbours. As explained by The New York Times, the law requires that all sales to the Middle East be evaluated based on the impact they might have on Israeli military superiority.
In May 2015, Washington approved a $US1.9 billion deal for Israel - 250 AIM-120C Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air missiles; 50 BLU-113 "bunker-buster" bombs capable of going through 7 metres of concrete; and 3000 Hellfire anti-armour missiles. Former White House adviser Dennis Ross was advocating that Israel be supplied with B-52 bombers.
A visitor walks past the General Dynamics pavilion during the 2013 edition of the DSEI arms fair in London.Credit: Alamy
Barack Obama, who came to office as the president who wanted to end wars, will leave the White House as the weapons super-salesman - in his first five years in office, he has already surpassed a full eight years of weapons deals by his predecessor, outselling George W. Bush by a cool $US30 billion.
But apart from repressing their own people, modern Arab armies have been notable failures. Equally, as fighters for the so-called Islamic State run amok in the region, they have struck from the air only gingerly and their reluctance to commit ground forces has been shameful.
New alliance: From left, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, Saudi Arabia's King Salman and Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi at a summit meeting in Egypt in March.Credit: Middle East News Agency via AP
Saddam Hussein's overrated forces collapsed in the face of a US-led invasion force in 2003. The Iraqi Army, their US and Australian-trained replacement, collapsed even more spectacularly in June 2014, when IS fighters swept into the city of Mosul.
The Kuwaiti princes fled the country and their forces were a pushover when Saddam stepped over their common border in 1990. Bahrain's security forces, with thousands of Pakistani mercenaries in their ranks, were unable to put down the peaceful protests of the Arab Spring – when protesters failed to respond to orders barked in English and Urdu, Bahrain's rulers had to call in reinforcements from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
A Lebanese commando demonstrates his skills during an exhibition at the Security Middle East Shows in Beirut this month. Saudi Arabia has pledged billions of dollars in assistance to Lebanon's military and intelligence services. Credit: AP
In 2011, the princes of the UAE gave their own forces the thumbs-down when they retained Erik Prince, founder of the notorious US security contractor Blackwater, to recruit a foreign and Christian mercenary force – a $US529 million venture which, in part, was reportedly intended to overcome the problem of Muslims' reluctance to kill one another by recruiting Colombian and South African forces.
Egypt too, after the military quashed the fledgling democracy that came on the wings of the Arab Spring, is back on the US weapons teat - the delivery of eight F-16 fighter jets to Cairo in August marked a return to a security-trumps-civil-rights policy stance in Washington.
Visitors at the 2011 IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, watch a promotional video for the M1117 armoured vehicle, manufactured by Textron Systems.Credit: Bloomberg
"It's crazy … unprecedented," Ben Moore, one of its authors, said on the launch of the IHS Jane's-SIPRI report early in 2015. "You're seeing political fractures across the region; and at the same time you've got oil, which allows countries to arm themselves, to protect themselves and [to] impose their will as to how they think the region should develop."
Warning of even greater upheaval in the region, Omar Ashour, a security analyst at Exeter University, told The Guardian: "Increases in arms sales are bound to be extremely destabilising. At the moment most of the interventions have been against soft targets – Saudi Arabia targeting guerrillas in Yemen; Egypt against Bedouin in Sinai; or air strikes on ragtag armies in Libya.
A Lebanese commando pulls an armoured truck at this month's Security Middle East Shows in Beirut.Credit: AP
"But if the 'soft' keep getting hit hard, they won't remain soft. They will find their own patrons and proxies and hit back - it will lead to a vicious cycle."
Which is what Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi seemed to have in mind when he told reporters in Washington in April: "The dangerous thing is, we don't know what the Saudis want to do [after Yemen]. Is Iraq within their radar? That's very, very dangerous - the idea that you intervene in another state, unprovoked, just for regional ambition is wrong.
A man stands amid the rubble of a house destroyed by an air strike of the Saudi-led coalition in Sanaa, Yemen, earlier this month.Credit: AP
"Saddam did it before – see what it has done to the country."
Beyond the IS conflict, Qatari aircraft joined the fight to oust Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and after months of controversial Saudi bombing raids on Yemen, Riyadh ordered a tentative cross-border incursion by its forces in August.
Children walk over the rubble of a house destroyed by an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition on the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.Credit: AP
Chris Harmer, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, observed by email: "GCC [Gulf Co-operation Council] militaries have two defining characteristics – first, they have extremely large budgets for weapons and equipment procurement; second, they are extremely ineffective relative to their budgets.
"[They] are completely reliant on Western technical experts to maintain their equipment; and, to a large extent, they are dependent on former Western military personnel for training."
A man displays a bomb fragment from a house destroyed by an air strike of the Saudi-led coalition in Sanaa, Yemen, earlier this month.Credit: AP
Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at SIPRI, told Fairfax Media: "The [military] proficiency, training, skills and morale of Saudi and Emirati nationals has long been questioned and therefore, their capability to actually use all the fancy equipment they buy."
Acknowledging recent combined operations as proof that the UAE and Saudi Arabia "are no longer just stocking up on advanced weapons, but seem increasingly willing and capable of using them", Wezeman took little comfort.
He said: "Considering the disregard of the ruling elites for the possibility of arms control as part of diplomatic and other peaceful efforts to solve conflicts and ease tensions, to prevent the actual use of deadly force or outright war, this is a more worrying development than was their previous inability to effectively use all the military gadgets they have."
Analysts estimate that the number of technical staff for the likes of weapons producers BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin and military trainers who formerly served in Western militaries now stationed in the Gulf states would number in the thousands.
Bruce Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, cites the war in Yemen as indicative of a change in conventional military wisdom in the Gulf.
"The UAE has deployed a small but heavily armed brigade which has performed credibly. The UAE previously sent special forces to Afghanistan, which did well. The Saudi and Emirati air forces have also performed at a standard never seen before."
But Riedel, a veteran White House adviser and CIA analyst, then qualifies all that: "Of course there are a lot of deficiencies in their performance. They require lots of US and UK help, employ lots of Pakistani mercenaries and they engage in indiscriminate bombing and shelling."
Widening the lens beyond Washington merely as weapons supplier, Riedel observes: "What the Saudis really want from Obama is unquestioning and complete political support for their war and its enormous carnage. They have it - and the Yemeni people are paying for the Iran [nuclear] deal."