Will there Be an Arms Trade Intelligence Deficit?

With the end of the Cold War and superpower rivalry, policymakers will want to know more about more common types of conflict and the transfers of conventional arms needed to fight them. Unfortunately, as interest in arms transfer intelligence increases, the relative amount of money available to track and analyze this trade is likely to remain stable or decline. Improvements in arms trade intelligence are possible, however, if intelligence agencies are willing to risk prioritizing and, arguably, narrowing their focus to those aspects of the trade that have not yet received the attention they deserve. Here key opportunities include defining arms trade intelligence to exclude the proliferation of strategic weapons or the arming of terrorist organizations; substituting unclassified academic analysis for current, less critical classified tasks; and experimenting with market mechanisms to discipline how policymakers task the arms transfer intelligence community.