ABSTRACT
Approximately 15 years ago, the author wrote:
The globalization of the arms industry entails a significant shift away from traditional, single-country patterns of weapons production toward internationalization of the development, production, and marketing of arms. While wholly indigenous armaments production may be on the decline, multinational arms production – through collaboration on individual weapons systems and increasingly via inter-firm linkages across the international arms industry – appears actually to be expanding. In several instances, in fact, multinational armaments production is increasingly supplementing or even supplanting indigenous or autonomous weapons production or arms imports. The emergence of an increasingly transnational defense technology and industrial base is fundamentally affecting the shape and content of much of the global arms trade.
(Bitzinger 1994, 170)