ABSTRACT

Arms races are only imperfectly understood, for theorizing, as far as it has gone, has concentrated on the experience of the industrial countries, or their equivalent in earlier periods. These states are militarily self-sustaining, actually or potentially. Their political and economic organization permits effective mobilization of manpower and effective use of raw materials to satisfy the demands of an arms buildup in competition with states of comparable size and capability. No Middle East state could produce all the weapons that its armed forces demanded, and very few of the states could vaunt more than the most primitive factories that made only small arms and ammunition. Even Israel, which had developed with the help of foreign technicians the most elaborate military industry in the region, imported sophisticated hardware and many components for locally manufactured items from the industrial countries of the West. The Arabs so far outnumbered the Israelis, that there was never any prospect of achieving numerical equality.