ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the arms-transfer element of security assistance, and provides an historical as well as a contemporary policy perspective. The provision of security assistance to friendly foreign countries and allies can help both to deter aggression and to improve those countries' defensive capabilities against external threats, and thus, may be linked to the furtherance of regional stabilization and international peace. Military assistance and arms transfers have a lengthy history of being integral to foreign relations and national security. Since the end of World War II, United States security assistance has undergone an enormous set of changes, although it has continually been steeped in, and possibly sold by dint of, anti-Soviet rhetoric. A major problem facing the security assistance program is the political process itself by which goal and objectives get identified, defended, and, if successfully transformed into "policy," implemented.
