ABSTRACT
Asia’s newly industrialized economies (NICs)—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand-constitute an important subset of the developing world’s so-called second-tier of arms producing states.1 They comprise some of the most economically advanced countries in the developing world, possessing growing wealth, sizable industrial capacity, and increasingly sophisticated technology bases, particularly in the area of electronics. They have pursued roughly similar paths of economic and industrial development, involving large-scale state investments, technology imports, applied research, and synergistic civil-military links (see US GAO, 1994). It is therefore no surprise that over the past 30 years most Asian NICs have embarked on some manner of local armaments production, both as a means of encouraging arms self-sufficiency and of driving general economic development.
