Sig Sauer’s sniper rifle that can shoot accurately over distances >1 kilometer.
The SSG 3000 has only been manufactured in Sig Sauer’s German facilities, i.e. not at their U.S. subsidiary.
Colombian police have confirmed that they have some SSG 3000’s. Yet Sig Sauer never got a German weapons export permit for Colombia for this gun.
(Ess ess gay dry TOWSE end.)
Big questions arising from Sipri’s peace research.
In an informal-sounding interview, a researcher from the peace studies institute in Stockholm described some questions observers have about international weapons sales.
Why did Greece need to buy so many guns and tanks?
Why does Saudi Arabia need so many high-tech weapons?
Will China start massively manufacturing and exporting arms?
What new weapons technologies will Russia develop?
Is there a connection between India’s problems with corruption and its status as the world’s biggest arms importer? The research director at Sipri said India’s biggest arms deal scandals involved companies from western countries.
I have some questions myself:
Is it a problem that the French government controls so many French arms manufacturers?
(GROW sah tsoo ZOM en heng ah owss dare SEE pree FREE denz foah shoong.)
Reliability verification procedure.
This month the responsible federal bureaux apparently stopped processing Sig Sauer’s applications for weapons export permits while investigations continue into how Sig’s guns were found in Colombia and Kazakhstan despite export permits that said “United States.”
(Tsoo fair LESS ichh kites PROO foongz fair FAR en.)
Arms exports report.
The Bundessicherheitsrat is a government board that meets secretly to approve German arms exports. Each deal must be separately approved as an exception to the Peace Clause in Germany’s constitution, yet so many are approved that Germany is the world’s #3 weapons exporter after the U.S.A. and Russia.
The permits issued by the Bundessicherheitsrat have been being published once each year in the annual arms exports report. The 2013 report was just published in June 2014, for example.
Reforms are under discussion. Critics of the current system say the report is being published too late and too infrequently. Now it was found that it’s too incomplete as well: The 2013 report did not mention a billion-euro deal to sell tanks, howitzers, mortars and masses of ammunition to Qatar that the previous coalition approved in March 2013.
Apparently it’s an accounting problem that happens to divide the reporting of these large arms deals up into the years of their partial deliveries, making them look smaller. It also happens to obscure when the Bundessicherheitsrat permitted these large deals.
(RISS toongs ex POT bear ICHH t.)
A fake debate.
The German defense ministry will be presenting their case Monday, 30 Jun 2014, in the Bundestag for why they must be allowed to buy and co-develop armed drones, unmanned airborne weapons platforms. But they’ve already decided, according to an “Einzelplan 14,” to buy Medium Altitude Long Endurance armable surveillance drones by late 2014. There are no longer M.A.L.E. drones that cannot be armed, said taz.de.
The Bundeswehr is currently staying in Afghanistan until 2016, and they said they need to tool up with drones and close some “capability gaps” because they’re staying in Afghanistan.
One of the evening news shows said the new supermajority government’s coalition agreement promised a debate about drones. They said this in a way that implied that the coalition agreement only promised a debate.
Update: After the Bundestag talk, the defense minister announced the German military won’t be buying killer drones. It will be leasing them, from Israel.
(SHINE day BAT ah.)
“She has to haul certain corpses out of the defense ministry’s cellar” at this stage, said a Leftists party spokesman about Germany’s new defense minister Ursula von der Leyen (C.D.U.). “Including these weapons projects.”
There was an uproar in the Bundestag after the Greens discovered the defense ministry made a 55-million euro payment to MTU in December 2013 without obtaining Bundestag approval or informing defense ministry management. The payment was compensation for a 2011 decision to reduce the German military’s Eurofighter order from 180 to 140 fighter jets. But budget rules require Bundestag approval for every single expenditure >25 million euros. Germany’s new defense minister said she was shocked and, said Spiegel.de, invited all responsible persons in her ministry to a meeting of her predecessor’s so-called Arms Board [Rüstungsboard] on 19 Feb 2014 to discuss the defense department’s biggest procurement projects.
Update on 20 Feb 2014: New defense minister Ursula von der Leyen (C.D.U.) fired Thomas de Maizière’s state secretary Stéphane Beemelmans and her Weapons department head Detlef Selhausen, “both considered key figures in the Euro Hawk drone controversy” said ARD tagesschau.de. She announced plans to fundamentally reform the German military’s entire planning and procurement because costs and schedules for billion-euro projects are not transparent, she said. ARD tagesschau.de said at this stage corruption cannot be ruled out in the defense ministry and in its complex interrelationships with German industry.
Over the next three months, the German military is going to “transilluminate” [durchleuchten] its ~1200 procurement projects, including gathering suggestions for how they can be better accompanied/managed/monitored and controlled/inspected/checked [begleitet und kontrolliert].
Update on 04 Apr 2014: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that some major defense procurement projects continue despite the new minister’s freeze.
“Although important decisions have been postponed or cast into question for some large arms orders, other major projects are ongoing, such as delivery of the new A400M transport plane (which has a long history of delays and cost overruns) and the new Puma armored tank (in which many initial deficiencies were found).” And, especially, the defense ministry is quietly preparing for a project that will cost billions, called the TLVS, taktisches Luftverteidigungssystem, a new generation of missile defense that will include new missiles, radar equipment, command centers and networking capabilities.
Ten years ago Germany began working with the U.S. and Italy on the new missile defense, called Meads, and has spent about a billion euros on prototypes since then. TLVS project requirements include “360-degree radar and a modular system in which any new components, such as launching platforms or other defense missiles, can be added. The defense batteries should be rapidly transportable by plane to distant theaters.” The defense department is looking at five options for this project, including using Lockheed’s Meads, Raytheon’s Patriots, or combinations of the two. German defense hawks will try to persuade other countries to join in development and deployment, lowering Germany’s costs for both. Vladimir Putin is helping with this by creating interest in missile defense in e.g. Poland and the Netherlands.
(G’VISS ah LIE chh en ow! sem KELLAH dess BOON dess min iss TARE ee oom fir fair TIED ee goong NAW chh hole en.)
“Thinking drones,” a wide spectrum of autonomous unmanned flying weapons systems, large and small, described in the Pentagon strategy paper for 2013 to 2038 called the Unmanned Integrated Systems Roadmap.
From a Spiegel.de summary of the 168-page document: Short-term, the Pentagon wants to add weapons to existing drones, including arming unmanned helicopters. Medium-term, developing smaller and more precise weapons specifically for drones. Long-term, autonomous “thinking” unmanned systems.
There will be drones that are weapons, such as the “Switchblade” minidrone and a “swarm of intelligent munitions” called L.O.C.A.A.S., low-cost autonomous attack system, to find and blow up moving targets.
(DENG kenned ah DRONE en.)
A perfidious invention: barrel bombs the Assad government is throwing out of helicopters onto residential urban areas of Syria. The steel barrels contain accelerant and e.g. nails, for large possibly napalm-like explosions that distribute sharp shrapnel. Opposition sources indicated these hardware-store bombs are being used for terrorism of civilians living in rebel-controlled areas; one was dropped near a school for example.
Meanwhile, the peaceful protesters who tried to oust the violent Assad family by nonviolent means and then understandably fled the country in droves suffered in an unusual blizzard last month, which dropped ~40 cm of snow on Jerusalem in early December 2013. German news showed footage of families living in tents on frozen dirt floors, with plastic tarp walls not even keeping out the wind, in Jordan, or a dozen people crowded into one unheated room with a weeping wet ceiling in Lebanon. Asking for several billion dollars in aid, especially from wealthy neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the United Nations estimated the number of Syrian refugees would increase to several million in the next year, while three-quarters of Syria’s population might experience food shortages. There’s talk too of a lost generation because, it was estimated in a U.N.H.C.R. report, ~3 million Syrian children aren’t attending school because of the war.
Update on 29 Dec 2013: Spiegel.de said a “rebel-friendly human rights organization” reported that Syria’s air force used the dreaded barrel bombs to blow up an open-air fruit-and-veg market in Aleppo’s old city on a Saturday morning.
Update on 19 Apr 2014: ZDF heute journal said the Assad troops dropped >300 barrel bombs from helicopters in March 2014; it’s unclear whether that was just over Aleppo or all battle zones in Syria.
For what it’s worth, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper said the Assads are hiring foreign mercenaries as pilots, possibly because some Syrian troops have refused to fly these helicopters.
(Eye nah peah FEE dah eah FINNED oong.)
Russian missile emplacement.
Moscow confirmed on 16 Dec 2013 that it had put short-range mobile SS-26, “Iskander” or “Stone” missiles on its western borders that could travel approx. 500 kilometers. From Kaliningrad in the island territory formerly known as East Prussia, an ARD tagesschau.de graphic showed for example, a circle with a 500-km radius could reach all of Poland and Lithuania and even pieces of Sweden and Finland, though perhaps not quite Berlin.
These missiles travel at several times the speed of sound and were first deployed against Georgia in 2008, Spiegel.de said.
(ROOSS ish ah rock ATE en shtah tsee own EAR oong.)
“Privatizing a troop of engineers,” the ~2800 elite engineers in Britain’s Defence Support Group which is responsible for maintaining and purchasing high-tech weapons systems such as fighter jets, tanks and troop transporters, said Spiegel.de.
Spiegel said London is ignoring the U.S.A.’s request not to sell off the unit. The U.K. military fears the sale would result in loss of institutional knowledge, loss of control over military secrets, exposure to boycott risk and other problems. Spiegel said the Observer said the official call for bids to buy D.S.G. will go out in a few days despite lots of domestic opposition to the plan, which didn’t stop Mr. Cameron’s government from e.g. privatizing the Royal Mail.
The Spiegel.de article said the U.S.A.’s notoriously tight control over military technology it shares with allies was circumvented by Tony Blair in 2007 when he worked out a simplified sharing agreement in the throes of the wars. George W. Bush agreed to share important anti-terrorism military technology using streamlined processes and without requiring export licenses.
(Inn jen YOO er en troop ah pree vot eez EAR en.)
“Devil’s stuff,” the chemical weapons Syria agreed to destroy with international partners, including the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. A schedule has been set for the most dangerous of them, mustard gas and sarin gas, with collection before 31 Dec 2013 and destruction before 30 Jun 2014.
Update on 16 Nov 2013: Protesters in Albania succeeded in getting their president to promise not to use Albanian facilities to destroy Syrian chemical weapons. Their concern was understandable. Everyone’s reluctance is understandable. Albania had been asked by the U.S.A. if they would take on the job because Albania had experience destroying its own chemical weapons. Germany still has some facilities that have been used to destroy old munitions and unexploded bombs that keep turning up from the world wars. Syria’s weapons might be destroyed by incineration at very high temperatures or by chemical “hydrolysis” cleavage, said ARD tagesschau.de correspondent Rolf-Dieter Krause. “Both are quite dicey methods whose control requires experience and very safe technical systems.”
Update on 30 Nov 2013: The U.S.A. offered to destroy 500 tons of the most dangerous of these military materials on board a ship and to pay for it. The O.P.C.W. announced that after that another 800 tons would be destroyed by specialist companies. The elimination is a little behind schedule because many countries that were asked to help destroy the chemical weapons regretfully declined to do so.
Update on 13 Dec 2013: All chemical weapon production sites in Syria are said to have been destroyed. Deadly chemicals from Syria’s arsenal will be transported on volunteered Danish and Norwegian ships to a huge U.S. Navy vessel that will destroy them via chemical cleavage and neutralization, in about two weeks, said Jan van Aken, former U.N. weapons inspector, environmentalist and now bioweapons and chemical weapons-specializing Bundestag member (Leftists party). “Helicopters, aircraft carriers and fighter jets will have to secure the Cape Rae” during the destruction process, said ZDF heute journal correspondent Roland Strumpf. The process will create >7 million liters of toxic waste water. The other residues left over from the substances will be stored in drums. The current cold snap in the Middle East, which just dumped forty cm of snow on Jerusalem, is a problem for the initial truck transport of the >1000 tons of poison gas; presumably the U.S. and other countries will be monitoring those transports via satellite imagery and other tracking.
Update on 10 Jan 2014: A company owned by Germany’s federal government in Munster will be participating in the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons by eliminating some of the degradation products produced by the breakdown of mustard gas. Several hundred tons of the diluted residues will remain after combustion on the Cape Ray, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons asked Germany for help with them in addition to the 5 million euros the country pledged to the project. The chancellor’s new defense minister told reporters Germany has the methods and technology to combust these residues down to nothing, with equipment still being used to dispose of unexploded bombs still being dug up from W.W.II.
Reporting on the methods and quantities involved in this project is starting to contradict itself, but the spirit of cooperation, multiplicity of partners and good intentions on all sides to “unsharpen” the conflict in Syria is wonderfully welcome.
Update on 23 Jun 2014: The Syrian government announced that all the chemical weapons scheduled to be destroyed have been destroyed.
(TOY fells TSOY g.)
“Federal German Security Council,” which must approve German weapons exports.
Approved arms exports to Gulf states increased in 2013 (~800 million euros in the first half of 2013; ~1400 million in 2012; ~500 million in 2011). For example, apparently this council approved sales of 24 “haubitze 2000” and 62 “leopard 2” tanks to Qatar last spring, but Qatar’s neighbors Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates apparently also tooled up, according to a response to queries from the opposition Leftists (Die Linken) party. German arms exports to governments without good recent human rights histories remain heavily criticized by the pre-Sept. 22 opposition to Chancellor Merkel’s pre-Sept. 22 government.
The ARD tagesschau.de report mentioned that in Germany arms exports are “poison” for incumbents in election years, which is why, they said, people inside the weapons industry said the C.D.U./C.S.U. + F.D.P. government postponed the decision on whether to approve some further arms exports such as >100 tanks to Saudi Arabia until after Germany’s national election on 22 Sep 2013.
Update on 15 Apr 2014: The new members of the Bundessicherheitsrat are the chancellor, vice-chancellor, foreign minister, defense minister, interior minister, finance minister, justice minister, development minister and the chief of the chancellory (the chancellor’s chief of staff).
Update on 01 Jul 2014: A former federal development minister, Dirk Niebel (F.D.P.), is going to become the top lobbyist for weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall. As development minister, he was on the Bundessicherheitsrat when it approved weapons exports by his future employer, including the export not just of tanks but of a tank factory to Algeria. An op-ed in Spiegel.de called for an investigation of what approvals and favors the F.D.P. minister provided for Rheinmetall while in office.
Update on 02 Jul 2014: Prosecutors are investigating Germany’s biggest small arms manufacturers, SIG Sauer, Heckler & Koch and Carl Walther, for exporting guns to e.g. Colombia and Mexico without saying so on the guns’ export permits. The economy ministry, part of the remit of superminister Sigmar Gabriel (S.P.D.), is investigating reforms to Germany’s weapons export permit procedures that would include e.g. the introduction of random checks to ensure weapons remained where their exporters said they were going.
(BOON dess ZICHH ah heights RAH t.)
Hydrogen fluoride, ammonium hydrogen difluoride, sodium fluoride.
What did your country’s companies export to the Assads’ Syria that could have been used to hurt civilians?
These are three of the chemicals German companies exported tons of to Syria between 2002 and 2006 that could have been used to make chemical weapons, at a time when the Assad regime was known to have a chemical weapons program.
The German government’s Ministry for the Economy [Bundeswirtschaftsministerium] drew up and published a list of such chemicals, including quantities, dates and prices, that could have been used to manufacture chemical weapons and for which the government issued export permits, in response to a question submitted by the Leftists party (Die Linken) and by Bundestag member and former U.N. weapons inspector Jan van Aken (Leftists) in particular. The government supplied this information one week before a national election.
Update on 30 Sep 2013: After the national election the government supplied more information. German companies were issued export permits for “dual-use” chemicals even until 2011, after the Assads were killing peaceful Syrian protestors. From 1998 to 2011, ~300 tons of such chemicals, which could be used for civilian or military purposes, were delivered from Germany to Syria. Klaus Barthel (S.P.D.) criticized the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium for, among other things, phased provision of the truth. The Bundeswirtschaftsministerium said they reviewed the investigation and remain convinced of the plausibility of the civilian uses cited, but the C.D.U. said plausibility is not enough when dealing with regimes like the Assads’. Reporter Arnd Henze said Germany has to be especially careful in these matters because the world knows that chemical weapons were produced in Libya and Iraq “with German support.”
On 01 Sep 2013 it was announced that Britain had issued licenses to export sarin gas precursors potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride to Syria in January 2012, ten months into the uprising against the Assad family. The export licenses were revoked in July 2012 after the European Union agreed to sanctions against the Assad regime. Prime Minister David Cameron (Tory)’s office initially responded by saying the U.K. has the the most rigorous export control regime, with a computer system called C.H.I.E.F., which is how they know that though the export permits were issued at that unfortunate time no chemicals were exported under the permits. Later it was indicated this was not so. Following up, Business Secretary Vince Cable (LibDem) subsequently reported that other licenses to export sarin precursor chemicals to Syria were issued by previous U.K. governments between 2004 and 2010 (the year Mr. Cameron’s Conservative-LibDem government came to power).
Update on 09 Jul 2014: U.K. foreign minister William Hague sent a written statement to the British parliament announcing that British companies had probably exported hundreds of tons of chemicals to Syria in the 1980’s that could have been used to make chemical weapons such as sarin and VX.
(FLEW or voss ah SHTOFF, a MOAN ee oom hee dro GAIN dee FLEW oar EAT, NOT ree oom FLEW oar EAT.)
Autonomous killer robots.
A Süddeutsche.de article said for years now billions have invested annually in research and development of these types of weapons by the U.S.A., United Kingdom, Israel and soon China as well. The U.S. Navy for example is working on unmanned killer submarines. The U.S. Air Force notoriously has its drones. Companies like iRobot Corp. have been delivering land-based battle robots for years, on wheels, caterpillar treads, four legs and they’re working on bipedal. Post-mounted or mobile Samsung sentries (“SGR-1”) have been erected along the North Korean border that can now be set to automatically shoot anything detectable by motion, heat or, presumably, video-analyzing software.
Opponents of the technology say it’s only a question of time until remotely operated killing machines become autonomous decision-makers. The time for people to decide on an international framework for these types of weapons is now, said a United Nations expert on extralegal killing.
Sweden, wrote Süddeutsche.de, has called for an international test ban [Testverbot] on L.A.R.’s, lethal autonomous robots, asking each country’s government to announce a national moratorium on them and to unilaterally decline to manufacture and test autonomous killer robots.
(Ow! toe NOME ah TƏ TOONGS roe BOT ah.)
Arms control treaty passed on 02 Apr 2013 by the United Nations’ General Assembly after seven years of negotiations. The world’s first international agreement for controlling conventional weapons, “from pistols to panzer tanks,” it must still be ratified by fifty countries. States that sign the treaty agree not to export arms to countries where it appears that they might be used in crimes against humanity; one controversial point in the agreement is that it allows distribution of weapons to rebel groups if the shipments “serve to aid freedom and stability in the world.” The USA insisted on leaving that one in.
Update on 25 Sep 2013: The U.S. secretary of state signed the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. Amnesty International praised this, noting that the U.S.A. is the world’s biggest weapons exporter, selling ca. 1/3 of the world’s arms trade to ~170 countries. 86 countries have signed the A.T.T.
(Fer TROG tsoor con TROLL eh dess VOFF en hon dellz.)
“Watering can principle,” in which subventions are distributed evenly throughout a group without regard to individual needs or priorities, a principle some European arms exporters say they won’t follow if allowed to resume exporting weapons to Syrian rebels. They say they will only give guns to good guys. The UK and France don’t want to renew the EU’s embargo on Syrian arms shipments, which is about to expire.
Update on 27 May 2013: Because the member states could not reach a unanimous decision, the EU embargo on sending more weapons to Syrian rebels will expire. The UK indicated they were only proposing voting against renewal of the embargo because they want to increase pressure on the Assad family (which is currently fighting to the death, of all its members, unless they agree to a better solution at the upcoming peace talks in Switzerland). We shall see whether France and the UK now indeed export more weapons to that corner of the world.
(GEESE Cannes en prints EEP.)
German WOTD 