On September 3rd, Beijing will host a parade to commemorate Japan’s defeat in 1945. Xi Jinping will stand with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, surveying serried ranks of troops and the latest in Chinese war machinery. The choreography is not just remembrance, it is also a clear act of salesmanship. The spectacle is meant to impress at home, intimidate abroad, and remind would-be clients that China can arm them too.
Other military-industrial displays are happening. In August, Britain secured its biggest-ever warship export: a £10bn deal to supply Norway with five frigates. Ministers called it a triumph for workers on the Clyde. Naval officers in Oslo have quietly muttered that German or French ships might have been better. Yet in an age of rising Russian submarine patrols, political solidarity and optics also matter. Later this month, London also is home to the DSEI, Britain’s flagship defence trade show that takes place every two years in the East-End’s docklands.
These episodes, taken together, reveal a new landscape of weapon-trade emerging, the contours of which show a quiet but accelerating global phenomenon. Namely, that the world is drifting into a new arms race.
Not just the old giants of Washington and Moscow, but middle powers like South Korea and Turkey, and now an ambitious China, are fuelling the surge. Artificial intelligence, drone swarms and naval expansion are reshaping battlefields and markets alike. Leaders sell such deals as job creation or deterrence.
What is notable in that this rush, critics are rare, often ignored. To dare to question the seeming immutable logic that more weapons are needed in this time of rising tensions is to be called ‘foolish’.
The post-Ukraine boom in weapons has been a windfall for industry. Western stockpiles have been drawn down, demand for ammunition and drones has soared, and new NATO members are rushing to rearm. South Korea has leveraged its production lines into Europe, signing multi-billion-dollar deals for tanks and artillery with Poland. Turkey has marketed its Bayraktar drones as a cheap but effective alternative to Western kit, embedding itself in conflicts from Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh.
China, whose industrial muscle far surpasses either, sees its opportunity. Its shipyards reportedly now churn out both container vessels and destroyers at a rate that Western navies cannot hope to match. Its AI firms are narrowing the gap with Silicon Valley, producing reasoning models that promise to underpin autonomous weapons. The Beijing parade will serve as both nationalist pageant and arms fair, a declaration that China’s arsenal is ready for buyers as much as for battle.
Britain’s deal with Norway tells a parallel story. For the government, it is a political and economic boon: thousands of jobs secured in Scotland, a chance to proclaim industrial renewal, and a demonstration of solidarity within NATO’s northern flank. For Norway, which faces an assertive Russia across the Barents Sea, political reliability trumped other considerations. That German shipbuilders offered a cheaper package, or that French designs carried longer endurance, mattered less than tying Oslo more tightly to London at a precarious time. What was sold as commerce was, in truth, a geopolitical transaction.
These cases underscore a deeper truth. Arms are no longer just tools of defence. They are the currenc of influence, of industrial strategy, and of diplomatic alignment. Turkey sells drones to Ukraine and uses them to win goodwill in Washington. South Korea floods Europe with tanks and cements its place as a reliable supplier. Britain parades its frigates as proof that Brexit has not killed its export ambitions. China offers drones and missiles to African and Asian states as tokens of partnership, backed by loans and infrastructure projects.
In this economy of weaponry, the lines between national strategy and commercial interest seem to be blurring to the point of vanishing.
The strides in new and novel technology itself is shifting the ground beneath states. Drones in Ukraine have reduced artillery to attritional duels guided by cheap flying cameras. Artificial intelligence is beginning to process targeting data at speeds no human can match. China, despite American chip sanctions, has managed to produce AI models that rival Western labs at a fraction of the cost. These systems are dual-use: designed for civilian industries, but easily harnessed for warfare. Beijing’s policy of “military-civil fusion” ensures that what is developed in the commercial sphere can be rapidly deployed to the battlefield.
A future of mass-produced, semi-autonomous weapons beckons. They will be cheap, abundant and networked. It promises not precision and control, but saturation and unpredictability.
In Europe and America, governments justify this surge in arms with talk of jobs and deterrence. Defence ministries trumpet the number of workers on production lines, or the apprenticeships created by new factories. Ministers insist that rearmament keeps adversaries at bay. Yet the economic benefits are often overstated: defence jobs are fewer than those in health or education, and the security gained is ambiguous.
The idea that money flowing into defence firms automatically improves the lot of the wider economy is questionable. The claim rests on a sleight of hand. Politicians present defence contracts as job creators, yet much of the profit is funnelled into boardrooms rather than dispersed across society. In 2024, BAE Systems’ top three executives (Charles Woodburn, Brad Greve and Tom Arseneault) took home combined bonuses of £4,755,258. This figure represents a reward for shareholders more than for welders in Glasgow or apprentices in Barrow.
Defence spending has a multiplier effect that is often far weaker than investment in other sectors. Studies have long shown that money spent on education, health care or renewable energy generates more jobs per pound than defence procurement. The economic case, touted so loudly at arms fairs, does not withstand close scrutiny.
Nor does the argument that such expenditure strengthens the economy in the long term. Arms contracts are lumpy, politically sensitive, and tied to fickle foreign buyers. They rarely foster the kind of broad-based innovation that, say, investment in civilian infrastructure does. The myth persists, though, because it suits industry and government alike: one gains windfall profits, the other a narrative of national defence, patriotism and renewal.
What it seems to leave behind is a distorted economy where executive pay soars while the social return is ambiguous at best.
What is clear is the boon to global arms industry who are enjoying a boon unseen before.
The top 100 arms firms reported revenues of $632bn in 2023, a sum greater than the GDP of Sweden. The war in Ukraine, the threat from China, and unrest in the Middle East have created what William Hartung, a defence analyst, bluntly called “a golden age” for war profiteers.
In Washington, this has seen defence budgets swell past $1 trillion, with more than half funnelled into private hands and Lockheed Martin alone receiving sums larger than the State Department. Into this mix step Silicon Valley’s techno-militarists (men like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey) promising AI-driven drones and pilotless warplanes as cheaper, smarter heirs to the lumbering giants of Lockheed, Boeing or Raytheon.
But history counsels scepticism: miracle weapons from Vietnam’s electronic battlefields to Reagan’s “Star Wars” and today’s flawed F-35 have all failed to deliver. Yet even if the new systems work, their effect may be to lower the threshold for conflict, making aggression easier and more deadly, as Israel’s use of Palantir software in Gaza already hints. The risk is not just profiteering but a drift towards a techno-autocracy where private elites shape warfare beyond democratic oversight.
In the face of all of this, though, the dissenting voices are faint. This despite us knowing clearly what dangers lie ahead. After all, as Action on Armed Violence has documented, the toll of explosive weapons on civilians is immense – but these weapons are rarely bought or made with much debate about the protection of civilians in mind.
Our data shows that more than 90% of those killed or injured when such weapons are used in towns and cities are civilians. Such findings seldom trouble ministerial speeches. UK parliamentary debates celebrate defence deals as triumphs for national industry, rarely pausing to ask whether Britain should be exporting weapons at all to regions already drenched in conflict. Similar blind spots afflict America, France, Israel and China. The voices that argue for restraint, or for the diversion of funds to peacebuilding, are drowned out by the cheerleaders of growth and deterrence. To suggest we should put diplomacy over sabre rattling is now dismissed out of hand.
History suggests this is a dangerous drift. Arms races have a momentum of their own. Once states commit to matching or outpacing rivals, disengagement becomes politically perilous. The Anglo-German naval race before the First World War did not absolutely cause that conflict, but it deepened mistrust and heightened tensions. The Cold War arms race bankrupted the Soviet Union and left a legacy of stockpiles and proliferation. Today’s surge, less openly declared, carries similar risks. Drones and missiles are already fuelling wars in Yemen, Sudan and Ukraine. Naval build-ups in the Pacific raise the odds of a clash in the Taiwan Strait. The proliferation of AI-driven weapons threatens to make conflict more unpredictable and the descent to conflict more rapid. Should this happen, civilian casualties would be far more likely.
What makes the present moment distinct is its silence. This is not a declared contest, framed as an existential struggle between blocs. It is a creeping accumulation of contracts, parades and production lines. Leaders sell weapons as economic insurance, as diplomatic gestures, as technical marvels. What is missing is a candid acknowledgement that the world is arming at a pace not seen in decades, and that the costs will not only be borne in treasuries but in lives. The parade in Beijing will be watched with awe and apprehension. The frigates built on the Clyde will be launched with pride. But in both, the undercurrent is the same: the return of a global arms race.
There is still time to resist. A call for rigorous arms export controls, for investment in conflict prevention, a recognition that true security is not built on missiles alone should be raised.
On September 3rd, the Gate of Heavenly Peace will echo with the tramp of soldiers’ boots and the rumble of armoured columns. Xi Jinping will stand flanked by fellow autocrats, basking in a display of military might. In the shipyards of Glasgow, engineers will weld together frigates destined for Norway, hailed as symbols of national renewal. These spectacles may seem far apart, but they are connected by a single truth: the world is once again building weapons faster than it can reckon with their consequences. The surge is silent, but it is no less real for that. Unless dissent finds a stronger voice, humanity risks sleepwalking into another age of arms.
That would be an age where parades, contracts and profit will lead, and the spectres of war will be close behind.
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