Food or Firepower: The Costs of the Arms Trade

Today, U.S.-deployed THAAD missile defense systems shield Israeli cities as part of its Iron Dome, Iranian Shahed-136 attack drones battle U.S. M1 Abrams tanks on Ukraine’s frontline, and U.S. MRAPs protect Gulf-backed militias in Yemen from Iran-supplied ordnance. While these arms transfers are a significant foreign policy apparatus, their ethics and undertaking have been increasingly called into question by the international community. 

While the conventional understanding of foreign aid centers around foodstuffs, medical supplies, and potable water, arms transfers are also an integral resource for foreign diplomacy and aid. Arms transfers are not simply a consideration in the proverbial aid portfolio; they regularly constitute a majority percentage of funds contributed to conflicts and humanitarian crises. This high proportional representation can be attributed to the significant cost of weapons systems. The THAAD weapons battery supplied to Israel costs $1.0-1.8 billion, while certain MRAP models can cost North of $1 million. As a result, even a small weapons cache can eat up a significant portion of a nation’s foreign aid budget, using funds that could be delegated to vast food reserves or refugee housing and transport. Most foreign aid structures are primarily fiscal; parliaments and executives consider how much tax revenue they can delegate to a cause, not how many gallons of water or pounds of food. As such, with high weapons expenditures, survival necessities can be starved to privileged arms trades. 

According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the United States has directly contributed $128 billion to the Ukrainian government, with $70.6 billion of this labeled “weapons, equipment, and other military support.” Summarily, as of the 2024 fiscal year, 55.1% of the U.S.’s foreign aid to Ukraine has been weapons supplies.  

While we see the benefits of American arms on the Ukrainian front, contributing to the acquisition of 4000 square kilometers of Russian territory in 2024. Some arms transfers raise questions about resource apportionment in Ukraine. In 2023, the U.S. sent  31 M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, worth $400 million. By December 2024, 20 of America’s most advanced battle tanks were immobilized or destroyed. This resulted from fundamental terrain incompatibility, as well as Ukraine’s relative lack of support infrastructure, including air assets and infantry support elements. These massive weapons shipments and their varied success force us to consider whether these funds could have been better allocated to supporting the 3.7 million internally displaced people in Ukraine. Despite the dismal performance of the Abrams tanks, they continue to be supplied. In July 2025, Australia supplied Zelensky with 49 M1A1 battle tanks, showing a general negligence of the Abrams’ shortcomings and raising questions about the efficient allocation of aid.  

Not only do arms transfers potentially represent a misallocation of funds, but they also can fall into the wrong hands, contributing to human rights abuses and prolonged conflict. In Yemen, the UAE provides anti-Houthi militias with Western arms, often provided by the U.S. and numerous Arms Trade Treaty member states. These weapons, including heavy weapons systems and aircraft, and originating from the roughly $3.5 billion in arms directed to the UAE by Western states, are being siphoned off to groups that have committed documented war crimes, such as torture and gendered sexual violence. In the misallocation of arms, as well as the possibility that weapons will be transferred among groups following arms transfers, the international arms trade represents a risk of increased human rights violations. Furthermore, trade with groups that commit documented rights violations is in violation of Article 6 of the Arms Trade Treaty, yet member states have faced no consequences for their indirect funding of anti-Houthi militias in Yemen.  

The arms trade also has a tangible correlation to increased gendered sexual violence. The 2013 Arms Trade Treaty was the first international document to enshrine this correlation, claiming that a state actor must “take into account the risk of the conventional arms… being used to commit or facilitate serious acts of gender-based violence or serious acts of violence against women and children.” The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, received $300 million in U.S. weapons and extensive military training during the Congo Wars of the late 90s and early 2000s, and has become a landmark for the weaponization of sexual violence by both state actors and non-state armed militias. Ongoing domestic conflict had riddled the nations, and arms trade had exacerbated the crisis, increasing instability and gendered violence in turn. In 2017, 85% of gendered sexual violence incidents in the nation's South Kivu Province were perpetrated by armed combatants. In receiving mass arms shipments, countries like the DRC regularly experience heightened intrastate conflict and use weapons to subjugate the civilian population, with sexual violence being an increasingly common means, especially within MENA and Sub-Saharan Africa. Arms, then, are often both intrinsically harmful and serve to reduce the share of economic aid that nations receive. This correlation between arms and heightened violence should be considered in parallel with the need for assistance in the developing world. Whether nations like Yemen need huge weapons shipments is a contentious and nuanced issue; whether Sudan needs more medicine, food, and water is wholly unambiguous.  

The international arms trade has poignant direct and indirect consequences for global human rights and well-being. Expensive arms sales can often divert fiscal resources from economic aid, leaving conflict-ridden regions underfunded and supplied, yet over-armed. These arms can also be used directly to violate international human rights law, employed by corrupt state actors, or provided to militias who commit mass violence without oversight. The Arms Trade Treaty, though theoretically effective, has seen endemic underperformance and a lack of accountability for nations supplying arms that are used to commit political violence. The arms trade does have a place in international relations; we have seen it used successfully in global conflicts of centuries past, to protect civilian populations from tyranny and to depose autocratic leaders. We must, however, reconsider the prevalence of the arms trade in fiscal foreign aid, better weighing the trade-off between food and firepower. The permitted weapons transfers must be subject to increased oversight and accountability for exporting nations, giving the ideals proposed in “The Treaty” the weight of an enforcement apparatus.