The Gulf and the Korean peninsula are the most likely flashpoints for a conventional war involving the world’s major powers. The antipathy between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf has moved into a phase of proxy war, with Iranian-backed militias fighting Gulf-backed forces in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and, most recently, Yemen. At the same time, both the Iranians and their Arab neighbors continue to build ever more deadly conventional military capabilities.

The Gulf is the largest market for imported military sales and equipment in the world. In spite of its relatively small population, the Gulf continues to be the top destination for US and European military weapons sales as well as a prime market for associated security training and education services.

This volume is the product of a workshop held during the Gulf Research Meeting at Cambridge in August 2015. This collection of essays examines the booming market for military services and equipment in the Gulf. The essays in this book analyze the market from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.

The development of the security market in the Gulf lies at the intersection of two major trends in the global economy: the rapid modernization of Gulf states, and the decline of manufacturing industries in arms-exporting countries. For many countries, weapons are one of the few manufactured goods that remain competitive in the global market. Western militaries are shrinking and thus seek out the military training contracts that the Gulf countries provide, both to justify existing force structure as well as to provide lucrative employment for retired officers.

For decades, the countries of the Gulf have striven for self sufficiency in a broad array of areas such as food, water, and basic industrial commodities, but have usually couched this desire in terms of national security. At the same time, every country in the Gulf (save Iran) has a foreign security presence in their country in order to bolster their security.

The security market in the Gulf has evolved from simple issues of basing and producing local constabulary, though even at that stage those groups were often under foreign command. The contemporary Gulf States have developed robust military forces with the most modern equipment in the world, including latest-generation fighter aircraft, world-class air defense systems, and significant arsenals of ballistic missiles. At the same time, they have built up a massive training and defense infrastructure which produces professional security forces equal to almost any other in the world.