Does the development of the military industry strengthen or weaken a country?

I try to avoid commenting on domestic politics, but sometimes it is not possible to make an assessment of a topic without touching upon the debates concerning domestic politics. Therefore, in order to make an introduction to the topic mentioned in the title, I will start my article by presenting some arguments that are widely used in domestic politics.

In the speeches made on various platforms in recent years, it is claimed that our defence industry has become very strong, that our army is stronger than before, that we have soldiers in many foreign countries as a result of this, and that our country has developed and become stronger as a result. 

Those who support such arguments immediately shout out when the various problems experienced in the country, especially the economic collapse, are mentioned; "But we built a UCAV, but we built a tank, Turkey is growing, Turkey is getting stronger, we will be a world power!" and so on. 

When it is pointed out that only being able to produce UCAVs, tanks or other weapons will not make us a world power, that the Soviet Union once produced intercontinental ballistic missiles, aeroplanes, cannons, tanks and many other weapons, and even established bases in space, yet it disintegrated, the example of Germany is usually given and it is argued that Prussia became powerful and established the German Empire in the 1800s thanks to the arms industry. 

It is also said that states such as the USA, the UK and France, which are world powers, are so powerful because they have strong arms industries. Supposedly, these states have also developed their industries thanks to the war industry.

But is this really so?

In order to understand this, I think it is useful to examine the most powerful countries of the world, especially the USA. 

When we look at the USA, which is one of the most powerful countries in the world, it is understood that this country participated in a major war outside the continent for the first time during World War I, and in this process, it started to strengthen its military industry by producing a huge amount of production both for its own army and for some European armies. Thus, the US army and war industry, which had previously been a weak force incomparable to the European armies, rapidly came to the forefront. 

Nevertheless, the real strength of the USA was not its army but its economy. Because the European countries, which fought fiercely for four years, transformed their civilian industries to produce military products, there was a shortage of industrial products that met the daily needs of the civilian population, and these products were imported from the USA as a remedy. 

With the sale of some military equipment, US exports reached enormous proportions by the end of the war, and as a result, a large part of the world's gold reserves flowed to the USA as payment. Moreover, for the first time during the war, the USA became a lender to foreign countries. Thus, unlike the European states, which were on the verge of collapse in terms of manpower and economy at the end of the war, the USA became a world state that everyone had to take into account.

As a similar development took place during World War II, the USA became the largest economic power in the world. It also assumed the role of military protector of Japan, which it had brought to its knees in the war, and of Western Europe against the USSR. 

In other words, the USA became the most powerful country in the West and even in the world, both militarily and economically. However, by the 1980s, Japan and Western European states had developed rapidly economically and were in a position to compete with the US. Nevertheless, the US managed to maintain its leadership position against these countries through military alliances. 

The US had to assume this patronage role due to certain necessities. For example, if Japan doubled its defence expenditures, this could have turned into a serious threat to the US security in the Pacific shortly after the war. For this reason, Japan was obliged to keep its military expenditures to a minimum. The main factor that necessitated the patronage of Western Europe was the Soviet threat.

For Japan, which, as the losing side in the war, accepted the disarmament imposed on it and agreed to be protected, this situation was seen as something humiliating at first glance. However, Japan, whose security was guaranteed by the USA, rapidly developed in the field of civilian industry with the savings they made from military expenditures and became an economic giant in a short time. For similar reasons, West Germany was the state in Europe that showed the same development. These two states soon became the two largest economies and the most respected states in the world after the USA. However, they did not even have a proper army.

During the Cold War period after World War II, the USSR was the hegemonic power against the Western world led by the USA. Even though the USA provides military material aid to its neighbours at certain rates, it has been able to finance its own arms industry without much burden on the country since it exports arms to these countries intensively. For this reason, by developing its civilian industry, it was able to increase the level of welfare in its country steadily, although not as fast as Germany and Japan. 

This was not the case in the USSR. Because in the USSR, military power occupied a much more important place than in the USA. While some developed countries in the West, other than the USA, have become almost self-sufficient in the defence industry, the main arms producer in the Iron Curtain countries has been the USSR. 

Moreover, contrary to what the USA did to its allies, the USSR did not sell a significant part of the weapons and equipment it produced to its client states, but gave them free of charge. However, since the pawn countries, like the USSR, built armies that were too large for their strength, they were not able to establish a developed civilian industry, taking advantage of the fact that they did not have to deal with the production of weapons and equipment. 

This resulted in the failure of the Iron Curtain countries, particularly the USSR, to achieve sufficient welfare gains and to lag behind the Western countries economically. As the Soviet economy continued to collapse and Soviet communism lost its political appeal, the USSR's only means of dominating the world was its military power. 

As a result, while the USA, which spent only 1 per cent of its GNP on defence between 1919 and 1939, increased to 9 per cent between 1950 and 1989, the USSR spent 33 per cent of its GNP on military expenditure in the same period. This high expenditure accelerated the economic and then political collapse of the USSR. In other words, the USSR became poorer as it developed its arms industry, and the poorer it became, the more it developed its arms industry. The result was a major collapse.

However, the Cold War damaged not only the Iron Curtain countries but also the development of welfare-enhancing civilian industry all over the world. Because, due to the arms race of the bipolar world, military technology and arms production came to the forefront of the world economy for the first time in history, and this situation caused some important side effects. 

For instance, the civil aviation industry has become glued to and overshadowed by the military sector. Technologies that would have triggered revolutionary developments, such as computer technology, were mainly limited to the calculation and decoding of ballistic missiles until the 1970s. 

This situation also had an impact on international trade. Although developed countries wanted to produce their own military equipment, only one or two of them were able to place enough orders to keep their arms companies afloat. Countries that failed to do so tried to meet their arms needs through imports, and thus international arms trade reached its highest level. In this way, modern weapons have spread all over the world and this has come at a heavy price. 

From an economic point of view, the money spent on arms is an expenditure that does not contribute to production, i.e. welfare. Investment in arms R&D and production is an inevitable necessity, but even when we take into account the subsidiary industries, it does not increase the GNP enough to be taken seriously.  

On the contrary, it has a negative impact on GNP by adversely affecting the development of other industries. For example, until the 1980s, 30 percent of engineers in the USA worked in defence-related fields and there was a shortage of engineers in civilian industries. 

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the economic growth rates of countries with the lowest defence expenditures, such as Japan, Germany and Canada, are higher than those of the USA and the UK, which have the highest defence expenditures. 

In recent years, other important examples have emerged that show that civilian industry, not military industry, is the most important factor that strengthens a country. For example, China, which had a defence-oriented strategy until the late 1970s, started to give importance to welfare-enhancing civilian industries. This new approach rapidly propelled China to the forefront in terms of GNP, making it the second largest economy after the USA.

Moreover, China started this development move by producing very simple products. As far as I remember, in the late 1970s, when Chinese goods were increasingly being used in Turkey, these were simple products such as padlocks, alarm clocks and toys. Over time, such products became more diversified and China started to produce high-tech products as well.

China has developed military industry as well as civilian industry, but the civilian industry has always taken the lead. For example, China, which has become the world's largest manufacturing centre and whose GDP ranked second only to the US in 2010, commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 2017.

In conclusion, it is possible to say the following: The arms industry is important for every country. Countries that can produce their own needs can act more independently in security and defence issues. However, it is not possible to become stronger only by developing in the arms industry. Civil economic sectors should not be neglected and should always be at the forefront. The military industry should follow the civilian economic sectors. Because in a country where the civilian sectors are not strong, the military industry cannot be financed for a long time.