Secrecy surrounding arms deals and a dearth of publicly available data means that the exact items being delivered to the Middle East are often unknown, but evidence collected, including UN and national arms export reports and weapons contracts, reveals that much of it is Cold War-era weaponry not in use by the militaries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE or Turkey.
(Keep in mind that, as everyone knows, the world is an arms bazaar filled with haggling merchants. Though the cold war and the superpower arms rivalry is long over, there are obviously plenty of countries eager to peddle their weaponry, no matter what conflicts may be stoked as a result).
It was a piece of legislation, the National Defense Education Act, which aimed at harnessing brain power rather than weaponry for the cold war.
In obtaining arms from Eastern-bloc manufacturers, and channelling them to small states and armed groups, Kassar prefigured the strategy of the notorious Tajik arms broker Viktor Bout, who in the nineties began selling surplus weaponry from the Cold War.
America bombed Serbia and invaded Iraq using weaponry developed for the Cold War.
The United States moved through the cold war with more confidence and less escalation of weaponry than would have been possible without the assurances provided by the U-2's and spy satellites.
"Partly that's because of a greater availability of other competitors with more advanced weaponry since the end of the Cold War," he said, "and partly, quite simply, because China doesn't compete very well in terms of quality".
Not long after, the two Cold War superpowers began to create vast arsenals of such weaponry, ever more powerful, ever more destructive, that could, if released in a full-scale nuclear war, annihilate not just humanity but much of the world (and possibly two or three more Earth-sized planets in the bargain).
Likewise, some the worst excesses of the cold war period, such as the multi-billion-dollar arms races in nuclear and conventional weaponry, are now largely absent.
The Pentagon needed the weaponry that was left over from the cold war and hidden around Europe, so paid sanctioned proxies such as Diveroli and Packouz to buy them on the down low.
