Military Aircraft Sales Visualized (1990)

I am working on a new paper that uses SIPRI data to look at more fine-grained transactions than the simple TIV value that I used for my dissertation research.  The project that I am working on is using these data to test some hypotheses that are related to realist behavior by states.  I am in the midst of coding the data.  The coding itself has been a good project to get me down into the details of arms transactions by states.  I am looking at transactions by examining the trade registers for all years from 1990-2013.

I have completed my first year of data coding.  Overall there were 215 distinct military aircraft sales in which aircraft were delivered in 1990.  This involved 26 suppliers, the largest two were the USSR and the United States.  Even more states were the recipients of these aircraft sales.  This included the sale of all types of aircraft ranging from small helicopters to large cargo planes.  The most interesting sales are those involving fighter jets and jets that have other strike capabilities.

Since I can't help it, I have visualized the sale of aircraft between states as a network.  The graph probably needs some work.  I plan on cutting it down into chunks, aircraft by type, at a later time.  For now, though, I thought it would be a fun graph to post.

Data on arms sales come from the SIPRI data.

Presidential Involvement in Arms Sales: Israel and France Edition

Today while I was working on coding aircraft sales (using SIPRI trade register data) I came across and aircraft type that I wanted more details about.  That took me down the Wikipedia wormhole.  What I found was a very interesting history of presidential involvement in arms sales - in this case the French President and sales of Mirage 5 fighters to Israel during the 1960s.

From Wikipedia:

The first Mirage 5 flew on 19 May 1967.^[2] It looked much like the Mirage III, except it had a long slender nose that extended the aircraft's length by about half a metre. A pitot tube was distinctively moved from the tip of the nose to below the nose in the majority of Mirage 5 variants. 

The Mirage 5 retained the IIIE's twin DEFA guns, but added two additional pylons, for a total of seven. Maximum warload was 4,000 kg (8,800 lb). Provision for the SEPR rocket engine was deleted. 

Rising tensions in the Middle East led French President Charles de Gaulle to embargo the Israeli Mirage 5s on 3 June 1967. The Mirages continued to roll off the production line, even though they were embargoed, and by 1968 the batch was complete and the Israelis had provided final payments. 

In late 1969, the Israelis, who had pilots in France testing the aircraft, requested that the aircraft be transferred to Corsica, in theory to allow them to continue flight training during the winter. The French government became suspicious when the Israelis also tried to obtain long-range fuel tanks and cancelled the move.The Israelis finally gave up trying to get the aircraft and accepted a refund. 

Some sources claim cooperation with France resumed outside the public's eye and Israel received 50 Mirage 5s in crates from the AdA, while the AdA took over the 50 aircraft originally intended for Israel, as Mirage 5Fs.^[3][4][5]Officially, Israel claimed to have built the aircraft after obtaining complete blueprints, naming them IAI Nesher.^[6][7]

In my dissertation I looked at the involvement of the Russian president in setting up deals for arms sales to other countries. There are some theories about arms transfers that would say that states such as France would be less likely to bow to pressure to restrict arms sales since there is a great deal of domestic pressure and incentives to produce these weapons systems for export. The customer (Israel) and the context (the 1967 war) are certainly factors to consider when looking at the case.  However, this is also in contrast to France's continued plan to sell Mistrel class ships to Russia in the midst of sanctions on Russia for its actions in Crimea and Ukraine.

I was happy to find more examples of presidential involvement in such matters because it reinforces the important foreign policy implications of exporting coercive capabilities to other states in the world system.