Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Communist nations closely guard their export figures, but Pentagon experts believe that China supplies some weapons (such as MIG-21 fighter-bombers, with instrument panels and operating manuals in Chinese) to North Viet Nam, North Korea, Pakistan and a few revolutionary movements in Africa. Poland is a major outlet for the Warsaw Pact's surplus tanks. Czechoslovakia, whose famed Bren gun as well as the Skoda Works' howitzers made the country second only to Britain as a weapons merchant in the 1930s, has dropped from the big leagues. It sells some jet trainers to other Communist states and Syria...
Saudi Arabia, whose oil lifeline also runs through the Gulf, has likewise turned to the U.S. for arms and found some sympathetic ears. The Pentagon has advised the Saudis that they should substantially expand their armed forces over the next decade by adding a mechanized brigade, at least one tank battalion, an air force wing, attack helicopters and coastal-defense vessels. "I do not know of anything non-nuclear that we would not provide the Saudis," says a U.S. military official in Jeddah. "We want to sell, and they want...
...Pentagon officials joke that "the Persian Gulf will sink under all the arms that it is buying." There are growing fears, however, that this amassing of aims in the Gulf area could trigger an accidental war. The Arab-Israeli conflict aside, there are bitter rivalries between the neighboring states and sheikdoms. Aryan Iran, even though it is a Moslem country, has never been fully trusted by its Semitic Arab neighbors. Experts do not rule out a future conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Tehran's support of the Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad, as well as longstanding frontier disputes, has already...
...Major U.S. weapons makers also, for example, turn out such pacific products as farm machinery and hair dryers. A relatively small number of firms-not necessarily the same ones that rank as the Defense Department's principal suppliers-dominate America's arms sales overseas. Last year the Pentagon listed the U.S.'s top ten armaments exporters...
...keep pace with the Soviets, who have been working overtime on their own sophisticated electronics weaponry, the Pentagon's spending for electronic warfare will rise by at least 30% this year, one of the largest individual hikes in the military budget. Some of the more remarkable areas of research and development...