If you are a young person who has just finished college and you are working to get your first corporate job there is a likelihood that BMW will sell you one of their starter cars. Their hopes are that you will fall in love with the feel and brand of BMW. Eventually, as you make more money, you will buy a more expensive model of BMW, until one day you are driving the ultimate of the ultimate driving machines. They do this because they know it works and although their starter series cars are not much better than a four-cylinder Nissan Sentra, it still has the brand name to get you started.
Weapons sales work the same way with small rogue nations and Machiavellian type regimes. In fact, we have several nations that are selling tiny fighter planes to the air forces of many of these questionable countries. The countries believe that they have the right to defend themselves, but all too often end up using these technologies on their own people, or to attack their neighbors over their borders. What we are doing is enabling these nations to gain more power.
Therefore, it would be better if the US industrial military complex manufactured and sold low cost military jet aircraft that were small starter airplanes. And it would be best if we led the world in doing this and exported to all those nations these little fighter aircraft at a lower cost than they could buy from the Chinese, Pakistanis, or other nations that are looking to build up their weapons sale manufacturing industry.
We should sell these aircraft so that we were closer to these countries, and could get them to side with the positive human rights principles that we believe in. And we could hold a carrot out to future weapons systems if they complied with various things. And if the price was lower they would buy our products because they were better built, and they had the backing of US companies, therefore, they are worth more.
If they are more valuable and the price is less, they would buy them all from us. We should definitely be thinking here, we might be making a mistake in our military export products and allowances currently, and this whole issue is quite troubling. Please consider all this.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes in the USA.
More info: http://www.worldthinktank.net/