High-technology weapons and their support platforms, together with robotic vehicles and satellite-based communications systems, have come to dominate how many nations frame their defense policies and wage war. The resulting technological dependence creates a number of problems for governments,...

Over the last 15 years, the ownership of U.K. and global defense companies has changed beyond recognition. A series of mergers, takeovers, strategic alliances and joint ventures in the defense industry, within and across geographic borders, has created a number of major defense systems...

This article highlights the until quite recently neglected political-economic thinking in matters of defense in twentieth-century Britain. It argues that retrieving such analyses from the interwar years is an excellent although partial way to get at an alternative picture of interwar defense...

Britain is not an independent nuclear power. Its nuclear warheads and delivery systems depend upon American supplied management and technology and have done so since the dawn of the nuclear age. For years these matters were classified and today both governments only supply partial information....

The article addresses the U.K. government’s arms export licensing process to try to account for the discrepancy between its rhetoric of responsibility and practice of ongoing controversial exports. I describe the government’s licensing process and demonstrate how this process fails to...

This article addresses the relationship between European and U.K. defense industrial policy. It considers recent initiatives to create a European Defense Equipment Market and the U.K.’s Defense Industrial Strategy. The European and U.K. defense industries are evaluated and some of the future...

Using as-yet-unpublished material, the article considers the interaction of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) with the “bribe culture” that surrounds international arms deals. It finds evidence of two phases. The first, which lasted until 1976, may be characterized as...