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The War Biennial

Politics Meets Business at World's Largest Arms Fair

By Ullrich Fichtner

Need some surface-to-surface missiles? In the market for grenade launchers or plastic explosives? Manufacturers and customers meet every two years in London for the world's largest arms fair. In the age of terror, business is booming in the secretive sector.

Warships are on sale at the Royal Victoria Dock in east London. Corvettes, frigates and mine-sweepers lie at anchor in the dark gray waters of the Thames, their holds filled with potential buyers. Men from faraway places, sweating in their suits and ties, stumble up and down stairways, through machine rooms and across bridges. They ask specialist questions about frequency and code agility, lateral drift and hydroacoustic noise levels.

At the head of the wharf, on the "Nyköping," a new Swedish stealth ship, Chinese delegates are photographing individual screws and every weld seam in sight, while heavyset men from Africa and Southeast Asia bump their shins against pipes and equipment.

"Don't be fooled by the 620 tons of dead weight," says the officer on duty, a jovial Swede, speaking as one expert to another. "As far as performance goes, you are dealing here with a classic 1,200-ton, steel-hulled corvette."

On the wharf, the cavernous ExCel London conference center is chock full of equipment. There are surface-to-surface missiles, cruise missiles, armored personnel carriers and artillery guns as tall as buildings, their barrels pointing to the ceiling. Smart bombs stand in display cases, looking like so many oversized perfume bottles, and British soldiers demonstrate lightweight devices used to fill sandbags. Heavy-set men in sports jackets play around with armor-piercing shoulder-mounted guns, drink white wine on the beds of military trucks and kick the tires of Humvees with their polished loafers.

Potential customers can examine scale models of combat helicopters and nuclear submarines, organizational charts of weapon guidance systems and samples of non-magnetic steel. They hold pistols, grenade launchers and intimidating machine guns in their hands as if they were party favors. At booth 533, Hesco, a maker of protective wall systems, has blondes in hot pants serving up cold beer.

It's Sept. 11, 2007, the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and the global war on terror is in full swing. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of that fact, people from around the world have been converging on the ExCel exhibition center in hordes since the show opened in the morning. Against the bold backdrop of Canary Wharf, and the even bolder outline of the London skyline on the western horizon, a unique trade fair has opened its doors. It's called the Defence Systems & Equipment International Exhibition (DSEI), and it is the world's largest assemblage of products from the arms and defense industry -- the fifth edition of a biennial of war, complete with country pavilions, a "Night Vision Pavillion," and an "Innovation Showcase."

By noon the "Boulevard," the central mall of the ExCel center, is teeming with emissaries from around the world. Exactly 25,699 visitors will come and go over the course of the four-day event. Eighty-five official government delegations from 52 countries are registered, and the exhibitors include, for the first time, Bulgarians, Turks, Lithuanians and Russians. Inside the halls they join the 1,352 other exhibitors on 66,000 square meters (709,677 square feet) of exhibition space, and during their short breaks they wolf down pastrami bagels from paper bags and rinse them down with large cups of takeaway coffee. Projection screens on the walls display video clips of F-16 fighter jets in flight, interrupted by colorful ads and confident slogans like: "Proud to Serve" and "Your Partner in Action."

Bottles of Veuve Cliquot champagne sit on ice in the West Quay Bar and the VIP Café. There are plenty of reasons for weapons manufacturers to be celebrating. The industry is booming, not just because of the war on terror, but also because the world is feeling insecure because of the myriad dangers that mark the beginning of the 21st century. The arms industry is a billion-dollar market, and "the key parameters are right," writes Jane's Defence Weekly, the leading industry publication. The business is doing well, or at least it isn't doing badly, despite cost pressures, budget cuts and increased competition from Asia.

Can you buy weapons here? "It depends," says Robert Galvin, a slim, unassuming, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties who works for BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace. Galvin runs the company's land-based systems unit, an important position. In 2006 BAE, the world's third-largest weapons manufacturer, earned €18 billion in revenues, selling all manner of equipment that flies, floats, rolls, shoots, explodes and kills.

An M777 howitzer, a huge, four-and-a-half-ton machine, its barrel as long as a semi truck, is set up in front of the BAE booth. The gun, loaded with 155-millimeter grenades, has a range of 24 kilometers (15 miles).

"A very useful weapon," says Galvin, "quite effective in subduing enemy movements." And the price? "It's negotiable," says Galvin, "but just to give you an idea: The United States has placed an order for 605 of them, which we will deliver in three batches, and it's a $900 million deal." So one of the howitzers costs about $1.5 million? "If you put it that way," says Galvin, beads of perspiration gathering around his nose. And what if someone, an ordinary private citizen, for example, had the necessary cash to buy one of these howitzers? "You mean for the front garden?" Galvin asks. "Well, let's put it this way: We don't deliver to front gardens and also not to back yards. No way."