ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — There’s always an element of the surreal at arms fairs. You catch it in the chipper tone of salespeople hawking new instruments of destruction; in the euphemisms — “defense” instead of “warfare,” “weapons platforms” rather than “guns” — sprinkled throughout glossy brochures; in the mini-lesson given by a jovial ex-soldier on best practices for operating an anti-tank missile system.
Now, there’s the added frisson of Europe’s biggest terrestrial armed conflict in decades — namely, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has made one thing clear: Nothing invigorates the business of war like a war.
The combat in Ukraine, now in its second year, has jacked the global arms trade, fueling a new appetite for materiel not just in Moscow and Kyiv but also around the world as nations gird themselves for possible confrontations. The war has rocked long-standing relationships within the weapons industry, rejiggered the calculations of who sells what to whom and changed customers’ tastes in what they want in their arsenal.
