The global military-industrial complex and its outriders were rammed into a giant indoor pigsty. Dealers and manufacturers and military men and politicians and officials from murky agencies and guys in cowboy hats and sunglasses who only really came to have their photos taken with guns – all of them in a crush to use a printer. It was day one of the arms fair, and they had forgotten to print their credentials at home. ‘Someone’s going to faint!’ cried a failing voice. ‘You can’t do this to humans!’ yelped another. ‘Bro,’ said an American on the phone to someone, ‘this is a complete fuckshow.’ As the bundle swirled and groaned, a Royal Marines band marched past. This did not improve the mood.
The formal name for the fuckshow is the ‘Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition UK 2025 (DSEI)’, and it is the largest arms fair in the western world. Fifty-thousand attendees, 1,600 exhibitors. An organiser said that the fair ‘is trying to be, and I think really succeeding at being, an international convening arena for the whole defence enterprise.’ A comms man for a large defence startup had it better: ‘We’re in the handbag business, and this is London Fashion Week.’
The show would be an easy four days of printing business. According to our Secretary of State for Defence John Healey, the defence industry is entering its most gainful period since the end of the Cold War. ‘For the first time in the careers of any of you sitting in this hall,’ Healey would tell attendees in his speech on the third day, ‘you can look forward to the certainty of ten years of rising defence spending.’ I went to DSEI to see what I would be getting for the money I give to the Treasury, and indirectly to Healey, and to see who the profiteers were, these people who traverse the globe selling arms, who see the dogs under our human skin.
The crew manning the printers started pumping out credentials, and the bundle shrunk. We were at the fair. DSEI is held biennially in East London in Customs House in the Excel Arena, and inside, the expo was divided into various ‘zones’, such as ‘aerospace’, ‘land’ and ‘tech’, which came off a spine of expensive coffee shops and bland fast food chains. Chozen Noodle, Subway, Viva Burrito, etc. (‘You would get a better burrito,’ wrote one recent customer of Viva in an online review, ‘if you stuffed a microwave rice pack in your mouth, covered your face in a tortilla and ran into a cow.’)
The weapons stands were jollier places. A Lithuanian company called NT Service, which builds an anti-drone gun called a SkyWiper, had made up a special Barbie pink version of their product with daisies printed on the side; UKC Group, which offers ‘100 years of combined electronics, manufacturing, precision-engineering and supply-chain solutions’ (it produces parts for warships), was cooking up popcorn.
Everything, everywhere was sweet, fun and lovely. Some guys messed about on an inexplicable temporary putting green; a police spaniel got its tummy tickled by a saleswoman; and a man who worked at EuroSpike, which trades in missiles, told me about the ‘Spike Users’ Club’, where his customers have meetups in European cities – like proud owners of Harley-Davidsons or Panerai watches – and fire their weapons with live rounds and share tips and tricks for using them better.
In the private hospitality section of Leonardo, which is an Italian prime, one officer of the Royal Navy kept finding himself unable to resist some little creamy puddings. (‘Prime’ is a useful bit of jargon that separates the defence world’s traditional, upper-class of companies from their upstart, nouveau riche competitors.)
It didn’t seem like these guys got a necrophilic kick from the business of war
A walk around DSEI was a lesson in the language that defence firms have developed to avoid confronting the truth that people die as a result of the stuff they sell. Humans were marketed out of the battlefield. ‘Suicide drones’, for example, the producers of which appeared to be busiest stands at the fair, are termed ‘one way effectors’ by industry operators. The general public weren’t at the expo, so the delusions couldn’t be for their sake. It was all for some internal reason. I was given a ‘Product Catalog’ from AeroVironment, an American firm that produces the Switchblade 600, a model of ‘one way effector’ which has been used in Ukraine. Does the Switchblade kill people? The catalogue would rather not go there. It has ‘anti-armour & anti-personnel effects’. Death is an unfortunate effect of use.
It didn’t seem like these guys got a necrophilic kick from the business of war, as some people assume arms dealers do. I’m guessing the dressing up and obfuscating terminology is really part of an industry-wide coping mechanism. This doesn’t make the people involved necessarily evil, but it’s an interesting psychological contortion.
It’s worth mentioning too that the ultimate intention is to remove humans from actual war, not just the marketing of it. People at the highest level of Britain’s defence establishment now say that we needn’t worry that young people don’t want to fight for their country, because drones can fill their place. Given that those drones will, in the end, still kill humans, this raises all sorts of nasty questions that no one wants to think about. E.g. Would you feel more comfortable about Britain joining a war if it were prosecuted largely by drones? If you could sit at home and just watch along? Will wars go on for longer if fewer humans fight? Do we need humans to die for war to serve its purpose?
John Healey’s day three address was in the ‘tech zone’, a 10-minute hike from the Excel’s entrance. I imagine this was a sop to companies such as Anduril and Helsing, the defence startups trying to usurp the primes, who were down in this area and pissed off about it. Anduril makes autonomous weapons and AI-powered scanners (these scanners have been placed without much publicity along the UK’s southern coast to track migrant boats), and its UK general manager Richard Drake was cross that he’d been shunted to the end of the arena. He said Anduril booked the slot two years ago, when the company was smaller, but now it deserved to be in one of the central pavilions. Big companies like BAE and Babcock and others had been given grandfather rights – the pleasure of a centrally located stand until they no longer wanted it.
People at DSEI got seriously on the booze from around 4 p.m. each day
The upstarts are trying to invert the way the defence industry works. Anduril actually has a sort of Bible, a 7,000-word ‘Mission Document’, which explains why it was founded. It blames a 1960s bureaucracy. In the beginning, the big defence firms such as Boeing and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin created things, like the genuinely beautiful SR-71, but they got stifled by a set of cost control rules initially formed by US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a decade or so into the Cold War, which were then broadened by his successors. The primes resultantly turned lazy.
Anduril and its competitors want to invert this relationship: they will imagine new methods of warfare, and pitch them to the government. ‘The next great defense companies will… have a vision of the future,’ the document says. Wars will not be fought by people, and their form will be decided by companies.
People at DSEI got seriously on the booze from around 4 p.m. each day. EuroSpike had a draught beer pump installed in their stand, staff at 4GD gave out Hawkestone lagers, friends of MDBA toasted Aperols, and employees of Ricardo, a British firm, drank bottles of Stella Artois and Budweiser from two crates which were plonked on top of their stand. On day two, at 2:56 p.m., I saw four guys doing shots of whisky. At the end of one day at the expo, when almost everyone else was drinking, I came across a sales manager at Sarsilmaz, a Turkish firearms manufacturer, who had his head in his hands. ‘I’m not coming to this show again,’ he told me. His stand consisted of a large display of pistols and rifles, including an ornate, 14k gold-plated gun. Business was ‘not good’, he said.
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