WILL THERE BE AN ARMS TRADE INTELLIGENCE DEFICIT

With the end of the Cold War and superpower rivalry, policymakers will want to know more about more common types of conflict and the transfe rs of conventional arms needed to fight them. Unfortunately, as intere st in arms transfer intelligence increases, the relative amount of mon ey available to track and analyze this trade is likely to remain stabl e or decline. Improvements in arms trade intelligence are possible, ho wever, if intelligence agencies are willing to risk prioritizing and, arguably, narrowing their focus to those aspects of the trade that hav e not yet received the attention they deserve. Here key opportunities include defining arms trade intelligence to exclude the proliferation of strategic weapons or the arming of terrorist organizations; substit uting unclassified academic analysis for current, less critical classi fied tasks; and experimenting with market mechanisms to discipline how policymakers task the arms transfer intelligence community