Armaments are just another global commodity. Yes indeed. One can almost smell the fiery depths of hell as one reads of the assassinations in parts of Africa, Asia, or Europe and tries to absorb the virulent rhetoric and the torrents of accusation and counter-accusation. We all want to live in peace, but throughout this human world some of the most explosive elements and forces have plagued the planet itself - the legacies of colonial dispossession, bizarre racial theories, perceived historical slights and injustices, warped religious cults, zealotry, and ideologies with pretensions to transcendent truth. There's a need to

P. Bobbitt wrote in his The Shield of Achilles; War, Peace and the Course of History "We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state: only states could muster the huge revenues, conscript the vast armies, and equip the divisions required to threaten the survival of other states. Indeed posing such threats, and meeting them, created the modern state. In such a world, every state knew that its enemy would be drawn from a small class of potential adversaries. This is no longer true, owing to advances in international communications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone." When Bobbitt wrote his book he did not know of what was about to occur a few months later in New York, the horrific terror of September 11, has highlighted more than ever the necessary need for nations to protect their sovereignty from all kinds of threats to their national security. Iain Carson of the Economist writes, "Since September 11th, the world's interest in defence has revived for the first time since the end of the cold war". Not surprisingly, the attacks on the United States have brought back the mainstream people of the world to the realisation of the importance of the defence industry. Carson quotes "Byron Callan, a defence-industry analyst at Merrill Lynch, an investment bank, has an office next to what used to be the World Trade Centre in New York. "When the second plane hit, we all started to leave our building," he recalls. "By the time the second tower fell, we looked up to see an F-15 fighter circling overhead. Everybody cheered and clapped." Finally the United States President George.W.Bush has promised the people to raise the defence budget to about $400 billion over the next five years. "And within that total many observers expect the procurement budget to climb back above $100 billion, after a slump to around $50 billion last year from its peak of $15

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1430
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)