What changed in small-arms dealings, once the Cold War ended?
After the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed. Tens of thousands of ex-Soviet soldiers were put out of work. Much of Eastern Europe was the same. In Africa, the lack of superpower support meant that the traditional militaries all but collapsed. And societies were beginning to fragment into numerous rebel groups, and there was a great demand for small arms. Many of the former Soviet people (one of the most famous ones is Victor Bout) became arms dealers. So, we went from a situation [that had] traditionally emphasized heavy arms to one which emphasized small arms — what the soldier could carry. These would have been AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars, that sort of thing. They were cheap, they were durable, and they could be easily transported. And I think the fact [is] that the West kept track of the state-to-state arms transfers, but what made this a particularly difficult problem after the end of the Cold War was there was no tracking of small arms. And i
