From the "Last Supper" to the attrition shock: Defense Industry and Global South (1993–2025)

Abstract

This article analyzes the structural transformations of the global defense industrial base between 1993 and 2025, emphasizing the contrast between the production model consolidated in the post–Cold War era, characterized by financial optimization, the elimination of redundancies, and a reorientation toward high-technology, low-volume systems, and the requirements revealed by the high-intensity conflict in Ukraine after 2022. We argue that the consolidation process inaugurated by the 1993 Last Supper produced an industrial base that was technically sophisticated yet structurally incapable of responding to large-scale attrition, thereby creating a systemic window of opportunity for producers from the Global South. Drawing on primary data from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (1993–2025), we apply the Bai and Perron (1998; 2003) method to identify endogenous structural breaks and the Chow Test (1960) to assess hypotheses at theoretically relevant dates. The results indicate that the rise of the Global South, particularly South Korea, Turkey, India, and Brazil, constitutes a medium-term structural trend (β = 0.171 percentage points per period, R² = 0.887, p < 0.0001), with regime shifts identified by the Bai-Perron procedure in 2007 and 2017. The Chow Test confirms a significant structural break in the 2018–2022 period (F = 5.85, p = 0.008), with an 88% increase in the slope coefficient. This process does not represent a reversal of the hierarchy proposed by Krause (1992), but rather its functional fragmentation: the Global North retains the technological frontier in the exquisite segment, while the Global South advances in niches defined by volume, cost, and availability.