Filling the weapons procurement gap in the Indo-Pacific: South Korean arms export to Indonesia and India

How do second-tier suppliers adapt to defense-industrial globalization and expand their weapons sales in different regions? We offer a demand-side explanation of arms procurement. As the first-tier suppliers focus on advanced power projection weapons, two types of qualitative structural gaps emerge in the global arms market either due to excessive superiority or utter neglect of certain platforms. Consequently, buyer states turn to weapon systems produced by second-tier suppliers as they are proximate to their qualitative needs in terms of strategic/technical and doctrinal requirements. Through case studies of South Korea’s weapons sales to India and Indonesia, we show how a second-tier supplier is able to outbid its first-tier counterparts on qualitative grounds to fill the structural gap left by global power disparity.