Cambodian army gets rid of US-made weapons in favor of Chinese ones According to The New Straits Times, Cambodia is reviewing whether its military has any US-made weapons or equipment and will either store or destroy them. The move follows the U.S. decision to impose an arms embargo on the country on December 9, citing “deepening Chinese military influence in Cambodia [that] undermines and threatens regional security” as well as alleged “corruption and human rights abuses”.
The Phnom Penh Post reports that Prime Minister Hun Sen had responded to the embargo by directing the Cambodian military to put all US-made arms and military hardware into storage in warehouses or just destroy them outright. He said it demonstrated the wisdom of his decision in 1994 (in UNTAC time) when he chose not to change the military’s weapons systems over to US models. Hun Sen then quipped that armies equipped with US-made weapons tend to lose wars, pointing at Cambodia’s defeat in 1975 to Khmer Rouge, which came about despite the US supporting the then government with weapons shipments. Hun Sen noted that those weapons imports ran up a huge debt to the US that remains on the country’s books to this day despite multiple other regimes having governed Cambodia since then. “Even recently, the losers of the war in Afghanistan used US weapons”, Hun Sen said.
Defense Minister General Tea Banh told The Phnom Penh Post that there were a moderate number of US-made weapons in the country but they were all imported in the early 1970s: “Yes, there are still US-made weapons here because they were brought into Cambodia during [former PM] Lon Nol’s time and it was a lot of weapons. If we’re just talking about the bombs they dropped from air, there were millions of tonnes of them. “Back when Lon Nol finally lost the war, there were still a huge amount of US-made weapons in different warehouses and other places stored across the country. But most of them would be too old to be used by now,” he said.