The arms trade runs on respectable professionals via fragmented, responsibility-diffusing operations.

Evidence

One might imagine that only a small group of unsavory individuals is involved in merchandising the weapons used in terrorism, but this is far from the case. A worldwide network of reputable, high-level members of society contribute to this deadly enterprise by fractioning the operations, farming them out to different firms, displacing and diffusing responsibility, and distancing themselves from the uses to which the weaponry is put. One group might manufacture the tools of destruction. Others might amass arsenals for legitimate sale at trade shows. Still others operate storage centers for them. Others procure export and import licenses to move the weaponry among different countries. Others obtain spurious end-user certificates that get the weapons to embargoed nations through circuitous routes. And still others ship them. Major banks process the financial transactions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2202

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s law-merchant material and general institutional economics—fragmentation that obscures agency is the dark twin of functional specialization.
• SEED: Angle: moral disengagement is not a psychological vice of criminals but an organizing principle of legitimate supply chains—how bureaucracy launders conscience the way banks launder money.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s infrastructure theme—here, the ‘infrastructure’ is a moral one; distributed operations function like root systems where no single node bears full responsibility.