A Study on Potential Defense Export Items Using Data Mining: Focus on the Eastern European Market

Abstract

The prolonged Russian-Ukrainian war has increased uncertainty in the global defense export environment, causing countries to increase spending on defense and demand more weapons systems. The defense industry is important for a country's growth as it helps test advanced technologies and gives the private sector an edge. The global defense industry is growing, and the defense export market is set to expand; thus, now is a good time to diversify the defense export market. This can be done by studying unplanned acquisition needs in overseas defense markets. The goal of this study is to analyze unstructured data to provide guidance for defense exports. This study utilizes the STP strategy as a theoretical background. The study aims to identify promising areas for export to specific target countries, focusing on Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania. They want to strengthen their arsenals after the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As they supported Ukraine with arms, creating a defense power vacuum. They need to respond to the Russian security threat. So, these countries must strengthen their defense capabilities. We collected highly reliable unstructured data on each country's ten-year plan. This data focuses on acquiring weapons systems. Next, we used the TF-IDF technique to identify keywords from these countries' data, helping find important words regarding each country's big projects. Poland's plan for defense spending includes four important keywords on warships, showing it wants to improve its navy. The Czech Republic and Romania both had the highest number of keywords related to operating systems. Then, we sorted the keywords to show the plans shared by all three countries to acquire items. The aim was to promote economies of scale. The analysis showed that 8 of the 21 words refer to obtaining weapon systems for operations. This has revealed promising defense export items.