For the last several years the international transfer of conventional arms has grown to alarming proportions and touched off considerable concern among researchers who are attempting to decipher the seemingly increasing role which arms transfers play in international relations. In an attempt to come to grips with the arms transfer problem through systematic, data-based research, analysts have employed several measurement techniques. A close examination of the more commonly employed techniques reveals that each of them has limitations restricting it to a narrow set of arms transfers issues. One issue of arms transfers which has not yet been addressed satisfactorily concerns plausibly measuring military capability along a scale which has ratio as well as interval properties. In an effort to help solve this problem, a weapons capability measure based on multi-attribute utility theory is proposed.