The ASIC manufacturers know that as more and more ASICs start mining, the network difficulty will go exponentially upwards. GPU miners will become like CPU miners of old. Soon you will need a 10 Ghash/sec rate just to earn 0.1 BTC/day. So ... they see the future and the writing that is already on the wall. They will make more profit selling the weapons rather than having the headaches of trying to run a poor country for themselves.
Don't think using weapons to invade a country is the same as using electricity to mine coins. If they were to put all their miners to work today the manufactures would still have an upper hand for quite some time. But on the other hand it is less risky being the middle man.