The Syria Squeeze: What will US Involvement mean for US-Russian Relations?

This post is in response to a question from a friend on Facebook.  He asks:

Excuse me, Dr. Willardson, but I would be very interested to hear your opinion on Syria, their relationship with Russia, and the potential consequences if the US decides to take military action.

That is an excellent question, and one which bears thinking about in general.  Syrian intervention is not something that the US public is really pushing for.  There is a great interview with a scholar, Matthew Baum, about the public's reluctance to enter the conflict.  I recommend that you read the entire interview if you are interested in the effects of public policy on presidential decision-making in these cases.

Matt Baum: I think that the fact that the polls say Americans are wary in Syria does not mean all that much. If the Obama administration is able to do something that has a decisive effect, they will look like heroes. And if they look impotent in their use of military force, it will rebound against them. But the polling numbers showing American reticence, as of right now, doesn’t add up to much, because it’s really not a salient issue. It’s not enough to look at the numbers of people opposing intervention; you have to look at how much people care and at this point it isn’t very high on the list, as of today. That can change if things escalate and it starts to look like a “real” war, as opposed to Libya — which was obviously real if you were there — but from the United States the perspective was that no Americans were on the ground and no American planes were being shot down. If Syria looks like that, the pubic won’t get all that engaged. It would potentially be a foreign policy success for the Obama administration, though coming awfully late, after a lot of horrible things have happened there. But if it doesn’t go well and America is gradually sucked in — throwing good resources after bad — eventually it could become a big political liability, and you could get significant public engagement. This could have happened in Afghanistan, too, if more Americans started getting killed. But it hasn’t escalated in that way.

Read the entire interview here: http://journalistsresource.org/skills/research/syria-intervention-public-opinion-research-chat-harvard-matt-baum

So this is one strand to the discussion.  Why are we threatening to intervene in the first place?

A second strand of the discussion is one that I hadn't considered until I saw this piece on Lawfare earlier today - that is the issue of the president actually overstepping his constitutional bounds to involve U.S. troops in the conflict. Jack Goldsmith argues that to commit forces to Syria without Congressional approval in this case pushes presidential power further than it has been pushed in other conflicts - even Kosovo and Libya. Here is a salient portion of his argument:

There are many reasons why it is a stretch even under OLC precedents.  The main ones, as I alluded to a few days ago, are (1) neither U.S. persons nor property are at stake, and no plausible self-defense rationale exists; (2) the main non-self-defense U.S. interest that the Commander in Chief has invoked since the Korean War to justify unilateral uses of force – upholding the integrity of the U.N. Charter – appears (as Wells argued) to be disserved rather than served by a military strike in Syria; and (3) a Syria strike would push the legal envelope further even than Kosovo, the outer bound to date of presidential unilateralism, which at least implicated our most important security treaty organization commitments (NATO).

Read the entire piece here (it's worth it!): http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/why-doesnt-president-obama-seek-congressional-approval-for-syria/

So now that I have talked about the U.S. side of the equation, let's get to the Russian side.   On the Russian side there are three considerations that are at play here:

1. Precedent 
2. Interests
3. Pride/prestige

Precedent

Russia has not been happy with the Arab Spring and the response by the West in general.  Moscow tends to take a dim view of protesters (See the issue with the Pastafarians in St. Petersberg in the last week) in general.  Protesters that turn violent and try to overthrow the government are even worse.  The Russian government prizes stability over nearly everything else - and so movements that threaten regimes are seen as dangerous.  This is true even for democratic movements such as the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia that led to governments that were less friendly to the Russian state. Russia is unhappy that the U.S. and NATO coalition supported protesters and rebels against Qaddafi in Libya and at the vacuum of stability that has created.  This leads to the second point -

Interests

Russia has interests in Syria. I have written about some of those interests in a post a couple of years ago (Link).  These interests are both commercial (arms sales, technical assistance, etc.) military (advising - leading to more equipment sales) and strategic. Russia's only foreign naval post is located in Syria.  Russia's ability to project power in a region where it was once very influential - a region just outside the "near abroad" where Russia's influence is still strong - is seen as damaging to the state's geopolitical position.

Prestige

Finally there is the issue of prestige.  Russia allowed itself to be taken out of the discussion by abstaining in the security council vote on Libya.  That gave NATO and the U.S. a free pass to operate. In the case of Syria Russia has actively opposed moves in the security council to pass resolutions on Syria.  If the U.S. acts in Syria it will be truly unilateral, and in direct opposition to what Moscow wants.  Even if Russia is not the superpower it once was, the leaders of the state are upset when they are railroaded in international affairs.  U.S. action in Syria will be such an act.

So what are the consequences of such action? I don't know.  It will definitely increase the tension between the two states, but as far as concrete retaliatory action, I am not sure. I anticipate that Russia will take an even more active role in opposing U.S. actions in all spheres.  Active opposition by Russia in matters of trade, security, and finance would be very damaging.

State Guarantees in the Defense Sector

From RIA Novosti.

Here is the latest news from Russia on domestic (government) support for the defense industry.  From PM Medvedev:

The provision of state guarantees is the first this year, Medvedev said, and stressed the beneficial effects it would have on the economy as a whole. 

“Everything invested in the defense industry has an influence on industry. Actually, the defense sector helps boost adjacent industries,” he said. 

State guarantees allow defense enterprises to obtain loans at a time when they face a shortage of working capital and have no other sources of financing, Medvedev said. 

Over a half of the state loan guarantees for defense producers this year will go to shipbuilders and developers of intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to the government resolution.

 In general there have always been arguments about beneficial spillovers from government spending on defense into the civilian economy.  This issue seems to be more important for the Russian economy. I often go back to the work of Gaddy and Ickes[1] that illustrates the distortions of Soviet Economy.

________________________________________
[1] Gaddy, Clifford G., and Barry W. Ickes. 2002. Russia’s Virtual Economy. Washington  D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Russia's Internal Arms Consumption

Russia is trying to re-equip its own army (LINK).  This has been going on for awhile.  P.M. Medvedev announced recently that the goal for new equipment in the Russian military is being raised to 75 percent new equipment by 2020.

There are a few implications for this, both internally and externally.  The first is that this is a move that is both about the military and about the militarized economy.  One of my favorite books about the subject of Russia's military economy is by Gaddy and Ickes (2002) [1].  This book talks about the distortions caused by the Soviet Union's militarized economy.  Russia's economy is still riding the oil and gas boom, but employment in those sectors is still small.  There are numerous factory towns (large and larger) whose existence and employment base was dependent on the militarized economy.

Vladimir Putin has elevated arms sales to the same level of state enterprise as the oil and gas industries.  The reasons for this are plentiful. One reason is that arms still are symbolically important.  The more states that use Russia's weapons, the greater Russia's perception of its own uniqueness and importance.  A second reason is hinted at above - Putin needs to employ individuals.  One way to do that is to continue to ride the distortions of the Soviet economy (to a lesser scale) by emphasizing the military industrial complex.

There have been some reports that Russian firms are unable to produce arms sufficiently to meet their obligations to external customers, let alone to fulfill such an ambitious rearmament agenda.  However, by emphasizing internal purchasing of weapons the Kremlin is sending a strong signal that these industries will have the continued support of the state - and that may goad them into ramping up production through hiring, streamlining processes, etc.

This will be an interesting phenomenon to keep an eye on.  To what degree will the Russian military re-arm itself in the coming years?[2]
____________________________________
[1] Gaddy, Clifford G., and Barry W. Ickes. 2002. Russia’s Virtual Economy. Washington  D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

[2] I did not tackle the issue of corruption in this post. I have addressed it earlier (here and here). That will be an even bigger issue as more funds are funneled into the defense sector.

Note: It has been a while since I've posted anything here.  This is not a widely-read forum in general (and for now I'm okay with that), and has been more of a way for me to keep my thoughts together and to have a little fun doing side projects.  I have finished my dissertation and am in the process of moving to a visiting professor position at UNLV.  I may not be writing much over the summer either.

Link-O-Rama: Russia's Domestic Market & Russian Arms Exports

Today I am sharing a number of links I keep saving in my Google Reader to get to later.  They deal with Russia and arms transfers primarily.  It is a mix of positive (for Russia) developments, negative developments, and some weirdness.  The weirdness is that Russia continues to fight against the rest of the world community on the arms to Syria issue. While it is true that arms sales to Libya have not yet been banned (primarily because of Russia's adamant opposition to the possibility), the consensus of the world is coalescing against the regime.  That is potentially long-term bad news for Russia's arms sales to that state.

However, the arms deal to Iraq (see below) is a sign that Russia may be able to regain some of its lost ground in the region.  The items from Libya are a bit confusing.

The bad news for Russia's arms industry is that it is losing past customers (even present allies) for its radar systems.

The last point I want to make before I get to the links is that Russia is really playing the embattled and encircled card on the issue of arms in general.  There is no doubt that the arms industry is a key component of Russia's foreign policy portfolio.

Putin wants to Re-arm Russia 

“In June, we in particular discussed implementation of a state armament program regarding aviation,” he said. “We will keep the issue under constant control.” 

“We will have no other historic chance to solve these ambitious tasks the country is now facing to ensure its defense capability in due time and with due quality when [the required] funds are available, thank God,” Putin said. “Tomorrow we will have none of these funds, and time will be lost.”

Part II

Russia will continue to build up its own defense capabilities according to foreseeable threats stated President Vladimir Putin at a meeting at the Defense Ministry, reports the Voice of Russia's correspondent from the session.

There are multiplying and expanding zones of instability on the planet: with non-stop armed conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the danger of radicalism and chaos being exported to Russia from neighboring regions. 

"At the same time there are methodical attempts being carried out to undermine the strategic balance," President Putin said.

Russia at War over Arms Sales

MOSCOW, March 2 (RIA Novosti) – Russia is facing a ‘real war’ aimed at hampering the country’s legal deliveries of weapons to Syria, the head of the Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation has said. 

“A real war has been declared against us,” Alexander Fomin told Ekho Moskvy radio on Friday without specifying who has declared the war. 

“The [Russian] ships are lured into ports and arrested there under various devised pretexts. When the ships are at sea, any insurance is canceled,” Fomin said adding that any attempts to deliver the contracted goods are being thwarted.

Libya and IRAQ
Iraq 

Indeed, when it became known that Iraq had problems with the Russian deal, there was widespread speculation that Washington had pressured Maliki to stop buying from Moscow to keep him dependent on the United States. 

That and the widespread accusations of corruption in the deal... 

Libya

There were denials all round at the time but the Americans, like the Russians, need hefty exports to keep assembly lines running amid massive cutbacks in domestic defense spending [1]. Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said Feb. 27 he will shortly ask the U.N. Security Council to lift the arms embargo imposed in 2011. 

Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Monday that Moscow had reservations about that, given the Tripoli government's lack of authority and multiple security threats but he said Russia was ready to help the new Libya "facilitate the possible acquisition of arms." 

Russia's RIA Novosti new agency reports Algeria, another Cold War client, is another target, but Algiers has quarreled with Moscow on the quality of its arms and isn't expected to be a major buyer of Russian systems.

More on Libya

The Libyan authorities should do everything possible to stop the spread of Libyan weapons in the region and beyond, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Wednesday. 

Rebels in Libya, some of them from Islamist groups, ousted and killed long-standing dictator Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 after a months-long uprising, in which they received assistance from NATO forces. Government arsenals across the country were looted during the conflict.

Wouldn't arms leakage present an opportunity for more sale to Libya in the long-run if they get the contracts?

Russia and Vietnam

Moscow will proceed with plans this year to help Vietnam launch a new submarine fleet and train the crews, Russian Defense Ministry Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday.

Vietnam ordered six submarines in order to counter Chinese expansion in the area. 

Estonia (and Belarus)

TALLINN, March 7 (RIA Novosti) - Estonia’s Air Defense Forces have dismantled their last obsolete Soviet-made radars, the General Staff of the country’s armed forces said on Thursday. 

One P-37 type radar will be installed as a monument at the Amari military base, while another will be sent to an aviation museum. 

At present, two radar stations monitor Estonia’s airspace - a TPS-77 at Kallavere, in western Estonia and an ASR-8 at Amari, not far from Tallinn. 

In late March, a new radar station will be opened on Muhu Island featuring a medium-range Ground Master 430 3D air-defense radar [2] with an effective range of up to 470 kilometers (295 miles) and an altitude of up to 30 kilometers (100,000 feet). 

Another post-Soviet republic, Belarus, said in mid-February it would replace a Russian radar station with an indigenous one and dispose of its Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 fighters.

The fact that even Belarus (Russia's erstwhile ally) is moving away from Russian-produced radar does not bode well for the reputation of Russian defense products.  This is a serious problem for Russia given its priority of exporting weapons.
__________________________________
[1] One of the assumptions I make in my dissertation is that both the US and Russia can use arms transfers as foreign policy tools because their domestic markets can support the arms industry.  This assumption does not seem to be holding up well.

[2] These are manufactured by the Thales group, a French firm.

Soviet Soldier Found Alive in Afghanistan

This story from RIA Novosti is pretty amazing.  It reminds me of the Japanese soldiers that they kept finding long after WWII had drawn to a close.  As someone who has lived through the ravages of war, the idea that this young man simply walked away from that and found a life for himself is inspiring.  If I had the proper linguistic skills and hadn't been married at the time, I may have done the same thing during my first tour in Iraq.  Living among the Kurds in northern Iraq was very appealing to me.

MOSCOW, March 5 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – There is a traditional healer living in the Shindand District in Afghanistan, known as Sheikh Abdulla, an elderly-looking, impoverished widower with a wispy beard leading a semi-nomadic life with a local clan. 

His real name is Bakhretdin Khakimov and he is a Soviet soldier who has been missing in action since the first months of a nine-year-long bloody war that began when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979. 

Khakimov, an ethnic Uzbek, was tracked down two weeks ago by a search party of the Warriors-Internationalists Affairs Committee, a nonprofit, Moscow-based organization, operating under the aegis of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), whose activists spent a year following the missing soldier’s decades-old trail.

I am glad that there are still those in Russia who are trying to find those that were so cruelly treated by their government.  A government, which for a long time refused to acknowledge the extent of the sacrifice that so many young men were asked to make.

The committee’s operations are funded by countries of the CIS, a confederation comprising most former Soviet republics. Though the expenditures are a mere 12,000 rubles ($400) a year per missing soldier, some countries, such as Ukraine and even oil-rich Turkmenistan, dodge the financial support responsibility, Lavrentyev said.

Deals, Corruption, and Leader Involvement in Arms Sales

There have been a number of interesting stories piling up in my reader over the past few days.  I have wanted to get to them, but have also been trying to finish up the last chapter of my dissertation.  Priorities are fun.  This is what I'm doing on my break.

India

As a follow up to my post last week (here) about Russian corruption is an interesting story out of India.  India made a deal for helicopters with Finmeccanica (Italian firm), which now appears to be the result of bribes paid.  Now the Indian government is threatening to cancel the rest of the contract if the allegations prove true. (Read more here)

(And more here)

More from India.  India wants to start producing more of its own arms, particularly aircraft.  However, it is having difficulty because the firm that could potentially produce arms is so inefficient as to make this an untenable prospect.

James Hardy, an analyst at the defence consultancy IHS Jane's, says that HAL is "overextended", expressing an opinion largely shared by observers at home and abroad.

More here

Russia and Syria
Russia is continuing to supply the Syrian government with weapons from contracts that were already in place.

The head of Russia's arms exporter Rosoboronexport, Anatoly Isaikin, said Russian deliveries to the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad included air defence systems but not the advanced Iskander missiles sought by Damascus. 

"We are continuing to fulfill our obligations on contracts for the delivery of military hardware," Isaikin was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Link

But Russia is not smuggling tank parts into Syria. (Link)

France and India

As part of my dissertation I am looking at the involvement of state leaders in arms deals.  I got a special gift from France's president Hollande on Valentine's Day.  The French President led an entourage to India to "clinch the world's biggest defense deal" in India.  The deal is a $12 Billion sale of 126 aircraft.  Along with this deal there are negotiations about French involvement in to help build a nuclear power plant in Maharashtra.

Link

The Enemy of my Friend - India Pakistan and Russia

This article popped up in my news feed this morning.  It is about Russia's anger that India is purchasing fighters from France. The gist of the argument is that Russia has been India's "true strategic partner" since the 1960s.  The evidence for this is that Russia has voluntarily abstained from selling weapons to India's primary enemy, Pakistan.

Russia now feels betrayed that India is not rewarding that loyalty. India is still the largest customer of Russian arms.  However, if India continues to seek alternatives, Russia could find a lucrative source of income drying up or at least becoming more difficult to assure.

Here is the money quote from the head of Rosoboroneksport:

“We do not sell military equipment to Pakistan, only because of our loyalty to India. But all other nations, with whom India does business, sell their weapons and systems to Pakistan. We are India’s true strategic partners.”

I had the data for arms networks laying around (for my dissertation) so I quickly put together graphs for both India and Pakistan.  These are the ego networks for the two states, which means that these are not the full world arms network, only those states involved in sales to either India or Pakistan.

Neither of these two graphs shows much difference in the composition of states selling weapons.  In the Pakistan network, shown at the bottom, Russia is located at the edge of the graph and is not selling directly to Pakistan.  In all other respects, though the networks are very similar.

I guess the question is now to what extent Russia has deliberately not sold to Pakistan.  If Russia has made a decision not to sell that is one thing.  If Pakistan has not tried to buy because it was being supplied by the US and its allies and wanted to maintain that source for its weapons, then this is a different conversation. The idea that Russia is engaging in a deliberate version of Heidegger's rule (The enemy of my friend if my enemy) is what is most fascinating to me about this entire episode.

Russia's Defense Fraud is Larger than Most States' Defense Budges!

File this under horrifying comparisons.  A report today from Moscow (link to news story) about the amount of fraud in the defense industry is simply staggering.

The Russian Audit Chamber has identified waste and misappropriation totaling almost 117.5 billion rubles – just over $3.9 billion at today’s rate – in the area of national defense, the first deputy head of the State Duma's Defense Committee, Viktor Zavarzin, told reporters, after a closed-door committee meeting attended by officials from the Defense and Finance Ministries, the Prosecutor General’s Office and other agencies.

That is a lot of money.  In order to put this into context I put together a quick visual using 2011 defense spending data from SIPRI. I had to download the data in an excel file and clean it up a bit.

Russian corruption in the defense sector is more than the median military spending by most states in the international system.  Average military spending is highly skewed by the US and China, which are not included in the graph above because of the way they ruin the scale.

What does all of this mean?  It means that it can be very lucrative to be involved in the defense sector in Russia!

None of this information by itself is really surprising and I've alluded to problems of corruption in previous posts.  The sheer scale of that corruption when put into context is simply staggering.

*NOTE:
Click on this link to obtain a zip file that has the SIPRI data for 2011 in a CSV file along with the STATA .do file I used to create the graph.    -Replication Materials-

Russian Government Priorities

The Russian government is being even more explicit in its priorities.  "Competitive serial products" is a good phrase for arms exports.

“The military-industrial complex will receive a serious impetus. It should become a source of technological innovation, both in the military and civilian sectors,” Medvedev said at a government meeting. 

“We should boost our research and development to build advanced specimens of armaments and military hardware and conduct technical retooling of enterprises so they can roll out competitive serial products,” he said.

And Now Corruption in Arms

Transparency International has come up with a new index of corruption in the defense sector.  I haven't had a chance to dig too deeply into the details yet.  Unsurprisingly Russia ranks high (low?) on corruption in the study.

The report can be found here.
A press release can be found here.

This critical passage comes from the press release:

The Index shows that only 15 per cent of governments assessed possess political oversight of defence policy that is comprehensive, accountable, and effective. In 45 per cent of countries there is little or no oversight of defence policy, and in half of nations there is minimal evidence of scrutiny of defence procurement. 

The study also finds that citizens are frequently denied basic knowledge about the defence sector. Half of the countries’ defence budgets lack transparency entirely, or include only very limited, aggregated information. In 70 per cent of the countries, citizens are denied a simple indication of how much is spent by their government on secret items.

The patterns of corruption from the front page of the report are not entirely unexpected.

 I am surprised there was not data on Canada in the study. Australia and Germany are the exemplar states for openness in defense reporting and relations.

I'll need to dig into this a bit further as a factor in arms transfers.  The ability of certain actors in society to enrich themselves through arms deals that are notionally being used to enhance the defense capabilities of the state is an interesting variant of the principal agent problem.

This is definitely an area that could use some further examination.

Arms Export Strategy as a Cause of Russia's Military Decline

Dmitry Gorenburg writes on Russia's military and does a great job of following the developments in that sphere.  In a recent blog post he discusses one of the implications of Serdyukov's prosecution for corruption and ouster as defense minister.

It seems that the new leadership team at the MOD has decided to stop using the threat of importing armaments from abroad to get Russian defense industry to improve the quality of its products. 

One of the interesting implications of the whole affair is summed up in the last paragraph of his post.

In the meantime, however, the defense industry’s defeat of Serdyukov reduces the likelihood that the military will get the equipment it needs. It will take time for the MOD to amass the political capital to fight back against the industry and its allies. The result will be that the industry will get its money, while the military will be promised new equipment that in many cases will not arrive on schedule. In a few years, the military’s situation will get even worse, while the MOD will have rebuilt some of its lost political capital.

One of the primary reasons that the US and Soviet Union (and now Russia) are the world's largest arms exporters is that there has been a large internal demand for those weapons.  If Russia's military collapse continues will it be as a result of a focus on using domestic weapons?  Those weapons slated for the Russian military (that are not delivered to domestic customers for various reasons related to the export focus of the industry) could lead to a lack of development of new weapons systems for the internal market.

This particular internal dynamic could lead to an interesting shift in the overall patterns of arms sales. 

The Power of Prisoners - A Brief note on Ratios

This post is a break from my usual obsession with arms transfers between states.  One of my side projects (and eventually hopefully more than that) is a project in which I examine the role of detainees on the military success of the surge in Iraq.  One of the arguments that I make in my working paper (link) is that one of the stronger signals that the US sent during the surge was to begin treating Shiite insurgents more like Sunni insurgents had been treated throughout the conflict.  One of the ways that this was done was through detention.

Detention was a strong signal - above and beyond rhetoric - that the US in connection with the government of Iraq was not going to play favorites.

Over the past few weeks protests in Iraq have increased. Sunnis are protesting what they perceive to be as uneven application of laws against the Sunni minority by the majority Shiites.  I found it interesting that one of the main areas of contention is detention policy.

Iraqi premier Nuri al-Maliki looked to head off protests in Sunni areas of the country on Tuesday with a prisoner release even as he threatened to use state resources to "intervene" to end the rallies. 

The move came as powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr voiced support for the demonstrations and predicted an impending "Iraqi spring" as ongoing rallies blocked off a key trade route connecting Iraq to Syria and Jordan for a 10th successive day. 

Maliki, who is Shiite, ordered the release of more than 700 female detainees, a key demand of demonstrators, the official appointed to negotiate with protesters, told AFP. 

"The prime minister will write to the president to issue a special amnesty to release them," Khaled al-Mullah said. 

Mullah said of 920 female prisoners in Iraqi jails, 210 had been accused or convicted of terrorism-related offences and could not be released. But, he said, they would be transferred to prisons in their home provinces. 

The remaining detainees, convicted on lower-level charges, would be released, he said. He did not give a timeframe for the process. (source)

Because my modus operandi is to throw a graph in to illustrate whatever news tickles my fancy, I will conclude this post with a graph from my paper referenced above.  It shows the ratio of Sunni to Shiite detainees in US custody during the course of major US operations in Iraq.

The most striking aspect of this graph to me is the huge imbalance of Sunni detainees that occurred in the aftermath of the major sectarian fighting within the country.  The ratio was more than 50 Sunnis detained for each Shiite.  By the time the surge was announced this ratio moved down into the 5:1 and 4:1 range where it held steady.

It would be interesting to have these same data for the Iraq government prison system.