Military Aircraft Sales Visualized (1990)

I am working on a new paper that uses SIPRI data to look at more fine-grained transactions than the simple TIV value that I used for my dissertation research.  The project that I am working on is using these data to test some hypotheses that are related to realist behavior by states.  I am in the midst of coding the data.  The coding itself has been a good project to get me down into the details of arms transactions by states.  I am looking at transactions by examining the trade registers for all years from 1990-2013.

I have completed my first year of data coding.  Overall there were 215 distinct military aircraft sales in which aircraft were delivered in 1990.  This involved 26 suppliers, the largest two were the USSR and the United States.  Even more states were the recipients of these aircraft sales.  This included the sale of all types of aircraft ranging from small helicopters to large cargo planes.  The most interesting sales are those involving fighter jets and jets that have other strike capabilities.

Since I can't help it, I have visualized the sale of aircraft between states as a network.  The graph probably needs some work.  I plan on cutting it down into chunks, aircraft by type, at a later time.  For now, though, I thought it would be a fun graph to post.

Data on arms sales come from the SIPRI data.

Presidential Involvement in Arms Sales: Israel and France Edition

Today while I was working on coding aircraft sales (using SIPRI trade register data) I came across and aircraft type that I wanted more details about.  That took me down the Wikipedia wormhole.  What I found was a very interesting history of presidential involvement in arms sales - in this case the French President and sales of Mirage 5 fighters to Israel during the 1960s.

From Wikipedia:

The first Mirage 5 flew on 19 May 1967.^[2] It looked much like the Mirage III, except it had a long slender nose that extended the aircraft's length by about half a metre. A pitot tube was distinctively moved from the tip of the nose to below the nose in the majority of Mirage 5 variants. 

The Mirage 5 retained the IIIE's twin DEFA guns, but added two additional pylons, for a total of seven. Maximum warload was 4,000 kg (8,800 lb). Provision for the SEPR rocket engine was deleted. 

Rising tensions in the Middle East led French President Charles de Gaulle to embargo the Israeli Mirage 5s on 3 June 1967. The Mirages continued to roll off the production line, even though they were embargoed, and by 1968 the batch was complete and the Israelis had provided final payments. 

In late 1969, the Israelis, who had pilots in France testing the aircraft, requested that the aircraft be transferred to Corsica, in theory to allow them to continue flight training during the winter. The French government became suspicious when the Israelis also tried to obtain long-range fuel tanks and cancelled the move.The Israelis finally gave up trying to get the aircraft and accepted a refund. 

Some sources claim cooperation with France resumed outside the public's eye and Israel received 50 Mirage 5s in crates from the AdA, while the AdA took over the 50 aircraft originally intended for Israel, as Mirage 5Fs.^[3][4][5]Officially, Israel claimed to have built the aircraft after obtaining complete blueprints, naming them IAI Nesher.^[6][7]

In my dissertation I looked at the involvement of the Russian president in setting up deals for arms sales to other countries. There are some theories about arms transfers that would say that states such as France would be less likely to bow to pressure to restrict arms sales since there is a great deal of domestic pressure and incentives to produce these weapons systems for export. The customer (Israel) and the context (the 1967 war) are certainly factors to consider when looking at the case.  However, this is also in contrast to France's continued plan to sell Mistrel class ships to Russia in the midst of sanctions on Russia for its actions in Crimea and Ukraine.

I was happy to find more examples of presidential involvement in such matters because it reinforces the important foreign policy implications of exporting coercive capabilities to other states in the world system.  

Iraq's new Civil War - Why Detention Matters.

Background

The past week has been interesting for me, sitting on the sideline and reading about detainees in Iraq.  The leader of the ISIS group that took over Mosul was released from Bucca in 2009.  The stories that are coming out about him now are primarily about how no one knows much about him.  The latest revelation is that he made a remark to the US soldiers releasing him to the effect that he would "See them in New York." That is a bit ominous given the stature of his group.  He is now the prime target of US forces. (See the following story for more background.)

My interest in this story comes from many sources. First, the news that Mosul had fallen deeply saddened me.  I was in Mosul from April to October 2003. I was stationed at the airfield there and worked as the leader of a Tactical Human Intelligence Team gathering information on threats to US forces and Iraqis in the area.  Mosul was very stable and pleasant during my time there. Mosul was the success that General Petraeus would capitalize on in his meteoric rise over the next decade.

Second, my next tour to Iraq in 2007-08 was to Camp Bucca.  Camp Bucca during the height of the surge was a contradiction.  It was an overcrowded mess (more than 25,000 detainees) of a camp that was simultaneously growing with the influx of detainees and working to reform the system to release them.  We hit a period of growth, and then the releases started.  The camp was run using doctrines from U.S. military incarceration, US Prisoner of War procedures, and a smattering of counterinsurgency.  The counterinsurgency aspects were taking root as we arrived.

Third, I have written on the subject of detention academically - and am one of the few political science scholars to do so. It is an area that has lacked attention in the past, but which now may become more obvious as a key aspect of conflict resolution, policy-making, and strategy.

Flawed System

One of the first papers I wrote as a graduate student dealt with the issue of releasing prisoners from detention centers.  The logic of the paper was simple. If detainees are properly classified using intelligence, the release of less dangerous detainees is sound policy.  However, the less certain we become about the classification of detainees, the more dangerous detainees will be released back into the fight.  This is a fairly obvious point, but it was made with my own personal experience in trying to classify detainees at Camp Bucca.  The fact is that we were not good at initially identifying dangerous detainees or updating our files through continued intelligence activities.

That is why I was unsurprised by the quotes of the commanding officer who was in charge of the facility when Baghdadi was released.  He says of the ISIS leader: 

"He didn't rack up to be one of the worst of the worst," said Col. Ken King, who oversaw Camp Bucca in 2008 and 2009. 

Baghdadi may have tried to manipulate other detainees or instigate reactions from the guards, but he knew the rules well enough not to get in serious trouble. 

"The best term I can give him is savvy," said King, who first spoke to the Daily Beast. 

The colonel recalled that when Baghdadi was turned over to the Iraqi authorities in 2009, he remarked, "I'll see you guys in New York," an apparent reference to the hometown of many of the guards. 

"But it wasn't menacing. It was like, 'I'll be out of custody in no time,'" King said.

The description of the detainee is one who knew that the Americans were easily manipulated by those who played lip service to the rules of the camp.  His probing and manipulation are skills that he certainly honed while in custody.  Camp Bucca was described at one point as a training ground for Jihadists.  The half-measures taken by US forces in 2007-08 were not enough to really identify the smartest of the hard-core jihadists.  We essentially created a Darwinian system where those with enough savvy to avoid detection could increase their skills.

The time to solve the crisis in Iraq has passed.  Bucca is closed, the US doesn't have troops on the ground. However, we do have the ability to patch some of these flaws before our exit in Afghanistan, and to learn from them for our next wars.

Naked Self Promotion

One place to start is by committing more intelligence resources to detention facilities. This needs to be coupled with a change in the way that we collect and analyze intelligence from such facilities. I made this recommendation in an article last year.

Willardson, Spencer. “Strategic Intelligence During Coin Detention Operations – Relational Data and Understanding Latent Terror Networks.” Defense & Security Analysis 29, no. 1 (2013): 42–53.

I also have a working paper about the Surge in Iraq that details why the process of detention was important in separating the Sunnis and Shiites and ending the first Civil war.  If you are interested in the latest version of this paper, please email me. 

Finally, I have a database with detainee stats from Iraq from early 2003 through the beginning of 2009. These data come from some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that I made.  A description of the data can be found on my website. LINK.

Kazakh Arms Imports Visualized (Part 1)

I thought it would be fun to put together a graph that shows the arms suppliers for Kazakhstan in 2013 in a network form.  The data come from SIPRI and I put them into a simple association matrix.  I used the R Statnet package to make the data a network, and then just used plot features in R to make the graph look a little nicer. I think that this is a fun little visualization of where these arms are coming from.  Here's the graph:

The code to do this is pretty straightforward.  If you want the data in the text format, please email me.  The code is pasted below using "Pretty R."

library(statnet)
supplier <- read.table("supplier.txt")
kasnet2013.m <- as.matrix(supplier)
kaznet2013 <- as.network(kasnet2013.m,matrix.type="adjacency", directed = T)
 
vertsize <- supplier$Kazakhstan*.05+1
png("Kazakh_imports2013.png", height = 8, width=11, units="in", bg="transparent",
    res=600)
plot(kaznet2013, displaylabels=TRUE, displayisolates = FALSE,
     vertex.col=c("gray","gray","red","gray","gray", "red","sienna4"),
     vertex.cex = vertsize,
     main=list("Kazakstan Arms Suppliers 2013", col="sienna4"),
     sub=list("Size of Vertex represents Value of Arms from Country",
              cex= .9, col="sienna3"))
 
mtext("Data from SIPRI TIV Database", side = 2, cex=.75, col="dimgray")
dev.off()

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

2013 Arms Imports into Former Soviet States

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has updated its arms transfer data for 2013.  I haven't worked much with arms transfer data since I completed my dissertation a year ago.  However, I recently accepted a job as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nazarbayev University (Link) and am looking to begin some projects on arms and security in the area.  As a kind of preliminary step in this endeavor I thought I'd play around with some of the SIPRI data while I'm on spring break at UNLV.

I am also teaching a course on research methods in political science this semester.  I am teaching our political science students to do statistical analysis in R.  I am learning a lot myself and am forcing myself to use it rather than STATA - which is my go-to statistical and graphing package.

My first plot is a simple bar chart showing the value of arms imports (major weapons systems) into former Soviet states during 2013.  One interesting aspect is that there are only six states that received arms during this year.  Azerbaijan is also off the charts compared to the other states on the list.  I am also posting my R code to make this chart as well as a link to the csv file that I used as a data source.  I made the R code look good using "pretty R".

# Examine 2013 SIPR Export Data
#setwd() #uncomment and use this command to set your working directory to the folder
  #where you downloaded the csv file to.
imports_fsu_2013 <- read.csv("imports_fsu_2013.csv")
as.numeric(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) #make the Imports column numeric
 
mean_import <- mean(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) # generate mean value
 
png("fsu_imports.png", height = 8, width=11, units="in", bg="transparent",
    res=600)
 
barplot(imports_fsu_2013$Imports,
        names.arg = imports_fsu_2013$Country,
        main=list("Military Imports into Former Soviet Countries 2013 \n in Millions $US", 
                  cex=1.1),
        ylab="Millions $US",
        xlab=list("Importing Country", font=2),
        col = "sienna4")
 
abline(h=mean_import, lty=3, col="black")
text(4,192, "Mean Value of imports to Former Soviet States in 2013", cex=.75)
mtext("Data from SIPRI TIV Database", side = 1, cex=.75, col="dimgray")
 
dev.off()

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Just an update on R coding

I'm teaching an introduction to political analysis course at UNLV this spring.  I have gone out on a limb and am teaching the students R instead of STATA or SPSS.  I am more familiar with STATA, but do my network analysis work in R.  I am trying to become more proficient.  I had a problem with a project I am working on - trying to count the number of rivalry ties that a state has in any given year. Normally I would do this in STATA, but I decided to give it a whirl in R.  After two hours and numerous "googlings" I have produced the code to give me the count for each year of my data.  The code looks like this:

for(i in 1816:2010){
  fp <- file.path("network", paste("net", i, ".txt", sep = ""))
  outcount <- file.path("count", paste("count", i, ".csv", sep=""))
 
  file <- read.table(fp)
  #sum row - this is the number of out ties by a state
  count.row <-rowSums(file, na.rm=FALSE, dims=1)
  count.col <- colSums(file, na.rm=FALSE, dims=1)
  comb.ties <- cbind(count.row, count.col)
  total.ties <- rowSums(comb.ties, na.rm=FALSE, dims=1)
  write.csv(total.ties, file= outcount, row.names = TRUE)  
}

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

The data come from text files with a network matrix (sociomatrix) for the states involved in the international system.  I use these to examine network characteristics in other contexts.  Here, I have just used them as matrices and have used the summing features to get both the outgoing ties, states that identify others as rivals, and in ties, those that identify the state as rivals.  These are combined and summed for a total.  The total is then exported to a CSV file that can be used in other contexts.  It's blunt force, and perhaps inelegant, but it's mine!

A quick review of "The Beijing Consensus" and Central Asia

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to read the Beijing consensus to see what it said about the role of China in Central Asia.  The answer is that it depends.  There is very little in the book that talks about the region.  In fact there were only two or three mentions of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at all - and these were really just in passing.

The more complicated answer is that the overall thesis of the book is about the ways that Beijing is circumventing the west's ideal of linking liberal economies with liberal polities.  The appeal of the China model is great for the autocratic rulers in the Central Asian states who face some similar issues as the Chinese. The primary motivator for these states is a need for stability.  This is shared by all the states in the region.  China and Russia are at the top of the list of states that have based their foreign policy on the stance that internal stability is the trump card.

For leaders around the world that look at the aftermath and continuing problems of the Arab Spring and the Euromaiden revolution brewing in Ukraine, the ideal of stability is attractive. The adherence of these states to the Westphalian ideal of sovereignty is a key to understanding Russian foreign policy and its positions in the UN.

This book is an important read for those that are interested in nuanced narratives of the way the world works.  It is important for reminding academics and policy wonks alike that there is a competing market in the world for ideas, and that there are powerful states that are backing a different set of ideas and ideals.

Central Asia and China - Research Note and Questions

Questions

I am beginning an interest in security issues in Central Asia.  I am interested in a few aspects of security.  The first is the continued existence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and its future.  How does a a treaty organization with two great powers that have traditionally been enemies work out?  What are the consequences of China's growing economic ties and Russia's historical ties to the area?  I am also fascinated by the fact that India is a member of the organization, but is a democracy.  How will the organization hold up in the long-term, and what shape will it take if it does survive?

Central Asia as Cake

Some of these questions are brought up in an article on the RFE/RL site:
General Liu Yazhou of China’s People’s Liberation Army perhaps summed up China’s interest in Central Asia best when he said, “Central Asia is the thickest piece of cake given to modern China by the heavens.” 

Central Asia’s energy resources -- oil, natural gas, uranium -- are the cake.
China needs these resources to fuel its economic growth and Beijing is seeking them everywhere in the world. 

But why send oil tankers half way around the world when Central Asia has numerous pipelines, railways and roads are being constructed, largely with Chinese money. All that can bring oil, gas, uranium, and various minerals from Central Asia to China. And the Chinese loans that the Central Asian governments are accepting to develop their oil and gas fields and build the infrastructure needed to export these resources to China are in fact pre-payment for goods to be received later.

Link to full article

The article goes on to downplay the potential expansionist/empire building motivations for China. One key portion of this argument is that China has enough problems within its own borders without expanding them and inviting further unrest. The article also notes that Russia's continued interest in - and support of the military forces of states in the region (Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) make it unlikely that China will be able to military dominate the region.

Exercising Restraint

One interesting aspect of the SCO is that its mission has remained defensive.  The organization won't take over security aspects of Afghanistan with the withdrawal of NATO, for example (RIA Novosti). This fits with Russia's own policy urging restraint in the internal matters of other states.

China's own foreign policy of engaging with dictators has not been going well either. States such as Sudan and Venezuela are becoming less stable and less attractive as economic partners.  As Zachary Keck argues in the Diplomat:

This underscores, however, that far from being a strength, China’s dictatorship diplomacy is a sign of its weakness. Because China entered the globalization game relatively late, almost all the most attractive economic partners already had strong and long-standing ties to Western nations. As a result, China to some degree has simply had to settle for the more problematic nations that the West refused to deal with. This inevitably required taking on more risk, and this risk has not paid off for China. Indeed, in the course of just a few short years China’s dictatorship diplomacy has virtually imploded all over the globe.

I have more questions than ideas about security in Central Asia right now, but I am starting a reading list. The first book I have on there is The Beijing Consensus.


See it on Amazon

If you have other books you recommend, please leave them in the comments!