This is a post for me to take care of some bookkeeping tasks. There have been a number of articles written about arms sales that relate to my research interests lately. However, I have needed to put them aside to finish up some other projects and to finish up the end of the year. I will present this as a roundup list with a little commentary so I can come back and do some deeper work with these sources later.
Vietnam
The Vietnam War ended long ago. The US has now lifted its arms prohibition on the country. It was done via an executive order and announced by President Obama. This is an interesting story for me. In this case, the prohibition on sales was political - trumping economic concerns. This decision is also political - a signal to China about the US interests in security in the region. It looks like the US will start fielding requests for aircraft. (LINK)
Russia has been supplying arms to Vietnam for a long time. I wrote a vignette about naval sales to Vietnam for a paper I wrote in 2012 (unpublished). Here is an interesting piece on the mechanics who maintain Russian-made Sukhoi jets for Vietnam (LINK). This aspect of arms sales and military effectiveness has not really made its way into the literature on arms sales. I think that it is really fascinating. If arms are something more than symbolic, they need to be maintained. The capacity for states to maintain their own high-end equipment puts them ahead of states that need to rely solely on the manufacturing country. I am still thinking of how this could be incorporated into a research paper, so for now it remains an interesting small question.
Russia
Russia and arms are always interesting. An interesting article from RFE/RL outlines the proliferation of new and fancy weapons being built by Russia and the fear that they will lead to a new arms race.
In other interesting news, Russia and the US (along with the rest of the P5) agreed to re-arm the Libyan government for that government to fight internal rebels (LINK). This is a very interesting state of affairs. The norm for western governments has been to avoid providing weapons to states to deal with internal repression (at least in policy and rhetoric). Now states are agreeing that states arming to fight against extremists is okay. This in many ways validates the Russian position in Syria. States have a right to protect their regime from violence. Does this signal a shift in norms to take into account the growing threat of Islamic violence (i.e. ISIS), or is this a unique case?
F-35
The Pentagon admitted that the F-35 will be delayed and will not be ready for full production until (at least) 2018 (LINK). The delays in this program are an interesting issue in arms acquisition and production. The F-35 was supposed to be cheaper and better and it is morphing into a hybrid that is neither. For me the interesting question to ask in a few years is whether the political capital gained by outsourcing and cooperating on its production are worth the cost in terms of acquisition cost and speed as well as the ratio of those two factors in effectiveness.
Vietnam
The Vietnam War ended long ago. The US has now lifted its arms prohibition on the country. It was done via an executive order and announced by President Obama. This is an interesting story for me. In this case, the prohibition on sales was political - trumping economic concerns. This decision is also political - a signal to China about the US interests in security in the region. It looks like the US will start fielding requests for aircraft. (LINK)
Russia has been supplying arms to Vietnam for a long time. I wrote a vignette about naval sales to Vietnam for a paper I wrote in 2012 (unpublished). Here is an interesting piece on the mechanics who maintain Russian-made Sukhoi jets for Vietnam (LINK). This aspect of arms sales and military effectiveness has not really made its way into the literature on arms sales. I think that it is really fascinating. If arms are something more than symbolic, they need to be maintained. The capacity for states to maintain their own high-end equipment puts them ahead of states that need to rely solely on the manufacturing country. I am still thinking of how this could be incorporated into a research paper, so for now it remains an interesting small question.
Russia
Russia and arms are always interesting. An interesting article from RFE/RL outlines the proliferation of new and fancy weapons being built by Russia and the fear that they will lead to a new arms race.
In other interesting news, Russia and the US (along with the rest of the P5) agreed to re-arm the Libyan government for that government to fight internal rebels (LINK). This is a very interesting state of affairs. The norm for western governments has been to avoid providing weapons to states to deal with internal repression (at least in policy and rhetoric). Now states are agreeing that states arming to fight against extremists is okay. This in many ways validates the Russian position in Syria. States have a right to protect their regime from violence. Does this signal a shift in norms to take into account the growing threat of Islamic violence (i.e. ISIS), or is this a unique case?
F-35
The Pentagon admitted that the F-35 will be delayed and will not be ready for full production until (at least) 2018 (LINK). The delays in this program are an interesting issue in arms acquisition and production. The F-35 was supposed to be cheaper and better and it is morphing into a hybrid that is neither. For me the interesting question to ask in a few years is whether the political capital gained by outsourcing and cooperating on its production are worth the cost in terms of acquisition cost and speed as well as the ratio of those two factors in effectiveness.
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