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.  

France and Russian Ship Deal - Russia not to Build its Own Ships

Here is the story:

Russia's new Defence Minister has made the decision that Russia will not build Mistral class helicopter-carriers, the Vedomosti newspaper reports with reference to sources in the Defence Ministry. 

According to earlier agreements, France was to build two such ships, with the costs totalling more than a billion euros, while Russia was to build two more ships at its own shipyards. 

But, according to the periodical, the concept of using Mistral class ships by the Russian Navy has turned out to be questionable, while the building and maintenance costs, too heavy. 

France is already building two helicopter-carriers for Russia, with the first one due to be commissioned in 2014, while the second one, in 2015.
Both naval ships will be based in Vladivostok.

My question on this particular case is whether or not Russia is backing out because it just doesn't have the capacity to build enough advanced ships for its own navy while maintaining its ship export commitments.

A Love Hate Relationship with R is Born

I am interested in arms transfers.  I am also interested in networks. In my dissertation I am combining those two interests.  I think that I am looking at some really cool relationships.  This is well and good. However, to do this fun research stuff I have had to leave my comfort zone of STATA and work in R.  Now I am fighting through the twin troubles of learning new software (and a language to code in) and learning new models.

I did a preliminary round of study to make sure that I could do this analysis in an advanced statistics class last semester.  Over the summer R changed versions. The package I use to do my ERGM analysis broke.  That package was updated.  Then my code broke and nothing worked the past two weeks as I have tried to get my analysis done for my dissertation.

After hours of frustrated Googling, I found a note on a blog (that I can't find a link to now... arrrrrgh!) about R namespaces and needing to remove the igraph and statnet packages and reinstall statnet first in order for it to work correctly.  I did this (without reinstalling igraph, just to be sure).  Now things run.  Now I can actually do analysis and not debugging and firefighting with the software.

Enough of the hate. I love Rstudio.  After running through some model specifications last night I decided to try out the knitr package. Awesome.  I still have a lot to learn to make things into real good documents and documentation of my analyses, but you can check out this link to my output for my test models here.

And here is a network graph of France's (egocentric) arms network during the 1950s.  The network is created from the main world network.  The world network accounts for all arms transactions from 1950 to 1959.  The sociomatrix shows a 1 if state i sold weapons to state j at any point during the 10 year window.

Created Using R. Data come from SIPRI.