Corruption investigations in the MoD - Filed under: Speculation

This is just a kind of tidbit - a nugget of joy - along with some wild speculation.  For what it's worth.

There has been a story developing about corruption among Russia's Defense Ministry's property department.  That has led to what appears to be a full investigation with documents and other items being seized today in Moscow.

From the article in RIA:

Oboronservis was set up in 2008 and carries out repair and services for Defense Ministry properties as well as repair and maintenance of military equipment and provision of services to military garrison towns. 

A law enforcement source told RIA Novosti that no detentions are planned in the near future as part of the ongoing investigation. 

Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was informed of the investigation and arrived at one of the locations being searched, law enforcement sources said on Thursday morning. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin met with Serdyukov and instructed him to ensure interaction with investigators on the Oboroneservis case. 

Presidential administration head Sergei Ivanov said it will be up to the court to rule who is guilty. 

“Only the court may determine whether a person is guilty or not. All the rest is vibrating air and propaganda,” Ivanov told journalists.

More details about the latest seizure and ongoing investigation can be found here.

Speculations

Now for the wild speculation.  It does not seem that any large and visible investigation such as this one is every done without the knowledge/approval of the Kremlin.  This investigation, and its timing, may indicate the model of having civilians as a part of the ministry of defense, and part of the defense and security structures within Russia, is under attack.  Many in the military have been unhappy with the civilian head of the Defense Ministry.  A good bio can be found at Wikipedia.

This may be more "Clan" maneuvering among Russia's elites, especially given the fact that Ivanov's held the position of Defense Minister prior to moving over to be head of the the Presidential administration in 2007.  If Kremlin watching is back in vogue, this makes for compelling television.

Why arms control is hard...

This item has been sitting in my reader for a few days.  This statement, made by Vladimir Putin, touches on so many aspects of international relations that I didn't quite know what direction I wanted to take in examining it.  First, the statement:

"Only sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council can serve as a basis for restricting weapons supplies to any particular country. In all other cases, nobody can use any pretext to dictate to Russia or any other country on how they should trade and with whom."

I would like to address two interesting points from the standpoint of my own research on arms transfer that this statement evinces.

1. Arms control is inherently difficult to begin if the two states that have the largest stake in the arms transfer game have an effective veto on limitations of their right to sell weapons.  This is a highly rational position for Russia to take if it sees arms sales as a vital part of its economic, military, or foreign policy portfolio. The built-in veto of the security council turns this international organization into a forum for state to state diplomacy rather than international action in the case of arms transfers.  What I mean by this is that in the case of the US and Russia having disputes over arms transfers to Syria, for example, the veto on the security council by each state means that either state can effectively get what they want in the absence of all but the most spirited international consensus.  
2. The second point is that Putin seems to put arms sales in the same category as other trade.  Nobody can dictate how they trade and with whom.  This is a very interesting sentiment for a state which recently was accepted into the WTO to have.  

The question about arms transfers being a different type of trade is one that I'll leave to another time.  However, Russia continues to hold firm to its position of autonomy in foreign policy.  Its leaders are unwilling to allow the state to be constrained by other states (i.e. the United States) or even by the international community more broadly.  

Russian Domestic Politics

Understanding Russian politics has always required a touch of second sight.  We had a talk on campus by John Zaller yesterday.  His talk was about American political parties. He noted that there is a lack of data about party nominations for most races - even Congressional races - in most years.  This is in a pretty open society.  The problem of data availability in Russia often leads to speculation - Kremlin watching - and inferences from the visible acts of the administration.

None of this is news to anyone who follows Russian politics.  I hadn't fully appreciated the issues associated with this issue until I began trying to understand Russian foreign policy.  Brian Whitmore over at Radio Free Europe has written a column detailing the schism between the elites in the Kremlin. He writes that this split is over the degree to which the Kremlin is willing to compromise with the middle class, continue its economic reforms, and tolerate media and popular dissent with the regime.  In this struggle in the Kremlin it is Putin v. Medvedev and their respective camps.  This particular conflict has likely been brewing behind the scenes for some time, but the position swapping of Putin and Medvedev in the most recent election seems to have exacerbated the tensions.

All of this serves as the backdrop for Russia's latest foreign policy moves vis-a-vis the United States.  According to Konstantin Von Eggert:

Russia became an irrelevant second-tier policy issue for the Americans quite some time ago. Until fairly recently, the Russian leadership had responded by using the so-called nuisance factor – i.e. making life difficult for the U.S. without crossing any red lines that might prompt an unpredictable U.S. reaction. No more. 

First by openly challenging the U.S. and the EU over Syria, and now by booting out an American government agency, Vladimir Putin has shown that he intends to turn this irrelevance to his regime's advantage and draw the red lines himself. 

He also demonstrated that his main policy concern is in fact domestic. Priority number one for Putin and his entourage is keeping his regime firmly in power and preventing development of the so-called Orange Scenario, along the lines of the peaceful 2004 revolution in Ukraine, which is widely perceived in Moscow to have been a Western plot to change the pro-Moscow regime there.

These domestic concerns also bear directly on the military and the military industrial complex in Russia.  One of the first items on Putin's agenda is the overhaul of Russia's defense sector.  This week he met with the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Defense industry, Dmitry Rozgin to push for modernization of the defense sector in Russia.

“This program must be tailored so that enterprises are modernized in parallel with the resolution of these social issues,” Putin said during a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.
Rogozin, who oversees the Russian defense industry, now faces the formidable task of streamlining weaponry development and production in the country. 

“This is an acute problem and you must take the appropriate steps in line with the state defense order,” Putin said. 

The president stressed the importance of direct support for the defense industry from both the state and the private sector. 

Russia’s defense industry brings together 1,353 organizations and companies in 64 regions of the country, and employs over 2 million people. 

The government has allocated 20 trillion rubles ($641 billion) to the comprehensive rearmament of Russia's Armed Forces. It is hoped this will see the share of modern weaponry reach 30% by 2015, with this figure rising to 70% by 2020. 

An additional 3 trillion rubles (approximately $100 bln) in public funds and about the same amount in private investment have been allocated to modernize the defense industry over the next decade.

These internal changes to Russia's defense industry will likely also affect Russia's foreign arms sales capabilities and priorities.  

"Private" Military Companies in Russia

The headline in my RSS feed from RIA Novosti made me think that Russia was going to privatize its military production.  It turns out that the "Private Military" companies would be state owned/sponsored private security forms on the order of Blackwater or whatever they are calling themselves these days:

The Russian government’s Military Industrial Commission may consider creating private military companies in Russia, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Wednesday. 

Russia’s significant economic interests abroad often operate in “difficult” conditions, and such companies would facilitate their work, said Rogozin, who oversees Russia's military-industrial complex. 

“We are thinking about whether our money should go toward financing foreign private security [and] military companies, or whether we should consider the feasibility of such companies in Russia itself,” he said.

 The article points out that such firms are useful for the US because it saves the government insurance money when people die on missions that are contracted to these firms rather than carried out by the military.  Insurance isn't a problem for the Russian military which doesn't really deal in such financial niceties according to Alexander Golt:

“In Russia, the state has practically no financial responsibility to the loss of military personnel.”

The question that remains for me is what affect such state-sponsored paramilitary firms would have on Russia's foreign policy actions.  It is plausible to think of such firms being hired by Assad, for instance, to perform various protective tasks, training, or necessary maintenance.  It would provide a bit of cover to Russia's government which could point to market principles and non-interference with private firms to justify unpopular foreign policy commitments.  This will definitely be an interesting area to watch in the coming years.

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.

Putting Dollars in STATA Graphics Titles

This post is mostly so I remember how to do this.

There is a problem that I run into a lot when I am plotting in STATA.  The $ symbol is used by STATA to call up various macros.  When you try to add it as a currency symbol in a graph title it ends up disappearing. Take, for instance the following code and its associated graphical output:

twoway dot percapmil id, mlabel(description) mlabpos(12)
scheme(s1mono)
xlabel(0(1)5)
ylabel(, angle(0))
xtitle("")
ytitle("$1000 US Per Military Personnel")
title("Per Capita (Mil. Personell) Spending of US and Russian Customers", size(medium))
subtitle("1992-2000 and 2001-2002")

Notice the y-axis label is missing the dollar sign.  I really want to emphasize the fact that the y axis represents money spent by states for defense.  How can I add the dollar sign to the graph?  This requires using a STATA Markup Control Language (SMCL) workaround.  

The modified code looks like this (just taking the relevant line of code):

ytitle("{c $|}1000 US Per Military Personnel")

With this modification the graph looks the way that I want it to. 

It's a little bit inconvenient to have to add the extra code {c $|} just to get the symbol to show up like it should, but once you know what the workaround is you can get your work done instead of endlessly Googling.  Now back to work.

Feudal Domains - Congress, the Military, and Arms Procurement

As part of my dissertation research I am examining the processes through which states make foreign policy decisions.  I am specifically interested in the policies that lead to the export of arms from one state to another. My dissertation focuses on this decision-making in the United States and Russia.  Today's reading of Chapter 5 of Richard Halloran's book To Arm a Nation proved to be a rich source of material.

This chapter focuses on the "Feudal Domains" within both the military and Congress which create unnecessary duplication of efforts in acquisition of arms.  The problems of acquisition are a result of turf battles within both institutions - Congress and the Military. The issue in Congress is the temptation to use the vast military budget to gain political advantage:

"Congress is the site of dozens of fiefs, each more concerned with its own turf....The primary reason is simple - money.  The military budget is so immense that everyone seeks to get as much of it as possible spent in his home state or election district." (Halloran 1986, 146-7)

Within the defense department, the problems come as a result of turf battles between powerful procurement chiefs that are exacerbated by the inter service rivalry within the military more generally.

"But the personnel fiefs are minor compared with those in the procurement of arms, equipment, vehicles ammunition, spare parts, and the vast storehouse of supplies for a modern military force.  It is surely the most divided and conflicting set of fiefs within the military establishment, rarely developing weapons that would be used by more than one service and hence could be produced economically." (Halloran 1986, 161)

Another point that is made by Halloran is of interest to those trying to research processes of decision making.   That is the difference between the people and the system.  He discusses some of the idiosyncrasies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He contends that they don't function well as advisers to the President and the Secretary of Defense.  The written reports and advice that comes from the Joint Chiefs is "...generally irrelevant, normally unread, and most always disregarded." (Halloran 1986, 163).  This is in contrast to informal meetings between the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense which were characterized by Harold Brown (President Carter's SECDEF).  Brown noted that these face-to-face meetings were "extremely helpful" (ibid).

Of particular interest to those interested in the processes leading to exports are the vignettes on page 170 of ways that Members of Congress push for extra production of weapons systems that benefit their district.

• Carl Levin (D, MI) - Pushes for an additional 120 M1 tanks (840 as opposed to the 720 requested by military)
• Howard Metzenbaum (D, OH) - critic of military spending but big supporter of the B1 bomber program because of the components made in Ohio.
• Sam Nunn (D, GA) - "respected for his evenhanded approach [to defense spending]" fought to have additional C5 aircraft built in Georgia even though the Army and Air Force favored a new plane.

In these cases it seems that there would be pressure from Congress to find foreign outlets for such weapons systems built in their home districts.  If we can sell such items to allies across the world, it is even better for the local economies that Members of Congress represent so fiercely.  Is that a reasonable assumption to make?  Can I think of this as one of the drivers of US arms export policy?

References

Halloran, Richard. To Arm a Nation: Rebuilding America’s Endangered Defenses. 1st ed. Macmillan, 1986.