The Turkish Kerfuffle - F35 and S-400 Missiles in Competition

It may be too dramatic to call the kerfuffle over S-400 missiles a fight for the soul of Turkey.  I am not a Turkey expert, but I think that Erdogan's victory over the military after the "coup" of 2016 took Turkey down a new security path that may be hard to come back from. Many articles have discussed the issue of the S-400 missile and the US decision to exclude Turkey from the F-35 project as a consequence.  A recent article in War on the Rocks helped me to think through my own position on this issue more clearly.

The author of the article, Ray Rounds, makes a number of interesting points about the ineffectiveness of arms as instruments of foreign policy - especially in terms of specific policies.  This ineffectiveness has been at the heart of the finds that Richard Johhnson and I found regarding human rights and arms transfers.  We published a piece in ISQ last year that tried to tie democratic states' stances on human rights to their policy actions in terms of arms transfers.  We found that the actions of these democratic states does not match their rhetoric in any meaningful way.  We have other work under review that tests this proposition using dependence on arms as the independent variable to test whether or not dependence on democratic suppliers can spur states to better human rights records.  The spoiler answer to that particular question is that it does not.

With that in mind, the argument that arms embargoes are more costly and harmful is thought-provoking.  It is especially useful for helping to develop clearer theories of arms transfers in international relations more broadly - my long-term project and personal white whale.

Arms exports are best used for maintaining or strengthening relationships while limiting adversary access to client states; a tool of nuanced influence, not outright coercion. In fact, threatening to withhold arms sales to coerce a state into changing its behavior often has the opposite effect, leading clients to diversify their arms sourcing instead of shifting course. 

This idea that arms create and strengthen relationships, and cannot simply be used instrumentally to get a particular policy or outcome at a desired time is interesting and nuanced.  It also tracks with my own theoretical leanings to think that arms sales are part of the fabric of international relations precisely because they are a currency of relationships.  They are a currency precisely because the transfer of arms represents the transfer of coercive capabilities that forms the basis of an anarchic world.  In terms of Wendt (1992) arms are a big piece of the anarchy that states are making.

Rounds lists a number of states that have moved to diversify their arms suppliers because of US restrictions, delays, and hesitance in supplying them with weapons over the course of a number of year:

Egypt is one example above; but others such as Venezuela and even tiny Kuwait — frustrated at years of U.S. approval delays — have significantly diversified their arms acquisitions. In other words, with the money and options available to Saudi Arabia, and few other producers showing a stomach for a full embargo, it is not unreasonable to believe that the Saudis might significantly diversify their arms acquisitions over time in response to a U.S. embargo.

In the case of US and Turkey, the refusal of the US to consider Turkey for Patriot Missiles (and some technology transfer and manufacturing offsets) was one of the main factors in influencing Turkey to move towards the Russians.  That move has now jeopardized further cooperation in defense and arms for the F-35, a project that may have kept Turkey in the US/Western orbit for 30-40 years or more. 

Military Aircraft Decisions - News Roundup

Pakistan and China are working on a joint fighter project to reduce Pakistan's dependence on Western arms imports. From the article:

The FC-1/ JF-17 Thunder is a joint Chinese-Pakistani project that aimed to reduce Pakistan’s dependence on western firms for advanced fighters, by fielding a low-cost multi-role lightweight fighter that can host modern electronics and precision-guided weapons. It isn’t a top-tier competitor, but it represents a clear step up from Pakistan’s Chinese MiG-19/21 derivatives and French Mirage III/V fighters. This positioning addresses a budget-conscious, “good enough” performance market segment that the West once dominated, but has nearly abandoned in recent decades.

 This reminds me of Caverly and Kapstein's (2012) article in Foreign Policy about the wisdom of the US moving to a model that builds "good enough" weapons that are more attractive for export.  The US has plenty of issues with Pakistan, but in terms of building long-term relations with countries, having them locked into your weapons systems seems to be a good one. 

Airbus sold the C295 to the Ivory Coast.  The Ivory Coast operates a very small air force (two transport planes and 3 helicopters) but are now purchasing from Europe.  The other aircraft are old Soviet aircraft, so this represents a shift to new suppliers, which is an interesting development.

In other decision-news, Singapore has chosen US-made F-35s as the next generation fighter rather than French or Chinese aircraft.  Singapore has a modern military and operates a lot of US equipment already, and decided to stay with the US in terms of upgrading its fighter fleet.

It took Singapore more than five years to make a decision on which planes to buy as they had to look carefully at specifications and what was needed, said Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen in a Facebook post. 

"Our agencies will now have to speak to their US counterparts to move the process forward," Ng said, adding it could be up to a year before any planes are purchased 

The F-16s are due to be taken out of service in around 10 years' time, meaning it was time to acquire their replacement and begin training pilots, he said.

The timeline is interesting.  A ten-year horizon to plan and implement the next generation of aircraft (and a five-year decision timeline) really locks states into relationships in ways that deserve further exploration.
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Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Why Arms Sales are Complicated - Purchaser Edition

I have spent a lot of time in the past decade researching arms transfers. There are a few of us who study this particular subfield of international relations/economics and sometimes I wonder if there is a really a lot more to say about the subject.  Then I read a bit more and realize that we are really only scratching the surface in terms of the complexity of the subject matter of arms sales.  I am working on some projects now that work to better integrate arms transfers with wider research in IR and that has me thinking more about the motivations of importing states.

I think that many of the models of arms sales think mostly of supplier considerations. There is a lot to commend in thinking of models of how states use arms as a foreign policy tool. Richard Johnson and I published an article last year in International Studies Quarterly (LINK) where we tested whether major democratic arms suppliers take human rights into consideration in their arms sales. Despite some evidence for this a decade ago (Blanton 2005) in the US context, it doesn't appear that human rights are really a major driver in states' decision-making.  That is important information to know, but rather than simply knowing what does not motivate sales, we need to think about what does.

It is often said that the end of the Cold War signaled a shift from a sellers' to a buyers' market in terms of weapons.  There is some truth to that, but states do not usually simply purchase arms "off the rack." The considerations for states in terms of replacement parts, continued supplies, ammunition, training, etc. especially for complex weapons systems also plays a role.  In other words, this is not simply an economic transaction.  Arms sales by their nature are political - and they often involve top-level government involvement in making the deals.  This is especially true of the most complex weapons systems - combat aircraft and ships.

Caverly and Kapstein (2012) argued a few years ago that the US was making a mistake focusing its research and development and arms sales policy on selling the most complex equipment. Their argument was that many states needed cheaper, reliable arms and that the US would push customers towards rivals (Russia and China) by focusing only on the latest generation of equipment.

I thought about that when I read a recent post in The National Interest that discussed Taiwan's decision to stop seeking access to the US F-35 fighter.  Taiwan's strategy has been to collect the most advanced weapons system that it could in order to deter potential future Chinese aggression.  The authors suggest that a better strategy would be one of denial that relies on abundant cheap resources such as anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to make any potential aggression costly. Rather than going toe-to-toe in terms of quality, to beat the Chinese by using multiple cheap technologies.  The strategic consideration of customers (especially for those that are allies) will do a great deal to determine the types of weapons required. This is to say nothing about budgets and the finite resources that states have to acquire weapons.

A second complication that I have been thinking about is one that came up in an article about India's attempt to upgrade its own air force.  Internal politics of this deal have been extremely heated and complicated.  The Indian supreme court refused to get involved in a case about Modi's deal to purchase French Rafale fighters. Modi changed the terms of the deal - abandoning the licensing and construction of aircraft in India in favor or purchasing aircraft built entirely in France.  Licensing, financing, and other considerations along with long-standing political cleavages and battles within purchasing states can also seriously affect the ability of a state to sell arms, and limit the types of equipment (and therefore the number of potential suppliers) available.

All this means is that there needs to be more work that examines qualitative details of arms sales from both the purchaser and seller perspective. Our quantitative models of arms sales need more accurate inputs and theories to become more reliable.  I am looking forward to an exciting year of digging into arms sales details.

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Blanton, Shannon Lindsey. (2005) Foreign Policy in Transition? Human Rights, Democracy, and U.S. Arms Exports. International Studies Quarterly 49: 647–668.

Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Johnson, Richard A. I., and Spencer L. Willardson. (2018) Human Rights and Democratic Arms Transfers: Rhetoric Versus Reality with Different Types of Major Weapon Systems. International Studies Quarterly 62: 453–464.

Some Links about Russian Arms

My own thinking about arms is grounded, primarily in my own experience in the Army and a lifelong proximity and love of aircraft.  I don't think a lot about the Navy, but I should.  The past few weeks have provided a number of interesting articles about the Russian navy and arms acquisition and manufacture, which have many applications for I think about the problem of arms in general. 

The first link is to a story about the sinking of the dry dock and damage to Russia's Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier.   The story highlights the importance of infrastructure for both building and servicing military equipment. In addition to the need to think about infrastructure, is a discussion about the shift in strategy and acquisition to favor small ships over a large blue-water navy. For states with arms production capability, the acquisition process is still tied to strategic priorities and bureaucratic politics. This is an issue that has been explored with a bit of depth in the US case and its often dysfunctional arms acquisition process. Opening the black box of other states and understanding what drives the purchasing decisions beyond economic necessity is an under-explored area in the literature on arms transfers.

A two-part article on the Russian Defense Policy Blog discusses the issue of nuclear submarines in the Russian fleet.  Part I of the article is basically a translation of an article that ran in the Russian press that asks hard questions about the priorities of the Russian fleet. Part II of the article provides more commentary on the primary arguments in the original piece. The gist of the piece is that the focus on nuclear subs with a capability that lags behind the US is starving the entire fleet of necessary resources that could provide stronger strategic value.

An interesting question to ask here is how the priority to export weapons interferes with or enhances the strategic capabilities of states.  Jonathan Caverley and Ethan Kapstein have written about this in the US context. They advocate updating the arms acquisition in the US to favor "good enough" weapons that can be exported as well rather than simply focusing on building the top of the line systems. When the state is both dependent on exports for reasons of status and economics (as I found in my dissertation), how do strategic priorities shift?  How can the state allocate resources efficiently under conditions of competing priorities?

In the case of Russia does chasing great power status and a posture that follows the Soviet Cold War allocation of naval resources (in terms of aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for nuclear deterrence) harm its ability to meet its new strategic demands and realities?


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Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. (2012) Arms Away. Foreign Affairs 91: 125–132.

Politics, Relationships, and International Arms Transfers

Arms transfers and the politics and relationships that surround them are everywhere when you are tuned in to them.  I know that I suffer from an extreme case of selective attention in the case of arms transfers, but I find them fascinating to think about.  I am constantly surprised both by how much we think about arms transfers in terms of human rights and foreign policy, but how little we actually think about the strategic logic of transferring coercive capabilities between states.  It is an area that is deeply in need of theorizing, and that is what I've taken as my central research task.

This week I had a few stories pop up in my news feed that reinforce the social and political nature of arms transfers.  The first one is one that I find very fascinating - it is the case of Turkey ordering S-400 missiles from Russia.  The original sale is problematic from the point of view of NATO since the S-400 is designed to shoot down NATO aircraft.  The symbolic move of Turkey away from NATO suppliers to Russia also signaled some deeper trends in the fracturing relationship between Erdogan and the West as a whole. 

I wrote about that sale in more detail earlier this year on this blog (LINK) and focused on the aspect that this particular sale may be an interesting case of a leading indicator that can be used to predict a state's alliance and ideological affiliation in the future.  One aspect that I didn't think of was the current state of Russian-Western relations and the fact that Russia faces sanctions.  The US is telling Turkey along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to back out of the purchase of these missiles from Russia or face the threat of sanctions themselves. LINK

In terms of the sanctions regime, it makes sense that explicitly military goods would be at the top of the list of sanctioned goods.  The fact that these arms are being considered by US allies is potentially troubling in and of itself in terms of what it may mean about the strength of trust between these states and the US in terms of security guarantees.

The second story that caught my eye was the potential for Ukraine to jointly produce armored vehicles with Thailand (LINK).  An article by Vucetic and Tago (2015) that I recently discovered (via Twitter) does a very good job of outlining the trade-off between autonomy and efficiency in the acquisition of arms.  It is most efficient to purchase arms off the shelf, but that leaves a state vulnerable to pressure from the selling state (which is the subject of the first part of this post).  It is costly and inefficient from an economic standpoint. 

What I found fascinating was the description of the meeting between the delegation from Thailand who came to Kyiv as part of bilateral talks between the nation.  The talks between the delegations are about strategic partnerships.  One way that is being considered to increase that partnership is to go into the business of arms together. One aspect of arms transfers that has been interesting to me since I started researching them 8 years ago is the high level of discussions that are involved in these purchases and how often heads of state or with cabinet/department level heads. 

The building of relationships through the transfer of weapons often seems to be part of an elaborate trust exercise.  I love the idea of Suchman and Eyre (1992) and their institutional logic of arms transfers, but I think that the social aspect of states bargaining and building relations based on arms tells an even deeper and surprising story.  It's a story that I'm happy to keep chipping away at.

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Suchman, Mark C., and Dana P. Eyre. (1992) Military Procurement as Rational Myth: Notes on the Social Construction of Weapons Proliferation. Sociological Forum 7: 137–161.

Vucetic, Srdjan, and Atsushi Tago. (2015) Why Buy American? The International Politics of Fighter Jet Transfers. Canadian Journal of Political Science 48: 101–124.

Arms, Social Theory, and Entanglement in the Long-Term

A recent story about Bulgaria’s dilemma in upgrading its MiG aircraft illustrates the difficulty of moving out of a long-term arms relationship. The issue is that Bulgaria is part of NATO, but that its aircraft are out of date.  Bulgaria can’t afford to change its total air force.  There are numerous costs involved in such a potential shift, both directly and indirectly.  Direct costs include the cost of purchasing new aircraft and paying for training for pilots of the new versions of aircraft.  Some of the indirect costs are the loss of expertise and experience that are necessary for competence in war-fighting.

Since MiGs are Russian-made, to upgrade them usually requires Russian involvement.  In this case, the Bulgarian government is considering using a Polish firm which upgraded Polish MiGs a few years ago when Poland faced a similar dilemma.  In this case, Bulgaria can bypass potential issues by using an ally country.

What if Poland was not an option?  The relations between Russia and the West have changed dramatically over the past decade.  A decade is not a long time in the life-cycle of a major conventional weapon like a fighter jet or tank.  Changing suppliers is hard - even when the geopolitical environment has been fundamentally altered.

What can this episode teach us about the arms-buying relationship?  First of all, the decision about suppliers is one that cannot be taken lightly by states - especially states that have real security needs.  Secondly, once that decision is made, it is quite sticky, and that has consequences.  These consequences are visible across a number of different domains. 

In terms of security, purchasing arms from a supplier makes it harder to fight against that supplier later.  This is due to the intimate knowledge that the supplying country will have with the strengths and weaknesses of the system due to firsthand experience.  It likely means (in the case of aircraft) that battles will hinge on the better trained military, and the resource imbalance that leads to exports vs. imports should normally provide an advantage here to the exporting rather than the importing state.

Also important in terms of security are the technological issues of supply of replacement parts, a maintenance program and the ability to upgrade equipment on a reasonable schedule.  Exporting states will have the advantage also in updating and improving the performance of the weapon system.

There is also another potential strategic advantage to the selling state.  The move to a new supplier is a potential indicator of future intentions or at least the assessment of the state about the potential for conflict in the future.  This offers an early warning advantage to the state providing arms.  It can also offer a first mover advantage in terms of conflict.

Even if a move from one supplier to another is not the result of strategic fears in the short and medium terms, the shift in relationships can be a powerful indicator about the status of the relations between the supplying and recipient states.  The sale of arms between states is a gamble always because once a state acquires weapons they can only be eliminated after the passage of a long amounts of time or through costly war. 

Because I am interested in the social relationship that is created and maintained by arms sales, such demonstrations of both interdependence and vulnerability provide fascinating insights into the potential mechanisms for studying and understanding interstate relations more completely.

On the Margins - Research Topics and "Selling" your work in Academia

Today I received a desk reject for a paper that a coauthor and I wrote.  The paper is a good one and it does something that we don't think any other scholars have done.  We didn't sell that point well enough, apparently, and the editors decided that our paper didn't fit the scope of their journal.  That is fine and good, and a real part of academia.  I understand that.  However, I am beginning to see a pattern that I had not noticed before when I was less confident in my own work.

Arms transfer research is not mainstream in terms of "big topics" in international relations.  I understood that when I picked the topic.  There is interest in the subject, but it ebbs and flows. Big work in big journals often ignores the more nuts and bolts empirical work of studying patterns in arms flows when they discuss how arms effect international relations.  A good example of this is the recent work by Yarhi-Milo and colleagues building on work by James Morrow about the choice that states have in providing arms or making alliances.  The paper is excellent and the empirical case studies do a great job of illustrating their larger point - that arming protege states is an option for patron states who don't want to be obligated by a formal alliance.

The theory is about great powers - and specifically great powers who are interested in extended deterrence.  This is a limited set of states. The use of case studies in this work is very appropriate. However, ignoring the work that has looked at arms transfers as a general pattern and its findings is a blind spot that is not caught by editors or reviewers.

When work that is grounded in the empirical patterns of arms sales between all states attempts to address wider theories of IR, however, the standards are much different.  That is the case with the paper that was rejected.  The paper addresses an issue that is simply taken for granted or assumed away in the broad literature on international relations - the existence of arms sales by states that are not great powers.  The desk rejection will allow us to "re-frame" the paper in a stronger way and send it back out.  That's not the main issue.  The issue is the difference between how this paper was dealt with and a paper by the same coauthor and I who wrote about arms and human rights and had the paper accepted at International Studies Quarterly.

That paper was accepted because of its relationship with human rights, not because of the arms aspect itself.  Work is also more accepted when it deals with the normative issues of arms control.  In this sense, arms work is not only marginalized, it becomes politicized because work that does not fit into "acceptable" categories may not even make it past the first gate-keepers. 

From a career standpoint this is something that needs to be considered.  In a publish or perish environment, the lack of outlets for work on the margins can either move people away from a topic, or lead them to study in ways that conform to conventional wisdom rather than challenging that work and its assumptions. This is a subtle way in which bias can creep into academic work, and which weakens overall knowledge and the process of creating it.

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Morrow, James D. (1993) Arms Versus Allies: Trade-Offs in the Search for Security. International Organization 47: 207–233.

Yarhi-Milo, Keren, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper. (2016) To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron’s Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances. International Security 41: 90–139.