Salesman in Chief - An unsurprising Development in Arms Transfers

One of the most fascinating pieces of news about arms sales came out in a Reuters story a few days ago. The gist of the plan is that the Trump administration has a plan for the diplomatic and military apparatus to make the sale of arms a priority.  It's part of the "buy American" plan to increase manufacturing capability within the US.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce a “whole of government” approach that will also ease export rules on U.S. military exports and give greater weight to the economic benefits for American manufacturers in a decision-making process that has long focused heavily on human rights considerations, according to people familiar with the plan.

This is a real shift in the recent policies of the United States in terms of seeking to be more limited about which states received US arms.  Richard Johnson and I have a paper coming out in ISQ soon that looks at whether or not this rhetoric on human rights has any real substantive effects on arms sales by major democratic suppliers (hint: it does not - with a few caveats).  Our study is a follow up and expansion of Lindsay Blanton's 2005 work that looked at US arms sales only [1].

I am not surprised by this development. In my 2013 PhD thesis[2] I examined US and Russian decision-making on arms sales.  I found that both states were reliant on foreign sales to some degree. Russia has had - and this increased under Putin - a strategy of arms promotion at all levels of the state for a long time.  It is surprising how often Putin's name comes up when new arms deals are announced.  He is Russia's salesman in chief when it comes to arms sales.

The US move to an open policy of arms sales promotion makes sense under two common assumptions about arms sales.  The first assumption is about economics - and apparently that is the argument that is being made to justify this shift in foreign policy.  It is expensive to develop new weapons systems.  It is expensive to maintain manufacturing for spare parts.  Having external customers keeps production going, and provides partial relief for development costs.  It provides employment (which is particularly important in defense industries that can affect Congressional races where they are concentrated), and it ensures domestic manufacturing capability into the future. 

During the Cold War both the US and the Soviets could sustain their arms development because of the large internal market for weapons and the sizes of their military economies in general.  The end of the Cold war changed the imperatives for both states.  Russia felt this need first, and more acutely.  The United States needed arms sales more after the contraction of the armed forces during the 1990s.

The second assumption about arms sales that supports this development is the idea that arms purchases and sales are part of relationship building between states. This is a connection that has not been explored too deeply by arms scholarship. My current book project, which adapts and expands my dissertation examines these relationships more closely. Trump is a businessman in a business that is dominated by personal relationships. It seems natural that he would want to have a policy that reflects those preferences.  The fact that he is focusing on the sale of arms highlights to me the importance of arms sales to state identity. Arms sales are still not "sexy" like conflict and other types of security studies, but the more we see such fascinating real-world examples of their importance, the more likely that academics will pay more attention.
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[1]  Blanton, Shannon Lindsey. 2005. "Foreign Policy in Transition? Human Rights, Democracy, and U.S. Arms Exports." International Studies Quarterly 49: 647–668.

[2] Willardson, Spencer L. 2013. "Under the Influence of Arms: The Causes and Consequences of Arms Transfers." PhD Thesis. University of Iowa. Link

Intelligence in a Trump Presidency

The election of Donald Trump has generated plenty of interesting talking points for pundits, political scientists, and everyday people. I am mostly fascinated by the interpretation of his actions by the media.  It is an interesting time to be a social scientist.

One recent area that has received a lot of attention lately is the apparent feud between the President-Elect and the intelligence community.  This issue has come to a head because of the Russian hacking accusation and scandal. In a recent article in Politico, there is a discussion of the issue in which Trump accuses the intelligence community of playing politics because the Top Secret briefing he is supposed to receive has already been leaked to the media.

"How did NBC get 'an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?'" Trump tweeted Thursday. "Who gave them this report and why? Politics!" 

The network says a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed leaked details of the report first published in the Washington Post, which states that U.S. intercepts captured Russian officials congratulating themselves on Trump's election win, citing U.S. officials. The overall report makes the case that Russia intervened in the election, NBC News reported. 

The president-elect is set to meet with intelligence officials on Friday, when he is expected to be briefed on evidence uncovered by the Russian hacking probe. Trump has repeatedly questioned intelligence agencies' conclusions that Russian operatives were behind several cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential race.

The accusation that intelligence is politicized is not a new one. Remember the ink that was spilled about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to provide evidence of Iraqi non-compliance with WMD? Goodman (2003, 62) attributes the failure of strategic intelligence to a politicization of intelligence at the CIA under Director Casey in the 1990s, and which he noted continued under Robert Gates:

Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA’s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s, from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decade, altogether the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001. In an unguarded moment in March 1995, Gates admitted that he had watched Casey on ‘issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued’. There has never been a better definition of politicization by a former director of central intelligence.

Loch Johnson (2003, 659), the father of modern intelligence studies, also weighed in on the issue of politicization of intelligence in a piece about theories of strategic intelligence had this to say:

Beyond these basics, a theory will have to take into account the most significant inadequacies of intelligence, including its periodic irrelevance and lack of timeliness, the frequent unwillingness of policymakers to accept reliable information (often a function of pathologies in the relationship between the producers and the consumers of intelligence), and the risks posed to democracy by the politicization of information.

His definition of politicization comes at the information presentation stage of the intelligence process.  The larger issue, and one which seems to be more frequently applicable today, is the leaking of intelligence information (which may be politicized in the Johnson context first) to the media.

News that Trump wants to shake up the intelligence community may cause them to lash out, but NPR has a great story about how the CIA has lost these battles in the past.

This particular agency battle will be one that should be interesting to watch unfold over the coming months and years.
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 Goodman, Melvin A. 2003. "9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security, 18(4): 59-71.

Johnson, Loch K. 2003. "Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence" International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16(4): 638-663.