Venezuela Needs Help!!!

"Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has called on Russia and the Vatican to help fend off what he described as a U.S. "military threat," and said he will soon go to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin." Link

 After Trump stated that the US would consider force to intervene against the Madura regime, he has called on Putin the "man of peace" to help protect the country from the US.  I was curious about how much Venezuela already relies on Russia for its security needs and so I downloaded the SIPRI data for arms transfers from 2000-2016.

Source: SIPRI

The short story is that Russia is already ensuring Venezuelan security through arms transfers.  The other largest exporter (nearly $1 Billion in arms) is China.  It's always interesting to see the way that material realities are reflected in rhetoric and vice-versa. 

A round up of arms-related goodness

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  I wrote a vignette about naval sales to Vietnam for a paper I wrote in 2012 (unpublished).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.

Arms Procurement Links: Japan Jumps in and India Sinking

One area that I neglected (out of ignorance and not deliberately) in my dissertation was the effect of domestic arms arms procurement procedures on arms exports and imports.  This is an area that I covered recently in a course that I am teaching on the Politics of Arms in International Relations.  I think that I have been primed to see problems of acquisitions because of the readings that we did in class - along with my own personal epiphany about the lack of such thinking in my earlier work. At the bottom of this post I'll post the readings that I had my class look at that turned my own view on the subject.  First, however, I am linking to two stories about domestic arms acquisitions that caught my attention in the past few weeks.

1. Japan to Launch a Defense Procurement Agency (LINK)

Japan's Ministry of Defense will use its new constitutional powers to set up an agency to manage international trade of weapons and military equipment. 

The ministry confirmed with IHS Jane's that the new agency will be named the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency, and will begin operations on October 1. 

The agency's key objectives will include promoting international cooperation on the procurement of defense equipment, enhancing project management, and enhancing development for Japanese defense production and technology bases. 

The Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency is set to become one of the most powerful wings of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, and will employ 1,800 people.

It is interesting to think that Japan did not have this agency earlier.  The country obviously has the capacity to engage in defense acquisitions, but those functions were not concentrated in a ministry that was part of the defense establishment.  This new move may not necessarily make acquisition more rational (Caverley and Kapstein), but it will make the Ministry of Defense more powerful.  This will be an interesting subject to follow over the next few years.

2. India's acquisitions process is corrupt and broken (LINK)

In a long and interesting story, the details of India's decades-long failure to replace its rapidly aging and diminished artillery is still not complete.  Problems of corruption meant that the acquisition agency changed its rules.  These rules have negative consequences:

The other problem involved India’s Ministry of Defence. India’s defense procurement establishment has shown an extreme risk-averse behavior and Defense India observes external link that when a competition devolves to a single-vendor solution, the practice is often to re-tender. Soltam and Denel’s exit left just BAE Bofors, until they, too were eliminated by allegations that Bofors had paid INR 640 million (about $16 million) in bribes, trying to secure the order. 

The net effect of corporate blacklists, plus single-vendor prohibitions, is a process that can’t field equipment to India’s military when it’s needed – and sometimes ever. Unfortunately for India’s front-line soldiers, their need for working artillery hasn’t changed.

Things only got worse and weirder.  I recommend that you read the entire article.  The more I think that I understand the dynamics of the arms trade, the more new information like this appears.  I guess I should be happy that there is still plenty of research for me out there!

__________
Class readings related to (at least tangentially) to domestic arms acquisition processes:

Kovacic, William E., and Dennis E. Smallwood. 1994. “Competition Policy, Rivalries, and
Defense Industry Consolidation.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 8(4): 91-110.

Mayer, Kenneth R., and Anne M. Khademian. 1996. “Bringing Politics Back in: Defense Policy and the Theoretical Study of Institutions and Processes.” Public Administration Review
56(2): 180-90.

Pearson, Frederic S. 1989. “The Correlates of Arms Importation.” Journal of Peace Research
26(2): 153-63.

Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. 2012. “Arms Away.” Foreign Affairs 91(5):
125-32.

Qingmin, Zhang. 2006. “The Bureaucratic Politics of US Arms Sales to Taiwan.” The
Chinese Journal of International Politics 1(2): 231-65.

Smith, Ron, Anthony Humm, and Jacques Fontanel. 1985. “The Economics of Exporting
Arms.” Journal of Peace Research 22(3): 239-47.

Link-O-Rama: Arms Edition

Apologies and Excuses

So much for resolutions! (Link) A bold prediction about my future blogging awesomeness followed by 1 post in 5 months is not a stellar beginning.  In my defense, the past 5 months have been as busy as any in my life.  These are the highlights of the past five months:

• The end of the semester
• chairing our graduate admissions committee
• A trip to the US to sit on a hiring committee
• A trip to the US a week later to attend a seminar at Brigham Young University
• Graduation
• A trip to Poland for a conference
• A vacation to the US for 5 weeks to visit family
• The return to Astana to start the new semester with a new role: acting department chairIn addition to the normal activities of getting ready for the semester (preparation of syllabi, courses, etc) I have had the new administrative tasks associated with my new position.  I also had an article accepted for publication that needed work to be ready for the publisher.  I have also been scrambling to put together my paper for the American Political Science Association Meeting (APSA) which is next week. 

I now have a better understanding of the wisdom of my PhD advisers who emphasized that life after graduate school was more busy.  The pressures and activities are a bit different, but it is definitely busy.

______

Arms Links

With the preamble over, I am now going to post links to articles about arms.  I am doing this in conjunction with my PLS455/555 Politics of Arms in International Relations course at Nazarbayev University. I thought this would be a good resource for my students as they begin their case study assignments for the course. It is also a good way for me to organize these links and resources and to put together some initial thoughts.  In this edition I will keep my comments brief. I would like to do this more regularly and add more context and analysis. 

F-35

• Australia drops out of F-35 program. Large-scale weapons system collaboration is hard! Link
• A good roundup of lots of arms news.  News on Russian Sukhoi fighter jets, and the ongoing saga of the F-35 fighter. Link
• F-35B not doing well in carrier testing and certification. Link

Mistrel

• France returns Russia's money for the Mistrel.  This is a great example of the politicization of arms transfers. It's an interesting case of Russia importing (Russia is not a major arms importer) and being denied a weapon system that it really wanted. Link
• France needs to sell the Mistrels it is not selling to Russia.  That will prove very difficult. Link

Russian Arms and Navy

• Russia to develop a new "Doomsday" aircraft command center. Link
•  Russian navy to begin building new destroyer - with capabilities that are very impressive and challenging to the US Naval superiority. Does this mean a comeback for the defense industry in Russia? Link
• New Russian drone design. Link
• Seven new and scary Russian weapons systems.  In this sense scary is for the West, or potential military rivals of the Russian state.  Hypersonic weapons are a new class of weapons that pose an interesting dilemma.  They are definitely weapons of the offensive, but are meant to overcome missile shield technology that rendered earlier nuclear offensive capabilities less secure. This is a demonstration of a technological arms race. Link
• Morocco to buy Russian Amur class submarine.  Why? Link
• New love for an old Bear. The TU-95 and nuclear bomber advantages. Link
• Refurbished Russian submarine with all kinds of capabilities baffles US experts. "The Russians were always more innovative at this than we were."  What also struck me about this sub is its length.  It is half the length of a US aircraft carrier.  The Russians don't mess around when it comes to submarines. Link
• Russian air to air missiles R-73 are flying off the shelves of the arms bazaars. Link
• Story about Russia's new Armata tank. Link
• Interesting video of forum on Russian naval power in the 21st century. Link
• Russia selling powerful anti-aircraft missile system to Iran.  Link

India

• Predictions of US-Russian arms competition in India.  This is an interesting field of inquiry.  India just became part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), but is also a democratic state, unlike most other members of the organization.  India has traditionally been one of Russia's biggest customers, and I have dealt with the issue of Russian-Indian arms purchases in other posts (Link, Link, Link). Will closer security cooperation cement the relationship that has been built between the two countries? Link
• India is going to be buying a lot of arms in the near to medium future. 4.7 Billion dollars is a good start. Link

US Navy and Military

• US begins work on second "Gerald R. Ford" Class of Aircraft Carrier to be named after JFK. Link
• An interesting piece on the size of the US navy.  Arguments on one side are qualitative (our fewer ships can do more than many more ships were able to do earlier.)  Arguments on the other are quantitative.  Fetishizing numbers is not good policy.  However, arguing in terms of threats faced and the ability of the naval force, as presently constituted, to respond to those threats is good policy. Questioning the definitions of threats is the next step in such an analysis.  Policy in the absence of strategy is rudderless. Link
• Russian jammers supposedly render aircraft carriers useless.  Whither the advantage of carrier groups? Link
• The US is not selling, but is deploying F-22s to Europe to ease the minds of allies.  Increased Russian air activity within the context of the Crimean and Ukrainian conflict is increasing tensions in the region. Link 
• Strong market for used US M113 Armored Personnel Carriers and its variants.  I spent a lot of time in one of these in Baghdad 2003. Link I spent more time in the Bradley, though.
• I don't understand why the US Air Force hates the A-10 so much.  I think the Army would be happy to have these aircraft. Link
• 
  

China

• China is holding a large military parade next week and is having trouble attracting western leaders: Link  and another Link

Communist China generally shies away from the vast annual demonstrations of military might that were a hallmark of the Soviet Union, normally holding such events once a decade to mark the foundation of the People's Republic. 

It has struggled to attract world-wide interest for the parade as world leaders are wary of the tone of the event, and the risk of lending it legitimacy. 

Beijing is becoming increasingly assertive in the region and regularly accuses Tokyo of failing to show sufficient contrition for Japan's 20th-century invasion of China.

Other Miscellaneous Arms Links 

• Analysis of Central Asian Military capabilities.  This should be of interest to my students. Link
• Sweden and Brazil sign a deal for Gripen fighters. The deal includes financial terms, as well as details about the licensing and production of half of the fighters in Brazil.  The jet was also modified to fit Brazil's needs.  Link
• French Deliver Rafale fighters to Egypt.  Link
• This link maybe the most interesting.  It details the problem with Pilatus aircraft that was sold to Chad by Switzerland. The aircraft is not mean to be armed or used offensively, but apparently it has been.  This has led the Swiss to pull back on other potential exports. It is interesting to see a principled stance on arms transfers. Economic theories of arms transfers would predict that Switzerland is under too much financial pressure to export in order to support its domestic manufacturing for a product that has a limited domestic market. Interesting counterexample/mini case study to think about in terms of policy-making and the complexity of arms sales as a topic. Link

Kazakh Arms Imports Visualized (Part 1)

I thought it would be fun to put together a graph that shows the arms suppliers for Kazakhstan in 2013 in a network form.  The data come from SIPRI and I put them into a simple association matrix.  I used the R Statnet package to make the data a network, and then just used plot features in R to make the graph look a little nicer. I think that this is a fun little visualization of where these arms are coming from.  Here's the graph:

The code to do this is pretty straightforward.  If you want the data in the text format, please email me.  The code is pasted below using "Pretty R."

library(statnet)
supplier <- read.table("supplier.txt")
kasnet2013.m <- as.matrix(supplier)
kaznet2013 <- as.network(kasnet2013.m,matrix.type="adjacency", directed = T)
 
vertsize <- supplier$Kazakhstan*.05+1
png("Kazakh_imports2013.png", height = 8, width=11, units="in", bg="transparent",
    res=600)
plot(kaznet2013, displaylabels=TRUE, displayisolates = FALSE,
     vertex.col=c("gray","gray","red","gray","gray", "red","sienna4"),
     vertex.cex = vertsize,
     main=list("Kazakstan Arms Suppliers 2013", col="sienna4"),
     sub=list("Size of Vertex represents Value of Arms from Country",
              cex= .9, col="sienna3"))
 
mtext("Data from SIPRI TIV Database", side = 2, cex=.75, col="dimgray")
dev.off()

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

2013 Arms Imports into Former Soviet States

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has updated its arms transfer data for 2013.  I haven't worked much with arms transfer data since I completed my dissertation a year ago.  However, I recently accepted a job as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nazarbayev University (Link) and am looking to begin some projects on arms and security in the area.  As a kind of preliminary step in this endeavor I thought I'd play around with some of the SIPRI data while I'm on spring break at UNLV.

I am also teaching a course on research methods in political science this semester.  I am teaching our political science students to do statistical analysis in R.  I am learning a lot myself and am forcing myself to use it rather than STATA - which is my go-to statistical and graphing package.

My first plot is a simple bar chart showing the value of arms imports (major weapons systems) into former Soviet states during 2013.  One interesting aspect is that there are only six states that received arms during this year.  Azerbaijan is also off the charts compared to the other states on the list.  I am also posting my R code to make this chart as well as a link to the csv file that I used as a data source.  I made the R code look good using "pretty R".

# Examine 2013 SIPR Export Data
#setwd() #uncomment and use this command to set your working directory to the folder
  #where you downloaded the csv file to.
imports_fsu_2013 <- read.csv("imports_fsu_2013.csv")
as.numeric(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) #make the Imports column numeric
 
mean_import <- mean(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) # generate mean value
 
png("fsu_imports.png", height = 8, width=11, units="in", bg="transparent",
    res=600)
 
barplot(imports_fsu_2013$Imports,
        names.arg = imports_fsu_2013$Country,
        main=list("Military Imports into Former Soviet Countries 2013 \n in Millions $US", 
                  cex=1.1),
        ylab="Millions $US",
        xlab=list("Importing Country", font=2),
        col = "sienna4")
 
abline(h=mean_import, lty=3, col="black")
text(4,192, "Mean Value of imports to Former Soviet States in 2013", cex=.75)
mtext("Data from SIPRI TIV Database", side = 1, cex=.75, col="dimgray")
 
dev.off()

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

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.

World Arms Network 1950 and 1975

I am starting work on my dissertation.  The first thing I needed to do was to get all of my arms transfer data into a form that I can work with it for network analysis.  That effort is going nicely.  I spent a little time today playing around with the graphs for the year 1950.  Here is the worldwide arms network for 1950:

I also ran a quick graph of the arms network in 1975.  The thing that jumps out is the difference in the number of states that are importing weapons.  The graph as an analytical tool is nearly useless given the crowded nature of the arms market.  This is why I have to utilize real Social Network Analysis tools to get at the questions I really want to answer.  Graphs are fun, though.

Russia and Syria: Arms and Alliances

The story referenced below gives a good overview of the relationship between Russia and Syria.  It is especially interesting that the ties that have made Russia and Syria "allies" are commercial and center on arms.  Russia, by supporting Syria with weapons, is able to maintain influence in the region.  This is an interesting contrast to the deteriorating arms relationship with Iran.

As international pressure on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria grows, Russia has maintained a perplexing timidity towards developments. Moscow has steadfastly refused to stake out an unambiguous position on events in Syria, a diplomatic paralysis that may end up proving more costly to Moscow in the long run. 

Some analysts say the Kremlin's careful stance is a result of its unwillingness to lose its only real Middle Eastern ally and a desire to avoid a confrontation with the West. 

"Syria remains Russia's only ally in the Middle East," Vladimir Karyakin from the state Institute for Strategic Research said. "We abandoned the rest either during perestroika or during the recent Arab revolutions. We even betrayed some - like Libya or Egypt, for example."
Russia has been a major arms supplier to Syria since the Soviet era and political cooperation with Damascus has often been far more valuable to Moscow than money. In 2005, Russia wrote off more than 70 percent of Syria's $13-billion debt, much of which was the result of Soviet-era arms deliveries. 

Although financial interests now play a more important role in defining Moscow's approach to Syria than during the Cold War, political concerns still remain the cornerstone, analysts say. Since the early 1970s, the country has hosted Russia's only naval supply and maintenance base outside the former Soviet Union in its Mediterranean port of Tartus.
"If we lose such an ally, we will lose our foothold in the Middle East," Karyakin warned.

Conflicting interests paralyze Russian diplomacy on Syria: analysts | Features & Opinion | RIA Novosti:

The following graphs show the growing importance of Russian arms imports to Syria.  I put together the graphs using data from SIPRI.