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.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but....

So I read this article on the Duck of Minerva about a week ago and I had a bit of a visceral and angry reaction to it.  I saved it to read later, and am now re-reading it. In this article, Mackenzie talks about the standards of combat for men and women and concludes that for a number of reasons there should be a re-evaluation of the physical standards of combat so that the military will not remain "behind."

If standards don’t change, inevitably, very few women will ‘make the (male) cut’ into combat roles, including into the Marines. But a lack of change will also keep the entire military behind. There is a need to  develop physical standards that reflect modern warfare, recognise areas that women excel physically- including in endurance and flexibility, and changing a sexist culture that values bands of brothers and men’s bodies over all else.

Mackenzie discuses both the changing nature of combat, and the fact that all soldiers (male and female) receive combat training, but is upset at the apparently anachronistic physical standards required for combat missions.  I have a number of problems with the article.

First, is the conflation of the fact that our most recent wars have a different character than past conflicts means that there is no difference between military tasks. This is not true, and it is laughable on its face.  Even someone with only a cursory understanding of warfare will understand that there are different physical abilities needed for driving a truck versus fighting in the infantry.  These different physical standards limit the number of men who are allowed to do certain highly physical tasks.

Combat training - and remember that basic training is just that: Basic Combat Training - is designed to make every soldier a minimally proficient soldier.  This applies to men, women, intelligence specialists, truck drivers, mechanics, cooks, etc.  When I went through basic training in the summer of 2001 it was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina - in an integrated male-female basic training. Something that has been around since the early 1990s.  We were all soldiers in combat support roles.  I was in intelligence. Others in my platoon were intelligence, some were clerks, some were cooks, and some were mechanics.  Many of the females were going on to be medics.

At some point - based on the fact that we were in the Army - we could expect to be in combat.  But combat for the infantry has a very different nature than that of the intelligence specialist and truck driver. Yes, in Iraq, women are in convoys that are attacked, are on bases that are attacked, or may be part of patrols and teams that come under fire.  Having basic skills is key.  This is different than the task that was given to the Marines in the battle of Fallujah.  It is different than the skills used by the 3rd Infantry Division and 101st Airborne in 2003 in fighting against regular military and irregular militia in the beginning part of the war in Iraq.  I know because that is who I was with - as an intelligence guy assigned to an infantry unit.  And I was not prepared.  I am a big man - 6'4" who at the time was in the best shape of my life.  And I was out of my depth.  I did not have the training to be doing what was done.

The purpose of the military is to fight and win battles.  Combat roles are open to women who meet the standards.  I am not convinced that Mackenzie has made a cogent argument about why those standards should be relaxed.

In Mosul in May 2003 - after I had already traveled across the whole country with the Infantry.  Flying in helicopters is so much easier.

 

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.