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.

Arms Odds and Ends (June 3, 2016)

Canada

Sometimes Canada gets good press, and sometimes bad.  The decision of the liberal government to continue a sale of armored vehicles to Saudia Arabia is turning into quite a political scandal. (LINK) Arms sales are fascinating precisely because of the highly political nature of these sales and the very real economic and security issues (domestically) that play into arms export decisions.

Nigeria

Nigeria has lost over $15 billion dollars due to arms acquisition corruption (LINK).  I wrote about Russia's own fraud problem a few years ago with some nice graphs.  Check it out (LINK)!

Russia

A good analysis of the effect of the economic crisis on Russia's military modernization process (LINK).

Another article examines problems within the Russian arms industry.  Some of this stems from corruption, some from incompetence.  (LINK)

On an unrelated (but not completely) note: more evidence that Russia is very concerned about the perceived legitimacy of its annexation of Crimea domestically (LINK). The political effects of the sanctions would be much worse if there wasn't a rally effect based on a widely-shared belief that Russia's actions were righteous and justified.

Zhirinovsky and the Power of Nationalism

RFE/RL has a good story today about the ways in which Russian governance is closer to the wack-a-doo ideas of Vladimrir Zhirinovsky than is comfortable.  I read the article with interest and reminisced about a paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar in comparative politics during my third year of graduate school in the Fall Semester of 2010.

The paper that I wrote was titled: Punching above Their Weight: Nationalist Parties in Presidential Systems.  The inspiration for the paper was the rise of the influence of Zhirinovsky in Russian politics.

I think that the idea of the paper was pretty good - although my execution of it was pretty limited.  Here is a piece from my theoretical set up from the paper:

Nationalist parties can occupy an important ideological space. Nationalist parties have their own policy preferences, and those preferences are communicated to the public. If the ideological space occupied by a nationalist party becomes a salient issue which a president must “own” in order to maintain office specifically and legitimacy more generally, then that party has “ideological blackmail potential.” This ideological blackmail potential will differ from polity to polity based on institutional and ideological factors.

The basic idea is that nationalist parties stake out key policy points that are sometimes incredibly salient.  In the case of Russia, the LDPR has occupied the space related to anger over the loss of great power status, the desire for international respect, and the idea that Russia has a special mission in the world.  Putin, because of domestic economic factors, has needed to use some of these themes to maintain support.  That usage comes at a cost - and part of that is adopting some of the more radical language espoused by the LDPR.  It means giving Zhirinovsky more power than he would have based on actual support for his total platform.


Presidential Susceptibility to Ideological Blackmail

		Nationalist Ideology
		Nationalist	Cosmopolitan
Institutional Constraints on Presidential Power	Strong	Low/Med	Low
	Weak	High	Low

Watching Russia is never boring.

Doctored Intelligence and ISIS, is this a Crisis?

Why don’t political scientists study intelligence as part of other issues? That is a longer post for a different day and the subject of a paper that I currently have under review at a journal. For today, though, I am interested in the potential for politicization of intelligence processes.

This is in the news again.  A few months ago a news story caught my eye about the fact that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were being asked to change their assessments about ISIS (A good recap of the controversy is here).  The story is in the news again after the Paris attacks and the new conflagration that is occurring in Syria presently.

Analysts assert that they were asked to tone down assessments that the Islamic State was growing in strength despite the coalition actions against them.

Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts -- a metric not used since the Vietnam War -- to paint a more positive picture. 

Critics say this "activity-based approach" to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.

President Obama has responded to the allegations and said that he doesn't think that the White House has been kept in the dark about the nature of ISIS, and that the administration didn't want intelligence "shaded by politics."

Whether or not President Obama was directly involved in ordering intelligence to be "softened politically" is not the question.  The question is how any president can expect to get unvarnished intelligence when the incentives are built into the system to give information to the boss that things are going well.

In a recent book, Garthoff (2015)[1] explores the relationship between Soviet Leaders and Intelligence.  One of the key points of his book is that Soviet leaders relied on their own conceptions of the main adversary (the US) in evaluating intelligence.  Even if a system exists to funnel "pure intelligence" to a leader, his or her particular lens on the world will always affect the interpretation, and subsequent decisions based on that intelligence.  One of the fundamental questions about foreign policy is whether or not states behave as rational actors.  This depends on whether or not individuals act rationally. Theories of satisficing, of using heuristics to make decisions rather than carefully exploring all options helps us to understand behavior quite well.  If we truly want to understand how intelligence works, we need to understand not only the processes by which it is produced, but the processes by which it is consumed.

In the case of the CENTCOM reports, if the President was given access to the raw intelligence, it is unlikely that the doctored reports made that much difference in national-level decision making.  However, having reports that show success may change the calculus at the operational level, leading to poor strategic outcomes.

One of the other lessons from Garthoff was that Soviet leaders could not rely on intelligence assessment from the KGB and GRU precisely because those organizations were expressly ideological and their assessments were not objective enough to provide clear guidance for decision-making. If the US Intelligence Community (IC) becomes similarly politicized it will lead to marginalization of that government function.

From a bureaucratic survival perspective, then, it is is probably in the best interest of the IC to be (or at least appear to be) politically neutral and ideology free.  The short-term gains in political favor will lead to long-term decline in the political power of the institution.

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[1] Garthoff, Raymond. 2015. Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. Georgetown University Press.

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!

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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.

 

Arms Export Strategy as a Cause of Russia's Military Decline

Dmitry Gorenburg writes on Russia's military and does a great job of following the developments in that sphere.  In a recent blog post he discusses one of the implications of Serdyukov's prosecution for corruption and ouster as defense minister.

It seems that the new leadership team at the MOD has decided to stop using the threat of importing armaments from abroad to get Russian defense industry to improve the quality of its products. 

One of the interesting implications of the whole affair is summed up in the last paragraph of his post.

In the meantime, however, the defense industry’s defeat of Serdyukov reduces the likelihood that the military will get the equipment it needs. It will take time for the MOD to amass the political capital to fight back against the industry and its allies. The result will be that the industry will get its money, while the military will be promised new equipment that in many cases will not arrive on schedule. In a few years, the military’s situation will get even worse, while the MOD will have rebuilt some of its lost political capital.

One of the primary reasons that the US and Soviet Union (and now Russia) are the world's largest arms exporters is that there has been a large internal demand for those weapons.  If Russia's military collapse continues will it be as a result of a focus on using domestic weapons?  Those weapons slated for the Russian military (that are not delivered to domestic customers for various reasons related to the export focus of the industry) could lead to a lack of development of new weapons systems for the internal market.

This particular internal dynamic could lead to an interesting shift in the overall patterns of arms sales. 

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.