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. 

Fighter Aircraft Sales and the Involvement of the Chief Executive: More Questions than Answers

One of the key questions within the academic literature on arms transfers is simply “why”.  Why do states transfer coercive capability to potential rival states?  The answer to this question is not easy, and there appear to be as many answers to the question as there are states that sell arms.  Explanations for arms sales typically boil down to economic imperatives or state interests. These are good explanations as far as they go, but even if we assume that these are the two main pressures that states face to sell arms, the degree to which one is more important than the other is still on the table.

My own beginning in the literature was launched with an assumption that arms sales by powerful states are used as a deliberate foreign policy tool.  I used the SIPRI classifications for exporters and assumed that the US and Russia (as heir to the Soviet Union) as hegemonic suppliers would be deliberate in their use of arms sales to enhance their foreign policy goals.  I found that this was not the case in either the US or Russia.  Russia is more dependent on arms sales - for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here - than is the US, but that arms sales are still driven by economic and other special interests in the US context.

What is surprising, is the fact that arms sales are an issue that make it onto the agenda of state executives and in meetings between heads of state. In today’s post, I am interested in a number of news articles detailing the sale of aircraft [1] by Russia and the United States.

The first article is mundane.  It describes the delivery of 4 refurbished F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia by the United States. The article describes the process of refurbishment and the means of delivery, and then notes that this is part of a sale of 16 fighters to the Indonesian government.  This article is most interesting when contrasted to the next article.  This article describes a letter sent by two Senators to the Trump administration arguing that the US should sign an agreement to allow F-16s to be produced in India.  The Senators argue that the deal is important to protect American jobs and the capability of producing a weapons system that is vital to the US arsenal.  (The US has almost as many F-16s in its arsenal - 1000 as India has fighter aircraft 1050 - and India has the world’s 4th largest capacity).  

This argument is interesting to me, because it assumes that the President will become involved in brokering deals with other states on behalf of private firms.

The third article is interesting because it examines the communication between different branches of the US government, but in the opposite direction. This article describes the Trump administration’s intention to allow the sale of F-16s to Bahrain reversing the Obama  administration decision that had stopped the sales because of human rights concerns.

The State Department originally notified Congress of the planned $4.87 billion sale last September during the Obama administration.
But it was pulled back because of the Obama administration's concerns that Bahrain had not made promised progress on human rights matters.
The decision by the new administration signals its backing for Sunni-led countries as counterweights to Shi'ite Iran's influence in the region.
Brian Dooley of Washington-based Human Rights First said separating the sale of the warplanes from human rights requirements would "encourage further repression" and create instability in Bahrain.

In my dissertation, I found that the US takes many considerations into view when selling arms, but that state security interests trump all the other considerations.  In this case, regional stability is more important than regime stability.  

The final article is one that describes the use of Arms as a deal sweetener by the Putin regime in negotiation with Serbia for a number of weapons systems.

Serbia is to soon receive six Mikoyan MiG-29 jets from Russia as a gift, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said.
Vucic made the comment after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who personally approved the transfer, Tass reported.
"President Putin will sign a decree in the coming days to transfer the planes to us," Vucic said. "Then, technical issues will have to be tackled: how to transport the planes, whether they should be disassembled into parts or one of the countries will provide its airspace for their flight. Of course, we favor the latter option because this is faster.

Putin has shown a willingness to be involved in bargaining for arms transfers.  He may be considered the arms saleseman in chief because many of his meetings with foreign leaders result in new arms deals being signed.  I am not sure, still, what to make of this behavior from a state and its leader, but I am very interesting in thinking through these issues for a long time.

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[1] Aircraft because that is the latest project I’m working on with one of my coauthors.

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.

Is there a coup a-brew in Turkey?

Over the past 18 months I've read half a dozen books about Turkey and scores of articles.  I did this for a long-term project in which Turkey's position in the international network of rivalries is very interesting.  That project is looking at Turkey as a case for whether an unknown social position that is determined by the cumulative social choices of all states about which states pose a threat (rivalry) can affect state behavior.  There is also a question about whether factors within a state may cause it to become central in such a network.

I am far from an expert on Turkish politics, but my foray into the academic international relations and historical literature about that state has made me curious.  The events within Turkey over the past six months have made the country even more interesting from the standpoint of someone who is interested in civil-military relations.

The reporting on the abortive coup and its aftermath has been interesting and scattered.  On the one hand, it seems as if the coup itself was largely theoretical and ineffective.  The prolonged and continued effort to blame the coup on Gulen and his followers has seemed like a naked political maneuver to minimize any influence that Erdogan's former ally has within the polity.  However, Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute has been writing about other issues with Turkey, and specifically about the chance for a real coup to take place sometime in the coming year.
(article)

Much of the reporting about Turkey in the West focuses on either President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to draft a new constitution or the aftermath of the abortive July 15 coup. But, behind-the-scenes, there is a story with ramifications as great: the competition for control of the military between followers of Erdogan on one hand and those of ultra-nationalist and former Maoist political leader and businessman Dogu Perincek on the other. Perincek’s followers have long occupied top role in the Turkish military which was fine when Erdogan and Perincek sought to take on common enemies: Kurds, liberals, followers of Fethullah Gülen etc. I had previously written about the Erdogan-Perincek struggle within the Turkish military here, but now it seems that the conflict may be accelerating. 

In recent days, Perincek has appeared on television and insisted Erdogan give up on his dreams of changing the constitution. He has cited a letter from a member of his political party calling for a popular rebellion and has now openly called for a change in government. Perincek has also suggested that Turkey could be aflame by March. One prominent Perincek supporter, prominent retired air force officer Ahmet Zeki Ucok has openly said there will be a new coup, but with full buy-in from all levels of the Turkish military.

 The continued unrest within Turkey, including the murder of Russia's ambassador, attacks carried out by ISIS, and Kurdish restiveness provide the military with plenty of arguments for the need to change the leadership of the state in order to right the security situation. While the idea that there may be a coup in Turkey is still speculative, the growing instability in the country's security situation heightens the risk that such a change could occur.

I am teaching a course this semester on civil-military relations, and we will be doing a lot of Turkey watching.

Bureaucracy and the University

I am not a big fan of bureaucracy.  I understand the point of it, and probably tend toward the bureaucratic in organizing my own life and time.  I am opposed to it when it is imposed upon me. This aversion to bureaucracy is probably a function of my own experiences with it.  It was one of the reasons that a long-term career in the military ceased to be appealing to me after awhile. The daily tasks of my job were fine, and in the context of my own small unit, things made sense.

For the same reason I see the virtue of setting standards and having rules for the academic department where I am currently chair. Our goal is to turn out well-rounded political science undergraduates and MA students. To do that we need to have some organization, and there have to be rules to organize that.  Beyond establishing basic frameworks and minimum standards, however, I am loathe to start to dictate what is happening in an individual course - let alone in individual lessons.

One of the most useful aspects of a liberal arts education is an exposure to the unevenness of life. Students can learn a lot about life by dealing with different types of professors with different types of classes and different types of personalities. The skills that we are teaching: critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, writing, and a broader exposure to problems and opportunities in the world are by their nature difficult to impart.

A graduate with a BA in political science can do a lot of things - but there is no nationwide professional test that needs to certify skills and knowledge like there is for engineering [in the US context], for example. We tell our students that the main object of their education is to learn to evaluate sources of information, identify what is important, and to be able to make their own arguments about what is important and why. There is not one single path or set of learning outcomes, activities, or objectives that will instill those skills into all of our graduates in the same way. 

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This is why this article from Inside Higher Ed really has me thinking about the current push in my own university to adopt more and more bureaucratic top-down procedures for designing, tracking, and reporting the work that is taking place in the classroom.

In this case a professor refused to put learning outcomes on his syllabus and has been relieved of teaching duties. He is suing the university over this.

Dillon’s complaint alleges defamation and violations of due process and his First Amendment rights. It’s heavily concerned with academic freedom, and it certainly has all the hallmarks of that kind of fight. The American Association of University Professors, for example, has appealed to the college on Dillon’s behalf. Its statement on assessment says that faculty members maintain “primary responsibility for establishing the criteria for assessment and the methods for implementing it.” 

But Dillon’s lawsuit also centers on the role of the accreditor in assessment. Hinting that the college may have used its upcoming accreditation review as an excuse to swat a known gadfly, the complaint says that a “single paragraph in a professor’s syllabus cannot possibly jeopardize any college’s reaccreditation.” 

Is that true? Dillon notes, correctly, that SACSCOC's Principles of Accreditation do not address syllabus content. Yet student learning outcomes -- a growing focus for regional accreditors -- loom large in those standards. SACSCOC’s principles on institutional effectiveness, for example, say that the college or university “identifies expected outcomes, assesses the extent to which it achieves these outcomes and provides evidence of improvement based on analysis of the results” in several areas. Those include “educational programs, to include student learning outcomes.”

For me this reveals many of the underlying tensions between professors and administration. The most important audience for the administration is whoever is signing the check, and whoever is signing the checks.  

The rules that trickle down to syllabi from school and department are a symptom of the need for administrators to "understand" what is happening. James Scott, in "Seeing like a State", describes the lengths that states go to change the landscape in order to make it readable for the tax collector and regulator.  

I wonder about issues of trust between faculty and administrator.  The rise of the professional administrator and tracks to administration that don't organically arise out of long years in the classroom and lab will likely increase this distrust.  Faculty resistance to these downward demands are often treated as simple pettiness or a desire to ditch accountability.  The idea that professors may have principled reasons for resisting the bureaucratic encroachment into their territory - to be treated as simple interchangeable cogs of information-dispensing diminishes the role and potential of professionals.  

Ironically, it is the skills that are most difficult to measure - the ones that get past the banal list of bullet-pointed outcomes - which are the real value added of a university education. Simple information consumption and fact-gathering can be "scaled" in ways that analysis and critical thinking cannot.

Russian Arms Propaganda?

I wonder about the effectiveness of propaganda sometimes.  In this post I share two different stories that seem to be part of Russia's propaganda offensive.  One has to do with the capabilities of Ukraine, and the other a disputed version of events. I wonder about the audiences for these particular pieces and the larger strategic thinking - and whether this is strategic or simply business as usual.
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There is an article in the "Sputnik" news about the state of the arms export business in Ukraine. It's the type of article that I am interested in reading in a region that I am interested in reading about.  

The article details some shady deals and shoddy workmanship and highlights the fact that Ukraine's Military Industrial Complex is dependent on reworking or simply reselling its stock of inherited Soviet weapons - not on the development and sale of new weapons.

The problem isn’t however, that a lion’s share of those exports consisted of decades-old weapons and parts Ukraine had inherited from the Soviet Union. 

Even before the 2014 “Maidan revolution” the head of the Verhovna Rada’s defense and security committee Anatoly Kinakh admitted that weapons developed and built in post-Soviet Ukraine accounted for less than 20 percent of its exports.

By these standards, it would be interested to note what percentage of weapons sold by Russia have been developed and built post Soviet Union. Furthermore, an interesting question is the extent to which those more advanced weapons are used in the Russian military.

The Russian military industrial complex is still in fairly bad shape from top to bottom.  There has been some new development of weapons, but production has been sporadic and there has been a problem in delivering those weapons to the Russian military - and to foreign customers.  The fact that Ukraine is experiencing these problems is not surprising.  It is also questionable, to what extent the sale of arms is a priority for the Ukrainian government and economy.

The arms industry was highly integrated during the Soviet Era, and many firms have struggled to find markets and to integrate.  The Motorsich firm in Zaporozhye was building motors for Russian helicopters through the 2000s, but the number or orders was a fraction of what it used to be.

Dispute over incident in Mediterranean Sea

RT, Russia's official propaganda station airs this video and accuses the USS Gravely of breaching international safety protocols during the encounter shown in the video below.  The version of events as told by the US is much different.  In their version, the Russian Frigate claimed to be having problems with maneuverability, but was constantly trying to interfere with the USS Truman.  The video shown is the USS Gravely maneuvering to stay between the Frigate and the Truman - this is its job as part of the Carrier Battle Group.  (US Version)





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It is interesting to me that Russian media is starting to fight back against the propaganda shown on domestic channels.  I don't know much about propaganda as a subject, but it is fascinating to see how much it comes up in relation to the subjects that I study.

Russian Consistency on Regime Change (and odds and ends)

Russia is warning the US about a push for regime change in Syria (LINK).  I think that Russia's policy has always been consistent in this regard. And their position has been borne out in the chaos that enveloped Egypt, Libya, and Iraq in the absence of strong leadership.  Democracy promotion is fine and good, but there has to be some semblance of political order and institutional ability (or social capital) to be able to develop it.

The lesson from Iraq is that any regime change imposed from the outside needs to be accompanied by very strong planning for the post-regime period.  Organic changes to leadership from popular uprisings may also be shaky.

We have given Putin's Kremlin plenty of ammunition in its offensive against democracy promotion by supporting regime change irresponsibly.

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This is an interesting article on the shake up of the Baltic Sea Fleet.

Clearly, for the purge to be so large and so open, the misconduct in the Baltic Fleet had to be very serious and very widespread. Yulia Nikitina and Irina Tumakova from Fontanka.ru have published a long article documenting the faults attributed to the fleet’s now-former leadership. The condition of the fleet under Viktor Kravchuk had supposedly declined when compared to how it was under his predecessors, who received much less financing than he did in the last four years. 

In other words, the Baltic Fleet purge appears to be a signal to other Russian military commanders (including mid-level ones) that corruption that has a negative effect on combat readiness will not be tolerated and will result in punishment far more severe than the usual honorable retirement given to senior officials who misbehave.

 Russia's military readiness has become political.