Arms Acquisition Research Articles

Industrial participation, investment and growth: The case of South Africa's defence-related industry

In November 1998 the cabinet announced the list of preferred suppliers for the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF) R30 billion arms acquisition programme. This included Britain (maritime helicopters, jet trainers and light fighters), Sweden (light fighters), Germany (corvettes and submarines) and Italy (light utility helicopters). To spend so much money on arms procurement from abroad is a major blow to the local defence industry. In attempting to win public support for the R30 billion arms deal government has continually stressed the potential positive effects of the proposed industrial participation offers on investment, job creation and growth in the local-defence related industry and the national economy.

Adjusting to the Post-U.S. Bases Era: The Ordeal of the Philippine Military's Modernization Program

Despite facing a regional arms build-up and an emerging regional power (the People's Republic of China), the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) found it difficult to convince the Philippine government of the need to modernize its obsolete military hardware. It took the Philippine government nearly four years before it approved a modest arms acquisition program for its armed forces. This article discusses how democratic institutions and practices have delayed and precipitated a drastic modification of the AFP modernization program.

EXPLORING POTENTIAL ARMS RACES

Defense spending accounts for a larger share of national output in most countries than many of the other allocative decisions, both public and private, which the majority of economic research aims at explaining. Yet with notable exceptions, most economists have ignored this topic and relegated to political science the task of explaining how resources are allocated to this sector. This paper aims at contributing to this literature by economists. A theoretical model is developed to explain the dynamics of the arms acquisition process. Within this framework, defense expenditures are governed by the expenditures of potential adversaries if these exist. Then the model is empirically tested using a sample of countries or dyads which have been proposed to be adversaries. The direction of the prima facie causal relationship between the military expenditures of these dyads is investigated using parametric causality tests. The results indicate that some of these country's expenditures seem to reflect an arms race while other proposed dyads seem not to be adversaries, i.e., their expenditures are independent and therefore, seem to be governed by other than an external threat.

SEAN's security cooperation: Searching for a regional order

Abstract This article examines ASEAN's security concerns and its efforts at security cooperation in response to such concerns. From the outset, ASEAN has defined security comprehensively and this has been reflected in its various attempts at security cooperation. In its early days, when security concerns were focused on domestic challenges and consequent opportunities for external power intervention, a number of concepts and instruments were introduced. These included ZOPFAN, SEANFZ, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, and the Declaration of ASEAN Concord of 1976. Security cooperation in the early stages mainly consisted of bilateral operations against communist insurgents. The most notable success was the building of a ‘security community’. With Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, ASEAN cooperated against the external military threat by non‐military means. In the post‐cold war era, while ASEAN countries seek security self‐reliance in the form of growing arms acquisition and modernization, ASEAN members are ...

National Arms Acquisition as a Rational Competitive Process

A formal dyadic model of the arms acquisition process is developed and analyzed through computer simulation. A rational model produces behavior consistent with a powerful security dilemma. A spiral model, in which images of the opponent become more aggressive, sparking an arms race, emerges from the simulation for deterrent nations. In addition to these anticipated findings, the rational arms model suggests that competitive factors have their greatest impact for rivals near parity; noncompetitive forces may drive the decision for unbalanced dyads. Also unpredicted from previous formal work, only one member of a competitive dyad needs to favor disarmanent for both nations to disarm.

The Next Great Arms Race

Despite the end of the Cold War?perhaps because of it?the nations of East and Southeast Asia are engaged in accelerating arms races with significant implications for regional and international security. The recent sale of American F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan and Russian Su-27 fighter jets to China are part of a larger arms acquisi tion effort as both countries also upgrade their own military produc tion capabilities. Other countries in the region?Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the two Koreas?are also involved in major arms acquisition programs and the development of high-tech military industries. Although these nations have generally managed to avoid direct combat with one another since the Vietnam War (the short border conflict between China and Vietnam in 1979 being the sole exception), continuing tension in Korea and a number of territorial disputes in the South China Sea area could provide the sparks to ignite a regional conflagration. The acceleration of regional arms races is made more worrisome by the absence of any regional arms control talks, such as those now under way in the Middle East, and by the growing technological prowess of the leading Asian powers. While most of the nato and former Warsaw Pact countries are reducing their military expendi tures and slowing the development of new weapons, many East Asian countries are raising their military outlays?in some cases by a

The Correlates of Arms Importation

The basic question of why nations import arms is addressed by identifying clusters of variables most closely correlated with arms import levels, both for the world's aggregate of countries and by region. From prior impressionistic studies of arms transfers a set of six hypothesized clusters is proposed, entailing: (1) national characteristics such as geography and population; (2) governmental characteristics such as regime type; (3) military characteristics such as defense expenditures; (4) economic characteristics such as degree of wealth and level of trade; (5) international conflict involvements; and (6) international political alignment and alliance entanglements. Each of these is measured with data from Kidron & Smith's, The War Atlas, supplemented by ACDA's, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, and by scholarly studies. The cluster with the largest impact on arms import levels consisted of military variables, especially budgetary expenditures and nuclear status. Economic and alignment variables were next in overall importance, followed by conflict involvement; national characteristics and regime type had very little influence. The inertial nature of arms importation was indicated by the high correlation between 1970s and 1980s import levels. Size of the military, levels of military expenditure, and war involvement in the 1980s had the strongest association with Latin arms acquisition, while military spending and nuclear potential dominated for the Middle East. In East Asia and the Pacific, beginning levels of indigenous weapons production and relatively low defense expenditures were associated with imports, while the impact of South Africa caused African import levels to be highly related to wealth, armed force size, and war involvements. In Europe, bloc politics and the presence of foreign bases constituted the main correlates of arms importation. The findings imply the need to control militarization if the global arms trade is to be contained.

European security and the decline of American hegemony: Implications for arms acquisition and arms control

(1988). European security and the decline of American hegemony: Implications for arms acquisition and arms control. Arms Control: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 234-264.

The Indo-Pakistani Military Balance

Research Article| May 01 1986 The Indo-Pakistani Military Balance Jerrold F. Elkin, Jerrold F. Elkin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar W. Andrew Ritezel W. Andrew Ritezel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1957) 26 (5): 518–538. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644480 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jerrold F. Elkin, W. Andrew Ritezel; The Indo-Pakistani Military Balance. Far Eastern Survey 1 May 1957; 26 (5): 518–538. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2644480 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1986 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Nuclear consequences of the welfare state

Using newly available data on comprehensive measures of U.S. and Soviet nuclear stockpiles this paper has investigated statistically the dynamics of nuclear arms acquisition by these nations over the past two decades. There is no evidence of a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Expectations and Arms Races

Recent empirical studies of arms races have produced two puzzling results. First, for several important arms races, particularly the U.S. -USSR case, there appears to be no interaction. Arms acquisition appears to be driven only by internal factors. Second, in several cases, nations appear to be responding to the current military expenditures of their opponent. This statistical result presents interpretation problems since nations do not know the current defense expenditure of their opponent at the time that they make their own military expenditure decision. A number of interpretations for these results have been provided. They include inappropriate model specification, inappropriate operationalization of military threat, and error-ridden military expenditure data. Nevertheless, the results persist and conflict with our more substantive and intuitive understanding of arms processes. A process based upon expectations of current arms expenditures of the opponent is developed to deal with this puzzle. In this paper several alternative expectation mechanisms are formulated and tested for a number of contemporary arms races.

The role of expectations in arms acquisition processes: The U.S.‐U.S.S.R. case

Recent empirical studies of arms races have led to the disturbing conclusion that for several important arms races, particularly the U.S.‐U.S.S.R. case, there appears to be no interaction. Instead arms acquisition appears to be driven only by internal factors. A number of interpretations for these results have been provided. They include, inappropriate model specification, inappropriate operationalization of military threat, and error ridden military expenditure data. Recent results, coupled with our more descriptive understanding of arms processes, suggest that expectations of current and future arms expenditures by the opponent are relevant to an understanding of current arms expenditures. This implies that such expectations must be taken into account in the arms modeling process. In this paper several alternative expectations mechanisms are formulated and tested for the U.S.‐U.S.S.R. case. The extent of measurement error in Soviet military expenditures and its effect on the empirical tests of the expec...

Let the Researcher Beware: The Use of the Richardson Equations to Estimate the Parameters of a Dyadic Arms Acquisition Process

Most attempts to untangle the factors accounting for arms acquisition by nation states rely implicitly or explicitly on the work of Lewis Richardson. However, very few findings from these investigations are durable; one study finds a particular nation state dyad to be involved in an arms race, while the next concludes that this same pair of nations is driven by factors internal to each. The question asked in this paper is: how likely is the true model of a dyadic arms acquisition process to emerge when the Richardson equations are used? This question is investigated by constructing two data sets representing the military capability of a pair of nations-one when an arms race is present, and the other when each nation's acquisition of capability is driven by internal factors. These data are then used to estimate the Richardson equations. The conclusion is that in many situations, estimation of the Richardson equations may not uncover the true parameters of the process and may well lead to different conclusions about the same dyadic arms acquisition process.