Country Survey XIII: Japan's security posture and defense industry prospects

Defense budgets in Japan have been complicated compromises from numerous inputs ‐ including threat perceptions, domestic industrial/technological base development, support for the bilateral security treaty with the United States and internal bureaucratic politics ‐ but with the fall of the former Soviet Union, the clearest justification for higher spending disappeared. Double‐digit defense spending increases that were common in the 1980s have been replaced by annual increases lower than present inflation rates, resulting in negative real growth in the country's defense budget. Domestic economic problems and consistent government pressures for smaller budgets have further slowed annual growth in total spending and have contributed to lower procurement budgets. As a result, the domestic Japanese defense industry is facing far more constrained conditions from the growth years of a decade before.

Government policymakers are examining Japan's regional security environment as well as its alliance with the United States to determine the appropriate course for the country to take in the coming years. The formal security treaty with the United States is likely to remain a major element of government positions, but other aspects of the country's overall security posture are open to debate. Perceptions of a reduced threat environment are fueling additional pressures for defense budget cuts.

The domestic defense industry seeks means to assure its survival in domestic defense markets in this constrained environment. Expansion into overseas markets to offset declining domestic markets is an option that currently is constrained by policy restrictions on arms exports. Industry is advocating re‐examination of those policies and unlike earlier years, government appears willing to respond positively but cautiously to this lobbying.     

CONTRIBUTORS

ABSTRACT

Narratives about Brazil's nuclear program are distorted by supporters and critics alike. In Brazil, the national nuclear infrastructure is undergoing a period of expansion, with plans to build new nuclear power plants and industrial-scale fuel production facilities. While Brazil's leaders herald the nuclear sector as a triumph for indigenous science and technology, foreigners view the nuclear program as a dangerous legacy of the military regime. This discrepancy becomes even more apparent in discussions about the ongoing construction of Brazil's first nuclear powered submarine. Brazil's military touts the submarine as a symbol of political status, economic growth, and military might. But from abroad, the military's involvement in nuclear development is considered unnecessary, worrisome, and even irresponsible. These narratives—often incomplete or selective—have polarized discussions about Brazil's nuclear submarine program and caused considerable political antagonism during safeguards negotiations. This article works to dispel myths, highlight legitimate concerns, and explain historical perspectives that shed light on some difficulties that can be anticipated in future negotiations.     

Defense policy in Brazil: bridging the gap between ends and means?

This article aims to analyze the Brazilian Defense Policy in terms of its ability to reduce the gap between ends and means. Since 2003, the Brazilian defense policy has evolved along with Brazil’s increased role in the international system. Sustaining this process depends on institutional, economic, and operational conditions that are yet to be fully guaranteed. They require negotiations, reforms, and strategic perspective. By identifying specific challenges emerging from the national security institutional framework, the combat capability building process, the budgetary cycle, as well as from the defense industrial base, we sought to explain their rationale and to offer concrete policy pointers to overcome obstacles. As a general conclusion, the Brazilian defense policy was strengthened by the 2008 National Defense Strategy (END) due to its clearer strategic goals. Bridging the gap between those ends and the proper means is a continuous effort for any given country, but in the case of Brazil it has been addressed with firmer steps since the END, even in the face of harder economic and political conditions.     

Remaking the military industrial relationship: A French‐American comparison

Defense industrial complexes in leading Cold War nations have downsized and reallocated resources to other productive activities in the 1990s. In this paper, we analyze the experience of two key countries ‐ the US and France. Comparing the two countries, we find similar outcomes in budgetary retrenchment and large firm restructuring but marked differences in the pace of downsizing and diversification among small and medium‐sized firms. We hypothesize that three sets of contextual differences may explain these differences: 1) institutional differences in the way that the State bureaucracies ‐ the Pentagon and the French Délégation générale pour l'armement (DGA) ‐ oversee defense industrial matters, 2) differences in military industry ownership and firm size patterns, and 3) differences in the regional distribution of defense industrial capacity and associated regional policies. In closing, we note that the two countries’ defense industrial complexes are becoming more alike and speculate on the significance of invidious competition and interactions between them. We address briefly the future of French/American arms industrial competition and cooperation, given the trend towards transnational security arrangements and defense industry globalization     

The symbolic politics of ballistic missile defense: seeking the perfect defense in an imperfect world

Ballistic missile defense (BMD) politics present an interesting evolution in how the USA, especially Congress, has come to think about BMD both as operational reality and as a symbolic policy. The argument here is that BMD's operational reality is increasingly overshadowed by its symbolic aspects. Such a status arose from rapidly changing international and domestic politics. The end result is a situation in which BMD policy in a sense floats above the question of its actual combat effectiveness. Its primary mission in part is sustaining US capacity to remain a global power and support its allies.     

The industrial structure of National Defence and transaction costs

A recent paper in Defence Economics suggests that “a single variable, the public opinion balance, ... when accompanied by a control variable measuring the proportion of responses in the ‘residuum’ (no opinion or keep the status quo), permits an accurate prediction of subsequent changes in the rate of change of U.S. defense outlays from the mid‐1960s through the 1980s” (Higgs and Kilduff, 1993, p. 227). In contrast, this comment provides evidence that since 1986 the Higgs‐Kilduff model frequently mispredicts the direction of U.S. defense spending. In addition, the average prediction error, and its variance, since 1986 consistently exceeds the average prediction error, and its variance, for the years prior to 1986.     

India's Pursuit Of Ballistic Missile Defense

This article analyzes India's efforts to deploy a Ballistic Missile Program (BMD). The article has three objectives. First, it argues that scientific-bureaucratic factors and India's incapacity to deter Pakistan's use of terrorist proxies have driven its quest for BMD. Second, the article also evaluates the current state of India's two-tiered missile defense shield. In spite of various claims on the part of India's defense science establishment, the paper estimates that India still lacks a deployable BMD system and is still far from developing an effective strategy of deterrence-through-denial. Third, the article analyzes the implications of the development of India's BMD system for nuclear stability in South Asia. The article shows how India's BMD capacities, however limited, have indirectly exacerbated the security concerns of India's regional rival, Pakistan.     

THE EFFECTS OF THE WORLD DEFENSE INDUSTRY AND US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL ON THE ISRAELI DEFENSE INDUSTRY: A DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS MODEL

This paper models the interactions between the defense industry market structure and the defense needs of Israel, the USA and Western Europe, which produce several heterogeneous defense goods. The model specifies that the defense industries of the US and Europe are ‘large’ while that of Israel is ‘small’. The US military aid to Israel is also an integral part of the model. The results show that net defense costs of Israel are minimal when the number of its defense firms is one. The model predicts that an increase in US military aid reduces Israel’s government expenditure, its defense industry’s profits and its net defense costs.     

Urban violence and the militarisation of security: Brazilian ‘peacekeeping’ in Rio de Janeiro and Port-au-Prince

Despite problems of violence domestically, Brazil has played a key leadership role as part of MINUSTAH peacekeeping operations in Haiti since 2004. This article addresses how Brazil's international military engagement is shaping domestic approaches to urban security, and what may be the implications of the use of military strategies, operations, and norms to address issues of public security in Brazilian cities. It is argued that current approaches toward urban security employing military-trained peacekeepers actually represent a continuation of old paradigms, yet these recent militarised approaches are likely evolving into newer and potentially more accountable forms by constraining indiscriminate use of force and establishing a positive state presence in marginal urban areas. As such, the article connects long-established issues of dealing with urban violence in Latin America with ongoing debates in the United States and beyond about post-counterinsurgency approaches to increasingly urban conflict settings. It reflects on potential lessons to be learned from the Latin American perspective, while showing also how these have changed over the last decade. The article concludes that despite the potential utility of force in some urban conflict settings, this approach could entail a normative shift towards legitimising forceful containment of violence, and hinder democratic consolidation in Brazil.     

Guns–butter tradeoff in contemporary China

This study offers an investigation of the relationship between defense and social spending in the People's Republic of China. In particular, three consecutive questions are answered here. Does a warfare–welfare tradeoff exist in China's budgetary allocation? Is it positive or negative? What is the causal direction involved? By applying a vector autoregression analysis for the period of 1952–2006, this study finds a unidirectional crowd-out effect going from defense to social spending.     

The origins of the cancellation of Canada's Avro CF-105 arrow fighter program: A failure of strategy

The story of the demise of Canada's remarkable CF-105 Arrow jet-fighter interceptor has been told and retold by numerous Canadian writers. As told by most, it is a tragic tale. Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, in an act as unforgivable as it was incomprehensible, not only destroyed a highly promising all-Canadian state-of-the-art aircraft but ruined all hopes of Canada ever being an important player in the North American defense industry. This article offers a contrasting interpretation — locating the problems leading to the aircraft's cancellation further back in history, and in particular in serious and determinative failures in strategic thinking and analysis by senior Canadian military officials at the time of the Arrow program's birth in 1953.     

Innovation in China’s Defense Technology Base: Foreign Technology and Military Capabilities

ABSTRACT

China’s defense science, technology, and industrial system has been undergoing a far-reaching transformation over the past two decades and the single biggest factor behind this turnaround is the role of external technology and knowledge transfers and the defense industry’s improving ability to absorb these inputs and convert into localized output. China is pursuing an intensive campaign to obtain defense and dual-use civil–military foreign technology transfers using a wide variety of means, which is explored in this article.     

日本防卫产业发展潜力问题分析

日本自卫队追求能力提升和活动范围扩大的努力受到其防卫产业发展的局限。防卫预算的有限直接导致防卫产业的市场规模狭小。部分核心技术自主研发的缺失限制了防卫产业独立发展的能力。融合式发展模式在成本核算、劳动生产率提升和产业发展稳定性等方面限制了防卫产业发展的潜力。     

Reforming China’s defense industry

ABSTRACT

Even with sizable economic inputs, access to foreign technologies, and considerable political will, China, up until the late 1990s, experienced only limited success when it came to the local design, development, and manufacture of advanced conventional weapons. Not surprisingly, therefore, reforming the local defense industry in order to upgrade its technology base and manufacturing capabilities and to make armaments production more efficient and cost-effective has long preoccupied the Chinese leadership. The fact that most of these efforts had little positive impact on the country’s military technological and industrial capabilities only encouraged Beijing to experiment with additional reforms in the hopes of finally getting it right.     

US strategic preferences in the early twenty-first century

This article investigates how US national security planners have envisioned the emerging strategic environment during the early twenty-first century and evaluates how their perceptions of this strategic environment have changed during these years. This conceptual evolution can be seen in how defense planners define threats, identify defense priorities, and design security strategies. Five key strategic planning documents serve as the basis for this analysis and illustrate significant shifts in how the US government has envisioned its own security requirements as well as the context within which its strategic vision will need to be realized. These planning documents are: (1) Joint Vision 2020, (2) the Bush Administration's 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, (3) the Obama Administration's 2010 National Security Strategy, (4) US Strategic Defense Guidance entitled Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21^st Century Defense, and (5) the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020.     

Introduction

The French defense policy has been considered unique among western countries. This policy relies on the concept of ‘strategic autonomy’, which is based on nuclear deterrence, autonomy of action, independence of defense industry, and arms exports. From an economic perspective, it implies major consequences both at the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. Given its importance, it is crucial to use economic expertise to provide insights on defense policy.     

The politics of defense revival in Argentina

In marked contrast with previous decades, defense issues in Argentina have started to receive increasing political attention over the last few years. The main goal of this article is to account for this new found interest in defense policy. The article contends that this revival could be accounted for by both the implementation of a neo-developmentalist strategy and a type of control that emphasizes civilian oversight over the armed forces. Both factors have promoted the implementation of policies that favored an increase in the military budget, the reconstruction of the defense industry and the establishment of a new military doctrine. This article evaluates the impact of factors that have not been previously considered by the literature on defense attention in South America.     

OPTING OUT OF THE IRON TRIANGLE

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the US chemical industry went from lobbying against the Geneva Protocol and promoting increased funding for chemical warfare to refusing to produce binary chemical weapons and assisting with the negotiations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)—even though the treaty included provisions that could be costly to industry. What happened in those thirty years to make the US chemical industry reverse its position on chemical weapons? This article argues these changes were largely caused by the chemical industry's desire to reform the negative public image it had acquired due to its involvement in the Agent Orange scandal and other high-profile incidents during the 1970s and 1980s. The chemical industry's assistance with CWC negotiations may be explained after an examination of the US public policy literature, which argues that industry will support apparently costly regulations if doing so helps it repair a damaged public image and ensures greater profits in the long run.     

航母编队防空作战编成评判方法

航母编队防空作战编成是影响其海上生存和完成作战任务的关键因素,在构建航母编队防空作战效能评估指标体系基础上,运用直觉模糊集理论的多属性决策方法,对航母编队防空作战编成待评方案进行评估。实例证明了该方法的可用性和有效性,可为航母编队指挥员指挥决策提供理论和方法支撑。     

Burden sharing and the future of NATO: wandering between two worlds

The US role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Alliance is a 65-year history of retrenchment and renewal. When Washington has sought a retrenchment from the world, it traditionally increased burden sharing pressure on Europe to do more. During times of increased global ambition, the USA reaffirmed its traditional leadership role in the Alliance and its commitment to NATO effectiveness and relevance. This cycle of NATO retrenchment and renewal, however, is halting. Though the USA will continue to go through periods of relative increases and decreases in security policy ambition, signs point to a permanent defense and security retrenchment in Europe. Germany is the ally singularly capable of filling the resulting security gap. If NATO is to avoid the drift toward irrelevance many critics have predicted, Germany will need to cast off old inhibitions toward security and defense leadership. These trends and their implications for NATO's future are explored through historical case studies and the shifting contemporary security environment.