Acrimony,asymmetry, and the Sino-Indian nuclear relationship

ABSTRACT

While most contemporary analyses of South Asian nuclear dynamics acknowledge the presence of a strategic triangle between the region’s three nuclear players, the primary focus usually remains on the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Discussions of Sino-Indian relations remain limited. This is likely attributed to the stability in the two countries’ relations, yet it is worth asking why this stability exists and whether it is likely to continue in the future. Although China and India have an acrimonious relationship, their asymmetric nuclear capabilities and threat perceptions mitigate the danger of a traditional security dilemma. India may perceive China’s nuclear aggrandizement to be a security threat, but the same is not true of China, which has a vastly superior nuclear force and is largely shaping its nuclear-force structure in response to the threat it perceives from the United States. This dynamic makes a serious conventional or nuclear conflict highly unlikely.     

美国边防管理理念及其启示

美中两国作为世界上比较大的海陆兼备的国家,边防环境有着诸多相似之处.从边界管理外移、重视海防、实施差异化边界管理模式、注重科技防边等方面对美国边防管理理念进行分析,提出美国边防管理理念带给中国边防管理工作的启示：陆海并重,突出海防;区别对待;预防为主;科技管边。     

It Takes Two to Tango: Autocratic underbalancing,regime legitimacy and China’s responses to India’s rise

What factors do autocracies evaluate when responding to perceived threats and why might they fail to balance appropriately? I posit that autocratic leaders may choose greater exposure to an external threat if, by doing so, it preserves regime legitimacy. Specifically, the desire to promote a positive image to one’s domestic public creates incentives to publicly downplay a rival’s military progress, which then affects the state’s ability to mobilize resources to respond to the growing threat. I test this theory in the case of China’s response to India’s military rise. This research contributes to balancing theory and empirical work on East Asian security.     

A Nonlinear Model of Military Expenditure Convergence: Evidence From Estar Nonlinear Unit Root Test

The paper builds a model to empirically test military expenditure convergence in a nonlinear set up. We assert that country A chooses a military strategy of catching up with the military expenditure of its rivals, subject to public spending constraints on public investments, including health and education, leading to decrease in long-term economic welfare. This implies nonlinear convergence path: only when the military expenditure gap between countries reaches the threshold level, will it provide incentives to catch up with rival’s military expenditures. We test this nonlinear catching up hypothesis for 37 countries spanning from 1988 to 2012. Results from individual nonlinear cross-sectionally augmented Dickey–Fuller (NCADF) regression indicate that 53% of countries converge to world’s average military expenditure: where 39% of countries converge to Germany; 33% of countries converge to China; 22% of countries converge to the USA, and 11% of countries converge to Russia. Interestingly, USA does not exhibit nonlinear military expenditure convergence toward world’s average level. For panel NCADF regression, the result suggests that on average, there is evidence for countries converging to USA’s military expenditure at 10% significance level. For the convergence to the world’s average, the statistical significance is at the 1% significance level.     

Keeping an eye on South Asian skies: America’s pivotal deterrence in nuclearized India–Pakistan crises

Since declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities in 1998, India and Pakistan have engaged in three major crises that each threatened to escalate into war. In each crisis, the USA engaged in active diplomacy to dissuade the South Asian rivals from taking escalatory actions. Previous literature on the crises has described the American role, but has not theorized third-party involvement in a nuclearized regional rivalry. We apply Timothy Crawford’s pivotal deterrence theory to the nuclearized India–Pakistan conflict, and extend the original theory to cover the novel condition of a non-superpower nuclear dyad, in the context of a single-superpower international system. We find that America’s pivotal deterrence generally enhanced stability in the India–Pakistan crises, and unlike in pre-nuclear South Asia, other great powers supported American diplomacy. However, we suggest that future regional crises between nuclear rivals, in South Asia or elsewhere, may present greater challenges for pivotal deterrence.     

State and society in Asia

India and China are the 2 most populous countries of the world; in the 1950s, both countries initiated a centrally planned program for rapid development within vastly differing political systems. China embarked India's policy encouraged only voluntary acceptance of family planning. In both cases, however, government involvement in population forms a part of comprehensive national planning. Both countries rely on a limited resource base and technological sophistication in order to alleviate mass poverty and misery. The political implications of population growth cannot be neatly isolated from those that are generated by social and economic forces of change in a society that is in a transitional stage of modernization and development. Development has not been an unmixed bleesing; population growth is one of its counterproductive outcomes. The development process has begun to draw increasing attention to hitherto neglected correlates of fertility decline, such as a reduction in infant mortality, universal education, improvement in women's status, and women's participation in economic activity outside the home, all of which eventually result in greater demand for family planning services. Both the Indian and Chinese models highlight the importance of taking the people into one's confidence; the response of the common people to official initiatives is critical in securing a reduction in fertility levels. China has adopted a 1 child family policy, yet it is unreasonable to expect that the Indian people would agree to a nationally prescribed family size norm below 2 children. The principal determinant of future population trends in both these countries is the course of their politics. The success of developing countries will be assured if the developed nations support their progress without being worried about their population growth, which is the result of their unavoidable failure to modernize their social and economic structures.     

Self-Defense Militias,Death Squads,and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey

What explains the variation in states’ nonstate partners in civil warfare? States often use nonstate actors to do what their regular military forces cannot do well – navigate the local population. Some of their nonstate partners are ordinary civilians, while others are battle-hardened fighters with a rebellious or criminal past. The choice of proxy carries serious implications for the patterns and effects of violence during civil war, human rights, and international security. This article is the first to disaggregate the nonstate counterinsurgents and offer an explanation for why and how states use each type. It brings together the politics of collaboration with the politics of exploitation. The article shows that the state’s use of nonstate proxies is shaped by the supply of willing collaborators, the state’s ability to exercise control over them, and the trade-offs underlying the use of the different types of nonstate actors. The empirical evidence used to support this argument comes from a novel, comparative study of Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists and India’s counterinsurgency against Kashmiri separatists. The original data were collected through fieldwork in the disputed territories of each country.     

War and peace in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue looks at the importance of institutions and the role played by international actors in crucial episodes of India’s strategic history. The contributions trace India’s tryst with war and peace from immediately before the foundation of the contemporary Indian state to the last military conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. The focus of the articles is as much on India as it is on Pakistan and China, its opponents in war. The articles offer a fresh take on the creation of India as a regional military power, and her approach to War and Peace in the post-independence period.     

Covert Canucks: Intelligence Gathering and the 1924 Voyage of HMCS Thiepval in the North Pacific Ocean

In 1924, HMCS Thiepval provided logistical support to a British attempt to circumnavigate the world by air. But the ship had another secret mission. Concerned America and Japan were fortifying their north Pacific possessions in violation of the 1922 Washington Treaty, and fearing war might be inevitable, the Canadian navy sent the Thiepval to covertly spy upon American and Japanese facilities. No cheating was discovered, but in the longer run, Canadian concerns about hostilities in the north Pacific were ‘on the mark’ correct.     

Implementing defence policy: a benchmark-“lite”

Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few “best of breed” small- to medium-sized defence organisations (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) deal with these issues. We find that most countries fail to link goals to resources and pay limited attention to specific and rigorous ex-ante or post-hoc evaluation, even when compared to their own national government-wide provisions. We do, however, observe a (modest) trend towards putting more specific goals and metrics in these documents that can be – and in a few rare cases were – tracked. The paper identifies 42 concrete policy “nuggets” – both “do’s and don’ts” – that should be of interest to most defence policy planning/analysis communities. It ends with two recommendations that are in line with recent broader (non-defence) scholarship on the policy formulation-policy implementation gap: to put more rigorous emphasis on implementation (especially on achieving desired policy effects), but to do so increasingly in more experiential (“design”) ways, rather than in industrial-age bureaucratic ones (“PPBS”-systems).     

A matter of time: On the transitory nature of cyberweapons

This article examines the transitory nature of cyberweapons. Shedding light on this highly understudied facet is important both for grasping how cyberspace affects international security and policymakers’ efforts to make accurate decisions regarding the deployment of cyberweapons. First, laying out the life cycle of a cyberweapon, I argue that these offensive capabilities are both different in ‘degree’ and in ‘kind’ compared with other regarding their temporary ability to cause harm or damage. Second, I develop six propositions which indicate that not only technical features, inherent to the different types of cyber capabilities – that is, the type of exploited vulnerability, access and payload – but also offender and defender characteristics explain differences in transitoriness between cyberweapons. Finally, drawing out the implications, I reveal that the transitory nature of cyberweapons benefits great powers, changes the incentive structure for offensive cyber cooperation and induces a different funding structure for (military) cyber programs compared with conventional weapon programs. I also note that the time-dependent dynamic underlying cyberweapons potentially explains the limited deployment of cyberweapons compared to espionage capabilities.     

Peacekeeping and civil–military relations in Uruguay

ABSTRACT

There have been over 90,000 UN peacekeepers deployed around the world to 78 peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in over 125 countries since 1948. Some scholars have made the case that these missions have had a positive impact on the relationship between the military and the civilians they work for. However, other scholars have identified a negative impact on civil military relations (CMR). This paper contributes to this debate by investigating how peacekeeping has impacted civil-military relations in Latin America's most prolific contributor to peacekeeping: Uruguay. This paper finds that PKOs in Uruguay have facilitated post-transitions attempts by civilians to build first-generation control, but not second-generation control. Further, PKOs have marginally improved military effectiveness, but we find that they do not improve societal trust in the armed forces.     

联合侦察图像对岸上目标定位方法

随着卫星和无人机技术日趋成熟,使用卫星和无人机搭载成像设备执行战场侦察任务,及时获取敌方阵地图像信息,已成为各军事强国的重要侦察手段。以大口径舰炮远程对岸目标精确打击为背景,对无人机侦察图像的几何校正、卫星图片的地理坐标提取等技术进行分析,推导了相关的数学模型。通过相关的图像处理技术,结合联合侦察图像对岸上目标定位的主要误差源分析,提供了一种有效的联合侦察图像目标定位方法,并通过仿真数据显示了图像预处理技术在目标定位过程中对提高定位精度的作用。     

Geopolitics over Proliferation: the Origins of US Grand Strategy and Their Implications for the Spread of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia

How much does the United States care about nonproliferation? Recent scholarship suggests that the fear of spreading nuclear weapons was central to the US grand strategy in the Cold War. In one important case, however, this argument does not hold. This article draws on theoretical debates and newly declassified archives to demonstrate the primacy of geopolitics over nonproliferation in Washington’s policy toward India and Pakistan. Despite their rhetoric, Democratic and Republican leaders consistently relegated nonproliferation to the backburner whenever it conflicted with other strategic goals. Moreover, they inadvertently encouraged proliferation in South Asia at three inter-connected levels: technology, security, and identity.     

Certainty of Uncertainty: Nuclear Strategy with Chinese Characteristics

China's nuclear deterrent relies on so-called ‘first strike uncertainty’, which means not letting the other side be confident of a completely successful disarming strike. But in order to deter, the uncertainty must be high enough. After reviewing the developmental history of China's nuclear capability and the evolution of Chinese and foreign leaders’ perceptions of China's nuclear retaliatory capability, this article identifies the criteria of nuclear deterrence for China and other countries. This research can contribute to Sino-US strategic dialogue and deepening understanding of the security consequences of nuclear proliferation.     

“多极”外交政策下的俄罗斯对印度军售现状分析与前景

俄印是传统友好国家,俄罗斯也是印度最大的武器和军事装备供应国。在俄奉行"多极"外交政策的背景下,同时印度作为世界最大的武器和军事装备进口国,其军火市场受到多方觊觎,俄对印军售也面临着严峻的挑战。俄专家认为,"俄中印"战略大三角的构想应做出调整,且"多极"外交政策无助于加强俄罗斯与印度关系。文章分析和预测了俄对印的军售现状和前景。俄印这两个传统与新兴大国间的军事技术乃至政治-军事合作,已经和继续对亚太地区乃至全球政治格局施加重大影响。     

Measuring hard power: China’s economic growth and military capacity

China’s rapid economic growth is facilitating massive increases in its military spending and causing increased security concerns in Asia and the Western Pacific. But there is uncertainty over how large China’s military spending is relative to other countries, or how fast it is growing in real terms. We address this issue by deriving a relative military cost price index based on the relative unit costs of inputs. We find that China’s real military spending is much larger than suggested by exchange rate comparisons, and even larger than standard purchasing power parity comparisons. We also find, however, that the real growth of China’s military spending has been smaller than conventionally thought. This is due to rapidly growing wages in China and the large share of personnel in China’s military budget.     

India’s Taliban Dilemma: To Contain or to Engage?

India’s Afghanistan policy in the 1990s is termed a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan. New Delhi’s aversion to the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime is considered a marker of this rivalry. This paper revisits India’s approach towards Afghanistan and examines if New Delhi was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions during 1990s. Based on fresh primary interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the paper shows that India engaged with and accommodated pro-Pakistan factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until 1996. The Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul in September 1996 challenged India’s engage-with-all approach. Nonetheless, the decision to sever ties with the Taliban and to bolster anti-Taliban factions was highly debated in New Delhi. Many in India saw the Taliban as a militant Islamist force sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control.     

Expansion of Chinese maritime power in the Indian Ocean: implications for India

This paper examines the ongoing expansion of China’s maritime power in the Indian Ocean region and analyses its potential impact on the extant balance of Sino-Indian maritime power in the region. It posits that the expanding Chinese maritime power in the Indian Ocean could seriously challenge India’s geostrategic advantage in the near future and that India can no longer take for granted its strategic location at the centre of the Indian Ocean nor the strength of its historical ties with the various regional states. It further argues that the current Indian maritime strategy for the Indian Ocean region, to be the “net security provider” for the entire region, is unsustainable and thus needs to be reviewed and rebuilt leveraging the geographic advantage enjoyed by India over China in the Indian Ocean.     

Clash of counterterrorism-assistance-seeking states and their super power sponsors: Implications on the war against Boko Haram

ABSTRACT

Decade-long security cooperation and counterterrorism engagements in Nigeria have failed to bring down Boko Haram or at least weaken its terrorist structures and transnational spread. I argue that disconnects between counterterrorism-assistance seeking states and their superpower sponsors are implicated in the intractability of Boko Haram's insurgency in Nigeria. Why is the U.S. counterterrorism intervention to individual MNJTF countries (i.e. troop contribution, military funding and intelligence support) ‘lopsided’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘unevenly distributed;’ and how are these implicated in the fight against Boko Haram terrorism? This has impacted negatively on MNJTF countries – lack of cooperation, divisiveness and individualism in coordinating and forging offensives against Boko Haram. These concerns interface several blind spots in the picture of external influences on military’s approach to Boko Haram. I elicit primary data from top military officers. I conclude by predicting the implications and consequences of these counterterrorism complexities, and their potency to defeat or encourage Boko Haram terror.