Explaining Contemporary Asian Military Modernization

The Myth of Asia's Arms Race

Sheryn Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book proposes a novel theoretical framework of "interactive arming" in order to explain armament dynamics in contemporary Asia.

Frequently, the modernisation of contemporary naval forces in Asia is described as an "arms race, " with the underlying assumption being that weapons acquisitions and increases in defence expenditure are competitive and bilateral and due to conflicting purposes or mutual fears. This book argues that the concept of an arms race is an unsuitable one for explaining contemporary military modernisation in 21st-century Asia. Instead, it proposes a novel and innovative concept of "interactive arming" and argues that what drives conflict is political rivalry, not weapons acquisitions. Instead of perceivingarming as abnormal behaviour, the book views arming as a natural strategic behaviour of states and military modernisation as a basic requirement for a state's ability to survive.

This book will be of much interest to students of Asian security, strategic studies and international relations in general.

1 Introduction

How do Asian arming dynamics interact with one another and why? Ever since the Asian economic “miracle” of the 1980s, many scholars and journalist have been quick to label arms acquisitions and the capability development of Asia’s armed forces as an “arms race or arms racing.” Much of this commentary reflected surprise at the rapid increase in Asian defence expenditure, anxiety about China’s growing capabilities and bewilderment about some of the major arms acquisitions.¹ Despite a decline in the size of the global arms trade, since 1988 Asian countries have held up their share of the market. By the 1990s, Michael Klare had declared the “next great arms race” was underway in Asia, and Amitav Acharya advised that South-East Asia was already undergoing an “arms race.”² More recently, British naval strategist Geoffrey Till maintained that there was an interactive element in the naval modernisation of China, India, Japan, and the US and that this dynamic could potentially evolve into an “arms race.”³ Moreover, international think tanks such as the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) have repeatedly warned of an “arms race” when analysing the extensive military modernisation of capabilities in the region.

The media further fuelled the perception of a dangerous and uncontrolled regional arms race. For example, the Wall Street Journal declared that “the rapid rise in Chinese military spending and greater assertiveness in its territorial claims is fuelling an arms race in the Asia-Pacific region even though many of the countries involved have been hit by an economic slowdown.” The Economist, on the other hand, explained that the region was not witnessing a

classical arms race between two great powers, of the sort Britain and Germany engaged in before the First World War, or a Cold War contest like that between America and the Soviet Union. But certainly, Asian countries are competing to modernize their military forces.⁴

By the end of the 2010s, emerging technologies in the region were also seen by some in the context of arms races. Foreign Policy stated that China, Russia, and the US were engaged in a “race for advanced artificial intelligence” in order to gain strategic advantage in deep-learning processes and complex decision-making.⁵ And The Economist posited that there was an emerging “hypersonic arms race” which could potentially change the character of war.⁶

However, to label any arming behaviour and policy as an “arms race”—broadly understood as a progressive and competitive increase in armaments by two or more states resulting from conflicting purposes or mutual fears⁷—is flawed. The arms race moniker assumes that states arm themselves simply to counter their opponent’s armaments and that military modernisation is therefore dangerous for regional stability. Arming is perceived as an abnormal behaviour which inevitably leads to competition outside the control of decision-makers. Rather, as this book demonstrates, the concept of “arms race or arms racing”—although widely employed and the subject of a voluminous literature—is an unsuitable theory for explaining strategic behaviour in contemporary Asia. Arms racing and the related “action–reaction” dynamic and “spiral model” are counterproductive for understanding why states arm and how they structure their armed forces. These concepts are rooted in a Western strategic debate, which sought to understand the dynamics between states and coalitions leading up to the First and Second World War, as well as the bipolar Cold War US–Soviet relationship. Such cases utilised basic indices of defence expenditures and weapons platform counts to model binary relations between states in which increases were alleged evidence of an arms race.

However, it is within a country’s sovereign right to secure its survival through armaments, and this necessitates a process of modernising its armed forces. All military modernisation constitutes arming. Modernisation involves arms acquisitions and technical upgrades (enhancement or modification) to arms. Here acquisition is interchangeable with the term procurement and refers to “more than just the purchase of an item or service; the acquisition process encompasses design, engineering, construction, testing, deployment, sustainment, and disposal of weapons or related items purchased from a contractor.”⁸ A country commits to harnessing the capability gains that flow from regularly updating the systems on its existing platforms because a modern and modernising defence force can be more readily expanded than one operating dated equipment and systems. This involves procurement, upgrades and enhancement. Although military expenditure and indices of platforms can provide broad trends, analysis needs to be supplemented with understanding how a state’s military modernisation programmes respond to internal decision-making about defence requirements and perceptions of a changing geostrategic environment.

Therefore, this book argues for a novel and innovative process of interactive arming. Instead of assuming that arming is abnormal behaviour, it is based on the premise that arming is a natural behaviour of states and, by extension, that military modernisation is a basic requirement for a state’s ability to survive. Responding to one or more opponents’ armaments implies that decision-makers have deemed an armaments policy necessary to secure state survival in response to perceived threats. As states react to their broader strategic environment rather than a single adversary, interactive arming is not a binary relationship but involves multiple actors. Both qualitative and quantitative changes in capability must occur—these can also be decreases in the level of armaments as individual platforms became more sophisticated, packed with equipment, and had longer shelf-lives.

Interactive arming dynamics also exhibits competitive security behaviour without direct involvement of the armed forces. It can take the form of enhanced strategic partnerships, intelligence sharing, and defence technology transfers. This is often a response to a perceived asymmetry in a strategic relationship and an understanding that developing armed forces “equal” to a potential opponent is futile. All such policies are complementary to arming policies. An interactive arming process ranges from basic military modernisation that all armed forces undergo to maintain basic self-defence requirements in response to their strategic environments to more belligerent postures in which there is a clear intent to use force or the threat of the use of force to achieve political ends. And only when political rivalry is present will there be the wherewithal by leaders to use force to achieve a nation state’s objectives.

This study focuses on naval and associated capabilities. In contemporary Asia, the significance of sea lanes and maritime borders has led to the rapid modernisation of regional navies over other services. The region is largely a maritime theatre, and most flashpoints involve maritime territory, features, and resources.⁹ Moreover, navies have been the predominant way to project military power well beyond states’ borders, particularly in maritime Asia.¹⁰ This includes principal surface combatants and submarines and the associated capabilities that support naval platforms, for instance developments in cruise or ballistic missiles, as well as fighter jets.

So What?

This monograph contributes to a sizeable literature examining Asian defence spending, arms acquisitions, and national security policy. Understanding why there has been a sustained investment and development of military capabilities in 21st-century Asia adds value to the existing scholarly literature on understanding the regional-specific political, economic and security motivations to arms in Asia and if it is fuelling competition. David Kang, for instance, has argued that there is no evidence of “anything approaching an arms race in East Asia,” and that rather than “sending signals that carry some risk of rejection and war,” regional countries are signalling that they do not want to fight.¹¹ Such regional-specific literature does not assume the existence of an arms race but rather focuses on the critical questions of when and why armament dynamics become interactive and what causes states to use and threaten the use of force to resolve political conflict.

Doing so is critical since the search for a universal arms race theory to understand the phenomenon of when armament dynamics become competitive has robbed the concept of its analytical and practical utility.¹² The term arms race no longer points to a form of strategic behaviour with a set of characteristics on which there is broad agreement. The Eurocentric literature on conventional arms races has been based on at least one of these three foundational cases: the construction of Dreadnought battleships in the early 20th century between Britain and Imperial Germany; the development of Japanese, British and American naval forces during the 1920s and 1930s; and the build-up of capabilities in the mid- to late 1980s in Asia, which some analysts called the “new Asian arms race.”¹³ Similarly, military budgets and policy have been explained with the same logic of interest groups and institutions: where rationalists view Imperial Germany’s decision to build a powerful navy in the run-up to the First World War as part of a systemic rivalry with Britain, others regard it as a response to domestic lobby groups seeking to link a steel industry facing weak demand to military groups wanting bigger budgets.¹⁴ Such a select number of cases, however, raises the question of whether the arms-race theories on...