Naval and Arms Race

6 Key excerpts on "Naval and Arms Race"

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  Explaining Contemporary Asian Military Modernization

  The Myth of Asia's Arms Race

  • Sheryn Lee(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  Rooted in European and American scholarship, the arms race concept attempted to understand arming dynamics between states and coalitions leading up to the First and Second World War and the Cold War bipolar US–Soviet relationship. The notion of arms racing served two primary functions: first, as an analytical concept to explain and identify abnormal strategic behaviour between states and, second, as a political advocacy tool to influence political debate and armaments decisions. The conventional arms build-up by France and the British Commonwealth between 1840 and 1866 is considered the first competition in armaments in the modern era. Then, France and Great Britain continued to improve their arsenals of revolvers, rifles, machine guns, guns and howitzers, engaging in a qualitative competition to increase the speed of fire, the accuracy of aim, range, weight and explosive force of the projectiles. From 1884 onwards, not only did the number of warships increase, but crucial qualitative characteristics—size and speed, the calibre and range of guns and protective belts of armour—also evolved rapidly. The first recorded use of the term arms race dates to 20 March 1894 in the British House of Commons, when Liberal member of parliament William Randal Cremer decried large increases in the navy’s budget as a “mad race of naval expenditures.”3 Victorian liberals and their socialist counterparts in Western Europe “saw excessive arms expenditure as a tragic diversion of wealth away from social goods and productive investments and as symptomatic of the twin evils of militarism and authoritarianism and the excesses of capitalism and imperialism.”4

  By the early 20th century, the term arms race became a popular media and scholarly description of competitive naval arming dynamics between Britain and Wilhelmine Germany. Particularly the frenzied construction of the Dreadnoughts, and later super-Dreadnoughts, which continued until the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, fed this narrative. Although the British were the first to commence building of Dreadnought battleships, it was German admiral Alfred von Tirpitz’s perceived intentions that resulted in strategic competition between Germany and the British Empire.5 The German construction of Dreadnoughts rendered obsolescent the 75 pre-Dreadnought British battleships and armoured cruisers, which led to England constructing Dreadnoughts to restore its primacy at sea. In 1908, Kaiser Wilhelm wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Tweedmouth: “Admiral Fisher and the Press had at once announced that [the Dreadnought] was capable of sinking the whole German Navy. These statements had forced the German government to begin building ships of a similar type, to satisfy public opinion.”6 Tirpitz and the Kaiser defended the First and Second German Navy Laws that doubled the fleet as not building against Britain but as necessary to guard the German Empire’s coasts and colonies. The British Empire responded to the challenge by launching a naval build-up to restore a favourable balance.7 The later introduction of the submarine and its major impact on the exercise of naval power meant both the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) and the Triple Entente (the United Kingdom, France and Russia) swiftly expanded their submarine fleets.8

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  Strategy in Asia

  The Past, Present, and Future of Regional Security

  • Thomas G. Mahnken, Dan Blumenthal(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Stanford Security Studies

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, during that period a sizable body of literature on arms races emerged, driven by interest in competition between the United States and Soviet Union. Samuel Huntington describes an arms race as “a progressive, competitive peacetime increase in armaments by two states or coalitions of states resulting from conflicting purposes or mutual fears.” 3 Subsequently, Colin Gray came to define an arms race as “two or more parties perceiving themselves to be in an adversary relationship, who are increasing or improving their armaments at a rapid rate and restructuring their respective military postures with a general attention to the past, current, and anticipated military and political behavior of the other parties.” 4 Accordingly, an arms race has four basic elements. First, it must involve at least two parties. Second, each party must develop its force structure with reference to the competition. Third, each must compete with the other in the quantity or quality of their respective militaries. Finally, interactions must lead to a rapid increase in the quantity or quality of weapons. Arms competitions can also vary considerably in both scope and pace. With this fact in mind, Barry Buzan coined the term arms dynamic to refer to pressures that make nations buy military capabilities and enhance their quantity and quality over time. 5 External Sources of Competition One group of scholars emphasizes external sources of arms competition. The most common and simplistic formulation is the action-reaction model, which stipulates “that states strengthen their armaments because of the threats the states perceive from other states. The theory implicit in the model explains the arms dynamic as driven primarily by factors external to the state.” 6 Basically, it holds that the search for security, together with uncertainty and worst-case estimates of enemy intentions and capabilities, will yield efforts to amass ever-greater stockpiles of weaponry

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  The Politics of the First World War

  A Course in Game Theory and International Security

  • Scott Wolford(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  After solving the puzzle of the Anglo-German naval race, we close the chapter by reviewing what political science can teach us about arms races and arms control in international relations writ large. Key Term for Chapter 3 • Arms Race 3.1 BRITAIN, GERMANY, AND DREADNOUGHTS For roughly six years, from 1906 until 1912, the British and German empires competed in the production of ever greater numbers of the newest, largest, and deadliest battleships in the world. Dreadnoughts, named for the eponymous first ship in the class launched by Britain’s Royal Navy in 1905, revolutionized naval warfare, outclassing virtually all other battle-ships then in service around the world. Boasting a larger complement of bigger, longer-ranged guns and propelled by powerful, efficient steam tur-bine engines, dreadnoughts were the new currency of global naval power. In a world dominated by seafaring European colonial empires, advances in naval power were as consequential as the development of long-range 3.1 Britain, Germany, and Dreadnoughts 53 bombers, precision-guided munitions, or stealth aircraft in the decades that followed. 2 Countries that could field a fleet of such ships could protect lines of trade and communication – a largely physical endeavor in a predigital age – and project military power around the world, from the shores of their colonies to the ports of their enemies. Those competitors that fell behind could expect to find themselves relegated to the second rank (or worse) of naval powers, hopelessly behind a British Empire already dominant in both naval and financial might. It’s not surprising that the United Kingdom should be at the cutting edge of shipbuilding in the early twentieth century. Its navy had dominated the world’s seas for over two hundred years, securing commerce and com-munication between far-flung elements of an empire over which the sun famously never set, supported by a sprawling global network of coaling stations.

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  Rational Theory of International Politics

  The Logic of Competition and Cooperation

  • Charles L. Glaser(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  176–177. Applying the Theory to Arms Races • 257 Roosevelt’s advisers increasingly favored. Given the continuing influence of isolationists in Congress and the restraining impact of the recession, Roosevelt faced significant barriers to launching a major naval buildup. Because the United States waited until 1940 to launch a buildup that came closer to its potential, the years leading up to World War II saw a growing mismatch develop between U.S naval capabilities and its po- litical commitments. 106 Whereas restraint and cooperation were well matched to the international conditions the United States faced in the early 1920s, negative shifts in U.S. assessments of Japan’s motives called for a more competitive policy by the mid-1930s, but the United States failed to fully meet this challenge. 107 U.S. Cold War Nuclear Buildups The deployment of large, sophisticated nuclear arsenals by the United States and the Soviet Union was a defining feature of the Cold War. Dur- ing this period the United States faced a number of major decisions and pursued a mix of competitive and cooperative policies, with the mix heavily weighted toward competition. 108 This section briefly assesses the U.S. buildup of a robust assured destruction capability and two of the key decisions that followed—the deployment of multiple independently tar- geted reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and the banning of large-scale antiballis- tic missile (ABM) systems. building to a robust assured destruction capability By the early 1960s, the United States was in the process of deploying a survivable nuclear force that, although not initially designed as a strategi- cally coherent package, promised to provide a diversified, redundant as- sured destruction capability. 109 Recognition of the limited value of still 106 The United States did recognize that it could win a long war and developed plans for this possibility. Pelz, Race to Pearl Harbor, p. 76, 199. Nevertheless, basic requirements for the core U.S.

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  The Sea Power of the State

  • S.G. Gorshkov(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  The role and place of different branches of the armed forces in armed conflict were revised, new ways of delivering nuclear weapons to strike targets and means of protection from their damaging factors were sought. As a realistic appraisal of the potential of these weapons took shape, the more distinct became the general outlines of the armed forces capable of waging combat operations in all possible conditions. This process marked the start of a military-technical revolution which in scope and depth transcended all the reforms and transformations which had previously occurred in the armies and fleets of the world. It made it necessary to revise not only tactics, which not infrequently brought about radical transfor-mations of the armed forces, due to the appearance of the new weapons, but also many technical means of waging war. The influence of the technical transformation process on all aspects of military matters also increased in connection with the use of atomic-powered engines in naval shipbuilding and outstanding discoveries in the field of radio-electronics and rocket construction. A radical transformation of the armed forces, of the structure of the weapons system, and of the command and organization of the rear became necessary. The need to take account of this circumstance considerably altered the concept of balance of the armed forces. Such forces had to become capable of executing their military tasks in the varied conditions which might arise in time of war. 1 P. Barjot, The Fleet in the Atomic Century (Russian translation), Inost. lit., Moscow, 1956. 158 The Sea Power of the State The Soviet Union could not be an exception in what had become a universal search, and, in the resolution of many questions, headed those who soberly estimated the enormous destructive potential of atomic weapons and their influence on the character of war, and at once began to fight for the banning of the use of means of mass strike.

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  The Dangers of Nuclear War

  A Pugwash Symposium

  • Franklyn Griffiths, John C. Polanyi(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  One cannot fail to see, however, that these trends of the arms race will destabilize the strategic situation and increase the risk of a dramatic, fatal mistake under conditions of acute international crisis. Moreover, another menace may be discerned: the arms race could take a course (and to a certain extent is beginning to do so) which would make new agreements on limiting and reducing armaments far more difficult, if not altogether impossible, due to the insurmountable obstacles entailed in verification of some new weapons. This is, for instance, one of the negative conse-quences of the development of the strategic cruise missile or the MX mobile missile. It must be stressed that the continuing arms race is highly unlikely to produce any immediate, let alone long-term, advantages for either side. But it does create grave threats for both parties as well as for world peace and security. This is so because the arms race increases the danger of nuclear war even though no government may want such a war or plans deliberately to unleash one. In this sense, the decades ahead may differ sharply from the sixties and seventies. These developments are already under way. We must act and act quickly to avoid the dangers. One has to agree with ambassador George Kennan who recently warned that time is running out for all of us. I believe that there is increasing need to understand that the Soviet Union and the United States, East and West, face in their relations and their negotiations -including arms control negotiations - an impersonal adversary that overrides any specific threat one side may see in the other. This adversary is the looming danger of nuclear war, whatever may be its concrete scenario. With all our differences and contradictions we have an overwhelming mutual interest in seeking to avert the threat of war. This interest compels us to be persistent in our efforts to promote détente and to secure arms control and disarmament.

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