Why are some states more war-prone?

Dinara Khalelova

Have you ever thought why some states are most prone to conflict? Some countries in the World are facing “infinite” number of conflict within the state and with other states. There is significant number of such countries. According to several sources, the worst bloodshed events are happening in Syria. BBC News (2017) states that Syrian Civil War is continuing from 2011, and took about 300 000 lives of people. Moreover, as a result of the war, approximately 11 million have lost their homes. Another country that is included to the list of the most war prone countries is Iraq. Iraq is also considered as the most dangerous war zones, because in the history of Iraq, there are a significantly big number of wars and conflicts took place. As in Syria, Iraq also undergoing a long war since 2014. UN reports that in 2016, according to calculations about 20 000 people were killed between 2014 and 2015.

Weeks (2014) in her book explains why some countries are prone to war. In order to find an answer, the author analyzes different nondemocratic regimes, including those of Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin; Argentine junta, and the communist regime of the North Vietnam. She believes that nondemocratic states have predisposition to war.  According to her findings, the type of authoritarian regime plays an important role in raising conflict.  She claims that in authoritarian state such as Iraq, where leaders of states directly and fully control the military, and more prone to start conflicts. However, authoritarian states that ruled by parties, like China, instead are less prone to conflict. It shows that not all authoritarian countries are war “lovers”.

To sum up, Weeks (2014) strongly believes that the regime type has a considerable impact on future prosperity of wars. She concluded that particularly countries with authoritarian regimes, like Iraq has the danger for having numerous conflicts.
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References:
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-most-war-torn-countries.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35806229
http://www.historyguy.com/wars_of_iraq.html#.WPomFvl97AU
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iraq-civil-war.htm


Weeks, Jessica L. P. 2014. Dictators at War and Peace. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press

No Nukes!

Dauren Koptleuov

Recent Korean missiles launch as well as nuclear weapon testing escalated huge concerns in the international community. The United States responded with sending naval missile cruisers to the sea territories near Korean peninsula (Mirror, 2017). At the same time, Russia is witnessed to reinforce the border security with the North Korea, as the global unrest upsurges (Mirror, 2017). According to the Mirror (2017), Russia is taking precautious measures, because the consequences of US target attack on Korean nuclear storages may reach the territory of Russian Federation. While Russia is trying to alleviate the situation by calling sides for responsibility, the escalation of conflict may lead to unexpected and extremely destructive outcomes.

While the United States are not directly threatening, North Korea responds that US naval deployment is a severe “act of aggression” that certainly makes American side responsible in any “catastrophic consequences” that may take place as a result of conflict escalation (CNN, 2017). It is safe to assume that if the United States eventually decides to commit a missile stroke, North Korea will answer with all their nuclear might. Considering the personalities of leaders from both sides, who actually have an access to nuclear launch, the likelihood of nuclear conflict can only increase. As North Korean nuclear tests are considered as violating the international law (Reuters, 2016), the United States, as every rational member-state of international community, expectedly wants to make it stop. However, despite the visible difficulty of situation, there are some means of resolving other than preventive strikes or any other manifestation of violence.

As a political leader, Kim Jong Un is one of the most discussed ones in the modern days. He is known for extremely repressing behavior, fully totalitarian outlook, non-compliance with international norms and regulations and the haircut, of course. The United States are not likely to make diplomatic deals with such dictator, but Blair (2013) in his work about coup attempts does not propose to make deals with tyrants. The author advices the US military leaders to influence military leaders from authoritarian regimes so that they would raise the army against the despotic leader (Blair, 2013, Chapter 6). Of course, the example of Philippines by Blair (2013) does not resemble the North Korean one by several reasons. First, the military leader of North Korea is Kim Jong Un himself. Secondly, there is no protests that can escalate the armed conflict between civilians and ruling power. However, citizens would most probably hate (even if they do not openly demonstrate it) such leader that promotes the politics of oppression, constant violation of human rights and free will. Moreover, there are probably a decent amount of such people among the political and military elites, considering the barbaric repression methods of Jong Un. Therefore, the United States should certainly seek to try the method described by Blair, either with the help of its intelligence or entrism. Finally, there is a little possibility of elite rejecting the coup proposition on the threshold of mutually assured destruction.
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Links and references:

Blair, Dennis C. 2013. Military Engagement: Influencing Armed Forces Worldwide to Support
Democratic Transitions. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-boosts-military-firepower-10259767

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/10/politics/us-aircraft-carrier-carl-vinson-north-korea-strike-capabilities/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-russia-idUSKBN0UK14Y20160106

Dismissal of Generals and Increase of the Armed Forces Personnel in Russia

Azamat Kabdrash

There were two things on the news that grabbed my attention last month. The first – Putin signed a dismissal of 16 generals. The second – the Armed Forces are going to be increased by 19000 personnel by July this year.

If to consider the first case, in fact, we can observe almost regular dismissal of high ranking military officials over the last two years. Overall number of fired generals this year constitutes 20 people. 16 of them were fired on February and 4 – on January. They served in the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Law Enforcement and in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) . Last year, Putin fired another 12 generals of the MIA.  The latter case was related to the reorganization of several departments of the MIA and their subordination to “Rossgvardia”, a body which was created on April 2016, by the Presidential decree. It now controls OMON, SOBR and other special military forces and is subordinated directly to the president. In addition, Putin dismissed entire fleet of naval commander last summer which counted about 50 people, including generals. The motifs for it were “incompetence and corruption” in the higher echelons of the Navy. In his interview to the Moscow Times, Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian navy expert told “The Russian leadership is clearly fine with corruption … but if you do that to an extent that combat readiness suffers, there will be consequences.”  So these cases with the dismissals of high ranking officers show the readiness of the Russian system of Armed Forces to changes. The question is “are these changes improve the condition of Armed Forces, and particularly the Civil-Military Relations?” I will try to answer this question in the end.

This year Putin increases the military by 19000 people, 13698 of them will be active military servicemen, and 5357 will be civilian workers.  Experts suggest that there are two possible reasons for this. First, the situation in Syria; the second, development of legal and organization structure of Armed Forces . It is obvious that it is a part of military reform on the development and modernization of Russian Armed Forces. And I will give justification from our readings that Putin’s action that I have mentioned above will improve military condition in the country.

There are two arguments proposed by Desch which explains Russian case. When external threat is high and internal is low, Civil-Military Relations become healthier. As it was suggested in the news article, the situation in Syria, and increased risk of terrorist attack (my addition) might, in fact, lead to strengthening the organization aspects within the military. As almost one third of recruited military personnel is going to be civilian workers, I think that, it is another step toward increasing the objective control of the military. One of Shvetsova’s argument, mentioned by Desch, was that corruption within the military is one of the sources of decline in the professionalization.  The example of the dismissal of the personnel in the Navy is a practical justification that Putin would not tolerate such kind of corruption if it undermines the performance of the military.


Having revised the reading materials and the news I think that it would be just to conclude that Russia is in his way to improve both its conditions in the Armed Forces and the Civil-Military Relations in the country in general.

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  Novayagazeta.ru, “Путин снял с должностей 16 генералов МВД, СК и МЧС”, 2017, https://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/2017/02/02/128661-putin-snyal-s-dolzhnostey-16-generalov-mvd-sk-i-mchs
  Currenttime.tv, “Путин уволил 12 генералов полиции”, 2016, http://www.currenttime.tv/a/28037927.html
  Express.co.uk, “Putin fires ENTIRE fleet of naval commanders who refused to engage with West's battleships”, 2016, http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/688775/Vladimir-Putin-purges-entire-Baltic-fleet-officer-class-coverup-claims-submarine-collision,
  Rbth.com, “Why is Putin expanding Russia’s armed forces to 1.9 million?”, 2017,
http://rbth.com/defence/2017/03/30/why-is-putin-expanding-russias-armed-forces-to-19-million_730717
  ibid.

US Navy Criminalizes Nude photo Sharing

Zhandos Bolatbek

The distribution of photographs containing nudity without the subject’s permission will now be considered as a criminal offense in the US Navy and Marine Corps.

The new regulation has been enacted after a scandal erupted when a closed Facebook group, “Marines United”, with about 30,000 members, featured on its page photos with female servicewomen featured nude. About 27 people are thought to have been directly engaged in distribution of these photographic materials featuring nudity. Another group of about 29 Marines face administrative punishment. The Marine Corps, prompted by the scandal, now considers distribution of nude photographs as “cyber-bullying and discriminatory” and the offenders are subject to prosecution under Article 92 of Uniform Code of Military Justice with the possibility of up to 2 years of confinement.

There has been considerable outcry, with Marine Corps spokeswoman Capt. Ryan Alvis stating: “The Marine Corps is deeply concerned about allegations regarding the derogatory online comments and sharing of salacious photographs in a closed website… This behavior destroys morale, erodes trust, and degrades the individual.” Republican House Representative Adam Smith has called the instance as “degrading, dangerous, and completely unacceptable”. One concern has been that the language prohibiting the circulation of nude photos is legally sufficient since it is hard to prove that images were shared without consent or if the image was taken with consent but not was not intended for the sharing widely.

The distribution of nude photos by military officers evokes civilian problem of “revenge porn” whereby a person circulates nude photographs of his or her ex-partner and distributes them without the person’s consent.

Engaging in these kind of immoral activities by the army personnel would go counter to the Huntington’s idea of professional army. Such disregard and disrespect for the human dignity of fellow servicemen contributes to the erosion of discipline. The move by the Navy to criminalize the act of distributing nude photos without consent will contribute to the oversight of army professionalization.

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Reference:

1. Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State the Theory and Politics of Civil- Military Relations.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/03/05/lawmaker-calls-justice-marines-nude-photo-sharing-scandal.html

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/04/19/navy-acts-criminalize-nude-photo-sharing-sailors-marines.html

Is There A New Sharif in Town?

Dauren Koptleuov

In the beginning of 2017, ex-General of Pakistan, Raheel Sharif, was appointed as a first Commander-in-Chief (The Guardian, 2017), moving to Saudi Arabia in order to head the army of the Islamic Military Alliance (IMA) (Dawn, 2017). According to the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in the United States (2015), the purpose of this organization is to unite 39 Arabic, African and Middle East countries to fight terrorism and to counter the formation of such organizations as ISIS, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and others. Whereas the fact of creation of such anti-terroristic military organization that is already known as “Arabic NATO” is accepted with general optimism, Pakistani civil-military situation can possibly make government regret of “losing” such cadre as Sharif.

Pakistan is known as a state with military, which has a significant influence over the political matters of the country. According to Huffington Post (2016), Sharif was the first military leader who decided to cooperate with Pakistani government. Moreover, Sharif is popular because of successful elimination of terrorist threat in the region as well as criminal control of the Karachi, the biggest city of Pakistan (Huffington Post, 2016). That already demonstrates the weakness of government, as police is unable to control criminal activity even in the largest cities due to its either corruptness or incompetence. However, with the Sharif involvement in IMA activities and leaving the post of the General, eliminated threats may become relevant once again.

Historically, Pakistani government had literally neither objective nor subjective control over the military. The reason why the military has such amount of influence is most probably due to the continuous conflict with the India, where Pakistani military was the most important sphere in the state (Huffington Post, 2016). With the resignation of Sharif, already weakened civil-military situation in Pakistan will deteriorate unless there is another military leader that is willing to cooperate with the government. What is more possible to happen, is that dissatisfied military would overthrow weak civilian government and proclaim military rule. In case of Pakistan becoming a “junta”, as Weeks (2014) would put it, it is more likely to favor armed conflict rather than peaceful diplomatic resolution (Weeks, 2014), which may bring every more harm to the state and its citizens, considering unstable situation in the region.


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Links and references:

Weeks, Jessica L. P. 2014. Dictators at War and Peace. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press

http://embassies.mofa.gov.sa/sites/usa/EN/PublicAffairs/Statements/Pages/Joint-Statement-on-the-Formation-of-the-Islamic-Military-Alliance.aspx

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/08/former-pakistan-army-chief-raheel-sharif-lead-muslim-nato

https://www.dawn.com/news/1328349

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raza-habib-raja/why-is-military-so-powerful_b_13269780.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raza-habib-raja/pakistans-most-popular-ge_b_10954454.html

“Vinson” Carrier’s Missing: Trump-Pentagon’s miscommunication?

Aidana Sapuan

In response to growing tensions in the Korean Peninsula and increasing number of nuclear tests by the North Korea, President Trump made a drastic order to head “an armada” - the US Aircraft carrier group named “Vinson” from Singapore in the northern direction towards the abovementioned region. The vast majority of public has interpreted this move as an act of deterring North Korea and showing-off the US military capabilities, as Trump puts it: “Very powerful, we have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you” in an interview with Fox News Business .

The most shocking revelation came out when Trump’s decision was an act of bluffing, since official photos on the US Navy website indicated that the carrier was thousands of kilometers away in the southern direction from the Korean Peninsula2. US military officials made an announcement that “Vinson” will first complete the joint military exercise with the Australian military, thereby disproving the implementation of Trump’s official order to head the carriers in an opposite direction. A little later, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told that the joint exercises had been cancelled and from now on the carriers will be heading back to the North Korea.

All of these confusions in reports both by President Trump and  military officials (such as DoD, Pentagon, Mattis) raises thoughts about many important aspects of today’s civil military relations in the USA. The conventional wisdom of US civil military relations has at least two fundamental premises framed by the constitution: 1) the president is the commander in chief of the US Army, and by ordering special operations he is held accountable for them; 2) the president has to be aware of the state and locations of different items of the country’s military assets, and to be able to employ them in the times of need. In the context of these responsibilities put before the newly elected US President, wrongly announcing the deployment of the 97.000-ton carrier and its 60-plus aircraft against the country with unpredictable changes in its foreign policy like North Korea, to put it mildly, decreases the level of credibility and trust attributed to Trump by the public.

The other issue is grounded in the ambiguity around questions of “who?” and “why?” ordered “Vinson” to steam towards North Korea. Due to this confusion between different US military structures in their reports about Vinson’s whereabouts, it is very difficult to understand, which of these actors were involved in the command formulation process. From the point of civil-military relations, this might have a huge degrading effect for the US current state of CMR since it would mean that military is losing some of its advisory responsibilities before the state, which were strongly advocated by Huntington’s (1957) theory of objective control.

One of the possibilities is that the decision about “Vinson’s” deployment was made by Trump’s administration, which does not cause problems in legal terms, since such kind of operational decision-making under threat to US national security is the presidential prerogative. Nevertheless, following inconsistencies in reports do show the lack of inter-organizational coordination between the civilian leadership and Pentagon highlights the lack of expertise of the executive and makes the functioning of Trump as a chief commander of the US Army less effective.

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Reference list:
Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State the Theory and Politics of Civil- Military Relations. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Web Sources:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/19/asia/uss-carl-vinson-north-korea-timeline/
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-in-a-nuclear-standoff-with-north-korea-trump-s/article_48f8c4aa-81f2-5494-916e-c27ef6c4a5a1.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/18/us-military-shoot-down-north-korea-missile-tests

What should we know from Chinese Military Reforms

Bektas Baktybayev

China has the third strongest military and the largest military in terms of military manpower in the world. That is why it would be interesting to analyze the current reforms aimed to structurally reorganize Chinese military and their effects to civil-military relations. Starting in late 2015, China began to implement plans for structural military reorganization because of needs to increase Chinese military power. Those plans had been announced at the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2013, with the goal of fully implementing the reforms in military sector. One of these reforms were related to Civil-military relations. The topic of these reforms was in the following way: Enhance management of civilian-military integration.
Since the early 2000s, Chinese reformers have sought to achieve synergies by integrating the defense and commercial industrial bases more tightly. This would benefit the PLA, which would have greater access to civilian S&T advances, as well as the civilian economy, which would be able to incorporate dual-use technology initially developed for military purposes. However, it was difficult to achieve synergy due to the poor coordination between the military and civilian research communities.
The topic of the poorly developed civil-military integration (CMI) had became central theme of the Xi Jinping–era reforms which resulted in aforementioned structural military reorganization. The Third Plenum decision called for promoting joint military and civilian development, perfecting defense innovation systems, and promoting entrance of private civilian firms into the defense sector. In March 2016, Xi again called for “coordinated, balanced, and compatible” development of civilian and military resources, noting that this had previously been hindered by a lack of high-level coordination.

Professional Military Education (PME) is another important topic related to civil-military relations in Chinese military reforms. There was a need to introduce changes to PME in China due to the weaknesses in officer education and training. According to the Bruneau and Tollefson (2008) the ideal purpose of PME is to empower the military to implement policy and at the same time discourage military leaders from seeking to make policy. In democracies such as USA education is particularly vital as a conduit of a professional military ethos. The example of USA is important because Chinese military reforms in PLA (People’s Liberation Army) is moving toward a command structure more closely resembling the U.S. military.

The US military is known as a fully professional army. China is also going to professionalize its army. According to President Xi the plan will involve China transforming its Soviet-era military structures into a more professional US-style force, with integrated commands and a centralized headquarters, which can be seen from cutting of 300,000 personnel from its 2.3m-strong military force from the PLA. It means that China wants to establish objective civilian control. Huntington argues that objective civilian control is obtained through maximum professionalization of the officer corps.


To conclude, China is going to professionalize its military and to improve civil-military relations. China is following the US example of PME and professional army in order to achieve such aim.

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References:

Bruneau, Thomas C., and Scott D. Tollefson. 2008. Who Guards the Guardians and How: Democratic Civil-Military Relations. University of Texas Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State the Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Links:

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-worlds-20-strongest-militaries-ranked-2016-4/#no-3-china-18

https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-military-organization-and-reform

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/china/ChinaPerspectives-10.pdf?ver=2017-03-21-152018-430

http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/president-xis-military-reforms-in-china-increase-professionalism-in-the-forces-or-his-own-power/