[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Growing Military-Industrial Complex in Asia

[Bill Totten]

by John Feffer and Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch (February 13 2008)


Often what is hidden in our world is so simply because no cares or
thinks to look. Yes, a fair amount of attention has recently been given
to the staggering new Pentagon budget request, the largest since World
War Two, that the Bush administration has just submitted to Congress for
fiscal year 2009. It comes in at $515.4 billion - a 7.5 percent hike for
an already bloated Pentagon - and that doesn't include all sorts of
Defense Department funds that will be stowed away elsewhere (even if in
plain sight), nor does it include the couple of hundred billion dollars
or more in funds to be appropriated largely via "supplemental" requests
for the ongoing military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the
official budget, however, includes staggering sums for procuring major
new weapons systems and for R&D leading to ever more such big-ticket
items in the future. According to Steve Kosiak, vice president of budget
studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, "The
fiscal year 2009 budget may be about as good as it gets for defense
contractors". When all is said and done, this will probably be a
trillion dollar "defense" budget.

As it happens, military budgets like this have a multiplier effect
globally. After all, there's no such thing as a one-nation arms race.
It's just that no one here thinking about what we're about to feed the
Pentagon pays much attention to such things. Fortunately, John Feffer,
an expert on military policy and Asia, has been doing just that. He is
the co-director of a particularly interesting Web site, Foreign Policy
in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, with which
TomDispatch hopes to collaborate on projects in the future.  In the
following piece, he brings genuine arms-race news to all of us. Yes,
Virginia, there is indeed an arms race underway; it's taking off in
Northeast Asia; and it's dangerous. -- Tom


Asia's Hidden Arms Race

Six countries talk peace while preparing for war

by John Feffer

Read all about it! Diplomats remain upbeat about solving the nuclear
standoff with North Korea; optimists envision a peace treaty to replace
the armistice that halted, but failed to formally end, the Korean War 55
years ago. Some leaders and scholars are even urging the transformation
of the Six Party Talks over the Korean nuclear issue, involving the
United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the two Koreas, into a
permanent peace structure in Northeast Asia.

The countries in the region all seem determined to make nice right now.
Yasuo Fukuda, the new Japanese prime minister, is considerably more
pacific than his predecessor, the ultra-nationalist Shinzo Abe. The new
South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, despite his conservative
credentials, is committed to continuing the previous president's
engagement policy with North Korea and plans to reach out to Japan via
his first post-inaugural state visit. The party that won the recent
Taiwanese parliamentary elections, the Kuomintang, wants to rebuild
bridges to the Mainland and, when it comes to the Communist Party there,
mend fences the ruling Democratic Progressive Party tried to pull down.
Beijing, for its part, is being super-conciliatory toward practically
everyone in this Olympic year.

Despite all this peace-talk, something else, quite momentous and hardly
noticed, is underway in the region. The real money in Northeast Asia is
going elsewhere. While in the news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an
already massive regional arms race is threatening to shift into
overdrive. Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries
involved in the Six Party Talks have increased their military spending
by fifty percent or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if
sizable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every
country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of
money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.

The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the
region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex.
Northeast Asia is where four of the world's largest militaries - those
of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan - confront each other.
Together, the countries participating in the Six Party Talks account for
approximately 65 percent of world military expenditures, with the United
States responsible for roughly half the global total.

Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today:
Wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan, and large swathes of Africa, but the heart
of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any
attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster
must start with the militaries that face one another there.

The Japanese Reversal

The Northeast Asian arms buildup - a three-tiered scramble to dominate
the seas, beef up air forces, and control the next frontier of space -
runs counter to conventional wisdom. After all, isn't Japan still
operating under a "peace constitution"? Hasn't South Korea committed to
the peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula? Didn't China
recently wake up to the virtues of soft power? And how could North Korea
and Russia, both of which suffered disastrous economic reversals in the
1990s, have had the wherewithal to compete in an arms race? As it turns
out, these obstacles have proved little more than speed bumps on the
road to regional hyper-militarism.

Perhaps the most paradoxical participant in this new arms race is Japan.
Its famous peace constitution has traditionally been one of the few
brakes on arms spending in the region. The country has long limited its
military expenditures to an informal ceiling of one percent of its
overall budget. As that budget grew, however, so did military spending.
Japan's army is now larger than Britain's, and the country spends more
on its military than all but four other nations. (China surpassed Japan
in military spending for the first time in 2006.) Nonetheless, for
decades, the provisions of its peace constitution at least put limits on
the offensive capabilities of the Japanese military, which is still
referred to as its Self-Defense Forces.

These days, however, even the definition of "offensive" is changing. In
1999, the country's Self-Defense Forces first used offensive force when
its naval vessels fired on suspected North Korean spy ships. Less than a
decade later, Japan provides support far from its "defensive" zone for
US wars, including providing fuel to coalition forces in Afghanistan and
transport in Iraq.

Japan was once incapable of bombing other countries largely because its
air force didn't have an in-air refueling capability. Thanks to Boeing,
however, the first KC-767 tanker aircraft will arrive in Japan later
this year, providing government officials, who occasionally assert the
country's right to launch preemptive strikes, with the means to do so.
This is not happy news for Japan's neighbors, who retain vivid memories
of the 1930s and 1940s, when its military went on an imperial rampage
throughout the region.

Tokyo already has among the best air forces and naval fighting forces in
the world, trailing only the United States. But leading Japanese
officials have displayed an even larger appetite. Some Japanese
politicians are lobbying to amend the peace constitution or even scrap
it entirely, while sending military spending skyrocketing. To promote
these ideas, they use the thin rationale that Japan should be
participating regularly in "international peacekeeping missions".

The Japanese Defense Agency - their Pentagon - which was upgraded to
ministry level last year, wants more goodies like an aircraft carrier,
nuclear-powered submarines, and long-range missiles. A light aircraft
carrier, which the government has coyly labeled a "destroyer", will be
ready in 2009. The subs and missiles, however, will have to wait. So,
too, will Tokyo's attempt to take a quantum leap forward in air-fighting
capabilities by importing advanced US F-22 stealth planes. Concerned
about releasing latest-generation technology to the outside world,
Congress scotched this deal at the last moment in August 2007.

Washington has been a good deal more accommodating when it comes to
missile defense. Japan has been a far more enthusiastic supporter of
missile defense than any of America's European allies. In fact, the
United States and Japan are spending billions of dollars to set up an
early-warning-and-response prototype of such an advanced missile system.
Part of this missile shield is land-based. Last month, Japan installed
its third Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) surface-to-air
interceptor and plans on nine more by 2011. The more ambitious part of
the program, however, is based at sea. In December, Japan conducted its
first sea-based interceptor test.

With Japan and the United States in the lead, a space race is also on in
Northeast Asia. Last year, China tested its own anti-ballistic missile
system by shooting down one of its old weather satellites. While at
present this is far from an actual missile-defense system, China
effectively served notice that it is up to the technological challenge
of hitting a bullet with a bullet in space. Meanwhile, thanks to US
pressure Russia too is upgrading its missile defense systems, while
pouring money into the development of new missiles that can bypass any
putative shield the US and its allies can develop.

Give Me Peace, but Not Just Yet

The two most recent South Korean presidents, Nobel Peace Prize winner
Kim Dae-Jung and the left-leaning Roh Moo-Hyun, have been well-known for
their efforts to foster reconciliation with North Korea. Less well-known
have been their programs to beef up South Korea's military. The dark
side of their engagement policy has been its unstated quid pro quo of
satisfying the security concerns of South Korean hawks by giving their
military everything it wants - and then some. Between 1999 and 2006,
South Korean military spending jumped more than seventy percent. In
2007, at the launching ceremony for a new Aegis-equipped destroyer,
which brought South Korea into an elite club of just five countries with
such technology, President Roh Moo-Hyun declared, "At the present time,
Northeast Asia is still in an arms race, and we cannot just sit back and
watch". By 2020, the South Korean navy wants to build three more Aegis
destroyers at a cost of one billion dollars each.

South Korean hawks are not only responding to concerns about North
Korea, the traditional threat around which the South has organized its
military. They are concerned about a declining military commitment from
the United States, which has reduced the levels of American troops that
traditionally garrison the country and pushed hard for greater military
"burden-sharing".

South Korea's leaders and military officials are anxious that the
Pentagon may continue to focus on the Middle East and Central Asia to
the exclusion of its Pacific commitments. To prepare for the contingency
of going it alone, South Korea has embarked on an ambitious $665 billion
Defense Reform 2020 initiative, which will increase the military budget
by roughly ten percent a year until 2020. In those years, while troop
levels will actually fall, most of the extra money will go to a host of
expensive, high-tech systems such as new F-15K fighters from Boeing,
SM-6 ship-to-air missiles that can form a low-altitude missile shield,
and Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles.

If South Korea's spending spree remains largely under the radar, China's
military expenditures have received considerable media scrutiny.
Newspaper accounts have focused on China's military spending, which
officially rose to $45 billion for 2007. However, that public figure,
according to US intelligence estimates, tells only half the story.
Beijing's spending, claim these sources, is really in the $100 billion
range. With this money, China is pushing forward with an ambitious naval
program that will include the addition to its naval forces of five new
nuclear-powered attack subs, a mid-sized aircraft carrier, and -
clandestinely - the supposed construction of a huge 93,000-ton
nuclear-powered carrier by 2020.

Lost in the hype around China's apparent quest for a world-class
military to match its world-class economy are the gaps in the country's
offensive capabilities. It has only a couple of hundred nuclear weapons
and fewer than two dozen ICBMs pointed at the United States. Its navy
doesn't have a "blue-water" capability, lacking (as yet) any aircraft
carriers, a large force of nuclear-powered submarines, and the overseas
basing infrastructure to support them. It relies heavily on imports and
can't yet build the sort of aircraft that would allow it to project
serious force over large distances.

China, however, has been the only modestly credible threat on the
horizon that the Pentagon has been able to wield to justify military
spending at levels not seen since World War Two. The Pentagon can't use
its big naval destroyers against al-Qaeda; Virginia-class subs can't do
much to fight the Taliban or insurgents in Iraq. Yet these systems
figure prominently in the Pentagon's long-range plans to build a
313-ship navy. Congressman John Murtha (Democrat, Pennsylvania), who
made headlines back in 2005 with his newfound opposition to the Iraq
War, is typical of congressional hawks when he warns of the need to
prepare for a coming conflict with China. "We've got to be able to have
a military that can deploy to stop China or Russia or any other country
that challenges us", he recently told Reuters. "I've felt we had to be
concerned about the direction China was going". To counter China, the
United States has pursued a classic containment strategy of
strengthening military ties with India, Australia, the Philippines, and
Japan.

The Bush administration trumpets its accomplishment of increasing
military spending 74 percent since 2001. In addition to the $12.7
billion for new warships, there's $17 billion for new aircraft and over
$10 billion for missile defense. The administration wants to increase
the Army from 482,400 to 547,400 troops by 2012. A sizable portion of
the administration's $607 billion Pentagon budget request for 2009,
which doesn't even include massive supplemental funding for the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, will go to maintaining and expanding the US
military presence in the Pacific. The Democratic front-runners for the
presidential nomination have also called for troop increases and have
said nothing about slowing, freezing, or even cutting the military
budget. No matter who is elected, under the next administration, as
under the last one, the United States will surely continue to be the
chief driver of global arms spending.

The Armies of Austerity

Increased military spending is not always just a function of affluence.
As the Russian economy contracted in the 1990s, the arms export industry
became an ever more critical way for the faltering country to earn hard
currency. Today, flush with oil and natural gas revenues, Russia has
regained its place as the world's second largest arms dealer by almost
doubling its arms exports since 2000. Washington's moves to establish a
global missile defense system and encroach on Russian interests in
Central Asia have only encouraged Moscow to boost its military spending
in an effort to recover its lost superpower status.

With the renewed growth of the Russian economy on the strength of energy
sales, Russian arms expenditures began to take off again in the new
millennium, increasing nearly fourfold between 2000 and 2006. The
Russian government, which projected a 29 percent increase in spending
for 2007, plans to replace nearly half its arsenal with new weaponry by
2015.

Compared to Russia, North Korea has had the full experience of economic
collapse with very little subsequent recovery. Yet, despite its woefully
limited means, it has tried to keep up with the great powers that
surround it. By many estimates, Pyongyang devotes as much as a quarter
of its budget to the military (even though prosperous South Korea still
spends as much, or more, on its military than the North's entire gross
domestic product). North Korea's failure to match the conventional
military spending of South Korea, much less Japan or the United States,
was what made the building of a "nuclear deterrent" increasingly
attractive to its leaders. In other words, the current nuclear crisis
that sucks up so much diplomatic attention in Northeast Asia today is at
least partly a result of the region's accelerating conventional arms
race and North Korea's inability to keep pace.

Critics of the North Korean regime often point out that its military
spending is ultimately a human rights violation, because the government
essentially takes food out of the mouths of its people to spend on
armaments. North Korea is, however, just a particularly gross example of
an expanding global problem. Each of the six countries in the new
Pacific arms race has devised a wealth of rationales for its military
spending - and each has ignored significant domestic needs in the process.

Given the sums that would be necessary to address the decommissioning of
nuclear weapons, the looming crisis of climate change, and the
destabilizing gap between rich and poor, such spending priorities are in
themselves a threat to humanity. The world put 37 percent more into
military spending in 2006 than in 1997. If the "peace dividend" that was
to follow the end of the Cold War never quite appeared, a decade later
the world finds itself burdened with quite the opposite: a genuine peace
deficit.

_____

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of
North Korea, South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories,
2003), among other books.

Copyright 2008 John Feffer

Copyright 2008 Antiwar.com

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=12357


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