John Feffer on the Growing Military-Industrial Complex in Asia

John Feffer on the Growing Military-Industrial Complex in Asia

By Tom Engelhardt

Created Feb 13 2008 - 9:36am

- from TomDispatch [1]

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 II [2],

that the Bush administration has just submitted to Congress for fiscal year

2009. It comes in at $515.4 billion - a 7.5% hike [3] for an already bloated

Pentagon -- and that doesn't include all sorts of Defense Department funds

that will be stowed away elsewhere [4] (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 [5] 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 website, Foreign Policy In Focus [6] at the

Institute for Policy Studies in Washington -- with which Tomdispatch hopes

to collaborate on projects in the future. (To subscribe to FPIF's e-news

service, click here [7].) 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

stand-off 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 [8] 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 twenty-first century, five of the six countries

involved in the Six Party Talks have increased [9] their military spending

by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable

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%

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 1% 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 [10] 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 U.S. 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 [11] 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 [12] 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 U.S. 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 [13] 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 [14] 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 [15] of hitting a bullet

with a bullet in space. Meanwhile, thanks to U.S. pressure Russia too is

upgrading its missile defense systems, while pouring money into the

development of new missiles that can bypass [16] any putative shield the

U.S. 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 70%. 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

[17], "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 $1 billion 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

10% 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 [18], and Global Hawk [19]

unmanned aerial vehicles.

If South Korea's spending spree remains largely under the radar, China's

military expenditures have received considerable media scrutiny [20].

Newspaper accounts have focused on China's military spending, which

officially rose to $45 billion for 2007. However, that public figure,

according to U.S. intelligence estimates [21], 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 [22] 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 [23] 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 II. 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 [24] to build a 313-ship navy. Congressman John

Murtha (D-PA), 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 [25]. "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 [26] of strengthening

military ties with India, Australia, the Philippines, and Japan.

The Bush administration trumpets [27] its accomplishment of increasing

military spending 74% 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 [28] 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 U.S. military presence in the Pacific. The

Democratic frontrunners 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 [29] 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 four-fold between 2000 and 2006. The Russian

government, which projected [30] a 29% increase in spending for 2007, plans

[31] 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% more [32] 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 [33] at the

Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North

Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis [34] (Seven Stories,

2003) among other books.

Copyright 2008 John Feffer

[Note for Tomdispatch readers: A few weeks ago, this site published Nick

Turse's "Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering: America's Forgotten

Vietnamese

Victims." [35] The result was a small flood of letters from readers -- many

of them Vietnam veterans -- looking for a way to donate money toward the

purchase of new artificial legs for Pham Van Chap and Nguyen Van Tu,

profiled in the piece. Now there is a way, thanks to the extraordinary

efforts of two men: Tom Leckinger, with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and

Cambodia in 1970 and today a resident of Hanoi where he served as the

country representative for the humanitarian organization Veterans for

America, and Chuck Searcy, a fellow U.S. Vietnam veteran, who has lived in

Vietnam for more than a decade and serves as the country representative for

the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

Any reader can now make a direct donation to purchase (and contribute to the

continuing care for) new legs for Mr. Pham and Mr. Nguyen by sending a check

or money order (payable to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund) to:

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

1023 15th Street NW

Suite 200

Washington, DC 20005

--

NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

available to advance understanding of

political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright

Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson

The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) hasn't applied to just the U.S.

for decades. The MIC -- or MICs -- are lynchpins of international

commerce.

BUY

MAKE

SELL

Virtually all of the world's nations participate in at least one of

these three aspects of military sales. The richer they are, the more

they are involved in all three. The U.S. involvement is valued at

many TRILLIONS of dollars since the 1950s. Without its MIC, the U.S.

economy would literally crash.