Page 2 of
2 Asian
arms race gathers speed By John
Feffer
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, 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. They 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 intercontinental ballistic missiles
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 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 to build a 313-ship navy.
Democratic Congressman John Murtha, who made
headlines 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 US has pursued a
classic containment strategy of strengthening
military ties with India, Australia, the
Philippines and Japan.
The George W Bush
administration trumpets 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 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 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 US 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
four-fold between 2000 and 2006. The Russian
government, which projected a 29% 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
US, 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
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.
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