Category Eastern Europe

Military Expenditures

The American political campaign has ended up discussing NATO recently, including one candidate who states that NATO is “obsolete.” The sense is that America’s allies are not pulling their weight. Let us just look at some comparative defense budgets for a moment. Most figures below are estimates for 2015 from the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a private UK based organization. I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but they have been doing this for a while.

United States: $597.5 Billion or 3.3% of GDP

Now, our NATO allies are spending much less. The big spender is the United Kingdom at 56.2 billion or 2% of their GDP. This is followed by Germany at 36.6 billion which is only 1.1% of their rather large GDP (largest economy in Europe). France is at 32.0 billion or 1.9% of their GDP (note that the SIPRI figures are much higher for France). Other large NATO countries include:

Turkey…..….22.6….2.2% (these are 2014 SIPRI figures)

Italy….…..….21.1….1.1%

Canada………14.0…..0.9%

Spain…………10.7…..0.9%

Poland…..…..10.3….2.1%

Netherlands…10.1.…1.2% (these are 2014 SIPRI figures)

Total NATO expenditures (not including United States) for 2014 was $310 billion (SIPRI figures). I gather it is now somewhat less. It was the goal once that every member of NATO spent 2% of their GDP on national defense. Many NATO members are far below that goal.

So, it would appear that the U.S. spending 3.3% of its GDP on defense, while no major country in NATO is spending much more than 2% of its GDP on defense. In contrast Russia is spending $51.6 billion or 4.1% of GDP. So certainly between England, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands they are spending at least $195.2 billon on defense, which is almost four times what Russia is spending.

If one looks to the Pacific, one sees the same pattern. The United States spends 597.5 billion on defense or 3.3%. Our ally Japan spends 41.4 billion or 1.0% of GDP. South Korea, sitting opposite the very unstable and dangerous North Korea, spends 33.4 million on defense or 2.4% of GDP. Taiwan, still claimed as a province by China, spends 10.2 billion or 1.9% of GDP.

In contrast China is spending 145.8 billion on defense or 1.2% of its GDP.

 

Now these are mostly IISS figures, there are somewhat different figures provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). For example they have the U.S. budget figures at 596.0 (vice 597.5) but this makes up 3.9% of GDP (vice 3.3%). Not sure why there is such a big difference in the figures for percent of GDP. They have a much higher figure for China (215 billion at 1.9% of GDP), Russia (66.4 billion at 5.4% of GDP) and France (50.9 billion at 2.1% of GDP). They have a world total figure of 1,676 billion (of which the United States spending makes up 35.6%) while the IISS has a world total figure of 1,563 billion (of which the United States spending makes up 38.2%).

Of course, this does not address how much “bang for the buck” people are getting.

Why the Russian Economy is Tumbling

The link here is to a New York Times article that nicely summarizes the situation with the Russian economy. Nothing new here, but nicely presented:

Why the Russian Economy is Tumbling

A few highlights

  1. The country has been operating at a deficit since 2012.
  2. Its Reserve Fund is slated to run out by 2017.
  3. Experts suggest this crisis is more alarming (it is a note on the Budget balance chart).
  4. Russian intervention in Syria cost Russia $482 million (not sure where that figure came from).
  5. Russia is decreasing its defense budget by 5%.
  6. The Russian defense budget is over $50 billion (in contrast, the U.S. defense budget is 610 billion for 2013).
  7. It can, of course, tap into the National Wealth Fund (raid their pensions to cover existing expenses).

 

History News Network (HNN)

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We do have a half-dozen links listed down at the bottom of the right hand column of this blog. One is the History News Network

I have five articles posted on HNN. Two of them being posts from this blog. They are:

How Military Historians Are Using Quantitative Analysis

Did the Pentagon Learn from Vietnam?

Defeating an Insurgency by Air

Did I Just Write the Largest History Book Ever?

Are Russians Really Long-Suffering

Now, they do choose the headlines, and sometimes that gives a different feel to the article. So for example, one of my blog posts was titled “Russian Revolutions.” The exact same article on the HNN is titled “Are Russians Really Long-Suffering.” This apparently got a couple of people up in arms because the article did not talk about all the famines and oppression in Russia and the Soviet Union. It did not, because it was about revolutions, and in particular was about revolutions that succeeded. The famines in the 1890s, 1920s and 1930s did not directly lead to a successful revolution (a point that I think is pretty significant).

The article “Did I Just Write…” is actually a shorter version of an article I posted on the Aberdeen Bookstore website: Long version of “Did I Just Write…” Part of the reason that I wrote that article was to see if someone would come out of the woodwork and post that there was a larger book published (usually these postings start with something like “the author is an idiot because….”). I did not get that for this article. This does sort of confirm my suspicion that this is indeed the largest single volume history book ever written (no disrespect intended for the 11-volumes done by the Durants…which were four million words and 10,000 pages). I wonder if this is something I should submit to the Guinness Book of World Records? Will I get free beer for that?

 

Oil Prices

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Nice map here (repeated above): Deutsche Bank Map

Couple of things caught my eye:

  1. Nigeria & Venezuela
  2. Of course, Algeria & Libya
  3. Iraq & Iran (which is just been added to the world market)
  4. Kazakhstan
  5. Russia (where the situation is much worse than shown by this map because of their tax system)
  6. Azerbaijan (which just showed up in the news with conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh)

The quote to pull from this article is:

While Nigeria requires an oil price of $85 per barrel to balance its budget in 2016, Kuwait needs only $47 a barrel. If countries used government assets to finance their budget deficits while the oil price was low, Kuwait would hypothetically be able to do this for the next 122 years, while Nigeria could only manage 0.1 years.

 

Next Stop Berlin?

053.#2.1Article in The National Interest by Michael Peck on Russia reconstituting the First Guards Tank Army: Next Stop Berlin

This appears to be in response to us sending a brigade to Europe: U.S. Brigade

We send a brigade…they raise a tank army.

Anyhow, the First Tank Army (later First Guards) commanded by Mikhail E. Katukov plays a prominent role in my book on Kursk. In July 1943 it consisted of the III Mechanized Corps (Krivoshein), VI Tank Corps (Getman…love that name) and XXXI Tank Corps (Cherniyenko). It was better handled that many of the other armored units at the Battle of Kursk.

On page 447 on the book I do have a story of a phone call on the morning of July 6 1943 between Stalin and Katukov drawn from “unpublished memoirs” provided to me by the late Col. Sverdlov.  This may be the only published reference to that phone exchange. It stated:

Vatutin ordered that the First Tank Army, II and V Guards Tank Corps should counterattack Tomarovka. I was against this decision. Why would we move our dug-in tanks two kilometers forward exposing them to the 88mm guns that can destroy our T-34s? Our 76.2mm guns could not reach the German tanks even at the 1.5 kilometer distance! Luckily for me, I received a phone call from Stalin in the morning of 6 July. I told him that it would make more sense to fight German tanks from prepared positions. “Okay,” Stalin said, “You won’t counterattack. Vatutin will call you and tell you that.”

From the bio of Katukov (1900-1976) in my book (whose picture is at top of this post) is a story from Col. Sverdlov:

In 1990, the newspaper “The Red Star” asked me [Col. Sverdlov] to write an “unusual” article about Katukov (to commemorate his 90th birthday). I went to the apartment where he lived—an ordinary nine-story building on the Leningrad parkway by the “Sokol” metro [station] where many marshals and army generals used to live back in the days. His wife Ekaterina received me very kindly. She showed me right away all four spacious rooms of the apartment, which she transformed into a museum: pictures, photographs, Katukov’s things. “Our dacha (summer house) is also a museum now, except that it is only visited by combat friends, but that is very rarely,” she said. And then she dazed me with a phrase coming literally from an unknown person, “He did not have children either with his first wife or with me. He couldn’t. He followed treatments before, during and after the war, but with no results. I was, so that you understand, the “field and campaign wife” from as early as 1941 and loved him a lot. He divorced his first wife right after the war and we got married in 1946.” All of this was said in a burst.

The museum was marvelous, and apparently it was very expensive to set up. It revealed immediately that the woman Katukov spent all the war years with, loved him so dearly that it would make any real man jealous. “I even put a memorial granite plaque on the house at my expense; can one really wait for the government?” Ekaterina added.

It’s true that she said all that was already long ago and well known on Katukov’s combat journey. And there was not one single unrespectful word! When we parted, she gave me Katukov’s memoir “At the Edge of the Main Strike,” written by V. Titov based on archival documents and Katukov’s stories. The book had the inscription, “To F. Sverdlov—in hallowed memory of Mikhail Katukov,” and all this after 14 years after his death! That’s what you mean by the real love of a woman! I will take the liberty to suppose say that she inspired him in the war as well. Perhaps Freud was right?!

For the newspaper article, I only described the museum. I earned some praise and double royalties for the article.

Putin Presides over a Slide into Poverty

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Article in Newsweek today: Putin Presides over a Slide into Poverty

Nothing new here (if you have been reading the blog), but a few highlights:

  1. “Russian officials project that the economy will contract 1 percent to 1.5 percent this year…”

2. “Currency devaluation (in 1998), generous state bailouts (in 2008) and a commodity prices rebound (in 2012) allowed the economy to bounce back quickly. None of these fixes are available now….to save the day.”

Oil today is at $39 a barrel for crude (Russia needs at least $50). I don’t think it is going significantly higher anytime soon, and some people are thinking that it is going to slide down some more.

 

Greater Economic Backwardness and Revolution

An article in the History News Network got my attention

Greater economic backwardness

A few lines caught my attention:

  1. “For the first time the researchers found that the greater the development gap….the more likely a country has experienced non-violent and violent mass demonstrations for regime change…”
  2. “Events in the Arab Spring and in the Euro-Maidan demonstrations in the Ukraine, show that the frustrated desire to catch up with the frontier era can extend to the political sphere, particularly with repressive regimes.”

Well, this is probably very interesting work and I probably need to scare up a copy. The “for the first time” claim caught my attention in light of the work by Ted Gurr and Feierabend & Feierabend in the 1960s, which I am familiar with. I have posted on their work before. Of course, what Gurr and the Feierabends’ work showed was that (and this is paraphrasing from my memory):

  1. Poorer countries had more political violence that richer countries.
  2. Really poor countries had less political violence than developing countries (poor countries that are getting richer).
  3. Political violence went up when the economy went down.

The sense I have from the Gurr and Feierabend’s work is that the least stable countries are those that were developing economically and then stalled or went into recession. This, of course, is the scenario with Russia (and others like Venezuela) and possibly may become the scenario in China.

 

Influencing the Price of Oil and the War in Syria

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Caption: Kurdish Cavalry, 1915

 

The real problem the Russian economy is suffering from is that oil has dropped from $100 a barrel to $30 a barrel. The Russian government budget was once based upon oil remaining at least $80 a barrel. The current Russian government budget is based upon oil remaining at least $50 a barrel. This is not happening. The end result has been two successive years of 10% budget cuts.

Right now the Russian ruble is moving back up into the range of 60 rubles for a dollar. It was in the 70s, it used to be in the 30s. This recent rise is mostly caused by an increase in the price of oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia have agreed to hold production stable, which is having some impact on the prices. But, this is still not recovery. The Russian economy is going to be declining or stagnant for the foreseeable future (for at least the next two years…which gets us close to their March 2018 presidential election).

So, the question is, what can Russia do to bring the price of oil back up? Obviously, reduce supply or increase demand. In fact, demand seems to be decreasing as the Chinese and some other economies slow. This is probably not something they can control. They could reduce their own supply, which would cause the price to go up. But, this does not solve Russia’s problem as it would be at the expense of less barrels sold, and oil is a major part of their economy and the government budget.

Therefore, their only real option is to reduce supply world-wide. This is really only possible if Saudi Arabia and OPEC decide to. But they have a problem in that Iran, which is also supporting Assad and is an OPEC member, is putting oil back into the marketplace. Iran is now joining the world order and able to sell oil. This was one of by-products of the agreement on nuclear development limitations. Whether or not you agree with the Iran nuclear deal, it is helping us at the gas pump. It is also probably making it impossible for Saudi Arabia to really significantly boost the price of oil.

Of course, they may not want to. Saudi Arabia and Russia are on different sides of the war in Syria. A Russia directly involved in a war in the Middle East is kind of a unique event. They have had multiple wars with Turkey, but their last war ended with World War I (1918). They did occupy the northern half of Iran during World War II, but withdrew after the end of the war. They provided considerable support to the Egyptians and Syrians during the 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars, but stay away from active intervention. But this Russian intervention in Syria provides an additional incentive for Saudi Arabia not to let oil prices rise much, as this only feeds the Russian military. We have seen Russian recently limit and curtail their invention in Syria.

I have known a lot of Russians. Not one has ever told me in private conversation how much they love Bashar Assad and how much Syria contributes to Russia’s economy and defense. In fact, from an economic and military point of view, Russia’s defense of the Assad regime makes little sense. If he was gone from power tomorrow, not sure many in Russia would miss him.

So, what does Russia gain from supporting Assad?

 

 

Sortie Counts

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OK…..so U.S. has flown more than 55,000 sorties since August 2014 (actually we started our first air missions on 8 August…so almost 19 months).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-16/u-s-bombing-of-islamic-state-fell-to-8-month-low-in-february?cmpid=yhoo.headline

Russian flew 9,000 sorties in 5 1/2 months (see two posts below).

55,000/19 = 2,895 sorties a month

9,000/5.5 = 1,636 sorties a month

 

 

Left Behind

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Nice article in the Economist:

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21694996-putin-appears-turn-hard-power-diplomacy-russians-show-their-hand

The interesting point is that they give stats as to what they are leaving behind (have no idea how they know this):

The first is that Russia is not pulling out its forces completely. It will retain its naval presence in Tartus; at least a dozen fast jets will continue to fly from its air base near Latakia; about 1,000 military advisers and special forces will stay; and the recently-installed S-400 air defence system covering the north-west of the country will also be kept in place. Should the fragile “cessation of hostilities” that Russia and America brokered last month fall apart, it can re-escalate very quickly. But for now, Russia can cut the $3m a day cost of its military operation, while preserving much of the leverage it has bought.

Not sure how they got the price tag either. Very cheap compared to U.S. deployments (which usually are in the billions). Maybe we can contract them.