Transforming the strategic landscape of Southeast Asia.

• Author: Loo, Bernard Fook Weng

Introduction

For too long, the study of Southeast Asian arms acquisitions has been asking the wrong question--whether or not there is a regional arms race. The typical regional answer, whether from policy-makers or analysts, has been a resounding no, that what has been taking place is force modernization, which suggests an essentially natural process by which states acquire military capabilities and upgrade them regularly through a natural process of obsolescence and replacement. There is some truth to this answer. Most of the armed forces of Southeast Asian states have been configured to meet internal security challenges that have, for some, only recently receded into insignificance; whereas for other Southeast Asian states, internal security challenges remain the predominant security concern for their armed forces. As such, by the standards of conventional warfare requirements, virtually all Southeast Asian armed forces have been weak and under-equipped. Inasmuch as internal security challenges have receded, the region's armed forces have had to undergo a process of reconfiguration and restructuring to take on new conventional military capabilities. To a large extent, therefore, the proliferation of conventional weapons in Southeast Asia has reflected these two needs--building up their material capabilities from very low levels, and re-configuring the respective armed forces from counter-insurgency (COIN) to conventional postures.

Nevertheless, this study argues that both explanations do not provide a sufficient understanding of the security implications of this military modernization process, in particular as some Southeast Asian armed forces begin to undertake agendas similar to what the United States Department of Defence currently refers to as military transformation, sometimes referred to elsewhere as revolutions in military affairs (RMA). Not all Southeast Asian armed forces are ready to undergo this sort of military transformation (Laird and Mey 1999, pp. 19-23). Even if most Southeast Asian military organizations are not transformation-ready, a process of conventionalization--shifting force structures and doctrines away from COIN to high-intensity, force-on-force military operations--has been under way for some of the states of Southeast Asia. What this study proposes to do is to use the prism of strategic stability to analyse the impact that recent Southeast Asian force modernization programmes have had on the regional strategic environment. In so doing, what emerges is an understanding that the transformation of military capabilities from COIN to high-intensity force-on-force operational capabilities also transforms the very business of strategy for Southeast Asian states in a potentially negative way.

Key Assumptions

Understanding Strategy

Before the analysis can really get under way, it is necessary to make clear my key assumptions and definitions. The first is the notion of strategy, for which this study takes as its starting point the Clausewitzian definition--"the use of engagement for the purpose of the war" (von Clausewitz 1976, p. 177). A further refinement of this notion of strategy comes from Colin Gray, who defines strategy as "the bridge that relates military power to political purpose" (Gray 1999, p. 17). There is the immediate problem of disagreements over nomenclature. What is to some merely strategy is to some others, grand strategy, and to yet others, political strategy. What this study proposes is that these confusions are somewhat unhelpful, and to some extent pettifogging. These various disagreements gloss over the fact that they basically agree that at some point in the strategic process, an interface between political objectives and requirements and the military instruments of war is necessary.

This study proposes that one can understand the war-strategy nexus at three levels: at the highest level, the calculus that ideally policy-makers and military planners jointly make concerning the use of military power for the interests of the state; at the level of military operations, where military planners begin to calculate where, how, and how much of military power is to be used; and at the level of the tactical, where military planners calculate how the deployment of military forces in military operations will allow the state to realize its interests. What this does to the other instruments of national power--economic, diplomatic, and so forth--is to consign them to another field of inquiry, which is not to denigrate these non-military instruments of power, but to suggest that they have no place in this analysis.

The Clausewitzian paradigm of the war-politics-strategy nexus is contested (Keegan 1993; Hart 1931; van Creveld 1991). These critiques tend to argue that war is not simply an extension of politics by other means but that it incorporates other facets of the human condition, including culture, religion, or self-preservation. These critiques thus portray the Clausewitzian paradigm as an essentially ethnocentric view--reflecting a modern, Western European, state-centric political system. This study suggests, however, that these culture-based critiques are similarly guilty of ethnocentrism and of misreading Clausewitz. A weak defence of Clausewitz against these culture-based critiques would suggest that the politics-war nexus is not unique to Clausewitz, but is present in other cultural traditions--the classical Chinese and Indian thinking on the subject, for instance (Rangarajan 1992; Ames 1993). A stronger defence of the Clausewitzian paradigm suggests that both van Creveld and Keegan are guilty of misinterpretation. Why should politics not include justice, religion, and self-preservation? Furthermore, in arguing that war is the continuation of political intercourse by other means, Clausewitz was referring to what he perceived to be the eternal nature of interstate politics. In the relationship between different political entities--whether states or kingdoms--disputes over a whole range of issues are bound to arise at some point in time. How these disputes are resolved varies in each specific case--clearly, some disputes will be resolved amicably, but other disputes will prove to be so intractable to the relevant policy-makers that these actors conclude that no satisfactory resolution is possible without the use of force. This use of the military instrument is thus an act that exists in the realm of the political entity.

Strategic Stability and Accidental and Inadvertent Wars

This study understands the term strategic stability to mean a condition wherein the likelihood of accidental or inadvertent wars arising between putative adversaries is extremely low (Loo 2005). Strategic stability is a framework of analysis that focuses on structural conditions that predispose policy-makers towards sudden and reactive changes of existing non-violent strategies to violent ones. The framework attempts to show how policy-makers can be pushed, almost against their will, towards decisions for war that they neither want nor anticipate. In other words, strategic stability refers to a condition wherein policymakers are less prone to strategic miscalculations that can end up in wars that neither side anticipates nor wants. The framework involves four broad sets of influences, three of which are structural in nature. These are geography, strategic culture, and military-strategic variables. This discussion focuses on the structural variables.

Geography is important in strategic stability in two aspects. The first, geopolitics, helps to shape the nature and tone of the hostile relationship, for instance, in providing conflicting territorial claims. Where there is a geographic component to a particular interstate conflict--whether it is about competition for access to scarce resources, the ability of communities to move freely from one location to the next, or disputes over antithetical cartographic visions--a condition of strategic instability may ensue. Geopolitics is thus a powerful influence on the creation and maintenance of a condition of strategic instability. The bilateral geopolitical disputes exist almost across the entire spectrum of states in Southeast Asia, and include both territorial and resource access disputes. The second, geostrategy, shapes the calculations that military planners and policy-makers make concerning the extent to which their state is vulnerable to aggressive military actions from their putative adversaries. This is especially true of the geostrategic conditions of the border regions (Midlarsky 1993, p. 121). These two conditions coincide with the essentially Kautilyan model of geopolitics in Southeast Asia, which posits the immediate neighbours as the "natural" enemies, and any state on the other side of the neighbouring state as a "natural" ally (Rangarajan 1992).

The second influence is strategic culture, which points to how images of the putative adversary (see, for instance, Kupchan 1994, p. 41) influence the proclivities of policy-makers to resort to the military instrument, "a people's distinctive style of dealing with and thinking about the problems of national security" (Hudson 1997, p. 202). These images, the result of ideational and material bases (such as ethnic or religious identities...