Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation

How do countries around the world approach and engage in defense innovation? Are there common patterns, catalysts, and enabling factors that identify and explain why some countries are successful while others struggle? This year’s edition of research briefs from the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Study of Innovation and Technology in China project examines these questions.

India has expended a great deal of energy and resources to set up a vast defense economy to innovate and produce state-of-the-art weapon systems for use by the armed forces. However, the performance of the defense economy has been largely suboptimal, leading to poor self-reliancein arms procurement and heavy dependence on foreign sources for meeting the key defense requirements. An examination of the causes of poor performance exhibits a number of  hortcomings related to India’s both 'hard' and 'soft' innovation capacities. Inefficiency and lack of reforms of the main research and development (R&D) and manufacturing players, meager R&D and procurement budgets, poor management of human resources, lack of strong support from the political leadership, and a weak acquisition system, leave India’s defense innovation in a poor state.

Will the Chinese military succeed in advancing new frontiers of defense innovation? China has already emerged as a powerhouse in artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. The continued advances in these dual-use technologies may be leveraged for military applications pursuant to a national strategy of military-civil fusion. At this point, the trajectory of technological developments is uncertain, and considerable challenges remain to the actualization of deeper fusion of China’s defense and commercial sectors. However, if successful, China’s ambitions to lead in these strategic technologies could enable it to pioneer new paradigms of military power.

Innovation in the Russian defense industry has drawn significant international attention since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation address of March 1, 2018. While the first part of the address covered the usual ground of planned economic policies, the second part was an extended presentation of Russian defense industry achievements. What Putin left outwas as important as what he highlighted, and provides a clear picture of Russia’s prioritization of radical over incremental innovation, sometimes to the detriment of current battlefield readiness. This research brief discusses Russia’s successes and failures in modernizing its weapons systems since 2000.

Israel and Singapore are both countries with small populations and no strategic depth, and both see technology as a crucial force multiplier when it comes to national security. Israel, however, has been much more successful than Singapore in developing a range of indigenous military-technological innovations. The reasons are both geostrategic and cultural. Israel faces a much more looming and imminent threat which demands more military-technological innovation. Moreover, Israel’s informal and anti-hierarchical society is much more supportive than Singapore’s when it comes to risk-taking and experimentation.

The preceding brief in the series provided an analytical framework for examining a country’s defense innovation system and the factors that shape innovation outcomes. This brief applies the framework to examine the factors at work in the Chinese defense innovation system. There are many reasons explaining the successful transformation of the Chinese defense innovation system from an ossified dinosaur in the 1990s to an increasingly credible military technological competitor on the global stage at the end of the 2010s. China’s approach to defense innovation has undergone considerable evolution since it launched a full-fledged modernization of its defense science, technology, and industrial (DSTI) system in the late 1990s. Some of these changes mirror what has taken place within the civilian sector, but there is also much that is different because of the specific dynamics of the defense arena.

The brief reflects on the evolution of the Israeli approach to military innovation and describes its proclivities, in order to enable comparative analysis and a more generalizable analytical framework. It first describes the structural factors that account for the Israeli fixation on the military-industrial complex and defense innovation; then it outlines the social-organizational factors, which have enabled and conditioned its realization. It concludes with an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli approach and a review of recent trends.

The international community has consistently underestimated North Korean nuclear and missile capabilities. How has an economically impoverished, technologically backward, and internationally isolated state been able to establish robust and increasingly competent nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, especially since the mid-2010s? Has North Korea predominantly relied on foreign sources of technology or are its nuclear and missile programs the result of domestic effort? Even when technologies have been borrowed, a detailed analysis of the evolution of the programs suggests sustained domestic investment has proven crucial. The result is a far-flung and large weapons of mass destruction (WMD) infrastructure. Any negotiations over the program must take the extent of this infrastructure into account and consider the challenges of how to inspect, verify, and limit them, including through repurposing these capabilities to civilian uses.

The defense innovation systems (DIS) in France and Sweden have longstanding traditions of domestic innovation and high self-reliance, but they differ greatly in how they have achieved these ambitions. France has almost complete self-reliance in defense technology and close government control of activities contributing to defense innovation and regarding the defense industry. In France, there is considerable state ownership, and foreign ownership is blocked. In contrast, Sweden has delimited its breadth of sovereign technology development since the 1990s, and now expresses three "essential security interests": fighter aircraft, underwater capability, and cyber. This research brief describes what characterizes the present defense innovation systems in these countries, discusses their similarities and differences, and points out factors that have led to their success.

This brief provides an analytical framework to identify, categorize, and assess the diverse array of factors that are involved in the pursuit of defense innovation, as viewed through an innovation ecosystem prism. Defense innovation systems are engaged in highly complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive work. Many of the insights from this framework are derived from an extensive examination into the state of innovation in the contemporary Chinese defense science, technology, andindustrial system, examined in more detail in Brief 2018-3 in this series.