Tim Huxley
When Singapore’s defence minister, Ng Eng Hen, said in February 2023 that his ministry and the city-state’s armed forces were watching the war in Ukraine ‘very, very closely’, he might have been speaking not only for his own country’s defence establishment, but also for those of others across the Asia-Pacific. Eighteen months after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine began, its military implications for the Asia-Pacific region are still unfolding. At the same time, it is difficult analytically to disentangle the impact of the Ukraine war on Asia-Pacific defence policies and postures from the influence of parallel concerns over a regional security environment widely perceived to be deteriorating. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify several important dimensions of the Ukraine war which are already affecting the efforts of Asia-Pacific governments to improve their countries’ military capabilities.
The first dimension is that the sheer reality of the outbreak of large-scale, protracted inter-state warfare in Europe (where it was largely unexpected) is providing some Asia-Pacific governments with additional reasons, or at least justifications, for increasing their military efforts in order to better deter or provide defence against pre-existing threats in their own region, where state-on-state conflict has been widely anticipated for at least the last decade – the most likely flashpoints being seen as Taiwan, the South and East China Seas and the Korean Peninsula. Tokyo’s first-ever National Security Strategy, announced in December 2022, emphasised that the most serious direct threats to Japan came from China and North Korea, but nevertheless also claimed that Russia’s attack on Ukraine showed that the international community faced ‘serious challenges’ and that Japan needed to make ‘independent and voluntary efforts’ to maintain its own sovereignty and independence. Consequently, the National Security Strategy said that Japan would increase its spending on defence and other initiatives related to national security to reach 2% of GDP by 2027, which implies a 60% increase compared with the previous five-year period. While Canberra’s Defence Strategic Review of April 2023 did not mirror this explicit emphasis on the relevance of Ukraine, the war appears to have woken Australia’s government to the imminent potential for conflict in the Asia-Pacific. According to one op-ed in the Australian Financial Review, this provided ‘urgent context’ for the initiation and conduct of the strategic review.
The war in Ukraine has also demonstrated the importance of both external support and national defence-industrial capacity in a sustained conflict, evidently influencing thinking on these matters among Asia-Pacific defence establishments. Again, it is difficult to disaggregate the impact of the war from concerns over the regional security environment. But it appears likely to have facilitated the tightening, since 2022, of the United States’ defence relations with its most important regional allies and partners – not only Australia, Japan and South Korea, but also Taiwan and the Philippines – each of which has good reason to feel the need for stronger engagement with the US. At the same time, as the war in Ukraine continued during 2022–23, some defence establishments in the region evidently focused more clearly on the potential practical implications of protracted war in their own cases. Thinking about the vulnerability of Australia’s supply lines reportedly led the authors of the Defence Strategic Review to pay much attention to the question of how to sustain the country’s armed forces in a future conflict. Crucially, the review said that Australia should quickly increase efforts to establish a domestic manufacturing capability for guided weapons and explosive ordnance. And Tokyo’s new strategy emphasised the urgency of ensuring that the Japan Self-Defense Force possessed ‘warfighting sustainability’ in the form of a reinforced production capacity for ‘high-priority ammunition’ as well as sufficient stocks of ammunition, spare parts and fuel.
Another important question concerns the extent to which the widely publicised employment of modern anti-armour, anti-air and anti-ship weapons, as well as uncrewed air and naval systems and precision-guided multiple-launch rocket systems in the Ukraine war, holds relevant operational lessons for Asia-Pacific armed forces and implications for the types of capabilities they themselves need to enhance. The war in Ukraine has apparently shown that armoured vehicles, aircraft and helicopters employed for close air support, not to mention surface ships, are all more vulnerable than ever to relatively inexpensive guided weapons and – in the cases of armoured vehicles and ships – uncrewed systems. A contrary view, however, is that the correct employment of platforms – for example, using main battle tanks as components of properly constituted and well-conducted combined-arms operations – may obviate at least some of the advantages of defensive weapons. Similarly, offensive air power – apparently in large part neutralised over Ukraine, whether operated by the Russian or the Ukrainian air forces – could be more effective if it encompassed capabilities for suppressing opposing air defences. And the uncrewed surface vessels employed by Ukraine against Russian warships may prove to be vulnerable to electronic countermeasures.
Such questions are – as Singapore’s defence minister indicated – attracting much attention in the Asia-Pacific. Ukraine’s experience in using guided weapons and uncrewed systems has been particularly relevant to Taiwan’s government and armed forces as they strive to bolster the island’s defences in response to their growing concerns that China may, in the foreseeable future, try to use military force to subjugate it. In July, Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercise was notably more realistic than in previous years and incorporated what one Taiwanese defence expert called lessons from the Ukraine war, including use of drones.
The Ukraine conflict is already affecting the defence-equipment trade to the Asia-Pacific, with its impact on Russian arms supplies being a crucial matter for some national-defence establishments in the region. The Chinese case is a special one in that the war has led to more intense bilateral cooperation with Russia on military technology and equipment. Meanwhile, Myanmar’s military regime – facing deteriorating internal security, subject to international sanctions and wishing to avoid complete dependence on China – is no less reliant now than it was before February 2022 on Russian arms supplies. But the Western-led imposition since then of more stringent sanctions on Russia’s defence-industrial sector has encouraged other Asian countries – specifically India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam – to further reduce their armed forces’ reliance on Russian arms imports. In the medium-term, the difficulty or even impossibility of ensuring supplies of Russian spare parts is likely to mean that some equipment supplied by Moscow will be retired prematurely. In some cases, this may lead to additional procurement from non-Russian sources and the national-defence industries of the countries concerned. For example, as Vietnam’s first international-defence exhibition in December 2022 highlighted, Hanoi has intensified its drive to further diversify its military procurement sources. Meanwhile, India’s defence industry is gearing up to produce Russian-designed equipment and spares locally. But another consequence may be reduced military capability and operational readiness in specific cases. Spares for the Malaysian air force’s Russian-supplied Sukhoi Su-30MKM combat aircraft may only last another two years, and funding constraints may delay the selection of replacement fighters until 2030.
Regional threat perceptions remain the primary drivers for the continuing military build-up in the Asia-Pacific. Since February 2022, however, the ramifications of the war in Ukraine have combined with existing region-specific concerns to accentuate the existing trend in the Asia Pacific towards higher defence spending, while encouraging regional states to re-examine the sustainability of their armed forces as well as their operational doctrine and equipment inventories. The longer the war continues, the more profound its influence will be on the development of Asia-Pacific armed forces and their capabilities.
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