When Do Too Many Men Become a Security Threat?

The quest for security is often ambiguous and complex. Any number of social forces are at work in creating political tensions that could lead to war and their more subtle effects can be difficult to discern. This is especially so for military planners preoccupied by the more traditional scenarios of armed conflict. Many factors receive little analysis or are ignored completely. One of them is demographics.

Yet, there is an ominous trend in the demographic profiles of a number of Asian nations. It is a product of culture facilitated by technology. It might foster conditions that make war more tempting. It is gender selection, and it is being practiced at an ever-increasing rate.

In these Asian nations, male offspring are more prized than female. This is particularly true in China and India, where gender selection enjoys strong cultural biases. To varying degrees, it is also practiced in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Korea and Taiwan. These nations collectively account for about 40% of the world’s population.

In India, gender selection generally occurs from early to mid-pregnancy. Gender identification is usually confirmed by the use of ultrasound technology or amniocentesis. If the child is determined to be female, it is aborted and the couple tries again. This practice reportedly continues until the desired male is identified in the womb.

In China, where such technology is less available and one child per couple is a law still enforced, the female offspring tend to either disappear or are abandoned, thus becoming wards of the state. In Korea, gender selection is illegal, but the country’s demographics indicate it still may be practiced. In any case, gender-selection prosecutions are rare, in part because abortion is legal and who is to say what the reason for terminating a pregnancy is.

Taken together, the overall result is an Asian population skewing toward males.

Demographers report that, barring any external interference, there are 105 boys born in the world for every 100 girls, a ratio that has persisted over the millennia. Recent research indicates, however, that this ratio has widened in certain societies. In China, for example, the ratio is approaching 114/100; in some rural provinces there, it can rise to 130 or 140 boys per 100 girls. Abortion based on gender selection, infanticide and child abandonment are illegal in China. But when social policy and law collide with long-standing cultural biases, the latter usually prevail. Many couples living in rural areas regard a male child as an economic necessity, especially in a society that proscribes additional children.

As new technologies to facilitate gender identification become more available to the child-bearing population, there is every reason to believe that gender selection will continue rather than abate. China’s current population exceeds 1 billion, and India is expected to surpass China early next century. With such huge starting points, deliberate shifts in the male-female ratio of these populations are not necessarily comforting to the security-conscious planner.

If present trends continue--and researchers see no reason for decisive change in the next two or three generations--India alone could have about 70 million males without available female partners. The same may be true for China, though on a smaller scale.

Traditional release valves such as migration will temporarily relieve the imbalance, but receiving countries can be expected to close their doors as the tide increases. Those left behind are likely to become even more frustrated by the news that their relatives have found marriage partners in other countries. Mass communication helps fuel the problem as these men realize a major expectation in life, marriage, may be denied them.

Wars, someone once said, are best fought by young men with raging hormones. Military leaders know the necessity of controlling and channeling the passions of young men in combat units. It is a task that requires constant attention. One piece of evidence of uncontrolled emotion in U.S. society is the large number of young men now incarcerated for violent crimes. While it is difficult to compare this experience to that in certain Asian nations, it takes little imagination to figure out that large populations of single men whose only future is taking care of elderly parents, and who have no hope of someone caring for them when they are old, might easily provide the flash point for future conflict.

The current wisdom is that democracies do not go to war with other democracies and, certainly, most of the Asian countries with growing male populations are democracies. China, the most notable exception, is slowly moving toward a form of market economy that will deepen its integration into the global economy. But democracies are also social fabrics, and history shows that when they are stretched to the breaking point, democracy is imperiled.

Male domination in a society will increasingly be paralleled by male frustration. Whether this plays out in the form of internal conflict or organized external expeditions can only be speculation. But the defense establishment is currently ill-prepared to deal with such a contingency. Demography, after all, does not clearly present security experts and military planners with the types of political issues they are accustomed to. “Peacekeeping” in ethnic or religious conflicts is a comparatively recent problem. For the most part, though, such missions have been carried out in countries with manageable populations, and many of the issues can be addressed through education and economics.

For today’s long-range military planners, the future holds out information warfare, advanced biotechnological conflicts and even possible actions in space. With the advent of skewed demographics caused by gender selection, security strategists and planners do not have far to look to add another contingency to their already full plate. How to manage it as a source of future conflict is extremely difficult, but the time to start thinking about it is now.