A new Security Nexus Perspective by Deon Canyon and Michael Kolton, professors at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, examines why the dominant burden-sharing metric—defense spending as a percentage of GDP—falls short in the Indo-Pacific and offers practitioners a tailored alternative.

In “Beyond the Two Percent: A Practitioner Framework for Assessing Burden Sharing in the Indo-Pacific,” the authors introduce the Burden and Responsibility Index for Security Contributions (BRISC)—a tiered, weighted, practitioner-ready instrument grounded in the federal government’s own multi-dimensional burden-sharing framework. BRISC organizes partner contributions across five tiers, applies context-variable weights that shift from peacetime to contingency, and incorporates an access, basing, and overflight conditionality modifier that accounts for partners whose access commitments are hedged or unreliable under pressure. Through illustrative case studies of Australia, the Philippines, and Palau, the paper demonstrates how the instrument reveals the strategic value of contributions that NATO-derived metrics often overlook—giving security cooperation officers a more actionable basis for engagement.

Read the full paper on Security Nexus.

 

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