Diplomacy & Crisis News

Second dissent cable directed at Pompeo also rebukes the secretary of state for not forcefully condemning the president.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

There were lots of accidents and deaths along the way.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The succession of devastating accidents in the 1960s cost hundreds of lives. However, they did have one positive aftereffect: they confronted the navy with major deficiencies with its safety culture, and forced it to implement serious reforms to training and upgrades to its equipment, including the installation of flight deck “wash down” systems and employing more stable munitions.

A series of collisions involving U.S. Navy destroyers in 2016 and 2017—including two incidents that left sixteen sailors dead—have raised questions as to why the maritime fighting branch appears to be suffering the same accident again and again.

However, it can take time for organizations to learn from mistakes and implement solutions to deal with them. This fact was illustrated when it took no less than three catastrophic fires on U.S. aircraft carriers between 1966 and 1969 that killed more than 200 sailors before major reforms decisively improved safety onboard the giant flat tops. This final article in a three-part series looks at the last incident which occurred on the USS Enterprise.

All three of the disasters were triggered in part by rocket munitions. In 1966, a magnesium flare tossed into an ammunition locker caused rockets to detonate aboard the USS Oriskany, killing forty-four. Then in 1967, a Zuni rocket mounted on a fighter onboard the USS Forrestal accidentally launched due to a power surge, blasting into the side of an A-4 attack jet. This began a chain-reaction of detonating bombs and jet fuel that threatened to consume the conventionally-powered supercarrier.

However, these last two incidents occurred while the crew were undergoing the stress of launching dozens of jet aircraft a day into combat over Vietnam. Such was not the case for the USS Enterprise as she cruised seventy miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on in January 1969. The 1,100-foot long Enterprise was the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Escorted by the destroyer USS Rodgers and the missile cruiser USS Bainbridge, the supercarrier was undergoing flight drills in preparation for another deployment to Vietnam.

At 6:45 AM on January 14 the carrier began launching a mix of F-4J Phantom fighters, A-6 and A-7 attack planes, and E-2 and KA-3 support aircraft. By 8:15 AM there were a total of fifteen aircraft prepping for launch on the flight deck. These included Phantom fighter 405 which was loaded with six 500-pound Mark 82 bombs and two LAU-10 rocket-launching pods, each containing four unguided five-inch Zuni rockets. As usual, an MD-3A huffer—a tractor-mobile heating unit used to warm up jet-engines—was positioned on the starboard side of the fighter, ready to prepare for it takeoff.

However, several crewmen noticed that the exhaust from the huffer was gusting onto one of the Phantom’s rocket pods only two feet away. At that distance, the heat would have amounted to more than 320 degrees while Fahrenheit the huffer was idling. The crew were not trained to know the cook-off temperature of the weapons they were handling, but several mentioned their concern to a nearby ordnance chief and other personnel. However, they were either preoccupied with fusing bombs in time for launch, or he couldn’t hear what was being said over the noise of nearby jet engines. Despite four different surviving crewmen admitting afterwards that they were aware of the unsafe positioning of the huffer, nobody acted on the situation in time.

The Zuni rocket employed a Composition B warhead, composed of 60 percent RDX and 40 percent TNT mixed with wax that was prone to cooking off when exposed to roughly 350 degrees of heat. M65 bombs made of Composition B had inflicted the lion’s share of the damage in the Forrestal fire, and the navy was then in the process of converting to more stable Composition H6 munitions.

At 8:18 the exhaust heat triggered the fifteen-pound warhead of one of the Zuni rockets. The resulting blast ruptured the Phantom’s fuel tank, which poured burning JP-5 jet fuel onto the deck, catching three more Phantoms on fire. Amongst the first victims of the conflagration were two operators of the huffer unit and the F-4 pilot.

A horrible chain reaction unfolded, similar to that which had occurred on the USS Forrestal. The heat from the burning fuel caused three more Zuni rockets to explode after two minutes, blasting a hole into the aircraft hangar below—allowing burning jet fuel to pour in.

The devastation had only just begun. The growing blaze then caused a 500 pound bomb mounted on the Phantom to detonate, gouging an eight-foot diameter hole into the deck, setting off secondary fires three decks below.

In his definitive book on the incident, Enterprise crewman Michael Carlin recalled the moment:

Everyone was stunned by the explosion and the shrapnel that hit all about the island…. Both twin agent units [full of flame-retardant foam] were knocked out. Hoses flopped about wildly, geysering spumes of foam and salt water. Men were on fire, the wounded moved feebly, the dead were still.

As ordnance detonations rippled across the ship, a rack of three Mark 82 bombs detonated all at once, blowing out a giant eighteen by twenty-two foot hole in the deck and causing a large KA-3 tanker to ignite with thousands of gallons of fuel onboard, sending a massive fireball scything into damage control crews.

More than eighteen explosions would tear open the Enterprise’s deck in eight places. Fortunately, her crew reacted efficiently to combat the blaze. Her skipper, Captain Kent Lee, turned the ship portside into the wind to blow away smoke, while sailors rushed forwards to combat the fire despite the detonating munitions, managing to roll the remaining bombs off the deck into the ocean before they could catch fire. The destroyer Rodgers put herself at risk by slewing in closely beside the Enterprise in order to spray her down with fire hoses. The efforts paid off—despite suffering a total of eighteen ordnance detonations, the crew brought the fire under control after forty minutes, and extinguished it entirely by noon.

The raging blaze had injured 314 crewmen and killed twenty-eight. Fortunately, this was significantly lower number of fatalities than had occurred on the Oriskany and Forrestal. Indeed, Captain Lee attributed the lower death toll to firefighting lessons learned from the earlier catastrophes.

Twisted and scarred by the blaze, with fifteen of her jets reduced to smoldering wrecks, the Enterprise limped back into Pearl Harbor, where she underwent fifty-one days of repairs costing $126 million ($866 million in 2017 dollars). The venerable carrier went on to serve forty-three more years before being retired in 2012. As for Captain Kent Lee, he would play an important role in the development of the FA-18 Hornet fighter jet. He passed away this August of 2017.

The painfully won experience from the Enterprise fire inspired a final round of introspection from the navy, which you can read in the mandatory JAG investigation here. Prior to the fire, sailors were already aware of the danger posed by the huffer heating units to aircraft weapons, due to earlier, nonlethal incidents. The crew of the USS Constellation had even devised longer huffer hoses for safer use. However, this awareness did not lead to navy-wide policies which could have prevented the accident, and the ordnance crew on the Enterprise’s deck failed to react promptly to a deadly threat to their safety despite spotting it in advance.

The succession of devastating accidents in the 1960s cost hundreds of lives. However, they did have one positive aftereffect: they confronted the navy with major deficiencies with its safety culture, and forced it to implement serious reforms to training and upgrades to its equipment, including the installation of flight deck “wash down” systems and employing more stable munitions. While carrier operations remain an inherently dangerous business, there have so far not been any catastrophic accidents on the scale of those that occurred in the 1960s. Tragically, those lessons were paid for in blood before their importance was fully realized.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

This piece first appeared in September 2017. It is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

During World War II, submarine and aircraft-dropped torpedoes sank hundreds of merchant ships and warships.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Theoretically, the best platform for hunting down a submarine is another submarine. Indeed, carrier task forces often are accompanied by a submarine which quietly prowls the nearby seas for hostile counterparts.

In 2019, an annual report released by the Department of Testing & Evaluation revealed that a potentially revolutionary new torpedo-defense system installed on five American aircraft carriers had proven unsatisfactory and would be withdrawn from service.

The system combined a towed Torpedo Warning System sensor array designed to detect incoming torpedoes with a quick-acting launcher called the Anti-Torpedo Device System (ATTDS) that could spit out a miniature 220-pound Countermeasure Anti-Torpedo (CAT) measuring only 171 millimeters in diameter. The CAT torpedo was designed to home in on the incoming torpedo and blast it short of its target.

Starting in 2013, the Navy installed the system on five Nimitz-class super-carriers—the George H. W. Bush, Harry Truman, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Theodore Roosevelt. You can see a photo of one being fired from its six-cell launcher here.

But in September 2018 the Navy concluded testing and began removing the systems from the ships. Reportedly, they had failed to demonstrate enough improvement to be operationally viable. The Pentagon had by then invested $760 million in the torpedo-defense program of which ATTDS was a part, though other components of the program may still prove successful.

Details on the ATTD’s deficiencies are vague. While it demonstrated “some capability” at intercepting torpedoes, but its reliability was “uncertain,” and its lethality “untested.” The Navy also failed to test it versus simulated foreign torpedoes, relying on U.S.-built torpedoes instead.

Particularly, earlier DOT&E reports indicated the TWS had a major false positive problem—implying it confused friendly ships and systems with possible torpedo threats. Because such short-range close-in defense weapons depend on super-fast automated systems to respond to incoming threats, the inability of that system to distinguish genuine threats from nearby ships could have posed a major problem and potentially a friendly-fire risk.

The Torpedo Threat

During World War II, submarine and aircraft-dropped torpedoes sank hundreds of merchant ships and warships. Unlike the numerous aerial bombs or cannon shells required to sink large warships, just one or two torpedo hits could and sometimes did suffice to sink huge aircraft carriers and battleships.

The downsides to torpedoes are that they were malfunction-prone and tricky to deliver on target, as warships could undertake evasive maneuvers to avoid them. Thus submarines (which could attack with surprise) and aircraft or fast motorboats (which were too fast to avoid) proved the most effective torpedo-delivery platforms.

Submarines and torpedoes have only become considerably stealthier, faster and deadlier since World War II—but have been rarely used in combat. A notable exception is the Falkland Island War, in which the British submarine Conqueror torpedoed the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, in one stroke inflicting over half of the war’s Argentinian fatalities. Meanwhile, the Argentine submarine San Luis twice launched torpedo attacks on British ships which went undetected; torpedo malfunctions saved the British vessels.

However, anti-ship missiles inflicted considerable damage in Falkland Island conflict, Iran-Iraq clashes in the Persian Gulf, and the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. As a result, navies have developed sophisticated multi-layered missile-defense systems for their carriers, cruisers and destroyers: powerful radars to detect incoming threats, long-range missiles to shoot at them from far away, radar jamming and decoys to misdirect them, and short-range missiles and rapid-firing auto-cannons called Close-In Weapon Systems (CIWS) that automatically attempt to blast incoming warheads on their terminal approach.

Submarines and torpedoes, of course, are harder to track at a distance, and existing defensive systems against them are not quite as dense. Helicopters with dipping sonars and land-based patrol planes drop sonar buoys to patrol a wide perimeter searching for submarines which they can then engage with air-dropped homing torpedoes. Sub-hunting frigates and destroyers form a closed perimeter around the carriers and cruisers they are escorting. Carriers also deploy acoustic decoys like the towed SLQ-25 Nixie designed to attract torpedoes to them.

Despite these precautions, diesel and nuclear-powered submarines have repeatedly succeeded in evading detection and “sinking” U.S. carriers during naval exercises. The new generation of Air-Independent Propulsion and/or Lithium-Ion Battery powered submarines are relatively cheap yet remain very quiet and have weeks of underwater endurance. Furthermore, they are just as capable of launching advanced new torpedoes as the U.S. Navy’s pricier nuclear-powered submarines.

Particularly, new wake-homing torpedoes such as the Russian Type 53 and Chinese Yu-9 are designed to track a large vessel's wake rather than its acoustic signature, rendering towed decoy and other countermeasures ineffective.

Given the apparent difficulty of ensuring that submarines never enter torpedo-attack range, it made sense for the Navy to pursue a short-range “hard-kill” defense system designed to blast approaching torpedoes out of the water.

Hard-kill active-protection systems are currently being installed on U.S. armored vehicles, and in the early 2020s the Air Force plans to test laser-based and possibly kinetic hard kill systems to protect aircraft.

Unfortunately, the ATTDS program’s failure indicates that reliable hard-kill protection against torpedoes for surface warships has yet to be realized. However, the problems with the system’s sensors do not strictly implicate its ATT anti-torpedo torpedoes. Reportedly, an ATT on the George H.W. Bush successfully intercepted seven incoming torpedoes in 2013.

The ATT is, in fact, a spinoff of a program to develop cost-efficient high-speed miniature torpedoes called the Common Very Light Weight Torpedo. The Navy’s 2020 budget documents now suggest that the anti-torpedo torpedo may instead show up on U.S. submarines as an “Anti-Torpedo Torpedo Compact Rapid Attack Weapon” system for potential integration into the AN/BYG-1 weapons loading systems used by U.S. submarines, as first reported in detail by The Drive.

Theoretically, the best platform for hunting down a submarine is another submarine. Indeed, carrier task forces often are accompanied by a submarine which quietly prowls the nearby seas for hostile counterparts.

This admittedly remains untested in real-world combat, as World War II submarines—with the notable exception of the sinking of U-864 by the HMS Venturer—lacked the capability to engage each other underwater, and no confirmed submarine clashes have occurred since. However, multiple underwater collisions indicate that submarines are quite capable of stalking their less discrete underwater adversaries.

If a viable submarine CAT can be developed, submarine commanders will get an additional weapon in their toolkit. That would be useful when confronting not only enemy submarines but also small underwater drones or surface warships that don’t merit the deployment of an expensive heavyweight 533-millimeter torpedo. Theoretically, up to four mini-torpedoes could be stored in the space of a single heavyweight torpedo, but devising a system to launch the small weapons remains a technical challenge.

Of course, just like the carrier-based ATTDS, the CRAW anti-torpedo torpedo would also require testing to see if they work as well in practice as they do in theory. Nonetheless, the concept of adding an additional close-range layer of protection to submarines has merit given the increasing capability of modern torpedoes, and the sobering reality that a submarine would be lucky to survive even a single torpedo hit.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

If the H-20 does have the range and passable stealth characteristics attributed to it, it could alter the strategic calculus between the United States and China.

Here's What You Need to Remember: An H-20 seeking to slip through the gauntlet of long-range search radars scattered across the Pacific to launch CJ-10K cruise missiles with a range of over nine hundred miles would not require the same degree of stealth as an F-35 intended to penetrate more densely defended airspace and launch small diameter bombs with a range of 70 miles.

In October 2018, Chinese media announced that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) would publicly unveil its new H-20 stealth bomber during a parade celebrating the air arm’s seventieth anniversary in 2019.

Prior news of the H-20’s development had been teased using techniques pioneered by viral marketing campaigns for Hollywood movies. For example, the Xi’an Aviation Industrial Corporation released a promotional video in May 2018 pointedly imitating Northrop Grumman’s own Superbowl ad for the B-21 stealth bomber, portraying a shrouded flying wing bomber in its final seconds. Later, the silhouette of a possible new bomber appeared at a PLAAF gala. This comes only two years after PLAAF Gen. Ma Xiaotian formally revealed the Hong-20’s existence.

If the H-20 does have the range and passable stealth characteristics attributed to it, it could alter the strategic calculus between the United States and China by exposing U.S. bases and fleets across the Pacific to surprise air attacks.

Only three countries have both the imperative and the resources to develop huge strategic bombers that can strike targets across the globe: the United States, Russia and China. Strategic bombers make sense for China because Beijing perceives dominance of the western half of the Pacific Ocean as essential for its security due to its history of maritime invasion, and the challenge posed by the United States in particular. The two superpowers are separated by five to six thousand miles of ocean—and the United States has spent the last century developing a network of island territories such as Guam, foreign military bases in East Asia and super-carriers with which it can project air and sea power across that span.

Xi’an Aviation, the H-20’s manufacturer, also builds China’s H-6 strategic jet bombers, a knockoff the 1950s-era Soviet Tu-16 Badger which has recently been upgraded with modern avionics, aerial refueling capability and cruise missiles in the later H-6K and H-6J models. Beijing could easily have produced a successor in a similar vein, basically a giant four-engine airliner-sized cargo plane loaded with fuel and long-range missiles that’s never intended to get close enough for adversaries to shoot back.

Alternately, analyst Andreas Rupprecht reported that China considered developing a late-Cold War style supersonic bomber akin to the U.S. B-1 or Russian Tu-160 called the JH-XX. This would have lugged huge bombloads at high speed and low altitude, while exhibiting partial stealth characteristics for a marginal improvement in survivability. However, such an approach was already considered excessively vulnerable to modern fighters and air defense by the late twentieth century. A Chinese magazine cover sported a concept image of the JH-XX in 2013, but the project appears to have been set aside for now.

Instead, in the PLAAF elected to pursue a more ambitious approach: a slower but far stealthier flying wing like the U.S. B-2 and forthcoming B-21 Raider. A particular advantage of large flying wings is they are less susceptible to detection by low-bandwidth radar, such as those on the Navy’s E-2 Hawkeye radar planes, which are effective at detecting the approach of smaller stealth fighters.

While China’s development of stealth aircraft technology in the J-20 and J-31 stealth fighter was an obvious prerequisite for the H-20 project, so apparently was Xi’an’s development of the hulking Y-20 ‘Chubby Girl’ cargo plane, which established the company’s capability to build large, long-range aircraft using modern computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques—precision technology essential for mass producing the exterior surfaces of stealth aircraft.

According to a study by Rick Joe at The Diplomat, Chinese publications began speculating about the H-20 in the early 2010s. Postulated characteristics include four non-afterburning WS-10A Taihang turbofans sunk into the top of the wing surface with S-shaped saw-toothed inlets for stealth. It’s worth noting that the WS-10 has been plagued by major problems, but that hasn’t stopped China from manufacturing fighters using WS-10s, with predictably troubled results.

The new strategic bomber is expected to have a maximum un-refueled combat radius exceeding 5,000 miles and payload between the H-6’s ten tons and the B-2’s twenty-three tons. This is because the H-20 is reportedly designed to strike targets beyond the “second island ring” (which includes U.S. bases in Japan, Guam, the Philippines, etc.) from bases on mainland China. The third island chain extends to Hawaii and coastal Australia.

In a U.S.-China conflict, the best method for neutralizing U.S. air power would be to destroy it on the ground (or carrier deck), especially in the opening hours of a war. While ballistic missiles and H-6 bombers can already contribute to this with long-range missiles, these are susceptible to detection and interception given adequate forewarning. A stealth bomber could approach much closer to carrier task forces and air bases before releasing its weapons, giving defenses too little time to react. An initial strike might in fact focus on air defense radars, “opening the breach” for a follow up wave of less stealthy attacks.

The H-20 will also likely be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, finally giving China a full triad of nuclear-capable submarines, ballistic missiles and bombers. Though the H-6 was China’s original nuclear bomber, these are no longer configured for nuclear strike, though that could change if air-launched nuclear-tipped cruise or ballistic missile are devised. Beijing is nervous that the United States’ limited ballistic missile defense capabilities might eventually become adequate for countering China’s small ICBM and SLBM arsenal. The addition of a stealth bomber would contribute to China’s nuclear deterrence by adding a new, difficult-to-stop vector of nuclear attack that the U.S. defenses aren’t designed to protect against.

Some Chinese publications also argue that the H-20 will do double-duty as a networked reconnaissance and command & control platform similar to U.S. F-35 stealth fighters. This would make sense, as China has developed a diverse arsenal of long-range air-, ground- and sea-launched missiles, but doesn’t necessarily have a robust reconnaissance network to form a kill-chain cueing these missiles to distant targets. Theoretically, an H-20 could rove ahead, spying the position of opposing sea-based assets using a low-probability-of-intercept AESA radar, and fuse that information to a firing platform hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The H-20 could also be used for electronic warfare or to deploy specialized directed energy.

The crescendo of publicity surrounding the H-20 indicates the PLAAF believes the plane will soon be ready enough to show to the public—and international audiences. Once revealed, analysts will pour over the aircraft’s geometry to estimate just how the stealthy it really is, looking for radar-reflective Achilles’ heels such as exposed engine inlets and indiscrete tail stabilizers. However, external analysis cannot provide a full assessment, because the quality of the radar-absorbent materials applied to surfaces, and the finesse of the manufacturing (avoiding seams, protruding screws, etc.) has a major impact on radar cross-section.

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that an H-20 seeking to slip through the gauntlet of long-range search radars scattered across the Pacific to launch CJ-10K cruise missiles with a range of over nine hundred miles would not require the same degree of stealth as an F-35 intended to penetrate more densely defended airspace and launch small diameter bombs with a range of 70 miles.

Analysts forecast the H-20’s first flight in the early 2020s, with production possibly beginning around 2025. If the H-20 is judged to be of credible design, the Pentagon in turn will have to factor the strategic implications of China’s stealth capabilities, and will likely seek to field implement counter-stealth technologies which formerly have been mostly vaunted by Russia and China. The publicity which the often-secretive Chinese government is according the H-20 also indicates Beijing’s hope the bomber will serve as a strategic deterrent to foreign adversaries—even before its first flight.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared in 2018 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

These warships defeated Imperial Japan and saved the day.

Key point: This class of aircraft carrier made a huge different in the outcome of the war. In fact, they would continue to serve even after World War II.

Perhaps no vessel embodies the U.S. Navy’s embrace of the aircraft carrier as the centerpiece of its strategy as the Essex-class carrier. Between 1943 and 1950, twenty-four of the thirty-thousand-ton carriers were built at shipyards in Newport News, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Norfolk and Braintree—some completed in as few as fourteen months. This makes the Essex the most extensively produced capital ship class in the twentieth century.

The Navy’s earlier carriers were limited in size due to the Washington Naval Treaty signed in 1922, with an exception granted for two battlecruisers converted into carriers with displacements of thirty thousand tons (in U.S. service, the Lexington-class).

Though lacking combat experience, the Navy tested its carriers extensively in wargames and gained a decent idea of their revolutionary. So did Japan, which withdrew from the Naval Treaty in 1934 to build up its forces up for planned future conquests.

Reciprocally freed from the treaty’s restriction, in 1940 the Navy set out to build a larger carriers than its latest Yorktown-class. Though the U.S. was over a year away from involvement in World War II, naval engineers grasped the qualities a fully-capable carrier needed: when it came to ‘flattops’, bigger was actually better.

The 30,000 ton Essex was finally commissioned on December 31, 1942, measuring 265 meters in length and displacing 31,300 tons with the hull reinforced by as much as four inches of Special Treatment Steel armor. Four twin and four-single five-inch gun turrets used two fire-control radars to blast aerial threats up to seven miles away using proximity-fused air-bursting shells. Additionally, sixty rapid-firing twenty-millimeter cannons and seventeen quad-barrel forty-millimeter Bofors guns provided close protection.

Additional air- and surface-search radars gave the carriers advance warning of approaching threats while helping manage friendly forces in the battlespace. A new side-mounted elevator gave the carriers better flexibility, particular in the event that the elevator was jammed by battle damage.

She and her sisterships officially had crew complements of 2,300 personnel, though often sailed with more than 3,000. Eight huge boilers generating temperatures of 850 degrees Fahrenheit turned four steam turbines for electrical power and propulsion, allowing the hulking carrier to achieve 33 knots under full power.

The Essex’s best defense and offense came from the new generation of aircraft she carried, all with ranges of a thousand miles or longer. Agile F6F Hellcat finally helped the Navy win air superiority over maneuverable, but fragile A6M Zero. Faster SB2C Helldiver bomber could heft up to two-thousand pounds of bombs internally, and another thousand underwing. And tubby three-man TBF Avengers could launch deadly torpedo attacks, and also proved effective as radar-equipped submarine hunters and airborne early warning plane. The air groups typically boasted two squadron each of Hellcats and Helldivers and a squadron of Avengers.

The Essex’s larger deck allowed two squadrons to be “spotted” for takeoff on the flight deck, while a third readied its engines on the open hangar deck below. As aircraft carried progressively heavier weapons loads, they began to make more extensive use of the Essex’s two to three steam catapults to achieve necessary takeoff speed. An enlarged store of 240,000 gallons of aviation fuel enabled extended flight operations.

Starting with the Ticonderoga laid down in 1943, new long-hull Essex carriers entered service with a flared ‘clipper bow meant to handle rough weather more smoothly. The long-hull ships boasted additional anti-aircraft guns and improved radars, and had their refueling and air vents reconfigured for improved survivability, and the ship’s Combat Information Center moved below deck. In fact, as Essex carriers received near continuous upgrades to their radars, guns and catapults, no two came to be exactly alike.

The Essex carriers were thrust into the cauldron of the Pacific War which had already consumed five of the eight fleet carriers the Navy began the conflict with. Many of the Essex class vessels were renamed after recently sunk carriers (Yorktown, Lexington, Wasp, Hornet, Independence) as well as other famous ships and historic battles.

Initially they primarily served as floating airstrips to pound fortified Japanese islands in the United States’ relentless island-hopping campaign. However, in June 1944 six Essex class-carrier engaged Japanese counterparts in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, sinking three Japanese carriers and shooting down around six hundred aircraft in the so-called “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The U.S. Navy lost 123 combat aircraft and no ships.

Fourth months later, four Essex-class carriers covering the U.S. landing on the Philippines fought off three separate Japanese fleets in the epic Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history. Aircraft from the Essex and Franklin (as well as from the Yorktown-class Enterprise) sank the Japanese battleship Musashi, the largest battleship ever built. Again, the Essex-class carriers survived Japanese counterattacks unscathed thanks to effective Combat Air Patrols.

However, in the final year of the war Japan launched increasing numbers of Kamikaze attacks that succeeded in penetrating the Essex’s formidable air defense screens. On May 11, 1945, while providing air support for the invasion of Okinawa, the Bunker Hill was simultaneously struck by two Zeroes also carrying bombs, the massive explosions killing 390 crew. She nonetheless managed to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs on her own power.

Another Essex-class carrier, the USS Intrepid, survived being hit by four Kamikaze attacks as detailed in this earlier article.

Earlier, on March 19, 1945, the Franklin was struck by two armor piercing bombs dropped by a lone D4Y “Judy” dive bomber, setting off an chain reaction of exploding bomb and fuel laden aircraft that killed over eight hundred crew. Remarkably, Franklin captain refused to abandon ship and managed to nurse her back to port, having suffered the heaviest casualties for any U.S. Navy ship not lost in action. You can see footage of the Franklin’s ordeal in this 1945 documentary.

Ultimately, not one Essex-class carrier was lost during World War II. The close of hostilities saw the cancelation of eight planned Essex carriers. But most of the remaining twenty-four would lead long and eventful service lives.

The Navy reconfigured its Essexes with angled flight decks (increasing their weight to forty-seven thousand tons) and mirror landing systems to help operate faster and heavier jet fighters like he F9F Panther and the FJ Fury, serving alongside trusted piston-engine fighters like the Corsair and the beastly A-1 Skyraider. Helicopters were also added for search-and-rescue duties.

Eleven of the Essex carriers saw action in the Korean War, hitting ground targets in North Korea. In one incident in 1952, a Panther launched from the Essex-class Oriskany shot down four Soviet jets in an aerial skirmish over the Sea of Japan.

A decade later the Essex’s continued to serve, now with Skyhawk attack jets, speedy F-8 Crusader fighters, which saw action in the Vietnam War, with A-1s from the Intrepid even improbably shooting down a MiG-17 jet fighter. The carriers were also extensively employed to recover NASA space capsules and astronauts. However, the Essexes were being replaced by new nuclear-powered carriers.

However, the Oriskany—the last Essex-class vessel launched in a heavily modified configuration—endured the class’s final ordeal when a mishandled flare tossed into an ammunition locker ignited a fire that vented poisonous fumes throughout the ship, killing forty-four.

While most of Essex-class vessels were decommissioned in the 1970s, the last still in service, the USS Lexington, remained active as a training ship until 1991. Four of the World War II fleet carriers still serve as museum ships in New York, South Carolina, Texas and California. The decades of operational service provided by the venerable carriers testified both to the robustness of their design, and their effectiveness as platforms of the U.S. naval power.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

China was proud to launch its first aircraft carrier.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Beijing did pay for the $20 million value of the carrier—but argued that it couldn’t cover other costs because he lacked receipts. Apparently, invoices—or fapiao in Mandarin—don’t come standard with bribes paid to Ukrainian businessmen. And, as one quickly learns in China, you always need the official fapiao.

China was proud to launch its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, in 2012. This vessel was a refit of an incomplete Soviet Kuznetsov-class cruiser carrier. However, the story of how China got that ship in the first place may as well be a comedy—because the carrier was actually a rogue acquisition for the Chinese military against the wishes of the government in Beijing. And it was undertaken by a basketball player who claimed he wanted to build a floating casino.

The People's Liberation Army Navy first became interested in acquiring an aircraft carrier in 1970, when China was still on bad terms with both the Soviet Union and the United States. However few concrete steps were taken, because the cost and complexity of such an endeavor far exceeded the PLAN’s limited capabilities during the Cold War.

The Soviet Navy did deploy its first carriers in the 1970s: Kiev-class vessels that could launch Yak-38 Forger jump jets of limited effectiveness. By the 1980s, the Soviets began construction of two more promising Kuznetsov-class carriers. These had a “ski jump” ramp, allowing more conventional—and much higher-performing—Su-33 Flanker fighters to take off from it. Like the earlier Kiev class, the Kuznetsov was technically an “aircraft-carrying cruiser” due its powerful armament of twelve P-700 Granit antiship missile systems. This technicality was important, as “aircraft carriers” proper weighing more than fifteen thousand tons (which is to say, virtually all aircraft carriers today) were not legally permitted by the Montreux Convention to transit from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Bosporus Straits.

However, the fall of the Soviet Union left the second vessel in its class, the Varyag, only two-thirds complete in Ukraine, lacking its armament and electrical systems. Construction ceased in 1992, and the cash-strapped Ukrainian government did its best to pawn off the fifty-five thousand tons of inoperable metal rusting in its Mykolaiv shipyard. Russia, India and China all passed.

A two-part series in the South China Morning Post in 2015 revealed the machinations behind how the carrier ended up in Chinese service anyway, two decades later. It turns out the PLA Navy did want the Varyag—the team sent to inspect it recommended purchasing it! But the government in Beijing was worried that acquiring a carrier might increase tensions at a time when it was seeking to further open itself to Western investors.

Instead, in 1996 a group of PLA officers including intelligence chief Gen. Ji Shengde approached Xu Zengping, a former PLA basketball star who had become a successful businessman arranging international events. The cabal’s proposal: to have Xu purchase the carrier as a private citizen, ostensibly to serve as a casino so as to avoid undesirable scrutiny. Then the PLAN could collect it for its own use once the political winds were more favorable.

This cover story is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Remember those Kiev-class carriers mentioned earlier? Two of them are now moored in China, serving as amusement parks. The Minsk was actually purchased by a consortium of video-game arcade owners in Shenzhen for $4.4 million, and has since been moved to Nantong, north of Shanghai. And the original Kiev? Now a floating hotel in Tianjin. However, the more modern Kuznetsov-class Varyag was undoubtedly of much greater practical interest for the PLAN than either of those ships.

Xu was down with the scheme and borrowed the equivalent of $30 million in Hong Kong dollars from a friend to help fund the venture—the first expense of which was to create a $6 million shell company in Macau called Agência Turística e Diversões Chong Lot Limitada, in order to maintain the fiction. (Macau was still in its last years as a Portuguese colony at the time.)

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In January 1998, Xu arrived in Ukraine and met with the shipyard owners. After four days of negotiations, in which enormous bribes were offered and fifty bottles of 124-proof baijiu liquor were consumed, he reached an agreement to purchase the carrier for $20 million—well below the cost of a single jet fighter today. He wasn’t able to make the payment until a year later, with a $10 million extra late fee tacked on.

Some international observers smelled something fishy in the arrangement—Xu’s company did not actually have a gambling permit in Macau, nor a listed phone number or address. Ironically, however, a Jane’s analyst interviewed by the Washington Post at the time stated it was “farfetched” that the PLA Navy would try to operate the Varyag due to its decrepit and incomplete condition.

By June 2000, everything was ready to go. The carrier’s four engines were packed in grease seals (they had yet to be installed), several tons of blueprints were sent overland to China by truck, and a Dutch towing company was ready to tug the 306-meter-long vessel all the way back to China. What could go wrong?

Ever been stunned by the towing fee after your car breaks down far from home?  Imagine that, but around five hundred times worse. Why five hundred? Because that equals the roughly five hundred days the Liaoning was stuck being towed in circles off Istanbul, after the Turkish government denied it passage to the Mediterranean via the Bosporus Straits.

The Turkish maritime minister argued that should there be a mishap towing the 306-meter-long carrier—which could not maneuver or move on its own power—it might spin around and block the Bosporus straits to all shipping, or run into one of the bridges connecting the two halves of Istanbul. The straits are only seven hundred meters wide at their narrowest point and require at least six major course corrections to navigate. Hundreds of ships had suffered accidents there in the past. Curiously, the Chinese appear to have perceived the Turkish refusal to be in retaliation for China’s opposition to the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia the previous year.

The Liaoning spent sixteen months racking up $8,500 a day in towing fees. Finally, Beijing had a change of heart on the matter, and stepped in on August 2001, promising major concessions on tourism to persuade the Turks to let the Varyag pass.

Finally on November 1, in an operation involving more than two dozens tug and emergency vessels, the Varyag was towed through the Bosporus without incident, and traversed the Dardanelles the next day. The hard part was over.

Except for the sea storm with sixty-mile-per-hour winds that struck the rudderless vessel off the island of Skyros two days later, causing it to snap its tow lines. It took two more days to recover the runaway carrier. Tragically, a Portuguese sailor fell to his death while helping reconnect it to its tugs.

Once under power, a normal vessel could have taken the shortcut through the Suez Canal and straight on back to China via the Indian Ocean. But the canal would not accept powerless vessels such as the Varyag, so it had to cruise all the way around Africa, Vasco de Gama–style, chugging along at a brisk jog of seven miles per hour.

In March 2002, the carrier finally arrived at the port of Dalian in Liaoning province, which would lend the carrier its name in Chinese service. Three years later, it was put into a dry dock to allow for an extensive refit process, including sandblasting away all the rust and restoring and installing the engines in 2011.

The PLAN intended to operate the vessel as a pure carrier, rather than as a cruiser-carrier hybrid, so the shipbuilders didn’t bother with the enormous antiship missile systems. They instead confined its armament to a trio of short-range HQ-10 air-defense missile launchers and a few close-defense guns. The vessel’s primary weapon, of course, would be its complement of twenty-four J-15 Flying Shark fighters. The Flying Sharks are domestic copies of the Russian Su-33 fighter, a prototype of which was also acquired from Ukraine in 2001. The Liaoning also flies six Z-12F antisubmarine helicopters, four airborne early-warning variants and two Z-9 rescue choppers.

The Liaoning was commissioned on September 25, 2012, and the first J-15 landed on it a month later. A home-built carrier based upon the Liaoning will soon put to sea this year; those blueprints must have proved useful.

The Liaoning is hardly equal to a U.S. supercarrier—in addition to its smaller air wing and lack of a nuclear power plant, its steam turbines are prone to breaking down and the ski-jump deck limits the fuel and weapons load its fighters can carry. However, it afforded China a leap forward in its naval construction program—which now includes five more carriers in the coming decade of increasing planned capability. According to Xu Zengping, a naval officer told him that the Varyag saved China fifteen years of research and development.

So was Xu richly rewarded for his initiative? He was rewarded with bills: $120 million in all in Xu’s estimation, forcing him to sell his decadent home in Hong Kong and spend all of the intervening years paying his lenders back. You see, General Ji was jailed in 2001 for his involvement in a massive smuggling ring in the city of Xiamen—so the cabal of officers that set Xu up for the task was no longer around to see that he was compensated.

Beijing did pay for the $20 million value of the carrier—but argued that it couldn’t cover other costs because he lacked receipts. Apparently, invoices—or fapiao in Mandarin—don’t come standard with bribes paid to Ukrainian businessmen. And, as one quickly learns in China, you always need the official fapiao.

So if there’s a moral to the story of the Varyag, it’s not to expect too much gratitude for your good deeds . . . and always keep the receipt.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

There were a lot of close calls that were not revealed until later.

Key point: Russia had nuclear-armed submarines and they nearly panicked and used their weapons. Here is what happened.

It is commonly accepted that the world has never come closer to nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States confronted Soviet Union over its deployment of ballistic nuclear missiles to Cuba. But in popular imagination, the decisions for war would have come from national leaders sitting in the comfort of executive offices in Washington or Moscow.

In fact, that decision was nearly taken out of Khrushchev and Kennedy’s hands by a group of men in the throes of dehydration and CO2 poisoning as they sat in a malfunctioning submarine surrounded by U.S. destroyers, unable to consult with Moscow.

This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Two officers gave the order to prepare a nuclear weapon for launch.

Fortunately, they brought their boss with them.

The origin of the Cuban Missile Crisis in fact lay in Operation Anadyr, the Soviet plan to covertly deploy fifty thousand personnel and their heavy weapons to Cuba by sea. Anadyr remains a masterpiece of operational security. Even the name Anadyr itself, referencing a river in Russia, was meant to deflect attention from its actual goals. Soviet diplomats prepared a cover story by boasting of a major civilian development program in Cuba. Meanwhile, orders for the troop deployments were transmitted by courier, and the troops and ship captains did not learn about their actual destination until they were given letters by KGB agents at sea.

A total of eighty-six Soviet ships transferred an entire motorized rifle division to Cuba, as well as forty MiG-21 jet fighters, two anti-aircraft divisions with SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), sixteen ballistic missile launchers loaded to fire R-12 and R-14 missiles, six Il-28 jet bombers, and twelve FROG-3 tactical ballistic missile systems. The last three systems came with their own nuclear warheads. The troops and equipment were mostly concealed from sight on the ships, though U.S. Navy aircraft did spot some of the SAMs on one transport on September 4. On the whole, however, the Soviet deception was a remarkable success.

The problem was that it wasn’t possible to deploy such a large force on the ground without being detected. On October 14, a U.S. U-2 spy plane photographed the Soviet ballistic missiles at San Cristobal, leading to the missile crisis. Eight days later, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. It would involve hundreds of ships, including four aircraft carriers, as well as numerous additional shore-based patrol planes.

The Soviet Union remained outwardly defiant of the blockade—but mostly turned its ships around. A small number of Soviet ships did attempt to run the blockade—but they were the exception. Weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had set in to motion Operation Kama to deploy four Foxtrot-class diesel submarines of the Sixty-Ninth Torpedo Submarine Brigade to the Cuban harbor of Mariel. The subs were numbered B-4, B-36, B-59 and B-130.

Command personnel from the brigade were attached B-4 and B-59, including Chief of Staff Vasili Arkhipov, who had earlier distinguished himself as the executive officer of the nuclear submarine K-19, which narrowly averted a nuclear meltdown. Arkhipov was badly irradiated during the incident but recovered to live until 1998—unlike many of the K-19’s crew.

The Foxtrot submarines, known as Project 641s in the Soviet Union, were not at the cutting edge of submarine design. Introduced in 1957, they just predated the introduction of teardrop-shaped hulls which offered superior stealth and underwater speed—and in fact were noisier than usual thanks to their three propeller screws. The third deck of the Foxtrots was entirely devoted to enormous batteries, allowing the diesel subs to operate underwater for ten days before needing to surface—but they could only sustain 2.3 miles per hour at maximum endurance, and the crew of seventy-eight was left with the absolute minimum of living space. Fatefully, the submarine’s cooling systems were not designed with tropical waters in mind.

Two other submarines would later be dispatched: the Zulu-class B-75, which escorted a Soviet transport carrying ballistic missiles, and B-88, which deployed off Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to prepare a surprise attack (again!) in the event that war broke out. These submarines do not appear to have been detected by the U.S. Navy.

The flotilla of Foxtrots sailed from the Kola peninsula on October 1 and managed to evade NATO Neptune and Shackleton antisubmarine aircraft in the North Atlantic. However, as they approached Cuba, they still needed to surface regularly to recharge their batteries.

Living conditions in the submerged submarines rapidly grew intolerable. The Foxtrots’ cooling systems broke down and temperatures rose to a range of 100 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. CO2 began to build up, worsening the physical and mental condition of the crew. A lack of fresh water led to widespread dehydration, and infected rashes broke out across the entire crew.

On October 23, Defense Secretary McNamara authorized U.S. ships to use special Practice Depth Charges, or PDCs. The grenade-sized charges were intended as a means of signaling to the submarines that they had been detected, compelling them to surface. However, the blasts damaged the Soviet subs’ radio antennae and terrorized the crews, who could not easily distinguish the signaling charges from real depth charges. Although the United States notified Moscow of its “Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures,” the message did not make it to the subs of the Sixty-Ninth brigade.

The U.S. Navy did not realize the risk of the cat-and-mouse game they were playing with the Soviet subs. In addition to the twenty-one regular torpedoes they carried, each Foxtrot was armed with a single “Special Weapon”: a T-5 torpedo that could be armed with a RDS-9 nuclear warhead. The T-5s had a range of ten kilometers and were designed to detonate thirty-five meters under water and rupture the hulls of nearby ships through the shockwave. Sources disagree as to whether the T-5s had small 3.5- to 5-kiloton warheads, or fifteen-kiloton warheads that could well have destroyed the firer. Regardless, setting off any nuke in the Caribbean would likely have incited a chain reaction of nuclear retaliation.

 

According to some accounts, Capt. Nikolai Shumkov on board B-130 ordered the arming of a nuclear torpedo—but later maintained he did so to impress Moscow with his dedication to the mission. B-130’s political officer objected, and Shumkov ultimately relented, noting that “we would go up with it” if they fired the torpedo and surfaced B-130. In the end, all three of B-130’s diesel engines broke down. With its battery power exhausted, it was forced to surface directly in front of the pursuing destroyer USS Blandy on October 30. B-130 had to be brought home to Murmansk by a tug.

The nearby B-36, under Capt. Alexei Dubivko, was chased by the destroyer Charles P. Cecil. Dubivko maintains that the destroyer nearly rammed B-36 while it was attempting to surface. B-36, too, ran out of battery and was forced to surface on October 31 and head back for home.

However, the most dangerous incident occurred days earlier on October 27 at the time of maximum tension between Moscow and Washington, when patrol aircraft forced B-59 to submerge with almost no battery accumulated. The American destroyer USS Beale began pelting the Soviet sub with PDCs. It was soon joined by ten additional destroyers from the USS Randolph carrier task force.

Communication Officer Victor Orlov recalled of the hours-long bombardment, “It felt like sitting in a metal barrel with someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. The crew was in shock.” Capt. Valentin Savitsky stubbornly kept B-59 submerged as the temperature built up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and oxygen steadily depleted, causing the crew to begin fainting.

Russian sailor Anatoly Andreyev described the deteriorating condition of B-59’s crew in a series of diary entries addressed to his wife:

For four days we haven’t been able to get a breath of fresh air, to emerge at least to periscope depth. The compartments are hot and stuffy. . . . It’s getting hard to breathe in here, too much CO2, but no one wants to leave, as it is slightly cooler here. I barely made it through my previous watch. I feel faint all over, slightly dizzy, and I am also showing the results of this way of life, something like hives.

Of Captain Savitsky, Andreyev wrote: “The worst thing is that the commander’s nerves are shot to hell, he’s yelling at everyone and torturing himself. . . . He is already becoming paranoid, scared of his own shadow. He’s hard to deal with. I feel sorry for him and at the same time angry with him for his rash actions.”

Unable to communicate with Moscow, Capt. Valentin Savitsky concluded that war had already broken out. According to Orlov, Savitsky ordered the crew to arm his submarine’s nuclear torpedo and prep it for firing at USS Randolph. “There may be a war raging up there and we are trapped here turning somersaults!” Orlov recalled Savitsky saying. “We are going to hit them hard. We shall die ourselves, sink them all but not stain the navy’s honor!”

His political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, concurred with the order.

Normally, the approval of these two officers would have sufficed to launch the torpedo. But by coincidence, Arkhipov, chief of staff of the Sixty-Ninth Brigade, happened to be on board—and he was entitled a say. According to some accounts, Arkhipov argued at length with Savitsky before the latter calmed down and ordered B-59 to surface.

As the submarine breached the surface, it was immediately illuminated by searchlights from destroyers. Helicopters and aircraft from the Randolph buzzed B-59 repeatedly at low altitude, firing their weapons across its bow. Destroyers closed within twenty meters, guns leveled, blaring warnings over loudspeakers. The Soviet sub was forced to limp back home.

There is some disagreement over how close Savitsky really came to launching the nuclear torpedo. The nuclear warhead required a certain amount of preparation, and some maintain Savitsky's order reflected a momentary loss of temper under stressful conditions rather than a commitment to following through. Nonetheless, it seems clear that a nuclear exchange was averted for reasons far more circumstantial than any would care to stake the fate of humanity on.

Of the flotilla, only B-4 under Capt. Rurik Ketov was able to avoid being forced to the surface by the U.S. blockade. Although detected by patrolling aircraft, B-4’s batteries had sufficient charge to remain underwater long enough to lose the U.S. patrols. Nonetheless, Ketov too was forced to abort the mission.

Kennedy ultimately moved towards resolving the crisis on October 28 with a secret deal suggested by Khrushchev, in which the United States withdrew missiles in Turkey and promised not to invade Cuba, in exchange for Russia withdrawing its nuclear weapons.

But next time you think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, don’t think first of Kennedy brooding over his options in Washington. Think instead of dehydrated, harassed men trapped in a fragile metal box under the surface of the ocean, trying to decide whether or not to go down in a blaze of radioactive glory.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

This appeared in November and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

This spy plane played a key role in many Cold War episodes.

Key point: The A-12 helped fill a missing capability as Soviet air defenses were able to threatend the U-2. Here is how the CIA used the A-12.

But the Blackbird’s was actually an enlarged evolution of the Lockheed A-12, designed for service with the Central Intelligence Agency. The single-seat A-12 could fly slightly faster and higher, but it was doomed to be replaced by its heavier Air Force spinoff.

By the late 1950s, aviation engineers knew that new Soviet surface-to-air missiles could effectively threaten high-altitude U-2 spy plane overflights of the Soviet Union. This was dramatically illustrated by the shoot down of Gary Power’s U-2 in 1960 over the Soviet Union, which triggering a humiliating political crisis. A second U-2 was shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis—an event which could have sparked a global nuclear war.

Engineers in Lockheed’s Skunk Work’s facility worked on a U-2 successor using new survivability strategies: sustained supersonic cruising speeds to outrun missiles, electronic warfare systems to suppress their guidance systems, and a stealth-optimized airframe incorporating radar-absorbent materials to decrease the range at which the spy plane could be detected.

Designer Kelly Johnson went through eleven concepts for its “Archangel” spy plane before settling on the twelfth, the A-12—later codenamed “Oxcart” by the CIA, and nicknamed “Cygnus” by its pilots. The last iteration added “chines”—thin blade-like protrusions from the sides of the jet that reduced its radar profile and coincidentally improved its lift.

The A-12’s airframe needed to withstand extremely high temperatures for prolonged periods so the Oxcart was built out of super-hard titanium. The Soviet Union was the chief global supplier of titanium, so the CIA used shell companies purchased the rare metal from the country it intended to spy upon. However, the hard metal proved extremely difficult to work or shape into curved surfaces, requiring the development of new drill bits and hybrid manufacturing processes.

The spy plane undertook its first two flights in April 1962 at Groom Lake—better known as Area 51—initially using less powerful J75 turbojets. Lockheed built only twelve of the super-secret stealth jets, plus a lone J75-powered two-seat trainer named “Titanium Goose” and two two-seat M-21 drone carriers. The aircraft were piloted by sixteen “demilitarized” Air Force pilots who made it through an astronaut-style screening process.

The M-21 carried supersonic D-21 drones on its back which themselves clearly took after aspects of the A-12 itself. However, on a fourth test-run in 1966, a D-21 fatally collided with its M-21 mothership. Both crew ejected, but flight engineer drowned awaiting rescue. Four more A-12s were lost in accidents, killing two more pilots.

Spy Jet Showdown: A-12 versus SR-71 Blackbird

Evolving technology and political circumstances both conspired to undermine the A-12’s relevance. Following the Gary Powers fiasco, Washington finally decided to cease illegal overflights of Soviet territory, killing much of the A-12’s raison d’etre. After all, new CIA-operated Corona spy satellites could obtain similar photo-intelligence—though not always as quickly, and with lower resolution—but crucially, without putting pilots at risk or heightening Cold War tensions.

Meanwhile, the Air Force also was interested in the A-12’s airframe—and ordered develop an interceptor variant called the YF-12, as well as an unclassified SR-71 Blackbird two-seat strategic reconnaissance variant with side-looking cameras, enabling gathering of photo-intelligence without having to fly over interdicted airspace. The SR-71 was six feet longer than the A-12 and could carry 20,000 pounds more equipment and fuel.

Even LBJ’s guns-and-butter economy could not accommodate both highly-expensive spy planes, so in November 12, 1967 the CIA and Air Force models flew-off in a competitive evaluation codenamed “Nice Girl.” Testers reported the A-12 was slightly stealthier, could fly five percent higher at ninety thousand feet and a bit faster with maximum speed of 2,212 miles per hour compared to the Blackbird’s 2,193 mph.

But the evaluators felt these incremental performance improvements were greatly outweighed by the Blackbird’s ability to carry multiple reconnaissance systems at once, as well as electronic countermeasures more likely to keep it alives. The Blackbird could also fly a few hundred miles further with its heavier fuel load.

The A-12 would be retired just seven months later.

Prior to its retirement, however, between May 1967 and March 1968 the CIA deployed three A-12s to Okinawa, Japan where they flew twenty-nine spy missions over Vietnam, North Korea, and Cambodia. These missions were greatly valued by the Johnson administration, revealing that North Vietnam had not deployed surface-to-surface missiles as had been feared, as well as locating the hijacked U.S spy ship USS Pueblo in North Korea. However, the A-12’s stealth characteristics were proven to be inadequate versus Soviet radars. On one mission over Hanoi, an A-12 was damaged by missile fragments after being chased by six S-75 missiles. You can read more about Operation Black Shield in a companion article.

The Black Shield flights proved valuable, but also suggested it’s a good thing the A-12s were never assigned for overflights of the Soviet Union, which was defended by more advanced surface-to-air missiles and interceptors.

Today, the surviving A-12 airframe can be seen in exhibitions across the country, including the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and onboard the USS Intrepid museum carrier at New York City.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

It was not as impressive as it sounds however.

Key point: Bascially, the Soviets rigged up a bigger plane to carry a smaller plane into battle. Here is how they used it against Hitler.

Since their debut of aerial warfare, air arms have struggled to find ways to extend the range of small, agile fighter aircraft optimized for speed and maneuverability rather than fuel capacity. In modern times, airliner-sized in-flight refueling tankers are a favored, though expensive, solution.

But before inflight refueling began to be widely adopted in the 1950s, no one found quite as creative a solution to this problem as Vladimir Vakhmistrov, who tested nine different Sveno mothership bombers designed to carry ‘parasite’ fighters on their wings and fuselage.

Remarkably, not only did the unwieldy-seeming contraptions of “Vakhmistrov’s Circus” prove air worthy, but the Sveno-SPB production model demonstrated surprising effectiveness during its brief combat career early in World War II.

In June 1931, Vakhmistrov, a test-pilot Vladimir of the VVS’s (Soviet Air Force’s) Scientific Test Institute, proposed that Soviet fighters could be usefully mounted on heavy bombers.

The bombers could allow the fighters to lift off with heavier weapons, while the fighters in turn could protect the bombers and even run their engines to speed along their motherships while attached. Umbilical fuel lines would allow the fighters to draw from their mothership’s much larger fuel supply, greatly extending range.

While the United Kingdom and U.S. Navy had tested docking “parasite” airplanes onto zeppelin-like airships, Vakhmistrov project was the first to mate one airplane to another.

By December 1931, Vakhmistrov had cobbled together Zveno-1: a twin-engine TB-1 heavy bomber mounting two all-metal I-4 biplane fighters on top of its high-fuselage mounted wings. As the I-4s were launched once the Zveno-1 was airborne, Vakhmistrov had their shorter lower-wings (which added lift at a cost of drag) removed without any reported performance issues. The initial flight on December 3 proceeded promisingly, despite one of the fighters separating from its mothership prematurely.

Three years later, the Zveno-2 was ready based on the more capable four-engine TB-3 bomber—this time carrying two newer I-5 fighters on its broad wings, (rolled on via a ramp) and a third on its back. However, the center I-5 had to be lifted manually. This proved so time-consuming that it was rarely launched and largely retained as an additional, manned engine for TB-3—sometimes even with its wings and tail removed!

The Zveno-3 introduced a more convenient configuration: two Grigorovich I-Z monoplanes fighters carried under the TB-3’s wings. The I-Zs had fixed landing gear that rolled along the ground during takeoff, and were distinguished by their bizarre armament of two single-shot 76-millimeter Kurchveski recoilless guns and just one regular 7.62 millimeter machine gun.

Coordinating takeoffs runs proved challenging, however. Zveno-3 suffered the program’s only deadly accident when one of the I-Z’s crashed upward into the TB-3 while attempting to disengage during takeoff. As described in this first-hand account, the TB-3’s pilot attempted an emergency landing, but the I-Z abruptly fully detached, killing its pilot.

Vakhmistrov tried a different approach with the Zveno-5, which had a trapeze under its fuselage that allowed an I-Z fighter to latch onto it mid-flight in order to extend their range. This tricky maneuver was the first aerial docking between fixed-wing aircraft.

This concept was revisited in November 1939 with the Zveno-7, which could “dock” two I-16 Ishak (“Donkey”) monoplanes using two belly-deployed trapezes—but the maneuver remain excessively difficult.

By then, however, the I-16’s retractable landing gear had made under-wing mounting far more practical. The compact, 1.6-ton I-16s were nimble and fast for their time, with speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour. In August 1935, the Zveno-6 carrying two underwing I-16s, made its first flight.

Vakhmistrov’s craziest endeavor was the Aviamatka—a TB-3 converted to carry five fighters: two underwing I-16s, two I-5 biplanes on top of the wings, and a lone I-Z dangling from a belly-mounted trapeze. Yes, the outlandish-seeming beast could actually fly. The Aviamatka was conceived as a sort of flying patrol carrier; Vakhmistrov envisioned up to eight I-16s taking turns refueling on her, collectively embarking on six-hour-long air defense patrols.

But by the end of the 1930s, Vakhmistrov began pursuing a different concept. He had read combat reports on how agile, single-engine Stuka dive bombers proved capable of relatively precise attacks targeting point targets like ships, tanks and bridges. However, only larger two- or four-engine bombers designed for less accurate level bombing had the range to attack distant targets.

Vakhmistrov reasoned bomb-carrying I-16s launched from TB-3 bombers could be the ultimate long-range precision strike weapon.

This led to the Zveno-SPB production variant which first flew in July 1937, combining a TB-3-4AM-34FRN bomber with more powerful 900 horsepower engines and two I-16 Type 24 fighters, each carrying two 250-kilo bombs. The TB-3’s wing-mounted fuel tanks kept the Ishak’s topped up, resulting in a maximum range of 1,550 miles. While linked together, the 24-ton trio could fly up to 165 miles per hour up to altitudes of 22,000 feet high.

The Navy and VVS each originally planned to order twenty Sveno-SPBs and forty I-16s. Vakhmistrov even sketched plans to convert Pe-8 bombers and Catalina or MTB-2 flying boats into motherships.

However, both services grew skeptical of the project. In the end Moscow Aircraft Factor 207 delivered only six Sveno-SPBs and twelve I-16 Type 24 fighters to the Black Sea Fleet. These were deployed in 1940 to the 2nd Special Squadron of the 32nd Fighter Regiment, based at Yevpatoria on the Crimean Peninsula. The unusual unit came to be known as “Shubikov’s Circus” after its commander Captain Arseniy Shubikov, a combat veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

One June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany began its devastating invasion of the Soviet Union. As German and allied Romanian forces advanced towards the Crimean Peninsula, the 2nd Squadron was tapped to launch raids against strategic targets in Romania, across the Black Sea.

On July 26, two Sveno-SPBs took off carrying four bomb-laden I-16s between them. Twenty-five miles from the Romanian coast near the city of Constanta, they released the fighters.

I-16 pilot Boris Litvinchuk described the launch procedure in The Angry Sky of Tauris by fellow combat pilot Vasily Minakov.

The light that flashed above my visor said, “Attention!”

I signal to Gavrilov in the same manner. “There, attention!”

A signal flashed on the shield under the bomber. It said, “Release!”

I nod to Shubikov, jerk to turn the rear lock release knob. I feel the plane attain freedom of motion on one axis. To achieve a complete release, I smoothly slide the fighter’s nose down. Suddenly, my fighter is entirely free of the mothership.

Minakov describes how the Ishaks easily penetrated Romanian airspace:

As expected, the enemy took the fighters for their own: where could Soviet fighters have come from? Shubikov and Litvinchuk precisely dived down upon the oil depot, with Filimonov and Samartsev on their port side. Only when their bombs flared up below, did the enemy anti-aircraft guns open fire wildly—too late! Nimble as hawks they pulled out from their steep dives at low altitude and slipped back across the sea.

From the nearest airfield, a pair of Messerschmitts flew towards them in pursuit. But here, Shubikov and Litvinchuk were in their native element. After a storm of impressive maneuvers, they rushed in for a head-on pass. Their stunned enemies turned away in a panic . . .

All four I-16s then landed in Odessa for refueling before returning to Yevpatoria. After a decade in development, the Zveno concept had been successfully tested in combat.

Soon, however, Shubikov’s Circus would be called on to hit a much more vital target—and this time, Axis forces would be expecting them.

The fate of Shubikov’s Circus and the Sveno program is detailed in a companion article.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

Here is what could have been.

Key point: All of the services in the early Cold War jockeyed over who would get what. The fight over the cost of super aircraft carriers and having nuclear weapons was one of them.

In the wake of the mushroom clouds that blossomed over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it swiftly dawned on political and military leaders across the globe that warfare between superpowers would never again be the same. But what exactly were the implications of nuclear weapons when it came to planning military force structure?

In the United States, it was assumed that nuclear weapons would be widely employed in future conflicts, rendering conventional land armies and fleets at sea irrelevant. The newly formed Air Force particularly argued that carrier task forces and armored divisions were practically obsolete when (ostensibly) just a few air-dropped nuclear bombs could annihilate them in one fell swoop.

The Air Force touted it soon-to-be operational fleet of ten-thousand-mile-range B-36 Peacemaker nuclear bombers as the only vital war-winning weapon of the nuclear age. This logic resonated conveniently with the postwar political program mandating sharp cuts to U.S. defense spending and force structure—which the Air Force naturally argued should fall upon the Army and Navy.

The Army responded by devising “Pentomic Divisions” organized for nuclear battlefields, with weapons ranging from nuclear-armed howitzers and rocket artillery to bazooka-like Davy Crockett recoilless guns. The Navy, meanwhile, sought to find a way to integrate nuclear bombs into its carrier air wings. However, early nuclear bombs were simply too heavy for World War II-era carrier-based aircraft.

In 1945, the Navy began commissioning three larger forty-five-thousand-ton Midway-class carriers which incorporated armored flight decks for added survivability. The decks were swiftly modified to angular, effectively lengthened configuration for jet operations. Neptune P2V-C3 maritime patrol planes converted into nuclear bombers could take off from Midway-class carriers using rocket-pods but would have no way landing on the carrier deck.

Therefore, the Navy decided it needed huge supercarriers from which it could operate its own fifty-ton strategic bombers. These would displace over 40 percent more than the Midway at sixty-eight thousand tons, and measure 12 percent longer at 330-meters. In July 1948, Defense Secretary James Forrestal approved plans for five such carriers, the first named USS United States with hull number CVA-58.

The naval heavy bombers (which didn’t exist yet) were expected to have such wide wings that naval architects decided that CVA-58 would have a completely flush deck without the standard “island” superstructure carrying a radar and flight control tower. Instead, the carrier would feature side-mounted telescoping smokestacks that could be raised should smoke impeded flight operations, and a similarly retractable wheelhouse that could be extended to observe navigation and flight operations.

The ship’s air wings would include twelve to eighteen heavy bombers that would mostly remain parked on the flight deck, exposed to the elements. Four side-mounted elevators would ferry forty to fifty-four jet fighters between the hangar and flight deck to escort the bombers. Eight nuclear bombs per heavy bomber would also be stowed in the hangar. The combined ship’s company and airwing would total 5,500 personnel.

The carrier’s oddly-shaped deck included four steam catapults—two for use by bombers, and two axial “waist” catapults.

Because the ship would be effectively blind without an elevated radar and control tower, a separate cruiser was intended to serve as the carrier’s “eyes.” Nonetheless, CVA-58 still incorporated eight 5-inch guns for air defense, and dozens of rapid-fire short-range cannons.

The “Revolt of the Admirals”

Though theoretically capable of contributing to conventional strike and sea control missions, the heavy bomber-equipped CVA-58 was clearly an attempt by the Navy to duplicate the Air Force’s strategic nuclear strike capabilities.

This put giant crosshairs on the program during an era of sharp defense cuts. After all, deploying strategic bombers at sea was many times more expensive than basing them on land.

Following his reelection in November 1948, President Harry Truman replaced Forrestal—a naval aviator in World War I, and former secretary of the Navy—with Louis Johnson, who had fewer qualms about enforcing defense spending cuts.

In April 1949, just five days after CVA-58’s fifteen-ton keel was laid down in Newport News, Virginia, Johnson canceled the mega-carrier. He also began advocating dissolution of the Marine Corps, starting by transferring its aviation assets to the Air Force.

This upset the Navy bigwigs so much that Navy Secretary John Sullivan resigned, and numerous admirals began openly opposing the termination of a project they viewed as essential to validating their branch’s existence in the nuclear age.

This “Revolt of the Admirals” developed into a crisis in civil-military relations, as the Navy’s top brass defied the authority of their civilian commander-in-chief and resorted to covert methods in an attempt to influence public opinion. The Op-23 naval intelligence unit formed by Adm. Louis Denfeld secretly circulated a memo called the Worth Paper alleging that Johnson had corrupt motivations due to being a former director of Convair, manufacturer of B-36 bombers, which were also claimed to be deficient.

The bitter inter-service rivalry, and the utility of land-based bombers versus carriers, was publicly litigated in congressional hearings. The Army also piled on against the Navy, and public opinion turned against the sea-warfare branch as Op-23’s activities were revealed.

As Gen. Douglas MacArthur would later discover, Truman had no qualms about squashing military leaders that questioned his authority. His new secretary of the Navy, Francis Matthews, torpedoed the career of several admirals that spoke against the CVA-58’s termination despite an earlier promise that those testifying before Congress would be spared retaliation.

The irony of this tempest in a teacup, which resulted in the political martyrdom of many senior Navy leaders, was how misguided both sides swiftly proved to be.

In June 1950 the Korean War broke out, and the U.S. found itself desperately short of the necessary conventional land, air and sea forces. U.S. aircraft carriers and their onboard jet fighters soon bore the brunt of the initial fighting, and continued to play a major role until the end of the conflict.

And the Air Force’s vaunted B-36s? They never dropped a single bomb in anger—fortunately, as they were only intended for use in apocalyptic nuclear conflicts.

It turned out that plenty of wars were liable to be fought without resorting to weapons of mass destruction.

However, the Navy also had cause to count itself fortunate that the CVA-58 had been canceled. That’s because in just a few years the size of tactical nuclear weapons rapidly decreased, while high-thrust jet engines enabled hauling of heavier and heavier loads. By 1950, nuclear-capable AJ-1 Savage hybrid jet/turboprop bombers were operational on Midway-class carriers, starting with the USS Franklin Roosevelt.

These were soon followed by nuclear-capable capable A-3 Sky Warrior and A-5 Vigilante bombers, A-6 and A-7 attack planes, and even multirole fighters like the F-4 Phantom II. Carriers with these aircraft were far more flexible than a CVA-58 full of B-36 wannabees ever could have been. Arguably, by the 1960s the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines would amount to scarier strategic nuclear weapons than any aircraft-based delivery system.

The schematics for CVA-58 nonetheless informed the Navy’s first supercarriers, named rather appropriately the Forrestal-class, laid down during the Korean War. But the heavy-bomber carrying United States remains notable as the supercarrier the Navy absolutely thought it needed—but which with literally just a couple years more hindsight it discovered it truly could do without.

(This article appeared earlier this year.)

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Richard Douglas

Security, Americas

Of all the revolvers on the market, few are like the Smith & Wesson Model 460XVR (Extreme Velocity Revolver).

Of all the revolvers on the market, few are like the Smith & Wesson Model 460XVR (Extreme Velocity Revolver). It’s one of the largest caliber handguns out there, with only giants like the S&W 500 registering a higher caliber. When it was released in 2005, there was literally nothing like it on the market. Since then, many companies have developed more powerful and accurate revolvers, but the 460 is a classic and still one of the best.

Accuracy

This gun has a rifle caliber placed inside of a handgun. It packs a punch, to say the least. However, if you aren’t careful it will become inaccurate. You have to clean it and take care of it as you should with any gun, but especially here. If you don’t your accuracy will slip quickly. It comes with adjustable rear sights, but if you plan on using it for big game hunting, I’d suggest adding your own sights on this one. It’ll make a great piece to add with your 30-30 hunting rifle, or whatever else you like to hunt with.

Reliability

This gun definitely makes up in power and pizazz what it lacks in reliability. I’ve had a few experiences where the casing has gotten stuck in the weapon after shooting and it’s a pain. You also have to be careful with making sure you are cleaning the gun regularly. I don’t own this one so I don’t have to deal with this, but my friend who loaned me it for the review has complained about accuracy slipping if he forgets to clean after shooting. Either remember to take care of it or expect it to slack off a bit.

Handling

The XVR standardly has a rubber grip, which I prefer for big game hunting. I like a Hogue grip on my revolvers, and I choose practicality over aesthetics. It’s easy to hold and I like it because of how much firepower is in the XVR. It’s stable and does its job. It fits my hands well and I wouldn’t change anything about the grip.

Trigger

If I haven’t already mentioned it, this gun is big, strong, and a little intense. Luckily, the trigger is not. It’s a smooth pull and I didn’t experience any problems when I shot with it. The smooth trigger is part of what will make this gun great for big game hunting and use in the field. It’s easy to use and packs a punch. It’s made for the real world.

Magazine and Reloading

When you shoot the 460 you can use either .454 Casull and .45 Colt ammunition. I like the .45 cold because it generates less recoil. It’s primarily personal preference but I’m just not trying to deal with excess recoil in my handgun. You also need to know that the 460 is a only a 5 shot revolver.

Length & Weight

If I haven’t already made this abundantly clear, this is a big gun. It weighs in at 72 ounces and has a barrel of 8.38 inches. The barrel is larger than some guns. The whole gun is 15 inches long. This massive size is to be expected, this one of the biggest and strongest revolvers on the market. The 460 is impressive, no doubt, but this gun is not for beginners.

Recoil Management

This gun does pack a punch. It’s strong, explosive, and powerful. That said, I was a little underwhelmed by the recoil. Compared to the firepower that came out of the barrel, I was expecting my wrist to hurt all afternoon, but the recoil was similar to a 44 Magnum. Considering that the 460 shoots at 2300 feet per second, I was quite surprised. 

Price

The 460XVR is one of the top-of-the-line revolvers on the market, and the pricing reflects that. Pricing can be as much as $1400 dollars, maybe more depending on the retailer that you get yours from. That said, if you’re even looking at this gun, you had to see this coming. It’s big and strong, and that strength costs money. If you like high powered revolvers but don’t love the high powered pricing, check out the Colt King Cobra or the Ruger GP100.

My Verdict

Of all the words that come to mind with the 460XVR from Smith & Wesson, “cool” is the word that makes the most sense. It’s cool the way muscle cars are cool. It’s ‘basically’ the muscle car of revolvers. It’s good ole fashioned American muscle. It’s cool, but I wouldn’t make it my top priority to own this gun. There’s also the Performance Center version of the XVR which essentially is the same firearm with smaller dimensions. I’d choose that, or another small revolver like the Taurus 380 or the Chiappa Rhino before I went all in on the most extreme revolver out there. I’m not an extreme guy, but if you are, this revolver was made for you.

Richard Douglas is a long-time shooter, outdoor enthusiast and technologist. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, Cheaper Than Dirt, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Smith & Wesson

Sebastien Roblin

A-12, Asia

The planes were able to show that, despite North Korean provocations, they were not mobilizing for a full war.

Key point: The USS Pueblo incident nearly caused a Second Korean War. Here is how the CIA spied out North Korea to see if Pyongyang really was preparing for another fight.

On October 30, 1967, a CIA spy-plane soared eighty-four thousand feet over Hanoi in northern Vietnam, traveling faster than a rifle bullet at over three times the speed of sound. A high-resolution camera in the angular black jet’s belly recorded over a mile of film footage of the terrain below—including the over 190 Soviet-built S-75 surface-to-air missiles sites.

The aircraft was an A-12 “Oxcart,” a smaller, faster single-seat precursor variant of the Air Force’s legendary SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The jet’s driver, Dennis Sullivan had earlier flown one hundred combat missions in an F-80 Starfighter over Korea for the U.S. Air Force. But Sullivan was technically no longer a military pilot—he had been “sheep-dipped,” temporarily decommissioned to fly the hi-tech jet on behalf of the CIA. He now sat in the cramped cockpit in a refrigerated space suit, as the friction generated by his plane’s Mach 3 speeds heated the cockpit to over five hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Sullivan noted warnings light up on his instrument panel as Vietnamese Fan Song radars locked onto him. But they did not launch missiles. In twelve-and-a-half minutes he completed his run and looped around over Thailand, where he received aerial refueling. Then he embarked on a second pass.

But the North Vietnamese were waiting for him. A missile launch notification warned him that a 10.5-meter-long missile was heading towards him.

Decades later, Sullivan described in a speech seeing one of the missiles streak just past him, two-hundred meters away.

“Here comes a big’ol telephone sailing right by the cockpit—going straight up. That’s interesting . . . So I continued down the route, and didn’t see anything—until I got down the road, and then I could see behind me in the rear-view periscope at least four missile contrails, all spread out. Those four contrails went up about 90-95,000 feet and all turned over, bunched up in a line, headed for my tail end.”

The A-12 officially had a maximum speed of Mach 3.2—but the missiles that were following Sullivan could attain Mach 3.5.

“I said, ‘Holy smokes—those things fly pretty good up there for something which doesn’t have much in the way of wings.’ So I watched them come.… They’d get up right behind me, very close, and all of the sudden there’d be a big red fireball—a big white cloud of smoke—and you’d immediately pull away from it. You were going thirty miles a minute. [Note: actually, 41 miles per minute!] Every one of those SAMs guided absolutely perfectly and did the same darn thing.”

The missile’s 440-pound proximity-fused warhead was designed to swat planes out of the sky within 65 meters of the point of detonation. However, in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere, its fragments could travel up to four times as far.

Sullivan escaped and landed his A-12 in Kadena Air Base, where it spent several minutes cooling on the tarmac before mechanics could even touch its friction-heated skin. The stress of the heat and high speeds exacted a steep physical toll on the jet’s pilots, who lost an average of five pounds of body weight on the completion of their three to four- hour missions.

He was sitting for debriefing when mechanics burst in the room to show him two metal fragments from a missile’s nose cone they had found buried under his low left wing—just shy of his jet’s fuel tank.

Later when, Sullivan’s camera footage was found to have captured the ghostly white contrails of six surface-to-air missiles surging towards him from the ground.

Operation Black Shield

The CIA’s twelve ultra-fast A-12 jets were doomed to a brief operational career after the first flight in 1962. Following on the heels of several U-2 spy plane shootdowns, Washington was no longer willing to authorize overflights of Soviet territory which the A-12 had been designed to perform. Meanwhile, the Air Force ordered a larger SR-71 variant of the A-12 that was deemed superior in a “fly off” in November 1967. Unwilling to fund both highly similar aircraft, the CIA’s A-12 fleet was promptly scheduled for retirement.

However for ten months, the A-12 briefly filled a vital niche providing rapid high-value photo intelligence over Asia, where the political and military risks were deemed acceptable. Between May 31, 1967, and March 8, 1968, CIA drivers flew A-12 on twenty-nine spy missions over Cambodia, North Korea and Vietnam in an operation codenamed Black Shield. The jets flew out of Kadena Airbase in Okinawa, Japan, supported by over 250 support personnel.

Initially, President Lyndon B. Johnson was concerned by reports that North Vietnam had obtained Surface-to-Surface (SSM) missiles for attacks on South Vietnam. On May 31, 1967, CIA driver Mele Vojvodich took of in a rainstorm and recorded a mile-long reel of camera footage covering most of Northern Vietnam. The reel was then air-transported for development by Kodak in Rochester, NY. The verdict, confirmed by subsequent overflights, was that Hanoi had no SSMs after all.

A-12 intelligence often directly influenced LBJ’s decisions to commit to air raids during the Vietnam War. However, the Oxcart’s stealth features never proved adequate to avoid detection by Soviet-built radars.

On October 28, 1967, an S-75 launched a missile at an A-12 flown by Miller, but did not come particularly close. However, after Miller’s close call two days later on October 30, the Black Shield flights were temporarily suspended. A later January 4 mission on the same route over Hanoi also elicited a missile launch, to no effect.

Meanwhile, on January 23, 1968, North Korean patrol boats seized the USS Pueblo, an American spy ship operating in international waters, taking her crew into captivity. Worrying the incident, combined with a failed commando raid on the South Korean presidential palace, might herald a second Korean War, Johnson was persuaded to dispatch an A-12 flown by Jack Weeks over North Korea on January 26.

Analysis of Week’s photos located the USS Pueblo near Wonsan anchored next to two patrol boats—and also revealed that Pyongyang had not mobilized its troops for war. This led Johnson to rule out plans for a preemptive or punitive strike in favor of diplomatic measures which eventually saw the ship’s abused crew released nearly a year later.

A-12s flew two additional missions over North Korea to keep tabs on the ship, which was eventually moved to Pyongyang. Tragically, Weeks died a half-year later on June 5 when a malfunction in his A-12’s starboard turbojet engine caused its to overheat, breaking his plane apart over the South China Sea. Sixteen days later, a CIA A-12 made its last flight before the type was retired from service.

Sullivan’s close brush over Vietnam suggests its fortunate no A-12 overflights were authorized over the Soviet Union, where they would have been exposed to even greater peril, from high-speed interceptors and more advanced SAMs like the S-200 (SA-5). Today, such high-risk photo intelligence is largely acquired by satellite, or by expendable drones.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Jack L. Rozdilsky

Politics, The Americas

Prior to Jan. 6, in the popular American imagination, violent mobs obstructing legal election processes only occurred in faraway places with a fragile hold on democratic institutions.

In a dark and surreal moment in American history, on the afternoon of Jan. 6, a group of Americans staged a violent protest by assaulting their own capitol building. In this short-lived riot attempt, four lives were lost, numerous injuries occurred, blood was spilled inside of the Capitol, the halls of government were ransacked and the constitutionally prescribed mechanisms of an election were interrupted.

Law enforcement officials now worry that a dangerous lesson could linger — a mob could shut down American democracy itself, by targeting its weakly defended centres of power. The origin of this disaster event lies with Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric spurring malcontents to attempt an insurrection. And in a rally earlier in the day, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani called for a “trial by combat.”

On the day after the quagmire, it is unclear how security authorities’ errors in tactics, techniques and procedures failed to defend the Capitol from incursion. It will take some time to unwind the specific series of missteps that allowed for a mob of criminals to embarrass the U.S. federal government.

What is clear is that a failure of imagination was one factor that contributed to the previously unimaginable and extremely dangerous events that unfolded in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.

It can’t happen here

The U.S. was — with an emphasis on was — a place that held the perception that something like this couldn’t possibly happen here. Images of intruders storming the symbolic centre of U.S. government were reserved for action and disaster films, like Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. One of the mistakes made in the lead up to the insurrection attempt was that it was not practically imagined that a hoard of hooligans could be unleashed to literally climb the walls of the chambers of the U.S. Congress, and that they would get away with it!

Prior to Jan. 6, in the popular American imagination, violent mobs obstructing legal election processes only occurred in faraway places with a fragile hold on democratic institutions.

The perception for America that “it can’t happen here” has been shattered. In previous analysis of the potential for electoral violence in the U.S., I have stated that even falling a little towards the direction of a fragile state prior to Jan. 20 can create a more permissive environment for inappropriate expressions of grievances through violence.

Unfortunately, such sentiments are now ringing true.

How was this chaos allowed?

The second failure of imagination was by security authorities. For reasons unknown at this point, security forces were unable to stop invaders from attacking the Capitol, when the threat was in plain sight for weeks. It may have been beyond authorities’ range of imagination that pro-Trump mobs would actually attack the Capitol.

 

What is puzzling is that the U.S. government clearly has forces at its disposal to defend key government sites. There are numerous historical examples of authorities taking a no-nonsense approach to putting down real or perceived threats to the nation’s Capitol.

One historic example of a muscular use of force was on July 28, 1932, when President Herbert Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to evict thousands of “Bonus Army” veterans from the Capitol. Soldiers under General MacArthur’s command set the protestors’ camps on fire and forcibly expelled thousands of disgruntled veterans from Washington.

During the turbulence of the 1960s, on Oct. 21, 1967, a large contingent of 35,000 anti-Vietnam war protesters marched on the Pentagon. Some of the demonstrators attempted to disrupt military operations by storming the Pentagon. When 20 to 30 of the demonstrators pushed through the line of U.S. Marshals and military police into the Pentagon’s Mall entrance, they were greeted by heavily armed troops. The business of the Pentagon was not interrupted.

One does not even have to look too far back in history to find a contrast in response methods. In June 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests, the tactic of an authoritative projection of force was used, as battle-ready soldiers from the D.C. National Guard stood ready to put down potential violent disorder, which did not occur. In stark contrast, during the violent assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, the National Guard was not deployed until the damage was already done.

The question of why a group of pro-Trump troublemakers was able to ravage to the U.S. Capitol and disrupt a joint session of Congress needs to be answered. This incident should not be viewed as mere political shenanigans, rather it should be considered as evidence of a serious gap in national security.

Beyond the pale

This level of dysfunction is beyond the pale. While Facebook and Twitter took action to ban Trump from pressing buttons and sending out dangerous social media messages, Trump still has access to the button that launches nuclear weapons.

 

At 3:41 a.m. on Jan. 7, Congress eventually certified Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. The mechanisms of democracy will limp along, and Biden will be sworn in as President on Jan. 20. Until that date, that nation remains in peril. Even once Biden is in office, the menace of Trump’s continued influence will remain.

The U.S. cannot afford the political lack of will or lack of ability to defend itself against acts of insurrection and sedition. During these final two weeks of Trump’s term in office, the failure to consider the possibility of a repeated insurrection represents an existential threat to the U.S. at this time.

Jack L. Rozdilsky, Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, Canada

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Europe

In fact, one of their trained animals actually got caught spying on NATO ships.

Key point: Russia used dolphins and whales to spy on other navies. Here is how this secret came to light.

On April 22, 2019 fishermen off the coast of northeastern Norway were approached by an unusually friendly beluga whale, as reported by Norwegian periodical NRK. The adorable pale white cetacean repeatedly rubbed against fishing boat hulls, attempting to dislodge a yellow harness on its back.

This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Two days later the four-meter-long Beluga was lured with cod fillets by a fisheries boat. A fishermen jumped into the water and removed the harness. You can see a recording of the peculiar incident here.

The harness had a clip apparently for mounting a camera, and the words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” written on a buckle. A similar yellow harness, this time mounting a camera, can be seen on a sea lion trained by the Russian Navy in a 2018 Russia Today article. Related screen captures can be viewed here.

As no Russian civilian research programs reported the loss of a whale, it is widely believed (though not officially confirmed) that the friendly beluga escaped from a Russian military program presumably training whales for surveillance of Scandinavian waters. Since 2014, Russian forces have increasingly targeted Norway and Sweden with mock attack runs and surveillance missions.

Beluga whales, which can weigh up to 1.75-tons, have strong echolocation capabilities and can dive up to 700 meters deep—deeper than all but a few military submarines. Both the Soviet Union and U.S. military have trained beluga whales for military purposes, as well as larger numbers of dolphins, sea lions, and seals.

Soviet Combat Dolphins

In the early 1960s the U.S. Navy began training marine mammals to retrieve underwater objects and detect infiltrating swimmers. Dolphin and whale echolocation amounted to an incredibly precise form of active sonar. Furthermore, due to their high levels of intelligence, marine mammals could be trained to retrieve objects or even drag swimmers to the surface using operant-conditioning methods.

The Navy deployed dolphins and sea lions to guard ships in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, and Bahrain, and to search and mark naval mines in the Persian Gulf and the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. Today, the San Diego-based Marine Mammal program musters around seventy-five dolphins and thirty sea lions—half its Cold War peak.

In 1965, the Soviet Navy responded by opening its own marine life program on the Black Sea, based near Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. A second center on the Arctic Ocean, the Murmansk Marine Biological Institute, was opened in 1984.

The Soviets feared sabotage by naval commandos, which also explains their development of a diverse family of underwater small arms. NATO benefited from the expertise of Italian Navy frogmen, who during World War II had infiltrated Allied harbors and used limpet mines to cripple two battleships, a cruiser and numerous other vessels.

A declassified 1976 CIA report reveals that the Soviet marine mammal program initially suffered severe deficits of scientific expertise and professional handlers. Dolphins died in droves from being fed un-thawed frozen fish, lack of prophylactic medical care, and inadequate environmental conditioning. Reportedly only two out forty-seven dolphins survived transportation to the facility. By 1974, the number “improved” to two survivors out of fifteen.

The report alleges that Soviet academics lacked familiarity with operant conditioning techniques, and instead used Pavlovian methods. These focused on creating positive “associations” while operant conditioning reinforced or punished actions, making the latter more effective for task-oriented training.

Eventually, the Soviet Navy recruited circus handlers, who employed combative “rough play” to build intimacy with the dolphins.

Object retrieval and reconnaissance was part of the Soviet program. On one occasion, Soviet dolphins located a prototype Medevka anti-submarine torpedo. The Soviet Union also tested a device designed to transmit the returns of organic dolphin sonar to help detect intruding submarines.

However, former dolphin instructors have repeatedly emphasized that “combat dolphins” were trained for lethal attacks.

Soviet scientist Gennady Matishov describes the tactics in an article by Nicholai Litovkin:

Their main role is to protect the waters of the fleet's principal base against underwater saboteurs. For instance, the bottlenose dolphins 'graze' at the entrance of the bay and, on detecting an intruder, immediately signal to an operator at a coastal surveillance point. After that, in response to the relevant command, they're capable of killing an enemy on their own with a special dolphin muzzle with a spike.

Matishov goes on to describe another novel defensive scheme developed by the Northern Fleet that could have come out of an Austin Powers flick.

“The naval command's idea was to deploy beluga whales at entrances to bays as sentries. If they detected an enemy, they were to signal their discovery to a handler, who was to release killer seals from their cages.

Supposedly, the Belugas proved “unsuitable” in arctic waters, so the navy focused on bearded seals instead. These proved scary during a counter-sabotage exercise:

Marine commandos were ordered to infiltrate a submarine base unnoticed and mine the vessels. But we did not warn the lads whom they would be up against. Literally a few minutes after the handlers opened the cage doors and the seals shot off into the bay, all the commandos returned to the surface and tried to make off for all they were worth.

U.S. Navy SEAL Brandon Webb described a different kill mechanism in his memoir: mounting hypodermic needles full of compressed gas over the dolphin’s nose. The dolphins were trained to headbutt and inject the needles, causing an embolism with fatal results.

Russia also reportedly trained kamikaze dolphins to deposit limpet mines onto enemy submarines. Former handler Col. Victor Baranets told BBC they were trained to distinguish between the sounds of the propellers of Soviet and American submarines.

However, operationalizing such a concept would be difficult, considering the Soviet World War II experience deploying explosive-laden dogs trained to dive under Nazi tanks, tripping a detonator rod on their backs. Because the dogs were more familiar with Soviet vehicles, they frequently ran towards Russian tanks or even their own handlers with catastrophic results.

It’s hard to believe the Soviet Navy would trust dolphins swimming close to port to decide whether to blow up a submarine carrying dozens of crew members. Perhaps the Soviets had a concept for offensive deployment: Litovkin claims that “bottlenose dolphins were trained for airdrops from helicopters” to perform ‘special forces’ missions.

Crimean Dolphin Controversies

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Crimea-based combat dolphin program passed to Ukraine. However, lacking funding the trained dolphins increasingly served as tourist attractions or therapy animals.

Finally, in 2001 the program’s manager Boris Zhurid sold the animals to Iran, claiming he lacked the finances to give them proper care. Twenty-six animals, including a beluga whale, four bottlenose dolphins, walruses and sea lions were transported by cargo plane to Iran.

It’s unclear whether Iran investigated a military use for military sea mammals. Most likely the Ukrainian dolphins were amongst those acquired for civilian use by the Kish Island dolphin park. Iran’s long coastline facing the narrow Persian Gulf make offensive marine-life operations hypothetically more practical. Tehran, incidentally, has accused Israel of using a camera-equipped dolphin for spying.

Meanwhile, in 2012 Ukraine reopened it its combat dolphin program with ten new dolphins trained to attack enemy intruders with “special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.” Just two years later, Kiev was about to close the program a second time when Russian forces seized the Crimean Peninsula—and refused requests to hand the dolphins back.

Some reports state the Ukrainian dolphins starved to death under Russian care. A Ukrainian spokesmen claimed the “patriotic” dolphins went on “hunger strike” due to their attachment to their Ukrainian handlers. Russian sources have variously claimed the dolphins died because of poor treatment by the Ukrainians, or that there were no dolphins remaining in the program to start with.

However, in 2016 the Russian government issued a tender for five dolphins, three male and two female, stipulating they must have “faultless teeth” and “impeccable motor skills.” These were eventually purchased from the Utrish Dolphinarium for the equivalent of $26,000.

Since then, Russian media has profiled the new dolphin training program, emphasizing its application for lethal attacks. While the U.S. Navy denies having trained killer dolphins or seals (likely not entirely truthfully), Moscow apparently sees the optics in a different light.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Oliver Hazard Perry-class,

A Cold War legend Russian submarine crews hated.

Many U.S. Navy warships have a lasting legacy and will be remembered for their accomplishments and abilities. This includes vessels such as the Iowa-class battleships and USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Even the Navy's workhorse Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDGs) will likely find a place in history given the role these have played in recent conflicts.

The same likely may not hold true for the Oliver Hazard Perry­-class of low-cost gas turbine-powered anti-submarine warfare (ASW) frigates, which could also perform the secondary role as anti-aircraft (AA) and anti-surface ship warfare (ASuW) vessels. Designed to provide escort protection for other ships, the Navy has said these proved to be the “little ship that could” for enduring missions over the course of nearly four decades. The frigates conducted maritime interdiction operations, counter-narcotic efforts, and engagements with partner navies—thus fulfilling the Navy's Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower or Maritime Strategy.

The frigates were developed by the Navy to replace the World War II destroyers set to retire, and in order to meet the numerical needs that resulted in stringent design controls that were placed on the size and costs. As a result of “protracted periods of austerity,” the crews of the frigates faced spare parts shortages and even reduced maintenance support.

Along with the ships, the crews proved “they could” as well, and sailors assigned to the frigates—named after the hero of the naval Battle of Lake Erie, U.S. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry—showed their determination, ingenuity and even grit to ensure the mission could be completed.

Initially classified as a patrol frigate (PF) the ships were re-designated guided-missile frigates (FFG) in June 1975, when the larger guided-missile frigates of the 1950s and 1960s were re-designated DDG (guided-missile destroyers) and CG (guided-missile cruisers).

A total of seventy-one of the warships were built between 1977 and 2004 by Bath Iron Works and Todd Shipyards, and fifty-one saw service with the U.S. Navy. The last of those—USS Simpson (FFG-56)—was decommissioned in 2016, while many of the retired were either mothballed or transferred to other navies.

Currently, nearly three dozen of the Cold War frigates remain operational with such navies as Turkey, Egypt, Poland, and Chile. The Republic of China (Taiwan) remains the largest operator of the Oliver Hazard Perry-class with ten in service. In 2018, it was even announced that the United States. would offer the retired vessels to Ukraine after a large part of its navy was seized following the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

The Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates were produced in two variants, known as “short-hull” and “long-hull,” with the later variant being eight feet longer than the short-hull version—either 445 or 453 feet in overall length, while both had a beam of 45 feet and a draft of 22 feet. The long-hull ships carried SH-60B LAMPS III helicopters, while the short-hull units carried the SH-2G. Both versions were powered by single shaft driven by 2 LM2500 gas turbines. Their maximum sustained speed was around 29 knots and the frigates had a range of 4,200 nautical miles at 20 knots. The ship’s active complement was fifteen officers and one hundred seventy-nine enlisted personnel.

The frigates were initially armed with one single-arm Mk 13 Missile Launcher with a 40-missile magazine that contained SM-1MR anti-aircraft guided missiles and Harpoon anti-ship missiles. It was removed from the U.S. Navy ships beginning in 2003, due to the retirement of the SM-1 missile from U.S. service. The loss of the launchers also stripped the frigates of their Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

In June 2009, Vice Adm. Barry McCullough turned down the suggestion of Rep. Mel Martinez (R-Florida) to keep the frigates in service, citing their worn-out and maxed-out condition. In the end, the vessels proved to be past their prime and with the retirement of FFG-56, the U.S. Navy was devoid of frigates for the first time since 1943.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Stephen Silver

Technology, Americas

If it occurs, then it will be an amazing combination.

The last few weeks have been full of conflicting reports, from both analysts and media, about Apple’s plans to produce a car.

The Apple car project, which goes by the name Project Titan, has been in the works for many years, mostly in secret, although Apple observers have often had to go by clues posed by job listings and vague public comments by Apple executives.

In December, Apple reshuffled the executives who were supervising the project. Then, the following week, Reuters reported that Apple was “targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology.” Indications for a while, prior to then, was that Apple wasn’t making a standalone car, but was developing technology that would be used to partner with other manufacturers.

Other reports have stated that Apple will likely take longer than that, with Bloomberg News, earlier this week, reporting that development of the product was in “early stages,” and that the fruition of the project was “at least half a decade away,” which would place its arrival at around 2026.

Apple, per the report, “has a small team of hardware engineers developing drive systems, vehicle interior and external car body designs with the goal of eventually shipping a vehicle.”

Meanwhile, another report Thursday, for the first time, named a car company that was in collaboration with Apple on such a car-the South Korean company Hyundai. Following the report by the Korea Economic Daily, Hyundai confirmed to CNBC that it had indeed had such talks with Apple.

“We understand that Apple is in discussion with a variety of global automakers, including Hyundai Motor. As the discussion is at its early stage, nothing has been decided,” A Hyundai spokesperson told CNBC. The news sent Hyundai’s stock soaring on Tuesday.

The report out of Korea had stated that the collaboration was Apple’s idea and that Hyundai was “reviewing the terms.” The arrival of the car was timed for 2027.

Analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush, in a note this week, predicted that Apple will make some sort of announcement this year, which “lays the groundwork to enter the burgeoning EV space.” 

“We would assign the chances of Apple unveiling its own standalone car by 2024 as 35%-40% given the Herculean-like auto production capabilities, battery technology ramp, financial model implications, and regulatory hurdles involved in such a game-changing initiative.” Ives wrote in the note. “In addition, on the autonomous front and given safety/regulatory issues we would see a longer timeframe if Apple ultimately heads down this path especially given the cautious DNA of Cook & Co. in launching new products.”

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters

Michael Rubin

Security, Middle East

Iran’s diplomats may deny the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions but a close read of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ rhetoric suggests that military considerations continue to motivate the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Iran’s diplomats may deny the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, but a close read of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ rhetoric suggests that military considerations continue to motivate the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. 

On November 27, 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, died in a hail of gunfire from what appears to have been a remotely controlled gun nest. The following day, Sepah News, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ official mouthpiece, published an article that eulogized Fakhrizadeh and stated, “Martyr Fakhrizadeh had placed the strengthening of the defensive power against weapons of mass destruction at the top of his scientific activities.” 

Defensive power, of course, neither equates to civilian energy generation nor the desire for medical isotopes, the two most frequent explanations Iranian officials provide inspectors and their Western counterparts. Almost every nuclear power describes their nuclear missile program as defensive in nature, and so the Revolutionary Guards’ embrace of the term should not surprise. 

Of course, it may be easy to cherry-pick loose rhetoric statements given the Islamic Republic’s traditional bombast, but Sepah’s statement appears more the rule than the norm. Consider, for example, the death of Major General Hassan Moghadam, a pioneer in Iranian missile development, in an explosion at a Revolutionary Guard base outside Tehran on November 13, 2011. What the Iranian government neglected to mention in their denials about the military nature of Moghadam’s work was his last will and testament that the Revolutionary Guards subsequently published (but which is no longer online). In it, Moghadam asked that his epitaph read, “The man who enabled Israel’s destruction.” 

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said they took solace in Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s supposed fatwa against nuclear weaponry. Iranian diplomats often quote that fatwa inconsistently, however, and with divergent verbiage raising questions about whether it exists in any form to which the Iranian government can be held accountable. Senior Iranian religious figures including those in Khamenei’s inner circle, however, have endorsed nuclear weaponry in much the same terms that Sepah does now. A September 2005 editorial in Marefat, a journal that belonged to Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, a Khamenei confidant who passed away on January 1, 2021, said that "the Quran calls on the faithful and the Muslim nation to acquire maximum power to be able to deter the enemies of religion and humanity." It added, “Deterrence does not belong to just a few superpowers.” This is just one of many examples. 

The Biden administration appears ready to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called 2015 Iran nuclear deal, if Iran itself returns to compliance. Secretary of State-nominee Tony Blinken and incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan suggest they then would be open to further negotiations to resolve other issues of dispute such as Iran’s ballistic missile program. In the rush to diplomacy, it may be tempting to dismiss the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ rhetoric as just bluster. This would repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration, however. While Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif might be the interlocutor of choice, Iran’s nuclear scientists do not answer to Iran’s foreign ministry nor, indeed, are any of the military or security apparatuses within the Islamic Republic under the direct control of the presidency or the ministers he appoints. Rather, the Revolutionary Guard controls both the ballistic missile and satellite launch capability, the technology for which doubles as a delivery system, and other possible military dimensions. Put another way, what the Revolutionary Guards say matters. European diplomats, Congressional Democrats, and those calling for restraint regardless of an adversary’s behavior might want to believe Iran’s intentions are peaceful and the problem lies more in Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh than in Tehran, but the Revolutionary Guards, at least when they write for their home audience, beg to differ.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent author for TNI.

Image: Reuters.

Jordan Henry

Politics, Americas

Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb is rightly emphasizing high demand as a key reason for states to prioritize the elderly ahead of other groups. Larry Hogan, by contrast, is blatantly failing to protect the elderly from the coronavirus. In essence, he is guilty of dereliction of duty.

As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic deepens, with death tolls mounting and an even more infectious strain of the coronavirus now knocking at the door, the United States continues to drive headlong into a decentralized and disorganized vaccine rollout. As of January 8, the United States has vaccinated roughly six million Americans—far below the Trump administration’s goal of twenty million by the end of 2020. Worse yet, the federal government has largely left the states to their own devices in developing an actual vaccine distribution plan. Many states have simply opted to follow the CDC’s own problematic guidelines, which attempt to both curb the spread of the virus and minimize the death toll by prioritizing healthy essential workers alongside vulnerable seniors. The result is an incoherent vaccination strategy that not only fails to achieve either goal but also carries grave consequences for those groups most at risk of death.

One need not look further than recent developments in Maryland to grasp this strategy’s potential tragic results.

On Tuesday, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced new measures intended to hasten the state’s sluggish pace of vaccinations. Of the 273,000 doses allotted to the state last month, more than half remain in storage, unused. “While none of us are thrilled with the pace of this rollout over the first couple of weeks, I can assure you that it is improving every day,” Hogan told reporters.

The governor has activated the Maryland National Guard to assist local health clinics in vaccinating frontline health workers and has even threatened to redirect future vaccine doses away from hospitals that fail to use 75% of their allocation.

Regardless of these new efforts, however, Hogan cautioned Marylanders that the state is still constrained by a paltry allotment of doses from the federal government. With 72,000 doses delivered each week, the state is on track to vaccinate only 1.8 million residents by the end of May—just 30% of the population. “This is going to be a long haul,” he warned.

Given this limited supply, one might assume that Governor Hogan would opt to minimize Maryland’s death toll and prioritize the state’s most vulnerable residents—namely, seniors aged 65 and over, who account for roughly 80% of coronavirus deaths nationwide. Instead, he has revised the state’s distribution plan to reflect CDC guidelines, which prioritize essential workers alongside seniors. Phase 1B of the state’s plan now lumps seniors aged 75 and over together with teachers, prison inmates, and “continuity of government” personnel, while seniors between 65 and 74 are downgraded to Phase 1C, grouped together with workers in grocery stores, public transit, agriculture, and manufacturing. More astonishing yet, residents with serious underlying health conditions have been relegated to Phase 2, which might not begin until late spring or early summer.

This “have it both ways” approach creates a grotesque, shameful and unacceptable situation where those most at risk of death must now compete elbow-to-elbow with relatively younger, healthier residents. Grouping the elderly alongside essential workers all but guarantees that many seniors—who otherwise might have been swiftly vaccinated—will in fact die. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has accused public health officials of ageism and even denounced their logistical mismanagement as a “genocide” against elderly Americans, arguing officials would never accept such high mortality rates among young people. In essence, Hogan is guilty of dereliction of duty. His bungling will likely result in further deaths among the most vulnerable part of the population.

With Maryland now set to hold off on vaccines for seniors aged 65 to 74 until early March, many residents have asked why the state does not simply follow the example of other states.

In neighboring Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the city will open vaccine appointments for DC residents aged 65 and over as soon as January 11—two weeks before essential workers will be able to do the same.

In other states, vaccinations for seniors are already well underway. In late December, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced he would place seniors ahead of essential workers in receiving the vaccine. While some state officials have praised the governor’s plan to prioritize vulnerable residents, Florida’s rollout is still plagued by mass confusion. Multiple news outlets have reported long waiting lines throughout the state, with hundreds of residents even camping outside overnight in frigid temperatures to receive a shot. Even in the face of such large-scale mismanagement, demand among Florida’s seniors for the vaccine remains high.

Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb has emphasized this high demand as a key reason for states to prioritize the elderly ahead of other groups. Last week he told CNBC:

“If we have a group of Americans that we know wants the vaccine very badly and would take it quickly, and happens to be at the highest risk of a bad COVID outcome—and I’m thinking in particular about senior citizens in this country—I would just give it to them. I would make it generally available to them to the extent possible.”

Gottlieb continues to stress the importance of getting the vaccine in “as many arms as possible,” and cited vaccine skepticism among younger people, including health workers, as yet another reason to focus vaccination efforts on the elderly. “We shouldn’t be spending three weeks trying to push the vaccines into arms where you have some reluctance when we know those vaccines are sitting on a shelf and building on a shelf,” he concluded.

Thursday marked a grim new milestone for the United States, as the daily death toll surpassed 4,000 deaths for the first time since the pandemic began. Public health officials warn that darker days still lie ahead. As a new, more infectious strain of the virus begins to spread across the country, time is of the essence in vaccinating vulnerable Americans. Will state health officials like Hogan continue to imperil them or will they finally change course?

Jordan Henry is a research associate at the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Richard Douglas

Glock 21,

What do you get when you combine a Glock and a .45 round?

45 Auto, also known as 45 ACP is a beefy cartridge developed in 1905 by John Moses Browning. Glock has a new take on that cartridge, melding a relatively modern design with the 115-year-old round. Does Glock have a viable platform for the 45 auto, or are the old ways truly better. Let's take a deep look in my review of the Glock 21.

Accuracy

The accuracy of a weapon is almost always its greatest strength and the Glock 21 is a straight shooter through and through. The hits always felt tight and landed where I was aiming with little to no deviation. Glock is known for its unique but solid builds. They’re reliable and will work just as advertised (we don’t need to talk about the .22 Glock). This build quality is apparent when shooting for accuracy.

I always shoot my pistol between 7 and about 30 yards. At seven yards to about 15 yards is where I can put my shots on top of each other, farther out than that is where I can hit the target, but not as precisely as I’d like. At my optimal distance, groupings were hovering at a variation of a ½ inch and 1-inch difference in a standing unstabilized shooting position. Shots that were 1 inch apart were almost always shooter error. When I was braced against something, my groupings shrunk to a cool ¾ inch. I reckon that that speaks for itself. 

The Glock 21 holds its own when it comes to clean shoots and pinging steel on target consistently.

Reliability

It’s a Glock. What else is there to say?

I’ve personally never had a Glock jam on me, and the Glock 21 continues the streak in perpetuity. Glock’s claim to fame is the boxy design, light polymer build, and the fact that it just keeps shooting. 

I’ve put well over 10,000 rounds through all my Glocks and about 1,000 through a brand new 21. Even during the break-in period, there were no stoppages. It had no problem in the hot Georgia sun, nor did it have trouble when I took it North with me in the Fall. It just works, all day, every day, every time.

Handling

Not everybody loves the feeling of operating a Glock, but I do, and the 21 feels great with a beefy round like the 45 ACP.

If you have or used a Glock, then you’re familiar with exactly what you’re getting into. It’s a bit wider than some other models, but it still feels natural in the hands and certainly familiar enough to operate with ease. There’s a backset of slide serrations for easy manipulations during reloads or, lord forbid, a malfunction. Additionally, it’s outfitted with the classic dotted texture handgrip. In the box, there are also a few different backstraps to customize the size of the grip.

Handling this pistol is easy and doesn’t require any special knowledge to operate.

Trigger

Ah, the trigger, Glock’s biggest weakness.

To put it bluntly, I hate stock Glock triggers. They’ve always felt relatively mushy and not particularly smooth. The 21 doesn’t do too much to remedy this either. After about 650 rounds with the stock trigger, I dropped a new, third party trigger to remedy my gripes with the 5.5 lb stock Glock trigger, I’d recommend that everyone who purchases the 21 to do the same.

You can also look into building your own Glock at 80 percent Arms.

Magazine and Reloading 

It may seem like a small thing, but the mag capacity and classic Glock mag feel improved my good opinion of the 21 to a new level.

Instead of your classic 7+1 in a 1911, the Glock 21 holds 13 rounds plus one in the chamber. Now not only do you have a comparable capacity to 9mm mags, but you also have a stacked 13 rounds at your disposal.

The magazine itself is nothing new, and neither is the reloading. The mechanisms feel satisfying and the exact same as any other Glock. Plus, Glock mags are cheap as dirt.

The magazine and reloading procedure are rather insignificant and didn’t detract or add to the experience of shooting.

Length and Weight

Unloaded, this gun is only 29 ounces, just shy of two pounds. The overall length is 8 inches so it’s an obvious full-sized gun. I really wished it was compact, but that’s the trade-off when you want a monster-hunting bullet. I tried to carry concealed, but I just found myself missing my Glock 19.

Recoil Management 

Here’s the pièce de résistance: the recoil is shockingly soft, the absolute softest shooting 45 I’ve used in fact.

The old round shines, even more, when it’s being shot out a modern body with a modern design. The combined heavier weight of the Glock 21 and slow velocity of the 45 make for an easy shooting firearm. To expand on that, a higher firearm weight almost always means lower recoil since the weight is not so easily tossed aside by the energy of the cartridge. Secondly, the 45 is a slow-moving bullet with less energy out of the gate. These two factors together create a kick that is more reminiscent of a push instead of a snappy reaction. Nobody should have an issue with this weapon's recoil. It’s flat shooting with a 45! What not to like?

Price

The Glock 21 is cruising at 547 big ones at the moment, which has been the case for years with other models.

Is the Glock 21 Worth it?

I’d say if you like Glocks, then sure. If you like 45 auto, then yes. If you like both, then absolutely!

Here’s why:

• Great design (familiar and easy to manipulate)
• Low recoil (soft shooting even with a big bullet) 
• Decent Price (relatively cheap for a great gun)
• Good Accuracy (small groups at distance)

They say that 45 is God’s caliber, and the Glock 21 is my preferred way of delivering it.

Richard Douglas is a long time shooter, outdoor enthusiast and technologist. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, Cheaper Than Dirt, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kris Osborn

Security, Americas

U.S. military installations, command and control centers and even air, ground and sea war platforms could themselves quickly fall victim to drone swarm strikes.

Massive numbers of small drones around the world are presenting an entirely new threat landscape for the Pentagon which must now confront networks of AI-enabled, coordinated attack drones sharing information, passing along targeting details and in some cases even exploding themselves upon high-value target areas.

U.S. military installations, command and control centers and even air, ground and sea war platforms could themselves quickly fall victim to drone swarm strikes. A newly released U.S. Department of Defense Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Strategy explains that the current threat circumstances call for new countermeasures, offensive weapons, allied cooperation, doctrine and weapons requirements specifications.

“Commercial manufacturers and nation-states are improving performance, reliability, and survivability of sUAS. Low-cost systems are increasingly available around the world,” the strategy writes.

The strategy is clear to point out that the growing dangers are not restricted to single systems or even groups of single systems but rather integrated fields of attack drones with greater levels of autonomy and coordination with manned platforms.

“Swarms of sUAS operating independently or augmented with manned systems, facial recognition algorithms, and high-speed digital communication networks, such as fifth-generation cellular networks, will create new levels of complexity,” the strategy states.

The systems themselves are now much more advanced and armed with AI-enabled sensors, guided weapons and an ability to launch previously impossible kinds of attacks. Autonomous drones can now be equipped with the technical ability to find targets, pass them off to other drones and simultaneously and in real-time cue other, potentially larger and more lethal attack weapons.

“These more capable systems have extended range, payload, and employment options. Some of these systems can fit in the palm of a hand, perform military missions, and conduct novel offensive or defensive operations not traditionally associated with the platform,” the strategy states.

Furthermore, AI itself, which naturally enables breakthrough levels of automation, autonomy and information sharing, can rely upon advanced sensor algorithms to gather otherwise separated pools of data and combine, organize and analyze them to present optimized solutions for commanders in need of information quickly.

“The impending integration of artificial intelligence with autonomous sUAS will introduce yet another dramatic change to the character of warfare,” the study writes.

For example, the technology enabling a drone to autonomously detect, track and attack high-value targets without needing human intervention is here, presenting tactical and ethical dilemmas for commanders. The biggest concern among Pentagon war planners is that adversaries will not adhere to the ethical and doctrinal limitations now embraced by the U.S., which stipulates that any decisions regarding the use of lethal force need to be made by human decision-makers.

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Department of Defense