Diplomacy & Crisis News

Asaf Romirowsky

Security, Middle East

How can the United States make progress beyond the Arab states normalizing ties with Israel?

Against the backdrop of normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and more recently Bahrain, are continued condemnations by Palestinian leaders. Palestinian president Abbas called the moves a “stab in the back,” “despicable,” and a “betrayal.” Even so, rumors regarding Saudi normalization continue to circulate.

Momentum is palpable. How then to move forward with an “outside in” strategy for Palestinian-Israeli peace? Keeping pressure on Palestinian leaders while finding new means to address Palestinian needs is key.

First should be new emphasis on high-level U.S. diplomacy in Europe and the Middle East aimed at convincing donors to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the internationally funded welfare agency for Palestinians, to rechannel funds away from the organization and towards targeted education, social service, health, and development programs aimed at the Palestinians. UNRWA remains a mainstay of Palestinian rejectionism, characterized by advocacy for the “right of return.” Perhaps as important, UNRWA is a European fetish.

For better and for worse, the only person capable of doing this is President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Only Kushner has the president’s full trust and understands his uniquely transactional mindset. And in contrast to the post-war decades of seeing the Palestinian issue as an isolated issue with unique importance, the Trump Administration sees it as merely one of many, tied to broader questions of peace, economic development, and a reduced American security footprint.

Tying changes in governmental funding for UNRWA (and for politicized NGOs that Europeans fund) to other issues of concern to European and Middle Eastern states is simple politics. This approach will be more successful than inertia-bound funding for UNRWA and the search for a perfect solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A second area for the administration combines foreign and domestic policy: the continued draining of the Washington “swamp,” which among other things has impeded Israeli-Palestinian peace. For example, for decades the U.S. Consul in East Jerusalem acted as the de facto ambassador to the Palestinians, undercutting broader U.S. policy. This politicized position has been eliminated. The longer term “Arabist” mindset within the State Department also contributed to mixed messages being spread regarding U.S. policy throughout the Arab world. Parallel attitudes immersed in intellectual and bureaucratic inertia have prevented long-overdue rethinking about NATO and other issues.

As was seen from the outside, the “Deep State”—the permanent foreign policy, intelligence and security apparatuses—resisted Trump’s policy changes. This was done mostly covertly, as State Department representatives refused to implement changes in policy, sometimes criminally, as the “Russiagate” scandal has shown.

Identifying, reassigning, firing, and otherwise changing the culture of these immense establishments is critical for American democratic accountability as well as for the execution of policy by the executive branch. The Palestinian issue is no exception.

But a critical complement to “draining the swamp” in Washington is draining the swamp in New York. Beyond UNRWA, Americans should be shocked at the extent to which the United Nations (to which the United States contributes approximately $10 billion) is uniquely dedicated to the Palestinian cause. In addition to the $1.4 billion UNRWA budget (to which the United States no longer contributes), the UN claims to spend another $400 million of the “State of Palestine.” This is approximately twice as much as it spends on Mozambique—a country with a population of 29.5 million.

It is unclear whether this figure includes funds spent by the UN on its vast internal Palestinian support infrastructure. This includes the General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs’ Division for Palestinian Rights, the unique database called the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” the “Quartet,” the countless reports, conferences, newsletters, and bulletins, or funds spent by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Security Council, the Human Rights Council (with its Special Rapporteur), or the Economic and Social Council, and their “civil society partners,” most of which support the Israel boycott movement.

Needless to say, no other cause receives even remotely this much money or institutional devotion from the UN. American policy should zero out contributions that are used by the UN to prolong the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a fight aimed at subverting Israel’s legitimacy as a state, promoting the Palestinian narrative of their martyrdom at the hands of Israel, and the international community’s putative responsibility to support them until their perfect solution is achieved.

It is a telling sign—of either desperation or overconfidence, certainly born of hope that the Democrats will retake the White House—that UNRWA is undertaking joint events with a leading U.S. boycott organization, American Muslims for Palestine. Former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to restore at least $350 million in UNRWA funding, as well as increasing funding to many other UN programs, including rejoining the World Health Organization. And while Biden himself has been firmly opposed to the Israel boycott movement, his campaign has reached out vigorously to anti-Israel activists.

The “outside-in” approach of defying conventional wisdom, taking chances, and demanding risk-taking and concessions on the part of allies like Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, has paid significant dividends. Furthering that cause by defunding and redefining dysfunctional institutions both at home and internationally, getting U.S. aid directly to those in need, and creating a sense of urgency about opportunities that may be lost, should be expanded regardless of who occupies in the White House in 2021.

Alex Joffe is a Ginsburg-Milstein Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Asaf Romirowsky is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a fellow at the Middle East Forum. Both are senior nonresident scholars at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History,

The B-29’s revolutionary gunnery system made a Japanese fighter pilot’s job neither pretty safe nor interesting.

Key Point: The Superfortress was key to American strategy in World War II.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a game changer. First rolling off the assembly line as a production aircraft in July 1943, the Superfortress was the answer to America’s need for a high-level long-range strategic bomber. Conceived in 1938, the Superfortress was designed to increase the range, payload, and speed of its predecessors and was ultimately slated for service in the Pacific Theater of Operations only. The B-29 had a loaded range of around 4,000 miles, could carry a bomb load of up to 20,000 pounds, had a combat ceiling in excess of 36,000 feet, and travelled at a maximum speed of over 350 miles per hour with a cruising speed of 230 miles per hour. No other bomber in the world approached its capabilities.

The Superfortress also influenced American strategy in the Pacific. Already masters of the Solomon, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands, American strategists elected to bypass the Japanese stronghold in the Caroline Islands and instead turn their attention to the Marianas Islands. Their decision was influenced in part by the availability of the new B-29 bomber, which could easily reach the mainland of Japan some 1,500 miles away from the Marianas islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.

The B-29 also brought a number of technological innovations to America’s existing air arsenal. It was the first plane to feature a heated, pressurized crew cabin, which greatly improved crew comfort and combat effectiveness while decreasing their fatigue. With pressurization, the B-29 could operate at significantly higher altitudes than previous bombers and often above the ceiling of enemy fighters. It was also the first bomber to pioneer dual-wheeled tricycle landing gear. Previously, the B-17 Flying Fortress featured a tail wheel and the B-24 Liberator a single nose wheel, which made the latter notoriously unstable on landing. Without discounting these aeronautical innovations, what really distinguished the B-29 from every other bomber in the world was its state-of-the-art gunnery system, which made it quite literally a flying superfortress.

The aircraft featured a General Electric Company model 2CFR55B1 centralized fire-control system, or CFC, which transformed bomber defensive gunnery from a loose collection of independent guns into an integrated gunnery system. The major components of the CFC system were five gunsights, five remotely controlled turrets, five targeting computers, and an electric gun-switching system. Each of the five turrets was operated remotely by a gunner stationed in one of five sighting stations located throughout the aircraft. The firing trajectory was calculated by five targeting computers, each associated with a sighting station and each connected to one or more turrets that could be operated from that single sighting station.

Two turrets were located in the forward section of the aircraft, with the upper forward turret on top of the fuselage and the lower forward turret on the bottom, both positioned slightly aft of the forward pressurized crew compartment where the pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, and navigator sat. Similarly, the upper aft and lower aft turrets were located on the top and bottom of the fuselage toward the rear of the aircraft forward of its tail fin. The fifth was mounted in the tail facing the rear.

The B-29 carried a crew of 11 airmen, five of whom were gunners. The fire control officer, also called the ring gunner or top gunner, sighted through a plexiglass blister on top of the fuselage and were seated in the middle pressurized crew compartment in a tall chair known as the “barber chair.” The right- and left-side gunners, or blister gunners, were stationed below the top gunner, sighting through blisters on opposite sides of the fuselage. The bombardier sat in the nose of the aircraft, forward of the pilot and co-pilot, and functioned as the nose gunner when not engaged in the actual bombing run. The nose gunner’s gunsight retracted to be stowed out of the way when he turned his attention to the bombsight, which was affixed to the floor between his feet. Finally, the tail gunner sat in the rear of the airplane alone in the aft pressurized compartment.

One gunner was assigned primary control or “first call” on the use of each of the five turrets. Through a series of electrical switches, control of the turret could be passed to a secondary gunner who could operate it alone or in conjunction with his primary turret. The nose gunner had primary control of both forward turrets. Secondary control of the upper forward turret fell to the top gunner; the lower forward turret was controlled by either of the side gunners. The top gunner had primary control of the upper aft turret and secondary control of the upper forward turret. The side gunners had primary control of the lower aft turret with secondary control of the lower forward turret and the tail turret. The tail gunner could only control the tail turret.

With all the overlapping fire control possibilities, proper communication among the gunners via the aircraft’s interphone system was paramount, with the fire control officer quarterbacking the whole process. The gun positioning system, with the exception of the tail mount, contained fire interrupter cams, which prohibited the guns from firing on their own aircraft’s wings or tail. However, the guns could fire on their own formation if the weapons were active at the time when control switched between gunners and the guns swung around to the second gunner’s targeting position.

Each of the five turrets featured two air-cooled Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns. In response to the relative effectiveness of frontal attacks, later versions of the aircraft included two additional .50s in the upper forward turret. To avoid overheating the guns, gunners were instructed to fire in short bursts and then count to three before firing again. Hot gun barrels would expand, decreasing accuracy, or could rupture completely or “cook off” the next round by thermally induced firing. A maximum of 25 rounds could be fired at once but then required at least 15 seconds of cooling off, which must have seemed like eternity when engaged with the enemy. Early B-29 models also included a 20mm cannon in the tail mount. The cannon was controlled by the same sighting and firing mechanism as the rear machine gun turret and could be fired in conjunction with the machine guns but not alone. The 20mm round weighed about twice as much as the .50-caliber round but packed nearly three times its force.

Each gunner manually operated a gunsight, which was connected electrically to the CFC system and contained a 2-inch by 3-inch glass eyepiece. The glass optics had two interchangeable sky filters, enabling the gunner to maintain a clear view of his target through the optics in nearly dark conditions or even sighting an enemy attacking from out of the sun. A reticle consisting of a circle of dots aligned around a center dot, similar to the crosshairs on a rifle scope or the focusing marks on a camera viewfinder, was reflected on the optical glass by a reticle lamp of adjustable illumination.

When a target was encountered, the gunner was required to first visually identify the type of enemy aircraft and then adjust the target size knob on the gunsight from 35 feet to 150 feet to correspond with the wingspan of the target aircraft. The projected reticle size changed as the target size knob was adjusted, showing the current target size setting in feet at the 12 o’clock position on the reticle circle. Placing the center dot of the reticle on the center of the target, the gunner would then adjust the gunsight’s range wheel until the target aircraft’s wings completely filled the reticle circle.

Tracking the target then required the smooth movement of the gunsight on both the vertical axis, or elevation, and on the horizontal axis, or azimuth, to keep the target aircraft centered in the reticle and properly ranged within the bounds of the reticle circle. Changes in azimuth were affected by the gunner rotating the gunsight horizontally along with his body, while changes in elevation required moving the gunsight vertically by rotating the two hand wheel grips that were located on the outsides of the gunsight frame. Friction adjustments allowed the gunner to customize the touch of the gunsight’s movements to his preference.

Each movement in the gunsight, whether in elevation or in azimuth, resulted in an electrically activated corresponding movement to the guns (elevation), the turret (azimuth), or both. The mechanism for transmitting these movements involved differential selsyn generators in the gunsight and at the gun emplacement as well as a servo amplifier and two amplidyne generators, which drove the two motors that moved the guns.

With the exception of the tail mount, the turrets could rotate 360 degrees in azimuth and the guns could incline to 90 degrees in elevation relative to the body of the aircraft. The firing triggers were not “pulled” per se, but rather were buttons located adjacent to the hand wheels and depressed by either of the gunner’s thumbs. An action switch depressed by the gunner’s left palm while in contact with the hand wheel served as a control override for the sighting station. If the action switch was not depressed, such as in the event the gunner was incapacitated, the guns could not be fired from that sighting station. Control of the turret(s) then passed to another gunner’s sighting station regardless of the current settings of the electrical control switches, ensuring that all turrets remained operational.

While in contact with the enemy, the gunner simply needed to properly size, range, and track the target with his gunsight and then fire at the appropriate effective range. The CFC system moved the guns while the computer continuously calculated all the corrections needed for the fired projectile to hit the target. With computer-calculated targeting, the effective range of the guns was 900 yards, 50 percent farther than manually sighted guns and over twice the effective range of most enemy fighters’ guns.

The computer introduced the correction as a deviation from the parallel mirroring movements between the gunsight and the guns as transmitted by the system of selsyns. The total calculated correction was the sum of individual corrections for ballistics, parallax, and lead. Ballistics corrections compensated for the deflection of the projectile caused by gravity and by wind as the projectile exited an aircraft traveling around 250 miles per hour. Since the guns themselves were remote from the gunsights, parallax correction allowed for the distance along the length of the aircraft between the gunsight and the gun barrels. Lead correction allowed for the travel distance of the target aircraft during the time the projectile was in the air.

To perform its correction calculations, the computer required a number of pieces of input information obtained from several different sources. These inputs included the current position of the guns in both elevation and azimuth; the aircraft’s true air speed, altitude, and outside temperature, which were input by the aircraft’s navigator; the range to the target obtained from the gunsight as the gunner tracked the target and adjusted the range wheel; and the relative velocity of the target received from two gyroscopes located on the gunsight as the gunner tracked the target.

Depending on the type of parallax, two different models of computers were used. A single-parallax computer, the General Electric model 2CH1C1, was used at sighting stations that had parallax between the gunsight and only one gun location, such as the tail gunner station, which controlled only one turret, or the nose gunner station, whose two turrets were located above and below each other almost equidistant longitudinally from the gunsight. A double-parallax computer, the model 2CH1D1, was used for the three top and side gunners’ sighting stations since all three gunners could simultaneously control two turrets of differing parallax from their gunsight. Although the side gunners were capable of controlling three different turrets via the control switching system, they could only operate two at any one time.

All inputs to the computer were electrical, but the computer itself performed its calculations mechanically since a purely electrical calculator lay outside the reach of existing technology in the era of vacuum tubes with their appetite for electrical current and enormous heat output. Aboard an aircraft, size and weight were further concerns. Conversion of the electrical inputs into the mechanical calculation system was achieved through an array of selsyns and potentiometers.

The computer itself was really several separate but interconnected calculating units contained within the same chassis, which was the size of a suitcase and weighed more than 50 pounds. The ballistic calculating unit was programmed with the known effects of gravity and the ballistic characteristics of a .50-caliber shell fired from the Browning M2, such as its muzzle velocity. To make the ballistics correction calculation, the ballistic unit needed to know the current gun position for the angle of initial velocity, the range to the target, the current true air speed, which affected windage, and the aircraft’s current altitude and outside temperature, which affected the air density and thus the drag on the bullet. Similarly, the parallax computing unit was programmed with the longitudinal distance(s) between its gunsight and the turret(s) that sight could control, but it needed to know the current gun position and the range to the target to compute the parallax correction trigonometrically. Finally, the lead calculating unit computed the lead correction from the range and the relative velocity of the target along with the ballistic characteristics, which affected the time of the projectile to the target.

The computer’s output, which consisted of the parallel signal received from the gunsight selsyn adjusted for the sum of the three calculated corrections, was then converted back into electrical impulses, which fed a servo amplifier, or feedback controller, that drove the two gunpositioning motors, one for elevation and one for azimuth. Thus the computer’s correction was introduced as an alteration to the position of the guns and of the turret from that which would have been exactly parallel to the gunsight’s position.

Because they were connected electrically, the computers did not have to be physically located with either the gunsights or the turrets. The nose gunner’s computer was located in the forward pressurized cabin aft of the pilot’s armor, while the other four computers were placed under the floor in the radar operator’s compartment near the back of the middle pressurized cabin surrounded by armor. In case of a computer failure or combat damage, an override switch allowed the gunner to bypass the computer completely and operate the guns without its correction using a retractable flip-down peep sight on the gunsight.

According to U.S. Army Air Forces records, a total of 3,760 production Superfortresses were delivered, around 70 percent of which were built by Boeing at its plants in Wichita, Kansas, and Renton, Washington. The rest were produced in Marietta, Georgia, by the Bell Aircraft Company and in Omaha, Nebraska, by the Glenn L. Martin Company, later part of Martin-Marietta.

After assembly was complete but before the aircraft was combat ready, the guns were harmonized and the targeting computers tested. First, both guns in a single turret were aligned to parallel target marks by use of a bore sighting tool with alignment made by changes to adjustment screws. Then each turret was aligned with each of the sighting stations that could control it by using a predefined harmonization target placed at least 100 feet away from the aircraft. Adjustments were made to either the selsyn at the sighting station or to the one at the turret, depending on which gunsight and turret combination was being adjusted. After the guns and sighting stations were harmonized, the targeting computers along with all the input systems and calculating components were tested using a comprehensive testing device containing on its face over 50 dials, meters, and switches.

Aircraft production quickly outpaced the manufacturers’ capacity to set up the revolutionary CFC systems, so the USAAF began training its own crews to ensure that the otherwise combat-ready bombers were not delayed in deployment. USAAF Corporal Robert W. “Bob” Truxell of Lansing, Michigan, was part of the first class to graduate from the B-29 CFC and computer training schools at Lowry Field in Denver, Colorado. Truxell had previously washed out of air cadet pilot training due to a three-month bout with rheumatic fever, which permanently disqualified him from serving in a flight crew. The illness proved to be fortuitous since most of his air cadet squadron was later lost in the ill-conceived raid on the Ploesti, Romania, oil refineries on August 1, 1943. After recovering from his illness, Truxell was reassigned from air cadets to aircraft armament, where he completed the remote control turret mechanic course.

After the turret course, Truxell was tapped for the 16-week B-29 CFC specialist course because he had begun studying engineering, including taking trigonometry, at the General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan, before enlisting in February 1943. Corporal Truxell finished first in his CFC class, earning entrance into targeting computer school and a third stripe upon its completion. Shortly thereafter he was given command of the first graduating class and a staff sergeant’s rocker. The new crew’s first assignment was in Georgia.

Truxell writes, “We were all sent to the [Bell Aircraft] B-29 factory in Marietta, Georgia, where completed B-29s were lined up for a mile awaiting proper alignment of the gun turrets and central computer.” He vividly recalls using a fire extinguisher to flush civilians sleeping on the clock at government expense out of the bombers’ pressurized crew tunnels so his crew could access the aft areas of the aircraft. Once the backlog in Georgia was cleared, the crew leapfrogged to various stateside air bases where B-29 squadrons were ready for overseas deployment—except for the final adjustment of their gunnery systems. After a particular squadron deployed, the gunnery crew moved on to the next base. Truxell calls his service a “pretty safe and interesting job.”

The B-29’s revolutionary gunnery system made a Japanese fighter pilot’s job neither pretty safe nor interesting. According to the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest published in December 1945, in the 13-month period from August 1944 to the war’s end in August 1945, B-29s were responsible for the destruction of 914 enemy aircraft in the air with a loss of just 72 of their own to enemy aircraft during more than 31,000 combat sorties flown.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

If China and America come to blows, it will be here.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Accidental war is rare, but not impossible. Common to all of these scenarios is the potential that Chinese (or less likely, American) public opinion might become so inflamed as to box in policymakers. If Xi Jinping, who has made assertive foreign policy a cornerstone of his administration, feels that he cannot back down and survive politically, then things could get unpredictable very quickly.

Neither China nor the United States want war, at least not in the near future.  China’s military buildup notwithstanding, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its components are not ready to fight the United States.  The U.S., for its part, would surely prefer to avoid the chaos and uncertainty that any military conflict with China would create.

Nevertheless, both China and the United States are making commitments in the South China Sea that each may find difficult to back away from. Over the past two weeks, these commitments have generated a war of words that analysts of the relationship have found troubling.  The key problems focus on China’s efforts to expand (or create) islands in the Spratlys, which could theoretically provide the basis for claims to territorial waters.  The insistence of the United States on freedom of navigation could bring these tensions to a boil. Here are three ways in which tensions in the South China Sea might lead to conflict.

Island Hopping in the SCS

Over the past several months, China has stepped up construction of what observers are calling “The Great Wall of Sand.”  This “great wall” involves expanding a group of islands in the Spratly chain so that they can support airstrips, weapons, and other permanent installations. It appears that Beijing is committed to defending these new islands as an integral parts of Chinese territory, a position that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does not support.  Washington has other ideas, and has maintained that it will carry out freedom-of-navigation patrols in areas that China claims as territorial waters.

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The prospects for conflict are clear. If U.S. ships or aircraft enter waters that China claims, then Chinese sailors, soldiers, and pilots need to take great care about how they respond.  A militarized response could quickly lead to escalation, especially if American forces suffer any kind of serious damage.  It’s also easy to imagine scenarios in which island-building leads China to become embroiled against an ASEAN state. In such a case, a freedom-of-navigation patrol could put China in an awkward position relative to the third party.

Excitable Fighter Jocks

China and the United States have already come close to conflict over aircraft collisions.  When a P-3 Orion collided a PLAN J-8 interceptor in 2001, it led to weeks of recriminations and negotiation before the crew of the P-3 was returned to the United States, and the plane was returned… in a box.

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It’s easy to imagine an even more serious confrontation in the SCS.  Another accidental collision would be bad enough, but if a scenario developed similar to that of the downing of KAL 007, with a Chinese fighter jock actually opening fire on an American plane, the situation could get ugly very quickly.  And if an American pilot fired upon a Chinese plane, the reaction of the Chinese public could become too much for Beijing to reasonably handle.

If China decides to go ahead and declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea, matters could become even more complicated.  The United States made an elaborate display of ignoring China’s ADIZ in the East China Sea, but China has greater interests and a greater presence in the South China Sea. Another declaration would almost certainly incur a similar reaction from the United States, putting American and Chinese planes into close proximity.

(Recommended: 5 Places Where World War III Could Start)

Submarine Misunderstanding

In the Cold War, the Soviet Union and NATO suffered innumerable submarine “near misses,” as boats hunted each other, and occasionally bumped each other, in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. The dynamics of U.S.-Chinese sub interaction hasn’t yet played out in quite the same way, in part because China has yet to establish a sustained SSBN patrol, and I part because Chinese boats do not range as far as their Soviet counterparts. But as the submarine force of the PLAN becomes more adventurous, submarine incidents may increase.

Many analysts are arguing that the PLAN needs to push its submarines past the first island chain in order to seriously threaten U.S. access to China’s littoral.  Preparing for this would require increasing the tempo of the PLAN’s submarine operations, which would more often put China’s boats in proximity with Japanese and American subs.  To be sure, Chinese submarines are loud enough that U.S. boats should have plenty of time to get out of their way, but the same could be said of Soviet boats for much of the Cold War.

If a major submarine incident happened between the United States and China, the nature of the medium might offer some hope for de-escalation (we often don’t hear about these accidents until much later). But such an incident would also put more lives and property at stake than a fighter collision.

Concluding Thoughts

Accidental war is rare, but not impossible. Common to all of these scenarios is the potential that Chinese (or less likely, American) public opinion might become so inflamed as to box in policymakers. If Xi Jinping, who has made assertive foreign policy a cornerstone of his administration, feels that he cannot back down and survive politically, then things could get unpredictable very quickly.

As Denny Roy has argued, China is playing offense in the South China Sea. By establishing facts on the ground (indeed, establishing “ground”), it is creating a situation in which normal U.S. behavior looks like destabilizing intervention. What’s less than clear is that Beijing fully understands the risks of this strategy, or the dangers of pushing the United States Navy on freedom of navigation, one of the long-term core interests of the United States. And given that governments sometimes don’t even understand that they’re playing a dangerous game until they find themselves in the middle of it, a great deal of caution is warranted.

This article first appeared in 2015. 

Image: Reuters.

Elena Pokalova

Security, Middle East

Foreign fighters who are left behind are only destined to rejoin the Islamic State at the first opportunity. But a different trajectory is possible for others if they are repatriated, brought to justice, and returned to a peaceful life.

The United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to address the fate of the foreign fighters remaining in Syria and Iraq on August 21, 2020. The draft resolution called on member states to prevent future security threats from “foreign terrorist fighters” (FTFs) “by bringing them to justice, preventing the radicalization to terrorism and recruitment of FTFs and accompanying family members, particularly accompanying children, including by facilitating the return of the children to their countries of origin, as appropriate and on a case by case basis.”

Around forty thousand people from all over the world had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for such terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State. Many of those people perished on the battlefield or have returned home. However, an active group of foreign supporters of the caliphate stayed until the Islamic State lost territory and collapsed in early 2019. Since then, thousands of foreigners have remained in detention facilities such as the Kurdish-controlled al-Hol or al-Roj camps.

While the draft resolution focused on the rehabilitation and reintegration of such foreign fighters, it did not include the repatriation of foreign fighters to their countries of origin. This was the reason for the U.S. veto. Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, explained that the resolution failed “to even include reference to the crucial first step—repatriation to countries of origin or nationality.”

Repatriation of foreign fighters has been a highly contentious issue. Some countries, like Macedonia, have taken their foreign fighters back. Others, like France, have been more open to repatriating children. Many repatriation efforts have faced resistance from the public and pushback from politicians. For instance, in Norway, a decision to repatriate a Norwegian woman and her two children from Syria prompted the collapse of the governing coalition.

European countries have been especially averse to bringing their foreign fighters back. After all, Europe has had experiences with terrorist attacks at the hands of foreign fighter returnees. The 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the 2015 attack on the Thalys train in France, the 2015 Paris attacks, and the 2016 bombing at the Brussels airport all involved ISIS returnees from Syria and Iraq. The fear is that repatriated foreign fighters could plot similar attacks once at home.

However, returnee perpetrators in those attacks returned back to Europe under the radar of security services. Mehdi Nemmouche, the man who attacked the Brussels Museum, made his way back through Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong to avoid detection. In the case of the Paris attacks, the perpetrators exploited refugee routes to smuggle foreign fighters back. 

In contrast, repatriated foreign fighters would remain visible to security services and security risks would actually be reduced. First, returnees could be prosecuted for crimes committed in Syria and Iraq and be placed in prison. Second, various administrative measures such as passport revocation would allow the authorities to significantly restrict the potential movements of suspect individuals. Finally, keeping track of repatriated returnees and providing them with rehabilitation assistance would offer venues for monitoring their activities.  

If security risks become more manageable in cases of controlled repatriation, then the world faces greater uncertainty if foreign fighters remain in Syria and Iraq. Returnees are not the only individuals that pose a threat. Lessons from history indicate that foreign fighter relocators can pose equal, if not greater, threats.  

After the Soviet-Afghan war, foreign fighters who were denied an opportunity to return home joined numerous armed conflicts around the world. Those relocating foreign fighters helped spread jihadist ideologies around the globe and promoted the use of terrorism. For instance, American Christopher Paul traveled to Afghanistan and Bosnia before making his way to Germany to train Islamist cells there. In the 1990s, some foreign fighter relocators found refuge in Europe, where some helped build European jihadist networks. Thus, Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri was active in London’s Finsbury Park Mosque where he disseminated militant jihadist ideas. Currently, the danger remains that if foreign fighters are not repatriated from Syria and Iraq, then they might similarly move on to other locales to further spread Islamic State ideals.  

While many countries are paralyzed with indecision, the Islamic State is taking advantage of the situation. Kurdish authorities have reported that Islamic State members have made prison escapes. Numerous reports have warned that the Islamic State is regaining strength and has been successfully mounting terrorist attacks in the region. Foreign fighters who are left behind are only destined to rejoin the Islamic State at the first opportunity. It is too late for some foreign fighters who have already done so. But a different trajectory is possible for others if they are repatriated, brought to justice, and returned to a peaceful life.

Elena Pokalova, PhD, is an associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University in Washington, DC, and author of Returning Islamist Foreign Fighters: Threats and Challenges to the West. The views expressed in the article are her own.

Image: Reuters

Ross Harrison, Alex Vatanka

Security, Middle East

The agreement with Iran could end up being the first major foray of many that gave Beijing a long reach into the Middle East at the expense of the United States, and even Russia.

Given today’s contentious global geopolitical map, the budding China-Iran relationship seems like a perfect marriage. China needs to buy oil and gas to fuel its economic growth, and Iran desperately needs revenue to sustain its flagging economy. This is particularly true given the collapse of global oil prices and the punishing sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran.  

The cooperation between Tehran and Beijing, however, extends way beyond the energy sector. Iran figures into China’s plan to extend its economic influence across Eurasia through its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Iran needs foreign direct investment. This strategic alignment explains the twenty-five-year, $400 billion economic deal presently under discussion between China and Iran. If this agreement is fully implemented between the two countries, then its ramifications will not be limited to China-Iran relations. In fact, they will have repercussions for Washington’s standing in the Middle East and beyond. 

China, Iran and the American Foe 

With a U.S. presidential election looming, and with all of the fanfare of the Israel-U.A.E.-Bahrain deals, Washington does not seem terribly alarmed about the possibility of a stepped-up Iran-China relationship. In fact, there is skepticism about whether the twenty-five-year agreement can be sustained. Claims about the strategic nature of the partnership have been dismissed as hyperbole. Skeptics claim that the deal is essentially an entirely Iranian-made wish-list presented to the Chinese, without any proof that Beijing is willing to fully sign it.   

But Washington should not be complacent. As China’s global footprint expands, and Tehran remains incentivized to resist U.S. pressure, the two states have a basic, powerful, and potentially enduring shared motivation for cooperation: to push back against U.S. efforts in the Middle East.

While it is still unclear how the relationship will play out, the geographic area for potential cooperation is surprisingly vast, extending from the Mediterranean coast of Syria to the steppes of Central Asia, and from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. If implemented, the deal could act as a force multiplier for Iran at a time when Washington claims its maximum pressure campaign is severely diminishing the country’s strategic punch.

While negotiations could progress slower than Iran would like, there are few baked-in historical conflicts that would completely derail a deal with China. Without any major substantive disputes and absent a fraught political history, the relationship between Tehran and Beijing will likely endure and even strengthen if the deal is implemented.

That having been said, one should be careful not to conclude too quickly that strong Iran-China relations in the coming decade will be trouble-free, or beyond the point of no return. In fact, there are several possible paths Iran-China relations could take in the future. One scenario could be that the agreement with Iran ends up being the first major foray of many that gave Beijing a long reach into the Middle East at the expense of the United States, and even Russia. Perhaps this agreement will signal that Iran is permanently giving up on what it sees as an unreliable and hostile West, and tacking toward more predictable Eastern partners.

But this future scenario is not inevitable. Another possible scenario could be that the benefits prove to have been more tactical than strategic, and limited to the economic sphere. 

Washington’s Choice

Washington needs to understand that these two future realities could hinge on the policy choices it makes today. In other words, the United States could be the wildcard driver of Iran’s relationship with China in the future. 

This claim is not pure conjecture. The partnership between Tehran and Beijing has already gotten ballast from actions taken in Washington. Trump’s trade war against China has given Beijing an incentive to challenge U.S. interests globally. After all, the U.S. renouncement of the 2015 international nuclear deal (JCPOA) gave Tehran a strong motivation to seek safety in China’s embrace.  

This deal might have taken place regardless of the nuclear deal’s demise. Unfortunately, America’s hostile policies have given both countries added incentives to make it successful. Iran, counterintuitively, has become one of China’s biggest champions in the Middle East and the broader Islamic World, despite Beijing’s blatant persecution of its Chinese Muslim (Uyghurs) minority population. The perceived need to keep China close is so great that officials in Tehran have gone as far as suggesting that the Muslims under pressure in China are “bad” [allegedly of jihadist persuasion] and China is doing the world a favor. This logic is only a smokescreen for Tehran’s need to sidle up to Beijing at a time when Iran is under siege from the United States. From the Chinese side, at the diplomatic level, Beijing protects Iran in places like the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors as a way to signal to Washington that it cannot be pushed around.

Aside from trying to resist pressure from the United States, behind the scenes, there are powerful domestic forces at play that are giving impetus to Iran’s relations with China. The dominant faction in power in Tehran needs Chinese diplomatic and economic cover as it tries to cement its hold on power, prepares for a presidential election in 2021, and is faced with a looming, yet unpredictable, succession crisis, should Iran’s eighty-one-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, be incapacitated or die.

At the moment, China is in a position to dictate to Tehran. Besides giving the Chinese economic interests preferential treatment, Washington should worry that Iran can be a passageway for Beijing’s rise as a powerhouse in the Middle East and beyond. For example, growing military-to-military ties between Iran and China, including the sale of sophisticated military equipment,  such as anti-ship missiles that can threaten U.S. naval supremacy in the Persian Gulf, as well as sophisticated surveillance capabilities, should be a concern to Washington. If this happens, then Beijing’s primary aim will not be financial. Instead, it will use the opportunity to challenge the U.S. position in the Middle East through Iran.

This concern about Iran’s growing military capabilities was one of the reasons Trump gave for tearing up the nuclear deal. It was a concern that has become even more intense due to Iran’s relations with China (and Russia). But the concern started much earlier and is nothing new. As early as 1992, U.S. Naval Intelligence warned that the United States might not be able to “safely deploy a carrier in the Persian Gulf” due to Iranian capabilities. Back then, the fear was that Moscow would be Iran’s supplier. Today, under Trump’s policies toward Iran and China, Beijing is also likely to provide advanced military systems to the Islamic Republic.

But that does not have to be the case. Policy choices going forward, either under a Biden or Trump administration, still matter. While Iran clearly wants the United States out of the Middle East, China does not want the United States to totally withdraw. Washington has underwritten the defense of the Persian Gulf, which serves Chinese economic interests quite well. Beijing’s goal is for the United States to continue to bear the costs of providing Gulf security, but to limit the geopolitical and economic benefits to Washington for doing so. In other words, Beijing wants the United States to underwrite the costs, while China reaps the political and economic spoils.

Another potential wedge between Iran and China could be that Beijing has interests across the Middle East that extend beyond Iran. It has, for example, very good ties with the Gulf States and Israel, something it is intent on preserving. If Iran thinks that China will reflexively side with Tehran against all of its rivals, then it is mistaken.

Moreover, should China have a greater presence in the region and need to juggle multiple interests, Tehran might feel pressure from Beijing to change aspects of its revisionist policies. This might include Tehran’s hostility toward Israel as well as Tehran’s support for militant non-state actors. Ironically, these would be the same irritants that put the United States and Iran at loggerheads.

Iran and China are, in fact, strange bedfellows. The world’s largest Islamic theocracy and the world’s largest communist system have many inherent incompatibilities. One will be hard pushed to come up with a list of common values other than a joint desire to hang on to power and assist each other on the international stage as much as possible.

Washington has choices to make. It can continue on the warpath with Iran and its trade war with China. But this course of action will increase the probability that the China-Iran connection will flower and grow into a strategic alliance that will work against U.S. interests. Or the United States can try to find a way back towards a diplomatic track with Tehran that might benefit the region in terms of tamping down instability, but also exploit some of the inherent cracks in the nascent China-Iran relationship. China’s global rise is inevitable and ineluctable. But the United States should take diplomatic action to ensure that Iran does not become the path of least resistance for China to get there faster.    

Ross Harrison is a senior fellow and director of research at the Middle East Institute. He is also on the faculty of the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he was a professor in the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. With Paul Salem, he co-edited Escaping the Conflict Trap: Toward Ending Civil Wars in the Middle East (2019) 

Alex Vatanka is the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. He is the author of two books: “The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979” (2021) and “Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence” (2015). You can follow him at @AlexVatanka.

Image: Reuters

Thomas Trask, Jonathan Ruhe

Security, Eurasia

Two initially separate trends are coming together to drastically reshape the region with new opportunities and challenges for the United States.

Given everything that’s happened this year, and now that we’ve filled the “double hurricane” box, perhaps it wouldn’t be that surprising to see “armed conflict within NATO” as the winning square on our 2020 bingo card. This is precisely what could happen without overdue U.S. leadership in the increasingly volatile and strategically important Eastern Mediterranean.

Washington largely overlooked the area for decades after the end of the Cold War, both because it could afford to and because it had more pressing problems elsewhere. But two initially separate trends are coming together to drastically reshape the region with new opportunities and challenges for the United States.

The first is Turkey’s transformation under President Recep Erdoğan. What used to be a secular and democratic Western partner guarding NATO’s southeastern flank is now much more Islamist, nationalist and autocratic. A key feature of this new Turkey is its interventionism around the Eastern Mediterranean, featuring a very Turkish version of gunboat diplomacy.

The second is the discovery of sizable undersea energy reserves by Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and potentially other regional actors in the future. Combined these constitute some of the largest offshore natural gas finds anywhere in the world over the past decade. 

These two trends first came to a head late last year when Turkey intervened militarily in Libya’s civil war. In exchange for saving it from defeat, Ankara secured from the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Tripoli government a maritime boundary agreement purporting to recognize vast Turkish offshore territorial claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Not accidentally, this agreement directly threatens everyone else in the neighborhood. Unlike its neighbors, which agree on applying the Law of the Sea, Ankara uniquely contends that islands cannot be part of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Thus its agreement with Tripoli extends nearly to the shorelines of Cyprus and Greek islands like Crete and Rhodes, threatening efforts by those countries to explore for additional energy and—along with Israel—deliver it via pipeline to Europe.

Now tensions are heating up. To demonstrate its expansive new EEZ claim, Turkey sent energy exploration ships with naval escorts into Cypriot and, just last month, Greek waters. Along with Ankara’s growing military and economic footprint in Libya, these provocations have almost triggered shootouts with naval vessels of Turkey’s NATO allies France and Greece. In recent days and weeks Turkey, Russia, France, the UAE, Greece and Cyprus have each bolstered the presence of their military in the region. 

Brussels and Berlin have tried to defuse these tensions while expressing support for Greece and Cyprus, but further Turkish escalation appears likely. Even when speaking with one voice, the European Union lacks credibly strong disincentives to deter Ankara, especially now as economic deterioration inside Turkey—made worse by the coronavirus—increases Erdogan’s temptation to stoke nationalism and seek diversions abroad.

Thus far, the United States has largely allowed the situation to deteriorate by standing aside. As the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) has laid out in several recent reports, Washington must reassert its former stabilizing role in the region to address these proliferating crises and protect U.S. interests.

A crucial step will be to appoint a U.S. Special Envoy for the Eastern Mediterranean. 

He or she should work with the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum—Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority—to create a clear counterweight to Turkey’s growing obstruction of regional energy development. 

American diplomatic leadership also could help de-escalate tensions between Ankara and Athens, both of whom remain open to talks. And last month’s EEZ agreement between Greece and Egypt, reached in accord with international law, did not foreclose future negotiations between Turkey and Egypt. 

A special envoy also must end a decade of “leading from behind” on Libya, where Turkey and Russia appear to be establishing permanent beachheads and coordinating to shape the country’s future, despite being on opposing sides of the conflict. Among other priorities, U.S. officials should focus on limiting Ankara’s influence over the Tripoli government. These limitations should include leveraging options to redeploy U.S. military assets out of Turkey, and perhaps consider basing them in Greece.

As a complement to stronger diplomacy, the United States also must bolster its military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Deeper defense ties with Athens would help counter both Turkey and Russia. This could be achieved through additional U.S. rotational deployments, increased foreign military financing for Greek purchases of U.S. weapons, and perhaps even permanent basing in Greece. 

A recent decision by Washington to loosen the arms embargo on Cyprus should be viewed as a productive step toward eliminating Russia’s own presence on the strategically vital island in exchange for closer U.S. defense cooperation with Nicosia.

Amid nearly unprecedented tensions within the transatlantic alliance, these initial measures would go a long way toward promoting U.S. interests in stability and peaceful energy development.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Trask (ret.), former vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, serves on the Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), where Jonathan Ruhe is Director of Foreign Policy. 

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

Such a feat would require major changes. Could China pull it off?

Key Point: This mysterious plane could be Beijing's version of the F-35. No doubt it was made from stolen U.S. technologies but China needs to improve its copy to make it carrier-worthy.

The Chinese appear to be preparing to launch a first-of-its-kind new-generation fighter jet in 2021, a move which could signify a large step forward in power-projection and air-attack capability for a country seeking to strengthen its global influence.

Citing an “aviation industry report,” the Chinese-backed Global Times stated that the new plane is likely to be a carrier-launched fighter variant of its fifth-generation J-31 stealth fighter jet. It has long been discussed that China may engineer a new, carrier-based variant of its J-31 jet, in what might appear as a transparent attempt to rival America’s F-35 fighter jet. 

The report speculates that the new plane could be the now-in-development Shenyang J-15 fighter jet but is more likely an FC-31 carrier variant of the J-31 jet. The Global Times reports said the Chinese have been rumored to be amid ongoing modifications to its J-31 jet for the specific purpose of engineering a carrier-launched variant.

The existence of an aircraft such as this could provide some kind of counterbalance to the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B fighter jet and the U.S. Navy’s F-35C fighter jet, depending upon its level of technical sophistication. An expeditionary fifth-generation stealth fighter able to operate from Chinese amphibious ships and aircraft carriers does bring new attack possibilities for maritime commanders seeking to project power. The possibility certainly does align with China’s well-known work to build its own indigenous fleet of aircraft carriers.

While there has been much discussion about the extent to which China’s J-31 fighter jet clearly seems to replicate the U.S. F-35 fighter jet in terms of external configuration, many of its internal components may simply not be fully known. Despite what appears to be a transparent attempt to possibly “rip off” F-35 design specs, it is not at all clear if an FC-31 would in fact rival a Navy F-35C. Much of this would rely upon sensor technology, weapons range and onboard computing, as those areas encompass many of the attributes unique to the F-35 fighter jet.

For instance, the F-35 fighter jet not only provides armed multirole air attack support but also functions as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aerial node able to find and transmit threat information at long ranges, at times beyond the horizon. The F-35s Distributed Aperture System surround cameras and Electro-Optical Targeting System enables it to operate in a sensor-drone type capacity as well as an attack platform. While designed to be maneuverable, the F-35 fighter jet is engineered to detect threats well in advance of being close enough to require dog-fighting.

A carrier-launched fifth-generation stealth fighter would massively expand China’s ability to project power internationally, especially in places such as the South China Sea where it may be difficult to build runways for a fixed-wing attack. A sea-based fighter could surveil or target island areas without needing to take off and land from one of the islands themselves, thereby making themselves less vulnerable to ground or runway strikes against their air operations. It also goes without saying that fifth-generation air support would change the threat equation for Taiwan should it face an amphibious attack. 

After all, having just fourth-generation aircraft able to launch from carriers, such as U.S. F/A-18s, may limit an ability to conduct operations over areas with extremely advanced air defenses. A stealthy fighter, however, while still at risk against some emerging air defenses, enables global power projection in a substantially different way. It takes little imagination to envision China’s grand ambitions for expanded global influence, as having attack-power projection fortifies their current efforts to expand into many areas of Africa, the Middle East and of course Southeast Asia. 

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.

This article first appeared earlier this year and is reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Carlo J. V. Caro, Sasha Dov Bachmann

Security, Asia

Since 1983, Beijing has been a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty which prohibits new territorial claims, other than the seven original ones. If China decided to alter this position, it would have to abandon the treaty or push for a reform in 2048.

Climate change has started to show its undeniable effects in global geopolitics. Its first consequences are seen in both polar continents, as their ice caps are increasingly melting. The United States, China and Russia are justling for influence in the Arctic, while the Antarctic has begun to experience similar characteristics, with the additional involvement of other European and Latin American powers.

The growing access to the Arctic ocean has transformed the region into a front of geopolitical tension because of its value as a commercial route and its natural resources. The Arctic has around 13 percent of non explored oil reserves, 30 percent of gas, and an abundance of uranium, minerals, gold, and diamonds. Greenland possesses the largest reserves of minerals outside China needed for the production of batteries and phones. For China itself, it is an important source of minerals and for the establishment of a route towards the United States. China seeks to develop a polar silk road as part of its global program in the construction of railways, ports, and other works in dozens of countries.

While mining in Greenland has high costs due to the environment, these can be reduced as the ice caps melt. This allows demand for potential buyers. From a strategic point of view, Greenland forms part of what the United States considers a crucial path for naval operations in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. It is also important because of its proximity to the United States. For these reasons the former U.S. secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, retired pressured Denmark to reject Chinese financial investments into three commercial airports in Greenland.

China uses its Belt and Road initiative as a debt trap, investing in regions to create debts that cannot be repaid. In exchange, Beijing steals strategic assets. In this manner, China has acquired strategic assets like a port in Sri Lanka. It is China’s belief that the polar regions will contribute to its development even though they are located far from them. Beijing, therefore, plans to emulate its actions in the South China Sea for the Arctic and Antarctic. In the South China sea, it slowly invaded disputed areas, establishing infrastructure and avoiding conflict. In this way, it, therefore, expanded its economic and military capacities, as well as its interests and sovereignty.

Beijing is planning the construction of submarines to operate in the arctic and it has examined how to build submarines capable of surfacing out of the ice caps. The Chinese icebreaking vessel Xue Long II was sent to the thirty-sixth Antarctic mission of China to supply the scientific base of Zhonstan, one of the four which China maintains in the area. This was the first time that type of Chinese vessel arrived in the Antarctic, demonstrating Beijing’s growing interest to consolidate its presence. This natural resources-rich region has been disputed by numerous countries, although litigations have been practically frozen since 1961 by the Treaty of the Antarctic. China has therefore forced itself into a complex system of relations, having launched its first expedition only in 1983. In comparison, the countries that have been historically connected to the region like Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Norway, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have undertaken missions since the nineteenth century, and the seven territorial claims date to the first part of the twentieth century.

China’s relations with Latin America cannot be separated from its ambitions in the Antarctic and will be fundamental for its expansionism in the years to come. In the 1990s, as military dictatorships were falling in Latin America, President Bill Clinton sought to promote neoliberalism in the region. But the failure of this policy and the rise of local nationalistic leftists left the United States with few friends in Latin America. After the financial crisis of 2008, China took advantage of the economic conditions in Latin America to expand their presence. Washington’s policies under President Donald Trump toward Latin America have allowed China to continue to consolidate itself in the continent.

Aside from its wealth in natural resources and its potential to supply Chinese markets with commodities, Latin America has a strategic significance. Since Washington has a network of alliances neutralizing Beijing’s expansionism in the Pacific, China’s aim is to ship its influence to the Western hemisphere. This encirclement includes Beijing’s aim to end the external recognition of Taipei by using its leverage on Latin American countries, many of whom have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Panama, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador are some of the most recent countries to have dropped recognition of Taiwan.

China’s economic and geopolitical interests are therefore interrelated. Beijing has invested in great infrastructure projects, from the Tren Maya connecting the beaches of Riviera Maya and destinations in the Yucatan peninsula, to a space monitoring station in Argentina. These investments stimulate their economies, while allowing Beijing the capacity to exercise their power over critical sectors and making Latin America dependent on China. Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela are countries that are increasingly falling into this debt trap. Already, China has overtaken the IMF and the World Bank as Latin America’s largest lender. China aims to facilitate the acquisition of projects for its companies, to assure Chinese products have a competitive edge in Latin America against the United States, and to internationalize its currency. Moreover, these investments also change the conditions of employment, as there is uncertainty of whether the jobs created are for locals or to create Chinese immigration to Latin America.

Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina under President Mauricio Macri, two U.S allies, have both employed tough anti-China rhetoric, only to find out their economies cannot survive without Beijing’s demand for their production of soy and raw materials. Not only has the role of the United States in Latin America’s trade gone down nearly 20 percent from 2000 to 2015, but Washington is also a competitor in agricultural production. Additionally, Beijing projects itself as a cyberpower, and has become part of the construction of the 5G network in Colombia, the country frequently described as the “U.S staunchest ally in Latin America.” In Argentina, the Chinese space monitoring station, managed by an agency linked to the People’s Liberation Army, is fenced off to Argentine officials, with no idea what communications it might be capturing in the region.

For the last ten years, Argentina has sought to pass laws that seek to reclaim their continental platform which they believe extends to the Antarctic. This year, Governor of Buenos Aires Axel Kiciloff indicated that the largest province in the country was the Antarctic, assuming the province of Buenos Aires was not considered. This reflects the notion for Buenos Aires the British Empire amputated its territorial integrity. Chile’s and Argentina’s relationship is also complex, reaching times bordering on war. With the arrival of President Alberto Fernandez, the relationship has experienced strong disagreements around maritime delimitations and Buenos Aires has sought to neutralize Chine’s projection towards the Antarctic. This same year, Uruguay received the Russian research vessel Admiral Vladimirsky on its way to the Antarctic to celebrate the 200-year-old discovery by Russian explorers, an event disputed by the British, and conduct a research expedition. China aims to catch up and it has mobilized towards the region since it experienced economic growth in 1990. Beijing considers it highly strategic, something shared by the rest of the world. China’s four bases and the construction of a fifth one, are dispersed throughout the Antarctic giving it a wide and ample reach into the continent.

Since 1983, Beijing has been a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty which prohibits new territorial claims, other than the seven original ones. If China decided to alter this position, it would have to abandon the treaty or push for a reform in 2048. This treaty has been instrumental in avoiding conflicts between the numerous countries that have territorial claims and also between those that possess research centers since it forbids military activities and establishes freedom for scientific work. The treaty also prohibits mining in order to protect the environment. While the Antarctic is rich in petroleum, gas and other minerals, it’s tough climatic conditions have made it expensive for its exploitation.

But the increasing Chinese interest in the Antarctic, especially after Xi Jinping took over, has generated worries to all the signatories of the treaty, especially those with claims in areas that have Chinese bases. Since 2013, China has pressured for the establishment of a Specially Designated Area in the Arctic. It has argued that it wants to protect the environment around its base. Nevertheless, this is a false pretense, and it is viewed with suspicion by the other powers.

The Kunlun station was established in 2009 and it is located in one the highest points of the antarctic, with both potential military and civilian applications. The center has been used for the Chinese space program and it has become a matter of pride for Beijing due to their belief they have reached parity in scientific research with the United States and Russia in the South Pole. More specifically, the Antarctic has a special role to play in the modernization and expansion of the Chinese Armed Forces. The base is essential for the development of a Chinese satellite system of navigation, similar to the GPS, Galileo, and Glonass. Satellite navigation systems are crucial in times of war since they are used to position and measure the timings of missiles. This station is perfectly positioned to increase the precision of Chinese navigation systems, therefore increasing their capacity.

To undertake military research is a violation of the Antarctic Treaty. The treaty allows members to conduct inspections but they are highly expensive and dangerous due to climatic conditions. This does not allow an efficient process of inspection, especially in areas like that are very remote.  If China is able to get the Specially Designated Area, then it will have increased influence over its activities around Kunlun station. But until now, this initiative has not been welcomed by the other signatories of the treaty even though Beijing has exerted pressure on Australia, the UK, France, Argentina, Norway, and New Zealand.

Carlo J. V. Caro researches U.S. Foreign Policy and Terrorism. He holds advanced degrees in Security Studies, and Islamic Studies from Columbia University.

Sasha Dov Bachmann is a professor of Law at the University of Canberra, Australia, and Research Fellow at NATO SHAPE Pacific, Hybrid Threats and Lawfare.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

Security, Asia

The Great War at sea presents an example worth emulating in certain respects and modifying or rejecting in others.

Here's What You Need To Remember: It’s doubtful any East Asian fight would be a one-on-one affair. This makes a heartening departure from the First World War precedent. While Japan is not today’s reigning maritime hegemon, it is the beneficiary of a preexisting and durable alliance with the reigning maritime hegemon, the United States. What it lacks in innate strength it can make up in allied solidarity so long as the transpacific relationship endures.

The First World War is the gift that keeps on giving when surveying modern Asian geopolitics and pondering how to manage it.

Consider what the Great War has to say about the military balance between China and Japan and how an East Asian war might unfold. Conventional opinion in Japan has long held that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would more or less steamroller the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) in wartime. Demographics, economics, defense budgets, you name it: they all line up on China’s side.

And there’s no gainsaying the impact of decades of meteoric economic growth and defense-budget increases on the mainland coupled with economic malaise in the island state. A productive economy furnishes the resources to amass military might while a stagnant one withholds warmaking resources. Beijing has availed itself of the opportunity flowing from its economic reform and opening project. To all appearances the balance of forces now tilts alarmingly toward the PLA.

Game over.

But not so fast: brute numbers of ships, planes, and missiles aren’t everything in combat. Far from it. The ability to combine all available assets for tactical and operational gain is what counts, and the order of battle—the panoply of hardware making up the military inventory—comprises only part of a nation’s martial portfolio. For example, the geographic setting matters. That’s why Clausewitz counsels commanders to evaluate the strength and situation of potential combatants when undertaking a net assessment. Tallying up hardware tells only part of the story.

And situation—geography—takes rank with Japan.

In that sense the island state resembles another island state situated off a great continent and squaring off against a continental aggressor. Namely, fin de siècle Great Britain. The British Isles stand athwart the sea lanes connecting the Low Countries, Germany, and Baltic countries to the broad Atlantic Ocean. A strong British fleet can barricade northwestern European navies within the North or Baltic seas with ease compared to, say, a blockade of France, which features Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts populated by multiple seaports.

British seamen had to block two seaways. Sealing the narrow English Channel was a fairly simple prospect. It could be done with minefields, small torpedo craft, and gunnery arrayed along the shoreline. That left the wide northern corridor between Scotland and Norway. Some 250 nautical miles of open sea separate the Royal Navy station at Scapa Flow, in Scotland, from the Norwegian coast. Britain’s Grand Fleet thus had to erect a defense perimeter spanning those waters to wall in the German High Seas Fleet. That made for an asset-intensive but workable strategy.

Now, the resemblance between the two offshore contestants is admittedly inexact. All comparisons are. Britannia ruled the waves in yesteryear whereas Japan isn’t the global marine hegemon of its day. It can nevertheless contemplate blockading the north Chinese seaboard—just as Britain cordoned off the North Sea and English Channel and mostly penned up the German surface fleet within.

Asian geography is even more auspicious for offshore combatants. The Japanese home islands and southwestern islands—the Ryukyus and Senkakus—enclose the mainland coast north of Taiwan. Sea traffic must exit the “first island chain” through the straits puncturing the island chain. The defense perimeter already exists, and it has immovable guard towers in the form of islands. Fortify the islands, array combat vessels or warplanes to close the straits, or both, and you confine Chinese shipping and aircraft to the China seas.

China depends on ready access to the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean for economic and military ventures. If the JSDF throttles that access, it can make major trouble for China—and that prospect would discourage PLA mischief-making. China could be deterred where imperial Germany was not.

Best of all, swarms of small craft and planes, manned or unmanned, could spearhead island-chain defense alongside land-based armaments such as anti-ship and anti-air missiles. Such implements are cheap compared to, say, Aegis destroyers. They can be built in abundance. This is an affordable strategy—helping Tokyo offset China’s advantage in defense budgets and force structure. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) doesn’t need latter-day counterparts to pricey Royal Navy battleships and cruisers to patrol the blockade line. It can make do with “flotilla” craft reminiscent of the rudimentary subs and torpedo craft of yore.

Plugging the English Channel, a narrow sea, makes a better metaphor for JSDF strategy than does guarding the Scotland-Norway corridor. Japan can wage perimeter defense on the cheap.

U-boat blockade runners were another problem for Britain. They simply swam underneath Royal Navy blockade craft prowling the surface and made their way out to the high seas to sink merchant shipping. But here too the comparison works in favor of contemporary Japan. Undersea terrain in and around the straits imparts predictability to submarine movements. It compels skippers to traverse predictable pathways to reach high-seas operating grounds. Terrain also limits how deep they can dive while essaying a breakout. Narrowing subs’ operating space simplifies matters for sub hunters.

In short, the JMSDF and fellow services could pull off the same feat the Royal Navy did a century ago—an effective blockade—without deploying the same weight of armed force. In Clausewitzian parlance: the advantage in military strength goes to China, the advantage in geographic situation to Japan. It’s far from obvious who commands the overall advantage in a one-on-one fight.

But it’s doubtful any East Asian fight would be a one-on-one affair. This makes a heartening departure from the First World War precedent. While Japan is not today’s reigning maritime hegemon, it is the beneficiary of a preexisting and durable alliance with the reigning maritime hegemon, the United States. What it lacks in innate strength it can make up in allied solidarity so long as the transpacific relationship endures.

Aggregating JSDF capabilities with those supplied by U.S. forces in the Pacific paints a truer picture of the force balance.

What if a proven Anglo-American alliance had been in place by 1914, when the guns of August rang out? The United States had not consummated its ascent to world power by then, but it was a power on the make. Its economic and industrial might waxed even as British supremacy started to wane relative to continental foes. It’s conceivable Kaiser Wilhelm & Co. would have desisted from invading Belgium and France had yet another great power arrayed itself with the Entente before war broke out. Peace may have held had America made its weight felt in European geopolitics.

It has made its weight felt in Asian politics for many decades now. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty dates from the 1950s—1960 in its current form—and held firm through the Cold War, the post-Cold War doldrums in Asian geopolitical competition, and China’s rise to regional eminence. No pact commits one ally to automatic war should another do something rash, but the U.S.-Japan alliance comes as close as any multinational arrangement could. The Security Treaty represents the gold standard for alliance solidarity alongside the North Atlantic Treaty that underwrites NATO.

So the East Asian military balance appears ambiguous when comparing orders of battle, while the U.S.-Japan alliance commands a pronounced geographic advantage. That leaves foreseeing and “gaming” out battle scenarios to determine whether the allies have the implements they need to prosecute real-world operations. True-to-life wargames will expose shortfalls and help commanders and officials align force design with strategy.

Great Britain came out of an age of “splendid isolation” under the press of great-power war a century ago. That involved wrenching change and encouraged Berlin to doubt the scope and fervency of British commitments on the Continent. Tokyo knows it does not have to face the PLA alone—and Beijing knows it too.

And then there’s the question of skill and valor in the services. War is a human affair. As Admiral Bradley Fiske observed during World War I, navies are fighting machines. (The same goes for armies and air forces.) Machines underperform without skilled users. Proficient mechanics wring maximum work out out of their machines, harnessing all of their theoretical potential. Machines operated by slipshod or lackadaisical users fulfill only part of their potential. Two contending forces could deploy exactly the same armaments, sensors, and related equipment. One would still lose. And in all likelihood it would lose because of training deficiencies, a deficit of strategic, operational, or tactical vision, or basic human frailties such as tepid fighting spirit in the ranks.

Intelligence specialists can count up forces, more or less, and estimate how they may perform in action. Human prowess is harder to measure but no less crucial. China has not fielded a serious oceangoing navy since the Ming Dynasty six centuries ago. It is a newcomer to martial strife at sea and has little relevant heritage to tap for inspiration and insight. Japanese mariners, by contrast, enjoy a great legacy: the enviable record compiled by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Japan scholar Alessio Patalano notes that for obvious reasons the JMSDF skips over the World War II imperial navy when seeking inspiration. Instead seafarers look back to the Meiji navy headed by Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō—the service that defeated Chinese and Russian navies, and did so mere decades after its founding. That’s a legacy to take heart in.

Japan has overcome bulkier foes before—and done so with panache.

As it turns out, then, gauging the outcome of a Sino-Japanese war is anything but simple or straightforward. And that’s a good thing! Forbearance may reign in Beijing so long as Chinese leaders doubt they can get their way in Asian quarrels by force of arms. Doubt and fear in Chinese minds are friends to the U.S.-Japan alliance.

So the Great War at sea presents an example worth emulating in certain respects and modifying or rejecting in others. Let’s devise forces capable of mounting a low-cost strategy, keep the alliance sturdy, and cultivate mariners, soldiers, and aviators who extract full value from their fighting machines. Do that and Tokyo may yet prevail.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition due out next month). The views voiced here are his alone.​ This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security,

To make peace, be ready for war?

Here's What You Need To Remember: “We want to raise the threshold to the highest level possible and let adversaries know we can counter any action that they may take and deliver consequences should deterrence fail. Deterrence is the ultimate goal, and this allows us to deter along the full spectrum of conflict. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the adversary does not miscalculate and think we have a weakness in this area,” Clark explained.

It might seem like a paradox: be ready to fight a limited “tactical” nuclear war and maintain an ability to ensure catastrophic annihilation of an enemy with nuclear weapons to keep the peace. 

This contradiction in terms, one might say, forms the conceptual basis for the Pentagon’s current nuclear-weapons strategy which not only calls for a new generation of ICBMs, but also directs the development and deployment of several low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons options. 

This includes nuclear-armed cruise missiles, submarine-launched nuclear weapons with low-yield warheads, and scalable air-launched nuclear missiles and glide bombs. 

“The central idea is we must be able to survive in a conflict where the environment is characterized by the use of a nuclear weapon,” Lt Gen Richard M. Clark, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, told the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace in a video discussion. 

The strategic basis for this, Clark maintained, is grounded in what he called CNI, meaning Conventional-Nuclear Integration. Such a tactical aim incorporates the development of dual-use weapons systems such as the emerging Long-Range Stand-Off weapon air-launched nuclear cruise missile which can fire with or without a nuclear payload. 

The Pentagon has already deployed a new “low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile,” armed with a nuclear payload enabled by a modified Trident II D5 re-entry body.  The weapon, Pentagon officials tell TNI, is called the W76-2. The Pentagon used to have a nuclear-armed Tomahawk missile, something which seems to introduce some interesting questions about additional applications for low-yield warheads.

The Air Force is now refining a CNI Capstone Concept and report for Congress and the Pentagon leadership on the topic, to ensure that weapons development continues to incorporate a full-spectrum of nuclear-weapons capabilities. 

The goal of developing tactical or “lower-yield” nuclear weapons, Clark explained, is quite different than that pursued by the U.S. during the Cold War. 

“This is different from a Cold War mentality where we had nuclear artillery, short-range rockets where we had weapons that would allow us to fight tactically in a conflict. Today we are trying to prepare ourselves to respond with whatever force is necessary in a nuclear environment. It is not just to fight tactically but the ultimate goal is to deter,” Clark explained. 

Interestingly, some have raised a concern that developing nuclear and conventional variants of the same weapon might lead an adversary to mistake a conventional attack for a nuclear one, therefore causing major unwanted escalation and starting a nuclear exchange. Others also maintain that there should not, in any fashion, be room for the concept of a “tactical” or “limited” nuclear war. Any use of nuclear weapons, the thinking goes, should result in complete and total nuclear destruction of the attacker. 

Responding to some of these concerns, Clark maintained that there is a significant need for the U.S. to have and deploy a wide range of nuclear weapons for the specific purpose of ensuring an adversary does not ever “attempt” to use low-yield nuclear weapons by virtue of being assured they would face immediate nuclear retaliation. 

“We want to raise the threshold to the highest level possible and let adversaries know we can counter any action that they may take and deliver consequences should deterrence fail. Deterrence is the ultimate goal, and this allows us to deter along the full spectrum of conflict. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the adversary does not miscalculate and think we have a weakness in this area,” Clark explained. 

Kris Osborn is the new 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. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Europe

Moscow has long lauded the plane as revolutionary, but is it the plane ready for real-life combat?

Key Point: The secretive plan is shourded in mystery. It could be a big deal if Moscow can get it right.

Russia has reportedly begun construction of its next-generation PAK DA stealth bomber as part of an apparent strategic effort to usher in a new era of stealth bombing technology. Moscow hopes to get ahead of the U.S. Air Force’s emerging B-21 stealth bomber and China’s H-20 strategic bomber.

A report in the Russian News Agencies’ TASS says the first prototype is expected to be finished by the end of next year. Later, more prototypes are slated to be ready for testing by April 2023, something which puts the bomber’s production schedule on roughly the same anticipated timeframe as the U.S. B-21. 

Interestingly, its configuration seems to parallel elements of the U.S. B-2 and emerging B-21 bombers, with some key differences. Of course, its horizontal blended wing-body shape is to be expected for these kinds of stealthy platforms, yet available renderings of the PAK DA show rectangular-shaped inlets aligned with or somewhat parallel to the top of the fuselage. 

While upon initial examination, more rectangular inlets may seem less stealthy than the more rounded inlets seen on the B-2, the Russian bomber seems to create a distinct horizontal line or clear linear configuration across the inlets and fuselage in a clear effort to reduce or eliminate and return radar signature potentially enabled by having peaks and valleys between the inlets and fuselage. Even if rounded, an indent or downward slope between the inlets and fuselage is decidedly less horizontal and potentially less stealthy. 

This might explain why the Air Force B-21’s inlets are even more indented and rounded than the B-2, and the new B-21 bomber does have a smaller or more blended incline between the fuselage and wings. Granted, protruding configurations of any kind, if even rounded or covered in a radar-absorbing exterior, are more likely to generate some kind of radar “ping” return from ground-based air defense systems. Vertical structures and uneven contours are therefore more likely to generate radar returns, as electromagnetic “pings” will discern the differences in shape. 

The concept with these kinds of stealth bombers is to not only elude surveillance radar systems but also evade higher-frequency, more precise engagement radar, ensuring that the platform will not only be difficult or impossible to hit, but also remain completely undetected. The idea is for adversaries to “not even know something is there.” A stealthy platform can succeed by appearing as a “bird” or “insect” to enemy radar. 

The back of the PAK DA does appear somewhat analogous to early models of the B-21 in that there appears to be little or no protruding external exhaust or heat release area; such a configuration does seem to suggest that perhaps some newer kind of internal heat dissipation or cooling technology has been discovered and applied as part of an effort to minimize heat signature. 

Some reports say the PAK DA may place Russia as the global leader in stealth bomber technology, however much of its actual technical sophistication may remain a bit of a mystery. One area in which Russia may have an advantage in is the area of air-launched weapons, as the TASS report says. “The PAK DA is expected to deploy Kh-102 nuclear tippled stealthy cruises missiles, and a number of newer hypersonic designs including derivatives of the Kh-47M2,” the TASS story writes.

That being said, the U.S. B-21 is slated to deploy with a new, high-tech Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) weapon, a conventional or nuclear-armed cruise missile reported to be the most advanced in the world. Now in development by the U.S. Air Force, the LRSO is expected to bring new dimensions to cruise missile attack possibilities by introducing longer ranges, advanced guidance systems and new weapons’ payload options. 

Kris Osborn is the new 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.

This article first appeared earlier this year and is reprinted due to reader interest.

 

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

95 year-old Luftwaffe ace Hugo Broch took to the skies for the first time in a Supermarine Spitfire.

Key Point: After flying high over Britain in the Spitfire, Broch heaped praise on his former adversary’s formidable fighter plane.

When Hugo Broch flew his fighter for the Luftwaffe, he probably didn’t imagine he would ever find himself in the cockpit of a Supermarine Spitfire. That, however, is precisely what happened when the 95 year-old fighter ace took flight in one of Britain’s last operable Spitfires, a two-seat Tr.9 MJ627 trainer.

The flight over the skies of Kent in the vintage aircraft gave Broch an authentic view of what the war would’ve been like for his adversaries: during World War II, there were over 20 RAF bases in Kent, many of which supported fighter squadrons engaged in the Battle of Britain.

Hugo Broch, Luftwaffe Ace

Broch served with the Luftwaffe fighter wing Jagdgeschwader 54 (JG 54) on the Eastern Front from 1943 to1945. In that time, he scored 81 victories in 324 mission against Soviet aircraft in a Messerschmitt Bf. 109 and a Focke-Wulf FW. 190. These included 18 kills against Sturmoviks, the Soviet Air Force’s deadly analogue to the Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive bomber, along with twelve double victories and three triple victories.

Broch’s impressive tally was, in fact, not uncommon for German pilots in WWII, especially on the Eastern Front. Broch is surpassed by 155 other Luftwaffe fighter pilots. The highest German ace of the war, Erich Hartmann is credited with 352 kills. He served with JG 52 on the Eastern Front.

Could Broch Have Encountered a Supermarine Spitfire on the Eastern Front?

While the Spitfire did its lion’s share of work on the Western Front, the aircraft saw service around the world during the war, including with the Soviet Air Force. 1,200 Spitfires of numerous variants were donated to the Soviet Union, however they were withdrawn from service nearly as quickly as they were introduced.

The Spitfire entered active duty with the Soviet Air Force in April 1943. It was soon discovered that the Spitifire, which Stalin had requested from the British in name, was wholly incompatible with the doctrine of the Soviet Air Force. Landing on rough Russian dirt runways exposed the Spitfire’s structural weaknesses. Soviet pilots were also unaccustomed to the aircraft’s wing-mounted guns, as opposed to the fuselage-mounted guns of most Soviet fighters. Most importantly, the Spitfire’s silhouette was often mistaken for that of the Messerschmitt Bf. 109 by pilots and anti-aircraft gunners. As a result, numerous Soviet Spitfire pilots fell victim to the fire of friendly guns. By June 1943, the Spitfire was largely phased out of Soviet combat duty.

Consequently, Broch likely never spotted the Supermarine Spitfire on his missions on the Eastern Front. However he was likely aware of the wide renown the British fighter had gained as a thorn in the side of the Luftwaffe over the skies of Britain.

The Spitfire’s reputation within the Luftwaffe is perhaps best illustrated by a quip made by Gruppenkommandeur Adolf Galland to Field Marshal Hermann Göring. On a visit to the Jäger squadrons in France at the height of the Battle of Britain, Göring asked his Jäger officers what he could do for them. Adolf Galland gave a biting answer: “I should like an outfit of Spitfires for my Jägdgeschwader.”

What Does Hugo Broch Think About the Spitfire?

After flying high over Britain in the Spitfire, Broch heaped praise on his former adversary’s formidable fighter plane: “The Spitfire was greatly respected. With these machines you have a feeling of being free, and being able to do what you want.”

“The Spitfire is a good machine, wonderful, he’s a good pilot and I have again experienced what flying is and how beautiful flying is.”

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ethen Kim Lieser

Health, Americas

Where did it come from?

An international research team of Chinese, European, and U.S. scientists has reconstructed the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the coronavirus, according to a study published in Nature Microbiology. 

The researchers now know that particular viral lineage has been circulating in bats for decades—diverging from other bat viruses about forty to seventy years ago—and likely includes other contagions that have the potential to infect humans.

“Collectively our analyses point to bats being the primary reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 lineage,” the study’s authors wrote.

“While it is possible that pangolins, or another hitherto undiscovered species, may have acted as an intermediate host facilitating transmission to humans, current evidence is consistent with the virus having evolved in bats resulting in bat sarbecoviruses that can replicate in the upper respiratory tract of both humans and pangolins.”  

The researchers noted that in concluding their findings, they had to engage in rigorous detective work to identify the full makeup of the virus.  

“Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’ genome can be derived from multiple sources,” Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State, said in a news release.  

“This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories. To do that, we put together a diverse team with expertise in recombination, phylogenetic dating, virus sampling, and molecular and viral evolution.”  

SARS-CoV-2 was found to be 96 percent genetically similar to the RaTG13 coronavirus that was discovered in 2013 in a sample of the Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in Yunnan Province, China.  

SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have diverged from RaTG13 in 1969. 

“The ability to estimate divergence times after disentangling recombination histories, which is something we developed in this collaboration, may lead to insights into the origins of many different viral pathogens,” Philippe Lemey, of the Department of Evolutionary and Computational Virology, KE Leuven, said in a release. 

Like the older members of the lineage, the coronavirus also has the ability to bind with human receptor cells. 

“This means that other viruses that are capable of infecting humans are circulating in horseshoe bats in China,” David Robertson, professor of computational virology at MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said in a release.  

He added that preventing future pandemics will require better samplings of wild bats and utilizing human-disease surveillance systems that can identify novel pathogens in real-time.  

“The key to successful surveillance,” Robertson said, “is knowing which viruses to look for and prioritizing those that can readily infect humans. We should have been better prepared for a second SARS virus.”  

Now more than eight months into the pandemic, there are roughly 30.2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide, including at least 947,000 related deaths, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.  

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

Beijing would like to carry out longer range strike missions, but it needs more tankers.

Key point: China's military is increasingly advanced and numerous. However, one platform they don't have enough of are aerial refueling tankers.

Aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, anti-satellite weapons, drones, cyber attack technology and a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles are all among a series of Chinese weapons said to present serious concerns for Pentagon leaders and weapons developers, according to DoD’s annual China report.

The Pentagon 2018 report, called “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” details a broad spectrum of risks to include global economic expansion, massive military modernization and breakthrough weapons technology able to threaten US superiority.

While of course the report emerges within the context of a complicated, multi-faceted and stressed US-China relationship which includes growing tensions, military rivalry and some measure of cooperation as well. A recent DoD news report, for instance, was careful to mention China as a potential “adversary,” not “enemy.”

Nevertheless, the Pentagon assessment is quite detailed in its discussion of the fast-growing military threat posed by China. A few examples, for instance, include the report’s discussion of China’s short, medium and long-range ballistic missile arsenal. China is believed to possess as many as 1,200 short-range missiles and up to 300 intermediate range missiles, according to the report. With this in mind, the report specifies that some of China’s longer-range, precision-guided ballistic missiles are able to reach US-assets in the Pacific region.

The Pentagon report, along with previously released Congressional assessments of China’s military, catalogue information related to China’s nuclear arsenal and long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles - such as the existing DF-31, DF-26 and DF-31A along with the DF-41. In fact, the Pentagon report specifically cites the DF-26 as presenting a particular threat; the intermediate range ballistic missile, the report says, can carry both conventional and nuclear explosives out to ranges of 4,000 kilometers.

“US bases in Japan are in range of a growing number of Chinese MRBMs and LACMs. H-6K bomber flights into the Western Pacific Ocean demonstrate China’s ability to range Guam with air-launched LACMs. The DF-26, which debuted publicly in 2015 and was paraded again in 2017, is capable of conducting precision conventional or nuclear strikes against ground targets that could include U.S. bases on Guam,” the 2018 report says.

The Chinese are believed to already have a number of road-mobile ICBMs able to carry nuclear weapons, the report says. The DF-41 is reported to have as many as 10 re-entry vehicles, analysts have said.

China is known to have conducted several hypersonic weapons tests. Not surprisingly, US Air Force leaders are currently accelerating prototyping, testing and development of hypersonic weapons.

In addition, China's well-documented anti-satellite, or ASAT, weapons tests have inspired international attention and influenced the Pentagon and US Air Force to accelerate strategies for satellite protection such as improving sensor resiliency, cyber hardening command and control and building in redundancy to improve prospects for functionality in the event of attack.

China's rapid development of new destroyers, amphibs, stealth fighters and long-range weapons is quickly increasing its ability to threaten the United States and massively expand expeditionary military operations around the globe, according to this years’ Pentagon report as well as several previous Congressional reports from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

In recent years, the Chinese have massively increased their foreign presence around the globe, in a transparent effort to rival the US as a global superpower. The Chinese have made large incursions into Africa, and even set up a military base in Djibouti, Africa, right near a strategically vital US presence.

“China’s military strategy and ongoing PLA reform reflect the abandonment of its historically land-centric mentality. Similarly,doctrinal references to “forward edge defense” that would move potential conflicts far from China’s territory suggest PLA strategists envision an increasingly global role,” the report cites.

Many of the details of the Pentagon’s 2018 report are aligned with similar claims made in a 2016 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a Congressional report which also specified China's growing provocations and global expeditionary exercises.

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Additional instances of Chinese provocation in recent years include placement of surface-to-air-missiles and fighters in sensitive areas of the South China Sea, along with its announcement of an "air exclusion zone" in recent years. While the US military flew B-52 bombers through this declared zone in a demonstration of defiance, the move did demonstrate China's growing willingness to be aggressive. In addition, Chinese "land reclamation" and territorial claims in the South China Sea continue to prompt US "freedom of navigation exercises" to unambiguously challenge China's claims.

Chinese Navy:

While Chinese naval technology may still be substantially behind current U.S. platforms, the equation could change dramatically over the next several decades because the Chinese are reportedly working on a handful of high-tech next-generation ships, weapons and naval systems.

China has plans to grow its navy to 351 ships by 2020 as the Chinese continue to develop their military’s ability to strike global targets, according to the Congressional reports.

Also the Chinese are building their own indigenous aircraft carriers; their first self-built carrier was launched last year and is expected to enter service by 2019, the Pentagon report says. More are being built to joint China’s first carrier, the Ukrainian-built Liaoning.

Looking to the future, the 2016 report says "future Chinese carriers are likely to be flat deck ships, like U.S. aircraft carriers, that utilize steam or magnetic catapults and would enable the PLA Navy to employ aircraft armed with heavier munitions intended for maritime strike or land attack missions. According to DOD, China could build several aircraft carriers in the next 15 years. China may ultimately produce five ships—for a total of six carriers—for the PLA Navy."

The report also cites the LUYANG III, a new class of Chinese destroyers are engineered with vertically-launched, long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The new destroyers carry an extended-range variant of the HHQ-9 surface-to-air missile, among other weapons, the report says.

As evidence of the impact of these destroyers, the reports point out that these new multi-mission destroyers are likely to form the bulk of warship escorts for Chinese carriers - in a manner similar to how the US Navy protects its carriers with destroyers in "carrier strike groups."

"These 8,000 ton destroyers (the LUYANG III) . . . have phased-array radars and a long-range SAM [surface-to-air missile] system which provides the [navy] with its first credible area air-defense capability," the 2016 report states.

The Chinese are currently testing and developing a new, carrier-based fighter aircraft called the J-15.

Regarding amphibious assault ships, the Chinese are now adding more YUZHAO LPDs, amphibs which can carry 800 troops, four helicopters and up to 20 armored vehicles, the report said.

"The YUZHAO can carry up to four air cushion landing craft, four helicopters, armored vehicles, and troops for long-distance deployments, which DOD notes ‘‘provide[s] a . . . greater and more flexible capability for ‘far seas’ operations than the [PLA Navy’s] older landing ships.,’ according to the report.

The Chinese also have ambitious future plans for next-generation amphibious assault ships.

"China seeks to construct a class of amphibious assault ships larger than the YUZHAO class that would include a flight deck for conducting helicopter operations. China may produce four to six of these Type 081 ships with the capacity to transport 500 troops and configured for helicopter-based vertical assault," the report says.

Some observers have raised the question as to whether this new class of Chinese amphibs could rival the US Navy's emerging, high-tech America-Class amphibious assault ships.

The Chinese are also working on development of a new Type 055 cruiser equipped with land-attack missiles, lasers and rail-gun weapons, according to the review.

China’s surface fleet is also bolstered by production of at least 60 smaller, fast-moving HOBEI-glass guided missile patrol boats and ongoing deliveries of JIANGDAO light frigates armed with naval guns, torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles.

Pentagon and Congressional reports also say that Chinese modernization plans call for a sharp increase in attack submarines and nuclear-armed submarines or SSBNs. Chinese SSBNs are now able to patrol with nuclear-armed JL-2 missiles able to strike targets more than 4,500 nautical miles.

The Chinese are currently working on a new, modernized SSBN platform as well as a long-range missile, the JL-3, the commission says.

Chinese Air Force:

A 2014 Congressional report states that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army currently had approximately 2,200 operational aircraft as far back as four years ago, nearly 600 of which were considered modern.

Regarding stealth aircraft, the Chinese now operate their first 5th Gen stealth fighter, the J-20. The aircraft is reported to be more advanced than any other air platform currently deployed in the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese are also testing a smaller stealth fighter variant called the J-31 although its intended use is unclear, according to the report.

In 2014, China displayed the Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter at China’s Zuhai Air show, according to various reports. However, several analysts have made the point that it is not at all clear if the platform comes close to rivaling the technological capability of the US F-35.

At the same time, the 2014 Congressional report specifically cites a Defense Science Board finding that Chinese cyber attacks resulted in the theft of significant specs and technical details of a range of US weapons systems - to include the F-35. In fact, the Pentagon’s recent news story about the 2018 mentions that apparent similarities between the F-35 and Chinese J-20 could very well be a result of espionage.

Overall, the U.S. technological advantage in weaponry, air and naval platforms is rapidly decreasing, according to all the assessments. To illustrate this point, the Congressional review cites comments from an analyst who compared U.S.-Chinese fighter jets to one another roughly twenty years ago versus a similar comparison today.

The analyst said that in 1995 a high-tech U.S. F-15, F-16 or F/A-18 would be vastly superior to a Chinese J-6 aircraft. However today -- China’s J-10 and J-11 fighter jet aircraft would be roughly equivalent in capability to an upgraded U.S. F-15, the review states. For this reason, the Air Force is now moving aggressively on a range of upgrades to its fleet of F-15s, to include new computer technology, electronic warfare, radar and weapons systems. 

Alongside their J-10 and J-11 fighters, the Chinese also own Russian-built Su-27s and Su-30s and bought Su-35s from Russia as well.

“The Su-35 is a versatile, highly capable aircraft that would offer significantly improved range and fuel capacity over China’s current fighters. The aircraft thus would strengthen China’s ability to conduct air superiority missions in the Taiwan Strait, East China Sea, and South China Sea as well as provide China with the opportunity to reverse engineer the fighter’s component parts, including its advanced radar and engines, for integration into China’s current and future indigenous fighters,” the review writes.

In addition to stealth technology, high-tech fighter aircraft and improved avionics, the Chinese have massively increased their ability with air-to-air missiles over the last 15-years, the review finds.

“All of China’s fighters in 2000, with the potential exception of a few modified Su-27s, were limited to within-visual-range missiles. China over the last 15 years also has acquired a number of sophisticated short and medium-range air-to-air missiles; precision-guided munitions including all-weather, satellite-guided bombs, anti-radiation missiles, and laser-guided bombs; and long-range, advanced air-launched land-attack cruise missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles,” the review says.

The review also points to the Y-20 aircraft, a new strategic airlifter being developed by the Chinese which has three times the cargo-carrying capacity of the U.S. Air Force’s C-130. Some of these new planes could be configured into tanker aircraft, allowing the Chinese to massively increase their reach and ability to project air power over longer distances.

At the moment, the Chinese do not have a sizeable or modern fleet of tankers, and many of their current aircraft are not engineered for aerial refueling, a scenario which limits their reach.

“Until the PLA Navy’s first carrier-based aviation wing becomes operational, China must use air refueling tankers to enable air operations at these distances from China. However, China’s current fleet of air refueling aircraft, which consists of only about 12 1950s-era H–6U tankers, is too small to support sustained, large-scale, long-distance air combat,” the review states.

The Pentagon annual review also raises concerns about China’s acquisition of Russian-built S-400 surface to air missiles.

The S–400 more than doubles the range of China’s air defenses from approximately 125 to 250 miles, the previous Congressional review writes. This new range would create a weapons with enough reach to cover all of Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, and parts of the South China Sea, the review says.

This first appeared in Warrior Maven here in 2018.

Image: Reuters

Randal O'Toole

Society,

Conceived with racist assumptions and faulty financial projections, the DC Metro system has proved to be a financial and operational disaster. The region would do better rely more on cars and, in some places, buses.

Highway traffic in the Washington DC metro area returned to 80 percent of its pre‐​pandemic levels in July, but DC transit carried only 16 percent as many riders as it did in July 2019. Metro’s own surveys have found that most of its riders don’t plan to return until and unless an effective COVID vaccine is found.

Given this, there is no better time to simply shut down the Metro rail system, thus saving taxpayers billions of dollars. Conceived with racist assumptions and faulty financial projections, the system has proved to be a financial and operational disaster. The region would do better rely more on cars and, in some places, buses.

When the system was originally designed, planners knew it would cost more than buses so they planned to build lines only into white neighborhoods because they figured blacks wouldn’t be able to afford the fares. When blacks objected, a line built into black neighborhoods in Anacostia was followed by a concerted effort by the DC government to gentrify the neighborhoods, forcing many families out.

As of 2018, the median income of DC‐​area transit commuters was more than $60,000 a year, which was 8 percent more than that of all workers in the region. More DC transit commuters earn above $75,000 a year than earn less than $35,000 a year.

Despite the high incomes of transit riders, fares don’t come close to covering the costs of running the system. As author Zachary Schrag documents in his book, The Great Society Subway, the original planners of the 103‐​mile rail system expected that fare revenues would cover 100 percent of operating costs and 80 percent of capital costs. As of 2018, fares covered barely half the operating costs and have paid for none of the capital costs, which turned out to be four times greater than anticipated.

The federal and local governments dealt with high costs by having the federal government pay most of the capital costs while local governments paid most of the operating subsidies. What neither took into account was that rail systems must be completely rebuilt about every 30 years. Metro’s staff warned as early as 2002 that the system would need billions for capital replacement over the next decade, but no one came up with the money.

Instead of rehabilitating the system, Virginia and Maryland politicians demanded that the federal government fund construction of the Silver Line in Virginia and Purple Line in Maryland, which together cost nearly $10 billion. The Silver Line actually harmed the system as a whole because it shares tracks under the Potomac River with the Blue and Orange lines, which were running at capacity during rush hours. Adding Silver Line trains meant cutting Blue Line trains that were carrying more riders than the Silver Line trains.

Meanwhile, the system decayed as predicted. In 2009, when the computerized signaling system that kept trains from crashing into one another failed, a crash killed nine people. Metro’s response to was to turn off the computers and let train operators, whose previous job had mainly been to open and close doors at the stations, drive the trains, resulting in jerky service and more crashes. When smoke in the tunnels from worn‐​out insulators killed a passenger in 2015, Metro’s response was to shut down its lines to inspect all of the insulators. But the fundamental problem of worn‐​out equipment remains, with at least two further smoke incidents in the last year alone.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the 2009 crash criticized Metro’s “lack of a safety culture.” More than a decade later, that hasn’t changed. A safety audit published last week by the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission found that the agency still did not have a safety culture.

Metro often had rail operations employees working longer hours than specified by its own safety guidelines. It allowed employees to work with broken equipment and sometimes attempted “to manipulate safety event investigations that create unacceptable safety risks.” Metro, added the audit, was a “toxic culture workplace” that “includes racial and sexual comments, harassment, and other unprofessional behavior.”

When Metro’s current CEO, Paul Wiedefeld, took the job in November 2015, he promised to improve the safety culture. Instead, he has been besieged by revenue and budgetary problems that were made worse by the coronavirus. Last week, Metro released a budgetary report to its board projecting that–despite having received nearly a billion dollars from the CARES Act–it would have to cut 39 bus lines, reduce service on all the rail lines, and make numerous other cuts just to finish its current fiscal year–and the agency has no idea how it will continue operating next year unless the federal government provides another bailout.

All of these problems show that the region can’t afford to keep running the trains and will have to shut them down sooner or later. Given the few number of riders being carried at present, the best time to do so is now when it will cause the least disruption. 

This article was first published by the Cato Institute.

Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

History, Eurasia

Barbarossa was eventually defeated, but not until four years had passed and tens of millions had died.

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”   

—Winston Churchill (1950)

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, as the sun slumbered, 3.6 million soldiers, 2,000 warplane pilots, and 3,350 tank commanders under skilled German command crouched at the border of Soviet-occupied Poland ready to invade the Communist nation Joseph Stalin had ruled with steel-fisted brutality for years. 

Shortly after 3 am, in an operation Adolf Hitler called “Barbarossa,” a three-million-man Axis force struck Soviet positions along a 900-mile-long front. German aircraft bombed military bases, supply depots and cities, including Sevastopol on the Black Sea, Brest in Belarus, and others up and down the frontier. The night before, German commandos had snuck into Soviet territory and destroyed Red Army communications networks in the West, making it difficult for those under attack to obtain direction from Moscow.

By the end of the first day of combat, some 1,200 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed, two-thirds while parked on the ground. The poorly led Soviet troops who were not killed or captured buckled under the German onslaught.

Stalin was staggered by the German ambush. Germany’s unannounced act of war violated the nonaggression pact that Hitler and Stalin had signed less than two years earlier and placed at risk the very survival of the Soviet Union. 

At first, Stalin insisted that it was just a provocation triggered by some rogue German generals and refused to order a counterattack until he heard officially from Berlin. The German declaration of war finally arrived four hours later. 

Hitler justified Barbarossa on the basis that the Soviet Union was “about to attack Germany from the rear.” Eventually, after much dithering, Stalin ordered the Red Army to “use all their strength and means to come down on the enemy’s forces and destroy them where they have violated the Soviet border,” but oddly directed that until further orders “ground troops were not to cross the border.”

The Soviet dictator lacked the heart to inform the Russian people that the Germans had invaded. That bitter task fell to Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, who reported the assault in a radio broadcast more than eight hours after the conflict began. Sadly, Axis bombs and bullets had already alerted millions to the disaster.

Despite the urging of his military officers, Stalin, fearing he would be blamed for the losses, declined to take on the title of commander in chief of the Red Army. He did not even meet with the Politburo until 2 pm on that traumatic day.

Lacking sufficient skilled military leadership, the shocked Red Army reacted slowly and fearfully. As the Germans stormed east and mauled the Soviet troops, Stalin’s generals asked for permission to retreat to reduce casualties, move to defensive positions, and prepare for a counterattack. Stalin refused. His poorly equipped, trained, and led soldiers were ordered to stand their ground regardless of the consequences.

In the first 10 days of combat, the Germans thrust some 300 miles into Soviet territory and captured Minsk and more than 400,000 Red Army troops. At least 40,000 Russian soldiers died each day. Axis forces gained almost total air control and destroyed 90 percent of Stalin’s mechanized forces. Twenty million people who had been living under Soviet control were suddenly living in Axis territory. Many of those in areas previously invaded by Stalin (e.g., Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland) initially welcomed the Germans as liberators.

Stalin seemed close to a nervous breakdown. The losses were so humiliating that, despite being the head of government, he retreated to his summer home and, during several gloomy June days of heavy drinking, refused to answer his phone or play any role in his nation’s affairs, leaving the ship of state to flounder helplessly. On June 28, he muttered, “Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have ****ed it up.” 

Senior Soviet leaders mustered the courage to visit Stalin’s dacha on June 30. Upon arrival, they found him despondent and disheveled. He nervously asked, “Why have you come?” Stalin apparently thought that his underlings were there to arrest him. But they, long cowed by the dictator’s brutal intimidation, simply beseeched him to return to work at the Kremlin. He eventually did so.

Certainly, Operation Barbarossa was spawned by Hitler’s hatred of communism and dream of world domination. But Stalin’s many missteps in the previous two years enticed Hitler to attack and contributed significantly to Barbarossa’s early successes. Stalin’s blunders included purging the Soviet military of its leaders, entering into a treaty with Hitler that triggered a world war that subsequently ravaged Russia, launching a bumbling attack on Finland in late 1939, misreading Hitler, adopting a flawed plan of attack on Germany, and ignoring warnings of Hitler’s forthcoming Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.

In furtherance of Lenin’s goal of provoking a worldwide communist revolution, Stalin sought to undermine capitalist governments across Europe. He sought to destroy anyone abroad or at home who might stand in the way of his brand of communism. According to Stalin, “As long as the capitalist encirclement exists there will continue to be present among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs and murderers.” 

In a 1937 speech, the “man of steel” (which is what “Stalin” means in Russian) made his brutal stance clear: “Anyone who tries to destroy the unity of the socialist state, who aims to separate any of its parts or nationalities from it, is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR. And we will exterminate each and every one of these enemies, whether they are old Bolsheviks or not. We will exterminate their kin and entire family. We will mercilessly exterminate anyone, who with deeds or thoughts threatens the unity of the socialist state.”

This thinking gave rise to the Great Terror in which Stalin had millions of Soviet citizens arrested for “counterrevolutionary crimes” or “anti-Soviet agitation.” In 1937 and 1938, at least 1.3 million people were convicted of being “anti-Soviet elements.” More than half were executed—on average 1,500 people shot dead each day.

Stalin used the Great Terror to eliminate potential threats within the Soviet military. He removed some 34,000 Red Army officers from service. Of those, 22,705 were shot or went “missing.” Out of 101 members of the Red Army’s supreme leadership, Stalin had 91 arrested and 80 shot. Eight of nine senior admirals in the Soviet navy were put to death. By 1939, he had essentially decapitated the military forces responsible for protecting the Soviet Union from invasion.

In Hitler’s 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf,he declared both his fierce opposition to Marxism and Germany’s need to acquire more territory to provide “living space” for its people. Hitler made clear that one source of such lands would be “Russia and her vassal border states.”

Following Hitler’s 1933 rise to power in Germany, the fascist policies he implemented were directly targeted against Stalin’s communism. Over the next half-dozen years, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty that basically forbade Germany from rearming, Germany’s military might and expansionist aspirations grew at a fearsome rate. Hitler added to Germany’s territory by absorbing Austria in 1938 and large parts of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. His gaze then fell upon neighboring Poland.

Stalin was right to fret about Hitler’s goal of seizing fertile lands to the east of Germany, including Ukraine. Stalin recognized that the Soviet Union and its Red Army in the late 1930s were not ready for war. He could buy time and seek to retard Hitler’s appetite either by forming an alliance with Germany’s traditional foes, Great Britain and France, or by pursuing a nonaggression treaty with Hitler.

In early 1939, Stalin began negotiations with France and Great Britain aimed at a treaty that would leave Hitler facing opponents to the east and west of Germany. These efforts, however, were impeded by the reluctance of both France and Great Britain to enter into a treaty with a communist nation bent on undermining capitalist democracies and especially one led by an unpredictable and ruthless dictator like Stalin.  The negotiations proceeded fitfully.

Several months later, seeking to thwart a treaty among Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, Hitler secretly invited Stalin to discuss a nonaggression pact (the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two countries’ foreign ministers). Hitler’s covert plan for a late summer attack on Poland, which both France and Great Britain had promised to defend, motivated him to strike a deal with Stalin so that Germany would not face a hostile military to the east.

In late August 1939, Hitler and Stalin stunned the world by announcing that their two nations had agreed to a trade and nonaggression pact. This came about only after Stalin obtained Hitler’s secret promise that the two nations would invade and carve up Poland between them, and Germany would facilitate Stalin’s desire to take over Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, and parts of Finland.

On August 19, Stalin justified his unlikely deal with Hitler to the Politburo: “The question of war and peace has entered a critical phase for us.  Its solution depends entirely on the position which will be taken by the Soviet Union. We are absolutely convinced that if we conclude a mutual assistance pact with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off from Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would be avoided, but further events could prove dangerous for the USSR.

“On the other hand, if we accept Germany’s proposal … and conclude a non-aggression pact with her, she will certainly invade Poland, and the intervention of France and England is then unavoidable. Western Europe would be subjected to serious upheavals and disorder. In this case we will have a great opportunity to stay out of the conflict, and we could plan the opportune time for us to enter the war.

“The experience of the last 20 years has shown that in peacetime the Communist movement is never strong enough for the Bolshevik Party to seize power. The dictatorship of such party will only become possible as the result of a major war.”

Stalin continued: “Comrades, I have presented my considerations to you. I repeat that it is in the interest of the USSR, the workers’ homeland, that a war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc. Everything should be done so that it drags out as long as possible with the goal of weakening both sides. For this reason, it is imperative that we agree to conclude the pact proposed by Germany, and then work in such a way that this war, once it is declared, will be prolonged maximally. We must strengthen our propaganda work in the belligerent countries in order to be prepared when the war ends.”

So, on August 23, 1939, the cold-blooded, anticapitalist leader who aimed to “Sovietize” the world climbed into bed with the cold-blooded, anti-Bolshevik leader who dreamed of fascist world rule.

On September 1, 1939, more than a million German warriors invaded Poland from the west. Sixteen days later, in accord with the secret August pact between Stalin and Hitler, half a million Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Within weeks the Polish nation simply vanished and, having pocketed its territory, Germany and the Soviet Union now shared a common border and responsibility for starting World War II.

In late November 1939, Stalin ordered about one million Red Army soldiers to invade neighboring Finland, a nation of just 3.6 million residents. (Finland had been ruled by Russia until 1918, when anti-Bolsheviks prevailed in a Finnish civil war.) During four months of harsh winter fighting against brave and defiant resistance, more than 200,000 Red Army soldiers died (Nikita Khrushchev said in his memoirs that the figure was closer to a million)—dwarfing the Finns’ military fatalities. 

Embarrassed, Stalin entered into an armistice under which Finland surrendered some territory, but the modest Soviet land gain was disproportionate to such vast human losses. Because of its unprovoked attack on Finland, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations.

Stalin’s earlier purge of his military leaders and the Red Army’s woeful showing in Finland persuaded Hitler that Soviet forces were weak and encouraged him to consider a surprise attack on the USSR. Stalin was painfully aware by 1940 that the Red Army was lacking in leadership, weapons, manpower, infrastructure, training, and war planning. He ordered a massive upgrade of the military to be carried out at top speed. But this would take time, and in the interim care would have to be taken not to provoke Hitler into attacking Russia.

To Stalin’s amazement and discomfort, during the first half of 1940, German military forces stormed through Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France and drove the humbled British forces back to their island from the European mainland. These rapid victories did not comport with the Soviet leader’s strategic concept that the Western European countries would, to communism’s ultimate advantage, exhaust each other in a protracted war.

Under their trade agreements, the Soviet Union supplied Germany with huge quantities of foodstuffs, raw materials, and oil and acquired from international markets goods Hitler needed but could not otherwise obtain due to Great Britain’s naval blockade of German ports. Ironically, by mid-1940, the Soviet Union was Germany’s most important trading partner. 

Stalin’s view at this time was that Hitler’s desire to seize land to the east was motivated mainly by Germany’s need for additional food and natural resources. Thus, Stalin hoped that if the Soviet Union satisfied much of Hitler’s hunger for essential goods the risk of a near-term German attack would be tempered.

Stalin appreciated that a German attack on the Soviet Union was likely to come eventually. He assumed, however, that Hitler would not strike until after Great Britain had surrendered. He believed the British could hold out until at least mid-1942. He also assumed that before attacking the USSR Hitler would demand from Stalin land and resources and that the Führer’s ultimatum would afford the Soviets some time to react with a concession, a preemptive attack, or at least a move to defensive military positions.

During the summer of 1940, Stalin secretly contemplated having the Red Army launch a surprise attack on Germany in 1942. He hoped that by then the Red Army would be stronger as its officers gained experience and it was modernized, and Germany would be weaker from her ongoing battles against Great Britain. 

Consistent with his August 1939 remarks to the Politburo, Stalin reasoned that if Germany fell the Red Army would have a clear path to sweep into capitalist Europe and implant communism there. He directed a few top generals to covertly draft battle plans. In October 1940, after reviewing several proposals, Stalin wavered over when—or whether—to launch a preemptive strike, but planning for such an attack continued.

Coincidentally, in July 1940, Hitler asked his generals to develop secret plans for a German surprise attack on the Soviet Union.  The Führer’s objectives were to eradicate “Jewish” Bolshevism, gain territory and natural resources to the east, exterminate the Stalinist threat, and eliminate the chance that the USSR would provide aid to Great Britain.

In November 1940, Hitler invited the Soviet Union to join with Germany, Italy, and Japan as a member of the Tripartite Pact, which committed all signatories to align in the event of war with the United States. The German dictator also sought to persuade the Soviet dictator to focus his territorial expansion efforts on the Middle East rather than Eastern Europe.

Because Stalin coveted lands in Europe and wanted Hitler to withdraw Axis troops from Finland, the negotiations failed. These differences convinced Hitler that conflict between his nation and Stalin’s was inevitable.

By December 18, 1940, Hitler’s mind was made up.  He ordered his generals to complete detailed war plans “to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign”—code named Operation Barbarossa—to begin in May 1941.

At about the same time, Stalin ordered the Red Army to construct armed fortifications close to the German/Soviet border. When completed, these would be an asset in a preemptive Soviet attack but a liability in a defensive contest triggered by a German blitzkreig. Military convention called for such fortifications to be set a distance inland from the border to protect troops, artillery, and weapons from prompt destruction or capture in the event of a surprise attack and to give the defending military forces room to maneuver.

As spring arrived in 1941, Stalin still had not decided whether or when to launch a preemptive assault on Germany. His generals, however, continued to prepare for such an attack.

In 1941, Hitler took steps to guard his southern flank against a hostile attack in the coming war on Soviet Russia and convinced Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to join the Tripartite Pact. When in early April civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, he sent troops to quell the uprising. His forces also invaded Greece that month to salvage a failed Italian operation there. These relatively brief military operations, however, forced Hitler to delay the start of Operation Barbarossa. It was reset for June 22.

In April 1941, Stalin proudly announced that the Soviet Union had entered into a nonaggression pact with Japan. This significantly reduced the threat of military action against the USSR from the east and allowed Stalin to focus on Germany. 

On May 10, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolph Hess, flew solo to the British Isles and parachuted into Scotland with the objective of negotiating peace between Germany and Great Britain. The British arrested Hess, who had made his flight without Hitler’s knowledge or consent. But Stalin’s suspicious and conspiratorial mind worried that if Hess were indeed on a secret peace mission and Germany ended its conflict with the British, the threat of a German attack on the USSR would balloon.

On May 15, Stalin’s top generals gave him an updated preemptive attack plan declaring that “it is necessary to deprive the German command of all initiative, to preempt the adversary and to attack.” The generals proposed sending troops, planes, and other equipment to the western border in the guise of “training exercises.”

With the risk of a Japanese invasion apparently neutralized, nervous about what Hess was up to in England, aware that Germany was massing troops at his border, and believing that the first nation to attack would likely prevail, Stalin felt the urge to be proactive. According to some historians, he decided to move the Soviet preemptive attack up from 1942 to the coming summer. 

Just a few days earlier, in a speech to Red Army military school graduates, Stalin had declared, “Our military policy must change from defense to waging offensive actions.” He then ramped up production of planes and other military equipment, drafted almost a million more men into the armed forces, and began moving millions of Red Army soldiers and their supplies west to be in place by July 10.

Still wary of giving Hitler an excuse to strike first, Stalin sought to conceal his massive military expansion near the German/Soviet border. Soviet propaganda derided rumors of a Russian buildup as “totally fantastic”—the troops were merely training. Yet, out of fear of inciting Germany to attack, Stalin repeatedly refused his generals’ requests to place those western Red Army soldiers on combat alert. He told them, “You must understand that Germany will never on its own move to attack Russia…. If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.”

Stalin’s vulnerability to a preemptive Axis attack in 1941 was increased by the fact that after moving into Poland in 1939, the Soviets had taken down their defensive fortifications near their old border but had not yet completed new ones at the more westerly frontier. 

Another problem was that the military supplies and warplanes Stalin had ordered moved to the new border in advance of the planned preemptive strike were now exposed to capture or destruction in a surprise Axis assault. 

Moreover, his military communications systems were rudimentary, and his ability to quickly move troops and equipment by road or rail was limited. Additionally, many of his weapons were outmoded. Finally, Stalin had no backup plan addressing how the USSR would defend if Germany struck first.

During the first half of 1941, the United States, Great Britain, and other foreign nations had gotten wind of Germany’s secret plan to attack the USSR. In April, Winston Churchill, no fan of communism, sent an invasion warning to Stalin. President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a similar alert. Stalin also received invasion signals from Soviet spies abroad, the increase of Axis troops on the border, repeated German aircraft incursions into Soviet territory, and the fact that many German diplomats and their families began to leave Moscow.

But Stalin, ever cynical of the motives of others, discredited all of these alarms. The Soviet leader remained convinced that Hitler would not be foolish enough to initiate a two-front war during the first half of 1941, even though by then the only powerful nation Germany was fighting was the beleaguered Great Britain. 

Stalin knew that the fall “mud season” and harsh Russian winter dictated that any German blitzkrieg likely to succeed would have to be launched by mid-summer. Thus, he reasoned that if Russia could avoid an immediate attack he would be in position to strike first.

In early June, Stalin’s anxiety about internal threats and traitors bubbled up anew. He once again purged the Red Army leadership, this time of 300 officers, including more than 20 who had received the nation’s highest military honor. As a result, about three-quarters of his field officers had no more than two years of experience in their posts.

In a peculiar June 14, 1941, radio broadcast reflecting Stalin’s paranoia and unwillingness to acknowledge the imminent threat, the Kremlin announced that British rumors of a German attack on the USSR were an “obvious absurdity” and “a clumsy propaganda manoeuvre of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany.” This statement troubled Stalin’s surviving generals, for it was inconsistent with their efforts to gear up for the war brewing at the border.

On June 19, 25 German ships abruptly left a port controlled by the USSR, and Stalin grew more nervous. He ordered that his planes on the western frontier be camouflaged within a month but continued to deny permission to place his troops on combat alert.

Seeking some assurance that his nonaggression pact with Hitler would hold, on June 21 (the day before the scheduled blitzkrieg) Stalin instructed his diplomats to contact Germany’s foreign minister to ask why so many German troops had gathered on the Soviet border. Ribbentrop’s staff stubbornly maintained throughout the day that the German diplomat was unavailable. Late that evening, when questioned about rumors of an impending Axis attack, Germany’s ambassador to the USSR simply said he was unable to supply an answer.

Also that evening, a German defector informed a Red Army officer that the blitzkrieg would come the next morning. Stalin panicked. Hitler might actually strike first! But the Soviet dictator reacted inconsistently. He alerted his field generals that a German attack could come on June 22 or 23 and told them to move their troops closer to the border and be on high alert. At the same time, Stalin warned them to prudently prevent “big complications”—war—and “not to yield to any provocation” from the Germans. Did this mean they were to accept an Axis blow and not counterattack? With no further explanation, Stalin went home for the evening.

Operation Barbarossa was launched several hours later with devastating impact on the Soviets. As both sides were gearing up for a preemptive attack, Hitler struck first and caught the Soviets flatfooted. A massive force of nearly four million Axis troops (from Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia), 3,350 tanks, 7,200 pieces of artillery, 2,770 warplanes, and 700,000 wagon-pulling horses crashed across a front that stretched 1,800 miles—from the East Prussia-Lithuania border on the Baltic Sea to the border of Romania and Ukraine on the Black Sea.

The Axis attack was astonishing in its speed, scope, and savagery. Soviet divisions, hopelessly outnumbered and outgeneraled, were torn to shreds by the advancing Axis troops. Some five million Red Army troops would be taken prisoner; most would not survive the war. Nazi death squads, known as Einsatzgruppen (“Operational Groups”), swept across the conquered lands in the wake of the combat troops to round up Jews in the towns and villages and kill them.

Stalin’s many errors invited the devastation. Stalin’s target date for his attack on Hitler was tardy by at least two weeks. The Soviet dictator had failed to heed multiple warnings of a German blitzkrieg. Before that, he had rejected a pact with France and Great Britain that, as he acknowledged to the Politburo, would have prevented World War II and probably the June 1941 attack.

Stalin had positioned his combat supplies and undisguised warplanes too near the German border, neglected to develop an adequate military transportation system, and taken down his fortifications at the old Soviet boundary without completing new ones. The Red Army lacked sound defensive plans in the event of a surprise enemy attack. 

Stalin failed to order an immediate and comprehensive counterattack early on June 22 and then refused to permit a strategic retreat. His decision to decapitate the Red Army had left him with meek and inexperienced combat leadership. The German attack achieved shocking results during its opening stages, leaving Stalin depressed, disheveled, and drunk.   

However, good fortune continued to follow Stalin personally. Despite ruthlessly eliminating all opposition within the Communist Party, killing and starving millions of Soviets in the 1930s and imprisoning millions more, bungling preparations for war with Hitler, and going into depressed hiding for several days after Hitler’s stunning attack, Stalin’s weak subordinates did not do to him in late June what he surely would have done to them had the roles been reversed; he was not arrested, tortured, imprisoned, or shot dead by firing squad. 

Stalin was also fortunate in late June that bellicose Japan rejected Hitler’s urgings and chose not to attack the Soviet Union from the east as Barbarossa advanced from the west.

And, although Stalin’s conspiracy with Hitler led to the start of World War II and years of vital communist aid to Axis forces, in the summer of 1941, when Stalin was most vulnerable, two capitalist nations opposed to communism came to his rescue. Great Britain and the United States sent lifesaving military supplies and food to the besieged Soviet leader—something that Stalin was loath to acknowledge.

Stalin was also lucky that Hitler had decided to postpone his Soviet invasion by five weeks to put down uprisings in Yugoslavia and Greece. The resulting belated Axis march on Moscow was thwarted by the snow and bone-cold December weather just a few miles from the Russian capital. An earlier start could have yielded a far different outcome. 

Barbarossa was eventually defeated, but not until four years had passed and tens of millions had died. Lacking Stalin’s good luck, the people of the Soviet Union paid a frightful price in death and destruction for his catalogue of blunders.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kris Osborn

Security,

In the event of a conflict, there would likely be risks of major power warfare engagement, as opposed to a small exchange of fire. The possibility of rapid escalation would be very high. 

An interesting interactive illustration from a prominent think tank appears to raise the question as to the extent to which China already controls the majority of the South China Sea. 

The map, presented by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), shows China’s fighter jet, bomber, radar and missile reach across the South China Sea, demonstrating that very little to none of the region is outside of China’s threat envelope. 

For example, the map indicates that the range of Chinese fighter jets completely encircles the South China Sea, stretching from mainland China down around the Philippines to the Southern parts of SouthEast Asia. China’s bombers, radar, anti-ship cruise missiles and air-defenses also have extensive reach spanning across wide swaths of dispersed terrain.

For instance, the map shows an area in the South China Sea called Fiery Cross Reef which has shelters equipped for mobile missile platforms and hangars sufficient to house 24 combat aircraft. This kind of placement offers China the ability to reach, cover and potentially attack virtually all areas of the South China Sea quickly.

The map also says that China’s HQ-9 Surface to Air Missile systems and YJ-12B anti-ship cruise missiles were deployed to the island in early 2018 

“A KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft was seen on the island in 2020,” the CSIS map says. 

Does this mean that U.S influence and activity in the area is constrained? At risk? Or merely challenged when it comes to operating in the area to assert freedom of navigation and counter China’s controversial and provocative territorial claims? 

Taken individually and collectively, each of the factors may not seem to fully restrict U.S. missions, patrols, training exercises or interoperability maneuvers with allied platforms. U.S. stealth fighters and bombers are built to operate in high-risk or contested areas by relying upon speed, altitude and stealth to elude detection from enemy air defenses. 

Navy surface ships travel with integrated layered defenses engineered to find and knock out incoming ballistic missiles or anti-ship cruise missiles and the presence of Chinese fighter jets in contested areas by no means ensures Chinese air supremacy in the region. 

For instance, the U.S. consistently operates drone flights, surveillance plane missions and bomber patrols in and near the area, suggesting that China’s reach and influence, while significant and disturbing to U.S. leaders, does not amount to what might be termed “operational control” of the area. 

What it does show, however, is that in the event of a conflict, there would likely be risks of major power warfare engagement, as opposed to a small exchange of fire. The possibility of rapid escalation would be very high. 

Kris Osborn is 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. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Peck

History, Europe

Without Hitler's halt order, the beaches of Dunkirk would have become a giant POW cage.

Key Point: Why did Hitler issue the halt order? No one knows for sure.

War movies tend to depict the battles a nation wins—not the ones it loses.

So with a blockbuster Hollywood movie on Dunkirk hitting the silver screen this July, one would think that Dunkirk was a British victory.

In fact, Dunkirk was the climactic moment of one of the greatest military disasters in history. From May 26 to June 4, 1940, an army of more than three hundred thousand British soldiers was chased off the mainland of Europe, reduced to an exhausted mob clinging to a flotilla of rescue boats while leaving almost all of their weapons and equipment behind.

The British Army was crippled for months. If the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force had failed, and the Germans had managed to conduct their own D-Day invasion of Britain, the outcome would have been certain.

So why do the British celebrate Dunkirk as a victory? Why is it called the Miracle of Dunkirk when another such miracle would have given Hitler the keys to London?

Consider the situation. In just six weeks during the spring of 1940, Britain and France had been crushed. When Hitler invaded France and the Benelux countries on May 10, 1940, the Allies were totally off balance. The cream of the Franco-British armies, including much of the ten-division-strong British Expeditionary Force (BEF), had been stationed in northern France. The plan was for them to advance into northern Belgium to stop a German advance, because that was the route the Germans took in 1914. Unfortunately, the German panzer spearhead divisions struck in the center of France, through the weakly defended Belgian and Luxembourg Ardennes forest. Quickly penetrating through the wooded hills, their tank columns turned north to cut off the Allied forces in Belgium from behind, while other German forces—backed by paratroopers—seized Holland and squeezed the Allies from the other direction.

Plagued by disorganization and lethargic leadership, the Allies tried to retreat from Belgium back to France. But it was too late. On May 19, the hard-driving panzer divisions had reached Abbeville, on the English Channel. The bulk of the Allied armies were trapped in a pocket along the French and Belgian coasts, with the Germans on three sides and the English Channel behind. Meanwhile, other German column raced for Paris and beyond, rendering any major French counterattack nothing more than a mapboard fantasy.

The British did what they always when their armies overseas get in trouble: start seeking the nearest port for an exit. With a typical (and in this case justified) lack of faith in their allies, they began planning to evacuate the BEF from the Channel ports. Though the French would partly blame their defeat on British treachery, the British were right. With the French armies outmaneuvered and disintegrating, France was doomed.

But so was the BEF—or so it looked. As the exhausted troops trudged to the coast, through roads choked with refugees and strafed by the Luftwaffe, the question was: could they reach the beaches and safety before the panzers did? There were four hundred thousand British and French troops to evacuate, through a moderate-sized port whose docks were being destroyed by bombs and shells. Even under the best of conditions, it would have taken more time than the Allies could rightfully expect for those troops to be lifted off the beaches.

Despite the general Allied collapse, the British and French troops defending the Dunkirk perimeter fought hard under constant air attack. Nonetheless, had Hitler’s tank generals such as Heinz Guderian had their way, the hard-driving panzers would have sliced like scalpels straight to Dunkirk. The beaches would have become a giant POW cage.

Then on May 24, Hitler and his high command hit the stop button. The panzer columns were halted in their tracks; the plan now was for the Luftwaffe to pulverize the defenders until the slower-moving German infantry divisions caught up to finish the job.

Why did Hitler issue the halt order? No one knows for sure. Hitler had fought in that part of France in World War I, and he worried that the terrain was too muddy for tanks.

Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering assured him that his bombers and fighters could do the job. There were concerns about logistics, or a potential French counterattack. Or maybe it was just that Hitler, that perennial gambler, was so dazzled by his own unexpected success at the dice table of war that he lost his nerve.

Whatever the reason, while the Germans dithered, the British moved with a speed that Britain would rarely display again for the rest of the war. Not just the Royal Navy was mobilized. From British ports sailed yachts, fishing boats, lifeboats and rowboats. Like the “ragtag fleet” in Battlestar Galactica, anything that could sail was pressed into service.

France has been ridiculed so often for its performance in 1940 that we forget how the stubbornness and bravery of the French rearguards around Dunkirk perimeter allowed the evacuation to succeed. Under air and artillery fire, the motley fleet evacuated 338,226 soldiers. As for Britain betraying its allies, 139,997 of those men were French soldiers, along with Belgians and Poles.

As they heaved themselves into the boats under a hail of bombs, the soldiers cursed the RAF for leaving them in the lurch. They couldn’t see above the tumult above the clouds where the RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires hurled themselves against the Luftwaffe. Weakened by losses during the French campaign, the RAF couldn’t stop the German air assault. But they at least could hamper it.

The evacuation was incomplete. Some forty thousand troops were captured by the Germans. The Scotsmen of the Fifty-First Highland Division, trapped deep inside France, were encircled and captured by the Seventh Panzer Division commanded by Erwin Rommel. The BEF did save most of its men, but almost all its equipment—from tanks and trucks to rifles—was left behind.

So why did the British treat Dunkirk as a victory? Partially it was out of necessity. The British public needed some good news now that their world had fallen apart. Yet despite Churchill’s rousing rhetoric about the battle, he knew that pseudo-victories would never defeat Hitler. “Wars are not won by evacuations,” he told the House of Commons.

The best answer is that the successful evacuation of the cream of the British Army gave Britain a lifeline to continue the war. In June 1940, neither America nor the Soviets were at war with the Axis. With France gone, Britain, and its Commonwealth partners such as Australia and Canada, stood alone. Had Britain capitulated to Hitler, or signed a compromise peace that left the Nazis in control of Europe, many Americans would have been dismayed—but not surprised.

A British writer whose father fought at Dunkirk wrote that the British public was under no illusions. “If there was a Dunkirk spirit, it was because people understood perfectly well the full significance of the defeat but, in a rather British way, saw no point in dwelling on it. We were now alone. We’d pull through in the end. But it might be a long, grim wait…”

Their patience and endurance were rewarded on May 8, 1945, when Nazi Germany surrendered.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Kris Osborn

Security,

Both countries are racing to gain a foothold in the resource-rich Arctic.

Key point: The terrain in the Arctic is extremely rugged. That means having the right equipment and training will matter more than in other regions.

Combat in the Arctic is a difficult proposition.

Sub-zero temperatures, penguins, polar bears, ice, glaciers and snowstorms all present challenges for possible combat operations. This is a growing concern among U.S. weapons developers now that the military is massively increasing Arctic warfare preparations. 

Increased activity in the Arctic, accelerated by fast-melting ice, continues to generate substantial international competition, particularly between Russia and America. Arctic ice is melting much faster than previously anticipated, leading major powers to see a fast-pressing need to step-up Arctic war preparation more than ten-years earlier than expected. Warmer weather and higher water temperatures are melting ice, opening up new waterways, areas for transit and an ability to gather resources and strategic advantages. Russia’s Northern Sea Route along the country’s Arctic border presents the largest and most prominent waterways approaching the Arctic. In order to protect that area and its resource claims, Russia has more ice breakers than the United States, and Moscow has been massively increasing its Arctic operational-tempo and basing there. 

For all of these reasons, the Office of Naval Research is looking at ways to help advanced weapons systems operate in extreme temperatures. The Pentagon is fast-tracking new icebreakers. The Army’s cold weather units, such as the 10th Mountain Division and Alaska-based forces are increasing the volume and frequency of cold weather warfare preparations. As part of this, the Army is also moving quickly to acquire a new Cold Weather All Terrain Vehicle, a platform especially engineered to operate in the harshest of cold weather combat conditions. 

The CATV Request for Prototypes Proposals was issued by the Army in June through the National Advanced Mobility Consortium, a BAE Systems statement said. Early prototypes will eventually be submitted for “limited performance and endurance testing,” according to the Army’s request for proposal.

BAE Systems is one vendor moving to offer a solution with its “Beowulf” vehicle. BAE reports that Beowulf is based on the BvS10, which is currently in production and already operational in multiple variants with five countries, first going into service with the U.K. Royal Marines in 2005. 

“The Beowulf and its armored sister vehicle, the BvS10, represent the most advanced vehicles in the world when it comes to operating in any terrain, whether it’s snow, ice, rock, sand, mud, swamp, or steep mountainous climbs, and its amphibious capability allows it to swim in flooded areas or in coastal water environments,” Keith Klemmer, director of business development at BAE Systems, said in a written statement. 

Having an Arctic-ruggedized combat vehicle certainly introduces a number of tactical advantages. Not only can it transport forces across dangerous, sub-zero terrain, but could perhaps at some point be configured as an unmanned variant designed to transport supplies, ammunition, fuel and other essential resources at minimal risk to soldiers. Also, should there need to be an Arctic attack or advance of some kind, it goes without saying that an Arctic-ready vehicle could greatly change the equation by advancing attacking infantry or even pulling weapons systems such as artillery. It could incorporate sensors intended to assess the thickness or strength of ice as well. 

Of course, BAE has not discussed any specifics related to its offering, yet the existence of such a platform raises interesting questions about the kinds of systems and technologies likely to inform its construction. BAE’s Beowulf offering looks like a tracked vehicle which most likely incorporates newer kinds of warming and propulsion technologies, as well as cold-weather operational hardening of various kinds. Interestingly, it would also make sense if, as a tracked vehicle, the Beowulf were able to climb glaciers and descend at safe speeds without sliding. 

Also, it would not be surprising if Beowulf’s technical systems incorporate some kinds of hull-warming, ice-melting technologies now being fast-tracked for Navy ships preparing for Arctic operations.

Finally, it would also seem likely that this kind of ice-ready vehicle includes some kinds of systems engineered to prevent an engine or vehicle oils from freezing. 

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. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler are frequently misunderstood as either Christian or atheist. A look at his own words reveals a complicated truth.

Key Point: Hitler's religious hypocrisy helped him to appeal to a broad constituency.

No matter how little you know about history, you know something about Adolf Hitler. And if you want to shut down an opponent, you can claim that Hitler said/did/believed the same thing. Godwin’s Law exists for a reason.

But Hitler remains a persistent mystery on one front—his religious faith. Atheists tend to insist Hitler was a devout Christian. Christians contend that he was an atheist. And still others suggest that he was a practicing member of the occult.

None of these theories is true, says historian Richard Weikart in his new book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Delving more deeply into the question of Hitler’s religious faith than any researcher to date, Weikart reveals the startling and fascinating truth about the most hated man of the twentieth century: Adolf Hitler was a pantheist who believed nature was the only true “God.” (click here to listen to an interview with Weikart on the History Unplugged Podcast)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

In mid-January of 1940, Hitler was discussing with his colleagues a rather frequent topic of his conversations and monologues: the church. After he sarcastically imitated Niemöller, the Confessing Church leader who was incarcerated in a concentration camp, someone in his entourage indicated to him that posterity might not be able to figure out what Hitler’s religion was, because he never openly stated his beliefs. The person who brought this to Hitler’s attention had clearly noticed the discrepancy between his private expressions of intense antipathy to Christianity and his public religious image. Since many in Hitler’s entourage were also intensely anti-Christian, perhaps they were trying to provoke him to state his personal religious views publicly. In any case, this observation about the inscrutability of Hitler’s religious views still has merit today— even though we have far more information about Hitler available to us than most of his contemporaries had.That, of course, does not mean everyone draws the same conclusion. As we have seen, some people today interpret Hitler as an atheist, while others insist he was a Christian. In fact, he has been described as an adherent of just about every major religious position in twentieth-century European society (excepting Judaism, of course), which included agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, occultism, deism, and non-Christian theism.

Interestingly, when he was confronted in January 1940 with the observation that people might not know Hitler’s religion, he suggested that, on the contrary, it should not be difficult for people to figure it out. After all, he asserted, he had never allowed any clergy to participate in his party meetings or even in funerals for party comrades. He continued, “The Christian-Jewish pestilence is surely approaching its end now. It is simply dreadful, that a religion has even been possible, that literally eats its God in Holy Communion.” Hitler clearly thought that anyone should be able to figure out that he was not a Christian. Nonetheless, Rosenberg reported in his diary later that year that Hitler had determined that he should divulge his negative views about Christianity in his last testament “so that no doubt about his position can surface. As head of state he naturally held back—but nevertheless after the war clear consequences will follow.” Many times, Hitler told his colleagues that he would reckon with Christianity after the successful conclusion of the war.

Interestingly, even in these conversations, Hitler only indicated what he did not believe. He did not explain at that time what he did believe about God, the after-life, or other religious issues. Indeed, it is much easier to figure out what Hitler did not believe than to figure out Hitler’s religion and feelings. Probably, this is partly because Hitler considered God ineffable. Hitler’s God was not one who revealed himself clearly to humanity, but a mysterious being who superseded human knowledge.

HITLER’S RELIGION: WHAT HE DID NOT BELIEVE

So, what did Hitler not believe? He continually rejected Christianity, calling it a Jewish plot to undermine the heroic ideals of the (Aryan-dominated) Roman Empire. He did not accept the deity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, or indeed any of the miracles of Jesus. There is no evidence that he believed in a triune God. Though he esteemed Jesus as an Aryan fighter against Jewish materialism who was martyred for his anti-Jewish stance, he did not ascribe to Jesus’s death any significance in human salvation. Indeed, he did not believe in salvation at all in the Christian sense of the term, because he denied a personal afterlife. Despite his public invocations to God, Hitler also did not believe in the efficacy of prayer. His God responded to people and judged them according to their works, not their words. Although he spurned Christianity, this did not lead him to disbelieve in every form of deity, however. He overtly rejected atheism, associating it with “Jewish-Bolshevism.” Further, he explicitly condemned mysticism, occultism, and neo-paganism. Thus, it is evident Hitler was neither a Christian, atheist, occultist, nor neo-paganist.

While this narrows the range of options of Hitler’s religion slightly, it still leaves us with agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, and non-Christian theism. A reasonable case could be made for more than one of these options. In order solve this puzzle, however, one must not only examine the full panoply of his religious statements but also decipher how to weigh those statements on Hitler’s religion. Are his private statements more revealing of his true convictions than his public speeches? Probably, but even his private statements must be used cautiously. Are his books a better indication of his personal beliefs than his speeches? This is likely, because he seemed to be more systematic in explaining his worldview in Mein Kampf and in his Second Book. However, they also served propaganda purposes and must be used carefully as well. There also remains the question of whether Hitler even had a coherent metaphysic; if not, perhaps there is no single answer to what Hitler’s religion was.

One problem is that Hitler often portrayed God as an impersonal force, yet sometimes he implied God did take a personal interest in humanity, or at least in the German people’s destiny. Though he usually insisted that God does not intervene in the natural cause-andeffect relationships in the universe, at times he seemed to ascribe a role to Providence in history. When he survived assassination attempts, for instance, he took it as a sign from Providence that he was specially chosen to fulfill a divine mission. Until the very end of World War II, he thought his God would not fail to bring victory to the German people.

One of the reasons it is unlikely that Hitler was a theist is because he did not seem to think God could contravene the laws of nature. Hitler often called the laws of nature eternal and inviolable, thus embracing determinism. He interpreted history as a course of events determined by the racial composition of people, not by their religion or other cultural factors. The way to understand humanity and history, according to Hitler, was to study the laws of nature. He considered science, not religious revelation, the most reliable path to knowledge. What Hitler thought science revealed was that races are unequal and locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence, which would determine the future destiny of humanity.

Whether Hitler construed the laws of nature as the creation of a deistic or theistic God, or the emanation of a pantheistic God, he clearly grounded his morality on the laws of nature, which he consistently portrayed as the will of God. Since nature brought about biological improvement through struggle, Hitler defined moral goodness as whatever contributed to biological progress. Evil or sin, in Hitler’s opinion, was anything that produced biological degeneration. Thus, Hitler thought he was operating in complete harmony with God’s will by sterilizing people with disabilities and forbidding the intermarriage of Germans and Jews. Killing the weak to make way for the strong was part of the divine plan revealed in nature, in Hitler’s view.

Thus, even murdering disabled Germans, launching expansionist wars to wrest territory from allegedly inferior races, and murdering millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, Slavs, and others defined as subhumans, was not only morally permissible but also obedience to the voice of God and aspects of Hitler’s religion. After all, that was how nature operated, producing superabundantly and then destroying most of the progeny in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler often reminded his fellow Germans that even if this seemed ruthless, it was actually wise. In any case, he warned that they could not moralize about it, because humans were completely subject to the laws of nature.

HITLER’S RELIGION: PANTHEISM AND BRUTAL POWER POLITICS

In the end, while recognizing that Hitler’s religion was somewhat muddled, it seems evident his religion was closest to pantheism. He often deified nature, calling it eternal and all-powerful at various times throughout his career. He frequently used the word “nature” interchangeably with God, Providence, or the Almighty. While on some occasions he claimed God had created people or organisms, at other times (or sometimes in the same breath) he claimed nature had created them. Further, he wanted to cultivate a certain veneration of nature through a reinvented Christmas festival that turned the focus away from Christianity. He also hoped to build an observatory-planetarium complex in Linz that would serve as a religious pilgrimage site to dazzle Germans with the wonders of the cosmos. Overall, it appears a pantheist worldview was where Hitler felt closest to home.

Since it is so difficult to pinpoint exactly what Hitler’s religion was, it might seem his religion was historically inconsequential.

However, hopefully this study of Hitler’s religion sheds light on a number of important issues. First, his anti-Christianity obviously shaped the persecution of the Christian churches during the Third Reich. Second, his religious hypocrisy helped explain his ability to appeal to a broad constituency. Third, his trust that his God would reward his efforts and willpower, together with his sense of divine mission, imbued him with hope, even in hopeless circumstances. This helps us understand why he was so optimistic until the very end, when it should have been obvious much earlier that the game was up.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons