Diplomacy & Crisis News

Si le gouvernement consacre des centaines de milliards de dollars à la guerre, il ne trouve pas d'argent pour venir en aide aux anciens combattants américains du Vietnam. / États-Unis, États-Unis (affaires extérieures), États-Unis (affaires intérieures), Irak, Armée, Conflit, Guérilla, Santé - (...) / États-Unis, États-Unis (affaires extérieures), États-Unis (affaires intérieures), Irak, Armée, Conflit, Guérilla, Santé - 2004/04

L'Amérique, c'est le monde. En deux propositions d'un enchaînement logique audacieux, le président George W. Bush a en effet expliqué : « Maintenant que la guerre nous a été déclarée, nous conduirons le monde à la victoire. » Le 11 septembre 2001, en tout cas, les Etats-Unis ont essuyé des pertes (...) / États-Unis (affaires extérieures), Information, Médias, Presse, Terrorisme - 2001/10

With Andrian Prokip 

First published in:

Since 1991, energy delivery and gas supplies have been an important factor in post-Soviet Ukraine’s relations with both Russia and the European Union (EU). Russia was and still is partially dependent on the Ukrainian gas transportation system (GTS) and has not been able to take full control of its energy relations with the EU. Since the 2004 Orange Revolution, geopolitical considerations rather than economic needs have motivated Moscow to build new pipelines specifically designed to bypass Ukraine, and thereby to get a freer hand in its dealings with its westernizing “brother nation.”

The completion of the first Nord Stream pipeline from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany in late 2012 lowered the role of the Ukrainian GTS for Russian energy exports to the EU. It provided a necessary pre-condition for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and covert intervention in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The forthcoming possible launch of the Nord Stream II pipeline would erase any remaining Russian dependency on Ukraine as a transit country and could be a prelude to new military escalation between Moscow and Kyiv.

For many years, the Ukrainian transit corridor was crucial to Europe’s gas supply. The routes that pass through Ukraine to Russia and the EU have always been more than sufficient to deliver as much gas volume as has been necessary for Europe. The EU’s and Russia’s reliance on the Ukrainian GTS has provoked international geoeconomic interest in Ukraine since its emergence as an independent state in 1991.

Today, the eventual completion of the Nord Stream 2 via the Baltic Sea looks increasingly likely. If this pipeline were to start operating, the Ukrainian GTS would become largely unnecessary. A loss of most or even all Russian-EU transit could call the future of the entire Ukrainian gas infrastructure into question.  Without the income from levies on the transit of Russian and Central Asian gas flowing through Ukraine to the EU, Ukraine may find that its gas transportation system is no longer economical.

If the Ukrainian GTS went out of business, this would have far-reaching implications for the EU’s energy supply, Ukraine’s relations with Russia, and larger European security issues. Many in Ukraine fear that the elimination of Russia and the EU’s dependence on Ukrainian gas transit will allow the Kremlin to provoke further instability in Ukraine.  The Kremlin would feel more comfortable to intensifying its hybrid war with Ukraine once Russia is no longer dependent on Ukrainian gas transportation. This could escalate into a full-scale as well as open (and not merely covert, proxy, and paramilitary) interstate war against its Slavic neighbor.

At the same time, it is increasingly obvious that the role of Russian and Central Asian pipeline gas in the EU’s energy market will gradually decline. Alternative energy sources are becoming more widely used. Remaining gas demand will increasingly be met via diversified supply mechanisms, including Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) tankers. These factors will decrease the EU’s dependency on both the gas supply from Russia  and the Ukrainian GTS. Recently, the adoption of the European Green Deal and a resulting acceleration of decarbonization have made this outcome more likely

However, Europe’s decarbonization plans may also be opening a new window of opportunity for Ukraine. In the best case scenario, an increasing demand for a variety of low carbon gases–such as biogas, biomethane, and hydrogen–could result in more energy collaboration between the EU and Ukraine. New joint projects for the generation and transportation of low carbon gas could become part and parcel of Ukraine’s future integration into European energy markets.

Ukraine has the potential to produce per year 7.5 to 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) of biogas and biomethane, which is approximately 25 to 30 percent of its own yearly natural gas consumption. As the production costs of such gas are relatively high, demand for this energy source may currently be low in Ukraine. Yet, it could be attractive for European customers today. The prices of these energy sources may be more acceptable in, and the nature of these gases will be more relevant, to the EU than they are currently for Ukrainian customers. Technically, these types of gas can be delivered through existing pipelines without much modernization, following a few legislative amendments that are expected to pass soon.

While exporting biogas is a short-term option, a promising long-term prospect is the generation and export of Ukrainian hydrogen. The European Hydrogen Strategy, as part of last year’s European Green Deal, stipulates that “the Eastern Neighborhood, in particular Ukraine, and the Southern Neighborhood countries should be priority partners.” The Strategy calls for the installation, within the EU by 2030, of 40 gigawatts (GW) of electrolyzers – specialized installations generating hydrogen – that, in their turn, need to use renewable or other low-carbon energy for their operation. (Such provisions are necessary to guarantee that, in the end, the exploitation of new energy sources is indeed contributing to environmental protection.) More electrolyzers producing another 40 GW are envisaged for the EU’s neighbor countries from which the EU could then import this green energy. It is planned that electrolyzers producing 10 GW out of the planned new 40 GW capacity will be located in Ukraine.

Despite the positive outlook for the development of Ukrainian hydrogen production for Europe, this plan is facing some challenges in Ukraine. First, the Ukrainian natural gas pipelines are so far not suitable to transport hydrogen. They would need modernization to be used for such a novel export function.

Some Ukrainian gas transportation companies are, in cooperation with various technical universities and other academic institutions, already investigating the possibility of transmitting hydrogen through the existing distribution grids. These Ukrainian investigations may be also of interest to other countries with similar gas transportation systems, especially those in post-communist Eastern Europe. However, significant investment in new hydrogen production and transit infrastructure will be needed soon in order to create and take advantage of  a modernized energy transportation network.

Moreover, the general organization of Ukraine’s entire gas system needs to be rethought and redesigned. The current volumes of gas consumption and transit are much lower than the previously installed capacities allow – a misbalance that raises the generic fix-costs and final price of the transportation and distribution services. For instance, overall gas transit in Ukraine amounted to 141 bcm during the year 1998, but was at only 55.8 bcm by 2020, meaning that much of the GTS remains unused. Based on existing contracts, the amount of gas transit may decrease further to 40 bcm annually by 2024. There is a similarly radical change in Ukraine’s own gas consumption. While Ukraine’s gas consumption had been 118 bcm during its first year of independence of 1991, this number declined to 50.4 bcm in 2013, and went further down to 31 bcm in 2020. However, it’s important to note that the latter number does not include gas consumption in the non-government-controlled parts of the Donets Basin and in occupied Crimea.

A second major challenge for Kyiv will be determining how to raise enough domestic and foreign investments to take full advantage of Ukraine’s high green gas generation and transportation potential. Above all, funding is needed to redesign and reconstruct the existing natural gas grids and prepare for the transmission of hydrogen. The  production of hydrogen  requires the construction of new facilities to produce it, preferably by using renewable energy sources to run the electrolyzing process.

A third challenge of Ukraine’s entry into EU’s emerging green gas market will be Kyiv’s energy relations and competition with Moscow. Presumably, the Kremlin will not wait for the EU’s demand for fossil fuels to decrease and for income from current Russian energy exports to the EU to shrink. Russia will also try to become a green gas and hydrogen exporter to the EU. There is a risk that Russia will draw on its experience conducting trade and (mis)information wars to limit Ukraine’s ability to supply hydrogen to Europe through defamation, subversion and intervention. This threat will become especially pertinent if the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is indeed launched, and the EU becomes entirely independent from the Ukrainian GTS. Russia cannot be expected to engage in fair competition with Ukraine and could even employ para- or regular military means – as it, in some ways, partly already does – to improve its position in the European energy market.

Still, trying to meet these three challenges could contribute to Ukraine’s energy transition and its emergence as a new green economy. Independent from geopolitical developments, the prevailing ecological, industrial, and technological trends are already dictating such a transformation. In particular, Ukraine’s energy transition could help to compensate for the already predictable losses that Ukraine will incur from the decreasing importance of traditional natural gas transit. Helping Ukraine to adapt its GTS and production facilities to the demands of the European Green Deal is an opportunity for the EU to support Ukraine in the face of the Nord Stream 2. Kyiv will need outside support to redesign its gas transportation and distribution systems and to modernize existing gas production facilities and build new ones. Finally, Ukraine will need new transit and export agreements on supplying green gas to the EU, and possibly to other countries in non-EU Europe, North America, or elsewhere.

Strategic investment into Ukraine’s energy industry, including its low-carbon gas generation and transportation system would not only have narrowly geoeconomic, but also wider geopolitical implications. Assistance to Ukraine would help Kyiv contain the Kremlin’s ongoing attempts to unleash further socioeconomic instability in Ukraine. Moreover, Washington and London would be supporting the sovereignty and independence of a country that once possessed the world’s third largest arsenal of atomic weapons. Thereby, the two Western signatory states of the famous 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States and United Kingdom, would indirectly strengthen the world-wide nuclear non-proliferation regime.

A similar story goes for two other countries that, in the 1990s, had inherited as well as given up Soviet atomic weapons, and also received Budapest Memoranda. Belarus and Kazakhstan too have been subject to Russian – so far only verbal – irredentist claims. Support for Belarus and Kazakhstan’s sovereignties would, like in the case of strengthening Ukraine’s resilience, be beneficial to the functioning of the worldwide non-proliferation regime. Such an approach further applies to two additional official nuclear-weapons states, France and China, that also provided Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan with their own governmental security assurances in December 1994. Any support that Paris and Beijing provide to former nuclear-weapons states that gave up all of their atomic war heads voluntarily would be a sign of support for the geopolitical logic behind the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, one of humanity’s most important agreements.

However, the main issue is here the future relationship between the EU and Kyiv. By supporting Ukraine’s energy transition, Brussels could strengthen a country in which an entire revolution, the Euromaidan uprising of 2013-2014, was conducted under European flags. While the three-month Euromaidan protests were not exclusively about Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation, they began in November 2013 to secure Kyiv’s signing of an Association Agreement with the EU. Ukraine’s Western integration, in turn, was the pretext of Russia’s military aggression in Southern and Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The Kremlin has since been conducting its hybrid war against Ukraine as a form of punishment for Kyiv’s decision to adopt EU norms and values.

Finally, Germany could support Ukraine’s energy system to partially atone itself for the damage that it has done to the geopolitics of Eastern Europe with its two Nord Stream pipeline projects. Arguably, the full opening of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in October 2012 was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for Russia’s military attack on Ukraine, one-and-a-half years later. Until 2012, Ukraine had, through its control over a large part of Gazprom’s pipeline connections to the EU, considerable economic leverage vis-à-vis Russia which will be further reduced should Nord Stream 2 also go online. The United States, United Kingdom and Germany would do themselves and the world a service by taking advantage of Ukraine’s considerable potential to become a major low-carbon gas supplier for Europe and beyond.

Andrian Prokip is an Energy Analyst at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv, and Senior Associate at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

Andreas Umland is Research Fellow at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv.

https://hir.harvard.edu/ukraines-low-carbon-gas-potential-and-the-eu/

 

 

 

Hernando de Soto est un homme très courtisé en cette période électorale au Pérou. Économiste primé à de multiples reprises, il fut un proche conseiller du président-dictateur Alberto Fujimori dans les années 1990. Son cheval de bataille ? La relation entre propriété privée et investissements dans les (...) / Amérique latine, Pérou, Agriculture, Droit, Écologie, Économie, Élections, État, Idées, Amérindiens, Droits des minorités, Mouvement de contestation, Pauvreté, Personnalités, Politique, Violence, Environnement, Privatisation, Néolibéralisme, Pollution, Réforme agraire, Corruption - 2016/06

Les récentes mutineries militaires en Argentine ont permis de manifester combien est puissant et massif le soutien des citoyens aux autorités élues. Elles ont aussi montré la grande fragilité des démocraties en Amérique latine. Dans la plupart des pays qui viennent à peine de retrouver le pluralisme (...) / Amérique latine - 1987/05

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

EPFs enable combat operations and potential war operations in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

The Navy’s fleet of Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF) vessels is continuing to take on a growing number of humanitarian and medical support missions, given the speed, versatility and cargo-carrying capacity of the ships.

However, alongside the expanding mission scope and growing combatant commander requests for the fleet, the ships bring some perhaps lesser recognized advantages to maritime warfare.

While perhaps operating with less firepower than many other deeper draft, heavily armed warships, EPFs enable combat operations and potential war operations in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

“Each vessel includes a flight deck to support day and night aircraft launch and recovery operations,” according to a press statement by Naval Sea Systems Command that was issued on Sept. 3, 2020.

This means that armed warships can patrol the area and quickly transport combat vehicles, equipment and troops to land sites along the coast. EPFs can support amphibious operations, a tactical circumstance that introduces new dimensions to deterrence should Russia or China be contemplating offensive actions. 

The Navy has received twelve EPFs from Austal USA, a Gulf Coast shipbuilder that is already working on the thirteenth ship. All EPFs are operated by Military Sealift Command. Interestingly, the thirteenth ship will set a new precedent for future ships in its class by being able to launch, land and operate V-22 Ospreys. Its ability to conduct high-speed maneuvers coupled with heavy equipment transport technology creates combat-tactic advantages. Also, its range of twelve hundred miles can enable crucial transport without having to operate large, deep-draft or big-deck ships in high-risk areas. 

Additionally, the speed of the vessels can help support the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations concept, which is a strategy aimed at leveraging long-range sensors, networking, and new weapons applications to optimize combat effectiveness. This strategy can be achieved by operating with less congested—and therefore potentially more vulnerable—aggregated forces on the ocean. For example, once a beachhead is secured through an amphibious attack, arriving forces will be in great need of reinforcements to expand and build upon mission objectives. These ships also help sea-basing objectives by enabling transport from the ocean, thereby removing the need for land deployments in high-risk, difficult-to-reach areas. Larger, deeper-draft ships will be able to operate at much safer distances, while EPFs approach enemy areas as smaller, faster and potentially less vulnerable targets. 

The ability to operate at sea gives attacking forces better protection and increased airpower support. Big-deck amphibious ships or even aircraft carriers could be well-positioned to better support advancing attack forces moving on land. This is mainly possible if deck-launched air-attack platforms, such as F-35 fighter jets, V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft or F/A-18 supersonic jets have targeting and logistics support from the shore. 

Special operations forces also need to move quickly in smaller groups. Equally important, they may need supplies, weapons, equipment and possibly fast-moving tactical vehicles. Thus, there are mission objectives that small groups of special operations forces may not be able to accomplish with an eleven-meter Rigid Inflatable Boat which naturally cannot transport equipment. For example, a V-22 Osprey launched from an amphibious ship or offshore sea base may wish to conduct Mounted Vertical Maneuver operations wherein Marines drop in behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, support friendly troops or launch targeted, covert attacks. These types of missions would benefit from a fast transport vehicle like the EPF.

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 Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Flickr / Official U.S. Navy Page

Caleb Larson

Guns, Americas

The iconic M1911 design is still manufactured by Colt 100 years later.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Despite no longer enjoying the widespread success that it once did as the United States’ standard-issue service pistol, the iconic M1911 design is still manufactured by Colt, as well as by a number of other firearm manufacturers in the United States and elsewhere abroad—not too bad for a pistol originally designed at the beginning of the last century.

John Browning, arguably one of the United States’ most iconic and talented weapon designers, designed what would become one of the most widely-produced, copied, and recognizable pistols in history, now known today as the M1911.

Post-World War II

Though the M1911 made its combat debut during World War I, the design really came into its own during World War II. During that conflict, the design’s worth was solidified—millions of M1911s were produced for not only the United States but for other allied countries as well.

Post-war, the United States relied on the M1911 design during the Korean war and during Vietnam, though by the 1980s, the design was beginning to show its age. A replacement was found in Beretta’s M9 pistol, chambered in the smaller 9x19-millimeter Parabellum.

A Marine Corps & SOCOM Favorite

Despite the widespread adoption of Beretta’s small, higher-capacity pistol, the M1911 remained a mainstay in the Marine Corps among certain specialized groups like some reconnaissance units as well as among some MEU(SOC) personnel.

And, despite the wide-spread adoption of tens of thousands of Beretta M9 pistols, the United States Special Operations Command felt the need for a pistol that retained the stopping power of the large .45 ACP cartridge, while updating the M1911 platform.

To that end, USSOCOM initiated the Offensive Handgun Weapon System competition in order to find a suitable, .45 ACP replacement service pistol. Though Colt had high hopes for their own M1911-replacement, the Colt Colt OHWS, the design was ultimately unsuccessful. The German Heckler & Koch ultimately won the competition with their MK23 Mod 0 pistol. The MK23 Mod 0 was intended to be an offensive weapon, rather than as a back-up, secondary weapon like the M9 and remains in service with some Special Operations Command soldiers.

Farewell

Despite the retention of updated and modified M1911, the Colt M45A1, by the Marine Corps, the M1911 and derivative designs are on the out, with the United States military shifting from lower capacity, harder-hitting ammunition, to increased capacity designs with less stopping power. Most recently, the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps adapted the M17 and M18 service pistols, chambered in 9x19mm Parabellum as their standard-issue service pistols.

Postscript

And, despite no longer enjoying the widespread success that it once did as the United States’ standard-issue service pistol, the iconic M1911 design is still manufactured by Colt, as well as by a number of other firearm manufacturers in the United States and elsewhere abroad—not too bad for a pistol originally designed at the beginning of the last century.

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and Defense Writer with The National Interest. He lives in Berlin and covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society.

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Episkopos

Nuclear Weapons, North Korea

The international sanctions regime has proven largely toothless, if not counterproductive, as a means of starving DPRK’s military-industrial complex.

Here's What You Need To Remember: According to a 2019 UN report, North Korea has developed a sophisticated criminal network to continue selling arms through a diverse cast of proxies, front companies, and foreign middlemen.

North Korea (DPRK) is sometimes described as an ‘autarky,’ or economically self-reliant state, but this label belies some of the core workings of the North Korean economy: among them, a vast, illicit arms trade that continues to thrive in spite of the international sanctions regime arrayed against Pyongyang.

In the early 1980s, Premier Kim Il-Sung’s DPRK found a lucrative niche as a small arms exporter to dozens of warring and unstable third world nations; these included Libya, Yemen, Uganda, Madagascar, Iraq, Syria, Iran. The crown jewel of North Korea’s arms export ambitions became Zimbabwe, newly independent from British colonial rule; a warm personal relationship between Il-Sung and Prime Minister Robert Mugabe made Zimbabwe one of DPRK’s most loyal customers over the 1980’s, importing a wide array of heavy military hardware including T-14 tanks, armored vehicles, missile defense systems, and artillery installations. According to a 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency report, arms sales grossed for a considerable $4 billion from 1981 to 1989 and comprised over one-third of DPRK’s total export volume in 1982.

In the following decade, DPRK branched out into the missile and nuclear technology business. It is difficult to ascertain the full scale of North Korea’s 1990’s export activities, but defectors and declassified intelligence reports name Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and Vietnam as among the dozens of prospective clients expressing interest in North Korean missiles or missile technology well into the early 2000’s.

The growing cascade of UN and EU-imposed sanctions in the wake of Pyongyang’s 2003 withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has certainly cut into North Korea’s arms export bottom line, but Pyongyang has proven remarkably adept at discovering new ways to skirt the sanctions regime. Though legally binding, none of the nine U.N Security Council Resolutions that make up the bulk of North Korea’s sanctions burden are self-enforcing. It falls on every individual member state to take adequate action against financial dealings with Pyongyang—a mandate that is being met with mixed success across the third and developing world.

According to a 2019 UN report, North Korea has developed a sophisticated criminal network to continue selling arms through a diverse cast of proxies, front companies, and foreign middlemen. In recent years, North Korea became a leading arms supplier to the Houthi movement in Yemen, as well as militant groups in Uganda and Sudan, mainly by funneling its merchandise through a Syrian company registered to arms trafficker Hussein al-Ali. Pyongyang has likewise succeeded in cultivating valuable ties at the highest echelons of the Libyan Defense Ministry, resulting in an arms contract that O Chol Su, the Deputy Minister of DPRK’s Ministry of Military Equipment, described as necessary “for the required defence systems and ammunition needed to maintain stability of Libya.”

North Korea also heads a robust maritime smuggling ring. In what the UN described as the "largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” customs officials found a cache with 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades aboard a North Korean vessel en route to Egypt. As it later turned out, the client was none other than the Egyptian Armed Forces themselves; Egypt’s military ordered the North Korean munitions through a complex web of Egyptian business proxies.

North Korea’s continued success in growing and expanding its illicit arms trade is perhaps the starkest illustration of a trend that has long drawn the alarm of Korea experts: the international sanctions regime has proven largely toothless, if not counterproductive, as a means of starving DPRK’s military-industrial complex.

Mark Episkopos is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and served as a research assistant at the Center for the National Interest. Mark is also a PhD student in History at American University.

This piece first appeared last year and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mark Episkopos

Russian Navy, Russia

Plagued by an increasingly complex and costly set of problems, Russia’s only aircraft carrier is hanging on by a thread.

Here's What You Need To Remember: So vast is the extent of the work that needs to be done on Admiral Kuznetsov that it may prove more cost-effective in the long run to simply procure a new carrier, or—as an increasing number of Russian defense experts are already doing—to ask whether or not the Russian Navy really needs an aircraft carrier in the first place.

Plagued by an increasingly complex and costly set of problems, Russia’s only aircraft carrier is hanging on by a thread.

Classified by the Soviets as a “heavy aviation cruiser,” Admiral Kuznetsov was conceived in the 1980s with a fundamentally different mission from its U.S. counterparts. Kuznetsov was intended as a hybrid mix between a heavy missile cruiser and a dedicated carrier, housing some fixed-wing aircraft whilst acting as a powerful combat platform against American carrier battle groups with its salvo-launched P-700 Granit anti-ship cruise missiles.

Kuznetsov was introduced in 1991 but did not become fully operational until the mid-1990s. Despite suffering several problems involving arguable degrees of human error, the carrier served largely uneventfully through the mid-2010s. It was not until Russia’s 2016 Syrian campaign that the Western world was offered its first glimpse into Kuznetsov’s numerous problems, with the carrier crashing two fighters within less than three weeks of one another.

Russia’s Defense Ministry signed a refit and modernization contract for Kuznetsov in late 2017, but those plans were cut short in the following year when a seventy-ton crane smashed through the ship’s hull and caused its PD-50 drydock to sink. It was estimated that the damage to the ship’s hull would cost as much as one billion dollars to repair, and that’s not considering the price tag of the deep refit and modernization for which Admiral Kuznetsov is long overdue. Then there is the PD-50 itself, which reportedly sustained catastrophic damage during the incident. There were several options available to the military following the drydock disaster, none of them cheap or fast. Moscow initially announced its intent to recover the PD-50 regardless of the colossal costs involved, but those efforts are reportedly being hampered by local corruption and gross industrial mismanagement. 

By itself, this sequence of events is more than enough to qualify the Admiral Kuznetsov as one of the world’s unluckiest carriers. But then, things took a truly vaudevillian turn: Kuznetsov caught fire. In December 2019, a fire broke out aboard the ship after a power cable reportedly exploded during routine welding work. Fourteen personnel suffered injuries, and two more died, from the fire and smoke inhalation. Though estimates vary, most sources agree that the fire caused upwards of one billion dollars’ worth of damage. The 2019 fire amplified the worries of some over the mounting costs and questionable benefits of repairing, maintaining, and refitting the carrier. So vast is the extent of the work that needs to be done on Admiral Kuznetsov that it may prove more cost-effective in the long run to simply procure a new carrier, or—as an increasing number of Russian defense experts are already doing—to ask whether or not the Russian Navy really needs an aircraft carrier in the first place.

One might assume that the combined weight of these mishaps would place Admiral Kuznetsov a hair’s breadth away from the scrap heap, but the Kremlin apparently has other plans.  Russian officials insist that Kuznetsov will re-enter service by the first half of 2023, replete with electronics, structural, and landing control upgrades, as well as a revamped weapons suite. Russia’s military and civilian leadership appear to have decided that Admiral Kuznetsov is, in a sense, too big to fail, and is willing to make massive investments in order to ensure the ship’s survival into the coming decades.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

This article is being reprinted due to readers' interest.

Image: Reuters

Caleb Larson

Submarines, Asia

Enemies beware.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The ability to launch nuclear warheads from sea in addition to positions on land would do much to preserve North Korea’s nuclear deterrence in case of a regional conflict with the United States or South Korea, despite the North’s significantly less-capable missile threat.

Also sometimes called the Sinpo-class, after the North Korean shipyard where the class was built, the Gorae-class is the Hermit Kingdom‘s first indigenously built ballistic missile submarine. The Gorae-class is currently considered by some naval experts as a test and research platform rather than a fully-fledged class.

A crew of about 70 or 80 sailors likely man the submarine’s stations. The class uses diesel-electric propulsion, and in addition to its solitary ballistic missile, it probably sports either two or four torpedo missile tubes for defense against other submarines or surface ships. Though North Korea no doubt would like to eventually christen more of the submarines, the class is likely represented by just one or two hulls.

Similar to the scrap Golf and Hotel-class hulls North Korea received in the 1990s, the Gorae-class launches its single missile from the submarine’s sail. After launch, the missile silo space would likely be flooded with seawater ballast to maintain the submarine’s sailing characteristics after ejecting the missile.

Pukguksong-3 Ballistic Missile

The little class of submarine carries just a single launch tube. Likewise, not terribly much is known about the missile it launches. The missile in question is thought by some to be the Pukguksong-3 ballistic missile. Using solid fuel propellant, the Pukguksong-3 has an estimated 1,900 kilometer, or about 1,200 mile range and was likely first tested sometime in 2019.

Though modest, the range is more than sufficient to put the entire Korean Peninsula and Japan in the Pukguksong-3’s crosshairs. More remote American installations like Guam are beyond the reach of the Pukguksong-3, though the island could be threatened if the Gorae-class positioned itself a few day’s journey west. The American West Coast is considered safe from both the Gorae-class submarine and the Pukguksong-3 missile. However, though difficult, Hawaii could possibly be threatened after a long journey and a lot of luck on the part of North Korean sailors. 

Postscript

Nuclear ballistic missile submarines are one of the world’s most exclusive clubs to be a part of. The few countries in the club—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, and India—have nuclear capabilities that are orders of magnitude greater than that of North Korea.

That being said, the ability to launch nuclear warheads from sea in addition to positions on land would do much to preserve North Korea’s nuclear deterrence in case of a regional conflict with the United States or South Korea, despite the North’s significantly less-capable missile threat. Enemies beware.

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and Defense Writer with The National Interest. He lives in Berlin and covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society.

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mark Episkopos

Russian Military, Africa

As of 2020, Rosoboronexport—Russia’s state arms export agency—accounts for a whopping 49 percent of Africa’s arms imports

Here's What You Need to Remember: Although military helicopters, strike fighter aircraft, tanks, and various types of anti-tank missiles continue to comprise the vast chunk of Russia’s arms exports to Africa, the Kremlin has been looking to diversify its portfolio into amphibious warfare systems.

Russia’s defense industry is preparing to unveil the new Strela amphibious armored vehicle at ShieldAfrica 2021 exposition, the latest in its ongoing attempts to expand its presence in the lucrative and rapidly growing African arms market.

“Live samples of VPK-Ural armored vehicle, Tigr special armored vehicle in the ‘Raid’ variant, and Strela amphibious vehicle have already been dispatched [for the expo]," announced Russian defense manufacturer Military Industrial Company (MIC). ShieldAfrica 2021 will be held from June 8–10 in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, with the organizers reporting as many as 145 exhibitors and 74 official delegations.

First displayed at the Army 2020 exhibition near Moscow, the amphibious Strela is part of a family of six multi-purpose, maneuverable, light armored vehicles. The Strela amphibious variant boasts a payload capacity of 800 kilograms, top speed of 120 kilometers per hour, maximum swimming speed of 7 kilometers per hour, and range of up to 1000 kilometers. Strela models offer partial parts interchangeability with the other vehicles in MIC’s catalog, such as the VPK-Ural. The MIC—Russia’s largest manufacturer of wheeled armored vehicles—maintains that Strela is not only cheap to produce by virtue of its modularity, but has no equal among Russia’s current roster of amphibious vehicles. The Strela family’s utility extends to ease of maintenance. “Due to wide use of parts from commercial cars, the Strela vehicles could be services and repaired at the vast car service station network,” noted an MIC executive. With its cost-efficiency, modularity, and simplified repair process, MIC intends for the Strela amphibious vehicle to make a splash in African arms import markets. The Strela vehicle can reportedly be transported by certain military helicopter models, including the prolific Soviet and now Russian Mil Mi-8 helicopter that continues to be widely used across Africa.

Although military helicopters, strike fighter aircraft, tanks, and various types of anti-tank missiles continue to comprise the vast chunk of Russia’s arms exports to Africa, the Kremlin has been looking to diversify its portfolio into amphibious warfare systems. In 2020, Russia’s Kalashnikov Concern sold a number of BK-10 assault boats to a country in Sub-Saharan Africa. MIC is seeking to make up for lost ground following a drop in transactions amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Such aggressive policy on conquering the African market is caused by a significant decrease in business activity last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, so we are catching up,” MIC CEO Alexander Krasovitsky told reporters.

As of 2020, Rosoboronexport—Russia’s state arms export agency—accounts for a whopping 49 percent of Africa’s arms imports. Algeria and Egypt are historically Moscow’s two biggest clients, but Russian exporters have pushed in recent years to expand their presence in states including Nigeria, Tanzania, and Cameroon. Beyond direct import contracts, Moscow is exploring a local production and distribution arrangement with Angola. Russia has considerably widened its export lead over the next two biggest players in the African market, France and the United States, over the past two decades.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

History, Eurasia

Before Fedor Tokarev's iconic guns left the drawing board, he tried his hand at a submachine gun.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Ultimately, the Tokarev Model 1927 was rejected by Soviet leadership in favor of the PPD submachine gun design.

In an effort to wean the Soviet Union away from a reliance on foreign ammunition calibers and foster self-sufficiency in weapon design, Soviet leadership turned to one of the heavyweight weapon designers: Fedor Tokarev.

Some of Tokarev’s most important weapon designs came to fruition in the 1930s or early 1940s, including the iconic TT pistol and SVT-38 and SVT-40. But before those two influential designs left the drawing board, Tokarev tried his hand at a submachine gun.

Model 1927

Great effort was made to ensure that the Tokarev Model 1927 was simple and inexpensive to manufacture. The Model 1927 was chambered in the widely-available 7.62×38mmR cartridge, a unique and fairly stout pistol cartridge for its time that was originally designed for the Nagant M1895 revolver.

Both the M1895 and the Mosin-Nagant rifle have an identical bore diameter, a commonality that was of benefit to the USSR, as some machine tooling could be used to manufacture both the revolver and the rifle. Had the Model 1927 been accepted into service, the Soviet Union would have had a full-length rifle, submachine gun, and revolver that all featured the same .30 bore diameter, with ammunition commonality between the revolver and submachine gun.

One of the Model 1927’s most prominent features is its forward grip, which also partially houses the magazine for better control during automatic fire by preventing “muzzle rise.” Though rather small, the grip would likely have afforded the Model 1927 good controllability.

Another of the Model 1927’s more unique features was the submachine gun’s trigger group. Two triggers, one for fully automatic fire, and another for semi-automatic shooting were housed within a rather large trigger guard.

The Model 1927’s magazines held 21 rounds, making their capacity rather small. In another interesting design choice, a spare magazine could be stored within the gun’s buttstock, in reserve as a last magazine when necessary.

At least one variant of the Model 1927 exists. In addition to a single trigger, likely for semi-automatic fire only, the variant also has a longer barrel, and a modified rear sight assembly marked to 800 meters, though the 7.62×38mmR cartridge would have been unable to accurately hit even area targets at those ranges.

Postscript

Before submachine gun trials, the Soviet Army specified that all entrants should be chambered in the more modern 7.62×25mm Tokarev pistol cartridge, necessitating changes to the Model 1927 design. Ultimately the design was rejected by Soviet leadership in favor of the PPD submachine gun design.

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and Defense Writer with The National Interest. He lives in Berlin and covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society.

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Caleb Larson

Taiwanese Air Force, Asia

Getting anti-ship missiles in the air is a strong message to Beijing.

Here's What You Need to Remember: If a China-Taiwan conflict were to break out, Taiwan's Harpoon missiles could factor heavily in hampering the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Living on China’s doorstep is an exercise in patience. As the country with the second-largest military budget in the world, China is well positioned to eventually invade Taiwan, which China sees as a rogue province rather than an independent country.

And Taiwan is in an unenviable position—the island of democracy in the South China Sea is a mere 100 or so miles—about 160 kilometers—from mainland China. The tiny republic has neither the military budget nor the manpower to guarantee a win in a potential fight against China. But, Taipei might just be able to make the cost of winning so great for Beijing, that a Chinese invasion never comes.

Taiwan Strait

Any attack by China on Taiwan is sure at some stage to include hundreds of ships sailing across the Taiwan Strait. This is where Taiwan could excel—repelling an amphibious Chinese invasion. Taiwan boasts a large assortment of missiles that have a modest 100-150 mile range and are intended to take out Chinese ships. 

Photos recently surfaced online that show Taiwanese F-16s equipped with the American-designed Harpoon anti-ship missile. The photos, published in the Taiwanese Liberty Times, showed that the Taiwanese planes were also armed with AIM-120 a beyond visual range air-to-air missile, as well as smaller Sidewinder missile. The display was considered by some as a pointed show of force for an island country that has typically tried to keep the waters between the two countries calm.

Territorial Dispute

A long-standing dispute between China and Taiwan over the Dongsha Islands may have prompted the recent Taiwanese Harpoon missile display. The islands, actually three small atolls, lie in the South China Sea and could become strategically important if they were to be fortified or militarized.

Earlier this year, reports surfaced that claimed PLA troops were preparing drills and military exercises that simulated the takeover of the Dongsha Islands. If China were to take over the islands, Beijing could better access the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. 

Postscript

If a China-Taiwan conflict were to break out, the island republic’s Harpoon missiles could factor heavily in hampering the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Getting the missile in the air is a strong message to Beijing—Taiwan may have a smaller military and by comparison a miniscule defense budget—but the island republic could nevertheless send Chinese ships to the bottom of the Taiwan Strait.

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and Defense Writer with The National Interest. He lives in Berlin and covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society.

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

economy, Americas

The expanded child tax credit that passed as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act could serve as a “pilot program” for a future universal basic income.

The United States does not offer its citizens a universal basic income, although that idea has been out in the ether a bit more in recent years than it had been for a while. 

Democrat Andrew Yang’s signature proposal when he ran for president in the 2020 cycle was for a “Freedom Dividend,” which would have entailed $1,000 a month in direct cash payments to every adult in the country. 

“This is independent of one’s work status or any other factor,” Yang’s campaign website said of that proposal. “This would enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real stake in the future.”

Yang did not win the presidency nor did he prevail in his subsequent bid for the mayoralty of New York. Once Joe Biden was elected, he did not make a universal basic income part of his platform. 

Earlier this summer, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota introduced legislation meant to create a universal basic income known as The Sending Unconditional Payments to People Overcoming Resistances to Triumph (SUPPORT) Act and the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) Act. That legislation does not appear to have advanced through Congress. 

However, some people have noted that the expanded child tax credit that passed as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act could serve as a “pilot program” for a future universal basic income. That idea has been the basis for an episode of The New Yorker’s “Politics and More” podcast. 

The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, spoke with a U.S. Senator, Michael Bennet, about that connection. Bennet, like Yang, had campaigned for president in 2020 while pushing for recurring payments for all Americans, although his campaign didn’t last nearly as long. 

“The child tax credit, received by more than thirty-five million families, isn’t entirely new,” according to the description of the episode on the magazine’s website. “But the way it’s distributed is almost a revolution in American politics: instead of having it show up once a year, at tax time, the government also provides money ahead of time, in predictable monthly payments. Wide-scale, direct cash payments are anathema to Reagan-era austerity economics. Is this policy the first sign that that consensus may be coming to an end?”

The podcast also featured a debate between the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Castro and the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain, over the worthiness of the universal basic income idea. 

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

Image: Reuters

Mark Episkopos

Hypersonic Missile, Americas

Russian commentators are mocking the Biden administration over the U.S. Air Force’s failed hypersonic weapons test.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The U.S. military is deploying a slew of hypersonic systems that are expected to reach operational maturity by the turn of the decade. Unfortunately, both China and Russia have already fielded hypersonic weapons.  

Russian commentators are mocking the Biden administration over the U.S. Air Force’s failed hypersonic weapons test.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) conducted the first booster flight of the long-range hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW). USAF noted in a statement that the missile did not “complete its launch sequence” from a B-52H Stratofortress bomber, and was subsequently returned to Edwards Air Force Base in California.  

The ARRW setback made a big splash among foreign defense observers, but none took as keen an interest in the failed launch as Russian commentators. The news was picked up by a slew of major Russian media outlets and reported on cable TV. Dmitry Kiselyev, one of Russia’s most prominent news anchors, devoted an entire segment of his weekend show to highlighting Russia’s military might vis-à-vis the United States. “If we were to reconstruct Biden’s thoughts, the failed test of America’s hypersonic airborne missile must have been chilling for him. The missile has not yet flown once. For all intents and purposes, it does not exist,” he said. “The first mock-ups were taken to the air by planes. When they decided to finally launch this missile from a B-52 on April 6 . . . the product didn’t even turn on, let alone detach. Disgraceful. Biden was upset. He grieved for a week. And maybe he remembered how his mentor Barack Obama refused to go to war with Russia even over Crimea,” Kiselyev added, referencing ongoing tensions between Russia and Washington over the Donbass conflict in Ukraine.

“Biden, as a way of putting it, blinked first,” Kieseliev continued. “At some point, even Joe Biden understood that America’s security guarantee to Ukraine is essentially a bluff. America will not go to war over Donbass. And if it does, [it will suffer a] defeat so shameful that it will lose face even before its allies in NATO and across the world. What would the U.S. security guarantee be worth after that? And how, after this, could [the United States] threaten anyone or remain solvent?”

Retired Col. Viktor Litovkin gave a less politically-tinged, but still pointed assessment to Russian outlet Izvestia. “No missile, no aircraft, flies on the very first time. There is always a testing period, mistakes and failures will occur . . . however, Americans have boasted of their hypersonic weapons, their hypersonic missiles, for the last twenty years—and still cannot accomplish anything.” Litovkin maintained that, with Russia’s Tsirkon, Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, and Avangard systems already in service, it will take the United States another ten years to catch up with Russia’s hypersonic weapons capabilities. Shortly following the failed ARRW test, Russian outlet Tsargrad touted these systems as “three blows to America’s self-confidence.”  

The U.S. military is deploying a slew of hypersonic systems that are expected to reach operational maturity by the turn of the decade. Unfortunately, both China and Russia have already fielded hypersonic weapons.  

Not only does the United States currently lack parallel capabilities, but it may not have a reliable means of countering these threats. Testifying about the challenges posed by Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons programs, former Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin said that Washington does not “have systems which can hold them [China and Russia] at risk in a corresponding manner, and we don’t have defenses against those systems.”

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest. This article is being reprinted due to reader interests.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Aircraft Carriers, World

Captain Leslie E. Gehres marred the USS Franklin’s human component.

Here's What You Need to Know: A ship is more than a hunk of steel.

Seldom does your humble scribe come away incensed from reading history. The saga of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) constitutes an exception. We normally think of Franklin’s history as a parable about the importance of shipboard firefighting and damage control. It’s about materiel and methods, in other words. And these things are important without a doubt. Fighting ships are metal boxes packed with explosives and flammables. Suppressing fire represents a crucial function, which is why the first thing a new sailor does after reporting aboard is qualify in rudimentary damage control.

But a ship is more than a hunk of steel. The hunk of steel plus the crew that lives on board it comprises the ship. Bad leadership marred Franklin’s human component. In the end, then, this is a story with mixed lessons. It is not merely about the material dimension of naval warfare.

USS Franklin lived a short but eventful life, joining the Pacific Fleet in mid-1944. Franklin was the first fleet carrier to absorb a direct strike from a Japanese kamikaze, in the aftermath of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. But the flattop was to endure its worst trial in March 1945, while operating with Task Force 58 off the Japanese seacoast. On the morning of March 19 a “Judy” dive bomber eluded the fleet’s air defenses, dumping two bombs on a Franklin whose decks were crowded with fully armed, fully fueled aircraft preparing to raid sites on Kyushu.

Armor plating shielded the carrier’s innards—in particular the engineering plant—from destruction. The crew eventually managed to restart propulsion, and Franklin made the fleet anchorage at Ulithi Atoll under her own power. In the interim, however, dozens of secondary explosions spanning five hours transformed the flight and hangar decks into something out of Dante. It was a charnel house. The blasts killed the damage-control team while disabling fire fighting equipment on the hangar deck. Ammunition “cooked off,” amplifying the destruction. Aircraft fuselages melted. Rivers of burning fuel sluiced into the hangar deck and beneath from fractured pipes. Over 800 perished out of a crew of around 3,400 sailors and aviators.

Recovery operations were fitful under these circumstances. The crew managed to start a diesel-powered fire pump and organize makeshift fire parties. Cruiser USS Santa Fe came alongside and executed a controlled crash with the flat top so seamen could pass across supplies, render such firefighting aid as they could, and take aboard Franklin crewmen. The carrier survived, returning to New York via the Panama Canal.

This is a Pacific War story rich in insights for practitioners of sea power. For instance, it reveals much about the strategic and operational environment in Eurasian waters today. To wit: a foe with no navy of consequence can still exert influence at sea. It can deploy shore-based implements of sea power to punish a hostile navy cruising off its shores. The Imperial Japanese Navy met its doom at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. It could do little despite a flashy last-ditch effort or two to stem the American advance. But airfields in the home islands could act as unsinkable if stationary aircraft carriers once U.S. Navy task forces came within reach. Japan fielded an array of tactical aircraft along with munitions to arm them and pilots to fly them or, in the case of the kamikaze, crash them into American vessels. Tokyo waged an “anti-access” strategy long before the term was invented.

Franklin’s ordeal also yielded hard-won lessons about naval architecture and shipboard practices, and about firefighting and damage control in particular. These are the standard lessons of the affair. To oversimplify, the chief lesson was: equip ships with more of everything. Assigning more people to a damage-control organization would give it a better chance of withstanding damage. Installing more and longer fire hoses would bolster fire parties’ capacity to get at blazes in remote recesses of the ship. Furnishing more portable pumps would let firefighters do their work should fireplugs fail. More high-capacity foam systems would help control and extinguish flaming fuel. Mounting quick-access “scuttles” on armored hatches would allow crewmen to escape compartments should hatches become jammed or too hot to handle. And on and on.

These are all valuable insights. To me, though, the tale of USS Franklin represents a cautionary tale about the scourge of “toxic leadership.” When I reported at the Surface Warfare Officers’ School a few brief years ago, my check-in interview with the skipper amounted to this: leave the place better than you found it. Toxic leaders leave the place worse than they found it. They put themselves ahead of the institution, and they deploy leadership and management tactics that advance their personal interests—even at the expense of colleagues or subordinates.

I’ve known toxic leaders. So have you if you’ve worn a military uniform. They appear from time to time, often as ship captains. Why them in particular? It’s been said a ship captain is the world’s last absolute monarch once underway. And like any absolute monarch, the skipper can be a tyrant if he rules in his selfish interest rather than the common good. He can abuse his authority in an effort to get ahead.

Enter Captain Leslie E. Gehres. Captain Gehres assumed command of Franklin at Ulithi on the heels of the October 1944 kamikaze strike. Historian Joseph Springer, the author of a gripping oral history of the carrier’s travails, recounts how the new skipper introduced himself to the crew. Gehres relieved Captain J. M. Shoemaker at Ulithi. At the change-of-command ceremony, according to one Franklin sailor, Gehres proclaimed: “‘It was your fault because you didn’t shoot [the kamikaze] down. You didn’t do your duty; you’re incompetent, lazy, and careless. Evidently you don’t know your jobs and I’m going to do my best to shape up this crew!’ We just stood there and couldn’t believe our ears. He sure got a lot of cheers for that.”

Imagine that. You’ve just been through hell. Dozens of your shipmates are dead, dozens more wounded. And the first thing your new commanding officer does is upbraid you and your shipmates while insulting his predecessor in his presence. That’s extreme toxicity. According to crew accounts relayed by Springer, as many as three hundred sailors jumped ship in Bremerton, Washington, when the carrier made port there for shipyard repairs. They did so in large part because they believed Franklin was jinxed following the suicide strike. In part, though, they fled to escape Captain Gehres and his noxious brand of leadership.

It gets worse. Japanese warplanes harried Task Force 58 relentlessly in the hours leading up to the March 19 attack. Franklin had gone to general quarters a dozen times in six hours, so Captain Gehres relaxed the ship’s posture to allow the crew to get a hot meal.

The captain’s after-action report and the official war damage report indicate that the skies were clear the morning of March 19. The deck log—the official record of a ship’s doings—says otherwise. At 0654 the ship’s Combat Information Center reported a “bogey,” or unidentified aircraft, thirty miles off. Two other sightings followed. The range was decreasing. At last, at 0708, lookouts on board USS Hancock positively identified the Judy. Hancock radioed Franklin: “Bogey closing you!” The dive bomber was twelve miles off at that point, and inbound fast. (The aircraft would cover that distance in under three minutes, scant reaction time for the best-trained crew.)

Yet Gehres never ordered Franklin to general quarters—meaning the bombs struck the flat top when it was less than fully ready for battle.

When Santa Fe came alongside he ordered the wounded evacuated and then, writes Springer, issued an order that “could not possibly have been more vague.” Gehres directed the air officer to evacuate anyone who “would not be needed to save the ship.” A mass exodus to the cruiser ensued as those who defined themselves as nonessential fled. Ship-wide communications were out, and in the confusion many crewmen believed “abandon ship” had been ordered. The skipper then stopped the evacuation. He later directed about one hundred sailors—including some blown overboard by bomb blasts—to return to Franklin, whereupon he demanded that they state in writing why they had “left this vessel while she was in action and seriously damaged when no order had been issued to abandon ship.” Springer opines that his action “nearly tainted” the carrier’s gallant struggle to survive.

Nearly tainted? Gehres announced that 215 Franklin crewmen would be charged with desertion, and insisted that ships carrying them treat them as prisoners. He founded the “Big Ben 704 Club” to honor the crewmen who had remained on board (and ostentatiously exclude everyone else), barred evacuees from attending the memorial service for fallen shipmates, made sure no evacuee received a medal, and laid the legal groundwork for courts-martial against officers and chief petty officers who took refuge in Santa Fe. (Thankfully the navy leadership ignored his legal maneuvering.) “The treatment of these Franklin crewmen,” concludes Springer, constituted “one of the greatest but least-known injustices involving the U.S. Navy in World War II.”

And how. No bad deed went unrewarded in the case of Leslie Gehres. The navy whitewashed his misdeeds. He was decorated with the Navy Cross, its loftiest award for martial valor, and ultimately promoted to a rear admiral. Here was a navy captain who assumed command of a wounded vessel, shattered its culture, scapegoated his way out of high-seas disaster, and in fact garnered promotions and high honors for his trouble. Many individual Franklin mariners—the ship’s chaplain and one of her engineering officers in particular—displayed conspicuous gallantry following the March 19 cataclysm. Indeed, the flattop is the most decorated U.S. Navy warship ever. Yet this was far from the navy’s finest hour.

This is a story worth telling and retelling. It supplies insight into material matters, along with examples of grit and fortitude. It also supplies a case study in how not to lead. Let’s detoxify the sea service.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in August 2017.

Image: U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons

Michael Peck

Tanks, Eurasia

Old Russian tanks cannot pierce modern tank armor, these unorthodox shells can do the job. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: There are several international organizations campaigning to ban depleted uranium shells. Whether the Russian government will heed them is another matter. 

Russia is arming its tanks with controversial depleted uranium shells.

While depleted uranium, or DU, is extremely dense and can punch through thick tank armor, many believe that these shells release small doses of radiation, like miniature neutron bombs. The U.S. has used DU shells in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

A Russian Defense Ministry bulletin said Russian T-80BV tanks would be armed with these powerful munitions, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. The bulletin noted that “the T-80BVM (the letter M stands for ‘modernized’) features ‘the improved weapons stabilizer and the loading mechanism for the 3BM59 Svinets-1 and 3BM60 Svinets-2 munitions.’”

The Svinets-1 has a tungsten carbide core, while the Svinets-2 uses depleted uranium. according to the Below the Ring armor site, published by a pair of Dutch defense experts. A 2016 post speculated that Russia might have been producing these special rounds for several years as replacements for existing tank ammunition.

The shells “utilize an aluminum sabot with three points of contact - this is rather unique, as most other types of APFSDS sabot use only two points of contacts,” Below the Ring said. “If and how this affects accuracy and barrel wear is currently not known.”

The Svinets-2 is not the first Russian shell to use depleted uranium. The 3BM-32 Vant, designed for Soviet 125-millimeter tank cannon, also contained a DU core. But the new rounds are longer.

“Compared to the 3BM-32 Vant APFSDS with a 380-mm-long [14.7-inch] DU penetrator, the two types of new ammunition have an approximately 79 to 84 percent longer projectile, which should lead to a significant increase in penetration power,” Below the Ring estimated.

The problem is that older Russian tank ammunition has difficulty piercing advanced tank armor such as that found on the U.S. M-1 Abrams or Israeli Merkava. “The 3BM-42 Mango relies on an outdated penetrator design, using two relatively short tungsten rods inside a steel body,” according to Below the Ring. “...Steel penetrates armor less efficiently than a high-density heavy metal alloy.”

Thus, the appeal of DU shells as tank killers (you can find a concise scientific explanation of depleted uranium ammunition here). There are 120-millimeter DU shells for the M-1 Abrams and 30-millimeter shell for the A-10 Warthog. Ironically, the Abrams tank uses depleted uranium in its armor plating to stop anti-tank shells.

The U.S. military says depleted uranium ammunition is safe, for the most part. “When fired, or after ‘cooking off’ in fires or explosions, the exposed depleted uranium rod poses an extremely low radiological threat as long as it remains outside the body,” says a U.S. Air Force fact sheet. “Taken into the body via metal fragments or dust-like particles, depleted uranium may pose a long-term health hazard to personnel if the amount is large. However, the amount which remains in the body depends on a number of factors, including the amount inhaled or ingested, the particle size and the ability of the particles to dissolve in body fluids.”

However, even the Veterans Administration acknowledges that depleted uranium poses health risks to soldiers, such as those who fought in Operation Desert Storm, where DU rounds were used to destroy Iraqi tanks. There are also complaints that depleted uranium contaminates the environment, such as in Iraq. The Pentagon promised that it wouldn’t use DU ammunition in Syria, though it later admitted that it fired thousands of rounds in 2015.

There are several international organizations campaigning to ban depleted uranium shells. Whether the Russian government will heed them is another matter.

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

This article first appeared last year and is being republished due to reader interest.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Unemployment Benefits,

The U.S. Department of Labor has opened up the possibility of unemployed Americans still being able to receive some form of government-issued payments. It recently noted that states could, in fact, disburse periodic or one-time direct cash payments to those who are still searching for work.

In less than two weeks, the enhanced federal unemployment benefits are slated to come to a screeching halt.

That means come Labor Day, according to a study conducted by the People’s Policy Project, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, approximately ten million more Americans on unemployment will lose those extra $300 in weekly benefits. The Century Foundation is supporting such projections as it has claimed that 7.5 million will lose all their jobless benefits in September.

But the U.S. Department of Labor has opened up the possibility of unemployed Americans still being able to receive some form of government-issued payments. It recently noted that states could, in fact, disburse periodic or one-time direct cash payments to those who are still searching for work.

States Taking Action

On the heels of this statement, there are already several states that are tapping into federal relief funds from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan to hand out their own “stimulus” checks to their respective residents.

For example, in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the 2021 California Comeback Plan last month that included $8.1 billion for stimulus payments. Taxpayers earning between $30,000 and $75,000 annually will receive a $600 check. In all, roughly two-thirds of the state’s total population can expect to receive some form of cash payment.

And in Florida, lawmakers are using federal funds from Biden’s stimulus bill to deliver $1,000 stimulus checks to teachers and educators in the state. In addition, Georgia, Michigan, and Tennessee are giving out similar cash payments to those working in schools.

Furthermore, do take note that the Internal Revenue Service is still working on distributing the remaining refunds from 2020 unemployment benefits. It was only a few weeks ago when the agency was able to disburse a sizeable batch of 1.5 million refunds averaging nearly $1,700—and more cash payments are expected to head out. Since May, the agency has issued about nine million unemployment refunds with a value of more than $10 billion.

Ending Benefits Cut Spending

What a recent study authored by economists and researchers at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Toronto is showing is that the twenty-six states that decided to withdraw early from the enhanced unemployment benefits did, in fact, see slightly higher job growth—but it was also responsible for a massive $2 billion cut in overall household spending.

According to the study’s data, the states that ended the benefits early witnessed employment rise 4.4 percentage points compared to the states that continued with the benefits. But that translated to only one in eight unemployed individuals in the “cutoff states” who eventually found employment. These same states also saw a 20 percent cut in weekly spending from their residents—which amounted to about $145 each week.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-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

Mark Episkopos

military, Americas

The Navy aims to accept as many as 273 F-35C fighter jets into service, a procurement that will transform U.S. naval aviation and define the power projection capabilities of the American carrier strike group for decades to come. 

Unmatched in its performance and versatility, the F-35C fighter jet is set to revolutionize the Navy’s carrier air wing. 

The Variants 

Although commonly referred to in the singular, Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighter jet was designed as three separate planes, purpose-built to accomplish different tasks in three of the U.S. military’s service branches. The F-35A is a conventional take-off and landing variant that will replace Air Force’s venerable F-16 Fighting Falcon, while the F-35B is a short takeoff and vertical landing model tailored to the Marine Corps’ unique operating requirements. Finally, there is the F-35C: a catapult-assisted take-off but arrested recovery variant that is designed to operate from aircraft carriers as part of the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups (CSGs).  

Enter the F-35C

The F-35C was introduced in 2019 as the Navy’s first aircraft-carrier-based next-generation stealth fighter. The fighter embarked on its first CSG deployment aboard the Nimitz-class USS Carl Vinson in August 2021. Whereas the F-35A and B variants are widely similar in external design, the F-35C can instantly be recognized for its large foldable wings that are meant to save space on crowded aircraft carrier decks—the plane has a forty-three foot-wingspan as opposed to the thirty-five feet of its two A and B counterparts. It is the heaviest F-35 variant, boasting seventy thousand pounds at full payload capacity. It also carries the most internal fuel by a slight margin, though this does not translate into a significant combat radius advantage over the F-35A. The F-35C carries over five thousand pounds worth of weapons in its internal weapons bays or a combined eighteen thousand pounds in external and internal slots for situations where the fighter can afford to sacrifice stealth performance in exchange for maximum firepower.

The Navy’s current workhorse fighter, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, has a combat radius of just under four hundred nautical miles. This is a serious potential vulnerability at a time of rapidly growing Chinese and Russian tactical strike capabilities. The latter will soon field the formidable new 3M22 Tsirkon winged, hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile. With a range of up to one thousand kilometers (around 621 miles) and flight speed of around Mach 9, Russian military officials and defense experts are projecting confidence that Tsirkon can effectively bypass the surface-to-air systems of CSGs and disable U.S. aircraft carriers with just one hit. The Chinese military is developing parallel capabilities with its hypersonic DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile. This means that, in their current form, the Navy’s carrier air wings will increasingly be forced to operate within strike distance of the latest Russian and Chinese missiles, putting their CSG at greater risk and compromising the formation’s ability to effectively project power.

The Advantage

That’s where the F-35C comes in. With an unrefueled combat radius of 670 nautical miles, Lockheed’s fighter reduces the potential for missiles like Tsirkon to threaten the Navy’s CSG’s whilst enhancing the formation’s battlespace persistence. As a fifth-generation stealth fighter, the F-35C is more survivable than the Super Hornet. Not only is it safer to operate across the board, but the F-35C vastly expands the Navy’s scope of mission possibilities—these include strike missions against high-value targets deep into enemy airspace, as well as the potential to execute multiple strikes within a single sortie. With arguably the most advanced and robust sensor suite of any active-service fighter in the world, the F-35C likewise introduces a whole new dimension of networking and interlinked performance. The fighter acts as a force multiplier for the rest of the CSG with its groundbreaking “sensor fusion” capabilities, painting a dynamic picture of the battlefield for nearby friendly sea, air, and ground units. 

The Navy aims to accept as many as 273 F-35C fighter jets into service, a procurement that will transform U.S. naval aviation and define the power projection capabilities of the American carrier strike group for decades to come.  

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest. 

Image: Reuters

Kyle Mizokami

military, Americas

If a submarine’s hull remained intact, then it was able to surface and the reactor continued to operate the crew had a shot at survival. The USS San Francisco was able to do all three.

Here's What You Need To Remember: In 2005, a U.S. Navy attack submarine collided head-on with an undersea mountain at more than thirty miles an hour. Despite the damage the ship sustained and the crew’s injuries, the USS San Francisco managed to limp to its homeport of Guam on its own power. The incident was a testament to the design of the submarine and the training and professionalism of its crew.

USS San Francisco is a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine. Submarine builder Newport News Shipyard began construction on it in 1977, and it was commissioned on April 24, 1981. The submarine joined the U.S. Pacific Fleet and served there throughout its career.

Like all Los Angeles-class submarines, it displaced 6,900 tons submerged, was 362 feet long, and had a beam of 33 feet. A General Electric PWR S6G nuclear reactor provided 35,000 shipboard horsepower, driving the submarine to a speedy 33 knots. A typical crew consisted of 129 officers and enlisted men.

On January 8, 2005, the USS San Francisco was traveling at flank (full) speed—approximately 38 miles an hour at a depth of 525 feet. It was 360 miles southeast of Guam heading to Brisbane, Australia for a liberty stop. Navigation plotted the route based on undersea maps that were generally agreed to give the most complete view of the seabed. According to the New York Times, the captain went to lunch and the navigation officer, believing it was safe to do so, dived the submarine from 400 to 525 feet and accelerated to flank speed.

At approximately 11:42 local time, while transiting the Caroline Islands mountain chain, the submarine came to an abrupt—and unexpected—halt. There was a shudder and then a tremendous noise. Men throughout the ship were thrown from their stations against their surroundings. In an instant many suffered bruises, lacerations, broken bones and fractures. A chief petty officer described the scene as looking like a “slaughterhouse,” with blood running everywhere. Ninety-eight crewmen were injured with one, Machinist's Mate Second Class Joseph Allen Ashley, fatally injured.

Despite their injuries, and not having any idea what had just happened, the captain and his crew rushed to surface the boat. The crew threw the emergency blow activator, known as the “chicken switch,” that immediately blast compressed air into the USS San Francisco’s ballast tanks. Unknown to the crew, the impact of the explosion had punched huge holes in the forward ballast tanks. The submarine was supposed to immediately rise, but it was an agonizing thirty seconds before the submarine began to surface. By 11:44 the submarine had surfaced.

Damage control reported the USS San Francisco’s inner hull was intact, its Mk. 48 torpedoes and Tomahawk cruise missiles were unharmed, and remarkably, its nuclear reactor was completely undamaged. All alone in the Pacific, the submarine began the long trip back to Guam. The submarine limped back into Apra Harbor in Guam thirty hours later on January 10, the crews of other moored submarines manning their rails in the stricken submarine’s honor.

Later, an investigation would reveal the submarine had crashed into a seamount rising 6,500 feet from the ocean floor. The seamount had not appeared on the charts that San Francisco’s crew had used to plot their course, but appeared on other charts as a “potential hazard.” The hazard was reported two miles from the site of the collision and the Captain of the San Francisco has stated that had he known about it, he would have given the potential obstacle a wide berth.

The chart used by the USS San Francisco’s crew was prepared by the Defense Mapping Agency in 1989. According to a study of the incident prepared by the University of Massachusetts in 2008, a Landsat satellite image showed a seamount in the area of the collision that rose to within one hundred feet of the surface. The Navy’s charts were not updated with the new data—according to the UMass report, the Navy believed that with the cessation of the Cold War the crash site area was not a high priority for mapping, and that priority had instead been given to the Middle East region to support the Global War on Terror.

After repairs to ensure hull integrity, San Francisco traveled under its own power to Puget Sound, Washington. The damaged portion of the boat’s bow was removed. The bow of sister submarine USS Honolulu, soon to be retired, was removed and welded onto San Francisco. The submarine rejoined the fleet in 2009 and served for another seven years. In January, it began a two-year conversion that will turn it into a permanently moored training submarine.

The heroic actions of the crew were essential to the submarine’s survival. Still, how did a submarine survive a high-speed collision with a mountain? In 1963, immediately after the loss of USS Thresher, the Navy instituted the SUBSAFE program. The goal of the program was to ensure that a submarine’s hull would retain pressure in the event of an accident and it would be able to surface. The Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program made safe, resilient nuclear reactors an absolute top priority.

If a submarine’s hull remained intact, then it was able to surface and the reactor continued to operate the crew had a shot at survival. The USS San Francisco was able to do all three. That it was able to survive was no accident but rather the culmination of decades of hard work and dedication by the U.S. submarine force.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This piece was originally featured in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons