Diplomacy & Crisis News

Trevor Filseth

Afghanistan,

The Red Cross also served in Afghanistan under the Taliban in the 1990s, and its staff has asserted that the group has a “very good working relationship” with the Taliban.

As the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan at the Kabul airport continues, U.S. forces are madly attempting to meet an August 31 “red line” date imposed by the Taliban. Meanwhile, humanitarian efforts conducted by international aid organizations and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) have dropped precipitously. A major concern for these organizations going forward is the potential for poor treatment by the Taliban, which developed a reputation for mistreating foreign workers during its first period of rule during the 1990s.

However, even as other NGOs depart, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), more commonly known as the Red Cross, has committed to remaining in the country and continuing its health mission there.

Red Cross staff confirmed the decision over the weekend, pointing out that the aid group had worked in Taliban-controlled areas during the active phase of the conflict and were welcomed then.

The situation in Afghanistan remains dangerous, despite the end of hostilities following the collapse of the internationally recognized Afghan government. On Thursday, a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed a dozen U.S. soldiers and nearly 200 Afghan civilians, injuring hundreds more. The attacks have been blamed on ISIS-K, a local offshoot of the Islamic State terror group based in Iraq and Syria.

Another factor complicating the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is the country’s ongoing economic problems. In the past week, UN officials have attempted to solicit an additional $800 million in donations to pay for humanitarian assistance in the country.

Prior to its collapse, eighty percent of the internationally recognized budget was sourced from aid from the United States—aid that Washington will not supply to the Taliban.

In addition to the conflict, Afghanistan is experiencing a historic drought, now accompanied by famine. If current trends persist, one-third of Afghans are likely to face food insecurity in the coming year if further aid is not provided. Moreover, there continue to be negative consequences from Afghanistan’s attempts to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Afghanistan has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world—with only around two percent having received one dose, and around one-half of one percent fully vaccinated. The worst effects of the virus, however, have largely passed the country by, owing to its relatively youthful population.

The Red Cross also served in Afghanistan under the Taliban in the 1990s, and its staff has asserted that the group has a “very good working relationship” with the Taliban.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Nuclear Submarines, World

The closest competitor to the Ohio-class submarine is Russia’s sole remaining Typhoon-class submarine, a larger vessel with twenty ballistic-missile launch tubes.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Ohio class will serve on until the end of the 2020s, and may even receive some additional acoustic stealth upgrades until they are replaced by a successor, tentatively dubbed the Columbia class. With estimated costs of $4–6 billion each to manufacture, the next-generation boomers may be fewer in number and will use new reactors that do not require expensive overhauls and refueling, allowing them to serve on until 2085.

Nine years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla depicted a monster awakened from the depths of the ocean to wreak havoc on Japanese cities. A giant fire-breathing reptile, however, was less horrifying than what was to come. In less than a decade’s time, there would be dozens of real undersea beasts capable of destroying multiple cities at a time. I’m referring, of course, to ballistic-missile submarines, or “boomers” in U.S. Navy parlance.

The most deadly of the real-life kaiju prowling the oceans today are the fourteen Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines, which carry upwards of half of the United States’ nuclear arsenal onboard.

If you do the math, the Ohio-class boats may be the most destructive weapon system created by humankind. Each of the 170-meter-long vessels can carry twenty-four Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) which can be fired from underwater to strike at targets more than seven thousand miles away depending on the load.

As a Trident II reenters the atmosphere at speeds of up to Mach 24, it splits into up to eight independent reentry vehicles, each with a 100- or 475-kiloton nuclear warhead. In short, a full salvo from an Ohio-class submarine—which can be launched in less than one minute—could unleash up to 192 nuclear warheads to wipe twenty-four cities off the map. This is a nightmarish weapon of the apocalypse.

The closest competitor to the Ohio-class submarine is the Russia’s sole remaining Typhoon-class submarine, a larger vessel with twenty ballistic-missile launch tubes. However, China, Russia, India, England and France all operate multiple ballistic-missile submarines with varying missile armaments—and even a few such submarines would suffice to annihilate the major cities in a developed nation.

What possible excuse is there for such monstrous, nation-destroying weaponry?

The logic of nuclear deterrence: while a first strike might wipe out a country’s land-based missiles and nuclear bombers, it’s very difficult to track a ballistic-missile submarine patrolling quietly in the depths of the ocean—and there’s little hope of taking them all out in a first strike. Thus, ballistic-missile submarines promise the unstoppable hand of nuclear retribution—and should deter any sane adversary from attempting a first strike or resorting to nuclear weapons at all. At least that’s the hope.

As such, the Trident-armed Ohio-class submarines will have succeeded in their mission if they never fire their weapons in anger.

The Ohio-class boats entered service in the 1980s as a replacement for five different classes of fleet ballistic-missile submarines, collectively known as the “41 for Freedom.” Displacing more than eighteen thousand tons submerged, the new boomers remain the largest submarines to serve in the U.S. Navy—and the third-largest ever built. With the exception of the Henry M. Jackson, each is named after a U.S. state, an honor previously reserved for large surface warships.

In the event of a nuclear exchange, a boomer would likely receive its firing orders via Very Low Frequency radio transmission. While a submarine’s missiles are not pretargeted, like those in fixed silos, they can be assigned coordinates quite rapidly. The first eight Ohio-class boats were originally built to launch the Trident I C4 ballistic missile—an advanced version of the earlier Poseidon SLBM. However, by now all of the boomers are armed with the superior Trident II D5 ballistic missile, which has 50 percent greater range and is capable of very accurate strikes, which could enable them to precisely target military installations as a first-strike weapon.

Ohio-class submarines also come armed with four twenty-one-inch tubes that can launch Mark 48 torpedoes. However, these are intended primarily for self-defense—a ballistic missile submarine’s job isn’t to hunt enemy ships and submarines, but to lie as low and quiet as possible to deny adversaries any means of tracking their movements. The submarine’s nuclear reactor gives it virtually unlimited underwater endurance and the ability to maintain cruising speeds of twenty knots (twenty-three miles per hour) while producing very little noise.

While other branches of the military may be deployed in reaction to the crisis of the day, the nuclear submarines maintain a steady routine of patrols, and communicate infrequently so as to remain as stealthy as possible. Each Ohio-class submarine has two crews of 154 officers and enlisted personnel, designated Gold and Blue, who take turns departing on patrols that last an average of seventy to ninety days underwater—with the longest on record being 140 days by the USS Pennsylvania. An average of a month is spent between patrols, with resupply facilitated by three large-diameter supply hatches.         

Currently, nine boomers are based in Bangor, Washington to patrol the Pacific Ocean, while five are stationed in Kings Bay, Georgia for operations in the Atlantic. The end of the Cold War, and especially the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, resulted in the downsizing of U.S. nuclear forces. However, rather than retiring some of the oldest boats as originally planned, the Navy decided to refit four of the eighteen Ohio-class subs to serve as cruise missile carriers to launch conventional attacks against ground and sea targets—starting with the USS Ohio.

Meanwhile, the New START treaty which came into effect in 2011 imposes additional limits on the number of deployed nuclear weapons. The current plan is to keep twelve Ohio-class subs active at time with twenty Trident IIs each, while two more boomers remain in overhaul, keeping a total of 240 missiles active at a time with 1,090 warheads between them. Don’t worry, restless hawks: that’s still enough to destroy the world several times over!

The Ohio class will serve on until the end of the 2020s, and may even receive some additional acoustic stealth upgrades until they are replaced by a successor, tentatively dubbed the Columbia class. With estimated costs of $4–6 billion each to manufacture, the next-generation boomers may be fewer in number and will use new reactors that do not require expensive overhauls and refueling, allowing them to serve on until 2085.

Sébastien Roblin writes on the technical, historical and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including The National Interest, NBC News, Forbes.com and War is Boring. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. You can follow his articles on Twitter.

This article first appeared in January 2017.

Image: Wikipedia.

Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the UN, has earned his place in history, but he credits another African American pioneer, Ralph Bunche, as his inspiration. Bunche, who died 50 years ago, was the first person of African descent to win the Nobel Peace Prize and played a major role in the early days of the UN.

Sebastien Roblin

Nuclear Weapons, Eurasia

While there’s a tactical rationale behind Russia’s development of a fast, surface-skimming cruise missile with an unlimited range as a means of bypassing American missile defenses, it strikes many analysts as an inordinately expensive, extremely technically challenging, and—evidently!—downright unsafe.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Unfortunately, in a climate of escalating paranoia and nuclear arms competition, Moscow is not merely devising exotic new nuclear weapons, but resurrecting the demons of our shared Cold War past.

After days of speculation by Western analysts that a deadly accident on August 8, 2019 that briefly spiked radiation levels in northwestern Russia was tied to tests of an exotic nuclear-powered “Skyfall” nuclear-powered cruise missile, Russian sources confirmed to the New York Times the explosion of a “small nuclear reactor.”

While there’s a tactical rationale behind Russia’s development of a fast, surface-skimming cruise missile with an unlimited range as a means of bypassing American missile defenses, it strikes many analysts as an inordinately expensive, extremely technically challenging, and—evidently!—downright unsafe.

That’s because the United States has tried it before sixty years earlier—and even with the fast-and-loose safety culture of the Cold War 1960s, the poison-spewing radioactive mega missile it began developing was considered too dangerous to even properly flight test.

This project was most famously described in a 1990 article by Gregg Herken for Air & Space Magazine, which remains well worth the read.

In the late 1950s, the United States had yet to deploy the intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles that remain two of three pillars of Washington’s nuclear deterrence today. That meant the drawing board was open for alternative methods to threaten Washington’s adversaries with atomic devastation.

One concept was to use a nuclear ramjet propulsion system to create a rocket that could fly for months thanks to a small nuclear reactor on board. The ramjet functioned by sucking in onrushing air while traveling several times the speed of sound, and warming it with its small reactor. The heated air would expand and get squeezed out exhaust nozzles to result in high-speed propulsion.

The resulting Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile (SLAM) was powered by a small reactor codenamed “Pluto,” to be developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

While proto-hippies gathered at the nearby university campus, the scientists at the laboratory, under project director Theodore Merkle, were devising a huge missile designed that would make any caught underneath it “deafened, flattened, and irradiated,” as Herken memorably put it in his article.

The SLAM missile was expected to soar towards its Soviet targets at tree-top level, traveling at three times the speed of sound. The combination of low-altitude (reducing detection range) and Mach 3 speed was thought to make it too fast for interception by fighters or surface-to-air missile. The sonic shock wave produced by the huge missile was believed to be strong enough to kill anyone caught underneath it.

The huge missile, laden with up to twelve thermonuclear bombs, would proceed to race towards one Soviet city after another, visiting Hiroshima-level human tragedies upon each. And once the bombs were exhausted, the nuclear-powered missile would…simply keep on going and going like a murderous Energizer Bunny.

Because installing adequate radioactive shielding on such a small reactor would have proven impossible, the SLAM would have spread in its wake trails of cancer-inducing gamma and neutron radiation and radioactive fission fragments expelled by its exhaust.

Project Pluto scientists even considered weaponizing this property by programming the missile to circle overhead Soviet population centers, though how exposing even more people to slow deaths by radiation poisoning would be useful in an apocalyptic nuclear war that would likely leave both nations in ruin in a few days is hard to fathom.

However, realizing the SLAM concept involved a succession of serious technical challenges. For example, a separate conventional rocket system would be necessary for the missile to reach the supersonic speeds at which its ramjet motor could function. That, in turn, meant the reactor had to be designed to withstand the heat and stress of those powerful booster rockets. In fact, it’s believed precisely that problem may have resulted in the deadly accident in Russia this August.

As a result, the Livermore laboratory devised a 500-megawatt reactor so robust it was nicknamed the “flying crowbar.”

Thus, the missile’s structure would need to withstand the intense heat generated by the reactor, estimated to operate at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, the lab commissioned the Coors Ceramic company in Colorado—yes, the same as the beer-brewers of today—to build heat-resistant ceramic fuel elements.

To test whether the various components Project Pluto could coexist non-explosively, an expensive, eight-square-mile test facility was established codenamed Site 401 at the Jackass flats of Nevada.

A nuclear ramjet named Tory-IIA was tested successfully for a few seconds on May 14, 1961, at low power. After three more years of development, a lighter Tory-IIC ramjet was then tested in 1964, operating at near to full power for five minutes. Over 300 tons of pressurized air were channeled to simulate high-speed flight conditions necessary for the ramjet to operate.

Having established the workability of the nuclear ramjet, Merkle’s team then ran into a serious practical obstacle: where on Earth, literally, could a long-range weapon prone to trailing plumes of radioactive pollution behind it be tested? And what would happen if the supersonic weapon with theoretically nigh-unlimited range “got away”—ie., fell out of control, and potentially irradiated American communities? Some scientists even suggested tying the missile to the ground to deal with the latter problem.

Deploying the weapon operationally presented even worse dilemmas, as the missile would likely overfly U.S. allies on its approach to Russia. Even deploying an operational weapon to a remote Pacific island seemed to entail an inordinate amount of radiation poisoning for the surrounding environment.

By then, the United States was well into deploying ICBMs and SLBM missiles, which presented none of these problems and were at the time virtually unstoppable once launched. By contrast, advances in radar and missile technology seemed bound to make the SLAM less invulnerable than had been previously supposed. Finally, in July 1964, the military pulled the plug on the $260 million program—equivalent to over $2 billion in 2019 dollars.

Fortunately, the Pentagon was able to assess that the SLAM did nothing to alter the Mutually Assured Destruction dynamic of Moscow and Washington’s Cold War standoff, except perhaps by provoking an equally terrifying response. Furthermore, it presented undesirable budgetary burdens and intolerable safety and political risks.

Despite technical advances since the 1960s, those same fundamental considerations likely remain true for Russia’s Skyfall missile today.

As John Krzyzaniak succinctly put it in a piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“The problems with a nuclear-powered missile are so numerous and obvious that some have questioned whether Putin is being hoodwinked by his scientists, or whether he is bluffing to scare the United States back into arms control agreements. In any case, what was once a terrible new idea is now just a terrible old idea.”

Unfortunately, in a climate of escalating paranoia and nuclear arms competition, Moscow is not merely devising exotic new nuclear weapons, but resurrecting the demons of our shared Cold War past.

Sébastien Roblin writes on the technical, historical and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including The National Interest, NBC News, Forbes.com and War is Boring. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. You can follow his articles on Twitter.

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

US Navy, Americas

How can the silent service stay in tune with the times?

Here's What You Need To Remember: The navy is already staring a shortfall of attack boats in the face even without undertaking a major redesign of the submarine fleet. Technological transformation, in short, could outpace shipbuilding programs predicated on longstanding assumptions about combat in the depths. Change could be swift, while a reengineering a fleet is a glacial process unless something really, really bad transpires to compel the leadership to act swiftly and decisively.

S’pose Bryan Clark has it right. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) analyst and retired U.S. Navy commander postulates that a technological revolution is about to overtake undersea warfare, rendering the wine-dark sea transparent to hostile antisubmarine (ASW) forces for the first time. This would be a bad thing from the standpoint of U.S. naval mastery. It would place in jeopardy America’s capacity to execute an ambitious foreign policy in distant waters, preside over the liberal maritime order, or accomplish all manner of worthy goals.

Such matters were much on my mind while careening down I-95 to the submarine base at Groton, Connecticut last week, there to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Midway. The event took place on the pier where USS Nautilus—the United States’ and the world’s first atomic submarine—lies berthed as a nautical museum. Earlier this year the silent service marked the sixtieth anniversary since the day when Nautilus’s skipper first radioed home: “Underway on nuclear power.”

That signal heralded a new age in undersea combat—the age our doughty CSBA analyst contends is giving way to another new age. The advent of naval nuclear propulsion let these newfangled craft remain underwater for long stretches of time. It spared them the need for regular refueling. Machinery needed little sustenance apart from routine upkeep and overhauls. Stores such as food and other necessities for the crew became the chief limiting factors on nuclear boats’ voyages. For the first time submarines became true denizens of the deep, as opposed to surface ships able to submerge temporarily.

Nuclear power, moreover, shunted the competition between subs and sub hunters—what Clark calls the “hider-finder” competition—into the acoustic realm. No longer could anti-submarine forces count on finding enemy boats cruising on the surface, lurking just below the surface with a periscope or snorkel peeking above, or using radio or radar with their telltale electromagnetic emissions. They could hide more or less indefinitely.

Sound, then, is the chief limiting factor on stealth. Sub designers and crews go to elaborate lengths to keep machinery and other sources of noise quieter than an opponent’s passive sonar—sophisticated listening devices, and any navy’s ASW tool of choice—can detect. A quiet boat is an elusive boat. It can prowl the depths, prey on fellow subs or surface craft, or project power onto hostile shores. But, writes Clark, Big Data coupled with non-acoustic detection, tracking, and fire-control technology may soon expose American boats to the prying eyes of hostile forces.

For instance, ASW hunters could look for minute disturbances a submarine makes to its tactical surroundings. The most hydrodynamic hull makes a wake as it travels through water. Engineering plants discharge heat. Undersea craft may interfere with sea life as they pass. Finding such traces of an American sub’s presence—and parleying that information into actionable tracking and targeting data—would nullify its core advantage in whole or in part—namely its ability to vanish beneath the waves. A visible boat is a vulnerable boat. The competition between hiders and finders could swing decisively in favor of super-empowered sub finders after six decades of supremacy for the hiders.

That leaves the silent service—where, precisely? Struggling to stay abreast of the times, one suspects. That’s how beneficiaries of a congenial status quo commonly respond when change shakes their world. Paradigm shifts are agony for entrenched cultures. Stakeholders in the ancien regime resist believing that shifting circumstances have rendered old ways partly or wholly moot. Oftentimes they fight against unorthodox methods that are better fitted to the times. Progress is fitful and uncertain. Strategic innovation tends to lag behind events.

How can the silent service stay in tune with the times? First and foremost, by acknowledging the danger posed by foreign navies toting gee-whiz gadgetry. Clark hints at how hard adapting to more transparent seas could prove: “unless U.S. forces adapt to and lead the new competition, the era of unrivaled U.S. undersea dominance could draw to a surprisingly abrupt close.” That’s a grim prognosis in itself. Abrupt change begets major traumas in big institutions like navies. It’s hard to get ahead of the process.

Yet while change may come quick, many of Clark’s recommendations have long lead times. If anti-access is indeed diving underwater, it may behoove sub skippers to remain farther offshore—much like their brethren skimming around on the surface. It also may behoove the silent service to reimagine its boats as underwater aircraft carriers—except that they’ll operate fleets of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) rather than airplanes, helicopters, and drones.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? The mothership stands off in relative safety while smaller, more elusive, less expensive craft do the hard and dirty work inshore. But the devil, as always, lurks in the details. Clark urges the sub force to construct larger nuclear-powered attack boats (SSNs) with the capacity to handle UUVs in significant numbers, not to mention new self-defense weaponry like ultralightweight torpedoes. Yet the U.S. Navy has cast its die with the medium-sized Virginia-class SSNs now joining the fleet. No replacement will enter service until 2044 according to current plans. Shipbuilding patterns, then, imply that bigger platforms don’t lie in store for the silent service. Not without a tectonic shift in priorities, at any rate.

Meanwhile, the navy is already staring a shortfall of attack boats in the face even without undertaking a major redesign of the submarine fleet. Technological transformation, in short, could outpace shipbuilding programs predicated on longstanding assumptions about combat in the depths. Change could be swift, while a reengineering a fleet is a glacial process unless something really, really bad transpires to compel the leadership to act swiftly and decisively. It takes time to transform ideas into widgets, and to develop sound tactics for employing them.

Next, with regard to fleet design, it may be instructive to think beyond the aircraft carrier as an analogy for this coming brand of subsurface warfare. Sure, the carrier air wing makes a nifty model for thinking about the functions of UUV flotillas. They would constitute the SSN’s long striking arm, much as fighter/attack jets comprise the flattop’s offensive punch. There’s value in mining this comparison. But the fit isn’t precise, is it? Presumably sub-force leaders have no plans to divest attack boats of their torpedoes and missiles, as naval aviation long ago stripped carriers of any serious offensive weaponry. They will retain battle power.

Subs, then, will be both vulnerable and heavy-hitting. There’s precedent for this quandary. A century ago naval historian Julian S. Corbett professed bafflement at the spectacle of hulking, thickly armored, heavily gunned battlewagons surrounding themselves with escorts to fend off torpedo-armed small craft like … submarines! For Corbett this constituted a “revolution beyond all previous experience.” The “old practice” was no longer a trustworthy guide. History furnished little help with foreseeing how sea combat might evolve.

Let’s not confine our quest for analogies to the deep, though, or even to the sea. In one sense the silent service is an undersea counterpart to the U.S. Air Force. Sound farfetched? Think about it. Subs rely on passive defense measures such as quieting to conceal their whereabouts. The latest air-force planes, such as F-22 and F-35 fighters, rely on built-in stealth to help them evade detection. Naval aviation trusts less to stealth than to active countermeasures such as electronic warfare to help airmen ride out enemy air defenses. Naval airmen defeat or fool defenses rather than elude them. Submariners might study the two paradigms—passive and active defense—to learn whatever lessons from the aerial domain are worth learning.

And as long as we’re bruiting about air power, is the SSN more akin to a fighter aircraft or to a bomber? There’s a division of labor that merits pondering. Fighters scour contested airspace of hostile forces, helping the bomber get through to its target relatively unmolested. Is the submarine a “fighter” in that sense? Or are UUVs the sub’s fighter squadrons, clearing out anti-access defenses so the sub—the “bomber”—can close the range to launch torpedoes or missiles? The question warrants investigating.

And lastly, as we gaze through a glass darkly into the future, Clark’s revolution could complicate—or foreclose altogether—certain strategic options involving submarines. It’s worth thinking ahead about those even as we obsess over hardware and tactics.

To name one, Corbett urged navies to concentrate assets at “focal areas” where shipping had to converge to pass from point A to point B. The sea may be tantamount to a wide, featureless plain, that is, but nautical passageways like the Strait of Malacca funnel shipping into narrow—and easily monitored—lanes. Subs are uniquely suited to loiter unseen off such narrow seas, watching—and potentially interrupting—traffic that passes through.

But what if they’re no longer unseen? If the sub and its human crew must keep their distance to avoid anti-access defenses, will UUVs—robots without human intuition and powers of observation—provide an adequate substitute? If not, strategies like “archipelagic defense” in Asia could underperform. If subs and their robot fleets can’t close narrow seaways to surface and subsurface traffic, the outlook for strategies premised on controlling them could prove dim. Thinking ahead about workarounds is imperative.

The situation isn’t entirely bleak for submariners, thankfully. While a leap in underwater detection technology may be in the offing, Clark points out that the U.S. Navy enjoys a first-mover advantage in other technologies that may help offset the loss of stealth or otherwise augment subs’ efficacy. UUVs capable of extending the submarine’s reach and lethality figure prominently among the new hardware. A torpedo boasting ten- or twentyfold the range of today’s ten-mile torpedoes would help redress the imbalance between subs and access deniers. So would a new Tomahawk anti-ship missile.

It’s highly doubtful, moreover, that the tactical setting will go kerchunk—like throwing a breaker—with subs accustomed to lurking underwater with impunity suddenly thrown in full view. More likely, the vicissitudes of naval competition being what they are, the subsurface theater will come to resemble the aerial and surface theaters. The silent service will periodically introduce new passive and active measures to restore its advantage of concealment, while access deniers will experiment with countermeasures of their own. And on and on the cycle of one-upsmanship—of challenge and reply—will go.

In short, submariners will no longer be as exceptional as before. They’ll have to learn new habits. They’ll be more like surface officers, forced to train for active defense and counterattack for survival rather than trusting to invisibility. They’ll have to be more like aviators, operating squadrons of offboard craft to extend their combat reach. And subs will no longer be loners, sent forth to do great things in independent operations. In short, not just a technological but a cultural revolution is afoot.

Embrace it.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and author of “Visualize Chinese Sea Power,” in the current issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. The views voiced here are his alone.

Image: Reuters

(Note: This article was reposted due to reader interest.)

Sebastien Roblin

China, Americas

Built by Hongdu in Nanchang, China, the L-15 Falcon resembles an adorably abbreviated Super Hornet or F-16.

Here's What You Need to Know: The market for trainer/light attack planes is relatively crowded with competitors such as the Russian Yak-130, Italian MB.346, China’s subsonic K-8, T-50 Golden Eagle or possibly Boeing’s T-X. It is too early to tell whether L-15 and JL-9 will prove a major export success—but sales of cut-price supersonic trainer/fighters could become an interesting signifier of Beijing’s expanding influence in Africa, Asia and Latin America in years to come.

Flying a high-performance jet fighter is a physically and mentally demanding skill that requires a lot of practice—but each hour flying a warplane can cost tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance expenses. That's why air forces employ lighter, easier-handling Lead-In Fighter Trainers (LIFTs) to give pilots a chance to accumulate real-life experience with supersonic flight, air combat maneuvers, and weapons launch before they take the stick of a possibly finicky high-performance jet fighter.

The thing is advanced jet trainers like South Korea’ T-50 Golden Eagle are quite capable of basic combat duties short of high-intensity conflict while costing half or a third as much as a brand new warplane. For example, Filipino FA-50s and Nigerian Alpha Jet trainers have played a major role in combating brutal insurgencies in 2017, though both were involved in tragic friendly fire incidents.

The U.S. Air Force is looking to purchase 350 new LIFT jets following its T-X competition and is evaluating several designs costing between $30 and $40 million per airframe. However, China has already been phasing into service its own very slick and speedy LIFT, costing the equivalent of only $10 to $15 million, which has attracted interest in Africa and Latin America.

Built by Hongdu in Nanchang, China, the L-15 Falcon resembles an adorably abbreviated Super Hornet or F-16. The Falcon’s two Ukrainian-built AL-222 turbofans afford the trainee and instructor a backup should one engine fail, while multi-function displays in the ‘glass cockpit’ and the hands-on-throttle-and-stick controls give trainees a chance to work with the kinds of instruments typical to fourth-generation fighters.

The Falcon' leading edge extensions on the front of its wings and a high G-load tolerance of 8.5 allow it to perform tight maneuvers and achieve high angles of attack up to 30 degrees above the vector of the plane. Quadruple-redundant fly-by-wire controls on three axes allow for precise maneuvers. These traits are used to prepare pilots for the diverse family of famously supermaneuverable twin-engine Flanker multi-role jets operated by China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force and Navy.

The L-15 prototypes first flew in March 2006 and entered service in limited numbers in 2013 as a subsonic Advanced Jet Trainer designated the JL-10. This basic model boasts six hardpoints to carry bombs, rockets and short-range air-to-air missiles, but lacks a radar to target long-range munitions.

However, Hongdu later exhibited a supersonic L-15B model with afterburning turbofans, allowing the Falcon to attain speeds of up to Mach 1.4. The L-15B also has a lengthened nose to accommodate a Passive Electronically Scanned Array radar with a reported detection range of  -seven or seventy miles (sources differ) which can scan both air and surface targets (photo here). A Radar Warning Receiver added in the tail gives it a fighting chance to dodge missile attacks, while an IFF antenna could help avoid friendly fire incidents.

The L-15B also has its payload capacity beefed up to nearly four tons of weapons loaded on nine hardpoints: six underwing, one belly pylon and two wingtip rails. The instructor's seat can instead be used by a Weapon Systems Officer to manage guided weapons. One photo depicts an L-15 lugging 23-millimeter cannon in a belly pod, PL-5E heat-seeking air-to-air missiles (distantly related to the AA-2 and Sidewinder), LT-2 laser-guided bombs, and LS-6 GPS-guided bombs with fold-out wings that allow it to glide to targets up to thirty-seven miles away. Reportedly, more modern PL-10 and PL-12 beyond-visual-range radar-guided missiles (range sixty-two miles) could also be carried as well as other air-to-ground munitions.

The L-15B can even lug jamming pods to serve as a cut-price electronic warfare jet. However, while the jet can theoretically fly up to 52,000 feet high and over distances of up to 1,900 miles, when fully combat-loaded its effective radius is reduced to just 350 miles.

Of course, the diminutive L-15B doesn’t boast the speed, defenses, sensors and heavy payload of a full-fledged fourth-generation multi-role fighter like the F-16 or Su-35. But for developing countries that don't expect to fight a major military power, jets like the Falcon could perform basic air defense and precision ground-attack missions, all on a platform that will be cheaper, easier to maintain, and used for training pilots.

The Zambian Air Force so far has acquired six L-15Zs for its No. 15 squadron for $100 million, plus simulators and various guided weapons. In 2015, Venezuelan Admiral Carmen Mirandez announced plans to acquire one or two dozen L-15s to help pilots transition to Su-30MK2 and F-16 fighters. However, cash-strapped Caracas has put the deal on hold. The Uruguayan Air Force has also expressed interest in acquiring eight L-15s to replace its A-37B Dragonflies, one of which suffered an accident in 2016. Pakistan, a close ally of China, is another potential operator of the L-15B, but the jet would conflict with plans to acquire two-seat JF-17B jets, which are a Pakistani-Chinese collaboration.

The L-15 also has a rival supersonic domestic jet trainer, the Guizhou JL-9. A heavily modified two-seat derivative of the legendary MiG-21 with cranked delta wings, the turbojet-powered JL-9 is less sophisticated and has only five weapons hardpoints, but is cheaper at $8.5 million each—and the basic model comes with afterburners, an Italian pulse-doppler radar and a built-in 23-millimeter cannon. JL-9s and carrier-landing capable JL-9Hs serve with the People’s Liberation Army and PLA Naval Air Force (PLANAF), and six export models called the FTC-2000 Shanying ("Mountain Eagle") were delivered to Sudan in May 2018. Sudan is infamous for using its warplanes to bombard villages in rebel-held territory, and Russia and China are amongst of the few major arms exporters from which Khartoum can obtain modern weapons.

Meanwhile, China operates between 130 and 150 L-15s in nine squadrons, presumably mostly the subsonic L-15A. In general, Chinese fighter pilots fly a decent number of hours annually but lack adequate training under realistic combat conditions; presumably, weapons-capable and radar-equipped jet trainers could help address that deficiency. Intriguingly, an L-15 was photographed in 2018 with PLANAF markings (it has been dubbed the JL-10H) suggesting a possible JL-10 variant for training carrier-based pilots. However, some in the Chinese media have expressed doubt that the Falcon's rear fuselage is strong enough to mount a tail hook to practice carrier landings.

The market for trainer/light attack planes is relatively crowded with competitors such as the Russian Yak-130, Italian MB.346, China’s subsonic K-8, T-50 Golden Eagle or possibly Boeing’s T-X. It is too early to tell whether L-15 and JL-9 will prove a major export success—but sales of cut-price supersonic trainer/fighters could become an interesting signifier of Beijing’s expanding influence in Africa, Asia and Latin America in years to come.

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

This article first appeared in August 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Stealth Fighters, Asia

While virtually any plane can be equipped to fire long-range missiles, stealth airframes are built using radar-absorbent materials and engineered precisely to minimize reflection of radar waves.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Ultimately, hit-and-run tactics leaning on BVR and stealth technology may be quite effective in securing air superiority. However, they won’t suffice to overcome constraints of fuel and weapons supply in scenarios that involve distant and more numerous opponents attacking high-value targets.

In Len Deighton’s book Fighter, he describes the tactics used by the outnumbered English fighter pilots defending against German Luftwaffe bombers in the Battle of Britain:

The professional fighter pilot gained height as quickly as he was permitted, and treasured possession of that benefit. He hoped always to spot the enemy before they spotted him and hurried to the sun side of them to keep himself invisible. He needed superior speed, so he positioned himself for a diving attack, and he would choose a victim at the very rear of the enemy formation so that he did not have to fly through their gunfire. He would hope to kill on that first dive. If he failed, the dedicated professional would flee rather than face an alerted enemy.

Deighton’s point was that the best British pilots used hit-and-run tactics emphasizing surprise and speed in order to minimize losses, rather than dogfighting at length with enemies after those advantages were spent. These tactics permitted small numbers of British fighters to tackle the aerial armadas of the German Luftwaffe.

Obviously, technology has changed dramatically since 1940. While contemporary fighters can now go more than five times as fast as the Spitfires and Messerschmitt fighters of the Battle of Britain, two new technologies promise to make hit-and-run tactics more effective: stealth technology and long-range air-to-air missiles.

Stealth and Its Limits: 

While virtually any plane can be equipped to fire long-range missiles, stealth airframes are built using radar-absorbent materials and engineered precisely to minimize reflection of radar waves. This constrains their load-carrying abilities, as external weapons or drop tanks could increase their visibility on radar. The United States fields two stealth fighters, the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II.

Stealth planes are properly described as “Low Observable” aircraft. They are not actually undetectable, but are very hard to spot on radar. Let’s review the limits on stealth technology, and how fighter doctrine may evolve around them.

Stealth aircraft are optimized to be difficult to observe on the precise X-Band radars used on modern fighters: while some radars have better resolutions than others, most will only be able to track a stealth fighter at shorter distances. An F-22 is claimed to have the radar cross section of 0.0001 square meters in certain aspect—the same as that of a marble.

Low-bandwidth radars are more effective at detecting stealth aircraft. These are typically used by ground installations and ships, but also found on specialized aerial platforms such as the E-2D. However, they come with a major limitation: they can reveal only the general location of a stealth fighter and are too imprecise to be used to target missiles—though they can indicate to an X-Band radar where to look.

Infra-Red Search-and Track (IRST) systems offer another means of detecting stealth aircraft, but their range is generally limited. The latest IRST system on the SU-35 has extended the range up to 50 kilometers, whereas its radar has detection range of up to 200 kilometers. Just like low-band radar, IRST doesn’t give a precise track and can’t be used to lock on weapons. Stealth fighters include features designed to minimize heat signature, but they are far from completely effective.

Of course, a stealth fighter can be seen within visual range, and is vulnerable to heat-seeking missiles.

To recap: stealth technology is more effective at a distance. Although there are a number of methods to detect stealth fighters at long range, they generally don’t permit weapons to lock on to them.

In return, nothing prevents the stealth aircraft from firing at its opponents.

Enter the beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile.

Long Range Air-to-Air Missiles

Around the late 1990s, a new generation of long-range radar-guided air-to-air missiles entered service, notably the AIM-120 AMRAAM and the Russian R-77. These could hit targets over 50 kilometers away. (The earlier AIM-54 Phoenix boasted even longer range but was very expensive). In subsequent decades, the range has continued to increase to well over 100 kilometers, and new types such as the European MBDA Meteor and the Chinese PL-15 continue to push the envelope of speed and range.

The current AIM-120D has a theoretical maximum range of 160 kilometers; although in practice firing range will likely be much shorter for reasons soon discussed.

As long-range missiles are radar-guided, stealth fighters are not particularly vulnerable to them. The same cannot be said for non-stealth aircraft. An F-15 or Su-35 may attempt to avoid missiles with evasive maneuvers and counter measures—but doing so will disrupt whatever they are doing, and an opponent is likely to fire more than one missile.

One factor that is difficult to calculate is how likely long-range missiles are to hit. Extrapolating from past usage of radar-guided missiles is problematic, both because missile technology has advanced considerably since its inception (early radar-guided Sparrow missiles had a less than 10 percent kill probability in the Vietnam War), and the conflicts in which radar-guided missiles have been more successful (Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Gulf War) involved poorly trained opponents lacking effective countermeasures.

It’s safe to say that long-range missiles will have lower hit rates than short-range missiles like the AIM-9 Sidewinder and the Russian R-73—modern versions of which have chalked up a roughly seventy percent probability of kill.

Attrition and High Value Targets

Third- or fourth-generation fighters seeking to engage stealth aircraft in combat must close within short range so that their targeting systems are effective, all while dodging volleys of deadly missiles. As the stealth fighters themselves are difficult to track, they can disengage to avoid entering the short-range envelope in relative security.

It’s a difficult advantage to overcome.

But referring back to the Battle of Britain can reveal a limitation of this strategy. The British hit-and-run attacks succeeded in inflicting deadly attrition on German bombers over time until they were forced to call off the air offensive. But they rarely prevented the German formations from hitting their targets. The German simply had too many aircraft.

At first, this was a problem: the Germans relentlessly pounded British airfields, degrading the Royal Air Force’s ability to fight in the air. But then the Germans switched to bombing civilian targets in London. While this inflicted many civilian casualties, the raids did not degrade the RAF’s ability to fight back. The British fighters could sustain their advantageous rate of attrition versus the German Luftwaffe until the latter was forced to tap out.

So what happens if the other side attacks with superior numbers a target that must be defended?

An F-22 has a combat radius of some five hundred miles on internal fuel. The F-35 can fly 875 miles when loaded for air-to-air combat. Now consider the thousands of kilometers lying between U.S. bases in the Pacific and Europe and various potential conflict zones. To operate over those distances, stealth fighters would require aerial refueling from tanker aircraft. If fighting a well-equipped opponent, carrier-based aircraft would also likely be distant from the warzone, as carriers are at risk if they approach too close to ground-based anti-shipping missile batteries and aircraft.

American fighters would also likely be supported by AWACS airborne radar and command and control platforms, notably the E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry. The tankers and the AWACS aircraft are basically lumbering airliner-sized planes crammed full of fuel and electronic equipment respectively.

Let’s consider what would happen when American fighters encounter a much larger force of fighters based on the coast. The American fighters could fire their long-range AIM-120D missiles from more than one hundred kilometers away—four from each F-35 and six on the F-22. Soaring at Mach 4—twice the maximum speed of the aircraft that launched it—an AIM-120 can traverse eighty kilometers in one minute.

The radar-warning receivers on their targets would light up as they detect the incoming attack. The further away the target, the more time it has to evade the missile. Therefore, BVR missiles may be fired at well below their maximum range to ensure a higher probability of a kill, particularly when engaging maneuverable fighter aircraft.

Most opposing aircraft would not be able to shoot back at the stealth planes, though they might have a general idea of their position if they are supported by low-band radar or good infrared sensors. They could close on the American fighters, hoping to enter the envelope in which their sensors are effective.

What if the U.S. fighters close to short range after expending their long-range armaments, rather than prudently disengaging? If both sides are closing upon each other at maximum speed at high altitude, the distance between them would diminish at a rate of 60-80 kilometers a minute. Even if the AIM-120s were fired at maximum range, the opposing aircraft could close that distance in one or two minutes.

In short-range engagements, surprise, pilot training and flight performance will determine the victor.

The F-22 is a superb dogfighter. The F-35… not so much, though it has its defenders. Both aircraft can carry two Sidewinder missiles and fire shells from their onboard cannons.

However, their opponents would be able to spot the American fighters as they enter visual range thanks to the Mark One human eyeball, as well as infrared and electro-optical sensors—and even radars, which are effective against stealth aircraft at short ranges. The stealth fighters could be targeted with heat-seeking missiles, more of which could be carried by the non-stealth aircraft. If the opponents retain a significant numerical advantage, than within-visual range combat could be quite risky.

But why would stealth fighters risk engaging in short range in the first place?

Stealth Fighters Don’t Swim

The Rand Corporation’s Pacific Vision wargame simulating a conflict with China in 2008 found that even in a favorable scenario for the United States—half of U.S. missiles hit at long range and the none of their opponent’s do—a force of U.S. fighters outnumbered roughly three to one would be overwhelmed after firing off all its missiles. The less-maneuverable F-35s fared poorly in the ensuing dogfight. But in the end, nearly all of the U.S. fighters were lost.

Why? The hostile aircraft didn’t have trouble detecting the tankers supporting the U.S. forces. Unlike the F-22s and F-35s, tankers have neither the speed nor stealth to evade a determined attack.

A final consideration is that opponents may field limited number of their own stealth fighters, such as the J-20 or the Sukhoi T-50. Even a small number of stealth fighters would be effective at sneaking into the range of the tankers and AWACs aircraft and taking them out before the U.S. aircraft could evade or retaliate. Very long-range missiles such as the R-37 and the PL-13 could also assist in the anti-tanker mission.

The Psychological Factor

There are limitations to the “overwhelm with numbers” strategy.

In ground warfare, consider what would likely happen if an attacking infantry unit were to sustain 33 percent casualties attacking an objective. More often than not, the attackers would halt their advance, if not beat an outright retreat. Not only do fear and stress from incoming fire and casualties cause soldiers to abandon an attack, but disorganization and confusion set in as communication becomes frantic and links in the chain of command are eliminated.

The RAND wargame results hinged on ten surviving pilots shooting down the U.S. tankers after sixty-two of their compatriots were shot down. How coolheaded and rational would these pilots remain while their unit suffered 86 percent casualties?

Air warfare does have different psychological and physical dynamics than ground warfare. There are historical incidents in which aerial units pressed home attacks despite sustaining very heavy casualties, even up to 100 percent. However, there are also instances in which aerial attackers aborted in disorder after taking losses.

Implementing a swarm attack would also be no simple matter. Concentrating large numbers of aircraft would be a logistical challenge. They would also need to attack a target that would force American fighters to engage in such adverse circumstances.

Solutions?

How can U.S. doctrine adapt to this challenging scenario?

Already, many theorists believe that carriers would be forced to remain far away from hostile shores. The survivability of airbases in the event of a mass surface-to-surface missile attack is also open to question. One possibility is that no large-scale air battles would materialize.

The two key limitations are logistical: lack of internal fuel to operate without support, and insufficient missiles to tackle superior numbers. For the time being, there is no obvious fix to the fuel problem: the latest U.S. fighters, the F-22 and F-35, are simply going to depend on tankers. Some suggest that the Navy should deploy light-weight low-observable drones from carriers that could potentially operate further afield.

What about increasing missile capacity?

The U.S. military is a big proponent of networked warfare. In theory, if one airplane detects an enemy, it could pass on that data to friendly ships and aircraft—and through Cooperative Engagement Ability, even potentially allow those friendlies to shoot at that target from far away. One potential tactic is to use a vanguard of stealthy fighters to identify incoming enemy aircraft and send targeting data to ships or non-stealth fighters, which can carry heavier weapons loads. The F-35’s excellent sensors and datalinks could make it effective in this role.

There is even an idea being kicked around to mount large numbers of missiles on a B-1 or B-52, which would be fired off hundreds of kilometers away from the battle. Of course, such an “arsenal plane” would be vulnerable if enemy fighters broke through the accompanying line of F-22s and F-35s. The tactic would likely require even longer-range missiles than the U.S. currently employs.

Ultimately, hit-and-run tactics leaning on BVR and stealth technology may be quite effective in securing air superiority. However, they won’t suffice to overcome constraints of fuel and weapons supply in scenarios that involve distant and more numerous opponents attacking high-value targets.

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

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Korean War, Asia Pacific

As the UN solidified control of the seas surrounding the Sea of Japan, the gun-armed capital ships embarked on an extensive shore bombardment campaign.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The most important naval battle of the war occurred on the opening day of the conflict. South Korea’s only large patrol boat intercepted and destroyed a North Korean vessel on the verge of landing troops in Pusan in an engagement described in a companion article.

Just days after North Korea embarked on its steam-roller invasion of its larger but less heavily armed southern neighbor, the United Nations decided it needed to step in and save the besieged Republic of Korea.

However, it would take time for ground forces and their heavy tanks and artillery to arrive in the South Korean port of Pusan (all the other major ports were swiftly overrun). 

The same was not true of aircraft ships based in U.S.-occupied Japan. While American jet fighters secured air superiority over North Korea’s World War II-vintage air force, it fell to the U.S. and British navies to try to stem the seemingly unstoppable North Korean advance.

The UN ships could affect battles on land in two key ways: by bombarding coastal facilities and enemy troops advancing along the coastline with their large guns, and by seizing control of the sea from North Korea’s People's Navy, which was using its small boats and merchant ships to supply troops along the coast and infiltrate commandos behind South Korean lines. 

The most important naval battle of the war occurred on the opening day of the conflict. South Korea’s only large patrol boat intercepted and destroyed a North Korean vessel on the verge of landing troops in Pusan in an engagement described in a companion article.

On July 2, a more formidable task force assembled on Korea’s eastern coastline, composed of the American light cruiser Juneau, the British cruiser Jamaica and the frigate-sized armed sloop Black Swan.

Both British vessels had seen significant action during World War II. 

The smaller escort 2,000-ton HMS Black Swan had survived mines and attacking Luftwaffe bombers and even helped sink German submarine U-124. A year earlier, she had emerged badly battered but still afloat from a deadly gun duel with Chinese coastal guns on the Yangtze River.

Jamaica’s feats were even more legendary. In 1942, she had charged towards German battlecruisers in the Battle of the Barents Sea, helping drive them away, then helped sink notorious battlecruiser Scharnhorst in the epic Battle of the North Cape.

By contrast, the 6,800-ton USS Juneau had only just been commissioned in 1946, the lead ship in her class anti-aircraft cruisers.

At a quarter past six in the morning of July 2, 1950, lookouts on the three ships spotted four North Korean motor torpedo boats (numbered No.21 through No. 24) and two gunboats (Mo-233 and Mo-234) escorting ten trawlers heading back to their bases in North Korea—having just emptied holds full of ammunition at Chuonmin Chan (also transliterated as Chumunjin).

As the cruisers surged forward to intercept, to their surprise, the motorboats peeled off and came barreling towards them!

The newly founded North Korean Navy had received at least five Soviet G-5 motor torpedo boats. The G-5s only 62 feet long, weighed a mere 18 tons and typically required a crew of six or seven. Their two 850 horsepower GAM-34 V12 engines—derived from an aircraft engine used on heavy bombers and ‘flying aircraft carriers’—could propel the boat to a blazingly fast 61 miles per hour. 

That speed was hoped to give the boats the agility to evade enemy fire and maneuver to a good firing position to release their primary weapons: two 533-millimeter torpedo tubes. While torpedoes could be dodged, they were still greatly feared: combat experience had shown that just one or two lucky torpedo hits could sink even large cruisers and carriers.

As secondary weapons, the motorboats also had 12.7-millimeter machine guns, and some may have been fitted with punchier rapid-firing automatic cannons.

The Soviet Union had built over 300 G-5s between 1934 and 1941 and lost in World War II skirmishes with the German, Finnish and Romanian forces in the Baltic and Black Seas. However, they rarely launched torpedo attacks against large warships, instead battling small minesweepers and minelayers, and serving in auxiliary transport roles. 

The two gunboats were 47-ton wooden-hulled OD-200-class submarine hunters armed with rapid-firing 37-millimeter anti-aircraft cannons, sonars, and depth charges.

The big cruisers began lobbing big shells at their diminutive assailants from over six miles away. The Jamaica disposed of both four triple-6” gun turrets, as well as four faster-firing 4” dual purposes guns. Juneau bristled with six turrets each packing two 5” dual-purpose guns.

In Michael Hickey’s history Korean War, Midshipman Michael Muschamp of the Jamaica remembered the battle thusly:

“A very perturbed 18-year old donned clothes, anti-flash gear, and a tin hat in triple quick time. I made my way to my action station on the bridge…I soon saw what all the fuss was about.

There were six small craft, trapped between UN three warships and the shore, firing what appeared to be 20mm and 40mm cannon at Juneau and Jamaica. The two cruisers got the range of the craft and sank four within ten minutes. Another ran ashore in flames and the sixth escaped seaward.”

By the time the little boats had closed within two miles, torpedo boats No.24 had outright sunk by the powerful shells, and No.22 badly damaged. No.23 grounded itself ashore due to damage and was subsequently destroyed.

Both gunboats were destroyed as well, and two North Korean sailors captured.

By most accounts, the North Korean never launched any torpedoes. According to Muschamp, one of the rescued sailors when asked by an interrogator stated: “Oh, the Russians were going to teach us how to fire them [torpedoes] next week.”

Only boat No.21 escaped the engagement unscathed. Its captain, Kim Kun Ok, apparently reported sinking the American cruiser Baltimore—a victory which remains celebrated with a display (pictured here) in the Victorious War Museum in Pyongyang. This would have been quite a feat, as the Baltimore had been decommissioned four years earlier in 1946, and was at the time held in reserve in Washington state.

Bravado aside, the KPN subsequently decided to avoid directly engaging U.N. warships for the remainder of the conflict. However, it did continue using small boats for resupply and troop infiltration mission—most of which were subsequently sunk that July and August, including the ten KPN trawlers the motorboats had been escorting. 

Later on August 15, South Korean minesweeper YMS 503 intercepted a large North Korean convoy and sank 15 small boats, and captured 30.

As the UN solidified control of the seas surrounding the Sea of Japan, the gun-armed capital ships embarked on an extensive shore bombardment campaign. One tactic employed was to preemptively shell the cliffs overlooking coastal roads to create obstructing debris. The cruisers would then wait quietly at night with their running lights off for a North Korean convoy to arrive and dismount to clear the debris, before opening fire with a surprise salvo.

However, coastal bombardment missions came with their own risks. On July 8, Jamaica was bombarding a shore target when a remarkably well-aimed 3-inch shell fired by a coastal battery smacked into her superstructure, killing five artillerymen that had been manning the guns as well as one sailor. These were the first UK casualties of the Korean War.

The battle of Chumonchin Chan is today considered one of the six surface warfare engagements fought by the U.S. Navy since World War II, but the small size of the North Korean vessels has likely contributed to the engagement’s obscurity. 

Nonetheless, North Korea’s coastal fleet played an important role in the early days of the Korean War in projecting force against its southern neighbor. The vigorous counterattack mounted by ROK and UN naval forces likewise was vital in curtailing that threat—and laid the groundwork for the landing at Inchon that ejected Pyongyang’s troops from South Korea, and ultimately threatened the North in turn with invasion.

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

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

Soviet Navy, World

For all its serious shortcomings, the Alfa was undeniably a striking and ambitious design that pushed the limits of submarine performance in ways few modern designs even attempt.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Alfa represented a design paradigm for “small but fast” attack submarines that would ultimately fall out of favor compared to “big but stealthy” designs like the Russian Akula-class and U.S. Sea Wolf-class SSNs—though isolated media reports have revealed some interest in future Alfa-like boats.

The Project 705 Lira—better known abroad as the Alfa-class submarine by NATO—was basically a submarine race car, and looked the part with svelte tear-drop shaped hull, rakishly trimmed-down sail designed to minimize aquadynamic drag, and even its convertible-style pop-up windshield.    

Military vehicles are generally designed out of a relentless quest for efficiency, but the Alfa’s iconic shape exemplifies how kinematically optimal designs often possess a striking aesthetic of their own. 

Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarines tended to be faster and deeper-diving than their Western counterparts—though they were also noisier and more prone to horrifying accidents. 

The Project 705, however, originated as a 1958-design concept to push the speed advantage to the maximum, allowing the submarine not only keep pace with but overtake NATO carrier task forces typically cruising at 33 knots—while keeping one-step ahead of enemy torpedoes and out-maneuvering enemy submarines.

This extraordinary performance would be achieved by ruthlessly maximizing speed and subtracting from weight. Thus the Alfa featured a relatively small hull made of titanium alloy. Titanium is a rare metal which can create surfaces as strong as steel for roughly half the weight. It is also paramagnetic, making the submarine’s hull more difficult to detect for maritime patrol planes using Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.

However, titanium can only be welded in an inert argon or helium atmosphere. This led U.S. engineers to assume it was simply impractical to weld large pieces of titanium on the scale necessary for a submarine hull. They underestimated Soviet determination: workers in pressurized suits would work in huge warehouses flooded with argon gas to assemble sheets of the shiny, rare metal.

The resulting Project 705 submarine measured 81-meters long but weighed only 3,200-tons submerged. For comparison, the 84-meter-long American Permit class submarine displaced 4,800 tons submerged. 

The Alfa featured a typical Soviet double-hull configuration, but only one of its six internal compartments was intended for habitation by the crew. Extraordinary degrees of automation allowed a complement of 15 officers cooped together in the heavily protected third compartment of the vessel, instead of the roughly 100 personnel typical on contemporary SSNs. 

In fact, only eight crew could operate virtually every system on the submarine from the command center thanks to its highly automated systems, allowing for very fast reaction times in combat. In the event of misfortune, the crew could make use of a spherical escape capsule built into the sail—the first to be found on a Soviet submarine.

The Alfa’s complement would later be doubled to 32 crew—but no enlisted ratings were invited onboard. 

However, as the U.S. Navy discovered decades later while developing the Littoral Combat Ship, this degree of automation meant the small crew was incapable of performing maintenance and repairs while at sea.

The Alfa relied upon reactor consuming 90% enriched uranium-235 fuel, and liquified lead-bismuth-eutectic for cooling to produce 155 MW of power. As the liquified metal would solidify at temperatures below 257 degrees Fahrenheit, the reactors typically had remain warm lest the liquefied metal freeze, rendering the reactor non-functional. 

Each Project 705 carried eighteen to twenty 533-millimeter torpedoes which could be automatically loaded into six tubes which could pneumatically ‘pop’ the weapons upwards to engage ships overhead. Optionally, RPK-2 “Starfish” nuclear anti-submarine missiles and ultra-fasted Shkval super-cavitating torpedoes could also be carried. Alfa variants armed with ballistic missiles (705A) or gigantic 650-millimeter torpedo tubes (the 705D) were conceived but never built.

After spending nine years in development, four Alfas were laid down in Severodvinsk and Lenningrad between 1967 and 1969. However, only one—K-64 Leningrad, had been launched and commissioned by the beginning of 1972. That same year, K-64 experienced both cracking in its titanium hull and a leaking liquified metal ‘froze’ on the exterior of the reactor causing irreparable damage. The super-submarine was decommissioned and scrapped just a few years after going on duty.

After several years of tweaking, six more Alfas were finally commissioned between 1977-1981, with later 705K boats using a moderately more reliable BM-40A reactors.

Undeniably, the Project 705 exhibited impressive performance. In a minute and a half, an Alfa could accelerate up to 41 knots (47 miles per hour) while submerged—though some sources claim eve higher speeds were achieved. Their high degree of reserve buoyancy also made them capable of executing fast turns and changes in attitude, and they could dive—and attack from!—depths that NATO torpedoes struggled to atain.

When racing at maximum speed using its steam-turbined turned five-bladed propeller, the Alfa-class was unsurprisingly noisy. But an Alfa commander in need of discretion had another trick he could pull from his sleeve: a secondary propulsion system in the form of two tiny electrically turned propellers that allowed the Alfa to slink around very quietly at low speeds.

The CIA initially mis-identified the Alfas as being diesel-electric submarines due to their small size. But two determined CIA case officers, Herb Lord and Gerhardt Thamm, began closely analyzing photo intelligence and reports on titanium components flowing to mysterious facilities in shipyards in Leningrad and Severodvinsk, as described by Thamm in this article. This led to a more accurate estimate the capabilities of the ‘titanium submarines’ by 1979, prompting the development of more agile Mark 48 ADCAP and Spearfish torpedoes by the U.S. and U.K. respectively. 

However, the Pentagon appears to have been fooled by misinformation suggesting much larger-scale production of the Alfa than was the case. In fact, the Alfa had big problems to match its extraordinary speed.

As the special facilities required to keep the liquid metal reactors were often missing or broken-down, Alfa crews resorted to keeping the reactors running full time even while in port, making the reactors very difficult to maintain and unreliable. And the Alfas’ hot-burning reactors had to be replaced entirely after fifteen years in service. 

The Alfa’s low reliability and maintainability at sea meant the submarine was conceived of as a sort of “interceptor,” kept ready at port to dash after key surface warships targets. In this role the Alfa amounted to a formidable foe to NATO submariners.

But all but one of the Alfas had been decommissioned by 1990, four of them having had their reactor coolant freeze while deployed at sea. The last ship, K-123, was refit with a pressurized water reactor and was finally decommissioned from duties as a training ship in 1996.

Safe disposal of the Alfa reactor cores encrusted with solidified lead-bismuth also proved quite challenging. Furthermore, over 650 tons of weapons-grade U-235 fuel used by Alfas was found unsecured in warehouses in Kazakhstan in 1994, where they had attracted interest from illegal arms dealers. The uranium was ultimately extracted to the United States using huge C-5 Galaxy cargo planes in a covert operation known as Project Sapphire.

The Alfa represented a design paradigm for “small but fast” attack submarines that would ultimately fall out of favor compared to “big but stealthy” designs like the Russian Akula-class and U.S. Sea Wolf-class SSNs—though isolated media reports have revealed some interest in future Alfa-like boats. Yet stealth, not speed, reigns as king in modern submarine warfare tactics.

That said, for all its serious shortcomings, the Alfa was undeniably a striking and ambitious design that pushed the limits of submarine performance in ways few modern designs even attempt.

Kyle Mizokami is a writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. This first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Social Security,

If both members of a married couple qualify for Social Security benefits, it is best to think about when each should file.

When many older Americans get closer to retirement, they often cram in as much information regarding Social Security benefits as possible.

Along the way, there invariably will be missing pieces of information that will prevent one from taking full advantage of the monthly checks and claiming all of the money that they’re entitled to.

For many experts, the most prudent financial decision is generally very simple: wait on filing for the benefits as long as possible—preferably till age seventy.

“Workers planning for their retirement should be aware that retirement benefits depend on age at retirement. If a worker begins receiving benefits before his/her normal (or full) retirement age, the worker will receive a reduced benefit,” the Social Security Administration (SSA) says.

“A worker can choose to retire as early as age sixty-two, but doing so may result in a reduction of as much as thirty percent,” it continues.

But what about married folks out there? Do they need to do anything special? Yes, there are indeed some proper steps an individual needs to take to max out those monthly benefits—and that final total might even be larger than what one anticipated.

Spousal Benefits

According to a finance expert on the Motley Fool, “spousal benefits are generally available to those who are married to someone receiving Social Security checks. They’re particularly helpful for those who either aren’t eligible for their own benefits or are receiving very little from Social Security.”

The maximum amount that an individual can receive via spousal benefits is half of the higher-earning spouse's benefit amount at their full retirement age (FRA). But if the widow or widower qualifies for Social Security on their own record and the monthly payments are higher, they have the option to switch to their own benefit at any time between ages sixty-two and seventy. There is also a “one-time lump-sum death payment of $255 (that) can be paid to the surviving spouse if he or she was living with the deceased; or, if living apart, was receiving certain Social Security benefits on the deceased’s record,” the SSA says.

Claiming Strategy

If both members of a married couple qualify for Social Security benefits, it is best to think about when each should file.

“You can begin collecting benefits at sixty-two years old or any age thereafter, but the age you file will directly affect the size of your monthly payments,” the expert writes. “The only way to receive the entire benefit amount you’re entitled to is to claim at your FRA—which is either age sixty-six, sixty-seven, or somewhere in between depending on the year you were born.”

When One Passes

It is also important to weigh options in the event a spouse passes away, as that decision could dictate how much one receives in benefits in the years ahead. 

The expert notes that “by being strategic about when you both claim benefits, you can make the most of survivors benefits.”

“For example, if the higher-earning spouse is significantly older, it may make sense for that person to delay benefits. If he or she does pass away first, then, the surviving spouse will earn larger checks than if the deceased spouse claimed earlier,” she adds.

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

Ethen Kim Lieser

Coronavirus,

Can a third shot give full protection from the Delta variant?

The timeline for Americans to get their coronavirus booster shots might be sped up by three months.

Last week, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, noted that data out of Israel were showing a reduction in the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against severe illness among those sixty-five and older who were fully vaccinated in January or February.

The data further revealed that booster doses provide four times as much protection against infection from the highly transmissible Delta variant, which was first detected by scientists in India last fall, Reuters reported.

In response, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki contended that President Joe Biden would fully rely on officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) if there is any need to adjust the previously planned rollout of booster shots at eight months after receiving two coronavirus vaccine doses.

“So, I want to be very clear on that. If they were to change their guidance based on data for any particular group, he would, of course, abide by that,” Psaki said during a press briefing.

“But for people watching at home, for you all who are reporting out this nothing has changed about the eight-month timeline as it relates to the boosters,” she added.

Limited Data

On Monday, a new CDC presentation has asserted that the data needed to properly evaluate booster shots for the general population has been found to be limited, which might suggest that the agency’s panel could limit its initial endorsement of booster shots to highly vulnerable groups and healthcare employees.

According to the presentation, vaccine efficacy for the Delta variant has ranged between thirty-nine percent and eighty-four percent. It is “important to monitor trends of effectiveness by severity of disease over time,” the presentation noted, adding that inoculating the unvaccinated must continue to be a “top priority.”

The latest estimates indicate that just over fifty percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. While inoculations have been increasing in recent weeks, millions are still firmly opposed to getting vaccinated.

Three and Done?

Last week, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an interview on CBS’ This Morning that there is a possibility that Americans may not need annual booster shots after a third jab.

“This virus has been humbling, so I don’t want to say never, but we are not necessarily anticipating that you will need this annually,” she said. “It does look like after this third dose, you get a really robust response, and so we will continue to follow the science both on the vaccine side but also on the virus side.”

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

James Holmes

Future Warfare, Asia

Sci-fi suggests, in a roundabout way, that personnel policy may constitute a U.S. Navy center of gravity.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Fling a variety of challenges at personnel, along as many axes as you can, as simultaneously as you can. Give each crewman more to do than he can, on the Cylon-esque reasoning that imposing numerous, repeated contingencies compounds the demands on people and hardware. Such tactics constitute the precursor to a crushing blow—or to an American withdrawal under duress.

How would you punk the U.S. Navy if the lords of naval warfare handed you the keys to, say, China’s navy? Well, you might do the obvious thing: read or watch some science fiction!

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

In the latest Star Trek flick, for instance, a new foe harnesses swarm tactics to eviscerate the starship Enterprise. A coordinated stream of small craft overpowers the starship’s defenses through the simple expedient of presenting more targets than the Enterprise crew can shoot down. Its overseer then concentrates fire at vital nodes to dismember the ship’s structure.

Such tactics are an otherworldly counterpart to saturation missile barrages meant to overwhelm U.S. surface combatants’ Aegis combat systems. Rather than try to evade Aegis defenses, attackers simply aim more rounds at this combination radar, fire-control and surface-to-air missile system than it can handle. Some get through—and sow havoc. Life imitates sci-fi.

And then there’s Battlestar Galactica, a TV show with a similar ripped-from-the-headlines feel. The conceit behind the show: rather than risk a slugfest against the human colonies’ fleet of capital ships and their Viper fighter squadrons, the archenemy Cylons insinuate a computer virus into the fleet. The virus spreads through the ubiquitous computer networks whereby commanders coordinate their endeavors. It disables heavy ships and fighter spacecraft alike, leaving the fleet easy prey.

Sound strategy, that. Why duel a stronger antagonist and risk losing when cyberwarfare can nullify combat power before shots are fired? Galactica, an aged man-of-war, rides out the onslaught because her old-school commander, William Adama, refuses to permit the computers on board to be networked. When modern Vipers—the F-35s of this faraway universe—shut down, the battlestar’s deck crew salvages obsolescent fighters. Old tech proves too low-tech for viruses to infect—yet still lethal enough for skilled aviators to repulse attack.

“Network-centric warfare” remains U.S. forces’ warfighting method of choice, even though the phrase has fallen out of fashion. It comes with grave perils. Live by the computer network, die by the computer network.

But Battlestar Galactica also hints at subtler ways to outfight a stronger opponent. The weak need not vanquish the strong outright. They can harry the strong—enfeebling them until their margin of supremacy vanishes.

Wise combatants, then, study their foes, discern their strengths and frailties, and design operations to tame the former while exploiting the latter. A prospective enemy like China would try to divine the American “center of gravity” or, as Carl von Clausewitz describes it somewhat mystically, the “hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” Should a fight erupt, Chinese forces would then aim “blow after blow” at that center of gravity—pounding away until U.S. forces capitulated or, more likely, lost heart and went away.

There’s a curious thing about centers of gravity, though. They can be innocuous. Petroleum refineries turned out to be a center of gravity for Hitler’s war machine, humble freighters and tankers for Tojo’s. By pummeling industry and merchantmen from sky and sea, the Allies starved Axis forces of irreplaceable war materiel.

A related idea from Prussia’s master of strategy: Clausewitz advises strategists that, in the folksy terms I like to employ in Newport, the enemy is not a potted plant. In strategy, in other words, one antagonist doesn’t work its will on a lifeless mass that’s unable to strike a counterblow. Rather, warfare involves an intensely interactive “collision of two living forces”—both imbued with ingenuity and with zeal for their causes. It’s the Golden Rule of combat: the foe does unto you even as you do unto him.

But here’s the thing. It may be possible, through dexterous strategy and operations, to transform a foe into a potted plant—dulling his reactions and material capacity until he’s little more than an inert mass with little prospect of protecting himself or thwarting your will. Better yet, such operations could yield an opponent prone to self-defeating mistakes. Inert pugilists make easy pickings.

By the Golden Rule, moreover, he may do things to reduce you to a potted plant, hampering your ability to adapt to change to the tactical surroundings—change he himself may have wrought. If he renders you inert, you can no longer compete effectively or efficiently. He imposes his will on you—and wins.

Which brings us back to the sci-fi universe. In the very second episode of Battlestar Galactica, titled “33,” the Cylons hit upon an ingenious stratagem: weary Galactica’s and the colonial fleet’s defenders through small-scale but frequent assaults, then strike a fatal blow against a foe too tired, addle-brained and mistake-prone to fight back effectively.

Clausewitz would instantly recognize the approach. He notes that the components of combat strength are force—material capability—and resolve. Quite so. The Cylon onslaught targets both the hardware and human dimensions, enervating the colonial fleet over time. The Cylons smuggle a homing device onto a transport to track its movements, then repeatedly “jump” in faster-than-light strike forces to menace the fleet. Cylon fighters appear every thirty-three minutes. It becomes plain to Galactica’s leadership that the attacks’ purpose is less to inflict damage than to compel the fleet to keep jumping. Relentless assault prevents repairs and upkeep to fighting ships while keeping crews awake.

The campaign takes its toll on hardware and bodies, debilitating the fleet’s fighting power. Think about scrambling an air wing for action every half-hour: you assemble pilots for a preflight briefing, launch, do battle, and recover through “combat landings” that require pilots to slam fuselages on the ship’s flight deck to get the squadron aboard fast. Little maintenance gets done under such circumstances. Machinery needs downtime, and it dislikes transients. Repeatedly starting and stopping it is stressful—even leaving aside the rigors of deep-space combat.

Nor do the equipment’s operators fare much better. “We’re getting slower,” observes Commander Adama grimly after fatigue cascades into computer problems that in turn delay a faster-than-light jump out of harm’s way. The mistake almost subjects not just the battlestar but its consorts—mostly unarmed transports—to Cylon missile fire. Laments the weapons scientist and turncoat Gaius Baltar, “there are limits” beyond which human physiology can’t be pushed. It’s just a matter of time, observes Baltar, before the fleet’s defenders commit a fatal blunder.

And that’s the impact of wearisome tactics on a ship of war that appears amply stocked with manpower. Throughout most of its history, the U.S. Navy manned its ships under a similar philosophy, reasoning that it takes a surplus of manpower to fight a ship in combat. Combat means losses. Now imagine Cylon pinprick attacks’ impact on Galactica and her coterie were it “minimally manned”—that is, if every crewman were assigned multiple jobs, and if the vessels lacked any manpower reserve when (not if) battle damage and casualties occur.

In all likelihood, colonial commanders would have committed a final mistake sooner rather than later, as demands on crews mounted to unbearable proportions. Humanity’s end would have come with it.

This foray into sci-fi represents a roundabout way of proposing that personnel policy may constitute a U.S. Navy center of gravity. Late-model surface vessels—ranging from diminutive littoral combat ships to hulking Zumwalt-class destroyers and Ford-class aircraft carriers—are indeed minimally manned. The logic behind this approach is simple: U.S. defense budgets are stagnant, sailors are expensive. Ergo, substitute technology for people to save taxpayer dollars. The navy doesn’t have to pay, say, an automated firefighting or ammunition-loading system a salary or pension, or fund its health care. The leaner the crew, the greater the savings.

Now, minimal manning may make sense for routine peacetime steaming. Transiting from point A to point B on the nautical chart represents a steady-state environment, entailing predictable demands and few extra stresses to wear down crews. It’s worth noting, though, that every crewman shoulders lots of different duties for different situations—even during everyday operations. That’s true even of ships manned under the traditional, more generous personnel policy. The same sailor might help launch or recover aircraft, take on fuel or supplies from a logistics vessel, fight fires or flooding, and on and on, depending on what the ship’s doing at the time.

Capping the number of crewmen caps the supply of labor. That means automation must reduce the demand for labor enough to keep supply in sync with demand. Can it? Color me skeptical. It’s an open question whether enough shipboard tasks can be automated, wholly or partially, to sustain that balance. I served in a warship operated by half the manpower that operated it in its first life, during World War II. You can indeed reduce manpower by replacing sailors with gee-whiz technology—to a point. It worked for us, but there were times when the makers of Galactica could have cast our crew as characters in “33.” We were the walking dead.

But if minimal manning may suffice for peacetime operations, when no enemy is trying to turn American shortcomings to advantage, what about combat—an environment without a manageable, predictable rhythm? War unfolds not by peacetime cost-benefit logic but by its own paradoxical logic, the logic of unforeseen reversals of fortune. It’s a helter-skelter realm that comes complete with antagonists bent on enfeebling and defeating warriors and materiel.

“Redundancy” is the traditional antidote for battle damage and other emergencies. It imparts resiliency to a combat unit. In hardware terms, redundancy means furnishing a spare of everything you can—shipwrights installing duplicate machinery so that a vessel has an extra generator, pump, piping system, whatever. Lose one widget, and you put a duplicate in service. Excess capacity thus lets crews reroute around damage. It lets a unit sustain its fighting strength despite absorbing a pounding. Spare manpower serves the same purpose. It provides skippers replacements for those who fall in action. Individuals may be incapacitated; the ship as a whole fights on.

If you’re China and confront an antagonist that opts to do without redundancy, you can deploy a troublemaking strategy. You whittle away at the center of gravity manifest in minimal manning. The object of such a strategy? Tire and bewilder crews that may already be overworked. Fling a variety of challenges at them, along as many axes as you can, as simultaneously as you can. Give each crewman more to do than he can, on the Cylon-esque reasoning that imposing numerous, repeated contingencies compounds the demands on people and hardware. Such tactics constitute the precursor to a crushing blow—or to an American withdrawal under duress.

China’s navy, in short, could ape the Cylons’ strategy. In purely martial terms, posing missile, gun, and torpedo threats from many points of the compass from as many domains as possible—from the surface, the depths, and aloft—would compel a ship’s beleaguered defenders to cope with more challenges, perhaps, than they could manage. Flooding an embattled zone with China Coast Guard vessels, fishing craft, and purportedly civilian sea and air traffic—interspersing combat units among nonmilitary ships and planes—would further complicate U.S. commanders’ picture of the surroundings. It would be hard to act for fear of hitting the wrong target—and having pictures of an errant shot splashed across TV and computer screens around the world.

That’s a fate few captains relish. And Chinese commanders would doubtless deploy deceptive measures to make the campaign even more wearisome. To glimpse the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) mindset toward deception, dust off that old copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Among other things, Book I of the Chinese masterwork instructs generals to “feign disorder,” “feign incapacity,” sow confusion among the enemy leadership, divide an enemy host and fall on the weaker fractions, and generally deploy “normal” and “extraordinary” forces in mercurial combinations to confound and weaken opponents. Such ideas find their way into contemporary works on PLA strategy.

Do all that, and a weaker but resolute China stands some chance of overcoming its brawnier foe. It could land a heavy hit or, failing that, simply outlast the foe. How to respond? First and foremost, the U.S. Navy should acknowledge—should grok, as sci-fi master Robert Heinlein might say—that a manpower deficit represents a grave weakness in a hot war. Taking the problem seriously constitutes the first step toward a solution.

Second, it should conscript some imaginative tacticians to play the “red team,” projecting how PLA forces might harness troublemaking strategies. Realistic wargames illuminate the contours of problems while hinting at workarounds.

Third, there may be no substitute for stationing sailors aboard American surface combatants in greater numbers. The service leadership already expanded the crew of littoral combat ships by 25 percent. That’s a welcome boost in percentage terms, but a 25 percent boost equates to just ten more seafarers. Exercises will show how many more mariners are needed, and what skills they should boast to bolster these vessels’ resiliency.

And lastly, the nation is poised to undergo a change of presidential administrations that will usher in a president inclined to bulk up the U.S. Navy, along with a secretary of the navy reportedly inclined to agree. The next few months, then, represent the ideal time for the navy leadership to put the case for new policies—including less minimal manning—before a political leadership favorably disposed toward such policies.

Let’s hand them a sci-fi tract while we’re at it. Therein lies wisdom.

James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

This article is being republished due to readers' interests.

Image: Reuters

Washington’s longest war officially comes to an end, 24 hours ahead of schedule.

Peter Suciu

Gun Control,

There is no denying that there has been a rise in the home-made guns showing up on San Francisco's streets—and according to reports, police had seized 164 of the so-called "ghost guns" in 2020, a 2,600 percent increase from the six confiscated in 2016.

High Bridge Arms, which closed in the fall of 2015, was the last gun shop to operate in San Francisco. Its closure was part of what supporters of the Second Amendment said was an effort to make the City by the Bay a "gun-free zone," and now nearly six years later San Francisco's chief prosecutor is looking to take it even further.

This month District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced the city is suing three California companies that make and distribute so-called "Ghost Guns," maintaining that the DIY firearms have been responsible for nearly half of the firearms recovered in gun-related killings in the city last year.

The suit names Blackhawk Manufacturing Group, GS Performance, and MDX Corp. – none of which are based in San Francisco, but are responsible for producing a large number of the firearms found in the city and across California, Boudin said during a news conference, as reported by the Associated Press.

"Guns are flooding our streets. Enough is enough," Boudin said. "It is not enough to wait until after someone has been shot and killed by a firearm. We must get to the root of the problem."

Defection for a Bigger Problem

Boudin's lawsuits were filed as he has faced criticism for his response to rising crime rates in San Francisco, and has cast blame on the guns—not criminals—for the city's woes.

"They are three separate manufacturers that are flooding our streets with illegal firearms, with firearms that we know are being used to harm, to maim, and to kill," added Boudin. "They're harming our communities. They're taking innocent lives. They're putting law enforcement officers at risk. And it's an epidemic that we know is disproportionately impacting communities of color."

The District Attourney (DA) has also called in support from gun control groups, most notably the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, to sue the three firearms manufacturers.

"They've made it possible for anyone in the state to buy all the parts needed to build an untraceable firearm, no questions asked, and get it shipped in a convenient package with tools and instructions, like a piece of IKEA furniture," Giffords Center lawyer Hannah Shearer told the California Globe.

The lawsuit calls for the companies to be barred from shipping their products in the Golden State, while it also seeks monetary penalties. 

Rising Problem?

There is no denying that there has been a rise in the home-made guns showing up on San Francisco's streets—and according to reports, police had seized 164 of the so-called "ghost guns" in 2020, a 2,600 percent increase from the six confiscated in 2016.

Boudin has also noted that sixty-five percent of all ghost guns seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) were in California—but it is unclear if all of those firearms were actually used in a crime.

The three companies named in the suit have said they are in full compliance with state and federal law. Moreover, the California Globe also reported that many anti-crime advocates have claimed that Boudin is simply trying to deflect blame with the lawsuit.

"You know who San Franciscans blame for the rise in crime? Boudin," neighborhood crime watch coordinator Theresa Ali told the Globe earlier this month.

"Everyone tries to paint San Francisco as just being all for these left causes, but it isn't always the case," added Ali. "I've marched with Black Lives Matter and protested against Trump. I thought he was a fascist. So it should be telling that a lot of people like me are not blaming these gun makers who are following the rules. We're against Boudin. A lot of us are against Boudin."

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

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

US Navy, World

Navies that skimp on the basics in peacetime seldom triumph in wartime.

Here's What You Need to Remember: If the U.S. Navy projects a slovenly appearance while, say, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy shows up in a foreign harbor looking spick-and-span, guess who seems like the trustworthy friend and fearsome foe? Advantage: China. Diplomatic influence goes to mariners mindful of the fundamentals.

The U.S. Navy has a diplomatic problem. It’s a problem that stems from the most mundane of failings: neglect of vessels’ outward appearance. The amphibious assault ships USS Boxer and Fort McHenry put into the seaport of Kiel, Germany not long ago in a disreputable state. Rust streaked their sides for all to see. The destroyer USS Gravely, one of America’s frontline Aegis surface combatants, operated alongside allied ships in a likewise parlous condition.

U.S. Marines have a slogan: no better friend, no worse enemy. Slovenly appearances imply to influential audiences that the U.S. Navy is neither a friend worth courting nor a foe worth fearing. After all, navies that skimp on the basics in peacetime seldom triumph in wartime.

How much effort should go into keeping up appearances is a running debate for seafarers everywhere. Sailors hate scraping and painting. It feels like drudgery visited on them by officers bent on currying favor with higher-ups who visit the ship. Cynics suspect their superiors of trying to win promotions, plum job assignments, or medals from visitors favorably impressed by the look of the command. They mutter darkly, channeling Murphy’s Laws of Combat, that no combat-ready unit has ever passed a peacetime inspection.

Such wisecracks betray a conviction that there’s a zero-sum contest between keeping a vessel looking sharp and practicing seamanship, tactics, and kindred technical endeavors that are crucial to routine operations and battle effectiveness. In other words, every minute spent burnishing appearances is a minute not spent on what truly matters.

And for sure, it is possible to take the pursuit of spit-and-polish to excess. Just about any virtue degenerates into vice beyond a certain threshold. Bear in mind, though, that it is human nature to rally to a likely winner while spurning a likely loser. How do people distinguish between the two in peacetime? Combat is the arbiter between superiority and inferiority, yet no missiles or gunfire fly around in peacetime—supplying unequivocal proof of who outmatches whom.

That leaves appearances. Naval forces strive to impress audiences domestic and foreign, friendly, hostile, or indifferent. These observers have few indicators apart from a ship’s appearance to judge its crew’s seamanship, technical acumen, and battle proficiency. So scraping and painting is about more than routine upkeep, or maintenance budgets. The look of a ship has strategic if not political import. It is critical to the war of perceptions.

But outward appearances matter even more than it might seem. While holding forth on the dynamics of peacetime naval diplomacy, strategist Edward Luttwak maintains that whoever most observers believe would have prevailed in a wartime trial of arms tends to prevail in a peacetime showdown. Naval practitioners could render an informed judgment about each contender’s prospects in action. Spit-and-polish might be a secondary concern for them.

Most beholders, however, are not specialists in naval affairs. Yet their opinions count all the same. A tidy, rust-free appearance suggests to landlubbers that the crew knows and cares about its business. If a warship looks like a rusty old hulk, contrariwise, it’s reasonable for onlookers to conjecture that its internals—its propulsion plant, sensors, and armament—may likewise be objects of neglect. Its image for professionalism and battle competence suffers.

If the U.S. Navy projects a slovenly appearance while, say, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy shows up in a foreign harbor looking spick-and-span, guess who seems like the trustworthy friend and fearsome foe? Advantage: China. Diplomatic influence goes to mariners mindful of the fundamentals.

Nor, it bears saying, are the great unwashed altogether wrong to judge a fleet by its look. Corrosion is an antagonist that can be managed and subdued but never finally defeated. Journalist Jonathan Waldman reviews engineers’ perennial struggle against it in his book Rust, aptly subtitling it The Longest War. It nearly brought down the Statue of Liberty during the 1980s. Manufacturers make extravagant efforts to tame it when, say, canning soda. And it afflicts ships ceaselessly. After all, a hull is a ferrous metallic box floating in seawater. Put iron in contact with saltwater and corrosion soon follows unless sailors stay constantly on the attack.

One imagines Bradley Fiske would nod knowingly at the U.S. Navy’s diplomatic plight. A century ago Admiral Fiske wrote a treatise portraying The Navy as a Fighting Machine. Any piece of hardware, from a humble water pump or electrical generator to a stately fighting ship, has certain maximum performance characteristics. However, it may underperform its design parameters because of the human factor. “When thinking or speaking of the power of any instrument,” he writes, “we mean the power of which it is capable; that is, the result which it can produce, if used with 100 per cent of skill.”

Yet few human beings achieve perfection. Deficits in operator training or experience handicap equipment performance. Technicians may be overworked or apathetic. In any of these cases, materiel will produce only a fraction of its design output. Human frailty degrades combat excellence.

Luttwak notes that weapon systems are “black boxes” to outsiders until used in action. With scant direct evidence of which naval force boasts the best black boxes—with no verdict of arms that yields a definite result—friends and allies, prospective antagonists, and domestic constituents will render a verdict based on the evidence of their eyes. Rust and slipshod housekeeping are telltale indicators that something deeper is amiss.

The balance of appearances, then, could favor even a lesser but spiffy-looking competitor. So let’s get the U.S. Navy fleet looking shipshape again—and restore our standing in the eyes of friend, foe, and bystander alike. The mundane is important.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and author of the forthcoming Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeaered in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Vietnam War, Asia

Only six of the eighteen CIA and Air Force personnel manning the remote outpost escaped with their lives in an incident that would remain veiled in secrecy for three decades.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Preserving the memory of shadowy episodes like the battle of Lima 85 may not heal the wounds of the past, but it can help bring about an honest reckoning of the mistakes that were made and inspire reflection as to how to avoid repeating them in the future.

Fifty years ago on March 12, 1968, a top-secret U.S. base on a mountain top in Laos was overrun by an elite force of Vietnamese commandos. Only six of the eighteen CIA and Air Force personnel manning the remote outpost escaped with their lives in an incident that would remain veiled in secrecy for three decades.

This was because the U.S. military was legally prohibited from operating in Laos. The southeast Asian nation had been wracked by a civil war pitting right-wing royalists against Pathet Lao communists—the latter backed by North Vietnam, which used Laotian territory to clandestinely funnel troops into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail. However, in 1962 Washington, Hanoi and Laotian factions all signed a peace treaty in which the foreign powers agreed to withdraw their forces from the country.

However, North Vietnam only withdrew a minority of its forces, and the United States continued transferring extensive military aid to the royalist and instead began a secret but large-scale aerial bombing campaign in the kingdom known as Operation Barrel Roll. Though warplanes based in Vietnam and Thailand flew missions into Laos, CIA-run mercenary contractors and ‘airlines’ such as Air America flew transport and observation aircraft from Laotian bases.

CIA personnel also recruited local Hmong, an ethnic minority present in several southeast Asian states, to fight a guerilla war against the Pathet Lao. It was with this purpose in mind that CIA personnel first established a base atop the steep cliff of Phou Pha Thi mountain, a sacred place in the Hmong’s animist faith which happened to be strategically located near the border with North Vietnam.

This base was one of many ‘Lima Sites’ in Laos intended to facilitate aerial supply of U.S.-allied forces. The main facility was at the peak of the 5,600-foot high mountain surrounded by steep cliffs; you can see the base’s layout in this photo. A path wound downslope to a short 700-meter long airstrip at the base of the mountain was used for resupply and staff rotations, delivered in covert weekly flights by CH-3 helicopters of the 20th U.S. Air Force helicopter squadron.

In the summer of 1966, the U.S. Air Force decided to adapt the base with a new purpose—to serve as radar-navigation system, a or TACAN, by installing a power generator and first a transponder. In the era predating GPS, TACAN sites helped warplanes find their targets, especially, while flying under low visibility conditions or at night. (The first radio navigation system, known as Knickebein, was developed by Nazi Germany, to enable more precise night bombing of England.) In 1967, this was further upgraded to a TSQ-81 antenna and remote bombing system that allowed the base to remotely control U.S. bombers.

Hanoi was only 135 miles northeast of Lima 85, so the clandestine base was able to direct very precise coordinates for U.S. aircraft bombarding the North Vietnamese capital. Because those strikes could involve anything from F-105 fighter bombers to dozens of huge B-52 bombers, this made the base a deadly force multiplier. In just six months, Lima 85 directed between 25 and 55 percent of the air strikes pounding North Vietnamese and Laotian targets.

Because Laotian Prince Souvanna refused to accept U.S. military personnel in Laos, U.S. Air Force personnel deployed to Lima 85 had to sign papers temporarily discharging them from the U.S. military before deploying to Lima, a farcical process known as ‘sheep dipping.’ These technicians were supposed to go unarmed, though they did eventually end up acquiring a handful of small arms. Instead, the base’s security was supposed to be assured by a battalion each of Hmong militia—advised by CIA agents—and Thai Border Patrol policemen deployed around the base of the mountain.

However, Lima 85 may have been concealed from the U.S. public, but it’s presence and purpose were not a secret to the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Scouts probed the base’s defenses in December 1967, and on January 12, 1968 a flight of four An-2 biplane transports attacked Lima 85 using underwing 57mm rockets, and 120mm mortar shells dropped out the side doors, killing four Hmong. An Air America UH-1 helicopter was scrambled to intercept the slow transports shot down one of the transports using AK-47 fired out the side—one of very few helicopter-on-airplane kills on record. Another An-2 crashed, either due to ground fire or a failed evasive maneuver.

The base was subsequently hit by a mortar barrage on January 30, then on February 18 Hmong militia ambushed and killed a team of NVA artillery observers near the mountain and recovered plans for a coordinated bombardment of the facility. American military leaders knew the isolated base was surrounded by stronger enemy forces and likely to come under attack, but the base’s TACAN support was considered so valuable that Amb. William Sullivan resisted evacuating the site. Unable to deploy significant defenses, the base’s technicians instead began dispatching hundreds of airstrikes against nearby communist forces to secure their position.

Elite North Vietnamese commandos from the 41st Special Forces battalion had already scaled the seemingly impassible cliffs on Phou Pha Thi’s northside without being detected on January 22 and reconnoitered the most feasible infiltration routes. Early that March, a thirty-three man platoon under the command of Lt. Truong Muoc assembled near the mountain, where they were reinforced by a nine-man sapper squad. The commandos were equipped with AK-47s, SKS carbines, explosives, hand grenades and three rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

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At 6PM on March 11 an artillery bombardment gave cover for Truong’s pathfinders to clear out mines and secure the infiltration paths to Lima 85. A few hours later, regular troops of the 766th Regiment of the NVA and a Pathet Lao battalions launched an attack that pinned down the Hmong troops in the valley around the mountain. Finally around 9 PM, Truong’s men began scaling up the cliff, the operators splitting into five “cells” to launch a multiprong attack. Cells One and two would concentrate on the command post, cells three and four would seize the TACAN equipment and airstrip respectively, and the fifth cell would remain in reserve.

The base personnel reported the artillery bombardment, but Ambassador Sullivan decided not to order an evacuation unless the attack proved to be overwhelming. Only by 8 AM the following morning did he dispatch helicopters and air support to cover the personnel’s escape.

This was far too late. The Truong’s infiltrators were in position by 3 AM that morning and knocked out Hmong guard posts and the base’s TSQ-81 radar and power generator using rocket-propelled grenades. When base commander Maj. Clarence Barton and several Air Force technicians rushed out to assess the situation, they were gunned down by the commandos. By 4 AM, the first three cells had captured all of their objectives. Some were captured and then flung over the cliff on Truong’s orders. Only cell 4 was forced to disengage from its objective, unable to dislodge a superior Hmong force of two infantry platoons and a mortar squad deployed around the airstrip.

Surviving U.S. personnel had fled to a ledge on the side of the cliff, where they were trapped as grenades and small arms fire rained down upon them. Firing back with their assault rifles, they attempted to call down an airstrike nearly on top of their position.

Finally at dawn, Air America helicopters covered by A-1 Skyraider attack planes swooped down upon the mountain. Hmong troops, led by two CIA agents and supported by Skyraiders, engaged in a fierce firefight as they attempted to dislodge the NVA commandos from the TACAN site. Though North Vietnamese platoon held its ground, the fracas provided a distraction for five surviving Air Force technicians and two CIA agents to be extracted.

Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger, one of the airmen trapped on the cliff, refused to board a rescue chopper until he had loaded three of his injured comrades on the Huey’s rescue sling. As he was being lifted away, the Pennsylvanian was mortally wounded by a parting burst of assault rifle fire. Communist forces would retain control of Phou Pha Thai mountain and later repel a Hmong offensive to seize it back.

Muoc’s assault on Lima 85 had significantly weakened the U.S. air campaign over North Vietnam and Laos. According to Vietnamese accounts, he lost only one commando and killed at least forty-two Thai and Hmong troops as well as a dozen U.S. airmen. However, Truong would return home to a court-martial rather than a hero’s welcome; his superiors were outraged that he had destroyed the valuable TACAN equipment and killed the technicians instead of capturing them.

Ironically, both Washington and Hanoi collaborated in preserving the secrecy of their war in Laos. North Vietnam needed to maintain and secure the Ho Chi Minh trail’s route through Laos, while the U.S. military was compelled to try to stop them there. That both were violating a treaty they had signed was merely something that had to be concealed from the public.

In a tragic postscript, Etchberger would be posthumously nominated for the Medal of Honor, but would have the request denied by the Air Force due to the need to maintain the secrecy of the U.S. air war in Laos, which would actually escalate under the Nixon administration and be exposed with the release of the Pentagon Papers. The United States dropped one ton of bombs for every person living in Laos, delaying but not preventing, the eventual communist victory in 1975.

Only thirty years later did the United States officially acknowledge the battle at the clandestine site. Etchberger would finally be awarded the Medal of Honor in a ceremony on September 1, 2010. Earlier in the 2000s, Vietnamese veterans of the battle helped U.S. military personnel locate the remains of airmen that had been cast over the side of the cliff, and later those of Major Barton as well.

Preserving the memory of shadowy episodes like the battle of Lima 85 may not heal the wounds of the past, but it can help bring about an honest reckoning of the mistakes that were made and inspire reflection as to how to avoid repeating them in the future.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

S-3 Viking, Americas

The long-legged jets proved extremely useful in a very wide variety of roles, whether as an electronic spy, submarine hunter, aerial tanker, cargo plane or even an attack jet.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Viking provided valuable service to the U.S. Navy by virtue of its very long range and adaptability to a wide variety of roles. It could likely have gone on doing so for many more years if newer, more expensive and more limited alternatives had not displaced it.

Eleven years ago the U.S. Navy retired:

A) Its only dedicated carrier-based tanker;

B) its last dedicated carrier-based antisubmarine airplane;

C) a carrier-based plane with more than twice the range of its current jets;

D) all of the above.

With a maximum speed of only five hundred miles per hour—many airliners fly faster—the S-3 Viking wasn’t about to be the subject of any movies starring Tom Cruise. However, the long-legged jets proved extremely useful in a very wide variety of roles, whether as an electronic spy, submarine hunter, aerial tanker, cargo plane or even an attack jet. And many of those roles have not been satisfactorily replaced since.

The S-3 Viking was first conceived in 1960s to serve as a next-generation submarine hunter. In the event of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. Navy’s most important mission would have been combating the Soviet Union’s large submarine fleet. If the war went nuclear, Soviet ballistic-missile submarines could have wreaked terrible devastation on U.S. cities. And if the conflict remained conventional, then attack submarines would have done their best to sink convoys of American troop ships reinforcing NATO forces in Europe.

During World War II, carrier-based aircraft such as the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber played a major role in sinking Axis submarines. However, the diesel-electric submarines of that era needed to surface frequently to recharge their batteries, exposing themselves to air attack. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had begun to deploy its first nuclear submarines, which could remain submerged for weeks, and later months, at a time, and the current S-2 submarine hunters were no adequate for chasing them down.

Lockheed partnered with LTV—which had experience developing the carrier-based A-7 and F-8 jets—in producing a new antisubmarine plane with a sophisticated new design. The resulting twin turbofan jet seated a crew of four in a two-by-two configuration, including a pilot and copilot, a sensor operator and tactical coordinator. The long-legged plane had a range of 2,300 miles and came with an aerial refueling probe that could extend that even further—leading on one occasion to an S-3 flying thirteen hours from a carrier in the Mediterranean to Washington, DC, carrying a captured terrorist hijacker.

The plane’s twin TF-34-400 turbofans—an engine related to that on the A-10 attack plane—were infamous for their peculiar vacuum-cleaner-like whine, leading to the plane’s nickname of "Hoover."

The Viking’s crew had access to a diverse array of sensors, starting with a APS-116 sea-search radar that could switch between a high-resolution mode for detecting submarine periscopes and a long-range mode that could extend up to 150 miles. A meters-long Magnetic Anomaly Detector boom could extend from the tail to scan the water for the metal in submarine hulls. The Viking also carried up to sixty sonar buoys to aid in tracking submarines, an infrared sensor and an ALR-47 ESM sensor that could track electromagnetic emitters. Most impressively, the Viking was one of the first U.S. planes to implement a degree of data fusion between the various sensors.

The Viking’s internal weapons bay and external wing pylons could carry a diverse array of weapons including homing torpedoes, CAPTOR antiship mines, Harpoon antiship missiles, unguided bombs, rocket pods and even nuclear gravity bombs.

The S-3A entered operational service in 1974 with VS-41, and soon each carrier had its own squadron of the antisubmarine planes. Though the U.S. Navy fortunately did not engage in any actual antisubmarine warfare in the subsequent decades, the records of S-3 squadrons suggest they might have proved pretty effective at their job. For example, in 1984 a Viking was the first NATO platform to detect a new class of Russian submarines, and in 1986, S-3s of VS-28 flying from the USS Independence detected submarines from eight different countries while on a cruise in the Mediterranean. Around that time the Navy began upgrading over a hundred Vikings to the S-3B model, which came with new APS-137 synthetic aperture radars with high enough resolution to identify ships by class.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy began assigning additional roles to the S-3 Viking. For example, taking advantage of the type’s large hull, six Vikings were modified into US-3A cargo planes modified to serve as special high-priority Carrier On-Deck Delivery planes, capable of carrying six passengers and up to four thousand pounds of cargo.

The Viking also took on a new role as an electronic spy, particularly with the sixteen modified ES-3 Sea Shadow aircraft that entered service in 1993. These signals-intelligence aircraft were capable of spying on enemy communications and determining the position of hostile transmitters so that friendly forces could target them. The Sea Shadows had a brief but eventful operational career, helping identify targets during the air wars over former Yugoslavia and enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq before being retired from service in 1998 in favor of a replacement program that never materialized. There were also a half-dozen unique variants of the Viking, including “Aladdin” and “Beartrap” aircraft, engaged in intelligence missions that remain classified to this day.

Meanwhile, one of the Viking’s most important roles was serving as an aerial refueling tanker. After the Navy retired its KA-6 Intruder refueling planes in the mid-nineties, the S-3 remained the only carrier-based tanker plane available until the Navy began introducing air-refueling-capable Super Hornet fighters in 2002. Particularly during the U.S. intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the Viking flew countless refueling sorties to give short-ranged fighters aboard U.S. carriers the reach to participate in the conflict.

The poky S-3 even saw action in the antiship and air-to-ground role, starting with the destruction of an Iraqi Silkworm antiship missile during the 1991 Gulf War using AGM-84 SLAM missiles. Vikings also sank several Iraqi patrol boats and destroyed antiaircraft guns and coastal radars during the conflict. More than a decade later, an S-3 crippled Saddam Hussein’s 350-foot personal yacht Al Mansur in its harbor at Basra using an infrared guided Maverick missile. The boat was, however, subsequently hit by Tomcat fighters.

In fact, the airplane would soon play a pivotal role in the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, when an S-3A was filmed to great fanfare landing President George W. Bush aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Though the carrier was only thirty miles away from shore, well within range of a helicopter delivery, the Viking was chosen for its dramatic appeal.

However, the Navy was intent on phasing the Viking out, skeptical that it was worth the effort to continually upgrade the aircraft’s systems. The last operational Vikings were actually flying out of Al Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2008, where they were using LANTIRN infrared targeting and navigation pods to identify ambushes and roadside mines in advance of friendly convoys, proving the type’s versatility until the very end.

The Navy finally retired its last S-3 squadron in January 2009, though three aircraft continued to serve on in the experimental VX-30 unit until 2016. Pilots in the unit remarked the onboard sensors remained so effective that they were detecting “schools of dolphins and patches of seaweed.” The retired airframes now lie in storage in the “Boneyard” facility in Arizona. An inspection revealed the airframes had only flown around ten thousand hours out of a potential twenty-three-thousand-hour service life. The last remaining S-3 in service is an experimental research plane flown by NASA.

This led Lockheed to propose refitting the S-3s to serve as replacements for the reliable C-2 Greyhound cargo plane the Navy was retiring from the Carrier Onboard Delivery role. However, in 2015 the Navy chose to instead purchase the tilt-rotor CMV-22B Osprey instead. The Osprey has much shorter range than either the Greyhound or the proposed S-3 variant, is slower and more expensive to operate per flight hour, and cannot fly high or in adverse weather conditions due to its unpressurized crew compartment. But using the Osprey does allow the Navy to directly resupply non-carrier-based ships directly, rather than having to land cargo on the carrier by plane and then redistribute to other ships via helicopter.

For several years, it also appeared likely that South Korea might purchase up to thirty-six refurbished S-3s to assist in its efforts to hunt down North Korea’s large submarine force, which includes numerous minisubmarines that have on more than one occasion caused considerable havoc. However, in March 2017 Aviation Weekly reported that Seoul had passed over the Viking and is now interested in the much larger P-8 Poseidon maritime-patrol plane.

The Navy is unlikely to return to the Viking, despite its demonstrated flexibility. This is out of a defensible preference for operating fewer different types of aircraft to maximize efficiency in training, maintenance and spare parts. However, the Viking’s retirements reinforces the Navy’s continued reliance on short-range carrier-based aircraft, which is becoming an increasing liability as more capable shore-based missiles threaten carriers at or beyond the maximum combat radius of their onboard aircraft.

Take, for example, the carrier air wing’s reliance on Super Hornet fighters to serve as air-refueling tankers. While it is to the Super Hornets credit that it can perform this role, it is hardly an optimal use of the flight-hours of a high-performance fighter plane. Furthermore, a Super Hornet tanker cannot carry as much fuel as a dedicated tanker.

In fact, missile-equipped Vikings would have slightly less than twice the combat radius of a Super Hornet equipped with extra fuel tanks. Of course, the Viking is not an airplane that wants to get to close to well-defended airspace, but it might still offer carrier air wings a useful capability for delivering stand-off attacks at much greater range.

Finally, there is the matter of the antisubmarine mission, which has no fixed-wing replacement onboard American carriers. While Navy SH-60 Seahawk helicopters provide antisubmarine protection, they can only operate over fairly short distances at low speeds, suitable for close protection rather than large area patrols. Long-distance patrol duties are now confined to large P-3 and P-8 maritime patrol planes, which operate from bases on land. This means the carriers can only make limited contributions to the antisubmarine mission, even though we live in a time when cheap and effective submarines are proliferating to an unprecedented degree in the Pacific, and submarines have repeatedly succeeded in slipping through defenses to sink carriers in naval exercises.

The Viking provided valuable service to the U.S. Navy by virtue of its very long range and adaptability to a wide variety of roles. It could likely have gone on doing so for many more years if newer, more expensive and more limited alternatives had not displaced it.

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

This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Wikipedia.

Mark Episkopos

Pandemic, Eurasia

The Delta variant is roiling Moscow with a sudden surge in coronavirus infections and fatalities, but life in Russia’s capital is proceeding largely as normal—for now.

As Russia struggles to maintain an air of normalcy over one year into the global pandemic, the threat of a new coronavirus wave looms over the country’s metropolitan centers.  

Reuters’ coronavirus tracker estimates that just under 80,000,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines were administered in Russia. Assuming every person needs two doses, this means that no more than 30 percent of the population is vaccinated according to the latest publicly available data. There have been 6.75 million recorded coronavirus cases in Russia, with an associated death toll of around 180,000.  

Russia’s Defense Ministry reported earlier this week that the country’s lowest coronavirus mortality rate is in the Armed Forces, citing the military’s sophisticated network of telemedicine consulting and sixteen newly created mobile technical units. For the military, as well as large swathes of Russia’s public service and around 60 percent of Moscow’s service sector, vaccination is mandatory. But there is research to suggest that vaccine hesitancy remains high among the general population despite the Kremlin’s ongoing public relations campaign to encourage nationwide mass vaccinations. According to survey data provided by the Levada Center, Russia’s vaccine hesitancy rates are among the highest in the world. Among those who say they are not ready to get vaccinated, a plurality are concerned with potential side effects and as many as 41 percent say that they will not get vaccinated under any circumstances. From recipients using prosthetic arms to dodge the jab to reports of a sprawling black market for forged vaccination certificates, Russian vaccine detractors are employing a wide-ranging set of countermeasures to bypass vaccination requirements. Russian President Vladimir Putin has regularly encouraged all Russians to get the shot but does not support a compulsory national vaccination mandate, saying earlier this summer that such a measure would be “counterproductive.”  

The Delta variant is roiling Moscow with a sudden surge in coronavirus infections and fatalities, but life in Russia’s capital is proceeding largely as normal—for now.  Sweeping mask and glove mandates are in place for most venues of public life in Moscow, including all stores, government buildings, corporate offices, the metro system, and more. These measures are religiously observed by public and private workers for fear of direct and enforceable professional repercussions. By the same token, Moscow’s coronavirus restrictions are largely disregarded by shop patrons, metro commuters, and others on the receiving end of services.  

Russian Health experts have warned that Moscow and other urban centers could be on the cusp of a new spike in coronavirus cases, spurred by the start of a fresh school semester and the return of summer vacationers back to the country’s large cities. Russian authorities have estimated that, if the national vaccination rate does not pick up significantly, healthcare outlays on coronavirus patients can reach 111.4 billion rubles, or upwards of 1.5 billion dollars, in the second half of 2021.  

There is mounting speculation that the ruling United Russia party may reintroduce much harsher coronavirus restrictions in Moscow, including a return to a QR code system for access to restaurants, most shops, and the metro system, shortly following its likely victory in the September 2021 Russian legislative election. 

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

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

Great Power Competition, Indo-Pacific

The QUAD is no military alliance like NATO. But to effectively curb China, its members should look to it for military strategy.

Here's what to remember: QUAD members mainly need to be precise when explaining their purposes and how they intend to put power to work attaining them. That means being circumspect about the terms they use to describe China policy. But they should own it on the military side. 

China grumps that the Quad, a league of like-minded Indo-Pacific democracies, is an “Asian NATO” or “mini-NATO” hellbent on “containing” China.

If only. 

Now, Beijing is not entirely wrong to liken the Quad to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Quad governments—representing India, Australia, Japan, and the United States—sometimes do things reminiscent of the Atlantic alliance. For instance, the four Quad navies just finished up with this year’s Malabar exercise in the Arabian Sea, showing they can work together and push back as China tries to make itself a serious if not dominant player in the Indian Ocean region. NATO navies commonly maneuver together, casting a counterweight to Russian ambitions in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas. 

But one of these things is not like the other. In reality, the Quad is a loose consortium, not a standing alliance anchored by a collective defense treaty. The arrangement bears more resemblance to the pre-World War I “entente cordiale” than to NATO. In April 1904 the French and British governments signed a series of agreements settling long-standing colonial quarrels. Setting aside centuries of on-again-off-again enmity, the two democracies drew together against the common danger manifest in autocratic Germany.

Kaiser Wilhelm II and his lieutenants repeatedly sought to break the entente in ensuing years, yet their bellicose diplomatic methods only cemented it. French ally Russia ultimately joined in, and the “Triple Entente” was on. As a result, a coalition—not a formal alliance—squared off against imperial Germany and its allies in 1914. Pre-war European alliance politics should come as cold comfort to Beijing. It shows that an overbearing power can prompt its opponents to make a common cause even when no mutual defense accord binds them to do so. 

It also shows they can win. 

NATO itself is something of an anomaly, as indeed is the array of alliances the United States has headed since 1945. Namely, the protracted strategic competition known as the Cold War lurched into being during the immediate aftermath of a system-shattering global war. The victorious World War II allies fell out against one another in the months after peace came. The Iron Curtain descended across Europe while America sought to rally the noncommunist world to oppose Soviet expansionism.

The anomaly is this. U.S. forces were already on the ground in war-stricken parts of the world, helping enforce the peace and reconstruct devastated countries. Allies did not invite America to construct and garrison bases on their soil during peacetime. That would have been a tough sell with host governments and peoples. U.S. forces came as conquerors; they stayed to hedge against fresh aggression. Facts on the ground simplified the challenge of forging Cold War alliances. 

In a real sense, then, U.S. containment strategy was an artifact of World War II. 

Lord “Pug” Ismay, the first secretary-general of NATO, encapsulated the alliance’s rationale breezily but accurately: its reason for being was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. Keep being the keyword. The Americans were already in; they did not have to be invited in. That made it politically easier for allied governments to ask them to stay, helping keep the Soviets behind the Iron Curtain and hold down new militarism in Germany. 

The American presence was the status quo—not some radical break from the status quo. And it’s easier to defend an established status quo than to disturb one. 

Similar logic held in Asia, where the defeat of Japan splintered the Japanese Empire into its constituent parts, many—including Japan itself—under direct U.S. military occupation. The U.S.-Japan security alliance was a kind of bilateral NATO meant to keep the Russians and Chinese out, the Americans in, and the Japanese down. South Koreans didn’t need to be kept down. After being ravaged by World War II and the Korean War, though, they consented to a strong U.S. military presence to keep North Koreans and their communist backers out and Americans in. 

Lord Ismay’s quip furnishes a powerful instrument for evaluating U.S.-led alliances past, present, and future. That instrument indicates that the Quad stands apart from long-standing alliances. The United States is not an occupying power in Quad members. Its presence in Japan long ago evolved into a mutual arrangement. Indeed, the U.S.-Japanese duo is more an alliance of equals by the day. 

Australia is arguably America’s closest friend on the planet yet remains reluctant to permit a standing presence that might entangle Canberra in adventures it prefers to avoid. The Australian government does allow U.S. Marine contingents to deploy to the northern harbor of Darwin on a rotating basis. Still, the situation bears scant resemblance to Europe or East Asia during the early Cold War. 

And India? Fuggedaboutit. New Delhi pioneered nonalignment during the Cold War. It had an occasionally fraught relationship with the United States (and a cozy one with the Soviet Union) whose legacy the partners are only now transcending. And a tradition of autonomy is etched on Indian strategic culture. India regards itself as a benign hegemon over the Indian Ocean region. No hegemon readily submits to an alliance headed by outsiders, let alone allows outsiders to establish a standing military presence on its territory. Only under extreme duress would New Delhi break with strategic autonomy.

The Quad is no NATO. 

The Quad is an option. It lays the groundwork for multinational operations should Quad leaders choose to avail themselves of that option, while not committing them to collective ventures from which they choose to abstain. Exercises like Malabar acquaint the partners with one another’s hardware, procedures, tactics, and cultural quirks. They build “interoperability,” or even “interchangeability,” between particularly close partners. Capability accumulated during peacetime does not have to be invented on the fly during wartime. 

What is that option for? Here it’s worth parsing China’s “containment” metaphor. Containment, of course, is a Cold War term. According to George F. Kennan’s iconic diagnosis of the Soviet challenge and his prescribed remedy, resisting communist expansionism would deprive Marxism-Leninism of its motive force over time. If denied the ability to claim that communism stood at the vanguard of history and was sweeping the globe, Moscow and fraternal governments would mellow over time. They might fall. 

Containment was both a policy and a strategy. As a policy, it does not fit contemporary China. Apart from being a big, ambitious, often domineering power, China today is not the Soviet Union circa 1949 when the North Atlantic Treaty—the Atlantic alliance’s founding document—was signed. Beijing does not appear intent on subverting or overthrowing foreign governments and turning them communist. It is economically intertwined with the noncommunist world to a degree unimaginable for the Soviet Union. Policy vis-à-vis China is something different and merits a different title.

As a strategy—in particular a military and naval strategy—containment is a fitting metaphor. This is clearest in East Asia, where the U.S. armed forces are reconfiguring themselves to fight among the islands, denying China’s navy and air force control of sea and sky. This approach comes straight out of the Cold War playbook, from the days when Secretary of State Dean Acheson called for making the first island chain America’s “defensive perimeter of the Pacific.”

The approach applies in the Indian Ocean as well, albeit in a fashion that is more scattered and not so visually striking when plotted on the map. Curbing Beijing’s effort to gain military access to Indian Ocean seaports is itself a way to contain China’s martial reach—and one well worth pursuing. 

Quad members may shy away from the containment metaphor, and that is understandable. They mainly need to be precise when explaining their purposes and how they intend to put power to work attaining them. That means being circumspect about the terms they use to describe China policy. But they should own it on the military side. 

Let’s dust off the Cold War playbook—and be candid about it. Lord Ismay would smile. 

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. His books have been named to the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Indo-Pacific Command Professional Reading Lists. The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

China Missile, East Asia

One report stops short of espousing an Asian NATO by name, but invokes the basic concept underlying the Atlantic Alliance.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Allies and partners should devise strategies and operations that hold down the price of access for U.S. forces—and thus make it thinkable if not easy for an American president to order them into combat.

Last week the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Center (USSC) set policy circles aflutter when it issued a novella-length report that questions the staying power of U.S. military strategy in the Indo-Pacific theater while urging inhabitants of the region to take up their share of the defense burden vis-à-vis a domineering China. Read the whole thing.

In one sense the report presents little new information or insight. That the U.S. military has retooled itself for counterinsurgency warfare and must now reinvent itself again for great power strategic competition is old news. So is the notion that Washington suffers from strategic ADHD, taking on new commitments around the world willy-nilly while shedding few old ones to conserve finite resources and policy energy. Over the past decade-plus, it’s become plain that Communist China is a serious, strategically-minded maritime contender and has equipped itself with formidable shore-based weaponry to assail U.S. and allied bases in the region and supply firepower support to its increasingly impressive battle fleet. Beijing can now hope to fend off U.S. reinforcements from coming to the aid of regional allies, to slow them down, or to make the effort so expensive in terms of lives and hardware that no U.S. president would order the attempt. If it does any of these things it could spring a fait accompli on the region, accomplishing limited goals before powerful outsiders could intercede.

This is old—if still potent—wine in a new bottle.

And yet. The report is clearly written and forceful, no small virtues. It adds a welcome new voice to the chorus—and that voice booms out from the region rather than from such precincts as Washington, DC or Newport, RI. One hopes the leadership in Canberra listens up, and other Indo-Pacific governments wary of Chinese Communist Party pretensions should bend an ear as well. The USSC coauthors’ central message—that the United States can no longer provide for common security alone and must have help—is precisely correct. They stop short of espousing an Asian NATO by name, but they invoke the basic concept underlying the Atlantic Alliance, namely “collective defense.” Allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific must shoulder their part of the defense burden, just as Europeans helped stave off the Soviet menace.

For its part, Washington must stop trying to do it all alone—and afford allies and friends the deference their interests and contributions warrant. All parties to the common defense must readjust not just strategy, resources, and hardware but also their way of thinking about these matters. They must nurture a culture of collective defense.

Three points the report puts forward are worth exploring: culture, strategy and operations, and alliance building and maintenance. First, culture. Note the coauthors: “In an era of constrained budgets and multiplying geopolitical flashpoints, prioritizing great power competition with China means America’s armed forces must scale back other global responsibilities.” But culture is a stubborn thing—and the strategic culture in Washington lags behind disconcerting new realities. The report maintains that “political leaders and much of the foreign policy establishment remain wedded to a superpower mindset that regards America’s role in the world as defending an expansive liberal order.” Acting as the lone custodian of the world order, including freedom of the sea, sets the United States up for strategic overreach and failure. Something will give.

The classics of strategy instruct statesmen and military commanders to wind down commitments or theaters that have outlived their usefulness, that no longer command the same importance they once did, or that have come to consume resources needed for more pressing priorities. That’s easy to say. It’s a simple matter of toting up costs and benefits, estimating the opportunity costs of one commitment against another, applying resources to the most important priorities, and downgrading or jettisoning the rest. But breaking up is hard to do, even with an Afghanistan where eighteen years of combat and diplomacy have yet to yield a durable sovereign government. Why such obtuse stick-to-it-iveness? Because every foreign commitment attracts a constituency within the establishment, the think-tank sector, or academia. That constituency sees its chosen commitment as the top priority for Washington, bar none, and clamors tirelessly for policy attention and resources.

For bureaucratic institutions, the easiest path is to try to please everyone and do everything. Yet setting and enforcing priorities is what strategy is at its most fundamental. Political leaders must harden their hearts when deciding on policy and strategy. If the Indo-Pacific is now the most critical geopolitical theater, other worthwhile commitments may have to give way.

Second, strategy and operations. The Australian coauthors do not counsel despair. They deny that “America is becoming a paper tiger.” It still fields “the world’s largest and most sophisticated armed forces, and is likely to continue to supply the central elements of any military counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific.” Still, “the United States’ longstanding ability to uphold a favorable regional balance of power by itself faces mounting and ultimately insurmountable challenges.” Just so. But let’s not sell ourselves short, either as the U.S. armed forces or as part of alliances that have endured for seven decades. It may be the case that Fortress China now boasts the capacity to reach out and smite allied military bases, or even forces in the field. But let’s refuse to succumb to a reverse form of the fallacy of “scriptwriting.” We have options.

Scriptwriting in strategy reduces a living, thinking, impassioned foe to an inert, docile mass on which we work our will. Scriptwriters in Los Angeles or New York develop storylines that instruct the characters in a drama or sitcom what to do, and the actors do it. But in strategic competition or warfare, some of the “actors” in our script are under no obligation to play the part we set out for them. In fact, they have every incentive to go off-script and wreck our production so that they can fulfill goals diametrically opposed to our own. Now flip that logic around. Sure, Communist China may be able to pound our legacy infrastructure or forces. But the United States and its allies aren’t lifeless masses. We too have ingenuity and the desire to prevail. Let’s refuse to follow Beijing’s script—and figure out how to ruin its production.

How do multinational and joint forces go off China’s script? The U.S. Studies Center insists that girding for strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific “will not be easy or cheap. On the contrary, it will require major changes to the U.S. military’s force structure, regional posture and concepts of operations, only some of which are currently in train.” But dodging the brunt of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategy while giving PLA commanders strategic headaches may be less burdensome than all that. Read the Commandant’s Planning Guidance issued by the new U.S. Marine Corps leadership last month. Geography favors the allies. They can deploy low-cost measures along the first island chain, throwing up a barricade to Chinese maritime movement between the China seas, the Western Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. Small bodies of ground troops could fan out along the island chain, using volleys of anti-ship missiles to halt surface traffic. Sea mines, diesel submarines, and surface patrol craft could lend their firepower to the mix. Etc.

There’s no free lunch in strategy, but such measures could levy some serious military, economic, and diplomatic pain at manageable cost to the allies. One leading strategy professor in China pronounces challenging such a strategy a “suicide mission” for the PLA. If that reflects how Chinese Communist magnates reckon matters, then the prospects for deterrence—and thus for peacetime strategic success—may be brighter and more affordable than the Australian team lets on. Offbeat approaches to force design, operations, and strategy merit debating in allied circles.

And third, alliance building and maintenance. There are unmistakable signs that what the strategic canon calls a “community of interest” is gelling around the idea of counterbalancing Chinese overreach. What the U.S. Studies Center depicts as a brave new world in the Indo-Pacific is in many ways a return to geopolitical business as usual. During the Cold War, few deluded themselves that the United States could deter or defeat the Soviet empire all by itself. Allies chipped in niche capabilities without which the U.S. armed forces would have found it hard to execute their strategy. For instance, I was grateful to NATO navies for supplying minesweepers in the Persian Gulf back in 1991. Approaching the Kuwaiti coast would have been perilous in the extreme without Europeans running interference for us. Mine warfare is a traditional zone of neglect for the U.S. Navy—not so for the allies. Same goes for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, whose diesel submarines prowled along the first island chain throughout the Cold War to cramp communist maritime movement. Another niche but invaluable capability.

Such examples are legion. It’s good to see allies take ownership of their own security, and of freedom of the sea. The French and British governments have bruited about a return to Asia, possibly including naval bases in the South China Sea where aircraft-carrier groups can tarry. Here’s how a grand bargain could work should the USSC team get its way. A Golden Rule governs alliances and ententes of all types: the ally who furnishes the gold makes the rules. If Washington could provide for the common defense all by itself, it would have little reason to consult with allies or heed their advice. It would remain the sole agenda-setter. But if others contribute significant resources of their own, Washington must consult with them and consider—and perhaps embrace—their advice. U.S. leaders often deferred to allies during the Cold War, allowing them a say in policy and strategy. Consensus prevailed for the most part, even when decisions ran afoul of American preferences. And U.S. alliances proved resilient for the most part.

So America needs to rediscover the habit of strategic humility after being top dog for a generation. Here’s what Indo-Pacific allies need to do: help us help you. Even if island-chain defense works out, U.S. reinforcements must gain access to the Western Pacific to prevail in wartime. PLA commanders have predicated their access-denial strategy on disheartening their U.S. counterparts or convincing the U.S. administration the military effort cannot succeed at a cost the country is prepared to pay. Allies and partners should devise strategies and operations that hold down the price of access for U.S. forces—and thus make it thinkable if not easy for an American president to order them into combat.

Let’s march jointly in the Indo-Pacific.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. 

This piece was originally featured in 2019 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Image: Reuters