Diplomacy & Crisis News

Sebastien Roblin

World War II History, Europe

It is a delicate balancing act to have air support close enough to be helpful in a battle and not turn those warplanes towards our own troops. 

Key point: Weather delays and unclear communication led to disastrous results. 

Allied troops spent six bloody weeks stuck in dense hedgerows of Normandy after the D-Day landings, fighting the German Wehrmacht one cow pasture at a time. U.S. Army general Omar Bradley cooked up a plan to break through the German defenses by calling upon the heavy four-engine bombers of the 8th Air Force.

What followed was one of the worst friendly-fire incidents in the history of the U.S. Army — and one of its greatest military victories.

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

The D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 in Normandy are famous for being one of the costliest military operations in American history. What’s less appreciated is that the following two months of combat in the farmlands of Normandy were just as nightmarish.

The problem was the terrain. Farmers in Normandy divided up their pastures with tall hedgerows called bocage that were impassible to most vehicles. Even though the Allies possessed tremendous numerical superiority and greater mobility due to their vast motor pool, the hedgerows forced them to fight in one short-range ambush after another through predictable corridors — a tremendously advantageous situation for the defending German army.

Deadly MG.42 machinegun nests and portable Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons defended each field, backed up by pre-registered mortar and artillery bombardments.

Allied tanks attempting to advance up the narrow country lanes had to contend with well-concealed anti-tanks guns and German armor, including Tiger and Panther tanks with frontal armor nearly impenetrable to most Allied tank guns.

U.S. troops sustained some of the heaviest casualties in the war in Normandy, advancing just a few hundred meters a day. Some U.S. divisions took greater than 100-percent casualties — but they avoided bleeding out through a steady flow of inexperienced replacements.

The Americans nonetheless managed to slowly creep forward over the course of six weeks at tremendous cost — 39,000 killed or wounded by the end of June alone.

The Allies’ greatest advantage was air superiority — swarms of American fighter-bombers roamed over Normandy, largely unopposed by German fighters, devastating German units attempting to move in daylight. American troops also called on them to take out enemy strongpoints and tanks — but often battles in the bocage were fought at such short ranges that it was unsafe to call in air support.

In an effort to break through the bocage, the British forces on the eastern flank of the Allied beachhead under the leadership of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery on July 18 launched a massive tank assault toward the city of Caen called Operation Goodwood.

Preceded by carpet bombing that leveled much of the city — killing around 3,000 civilians and largely missing German front-line units — the British tanks surged forward without infantry support and ran straight into anti-tank guns and panzers rushed in as reinforcements, including massive King Tiger tanks.

Accompanied by too little infantry to ferret out the ambushes, the British lost no fewer than 300 tanks in three days and Goodwood ground to a halt. Supporting attacks by Canadian troops met a similar fate.

Supreme Allied commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious with Montgomery, who maintained in his defense that the real goal of Goodwood had been to draw away the German panzer divisions in reserve, allowing the Americans to launch the real breakout.

While it remains debatable that this was what Goodwood has been intended to accomplish, it was undeniably a consequence — six panzer divisions had been deployed to the British sector, while only two faced the American sector to the west.

Bradley’s Plan:

American general Omar Bradley had identified the main German defensive line as running along the east-to-west road connecting the cities of St. Lo and Perrier. He wanted to blast a hole in it through the through which his tank divisions could drive into the open country south of Normandy.

The secret weapons for the attack, called Operation Cobra, were the massive four-engine strategic bombers of the 8th Air Force.

The famous B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator were designed to carpet-bomb factories and cities, not take out troops on the front line. A Flying Fortress could drop up to 17,000 pounds of bombs, sending massive explosions rippling over large swaths of the ground.

Bradley designated a zone five kilometers long by two kilometer deep to the west of the city of St. Lo that he wanted the 8th Air Force to blast into oblivion.

However, his troops needed to advance next to the German defensive line so that they could immediately exploit the shock of the bombardment. On July 18, American infantry drove the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Corps out of St. Lo at a cost of 5,000 casualties. The American lines to the west were now directly facing the infantry and tanks of the Panzer Lehr Division.

Panzer Lehr had been reduced to just 2,200 soldiers and 47 operational Panzer IV and Panther tanks, roughly a quarter of its theoretical strength. A poorly-trained 500-man parachute regiment and a small reserve battlegroup of 450 men accompanied it.

However, Bradley’s plan had a significant problem. Weapons as imprecise as a B-17 were as likely to hit friendly troops as they were the enemy. Bradley reassured the 8th Air Force that he would pull back his troops 800 meters just before the bombardment. The Army Air Force generals insisted the minimum safe distance was 3,000 meters. After some haggling, they settled on a gap of 1,200 meters.

Bradley also stipulated that the bombers approach parallel to the front-line troops, so if any of them released their bombs too early, they wouldn’t land on the American lines.

The VIIth Corps, comprising six divisions, would lead the attack under Gen. Joseph Collins. On the left and right flank were the 9th and 30th Infantry Divisions respectively. Both divisions had seen heavy combat and sustained over 100-percent losses in the preceding weeks, and were reduced to a hard core of exhausted veterans surrounded by hordes of rookies. The fresher 4th Infantry Division would attack down the center.

Waiting in reserve were the 1st Motorized Infantry Division and the powerful 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions. These were the only two heavy armored divisions in the U.S. Army, each with more than 300 Sherman and Stuart tanks in six battalions, instead of the usual compliment of around 200.

The Americans had a new trick to deal with the Normandy hedgerows. When a fellow soldier suggested the tanks needed giant hedge clippers to traverse the bocage, Sgt. Curtis Culin went ahead and made some out of scrap metal from D-Day beach obstacles.

“Rhino tanks” fitted with the metal prongs could plow through the hedgerows without exposing their thin belly armor. Up to 60 percent of the VII Corp’s tanks were equipped with the device before the attack.

Nonetheless, Bradley didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of operation Goodwood. Tanks were vulnerable in the close Normandy terrain to ambushes. He intended to have infantry lead the initial assault with only limited tank support. Once the German defenses were breached, the armored divisions could plunge through the gap.

But timing was key — if he waited too long to unleash the armor, the Germans would have enough time to form a new defensive line.

Waiting in the wings was Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army. Normandy’s cramped front line and limited road network had prevented the 3rd Army from being deployed into battle. If Bradley’s attack succeeded, then it would finally have enough space to go roaring through the German rear lines.

False Start:

After several delays because of bad weather, on July 25, clear skies were recorded and the bombers of the 8th Air Force leaped into action. However, as the bomber formations approached Normandy, grey clouds reappeared.

The attack was called off — but not before over 100 aircraft dropped their bombs. Sixteen B-17s dropped their bomber two kilometers north of their target, hitting the 30th Infantry Division. Twenty-five American soldiers were killed and over 130 wounded. Enraged troops of the 120th Infantry Regiment even opened fire on the American planes.

Bradley was furious — the aircraft had approached perpendicular, not parallel, to the American lines. The commander of the 9th Air Force, Gen. Elwood Quesada, whose fighter bombers had approached parallel, sent a reproachful message to the 8th, as well.

The Army Air Force generals argued that approaching parallel would not prevent collateral damage and would expose the lumbering bombers to flak for a prolonged period. Besides, it would take days to draft a new plan of attack.

Worse, the U.S. troops then had to attack to recapture all the ground they had ceded when pulling back for the bombardment. This was accomplished at the cost of 174 killed or wounded by German troops who had infiltrated the abandoned positions. The Panzer Lehr Division lost 350 men and 10 tanks in the day’s action, but its commander, Gen. Fritz Bayerlein, assumed it had successfully resisted the main assault.

The Germans were bewildered and elated when American infantry withdrew from their positions again early the next morning. “It seems as if they’ve chickened out!” observed a divisional operations officer.

The bombardment

Clear weather on July 26 allowed the 8th Air Force to go in for real. The attack began with dive bombing, strafing and rocket attacks by 550 fighter bombers. Then the entire strength of the 8th Air Force, over 1,800 bombers, flew in.

Pulitzer-winning journalist Ernie Pyle described the scene. “A new sound gradually droned into our ears — a gigantic faraway surge of doom-like sound. It was the heavies. They came on in flights of 12, three flights to a group and in groups stretched out across the sky. Their march across the sky was slow and studied. I’ve never known anything that had about it the aura of such a ghastly restlessness.”

The heavies carpeted the front line with more than 12 million pounds of bombs, turning the land into a cratered moonscape.

German 88-millimeter flak guns fired back at the bombers, shooting down five — but the guns were spotted by low-flying L-4 observation plans, which directed artillery batteries to silence them. More than 50,000 shells were fired by no fewer than 1,000 artillery pieces in 47 artillery battalions to support the bombardment.

To cap it off, another wave of 350 P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers and 396 B-26 Marauder medium bombers pounded the German lines, many of them unloading canisters of napalm.

Once again, the bombers flew perpendicular to the allied lines. Many used the smoke from earlier bombing as a guide for where to drop their bombs, but unfortunately the wind began blowing the smoke toward the north. This time, 77 dropped too soon.

A 4th Infantry Division battalion commander described the feeling of dread. “The dive bombers came in beautifully, dropped their bombs right in front us just where they belonged. Then the first group of heavies dropped theirs. The next wave came in closer, the next one closer, still closer. Then they came right on top of us. The shock was awful.”

Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair, one of the chief brains behind the Army’s training program and doctrine, had advanced to a foxhole at the tip of the attack in order to boost morale.

“The ground belched, shook and spewed dirt to the sky,” Bradley wrote in his autobiography A General’s Life. “Scores of our troops were hit, their bodies flung from slit trenches. Doughboys were dazed and frightened … A bomb landed squarely on McNair in a slit trench and threw his body 60 feet and mangled it beyond recognition except for the three stars on his collar.

The short bombing killed 111 American soldiers and wounded 490, the majority in the 30th Division. The entire headquarters staff of a battalion in its 47th regiment was wiped out save for the commander.

Eisenhower was so furious that he declared he would never employ strategic bombers on tactical targets again. But the German troops suffered even worse from the bombing.

“The long duration of the raid, without any chance of fighting back, created depression, a feeling of powerlessness and weakness and inferiority,” Gen. Fritz Bayerlein recounted:

Some of the soldiers went crazy; others remained prostrate on the ground, incapable of doing anything. I found myself personally at the heart of the bombardment on the 24th and 25th July, and I was enormously affected. I, who always found myself in the most exposed places in war, it was my worst experience ever.

The well-dug-in infantry were crushed in their foxholes by the bombs, killed and buried by the explosions …

The bombardment zone was transformed into a field of craters in which not a single human remained alive. Tanks and cannons were destroyed or over turned without any hope of being recovered because all of the roads were blocked. Once the bombardment had begun, all telephone lines were cut. Because most of the command posts were caught in the bombardment, there was not any radio communication, either.

Upon receiving orders from Kluge to hold the line, Bayerlein famously responded, “Out in front, everyone is holding out. Everyone. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews — they’re all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post They’re lying silent in their foxholes because they are dead.”

It is estimated 1,000 Germans were killed by the bombardment. The rookie German parachute regiment simply evaporated, its survivors fleeing or surrendering. The Panzer Lehr Division had only a dozen operational tanks left.

The Infantry Go In:

The American infantrymen were badly shaken by the friendly bombing but were swiftly thrust out into the attack — and soon had the impression the German were unaffected by the bombardment. Machine-gun fire stitched across their advance, and surviving German tanks and artillery were soon raining shells upon them.

The 9th Infantry Division on the west flank made little progress as it attacked through wetlands towards the village of Marigny. The 30th Infantry Division on the east flank founds it advance blocked by three deadly Panther tanks. An American tank attack left three Shermans in flames for little gain — it wasn’t until midnight that the 30th secured its minimum objective for the day, the nearby village of Hébécrevon.

The 4th Division in the center made the most progress. One of its battalions stalled facing two Panzer IV tanks supported by infantry. G.I.s eventually knocked out the tanks with bazookas, and a late-arriving company of 18 Sherman tanks blasted out the infantry. The 4th made it to the ruins of Saint Chapelle-le-Juger that evening.

In the first day of Cobra, the VII Corps had only advanced 2,000 meters. The Germans were still fighting back as hard as ever. Collins wasn’t sure if he needed to give the infantry more time to clear out the German defenses, or if he should send his armor divisions out to attempt a breakthrough.

If deployed too early, the tanks might get bogged down in ambushes and cause traffic jams on the limited road network, bringing an end to the Americans hope of a break out.

Collins had noted that the German defenders were no longer coordinated in a single defensive line. He decided to unleash the armor. By the morning of July 27, tanks from the 2nd and 3rd Armored Division were rolling down to the front line.

The armor breaks through

Collins had gambled well. Only a thin crust of German defenders fighting from isolated strongpoints remained. They had no reserves behind them. Supporting attacks by American and Canadian troops to the west and east respectively had pinned down other German units in Normandy.

While Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored Division wasn’t able to secure Marigny to the west, to the east the 2nd Armored roared ahead at full speed. At Saint Gilles it encountered four German Panzer IVs and a Sturmgeschutzassault gun, but a combination of Sherman tanks and tactical air strikes dealt with the enemy armor.

By the end of the day, the 2nd had advanced 12 kilometers at cost of just three tanks. There were no enemy units left in front of it.

Field Marshall Günther von Kluge, commander of German forces in Western Europe, realized the gravity of the situation — he ordered troops along west of the breakthrough to retreat 30 kilometers to avoid being pinched off against the French coast. But the order came too late.

By July 28, the 2nd Armored Division managed to encircle the retreating Germans around Coutance, cutting off the remaining German units on the Cotentin peninsula. American tanks rolled by Bayerlein’s headquarters. “My division no longer effectively exists,” Bayerlein reported to his superiors.

The commander of the German 7th Army had to dodge fire from American Greyhound armored cars. Christian Tychsen, the chief of the 2nd S.S. Panzer Division Das Reich who had ordered the reprisal execution of 99 innocent French civilians in Tulle a month earlier, was killed when his Schwimmwagenattempted to run a road block of the 2nd Armored Division.

That night, the encircled German troops — including dozens of tanks — attempted to slip through the American lines. Some evaded the net — others fought frantic battles against American blocking forces.

In one incident, a German tank column caused an American infantry company to route. As the German tanks pursued, they bumped into the bivouac of M7 Priest self-propelled howitzers of the 78th Armored Field Artillery. Generally used to fire indirectly at distant targets, the 78th lowered it guns for direct fire and knocked out seven Panzer IVs, causing the remainder to retreat.

On the other hand, Hans Schabschneider, a sergeant in a German munitions unit, managed not only to lead his group safely, but captured 120 American soldiers and 12 trucks while doing so.

Overall, over 7,500 German troops were captured or killed in the Roncey pocket, and over 250 vehicles and 100 tanks were found destroyed or abandoned. On July 31, American units driving south seized Avranches, giving the Allies free range of France’s western coastline, including Brittany.

On Aug. 1, Patton’s Third Army roared through the breakthrough and turnedeast, seeking to encircle the German troops engaged with British and Canadian Forces. Soon the entire German front line came unglued as divisions retreated in a desperate effort to avoid being caught in the Falaise Pocket.

Patton’s Army continued its historic advance, liberating more than half of France, including the city of Paris on Aug. 25. After troubled campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the U.S. Army’s moment of glory had finally come.

Bradley’s attack succeeded because of its application of combined arms warfare using the strengths of infantry, armor, artillery and air power. While the aerial bombardment played an important role in opening the breach, the friendly casualties were a result of disregarding the inability of the strategic bombers of the time to act as precision weapons.

Allied bombing in Normandy in June and July is also estimated to have killed 50,000 French civilians and destroyed roughly 75 percent of the buildings in its major cities. Americans, Germans and the French all paid aid a terrible cost in the campaign that finally broke the Nazi occupation of Northern France.

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

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

History,

Asia's stealth arms race is here. 

Here's What You Need To Remember: Singapore’s purchase of the F-35 reaffirms its commitment to defense cooperation and integration with these regional allies. Singapore’s decision to announce the F-35 purchase during a series of disputes with Malaysia suggest that the F-35s capability could become a “big stick” that it might wield in the future in regional affairs. While Malaysia’s air force is good for the region, the latest aircraft it is considering purchasing are only fourth generation and would probably only be comparable to the upgraded F-16s Singapore already fields. The F-35 would be a significant strategic advantage, and could pressure Malaysia to perhaps look to Russia for more advanced anti-access weapons.

On January 2019, Singapore announced that it planned to buy a limited number of F-35 fighters for evaluation purposes. While this didn’t come as a surprise to many Singaporean military watchers, the decision comes at a tense time for Singapore, with China becoming more assertive and rising tensions with Malaysia.

Could the F-35 purchase accelerate the arms race in the region? How might the F-35’s unique technical characteristics make it suitable for Singapore’s tactical environment?

In order to understand the effect that the F-35 will have on Singapore’s national defense, it is important to recognize that they are slated to replace Singapore’s advanced F-16 variants. Singapore operates around 60 F-16 Block 52s, which are underwent an upgrade program that gave them more advanced features such as AESA radars. Nevertheless, the Singapore defense ministry (MINDEF) expects that these aircraft will be obsolete by 2030.

In Singaporean service, the F-16 serves in a multirole capacity. However, the most recent upgrade appears to have prioritized its role as a strike aircraft rather than air-to-air combat. While some air-to-air missiles are included in the package, they are short range AIM-9X.

The majority of equipment purchased is meant for the strike mission, from laser guided kits for bombs to the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missile. For a pure air-to-air mission, Singapore is likely to rely on it’s F-15SGs, which are optimized for the role with additional systems like infrared search and track (IRST).

As such, if the F-35 is expected to replace the F-16, it is likely because it is seen by MINDEF as the most survivable light strike aircraft in an airspace that will be filled with increasingly deadly threats. While the number of F-35s the SAF fields may not be enough for saturation strikes on large opponents like China which possess significant anti-access capabilities, the F-35 may significantly decrease the risk of preemptive strikes against less prepared opponents like Malaysia. Preemptive strikes are an important part of Singaporean doctrine given that the city-state has no defensive depth, so increased capability in that realm might have a deterrent effect.

The F-35B variant could also significantly increase survivability in event of runway destruction by a surprise strike due to its VTOL capability. Because Singapore is very small, the airbases it has are prominent targets. While a strike to these could knock out the ability for F-16s or F-15s to fly sorties, the VTOL capabilities of the F-35 might allow it to stay in the fight longer than traditional platforms.

Singapore maintains the capability to create field-expedient airfields in their Air Power Generation Command, the short takeoff runs of the F-35 would allow this command to do far more with less.

The F-35 also integrates well with the other American aircraft Singapore fields: it uses the same datalinks, radar, and pilot ergonomics. It also integrates well with modern Singaporean doctrine. The Singaporean military is striving to be a highly networked, agile force, in what they call IKC2, Integrated Knowledge-based Command and Control. The ability of the F-35 to provide a rich sensor picture of a tactical environment would make it a very important asset in the IKC2 doctrine.

Moving onto strategic considerations, Singapore’s decision to buy F-35 puts it in what China derisively calls the “U.S. F-35 friends circle”, a group of nations that border China that have bought F-35s to counter China’s increasingly powerful air force. This group currently includes South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Singapore’s purchase of the F-35 reaffirms its commitment to defense cooperation and integration with these regional allies, in what some call the “strategic quadrangle”.

Singapore’s decision to announce the F-35 purchase during a series of sea and airspace disputes with Malaysia suggest that the F-35s capability could become a “big stick” that it might wield in the future in regional affairs.

While Malaysia’s air force is good for the region, the latest aircraft it is considering purchasing are only fourth generation and would probably only be comparable to the upgraded F-16s Singapore already fields. The F-35 would be a significant strategic advantage, and could pressure Malaysia to perhaps look to Russia for more advanced anti-access weapons.

The author would like to thank Timothy Soh of Defense Politics Asia for assistance.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. This first appeared in January 2019.

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

WWII Semi-Automatic, Europe

During the Battle at Itter Castle German, American, French and eastern European defenders of the castle acted on their own initiative to salvage the situation, rather than act at the behest of higher commanders. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Battle at Itter Castle is filled with crazy twists and turns and is notable for two reasons. First, it is quite possibly the only battle where the Nazis and Americans fought on the same side. Second, it is a powerful example of soldiers acting on their own rather than at the behest of their commanders to salvage a situation. 

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an all-around monster, decided it would be a good idea to take the top members of France’s political and cultural elite and imprison them in a medieval castle in Austria. That sentence alone should tell you that the Nazis’ predilection for acts of Hollywood villainy was deep-seated and incurable. But real events soon became stranger than fiction. A small American recon platoon managed to liberate the captives during the closing days of the war, and fought a desperate last stand to prevent their SS captors from returning.

Fighting alongside the small American force against the Waffen SS were more than a dozen Wehrmacht (Army) soldiers—making the Battle at Itter Castle possibly the only engagement in which U.S. and German troops fought on the same side in World War II.

This unique conflict has been most thoroughly documented in The Last Battle by Stephen Harding, whose book has since been optioned as a movie—and inspired a heavy-metal music video. Harding’s work particularly focuses on the fourteen French notables stuck in the castle, which included both French prime ministers at the start of World War II, Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, and top military commanders Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin. For a good measure they also threw in Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the sister of the current leader of the Free French; Michel Clemenceau, son of the French leader during World War I; and French tennis star Jean Borotra—because, well, why not? There were also several wives and one husband who elected to join their partners in the prison.

This forced reunion of French VIPs, many of whom passionately hated each other, included both Vichy collaborators, such as Borotra and Weygand, and members of the Resistance, some of them transferred there from concentration camps. It had the making of a grotesque hostage situation—or, the captives feared, a soon-infamous massacre.

Itter Castle, actually a nineteenth-century construction built upon the site of a thirteenth-century century fortress, was situated atop a nearly seven-hundred-meter-high hill just a few miles south of the town of Wörgl. Seized by Himmler in 1943, it was administratively attached to the Dachau concentration camp, which contributed a staff of eastern European prisoners to serve as the prison’s staff.

However, it doesn’t seem Himmler ever attempted to leverage the captives in Castle Itter to his political advantage, and the American troops advancing into Austria in May 1945 had no idea of its significance. Indeed, even the prison’s commandant, Sebastian Wimmer, ran away from his charges on May 4, promptly followed by the rest of the guards. The liberated prisoners snatched up the small arms that had been left behind and even enlisted a wounded SS officer, Kurt Schrader, to help protect them. However, they were still surrounded by hostile SS troops. Though the imprisoned Croatian resistance fighter Zvonimir Cuckovic managed to slip away on the pretense of running an errand and contact U.S. troops on May 3, an attempted rescue effort was aborted in the face of German shellfire and concerns about intruding into a neighboring American unit’s operating area (truly!).

On May 4, the castle’s Czech cook, Andreas Krobot, rode away on a bicycle in a second attempt to find help. He finally encountered the unit of Maj. Josef Gangl in the town of Wörgl. The Austrian major had commanded howitzers on the Eastern Front and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers in the Battle of Normandy. Ordered to make a last stand against the advancing U.S. Twelfth Armored Division, he had instead contacted the local Austrian resistance under Alois Mayr, providing them with weapons and agreeing that they needed to prevent a destructive battle on Austrian soil at all costs. The SS had orders to shoot Austrians who showed signs of welcoming the incoming Allies, and Gangl’s troops were ready to fight back—but he hoped that American troops would arrive before that was necessary. After speaking with Krobot, Gangl agreed to dispatch his small force to protect the prisoners in Itter in case the SS tried to take it back.

On the way, Gangl’s troops—embarked on a Kübelwagen command car and a truck—encountered a reconnaissance unit from the Twenty-Third Armored Battalion in the village of Kufstein, operating well in advance of its parent formation. Commanding the unit’s four running Sherman tanks was First Lieutenant John “Jack” Lee. Gangl raised a white flag and explained the situation at Castle Itter. The New Yorker decided to help out—and they headed down to Itter together, overcoming a bridge wired to explode along the way, and scattering SS troops setting up a machine-gun nest.

The liberation force was eventually pared down to only fourteen Germans and ten Americans, as the other tanks were left behind to man roadblocks. This left only Jack’s tank Besotten Jenny, an upgraded “Easy 8” Sherman tank named with a high-velocity seventy-six-millimeter gun, with several African American soldiers from the Seventeenth Armored Infantry Battalion riding on top.

The French prisoners were unimpressed by the rescue party—Reynaud later wrote that Lee was “crude in both looks and manners.” Nonetheless, Lee quickly deployed his handful of troops and the armed French captives into defensive positions and positioned Besotten Jenny in front of the gatehouse.

This was fortunate, as troops from the nearby Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier (Armored Infantry) Division soon began moving against the castle. That night, an SS infantry force raked Castle Itter’s walls with rifle and machine-gun fire, but the defenders beat them back with their own small arms. By the following morning, around 150 to two hundred SS troops had massed to besiege Castle Itter, setting up a deadly eighty-eight-millimeter antitank gun and a twenty-millimeter flak gun on a hill eight hundred yards away. Meanwhile, just two additional members of the Austrian resistance arrived to reinforce the castle’s defenders.

The SS artillery began systematically blasting apart the crenellations and windows the castle’s defenders were shooting from. An antitank round blew through the side hull of Besotten Jenny, with the crew barely escaping before the tank brewed up in flames. The SS infantry then stormed towards the castle, despite taking losses to the defenders—which included both of the aged French former prime ministers and the seventy-year-old Michel Clemenceau! The tennis star Borotra volunteered to run the SS lines to look for help. He jumped the wall, dashed across forty meters of open ground, evaded the encircling SS troops in the woods and eventually linked up with American soldiers of the 142nd Regimental Combat Team.

But the SS attackers continued to advance. Several of the German defenders of Castle Itter were killed, including Major Gangl, mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet. By the afternoon, a German antitank team was coming into position to blow up the fortress’s main gate with Panzerfaust rockets.

Suddenly, cannon fire rang from behind the German attackers—Jenny’s sister tank Boche Buster, accompanied by a company of American infantry, was riding into the rescue. They were later joined by troops from the 142nd battalion, led by Borotra, sporting an American uniform. He had led in the infantry of G Company supported by a tank platoon. Along the way, they knocked out several machine-gun nests, and narrowly dodged an ambush by a self-propelled seventy-five-millimeter gun on a German 251/22 halftrack before destroying it with a seventy-six-millimeter shell.

The relief forces captured over a hundred SS prisoners. By that evening, the French prisoners were being driven to Paris. Nazi Germany surrendered three days later on May 8.

In all honesty, it’s not clear whether the SS troops were actually under orders to deliberately massacre the French elites, as has been alleged. However, it would have been very bad if they had, intentionally or in the heat of battle, as the French Republic was in the painful process of reconstituting itself. Following the war, both Reynaud and Daladier would go on to hold political office.

What’s striking about the battle at Itter is how the German, American, French and eastern European defenders of the castle acted on their own initiative to salvage the situation, rather than at the behest of higher commanders. Of course, it’s hard to know precisely what motivated Gangl and his followers to finally turn against the excesses of an evil regime in its final hours. Regardless, France can be thankful that the German major went out of his way to do the right thing, making the ultimate sacrifice protecting both French leaders and his fellow Austrians.

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Creative Commons. "Major Josef 'Sepp' Gangl"

Michael Peck

Military History,

There are lessons to be learned from the Pacific War, says Yoshiaki Nakagawa, a retired lieutenant general the Japanese Self Defense Force

Here's What You Need To Remember: It is true that Japan forced the United States to commit huge ground, air, and naval resources to bloody assaults on islands like Tarawa and Iwo Jima. But Japan's original strategy in 1941 had been to create a defensive system of island outposts and airbases, which would tie down U.S. forces while the Japanese fleet and long-range bombers rushed to the scene to destroy the invaders. That strategy failed.

Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. The assault by U.S. Marines in February 1945 on the small island—just eight square miles of volcanic rock—cost the United States more than 25,000 casualties. The Japanese garrison, more than 20,000 strong, fought and died virtually to the last man.

Is this a guide for how Japan can stop China?

There are lessons to be learned from the Pacific War, says Yoshiaki Nakagawa, a retired lieutenant general the Japanese Self Defense Force. To be clear, Nakagawa is not calling for Japanese soldiers to again launch suicidal banzai charges. But he does point out how the Pacific War proved that storming a defended island requires an attacker to commit vastly more resources than the defender.

Nakagawa's analysis is part of a RAND report titled “The U.S.-Japan Alliance and Deterring Gray Zone Coercion in the Maritime, Cyber, and Space Domains.” Written by U.S. and Japanese researchers, the study examined Chinese "gray zone" warfare, or actions meant to coerce the United States and Japan while not triggering a war." These range from fishing boats and maritime police vessels entering disputed Japanese waters, to cyberattacks, to high-profile space launches.

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The report concluded that there are strategies that the United States and Japan can pursue to stop or deter Chinese provocations. Among them are Nakagawa's contention that Japanese ground troops can deter China from the Ryukyu (Nansei in Japan) and Senkaku islands, which are owned by Japan but claimed by China.

"Through the emplacement of an appropriately dug-in and well-provisioned defending force, the Japanese Imperial Army determined that it could force its U.S. adversary to expend between three and five times the number of forces Japan had deployed in order to occupy and use the islands," who Nakagawa, who notes the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces have taken this lesson to heart.

Japanese troops armed with antiship missiles can foil a Chinese landing, or fight a delaying action to render the island unusable until help arrives. Assuming the Japanese navy and air force can secure control of the waters around an island, Japanese ground troops can retake it. If the provocation is small, such as "armed fishermen" planting a flag on an island, the Japanese coast guard—backed if needed by Japanese soldiers—can deal with it.

Japan already has one airborne brigade, a battalion-sized special forces group, and will have a rapid-reaction regiment equipped with air-transportable armored vehicles by 2018. A planned 3,400-strong amphibious assault brigade will have sufficient amphibious lift to move 2,000 infantry and their equipment. Guard units totaling 500 to 800 men, armed with antiship and antiaircraft missiles, are also being stationed in the Ryukyus. According to Nakagawa:

Given the presence of deployed JGSDF forces, together with the standing up of an amphibious assault brigade, an adversary looking to invade an important area of the Nansei Islands (for example, Miyakojima) must be able to mobilize 3,000-10,000 amphibious troops or more to overcome the advantages of dug-in defenders. . . . The size of the invading units as measured by vessel volume will be about 60,000-200,000 tons, which represents a substantial set of logistical and lift requirements for the invading side. If the deployment of a rapid-reaction regiment to the Nansei Islands can be completed before enemy forces arrive, the level of invading troops required by the adversary will be even greater.

Nakagawa concedes a few problems with this approach. Japan would need air and naval control around the island to move troops, which in turn might require U.S. muscle. There are Japanese civilians on the island that would need to be protected, supplied and possibly evacuated. And a 500-strong garrison and a 3,400-strong amphibious brigade isn't much of a defense against Chinese invasion, or much of an amphibious counterattack force to retake lost islands.

Nonetheless, Nakagawa hits on the key point: an amphibious assault against an island defended even by a small number of well-armed defenders with long-range weapons is difficult, which is one reason why the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are worried about their ability to conduct invasions. A Japanese garrison could either deter or repel provocations by irregular Chinese forces. Or, their presence would force China to mount a large-scale military invasion, which would trigger the U.S. defense treaty with Japan, and would also force China to openly use force instead of gray warfare.

On the other hand, basing a strategy on Japan's World War II experience is a mixed bag. Leaving aside how the symbolism of the Pacific War will play out in China—which still remembers Japanese atrocities—Imperial Japan's strategy could hardly be called a success.

It is true that Japan forced the United States to commit huge ground, air, and naval resources to bloody assaults on islands like Tarawa and Iwo Jima. But Japan's original strategy in 1941 had been to create a defensive system of island outposts and airbases, which would tie down U.S. forces while the Japanese fleet and long-range bombers rushed to the scene to destroy the invaders. That strategy failed. Once the Americans had worn down the Japanese fleet and airpower, and the islands were cut off, there was no escape. The garrison was doomed, and the outcome was merely a question of how long the battle and how swollen the body count.

Japan may repeat this strategy, but they will hardly desire to emulate the outcome.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Reuters

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Sam Lewis

Taiwan,

Those inclined to get jittery about whether the U.S. can be trusted as a long-term ally in Asia should remember the situation in Taiwan and South-East Asia is very different from that in Afghanistan.

As the Taliban breached the gates of the Afghan capital and citizens fled for their lives in scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975, Chinese news agency Xinhua spat that “The fall of Kabul marks the collapse of the international image and credibility of the United States.”

A mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, The Global Times went further and used the fall of Kabul as an opportunity to crow that those with high opinions of the U.S. in Taiwan “cannot count on Washington,” that the U.S. would “cast Taiwan aside just as it has done with Vietnam, and now Afghanistan.” 

That’s absurd. 

Though commentary in the West has questioned how far the U.S. will go to maintain the international order from now on, we should not get carried away with ourselves. To suggest that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan means Taiwanese leaders should prepare themselves for inevitable betrayal is wrong for several reasons.

First, Taiwan is already a fully functioning democracy in a way Afghanistan never was. The 2020 Taiwanese Presidential election drew a turnout of 74.9 percent—figures most democracies can only dream of. In comparison, due to threats from the Taliban, the Afghan Presidential election in 2019 drew a turnout of only twenty percent. The countries bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever. Afghanistan has been on the brink of civil war for over a decade. Taiwan hasn’t. Although Taiwan is not a part of the UN, it is an important example of the liberal international order at work—something all Western nations have expressed an interest in defending.

What’s more, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was never declared to be a long-term plan. Thanks to some poor decisions, and as President Joe Biden outlined Monday in his first speech since Kabul fell, the reason the U.S. went was to “get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001.” In an attempt to create long-term stability, the United States and its allies initially engaged in the time-consuming process of nation building, but as the President pointed out, “a decades long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently remake and change Afghanistan” was unsuccessful. 

East Asia, on the other hand, is entirely different. The U.S. has maintained a presence there since the end of WWII. With 38,000 U.S. service members stationed in Japan and over 28,000 stationed in South Korea, interests in the area are far better defined. Any change in the region caused by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would alter the balance of power in a way that even a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would not. Keeping shipping lanes open in the East and South China Seas is of far greater concern to the United States than stability in the vast plains of Central Asia. That is why U.S. Presidents have consistently sold arms to Taiwan, most recently at the beginning of this month.

Finally, there comes the question of political will. It has been the case for a number of years that many Americans, and indeed Western allies, have been against the U.S. staying in Afghanistan. A June 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey of thirteen NATO countries by the German Marshall Fund found sixty-six percent of U.S. respondents wanted to reduce or withdraw all troops from Afghanistan—sixty-nine percent of British and sixty-four percent of French respondents felt the same way. The opinion polls have been clear for a while—withdrawal was inevitable.

Taiwan, on the other hand, has received an uptick in support from the publics of Western countries and, conversely, the actions of the Chines Communist Party have increased skepticism of the Chinese. A Pew Research poll towards the end of last year found increasingly negative opinions of China across the board, with seventy-three percent of respondents in the United States reporting unfavorable views and similar numbers elsewhere. Perhaps most strikingly, of respondents from Japan, the one nation whose deputy Prime Minister advocated for defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, eighty-six percent reported unfavorable views of China. The political will to defend Taiwan is there in a way that it hasn’t been for Afghanistan. 

When Joe Biden declared “America is back” at his inauguration, no one foresaw the scenes of chaos at Kabul airport. The United States and its allies have taken a hammering for its actions these past few weeks and perhaps rightly so—the withdrawal didn’t have to be this chaotic. But as President Biden made clear, Afghanistan was about counter-terrorism, not nation-building. U.S interests in East Asia involve the future of the international order, and the United States just freed up a lot of time, energy, and resources to focus on the region. 

Those inclined to get jittery about whether the U.S. can be trusted as a long-term ally in Asia should remember the situation in Taiwan and South-East Asia is very different from that in Afghanistan. Don’t listen to those that suggest otherwise.

Sam Lewis is a Young Voices contributor and author of the blog ‘East Asia Insider’

Image: Reuters

The chaotic U.S. withdrawal has already led thousands of Afghans to flee.

Michael Peck

World War II History,

Ironically, the battlefield results of a Japanese invasion of Siberia would have been relatively minor.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The ultimate question for a 1941 Russo-Japanese War may actually be psychological. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown when Germany, with whom Russia had a nonaggression pact, launched its massive Barbarossa surprise attack. How would he have reacted to the news that Japan was attacking from the other side of the Soviet Union?

Fighting a war on two fronts is the military equivalent of driving a car while texting. It’s just a really bad idea, as Germany can attest. One reason Germany lost two world wars is because its forces were split between East and West. America and Britain also fought World War II in Europe and Asia.

In contrast, the Soviet Union could concentrate its forces against Germany, thanks to a 1941 neutrality pact with its long-time rival Japan. This became painfully obvious to Hitler during the 1941–42 Battle of Moscow, when the Red Army’s well-trained and well-equipped Siberian divisions reinforced the battered Soviet armies defending Moscow. Trained to operate in the harsh cold of Siberia, these fresh troops shattered the frozen German spearheads and sent them reeling from the gates of Moscow.

But what if the Soviet Union had also faced a two-front war? One of the great what-ifs of the Second World War is what would have happened if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Soviet Union seemed at defeat’s door as the German panzers drove deep into Russia.

The traditional narrative is that in mid-1941, Japanese leaders were split between the “strike north” faction, championed by the Imperial Army, which wanted to attack Russia. Opposing them was the Navy-backed “strike south” faction pressing for seizing the resources of Southeast Asia from their American and European masters. In the fall of 1941, with the German armies approaching Moscow, Japanese leaders made the fateful decision to declare war against the Western powers. The immediate impetus was a series of American and European embargoes in 1940–41, most importantly of oil, which left Japan facing the prospect of running out of fuel for its factories and ships. However, Stalin learned from Richard Sorge, a well-placed Soviet spy in Tokyo, that Japan would not invade Siberia, which the Soviet dictator to shift his elite Siberian troops from the Far East to Moscow, just in time to save the Soviet capital.

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What would have if Japan had struck north after all, attacking Russia from the east while Germany relentlessly advanced from the west? Would it have changed the course of World War II? Like most great what-if questions, the answer depends on the assumptions you make. Consider this: if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, would isolationist America would have declared war on Japan? And if Japan had attacked Russia, which certainly would have compelled the Western powers to tighten their embargo, how would the Japanese economy have fared?

Militarily, the outcome of a 1941 Russo-Japanese war would have been far from certain. Russia had been defeated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and during its intervention in the Russian Civil War, Japanese troops had advanced all the way to Lake Baikal. But closer to World War II, Russian tanks and artillery won the Khalkin Gol border battle in 1939, while the Red Army’s armored blitzkrieg smashed Japan’s Manchurian Kwantung Army in 1945. But a 1941 clash would have been interesting. The Japanese Army was not mechanized by Western and Soviet standards, putting them at a disadvantage against Soviet armor, while the logistics of supplying even a lightly equipped Japanese offensive into the Siberian wilderness would have been daunting.

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On the other hand, Japan was not one of Germany’s satellite armies on the Eastern front. Italy and Romania were like the seven dwarves to the Aryan Snow White, and the Red Army smashed them with ease. But the Imperial Japanese army in 1941 was battle-hardened—but not yet worn down—by the China War. It could move fast, fight just as fanatically as Soviet troops, and was skilled in infiltration tactics and night fighting. It would have enjoyed powerful air and naval support. Spared from battle with the Americans, the Imperial Navy could have employed naval gunfire and its elite, long-range Zero fighter squadrons to ensure air superiority for a drive on the vital port of Vladivostok.

As it bravely but ineptly demonstrated against the Finns and Germans, the Red Army in 1941 had been devastated by Stalin’s purges. At least the Siberian troops were good, but in 1941, they were at the end of a long supply line from western Russia that would have been disrupted by the German capture of factories and resources. Given a choice between retaining Moscow or Vladivostok, Stalin would have prioritized defending the Soviet capital, so Japan might have taken Vladivostok and the Siberian coast without too much effort.

But then what? Advance six thousand miles down the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow? Garrison vast Siberia while still attempting to subdue the vast population of China? Incorporate Kazakhstan into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? One wonders how much Japan would ultimately have gained from this war.

Ironically, the battlefield results of a Japanese invasion of Siberia would have been relatively minor. The real action was a continent away, in Moscow. The Soviet Union could lose Vladivostok (even though much American Lend-Lease came through that port), but Moscow was a different matter. Thus a 1941 Russo-Japanese War boils down to two questions. First, if the Battle of Moscow was one of the turning points of World War II, then would Japan pinning down the Siberian reinforcements have crippled the Soviet counteroffensive? The German armies in front of Moscow were depleted, exhausted, unsupplied and freezing. Yet many of the Soviet armies at Moscow were hastily thrown together, inexperienced, poorly led and still struggling to regain their balance from the German onslaught. It seems likely the Soviet counteroffensive would have thrown back Hitler’s armies without the Siberians, but would have inflicted less damage. If so, the real impact might have been in 1942. Germany came close to capturing Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields before the Soviets launched their devastating counteroffensive in November 1942; would sending forces to stop, or at least delay, a Japanese advance have meant no Stalingrad catastrophe for Germany?

The ultimate question for a 1941 Russo-Japanese War may actually be psychological. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown when Germany, with whom Russia had a nonaggression pact, launched its massive Barbarossa surprise attack. How would he have reacted to the news that Japan was attacking from the other side of the Soviet Union? The Red Army suffered four million casualties in 1941; it had enough problems attempting to build new divisions and control the ones it already had in western Russia, without having to deal with a Siberian front.

The Russo-German War was a war of annihilation. Peace was not possible until one side or the other was conquered. But could Stalin have conceded Siberia to Japan in return for an armistice? Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (whom the Nazis classified as honorary Aryans) were loose allies at best. A separate peace might have been possible. At the least, a Russo-Japanese war would have diverted Soviet resources away from Germany and thus prolonged the European war, though perhaps America would have found Japan less difficult to subdue.

Had Japan declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941, the East might have been Red, as the Communist Chinese song goes. But it might have been the red of the Rising Sun.

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

This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

Modernization efforts of the People's Liberation Army began in 1991 when Beijing realized its dated WWII-style military was insufficient. 

Here’s What You Need to Remember: Transforming rigid command and control and logistical systems, and rooting out endemic corruption, is one of the chief aims of the reforms. So is implementing realistic combat training emphasizing joint operations, instead of reputation-burnishing scripted exercises. The radical reorganization of the PLA shows awareness at senior levels that overcoming the PLA’s shortcomings isn’t only a matter of procuring better technologies, but changing how the military uses them.

The PLA was formed in 1927 as a Communist revolutionary force to oppose the Nationalist Kuomintang government and (later) invading Japanese forces. Unlike Western militaries, the PLA remains loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, not a theoretically independent Chinese state. A cadre of political officers (commissars or zhengwei) still operate at every level of the command structure to ensure loyalty and manage personnel.

Even after securing the mainland in 1949 and sprouting Navy and Air Force branches, the PLA adhered to a defensive “People’s War Strategy” which assumed that technologically superior foreign invaders (the United States or the Soviet Union) would need to be lured deep into Chinese territory to be worn down by guerilla warfare and superior numbers.

Serious PLA modernization efforts began in 1991 when the trouncing of Iraq’s huge mechanized army in the Gulf War caused Beijing to realize its dated, World War II-style military was similarly vulnerable. By 2004, a new doctrine focused on proactively defeating enemies beyond China’s borders, including through preemptive strike if necessary, as well as undertaking global governance missions befitting its superpower status.

Between 2000 and 2016, while the Chinese economy averaged official annual growth rates around 7-8 percent, the PLA’s budget grew even faster at 10 percent. Despite that, the PLA’s current roughly $200 billion dollar budget totals less than one-third of U.S. defense spending. However, China pays much lower costs for hardware and personnel because of China’s “latecomer advantage” as the DIA report explains:

“China has routinely adopted the best and most effective platforms found in foreign militaries through direct purchase, retrofits, or theft of intellectual property. By doing so, China has been able to focus on expediting its military modernization at a small fraction of the original cost.”

Prominent examples include China’s aircraft carriers and its J-11 jet fighters.

By 2017, Chinese defense spending growth declined to 5-7%percent and the PLA shed 300,000 personnel, bringing it down to 2 million-strong—still the largest armed force on the planet. This transition sought to remodel the PLA into a leaner, more flexible force suited for fast-paced modern warfare.

Indeed, that year Beijing fundamentally restructured how the PLA worked, consigning the traditionally dominant ground forces to their own branch on equal footing with the PLA Air Force, Navy, Rocket Force, and a brand-new Strategic Support Force. This last addition combines satellite-launch and satellite-killing capabilities, with elite hacker and electronic warfare units to collect vital intelligence while disrupting the adversary’s own recon capabilities.

Rather than being siloed in their respective branches, operational units now fall under five regional commands, each with its own Joint Operations Command Center to enable air-, land- and sea-warfare branches of the PLA to rapidly coordinate using robust and redundant communication networks and inter-service chains of command.

The theater commands fall under the ultimate control of a Central Military Committee. The Army’s large division-sized units have mostly been dissolved, with assets devolved to seventy-eight combined-arms brigades mixing together armor and infantry with organic artillery and anti-aircraft units. Special forces and helicopter units also doubled in number.

The new organization allows lower-ranking officers to act more flexibly without depending on higher headquarters for orders and support assets. However, the transition is proving culturally difficult for the traditionally hierarchy-obsessed PLA and complicates logistics and training for units now combining several types of equipment.

Nonetheless, transforming rigid command and control and logistical systems, and rooting out endemic corruption, is one of the chief aims of the reforms. So is implementing realistic combat training emphasizing joint operations, instead of reputation-burnishing scripted exercises.

Beijing’s Strategic Forces

The PLA’s huge Rocket Force has a diverse array of over a thousand ballistic and cruise missiles armed with both conventional and nuclear warheads, most of them short- or intermediate-range weapons to strike targets in Asia and the Pacific, as well as a smaller number of inter-continental ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. cities. New truck-launched DF-21D missiles may uniquely boast the precision-guidance capabilities to strike aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away from China.

China’s arsenal of around 300 nuclear warheads is primarily delivered by the Rocket Force, but the PLA Navy also operates nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, which may soon have the ability to strike U.S. targets without sortieing far from the Chinese coast. In 2017, the PLA reintroduced a nuclear role for the Air Force, likely to be fulfilled by the forthcoming H-20 stealth bomber.

However, Beijing has a no-first-use nuclear policy: it only plans to launch nukes if attacked with them first. A network of hardened underground facilities means the Rocket Force is likely to survive a first strike to inflict a retaliatory attack. China does not stockpile biological or chemical weapons.

The PLA’s New Mission

The PLA’s strategic objectives have expanded from territorial defense to achieving regional military dominance over East Asia and the western half of the Pacific, as well as expansion into the Indian Ocean. Beijing eventually aims to displace or render indefensible the Pentagon’s East Asian footholds, notably island bases in Guam and Okinawa and alliances with South Korea and Japan.

Regional hotspots include a border dispute with India, potential instability in North Korea, and maritime sovereignty disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Beijing also requires the PLA to maintain a credible capability for invading Taiwan, including fighting off or deterring U.S. intervention on Taipei’s behalf. The PLA Navy operates Yuzhao-class Landing Platform Docks, and its Marine Corps recently tripled in size to around 35,000 personnel in seven brigades. The Army also maintains six combined arms brigades equipped with amphibious tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Operations other than war are also of increasing importance to the PLA, including suppressing protest and unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang—where reportedly hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs have been placed in forced labor camps—as well as providing disaster relief and evacuating nationals abroad in emergencies.

Though the PLA is focused on fighting regional, not global conflicts, it’s developing a limited capacity for global expeditionary operations—particularly evident in the opening of its first overseas base in Djibouti. Beijing is preparing the ground for additional overseas bases in Pakistan, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and various Pacific islands. The introduction of huge new Y-20 “Chubby Girl” transport planes will significantly improve China’s global logistical capabilities.

These technologies and reforms have only begun to address longstanding PLA deficiencies in command-and-control, logistics, unrealistic training, and lack of recent combat experience. Furthermore, while the PLA does field cutting-edge systems like the Type 99 tank, J-20 stealth fighter, and Type 055 destroyer, roughly 40 percent of its armor and fighter units still use outdated 1950s-era hardware like Type 59 tanks, Type 63 APCs, and J-7 fighters. The rapidly growing PLA Navy still relies on many noisy diesel submarines, and its two new carriers are less capable than U.S. nuclear-powered carriers.

Despite these weaknesses, the radical reorganization of the PLA shows awareness at senior levels that overcoming the PLA’s shortcomings isn’t only a matter of procuring better technologies, but changing how the military uses them.

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.

Image: Creative Commons "Chinese Sailors on Visit to Portsmouth" by Defence Images is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sebastien Roblin

Soviet Navy, World

The Navy could hear an Alfa-Class submarine coming, but could it outrun one?

Key point: 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; 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.

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. 

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

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: Reddit 

Mark Episkopos

Russia China,

Whatever their technical benefits, the exercises augur a new wave of Russian-Chinese cooperation.

Reaping the windfall of their ongoing cooperation in Afghanistan, Russia, and China seek to further deepen their military ties.

Chinese and Russian forces conducted the ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 joint drills earlier this month at a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) base in West China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

The drills involve as many as 13,000 troops and 400 pieces of military hardware, including 200 pieces of armor, 90 artillery units, and 100 aircraft. The exercises notably featured China’s fifth-generation J-20 stealth fighter jet, marking the first time that the fighter participated in joint exercises. The Russian side was represented by forces from the country’s Eastern Military District, bringing air defense systems, motorized divisions, and Su-30SM fighter jets.

The course of the drills remains largely unclear, with previous statements from Russian and Chinese officials suggesting that the exercises encompassed joint reconnaissance, early warning, and electronic warfare tasks, as well as combined arms strike operations against notional terrorist outposts. Experts say ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 is the first China-hosted Russian-Chinese drill hosted on Chinese soil; it is also the first joint drill held in China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, who attended a portion of the drills, reportedly commended the joint forces’ “coherent operations” and their “high professionalism.” Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe echoed Shoigu’s sentiments about the high level of Russian-Chinese military interoperability while offering even stronger praise. "Amid sweeping changes and the pandemic, the drills reflect the invariable support between China and Russia and show the high level of inter-army ties,” Fenghe said. "This fully testifies to close relations between China and Russia, the indestructible ties between the Chinese and Russian servicemen and the strong and durable friendship between us personally.”

Fenghe averred that the "these drills are yielding obvious results as real warfare can be simulated at a very high level,” but some military experts have cast doubt on that assessment. Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, told CNN that the drills were too choreographed to yield concrete military results; that they lacked the crucial component of commanders making unscripted decisions with an impact on the course and outcome of a battlefield engagement. "Free play is what hones military skills, not highly choreographed airshow-like events," Layton added.

Chinese state news outlet the Global Times shot back at the CNN report in a heated rebuttal piece, insisting that the drills demonstrated the ability of Russian and Chinese troops to jointly fight “the forces of terrorism, extremism and separatism.” The Global Times article added that “CNN's badmouthing of China-Russia military strategic cooperation will be of no use, nor will it succeed in trying to drive a wedge between the two countries.”

With key operational details from ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 still mired in mystery, it is difficult to fully evaluate the drills’ instructional value. But whatever their technical benefits, the exercises augur a new wave of Russian-Chinese cooperation that was recently illustrated in Afghanistan, where the two sides reached a consensus around backing the Taliban’s legitimacy in the weeks following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

A sizable PLA contingent is expected to make an appearance during the 2021 edition of the International Army Games, a Russian-hosted annual military sports event.

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

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

U.S. Air Force, Americas

The Harvest Hawk is a KC-130J tanker that Marines modified to fit their needs. 

Here's What You Need to Know: The Harvest Hawk has worked so efficiently because it operates in “permissive” environments where adversaries lack the anti-aircraft weapons to effectively shoot back. In these situations, the speed and defense capabilities of expensive, fuel-gulping jet fighters are superfluous, and a lumbering cargo plane can virtually hover in place in relative safety while benefiting from greater endurance and payload. The Hawk thus is an investment not only in conventional warfighting capability but in providing both ISR and close air support capabilities for counter-insurgency missions. 

Dropping bombs out of cargo planes has been a common measure of desperation for under-equipped air forces and opportunistic mercenaries throughout the history of aviation. However, in 2009 the U.S. Marine Corps found a way to make a virtue out of flexibility by developing Harvest Hawk, a kit that allowed their new KC-130J refueling tankers to double as missile-toting gunships and creepy aerial spying platforms that would put the Eye of Mordor to shame.

Heavily armed Hercules transports have existed since the feared AC-130 Specter gunship debuted during the Vietnam War, and the Air Force currently operates several different types. In 2009, the Marines joined in by developing the Hercules Airborne Weapons Kit, which can be bolted on to the service’s KC-130J refueling tankers.

While the Air Force and navy operate KC-135 and KC-10 tankers based on jetliners, the Marines instead adapted C-130 Hercules transport planes to serve as slower, more versatile platforms that can refuel helicopters and Osprey tilt-rotors as well as fixed-wing jets. Even better, a KC-130 can top up two helicopters at a time via drogue-hoses which can pump 300 gallons a minute. A KC-130J can carry 60,000 pounds of fuel and cargo—or 84,000 pounds without cargo.

Six $22 million HAWK kits were assembled, and ten KC-130Js modified to accept them. The kits added an AAQ-30 Targeting Sighting System sensor pod under the KC-130J’s left wingtip fuel tank which can spot individuals up to ten miles away; an M299 quad-launcher capable of carrying four AGM-114P2 Hellfire II anti-tank missiles (or P2A anti-personnel models) under the right wing; and a box-launcher loaded with ten smaller AGM-176 Griffon GPS-guided missile on the cargo ramp. That’s right, the beast had to lower the cargo-bay door midflight to fire the Griffons.

The Hawk’s crew of seven included a pilot and co-pilot, two fire control officers operating a fire control system fixed on a cargo palette, a crewmaster and two cargomasters that double as Griffon missile operators.

Harvest Hawks provide ‘overwatch’ for friendly ground troops by spending hours slowly orbiting overhead, using their sensor balls to scan huge swathes of terrain and spy on what the locals below are up to. As Hawk crewmember Major Mark Blankenbricker told defense media, “We use our cameras to look at villages, watch pattern of life and assess what is going on in the [area of operation] at that time.” No less than seven onboard radios allow close coordination with ground forces and friendly aircraft. If the grunts on the ground run into trouble, the Hawks sling guided missiles fairly precisely on top of the hostiles.

A Harvest Hawk was deployed by Marine Air Refueling Squadron 352 to Afghanistan in October 2010 and first saw action at Sangin on November 4 while supporting 5th Regiment Marines, killing five Taliban insurgents with a Hellfire missile. The lone Hawk soon proved to be under constant demand by ground troops.

Improved with Experience

By 2012, Harvest Hawks were a reliable fixture of Marine air support over Helmand Province, Afghanistan as detailed profile by Code One Magazine in which Marine Major John Bulter of VMGR 252 shared a starting figure: “Our launch total was considerably more than Marine Harriers, Navy Hornets, and even Air Force A-10s. With only one aircraft, we shot close to half of all the kinetic weapons launched in theater in the nine months we were there.” The armed tankers averaged four flight hours a day, though could remain aloft as many as ten hours if necessary.

The aircraft’s sensors reportedly could distinguish humans from animals, and even adults from children. In one incident, a HAWK crew spotted a group of Taliban firing on U.S. troops while using children “as a buffer” and to resupply ammunition. Unwilling to launch missiles, the pilots instead buzzed low overhead while spraying out a rain of defensive flares. The insurgents and their captives dispersed.

Over time, the Harvest Hawks were improved. The cheaper Griffon missiles were rarely used at first because depressurizing the cargo bay to fire them was such a pain—so a new ‘wine rack’ launcher was developed poking out the side of the paratrooper jump door. The new “Derringer Door” could also launch GBU-44/B Viper Strike glide bombs—designed to deliver very precise strikes with minimal collateral damage due to their 2-pound warheads and sub-one meter accuracy. You can see the newly configured Harvest Hawk fire Griffon and Maverick missiles in this video.

Additionally, new Intrepid Tiger electronic warfare pods gave Hawks the ability to jam hostile radio signals—particularly those that might trigger an IED from under the feet of troops on the ground. Marines in the field even scrounged a ground-based ROVER video receiver and installed it in the cargo bay of KC-130s, using it to collect video feed from all kinds of drones and aircraft.

In 2016, the Marines formulated a major upgrade called Harvest Hawk+, and announced plans to introduce HAWK-compatibility on the sixty-nine remaining un-upgraded KC-130Js. The new format swaps out the AAQ-30 bolted on the left wing for a higher-quality L3 Wescam MX-20 sensor turret permanently installed under the nose. Additionally, an ALQ-23 Intrepid Triger II electronic warfare pod allows selective jamming or spying on different radio frequencies, and may be eventually upgraded for area radar jamming capability. Finally, compatibility was added for the AGM-114P4 Hellfire, which has improved maneuverability for hitting moving vehicles. In June 2018, the Harvest+ successfully completed a five-week live-fire training at the Naval Weapons Station at China Lake. Compatibility with additional weapons such as Small Diameter Bombs, 70-millimter guided rockets, a more prodigious Hellfire missile rack, or a long-promised but long delayed 30-millimter side-firing cannon, could eventually follow.

An Osprey Hawk?

Intriguingly, the Marine Corps also declared in 2016 its interest in upgrading its fleet of MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft with many of the Hawk+ systems. The very flexible, but expensive and accident-prone Osprey was criticized for its lack of effective armament when delivering troops to hot drop zones in Iraq.

The laundry list of proposed upgrades would turn the Osprey into a true multi-role platform: aerial refueling capability with other Ospreys, a self-defense jamming pod, a Forward-Looking Infrared Sensor for both scanning for hostiles and assisting in landing, a laser designator for targeting precision-guided munitions, an MX-20 sensor ball under the chin, and even capability to guide Switchblade kamikaze drones that can be literally chucked by hand out the side door. Of course, whether funding will materialize for such an ambitious and expensive upgrade is to be determined.

The Harvest Hawk has worked so efficiently because it operates in “permissive” environments where adversaries lack the anti-aircraft weapons to effectively shoot back. In these situations, the speed and defense capabilities of expensive, fuel-gulping jet fighters is superfluous, and a lumbering cargo plane can virtually hover in place in relative safety while benefiting from greater endurance and payload. On the other hand, the Hawk mission may reduce KC-130 availability for the aerial refueling missions, which has already suffered due to the grounding of the majority of the Marine’s older KC-130T tankers after a deadly crash in July 2017.

The Hawk thus is an investment not in conventional warfighting capability, but in providing both ISR and close air support capabilities for counter-insurgency missions—a need which unlikely to go away soon as Washington doubles down on military commitments in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan.

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 June 2018.

Image: Reddit

Michael Peck

U.S. Military,

News last month that Britain is boosting its hypersonic weapons program didn’t come as a surprise. Many other nations are doing it.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In other words, hypersonic engines won’t turn a Typhoon, F-15 or F-22 into a Mach 5 jet. Instead, hypersonic missiles will do the work. It’s the same approach that allows sixty-year-old B-52s to remain formidable weapons, by arming them with smart bombs. The platform remains the same, but the payload is updated as technology advances.

Can an F-35 be turned into a hypersonic aircraft?

News last month that Britain is boosting its hypersonic weapons program didn’t come as a surprise. Many other nations are doing it.

What caught everyone’s attention was that there are plans to rework the jet engines on the 1990s Eurofighter Typhoon—which propel the aircraft to Mach 2—into hypersonic engines that could achieve Mach 5 or faster.

Which naturally led to a question: can existing fourth- and fifth-generation fighters—which operate at speeds of around Mach 2 or less—become Mach 5 speed demons?

The technology in question is the Sabre engine from British firm Reaction Engines. Sabre aims to combine the advantages of both conventional jet engines with rocket engines. Ground tests have shown that demonstrated that the engine is capable of flying faster than Mach 3, according to Defense News.

“SABRE’s unique feature is a precooler which reduces the temperature of the incoming compressed air,” explains British defense site Forces.com. “This means the engine does not need to cope with extreme temperatures which requires special materials.”

“At high altitudes, it is a rocket, but, at lower altitudes, it works like a jet engine - sucking in and compressing air.”

One option that the RAF is considering for development of hypersonic engines is to add pre-cooler technology to the EJ-200 gas turbine engine that currently powers the Typhoon.

Alas, that isn’t the same as sticking a hypersonic engine on an older fighter.

“You shouldn’t read into that we are somehow going to achieve a hypersonic Typhoon,” said Air Chief Marshal Stephen Hillier.

There is more to developing a hypersonic aircraft than sticking a new engine in an old airframe. To turn a fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft, such as the F-16 or F-35, would invoke a variety of airframe, aerodynamic and avionics issues.

Instead, Britain’s new £10 million ($12.2 million) hypersonics program will be used to thrust Britain into the hypersonic race that is currently dominated by the U.S., Russia and China. For example, hypersonic research is expected to bear fruit in engine development for the Tempest, Britain’s planned sixth-generation fighter.

With 80 percent of Western fighters expected to be fourth-generation for the foreseeable future, hypersonic missiles are a way to keep older jets relevant. “We are working with some other people to see whether we can generate a Mach 5 capability in four years,” said Air Vice Marshal Simon Rochelle, chief of air staff capability. “There will be others pursuing higher and fast speeds … but much beyond that speed you start to change the chemical properties, the physical properties and metallic properties within the actual weapon system.”

“Part of the reason for rapidly developing high-speed weapons was to enable those aircraft to maintain their edge," Rochelle said. “There is a challenge and competition now going on at range, at speed, at pace and we have to mobilize ourselves to be ready to take that on.”

In other words, hypersonic engines won’t turn a Typhoon, F-15 or F-22 into a Mach 5 jet. Instead, hypersonic missiles will do the work. It’s the same approach that allows sixty-year-old B-52s to remain formidable weapons, by arming them with smart bombs. The platform remains the same, but the payload is updated as technology advances.

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

This article originally appeared several months ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Missiles, World

The first anti-ship smart bombs, invented like so many other weapons by the dark scientists of Nazi Germany, were not just deadly. They seemed inhuman.

Here's What You Need to Know: Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is that what is new is old. With each passing year, the weapons of World War II seem closer to the era of Gettysburg and Jutland than the high-tech warfare of today. That perception can encourage an unjustified smugness.

What is that strange bomb in the sky?

That’s what the sailors of the Italian battleship Roma must have wondered in the final moments before they died.

Naval warfare changed on Sept. 9, 1943. Dictator Benito Mussolini had been deposed, the new Italian government was abandoning a lost war and its doomed Nazi ally and the Italian fleet was sailing to Malta to surrender. But the habitually treacherous Nazis, who had always suspected their Italian allies of similar trickery, detected the Italian ships leaving port.

The Luftwaffe dispatched a force of Dornier Do-217 bombers to deal with the Italian ships.

As the bombers approached, the Italians were unsure whether the Germans meant to attack or just intimidate. They were relieved to see the German aircraft appear to drop their bombs into the ocean. Perhaps with uncharacteristic gentleness, the Germans were just firing warning shots.

But then something unexpected happened. Instead of plunging straight down into the sea, the bombs headed toward the Italian ships. One slammed into Roma’s hull, exited out the other side and exploded in the water, destroying an engine room.

A second bomb penetrated the deck into the forward magazine, where shells for the ship’s big 15-inch guns were stored. The battleship exploded, killing 1,253 members of her crew.

The age of the ship-killing missile had dawned.

The first anti-ship smart bombs, invented like so many other weapons by the dark scientists of Nazi Germany, were not just deadly. They seemed inhuman. A “Wellsian weapon from Mars,” was how one newspaper reporter described an early attack.

Smart bombs have become so common in modern warfare that we take them for granted. Yet 70 years ago, a bomb that could chase a ship seemed as exotic and frightening as the muskets of the conquistadors must have seemed to the Aztecs. The Germans “made them [the missiles] turn corners,” an Allied sailor complained.

Anti-ship guided missiles have been used for decades now. Missiles sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat in 1967 and the British destroyer Sheffield in 1982. Today, China hopes that weapons such as the DF-21D ballistic missile, with a range of a thousand miles, can sink U.S. aircraft carriers and thus neutralize American naval power in the Pacific.

But these weapons did not materialize overnight in a Beijing weapons lab. They are the fruits of Nazi research from more than 70 years ago.

A smart bomb named Fritz

The weapon that sank Roma was known by the very German name Fritz-X. It was not a powered missile but a 3,000-pound armor-piercing gravity bomb meant to be dropped from a bomber at 20,000 feet.

Battleships were armored to survive multiple bomb hits—in 1944, the Japanese super-battleship Musashi was hit by 17 bombs and 19 torpedoes before sinking. But a bomb dropped from high enough should have enough kinetic energy, imparted by gravity, to smash through thick deck armor.

The problem was hitting the battleship in the first place. High-flying bombers in the 1940s had scant chance of hitting a warship frantically weaving through the water at 30 knots. That meant aircraft had to come in low to attack, which made them easier targets for the ship’s antiaircraft guns and also robbed the bombs of kinetic energy.

The 11-foot-long Fritz-X, slung under the wing of a bomber, had radio-controlled fins that could change the munition’s glide path. A tail-mounted flare enabled the operator on the bomber to track and adjust the weapon’s course. Tests showed that 50 percent of bombs would land within five meters of the target—astounding accuracy for the 1940s.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because the concept endures in modern weapon such as America’s Joint Direct Attack Munition, a kit that makes dumb bombs smart by adding fins and satellite guidance.

The Hs 293 missile

The Fritz-X was an awesome battleship-killer, but only under the right conditions. A glide bomb has only gravity rather than a rocket motor for propulsion. The steerable fins on the Fritz-X could adjust its trajectory only slightly, meaning the bomb had to be dropped within three miles of the target.

While deadly to heavily armored warships, the armor-piercing Fritz-X was actually too much bomb for small ships. It would slice all the way through unarmored destroyers and transports and explode in the sea.

The Nazis had another weapon, a genuine anti-ship missile called the Hs 293. The 12-foot-long weapon looked like a miniature airplane with a rocket motor slung underneath.

The radio-controlled Hs 293 could be launched from 10 miles away, out of range of shipboard anti-aircraft guns. Its 2,300-pound high-explosive warhead detonated on contact with a lightly armored ship.

“In a typical deployment, the attacking aircraft would approach the target to within 12 kilometers (6 miles), then fly a parallel course in the opposite direction,” writes Martin Bollinger, author of Wizards and Warriors: The Development and Defeat of Radio Controlled Glide Bombs of the Third Reich.

“When the ship was about 45 degrees off the forward right side, the aircraft launched the HS-293,” Bollinger continues. “The Walther liquid-fueled rocket, running for 10 or 12 seconds, would accelerate to about 600 kilometers per hour (325 knots), at which point the operator had turned the missile into the target.”

“Once the rocket burned out,” Bollinger explains, “the missile continued with its forward momentum, maintaining a glide by virtue of short wings, until the operator steered it into the target.”

The electric razor missile defense

The British and Americans were gravely worried. By the fall of 1943, Allied forces had captured North Africa and Sicily, the U-boat threat was diminishing and the Luftwaffe faded before growing Allied air strength. Now the Brits and Americans could focus on the dangerous task of landing their armies on the European continent.

First they had to thwart the new German ship-killers. The Allies could mostly protect the vulnerable amphibious invasion fleets from regular German air attacks. But if German aircraft could stand off at a distance and lob bombs with pinpoint accuracy onto the soft-skinned transports and their escorts, then the Third Reich might stave off invasion.

Fortunately, a disgruntled German scientist had warned the Allies about the smart bombs in 1939, and Ultra code-breakers had intercepted German communications regarding the weapons.

The British outfitted the sloop Egret with special equipment to identify the radio frequencies used to control the German munitions. Some 13 days before Roma was sunk, Egret joined a convoy sailing within range of German bombers based in France.

As hoped, the Germans attacked the convoy with Hs 293 missiles. Unfortunately, one of the ships sunk was Egret.

The Allied landing at the southern Italian port of Salerno on Sept. 3, 1943 was a wake-up call for alliance. The Germans counterattacked and almost drove the Anglo-American troops into the sea. Gunfire from Allied warships saved the landing force … and the entire operation.

But at a terrible cost. The Luftwaffe launched more than 100 Fritz-X and Hs 293 weapons. A Fritz-X struck the famous British battleship Warspite and put the vessel out of commission for months.

Another Fritz-X hit a gun turret on the U.S. light cruiser Savannah and “penetrated through the two-inch armored surface of the turret, tore through three more decks and exploded in the ammunition handling room deep in the bowels of the ship,” Bollinger writes.

Miraculously, Savannah survived—but 197 of her crew did not. German guided weapons sank and badly damaged around a dozen ships off Salerno.

Convoys sailing the Atlantic and Mediterranean also suffered. Convoy KMF-26, whose escort included included two U.S. destroyers equipped with the first anti-missile jammers, was attacked off the Algerian coast on Nov. 26, 1943.

An Hs 293 slammed into the troop transport Rohna, carrying U.S. soldiers to India. At least 1,149 passengers and crew died in what Bollinger describes as the “greatest loss of life of U.S. service members at sea in a single ship in the history of the United States.”

It was not until the 1960s that U.S. authorities even admitted that Rohna had been sunk by a guided missile rather than conventional weapons.

Rumor spread among desperate sailors that switching on electric razors would jam the radio frequencies of the “Chase Me Charlies,” as the British called the guided munitions.

An urgent and massive anti-missile effort ensued. Ships were told to lay down smokescreens so Germans aircrews couldn’t see their targets—and to take high-speed evasive action under attack. But how could anchored transports unloading troops and supplies, or warships providing naval gunfire, maneuver at high speed?

The Allies pinned their hopes on electronic warfare, another class of modern weaponry originating in World War II. The British were already dropping aluminum foil decoys to jam German radars. Less well-known are the Allies’ intensive efforts to disrupt German anti-ship missiles.

Allied agents interrogated captured Luftwaffe aircrew. Recovery teams sifted through missile fragments from damaged ships and examined remnants of bombers left behind on airfields in Italy.

The most intensive work took place in labs across Britain and America including the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where scientists worked feverishly to jam the radio frequencies used by German missile controllers. operators to control the missiles.

The British chose barrage jamming of multiple frequencies, while the Americans opted for what they considered a more efficient technique of jamming only specific frequencies. The U.S. installed the first jammers on two destroyers in September 1943.

The first anti-missile jammers were primitive and cumbersome by today’s standards. American equipment required multiple operators and devices to identify the correct frequency and match the jammer to the frequency—and do it all in 10 or 20 seconds before the missile hit its target.

Early jammers didn’t work. Based on faulty intelligence, the Allies guessed that the German missiles were controlled by High Frequency signals under 30 MHz. The German actually used the Very High Frequency band of around 50 MHz.

The missiles kept coming.

Yet by August 1944, the Germans missile campaign was over. Some of the last Hs 293s were not even launched at ships, but against French bridges used by Patton’s advancing tank columns. Less than a year after its dramatic debut, the German smart bomb threat disappeared.

No wonder weapon

It’s hard to estimate losses caused by the guided weapons. German air raids saturated Allied defenses by combining smart bomb attacks with conventional dive bomber and torpedo assaults, so it is always not clear which weapon hit a ship.

The Allies also tried to maintain morale by attributing guided weapon losses to conventional weapons.

Bollinger counts 903 aircraft sorties that carried around 1,200 guided weapons. Of those 1,200, almost a third were never fired because the launch aircraft aborted or were intercepted.

Of the remaining 700 weapons, another third malfunctioned. Of the approximately 470 whose guidance systems worked, at most 51—or just over 10 percent—actually hit their targets or landed close enough to damage them.

Bollinger calculates that just 17 to 24 ships were sunk and 14 to 21 damaged.

“At most, only one weapon in 24 dispatched from a German airfield scored a hit or damage-causing near miss,” Bollinger writes. “Only about one in 14 of the missiles launched achieved similar success, and at most one in nine of those known to respond to operator guidance was able to hit the target or cause significant damage via a near-miss.”

“This is very different from the 50-percent hit rate experienced during operational testing,” Bollinger points out.

To be fair, the technology was new. There were no lasers or fire control computers. The Fritz-X and Hs 293 were manually guided all the way. Operators had to track both missile and target through cloud, fog and smoke, without the benefit of modern thermal sights.

“It was virtually impossible to hit a ship that was steaming more than 20 knots and could fire back,” Bollinger tells War is Boring. “Almost all of the hits were against slow and/or defenseless targets.”

Bollinger hypothesizes that a phenomenon called “multi-path interference,” unknown at the time, may also have hampered the performance of the Hs 293. Radio command signals sent from the bomber to the missile might have overshot the weapon, bounced off the ocean surface below and interfered with the missile guidance signal.

The early jammers were ineffective, but Bollinger believes that by the time of the Normandy assault in June 1944, the equipment had improved enough to offer a measure of protection—and partly explains why German missiles performed poorly later in the war.

Strangely, while the Germans took measures to counteract Allied jamming of their air defense radars, they never really addressed the possibility that their anti-ship missiles were also being jammed.

It’s wrong to blame the bomb for the faults of the bomber. The real cause for the failure of German smart bombs was that by the time they were introduced in late 1943, the Luftwaffe was almost a spent force.

Already thinly spread supporting the hard-pressed armies in Russia and the West, the German air arm suffered relentless bombardment by U.S. B-17s and B-24s. The Third Reich could never deploy more than six bomber squadrons at a time equipped with the Fritz-X and Hs 293.

When the Luftwaffe ruled the skies over Poland and France in 1939, this might have been enough. By late 1943, a guided-bomb run was practically suicide.

German bombers making daylight attacks had to run a gauntlet of fighters protecting Allied ships in the daytime. Night attacks were marginally safer for the bombers but still exposed them to radar-equipped British and American night fighters. The Allies aggressively bombed any airfield suspected of harboring the smart bombers.

“Allied fighter air cover was by far the most important factor,” Bollinger tells War is Boring. “Not only did it lead to large numbers of glide-bombing aircraft getting shot down, it also forced the Germans to shift missions from daylight to dusk or nighttime. This in itself lead to a major and measurable reduction in accuracy.”

Many raids would cost the Germans a few bombers. By the standards of the thousand-bomber raids over Germany, this was trifling. But for the handful of specially trained and equipped Luftwaffe squadrons, it was catastrophic.

Of the 903 aircraft sorties, Bollinger estimates that in 112 of them, the bombers were lost before launching their weapons. Another 21 were shot down or crashed on the return flight, for an overall loss ratio of 15 percent.

“Each time a pilot departed on a glide bomb mission, he had almost a one-in-seven chance of never returning in that aircraft safely,” Bollinger says. “Put another way, the probability that a pilot would return safely after each of the first 10 missions was only 20 percent.”

Learning from history

The rise and fall of the Nazi anti-ship missiles offers lessons for the U.S. and its opponents in the present day. American planners worry that smart anti-ship weapons in the hands of China, smaller nations like Iran or even insurgent groups could threaten U.S. warships and amphibious forces.

One lesson from the 1940s is that passive defenses such as jamming have limited utility against access denial weapons. The best defense is to destroy the launch vehicle before it can fire. “Kill the archer” is the term the Pentagon uses.

China stands to learn the most profound lesson. For all the power and terror of the German anti-ship weapons, they could not compensate for the inability of the German navy and Luftwaffe to confront the Allied navies on the open seas.

Smart bombs did worry Allied commanders, but the new munitions couldn’t prevent the amphibious invasions of Italy and France. Chinese missiles might disrupt U.S. operations, but they are no substitute for countering a powerful navy with an effective navy of your own.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is that what is new is old. With each passing year, the weapons of World War II seem closer to the era of Gettysburg and Jutland than the high-tech warfare of today. That perception can encourage an unjustified smugness.

The problems modern navies and air forces struggle with—anti-ship guided missiles, jamming, operations in contested airspace—were the same that German pilots and Allied sailors faced.

The terror that the crew of an Italian battleship, British cruiser or American merchant ship felt at the sight of German missiles might not differ from what a U.S. destroyer or carrier crew might feel while being targeted by Chinese ballistic missiles.

You can follow Michael Peck on Twitter at @Mipeck1 or on Facebook.

This article first appeared at War is Boring in 2014.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

U.S. Military, Asia

For the foreseeable future, the United States and China are locked in a security competition. 

Here's What You Need to Know: Land-based missile batteries can threaten ships dozens or even hundreds of miles away.

(This article first appeared in 2018.)

On July 12, 2018, the USS Racine met her grisly fate.

The 522-foot long tank landing ship was struck by four different types of guided missiles, one of which triggered a massive explosion that sent shards of debris spraying across the sea and ripped open part of her hull, exposing the inner decks. Finally, a Mark 48 torpedo struck the forty-six-year-old vessel beneath the waterline and nearly snapped off her bow. An hour later, the five-thousand-ton ship sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean fifty-five miles north of Hawaii.

At least four different military services participated in the Racine’s ritual sacrifice on the altar of the Pacific Rim (or RIMPAC) exercise known as SINKEX. Participants included P-8 Poseidon patrol planes of the Australian Navy, Type 12 surface-to-surface missile batteries of the Japanese Self Defense Ground Force, the U.S. Navy Los Angeles-class submarine Olympia, and artillerymen and helicopter pilots from the U.S. Army.

Yes, you read that last part right.

An Army AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopter flew within range using a remote-controlled MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone (a unique capability of the Guardian), located the Racine and shared targeting data across Link 16 datalinks to two artillery units.

One battery fired Norwegian-built Naval Strike Missiles from a Palletized Loading System 10x10 truck sixty-three miles away. The ship was attacked by six rockets from a HIMARS multiple-rocket system of the 17th Field Artillery Brigade on Kauai, Hawaii. You can see the missile launches and the destruction of the Racine in this video.

But why on earth is the land warfare branch practicing sinking ships?

Pacific War Redux

The United States and China are locked in a security competition for the foreseeable future, so the Pentagon is re-gearing for great-power conflict—and deploying a slew of new buzzwords to explain how it will go about it.

Beijing claims huge swathes of the South China Sea as territorial waters, and is establishing a network of military bases with friendly governments to envelope potential rivals such as India and Australia. Therefore, a U.S.-China clash would likely concern ships, missiles and airplanes, and perhaps a side order of special and amphibious forces—and not so much tank and mechanized infantry brigades. After all, per the famous quote, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

So the Army is looking to remain relevant through a doctrine called Multi-Domain Battle which see integrating Army operations with the Navy and Air Force in air, sea and cyber domains.

Regarding artillery, some see potential in a modern incarnation of the defunct the Coast Artillery Corps, which protected U.S. bases and harbors from attack with large guns. It was finally disbanded in 1950 as technological advances rendered fixed, short-range coastal defenses obsolete.

Today, land-based missile batteries can threaten ships dozens or even hundreds of miles away. However, unlike Japan or Sweden, the United States is unlikely to have hostile surface warships operating within range of its coastline. However, some theorists propose the Pentagon could forward deploy a sort of “expeditionary coast artillery” force to island flashpoints in the Pacific.

This would be borrowing a page from Beijing’s playbook. The PLA Navy has built a web of small military bases on tiny disputed islands in the contested waters of the South China Sea—or even on artificial islands built with dredged up soil. These bases are hosting anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile batteries that could theoretically threaten large “bubbles” of territory around them—a strategy known as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD). Thus the Marine Corps already has a concept for countering these bases with its own Expeditionary Advance Bases on islands of the Western Pacific.

HIMARS to the Rescue?

The Army’s multiple-rocket launchers were originally intended to unleash extraordinarily deadly and indiscriminate barrages over a large area using cluster munitions. However, recently the Marine Corps and Army have begun launching individual M31 GPS-guided rockets that offer similar precisions to a guided missile.

The platform of choice for recent operations in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq has been the lighter, air-transportable M142 HIMARS truck-based system, which weighs twelve tons and can carry six standard 227-millimeter rockets or a single larger ATACMS missile, which can hit targets up to 190 miles away.

Such munitions may be accurate enough to potentially hit a ship, as the SINKEX exercise highlighted, but GPS-guidance alone will not suffice to hit a moving target, so the rockets may require upgrading with a seeker or use of laser guidance by a third party. Indeed, there are some doubts as to whether HIMARS at RIMPAC actually demonstrated the range and accuracy to hit the Racine. The Army is reportedly seeking upgraded ATACMS missiles with seekers to hit moving targets.

Not only could HIMARS be deployed to island bases, they could even be fired off the decks of Navy ships. HIMARS from the 11th Marine Regiment tested this concept in the 2017 Dawn Blitz exercise, (you can see the launch in this video) shooting M31rockets to strike a target forty-three miles away from the deck of the USS Anchorage, a Landing Platform Dock. This capability is particularly intriguing because many LPDs entirely lack missiles to engage surface targets themselves.

While this capability is primarily intended for bombardment of shore targets, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller spoke of his interest in outfitting leathernecks with anti-ship missiles in 2016.

This initiative is encouraged by the Marine’s experience of the Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II. The day after the 1st Marine Division landed on the Solomon Islands in August 1942, the Navy covering force suffered a devastating defeat in the Battle of Savo Island and was forced to withdraw. The disembarked Marines were left exposed for weeks without their naval support, their base at Henderson Field subject to nightly bombardments by Japanese battleships.

The Marines plan for their anti-ship weapons to be integrated with the Navy’s air and surface assets via a new technology called “Cooperative Engagement.” Thus, Marine missiles—both on and off ships—could contribute to the Navy’s new “distributed lethality” doctrine of networking sensor data together while spreading out firepower across more platforms.

Deadly Cargo Palettes

Several years ago, Russia demonstrated how it could use cargo containers as launch pads for Klub cruise missiles. This would make the weapon easy to transport—or even employ from a ship—while concealing it from detection and pre-emptive strikes.

The United States has seized on the idea with its “palettized” missile-launch container, which could also be fired from a ship—or even plopped down onto a proposed floating platform.

In the SINKEX exercise, the Army demonstrated the system using newly acquired Naval Strike Missiles. The subsonic cruise missiles can skim low over the sea or terrain to hit sea or land targets up to 115 miles away, combining a GPS and an infrared-seekers for guidance.

This kind of improvised solution using available technology seems preferable to the Pentagon’s notorious predilection for overly-tailored and expensive solutions to capability gaps. The affordable NSM currently seems to be the munition of choice, the Army and Marines may also be interested in adapting the higher-capability LR-ASM, or upgraded versions of the older Tomahawk or Harpoon

The deployment of the AH-64E Guardian at RIMPAC also highlighted the use of aviation assets in non-traditional maritime roles. The Army has already experimented with using ship-deployed Apaches in a naval strike role, though longer-term sea deployment would likely require ruggedizing the choppers. Even the Air Force has tested deploying assets such as B-52 bombers and A-10 Thunderbolts in maritime patrol and naval strike roles, despite these being designed for very different missions.

Thus, the Army and Marine Corps’s growing anti-ship capabilities show a willingness to adapt weapons systems originally designed for a Cold War slugfest in twentieth-century Europe to meet the changing security environment of the Pacific in the twenty-first century.

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

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Jonathan Valdes Montijo

Sebastien Roblin

Pearl Harbor, Americas

Unlike the aerial attack, the submarine attack failed spectacularly. 

Here's What You Need to Know: An hour before the air attack, a squadron of tiny Japanese midget submarines attempted to slip into Pearl Harbor's defenses.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy rained devastation upon the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. But Japanese warplanes didn’t actually fire the first shots that brought America into a massive Pacific War.

An hour before the air attack, a squadron of tiny Japanese midget submarines attempted to slip into the harbor’s defenses, like burglars in the night, to wreak havoc on Battleship Row. Unlike the aerial assault, the sailors failed spectacularly — and the story is often forgotten.

By the 1930s, Imperial Japan and the United States were set on a collision course. Tokyo’s decision to invade China in 1931 and intensify their brutal campaign six years had provoked ultimately irrevocable tensions.

The United States responded to the incursion into China with increasing sanctions, culminating with an embargo on petroleum in July 1941 that crippled the Japan’s economy. Japanese military leaders had wanted to capture the Dutch East Indies to secure its oil wealth, but knew it would trigger war with the Unites States.

While U.S.-Japanese negotiations came within striking distance of a peace agreement, Roosevelt was a hard bargainer, demanding Japan’s leaders order a complete withdrawal from China. They refused.

Thus, Japanese Adm. Yamamoto began planning for a “short victorious war.” The key to this idea was knocking out the battleships of the U.S. Pacific fleet at their home base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to buy the Japanese Army time to complete the conquest of the Western Pacific.

Along with a massive air strike from a Japanese carrier task force would constitute the main attack, the Navy coordinated the undersea assault using midget submarines.

During World War II, Japan, England, Italy and Germany all employed midget submarines to stealthily infiltrate shallow, defended harbors and attack vulnerable capital ships. The Japanese Navy’s midget submarines had hidden their developments by calling the ships Type A Kō-hyōteki , or “Target A”

Japanese officials hoped the designation would deceive foreign analysts into believing the 78-feet long submarines were actually mock ships for naval gunnery practice. In reality, each of the 46-ton subs had a crew of two and was armed with two 450-millimeter Type 97 torpedoes with 800 pound warheads.

The little submarines could sprint up to 26 miles per hour submerged, but could not dive deeper than 100 meters. More importantly, the Type As had no engine and ran purely on batteries.

This gave the diminutive vessels a maximum endurance of 12 hours at speeds of 6 miles per hour. The subs often ran out of power much faster in real combat.

As a result, a larger submarine mothership had to bring the Type As close to the target area. Even so, the battery limitations made it unlikely the midget sub could make it back to safety. Each one had a 300-pound scuttling charge as a self-destruct device.

Just getting to the designation was difficult enough. Since the small boats were difficult to control even while swimming in a straight line, crews had to manually move lead weights backwards and forwards to stabilize the vessel.

With these obvious issues, on Oct. 19, 1941, the Japanese Navy began modifying five Type A subs with improved pneumatic steering devices, as well as net-cutters and guards for fending off anti-submarine nets. Workers at the Kure Naval District painted over the submarine’s running lights to help hide them from enemy spotters.

Afterwards the midgets went to the Kamegakubi Naval Proving Ground and crews loaded them onto the backs of five large Type C-1 submarines, the I-16, I-18, I-20, I-22 and I-24. On Nov. 25, 1941, The motherships set sail for Pearl Harbor.

While on route, the so-called “Special Attack Unit” received the coded message “Climb Mount Niitaka 1208.” This meant authorities in Tokyo had not found a diplomatic solution and signaled the go-ahead for the Pearl Harbor attack.

On Dec. 6, 1941, the C-1s swam to points within 12 miles of Pearl Harbor. Then, between the hours of midnight and 3:30 A.M. the next day, the ships released their deadly payloads.

For the crews, getting inside Pearl Harbor posed a serious challenge. Ships could only enter the port through a 65 foot-deep channel guarded by an anti-submarine net 35 feet deep.

Boats on either side of the nets tugged them apart to allow friendly boats to pass through. On top of that, American destroyers prowled in a five mile arc around the harbor entrance, assisted by watchful eyes on orbiting PBY Catalina maritime patrol planes.

On paper, the Japanese intended for the submarine attack to work as well-planned heist. The midget subs would sneak in by following American ships passing through openings in the anti-submarine net.

Then the subs would lay low until the air attack sowed chaos throughout the harbor, at which point they would unleash their torpedoes at any American battleships that survived the bombing. Afterwards, the midget subs would slip away to Hawaii’s Lanai Island.

The submarines I-68 and I-69 would wait no more than 24 hours to pick up any surviving crew. The Japanese did not plan to recover the Type As themselves.

If everything worked out right, American officials would only receive the Japanese declaration of hostilities mere moments before the attack commenced. However, things didn’t go according to plan.

Just before 4:00 A.M., the minesweeper USS Condor spotted the periscope of the midget submarine Ha-20 and called over the destroyer USS Ward to search the area.

Just over an hour and a half later, crew aboard the Ward spotted a periscope in the wake of the cargo ship Antares as it passed through the anti-submarines nets. While a PBY Catalina patrol plane dropped smoke markers near the sub’s position, the Ward charged the sub.

Gunners fired two shots from the ship’s 4-inch main gun at less than 100 meters and followed up with four depth charges. The Type A vanished into the water.

For the crews, getting inside Pearl Harbor posed a serious challenge. Ships could only enter the port through a 65 foot-deep channel guarded by an anti-submarine net 35 feet deep.

Boats on either side of the nets tugged them apart to allow friendly boats to pass through. On top of that, American destroyers prowled in a five mile arc around the harbor entrance, assisted by watchful eyes on orbiting PBY Catalina maritime patrol planes.

On paper, the Japanese intended for the submarine attack to work as well-planned heist. The midget subs would sneak in by following American ships passing through openings in the anti-submarine net.

Then the subs would lay low until the air attack sowed chaos throughout the harbor, at which point they would unleash their torpedoes at any American battleships that survived the bombing. Afterwards, the midget subs would slip away to Hawaii’s Lanai Island.

The submarines I-68 and I-69 would wait no more than 24 hours to pick up any surviving crew. The Japanese did not plan to recover the Type As themselves.

If everything worked out right, American officials would only receive the Japanese declaration of hostilities mere moments before the attack commenced. However, things didn’t go according to plan.

Just before 4:00 A.M., the minesweeper USS Condor spotted the periscope of the midget submarine Ha-20 and called over the destroyer USS Ward to search the area.

Just over an hour and a half later, the crew aboard the Ward spotted a periscope in the wake of the cargo ship Antares as it passed through the anti-submarines nets. While a PBY Catalina patrol plane dropped smoke markers near the sub’s position, the Ward charged the sub.

Gunners fired two shots from the ship’s 4-inch main gun at less than 100 meters and followed up with four depth charges. The Type A vanished into the water.

Taking on seawater caused the batteries to spew out deadly chlorine gas. A depth charge attack finally knocked out the periscope and disabled the midget submarine’s remaining undamaged torpedo.

Sakamaki decided to try and sail their stricken craft back to the mothership. He and Inagaki passed out as the choking gasses filling the inside of their ship.

The two managed to regain consciousness in the evening and decided to ground their sub near the town of Waimānalo to the east. However, they crashed on yet another reef.

A patrolling PBY bomber dropped depth charges on the crippled submarine. Sakamaki decided to abandon ship and attempted to detonate the scuttling charge — but even the ship’s self-destruct device failed to work.

Sakamaki succeeded in swimming ashore and promptly fell unconscious. His crewmate drowned.

The following morning, Hawaiian soldier David Akui captured a Japanese sailor. The first Japanese prisoner of war of World War II, Sakamaki refused to cooperate during his interrogation, requesting that he be executed or allowed to commit suicide.

The Japanese military became aware of his capture but officially claimed that all of the submarine crews had been lost in action. A memorial to the Special Attack Unit omitted his name.

The crew of Ha-18 abandoned ship without firing either of their torpedoes after falling victim to a depth charge attack. Nineteen years later, the U.S. Navy recovered the sub from the floor of Hawaii’s Keehi Lagoon and ultimately shipped it off for display at the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima.

The fate of the fifth submarine, Ha-16, remains controversial. At 10:40 P.M., the crew of the I-16 intercepted a radio message that appeared to repeat the word “Success!” A few hours later, they received a second transmission: “Unable to navigate.”

The belief was that Ha-16 transmitted these alerts. In 2009, a Novadocumentary crew identified three parts of the midget submarine in a navy salvage pile off of West Loch, Hawaii.

A popular belief is that Ha-16 successfully entered the harbor and fired off its torpedoes. Then the crew slipped out and scuttled the sub off of West Loch island before perishing of unknown causes.

U.S. Navy salvage teams probably later scooped up the sub amidst the wreckage of six landing craft destroyed in the West Loch disaster of 1944. They then proceeded to dump the whole pile of debris further out at sea.

That no one ever found the Ha-16’s torpedoes gave rise to the theory that the midget submarine might have successfully torpedoed the battleship USS Oklahoma. The USS West Virginia was another possible target.

A photo taken from an attacking Japanese torpedo bomber at 8:00 A.M., which appears to show torpedo trails lancing towards Oklahoma without a corresponding splash from an air-dropped weapon added more weight to the idea. In addition, the damage to the Oklahoma, and the fact that it capsized, suggested to some it was struck by a tiny sub’s heavier torpedoes.

However, this theory is dubious. The Oklahoma capsized because all the hatches were open for an inspection at the time of the attack. The heavy damage can be explained by the more than a half-dozen air-dropped torpedoes that hit the ship.

It is more likely Ha-16 launched the torpedoes at another vessel. At 10:04 A.M., the light cruiser USS St. Louis reported it had taken fire from a submarine, but both torpedoes missed.

In the end, the air attack accomplished what the midget submarines could not. Japan’s naval aviators sank three U.S. battleships, crippling another five, blasted 188 U.S. warplanes — most sitting on the ground — and killed 2,403 American service members.

Unfortunately for officials in Tokyo, the Japanese Navy had struck a powerful blow, but not a crippling one. The bombardment failed to hit the repair facilities and fuel depots, which allowed the U.S. Pacific fleet to get back on its feet relatively quickly.

Just as importantly, not a single U.S. aircraft carrier was in Pearl Harbor at the time. The flattops would swiftly prove their dominance over battleships in the coming Pacific War.

Despite the debacle, the Japanese Navy continued sending Kō-hyōteki into combat. As at Pearl Harbor, the submariners in their tiny ships had very limited successes in operations from Australia to Alaska to Madagascar.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring.

Image: Creative Commons "Pearl Harbor" by The U.S. Army is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Doug Bandow

North Korea,

If it is inconceivable that Kim is prepared to give up all his nukes, why continue demanding that he do so?

Sydney Seiler, a national intelligence officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, believes that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons. Its objective, he observed, is to gain acceptance as a nuclear state.

He seemed almost irritated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) saying it, “simply squandered away an opportunity to move forward with it, with the United States in a better relationship.” Despite Washington’s best efforts, Seiler complained, “We have made clear in all of our negotiations—what it is we expect from the North ... and what benefits would accrue to the DPRK.” Alas, “until now, the regime just has simply not wanted to take these exit ramps.” Indeed, in Seiler’s view at the failed Hanoi summit “once again, North Korea was unwilling to go down the credible path of denuclearization.”

However, Pyongyang isn’t acting irrationally. The greatest, if inadvertent, advocates of nonproliferation are the existing nuclear powers which have shown no inclination to yield their own nukes. India, Israel, and Pakistan all acquired nuclear weapons against Washington’s wishes.

Nuclear weapons have turned the DPRK into a global player of sorts. They offer prestige and the potential for extortion. More fundamentally, they are, Seiler allowed, “a capability that's designed to ensure the survival of the Kim regime. It's not necessarily good for the nation state but it's not meant to be. It's meant to pursue this―to protect the system and protect the regime.”

If this is the case, the odds of convincing the North to abandon its nuclear program are minimal. There is no more powerful impulse than self-preservation. Since dictators see themselves and, in the case of North Korea, the ruling dynasty, as synonymous with the nation, yielding a weapon necessary for self-preservation is tantamount to suicide.

Which necessarily raises doubts about the viability of a strategy based on denuclearization. If it is inconceivable that Kim is prepared to give up all his nukes, why continue demanding that he do so?

Still, Seiler rejected accepting the North as a nuclear power. He explained: “It is the abandonment of an ally with the Republic of Korea (ROK). It is a proclamation that we have given up on our global nonproliferation principles. It is a signal to other aspirants who are thinking―‘Should we or shouldn't we?’―that they can get away with it.”

None of these are persuasive reasons, however. The alliance with the ROK doesn’t require eliminating North Korean nuclear weapons, even though they greatly complicate the security relationship. Particularly ominous are estimates that within just a few years the North could have 200 nuclear weapons. However, not doing the impossible—ridding the DPRK of its nuclear weapons—does not constitute “abandonment.”

Nor does accepting the inevitable mean dropping nonproliferation as a priority. In regards to the latter, the U.S. already has done so. Washington opposed the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Israel but then responded with private acceptance, applying no punitive penalties once Israel acquired its arsenal. Today Washington never raises the issue, simply ignoring the embarrassing fact. And if the issue was officially raised, the Israeli embassy could host a celebratory party and most members of Congress would show up.

Washington took a less friendly stance toward India and Pakistan, but sanctions were a complete bust. The imperatives of confronting each other and China created enormous pressure on both to become nuclear powers. The U.S. eventually accepted their status, particularly that of India. Nonproliferation concerns fell by the geopolitical wayside, since treating New Delhi as an enemy would drive away an important counterweight to China without causing India to yield its nuclear weapons.

As for signaling other nuclear aspirants, Washington already has done so in two important ways. The first, as noted earlier, is accepting India, Israel, and Pakistan as nuclear powers. America has abandoned its principled nonproliferation policy which cannot be reclaimed.

The second, and equally important, factor was turning nuclear weapons into an essential deterrent for weaker states. Once American officials decided that they had been anointed by providence to run the world, they sent a message that the world was divided in two: countries that bombed other states, and countries that got bombed.

That played out in practice in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, the Balkans, Libya, and more. However, Washington treated nuclear powers with much greater respect. As in, the U.S. did not attack them. The Libyan lesson was particularly powerful, since Muammar el -Qaddagi traded away his missile and nuclear programs for international respectability. For a time he was feted in Western capitals, but the moment he seemed vulnerable during the Arab Spring his new friends deserted him. Ultimately, he was pulled out of a storm drain in the city of Sirte and met an unpleasant end. The obvious lesson: Any dictator stupid enough to give up his nukes risked a similar fate.

Kim Jong-un evidently isn’t stupid. If there is any chance to get him to disarm, it requires convincing him that he would be safe from attack from the current and future administrations, even if an opportunity for regime change arrived. That would require more than empty words and meaningless gestures. The Singapore summit statement places the importance of a better bilateral relationship and improved regional environment before denuclearization, which North Korean officials have told me was intentional. And it makes sense though, of course, following those steps wouldn’t ensure that Pyongyang would then denuclearize.

As a matter of policy, there is no need for the Biden administration to formally and publicly acknowledge a nuclear DPRK. However, in practice Washington should accept reality and develop a policy of arms control, offering sanctions relief and other concessions to limit and, hopefully, ultimately reverse the North’s program. The final objective would be denuclearization. However, the immediate goal would be to forestall the world foreseen by  the RAND Corporation and Asan Institute for Policy Studies—North Korea as a middling nuclear state, alongside India, United Kingdom, and even China.

Insisting that an existing nuclear power cannot be a nuclear power demonstrates the otherworldly character of current U.S. policy. The Biden administration should root relations with the North to current reality. Success still might prove illusive. However, at least there would be a chance for success.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of several books, including Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World and co-author of The Korean Conundrum: America’s Troubled Relations with North and South Korea.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Coronavirus,

The World Health Organization warned it likely increases the risk of hospitalization in those infected.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that recently culled data from some countries suggest that the highly transmissible Delta variant likely increases the risk of hospitalization in those infected.

“In terms of severity, we have seen some countries suggest that there is increased risk of hospitalization for people who are infected with the Delta variant,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said during a Tuesday press briefing.

However, “we haven’t seen that translate to increased death,” she added.

Van Kerkhove noted that similar to other strains, the Delta variant is particularly dangerous for individuals who have underlying health conditions, which can include obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

“The risk factors for severe disease and death are the same,” she said. “If you have underlying conditions, no matter what age you are, you’re at an increased risk of hospitalization.”

The Delta variant, first detected by scientists in India last fall, has rapidly spread to more than one hundred forty countries so far. After being identified in the United States just a few months ago, the variant is now responsible for more than ninety percent of all sequenced cases, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated.

According to the latest data compiled by the agency, the United States is currently witnessing roughly hundred thirty thousand new cases per day, which is more than 700 percent higher compared to the beginning of July.

Booster Shots

In response to the Delta variant, top health officials in President Joe Biden’s administration are planning to announce that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster shot eight months after becoming fully vaccinated. The plan, which could be announced as soon as this week, would involve administering third shots beginning in September or October.

Earlier this week, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, indicated that new data out of Israel—which showed a reduction in the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against severe illness among seniors who were fully vaccinated in January or February—are indeed forcing health officials to rethink their position on booster shots.

“The people who got immunized in January are the ones that are now having more breakthrough cases,” Collins said during an interview on The Hugh Hewitt Show.

The latest estimates suggest that a shade over fifty percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. While vaccinations have been increasing in recent weeks, millions are still firmly opposed to getting inoculated.

300 Million Cases

Since the beginning of the pandemic a year and a half ago, more than two hundred million people worldwide have become infected. Last week, WHO officials warned that the figure could easily reach three hundred million early next year.

“Whether we reach three hundred million and how fast we get there depends on all of us,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

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

South China Sea, Asia

Beijing, for instance, has proclaimed repeatedly, loudly and stridently that it commands “indisputable sovereignty” within a nine-dash line enclosing some 80–90 percent of the South China Sea.

Here's What You Need to Know: To uphold freedom of the sea, U.S. Navy and friendly ships and planes should exercise every prerogative to which they’re entitled by the law of the sea, in every square inch of airspace and waterspace where they’re entitled to exercise it.

Weeping, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments! Those were sounds emanating from Beijing following the July 2016 ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

International law has a way of accommodating realities of power—of deferring to the strong. Kudos go to the jurists, consequently, for speaking truth to power—for upholding the plain meaning of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) rather than softening their findings or declining to rule on the most contentious matters in hopes of fostering amity with China. John F. Kennedy would award them a profile in courage.

Beijing, for instance, has proclaimed repeatedly, loudly and stridently that it commands “indisputable sovereignty” within a nine-dash line enclosing some 80–90 percent of the South China Sea. That includes exclusive economic zones (EEZs) apportioned to coastal states such as the Philippines, the claimant that brought its case before the UNCLOS tribunal. Indisputable sovereignty is a sea grab.

And a land grab, even if much of the land is watery. At issue is Scarborough Shoal; the shoal is a submerged reef deep within the Philippines’ EEZ, extending two hundred nautical miles offshore and grants the coastal state exclusive rights to tap natural resources in those waters and the seafloor beneath. China’s coast guard and navy shut their Philippine counterparts out of the waters at Scarborough Shoal—that is, out of waters allocated to Manila by treaty—in 2012.

The tribunal rejected not just China’s claims to the waters adjoining Scarborough Shoal; it rejected the nine-dashed line as a whole. Beijing has claimed sovereignty—physical control upheld by a monopoly of force—within that expanse based on “historic rights”. In other words, officialdom contends that since Chinese fishermen worked those waters for centuries, they and the geographic features within belong to China.

Not so, say the UN judges. They point out that fishermen from other Southeast Asian countries plied their trade in the same waters. But even if historic rights once commanded some validity, they note, UNCLOS—to which China is a party, and to which it consented—supersedes any such claims. The Philippine exclusive economic zone, then, belongs to the Philippines.

And so it went. The UNCLOS tribunal also held that no island, atoll or reef in the Spratly Islands is entitled to an EEZ. The treaty text sets criteria for judging a feature’s legal status: if it can sustain human habitation or economic life from its innate resources, it qualifies as an island encircled by an exclusive economic zone.

The judges administered a mild shock. Commentators, including yours truly, have generally interpreted the convention’s requirements to mean that an island with its own freshwater supply qualifies as an island. The jurists demurred, pointing out that no one has ever inhabited the Spratly Islands except in transient fashion. Still less has China ever exercised exclusive control over South China Sea waters. Heck, the decision even downgraded Taiwan’s Itu Aba (Taiping) Island, the largest of the Spratly Islands and a feature boasting fresh water of its own.

The tribunal, furthermore, took Beijing to task for its island-building project. Manila maintained that Chinese engineers were unlawfully erecting artificial islands within the Philippine EEZ. UNCLOS allows coastal states to build artificial islands within their own EEZs, but not those belonging to others. The judges agreed. They also held that China had wrought “irreparable harm” to the marine environment while excavating the seafloor to expand rocks or reefs into islands capable of supporting airfields, piers and other infrastructure.

China “destroyed evidence” of these features’ natural and thus legal status to boot. That’s doubtless a feature—not a bug—in the process from Beijing’s standpoint. Tampering with evidence is no big deal for an offender willing to flout the law. In short, very little didn’t go the Philippines’ way in the proceedings. It was a win-win day for Manila, to borrow the hackneyed business jargon whereby Chinese interlocutors seem so bewitched.

Which leaves the question: what next? First of all, it’s plain that this is not over. Americans are accustomed to an orderly legal process. A court hands down its judgment, the authorities execute it, and that’s that. Not so in this case.

The UNCLOS tribunal ruling constitutes one more milestone in an unfolding strategic competition between China and rival claimants such as the Philippines and Vietnam, the latter backed by the United States and, with luck, by other friendly powers such as Australia and Japan. Let’s take our victory lap today—and don our game faces tomorrow. In all likelihood this will be a long, trying contest.

Second, Chinese interlocutors are fond of invoking American history, in hopes of finding some historical precedent that will disarm U.S. officialdom in interactions on quarrelsome matters. The Monroe Doctrine often comes up, and some Westerners are taken in by the analogy. So do the Cuban Missile Crisis and other past controversies.

Here’s one I’ve never seen invoked, but one that might discomfit Beijing: Andrew Jackson. As a fellow son of Tennessee, I’ve never been able to summon up much enthusiasm for “Old Hickory”. President Jackson’s cavalier disregard of the law is mainly why. After the U.S. Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice John Marshall found—in Worcester v. Georgia (1832)—that Georgia laws authorizing the seizure of Cherokee lands breached federal treaties with the Cherokee nation, Jackson reputedly replied: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

The shade of Old Hickory evidently dwells in Beijing, which has declared that it will ignore the UNCLOS ruling despite having acceded to UNCLOS. Sucks to be you if you’re Filipino—or Cherokee.

And, like the U.S. Supreme Court, the UNCLOS tribunal has no force at its disposal—no navy or coast guard—to dispatch to the scene to enforce its decision. Another eminent American statesman, Theodore Roosevelt held forth a century after Jackson’s day on behalf of an international court wielding the sanction of physical force. A century later, Roosevelt’s vision has borne little fruit.

To be sure, the UN Security Council could authorize enforcement of the UNCLOS tribunal’s decision, except Security Council resolutions demand the concurrence of all five permanent members . . . including China. So much for UN enforcement action.

Short of UN action, seafaring powers will have to band together to oppose Chinese overreach. And the United States cannot do it all alone. If Asian and extraregional powers care enough about freedom of the sea to mount a sustained effort to defend it, the resulting maritime consortium could deter China. If the seagoing community proves apathetic, on the other hand, China could prevail by default—and do serious damage both to Asian interests and to the liberal system of nautical trade and commerce.

Third, China is politically and strategically predictable but tactically unpredictable. Politically and strategically predictable because the leadership has gone on record, again and again, proclaiming that the UNCLOS tribunal has no standing to judge what Beijing sees as rights dating from remote antiquity. The leadership can hardly back down now for fear of being hoist by the standard it has set—that it’s the protector of historic rights that amount to a birthright.

Tactics are another matter. Chinese strategic traditions hold that there can never be enough deception in diplomacy and warfare. Roughly speaking, Beijing has a few options. It can comply with the UN ruling. That’s a nonstarter.

It can ignore the ruling, let the furor subside, and, assuming it does, get back to business as usual. A quiet, temporary tactical withdrawal would suit China’s purposes while costing the leadership little in political terms. Afterward China could resume its “small-stick diplomacy,” relying chiefly on law-enforcement ships and aircraft to get its way vis-à-vis lesser contenders while backing its “white hulls” up with naval, air and missile forces.

Or Beijing could escalate. It could do the usual things commentators speculate about. It could declare an air-defense identification zone, possibly corresponding to the zone within the nine-dashed line. Over time, enforcing such a zone could help consolidate its claim to indisputable sovereignty.

It could start island-building at Scarborough Shoal—much as it did at Mischief Reef starting in quieter times twenty years ago. If no one opposed its efforts effectively, China would have effectively hollowed out the law of the sea in Southeast Asia, and in highly public fashion. American sea power would have been proved impotent.

It could shift the scene of conflict to the East China Sea, where Chinese ships and aircraft wrangle with their Japanese counterparts around the Senkaku Islands. That would stretch the allies in an effort to cover all bases.

Or China could do something altogether unexpected. It excels at that.

What should contenders not named China do? Rival Southeast Asian claimants—Vietnam, Indonesia and so forth—should take heart from the Philippine example and file their own cases with the tribunal. One doubts Beijing will refuse to take part in future proceedings, considering how this one went. At a minimum, findings from the tribunal would amplify their legal and moral standing in the disputes.

And the United States? Over the past year or so, U.S. mariners and legal scholars have gone the rounds over the intricacies of freedom of the sea, including “innocent passage” through China’s “territorial sea”, that twelve-nautical-mile belt of sea that adjoins the mainland, islands that qualify as islands under the law of the sea, and rocks that are above sea level at all times.

Here’s an idea: as a guide to action, let’s jettison the adjective “innocent” in favor of “indecent”. Innocent passage seldom offends those who need to be offended. It does little for freedom of the sea, except in the trivial case when the coastal state imposes some extra burden on freedom of navigation—such as demanding advance notice from vessels before they cross through the territorial sea. Innocent passage deflates minor excesses at best.

Think bigger. Indecent passage would mean challenging every Chinese overreach, early and often. Its goal would be to prevent Beijing from abridging any maritime freedom guaranteed by treaty or customary international law. In the case of the Scarborough Shoals of the world, it would mean keeping China from changing the legal status of a maritime feature merely by altering its physical conformation—by piling sand on an atoll or submerged rock.

Mother Nature made Scarborough Shoal an undersea reef. It remains an undersea reef in the eyes of international law, entitled to no exclusive economic zone or territorial sea. Conveying that message is the point. So, even if China constructs an island on Scarborough Shoal, complete with runways or piers, American and allied strategy must insist that it’s entitled to zero control of the air and seas over or around it. Nada.

To uphold freedom of the sea, U.S. Navy and friendly ships and planes should exercise every prerogative to which they’re entitled by the law of the sea, in every square inch of airspace and waterspace where they’re entitled to exercise it. Airmen should conduct surveillance flights in immediate proximity to Scarborough Shoal and other contested features. Ships can lawfully conduct flight operations, underwater surveys and the like—check UNCLOS. They can loiter or even anchor there.

They should. Be indecent—and confound the lawless.

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

This article first appeared in July 2016.

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

Submarines, World

The U.S. Navy's Orca Robot Submarines could transform Naval Warfare. 

Here's What You Need to Know: Of course a manned, nuclear-powered attack submarine is overall more capable, has more context-sensitive human brains helming it, and can perform missions like deploying special operations forces that a drone submarine cannot. But for very dangerous—or even very lengthy and boring missions—drone submarines could prove an attractive alternative. 

At a military parade celebrating its 70th anniversary, the People’s Republic of China unveiled, amongst many other exotic weapons, two HSU-001 submarines—the world’s first large diameter autonomous submarines to enter military service.

The unarmed robot submarines visibly had communication masts and sonar aperture suggestive of their intended role as tireless underwater surveillance systems intended to report on the movements of warships and submarines of other navies in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

While the United States may not be the first to operationally drone a Large Diameter Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (LDUUV), it is not far behind with a slightly smaller sub Extra Large UUV. In February 2019, the Navy awarded Boeing a $274.4 million contract to build four (later increased to five) Orca autonomous vehicles, beating out a more elongated and cylindrical design proposed by Lockheed Martin. 

And the publicly available details on the Orca suggest it could prove a highly-capable platform that—unusually for new weapons technologies—is surprisingly cheap.

Meet the Echo Voyager

There aren’t too many specifications available on the Orca, but that’s not the case for the craft the Orca is derived from—Boeing’s Echo Voyager, which began testing in 2017. The Orca, like Voyager, will remain small enough to lower into the water at a pier, rather than requiring maintenance and replenishment in the water. 

The 50-ton Voyager was developed by Boeing’s PhantomWorks division, which is devoted to advanced new technologies, succeeding a series of smaller Echo Seeker and Echo Ranger UUVs. The 15.5-meter long Echo Voyager has a range of nearly 7,500 miles. It has also deployed at sea up to three months in a test, and theoretically could last as long as six months.

Supposedly, Voyager also can dive as deep as 3,350 meters—while few military submarines are (officially) certified for dives below 500 meters. 

On the other hand, Echo Voyager is no speedster with a maximum speed of 9 miles per hour, and a sustainable cruising speed of just 3 mph. It relies on a diesel-electric propulsion system. That means when the submarine begins to exhaust its lithium-ion batteries—which should occur roughly every two days at cruising speed—it rises near the surface and raises a snorkel to suck in air which can then be consumed by a diesel engine which recharges the batteries, drawing from a 1,000-gallon fuel supply.

For navigation, Voyager relies primarily on depth sensors and gyrometric inertial navigation system. However, when near the surface it can also raise a satellite mast to acquire more precise GPS coordinates.

Concept images of the Orca itself reveal that it appears very similar to Voyager except that it has a shrouded pump jet propulsor rather than a Voyager’s conventional propeller. That suggests the Orca will be quieter and possibly faster than its progenitor.

Underwater Killer Robots

Before the Navy began work on developing operational capabilities, it wanted its prototype to have achieved certain baseline characteristics: long endurance and power management, navigation and sensors for situational awareness, payload capacity, and above all, autonomy.

You’ve probably seen earlier remote-controlled scientific UUVs while watching marine life documentaries. But such unmanned vehicles needed to remain tethered to a ship on the surface so to maintain their control link and transmit video feeds back to their operators.

Unlike the Predator and Reaper drones, the long-range Orca submarine would by necessity be a truly autonomous system, meaning that while it would follow certain pre-programmed instructions, its artificial intelligence would be actively making decisions without human input. 

That’s by necessity, as it’s very difficult to maintain quality communications links through water. The Orcas may be programmed to rise close to the surface—either periodically or in response to certain trigger-conditions—to transmit updates, and receive new instructions from home base. But it couldn’t do that very long, or too frequently, if it wanted to remain undetected.

That means the Orca would have to be programmed to make its own decisions. Some of those decisions might be as innocuous (and necessary) as maneuvering to avoid collision with a ships or the sea floor. 

But for a combat-equipped Orca, those decisions would be as momentous as attempting to identify whether a sonar contact is friendly or hostile, and whether to engage it with weapons.

Still drone submarines are far from exhibiting the performance to “chase” enemy vessels—but they could conceivably be discretely prepositioned to ambush hostile ships and submarines.

A Submarine Drone for All Seasons

The Orca is meant to be a modular vehicle with capability-sets plugged into it according to operational needs.

A developmental planning chart from a Navy presentation reveals an extremely ambitious vision for the Navy’s new XLUUV. Initially, it is intended to integrate surveillance sensors and mine-laying capability—and foremost be used as a test bed to develop a Concept of Operations of how to routinely operate drone submarines.

But in later phases, the Orca XLUUV could evolve to carry mine-clearing devices, surveillance sensors, and even electronic warfare systems that track and disrupt enemy sensors and communications—though that would likely require operating close to the surface. 

Furthermore, it could acquire sensors and armament to perform anti-submarine, surface warfare (hunting enemy warships), and surface strike (presumably launching cruise missiles at land targets) missions.

Submarine expert H.I. Sutton wrote on his website that the Navy’s future combat XLUUVs may feature “up to twelve heavyweight [533-millimeter] tubes,” based on a Navy presentation appearing to show belly-mounted by with twelve downward-firing tubes. The Orca may also be able to mount weapons or support systems externally.

Sutton also speculates U.S. XLUUVs might have a role hunting down Russia’s forthcoming Poseidon intercontinental nuclear torpedoes—which could prove too fast and/or deep diving to easily intercept with manned submarines.

Whither the Manned Submarine?

The Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines cost $2 to 2.4 billion—and the Navy’s successor to the Virginia will surely cost even more. The basic Orca is said to cost $43 million, though its price would surely rise substantially if outfitted with sensors and weapons.

Still, the Navy could theoretically procure many armed Orcas for the price of a single Virginia. And then it wouldn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to train and sustain large crews to operate onboard those Orcas.

Of course a manned, nuclear-powered attack submarine is overall more capable (faster, stealthier due to not having to recharge batteries, can carry more weapons, etc.), has more context-sensitive human brains helming it, and can perform missions like deploying special operations forces that a drone submarine cannot.

But for very dangerous—or even very lengthy and boring missions—drone submarines could prove an attractive alternative. 

The Orca isn’t the only robot submarine in the work. A “fatter” Large Diameter UUV like the Chinese HSU-001, designed to be launched from surface warships or Virginia-class submarines, is also under development. The LDUUV would surveil and possibly hunt enemy forces within a closer radius to its mothership.

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 October 2019.

Image: Boeing Co.