Diplomacy & Crisis News

Mark Episkopos

Russian Navy, Europe

Initially projected to rejoin the Navy in 2018, the Nakhimov’s handoff was subsequently postponed to 2022. Now its been pushed back even more.

The post-refit handover of Russia’s Admiral Nakhimov battlecruiser has reportedly been postponed.

A defense industry source told Russian news outlet TASS earlier this week that the delivery of Admiral Nakhimov has been pushed back “due to problems with suppliers.” The source did not give a concrete timeline, but told TASS that the handover is “postponed until 2023 at best.”

One of the largest and heaviest surface combatant ships in the world, the Kirov-class nuclear-powered battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov was commissioned in 1988 under a different name: Kalinin. The Kirov class has its roots in a prominent strain of Soviet 1970’s military thinking. Initially conceived as a battlecruiser— that is, a lighter and faster variant of battleship— to counter the U.S. navy’s latest submarines with its large payload of SS-N-14 anti-submarine missiles, the Kirov line grew into another, no less important role: namely, containing the threat from U.S. carrier strike groups (CSG’s). Armed with twenty onboard P-700 Granit anti-ship missiles, Kirov-class vessels were meant to threaten U.S. aircraft carriers and other large surface ships. There was yet another, broader strategic goal: Kirov-class battlecruisers were intended to operate alongside a class of dedicated modern aircraft carriers, heralding a new era of Soviet global power projection.

The grand strategic visions driving the Kirov-class project collapsed alongside the Soviet Union. The ill-fated Admiral Kuznetsov became the only carrier of its line, and is now undergoing major repairs following a series of catastrophic incidents including an onboard fire and collapsed drydock. Meanwhile, the four Kirov-class cruisers—Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Kalinin, and Petr Velikiy— fell into disrepair over the 1990s. Two of these, Petr Velikiy and Kalinin, were deemed to be in a salvageable state. Kalinin was renamed to Admiral Nakhimov in 1992, and has been docked since 1999. Modernization work on Nakhimov began in earnest only in 2013. As part of its deep refit, Admiral Nakhimov will be upgraded to carry 3M22 Tsirkon winged, anti-ship hypersonic cruise missiles, Kalibr cruise missiles, and Otvet anti-submarine missiles, as well as the Fort-M (a naval S-300 variant) and Pantsir-M air defense systems. The Russian navy is likewise reportedly planning to outfit Admiral Nakhimov, as well as its counterpart Petr Velikiy, with a naval version of the S-400 missile system. These prodigious armament updates will be accompanied by a modernized radar and onboard electronics suite. If successful, this refit will place Admiral Nakhimov high among the ranks of Russia’s most capable large surface warships.

Initially projected to rejoin the Navy in 2018, the Nakhimov’s handoff was subsequently postponed to 2022. Sevmash CEO Mikhail Budnichenko repeated the 2022 projection at Russia’s ARMY 2020 military exhibition. That date was also reaffirmed by Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (UAC) head Alexei Rakhmanov. “We are planning to complete the ship’s repairs in 2022,” said Rakhmanov during Shipbuilders’ Day celebrations in 2020. Russian officials have not formally confirmed this latest alleged delay to 2023 or later, nor has its cause been identified as of the time of writing.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Suciu

U.S. Air Force, Americas

Rumors are often ill-founded, especially when they start to mention alleged alien technology.

Key point: The Klingons may have had their Bird of Preys and the Romulans their Warbirds, but such technology does not yet exist. So no, you won't see a B1-B bomber suddenly dissappear from sight.

Although the point of a “cloaking device”—a hypothetical technology common to science fiction—is to make something invisible to the naked eye, even in movies and TV the technology isn’t exactly perfect. Instead of making an object, such as an aircraft, completely invisible there is often a faint but still noticeable shimmer or blur. 

At least that’s how it works in Star Trek, which was the first to conceptualize the technology in its 1966 episode “Balance of Terror” where the selective bending of light made a spacecraft essentially invisible to sensors and visual detection. Yet it wasn’t until the 1968 episode of the series “The Enterprise Incident” in which the technology was actually given a name, and since then the concept of cloaking devices has been seen in countless science fiction narratives in film, TV and video games.

Recently UFO conspiracy theorists offered visual “proof” that the technology exists, which is ironic considering that a cloaked craft shouldn’t be something you’d actually see. 

Look and You Shall Find It 

The UK’s Daily Express reported last year that UFO hunters widely shared an image from Google Earth that they believed clearly showed alien technology—and possibly even an alien craft—at Dyess Air Force Base (AFB), Texas. The image has caused a stir in the UFO community, the British tabloid reported.  

Next to a parked B-1B Lancer Bomber appears a visual anomaly, which “extraterrestrial expert” Scott Waring—who first apparently discovered the image—suggested was a cloaked U.S. Air Force aircraft or perhaps even a cloaked alien spaceship. He shared the images on the UFO Sightings Daily website. 

“I was looking for UFOs and alien bases using Google Earth today and came across something that just blew me away,” he told the tabloid.  

Waring, who also claimed that he “worked” on B-1 bombers at Ellsworth Air Force Base, said he determined the blur in the image wasn’t the result of photo manipulation but was, in his opinion, a cloaked B-1 bomber. Waring added that if you rotate the map 360 degrees viewers can even see a second B-1 that is also cloaked. 

“It makes sense, you see the black paint already on the B1 is cloaking technology that absorbs radar so it won’t reflect a signal back and be seen, thus it’s nearly invisible. It really makes sense to use alien technology on a B-1 and create the most perfect aircraft ever.”

The Truth is Far Simpler 

The fact that someone looking for a UFO would find one is a point we’ll leave aside, but skeptics were quick to address the UFO expert’s claims. The truth is out there, but it is far simpler than perhaps most UFO enthusiasts would like. 

The skeptics noted that “Google Earth image sometimes store old images in their cache,” so when a new image was taken it overlaps and creates a ghostly image. Such “ghosting” commonly occurs in film-based photography and such phenomena are also a regular occurrence with Google Maps. Thus it is likely—almost certain—that a B-1 was simply in different places on the tarmac when a second photo was taken and hence left a ghost image. 

But even beyond the obvious reasons for why the image shouldn’t be taken at face value; and there are other reasons that easily debunk the cloaking theory. The most obvious is that the B-1B is far from the most “perfect” aircraft, and despite its sleek profile it isn’t exactly what would be considered cutting edge either.

Development on the aircraft begin the late 1960s while Star Trek was still on the air, and while the bomber has been going through numerous updates and upgrades it seems difficult to believe a cloaking device would be among the first choices to put on such an old airframe. Moreover, Waring showed some ignorance as the B-1B isn’t technically a stealth aircraft—certainly not to the level of latter aircraft. 

That begs the question, why wouldn’t such “cloaking” technology be applied to more modern aircraft such as the B-2 Spirit, F-22 Raptor or certainly the F-35 Lightning II. For what the F-35 costs some might even question why it doesn’t have a cloaking device. It is also convenient that a UFO expert would suggest that the technology must be alien as well, instead of assuming that perhaps the military had developed a special camouflage to conceal aircraft on the ground.  

Since the beginning of the development of military aircraft, it was common to paint the airplanes to match the terrain to make them harder to see, but apparently, such thinking seemed lost on those who are certain the truth is out there.

The final consideration that UFO experts should ask is why would you keep the plane in a cloaked state on the runway? Such technology would likely require vast amounts of energy, and then there is always the fact that someone might walk into it—something that has been used as a joke in science fiction—or worse, not be able to find the plane. As then Admiral James T. Kirk said in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when exiting a cloaked spaceship, "Everybody remember where we parked." 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

Nuclear Weapons,

At nearly one and a half tons, the B83 is the largest nuclear bomb that the United States currently keeps.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In any case, the end of the line may be approaching for the B83. Its smaller and less-powerful little sibling, the B61 was recently upgraded. Though costly, the upgrades will keep the B61 in service for at least another twenty years.

The B83 is one of two so-called “dumb” or unguided nuclear bombs that the United States maintains as a part of its post-Cold War Enduring Stockpile arsenal. Along with intercontinental ballistic missiles and other smaller nuclear-capable bombs, stocks of the B83 are kept in case of emergency. It replaced a number of older American free-falling weapons, and is big.

At nearly one and a half tons, the B83 is the largest nuclear bomb that the United States currently keeps. Its nuclear tiled is 1.2 megatons—significantly more powerful than either of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. It’s big, it’s powerful, and it’s had a colorful history.

Bombs Away

Though often thought of as a domain best left to Hollywood, asteroid impacts could pose a real danger to the United States. Like the blockbuster film Armageddon showed, a large enough interstellar object could end life on Earth as we known it. The threat of impact is great enough, that NASA designed a spacecraft with just one purpose—to deflect objects on a collision course with Earth.

The launch vehicles would be launched in a staggered succession, allowing NASA several “shots” at any Earth-bound projectile in case the first interceptors failed to detonate, went off course, or experienced any other operational hiccups.

The so-called nuclear interceptor would carry a total of six packages that would each carry the nuclear components from a B83. At a close enough distance, the hope was a large enough nuclear explosion would pummel the threatening interstellar body away from Earth—though this would be no guarantee of survival.

Bunker Buster

The B83 was also tentatively evaluated as a nuclear bunker-busting munition. Modifications were made to the projectile’s nose to allow it to survive impact with earth and reinforced concrete, though using nuclear weapons is fraught with political considerations. The design may have never been finalized. Either way, the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (aptly named considering its 30,000 pound, or over 13,500 kilogram weight) is the primary bunker busting bomb in the United States’ arsenal.

Postscript

In any case, the end of the line may be approaching for the B83. Its smaller and less-powerful little sibling, the B61 was recently upgraded. Though costly, the upgrades will keep the B61 in service for at least another twenty years. And the B83? It might be reserved in the future exclusively for use with the Space Force.

Caleb Larson is a defense writer for the National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Peter Suciu

F-14 Tomcat,

The F-14, which made its first deployment in 1974, arrived as a supersonic, twin-engine, variable-sweep wing, two-place fighter.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Only a handful of the planes, which were purchased by the Imperial Iranian Air Force in the 1970s, remain in operation but according to reports these aircraft have flown escort missions in Syria proving that even after nearly 50 years the Tomcat still has sharp claws.

During its three decades in service with the United States Navy the Grumman F-14 Tomcat more than lived up to the role, it was designed for, drawing blood in combat and even getting its moment in the spotlight in the film Top Gun. Designed to incorporate the air combat experience learned during the Vietnam War, the F-14 was the first of the American "Teen Series" fighters that included the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon and the F/A-18 Hornet.

The two-seat carrier-based multi-role fighter was developed after the United States Congress halted the development of the F-111B along with the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) program. While the goal of that program was to supply both the United States Air Force and the United States Navy with the planes to fit each of their respective needs, the Navy was opposed.

Instead, the Navy called for a request for proposals for its Naval Fighter Experimental (VFX) program, which required a tandem two-seat, twin-engine air-to-air fighter. Grumman was awarded the contract in January 1969. The result was the F-14 "Tomcat" – named so partially to honor Navy Admiral Thomas "Tomcat" Connelly who had called upon Congress for the Navy to develop a carrier-based fighter.

The F-14, which made its first deployment in 1974, arrived as a supersonic, twin-engine, variable-sweep wing, two-place fighter that was designed to engage enemy aircraft in all weather conditions as well as at night. It was designed to track up to 24 targets simultaneously. The plane featured an advanced weapons system that includes a powerful Hughes AWG-9 radar, which used in conjunction with the Phoenix AIM-54A missiles, can pick out and destroy a chosen target from a formation at a distance of over 100 miles. Additional armaments include a variety of other intercept missiles, rockets, bombs and an internal M61A1 Vulcan 20mm Gatling-style rotary cannon.

With its variable-sweep wing the F-14 could match the speeds of other aircraft as needed – and for takeoff and low-speed flight, the wings would shift to the front, while for supersonic speeds the wings could tuck backward. Because of its versatility, it served as an air superiority fighter, fleet defense interceptor and even tactical reconnaissance platform.

The Tomcat drew its first blood in August 1981 during the "Gulf of Sidra incident," in which two F-14s were attacked by a pair of Libyan Su-22 Fitters. Both Fitters were shot down, but the events would be replayed nearly eight years later when in January 1989 another pair of F-14s shot down two Libyan MiG-23 "Floggers" again over the Gulf of Sidra.

The United States Navy continued to rely on the F-14 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, where it was utilized in strike escort and reconnaissance roles in Operation Desert Storm as well in Operation Deliberate Force and Operation Allied Force in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. The F-14's final combat mission took place in February 2006 when two Tomcats were used in a bombing mission in Iraq.

While the F-14 was retired from service with the Navy, and supplanted by the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the Tomcat remains in use with the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force. Only a handful of the planes, which were purchased by the Imperial Iranian Air Force in the 1970s, remain in operation but according to reports these aircraft have flown escort missions in Syria proving that even after nearly 50 years the Tomcat still has sharp claws.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and website. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

Nuclear Weapons, Americas

 Extreme weather conditions made the plan infeasible.

Here's What You Need to Know: In the middle of the Cold War, the U.S. Army developed a program to secretly deploy hundreds of nuclear-armed Minuteman ICBMs deep below Greenland’s ice cap.

One of the most well-known US military bases in the Arctic is Thule Air Base, in Greenland’s frigid northwest. Less well-known is the now-defunct Camp Century. Just 150 miles from Thule,  the area surrounding Camp Century is bitterly cold. Nighttime temperatures dip to -70°F and wind whips ice and snow through the air at 125 miles per hour.

Camp Century was opened in 1960 rather openly— the US Army released a short documentary film outlining the new construction techniques used to build the camp. Publicly at least, the camp was supposed to be used for conducting scientific research in the Arctic.

In reality, Camp Century was cover for a top-secret weapons project. The Danish government was opposed to housing nuclear weapons on their soil, and was thus not informed about Camp Century’s true purpose.

At Camp Century, engineers developed and improved subterranean Arctic building techniques. Modified tractors cut deep trenches nearly 30 feet into the ice. These trenches were then covered with steel semicylinders and topped with snow and ice that froze them firmly into place, providing shelter for the small underground city.

Transporting or airdropping diesel to fuel power generators would have been prohibitively expensive, and impossible during extreme weather conditions. The solution was to install a portable nuclear reactor that addressed all of Century’s electricity needs.

Heating Up:

Building upon lessons learned from Camp Century, Project Iceworm was to be built on a massive scale. Iceworm would have been the world’s largest ICBM launch site— over 52,000 miles of tunnels cut deep into the Greenland ice sheet. Iceworm’s footprint would cover an about the size of the state of Indiana, and a whopping three times the size of the host country, Denmark.

600 modified “Iceman” Minuteman missiles would be transported underground on large road-sized tunnels via railcar to launching sites cut even deeper into the ice. The Iceman missiles would be constantly shifting to other sites to keep their exact locations a secret. The subterranean placement and a mandatory 4-mile distance between launch sites would offer a degree of protection and increase survivability in the event of an attack by the Soviet Union.

Greenland’s proximity to the Soviet Union would have given American Minuteman missiles an enormous strategic advantage. Greenland is much closer to Russia than the continental United States, and the Iceman ICBMs would have been able to strike almost any target within the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice. The sheer size of the planned Iceworm complex and the missile’s relatively wide distribution would help to ensure the United States’ second-strike capability and to strengthen the land-based leg of the US nuclear triad.

Doomed to Die:

Alas, Project Iceworm was not practically feasible. Initial surveys had indicated that the Greenland ice sheet was rigid and ideal for tunneling. Later data gathered during the Camp Century experiment showed that the ice sheet was actually very elastic. Tunnels would have to be constantly maintained and be in danger of collapse every few years.

The extreme weather conditions also made steel building materials brittle and prone to cracking. Communications problems between the Pentagon and Camp Century were also an issue: sending or receiving messages during extreme weather events was problematic.

Ticking Time Bomb:

In the 1960s global warming was not a part of Pentagon strategic thinking. After shuttering Camp Century in 1967, The Army Corp of Engineers left behind thousands of gallons of radioactive water used to cool the portable reactor, and an unknown amount of sewage to be forever entombed in Greenland’s ice shelf.

In 1997, the Kingdom of Denmark conducted an inquiry into Camp Century, revealing the deceptive nature of the camp and the remaining hazardous waste enclosed in the ice.

Estimates from the scientific community predict that by 2090, the ice under Camp Century will begin to melt, releasing radioactive and human waste into the ocean. It remains to be decided if either the United States or Denmark, or perhaps even the now-autonomous Greenland will be responsible for cleanup.

Caleb Larson, a defense writer and journalist for the National Interest, holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on US and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics and culture.

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Edward Chang

Harriet Fighter Jet,

When the final chapter in the Harrier story is written, the Marines will bid farewell to an underappreciated aircraft that became much better over time and came through when it mattered most.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Unlike during Desert Storm, where Harriers expended only unguided ordnance, most of the expenditures during Iraqi Freedom were of the guided variety. As in Afghanistan, Harriers would provide CAS during the entire occupation, up until the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

Since the intervention by the United States and coalition partners began in 2014, the Middle East's skies have become crowded with the very best in modern air power. The air is full of flashy fourth-generation fighters (like the Air Force's F-15s and F-16s and the Navy's F/A-18E/Fs), and newer fifth-generation fighters (like the F-22). But also flying proudly with these other planes is a Marine Corps mainstay generally not considered a fourth-generation platform and unlikely to win any beauty contests—the McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II. That plane has, time and again, proven itself a highly effective multirole combat aircraft.

The Harrier II is unique among American military aircraft as one of few to have been adapted from a foreign design. The AV-8B's origin traces back to the British Hawker Siddeley Harrier, which was designed in the 1960s. Though not the first vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft built, it was the first fully operational and successful example. V/STOL capability was revolutionary because it created an aircraft that could operate from short or less-than-ideal runways, or from no runway at all.

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V/STOL caught the eye of the U.S. Marine Corps and, by 1971, the service was flying harriers. Designated the AV-8A, the American export model was similar in most respects to the British Harrier GR.1. A single-seater, the Marines intended for the Harrier to conduct ground attack, close air support (CAS), reconnaissance, and fighter missions. Despite giving the appearance of radical design, the AV-8A was quite unsophisticated on the inside, possessing bare-bones navigation and attack systems. Its armament was limited to AIM-9 Sidewinder infrared-guided air-to-air missiles and unguided air-to-ground ordnance such as rockets and general-purpose bombs.

Despite its drawbacks, the Marines were happy with the Harrier, and it continued to serve from both forward bases and aboard amphibious warfare ships. At the same, the Marines sought to improve deficiencies in payload and range and, in the mid-1970s, began development on what would become the Harrier II. By the end of the decade, the project had come entirely under the direction of American aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. Designated as AV-8B, the improved Harrier entered service in 1985 and, by 1987, all A and C-models (an upgrade of the A) were withdrawn from service.

Like its predecessor, the AV-8B was initially capable of day attack only but added the AN/ASB-19 Angle Rate Bombing System (ARBS), which was equipped with a laser spot-tracker and television, plus the AN/ALR-67 radar warning receiver (RWR). By 1991, a night attack version emerged, equipped with a nose-mounted Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR), night-vision goggle (NVG)-compatible cockpit, and a digital moving-map display.

The latest variant of the AV-8B in operation is the Harrier II+, first introduced in 1993. Like other fighters currently in U.S. service, such as the Air Force’s F-15E Strike Eagle or the Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the Harrier II+ is a leaps-and-bounds improvement from the AV-8A and even the original “Day Attack-Only” AV-8B. In addition to the features on the “Night Attack,” the “Plus” added the AN/APG-65 radar, the same radar initially fielded on the F/A-18 Hornet. Along with the Sidewinder, it also fires the AIM-120 AMRAAM, giving the Harrier II beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air capability.

The AV-8B is, of course, an attack aircraft, first and foremost. It is geared with a single GAU-12 Equalizer 25mm cannon and six hardpoints that can carry up to 9,200 pounds of ordnance—two hardpoints and over 4,000 pounds more than the original Harrier. In addition to rockets and unguided bombs, the Harrier II now employs the AGM-65E Maverick laser-guided ground-attack missile, GBU-12 and GBU-16 Paveway laser-guided and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) satellite-guided bombs. Precision strike is conducted through the AN/AAQ-28(V)1 LITENING targeting pod, which offers high-resolution target imagery from altitudes up to 50,000 feet and a laser designator. This followed the evolutionary roadmap established by attack aircraft like the Air Force's A-10 Thunderbolt II. Like the A-10, the Harrier II was initially a dedicated CAS platform which eventually adopted precision-strike capabilities that tremendously expanded its mission set. More recent upgrades also include integration into the Link 16 data exchange network, which allows the AV-8B to transmit and share data with other platforms. The LITENING pod also permits Harrier pilots to transmit real-time imagery to troops on the ground via the ROVER system, allowing the latter to see what the former is seeing from the air.

Furthermore, the Harrier II is powered by the Rolls-Royce Pegasus F402-RR-408 thrust-vectoring turbofan, producing 23,500 lbs. of thrust, making it both more powerful and reliable than the original Pegasus powerplant. It is a subsonic aircraft, with an airspeed of less than Mach 1 (673 mph.) and has a combat radius of only 300 nautical miles. The limitation in range, however, is mitigated by V/STOL, which permits the Harrier to be deployed far forward without relying exclusively on air bases or carriers like other fixed-wing aircraft. Much like helicopters, it can instead utilize Forward Area Refueling/Rearming Points (FARPs).

The Harrier has earned the reputation of being a “widow-maker,” owing to the eyebrow-raising number of losses and fatalities incurred in both American and foreign service. A sizable percentage of these losses happened during take-off and landing, suggesting the Harrier’s V/STOL capability posed unique risks not present in conventional aircraft. But as Lon Nordeen, author of three books on the AV-8B, points out, airplanes like the A-4 Skyhawk and A-7 Corsair suffered even higher mishap rates, implying there was not anything inherently problematic with the Harrier. It also goes without saying take-off and landing are generally the most dangerous phases of flight for any aircraft, regardless of design. Still, the Harrier was statistically one of the most dangerous aircraft to fly in the military during its time in service.

The AV-8B made its combat debut in the 1991 Gulf War. Harriers were aboard the amphibious assault ships USS Tarawa and Nassau and airfields ashore. It was intended to play a backup role but was forced into the fight when it responded to an urgent call for CAS on the first day of the war. From then on, the five deployed AV-8B squadrons were at the forefront of the Coalition air war, due to both the competency of Marine pilots and the tactical flexibility V/STOL offered. It was not a bloodless conflict for the Harriers, however as five AV-8Bs were lost and two pilots killed. Still, it proved so useful that General H. Norman Schwarzkopf considered it one of the most important weapons of the war.

Of course, America's conflict with Iraq never ended, and Harriers would take part in patrolling the southern no-fly zone during the 1990s into the early-2000s. During that same timeframe, AV-8Bs participated in humanitarian and peace-keeping operations in Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, Albania, Zaire, and Sierra Leone, flying air cover and armed reconnaissance sorties. It next saw combat over Kosovo in 1999, operating from amphibious assault ships as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). The Harrier offered deployed MEUs an immediate, integrated source of fixed-wing air power otherwise unavailable due to lack of access to land bases or the unavailability of an aircraft carrier.

But the Harrier's heaviest experience with combat was yet to come. They were among the first combat aircraft available in-theater during the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks. Soon, AV-8Bs were operating from air bases in Afghanistan, providing CAS to troops on the ground as they purged the Taliban and continued to do so for over ten years. It was also during this war the Harrier suffered one of its most shocking losses. On September 14, 2012, the Taliban executed an attack on Camp Bastion in the Helmand Province, destroying six AV-8Bs belonging to Marine Attack Squadron 211 (VMA-211), killing two Marines (including VMA-211’s Commanding Officer), and rendered the squadron combat ineffective.

In 2003, Harriers based aboard four “Harrier carriers” and in Kuwait supported Marines in their advance toward Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The AV-8Bs exhibited significant lethality and, thanks to improvements like the LITENING pod, were able to provide around-the-clock air support for ground forces. Unlike during Desert Storm, where Harriers expended only unguided ordnance, most of the expenditures during Iraqi Freedom were of the guided variety. As in Afghanistan, Harriers would provide CAS during the entire occupation, up until the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

Earlier that same year, AV-8Bs embarked aboard USS Kearsarge attacked targets in Libya while enforcing the U.N. no-fly zone over the country. Attached to the 24th MEU, Harriers also successfully defended a downed Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle pilot from advancing hostile Libyans. Five years later, Harriers also formed the main effort of a small air campaign to roll back the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the same country.

In fact, the Harrier II is serving at the forefront in the war against ISIL. When the U.S-Coalition intervention, Operation Inherent Resolve, commenced in summer 2014, AV-8Bs were once again among the first air assets to participate, flying reconnaissance missions and eventually transitioning to striking ISIL targets in both Iraq and Syria. As in previous wars, they flew from both ships in the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as land bases in the region. These missions continue today, as the U.S. maintains its presence in the region to defeat ISIL and ensure a favorable post-ISIL state of affairs. Harriers have also participated in less-visible operations in Yemen by bombing al-Qaeda in the country—again emphasizing its flexibility and adaptability to a wide range of operations in diverse environments and levels of warfare.

Currently, the Marine Corps flies ‘Night Attack’ and ‘Plus’ Harriers in five active-duty squadrons plus one training squadron. They are divided among two home bases; Marine Corps Air Stations Yuma, Arizona, and Cherry Point, North Carolina. The Harrier II is in the process of being replaced by the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II. Though mired in “development hell,” the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), as the F-35 was conceptually called, promises to be a monumental leap in sophistication, to say nothing of its stealth capability. With V/STOL having proved its worth, the Marines pushed for the development of the B-variant possessing this capability, while also planning to purchase a number of the carrier-capable C-variant as well. Superior in armament, speed, combat radius, and avionics, the Lightning is undoubtedly a far more capable platform. But given difficulties in fielding the F-35, the AV-8B is slated to serve at least several more years—a decade longer than intended.

When the final chapter in the Harrier story is written, the Marines will bid farewell to an underappreciated aircraft that became much better over time and came through when it mattered most.

Edward Chang is a freelance defense, military, and foreign policy writer. His writing has appeared in The National Interest and War Is Boring.

This first appeared last month. 

Caleb Larson

Tanks, Eurasia

Does Moscow have enough time to complete its ambitious plans?

Here's What You Need to Know: These platforms hold much promise and seem to be well designed, but are as of yet untested.

While the T-14 Armata MBT has been widely discussed, it’s parent platform, the Armata Universal Combat Platform has not. Initially lofty claims were made that these vehicles would replace much of Russia’s Soviet-inherited armor, but due to higher than expected production costs, these the number of units produced has remained low. Here are a few of the current or planned variants of the Armata Universal Combat Platform.

T-15 Heavy Infantry Fight Vehicle Armata

The T-15 is an infantry fighting vehicle, designed to keep up with Main Battle Tanks and bring infantry rapidly into the fight. Importantly, the T-15 is designed to be fast, and well protected— the T-15 is readily identified by its steeply sloped frontal and side armor. Unlike the T-14 MBT, the T-15’s engine in located in the front, further protecting its estimated payload of 9 troops.

The T-15 further benefits from the overlapping active and passive protection used on the T-14, making both the T-14 and T-15 tough nuts to crack.

The first and outermost protection is the Afghanit Active Protection System that uses radar to detect and track incoming projectiles. The APS system can pop smoke to create a smokescreen between itself and the incoming projectile, or attempt to shoot the projectile down. If something manages to get past the APS, it would have to contend with Malakhit explosive-reactive armor, essentially blocks of explosives on the outside of the hull that explode outwards to disrupted the path of the projectile or make it detonate before coming into contact with its hull. The hull too is well-protected, a blend of composite armor and steel that is estimated to be equivalent to between 1,200-1,400mm of Rolled Homogenous Armor.

The T-15 is no lightweight when it comes to firepower either, hence the HIFV— Heavy Infantry Fighting Vehicle designation. It appears there are several remote weapon station variations— one with a respectable 30mm autocannon, coaxial 7.62 PKT machine gun, and four improved Kornet-M antitank missiles. Alternatively, the T-15 can be equipped with a much larger 57mm autocannon  and several antitank guided missile and machine-gun variants. The current direction of IFV and APC development seems to favor the 57mm for its better penetration against light armored targets, better defense against drones, and higher rate of fire.

In keeping the the Soviet high power-to-weight ratio design philosophy, the T-15 is nimble and has a multifuel 1,500hp engine with two externally mounted rear fuel tanks, giving it an impressive 31+ horsepower per ton (by comparison, the M1 Abrams power-to-weight ratio is 24-27hp/ton depending on the variant).

Kurganets-25 IFV/APC

The Kurganets family comes in Infantry Fighting Vehicle and Armored Personnel Carrier variants. First seen during the 2015 Victory Day Parade in Moscow, the Kurganets-25 variants are likely intended to replace the wide variety of aging Soviet APCs and IFVs.

The Kurganets-25 has a much higher stance than its legacy Soviet predecessors it will eventually replace, which are typically much lower-profile. Outwardly, the Kurganets-25 more closely resembles the American M2 Bradley IFV or British Warrior, both of which feature higher up, more upright stances. The more upright Kurganets stance design would theoretically afford greater protection from IEDs due to higher ground clearance and may be a lesson taken from the American experience in the Middle East.

Despite its significantly less powerful 800hp engine— also located in the front of the vehicle— the Kurganets has a high 32hp/ton power-to-wieght ratio due to its lower weight.

It is amphibious as well, with a retractable wavebreaker and two waterjets that are located quite low on the rear of the hull. Although primarily a land power, amphibious capabilities would allow its crew of three plus 9 passengers to access a wider range of areas.

At least one of the Kurganets turret configurations is shared with the T-15, which simplifies manufacturing. The turret in question is an unmanned 30mm turret equipped with Kornet-M antitank missiles and would be used on the IFV variant, while the APC variant is more lightly armed with a 7.62mm remote weapons station, and does not appear to have the Afghanit Active Protection System.

2S35 Koalitsiya SPG

The 2S35 Koalitsiya, also showcased during the 2015 Victory Day Parade, is a Self Propelled Gun (i.e. a mobile artillery) that is designed to replace the  2S19 Msta currently in use with Russian ground forces.

Although the platform is planned to be based on the Armata Universal Combat Platform, the examples seen in 2015 appear to have used the same chassis as the 2S19 Msta it is slated to replace, although the turrets were a new design.

Due to a great amount of automation, the crew has been reduced from 5 for the Msta to a minimal 3 for the Koalitsiya— just a commander, driver, and gunner. This is accomplished through the use of an autoloader, making the turret of the 2S35 longer than that of the Msta.

The main armament is a 152.4mm howitzer, similar the that of the Msta, but featuring a different style muzzle brake to reduce recoil, and internally inclosed recoil dampeners. An export version will apparently come equipped with a 155mm gun to accept more commonly available ammunition types.

As is the Koalitsiya can fire a wide variety of ammunition too, standard high explosive, antitank, jamming ammunition, as well as guided projectiles, such as the Krasnopol fin-stabilized, laser guided artillery shell which coasts to its target using its multiple control surfaces. Maximum range estimates outclass SPGs of both the UK and the United States, possibly a high as 70 kilometers, or just over forty-three miles.

The Koalitsiya is very similar in capabilities to its predecessor— so why bother? Automation. A crew of just three would, in theory, allow for the incredible sixteen+ rounds per minute rate of fire  that the manufacturer claims is possible. If true, this would perhaps be the highest RPM of any self-propelled gun in existence. By comparison, the current American M109 SPG variant has a sustained rate of fire of just 4 rounds per minute, although an upgrade now in the works aims to increase that number to 6-10 rounds per minute, also through the use of an autoloader. A longer barrel is also being considered to walk out the 155mm howitzer’s range, as are rocket assisted projectiles.

An a crew of just three sounds great, but there has been some speculation about what would happen in the case of a misfire, which would probably require opening the gun breech manually, was are there still-unanswered questions about reliability, especially on a such a fresh platform that has not yet proven itself in combat.

Time is Money

Ultimately, these platforms hold much promise and seem to be well designed, but are as of yet untested. Like the T-14 MBT, these Armata Universal Combat Platforms suffer most from significantly lower than planned production numbers. Until they can be produced in higher numbers, cost per unit will remain high, discouraging increased production.

Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics, and culture.

This article first appeared in October 2019.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Russia,

From 2015 to 2019, Russia accounted for 21 percent of total arms exports.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Despite the ongoing pandemic, this year's Army 2020 event was not noticeably scaled down from its previous iterations. More than 1,316 exhibitors and just fewer than 12,000 total participants reportedly attended the event, suggesting roughly the same engagement as last year's ARMY 2019. All this suggests that Russia will likely maintain its second-place position in the global arms market and has nowhere to go but up.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been good ones for military contractors. The United States has remained the top arms seller, and in a five-year period from 2015 to 2019 exported military hardware to 96 countries, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The United States accounted for 36 percent of the total global arms exports in that period.

Following in second place was Russia, which accounted for 21 percent of arms exports.

This week, Tass reported that the Russian state arms seller Rosobornexport, which is part of the tech conglomerate Rostec, delivered military hardware worth $180 billion to its foreign customers over the past two decades.

"The company’s financial indicators - the order book and the delivery volume - have risen fivefold since 2000. Over these years, Rosoboronexport has concluded more than 26,000 contracts with partners and delivered products worth a total of over $180 billion to 122 countries of the world," said Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov via the company's press office.

Rosoboronexport CEO Alexander Mikheyev added that the sales have allowed Russia to maintain its second place on the global arms market. "Our foreign partners have received hardware worth over $85 billion for their Air Forces," he noted. "The deliveries for our customers' air defense and land troops have topped $30 billion for each of these military branches and have amounted to over $28 billion for their Navies."

To drive the sales of its military hardware Russia has increasingly "upped its game" quite literally – and now holds its annual International Army Games. First staged in August 2015, it has involved close to 30 countries taking part in dozens of competitions over two weeks. Organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense, the games feature 31 competitions, most of which involve military hardware. These include a "Tank Biathlon," "Seaborne Assault" and multiple dog and equestrian events. The games are primarily held in Russia at the Alabino training ground and Kubinka airfield just outside Moscow.

Army-2020 International Trade Event

The International Army Games coincide with the annual Army-2020 International Military and Technical Forum, which is essentially a tradeshow for all things Russian military hardware. The most recent event was held this past August, where Russia's state arms sellers offered almost 50 new weapons systems to the world market.

This year's event included demonstrations of the T-14 "Armata" tank; the Su-57 fight-generation fighter jet, which was offered for export for the first time; and the entire family of Kalashnikov new-generation assault rifles.

Mikheyev told Tass in August that Rosoboronexport would also continue its deliveries of Mi-35M, Mi-171E, Mi-171Sh, and Mi-17V-5 helicopters, aircraft engines, Orlan-10 drones, T-90S and T-90SK tanks, BTR-82A armored personnel carriers, BMPT tank support fighting vehicles, Kornet anti-tank missile systems, Repellent anti-drone systems, Tor-M2E surface-to-air missile launchers, Pantsyr-S1 anti-aircraft missile/gun systems, Igla man-portable air defense systems, small arms, ammunition, and other items.

Despite the ongoing pandemic, this year's Army 2020 event was not noticeably scaled down from its previous iterations. More than 1,316 exhibitors and just fewer than 12,000 total participants reportedly attended the event, suggesting roughly the same engagement as last year's ARMY 2019. All this suggests that Russia will likely maintain its second-place position in the global arms market and has nowhere to go but up.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

military, Americas

The service has a reputation as an efficient and professional fighting force, unhampered by corruption.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Navy enjoys a high degree of trust from the Mexican people.

Compared to their counterparts in the United States, the United States Navy and Marine Corps, the Mexican Navy is small— around sixty-six thousand. The Mexican Naval Infantry, their Marine Corps, is even smaller— numbering only about eighteen thousand.  

In contrast to the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy, the Mexican Navy’s main missions have typically been coastal protection, which in the United States would fall to the U.S. Coast Guard. Assisting the civilian populace following earthquakes or other natural disasters, defending oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, intercepting boat-born migrants, and drug interdiction through boarding and seizing boats and semi-submersible narco submarines. 

Despite their small size, they are the go-to force when combating the Mexican criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking—widely trusted and seen as more reliable than the Army. They’ve also racked up a string of successes, despite being many times smaller than the Mexican Army. 

An Ossified Army:

For historical reasons, United States troops in Mexico are a taboo topic. An intensely nationalistic streak runs through the Mexican Army. Lingering resentment against the United States runs deep. For this reason, the Mexican Army conducts little training with the United States. 

The Mexican Navy was spared most of the humiliation experienced by the Army during the 1916–1917 American expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa, or during the 1914 American occupation of Mexican port city Veracruz. Being sea-based, the Mexican Navy also did not suffer nearly as many losses as the Army during the Mexican-American war, which was predominantly a land conflict. As a result, Mexico is one of the least connected of the Latin American countries to the United States, militarily speaking. 

Therein lies the reason for the Navy’s reputation as an efficient and professional fighting force, unhampered by deep-rooted corruption endemic in the Mexican government and military. “In the last 10 years, UIN [Mexican Naval Intelligence] has become the most trusted Mexican intelligence service for the DEA and DIA,” explained Dr. Raúl Benitez-Manaut, a professor at the National University of Mexico, and an expert on Mexican security and defense issues. “[The Navy’s] construction was based on a lot of training in the United States, UK, France, and Spain. It has civilian and military intelligence teams unlike the Army, which are only military.” 

Part of their success lies simply in being based at sea, rather than land. Unlike the Mexican Army, Mexican Naval Infantry does not have extensive inland bases, giving them a measure of insulation from cartels—and corruption opportunities. 

Since it is a significantly smaller branch than the Army, the Navy is much more tight-knit. Naval officers have a closer relationship with each other, as most are graduates of Mexico’s naval academy. Closer personal ties help to prevent secrets deals and backdoor cash—subjecting officers to random polygraph tests also helps. 

American Intel, Mexican Manpower:

Despite disagreements over tariffs and trade, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Defense Intelligence Agency have managed to cultivate close ties with Mexico. 

Beginning with the signing of the 2008 Mérida Initiative, a cross-border training and capacity-building cooperation agreement between the United States and Mexico, U.S.-Mexican cooperation increased, with a particular focus on the Mexican Navy and Naval Infantry. In a surprise 2009 statement, the Navy moved to keep all intelligence communications with the United States secret, in an effort to preserve secrecy and prevent potentially dangerous information leaks, further cementing ties, albeit quietly. 

Ties between U.S. intelligence and the Navy splashed across the news in 2012, when a U.S. diplomatic vehicle transporting two CIA officers and a Mexican Navy captain was shot at. The two CIA officers were wounded. Mexican Naval officials downplayed the incident, aware of the fact that cooperation with the United States could harm them at home, where they have much less domestic clout in government than their Army, with whom they compete for funding and resources. 

Fit to Fight:

Since the late 2000s, the Naval Infantry’s mandate has steadily expanded, from exclusively littoral or deep-water operations, to include land missions deep within Mexico, far removed from the blue. 

The Navy enjoys a high degree of trust from the Mexican people. According to a recent poll conducted by the Mexican newspaper El Financiero, the Navy, at 69 percent, is the most trusted organization in Mexico. This trust stems in large part from the steadily rising number of successful land operations they’ve conducted since their expanded responsibilities. 

“One of the Naval Infantry’s most important achievements was the dismantling of the criminal structure of the Los Zetas group, in the state of Veracruz, from 2008 to 2012,” said Dr. Benitez-Manaut. Unlike the Army, the Navy has sought out help from the United States and American Special Forces in honing their capabilities in order to improve the chances of mission success against various cartels and criminal groups. 

In addition to significantly damaging Los Zetas, Naval Infantry was responsible for killing the drug kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009 in Cuernavaca, less than 50 miles from the capital. While 50 miles is not far removed from Mexico’s largest city, a large Army regional headquarters was even closer—mere blocks away. 

Two hundred Naval Infantry rappelled from helicopters to a luxury mansion where “El Muerte” had been having a party. There, they laid siege to the compound. In the ensuing firefight, six cartel members, along with Beltrán Leyva himself were killed. One Naval Infantry member also died. 

In Los Mochis, a city near the Pacific coast in Sinaloa, the Navy scored their biggest victory to date. The Navy and Naval Infantry’s most notable achievement has been Operation Black Swan in 2016, the operation that resulted in “El Chapo” Guzman’s third and final capture. Black Swan was reportedly conducted in tandem with American Special Forces, which would be evidence of a very high level of cooperation between the United States and Mexican Navy. 

The National Guard— A National Disaster?:

President López Obrador has made the creation of the National Guard, or Guardia Nacional, as it is known in Spanish, the centerpiece of his new security strategy, where pacification in some form, other than military force, is to be used to end the war on drugs. 

“The president decreed the end of the war on drugs on January 31, 2019,” emphasized Dr. Benitez-Manaut. “The Navy was excluded from the main efforts of the President in his new security strategy. Its most important members come from the Army.” Dr. Benitez-Manaut estimates that roughly 80 percent of the members of the National Guard came from the Army, most in leadership positions. Only 8 percent have a naval background. 

This raises serious questions about the future efficacy of the National Guard, especially considering the pervasive corruption question. When based on land, will the Mexican Navy, and Naval Infantry be able to preserve their reputation as a disciplined, effective quick-reaction force? Only time will tell. 

Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics, and culture.

This article first appeared December 2019.

Image: Reuters

Ali Boyle

Science,

Not just a one-trick pony. 

If you ask people to list the most intelligent animals, they’ll name a few usual suspects. Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are often mentioned, as are crows, dogs and occasionally pigs. Horses don’t usually get a look in.

So it might come as a surprise that horses possess an unusual skill, widely considered an indicator of self-awareness. In a recent study, researchers have found horses can recognise their reflections in mirrors.

Animals looking at a mirror for the first time often respond socially – they act as if their reflection is another animal. After a while, this social response tends to subside. Some animals lose interest at this point, but others will go on to explore the mirror and investigate how they can make the reflection move using their own body.

Once animals have stopped responding socially, scientists test their understanding using the “mark test”. The animal is marked in a location they’ll only be able to see in the mirror, perhaps on their forehead or ear. Then scientists watch to see if the animal spends more time touching this body part in front of the mirror when it’s marked than when it isn’t. If it does, this suggests the animal recognises its reflection.

This test was first used to demonstrate self-recognition in chimpanzees in 1970, and scientists have since used versions of the test to look for self-recognition in many other species. The results suggest that self-recognition is rare. Among non-primates, only a few individual animals have passed the mark test, including four Bottlenose dolphins, two Eurasian magpies and an Asian elephant.

But a new study by researchers in Italy has found evidence of self-recognition in horses. Interestingly, the results suggest the ability is not just limited to a few clever individuals. While we should be cautious about generalising from a single study, this suggests self-recognition might exist in horses as a species.

Horse marks

In the study, a large mirror was placed in a horse training arena. Once horses got used to the mirror and stopped responding socially, the researchers used the mark test to look for self-recognition, comparing the horses’ behaviour in two conditions. In one condition, researchers drew a cross shape on both of their cheeks using a colourless ultrasound gel. In the other, they were marked in the same way but with a coloured ultrasound gel.

The important question was whether the horses would be more interested in the visible marks than the invisible ones. And they were. The horses spent around five times longer scratching their faces in front of the mirror when they were visibly marked.

The researchers concluded that they saw the marks in the mirror, understood that those marks were on their own faces, and were trying to remove them. They recognised their reflections.

Self-awareness

The mark test is often described as a test for self-awareness. But whether that’s true is debatable, and depends on what we mean by self-awareness – a tricky philosophical question.

When we say that a person is self-aware, we often mean they have a special insight into their own mind. Perhaps they know what they really want, or they’re aware of their personality flaws.

A few researchers have argued that self-recognition involves having a concept of oneself as a psychological agent with a mind. But that’s not a popular view, because recognising your reflection doesn’t seem to involve thinking about your mental states.

 

Self-recognition seems to have more to do with being aware of our bodies. Of course, even very simple animals are aware of their own bodies, even ones that don’t pass the mark test. But, as I’ve argued in my own research, there are different ways of being aware of one’s body.

Some of our senses give us a special awareness of our bodies “from the inside”. For example, something called proprioception gives us information about the position of our bodies. When proprioception tells you you’re slouching, you don’t have to work out who is slouching – you just know immediately that it’s you.

But mirrors enable us to become aware of our bodies “from the outside”. When we see a body in the mirror, it’s not obvious that the body is ours – we have to work that out. I’ve argued that taking this external, objective perspective on ourselves and our bodies is another kind of self-awareness.

While this new study might not show that horses can reflect on their own minds, it does put them in the small group of animals who can think in an objective way about their own bodies. Perhaps it’s time to revisit our assumptions about horses. They may be much smarter than we think.

Ali Boyle, Research Fellow in Kinds of Intelligence (Philosophy), University of Cambridge

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

Image: Creative Commons

Steve Weintz

Security, Europe

By the 1950s, the British empire and its wealth were no more, and nuclear weapons were very costly.

Here's What You Need to Remember: An agreement was reached: The United States would sell the United Kingdom Polaris missiles, launch tubes, and fire-control systems, which the British would put aboard British submarines and arm with British warheads.

Mark Twain probably didn’t make the famous quip, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,” but the phrase’s sentiment often feels right. In discussing British independence, U.S. nuclear policy, strategic weapons upgrades and a fraying “special relationship,” we could be discussing current events—or those of a half-century ago.

In the late 1950s, Britain’s defense establishment faced some grim realities. The empire and its wealth were no more, and nuclear weapons were very costly. Although UK scientists played major roles in the Manhattan Project, postwar espionage and U.S. mistrust of the British led to a chill in collaboration and to the UK’s drive for an independent nuclear deterrent.

By 1958 the UK possessed manned bombers like the Avro Vulcan and Handley-Page Victor capable of delivering British thermonuclear bombs to the Soviet Union. However, the development of successful surface-to-air missiles (SAM) rendered World War II–style manned bomber fleets vulnerable and eventually obsolete.

Ballistic missiles arrived in the late 1950s, their promise of extreme speed and invulnerability hampered by the challenges of rocket science and concerns about control. Once fired, a land-based missile slips the bonds of its handlers and cannot be recalled. A manned bomber can loiter for hours awaiting the outcome of diplomacy.

By 1958, American defense firms determined that launching a ballistic missile from an aircraft was possible. The concept combined the loiter ability of a manned aircraft with the Sunday punch of an H-bomb on an rocket. New guidance systems employing star tracking to update inertial-guidance modules promised accuracy close to that of land-based ICBMs.

At the same time, Britain’s defense firms struggled with their homegrown ballistic missile project, Blue Streak. (The heirs of Shakespeare adopted the most colorful naming scheme for their nuclear projects: Violet Club, Red Beard, Black Prince.) Blue Streak was behind schedule and over budget, but faced the more daunting problem of geography. The British Isles lack vast sparsely populated areas suitable for missile silos, and such silos would be easy to target.

In May 1959 the U.S. Air Force issued a formal request for Weapon System 138A and selected Douglas Aircraft as prime contractor. The Skybolt, as it was known, was a hefty two-stage solid rocket mounting a one-megaton W-59 warhead. Four Skybolts would fit aboard the wing pylons of a B-52, giving the bomber a tremendous punch.

During wartime, B-52s approaching Soviet airspace would launch their Skybolts hundreds of miles away. Upon release, the big missiles would drop their aerodynamic tail cones and ignite their first stages. After soaring to three hundred miles’ altitude and 1100 miles downrange, the hydrogen bombs would destroy airbases, command centers and radar installations ahead of the U.S. bomber waves.

For the British, the Skybolt seemed ideal: a ballistic missile deterrent that fit within the British Isles, was invulnerable to attack and compatible with existing aircraft. In February 1960 the British cabinet decided to cancel Blue Streak and go all in with the Skybolt. Henceforth the UK’s only nuclear weapons platform would be an American missile.

In March 1960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met with President Eisenhower on a state visit; Eisenhower agreed to sell the UK 144 Skybolts, which would be fitted with British warheads. In return, the U.S. Navy got access to Britain’s submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, a concession that even now causes heartburn. In May 1961 an RAF Vulcan flew to Santa Monica, California for tests and fitting at Douglas’s facilities.

But in Washington, dark geopolitical storms were brewing. In an eerie echo of today’s concerns about allied nuclear proliferation in Asia, the incoming Kennedy administration viewed the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent with serious misgivings.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in particular worried that, should another Suez Crisis occur and Britain face off against the Soviets, the UK’s nuclear forces would not be a credible deterrent. The United States might then be drawn into the conflict in order to back Britain.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson drove the point home in a famous speech at West Point: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role—that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States . . . is about played out.”

Better, thought the Americans, if British nuclear forces were brought under a “multilateral-force” umbrella, with launch commands vetted by American commanders in “dual-key” authorizations. The British loathed the idea of joining a force that would allow the Germans to possess nuclear weapons.

And the United States now had an alternative to Skybolt, which failed all five of its first test launches. The remarkable success of the Navy’s Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) program ended the need for Skybolt in American eyes. Secretary McNamara informed Whitehall of Skybolt’s cancellation in December 1962, just a few weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

McNamara’s announcement caused a firestorm in the House of Commons. The British felt betrayed and manipulated; the Conservative government took a shellacking. Liberal MP Jo Grimond cried, “Does not this mark the absolute failure of the policy of the independent deterrent? Is it not the case that everybody else in the world knew this, except the Conservative Party in this country?”

But, in one of those oddities that litter the pages of history, the United Kingdom eventually came out ahead. The turnaround began in the Bahamas, where Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy held urgent talks just before Christmas 1962. With more than 30 percent of his own party’s members demanding an independent deterrent, Macmillan reminded Kennedy of the key role Britain played in the Manhattan Project, and refused to give up atomic arms. No multilateral “umbrella” was acceptable.

But out of those talks on the beach in Nassau came an extraordinary agreement—one that cemented the “special relationship” for decades. The United States would sell the United Kingdom Polaris missiles, launch tubes and fire-control systems, which the British would put aboard British submarines and arm with British warheads. Faced with a humiliating unraveling of its closest alliance at the height of the Cold War, the United States offered its crown jewels.

For Kennedy, it was one of the more distressing moments of his presidency. When Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker joined him and Macmillan in Nassau, Kennedy quipped, “There we sat, like three whores at a christening.”

For Britain, it was an almost unbelievable coup—“the bargain of the century,” as one observer called it. Polaris was a far more effective weapons system that Skybolt—its loiter time measured in months rather than hours, and its support needs sustaining the British shipbuilding industry for decades. The Royal Navy eclipsed the RAF and resumed its centuries-old role as the guarantor of the nation’s safety.

The Polaris Sales Agreement proved so successful that it became the model for its successor involving the Trident SLBMs developed in the 1970s. Its impact continues today: both the U.S. and Royal Navies are codeveloping the Common Missile Compartment for both the U.S. Columbia-class and the British Successor-class missile subs.

The Skybolt lives on in a conceptual sort of way, but as a civilian project. Billionaire Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch venture aims to fire Skybolt-sized space boosters from a gigantic aircraft—bigger than the B-52s and Vulcans of yore. Skybolt may yet return in darker guise, as military powers face the same needs that created the air-launched ballistic missile. Skybolt-like missiles would seriously complicate the defense of Guam, for example. . . .

Steve Weintz, a frequent contributor to many publications such as WarIsBoring, is a writer, filmmaker, artist, animator.

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

Peter Suciu

History,

Take a look at America’s USS Olympia.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Interim efforts have the Olympia looking better than she has in years, while new monitors and sensors can alert the museum’s staff to potential dangers including breaches in the hull. A cofferdam was also instituted to help pump the water out from some particularly weak sections of the hull, and allow it to be dried and repaired.

The oldest steel warship afloat has survived wars, economic downturns and even the harsh passage of time, but there was one battle that the USS Olympia (C-6), flagship of the American Asiatic Fleet during the Spanish-American War (1898), almost was unable to win. The future of the ship remained very much in jeopardy for several years due to the rising costs of maintaining the protected cruiser.

Today the Olympia is at home at the Independence Seaport Museum on the Delaware River near downtown Philadelphia, where it has been since 1957. Interim repairs were made on the ship over the years but following some mismanagement at the museum, there hasn’t been the money for a much needed full restoration. As a result, for a while, it looked like the once majestic vessel would meet a fate that no great warship deserves. She would be sunk and converted to an artificial reef!

The Modernization of the U.S. Navy 

The USS Olympia was launched in 1892 as part of American efforts to modernize its navy and to have a military presence in the Pacific Ocean. The Olympia, under Commodore George Dewey steamed into Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, to engage the Spanish Navy at the start of the Spanish-American War. It was from Olympia’s bridge that Dewey made his famous command to the ship’s captain, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridely.”

Those words might have never have been said and the (now) apparent one-sidedness of the battle not been so had it not been for a sudden American interest in overseas trade—and to a lesser extent an overseas “empire.” William Henry Seward, who had been secretary of state during the American Civil War and early reconstruction, had made the proclamation that “the empire of the seas alone is real empire.”

This was not to be another “Seward’s folly” but rather a prophecy that would very soon come to pass, as America joined the European powers in looking to a newly opened Asia with trade opportunities in mind, while backing it with the very nineteenth-century notion of “gunboat diplomacy.” To pull that off, however, required real gunboats and American’s obsolescent Civil War-era fleet of the 1860s was certainly no match for the modern British or French naval squadrons.  

When President James A. Garfield took office in 1881, the new Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt found that of the 140 vessels on the active list only fifty-two were actually in an operational state, and only seventeen of those were even iron-hulled ships. In fact, fourteen of those seventeen ships were aging Civil War-style ironclads. Most military historians agree that at the time the United States would have been incapable of fighting a naval war with a European power and probably would have faced difficulties with many of the Latin American powers such as Peru or Chile! If the United States was to be a player in world trade, it needed a world-class navy.

In March 1883, the United States Congress appropriated $1.3 million for the construction of four new vessels known as the “ABCDs”—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin. Unlike the ironclad warships of the Civil War, these were to be fabricated not from wood and iron but steel. It would truly be a first-rate, modern navy.

The ABCD experiment was followed by the next step in naval modernization, which included the construction of the battleships Texas and Maine; as well as six-light, or so-called “protected,” cruisers. These cruisers would feature an armored deck but still be able to maintain an impressive speed faster than most warships of the day. Protected cruisers actually formed a new category that fell between the unprotected versions of the warships with no armor and those later stylized as “armored cruisers” that were almost as heavily armored as true battleships of the era.

These efforts to modernize the navy paid off. By 1889 the United States Navy ranked second only to Great Britain in terms of warships that could exceed 19-knot speeds while displacing 3,000 tons or more. The British had a total of ten ships and a total of 56,000 tons, while America’s eight ships displaced 32,010 tons. That exceeded the French Navy’s five ships and 24,630 tons and notably Spain’s three ships and 14,400 tons.

More importantly, this was a paradigm shift from the “commerce destroyer” type of ships that were used during the American Civil War to a fleet that had a true offensive spirit.

The Olympia actually began life as Cruiser Number 6, a 20-knot warship that was designed to cost no more than $1,800,000. The newly formed Board on the Design of Ships (originally the “Board on Construction”) first began the design process in 1889, and less than a year later the navy solicited bids for the construction of the ship. Yet it actually found only a single bidder, the Union Iron Works in San Francisco—where it remained the largest ship ever built on the western coast of the United States until it was surpassed by the construction of the battleship Oregon a few years later.

The keel of Cruiser Number 6 was laid in June 1891 and the ship was launched in November 1892. While the primary construction occurred in San Francisco, the heavy armor plate was constructed back east. The Bethlehem Steel Company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was tasked to provide the steel but ran into difficulties, so Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel Company was called in to help provide the material for the ship’s armor.

In December 1891 sea trials were conducted in the Santa Barbara Channel, and in February 1895 the ship was commissioned the USS Olympia and departed the Union Iron Works yard in San Francisco for the last time. It steamed to the U.S. Navy’s Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo for outfitting.

It was in April 1895 that the ship conducted its first gunnery practice, and sadly it was during this shakedown that a crew member was killed. Coxswain John Jonson lost his life in an accident while firing one of the 5-inch guns. Fortunately, it was not a portent of things to come.

In July 1895 the Olympia was assigned to replace the USS Baltimore as the flagship of the Asiatic Squadron, and it departed in August of that year for Chinese waters. However, due to an outbreak of cholera amongst the crew, the ship was forced to remain in Hawaii until October, and didn’t arrive in Shanghai until November.

She spent three mostly peaceful years in the Far Eastern waters, where Olympia made visits to British Hong Kong, Kobe and Nagasaki in Japan; performed humanitarian service at Woosung in China when two steamers collided and needed assistance; and even headed to Vladivostok in Russia for the coronation celebrations of Czar Nicholas II. During this time the crew’s baseball team even played against a Japanese team, with the Americans coming out on top in this unofficial “world series.”

On January 3, 1898, Commodore George Dewey raised his flag on Olympia and assumed command of the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron. Dewey, along with the newly assigned Captain Charles Vernon Gridley, was about to sail into history.

From Manila Bay to Philadelphia 

Tensions had been simmering between the United States and Spain for nearly a decade over the latter’s rule of Cuba, which sought independence from the mother country. The USS Maine, which had been sent to Havana, Cuba by President William McKinley to ensure the safety of American citizens and interests, suffered a sudden and massive explosion on February 15, 1898. While McKinley tried to preach patience—especially as the cause of the explosion was not known and there was no evidence of an attack—the news of the event stirred popular opinion, and by the end of April the United States was at war with Spain.

The Olympia had been in Hong Kong preparing for action, and following the declaration of war, the Asiatic Squadron was ordered to Manila. Dewey was given the order to sink or capture the Spanish fleet and open the way for a subsequent invasion by American forces.

Dewey, in command aboard the Olympia, steamed into Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, to face the Spanish flotilla commanded by Rear Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón. Montojo had anchored his ships close to the shore and under the protection of coastal artillery. However, the shore batteries along with the fleet were to prove no match for Dewey’s squadron.

Dewey must have felt confident, for while desks and cabinets were ordered to be removed from the ship—as these could create splinters and endanger the crew should it take a direct hit—the Commodore opted not to have the fine wooden paneling inside the ship removed. The ornate panels were part of the ship’s opulence and thus were spared.

While largely considered a one-sided affair, especially as the Spanish gunners were unprepared for action, the shooting from both sides could best be considered rather poor. At one point Dewey withdrew when it was erroneously reported that the ship was running low on 5-pound shells. When it was discovered that the ship’s ordnance supplies were high the attack continued, and by early afternoon Dewey had virtually destroyed Montojo’s squadron along with the shore batteries, while the American ships took little damage. In total some 160 Spanish sailors died, while just a single American sailor lost his life during the battle—and that was reportedly due to sunstroke.

With Montojo’s fleet sunk or burning, Dewey anchored his squadron in the bay and accepted Manila’s surrender. The news of the successful attack soon spread around the world. Dewey and the Olympia would forever be linked to the attack, which was the first major victory for the American forces in the war and the first victory for the U.S. Navy against a foreign power in decades.

Olympia supported the U.S. Army’s subsequent invasion of the Philippines before it returned to China in May of 1899. Despite its success in battle, the ship was recalled to the United States soon after and headed home via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea. The ship reached Boston in October 1899 and a month later the ship was decommissioned and placed in reserve. Her career had been colorful yet short-lived.

Olympia’s first “retirement” was also short-lived and the ship returned to duty in January 1902 where it was assigned to the North Atlantic Squadron and served as the flagship of the Caribbean Division. It took part in the intervention of Honduras in the spring of 1903, and in 1906 became a training ship for naval cadets from the United States Naval Academy, and later served as a barracks ship.

During the First World War, the USS Olympia served as the flagship of the U.S. Patrol Force, and later carried an expeditionary force bound for Russia during the Russian Civil War. The ship arrived in Murmansk, Russia and helped deploy the peace-keeping force and then assisted in the occupation of Archangel.

Despite her primary role as a warship, the USS Olympia carried out other duties. At the end of the First World War, the ship traveled to the Black Sea to aid in the return of refugees from the Balkans, and in 1921 brought home the remains of the Unknown Soldier for interment in Arlington National Cemetery.

The ship was decommissioned for the last time in Philadelphia in 1922 and placed on reserve. This time she would never be called back to duty.

Preserving the Olympia

Despite the fact that the Olympia was never to sail again as a warship, she survived the passage of time, and was released to the Cruiser Olympia Association in 1957, which saw her returned to her original 1898 configuration, complete with beautiful wood paneling that had not been removed prior to the Battle of Manila Bay despite the standing orders of the time that the wood splinters could have posed a hazard to the crew inside the ship.

Since 1957 the ship has been part of the Independence Seaport Museum at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, and with this transfer, Olympia became the sole survivor of the U.S. naval shipbuilding program from the 1880s and 1890s and the only surviving pre-Dreadnought protected cruiser in the world.  

While the move to Independence Seaport Museum was in part because of the close proximity to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, it should be noted that Olympia also had a connection to Pennsylvania as that is where its armor plating was produced.  

Over the years members of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps from Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania acted as a maintenance crew, but the passage of time has not been kind to the once proud warship. It needed more than the Midshipmen could provide. The last of the U.S. Navy’s Spanish-American War fleet, the ship had been in serious need of much more major repairs in recent years. She is a steel-hulled ship and yet has been in the water continuously since 1945. During the time there have been leaks in the hull, many of which have put the future of the ship in jeopardy.

In February 2010, museum officials announced that the cruiser Olympia needed $10 to $20 million for repairs to the hull to prevent her from sinking. When it was determined that the museum might not be able to support the efforts to save her, plans were even considered to scuttle the ship and make her into an artificial reef. However, public outcry helped save the Olympia.

The Seaport Museum held a preservation summit in March 2011 and announced that qualified interested organizations could apply for stewardship of Olympia through a transfer application process vetted by a review panel of historic ship and preservation experts. By 2014, however, the museum did an about-face and decided it would retain the ship and look to efforts to have her restored.

Various groups have stepped up to help raise the money, and interim efforts have been made to keep the ship open to the public while long-term plans are discussed.

Thanks to an outpouring of support the ship was saved. 

In 2014, the museum began a series of interim steps to preserve the ship while efforts for a major refit could be determined. Of course, Mother Nature hasn’t helped matters in recent years including the 2012 “Super Storm Sandy” and the brutal winter of 2013-2014.  

Yet, the interim efforts have the Olympia looking better than she has in years, while new monitors and sensors can alert the museum’s staff to potential dangers including breaches in the hull. A cofferdam was also instituted to help pump the water out from some particularly weak sections of the hull, and allow it to be dried and repaired.

In 2017, the Museum announced that it will embark on a major national fundraising campaign to raise $20 million to drydock the vessel so that the hull can finally be fully repaired.  

USS Olympia Facts: 

Length: 344 Feet  

Beam: 53 feet  

Displacement: 5,870 tons  

Crew: 33 Officers, 396 enlisted men  

Top Speed: 22 knots (25mph)  

Coal Consumption at Top Speed: 633 lbs./minute 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

While Germany was able to defeat Yugoslavia, the opportunity cost of attacking them instead of the Soviets proved devastating. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: The last Yugoslavian casualty of the invasion did not die until 1970. He was the sad, boozebloated shell of the trim young man who, for a brief moment, had been the hope and idol of at least part of his country, King Peter II.

It was the most exciting scene Associated Press correspondent Robert St. John had yet witnessed in the career he had abandoned for five years to farm in New Hampshire then returned to when he sensed that war was coming.

It was March 27, 1941, and Terrazia, the Times Square of Belgrade, capital of what was then Yugoslavia, was packed with crowds jubilant at their country’s sudden stunning, defiance of Adolf Hitler. The mood quickly turned to anger, though, directed at St. John when he began to get down to his job of reporting.

“If I wanted to photograph these scenes I must be a Nazi agent gathering evidence, trying to get onto film the faces of those responsible, so they could be punished in true Nazi style when and if Hitler got this country under his thumb again,” he recalled. “That was the way they seemed to figure it.”

Early in his journalism career in notorious Cicero, Illinois, the town owned by Al Capone, St. John had been set upon by thugs and left for dead in a ditch. Understandably anxious to avoid a repetition, he waved his passport and a small American flag; the fickle crowd turned to ransacking the tourist agency of Hitler’s ally Italy while he took the opportunity to hotfoot it from the square.

Just 10 days later St. John would be back in Terrazia Square to witness a very different, tragic scene before running again—this time right out of the country before one of World War II’s briefest but most brutal blitzkriegs, the effects of which would be felt to the end of the 20th century. Yet another American, a female member of a distinguished political-military family, would also be on the run—not from danger but deliberately heading straight into it with near fatal results.

Yugoslavia was the makeshift attempt after World War I to bring the lands and people of the southeastern Balkans, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs, under the rule of the royal house of Serbia. But, it turned out, union did not mean unity. Almost a dozen nationalities and ethnic groups seethed with resentment, none more so than the largest among them, the Croats.

The political powder keg finally exploded in 1929 when a member of a different national group gunned down three Croatian deputies during a riotous session of Parliament. Arguing he needed to act to prevent civil war and secession, Serbian King Alexander I moved swiftly to establish a dictatorship.

The response by Croatian extremists out for independence was to found a terrorist group, the Ustachi, which engineered the king’s assassination in France in October 1934.

With his heir Peter II just 11, a cousin, Prince Paul, assumed a regency. The result was power without leadership. The prince, a cultured figure with little interest in or much aptitude for politics, made no secret he was just marking time until he could hand responsibility to the king on his 18th birthday in September, 1941.

Unhappily for the prince and tragically for Yugoslavia, Adolf Hitler would not wait. Preparing for his invasion of Greece, Hitler put relentless pressure on the nations of the Balkans to sign his de facto alliance, the Tri-Partite Pact. Robert St. John found himself rushing from capital to capital: “Weeks of ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ Weeks of dope stories based on the slimmest of chancellery gossip. Weeks of writing two or three long dispatches a day trying to keep the story alive while we waited for the inevitable to happen.”

Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania fell into line, and St. John found himself waiting in Belgrade for Yugoslavia’s turn to fold. Also observing events anxiously there was the other American, the woman of distinguished family, determined to do more about events than merely report on them.

Ruth Mitchell was the daughter of a one-time United States Senator from Wisconsin and the sister of General Billy Mitchell. A journalist herself, she accepted the fateful assignment of covering the comic-opera wedding of Albania’s outlandish King Zog I in 1938. “If I had known then what was coming,” she would reflect after the end of her ordeal, “would I have turned back? The answer is a completely certain No!”

Intending to stay just a few days for her story, she instead became so intrigued by Albania that she gave up her career to stay and study it. Driven out by the Italian invasion in early 1939, she then moved to Yugoslavia. There she became enthralled by Serbian history and culture. “The Serbs,” she was to write, “are a very small race; there were before the war not more than eight million of them. But it is a race of strikingly individual character, of extraordinary tenacity of purpose and ideal. That ideal can be expressed in a single word: Freedom.”

With the same uncompromising intensity for a cause and personal flamboyance that had cost brother Billy his military career due to his vocal advocacy of military aviation in the United States, she went so far as to enlist in the legendary Serbian Chetnik militia, complete with fur hat, skull and crossbones emblem, uniform, boots, dagger, and poison pill in case of capture.

“The soul of Serbia on the march! I was a Chetnik—until death,” she exulted.

For his part, though, Robert St. John was skeptical. “It seemed to me that Miss Mitchell was just looking for some Hollywood adventure. Well, I thought, she’ll probably get all she wants before long.”

Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Markovic, then Prime Minister Dragisa Cvetkovic, and finally Prince Paul himself got the feared summons to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden. “Fear reigned,” Churchill would record. “The Ministers and the leading politicians did not dare to speak their minds. There was one exception. An Air Force general named Simovic represented the nationalist elements among the officer corps of the armed forces. Since December his office had become a clandestine center of opposition to German penetration into the Balkans and to the inertia of the Yugoslav government.”

Serbian public opinion, remembering their support during World War I and afterward for independence, was overwhelmingly pro-British. “I am out of my head!” Prince Paul bewailed under the strain. After a second visit to Hitler and the assurance—for what it was worth— that all that was wanted was his signature, the prince finally sent Prime Minister Cvetkovic and Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic to sign the Tri-Partite Pact in Vienna on March 25, 1941. To the protesting minister from the United States, Prince Paul replied bitterly, “You big nations are hard. You talk of honor, but you are far away.”

Ruth Mitchell’s Serbian friends visited, anguished and humiliated at what they considered the betrayal of a friend. “We had written our capitulation stories, packed our bags, and argued over where the next crisis was likely to break out,” St. John later wrote. “But then something happened that forced us to unlimber our typewriters, dig copy paper out of our suitcases, and get to work in Belgrade again.”

Prince Paul had warned Hitler that if he signed the pact he would not last another six months in power. He would be off in his calculations by five months and 28 days.

The day after the signing, demonstrations, started by students, erupted on the streets of Belgrade. As he watched, a secret policeman next to St. John remarked, “You newspaper boys better keep your pencils sharp. Things are going to happen in Yugoslavia yet!”

At 2:30 the next morning, St. John was awakened by a phone call from a colleague who informed him that troops and tanks were in the streets. Rushing out, he was soon led under guard to a park to join prostitutes, cleaning women, and other night-crawlers.

“We were watching the unfolding of a first class, full-dress coup d’etat,” he recognized.

Without a shot, government buildings were occupied and ministers arrested at their homes. At the palace, the guards opened the gates to the rebels without resistance while young King Peter II climbed down a drainpipe to join them. Soon, General Simovic, the leader of the revolt, arrived to announce, “Your Majesty, I salute you as King of Yugoslavia. From this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power.”

Prince Paul had been heading to his country estate for a badly needed rest. He would get a longer one. His train was intercepted and rerouted back to Belgrade. Under guard, he was then trooped into the office of the new prime minister, General Simovic, to sign his resignation. He finally reboarded his train with many of his ministers for a new destination, Greece. They were luckier than they knew. Ruth Mitchell had been tipped that the Chetniks were launching their own coup, which intended to leave none of them alive. Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic was one the few kept on in the new regime, with a personally tragic consequence.

“Few revolutions have gone more smoothly,” Churchill would comment. The king, who had just learned to drive, without guards creeped and beeped his way through the packed, wild, streets.

The euphoria soon wore off as the grim reality of their position began to set in on the Serbs. Just three days after the coup, the new government timidly announced it would abide by the Tri-Partite Pact after all.

It was already too late. Hitler had reacted to the news of the coup with an awesome, eardrum-bursting blast of blind fury, then issued Directive 25 not merely to invade but to completely destroy Yugoslavia. “The tornado is going to burst upon Yugoslavia with breathtaking suddenness,” he vowed.

At the main planning session with high-ranking henchmen, Hitler made another statement that was to doom a country. The officer taking down the minutes felt compelled to underline it: “The beginning of Operation Barbarossa will have to be postponed up to four weeks.”

“Belgrade those last two days of peace was a weird place,” Robert St. John would remember. “A heavy, depressing atmosphere hung over the city.” He went to the train station to see the German legation depart but noticed the military attaché was not there. One of the officials made a remark that left him pondering the meaning. “We’ll be back soon. Probably very soon. And when we come we’ll bring a few souvenirs for you boys.”

St. John would not be there to see them when they returned. He was ordered to report the next day, Palm Sunday, April 6, 1941, at 3 pm for an immediate expulsion order. Back in his hotel for his last night in Yugoslavia, he got a new head scratcher, a call from the Associated Press office in Berlin cryptically suggesting he not go to bed. “We think up here it would be an excellent night for you [to be] listening to the music from the Berlin broadcasting station.”

St. John dutifully kept vigil all night. Finally, at 4 am German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop suddenly came on the air. St. John could not make out what he was shouting about, but Ruth Mitchell, at home, did. “The bombs fall and already now this instant Belgrade is in flames.”

St. John phoned a Yugoslav colleague. “War! War! War is here, St. John,” the Yugoslav responded.

With another American reporter, St. John rushed to the balcony of his hotel room. “We heard the planes before we saw them,” he would later describe. “At first it was just a faint drone. Like a swarm of bees a long way off. Then louder, louder! LOUDER!”

The Yugoslav military attaché in Berlin learned of the sledgehammer blow about to fall but had been, foolishly and fatally, disbelieved in Belgrade. Now more than 300 Luftwaffe aircraft—dive bombers, medium bombers, fighters— were heading in to commence one of the war’s worst terror bombings, codenamed bluntly and brutally Operation Punishment.

St. John and his colleague quickly tore down the stairs as explosions shook the hotel to wait it out in the crowded, panic-filled lobby. At home, Ruth Mitchell was sheltering under the stairwell while bombs were falling scarcely 20 yards away. “The effect was almost inconceivable,” she would write. “It wasn’t the noise or even so much the concussion. It was the perfectly appalling wind that was most terrifying. It drove like something solid through the house: every door that was latched simply burst off its hinges, every pane of glass flew into splinters, the curtains stood straight out into the room and fell back into ribbons.”

The only Yugoslav aircraft to get airborne were, ironically, Messerschmitt Me-109 fighters supplied earlier by Germany. Those not brought down by the far more experienced Luftwaffe sometimes were by mistaken antiaircraft fire from the ground. The Luftwaffe struck around the clock in waves every two to four hours. St. John used one lull to pick his way through the rubble for the U.S. Legation.

He passed a truck stacked with dead, the ramp down with legs sticking out. He went through Terrazia Square, scene of the celebrations he had witnessed then had run from just 10 days before. “Pieces of peoples’ bodies,” he saw. “Jewelry and groceries and clothing out of shop windows. Glass and stone. Chunks of bombs and jagged pieces of tin roofing.”

St. John was certain the Germans had dive bombed the square in revenge for the celebrations there. One body riveted his attention, that of a young woman in an evening dress. “I looked down on her,” he recalled, “and wondered where she had been last night, to still have on an evening dress at five o’clock in the morning. Then I noticed her right leg. Half of it was gone. Sawdust trickled out of the stump. My lovely brunette had been blown out of a shop window.”

St. John finally reached the Legation followed soon after by Ruth Mitchell in her Chetnik uniform. “Where’s your horse? I asked her,” St. John later wrote. “She didn’t laugh.”

She had good reason. Along her own way through the devastation she had come upon a scene “which will haunt me while I live—a gaping hole where an air raid shelter had been and in the trees around legs and arms, many of them so pathetically, tragically, small, dangling from the branches.”

At the time he was to have been expelled, St. John was driving out of Belgrade during another air raid. At his side was a young Serbian girl who asked for his help and proved invaluable in hunting for food and lodging in the days ahead. King Peter was again at the wheel amid the motorized mob. He would never see his capital again.

“The vehicles on that road leading out of Belgrade were a strange sight,” St. John later recorded. “There was everything in the parade that man had ever invented to run on wheels, from the crudest kind of oxcart you ever saw, up to some diplomatic limousines fancy enough for an Indian Maharajah …

“The people we felt really sorry for were those who had everything they owned tied in bundles on the end of sticks they carried over their shoulders. Instead of following the winding highway, these footloose people trudged across the fields because that way was shorter, even though they did have to struggle down through little valleys and then up steep hills. That ribbon of people is still one of the most vivid pictures of the whole war.”

The absence of panic made St. John wonder if Americans would react the same way. He doubted it. “The difference, I suppose,” he reflected, “is that those poor Europeans, and especially people like the Serbs, are so used to war and destruction that they have got resignation in their bones. They just take it. There isn’t much else they can do.”

Ten miles out of the city St. John stopped on a hilltop for a final look. “We could see Belgrade,” he recalled. “Burning Belgrade. Belgrade already well on the way to becoming a city of silent people. Except that a lot of these men and women lying around in the streets were probably still moaning for help and a drink and something to stop the pain.

“We could see the smoke from dozens of fires. And up through the smoke the red flames. It looked as if there was another air raid going on. We were too far away to hear sounds distinctly, but what we did hear was a dull noise that was probably a brew of all the miseries of war mixed together. The noises of planes and guns and sirens and falling buildings.

“But what made us think the raid was going on in earnest again were the little dark dots in the sky and the puffs of white smoke, which we knew came from the shrapnel set up by the ack-ack guns as they tried so hard and generally so futilely to pin one on the bombers.”

In the late afternoon the Germans had been dropping incendiaries to light up the city for the night attacks. Ruth Mitchell had been among those fleeing on foot and from a village had the same, grim, view as St. John. “The great city on the Danube seemed to be one blazing bonfire. Great tongues of fire would burst suddenly, glare fiercely for a while and slowly sink away. Suddenly heavy clouds of smoke coiled upwards, billowing, writhing, twisting into the sky, reflecting on their black bellies the angry glare that must have been visible for hundreds of miles across the huge river and the limitless flat plain.”

When the air assault and slaughter ended after two horrific days, the city of Belgrade was in ruins and an estimated 17,000 were dead. Robert St. John, who had just come for a story, quickly decided it was hopeless to continue reporting so he had to get out of Yugoslavia.

Ruth Mitchell, who had found a cause, elected to stay. “I was full to the brim and running over with fury,” were her feelings. “I swore to myself that while there was breath in my body I would fight to save what those monsters of cruelty would leave of a people whose dream they could never understand.” But her personal crusade was to end before it could get started—and her real ordeal would begin.

Less than an hour after the bombing of Belgrade had commenced, the ground invasion got underway. “It is vital for the blow to fall on Yugoslavia without mercy. There must never again be a Yugoslavia,” Hitler had decreed. Yugoslavia’s neighbors had been bullied under the Tri-Partite Pact to join in or permit passage of German troops. Hungary’s foreign minister, who not long before signed a friendship treaty with Belgrade, alone made an honorable, if futile, protest—he shot himself.

The invasion had been so hastily ordered that some Wehrmacht units were still en route from as far as Germany, or just getting orders. Fully eight divisions would not get there in time, but those that were there proved enough to overwhelm the hapless Yugoslavs.

The German Twelfth Army and 1st Panzer Group attacked from Bulgaria, the German Second Army and Hungarian 3rd Army from Austria, Hungary, and Romania, and finally the Italian 2nd Army from occupied Albania. To meet the multisided onslaught, the Yugoslav Army had almost a million men. It was an army, though, with antiquated weapons, a transport system based on the sluggish oxcart (a Yugoslavian unit required a whole day to cover the distance an equally sized but motorized German one could speed across in an hour), and a defense plan stubbornly based on holding the entire 1,900-mile border instead of withdrawing to more defensible positions as the British had urged.

And just how weak these border defenses turned out to be was glaringly exposed as a German bicycle company jumped the gun and pedaled more than 10 miles before having to fire a shot! However, the greatest weakness of all for the Yugoslavian Army was its other, equally deadly, enemy—the one from within.

“It is a sad fact,” Ruth Mitchell was to bitterly comment, “that Yugoslavia, of all the small nations of Europe, is the only one in which a large portion of her army with its regular officers turned traitor to their oaths.” That portion she was referring to was the Croats, who saw the invasion as an opportunity to throw off Serbian rule and eagerly took with a long-simmering vengeance.

One Croatian officer had defected to the Germans three days before the invasion with Yugoslavia’s air defense plans, enabling the Germans to pinpoint targets, particularly government buildings, in bombing Belgrade, then to locate local airfields to catch and destroy the obsolete Yugoslav air force on the ground. More than 1,600 others, 95 percent of the Croatian officers in the army, also deserted to the Germans while Serbian officers by the hundreds were murdered by their Croatian troops.

Equipment was disabled, communications disrupted, transport diverted. Croatian soldiers would wave on or outright cheer passing German formations. One was notoriously filmed handing over his rifle and, with a stupid grin on his face, offering to shake hands as the German smashed the weapon on the ground and, with obvious disdain, walked away.

From her train window Ruth Mitchell watched Croatians celebrating, with the royal Yugoslav flag hung with contempt upside down. The train repeatedly came under fire from mutineers. “Suddenly a sharp burst of firing. The train jerked to a stop. Our soldiers, yelling raucous curses at the Croats, tramped down the corridor, jumped out and down the embankment. Violent firing continued for 10 or 15 minutes. I could watch the flashes of the guns as our Serbs hunted the traitors among the trees and shrubs along the embankment.”

She got a further glimpse of the hopelessness of Yugoslavia’s position when she met on the train a Montenegrin peasant, gaunt, clothes in tatters, rags around his feet instead of shoes, who told her how he had rushed off from home to fight armed with just a knife. “There were only big iron monsters—tanks in long rows coming down on us. And what use—what use are knives against tanks?” he kept repeating.

The terrain at times was a more stubborn adversary. German armor so rutted the dirt roads that oxen were seized from the Yugoslavs to pull supply vehicles. Skopje fell to the German Twelfth Army on the second day, sealing off the border with Greece. When the news hit Sarajevo, which he had reached, St. John knew what that meant. “Poor Yugoslavia was hemmed in on three sides. The necklace of steel was tightening…. And it meant that all those thousands of people in Sarajevo had only one way out now. The Adriatic!”

Good Friday in Sarajevo was anything but as the city was repeatedly bombed—St. John sadly watching soldiers shoot at the aircraft, then dance around thinking they had driven them off—and diamonds were being offered for gasoline. “It was a battle of wits, with no tricks barred,” St. John would say about the relentless hunting for gas. “Whenever we parked the Chevrolet anywhere, one of us had to stand guard to make sure some unscrupulous or hysterical refugee wouldn’t break the lock on the gas tank and siphon out our last drop of fuel.”

With panic full on, the scenes in Sarajevo’s cafes reminded him “of the New York Stock Exchange on a two-million trading day.” Luckily, St. John remembered an army depot outside of town; the officer in charge, resigned to the Germans coming, let him have all the gasoline he needed.

With the Yugoslav command structure destroyed by design in the bombing of Belgrade and the king and government on the run, Yugoslav forces in the field were leaderless. On his flight for the coast St.John met general staff officers who took their time dining and chatting with him. “Members of the Yugoslav General Staff, on the eve of a great military debacle, were spreading butter on salted biscuits and talking about things that didn’t matter and never had mattered and never would matter,” he would recall with dismay.

The Germans often simply bypassed what pockets of resistance there were. One Yugoslav unit made a desperate nighttime charge out of the woods against a village Germans were billeted in. Grabbing their boots, helmets, and weapons, the Germans, still in their underwear, soon drove off the attackers.

Racing 100 miles a day, the German Second Army rolled into the Croatian capital, Zagreb, on April 11, to be cheered for the first time in the war by a non-German population. The Ustachi declared independence and set up the most crazed, murderous, quisling regime of the war. “In the north of Yugoslavia the front is breaking up with increasing rapidity,” General Franz Halder of the German General Staff, who knew what they were doing, recorded in his diary. “Units are laying down their arms or taking the road to captivity. One cycle company captures a whole [unit] with its staff. An enemy divisional commander radios his superior officer that his men are throwing down their arms and going home.”

The German Twelfth Army had broken through a strong defense line of bunkers and antitank batteries then driven northwest 213 miles through the Morava Valley in seven days toward Belgrade. Other Wehrmacht units were closing in from the southeast, through Serbia where resistance had been the stiffest, and from the west, but all were beaten to the prize by a tiny unit of the hated rival, the Waffen SS.

A motorcycle assault company of the SS Das Reich Divison led by Captain Fritz Klingenberg and attached to the German Second Army reached the opposite, north bank of the Danube on the morning of April 12, 1941. Though the river was flooded, Klingenberg located a motorboat and with a lieutenant, a pair of sergeants, and five privates grandly set off to conquer a capital.

They were nearly swamped, but crossed successfully. On shore they surprised a score of Yugoslav soldiers who, at the sight of them, just dropped their weapons and threw up their hands. When Yugoslav military vehicles arrived shortly afterward, Klingenberg fired on them, boarded, and then headed into the ruined city.

With no one to stop him, he made his way to the wreck that had been the Ministry of War, then drove on, weaving through the rubble, to the German Legation. It was untouched. The Luftwaffe had spared the blocks around it.

The military attaché, Robert St. John noticed, had not left, and Klingenberg ran up the Swastika at 5 pm to proclaim Belgrade’s fall. The mayor appeared two hours later with what little authority he had left to make it official, and the next morning German armor crunched the debris to make it final.

The last major city left, Sarajevo, fell two days later. Cruelly fitting, the Yugoslav government official who surrendered the country had signed Yugoslavia’s first capitulation to Hitler in Vienna just a month before—Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Markovich.

King Peter and Prime Minister Simovic had flown out from one of the few remaining operational airstrips incongruously aboard another German aircraft purchased during better days with Berlin, a Junkers Ju-88. Along the way they ran short on fuel and had to put down at a makeshift British airfield in Greece, with airmen rushing it with pistols in hand.

“And I’m Father Christmas!” an irate British pilot responded when the young king identified himself. “Now come on, get out.”

After the king convinced the British of his identity, Simovic passed out on gin and had to be carried back on board for the flight to Athens. Aboard British aircraft now, this was the beginning for King Peter II of a long, sad road leading to Jerusalem, Cairo, London—and ending on a barstool in Los Angeles.

Robert St. John would make his own perilous escape from Yugoslavia. On a winding mountain road he passed troops building tank traps and reflected on the futility. More hopefully, he saw others, rifles on their shoulders, heading up into the forests to launch what became one of World War II’s epic guerrilla resistance movements.

He delivered his Serbian companion to her family, and his last memory of Yugoslavia was the sight of her in his rear view mirror waving proudly. At the coast he and three other journalists boarded a 24-foot sardine boat to sail down along the coast for Greece.

The only one with any experience at sea, however, was St. John, who had swabbed the deck of a Navy transport during World War I. The voyage soon turned into a desperate struggle against pelting rain and stiff wind, requiring bobbing and constantly bailing.

“Several times the combined force of the wind and waves tore the oars from our hands, and we had to risk drowning to grab them as they flew through the air and landed on the water,” St. John would be lucky to write later. The most dangerous moment came when an Italian warship spotted them and trained its guns. St. John and the others held up an American flag and, after several tense minutes, they were waved on.

After four days they reached the island of Corfu on April 20, 1941. From there St. John reached the Greek mainland only to be caught up in the German blitzkrieg there. After surviving more bombings he squeezed aboard what turned out to be the last British evacuation ship. From there it passed through Crete just before the German invasion, then went on to Alexandria, Cairo, Cape Town, and finally reached New York.

Back home he was advised to go easy on his remarks at an after-dinner lecture and rest in the country to forget and find perspective. “I didn’t make pleasant remarks in that lecture,” he concluded in his account of his experiences in Yugoslavia and Greece, From the Land of Silent People (1942).

“I didn’t go to the country to try to forget. Maybe I don’t have any perspective,” he wrote.

Ruth Mitchell also made her way to the coast, reaching Dubrovnik. Along the way she met British diplomats who offered to evacuate her. “I did think about it all that night…. But, of course, my choice had been made a long time ago, when I became a Chetnik,” she was, like St. John, fortunate to write later.

Italian forces arrived, and she gamely mapped their positions while preparing to rejoin the Chetniks. But the day before she was set to flee, on May 22, 1941, she was arrested by the Gestapo. Sentenced to death as a spy she was imprisoned in Belgrade, then in Germany. In the end she would sail from Lisbon aboard the last shipload of repatriated Americans, to reach New York on June 30, 1942, and later tell of her own eventual time in The Serbs Choose War (1943).

Ruth Mitchell proved luckier than the 6,028 officers and 337,684 soldiers of the Yugoslavian Army who also went, but stayed, in captivity. The poisonous ethnic hatreds that doomed Yugoslavia to swift, ignominious defeat and the decades of suffering that lay ahead were reflected in how fewer than two percent of those prisoners were Croats who refused the Nazis’ offer of release.

The last Yugoslavian casualty of the invasion did not die until 1970. He was the sad, boozebloated shell of the trim young man who, for a brief moment, had been the hope and idol of at least part of his country, King Peter II.

Driven out by Hitler then kept out by Tito, he could never adjust to exile or abandon the fantasy of one day returning to his throne. Fed up with his maudlin self-pity, his wife, a Greek princess, finally gave up on him and left. He ended his days in Los Angeles, destitute, despondent, drinking (the author’s late father, a used car dealer in Long Beach, had a repossessor working for him who knew the king in LA’s dingier establishments). When liver failure finally put him out of his misery at just 47, the King–for-ten-days made a final bit of royal history. He was the only king ever to die in the United States.

To borrow from Churchill, Yugoslavia’s swift surrender proved only the end of the beginning for what lay ahead. As brutal as they were, the German and Italian occupations paled in comparison to the reign of terror the Ustachi in Croatia launched against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. When the Communists defeated the Chetniks and took over, a Croat would finally be leader of all of Yugoslavia, but Tito’s rule proved more iron fisted, not least against his own people, than any Serb king could have imagined.

When Communism and the Cold War ended, so did Yugoslavia finally. The breakup, though, soon turned into a nightmare of war, ethnic cleansing, wholesale massacre, and systematic rape culminating in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign.

It would not be until 2000, when the Serbian strongman at the bottom of the turmoil, Slobodan Milosevic, was voted from office by his war-weary people and died in United Nations custody while being tried as a war criminal, did the ordeal that started that Palm Sunday finally come to an end. Ironically, separated, the parts of what became generically referred to as the former Yugoslavia became what they could never be as a whole—prosperous and democratic.

Ironically, in his furious determination to obliterate Yugoslavia, Hitler very likely brought about his own self-destruction. The cost of the invasion did, at the moment, seem cheap—151 dead, 392 wounded, 15 missing, but, as the well-known chronicler of the Third Reich’s rise and fall, William L. Shirer, noted, the real price was paid later. “The postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most single catastrophic decision in Hitler’s career.

“It is hardly saying too much to say that in making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his golden opportunity to win the war and to make the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe.

“Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of the consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final victory. Forever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued.”

Author John W. Osborn, Jr. is a resident of Laguna Niguel, California. He has previously written for WWII History on numerous topics such as the British Long Range Desert Group and Polish General Wladislaw Anders.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Firearms, Americas

This kind of weapon and bullet are among the best and are also cultural icons.

Key point: Good weapons for self-defense are important and so are bullets with enough stopping power. Here is what the .44 Magun can do.

Few firearms are as famous as the Smith & Wesson Model 29, chambered in .44 Magnum—which the fictional Dirty Harry Callahan, played perfectly by Clint Eastwood, described as being the “most powerful handgun in the world.” In fairness, it wasn’t really the oversized hand cannon that Harry was holding but the cartridge.

“Introduced in 1950, the .44 Magnum had both the energy and speed gun owners wanted. It delivered 767-foot pounds of energy against targets, and at 1,200 feet per second achieved supersonic speed. The result was an excellent round for hunting sidearm, capable of defending a hunter from a charging boar, bear” or some other type of dangerous animal, according to Kyle Mizokami.

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

What the Model 29 was able to do is to truly harness that power. Weighing in at nearly three pounds loaded—double a modern Glock 9-millimeter pistol—the Model 29 needed that weight to absorb the hefty recoil. While perhaps a police detective might not mind having the solid chunk of metal holstered all day this probably isn’t something CCW holders would ever consider for everyday carry.  

However, the .44 Magnum has remained a popular choice for sport shooters, which explains why the Model 629—a stainless steel version of the iconic Model 29—has been one of the top-selling revolvers according to the National Shooting Sport Foundation for 2020.

Moreover, this version of the Smith & Wesson classic is actually less powerful than the company’s Model 500, which is chambered for the even heftier .500 Magnum. This suggests that a nearly fifty-year-old movie has remained the best salesman for the Model 29/629. Branding is everything, and the .44 Magnum is as powerful a “brand” as it is a caliber.

It is also easy to see why the Model 629, which was first introduced in 1979, has remained such a popular choice for handgun buyers. Its stainless steel construction means it is easy to clean and more resistant to rust than carbon steel, and, unlike blued revolvers, this one will certainly be noticed.  

As a double-action revolver, the single-action trigger is light and crisp for precise shooting, while the double-action pull can cycle the cylinder smoothly for rapid-fire. The large, aggressively checkered exposed hammer will provide a solid non-slip surface that allows shooters to cock the hammer under inclement conditions.  

The Model 629’s red-ramp front sight is pinned into an integral sight ramp, and the rear sight has a white outline and is adjustable for windage and elevation. The synthetic rubber grip provides a sure hold in any weather and helps to absorb recoil. This is a handgun that is capable of taking large game while also being there to make a huge statement as a home defense weapon.  

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Caleb Larson

Nuclear Energy, World

The idea has been tried before.

Here's What You Need to Know: Aircraft powered by nuclear reactors could, in theory, remain in the sky for weeks or possibly months.

The 1950s and 1960s were the United States’ and Soviet Union’s nuclear heyday. Unlocking the power of the atom was supposed to usher in a new era in human achievement. In many ways, it did—harnessing nuclear power offered nearly unlimited energy to countries in the exclusive nuclear club.

But could the nuclear age transform aviation as well? The United States and USSR certainly thought so. Meet the Tu-95LAL and the Convair NB-36H— both of which carried onboard nuclear reactors.

Unlimited Range, Limited Exposure

In the early days of the Cold War before ICBMs and nuclear-powered submarines, American and Soviet nuclear preparedness was extremely high. Both countries had nuclear-armed bombers in the sky around the clock, waiting to deliver their payloads on Moscow and Washington. Keeping bombers constantly in-air required lots of support infrastructure and forward planning—and lots of refueling, which limited bomber’s range and endurance.

Aircraft powered by nuclear reactors could, in theory, remain in the sky for weeks or possibly months without needing to refuel. Their only limitations would be food, water, and pilot endurance. The idea was seemingly straightforward: use existing aircraft designs and modify them to be powered not by conventional means, but by nuclear power.

American and Soviet engineers faced several complex design problems. First, how exactly would nuclear propulsion work? Surprisingly similar to any other kind of aircraft. Of crucial importance would be the massive amount of thermal energy a nuclear reactor creates.

First, a simplified explanation of jet engines: during normal flight, air enters a jet engine, where it is compressed, injected with fuel, and ignited. This creates a controlled explosion that is forced rearward, creating thrust and pushing the aircraft forward.

A nuclear-powered airplane would operate in much the same way—air is taken in and compressed, and pushed out the back of the engine, creating thrust and pushing the aircraft forward. However, after entering the engine, compressed air would act as a reactor coolant, flowing around either the reactor itself, or a heating element from the reactor. This super-hot and compressed air would then squirt out the back of the engine, creating thrust and pushing the aircraft forward. Importantly, air would not flow through the reactor core itself, as this would contaminate the exhaust with radiation that would be ejected into the air.

The Workhorses

The United States and USSR both needed huge aircraft that could transport prodigious payloads, capable of housing heavy reactors within their bomb bays.

In 1961, Soviet aircraft designers decided on their platform of choice, a modified Tupolev Tu-95. The Tu-95’s first flight was ten years previous, in 1951. The strategic nuclear bomber is enormous and continues to fly today, roughly analogous to the United States’ venerable B-52 strategic bomber.

The Tu-95 has extreme endurance and can carry a large bomb load, perfect for hauling a nuclear reactor. It has several design features not often seen on other aircraft. Not only is it propeller-driven, but the four engines each have a set of contra-rotating propellers.

In the United States, nuclear-powered aviation testing began earlier in 1955. Their test platform was a modified Convair B-36. The B-36 was truly a beast—the B-36 had the longest wingspan of any operational military aircraft ever built.

The B-36 sported a whopping six engines, arranged in a pusher configuration with the propellers located behind the wings. The hollow wing roots were over seven feet thick to provide additional space for fuel for transcontinental flight. Some of the later B-36D models were even fitted with two sets of side-by-side jet engines for short bursts of higher performance, which brought the engine count to ten.

No Risk, No Fun

Design challenges were prodigious, but not insurmountable. The biggest design consideration was Acute Radiation Syndrome—radiation poisoning that the crew would need protection from.

The Americans installed a four-ton lead disk in the middle of the B-36 fuselage to reduce the crew’s radiation exposure. The 5-man flight crew were stationed in the plane’s cockpit, which was encased in lead. The cockpit windows were switched out for foot-thick lead glass as an extra precaution. The modified Tu-95 also had similar shielding installed.

During their lifespans, both the American and Soviet experiments left the drawing board, but were rather unimpressive in the air. Besides the success of flying with a nuclear reactor onboard, the biggest concern was for the safety of the pilots and crew. Therefore most flights were thankfully reactor-off journeys.

For what they were, both programs enjoyed a certain degree of success. Both had installed a functional nuclear reactor into a large bomber, and conducted test flights. The parent platforms were also rather successful. The Tupolev Tu-95 remains in service with Russia to this day. The American B-36 had a shorter run and was replaced by the iconic B-52, also still in service.

Modernity Knocking

Jet engines are part of what did in the nuclear-powered bombers. Early but mature jet fighter designs left drawing boards and entered serial production at roughly the same time as the bomber prototypes. They were much faster than turboprop bombers, and if they crashed or were shot down, there would be no risk of nuclear contamination.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles were also played an outsized role. Why build and maintain a massive aircraft, train pilots, and then risk both to deliver payload when a missile would do the same job faster with no risk to life?

Nuclear-powered submarines that could carry ICBMs also doomed the continued development of nuclear-powered aircraft. They were thought to be safer too, although there have been notable accidents.

Still, the test programs were not totally unproductive. Some of the nuclear data that the B-36 program gathered was used in developing the reactors that power NASA’s deep-space satellites.

Nuclear 2.0

In April, an accident in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region released a detectable level of airborne nuclear material.

Several Russian nuclear monitoring stations that report to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization’s network then went silent and stopped transmitting nuclear detection data. Speculation says that Russia is experimenting again with nuclear propulsion, this time for cruise missiles.

Is nuclear propulsion making a comeback? Hopefully not. 

Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics, and culture.

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

World War II History,

Capturing the Imperial Japanese island was brutal work, but it created an airfield for damanged Allied bombers to safely land.

Key point: The cost and benefits of any campaign or battle are important to weigh. Here is one factor that is often forgotten when people think about the Battle of Iwo Jima.

On February 19, 1945, thousands of American Marines hit the beaches on the Volcano Islands in the Pacific, starting what we call today the Battle of Iwo Jima. Taking the small island, encompassing only about eight square miles, required the commitment of 70,000 American fighting men and 26,000 casualties, over 6,800 of them killed.

The island itself is situated only 650 nautical miles south of the Japanese capital of Tokyo, and the defenders of this steaming, sulfurous piece of land shaped like a pork chop fought to the death. Nearly 19,000 Japanese troops were killed in action, and only 216 were taken prisoner.

This article appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

The Focus of the Pacific Theater

This otherwise obscure piece of real estate would ordinarily attract no attention at all. However, by early 1945 Iwo Jima was the focus of the costly war in the Pacific, now in its fourth bloody year. Iwo Jima’s proximity to Japan made it an ideal staging area for American forces that were inching closer to the home islands, anticipating a massive amphibious invasion that would ultimately thwart the territorial ambitions of Imperial Japan.

The Japanese had also constructed three airfields on Iwo Jima, and enemy planes flying from these locations posed a threat to American naval units operating ever closer to Japan proper. The U.S. Navy’s top commanders were already well aware of the hazards posed by the fanatical kamikaze, suicide pilots bent on inflicting damage on American ships and sacrificing their own lives in the process. Once these airfields were captured, the kamikaze menace, at least insofar as it emanated from Iwo Jima, would be eliminated.

Rescuing 2,400 B-29s

Another prime mover in the decision to commit American blood and treasure in the capture of Iwo Jima involved U.S. air power. Long-range Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were already flying from bases in the Mariana Islands and regularly pounded military targets and cities on the Japanese home islands. To accomplish their strategic bombing missions, these massive aircraft flew through a gauntlet of Japanese fighter planes and antiaircraft fire. Many of them were crippled in the attacks, and a significant number were forced to ditch in the broad expanse of the South Pacific, too damaged to complete the return flight to their bases in the Marianas.

The trained crews of the B-29s were a valuable commodity, and those B-29s that were damaged might be repaired and returned to service. In order to save lives, though, lives had to be lost. It fell to the brave men of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions, their attached Navy medical personnel, and the sailors manning the fleet off the coast of Iwo Jima to accomplish the task of wresting the island from the Japanese. They paid a terrible price, and in their heroic sacrifice allowed more than 2,400 B-29s, damaged, low on fuel, and carrying wounded crewmen, to land on Iwo Jima.

Uncommon Valor a Common Virtue

On March 4, 1945, even before the island was declared secure, the B-29 Dinah Might reported that it was critically low on fuel and requested an emergency landing. It is estimated that by the end of World War II more than 27,000 American airmen were saved from an uncertain fate when their planes safely landed on Iwo Jima. A decades long debate has wrestled with the question as to whether the Battle of Iwo Jima was worth the cost. Some American families experienced a devastating loss, while others welcomed home their veteran servicemen.

When it was over, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, stated that on Iwo Jima “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Twenty-seven American Marines and Navy personnel were awarded the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, and 14 of these were posthumous. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the iconic image of the flag raising atop Mount Suribachi, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal noted that the image would ensure the existence of the Marine Corps for the next 500 years.

The battle for Iwo Jima provided one of history’s greatest examples of strong, dedicated men laying down their lives for others. Such devotion to duty is forever worthy of honor and respect.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network. This article appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Living with HIV in Yemen, a country mired in a seemingly interminable conflict, is particularly challenging, with medical supplies hard to come by, and only around half of all health facilities fully operational.

Kyle Mizokami

Cold War History, Europe

A super power needs super weapons and the Soviet Union had them in spades.

Key point: The Soviet Union set out to build a robust and first-class military. It may not have been as powerful as America in many regard, but Moscow certainly scared Washington.

The Soviet Union was one of the most powerful collections of states that ever existed. Born in the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Union boasted one of the strongest armies on Earth.

It was a repressive regime that killed millions of its own citizens and saw itself as surrounded by ideologically incompatible and hostile states. It maintained a large standing army ostensibly for defensive purposes, but that did not stop it from invading neighboring Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland.

This article appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

The Soviet Union placed a premium on science, technology and industrial production. As a result, the USSR fielded some of the most advanced weapons of its time, in large numbers, with millions continuing to serve today.

AK-47:

The Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 assault rifle, a simple infantry weapon, has almost certainly killed more people than all the nuclear weapons ever used. With its curved banana magazine and rakish profile, the AK-47 is the most recognizable assault rifle of the post–World War II era. Approximately 75 million AK-47s have been built.

The AK-47 took design cues from a number of guns, particularly the German Sturmgewehr StG-44, the world’s first true assault rifle, and the American M-1 Garand rifle. The advantages of the AK-47 were that it combined a newer, lighter 7.26-millimeter bullet with full automatic operation in a durable, dependable package. The weapon was lightweight, easy to disassemble and easy to shoot.

These attributes made the weapon excellent for “wars of national liberation,” and in addition to arming the Red Army and Warsaw Pact countries, the AK-47 was liberally distributed to groups ideologically aligned with the USSR. Millions continue to serve with armies, guerrilla movements and terrorists today.

Typhoon-class Ballistic Missile Submarine:

The largest submarines ever built, the Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarines formed a large part of Russia’s nuclear deterrent at sea. At 574 feet long and displacing 24,000 tons, the massive submarines were three times larger than the American Los Angeles–class attack submarines and nearly ten thousand tons heavier than their counterparts, the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines.

The Typhoon class of Soviet submarines was an innovative design, stationing twenty SS-N-20 Sturgeon submarine-launched ballistic missiles in front of the sail instead of behind it. Each SS-N-20 was equipped with ten warheads. Six Typhoon-class subs were built and later went on to serve in the Russian Navy. One remains in service as a test ship for the Bulava missile.

The Typhoon class was the inspiration for the submarine Red October, from the novel The Hunt for Red October. Red October differed from the class in being even larger, having twenty-six missile tubes instead of twenty, and incorporating a magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system.

T-55 Main Battle Tank:

Introduced at the end of World War II, the T-54 medium tank was the first of an entirely new line of Soviet main battle tanks. It featured a new hull and suspension system, new turret and was armed with a 100-millimeter main gun. The T-54 was an excellent combination of firepower, protection and mobility.

A series of modifications—including making it capable of fighting on the nuclear battlefield—resulted in the T-55 designation. The T-54/55 series was the mainstay of the Soviet Army from the end of World War II until the introduction of its descendant, the T-62. Indeed, in addition to the T-62, the newer T-64, T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks are direct descendants of the T-55.

Total production numbers for the T-55 vary wildly, with between 42,000 and 100,000 built by the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact states and China. The T-55 was widely exported to Soviet client states, including the Warsaw Pact countries, North Vietnam, Cuba, Syria, Egypt, Angola and more than a dozen others. Obsolete but cheap and easy to maintain by today’s standards, the T-55 is still in service across Africa.

Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bomber:

Nicknamed the “White Swan,” the Tu-160 was the last strategic bomber built by the Soviet Union. With its swept wing, white paint scheme and beaklike nose, it’s not hard to see why.

The Tu-160 was designed to be a stealthy bomber capable of operating at night and in adverse weather conditions. It was to be a penetrating bomber, like the Tu-22M Backfire before it, capable of using stealth and a low-altitude mission profile to infiltrate NORAD airspace and launch nuclear cruise missiles. After a lengthy development period, the first Tu-160 flew on December 18, 1981.

The Tu-160 can carry twenty-two tons of ordnance in two weapons bays, including the Kh-55/AS-15 “Kent” nuclear cruise missile. Similar to the American Air Launched Cruise Missile, the AS-15 is a small, subsonic cruise missile with pop-out wings that carried a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead. The Tu-160 can carry twelve AS-15 missiles.

M1938 122mm Towed Howitzer:

The Soviet Union relied heavily on artillery during World War II. Towed artillery—particularly mortars—was inexpensive, easy to produce and had a powerful effect on the battlefield. Statistically, artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield, and so artillery provided the best bang for the buck for Stalin and the Soviet High Command. Thirteen thousand artillery pieces were deployed by the Soviet Union at Stalingrad. During the Battle of Kursk, more than 25,000 guns, mortars and howitzers were amassed to stop the German offensive.

The M1938 122-millimeter towed howitzer was the most common heavy artillery piece in the Soviet Army and is representative of Soviet artillery in general. The M1938 had a range of 11.8 kilometers and could fire a 21-kilogram high explosive shell at five or six rounds per minute. During the war, each Soviet infantry division was assigned up to thirty-two M1938 howitzers, meaning even a lowly division could hurl 4,032 kilograms of HE shells per minute.

Like all Soviet weapons, the M1938 can be used as an anti-tank weapon, depressing its barrel to engage enemy tanks that have achieved a breakthrough. A total of 19,266 M1938s were built, mostly during the war.

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 article appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

World War II changed the way the Army's combat units were organized and shaped the future of America's armed forces. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: As the course of the war became clearer, a decision was made in early 1943 on the number of Army divisions needed to win the war. It was called the “90-division gamble.” The Philippine Division had surrendered in 1942. The 2nd Cavalry Division was later to be deactivated, reducing the total of Army divisions to 89. The last Army division was activated in August 1943 and deployed at the end of 1944. All 89 Army divisions went overseas. Only two, an infantry division in Hawaii and an airborne division in France, did not see combat.

The definitive combat unit of comparable strength among the forces of the world during the 20th century was the division. Not all divisions, however, have been of the same size. The number of men in Allied and Axis divisions during World War II varied considerably. The number of men in an American division also varied depending on the type of division, for example, infantry, airborne, light, mechanized, armored, or Marine Corps. Manning of American divisions even varied as the war progressed, and reorganizations were made to ensure the most efficient use of manpower and to reflect the tactical deployment in the various theaters of the world. Although a standard division might be desirable, it was not always viable. Tanks, for instance, were suited to the plains of Europe but of less use in the steaming jungles of New Guinea.

A division has been defined as “a major administrative and tactical unit/formation which combines in itself the necessary arms and services for sustained combat, larger than a brigade/regiment and smaller than a corps.” Inherent in such a definition is that a division is a combat unit that contains maneuver elements, infantry, or armor; fire support elements, mainly artillery but also tank or antitank units; and logistical or service support elements. The last includes motor transport, engineer, maintenance, supply, medical, and communications units. These three legs— maneuver, fire support, and logistics—enable a division to conduct sustained combat operations.

The Development of the Modern Army Division

Although the Civil War armies and the army sent to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898 had units called divisions, they were mainly infantry or cavalry and lacked the other organic elements that constitute a modern division. The first real divisions of America’s armed forces were those sent to France in 1917-1918. They numbered more than 28,000 men and were more than twice the size of those of the other Allies or Central Powers. American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) divisions consisted of two infantry brigades of two regiments each; three artillery regiments, two of medium and one of heavier artillery; an engineer regiment; plus the various housekeeping units of supply, transport (some truck but mostly horse-drawn), medical, sanitation, supply, and signal. The rifle companies, of which there were four in a battalion, were more than 250 strong. There were three squads of eight men in each platoon, but the companies had seven platoons apiece. The infantry regiments had three battalions. Due to their composition of four regiments of two brigades, this organization was known as the “square division.”

The square division was the standard Army formation for most of the period between the world wars. Although mostly paper formations and vastly undermanned, the Regular Army (RA), National Guard (NG) and Organized Reserve (OR) divisions were square divisions. The difference between the NG and OR divisions was that the former were multistate units whose regiments were under the governors of their respective states until called to federal service while the latter were cadres of Reserve officers and noncommissioned officers for mobilization. This was consistent with the reforms made by Secretary of War Elihu Root after the difficulties of the Spanish-American War, which then provided for an orderly, expandable Army.

From Squares to Triangles

In the mid-1930s, there was a public reawakening concerning the armed forces. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a measure to get the Depression-stalled economy going again, decided that deficit spending to fund public works would be a prudent move. Included in such public works were warships for the Navy. The Army also benefited in that installations throughout the country were improved and even some air bases were constructed for the Army Air Corps.

The thinkers in the Army had never been idle, and they welcomed the opportunity to “get their nose under the tent” and share in the renewed interest in the armed forces. Although the Army was still saddled with the weaponry of World War I, a decade and a half had brought technical improvement. The biggest was in motor transport. Infantry could be given greater mobility moving to the battlefield, and units could be supplied more quickly. The reduction in time for movement could be translated into a reduction of manpower to provide the cutting edge. Firepower had been improved to include semiautomatic rifles, mortars, artillery, tanks, and aircraft.

A word about tanks is appropriate. Tanks had been an Allied innovation in World War I to break the stalemate of trench warfare. The AEF had formed a Tank Corps. It was disbanded after the war and what were formerly “tanks” were transferred to the infantry as “combat cars.” Since tanks had a connotation of offense, the euphemism was a way of appeasing a public, which would support an armed force for defense but abhorred any hint of its use offensively.

Army thinkers began to reappraise the tactics of the battlefield and the type of units that would have to fight. In the world war, infantry regiments attacked in a column of battalions in linear waves. Battalions of a regiment would move successively across no man’s land to take the enemy trenches after artillery had neutralized the defenders. The two lead battalions suffered relatively high casualties, but the breakthrough could be exploited by the third, or reserve battalion. A concept of “two up and one back” emerged. It was just a short step to applying this concept at all levels within a division. Thus was born the “triangular division.”

The Factor of Three

The factor of three was applied at all levels in the new, albeit experimental, division. Three squads made up a platoon. Three platoons were a rifle company. Three rifle companies with a weapons and headquarters company made up an infantry battalion. Three infantry battalions with a headquarters and service company were an infantry regiment. The division had three infantry regiments. Field artillery in the division consisted of three light battalions of three four-gun batteries and a medium battalion of four-gun batteries. In the initial artillery regiment of the first triangular division, circa 1936, the light battalions had 75mm howitzers and the medium battalion had 105mm howitzers. By the time war came, the light howitzers were 105mm and the mediums were 155mm.

These were two of the three legs of the triangular division. The third leg was rounded out by a reconnaissance troop, an engineer battalion, a medical battalion, and companies of ordnance, quartermaster, signal, and division headquarters personnel. There was also a military police platoon and a division band. Medical detachments were with the infantry and artillery to provide forward support on the battlefield.

The 1936 triangular division had 13,552 officers and men, of which 7,416 were in the three infantry regiments. After an initial field test, the recommended division in 1938 was reduced to 10,275, of which 6,987 were infantry. In June 1941, the division had risen in strength to 15,245, with 10,020 infantrymen. Fourteen months later, in August 1942, the division had increased to 15,514, but the infantry had been reduced to 9,999. A further reduction was proposed in early 1943, to 13,412 with 8,919 infantrymen.

The organization that fought the war (beginning in August 1943) was one of 14,255 officers and men, with 9,354 in the infantry. During the last year of the war, the standard infantry division had a strength of 14,037, with 9,204 in the infantry regiments. During all the reorganizations and changes, a triangular division was about half the size of the square division it replaced.

In addition to increased mobility there were other reasons for the fine-tuning of the infantry division during the war. The primary one, of course, was combat experience. Weaknesses were determined and remedied. Strengths were evaluated and reinforced. There were mundane reasons as well for tinkering with the size of an infantry division. Reducing the size from 15,514 (August 1942 level) to 14,255 (July 1943 level) meant a savings of 1,259 men. Thus for every 11 divisions, the savings in manpower would generate a 12th. Another reason was the wartime shortage of shipping. Slightly smaller divisions took up fewer “boat spaces.” This was important since the Army had to cross the oceans to fight the enemies. When the forces for D-Day and beyond were being built up in the United Kingdom, the two largest transoceanic liners, Britain’s Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, could “comfortably” carry a U.S. infantry division every other week. This was no minor factor. Another reason to keep the infantry division to the smallest size consistent with projecting its combat power offensively was the finite manpower pool in the United States.

A Draft for the “Arsenal of Democracy”

While the number of American men of combat age who were physically fit for induction was between 20 and 25 million, there was competition for the pool other than the Army’s infantry. Service troops, such as engineers, supply men, and others were needed to make frontline infantry effective. The Army Air Corps, by then the Army Air Forces, had a large claim on manpower. The Navy and Marine Corps needed men. And, in addition to its fighting forces in the field, the United States was both the “arsenal of democracy” and the breadbasket of the Allies. Although many women labored in the factories and the fields, a large body of men was needed to turn out the weapons for the United States and its Allies.

In late 1942, the government took control of manpower. The draft, which had been instituted in 1940 for one year for selected 21-year-olds and older inductees, was extended to 18-year-olds, and voluntary enlistments for all those over 18 were suspended. All males subject to the draft were inducted and assigned to each service according to the needs at the time. Since the Navy and Marines had been enlisting 17-year-olds long before the war, some found this a way to avoid the draft before their 18th birthday. Last, by completely controlling manpower, the draft boards could defer skilled workers and farmers, often only temporarily. This last point was important because workers could be gainfully employed until the Army was ready to use them in uniform. More than one GI in the last years of the war encountered a truck, tank, or howitzer that he had helped build on the assembly line.

Old Divisions vs New Divisions

In 1917-1918, the AEF sent 43 divisions to France. Eight were RA, 17 were NG, and 18 National Army (NA) or divisions raised from regiments that had not existed before. These were all square divisions, but three NG and three NA divisions were converted into depot divisions for the Services of Supply. Likewise, two NG and one NA division were disbanded to replace casualties. After the war, the RA had three numbered infantry divisions and a cavalry division. There were two unnumbered divisions in the insular possessions: the Hawaiian and Philippine Divisions. The NG units returned to their respective states as regiments. As previously noted, the Tank Corps was disbanded. The Army had a maximum authorized strength, but this was never reached because the real limiting factor was paltry funding.

When war came to Europe in 1939 and the Axis ran wild in 1940, America saw the need to rearm quickly. The Navy was well on its way to building a two-ocean navy after the fall of France in 1940. The Army Air Corps was given similar priority. Both of these were Roosevelt’s darlings. For two decades the Army had been the poor relation.

This was changed. Five more RA infantry divisions were activated during 1939-1941. An additional RA cavalry division was activated. Reorganization revived the Tank Corps as the armored force. The NG was called into federal service, and 17 divisions were activated between September 1940 (when the first draftees also were inducted) and March 1941 as camps were built to quarter them. Four RA armored divisions were activated. The Hawaiian Division was split into a RA division and an additional Army of the United States division (AUS). AUS meant that no previous cadre organization existed as a framework for the new divisions.

As would be expected, the pre-Pearl Harbor divisions were the “old” divisions and those subsequently organized were the “new” divisions. The NG divisions entered active service under the square division organization and were converted to triangular. One of these, the 27th Infantry Division, was deployed to Hawaii before it was converted. The ranks of all the old divisions were brought up to strength by draftees and new recruits finishing basic training. They were “fillers” in Army parlance.

Equipment for the old divisions was a problem. Factories were turning out arms for Britain, which had evacuated its expeditionary force from the European continent at Dunkirk but had abandoned most of its equipment. Roosevelt had assured arms production for Britain with the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941 brought Russia under the Lend-Lease provisions as well. Thus, there developed competition between the Allied forces fighting Hitler and the emerging U.S. Army preparing to fight if necessary. In the meantime, training went on in the United States. Newspaper photographs and newsreels of the time showed GIs in the field with wooden mock-ups labeled “howitzer” or trucks with “tank” emblazoned on their sides.

Raising New Divisions During World War II

In the meantime, the Army planners and logisticians were systematically setting about raising the new divisions. It was methodical and orderly at first.

When a division was designated for activation, the War Department selected its key officers about three months in advance. These included the commanding general, his assistant division commander, and his artillery commander. All were general officer billets, but the selectees did not necessarily have those ranks initially. Promotion came with performance. In addition, key staff officers and commanders were designated shortly after the commanding general was assigned. This enabled him to choose his subordinates from a slate prepared by the War Department. The criterion for the slate of eligibles was based on records of performance.

In addition, the small RA of the interwar years included that intangible known as “service reputation.” Most officers knew most others. The key officers of the division to be formed were assigned special schooling such as the Command and General Staff Course (C&GSC), Advanced Artillery Course, and even condensed courses in automotive maintenance, logistics, and communications.

Just before actual activation, a cadre of key junior and middle-grade officers and noncommissioned officers was assigned. These came from the old division that had been made parent division to the new outfit. This could have been a weak point because of human nature. A commander would be reluctant to give his best people to someone else. Owing to the high state of professionalism of commanders, this did not occur in the raising of the initial new divisions. Commanders of old RA divisions took pride in the cadres they sent. It was not until later in the war that some commanders of the new divisions that in turn had been made parents to newer divisions forming began to send newer castoffs to cadres.

Upon the activation of a division, the key commanders and staff plus the cadre were joined by fillers and new officers mostly from Officer Candidate School (OCS). The division thus began a training cycle that was to last almost a year before it was deemed deployable. There were three distinct phases—individual training, unit training, and combined arms training. Appropriate testing by the Army Ground Forces (AGF) headquarters was conducted at all phases to ensure the division was up to standard. This continued well into mid-1944 when divisions committed in Europe began to take casualties. Then divisions in training in the United States were raided for their infantrymen who had completed individual training to serve as replacements overseas. Fillers had to start the cycle over again. Many of them came from disbanded antiaircraft battalions in the United States and from discontinued programs.

The U.S. Armored Division

There were other types of divisions in the AGF. Some were experimental and either discarded or retained in limited number. One of the two cavalry divisions, still a square division, was sent overseas to fight as infantry. The other was disbanded, reactivated, and deactivated in North Africa, its personnel being made service troops overseas.

The German blitzkrieg of 1940 alerted the U.S. Army to its need for armored formations, mechanized formations, and airborne units. Divisions of all three types were formed. Only two survived as viable units. The mechanized concept, which envisioned infantry riding to battle swiftly in trucks and half-tracks, was abandoned after troop testing. Those divisions reverted to standard infantry divisions. This decision was made for several reasons. The increase in vehicles placed a maintenance burden on the division, which enlarged its size out of proportion to its combat capability. Transportation to combat or the exploitation of a breakthrough could be furnished by mobile units of higher headquarters. Further, the deployment of a special mechanized division overseas took up more shipping than an infantry division. Standard infantry divisions could have all the advantages of mobility when reinforced by vehicles.

The trend moved away from specialized divisions. Exceptions were the armored division and the airborne division. There were to be 16 of the former and five of the latter.  From the organization of the first two armored divisions in July 1940 until September 1943, these were heavily weighted with tanks. A minor modification occurred in January 1945 as a result of combat experience in France.

The initial armored division was 14,620 strong. It had a division headquarters with two subordinate commands capable of forming task forces for tactical employment. These were Combat Commands A and B. The tank component contained 4,848 men in two armored regiments. The regiments had one light and two medium tank battalions, with a total of 232 medium tanks and 158 light tanks. The infantry component was an armored infantry regiment of 2,389 men in three armored infantry battalions of three companies each. The 2,127 artillerymen were in three battalions of three batteries each. The latter served six 105mm self-propelled howitzers.

There were a division headquarters and a division service company, signal company, reconnaissance and engineer battalions, and division train. The last had three battalions—maintenance, supply, and medical plus an MP platoon. The tactical concept that generated this formation was that the armored division, wreaking havoc, would punch through the enemy defenses and speed into the enemy’s rear. Fighting in North Africa as well as British experience in the Eastern Desert showed that tanks unsupported by infantry were vulnerable to antitank ambushes and minefields. Thus, the tactical employment of armored divisions was rethought.

In September 1943, the armored division was reduced to 10,937 men. The two armored regiments were eliminated and replaced by three tank battalions of three medium and one light tank company each. There were now 186 medium and 78 light tanks. The two combat commands were kept, but a headquarters reserve command was added. The infantry component was increased to 3,003, with the regiment eliminated and the three armored infantry battalions each increased to 1,001 men still with three companies. Artillery units remained essentially the same. The concept now was for the armored division to exploit the breakthrough of enemy lines made by the infantry divisions. To this end, separate tank battalions were formed from the tanks saved from the armored divisions. These could be used to reinforce an attacking infantry division as needed.

Specialized Infantry Divisions

The U.S. airborne division was conceived in 1942 as a miniature division of 8,500 men. There was a parachute infantry regiment of 1,958 and two glider regiments of 1,605 men each. The artillery included three battalions of three four-gun batteries of 75mm pack howitzers. The vehicles were mostly jeeps and trailers with approximately 400 jeeps and 200 trailers. The Army Air Corps provided the lift for the paratroopers and towed the gliders.

In December 1944, in response to recommendations from a battle-experienced airborne division commander, the size and composition of the airborne division was beefed up. It had 12,979 men in two parachute regiments and one glider regiment. A battalion of 105mm howitzers replaced the 75s. Supporting units were also increased. Only the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific remained under the old organization.

Experiments were made in light, jungle, and mountain divisions, but all except the last were discarded when it was determined that the standard infantry division could fill the bill in any theater. The 10th Mountain Division was sent to Italy in December 1944 to let its muleskinners and skiers try their hand.

Preparing for the Invasion of France

Two major concerns remained regarding U.S. Army divisions prior to the invasion of France in 1944. One was the total number of divisions required in the Army to ensure victory.  The second was how to transport the personnel and equipment to Europe when a trained division was ready to deploy.

The first U.S. Army units sent to the European Theater of Operations (ETO) were an NG infantry division in January 1942 and an RA armored division in March. They debarked in Northern Ireland. In April, an Army infantry division replaced a contingent of Marines in Iceland. In October, combat-loaded divisions sailed from the the UK and the United States for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Later, divisions were deployed to North Africa for operations in the Mediterranean theater in 1943. Their equipment had been moved separately.

Meanwhile, the buildup for the return to France was ongoing in the UK. A unique logistics concept solved a myriad of problems. The men of a division sailed for camps in England on a deployment schedule. At the same time, equipment was steadily being moved to the UK and stored in depots. Before leaving camp in the United States for a port of embarkation, a deploying division turned over its equipment to a new division being activated in the camp. On arrival in the UK, a complete equipment outfit of organizations, not individuals, was issued to the division.

The “90-Division Gamble”

The question of the number of divisions was more complicated. There was a minimum of one year of lead time before a division was ready for deployment. After the fall of France there was also a question of Britain and its armed forces being able to hold out. Would the United States have to face the Axis threat alone? Then, when Russia was invaded there was the question of its survivability. If Russia and Britain were knocked out of the war, more U.S. divisions would be needed. As many as 200 divisions were estimated for the worst case scenario.

As the course of the war became clearer, a decision was made in early 1943 on the number of Army divisions needed to win the war. It was called the “90-division gamble.” The Philippine Division had surrendered in 1942. The 2nd Cavalry Division was later to be deactivated, reducing the total of Army divisions to 89. The last Army division was activated in August 1943 and deployed at the end of 1944. All 89 Army divisions went overseas. Only two, an infantry division in Hawaii and an airborne division in France, did not see combat.

In addition to the 89 Army divisions, there were six Marine divisions—all of which fought in the Pacific. Marine divisions used the triangular organization of the Army but had units peculiar to their amphibious mission. These included, eventually, a shore party battalion to organize the supplies coming over the beach and an amphibious tractor battalion. The standard Marine division could be tailored for a specific operation by being reinforced with specific units such as naval construction battalions (SeaBees). A reinforced Marine division could run to about 20,000 men. With the opening of the drive across the Pacific, Marine rifle companies came up with an innovation called the fire team. A fire team was a four-man unit built around the Browning Automatic Rifle. Three fire teams led by a sergeant formed a squad, one of three in a platoon, placing heavy firepower in the assault waves which struck Japanese-held islands.

By the end of the war, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had deployed 95 divisions around the globe. Ninety-eight percent of these had engaged in combat, and the success of their deployment and combat experience was due in large part to reorganization and preparation efforts by higher-echelon commanders.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Aircraft Carriers, Asia

Fortress China is festooned with airfields and mobile antiship weaponry able to strike hundreds of miles out to sea.

Here's What You Need to Know: The U.S. Navy isn’t without options in naval war.

Ah, yes, the “carrier-killer.” China is forever touting the array of guided missiles its weaponeers have devised to pummel U.S. Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs). Most prominent among them are its DF-21D and DF-26 antiship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has made a mainstay of China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) defenses.

Beijing has made believers of important audiences, including the scribes who toil away at the Pentagon producing estimates of Chinese martial might. Indeed, the most recent annual report on Chinese military power states matter-of-factly that the PLA can now use DF-21Ds to “attack ships, including aircraft carriers,” more than nine hundred statute miles from China’s shorelines.

Scary. But the U.S. Navy has carrier-killers of its own. Or, more accurately, it has shipkillers of its own: what can disable or sink a flattop can make short work of lesser warships. And antiship weaponry is multiplying in numbers, range, and lethality as the navy reawakens from its post-Cold War holiday from history. Whose carrier-killer trumps whose will hinge in large part on where a sea fight takes place.

That carrier-killer imagery resonates with Western audiences comes as little surprise. It implies that Chinese rocketeers can send the pride of the U.S. Navy to the bottom from a distance, and sink U.S. efforts to succor Asian allies in the process. Worse, it implies that PLA commanders could pull off such a world-historical feat without deigning to send ships to sea or warplanes into the central blue. Close the firing key on the ASBM launcher, and presto!, it happens.

Well, maybe. Why obsess over technical minutiae like firing range? For one thing, the nine-hundred-mile range cited for the DF-21D far exceeds the reach of carrier-based aircraft. A carrier task force, consequently, could take a heckuva beating just arriving on Asian battlegrounds. And the range mismatch could get worse. Unveiled at the PLA’s military parade through Beijing last fall, the DF-26 will reportedly sport a maximum firing range of 1,800-2,500 miles.

If the technology pans out, PLA ballistic missiles could menace U.S. and allied warships plying the seas anywhere within Asia’s second island chain. The upper figure for DF-26 range, moreover, would extend ASBMs’ reach substantially beyond the island chain.

From an Atlantic perspective, striking a ship east of Guam from coastal China is like smiting a ship cruising east of Greenland from a missile battery in downtown Washington, DC. Reaching Guam would become a hazardous prospect for task forces steaming westward from Hawaii or the American west coast, while shipping based at Guam, Japan, or other Western Pacific outposts would live under the constant shadow of missile attack.

Now, it’s worth noting that the PLA has never tested the DF-21D over water, five-plus years after initially deploying it. Still less has the DF-26 undergone testing under battle conditions. That’s cause to pause and reflect. As the immortal Murphy might counsel, technology not perfected in peacetime tends to disappoint its user in wartime.

Still, an ASBM will be a useful piece of kit if Chinese engineers have made it work. The U.S. military boasts no counterpart to China’s family of ASBMs. Nor is it likely to. The United States is bound by treaty not to develop mid-range ballistic missiles comparable to the DF-21D or DF-26. Even if Washington canceled its treaty commitments today, it would take years if not decades for weapons engineers to design, test, and field a shipkilling ballistic missile from a cold start.

Still, the U.S. Navy isn’t without options in naval war. Far from it. How would American mariners would dispatch an enemy flattop in combat? The answer is the default answer we give in my department in Newport: it depends.

It would depend, that is, on where the encounter took place. A fleet duel involving carriers would take a far different trajectory on the open sea—remote from fire support from Fortress China, the PLA’s unsinkable aircraft carrier—than if it unfolded within range of ASBMs, cruise missiles, or aircraft emplaced along seacoasts or offshore islands.

The former would be a fleet-on-fleet affair: whatever firepower each force totes to the scene of action decides the outcome, seamanship, tactical acumen, and élan being equal. The latter would let PLA commanders hurl land-based weaponry into the fray. But at the same time, the U.S. Navy would probably fight alongside allied navies—from the likes of Japan, South Korea or Australia—in near-shore combat. And, like China, the allies could harness Asia’s congested offshore geography, using land-based armaments to augment their fleets’ innate combat punch.

In short, the two tactical arenas differ starkly from each other. The latter is messier and more prone to chance, uncertainty, and the fog of war—not to mention the derring-do of an enterprising foe.

Submarine warfare would constitute a common denominator in U.S. maritime strategy for oceanic and near-shore combat. Nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) such as U.S. Virginia- or Los Angeles-class boats can raid surface shipping on the high seas. Or they can slip underneath A2/AD defenses to assault enemy vessels, including flattops, in their coastal redoubts.

In short, SSNs are workhorses in U.S. naval operations. That’s why it’s a grave mistake for Congress to let the size of the SSN fleet dwindle from fifty-three today to forty-one in 2029. That’s a 23 percent drop in the number of hulls at a time when China is bulking up its fleet of nuclear- and conventionally propelled subs—to as many as 78 by 2020—and Russia is rejuvenating its silent-running sub force.

American submarines, then, are carrier-killers regardless of the tactical setting. Now, there’s a bit of a futurist feel to talk about battling Chinese carrier groups. At present the PLA Navy has just one flattop, a refitted Soviet vessel dubbed Liaoning. That vessel is and will probably remain a training carrier, grooming aviators and ship crews for the operational carriers—most likely improved versions of Liaoning—that are reportedly undergoing construction.

Let’s suppose Chinese shipyards complete the PLA’s second carrier—China’s first indigenously built carrier—at the same clip that Newport News Shipbuilding completed USS Forrestal, the nation’s first supercarrier and a conventionally propelled vessel with roughly the same dimensions and complexity as Liaoning. It took just over three years to build Forrestal, from the time shipbuilders laid her keel until she was placed in commission.

Let’s further suppose that the PLA Navy has made great strides in learning how to operate carrier task forces at sea. If so, the navy will integrate the new flattop seamlessly and speedily into operations, making it a battleworthy addition to China’s oceangoing fleet. Our hypothetical high-seas clash thus could take place circa 2020.

In 2020, as today, the carrier air wing will remain the surface U.S. Navy’s chief carrier-killer. U.S. CVNs can carry about 85 tactical aircraft. While estimates of the size of a future Chinese flattop’s air wing vary, let’s take a high-end estimate of 50 fixed-wing planes and helicopters. That means, conservatively speaking, that the U.S. CVN’s complement will be 70 percent larger than its PLA Navy opponent’s.

And in all likelihood, the American complement will be superior to the Chinese on a warbird-for-warbird basis. It appears future PLA Navy flattops will, like Liaoning, be outfitted with ski jumps on their bows to vault aircraft into the sky. That limits the weight—and thus the load of fuel and weapons—that a Chinese aircraft can haul while still getting off the flight deck.

U.S. CVNs, meanwhile, slingshot heavy-laden fighter/attack jets off their flight decks using steam or electromagnetic catapults. More armaments translates into a heavier-hitting naval air force, more fuel into greater range and time on station.

For example, F-18E/F Super Hornet fighter/attack jets can operate against targets around 400 nautical miles distant, not counting the additional distance their weapons travel after firing. That’s roughly comparable to the combat radius advertised for Chinese J-15 carrier planes—but again, a U.S. air wing will outnumber its Chinese counterpart while packing more punch per airframe. Advantage: U.S. Navy.

By 2020, moreover, promising antiship weaponry may have matured and joined the U.S. arsenal. At present the surface navy’s main antiship armament is the elderly Harpoon cruise missile, a “bird” of 1970s vintage with a range exceeding 60 miles. That pales in comparison with the latest PLA Navy birds—most notably the YJ-18, which boasts a range of 290 nautical miles.

Weaponeers are working at helter-skelter speed to remedy the U.S. Navy’s range shortfall. Boeing, the Harpoon’s manufacturer, is doubling the bird’s range. The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office recently repurposed the SM-6 surface-to-air missile for antiship missions, doubling or tripling the surface fleet’s striking range against carrier or surface-action groups. And on it goes. Last year the navy tested an antiship variant of the Tomahawk cruise missile, reinventing a very—very—long-range capability that existed in the late Cold War. A new long-range antiship missile is undergoing development.

How the navy deploys new weaponry as it enters service is nearly as important as fielding the weapons themselves. Under a concept dubbed “distributed lethality,” naval officialdom wants to disperse firepower throughout the fleet while retaining the capacity to concentrate firepower on target. What that means in practical terms is arming more ships with antiship missiles, supplemented by gee-whiz technologies like electromagnetic railguns and shipboard lasers should they fulfill their promise.

The U.S. Navy, then, will deploy no single carrier-killer weapon. It will deploy many. Coupled with submarine warfare and naval aviation, newfangled surface-warfare implements will stand the U.S. Navy in good stead for blue-water engagements by 2020. Trouble is, an open-ocean engagement is the least likely scenario pitting America’s against China’s navy. What would they fight over in, say, the central Pacific? And what would prompt the PLA Navy to venture beyond range of shore fire support—surrendering its difference-maker in sea combat?

No. It’s far more likely any fleet action will take place within reach of PLA anti-access weaponry. The waters shoreward of the island chains are the waters Beijing cares about most. They’re also waters where the United States, the keeper of freedom of the sea and guarantor of Asian allies’ security, is steadfast about remaining the predominant sea power. Conflict is possible in offshore seas and skies should Beijing and Washington deadlock over some quarrel.

And waging it could prove troublesome in the extreme. Talk about distributed lethality! As U.S. forces close in on the Asian mainland, they must traverse an increasingly dense thicket of A2/AD defenses. Carrier-killer ASBMs could cut loose throughout the Western Pacific on day one of a naval war, peppering vessels already in the theater or lumbering westward from U.S. bases. Offshore sentinels—principally missile-armed small craft and diesel attack subs—could disgorge barrages of antiship cruise missiles.

As if that offshore picket line isn’t enough, there’s shore-based antiship weaponry, including not just ASBMs but cruise-missile batteries and missile-armed warplanes stationed along the Chinese seaboard. A nuclear-propelled carrier is a big ship but a small airfield—and it would face off against a host of land-based airfields and missile platforms. All in all, A2/AD poses a wicked tactical and operational problem for U.S. skippers.

The oceangoing PLA Navy fleet could fare far better in a Western Pacific trial of arms than in the open Pacific, the Indian Ocean, or some other faraway expanse. In short, the PLA Navy is a modern-day fortress fleet. Such a fleet shelters safely within range of shore-based defenses—supplementing its own firepower to make the difference in action against a stronger antagonist.

Fortress fleets often meet a grim fate in combat on the open sea, denuded of that protective umbrella. Closer to home—within reach of shore fire support—they can acquit themselves well. China is counting on it.

A quick history lesson in parting. The fortress-fleet concept had humble origins. Sea-power pundit Alfred Thayer Mahan coined it—I think—to describe Russian Navy commanders’ habit of staying within reach of a fort’s gunnery to fend off superior opponents. The fleet was ostensibly the fort’s forward defender against naval assault, but an outgunned fleet could use the fort’s artillery as a protective screen.

Mahan had the guns of Port Arthur, the maritime gateway to the Bohai Sea and thence to China’s capital city, in mind when writing about fortress fleets. The Russian squadron based at Port Arthur stayed mainly under the guns while confronting Admiral Heihachiro Tōgō’s Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) Combined Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

The Port Arthur squadron was more or less safe so long as it remained within range of Port Arthur’s guns, but it accomplished little. Tōgō & Co. made short work of the fleet when Russian commanders offered battle on the high seas in August 1904. The debacle repeated itself in May 1905, when the Combined Fleet and the Russian Baltic Fleet met in action at Tsushima Strait.

Russian fleets, then, were simply outclassed by their IJN antagonists on a mano-a-mano basis. But imagine what may have transpired had the gunners at Port Arthur been able to rain accurate fire on Japanese ships not just a few but scores or hundreds of miles distant. That would have extended Mahan’s fortress-fleet logic throughout the combat theater. With long-distance backup from the fort, Russian seafarers may have emerged the victors rather than suffering successive cataclysmic defeats. The weak would have won.

That’s a rough analogy to today. Fortress China is festooned with airfields and mobile antiship weaponry able to strike hundreds of miles out to sea. Yes, the U.S. Navy remains stronger than the PLA Navy in open-sea battle. A fleet-on-fleet engagement isolated from shore-based reinforcements would probably go America’s way. But that hypothetical result may not make much difference since the two navies are more likely to join battle in confined Asian waters than on the open ocean.

The U.S. Navy, it seems, is optimized for the blue-water conflagration that’s least likely to occur. Question marks surround who would prevail in the scenarios that are most menacing and most likely to occur. Carrier-killing munitions may make the fortress fleet a going concern at last, long after the age of Mahan. And that suits Beijing fine.

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 2016.

Image: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Casey Scoular