Diplomacy & Crisis News

Robert Farley

Russian Navy, Europe

These warships are large and impressive, but they are not the same as an aircraft carrier.

Key point: Refitting and upgrading old Soviet warships is a decent, affordable option for Moscow. These ships may not be the finest, but they are powerful and do make a point wherever Russia sends them.

A second Russian battlecruiser may be on the cusp of returning to service for the first time since the 1990s. 

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

The Admiral Nakhimov, one of four Kirov class nuclear cruisers built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, appears finally to be nearing the final stages of a long-planned refit that will return her to service with a suite of lethal new weapons. If her reconstruction remains on schedule, she will re-enter service as one of the world’s largest and most powerful surface combatants.

Like her sisters, Admiral Nakhimov (named after a nineteenth-century Russian admiral who participated in the Crimean War) displaced some 28,000 tons full load and could make some 32 knots on a combined diesel and nuclear propulsion system. She was equipped with the most advanced surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, and anti-submarine weapons of the day. The Kirovs were initially expected to provide the core of independent surface groups that could threaten US and NATO carrier battle groups. To this end, they carried the P-700 Granite SSM, which relied on a sophisticated set of communications technologies that enabled missiles to communicate in flight, with the hope that at least one missile would reach a carrier and inflict enough damage to prevent it from completing its mission. 

Like other late period Soviet naval projects, the Kirovs differed significantly from one another in configuration, as well as in service history. The Admiral Nakhimov mostly closely resembled Pyotr Velikiy, but had a considerably different anti-aircraft missile suite. Despite her age, the Admiral Nakhimov has enjoyed only a very short service career. She entered service in 1989, but the economic crisis that ensued at the end of the Soviet Union sharply reduced her tempo of operations. By 1999 she had entered what amounted to reserve status, a purgatory that included the bulk of the former Soviet surface fleet. Plans for refurbishing the Nakhimov began to emerge around 2006, with confusing and contradictory reports about the progress of the refit flying for more than a decade. This kind of confusion was typical of the Russian Navy in the 1990s and 2000s, as ambitions often exceeded the means of Russia’s chaotic economy. 

Post-refit, the Nakhimov will carry the 3M22 Zircon surface-to-surface missile, a smaller but more sophisticated weapon than the Granite. The hypersonic Zircon can reportedly reach Mach 8 or higher, maneuver during flight, and strike targets at a range of over 200 miles. It is much smaller than the Granite, enabling the ship to carry up to three times as many weapons. The Zircon appears to be interchangeable with Russian land-attack cruise missiles, meaning that the Nakhimov (and eventually the Pyotr Velikiy, assuming she is brought up to the same standard) will have a much more effective land-attack capability than their architects originally intended. The Nakhimov will also receive a substantially upgraded anti-air missile system (the naval version of the S-300), and various other upgrades. 

The plan now is for Admiral Nakhimov to re-enter service in 2022 with a series of significant upgrades. The Pytor Velikiy will likely begin her own (less substantial) refit around the same time. The primary contribution of Pyotr Velikiy has been as a visual manifestation of Russian naval power. While submarines continue to represent the core of Russia’s naval strength, we can expect that the refurbished Admiral Nakhimov will take on much of that role, especially with the future of Russia’s aircraft carrier (the perpetually troubled Admiral Kuznetsov) in deep question. Even with its more advanced missile systems, the Nakhimov would have little hope of inflicting serious damage on an alert U.S. carrier battle group. 

It is thus not difficult to imagine Nakhimov anchoring a Russian surface battle group off the coast of Syria, Libya, or another crisis hotspot. She could offer effective surface and air protection to Russian naval assets, while also demonstrating the political commitment of the Russian state. In more tangible terms, Nakhimov could play the role that so many U.S. cruisers and destroyers have undertaken over the last three decades, launching precision-guided cruise missiles against land targets either in support of Russia or allied land forces, or to inflict enough harm to coerce a foe into submission. This is a genuine improvement over Pytor Velikiy, at considerably less expense than refurbishing and operating the Admiral Kuznetsov. 

Nevertheless, we should keep the refit of the Nakhimov in context. Her refit is entirely opportunistic on the part of the Russian Navy, in the sense that no navy has given much consideration to building a ship of her size and capabilities since the 1980s. If the hull were not readily available and in decent shape, returning the ship to service would make little strategic sense (indeed, two Kirovs in somewhat worse shape will not be returned to service). Her refit does not seem to portend a return to the construction of large, ocean-going vessels on the part of Russia’s shipbuilding industry, but rather reflects the inability of that industry to economically build new large warships. In great power conflict, the Nakhimov undoubtedly represents a threat to Western naval forces, but also an extremely attractive target, especially for submarines. 

The addition of a second modernized battlecruiser undoubtedly fills gaps in Russian naval and strategic capabilities. However, it does not portend a transformation in Russian naval affairs, or a fundamental shift in naval power between Russia, NATO, and the United States. Indeed, if the refit of both battlecruisers allows Russia to give up on the Admiral Kuznetsov, it may represent the choice of a more moderate, sustainable direction for Russia’s surface fleet. 

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Battleships Aircraft Carrers,

No single weapon could have saved the Soviet Union, but several might have shifted the contours of its collapse.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Had the USSR pursued the T-4, it would have had to give up on large portion of its tactical air fleet. However, it would also have had a high-level, supersonic bomber designed (in part) to deliver anti-ship missiles. This would have complicated the defense of US carrier groups even more than the arrival of the Tu-22M, a smaller, shorter ranged bomber.

For nearly seven decades, the defense-industrial complex of the Soviet Union went toe-to-toe with the best firms that the West had to offer. In some cases, it surprised the West with cheap, innovative, effective systems. In others, it could barely manage to put together aircraft that could remain in the air, and ships that could stay at sea.

No single weapon could have saved the Soviet Union, but several might have shifted the contours of its collapse. The relationship between technology and the “human” elements of war, including doctrine and organization, is complex. Decisions about isolated systems can have far reaching implications for how a nation defends itself.

As with prior list, weapons are often cancelled for good reason. Events intercede in ways that focus a nation’s attention on its true interests and needs, rather than on the pursuit of glory and prestige. In the Soviet case, many of the “wonder weapons” remained safely in the realm of imagination, both for the enemies of the USSR, and the USSR itself. 

Sovetsky Soyuz class battleship:

During the interwar period, the Soviet Union explored a variety of options for revitalizing its decrepit fleet. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, the czars had maintained a relatively modern, powerful navy. After the Russo-Japanese War, however, Russian shipbuilding fell steadily behind the West, and the Revolution disrupted both the industry and the Navy itself.

By the late 1930s, the Soviet economy had recovered to the point that Stalin could seriously consider a program of naval construction. The Sovetsky Soyuz class battleships spearheaded an ambitious acquisition plan, which also included battlecruisers and aircraft carriers. Based loosely on the Italian Littorio class, the Sovetsky Soyuzs would displace approximately 60,000 tons, carry 9 16” guns, and make 28 knots. This made them competitive in size with the most powerful battleships in the world, although inexperience and shoddy Soviet construction practice would likely have rendered them troublesome in battle.

The Soviet Union laid down four of the intended sixteen battleships between 1938 and 1940, parceling out construction between Leningrad, Nikolayev (on the Black Sea), and Molotovsk (on the White Sea). One was cancelled in 1940 because of poor workmanship. The other three were suspended on the arrival of war, although plans proceeded to complete one (in Leningrad) even after World War II ended. Wiser heads eventually prevailed, and the ships were broken up in place.

Construction of the ships required an enormous investment of Soviet state resources. Had construction begun earlier, the USSR would have wasted a fair chunk of national income on three ships that could not escape the Baltic and the Black Sea, respectively, and one that would have been limited to convoy escort in the Arctic. Literally any use of materials and industrial capacity would have served the USSR better in war than these four ships.

The Orel and Ulyanovsk class aircraft carriers: 

The Soviet Union began to study aircraft carrier construction shortly after the Revolution, but as with battleships the disordered economy, the backward state of Soviet industry, and the Second World War disrupted planning. After the war, and after a briefly ambitious effort under Stalin, Soviet authorities undertook more modest, sequential efforts at carrier construction. The Moskva class helicopter carriers entered service in the mid-1960s, followed by the Kiev class VSTOL carriers in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The next step was complicated. Some favored another sequential step, while others argued for pushing forward to a full supercarrier (what would have been the Orel project). The Soviet Navy took the gradual path, working out improvements to the Kiev class and initiating what would become the Kuznetsovs, conventionally powered medium-large ski-jump carriers.

The Soviet Navy expected the Ulyanovsk class to succeed the Kuznetsov. Displacing over 80000 tons, with a nuclear power plant, the Ulyanovsk were the first real Soviet competitors to the American supercarriers. Although Ulyanovsk would retain a ski-jump, it would have had sufficient catapult capacity to launch strike-laden fighters and early warning aircraft, make it more or less equal to its American contemporaries. For the first time, the Soviet Navy would have possessed a carrier capable of long-range offensive operations around the globe. 

However, as with so many Soviet weapon systems, catastrophe intervened. The end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, made completing the Ulyanovsk a dicey proposition, and the only hulk was broken up. In hindsight, the gradual approach had much to say for itself, as it resulted in a force of sea control ships and a cadre of naval aviators. The decision to forego the full supercarrier, however, meant that the Soviet Navy could never offer friends (or enemies) the same kind of reassurance as the U.S. Navy. It meant adherence to a reactive naval strategy rather than a proactive effort to offer an alternative to the Western maritime system. But then the Soviets may not have had much to offer, in any case.

Interwar Heavy Bomber

Although the Soviet Air Forces never developed a reputation for strategic bombing during World War II, in the interwar period the Soviets experimented heavily with long-range, four engine bombers. Indeed, at the outbreak of war the Soviet Union fielded more of this type than any other country, although most of these were antiquated TB-3s.

By the time the war started, the Soviets had settled on the Pe-8, a bomber very roughly comparable to the Avro Lancaster and the Boeing B-17. The Pe-8 never achieved the same level of success as those two aircraft, largely because of construction and supply problems. However, during the process of development, the Soviet Air Forces had experimented with some truly grandiose projects, including the K-7 heavy bomber, which looked like a Junkers fever dream and crashed on its eighth test-flight, killing 14 aboard.

The most promising line of development revolved around the TB-3/ANT-20/TB-6 family, which were all monstrous aircraft of six engines or more. The concept sacrificed speed and maneuverability for heavy armament, based on the theory that bombers flying in formation could defend themselves from pursuit aircraft. The ANT-20 transport  had eight engines and could carry 72 passengers, at least before the prototype plowed into a Moscow neighborhood, killing 45 people. The ANT-26, a potential bomber variant of the ANT-20, would have had twelve engines and a bomb load exceeding 33,000 pounds, considerably greater than a B-29. 

Only prototypes of these beasts ever got off the ground, and usually not for long. Had the Soviet Union decided to go this direction, it likely would have severely retarded the development of Soviet tactical aviation, as well as draw resources away from the ground forces of the Red Army. Giant ANT-26s would likely have proven easy pickings for German interceptors, although at least they could have flown from bases beyond the range of the Luftwaffe. Unlike the Western Allies, the Soviet Union didn’t have the luxury of wasting resources on an extended, expensive strategic bombing campaign; it needed to defeat the Wehrmacht on the field of battle. Had the USSR chosen the strategic bombing route, it might have been unable to resist the German advance.

Tu-42 Super-heavy tank:

German and Soviet tank designs converged somewhat in the 1930s because of the shared experience of the Kazan Tank School. Both international pariahs, Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union began a fruitful collaboration in the late 1920s on air, armor, and chemical weapons. By the time the rise of the Nazis ended the collaboration, both the Soviets and the Germans possessed innovative new ideas for armor technology and employment.

During the interwar period several countries contemplated the construction of “super-heavy” tanks, vehicles that would weigh three, or even four times as much as a standard battle tank. One German designer in particular, Edward Grotte, worked on super-heavy designs for both Germany and the Soviet Union. The most interesting of the several designs presented to the Soviet General Staff was the T-42, a 100 ton beast with three turrets, a speed of 17 MPH, and a crew of 14-15.

The T-42 never made it to prototype stage, but did earn some serious consideration in Soviet military circles. Other, somewhat more realistic projects included the T-35, T-100, SMK, KV-4, and the KV-5. Only the T-35, a 45-ton tank with 5 turrets, made it to production. Nearly all of the 61 vehicles were lost in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, usually to mechanical defect and crew abandonment.

Like most of its super-heavy kin, the Tu-42 was too heavy, too costly, and too slow to put into serious production. Had the Red Army determined to acquire the beast, however, it would likely have proven a disastrous liability in battles against Japan, Finland, and Germany, potentially distorting Soviet armored doctrine in addition to proving tactically useless.

Sukhoi T-4:

Many of the Soviet bombers of the post-war era were direct analogues to US types. The Tu-4, in fact, was a direct copy of captured American B-29s. The Sukhoi T-4 was the USSR’s answer to the B-70 Valkyrie. A massive, incredibly fast bomber capable of high altitude flight, the T-4 tested (and in many ways exceeded), the limits of the Soviet Union’s defense industry.

Designed to hit Mach 3, with a service ceiling of around 70,000’, the T-4 resembled the B-70 visually, and in capability. However, because the organization of airpower in the Soviet Union differed from that of the United States, T-4s were also considered for tactical missions, such as reconnaissance and the delivery of anti-ship missiles. The idea of a T-4 carrying Kh-22 anti-ship missiles is very scary indeed. 

However, the demands of the technology proved too great for the USSR to move to production. The tolerances required for such high speeds and altitudes were probably beyond the capacity of the Soviet aviation industry to reliably produce. Moreover, the T-4 suffered from many of the same intercept and SAM issues as the B-70. Much as the case with the B-70, the T-4 spawned its successor, the swing-wing Tu-160. Only 35 of the latter were built, arriving roughly a decade after the projected service date of T-4.

Had the USSR pursued the T-4, it would have had to give up on large portion of its tactical air fleet. However, it would also have had a high-level, supersonic bomber designed (in part) to deliver anti-ship missiles. This would have complicated the defense of US carrier groups even more than the arrival of the Tu-22M, a smaller, shorter ranged bomber. Production of the T-4 might also have wrought changes in US procurement, with potentially greater focus on the B-1A, and on the strategic interceptor force. Although extremely expensive to maintain, at least some of the T-4 force would likely have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union to serve in the Russian Air Force.

Conclusion:

The Soviet military combined grandiose vision and global aspiration with a defense-industrial base that had severe limitations. In some cases, these limitations produced remarkable weapons, such as the T-34 and the MiG-21. In other cases, the limitations precluded disastrous decisions, such as the giant heavy bombers, the huge battleships, and the giant tanks of the interwar period. The true lesson, however, is that while decisions about weapon systems often reverberate across an entire defense-industrial base, they only rarely change the fates of nations.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter:@drfarls.

This first appeared in 2014 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Wikipedia.

John Rossomando

Taiwan, Asia

Beijing may be deterred if it is clear that moving its naval and air force assets to attack Taiwan puts them at risk of humiliating losses.

“If China is going to start a war, they are going to do it on their terms. All of our wonderful stuff won’t get there in time. You need to get your stuff there on Day Zero of the fight,” Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me last fall.

China has escalated “gray-zone” attacks against Taiwan in recent months. “Gray-zone” activity advances a state’s objectives outside the realm of accepted diplomacy, but below full military conflict. This can include disinformation campaigns, political or economic coercion, cyberattacks, or using proxies.

The United States, Japan, Australia, and other regional allies should counter Chinese gray-zone provocations with ones of their own. They need to have military assets at sea, in the air, and on the ground on Day Zero, or Taiwan would be quickly seized in the event of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invasion.

Beijing may be deterred if it is clear that moving its naval and air force assets to attack Taiwan puts them at risk of humiliating losses. Placing equal and opposite pressure against the Chinese regime is the only way to keep its aggression at bay. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t respect weakness.

The United States and Japan can play a key role in the area of deterrence. Taiwan has one of the freest democracies in East Asia. Its government has been a friend to the United States since World War II when American fliers signed up with the Flying Tigers to help it resist the Japanese occupation. Allowing the Chinese Communist Party to occupy the island and jail its democratically elected leaders would leave an indelible global blot on U.S. credibility. It would tell our allies including Japan, Australia, South Korea, Poland, and the Baltic States that U.S. mutual defense commitments are worthless.

The Chinese Communist Party-linked Global Times noted that the PLA counts on air supremacy to keep aid from reaching Taiwan in time; consequently, it’s essential for the United States and its allies to quickly gain the upper hand in Taiwanese airspace.

If an invasion were to occur, it would likely happen on the Western side of the island. Taiwanese forces would be spread across that side, and the PLA could use a flanking maneuver to strike the less defended eastern side of the island.

Recent People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) exercises in this area with fighters, anti-submarine warfare aircraft, KJ-500 early-warning aircraft, and H-6K bombers suggest this could be part of its strategy.

Japan could help prevent this. The Japanese island Yonaguni, located approximately 120 miles off the east coast of Taiwan, already has a long-range radar station. The island could act as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, closing off Taiwan’s east coast from naval assaults or a blockade. The U.S. military could consider deploying a ground-based version of its Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) to deter Beijing’s surface combatants.

The United States should also consider developing longer-range anti-aircraft missiles that could saturate Taiwan’s airspace from Yonaguni, not unlike Russia’s S-400 missile defense system that has a 250-mile range. Its current Patriot anti-aircraft missile has a mere forty-six-mile range, which is inadequate for deterrence. The uprated system would help the U.S. Air Force in areas where it faces peer-level competition from either Russia or China. A longer-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) could deny access to aircraft flying in Taiwan’s airspace and over international waters off Taiwan’s coast.

To test this theory, I ran a simulation in Command: Modern Operations, a war game used by defense professionals and the Department of Defense. I placed an S-400 on Yonaguni due to the lack of a comparable U.S. or Japanese surface-to-air missile system, and it knocked out PLAAF H-6 bombers and other PLAAF early warning aircraft over waters to the West of Taiwan.

Fighters launched from Yonaguni would be minutes from Taiwan’s airspace and would threaten the PLAAF’s effort to gain air supremacy. If Yonaguni’s airstrip was upgraded for use by allied F-35 stealth fighters, F-16s fighter jets, and airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft, it would force PLAAF to face better-trained American pilots.

A few of the northernmost islands in the Philippines have a similar strategic position vis-à-vis Taiwan. The Filipino island of Itbayat is a mere ninety-seven miles from Taiwan and could be also used as a base for long-range anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to deny the PLA access to the southernmost approach to Taiwan.

It would also require improving missile defenses, however. If the Navy and PLAAF were not enough, the PLA would likely target the island with intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) such as the DF-21 and DF-26.

Japan and the United States should counter Chinese drills near Taiwan with ones of their own to send the message that any attempt to seize Taiwan by force would go badly for China.

The United States, Japan, Australia, and possibly the British Royal Navy, Indonesia, and Malaysia should consider having a major naval exercise in Japanese waters near Taiwan and sink a target ship to show Beijing that its fleet would be putting itself in peril. Considering that Beijing has invested considerable capital in its new aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, perhaps the U.S. Navy should consider towing the USS Bonhomme Richard to the area and sinking it as a target.

The U.S. Navy also needs to have regular submarine patrols through the deep waters of the Taiwan Strait and in the waters surrounding Taiwan, not unlike during the Cold War when U.S. attack submarines operated off Russia’s northern coast.

The threat of a vicious response to aggression on the part of Beijing must be real, imminent, and immediate. Otherwise, Beijing will take Taiwan and U.S. military dominance in the region will permanently end.

John Rossomando is a Senior Analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.

Image: Reuters.

Joseph Trevithick

Russian Navy,

The U.S. Navy has little to fear.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The carrier is barely capable of doing what carriers are supposed to do: launch fighters. When she does, she uses a bow ramp instead of steam catapults, which forces reductions in the planes’ takeoff weight and patrol time.

In December 2011, the Russian navy’s aging, poorly-maintained aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov departed from its northern base on the troubled vessel’s fourth deployment to the Mediterranean Sea.

True, the full-size carrier—which displaces 55,000 tons fully loaded—has a history of mechanical troubles since she entered service in 1991. But her operational tempo had increased, the result of a renewed push by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin to get the fleet out into the oceans for training and patrols.

To that end, Admiral Kuznetsov has undergone some limited retrofits in recent years and participated in several missions to the Med, so the old vessel had done this kind of thing before.

But as the Kuznetsov rounded Europe and headed towards the Syrian coast, the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet kept close by in case the carrier … sank.

It might be hard to believe, but it’s just one bizarre detail noted by journalist Michael Weiss in a essay on Russia’s military expansion.

Admiral Kuznetsov has a problematic history. One seaman died when the carrier caught fire during a 2009 deployment to the Med. During the same cruise, the flattop spilled hundreds of tons of fuel into the sea while refueling. Her steam turbines are so bad the ship has to be escorted by tugs in case she breaks down.

Not to mention the carrier is barely capable of doing what carriers are supposed to do: launch fighters. When she does, she uses a bow ramp instead of steam catapults, which forces reductions in the planes’ takeoff weight and patrol time.

Anyways, in 2011 despite the Americans’ concerns, Admiral Kuznetsov made it home to her home port at Severomorsk near Murmansk. But she’s headed back to the Mediterranean by year’s end—without, apparently, a long-planned retrofit to her engines and flight deck. No word from the U.S. Navy as to whether it fears the decrepit flattop again might sink.

Image: Wikipedia.

Jarrett Stepman

Second Amendment, Americas

Entrenched opposition to gun control laws, even following mass shootings, doesn’t come from the power of the NRA. It comes from the foundational worldview of Americans who not only look at gun control measures as unlikely to stop violence, a curtailment of their own means to personal safety, but also fear that they will ultimately be used to undermine liberty.

Many liberals are often incredulous that shooting incidents don’t provoke larger calls for gun control among Americans.

This was certainly the case after recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Colorado. 

President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress immediately called for more extensive background checks and a revival of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban. 

But if the history of the last few decades is any guide, this move is unlikely to dissuade Americans from their attachment to firearms. If anything, then it will likely have the opposite effect. 

“Before the 1994 ban, Americans owned approximately 400,000 AR-15s, according to government estimates; today, there are approximately 20 million AR-15 style rifles or similar weapons in private hands,” according to The Wall Street Journal. 

While Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, they own nearly half of the world’s privately held firearms, according to a recent Vox article. This is a remarkable statistic.

Longstanding American attachment to firearms is explained away in various ways. The answers usually revolve around blaming the trend on the power of the National Rifle Association, or more commonly these days, “racism.” 

The second suggestion is particularly ridiculous. More often than not, gun control has historically been used to disarm black Americans in particular and make it less possible for them to defend themselves.

One historian, Michael Bellesiles, even tried to claim that mass American private gun ownership is an entirely modern phenomenon and has little grounding in the founding era. His book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, won many awards but was ultimately debunked and proven to be based on fraudulent statistics. 

In general, these theories wildly miss the mark of why Americans have little desire for strict gun control.

Many discussions around gun control in America focus on background checks and the limitation of specific types of guns. However, if one follows the logic that something must be done until almost every single shooting is stopped, then it’s hard not to see the end goal as Australian-style gun confiscation, which former President Barack Obama called for in 2015. 

Evidence for the “success” of Australia’s law is mixed at best and would be an undertaking on a much, much larger scale than what happened in Australia. 

In a time of rapidly increasing violence—in part due to the “defund the police” movement—law-abiding Americans are less likely to want to give up their means of self-defense. Politicians, corporate CEOs, and various members of the country’s elite will no doubt have little problem employing government resources and private security for their protection under a regime of stringent gun control. But the average citizen will not. 

It must be noted that while firearm ownership has gone up, trust in government—and fellow Americans—has been on the decline for decades. And this gets to perhaps the biggest reason Americans are unlikely to accept strict gun control parameters or even more limited gun control any time soon.

Baked into the ethos of the United States is the belief that liberty and the rights of the people can only truly remain secure as long as the right to bear arms remains secure. There is a good reason for Americans to have this outlook. 

History is full of examples of governments using weapons confiscation, gun registry, and mass disarmament of the population as a precursor to tyranny. The American Revolution even began with failed British attempts to disarm the American colonies. 

Perhaps one of the most illustrative examples is the great “sword hunt” that took place in Japan in the late sixteenth century. Toyotomi Hideyoshi came to power as second of the three great unifiers of Japan during a century of internal conflict and civil war. His story was particularly exceptional since he rose from the peasant rather than the noble samurai class. 

Alas, upon achieving victory, it was clear that Hideyoshi would be no George Washington. 

Like most great men in history who’ve achieved absolute power, Hideyoshi became a tyrant who committed a variety of atrocities. He even enacted an edict in 1588 calling for the confiscation of all arms—guns, swords, and pretty much every kind of weapon—from everyone below the ranks of the thin upper crust of Japanese society.  

It was justified as a means to control violence and uprisings in the country. The weapons, according to the edict, were to be melted down and used to create a statue of Buddha. A seemingly noble goal with obvious self-interested intent. The truth was the edict was primarily used to suppress any potential opposition to Hideyoshi’s rule and to solidify class lines in the country. An ironic move given Hideyoshi’s humble origin. 

The edict did have the practical effect of reducing a certain amount of violence in the country, but it also ensured that there could be no resistance to tax collectors or the arbitrary whims of the powerful few who ruled. This mass disarmament was the Japanese peasantry’s “first step towards enforced serfdom,” according to Danny Chaplin, who wrote Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan.

A Jesuit missionary observer of the event, Luis Frois, described how this once well-armed populace became “disarmed” while Hideyoshi became “more secure in his arbitrary dominion.” 

The disarmament edict was followed by more repressive laws all meant to control the population and eliminate resistance to the ruling powers. Very soon thereafter, under Hideyoshi’s successors in the Tokugawa Shogunate, religious liberty was curtailed as well.  

Christianity was eventually outlawed, and missionaries were expelled from the country. The reforms of this era brought a certain amount of peace but also tyranny, religious repression, and social ossification.

The United States, on the other hand, was founded to be a nation of self-rule, on the idea that all men are created equal, and none have the arbitrary right to lord over others. The Second Amendment and the country’s gun culture flow from these ideas. Fortunately, under the Constitution, Americans have many checks on government power. Protection of the right to bear arms makes it unlikely the government will ever even attempt to suppress liberty as authoritarian regimes have done throughout history. 

This is no “fringe” theory, but a direct result of the founding generation’s understanding of human nature, history, and their commitment to creating a free society that could endure for ages to come. Support of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms is not a call for violence or general resistance to government. In some ways, it’s just the opposite. It provides a more secure guarantee that any mass violence between the state and citizens won’t happen at all. Americans are unlikely to abandon this commitment any time soon. 

Entrenched opposition to gun control laws, even following mass shootings, doesn’t come from the power of the NRA. It comes from the foundational worldview of Americans who not only look at gun control measures as unlikely to stop violence, a curtailment of their own means to personal safety, but also fear that they will ultimately be used to undermine liberty. 

Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast.

Image: Reuters

WarIsBoring

Korean War,

On a per-capita basis, the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history, especially for the civilian population of North Korea.

Here's What You Need to Remember: North Korea’s arsenal isn’t anywhere nearly as advanced as that of the United States, but it is massive. Some analysts have suggested that the regime’s huge stockpile of traditional artillery and rockets would “flatten Seoul in the first half-hour of any confrontation.”

It’s difficult to try to keep up with developments in the latest round of saber rattling between the United States and North Korea. U.S. President Donald Trump and Korean “supreme leader” Kim Jong-un have repeatedly traded verbal barbs via Twitter and more formal avenues amid news of naval redeployments, massive live-fire artillery exercises, United Nations condemnations and rumors of troop movements by regional powers.

The United States would have an obvious and distinct advantage over North Korea in a direct military engagement. That doesn’t mean that a war wouldn’t be a grueling and costly endeavor. North Korea’s military is dilapidated and antiquated, but it’s still one of the largest militaries in the world. When the two countries clashed before, from 1950 to 1953, the conflict ended in a virtual draw along the 38th parallel.

Of course, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers China sent to save its North Korean ally played a decisive role in that outcome, but the Korean People’s Army itself put up a formidable fight against the much more powerful United States and its allies. The KPA inflicted considerable casualties in a blitzkrieg-like assault through the south and quickly seized huge swaths of territory, compelling the United States to implement a scorched-earth policy that inflicted a tremendous death toll.

On a per-capita basis, the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history, especially for the civilian population of North Korea. The scale of the devastation shocked and disgusted the American military personnel who witnessed it, including some who had fought in the most horrific battles of World War II.

World War II was by far the bloodiest war in history. Estimates of the death toll range from 60 million to more than 85 million, with some suggesting that the number is actually even higher and that 50 million civilians may have perished in China alone. Even the lower estimates would account for roughly three percent of the world’s estimated population of 2.3 billion in 1940.

These are staggering numbers, and the death rate during the Korean War was comparable to what occurred in the hardest hit countries of World War II.

Several factors contributed to the high casualty ratios. The Korean Peninsula is densely populated. Rapidly shifting front lines often left civilians trapped in combat zones. Both sides committed numerous massacres and carried out mass executions of political prisoners. Modern aircraft carried out a vast bombing campaign, dropping massive loads of napalm along with standard bombs.

In fact, by the end of the war, the United States and its allies had dropped more bombs on the Korean Peninsula, the overwhelming majority of them on North Korea, than they had in the entire Pacific Theater of World War II.

“The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating U.N. forces,” historian Charles K. Armstrong wrote in an essay for the Asia-Pacific Journal.

“The U.S. Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the U.S. had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea—that is, essentially on North Korea—including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.”

As Armstrong explains, this resulted in almost unparalleled devastation.

“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.”

U.S. officers and soldiers who surveyed the results of the air campaign in Korea were both awestruck and revolted. In his controversial book Soldier, Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert collects reflections on the carnage from America’s most prominent generals of the day.

“We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both,” recalled Gen. Curtis LeMay. “We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue.”

LeMay was no newcomer to the horrors of war. He led several B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raids deep into German territory before going on to command the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, including the firebombings of Tokyo.

Another decorated veteran of World War II, Air Force four-star Gen. Emmett E. “Rosie” O’Donnell, Jr., who later served as Commander in Chief of Pacific Air Forces from 1959 to 1963, collaborated LeMay’s and Armstrong’s assessments.

“I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed,” O’Donnell said. “There is nothing left standing worthy of the name.”

Perhaps the most scathing account of the destruction came from Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur had become a national hero for his exploits as commander of the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East during the Philippines campaign of World War II, and as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers during the occupation of Japan before he was named Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Command at the onset of the Korean Conflict.

Despite his long and storied career as an officer, he began butting heads with Pres. Harry Truman over how the war in Korea was being conducted. This led to Truman relieving him of his command on April 11, 1951. MacArthur subsequently testified at joint hearings before the Senate’s Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss his dismissal and the “Military Situation in the Far East.”

“I shrink—I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words—at this continuous slaughter of men in Korea,” MacArthur lamented during the hearings.

“The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited … If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind.”

Neither North Korea nor the United States has ever been able to truly come to terms with the havoc wrought during the conflict.

In North Korea, the war is often referred to as the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War, with the Korean People’s Army being cast as the valiant protector of the virtuous Korean people in the face of American imperialism. North Korean casualties and atrocities—as well as the U.S. strategic bombing campaign—are downplayed or ignored while victories are often exaggerated. This revisionist history falls in line with the “Great Leader” cult of personality promulgated by Kim Il-sung and his heirs who have led the country since the end of the war.

In the United States, the war is somewhat lost in the shadows of World War II and the Vietnam War. It came as Americans were still recovering from the former and was, by comparison, a much smaller and shorter conflict. It lacked the media coverage and cultural impact of the prolonged war in Vietnam. Its legacy was also marred by a preponderance of atrocities—some of them carried out by the United States and its allies—and what in the minds of many Americans ultimately amounted to a defeat by a smaller and weaker enemy.

It wasn’t until 1999 that the United States acknowledged—after a lengthy investigation by the Associated Press—that a 1950 letter from U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio authorized commanders in the field to adopt a policy of openly massacring civilians.

The policy led to massacres in No Gun Ri and Pohang, among others, in which U.S. soldiers and seamen knowingly fired on civilians. Refugees fleeing North Korea were particularly susceptible to attacks from the U.S. and South Korean militaries under the pretense that North Korean soldiers had infiltrated their numbers in order to orchestrate sneak strikes. Hundreds at a time were killed, many of them women and children.

”We just annihilated them,” Norman Tinkler, a former machine gunner, later told the Associated Press of the massacre at No Gun Ri.

Edward L. Daily, another soldier present at the No Gun Ri, was still haunted by what he witnessed there decades later.

”On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming,” Daily confessed. ”The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group.”

In a follow-up interview with The New York Times, Daily said he could not confirm how many Koreans they killed that day—up to 400 is a common estimate—but added, “[W]e ended up shooting into there until all the bodies we saw were lifeless.”

Daily later earned a battlefield commission for his service in Korea.

A South Korean government commission investigating massacres and mass executions of political prisoners by the militaries of both sides claims to have documented “hundreds of sets of remains” from massacres and estimates that up to 100,000 people died in such incidents.

Any new conflict in Korea is likely to be just as vicious and deadly as the last, if not even more so. The destructive potential of the weaponry possessed by both sides has increased exponentially in the intervening decades. The United States’ nuclear arsenal has greatly expanded, and North Korea has developed its own limited nuclear capabilities.

Even without the use of nuclear weapons, the traditional weapons that would be used are far more powerful today than they were 75 years ago. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb the United States used in Afghanistan for the first time in April 2017 is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever deployed. Upon impact, the 30-foot long, 22,000 pound, GPS-guided bomb emits a mushroom cloud that can be seen for 20 miles.  It boasts a blast radius of one square mile, demolishing everything within that range.

The Air Force currently has only around 15 MOABs, and they are not capable of penetrating the numerous hardened underground tunnels, bunkers and bases the North Koreans have built. To address that problem, the Pentagon has developed a special bomb designed specifically for underground facilities of the kind built by North Korea and Iran. The 15-ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator can supposedly blast through 200 feet of concrete to take out the most hardened subterranean lair.

North Korea’s arsenal isn’t anywhere nearly as advanced as that of the United States, but it is massive. Some analysts have suggested that the regime’s huge stockpile of traditional artillery and rockets would “flatten Seoul in the first half-hour of any confrontation.” That’s probably giving North Korea far too much credit, but its artillery and rocket stockpiles could definitely inflict serious casualties and structural damage to Seoul and its 10 million inhabitants.

Likewise, the bases housing the 29,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea are also within range of North Korea’s arsenal. History contains a warning—another war would be unpredictable, chaotic and exceedingly brutal.

(This article by Darien Cavanaugh originally appeared at War is Boring in 2017.)

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Tanks,

APS, as they are called, have been developed, tested, refined, and built into vehicles for many years now to introduce new levels of survivability in armored warfare, something likely to increasingly be characterized by more and more advanced, long-range, and highly precise enemy anti-armor weapons being possessed by enemy forces. 

Is there an Active Protection System that is fast enough--while also effective enough--against a wide sphere of incoming enemy attacks, and lightweight enough to integrate into a heavily armored vehicle that can succeed in addressing the Army’s evolving requirements for future mechanized combat? 

APS, as they are called, have been developed, tested, refined, and built into vehicles for many years now to introduce new levels of survivability in armored warfare, something likely to increasingly be characterized by more and more advanced, long-range, and highly precise enemy anti-armor weapons being possessed by enemy forces. 

The technology, some elements of which date back as far as 20 years, involves the use of highly sensitive sensors to detect incoming RPG or Anti-Tank Guided Missile fire, identify the location, trajectory and expected impact point with computer-enabled fire control algorithms and then fire out an “interceptor” projectile to intercept, explode or simply “knock out” the incoming round before it impacts a vehicle.

Over the years, many interactions and applications of these kinds of systems have been demonstrated with great degrees of success, some of them such as Raytheon’s Quick Kill hemispheric interceptor system dating back as far as the Army’s Future Combat Systems program. The promise of APS, as part of an integrated suite of sensors called a “survivability onion” at the time, in large measure inspired the conceptual basis for engineering lightweight, deployable 27-ton Manned Ground Vehicles. While those vehicles did not come to fruition, the fundamental mission persists with great vigor today. 

This phenomenon, which could even be called a predicament of sorts, informs current Army efforts to architect a new generation of APS architecture called Modular Active Protection Systems. The intent is to engineer the technical infrastructure needed to build and integrate new, lightweight, adaptable APS systems sufficient to propel armored warfare into the future. 

Some recent APS technologies, which have in recent years been tested on armored vehicles such as Bradley infantry carriers and Abrams tanks include The Trophy System, Iron Fist, and Iron Curtain, however, while many assessments show great promise and effectiveness, the Army is still seeking new technical paradigms for APS. 

“We still have a ways to go with APS. It is about the architecture, right? A technical “brain” which will control any effector and any sensor. We can pick the best sensor available and integrate it. At the same time the Abrams is going to be around for a while. It is still the best tank in the world, and APS can add weight to a tank,” Gen. John Murray, Commander, Army Futures Command, told The National Interest in an interview. 

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Kris Osborn

military,

It is the key to America's modern military. How could they function without it. 

You May Also Like: 5 Best Submarines of All Time, 5 Best Aircraft Carriers of All Time, 5 Best Battleships of All Time and Worst Submarine of All Time. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: The military relies on GPS and it would likely be destroyed in a war. This is why backups to GPS are being worked on.

Since the days of the Gulf War debut of a host of new precision weaponry and communications technology, the US military has increasing developed GPS-dependent drones, satellites, force tracking systems and a wide range of weapons.

While such things, such as Air Force Joint Direct Attack Munitions for the Air Force, or the Army’s GPS-enabled Blue Force Tracking succeeded in ushering in a new generation of advanced combat operations – in more recent
years potential adversaries have become adept at closing the technical gap with the US. As part of this, the margin of US military technological superiority is challenged, matched and, in some cases, outdone.

Advanced jamming techniques, electronic warfare and sophisticated cyberattacks have radically altered the combat equation – making GPS signals vulnerable to enemy disruption.

Accordingly, there is a broad consensus among military developers and industry innovators that far too many necessary combat technologies are reliant upon GPS systems. Weapons targeting, ship navigation and even small handheld solider force-tracking systems all rely upon GPS signals to operate.

​As a result there is increased focus within the military community on combat technologies that can provide what the military calls precision, navigation and timing (PNT) for a wide range of systems.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is working with industry to test and refine an emerging radio frequency force-tracking technology able to identify ground forces’ location without needing to rely upon GPS.

The technology utilizes a ground operated handheld device which uses an algorithm to aggregate signals of opportunity from various radio frequencies, said Mark Smearcheck, AFRL electronics engineer, in a written statement several months ago.

“By receiving and processing various radio frequency sources not designed for navigation purposes, the new system connects to a smartphone and is designed to pinpoint a user’s location without relying on GPS,” Smearcheck said.

The concept, a combined effort between the AFRL and Virginia based Echo Ridge, is to identify and develop position, navigation and timing technologies able to operate in a GPS-denied environment wherein commonly relied upon GPS signals are jammed, attacked or compromised.

In particular, China is known to be testing high tech ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapons intended to knock out or destroy enemy GPS systems.

As a result of this and other threats, the Air Force has been vigorously pursuing resilient, cyber hardened, combat capable communications technology to sustain combat operations and preserve force networking without GPS.

The device connects to a smartphone running the Android Tactical Assault Kit, a device typically carried by Air Force ground operators to display the navigation solution on a map.

With the process developed by Echo Ridge, the errors do not accumulate over time, as they might with a traditional dead reckoning approach, so a valid position can be produced indefinitely, officials explained.

“Multiple signal sources are used simultaneously, which provides redundancy and increased immunity to adversarial attack,” an Air Force statement said.

“We’re measuring signals that have known or discovered geographical locations,” said John Carlson, chief technical officer at Echo Ridge. “Because we’re able to precisely measure those signals, we can accurately estimate position without error growth over time or distance traveled.”

Several months ago, Echo Ridge and the AFRL Sensors Directorate completed a field test and demonstration of the technology at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Developers are now working on improving ruggedness for the device to expand the mission scope of its potential combat uses.

Industry developers are also working with the Army to develop navigation technologies able to function in a GPS-denied environment – combat scenarios where satellite signals are compromised or unable to function due to enemy activity or technical malfunctions.

One promising PNT technology under development is an Orolia-developed device called Versa PNT.

“You may not be aware of how susceptible GPS signals are to jamming or spoofing. The whole issue of interference, detection and mitigation is the focus of our technology,” said Mark Cianciolo, regional vice president for the Americas, Orolia.

The technology comes in a ruggedized box designed to mount on vehicles, drones and other mobile platforms that network combat forces. The device uses encrypted RF signals to both detect and mitigate potential jamming or interference – all while providing key navigation and timing systems for mounted and dismounted units. The Army’s mobile Blue-Force Tracker, for example, is a GPS-reliant system, which provides friendly and enemy force-tracking technology

Orolia is currently working on a prototype Versa for dismounted soldiers, Cianciolo said.

It functions like a Wave Relay (Persistent Systems technology) network with each device able to both transmit and function as a router or node. It uses an iridium receiver and inertial measurement technology to provide guidance, navigation and timing, Cianciolo said. The receiver is a small antenna, which receives RF frequencies. This kind of Wave Relay networking is also being successfully developed by the Army for subterranean combat, allowing soldiers to conduct combat operations underground.

“When you look at our solution in an environment where the timing is jammed, we’ve built in several redundant critical timing solutions,” he added. “Our new Versa product is the only fully integrated flexible platform of its kind that delivers comprehensive PNT solutions. The signal is fully encrypted.”

The Versa PNT system is entirely consistent with existing Army terrestrial, ad hoc software programmable radio networks designed to relay combat-relevant voice, data and video technology across a force in real-time.

These networks, currently used by Army soldiers to connect the handheld Rifleman Radio, operate in an environment without a fixed infrastructure such as a cell tower or satellite network.

Rifleman Radio, used by Army Rangers in Afghanistan in recent years, uses the high-bandwidth Soldier Radio Waveform to transmit info across the force. A software programmable network is based upon the premise that each node or radio on the system functions as a router as well as something which transmits.

Versa PNT is also designed in a small, four-and-a-half inch form factor to ultimately enable use with dismounted soldiers as well as vehicles, drones or other platforms.

This first appeared in Warrior Maven here. 

Image: Reuters

Stephen Silver

Stimulus Check, United States

Many of the checks have already been distributed, but there are complications with some others. For example, what about those who have recently collected unemployment?

The American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law by President Joseph Biden in early March, and in addition to various measures to jump-start vaccine distribution and expand the child tax credit, the package also distributed $1,400 checks to most Americans.

Many of the checks have already been distributed, but there are complications with some others. For example, what about those who have recently collected unemployment? The Bureau of Labor Statistics, after all, has said that over twenty-three million U.S. workers nationwide filed for unemployment in the pandemic year of 2020, per the IRS.

The Rescue Plan changed the rules about how that is handled, while also extending unemployment benefits. Those who earned less than $150,000 in modified adjusted gross income, will be allowed to “exclude unemployment compensation up to $20,400 if married filing jointly and $10,200 for all other eligible taxpayers.” Those benefits apply only to benefits received in 2020.

The IRS announced on March 30 that it “will take steps to automatically refund money this spring and summer to people who filed their tax return reporting unemployment compensation before the recent changes made by the American Rescue Plan.”

“For those taxpayers who already have filed and figured their tax based on the full amount of unemployment compensation, the IRS will determine the correct taxable amount of unemployment compensation and tax. Any resulting overpayment of tax will be either refunded or applied to other outstanding taxes owed,” the IRS continued.

The recalculation will first be done for those eligible for up to the $10,200 exclusion, with those up for the $20,400 exclusion coming next.

What do those affected need to do right now?

“There is no need for taxpayers to file an amended return unless the calculations make the taxpayer newly eligible for additional federal credits and deductions not already included on the original tax return,” the IRS said. Taxpayers are also asked to review their state returns.

Last month, the government agreed to push back the federal income tax filing deadline past the initial date of April 15. This followed a letter from a pair of members of Congress asking the IRS and Acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy asking for that change to be made.

“We welcomed the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) decision last year, after bipartisan calls from Congress, to provide an automatic filing and payment extension to July 15, 2020,” the letter said.

“Almost a year later, we are still grappling with the massive economic, logistical, and health challenges wrought by this devastating pandemic. Millions of stressed-out taxpayers, businesses, and preparers would appreciate an extension of the deadline to file their 2020 tax returns.”

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

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

M4A1, Americas

The US Army has now produced at least 117,000 battle-tested, upgraded M4A1 rifles.

Here's What You Need to Know: Army developers explain that conversions to the M4A1 represents the latest iteration in a long-standing service effort to improve the weapon.

(This article first appeared in December 2017.)

The US Army has now produced at least 117,000 battle-tested, upgraded M4A1 rifles engineered to more quickly identify, attack and destroy enemy targets with full auto-capability, consistent trigger-pull and a slightly heavier barrel, service officials said.

The service’s so-called M4 Product Improvement Program, or PIP, is a far-reaching initiative to upgrade the Army’s entire current inventory of M4 rifles into higher-tech, durable and more lethal M4A1 weapons, Army spokesman Pete Rowland, spokesman for PM Soldier Weapons, told Scout Warrior in an interview.

“The heavier barrel is more durable and has greater capacity to maintain accuracy and zero while withstanding the heat produced by high volumes of fire. New and upgraded M4A1s will also receive ambidextrous fire control,” an Army statement said.

To date, the Army has completed more than 117,000 M4A1 upgrades on the way to the eventual transformation of more than 480,000 M4 rifles. The service recently marked a milestone of having completed one-fourth of its intended upgrades to benefit Soldiers in combat.

The Army is planning to convert all currently fielded M4 carbines to M4A1 carbines; approximately 483,000,” Rowland said. “Most of the enhancements resulted from Soldier surveys conducted over time.”

Rowland explained that the PIP involves a two-pronged effort; one part involves depot work to quickly transform existing M4s into M4A1s alongside a commensurate effort to acquire new M4A1 weapons from FN Herstal and Colt.

Army developers explain that conversions to the M4A1 represents the latest iteration in a long-standing service effort to improve the weapon.

“We continuously perform market research and maintain communications with the user for continuous improvements and to meet emerging requirements,” Army statements said.

The Army has already made more than 90 performance “Engineering Change Proposals” to the M4 Carbine since its introduction, an Army document describes.

“Improvements have been made to the trigger assembly, extractor spring, recoil buffer, barrel chamber, magazine and bolt, as well as ergonomic changes to allow Soldiers to tailor the system to meet their needs,” and Army statement said.

Today’s M4 is quite different “under the hood” than its predecessors and tomorrow’s M4A1 will be even further refined to provide Soldiers with an even more effective and reliable weapon system, Army statements said.

The M4A1 is also engineered to fire the emerging M885A1 Enhanced Performance Round, .556 ammunition designed with new, better penetrating and more lethal contours to exact more damage upon enemy targets.

“The M4A1 has improvements which take advantage of the M885A1. The round is better performing and is effective against light armor,” an Army official told Scout Warrior.

Prior to the emergence of the M4A1 program, the Army had planned to acquire a new M4; numerous tests, industry demonstrations and requirements development exercises informed this effort, including a “shoot off” among potential suppliers.

Before its conversion into the M4A1, the M4 -  while a battle tested weapon and known for many success – had become controversial due to combat Soldier complaints, such as reports of the weapon “jamming.”  

Future M4 Rifle Improvements?

While Army officials are not yet discussing any additional improvements to the M1A4 or planning to launch a new program of any kind, service officials do acknowledge ongoing conceptual discussion regarding ways to further integrate emerging technology into the weapon.

Within the last few years, the Army did conduct a “market survey” with which to explore a host of additional upgrades to the M4A1; These previous considerations, called the M4A1+ effort, analyzed by Army developers and then shelved. Among the options explored by the Army and industry included the use of a “flash suppressor,” camoflauge, removable iron sights and a single-stage trigger, according to numerous news reports and a formal government solicitation.

The M4A1+ effort was designed to look for add-on components that will "seamlessly integrate with the current M4A1 Carbine ... without negatively impacting or affecting the performance or operation of the M4A1 weapon," a FedBizOpps document states.

Additional details of the M4A1+ effort were outlined in a a report from Military.com’s Matt Cox.

“One of the upgrades is an improved extended forward rail that will ‘provide for a hand guard allowing for a free-floated barrel’ for improved accuracy. The improved rail will also have to include a low-profile gas block that could spell the end of the M16/M4 design's traditional gas block and triangular fixed front sight,” the report says.

Despite the fact that the particular M4A1+ effort did not move forward, Army officials explain that market surveys regarding improvements to the weapon will continue; in addition, Army developers explain that the service is consistently immersed in effort to identify and integrate emerging technologies into the rifle as they become available. As a result, it is entirely conceivable that the Army will explore new requirements and technologies for the M4A1 as time goes on.

This article first appeared in December 2017.

Image: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jeremiah Woods

Robert Farley

X-32 Fighter,

Given the struggles of the last decade with the Joint Strike Fighter, it’s impossible not to wonder about what might have been.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The X-32 escaped all of the most significant challenges to the F-35. The X-32 never faced decades of testing and redesign; it never saw massive cost overruns; it was never subjected to an endless series of articles about how it couldn’t out-dogfight an F-16A

The Department of Defense (DoD) didn’t have to opt for the F-35. In the 1990s, both Boeing and Lockheed Martin bid for the next big fighter contract, a plane that would serve in each of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as grace the air forces of many US allies. Boeing served up the X-32; Lockheed the X-35.

The Pentagon chose the F-35. Given the struggles of the last decade with the Joint Strike Fighter, it’s impossible not to wonder about what might have been; what if DoD had gone with Boeing’s X-32 instead, or with some combination of the two aircraft?

History:

At the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon proposed a joint fighter project in the hopes of reducing the overall logistical tail of fielded forces, as well as in minimizing development costs. Each of the three fighter-flying services needed replacements for the 4th generation aircraft in their inventory; the F-15 and F-16 in the case of the Air Force, and the F/A-18 and AV-8B Harrier in the case of the Navy and the Marine Corps. The new fighter, thus, needed conventional, carrier, and STOVL (short take off vertical landing) configurations.

DoD had not, historically, had good luck with joint programs, but the hope was that increased “jointness” between the services, combined with more advanced production techniques and more carefully refined logistics procedures, would make a shared fighter worth the effort. All parties understood that the winner of the competition would likely enjoy a great deal of export success, as many air forces around the world required a fifth-generation fighter. In short, this was the biggest deal on the horizon of the post-Cold War defense industry.  Boeing and Lockheed Martin won contracts to develop two demonstrators each.

Capabilities:

Built to the same specifications, the X-32 and the F-35 had relatively similar performance parameters. Deciding to compete on cost, Boeing designed the X-32 around a single-piece delta wing that would fit all three variants. The X-32 lacked the shaft-driven turbofan lift of the F-35, instead using the same thrust vectoring system as the AV-8 Harrier. The X-32’s system was less advanced than the F-35’s, but also less complex.

The X-32 was designed to reach Mach 1.6 in conventional flight. It could carry either six AMRAAMs or two missiles and two bombs in its internal weapons bay. Range and stealth characteristics were generally similar to those expected of the F-35, and the body of the aircraft could accommodate much of the advanced electronic equipment that the F-35 now carries.

Decision:

One thing is for certain; the X-32 was a ridiculously ugly aircraft. It looked like nothing so much as the spawn of an A-7 Corsair and a hideously deformed manatee. The F-35 is no prize from an aesthetic point of view, lacking the sleek, dangerous lines of the F-22, but the X-32 made the F-35 look positively sexy by comparison. How much should this matter? Not a bit. How much did it matter? Good question. Fighter pilots don’t like to fly aircraft that look like they could be run over by Florida speed boat.

On more concrete grounds, Boeing’s strategy probably hurt its chances. Instead of building one demonstrator capable of fulfilling the requirements of all three services, Boeing built two; one capable of conventional supersonic flight, and the other of vertical take-off and landing. Lockheed’s prototype could do both. The Pentagon also liked the innovative (if risky) nature of the F-35’s turbolift. Finally, Lockheed’s experience with the F-22 suggested that it could probably handle another large stealth fighter project.

Conclusion:

Chosen in 2001, the F-35 went on to become the largest Pentagon procurement project of all time, and one of the most beset by trouble. The X-32 escaped all of the most significant challenges to the F-35. The X-32 never faced decades of testing and redesign; it never saw massive cost overruns; it was never subjected to an endless series of articles about how it couldn’t out-dogfight an F-16A. Nostalgia for what might have been is common in aircraft competitions, and it’s impossible to say whether the X-32 would have run into the same difficulties of the F-35.  Given the complex nature of advanced fighter projects, the answer is almost certainly “yes.”

But in hindsight, it almost certainly would have made more sense to go with a VSTOL alternative fighter for the Marine Corps. This would have eliminated the most complex aspect of the “joint” project; the need to create an aircraft that shared critical components across three wildly different variants. This also would have helped spread the wealth across different major defense contractors, a practice that has increasingly become a Pentagon priority. Of course, given that the STOVL aspects of the F-35 and X-32 were baked in at the proposal stage, this would have required turning the clock back all the way to 1993, not just to 2001.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Great Power Competition, World

As the world becomes more multipolar, expect to see more and more countries with big economies and advanced militaries looking to flex their newfound might.

Key point: America, China, Russia, and India all come to mind. But which powers will truly be one top over the next deacde?

The focus of ground combat operations has shifted dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Relatively few operations now involve the defeat of a technologically and doctrinally similar force, leading to the conquest or liberation of territory. Preparation for these operations remains important, but ground combat branches also have a host of other priorities, some (including counter-insurgency and policing) harkening back to the origins of the modern military organization.

What will the balance of ground combat power look like in 2030, presumably after the Wars on Terror and the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation (more to come on this idea below) shake out?

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

Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but a few relatively simple questions can help illuminate our analysis. In particular, three questions motivate this study:

• Does the army have access to national resources, including an innovative technological base?

• Does the army have sufficient support from political authorities, without compromising the organization’s independence?

• Does the army have access to experiential learning; does it have the opportunity to learn and innovate in real-world conditions?

Given these questions, most ground combat forces of 2030 will very much resemble the most lethal forces of today, with perhaps a couple of important changes.

India

The Indian Army is poised to stand alongside the world’s most elite ground combat forces. The Army has dealt with combat operations across the intensity spectrum, contending against a Maoist insurgency at home, a Pakistani-supported insurgency in Kashmir, and a variety of other, smaller domestic operations. At the same time, the Indian Army remains well-prepared for high intensity combat against Pakistan, having long accepted the need for realistic combat training. Altogether, these experiences have helped hone the force into an effective tool for New Delhi’s foreign and domestic policy.

While Indian Army equipment has lagged behind competitors in important ways, India now has access to nearly the entire universe of military technology. Russia, Europe, Israel, and the United States all sell their wares to India, complementing a growing domestic military industrial complex. Despite the need to compete with the air and naval services, the Indian Army should have greater access to advanced technology in the future than it has in the past, making it an ever more formidable force.

(Recommended: 5 Most Powerful Navies in 2030) 

France

Of all the European countries, France will likely retain the most capable, lethal army in the future. France remains committed to the idea of playing a major role in world politics, and clearly believes in the necessity of effective ground forces to fulfill that role. This should continue into the future, and perhaps even accelerate as France takes on greater control of the military and security apparatus of the European Union.

France’s military industrial complex remains robust, both on the domestic and the export fronts. The Army has modern command and communications equipment, and provides the backbone for most multilateral European Union forces. It also enjoys access to excellent field equipment, including tanks and artillery. The commitment of the French government to maintaining a strong domestic arms industry works in the Army’s favor.

The French Army has considerable experience with operations from the low to medium arcs of the combat spectrum. It has served in the Afghan and North African theaters of the Wars on Terror, using regular and elite forces to support locals and defeat enemy irregulars. The Army also enjoys the support of the two other French services; the Marine Nationale has creditable expeditionary capabilities, and the Air Force has increasingly focused on support operations, including battlefield strike, transport, and reconnaissance. The modular, professional nature of the Army makes it easily deployable across a wide range of territory.

Russia

The Russian Army went through a wrenching transformation at the end of the Cold War, losing much of its access to resources, to political clout, and to manpower. The military-industrial complex that had supported the Red Army collapsed in slow motion, leaving the force with outdated and poorly-maintained equipment. Morale dropped, and the Army struggled in combat against irregulars in Chechnya and elsewhere.

(Recommended: China and America Go To War in South China Sea: Who Wins?) 

Not everything has turned, but some things have. Improvements in the Russian economy allowed for more investment in the force. Reform, especially in the elite forces, helped Russia win the war in Chechnya. In 2008, the Russian Army quickly defeated Georgia, and in 2014 it spearheaded the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Together, we might call these the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation, a conflict that may not yet have ended. The Russian Army continues to play the central role in Moscow’s management of the near abroad, even as it has ceded some space to naval and air forces over the past couple of years.

The Russian Army will remain a lethal force in 2030, but nevertheless will have serious problems. Access to technology could become a greater problem in the future. The death throes of the Soviet military-industrial complex have finally played out, leaving a system of innovation and production that has struggled on both sides of the coin. Manpower may also prove problematic, as the Army seems stuck between the old conscription model (supported by a dwindling population), and the volunteer system that makes elite forces so special. Still, Russia’s neighbors will continue to fear the size and prowess of the Russian Army (especially in so-called “hybrid” operations) for a long time.

United States

The United States Army has represented the gold standard for a ground combat force since at least 1991. The defeat of the Iraqi Army in 1991, and the consummate destruction of the same in 2003, remain the most impressive feats of ground combat since the end of the Cold War. Over the last fifteen years, the Army has continued field operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; special operators have gone much farther afield.

The US Army continues to have access to a formidable system of military innovation. It shares the pie with the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, but notwithstanding sluggish growth in the last decade, the pie remains very large. While some of the equipment used by the US Army still dates to the Cold War, almost all such material has undergone a series of upgrades to bring it up to the standards of modern, networked warfare. The Army has the world’s largest array of reconnaissance drones, connecting forward observation with lethal, accurate fires.

 

Moreover, the Army has fifteen years of combat experience in the Wars on Terror; the longest period of consistent combat operations since at least the Indian Wars. To be sure, this experience holds dangers, not least of organizational exhaustion. This is particularly concerning given the apparently endless nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the US Army should remain the most powerful ground combat force in the world in 2030, and not by a small margin.

China

Since at least the early 1990s, the People’s Liberation Army has engaged in a thorough-going reform of its ground forces. For decades, elements of the PLA acted as the guarantors of specific political factions within the Chinese Communist Party. As reforms took hold, the PLA became a commercial organization as much as a military one, taking control of a wide variety of small enterprises.

This situation began to turn as the Chinese economy erupted in the 1990s and 2000s. With access to funding and an increasingly innovative technology sector, the ground element of the PLA began to slim down and reform itself, becoming a modern military organization.

Like its American counterpart, the ground force of the PLA must share the financial pie with a pair of voracious partners. The era in which China focused on ground power at the expense of sea and air power has decisively ended. Also, the PLA can never detach itself fully from the factional struggles within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the two are too closely intertwined for anything approaching Western style civil-military relations to take hold.

Reform has included massive equipment modernization projects, realistic training, and steps toward the professionalization of the force. While the PLA does not enjoy the same level of funding as the US Army, it does have access to nearly unlimited manpower, and it controls greater resources than almost any other army in the world. The one thing the PLA lacks is real-world experience; it has not conducted live combat operations since the Sino-Vietnamese War, and has played no role in the major conflicts of this century. Still, there is no reason to believe that existing trends in PLA modernization and reform will change direction in the next fifteen years.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, the answers to “how do we build a powerful army” remain painfully simple. States that have access to enthusiastic populations with high human capital, that can cull the most innovative technologies from robust, modern economies, and that can structure their civil-military relations with just-enough-but-not-too-much independence will tend to do very well. Experience doesn’t hurt, either. The simplicity of the answers does not imply that the prescriptions are easy to achieve, however.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Oscar-nominated “The Mole Agent” is a film noir take on life in a Chilean nursing home.

Joseph Trevithick

B-58 Bomber,

Convair’s delta-wing Hustler was in some respects a fantastic aircraft.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The B-58 Hustler would never see combat and was never configured for non-nuclear bombing missions. In January 1970, the Air Force retired the aircraft. The flying branch’s nuclear-attack mission would fall to low-flying B-52s, B-1s, F-111s, stealthy B-2s and ballistic missiles — the latter of which were a testament to the success of concurrency.

On Nov. 11, 1956, the first B-58 Hustler took flight. It would never see combat. An exotic, beautiful bomber designed for high-speed nuclear strike missions, changes in Soviet tactics and a development method which dramatically hiked costs conspired to doom the Hustler — intended as a replacement for the jet-powered B-47 Stratojet.

Convair’s delta-wing Hustler was in some respects a fantastic aircraft, and as a supersonic jet bomber was capable of flying significantly faster — at Mach 2.0 — than the B-52 Stratofortress and the Stratojet. With a maximum altitude of 63,400 feet, it flew much higher than both of those bombers.

The Hustler was also small, for a bomber, with its 95.10-foot length and a 56.9-foot-wingspan. A B-52 is 64 feet longer and has 128 more feet of wing.

Speed was everything for the Hustler, as the Air Force aimed to have the bombers — armed with a single nine-megaton B53 nuclear bomb or four B43 or B61 nuclear bombs on four wing pylons — dash into the Soviet Union and China at speeds and altitudes that interceptors and surface-to-air missiles would have difficulty reaching.

In 1964, the CIA determined that the only Chinese aircraft possibly capable of intercepting it was the MiG-21 Fishbed and “even then” the chances of a successful hit would be “marginal.”

This was due in part to the Hustler’s four J79-GE-5A turbojet engines capable of individually producing 10,400 pounds of dry thrust. The delta wing shape also helped increase speed, but the resulting drag pushed the engineers to redesign the fuselage in a curved “coke-bottle” shape. A large bomb-and-fuel pod sat underneath the fuselage.

To reduce heat, Convair designed the B-58’s skin out of honeycombed fiberglass sandwiched between aluminum and steel plates, glued together instead of riveted. This engineering method would later inform future jet aircraft such as commercial airliners.

However, the Hustler’s small size created one of its biggest shortcomings for a jet designed to penetrate Soviet airspace — an unrefueled combat radius of only 1,740 miles. This would require the flying branch to base its Hustlers in Europe or devote substantial numbers of tankers for aerial refueling.

The short range was a serious concern in the Air Force, according to the 2012 book Rearming for the Cold War, 1945-1960 by retired USAF Col. Elliott V. Converse III.

Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay of Strategic Air Command disliked the bomber and wanted the planes kept away from SAC. “In 1955, Maj. Gen. John P. McConnell, LeMay’s director of plans, commented wryly that as long as the Soviet Union and not Canada was the enemy, range would matter,” Converse wrote.

To make matters worse, the bomber was mechanically complicated, expensive — three times as much to operate than the B-52 — and difficult to develop. To redesign the fuselage into the “coke bottle” forced delays in the program and an increase in costs.

The number of planned B-58s changed — the Air Force would end up buying 116 Hustlers, a third of what the flying branch wanted. And because the bomber traveled so fast, the Air Force needed a new navigation and bombing system — the Sperry AN/ASQ-42 — which proved most troublesome of all to develop.

The J79 engine ran into problems, as did the braking system and ejection seats, the latter of which Convair ultimately swapped out for ejectable pods. “Despite the several speed records that it established, the B-58 may not have been worth its high cost,” Converse wrote.

More than anything else, two factors ultimately doomed the Hustler. The first was the development of better Soviet surface-to-air missiles in the 1950s culminating in the May 1960 shootdown of a high-flying U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers. The weapon, an S-75 Dvina — known by NATO as the SA-2 Guideline — could reach thousands of feet higher than the B-58’s maximum operating altitude.

One solution was to fly low, but flying low also means flying slow given the heavier air. Not only did that defeat the purpose of the Hustler’s design, the plane handled poorly at lower speeds. Twenty percent crashed.

The second problem was inherent to the U.S. Air Force’s demand that the B-58’s development occur concurrently, similar to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter decades later.

“These central principles were that a system should be designed from the outset as an integrated whole and, based upon this plan, work on all of the elements making up the system, including its subsystems and aspects of its employment such as supporting facilities and equipment and training programs, should take place concurrently,” Converse wrote in Rearming for the Cold War.

Problems, when they arose, created cascading problems for the entire project. “When technological monkey wrenches showed up in the B-58 program, the system had to be redesigned or wait for the problems to be solved. As a result, development slowed, some production preparations had to be scrapped, costs rose, and deployment was delayed.”

If this sounds familiar, it should given the repeated delays to the F-35. While the Air Force promised that concurrency would reduce costs for the stealth fighter, it hasn’t. Quite the opposite.

The B-58 Hustler would never see combat and was never configured for non-nuclear bombing missions. In January 1970, the Air Force retired the aircraft. The flying branch’s nuclear-attack mission would fall to low-flying B-52s, B-1s, F-111s, stealthy B-2s and ballistic missiles — the latter of which were a testament to the success of concurrency.

The forgotten B-58’s failure, however, shrouded the reality of how dangerous concurrency can be in radically-new aircraft projects.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Russian Navy,

After more than twenty years of American submarine supremacy, a new challenger has arisen from the deep.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Virginia class is quieter and has a better sonar rig than its Russian opponent. In the world of submarine warfare, that’s an unbeatable combination. It can move and detect in ways that would give away Severodvinsk.

The United States Navy’s submarine force emerged from the Cold War as the undisputed masters of the undersea realm. The elite, all-nuclear submarine force watched as its Soviet submarine force rivals rusted away pierside, the newly founded Russian Federation unable to maintain them.

After more than twenty years of American submarine supremacy, a new challenger has arisen from the deep. Slightly familiar and almost two decades in the making, it’s an unusual challenge to U.S. naval superiority, but nevertheless one with a long, lethal pedigree. How does this new old upstart, Russia’s Yasen-class submarine, compare with the new backbone of the U.S. submarine force, the Virginia class?

The Yasen (“Ash Tree”) class of submarines was conceived as early as the mid-1980s by the Malakhit Central Design Bureau, one of the Soviet Union’s three main submarine bureaus. Construction of the first submarine, Severodvinsk, began in 1993 in Russia at the Sevmash Shipyards, but lack of funding delayed completion for more than a decade. Severodvinsk was finally launched in 2010, and commissioned into the fleet in 2013.

The Yasen class measures 390 feet long and displaces 13,800 tons. It has a crew of just ninety, far fewer than its American equivalents, suggesting a high level of automation is built into the submarine. In shape it resembles the earlier Akula class, but much longer behind the conning tower and a hump to accommodate vertical launch tubes. According to the authoritative Combat Fleets of the World, Severodvinsk has a OK-650KPM two-hundred-megawatt nuclear reactor, good for the life of the boat, which drives it to speeds of up to sixteen knots surfaced and thirty-one knots submerged. Other reports peg it slightly faster, at thirty-five knots. It can run quiet underwater at twenty knots.

Severodvinsk’s sensor suite consists of a Irtysh-Amfora sonar system, with a bow-mounted spherical sonar array, flank sonar arrays and a towed array for rearward detection. It has a MRK-50 Albatross (Snoop Pair) navigation/surface search radar and features a Rim Hat electronic support/countermeasures measures suite.

Armament for the submarines consists of four standard-diameter 5,333-millimeter torpedo tubes and four 650-millimeter torpedo tubes. The torpedo tubes can accommodate homing torpedoes and 3M54 Klub missiles, which are available in both antiship, land attack and antisubmarine versions. For even more firepower, the Yasen boats are each equipped with twenty-four vertical launch missile tubes behind the conning tower, each capable of carrying P-800 Oniks ramjet-powered supersonic antiship missiles.

The Virginia-class submarines were conceived as an affordable follow-on to the short-lived Seawolf class, which, although extremely capable, were also extremely expensive. In that sense, they have been highly successful, and Virginias are gradually becoming the mainstay of the U.S. Navy’s submarine force.

At 377 feet, the Virginias are only thirteen feet shorter than the Yasen class, but displace only half as much water. They have crews of 113, and are powered by one General Electric SG9 nuclear reactor, driving a propulsor/pump-jet instead of a propeller. Speeds are reportedly twenty-five knots on the surface and thirty-five knots underwater, and the submarines are reportedly as quiet at twenty-five knots as the Los Angeles class is alongside the pier.

Like its Russian counterpart, a Virginia’s main sonar is a spherical, bow-mounted type. However, starting with the Block III series of submarines, the BQQ-10 sonar is replaced with the U-shaped Large Aperture Bow sonar. Complementing them are arrays on the port and starboard flanks, also known as Light Weight Wide Aperture Arrays, comprising two banks of three fiber-optic acoustic sensors. LWWAA is particularly attuned to detecting diesel electric submarines. Rearward detection is covered by the TB-29(A) towed passive array. Finally, a high-frequency sonar array mounted on the sail and chin allows a Virginia to detect and avoid sea mines.

The Virginia class has only four 533-millimeter torpedo tubes, capable of firing the Mk.48 Advanced Capability (ADCAP) heavyweight homing torpedo for use against surface ships and submarines and the UGM-84 Sub-Harpoon antiship missile. Early versions of the class carried twelve Tomahawk land-attack missiles in vertical launch tubes, replaced in Block III by two cylinder launchers carrying the same number of missiles. Block V Virginias will expand the number of launchers to carry up to forty Tomahawks per submarine.

In a head-to-head confrontation between a Virginia Block III—the version under construction when Severodvinsk was commissioned—who would win? Both submarines are the pinnacle of their country’s submarine technology and, pitted against one another, would be fairly well matched. Severodvinsk may be slower, but it can dive deeper. The Virginia may be faster, but according to Combat Ships of the World, the hull has only been tested to 488 meters. Virginia likely has the edge in sonar detection, thanks to the new Large Aperture Bow sonar.

In terms of weapons the two sides are fairly evenly matched, although Severodvinsk has the antisubmarine version of the Klub missile, allowing the Russian ship to quickly engage enemy submarines with a missile-delivered lightweight torpedo, much like the retired American SUBROC system.

The Virginia class is quieter and has a better sonar rig than its Russian opponent. In the world of submarine warfare, that’s an unbeatable combination. It can move and detect in ways that would give away Severodvinsk. One thing to be said for Severodvinsk is that it is more capable of quickly responding to a sudden target opportunity via her supersonic Klub ASW missiles. As for near term prospects, the usability of the Virginia’s sonar improves on a regular basis via software updates. Severodvinsk may not be able to update its sonar suite, and making the Russian submarines quieter may not be easily implemented. Overall, the edge has to be given to the Virginia class.

In the long run, the rivalry between the two submarines will likely see the inclusion of unmanned underwater vehicles and a host of other new technologies. The United States has pursued submarine warfare halfheartedly since the end of the Cold War, and even less so since 9/11. As the United States turns its full attention back to big power warfare and submarine warfare in particular, American submarines will likely once again outsail their Russian rivals.

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

This article first appeared several years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Robert Farley

Israeli Defense Forces, Middle East

Here are some platforms that Israel could likely make good use of or that it would possibly purchase if Washington let it.

Key point: There are still some platforms that are too exclusive or sensitive to sell even to a close ally like Israel. Here are some of those powerful weapons.

With only a few notable exceptions, Israel can buy whatever it wants from the United States, generally on very generous terms associated with U.S. aid packages. Notwithstanding the availability of weapons, however, Israel must still make careful decisions regarding how to spend money. Consequently, Israel can’t have quite everything that it would like, despite the continued good relationship with the United States and its arms industry. Here are a few US military systems that the Israelis could use:

Littoral Combat Ship

For a long time, the sea arm of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has examined the potential for warships somewhat larger than the corvettes that have historically dominated the force. As Israel’s maritime security interests increased (the necessity of maintaining the Gaza blockade, and of patrolling offshore energy deposits), this need has become more acute.

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

Over the last decade, the IDF extensively studied the possibility of acquiring heavily modified versions of the U.S. Littoral Combat Ship design. These would have had significantly different features, mainly making them less modular and more self-sufficient than their American cousins. On paper, the plan made a lot of sense; a high-speed, networked platform would fit in very well with the IDF’s operational concept. However, the necessary modifications drove up the cost of the warship, pricing it out of Israel’s range. Future changes in the market (or in Israel’s perception of need) might well shift the equation, however.

F-22 Raptor

The Obey amendment, which prohibits the export of the F-22 Raptor, was developed with Israel firmly in mind. Concerned about Israel’s transfer of high-technology equipment to Russia or China, the United States decided that domestic considerations meant it could not bar Israel from acquiring the Raptor without a blanket ban.

And so this has meant that only the USAF flies the world’s most advanced fighter aircraft. Historically, Israel has preferred fighter-bombers that can conduct both air superiority and strike missions, and the Raptor doesn’t yet have much in the way of a strike profile. However, the IDF purchased the F-15 when it was still primarily an air-superiority platform, then made the necessary modifications on its own to transform the fighter into a devastating bomber. The F-22, which otherwise serves Israel’s air superiority needs nicely, might have gone through a similar process.

Long Range Strike Bomber

Setting aside the periodic nonsense about Israel acquiring American B-52s, the long-term stand-off with Iran has demonstrated that Israel really could use a plausible long-range strike option. While Israeli F-15s and F-16s can, with refueling, reach targets in Iran, the immense distance would put them at a disadvantage as they tried to penetrate defended airspace. In this context, the Air Force’s B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber might seem attractive.

Of course, Israel hasn’t operated a strategic bomber since it retired a few B-17 Flying Fortresses in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the perceived need for an option that could penetrate Iranian air defenses and deliver heavy payloads might make the IDF reconsider its commitment to fighter-bombers. Whether the United States would ever consider exporting the bomber (which will likely fall under a variety of legal restriction associated with nuclear-delivery systems) is a different question entirely.

Massive Ordnance Penetrator

And what good are planes if they don’t have bombs to drop? Rumors of Israeli interest in the thirty-thousand-pound precision-guided bomb began to emerge at the beginning of this decade, fueling ideas in Congress about transferring the munition and an aircraft capable of delivering it. The MOP interests Israel because of its “bunker busting” capacity, which would give Israel the ability to hit deeply buried weapons facilities in Iran and elsewhere.

The United States has thus far declined to send the bomb to the Israelis, in no small part because the IDF still lacks a plausible delivery system. The Obama administration also worried about giving Israel the tools it needed to strike Iran would upset the regional balance. But geostrategic changes (or domestic political shifts in the US) might alter that calculation.

Ballistic Missile Submarine

Israel’s submarine force teeters on the very edge of presenting a plausible deterrent. The IDF submarine arm has done excellent work with its group of transferred Dolphin-class subs. However, diesel-electric submarines carrying long-range cruise missiles simply cannot match the performance, endurance, or security of nuclear boats.

This is not to say that Israel needs, or could use, something analogous to the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine. However, a more modest boat with a smaller number of missiles of limited range could indeed prove very useful to Israel’s efforts to create a robust second-strike capability. A flotilla of four such boats would provide a nearly invulnerable retaliatory capacity.

Israel has most of what it needs from the United States; in several areas, the technical capabilities of the IDF exceed those of the U.S. military. But in some areas the Israelis could take more advantage of U.S. technology, especially if strategic necessity and financial reality came together in more productive ways. Given the dynamism of Israel’s economy, the IDF may have the chance to avail itself of some of these opportunities in the near future.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Matthew Moss

Firearms, Europe

The Walther PPK is still produced today and this gun has quite the colorful history.

Key point: Hitler used the PKK to kill himself and year later James Bond used the gun in his movies. How did this weapon make its name and continue to be used all these decades later?

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Third Reich, killed himself with a 7.65-millimeter Walther PPK pistol.

Terrified of falling into the hands of the Soviets, who were fighting their way through Berlin, Hitler first swallowed a hydrogen-cyanide capsule and then, at 3:30 P.M., shot himself, possibly firing a round from beneath his chin.

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

He was found alongside his new wife Eva Braun, who had also swallowed a cyanide capsule. They were slumped on a sofa.

It is believed that Hitler owned several PP & PPKs, but the pistol he used on April 30 is long lost, possibly taken as a trophy by a Soviet soldier or kept and hidden by one of the last people to leave the Fuhrerbunkerbefore the surrender of Berlin and the final collapse of the Third Reich on May 7.

On May 1, Nazi authorities announced that Hitler had died fighting with his men and that Adm. Karl Donitz would become his successor. The bodies of Hitler and Braun were taken out of the bunker to a small garden behind the Reich Chancellery. They were doused with petrol, set alight and then hurriedly buried in a crater.

While the PPK may be infamous for its links to Nazi Germany, it’s famousas James Bond’s weapon of choice — although Bond’s first weapon was the Beretta 418. It was only when a fan suggested the PPK as a more manly weapon that Ian Fleming rearmed his famous character.

Carl Walther Waffenfabrik initially developed the PPK from the slightly larger Walther Police Pistol in 1931. “PPK” is short for Polizeipistole Kriminalmodell — “Police Pistol Detective Model” — and was extremely popular throughout mainland Europe with police and civilians.

During the war, the P-38 was the standard sidearm of the German armed forces. However, the PPK was issued to police, high-ranking officers, members of the Luftwaffe and intelligence services.

The PPK arguably is one of world’s most successful double-action blow-back pistols. It’s also one of the most copied pistols in the world. The Russian Makarov is a popular clone. The PPK is still in production after 80 years.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

China War, Americas

Did the Chinese overstate the implications of the Gulf War? Yes and no.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: In 1991, Chinese military officers watched as the United States dismantled the Iraqi Army, a force with more battle experience and somewhat greater technical sophistication than the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Americans won with casualties that were trivial by historical standards.

This led to some soul searching. The PLA hadn’t quite been on autopilot in the 1980s, but the pace of reform in the military sector had not matched that of social and economic life in China. Given the grim performance of the PLA in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union, something was bound to change. The Gulf War provided a catalyst and direction for that change.

Learning: 

To get a sense of why the Gulf War matters for the PLA, we need to take a quick detour into organizational theory. Armies learn in several different ways; experiments, experience, grafting (taking members from other, similar organizations), vicarious learning and scanning. In 1991, the PLA lacked any relevant experience in modern warfare since the disastrous campaign against Vietnam in 1979. It lacked the funds and the political wherewithal to undertake the kind of large-scale exercises necessary for modern war. Grafting is notoriously difficult for modern military organizations, as it’s become awkward to simply hire sergeants and colonels from foreign countries.

(What You May Like: Should America Fear China's Carrier-Killer Missile?) 

This leaves scanning and vicarious learning, both of which involve trying to learn as much as possible from the environment (scanning), and from the experiences of other armies. In 1991, the Gulf War made apparent both what worked (the United States military) and what didn’t work (the Iraqi military). It’s not surprising, in this context, that the Gulf War would have such a big effect on the PLA.

Equipment

One big problem came on the equipment side.

By 1990, the technical sophistication of the PLA had deteriorated to the degree that Iraqi forces enjoyed a considerable advantage over their Chinese counterparts. The Iraqi Air Force included MiG-23s, MiG-25s and MiG-29s, while the PLAAF relied on Chinese-produced copycats of the MiG-21, as well as older aircraft such as the MiG-19. Similarly, the Iraqi air defense system, which had failed to incur major damage on waves of attacking American aircraft, was at least as sophisticated as the systems China was capable of employing.

(What You May Like: Asia's Greatest Fear- A U.S.-China War) 

The Chinese had also discovered, through access to Iraqi tanks captured by the Iranians in the Persian Gulf War, that the Iraqi T-72s that presented no challenge whatsoever to the U.S. Army were considerably superior to extant Chinese tanks. Although the Gulf War didn’t involve serious naval combat, it wasn’t hard to infer that the problems likely afflicted the naval sector, as well.

The balance between quality and quantity has shifted back and forth historically. In the Chinese Civil War and in Korea, the PLA took advantage of numbers and tactical effectiveness to defeat (or at least level the ground with) more technologically sophisticated opponents. In Vietnam, injections of critical anti-access technology had helped blunt U.S. air offensives. Historically, the PLA had hoped that numerical advantage would help even the playing field against one of the superpowers, but the U.S.-led coalition cut through quantitatively superior Iraqi forces like a hot knife through butter. Iraq demonstrated that, at least as far as conventional warfighting was concerned, the balance had shifted heavily in favor of technology.

This understanding of the Gulf War helped drive PLA modernization. Especially in air and naval forces, China took immediate steps to update its military technology, generally through purchasing the most-advanced Soviet hardware. Strapped for cash, Russia was eager to make deals and didn’t worry overmuch about the long-range consequences of technology transfer. China also attempted to acquire technology with military applications from Europe, but sanctions associated with the Tiananmen Square massacre hamstrung this effort. Finally, China accelerated efforts to increase the sophistication of research and development in its own military-industrial base.

(What You May Like: Russia's Military is Back) 

Doctrine

Along with the changes in technology came changes in doctrine and in expectations for how war would play out. The PLA began to emphasize airpower more than ground power, and in particular, investigated the potential for long-range precision strike. Historically, the PLA has never had the opportunity to carry out significant, operationally relevant strikes behind enemy lines, cooperation with guerrilla formation in the Civil War notwithstanding. Indeed, the PLA even lacks experience with traditional, “deep battle” maneuver warfare, in which the exploitation of breakthroughs gives armored spearheads the ability to disrupt enemy logistics and command.

While the Gulf War did not demonstrate that deep strike could decisively win modern wars, it undoubtedly did show that long-range precision strike could help disrupt enemy operations, and even seriously attrite fielded enemy forces. The PLA immediately began to develop its capability in this area. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) grew in importance relative to the ground forces of the PLA (although, this has as much to do with the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the decline in importance of North Korea as it does with a new understanding of technology), and both began to concentrate on platforms that offered long-range strike opportunities. The two services also began to shift towards smaller numbers of higher-technology systems.

For its part, the Second Artillery shifted its focus from nuclear deterrence to long-range precision strike, with both ballistic and cruise missiles. Developing a modern appreciation of military-systems integration, the PLAN, PLAAF and Second Artillery have also emphasized joint operations, with a focus on developing command, control and communications procedures that allow the efficient, coordinated use of military force. However, it’s hard to evaluate the success of such planning in the absence of wartime experience.

Conclusion

Did the Chinese overstate the implications of the Gulf War? Yes and no. Revised scholarship on the Gulf War has made clear that whatever the impact of “shock and awe,” the coalition’s conventional military superiority carried the day. American and British forces had significant technical advantages, but they also had much better training than the Iraqis, the experience of the Iran-Iraq War notwithstanding. The air war set the stage for coalition victory, but the coalition still needed to excel at conventional maneuver warfare in order to succeed.

Still, the Gulf War provided Chinese military and civilian decisionmakers with a ready example of what modern war looked like, and gave some lessons about how to fight (and how not to fight) in the future. The PLA has become a radically more sophisticated organization—with much more effective learning capacity—than it was in 1991. We have yet to see, however, how all the pieces will fall together in real combat.

Robert Farley is a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

This article was first published in 2014.

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

One of the most widely distributed export fighter aircraft in history, the MiG-21 remains active with many countries.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: Just like Korea, this war was a way for each global bloc to test each other's technologies. Here is what happened.

During the protracted air war in the skies over Vietnam, two fighter interceptor and air superiority planes emerged as the most prominent aircraft of their type. These were the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom and the Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-21. When these supersonic fighters met in combat, the skills of the individual pilots and sometimes sheer luck were often the deciding factors, and more than 40 years after the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War debate continues as to the accuracy of kill ratios and claims made by both the sides.

Interestingly, though they were common adversaries, the appearances of the Phantom and the MiG-21 could scarcely have been more different. The big, burly Phantom weighed nearly 19 tons, while the MiG-21 weighed slightly less than 10 tons. The Phantom was 63 feet long with a wingspan of more than 38 feet. The MiG-21 with a much smaller profile and more nimble appearance stretched just under 48 feet in length, and its wingspan was just under 24 feet. Both aircraft were capable of speeds of at least Mach 2.

Relative Strengths & Weaknesses

The MiG-21 was typically armed with air-to-air missiles such as the AA-2 Atoll and a 23mm internal cannon. The Phantom was often armed with the AIM-7 Sparrow or AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Each was capable of carrying a bomb load as well. Early Phantoms deployed to Vietnam were armed only with missiles. Lacking a cannon, these fighters were often at a disadvantage in dogfights with the MiG-21 and other Soviet- and Chinese-manufactured fighter aircraft. Later models were equipped with an internal 20mm M61 Vulcan internal rotary cannon. The Phantom held the edge with multiple missiles, often up to eight, while the MiG-21 carried only two.

The performance of each aircraft demonstrated relative strengths and weaknesses. The agile MiG-21 was deadly in a turn, and its silhouette was difficult to acquire visually at any great distance. The heavy F-4 was known for jet engines that produced a great deal of smoke, adding to the ease of identification at a distance due to its large size. The MiG-21 was generally considered more maneuverable, while the Phantom was well-armed with missiles and more lethal with the addition of the cannon. The MiG-21 was designed as a short-range interceptor, and the Phantom was a long-range aircraft.

The Phantom Retires, but the MiG Still Soars the Skies

The Phantom was produced in multiple variants and became a primary component of the air superiority, fighter bomber, reconnaissance, and radar jamming air complements of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Developed during the 1950s, it entered service in 1960, and nearly 5,200 were produced during a 30-year run from 1958 to 1981. Its combat service included engagements from the Vietnam era through Operation Desert Storm and beyond. The Phantom has been operated by the air forces of at least a dozen nations, and many remain in service. The U.S. military retired the Phantom from combat use in 1996.

The MiG-21, identified as the Fishbed in NATO nomenclature, was a continuation of the MiG fighter series that originated in the late 1940s. The MiG-21 entered service in 1959, and more than 11,000 in various configurations were completed when production ended in 1985. One of the most widely distributed export fighter aircraft in history, the MiG-21 remains active with many countries.

This article by Michael Haskew originally appeared on Warfare History Network. This first appeared earlier in October 2019.

Image: Reuters

Lyle J. Goldstein

PLA Navy, Asia

Beijing has a lot of missiles and it especially has been doubling down on anti-ship missiles.

Key point: Washington tends to get nervous about China's new missiles, which Beijing rather likes. What have China actually revealed about this new weapon?

Entering the Second World War, the United States dramatically underestimated the effectiveness of certain Japanese naval systems and operations.  The tendency to look askance at Japanese naval prowess during the interwar period obviously impacted the failure to anticipate the Pearl Harbor attack.  But it is less widely understood that U.S. intelligence similarly underestimated the strength of Japan’s primary naval fighter aircraft (the Zero), the dramatic effectiveness of its long-range torpedoes, as well as its dedication to mastering difficult, but essential operations such as night combat.  Remarkably, these problems in assessment occurred despite a plethora of openly available information regarding Japanese naval development during that time.

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

There are many reasons, of course, that contemporary China’s maritime ascendancy is starkly different from that of Imperial Japan almost a century ago.  In particular, there is hardly a shred of evidence (reef reclamation included) to suggest that Beijing is inclined to undertake a rampage of conquest similar to Japan’s effort to bring the whole of the Asia-Pacific to heel from 1931 to 1942.  Still, the complex maritime disputes in the Western Pacific require that American strategists keep a close eye on the evolving military balance.  In that spirit, this installment of the Dragon Eye series turns once again to focus a bright light on one of the newest elements of China’s missile arsenal: the YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM).

A test of the new Chinese YJ-18 supersonic ASCM from November 2014 is visible in this video clip, about one minute into this segment introducing China’s new nuclear submarine design. Even though we know that YJ-18 is part of a whole new generation of new and lethal Chinese ASCMs, it is curious that Chinese ASCMs generally go unmentioned in a recent TNI analysis of the “5 Most Deadly Anti-Ship Missiles of All Time.”  Clearly, Chinese naval analysts, who have labeled the YJ-18 in an early 2015 analysis “最完美的反舰导弹” [the most perfect ASCM] would not agree with that rendering.  A Chinese analysis of the YJ-18 appearing in the naval magazine 舰船知识 [Naval & Merchant Ships] published by the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) in February 2015 is the main basis of this Dragon Eye discussion.

However, before turning to the insights from this recent Chinese analysis, let us return briefly to what has been revealed about this new missile from both the recent U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report, as well as the annual Pentagon report on Chinese military power.  The ONI report is generally well done, but curiously the new YJ-18 only rates a mention in two spare sentences.  This report notes that the YJ-18 can be vertically-launched (generally from a surface combatant) or alternatively submarine-launched, but there is no discussion of its supersonic sprint vehicle.  Since the U.S. Navy (USN) lacks a supersonic ASCM and will not have one in the foreseeable future, this omission is troubling. Similarly puzzling is the decision not to discuss the recent appearance of another supersonic ASCM, YJ-12, in China’s arsenal. True, such capabilities did exist earlier in other forms, namely as imported Russian systems, but the indigenization (and likely upgrade) of these capabilities is hardly insignificant and will mean they are much more widespread and employed with greater confidence and proficiency.  

The 2015 Department of Defense report does offer a bit more detail and thus draws the proper attention to the YJ-18 threat, but again does not mention its supersonic sprint vehicle.  The YJ-18 ASCM is described as a “significant step” and subsequently as a “dramatic improvement” over current missiles in China’s inventory.  Perhaps most significantly, however, the DoD report puts the range of YJ-18 at 290 nautical miles – more than double that of its likely progenitor, the Russian SS-N-27 Klub ASCM (export version).  If correct, moreover, this new range will, in the near term, more or less quadruple the range of the standard ASCM fired from most PLA Navy submarines.

The February 2015 Chinese analysis of YJ-18 is somewhat cautious in tone and hardly purports to be a comprehensive analysis.  Perhaps fitting for an initial piece on a cutting edge system, the article’s introduction sports the rare caveat “…并不代表本刊观点” [does not represent the viewpoint of this magazine].  However, the title “‘鹰击’18 -- ‘俱乐部’导弹中国版?” [Is the Yingji-18 Simply a Chinese Version of the Klub?] asks the precise question that will be on the minds of many defense analysts examining the YJ-18.  A decent amount of the article just reviews the development of the Russian Klub system and its different variants. It is noted, moreover, that China has had ready access to the Klub missile system since it imported the Type 636 Kilo-class conventional subs about a decade ago.  Indeed, some had remarked that Beijing imported the submarine for the sole purpose of actually acquiring its superior missile system.  Interestingly, the article does not report the much extended range outlined in the new Pentagon report.

This Chinese description relates that the missile’s great strength is its “亚超结合的独特动力” [subsonic and supersonic combined unique propulsion].  Another term applied to this design is “双速制反舰导弹” [dual speed control ASCM].  As explained in the article, it is projected that YJ-18 would have an initial subsonic phase estimated at .8 Mach similar to the Klub of about 180km, but 20km from the target would unleash the supersonic sprint vehicle at speed of Mach 2.5 to 3.  The “dual speed” function allows the system to realize certain advantages of subsonic cruise missiles, such as their “relatively long range, light weight and universality …” but also takes the chief advantage of supersonic ASCMs as well, namely the ability to “大幅压缩敌方的反应时间” [radically compress the enemy’s reaction time].  

The Chinese article relates another advantage of the “dual speed” approach.  Just as the missile comes into contact with the ship’s defenses, it “sheds the medium stage …,” thus simultaneously and dramatically altering both its speed and also its radar reflection, “which would impact the fire control calculation.”  The likelihood that YJ-18 improves upon the Klub missile’s “digitization, automation, as well as providing more intelligent flight control and navigation technology” is attributed in the Chinese article to a recent Jane’s report. A final interesting issue raised in the Chinese article concerns the “hot launch” technique suggested in the test video clip mentioned at the outset of this article (and illustrated in photos accompanying the Chinese article). Indeed, a new vertical launch system for the new 052D destroyer is confirmed as a “共架混装” [common rack for mixed arms] system with a citation in the article to PLA Admiral Qiu Zhiming, director of the Naval Armaments Research Academy.  But it is not clear from the article that YJ-18 will rely on the hot launch versus the cold launch method--the latter being much more common for submarine launched missiles.

The article interestingly discusses recent Russian placement of additional Kilo-class submarines equipped with the Klub-missile systems into the Black Sea.  These new submarines “based on the Crimean Peninsula, operating in harmony with air and land-based missile forces [can] … limit the deployment of NATO fleets into the Black Sea …”  I have noted before in this column the seductive possibilities of the “Russian model” for Chinese strategists. This Chinese author concludes the piece, explaining that, “The YJ-18 will gradually replace the YJ-82 across the PLA Navy submarine fleet.  That development combined with surface ship and air-launched missiles will create a comprehensive attack system of even greater combat power.”  The implication seems to be that for China, in its various maritime disputes, the YJ-18 can play a role similar to the one that nearly identical Russian weapons have played in creating decisive local military superiority in the Black Sea area.

On the other hand, Beijing has been making noteworthy strides in military transparency of late, for example with the most recent white paper or the somewhat unusual discussion of the new Type 093G nuclear attack submarine in China Daily.  Nevertheless, the gap in transparency continues to be quite wide when it comes to some of the most lethal weapons in China’s arsenal, such as the new YJ-18.  Allowing the rumor mill to churn, spreading anxieties regarding Chinese capabilities hither and thither is really not in China’s interest and greater transparency, of course, is necessary.

For Washington, some additional attention seems warranted in future intelligence community studies with respect to Chinese ASCM development. The 2015 ONI study gave some attention to YJ-18, but omitted discussion of the supersonic YJ-12, the long-range subsonic YJ-100 or the CX-1 supersonic ASCM that are apparently now in development, according to Chinese sources.  Renewed attention will help muster the necessary focus for the U.S. going forward to prepare its forces adequately.  For all the ink spilled and Washington seminars convened to discuss China’s expanding coast guard fleet, it is obviously the ever-growing sophistication of the Chinese ASCM arsenal that poses the “clear and present danger” to American sailors.

Lyle J. Goldstein is Associate Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. The opinions expressed in this analysis are his own and do not represent the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

Editor’s Note: The following is part of a unique series we call Dragon Eye, which seeks insight and analysis from Chinese writings on world affairs. You can find all previous articles in the series here. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.