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History, Europe

The giant French submarine Surcouf’s mysterious fate made her the true Flying Dutchman of World War II.

Here's What You Need to Know: Neither the sub nor any member of her crew has been seen since the winter of 1942.

The legendary Flying Dutchman of maritime lore was a spectral ship of disastrous portent that haunted the high seas and endangered anyone who came into contact with it. If any real-life vessel fit that description, it was the French World War II submarine Surcouf. During her abortive wartime career, Surcouf displayed all the ghostly, rumor-generating characteristics of the Flying Dutcman. To this day, whispers and innuendos follow the ill-fated sub, which disappeared without a trace 65 years ago, making her a veritable lodestone of controversy, suspicion and latent fear.

The Cruiser Submarine

Surcouf’s genesis can be traced back to the waning days of World War I, when Imperial Germany deployed three large, powerful submarine cruisers designed specifically to be commerce raiders. The three new submarines, designated U-139, U-140, and U-141, were armed with two 5.9-inch deck guns mounted fore and aft of their conning towers. These cruisers, with an extended range of over 12,000 nautical miles, were tasked with taking the war to Allied seaborne commerce, from the Atlantic coast of the United States southward into the South Atlantic as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Illustrating the importance assigned to the new vessels, U-139 was placed under the command of Kapitanleutnant Lothar Von Arnauld de la Perriere, Germany’s leading U-boat ace. Arnauld sank six Allied ships totaling over 72,000 tons during his one brief patrol with U-139 in 1918.

Germany’s successful development of U-boat cruisers did not go unnoticed by opposing Allies. Great Britain, France, and the United States all were impressed by the apparent potential for the new weapon, and commenced developing similar vessels during the 1920s. But severe funding restrictions and improved defensive measures for merchant ships rendered the new concept less effective. By the late 1930s, submarine commerce raiders clearly had become obsolete, rendered ineffective by the implementation of enemy convoys that, acting in concert, could outgun and outspeed any submarine raider. By the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the United States and Great Britain had curtailed or abandoned their submarine commerce raider programs, partly out of fear that Japan, the rising sea power in the Pacific, might emulate the weapon if it proved successful.

The one maritime power that moved forward with development of a powerful submarine cruiser was France. After refusing to execute that part of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 that proposed the eventual abolition of submarine raiders, France began an aggressive construction program divided between oceangoing and coastal-type boats. Among the oceangoing submarines was Surcouf, the French Navy’s first and only cruiser submarine designed specifically for open-ocean surface raiding. Surcouf was begun in 1927 and eventually commissioned in May 1935, a lengthy period that was extended by continued revisions and additions to the sub’s design and armament.

When completed, Surcouf appeared to be a formidable vessel. She was the largest submarine in the world, displacing 3,404 tons submerged. She was 350 feet long, with a beam of over 29 feet. Powered by two 3,800-horsepower Sulzer diesel engines on the surface and two 1,700-horsepower electric motors for undersea propulsion, Surcouf had a range of 10,000 nautical miles and carried a crew of 120 men. The most formidable aspect of the vessel was her armament. She mounted two 8-inch guns in a twin turret located forward of the conning tower. Aft of the structure on deck was a watertight hangar containing a Besson/ANF Murceau MB-411 scout seaplane. The seaplane had two functions: to locate potential shipping targets over the horizon, and to spot the fall of shots from the submarine’s guns after she commenced an attack. Surcouf carried 600 rounds of 8-inch ammunition for her two guns, plus a wide optical range finder mounted high enough above the sea to give a seven-mile horizon. The giant submarine also carried a 16-foot-long motorboat and an internal compartment designed to house up to 40 prisoners. Surcouf was equipped with six external torpedo tubes, none of which could be fired when submerged. Sixteen spare torpedoes also were carried.

In the Service of the French Navy

Fittingly, Surcouf was named after France’s most famous privateer, Robert Surcouf (1773-1827). Classified as a common pirate by the British, Surcouf commanded the four-gun Creole during the 1793 war with Great Britain, capturing four British ships, breaking a blockade, and becoming a national hero. Obtaining an official letter of marque from the revolutionary government, Surcouf took over the 18-gun Clarisse, from which he captured six ships in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Switching to the 18-gun Confiance, he captured nine more British merchant ships, including the 38-gun Kent with a crew of nearly 400 men, plus a company of naval riflemen. This action made Surcouf a living legend in France and a public enemy in England, with a posted reward of five million francs for his capture. Named a baron of the empire by Napoleon in 1809, Surcouf lived out his life on the island of Mauritius, where he became a prosperous ship owner and merchant.

After her commissioning in 1935, Surcouf was stationed at Brest, a French submarine base with open access to the Atlantic Ocean. For the next four years, Surcouf operated sporadically in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, spending the vast majority of her at-sea time on the surface. Although she remained the world’s largest submarine, Surcouf revealed several serious problems in design and safety. The boat was cumbersome, rolling alarmingly in heavy seas, and her diesel engines were unreliable. She also leaked continuously through and around the gun turrets. Most serious was her slow diving time, which required four or five times as long to submerge to periscope depth as smaller, conventional submarines. Lacking radar, Surcouf was vulnerable to attacks from the air.

With the fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940, Surcouf’s crew faced a confusing political situation. Many crewmen had divergent loyalties, and all feared that their families or friends remaining in France might be badly treated by the occupying Germans if Surcouf threw in with the Royal Navy. Her crew members might also be treated as traitors when they returned to France, which now had a collaborationist government based at Vichy. On June 15, Surcouf’s commanding officer, Captain Paul Martin, was warned that Brest would be captured by the Germans within three days. Acting promptly, Martin sailed Surcouf toward the British naval base at Plymouth, docking five days later alongside the French battleship Paris.

After an incident with British boarders, Surcouf’s crew was given the option of repatriation to France or returning to their submarine under the aegis of the new Free French navy. Only 16 officers and men opted to serve aboard Surcouf; Captain Martin chose repatriation. Captain Pierre Ortoli, second senior officer in the Free French navy, was named Surcouf’s new commander. His executive officer was Lt. Cmdr. Louis Blaison, a holdover from the former crew. The remainder of the sub’s new crew was recruited from French naval officers and sailors stranded in England, many of whom, like Ortoli himself, had little or no prior training in submarines.

A Troublesome Ship and Crew

The question arose in the British Admiralty of what to do with Surcouf. Initially, the submarine was the responsibility of the Royal Navy Vice Admiral Max Horton, who was the navy’s flag officer for submarines. Horton concurred with dockyard experts at Plymouth that Surcouf was essentially useless as an effective combat vessel, but Free French leader Charles de Gaulle insisted that the sub be sent to sea as a symbol of French greatness. Unwilling to overrule de Gaulle, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill instructed Horton to keep the vessel on active service.

Led by an inexperienced commanding officer and an equally unprepared crew, Surcouf readied for combat. On November 30, 1940, Horton ordered Surcouf north to the Royal Navy training base in the Clyde region of Scotland. Surcouf spent less than two weeks training, insufficient time for a ship burdened by eight months of enforced idleness and an essentially novice crew and commander. Horton, still convinced that Surcouf was unfit to operate in cruiser mode, decided to send her to Canada to operate as a convoy escort in the western Atlantic, where there would be no threat from German air attacks. Surcouf duly departed Clyde for Halifax, Nova Scotia, on February 19, 1941, arriving six days behind schedule and spending nearly a month in port for additional repairs. Ortoli exacerbated tensions between the crew and their hosts by forcing the men to live onboard their crowded submarine while in port, sparking rumors of aloofness about the crew.

Surcouf finally joined an easterly bound convoy on April 1 as an escort vessel. The ship became a target for malicious rumors among other sailors, who suggested that she was more a threat than a protective escort. Horton eventually ordered Surcouf to break away from the convoy and proceed to Devonport naval yard at Plymouth. German warplanes attacked Plymouth soon afterward, and Surcouf suffered one man killed and six injured. The Besson float plane and motorboat were damaged and removed from the submarine, never to return. Surcouf’s crew, still forced to live in crowded conditions aboard ship, became even more divided and depressed by events.

Still confronted with the task of creating a viable mission for the submarine, Horton decided to send Surcouf to the South Atlantic, a region largely devoid of hostile enemy aircraft but one in which German surface raiders were sinking Allied merchant ships. He reasoned that Surcouf might actually sink one of the raiders with her superior firepower, thus quelling rumors about her mixed loyalty. Accordingly, Surcouf sailed for Bermuda on May 14, arriving a month later. She departed from Bermuda for her first war patrol on June 30. The effort was a complete disaster. Three major electrical failures ensued aboard ship, compounded by a fire in the switch gear room and an incomprehensible dive with the conning tower hatch improperly closed, which resulted in flooding and the release of chlorine gas within the pressure hull. Surcouf limped back to Bermuda on July 20.

The United States Navy granted Surcouf priority to receive a complete overhaul at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire. The submarine sailed from Bermuda on July 25, arriving at Portsmouth three days later. It soon became obvious that the ship required a total refitting, one that would require more money than her original building cost. Meanwhile, morale among the crew was adversely affected at Portsmouth. The United States had not yet entered the war, and Republican-dominated New Hampshire remained a stronghold for isolationism. In nearby Canada, there was a strong pro-Vichy movement, exacerbated by rumors that American President Franklin Roosevelt did not like or trust Charles de Gaulle. Ortoli was removed from command and replaced by Blaison, and Surcouf returned to Bermuda, only to sail back to Halifax on December 7. During the return voyage, Surcouf encountered the Norwegian tanker Atlantic, and the sub’s behavior was so bizarre that Atlantic broadcast a distress call, claiming that she was under attack by a large submarine flying the French flag. The misunderstanding was explained away as Blaison not knowing or executing proper procedures to stop and question a neutral merchant ship, but rumors continued to fly about which side of the war the submarine was really on.

While at Halifax, Surcouf took part in the controversial Free French invasion of two small islands under Vichy control 12 miles south of Newfoundland. Saint Pierre and Miquelon were important because they lay just off the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, near the point where Allied convoys assembled. The invasion was a near-bloodless success, but one that antagonized both Great Britain and the United States and cast Surcouf increasingly as a rogue submarine. The rumor mill came alive with stories that Surcouf had shelled an American destroyer in the area, supposedly killing two American sailors. Such tales only added to the ship’s reputation as an untrustworthy ally, but Roosevelt classified the occupation of the islands as “a tempest in a teapot” and moved on with his conduct of the war.

Surcouf sailed from Halifax to Bermuda on February 3, 1942, arriving four days later. British Admiral Sir Charles Kennedy-Purvis sent Horton a top-secret message stating that Surcouf “is of no operational value and is little short of a menace.” British intelligence officers reported that over half of the ship’s crew was pro-Vichy and could not be trusted to serve the Allied war effort. Horton concurred, directing Surcouf to sail from Bermuda to French-controlled Tahiti, where her 8-inch guns might be effective in defending the islands against a possible Japanese invasion, and her loyalty—or lack thereof—might not be so striking.

The submarine departed Bermuda for Colon, en route to Tahiti, on February 12, sailing unescorted through an area now active with German U-boats. Because Surcouf had only one operational electric motor necessary for underwater propulsion, she was forced to steam on the surface, using just one of her two propellers and limited to a speed of 10 knots. In keeping with her previous suspicious behavior and rumors, the submarine never arrived at Colon. No distress message was received from Surcouf after she departed Bermuda, and no trace of her ever was found.

Theories Behind the Disappearance

What had happened to the now-notorious submarine? A convincing case can be made that Surcouf was lost after a collision at sea with the U.S. merchant freighter Thompson Lykes on the night of February 18. Under charter by the U.S. Army, Thompson Lykes had departed Colon bound for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that afternoon. At 11:28 pm, her crow’s-nest lookout reported seeing a white light one point off her starboard bow. Shortly afterward, the light appeared dead ahead, and before the rudder could be shifted to full right, Thompson Lykes struck something squarely in the water. The impact was followed a few seconds later by a loud explosion and a sheet of flame on both sides of the merchant ship’s bow. Captain Henry Johnson burst onto the bridge and turned on the ship’s navigation lights, activated a searchlight, and brought his vessel around to pass through the impact point in search of survivors. There was nothing at the scene but the smell of oil. No survivors or wreckage of any kind came to the surface.

Crew members and U.S. Army passengers aboard Thompson Lykes reported that they had seen something long and cigar-shaped pass down the freighter’s port side and disappear into the darkness astern. Thompson Lykes remained searching the area until 10:45 the next morning, when she was relieved by a U.S. Navy destroyer and returned to Colon for repairs. A subsequent Coast Guard inquiry concluded that the collision between Thompson Lykes and the unknown other vessel was purely accidental, asserting that “the collision was caused by the operation of two vessels on intersecting courses, without lights due to the exigencies of war.”

Unsurprisingly, Surcouf’s mysterious disappearance fueled rumors that the sub had been deliberately sunk by the British or Americans. Such tales rested on the premise that the Surcouf’s crew was loyal to the Vichy government and had taken over the ship during or after her last stop in Bermuda. One variation on the theory alleged that at least one of Surcouf’s officers was a Nazi submariner, fluent in French, who had infiltrated the submarine during her recruiting efforts in Great Britain. The British supposedly became privy to the situation and placed two mines on the exterior of Surcouf’s hull, set to detonate in deep water. A still unexplained letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the director of naval intelligence in Washington, dated March 12, 1942, asserted that according to a “highly confidential source,” Surcouf had been sunk off the island of Martinique on March 3.

Speculation continued to run rampant on Bermuda and elsewhere following Surcouf’s disappearance. One rumor asserted that Surcouf had attempted to torpedo the huge Allied troop carrier Queen Mary as she departed Boston. According to another tale, the sub was observed refueling a German U-boat and was promptly sunk by the American experimental submarines Marlin and Mackerel or by a Coast Guard blimp. Further departing from the realm of reality, other tales asserted that Surcouf was lost in the infamous Bermuda Triangle or sunk in Long Island Sound while carrying a huge cargo of French government gold in her large prisoner compound. Famed French aquanaut Jacques Cousteau was said to have located and dived on the wreck site in 1967, but he remained unaccountably silent about his findings.

No documentation or evidence has ever been discovered to confirm any of the foregoing tales, although one verifiable event detailed the bombing and sinking of a “very large” submarine lying low in the water by the U.S. 3rd Bombardment Squadron operating out of Rio Hato airfield in Panama at 9 am on February 19, 1942. Coming one day after Thompson Lykes had collided with an unidentified vessel at sea, the bombed submarine conceivably could have been the mortally damaged Surcouf. Why she would have been bombed by American planes was left unexplained.

An object of rumor, speculation, and conjecture while she was afloat, Surcouf continues to arouse speculation today, 65 years after her disappearance. Neither the sub nor any member of her crew has been seen since the winter of 1942, fueling her unwanted but unavoidable reputation as the true Flying Dutchman of World War II.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network in 2007.

Image: Flickr

Mark Episkopos

S-500, Europe

The S-500 is less of a pure “successor” to the S-400 than it is an entirely new weapon, designed to fulfill a different—though not necessarily more important—set of strategic tasks.

In what may be one of the consequential defense developments of 2021, Russia’s next-generation S-500 missile defense system is on the cusp of entering service.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko told the defense publication Krasnaya Zvezda that the Russian military plans to complete state trials of the next generation S-500 surface-to-air/anti-missile system sometime in 2021, with its introduction into service to follow in the same year. "Next year, it is planned to complete trials and introduce into service the S-500 missile system and the Voronezh radar that works in the meter range of wavelengths," he said in a late December 2020 interview.

The S-500, also known as the Triumfator-M, has had a rocky research and development path. Its development was declared to be completed as early as 2011, with serial production expected to begin in 2014. That date was unceremoniously pushed back to 2017, and again to 2020. Krivoruchko’s revised 2021 estimate is one to which he has stuck throughout 2020, with the Russian defense official likewise adding that serial S-500 deliveries are expected to begin in 2025. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has previously expressed his interest in jointly producing the S-500 with Russia, though the state of those talks between Moscow and Ankara in 2021 is ambiguous. The first S-500 regiments are exceedingly likely to protect Moscow and the areas surrounding it— beyond that, Russia’s deployment plans for its new system remain unclear.

The much-anticipated “successor” to the S-400 boasts a slew of best-in-class performance features. Triumfator-M is widely believed to be capable of engaging ballistic missiles at a range of up to 600 kilometers and enemy aircraft at roughly 500 km, an exponential improvement over the S-400. Outfitted with new homing warheads, Russia’s upcoming air defense system can track and target up to ten missile warheads flying at a speed of over 4 miles per second. The S-500’s 77N6 series of missiles is reportedly capable of intercepting hypersonic cruise missiles and ICBM’s, as well as other aerial objects flying at speeds of over five Mach. The manufacturer, Almaz-Antey, maintains that the S-500 can even threaten certain types of low-orbit satellites, though the full extent of the S-500’s capabilities at extremely high altitudes remains to be determined.

It is unknown how many S-500s are scheduled for delivery, and how quickly. Nevertheless, it would be a financial and technical nonstarter for the Kremlin to attempt to replace every S-400 regiment with the costly and sophisticated S-500. Instead, it appears that the Triumfator-M is intended to serve alongside the S-400 into the coming decades as a longer-range and more situationally capable complement. With its advanced tracking and targeting capabilities, it can bolster existing S-300 and S-400 systems with an additional layer of defense against saturation strikes. Nevertheless, it promises a fundamentally new level of performance against niche, but existential threats like hypersonic weapons.

In that sense, the S-500 is less of a pure “successor” to the S-400 than it is an entirely new weapon, designed to fulfill a different—though not necessarily more important— set of strategic tasks. 

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

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Security, Eurasia

It isn’t surprising that New Delhi would express interest in the next-generation tank.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The time is good, as Russia has also been eager to find customers to help subsidize the cost of the tanks—and the Russian Army, which initially planned to acquire upwards of 2,300 of the tanks between 2015 and 2020 has scaled back its acquisition significantly, so much so that it led to a cancelation of the main production run.

Last month Russia’s Ministry of Defense announced that the production of the T-14 Armata Main Battle Tank (MBT) was underway, and that followed the news that Moscow was planning to start to work with foreign customers next year and already received several prior requests. Among the potential buyers include Egypt, Vietnam and Belarus but also India.

It isn’t surprising that New Delhi would express interest in the next-generation tank, which is based on the Armata Universal Combat Platform. During the Cold War, India used a mix of western and Soviet-bloc military equipment and the Indian Air Force (IAF) operates Russian jet fighters. In June, it was also announced that India would purchase twenty-one MiG-29 supersonic fighter jets to replace the aging MiG-21 fighters already in service with the IAF, along with around a dozen Sukho Su-30 MkI multi-role fighters.

New Delhi may see Washington as a potential partner against Beijing, but it is still in Moscow where the Indian military does its shopping. Currently, approximately 86 percent of India’s military equipment is Russian in origin according to a Stimson Center working paper.

The T-14 could be seen to give the Indian Army a powerful deterrent to China, which is also unlikely to purchase the Russian-made tank. The Chinese arms maker Norinco produces the VT-4—and Beijing has maintained that the tank is among the best in the world. It is currently China’s premier export tank, but it is also built on technology and designs behind the earlier Al-Khalid tank that was developed with cooperation from Pakistan. However, the engines for the tank had to be sourced from the Ukraine—a fact that has been a sore spot for the Chinese designers.

Whether the VT-4 is in the same league as the T-14 is of course debatable. However, China's Type 15—while lighter than the Type 99—also seems to be purpose-built for an engagement with India. It can clear rough terrain and operate in high-altitude better than other and notably larger tanks. 

However, the main point is that India currently fields tanks that can be accurately described as antiquated—and this includes its force of T-72 MBTs. Clearly, New Delhi knows it has to up its game.

The time is good, as Russia has also been eager to find customers to help subsidize the cost of the tanks—and the Russian Army, which initially planned to acquire upwards of 2,300 of the tanks between 2015 and 2020 has scaled back its acquisition significantly, so much so that it led to a cancelation of the main production run. However, Russia has continued to forge ahead with the platform—even after one was reportedly destroyed by “terrorist forces” in Syria with a rather low-tech TOW-2B anti-tank system.

The T-14 tank, which is based on the Armata platform, was shown to the public for the first time at Red Square’s Victory Day parade on May 9, 2015. The new combat vehicle features fully digitized equipment, an unmanned turret and an isolated armored capsule for the crew. It was among the military hardware displayed at last month’s Army-2020 international arms show, which was held outside of Moscow.

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

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley

Security, Americas

Some may claim they are overrated, but they have served their purpose.

Key point: Some of these weapons are useful and some maybe were not worth the cost. As for nuclear weapons, it is good they have never been used but they also arguably have helped to keep the peace.

“Overrated” is a challenging concept.  In sports, a player can be “great” and “overrated” at the same time.  Future Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Derek Jeter, for example, is quite clearly a “great” player, well deserving of the first ballot invitation he will likely receive.  However, as virtually all statistically minded aficionados of the game have noted, he is highly overrated (especially on defense) by the baseball press. Similarly, no one doubts that Kobe Bryant is an outstanding basketball player.  However, many doubt that he is quite as good as his fans (or the NBA commentariat) seem to believe.

The five weapons of war listed below are “overrated” in the sense that they occupy a larger space in the defense-security conversation than they really deserve.  Some of them are fantastic, effective systems, while others are not. All of them take up more ink than they should, and (often) distract from more important issues of warfighting and defense contracting.

Nuclear Weapons:

Nuclear weapons have, in an important sense, dominated international diplomacy for the last six decades. What they haven’t dominated is warfare, where they appear to be nearly useless in all configurations.

The United States designed much of its doctrine and force structure around the potential for atomic warfare in the first half of the Cold War.  Carrier aircraft were developed to deliver nukes, and the system of fleet air defense changed dramatically over concerns about tactical nuclear attack.  The Air Force built itself around the idea of a strategic nuclear offensive, deep into the Soviet Union.  The Army expected to deliver (and absorb) huge numbers of tactical nukes in a NATO-Warsaw Pact fight.

But since World War II, the United States has eschewed the use of nuclear weapons, even against capable non-nuclear opponents.  Because of the deep political complexity associated with their employment, the weapons simply have too little battlefield and strategic impact for the US to seriously entertain their use.

We very occasionally make veiled threats of the combat use of nukes, we often use nukes as diplomatic chips, and we certainly enjoy the deterrent umbrella than the strategic nuclear forces provide.  But the weapons themselves haven’t helped us win a war since 1945, even then under arguable circumstances.

This tension between weapons of war and weapons of diplomacy will continue to have a big effect on Navy and Air Force procurement.  Both services are legitimately concerned about the amount of warfighting capability they will lose from updating their legacy nuclear systems (ICBMs and SSBNs), systems that will almost certainly never fire in anger.

The A-10 Warthog:

No aircraft could live up to the legend that the Warthog has become.

The story of the A-10 is relatively well known.  Seeking to head off the growth of Army aviation, the Air Force proposed a ground attack aircraft to replace the A-1 Skyraider. The Air Force has never been enamored of the ground support mission, but it supported the A-10 (along with the “defense reform” movement of the 1970s and 1980s), eventually bringing several hundred Warthogs into the fleet.

Originally, the Warthog was expected to kill Soviet tanks, blunting a Warsaw Pact offensive into Germany, presumably at extremely high cost to the Warthogs themselves. The Cold War ended, however, and the Warthog only performed this role in Kuwait, where it devastated Iraqi Army forces in 1991.

Today, the A-10 is a useful counter-insurgency aircraft, although probably less useful than a dedicated, purpose built light attack aircraft like the A-29 Super Tucano. And the Warthog undoubtedly has problems. In a force that still enjoys the C-130 and B-52, we should hesitate to accuse any aircraft of excessive age. Nevertheless, the A-10 is old. It was designed for a foe much different than those we’re fighting today and those we anticipate fighting in the future.

But after years of Air Force efforts to retire the aircraft (and Army resistance to those aircraft), it has acquired such symbolic resonance that almost no one evaluates it objectively.  To take a position on the A-10 is to take a position on the importance of close air support, and on sixty years of Army-Air Force relations.  This dissonance lends itself to hyperbole on the part of both supporters and opponents.

But this is the other problem; even if the A-10 isn’t the ideal platform for modern close air support, it’s better than most of the options the Air Force is currently suggesting. And many (including some in Congress) view saddling the USAF with the A-10 as a way of ensuring the Air Force’s continued commitment to the close air support mission.

National Missile Defense (NMD):

The United States has wasted extraordinary resources over the past three decades on the phantom of national missile defense.  The current system of systems involves Aegis sea-based interceptors, Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense. Anticipated systems include both airborne and laser components.

Theater missile defense has made enormous strides, as has sea-based missile defense built around the Aegis SAM system. Theater systems, focused on conventional ballistic missile attack, can substantially reduce damage to civilian areas and to military installations.  Where conventional munitions are concerned, hitting 75% of the incoming warheads is very helpful.

The problem is that National Missile Defense is conceptually challenged. Anyone psychotic enough to attack the U.S. homeland with a nuclear weapon cannot be deterred through usual means anyway, and any defense system that is not foolproof (to a degree much higher than a system like Iron Dome, which protects only against rockets) cannot be relied upon when nuclear missiles are at stake.  No President will ever rely on a National Missile Defense system that is merely 90% effective. Moreover, national missile defense encourages potential foes to develop other means of delivery, or to adopt innovative targeting procedures.

This relates to the technical problems posed by the system.  The bar for success for NMD is extremely high, given that we are tasking it with the protection of our cities.  The high bar gives potential foes many opportunities for disruption.  Relatively cheap, easy to deploy decoys can confused NMD systems.  Ballistic missiles with maneuver capabilities can potentially avoid interceptors.  The onus, unfortunately, lies with the defender; any attacker innovation that renders NMD even marginally less effective makes it politically useless.

In other words, the proponents of National Missile Defense seek not a weapon of war, but rather a weapon of diplomacy.  Unfortunately, NMD has struggled both logically and technically, and has yet (after decades of effort and expense) to produce a reliable, effective system.

Tomahawk Missile:

The Tomahawk missile is the symbol of post-Cold War American power. The U.S. Navy (USN) launched the first waves of Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles against Iraq in 1991, and it has used the missiles in every conflict since.  The Tomahawk gives the U.S. the opportunity to deliver military messages without endangering pilots, and also a chance to bust open the doors of integrated air defense networks. 

However, the missile has grown long in the tooth. Competitive cruise missile systems in China and India boast much higher speeds, as well as evasive characteristics.  These missiles are considerably more deadly to surface ships than the Tomahawk (indeed, the last anti-ship versions of the Tomahawk were converted years ago), but can also threaten well-defended military installations on land.

To be sure, there are some things that the Tomahawk will always be able to do well, including strikes against opponents who lack sophisticated air defense systems. Moreover, Raytheon has plans for a wide variety of Tomahawk upgrades, which would allow the venerable missile to continue to perform its mission into the future.  These upgrades include adding sensors to the missile, making it easier for the missile to strike moving targets, and providing for loiter time over the target site.

But as with all weapons, the basic architecture of the missile limits the extent of upgrade. The United States is working on a replacement, the LRASM (Long Range Anti-Ship Missile), which was initially intended to fly at supersonic speeds.  Testing went poorly, and the most recent versions will travel at subsonic speed.

The Tomahawk is a good missile, a useful missile, but it’s no longer the best missile available.

Predator Drone:

The Predator drone has, through little fault of its own, become the face of American airpower during the Wars on Terror. The idea of Predator launched strikes has come to dominate how international society view the War on Terror, and how, more broadly, it understands the role of the United States.

The Predator is a fine little airplane, but it has its issues for sure.  It flies slow, doesn’t carry much ordnance, and can’t maneuver worth a damn.  A Predator once tried to ambush an Iraqi MiG-25 in air-to-air combat, but failed utterly. Simply put, the Predator cannot operate in a contested environment.  This means that it cannot significantly contribute to combat over a wide range of potential conflict zones, including Ukraine, Syria, and any serious conflict in the East or South China Seas.

The effectiveness of the Predator is an artifact of the peculiar political conditions of the War on Terror, where states (like Pakistan) want US airstrikes against insurgents, but also want to deny that they want such strikes. The weaknesses of the Predator, ironically, serve to embarrass some American allies.  The Pakistani military cannot plausibly claim that Predators flying over Pakistani airspace do so without its permission.

But these facts have barely dented the popular perception of the Predator. In addition to its role as a reconnaissance and strike aircraft, the Predator serves as a sponge for vitriol that would be better directed at the policies of the U.S., Yemeni, and Pakistani governments.

The Predator is the Etrich Taube of the drone set; the first mass production drone with a sufficiently flexible architecture to undertake a wide variety of missions. It’s an important aircraft, but hardly one that deserve the attention it has received.

Conclusion:

To reiterate, using the concept “overrated” requires evaluating the difference between reality and hype.  The family can include useless weapons that have a veneer of utility, or good weapons that have acquired legendary status. Most of the weapons described above are useful, within careful limits. Some aren’t.  In all cases, however, our national security conversation would be better served by appreciating the limits, as well as the promise.

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 July 2014 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters

David Axe

Security,

With the Marines giving up on their radar-equipped drone, the small carriers likely will lack the wide sensor coverage that the bigger vessels can project.

Here's What You Need to Remember: A possible move to smaller carriers comes with its own cost. Lighting carriers might be cheaper than supercarriers are, but they carry far fewer planes than the bigger vessels do and can sustain fewer sorties.

The U.S. Marine Corps has chosen not to develop a ship-launched drone for the airborne early-warning role.

The decision weighs on the U.S. Navy’s plan to deploy some of its amphibious assault ships as “Lightning carriers” embarking as many as 20 F-35B stealth fighters.

The Marines had been counting on a variant of their in-development Marine Air Ground Task Force Unmanned Expeditionary Capabilities drone, or MUX, to carry a powerful radar in order to help manage air battles around amphibious groups.

But a big radar proved to be too heavy for the drone, Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps for Aviation Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder told USNI News. The weight of the radar limited the vehicle’s endurance.

So instead of equipping the ship-launched drone with the radar, the Corps plans to add the sensor to a land-based vehicle.

“I think what we discovered with the MUX program is that it’s going to require a family of systems,” Rudder said. “Power output and weight capacity, obviously you get more weight and power output with a ground-based system with a longer runway, expeditionary runway, than you can coming vertically off the back of a ship. Shipboard compatibility continues to be a challenge for all our air vehicles.”

The shift to a land-based AEW drone could deprive Lightning carriers of an important capability. Radar planes such as the Navy’s E-2 help to spot targets and coordinate allied forces.

But AEW planes tend to be large. So large that only big carriers with catapults and arrestor wires, such as the U.S. Navy’s Nimitz- and Ford-class vessels and the French navy’s Charles de Gaulle, can launch and land them.

The Lightning carriers lack catapults and wires and can support only short-takeoff and vertically-landing aircraft. The British and Russian navies use radar-equipped helicopters for at-sea early-warning. The U.S. military doesn’t possess an AEW helicopter.

The Marines aimed to solve that problem by packing early-warning capability into a vertically-launching unmanned vehicle. Unfortunately for the service, that proved impossible.

The lack of organic AEW capability could become painful for the Navy and Marines as they look to expand on the Lightning-carrier concept. At present, only the fleet’s two America-class assault ships possess the facilities to support 20 vertical-landing F-35Bs.

But the Navy is reconsidering its long-term plans for at-sea aviation. The sailing branch in early 2020 launched a formal study of aviation-ship requirements after the current order for four Ford-class supercarriers.

The Navy’s new “Future Carrier 2030 Task Force” review dovetails with a second carrier study that’s underway inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The OSD study is due in the summer of 2020. It’s unclear when the Navy might release its own review.

Both studies could inform the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding plans and Congress’s own appropriations, which increasingly are shaping military force structure in the absence of feasible military planning.

One possible outcome is a greater emphasis on Lightning carriers. The U.S. fleet could opt to acquire more ships like America in addition to, or in place of, traditional supercarriers with their 60- or 70-plane air wings.

A 40,000-ton-displacement America-class vessel costs just $4 billion or so, compared to $14 billion for a supercarrier displacing 100,000 tons. In theory, the Navy could buy larger numbers of small carriers and distribute them more widely across the ocean, helping the fleet to avoid missile attacks.

But a possible move to smaller carriers comes with its own cost. Lighting carriers might be cheaper than supercarriers are, but they carry far fewer planes than the bigger vessels do and can sustain fewer sorties.

A Lightning carrier embarking 20 F-35s, compared to the roughly 40 strike fighters that a supercarrier normally carries, should be able to launch 40 sorties per day, the Marines estimated. A Ford-class supercarrier, by contrast, is supposed to be able to launch 160 sorties per day.

And with the Marines giving up on their radar-equipped drone, the small carriers likely will lack the wide sensor coverage that the bigger vessels can project.

David Axe served as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This first appeared in August 2019.

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Security, Europe

Was the King Tiger a great tank or simply hype?

Nazi Germany's Tiger is arguably the most famous tank of World War II. With its thick armor and devastating 88-millimeter gun, the Mark VI—or Tiger I—soon earned a devastating reputation on the battlefield.

Designed as a breakthrough tank for breaching enemy defenses, and allocated to a handful of special heavy tank battalions, the sixty-ton Tiger I seemed to have it all: firepower, armor and for an early 1940s vehicle that weighed as much as today's M-1 Abrams, it was fairly agile. With its square, castle-like shape and long cannon, the Tiger I even looked deadly. But Hitler's generals and weapons designers were not satisfied. With Teutonic perfectionism, they complained that the Tiger I's KwK 36 gun was not the most powerful version of the 88-millimeter cannon (not that Allied tankers would have noticed the difference). Even before the Tiger I debuted on the battlefield (floundering in the swamps near Leningrad in an ill-advised attack in September 1942), work had begun on a successor.

Enter the Tiger II, or Konigstiger (King Tiger). At seventy-five tons, it was bigger than its predecessor. Its longer-barreled (and thus higher velocity) KwK 43 88-millimeter cannon could penetrate five inches of armor at a range of two kilometers (1.2 miles). With Sherman and T-34 crews having about two inches of frontal armor between them and eternity, no wonder a supersized Tiger must have seemed the devil on treads.

The Tiger II also featured numerous improvements over the Tiger I. The original Tiger had vertical armor, rather than the more effective sloped armor (effectively increasing armor thickness) found on the T-34 and the later German Panther. The King Tiger had well-sloped armor that was six inches thick on the front hull. Its turret could traverse 360 degrees in nineteen seconds, compared to sixty seconds for the Tiger I, which had theoretically allowed a fast-moving Sherman or T-34 to maneuver behind a Tiger I faster than the German tank's gun could track it.

Like a professional football player, the Tiger II was more agile than it looked. It had a road speed of about twenty-five miles per hour, versus about thirty for the Sherman and T-34. Cross-country speed was about ten miles per hour, versus about twenty miles per hour for the other two tanks. Author Thomas Jentz, the dean of Tiger historians, writes that despite its size, the Tiger II had surprisingly good tactical mobility. Unlike the megalomaniacal 200-ton German Maus, which couldn't even roll over many European bridges, the King Tiger was a viable design.

Late war Germans tanks like the Tiger and Panther had a reputation for being over-engineered and mechanically finicky. As with any sophisticated weapon, the Tiger II did suffer from reliability issues, especially at the hands of the poorly trained and inexperienced tank drivers of the late war German army. But given a skilled crew and proper logistics support, the Tiger II was fairly reliable, according to Jentz. The problem was that by the time the King Tiger made its combat debut in Normandy in July 1944, the necessities that Nazi Germany most lacked was trained, experienced tank crews and fuel and logistics support.

Which brings us to the question dear to every treadhead: Was the King Tiger a great tank? As with all weapons, the answer is: it depends. In terms of the triad of metrics for tanks—firepower, armor and mobility—the Tiger II was quite impressive. It was probably better than its American rival, the lighter and less heavily armored forty-six-ton American M-26 Pershing. A more interesting question is the King Tiger versus the Soviet IS-2 Stalin tank. There are all sorts of conflicting data and opinions on this duel, though an encounter between IS-2s and King Tigers in August 1944 destroyed or damaged ten tanks on either side. One flaw of the IS-2, whose powerful 122-millimeter gun could theoretically penetrate a King Tiger's thickly armored turret at one-mile range—was its low rate of fire and limited onboard ammunition supply. Had the war continued until 1946, the King Tiger would probably have met its match in the British Centurion, one of the most successful tanks in history and still used today.

However, the most telling statistic is that while the Soviet Union produced nearly 3,900 IS-2s, Germany built just 492 Tiger IIs. The Soviets built more than 108,000 tanks, and the Americans eighty-eight thousand, because World War II was a contest of production that devoured material at an appalling rate. Less than 500 King Tigers, no matter how powerful, were not going to change the outcome.

Ironically, the King Tiger's most deadly predator wasn't other tanks, but Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers. The German army ordered 1,500 Tiger IIs, but RAF raids on manufacturer Henschel's factories slashed production. An earlier Tiger I cost 250,000 Reichsmarks, two to three times as much as smaller German tanks such as the Panther or Mark IV. Would Germany have been better off with a greater number of lighter tanks, especially the heavier Panther? Given the current American preference for expensive weapons like aircraft carriers and F-35 fighters, this question still resonates.

Weapons are extremely situational items. A tank that functions well in one setting might prove a failure in another. By the time the Tiger II made its combat debut in Normandy in July 1944, Germany was on the defensive. Big tanks like the King Tiger were mobile fortresses if properly sited in ambush positions. But on the attack, advancing down narrow, icy roads as the Tiger II did during the Battle of the Bulge, big, heavy fuel-guzzling tanks could be a liability. One problem with both the Tiger I and II was that they were so big relative to other German tanks, that the only vehicle that could tow a damaged Tiger was another Tiger. As the German armies retreated in the East and West, many of these behemoths were abandoned or blown up by their own crews.

Heavy tanks like the King Tiger proved a dead end. After 1945, nations switched to building main battle tanks that had sufficient firepower and armor to breach enemy defenses, like heavy tanks, while being mobile enough to exploit breakthroughs like medium and light tanks.

The day of the Tiger had passed.

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

Image: Tiger Tank. Author: Hohum. Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons 3.0

This article was first published in 2016.

 

 

 

Ethen Kim Lieser

Politics, Americas

Sadly, too many people have bought into a lot of nonsense around the coronavirus and the vaccines.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has admitted that he is indeed surprised by the amount of “crazy and evil” conspiracy theories about him that have spread on social media over the course of the yearlong coronavirus pandemic.

“Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. (Anthony) Fauci would be so prominent in these really evil theories,” he told Reuters. “I’m very surprised by that. I hope it goes away.”

Gates, who stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in 2014, has already committed nearly $2 billion through his philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to assist in the global response to the ongoing pandemic.

Some of the well-known conspiracy theories that have circulated on the internet include claims that Fauci and Gates created the pandemic to control populations and governments and that they aim to financially profit from the spread of the disease.

“But do people really believe that stuff?” Gates asked. “We’re really going to have to get educated about this over the next year and understand … how does it change people’s behavior and how should we have minimized this?”

The Microsoft co-founder, who has been warning about the threat of a global pandemic since 2015, added that he is pleased that under President Joe Biden, the United States has rejoined the World Health Organization and “that he’s appointed smart people, and the fact that Dr. Fauci won’t be suppressed.”

Gates had previously defended himself after a poll from a Yahoo News/YouGov survey revealed that 28 percent of American adults actually believe theories claiming that he would implant microchips in billions of people to monitor their movements.

“We need to get the truth out there,” he said in an interview on CBS News. “I hope it’ll die down as people get the facts.”

Gates has also long voiced his concern that the potentially life-saving coronavirus vaccine doses won’t reach many of the world’s poor.

In The Goalkeepers Report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, modeling from Northeastern University was used to forecast that twice as many people could die from the pandemic if wealthy countries decide to hoard the first two billion vaccine doses.

“It shouldn’t just be the rich countries winning a bidding war (for a coronavirus vaccine),” he said during a recent conference call with reporters. “Misallocating the vaccine would cause dramatic additional deaths.”

The eye-opening report also noted that the pandemic disproportionately impacts women, racial and ethnic minority groups, and those living in extreme poverty.

“The pandemic, in almost every dimension, made inequity worse,” Gates said. “The poorer countries are suffering far more than the richer countries because of a lack of fiscal resources to go on.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security,

Here’s how.

A Navy Littoral Combat Ship is conducting coastal patrols for reconnaissance and countermine missions when it suddenly comes upon or discovers an approaching fleet of enemy ships. How many of them are there? How far away are they? What weapons might they be armed with? All of these questions, potentially answered by drones, surveillance planes, or even space-based nodes, would need to be cataloged, stored, and transmitted quickly to larger, more heavily armed surface vessels such as carrier strike groups, fixed-wing aircraft, ground-based command and control, and other data systems able to perform data analysis and connect maritime warfare “nodes” to one another.

Surface ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), rely upon a host of interwoven technologies intended to share key data in real-time—such as threat and targeting information, radar signal processing and fire control systems, systems which would need to share data in real-time to optimize combat performance.

This is why the Navy continues to make progress wiring its surface fleet for massive “interconnected” or networked maritime warfare operations by arming carriers, amphibious vessels, destroyers, and even submarines with an emerging ship-based combat communication system called CANES.

CANES, or Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services, is a radio and computer command and control system that is increasingly being cyber hardened and operated with greater levels of AI-enabled automation. The Navy has both been integrating and upgrading CANES across its surface fleet to cyber-harden its networks, migrate toward AI-enabled computing and add new levels of automation to streamline functionality. CANES gathers and transmits intelligence across domains and through both classified and unclassified networks. The faster and more efficiently data can be analyzed, stored, and shared, the more time Navy commanders may have to respond to a fast-evolving threat dynamic such as the aforementioned LCS scenario. 

The LCS, in particular, draws upon interconnected surface and anti-submarine “mission packages” to integrate anti-submarine warfare, countermine operations, and surface warfare technical systems woven together with the ship’s technical infrastructure. Among other things, the mission packages include ship-mounted guns and missiles along with helicopters, drones such as the Fire Scout, and various sonar systems—the kinds of things potentially enhanced by CANES consolidation of networked nodes potentially strengthened by AI-empowered analysis.

Navy developers say increasing cybersecurity, mission scope, and overall resiliency on the CANES networks depends on using a common engineering approach with routers, Satcom networks, servers, and computing functions. Nodes on CANES communicate using an automated digital networking system, or ADNS, which allows the system to connect with Satcom assets using multiband terminals. CANES consists of a number of hardware and software elements to include thousands of local area network (LAN) drops. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters,

Robert Farley

Security, Europe

This fighter will get basic jobs done without breaking budgets.

Key point: This jet fighter is good in a dog fight and has served well across Europe. It may not be a high-end stealth fighter, but it is a decent multi-national design.

The Eurofighter Typhoon has joined the Dassault Rafale, the Saab Gripen, and the Sukhoi “Flanker” in pursuit of a growing niche in the international fighter market. These aircraft offer capabilities beyond the Generation 4 platforms developed in the 1970s, but don’t carry the costs and complications of stealth. While the Eurofighter has enjoyed outstanding technical success thus far, the market niche may not be large enough to sustain production over time.

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

Origins:

In the 1970s, several Western European countries perceived a need for a new fighter aircraft. Older designs, often acquired from the United States, were reaching the end of the mature stages of their development, and desperately needed replacement. These included the F-4 Phantom and the F-104 Starfighter. The United States had developed the F-15 and F-16 in the 1970s, and the Soviets were threatening to leave the Europeans behind with the combination of the MiG-29 and Su-27.

The relative success of the multinational Panavia Tornado project had led to a heavy fighter that could conduct both penetrating strike and interception missions. The countries associated with the Tornado investigated several different projects for a lighter fighter optimized for air superiority missions. Spain, having joined NATO in 1982, also became part of the project, which had the side effect of reinvigorating the European military aviation industry.

France, an early partner, eventually dropped out over concerns about its domestic aviation industry, and the need for a carrier-capable variant. The Eurofighter project survived the collapse of defense spending at the end of the Cold War, with a prototype first flying in 1994. Operational Typhoons (continuing a naming convention that had begun with the Tornado) started entering service in 2003.

Concept:

Around 450 Typhoons have entered service, with another 150 or so on order. The Typhoon incorporates lessons learned from fourth-generation fighters, while also including some capabilities associated with fifth-generation aircraft. The Typhoon has a top speed of Mach 2, a high service ceiling, an excellent thrust-to-weight ratio, and “supercruise” capabilities. Current Typhoons carry the last mechanically scanned radar array to be deployed in an advanced fighter, although new electronically scanned arrays may eventually replace these radars in older models. These features allow it to operate in teams that include either older fighters, or new aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 JSF.

In exercises, the Typhoon has quickly established a reputation as one of the world’s most formidable dogfighters, with high maneuverability and energy preservation characteristics. Advanced helmet and g-suit equipment allows Typhoon pilots to take advantage of these qualities to excellent effect. The Typhoon also has excellent Beyond-Visual Range (BVR) combat capabilities, carrying the AIM-120 missile and having a lower radar cross-section than any fourth-generation fighter. Although not a stealth fighter, the Typhoon design included some low observable qualities, as well as significant electronic warfare capabilities. Typhoons will soon begin to carry the MBDA Meteor long-range missile in operational capacity, which will only increase the lethality of the platform.

The Typhoon has trailed behind some contemporaries in air-ground capabilities, but upgrades to equipment and munitions have helped close that gap over the last few years. In Libya, the Royal Air Force needed to operate its Typhoons alongside older Tornados because the Eurofighters lacked advanced ground targeting capabilities. RAF Typhoons have also operated against ISIS, sometimes in spectacular fashion.

Export:

Within Europe, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the United Kingdom have all purchased the Typhoon. Of these, only Austria is outside the initial design consortium. The Typhoon has struggled a bit to find customers outside of Europe. Various bids to sell the aircraft to Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American customers have failed, as the aircraft has run up against tightening defense budgets and tough competition from the F-35, the Gripen, the Rafale, and an apparently endless series of Su-27 variants.

The Typhoon is subject to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restrictions, because it contains certain elements of US technology. However, the aircraft has seen success mainly in the Middle East, where it currently serves in the Royal Saudi Air Force. Oman and Kuwait have also arranged for purchase of the Typhoon, and Eurofighter continues to pursue bids with other Middle Eastern countries.

Conclusion:

The development of the Typhoon did not clear the field of European fighter contenders. France, with its own aviation industry and its own specialized requirements (including carrier takeoff and landing capability) and Sweden would produce their own fighters, which continue to compete with the Typhoon for export contracts. The F-35 has come to dominate the fighter acquisition plans of many European countries, sucking up money and attention that might have gone to the Typhoon.

Still, for an aircraft effectively designed by a multinational committee, the Eurofighter has performed well in service, and has won an excellent reputation among aviation experts. It will continue to serve alongside both fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, providing a bridge and offering capabilities that complement either type.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

David Axe

Security, Asia

A new landing helicopter dock has been designed.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Japanese navy does not have a formal requirement for an LHD, but there’s an obvious gap in the fleet’s structure that an assault ship could fill. Tokyo is building up a force of 17 MV-22 tiltrotors, 52 AAV7s and six LCACs to carry marines into combat. But the landing craft, vehicles and rotorcraft require ships to transport them close to shore.

A Japanese shipbuilder is pitching a new amphibious assault ship that could transport the Japanese military’s new Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade marine force and its MV-22 tiltrotors.

Japan Marine United Corporation revealed, at the DSEI Japan 2019 exhibition in Chiba in late November 2019, its design for a new landing helicopter dock, or LHD.

The 19,000-ton-displacement vessel’s design features a floodable well deck for embarking two LCAC air-cushion landing craft plus 20 AAV7A1 amphibious assault vehicles. Its full-length flight deck boasts five marked landing spots for helicopters or tiltrotors. Two below-deck hangars have space for five more rotorcraft.

The crew would number 500. It’s unclear how many troops the ship could embark, but similar vessels in service with other navies typically carry 500 passengers for long missions and up to a thousand for shorter hauls.

The Japanese navy does not have a formal requirement for an LHD, but there’s an obvious gap in the fleet’s structure that an assault ship could fill. Tokyo is building up a force of 17 MV-22 tiltrotors, 52 AAV7s and six LCACs to carry marines into combat. But the landing craft, vehicles and rotorcraft require ships to transport them close to shore.

At present, Japan’s amphibious flotilla includes two Izumo-class big-deck assault ships that Tokyo is converting into light aircraft carriers for embarking F-35B jump jets. Another two light carriers are on order. In addition, the amphibious fleet includes two Hyuga-class helicopter carriers and Osumi-class three landing ship tanks, or LSTs.

The navy is updating the three LSTs to support V-22s and AAV7s. But the LSTs each can carry just 330 troops on long missions. Tokyo’s marine brigade numbers 3,000 personnel. If the Japanese fleet aims to deploy the entire brigade in one amphibious group, it needs more ships.

Acquiring LHDs also would align Japan’s navy with allied and rival fleets. The U.S. Navy has 10 LHDs, including one that sails from a base in Japan. The Australian navy has two LHDs. The South Korean fleet is building three. The Chinese navy in September 2019 launched its own first LHD.

“For Japan, even a small fleet of LHDs could allow the Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade to flex its muscles more throughout East Asia and elsewhere in the Pacific, where the country has increasingly diverse security concerns,” Joe Trevithick explained at The War Zone.

North Korea presents an immediate threat and has recently begun conducting increasingly worrisome missile launches, among other shows of force. This has already prompted Japanese authorities to make a number of defense-related investments, including the acquisition of Aegis Ashore missile defense sites equipped with Lockheed Martin's new AN/SPY-7(V)1 Solid State Radar. North Korean belligerence has also been a factor in the decision to integrate the F-35B onto the Izumo-class ships. ...

The current Japanese government has also shown that it is eager to be involved in challenging China's broad and controversial claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea and potentially expand its ability to conduct military activities farther beyond its borders in service to Japan's broader foreign policy aims.

The Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade is seen as an important component of these efforts and elements of the unit have been participating in increasing numbers of multinational exercises in the Pacific region in recent years. Just in October [2019], the brigade sent personnel to The Philippines to join that country and the United States in the annual Kamandag exercise.

Shipbuilder JMU told Jane’s that in coming years it expects the Japanese navy to announce a formal requirement for at least one LHD. The design is ready.

But there’s another way the Japanese fleet could complete its amphibious flotilla. “Japan may decide it is more cost-effective to develop a smaller landing platform dock-style ship as a direct follow-on to Osumi class, instead, which could then operate as part of a larger amphibious force in concert with the Izumos or Hyugas,” Trevithick noted.

David Axe served as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

History, World

These warships were mighty in their day before the age of the battleship came to a close.

Key point: Battleships used to be the most powerful and valuable capital ships. Now, they have been superseded by aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines.

The age of the steel line-of-battleship really began in the 1880s, with the construction of a series of warships that could carry and independently aim heavy guns external to the hull.  In 1905, HMS Dreadnought brought together an array of innovations in shipbuilding, propulsion, and gunnery to create a new kind of warship, one that could dominate all existing battleships.

Although eventually supplanted by the submarine and the aircraft carrier, the battleship took pride of place in the navies of the first half of the twentieth century. The mythology of of the battleship age often understates how active many of the ships were; both World War I and World War II saw numerous battleship engagements. These are the five most important battles of the dreadnought age.

Battle of Jutland:

In the years prior to World War I, Britain and Germany raced to outbuild each other, resulting in vast fleets of dreadnought battleships.  The British won the race, but not by so far that they could ignore the power of the German High Seas Fleet.  When war began, the Royal Navy collected most of its modern battleships into the Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow.

The High Seas Fleet and the Grand Fleet spared for nearly three years before the main event. In May 1916, Admiral Reinhard Scheer and Admiral John Jellicoe laid dueling traps; Scheer hoped to draw a portion of the Grand Fleet under the guns of the High Seas Fleet, while Jellicoe sought to bring the latter into the jaws of the former.  Both succeeded, to a point; British battlecruisers and fast battleships engaged the German line of battle, before the arrival of the whole of the Grand Fleet put German survival in jeopardy.

The two sides fought for most of an afternoon.  The Germans has sixteen dreadnought battleships, six pre-dreadnoughts, and five battlecruisers.  Against this, the British fielded twenty-eight dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers. Jellicoe managed to trap the Germans on the wrong side of the Grand Fleet, but in a confused night action most of the German ships passed through the British line, and to safety.

Many, on both sides, considered Jutland a disappointment.  Both Scheer and Jellicoe believed that they missed a chance to destroy the enemy fleet, the latter with considerably more justifiable cause. Nevertheless, together the two sides lost four battlecruisers and a pre-dreadnought battleship.  Had either side enjoyed a bit less luck, the losses could have been much worse.

Battle of Mers-el-Kebir:

The surrender of France in 1940 left the disposition of the French Navy in question. Many of the heavy ships, mostly located in French colonies, could aid either Axis or British forces.  In early July 1940, Winston Churchill decided to take a risk averse approach.  The Royal Navy would force a French decision, with the result of either seizing or destroying the French navy.

(Recommended: 5 Most Powerful Battleships Ever)

The largest concentration of French ships, including four French battleships, lay at Mers-el-Kebir, in Algeria. Two of the French battleships were veterans of World War I; old, slow, and not particularly useful to either the Italian or the British navies. The prizes were six heavy destroyers, and the fast battleships Strasbourg and Dunkerque.  These ships could contribute on either side of the conflict.

The British dispatched Force H from Gibraltar, consisting of HMS Hood, HMS Valiant, HMS Resolution, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, and a flotilla of supporting ships to either intimidate or destroy the French.  Royal Navy representatives submitted an ultimatum to their French counterparts, demanding that the ships either join the British, sail to America and disarm, or scuttle themselves. What precisely happened in the communications between Force H and the French commander remains in dispute.  What we do know is that the British battleships opened fire, with devastating results. Bretagne’s magazine exploded, killing over a thousand French sailors.  Provence and Dunkerque both took hits, and promptly beached themselves.  Strasbourg made a daring dash for the exit, then outran Hood to escape the British task force.

In the end, the British sank one obsolete ship and damaged another.  They damaged one fast battleship, and let another escape.  1300 French sailors died during the battle. Fortunately, the surviving French sailors had little interest in serving the Germans; they would eventually scuttle most of their ships at Toulon, following a German invasion of Vichy.

Battle of Calabria:

Most of the battles in the Mediterranean theater in World War II came about as the result of convoy protection.  The Italians needed to escort their convoys to Libya, while the British needed to escort convoys to Malta, and points east.

In July 1940, shortly after the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, the far escorts of two convoys met each other in battle.  An Italian task force consisting of the battleships Giulio Cesare, Conti di Cavour, and various smaller ships rubbed up against a British convoy including HMS Warspite, HMS Malaya, HMS Royal Sovereign, the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, and associated escorts.

The Italians had the initial advantage, as the dispersal of Royal Navy ships meant that only Warspite could fire upon the Italian line.  Warspite engaged both enemy ships, coming under fire from Giulio Cesare as Malaya and Royal Sovereign hurried to her aid.  After several near misses on both sides, Warspite struck with one of the longest hits in the history of naval artillery.  The hit, which detonated ammunition on Giulio Cesare’s deck, resulted in a loss of speed that forced the Italian ship out of line.  This cost the Italians their moment of advantage; with odds at 3-1, the remaining Italian ships retired.

Although the Italians failed to score a victory in the battle, they did demonstrate that the Royal Navy could not operate in the central Mediterranean without heavy escort.  The addition of two new, modern fast battleships in the next months would give the Italians a major advantage, which the airstrike on Taranto would ameliorate only for a time. The Allies could not claim naval supremacy in the ‘Med’ until 1943, when the Italian fleet surrendered under the guns of Malta.

When the German battleship Bismarck entered service in 1941, she became the largest warship in the world, displacing the Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS Hood.  In May 1941, the Bismarck sortied from Norway in the company of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen.  The Germans planned to use the pair as commerce raiders, with Bismarck drawing off or destroying the capital ship escorts of any convoys, while Prinz Eugen concentrated on the merchant ships themselves.

The first task force to intercept Bismarck included HMS Hood, HMS Prince of Wales, and four destroyers.  HMS Prince of Wales was theoretically comparable to Bismarck, but teething problems (she had only very recently completed trials) limited her combat effectiveness.  HMS Hood carried a similar armament to Bismarck (8 15” guns), but also carried twenty more years of age.

Appreciating the threat that long-range fire posed to the thin deck-armor of Hood, Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland sought to close the range as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately, Bismarck’s fifth salvo caught Hood amidships, resulting in a huge explosion.  Analysts debate to this day what precisely happened aboard Hood, but the blast took her to the bottom so quickly that only three crewmembers (from a crew of 1419) escaped.

Late in the battle, Prince of Wales scored a hit on Bismarck that caused a fuel leak.  This killed Bismarck’s mission; she could not raid into the Atlantic with fuel running low.  Bismarck broke contact with Prince of Wales (which by this time was severely hampered by gunnery breakdowns), and attempted to run for home.  Two days later she was caught by HMS Rodney and HMS King George V, which avenged Hood by sending Bismarck to the bottom.

Second Battle of Guadalcanal:

In late 1942, Americans owned the day over the Solomon Islands, largely by virtue of their control of Henderson Airfield.  The Japanese, on the other hand, owned the night.  The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) used its advantages at night to run supplies and reinforcements to Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, and to bombard American positions.

On November 13, a task force including two Japanese battleships tried to “run the slot” and bombard Henderson. The IJN task force was met by a group of American cruisers and destroyers, which took advantage of surprise and good luck to cripple the battleship Hiei.  American aircraft finished off Hiei the next day.

The following evening, the Japanese tried again. The Americans, virtually tapped out after months of grueling combat, went to their aces in the hole; USS Washington and USS South Dakota, a pair of fast battleships normally tasked with escorting carriers.  Four destroyers screened the two battleships.  The IJN force included the battleship Kirishima (sister of Hiei, and survivor of the first battle), four cruisers, and nine destroyers.

The early stages of the night action saw the IJN warships sweep aside the U.S. Navy destroyer screen.  South Dakota and Washington became separated, and the former came under heavy fire from the entire Japanese task force, which caused high casualties and a complete loss of communications.  When the Japanese opened up on South Dakota, however, they revealed their position to USS Washington, which took the opportunity to hammer HIJMS Kirishima with her 16” and 5” guns.  Kirishima suffered mortal damage, fell out of the battle line, and eventually sank (although most of her crew was rescued).  South Dakota and Washington escaped, the latter with virtually no damage.

Parting Salvos:

Only eight dreadnoughts remain, all in the United States. Over time, it is almost certain that this number will dwindle; several of the memorialized battleships are in poor condition, and likely will eventually find their way to the scrappers, or to service as an artificial reef. Nevertheless, for more than a generation analysts and the general public perceived these ships to constitute the currency of naval, and to some extent national, power.

Robert Farley , a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security, Americas

The stealth bomber is no fighter, yet an anti-air defense capability would serve it well.

Key point: Stealth is not perfect. If the B-21 was discovered, it might need a way to protect itself from another warplane.

Recent reports about the B-21 Raider suggest that the plane might have a mission that U.S. bombers have not had for a very long time: air-to-air combat. If the Air Force continues to pursue this line of thought, it will revive a concept that dominated airpower theory in the early age of aviation, but that fell by the wayside because of technological and operational concerns in the 1950s and 1960s. However, it remains to be seen whether the idea of a B-21 “battleplane” is practical, or simply the bureaucratic answer to critical concerns about the bomber’s survivability. 

History

Arming a bomber always came with trade-offs. For one, armament invariably increased the weight of the plane, necessarily reducing some combination of range, speed, and payload. Defensive weaponry also often had negative aerodynamic effects, leading losses in speed and maneuverability. Nevertheless, air forces began arming bombers from a very early period. The Gotha bombers that terrorized London during World War I experimented with a variety of different kinds of armament to defend themselves from British interceptors. A turning point in the search for the self-defending bomber came with the Martin B-10. The B-10 had three enclosed turrets for defensive machine guns, enabling it to defend itself on multiple vectors. Operating in concert, a formation of B-10s could theoretically protect itself from attacking fighters, and even incur serious attrition on a defensive force of pursuit aircraft.

Heyday

The heyday of the self-defending bomber came during the interwar period, when theorists in the United States and (to a lesser extent) the United Kingdom hoped that well-armed bombers, flying in formation, could defeat attacking pursuit aircraft. The defensive argument performed two strategic roles, both increasing the chance that bombers would arrive over their targets to deliver payloads, and attriting away the defensive fighters of the enemy. 

The USAF put the theory to test in the early daylight raids over Germany, and the results were far from good. The high speed and maneuverability of German fighters, combined with Germany’s “home field advantage” of anti-aircraft artillery, meant that formations could be broken up and individual bombers hunted down. Moreover, the machine guns carried by U.S. bombers were generally insufficient for warding off German fighters, which could punch at them with long-range 20mm cannon. The USAF eventually gave up on unescorted flights of bombers during daylight, instead turning first to night bombing, and then to long-range escort fighters such as the P-51 Mustang.

Bombers were nevertheless used in some other fighting roles, however. The Germans experimented with turning light bombers into night fighters, which could sacrifice maneuverability for speed, firepower, and sensors. Some Ju-88s and Do-217s were used in such a fashion. The Royal Air Force also used the de Haviland Mosquito light bomber as a night fighter in certain situations. 

Decline

The immediate post-war bombers kept the dream of a defensive armament alive. The B-36 Peacemaker carried a 20mm cannon in a tail turret, as did the B-47 and the B-52. The USAF also famously experimented with turning the B-36 into a makeshift mothership with its own defensive fighter. However, most bomber designs of the jet age basically gave up on the idea of defensive armament. The B-58 Hustler carried no defensive weapons, nor did the XB-70 Valkyrie. As interceptors shifted from hunting with guns to hunting with missiles, a cannon offered little protection. Jet age bombers would depend on speed for protection, at least until it became apparent that they could not outrun SAMs. The last bomber designed to defend itself against enemy fighters was the B-52 Stratofortress, which carried 20mm Vulcan cannon in its tail. Although the accounts are disputed, B-52 tail gunners were credited with the kills of two Vietnamese People’s Army Air Force MiG-21s during Operation Linebacker II. Vietnamese sources attribute the loss of a third MiG to a B-52 gun in April 1972. 

Conceptual Rebirth

At one point, someone floated a half-serious proposal that involved equipping the B-1B with a mechanism for firing air-to-air missiles at pursuing targets, although it was unclear how the radar systems to guide such missiles were supposed to work. In a somewhat similar vein, thought has been given to modifying the B-1B to fit the missile truck concept, one version of an “arsenal plane” that would carry a large number of missiles but rely on sensors from other aircraft. The high speed and large payload of the B-1B would make it ideal for such a mission, at least among existing aircraft in the USAF inventory. Of course, the Air Force and associated analysts have also argued that drones could fulfill this role without the need for risking a manned aircraft. 

The idea of a B-21 optimized for air-to-air combat makes some sense, given existing trends in the development of weapons and sensors. A large aircraft like the B-21 could carry numerous air-to-air missiles, even in stealth mode. Properly equipped, it could use powerful sensors to develop a good picture of the aerial battlefield, simultaneously acting as a fighting and command-control platform. Trends in bomber design have of late tended to eschew high speed in preference for stealth. Fighters, on the other hand, continue to prize speed in both offensive and defensive tactical situations. Firing missiles tends to reduce stealth, both because of the aspect change of the aircraft as it fires, and because of the evident existence of the air-to-air missiles. Fighters solve this problem by running away as fast as possible after shooting. The B-21 would likely require a different strategy, or very long-range missiles that would place it beyond the effective range of the enemy. 

Wrap

The idea of a bomber as fighter stems from several related problems. The USAF remains reluctant to completely entrust its deep penetration mission to the concept of stealth, both because of the evident practical difficulties (large bombers aren’t invisible during the day, no matter how stealthy they are) and because of concerns about improvements in sensor technology. Thus, the idea of a plane that could defend itself has some appeal. Moreover, as the cost of fighter aircraft has escalated dramatically, the idea of using a bomber to inflict serious damage on the defensive forces of an enemy has become more enticing. Finally, the general “capabilities creep” of proposed aircraft is almost necessary to building a strong, broad-based, and robust coalition for procurement. This can mean over-promising with respect to capabilities and missions. Whether the B-21 will ever actually try to shoot down an enemy fighter remains an open question; if so, it will become the first bomber since 1972 to successful turn the predator into the prey. 

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to The National Interest, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Peck

Security, Americas

Thanks, arms race. 

In another sign that the nuclear arms race is heating up, the U.S. is ramping up production of nuclear bomb cores.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced that it plans to increase the production of plutonium pits to 80 per year. The grapefruit-sized pits contain the fissile material that give nuclear weapons such tremendous power.

Production will center on the Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River site in North Carolina, which would be modified to manufacture at least 50 pits per year, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would generate at least 30, by 2030.

America’s nuclear weapons cores are aging, with some pits dating back to the 1970s, leading to concerns about the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

“The U.S. lost its ability to produce pits in large numbers in 1989, when the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado, was shut down after the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Environmental Protection Agency investigated environmental violations at the site,” noted Physics Today magazine in 2018. Up to 1,200 pits per year had been manufactured there.

“Since then, only 30 pits for weapons have been fabricated—all at LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory], the sole U.S. facility with production capability. Weapons-quality pit production ceased in 2012, when LANL began modernizing its 40-year-old facilities, although several practice pits have since been fabricated. The oldest pits in the stockpile—which now numbers 3,882, according to DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—date to 1978.”

In its 2018 Nuclear Policy Review, the Trump administration called for 80 new plutonium pits per year. Congress has also allocated large sums, with $4.7 billion alone allocated in FY 2019 for maintenance and life extension of the nuclear stockpile. The NNSA says it is legally mandated to ensure a capacity of at least 80 pits per year.

Though the production of nuclear cores has been an issue for years, a looming U.S.-Russia arms race makes the situation even more sensitive. Russia is fielding a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons, including a hypersonic nuclear-armed glider and an air-launched ballistic missile. The Trump administration has withdrawn from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, alleging Russian violations, leading to fears that a new competition will beget the return of nuclear-armed, medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles.

Anti-nuclear groups are furious. “Expanded pit production will cost at least $43 billion over the next 30 years,” argues the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups. Yet the Defense Department and NNSA have never explained why expanded plutonium pit production is necessary. More than 15,000 plutonium pits are stored at NNSA’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. Independent experts have concluded that plutonium pits have reliable lifetimes of at least 100 years (the average pit age is less than 40 years). Crucially, there is no pit production scheduled to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, proposed future pit production is for speculative new-design nuclear weapons, but those designs have been canceled.”

Introducing a new generation of nuclear weapons “could adversely impact national security because newly produced plutonium pits cannot be full-scale tested without violating the global nuclear weapons testing moratorium.”

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

This article was first published in 2020.

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

Beijing has worked hard to build a modern navy.

Key point: The Type 055 is pretty decent and one of the best the PLA Navy has. However, America is already moving ahead with its own new warships.

Does the United States have an answer to China’s new Type 055 destroyers? Does it need one?

On July 3 Dalian shipyard launched two of the big new ships, with some reports suggesting that the class may extend to twenty-four vessels. The ships are large and have more VLS cells than Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers, although the latter still exceed the former in sensor integration and other capabilities.

Still, with the Navy’s cruiser force aging, does the U.S. Navy need to think seriously about its own large cruiser?

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

Description:

The Type 055 destroyers are large ships, probably displacing around thirteen thousand tons and carrying 112 vertical launch system (VLS) cells, in addition to a 130-millimeter gun and a wide array of sensors and defensive weapons. They are the world’s largest surface combatants apart from the Zumwalt class destroyers, which really are specialized land attack vessels. The overall production run remains uncertain, with a low estimate of six and a high estimate of twenty-four; much likely depends on how effectively the ship performs in PLAN service.

U.S. Response:

The United States has been slow to develop a replacement to the Ticonderoga class cruisers, which are somewhat smaller than the Type 055. The DDG-1000 class will end after three ships, and in any case the Zumwalts do not perform missions similar to the Type 055. The Obama administration cancelled the CG(X) program after cost projections became excessive. In response to the failure of the DDG(X) and CG(X) programs, the Navy decided to restart the Arleigh Burke program, which had the added benefit of improving ballistic missile defense capabilities. But apart from the Arleigh Burke Flight III ships, the U.S. Navy has no specific large combatants in its long-term plans. At the moment, the FFG(X) program is dominating the U.S. Navy’s procurement attention, as the shortcomings of the Littoral Combat Ship have demonstrated a need to fill the gap between the LCS and the Arleigh Burkes.

But the Ticonderogas will soon reach the end of their useful service lives, as will the oldest of the DDG-51 class of ships. Some have floated the idea of a cruiser based on the hull of the LPD-17, which would allow high energy production, a degree of modularity, and the inclusion of a wide variety of different systems. However, the LPD-17s are large and slow, likely incapable of keeping up with carrier battle groups. Another idea (floated by Tyler Rogoway, among others) is to modify the existing Zumwalt design for cruiser-esque purposes. But as of yet the Navy has made no firm determination about the future of its large surface combatant program.

The Need?

But then there is little obvious need for a direct analogue to specific Chinese ship classes. The existing cruisers and destroyers of the U.S. Navy perform roles essentially similar to that of the Type 055s, even if the latter carry more VLS cells. And the era in which individual ships fight each other independently is long in the past; indeed, even during the dreadnought era individual ship-to-ship comparison rarely played out in actual combat.

In a fight between the United States and China, the U.S. Navy would use a wide variety of air, surface, and subsurface systems to track and destroy the largest units of the PLAN. While the additional VLS systems and sensors of the Type 055 will undoubtedly increase Chinese capabilities, they won’t be directed towards any specific U.S. ship type (other perhaps than aircraft carriers). Similarly, the U.S. Navy will find it far more convenient to sink the Type 055s with submarines and air-launched cruise missiles than it will with any specific ship type. And so the question is less “can the United States match the Type 055” than “what hull or set of hulls will make it easiest to match the capabilities that the Type 055 can offer?” There are a variety of technological developments (VLS, power generation, sensor capability, and future avenues in railguns and lasers) that suggest that size may once again be rewarded in naval architecture; the Type 055s offer China’s initial answer for how to take advantage of these developments, just as the Zumwalts represented an exploration of those capabilities on the U.S. side. Unfortunately, the former seem more likely to see long-term success than the latter.

Recommended: How an ‘Old’ F-15 Might Kill Russia’s New Stealth Fighter

Recommended: How China Plans to Win a War Against the U.S. Navy

Recommended: How the Air Force Would Destroy North Korea

Wrap

So the short answer to the question “does the United States need to respond to the Type 055” is “no, not in the medium term.” The longer answer is that the U.S. Navy needs to figure out its procurement and shipbuilding policies soon in order to credibly approach design of the next big surface combatant. As the Ticonderogas continue to age, they will leave a gap that a new large warship needs to fill, even if it is never likely to meet the Type 055 in direct combat. China has decided to take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in a large hull-type, not because of any specific competition with the United States, but rather because of the evolution of key technologies. The U.S. Navy can also take advantage of these evolutionary developments, even if it doesn’t specifically think of matching the Type 055, but it needs to sort out its long-term shipbuilding plans.

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

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Security, Eurasia

Christmas came early for the Russian Ground Forces.

Here's What You Need to Know: No mention was made of what the individual soldiers may have received this year, but the Russian military has been adopting the Ratnik, “soldier of the future” combat outfit.

Christmas came early for the Russian Ground Forces, which received more than 2,500 new pieces of armaments this year—including advanced Buk-M3 medium-range air defense systems and Tornado-S multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS). 

“In order to increase combat performance and renew the equipment in 2020, military units of Russia’s Ground Forces received over 2,500 pieces of new standard weaponry, as well as military and special hardware,” Ground Forces Commander-in-Chief Army Gen. Oleg Salyukov said in an interview with the Defense Ministry’s Krasnaya Zverda newspaper, according to a report from Tass.

The new equipment included the Buk-M3 and Tornado-S, but also the Verba fourth-generation infrared homing surface-to-air missile MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems).

The Tornado-S multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) is reported to be the most powerful MLRS weapon in the world with the longest-range. It features improved range and accuracy over its predecessor platforms.

The advanced Tornado multiple rocket launchers are precision systems that are outfitted with smart rocket shells. These have the capability to strike an enemy’s vital facilities at considerable distances. It is a heavily upgraded version of the BM-30 Smerch multiple rocket launcher, and it features increased range and fire accuracy capabilities. It also offers the option of introducing an individual flight assignment to each of the shells, while the system was designated to strike enemy soldiers, military hardware, stationery and mobile sole/individual as well as multiple targets.

The Tornado-S is now replacing the outdated BM-27 Uragan self-propelled multiple rocket launcher system, which entered service with the Soviet Red Army in the late 1970s, along with the BM-30 Smerch heavy multiple rocket launcher of the late 1980s. Both platforms are set to be retired from service by late 2027.

“Artillery units receive Tornado-G MLRS and Msta-SM self-propelled howitzers with a new automatic fire control system,” the ground forces commander added. “Anti-tank units got the Khrizantema-SP anti-tank missile system with a unique capacity of penetrating the armor of all modern tanks in any weather conditions.”

Those who were clearly on the Ground Forces’ “nice list” were the reconnaissance teams who received Strelets combined-arms reconnaissance systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as Taifun-K (Typhoon K) family of 4x4 light armored vehicles.

The Russian military’s armored units also received new platforms in 2020.

“Tank crews and motorized infantry units receive modern T-72B3M and T-80BVM tanks, BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, modernized BMP-2 vehicles with the Berezhok combat module and the BTR-82A wheeled armoured personnel carrier,” said Gen. Salyukov.

Notably absent from the list was the T-14 Armata tank, which had been scheduled for deployment to units this year but now will likely be arriving next year.

No mention was made of what the individual soldiers may have received this year, but the Russian military has been adopting the Ratnik, “soldier of the future” combat outfit. It utilizes lightweight body armor designed to protect up to 90 percent of a soldier's body, as well as a highly-integrated, wireless networked communication system that provides greater situational awareness and sharing of vital information and intelligence between each soldier and unit.

Now the hope is that Russia remains on the nice list, and doesn't suddenly get naughty with all of its new military hardware. 

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

This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

In their first combat experience, a handful of American soldiers accomplished its objective and held against powerful German counter-attacks.

Here's What You Need to Know: In November 1944, an American infantry division underwent its baptism of fire in the worst conditions imaginable and acquitted itself with honor beyond anyone’s expectation. The final outcome of the campaign, however, was determined by the heroic action of only 100 men who found themselves in a hopeless situation and simply would not give up.

The men of the 84th Division—the Railsplitters—were, to use the GIs’ own language, “green as grass,” fresh off the boat from the States, and they were not going to a quiet sector to get combat experience on the cheap. Their first combat mission was to assault and reduce the Geilenkirchen Salient, a chunk of the German Siegfried Line that featured dragon’s teeth, minefields, and layer after layer of concrete pillboxes surrounded by trenches, foxholes, and barbed wire, which Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of British XXX Corps, described as the most formidable fortifications on the entire German front.

Operation Clipper

If the GIs had been expecting their first sight of Germany to be picturesque, they were disappointed. The area around Geilenkirchen, the flood plain of the Wurm and Roer Rivers, was depressingly drab, worn, and ugly. Nondescript shabby little villages and gray industrial towns dotted a landscape unbroken by any terrain features likely to catch the eye. There were a few scattered woods and orchards, but the ground was mostly cabbage and sugar beet fields now turned to sticky brown mud by the autumn rains.

The flood plain boasted no major hills or ridges, but a series of rises on the south bank of the Wurm gradually joined to form a low plateau farther to the northeast. The low hills and rises were not obstacles to movement but did provide excellent observation posts for German artillery. Everything had an abandoned, desolate feel, made more pronounced by the absence of civilians. Most had been evacuated by the Germans before the fighting began.

There was another thing—the 84th Division would not be going into action under U.S. command. Its first offensive would be fought under British XXX Corps. Geilenkirchen was at the far northern end of the U.S. 9th Army’s area of responsibility and the far southern end of the British 2nd Army’s. The Wurm River formed the rough boundary line between U.S. General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st. Despite that, cooperation between General William Simpson of the 9th Army and Horrocks of XXX Corps was good. Geilenkirchen needed taking, but XXX Corps did not have the strength on the ground to take it. So Simpson loaned Horrocks a U.S. division to get the job done. The operation would be called Clipper.

The Geilenkirchen Salient was a tough proposition—impressive fortifications, and deep—seven miles deep, all the way back to the Roer River with interlocking fields of fire and few covered routes of approach. Asking a green American division to tackle this as its first assignment was asking a lot. The fact that Simpson and Horrocks were willing to do so spoke volumes about their confidence in the ability of the U.S. training system to turn out combat-ready divisions capable of hitting the ground running. When it came to the Railsplitters of the 84th Division, they were right.

The plan for Operation Clipper was simple. Most good ones are. On November 18, the British 43rd Wessex Division would drive in the northern side of the salient, and the U.S. 334th Infantry Regiment, 84th Division would drive in the south, leaving Geilenkirchen exposed and cut off. The 333rd Infantry would then hit Geilenkirchen itself the next day.

Attack on the Geilenkirchen Salient

The 334th attacked on the morning of the 18th with two battalions up, the key attack being by the 1st Battalion on the right through a heavily mined orchard and entrenched rail embankment, then two clusters of concrete pillboxes, and finally across 2,000 yards of open fields to seize the fortified village of Prummern. The attack bogged down almost at once under artillery and small arms fire at the rail embankment, but the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Lloyd H. Gomes, moved up and led the forward rifle companies and platoons himself.

This got the attack moving again, and it rolled forward, overwhelming all German resistance. The battalion paused to reorganize before attacking Prummern and then swept in and cleared the village house by house. The regiment’s 2nd Battalion made similar progress on its left, but against lighter resistance.

Casualties in the two attacking battalions were moderate, 10 killed and 180 wounded, but by the end of the day the 334th had destroyed a battalion of the defending 183rd Volksgrenadier Division, inflicting 450 casualties, of which 330 were prisoners. Among the dazed German POWs was a veteran officer, stunned by what had happened. “We knew we were facing new troops and expected it to be easy,” he said, “but these men fight better than any troops I saw in Africa, Russia and France.”

The next day, the 333rd attacked and cleared Geilenkirchen with light casualties, and another battalion of the 183rd Volksgrenadiers was kaput. In the early morning hours of the same day, however, a new enemy appeared near Prummern—the veteran 9th Panzer Division. On the 19th it launched a counterattack, with the 1st Battalion, 10th Panzergrenadier Regiment and six tanks of the 2nd Battalion, 33rd Panzer Regiment, and retook much of the town.

The 1st Battalion, 333rd Infantry still held the surrounding orchards, and regimental committed its reserve battalion along with the M4 Sherman tanks of the attached British Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. There followed several days of tough back-and-forth fighting for Prummern and the wooded hill behind it—dubbed Mahogany Hill—but Prummern was secure by the 20th and Mahogany Hill by the 22nd.

Stalled by Rain and by Panzer

The division pressed forward to the northeast, closing on the villages of Muellendorf and Beeck, but the advance slowed to a crawl, in part because the Germans threw in more troops to halt the division. Both the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and elite 10th SS Panzer Division “Frundsberg,” fresh from its fight at Arnhem during Operation Market-Garden, were committed to stop the Railsplitters and absorbed the remnants of the 183rd Volksgrenadier Division.

The SS division, which began entering the lines on November 23, relieved the battered 9th Panzer Division, which was pulled back to refit for the upcoming Ardennes Offensive. Neither German division was up to full strength, but they were on the defensive, held excellent positions, and had strong cadres of seasoned veterans.
And then there was the mud.

It rained almost every day that long November—a cold, steady rain, sometimes mixed with sleet. The floodplains of the Wurm and Roer were usually wet this time of year, but in November 1944 the region received over twice as much rain as the average, and it became a vast sea of mud. Roads were axle-deep canals of mud. Foxholes dug in the low-lying beet fields became waterlogged, and soldiers slept on the ground beside them instead of in the water. Some foxholes filled up to the very top, and to keep under cover when shells hit nearby, riflemen had to hold their breath and duck their heads under water.

Weapons became coated with mud and jammed. Trench foot reached epidemic proportions. Tracked vehicles could not leave the roads, wheeled vehicles often could not move even on the roads. Hot chow was a distant memory. Men fought and died for high ground just to get out of the mud. By November 28, the advance ground to a halt. It was time to try something different.

Item and King Forward, Love in Reserve

All of the advances of the 84th Division to date had been made by only two of its three infantry regiments. The third regiment, the 335th, had been detached to support another U.S. division farther south. Now it rejoined the Railsplitters and was available to get things moving again.

The main front had stalled in the face of strong German positions in Muellendorf and Beeck, and on Schlachen Hill. In addition, there was a fortified backstop position on Toad Hill and in the village of Lindern—held by the 1st Battalion, 21st SS Panzergrenadier Regiment,10th SS Panzer Division, giving the entire position depth. The attacks by the 84th Division’s main body, however, had drawn the bulk of the German troops into this position, and its left, or southeastern, flank was open, covered only by miles of muddy fields and a long antitank ditch. Behind the antitank ditch was the town of Lindern, and it sat astride the main German supply route. If the Railsplitters could get a firm hold on Lindern, the rest of the position would fall easily. Getting a hold on Lindern would be the job of the 335th Infantry.

The original plan was for the regiment to throw all three battalions at Lindern, one behind the other, but that was reduced to a two-battalion attack when the regiment’s 2nd Battalion was switched west for an attack on Toad Hill. Then 1st Battalion was held back as a reserve, and the Lindern attack came down to a single infantry battalion.

Major Robert W. Wallace’s 3rd Battalion, 335th Infantry would attack with two companies, Item and King, forward and one, Love, in reserve. They would make a long approach march at night and jump off before dawn. The approach march was from the southwest and would require a gentle left turn to make a head-on approach to the target. Navigating at night and in extended assault formation would be tricky, so a landmark was picked out. As the troops reached the north-south highway from Gereonsweiler to Lindern, they would wheel left and advance along its axis, with the highway becoming the boundary between the two assault companies. If they became disoriented, they could orient at first light on a tall church steeple in Lindern, or the brickyard on the southwest side of town.

After the wheel, the assault companies would cross the antitank ditch and press forward, ignoring any pockets of resistance, until they had crossed the railroad behind Lindern. They would dig in on the far side and await the inevitable German counterattacks. The reserve company would follow them and clear Lindern of any pockets of resistance and then reinforce them. The regiment’s 1st Battalion in reserve would be available for additional strength as needed.

The attack was also to be supported by the 40th Tank Battalion, which was now attached to the division, but the tanks would not go in with the first wave. Surprise was believed to be more important, and so the tanks would wait for word from the infantry as to when they should advance. In order to communicate with the tanks, each of the leading rifle companies was given one heavy SCR 509 radio in addition to two SCR 300 backpack radios for communication with battalion and regiment. The SCR 509, with its longer range, was only barely man-portable, and in fact was carried in two loads: one man carried the radio itself, and the other the heavy battery pack that powered it, with a power cable connecting them.

“A Phi Beta Kappa of Soldiering”

Company K, which played such a remarkable role in the coming battle, was an unlikely candidate for the history books. It had not yet been in serious combat, but had already lost half of its officers—including its commander—in a jeep accident nine days earlier. First Lieutenant Leonard Carpenter, its unpopular executive officer, seen by the men as stuffy and distant, had assumed command, and three of the four platoon leaders were replacement officers who had arrived in the last few days. They hardly knew their men’s names, let alone strengths and weaknesses. Morale was shaky, and the men had little confidence in their company commander or new platoon leaders.

Most rifle companies have one or two key noncommissioned officers to whom others look for leadership. In King Company, that man was Technical Sergeant George O. Prewitt, the platoon sergeant for 1st Platoon. One of his comrades remembered him as “a football hillbilly out of North Carolina with little learning, [but] he was a Phi Beta Kappa of soldiering.” Almost alone among the soldiers of King Company, Prewitt accepted and worked with Lieutenant Carpenter, the new company commander, without reservation. Perhaps he saw something in Carpenter the other men had not yet noticed, but soon would.

The Attack 0630, 29 November

At 6:30 am, still pitch black on November 29, both assault companies crossed the line of departure in the same formation, two rifle platoons up, one in reserve, and the weapons platoon split up to give support to the rifle companies. Each platoon advanced with two squads up and one back, and Staff Sergeant Jeff Parker, who led King Company’s third squad of 1st Platoon, recalled, “We went out in a column of twos. The columns were about 25 yards apart with three yards between men because it was still dark and we wanted to stay pretty close.”

King Company attacked with Lieutenant Pozyck’s 3rd Platoon on the left, Lieutenant Romersberger’s 1st Platoon on the right, and Lieutenant Smith’s 2nd Platoon in support. Lieutenant Lockard’s 4th (weapons) Platoon gave up one 60mm mortar squad to each of the three rifle platoons, and its two .30-caliber light machine gun squads to 3rd Platoon on the battalion’s open left flank. Lockard, with his weapons platoon headquarters party and the company’s spare SCR 300 radio, brought up the rear behind 2nd Platoon. Each man carried only the essentials: rifle, gas mask, three chocolate D-ration bars, one canteen of water, and two bandoliers of ammunition. The men left their overshoes behind. Speed meant more than keeping dry.

Lieutenant Carpenter and his small command group advanced with the two lead platoons. A rear company command group, led by the executive officer, Lieutenant Johns, and the company first sergeant, Julius Phagan, moved with the supporting platoon. Carpenter was up front to ensure that the lead platoons got their navigation right and pushed on, regardless of what they ran into. Johns and Phagan would do the same for the support elements.

Shortly after they crossed the line of departure, several German flares erupted in the night sky, illuminating King Company. Every man froze in place, as trained to do. As the flares drifted down on their parachutes and burned out, every man waited for the tearing sound of German MG-42 machine guns, but there was no German fire. They had not been spotted. As soon as the light flickered out, the advance resumed.

“They Can’t Hit You if They Can’t See You”

The plan started going wrong as soon as the attacking companies came to the “highway” to Lindern at 6:45. It was actually no more than a narrow dirt road. Fortunately, the men of King Company’s 1st Platoon recognized it immediately as their landmark and alerted Carpenter, who ran over to 3rd Platoon to tell them to wheel. King Company’s two assault platoons came on line with the road to their right and headed toward Lindern.

They crossed the antitank ditch with difficulty. It was partly flooded, and the soft banks collapsed in sheets of mud as the men tried to climb out, but 1st Platoon and most of 3rd stayed together as units. Then they encountered flanking fire from German machine guns, and a few mortar rounds landed among the soldiers of 3rd Platoon but, remarkably, caused no casualties. The troops went to ground, but Lieutenants Carpenter and Romersberger and several NCOs encouraged the men to crawl out from under the tracers of the blind grazing fire and keep advancing.

First Platoon’s Sergeant George Prewitt recalled, “There were four machine guns firing at us. I began to yank the men up, and I kicked one in the ass. Sergeant Matuska did the same.”

“They can’t hit you if they can’t see you,” Lieutenant Carpenter shouted over and over, and the men followed him forward.

About this time, a German round clipped off the antenna of the SCR 300 radio carried by Private Paul North, Carpenter’s radio man. A runner was sent back to 4th (weapons) Platoon to get the spare antenna from the company’s other SCR 300, but the advance continued.

Three Platoons and No Radio

The two assault platoons sprinted forward and in moments were in Lindern, the outlines of the buildings growing visible as the sun rose. At first Carpenter was unsure they were in the right place, there was no church steeple visible anywhere, but then he caught sight of the brickyard and knew they were on the objective. Contrary to the pre-attack briefing, Lindern was one of the only towns in the area that did not have a standing church steeple, a mistake that would cost the battalion dearly in the next hour.

The assault platoons ran through Lindern, firing from the hip and throwing grenades at any sign of resistance, but never slowing up. They came out on the far side and sprinted across the open ground to the 20-foot-deep rail cut. Carpenter later reported, “We hit the railroad north side of Lindern. We went down a bank about 20 feet high and ran up the other side. We saw some long buildings that looked like barracks and turned out to be a German rest camp. Some men threw grenades into the buildings. Nothing happened. Fifty yards in front of the barracks we found a fence. There we started digging in—two-man foxholes. We stopped there because we knew we were going to dig in 50-100 yards the other side of Lindern. A long, sloping hill was in front of us. We dug in on the reverse slope of a very slight rise in the ground, the crest of which was 250 yards in front of us.”

The 84th Division’s history describes the rail line as sitting on top of a 20-foot-tall embankment, and the U.S. Army’s official history, The Siegfried Line Campaign, also refers to the rail embankment. The eyewitness accounts from King Company, however, make it clear the railroad ran through a deep cut, not along the top of an embankment. Carpenter specifically mentions sliding down into the cut, then scrambling up the other side, while another soldier talks of tanks coming into the area across a highway overpass—not through an underpass tunnel. Equally telling, however, King Company continued to take scattered small arms fire from Lindern throughout the day, which would have been unlikely if there was a 20-foot-tall earthen berm between them and the enemy.

King Company began digging in at 7:45. Lieutenant Carpenter remembered someone had asked the time. Now there was nothing to do but report their success and wait for the rest of the company to show up. Unfortunately, it was going to be difficult to contact battalion headquarters that day.

German small arms fire had taken off the antenna of the company’s forward SCR 300 radio, and the antenna of the big SCR 509 had been damaged as well. The heavy two-part radio had been abandoned at the base of the rail embankment so the two-man team could keep up with the advance. A runner had been sent back for a spare SCR 300 antenna, but he never returned and, as the sun rose, there was no sign of the rest of the company.

Carpenter conferred with Item Company to his right, and discovered a full company was not present there either—only 35 men of its 3rd Platoon, and a five-man mortar squad, all under Lieutenant Creswell Garlington. They did not have a working radio.

Carpenter had only 60 of his own men under his direct command, the four men of his forward company command group, 32 men of 1st Platoon under Lieutenant Romersberger and Technical Sergeant Prewitt, the 1st Platoon’s attached 60mm mortar squad with six men, but only 18 men from Lieutenant Pozyck’s 3rd Platoon.

Separated and Under Friendly Fire

Romersberger and Pozyck were both new replacements. Romersberger, even though he had been with the company only four days, had already displayed excellent leadership under fire during the advance and would continue to play a key role in the company’s survival. Less is recorded of Pozyck’s contribution, except for a report by one of his NCOs that a piece of shrapnel “went right through Lt. Pozyck’s helmet,” perhaps leaving him temporarily stunned or disoriented. It is more likely Pozyck’s contributions were tangible and considerable, but simply never written down. Pozyck received one of the first Bronze Stars for the action afterward and was soon promoted to first lieutenant.

The only senior NCO who had made it forward was George Prewitt. Carpenter co-located his foxhole with Pruitt, who effectively became the company first sergeant for the balance of the action.

Pozyck’s 3rd Platoon had a harder time moving forward than 1st Platoon, as it had been closer to the enfilading fire of the German machine guns on the left and had lost time engaging them. The artillery prep on the brickyard, through which they had to advance, had been late and so had delayed them another five minutes. The follow-on rifle squad remained pinned down near the antitank ditch for too long. When the sun rose they were still in the open in front of Lindern and the now alert SS defenders and were forced to surrender.

The left wing of 3rd Platoon’s forward echelon, over 20 men, including the light machine gun section attached from weapons platoon, 3rd Platoon’s attached 60mm mortar squad, one complete rifle squad and four men from another, became separated from the rest of the company around 7:30 and crossed the railroad farther to the left. Although the company’s main body could see them, they were too far away for Carpenter to control, and it is unclear who actually stepped up and assumed command of this group.

They started to dig in on a low hill, but then were hit by U.S. artillery fire, including white phosphorus rounds, and pulled back into an apple orchard. At about 9 or 10 am, they were hit again by friendly artillery fire. Two men were killed and at least one wounded, and they withdrew across the rail line, carrying their wounded but leaving behind one light machine gun and the mortar. Shortly after noon the 18 or 20 survivors, of whom six were wounded, encountered a dug-in German infantry force that took them prisoner. Carpenter later sent runners over to the abandoned position in the apple orchard and recovered the light machine gun.

But what had happened to the rest of King and Item Companies?

The rear element of King Company, 2nd Platoon, the rear headquarters party, and the weapons platoon headquarters failed to keep closed up behind the lead platoons and lost contact in the dark. When they crossed the Lindern road, the officers did not recognize it as such, perhaps being confused by the reference to a “highway.” The 2nd Platoon’s senior NCO realized the mistake but was unable to convince his platoon leader of the error. The group was being led by Lieutenant Johns, the company executive officer. The company first sergeant was also with this group and had been ordered by Carpenter to maintain contact between the assault platoons and the follow-on echelon,; he failed to do so. The group continued north, well off its intended path, until it encountered entrenched German infantry, was pinned down by fire in the open, and forced to surrender at daybreak.

Nearly the same thing happened to the bulk of Item Company. It had farther to go than King Company (being on the outer arc of the wheeling maneuver), and had navigation problems of its own. Not only was there confusion at the road crossing, but the church steeple in a village to the north, combined with the absence of a steeple in Lindern, further slowed and misdirected the advance. Most of Item was caught in the open fields around Lindern at daybreak and either driven back or forced to surrender.

By 8 am, the two assault companies of 3rd Battalion, 335th Infantry had effectively ceased to exist. There were only 100 men on the far side of the rail embankment, and they had no means of communicating their position to the rear. From the point of view of battalion headquarters, they had marched into the darkness and vanished in a storm of small arms and mortar fire.

“Hold Our Ground at All Cost”

As Love Company, the battalion follow-on echelon, tried to move forward to clear Lindern it was pinned down by heavy fire short of the line of the antitank ditch and forced to dig in. Elements of the 21st SS Panzergrenadiers in the entrenchments in front of Lindern were alert, full of fight, and not going anywhere. German artillery fire on the area forward of Lindern was accurate and intense. As far as 335th Regiment could tell, the attack had been a total disaster and both rifle companies had been wiped out.

For the men under Carpenter’s command, the first real action after crossing the rail line came on King Company’s left. About 20 minutes after they began digging in, three German medium tanks appeared on the road from Lindern, crossing the railroad at the single overpass in the area, and driving north almost through 3rd Platoon’s position. Private First Class Morton Reuben remembered, “I grabbed a bazooka round and put it in Wolfenberger’s bazooka. He fired and hit the middle of the tank but it bounced off…. The second round hit a tree and tore it up. The tanks passed out of sight.”

Bazooka and small arms fire, while causing no visible damage, had nevertheless encouraged the tanks to leave the area, which is not surprising since they had no close infantry support and could not know how weak the U.S. position was.

Between 9 and 10 am, the company began taking friendly artillery fire on the far left. This would eventually drive the isolated left wing of 3rd Platoon back. At about the same time, however, three different German tanks appeared from the north. Carpenter remembers them as Tigers, and the U.S. official history concurs. The majority of “Tiger tank” reports turned out to be Panthers or Panzer IVs, but elements of the 506th Schwere Panzer Abteilung (Heavy Tank Battalion) were in the area and were certainly committed against Lindern in the following days, so it is not improbable that three Tigers were present that morning. King Company had already identified the first group of three tanks as “mediums,” so they knew the difference, and they would get a very close look at these new ones.

Two of the German Tigers halted about 300 yards away while the third continued to advance directly into the American position. There were several German-held pillboxes about 500 yards away in the same direction, and Carpenter could also see four more German tanks moving about 800 yards away. That made 10 German tanks sighted in quick succession, but the most immediate problem was the lead tank moving into 3rd Platoon’s positions on the left.

Even though 1st Platoon still had a few bazooka rounds left, the U.S. infantry was nearly defenseless against heavy armor, and Carpenter had to make a quick decision: should they remain in place and risk getting overrun, or should they try to infiltrate back to their own lines through Lindern? He took a moment to confer with his senior NCO, Technical Sergeant Prewitt, “and we decided to hold our ground at all costs.”

Holding, but Cut Off

And they did hold—in part because of the cool-headed marksmanship of 3rd Platoon’s Private Robert Nordli. He told the story a few days later without dramatics, as if it was just another day at the office. “The tank came up to our front right in our lines. The tank commander stood up from the turret to observe. We moved back about 100 yards to get a better defilade position as the tanks came up. Unfortunately we had run out of bazooka ammunition. I hit the tank commander with an M1. He slumped over. The tank continued past us into Lindern for about another 100 yards, then backed up and returned to the vicinity of the pillbox.”

The death of the commander of the leading German tank—probably the platoon leader—deprived the German armor of leadership at a critical time and caused the tanks to pull off to a safer distance. Nevertheless, it now appeared the Germans were alert to the presence of the Americans in their rear. More German infantry began assembling around the pillboxes, and tanks moved back and forth along the road to the front.

One hundred infantry with a handful of 60mm mortar rounds and two or three bazooka rockets could not possibly hold out against the force assembling unless they got help, and getting help meant getting word back to battalion or regiment. Carpenter sent a party of four volunteers back to retrieve the abandoned SCR 509 radio set, but, although they recovered it and got it working, its antenna was sufficiently damaged that it could only receive faintly and not transmit.

The only other option was to send runners to try to get through. The odds of success did not seem high. In Carpenter’s deceptively casual words, “We knew there were Germans in and around Lindern in back of us because we were always getting fire from our rear.” Four soldiers volunteered anyway. They did not make it. One was killed and the other three captured.

“Like Hannibal Crossing the Alps”

By 1 pm, the situation was clearly desperate, but suddenly one of King Company’s men had an inspiration. After working with the two disabled radios for several hours, Carpenter’s radio man, Private Paul North, realized one antenna is pretty much like any other.

The company still had several small SCR 536 “handy talkies,” although they did not have the range to carry back to battalion. North, however, unscrewed an antenna from a 536 set, tied it to a fence post to get maximum elevation, and jury-rigged a connection to the big SCR 509 using a length of signal corps telephone wire. At about 1 pm, Private James Calhoun of Love Company, the battalion reserve, heard his own SCR 509 come to life. The message was from King Company, and it was, “We made a Touchdown at 0745.” Touchdown was the coded signal for King Company on its objective.

Two companies of M4 Shermans of the 40th Tank Battalion had been waiting to advance in support of the infantry but had never gotten word there was actually infantry left to support. As soon as the radio message was relayed to the commander of 40th Tank Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel John Brown, he ordered his Company A to “forget about bad roads, mine obstacles, and infantry support and get out to Lindern.”

The tanks moved forward, passing south of Lindern, but lost one Sherman to German fire and stalled short of the rail cut. Lieutenant Romersberger of 1st Platoon and his runner, Private Howerton, volunteered to go back, find the tanks, and guide them to King Company’s positions. Although Howerton is officially credited with volunteering, he does not remember doing so and believes Romersberger volunteered, and he simply accompanied him as his runner. Howerton had developed enormous respect for his new platoon leader during the hours of the Lindern battle, and in his own words, “I would have followed him anywhere.”

The two men found six of the Shermans buttoned up on the outskirts of the village and had a hard time getting their attention. The field phones on the back decks were not working, and so Romersberger and Howerton were reduced to banging on the side of the hulls with their rifle butts. “If there had been any German snipers nearby we would have most certainly drawn their fire,” Howerton recalled years later, “but nothing happened. Eventually we roused the tank commander, crawled on his tank and rode back through Lindern like Hannibal crossing the Alps.”

A High Price for Lindern

At 2 pm, the six tanks crossed the overpass and deployed in support of King Company. The sense of elation among Carpenter’s men was indescribable. One of the soldiers in King Company later remembered, “When we saw those tanks, we figured the whole German Army couldn’t drive us out of there.”

The fight was far from over, but from that point on the Railsplitters definitely had the upper hand and did not let it go. Throughout the night of November 29, Love Company, all of 1st Battalion, and most of the 40th Tank Battalion moved forward, cleared Lindern, and formed a perimeter defense. No counterattacks came that evening, but German shelling became heavy.

On the evening of the 30th, and again on the night of December 1, the Germans launched a series of strong counterattacks using battle groups formed from 10th SS Panzer Division and 506th Schwere Panzer Abteilung, as well as the 9th Panzer Division, hastily pulled back out of its rest and refit encampment. It was too little, too late, however. The 335th had paid a very high price for Lindern, and no one was ready to give it up. Within days the main German position began to crumble and the balance of the Railsplitters moved forward and secured the plateau overlooking the Wurm and Roer Rivers. After a week or so to rest and reorganize, the Railsplitters would conduct an assault crossing of the Roer.

That, at least, was the plan, and the Railsplitters would indeed force the Roer River against tough German resistance, but they would not get around to it until the end of February 1945. Days before they were to hit the Roer in December, Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge, kicked off, and the 84th Division was shifted south. It played a key role in blunting the German northern offensive arm in the Ardennes.

What was important now was that the Railsplitters had taken everything four German divisions could throw at them, advanced through the strongest fixed defenses the Germans had anywhere, in the worst physical conditions imaginable, and triumphed. And in the end it was not numbers or firepower that made the difference; it was the courage and determination of just 100 infantrymen at Lindern.

After the Battle

After it was pulled out of the line, King Company received enough replacements to bring it close to full strength for the Ardennes. It needed quite a few. Of the 174 officers and enlisted men of King Company who crossed the line of departure at 6:30 am, November 29, 1944, a total of 88 men were killed, wounded, or captured, almost exactly half the company’s strength. The influx of new men, however, did not change the essential character of the company. No matter how hard things got in the Bulge, the solid cadre of “Lindern men” always held the company together and kept it going.

There were some new officers. George Prewitt moved up to command a platoon, receiving his field commission on December 19. He refused to let any of his men salute him or call him sir, though. He still worked for a living.

There were medals, as well. A total of 21 Bronze Stars were awarded to King Company men for the action at Lindern. Lieutenants Romersberger and Pozyck both received the medal, as did Sergeants Prewitt, Matuska, and Humphrey. So did Private Robert Nordli, who stopped a Tiger tank with an M1. Two of the Bronze Stars were awarded posthumously.

Another posthumous Bronze Star went to First Lieutenant Garlington, who had brought forward the only platoon of Item Company to get through. He made it through the initial advance, and showed both courage and initiative in his actions covering King’s right flank, but he was mortally wounded by German artillery fire the following day. Garlington was a graduate of The Citadel, had in fact been the class valedictorian, and great things were expected of him. He did not have long to make good on those expectations, but he made the most of the time he had.

First Lieutenant Leonard Reed Carpenter, the man who led King Company forward and held them together all through that long day, was awarded the Silver Star. He continued to lead King Company during the Bulge, the assault crossing of the Roer, and on into Germany, right up through March 1945, when he was rotated out for 30 days of R&R. The war ended before he returned. Some of the men felt the R&R saved his life; he continued to lead from the front, and, by March, many felt his luck had about run out.

They were wrong, however, and it was not the first time they had been wrong about him. A junior merchandizing executive before the war, a white-gloved, spit-and-polish martinet of an executive officer in stateside training, Carpenter had emerged as a calm, courageous, and resourceful leader in the crucible of combat. There had been a time when no one in the company—except perhaps George Prewitt—would have thought it possible.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr

David Axe

Security, Middle East

An enemy possessing 79 of the world’s most fearsome interceptors.

Key point: They can still do some serious damage--even if they are really old. 

On April 9, 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed an historic agreement. The USSR committed to arming the Arab republic with the latest weaponry. In return for sending Baghdad guns, tanks and jet fighters, Moscow got just one thing — influence … in a region that held most of the world’s accessible oil.

In neighboring Iran, news of Iraq’s alliance with the Soviets exploded like a bomb. Ethnically Persian and predominately Shia, Iran was — and still is — a bitter rival of Iraq’s Sunni Arab establishment, which during the 1970s dominated the country’s politics.

In Tehran, King Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — the “shah” — moved quickly to counter Baghdad’s move. First he set loose an army of secret police in a desperate and bloody bid to quell internal dissent. And then he reached out to the United States.

The shah wanted weapons. And not just any weapons. Himself a former military pilot, the king wanted the latest and best U.S.-made warplanes, with which the Iranian air force might dominate the Persian Gulf and even patrol as far away as the Indian Ocean.

The Iranian leader’s appetite for planes was notorious. “He’ll buy anything that flies,” one American official said of the shah. But Pahlavi was especially keen to acquire a fighter that could fly fast enough and shoot far enough to confront Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat recon planes that had been flying over Iran at 60,000 feet and Mach 3.

The administration of U.S. president Richard Nixon was all too eager to grant the shah’s wish in exchange for Iran’s help balancing a rising Soviet Union. Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger visited Tehran in May 1972 — and promptly offered the shah a “blank check.” Any weapons the king wanted and could pay for, he would get — regardless of the Pentagon’s own reservations and the State Department’s stringent export policies.

That’s how, starting in the mid-1970s, Iran became the only country besides the United States to operate arguably the most powerful interceptor jet ever built — the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a swing-wing carrier fighter packing a sophisticated radar and long-range AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles.

It’s fair to say American policymakers quickly regretted giving Iran the F-14s. In February 1979, Islamic hardliners rose up against the shah’s police state, kidnapping 52 Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran and ushering the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Islamic Revolution transformed Iran from an American ally to one of the United States’ most vociferous enemies.

An enemy possessing 79 of the world’s most fearsome interceptors.

For the next five decades, the United States would do everything in its power — short of war — to ground the ayatollah’s Tomcats. But the Americans failed. Through a combination of engineering ingenuity and audacious espionage, Iran kept its F-14s in working order — and even improved them. The swing-wing fighters took to the air in several conflicts and even occasionally confronted American planes.

Today Iran’s 40 or so surviving F-14s remain some of the best fighters in the Middle East. And since the U.S. Navy retired its last Tomcats in 2006, the ayatollah’s Tomcats are the only active Tomcats left in the world.

The F-14 was a product of failure. In the 1960s, the Pentagon hoped to replace thousands of fighters in the U.S. Air Force and Navy with a single design capable of ground attack and air-to-air combat. The result was the General Dynamics F-111 — a two-person, twin-engine marvel of high technology that, in time, became an excellent long-range bomber in Air Force service.

But as a naval fighter, the F-111 was a disaster. Complex, underpowered and difficult to maintain, the Navy’s F-111B version — which General Dynamics built in cooperation with carrier-fighter specialist Grumman — was also a widowmaker. Of the seven F-111B prototypes that the consortium built starting in 1964, three crashed.

In 1968, the Defense Department halted work on the F-111B. Scrambling for a replacement, Grumman took the swing-wing concept, TF-30 engines, AWG-9 radar and long-range AIM-54 missile from the F-111B design and packed them into a smaller, lighter, simpler airframe.

Voila — the F-14. The first prototype took off on its inaugural flight in December 1970. The U.S. fleet got its first Tomcats two years later. Grumman ultimately built 712 F-14s.

In 1974, the shah ordered 80 of the fighters plus spare parts and 284 Phoenix missiles at a cost of $2 billion. Seventy-nine of the Tomcats arrived before the Islamic Revolution forced the shah into exile in Egypt and compelled the United States to impose an arms embargo. The U.S. Navy eventually scooped up the 80th plane for one of its test squadrons.

The U.S. State Department oversaw the F-14 transfer and, in its eternal wisdom, delegated most of the work to the Air Force. But the F-14 was a Navy plane and only the Navy had pilots qualified to fly the machine. The sailing branch seconded Tomcat crews to the flying branch, but only after extensive security checks lasting six months — and not without some culture clash.

The Navy pilots picked up the brand-new Tomcats at the Grumman factory in Long Island, New York and flew them three at a time to Iran. “Few pilots in their careers ever have the opportunity to fly an airplane that ‘smells’ exactly as a new car, and still has cellophane covering the cushions of the ejection seat,” one F-14 flier wrote years later. “Well, I had that amazing experience.”

“Although my F-14 was ‘factory fresh,’ it had an Iranian specified camouflage paint scheme. And while it did have U.S. military markings, as I found out later, those markings would be ingeniously and quickly changed upon arrival in Iran. The U.S. paint easily disappeared when a certain solution was applied, thus exposing the Iranian air force markings underneath.”

The journey to Iran involved two legs — from Long Island to Torrejon, Spain, and then onward to Iran’s Isfahan air base, with Air Force KC-135 aerial tankers constantly attending to the F-14s.

It was a complex and, for the pilots, uncomfortable undertaking. “We needed to be ‘topped-off’ with fuel for most of the seven-hour flight in case we had to divert to an emergency field,” the ferry pilot wrote.

“This meant at least six in-flight refueling events for each leg, despite some weather conditions — and the KC-135’s difficult, Rube Goldberg type of refueling hose to accommodate Navy aircraft.”

Air Force planes refuel in mid-air via a probe extending from the tanker into the receiving plane’s fuselage — the tanker crew does most of the work. Navy aircraft have their own probes and refuel by maneuvering the probe into a basket dangling from the tanker’s underwing fuel pods. The receiving pilot does the work — an arrangement consistent with the incredibly high demands the Navy traditionally places on its combat pilots.

To make the KC-135s compatible with the F-14s, the Air Force awkwardly fitted a basket to the tankers’ probes. The improvised contraption tended to whip around in the air, threatening to smash the Tomcats’ canopies every time they refueled.

Keeping gassed up wasn’t the only source of stress for the Tomcat ferry crews. “People often wonder, and it is rarely discussed — how did you relieve yourself, strapped into an ejection seat and immobile for seven-plus hours?” the pilot wrote.

The Navy offered the fliers diapers, but some refused to wear them. “I personally held it for seven hours … as I had planned and for which I had prepared by remaining dehydrated. Hey, I’m a fighter pilot.”

“However, upon arrival in Torrejon, I could barely salute the welcoming Air Force colonel,” the pilot continued. “Bending over and doubled-up under pressure, I feverishly ran to the nearest ‘head’ to relieve myself — for seemingly and refreshingly forever, before I could then return to properly meet, greet and properly salute the receiving Air Force colonel.”

While the U.S. Air Force and Navy worked together to deliver Iran’s F-14s, the State Department arranged for Iranian aviators and maintenance technicians to get training on the Tomcats and their complex systems. Some of the Iranians attended classes in the United States, others received instruction from American contractors in Iran. By 1979, the Americans had trained 120 pilots and backseat radar intercept officers.

The shah’s Tomcat squadrons were coming to life. But the Iranian king wasn’t entirely happy with his acquisition. In late 1975, the shah complained to the U.S. embassy in Tehran that Grumman had paid agents in Iran $24 million to facilitate the F-14 sale. The shah considered the payments bribes — and wanted Grumman to take the money back.

“Shah views with bitter scorn corrupt practices of agents for U.S. companies and ineffective [U.S. government] efforts to deal with problem,” the embassy reported back to Washington in January 1976. The shah was so angry that he threatened to halt payments to Grumman. Washington reminded Tehran that failure to pay would amount to breach of contract.

“The dispute over agents fees was poisoning U.S.-Iranian relations,” American diplomats in Tehran warned. Amid the diplomatic tension, Tehran put its Tomcats to good use performing the mission for which Iran originally wanted them — deterring the Soviet Union’s MiG-25 spy planes. In August 1977, Iranian F-14 crews shot down a BQM-34E target drone flying at 50,000 feet. “The Soviets took the hint and Foxbat over flights promptly ended,” Iranian air force major Farhad Nassirkhani wrote.

Tehran’s spat with Grumman continued, but a year and a half later the Islamic Revolution intervened and rendered the issue moot. Revolutionaries took the streets. Violence broke out. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah fled.

Twenty-seven of Iran’s freshly-minted F-14 fliers fled, too. On their own way out of the country, American technicians working for Hughes, the company that manufactured the Phoenix missile, sabotaged 16 of the deadly missiles — or tried to, at least. Engineers loyal to the ayatollah eventually repaired the damaged munitions.

Agents of Iran’s new Islamic regime suspected the remaining F-14 crews of harboring pro-shah and pro-American sentiments. Police arrested at least one F-14 pilot at gunpoint at his home, finally releasing him months later when the regime realized it actually needed trained aircrews if it ever hoped to make use of all those brand-new F-14s lined up on the tarmac at Khatami air base.

By September 1980, Iran and Iraq were at war. Baghdad’s own MiG-25 fighters and recon planes could dash into Iranian airspace unmolested by Tehran’s much slower and lower-flying F-4 and F-5 fighters. Over the course of the eight-year war, MiG-25s shot down more than a dozen Iranian aircraft, including a priceless EC-130 electronic warfare plane. Iraqi pilot Col. Mohommed Rayyan alone claimed eight kills in his MiG-25.

Only the F-14 could challenge the MiG-25.

When war broke out, just 77 Tomcats were left — two had crashed. With crews and maintainers scattered and Tehran cut off from Grumman, Hughes and the U.S. Air Force and Navy, most of the Iranian F-14s were inoperable. The ayatollah’s air force managed to assemble 60 loyal pilots and 24 back-seat radar operators. By stripping parts from grounded Tomcats, technicians were able to get a dozen F-14s in fighting shape.

They immediately flew into action. At first, the Tomcats acted as early-warning and battle-management platforms while less sophisticated planes did the actual fighting. “The planes have not been used in combat,” The New York Times reported in December 1981. “Rather they have stood off from the battle and been used as control aircraft, with their advanced radar and electronics guiding other planes to their targets or warning the pilots of Iraqi aircraft attacks.”

The fighting escalated and drew the F-14s into battle. In eight years of combat, Iran’s Tomcat crews claimed some 200 aerial victories against Iraqi planes, 64 of which the Iranian air force was able to confirm. One F-14 pilot named Jalil Zandi reportedly claimed a staggering 11 air-to-air victories, making him by far Iran’s deadliest fighter pilot of the war.

“The Iraqi high command had ordered all its pilots not to engage with F-14 and do not get close if [an] F-14 is known to be operating in the area,” Nassirkhani wrote. “Usually the presence of Tomcats was enough to scare the enemy and send the Iraqi fighters back.”

At first, the F-14s were armed only with their internal 20-millimeter cannons and the long-range Phoenix missiles. American contractors had not had time to integrate medium-range Sparrow and short-range Sidewinder missiles.

Normal tactics called for F-14 crews to fire Phoenixes at their targets from a hundred miles away or farther, but with no alternative armament Iranian aviators relied on the heavy AIM-54s for close-in fighting, as well — once even hitting an Iraqi plane from just 12 miles away, according to Iranian reporter Babak Taghvaee.

Eight F-14s fell in combat during the war with Iraq — one accidentally shot down by an Iranian F-4; three struck by Baghdad’s Mirage F.1 fighters; one hit by an Iraqi MiG-21; and two falling victim to unknown attackers.

The eighth Tomcat that Tehran lost during the Iran-Iraq war reportedly wound up in Iraq when its crew defected. Taghvaee claimed that U.S. Special Operations Forces infiltrated “deep inside Iraqi territory” in order to destroy the abandoned F-14 and “prevent it falling into Soviet hands.”

Iranian Tomcats intercepted Iraqi MiG-25s on several occasions. But only one Iranian flier succeeded in downing any of the Mach-3 MiGs. In September 1982 and again in December, Shahram Rostani struck MiG-25s with Phoenix missiles.

Combat ops were hard on Iran’s F-14 force. A lack of spare parts compounded the maintenance woes. After the revolution, the United States had frozen Iranian assets, embargoed Iranian trade and imposed other economic sanctions. The United Nations and many U.S. allies followed suit, cutting off Tehran from global supply chains.

In 1981 an Iranian trade agent wrote to the London office of F-14-builder Grumman asking to acquire parts for Iran’s Tomcats. Citing the new sanctions, Washington declined to grant Grumman a license to sell the components. “It is the present policy of the United States government not to permit Grumman or any other defense contractor to obtain a license to provide Iran with these materials,” the Navy told The New York Times.

By 1984, just 15 or so of the twin-engine fighters were flightworthy, according to Nassirkhani. Technicians kept the 15 jets in good repair mainly by taking parts from the roughly 50 F-14s that couldn’t fly.

Starting in 1981, Iranian Aircraft Industries began performing overhauls and upgrades on the F-14s as part of the Tehran’s effort to make the country militarily self-sufficient. The upgrades finally added Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles to the Tomcats. The self-sufficiency program had help from Iranian agents working abroad — and at great risk to themselves — to divert spare parts for the F-14s and other weapon systems.

America begrudgingly helped, too — albeit briefly. In negotiating to free American hostages that an Iran-backed militant group was holding in Lebanon, the administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan agreed to transfer to Tehran badly-needed military equipment, reportedly including Phoenix missiles and bomb racks. Iranian engineers added the bomb racks to four of the F-14s as early as 1985, transforming the Tomcats into heavy ground-attack planes. Years later, the U.S. Navy would modify its own F-14s in the same way.

Rostani flew the “Bombcat’s” first ground-attack mission in 1985, targeting an Iraqi field headquarters … but missing. Frustrated technicians boosted the Bombcat’s weapons load-out with a whopping, custom-made 7,000-pound bomb — one of the biggest freefall munitions ever. As Iranian commander-in-chief Gen. Abbas Babaei observed from near the front line, an F-14 lobbed the massive bomb.

The estimated time on target passed … but nothing happened. Babaei was getting ready to return to his jeep when a powerful blast shook the ground. The bomb had missed, but its psychological effect on Iraqi troops was surely profound.

By the war’s end in 1988, 34 of the 68 surviving F-14s were airworthy. But just two of the Persian Tomcats had working radars. And Iran had expended all of its original consignment of Phoenixes. More Phoenixes reportedly arrived as part of the hostages-for-arms deal with the United States, and in the post-war years Iranian Aircraft Industries experimented with “new” weaponry for the F-14 — including modified Hawk surface-to-air missiles that the shah had bought from the United States as well as Soviet-supplied R-73 missiles.

The experiments added flexibility to the F-14 force, but it was the spare parts that kept the Tomcats in working condition — and the Iranian air force quickly burned through the spares it obtained from the hostage deal. Tehran established self-sufficiency programs — not just in the air force, but across the nation’s economy — in an effort to satisfy material needs that foreign companies had once met.

In many sectors, the self-sufficiency initiative worked. Besides producing all its own oil, Iran has declared itself autonomous in agriculture, steel production, electricity generation and civil aviation. “Well before the advent of abundant oil wealth, Iranians have tended to see their country as a unique nation amply endowed with natural resources that could take care of itself without outside assistance,” said Rudi Matthee, a history professor at the University of Delaware.

But Iranian companies struggled to produce all the specialized parts that the Tomcat requires. In the late 1990s, the air force considered simply buying new planes to replace the F-14s, but China was the only country that would sell fighters to Iran. In 1997 and 1998, Iranian pilots evaluated China’s F-8 … and rejected it. Even deprived of spares and mostly grounded, the F-14s were superior to the Chinese planes in the eyes of Iran’s air force.

Tehran turned to the black market, paying huge sums to shady middlemen to sneak F-14 parts into Iran. American authorities became aware of the illicit trade as early as 1998. In March of that year, federal agents arrested Iranian-born Parviz Lavi at his home in Long Island, charging him with violating U.S. export law by attempting to buy up spare parts for the F-14’s TF-30 engine and ship them to Iran via The Netherlands. Lavi got five years in prison plus a $125,000 fine.

The arrests came in a steady drumbeat. In 1998, an aircraft parts vendor in San Diego told U.S. customs officials that Multicore Ltd. in California had requested price information for air intake seals used only on the F-14. Agents arrested Multicore’s Saeed Homayouni, a naturalized Canadian from Iran, and Yew Leng Fung, a Malaysian citizen.

“Bank records subpoenaed by the Customs Service showed that Multicore Ltd. had made 399 payments totaling $2.26 million to military parts brokers since 1995 and had received deposits of $2.21 million,” The Washington Post reported. The company shipped parts mostly through Singapore.

The feds began investigating 18 companies that had supplied airplane components to Multicore.

 

In September 2003, U.S. authorities nabbed Iranian Serzhik Avasappian in a South Florida hotel as part of a sting operation. Agents had shown Avasappian several F-14 parts worth $800,000 and arrested him after he offered to buy the components.

“While these components may appear relatively innocuous to the untrained eye, they are tightly controlled for good reason,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement interim agent Jesus Torres said in a statement. “In the wrong hands, they pose a potential threat to Americans at home and abroad.”

Even with U.S. authorities tamping down on the illicit trade in F-14 parts, Iran persisted. After shutting down Multicore, the feds confiscated the firm’s Tomcat components and sent them to the Defense Department’s surplus-parts office. In 2005, a company — allegedly Iranian — bought the very same parts from the military.

The parts war escalated after the U.S. Navy retired its last F-14s in 2006, leaving Iran as the type’s only operator. In 2007, U.S. agents even seized four intact ex-U.S. Navy F-14s in California — three at museums and one belonging to a producer on the military-themed T.V. show JAG — charging that the F-14s had not been properly stripped of useful parts that could wind up in Iranian hands.

The U.S. Congress was furious at the Pentagon for its lax handling of the F-14-parts problem. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, described it as “a huge breakdown, an absolute, huge breakdown.” Lawmakers passed a bill specifically banning any trade in Tomcat components to Iran or any other entity, and then-president George W. Bush signed the law in 2008.

A minor tragedy unfolded as the military paid contractors to dismantle, crush and shred many of the approximately 150 retired F-14s. Scores of old F-14s — properly “demilitarized” — are still on display in museums across the United States. But none remain at the famous airplane “boneyard” in Arizona, where the Pentagon stores retired planes just in case it needs them again.

Even so, the underground trade in Tomcat parts continues, with shady companies scouring the planet for leftover components. In early 2014, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigated Israeli arms dealers that it said had twice tried to send F-14 spares to Iran.

And it’s not for no reason that Tehran would keep trying to supply its Tomcats. In recent years the United States has stepped up its efforts to spy on Iran, deploying drone aircraft including the secretive, stealthy RQ-170 to the Middle East apparently to surveil Iranian nuclear facilities. An RQ-170 crashed in Iranian territory in 2011.

Tomcats have led the effort to intercept these drones. In the early 2000s, the Iranian air force stationed an F-14 squadron in Bushehr, the site of Iran’s first nuclear reactor. That squadron eventually disbanded as its Tomcats fell into disrepair, but other F-14 squadrons maintained vigil over Bushehr and two other atomic facilities as U.S. spy flights continued to probe the sites, trying to glean intelligence on Iran’s nuclear efforts.

And that’s when things got weird. F-14 crews protecting the facilities reported seeing increasingly sophisticated and bizarre drones, according to Taghvaee. “The CIA’s intelligence drones displayed astonishing flight characteristics, including an ability to fly outside the atmosphere, attain a maximum cruise speed of Mach 10 and a minimum speed of zero, with the ability to hover over the target.”

“Finally,” Taghvaee added, “the drones used powerful [electronic countermeasures] that could jam enemy radars using very high levels of magnetic energy.” In November 2004 one F-14 crew intercepted a suspected CIA drone over the nuke facility at Arak. As the aviators tried to lock onto the drone with their Tomcat’s AWG-9 radar, they “saw that the radar scope was disrupted.” The drone lit its green afterburner and escaped.

To be clear, it’s highly unlikely the CIA possesses hypersonic space-capable drones with radar-killing magnetic ray weapons. The point is that Tehran is protective, even paranoid, when it comes to its nuclear sites — and yet entrusts their defense mainly to the 40-year-old F-14s.

Whether it’s producing parts itself or acquiring them abroad, Iran is clearly succeeding in its efforts to supply its F-14 squadrons. In October 2013, Taghvaee estimated that more than 40 of Tehran’s surviving F-14s were in flyable condition, possibly the highest number since the mid-1970s. Iran has begun upgrading the Tomcats with new radar components, radios, navigation systems and wiring while also adding compatibility with R-73 and Hawk missiles.

Five decades in, Iran’s F-14s are only getting better and better. And more and more important to the Persian state’s defense.

David Axe was a defense reporter for the National Interest.

This article was first published several years ago. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

The Douglas C-47 was a workhorse of air transport during the war.

Here's What You Need to Know: Even though, technically at least, it was not a combat airplane, the performance of the Douglas C-47 transport led General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower to label it as one of the most important weapons of World War II.

It carried no armament and was not designed to drop bombs, but the C-47 and other variations of the Douglas DC-3 twin-engine airliner quickly proved their worth both on and off the battlefield as they became a familiar sight all over the world. Eisenhower was not exaggerating with his accolade. The C-47 became crucial to the conduct of the war in at least three theaters and proved beneficial to military operations around the world in roles that varied from limited to indispensable. By the end of the war, the Army had purchased more than 10,000 of the Douglas twin-engine transports in several variants.

From the DC-3 to the C-47

The C-47 is the most commonly known military designation for the airplane that revolutionized the civilian air transportation industry in the 1930s. Douglas Aircraft Company’s DC-3 was a follow-on to the DC-2, the first modern American-built transport aircraft. By the outbreak of war in 1939, the DC-3 had proven to be a safe, reliable transport capable of operating from short, relatively unimproved airstrips. Although it had not been designed with military needs in mind, the DC-3 was the natural choice to be the first widely produced Allied military transport aircraft.

The Army purchased a number of DC-2s, giving them the military designation of C-39; the bomber derivative was the B-18. When the DC-3 came out, the Army ordered several built to military specifications and designated them as C-47s. The bomber version was designated as the B-23, but it was not much of a bomber, so the Air Corps converted most of them for transport use, including for dropping paratroops, and called them C-67s.

When the Army began experimenting with airborne forces, it turned to the 50th Transport Wing, which had been established at Wright Field under the Air Corps Maintenance Command, for the use of its C-39s and C-47s to drop the fledgling airborne troops. Activated on January 14, 1941, as the parent unit for the Air Corps transport squadrons, the wing transported more cargo during the first half of 1941 than the entire U.S. civilian airline industry. The new airborne mission placed a heavy additional burden on the wing, so the Army placed orders for more transports and began training crews to fly them.

The original DC-3 was designed to carry 21 passengers, although increased engine performance on later models allowed 28. Other designations were given to production DC-3s that were taken over by the military but lacked the reinforced cargo floor and other amenities of the basic C-47. When the Army decided to develop the airborne mission, it contracted for a number of DC-3s specially configured to carry troops, with bucket seats and a door designed for paratrooper exit, and called it the C-53 Sky Trooper. Shackles were attached under the fuselage of the C-53s to carry parapacks, special bundles that could be filled with items too large to be carried by individual troops during a parachute assault.

In addition to dropping paratroopers, C-53s were also used for supply drops and as glider tugs. Although thousands of C-53s were produced, as the war continued the C-47 designation became generic. A later modification with larger engines and a redesigned tail was designated as the C-117. Various versions of the Douglas transport would see service with Army, Navy, and Marine transport squadrons as well as in the air forces of most of the Allied nations.

Building Allied Air Transport Wings

Several Douglas transports entered service in North Africa in 1941 when the U.S. Army Ferrying Command contracted with Pan American Airways to provide air transportation for British forces fighting Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The British had ordered their own Douglas transports, and the Royal Air Force (RAF) gave them a new name—Dakota. The Pan American DC-3s were sent to Africa to fill the gap until the RAF had received its own Dakotas and established air transport squadrons. The first British transports were DC-3s requisitioned from the airlines since the U.S. Army lacked the numbers to provide airplanes from its own stock.

The first Douglas transports to see operational duty were a trio of C-53s that arrived in Australia aboard ship in February. They joined an ad hoc group of transport aircraft and obsolete combat planes in the newly created Far East Air Forces Air Transport Command and went to work hauling cargo and personnel around Australia and northward to New Guinea—and even as far north as the southern Philippines, which were still in Allied hands. A reorganization of U.S. Army air transportation in June 1942 resulted in the redesignation of the air transport units as troop carriers, while a new Air Transport Command was created from the Army Ferry Command.

In early 1942, the Australia-based transports supported combat operations in the defense of Java. Until the American surrender of the Philippines, transports operated into airstrips on Mindanao, the southernmost of the Philippine islands, where American forces remained until their surrender in May 1942. A few weeks later, the transports proved their worth as the lifeline for Australian troops battling Japanese forces advancing southward toward Port Moresby over the rugged Kokoda Track in the Owen Stanley Range of Papua, New Guinea. The rough terrain ruled out resupply by truck, and the distances involved required hundreds of human porters. Air transportation allowed timely resupply as the transports landed on rude jungle strips when possible, and air-dropped ammunition and rations when no suitable landing strip lay close enough to the troops. A lack of suitable airdrop containers and parachutes led to the adaptation of cardboard ice cream containers packed with straw to deliver packets of ammunition and foodstuffs. The Australian infantrymen began referring to the transports of the 21st and 22nd Troop Carrier Squadrons as “Biscuit Bombers.”

The Troop Airlift Concept Takes Off

When Lieutenant General George C. Kenney arrived in Australia in mid-1942 to assume the role of chief of staff for air under General Douglas MacArthur, he brought many ideas with him, including the concept of using the airplane to move troops into battle and keep them supplied. An opportunity to prove his theories arose in September when MacArthur decided to move the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division northward to New Guinea. Kenney persuaded MacArthur to let him move a regiment by air; the event came off so well that he got permission to move a second regiment. The two regiments were in place in Port Moresby several days before the rest of the division arrived by ship.

Allied successes in New Guinea—thanks largely to the efforts of Kenney’s Fifth Air Force—raised the value of Kenney’s stock in Washington considerably. Part of the payoff for earlier successes was the assignment of an airborne regiment to the Southwest Pacific Area of Operations, and its arrival allowed Kenney to mount the attack on Nadzab he had been planning for several months. The 54th Troop Carrier Wing C-47s dropped the troops without a hitch, and the airfield was in Allied hands within a matter of minutes. MacArthur used the new installation to mount a two-pronged attack on Lae that led to the destruction of Japanese efforts in New Guinea.

The early successes of the C-47s and other transports in New Guinea led to the development of tactics built around the use of air transport to airlift troops into battle and also to move air units forward. Air evacuation of casualties made its debut in New Guinea during the battle for Buna. Young female flight nurses were assigned to troop carrier squadrons to care for wounded men who were brought from the forward airfields. Regularly scheduled air evacuation flights were established between Port Moresby and rear area hospitals in Australia. The success of air evacuation in the Southwest Pacific led to it becoming part of the troop carrier mission throughout the world. Thanks to the use of the airplane to move the seriously wounded, the combat death rate was drastically reduced.

The dependable C-47s and C-53s soldiered on, racking up hundreds, then thousands of hours in combat operations. One of the C-53s that had arrived in Australia in early 1942 had amassed more than 10,000 hours by 1944. The efforts of the troop carrier C-47 crews did not go unappreciated by the senior officers in their chain of command. General Kenney recognized the efforts of his troop carriers and said so in dispatches to the War Department in Washington, D.C. In one request for additional troop carrier pilots, Kenney told General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, that the life expectancy of his C-47 crew members was less than that of the P-39 fighter pilots in his command.

The Hump Airlift

In the spring and summer of 1942, while the two troop carrier squadrons in New Guinea were making their mark, developing air transportation efforts in the China-Burma-India Theater began another chapter in the story of the Douglas transport. In early 1942, a small contingent of Pan American DC-3s was sent to India to airlift fuel and oil to Chinese bases in preparation for the arrival of the North American B-25 Mitchell bombers of the Doolittle mission against the Japanese home islands.

The civilian contingent was soon joined by a squadron of Army C-47s that arrived in India as part of Colonel Caleb Haynes’s AQUILA project that was intended to serve as the nucleus of a heavy bomber effort against Japan from Chinese bases. A Japanese offensive in China in retaliation for the Doolittle mission deprived the Allies of the planned bomber bases, and the Army and civilian C-47/DC-3 crews soon found themselves in the middle of the battle for Burma. When it became apparent that the Japanese had gained the upper hand, the transports were put to work evacuating Allied troops.

Although combat operations in defense of India were requiring most of Tenth Air Force’s efforts, it was imperative that supplies get to China, where the American Volunteer Group, popularly known as the Flying Tigers, was doing a good job of harassing the Japanese. Fortunately, there was another air transport organization in the theater. Before the war Pan American Airways had contracted with the Chinese government to operate a national airline. The China National Airways Corporation (CNAC) operated a fleet of DC-3s with civilian crews, mostly Americans.

Tenth Air Force contracted with CNAC to airlift supplies to China, beginning what came to be known as the Hump Airlift. Throughout 1942, DC-3s and C-47s operated the airlift, but the massive amounts of material requiring airlift dictated the use of larger airplanes with greater payloads. In late 1942 the airlift of supplies to China was taken over by the newly created Air Transport Command (ATC). ATC began the airlift with C-47s but switched to larger Curtiss C-46s and Consolidated C-87s, the cargo version of the B-24 Liberator bomber, as they became available.

Although the C-47 was replaced within the ATC airlift to China, the Douglas transports continued to play a major role. One of the conditions of the transfer of the China Air Ferry to the ATC was that Tenth Air Force would receive a troop carrier group equipped with C-47s. Additional Douglas transports came in the form of Royal Air Force Dakotas.

Many Roles in Many Theaters

Air transport would be a feature of new tactics worked out by the eccentric British Brigadier Orde Wingate, the commander of a special force made up of British and Commonwealth troops known as Chindits. In the spring of 1944, Wingate’s special force invaded Burma from the air. The entire Tenth Air Force effort was directed toward supporting the operation, which consisted of a glider assault onto landing zones in Burma that would be used as forward bases supported by troop carrier C-47s. The three C-47 squadrons of Tenth Air Force had been joined by a fourth squadron that came to India as part of Colonel Philip Cochran’s air commando group, and had been further augmented by the temporary assignment of the 64th Troop Carrier Group from the Mediterranean.

The air commando C-47s were assigned to glider towing duty while the troop carrier command transports airlifted men and equipment into the hastily prepared landing zones. One troop carrier squadron was assigned to support the American provisional force under Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill, who walked into Burma in the north. Once again the C-47 proved its worth as the twin-engine transports operated into airstrips that had been constructed with small bulldozers and graders that had been landed by glider.

The role of the C-47 in Europe was initially primarily logistical. In the summer of 1942, the 51st Troop Carrier Wing and its three groups moved to England as part of the Eighth Air Force. Throughout the summer the wing’s C-47s and C-53s supported the newly arrived bomber and fighter groups. Planning for the invasion of North Africa called for the wing to transfer to Africa. Several squadrons of C-47s left England carrying the paratroopers of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the first American paratroop unit to see combat.

There were a handful of limited airborne operations in North Africa, but the transport mission became support of air and ground combat units, particularly after the battle moved away from the coast. Military planners had not taken the troop carrier transports into consideration, but their presence proved highly beneficial as they were used to airlift bombs and supplies for combat squadrons to airfields in the desert and to support motorized columns. Troop carriers in North Africa borrowed a page from the Southwest Pacific as they began evacuating casualties from forward areas to rear area hospitals.

In European Combat Operations

Plans for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, called for the use of paratroops and glider-borne forces. The airborne operations did not go well, thanks in part to high winds that blew the formations off course. Jittery antiaircraft gunners on ships offshore took the approaching C-47 formation under fire and shot down quite a few transports. Dozens of paratroopers fell into the sea and were drowned. Many gliders cut loose too early and failed to make the beaches, leaving their occupants to the same fate as the paratroopers who fell into the sea.

In spite of the numerous problems, the few paratroopers and glider troops who managed to arrive in one piece caused so much confusion among the German and Italian defenders that airborne operations were planned for future invasions. There was one paratroop drop in Italy when General Mark Clark decided to reinforce the beachhead at Salerno. Once Allied air units were established in Italy, the C-47s assumed a new mission, the resupply of partisans in Yugoslavia.

Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, included the massive use of American and British airborne forces. The D-Day airdrops have become famous and are perhaps the one World War II event most associated with C-47s. Unfortunately, the drops did not go well, while dozens of C-47s were shot down and hundreds were damaged by intense German fire. Once the beachhead had been established, landing strips were constructed for C-47s arriving on the continent from England.

The American breakout from the beaches in early August saw the C-47s in an important new role as they were called upon to support the rapidly moving armored columns of General George Patton’s Third Army. Patton came to depend on the C-47s and other transports to bring in fuel for his tanks and trucks, and when they were taken away his rapid advance ground to a halt.

The Troop Carrier Command was dedicated to the support of the First Allied Airborne Army when it was established in early August, and its squadrons were taken off combat operations to train for Operation Market-Garden, the upcoming airborne invasion of Holland. An additional 100 C-47s were taken off Air Transport Command domestic operations in the United States and sent to England to beef up the Service Command transport forces.

The drops in Holland saw the C-47 crews earn the respect of the paratroopers. While previous airborne operations had often been characterized by confusion, the drops in Holland were well organized and the crews were motivated to risk their own lives to ensure that the troops were dropped on target. Paratroopers returned from Holland to tell of courageous C-47 pilots were able to hold their course in burning airplanes so their troops could jump, and then went to fiery deaths as their stricken craft crashed. Troop Carrier Command C-47s, supplemented by B-24s detached from Eighth Air Force, kept the troops in Holland supplied until ground links were opened.

During the Battle of the Bulge paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division were sent to hold the town of Bastogne, where they soon found themselves surrounded by a determined enemy and cut off from all means of ground resupply. Terrible winter weather, with low clouds, fog, drizzle, and snow, prevented the C-47s from delivering supplies by air for several days. As their supplies dwindled, the Screaming Eagles held on. Finally, on December 23 the skies cleared and parachutes blossomed over Bastogne as C-47 crews braved German fire to deliver their loads of ammunition, rations, and medical supplies. By evening, 101st artillery crews were firing shells that had just been dropped in. The Bastogne relief was perhaps the C-47’s finest hour.

The Goony Bird Behind the Front

While the airborne operations in the European theater, the Hump Airlift, and the New Guinea missions were their most important, the Douglas transports were a familiar sight all over the world. Army C-47s supported combat operations in the Aleutians, while the Navy and Marine Corps established transport squadrons for duty in the islands of the Central Pacific with their own C-47s, which were given the naval designation of R4D. It was probably the Navy and Marine crews who gave the DC-3 its most famous name—Gooney Bird. Nature’s gooney birds are a species of albatross that are unique to Midway atoll, where sailors and Marines had been entertained by the ungainly creatures long before Midway became famous in mid-1942.

By 1943 the U.S. military was active all over the world as ferry and transport routes were developed over which young, inexperienced crews delivered bombers, fighters, and transports to combat squadrons overseas. Engine trouble, bad weather, and enemy action led to the loss of aircraft and crews who went down in the ocean or over hostile terrain. The Air Transport Command developed its own search and rescue units to look for downed airmen, and C-47s were equipped for the role. Some C-47s were equipped with skis to allow landings close to downed airmen in Arctic terrain. The C-47C was equipped with giant Edo floats to allow water landings. Tests were even conducted with a glider version of the C-47, when an early model was converted to become the XCG-17.

On May 5, 1945, the 10,000th DC-3 was delivered to the United States Army Air Forces; all but 500 were built after Pearl Harbor. By the end of 1944, all the DC-3s that had been procured from the airlines for military use had been returned. The airlines also benefited from the military production, as hundreds of C-47s and C-53s became surplus to the military’s needs and were released for civilian purchase.

Immediately after the war, the C-47s were instrumental in airlifting supplies to areas that had been devastated by the conflict and providing support for occupying forces. Unlike most other U.S. military aircraft of World War II, the C-47 remained in active military service during both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Silver

Technology, Americas

The film, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival and will reach theaters and VOD this Friday, takes much of its inspiration from another popular film, the 1999 science-fiction hit The Matrix.

Back in 2012, filmmaker Rodney Ascher directed a documentary called Room 237, which was a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic The Shining. The film consisted entirely of the voices of people with unconventional, out-there theories about The Shining.

These ranged from the idea that Kubrick made the movie as a confession that he had taken part in faking the moon landing in 1969, and conjecture about how the film was a hidden allegory about either the Holocaust or the genocide of American Indians. One participant obsessed about the layout of the movie’s Overlook Hotel, while another argued that a post on the wall in the movie of a skier was actually a Minotaur (it looked to me like a skier.)  A whole other movie, the 2016 comedy Moonwalkers, was based around the conceit that the CIA had really enlisted Kubrick to stage a moon landing, in case the real one didn’t work out.

The theories presented in Room 237 were almost entirely unconvincing—as fan theories turn out to be, about 95 percent of the time—but that wasn’t really the point. It was such a fascinating deep dive that I proposed at the time that it be adapted into a TV series, with bonkers theories about a different classic movie each week. Room 237 is one of those movies that should only ever be watched late at night.

In between the director made a documentary about sleep paralysis called The Nightmare. And now, nearly a decade later, Ascher has returned with another documentary, called A Glitch in The Matrix. The film, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival and will reach theaters and VOD this Friday, takes much of its inspiration from another popular film, the Wachowskis’ 1999 science-fiction hit The Matrix.

But rather than applying the Room 237 formula to The Matrix, Ascher’s film takes another angle: He interviews those who believe that the real world has begun to resemble The Matrix, and that we are, in fact, living in a simulation.

No, this film isn’t about The Matrix’s concepts of the “red pill” and “blue pill,” and all of the unpleasant connotations that have become attached to that. Instead, it shares a handful of regular people sharing their views on the simulation hypothesis, interspersed with footage from the film, as well as an old lecture by the famed novelist Philip Dick, in which he claimed late in life to have been imported with special knowledge of the universe’s true nature. There are even some quotes from various well-known tech people, led by Elon Musk, indicating that they themselves believe the simulation theories.

After all, references to “the simulation” have only gained further purchase by world events in the couple of decades since The Matrix was released, from the pandemic to strange weather events to the Donald Trump presidency.

The idea that reality isn’t really reality, and that at some point the real world was replaced by a fake one, is an argument that takes some pretty heavy lifting to make convincingly. A Glitch in the Matrix does not come close to doing so. 

Indeed, it must be said that much of what’s uttered in this film is complete nonsense, which doesn’t come close to making the case that we are, in fact, living in a simulation. That was, of course, also the case with Ascher’s Shining movie. But the difference is that in a full movie of what strongly resembles stoned dorm room philosophizing, the musings are very rarely particularly interesting. 

Another huge mistake the movie makes is that rather than keep those theorizing off-screen the way he did in Room 237, Ascher gives them animated avatars. This is just a ridiculous, failed conceit, mostly because it’s hard to take anything anyone has to say seriously when they look like an alien in a Buzz Lightyear costume. It doesn’t help that most of these peoples’ theories basically amount to “I saw a weird, unlikely thing happen once.” 

As for the Dick speech, which was delivered at a science fiction convention in France in 1977, it’s certainly more intriguing than most of what the other interviewees have to say.

But the lecture, in which Dick lays out how he believed he was given special knowledge about the universe after undergoing dental surgery, is more notable for having predicted the plot of The Matrix two decades in advance than anything having to do with an actual simulation existing. We already knew Dick was great at anticipating where popular science fiction imagination was heading, considering how many of his works were adapted for the movies and TV (Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Blade Runner, Total Recall, and more), mostly years after his death.

But the film’s worst decision, by far, is when it hands over the floor for about ten minutes to Joshua Cooke, a man convicted of 2003 of murdering his own parents when he was under the delusion that The Matrix was real. The film has Cooke describe the murders in slow, mechanical detail, and not only does it come across as crass and exploitative, but it doesn’t really have much to do with what this movie is about. 

There’s going to be another movie in the Matrix franchise later this year, as part of the Warner Brothers/HBO Max streaming day-and-date strategy. And when it arrives, we’re likely to see more arguments about the simulation hypothesis. But those trying to make the case for such theories will have to do better than A Glitch in the Matrix did. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to 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

David Axe

Security, World

With INF dead, the world’s nuclear balance is in flux.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The United States probably would have to agree to broad limitations on its own weaponry in order to bring China to the table. But the Trump administration consistently has wanted fewer, not more, restrictions on its weapons.

The U.S. military on Aug. 18, 2019, successfully tested a ground-launched, intermediate-range, nuclear-capable cruise missile.

It’s exactly the kind of missile that the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, or INF, had banned before the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump in early August 2019 formally withdrew from the treaty.

With INF dead, the world’s nuclear balance is in flux. In the near term at least, it’s clear that the United States and Russia intend to deploy shorter-range nukes. It seems unlikely that a new treaty will halt these deployments.

The flight test of America’s new “conventionally-configured, ground-launched cruise missile” took place at San Nicolas Island in California, the Pentagon announced.

“The test missile exited its ground mobile launcher and accurately impacted its target after more than 500 kilometers [310 miles] of flight,” the Defense Department stated.  “Data collected and lessons learned from this test will inform [the Defense Department's] development of future intermediate-range capabilities.”

The missile appears to be a version of the Tomahawk cruise missile, which U.S. forces also deploy in sea- and air-launched versions.

The U.S. military previously deployed a ground-launched Tomahawk from 1983 to 1991. The missile type boasted nuclear warhead and a 1,600-mile range. INF compelled the Americans and Russians respectively to withdraw 400 and 1,500 ground-launched nuclear missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles.

Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin doomed INF and heralded the return of quick-striking intermediate missiles.

The first sign that the 1987 agreement was in trouble came in 2011, when the administration of then-U.S. president Barack Obama warned that new, intermediate-range nuclear-armed cruise missile—under development in Russia since 2008—could violate the terms of the treaty.

The U.S. State Department in 2013 first raised the issue with the Kremlin. Later the same year, the White House formally announced that Russia was in violation of the treaty.

The Americans were responsible for their own provocations. In 2015 the Pentagon began installing missile defenses in Romania. The non-nuclear SM-3 missile-interceptors are designed to hit ballistic missiles launched by Iran at the United States, and are not capable of stopping intermediate-range nukes launched from Europe.

But the Russians viewed the SM-3s as a threat and cited them as an indication that the Americans were developing their own intermediate-range weapons. Sometime in 2017 the Russian military finally deployed its new intermediate-range missile, the SSC-8, at a site along Russia’s western frontier.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration advanced plans for a host of new nukes, including smaller “tactical” atomic weapons that the White House might be more willing to use than larger, more powerful strategic weapons.

The Trump administration also cited China as a rationale for canceling INF, as Beijing was never party to the 1987 treaty.

Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review, released in early 2018, codified U.S. rearmament plans, effectively mirroring Russia’s own new atomic deployments. INF’s demise freed both countries to develop and field a class of weapons that for decades have been absent from Europe.

“The new policies only increase the chances of blundering into a nuclear war,” commented Bruce Blair, a Princeton University nuclear scholar.

The United States could negotiate a new treaty to replace INF, Trump said in his February 2019 state-of-the-union address. And that treaty could include China, Trump claimed.

That's unlikely to happen, explained Gregory Kulacki, a nuclear expert with the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

The United States probably would have to agree to broad limitations on its own weaponry in order to bring China to the table. But the Trump administration consistently has wanted fewer, not more, restrictions on its weapons.

"Decades ago the United States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capabilities," Trump said in his speech. "While we followed the agreement to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. That is why I announced that the United States is officially withdrawing.""Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others," Trump added, "or perhaps we can't --- in which case, we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far."

The problem for China isn't nuclear weapons, rather non-nuclear ones. "China has a small number of nuclear-armed ground-based intermediate-range missiles that would fall under the original INF treaty limits," Kulacki wrote. "But it also has a much larger number of conventionally-armed missiles in this class that seem to be the major concern of U.S. advocates of withdrawing from the treaty."

“Figuring out how to negotiate an expanded INF treaty that would require China to dismantle them would introduce a number of new and difficult issues to resolve, but it could also lead to some very productive conversations on how to build trust and preserve the peace in East Asia,” Kulacki added.

“Sadly, I suspect U.S. advocates of killing the INF treaty have no intention to talk to China about joining it.”

David Axe served as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters