Diplomacy & Crisis News

The Treasury’s decision to label both Switzerland and Vietnam currency manipulators was unusual—and leaves the Biden administration with some tough choices to make.

As governments move to secure COVID-19 vaccines for their populations, choosing these treatments should not be viewed as “some kind of nationalistic footrace”, with some countries winning and others losing, a senior official with the World Health Organization (WHO) told journalists on Friday. 

The country’s contrarian approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was meant to prove that trust in authorities could avert lockdowns. Instead, mixed messaging and political squabbles have led to an exploding epidemic.

Craig Singleton

Health, Americas

If America remains a member of the World Health Organization without extracting any meaningful concessions, then that would be tantamount to foreign policy malpractice.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies appear to have the inside track in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine. As expected, these breakthroughs have been greeted with sighs of relief by Main Street America and Wall Street.

And yet, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) muted response speaks volumes, as does its unwillingness to conduct a transparent investigation into the virus’s Chinese origins. By any measure, the WHO’s perceived deference to Beijing has left its credibility and that of its leaders on life support.

If public and institutional distrust is a symptom of a larger disease, then the WHO is clearly unwell.  

Could U.S.-led coronavirus diplomacy cure its ills?

Not surprisingly, the contest to develop a vaccine has devolved into a great-power war game. While the United States has pursued a reliable, albeit accelerated, path forward, the same cannot be said of its strategic competitors.

Eager to repair the damage stemming from its coronavirus deceptions and ensuing “wolf warrior” diplomacy, Beijing has turned to a familiar playbook, attempting to steal information about U.S. vaccine programs. China’s willingness to cut corners has also included inoculating thousands outside of supervised trials, as well as convincing vulnerable governments to offer their own citizens as guinea pigs in exchange for relief. The Russian government has also performed as expected, downplaying the virus’s death toll and pushing unverified claims about the efficacy of its Sputnik V vaccine.

Although President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the WHO, the next administration is certain to reverse course. However, nursing the organization back to health and championing top-to-bottom reform will not come easily.

With America’s rivals knocked off balance, and to achieve its aims of overhauling the WHO and restoring America’s reputation, the next administration and its allies should move swiftly to administer a more aggressive Western antidote, albeit one hard for the WHO to swallow. 

While U.S. vaccines are in production, the question of distributing them around the world remains unanswered. The Achilles heel to the WHO’s response lies with its COVAX program, which is tasked with procuring vaccines for developing countries. At present, COVAX remains woefully mismanaged and severely underfunded, as many countries harbor reservations about the WHO’s reliability. Without significant restructuring, COVAX is unlikely to succeed. The situation is further complicated by rampant G-20 vaccine nationalism, in which leaders are prioritizing inoculations for their citizens and in effect relegating developing countries to the back of the line.

If America’s successful AIDS programming in Africa is any indication, then this need not be the case. What’s more, re-capturing the hearts and minds of these developing countries will be key to establishing an international coalition to confront China’s increasingly malign behavior.

Remaining in the WHO without extracting any meaningful concessions would be tantamount to foreign policy malpractice. As a first step, the provision of any additional COVAX funding, administrative support, or vaccine assistance should be tied to a full, fast-tracked audit of the COVAX program and the WHO’s initial response to the pandemic, specifically focusing on the organization’s interactions with Beijing. This audit should also scrutinize COVAX’s vaccine approval process to ensure the WHO never greenlights unsafe Chinese and Russian vaccines for distribution.

Given concerns about undue Chinese influence at the United Nations, these investigations should be led and paid for by the WHO’s top Western contributors and COVAX partners, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. To be sure, such institutional shock therapy is all but certain to clash with established diplomatic norms; however, continued stonewalling on these issues will only compound pre-existing concerns that the WHO is simply beyond repair.

As more information comes to light and with pressure building in anticipation of a vaccine rollout in mid-2020, the WHO’s bureaucratic dam will eventually break, leading to leadership resignations and a global reckoning for China. Only then will the United States and its allies be positioned to exercise greater control over the organization and its inoculation protocols.  

Of course, immunizing billions will cost billions and investing even more in the WHO will be a hard sell for many leaders. Moreover, U.S. taxpayers and members of Congress have every reason to remain skeptical, although skepticism alone has done little to dent U.S. contributions to the UN’s coffers over the years.

To their surprise, congressional watchdogs may realize that the way to establish greater control over the WHO—a goal that has remained elusive—is to actually increase U.S. support for the UN body, albeit in a reformed institution with the United States and its allies at the helm. 

Experimental treatments, and particularly those that stray from standard operating practices, are certain to be met with suspicion and even derision. In this case, the patient may even revolt, although doing so would seal the WHO’s fate and lead other countries to partner with the United States on independent vaccine initiatives.

If that is the worst side-effect, then so be it. It sure beats the alternative of placing the world’s fate in the hands of a compromised WHO and its enablers in Beijing. 

Craig Singleton is a national security expert and former diplomat who currently serves as an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) for its China Program. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues. 

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Technology,

AT&T knows that its DirecTV division, for which it paid a whopping $49 billion in 2016, is failing miserably—and perhaps the only way to save it is by selling it.

AT&T knows that its DirecTV division, for which it paid a whopping $49 billion in 2016, is failing miserably—and perhaps the only way to save it is by selling it. 

In just the past quarter, AT&T announced that it lost 590,000 subscribers to its “Premium TV,” a category that includes DirecTV satellite service, U-verse wireline TV, and the online service known as AT&T TV. The telecommunications giant also shed 37,000 customers from AT&T TV Now, the streaming service formerly known as DirecTV Now. 

DirecTV and AT&T’s premium services lost 897,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2020, and 886,000 in the second quarter. AT&T now has 17.1 million premium TV subscribers, after losing more than three million over the course of the last year. To put those figures more in perspective, in 2017, there were more than twenty-five million subscribers.  

Accordingly, revenue for video entertainment plunged to just under $7 billion last quarter, which is 16 percent less than what was registered in 2018.  

As for DirecTV itself, it has gone from twenty-one million subscribers in 2017 to roughly 13.6 million this past quarter, according to Statista. 

With the satellite TV provider being such a huge part of the problem, it’s no wonder that AT&T is looking to cut ties with it. Dish Network has long held out hope that a merger with DirecTV would help the company get out of its years-long economic doldrums.  

Dish’s CEO Charlie Ergen has even repeatedly stated that he considers a merger of the two satellite TV providers to be “inevitable,” even though such a business deal would likely face significant regulatory scrutiny.  

It does appear that an actual sale is creeping closer—but Dish isn’t seen as one of the potential buyers. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that AT&T has received bids from the auction it’s held for DirecTV—and that such bids have valued the unit upwards of $15 billion including debt. The paper added that the sale “could be completed by early next year.” 

There could also be more pain in the offing for AT&T as DirecTV might lose its exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the popular NFL package that offers every out-of-market game to football fans. While equivalent packages for other sports leagues are available on multiple platforms, DirecTV has had the exclusive on NFL Sunday Ticket ever since it first launched way back in 1994.  

The current agreement expires after the 2022 season, and Amazon, Disney-owned ESPN+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and sports streaming service DAZN have all expressed interest in garnering the rights to the package.  

AT&T currently pays $1.5 billion per year to carry NFL Sunday Ticket, but the cost might be too high now considering that the company has been actively working to reduce its debt.

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

Paul R. Pillar

Security, Middle East

Transactional diplomacy in which prices are paid is not inherently bad. Countries do it all the time. But when the United States pays such a price, it ought to be in return for something in U.S. interests, or in the more general interest of peace. It ought not to serve instead the territorial ambitions of a foreign state.

For Americans, the Western Sahara is a faraway land about which they know little. There is no good reason for the United States to separate itself from the mainstream of international opinion about the long-running conflict in that territory. There is even less reason for the United States to support the claim of a neighboring state that, enjoying local military dominance, wants to annex the territory. Yet that is what the administration of Donald Trump, acting very much alone, has done by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. 

Conflict in the Western Sahara dates back to local resistance against Spanish colonial rule, eventually led by what became known as the Polisario Front. When Spain, in Francisco Franco’s dying days, pulled out of the territory in 1975, the Polisario Front’s struggle became one against the bordering states of Morocco and Mauritania. Mauritania, the weaker of these two states, stopped contesting the territory in 1979, and the war became one between the Polisario Front and Morocco. 

A cease-fire in 1991 left Morocco in control of more than three-fourths of the Western Sahara. The Moroccans constructed a long earthen berm to separate what they control—which includes the territory’s economically important phosphate deposits—from the remaining desert that is left to the Polisario. The most significant breach of the cease-fire occurred just last month, touched off by Moroccan military movements near a border post that followed nonviolent protests obstructing truck traffic to Mauritania.

Various peace efforts through the years, including one led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker acting as a United Nations envoy, have centered on the concept of self-determination for the Sahrawi people, with a referendum to determine the will of those people. Disagreement over who ought to be on the voter rolls has prevented any referendum from being held.

The prevailing international perspective toward the conflict is very much in line with the concept of Sahrawi self-determination, and not at all in line with Moroccan annexation. The United Nations considers the Western Sahara to be a non-self-governing territory and the Polisario Front to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Sahrawi people. Forty countries recognize the “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic” that the Polisario Front declared in 1976. SADR is a full member of the African Union. Morocco has not received comparable support for its claims from the Arab League, which has offered only a vague statement about respecting Moroccan territorial sovereignty.

The Trump administration’s move does nothing for the people of the Western Sahara, nothing for the cause of self-determination, and nothing for efforts to resolve the Western Sahara dispute. It can only make resolution of the conflict less, not more, likely than before—especially coming amid a breakdown of the cease-fire between Morocco and the Polisario. It also increases U.S. isolation on yet another international issue, identifying the United States with a might-makes-right approach to territorial control. 

And what did the administration get in return for incurring these costs? Nothing for the United States. Instead, the deal reached with the Moroccan regime of King Mohammed VI was part of the administration’s campaign on behalf of the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to get Arab states to upgrade their relations with Israel. It is transactional dealing in support of Likud. 

The upgrade deals that the administration has struck with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and now Morocco are not “peace” agreements, much less the “breakthroughs” that the administration likes to describe them as. None of these states was at war with Israel. Instead, they already had extensive cooperation with Israel, including on security and defense matters. Morocco even had previously exchanged diplomatic liaison offices with Israel following the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, although those offices were closed after a new Palestinian uprising in 2000. This month’s deal merely reopens those liaison offices. 

Netanyahu’s government strongly wants more extensive relations with Arab states as a way of having its cake and eating it too—that is, as a way of losing its pariah status while continuing its occupation of Palestinian territory. Far from advancing peace, this process sets back any prospects for peace. It reduces further any incentive for the Netanyahu government to make the sort of policy changes necessary for resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has paid other peace-eroding prices in its campaign on behalf of the Israeli government. F-35 stealth jets and other advanced military hardware were part of the price paid to the UAE—a transaction that, thanks partly to Trump’s veto threat, evidently will be completed despite significant congressional opposition. The deal risks stoking an arms race in the Persian Gulf, and at a minimum intensifies the lines of conflict in that region. It also provides advanced weapons to a regime that has used the military aircraft it already has for such destabilizing activities as intervening in Libya’s civil war and adding significantly to the death and destruction there. 

The Trump administration’s motives in all this clearly have to do with catering to those domestic political elements, consisting mainly of the Christian evangelical part of Trump’s base, that see as good anything that conforms with the wishes of the Israeli government. More personal urges may be in play as well, especially for Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who reportedly was in the middle of the deal-making with Morocco. 

Transactional diplomacy in which prices are paid is not inherently bad. Countries do it all the time. But when the United States pays such a price, it ought to be in return for something in U.S. interests, or in the more general interest of peace. It ought not to serve instead the territorial ambitions of a foreign state. 

The transaction with Morocco has a perverse symmetry. A deal in which one side’s motivations involve sustaining occupation of a territory and subjugation of its people (the Palestinians) helps the other side sustain another occupation and subjugation of a people (the Sahrawis). The connection is not lost on foreign observers.

Paul R. Pillar is a Contributing Editor at the National Interest and the author of Why America Misunderstands the World.

Image: Reuters

Here’s how to stop bleeding information about yourself online.

After a drawdown of staff at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered another cut in response to threats from Iran.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

China wants to deny others access to the South China Sea while keeping free access to trade and military routes for itself.

Key point: Washington knows that Beijing would love to push it completely out of the Western Pacific. Here is how America could try to prevent that from happening.

Suppose the United States and its allies erect a “Great Wall in reverse,” deploying anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and anti-submarine armaments on and around the islands constituting the first island chain.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not submit meekly while the allies curb its freedom of movement between its home waters and the Western Pacific. Instead, PLA soldiers, sailors, and aviators will try to puncture, outflank, or otherwise nullify the wall, regaining access to the wider world. They must—lest China forfeit the export and import trade that underwrites its “dream” of prosperity and national dignity, not to mention its capacity to project military might outside its immediate environs. But how?

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

Peering through a glass darkly now may help the allies discern what the red team may do. In turn, foresight may help them get ahead in the inevitable next round of strategic competition, devising countermeasures to defeat PLA efforts to defeat the wall. And on and on the competition will go.

Impelling a Great Wall strategy is the notion that the allies must reply to the challenge manifest in China’s theater-wide “anti-access/area-denial” defenses, which aim to make things tough on U.S. and allied forces seeking entry to embattled Western Pacific waters, skies, or landmasses. China has essayed access-denial on a grand geographic scale, hoping to ward off U.S. reinforcements dashing to the relief of Taiwan, Japan, or some other Asian friend. Rigging barricades across short, defensible narrow seas would remind Beijing that access-denial is not just a Chinese thing. The allies can contest access as well, and they can make geography their ally in a way China cannot.

It’s far easier and cheaper to plug a strait, preventing a Chinese ship from exiting the China seas or returning from beyond, than it is to detect, track, and target a U.S. warship traversing the trackless plain that is the Pacific Ocean. Advantage: America.

That island-chain defense is taking hold within Pentagon circles is palpable even as U.S. military strategy recesses more and more into the hush-hush realm of classified intelligence. Just study acquisition patterns along with the guarded words military potentates and their political masters do utter in public. The U.S. Marine Corps is acquiring truck-mounted launchers capable of lofting anti-ship missiles seaward. Likewise is the U.S. Army. The U.S. Air Force has practiced fitting its bombers with precision-guided sea mines. The U.S. Navy is experimenting with unmanned undersea vehicles optimal for lurking in narrow seas to find or pummel hostile shipping from beneath. Etc.

Yet the PLA will not cower before an allied Great Wall, no matter how formidable. How will Beijing seek to win? By harnessing diplomatic, economic, and military implements throughout the continuum from peacetime strategic competition to armed strife and back again. There’s more to access-denial than weapons, sensors, and computers. It is a variety of grand strategy aimed at deterring an adversary from entering geographic space the access-denier places off-limits, retarding that adversary’s advance into contested space should deterrence fail, or barring entry altogether in the ideal case.

What countermoves are available to Beijing as it surveys an increasingly solid first island chain? In peacetime, it can attempt to corrode or fracture the chain through deft grand strategy. China commands advantages in wealth, geographic proximity, and sheer permanence. Asian capitals covet good trade relations with China. Trade lifts all boats, helping countries prosper. At the same time, Asians are acutely conscious that Big Brother lies just over the horizon and increasingly brandishes a big stick. America may come and go from the Western Pacific; China is forever. Its status as Asia’s central power lets Beijing combine economic inducements with diplomatic outreach, friendly or coercive.

The goal of Chinese diplomacy is to convince neighbors to withhold support from U.S. military strategy. An island-chain defense can accomplish little if Asian allies refuse U.S. forces access to their soil. That’s why Xi Jinping & Co. have wooed Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte with such fervor. Beijing can open a breach in the maritime Great Wall without firing a shot if Duterte closes Philippine territory to U.S. forces for the sake of trade and comity with China. Alliance-breaking represents Beijing’s best option in peacetime—and it’s an option that comes naturally, consonant as it is with Chinese strategic traditions.

Still, China’s adventures in dealmaking could fall flat. The U.S.-led alliance system could hold, and martial strife ensue. What then? Rather than project-specific scenarios whereby the PLA might attempt a breakout, let’s look at factors likely to shape China’s wall-busting strategy. First of all, this is a classic case of perimeter defense. In this case, the perimeter is made up of fixed points—namely the islands—and the waters and military implements between.

Like other martial sages, Carl von Clausewitz is no fan of perimeter defense. In fact, he pronounces it a “ruinous form” of “cordon-warfare.” That’s a cutting indictment. However strong the defending force may be, it must spread out in a vain effort to make the line impenetrable. Forces that aspire to be strong everywhere tend to accomplish little anywhere. In other words, parceling out defenders along a distended perimeter thins out the combat power available at any single point. A feeble but astute foe could mass its forces at one point and punch through.

Clausewitz offers a partial remedy if cordon warfare is unavoidable. He exhorts commanders to keep their defensive lines short, refusing to attenuate firepower any more than necessary. And they should lavish fire support on those manning the ramparts, helping offset the problem of dispersed strength.

By Clausewitzian logic it appears the best places for the PLA to stage a breakthrough would be the Miyako Strait and the Luzon Strait. Miyako Strait lies south of Okinawa. It’s the widest aperture between the China seas and the Western Pacific, spanning about 158 miles. It is also the entryway of choice for PLA vessels and aircraft. Chinese commanders thus might incline to force their favorite strait—especially since allied defenses have more geographic space to protect there and could prove more permeable. That section of the Great Wall could prove collapsible if stormed by determined attackers.

The Luzon Strait lies to the south, separating Taiwan from the main Philippine island of Luzon. It thus rests between a not-quite-ally and a wobbly ally of the United States—opening up space for diplomatic mischief-making on China’s part. It also boasts geophysical advantages. The strait lies far south of the main U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force bases at Yokosuka and Sasebo. Distance would stretch allied logistics unless Manila permitted the allies to use Subic Bay and other Philippine facilities. In other words, it would prove hard to sustain a nautical cordon without help from President Duterte. And Duterte is a weak reed on which to rest one’s fortunes.

Policing the Luzon Strait could prove taxing in the best of times, for anti-submarine forces in particular. The deep Bashi Channel runs through the strait, offering submarines and other undersea vehicles a convenient gateway between the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean. Moreover, environmental and hydrographic conditions prevalent in the strait befriend those who want to elude detection; their assailants less so. In short, the Miyako and Luzon straits are not the only candidate sites for the PLA’s great escape. But they are prime candidates.

There is at least one variant to a PLA breakout strategy. Rather than burst through one or more straits in force, the PLA Navy could try to sneak forces through the cordon and employ them to assault islands from easterly points of the compass. Military folk love to “envelop”—meaning surround—their objectives in order to sunder them from outside support. Insinuating forces into the Pacific, then mounting attacks from all axes, would bolster PLA forces’ chances of success amid trying circumstances.

Second, PLA commanders might mount a broad-front offensive rather than thrust a spearhead at a single point. Strategist Edward Luttwak portrays the choice between advancing along a broad or a narrow front as the pivotal choice in theater strategy. Broad-front operations would probe the allied defenses all along a major segment of the island chain, more or less simultaneously. Where they found weakness, PLA units would pour through in what English soldier B. H. Liddell Hart calls an “expanding torrent,” supported and followed by adjacent Chinese forces. If successful, the torrent would further erode the defenses—widening the breach to the shores of the islands adjoining the strait. Access to the Pacific would be restored at least temporarily.

Third, In all likelihood, PLA commanders would want to wrest the islands flanking a newly reopened strait from their guardians. Emplacing PLA forces in a commanding position would consolidate their hold on the contested seaway. Otherwise, the allies might rush in reinforcements to cement the line—and imprison Chinese forces within the China seas anew. Seizing islands would demand multiple amphibious landings coupled with fire support from the PLA Air Force and Navy. And indeed, Beijing has plowed considerable effort and resources into amphibious forces in recent years.

Now, it’s doubtful whether Beijing would content itself with forcing a single passage and the islands overshadowing it. Alfred Thayer Mahan deprecates maritime powers that have only one access point to the high seas. Their poverty of access exposes them to blockade and desolation. To forestall such a fate, Chinese strategy might seek to blow open a wide arc in the first island chain, diversifying China’s geostrategic portfolio. Suppose the Miyako Strait were the principal target of a maritime assault. Rather than settle for momentary control of the strait, PLA forces might swing north toward Okinawa and the Japanese home islands or south toward Taiwan. Sweeping along the island chain would hand them control of multiple islands and straits—easing China’s Mahanian plight.

Which would it be? A southerly turn appears far more promising. Going north would probably demand that the PLA first subdue Okinawa, home to powerful U.S. and Japanese air forces. It would certainly mean approaching the Japanese home islands, the seat of U.S.-Japanese armed might. Clausewitz warns of the perils of plunging into an enemy’s territory, where the enemy enjoys advantages conferred by dense military resources and proximity to likely scenes of action. His admonition would hold sway in an island-chain war even if PLA forces island-hopped around Okinawa the way General Douglas MacArthur bypassed Japanese fortresses such as Truk and Rabaul three-quarters of a century ago. Worse, it would leave Okinawa-based air and sea forces to the rear of the advancing PLA vanguard.

A forbidding prospect. A pirouette toward Taiwan, by contrast, would aim the Chinese campaign toward weakness—elongating allied logistics while interposing PLA forces between the targeted islands and forces coming to their relief from Okinawa or the home islands. In that case, battlefield dynamics would gladden the hearts of Chinese commanders and officialdom. Success in a southerly venture would ameliorate China’s access problem. As a side benefit, it would drive a salient into the Pacific Ocean, granting the PLA positions to Taiwan’s north and astride the sea lanes to Japan’s south. Positions bestow influence. This is an operational option with allure.

And fourth, it’s worth noting that China will have the initiative in island-chain combat. Perimeter defense is a mostly static affair. It has “negative aims,” as Clausewitz would put it, meaning it strives to keep a foe from taking something away rather than trying to take something from the foe. Hence it involves awaiting blows. The negative attitude underlying perimeter defense opens up a menu of options for an enterprising antagonist.

Menus list delicacies. Master of deception Barton Whaley observes that a force that can plausibly pursue more than one objective puts its enemy on the horns of a dilemma. It compels enemy commanders to choose between dispersing forces in a bid to protect all potential objectives and guessing at the one true objective and committing resources to defend it. Guess wrong and you could lose it all. Or as General William Tecumseh Sherman once encapsulated his battlefield strategy: put your opponent on the horns of a dilemma, then gore him with one of them!

In a way, U.S. Navy war planners had it easy during the interwar decades. They could afford to assume the United States would lose Far Eastern possessions of less than paramount importance, chiefly the Philippines and Guam, at the outset of a Pacific war against Japan. This simplified matters. Raw facts of power let them concentrate on explaining how U.S. joint forces should fight their way back into the Western Pacific to retake these possessions and starve out Japan. War Plan Orange and its successors were the result.

Today, though, the United States cannot afford to surrender its commitments in East Asia. An early defeat could see China conquer Taiwan, wrench the Senkaku Islands from Japan, or otherwise order things to Beijing’s liking and Washington’s detriment. Allies would lose faith in U.S. martial prowess and might accommodate themselves to the wishes of a strongman China. The alliance system would falter, and America’s strategic position with it.

Deployed forces, then, must stand until the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated forces can battle their way into the arena to join them. Like their Plan Orange forerunners, war planners today must figure out how to crack the access-denial problem. But they must also shoulder the burden of figuring out how to balk Chinese strategy—and deny Beijing the fait accompli it craves—until the cavalry thunders to the rescue.

Revisiting the basics of perimeter defense would make a good start. After all, a reverse Great Wall is an inert obstacle without wily defenders. Build the wall—and educate the sentries destined to guard it.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, and author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest

Image: Reuters.

Modi’s party is expected to further polarize state electorates along religious lines in 2021.

When they enter office, Biden and Harris must make up for lost ground.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

Japan had already waged biological warfare in China.

Here's What You Need to Know: Plans to employ bioweapons cannot help but seem especially short-sighted given the indiscriminate and unpredictable nature of diseases.

During World War II, Japan infamously deployed biological weapons in attacks that infected and killed thousands of Chinese citizen. Less well known, however, is the fact that Japanese strategists also planned to deploy plague bombs against U.S. forces on at least four separate occasions—each only narrowly averted by circumstance. The last such attack, known as Operations Cherry Blossoms at Night, envisioned bombing San Diego with plague-infected fleas.

The Japanese bioweapons program was the brainchild of Gen. Shirō Ishii, who in the 1930s received backing at the highest levels to form a biological warfare unit known as Unit 731, deceptively designated the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department” of the Kwantung Army deployed to China. Unit 731 established a massive 150-building complex in the Pingfang District of Harbin (then part of the puppet state of Manchuria), where it developed and tested its weapons on involuntary human subjects, around two-thirds of whom were Chinese, with most of the rest coming from the Soviet Union. Their subjects would later include a small number of Allied POWs, Koreans and Pacific islanders.

One cannot overstate the monstrousness of Unit 731’s testing program. Human beings were vivisected while still alive without anesthetic, or had major organs removed to see how long they would survive, then had their remains pickled in jars. Subjects had their limbs frozen until afflicted with frostbite, then had those limbs beaten with sticks or amputated. Others afflicted with syphilis, including children, were forced to have sex at gunpoint with other prisoners, and the progression of the disease was then observed. Live human beings were used in weapons tests of grenades, poison gas, flamethrowers and bombs—including air-dropped biological bombs carrying anthrax or fluid-form bacteria.

However, the chief weapon favored by Japanese biowarfare specialists appears to have been the plague, the bacterial infection which wiped out much of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century during the Black Death. A few days after infection, a plague-afflicted person may begin exhibiting symptoms, including grotesque buboes, high fever, gangrene in the extremities and chills or seizures, with a death rate of around 50 percent for untreated individuals.

Unit 731 was capable of producing around sixty pounds of plague agent in a few days, and the method of transmission mimicked that found in nature: plague-infested fleas. The fleas were stored in ceramic Uji-50 bombs with celluloid fins and dropped out of airplanes onto civilian communities. The released fleas went on to infest local rats, which in turn would contaminate food stores, spreading the plague to human beings.

This delivery mechanism was employed by Japanese bombers over the cities of Ningbo and Changde in China, and on some occasions proved “successful” in starting a plague, although whether casualties number in the hundreds or tens of thousands remains disputed. Following the Doolittle raid over Tokyo in 1942, Japanese troops launched a revenge campaign called Operation Sei-Go, which included the employment of cholera, typhoid, plague and dysentery bioweapons—which in addition to killing tens of thousands of Chinese, may have backfired and killed 1,700 Japanese troops by one estimate.

Having used China as a laboratory for its bioweapons, the Japanese military began searching for ways to use the weapons against its chief military threat. In March 1942, plans were made to drop 150 million infected fleas in ten separate plague-bomb attacks against U.S. and Philippine forces, who were fighting a desperate last stand on the swampy Bataan Peninsula of the Philippines. However, Allied forces surrendered that April, before the attack could be executed. That same year, Japanese military commanders mulled biological attacks on Dutch Harbor, Alaska; Calcutta, India; and parts of Australia, but didn’t carry them out. Other schemes proposed including infecting U.S. cattle and grain crops, or using balloon bombs as a means to disperse plague agents in North America.

Japan’s military fortunes had turned for the worse by 1944, when U.S. forces launched an amphibious invasion of Saipan Island in the Marianas. A biological warfare detachment preemptively detached there was overrun before it could deploy its weapons. Separately, a Japanese submarine was dispatched to the island of Truk with twenty biowarfare specialists onboard, including two medical officers and deadly pathogens. However, it was sunk on route by another American submarine, allegedly the USS Swordfish. During the bloody battle of Iwo Jima, Unit 731 even planned to deploy bioweapons via two German-made gliders, according to Japanese pilot Shoichi Matsumoto. However, the two gliders broke down in flight while being transferred from Japan to Unit 731’s base in China.

As the specter of total defeat loomed ever larger over the Japanese military, Ishii conceived Operation PX in December of 1944 as a last-ditch suicide mission on the continental United States. The target: San Diego, California. The delivery mechanism would be new I-400 class of submarine aircraft carriers nearing completion—the largest type of submarine to enter service during World War II. These massive vessels measured well over a football field in length at 122 meters, displaced 6,670 tons, and carried a 140-millimeter gun and three Aichi M6A Seiran floatplanes. These could be stowed in the sub’s hangar thanks to their folding wings and removable floats.

By using similar methods to the plague attack in China on a more densely populated urban area, it was hoped that plague-flea bombs would start an epidemic that would kill tens of thousands of Californians. Furthermore, commando teams aboard the submarines would land on U.S. soil and further disseminate cholera and plague.

The attack, codenamed Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night at Ishii’s insistence, was scheduled for September 22, 1945—five weeks after the Japanese surrender on August 15. While some sources characterize the war’s ending as aborting the attack, others state the bioweapon bombing was cancelled considerably earlier in March of 1945 by Gen Yoshijiro Umezu, who recognized how useless it would be. Even in the “best case” that the plague caused thousands of casualties and a degree of economic disruption in the United States, it would have been delusional to believe it could reverse Japan’s calamitous situation on the battlefields of the western Pacific. However, an account by flight instructor Toshimi Mizobuchi implies that personnel were being assembled as late as July to carry out the attack.

In any event, the Japanese Navy appears to have had different plans for the I-400 submarines, initially intending to use them to deliver a devastating strike on the Panama Canal. The Seiran pilots spent time in June practicing attack runs on simulated canal locks when the mission was scrapped, and another scheme was hatched to launch surprise attacks on U.S. forces assembling at the Ulithi Atoll, with the M6As illegally disguised with U.S. markings. The two operational submarines, I-400 and I-401, were at sea heading for Ulithi when they received word of the Japanese surrender, and promptly catapulted or shoved their planes into the sea.

Following the Japanese surrender, Ishii cut a deal with the U.S. military: he would hand over all the research data from his atrocious experiments on live human subjects in exchange for immunity from war-crimes prosecution for him and his scientists—an arrangement not dissimilar to that struck with many scientists in Nazi Germany. The chief of the U.S. bioweapons program deemed the research “absolutely invaluable” because its findings could not have been obtained in the United States “due to scruples attached to experiments on humans.” Years later, there were even rumors that Ishii had traveled to Maryland to work with the U.S. bioweapons program at Fort Detrick.

The Soviet Union was not as lenient towards twelve members of Unit 731 it captured in Manchuria, finding them guilty of war crimes in the Khabarovsk trials in 1949—though the confessions by the accused were dismissed for decades as Cold War propaganda in the West. In any case, the Soviet Union also scooped up all the documentation it could find in the Pingfang facility, and used it to build its own bioweapons complex in Sverdlovsk, Russia (now Yekaterinburg). Focused on the production of anthrax, the Sverdlovsk facility experienced a deadly leak in 1979 that killed dozens.

Plans to employ bioweapons cannot help but seem especially short-sighted given the indiscriminate and unpredictable nature of diseases. If the attack at Bataan had been carried out, for example, soon-to-be victorious Japanese troops would likely have fallen victim to their own plague. Just as air raids broadly targeting the civilian populations generally proved both cruel and of little military effectiveness during World War II, biological weapons were mostly “useful” for killing civilians. And if a bioweapon ever had proven successful in triggering a pandemic, such an outcome could have proven disastrous for both sides of the conflict.

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

This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Since the 1970s, the Russian military has possessed a diverse fleet of armored vehicles it can drop out of airplanes … with parachutes, of course.

Here's What You Need to Know: Though the era of mass airborne drops behind enemy lines may have passed, air-deployable vehicles still have great utility, even if they’re not especially tough.

Since the 1970s, the Russian military has possessed a diverse fleet of armored vehicles it can drop out of airplanes … with parachutes, of course.

The BMD family of infantry fighting vehicles is armed to the teeth with autocannons, machine guns and anti-tank missiles. And despite being very much a product of the Cold War, the little fighting vehicles have continued to see combat — and the new BMD-4 variant is even packing a 100-millimeter gun.

How did an airborne assault tank even come about?

Following World War II, the Soviet Union expanded its elite air landing forces — a separate branch of the military known as the VDV, which at its peak consisted of 15 Guards Airborne divisions and 13 independent brigades. Soviet strategists foresaw deploying the VDV far inside enemy territory as part of their “deep battle” doctrine, with different airborne units dedicated to strategic, operational and tactical missions.

For example, an operational airborne regiment or division might drop 100 to 300 kilometers behind enemy lines to capture river crossings, enemy command centers, logistical bases and nuclear weapons facilities.

However, Soviet military theorists were aware of the problems airborne infantry had faced during World War II, particularly in massive air-landing operations such as Operation Overlord and Market Garden — the latter which resulted in the virtual destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division.

Upon hitting the ground, scattered and disorganized paratroopers lacking mobile anti-tank weapons were likely to be slammed by counter-attacking enemy tanks. Furthermore, once landed, airborne infantry were slow to advance on objectives because they lacked their own motor vehicles.

The Soviet solution, of course, involved giving the airborne troopers their own armored vehicles — ones that can either be air dropped, lifted by helicopter, or rolled readily from a transport plane at a rough satellite airfield recently captured from the enemy.

In 1966, the Soviet Union introduced the BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle, a new type of armored personnel carrier which gave mechanized infantry squads the firepower to take on tanks and entrenched ground troops. The 14.6-ton BMP-1 packs a machine gun, an anti-tank missile launcher for sniping tanks at long range, and a 73-millimeter low-pressure cannon.

Soviet designers crammed the same formidable armament package onto the much smaller and lighter aluminum-hulled BMD-1, or Boyevaya Machine Desanta, meaning “Airborne Combat Vehicle.” The vehicle even boasts two additional machine guns on the corners of the front hull.

The smaller, eight-ton BMD-1 is most easily visually distinguished by its shorter front hull compared to the BMP-1.

The speedy, tracked vehicles can attain roads speeds of 50 miles per hour, 25 percent faster than the BMP-1. By 1982, each 6,500-man Soviet airborne division had 330 BMD-1s on its organizational chart, effectively making them into light mechanized units.

BMDs are compact enough that Mi-6 and Mi-26 transport helicopters can carry them, and up to three can fit inside larger Il-76 transport jets, or two within an An-12 medium transport. Heavy-duty hydraulic suspension helps the BMD cope with the impact of an air drop, and also allows for adjustable ground clearance ranging between 10 and 45 centimeters.

Originally, the Soviets’ plan was to drop the vehicles in cargo palettes separately from their crew of four, but the operators often landed far away from their tanks and had trouble finding them. The solution — simple enough — was for the driver and commander to hit the ground with a jeep and drive to their BMD.

The armored vehicles still experienced rough landings while floating down to the earth at 15 to 20 meters per second, so the Soviet Union developed a rocket parachute. Touch-sensitive rods dangling below the BMD pallet activates a retro rocket upon hitting the ground, helping slow terminal landing velocity to a safer six meters per second.

The BMDs can float in more ways than one.

The light vehicles are fully amphibious, propelled through water at speeds of up to six miles per hour by two water jets similar to those on the PT-76 light tank. Transitioning the vehicle for water operations merely involves lowering a trim vane, raising a driver’s periscope and activating a bilge pump.

BMDs brought paratroopers one more key advantage — the vehicles are protected from many of the effects of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, giving the crews a chance to survive on a contaminated battlefield.

However, the BMD-1 arrived with several major downsides. Its smaller, cramped passenger compartments have a lower passenger capacity of just three or four paratroopers, who must exit out a top hatch, a far more vulnerable disembarkation method than via the rear ramp on a BMP. In recent fighting in Ukraine, infantry have often elected to ride on top of their BMDs, rendering somewhat absurd the entire premise of an armored transport.

For this reason, some observers consider the BMD to be more of a light tank than a true infantry fighting vehicle.

Furthermore, the BMD has lightweight aluminum armor — not steel — which is prone to catching fire and melting, resulting in many battle-damaged BMDs being reduced to charred skeletons after the fuel ignited in combat.

The BMD-1 shares some problems in common with the BMP-1. The BMD’s armor is roughly just as thin, with a maximum of 33 millimeters on the front for protection from 12.7-millimeter machine guns, and as little as 13 millimeters along the vehicles side. That’s just enough to protect those inside from rifle bullets but little else.

The 73-millimeter “Grom” gun has also performed poorly in combat due to limited range and accuracy beyond 500 meters, and insufficient vertical traverse to hit targets on steep hills or at the bottom of deep valleys. The early Malyutka anti-tank missiles carried on top proved difficult to fire, guide and reload.

Neither weapon can be fired accurately while moving.

Airborne armor in Ethiopia and Afghanistan

The Soviet Union exported BMDs not only within the Warsaw Pact, but to Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Angola. Cuban troops were possibly the first to test the Soviet mechanized airborne doctrine in combat during the Ogaden War.

In July 1977, a Somali army of 70,000 troops and 600 armored vehicles invaded Ethiopia in an attempt to capture the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, which was majority Somali in population. The Soviet Union was then allied with both Somalia and Ethiopia.

The Kremlin first attempted to mediate the conflict, and then decided to throw all its support behind the Ethiopians, sending 300 Soviet advisers who joined 15,000 Cuban expeditionary troops.

By September, Somali forces had overrun the 25,000 troops defending the town of Jijiga near the strategic Kara Marda Pass, and in November laid siege to the walled city of Harar, the regional capital. There, an army of 40,000 Ethiopian troops bolstered by Cuban soldiers and Soviet advisers brought the Somali advance to halt.

While the Ethiopians built up their strength during the rainy season, Soviet Gen. Vasiliy Petrov planned a pincer counterattack. As Cuban tanks tackled the Somalis head on in February 1978, Mi-6 transport helicopters landed 70 BMD-1 fighting vehicles and ASU-57 assault guns at Kara Marda, dozens of miles behind the Somali defenses.

Striking in unison with a frontal attack up the pass, the airborne armored offensive swiftly recaptured the pass and Jijiga soon afterward, inflicting 3,000 casualties and spreading panic throughout the Somali army, hastening its total rout from Ethiopian territory.

Two years later, BMD-1s rolled out of the cargo bays of Soviet transport planes in Kabul, Afghanistan, enabling the airborne troops to rapidly seize major Afghan cities. Of course, just as the U.S. military learned, Afghanistan may be easy to invade but it’s difficult to leave, and the Soviet 40th Army remained committed to counter-insurgency operations against the mujahideen for the following decade.

Of the four to six divisions in the 40th Army, the 103rd Guards Airborne Division performed the majority of offensive operations. Although the desantniki, or airborne troopers, are best remembered for their use of air-mobile tactics combined with Hind helicopter gunships, the paratroopers frequently relied on their BMDs to deploy quickly into combat.

However, the lightly armored vehicles were even more vulnerable to Afghan ambushes than Russia’s regular BTR and BMP troop carriers. The little vehicles were vulnerable to mines, and the stony terrain wore down their tracks especially fast.

In 1985, Soviet troops in Afghanistan began receiving the BMD-2, a stop-gap model which swapped the low-pressure gun for a 2A42 30-millimeter autocannon that is more effective against infantry and light vehicles and can be fired on the move. The missile launcher was upgraded to fire newer AT-4 and AT-5 Konkurs anti-tank missiles. New steel rollers improved the vehicle’s durability on rough terrain, though the vehicle was now 50 percent heavier, at 11.5 tons.

A decade earlier, the Soviet Union had introduced the slightly lengthened BTR-D, a troop carrier variant of the BMD that replaced the turret and its armament for the capacity to carry a squad of nine paratroopers. Many BTR-D variants were produced including Rheostat artillery observation vehicles, anti-tank missile and drone carriers, and armored engineering and anti-aircraft vehicles.

The most notable spinoff of the BTR-D is the tank-like 2S9 Nona with a turret-mounted 120 millimeter gun-mortar — effective at both direct fire and lobbing shells at targets up to nine kilometers away.

The 2S9 saw action in Afghanistan, where the armored mortar proved useful due to its mobility, low minimum firing range, and ability to plunge shells at steep angles behind walls and ridges.

By 1990, production began of a new 14-ton BMD-3 with a roomier, redesigned hull that accommodates the same two-man steel turret as the BMP-2, and five passengers. However, Russia only produced 143 of these as its military rapidly contracted following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Despite the BMD’s specialized role, the vehicle did not fade into obscurity. BMDs continued to serve with airborne units fighting in Chechnya and Georgia, and even with Russia’s former peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Exported BMD-1s saw action in Iran, Angola and Iraq during the ’80s and ’90s. A photo from 2003 credits a tank from the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1st Tank Battalion as having blown the turret off a BMD-1 in Al Tubah Habra, Iraq.

‘Desantniki’ in Georgia

At midnight on Aug. 7-8, 2008, Georgian forces launched an offensive against Russian-backed South Ossetian separatists. The artillery barrage, and the ground offensive that followed it, struck Russian troops based in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

By 4:00 p.m. on Aug. 8, Moscow began flying the desantniki of the 104th Air Assault Regiment based in Pskov on Il-76s to a forward staging airfield in Beslan, North Ossetia — earlier, the site of a horrific terrorist attack. The 104th, which operated BMD-1s, was soon joined by the BMD-2s of the 234th Regiment. Both united and transited into South Ossetia via the Roki tunnel.

The publication The Tanks of August from the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies of and Technologies details some of the confused action that ensued.

On Aug. 11, a battalion each from the 104th and the 234th spearheaded an offensive aimed at pushing back Georgian artillery units from Tskhinvali. Each battalion had around 20 BMDs, supported by 2S9s and BTR-Ds equipped with 23-millimeter anti-aircraft guns.

The BTR-Ds reportedly engaged Georgian Mi-24 Hind helicopters which had just shot up a Russian truck convoy, and damaged one of the gunships. Meanwhile, the 2S9 self-propelled mortars served as the only forward artillery support available to Russian ground forces at that stage of the campaign.

In one engagement, a company of Georgian engineers mounted on a dozen trucks bumped into two BMD-1s — one of them broken down — and a dozen paratroopers who had been left behind in the town of Shindisi. The blaze of cannon shells and rocket-propelled grenades from the desantniki caused the Georgian unit to scatter and take cover in nearby buildings.

The BMDs engaged in a half-hour-long firefight before Russian armored and infantry companies intervened and destroyed the Georgian unit. By the end of the same day, a Russian recon company mounted on BMDs entered the important city of Poti.

The Russian mechanized airborne units had succeeded in securing key objectives in Georgia while suffering only modest losses — with only a single BMD-2 confirmed destroyed near Shindisi.

The BMD-4 gets a large gun

In 2014, Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatist forces both made extensive use of BMD-1 and 2s and BTR-Ds — and lost 40 to 60 of the vehicles between them, highlighting the vehicle’s age and vulnerability to virtually any type of heavy weapon.

Despite being intended to provide a defense against tanks, there are no accounts of BMDs destroying tanks in any conflict. The vehicles have proven handy in reconnaissance and fire support missions, but it is hard to envision large-scale parachute operations on a 21st century battlefield featuring modern anti-aircraft weapons.

Nonetheless, in 2005 Russia produced a small run of new 15-ton BMD-4 vehicles evolved from the BMD-3. This version incorporates the heavily-armed turret of the earlier BMP-3, including a 100-millimeter cannon equipped with high explosive and shaped charge anti-tank shells, and a 30 millimeter co-axial auto cannon.

The BMD-4 not only retains the Konkurs anti-tank missile launcher post on top, but can shoot long-range AT-10 Arkan missiles through the cannon.

A recent modernized variant, the BMD-4M, features increased parts commonality with the BMP-3, including an improved engine, as well a new version with a thermal imager.

Supposedly the BDM-4M’s front armor has been reinforced to survive hits from 30-millimeter cannon shells, but chances are it’s vulnerable like its predecessors, and its airborne and amphibious roles remain a specialized niche compared to the larger BMP-3.

This led to a rare spate of internal criticism of the vehicle, with one Russian general ridiculing the production of a light vehicle “with no protection, that costs as much as a tank.”

Nonetheless, the Russian military approved a new order in 2014, and the Volgograd tank factory is currently churning out dozens of BMD-4Ms and their BTR-MDM trooper carrier models each year to fulfill an order of 250. The new model will enter service with Russian naval infantry — and possibly the Indonesian navy as well — due to its amphibious capabilities.

Though the era of mass airborne drops behind enemy lines may have passed, air-deployable vehicles still have great utility, even if they’re not especially tough. The U.S. Army once operated its own parachute-tank, the M-551 Sheridan, which saw action in Vietnam, Panama and the Gulf War. The Sheridan’s only air-dropped combat mission was in Panama.

Like the BMD, the Sheridan was made of aluminum armor that left it vulnerable to mines and heavy weapons, and many were lost in action. However, the light tanks brought heavy firepower to the battlefield, especially as they were sometimes the only armor available to support infantry in the field. The Sheridan’s retirement in 1996 left a gap in the airborne force structure that has yet to be replaced.

By contrast, even though Russia’s airborne force has been reduced to just four divisions, the desantniki seem intent on retaining their lightly armored, air-droppable steeds just in case.

Like the United States, Russia has called up its airborne units time and time again to fight in conventional military operations — and possessing fast and heavily-armed fighting vehicles for those situations is handy, even if their armor leaves something to be desired.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

James Holmes

Security, Americas

Should America instead invest in other platforms such as submarines?

Key point: Just because we have a certain kind of navy now does not mean it is the best one. Perhaps aircraft carriers are too costly and vulnerable and a different fleet structure is needed?

Here's a thought experiment: would America build the U.S. Navy currently plying the seven seas if it were starting from scratch? Color me skeptical. If not, what kind of navy would it build, and how can we approximate that ideal in light of budgetary constraints, a slew of legacy platforms that can't simply be scrapped and replaced, and an organizational culture and history that frown on revolutionary change?

For the idea behind this exercise, a tip of the hat goes to Shawn Brimley and Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security or CNAS, who ran an item over at Foreign Policy last May wondering how the United States would reboot the armed forces as a whole. Brimley and Scharre dangle their query out there with a few remarks about organizational wiring diagrams and personnel policy. They hint at answers without quite giving them. They want to start a rumble within officialdom. In a novus ordo seclorum, would we create, say, a separate U.S. Air Force, or institute recruitment and retention policies reminiscent of conscription? Such matters are worth pondering.

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

Last week, writing in a similar vein, Washington Post columnist and sometime naval enthusiast  George Will asked what kind of navy the nation needs, and wants. That sounds like a technical question. And it is -- in part. Is the U.S. Navy outfitted with the right types and numbers of ships, aircraft, and armaments?

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Yet Will cuts to the heart of the matter. At bottom this is less a question about gadgetry or high-seas tactics than about national purposes and power. Nations, that is, amass military power to fulfill larger purposes. Martial strength helps advance their interests, ward off danger, and uphold their ideals. But does a listless American republic, "demoralized by squandered valor in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dismayed in dramatically different ways by two consecutive commanders in chief," even want to project power overseas?

If so, where, and to what ends? Today, maintains Will, "cascading dangers are compelling Americans to think afresh about something they prefer not to think about at all -- foreign policy. What they decide that they want will define the kind of nation they want the United States to be. This abstract question entails a concrete one: What kind of navy do Americans want?"

Good question. There's a canned quality to what-if exercises like this one. Two basic approaches come to mind. One, there's the tabula rasa. You could posit that the United States is only now rising to regional or world power, and thus is making itself a sea power for the first time. Such a scenario would be a throwback to 1883, when the nation started constructing its first steam-driven battle fleet. Americans could start from first principles, asking themselves what they wanted to accomplish in the world and what kind of naval might their republic needed to accomplish it.

Or, two, you could stipulate that the United States somehow made itself into the world power it is, blessed and burdened by its current array of foreign alliances and commitments, without ever having built an imposing navy to bind such arrangements together. The challenge in this unlikely scenario would be to field a fleet able to uphold commitments to Japan, Australia, NATO, and so forth. The demands of these two constructs are starkly different. For the fun of it, and to avoid a War and Peace-length discourse -- a zero-based look at U.S. foreign policy would consume page after page -- let's go with the latter. What kind of navy should Washington build to discharge today's commitments if starting afresh?

To further simplify the problem, let's accept the geopolitical assessment set forth in the 2007 U.S. Maritime Strategy, titled A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. In the strategy the chieftains of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard pronounce the Western Pacific and greater Indian Ocean the primary theaters for U.S. marine endeavor. They pledge to stage credible combat power in the Indo-Pacific for the foreseeable future, using forward-deployed forces to execute a variety of missions. Enforcing freedom of the seas and skies in peacetime, deterring war or winning it, and rendering humanitarian or disaster relief rank high on the sea services' to-do list.

How to proceed? When contemplating grand enterprises, you seldom go wrong starting with Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz urges statesmen and commanders to take a tour d'horizon before picking up the sword. To "discover" how many and what type of resources they need to marshal, they need to evaluate the adversary's and their own political aims. What does each belligerent want, and how much does it want it? Strategic overseers should survey the opponent's "strength and situation," appraising everything from geography to military potential to morale. They should "gauge the character and abilities" of the opponent's government and people, and of their own. And they should evaluate the "political sympathies" of third parties, estimating the likely impact of military action on these prospective allies, enemies, or bystanders.

Clausewitz's discovery process is meant for discrete conflicts, but it's a serviceable template for long-term strategy as well. Applied to the Indo-Pacific rimlands, who are the likely competitors, what are their long-term interests and aspirations, and how much are they prepared to invest in fulfilling these aspirations? How can Washington sway them in favor of American policy? What advantages and liabilities does prospective antagonists' offshore geography present, how much and what type of military potential do they boast, and is their warmaking potential likely to wax, wane, or stagnate over time? Are their people and government well suited to long-term strategic competition? And what impact will the competition have on third parties? Will it help the United States firm up its alliances or woo new partners? Or will it erode ties in the region?

Sizing up the strategic surroundings, then, represents the beginning of wisdom. Now let's neck down to the operational and hardware levels. How can a reinvented U.S. Navy achieve its goals amid Indo-Pacific surroundings? For insight let's ask that scion of Edwardian England, sea-power theorist Julian S. Corbett. Corbett partitions navies into the "battle fleet," "cruisers," and the "flotilla." The battle fleet dukes it out with enemy fleets for command of vital waters. Thrashing the enemy frees the cruisers and flotilla -- swarms of lighter, less heavily armed, cheaper craft -- to fan out in large numbers, controlling seagoing traffic at important junctures on the map. Command also empowers a navy to blockade enemy shores, land troops, or otherwise project force from the sea. These too are jobs for cruisers and the flotilla.

And they're the crucial jobs. Harnessing the sea for our purposes while keeping enemies from interfering is the point of maritime strategy. Battle, then, is only an enabler in marine warfare -- not an end in itself. "Capital ships" constituting the battle fleet thus occupy a curious place in navies. They enjoy most of the sex appeal, festooned as they are with radars, missiles, and guns. And their efforts are indispensable to success. Enemy sea power does have to be expelled from the expanses that matter, or at least reduced to near-impotence. But at the same time Corbett insists that the battle line's chief function is to protect unsexy cruisers and flotilla ships at their "special work." Though celebrated in legend and song, then, fleet engagements are merely a means to that happy end. Savvy commanders refuse to fight Trafalgar- or Leyte-like actions for their own sake.

This was true in Corbett's day, but what about our own? Seeking out the enemy fleet for a major action at the outset of a conflict -- Corbett's preferred method for settling affairs -- may avail a dominant navy little in today's strategic setting. That's because incapacitating or sinking an enemy fleet no longer represents a sure route to success, as it did during the age of Corbett a century ago. No longer is sea power all about fleets. For instance, arsenals of anti-ship missiles and aircraft can strike hundreds of miles from a local defender's coasts -- shaping events on the high seas even if no surface fleet gets underway. Even if our hypothetical U.S. Navy, say, knocks China's shiny new fleet out of a conflict, American task forces must still operate under the shadow of shore-based sea power. Disabling Chinese airfields or mobile anti-ship-missile batteries threatens to be harder and more exasperating than fighting a concentrated fleet.

Corbett's Royal Navy never faced barrages of Imperial German anti-ship ballistic or cruise missiles lofted its way. The Corbettian playbook for maritime warfare remains relevant -- but naval commanders should flip to the pages in his book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy that explore how to start campaigns from a position of weakness. If it proves impossible to win command of the commons through a decisive encounter at the outset, what then? Well, a U.S. Navy optimized for an anti-access environment would deploy assets to eliminate the opponent's navy (or, second best, bottle it in port) while trying to nullify the land-based component of enemy sea power. It would deny the opponent his goals as a first step.

But denial is not the same thing as command. Wrestling command from antagonists isn't simply about defeating an enemy fleet. It's about defeating enemy sea power as a whole -- including that land-based component of which Corbett could scarcely have dreamt. Shore-based sea power radiates from an enemy's homeland. That leaves navies operating off enemy coasts an uncomfortable choice. They can strike hard at sites on land, and risk escalating the conflict. They can refrain from hitting targets on enemy soil, and grant a major portion of enemy sea power sanctuary from which to lash out at U.S. task forces. Or they can try to break the opponent's "kill chain" though some mix of deception, electronic warfare, and other measures that inflict little physical damage on opposing forces yet yield decisive effects.

None of these options is especially palatable. Winning command in future conflicts promises to demand a slow grind rather than the knockout blow that so captivates seafarers and maritime theorists. Which is where Corbett furnishes a helpful algorithm for the inferior force. For Sir Julian, maritime warfare is about denying command (which he terms "permanent general control" of important expanses), winning command, and exploiting command. Deftly handled, a lesser fleet can deny an antagonist command of the sea while striving to shift the balance in its favor. It can shift the balance by building new forces, massing existing forces, fighting alongside existing allies or courting new ones, or encouraging adversary commanders to fritter away their strength across the map or do stupid things. This leads, at last, to some specific pointers for rebooting the U.S. Navy:

-    Find out what the American people and government will support. Sea power is a conscious political choice, not a birthright or something that happens in a fit of absence of mind. George Will hints that Americans are too distracted and war-weary to make the choice for sea power. If that's true, then future naval operations will amount to campaigns limited by "contingent." War-by-contingent is Corbett's way of describing an endeavor whose dimensions are determined not by the goals sought but by the amount of resources a society is prepared to spend. This way of executing policy assigns commanders a fixed amount of assets and manpower and instructs them to do great things with it. The founders of a rebooted U.S. Navy must undertake some soul-searching about what they can achieve with stingy means. Preferred methods may be unaffordable.

-    Run silent, run deep. If Congress has indeed capped U.S. maritime means more or less permanently, undersea warfare promises the biggest bang for limited bucks. Nuclear-powered submarines, or SSNs, constitute an enduring U.S. naval advantage. They can deny an adversary the use of the sea. If nothing else, then, submarines could impose a sort of mutual assured sea denial while naval commanders try to neutralize enemy shore-based forces by other means. Subs cannot command the sea, but they can clear it of hostile surface fleets. That's a major contribution if also a negative one. SSNs, consequently, should have first claim on scarce shipbuilding dollars. But undersea combat need not involve all nukes, all the time. To proliferate subs while holding down costs, why not, say, buy Japanese? The U.S. Navy could purchase some Japanese Soryu-class diesel attack boats -- acclaimed among the world's best -- and create a standing combined squadron in Japan. Naval officials should explore such options.

-    Demote the surface fleet. Traditional prestige platforms such as aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers would find themselves demoted in a rebooted U.S. Navy. Their capacity to spearhead the fight against a capable access denier -- a power like China that fields a beatable navy but backs it up with a large shore-based arsenal -- appears increasingly doubtful. Surface ships that have to await the outcome of the struggle for command? That sounds like Corbett's definition of cruisers and the flotilla -- large numbers of lightly armed combatants for policing relatively safe waters and projecting power ashore after the battle is won. Let's act on his guidelines for platforms that exercise command. A mix of workhorse frigate- or corvette-like platforms for peacetime pursuits, combat platforms designed to operate in less threatening wartime theaters, and small missile craft for harrying access deniers in cramped Asian waters looks like the refounded U.S. Navy's best bet. Naval leaders should fund the most capable, most numerous surface force they can -- on a not-to-interfere basis with units that compete for maritime mastery.

Reinventing America's navy, in short, could involve reshuffling priorities for future acquisitions, tactics, and operations. A strategy premised on starting with sea denial, deploying unconventional techniques to incapacitate adversaries' sensors and weaponry, and relegating the surface navy to secondary status would have seismic impact not just on the navy's warmaking methods and force structure but on its very culture. But a cultural revolution may be what the service needs to fulfill its ends while operating on a shoestring budget in a menacing world.

Needless to say, lots of assumptions are at work here. Every system of logic has its givens and its theorems. For one thing, is anti-access just a moment in naval history? I assume not. Prospective Asian competitors outrange U.S. Navy men-of-war for the moment. It's conceivable, nonetheless, that some combination of technological wizardry -- shipboard lasers, electromagnetic railguns, unmanned combat aircraft -- and inventive tactics could restore mobility and superior striking range to fleets. If so, the surface navy could regain its accustomed nautical mastery. Or, lawmakers and administration officials could make the pitch to the electorate for more resources. A bigger navy could withstand combat losses in an anti-access setting and keep fighting. Better a surplus of assets than a deficit. And so forth.

Don't like my thought experiment? Run your own. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Nuclear artillery shells could have been the ultimate weapon--or not.

Here's What You Need to Know: Modern war won't necessarily involve a liberal sprinkling of little mushroom clouds—an epiphany we should all be thankful for.

Today the use of nuclear weapons is a near-unthinkable military option of last resort. But back in the 1950s, that norm had yet to be established. The U.S. Army believed then that in the event of war with the Soviet Union, tactical nukes would be landing left and right across the battlefield. It therefore fielded the “Pentomic” division to fight on the anticipated nuclear hellscape. It even gave battalion-level commanders access to short-range nuclear shells, which risked blasting the units that fired them.

The motive behind the Pentomic divisions may have been more political than military. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration believed nuclear weapons were so powerful that conventional ground troops would be rendered irrelevant. The doctrine of “massive retaliation” dictated that the United States would respond to any Soviet attack with full-scale nuclear attack. Indeed, Eisenhower even considered going nuclear to prevent Vietnamese and Chinese Communist forces from securing battlefield victories that were hardly direct threats to U.S. national security.

Because the U.S. Air Force and Navy had the majority of nuclear-weapons systems, they received the lion’s share of military funding. Under the “New Look” defense budget of 1955, the Army was considered a mere garrison force to protect nuclear-weapons facilities. The infantry branch in particular fell from a height of 250,000 personnel during the Korean War to around 130,000.

Eager to get a bigger cut, the U.S. Army decided it needed to field a force fit for the nuclear age. At the time, U.S. infantry divisions still had the “triangular” force structure used in World War II, with units organized in threes: three companies in a battalion, three battalions in a regiment, three regiments in a division, and so forth. The battalions in each regiment were supposed to stick close together for tactical, logistical and communications support. However, military theorists worried that large regiments would be make ideal targets for nuclear attacks. To their thinking, numerous smaller, independent units would be more survivable.

Thus the Army coined the Pentomic division, so named because it was based around five battalions—renamed “battle groups”—each composed of five infantry companies. A sixth support company in the battle group included radars, a battery of 4.2-inch mortars, 106-millimeter antitank recoilless rifles and eventually the U.S. Army’s first antitank missiles, the French-made SS-10. The infantry squads were increased to eleven men each and issued squad-level radios for the first time, as well as new M14 semiautomatic rifles with twenty-round magazines that could be switched to (inaccurate) automatic fire.

The Pentomic divisions possessed no regimental level of organization. Instead, armor, artillery and logistical elements were detached from the division to reinforce each 1,400-man battle group. By 1960, the Pentomic divisions had five direct support artillery battalions, with one battery apiece of 105- and 155-millimeter howitzers, as well as a five-company tank battalion. These would be split up to support battle groups on the frontline, allowing the infantry units to remain self-sufficient even if they were cut off from support by radiation and advancing Soviet tanks.

The three Airborne Divisions then active were the first to convert to the Pentomic organizational structure in 1957, and all the active Infantry Divisions followed in 1958. The armored branch did not undergo conversion, as it already had a smaller and more flexible organization. In general, there was not much enthusiasm for the Pentomic system, as each division became smaller and lost much of the historical identity invested in the absent regimental units.

The Army’s first nuclear weapon system, the M65 280-millimeter cannon, lacked mobility. But soon rockets and lighter nuclear artillery shells made nuclear firepower available to divisional commanders in the Pentomic division’s general support battalion. World War II–era eight-inch M115 howitzers were issued W33 nuclear-tipped shells with a yield of up to forty kilotons. These could be lobbed up to ten miles away. Meanwhile, truck-mounted MGR-1 Honest John rocket systems could strike targets fifteen to thirty miles distant, depending on the model. The unguided 760-millimeter rockets were prone to scattering the length of a couple football fields off target, but a high level of precision wasn’t a priority when delivering thirty-kiloton nuclear warheads.

The ultimate upgrade to the Pentomic division came in 1961, when battle groups received the M28 and M29 Davy Crockett towed recoilless guns. These fired W54 .01-kiloton nuclear warheads that weighed seventy-six pounds. The miniature nukes emitted enough radiation to immediately kill everyone within five hundred feet of the point of detonation, and cause blindness or slow death in a much wider radius. But the 120-millimeter M28 had a maximum range of just slightly over a mile, which meant the crew of three could easily be affected by the radiation from their own weapon. The 155-millimeter M29 variant had double the range, making it somewhat more practical. Placing so many nuclear weapons in the hands of frontline battle groups multiplied the chance of unauthorized use, and the more than two thousand rounds produced increased the likelihood of the man-portable warheads being lost or stolen.

In battle, a Pentomic division was supposed to keep its battle groups spread out in defensive islands, so that no more than one could be wiped out by a single nuclear strike. Pre-sighted Davy Crocketts deployed in Europe would irradiate key chokepoints, killing Soviet tank crews inside their vehicles and preventing other units from advancing through the area. When the division went on the attack, nuclear artillery would be used to blast holes through enemy lines which Pentomic battle groups could exploit.

Eventually, the Army evaluated the performance of the new divisions—and realized they were terrible. Five reinforced battalions simply weren’t as effective as three full regiments, especially in conventional warfare. Although the Pentomic divisions theoretically had 33 percent more troops in frontline roles, they often needed to shift those troops back to logistical tasks because the support services were undermanned. The Pentomic battle groups also lacked battlefield mobility in the form of armored all-terrain transport. Eventually, divisional transport units received M113 APCs and H-34 helicopters in order to provide mechanized or airborne movement to one or two battle groups at a time—out of five.

Despite modernized communication systems, the Pentomic division also posed command-and-control problems. The colonel in charge of a battle group had to direct five to nine companies at a time once typical supporting units were accounted for, rather than the three to five a battalion commander would normally have to deal with. This was more than most officers could efficiently keep track of. The lack of a regimental organization also distorted the Army’s rank structure. The armies of Australia, Spain, Turkey and West Germany all considered adopting the Pentomic structure—and all gave up on it within a few years.

Most importantly, under President Kennedy the Pentagon switched to a doctrine of “flexible response,” which did not automatically assume escalation to nuclear warfare. This way of thinking was encouraged by improvements in Soviet nuclear capabilities. American military planners were horrified to discover from war games that even “limited” use of nuclear weapons would cause massive devastation to Europe, and so the Army reoriented itself towards winning conventional conflicts, as well as counterinsurgency in developing countries.

The Pentomic divisions fortunately never saw combat, though they came close to doing so in the Cuban Missile Crisis. After only five years, the Army began transitioning in 1962 to the ROAD division, which largely reverted to a triangular organization. The Davy Crocketts were withdrawn from operational units by 1968. While the Army retained nuclear artillery shells for several more decades, the passing of the Pentomic division marked the turning point when the Pentagon realized modern war wouldn’t necessarily involve a liberal sprinkling of little mushroom clouds—an epiphany we should all be thankful for.

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

This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Bill Boecker

James Holmes

Security, World

Carriers are large, complex warmachines and it is impressive when a country gets it right.

Key point: These ships made history, either through combat or sheer technological advancement. Which is your favorite?

Anyone who's tried to compare one piece of kit—ships, aircraft, weaponry of various types—to another will testify to how hard this chore is. Ranking aircraft carriers is no exception. Consulting the pages of Jane's Fighting Ships or Combat Fleets of the World sheds some light on the problem. For instance, a flattop whose innards house a nuclear propulsion plant boasts virtually unlimited cruising range, whereas a carrier powered by fossil fuels is tethered to its fuel source. As Alfred Thayer Mahan puts it, a conventional warship bereft of bases or a coterie of logistics ships is a "land bird" unable to fly far from home.

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

Or, size matters. The air wing—the complement of interceptors, attack planes and support aircraft that populate a carrier's decks—comprise its main battery or primary armament. The bigger the ship, the bigger the hangar and flight decks that accommodate the air wing.

Nor, as U.S. Navy carrier proponents like to point out, is the relationship between a carrier's tonnage and number of aircraft it can carry strictly linear. Consider two carriers that dominate headlines in Asia. Liaoning, the Chinese navy's refitted Soviet flattop, displaces about sixty-five thousand tons and sports twenty-six fixed-wing combat aircraft and twenty-four helicopters. Not bad. USS George Washington, however, tips the scales at around one hundred thousand tons but can operate some eighty-five to ninety aircraft.

And the disparity involves more than raw numbers of airframes. George Washington's warplanes are not just more numerous but generally more capable than their Chinese counterparts. U.S. flattops boast steam catapults to vault larger, heavier-laden aircraft into the wild blue. Less robust carriers use ski jumps to launch aircraft. That limits the size, fuel capacity, and weapons load—and thus the range, flight times and firepower—of their air wings. Larger, more capable carriers, then, can accommodate a larger, more capable, and changing mixes of aircraft with greater ease than their lesser brethren. Aircraft carriers' main batteries were modular before modular was cool.

And yet straight-up comparisons can mislead. The real litmus test for any man-of-war is its capacity to fulfill the missions for which it was built. In that sense George Washington, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, may not be "superior" to USS America, the U.S. Navy's latest amphibious helicopter carrier, or to Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force "helicopter destroyers"—a.k.a. light aircraft carriers—despite a far more lethal air wing and other material attributes. Nor do carriers meant to operate within range of shore-based fire support—tactical aircraft, anti-ship missiles—necessarily need to measure up to a Washington on a one-to-one basis. Land-based implements of sea power can be the great equalizer. Like any weapon system, then, a great carrier does the job for which it was designed superbly.

And lastly, there's no separating the weapon from its user. A fighting ship isn't just a hunk of steel but a symbiosis of crewmen and materiel. The finest aircraft carrier is one that's both well-suited to its missions and handled with skill and derring-do when and where it matters most. Those three indices—brute material capability, fitness for assigned missions, a zealous crew—are the indices for this utterly objective, completely indisputable list of the Top Five Aircraft Carriers of All Time.

5. USS Midway (CV-41):

Now a museum ship on the San Diego waterfront, Midway qualifies for this list less for great feats of arms than for longevity, and for being arguably history's most versatile warship. In all likelihood she was the most modified. Laid down during World War II, the flattop entered service just after the war. During the Cold War she received an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and other trappings befitting a supercarrier. Indeed, Midway's service spanned the entire Cold War, winding down after combat action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991. Sheer endurance and flexibility entitles the old warhorse to a spot on this list.

4. USS Franklin (CV-13):

If Midway deserves a place mainly for technical reasons, the Essex-class carrier Franklin earns laurels for the resiliency of her hull and fortitude of her crew in battle. She was damaged in heavy fighting at Leyte Gulf in 1944. After refitting at Puget Sound Navy Yard, the flattop returned to the Western Pacific combat theater. In March 1945, having ventured closer to the Japanese home islands than any carrier to date, she fell under surprise assault by a single enemy dive bomber. Two semi-armor-piercing bombs penetrated her decks. The ensuing conflagration killed 724 and wounded 265, detonated ammunition below decks, and left the ship listing 13 degrees to starboard. One hundred six officers and 604 enlisted men remained on board voluntarily, bringing Franklin safely back to Pearl Harbor and thence to Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her gallantry in surviving such a pounding and returning to harbor merits the fourth position on this list.

3. Akagi:

Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's flagship serves as proxy for the whole Pearl Harbor strike force, a body composed of all six Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) frontline carriers and their escorts. Nagumo's was the most formidable such force of its day. Commanders and crewmen, moreover, displayed the audacity to do what appeared unthinkable—strike at the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its moorings thousands of miles away. Extraordinary measures were necessary to pull off such a feat. For example, freshwater tanks were filled with fuel to extend the ships' range and make a transpacific journey possible—barely.

The Pearl Harbor expedition exposed logistical problems that plagued the IJN throughout World War II. Indeed, Japan's navy never fully mastered the art of underway replenishment or built enough logistics ships to sustain operations far from home. As a result, Nagumo's force had too little time on station off Oahu to wreck the infrastructure the Pacific Fleet needed to wage war. And, admittedly, Akagi was lost at the Battle of Midway, not many months after it scaled the heights of operational excellence. Still, you have to give Akagi and the rest of the IJN task force their due. However deplorable Tokyo's purposes in the Pacific, her aircraft-carrier force ranks among the greatest of all time for sheer boldness and vision.

2. HMS Hermes (now the Indian Navy's Viraat): 

It's hard to steam thousands of miles into an enemy's environs, fight a war on his ground, and win. And yet the Centaur-class flattop Hermes, flagship of a hurriedly assembled Royal Navy task force, pulled it off during the Falklands War of 1982. Like Midway, the British carrier saw repeated modifications, most recently for service as an anti-submarine vessel in the North Atlantic. Slated for decommissioning, her air wing was reconfigured for strike and fleet-air-defense missions when war broke out in the South Atlantic. For flexibility, and for successfully defying the Argentine contested zone, Hermes rates second billing here.

1. USS Enterprise (CV-6):

Having joined the Pacific Fleet in 1939, the Yorktown-class carrier was fortunate to be at sea on December 7, 1941, and thus to evade Nagumo's bolt from the blue. Enterprise went on to become the most decorated U.S. Navy ship of World War II, taking part in eighteen of twenty major engagements of the Pacific War. She sank, or helped sink, three IJN carriers and a cruiser at the Battle of Midway in 1942; suffered grave damage in the Solomons campaign, yet managed to send her air wing to help win the climatic Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; and went on to fight in such engagements as the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. That's the stuff of legend. For compiling such a combat record, Enterprise deserves to be known as history's greatest aircraft carrier.

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

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

Image: Reuters.

The end of the pandemic is in sight but we must not let our guard down, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, as he welcomed the news that the global vaccine partnership COVAX has lined up almost two billion doses of existing and candidate vaccines for use worldwide.

Driven by insecurity, the effects of COVID-19, an on-going economic crisis, and the impact of flooding on livelihoods, three UN agencies called on Friday for immediate humanitarian access to eastern South Sudan’s Pibor county, where people are facing catastrophic levels of hunger. 

Peter Suciu

Security, Americas

The weapon was developed by the Dirección General Industria Militar Mexicana (Directorate of Military Industry) or DGIM, the Mexican military's industrial arm, to replace the German-designed Heckler & Koch G3, which was produced in Mexico under license.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The FX-05 has several improvements over the old G3. The biggest is that it has been re-chambered to 5.56mm ammunition, which has been used extensively during the Mexican Drug War.

Literally meaning "turquoise serpent" but also carrying the symbolic significance "fire serpent," the Xiuhcoatl was a creature of Aztec mythology – thus it is a fitting moniker for the FX-05 Xihcoalt Mexican assault rifle that entered service with the Mexican Army in 2006.

The weapon was developed by the Dirección General Industria Militar Mexicana (Directorate of Military Industry) or DGIM, the Mexican military's industrial arm, to replace the German-designed Heckler & Koch G3, which was produced in Mexico under license. The FX-05 was gradually phased into Mexican Army and was first seen in the September 16, 2006, Mexican Independence Day celebration when it was carried by soldiers of the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), the Special Forces Airmobile Group.

The FX-05, which has been widely used in the Mexican Drug Wars since its introduction, is chambered for the 5.56x45mm NATO round. It is a selective-fire, gas-operated assault weapon that utilizes a rotating bolt and has a rate of fire of 750 rounds per minute. It has an effective range of 200 to 800 meters and is fed from a 30-round detachable box magazine or 100-round drum magazine. It is currently available in three variations that include a full-length rifle, carbine and short carbine, and these differ mainly by barrel length. All three versions are made of carbon fiber reinforced impact-resistant polymer and utilize a translucent magazine, and each is adaptable for left-handed shooters as the charging handle can be installed on either side of the weapon.

This Mexican-made assault rifle isn't without some controversy. The Mexican government and German-based H&K had some 20 years ago agreed to supply locally-produced versions of the H&K G36 that were built at factories in Mexico under license. For a number of reasons, the Mexican government decided to go another direction, deciding it made more financial sense to design, develop and produce a homegrown weapon instead.

From appearances, it looked similar to the H&K G36 – so much so that the German government and H&K accused Mexico of copying the G36V design, and even threatened to take the case international tribunals. Mexico took the threat seriously enough that soon after the FX-05 was first seen in use with the GAFE units that it stopped manufacturing the new rifle.

The head of the DGIM, General Alfredo Oropeza, was caught in the legal crossfire. He had been in line to become the next Secretary of National Defense but was passed over due to the matter. Yet, just some three months later in a meeting between H&K and the Mexican government it was determined that the FX-05 was not, in fact, a copy of the G36. How this came to be as been a matter of conjecture but in the end, the Mexican Army has ramped up production.

While the 5.56mm round of the FX-05 is less powerful than that of the 7.62mm round of the G36, it is more ideally suited to the close-quarters urban warfare being seen in the sadly still ongoing war on the drug cartels. It could take something as powerful as fire serpent to truly turn the tide in that struggle.

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 in April 2020 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

Chinese missiles were made to ensure U.S. bases throughout the Pacific could be taken out of action.

Key point: Beijing knows that America has the technological edge in a major war. But they also know that America's forward-deployed bases are also very vulnerable to attack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s march jointly in the Indo-Pacific.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.