Diplomacy & Crisis News

Steve Cimbala, Adam Lowther

Security, The Americas

Although the arms control community is focused on the opportunity to cut the nuclear deterrent, the President has a responsibility to listen, as well, to the expert advice of his uniformed military advisors who must plan for, operate, and deploy nuclear and conventional forces.

President-elect Joe Biden recently indicated that he would review the nation’s nuclear deterrence strategy and weapons modernization program, focusing on reducing their role in national strategy. The review will also look to reduce funding for nuclear modernization. Depending on the administration's actions, there is a real risk of compromising the credibility of American deterrence when both China and Russia see the United States as a weakened great power. 

Although the arms control community is focused on the opportunity to cut the nuclear deterrent, the President has a responsibility to listen, as well, to the expert advice of his uniformed military advisors who must plan for, operate, and deploy nuclear and conventional forces.

Undoubtedly, pressure exists within the Democratic party to do anything that seems anti-Trump. Tossing out the Trump administration’s nuclear modernization program would certainly fit that bill, but the Trump plan mostly followed the Obama script in calling for preserving all three legs of the strategic nuclear triad. 

Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review added a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, but experts suspected that this was a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Russia. The Obama and Trump administrations also favored replacing aging launch systems with new generations of SLBMs and heavy bombers. Some within the Obama administration favored replacing the 1970s-era Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and others preferred upgrading the existing platforms.   

In our judgment, until the future prospects for nuclear arms control are clearer, the prudent course for the Biden administration would be to maintain all three legs of the strategic nuclear triad and to replace aging systems with modern technology. There is broad support in Congress for this approach.

In passing its version of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in December 2020, Congress approved funding for the Columbia class strategic submarines ($4.46 billion); the B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber ($2.8 billion); the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) to replace Minuteman III ICBMs ($1.51 billion); the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO) nuclear cruise missile for the Air Force ($444 million); and additional modernization for the existing Trident II SLBM ($1.2 billion).  In addition, Congress also approved an expenditure of about $2.7 billion for nuclear warhead modernization.

Arms control advocates contend that the US can save money and contribute to arms control by downsizing its strategic nuclear triad to a “dyad" of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bombers. Opponents of ICBM modernization argue that strategic land-based missiles are especially destabilizing because they are vulnerable to first strikes and create unnecessary pressure for a preemptive launch during a crisis. This assertion is untrue and inconsistent with what we know about how the United States operates its ICBM force.

While deriding ICBMs as a Cold War relic, critics never address the fact that America’s adversaries (China and Russia) are focused on the modernization of their own ICBM forces. If ICBMs are relics of a bygone era, why are the Chinese and Russians spending the bulk of their modernization effort on them?

The opponents of ICBM modernization fail to appreciate that the synergy of the American nuclear triad is the key to its survivability and resilience. Each leg contributes to an important set of attributes. In short, ICBMs are responsive. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are survivable—so long as quantum computing does not eliminate the opacity of oceans. Bombers give an adversary time to contemplate nuclear destruction, encouraging better choices, and support crisis management. Each of these attributes is critical to deterrence stability.

As to the alleged vulnerability of land-based missiles, those very “vulnerabilities” are part of the deterrence calculous that any adversary must account for when considering how aggressive they should act toward the United States. The next generation of ICBMs need not necessarily be based only in silos. Some, or all, might be deployed in mobile platforms on roads or trains, thus increasing their survivability and our ability to wait.

Past efforts to explore these options for ICBMs were faced with opposition in US domestic politics on the grounds of cost and conservation.  On the other hand, if mobility is infeasible, silo-based ICBMs might be better protected by companion small radars and ballistic missile defenses. Reducing an adversary’s probability of killing an American ICBM, even by a small amount, greatly increases the number of weapons required to strike the United States—making the decision even tougher.   

Old debates about nuclear weapons are fast proving antiquated as China is adding an unprecedented threat into the bilateral face-off that was once the purview of Russia and the United States. Hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, robotics, and other technological developments are also dramatically changing the debate. The entire choreography of US nuclear modernization and arms control planning will have to change to address these challenges. 

The canonical nuclear first strike scenario of the Cold War is outdated by advances in military technology and new thinking about strategy. New strike systems, including hypersonic conventional and nuclear weapons, will challenge existing assumptions about stability. Space also looms large as the new "high ground" not only for information warfare but also for kinetic attack.  Future defense planners must assume that a “nuclear first strike” will be preceded by knockout blows against early warning and command and control systems, including those based in space and terrestrial.

Thus, efforts to kill a leg of the triad appear premature and mistaken. The United States needs every tool in its kit for an uncertain future.

Given the uncertainty we face, there are useful steps the Biden administration can take to support the furtherance of peace.  

Useful Efforts

The New START treaty with Russia is set to expire in February 2021. Coordinating treaty-consistent limits on numbers of deployed and other nuclear weapons might lead to reduced expenditures for nuclear modernization, but only if the administration can get the Russians on board.

Extension of the New START agreement should not be controversial. Both countries can modernize their nuclear arsenals, replacing aging systems with new and more reliable systems—all without increasing the number of deployed and nondeployed launchers and weapons. During the notional five-year extension of New START, the door is open for a more extensive agreement to limit strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons of shorter ranges. 

If President Biden is successful in seeing New START renewed, Moscow and Washington could also discuss measures to improve transparency in bilateral military-to-military forums, including de-escalation protocols for avoiding inadvertent clashes between American and Russian forces and their proxies. The United States and Russia could also address the consequences of the expiration of the INF Treaty for strategic stability.

An arms race in conventional weapons of intermediate range (500-5,500km) in either Europe or Asia could raise the likelihood of a large scale conventional war with the potential for nuclear escalation. Working to reduce those prospects is well worth the effort and would serve the prospects of peace far more successfully than eliminating ICBMs.

The United States is facing an unprecedented challenge on two fronts (Russia and China). This challenge is far more dangerous than the Soviet menace of the twentieth century. Reducing the nation's nuclear arsenal's size and capability will not signal China and Russia that we mean no harm. It will signal weakness and weakness is provocative.

American resolve should never be a point of contention. Both China and Russia possess national cultures that respect strength. Thus, eliminating the American ICBM force will have the exact opposite effect as suggested by detractors. They are well worth the security and stability they provide.

This article was first published by Real Clear Defense.

Image: Reuters

Kyle Mizokami

History, Europe

America's Iowa-class battleship would likely wipe out the Bismarck.

Key point: America's battleships were large and powerful. But they also had radar-guided guns.

Despite the vast scope of the Second World War, the navies of the United States and Nazi Germany fought few, if any, direct surface engagements. By the time of America’s entry into the war the Royal Navy had already sunk or neutralized the lion’s share of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, with only Hitler’s U-boats remaining a substantial German threat.

But what if the UK’s Royal Navy hadn’t been as successful as it was, and the U.S. was forced to hunt down the German Navy’s major surface combatants? What if the Iowa-class fast battleships had been sortied into the Atlantic to square off against their counterparts, the Bismarck-class battleships?

The Bismarck-class battleships were the largest surface ships built by Germany before and during the Second World War. Germany had been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles to build warships over 10,000 tons, but the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935 implicitly allowed them—though the German Navy was not to exceed thirty five percent the size of the Royal Navy.

With that restriction out of the way, Germany immediately began construction on the Bismarck-class battleships. Two ships, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, were planned. The ships were 821 feet long and displaced up to 50,000 tons fully loaded. Twelve high-pressure boilers powered three turbines, giving the ship a top speed of 30.1 knots. Three FuMo-23 search radars could detect surface targets at more than thirteen miles.

The Bismarck class had eight fifteen-inch guns, each capable of hurling an armor piercing, capped round up to 21.75 miles. The 1,764-pound killer shell traveled at 2,960 feet per second out the bore, faster than the bullet of a high-powered rifle. At 11 miles, it could penetrate 16.5 inches of armor, or roughly to the horizon at sea level, although it could theoretically hit targets much further.

Both battleships were heavily protected, with 12.5 inches of steel at the main belt, 8.7 inch armored bulkheads, and 14.1 inches of armor on the main gun turrets. The eight guns were installed in four turrets of two guns each. This spread the battleship’s main armament out among more protected turrets, increasing their survivability in a gunfight.

Overall, the Bismarck class was an impressive combination of firepower, speed, and protection.

The Iowa-class battleships were the most powerful battleships built for the U.S. Navy. Four ships: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin were built. Each was approximately 861 feet long and weighed 52,000 tons. Eight water boilers connected to General Electric steam turbines propelled the battleships along at a speedy 32.5-knot maximum speed.

Iowa had nine sixteen-inch guns. Each Mark 7 gun could launch a 2,700 pound armor piercing shell 11.36 miles to penetrate 20 inches of steel plate—and even farther to a lesser penetration. In addition to search radar, the Iowas had Mk 13 fire control radars, allowing them to engage targets at extreme ranges and at night. The Mk 13 had a theoretical range out to 45 miles, and could even spot where the Iowa’s errant rounds landed, making aiming corrections much easier.

The Iowas too were heavily armored, with 12.1 inches at the main belt, 11.3-inch bulkheads, and an amazing 19.7 inches of armor on the main turrets. The ship’s vital combat information center and ammunition magazines were buried deep in their armored hulls.

Now, on to the battle. It’s 1942, and the new American battleship Iowa has been rushed into service to hunt the Bismarck. Bismarck, her sister ship Tirpitz, and other large German combatants have made the Atlantic too dangerous to send convoys across, something the United Kingdom desperately needs.

A fast battleship designed to operate alongside aircraft carriers, Iowa can cover a lot of ocean. Operating alone, she detects Bismarck—also operating alone. The duel is on.

Despite the Bismarck’s well-trained crew, good design and powerful weapons, Iowa has one technological innovation the German battlewagon doesn’t: radar-directed main guns. Iowa can fire much more accurately at longer distance targets. This allows Iowa to “out-stick” the Bismarck, which must close to within visual range for its fire control systems and procedures to work effectively. While Bismarck would avoid a nighttime duel, Iowa would welcome it—and its 2.5-knot advantage in speed means it can force a night battle if it wants to, chasing Bismarck down before sunrise.

Iowa’s combination of the Mk 13 fire control radar and Mk 7 shells means it can fire first, hit first, and hurt first. While Bismarck’s armor protection and distributed firepower could help ensure it lasts long enough above the waves to damage Iowa, it’s unlikely could save itself, damaging the American battleship enough to make it break off the attack.

Iowa wins.

The larger context of the battle—the U.S. Navy being forced to take on the German Navy—would have had serious repercussions for the Pacific theater. Germany was, after all, considered the primary threat, with Japan second and Italy third. A more powerful German Navy (or weaker Royal Navy) would have had second order consequences for the Pacific, delaying the Solomons campaign, including the invasion of Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Coral Sea, and even the Battle of Midway.

U.S. Navy planners in the Pacific, still overestimating the value of battleships, could have been less daring in their absence and fought a holding action until late 1942 or 1943. Had things been different we might think of America’s initial war against the Axis as taking place in the Atlantic and not the Pacific, the Marines hitting the beach in Iceland and not Guadalcanal, and the cataclysmic battle between the battleships Bismarck and Iowa.

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

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

The new generation of hardware is coming.

Here's What You Need to Remember: To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

The U.S. Army is at a crossroads as the Pentagon is reorienting itself to fight a capable great power opponent after nearly two decades focused on counter-insurgency conflicts.

Russia poses a traditional land-power challenge for the U.S. Army with its large mechanized formations threatening the Baltics, as well as formidable long-range ballistic missiles, artillery and surface-to-air missiles.

By contrast, a hypothetical conflict with China would focus on control of the sea and airspace over the Pacific Ocean. To remain relevant, the Army would need to deploy long-range anti-ship-capable missiles and helicopters to remote islands, allied nations like Japan and South Korea and even onto the decks of U.S. Navy ships.

Almost all the Army’s major land warfare systems entered service in the 1980s or earlier. Five ambitious programs to replace aging armored vehicles, artillery and helicopters consumed $30 billion only to fail spectacularly.

Thus, in 2017 the Army formed eight cross-functional teams led by brigadier generals to rapidly cost-efficiently develop a new generation of hardware. These far-reaching modernization initiatives are collectively called “the Big Six.”

1. Long-Range Precision Fire (Artillery)

The U.S. Army was famed for its lavish, rapid and accurate use of artillery support during World War II. However, in recent conflicts, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on air strikes using precision-weapons over artillery barrages.

But on-call air support would be far from given when facing a peer enemy possessing formidable air defenses. In fact, long-range missile and artillery strikes might be needed to destroy air defenses, “kicking in the door” for air power.

Thus the Army’s top priority is “Long Range Precision Fire.” a half dozen projects seeking to enable accurate ground-launched strikes against targets dozens or hundreds of miles away.

To begin with, the Army seeks to further upgrades its tank-like 1960s-era M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers with long-barreled Extend Range Cannon boosting regular attack range to forty-three miles, and possibly even ram-jet -assisted shells extending range to eighty-one miles.

The artillery branch’s other mainstay, the truck-based M270 and smaller M142 Multiple Rocket Launcher Systems, will receive extended-range rockets doubling reach to ninety-three miles. Moreover, their capability to launch a single large, 180-mile range ATACMS tactical missile will be replaced with two smaller Precision Strike Missiles with a range of 310 miles that can hit moving targets (ships).

Following the killing of the INF treaty, the Army furthermore is developing two even longer-reaching weapons: a hypersonic missile with a range of 1,499 miles, which could prove extremely difficult to defend against and boast deadly anti-ship capabilities, and a gigantic Long Range Strategic Cannon supposedly boasting a range of one thousand miles.

2. Next Generation Combat Vehicle (Armor)

The Army’s second priority is to replace its increasingly vulnerable and underpowered M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. In 2018, the Army decided to proceed with improving the Bradley’s power train but canceling replacement of its turret.

Instead it seeks an Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) capable of carrying larger squads, a thirty- to fifty-millimeter automatic cannon (the Bradley has a twenty-five-millimeter gun), and new missiles and active protection systems. Current competitors include the Raytheon/Rheinmetall Lynx, the General Dynamics Griffon III and the BAE CV-90 Mark IV.

The separate Mobile Protected Firepower program seeks a fast and air-transportable light tank. Currently, a dozen 105-millimter gun-equipped M8 Bufords with scalable armor are set to compete versus Griffin II tanks armed with 120-millimeter guns.

The Army has also begun procuring turretless Bradleys to serve as Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, replacing old M113 APCs in support roles such as combat engineering, utility transport, ambulance duty, command post, and mortar carrying. And some of its wheeled Stryker APCS are receiving “Dragoon” turrets with thirty-millimeter cannons and Javelin anti-tank missiles to give the lighter vehicles a fighting chance versus enemy mechanized forces.

The Army is also installing Trophy and Iron Fist Active Protection Systems on Abrams and Bradley tanks. These detect incoming missiles and jam or shoot them down before impact. As long-range anti-tank missiles have destroyed hundreds of tanks in Middle Eastern wars, including Saudi-operated Abrams, APS could significantly improve survivability.

3. Future Vertical Lift (Aviation)

Helicopters are essential for battlefield and operational mobility—however they are also expensive, relatively slow (150–200 miles per hour), short-ranged and vulnerable to enemy fire.

The Army is looking ahead to a radical new “Future Vertical Lift” system to eventually replace its over two thousand Blackhawk medium transport helicopters and its heavily armed and armored Apache gunships.

Two innovative flying prototypes are competing. The Bell V-280 Valor is a tilt-rotor aircraft: it can rotate its engines from a helicopter to an airplane-like configuration. The likely more complex and expensive Valor would boast greater speed (320 miles per hour) and range.

The Sikorsky SB-1 Defiant is a compound helicopters with two counter-rotating blades atop each other and pusher rotor. The Defiant likely is better at helicopter-style low-speed maneuvers—at the expense of speed and fuel efficiency.

The Army also retired its last OH-58 scout helicopters in 2015, only to discover that Apache gunships were a poor replacement. As a result, the Army is searching for an agile scout helicopter separately from FVL.

4. Network

The Army would like a brand-new unified, field-deployable Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) network tying together its land-warfare systems.

The last attempt to field such a network, called WIN-T, was cancelled after $6 billion in spending due to its vulnerability to electronic-and cyberwarfare. In 2014, the Army observed how Russia forces extensively jammed, hacked and geo-located Ukrainian command-and-control nodes—and even targeted them with lethal attacks.

The Army intends to buy as much of the software off-the-shelf as possible to avoid spending years and dollars building a new system from the ground up. The new network needs to be standardized yet modular, transportable, and cybersecure.

A separate “Assured Position Navigation & Timing” team is developing redundant navigational aids so that ground forces smoothly function under GPS-denied circumstances, particularly by using ground or air-deployed “pseudo-satellites.”

5. Air & Missile Defense

In the last half-century, air supremacy courtesy of the U.S. Air Force has reduced the demands on the Army’s ground-based air defenses, which have been heavily downsized. However, new threats posed by swarming drone attacks and proliferating cruise and ballistic missiles have made re-building the air defense branch a huge priority.

The Army is currently focusing on “Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense”—vehicles accompanying frontline troops to shoot down low-altitude threats. The Army plans to field 8 x 8 Strykers armed with Stinger and Hellfire missiles, anti-drone jammers and thirty-millimeter cannons. It’s also interim procuring Israeli Iron Dome missile systems, the munitions from which may eventually be adapted to Multi-Mission Launcher.

The Army is also developing a vehicle-mounted 100-KW laser that could be used to cost-efficiently burn drones out of the sky.

For longer-range air defense, rather than develop new missiles, the Army is spending billions to improve its existing Patriot and THAADS systems by tying together their dispersed radars and fire-control systems into an Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) network.

6. Soldier Lethality

Close-combat infantrymen account for only 4 percent of the army’s personnel but have suffered 90 percent of the casualties in conflicts since 2001. The “Soldier Lethality” initiative is divided in two teams.

One focuses on improving “human” factors using more realistic training simulators, and retaining experienced NCOs and officers through better perks and incentives.

The other team plans to procure “Next Generation” assault rifles and light machine guns—likely using the 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor round, which is deemed to have superior penetrating power versus body armor. The Army also is devising an infantry “Head’s Up Display” with integrated (and improved) night-vision, tactical data and targeting crosshairs.

Implementation

The Army is killing or curtailing 186 older programs and procurements, including down-sizing CH-47F heavy transport helicopters and JLTV Humm-Vee replacement orders, to ensure the Big Six’s 31 initiatives receive a targeted $33 billion in funding through 2024.

To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

Time will tell whether the Army’s new, seemingly more agile approach will dodge the bullets that have taken down prior modernization efforts.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense

Michael Peck

History, Europe

Here is one of the more interesting Cold War stories.

Key point: Not every spy missions goes right and drones can do the wrong thing. This is the tale of a spy plane that flew itself straight into enemy hands.

In November 1969, the U.S. Air Force sent Russia an early Christmas gift.

It was a sleek flying machine that bore an uncanny resemblance to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The American generosity was purely unintentional. The aircraft was actually a cutting-edge drone dispatched on a mission to photograph Communist Chinese nuclear sites. And the drone did what it was supposed to until it failed to turn around, and kept on going north into Siberia before crashing.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Russia paid the skilled aircraft designers at Lockheed the highest compliment: they tried to copy their work.

The drone in question was the D-21. With its graceful delta wings, the D-21 resembled a miniature SR-71, which was no coincidence given that they were products of Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works, the originator of many an amazing secret project. In fact, the D-21 was originally designed to be mounted and launched from the tail of an SR-71, itself famous for its Mach 3 speed and its 85,000-feet maximum altitude.

The D-21 was conceived in the mid-1960s as a solution to the problem of spying on the Soviet Union. Soviet surface-to-air missiles, like the one that downed a U-2 over Russia in 1960, were making photo missions over Communist territory more hazardous. The SR-71 could fly high and fast enough to be safe, but why risk a manned aircraft and its pilot when a robot could do the job?

The idea was for the D-21 to be mounted atop an M-21, a specially modified two-seat SR-71, according to documents recently declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office. After completing its mission, the drone would eject its film canister, which would be snatched in mid-air by a C-130 transport. But launch problems, including an accident that crashed the launch M-21 and killed one crewman, saw the B-52H as the new launch vehicle for the improved D-21B.

Unfortunately, the project didn’t work out as planned. There were four D-21B flights, carried by B-52s launched from Guam. Their target was Communist China, specifically China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nor. All of them failed. Out of the last three, mid-air recovery failed to recover film canisters from two of them, which crashed into the Pacific on the flight out, while one drone crashed in China.

It is the fate of the first mission, in November 1969, that’s interesting. The D-21B crossed into China – and kept going into the Soviet Union, where it crashed.

“This proved to be of great interest to the Soviet aircraft industry, as it was a fairly compact machine equipped with up-to-date reconnaissance equipment and designed for prolonged reconnaissance flights at high supersonic speeds under conditions of strong kinetic heating,” write Russian aviation historians Yefim Gordon and Vladimir Rigamant. “Many leading enterprises and organizations of the aircraft, electronic and defense industries were commissioned to study the design of the D-21 together with the materials used in its construction, its production technology and its equipment.”

The result was the Voron (“Raven”) project to develop a supersonic strategic reconnaissance drone. The Voron would have been launched by a Tu-95 or Tu-160 bomber. After separation, a solid-fuel booster would have accelerated the drone to supersonic speed, at which point the ramjet would have kicked in, according to Gordon and Rigamant. The craft would then follow a pre-programmed flight path using an inertial navigation system. Once the unmanned aircraft returned to base, the film canister would be ejected and land by parachute, after which the drone itself would land.

But much like manned reconnaissance aircraft, the Voron idea fell victim to the advent of spy satellites that could soar over foreign territory without fear of being shot down. Another advantage is that satellites would not crash-land and have their secrets recovered by the enemy, as happened to the D-21.

But at least no one can accuse the Soviets of being ungenerous. In the mid-1980s, Ben Rich, a Lockheed engineer who worked on the D-21, recalled being given a metal panel by a CIA employee. It was a piece of the D-21 that had crashed in Siberia, and which had been recovered by a shepherd. The piece was returned by a KGB agent.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Not all A2AD systems are as technically mature and operationally effective as they are made out to be.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Undeniably, A2/AD weapons can threaten large areas and will likely shape operations in the regions where they are present. However, they cannot “shut down” access to a region by themselves, and their threat can be mitigated through appropriate planning using existing technologies and tactics.

On March 7, 2019 defense analysts from the Rand Corporation told a panel, “In our [war]games, when we fight Russia and China, blue [the U.S. and its allies] gets its ass handed to it.”  The scenarios were defenses of the Baltics and Taiwan from invasions by Russia and China, respectively.

In both cases, Russia and China leveraged long-range cruise and ballistic missiles to sink U.S. ships hundreds of miles away at sea, destroy forward air bases that short-range F-35 stealth fighters depend upon, and interdict airspace against non-stealth aircraft.

The huge ‘bubbles’ of interdicted space generated by such ‘anti-access/areas-denial’ weapons (or A2/AD) impede a U.S. counterattack long enough for locally superior attackers to overwhelm defenders in the region.

However, just a few days earlier the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) released the report ‘Bursting the Bubble?’, described in this earlier article by The National Interest’s David Axe. It arrived at a very different conclusion:

“Much has in recent years been made of Russia's new capabilities and the impact they might have on the ability of NATO member states to reinforce or defend the vulnerable Baltic states in case of crisis or war. On closer inspection, however, Russia's capabilities are not quite as daunting, especially if potential countermeasures are factored in. In particular, surface-to-air missile systems currently create much smaller A2/AD bubbles than is often assumed...Experiences from Syria also raise questions about the actual capabilities of such systems in combat…Anti-ship and anti-land systems pose a greater threat but, here too, countermeasures are available.”

In FOI’s view, A2AD is an overhyped buzzword leveraged to create an excessive sense of vulnerability—intimidating potential adversaries before the match even begins.

Back in 2016 the U.S. Navy apparently came to a similar conclusion—practically banning the term ‘A2/AD’ in its internal strategy documents on the grounds that the term ceded adversaries too much credit by conflating ability to threaten a space with successfully controlling it.

How can the same premises lead to such dissimilar conclusions? In fact, many of the analysts’ insights on the strengths and limitations of A2AD strategy can be reconciled.

There are different correlations of forces in Baltic Sea and the Western Pacific Ocean.

The Swedish study understandably focuses on the Baltics, while the Rand panelists also referred to potential conflict with China in the Western Pacific. However, China has a more dominant military posture in East Asia than Russia does in Europe. Furthermore, despite starting technologically behind, Beijing has demonstrated a greater capacity to sustainably develop and deploy advanced systems.

Russia wins when it adversaries fail to counter-mobilize.

Rand’s pessimistic projections regarding a Russian invasion of the Baltics date back to 2016.  However, its wargames have tended to pit a mobilized Russian invasion force against un-mobilized NATO forces. However, it’s questionable that Russia could spend weeks massing the forces necessary for an invasion without detection and some counter-mobilization by NATO, particularly given capabilities of modern surveillance systems. ‘Strategic surprise’ can be achieved—but is harder than ever before.

FOI, for its part, argues that NATO should simply deploy more troops in Eastern Europe to deter Moscow. Many of Russia’s anti-access capabilities in the Baltics center around its exclave in Kaliningrad, which itself could be made quite vulnerable, surrounded as it is by Polish territory.

Not all A2AD systems are as technically mature and operationally effective as they are made out to be.

The Swedish report points out that Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system (also in service in China) has yet to actually receive its vaunted 250-mile range 40N6 missiles. Furthermore, very long-range interceptions are only viable against large, slow aircraft (think tankers, cargo planes and AWACS radar planes) flying at high altitude. ‘Pushing back’ vital support planes is still useful, but agile war planes may only become vulnerable within a few dozen miles of a SAM site.

Another intimidating new technology, anti-ship ballistic missiles, has only been tested against naval targets a few times, and never in combat

On the other hand, cruise missiles and short-range land-attack ballistic missiles have seen extensive combat employment in the last half-century, blasting Middle Eastern cities and sinking Royal Navy ships in the Falklands. Land-based missile transporters have proven easy to conceal and difficult to hunt down.

The FOI study also points out that short-range air defense systems like the Pantsir-S have repeatedly failed to stop U.S. cruise missile barrages and constant Israeli air strikes.

A2AD systems can’t see as far as they can shoot.

A 40N6 missile (when and if it enters service) may threaten aircraft up to 250 miles away. A DF-21D may be able to sink a carrier a thousand mile away.

However, neither missile batteries’ organic fire control radars can realistically acquire targets that far over the horizon due to the curvature of the Earth. Both would need to cue targeting data by networking with remote AWACS radar and maritime patrol planes, drones, surveillance satellites, and distant land and sea-based radars.

Forming such a ‘kill-chain’ is doable—but it’s technically challenging task that requires practice and is vulnerable to disruption at any point in the chain. For instance, the surveillance and communication assets could be destroyed, or their communication links to firing platforms jammed.

Both China and Russia, however, are assembling the surveillance capabilities to form kill chain, however, by expanding its satellite surveillance assets and deploying new airborne radar planes.

‘Threatening’ an area doesn’t have to mean ‘denying’ it.

In recent conflicts, U.S. air and naval forces have benefited from technological ‘offsets’ allowing them to bombard adversaries from afar at virtually no risk to return fire. For example, the U.S. did not lose a single warplane to enemy fire in its 2011 intervention against Libya.

However, when combating a peer adversary, Western forces may simply have to accept higher degrees of risk in order to complete their missions. In other words, A2/AD systems may take out some ships or aircraft, but not necessarily impose high enough costs to defeat operations in a region before they are neutralized.

For example, during World War II land-based bombers posed a deadly anti-access threat to warships that passed within their range. However, that didn’t prevent Allied naval forces from taking what lumps they had to when evacuating troops at Dunkirk and Crete, or conducting amphibious landings in Dieppe, Sicily and Normandy.

Counter-measures against A2AD strategy and technologies already exist.

The Rand analysts argue the U.S. military could address its weaknesses versus anti-access weapons by re-allocating roughly $24 billion of its roughly $700 billion annual budget to existing systems. In their view, sacrificing funding for, say, one or two carriers, makes sense if it pays for capabilities that make the remaining nine floating airbases much more survivable.

Basically, the analysts think the U.S. needs a larger supply surface-strike missiles to threaten enemies at long range; and a much larger capacity to defend against incoming long-range missiles with counter-missiles.

In other words, fight fire with fire and water.

Naturally, greater numbers of long-range, high-capacity launch platforms are desirable.

On the offense side, promising new long-range strike weapons include the LRASM anti-ship missile, the stealthy JASSM-ER cruise missile and the Army’s multi-faceted Long-Range Precision Fire program. On the defense side, the Army’s maneuver short-range air defense program and the Navy’s SM-3 and SM-6 offer promising force protection capabilities.

Taking the analysts’ conclusion together, one can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by anti-access weapons. Undeniably, A2/AD weapons can threaten large areas and will likely shape operations in the regions where they are present. However, they cannot “shut down” access to a region by themselves, and their threat can be mitigated through appropriate planning using existing technologies and tactics.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters. 

For people living off-grid in remote villages in Laos, solar energy offers a clean, sustainable way to bring electricity for all, and the promise to transform their lives.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

The U.S. Navy’s placid-looking E-6 Mercury, based on the 707 airliner, seems particularly inoffensive, but that is a lie.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The E-6 platform should remain in service until 2040 thanks to a service-life extension program and continual tweaks to its systems and radios. While the Mercury has demonstrated its usefulness as an airborne communication hub for supporting troops in the field, the airborne command post will be considered a success if it never has to execute its primary mission.

In a military that operates Raptor stealth fighters, A-10 tank busters, B-52 bombers and Harrier jump jets, the U.S. Navy’s placid-looking E-6 Mercury, based on the 707 airliner, seems particularly inoffensive. But don’t be deceived by appearances. Though the Mercury doesn’t carry any weapons of its own, it may be in a sense the deadliest aircraft operated by the Pentagon, as its job is to command the launch of land-based and sea-based nuclear ballistic missiles.

Of course, the U.S. military has a ground-based strategic Global Operations Center in Nebraska, and land-based transmitters for communicating with the nuclear triad. However, the E-6’s sinister purpose is to maintain the communication link between the national command authority (starting with the president and secretary of defense) and U.S. nuclear forces, even if ground-based command centers are destroyed by an enemy first strike. In other words, you can chop off the head of the U.S. nuclear forces, but the body will keep on coming at you, thanks to these doomsday planes.

The E-6’s basic mission is known as Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO). Prior to the development of the E-6, the TACAMO mission was undertaken by land-based transmitter and later EC-130G and Q Hercules aircraft, which had Very Low Frequency radios for communication with navy submarines. Interestingly, France also operated its own TACAMO aircraft until 2001, four modified Transall C-160H Astarté transports, which maintained VLF communications with French ballistic-missile submarines.

The first of sixteen E-6s entered service between 1989 and 1992. These were the last built in a very long line of military variants of the venerable Boeing 707 airliner, in particular the 707-320B Advanced, also used in the E-3 Sentry. Bristling with thirty-one communication antennas, the E-6As were originally tasked solely with communicating with submerged Navy submarines. Retrofitted with more fuel-efficient CFM-56 turbojets and benefiting from expanded fuel tanks, the E-6A could remain in the air up to fifteen hours, or seventy-two with inflight refueling.

To use its Very Low Frequency radios, an E-6 has to fly in a continuous orbit at a high altitude, with its fuselage- and tail-mounted VLF radios trailing one- and five-mile-long wire antennas at a near-vertical attitude! The VLF signals can be received by Ohio-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines hiding deep underwater, thousands of miles away. However, the VLF transmitters’ limited bandwidth means they can only send raw data at around thirty-five alphanumeric characters per second—making them a lot slower than even the old 14k internet modems of the 1990s. Still, it’s enough to transmit Emergency Action Messages, instructing the ballistic-missile subs to execute one of a diverse menu of preplanned nuclear attacks, ranging from limited to full-scale nuclear strikes. The E-6’s systems are also hardened to survive the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear weapons detonating below.

Between 1997 and 2006, the Pentagon upgraded the entire E-6A fleet to the dual-role E-6B, which expanded the Mercury’s capabilities by allowing it to serve as an Airborne Nuclear Command Post with its own battle staff area for the job. In this role it serves as a backup for four huge E-4 command post aircraft based on the 747 Jumbo jet. The E-6B has ultra-high-frequency radios in its Airborne Launch Control system that enable it to remotely launch land-based ballistic missiles from their underground silos, a task formerly assigned to U.S. Air Force EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft—yet another 707 variant. The E-6’s crew was expanded from fourteen to twenty-two for the command post mission, usually including an onboard admiral or general. Additional UHF radios give the E-6B access to the survivable MILSTAR satellite communications network, while the cockpit is upgraded up with new avionics and instruments from the 737NG airliner. The E-6B can be distinguished in photos by its additional wing-mounted pods.

The Mercury’s abundant communications gear allows it to perform nonnuclear Command, Control and Communications (C3) operations as well. For this reason, E-6s have at times been deployed to Europe and the Middle East to serve as flying C3 hubs. For example, VQ-4 was deployed in Qatar for three years from 2006 to 2009, where it relayed information such as IED blast reports and medical evacuation requests from U.S. troops in Iraq who were out of contact with their headquarters.

Two Navy Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadrons currently operate the E-6: VQ-3 “Ironmen” and VQ-4 “Shadows,” both under the Navy Strategic Communications Wing 1. These have their home at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, but also routinely forward deploy out of Travis AFB in California and Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. At least one E-6 is kept airborne at all times. E-6s on the submarine-communication mission often fly in circles over the ocean at the lowest possible speed—for as long as ten hours at a time. Those performing the nuclear command post mission typically remain on alert near Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The E-6’s nuclear mission has also made its operations occasional fodder for conspiracy theorists and foreign propaganda outlets.

The E-6 platform should remain in service until 2040 thanks to a service-life extension program and continual tweaks to its systems and radios. While the Mercury has demonstrated its usefulness as an airborne communication hub for supporting troops in the field, the airborne command post will be considered a success if it never has to execute its primary mission. The heart of nuclear deterrence, after all, is convincing potential adversaries that no first strike will be adequate to prevent a devastating riposte. The E-6s are vital component in making that threat a credible one.

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 first appeared in December 2017. It is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Game of Thrones,

The Game of Thrones episode "The Long Night" features the last stand of a fantastical medieval army against an implacable horde of White Walker zombies led by the chilling undead Night King.

Here's What You Need to Remember: However, effective fighting forces learn from defeats and mistakes and institutes necessary reforms. Jon and Daenerys’ would do well to ensure their forces all act cohesively towards a common strategy; deploy their cavalry, infantry and artillery in a mutually-supporting manner; commit more effort to building defense-in-depth; and establish effective means to communicate between their air and ground forces.

The Game of Thrones episode "The Long Night" features the last stand of a fantastical medieval army against an implacable horde of White Walker zombies led by the chilling undead Night King.

It also showcases a series of terrible command decisions made by its protagonists, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, squandering their forces lives in poorly thought-out gambits.

These episodes of military ineptitude may be one of the TV show’s most believable attributes, reflecting real-world military disasters. As such, a battle featuring a zombie horde and fire-breathing dragons offer surprising insight into classic errors in battlefield command.

Failing to Act Cohesively Against the Enemy’s Center of Gravity

Carl von Clausewitz, the grandfather of modern Western military theory, wrote in On War that it was vital to identify and strike at the enemy’s “center of gravity”—that is, “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.”

That ‘center of gravity’ varies based on the nature of the adversary—it could be an enemy capital, a charismatic leader, or a strategically-deployed army.

In the episode prior to the battle, Jon and Daenerys correctly identified the Night King as the center of gravity, as the White Walkers have no will to fight (or ability to remain animate) without their leader. However, so long as the Night King lives, he can replenish his army’s losses extremely quickly and cheaply by reanimating the dead.

Unfortunately, Jon and Daenerys’s battle plans are incoherent. They employ their dragons to personally hunt the Night King, but commit the rest of their troops to fighting a conventional defensive action predicated on the Night King evading their dragons and entering an ambush on the ground. Thus, they fail to ensure their forces are all acting upon the center of gravity with a common strategy.

Allowing Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery to Act Without Mutual Support

The humans at Winterfell field a balanced combined-arms forced including infantry, cavalry, artillery and air support. Such a force has tools to deal with virtually any situation—if its elements work in concert.

However, the defenders of Winterfell fail to coordinate their separate arms, and each is defeated in turn without support from the others.

The battle begins with a charge of the Dothraki cavalry. On its face, this is understandable: cavalry is most effective when it can maneuver and build up momentum over open ground.

However, charging cavalry—or their modern equivalent, tanks—headlong into strong enemy forces is frequently ill-advised.

Yes, the shock of an assault may overwhelm poorly-trained conscripts or a weakly defended sector of a frontline, potentially breaking through and spreading panic into the rear.

But if assaulting a strong position, cavalry or armored forces are likely expend their shock effect without achieving a breakthrough—and soon find themselves outnumbered and surrounded by counter-attacking foes.

For example, early in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, unsupported Israeli tanks barreled into ambushes by Egyptian infantry armed with long-range anti-tank missiles and suffered devastating losses. These ambushes could have been avoided with proper reconnaissance and support from infantry and artillery.

Incredibly, Winterfell’s defenders fail to dispatch outriders to scout out the disposition of the approaching White Walkers. However, given that Jon knew the White Walkers are incapable of panicking and had limitless reserves, he could have guessed that a cavalry charge would fail to achieve decisive effects.

Instead, the Dothraki should have been deployed on the flanks, forcing the Night King to either split his forces to chase after them, or expose his own flanks to Dothraki hit-and-run attacks. The cavalry’s superior mobility would allow them to avoid getting stuck in unwinnable fights, and strike when and where their enemies are vulnerable.

The deployment of the catapults in front of the infantry, where they are immediately overrun, is also perplexing. As indirect-fire weapons, they do not require line-of-sight to their targets. Had they been arrayed behind the frontline, they could have continued blasting holes in the White Walker ranks for a prolonged period.

Poor Coordination of Air Support

Close Air Support (CAS) is crucial to Jon and Daenerys’s plan to defending Winterfell, and indeed we see the dragon’s fire devastate White Walker ranks.

But ultimately, dragon-based CAS operations fail to achieve decisive effects. Why? Jon and Daenerys are confronted with problems that have long frustrated military pilots: it’s hard to identify targets on the ground when flying thousands of feet above the battlefield—particularly at night and in inclement weather conditions. Likely, Jon and Daenerys’ strafing runs were particularly curtailed for fear of friendly fire incidents.

Low-visibility conditions were worsened by a blizzard conjured by the Night King, just as modern militaries employ electronic warfare to fog radar and communication links.

Hovering close to the ground to get a better picture of the action, meanwhile, exposes Daenerys’ dragons to attack, just as low-and-slow flying aircraft become vulnerable to numerous short-range air defense weapons.

Winterfell’s ground troops lack Forward Air Controllers to signal when and where air support is needed. Even Ser Davos’ pre-arranged signals to summon a dragon-strike go unheeded. For their part, Daenerys and Jon fail to use their mobility to perform reconnaissance overflights and facilitate command and control of their dispersed ground forces.

Enemy counter-air operations undertaken by the Night King on his zombified-dragon also disrupt Winterfell’s aviation. Since the first air battles of World War I into the modern age of stealth fighters, the side which detects its adversaries and attacks first is far more likely to prevail in aerial battle. Daenerys’ dragons struggled to locate their adversary, and eventually climb to very high altitudes seeking a spotting and energy advantage, as higher altitude can be converted into speed by diving.

This comes at the expense of maintaining situational awareness of events on the ground.

Ultimately, the air-to-air action proves inconclusive—a favorable outcome for the Night King, as Winterfell’s forces depend more on air support than his own do. Daenerys should have devised better means to coordinate with her ground forces. Rather than chase after an elusive enemy, she should have dedicated one dragon to CAS while another flew escort above, forcing the Night King to engage her in the air or suffer losses on the ground.

Inadequate Defense in Depth

The most successful ploy employed by Winterfell’s defenders is the flaming, stake-filled trench used to impede the Wight Walker’s advance. Eventually, however, Walkers sacrifice themselves to breach this obstacle.

But why wasn’t the initial line of human infantry deployed behind the trench—breaking the White Walker’s charge, and allowing the small numbers traversing the obstacle to be individually dispatched? And why didn’t Winterfell’s defenders build a dozen such trenches, each impeding the horde’s momentum and sapping its strength, while giving infantry multiple defensive points to fall back to?

The Soviet Red Army used similar tactics at the Battle of Kursk to defeat qualitatively superior German forces. Anticipating an attack by elite Panzer divisions, the Soviets spent weeks building layers of defensive fortifications consisting of minefields, anti-tank ditches and obstacles, and concealed anti-tank gun batteries and machinegun nests. These defensive “belts” extended ninety miles deep.

The German armored juggernaut would smash through one fortified gauntlet at significant cost, only to be confronted with another line a few miles further back. Each assault cost more time and casualties to secure, bleeding away any momentum the offensive might have achieved.

Daenerys and Jon’s leadership at the battle of Winterfell is decidedly lackluster—though perhaps understandably so, given the unconventional capabilities of their adversary and their own force’s lack of experience with combined-arms warfare.

Real armies lacking recent combat experience often stumble in their first major actions, such as the U.S. Army’s early World War II debacle at the Kasserine Pass, or the Russian Army’s disastrous tank assault into Grozny in 1994-1995.

However, effective fighting forces learn from defeats and mistakes and institutes necessary reforms. Jon and Daenerys’ would do well to ensure their forces all act cohesively towards a common strategy; deploy their cavalry, infantry and artillery in a mutually-supporting manner; commit more effort to building defense-in-depth; and establish effective means to communicate between their air and ground forces.

That all sounds like quite a tall order—and it is, both for real world commanders and the heroes of a fantasy saga.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

Considering all the problems with the plane, was it worth all that money?

Key Point: This plane is supposed to be the world's best. However, it has many issues and cost a lot that could have been better spent elsewhere.

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is estimated to be the most expensive weapons system in human history, based on its projected lifetime cost of $1.5 trillion dollars ($406 billion for the aircraft, the rest in lifetime operating costs)—and that’s before we factor in the endless cost overruns.

One could argue there is a certain logic to this. The United States spends greater sums on the military than any other country (though some spend a greater percentage of GDP), and it has emphasized air power as its chief military instrument in recent decades. Additionally, different variants of the F-35 are prepared to equip the Air Force, Navy and Marines through most of the twenty-first century, and the type is also slated to serve in the air forces or navies of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and Turkey—with more countries likely to join the list.

However, the F-35 program has been notoriously mismanaged and perpetually over budget, and remains far behind schedule. The Pentagon was persuaded to pay for “concurrent” production of F-35s before it had been developed into a fully operational prototype; today Lockheed is shipping non-feature-complete F-35s, which will need to be expensively upgraded later when new components and systems are finally ready. Listing everything that was and continues to be wrong with the F-35 procurement process could be the subject of many articles.

But at the end of the day, however mismanaged the program may have been, does the F-35 at least amount to a decent jet fighter?

How Did the F-35 Come to Be?

Back in the 1990s, the U.S. Air Force developed the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, which arguably still reigns as the top air-superiority fighter in service: it is fast, highly maneuverable and extremely stealthy. However, the Raptor was less optimized for ground-attack roles and deemed too expensive to build and operate to serve as a replacement of the Pentagon’s large inventory of fourth-generation fighters—so production was cut to just 180 aircraft, 120 of which serve in operational units.

The Navy and Marines also needed a new fighter, so the Pentagon committed to building a more multirole “joint” stealth fighter that would eventually replace the F-15, F-16, FA-18 and AV-8 Harriers serving in all four branches. The last time an interservice fighter-bomber was pursued, it didn’t work out, but Lockheed and Boeing both gave their best shot anyway, and the former won the competition. The JSF was supposed to a more affordable stealth fighter that could also be marketed to friendly nations, unlike the Raptor.

The trickiest requirement for the JSF was the Marine Corps’ insistence on making its version of the F-35 a jump jet. For historical reasons, the leathernecks want jets like the Harrier that can fly off smaller Marine-operated amphibious carriers or remote forward bases. However, the compromises needed to make them work leave them significantly inferior to conventional fighters. Lockheed actually acquired schematics for a prototype Russian jump jet called the Yak-41, and tried to make the most aerodynamic airframe possible.

Sniper, Not a Sword-Fighter

To cut a long story short, the additional weight and bulkier fuselage necessary to make the F-35B jump jet version left all variants of the F-35 saddled with performance thresholds that are objectively inferior to the fourth-generation fighters it is intended to replace.

The F-35 has a maximum speed of Mach 1.6, compared to Mach 2 to 2.5 for the F-16 and F-15, respectively. Its service ceiling is fifty thousand feet, compared to sixty thousand for the other models. In 2015, the Air Force tested the F-35 in a short-range dogfight with an F-16D mounting external fuel tanks, and the test pilot complained that it was simply out-turned and less energy efficient than its more agile opponent.

This critique doesn’t mean that the F-35 is a terrible plane. In one post (scroll down for English), a Norwegian F-35 pilot praises its ability to maintain high angles of attack. Nonetheless, the Lightning remains less kinematically optimized for air-to-air combat than most fourth-generation fighters.

The Air Force and Lockheed, however, insist that the F-35 isn’t meant to engage in a within-visual-range dogfight in the first place. After all, low-observable aircraft are stealthier when they are more distant from adversaries—and new beyond-visual-range missiles like the AIM-120D or British Meteor that can strike enemies up to a hundred miles away potentially allow an F-35 to sneak up on enemy aircraft and engage them with missiles without having to get close. Such a strategy is aided by the superior characteristics of U.S. Active Electronically Scanned Array radars.

In this view of things, the F-35 would act as a sort of sniper in air-to-air engagements, stalking its prey from a distance until it has a good angle for a shot, releasing its weapons and then hightailing it for home before the (possibly faster, more maneuverable) enemy has a chance to come close enough to detect it and retaliate. And if more intense air battles are anticipated, then the more specialized F-22 could take some of the heat.

No stealth fighter has ever shot down another jet in actual combat, and long-range air-to-air missiles have only been used a few times in action, so how the F-35 performs versus fourth-generation fighters depends a great deal on theory rather than operational experience. The Air Force feels this strategy has been validated by the results of repeated air combat exercises in which stealth fighters have racked up kill ratios as lopsided as 15:1 against faster, more maneuverable fourth-generation jets. And because of its low-observable characteristics, the F-35 can pick and choose when to engage and when to withdraw from a dangerous opponents in a good position.

Of course, those exercises are only good predictors of performance if they are built around correct assumptions about air warfare will work out. A big question remains, concerning how high the hit rate will be for long-range air-to-air missiles, which have seen limited use in actual combat. An estimated hit rate of 50 percent may prove optimistic. Here, F-35 doubters may point out that the Air Force overestimated the hit rate of its air-to-air missiles during the Vietnam War, resulting in disappointing kill ratios when pitted against North Vietnamese fighters in that conflict.

Critics also point out that stealth would not prevent an F-35 from being detected if an enemy got close, as stealth fighters begin to appear on X-band targeting radars once the distance is short enough. Furthermore, though optimized for minimal infrared signature, stealth fighters remain susceptible to detection by infrared-search and track (IRST) systems.

Finally, the stealth fighters can be tracked using low-bandwidth radars, which are typically found on ground-based installations. Such radars lack the resolution to engage a stealth fighter with missiles from distance, but they could be used to direct intercepts by fighters, or to stage short-range ambushes with the targeting radars of surface-to-air missile systems—the latter a technique used to down an F-117 stealth fighter over Yugoslavia in 1999.

Another tactic could be to overwhelm stealth fighters with a swarm of lower-cost jets, accepting some losses while charging into the short-range envelope the F-35 is vulnerable in—a tactic that caused the defeat of F-35s by inferior Chinese jets in a RAND Corporation simulation.

F-35 proponents, in turn, are skeptical that the ability to pull off tight maneuvers is as useful as it once was—a view in sharp contrast to that of Russian aircraft manufacturers, which continue to produce super-maneuverable jets with vector thrust engines. American air-combat doctrine emphasizes maintaining a high energy state through speed, and altitude that can be traded for speed. Pulling off extremely tight turns may help dodge a missile, but usually at the cost of so much energy that the aircraft will have little speed and altitude left to evade a follow-up attack.

Furthermore, modern short-range heat-seeking missiles like the American AIM-9X and Russian R-73 can target hostile aircraft through a helmet-mounted sight without needing to point the aircraft’s nose at a target (though doing so still confers additional momentum, of course). Such missiles are believed to have hit probabilities as high as 80 percent, quite possibly making short-range dogfighting agility a moot issue—though an F-35 configured for stealth can’t carry any AIM-9s.

Insufficient Payload and Range?

There’s another issue in play: can the F-35 carry a worthwhile payload? If a Lightning is to remain stealthy, it cannot carry external weapons, limiting it to just four (or, eventually, six) missiles carried in a stealthy internal-weapons bay, plus a twenty-five-millimeter cannon. This does not compare favorably to the eight to ten hardpoints on most fourth-generation fighters. This issue is even more salient when considering the F-35’s ground-attack capabilities in stealth mode, amounting to 5,700 pounds of internal stores, leaving them at a deficit compared to the roughly fifteen thousand pounds or more of external stores that can be carried on U.S. fourth-generation aircraft.

To be fair, Lockheed has advertised a nonstealthy “beast mode” configuration of the F-35 with sixteen wing-mounted bombs and missiles, allowing a full twenty-two-thousand-pounds payload. However, this configuration remains only hypothetical.

Payload brings us to the matter of range. Once again, the F-35 cannot rely upon externally-mounted fuel tanks if it wishes to retain its stealthy radar cross-section. In compensation, the Lightning has longer range on purely internal fuel than most fourth-generation fighters. Unfortunately, this still means that both land- and carrier-based F-35s will need to be based within range of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) that are quite capable of devastating airbases or sinking carriers. Mid-air refueling could help with this problem, but tanker aircraft too may be vulnerable to attack, unless the Navy chooses to acquire a stealthy tanker drone.

The Pentagon remains optimistic about the F-35’s ground-attack capabilities for a simple reason: they believe the F-35 will give it a convenient tool for penetrating increasingly deadly integrated air-defense systems without having to put together a huge strike package, including jamming planes, Wild Weasel anti-SAM aircraft, escort fighters and so forth. As discussed above, F-35s wouldn’t be invulnerable to ground-based air defenses, but they would have an easier time slipping past and dismantling ground-based missile batteries with fewer support planes put at risk.

New Paradigm of Networked Warfare

F-35 proponents also emphasize that the F-35 is designed around new digital technology to an unprecedented level. It has sophisticated sensors that not only soak up copious data from the surrounding environment, but then funnel it back for use by friendly forces via high-capacity datalinks. F-35 pilots use state-of-the-art helmets that allow them to “see through” their own aircraft (which is good, as the canopy on the F-35 has poor visibility to the rear). The F-35’s mission systems computer is designed to automatically download mission parameters, while its logistics computer can offload status reports for technicians through a proprietary encrypted system.

Thus, in the F-35, the futurists of the Pentagon envision a new networked way of war, wherein each fighter will serve as much as a sensor node for a larger war machine as it does as a distinct weapons platform.

Of the course, the flipside of seeing the F-35 as the apotheosis of a networked paradigm is that it may be more vulnerable to hacking attacks and other electronic warfare systems than any warplane before, potentially allowing for a Battlestar Galactica scenario in which a digital surprise attack leaves many of the stealth fighters compromised. Particularly unpromising is that Chinese hackers apparently broken into Lockheed’s computers twice and acquired F-35 blueprints—which may explain why China’s J-31 Gyrfalcon stealth fighter bears more than a passing resemblance to the American stealth jet.

All in all, the F-35’s rising costs and mounting delays towards achieving full operational capability have caused the Pentagon to appreciably begin downsizing or delaying F-35 orders in the near term, and advance plans on keeping the older F-15, F-16s and FA-18 in service into the 2040s. For example, the Navy now plans on phasing in two squadrons of F-35s on its carriers alongside three squadrons of FA-18 Super Hornets. One can imagine a similar force mix of F-35s cooperating with F-15s, -16s and -22s.

Rather than fully replacing the last generation of jets, the F-35 may best fit in as a complement to them by undertaking missions that take maximum advantage of its stealth characteristics and networked sensors. For example, F-35s could range ahead and ferret out the location of enemy fighters, radars and missile batteries. Then the data they gather could then be used to coordinate intercepts and attack runs by more heavily armed Eagle or Super Hornet fighters following in their wake, or even guide their missiles to their targets.

The F-35 program has long been criticized as too big to fail, and that may in fact be true given the enormous resources already sunk into it. The Pentagon, and many other countries, are betting that the new (promising but not combat-tested) air-warfare paradigm will limit the impact of its shortcomings. However, due to mounting expenses, continual delays and breakdowns, and high operating costs, the Lightning is likely to serve alongside its predecessors for a long time to come.

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 piece was first featured in April 2018 and is being republished due to reader's interest. 

Media: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Middle East

The IDF does not mess around.

Key point: Drones of all kinds are the future of warfare. And Israel is doubling down on investing in this new technology.

On January 21 of last year Iranian, Syrian and Israeli forces unleashed a hail of missiles upon each other in what is becoming yet another flare-up of violence along the Syria-Israel border. Afterwards, the Israeli Defense Force released a video depicting unidentified munitions eliminating two or three short-range air defense systems—apparently including Russia’s latest short-range system, the Pantsir-S2.

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

In fact, the recent raids may reveal improvements to Syria’s air defense forces due to ongoing Russian training and weapons transfers. However, they also reveal Israel’s continuing ability to defeat, including through likely use of kamikaze-drones.

The succession of tit-for-tat attacks apparently began with the launch of a Fateh 110 short-range ballistic missile by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeting an Israeli ski-resort on Mount Hebron in the Golan Heights. As the solid-fuel rocket blazed towards to the snowy mountain, it was intercepted and destroyed by two missiles from the Israel Iron Dome air defense system, as you can see in this video.

Prior to Russia’s intervention in 2015, intervening IRGC troops played a critical role in rescuing Bashar al-Assad’s faltering regime. In addition to combating Syrian rebels, the IRGC has established an extensive network of bases on Syrian soil to exert military pressure on Israel and furnish assistance to Hezbollah, which is supported by both Syria and Iran.

In response, Israeli warplanes have launched hundreds of strikes on targets in Syria since the start of the civil war, seeking to disrupt arms transfers to Hezbollah and the buildup of Iranian forces. Despite frequently encountering Syrian anti-aircraft fire, only a single Israeli F-16 has been lost, shot down in February 2018 by an S-200 surface-to-air missile. That year alone, the IDF struck targets in Syria with over 2,000 missiles.

Hours after the IRGC’s missile attack, the IDF retaliated with its most extensive attack to date. According to the Israeli periodical Debka, however, they did not target the IRGC battery that launched the attack. A hail of missiles instead descended upon Damascus International Airport and nearby weapon stores.

Syrian air defense troops reportedly fired dozens of missiles in response, primarily medium-range missiles from Buk air defense systems (SA-17), and 57E6 missiles from short-range Pantsir-S1 (SA-22) systems.

Syria’s Sana state news agency later claimed destruction of thirty Israeli missiles. A video in Damascus shows the missiles arcing into the night sky. At least five mid-air explosions can be seen in the video, though these are not necessarily the results of successful intercepts.

Though Syrian government statements are less than trustworthy, multiple sources suggest the defenses may have impeded the initial Israeli attack. The IDF then unleashed a second wave of strikes targeting the air-defense batteries themselves.

You can see the video released by the IDF of the attack here.

In the first part of the clip, an unidentifiable system can be seen rapidly firing off two missiles in a frantic effort to defend itself from multiple incoming munitions. Whether the two missiles manage to hit anything is unclear, as the system abruptly erupts in flames, apparently struck by an unseen munition before the point-of-view weapon impacts.

In the second part, an apparently inactive Pantsir system mounted on its 8 x 8 truck can be seen sitting placidly as the Israeli munition plunges towards it.

Syrian military commentator Mohammed Salah Alftayeh brought to the author’s attention that the system in question appears to be a Pantsir-S2—an improved variant of the Pantsir-S1 in wide-scale service with both Russian and Syrian troops.

The Pantsir-S2 entered Russian military service in 2015, capable of employing 57E6-E missiles with a fifty percent greater engagement range of 18.6 miles, and slightly longer radar-detection range of twenty-five miles. Though Russia has not announced combat-testing of the Pantsir-S2 in Syria, it has nonetheless been spotted in media footage released by the Syrian government. The S2 model can be visually distinguished by its retractable “two-faced” SOTS S-band radar, in contrast to the rectangular flat-panel radar on the S1.

You can see the difference visually highlighted in this post by Alftayeh.

Reportedly two Pantsir and one older 9K33 Osa (SA-8) short-range air defense system were destroyed, and four Syrian personnel killed. According to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, the Israeli strikes collectively killed twenty-one persons, including twelve Iranian soldiers.

Why was Pantsir’s radar visibly folded-down in an active state, and its crew unresponsive to the incoming attack? The open-source intelligence website T-Intelligence claims that the system was abandoned by its crew after expending the last of its missiles. Alternately, the crew may have been off-duty, and the system left unmanned due to a lack of personnel.

The Pantsir-S’s performance has received scrutiny, as the truck-born short-range air-defense system—which combines rapid-firing thirty-millimeter autocannons with twelve Mach 3 missiles remotely guided using the truck’s radar—seems ideal for countering both low-altitude standoff cruise missiles and kamikaze drones which are proliferating in the twenty-first century. In January 2018, the Pantsir reportedly had some success in repelling a drone-swarm attack at Hmeimim airbase. However, later reports in 2018 implied it performed poorly compared to the Tor-missile system in anti-drone engagements.

The IDF also recorded the destruction of a Pantsir-S1 during a massive series of strikes in May. To be fair, a prudent air force can safely target any short-range air defense systems using stand-off weapons. However, the Pantsir theoretically should have had a shot at shooting down the incoming missiles.

It appears the air defense batteries were overwhelmed by a saturation attack. The implication, then, is that Syrian air defenses have made Israeli attacks more expensive by requiring expenditure of additional and more expensive munitions, but they remain incapable of halting the Israeli strikes.

In Alftayeh’s estimation, “Syrian SAMs shoot down a good percentage of the targets detected by the radars but then a new wave of missiles/smart bombs follows, and perhaps a third and a fourth one. The new waves most of the time succeed in achieving their goals, either striking warehouses or striking the SAM launchers and their radars.”

Syrian troops reported in social media the munitions were relatively slow, and left winged debris. According to Alftayeh, the anti-SAM weapon was likely an Israeli-built Harop (Harpy 2) kamikaze drone, which can either be remotely piloted, or set to automatically home in on radar emissions, detonating a seventy-pound explosive on impact. The Harop has a maximum speed of 115 miles per hour, and can loiter over the battlefield for six hours.

The IDF may have used additional types of weapons, including GPS-guided Delilah cruise missiles, which also have man-in-the-loop capabilities. carried by F-16s, or bombs or glide-bombs fitted with a hi-tech SPICE kit including dual GPS and electro-optical guidance.

Under the circumstances, it’s difficult to judge the Pantsir’s effectiveness given the extent of the force leveraged against it by experienced and well-equipped Israeli forces. In the coming months, Syria may eventually activate long-range S-300 surface-to-air missiles systems which may impose additional risks and costs on Israeli strikes. However, this seems unlikely to bring a halt to the long-running contest of forces between Israel, Iran and Syria.

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 first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

K-3 rapidly demonstrated the extraordinary endurance of nuclear submarines, embarking upon two-month long cruises while submerged.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The November-class submarines may not have been particularly silent hunters, but they nonetheless marked a breakthrough in providing the Soviet submarine fleet global reach while operating submerged. They also provided painful lessons, paid in human lives lost or irreparably injured, in the risks inherent to exploiting nuclear power, and in the high price to be paid for technical errors and lax safety procedures.

The United States launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, in 1954, revolutionizing undersea warfare. The Nautilus’s reactor allowed it operate underwater for months at a time, compared to the hours or days afforded conventional submarines. The following year, the Soviet Union began building its own nuclear submarine, the Project 627—known as the November class by NATO. The result was a boat with a few advantages compared to its American competition, but that also exhibited a disturbing tendency to catastrophic accidents that would prove characteristic of the burgeoning Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War.

The original specifications drafted in 1952 for a Soviet nuclear submarine had conceived of employing them to launch enormous nuclear torpedoes at enemy harbors and coastal cities. At the time, the Soviet Union lacked the long-range missiles or bombers that could easily hit most of the continental United States. However, as these capabilities emerged in the mid-1950s, the Project 627 design was revised to reflect an antiship role, with eight torpedo tubes located in the bow and combat systems taken from Foxtrot-class diesel submarines.

The first Project 627 boat, the K-3 Leninsky Komsomol, launched in 1957 and made its first voyage under nuclear power in July 1958 under Capt. Leonid Osipenko, using a reactor design supervised by renowned scientist Anatoly Alexandrov. The large, torpedo-shaped vessel displaced more than four thousand tons submerged and was 107 meters long. Its double-hulled interior was divided into nine compartments, housing a crew of seventy-four seamen and thirty officers.

K-3 rapidly demonstrated the extraordinary endurance of nuclear submarines, embarking upon two-month long cruises while submerged. In 1962, it became the first Soviet vessel to travel to the North Pole, while a sister ship, K-133, was the first submarine to traverse the Drake Strait submerged in a twenty-one-thousand-mile cruise that lasted fifty-two days.

K-3 was soon joined by twelve additional November-class vessels of a revised design designated the Project 627A, distinguishable by a bulbous sonar dome under the bow, as well as a single Project 645 prototype powered by an experimental VT-1 liquid metal reactor with greater power efficiency. The fourteen November-class boats were deployed to the Third and Seventeenth Divisions of the Northern Fleet, though later four were transferred to the Pacific Fleet by transiting under Arctic ice.

The 627’s VM-A reactors were more powerful than their American contemporaries, speeding the Project 627s along up to thirty knots (34.5 miles per hour). However, the 627 lacked another quality generally expected of a nuclear submarine: the reactors were extremely noisy, making the Project 627 boats easy to detect despite the use of stealthy propellers and the first anti-sonar coating applied to a nuclear submarine. This lack of discretion, combined with its inferior sonar array, made the November class ill suited for hunting opposing submarines.

Nonetheless, the 627s still dealt the U.S. Navy a few surprises. In 1965, K-27 managed to sneak up on the antisubmarine carrier USS Randolph off of Sardinia and complete a mock torpedo run before being detected. In 1968, another November-class boat proved capable of matching pace with the carrier USS Enterprise while the latter moved at full power, causing a minor panic in the Navy leadership that led to the adoption of the speedy Los Angeles–class attack submarine, some of which remain in service today.

However, the power of the November class’s reactors was bought at the price of safety and reliability. A lack of radiation shielding resulted in frequent crew illness, and many of the boat suffered multiple reactor malfunctions over their lifetimes. This lack of reliability may explain why the Soviet Union dispatched conventional Foxtrot submarines instead of the November-class vessels during the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite the fact that the diesel boats needed to surface every few days, and for this reason were cornered and chased away by patrolling American ships.

In fact, the frequent, catastrophic disasters onboard the Project 627 boats seem almost like gruesome public service announcements for everything that could conceivably go wrong with nuclear submarines. Many of the accidents reflected not only technological flaws, but the weak safety culture of the Soviet Navy.

K-8 started the trend in October 13, 1960, when a ruptured steam turbine nearly led to a reactor meltdown due to loss of coolant. The crew was able to jury-rig an emergency water-cooling system, but not before radioactive gas contaminated the entire vessel, seriously irradiating several of the crew. K-14, which would distinguish itself in the medical evacuation of an Arctic expedition in 1963, also experienced a reactor breakdown in 1961, necessitating its replacement the following years.

In February 1965, radioactive steam blasted through K-11 on two separate occasions while it underwent refueling at base. The repair crews misdiagnosed the implications of the first event and followed incorrect procedures during the second, and were ultimately forced to evacuate the reactor room, leading to fires breaking out across the ship. The Soviet crew flooded the vessel with 250 tons of water to put out the flames, spreading radioactive water throughout the entire vessel. Seven men were badly irradiated, and the reactor required a complete replacement before it could be returned to active duty three years later.

K-3, the first Soviet submarine to sail on nuclear power, was on a Mediterranean patrol on September 8, 1967, when a hydraulic fire broke out in its torpedo tubes, with the resulting buildup of carbon monoxide killing thirty-nine sailors. The entire command crew passed out, save for a lone petty officer who managed to surface the ship, saving the vessel. A later investigation concluded the fire may have been caused by a sailor smoking in the torpedo compartment.

K-27, the lone Project 645 boat, experienced a breakdown in its port-side reactor on May 24, 1968, in the Barents Sea—despite the crew warning that the reactor had experienced a similar malfunction in 1967 and had yet to test that it was functioning properly. The entire crew of 124 was irradiated by radioactive gas, but Captain Leonov refused to take emergency measures until hours later due to his faith in the reactor. Shortly after the ship limped home on its starboard reactor, five of the crew died from radiation exposure within a month, with twenty-five more to follow in subsequent years. Repair of K-27 ultimately proved too expensive a proposition, so it was scuttled by ramming in Stepovoy Bay in waters only thirty-three meters deep—rather than the three to four thousand meters required by the IAEA.

In 1970, the ill-fated K-8 was participating in the Okean 70 war games off the Bay of Biscay when it suffered simultaneous short circuits in its command center and reactor control room, spreading a fire through the air conditioning system. The captain managed to surface the boat, and the crew nearly escaped with only moderate loss of life—except that the Soviet Navy ordered about half of the men back on board to conduct emergency repairs and pilot the ship home. An encounter with a sea squall led to the damaged boat sinking to the ocean floor, taking fifty-eight crew and four nuclear torpedoes with it.

The November-class boats finally began to enter retirement in the 1980s and early 1990s—but not before being subject to a final few accidents, not of their own making. In August 1985, K-42 was berthed next to the Echo-class submarine K-433 near Vladivostok when the latter suffered a nuclear refueling accident that killed ten and irradiated 239. K-42 was deemed so badly contaminated that it, too, had to be decommissioned.

As the Soviet Union was succeeded by an economically destitute Russia, many decommissioned nuclear submarines were left to rust with their nuclear fuel onboard, leading to safety concerns from abroad. International donors fronted $200 million to scrap the hulks in 2003. Flimsy pontoons were welded onto K-159 to enable its towing to a scrapping site, but on August 30 a sea squall ripped away one of the pontoons, causing the boat to begin foundering around midnight. The Russian Navy failed to react until hours later, by which the time submarine had sunk, taking eight hundred kilograms of spent nuclear fuel and nine of the ten seamen manning the pontoons with it. Plans to raise K-159 have foundered to this day due to lack of funding.

This is just an accounting of major accidents on the November-class boats—more occurred on Echo- and Hotel-class submarines equipped with the same nuclear reactors. Submarine operations are, of course, inherently risky; the U.S. Navy also lost two submarines during the 1960s, though it hasn’t lost any since.

The November-class submarines may not have been particularly silent hunters, but they nonetheless marked a breakthrough in providing the Soviet submarine fleet global reach while operating submerged. They also provided painful lessons, paid in human lives lost or irreparably injured, in the risks inherent to exploiting nuclear power, and in the high price to be paid for technical errors and lax safety procedures.

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 several years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, World

The conflict still raged in many parts of the world after the official surrender.

Key point: The conflict resulted in a lot of political fall out. Here are the many other wars and fights spawned by the Great War.

Countless history books record that “on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, the calamitous Great War finally came to an end.

Indeed, no longer would machinegun fire tear apart generations of young men on West European battlefields, nor would week-long artillery barrages torture the very land itself into a cratered, muddy moonscape.

But the supposed world peace brought about by Armistice Day was anything but universal. In 1919, across Eastern Europe to Central Asia, the violence begun in World War I raged on for as long as five more years—sucking in not only local actors, but troops from the United States, France, the UK and Japan, despite political pressure to bring them home.

Fundamentally at issue was the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian empire in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire in Central Asia. This was justified by London, Paris and Washington on the basis of recognizing the passions of aspiring nationalists who sought their own nation-state ungoverned by foreign occupiers.

The problem with this reasonable conceit was that despite the frequent brutality and increasing dysfunction of the multinational empires based in Vienna and Istanbul, they nonetheless by their very nature facilitated a degree of toleration and intermingling of diverse ethnic and religious minorities throughout their sprawling domains. Not only were new ethno-nationalist governments often uninterested in protecting minorities dwelling in their territories, but the fact that those communities were heavily intermixed—inevitably led to violent conflict between newborn nation-states.

Furthermore, a principle of national self-determination seen as fair when applied to Eastern Europe was not equally applied to nationalists among European colonial subjects in Africa or Asia, whose political ambitions would have come at the victor’s expense. Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh was shown the door when he petitioned for inclusion in the Versailles conference. Territory in China, which had supported France in the war, was awarded to Japan. In April 1919, British troops gunned down 1,600 Indians in a public garden in Amritsar protesting a law facilitating the arrest of Indian nationalists. That last act too contributed to another war begun in 1919—an opportunistic Afghan invasion of British India by King Amanullah under pressure to resist British political domination.

Armistice Day, of course, did nothing to stop the civil war raging within the shattered husk of Imperial Russia between the Whites and the Reds. The conflict had its roots in the decrepitude of Tsarist rule and the rise of international socialist ideology prior to World War I. The strain of the Great War triggered a largely peaceful revolution that installed a liberal-democratic “White” government in Moscow. A bloody civil conflict might have been averted had Imperial Germany not arranged for Lenin and his supporters to travel to Russia by sealed train in 1917. His political agitation led to a far bloodier second revolutionary act.

Not only did millions of Russians, East Europeans and Central Asians take up arms against each other during the civil war, but British, French and U.S. troops landed in the Arctic Arkhangelsk in a confused and half-hearted attempt to support the White cause. Later, a second force of U.S. and Japanese troops invaded Siberia, the former ostensibly seeking to facilitate the withdrawal of the Czech Legion, the latter looking to annex territory and support the Whites.

The Red versus White conflict reached its climax in 1919 with the defeat of White forces in Siberia and Ukraine, followed in 1920 by the evacuation of White troops and Kolchak’s execution. U.S. troops finally withdrew from Russia in 1920, but White-held Vladivostok did not fall until 1922. Conflict raged for two more years as Soviet troops reconstituted former Tsarist Russian territories in Central Asia, using aircraft, poison gas and primitive armored vehicles to crush upstart republics and ethnically cleanse through forced migration and executions “troublesome” minorities such as the Cossacks.

Over 1.5 million soldiers and eight million civilians died in the Russian civil war—the latter mostly due to famine as well as political terror campaigns waged by both sides—making it debatably the deadliest civil war of the twentieth century.

The revolution had a spill-over effect in Poland, which in 1919 regained formal independence over a century after it had been annexed out of existence by Germany, Austria and Russia. However, the nationalist government of Józef Piłsudski government dreamed of rebuilding a wider Polish-Lithuanian empire—an idea Poland’s neighbors were not on board with. In a darkly ironic turn, after suffering over a hundred years of foreign domination, Warsaw fought a half-dozen border wars with Ukraine, Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Baltics. Then in 1920, the Poles launched a full-scale offensive on Kiev (the capital of modern-day Ukraine), capitalizing on the chaos of the Russian civil war.

The war seesawed, however, as the Polish instigated a devastating Russian counterattack. The Poles were driven as far back as the gates of Warsaw before a renewed counter-counter-offensive left Poland closing hostilities in 1921 with additional territory in modern-day Western Ukraine and Belarus. The conquest backfired in the long-run, making potential allies leery of Warsaw. After World War II, the Soviet Union took back the lost territory and compensated the Poles with German land, from which the Germans were forcibly deported.

Though Paris, London and Rome didn’t formally dissolve the Ottoman Empire, they quickly seized valuable Middle Eastern territories for their own profit and deployed occupying forces on the Anatolian peninsula. At times the ostensible allies even competed with each other to seize the most territory. The Sultan’s government was rendered largely powerless and utterly dependent on the occupying forces.

In May 1919, the multi-ethnic city of Smyrna was handed over to a Greek occupation force, formerly subject to Ottoman rule and now its greatest enemy. The resulting sense of national humiliation led a resurgent nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a general who had successfully defeated British and French forces at Gallipoli during World War I. When Turks grew outraged at the terms of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, Ataturk’s Grand National Assembly led an uprising against the foreign armies.

As pressure to bring the troops home caused France and the UK to shy away from deeper engagement in the conflict, the Turkish nationalists principally battled Greek troops. However, in October 1920, the Greek King was fatally bitten by a monkey in an altercation also involving his German Shephard Fritz. This led to a political purge of the Greek military which fatally compromised its effectiveness.

The Greco-Turkish War culminated in the Greek defeat in the Battle of Sakarya, the suppression of Armenian national army and the Turkish capture of Smyrna on September 1922. Four days later, a fire broke out in the Greek quarter—by many, but not all, accounts started by Turkish soldiers—utterly destroying only those parts of the city and killing over ten thousand Greeks and Armenians. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the docks where they remained crowded for two weeks, subject to rape, theft, killing and starvation before roughly half were evacuated by British and U.S. ships.

Once again, the establishment of one national homeland took place at others’ expense: in the treaty, Ankara and Athens agreed to forcibly deport 1.6 million Orthodox Christians and 355,000 Muslims into each other’s territory, though religious minorities were allowed to remain in Istanbul and Western Thrace.

The tragic and prolonged conflicts that raged after World War I “ended” serve as a cautionary tale as to how historical narratives are so often over-tidily trimmed of inconvenient details—and how cynicism and idealism alike can sabotage the quest for peace.

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 first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Security,

This submarine is one of the most powerful to ever go under the waves.

The “Buckeye State” may be nearly 500 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, but ask any U.S. Navy submariner about the Ohio-class submarines and they'll tell you it is a platform that should strike fear into America's enemies. The submarine class that serves the Navy was developed as a virtually undetectable undersea launch platform to launch intercontinental missiles.

As the largest subs ever constructed for the U.S. Navy, and the third-largest submarines ever built, the boats were designed to carry the concurrently developed Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles. A total of eighteen of the Ohio-class submarines were constructed by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics between 1981 and 1997.

According to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), which was agreed in June 1992, the number of U.S. Navy strategic missile submarines was limited to fourteen beginning in 2002. Rather than simply phasing out or decommissioning four of the boats, the U.S. Navy opted to convert them to conventionally armed nuclear-powered cruise missile-submarines (SSGNs).

Electric Boat was awarded a contract in September 2002 to convert the four oldest of the class including USS Ohio (SSBN 726), Michigan (727), Florida (728), and Georgia (729); and each of those boats was refitted with vertical launching systems, which allow the submarines to carry up to 154 Tomahawk TLAM (land attack) or Tactical Tomahawk (block IV) missiles. According to Naval-Technology, the conversion also allowed the subs to be capable of deploying special operations forces via accommodation of Northrop Grumman's advanced SEAL delivery system (ASDS), along with a mission control center. This was accomplished by converting two of the twenty-four vertical payload tubes into a lockout, which could be used by special operators such as the Navy SEALs.

The SSGN Program Office was able to refuel and convert the four ballistic missile subs (SSBN) to SSGNs in just over five years, and more importantly for U.S. taxpayers for considerably less cost and at less time than it would take to build a new platform. All four of the vessels had completed their conversion by December 2007.

Similar to the U.S. Navy's SSBNs, the four SSGNs now operate with two separate crews—a Blue and Gold crew. While most of the crew swaps are done in theater, the SSGNs are also based in their home ports of Kings Bay, Georgia and Bangor, Washington.  These four Ohio-class SSGNs operate on a fifteen-month cycle, which consists of a three-month major maintenance period followed by an entire year deployed overseas. As a result of this schedule, the SSGNs are in theater nearly seventy percent of the time.

As the SSGNs are nuclear-powered, these can operate undetected for extended periods, to deploy the special operators, or to launch its cruise missiles. However, unlike surface combatants, the SSGNs carry no defensive missiles.

While all four Ohio-class SSGNs will reach the end of their forty-two life cycle and are scheduled to be retired by 2028 without replacement, the Navy has been working to add the Virginia Payload Module, which contains four large vertical payload tubes, to future Virginia-class submarines beginning with the Block V submarines.

Yet, even with their retirement not all that many years away, the U.S. Navy could look to expand the capabilities of the SSGNs. In December 2020, noted naval expert H I Sutton, writing for Naval News, reported that the four aging boats could soon receive hypersonic missiles to increase the submarines' capabilities. For the time those SSGNs have left, they could remain a major offensive weapons platform.

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

Stephen Silver

Technology, Americas

But will its streaming dominance continue into 2021?

In news that’s perhaps not surprising, Roku said Friday that Roku TV was the top TV operating system in both the United States and Canada, during the time period that amounted to nearly all of 2020.

Roku, in a press release, cited NPD’s Weekly Retail Tracking Service, which included data from between Jan. 5 and Dec. 26, 2020. Per NPD, Roku TV had 38 percent of the market in the United States and 31 percent in Canada.

In addition, ahead of CES next week, Roku announced that it is launching what it calls “a new wireless reference design,” for wireless soundbars, called Roku TV Ready Wireless Soundbar.

“This new design uses Roku’s proprietary audio technology to connect the soundbar seamlessly with any Roku TV model wirelessly,” the company said in a blog post. “It will offer impressive audio and video synchronization, have simple to set-up without the clutter of cords and can be controlled by one Roku TV remote.  Even better, you can place it anywhere in the room.”

The first such soundbar, Roku said, will arrive at CES, from TCL. Also, Element will launch a 2.0 Roku TV Ready Soundbar and 2.1 Roku TV Ready Soundbar + Subwoofer later in January.

Roku made another announcement Friday, one that had been rumored earlier in the week: It announced that it has reached a deal to acquire the library of the departed, much-maligned shortform streaming video service, Quibi. Quibi’s shows will live on in the Roku Channel, becoming available soon, and is expected to stream for free for Roku users.

“The Roku Channel will soon be home to Emmy-nominated and popular shows, such as #FreeRayshawn, Chrissy’s Court, Die Hart, Dummy, Flipped, Most Dangerous Game, Punk’d, Reno 911!, Survive, and more, featuring stars including, Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Liam Hemsworth, Anna Kendrick, Nicole Richie, Chrissy Teigen, Lena Waithe, and many others,” the company said in a blog post.

Quibi launched in the spring of 2020, around the start of the pandemic, with billions in backing and the participation of two veteran executives, former Disney and DreamWorks decision make Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP and eBay CEO Meg Whitman, and the company secured the participation of a long list of A-list talent.

But Quibi soon became something of a laughingstock for many reasons, from its silly name to the folly of launching an app for people on the go during the months when everyone was stuck at home, to the inability to take screenshots. None of the shows on Quibi made any kind of cultural impact, and after failing to sell itself, the company folded in October, just six months after its launch.

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

Image: Reuters

Caleb Larson

Security, Europe

Thanks to the Spear 3 missile.

The United Kingdom’s F-35s will be equipped with a small but powerful new surface-to-ground missile in the near future: the Spear 3 missile, manufactured by MBDA, a European arms manufacturer, stands for Selective Precision Effects At Range and hints at the missile’s unique capabilities.

In an announcement posted to the MDBA website, the company elaborated on the details of the £550 million ($747 million) deal with the UK Ministry of Defense, stating “SPEAR will be the main medium-to-long-range strike weapon of the UK F-35 combat aircraft, enabling them to defeat challenging targets such as mobile long-range air defence systems at over-the-horizon ranges in all weathers and in highly contested environments.”

Here’s what makes the missile so deadly.

Spear 3

The missile itself is a stand-off weapon that is relatively small, about two meters, or six feet in length, and lightly tipping the scales at around one hundred kilos, or about twenty-two pounds. MBDA advertises the missile as efficient and cost-effective, and thanks to the missile's small payload size and relatively low explosive power, MBDA claims that collateral damage is significantly minimized.

Thanks to the Spear’s pop-out wings, the stand-off missile has a range of about 140 kilometers, or 87 miles. Given the missile’s diminutive size, it can be carried on pylons in packs of up to three, affording a higher total number of munitions per pylon.

As of now, the Spear is compatible only with the F-35B, the short take-off and vertical-landing variant of the F-35 stealth fighter family, though that is likely to change in the future. In addition to eight internally-carried Spear missiles, the F-35 could carry at least six more missiles externally on underwing pylons, though at the cost of significantly degraded stealth capabilities. MBDA artwork also shows Eurofighter Typhoons outfitted with a whopping sixteen Spear missiles in addition to external fuel tanks and additional air-to-air missiles.

Artwork released by the company shows multiple Spear missiles being released simultaneously, a nod to the interconnected and networked nature of the missile. The Spear will use both a GPS as well as an inertial navigation system and a multimode seeker to lock onto targets.

Spear Sharpening

Though the Spear missile is not yet ready for service, the seven-year deal struck with the Ministry of Defense covers additional weapon testing and integration onto British aircraft that, if adhered to, will see the first missiles built sometime in 2023. In the meantime, the Ministry of Defense is quietly sharpening its spears.

Caleb Larson is a Defense Writer with The National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Technology, Europe

Speed has often held a mixed appeal in submarine warfare.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Re-designated K-222 in 1975, the speedy submarine served the Soviet Northern fleet for fourteen more years, soldiering through a reactor accident in 1980 caused by a wrench dropped into machinery during refueling of the reactor core. The titanium boat was finally decommissioned in December 1984 and left on a pier in Severodvinsk.

Speed has often held a mixed appeal in submarine warfare. After all, even very quiet submarines become noisy when they're tearing through the ocean at their maximum speed of 20 to 30 knots. As typically the goal in submarine warfare is to detect an unaware adversary and launch torpedoes without being detected in return, many submarines cruise at little more than a brisk jog to minimize noise.

However, speed also enables more aggressive maneuvers against alert enemies and incoming torpedoes, and the ability to close with or disengage from adversaries as the situation dictates. And sometimes speed is desirable simply to get a submarine where it needs to be to engage a fast-moving enemy.

Such was the thinking behind the Soviet’s Project 661 submarine Anchar that was conceived in 1959: a speedy submarine that could race forth to intercept American carrier task forces cruising at 33 knots, blast them with long-range cruise missiles fired from underwater, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

Project 661, known as the Papa-class by NATO, was developed roughly in parallel with another high speed-design, the Project 705 torpedo attack submarine, which would result in the iconic Alfa-class submarine. Though the two boats diverged in many respects, they had in common hulls made of strong but lightweight titanium alloy instead of steel to save weight, and thereby increase speed.

While U.S. engineers incorporated titanium components into aircraft like the ultra-fast SR-71 Blackbird, doing so on something the scale of a submarine hull was considered unfeasible because the element could only be welded in a de-oxygenated environment. That didn’t stop Soviet engineers, who had workers in pressurized suits weld 60-millimeter thick titanium plates of the Project 661’s pressure hull in the argon gas-flooded Building No. 42 in Severodvinsk.

The cost of this scheme was a (then) considerable 2 billion rubles, leading to titanium submarine being dubbed the “Golden Fish.” Many of the titanium plates subsequently cracked due to manufacturing flaws—particularly in the ballast tanks—requiring lengthy and expensive re-manufacturing of components.

Unlike the relatively small and sleek Alfa and its tiny crew of fifteen to thirty-two, the Project 661 was a large but conventional-looking double-hulled design that displaced a sizeable 7,000 tons submerged, measured 107 meters long and had a complement of eighty-two officers and seamen. Its speed advantage came from the fact that it incorporated two powerful VM-5m pressurized water reactors, each generating 177 megawatts to turn two side-by-side propeller shafts.

The K-222 had four torpedo tubes with just twelve torpedoes for self-defense. Its principal armament was meant to be ten seven-meter-long P-70 Amethyst cruise missiles (NATO codename SS-N-7 Starbright) mounted in flooded, slanted tubes along each side of its bow. These were the first cruise missiles designed for under-water launch (SLCMs) ever deployed.

Project 661’s tactical concept was simple: it would race at maximum speed towards the reported location of carrier task forces. Once it had located prey using its powerful MGK3 Rubin sonar array, the sonar would transmit targeting data to Anchar’s torpedo and missile systems.

The missile submarine would rise to within 30 meters of the surface to launch all its 3.85-ton missiles in two five-shot volleys timed three minutes apart from a distance as great as forty miles away. The Amethyst missiles would pop up to the surface powered by their first-stage rockets, whereupon they would extend wings and a second solid-fuel rocket would hurl them up into the sky. 

Upon attaining an altitude of 200 feet, a third rocket then propelled the P-70s at just under the speed of sound towards the designated target area using inertial guidance systems. In the terminal phase, the missiles switched on active L-Band radars to home in on the largest nearby target. As the missile plunged towards their target, the Project 661 sub would hightail its way back to base for reloading.

The numerous new technologies involved in the Anchar resulted in false starts to the project in 1962 and 1963. Finally, a Project 661 submarine K-162 was laid down in 1965 and launched four years later in 1969. In initial sea trials using 80 percent reactor power, she attained an impressive 42 knots, exceeding the 38 knots stipulated in design documents. By contrast, the American Permit­-class submarines of the era had a maximum speed of 28 knots. But access-hatch fairings, emergency signal buoys and water intakes were torn away during the speed run.

On December 30, Captain Golubkov Filipovich took K-162 on a test run seeking to push the titanium sub to its limits. After overriding engine safety controls, the missile submarine attained a world record of 44.7 knots (51 miles per hour) using 97 percent of reactor power while swimming 100 meters under the surface.

This speed was repeated on a second test on March 30, 1971 using 100 percent power, though the crew had to abort the third leg of the run as the turbines began to fall out of control. That fall the submarine practiced stalking an American carrier task force across the Atlantic, surfacing just once during its eighty-day deployment.

The Project 661’s impressive speed, however, came with major shortcomings—maximum speed resulted in intolerable noise levels of 100 decibels for the crew. In Cold War Submarines, author Norman Polmar shares an account by a Soviet crew member:

“…when 35 knots was exceeded, it was like the noise of a jet aircraft. In the control room was heard not simply the roar of an aircraft, but the thunder of the engine room of a diesel locomotive.”

Obviously, this would have been extremely acoustically conspicuous to adversaries. Furthermore, the submarine was prone to damaging itself when charging ahead at full speed.

This considerable expense involved in the Golden Fish’s construction meant no other boats were built in her class. However, the Papa-class did serve to pioneer technology used in later titanium-hulled submarines, leading to premium hunter-killer designs such as the Alfa and Sierra-class submarines and the deep-diving experimental Mike-class.   

Re-designated K-222 in 1975, the speedy submarine served the Soviet Northern fleet for fourteen more years, soldiering through a reactor accident in 1980 caused by a wrench dropped into machinery during refueling of the reactor core. The titanium boat was finally decommissioned in December 1984 and left on a pier in Severodvinsk. She remained inactive for twenty-four more years before she finally was scrapped in 2015.

Kyle Mizokami is a writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. This article first appeared two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Eurasia

The age of the carrier could be ending.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Today’s supercarriers will likely serve on for decades. However, the new threats arrayed against them, combined with the limited range of the current generation of carrier-based aircraft, suggest they may prove too vulnerable to operate within striking distance of near-peer opponents.

On May 31, 2017, the U.S. Navy accepted into service USS Gerald Ford, the first of up to four new fleet carriers. The massive 1,100-foot-long vessel will eventually embark around sixty aircraft, including twenty-four F-35 Lightning stealth fighters and another twenty to twenty-four FA-18 Super Hornets. It features a faster elevator for loading munitions, and new electromagnetic launch catapults (EMALS) and arresting hooks to increase the tempo of flight operations while reducing maintenance costs. All of these new perks come at roughly a $13 billion price tag—more than twice the cost of the preceding USS George H. W. Bush.

The United States’ nuclear-powered fleet carriers are currently without rival in the world, and their onboard Carrier Air Wings can unleash tremendous sustained firepower. They serve as potent symbols of American military power, and floating air bases for campaigns in Libya, Iraq and the Balkans.

But how would the supercarriers fare when taking on something tougher than a third-world despot? Advances in missile and submarine technology put in question whether such large and expensive ships are survivable when operating within striking distance of an enemy coastline.

That striking distance is dictated by the roughly seven-hundred-mile combat radius of the carrier’s F-35C stealth fighters, with a shorter range for the Super Hornets. Inflight refueling may extend that distance a bit, though one should bear in mind that a carrier air wing has only a modest ability to refuel itself with its Super Hornet tankers without resorting to larger land-based tanker support. However, sailing a carrier strike group close enough for its fighters to attack coastal targets also places the carrier well within harm’s way of a variety of nasty new weapons.

Long Littoral Reach

One of the newer threats comes from ground-based ballistic missiles—normally a weapon we think of as exclusively used for striking land targets. However, the new Chinese DF-21D Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) possess a high degree of accuracy and the capability to adjust course midflight. Both traits enable the rocket to hit a moving target like an aircraft carrier.

The DF-21D “East Wind” IRBM has a range of nine hundred miles, and can adjust its flight path using targeting data fed to it by other platforms, including a series of Yaogan satellites put into space over the last several years. The U.S. Naval Institute claimed the massive kinetic energy of a descending DF-21D, combined with the explosive payload, could potentially destroy a carrier in one hit.

It’s important to note that the East Wind is a mobile weapons system, and could thus prove difficult to preemptively strike. On the other hand, while dozens of the missiles have been deployed to PLA units, it doesn’t appear that the weapon has ever been tested against a moving naval target.

Until recently IRBMs were nearly impossible to shoot down. Today, U.S. cruisers and destroyers carry SM-3 air-defense missiles, which supposedly might be able to swat down an incoming IRBM—although it’s not expected to be easy. There also a number of potential methods for messing up an IRBM’s guidance systems.

Stealthy Submarines—or Subs with Big Missiles

Torpedo-launching submarines sank several aircraft carriers during World War II—though both land- and carrier-based aircraft played a major role in countering the submarine threat. At the time, submarines were especially vulnerable to patrol planes because they had to surface a couple of times a day to keep their batteries charged. Even when lurking underwater, they relied on noisy air-breathing diesel engines that made them easier to pick up on sonar.

During the 1950s and ’60s, new nuclear-powered submarines increased the underwater endurance of subs from hours or a few days at best to months at a time. Nuclear propulsion also enabled them to become far faster and quieter than diesel submarines. Other innovations, such as anechoic tiles and teardrop-shaped hulls reinforced the sonar stealth trend. The quieting technology had reached such a peak by the end of the Cold War that nuclear submarines obliviously collided with each other in 1992, 1993 and as recently as 2009, due to their inability to detect each other.

Of course, carriers are always escorted by destroyers or frigates specialized in antisubmarine warfare. Furthermore, long-distance maritime patrol planes and shipboard helicopters also assist in sweeping the seas for enemy subs. However, while Russian submarines were initially much noisier than their Western counterparts during most of that period, later Cold War designs, such as the nuclear-powered Akula class, were nearly peers to their Western counterparts in quietness.

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Nuclear submarines, however, cost well over $2 billion apiece in modern times, so noisier diesel submarines remain more common across the world. However, in the 1990s Sweden deployed the first submarine to use Air Independent Propulsion (AIP), the Gotland. A variety of AIP technologies allow for a new generation of very quiet and very cheap ship-hunting submarines that cost as little as roughly one-sixth the price of a nuclear submarine, and can operate up to two to four weeks underwater, albeit at fairly slow speeds.

China now possesses fifteen Type 41 submarines, employing the same Stirling AIP system as the Gotland, with another fifteen planned, while dozens of German-made Type 212, 214 and 218 AIP submarines are entering service across Europe and Asia. In fact, the Pacific in particular has become the site of a veritable submarine arms race.

Both nuclear and AIP submarines, including the Gotland, have repeatedly succeeded in sinking aircraft carriers during NATO naval exercises. This is even more alarming considering how cheap the latter type of submarines are to build. In addition to being quiet, AIP submarines possess the range and endurance to hunt for carriers across regional waters, even if most aren’t suitable for deep-ocean operations. Another limitation is that they are significantly slower than the carriers they are hunting, especially while attempting to maximize battery life, forcing them to rely more on ambush tactics.

Still, creeping up to within torpedo range of a carrier strike group is a risky business. Some submarines are designed to hunt their targets from afar. The Russian Oscar-class cruise missile submarine, for example, is not especially stealthy, but it does not have to get close to a carrier group’s surface escorts, thanks to the four-hundred-mile range of its P-700 Granit missiles, which it can launch while underwater. The ten-meter-long missiles travel at supersonic speeds, and are designed to network together to overwhelm defensive countermeasures.

Cruise Missile Defense

This brings us into the realm of missile defense, a long-established threat that carrier strike groups have evolved to counter. While carriers carry short-range antiaircraft missiles and Phalanx CIWS guns for self-defense, their escorting Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are armed with a diverse array of medium- and long-range air antiaircraft missiles, designed to thin out incoming missile barrages from hundreds of miles away. These defenses are backed up by networked radars and coordinated by the sophisticated Aegis defense system.

The challenge facing carrier strike groups today is that new antiship missiles are becoming faster, longer-range and more widespread, and can be deployed from platforms including long-distance patrol planes and bombers, small and stealthy fast-attack boats, and even shipping containers concealed in a harbor.

The greater range means new missiles can be more safely lobbed at the carrier without necessarily entering within range for easy retaliation. The greater speed means they are harder to shoot down. And the ability to deploy them from a variety of platforms means the missile-launching units might prove difficult to detect and comprehensively eradicate preemptively.

Take, for example, the Russian Kalibr cruise missile, the “Sizzler” antiship variant of which can strike naval targets up to four hundred miles away. The missile skims just above the sea, making it difficult to detect at a distance, before leaping up to three times the speed of sound on the terminal approach—offering a challenging target for missile-defense systems. The Kalibr can be fired not only from underwater by submarines, but also by relatively small and cheap corvettes.

The heavier but shorter-range BrahMos missile entering use on sea, land and air platforms in the Indian military approaches the target at Mach 2.8, and is designed to perform an L-shaped evasive maneuver to fool a ship’s missile defenses. And China, needless to say, has developed its own range of similar antiship missiles, including both clones of Russian weapons as well as truly indigenous designs.

Even more troubling for a carrier’s air defenses are a new generation of hypersonic missiles—weapons exceeding five times the speed of sound. On June 3, Russia claimed to have successfully tested the hypersonic Zircon missile, with a reported speed of 4,600 miles per hour.

If a carrier tasks forces defense’s function properly—not something to take for granted when both the attacking and defensive systems have scant operational records—then they should be able to handle a few incoming missiles. However, an attacker would seek to “saturate” the defender’s defenses by launching large volleys of the missiles all at once, and it may only take a few getting through to wreak considerable havoc.

This, however, brings us to the major critique common to all these carrier-killing tactics: they often require a high degree of coordination, operational planning and networking.

Breaking the Kill Chain

Set aside the air-defense missiles for a moment—a carrier’s first defense is that its thousand-foot-long flight deck is still nothing more than a tiny pinprick measured against the millions of square miles that make up the ocean. A tiny moving pinprick. Not just locating but also tracking a carrier across all that space relies on having a maritime observation apparatus coordinating long-distance patrol planes, submarines, over-the-horizon radars and satellites—many of which are vulnerable in turn to a carrier strike group’s aircraft and missiles.

Once that apparatus identifies a carrier’s position, the targeting data needs to make it back in a timely fashion to air, land or naval units to put them in position for an attack. This sort of “cueing” is also very important in submarine operations. In many cases, a separate platform will have to network targeting data on the carrier, as the launch platforms may be too far away to acquire them on their own radars. Of course, that targeting data may also be disrupted by electronic warfare and defensive countermeasures. Just as likely, the observers may lose track of the carrier task force’s position before elements can get into place to make the strike.

These considerations lead National Interest contributor Rob Farley to argue that China and Russia lack adequate the maritime intelligence assets and operational experience to mount a well-coordinated maritime search-and-destroy campaign against a carrier task force, even if they possess armaments that could theoretically prove effective against one.

The Operational Track Record—Such As It Is

It’s important to stress that nobody really knows how effective both the offensive and defensive naval technologies will prove against each other, as there have fortunately been no large-scale naval wars since World War II.

However, the smaller-scale naval conflicts that have occurred in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and the South Atlantic all suggest long-range antiship missiles pose a substantial threat.

Consider the two British ships sunk by air-launched Exocet missiles in the Falkland War, with a third damaged by a ground-launched weapon. The first attack was not detected until seconds before the moment of impact. Argentina’s possession of just a few of the missiles nearly led London to dispatch a suicidal commando raid on Argentine soil to negate the threat.

During the same conflict, an Argentine diesel-electric submarine twice managed to launch torpedo attacks on British vessels without being detected—though, fortunately for the Royal Navy, the torpedoes all malfunctioned! Meanwhile, Argentina’s own carrier did not participate in the conflict due to the threat posed by British submarines, one of which had sunk cruiser General Belgrano.

On the other hand, antiship missiles liberally employed during the Iran-Iraq War generally failed to sink large tanker vessels—which may imply that supercarriers will also prove similarly resilient.

Obviously, these decades-old incidents should not be over-extrapolated into applying to current technology—but their lessons shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

One should also recall how many navies continued to invest in battleships in between the world wars, skeptical that then-new aircraft carriers could seriously challenge them. Surely, early carrier-based aircraft must not have seemed nearly as dependable as the sixteen-inch guns on a battleship turret. But those primitive warplanes and the operational doctrine for their use matured to the point where their ability to search for and destroy targets across hundreds of miles rendered the battleship obsolete.

Actual combat in World War II proved revelatory. In the December 7 raid on Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes sank three U.S. battleships and severely damaged several more. Shortly afterward, land-based bombers sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse in a few of frenetic hours of action. To cap it off, the subsequent decisive naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway were fought entirely by carrier air strikes and submarine attacks. It took these brutal encounters with reality to finally sweep away many navies’ long-held devotion to a weapon system that no longer provided results commensurate with the expense of building them.

Today’s supercarriers will likely serve on for decades. However, the new threats arrayed against them, combined with the limited range of the current generation of carrier-based aircraft, suggest they may prove too vulnerable to operate within striking distance of near-peer opponents.

It would make sense to plan future naval strategy around these new adversary capabilities, rather than simply doubling down on the supercarrier model because it has worked so far in permissive environments. Solutions that have been suggested to meet the new challenges posed by operating in littoral waters include using long-range carrier-based drones that will allow carriers to operate further afield from dangerous coastlines, relying on stealthy submarines to deliver cruise-missile attacks and distributing firepower across a larger fleet of individually less expensive ships. Above all, planners should seriously consider whether supercarriers loaded with relatively short-range warplanes remain a survivable and cost-efficient linchpin of U.S. naval strategy.

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 first appeared in August 2017 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

Speed is not cheap, especially when the plane is the fastest in the world.

Key Point: The SR-71 served well but has yet to be replaced. Rumor has it that newer version is in the works.

The sleek and sinister SR-71 Blackbird looks like it belongs in a science fiction movie, though in fact the jet black spy plane proved far more successful at outrunning enemy missiles than any of the spaceships depicted in Star Wars. Though retired in the 1990s in favor of spy satellites and recon drones, it doesn’t look like any modern designs are likely to challenge the Blackbird’s record as the fastest manned aircraft ever.

Stealthy Speedster:

As Cold War tensions heightened during the 1950s, the CIA began flying the U-2 spy plane to keep tabs on the Soviet Union’s fast expanding nuclear weapons capabilities. Ungainly and relatively slow-moving, the U-2 relied upon its ability to fly at extremely high altitudes to avoid enemy fighters and early surface-to-air missiles.

The intelligence provided by U-2s in 1962 uncovered the Soviet nuclear missiles deployed to Cuba, leading to the dramatic events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the U-2s also provoked diplomatic incidents because they simply couldn’t fly high enough to avoid Russian missiles SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. A U-2 was shot down in 1960, and its pilot, Gary Powers, captured, triggering an embarrassing diplomatic row.  Another U-2 was shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, killing the pilot and escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington at a critical moment. Five Taiwanese U-2s were shot down over China.

American engineers realized altitude was no longer an adequate defense and in 1957 began working on a plane for the CIA that they hoped Soviet radars would be unable to detect, and that could outrun any missiles fired at it. The Lockheed Skunkworks factory ultimately developed the A-12, codenamed “Archangel.” The prototype was first tested in Area 51 in 1962, and in the end fifteen A-12s were produced.

CIA A-12s flew a total of 29 spy missions over North Korea and Vietnam through 1968 in Operation Black Shield, losing six aircraft to accidents. Intelligence gathered by A-12 helped the CIA to map out North Vietnamese air defenses and located the U.S.S. Pueblo after it was hijacked by North Korea.

The Air Force developed prototypes of an interceptor version, the YF-12, and later considered a high speed bomber, the B-71 (coming numerically after the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber that never entered production). There was even a bizarre M-21 drone carrier that launched a D-21 spy drone off its back. However, none of these spinoffs entered service, and the A-12 was retired in favor of an Air Force operated variant, the SR-71.

The A-12 mounted a single high-resolution camera that recorded a broad swath of terrain directly underneath the aircraft. The Air Force wanted a longer-range version of the A-12 with better sensors that didn’t need to fly directly over hostile territory, particularly as an agreement reached with the Soviet Union that banned territorial overflight. This led to the two-seat SR-71A—the “SR” standing for Strategic Reconnaissance.

The SR-71 was actually slightly less stealthy and high-flying than the A-12, but had different intelligence-gathering technology. It mounted a side-looking airborne radar that mapped the ground below it, and also used two cameras that took images to either side, though at lower-resolution than the A-12’s larger camera. The Reconnaissance Systems Officer in the back seat operated the radar and assisted with navigation. Additionally, the Blackbird had an Electro-Magnetic Reconnaissance system that could detect and record signals traffic.

A total of 32 SR-71s were produced, including two SR-71B trainers and a single SR-71C prototype nicknamed “the Bastard” because of its unstable handling.

The Blackbird could sustain speeds above Mach 3, with a so far unbroken manned-flight record of Mach 3.3 or 3.5.  (The 3.3 record is confirmed, while Mach 3.5 is claimed by pilot Brian Shul to have been achieved while outrunning a missile over Libya in 1986.) That speed is actually even more impressive than it seems, because while later Soviet MiG-25 and MiG-31 fighters could attain Mach 3, they could only do so for brief periods on afterburners, the aerial equivalent of an energy-burning sprint. The SR-71 could sustain Mach 3 flight  for 90 minutes, at which points it required in-flight refueling. A Blackbird once set the record for flying from New York to London in 1 hour and 54 minutes.

In effect, by the time it took a SAM system could lock onto an SR-71 traveling at Mach 3 and launch a missile, the Blackbird was already moving beyond the effective range of the missile.

But Lockheed wasn’t just counting on speed to evade enemy missiles. The Blackbird was the first operational airplane intentionally designed with a reduced radar cross-section to minimize the chance of detection. The Blackbird’s chines—the knife-like tapered edges of the fuselage—were even coated with early radar-absorbent iron-ferrite paint to help lower radar detection ranges.  The chines were also found to provide additional lift and greater aerodynamic stability.

However, the Blackbird wasn’t a stealth plane by modern standards—it had a cross section of 10 square meters—which Soviet radar technology soon proved capable of detecting anyway. Adding to the problem was the enormous heat-exhaust plumes the SR-71’s engines generated, which disrupted the air particles behind it in a manner visible to radar.

Fortunately, the Blackbird also mounted a radar jammer and other electronic countermeasures for confusing enemy missiles. To cap it all off, it was capable of sustained flight at 85,000 feet—another unbroken record—and employed an astro-inertial navigation system that used the stars overhead to calculate the plane’s position.

The Blackbird’s design reflected the fact that it was pushing the limits. The crew wore pressure suits like those used on space missions to withstand the high altitudes they were flying at, and were treated to a medical exam and a high-protein steak and egg meals before each mission.  The SR-71’s J58 engines could only start through use of two vehicle-mounted V8 starter engines, and the triethylborane used in the fuel would belch green flames during ignition. The J58s would switch to a partial ramjet mode at high speeds, such that the SR-71 actually became more fuel efficient when it went faster.

However, when moving at high speeds for long periods of time, the friction generated by the air caused the exterior of the Blackbird to heat up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit or higher—and so the Blackbird was designed top to bottom to shed enormous heat without melting. The SR-71 was made 85% out of of titanium, a heat-resistant metal so hard it broke ordinary drill bits after making just 17 rivet holes, necessitating the development of specialized new tools. The windshields were made of pure quartz, and heavy duty air conditioning system dumped heat out of the cockpit.  After landing, both flight and ground crew had to wait a good while for a Blackbird to cool down before they could even touch it.

The Blackbird consumed special JP-8 high-density jet fuel that had such a high combustion temperature, legend had it you could safely put out a match in it. The fuel was circulated through hundreds of small tubes in the fuselage to double as a heat sink. Blackbirds in photographs often appear a bit ‘shiny’ or wet in photos. That’s actually fuel leaking out of the tanks. Because metal expands at high temperatures, the metal plating of the Blackbird was designed purposefully loose to accommodate the expanding metal, leading to an intentionally leaky fuel tank. Once the SR-71 started flying at high speeds, the metal would heat up and expand several inches, sealing the fuel tank with the aid of a heat-released sealant. The Blackbird’s metal skin was also corrugated in parts to allow for metal expansion.

The Blackbird required multiple aerial refuelings for its missions. These were delivered by specialized KC-135Q tankers, which used a stabilized boom to refuel planes traveling at unusually high speeds, while the Blackbird’s special fuel was stored a separate tank.

An Impressive Record:

The first operational SR-71 unit was activated in 1968, based at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. The locals nicknamed the recon birds Habu—“pit vipers”—a nickname which stuck amongst Blackbird pilots. 

They went onto fly numerous reconnaissance missions over Vietnam. And while the plane performed well, it seems those who would want to take the plane down as the ultimate trophy were catching up.

American pilots soon discovered that the Blackbird’s reduced radar cross-section wasn’t an effective defense by itself–Russian-made radars were powerful enough to track the Habu and launch missiles. However, they learned that the SR-71’s  speed did work as a defense.

Around 800 missiles were fired at Blackbirds over Vietnam alone—but not a single one was lost to enemy fire, though one CIA A-12 did take a piece of shrapnel from an SA-2 missile that exploded 100 meters away.

Blackbirds went onto fly over 3,551 reconnaissance missions over the next 30 years, flying over the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Asia.  Eleven SR-71s were lost in accidents—though all but one pilot survived.  Not one was lost to hostile fire.

Blackbird pilot Colonel James Shelton Jr. recounted how his plane flew an epic 11.5 hour mission to photograph Israeli army positions near the end of the Yom Kippur War. Along the way, he overflew Egyptian airspace and was tracked by multiple radar sites and interceptors—but none of them could keep up. The photos he took later established that Israeli troops were further in Egyptian territory than they had admitted, leading the U.S. to successfully pressure Israel into withdrawing its forces.

Blackbirds also flew recon missions off the Russian coast—though not over Russia itself—evading all of the Mach 3 MiG-25 fighters sent after them. Soviet defector Victor Belenko wrote in his biography MiG Pilot, “They taunted and toyed with the MiG-25s sent up to intercept them, scooting up to altitudes the Soviet planes could not reach, and circling leisurely above them or dashing off at speeds the Russians could not match.”

Yet the Blackbird had shortcomings. It was expensive to operate, costing more than $100,000 per hour flown according to one estimate. Furthermore, an SR-71 required an average of a week of maintenance between each mission because the high-speed flights often caused bits and pieces of the airplane to loosen or come off. The Air Force was also worried that new Soviet SA-5 surface-to-air missiles had the speed and range to hit it.

Most importantly, spy satellites and drones could handle the strategic missions that the SR-71 was supposed to perform. And the Blackbird, which relied on 1960s technology, had no datalink to transmit its intelligence data back to base, so it was not considered ideal for providing data in a time-sensitive manner.

The End of an Era:

The SR-71 was first retired in 1989, before three airframes were brought back into service in 1994. However, the operating costs of the small fleet were extremely high. Despite attempts by politicians like Senator John Glenn to save the program, the Air Force wanted to redirect funding to other projects, and the SR-71 was finally withdrawn from service in 1998. NASA’s two Blackbirds were retired the following year.

For years, there were rumors of an even faster spy plane, the Aurora, but its existence seems unlikely at this point. Rather, the Pentagon relies on drones and satellites if it needs to cast an eye on a well-defended location. Why risk lives and diplomatic incidents using manned aircraft? The still-classified RQ-180 Global Hawk stealth drone currently in development is believed to be the effective successor of the Blackbird.

What about gathering intel over places where there is no threat from surface-to-air missiles?  Then the Air Force can call upon the venerable 1950’s era U-2—which in heavily upgraded form, is now flying photo reconnaissance missions over Iraq, having outlasted its successor by two decades and counting.

Nonetheless, it looks like the Blackbird will remain the queen of speed for some time to come.

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 piece was originally featured in October 2016 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Image: SR-71.

Russell A. Berman

Diplomacy, Europe

President-elect Joe Biden and members of his foreign policy team have signaled their own European aspirations, with greater attention likely to be devoted to western European allies, France and Germany, as well as the EU itself.

The trans-Atlantic partnership is indispensable to American security and prosperity. In the context of great power competition, where democratic values face constant challenges from China and Russia, the deep ties between North America and the countries of Europe have grown especially vital. It is important for American leadership to cultivate these connections.

The Trump administration has had a European agenda, marked by visits by top American officials to the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union, from the Baltics to Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Greece. President-elect Joe Biden and members of his foreign policy team have signaled their own European aspirations, with greater attention likely to be devoted to western European allies, France and Germany, as well as the EU itself. Rather than emphasizing the differences between these approaches, it is more appropriate to see the continuity in Washington's ongoing efforts to maintain robust ties to a continent of multiple countries with diverse interests and perspectives.

The Biden team has made it clear that it intends to strengthen trans-Atlantic relations by acceding to two salient foreign policy agenda items of the Europeans: returning to the Iran Deal, the JCPOA, and rejoining the Paris Climate Accords. Despite the substantive discussions around each of these two agreements—whether the JCPOA can effectively block Iran's path to nuclear weapons and whether the Paris Accord does not unfairly advantage China, the worst Carbon offender—each also represents a prospective concession by the incoming Biden administration to European expectations. They can serve as vehicles to reground traditional trans-Atlantic collaboration. Some may doubt the wisdom of these plans, but no one, at this point, should be surprised if the Biden State Department moves willy nilly to restore the status quo ante by re-embracing both Obama-era arrangements. Europe will be happy.

We should however not forget that rebuilding trans-Atlantic relations is also a European goal. A reinvigorated Atlanticism could therefore also benefit from steps by the Europeans and not only depend on one-sided concessions by Washington. Indeed, a smart European strategy at this point would include extending olive branches to the United States in order to facilitate the potential rapprochement. There are some real points of dispute that have been dividing the Atlantic partnership, but a willing Europe could fix them easily. Meanwhile, smart American diplomacy should encourage such reciprocity, especially in two areas where European flexibility would earn bipartisan applause in Washington.

Stopping the Nord Stream 2 (NS2). Blocking the pipeline has been a consistent goal of both the Obama and Trump administrations. The pending sanctions against completing NS2 have wide bipartisan support in Congress. Nord Stream has also faced extensive opposition in Europe, especially in Poland and the Baltics, but in France as well. It has really only been championed in Germany, but even there, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny, influential figures have challenged NS2, both because it poses a threat to European energy security and because it signals inappropriate support for Vladimir Putin's dictatorship. Chancellor Angela Merkel came close to pulling the plug on the pipeline construction, but she ultimately punted, saying the decision should be European, not just German. It is time to take her by her word and urge the European Commission to suspend NS2. Europe could give no clearer signal to the Biden administration that it values the trans-Atlantic partnership. Our diplomats should encourage their European colleagues to move expeditiously on this. It would be a sign of good faith in the Atlantic Alliance.

Pushing Back on China. The Trump administration transformed the U.S. view of China, but the criticism of China has become bipartisan, regarding unfair trade practices, the treatment of minorities, and the rollback of democracy in Hong Kong. President-elect Biden has signaled his intention to continue a tough line toward Beijing, hopefully in collaboration with European allies. Yet in late December, on the eve of the Biden presidency, the European Commission approved an investment agreement with China. On this agreement too, the devil is in the detail, and serious doubts have been raised as to whether it would ever be able to deliver on the rosy terms that it promises. The agreement must still be ratified by the European Parliament, and its passage is by no means assured, especially in light of China's continued mass arrests of democracy activists. At this point, EU approval of the agreement would signal a callous disregard for the human rights abuses as well as for China's breaking its treaty obligations regarding Hong Kong. Biden’s diplomats have an opportunity to convince the European Commission to suspend the investment agreement unilaterally, while working together with Brussels to persuade China to desist in Hong Kong, to end the persecution of the Uighurs, and to initiate domestic reforms. In addition, Washington could use the authority of the Global Magnitsky Act in concert with the EU that has just adopted parallel legislation to sanction Chinese officials involved in human rights violations. That would be a new “Atlantic Alliance,” worthy of the name.

Of course there are other long-standing issues that irritate trans-Atlantic ties, including the reluctance of many NATO members to share the cost of the defense burden equitably as well as the endemic trade imbalances. These matters certainly need addressing, but given their complexity, rapid progress is unlikely. In contrast, the Biden team could encourage Europe's leadership to move quickly to freeze Nord Stream 2 and to suspend the investment deal with China. If the new administration embraces the Europeans' goals by returning to the JCPOA and the Paris Accords, its success will be measured in terms of its ability to achieve reciprocity, by influencing European allies to meet American goals toward Russia and China. Trans-Atlanticism has to work in both directions for it to remain politically sustainable.

Russell A. Berman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University. He served on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was won on the back of well over tens of thousands of medium tanks churned out by Allied factories over the course of the war.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The key conclusion is that the Allied tanks were engineered for mass production and to handle routine battlefield tasks well, rather than being over-engineered to survive the heaviest guns or penetrate the thickest armor. Upgrades introduced in 1944 gradually helped address undeniable shortcomings in armor penetration when facing the smaller force of German heavy tanks.

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was won on the back of well over tens of thousands of medium tanks churned out by Allied factories over the course of the war. These war-winning weapons stemmed Nazi attacks from the gates of Moscow to Tunisia and the Battle of the Bulge, and swarmed in their thousands to surround and eliminate the Wehrmacht’s ground forces in campaign such Stalingrad, Operation Cobra and the Bagration offensive.

These victories were won despite the well-known fact that by 1943 the Allied tanks were outclassed by heavier German Panther and Tiger tanks that at times dealt them lopsided losses.

The Allied medium tanks, in fact, shared very similar armaments, degrees of armor protection and mobility. Their key trait was that they boasted just enough firepower and armor to get the jobs done, and could be mass produced to an unprecedented scale. This allowed the United States and Soviet Union to fully leverage their larger industrial base to overwhelm the Third Reich’s creaky industrial base, which relied on over-engineered designs built by slave-labor.

This article will compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of the legendary Sherman and T-34—as well as the British Cromwell, a similar-performing medium tank introduced in 1944.

Crew Accommodations

The Cromwell and Sherman both had five-man crews: a tank commander, a gunner, a driver, a loader and a radio operator. Furthermore, each tank was equipped with its own radio receiver, allowing tank units to split apart to perform individual maneuvers and separate missions.

Early-war T-34s, by contrast, had a crew of four: a tank commander who doubled as a loader, a gunner, a driver and a machine-gunner/radio operator. This meant the tank commander had to do double-duty—or triple duty if he was also a unit commander.

Moreover, often only officer’s tanks were equipped with radios earlier in the war, which meant instructions had to be passed on orally or by signal flags from platoon commanders to their subordinates.

As a result, Soviet tank platoons typically maneuvered closely together, and could not react to changing orders as quickly. The T-34 also had notoriously uncomfortable ergonomics and a cramped turret.

Armor

The Sherman and Cromwell tanks were protected by up to three inches of armor, with lower degrees of protection on the sides and rear. The lighter 1941-model T-34 had only 45 to 60 millimeters of armor, but this was heavily sloped up to 60 degrees, resulting in comparable effectiveness.

This degree of protection largely protected the vehicles from frontal hits by early-war German 37-millimeter and 50-millimeter guns, and low-velocity 75-millimeter howitzers. The T-34 particularly made a big splash when it began seeing action in 1941, posing significant problems to the otherwise devastating initial German assault on the Soviet Union.

However, starting in 1942, the T-34 and Sherman could be reliably penetrated by long-barreled 75-millimeter guns entering German service. Ironically, the even heavier guns used by the Tiger and Panther tanks were tremendous overkill against the Allied medium tank’s armor.

A well-designed tank can sometimes survive penetrating hits. The Sherman, however, developed a reputation for having its ammunition “brew up” in flames after impact. This led to later “W” or “Wet-Storage” models of the Sherman which stored ammunition in water-insulated compartments, significantly reducing the frequency of combustion.

The T-34 crews had a different problem: the tank’s heat-treated steel was prone to spalling into deadly fragments from non-penetrating hits.

Armament and Upgrades

The Sherman, T-34 and Cromwell all employed remarkably similar medium-caliber guns. The Sherman, and most models of the Cromwell, used a 38-caliber 75-millimeter gun, while starting in 1941, the T-34 used a 41-caliber 76-millimeter gun. These were effective even against entrenched infantry and even could shoot shotgun-like cannister anti-personnel rounds.

The guns’ armor-piercing rounds could reliably penetrate German Panzer III and IV medium tanks and their turretless assault gun derivatives, but were infamously ineffective against the thick frontal armor of the Tiger and Panther. In one engagement, three Tigers rolled head-long through a battalion of Cromwells, destroying two-dozen before they were knocked out.

Early-model Cromwell I tanks had used high-velocity 57-millimeter 6-pounder guns with superior armor-penetration. However, these lacked effective anti-personnel munitions, so the 75-millimeter gun models were adopted instead. The Soviets also experimentally deployed several hundred T-34 “tank hunters” with 57-millimeter weapons.

In 1944, up-gunned variants of the Sherman and T-34 were introduced to deal with the Tiger and Panther problem. The T-34/85 boasted a heavier 85-millimeter gun which also had a deadlier anti-personnel blast effect. This was combined with a fifth crew member and a more heavily armored turret.

The M4A3E8 “Easy 8” Sherman mounted a 76-millimeter gun with modestly improved penetration using regular armor-piercing shells and had very high penetration using a limited supply of tungsten high-velocity shells. However, the 76-millimeter gun had significantly weaker anti-personnel effects.

Arguably the best up-gunned World War II Sherman was the British Sherman Firefly, which carried a powerful 3-inch 17-pounder gun. However, the British attempt to upgrade the Cromwell with a 17-pounder resulted in the poorly armored and ill-balanced Challenger tank. After serving in the Battle of Normandy, the Challenger was hastily withdrawn from service.

All three tanks mounted additional machine guns in the hull and turret for anti-personnel use and ranging against armored targets. The Sherman alone additionally mounted a heavy .50-caliber machine gun on the turret for air defense.

Mobility and Reliability

The Sherman and T-34 could attain 28 and 32 miles per hour respectively, a very decent pace for tanks of the era. The Cromwell’s most distinguishing quality was its higher speed of 40 miles per hour, which allowed it even to “leap” over significant gaps.

The T-34’s Christie suspension was particularly noted for its ability to traverse heavy snow and mud, common impediments on the Eastern Front. However, the Sherman’s relatively narrow-set tracks sometimes struggled to negotiate rough terrain compared to the wider-set tracks of the T-34, Cromwell and German tanks.

On the other hand, the Sherman developed a reputation for excellent reliability, while the sometimes crudely-manufactured T-34 could experience frequent breakdowns.

Economy

Russia produced a staggering 84,000 T-34 tanks during World War II. Such was the pace of production, that tanks in Stalingrad were even rolled directly off the factory line straight into battle. The city of Chelyabinsk was dubbed “Tankograd” due to the over 60,000 workers gathered to assemble tanks there. Massive economies of scale caused the production price to fall from 269,000 rubles to just 135,000, and man-hours to descend from 9,000 hours to eventually just 3,200 hours per tank.

The United States’ mighty industrial machine built up 49,000 M4 tanks and shipped most of these 33 to 40-ton tanks across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with thousands entering British, French, Chinese and Soviet service. The Shermans were built comparatively expensively at around 48,000 man-hours and $55,000 each—or $800,000 in contemporary dollars.

The United Kingdom with its much more limited resources built only 6,000 Cromwells, which served primarily in armored reconnaissance regiments and the famous 7th Armored Division.

Meanwhile, the scary German Tigers required 300,000 man-hours—and for every Tiger that rampaged amongst the Allied medium tanks, many more were lost due to fuel shortages and mechanical breakdowns. The arguably better Panther still clocked in at 55,000 hours.

The key conclusion is that the Allied tanks were engineered for mass production and to handle routine battlefield tasks well, rather than being over-engineered to survive the heaviest guns or penetrate the thickest armor. Upgrades introduced in 1944 gradually helped address undeniable shortcomings in armor penetration when facing the smaller force of German heavy tanks.

Sure, the Sherman or T-34 weren’t favored to win in a head-on one-on-one confrontation versus heavier Nazi foes. But the countries building them planned their military-industrial base to win the war.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.