Diplomacy & Crisis News

William Jeynes

North Korea, Asia

The twentieth century has often been called the “American Century.” Part of that greatness was a result of the nation’s leaders building upon the successes of previous presidents, even if they were of a different political party. One can only hope that President-elect Biden will lay the previous pejorative political rhetoric aside and build upon the progress in American-North Korean relationships that were built under the Trump Administration.

The 2020 election meant a great deal to Pyongyang, because of the very special relationship that exists between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. How will Biden’s apparent election victory affect relations with North Korea?

The question has profound implications. During the November 2016-January 2017 transition from President Obama to newly elected Donald Trump, Barack Obama warned that North Korea was the thorniest quagmire that the nation faced and it could easily lead to war. The situation in late 2016 was bleak. According to Watergate famed reporter Bob Woodward, in his book Fear: Trump in the White House, President Obama considered a limited pre-emptive surgical military strike because of the combination in September 2016 of North Korea conducting its fifth nuclear test and shooting a medium-range missile 1,000 kilometers into Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the North Korean test missile that landed 150 miles off Japan's coast. "It's a serious threat against our country's security," Abe told reporters. "This is an outrageous act that cannot be tolerated."

In one of President Trump’s greatest international victories, a special relationship burgeoned between him and Kim Jong-un. However, Biden has been quite caustic in his criticism of North Korea’s leader. Biden and North Korea have engaged in an ongoing exchange of name-calling. In the most recent presidential debate, Biden called Kim Jong-un a “thug.” For their part, the North Korean media has called Biden an “imbecile” and “a rabid dog.” Biden has promised that he would continue Barack Obama’s policy toward North Korea that is dependent on North Korea promising to give up part of their nuclear arsenal before talking. However, many American political leaders are concerned, because in the past that approach brought the United States to the brink of war.

President-elect Biden has criticized the progress that has clearly been made between the two nations and this has deeply tested the patience of both Trump and Kim Jong-un. Now that Biden’s presidential election victory is confirmed, one can only hope that common sense will prevail and Biden will continue to build on the foundation of warmer relations that has been established.

Sadly, there has been an increasing tendency in America over the last twenty years to almost automatically decry the foreign policy initiatives of the President, when he has been from the opposing political party. Recently, Donald Trump was nominated for his third Nobel Peace Prize. The most recent one was for the “Trump Doctrine.” David Flint, an Australian law professor, described the reason for this most recent nomination. Flint shared, “He’s reducing America’s tendency to get involved in any and every war.” In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, if the President of the United States or Secretary of State made substantial progress toward real peace, political leaders on both sides of the aisle would profusely lionize the peacemakers. Americans lavished much praise on Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and President Ronald Reagan’s agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, which ushered in the end of the Cold War.

Whatever one might think of President Trump overall, he has brought the United States from the possible brink of war with North Korea, under the Obama Administration, to something of a special relationship between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Does former President-elect Biden really want to regress back to North Korean missiles landing near the coast of Japan and videotapes of North Korea nuking San Francisco? The twentieth century has often been called the “American Century.” Part of that greatness was a result of the nation’s leaders building upon the successes of previous presidents, even if they were of a different political party. One can only hope that President-elect Biden will lay the previous pejorative political rhetoric aside and build upon the progress in American-North Korean relationships that were built under the Trump Administration.

William Jeynes is a professor at California State University at Long Beach and a Senior Fellow, at Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

The concept of the diving shell came about by accident.

Here's What You Need To Remember: American tests of a diving shell similar to the Type 91 confirmed that it maintained a good underwater trajectory and that it had consistent success against lightly armored ships. Its effectiveness against heavier armor proved to be very poor. The U.S. Navy decided that a diving shell would not make a worthwhile addition to its inventory.

The eight-inch shell that penetrated the cruiser’s hull and threatened to blow up her forward magazines was a Type 91 armor-piercing shell, which had been designed to continue through the water when it fell short of its target and penetrate the ship’s hull below the waterline. The damage done by this type of projectile, sometimes called a “diving shell,” was intended to be more like that inflicted by a torpedo than by a conventional shell.

The concept of the diving shell came about by accident. During gunnery trials in 1924, Japanese officers noticed that some “shorts” continued their trajectory through the water and pierced their targets below the waterline. Not only did these shells explode inside the target ship; they also caused considerable flooding. Because of their ability to inflict damage by both flooding and explosion, it was decided to investigate the possibility of introducing diving armor-piercing shells into the Japanese Navy’s arsenal.

After much testing and study, it was discovered that making a shell with a very blunt or nearly flat nose eliminated any tumbling or lateral movement under the water, which had been a problem with conventional shells. The flat shell stayed on an even trajectory after it broke the surface. The projectile was given a pointed ballistic cap that broke away upon impact with the sea, allowing a good trajectory through the air as well as under the water.

An entire range of diving shells was created, eight-inch and larger. In spite of the confidence shown by Japanese officers, the only known instance of a Type 91 shell actually penetrating its target below the waterline was at Cape Esperance against USS Boise.

After a thorough inspection of Boise and the damage done to her hull, American ordnance and ballistics experts were able to work out the properties of the Type 91 shell. American tests of a diving shell similar to the Type 91 confirmed that it maintained a good underwater trajectory and that it had consistent success against lightly armored ships. Its effectiveness against heavier armor proved to be very poor. The U.S. Navy decided that a diving shell would not make a worthwhile addition to its inventory.

This first appeaerd in Warfare History Network here.

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Middle East

How did a weapon only produced in the final years of World War II begin appearing in a Middle Eastern civil war seventy years later?

Here's What You Need To Remember: East Germany was hardly alone in selling ex-Nazi armaments to the Middle East, nor of selling German rifles in particular. The Third Reich’s genocidal regime made extensive use of slave labor factories, particularly in occupied Czechoslovakia. Afterward, the Czechs not only exported the Nazi weapons on they had on hand, but even manufactured their own versions both for domestic service and export.

In 2012, rebels of the Free Syrian Army posted a video in which they uncovered an arms cache containing five thousand assault rifles. Though not an uncommon episode in a civil war then in its early stages, what was truly bizarre was that the rebels had uncovered a cache of Sturmgewehr 44s—an assault rifle designed by Nazi Germany seventy years earlier.

How did a weapon only produced in the final years of World War II begin appearing in a Middle Eastern civil war seventy years later?

Despite its limited impact on World War II battlefields, the Sturmgewehr is already legendary for being the first successful, mass-produced “assault rifle”—a weapon capable of accurate single shots at a long distance and deadly automatic bursts at shorter range.

The standard infantry weapon during World War II was the bolt-action rifle, long bulky weapons with heavy bolts that needed to be manually pulled before each shot. These used high-powered rifle cartridges that remained accurate at long distances. However, infantry squad leaders were often assigned less bulky submachineguns using pistol rounds. These were much deadlier at close quarters than a rifle but lost power and accuracy beyond one hundred meters (roughly the length of a football field.)

However, battlefield research showed that except for highly-trained snipers, the average soldier rarely fired at long range, and rifle rounds accounted for few casualties compared to machineguns capable of accurate automatic fire.

Exceptionally, the Soviet Union experimented with equipping entire companies only with PPsH submachineguns instead of rifles, making them extremely deadly in close combat in urban environments—but ineffectual in longer-distance fighters over open ground. Meanwhile, the U.S. made large-scale use of semi-automatic M1 Garand rifles and M1 carbines, which were better but still lacked automatic fire capability save for the latter’s M2 variant. (Germany and Russia also deployed semi-automatic rifles on a more limited scale.)

Based on research showing that infantry rarely fired at targets further than two hundred to three hundred meters away, the German Army became interested in developing a rifle using intermediate-strength 7.92x33 millimeter kurze cartridge that could fire accurately beyond three hundred meters, but could still switch to automatic fire for a close engagement without excessive recoil. The weapon produced a muzzle velocity of 685 meters a second, nearly twice that of a submachinegun round, and 92 percent as powerful as a standard German Kark 98k bolt-action rifle.

Using a curved thirty-round magazine, the StG-43 could achieve a cyclical rate over five hundred rounds per minute. While burst fire tends to be inaccurate, it is also more effective at suppressing opponents, preventing them from firing back. This ability to provide covering fire while assaulting an enemy position to its designation as a “Sturm” (“storm” or “assault”) rifle.

German paratroopers had already been issued a small number of FG.42 rifles capable of automatic fire, but the expensive and complicated weapons used 7.92x57 millimeter rounds that produced greater flash, noise and recoil.

However, Hitler objected to the German army’s plan and demanded new submachine guns instead. Accounts claim he either insisted that the bolt-action rifle’s better long-range accuracy remained essential or perhaps more astutely worried that the beleaguered Third Reich lacked the industrial resources to scale up production.

However, the German armament office went behind the Fuehrer’s back and ordered the weapon anyway, disguising it with the designation Machine-Pistol 43. Hitler learned of the deception, halted the program, then changed his mind after a successful trial program, and allowed it to enter full-scale production. This led to the weapon being variously designated the MP-43, the StG-43 and the StG-44.

Germany managed to churn out over 426,00 StG-44s out of 4 million planned before its defeat. Initially assigned to elite units, StG-44s were increasingly delivered to low-quality Volksturm militias in the hopes increased firepower would counterbalance inferior training and physical fitness. Thus, while the weapon performed well, its battlefield impact was inevitably limited.

The Nazis characteristically devoted resources to developing exotic specialized variants it probably could not afford. The Vampir, for example, had an infrared night-fighting scope with a battery life of 15 minutes and a range of 200 meters, while the Krummlauf featured a barrel curved at a thirty-degree angle to safely shoot around the corners of street blocks!

However, the implications of the StG-43’s versatility were widely appreciated, particularly in the Soviet Union. In 1947, Soviet weapon designer Mikhail Kalashnikov combined the features of the StG-43 with the American M1 Garand rifle to form the Avtomat Kalashnikova—the AK-47. The rugged assault rifle soon proved deadly, reliable and iconic in conflicts across the globe.

However, Communist East Germany’s police and army continued using MP-43s through 1962 until they were replaced with AK-47s, SKS carbines and PPsH submachineguns. Yugoslavia also used MP-43s with select units and its successors continue very limited-scale production of the rare 7.92x33 millimeter ammunition. And the weapons were only slightly modified to appear as the rebel sci-fi blasters in wintery in The Empire Strikes Back.

This brings us to the real-life rebels using StG-44s in Syria today. As East Germany began receiving new weapons from the Soviet Union, sold 4,500 of its World War II-vintage assault rifles to Syria in 1964, along with ammunition, conducted under relative secrecy. This was followed by additional shipments to Syria and Palestinian militant groups which also included T-34 tanks and PPsH-41 submachine guns.

East Germany was hardly alone in selling ex-Nazi armaments to the Middle East, nor of selling German rifles in particular. The Third Reich’s genocidal regime made extensive use of slave labor factories, particularly in occupied Czechoslovakia. Afterward, the Czechs not only exported the Nazi weapons on they had on hand, but even manufactured their own versions both for domestic service and export.

An extremely breakdown-prone Czech variant of the famous Messerschmitt 109 fighter was also adopted by nascent Israeli Defense Force. Four of these undertook a near-disastrous strafing run on an Egyptian column advancing on Tel Aviv that nonetheless may have saved the newborn Jewish state by bringing the attack to a halt.

Later, the Czechs began exporting Nazi Panzer IV medium tanks and turretless Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers to Syria which saw use against Israel during the 1960s. The Czechs also exported 10,000 “self-loading rifles” including StG-44s, along with 500,000 rounds of ammunitions—deals for which Syria eventually still owed $900 million in payment by 1990.

As Syria acquired a more complete inventory of Cold War-era weaponry and the rare 7.92x33 millimeter ammunition grew scarce, the guns were eventually placed in long-term storage—which is how they came to fall in the hands of Syrian rebels in 2012.

For four years, the weapons were widely photographed and filmed in combat with Syrian rebel factions, including ISIS and Kurdish fighters, as you can see with this link. However, by 2017 the ammunition had become so scarce that the weapon’s black-market value in Syria collapsed and its appearances grew more infrequent.

Thus, hopefully closes the final chapter on the combat employment of a weapon that continues to impact how wars are fought to this day.

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 earlier this year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

The U.S. Army took the drastic step of arming its tank, the M1 Abrams, with the ultimate upgrade: a tank-killing round made of uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The use of depleted uranium as a penetrator has resulted in superior armament for U.S. tankers crossing the battlefield. Nobody knows how long the one-two combination of the M256 gun and DU ammunition will continue to overmatch enemy armor, but given DU’s superior armor piercing capability, it’s a fairly sure bet DU will arm the next generation of Army tanks as well.

A tank is a fast-moving, well-protected, heavily armed behemoth designed to dominate the land battlefield. As the primary offensive weapon in any army, nations compete to field the best tanks in both peace and war. In the 1980s, the U.S. Army took the drastic step of arming its tank, the M1 Abrams, with the ultimate upgrade: a tank-killing round made of uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth. The result is an unmatched tank killer capable of destroying any fielded tank.

The M1 Abrams tank was first fielded by the U.S. Army in the 1980s. The Army had preferred the 105-millimeter gun, the British-designed Royal Ordnance L7, also known in the United States as the M68. The M68 had armed the M60 series of tanks for decades and was considered a proven “good enough” gun. The M1’s turret could only accommodate fifty-five rounds of 105-millimeter ammunition, a reduction from the sixty-two rounds the older M60 tank could carry. An even larger gun would further reduce ammo capacity to a mere forty rounds.

Pentagon officials, on the other hand, wanted to equip the M1 with the larger German-designed Rheinmetall M256 120-millimeter smoothbore gun. The civilian leadership felt obliged to use the gun in part as a way to offset German participation in the NATO AWACS program. A larger gun would also “future-proof” the M1, allowing it to defeat future tanks with heavier armor. A compromise resulted, in which the M1 would be initially manufactured with the M68 gun, but would be upgradable to the M256 at a later date. Moreover, a later version of the tank, later called M1A1, would come standard with the larger M256.

While the tank was now future-proofed, the point about smaller ammunition capability still stood. The fire control system on the M1 was so advanced that it could hit a moving target at two thousand meters with 90 percent accuracy. The problem was not going to be missses and wasted ammunition, but ensuring that hits translated into kills.

At the same time, the United States was researching the use of depleted uranium as an armor penetrator. A byproduct of nuclear reactor fuel, depleted uranium was harder and denser than existing tungsten-tipped penetrators. Accelerated to extremely high speeds, this allowed a depleted-uranium (DU) round to smash through an unprecedented amount of armor. The pyrophoric nature of uranium and steel would cause the DU to catch fire upon penetration, causing catastrophic damage inside the tank.

The standard tungsten antiarmor round for the M60 tank, the M735, could penetrate 350 millimeters, or 13.7 inches, of steel rolled homogenous armor (RHA), the standard measurement for armored vehicle protection. The M833 DU round, however, could penetrate 420 millimeters of RHA positioned at a sixty-degree angle for maximum armor thickness. By comparison, the larger Soviet 125-millimeter gun on the T-72 tank could penetrate 450 millimeters of armor. Most importantly, the M774 could penetrate the T-72’s frontal hull and turret armor, where armor was the thickest.

Meanwhile, efforts to future-proof the M1’s armament were coming in handy. The Soviet Union was known to be deploying a new main battle tank, the T-80. U.S. intelligence believed that the T-80, like other modern tanks such as the M-1 and Leopard 2, had shifted away from an all-steel armor to a mixed composite matrix that included ceramic armors. The result was dramatically improved “composite” armor protection. The T-80 had a frontal turret protection of five hundred millimeters of RHA, and glacis plate (frontal hull) protection level of 450 millimeters of RHA. The 105-millimeter gun had finally run its course as an effective armament.

Improved M1A1 tanks equipped with the larger 120-millimeter gun began rolling off assembly lines starting in 1985. The 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq saw the M829A1 depleted-uranium round used by M1A1s against Iraqi T-72s with devastating effect. Nicknamed the “Silver Bullet,” the round could penetrate an estimated 570 millimeters at two thousand meters, giving it good penetration against even a T-80 at typical range. Amazingly, the M829A1 has a flat, laser-like trajectory out to 3,600 meters, meaning it does not incur ballistic drop due to gravity over a distance of two miles. That gives one an idea of the pure power behind the 120-millimeter gun.

The latest generation of the M829 series round, M829E4, is designed to penetrate even further than previous versions, the exact extent of which is classified, and to defeat active protection systems such as those built on the latest Russian tanks. Whether or not the M828E4 can penetrate the armor of the new Russian T-14 Armata tank is publicly unknown. The U.S. Army has not pushed to arm the M1 with a longer gun barrel (to increase muzzle velocity) or a larger diameter gun since Armata’s introduction, an interesting nondevelopment in the face of a new threat tank.

The use of depleted uranium as a penetrator has resulted in superior armament for U.S. tankers crossing the battlefield. Nobody knows how long the one-two combination of the M256 gun and DU ammunition will continue to overmatch enemy armor, but given DU’s superior armor piercing capability, it’s a fairly sure bet DU will arm the next generation of Army tanks as well.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Public Health, Europe

Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, plans to cull all fifteen million mink in the nation to contain a mutated form of the novel coronavirus.

Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, plans to cull all fifteen million mink in the nation to contain a mutated form of the novel coronavirus.

The country’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, noted during a press conference that the mutated virus has the potential to spread to other countries and it “may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine.” 

“We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well,” she said.

Frederiksen added that the decision had been made with a “heavy heart,” but the action was necessary based on the recommendation of local health officials. National police chief Thorkild Fogde urged that the culling “should happen as soon as possible” with the help of Denmark’s police and army.

The mutated virus was discovered in more than ten people. According to Health Minister Magnus Heunicke, roughly half of the nearly eight hundred confirmed human coronavirus cases in northern Denmark “are related to mink.”

Despite repeated efforts to cull the infected animals since June, outbreaks of coronavirus at mink farms have continued. In October, one million mink within a five-mile radius of a suspected or confirmed farm infection were destroyed.

On Friday, more than a quarter million Danes went into lockdown in a northern region of the country where a mutated variation of the coronavirus was found.

In seven northern Danish municipalities with 280,000 residents, all sports and cultural activities have been suspended, public transportation has been halted, and regional borders have been closed.

Frederiksen warned that more restrictions could be introduced in Hjorring, Frederikshavn, Bronderslev, Jammerbugt, Vesthimmerland, Thisted, and Laeso municipalities.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has already called for scientific investigations of the mink infections, which in turn have transmitted the virus back to the human population.

In the United States, nearly ten thousand mink at nine fur farms in Utah have died from coronavirus complications. According to the Department of Agriculture, about fifty different animals—including dogs, cats, tigers, and lions—in the United States have been infected by coronavirus.

Mink have also been culled in the Netherlands and Spain after infections were discovered there.

According to government estimates, culling Denmark’s mink population could cost up to $785 million.

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

Image: Reuters

David Axe

Technology, Americas

The ships are weak, lack good protection or firepower, and are just plain useless.

Here's What You Need to Know: The LCS program has been an expensive boondoggle.

After spending $30 billion over a period of around two decades, the U.S. Navy has managed to acquire just 35 of the 3,000-ton-displacement vessels.

Sixteen were in service as of late 2018. Of those 16, four are test ships. Six are training ships. In 2019 just six LCSs, in theory, are deployable.

While that number should increase as the remaining ships in the class finally commission into service, the LCS’s low readiness rate calls into question the wisdom of the Navy’s investment in the type.

Indeed, the Navy in 2018 didn’t deploy a single LCS, USNI News reported. “The service was supposed to push forward three ships in Fiscal Year 2018, after a 2016 overhaul of LCS homeporting, command and control and manning constructs.”

“However, USNI News first reported in April 2018 that zero LCSs would deploy in [fiscal year] 2018. Since then, the Navy had not talked publicly about progress made towards getting ready to deploy its first LCSs since ships from a block-buy contract started delivering to the fleet at about four a year.”

Navy officials in early 2019 claimed at least three LCSs would deploy before the end of the current fiscal year in September 2019.

“We’re deploying LCS this year, it’s happening,” Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Richard Brown told reporters. “Two ships are going on the West Coast; one ship is going on the East Coast, followed shortly [by a second] in the beginning of ‘20. And that marks the deployment of LCS; there will always be LCS forward-deployed now, just like we designed the program.”

Brown said the LCSs USS Montgomery and USS Gabrielle Giffords would deploy from San Diego to the Western Pacific while USS Detroit deployed from Florida. USS Little Rock in early 2020 also would deploy from Florida.

U.S. Southern Command in February 2019 announced that Detroit would conduct counterdrug operations. "We expect to have a littoral combat ship this year, and that will be a big benefit for our exercise program for our engagement with partners and because of the flexibility it brings for counter-narcotics interdiction," SOUTHCOM commander Adm. Craig Faller said.

When the Navy in the 1990s first began shaping the LCS program, the idea was for the ships to be small, fast, inexpensive and lightly-manned “trucks” into which the sailing branch could plug a wide array of “modules” carrying equipment for specific missions including surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare and minesweeping.

In a bid to speed up the production of as many as 55 LCSs, the Navy selected two shipyards -- Lockheed Martin’s facility in Wisconsin and an Austal yard in Alabama -- each to build their own variant of the class. Complications and cost compounded.

“The Littoral Combat Ship program has been unnecessarily complicated from the beginning,” the Project on Government Oversight explained in 2016. “Initially the Navy aimed for each ship to cost $220 million, but the Government Accountability Office estimates procurement costs for the first 32 ships is currently about $21 billion, or about $655 million per ship—nearly triple what they were supposed to cost.”

“The program’s three mission packages, according to the latest select acquisition report, add about $7.6 billion.”

In the decade and a half since the program was first sold to Congress, the LCS has already been forced into multiple major program changes, initially driven by large cost overruns, the lack of combat survivability and lethality discovered during operational testing and deployments, the almost crippling technical failures and schedule delays in each of the three mission modules.

Now the Navy has announced it is abandoning the two fundamental concepts behind the program: a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules and a radically new way of manning it. Instead, each LCS hull will have a single mission and a significantly larger crew assigned a single primary skill set.

It took the Navy nearly two decades to realize the LCS program had failed. The sailing branch in 2014 cut LCS acquisition from 55 ships to 32. Congress eventually added three vessels, boosting the class to 35 ships.

In place of the 20 canceled LCSs, the Navy plans to buy 20 new missile frigates. The service in 2019 asked Congress for around $1 billion for the first ship in the new class.

In contrast to the LCS in its original guise, the new frigate will be a conventional vessel with a large crew and hard-wired systems.

The Navy surely hopes the new vessel is more deployable than the LCS has proved to be. A warship that can’t leave port hardly qualifies as a warship.

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

This article first appeared in August 2019.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Navy

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

North Korea should by all rights be a naval power.

Here's What You Need To Remember: North Korea’s reliance on submarines exposes a harsh reality for the country: U.S. and South Korean naval and air forces are now so overwhelmingly superior that the only viable way for Pyongyang’s navy to survive is to go underwater. While minimally capable versus the submarine fleets of other countries, North Korea does get a great deal of use out of them.

North Korea should by all rights be a naval power. A country sitting on a peninsula, Korea has a long naval tradition, despite being a “shrimp” between the two “whales” of China and Japan. However, the partitioning of Korea into two countries in 1945 and the stated goal of unification —by force if necessary—lent the country to building up a large army, and reserving the navy for interdiction and special operations roles. Now, in the twenty-first century, the country’s navy is set to be the sea arm of a substantial nuclear deterrent.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

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The Korean People’s Navy (KPN) is believed to have approximately sixty thousand men under arms—less than one-twentieth that of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) ground forces. This, as well as comparable budget makes the KPN’s auxiliary role to the KPA. KPN draftees spend an average of five to ten years, so while Pyongyang’s sailors may not have the latest equipment, they do end up knowing their jobs quite well.

A substantial number of these sailors serve in the KPN’s submarine fleet, which is one of the world’s largest. In 2001, North Korea analyst Joseph Bermudez estimated that the KPN operated between fifty-two and sixty-seven diesel electric submarines. These consisted of four Whiskey-class submarines supplied by the Soviet Union and up to seventy-seven Romeo-class submarines provided by China. Seven Romeos were delivered assembled, while the rest were delivered in kit form. Each Romeo displaced 1,830 tons submerged, had a top speed of thirteen knots and was operated by a crew of fifty-four. The Romeo submarines were armed with eight standard-diameter 533-millimeter torpedo tubes, two facing aft. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was filmed touring and taking a short voyage on a Romeo-class submarine in 2014.

Despite such an endorsement, the submarines are generally considered obsolete and are being phased out. In 2015, the Pentagon believed that North Korea has seventy submarines of unknown types on active duty. A multinational report on the sinking of the South Korean corvette ROKS Cheonan states that the KPN operated twenty Romeo-class submarines, forty Sang-O (“Shark”) class coastal submarines (SSCs), and ten midget submarines of the Yono class.

The Sang-O class of coastal submarines is approximately 111 feet long and twelve feet wide, and displaces 275 tons. It can do 7.2 knots surfaced and 8.8 knots submerged. There are two versions, one with torpedo tubes and another where the torpedo tubes are replaced with lockout chambers for divers. The latter are maintained by the KPN but operated by the Reconnaissance Bureau’s Maritime Department. An improved version, informally known as the Sang-O II, is 131 feet long, displaces between 350 and 400 tons, and reportedly has a top speed of thirteen knots. The armed variant is believed to be capable of carrying, in addition to torpedoes, sea mines, while the Reconnaissance Bureau’s version carries between thirty-five and forty passengers and crew.

Finally, North Korea has about ten Yono-class midget submarines (SSm). Derived from an Iranian design, the Yono class displaces 130 tons submerged, with two 533-millimeter torpedo tubes and a crew of approximately twenty. The submarine can make an estimated eleven knots on the surface, but only four knots submerged.

North Korea’s submarine fleet, while smaller and less well funded than the other armed services, has generated an outsized number of international incidents. On September 18, 1996, a Sang-O SSC operated by the Reconnaissance Bureau ran aground near Gangneung, South Korea. The submarine, which had set a three-man party of commandos ashore two days before to reconnoiter a South Korean naval base, had failed to pick up the party the the previous night. On its second attempt, the submarine ran aground and became hopelessly stuck within sight of the shoreline.

Aboard the submarine were twenty-one crew and and the director and vice director of the Maritime Department. South Korean airborne and special-forces troops embarked on a forty-nine-day manhunt that saw all of the North Koreans except for one killed or captured. Many committed suicide or were murdered by their superior officers to prevent capture. The remaining North Korean sailor, or agent, is believed to have made his way back across the DMZ. Eight ROK troops were killed, as were four South Korean civilians.

In 1998, a Yugo-class midget submarine, predecessor to the Yono class, was snared in the nets of a South Korean fishing boat and towed back to a naval base. Inside was a macabre sight: five submarine crewmen and four Reconnaissance Bureau agents, all dead of gunshot wounds. The crew had been murdered by the agents, who promptly committed suicide. The submarine was thought to have become entangled in the fishing boat’s net on its way back home to North Korea, after picking up a party of agents who had completed a mission ashore.

In March 2010 the corvette ROKS Cheonan, operating in the Yellow Sea near the Northern Limit Line, was struck in the stern by an undetected torpedo. The 1,500-ton Cheonan, a Pohang-class general-purpose corvette, broke into two halves and sank. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed and fifty-six were wounded. An international commision set up to investigate the incident pinned the blame on North Korea, in large part due to the remains of a North Korean CHT-02D heavyweight acoustic wake-homing torpedo found at the location of the sinking. The submarine responsible is thought to have been a Yono-class midget sub.

North Korea’s latest submarine is a step in a different direction, the so-called Sinpo or Gorae (“Whale”) class ballistic-missile submarine (SSB). The SSB appears to blend submarine know-how from previous classes with launch technology from the Soviet Cold War–era Golf-class ballistic-missile submarines; North Korea imported several Golf-class subs in the 1990s, ostensibly for scrapping purposes. Both the Golf and Gorae classes feature missile tubes in the submarine’s sail. The tubes are believed to be meant for the Pukkuksong-1 (“Polaris”) submarine-launched ballistic missiles currently under development. If successful, a small force of Gorae subs could provide a crude but effective second-strike capability, giving the regime the opportunity to retaliate even in the face of a massive preemptive attack.

North Korea’s reliance on submarines exposes a harsh reality for the country: U.S. and South Korean naval and air forces are now so overwhelmingly superior that the only viable way for Pyongyang’s navy to survive is to go underwater. While minimally capable versus the submarine fleets of other countries, North Korea does get a great deal of use out of them. Although old and obsolete, North Korea’s submarines have the advantage of numbers and, in peacetime, surprise. Pyongyang’s history of armed provocations means the world hasn’t seen the last of her submarine force.

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

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Security, Europe

Russia wants to make money while showing off its weapon systems.

Here's What You Need to Know: Moscow likes to export its weapons.

While Russia’s next-generation Armata has not yet officially entered service, buzz has already been created on what countries other than Russia might field it.

Russians are no stranger to cooperative weapons development (as seen in the Brahmos missile) and even offering to export products before they are finished (as seen with the Su-57).

What countries might field the Armata in the future? Here is a few ideas:

1. India:

India is looking to be the primary export partner for the T-14 Armata, with the Armata fulfilling the requirements for India’s FRCV open contract.

Other tanks that could compete against the Armata within the FRCV contract requirements are the Korean K2 Black Panther and Ukrainian BM Oplot. Most current Western tanks like the Leopard 2A7 and M1A2 Abrams are too heavy for Indian terrain.

The Armata also faces domestic opposition in the Arjun Mk. 2, but it’s unsure if the latest version of the Arjun can overcome the poor reputation and controversies of its predecessor.

2. China:

Despite its own burgeoning arms industry, China continues to acquire advanced Russian military equipment such as the Su-35S and the S-400.

In doing so, it’s continuing a relationship that began in the 1990s in which China buys expensive and close to cutting edge equipment from Russia then incorporates its features into its own products, as it has done with the J-11B and HQ-9.

As such, China will likely try to buy Armatas, if only in limited numbers to evaluate them, adopt what technology they think is good, and perhaps produce their competing version of the Armata for export.

3. Algeria:

Algeria has a long standing defense relationship with Russia and fields some of the most advanced Russian weapons in its military. They operate T-90s, S-50, and Su-30MKAs, which are an advanced variant of the Su-30.

They even have bought more recent Russian developments such as versions of the BMPT infantry support tank and Yak-130 fighter trainer.

Russia appears to trust them as a partner in advanced weapons development programs, and has asked them to be partners in the PAK FA (Su-57) project and appears to be willing to export the advanced fighter to them.

Algeria acquiring Armatas would ensure their supremacy as one of the most powerful militaries in their region and the Maghreb, and even Africa. However, given the large number of already advanced (for the region) T-90s they field, it’s unlikely Algeria will acquire more than a handful of Armatas due to the expensive cost.

4. Egypt:

Similar to Algeria, Egypt has gravitated towards purchasing Russian equipment recently, including T-90s and MiG-35s. Interestingly, both Egypt and Iraq have shifted from using U.S.-made export versions of the Abrams back to Russian-manufactured armor in their recent T-90 purchases.

For Egypt, this ends an almost thirty year relationship with the United States, in which they first bought M60 Pattons and then M1A1 export Abrams. Despite the recent pivot towards Russian products, Russia appears to trust Egypt and has offered the Su-57 to export to them as well.

As such, Egypt is a likely Armata export customer. That being said, they’re unlikely to procure them in the near future. The Egyptian Army placed an order for T-90s to augment their Abrams fleet in 2017, so they are unlikely to make another order for modern tanks for quite some time.

5. United Arab Emirates:

Similar to Algeria and Egypt, the United Arab Emirates has been cited as a potential export customer for the advanced Su-57 fighter, indicating a Russian willingness to cooperate on military and technical affairs.

Russia has been attempting to align the UAE’s armament procurement towards it more recently, offering it access to the Russian GLONASS GPS-equivalent satellite network.

With regards to armor, the UAE fields both Russian BMP-3 tracked infantry fighting vehicles and Ukrainian BTR-3 wheeled armored personnel carriers. Its entire tank fleet is comprised of French LeClerc Main Battle Tanks, which are of a fairly advanced type and which have been receiving considerable upgrades since being adopted.

According to this French blog, the type has performed satisfactorily in Yemen, suffering minimal losses.

Despite the strategic successes of the LeClerc, it was noted that the tank was penetrated on the frontal arc by an old Konkurs anti-tank guided missile. The projectile killed the driver and wounded the tank commander.

As a result, the UAE looked into upgrade kits for the LeClerc, including soft and hard-kill systems. However if France is unable to deliver or if the Armata’s solution to these problems is evaluated to be superior, the UAE might find itself procuring the Armata in the near future.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. This first appeared in November 2018.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

For the first time, the Wehrmacht had encountered a tank that completely that outmatched its own.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The lumbering Char B1 didn’t really suit the Heer’s style of high-speed armored warfare. However, a victorious Germany decided to employ more than 161 captured Char B1s, overhauled and designated Panzerkampfwagen B2 740(f), in more static roles. Some were used in the invasion of Russia. Others fought huge partisan armies in the Balkans. Panzer Battalion 213 was even deployed to the Channels Islands that Germany captured from England.

At five o’clock in the morning on May 16, 1940 a company of the 8th Panzer Regiment lay in an ambush position along a rubble-strewn street of the French town of Stonne. The day before, the unfortunate village had changed hands several times as French troops attempted to stem the tide of German armor headed toward the English channel, threatening to trap Allied forces in Belgium.

Three squadrons of Stuka dive bombers ravaged Stonne, as well as both French and German artillery. That morning, the Panzer IIIEs and IVDs—then the best tanks in German service—deployed to stave off a French counterattack.

Suddenly, a squat green tank lumbered around a street block directly before of the German unit. This was Eure, a 31.5-ton Char B1 bis tank commanded by Capt. Pierre Billotte. His driver, Sergeant Durupt, triggered the 75-millimeter howitzer fixed in the front hull roared, smashing the Panzer III to the rear of the column. At the same time, Billotte swiveled the smaller 47-millimeter high velocity cannon in the turret and picked off the lead tank—a mere 30 meters away.

The wrecks trapped the Panzer company in a head-to-head confrontation with the Gaelic behemoth. 37-millimeter rounds cracked from the long barrels of Panzer III tanks and ricocheted off Eure’s turret. Low-velocity 75-millimeter shells made basso thuds as they spat out the stubby guns of Panzer IV tanks, only to shatter in clouds of shrapnel against the French tank’s glacis.

More than 140 shells cratered Eure’s armor—but none penetrated. Billotte coolly blasted one Panzer after another.

Once he had destroyed the entire company—11 Panzer IIIs and two Panzer IVs in all—Billotte continued his advance and added two 37-millimeter anti-tank guns to the tally. By 7:00 A.M., Stonne was back under French control and would remain so for the rest of the day. The same day, the tank Riquewhir would charge into a column of enemy infantry, its blood-stained tracks causing the German 64th Schutzen Regiment to panic and flee an entire sector of Stonne.

For the first time, the Wehrmacht had encountered a tank that completely that outmatched its own.

France will of course go down in history for being defeated by tanks in World War II, but it was not due to lacking tanks—the French army fielded nearly 4,000 tanks of more than a dozen different types, most of them well-armored. Rather, poor organization, confused doctrine and disastrous operational conduct defeated the French military.

The Char B1 was conceived only a few years after World War I as an infantry support tank with a heavy assault role. The “battle tank” would tackle enemy fortifications, artillery and tanks head-on, prevailing through superior firepower and armor. The slow heavies would punch holes allowing faster “cavalry tanks” to penetrate behind enemy lines.

The resulting design revealed its World War I-era pedigree with huge tracks as tall as the hull intended to ford trenches with ease—as well as its multiple cannon armament. A heavy 75-millimeter howitzer was fixed with only vertical traverse in the hull for blasting pillboxes. It was operated by the driver via a sophisticated Naeder hydraulic system for precise aiming, and serviced by a loader. Additionally, a small turret on top mounted a 47-millimeter gun for hunting tanks. There were also machine guns in the turret and hull for close defense against infantry.

It took nearly a decade and a half before the first B1 was ready to enter production in 1937. A short initial run of 35 Char B1s was quickly superseded by the B1 bis model, with higher-velocity SA35 47-millimeter gun for busting enemy tanks and a 300-horsepower engine. Most notably, the B1 bis boasted 55 to 60 millimeters of armor on all sides, leaving it virtually without major weak points. For comparison, the Panzer III and IV had only 20 to 35 millimeters of armor.

Despite completely overmatching its peers in firepower and armor, the B1 had major flaws. It could only achieve a maximum speed of 17 miles per hour while contemporaries typically averaged 25 miles per hour. The B1’s range of 110 miles wasn’t actually worse than that of German medium tanks, but it required tons more fuel. The French army even experimented with having the B1s tow extra fuel supplies in a trailer, then decided to rely on fuel trucks, which were vulnerable and in short supply.

The B1 also suffered from the one-man turret endemic to French tanks. A B1’s commander had to give verbal commands to his crew and possibly the other tanks in his unit, aim and fire the 47-millimeter gun in the turret and reload the gun. It was simply too much do efficiently. Even though the turret gun could theoretically fire up to 15 rounds a minute, a rate of fire of four rounds per minutes was more typical.

A final weakness of the Char B1 was its rudimentary ER53 radio, through which the operator could only transmit simple commands via Morse code! Even though an audio receiving model later became available, it was considered inferior because it was drowned out by the roar of the engine. By contrast, German Panzers all had excellent radio communications, affording commanders much finer tactical and operational control.

At least 369 B1 Bis were manufactured by Renault and four additional French companies. Each was individually named after a French city, colony or even wine. They were not cheap — 1.5 million francs each, four or five times the cost of a light tank. Three B1 ter prototypes were also constructed with five-man crews, 70-millimeters armor plates and 350-horsepower engines, but the Third Republic fell before they could enter production.

France entered World War II with only four battle tank battalions, or BCCs, each with 33 B1 tanks. By the time major ground operations began in May 1940, two BCCs each served in three reserve armored divisions, or  DCRs, that were intended to support the infantry. A fourth DCR was hastily formed under command of Gen. De Gaulle, as well as five independent companies for supporting infantry formations.

Unfortunately, the DCRs were gravely lacking in logistical and repair services, a weakness compounded fatally by the Char B1’s high fuel consumption and frequent breakdowns. As air strikes and armored columns caused the French logistical system to collapse, more Char B1s were abandoned for lack of fuel or necessary repairs than were destroyed in combat. The DCRs’ infantry regiments also lacked motorized transport to keep up with the tanks. Invariably, the B1s roamed ahead into battle without infantry support.

Nonetheless, the B1s were very tough—flat-out invulnerable to the 20-milimeter gun on the Wehrmacht’s most numerous tank, the Panzer II. Panzer III, 38t and IV tanks only had a slim chance of penetrating at ranges under 100 meters. All were easily destroyed by both of the B1’s cannons.

Only 88-millimeter flak guns could reliably take out a B1. For example, Jeanne d’Arc continued running despite being struck by 90 shells and losing both of her main guns, before finally being dispatched by a flak gun.

The French tanks occasionally were disabled by smaller guns. In the first day of the battle for Stonne, a Panzer IV knocked out the B1s Gaillac and Hautvillier, while an anti-tank gun destroyed Chinon with a hit aimed at the side armor. Billotte’s unit, the 3rd DCR, was eventually deployed elsewhere, and Stonne fell to German forces on May 19 after changing hands 17 times.

However, a concurrent French counterattack in Flavion, Belgium better illustrates how the near-impenetrable armor, superior firepower and bravery and determination of the French tankers could not makeup for failures in logistics and combined-arms coordination.

On May 15, the 62 Char B1s and 80 H39 light tanks of the 1st DCR rolled forward to block the advance of more than 546 tanks of the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions, the latter commanded by Erwin Rommel. The lopsided numbers were typical of the German superiority at concentrating their armored forces to decisive effect.

The B1s deployed to battle at 8:00 A.M. short on fuel, many of their supply trucks already lost due to air attacks. Just 26 tanks of the 28th BCC rolled forward to block the 7th’s path. Four had already broken down. From atop a hill, they began picking off swarming Panzer IV and 38t tanks. The German armor charged, closing within 100 meters, only to be scourged by 47- and 75-millimeter shells. Sousse took out seven tanks, Phillipeville six and other tanks averaging three each. In return, only a single B1 was knocked out and another damaged. The Panzers retreated.

Rommel then committed a Panzer regiment to a flanking attack which was countered by a company of B1s—some of which ran out of fuel in the process, forcing them to manually rotate their turrets. Three immobilized B1s were swarmed by a dozen German tanks each, their armor scoured by small-caliber shells until the crews were forced to bail. But the German probe turned back.

Rommel then called in artillery and dive-bomber strikes on the hill. His Panzer IVs had exhausted their 75-millimeter shells to little effect on the B1s’ heavy armor.

Around noon, the 37th BCC dispatched its 2nd company to roll to the assistance of the 28th, but fuel shortages and mechanical breakdowns reduced the unit to only five running tanks when they were ambushed by anti-tank guns and 30 Panzer IIIs and IVs hiding in the Biere l’Abbé woods. The vastly outnumbered heavy tanks took out 15 Panzers, but three B1s succumbed to the sheer weight of incoming fire. The remaining Guynemere, Ourcq and Isere retreated, heavily damaged.

The other two companies of the 28th began to withdraw. While the 1st company got out cleanly, the 3rd bumped into a battalion of powerful 88-millimeter Flak guns and 105-millimeter howitzers near Denée. After losing all but seven of his B1s, Lehoux ordered his company to charge, even though he lacked infantry and artillery support. The heavy guns wiped out the French tanks—but not before the French crushed several 37-millimeter guns under their treads, and destroyed eight of the German flak and field pieces with direct fire.

Back at Flavion, the 37th BCC single-handedly continued to hold up an entire Panzer division. Growing desperate, Rommel deployed 88-millimeter flak guns a kilometer away. These begin picking off the fuel-starved French tanks, which could barely move to fire back with their hull-mounted howitzers. A final charge by the Panzers caused the signal to retreat to be sounded at 6:00 P.M. Between the lack of fuel, mechanical breakdowns and enemy fire, only three of the battalion’s B1s escaped.

Though a battalion and a half of French tanks had knocked out roughly 100 Panzers, a failure to support their actions with artillery, infantry and air support meant the tankers’ sacrifice had been in vain.

Char B1s continued to see action into June 1940, frustrating German efforts at the local level. In five days, three B1s defending the bridges at Rethel knocked out 20 German tanks, nine armored cars and 38 motor vehicles. Legendary general Heinz Guderian even notes the hassle a lone Char B1 caused in his memoir Panzer Leader: “All the shells I fired at it simply bounced harmlessly off its thick armor. … As a result, we inevitably suffered sadly heavy casualties.”

But such actions could not shift the overwhelming tide of events.

The lumbering Char B1 didn’t really suit the Heer’s style of high-speed armored warfare. However, a victorious Germany decided to employ more than 161 captured Char B1s, overhauled and designated Panzerkampfwagen B2 740(f), in more static roles. Some were used in the invasion of Russia. Others fought huge partisan armies in the Balkans. Panzer Battalion 213 was even deployed to the Channels Islands that Germany captured from England.

Under personal consultation of Hitler, the German military and tank manufactures tinkered with the French tanks. Sixty B1s had their hull-mounted howitzers replaced with flamethrowers on flexible mounts. These first saw action in the 102nd Flame-tank Battalion as part of Operation Barbarossa, assaulting Soviet border fortifications in Western Ukraine on June 1941.

Two of the tanks were knocked out, however, and the unit suffered so many breakdowns that it was withdrawn from action in July. The Germans busily went about redesigning the flame tanks, and deployed an upgraded design in the 223rd Captured Tank Company to the siege of Sevastopol in the summer of 1942, again with little success.

Another 16 B1s had their turret ripped off, and replaced with 105-millimeter howitzers enclosed with an armored cab to serve as self-propelled artillery. These served in the 93rd Artillery Regiment in the garrisons of occupied France and then Sardinia.

In June 1944, American and British troops encountered B1s in Cherbourg during the battle of Normandy, then again in Arnhem and Oosterbeek in Holland during Operation Market Garden. By this late stage in the war, Sherman tanks and bazookas easily outgunned the early war design. Still, the B1 could still dish out quite a bit of anti-personnel firepower and the Germans still had 40 in service entering 1945.

French resistance fighters managed to get their hands on a handful of the abandoned heavy tanks and used them in the liberation of Paris. While the front-line units of the Free French Army under DeGaulle primarily used U.S. armor such as M10 tank destroyers, they still rounded up 19 Char B1s they found in Renault factories and assigned them to 2nd Squadron of the 13th Dragoon Regiment.

The Dragoons were dispatched to assist in the siege of the last fortified pockets of German forces in Royan and La Rochelle. Facing limited anti-tank defenses, the Free French Chars blasted German pillboxes in Saint-George de Didonne, which surrendered on April 1945, and then besieged the German garrison at La Rochelle. The French heavy tanks were finally retired in 1946.

A final two Char B1s were modified as minesweepers in April 1945. They contributed to cleaning up the terrible mess of a war, that for all their formerly impermeable armor, they could not win by themselves.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: Wikipedia.

This article first appeared several years ago.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

A new, old, plan for the South China Sea.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Adding American boats would impart mass to the fleet—further easing the challenge of keeping enough boats plying the deep. The more subs in the rotation, the shorter voyages can be. Bottom line, having the fleet make its home near likely Asian hotspots would solve many ills, as would expanding and diversifying logistics arrangements.

What madman would propose adding diesel submarines to the U.S. Navy’s all-nuclear silent service?

There are a few. The topic came up at an early March hearing before the U.S. House Seapower and Force Projection Subcommittee. Representatives from three teams that have compiled competing “Future Fleet Architecture” studies convened to debate their visions with the committee. Published by the Navy Staff itself, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the MITRE Corporation, the studies explore everything from overall ship numbers to the types of hulls comprising the future fleet to the mix between manned and unmanned platforms.

Navy potentates will now evaluate and compare the studies. The end product will be an official navy statement about force-structure questions, useful to Congress as lawmakers determine how many—and which—ships, planes, and armaments to fund. One consensus, however, already unites the protagonists to this debate: the U.S. Navy needs more of just about everything. The navy estimates it needs 355 vessels to fulfill its missions in increasingly contested settings, principally around the margins of Eurasia. That portends about a 30 percent boost to the force.

A naval expansion of such proportions will put a premium on low-cost yet effective platforms that can be acquired in bulk. Diesel-electric submarines constitute one such platform. The last boat in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s (JMSDF) Soryu class—a class widely acclaimed the world’s finest of its kind—ran Japanese taxpayers $540 million. Let’s use that as a benchmark for discussion. Meanwhile, each Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack boat sets back American taxpayers a cool $2.688 billion. That’s five for the price of one—a low, low price by any standard!

Reports Megan Eckstein of USNI News, however, Charles Werchado, the deputy director of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ assessments division, “firmly denounced” the MITRE analysts’ vision of a hybrid nuclear/conventional submarine force. Quoth Werchado:

“If I was a country like China, I would buy a lot of diesels because I know you’re going to come and fight me here at home. We have to deploy, and the only way to deploy is to bring your own fuel with you. When we buy a Virginia, it comes with a lifetime of fuel. So I have nothing against diesel submarines, but you have to say, am I’m going to be fighting within 200 miles of where I’m based at? Or else now I have to buy extra oilers. I’m going to make them vulnerable when I refuel them; they’re going to have to snorkel and they’ll become vulnerable. It’s just not an option for us as long as we have to be a global navy."

He thus objected to diesels based on geography, logistics, and military capability. Let’s take those objections in turn. First, geography. Werchado’s critique seemingly presupposes that a U.S. diesel contingent would be based on U.S. territory—in other words, no closer to East Asia than Guam. QED: diesels are a non-starter. They would be positioned too far from the Yellow and East China seas, a likely combat theater, to do much good. And indeed, the cruising-range limitations on diesel boats are real and immutable. But let’s not overstate their impact. Distance can be managed through savvy force dispositions on the map.

In fact, if it does things wisely, the U.S. Navy can turn technical shortcomings to strategic and political advantage. Here’s how: it could procure a squadron of diesel boats in large numbers, station it permanently in the Far East, close to potential scenes of action, and place it under a combined U.S.-Japanese submarine command. Doing so would confer a host of benefits. Forward basing would obviate the range problem. For instance, Soryu-class boats boast a cruising range of 6,100 nautical miles—more than adequate for prowling the depths in Northeast Asia. A U.S.-Japanese force founded on a common hull—whether the Soryu or some other design—could presumably match or exceed this performance.

Nor would this represent some leap in the dark. Diesel subs have proven themselves in Northeast Asia across many decades—witness the U.S. submarine campaign against Japan during World War II. And after six-plus decades of practice dating to the JMSDF’s founding, Japanese subs excel at regulating east-west movement through the first island chain, as well as north-south movement along the East Asian periphery. Indeed, undersea warfare represented one of Japan’s chief contributions to allied strategy during the Cold War. Japanese boats lurked along the island chains to detect and trail Soviet subs trying to exit the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk for the broad Pacific Ocean. Soviet skippers commonly sheltered within Asia’s near seas rather than make the attempt.

This constitutes an ideal approach for an age when island-chain defense is regaining its prominence in allied maritime strategy. Want to deter China from seizing the Senkaku Islands or venturing other forms of aggression? Threaten something Beijing prizes dearly, namely ready access to the Western Pacific. Proliferate subs in Northeast Asia, and demonstrate the capability to use them to bar the straits piercing the first island chain. That should give Beijing pause when the leadership contemplates adventurism. If it’s good for China to procure diesels for anti-access/area-denial purposes in the near seas, then it’s good for Americans and Japanese if they want to deny the denier access it covets.

So the strategic logic cuts both ways. Now think about such a deployment from an alliance-relations standpoint. China is a breaker of alliances. It hopes to divide the allies into manageable bits while dislodging the United States from its strategic position in the Western Pacific. Accordingly, Tokyo fears abandonment by its superpower patron. How better to make a statement about American steadfastness than by permanently forward-deploying a fleet of submarines to Japan while embedding U.S. boats and crews within a multinational command? That would show America is in Asia to stay.

And heck, if Tokyo and Washington were willing to take the diplomatic heat from Beijing, they could even equip the Taiwan Navy with a flotilla of diesel boats built on the common design. The George W. Bush administration offered Taipei eight diesel submarines sixteen years ago. But no American shipbuilder has constructed conventional subs in decades, while no foreign government was prepared to help construct the craft—and thereby incur Beijing’s wrath. The deal languished.

Now might be the time to consummate it. Supplying the boats would help Taiwan defend itself, replacing its flotilla of two Dutch-built subs of 1980s vintage and—astonishingly—two World War II-era relics. And furnishing Taipei with boats interoperable with the U.S.-Japanese diesel fleet would allow for coordinated operations should the allies summon the political moxie to work with Taiwan. A diesel program, then, could open new strategic and diplomatic vistas.

Second, logistics. The U.S. Navy combat-logistics fleet doubtless needs expanding, but not because of prospective conventional subs. Forward-deployed U.S. boats would presumably adopt Japanese logistical patterns, meaning they would go on patrol and refuel in port after returning from sea. Now, the allies could stand to bolster their shore logistical arrangements. China’s military would not exempt Japanese seaports such as Yokosuka and Sasebo from attack in wartime. If it did so it would grant its foes a safe haven for naval warmaking. Missile strikes would be sure to come, and might impair or disable shore infrastructure—starving the fleet of precious fuel and stores.

To cope with this prospect, the allies should rediscover their Pacific War past. During its westward advance across the Pacific, the U.S. Navy fashioned techniques and hardware to refuel, resupply, and repair ships from dispersed, often improvised island bases. The allies should ransack history for insight—thinking ahead about how to use Japan’s many islands and inlets as impromptu logistics hubs. But again, the allies need to make themselves resilient as a matter of course. After all, the conventionally powered surface fleets based in Japan need fuel too. And nuclear-powered warships need every other form of replenishment except fuel for their main engines. (Try running aircraft-carrier flight operations without jet fuel.) Logistical demands, in short, are hardly unique to diesel subs.

And third, diesel subs’ supposed vulnerability. Diesel subs have to surface periodically to snorkel, taking in air to help power their engines. They’re exposed to radar detection while snorkeling. Soryu-class boats, however, sport “air-independent propulsion” that lets them stay submerged for up to two weeks. JMSDF commanders and their political masters evidently find the design wholly adequate, while Japanese submariners have mastered tactics and deployment patterns that let them reach Northeast Asian patrol grounds, loiter on station for a satisfactory amount of time, and return to port.

Adding American boats would impart mass to the fleet—further easing the challenge of keeping enough boats plying the deep. The more subs in the rotation, the shorter voyages can be. Bottom line, having the fleet make its home near likely Asian hotspots would solve many ills, as would expanding and diversifying logistics arrangements. Such measures, furthermore, would cow prospective antagonists while comforting allies and friends. This constitutes a promising venture in manifold respects.

The MITRE proposal, then, deserves a fair hearing—not denunciation. Every ship in a global navy need not be a globe-spanning ship. Diesel submarines are an option for the future U.S. Navy. Whether to exercise that option is the question before Congress and the navy.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). The views voiced here are his alone. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Reuters.

Fahmida Zaman

Bangladesh, Indo-Pacific

The rise of digital authoritarianism has become a troubling trend. For countries like Bangladesh, where civil and political rights of citizens have never been consolidated, authoritarian behavior online by governments is even more troubling.

On October 13, the home ministry of Bangladesh government issued a statement “forbidding people at home and abroad from spreading ‘false, fabricated, confusing, and inciting statements’ on social media about government, military, police officials and members of different other law enforcement agencies.”

The statement went on, “The government has observed the activities of such people with patience and has come to the conclusion that it is necessary to take legal action against such people to maintain the stability, domestic security and public well-being.” The statement also threatened legal actions “according to the law of the land” against the public. Presumably, the cited law of the land is the 2018 Digital Security Act. On October 7, the Department of Secondary and Higher Education directed students and teachers to refrain from “writing, sharing, "liking", or posting anything that ‘ruins the image of the government or the state’, or ‘disrespects any important person, institution or profession’” on social media.

The government’s effort to restrict freedom of expression online has not been limited to circulating statements. In June of this year, Bangladesh police arrested a fifteen-year-old boy near Dhaka for allegedly “defaming” the country’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in a Facebook post. After a local supporter of the ruling Awami League filed a case accusing that the teenager had “badmouthed...our mother-like leader,” the boy was quickly arrested and sent to jail. Earlier in June, two university teachers were arrested and sent to jail for allegedly mocking the former health minister on Facebook who died of coronavirus. All three of these cases were filed under the Digital Security Act, and these cases are not exceptions. Critics have dubbed the law as draconian, and with good reason.

The Digital Security Act 2018 was supposed to replace the infamous Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT) 2006, in particular section 57 of the act. Section 57 has been used extensively to crackdown on dissenting voices of journalists, academics, human rights activities, and members of the public especially since the controversial 2014 national election. Yet, the Digital Security Act (DSA) reinforced even more punitive measures to curb freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The act authorizes law enforcement agencies to search or arrest anyone without any warrant and imposes harsh prison sentences for vaguely worded offenses—including online defamation, hurting a person’s religious feelings, and spreading propaganda and campaigns against the liberation war of Bangladesh others, among other things.

Since its implementation in October 2018, more than 1,000 cases have been filed under the act against ordinary citizens, activists, academics, and journalists for “criticizing” the government policies or its political leadership. The number of cases and arrests under DSA has significantly increased since the beginning of 2020. A UK based media-watchdog reported that from January to June of 2020, 113 cases have been filed accusing a total of 208 people, of whom 53 are journalists. Of the accused, 114 were arrested immediately. In May, at least 11 people were charged with “spreading rumors and misinformation on Facebook” for posting about the government’s ill-fitted response to the pandemic. At this rate, there have been three cases on average per day leading to an anticipated 60 percent increase in the number of cases and arrests in 2020 under DSA.

The Digital Security Act came into effect in October 2018, months before a national election that secured a consecutive third term in government for the ruling Awami League party. When Awami League won a landslide victory in 2008 after two years of an unelected military-backed government, it presented hopeful possibilities for a return to democracy. Yet, in 2011, the government took advantage of its majority in the parliament to remove the Caretaker government provision that, until its removal, mitigated deep mistrust between the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the country’s main opposition party. The provision also ensured relatively fair elections and peaceful changes of power. This caretaker provision, in essence, called for a temporary government to be appointed as polls approached in order to oversee a smooth and fair election process. The next national poll, in 2014, was boycotted by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, witnessed unparalleled election violence, and led to 153 out of the 300 parliamentary seats going uncontested. This resulted in a “legally and constitutionally legitimate” yet morally questionable election victory for Awami League.

The 2014 election also marked a decisive turn towards authoritarian practices. Following the election, section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology Act was used to operationalize a deliberate campaign to silence dissenting voices in the press and among citizens. Political opposition members including the former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, among others, were jailed. In addition, the government instigated an anti-narcotics drive leading to significant increases in extra judicial killings ahead of the 2018 election. Human rights organizations and civil society alleged that the anti-narcotics drive “was a government effort to exert increased political control over the populace.”

In the national election of December 30 of 2018, the ruling Awami League led alliance won 288 of the 300 parliamentary seats, an overwhelming 90 percent of the vote. Such a rate of victory, however, has been questioned and is widely believed to be rigged as witnesses reported ballot-box stuffing, intimidation of voters, and election violence.

Reinforcing the government’s determination to restrain civil and political rights, an effort that began in 2014, the unparalleled number of cases and arrests under the Digital Security Act in Bangladesh demonstrates Dhaka’s authoritarian behavior. It also makes the country an embodiment of a global phenomenon—the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Cyber Tyranny

In recent years, internet and social media platforms have become highly useful tools for authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian and repressive governments are surveilling and repressing dissent not only by creating restrictive laws such as the Digital Security Act in Bangladesh or the new internet law in Turkey, but also by taking active legal steps against citizens for expressing critical opinions on the internet.

Of the 65 countries assessed for the 2019 Freedom on the Net report by Freedom House, law enforcement agencies in 47 of them arrested people for posting political, social, or religious content online. Additionally, 40 of the 65 countries instituted advanced social media surveillance programs. For 15 of these 40 countries using advanced social media surveillance, such programs have either expanded or been newly established. As a result, 89 percent of internet users around the world, close to three billion people, are being monitored on social media, the 2019 Freedom House assessment reported.

Efforts to control the internet and social media reflect governments’ concerns about their ability to maintain domestic political control. Governments that perceive their power or legitimacy to be threatened by a mass display of dissatisfaction online or through protests are more likely to enhance restrictive measures online. Such restrictive measures online are aimed to limit the role of the internet and social media in spreading critical discourse or mobilizing protests. This is evident by how quickly governments in India, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, and Belarus—among others—have suspended, shut down, or slowed down internet connections amidst protests.

In Bangladesh, digital authoritarianism is reflected not only through the Digital Security Act but also through the state’s increased capacity for internet and social media surveillance; increased arrests based on political content; the tendency to block critical websites, including local and international news sources; and the limits placed on internet access—and particularly following critical moments such as anti-government protests and national elections.

The government has also repeatedly blocked or threatened to block social media platforms, and particularly Facebook—which is arguably the country’s most-used social media platform. In addition, the government has established significant control over online content. It has also been accused of state-sponsored monitoring and hacking of Facebook accounts of journalists, political dissidents, and opposition figures.

Bangladeshi Issues

Although the DSA is a relatively recent development in controlling cyberspace in Bangladesh, it highlights a larger problem in the country.

First, it demonstrates the government’s authoritarian behavior both online and offline. Before the implementation of the Digital Security Act, a similarly draconian law—section 57 of the ICT Act—was used for the strategic silencing of any criticism of the government and for curbing press freedom. Overall, an astonishingly high number of enforced disappearances, crackdowns on any critics, jailing of political opponents, and the routine targeting of democracy advocates and citizens under the Digital Security Act show the abysmal state of civil and political rights in the country. The most devastating impact of these actions is perhaps that self-censorship has become a common practice—so much so that Human Rights Watch reports that news editors themselves suppress 50 to 90 percent of the news at hand. Given the government’s repressive behavior both online and offline in recent years, by no measure can the country be called democratic.

Second, like everywhere else where governments are practicing tactics of digital authoritarianism, Bangladesh’s actions are aimed to limit the spread of unfavorable information, particularly during critical moments such as a large-scale road-safety protest in 2018, the 2018 Election, and even coronavirus. The 2018 road-safety protests, led by students, began after two students were killed by an unlicensed bus in Dhaka in early August and spread quickly across the city. One may argue that the protests were fueled by accumulated anti-government sentiments in an ever-shrinking space for freedom of expression. When the prominent photojournalist Shahidul Alam pointed out these underlying causes of the protest in an interview with Al Jazeera, he was arrested within hours of the interview and detained for 102 days. During the protests, the government shut down mobile internet service as the protests utilized social media platforms to mobilize. Additionally, during the national election in December 2018, two journalists were arrested while covering the 2018 national election under the Digital Security Act for “false information” about voter-turnout. Several others were attacked and denied entry to polling centers.

In May 2020, two months after the first cases of coronavirus in Bangladesh, the government issued an order warning officials not to make negative comments on social media about “[the] state or its important persons,” declaring that any violator would face personal repercussions and legal actions. The instructions explicitly commanded public servants “not to upload, share, comment on or react to social media posts, including image, audio or video, with ‘damaging’ messages.” The number of legal cases under the Digital Security Act against journalists and ordinary citizens has significantly increased as people suffer the consequences of an ill-planned and ill-implemented response to coronavirus in Bangladesh, and of the rampant corruption in the health sector.

As such, controlling the flow of information by curbing freedom of expression online and offline while criminalizing even mildly opposing views undoubtedly constitutes a brutally effective political strategy for the ruling party in Bangladesh.

Digital Bangladesh

The rise of digital authoritarianism across the globe, led by China and Russia, has become a troubling trend, from Turkey to Sudan to India to Zimbabwe to Brazil. However, for countries like Bangladesh, where civil and political rights of citizens have never been consolidated, authoritarian behavior online by governments is even more troubling. In the absence of democratic models of digital governance, Chinese and Russian’s leadership in exporting digital authoritarianism may lead us to unfamiliar and damaging territory within the realm of digital governance, and particularly in already authoritarian countries like Bangladesh. Competitive democratic models of digital governance that counter China and Russia as role models of digital authoritarianism need to be championed by the United States and other established democracies. Such a task should also engage in public diplomacy—creating awareness about digital civil and political rights, empowering citizens to challenge digital authoritarian behavior, and promoting digital critical thinking skills. 

The government of Bangladesh headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has extensively campaigned for, and promised its citizens, a “Digital Bangladesh” ever since it came to power in 2008. In 2019, Hasina claimed that her government has made the dream of a Digital Bangladesh a reality. And yet, the presence of a powerful Digital Security Act that aims to control what can be said online, and the punishment of citizens for any remotely unfavorable online content, make the prime minister’s proclamations about a “Digital Bangladesh” ring hollow.

Fahmida Zaman is a doctoral student with the University of Delaware’s Department of Political Science & International Relations. She was a research intern at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC this past summer.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

A U.S. F-117 Nighthawk faced trouble over Serbia.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Getting a platform with a high-bandwidth radar or heat-seeking weapons close enough to actually shoot at a stealth plane remains a major challenge. Afterall, the stealth jet could detect and simply avoid or shoot at an approaching threat. 

At 8 p.m. on March 27, 1999, a bizarre-looking black painted airplane cut through the night sky over Serbia. This particular F-117 Nighthawk—a subsonic attack plane that was the world’s first operational stealth aircraft—flew by the call sign of Vega-31 and was named “Something Wicked.” Moments earlier, it had released its two Paveway laser-guided bombs on targets near the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Its pilot, Lt. Col. Dale Zelko, was a veteran with experience in the 1991 Gulf War.A dozen Nighthawks had deployed to Aviano, Italy on February 21 to participate in Operation Allied Force—a NATO bombing campaign intended to pressure Belgrade into withdrawing its troops from the province of Kosovo after President Slobodan Milosevic initiated a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign seeking to expel the Kosovar Albanian population.

The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) possessed a mix S-75 and S-125 surface-to-air missile systems dating back to the 1950s and 1960s, as well as more recent 2K12 Kub mobile SAMs and MiG-29 Fulcrum twin-engine fighters. Together these posed a moderate threat to NATO warplanes, forcing them to fly at higher altitudes and be escorted by radar-jamming planes like the EA-6B Prowler.

However, that evening the Prowlers were grounded by bad weather. Something Wicked and her three flight mates were dispatched anyway because their faceted surfaces drastically reduced the range at which they could be detected by radar and shot at.

Suddenly, Zelko spotted two bright dots blasting upwards through the clouds below, closing on him at three-and-a-half times the speed of sound. These were radar-guided V-601M missiles, fired from the quadruple launch rails of an S-125M Neva surface-to-air missile system. Boosted by a two-stage solid-fuel rocket motors, one of the six-meter long missiles zipped so close that it shook Vega 31 planes with its passage. The other detonated its 154-pound proximity-fused warhead, catching Zelko’s jet in the blast that sprayed 4,500 metal fragments in the air.

Something Wicked lost control and plunged towards the ground inverted. The resulting g-force was so powerful Zelko only barely managed to grasp the ejection ring and escape the doomed Nighthawk.

How had a dated Serbian missile system shot down a sophisticated (though no longer state-of-the-art) stealth fighter?

Zelko’s adversary that evening was Serbian Col. Zoltán Dani, commander of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade. Dani was by all accounts a highly motivated commander who studied earlier Western air-defense suppression tactics. He redeployed his Neva batteries frequently, in contrast to the static posture adopted by ill-fated Iraqi and Syrian missile defenses in the Middle East. He permitted his crews to activating their active targeting radars for no longer than twenty seconds, after which they were required to redeploy, even if they had not opened fire.

The S-125M wasn’t normally considered a ‘mobile’ SAM system, but Zoltan had his unit drilled to redeploy the weapons in just 90 minutes (the standard time required is 150 minutes), a procedure facilitated by halving the number of launchers in his battery. While his batteries shuttled from one site to another, Dani also setup dummy SAM sites and decoy targeting radars taken from old MiG fighters to divert NATO anti-radiation missiles.

Thanks to the decoys and constant movement, Zoltan’s unit didn’t lose a single SAM battery despite the twenty-three HARM missiles shot at him by NATO war planes.

Dani had noticed that his battery’s P-18 “Spoon Rest-D” long-range surveillance radar was able to provide a rough track of Nighthawks within a 15-mile range when tuned down to the lowest possible bandwidth—so low, in fact, that NATO radar-warning receivers were not calibrated to detect it. (Dani initially claimed he had modified the P-18’s hardware to achieve this, but later admitted this was a hoax.)

However, low-bandwidth radars are imprecise and cannot provide a ‘weapons-grade’ lock. However, that the NATO mission planners had complacently scheduled the stealth bombers on predictable, routine flight patterns. Worse, the Serbs had managed to break into NATO communications and could overhear conversations between U.S. fighters and the airborne radar planes directing them, allowing Dani to piece together a accurate picture of those routines.

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The missile commander decided to set an ambush for the stealth jets, deploying S-125M batteries with a good firing angle on the NATO jets as they flew back to Italy. The thing is, stealth jets can be detected by high-band targeting radars at short distances. However, that still requires sweeping the sky for targets, and in the process illuminating themselves to enemy radars. That not only gave adversaries a chance to direct stealth aircraft away from the threat, but invited a potential strike by a HARM anti-radiation missile.

Therefore, Dani kept the battery’s targeting radar inactive, but cued them towards the approximate position of the stealth aircraft reported by the P-18 radar. Obligingly, the battery’s P-18 radar detected Something Wicked and three other F-117s—but when the high-band targeting radar activated for a twenty second ‘burst,’ it couldn’t acquire a target.

Dani claims that he had been alerted by spies in Italy that the Prowlers were grounded for that day, so he was willing to take greater risks and reactivated the targeting radar a second time rather than immediately relocating—still without result.

Finally, on the third try an S-125M battery locked onto Something Wicked when it was just eight miles away. Dani claims the window of opportunity came when the F-117 opened its bomb-bay doors to release weapons, causing its radar cross-section to briefly bloom.

After bailing out, Zelko concealed himself an irrigation ditch and only narrowly escaped capture by Serbian search parties that combed within a hundred meters of his position. The following evening, he was whisked to safety by an Air Force combat search and rescue team deployed from an MH-60G Pave Hawk special operations helicopter.

Dani’s unit later claimed the only other Yugoslav aircraft kill of the war, shooting down a U.S. F-16 on May 2. Another F-117 was damaged by a missile on April 30 but managed to return to base.

Something Wicked impacted Yugoslav soil upside down near the village of Budanovci. Parts of the wreckage can be seen today at the Serbian Museum of Aviation in Belgrade. Components were also flown to Russia and China and studied to inform their own stealth aircraft programs. Dani kept the plane’s titanium engine outlet as a memento.

The F-117 shootdown was an embarrassing, though fortunately non-fatal, episode for the U.S. Air Force. It has been endlessly cited since as ‘proof’ that supposedly radar-invisible stealth planes could ‘easily’ be shot down by even dated Soviet-era SAM systems.

The truth is more complicated. Zoltan’s ploy of using low-bandwidth radars to track stealth aircraft from afar indeed remains a cornerstone of counter-stealth tactics today. (Another is using infrared sensors, though these remain limited to around thirty to sixty miles in range.)

However, getting a platform with a high-bandwidth radar or heat-seeking weapons close enough to actually shoot at a stealth plane remains a major challenge. Afterall, the stealth jet could detect and simply avoid or shoot at an approaching threat. Dany benefited from having good intelligence of the F-117’s flight path that allowed him to position a missile battery very close to Vega-31’s avenue of approach.

Furthermore, the Nighthawk was a 1970s-era design with a larger radar cross-section than the F-22 and F-35. These modern stealth jets furthermore come equipped with their own onboard radars and carry a greater diversity of weapons, making them more dealing with surface- and air-based threats.

The takeaway, ultimately, is that stealth aircraft are not truly ‘invisible’ to detection, and that sufficiently cunning adversary may find ways to ambush or corner them. However, while Col. Dani’s leadership did exemplify many best practices of air defense warfare, his ambush of Vega-31 does not offer a ‘cookie-cutter’ solution to combating stealth aircraft, particularly as both low-observable airplanes and the SAM systems and fighters hunting them improve in capability.

Zelko and Dani would later meet under friendlier circumstances in 2011. The Serbian missile commander had resumed his profession as a baker in his hometown of Skorenovac. The former adversaries recorded a documentary about their meeting and subsequent friendship. For all the considerable ingenuity it invests in high-tech warfare, humankind fortunately also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation under the most unlikely circumstance.

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 November 2017.

Image: Wikipedia.

David Axe

Security,

A recent simulation underscores the importance of sealift to U.S. war plans, as well as the shortage of naval escorts.

Here's What You Need to Know: Adding more than 60 ships to the sealift fleet is a tall order and could cost billions of dollars. But experts’ warning have not gone entirely unheeded.

Aconvoy of five American cargo ships made a simulated run through hostile waters in September 2019 during a sprawling, short-notice test of the U.S. fleet’s ability to ship people and cargo during a major war.

The simulated, World War II-style convoy underscored the importance of sealift to U.S. war plans, as well as the shortage of naval escorts that has incited a minor panic among military planners.

The five ships in the East Coast convoy test included the roll-on/roll-off cargo vessels USNS Benavidez, USNS Gilliland, and USNS Mendonca, USNS Pfc. Eugene A. Obregon and USNS Sgt. Matej Kocak.

All five vessels belong to U.S. Military Sealift Command, the quasi-military transport branch of the U.S. Navy. MSC operates more than 100 vessels. Many of them lie inactive in major ports during peacetime. During a crisis, Navy and civilian mariners quickly would reactive the ships.

The September 2019 transportation “stress test”  activated a total of 33 sealift ships on both U.S. coasts. As part of the exercise, the five East Coast ro/ro ships simulated an unescorted convoy moving through waters where enemy submarines and sea mines posed a threat.

“The convoy sailed through a simulated minefield while limiting visual and sound signatures,” USNI News reported, citing an MSC statement. “Crews stopped using all personal electronic devices to decrease transmissions from the ships and operated in a ‘darken ship’ mode to prevent light from emanating from the ships.”

“We were also training the crews to sail their ships as quietly as possible to counter ships’ electromagnetic signatures because our vessels also could face anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, fighter aircraft and enemy bombers,” Capt. Hans Lynch, MSC’s Atlantic commodore, said in the official statement.

The training belies a serious shortage of surface warships that could function as escorts. In October 2018, U.S. Maritime Administration head Mark Buzby said the Navy admitted it wouldn’t be able to escort sealift ships during a major war with Russia or China.

The Navy is struggling to expand the fleet from around 290 front-line ships in 2019 to as many as 355 in the 2030s. But the cost of building and maintaining the extra ships has cast into doubt the sailing branch’s ability to meet its expansion goal.

The Congressional Budget Office consistently has maintained that Navy shipbuilding accounts are billions of dollars too low on an annual basis in order to fund the bigger fleet.

With too few warships to escort the sealift vessels, MSC crews would be on their own. To help them survive, they should “go fast and stay quiet,” Buzby said the Navy told him.

That’s exactly what the crews of the five East Coast MSC ships did in September 2019. Between 80 percent and 85 percent of the ships in the wider shipping stress test successfully met the underway evaluation criteria, a U.S. Transportation Command spokesperson told USNI News.

But the U.S. sealift force has other problems. For one, it’s too small, the Washington, D.C. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment warned in a May 2019 report.

The civilian merchant marine, which during wartime would become an auxiliary force under the Navy, possesses around 180 U.S.-flagged vessels. Add in MSC’s own ships and the overall U.S. sealift force numbers around 300 ships.

But by 2048 it needs to grow to 360 ships in order to successfully support the Navy and resupply U.S. military forces during a major war, CSBA asserted. The fleet should add 48 tankers ships to its current 21 tankers, add 20 salvage ships to the five it has in 2019 and boost the number of repair tenders from two to 17. Munitions ships should number 25, up from 12 in 2019. There should be seven hospital ships, up from two.

“Failing to remedy this situation, when adversaries have U.S. logistics networks in their crosshairs, could cause the United States to lose a war and fail its allies and partners in their hour of need,” CSBA warned.

Adding more than 60 ships to the sealift fleet is a tall order and could cost billions of dollars. But experts’ warning have not gone entirely unheeded. Kevin Tokarski, a senior official with the U.S. Maritime Administration, in May 2019 told USNI News that he was considering reflagging some ships working for American companies in order quickly to grow the sealift force.

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

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Navy

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

In 2017 the Army formed eight cross-functional teams led by brigadier generals to rapidly cost-efficiently develop a new generation of hardware

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 “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 first appeared in May 2019.

Image: DVIDS

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

The Scharnhorst was far from the most heavily armed battleship deployed by the Kriegsmarine—but she arguably was its most successful.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The more numerous and powerful radars on Force 2’s Duke of York finally picked up the Scharnhorst twenty-five miles away after 4 p.m. Her sole forward radar knocked out, and nightfall and blizzard decreasing visibility, Scharnhorst was blind to the powerful British force barreling towards her from the west. Force 2 finally opened fire at six-miles range.

The Scharnhorst was far from the most heavily armed battleship deployed by the Kriegsmarine—but she arguably was its most successful. She and sistership Gneisenau were laid down in 1935 with nine 283-millimeter guns with a range of twenty-five miles—significantly smaller than those on British battleships so as not to spook London over German rearmament.

Nonetheless, Scharnhorst measured 234 meters, which is longer than two football fields, and displaced a massive forty-two thousand tons fully loaded with fuel, ammunition and a wartime-crew of nearly two thousand men. The ship’s three Swiss-built steam turbines allowed her to attain flank speeds of thirty-one knots or higher—fast enough to outrun most warships. Indeed, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser designed to chase down and overmatch smaller vessels rather than duel enemy battleships.

The Scharnhorst’s guns were mounted in 750-ton triple-gun turrets named Anton and Bruno in the bow, and Caesar on the stern. Twelve quick-firing 150-millimeter guns provided additional firepower. The Scharnhorst’s two Seetakt radars, one forward and one rearward-facing, had a surface-search range of around ten miles and were primarily used for gun-laying. Three Arado 196 seaplanes served as the battlecruiser’s long-range “eyes.”

For air defense, the Scharnhorst additionally mounted seven twin 105-millimeter flak turrets that could spit air-bursting shells up to forty-thousand-feet high, and dozens of smaller thirty-seven-millimeter and twenty-millimeter auto-cannons for close defense. She was well-protected from long-range hits by up to fourteen inches of Krupp cemented steel girding her turrets, bridge and hull. However, her two-inch deck armor was vulnerable.

For all her speed, the Scharnhorst was not highly maneuverable and frequently returned to port damaged by rough seas. In sea trials after commissioning in January 1939, the Scharnhorst’s bow took on so much water she was promptly refitted with a flared “clipper-style” bow.

Despite these flaws, the Scharnhorst proved far more than the Kriegsmarine’s other capital ships. On her maiden war-cruise in November 1939, she sank the auxiliary cruiser HMS Rawalpindi. Then in June 1940, the battlecruiser ambushed the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, sinking her and two escorting destroyers, though Scharnhorst sustained a torpedo hit in battle.

Like an outlaw continually outwitting justice, the Scharnhorst was a notoriously “lucky” battleship, weathering numerous attacks by British bombers. In 1941, she managed to slip into the Atlantic and sink ten merchant ships, then evaded retribution under cover of sea squall to make port at Brest, France where she was outfitted with six torpedo tubes.

Heavily damaged in a July 1941 air-raid, Scharnhorst joined other German capital ships five months later in the notorious “Channel Dash” that was staged under the nose of Britain’s coastal defense, though she struck two mines in the process.

However, by 1943, German capital ships had fallen out of favor with Hitler after the Battle of the Barents Sea, a botched attack on an Arctic convoy carrying Allied aid for the Soviet Union. The Fuhrer had to be talked back from scrapping all his capital ships.

As the Wehrmacht’s woes in Russia mounted, in December 1943 Adm. Karl Donitz decided to again attempt a surface sortie targeting the Arctic convoys as they skirted past German-occupied Norway—and tapped Scharnhorst for the job.

However, not only were the British listening in to Donitz’s radio messages, but Home Fleet commander Adm. Bruce Fraser was already planning to lure the Scharnhorst into battle. Though the Royal Navy far outnumbered German surface combatants, it had to devote disproportionate resource to guard against possible sorties.

Fraser planned to use JW 55B as bait, reinforcing her ten escorting destroyers with three cruisers in “Force 1” under Vice Adm. Robert Burnett, which had just escorted a preceding convoy. Meanwhile, “Force 2” would sortie from the west, including the battleship Duke of York, the heavy cruiser Jamaica and four S-class destroyers.

The Brits made no effort to prevent German patrol planes from spotting the convoy on December 22. On Christmas Day, Fraser was pleased to learn that Scharnhorst and five destroyers had departed Altafjord at 7 p.m. under command of Adm. Erich Bay.

However, the German force failed to contact the nineteen-ship convoy. This far north, there was less than an hour of daylight, and gale-force winds were gusting heavy snowfall over the water. Bay fanned out his destroyers to extend his search—ultimately depriving his flagship of badly needed support.

At 9 a.m., the light cruiser Belfast of Force 1 picked up the Scharnhorst with her superior radar. The two sides finally spotted each other at a distance of about 7.5 miles and exchanged fire. While Scharnhorst missed, she was struck twice. One 8-inch shell fatefully smashed the battlecruiser’s forward-looking radar, crippling her situational awareness and the accuracy of her guns.

Scharnhorst disengaged, while the British escorts withdrew to screen the convoy as Force 2 raced to support them. But Bey circled Scharnhorst around and at noon bumped into Force 1 a second time. This time the battlecruiser’s guns twice struck the Norfolk, the huge 727-pound armored-piercing rounds passing clean through, knocking out a gun turret and radar.

Bey then decided to head south back to port with Force 1 in pursuit—though only the lighter Belfast could keep up.

However, the more numerous and powerful radars on Force 2’s Duke of York finally picked up the Scharnhorst twenty-five miles away after 4 p.m. Her sole forward radar knocked out, and nightfall and blizzard decreasing visibility, Scharnhorst was blind to the powerful British force barreling towards her from the west. Force 2 finally opened fire at six-miles range.

Norman Scarth, a sailor onboard the destroyer Matchless described the moment in a BBC interview:

All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells, which fired into the sky like fireworks, providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.

One huge fourteen-inch shell jammed the in Anton turret, silencing its triple-guns. Another strike triggered an ammunition fire in Bruno, forcing the gun crew to flood the turret to avoid an explosion. Now only Caesar could return fire—and fire she did, in turn knocking out a radar on the Duke of York.

However, the superior British fire-control radars gave British warships greater accuracy, while their flash-less charge left them difficult to spot with the naked eye.

Bey tried tacking back north away from Force 2, only to run afoul of the cruisers of Force 1. The battlecruiser finally began pulling away eastward at maximum speed. However, a long-range fourteen-foot abruptly penetrated Scharnhorst’s belt armor and blew apart one of her boiler rooms, reducing her speed to just twelve knots. Bey radioed his superiors “We will fight on until the last shell is fired.”

As the British barrage relentlessly crippled Scharnhorst’s main guns, smaller British destroyers swarmed in to attempt torpedo runs. Some of Scharnhorst’s smaller guns remained active, though, and one blasted a shell straight through the fire control tower of the Saumarez, killing eleven crew. Meanwhile, the Savage and Norwegian destroyer Stord dashed up to within a mile of the beleaguered battlecruiser and slammed three twenty-one-inch torpedoes into her port side approaching 7 p.m.

For nearly an hour more, the British ships relentlessly pounded the crippled Scharnhorst, with shells and torpedoes. The latter were known to occasionally sink capital ships with just a few lucky hits. The Scharnhorst, however, sustained nineteen torpedoes before she finally capsized.

As Scarth recounted:

She looked magnificent and beautiful . . . She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a twenty-millimeter cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.

A twenty-millimeter cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle . . . And that's one of the things that remains in my memory—a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.

Afterward, Matchless and Scorpion picked up just thirty-six survivors from the freezing Arctic waters before receiving the order to abandon the rest for fear of a counterattack.

German battleships never engaged their British peers again in battle. Fifty-seven years later, a Norwegian-led expedition located the Scharnhorst’s mangled wreckage 290-meters deep on the seafloor.

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 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Caleb Larson

Security, World

Russia is apparently the first country to field submarine-based hypersonic missiles.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin do further develop hypersonic vehicles, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is further developing the appropriate engines after stopping research in 2010–2011. A step in the right direction. Still, let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

As recently detailed, Russia’s new hypersonic Zircon missile will soon be submarine based. This diversifies Russia’s hypersonic capabilities—from air and at sea, to underwater, for greater strategic advantage. America and U.S. allies beware.

Better than Greased Lightning

But first, what is a hypersonic missile? And why is it so dangerous? Although there are different delivery systems, hypersonic missiles are essentially a new class of missile that flies fast—extremely fast—the Zircon soars in excess of Mach 8. Hypersonic missiles targets would have very little time to react, either by evading or trying to shoot the missile down. Hypersonic missiles are so fast, they don’t necessarily need to carry any explosives, as the impact of something traveling hypersonically would create a terrific explosion.

Evasive maneuvers are difficult against hypersonic weapons because the weapons themselves are highly maneuverable. Using kinetic interceptors to shoot down a hypersonic missile would be like shooting a bullet with a bullet. Further complicating the problem is the fact that most missile defense systems are generally optimized to counter specific, existing threats and hypersonics traveling close to two miles a second are just not on their menu.

One of the truly frightening aspects of hypersonic missiles are the potential stealth capabilities inherent to some of their design. Because they move so quickly through the atmosphere, such missiles generate a plasma field around themselves that is radar absorbent, making them harder to detect. Bad news for aircraft carriers, cities, or other potential targets.

Location, Location, Location

So why are submarine-based hypersonic missiles such a big deal? After all, Zircon and other hypersonic missiles are relatively new, but not unknown, and being deployed at sea is no big secret.

One word: survivability. Russia is apparently the first country to field submarine-based hypersonic missiles. This arrangement is particularly dangerous because submarines can hide underwater for days, or even weeks. Submarines are highly protected if they stay below the surface, and very hard to detect, especially if a sub commander is willing to sail slowly, or not at all.

Like conventional submarine-based ballistic missiles, shooting a hypersonic missile at a target on land or at sea could happen very quickly, without even needing to surface. Blisteringly high speed, combined with close proximity to targets that submarines can provide would give an opponent a laughably low reaction time.

Falling Behind

The United States is falling behind. Michael D. Griffin, the current serving Under Secretary for Defense and Engineering has repeatedly spoken on Capitol Hill about the plight of the United States in relation to its adversaries in the realm of hypersonics. “We, today, do not have systems which can hold them [Russia and China] at risk in a corresponding manner, and we don’t have defenses against those systems…Should they choose to employ them, we would be today at a disadvantage,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up ball.” Not a great game to be playing.

His comments are supported by the findings of the Congressional Research Service (CRS). In fall of 2019, the CRS, Congress’s think tank, released a report that detailed the hypersonic state of the art. Their firm conclusion was that Russia is seeking to perfect maneuverable hypersonic weapons to perforate American missile defense and, therefore, to ensure a measure of “strategic stability” in relation to the United States. According to CRS, Zircon will be operational by 2023.

The Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin do further develop hypersonic vehicles, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is further developing the appropriate engines after stopping research in 2010–2011.

A step in the right direction. Still, let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

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

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Security, Asia

Dennis Killinger, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of South Florida, called the idea “intriguing.”

Here's What You Need to Know: China claims to be developing “magnetized plasma artillery.”

The Chinese military recently published a notice inviting researchers to devise a weapon that sounds like a sort of electromagnetic rail gun—which uses magnetism instead of gunpowder to fire shells—that several nations are developing. But actually deploying railguns has been hampered by the size of the weapon and especially the vast amount of electrical energy needed to propel a shell to speeds of greater than Mach 7. For example, despite years of research and vast sums of money, the U.S. Navy appears less than optimistic about fitting railguns on its warships.

But Chinese scientists believe that magnetized plasma artillery will be so light and energy-efficient that it can be mounted on tanks.

“The notice invites tenders for a theory-testing and a launch system for magnetized plasma artillery,” said China’s state-owned Global Times. “Although the weapon sounds as if it comes from a sci-fi movie, it will probably not shoot high-energy plasma but ultra-high velocity cannon shells.”

But how exactly does magnetized plasma artillery work? Global Times helpfully noted that a Chinese-approved patent is available on Google Patents. Here is the text of the patent:

The invention discloses magnetized plasma artillery. A magnetic field is arranged in an artillery body pipe, the direction of the magnetic field points to an artillery port along the direction of an axis of the artillery body pipe, the magnetic field strength is gradually reduced from an inner wall of the artillery body pipe to the axis of the artillery body pipe, and the gas in the artillery body pipe can be ionized into the plasma for forming a plasma sheath layer on the inner wall of the artillery body pipe under the action of the magnetic field while the artillery is launched. The magnetized plasma sheath layer formed on the inner wall of the artillery body pipe of the magnetized plasma artillery has stress anisotropic characteristic and has thermal insulation function, and then, the radial force for the artillery body pipe is greatly reduced, the driving force for the bullet is greatly improved, the heat resistance of the artillery body pipe is greatly improved and the service life is prolonged.

In other words, the magnetized plasma layer protects the gun barrel from wear and heat, and allow the projectile to achieve a higher launch velocity.

Chinese military analyst Wei Dongxu told Global Times that the new technology “would extend the range of a conventional 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer from 30 to 50 kilometers [19 to 31 miles] to 100 kilometers [62 miles]. The plasma layer might also reduce friction between the barrel and rounds, making the weapon more accurate.”

Dennis Killinger, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of South Florida, called the idea “intriguing.” “The idea seems possible,” he told the National Interest. “My main question is what is the lifetime of the plasma and is it sufficient during the launch time inside the barrel.”

It is also a different approach than a railgun. “I don’t think that you can think of it as an offshoot of the classic railgun technique since the railgun is more a linear motor (moving mag field) approach using a fixed stator (i.e., bullet) similar to the linear accelerators used for the newer roller coasters. This new, patented technique uses a plasma which interacts with the magnetic field and serves as a liner for the barrel.”

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

This article appeared last year.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History,

The Navy's experience was gained with blood, but it would help again against the Nazis during the Second Battle of the Atlantic.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The most successful anti-submarine ships were agile “torpedo-boat destroyers,” which sank U-Boats using deck guns and even ramming. Starting in 1916, Royal Navy vessels carried depth charge designed to detonate underwater, rupturing a submarine’s hull. These proved effective if the ship captains could guess the sub’s position. Statistically, naval mines proved deadliest, accounting for one-third of U-Boat losses.

When Congress voted on April 6, 1917 to declare war on Imperial Germany, the task before the U.S. Navy was clear: it needed to transport and supply over a million men across the Atlantic despite the Imperial German Navy’s ferocious U-Boat campaign, which reached its peak that month, sinking over 874,000 tons of shipping.

Indeed, Germany’s decision to recommence unrestricted submarine warfare in February was one of the decisive factors driving the United States, and later Brazil, into finally joining “the war to end all wars.”

While World War I submarines could only remain submerged for brief periods, they were highly successful at picking off unescorted merchants ship in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Neither active sonar nor radar yet existed with which to track submarines, though the British had begun using hydrophones to listen for the noise of a submarine’s diesel engine.

The most successful anti-submarine ships were agile “torpedo-boat destroyers,” which sank U-Boats using deck guns and even ramming. Starting in 1916, Royal Navy vessels carried depth charge designed to detonate underwater, rupturing a submarine’s hull. These proved effective if the ship captains could guess the sub’s position. Statistically, naval mines proved deadliest, accounting for one-third of U-Boat losses.

For years, the Royal Navy resisted instituting a convoy system to guard merchant ships, preferring not to divert warships from offensive missions and believing the decrease in throughput from adhering to a convoy schedule would prove worse than the losses inflicted by U-Boats.

But that April, U-Boats had sunk one-quarter of all merchant ships bound for the UK, leaving it with just six week’s grain supply. Threatened with economic collapse, the Royal Navy finally instituted the convoy system. But the Brits had a problem: they could divert only forty-three out of the seventy-five destroyers required to escort convoys.

Naval liaison Rear Admiral William Sims convinced the navy to dispatch thirty-five U.S. destroyers to bases at Queenstown (modern-day Cobh), Ireland to fill in the gap. These began escorting convoys on May 24, usually supported by navy cruisers. In 1918, an even larger escort flotilla began operating out of Brest, France.

The U.S. Navy itself began the war with only fifty-one destroyers. It immediately faced a classic military procurement problem: politicians and admirals wanted to build more expensive battleships and battlecruisers, construction of sixteen of which had been authorized by the Naval Act of 1916.

But the Royal Navy already had the German High Seas fleet effectively bottled up in port with its larger force. While five coal-burning and three oil-burning U.S. battleships did join the blockade in 1918, they never saw action. Common sense prevailed, and battleship construction was halted in favor of building 266 destroyers.

More rapidly, the Navy commissioned hundreds of small 70-ton wooden-hulled “sub-chasers” equipped with hydrophones, 3” deck guns and depth charges. Civilian yachts were similarly converted. The Navy’s eleven L-class and K-class submarines were also deployed to Berehaven (now Castletownbere), Ireland and the Azores respectively to hunt (surfaced) U-Boats, but none encountered enemy forces during the war.

Hundreds of twin-engine HS maritime patrol planes were also procured to scour the seas for submarines. Though the seaplanes sank few if any submarines, they disrupted numerous attacks by forcing U-Boats to dive and abort their torpedo runs.

The convoy system proved a dramatic success, cutting shipping losses to less than half their peak. U-Boats simply lacked unprotected targets and were more likely to be lost combating escorts. Shipping losses gradually fell to roughly 300,000 tons per month, while U-Boat losses increased from three per month to between five and ten.

However, submariner-hunting remained a dangerous business in which a hunter could swiftly become hunted. On Nov. 17, 1917, the destroyer USS Cassin was pursuing U-61 near Ireland when the U-Boat counterattacked. Spotting a torpedo rushing towards the depth-charge launcher on the ship’s stern, Gunner’s Mate Osmond Ingram lunged forth to jettison the explosive charges but was caught in the blast that tore away the destroyer’s rudder. The Cassin remained afloat and shelled U-61’s conning tower, causing her to disengage. Ingram was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The destroyer Jacob Jones was not so fortunate when she was struck in the rudder by a torpedo fired by U-353 near Brest on December 6. Sixty-six crew perished abandoning ship as her depth charges detonated. Gallantly, U-Boat captain Karl Rose rescued two of the crew and radioed the position of the other survivors.

U.S. sub-hunters did score some successes. On November 17, the destroyers Fanning and Nicholson forced U-58 to the surface with depth charges, then engaged her with deck guns until her crew scuttled her. The converted yacht Christabel crippled a U-Boat with depth charges in May 1918 off the coast of Spain.

That month, the Imperial Navy began dispatching long-range U-Boat “cruisers” with huge 150-millimeter deck guns to maraud the U.S. coast. These sank ninety-three vessels, mostly small civilian fishing boats. The Germans hoped this would spread panic, causing the Americans to withdraw assets in Europe for home defense.

Notably, on July 18 the boat U-156 surfaced off the coastal town of Orleans on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and proceeded to destroy a tugboat, four barges and the nearby shoreline with its cannons. Nine Coast Guard HS and Model R-9 seaplane bombers scrambled from NAS Chatham and peppered the withdrawing U-boat with bombs—none of which exploded.

The following day, the armored cruiser USS San Diego struck a mine probably lain by U-156 south of Long Island. The explosion flooded her engine room, causing the cruiser to sink with the loss of six hands—becoming the only capital ship lost by the navy. U-156 proceeded to sink twenty-one fishing boats in the Gulf of Maine, and even commandeered a trawler to assist in its rampage. But though the navy instituted coastal convoys, it didn’t withdraw ships from Europe.

U-Boats were also active in the Mediterranean, and Gibraltar-based American subchasers—often little more than civilian yachts fitted with 3” guns and depth charges—twice clashed with them, sinking at least one.

Perhaps the Navy’s most swashbuckling episode of the war occurred on October 2, 1918, when twelve U.S. subchasers covered an Italian and British surface force raiding the Albanian port of Durazzo. Dodging shells from shore batteries, the subchasers cleared a path through the defensive minefield for the accompanying capital ships. They then hounded away the submarines U-29 and U-31, heavily damaging both.

The navy’s deadliest anti-submarine measure was the North Sea Mine Barrage, a 230-mile-long chain of 100,000 naval mines between the Orkney islands and Norway. U-Boats seeking passage to the Atlantic had to wend through eighteen rows of Mark 6 mines concealed at depths of twenty-four, forty-nine and seventy-three meters deep, strung together with piano wire. Each of the horned steel spheres contained three hundred pounds of TNT. The barrage cost $40 million ($722 million in 2018 dollars) and required the deployment of eight large steamships. However, it sank between four and eight U-Boats—including the infamous U-156—and damaged another eight.

Ultimately, 178 out of 360 operational U-Boats were sunk during World War I. In return, the German subs sank 5,000 merchant ships totaling 12.8 million tons, killing 15,000 mariners. The U.S. Navy lost 431 personnel and five ships—its worst loss occurred when the collier USS Cyclops vanished with 306 crew in the Bermuda Triangle.

Despite its unglamorous duties, the U.S. Navy learned valuable lessons in the Great War about employing convoys, smaller submarine-hunters and maritime patrol planes that would save many lives in the even more destructive conflict that followed two decades later.

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 2018.

For farmers in Myanmar, the COVID-19 pandemic is adding to growing unpredictability, in a sector already struggling to cope with the effects of climate change. The UN is working closely with the country’s government to help them to adapt and thrive.

Robert Farley

History, Americas

Washington nearly made different spending choices when it came to battleships vs battlecruisers.

Key point: America got along okay during the start of the war with battleships instead. But imagine if Washington had built a class of battlecruisers during the build up to the conflict.

The United States Navy (USN) entered World War II when Japanese aircraft battered its fleet of old, slow battleships at Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, newer, faster ships would soon enter service, but the USN nevertheless fought the opening battles of the Pacific War without the support of fast battleships.

Had the U.S. Navy made different, better choices at the end of World War I, it might have begun World War II with battlecruisers that could have supported its fast carrier groups. The names of these ships might have been USS Lexington and USS Saratoga.

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

The Battlecruiser Turn

The United States Navy began to think about battlecruiser construction even before HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible entered service. Prior to the construction of Dreadnought, the USN had built two different kinds of capital ship. Large, slow, well-armored battleships would engage enemy battleships in set-piece battles, while large, fast, poorly armored cruisers would raid and disrupt enemy commerce. Although the battleships were starting to trend larger, at the turn of the century cruisers and battleships were of roughly the same size.

The Dreadnought Revolution changed the equation. Britain, Germany, and Japan began to build all-big-gun battleships, but supplemented these battleships with battlecruisers. Faster but less heavily armed and armored than their cousins, battlecruisers would serve as the scouting wing of the battlefleet, but could also operate in traditional “cruising” roles, such as commerce raiding or protection.

The Lexingtons

The United States, on the other hand, focused entirely on battleships. Not until the 1910s, when it became apparent that Japan was about to acquire four large, fast battlecruisers, did the USN begin to take the battlecruiser seriously. The first designs resembled modified Wyomings, dropping a turret or two and using the saved weight to increase speed. This superficially resembled British practice of the day, in which battleships and battlecruisers shared core design elements in order to save time and expense.

The Lexingtons were to be a class of six battlecruisers that would close the gap with the British, Germans, and especially the Japanese. The USN discarded the idea of simply modifying an existing battleship design (these designs were in flux, anyway) and started from scratch. The first efforts were . . . sketchy, resulting in huge, fast, poorly protected ships with bizarre configurations (one design had seven funnels). The 1916 design specified a displacement of thirty-five thousand tons, a speed of thirty-five knots, and main armament of ten fourteen-inch guns in four turrets.

Of course, reality intervened and the Lexingtons were delayed by war requirements. Fortunately, the Royal Navy offered its assistance, having won hard experience with battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland. British intervention resulted in significant design changes that increased the size of the ships but left them more well-balanced. The USN also opted to shift to sixteen-inch guns, which alleviated some design problems.

When wartime demand for escort craft receded, the United States Navy resumed construction of its battlefleet. The U.S. Navy decided to commit to construction of the Big Five, advanced Standard Type battleships that included two ships of the Tennessee class and three ships of the Colorado class. One of the Big Five was laid down in 1916, two in 1917, and two in 1919.

Interwar

The USN finally began construction of the Lexingtons in the early 1920s. But by that time the strategic landscape had changed once again, as the United States entered the Washington Naval Treaty with Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. That story is well-known; the United States was granted the right to convert two capital ships into aircraft carriers, and it chose Lexington and Saratoga. Both ships served with distinction in the war; Lexington was sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea, and Saratoga in the post-war atomic bomb tests.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the USN would have entered the Treaty system with two fewer battleships and two more battlecruisers. The Navy would likely have selected two other ships (for convenience sake Constellation and Constitution) for refit into aircraft carriers, so it’s unlikely that this would have changed the composition of the carrier fleet. The overall impact depends greatly on where in the design process the USN would have changed its mind. The earliest designs for the Lexingtons were a bit of a disaster and would have resulted in ships requiring immense modification during the interwar period. Still, even the early problematic designs would have left the USN in possession of two large, well-armed, fast battlecruisers. The Navy devoted immense resources to rebuilding its battleships in the interwar period anyway, and it’s possible that it could have remedied many of the core problems with the Lexingtons.

World War II

Of course, speed wouldn’t have helped the Lexingtons if they’d been trapped at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. But then the battlecruisers might not even have been in Pearl on December 7. The battlefleet remained home while the aircraft carriers conducted missions around the Pacific because the battleships could not keep up with the carriers. Had battlecruisers been available, they might well have escorted Enterprise and Lexington on their ferry and patrol missions, and thus missed the attack. Alternatively, the USN might have posted the ships to the Atlantic, as it did with the North Carolina class fast battleships when they entered service.

If the Lexington and Saratoga survived Pearl Harbor, they would have immediately offered the USN a capability that it did not have until mid-1942, and in some sense not until late 1943; a fast battleship that could provide high-speed carrier escort in engagements across the Pacific. The Lexingtons might have seen duty at Coral Sea, Midway, and the Doolittle Raid, offering anti-aircraft and anti-surface protection for USN carriers. In late 1942 they could have operated as the core of cruiser divisions in the Guadalcanal campaign.

In short, like their Japanese counterparts the Kongos, they would have been among the busiest ships in the fleet. Of course, the story of the Kongos ended badly, with two of the four sinking during the Guadalcanal campaign. The Lexingtons would also have sailed into harm’s way, and wouldn’t have enjoyed the protection of fast battleships like USS Washington or USS South Dakota. Of the seven battlecruisers to enter World War II, only one (HMS Renown) survived the conflict.

Wrap

The USN prioritized slow, well-armored battleships that could operate together in a line-of-battle. Had the Navy paid more attention to European trends in shipbuilding, it might have gone ahead with the Lexington-class battlecruisers, which would have offered U.S. commanders in the Pacific better tools for fighting the war. The USN might well have lost the ships in the bitter, hard-fought battles of World War II, but this is always the potential fate for useful, in-demand warships. In light of wartime experience, where the utility of the fast battlecruisers of the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy became clear (notwithstanding the vulnerability of the ships), the USN ought to have prioritized battlecruisers over the advanced “Big Five” battleships that it began to build in 1917.

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

Image: Reuters