Diplomacy & Crisis News

Richard Douglas

Guns,

Though its price slightly above average, the Ruger SP101 is very durable and an excellent choice for anyone who needs a solid revolver for personal defense.

Ruger’s SP101 is a small, durable, and elegant-looking revolver that’s great for concealed carry, personal defense, or even home defense. It’s available in a variety of calibers, including .357 Magnum, .38 Special, .327 Federal, and .22 LR. Throughout my years of owning this little revolver, I’ve never had any failures whatsoever. It’s incredibly reliable and built for years of consistent service.

The SP101 features a triple-locking cylinder, locked into the front, bottom, and rear of the frame to ensure dependability and positive alignment. There’s also a transfer bar safety, which will prevent any accidental discharges during concealed carry. The SP101 is very easy to take down for cleaning or maintenance, and requires no special tools to do so.

It comes with a sleek, brushed stainless steel finish for extra aesthetic appeal. While it’s not quite as nice as what you might find on a Smith & Wesson revolver, it’s still very high-quality. The SP101 also features a cushioned rubber grip with either a black synthetic or hardwood insert, depending on which model you choose. It feels nice in your hand, and there’s no exposed metal in the backstrap to further ensure a secure, comfortable grip. It’s great for me, but if the grip doesn’t quite meet your standards, the frame easily accommodates custom grips as well.

Most SP101 models come with a five-round capacity, apart from the .22 LR model (which comes with an eight-round capacity) and the .327 Federal (six-round capacity). You can shoot the revolver in double-action or single-action by manually cocking the hammer. I’d recommend shooting in single-action for a quick, light pull that breaks around 4 lbs, as the double-action pull can be long, gritty, and quite heavy, breaking around ten to eleven pounds.

This revolver comes in several different barrel lengths, including 2.25-inch, 3-inch, and 4.2-inch. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and designed for ultimate concealability and easy storage. Weighing in at around twenty-five ounces, it is a bit heavy for its size. However, this heft does help to mitigate some of the recoil.

Just like the Taurus 380, it’s relatively soft shooting despite its small size. The .357 loads are much more snappy than .38 loads, but the combination of the revolver’s heavier weight, solidity, and cushioned grip make the recoil much more manageable than most snubnose revolvers.

As far as accuracy goes, you’ll have the best chance at hitting your target from short distances. Shooting in single-action helps with accuracy, as well. In fact, when I switched from double-action, I was able to cut my five-shot groups in half! My average grouping in single-action was just 1.5 inches from twenty-five yards, using various .38 Special loads. Getting small groupings from close distances (up to thirty yards) is easy, but anything further requires a bit of practice.

It comes standard with some basic sights, lowered to reduce the chances of snagging on your clothes when you draw the revolver from the concealed carry position. Both are adjustable for windage and elevation and set within the frame.

The MSRP of the Ruger SP101 is between $719–$769, depending on which model you choose, but you can usually find them online for around $550. It is a higher-than-average price, but extremely durable, soft shooting, and an excellent choice for anyone who needs an easy-to-conceal revolver for personal or home defense.

Richard Douglas writes on firearms, defense and security issues. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, 1945, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Stealth Bomber,

The YB-49 prototypes suffered an unusual run of bad luck.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The B-2 Spirit, while utilizing radically different technology, bears a strong visual resemblance to its distant cousin. Indeed, the two aircraft share exactly the same wingspan. Northrop adopted the flying wing shape for the B-2 because it offers the advantage of a low radar cross-section.

As the United States approached World War II, it enjoyed the luxury of many innovative aircraft companies, and a ton of money to spend.  Part of this bounty went to pursuit aircraft, part to tactical attack planes, and part to long-range bombers. This last generated one of the most interesting failures ever to emerge from the U.S. aviation industry; the Northrop YB-49 “flying wing” bomber.

The Flying Wing

Early aviation engineers appreciated the potential for a “flying wing” design. A flying wing, which minimizes fuselage and usually eliminates the tail, reduces many of the aerodynamic compromises associated with a normal fuselage, reducing overall drag. However, many of these features enhance stability, meaning that a flying wing often lacks the stability of a traditional airframe. This makes the aircraft more difficult to fly, especially before the advent of fly-by-wire technology. A flying wing can also struggle with creating space for crew, payload, and defensive armament, as any of these can reduce the aerodynamic advantages than the shape offers.

Nevertheless, engineers (especially in Germany and the Soviet Union) tried repeatedly in the interwar period to develop a viable flying wing, either for transport or for military purposes. While these efforts yielded useful data, they rarely resulted in practical airframes. Near the end of World War II, the German successfully developed a jet fighter flying wing, although it did not enter mass production.

From XB-35 to YB-49

In the early years of World War II, U.S. strategists realized that it might become necessary to bomb Germany directly from the United States, especially if Great Britain left the war. A U.S. Army Air Corps request triggered proposals from a Boeing-Consolidated alliance (eventually Convair) and from Northrop. The former resulted in the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the latter in the XB-35. The B-36 had a relatively conventional design; it looked more or less like a bigger version of the extant bombers of the time, although it had innovative features. The XB-35, on the other hand, was something new to U.S. military aviation; a flying wing. It was smaller than the B-36, but comparable in many performance features.

By 1944, the XB-35 had fallen behind the B-36 (although both suffered significant technological problems), and in any case the immediate strategic necessity for a trans-continental bomber had waned. The Air Force, which acknowledged that both the B-36 and the XB-35 were largely obsolete, canceled the latter instead of the former because it believed that the problems of the B-36 were easier to solve. However, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) found the flying wing concept sufficiently intriguing that it proposed redesigning the XB-35 airframe around a jet, rather than piston, engines. Northrop developed a plan to re-engine a number of incomplete XB-35 frames with jets, eventually completing three such conversions and preparing several more.

The jet engines improved the top speed of the bomber to 493 miles per hour, an improvement of about 20% over its antecedent. The service ceiling of the YB-49 also increased, an important consideration for escaping Soviet interceptors.  However, the fuel-hungry engines shrank the YB-49s combat radius, making it more comparable to a medium bomber than to the long-range B-36. Unfortunately, while the YB-49 could outrun the B-36, it lacked the speed of Boeing’s new B-47 Stratojet medium bomber.

Sabotage?

The YB-49 prototypes suffered an unusual run of bad luck. One prototype was lost with five crew members in June 1948, when the aircraft broke up in midflight. Another was lost during taxi when the nosewheel collapsed, leading to a fire that destroyed the entire aircraft. The Air Force cancelled the contract for the YB-49 in May 1950, shortly after this second accident. The last prototype, a recon variant, flew until 1951 and was scrapped in 1953.

Advocates of the YB-49 long nursed the belief that the Air Force had deliberately sabotaged the program in preference for the B-36 and other, later bombers. Jack Northrop, founder of the company, believed that the Air Force canceled the YB-49 because he would not agree to a merger with Convair. A few dark rumors implied that the accidents suffered by the YB-49 prototypes had not been accidental at all, but rather the result of sabotage. No meaningful evidence has ever emerged to substantiate these allegations.

B-2

Northrop would not realize success in an all-wing airframe until decades later. The B-2 Spirit, while utilizing radically different technology, bears a strong visual resemblance to its distant cousin. Indeed, the two aircraft share exactly the same wingspan. Northrop adopted the flying wing shape for the B-2 because it offers the advantage of a low radar cross-section. Advances in fly-by-wire technology have made the B-2 much easier to fly than the YB-49 (or the YB-35). All indications suggest that Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber will have a similar configuration, as will the Xian H-20 strategic bomber and the Tupolev PAK DA. 

Although the YB-49 never reached full production, experience with the frame helped validate the concept which now dominates international thinking on strategic bomber design.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Security, Americas

Instead of an easy victory, the British handed the Americans a devastating defeat.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: 

American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests. Nevertheless, each of these avoidable defeats proved costly to the United States—in blood, treasure and time.

Nations often linger on their military defeats as long as, or longer than, they do on their successes. The Battle of Kosovo remains the key event of the Serbian story, and devastating military defeats adorn the national narratives of France, Russia and the American South. What are the biggest disasters in American military history, and what effect have they had on the United States?

In this article, I concentrate on specific operational and strategic decisions, leaving aside broader, grand-strategic judgments that may have led the United States into ill-considered conflicts. The United States may well have erred politically in engaging in the War of 1812, World War I, the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, but here I consider how specific failures worsened America’s military and strategic position.

Invasion of Canada

At the opening of the War of 1812, U.S. forces invaded Upper and Lower Canada. Americans expected a relatively easy going; the notion that Canada represented the soft underbelly of the British empire had been popular among American statesmen for some time. Civilian and military leaders alike expected a quick capitulation, forced in part by the support of the local population. But Americans overestimated their support among Canadians, overestimated their military capabilities, and underestimated British power. Instead of an easy victory, the British handed the Americans a devastating defeat.

American forces (largely consisting of recently mobilized militias) prepared to invade Canada on three axes of advance, but did not attack simultaneously and could not support one another. American forces were inexperienced at fighting against a professional army and lacked good logistics. This limited their ability to concentrate forces against British weak points. The Americans also lacked a good backup plan for the reverses that the British soon handed them. None of the American commanders (led by William Hull, veteran of the Revolutionary War) displayed any enthusiasm for the fight, or any willingness to take the risks necessary to press advantages.

The real disaster of the campaign became apparent at Detroit in August, when a combined British and Native American army forced Hull to surrender, despite superior numbers. The British followed up their victory by seizing and burning several American frontier outposts, although they lacked the numbers and logistical tail to probe very deeply into American territory. The other two prongs of the invasion failed to march much beyond their jumping-off points. American forces won several notable successes later in the war, restoring their position along the border, but never effectively threatened British Canada.

The failure of the invasion turned what Americans had imagined as an easy, lucrative offensive war into a defensive struggle. It dealt a major setback to the vision, cherished by Americans, of a North America completely under the domination of the United States. Britain would hold its position on the continent, eventually ensuring the independence of Canada from Washington.

Battle of Antietam

In September 1862, Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland with the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s objectives were to take advantage of foraging opportunities (the movement of armies across Virginia had left the terrain devastated), support a revolt in Maryland and potentially inflict a serious defeat on Union forces. Unfortunately for Lee, information about his battle disposition fell into the hands of General George McClellan, who moved to intercept with the much larger Army of the Potomac. President Lincoln saw this as an opportunity to either destroy or badly maul Lee’s army.

The Battle of Antietam resulted in 22,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest day in the history of the Americas. Despite massive numbers, a good working knowledge of Lee’s dispositions and a positional advantage, McClellan failed to inflict a serious defeat on the Confederates. Lee was able to withdraw in good order, suffering higher proportional casualties, but maintaining the integrity of his force and its ability to retreat safely into Confederate territory.

McClellan probably could not have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam (19th-century armies were devilishly difficult to annihilate, given the technology available), but he could have dealt it a far more serious setback. He vastly overestimated the size of Lee’s force, moved slowly to take advantage of clear opportunities and maintained poor communications with his subcommanders. A greater success at Antietam might have spared the Army of the Potomac the devastation of Fredericksburg, where Union forces launched a pointless direct assault against prepared Confederate positions.

Antietam was not a complete failure; the Army of Northern Virginia was hurt, and McClellan forced Lee out of Maryland. President Lincoln felt confident enough following the battle to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, promising to free slaves in rebellious states. Nevertheless, Antietam represented the best opportunity that the Union would have to catch and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, which remained one of the Confederacy’s centers of gravity until 1865.

Operation Drumbeat

On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Germany’s treaty obligations to Japan did not require action in case of Japanese attack, but Germany nevertheless decided to make formal the informal war that it had been fighting with the United States in the Atlantic. Historically, this has been regarded as one of Hitler’s major blunders. At the time, however, it gave German submariners their first opportunity to feast upon American coastal shipping.

In the first six months of 1942, the U-boat force commanded by Admiral Doenitz deployed into the littoral of the eastern seaboard. The Germans had observed some restraint prior to Pearl Harbor in order to avoid incurring outright U.S. intervention. This ended with the Japanese attack. The German U-boats enjoyed tremendous success, as none of the U.S. Army Air Force, the U.S. Navy, or American civil defense authorities were well prepared for submarine defense. Coastal cities remained illuminated, making it easy for U-boat commanders to pick targets. Fearing a lack of escorts (as well as irritation on the part of the U.S. business community), the U.S. Navy (USN) declined to organize coastal shipping into convoys. The USN and U.S. Army Air Force, having fought bitterly for years, had not prepared the cooperative procedures necessary for fighting submarines.

The results were devastating. Allied shipping losses doubled from the previous year, and remained high throughout 1942. German successes deeply worried the British, such that they quickly dispatched advisors to the United States to help develop a concerted anti-submarine doctrine. Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) was (and is) immensely complicated, requiring a great deal of coordination and experience to pull off correctly. The United States had neither worked diligently on the problem prior to the war, nor taken the time to learn from the British. However, the USN would make good its mistake later in the war, developing into a very effective ASW force, and deploying its own submarines to great effect against the Japanese.

Across the Partition, 1950

Following the successful defense of Pusan, and the stunning victory on the beaches of Inchon, the United States Army and Marine Corps, with support of Republic of Korea forces, marched deep into North Korea in an effort to destroy the Pyongyang regime and turn over full control of the Korean Peninsula to Seoul. The United States saw a counteroffensive as an opportunity to roll back Communist gains in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, and punish the Communist world for aggression on the Korean Peninsula.

This was an operational and strategic disaster. As American forces approached the Chinese border on two widely divergent (and mutually unsupportable) axes, Chinese forces massed in the mountains of North Korea. Beijing’s diplomatic warnings became increasingly shrill, but fresh off the victory at Inchon, few in the United States paid any attention. China was impoverished and militarily weak, while the Soviet Union had displayed no taste for direct intervention.

When the Chinese counterattacked in November 1950, they threw back U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces with huge loss of life on both sides. For a time, it appeared that the People’s Liberation Army’s counteroffensive might completely rout United Nation forces. Eventually, however, the lines stabilized around what is now the Demilitarized Zone.

This failure had many fathers. While General Douglas MacArthur pushed most aggressively for a decisive offensive, he had many friends and supporters in Congress. President Truman made no effort to restrain MacArthur until the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. U.S. intelligence lacked a good understanding of either Chinese aims or Chinese capabilities. The invasion resulted in two more years of war, in which neither China, nor the United States could budge the other very far from the 38th parallel. It also poisoned U.S.-Chinese relations for a generation.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army

On May 23, 2003, Paul Bremer (chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority) ordered the Iraqi Army to disband. It is difficult to overstate the unwise nature of this decision. We don’t need hindsight; it was, as many recognized, a terrible decision at the time. In a moment, swept aside was the entirety of Iraqi military history, including the traditions and communal spirit of the finest Iraqi military formations. Eradicated was the best means for managing the sectors of Iraqi society most likely to engage in insurgent activity.

It’s not hard to see the logic of the decision. The Iraqi Army was deeply implicated in the Baathist power structure that had dominated Iraq for decades. Many of its officers had committed war crimes, often against other Iraqis. It was heavily tilted towards the Sunnis, with few Shia or Kurds in positions of responsibility. Finally, it had, from the American perspective, a recent history of appallingly poor military performance. As Bremer argued, it had largely dissolved in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But this was not how many Iraqis viewed the army. The Royal Iraqi Army had come into existence in the early 1920s, when Iraq remained a protectorate of the British Empire. It had revolted in 1941, but the British made the wise decision to keep the force together so as to maintain order. In 1948, its units fought against Israeli forces during the wars of Israeli independence, and it participated in the 1967 war, if briefly. In the 1980s, it waged an eight-year struggle against Iran. While its legacy was complex, for many Iraqis, service in the Army (and in particular its performance against Iran) remained a source of personal and national pride. Eradicated was eighty years of institutional history.

It’s impossible to say how the reconstruction of the Iraqi Army might have played out differently, but then it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been worse. The Iraqi Army has consistently failed in the most elementary of military tasks when not directly supported by American forces. It remains unpopular in broad sectors of Iraqi society, and its performance against lightly armed ISIS fighters has made it the laughingstock of the region.

Conclusion

American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests. Nevertheless, each of these avoidable defeats proved costly to the United States—in blood, treasure and time.

This article was first published in 2014.

Daniel Khalessi

U.S. Democracy, Americas

An old adage warns us that people who stand for nothing fall for anything. March 27, 2021, marked the passing of a great Cold War diplomat and professor who stood for something: Charles Hill.

An old adage warns us that people who stand for nothing fall for anything. March 27, 2021, marked the passing of a great Cold War diplomat and professor who stood for something: Charles Hill. From his time as a young China watcher during the Sino-Soviet split to his experiences as a career diplomat and trusted adviser to former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Hill committed his life and teaching to the cause of upholding world order.

As a Yale professor, he co-founded the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy and pushed his students to think critically about the competing forces of world history. In his book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, he argued that effective leaders made sound strategic decisions because they could “sense the course of history.” He called this a strategist’s “sixth sense”—the ability to “size up the situation at one glance and decide how to incorporate it, or not, into your grand strategy.” 

To this end, Hill pushed his students to study oratory, geography, literature, classics, and philosophy. He viewed these disciplines as integral to leadership, diplomacy, and strategy—despite the fact that the many universities and public policy schools had long abandoned them. To Hill, the idea that policy schools would purport to teach “diplomacy” but fail to introduce students to the time-honored arts of great diplomats was irrational. For Hill, strategy was not political science; it was more of a philosophy of history.  

The central theme in Hill’s philosophy of history was that the international state system is under siege by modern-day empires and revisionist powers. A rising China, revanchist Russia, revolutionary Iran, and resurgent right-wing extremism in America threaten the international state system. In Hill’s view, America is the only nation with the creed, capacity, and coalitions congruent with establishing a balance of power that preserves world order.

To be sure, America cannot and should not extinguish any and every threat to the international state system. Prudent strategy requires an ecological view of tectonic shifts, prioritizing objectives, building coalitions, balancing opposing forces, and not losing sight of America’s highest national interest: preventing threats to order and liberty at home.

Hill would often point to Alexander Hamilton as an American strategist who understood well that the demands of statecraft must trump soulcraft. As the Jeffersonians pushed for America to support the French Revolution, Hamilton argued that American involvement would lead to a war “with greater dangers and disasters than that by which we established our existence as an independent nation.” The survival of the fledgling American republic was more important than the rigid pursuit of ideology through military adventurism.

At the same time, American leaders must not become paralyzed by the fear of war. The first rule of strategy, Hill noted, is to “never tell your opponent what you are not going to do.” Today, the word diplomacy has lost meaning. For too many, its practice has become synonymous with accommodation, concession, détente, or even appeasement. But historically, the purpose of diplomacy has been much more: to extract concessions, forge coalitions, and construct international rules and procedures. Accommodation was not its sole purpose. In the Cold War, Paul Nitze argued that American diplomacy was analogous to Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity. As Hill explained, America would need to be “adversarial and accommodating at the same time.”

Absent meaningful diplomacy and strategic foresight, world order can collapse in three different ways. First, America surrenders its leadership role out of a fear of war. Second, America sleepwalks into a nuclear war through miscalculation. This war, Reagan famously noted, that “cannot be won and must never be fought.” And third, despotism emerges in America.

The remedy to the first is American economic, diplomatic, scientific, and military strength. The remedy to the second is the marriage of prudence with deterrence. The third, however, will require nothing short of a societal renewal of America’s commitment to law, national service, and civic engagement.

If despotism were to “spring up amongst us,” as Lincoln argued in his Lyceum Address, then “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The collapse of American democracy would pose the greatest threat to world order in a trial of a thousand years, and thus America must stand for something, so it falls for nothing.

Daniel Khalessi is a J.D. Candidate at Stanford Law School and a former student of Professor Hill’s in the Yale Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.  

Image: Reuters

The Conversation

Culture, Britain

Easter Eggs are plentiful in Great Britain today, but that was not always the case. 

For weeks (and weeks) in the run up to Easter, brightly packaged chocolate eggs fill the shelves of British supermarkets. Piled high and sold cheap, they are easy to get hold of – even hard to avoid.

But this wasn’t always the case. For almost a century after the first ones were produced in the 1870s by Fry’s and Cadbury’s, chocolate eggs were a luxury product. They were expensive, and difficult to find, with specialist confectioners often requiring orders to be made several months in advance.

The ease of buying an Easter egg changed dramatically for British consumers in the middle of the 20th century, as they appeared in a wider range of retail outlets. Just a few years after the end of wartime rationing, Easter eggs were widely available in 246,400 outlets and thousands more co-operative shops.

But even then, matching supply and demand was a real headache for both manufacturers and retailers. After Easter Sunday, remaining stock was difficult to sell, potentially wiping out profits.

Shopkeepers did not want to over order because they had much less power over how much they could charge for sweet treats. Manufacturers were allowed to fix the prices of chocolate and confectionery until 1967 through Resale Price Maintenance legislation. If a shop wanted to discount Easter goods after the festival ended, they had to ask the permission of the manufacturer.

Although it sounds like manufacturers had it all their own way, confectionery producers made only slightly higher margins on Easter eggs compared to other chocolate goods – and eggs were much more difficult to make.

Meanwhile, self-service was becoming the major innovation in post-war British retailing. The number of supermarkets grew from approximately 50 in 1950 to 572 by 1961, and by 1969 there were as many as 3,400. Self-service operations (including smaller stores and supermarkets) accounted for around 15% of grocery turnover in 1959, rising to as much as 64% ten years later. Specialist confectionery shops were worried by the trend – and rightly so.

Then in 1967 the abolition of price fixing legislation led to Easter-themed goods becoming increasingly important in the supermarkets’ calendar. Ever since, they have offered cut-price chocolate eggs before Easter to attract shoppers into their stores.

Competing for for the deepest discounts and the largest sales, the pressure switched to manufacturers who had to meet demand, but risk over production.

How do you eat yours?

In the 1970s, supermarkets routinely cut the price of Easter eggs, meaning shoppers were shielded from some of the worst effects of inflation and soaring cocoa prices.

Yet despite the difficult economic environment, in 1974, Grocer magazine reported that Cadbury’s aimed to significantly boost its share of the annual Easter egg business, which was worth around £23m. The following year, Cadbury’s hoped to gain 45% of the market with 21 items in its Easter range.

Since the 1980s, manufacturers have invested heavily in technology and production abroad, in a bid to reduce their costs. And to meet supermarket demands for heavy discounts, they have reduced the variety of Easter eggs they produce.

Consequently, the consumer price of chocolate eggs has remained broadly similar for the last 40 years or so. Taking into account retail price inflation, an egg costing two shillings in 1962 should be around £2.20 today, which isn’t too far from what we would expect to pay in most supermarkets for a chocolate egg in 2018 (despite the rising costs of cocoa over the past ten years).

The Easter Bank Holiday is a time when shoppers spend money on groceries, which means that attracting people into stores is a particularly important objective for retail managers at this time of year. One way to do this is through big discounts on traditional chocolate treats.

Nobody remembers resale price maintenance now, but we are left with the effects of this change in supermarkets up and down the country. The cut price Easter egg is now a major feature of our supermarkets – and is likely to stay.

Changes in the law and the rise of self-service shopping have provided a huge boost to the total Easter chocolate trade. Worth an estimated £10m in 1960, it has jumped to around £364m today.

The real losers from this were smaller sweet shops, who lost out as sales migrated to supermarkets. And although Easter eggs are big business, it is likely that we don’t value them as much today. There is less variety, less novelty and our way of buying them has changed.

And this bountiful supply of cheap chocolate also means we are eating more of the stuff. By some measures Britons currently eat an average of 8.4kg of chocolate per year. That’s double the amount reported before 1967’s pricing rule change – and proves the confectionery industry is still on a roll.

Adrian Bailey is a Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

Image: Reuters 

Robert Farley

Russian Air Force, Europe

This excellent warplane was made to take on American jet fighters and is now used by countries such as China.

Key point: The Su-27 flexible, powerful, and affordable. Here is how it projected Soviet power and how the Chinese made their own copies.

To the West, most of the legendary Soviet aircraft of the Cold War came from the design bureau Mikoyan Gurevitch, which spawned such aircraft as the MiG-15, MiG-21 “Fishbed,” MiG-25 “Foxbat” and MiG-29 “Fulcrum.” The single best Soviet fighter of the Cold War, however, was Sukhoi’s Su-27 “Flanker.” Intended both to defeat U.S. fighters over central Europe in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict and to patrol the airspace of the Soviet Union against U.S. bomber incursions, the Su-27 survived the end of the Cold War to become one of the world’s premier export fighters.

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

Origins

The Flanker emerged as part of the high part of the high-low fighter mix that both the United States and the Soviet Union adopted in the 1970s and 1980s. In the U.S. Air Force this manifested in the F-15 and F-16; in the U.S. Navy, the F-14 and F/A-18. The MiG-29 “Fulcrum” played the light role in the Soviet partnership.

Sukhoi designed the Flanker with the capabilities of the F-15 Eagle firmly in mind, and the aircraft that emerged resembles the fast, heavily armed, long-ranged Eagle in many ways. Whereas the Eagle looks healthy and well-fed, the Flanker has a gaunt, hungry appearance. Although designed as an air superiority aircraft, the Su-27 (much like the Eagle) has proven flexible enough to adapt to interceptor and ground strike roles. Sukhoi has also developed a wide family of variants, specialized for particular missions but retaining overall multirole capabilities.

The Su-27 entered service more slowly than its fourth-generation counterparts in the United States (or the MiG-29, for that matter). A series of disastrous tests bedeviled the program’s early years, with several pilots dying in early versions of the Flanker. As it entered service in the mid-1980s, production problems slowed its transition to front-line status. And of course, the end of the Cold War curtailed the overall production run of the aircraft.

The Su-27’s capabilities are formidable. The Flanker can reach Mach 2.35 with a thrust-to-weight ratio above one (depending on fuel load). It can carry up to eight air-to-air missiles (generally of short to medium range; other variants specialize in Beyond Visual Range combat) or an array of bombs and missiles. In the hands of an experienced pilot, the Su-27 can carry out a bewildering array of maneuvers, many of which have delighted air show audiences across Russia and Europe.

The basic Su-27 frame has proven remarkably flexible. The Russian Air Force has modified most of its existing Flanker fleet with a variety of advanced avionics, improving its air-to-air capacity and also giving it an effective ground attack capability. Several Flanker variants have acquired their own designations, especially on the export side.

Export

The original version of the Flanker has enjoyed tremendous export success, and still flies in eleven air forces around the world. The bulk of aircraft fly in Russian (359) and Chinese (fifty-nine) service. In some smoldering conflicts (Russia-Ukraine, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Vietnam-China) both sides fly Su-27s. Overall, 809 Flankers have entered service, plus large production orders for several variants.

The transfer of Su-27s to China caused a surprising amount of friction between Moscow and Beijing. China purchased some Flankers off the shelf, agreed to coproduce another batch, and acquired a license for production of additional aircraft. However, Russia soon accused China of violating the terms of the agreement by installing its own avionics on the J-11 (as the Chinese designated their own Flankers), appropriating Russian intellectual property and developing a carrier variant (eventually the J-16). The dispute cooled Russian enthusiasm for arms exports to China, a situation that persists today.

Combat

For such a remarkable aircraft, the Su-27 has seen relatively little combat. It has flown combat missions in several theaters across the world, although it has yet to serve in a sustained air superiority campaign. Flankers flew in some of the wars that characterized the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and have constituted the core of Russian airpower in the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation. Indeed, Su-27s have flown on both sides of the spasmodic conflict in Ukraine. Su-27s in Russian service also currently fly in Syria. In foreign service, the Su-27 has flown in the Angolan Civil War and the Ethiopia-Eritrea War, scoring its only air-to-air victories (over Eritrean MiG-29s) in the latter.

The Su-27 was the last of the major fourth-generation fighters to enter service, and has proven an exceedingly successful design. Big enough and powerful enough to sustain a number of modifications and improvements, the Flanker should continue to see service (and even production) for quite some time. This is especially true given the uncertainty associated with the future of the PAK FA, the fifth-generation stealth fighter intended to replace both the MiG-29 and the Su-27.

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

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Israel Military, Middle East

These weapons are the foundation of why Israel is a military power no one wants to mess with.

Here's What You Need to Remember: When considering the effectiveness of Israeli weapons, and the expertise of the men and women who wield them, it’s worth noting that for all the tactical and operational success the IDF has enjoyed, Israel remains in a strategically perilous position.

Since 1948, the state of Israel has fielded a frighteningly effective military machine. Built on a foundation of pre-independence militias, supplied with cast-off World War II weapons, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have enjoyed remarkable success in the field. In the 1960s and 1970s, both because of its unique needs and because of international boycotts, Israel began developing its own military technologies, as well as augmenting the best foreign tech. Today, Israel boasts one of the most technologically advanced military stockpiles in the world, and one of the world’s most effective workforces.

Here are five of the most deadly systems that the Israeli Defense Forces currently employ--the foundation of why Israel is a military power no one wants to mess with.

Merkava: 

The Merkava tank joined the IDF in 1979, replacing the modified foreign tanks (most recently of British and American vintage) that the Israelis had used since 1948. Domestic design and construction avoided problems of unsteady foreign supply, while also allowing the Israelis to focus on designs optimized for their environment, rather than for Central Europe.  Around 1,600 Merkavas of various types have entered service, with several hundred more still on the way.

The Merkava entered service after the great tank battles of the Middle East had ended (at least for Israel). Consequently, the Merkavas have often seen combat in different contexts that their designers expected. The United States took major steps forward with the employment of armor in Iraq and Afghanistan (particularly in the former) in a counter-insurgency context, but the Israelis have gone even farther. After mixed results during the Hezbollah war, the IDF, using updated Merkava IVs, has worked hard to integrate the tanks into urban fighting. In both of the recent Gaza wars, the IDF has used Merkavas to penetrate Palestinian positions while active defense systems keep crews safe. Israel has also developed modifications that enhance the Merkavas’ capabilities in urban and low-intensity combat.

Indeed, the Merkavas have proved so useful in this regard that Israel has cancelled plans to stop line production, despite a lack of significant foreign orders.

F-15I Thunder: 

The Israeli Air Force has flown variants of the F-15 since the 1970s, and has become the world’s most versatile and effective user of the Eagle. As Tyler Rogoway’s recent story on the IAF fleet makes clear, the Israelis have perfected the F-15 both for air supremacy and for strike purposes. Flown by elite pilots, the F-15Is (nicknamed “thunder”) of the IAF remain the most lethal squadron of aircraft in the Middle East.

The F-15I provides Israel with several core capabilities. It remains an effective air-to-air combat platform, superior to the aircraft available to Israel’s most plausible foes (although the Eurofighter Typhoons and Dassault Rafales entering service in the Gulf, not to mention Saudi Arabia’s own force of F-15SAs, undoubtedly would provide some competition. But as Rogoway suggests, the Israelis have worked long and hard at turning the F-15 into an extraordinarily effective strike platform, one capable of hitting targets with precision at long range. Most analysts expect that the F-15I would play a key role in any Israeli strike against Iran, along with some of its older brethren.

Jericho III: 

The earliest Israeli nuclear deterrent came in the form of the F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers that the IAF used to such great effect in conventional missions in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. Soon, however, Israel determined that it required a more effective and secure deterrent, and began to invest heavily in ballistic missiles. The Jericho I ballistic missile entered service in the early 1970s, to eventually be replaced by the Jericho II and Jericho III.

The Jericho III is the most advanced ballistic missile in the region, presumably (Israel does not offer much data on its operation) capable of striking targets not only in the Middle East, but also across Europe, Asia, and potentially North America. The Jericho III ensures that any nuclear attack against Israel would be met with devastating retaliation, especially as it is unlikely that Israel could be disarmed by a first strike. Of course, given that no potential Israeli foe has nuclear weapons (or will have them in the next decade, at least), the missiles give Jerusalem presumptive nuclear superiority across the region.

Dolphin: 

Israel acquired its first submarine, a former British “S” class, in 1958. That submarine and others acquired in the 1960s played several important military roles, including defense of the Israeli coastline, offensive operations against Egyptian and Syrian shipping, and the delivery of commando teams in war and peace. These early boats were superseded by the Gal class, and finally by the German Dolphin class (really two separate classes related to the Type 212) boats, which are state-of-the-art diesel-electric subs.

The role of the Dolphin class in Israel’s nuclear deterrent has almost certainly been wildly overstated. The ability of a diesel electric submarine to carry out deterrent patrols is starkly limited, no matter what ordnance they carry. However, the Dolphin remains an effective platform for all sorts of other missions required by the IDF. Capable of maritime reconnaissance, of sinking or otherwise interdicting enemy ships, and also of delivering special forces to unfriendly coastlines, the Dolphins represent a major Israeli security investment, and one of the most potentially lethal undersea forces in the region.

The Israeli Soldier: 

The technology that binds all of these other systems together is the Israeli soldier. Since 1948 (and even before) Israel has committed the best of its human capital to the armed forces. The creation of fantastic soldiers, sailors, and airmen doesn’t happen by accident, and doesn’t result simply from the enthusiasm and competence of the recruits. The IDF has developed systems of recruitment, training, and retention that allow it to field some of the most competent, capable soldiers in the world. None of the technologies above work unless they have smart, dedicated, well-trained operators to make them function at their fullest potential.

Conclusion: 

When considering the effectiveness of Israeli weapons, and the expertise of the men and women who wield them, it’s worth noting that for all the tactical and operational success the IDF has enjoyed, Israel remains in a strategically perilous position. The inability of Israel to develop long-term, stable, positive relationships with its immediate neighbors, regional powers, and the subject populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip means that Jerusalem continues to feel insecure, its dominance on land, air, and sea notwithstanding. Tactics and technologies, however effective and impressive, cannot solve these problems; only politics can.

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

This first appeared in May 2015 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Superweapons,

The effect of the B-70 on the Air Force would have, on balance, been quite negative.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Technology undoubtedly matters, but only rarely in the sense that an isolated technological achievement lends decisive advantage in tactical engagements. Rather, technological innovations and choices shape the ways in which military organizations, and the broader defense-industrial complex, approach the prospect of war.

Weapons die for all kinds of different reasons. Sometimes they happen at the wrong time, either in the midst of defense austerity, or with the wrong constellation of personnel. Sometimes they fall victim to the byzantine bureaucracy of the Pentagon, or to turf fights between the services. And sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough.

This article concentrates on five systems that died, but that might have had transformative effects if they had survived. These transformations would only rarely have changed the course of wars (countries win and lose wars for many reasons besides technology), but rather would have had ripple effects across the entire defense industrial base, altering how our military organizations approached warfighting and procurement. Not all the changes would have been for the best; sometimes programs are canceled for sound reasons.

AH-56 Cheyenne

In the early 1960s, the Army was just beginning to appreciate the value of helicopter aviation. The Army had used helicopters at the end of World War II, and used them extensively in Korea for reconnaissance and evacuation purposes. As the sophistication of the machines grew, however, the Army began to see the prospect for much more advanced helicopters that could conduct a wide variety of missions.

The star of the show was supposed to be the AH-56 Cheyenne, a radical design that combined high speed with punching power. The Cheyenne could escort other helicopters in transport mission, or conduct ground support and attack ops independently. In particular, it contained a magnificent propulsion system that could offer speeds of up to 275 miles per hour.

But the Cheyenne fell victim to its own promise. The technologies that made the Cheyenne possible weren’t yet mature, and the early prototypes suffered from teething problems, leading to a fatal crash. The Air Force hated the whole idea of the Cheyenne, believing that the Army was trying to steal close air support and interdiction missions for itself. The Air Force went so far as to propose a fixed-wing attack aircraft (which would eventually become the A-10) in its effort to kill the program. Finally, the Vietnam War put enormous pressure on the defense budget, both in terms of making it harder to sell particular programs, and in diverting funds to directly support the war effort.

And so the Cheyenne never happened. Although, a few years later, the Army would push forward with the AH-64 Apache. In this sense, the cancelation of the Cheyenne merely delayed an advanced attack helicopter capability. But the Apache was also a much safer machine than the Cheyenne, and going with the more conventional system has undoubtedly limited the horizons of Army aviation.

B-70 Valkyrie

The B-70 Valkyrie deserves its own operatic cycle. Envisioned as the replacement for the B-52 Stratofortress and the B-58 Hustler, the B-70 was designed to penetrate Soviet airspace at high altitude, and upwards of Mach 3. Beloved of the “Bomber Mafia,” a generation of senior officers who had cut their teeth in World War II’s Combined Bomber Offensive, the B-70 represented, to many, the future of the Air Force.

And just to show I’m not a hard-hearted guy, and it’s not all dollars and cents, the B-70 was a beautiful aircraft. Long and sleek, the Valkyrie resembles a space ship more than an aircraft. The surviving prototype remains on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

But the Valkyrie was enormously expensive, and this expense made it vulnerable. First President Eisenhower, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were less than enchanted with the idea of spending enormous sums on another heavy bomber when ICBMs showed great promise in delivering nuclear weapons to the Soviet homeland. Advances in Soviet interceptor and surface-to-air missile technology were also making the B-70’s mission considerably more dangerous than first anticipated.

After constructing only two prototypes (one of which was lost during a PR stunt), the Air Force shut production down. Fifteen years later, the B-1B, with some superficially similar characteristics, would enter service.

The effect of the B-70 on the Air Force would have, on balance, been quite negative. Devoting tremendous resources to the procurement of another strategic bomber would have drawn attention away from both the tactical air force and the missile force. B-70s might (in desperation) have been committed to the bombing of Vietnam during Operations Linebacker I and II, but they would likely have performed no more effectively than the B-52s they were replacing. And both the B-52 and the B-1B have proven remarkably flexible in terms of missions and update technologies, in part because they have space for a larger crew (4 and 5, respectively) than the Valkyrie (2). McNamara saved the Air Force from itself by preventing a long, deep procurement chasm that would have lasted thirty years.

A-12 Avenger

What if we had a stealthy strike bomber that could take off from aircraft carriers? In the mid-1980s, the Navy needed a replacement for the beloved-but-venerable A-6 Intruder. Building on expectations about the progress of stealth technology, McDonnell Douglas developed the A-12 Avenger, a subsonic “flying wing” bomber that visually resembled a miniature B-2 Spirit. Combining stealth with the flexibility of carrier ops, the A-12 promised an unparalleled deep strike capability. Even the Air Force expressed interest in the A-12 as a replacement for the F-111 Aardvark.

But there were problems. Early expectations about the stealth coating proved optimistic, and the fixes substantially increased the Avenger’s weight. Expenses soared, but the aircraft did not. The biggest problem, however, was that the Avenger entered the design and production cycle just as the Cold War came to a close. Facing a tight defense budget, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney decided to kill the A-12 in favor of less risky programs.

The effects of the cancelation remain with us today. Instead of acquiring an advanced stealth bomber, the Navy settled on the Super Hornet, a significant, but conventional, upgrade on the F-18s it already possessed. Eventually, the continuing need for a stealthy, carrier-borne strike aircraft would manifest in the F-35C, a program that continues to teeter between “disaster” and “epic disaster.” Even if the F-35C somehow works out, the Navy gave up the deep strike mission when it settled on the Super Hornet. The Air Force is now concentrating on the Next Generation Bomber, a project that closely resembles the A-12 in many ways. The death of the A-12, in effect, transformed the nature of the USN carrier wing for a generation or more.

Future Combat Systems

In the early 21st century, the body of theory known as the Revolution in Military Affairs resulted in a major Army procurement plan known as “Future Combat Systems.” In brief, the application of RMA theory to modern operations suggested that the combination of precision-guided munitions, high processing speeds, real time communications, and all-encompassing sensor capabilities would transform the way in which armies fought. Future Combat Systems envisioned an integrated system of weapons, vehicles, and sensors that could prove lethal and decisive across the combat spectrum. The Army expected every element of the system to support the goal of linking sensors to shooters, enhancing killing power while reducing footprint. Army planners also intended FCS to result lighter, more deployable brigades.

But then the Bush administration dropped the Iraq War on the US Army. Iraq created major problems for the development of the FCS program. Intellectual energy and material devoted to developing the FCS concept to its fullest went, instead, to fighting the war. The conflict demanded systems (such as the MRAP) that did not fit into the FCS concept. Perhaps most important, the course of the war threw RMA theory into question, with guerrilla fighters consistently bloodying the nose of their technologically sophisticated American foes.

And so FCS died a slow death. The vision of a coherent system-of-systems surrendered to the need to get particular capabilities into the field in piecemeal fashion, regardless of their role in the larger puzzle. The Army fought the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars with a mix of new and legacy systems, combined with weapons that had no place in its future expectations. While individual parts of the FCS vision survive, the ideal has yielded to budgetary and military reality.

Sea Control Ship

What if, instead of a few very large carriers, the United States Navy had undertaken to build a large number of small carriers? In World War II, the Royal Navy and the US Navy (USN) employed large numbers of escort carriers, small flattops that could support anti-submarine and amphibious operations.

In the early 1970s, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt pushed the idea of the Sea Control Ship (SCS), a small carrier that would defend sea-lanes against long-range Soviet strike aircraft and Soviet submarines. Faced with the growing expense of modern supercarriers (the first Nimitz class carrier would enter service in just a few years) and the impending retirement of the venerable Essex class carriers, Zumwalt sought a low cost option for air operations that did not demand the full capabilities of a major carrier group. Escort carriers had helped win the Battle of the Atlantic, and Sea Control Ships might make a similar contribution in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict.

The USN tried the concept with the helicopter carrier USS Guam for a couple of years, adding Harrier fighters to its complement of choppers. Eventually, however, the Navy decided that the expense of the new ships, and the risk that they might cut into resources dedicated to supercarriers, were too great, and nixed the idea.

Eventually, the big amphibious ships of the Tarawa and Wasp classes would take over the sea control role. In effect, the USN acquired Sea Control Ships, although we call them amphibious assault ships and delegate to them a broader array of tasks. We also rely on other countries to build small carriers to fulfill the missions envisioned by the SCS; many of the flattops operated by the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and Japan essentially fulfill an SCS role.

Pursuit of the Sea Control Ship would obviously have led to a different naval force structure, as well as changes in the composition of naval aviation. The biggest difference, however, might have been conceptual; the Sea Control Ship might have changed the way we think about how naval aviation contributes to international security. The ability of small carriers to contribute to a variety of different missions and needs might draw us away from the (if incorrectly applied) Mahanian conception of naval power to a more Corbettian “dispersal” concept. And at a time when even strong advocates of the modern CVN have begun to buckle under the enormous cost of the great ships, the SCS might have offered a different way of approaching the projection of naval power.

Conclusion

Technology undoubtedly matters, but only rarely in the sense that an isolated technological achievement lends decisive advantage in tactical engagements. Rather, technological innovations and choices shape the ways in which military organizations, and the broader defense-industrial complex, approach the prospect of war. Each of these systems involved a radical rethink of organizational roles and priorities, and the cancelation of each left huge holes in capabilities, holes that continue to be filled in novel ways.

Honorable Mentions

USS United States class aircraft carrier, USS Montana class battleship, USS Lexington class battlecruiser, B-49, F-23 “Black Widow” and the F-20 Tigershark.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Pedro Gonzalez

HR 1, Americas

To start, HR 1 would grant federal voting rights to convicted felons, enabling people who have been sentenced for cruel crimes to cast ballots so long as they aren't serving a sentence in a correctional facility at the time of the election.

The concept of a Trojan Horse may be something of a political cliché but it is hard to think of a better analogy for HR 1, also known as the For the People Act. It sits at the legislature’s gates now as an election reform bill formally designed to redress racial grievances. The reality, however, is very different.

To start, HR 1 would grant federal voting rights to convicted felons, enabling people who have been sentenced for cruel crimes to cast ballots so long as they aren't serving a sentence in a correctional facility at the time of the election. What about felons out of confinement? In 2017, Brian Golsby abducted, raped, murdered a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State named Reagan Delaney Tokes. Golsby had just gotten out of prison after serving a six-year sentence for abducting a pregnant woman and her child and raping the woman. He was staying in state-contracted housing at the time of the crime.

Golsby raped Tokes, then marched her into a field and shot her in the head. He didn’t even bother removing the GPS monitor issued to him by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Would HR 1 have allowed him to vote? The answer appears to be yes.

“Under the Democrats’ radical plan to give the vote to everyone, even violent felons including rapists and murderers who were just released can cast a ballot,” said Sean Kennedy in an interview for this story. Kennedy is a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute who has written extensively on felon voting rights and COVID releases. “The bill specifies that the individual only need be currently incarcerated so all probationers and parolees including those under home confinement or GPS monitoring could legally vote including dangerous predators like Golsby.”

He warns that many of the worst types could benefit from HR 1. “Thirty states currently restrict the ballot to only those who have completed their sentence or had their rights restored by a court, so over two-thirds of released felons would be instantly eligible to choose their Congressman, school board president, and local water board officials with a vote equal to their victims and their families.”

“So far,” he adds, “over 100,000 prisoners have been released due to ‘COVID concerns,’ many of which have gone on to commit heinous acts including murders, rapes, and hate crimes.”

Indeed, HR 1 would effectively codify as federal law the massive, emergency expansion of mail-in voting implemented in response to the pandemic while eliminating basic election integrity measures. HR 1 would dramatically expand ballot harvesting and remove limits on how many ballots a single person could return on behalf of others. It would compel states to accept mail-in ballots postmarked before or on election day—without requiring any standard of proof—if received within ten days after the election. The bill prohibits states from requiring a voter to provide an ID to vote by mail or require notarization or witnesses of voters’ signatures to cast an absentee ballot. It consequently paves over federal election laws that received bipartisan support, like the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

HR 1 registers to vote virtually anyone who interacts with the federal government for a variety of reasons. As a result, the bill’s authors anticipate noncitizens to be registered, so they include a provision to protect them from prosecution if and when they are automatically registered in error. Further, it would impose, as the MinnPost put it, “new safeguards against improper purges of voting rolls to prevent voters being incorrectly removed from their voter registration.” That is another way of saying it would make it more difficult to clean up and upgrade states’ voter databases.

In 2012, on top of millions of invalid voter registrations, the Pew Center on the States found more than 1.8 million dead people registered to vote across the United States, and approximately 2.75 million people with registrations in more than one state. Our voting systems, the authors warned, “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence, and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.” As a result, elections can suffer from “the perception that they lack integrity or could be susceptible to fraud”—and that would only worsen under HR 1.

The bill would also eliminate all voter ID laws. “If ‘John Jones’ says he wants to vote, there's no way to prove that ‘John Jones’ is ‘John Jones,’” worries Raynard Jackson, CEO of the political consulting firm Raynard Jackson and Associates. He told The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat that there would be “no way to prove that ‘John Jones’ hadn't voted at five other locations, he just kept driving around town, voting multiple times.” That may or may not be an exaggeration, but all that would take the place of voter ID is a sworn statement. At a time when “interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline,” HR 1 attempts to institute voting by the honor system.

The rebuttal goes that voter ID is intimately connected to the specter of Jim Crow. However, that is complicated by the fact that recent polling shows 69 percent of Black people and 82 percent of other minorities say voters should be required to present photo identification before being allowed to vote. Support for voter ID laws has actually increased from 67 percent to 75 percent since 2018 among likely voters.

But the worst, most significant aspect—and the real purpose—of HR 1 is hidden in plain sight. “It would abrogate the authority of state legislators to draw the boundary lines of congressional districts and transfer it to so-called independent redistricting commissions,” explains Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. As with all the other provisions, the justification for these commissions is anti-racism.

He notes that to be in the “selection pool” for one of these commissions, an applicant would, among other things, have to disclose their “race, ethnicity, [and] gender.” HR 1 requires that membership on the redistricting commission be “representative of the demographic groups [including racial, ethnic, economic, and gender] . . . of the State.” This is a racial- and gender-quota system that appears conspicuously at odds with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Like most affirmative action-type policies, these requirements would likely result in discrimination against white Americans.

Put simply, HR 1 would not make elections fairer, securer, or safer. There is certainly room and a need for reform, but HR 1 would be iatrogenic in its effects: its prescriptions would cause more harm. However, that’s beside the point.

Independent of its formal aims, the effective truth of HR 1 is the usurpation and centralization of individual states’ constitutionally assigned functions into bureaucracies that would serve above all the political party that created them—there is no such thing as an “apolitical” institution or commission. And Democrats, who control or benefit from much of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the managerial regime, know this.

Some of HR 1’s opponents have struggled to formulate a response to the anti-racism narrative behind the bill beyond merely yelping about double standards. Thus, it may be worth reflecting on the concept that Pierre-André Taguieff, a French philosopher who has specialized in the study of racism, likens to totalitarianism. President Emmanuel Macron himself reportedly uses Taguieff's work to better understand the dangers facing France from the social theories on race imported from American universities. Politicians and prominent intellectuals alike view them as an existential threat to the French Republic and French identity.

According to Taguieff, society is currently in the presence of “antiwhite anti-racism,” or what is a new, disturbing form of “politically and culturally acceptable political and cultural racism.” Some people believe that white people are “systemically” guilty of racism because they are white and Black people are “systemically” victims of racism—which is “white” by definition—because they are Black. “This militant definition of racism, known as 'structural' or ‘systemic,’ further implies a dogmatic definition of anti-racism as the fight against white racism, and nothing else,” Taguieff explains. “And if said racism is ‘systemic,’ then anti-racist action must aim at destroying the ‘system’ that produces racism by its very functioning.”

Taguieff adds that this definitional “sleight of hand” precludes “the very possibility of anti-white racism and conferred a revolutionary final telos on the anti-racist struggle.” Therefore, he concludes, “Marxists of all persuasions welcome these anti-racist anti-white mobilizations, in which they see the Revolution on the march.”

Though the ends of HR 1’s promoters may or may not be as lofty as Lenin’s, the means are more or less the same: by portraying the “system” as racist, its deconstruction is justified and opposition to HR 1, by definition, is racist in the Taguieffian sense. It is therefore irrelevant that some of HR 1’s provisions are, in fact, discriminatory, because this view renders “the existence of anti-white racism theoretically impossible.”

Taguieff’s advice is to explicitly reject intimidation from the hucksters of professionalized anti-racism and all the schemes they attempt to justify by those means. Americans should take a page out of his book before it’s too late.

Pedro L. Gonzalez is a Senior Writer for American Greatness.

Image: Reuters

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