Diplomacy & Crisis News

Denis Corboy, William Courtney, Kenneth Yalowitz

Security, Eurasia

A flawed presidential election, use of force against protesters, and political manipulations by the secretive billionaire who heads the ruling Georgian Dream Party have strained public confidence and brought mounting public protests.

Georgia’s status as a post-Soviet democratic leader is under challenge. A flawed presidential election, use of force against protesters, and political manipulations by the secretive billionaire who heads the ruling Georgian Dream Party have strained public confidence and brought mounting public protests. Domestic calm may hinge on improving political dialogue and conducting free and fair parliamentary elections in fall, 2020.

Independent Georgia has made substantial democratic progress, aided by multiparty elections, robust civil society organizations, and media freedoms. In 2003 the Rose Revolution—a peaceful uprising against political stagnation—accelerated democratic momentum.  Now Georgians may again be tiring of poor governance and lack of transparency. A National Democratic Institute poll last July found that 60 percent of respondents evaluate the performance of the current government as “bad.” 

Democratic momentum persisted until last year’s presidential election. National Democratic Institute observers cited aggressive, personalized, and unprecedented attacks by senior state officials against the country’s most respected civil society organizations, “abuse of administrative resources,” and the lack of a level playing field, even though “fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly, and association” were largely respected.

Some hoped the flawed election was an aberrant democratic setback, but perhaps not.

Last June, Interior Ministry forces used disproportionate force, including rubber bullets, against anti-government protesters, partially blinding two. More than one hundred participants were hospitalized. In an insensitive step last September, the ruling Georgian Dream party promoted the interior minister to prime minister rather than hold him accountable for the June excesses. 

Beyond these measures what has caused unrest and democratic backsliding?

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Farok J. Contractor

economy, Americas

Is Argentina intentionally weakening the peso?

President Donald Trump slapped new tariffs on Brazil and Argentina after accusing them of manipulating their currencies to boost exports.

It wasn’t the first time Trump has labeled another country a “currency manipulator” for supposedly meddling to keep its own currency weak or undervalued. China received that epithet from the president long before it felt the pain of his trade war.

But the truth is more complicated than Trump makes it out to be.

Everyone does it

The first thing to understand is that government efforts to influence their exchange rates – which is often dubbed currency manipulation – is extremely common, as I’ve seen firsthand in my work as an international business professor.

All but 31 of the International Monetary Fund’s 189 members meddle, in a mild or total fashion, to influence or fix their exchange rates. Only a few major currencies, such as the dollar or euro, are allowed a “free float” based on market forces of supply and demand with minimal or no government intervention.

Other governments have a variety of ways to manage their currencies. Some peg their currencies to a fixed rate, as long as they can afford to keep it there. Others tie their currencies to a major but stable currency like the euro or a basket of different ones. For example, the Lebanese pound is tied to the dollar at a fixed rate of 1,507.5 to 1.

About 16% of IMF members use a “managed float,” in which they allow market forces to play a role but with the government buying or selling their own currency as needed to bias the exchange rate upward or downward. Argentina and Brazil both adhere to a managed float system.

Why weaken a currency

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Lyle J. Goldstein

Security, Asia

A new trilateral exercise with South Africa may be a sign of coming attractions, but the United States should not overreact.

These are heady days for strategists tracking the development of Russia-China relations. Nearly every day brings a new surprise. Some are inclined to see the relationship as a mere “marriage of convenience”—fleeting in time and lacking in substance. More and more, however, this “quasi-alliance” seems quite durable and also to have legs. 

Rather concrete developments in the relationship may range from the seemingly mundane, but actually ultra-critical completion of the first-ever bridge across the Amur, finally connecting the twin cities of Blagoveshensk and Heihe in the interior of Northeast Asia. But almost a thousand kilometers to the north, a Chinese-made super ice-hardened LNG tanker plies Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR), even in the wintertime—an unprecedented feat of engineering and navigation.

Strategists focusing on the military domain also find a rather full plate. Back in the fall, the South Korean Air Force sortied en masse and warning shots were even fired to indicate displeasure with the first-ever joint aerial patrol by Russian and Chinese strategic aviation. Tokyo was also not amused by this stunt, of course. Then, at Valdai, Russian president Vladimir Putin made the interesting announcement that Beijing and Moscow would cooperate in the critical sphere of early warning systems—a rather important tool for advanced military establishments. Now, the Russian and Chinese navies are carrying out the first-ever naval exercise with a third country: South Africa. One could dismiss the exercise as another ploy to gain attention without significant strategic meaning, but that might also be a mistake when viewed in a larger context.

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Dalibor Rohac

Security, Europe

Low expectations have led to poor outcomes.

Make no mistake, the half-day meeting of NATO leaders in London is a minefield. Most observers will be relieved if the alliance can get it over with without explosive rhetorical exchanges, tweetstorms, or other mishaps. President Trump, in particular, has been long distrustful of the usefulness of the alliance for the United States — though today he said (correctly!) that NATO “served a great purpose.”

Yet, it is troubling that for a NATO summit to qualify as a success these days, it is simply necessary to avoid larger fallouts and to preserve the status quo, or at least its appearances. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” means that long-standing problems continue to fester, making transatlantic security architecture more fragile than it may seem from the rising levels of defense spending in Europe and the military build-up on NATO’s eastern flank.

One of such long-standing issues is the continuing failure of the alliance to confront authoritarians in its midst. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the alliance has been defined not so much by its enemies as by its values. Yet, countries such as Erdogan’s Turkey continue to violate those values — and act against the US and Europe’s interests in practical ways, including through its behavior in Northern Syria and through its purchases of Russian military equipment.

Likewise, Orban’s Hungary has moved markedly in the authoritarian direction during recent years, while simultaneously seeking to undermine the alliance’s efforts to help Ukraine, inviting the Cold War-era, Russian-led International Investment Bank to move its headquarters to Budapest, and normalizing relations with Assad’s Syria.

To tolerate such excesses is to encourage them further. And insofar as authoritarian regimes do indeed behave differently and less predictably in the international arena than democracies, keeping Turkey and Hungary unchallenged, under the alliance’s fold, represents a ticking time bomb.

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Henry F. Fradella

Security, Americas

‘Stop-and-frisk’ can work, under careful supervision. In mid-November, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized publicly for his backing of a practice intended to reduce violent crime that had for years been criticized as racially biased. “I realize back then I was wrong, and I’m sorry,” he said.

But his apology, made at a predominantly black church in Brooklyn, puzzled many observers. That included scholars of criminal justice like ourselves.

Bloomberg has long been a vocal supporter of a policy the city police department officially called “Stop, Question, and Frisk,” including during his time as New York’s mayor. In an effort to control crime, police aggressively and indiscriminately stopped and questioned people on the streets or in public housing projects. Police also often patted down suspects to check for weapons.

His apology was confusing because that phrase, often shortened to “stop and frisk,” is used to describe two different things.

As we wrote in our book, “Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic,” one is a legitimate, constitutionally sanctioned tactic, grounded in a police officer’s reasonable suspicion that a particular person is engaged in criminal activity.

The other is an illegitimate, broad crime-control strategy that, more often than not, ignores the law’s requirement that a particular person be reasonably suspected of breaking the law.

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Michaela Dodge

Security, Americas

A movie tells us what we can do about it.

Key point: The threat of nuclear annihilation is ever-present.

The Heritage Foundation’s documentary “33 Minutes” may not be the most cheerful holiday season film, but its warning to the American public about the risk of nuclear attack could not be more timely.

In recent years, North Korea’s missiles have grown in range and capability. The most recent missile it tested, the Hwasong-15, can reach anywhere in the continental United States. This is a deeply alarming development.

When the documentary was first released in 2007, and then updated in 2016, the idea of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile being able to reach the entire United States remained a fearful yet still unrealized possibility.

Now that North Korea has signaled its intention to continue developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of threatening the U.S. with nuclear warheads, it is all the more important for the Trump administration’s Ballistic Missile Defense Review to fund comprehensive missile defense.

The documentary’s title, “33 Minutes,” refers to the maximum amount of time the U.S. government would have to respond to an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile from anywhere in the world. Beyond showing this short response time, the film vividly depicts the threat of a nuclear attack and its destructive consequences.

The first and most well-known form of attack is the use of a nuclear weapon to physically destroy a major city like New York. The second is the use of such a weapon to generate an electromagnetic pulse.

The bomb that leveled much of central Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 had an explosive yield of 15 kilotons. North Korea’s nuclear test in October was the equivalent of 250 kilotons of TNT.

As the film’s narration observes, the 9/11 terror attacks, which used commercial airliners as weapons, resulted in 3,000 deaths and $80 billion in damage. A nuclear bomb dropped on Manhattan would cause hundreds of thousands of casualties and trillions in damage.

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Military and Aerospace Electronics

Technology, Americas

The race is on.

WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) scrambles to keep ahead of China, it’s relying more and more on public-private partnerships called consortia to connect it to innovative high-tech firms. Breaking Defense reports. Continue reading original article

The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:

5 Dec. 2019 -- The latest example comes in an announcement Monday that only members of the National Spectrum Consortium can bid on pilot projects to install prototype 5G networks to manage radar and radio spectrum, “smart warehouse” logistics, and other functions on four military bases.

Writ large, over the last three years, as the Pentagon has nearly tripled spending on streamlined Other Transaction Authority (OTA) prototyping contracts, more than half that money has gone to consortium members.

Some 49 percent went to consortia administered by a single management contractor, South Carolina-based Advanced Technology International (ATI). And future prospects look good. One group, the Space Enterprise Consortium – run by ATI – may even see its Air Force funding increase 24-fold.

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Matt Weidinger, Angela Rachidi

Society,

These rules are consistent with longstanding federal policy of expecting work-capable adults to work instead of depending solely on government assistance.

Recently the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released final rules that strengthen work requirements for non-disabled people without dependents who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps.  These rules are consistent with longstanding federal policy — in both SNAP and the cash welfare Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program — of expecting work-capable adults to work instead of depending solely on government assistance. Currently, unemployment is low and wages are rising fastest for people in entry-level jobs, providing an opportune time to help more adults in low-income households improve their financial well-being by strengthening work requirements in SNAP.  

The new rules center on who can be exempt from an existing SNAP requirement that certain recipients work in order to receive benefits for an extended period of time. The rule applies to a group called “able-bodied adults without dependents” or ABAWDs. As that title suggests, people in this group are able to work, are working age (18-50), don’t have disabilities, and don’t have dependents — people who are considered to be the most work-ready. Overall, only 3 million of the 18 million households that currently collect SNAP benefits include one or more ABAWDs.  The remaining households, including children, seniors (in fact, anyone over age 50), people with disabilities, or people caring for dependents are unaffected by the ABAWD work requirement and the new rules.

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Charlie Gao

Technology, Americas

Cheap and effective.

Key point: It is one of Boeing's most successful exports.

The F-5E “Tiger” is one of U.S. aerospace industry’s largest export successes. Designed as a budget lightweight fighter, the F-5E is still operated by many nations around the world despite the availability of more modern fighters.

Its continued service is enabled by miniaturization of electronics, which allows for more powerful radars and more systems to be integrated into the same spaces as the original system. This approach is exemplified by the F-5EM operated by Brazil, one of the most advanced variants of the F-5E flying today.

Brazil first acquired F-5Es in 1974 after comparing it to rival NATO light fighters like the Harrier, Jaguar, Fiat G.91 and A-4 Skyhawk. Forty-two units were purchased originally, followed by twenty-six more in the 1980s.

These aircraft served in without much modification until CRUZEX I aerial exercise in 2002. The exercise simulated conflict between the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) and a French Armee de l’Air force equipped with Mirage 2000s with E-3 Sentry AWACS support. The results were abysmal, with France expected to take air superiority in a real conflict despite some good simulated kills by FAB Mirage IIIs.

This sparked a significant push to modernize the FAB’s capability to defend Brazil’s airspace. Modernization of the Mirage III was explored but deemed to be cost ineffective. The F-5E showed much more promise.

In the 1990s, Chile, facing a similar need to modernize, created their own variant, the Tiger III Plus with assistance from Israel Aircraft Industries. A similar program with newer technology could be done with the FAB’s F-5Es.

The program began in the 2000s when a contract was awarded to the Brazilian firm Embraer to modernize forty-six F-5Es with European and Israeli technology. The key aspect of the modernization was to “extend” the legs of the F-5E from being a short-range “point defense” fighter to something that could cover more ground over Brazil’s rather large borders.

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Robert Farley

Security, Asia

But it didn't happen. Why?

Key point: For Imperial Japan, size mattered.

In January 1936 Japan announced its intention to withdraw from the London Naval Treaty, accusing both the United States and the United Kingdom of negotiating in bad faith. The Japanese sought formal equality in naval construction limits, something that the Western powers would not give. In the wake of this withdrawal, Japanese battleship architects threw themselves into the design of new vessels. The first class to emerge were the 18.1-inch-gun-carrying Yamatos, the largest battleships ever constructed. However, the Yamatos were by no means the end of Japanese ambitions. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) planned to build another, larger class of super battleships, and had vague plans for even larger ships to succeed that class. War interceded, but had Japan carried out its plans it might have deployed monster battleships nearly as large as supercarriers into the Pacific.

“Super” Yamatos

The A-150 class would have superseded the Yamatos, building on experience with that class to produce a more formidable, flexible fighting unit. Along with the Yamatos, these ships were expected to provide the IJN with an unbeatable battle line to protect its Pacific possessions, along with newly acquired territories in Southeast Asia and China.

The A-150s would theoretically have carried six 510-millimeter (twenty-inch) guns in three twin turrets, although if problems had developed in the construction of that gun they could have carried the same main armament as the Yamatos. The 510-millimeter guns would have wreaked havoc on any existing (or planned) American or British battleships, but would also have caused substantial blast issues for the more delicate parts of the ship. The A-150s would have carried heavier armor than their smaller cousins, more than sufficient to protect from the heaviest weapons in the American or British arsenals. The secondary armament would have included a substantial number of 3.9-inch dual-purpose guns, a relatively small caliber suggesting that the A-150s may have relied on support vessels to protect them from enemy cruisers and destroyers.

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Dan Goure

Security, Eurasia

Put will Putin pull the trigger?

For almost two decades, Russia has been interfering in the domestic politics of other nations. According to one report, Russia has interfered in the political processes of at least 27 North American and European countries since 2004.  The Kremlin has several goals for this assault:  first, to undermine the legitimacy of Western governments and principles such as the rule of law and human rights; second, to weaken major institutions such as the European Union and NATO; and third, encourage the formation of pro-Russian governments.

A wide variety of techniques and tactics are being employed, including generating false news stories about pro-democracy movements, hacking the communications of government institutions and political parties, funding pro-Moscow political movements, and using international organizations such Interpol to harass political opponents. The effects of this undeclared war are particularly pernicious in so-called semi-consolidated democracies, such as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Moldova.

One of the Putin regime’s favorite tricks is to support pro-Russian political parties while simultaneously doing everything possible to undermine the credibility of pro-Western parties and politicians. In some instances, Russian money has gone simultaneously to both pro-Russian and extreme nationalist parties. This would seem to be a self-contradicting strategy. However, the Kremlin’s primary objective is to undermine the power of centrist parties that have dominated European politics for decades and to encourage those countries to pursue anti-Western and anti-EU policies.

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Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

And it nearly happened. 

Key point: A Taiwanese-Chinese nuclear standoff would have destabilized the entire region.

It would have been one of the greatest crises of postwar Asia: the revelation of a Taiwanese atomic bomb. For Taiwan, the bomb would have evened the odds against a numerically superior foe. For China, a bomb would have been casus belli, justification for an attack on the island country it considered a rogue province. Active from the 1960s to the 1980s, Taipei’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons were finally abandoned due to diplomatic pressure by its most important ally, the United States.

Taiwan’s nuclear program goes back to 1964, when the People’s Republic of China tested its first nuclear device. The test was not exactly a surprise to outside observers, but it was still Taiwan’s nightmare come true. Chinese and Taiwanese air and naval forces occasionally skirmished, and it threatened to turn into all-out war. Suddenly Taipei was confronted with the possibility that such a war could turn nuclear. Even just one nuclear device detonated on an island the size of Maryland would have devastating consequences for the civilian population.

From Taiwan’s perspective, a nuclear arsenal would be the ultimate guarantor of national sovereignty. Even if the United States split with the country, as it eventually did, Taiwanese nukes would keep the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at bay, a deterrent not only against Chinese nuclear power, but against conventional forces as well. In hindsight, this would have had a good chance of success, as North Korea’s own procurement of nuclear weapons has made the United States and South Korea reluctant to retaliate over the country’s various military provocations.

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Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

It could happen.

Key Point: China only has so much patience, and won't let the entire peninsula fall into American hands.

North Korea is both a blessing and a curse for China. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an independent state that is openly hostile to the United States and other regional powers. Pyongyang’s military is a deterrent to attack without posing a direct threat to China. As a result, nearly a thousand miles of China’s borders are occupied by a regime that finances its own defense and will never fall willingly within the U.S. sphere of influence.

The situation is far from perfect. While North Korea has traditionally been a Chinese client state, ties between the two countries have deteriorated in recent years. Pyongyang’s fiery anti-American rhetoric and nuclear weapons program have provoked the United States, making North Korea a major point of contention between Washington and Beijing. The country’s flagrant violation of international norms have tested Beijing’s patience.

There are persistent rumors that Beijing has long prepared to intervene in North Korea, whether in the aftermath of a government collapse or should the country’s leadership make credible threats against China. No one outside of Beijing knows what those preparations might be, but we can outline some scenarios. One thing seems reasonably certain, however: if China goes into North Korea, the presiding regime, whether of Kim Jong-un or someone else, will not survive.

One possible scenario is a military incursion into North Korea in response to regime collapse. An imploding economy, military coup, or Syria-like rebellion could all cause the regime to fold, and it will likely fold quickly. When it does, the national food distribution system will likely fail, causing refugees to flee the country. Given that the border with South Korea is notoriously fortified and the Russian border is relatively far and remote, the least difficult border to cross is into China.

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Subhash Kak

Security, Americas

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors.

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity and, therefore, the Google announcement should be taken “with a large dose of skepticism.”

This wasn’t the first time someone cast doubt on quantum computing. Last year, Michel Dyakonov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Montpellier in France, offered a slew of technical reasons why practical quantum supercomputers will never be built in an article in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship journal of electrical and computer engineering.

So how can you make sense of what is going on?

As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.

What’s a quantum computer?

To understand why, you need to understand how quantum computers work since they’re fundamentally different from classical computers.

A classical computer uses 0s and 1s to store data. These numbers could be voltages on different points in a circuit. But a quantum computer works on quantum bits, also known as qubits. You can picture them as waves that are associated with amplitude and phase.

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Patricia Illingworth

History, Americas

Jeffrey Epstein faced sex trafficking and conspiracy charges when he died in July 2019. 

I teach a course on ethics and philanthropy and have written about how to donate to charities ethically.

Recent news about people who make big charitable gifts acting badly is making me wonder whether philanthropy really does make the world better.

Think about it: Members of the Sackler family, who have given millions to arts institutions, also own Purdue Pharma. That’s the company that patented and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, an approach that helped bring about the opioid crisis. Between 1999 and 2017, close to 218,000 people died from overdoses connected to prescription opioids.

Then there’s Warren Kanders, a major donor to New York City’s Whitney Museum. He stepped down as vice chair of its board in July 2019 over his role as the chief executive of Safariland – a manufacturer of bulletproof vests, bomb-defusing robots and other security products. Artists and activists demanded his ouster after learning that Safariland made the tear gas launched at migrants at the border between Mexico and California.

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Walter Olson

Politics,

Ohio offers an example of a bad outcome.

This is just absurd: to comply with federal regulations barring owners of daily newspapers from also owning local broadcast stations, the owner of the venerable Dayton Daily News in Ohio may knock it down to three-times-a-week publication so that it won't count as a daily anymore. Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post spotted the story, Cox Media Group outlined the plan in a press release a few weeks ago, and Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab has more:

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily....

Did you get that? To strengthen the local news ecosystem in Dayton, the government is making its biggest newspaper publish less.

The rules date back to 1975 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted regulations barring cross-ownership of local broadcast and newspaper properties while grandfathering in existing arrangements. It was never a good rule, but progressive social critics then as now traced countless social ills to media concentration and for-profit ownership of the press (what's new these days is that populist conservatives crusade against the corporate media too).

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Diane Winston

History, Americas

Salvation Army Captain Joseph McFee’s legacy lives on – providing inspiration to millions of Americans, whether they care about religion or not. Tinseled trees and snowy landscapes are not the only signs of the upcoming holiday season. Red kettles, staffed by men and women in street clothes, Santa suits and Salvation Army uniforms, also telegraph Christmastime.

The Salvation Army is among America’s top-grossing charities. In 2018, its 25,000 bell-ringers helped raise US$142.7 million. That was part of the charity’s $3.8 billion year-end revenue from bequests, grants, sales, in-kind donations and investments as well as direct contributions.

William Booth, an English evangelist, founded the Salvation Army in 1878 as a religious outreach to London’s poor. How a British evangelical church became an American icon is an ongoing interest of mine.

Entry into the United States

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Kyle Mizokami

Security,

You decide.

Key point: For those that want a slightly unconventional handgun, revolvers such as the Smith & Wesson Governor are an equally conventional, though entirely practical, solution.

One of the most interesting trends in the world of handguns is the revolver than first not only handgun ammunition but also shotgun shells. The ability to shoot both high-powered handgun ammo above .40 caliber and small caliber shotgun shells makes these revolvers far more versatile than most. Although seemingly a new phenomenon, the development of handheld shotguns actually goes back to before the U.S. Civil War.

The unusual nature of the revolver shotgun requires a bit of history and explanation. The first revolver/shotgun combination was the LeMat revolver. Developed by Jean LeMat, a French emigre to the United States, LeMat’s creation was a cap and ball revolver, state of the art at the time, but it featured two barrels and a nine-round cylinder. This gave the LeMat a highly unusual appearance, both then and today. The cylinder held both .40 and .42 ammunition and a larger .60 caliber/20 gauge shotgun ammunition. The latter gave the revolver the nickname “The Grape Shot Revolver.” Up to 2,400 LeMats were smuggled into the Confederacy to arm cavalry units.

The modern “grapeshot revolver” movement was sparked in the 1990s by the MIL Thunder 5 revolver. Although only briefly in production, the Tennessee-made firearm was able to shoot both .45 Long Colt handgun rounds and .410 shotshells. This unusual combination sparked industry-wide interest. The Thunder 5 was followed up by Brazilian gunmaker Taurus and their Judge revolver, which is similar in appearance and shoots the same combination of cartridges.

Why a revolver shotgun?

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Warfare History Network

History, Asia

Never leave a man behind.

Key point: Success came at a high price.

In the predawn darkness of Dobodura, New Guinea, 2nd Lt. William J. Smith of the U.S. Army Air Corps was roughly awakened by a noncom announcing that it was time to get dressed and get to the mess tent for breakfast.

Smith had not slept well, having spent most of the night fighting mosquitoes that had managed to get inside his cot’s netting. The nervous anticipation of flying another combat mission in the morning did not exactly make for peaceful slumber either. Five days earlier, eight North American B-25D Mitchell medium bombers of the 71st Bomb Squadron, 38th Bomb Group, Fifth Army Air Force had flown north over the Owen Stanley Mountains from their permanent base near Port Moresby to Dobodura, their temporary base of operations. The 38th Bomb Group, known as the “Sun Setters,” was composed of the 71st, 405th, 822nd, and 823rd Squadrons, and 16 other Mitchells from the 38th would join today’s mission. Their target on February, 15, 1944, was Kavieng Township on the northern tip of New Ireland, deep in Japanese-held territory. A long flight lay ahead of the Army aviators, even from this forward airstrip.

At the mess tent Lieutenant Smith sawed into his pancakes and hit a pocket of unmixed batter. As he watched the powder spill down into the syrup, he daydreamed of biscuits with red eye gravy, eggs, bacon, sweet cream, homemade preserves, and all the other delights of his mother’s breakfasts back in Kentucky. As he came back to harsh reality, Smith put sugar in his coffee and then with experienced precision skimmed off the floating ants. Soldiers in South Pacific territories learned that you could not keep ants out of the sugar, and it was just easier to strain them out of your coffee. It was not a great breakfast by stateside standards, but about the best the Army Air Corps personnel could expect in primitive New Guinea.

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Caleb Larson

Security, Americas

A game-changer or just some really cool marketing?

U.S. forces reportedly killed a senior jihadist leader in Syria. While such strikes are typically carried out by drones and not so unusual, this particular strike used a new type of "ninja" missile. These missiles have been reportedly been used only a few times. Designed to minimize civilian casualties, the ninja missile is a specially modified Hellfire—without a warhead. In place of explosives, razor-sharp folding blades are used to literally chop the target to bits.

Hell in a Handbasket

The Hellfire family was originally developed in the 1980s as a tank-busting, surface-to-air missile designed specifically to counter armor. Several variants are used today, including fragmentation, incendiary, and high explosive anti-tank, or HEAT. The Hellfire missiles weigh in the 100 to 110 pound range, including a 20-pound warhead and are guided through a millimeter wave radar seeker, or by laser.

Years after their development, Hellfire missiles have become the armament of choice in the war on terror, and are often used on Reaper and Predator drones in strikes against militants in crowded, urban environments. The relatively small 20-pound warhead is crucial in these environments, where unnecessary civilian casualties or infrastructure damage could be detrimental to long-term mission success. Still, an explosion, regardless of size, runs the risk of civilian casualties. So how could a missile be improved for greater precision and pose less risk to civilian bystanders?

Chop-Chop

The R9X was developed to answer just this question. The R9X Hellfire variant is outwardly quite similar to the other Hellfire variants—except that it paradoxically isn’t equipped with an explosive warhead. In the missile body, where explosives would normally be located, are six razor-sharp blades.

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