Diplomacy & Crisis News

The terror group behind the Kabul attacks has close ties to the Haqqani network.

Trevor Filseth

economy, Americas

However, the federal government’s reluctance to pass out cash has not stopped state and local governments from passing stimulus measures of their own.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Since most states generally have not had access to enormous cash surpluses, their “stimulus” measures can sometimes be more targeted, directed towards specific occupations or income levels. However, this is not always the case. 

President Joe Biden has more or less officially established that there will not be a fourth stimulus check. The president’s second infrastructure bill, the framework of which has already been approved by the Senate, does not include a fourth stimulus check measure. The last such measure, approved in the March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, cost the government roughly $450 billion to send out; a similar expenditure today, while the U.S. economy rapidly recovers from the pandemic, would meet fierce opposition from fiscally conservative lawmakers. In the absence of a fourth major stimulus check, a series of smaller and more targeted ones have been sent out, in the form of the now-fully refundable Child Tax Credit to 36 million American families across the nation. 

However, the federal government’s reluctance to pass out cash has not stopped state and local governments from passing stimulus measures of their own. Since most states generally have not had access to enormous cash surpluses, their “stimulus” measures can sometimes be more targeted, directed towards specific occupations or income levels. However, this is not always the case. 

The “Golden State Stimulus” payment in California represents the largest state-wide stimulus check program in the United States. California, which emerged from the pandemic with a multibillion-dollar surplus, is compelled by a State Senate bylaw from the 1970s to return unspent money to taxpayers, rather than using it on other projects. The state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has enthusiastically embraced the payments—possibly to improve his odds in an upcoming recall election, which polling has indicated a surprisingly close margin for in the deep-blue state.  

Consequently, every Californian earning between $30,000 and $75,000 per year is entitled to a payment of $500 or $600—including undocumented immigrants. Parents of dependents will also receive an extra $500 for each child. 

In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis (D) has announced that all of its residents who received at least one unemployment payment from March until October 2020 will receive a $375 bonus.  

In Maryland, a statewide stimulus program has also been announced for filers of the Earned Income Tax Credit, with $500 for families and $300 for individual filers. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has announced a bonus payment of $1,000 for workers in key areas, such as teachers, administrators, police, and first responders, who continued working through the pandemic. A similar plan is under development in Georgia and Tennessee, where full-time teachers and administrators will receive $1,000, and in Michigan, where they will receive $500.  

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mark Episkopos

Tsirkon Hypersonic Missile,

The contract has been inked and the missiles are underway.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday that it has signed its first contract for the delivery of Tsirkon missiles to Russia’s military. “A government contract on the delivery of the 3M22 missile (the Tsirkon hypersonic missile) has been signed. The contract has been handed to CEO of the Research and Production Association of Machine-Building Alexander Leonov at the [Army-2021] international military-technical forum," according to the Defense Ministry’s press statement.

Leonov confirmed the news on the sidelines of the ARMY 2021 defense exhibition, adding that "the contract on Tsirkon missiles will be fulfilled by 2025. The missile has been standardized and can be used both from surface ships and submarines. The only difference is in the launcher used on surface ships or submarines.” Top Russian officials previously posited that the military could begin taking serial Tsirkon deliveries as early as 2022, but Leonov’s phrasing— “by 2025”— suggests that this timeline may prove too optimistic.

The statement did not specify which Russian vessels will be getting the vaunted Tsirkon upgrade first. But, according to earlier reports sourced by statements from anonymous Russian defense industry insiders, the honor will go to Admiral Golovko—the third frigate of the Project 22350 Admiral Gorshkov class. Tsirkon is likely to eventually make its way to numerous ships in Russia’s naval roster, including the Kirov-class battlecruisers Petr Velikiy and Admiral Nakhimov, as well as the modernized Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates and the Karakurt/Buyan/Gremyashchiy-class corvettes. The missile will also figure prominently into the offensive capabilities of Russia’s new Yasen-M class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines, seven of which are expected to enter service through 2028. Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to suggest in late 2019 that a land-based Tsirkon variant is in the works, but all current signs point to Tsirkon being a ship and submarine-launched weapon for the foreseeable future.

 3M22 Tsirkon (also known as “Zircon”) is a winged, anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile that is reportedly capable of reaching speeds of up to Mach 8-9 and maneuvering in mid-flight to evade enemy air defenses. The missile boasts an effective operating range of around 1,000 km, though its precise reach reportedly depends on whether it is engaging ground or naval targets. Russian military observers have projected confidence that Tsirkon can credibly hold American Carrier Strike Groups (CSG’s) at risk and impede the U.S. Navy’s current carrier wings from operating effectively.

Previously derailed by unspecified technical problems encountered in development, the Tsirkon has gotten back on track with a flurry of reportedly successful launch tests—many of which were conducted from the lead Project 22350 ship Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Gorshkov—in 2020 and 2021. Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko said earlier this month that Russia plans to wrap up the Tsirkon missile’s state trials in 2021. Defense sources told TASS state news that the missile’s first test launches from the Yasen-class Severodvinsk submarine are planned for September, before the White Sea freezes.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: YouTube

Sebastien Roblin

Su-25, Europe

The Su-25 is the Russian version of the deadly American A-10 Warthog.

Key point: The Su-25 is a flying tank that can pack a huge punch. Here is how it helps Russian ground forces win their battles.

The Su-25 Frogfoot, known as the Grach or “Rook” by Russian pilots, is one of those aircraft that may not be at the cutting edge of technology, but still has seen widespread service around the world because it offers an effective and useful solution to the need to blast targets on the ground.

As such, its obvious stablemate is the American A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane. But while the U.S. Air Force wants to retire the A-10 starting in 2022, the Su-25 is undergoing extensive upgrades to keep with the times.

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

Also unlike the Thunderbolt, it has been disseminated it all over the world and seen action in over a dozen wars, including in the air campaigns over Syria, Iraq and Ukraine.

Not only has Russia had a lot of experience flying Su-25s in combat—it has shot several down as well.

During World War II, Russia’s armored Il-2 Sturmovik attack planes, nicknamed “Flying Tanks,” were renowned for their ability to take a pounding while dishing it out to German Panzer divisions with bombs, rockets and cannon fire.

Unlike the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s, which was enamored with the concept of “winning” nuclear wars with strategic bombers, the Soviet air service, the VVS, placed more emphasis on supporting ground armies in its Frontal Aviation branch. However, no worthy successor to the Shturmovik immediately appeared after World War II

In 1968, the VVS service decided it was time for another properly designed flying tank. After a three-way competition, the prototype submitted by Sukhoi was selected and the first Su-25 attack planes entered production in 1978 in a factory in Tbilisi, Georgia. Coincidentally, the American A-10 Thunderbolt had begun entering service a few years earlier.

Like the A-10, the Su-25 was all about winning a titanic clash between the ground forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact by busting tanks and blasting infantry in Close Air Support missions. This meant flying low and slow to properly observe the battlefield and line up the plane for an attack run.

Flying low would also help the Su-25 avoid all the deadly long-range SAMs that would have been active in a European battlefield. However, this would have exposed it to all kinds of antiaircraft guns. Thus, the pilot of the Su-25 benefited from an “armored bathtub”—ten to twenty-five millimeters of armor plating that wrapped around the cockpit and even padded the pilot’s headrest. It also had armored fuel tanks and redundant control schemes to increase the likelihood of surviving a hit. And in their extensive combat careers, Su-25s have survived some really bad hits.

Despite the similarities with the A-10, the Su-25 is a smaller and lighter, and has a maximum speed fifty percent faster than the Thunderbolt’s at around six hundred miles per hour. However, the Frogfoot has shorter range and loiter time, can only operate at half the altitude, and has a lighter maximum load of up to eight thousand pounds of munitions, compared to sixteen thousand on the Thunderbolt.

More importantly, the types of munitions usually carried are typically different. The Thunderbolt’s mainstays are precision-guided munitions, especially Maverick antitank missiles, as well as its monstrous, fast-firing GAU-8 cannon.

The Su-25’s armament has typically consisted of unguided 250 or 500 kilogram bombs, cluster bombs and rockets. The rockets come in forms ranging from pods containing dozens of smaller 57- or 80-millimeter rockets, to five-shot 130-millimeter S-13 system, to large singular 240- or 330-millimeter rockets. The Su-25 also has a Gsh-30-2 30-millimeter cannon under the nose with 260 rounds of ammunition, though it doesn’t have the absurd rate of fire of the GAU-8.

The lower tip of the Frogfoot’s nose holds a glass-enclosed laser designator. Su-25s did make occasional use of Kh-25ML and Kh-29 laser guided missiles in Afghanistan to take out Mujahideen fortified caves, striking targets as far as five miles away. KAB-250 laser-guided bombs began to see use in Chechnya as well. However, use of such weapons was relatively rare. For example, they made up only 2 percent of munitions expended by the Russian Air Force in Chechnya.

The Su-25 was still packing plenty of antipersonnel firepower—and that’s exactly what was called for when it first saw action in Afghanistan beginning in 1981. The Su-25 was the workhorse fixed-wing attack plane in the conflict, flying more than sixty thousand sorties in bombing raids on mujahedeen villages and mountain strongholds. They often teamed up with Mi-24 attack helicopters to provide air support for Soviet armored units.

However, as the Afghan rebels began to acquire Stinger missiles from the United States, Su-25s began to suffer losses and the Soviet pilots were forced to fly higher to avoid the man-portable surface-to-air missiles. In all, some fifteen Su-25s were shot down in Afghanistan before the Soviet withdrawal.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Su-25s were passed onto the air services of all the Soviet successor states. Those that didn’t use Su-25s in local wars—on both sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, for example—often exported them to countries that did. Frogfoots have seen action in the service of Macedonia (against Albanian rebels), Ethiopia (against Eritrea, with one shot down), Sudan (target: Darfur), and Georgia versus Abkhazian separatists that shot down several. And that list is not comprehensive.

In one notable episode, Cote d’Ivoire acquired several Su-25s and used them in its civil war. When the government of President Laurent Gbagbo was angered by the perceived partisanship of French peacekeepers, his mercenary-piloted Su-25s bombed the French camp, killing nine. Whoever ordered the attack didn’t consider that there was a French contingent stationed at the Yamoussoukro Airfield where the Frogfoots were based. The French used anti-tank missiles to destroy the fighter bombers on the ground in retaliation.

Russian Su-25 were back in action in the Chechnya campaign of 1994 to 1995, flying 5,300 strike sorties. Early on they helped wipe out Chechen aircraft on the ground and hit the Presidential Palace in Grozny with anti-concrete bombs. They then pursued a more general bombing campaign. Four were lost to missiles and flak. They were again prominent in the Second Chechen War in 1999, where only one was lost.

Of course, it’s important to note at this juncture that the Su-25 is one of a handful of Soviet aircraft that received its own American computer game in 1990.

Modern Su-25s

In addition to the base model, the Frogfoot also came in an export variant, the Su-25K, and a variety of two-seat trainers with a hunchback canopy, including the combat-capable Su-25UBM.

There were a number of projects to modernize the Su-25, including small productions runs of Su-25T and Su-25TM tank busters. But the Russian Air Force finally selected the Su-25SM in the early 2000s for all future modernization.

The SM has a new BARS satellite navigation/attack system, which allows for more precise targeting, as well as a whole slew of improved avionics such as news heads-up displays (HUDS), Radar Warning Receivers and the like. The Su-25SM can use the excellent R-73 short-range air-to-air missile, and has improved targeting abilities for laser-guided bombs. Other improvements reduce maintenance requirements and lower aircraft weight.

The National Interest’s Dave Majumdar has written about the latest SM3 upgrade, which includes the capacity to fire Kh-58 anti-radar missiles, which could enable Su-25s to help suppress enemy air defenses, as well as a Vitebsk electronic-countermeasure system that could increase its survivability against both radar- and infarred-guided surface to air missiles.

Georgia and Ukraine also have limited numbers of their own domestically upgrade variants, the Su-25KM and the Su-25M1 respectively. You can check out the Su-25KM variant, produced with an Israeli firm, in this video full of unironic 1980s flair.

Speaking of Georgia, things got messy in 2008 when both Russia and Georgia operated Frogfoots in the Russo-Georgian War. The Georgian Frogfoots provided air support for Georgian troops seizing the city of Tskhinvali. Then Russian Su-25s assisted Russian armor in blasting them out. Russia lost three Su-25s to MANPADS—two likely from friendly fire—and Georgia lost a similar number to Russian SAMs. To the surprise of observers, however, the Russian Air Force did not succeed in sweeping Georgian aviation from the sky.

In 2014, Ukraine deployed its Frogfoots to support ground forces combating separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine. They assisted in the initial recapture of the Donetsk airport in May, would be followed over a half year of seesaw battles ending in a separatist victory in 2015. Ukraine lost four Su-25s in the ensuing ground-attack missions—three were hit by missiles (one MANPADS, two allegedly by longer-ranged systems across the Russian border), and a fourth was reportedly downed by a Russian MiG-29. Two others survived hits from missiles. As a result, Su-25 strikes were sharply curtailed to avoid incurring further losses.

In 2015, the Russian separatists of the Luhansk People’s Republic claimed to have launched airstrikes with an Su-25 of their own. Depending on who you ask, the airplane was restored from a museum or flew in from Russia.

The Iraqi Air Force has deployed its own Su-25s in the war against ISIS, purchasing five from Russia in 2014 and receiving seven from Iran that had been impounded during the 1991 Gulf War.

Finally, in the fall of 2015, Russia deployed a dozen modernized Su-25SMs in support of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Many observers noted that of the aircraft involved in the mission, the Su-25s were the best adapted for the close air-support role. The Frogfoot flew 1,600 sorties against rebel-held Syrian cities, and expended more than six thousand munitions, mostly unguided bombs and S-13 rockets. They were withdrawn this year, leaving attack helicopter behind to perform more precise—and risky—close air support missions.

Lessons Learned from Flying Tanks?

While it’s fun to admire high-performing fighters like the MiG-29 or F-22 Raptor, the unglamorous Su-25 has so far had a greater impact on a wide range of conflicts. We can draw a few lessons from its recent combat record.

First, the significant losses suffered by Su-25s demonstrate that without effective air-defense suppression and electronic counter-measures, low-and-slow ground support planes are poised to take heavy losses against Russian-made surface-to-air missiles deployed in sufficient numbers.

Second, observation of Russia’s Syrian contingent suggests that despite possessing a diverse arsenal of precision guided munitions, the Russian Air Force continues to rely primarily on unguided bombs and rockets for the close air support mission.

Lastly, aircraft capable of delivering punishing attacks on ground targets while retaining a good chance of surviving hits taken in return are going to remain in high demand worldwide.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

LG OLEDs,

We might not see that 42-inch gaming OLED TV until 2022.

Last January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), LG introduced its latest generation of OLED TVs, which featured “new panel technology, even more powerful processors, and a completely redesigned webOS experience.”

Among the products announced at the time was a new 42-inch OLED gaming TV. And while traditionally TVs that are introduced at CES in January arrive before the end of that year, a new report says we might not see that 42-inch gaming OLED TV until 2022. The TV would be the smallest OLED TV yet, after the previous smallest was fort-eight inches. 

According to the Korea Economic Daily, the 42-inch TV, which had been expected to arrive by the end of the year, will instead arrive as part of the 2022 lineup. The unveiling is expected to take place at CES in 2022. 

“Apparently, LG wants to add the model to next year’s TV lineup to maximize its marketing efforts rather than unveiling it later this year,” a source told the Korean publication. 

The TV, whenever it arrives, will be optimized for all of the major gaming consoles, PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X. In addition, the panels would be mass-produced by LG Display. 

“If all of this pans out, it’ll ideally have a 120Hz refresh rate display with multiple HDMI 2.1 ports that allow 120 frames per second 4K gameplay (in games that support it) on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X,” The Verge said regarding news of the delay. “It should also support variable refresh rate (VRR) and auto low-latency mode, which are features that can make gaming look and feel smoother and more enjoyable. Though, with specs like that, I wouldn’t expect this to be a particularly affordable TV. The current 48-inch C1 was originally priced at $1,499.99 (but can currently be purchased for $1,299.99), so this smaller one will hopefully cost a little less.”

Following the virtual CES that took place in January 2021, the massive trade show is scheduled to return to Las Vegas next January, although the event will still have a virtual component. The organizers of CES announced last week that they will require proof of vaccination for in-person attendees of the event. 

"Based on today’s science, we understand vaccines offer us the best hope for stopping the spread of COVID-19,” Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, of CTA, said in a statement announcing the move. “We all play a part in ending the pandemic through encouraging vaccinations and implementing the right safety protocols. We are taking on our responsibility by requiring proof of vaccination to attend CES 2022 in Las Vegas.”

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

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Chemical Weapons, Middle East

No wonder these weapons of war are banned.

Here's What You Need to Know: As early as 1925, the Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons in international conflicts.

The residents of Khan Sheikhoun probably thought they were in for just another ordinary day of civil war when they woke up early in the morning of April 4 to the whine of approaching Syrian Air Force Su-22 attack jets. The town of around fifty thousand people was situated west of Aleppo in Idlib Province, long a stronghold of rebel groups opposing the government of Bashar al-Assad since 2011. Artillery and air attacks were a horribly routine aspect of daily life there, as they are in many parts of Syria, divided by numerous warring factions.

Residents later reported that the munitions dropped by the jets released clouds of poisonous gas. Even this was hardly unheard of in Idlib Province. Even while Assad handed over his stockpiles of mustard gas and deadly nerve agents, government helicopters launched at least a dozen chlorine-gas attacks on communities in Idlib Province alone in 2014 and 2015. However, while chlorine gas causes horrifying respiratory problems, particularly in children and the elderly, it usually killed “only” a handful of people per attack, if any.

However, rescuers arriving from outside Khan Sheikhoun beheld an unexpectedly nightmarish sight: more than six hundred civilians lying paralyzed in their homes or helpless on the ground, limbs convulsing, saliva foaming from their noses and mouths as they gasped for breath. Local first responders—the lucky ones that hadn’t died or fallen violently ill when arriving on the scene—were frantically spraying the twitching bodies with hoses.

These symptoms correspond to the effects of sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent that disrupts acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that helps a muscle relax once it has completed an action. By blocking the enzyme, sarin has the effect of continuously triggering those muscles, making breathing effectively impossible as well as causing the breakdown of other bodily functions, and leading to the discharge of bodily fluids.

Though inhalation of the vapors is the primary vector of the agent, even skin contact can transmit a fatal dose of sarin to victims, who may die within one to ten minutes of exposure due to asphyxiation and the loss of bodily functions. Those surviving initial exposure may suffer permanent brain damage if they do not receive swift treatment. Even worse, particles of the gas cling to clothing, food and water, and can remain lethal for up to thirty minutes. That was why responders were washing the victims with hoses.

Reports currently suggest that eighty to one hundred of the residents were killed, and over six hundred injured. On Thursday, a Turkish hospital claimed its examination of the victims confirmed the use of sarin gas.

Chemical weapons are often collectively labeled weapons of mass destruction, but many of them—fortunately—have a low fatality rate, serving principally as weapons of terror rather than attrition.

Sarin and other nerve agents are a notable exception. Only thirty-five milligrams of sarin per cubic meter are necessary to kill a human being after two minutes of exposure, compared to nineteen thousand milligrams for chlorine gas, or 1,500 for phosgene gas, the deadliest chemical weapon used in World War I. The latter invisible gas often killed those affected the day after exposure, meaning it was not especially practical for achieving battlefield objectives. Mustard gas, which was highly visible and widely feared, caused horrible blistering injuries on contact with the skin, but killed only two percent of those it scarred.

The first nerve agent was accidentally discovered by German scientist Gerhard Schrader in 1938, who had to be hospitalized for three weeks after exposing himself to a partial dose of tabun. Realizing the gas’s potential as a weapon, Nazi Germany developed four different “G-Series” nerve agents and produced tens of thousands of tons of the deadly poisons—at the cost of a dozen workers, killed by contact with the deadly liquid despite the use of protective suits.

Fortunately, Hitler ultimately shied away from using nerve agents. This wasn’t because of some deeply buried shred of decency. When Hitler inquired about using sarin against the Allied powers, he was told by IG Farben chemist Otto Ambrose—who himself had tested the gas on human subjects—that the Allies probably had nerve agent stocks too, and would likely retaliate on an even greater scale. This was a fortunate misperception, as the Allies did not possess any nerve agents at all and were completely unaware the Germans had them.

After World War II, both the Soviet Union and Western nations studied up on the German poisons and developed even deadlier “V” series nerve agents, most notably the VX gas rather inaccurately depicted in the 1996 film The Rock. However, the taboo against using lethal chemical weapons on the battlefield was mostly respected—with some notable exceptions.

Egypt dropped mustard and phosgene gas from Il-28 bombers over villages in North Yemen between 1963 and 1968, killing an estimated 1,500 people. Nerve agents may also have been used by Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, Cuban troops in Angola and the Pinochet regime in Chile. Iraq unleashed mustard and sarin gas during the Iran-Iraq War on poorly armed Iranian militias executing human wave attacks. Then on March 16, 1988, Iraqi aircraft bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with a mixture of both gasses, massacring between three and five thousand people in just five hours.

As my colleague Paul Iddon pointed out in a recent article, there’s a common thread in the use of chemical weapons since World War I: they’re nearly always used by governments against victims that lack the ability to retaliate in kind.

Even as far back as World War I, the opposing armies successfully phased in training and equipment that limited the effectiveness of chemical weapons. Whenever one side employed a new type of gas, the other soon copied it and retaliated. Chemical attacks failed to change the outcome of a single major battle, despite their horrifying effects. Even worse, unpredictable winds frequently blew the poisonous clouds back onto friendly troops or towards civilians, who were much less well prepared to deal with them. That explains why many armies otherwise bristling with more and more deadly weapons aren’t begging to bring gas warfare back.

As early as 1925, the Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons in international conflicts, and was succeeded in 1993 by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which further forbade their stockpiling and production. (Syria is a signatory to the former but not the latter.) The United States renounced first use of chemical weapons in 1969 under Nixon, and then committed itself to destroying its stockpiles under George H. W. Bush in 1991—a process which was reportedly 89 percent complete in 2012.

Syria came to the brink of war with the United States after a sarin gas attack on August 2013 that killed hundreds of Syrians in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. It was a clear violation of the international taboo against chemical weapons (which Syria denied even possessing at the time), and more specifically, the “red line” threat made by President Obama. However, Russia brokered a deal in which Assad pledged to give up his military-grade chemical arms in order to avert a U.S. attack. The process of destroying nearly six hundred tons of mustard, sarin and VX gas was officially completed in August 2014, and involved many international observers and contractors.

However, this did not bring a halt to government air attacks using chlorine gas to terrorize rebel-held communities. Because of its broad civilian applications, there is no way to “ban” chlorine. Syrian rebels—mostly, but not exclusively, belonging to ISIS—have also occasionally launched rockets laden with chlorine or mustard gas on government-held territory in Syria and even Iraq.

Meanwhile, there were persistent rumors that the Syrian army’s destruction of its chemical stocks was less than comprehensive, and that the Assad regime had hidden away small quantities to serve as a future deterrent. International inspectors also reported discovering trace quantities of sarin, VX and ricin in facilities that had not been listed as storing chemical weapons by the Syrian government.

Damascus admitted to launching the airstrike on Khan Sheikhoun with Su-22 fighter-bombers, but maintains its warplanes did not use chemical munitions. Predictably, Moscow claimed the chemical attack was the opposition’s fault, alleging Syrian bombs had hit a rebel chemical-weapons workshop. This was far from the first time the allied governments have advanced some variant of the classic “they bombed themselves” defense in regards to chemical attacks that mostly land in rebel territory.

However, chemical-arms experts don’t buy it, pointing out that even if opposition fighters had somehow managed to produce and store sarin agents with the binary precursors side by side for rapid use, blowing them up with a bomb would simply not have dispersed the gases to such murderous effect. They argue that such a deadly attack could only have been carried out by properly deployed chemical munitions.

It is vital that the Syrian Civil War not lead to a further breakdown in international norms against chemical warfare, resulting in their more frequent use in conflicts across the world. Chemical weapons have repeatedly proven to be inherently indiscriminate terror weapons, and have killed far more civilians than combatants in the Syrian conflict.

However, the vast majority of civilian deaths in Syria occur due to bombardments by conventional artillery, mortars and aerial bombs—including those dropped by Russian and American warplanes as well as the Syrian Air Force. Even without the use of chemical weapons, the suffering experienced by Syrians on all sides of the conflict will continue for some time if a viable political solution does not silence these “conventional” death machines.

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

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: A U.N. chemical weapons expert, wearing a gas mask, holds a plastic bag containing samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Ain Tarma neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria, August 29, 2013. REUTERS / Mohamed Abdullah

Stephen Silver

Child Tax Credit,

There have been two payments so far, in July and August, and a new study says that the July payment had a major effect in alleviating child poverty.

Full-on stimulus checks may be a thing of the past, but one series of payments from the American Rescue Plan Act is continuing: the expanded child tax credit, which is conferring monthly payments to Americans with children every month between July and December.

There have been two payments so far, in July and August, and a new study says that the July payment had a major effect in alleviating child poverty.

According to a study from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy, the July payment alone lifted millions of children from poverty.

“Using our innovative approach to tracking monthly poverty rates, we project that ongoing COVID relief efforts continue to have a sizable effect on reducing child poverty keeping six million children from poverty in July 2021 alone (a reduction of more than forty percent),” the Columbia study said. “This impact also resulted in a notable drop in child poverty between June and July 2021, due primarily to the rollout of the expanded Child Tax Credit. On its own, this new payment kept three million children from poverty in its first month.”

The six million figure refers to all coronavirus relief efforts, while the three million refers to the number of people who benefited from the first month of the Child Tax Credit by itself.

The Center predicted continued good outcomes from the rest of the Child Tax Credit payments.

“As rollout continues, the expanded Child Tax Credit has the potential to achieve even greater child poverty reduction,” the report said. “If all likely eligible children are covered, it has the potential to reduce monthly child poverty by up to forty percent on its own; in combination with all COVID-related relief, it could contribute to a fifty-two percent reduction in monthly child poverty. Expanding coverage to all eligible children is key to achieving the Child Tax Credit’s full anti-poverty potential, with the greatest gains to be realized for Black and Latino children.”

As of now, the expanded child tax credit is for 2021 only, although there have been proposals to extend it further. The $3.5 trillion Democratic budget proposal would extend the Child Tax Credit, with the Senate Democrats’ fact sheet including a “Child Tax Credit/EITC/CDCTC extension” as part of the framework for the bill. However, there isn't a lot of specific detail about exactly how the extension will work, as the bill itself has not yet been written. The president, in his American Families Plan that served as a template for the budget bill, had proposed to extend the child tax credit through 2025.

The next part of the expanded child tax credit will arrive in mid-September.

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

Image: Flickr

Facing security risks and shaky legitimacy, the group will struggle to govern and consolidate power.

Trevor Filseth

Afghanistan, Asia

Pelosi described the incident as “deadly serious” and suggested that their committee assignments could be affected by the trip. 

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) condemned on Wednesday a trip that two House representatives took to the Kabul airport, which is where thousands of Americans remain pending evacuation.

Earlier in the week, it emerged that Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) had secretly flown to Afghanistan to evaluate the U.S. withdrawal effort, prompting anger from the White House, State Department, and Defense Department. 

Critics of the representatives highlighted the fact that their presence required resources to be diverted to protect them and update them on the situation. The trip was conducted without consulting the Defense Department, which allegedly learned of their presence after their plane was cleared to land at the airport.  

Moulton and Meijer’s critics have also noted that their presence took up airplane seats which could have been used to evacuate more people, although the two representatives have denied this, noting that they were sitting in empty staff seats rather than with passengers.  

Pelosi described the incident as “deadly serious” and suggested that their committee assignments could be affected by the trip. 

In a joint statement, the two representatives, both U.S. military veterans who served in the Iraq War, defended their decision and argued that further oversight was needed. 

The Defense Department has reported that nearly twenty thousand people were evacuated from Afghanistan in the past day, and President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States intends to adhere to the August 31 withdrawal date demanded by the Taliban. However, Moulton and Meijer emphasized in their statement that the August 31 withdrawal would be logistically impossible. “After talking with commanders on the ground and seeing the situation here,” the statement reads, “it is obvious that because we started the evacuation so late, that no matter what we do, we won't get everyone out on time, even by September 11.” 

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby described the trip as a “VIP visit” and noted that their presence “certainly took time away from what we had been planning to do that day.” Kirby indicated that the representatives had not consulted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin before the trip.  

However, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) defended Moulton and Meijer in his own press briefing, citing the frustration of the two veterans with the confusing and chaotic situation at the airport.  

“It’s not the best idea to go there,” McCarthy said, “but I understand their frustration.” 

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. 

A military confrontation that started 10 months ago in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region is spreading, with serious political, economic and humanitarian implications for the country and the broader region, the Secretary-General warned the Security Council on Thursday.

Sebastien Roblin

North Korea, Asia

And it paid the ultimate price.

Here's What You Need to Know: North Korea has never ceased its espionage activities.

At 4:30 p.m. on June 22, 1998, Capt. Kim In-yong noticed a curious site from the helm of his fishing boat as it sailed eleven miles east of the South Korean city of Sokcho: a small submarine, roughly sixty feet in length, caught in a driftnet used for mackerel fishing. Several crew members were visible on the submarine’s deck, trying to free their vessel. Upon noticing the fishing boat, they gave friendly waves of reassurance.

Captain Kim was suspicious. The entangled submarine was located twenty miles south of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. Likely, he recalled an incident two years earlier when a North Korean spy submarine ground ashore further south near the city of Gangneung. Rather than surrendering, the heavily armed crew first turned on itself and then tried to fight its way back to the border, resulting in the death of thirty-seven Koreans from both nations. Perhaps he was aware that while Republic of Korea Navy operated three Dolgorae-class mini-submarines at the time, North Korea had roughly fifty small submarines of several classes. So the South Korean fisherman informed the Sokcho Fishery Bureau.

The submarine, meanwhile, freed itself from the nets and began sailing north, with Captain Kim following it at a distance. However, before long the submarine rolled on its belly, stalled and helpless in the water.

By 5:20 p.m. the Republic of Korea dispatched antisubmarine helicopters, and the submarine’s location was confirmed nearly an hour later. The vessel was a Yugo-class mini-submarine, imported from Yugoslavia to North Korea during the Cold War. The boats in the class vary from sixteen to twenty-two meters long and seventy to 110 tons in weight, and can’t go much faster than ten knots (11.5 miles per hour), or four knots underwater. Though some carried two torpedo tubes, they were primarily used to deploy operatives on spying missions, with the five-man vessels able to accommodate up to seven additional passengers. Later inspection of the Yugo-class boat revealed it had a single rotating shaft driving its two propellers, which had skewed blades for noise reduction, and that the hull was made of plastic to lower visibility to Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.

ROK Navy surface ships surrounded the vessel and attempted to communicate with the stranded boat, first via signaling charges and low-frequency radio, then loudspeakers and even hammers tapped on the boat’s hull—without response. Unwilling to risk opening the submarine while at sea, the South Korean sailors ultimately hitched the mini-sub to a corvette at 7:30 that evening and began towing it for port of Donghae.

The timing was inauspicious. South and North Korea were about to hold their first major talks in years at Panmunjom. Recently elected South Korean president Kim Dae-jung was promoting his “Sunshine Policy,” attempting to promote reconciliation and openness between two nations that had been officially at war since 1950. On January 23, North Korea declared that a submarine had suffered a “training accident.” According to Pyongyang, the submarine’s last communication reported “trouble in nautical observation instruments, oil pressure systems, and submerging and surfacing machines.” South Korean officials told the New York Times they didn’t believe the Yugo-class boat had actually been involved in a spy mission.

There was of course something a bit comical about the South Korean Navy coming to the unwanted rescue of a submarine that was spying in its waters. However, as frequently happens in tales of North Korean espionage, the absurd becomes horrific.

South Korea had readied a special team to open the ship and negotiate with the North Korean crew, including defector and former submariner Lee Kwang-soo, one of only two North Korean survivors of the Gangneung incident. However, while still being towed on July 24, the submarine sank abruptly to the bottom of the ocean. South Korean officials were uncertain: had the boat succumbed to mechanical difficulties, or had it been scuttled by the crew?

On June 25, a South Korean salvage team recovered the boat from one hundred feet underwater and an elite team bored into the hull. They found a horrid tableau inside.

The submarine’s interior had taken on only two and a half feet of water—but the five submariners had been gunned down, with bullet wounds visible across their bodies. Four elite North Korean Special Forces also lay dead, each shot in the head. North Korean military culture stresses that its soldiers should kill themselves rather than accept capture. It seemed likely that the more fanatical Special Forces had murdered the crew—perhaps after they had refused an order to commit suicide—then killed themselves. The nine dead men aboard the submarine were buried in South Korea’s Cemetery for North Korean and Chinese Soldiers, as Pyongyang has mostly refused to accept back the remains of its own spies and soldiers.

The more than two hundred items recovered from the submarine were also revealing. The crew had been packing AK-47s, machine guns, grenades, pistols, a rocket-propelled grenade and three sets of “American-made infiltration gear.” The presence of an empty South Korean pear juice container also suggested that the Special Forces personnel had made it ashore, as did a 1995 issue of Life magazine. If there was any doubt of the boat’s espionage activities, the ship’s log indicated the submarine had landed agents into South Korea on multiple occasions in the past.

The incident underscored South Korea’s inability to consistently detect and interdict North Korean mini-submarines, leading some commenters to joke that the nation relied on fishermen and taxi drivers (as occurred in the Gangneung incident) to patrol her waters. To be fair, however, small submarines like the Yugo-class boats are extremely difficult to detect in the shallow waters off the Korean coast, a threat underscored by the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010. Shallow, rocky waters also led to a collision between much larger Russian and American submarines in 1992, due to their inability to detect each other over background noise.

Despite the death of its crew, Pyongyang did not make a big fuss as it was eager to receive South Korean economic aid to assist its recovery from a devastating famine. Seoul did it best to overlook the spying in an effort to make the Sunshine Policy work.

However, North Korea never ceased its espionage activities, nor did it change its death-over-surrender policy. In July that year, South Korea recovered the body of an armed North Korean agent with an underwater propulsion unit. And in December, another North Korean mini-submarine opened fire when challenged by South Korean ships, resulting in the Battle of Yeosu, the subject of the next piece in this series.

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

This article first appeared in March 2017.

Image: Reuters

The World Food Programme (WFP) is stepping up ongoing support to Haitians who are now facing destroyed homes, lost livelihoods and little or no access to food in the wake of the 14 August earthquake, the UN agency reported on Thursday.   

Two blasts hamper evacuation effort.

Sam Sweeney

Iraq War, Middle East

The United States should still strive to align its interests with its values and try to do the right thing when it acts in the Middle East. It should not, however, believe that people in the region will see it as a white knight riding in to save the day.

Peter van Buren’s 2011 book We Meant Well sums up a common theme when Americans look back about the Iraq War: The country went into it with good intentions but didn’t understand the country being invaded and was thus unable to make any sort of positive change. Perhaps there was ill intent within the Bush administration, but the effort itself as carried out by the U.S. military and the foreign policy bureaucracy was a noble but tragic one. The United States got rid of a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, but made things worse as the government clumsily fumbled its way through an occupation or liberation, depending on your preferred term. At the very least, the war did not make things better. Van Buren asks how we ended up “accomplishing so little when we meant well?” His book, a well-written account of his time working to stabilize Iraq for the State Department, attempts to answer that question in between anecdotes of all the things that went terribly wrong. It also reveals, unintentionally, the massive gap in how Americans perceive the intentions behind the war and how Iraqis perceive those intentions.

Van Buren was not alone in his assessment of the war as one of good intentions gone awry. The war enjoyed widespread public support, with 72 percent approving of the decision to invade in the first few weeks after the invasion. Support waned significantly as the war dragged on, but the initial reasons for going to war were convincing to the American public. As the war’s failure became apparent, many continued to insist that the initial intent had been good. John Agresto, an academic adviser in the country after the invasion, wrote a book called Mugged By Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions. Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institute, writing in 2008 in the New York Times, said that “if we leave behind a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms, then no one will care how well-intentioned our motives.”

However, this perception of the Iraq War as one of good intentions gone wrong is the most common point of contention I find between Iraqi narratives of the war versus American narratives. By and large, Iraqis I talk to do not believe the United States had good intentions when they removed Saddam in 2003, and this opinion is shared by those who believe removing Saddam was a good thing and those who do not. A poll of Baghdad residents in 2003 showed that just 5 percent of Baghdadis thought the United States’ main intention during the 2003 invasion was to help the people of Iraq, while 43 percent believed the primary intent was to take Iraq’s oil reserves.

A good example of Iraqi perceptions of the war, by no means unique, is a book called Baghdad Melodies [maqamat baghdadiyya] published in Arabic in 2006 by Sahar Taha, an Iraqi musician who passed away of cancer in 2018. Taha was a famous player of the oud, a stringed musical instrument from the Middle East, and she was a regular on Arabic television during her career. Iraqi by birth, she married a Lebanese man and made her career in Lebanon, ultimately gaining Lebanese citizenship as well. Shortly before the U.S. invasion of March 2003, she visited her family in Baghdad, then continued to write a diary of sorts about the war from Lebanon, where she watched events unfold on TV and in phone conversations—when possible—with family still in Iraq. She later published this diary as a book with Riyad el-Rayyes, one of the most prominent Arabic-language publishing houses.

To take an example of the gap in perception, one of the widely acknowledged mistakes of the early days of the war was the United States’ inability to prevent the looting of Iraqi governmental institutions in the first days after the fall of the Iraqi government. In the American telling of the issue, soldiers were not given proper orders to become the country’s police force, and the confusion led to a breakdown in law and order. Soldiers blamed the looting on a desire for revenge among Iraqis against their oppressive government, but they were unable to intervene. As then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, “Freedom's untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things.” This was not how many Iraqis saw it. In her book, Taha recalls watching the looting on TV, and quotes a bystander interviewed in Basra: “They could simply impose order. There’s no explanation for them just standing by neutrally unless they mean for this to happen.” Taha agrees, wondering: “Is the destruction, theft, and burning of the official institutions of the government and ministries a coincidence?” She also wonders about the disappearance of thousands of pieces from the national museum overnight: “A museum with thousands of pieces is emptied overnight? That is what they want us to simply and naively believe? Is there a rational person who would believe that this is the result of general chaos, and merely theft? Or was it planned and trained for months before the invasion…?” As I’ve heard from countless other Iraqis, Taha saw a plan in the chaos.

Equally important is the question of why the United States suddenly opposed Saddam despite previous support for him. Even in the United States, much was made of the sharp turn in American engagement with Iraq between the Iran-Iraq War and the first Gulf War. Within a few short years, the United States went from supporting Saddam against Iran to fighting a war against Iraq in Kuwait. A decade later, the United States removed Saddam from power. Iraqis like Taha were skeptical of America’s intentions in “liberating” the country, given the American relationship with Saddam in the days when he was still a brutal dictator but less of a nuisance regionally. “Most Iraqis are convinced today that Iraq has been afflicted with wars that were programmed from the time that Iraq was reaching the height of its power,” Taha wrote. “The result was that Saddam was put in power, by the Americans themselves, so that they could eventually reach this exact point.” It would be hard to find an American to make this claim and be taken seriously, but it is not a rare opinion in the Middle East, where America is generally considered capable of planning decades in advance and carrying out its plans to the letter, with intended effect.

Indeed, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait revealed much about Arab feelings towards the United States. For example, Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh was in the al-Muslimiyah prison in Aleppo at the time (he was a political prisoner from 1980 to 1996). Prisoners “were divided sharply over the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait,” he wrote in his 2012 book about Syrian prisons. “In the beginning it looked to all of us that this invasion was a step beyond the countless other repugnant transgressions between Arab countries engrained in the memory of our generation.” However, as the Americans moved against Saddam, public opinion also began to shift among the prisoners towards tacit sympathy with Iraq.

The decisive factor in my position was my opposition to the Americans, and to the Syrian regime, which had participated in the international coalition [against Saddam]. It was necessary to turn a blind eye to the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Meanwhile, the motivating factor in the opposing position was opposition to the Iraqi regime, which also necessitated a degree of overlooking the view of Americans and the international coalition. As for Kuwait itself, it took a secondary position in forming all of our opinions.

Note the tone here towards the Americans: Even those opposed to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait supported the war against Saddam despite the American involvement, not because of it. America’s participation did little to improve its image among those who supported ending Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait.

Barely a decade later in 2003, Taha had no doubt that the Americans were invading Iraq to benefit from its economic resources. She laments that the average Iraqi has little access to information about the actual value of their country’s resources. All-knowing America, however, must know in detail what resources exist in Iraq, and that explains their interest in the country. As always in the Arab understanding of the United States, the American government is omniscient: “There is no doubt that America must be watering at the mouth because of the vast and indisputable evidence [of economic resources], given that they are suffering from a real economic crisis.” America’s war, in other words, was intended to boost America’s economy by invading Iraq and stealing its resources. No matter the massive increase to America’s national debt and the several trillion dollars spent on the war effort, many Iraqis remain convinced that the United States benefited greatly from the Iraq War.

In neighboring Syria as well there remains a widespread belief that America is taking Syria’s oil, in no small part because Donald Trump announced that this was the explicit purpose of the ongoing American presence there. I asked a Syrian there recently about the oil, and he simply said that some is refined locally, and the Americans take the rest. This is not factually true—in reality, a complex network of local and regional actors collude to smuggle the oil out of northeastern Syria, and more recently an American company was briefly involved—but the perception is logical from the average Syrian’s perspective: When the American president announces that his country will take the oil, and his country’s troops are the most powerful actor in the country’s oil-producing region, and the oil is being shipped out of the country in long lines of oil trucks, why would the average person doubt that America’s intention is to take the oil, and that it is doing so? In the same way, Sahar Taha and many Iraqis like her are making a logical assumption when they assume the United States wanted to invade Iraq for economic reasons.

Most Iraqis would be surprised to know how inept the U.S. government is. They assume that the government of the world’s most powerful country must necessarily be competent and all-knowing. What Iraqis see as a grand strategy to weaken Iraq and steal its resources was, in reality, the missteps of a country that naively assumed that by installing democracy from the outside, it could simultaneously change the domestic situation of the Iraqi people and ensure the United States’ own national interests in the region. This misperception of the abilities of the U.S. government may be the biggest underlying cause of the gap in understanding the intentions behind the Iraq War.

America would do well to bear this in mind: When we act in the Middle East, few perceive our intentions to be pure or altruistic. Even those who work with the United States believe, rightly, that America is acting in its own interest, not the interests of Iraq, Syria, or any other country. The United States should still strive to align its interests with its values and try to do the right thing when it acts in the Middle East. It should not, however, believe that people in the region will see it as a white knight riding in to save the day. Knowing this fact will help us avoid getting stuck in situations where we make strategic mistakes of the tallest order—like invading Iraq—on the assumption that doing so will earn us goodwill in the region. There are plenty in Washington, DC who still say that had we intervened in Syria, the country would be a pro-American beacon of democracy in the region. We thought that about Iraq as well, and the difference between Iraqi and American perceptions of the war remain some of the strongest proof that no intervention in Syria would have led to a sudden burst of goodwill towards America in the region.

Syria scholar Dawn Chatty interviewed a Syrian-Armenian named Vahan in Damascus in 2005, whom she quoted in her book Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State. Vahan drew an interesting parallel between the European meddling in Ottoman affairs, which he believed was a contributing factor to the Armenian genocide, and the U.S. war in Iraq, saying:

I don’t justify what the Turks have done, but Europe wanted to destabilize the Ottoman Empire for various reasons; for colonialism, or for the colonial extension. So Europe encouraged our young people to use the same slogans that they are now using to destabilize the Arab world. You see “Freedom, This and This”, “Social Justice”, “Dictatorship”…By killings tens of thousands of people they think they can extend Democracy.

Particularly among religious and ethnic minorities in the region, who have borne the brunt of the region’s recent instability, this view has only increased in prominence since 2005.

Whether or not one agrees with Vahan’s assessment of the West’s meddling in the Middle East, then or now, his and others’ reaction highlights the important point that the West should not assume that its efforts, however noble the intention, will be met with goodwill on the part of those we mean to help. I have no doubt that Americans will continue to understand the Iraq War as a misguided but noble effort gone wrong, and that many—probably most—in Iraq will continue to understand the war as one of bad intentions that went just the way America planned. The practical implications of this are potentially deadly, and as such, when a future war in the Middle East is justified on the basis that it will improve our image in the region, rest assured the messenger is either naïve or disingenuous. Judge their plan accordingly.

Sam Sweeney is a writer and translator based in the Middle East. He is a former Congressional staffer and has a Master's degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from l’Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. He is also the president of the Mesopotamia Relief Foundation, which works in northeastern Syria.

Image: Flickr.

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

If rivals see their courses as preordained and Thucydides’ supposed trap as inescapable, both will gird for what they regard as inevitable.

Here's What you Need to Remember: It’s crucial for Washington to undertake some soul-searching as it declares that a new age of great-power competition is upon us, and as U.S. leaders try to discern how their counterparts in Beijing, allied capitals, and third parties see matters.

A panel at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis once asked whether—as Professor Graham Allison’s book contends—China and the United States are “destined” for war. Indeed, Professor Allison numbered among the panelists who discussed the new China challenge.

The short answer from the gathering: maybe.

Commentators have held forth on this topic from antiquity till the present day. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus taught that character is destiny. Herodotus maintained that custom is destiny. We hear that geography is destiny, or demographics is, or some other factor is. This time of year sports commentators even tell us football teams can control their destiny—chiefly by winning every game against opponents that also want to win. In that spirit, one literature specialist counsels that destiny goes by many names, including “God, gods, fate, accident, fortune, necessity, [and] circumstance.”

An enormous amount turns on how you define terms like “destiny,” or the “trap” part of Allison’s signature catchphrase “Thucydides Trap.” The latter refers to the conceit of established great powers using armed force to maintain their standing atop the pecking order or when upstart challengers reach for the sword to seize that lofty status for themselves. Geopolitical asymmetries ensnare hegemons and would-be hegemons alike—speeding them along the path to war.

If rivals see their courses as preordained and Thucydides’ supposed trap as inescapable, both will gird for what they regard as inevitable. If they believe they enjoy some say-so over the workings of destiny, then they might find some way to navigate their differences. And if one contender accepts the logic of the Thucydides Trap while the other rejects it, watch out: strategic competition could take on a seesaw character as action begets misperception begets reaction, and on and on. The action-reaction cycle could set war loose through different understandings of the dynamics at work.

Far from an exercise in hair-splitting, then, this is a philosophical debate pregnant with fateful consequences. The central question: does destiny master us or can we master it? If America and China are captive to destiny and destiny is remorseless, then there’s little for the U.S. naval and defense establishment to do except get ready. The sea services and land-based arms of military might must ready themselves for inevitable combat. If force is the only option, then the only questions left involve where, when, with what, and with which allies the U.S. armed services will attempt to crush or dishearten the foe. The reciprocal is true for China’s People’s Liberation Army.

If on the other hand, it is possible for the contestants to take charge of their destiny—in whole or in part—then they might find some way through the quarrels and disparate visions that separate them. Some mix of deterrence, diplomacy, and economic outreach or coercion could forestall war.

Now, entertaining the possibility of peace scarcely exempts American military planners from getting ready. Not for nothing did founding father George Washington proclaim—channeling the classics—that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” After all, the point of peacetime naval and military diplomacy is to cast a “shadow” over an antagonist’s deliberations and actions. The greater the possibility of defeat appears to foes who square off against the U.S. military, the longer and darker the shadow cast—and the likelier they are to desist from actions Washington deems objectionable.

Here’s one way to think through this question of whether armed strife is preordained. Crudely speaking, scribes from Greek antiquity forward have crafted three ideas about destiny. The first is fate. Fate is implacable and inescapable. The concept of irresistible fate feels very Calvinist, entailing preordination. We are the playthings of fate. Vast forces sweep us along wherever they will. Think about Odysseus, buffeted around the Mediterranean Sea for twenty long years on his return voyage from the war against Troy. The adventurer from Ithaca could do little except comply with the whims of fate. Even the gods and goddesses of Olympus found it hard to speed his return home (in part because they were working at cross purposes, as was their wont).

The classics sometimes set forth a less fatalistic concept of destiny. Playwrights and philosophers commonly warn mortals not to choose to do things that offend the “deathless gods” lest the gods exact terrible vengeance and impose a bleak destiny on the offenders. Retribution for hubris—overweening pride—constitutes a staple of classical literature. Hubris brings on Nemesis as surely as night follows day. The Greeks never quite say so, but it is possible that other vices also elicit divine retribution. Bottom line, this variant of destiny permits human beings the power to choose. It’s up to them to exercise that power wisely.

And then there’s the manageable, if still stubborn, variety of destiny. Riffing on the classics, Niccolò Machiavelli terms it "fortune." Fortune, proclaims the Florentine philosopher-statesman, is like a violent river that sweeps everything and everyone before it after a storm. But Machiavelli adds that human beings can exercise foresight during tranquil times before the onset of a tempest. They can construct dams and other engineering works to block or divert flood waters when they come. We can master fortune, in other words, by peering ahead into the future and being venturesome in the here and now—guarding against its wiles. This is a comforting interpretation coming from a writer known for his bare-knuckles approach to politics.

So who’s right? Does destiny exist in geopolitics, and if so, how much scope for free will does it allow societies and statesmen? Is it possible for rising and falling nations and their allies to be destined for war? The answers potential antagonists give will prod them to design and deploy strategy, forces, and operational methods in a certain fashion. Believers that war is fated will comport themselves as though battle is imminent. Those convinced they can master fortune dwell in the realm where military implements can persuade or dissuade. Different strategies result.

What about the trap in Professor Allison’s Thucydides Trap? Enlightenment might likewise come from parsing this everyday metaphor. Traps come in endless varieties. People lay some traps. People stumble into others. Some are visible, others hidden. Some are inescapable, others easy to evade or escape. Some inflict fatal consequences; others exact lighter damage. Is the Thucydides Trap a steel trap that a hunter lays to pinion an animal’s leg? Or is it a sand trap that a dexterous golfer can exit without losing more than a shot or two from his overall tally?

These are questions of the significant moment. That being the case, it’s crucial for Washington to undertake some soul-searching as it declares that a new age of great-power competition is upon us, and as U.S. leaders try to discern how their counterparts in Beijing, allied capitals, and third parties see matters. This is no idle philosophical musing. It could shape Asia’s—and the world’s—future.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming next month). The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

The Khmer Rouge waged a bloody guerilla resistance war against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, assisted by two more Western-aligned resistance groups.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Khmer Rouge’s ultra-nationalism made them violently suspicious of the Vietnamese Communists, even though the Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia had only been possible with Hanoi’s support.

The fall of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, was preceded two weeks earlier by another Communist victory: the capture of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.

Yet less than four years later, Vietnamese troops would engage in a second conquest—this time targeting its erstwhile allies, using many of the tanks and aircraft it captured from South Vietnam.

The Khmer people of Cambodia have ethnic ties to southern Asia and practice a hybrid Buddhist-Hindu faith. Just as the Vietnamese historically resisted imperial occupation by China, the Khmer historically were subject to foreign encroachment from Vietnam.

The Khmer Rouge had been formed by a clique of Marxist students educated in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, adopting a uniquely extreme ideology combining fervent Khmer nationalism with Maoist-style communism, which emphasizes revolution by the rural peasantry rather than an urbanized working class.

However, the Khmer began with only limited domestic support in Cambodia. Their conquest of Phnom Penh was only possible with aid from North Vietnam, which armed and organized the Khmer Rouge to so it could infiltrate its forces through Eastern Cambodia with less interference from the politically-divided Cambodian government. A massive bombing campaign by U.S. warplanes devastated rural Cambodia, delaying but failing to prevent a Communist victory, and may have increased pro-Communist sentiment amongst the peasantry.

The ruling clique renamed their country the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and implemented a spectacularly self-destructive and brutal police state unlike any other Communist regime. Not merely content to promote rural interests, the Khmer forced Cambodian city-dwellers from their homes, emptying the cities so that urbanites could live an ‘authentic’ life in the countryside. The regime implemented Chinese Great Leap-style agricultural policies that predictably led hundreds of thousands to die from famine.

Hundreds of thousands more Cambodians suspected of political disloyalty or "immorality" were murdered in the infamous Killing Fields. Even adult victims’ children and babies were killed, smashed to death against tree trunks to save bullets. Xenophobic and obsessed with Khmer racial purity, the Khmer Rouge also targeted minorities and people of mixed descent. In four years of rule, these genocidal follies killed between 1.5 to 3 million people in a country of only 8 million.

The Khmer Rouge’s ultra-nationalism made them violently suspicious of the Vietnamese Communists, even though the Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia had only been possible with Hanoi’s support. As early 1974, the Khmer Rouge began purging Vietnamese-trained members from its ranks and skirmishing with Vietnamese troops. Increasingly, the Cambodian Communists turned to China for support, which furnished Kampuchea with economic and military aid.

Still, Communist Cambodia and Vietnam remained officially friends at first, and continued diplomatic outreach even while their troops clashed violently over border towns and outlying islands. But the Khmer Rouge felt that Vietnamese border towns as belonging historically into the Khmer—and it asserted its claims with habitual violence, dispatching troops on cross-border raids that massacred thousands of Vietnamese civilians.

Hanoi finally responded to the attacks in December 1977 with a punitive multi-division invasion supported by air power. However, though the Khmer Rouge’s forces were steam-rolled in combat, the Khmer to escalate hostilities even further with more cross brutal cross-border raids, peaking with the merciless slaughter of 3,157 villagers at Ba Chúc in April 1978, leaving only two survivors.

Hanoi then tried to unseat the Khmer Rouge regime using its own Maoist ‘People’s War’ doctrine, by organizing a rural insurrection amongst sympathetic elements of the population. Ironically, the Maoist doctrine proved unsuccessful in the face of the zealousness of the Khmer Rouge’s secret police, which learned of the subversive elements and crushed them.

By this point, the conflict increasingly was drawn into the dysfunctional relations between Communist states. Beijing wanted to cultivate Cambodia as an outpost of its influence. Vietnam, seeking to keep the Chinese out, signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, which by then was possibly on worse terms with Beijing than with Washington, securing the military and political support for a Cambodian invasion.

The Vietnamese Army assembled 150,000 troops in thirteen divisions on the Cambodian border. It could draw upon a pool of 900 tanks—a mix of T-54 and Type 59 medium tanks, PT-76 and Type 63 amphibious tanks, and captured U.S. M41 Walker Bulldogs. Its Air Force counted over 300 warplanes including squadrons of A-37 Dragonfly attack jets and F-5 Freedom fighters captured from South Vietnam, as well as older Soviet MiG-21 and MiG-19 jets and beefy new Mi-24A Hind armored attack helicopters. These were vectored to targets by observers in slow Cessna UH-17 and O-1 utility planes. In addition, the Vietnamese organized three regiments (15,000 men) of Cambodian fighters that would form the nucleus of a new Cambodian government.

The Kampuchean Revolutionary Army mustered only seventy thousand troops and far fewer tanks. Its fledgling Air Force retained some twenty abandoned Huey helicopters and twenty-two T-28 Trojans trainers, and sixteen Shenyang J-6 fighters (MiG-19 clones) received from China, which also dispatched thousands of advisors.

Vietnamese troops began a limited invasion of north-eastern Cambodia on December 21, 1978, then four days later launched the main offensive on three axes in the southeast, converging on the capital of Pnomh Penh. The Vietnamese advanced blitzkrieg-style, using armored columns supported by airpower to "fix" enemies in place, and then having the reinforcement waves bypass identified enemy positions to sustain the advance and cut enemy lines of supply. Regional capitals Kracheh and Stung Treng were captured in five days, then the port in Kampot was seized by an amphibious landing

The Khmer Rouge regime tried tackling the Vietnamese attacks head-on, but its starving and demoralized troops failed to mount an effective resistance. After just two weeks of fighting, Pol Pot’s clique ordered its troops to melt into the jungle to wage a guerilla resistance war and fled Phnom Penh in five Huey helicopters—only narrowly dodging a Vietnamese airstrike.

Only January 7, Vietnamese tanks rolled into Phnom Penh, linking up with commandos earlier landed by helicopter, and installed a new government under Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander. The Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later by the Vietnamese Navy in a bloody battle that saw twenty-two ships sunk.

China, infuriated by the overthrow of its client-state, launched a punitive invasion of mountainous Northern Vietnam on February 17. However, the People’s Liberation Army’s inexperienced troops and tanks sustained heavy losses from the defending Vietnamese. The invasion failed to divert Vietnamese troops from Cambodia, and a ceasefire was declared after a month.

The invasion brought an end to the Khmer Rouge’s monstrous genocide, but not to the war itself. The Khmer Rouge waged a bloody guerilla resistance war against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, assisted by two more Western-aligned resistance group.

Hanoi found to its surprise that it had become internationally ostracized for the invasion. Isolated from international aid, Vietnam suffered economically and became closely dependent on the Soviet Union. Many Khmer, for their part, saw the Vietnamese intervention as vindicating the Khmer Rouge’s worst fears of Hanoi’s imperial designs on Cambodia.

Throughout the 1980s, the United States, smarting over its defeat in Vietnam, collaborated with Thailand and China to funnel arms and support to resistance armies, some of which wound up in Khmer Rouge hands. The Vietnamese army ironically found itself on the other side of a brutal counterinsurgency war not unlike the one it had waged against the U.S. forces during the 1960s and 1970s.

The decades-long war finally wound to its end in the 1990s, with a Vietnamese withdrawal, deployment of a UN peacekeepers and the disbanding of the Khmer Rouge. The Hun Sen regime managed to subvert provisions for democratic elections, however, and remains in power to this day, now again courting Chinese support.

Vietnam’s invasion brought an end to a horrifying genocide. Furthermore, Hanoi can hardly be faulted for using force after foreign troops repeatedly invaded its territory and massacred thousands of its civilians.

However, Vietnamese generals and politicians have made clear the invasion was meant to serve Vietnam’s interests in expelling Chinese influence over Cambodia, not a humanitarian mercy mission. For some Khmer, the Vietnamese were seen as yet another foreign invader.

Thus the tragic conflict defies the natural desire to define the war in terms of black-and-white morality.

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

Image: Flikr.

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

There are several ways that the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency and industry partners are working to accomplish this feat in a matter of seconds. 

The Defense Department is interested in the technology seeing, tracking and finding hypersonic missiles is a crucial technology needed for defense, yet it is simply not enough. Threat information regarding the maneuvering, high-speed missile transiting between radar fields must be tracked, processed and communicated. Crucial data such as information about the flight trajectory needs to be organized, processed, sent through command and control and ultimately given to an interceptor or countermeasure of some kind. How can this happen? Can it happen fast enough to stop a hypersonic threat? 

“There’s a tremendous amount of data that comes out of that space,” Mike Ciffone, the director of Northrop Grumman’s Strategy, Capture and Operations for overhead persistent infrared and geospatial systems, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “How do you effectively utilize that data in terms of integrating that with your weapon?” 

There are several ways that the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency and industry partners are working to accomplish this feat in a matter of seconds. 

“One method is obviously data fusion and doing what fusion implies,” Ciffone said. “I need to get that data that comes from the satellites down to the ground and to weapons as quickly as possible. A method of doing that is potentially processing some of that data in real-time to a weapons database and transfer that data from the satellite system down to the weapon.”

Some of the data processing, for instance, can potentially be artificial intelligence-enabled and also performed at the point of data receipt, essentially wherever the incoming sensor data first arrives. Computer processing is becoming much faster and artificial intelligence-enabled due to a series of technical breakthroughs which enable incoming sensor data to be instantly analyzed, organized, assessed and streamlined. With this, key points, moments or objects of relevance can be found and sent to commanders at speeds exponentially faster than what may have previously been possible.

The success of this also naturally depends upon networking satellites and sensor nodes to one another, something which is a major focus for Pentagon, Missile Defense Agency and Northrop developers. This may be one key reason why the military services are quickly building and deploying faster, smaller and better networked Low and Medium Earth Orbit satellites. These new systems complement larger Geospatial satellite networks and are designed to closely cover wide swaths of expansive geographical areas by networking. This is exactly why Northrop Grumman is engineering, testing and planning to deploy a new network of smaller, high-resolution satellites called Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space and Sensor program. 

“When you look at a system like this where we have a constellation of many dozens of satellites in the future, you want to get a model of the performance of that integrated constellation,” Ciffone said. “And so having the digital engineering capability and the modeling and simulation tools allows us to model the performance of those complex architectures and get to optimize the system in a way now that we wouldn’t have traditionally been able to do with legacy methods. When it comes to national security, failure is not an option. The nation can’t afford to rely on unproven technology when lives are at stake.” 

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters

After the deadly Kabul attack, the CIA pins its hopes on an unconventional counterterrorism strategy.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

The Red Army was an early practitioner of mechanized warfare.

Here's What You Need to Know: For armament, the KV-1 had a single short-barrel seventy-six-millimeter L11 gun in the turret, as well as 7.62-millimeter machine guns in the hull and turret. There was even a third machine gun in the rear of the turret to fend off ambushing infantry.

In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, the brutal Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Panzer tanks overran hundreds of miles of Soviet territory and reached the outskirts of Moscow before winter weather and reinforcements from Siberia brought a halt to their advance. In a period when the Red Army seemed on the verge of collapse, a lumbering forty-eight-ton heavy tank that could absorb German tank shells like so many spitballs was one factor that bought it badly needed time.

The Red Army was an early practitioner of mechanized warfare, with thousands of light T-26 and BT tanks in its operational units when Germany invaded. It also also developed huge T-28 and T-35 multiturret heavy tanks to punch through enemy defenses. However, these hulking “land battleships” proved ill conceived: they had great difficulty negotiating rough terrain, and their large hulls were surprisingly poorly armored.

Therefore, in the late 1930s, designer Josef Kotin rushed into production the simpler, more densely armored Kliment Voroshilov, named after the Soviet defense minister. The early-model KV-1s boasted an extraordinary seventy to ninety millimeters of armor, rendering them impenetrable to the standard thirty-seven- or forty-five-millimeter antitank guns of the day. By contrast, early war German Panzers ranged in armor from ten to thirty-five millimeters and weighed less than half that.

For armament, the KV-1 had a single short-barrel seventy-six-millimeter L11 gun in the turret, as well as 7.62-millimeter machine guns in the hull and turret. There was even a third machine gun in the rear of the turret to fend off ambushing infantry.

The KV-1 debuted promisingly against the Finnish during the 1939–40 Winter War, with only one lost in action. The Soviets busily iterated, and the 1940-model KV-1s added higher-velocity seventy-six-millimeter F32 guns to that could bust Panzers with ease, and caked on even more armor. The KVs were organized into small sixteen- to twenty-two-vehicle battalions which served alongside T-34 mediums tanks in mixed brigades. The T-34 was cheaper and faster, had similar armament, and was also quite tough—but still not as tough as the KV-1.

The Soviets also produced over three hundred KV-2 tanks, which had a huge boxy turret mounting a massive 152-millimeter howitzer for swatting concrete bunkers. Though its shells could annihilate anything they hit, the fifty-seven-ton KV-2 was so unstable it couldn’t fire when on uneven terrain or while moving, and it did not reenter production after nearly all were lost in 1941.

Roadblock at Raseiniai

The Soviets Union only disposed of 337 KV-1s and 132 KV-2s in the Western military district when the Nazis invaded. German intelligence somehow failed to identify the threat they posed. However, the Wehrmacht should have had an inkling of its heavy tank problem from its experiences in the Battle of France, when Panzers faced heavily-armored Matilda II and Char B1 tanks that their guns could not penetrate. Unfortunately, the Allied heavies lacked the combined arms and logistical support to capitalize on initial battlefield success.

German commanders had also countered with heavy antiaircraft guns or howitzers in direct-fire mode to penetrate heavy armor. This was not ideal for an army on the attack, however, as the artillery had to be towed into position by soft-skinned vehicles and required minutes of setup time. Deploying them in front of advancing enemy tanks bristling with firepower was a risky business.

The shortcomings of this approach became evident in the Battle of Raseiniai, in the opening days of Operation Barbarossa. On June 23, German tankers in Czech-built 35(t) tanks were startled when KVs of the Second Tank Division rolled straight through their regiment, unperturbed by ricocheting thirty-seven-millimeter shells, to rampage amongst the infantry behind them. The 35(t)s had to wheel around and chase after the Russian heavies, eventually immobilizing some with hits to the tracks and driving off the rest.

However, one of the KVs penetrated far behind German lines before running out of fuel directly in the supply lines of the Sixth Panzer Division on June 24. When a fuel-and-ammunition convoy attempted to pass the seemingly abandoned tank, it opened fire and set twelve of the trucks ablaze. A battery of fifty-millimeter antitank guns began smacking the tank with high-velocity shells, but the Russian behemoth wiped it out it with cannon fire.

Then the Germans tried setting up a more powerful eighty-eight-millimeter flak gun seven hundred meters away to destroy the Russian tank, but it too was knocked out before it could land a shell on target.

That night, German pioneers tried sneaking up to the tank and blow it up with satchel charges. But as the sappers made a dash for the tank, its machine guns blazed into action, foiling the attack.

Perturbed that a single Russian tank had delayed an entire Panzer division for twenty-four hours, Gen. Erhard Raus coordinated a tank-infantry-artillery assault the following morning. The crew was stunned by repeated hits, including several penetrating shots from flak guns. German Schutzen finally climbed on top of the tank’s hull only for the turret to begin rotating! They hastily chucked grenades through some of the shell holes, bringing an end to the crew’s heroic stand.

Shock at Kamenevo

Despite the intimidating armor and firepower of the T-34 and KV tanks, the Wehrmacht seemed to roll on to victory after victory. After encircling and destroying over six hundred thousand Soviet troops in Kiev in September, the Germans finally committed to a drive on Moscow. The tip of the armored spear piercing northeast towards the Soviet capital was led by the Fourth Panzer Division’s Kampfgruppe Eberbach. This combined arms force included a motorcycle-infantry battalion, five companies of Panzer III and IV tanks, and nine towed eighty-eight- and 105-millimeter guns.

On the morning of October 6, 1941, the Kampfgruppe overran infantry and T-26 light tanks defending the town of Kamenevo, close to Mtsensk, 170 miles southwest of Moscow. However, as the Panzers rolled up the road leading to Tula, they were started to behold a vast armada of T-34 and KV tanks charging towards their left flank across an open plain. The night before, Col. Mikhail Katukov had hidden his Fourth Tank Brigade in an ambush position. The Soviet armor now pounced in a concentrated rush.

Heavy guns deployed on an overlooking ridge began picking off Soviet tanks, but there were too few to stem the tide. The armored horde overran the ridge, crushing several of the guns under their treads, and plunged into a wild melee with the undergunned Panzers. The only bright side for the Germans was at that short range, they had a slightly better chance of penetrating the thick Russian armor from the side.

Amidst the chaos of milling Russian tanks, Eberbach was eventually able to fall back, losing around a dozen tanks destroyed or damaged while knocking out eight of the Russian heavies—at least by their own count. The first winter snow arrived the following day. The Wehrmacht would secure the Mtsensk region three weeks later, but Katukov’s counterattack had fatally upset the pace of their advance, which fell just short of Moscow before the Russian winter froze it for good.

That victory came at great cost. The Red Army had lost nine hundred KV-1s and 2,300 T-34s by December 1941.

Unreliable Steel Beast

Through 1943 the Soviets built more than four thousand KV-1s, with successive model initially bolting on more and more armor to the overloaded vehicle. This trend peaked with model 1942 KV-1c, which boasted a ZiS-5 seventy-six-millimeter gun, a maximum of 130 millimeters of armor—and a road speed of just seventeen miles per hour! These assumed a major role in the Soviet offensives of 1942. There was also a run of around seventy KV-8s sporting flamethrowers in place of their main guns.

However, while the KVs were nearly invulnerable to early-war German tanks, they suffered from terrible visibility and defective transmissions. Frequent mechanical breakdowns and slow speed meant they struggled to keep up with the T-34s alongside which they served.

Finally recognizing these crushing defects, Soviet factories followed up with the lighter KV-1S, which selectively trimmed armor down to seventy-five millimeters, while fixing the transmission and vision slits. The more reliable vehicle could keep pace at twenty-eight miles per hour.

But by that time, new German tanks with improved armor and long-barreled seventy-five- or eighty-eight-millimeter guns could penetrate the KV’s formerly near-impervious armor. While the KVs were still tough, that no longer made up for their high expense and by then merely average firepower.

Thus, the KV-1 was fated to fade from prominence, unlike its stablemate the T-34. Only a few battalions of KVs served in the Battle of Kursk, the titanic armored clash of the summer of 1943. These proved completely outclassed in confrontations with new German Tiger and Panther tanks.

To counter that threat, Soviet factories churned out 148 KV-85s, a stopgap model upgraded with an eighty-five-millimeter gun. However, tank designers were already working on installing the gun on the T-34 tank, while the more heavily armed and armored Joseph Stalin series of tanks took over the KV’s role. Still, small numbers of surviving KV-1s would serve through the remainder of the war, including in the siege of Leningrad, the recapture of Crimea and the invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria in August 1945.

Despite their superior armor, the KV tanks simply sacrificed too much mobility, reliability and cost-efficiency to equal the success of the T-34. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the formidable tanks and their crews served as a vital bulwark in the desperate early months of the Nazi invasion.

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

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft.

Here's What You Need to Remember: China's island-chain defense is strategy on the cheap in relative terms. It’s an approach that would conjure a glint in Andrew Marshall’s eye.

The feel-good story of last month comes out of the U.S. Marine Corps, whose leadership has set in motion a crash effort to field anti-ship missiles for island warfare. Grabbing headlines most recently is the high-mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. In effect, HIMARS is a truck that totes around a launcher capable of disgorging a variety of precision-guided munitions. Some can pummel ships at sea.

And devil dogs will grin. As will their U.S. Navy shipmates. America’s navy can use all the joint-service help it can get as it squares off against China and Russia in their home waters. The Marine Corps Hymn proclaims that marines are “first to fight,” and that remains true in this age of Eurasian seacoasts abristle with long-range precision-guided armaments and missile-armed ships and planes prowling sea and sky. But that fight will commence at sea, not on distant beaches. Marines realize they may never reach Pacific battlegrounds without first winning command of waters that furnish an avenue into contested littorals.

Marine Commandant Robert Neller is fond of telling his comrades they must “fight to get to the fight.” His logic is remorseless. And marines will take up arms in company with navy and merchant-marine sailors who man the fleet. Expeditionary forces can’t even begin prying open the halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli until they defeat hostile navies and batter down “anti-access” defenses. But it goes further. In all likelihood, the fight will involve more than just the naval services. U.S. Air Force aviators may bear a hand in future high-sea imbroglios. Even the U.S. Army stands poised to get into the action as soldiers prepare for “multi-domain operations” spanning the terrestrial, air—and, yes, saltwater—domains.

In other words, future fights promise to be joint fights that mesh capabilities from naval and non-naval services. In that sense, the future promises to be a throwback to Pacific campaigns of old. It’s fitting, then, that marine magnates are peering both ahead and back in time as they orient the Corps toward today’s challenges. They want to harness newfangled technology to help win the war at sea while returning the service to its maritime heritage after seventeen years of battling insurgents and terrorists on dry land. In so doing they intend to bolster the efficacy of American maritime strategy.

First, technology. Nowadays sea power is no longer purely a matter for fleets. To the extent it ever was: that a ship’s a fool to fight a fort is an old adage, not one of recent coinage. Nor is sea power an exclusive province of navies. It is a joint enterprise whereby seagoing, aviation, and ground forces concentrate firepower at embattled scenes on the briny main to impose their will on the foe. The logic is plain. More and more shore-based weaponry can strike farther and farther out to sea as sensor technology and precision guidance mature. Fleets are beneficiaries of fire support from that weaponry so long as they cruise within its range.

Or as General Neller puts it, “There’s a ground component to the maritime fight.” Marines constitute “a naval force in a naval campaign; you have to help the ships control sea space. And you can do that from the land.”

And you can do it best from the land you already occupy. Emplaced on islands dotting the Pacific Ocean, HIMARS and kindred missile launchers could give Chinese ships of war a very bad day. If positioned along the “first island chain” paralleling the mainland’s coastline before the outbreak of war, marines and their joint-service and allied brethren could plausibly threaten to bar access to the Western Pacific and points beyond. And they could execute the threat in wartime, confining Chinese merchantmen, warships, and aircraft to the China seas to exact a frightful economic and military penalty should Beijing do things the United States and its allies hope to deter.

The Marine Corps’ missile procurement blitz will be instantly familiar to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In fact, the marines are mounting a version in miniature of the PLA’s “anti-access/area-denial,” or A2/AD, strategy. China’s armed forces want to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint forces out of the Western Pacific or take a heavy toll should they try to break in. Advanced technology likewise super-empowers U.S. and allied forces. They could strew anti-ship and anti-air missiles on landmasses comprising the first island chain while deploying additional munitions aboard aircraft, submarines, and surface craft lurking nearby.

Land forces—marines and soldiers, American and allied—can anchor the ground component of U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. Like A2/AD, island-chain defense leverages the symbiosis between sea- and shore-based implements of sea power. Joint firepower will help expeditionary forces fight their way to the fight. Or, in the case of the first island chain, likely battlefields already belong to allies or friends. Island warriors only need to hold friendly soil—and as military sages from Clausewitz to Moltke the Elder teach, tactical defense represents the strongest form of warfare.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Beijing ought to feel flattered indeed. And dismayed!

Second, culture. Sophisticated implements like HIMARS accomplish little unless used with skill and verve. The naval services are trying to rejuvenate martial cultures deadened by three ahistorical decades. Once upon a time—in fact, throughout their history until recent times—the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy assumed they had to fight for command of the sea before they could harvest the fruits of command. In other words, they assumed they had to wrest control of important waters from local defenders in order to render seaways safe enough to land troops, bombard coastal sites, or, in the air and missile age, loft firepower deep into the interior. They had to make the sea a protected sanctuary.

In other words, they assumed they had to do what naval services have done throughout history. Yet service chieftains instigated a cultural revolution in 1992, declaring in effect that the sea services were now exempt from the rigors of peer-on-peer combat. That year they issued a strategic directive titled “. . . From the Sea” proclaiming that, with the Soviet Union dead and the Soviet Navy rusting at its moorings, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could afford to reinvent themselves as “fundamentally different” sea services. With no peer antagonist to duel and none on the horizon, they were at liberty to assume away their most elemental function.

Not only could the sea services drop their guard; the leadership ordered them to. And they complied. Tactics and weaponry for prosecuting major combat languished in the wake of “. . . From the Sea.” The services first lost their fighting edge during the strategic holiday of the 1990s, and then while waging irregular warfare in the years since 9/11. Small wonder the services find themselves struggling to refresh their cultures for the new, old age of great-power strategic competition that’s upon us.

Few in uniform today remember the Cold War, when the prospect of battle was a daily fact of life. Preparing for strategic competition demands more than upgrading equipment or relearning skills grown stale. It demands that officialdom and senior commanders imprint bloody-minded attitudes on the sea services anew. Only thus will they extract maximum combat power out of new weapons and sensors, assuring hardware fulfills its potential.

And third, strategy. If highfalutin’ technology and the cultural counterrevolution pan out, the U.S. Marines and fellow services will have positioned themselves to execute a strategy that could give rival great powers fits. Look back again to look ahead. During the late Cold War, the founding chief of the U.S. Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, exhorted the Pentagon and the armed forces to fashion “competitive strategies” whereby they could compete at a low cost relative to American economic means while compelling the Soviets to compete at a prohibitive cost relative to their means. Over time the approach would render waging cold war unaffordable for Moscow.

Competitive strategy is a mode of competition worth rediscovering. The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft. In so doing they can deny China the access it must have to transact commerce, diplomacy, and military affairs in faraway regions. And they can close these narrow seas with systems such as HIMARS. While HIMARS anti-ship rounds are not cheap in absolute terms, dislodging rocketeers from Pacific islands would prove far more burdensome for the PLA. An allied strategy can compel Chinese forces to fight to get to the fight—flipping the logic of anti-access and area denial against them.

In short, island-chain defense is strategy on the cheap in relative terms. It’s an approach that would conjure a glint in Andrew Marshall’s eye.

Let’s call it a “Great Wall in reverse” strategy, with islands comprising the guard towers and joint sea power stationed on and around the islands forming the masonry in between. The legendary Great Wall was built to keep out Central Asian nomads who ravaged China from the steppes. Properly fortified, an archipelagic Great Wall can barricade China within the China seas—and thereby force the PLA to compete on allied terms at a fearsome cost to itself.

HIMARS, then, may look like a humble truck. In reality, it is far more: a tactical implement commanding significant strategic import. As the Marine Corps girds to fight in the air, on land, and sea, it ought to procure anti-ship weapons in bulk—and in haste.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, and author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Reuters