Diplomacy & Crisis News

Peter Suciu

Afghanistan, Asia

Wars are costly affairs though.

As American's longest war comes to an end, the Taliban have essentially retaken control of the nation, and for the insurgent forces, it is almost as if the past twenty years didn't matter. 

Their resolve was greater and Kabul is under their control again.  

The lives of women will likely change, TV and social media will likely be banned, and the country will fall into its old ways. Whether the country once again harbors terrorist groups like Al Qaeda is a variable that can't truly be answered yet, while other questions will likely remain just as elusive to determine an answer for now.

It will forever be impossible to ever know “if it was worth it” in regards to the U.S.-led coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

The Human Cost 

While the war will likely be debated for years to come, possibly with many different opinions, it is even now possible to put the cost of it in perspective.  

According to figures from the Associated Press, 2,448 U.S. service members gave their lives, while the BBC reported that more than 450 British military personnel were killed. In total, since the war against the Taliban began in 2001, there have been more than 3,500 coalition deaths—while a further 20,660 U.S. personnel were injured in action.

Upwards of 66,000 Afghan national military and police personnel were also killed through April of this year. A total of 444 aid workers and 72 journalists also saw their lives cut shot in Afghanistan since 2001.

Additionally, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, some 111,000 civilians have been killed or injured since it became recording the numbers in 2009. That would not account for those injured or killed in the years between 2001 and 2008, nor from the most recent fighting.

The Financial Burden 

Wars are costly affairs, and according to U.S. Department of Defense figures, between October 2001 until September 2019, the total military expenditure in Afghanistan reached $778 billion; meanwhile, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent $44 billion on reconstruction projects.

However, that number doesn't include the spending in Pakistan, which has been used as a base for Afghan-related operations. In total, based on figures from a Brown University study from 2019, the total spending was $978 billion.

Moreover, before the withdrawal of forces was completed, the United States and NATO had pledged to provide the Afghan government with $4 billion until 2024 to fund the Afghan military. However, given that the country has fallen to the Taliban, it is likely NATO will save on that amount!

The Lingering Human Toll 

Even as the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and continues to scale back in Iraq, a Harvard University’s Kennedy School and Brown University Costs of War project study found that the United States will continue to pay for the health care, disability, burial and other costs for the roughly four million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, costing taxpayers some $2 trillion.  

Those costs will only peak after 2048, according to the Associated Press.  

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

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

Retirement, Americas

The income from the benefits is designed to replace 40 percent of a person’s pre-retirement income, according to the Social Security Administration itself. But 40 percent of one’s pre-retirement income is not enough for most Americans to live comfortably on, especially without other sources of money.

Here's What You Need to Remember:  If a person is able to save $5,000 per year from the age of twenty-five until the age of seventy and deposit it into a Roth IRA with an average yearly return of 8 percent, by the age of seventy, they will be sitting on more than $2 million, although this amount will decrease somewhat in real terms because of inflation.

When Americans reach retirement age, it is expected that they will file for Social Security, which pays a reliable monthly benefit for the rest of their life. The program, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal in 1935, was regarded as an effective anti-poverty program for elderly Americans, and quickly became one of the most popular government programs in the United States. It still is; according to AARP, a senior citizens’ advocacy group, 96 percent of Americans want to continue or increase the payments.

However, while Social Security unquestionably keeps elderly Americans out of poverty, its ability to provide for them above a basic level is limited. The income from the benefits is designed to replace 40 percent of a person’s pre-retirement income, according to the Social Security Administration itself. But 40 percent of one’s pre-retirement income is not enough for most Americans to live comfortably on, especially without other sources of money.

There are some ways that this income can be supplemented. A key way is to wait as long as possible to claim benefits. Waiting until the age of seventy to file for Social Security, for instance, can increase the monthly payments by 25 to 30 percent. Retiring later can also help a person increase the size of their benefits, since the monthly amount is based on the thirty-five highest-paying years of a person’s career and most people make more money at the end of their careers than at the beginning.

Even so, these tricks can only increase the amount by so far. While it is possible to live on nothing except Social Security payments, the limited quality of life that they provide is not what many people hope for in their retirement. To enjoy a more comfortable retirement, it is vital for families to save money and create a nest egg.

There are several ways that this can be done, but the two most effective are by opening a 401(k) and a Roth IRA account during one’s career. Although these differ slightly, they are both essentially tax-free retirement accounts that can be invested during one’s life. Although they cannot be withdrawn until a person’s retirement, they can grow considerably if invested in a relatively safe fund with a reasonable rate of return—such as an S&P 500 index fund, which averages a return of 10 percent per year.

Consider the following. If a person is able to save $5,000 per year from the age of twenty-five until the age of seventy and deposit it into a Roth IRA with an average yearly return of 8 percent, by the age of seventy, they will be sitting on more than $2 million, although this amount will decrease somewhat in real terms because of inflation.

Even if the annual deposit is decreased to only $2,000, the amount is still more than $800,000—and in both scenarios, the retirees will receive Social Security payments on top of this.

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

Image: Reuters.

Russia signals an openness to working with the Taliban.

Stephen Silver

Pandemic, Americas

The California doctor was charged with one count each of wire fraud and of false statements related to health care matters.

As vaccine mandates begin to go into effect everywhere from New York City restaurants to the Las Vegas Raiders’ home stadium to next January’s International CES, the idea is to incentivize people to get vaccinated. 

This has, as expected, led to demand for fake vaccine cards, or even repurposing real ones for sale. And now we have one of the first major arrests for carrying out such a scheme. 

Recently, a Chicago pharmacist was arrested for selling more than one hundred coronavirus vaccination cards to eleven buyers on eBay. The thirty-four-year-old man sold the cards for $10 each, according to the Department of Justice. He was charged with twelve counts of theft of government property. 

The pharmacist worked at a company that distributed vaccines for the coronavirus.  

It’s important to note that while there has been concern about the forgery of the vaccine cards, the Chicago case concerned vaccination cards that are genuine.

“We take seriously, and will vigorously investigate, any criminal offense that contributes to the distrust around vaccines and vaccination status,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a press statement. “The Department of Justice and its law enforcement partners are committed to protecting the American people from these offenses during this national emergency.” 

“Knowingly selling COVID vaccination cards to unvaccinated individuals puts millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death,” Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie Jr. of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office said in the press statement. “To put such a small price on the safety of our nation is not only an insult to those who are doing their part in the fight to stop COVID-19, but a federal crime with serious consequences.”

Back in July, a naturopathic doctor in California was arrested and charged with both selling “homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets” and with falsifying coronavirus vaccination cards.  

The California doctor was charged with one count each of wire fraud and of false statements related to health care matters, in what the federal government described as “the first federal criminal fraud prosecution related to homeoprophylaxis immunizations and fraudulent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 vaccination record cards.” 

Back in April, months before the California case, a group of state attorneys general wrote a letter to the CEOs of Twitter, eBay, and Shopify, warning of the “deceptive marketing and sales of fake COVID vaccine cards.”  

“It has come to our attention that your platforms are being used to market and sell blank or fraudulently completed COVID vaccine cards bearing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logo,” the letter stated. “We are deeply concerned about this use of your platforms to spread false and misleading information regarding COVID vaccines. The false and deceptive marketing and sales of fake COVID vaccine cards threatens the health of our communities, slows progress in getting our residents protected from the virus, and are a violation of the laws of many states.” 

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

Ethen Kim Lieser

Tax Refund,

These particular refunds are due to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was able to waive federal tax on up to $10,200 of unemployment benefits, or $20,400 for married couples filing jointly, that were received by taxpayers last year. Unemployment benefits are generally treated as taxable income, according to the tax agency.

Here's What You Need to Remember: According to the National Taxpayer Advocate, “this filing season was the quintessential definition of a perfect storm—a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from several negative and unpredictable factors—resulting in tens of millions of taxpayers experiencing hardship and uncertainty in trying to reach a live assistor.

It has, unfortunately, been the same old story for the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department, which have for months have been struggling to keep up with their ongoing responsibilities to promptly issue the various government-issued payments to eligible Americans.

Do take note that just a few weeks ago, the agencies were able to disburse a sizeable batch of 1.5 million refunds averaging $1,686 from 2020 unemployment benefits—and more checks are slated to head out to Americans this month. 

These particular refunds are due to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was able to waive federal tax on up to $10,200 of unemployment benefits, or $20,400 for married couples filing jointly, that were received by taxpayers last year. Unemployment benefits are generally treated as taxable income, according to the tax agency.

The IRS has noted that since May, it has issued in total nearly nine million unemployment refunds with a value of more than $10 billion.

“The IRS will continue reviewing and adjusting tax returns in this category this summer,” the tax agency said in a release. “The IRS continues to review the simplest returns and then turns to more complex returns.”

Refunds Sent Out Automatically

In order to receive the refunds, for most Americans, there is no action needed on their part. The IRS has confirmed that it will automatically adjust tax returns if individuals are indeed eligible for any cash refund.

“Because the [approval of the refund] occurred after some people filed their taxes, the IRS will take steps in the spring and summer to make the appropriate change to their return, which may result in a refund,” the agency states.

In addition, “taxpayers will receive letters from the IRS, generally within thirty days of the adjustment, informing them of what kind of adjustment was made (such as refund, payment of IRS debt payment or payment offset for other authorized debts) and the amount of the adjustment.”

IRS Overwhelmed

Do understand that throughout the past several months, the IRS has worked around the clock to issue tens of millions of $1,400 stimulus checks, the monthly expanded child tax credits, and “plus-up” payments—not to mention the traditional refunds from federal tax returns.

Because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and staff shortages, the agency has reported that it still has more than thirty-five million individual and business tax returns to process—a massive backlog that is believed to be four times larger compared to the end of the 2019 filing season.

According to the National Taxpayer Advocate, “this filing season was the quintessential definition of a perfect storm—a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from several negative and unpredictable factors—resulting in tens of millions of taxpayers experiencing hardship and uncertainty in trying to reach a live assistor. … In the coming months, the IRS must work through its backlog of tax returns and be current in processing its correspondence while focusing on rebuilding itself to become a more efficient and taxpayer-centric organization.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Kabul’s swift collapse leaves New Delhi with significant security concerns.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday urged countries to step up support to Haiti as the country recovers from a deadly earthquake under the clouds of a tropical storm.  

The fall of Afghanistan reveals hard truths about U.S. talk of human rights.

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

“Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America,” the Social Security Administration claims on its website.  

Here's What You Need to Remember: “Question whether the other person or organization truly needs to know your child's SSN. And ask whether you can share other information instead. Keep private documents secure. You may also want to get a safe and keep all your private documents locked up, including birth certificates, Social Security cards and tax forms.”

As a proud parent of however many children one may have, it might never have crossed one’s mind why fraudsters would want to get their hands on Social Security numbers of minors.

But a 2018 child identity fraud study conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that more than one million children, with the majority being seven years old or younger, fell victim to identity fraud the previous year. 

“Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America,” the Social Security Administration claims on its website.  

The research further revealed that children were more likely to become victims of identity theft than adults following a data breach.  

“These breaches can occur at different organizations that commonly have children’s data, including schools, doctors’ offices, daycares, and summer camps. Thieves may also target parents and try to get them to share their children’s Social Security number and other personal information,“ according to the financial site myFICO. “These attacks could come in a variety of forms, from phishing emails to dumpster diving. As is always the case, be cautious about what you share online and over the phone.“

Moreover, in what may be a surprise, “the fraudster isn’t always a stranger. In many cases, the thief may be a parent, family friend or relative who has access to the child’s SSN. Familiar fraud can be particularly difficult to deal with as you might not want to press charges against a close friend or family member,” it adds.  

Children Targeted

Children aren’t able to obtain a bank loan or sign up for a credit card on their own, but the lack of credit history could work in the favor of thieves.  

“In a sense, they’re clean slates. Plus, parents rarely try to check their child’s credit, which means the fraud might not be detected right away,” according to my FICO. 

“Rather than using the child’s identity directly, fraudsters often use a stolen SSN to create a synthetic identity,” the financial website states. “To do this, they combine the real SSN with fake identifiers, such as a fake name and date of birth. They can then use the synthetic identity in many of the same ways, but there’s even less of a chance that the SSN holder will find out. And, in some cases, the same stolen SSN gets used to create dozens of synthetic IDs.” 

Preventing Identity Theft

For most victims of child identity theft, the parents necessarily won’t be aware until years later—perhaps when the minor tries to get his or her first bank account or loan. But before having to be mired in such an unsavory situation, there are indeed steps that parents can take right now to prevent identity theft.

“Limit what you share about your children on social media. While you may want to share big announcements and pictures online, the information (such as their birthday) could be compromising,” the website asserts.

“Don’t share their SSN,” the website warns. “Question whether the other person or organization truly needs to know your child's SSN. And ask whether you can share other information instead. Keep private documents secure. You may also want to get a safe and keep all your private documents locked up, including birth certificates, Social Security cards and tax forms.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn. This article is being republished due to reader interest.  

Image: Reuters

Afghanistan faces a “cultural disaster”, following the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces, a UN Special Rapporteur said on Tuesday, in a statement urging countries to provide urgent assistance to human rights defenders, including those working on women’s and cultural rights, as well as artists, trying to flee the country. 

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy,

The 6.2 percent bump may be music to the ears of many Social Security recipients, but according to the financial site Motley Fool, the program has been stingy on its adjustments for far too many years.

Here's What You Need to Remember: It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own. Consistently funding an IRA or 401(k) plan could make it so that seniors are less reliant on Social Security—and more financially stable once their time in the workforce comes to an end.

For the past several months, the consumer price index, the primary indicator of inflation in the United States, has been steadily trending upward—and there appears to be no end in sight.

As inflation continues on its current trajectory throughout this year, Social Security’s cost of living adjustment (COLA) for 2022 is expected to receive a major boost as well. COLA is calculated each year based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W.

Higher Estimate

Just how much? According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, the data now points toward a possible 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients for 2022. This new figure is up from the 6.1 percent estimate that the group projected last month—and it would be the largest increase in nearly forty years.

“The estimate is significant because the COLA is based on the average of the July, August, and September CPI data,” Mary Johnson, a Social Security policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League, said in a statement.

“With one-third of the data needed to calculate the COLA already in, it increasingly appears that the COLA for 2022 will be the highest-paid since 1983 when it was 7.4 percent,” she continued.

For comparison, in 2021, the Social Security COLA was only 1.3 percent. That amounted to a roughly $20 extra monthly payment for the average retiree.

SSA Too Stingy?

The 6.2 percent bump may be music to the ears of many Social Security recipients, but according to the financial site Motley Fool, the program has been stingy on its adjustments for far too many years.

“Seniors on Social Security are entitled to an annual raise known as a cost-of-living adjustment or COLA. The purpose of COLAs is to help seniors maintain their buying power when living expenses inevitably rise,” the expert wrote.

“But over the past twelve years, Social Security COLAs have averaged just under 1.4 percent. That’s hardly been enough to keep pace with inflation,” she added.

With this in mind, the expert noted that younger people should save more during their working years so that they are “less reliant on Social Security.” According to recent data released by the Social Security Administration (SSA), approximately 20 percent of married couples and 40 percent of singles receive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security benefits.

“Unfortunately, Social Security isn’t perfect, and it’s seniors who have been paying the price for a long time. It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own. Consistently funding an IRA or 401(k) plan could make it so that seniors are less reliant on Social Security—and more financially stable once their time in the workforce comes to an end,” she advises.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Military Technology,

The Israeli service often extensively modifies American military equipment to fit the IDF’s unique mission.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Israel's operating conditions of harsh desert and urban conditions require modifications to American equipment to allow the American equipment to thrive in the environment encountered by the IDF. Here are four great examples of how American military equipment has been adjusted to fit the needs of IDFs unique mission.  

The Israel Defense Forces field a wide variety of American military equipment, due to significant amounts of American military aid to Israel. However, American equipment has not always been the best suited to the tough desert and urban conditions encountered by the IDF. As a result, American equipment in Israeli service is often extensively modified to fit the IDF’s unique mission. Here are some unique derivatives of American equipment that the IDF fields.

1. MAPATS Antitank Missile

The IDF has had a long relationship with the antitank guided missile. In the long desert approaches that surround Israel, antitank missiles can direct the flow of combat and are very effective weapons. While the first ATGMs fielded by Israel were the French SS.10 and SS.11, it was replaced in the late 1970s by the American TOW (Orev in IDF service) missile. However, due to its wire-guided nature, the TOW has range limitations and cannot be used in all circumstances. Bodies of water, trees, and power lines can disrupt the TOW’s guidance or endanger the TOW’s operator. As a result, the Israelis developed a version of the TOW that used laser guidance to avoid these issues. A new engine and improved warhead also gave it superior penetration and speed to the original TOW. The MAPATS has seen export success, although it is being replaced by other, newer Israeli ATGMs of wholly indigenous design.

2. Israeli M16 and CAR-15 Variants

While nominally most of the IDF has switched over to the Tavor, variants of the M16 continue to serve in the IDF. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, these rifles were the frontline rifles of the IDF, replacing the heavier FN FAL and the Israeli Galil (although Galil carbines remained in service in the Armored Corps, due to their shorter lengths with stocks folded). In the aughts, Israel set about modernizing these rifles. Due to the largely urban nature of combat the IDF Infantry engaged in, the long twenty-inch and 14.5-inch barrels of the M16s and Colt 653s were deemed too long. The barrels were sawn off to around 12.5-inch length, and the resulting carbines were called “mekut’zrar.” Furniture on these varied, but always had an eye towards the practical. Fabric bands could be wrapped around the plastic handguards to make them more rigid and stop them from creaking, red dots were added straight onto the carry handles, and stocks were often replaced with modern six-position M4 stocks. The results were relatively modern, lightweight carbines on the cheap. Mekut’zrar carbines are still seen in service today, although they’ve been supplanted by new stocks of M4s and the Tavor series.

3. Machbet Self-Propelled Antiaircraft Gun

While the M163 VADS was always considered to be kind of a “stopgap” solution for the short-range antiair defense solution for the U.S. military, the VADS saw significant Israeli service in the 1982 Lebanon War. In addition to scoring a kill on a Syrian MiG-21, they provided valuable ground support, suppressing infantry in urban and mountainous areas with their rapid-fire twenty-millimeter cannons. While they were phased out of American service in the 1990s and replaced with the better-armored but slower-firing M6 Bradley Linebacker, Israel opted to upgrade its VADS to the new “Machbet” standard instead, fitting an optoelectronic tracking system, better radar, a quad-Stinger pod, and an ADA network datalink to the VADS to make it effective against a wider variety of targets and faster reacting.

4. The F15 Baz Meshopar

Israel was one of the first customers for the American F-15 fighter. It has served admirably as the backbone of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) throughout the late 1970s to the present day. In addition to its superb performance in the air-to-air role during the 1982 Lebanon War, the F-15 was also used in Operation Opera and Operation Wooden Leg, both long-range-strike missions. These were done with the addition of some indigenous guidance and sensor pods. While Israel later acquired variants of the ground-attack F-15E Strike Eagle under the name F15I Ra’am, they also updated their first- and second-gen F-15s to a new standard with indigenous electronics and parts, under the name F-15 Baz Meshopar, or Baz 2000. The upgrade included a new radar with AIM-120 and Israeli Python missile compatibility, redone cockpits with a new throttle and stick and glass cockpit, and improved electronic-warfare capability. This upgrade program ran from 1995 to 2001, and these upgraded F-15s are expected to continue to serve far into the future.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

military, Americas

The vessel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2008.

In 1996, actor Kelsey Grammer starred in the largely forgettable military comedy Down Periscope, in which a disgraced U.S. Navy officer is given command of an obsolete diesel submarine that was recommissioned to participate in a special naval war game. The movie's screenplay should have been “deep sixed” before the film was actually made, but one takeaway from it is that the U.S. Navy by the 1990s was a fully nuclear-powered fighting force. 

Yet, it had been only a few years earlier that the Navy retired and decommissioned the USS Blueback (SS-581). Laid down by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation of Pascagoula, Mississippi in April 1957 and launched in May 1959, she was the last non-nuclear submarine to enter service in the U.S. Navy. Serving until October 1990, she was also the final conventionally powered combat-capable submarine to be decommissioned. 

The U.S. Navy had only become a fully nuclear submarine fleet some six years before Down Periscope was made, and moreover, the fleet still maintained the research submarine USS Dolphin, which wasn't retired until 2007. Perhaps some screenwriters should have done their homework! 

The Barbel-Class 

In addition to being the last combat-capable diesel-electric attack submarine commissioned into the U.S. Navy, the USS Blueback was also notable for being just one of three Barbel-class boats to be constructed, and the only of the three to be maintained as a museum ship. 

The class was notable in that it actually incorporated numerous, even radical engineering improvements over the previous diesel-electric subs, including the first to be built with the “teardrop-shaped” hull that had been tested on the USS Albacore (AGSS-569), as well as the first to feature a single propeller. The hull design was critical in that it increased underwater speed dramatically while it also enabled the submarine to be far more maneuverable.  

Additionally, the Barbel-class utilized a combined control room, attack center and conning tower in the same space in the hull.  

Notable USS Blueback Accomplishments 

During her thirty-one years in service with the U.S. Navy, USS Blueback participated in Pacific Fleet operations, which included a transiting of the Panama Canal. In September 1961, she also set a record by traveling 5,340 miles from Yokosuka, Japan to San Diego entirely submerged.  

The submarine also earned two battle stars for her service in the Vietnam War.

Shortly before her decommissioning in 1990, USS Blueback was provided by the U.S. Navy for use in the film The Hunt for Red October, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. Standing in for a Soviet submarine, a film crew was reported to have been allowed to film in the torpedo room, while some of her crew were said to have been paid to wear Soviet Navy uniforms. The submarine had previously appeared in the 1970s TV series Hawaii Five-O.  

After her decommissioning, the USS Blueback was struck from the Naval Vessel Register. In February 1994, the boat was acquired by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), which towed her back to Portland. She serves as a maritime memorial and is an interactive part of the museum. Visitors can walk through the 219-foot submarine to get a glimpse of how the crew of eighty-five sailors and officers lived on the boat. There are two tours for guests—a basic forty-five-minute guided tour and a two-hour long tour that is guided by a submarine veteran, who provides insight on the technical workings of the submarine.

The vessel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2008.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ethen Kim Lieser

Social Security,

According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, that boost could come in the form of a 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment, which would be the highest registered in nearly forty years.

The data over the past several months have signaled that the consumer price index (CPI)—the primary indicator of inflation in the United States—has been steadily pointing north.

And as inflation continues on its current trajectory, millions of senior citizens across the country have voiced frustration that their dollars just won’t stretch far these days. In the worst cases, some seniors are even being forced to choose between medicine and food.

However, there could be much-needed help in a few months, as Social Security’s cost of living adjustment (COLA) for next year is expected to receive a major boost. According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, that boost could come in the form of a 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment, which would be the highest registered in nearly forty years. Last year, the Social Security COLA was only 1.3 percent.

“The estimate is significant because the COLA is based on the average of the July, August, and September CPI data,” Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League, said in a statement. “With one-third of the data needed to calculate the COLA already in, it increasingly appears that the COLA for 2022 will be the highest-paid since 1983 when it was 7.4 percent.”

Short-Term Solution?

The sizeable bump in Social Security payouts may solve the financial problems of some seniors, but there are experts who believe that the Social Security Administration (SSA) needs to be even more aggressive with its adjustments going forward.

“We’re not seeing any improvement in the share of people who have incomes above the Elder Index (a measure of the cost of living for older U.S. adults),” Jan E. Mutchler, professor of gerontology and director of the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said in an interview with CNBC. “We’re seeing sustained high levels of people who do not appear to have the resources they really need to get by in retirement.”

Diversify Income

According to the SSA, approximately twenty percent of married couples and forty percent of singles receive at least ninety percent of their income from the Social Security program.

“Over the past twelve years, Social Security COLAs have averaged just under 1.4 percent,” a Motley Fool expert wrote. “That’s hardly been enough to keep pace with inflation.”

Against this backdrop, the expert suggested that younger workers need to start preparing for their retirements now.

“Unfortunately, Social Security isn’t perfect, and it’s seniors who have been paying the price for a long time,” she said. “It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Stephen Silver

North Korea, Asia

North Korea was scheduled to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, although negotiations stalled at some point.

Since the start of the pandemic, North Korea has continued to claim that it has zero cases of coronavirus, much to the disbelief of the worldwide medical and diplomatic establishments.

Some reports earlier this month indicated that North Korea appears not to have a strategy for mitigating the virus. The Voice of America has reported that the North Korean regime “has done little to advance the process to receive vaccines from COVAX,” which is an international organization for distributing coronavirus vaccines.

North Korea was scheduled to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, although negotiations stalled at some point.

“News of countries vaccinating their people or life returning to normal is rarely, if ever, transmitted within North Korea, perhaps over fears that it might trigger resentment against the regime for its failure to secure shots,” Pratik Jakhar of BBC Monitoring wrote in an op-ed published by Foreign Policy this month. “In contrast, the propaganda apparatus has been unusually quick to report on cases rising abroad and the spread of COVID-19 variants.”

Now, a new report says North Korea is once again reporting zero positive tests.

The North Korean regime has told the World Health Organization (WHO)    that they still have no cases, following the testing of 693 people. That brings the total of those tested in North Korea to 35,947, according to NK News.

An Amnesty International report last July looked at North Korea’s claims about having zero coronavirus cases.

“North Koreans are well aware that when making contact with family or friends living in South Korea, there is always a chance that they are being wiretapped,” a North Korean pharmacist told Amnesty International. “So phone calls and letters are usually made under the premise that someone might be listening to or reading their conversations. They will never say a word related to COVID-19, as this can cost their lives.” 

Last week, the president of South Korea said in a speech that he hopes to cooperate with North Korea on fighting the pandemic. This includes inviting North Korea into the Northeast Asia Cooperation Initiative for Infectious Disease Control and Public Health. That organization currently consists of South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Mongolia, and the United States. Its goals include “information sharing, shared stockpiling of medical supplies and joint training of COVID-19 response personnel.” 

“It is clear that the COVID-19 threat is not temporary, which makes [the initiative] even more important,” Moon Jae-in said in the speech.  

“For us, division is the greatest obstacle to our growth and prosperity and a tenacious barrier that obstructs permanent peace,” the South Korean president added. “We can also remove this barrier.”

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

John Allen Gay

Afghanistan, Asia

The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.

“Afghanistan,” wrote Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands in 2019, “is best seen not as a morality play but as a classic foreign policy dilemma in which all the options are bad ones.” The tragic scenes unfolding in the country this week must be understood in this context. Some pundits are proclaiming that the U.S. withdrawal was an evil act and that continued U.S. participation in the conflict was clearly the morally superior choice. They hold that the ongoing U.S. presence was cheap—their view of tens of U.S. casualties and tens of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Their position ignores the high moral costs of remaining in the war, our duties to our own nation, and the profound moral failures of our partner government. Afghanistan was a land of nasty tradeoffs that any moral declamations must reckon with. These are tradeoffs that we will no longer be making.

The price of fighting

Above all we must remember that war is a morally costly activity. Even the most careful and well-intentioned major military operation will kill many civilians, displace many more, and devastate civilian property. This was especially true in Afghanistan. Like many insurgent forces, the Taliban do not wear uniforms and can operate in civilian areas. As the conflict grew more unpopular, the U.S. assistance mission had turned to airstrikes to keep the Taliban at bay while keeping U.S. casualties down. This had driven up civilian casualties. With the Taliban growing in strength and the regular Afghan military hesitant to fight without air support, these casualties would likely have remained high.

Fighting in the conflict had been heavily concentrated in rural areas; Kabul had been safer for the common Afghan. And our view of Afghanistan is heavily shaped by Kabul—it is more accessible to journalists, especially Western journalists, and is home to many English-speaking professionals. This is the part of the country that had benefited the most from the establishment of the 2001-2021 Afghan government. As Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown, writing with former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan John R. Allen, pointed out, drawing on survey work she had done in Afghanistan,

Urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks. For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women.

It is unsurprising that the media’s parachute regiment thus found a country eager to continue the war, eager to have American forces remain and American airstrikes continue—and a country that would change profoundly under new rulers.

The picture in rural areas was more complicated, Felbab-Brown and Allen wrote:

For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. […] Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live—experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life.

What does that add up to? They write: “peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.” Felbab-Brown’s survey is not the only data point here. 2018 saw a public peace movement in Afghanistan, one that pressured Taliban and government alike, with demonstrators marching barefoot hundreds of miles through dangerous terrain to show support for a peace process. Voices like the rural women or the peace marchers do not fit in a clean narrative of good and evil, of a battle between miniskirted modernity and bearded barbarism. The war was costing Afghanistan tens of thousands of lives and regular mass displacement, and many Afghans had come to favor peace at any price.

The price for America

The war’s cost for the United States was high, too, even if it wasn’t like that of Vietnam or World War II. U.S. casualties would surely have followed had we broken the Doha Agreement that had kept the Taliban off our backs for more than a year. Too many in Washington see our side of the war as an abstraction and speak of U.S. involvement in conflicts in euphemisms like “kinetic action,” “presence,” or “light footprint.” Consider, then, this recent Associated Press profile of a chaplain who had spent the War on Terror caring for the families of U.S. war dead and for the mortuary technicians who prepared bodies for funerals:

Some families seem to sink into a catatonia that he knows means he should give them space. Others come clutching photos of the lost or otherwise tip [him] off that his conversation might help. […] Sometimes, he’ll find a child hasn’t been told why they’re there. Others pose wrenching questions, like a boy who asked the minister who would play catch with him now that his father was gone. […] The work can bring some of the steeliest to crumble. He’s seen drivers who transported families of the dead bawling and embalmers who reached their breaking point and found a new profession. A handful of times over the years, a mortuary staffer has died by suicide or suffered through an attempt.

The war had also produced a swarm of veterans bearing physical, mental, and moral injuries. Some came back as different people. Some hid their problems in alcohol or drugs. Some died by their own hand. And even the many who came back well lost time with family—something that surely has been one factor in the many divorces in the military community.

There was also a military cost to the war. Time spent preparing for deployment, deploying, and redeploying is time unavailable for training more relevant to current U.S. security needs. Our air forces have spent the last two decades flying racetracks over places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, waiting to be called for a strike; they spent the decade before that enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq. All that time, effort, and money went into present-tense consumption of military power, not future-tense development of military power. We spent the first decades of the “Pacific Century” using land power, not building sea power. We operated in uncontested airspace with persistent surveillance and reliable communications, an environment nothing like what we’ll confront in a major power war. Our military was eating its seed corn; China’s was putting every last kernel in the ground. That fact has a moral reality, too. Every day it looks more and more likely that U.S.-China relations will define the middle of the century. Our military is less prepared to play its part in that. In conflict, that could end up costing us more dead in a few hours than we’ve lost in Afghanistan in a few decades. It could make that conflict more likely.

And, of course, the war’s financial cost was nothing to sneeze at. We were slated to spend $14 billion this year, and, as RAND’s Michael Mazarr pointed out, this number could have climbed if we’d stayed and the Taliban had continued to advance. That means we would be spending around what the federal government spends every year on children’s health insurance. It’s about half of what we spend on health research and training. It’s roughly what the Navy spends on shipbuilding or the amount the Navy and Air Force each separately spend on buying aircraft. It’s about the value of United Airlines. And it’s certainly a big amount for a country to be sending abroad when more than two million of its own citizens don’t have running water or indoor plumbing.

A bad government

Working with the Afghan government had a moral price, too. We had to overlook a lot of corruption—much of which was fueled by the money we pumped into Afghanistan. Uprooting that corruption would have been akin to uprooting the Afghan system. We had to overlook massive poppy production—and when we fought it, we pushed money toward the Taliban. We had to overlook pedophilic kidnappings by Afghan military leaders. We had to overlook nasty partners like General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who once suffocated hundreds of prisoners of war and who has twice caused political crises by kidnapping and torturing high-profile rivals. U.S.-backed strike teams and militias were no strangers to serious abuses too.

The Afghan military and Afghanistan’s political leaders bear the most moral responsibility, after the Taliban, for the situation in the country now. After decades of fighting, these men gave up and cut deals with the Taliban. Those who wanted to stand their ground found themselves isolated and abandoned by their comrades in arms. Pundits may speak of Biden abandoning the women of Afghanistan. This is navel-gazing. The women of Afghanistan were abandoned by their husbands, sons, and fathers. The Afghan military’s surrender was an act of cowardice and injustice against their own country and their fellow citizens. We would be outraged if our military did this to us. To be sure, the United States could have better prepared for Kabul’s fall, and there have been ignominious moments in the withdrawal—see the aerial evacuation of dogs, for example. But the ugly scenes at Kabul’s airport would not have happened had the Afghan military held its ground.

The higher levels of Afghanistan’s military leadership failed, too. They obviously did not prepare a competent fighting force. Their corruption certainly helped with that—some frontline personnel had not been paid in months, and many lacked supplies. Yet they also failed to deploy what they had well. All of Afghanistan’s major cities fell in a matter of days because the Taliban had methodically cut them off, one by one, in the preceding weeks and months. The Afghan military lost everything because it had tried to hold too much.

Afghanistan’s political leaders deserve the blame most of all. They oversaw all of this, and their venality, selfishness, and incompetence undercut support for the government.

This cuts into a set of deeper moral issues for the United States. It is right for us to wish the people of other lands well and at times to help them. Indifference would be a failure of solidarity—a denial of our common humanity. But a solidarity-only ethic denies subsidiarity. Humans are not abstractions—rational souls floating in the void. We are incarnate. We live in particular times, places, and cultures. These particularities impose duties on us—to our family and polity—that are more immediate than our duties to humanity at large. It is natural and just that Americans rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and not after, say, the fall of Mekelle or Kilinochchi. The Afghan state and its security forces bore the same duties to Afghanistan—duties they abandoned. Thus President Joe Biden’s statement Monday: “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”

Behind all this, we must remember that the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place because we were victims. The de facto government of Afghanistan hosted a notorious international terrorist group. That group then killed thousands within the United States. We drove out this government and replaced it with a better one. We then spent nearly two decades strengthening the new government and providing reconstruction aid. We sacrificed thousands of our troops’ lives. We went above and beyond any reasonable duty that could be imposed on a victim of aggression. Was Abyssinia obliged to rebuild post-Mussolini Italy? How many decades of support did China owe post-Imperial Japan?

The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.

John Allen Gay is executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society.

Image: Reuters.

A review of Christophe Jaffrelot's "Modi's India", which examines the rise of Hindu nationalism and ethnic democracy under Narendra Modi.

Peter Suciu

Afghanistan, Asia

Biden may be forever remembered as the president who lost the war in Afghanistan.

Twenty years ago this August, the mainstream media was focused on the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a twenty-four-year-old intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The case attracted attention as it was revealed she had been having an affair with former Gary Condit, a former Democratic lawmaker from California. The focus on the case all but ceased on September 11, 2001.

Just like that the world turned its attention to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The subsequent U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the liberation of Iraq some two and a half years later, defined the presidency of George W. Bush. He will always be the president who infamously “dragged” the United States into the Global War on Terror. 

Yet, after the fall of the Afghan capital to the Taliban this week, President Joe Biden may be forever remembered as the president who lost that war. Already, Biden has seen his numbers fall in the polls. While the country has remained deeply divided politically, Biden had approval numbers far exceeding his predecessor—only to see his mishandling of the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan bring those numbers down. 

According to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, which utilizes a weighted average of polling, President Biden’s approval sat at just above 50 percent last Friday. The numbers had continued to plummet further, given that he was largely silent and out of sight over the weekend as the Taliban regained control. As of Monday afternoon, Biden's approval was at just 49.9 percent, the lowest since he took office in January.

Unfit for Office? 

Throughout the weekend and into Monday, there had been repeated calls that Biden was not fit to remain commander-in-chief after his handling of the events in Afghanistan. It was just weeks ago that Biden praised the Afghan security forces and said they were a far larger and better-trained fighting force than many of the United States’ NATO allies. However, in just a week nearly the entirety of Afghanistan fell to the insurgents. 

Across social media, the president was repeatedly mocked by his critics, with the hashtags #WheresBiden, #BidenDisaster and #25thAmendment Trending.  

Passing the Buck

Prior to speaking to the American public on Monday afternoon, the White House had issued a statement, in which Biden seemed to cast the blame on former President Donald Trump. 

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021, deadline on US forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500,” Biden said in that statement. 

“Therefore, when I became president, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country's civil conflict,” he added. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.” 

During his address on Monday, Biden did say that as president the buck does stop with him, but also said that the Afghan security forces lacked the will or determination to even stand up to the Taliban. He had said he accepts responsibility for the withdrawal but added again that he didn’t want a future president to have to make the same difficult choices. 

“I am president of the United States and the buck stops with me,” Biden added. “I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America's war-fighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser-focus on our counter-terrorism mission there and in other parts of the world.” 

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

Image: Reuters

Paul R. Pillar

Afghanistan,

When the United States ends most wars, it is the dominant American patterns of thought rather than the wisdom of Clausewitz that prevails.  And so there will likely be, years into the future, cries of “who lost Afghanistan” even though Afghanistan was never America’s to lose.

The recriminations and anguish that are dominating discourse in America in response to events in Afghanistan have roots in distinctly American ways of viewing war and peace.  Those ways are part of a larger lens through which Americans have tended to perceive the outside world.  That lens has been shaped by the unique history and circumstances of the United States, such as how two ocean moats have insulated it from most of the world’s threats and insecurities.

The traditional American notion of war and peace is non-Clausewitzian.  It rejects the Prussian theorist’s concept of war as an extension of politics by other means.  The American conception instead has been that war and peace are two distinct and separate states of affairs.  According to this view, a bright line marking a transition from war to peace should be characterized by a clear-cut U.S. victory, after which Americans put down their swords and return to their plows.

This view has especially characterized what Walter Russell Mead has called the Jacksonian tradition of American thinking about foreign relations, which has tended to be the most influential strain of thinking about war and peace throughout most of American history.  In the traditional Jacksonian view, war is something resorted to only infrequently, when a foreign threat arises that is sufficiently serious for the citizenry to rise up in anger and vanquish the threat.  It is no accident that Donald Trump—always attuned to the most visceral inclinations of that portion of the American citizenry to whom he appealed—hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.

Most of America’s history of wars has nurtured such conceptual habits.  The Revolutionary War was considered a victory—after all, the colonies did win their independence—even though most of what the Continental Army accomplished was merely to survive until events in Europe turned the colonials’ way.  The War of 1812 was a draw, but many Americans thought of it as a victory because the last battle of the war—fought after the peace treaty had been signed on the other side of the ocean—was Jackson’s smashing victory at New Orleans.  The Mexican War was a big U.S. conquest, and the Spanish-American War was an even quicker and easier U.S. win.  In World War I, American doughboys were decisive in turning the tide of war and leading Germany to sue for peace.  Then World War II became a model war for many Americans, ending with what is usually described as an unconditional surrender by the hated Axis powers.

After World War II, there arose a different American strain of thinking, accentuated further when the Cold War ended, which was to view the United States as the indispensable superpower.  This led to near-continuous American involvement, including military involvement, around the world, from the “police action” in Korea to the “forever wars” of today.  This conception has now been around long enough and has influenced policy decisions enough that it has become as firmly entrenched in much American thinking as the Jacksonian conception. 

The basic problem has involved the resulting mash-up between the traditional and newer patterns of thinking.  American use of military force overseas has become far more frequent than under the Jacksonian idea of an infrequent resort to arms to eliminate only serious threats.  And yet the Jacksonian standard of achieving something that can be called “victory” continues.  The oxymoronic result is illustrated by Douglas MacArthur’s declaration during the police action in Korea that “in war, there is no substitute for victory”—an attitude that helped provoke Chinese intervention and extend that conflict for two more years. 

Several other ill consequences may ensue from the conceptual mash-up.  Sometimes the United States seems to pursue objectives that, although they might count as indicators of victory if they could be achieved, are unobtainable.  The North Vietnamese regime that was the adversary in the Vietnam War was never going to fall to its knees and cry uncle.  Afghanistan was never going to be made into a western-style liberal democracy.

Sometimes U.S. leaders, aware of what is unobtainable but still feeling obliged to pursue something that could be called a win, are uncertain about their objectives and as a result lack a clear strategy.  Such a lack is the number one conclusion of the lessons-learned report just issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Often there is blindness to the need for compromises, including even with loathed wartime enemies, in order to terminate a conflict or at least to terminate U.S. involvement in the conflict.  The Trump administration was correct to negotiate with the Taliban—notwithstanding the much-criticized subsequent history of the deal that was negotiated—because the Taliban represent a significant element, politically as well as militarily, that unavoidably is part of the future of Afghanistan.

And sometimes, looking for an elusive Jacksonian victory but unable to find it, U.S. leaders just keep a conflict going on and on.  That is what happened over twenty years in Afghanistan—until President Biden’s politically courageous decision to end what should have been ended long ago.

Clausewitz was right: war ought to be thought of not as an isolated phenomenon with its own standards of success and failure but instead as one more instrument for pursuing national objectives that also get pursued through diplomacy or other instruments.  As with any other political matter, the pursuit rarely involves absolutes of victory and defeat but rather compromises, negotiation, recognition of competing interests, calculations of costs versus benefits, course corrections, cutting of losses, and partial fulfillment of objectives.

Warfare, and terminating wars, always involves bargains.  Even what are described as unconditional surrenders are rarely unconditional.  The surrendering side bargains away its ability to resist with all its remaining strength.  Japan at the end of World War II had considerable such ability remaining, and an invasion of the home islands against a still-resisting Japan would have been extremely costly to the United States.  In the bargain that was struck, the Japanese laid down their arms in return for no more atomic bombs and a benevolent occupation in which they kept their emperor.

When the United States ends most wars, it is the dominant American patterns of thought rather than the wisdom of Clausewitz that prevails.  And so there will likely be, years into the future, cries of “who lost Afghanistan” even though Afghanistan was never America’s to lose.

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a Contributing Editor for this publication.  

Image: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Chinese Air Force,

Both of these planes put up a formidable fight 

Here's What You Need to Know: The Russian Su-33 is probably superior to the J-15 in reliability and engine power, the Chinese J-15 is simply a more modern aircraft. However, even Sputnik’s expert, Vasily Kashin, states at the end of the article: “By spending some more time and money, the Chinese will apparently solve the problems they now have and will get a fairly reliable and powerful carrier-based fighter.”

Back in 2018, Sputnik International put out a piece bashing China’s based J-15 carrier-based fighter jet, describing it as having problems with its flight-control system. But the J-15 is itself a derivative of the Russian Su-33 Flanker. Is the Chinese jet really that inferior to the Russian one? Or are the problems shared, and the article an attempt to distract from the Russian fighter’s own failings?

The beginning of the article begins with a criticism of the J-15’s weight and ski-jump launching mechanism. As the jet is heavier than its western counterparts and relies on a “ski-jump” at the end of the runway to get airborne, it can carry fewer armaments and fuel. But this was the original Soviet design concept for carrier operations.

The Liaoning (originally the Soviet Varyag) was designed with the ski-jump because it was designed to support the Su-33 and MiG-29K fighter aircraft, which weren’t designed to be catapulted off the deck. This made carrier operation simpler, albeit with the aforementioned disadvantages. Sputnik’s criticism rings hollow: the PLAN is simply utilizing the carrier as it was designed: by the Russians.

The PLAN is even planning to improve this aspect, and catapult-launched versions of the J-15 are reported to be in development. Photos have been seen of J-15s with modified nose gear that could be used with catapults.

The second, more valid criticism is that the J-15 is an underdeveloped version of the Su-33. Since China bought only the prototype of the Su-33, the T-10K3, they had to reverse-engineer this airframe. China then subsequently attempted to acquire Russian Su-33s in 2006 and 2009, but these negotiations appear to have fallen through, resulting in China pushing forwards with the indigenous J-15 program.

The Russian experts' criticism of the J-15 as being immature in development are mostly valid. Most of the problems with the J-15 stem from its underdeveloped indigenous WS-10 engines. The inability to produce satisfactory domestic engines has been a perennial thorn in the side of the Chinese aerospace industry, which has been reliant on Russia for engines for its Flankers.

That being said, the criticism often cites the many crashes of the J-15 as evidence of the fighter's deficiencies. Operating fighters from a carrier isn’t easy even in ideal conditions, and the original Su-33 design also crashed multiple times in 2016 when Admiral Kuznetsov was deployed to support Russian troops in Syria.

The Su-33 itself hasn’t even seen that many upgrades since the early 1990s, only undergoing light upgrades. Russian naval aviation appears to be more focused on procuring the newer MiG-29KR, a lighter airframe. The Su-33 only has one semi-multifunctional display in its cockpit, limiting its ability to employ precision-guided munitions and use modern navigation techniques. Upgrades have not changed this, only adding new bombing systems and giving the pilot a digital kneepad in lieu of a cockpit refit.

China, on the other hand, has built the J-15 to its latest standards of cockpit design and ergonomics. A picture of the J-15’s cockpit shows multiple MFDs in the cockpit and a F/A-18-inspired control panel under the hold.

They also have been more aggressive in developing improved variants of the J-15 for other roles, including the J-15D electronic-warfare aircraft to match the US Navy’s EA-18G “Growler”. Dual cockpit variants of the J-15 have also been developed.

Overall, while the Su-33 is probably superior to the J-15 in reliability and engine power, the J-15 is simply a more modern aircraft and is integrated with modern ergonomic design concepts. China’s effort in tearing down the airframe and (even imperfectly) understanding how it works has allowed them to thoroughly modernize it and develop new variants of it. This has allowed them to build a modern carrier-based fighter, while Russia’s Su-33 remains stuck in the 1990s with analog instruments and a simple HUD.

Even Sputnik’s expert, Vasily Kashin, states at the end of the article: “By spending some more time and money, the Chinese will apparently solve the problems they now have and will get a fairly reliable and powerful carrier-based fighter.”

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues.

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Creative Commons "PLA Navy J-15 552 landing trial moment before hooking up the second arresting cable" by simonyang126 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0