Diplomacy & Crisis News

Franz-Stefan Gady

History, Europe

"My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Radetzky March is an important novel, since it singularly conveys the constrained spirit that some leaders of the Great Powers in Europe must have experienced prior to the First World War—the feeling that the conflict was preordained and that diplomacy merely provided respite from the inevitable clash that would bring down the old world, despite their best efforts.

Joseph Roth’s magnum opus, The Radetzky March, is perhaps one of the greatest novels that emerged out of the carnage of the First World War describing the dying days of Habsburg rule in Central Europe. It is also one of the most melancholy tales ever written in the German language. Roth vividly portrays the decline and death of an empire that has outlived its time by telling the story of the ill-omened Trotta family, whose sad end—like in a Greek tragedy—is preordained.

The fragility of life in general and political institutions in particular is naturally, most acutely felt during times of profound social upheaval. Times of upheaval, however, also offer a unique vantage point for authors to observe change; “The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk,” as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously stated. Consequently, Roth’s The Radetzky March provides a rare perspective on the old Europe prior and during “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, modern-day Western Ukraine, which was then part of the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. He studied in Vienna, served in the Habsburg army, witnessed the dissolution of the empire, became a writer, moved from Berlin to Paris, and finally succumbed to alcoholism in 1939. Talking about his life, Roth notes: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Legend has it that in 1928, while living in Berlin, a dispirited Roth asked the band at the Hotel Adlon to play the Radetzky March—a march composed by Johann Strauss Senior in 1848 and dedicated to Field Marshal Radetzky in honor of the old soldier’s victory at Custozza—while the Austro-Jewish author was reminiscing about the past. Radetzky was the epitome of Austria’s imperial Heldenzeitalter (heroic age). The poet Franz Grillparzer waxes eloquently about this longest-serving, imperial Austrian officer (who served more than seventy years in total) in his poem, In deinem Lager ist Oesterreich (“In your camp is Austria”). More important to Roth, the old general singularly rekindled and solidified Austria’s neo-absolutist identity around the Habsburg dynasty after the revolutionary years of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1930, Roth, inspired by Austria’s past and no small amount of alcohol, finally got to work on the novel, which he finished in September 1932. However, it was his editor, Gustav Kiepenheuer, who chose the ironic title The Radetzky March—ostensibly compressing the novel’s content in one short phrase, but in reality, turning the meaning of the old march upside down; Roth’s novel was about death and demise, rather than victory and rebirth.

Roth traces the fate of three generations of the Trotta family and their service to the Habsburg Empire and the Austrian Emperor Franz-Josef. The founder of the dynasty, Joseph, a Slovenian peasant and officer in the Austrian army, saves Franz-Josef’s life during the Battle of Solferino in 1859, a deed for which he is subsequently knighted and awarded nobility. The towering figure of Joseph, the “hero of Solferino” casts a large shadow over his son Franz, who becomes a district captain in Moravia, and Franz’s son Carl Joseph, who is commissioned into the imperial forces, first into a prestigious cavalry regiment and then into an infantry battalion stationed in Galicia. Joseph von Trotta is an impossible role model to follow for both his son and grandson in the already crumbling empire, and from page one of the novel, there is never any doubt of the impending doom of a family so intrinsically linked to the fate of a dying monarch and monarchy.

The relationship between the district captain Trotta and his son, Carl Joseph, is the driving force of the novel and the vehicle Roth uses to paint the kaleidoscopic world of Austria-Hungary stretching from Moravia to Galicia. While still a cadet, Carl Joseph visits his father’s residence in the Moravian district town of W every summer. Every Sunday the military band of a nearby-stationed regiment plays under the balcony of the district captain’s house. Each performance of the band begins with The Radetzky March, invoking in Carl Joseph the desire to go to war and die for the emperor:

It would be best to die for him amid military music, easiest with The Radetzky March. The swift bullets whistled in cadence around Carl Joseph’s ear, his naked saber flashed . . . he sank into the drumming intoxication of the music . . .

The district captain’s house also contains a portrait of the founder of the dynasty, the “hero of Solferino.” Carl Joseph studies it during every summer vacation:

The dead man revealed nothing; the boy learned nothing. From year to year, the portrait seemed to be growing paler and more otherworldly, as if the hero of Solferino were dying once again and a time would come when an empty canvas would stare down upon the descendant even more mutely than the portrait.

In fact, throughout the novel, the Trottas, rather than being alive, appear already dead. They are part of the group of the “living dead”—Habsburg servants cursed to wander the twilight zone between life and death while the empire lingers—yet released from their oath with the demise of the monarchy after which they can finally flee this world, freed from its cares and troubles. Carl Joseph, the district captain, after the death of his faithful servant Jacques, has the foreboding that they both belong to a cursed class of civil servants and soldiers, the traditional pillars of the Austrian monarchy, doomed to collapse once the superstructure is gone.

While the district captain, one of the “old decent men,” dutifully continues his work as a faithful civil servant to the emperor, maintaining “heroic equanimity,” Carl Joseph fails as a soldier in the peacetime army. Acutely sensitive, he feels unable to live up to the impossible ideals of the “hero of Solferino.” He initiates affairs with married women, accumulates gambling debts, is partially responsible for the death of one of his friends in a duel and becomes an alcoholic on the Galician border (“Der Leutnant von Trotta, der bin ich.”—“I am Lieutenant von Trotta,” Roth allegedly proclaimed after he finished the novel). The young Trotta’s principal achievements are the rescue of a faded portrait of the Emperor Franz-Josef from a brothel, which he and his fellow officers frequent, and the bloody suppression of a communist-inspired riot in Galicia, where he is severely wounded by a protester.

In the summer of 1914, during a regimental anniversary ball in the castle of Count Chojnicki, a rich Polish noble, the news arrives that Franz-Ferdinand has been assassinated. A heated discussion immediately breaks out among the different nationalities of the officer corps with some Hungarian officers openly showing their disloyalty to the empire (“We can be glad the bastard is gone!”). It was then that Carl Joseph finally realizes that, “The Fatherland of the Trottas was splintering and crumbling. At home in the Moravian district seat of W, Austria might still exist. Every Sunday Herr Nechwal’s band played The Radetzky March. Austria existed once a week, on Sundays.” Yet otherwise, she was already a corpse.

In one last outburst, Carl Joseph von Trotta seemingly tries to defend his family’s honor: “My grandfather saved the Kaiser’s life. And I, his grandson, will not allow anyone to insult the House of our Supreme Commander in Chief; these gentlemen are behaving scandalously.” Yet even the subsequent funeral march at the ball turned into a farce with drunk musicians playing too fast, guests hopping around and giggling, “each person a mourner behind the corpse of the one in front of him, and at the center of the room, the invisible corpses of the heir apparent and the monarchy.”

Carl Joseph dies ingloriously in the first weeks of the war in Galicia, while trying to fetch water for his troops:

He heard the shots before they were fired and also the opening drum beats of The Radetzky March. He was standing on his father’s house. Then a bullet hit his skull. Warm blood ran from his head to the cool soil of the slope. From below, the Ukrainian peasants in his platoon chorused, ‘Praised be Jesus Christ!’ Forever Amen! he wanted to say. Those were the only Ruthenian words he knew. But his lips didn’t stir. His mouth gaped. His white teeth shone against the blue autumn sky.

His father, the district captain, died a few days after the death of emperor Franz-Josef in 1916. The physician, Dr. Skowronnek, pronounces the grim diagnosis: “I don’t think either of them could have outlived Austria.”

The fatalism of the protagonists, the living dead, and their dogged belief in the inevitability of the fall of the monarchy is perhaps the most disturbing feature of the novel, considering the millions of dead that the dissolution still required. Yet, it is not a literary invention. Conrad von Hoetzendorf, the highest-ranking officer in the imperial army, gloomily noted already on June 28, 1914: “This will be a forlorn fight, it nevertheless will have to be fought, such an old monarchy and such a glorious army cannot go down ingloriously.” Emperor Franz-Josef echoed Conrad’s sentiment by stating: “If we go down, at least we shall go down with decency!” Even young Austrian Colonel Bosch, commander of the elite 1st Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger was sure of the empire’s demise. Nevertheless, he was determined to observe the end, “not as an uncommitted bystander, but as a resigned combatant who will see the black steamroller, which will obliterate us, approach, but who cannot stop it.” Out of 8 million men mobilized by the empire, more than a million died. The professional officer corps of which Carl Joseph von Trotta was a member had been nearly wiped out by the end of 1914. Yet, as historian Gunther Rothenberg states: “The remarkable thing was that the Habsburg army, shackled by a complicated and unsteady political and social structure, with an inefficient mechanism of coordination and control, had held out for so long.”

The Radetzky March is an important novel, since it singularly conveys the constrained spirit that some leaders of the Great Powers in Europe must have experienced prior to the First World War—the feeling that the conflict was preordained and that diplomacy merely provided respite from the inevitable clash that would bring down the old world, despite their best efforts. The Russian Czar and the German Kaiser were in that sense less perceptive than the Trottas, since the monarchs did believe in victory and by doing so, accelerated their own downfalls. Still—and this is the real tragedy of the novel—while the Trottas did not believe in the success of Austrian arms, they went along with the war just the same, and are, therefore, exemplary of the ‘living dead’ in all the European countries and capitals at that time, who faithfully helped set in motion the all-consuming juggernaut in the summer of 1914. Perhaps, this is also the reason why the question of war guilt still puzzles historians and political scientists: If all are guilty, no one is guilty.

Of course, it is not possible to deny that Joseph Roth, especially when portraying Emperor Franz-Josef, is somewhat glorifying the past of an autocratic empire. Roth, in the late 1930s, actively but unsuccessfully advocated for the reestablishment of the monarchy in Austria. Yet, he also shows the horrors of Austria’s campaign in the East, especially the heinous crimes committed by the Austrian military against Ukrainians suspected of harboring pro-Slavic sympathies in the first weeks of the war:

The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from the trees on church squares to terrify the living. Hasty court-martials in villages passed hasty sentences. Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials.

Rather than an expression of effete Habsburg nostalgia, Roth, in The Radetzky March, seems to grasp the essence of the Japanese mono no aware—being aware of the transience of all things heightens the appreciation of their beauty. It is this latent beauty prior to the outbreak of the Great War that makes the novel resonate in our modern times. In that sense, Roth’s plaintive narrative of the brief existence of the Trotta family also cautions us to appreciate one’s own time, for it is just as fleeting. And while the monarchy rightfully concluded its hour upon the stage, it is inevitable that future empires and civilizations will share the Dual Monarchy’s Ozymandian passing. This alone should stir our interest in the summer of 1914 and the ill fortune of the Trottas.

Franz-Stefan Gady is a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute, where he was a program associate and founding member of the Worldwide Cybersecurity Initiative. Follow him on Twitter (@HoansSolo). This first appeared in July 2014.

Image: Wikimedia.

Michael Peck

Security, Europe

If you're a sailor on a Russian submarine that sinks in the middle of the ocean, don't expect much sympathy from the Kremlin.

Here's What You Need to Remember: To his credit, the Politburo transcript also shows how alert and incisive was Gorbachev. Leaving aside the concerns about sabotage and incompetence, he asks pertinent questions about the disaster, such as why the explosion occurred and why rescue vessels couldn't save K-219. He wanted to know how toxic gases poisoned the submarine's air, why a tow rope broke, and whether sensitive information on K-219 could be retrieved by the Americans.

If you're a sailor on a Russian submarine that sinks in the middle of the ocean, don't expect much sympathy from the Kremlin.

Judging by the reaction of Soviet leaders to the accidental sinking of a Soviet nuclear missile sub 30 years ago, you'll be lucky if you're not shot by a firing squad.

Just how hard-nosed the Kremlin can be is shown in the transcript of a Politburo meeting on the maritime disaster, published by the National Security Archive.

On October 3, 1986, the Soviet Yankee-class ballistic missile submarine K-219, equipped with 16 R-27 nuclear missiles was on patrol in the North Atlantic, about 700 miles off the coast of Bermuda. A seal in the hatch cover of Number 6 missile tube failed, which allowed seawater to leak into the tube and mix with missile fuel (rumors that K-219 collided with a U.S. Navy submarine have been denied by both the U.S. Navy and the K-219's captain).

Seawater combined with missile fuel to produce heat and toxic gases. Despite a crewman venting the tube, an explosion erupted in the silo, ejecting the missile and its warheads into the sea. Five crewmen eventually died, and the boat began to sink. After a Soviet freighter unsuccessfully attempted to tow the submarine home, Captain Second Rank Igor Britanov ordered the crew to abandon ship. K-219 sank 18,000 feet to the ocean bottom, where it broke into two pieces, with several missile hatch covers open and the missiles gone.

That Captain Britanov was charged with negligence is not totally surprising: the U.S. Navy might have done the same. But charging him with sabotage and treason? That is truly remarkable.

"Could it [the accident] have happened due to lack of competence of the crew or because of cowardice?" asks Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during the October 6, 1986 meeting. In other words, Gorbachev wonders whether the crew of a Soviet nuclear submarine, who were entrusted with the capability to start World War III, actually panicked and abandoned their boat without cause.

It's hard to imagine a U.S. President having such a concern about U.S. submarine crews (though they have also been known to make mistakes). Then again, Soviet submarine safety can be gauged by the old Red Navy joke that you can recognize Soviet nuclear submarine sailors because they glow in the dark.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Gorbachev also repeatedly voices suspicion that the K-219's demise was no accident.

"This couldn’t be sabotage?" Gorbachev asks when Soviet Navy chief Vladimir Chernavin reported that the attempted tow of K-219 had failed because too much water had flooded the sub.

"We do not have data to make such a conclusion," Chernavin replies.

At another point, Gorbachev tells the Politburo that "the boat was taken for towing, but the tow cord broke. Again, not clear why? In short, one mystery after another."

Presumably the "sabotage" that worried Soviet leaders would have been performed by Western nations, most likely the United States. If in fact the Soviets had found evidence -- or thought they found evidence -- that the United States had sabotaged a nuclear missile submarine, then Ronald Reagan's nuclear war-fighting strategy might have had its first -- and last -- field test.

Soviet leaders also worried that the Americans would raise the sunken sub to loot code books and secrets, just as the CIA had attempted with the wrecked K-129 in 1974. "It is possible that some items had not been destroyed, because they were confident that the boat would not sink and they would be able to tow it," Minister of Defense Sergey Sokolov told the Soviet leadership.

Beyond seeking details of the disaster, the Politburo also focused on how to spin-doctor the disaster to limit damage to Soviet prestige. Gorbachev noted that President Reagan had thanked the Soviets for notifying the U.S. about the incident. "The Americans even offered their assistance and informed us that their planes will be present in the area of the accident," he noted. "In his conversation with [former Soviet ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly] Dobrynin, Raul [Castro] especially noted the speed of our reaction and said that it has great importance for informing the world public because previously they would learn about such things from American media reports.”

Gorbachev suggests a statement to the Americans, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Soviet TASS news service, and other Communist nations. "In our information we should reiterate that according to the conclusion of the experts, a possibility of a nuclear explosion is ruled out after the boat has sunk. At the same time, we could say that the experts see a possibility of radioactive contamination at great depth after a certain period of time."

To his credit, the Politburo transcript also shows how alert and incisive was Gorbachev. Leaving aside the concerns about sabotage and incompetence, he asks pertinent questions about the disaster, such as why the explosion occurred and why rescue vessels couldn't save K-219. He wanted to know how toxic gases poisoned the submarine's air, why a tow rope broke, and whether sensitive information on K-219 could be retrieved by the Americans.

It's a curiosity and comfort level with detail that probably would have eluded Gorbachev's counterpart Ronald Reagan. But it's also a tragedy that K-219's brave sailors were accused of failing to do their duty.

Michael Peck is a frequent contributor to the National Interest and is a regular writer for many outlets like WarIsBoring. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared several years ago and is being republished due to reader's interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Samuel J. Abrams

Politics, Americas

While trust in the federal government is low, trust in one’s neighbors is comparatively high. Therefore, greater specificity is absolutely needed when we talk about generalized trust.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a big story trying to unpack the idea of social trust with the headline of “Why are Americans So Distrustful of Each Other.” The author of the piece argues that social trust in American is declining, relying on data from national surveys like the General Social Survey (GSS) to show “a drop {from} 46 percent in 1972 when it began to 31.5 percent in 2018, and the drop is fairly gradua{l}.” This decline represents a 33-percent drop overall and actually fluctuates quite a bit, but there is a real problem with this data: The idea of trust is never clearly defined. In fact, when more clear measures of trust are considered, the data looks far less grim, and Americans may be far more trusting of others than the Journal suggests.

Social trust is critical for the creation of social capital and strong institutions, so having a society with seemingly such low levels of trust would be very worrisome. The GSS asks, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” But who is this question referring to? Those who live in one’s local residential community? Those who do billing for large corporations? Those who work in the government? This question is so amorphous that it is impossible to develop any real sense of what Americans are evaluating here. We should be careful about taking away too much from the decline.

In fact, the Pew Research Center has asked a similar question about trust: “Which of the following statements comes to closer to your view? In general, most people can be trusted {or} in general, most people cannot be trusted.” These results look quite different. In 2016, Pew found that 43 percent of Americans believed that most people can be trusted — a number 12 points higher than the GSS figure of 31 percent in 2016. Since the rise of the global pandemic, trust has climbed: In the summer of 2020, 58 percent of Americans reported that, in general, most people can be trusted according to Pew; a figure almost twice as high at the most recent data point relied on by the Journal.

When particular groups of people or institutions are considered, the numbers are more clear and reputable. For instance, American trust in the federal government is low and has been steadily declining. As of fall of 2020, Pew found that only 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. Compared to the late 1950s and early 1960s, this figure has plummeted from around 70 percent. And over the past three presidencies — through the final years of the George W. Bush administration and the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump — less than 30 percent of Americans trust the federal government just about always or most of the time.

Trust in other areas of American life varies. State and local government, for instance, rate very differently from the national figures. AEI’s Survey on Community and Society (SCS) directly compared the different levels of government and found that, in 2018, 17 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always or most of the time.” Meanwhile, the state government was higher, at 25 percent, and local government was appreciably higher, at 37 percent — more than twice the number of the federal government and a potent illustration of why specificity matters.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, trust was not as bad as it may appear based on the GSS. AEI’s SCS asked about trust in a number of groups in America, prompting them with “In general, how much do you trust the following groups of people?” and the results are far less negative when smaller — yet hugely important — institutions and groups are considered.

When asked how much they trust the people in their neighborhood, for instance, 70 percent of Americans said that trusted their neighbors “a great deal” (22 percent) or “some” (48 percent). Twenty percent trusted their neighbors “only a little” and 8 percent “not at all.” This is fairly positive news, as an overwhelming majority of Americans reported robust levels of trust in the areas in which they reside. Slightly lower numbers — around 60 percent or so — had such high levels of trust with the people with whom they attended school or work, the local stores where they regularly shopped, and those who were in shared clubs, groups, and associations. The numbers are lower for their churches or places of worship, at 51 percent, and the local news media is lower, at 45 percent. Incidentally, before the recent national protests surrounding the police, 70 percent of Americans trusted the police.

The point here is very simple: Levels of general trust in the nation could be better, but poorly specified conceptions of trust are not helpful when thinking about how to improve our polity. While trust in the federal government is low, trust in one’s neighbors is comparatively high. Therefore, greater specificity is absolutely needed when we talk about generalized trust. The numbers that emerged in multiple surveys from less amorphously defined questions are not nearly as discouraging as the low numbers reported in the Journal, which should be taken with a grain of salt.

This article first appeared on AEIdeas, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters.

Kyle Mizokami

Technology,

The .44 Magnum cartridge was invented in the late 1940s and introduced in 1950.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Smith & Wesson 329PD is not a handgun for everyone—but then again, neither is the .44 Magnum caliber. The combination of the two should appeal to shooters with a specific set of requirements, namely an easy to carry large caliber revolver that ideally won’t be fired more than a few times in a row with Magnum cartridges.

One of America’s oldest gun companies has pushed the limits of technological innovation to create the lightest large-caliber revolver on the U.S. market. The Smith & Wesson Model 329PD takes technology the company pioneered for smaller revolvers and ports it to large frame, large caliber revolvers. The result is perhaps the lightest .44 Magnum revolver ever made.

The .44 Magnum cartridge was invented in the late 1940s and introduced in 1950. The big round was based on the .44 Special and featured a significant boost in energy and velocity. The .44 Magnum delivered 767 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, and at 1,200 feet per second easily broke the supersonic barrier.

One of the first—if not the first—handgun to take advantage of the new cartridge was the Smith & Wesson Model 29. The result was a handgun not only useful for dealing lethal effects against large, dangerous game, it achieved fame as the “Dirty Harry” gun. The Model 29 is not a light firearm, however, weighting 2.69 pounds unloaded and three pounds loaded. This was a pronounced downside for hunters pursuing big game in the backcountry, who were already carrying a large caliber rifle and various equipment.

In the early 2000s, Smith & Wesson enhanced their line of snubnose, or “J-frame” revolvers with a new metal technology called scandium. A rare-earth metal, adding small quantities of scandium to aluminum greatly improved aluminum’s tensile strength. Less than one percent of the weight of the aluminum used in a product is necessary to give the alloy improved strength, so scandium aluminum alloy is virtually the same weight as untreated aluminum. Scandium was used in considerable quantities in early versions of the MiG-29 fighter jet, allowing for a lighter fighter with a higher thrust to weight ratio.

In addition to lightweight, a scandium-aluminum alloy is also corrosion-resistant and has “exceptional high fatigue properties approaching titanium”—all features that would be very useful in a metal handgun. A revolver made of scandium instead of steel was therefore significantly lighter, a desirable feature in a small backup or pocket pistol. Smith & Wesson brought this technology to market with the Model 340PD. The 340PD had a scandium frame and a titanium cylinder, the latter necessary for resisting high chamber pressures.

The result was a dramatic loss in revolver weight. The Smith & Wesson 640, an all-steel J frame hammerless revolver with two-inch barrel, weighs 22.1 ounces. The very similar 340PD, built with scandium and titanium, weighs just 11.8 ounces. The 340PD is significantly more expensive, but a fifty percent reduction in carry weight is an extremely attractive feature for those that carry handguns concealed.

The Model 329PD quickly followed the scandium J-frame revolvers, bringing lightweight metals to the large, “N-frame” revolver family. The 329PD, like the 340PD, features a scandium aluminum frame finished in matte black and titanium cylinder. The 4.1-inch barrel is made of stainless steel for accuracy and long life. The 329PD weighs just 25.2 ounces. The all-steel Model 29, by comparison, weighs 43.8, a savings of more than a pound.

The 329PD is in other respects identical to other Smith & Wesson revolvers. It is a single action/double-action revolver, is approximately the same length as steel revolvers, and comes with both wood and synthetic grips. Tacking on the technology, however, Smith & Wesson provides the 329PD with HI-VIZ fiber optic sights. Like other .44 Magnum revolvers, the pistol can fire both the powerful .44 Magnum round and the weaker .44 Special round.

A handgun’s weight is typically a double-edged sword: while a lighter handgun is typically more comfortable to carry, a heavier handgun absorbs recoil better, sparing the user much of the ensuing kick. This is particularly true in heavier caliber revolvers. The 329PD is an exceptionally light heavy-caliber .44 Magnum revolver. According to reviewer Jeff Quinn, “.44 Special loads were all very comfortable to shoot in the 329PD for extended range sessions, but most of the .44 Magnum loads were brutal after a few shots.”

The Smith & Wesson 329PD is not a handgun for everyone—but then again, neither is the .44 Magnum caliber. The combination of the two should appeal to shooters with a specific set of requirements, namely an easy to carry large caliber revolver that ideally won’t be fired more than a few times in a row with Magnum cartridges.

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

Image: Reddit.

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

As recently as 2009, the remains of soldiers who were interred on the field, their final resting places forgotten, have been rediscovered.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Even though McClellan knew Lee's plans in advance, the Battle of Antietam was drawn-out - and horrific. Some units sustained casualties approaching three-fourths.

During the September 17, 1862 Battle of Antietam, casualties piled almost too high to count. The culmination of the first invasion of the North during the American Civil War by General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, it was the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States and the bloodiest day’s fighting ever in the Western Hemisphere. Due to the massive scale of the losses, the Antietam death toll has always been hard to accurately determine.

The Battle of Antietam’s Three Phases

The Battle of Antietam swirled in three phases from north to south and lasted from early morning until dusk. During the first phase, fighting raged in a 24-acre cornfield and on high ground surrounding the Dunker Church, which belonged to the German Baptist Brethren, a Christian sect that believed in baptism by full immersion and were, therefore, known as “Dunkers.” Casualties were extremely heavy in the Cornfield, with some regiments suffering greater than 70 percent casualties. At midday, the fighting had shifted to a sunken road that formed a natural trench-like defensive position. Confederate troops shot down rank after rank of attacking Union troops from the sunken road, later to be called Bloody Lane, until their position was flanked and the depression became a deathtrap. Confederate bodies were strewn so thickly through Bloody Lane by the end of the day that it was impossible to take a step without touching a corpse.

Late in the afternoon, Union troops finally succeeded in crossing a stone bridge over Antietam Creek and moving up the slope on the stream’s western bank. Although they left scores of dead and wounded in their wake, the Union troops pressed on toward the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, and were poised to trap Lee’s army against the Potomac River. However, the timely arrival of A.P. Hill’s Light Division from Harpers Ferry, 12 miles away, blunted the Union drive and ended the battle.

Night Might Never Come

One veteran of the fighting at the Battle of Antietam remembered that the sun seemed to pause high in the sky and it felt as if night would never come. The ferocity of the battle is reflected in the appalling casualties suffered by both sides. Nearly 23,000 men were killed and wounded, with more than 1,500 Confederate dead and over 2,100 Union soldiers slain. Six generals either died on the field or succumbed to wounds suffered at Antietam, including Union Major Generals Joseph K.F. Mansfield and Israel Richardson and Brigadier General Isaac Rodman, and Confederate Brigadier Generals Lawrence O. Branch, William E. Starke, and George B. Anderson.

Before the dead were buried, photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson, employed by the famed Mathew Brady, traveled to the battlefield and recorded a series of images depicting with stark clarity the horror of war. In many of Gardner’s photographs, the dead lay where they fell, their bodies in grotesquely contorted positions, frozen before his lens. Many of the images were displayed in Brady’s New York gallery, and the exhibition was billed as “The Dead of Antietam.” The death studies stunned the public and emphasized that the cost of the war would be substantial.

Buried Hastily in Shallow Graves

So many soldiers of both sides died during the Battle of Antietam; casualties were sometimes buried hastily in shallow graves and never moved to formal cemeteries. As recently as 2009, the remains of soldiers who were interred on the field, their final resting places forgotten, have been rediscovered. Although it is most often impossible to specifically identify the remains, one soldier was determined to have been from a New York regiment that fought in the cornfield. His name will never be known; however, the buttons of his jacket identified his home state. The remains were accorded full military honors and returned to a New York cemetery for burial.

This article first appeared at the Warfare History Network and first appeared on TNI this year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Americas

Russia and China have both made fast progress modernizing their respective nuclear arsenals. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: While no one is advocating any move to cut corners or decrease the effectiveness of weapons development, the idea is to leverage newer technologies, realize the competitive global environment, and move new platforms to completion on an expedited, massively accelerated basis. This is already happening, as the Air Force’s prototype sixth-generation stealth fighter has taken to the sky years ahead of schedule. 

The pace at which China is adding carriers, destroyers and amphibious ships is staggering, the Russians reportedly already operate hypersonic missiles and possibly even satellite-launched missiles and both Iran and North Korea seek advanced nuclear weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and tactical nuclear-armed rockets.

China is already working on a second and third indigenous carrier and plans to double its fleet of destroyers within just the next five years. Russia and China have both made fast progress modernizing their respective nuclear arsenals. 

All of these well-known realities continue to provide new urgency to the longstanding refrain that the U.S. military is in desperate need of more effective acquisition reform. The idea, which has actually circulated for decades as a huge, yet largely unrealized priority, may actually be happening now thanks to computer simulation, digital engineering and rapid prototyping.

The Pentagon has, finally, actually re-written its famous Defense Department 5000 acquisition procedural and legal manual. The specifics of the rewrite might not as of yet be available, yet the development is likely a welcome move for many who have been seeking to streamline lengthy acquisition milestones often unnecessarily set apart by years.

While no one is advocating any move to cut corners or decrease the effectiveness of weapons development, the idea is to leverage newer technologies, realize the competitive global environment, and move new platforms to completion on an expedited, massively accelerated basis. This is already happening, as the Air Force’s prototype sixth-generation stealth fighter has taken to the sky years ahead of schedule. 

The intent is not so much to circumvent essential procedures, safeguards and certifications, but rather to concurrently accomplish numerous functions, which have previously been spaced years apart and often stalled by cumbersome, bureaucratic and sometimes unnecessary traditional acquisition procedures. 

How is all this happening? Rapid advancements in digital engineering, for example, enable the Pentagon’s weapons developers to assess multiple design models of new systems such as new ICBMs, stealth fighters or even armored vehicles through digital computer modeling without having to spend years building and testing multiple competing prototypes. This technique is not only gaining traction but already producing substantial results. 

It is on the way to being used in an even greater capacity, Alan R. Shaffer, the Pentagon’s Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, said at the National Defense Industrial Association's virtual Interservice/Industry Training (I/ITSEC), Simulation and Education Conference, according to a Pentagon report. 

“The same technologies . . . you investigate at I/ITSEC (Simulation and Training)  are the ones that will allow us to move to an agile and adaptive acquisition framework and be much more agile,” Shaffer said in the essay. “Digital engineering, digitization, modular open systems architecture and model composability are all key within the I/ITSEC community They’re also the bedrock for an agile acquisition framework and will provide us the tools we need to cut development time,” he said.

Shaffer went on to explain that simulation can also assist weapons development through wargaming and threat assessments, the kinds of exercises that test and assess advanced Red (enemy) forces against Blue (friendly) forces.

“We should be able to do a much better job in assessing to be fit for purpose by use of simulation and the performance of red versus blue systems and simulators to really understand how what we are going to buy in the Department of Defense will operate in a real world,” he said.

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Jeff Schogol

Security, Asia

That is one mistake that probably ruined someone’s day.

Key point: The submarine was not actually lost, but a lot of equipment was damanged. Needless to say, this is why you make sure all of your hatches are closed before diving.

The modern submarine is not a simple machine. A loss of propulsion, unexpected flooding, or trouble with reactors or weapons can doom a sub crew to a watery grave.

Also, it’s a good idea to, like, close the hatches before you dive.

Call it a lesson learned for the Indian navy, which managed to put the country’s first nuclear-missile submarine, the $2.9 billion INS Arihant, out of commission in the most boneheaded way possible.The Hindu reported yesterday that the Arihant has been out of commission since suffering “major damage” some 10 months ago, due to what a navy source characterized as a “human error” — to wit: allowing water to flood to sub’s propulsion compartment after failing to secure one of the vessel’s external hatches.

Water “rushed in as a hatch on the rear side was left open by mistake while [the Arihant] was at harbor” in February 2017, shortly after the submarine’s launch, The Hindu reports. Since then, the sub “has been undergoing repairs and clean up,” according to the paper: “Besides other repair work, many pipes had to be cut open and replaced.”It’s hard to articulate how major a foul-up this is, but Kyle Mizokami does a good job at Popular Mechanics: Indian authorities ordered the pipe replacement because they “likely felt that pipes exposed to corrosive seawater couldn't be trusted again, particularly pipes that carry pressurized water coolant to and from the ship’s 83 megawatt nuclear reactor.” For context, a submarine assigned to Britain’s Royal Navy narrowly avoided a complete reactor meltdown in 2012 after the power sources for its coolant system failed.

The incident is also quite an embarrassment — and strategic concern — for the Indian Armed Forces. A Russian Akula-class attack sub modified to accommodate a variety of ballistic missiles, the Arihant represented a major advance in India’s nuclear triad after its completion in October 2016. (India in 1974 became the 6th country to conduct a successful nuclear test.) Indeed, the Arihant’s ability to deliver K-15 short-range and K-4 intermediate-range nuclear missiles was envisioned as a powerful deterrent against India’s uneasy nuclear state neighbor, Pakistan.

“Arihant is the most important platform within India’s nuclear triad covering land-air-sea modes,” the Hindu reports. Well, it’s important if it works — and it probably helps to make your submarine watertight.

This is just some sloppy, dangerous seamanship, and the Indian Navy better get its act together fast. Either that, or perhaps follow the Royal Navy’s lead and install the 2001-era Windows XP as an operating system on all your most vital vessels. That way, you can blame the blue screen of death instead of “human error” for the next critical foul-up. Although even outdated software probably knows enough to dog down on all the hatches.

(This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter. This article first appeared in 2018.)

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Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Coronavirus, Americas

“My message is very simple: Don’t wait for a particular vaccine.”

Americans shouldn’t be wasting time weighing the pros and cons of available coronavirus vaccines and should instead focus on getting inoculated as soon as possible, according to Mayo Clinic CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia.

“My message is very simple: Don’t wait for a particular vaccine,” he said Tuesday in an interview on CNBC. “Get the first vaccine that is offered because their benefits far outweigh any potential risk.”

Currently, only two coronavirus vaccines—one from Pfizer and BioNTech and the other from Moderna—have been approved for emergency use in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration.

They both require two doses for each individual getting inoculated and have exhibited strong efficacy in clinical trials. The Pfizer vaccine’s reported efficacy is 95 percent, while Moderna’s vaccine is believed to be 94 percent. The FDA was expected to green-light a vaccine if it was 50 percent effective.

“To have a vaccine that is 95 percent effective—as the two vaccines we currently have are—is a medical marvel,” said Farrugia, who has led the Mayo Clinic since January 2019.

The vaccines come at a critical moment in the ten-month-long pandemic that has infected seventy-eight million and killed 1.7 million worldwide, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

On Tuesday, the United States reported more than three thousand coronavirus-related deaths, and the nation’s seven-day average of new infections now sits at roughly 215,000.

“It is essential that people get educated and then they get vaccinated,” Farrugia said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get out of this pandemic.”

Earlier this week, an advisory panel for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended, by a vote of thirteen to one, that the next two groups of Americans to receive the coronavirus vaccine should be those seventy-five and older and frontline essential workers.

The so-called Phase 1b group is estimated to include about forty-nine million people, or nearly 15 percent of all Americans, according to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Frontline essential workers include firefighters, police officers, teachers, corrections officers, grocery workers, food and agricultural employees, manufacturing workers, U.S. postal service employees, and public transit workers, among others.

According to the committee, these workers “are in sectors essential to the functioning of society and are at substantially higher risk of exposure” to the novel coronavirus.

The ACIP also recommended that Phase 1c should include individuals between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-four, those between sixteen and sixty-four who have high-risk underlying conditions, and the remaining essential workers. The underlying conditions can include obesity, cancer, and smoking, among others.

This group represents roughly 129 million Americans, about a third of the country’s population.

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

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

On June 16, 1861, at the invitation of the War Department, Lowe ascended in Enterprise 500 feet above the capital, telegraphing U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in the White House: “This point of observation commands an area nearly 50 miles in diameter."

Here's What You Need To Remember: The principles behind balloon observation endured - even though the practice itself was criminally underused by the Union Army.

A week after the first shots of the War Between the States at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the future of warfare came to Appalachia. Plowmen in the remote Allegheny Mountains heard a voice calling, “What state is this?” and, seeing no one about, replied toward the nearest woods: “Virginia.”The voice answered, “Thank you,” and the farmers were startled by a stream of sand pouring, unbelievably, from the sky. Looking up they saw, hanging in space above them, a gargantuan cloth sphere. Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe had merely dumped ballast from his balloon, but remembered, “A yell of horror arose from them, and if fleetness of foot is any indication of fright, then they must have been terribly frightened.”

If being observed from the skies was an alien experience to most people of the 1860s, navigating the skies was even more so. Lowe had lifted off from Ohio, hoping to reach Washington, D.C., as proof that a hydrogen balloon could make a trans-Atlantic passage, but contrary high-altitude winds carried his Enterprise more south than east: “I finally landed in South Carolina, a short distance from the line of North Carolina.”

Upon touchdown he was disconcerted to find himself surrounded by ardent new Confederates. Virginia having seceded just two days earlier, he was very likely the first captive taken in the American Civil War. Lowe had long since established himself as one of the world’s foremost aerialists. His title was born of showmanship rather than any official scientific degree, but Lowe never balked at self-promotion. In September 1860, only a gasbag tear had prevented his 103-foot-diameter balloon, Great Western, from taking off with an 11.5-ton load, including an eight-man gondola and lifeboat, across the Atlantic Ocean. His scientific credentials were enough to convince the Southern authorities that he was merely a stray Yankee. Rather than imprisoning Lowe, they politely put him and his floating contraption aboard a northbound train.

Though Lowe had not reached Washington, word of his exploit had. The U.S. Army had little interest in using balloons over the Atlantic but much interest in using them over the Confederacy. On June 16, 1861, at the invitation of the War Department, he ascended in Enterprise 500 feet above the capital, telegraphing U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in the White House: “This point of observation commands an area nearly 50 miles in diameter,” he wrote. “The city with its girdle of encampments presents a superb scene. I have pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station.”

From above Maryland, observers could overlook Confederate outposts halfway to Manassas Junction, Virginia, 25 miles away. Control of this new “high ground” led, perhaps, to overconfidence. A month later Lowe packed his balloon and followed the Army of the Potomac toward the Battle of First Bull Run, only to run into a panicked throng of Federal troops, civilians, and day-tripping politicians fleeing the other way. When he took to the air to look out for any enemy pursuit, friendly forces vented their frustration on him. “Within a mile of the earth our troops commenced firing at the balloon, supposing it to belong to the rebels,” Lowe wrote. “I descended near enough to hear the whistling of the bullets and the shouts of the soldiers to ‘show my colors.’”

Lowe had not thought to bring a flag. “Knowing that if I attempted to effect a landing there my balloon—and very likely myself—would be riddled,” Lowe wrote. “I concluded to sail on and to risk descending outside of our lines.” He landed hard, punctured his gasbag, twisted his ankle, and spent a long night alone in enemy territory. Legend has it that his wife, Leontine, rode through the lines in a buckboard to retrieve him and his balloon. “A detailed account of my escape would be interesting, but it is sufficient to say that I was kindly assisted in returning by the Thirty-first Regiment New York Volunteers, and brought back the balloon, though somewhat damaged,” Lowe wrote.

The Army offered to pay for a new gasbag. “From this time until the 28th of August was consumed in the construction of the first substantial war balloon ever built,” Lowe wrote. “The main obstacle to the successful use of balloons still had to be overcome, namely, a portable apparatus for generating the gas in the field. I had already devised a plan for this purpose.” His generators would use dilute sulfuric acid on iron filings to give off pure hydrogen.

When the Confederates pressed to within two miles of the Potomac, Lowe and his balloon rose in front of them. “The enemy opened their batteries on the balloon and several shots passed by it and struck the ground beyond,” he wrote. “These shots were the nearest to the U.S. capital that had been fired by the enemy, or have yet been, during the war.” He paid them back in kind, pinpointing Confederate positions from more than three miles away and using his telegraph to call down Federal artillery on them. It was the first aerially directed fire support in history.

Lincoln ordered the formation of the Union Army Balloon Corps, with Lowe as chief aeronaut, but the government neglected to fund his portable hydrogen generators. He had to inflate his new balloon, the Union, with coal gas from Washington, D.C., city lines—32,000 cubic feet of it—and tow it to the war zone. No sooner was it tied down in Virginia than a storm blew up. Mooring lines tore. The unmanned balloon whisked away to come down 100 miles away on the Delaware coast, but Lowe’s military-grade gasbag held.

In early November the professor pioneered another military first: the aircraft carrier. He had the coal barge USS George Washington Parke Custis fitted with a “flight deck” and his new gas generator, towed out onto the Potomac by the steamer USS Coeur de Lion with his 20,000-cubic-foot-balloon, Washington. “I proceeded to make observations,” he wrote, “and saw the rebels constructing new batteries at Freestone Point.” These guns commanded the river from atop a cliff 90 feet above the water, invisible from the Maryland side except from the air; targeted by Federal warships, the site was soon abandoned.

By the beginning of 1862, the Union Army Balloon Corps had five balloons in operation, including the 15,000-cubic-foot Eagle serving as eyes for the gunboat siege of Island No. 10 in the Mississippi at New Madrid, Missouri. “During the bombardment,” Lowe wrote, “an officer of the Navy ascended and discovered that our shot and shell went beyond the enemy, and by altering the range our forces were soon able to compel the enemy to evacuate.” The loss of the strategic river bend that April directly contributed to the South’s eventual loss of the entire Mississippi—the cutting in two of the Confederacy.

The Southerners, however, were becoming wise to being watched from above. They had convinced Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan that they held overwhelming numbers until balloonists reported that they had in fact evacuated. Cautiously advancing Union troops found enemy artillery positions mounting “Quaker guns,” which were logs painted black to fool observers.

Chastened by the deception, McClellan took the Balloon Corps along on his invasion of the Virginia Peninsula, where Union scouts reported another 100,000 Southerners blocking the way to Richmond. From 1,000 feet above the peninsula it was plain to Lowe that the reports had vastly overestimated enemy forces, but again McClellan played it safe, settling down to besiege Yorktown. The professor watched the Confederates strengthening their positions, to their mutual displeasure. “Almost daily whenever the balloon ascended the enemy opened upon it with their heavy siege guns or rifled field pieces,” he wrote, “until it had attained an altitude to be out of reach, and repeated this fire when the balloon descended, until it was concealed by the woods.” Southern ire was partly enflamed by the huge portrait of the Balloon Corps’ patron, McClellan, emblazoned on Intrepid’s 50-foot envelope, looking down on them. (The balloon bag is referred to as the envelope.) They went so far as to build their own primitive hot air balloon, which Captain John R. Bryan flew over Yorktown, but clumsy handling and friendly fire made his a risky job; the Confederate balloon ultimately crashed and was destroyed. On Saturday, May 3, Lowe lifted off from McClellan’s own headquarters: “No sooner had the balloon risen above the tops of the trees than the enemy opened all of their batteries commanding it, and the whole atmosphere was literally filled with bursting shell and shot, one, passing through the cordage that connects the car with the balloon, struck near to the place where McClellan stood.” Upon landing Lowe was duly informed, “The general says the balloon must not ascend from the place it now is any more.”

The barrage continued all day. “The last shell fired after dusk came into [Brig. Gen. Samuel P.] Heintzelman’s camp and completely destroyed his telegraph tent and instruments, the operator having just gone out to deliver a dispatch,” Lowe wrote. “The General and I were sitting together discussing the probable reasons for the enemy’s unusual effort to destroy the balloon when we were both covered with earth thrown up by the twelve inch shell. Fortunately it did not explode.”

Cause for enemy concentration on the balloon soon became apparent. Lowe was awakened that night by reports that the barrage had abated and fires were burning in the city. “I ascended at a point near Yorktown and discovered that the enemy had left, and at 6 o’clock a portion of them were visible about two miles from Yorktown on the road to Williamsburg,” he wrote. “It is fair to presume that the first reliable information given of the evacuation of Yorktown was that transmitted from the balloon to General McClellan.”

Lowe and his unit joined the Union pursuit. By the end of May, the Confederates in Richmond could see balloons marking a near quarter-circle northeast of the city, hampering their efforts to counterattack. “The balloons of the enemy forced upon us constant troublesome precautions in efforts to conceal our marches,” recalled Confederate Chief of Ordnance Lt. Col. Edward Porter Alexander. The Southerners fashioned a new balloon, the Gazelle, from swatches of silk dress fabric—not, as is often reported, from dresses donated by Southern ladies—and Alexander would fly it in the ensuing assault.

“The enemy commenced to concentrate their forces in front of Fair Oaks,” Lowe wrote, “moving on roads entirely out of sight of our pickets, and concealing themselves as much as possible in and behind woods, where none of their movements could be seen, except from the balloon.”

A French observer with the Union Army wrote, “There was some doubt whether the enemy were making a real attack, or whether it was merely a feint; but this doubt was soon removed by reports from the aeronauts, who could see heavy columns of the enemy moving in that direction.”

“I knew exactly where to look for their line of march,” Lowe wrote, “and soon discovered one, then two, and then three columns of troops with artillery and ammunition wagons moving toward the position occupied by Heintzelman’s command.” Isolated across the rain-swollen Chickahominy River at the crossroads of Seven Pines, Heintzelman’s III Corps could be reached only via one rickety, flood-damaged bridge. “All this information was conveyed to the commanding general,” Lowe recalled, “who, on hearing my report that the force at both ends of the bridge was too slim to finish it that morning, immediately sent more men to work on it.”

The Southerners would not wait. “I used the balloon Washington at Mechanicsville for observations, until the Confederate army was within four or five miles of our lines,” wrote Lowe, who “telegraphed my assistants to inflate the large balloon, Intrepid…. I then took a six-mile ride on horseback to my camp on Gaines Mill.” On his arrival, however, he found Intrepid still only partially filled. “It was then that I was put to my wits’ end as to how I could best save an hour’s time, which was the most important and precious hour of all my experience in the army. As I saw the two armies coming nearer and nearer together, there was no time to be lost. It flashed through my mind that if I could only get the gas that was in the smaller balloon, Constitution, into the Intrepid, which was then half filled, I would save an hour’s time, and to us that hour’s time would be worth a million dollars a minute…. In the course of five or six minutes connection was made between both balloons and the gas in the Constitution was transferred into the Intrepid…. Then with the telegraph cable and instruments, I ascended to the height desired and remained there almost constantly during the battle, keeping the wires hot with information.”

The New York Herald reported, “During the whole of the battle of this morning, Professor Lowe’s balloon was overlooking the terrific scene from an altitude of about two thousand feet…. This is believed to be the first time in which a balloon reconnaissance has been successfully made during a battle, and certainly the first time in which a telegraph station has been established in the air to report the movements of the enemy and the progress of a battle. The advantage to General McClellan must have been immense.”

McClellan ordered Brig. Gen. Edwin C. Sumner’s II Corps over the bridge to halt the Confederate attack. Adolphus W. Greeley, then an 18-year-old soldier in Sumner’s command but ultimately a major general and Chief Signal Officer of the Army, would write in Harper’s Weekly, “It may be safely claimed that the Union Army was saved from destruction at the Battle of Fair Oaks … by the frequent and accurate reports of Lowe.” 

Having barely withstood the assault, McClellan required three weeks to come up with a riposte, meanwhile relying on his balloonists to stand guard. To keep the initiative, General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, made targeting them a top priority. On the morning of June 26, Lowe’s assistant James Allen (himself an accomplished prewar aeronaut) was floating in the Union near Mechanicsburg when he spotted a Confederate detachment about to surround his own base camp. He called to be pulled down, but when shots began flying past his basket he jumped out and slid down one of the mooring lines. He, his crew, and their balloon just escaped capture.

Along with the rest of the Army of the Potomac, the Balloon Corps was on the run all through the ensuing Seven Days Battles. They abandoned their base at Gaines Mill in such a hurry they had to leave two gas generators behind. Without hydrogen, the deflated balloons were simply cargo, packed along on McClellan’s withdrawal to the James River. Lowe, shivering with malaria, turned the unit over to Allen and returned by boat to Washington, missing the Second Battle of Bull Run. Without the professor to stand up for them, the Balloon Corps’ wagons, mules, and gear were reclaimed by the Army Quartermaster. The unit never consisted of more than seven aeronauts, with a few specialists in gasbag varnishing, hydrogen generators, a repairman, and machinist, and also a rotating detachment of enlisted men subject to recall at official whim. Command was handed off among various junior staff officers. “I was subject to every young and inexperienced lieutenant or captain, who for the time being was put in charge of the Aeronautic Corps,” wrote Lowe on his return. “These young fellows had no knowledge whatever of aeronautics and were often a serious hindrance to me rather than a help.”

Lowe could not even reach Sharpsburg, Maryland, until the Battle of Antietam was over. “General McClellan remarked on several occasions that the balloon would be invaluable to him, and he repeated this to me when I arrived, assuring me that better facilities should be afforded me in future,” he wrote. “On this occasion he greatly felt the need of reports from the balloons, which … were perhaps not sufficiently valued.”

But having risen with McClellan, the Balloon Corps declined with him. Lowe’s ideas for high-resolution aerial photographic reconnaissance and using flares to signal across vast distances went nowhere. In April 1863, Captain Cyrus B. Comstock of the Army Corps of Engineers, to whom the Balloon Corps was relegated, was irked to learn the civilian professor was being paid as a full colonel, $10 per day. “Six dollars per day is ample payment for the duties he has to perform at present,” wrote the captain.

Lowe appealed all the way up to the office of commander Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, getting nowhere. At the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, a heavy storm damaged two of his balloons and destroyed much of his supplies of acid and iron trimmings for reinflating them. Comstock denied Lowe permission for their repair. It was the last straw. “As the battle was now over, I wished to be relieved, provided it was a suitable time,” wrote Lowe, “to which Captain Comstock replied that if I was going I could probably be spared better then than any other time.” Without its leader, the Balloon Corps fell into disuse and was disbanded that August.

“I have never understood why the enemy abandoned the use of military balloons early in 1863 after using them extensively up to that time,” wrote Confederate balloonist Alexander, whose Gazelle had been captured on the Virginia Peninsula. “Even if the observers never saw anything they would have been worth all they cost for the annoyance and delays they caused us in trying to keep our movements out of their sight.”

Though balloons would ultimately be outmoded on the battlefield, reconnaissance from on high is performed today by their technological successors, orbital spy satellites. Union commanders failed to exploit the air, but European observers did not. One German visitor to Lowe’s Civil War camp took the idea home with him and would develop hydrogen balloon warfare to its furthest extent. His name was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

This article first appeared at the Warfare History Network and first appeared on TNI earlier this year.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

John O'Sullivan

Security, Americas

On a range of issues—trade negotiations, relations with China, balancing between Iran and the Sunni Arab states in the Middle East—Biden should be thinking of pursuing a better-managed version of Trump’s foreign policy.

IF COUNTRIES in the mostly free world don’t respond warmly to whatever U.S. foreign policy Joe Biden offers them, they will be showing gross ingratitude, since ending the unpredictable and impolite oscillations of Trump's foreign policy has been the constant theme of their complaints for the last four years. Biden should be able to manage that easily enough, as he’ll be surrounded by people with advanced Ivy League degrees in making things run smoothly.

In addition, the points in his manifesto that reflect Democratic talking points and the interests of supportive NGOs—for instance, new arms control treaties, toughening global rules on gender violence, liberalizing migration rules for Muslim majority countries—will be popular with the countries concerned, alienate only Republican voters, and give him favorable headlines in The New York Times. He is already on the same page as European Union leaders in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels in wanting “More Europe” policies such as an integrated European defense policy and the rubber-stamping of ambitious financial packages designed to save Europe from both the coronavirus and the endless Euro crisis. And, finally, Biden would win any competition in not being Donald Trump. He is more unlike Donald Trump than any other Democrat except perhaps for those who apparently voted from their graves in Milwaukee. And that’s a foreign policy in itself.

At the same time, Biden takes office at the moment when it’s increasingly respectable to point out that many of Trump’s innovations in foreign policy now look necessary and sensible. Some will say Trump’s obnoxious behavior is to blame for the resistance of America’s allies to seeing the virtues in those policies. But how successful were the many presidents who asked NATO’s European members to increase their defense spending in politely diplomatic terms? It took noisy table-thumping from Trump to change some minds. Come to that, has Angela Merkel’s Germany yet learned the obligations of alliance solidarity either towards Russia over Nord Stream Two or towards China on a range of topics from Huawei to its imprisonment of Uighur Muslims? Germany’s political culture, which is a sort of commercial pacifism heavily scented with anti-Americanism, is a problem for America mainly, but also for those European countries which are perpetually nervous of a Russo-German partnership that would decide key issues “Rapallo-style.”

On a range of issues—trade negotiations, relations with China, balancing between Iran and the Sunni Arab states in the Middle East—Biden should be thinking of pursuing a better-managed version of Trump’s foreign policy. One can see some signs of that in the rhetoric of his forthcoming foreign policy. He promises, for instance, to end the endless wars carried on ... well, not by President Trump, but by some of the neoconservative “Never Trumpers” who urged voters to save America from Trump by backing Biden (it reminds one of Lebanese politics.) On the other hand, he wants to demonstrate that he wouldn’t be a pushover for foreign enemies, from terrorists to Beijing. So his foreign policy statement declares with appalling frankness: “Biden believes the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack.” That conforms to NATO orthodoxy; still, it’s rare to see a Democratic leader explicitly threatening nuclear retaliation. And the entire confection is topped off with a strong commitment to promoting democracy by heightened public diplomacy that would include a world conference on expanding it (and perhaps its definition too).

In short, Biden seems to be promising Teddy Roosevelt’s policy of carrying a big stick and speaking softly—but about globalism in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In Asia, that presumably means telling the Chinese communists frankly that if they want to restore an economic partnership that has served China better than America, Beijing will have to make political and human rights concessions to do so. If that offer is rejected, Biden’s emphasis on democracy should then inspire not a conference but a massive expenditure on U.S. public diplomacy and broadcasting that leaps over the barriers and firewalls against it.

A somewhat different approach is needed for Europe. It’s clear that a Biden-Harris administration would align itself with the Eurocrats in Brussels, the center-Left parties in the European Parliament, and the governments in Paris, Berlin, Spain, and Italy. That probably means Washington urging greater centralization of power in Brussels as a corrective to “nationalism” and “populism,” and, in particular, pressing Budapest and Warsaw to give ground to “democratic” renewal, e.g., measures to give the courts greater authority over legislation and guarantees of editorial independence for state-owned media.

Exactly how strongly Washington would press these points—and how immediately—is another matter. Given the uniformity of U.S. media and Big Tech friendliness to Biden and hostility to Trump in the campaign, the United States is in a weak position to urge media diversity in other countries. Another argument for restraint is that Europe stands poised on the edge of a carefully-balanced series of steps towards the “More Europe” policies that Biden’s State Department will want to support. Part of that balance is that Budapest will not obstruct the financial packages (from which Hungary benefits, along with Mediterranean Europe and the rest of Central Europe) if it’s not subjected to incessant attacks on “Rule of Law” grounds. Germany put this package together, and it won’t want to preside over it falling apart. As such, the new Biden team will take their cue from her. And that’s likely to be a plea for caution too.

Neither Merkel nor Biden will want to risk the kind of row, either internal to Europe or external, that would disturb the unstable Italian political situation and give Matteo Salvini another shot at power. A populist Italy would significantly strengthen the resistance to any new Biden-Brussels axis. Above all, the progressive urge to scapegoat Viktor Orbán may have to be foregone when President Emmanuel Macron has joined the majority of European states in acknowledging that the Hungarian prime minister called the migration crisis right five years ago.

John O’Sullivan is the President of the Danube Institute in Budapest, and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a former editor of The National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Kimmage

Politics, Americas

Republicans and Democrats alike should try to escape from the second imperial presidency that arose with Barack Obama and was then taken to a baroque extreme by Trump.

“BUT IT was not to be,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the 1920s after the shock of October 1929. “Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.” The years between 2016 and 2020 were never as much fun as Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. How expensive they were—in the coin of political stability, of foreign-policy clout, and of the national debt—is still to be measured. But they amount to an orgy of sorts, one of official mendacity, journalistic hyperbole, exaggerated despair in some corners and perfervid hopes about tearing down the system in others, an orgiastic riot of words, of presidential tweets, of outraged op-eds, of commentary on crises that dominated news cycle after news cycle until a month later they were largely forgotten. If you remember the Donald Trump era you weren’t really there, one might almost say, as was once said of the 1960s and its orgy of politics, narcotics, and protest.

And then in the five-day election of 2020, it was over.

Perspective on politics comes only with time. As the United States retreats from the Trump era, perspective can be gained by contemplating Trump for what he has so suddenly become. He is not Benito Mussolini poised to preside over a country made subservient to him, readying himself to invade some twenty-first-century equivalent to Ethiopia. It was always through war that fascism came into its own, and Trump started no war. Not a bona fide fascist, Trump is not a conservative or a populist leader either. Conservatism is among other things an idea, and one that in the United States goes back to the creation of the Republic (the Enlightenment) and/or to some Judeo-Christian foundation (the Ten Commandments broadly construed). Trump’s obscurantism and his disinterest in actual Christianity deprive him of a conservative’s credentials. Likewise, he could never separate his populism from his person, a common enough problem among populist figures, and Trump’s businesses, his fabulous self-love, and his weekends at Mar-a-Lago compromised his populism. He got almost 74 million votes in the 2020 election, no small feat, but it was not enough to win an Electoral College hospitable to those with a populist touch.

So what is Trump? He is less than he says and less than he seems. He is not a man without precedent. He is, rather, a relatively ineffective one-term president. In foreign policy, he shifted the consensus on China toward greater concern. He had real diplomatic achievements in the Middle East, and by design or by accident he has compelled Europe to think more prudently about its own security. As for his domestic policy, it is hard to say what will endure as policy, apart from the judicial appointments and whatever governing philosophy they represent. Much of what Trump achieved through executive orders will soon be reversed. The Republican Party may remain loyal to some image of Trump; it may continue to profess loyalty, but policy-wise this will decide little for the party.

The perspective to be gained from the transformation of Trump the ubiquitous into Trump the has-been is the sight—at last—of the country behind the White House. It is not on the verge of civil war. Its most significant realities are likely those at a far remove from spectacle, from the salted bread of endless grievance and the three-ring circus of the Trump show. A brilliant observer of politics, Isaiah Berlin was fond of quoting the words of the philosopher C.I. Lewis: that “there is no a priori for supposing the truth, when it is discerned, will necessarily prove interesting.” And what could be more boring than having Donald Trump join the ranks of John Tyler, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chester Arthur? But the orgy has ended, and there he is. Minimizing Trump and consigning him to history will allow Americans to see themselves after four years of squinting through a glass darkly.

In this clear, sobering light, Republicans and Democrats alike should try to escape from the second imperial presidency that arose with Barack Obama and was then taken to a baroque extreme by Trump. The first imperial presidency was a function of the Cold War. It was buoyed by memories of World War II and by the primacy of international politics, by U.S.-Soviet summitry, and by nuclear brinkmanship. It came to dust in the Vietnam War, which demystified the presidency. The second imperial presidency was not a function of foreign policy but of celebrity, of personalities and narratives that were in and of themselves supposed to be transformative. But the very essence of leadership in a democracy is that it is not monarchical, it is not incumbent on the person of the leader, individual leaders do not transform democracies, and they should not be given that power. Voters transform democracies, a banal fact of American democracy. However banal the fact, there is no a priori for supposing the truth, when it is discerned, will necessarily prove interesting.

Michael C. Kimmage is a professor and department chair of history at Catholic University of America.

Image: Reuters.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Americas

Both weapons are very good, but the G3 is certainly more affordable.

Key Point: These weapons are both popular and compare well. However, the trade off of fewer bells and whistles is a better price tage for the G3 over the Glock 19.

High capacity nine millimeter pistols were first introduced to the public as service pistols. Built for military and police without regard for size, service pistols were full-sized handguns that prioritized recoil reduction and magazine capacity over concealability. Over the years a compromise has evolved, resulting in a pistol mixing all three features. The Glock 19 is cited as the ideal compromise, and Taurus’ G3 pistol very much runs in that vein--but at a substantially lower cost.

The Glock 17 handgun was originally designed for the Austrian armed forces and then exported to civilian markets worldwide. The Glock 17 is a reliable handgun that, while lightweight, still has enough heft to absorb the modest recoil of the nine millimeter round. This makes it an excellent gun for conscript armies, where soldiers may not have a background in firearms. It also features a large, seventeen round magazine allowing soldiers to carry more rounds on their person.

The Glock 17 did well in the American commercial market but many buyers clamored for a handgun with a shorter barrel and slightly shorter magazine, resulting in the Glock 19. This defined the “sweet spot” for many compact nine millimeter handguns, and Brazil’s Taurus steps into that spot with the G3 pistol.

Forjas Taurus, or Taurus, was established in Brazil in 1939 as a tool and die manufacturing company. The company produced its first pistol, the 38101SO, in 1941, and began exporting pistols to the United States in 1968. Briefly controlled by Smith & Wesson, the Brazilian company broke with its American parent in 1977--but not before absorbing many handgun technologies. The company became adept at producing clones of Smith & Wesson style .38 caliber revolvers, and by the 1980s was copying firearms such as the Beretta 92.

Now, in the late 2010s, Taurus is producing the G3 as a compact, high capacity handgun and a Glock 19 competitor. While the two handguns are very similar, there’s no denying that Glock has a historical edge in reliability. Perhaps balancing that for some users is the significantly lower cost of the G3, which takes advantage of lower labor costs in South America to present a pistol typically found in the $250 range--about half that of the Glock.

Like the Glock 19, the G3 is a striker-fired, polymer frame handgun with a steel slide and barrel. Also like the Glock, the G3 can carry up to fifteen rounds of nine millimeter Luger ammunition in a double stack magazine. At 7.28 inches long and at 5.2 inches tall it’s virtually identical dimensionally to the Glock. It’s even the width, 1.25 inches, although one reviewer notes that the G3 would be narrower but for the manual safety mechanism. The G3 weighs 25 ounces unloaded, making it four ounces heavier than a Glock 19.

The G3 has all of the latest safety features in modern pistols, starting with a manual safety. This allows a user to carry the pistol loaded, safety on, ready to fire at the flick of a lever. The pistol has not one but two safety mechanisms designed to ensure a finger is on the trigger when the weapon fires: a blade safety on the trigger itself and a striker block mechanism. Both prevent the handgun from discharging due to an accidental fall or jolt. Finally, a loaded chamber indicator pops up on the frame when the pistol is loaded, showing at a glance that the pistol is live and ready to fire. Although a safety feature the loaded chamber indicator is also useful in shooting situations, making actions like press checks unnecessary.

The G3 is does lack features found in more expensive handguns. The Brazilian pistol includes factory stippling on the frame, as well as finger shelves for resting fingers when not aiming the pistol while preparing to fire. The pistol lacks features such as grip modules, interchangeable palm swells, and fully ambidextrous controls. The manual safety and magazine release are both positioned for right-handed shooters.

The G3’s sights are best described as inexpensive and consist of a single white dot post at the front of the slide and two dots on a Novak-style rear post. The sights are adjustable for windage. In addition the Brazilian gun has a Picatinny rail that runs under the barrel, allowing the user to add weapon lights, lasers, or other devices. The slide lacks a cutout for installing a red dot or reflex sight.

The G3 is a little longer, a little taller, a little heavier, and a little wider than its competitors. The G3 is designed to take on the Glock 19, but its main advantage is in pricing. The G3 costs less than half the price of the Austrian pistol, and if history is any guide is likely less reliable. That having been said, with a street price of $250 it’s an option for those looking for a handgun and on a budget.

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

Image: Taurus.

TNI Staff

Security, Asia

Too many of their tanks are old and out-dated Cold War models.

Key Point: Kim has lots of tanks--but they might just be too old to fight. 

While the T-34/85 medium tank might be have been instrumental in the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht in World War Two, the vintage war machine is probably still in service in North Korea.

The Soviet Union delivered some 250 T-34/85s to the nascent Democratic People’s Republic of Korea before March 1950. The Soviets delivered more of the tanks later over the course of the Korean War. The North Koreans lost many T-34/85s during the war as it became very apparently that the American M26 Pershing, M46 Patton and the British Centurion grossly outclassed the long-serving Soviet-built tank.

It not clear how many of the antiquated T-34/85 tanks are still in service with the Korean People’s Army, but some of the machines were spotted in North Korean propaganda videos as late as 2012. There were some 250 of the vintage T-34/85 tanks in the North Korean inventory as of 1996 according to some sources, but it is not clear how many of those machines are still in service. North Korea has been isolated for much of the preceding 25-years under various sanctions and embargos, so it is possible a significant portion of those tanks are still in the KPA inventory. Forces such as the KPA rarely throw away hardware no matter how obsolete.

But how would the T-34/85 fare on the modern battlefield?

If the KPA were to use the T-34/84 as part of mechanized formation conducting actual maneuver warfare, it would probably not end well for those crews. The North Koreans are more likely to use the T-34/85 for their reserve units and would probably use the machines for infantry support or in a defensive role from dug in positions. Otherwise, out in the open against either U.S. or South Korean forces, the T-34/85 would be basically useless.

However, if the North Koreans—who have had more than 50 years to prepare for a renewed war on the Korean peninsula—use clever tactics to ambush allied forces in the event a full-scale conflict breaks out again, the T-34/85 might still be of some use. The KPA would likely have to use camouflage and North Korea’s rugged terrain to their advantage to ambush U.S. and allied forces under conditions that are favorable to them.

Essentially, the KPA would have to use asymmetric tactics more similar to an insurgency—perhaps not unlike the Taliban or the Islamic State—to make life as difficult for allied forces as possible. Even then, the KPA would likely suffer grievous losses and would inevitably lose ultimately, but they could make allied forces pay for every millimeter of ground in blood in a fanatical defense of their homeland.

Fanatical defense of the homeland—even under the rule of a totalitarian state—is not unheard of, the German Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS would often put up a ferocious—often suicidal—fight even when there was no hope of winning toward the end of the Nazi regime. Similarly, Imperial Japanese forces would often fight to the last man rather than surrender—often out of devotion to their emperor. And while North Korea is a nominally Communist dictatorship, its leadership more resembles a Confucian monarchy in many ways. It’s not out of the realm of the possible that North Korean forces would put up a fanatical defense of their regime and fight to the bitter end with whatever means they have left to them.

This first appeared in 2017. It is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security,

What stopped them?

Here's What You Need to Remember: After the war navies faced the same problem that they had suffered after World War I, a surplus of large battleship hulls.

The dream of the battlecarrier did not die in World War II, despite the substandard performance of many of the converted ships, and despite the severe demands that jet aviation would put on modern flight decks.  

Indeed, the possibilities offered by new technologies kept generating proposals for new battlecarrier configurations for nearly as long as the last battleships remained in service. Even after the retirement of the last battleship, the idea of combining surface warships characteristics with aviation capabilities continues to entice major navies. 

Post-War Proposals: 

After the war navies faced the same problem that they had suffered after World War I, a surplus of large battleship hulls. Especially in the U.S. Navy (USN), admirals were reluctant to give up these hulls, despite the evident obsolescence of the battleships. 

In the U.S. and elsewhere, architects studied the idea of converting old battleships, or sometimes unfinished battleship hulls, into aircraft carriers. In France, engineers studied the possibility of converting the incomplete battleship Jean Bart and the battered, refloated Strasbourg into carriers.  The Soviet Navy gave considerable thought to finishing its incomplete battleships and battlecruisers as carriers. The Royal Navy even gave some thought to completing its Lion class battleships as hybrid aircraft carriers, with two 16” gun turrets forward and a flight deck aft. The Director of Naval Gunnery pointedly referred to the idea as an “abortion,” and the idea was not seriously pursued. French and Soviet engineers came to similar conclusions, as the conversions were cost-prohibitive and would have resulted in ships less effective than purpose-built carriers. 

Iowa Class:

Most of the world’s modern battleships went into reserve shortly after the war, and were scrapped in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The hulls were large, but not ideal for carrier conversion, and in any case, purpose-built ships were cheaper and more effective. Only the four ships of the Iowa class survived into the 1980s on the strength of their sound design, an enduring need for fire support, and the immense resources of the United States Navy. Over the long history of the class, several proposals emerged for converting them into hybrid battlecarriers.  Most of these proposals involved replacing the aft turret with a flight deck that could operate helicopters, thus giving the warships intrinsic anti-submarine and reconnaissance capabilities. The Royal Navy had undertaken a similar effort with the cruisers HMS Tiger and HMS Blake to only middling success, but the Iowas were much larger and thus offered considerably more space.

Advances in technology made the prospect even more enticing.  As the promise of the Harrier VSTOL fighter became apparent, plans for conversion envisioned battleships that could carry their own fighter protection. One design involved installing ski-jumps and aviation facilities on the Iowas that would allow them to carry up to twenty Harriers. The ideas were abandoned for the traditional reasons; conversion would be extremely expensive and would result in substandard aviation facilities compared to flight decks on dedicated aviation warships. The Iowas returned to service, but with their main armaments intact, and no major

Soviet approach:

While the Americans were contemplating ways to modernize the Iowas, the Soviets went in a different direction. Instead of giving a battleship a flight deck, they decided to give an aircraft carrier the kinds of weapons normally associated with a surface combatant. Soviet naval doctrine did not envision carriers as the center of major strike groups, but rather as playing a primarily defensive role.   The result was the Kiev class, a group of four “heavy aircraft cruisers” that could operate helicopters and VSTOL aircraft while also carrying a heavy anti-surface, anti-air, and anti-submarine armament.  Most notably, all of the Kievs carried at least eight P-500 surface-to-surface missiles, designed to strike enemy carrier battle groups at a range of up to 300km. The Kievs also carried a plethora of anti-air and anti-submarine missiles. 

While most conversion proposals looked like battleships with flight decks, the Kievs mostly looked like aircraft carriers with a forward deck covered by missile launchers. Their primary fighter was the Yak-38 Forger, of which they normally carried twelve, along with some sixteen helicopters. The four ships of the Kiev class were mostly successful in service, although the one surviving ship, INS Vikramaditya, underwent reconstruction upon sale to India in order to acquire a full, ski-jump flight deck.     

The Last Salvo: 

Ironically, concurrent developments in naval technology would probably render the idea of a battlecarrier more workable today than in the past. The F-35B Panther VSTOL fighter has served to make short decked aircraft carriers considerably more lethal than even in the height of the Harrier era. The MV-22 Osprey has, similarly, substantially increased the flexibility of small carriers.  Unfortunately, there are no more battleships to convert. While the Navy had excellent reasons to dispose of the obsolete Iowas, the existence of the F-35B and the MV-22, along with the desire to disperse aviation resources across a wide set of platforms, may revive demand for large surface ships that can do a bit of everything.

Dr. Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, teaches at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of the Battleship Book and can be found at @drfarls. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

The new ready-for-production drone has been cleared for export by Chinese authorities, raising the already large concern that dangerous drone technologies will continue to advance in sophistication and proliferate quickly around the world.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The drone is likely armed with standard EO/IR camera sensors and electronic warfare systems, and it may be that its principal advantage or attribute may simply be intended to be its speed. The exact speed may not be known at the moment, however, it is clearly built with counter-rotating rotor blades, a well-known compound configuration built to maximize speed. The idea is to offset potentially destabilizing vibrations or flight-path disturbances likely to take place at high speeds. 

China’s new CR500 Golden Eagle helicopter drone now being prepared for war. It looks like a mini-drone helicopter built to fly at high speeds with coaxial, counter rotating blades and a small, sensor-carrying body structure. The drone is likely intended to find and paint hostile targets ahead of advancing armored units.

The new ready-for-production drone has been cleared for export by Chinese authorities, raising the already large concern that dangerous drone technologies will continue to advance in sophistication and proliferate quickly around the world. Those seeking advanced drones range from large nation states looking to offer reconnaissance support to large mechanized armored units to small groups of rogue, stateless insurgents or even terrorists.

While many of the specifics of the platform, such as its speed or sensor payload, may not be fully known, a Chinese government-backed newspaper writes that the drone is ideally suited to support tanks, self-propelled artillery and other ground combat units advancing to enemy contact.

“The drone can carry a large payload, has a long endurance even when fully loaded, and a compact structure that can be easily stored and transported. It can also resist strong winds, carry different types of electro-optical pods and payloads, and act as a logistics support craft and deliver materials with pinpoint accuracy,” the drone’s maker, a Chinese state-owned firm called NORINCO stated in the Global Times newspaper. 

The paper even goes on to say that the Golden Eagle is “designed to meet the demands of the arms trade,” a scenario likely to fortify or simply add to existing U.S. concerns that China is not only engineering dangerous new technologies but also exporting them to hostile nations around the world. 

The drone is likely armed with standard EO/IR camera sensors and electronic warfare systems, and it may be that its principal advantage or attribute may simply be intended to be its speed. The exact speed may not be known at the moment, however it is clearly built with counter-rotating rotor blades, a well-known compound configuration built to maximize speed. The idea is to offset potentially destabilizing vibrations or flight-path disturbances likely to take place at high speeds. 

Also, much like a compound configuration, albeit in a massively scaled back way, the mini-helicopter drone may have some kind of thrusting or propulsion mechanism in the back. It may not be known if the Golden Eagle is faster than the larger, more rounded U.S. Navy helicopter-like Fire Scout drone, yet speed might be a key advantage when it comes to scouting ahead of attacking armored units. As a vertical take-off-and-landing drone, it would not have to rely upon a small landing strip or catapult of some kind to launch and can instead be organic or closely responsive to any ground forces it may support. 

The drone also looks like it has small side pylons or mini-fins which might be able to hold weapons for remote firing, which would allow an aerial attack should targets beyond line of sight for friendly troops be identified. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Alex Hollings

History, Americas

America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines represent two of the most potent forms of force projection wielded by any force in military history. For a short time in the late 1950s, America had plans to put them together.

Today, America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines represent two of the most potent forms of force projection wielded by any force in military history. For a short time in the late 1950s, America had plans to put them together into a single GI Joe style superweapon: A submarine aircraft carrier.

The nuclear days before we got MAD

For a short four years after the United States dropped the only atomic bombs ever used in anger on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America enjoyed a monopoly on the destructive power of splitting the atom. But on August 29, 1949, America’s former World War II allies in the Soviet Union conducted their own nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk test site in modern-day Kazakhstan. While America’s use of atomic weapons may have brought the world into the atomic age, it was truly the Soviet test that hurled the world’s two dominant superpowers into the decades-long staring contest we now know as the Cold War.

The massive destructive power of these new weapons forced a strategic shift in military operations the world over. Today, it’s difficult to fully appreciate the scope of the challenge nuclear weapons posed to military operations in those early days. Since the early 1960s, the nuclear powers of the world have operated under the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. The premise behind MAD was simple as laid out by President Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: Any single Soviet nuclear attack would be met with a barrage of American nuclear weapons, which would prompt a full-fledged launch of Soviet nuclear weapons in a deadly cascade.

The result, everyone knew, would be the end of life as we know it. MAD ensured there would be no winners in a nuclear conflict — effectively rendering nuclear weapons moot on the battlefield. If any single nuclear attack could bring about the end of the world, it was in the best interest of all nations never to launch such an attack at all. But prior to the advent of the MAD doctrine, nuclear weapons were largely seen like any other weapon in a nation’s arsenal. Because these weapons were so capable, many military leaders began devising entire strategies around their creative use (from developing what would become America’s nuclear triad to fielding backpack nukes on skiing Green Berets).

Of course, not all military planning was based on finding new ways to use nuclear weapons. There was also a pressing need to develop strategies and technologies that would be able to fight after the first few volleys of a nuclear exchange. One area of particular concern was America’s newfound air power. At the onset of World War II, the United States maintained just 2,500 or so military aircraft, but by the end of the war, America was an aviation powerhouse. With more than 300,000 tactical aircraft and a fleet of the most advanced bombers on Earth (the B-29 Stratofortress), America knew a potential World War III would be fought largely in the skies… but that posed a problem. How do you launch aircraft after all your airfields have been erased by nuclear hellfire?

That question led to a number of interesting programs, including the UFO-like VZ-9 Avrocar that theoretically wouldn’t need runways to take off. Another strategy first introduced in the 1950s called for a fleet of fighters that didn’t need runways, or even hangars that could be targeted by enemy bombers. Instead, the U.S. Navy wanted to launch fighter jets from submarines, just like they had been experimenting with launching cruise missiles.

Launching winged cruise missiles from submarines

In the 1950s, the United States was already hard at work experimenting with the idea of launching large missiles from submarines, in the early stages of what would become America’s seaward leg of the nuclear triad. In fact, the concept seemed so promising that some Navy officials began to wonder if they could launch small fighters from the hull of a submarine, just like they could with missiles.

After conducting missile tests aboard modified fleet ships, the Navy built two diesel-electric cruise missile submarines known as the Grayback Class. These subs could carry four large Regulus II missiles — which were turbojet-powered cruise missiles. After the Grayback Class subs’ promising performance, the Navy built a single Halibut-class vessel: a nuclear-powered submarine that could carry five of these large missiles. Unlike the submarine-launched ballistic missiles of today, these missiles were not fired while the sub was submerged. Instead, it would surface and launch the winged-cruise missiles via a ramp that led down the bow of the ship.

In order to defend itself against enemy ships, the USS Halibut also carried six 533-millimeter torpedo tubes, making the 350-foot long submarine a 5,000 thousand ton warfighting behemoth. Thanks to its S3W nuclear reactor, the Halibut had limitless range, which was important because the Regulus II missiles it carried had a range of only around 1,000 miles.

Because the Halibut had been designed to deploy winged cruise missiles of a similar size and weight to crewed fighter aircraft, the Navy saw an opportunity. Not only could these new submarines be used for missiles… they could also feasibly be used as carriers.

The plan to build submarine aircraft carriers

World War II had proven the value of aircraft carriers to the U.S. Navy, but after losing five such vessels and seven more escort carriers in the conflict, the Navy could see the value of an aircraft carrier that could submerge after launching its fighters.

Using the Halibut as a model, the U.S. Navy devised the AN-1 submarine aircraft carrier, which would carry eight fighters stored within two hangers inside the ship’s hull. In order to launch the fighters, the submarine would surface and orient the fighters straight up to be launched vertically. In order to manage the vertical launch, separate boosters would be affixed to the aircraft once they were on the launch rail. Those boosters would then fire, propelling the fighter into the air with enough speed and altitude for the fighter’s own engines to keep it flying.

According to the Navy’s plans, the AN-1 submarine aircraft carrier could launch four fighters in just 6 minutes and all eight fighters in less than eight minutes. Today’s Nimitz-class supercarriers can launch a fighter every 20 seconds when moving at full steam, but nonetheless, eight fighters in eight minutes was seen as an impressive figure at the time, especially for an aircraft carrier that could submerge again after launch.

Initially, the Navy hoped to use conventional fighter aircraft with the new submarine, and for a short time, the Grumman F-11F Tiger was considered for the role. But the 1950s saw such rapid advancement in aviation that the F-11 was soon deemed too slow to compete in the latter half of the 20th century. Instead, the Navy looked to Boeing to devise purpose-built fighters that could not only manage the stress of a vertical launch from an aircraft carrier submarine, but that could also attain speeds as high as Mach 3.

The challenges of flying a fighter from a submarine aircraft carrier

The proposed Boeing fighters never received a formal designation, but plans called for them to have an overall length of 70 feet, with a height of 19.5 feet and a wingspan of just 21.1 feet. They were to use a Wright SE-105 jet engine that produced 23,000 pounds of thrust and were to be crewed by a single pilot.

Boeing’s plan called for two additional SE-105 engines to be attached to the fighters to sustain its vertical liftoff, but once it had reached sufficient altitude, the aircraft would eject the two additional engines, which would later be recovered for re-use.

Vertical lift-off tests on other platforms had proven the viability of such a launch approach, but take-off is only half of what fighters do aboard aircraft carriers. In order to work, the fighters also needed to be able to land. On surface ship aircraft carriers, that’s done in a somewhat traditional manner, with fighters landing on the carriers’ deck and using a tail hook and cable to arrest its forward momentum.

Without sufficient deck space for such landings on a submarine, Boeing considered having its AN-1 fighters land vertically just like they took off. In theory, it was possible, but tests of such a landing approach proved too risky for all but the most experienced pilots. In order to land vertically with the engine facing the deck of the ship, the pilots would have to turn and look over their shoulder during landing — like using a jet engine to back into a parking spot from above, knowing full well that your aircraft (and potentially the submarine) would explode if you made even the slightest mistake.

The military landscape would shift dramatically again in the years that followed, as new ballistic missiles made it possible to launch nuclear weapons at far-flung targets with a great deal of accuracy and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction reduced the likelihood of an early nuclear exchange wiping out airfields. America would ultimately invest heavily in massive supercarriers that, while unable to hide from enemy missiles, offer a great deal more capability and versatility than the AN-1 submarine aircraft carrier ever could.

This article first appeared at Sandboxx.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

Russia is quietly strengthening its Naval fleet, adding new weapons to surface ships and engineering new, quasi-stealthy corvettes built for the Pacific.

New Russian Navy ships recently fired artillery and cruise missiles in the Sea of Japan as part of a visible move to increase its offensive maritime warfare presence in the Pacific. But this development could easily fall beneath the radar given the attention now being paid to China’s fast-growing navy and escalating U.S.-China tensions in the region. 

However, Russia is quietly strengthening its Naval fleet, adding new weapons to surface ships and engineering new, quasi-stealthy corvettes built for the Pacific. A recent essay published by Russia’s TASS news agency reports that its latest Project 20380 Corvette, called the Aldar Tsydenzhapov, conducted its first artillery fire and launch of an Uran cruise missile against a naval target as far as 40km away. 

“The cruise missile successfully struck the surface target at a distance of about 40 kilometers from the warship at the designated time. Up to 10 ships and vessels, and also aircraft of the Pacific Fleet’s naval aviation were involved in the test-fire to provide security in the area and exercise control of the results of accomplishing the combat assignment,” the Russian Pacific Fleet press office said in a statement quoted by TASS. 

The new corvette also tested its air defense weapons during Sea Trials in the Sea of Japan as part of the effort to fire off artillery at coastal targets. 

“At the combat training range near Zheltukhin Island, the ship conducted artillery fire to suppress invisible coastal targets hidden by the terrain, eliminating the targets simulating a notional enemy’s sheltered fire emplacements and combat hardware, and visible targets on the coastline. The fire was delivered from a 100mm A-190 multi-purpose shipborne artillery gun,” the press statement from Russia’s Pacific Fleet said. 

The Russian war ops in the Pacific are also intended to refine multi-domain warfare tactics through the use of Tu-22M3 missile-armed bombers and Su-35 fighter jets to conduct maritime combat operations in connection with the corvette. The war preparations raise interesting questions about the level of technical maturity of Russia’s air-surface networking and information sharing. 

Russia’s ability with electronic warfare is fairly well known, given its use in Ukraine in 2014, yet its technological capacity to conduct multi-domain warfare networking stealth fighter jets to bombers and surface ships may be more mysterious. Certainly, any such effort corresponds to heavily emphasized U.S. and allied initiatives to advance interoperability and cross-domain functionality. 

Also interestingly, the Russian essay makes reference to the stealth properties of the corvette, stating that its construction is incorporating “radio absorption materials and specially designing the ship’s hull and superstructure.” A quick look at the ships configuration confirms this as it appears to have a rounded bow and smooth, curved exterior, part of an apparent effort to minimize the return signal generated back to radar systems seeking to locate or target the ship. 

The Project 20380 third corvette is designed to accomplish green-water missions, fight enemy surface ships and submarines and provide artillery support for amphibious assault operations. In addition, they are armed with multi-purpose artillery guns, surface-to-air missile/artillery systems, supersonic missiles and automatic artillery launchers; they carry a Ka-27 helicopter, displace 2,200 tonnes and have a crew of 99, TASS reported. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

Douglas MacArthur seemed to think so.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Nuclear escalation on the Korean Peninsula would have gone terribly for everyone involved. The United States would have caused dreadful pain to uncertain strategic advantage, potentially pushing the Communist powers to escalate.

In 1950, as U.S. forces retreated from China’s onslaught across the Yalu River, General Douglas MacArthur called for strategic air attacks against China. Many believed that this would necessarily include the atomic bomb, America’s “asymmetric advantage” of the time.

America’s large arsenal of atomic weapons, and the fleet of strategic bombers necessary to deliver those weapons, was the central military advantage that the US enjoyed over the Soviet Union in 1950. The large, battle tested Red Army remained in Eastern Europe, capable of moving west on short notice. Many believed that only America’s ability to destroy the Soviet heartland with nuclear weapons held the Russians back. Many also believed that Moscow had orchestrated the war on the Korean Peninsula.

So why didn’t the United States use the bomb in Korea?  What if it had?

The Situation:

The Korean War witnessed three critical inflection points in 1950. The first was North Korea’s full-scale invasion across the thirty-eighth parallel in June, an action which escalated a conflict that had broiled for several years. The U.S. landing at Inchon in September ended the North Korean offensive, turning the tables and putting the Communists on the defensive. Then, in late October, the intervention of China’s People’s Liberation Army ended the Allied offensive, and forced UN forces back beyond the thirty-eighth parallel.

It was at this point that MacArthur called for attacks into China, and many in the United States began to demand the use of the atomic bomb. Despite the remarkable progress that the Soviets had made on their own bomb program, the United States still enjoyed a huge advantage in total atomic weapons, and in delivery systems.

Strategic or Tactical:

In 1950, the U.S. defense establishment had yet to work out the elaborate system of planning, development, and mobilization that would divide nuclear weapons by type and purpose, and had not fully integrated atomic weapons into its conventional warfighting plans. Nevertheless, the United States would have faced a choice between using atomic bombs as “tactical” or “strategic” weapons.

Strategic attacks would have concentrated on Chinese staging areas, industrial sites, and political targets, aiming to either bring about the collapse of the PRC or force it from the war. Mao Zedong expected something of this nature when he chose to commit the People’s Liberation Army to the war on the peninsula. Given the size of China’s population and the dispersed nature of its industry, such a campaign would have required a great many of the rudimentary atomic warheads of the time.

And indeed, even the strategic use of atomic weapons against Chinese targets would have generated criticism from within the U.S. defense establishment. For many within the establishment, China was only a proxy for broader Soviet efforts to destabilize the West and break the nascent system of containment.  Wasting warheads on Chinese targets would have left Soviet industry relatively untouched, and thus capable of generating additional proxy wars across the globe. Committing the US Air Force’s fleet of B-36 “Peacemakers” to a general strategic campaign against China would not only have tipped the hand of the Strategic Air Command, it might- given the questionable defensive capabilities of the bombers- have left the US with few or no options for striking directly into the Soviet Union.

What if the United States had instead concentrated on using nuclear weapons in a tactical manner?  First things first, U.S. nuclear strategy did not envision using the nation’s relatively small nuclear arsenal against merely “tactical” targets; the United States had few enough weapons (and few enough delivery systems) to waste them on the deployed enemy forces. We had extraordinarily little information on the actual tactical and operational effect of nuclear weapons on the battlefield.  Certainly, Chinese and North Korean command centers, logistical centers, and troop concentrations would have fared poorly under nuclear assault.  But then the United States enjoyed major advantages in the airspace above Korea in any case, and regularly subjected Communist forces to air attack. Atomic weapons surely would have helped, although potentially at the cost of permanently delegitimizing the Seoul government (which would have invited the nuclear destruction of its own homeland).

War Situation:

Recent work on the Korean War has revealed other reasons why the United States resisted using the atomic bomb. While some believed that the United States exercised unilateral restraint in the war, in fact both sides carefully husbanded their strength, and took care moving up the escalatory ladder.

American military authorities feared that an escalation of the war would make the situation on the peninsula untenable. Far from exhausting its strength, the People’s Republic of China maintained a substantial reserve of ground and air forces that it could throw into the fight if the United States decided to step up the war.  Perhaps more importantly, the Soviet Union could exert a vastly greater influence on the conflict, either through a stepped up transfer of equipment to China and the DPRK, or through the direct deployment of Soviet ground, air and naval forces. If the US decided to go all out, the Red Army had more than enough strength to clear continental East Asia of U.S. forces, and perhaps to cut U.S. lines of retreat from Korea.

The Final Salvo:

Nuclear escalation on the Korean Peninsula would have gone terribly for everyone involved. The United States would have caused dreadful pain to uncertain strategic advantage, potentially pushing the Communist powers to escalate.  The physical and human terrain of Korea would have endured awful suffering. And perhaps most importantly, the world would have lost the nascent nuclear taboo, a sense among policymakers that atomic weapons differed in some meaningful sense from other kinds of explosives, and that their practical use portended something momentous.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Middle East

This weapon functions well and is popular for export.

Key Point: Israel does not employ the Galil rifle in combat today. However, this weapon made its mark and is known throughout the world as powerful and reliable.

The 1967 Six Day War provided many military lessons for the young state of Israel. One of many lessons was that the Israeli Army’s FN FAL battle rifles were too heavy and unwieldy. Israel needed a new assault rifle, and as a result, developed the Galil. Largely based on the Soviet AK-47, the Galil served as the service rifle of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for nearly three decades.

In the wake of the 1967 war, Israel decided it needed a new assault rifle. The standard issue rifle of the Israeli Army, the Belgian FN FAL, was a large, heavy battle rifle chambered in 7.62. The FAL was equipped with a fixed stock and twenty-round magazines, making it a large, powerful weapon not well suited for urban combat. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had evolved past the battle rifle concept to field smaller, lighter rifles firing intermediate-powered cartridges, and Israel had captured thousands of AK-47s from Arab forces during the war. Lacking a major arms industry but wanting its own homemade assault rifle, Israel took a compromise route: it copied the AK-47.

Development of the Galil started after the Six Day War. The Galil uses the same piston-based method of operation as the AK-47, a rotating-bolt operating system that diverts propellant gasses to drive a combined piston/bolt carrier that cycles the weapon. The Galil looks like the AK-47, but individual parts are not compatible. The Galil is more directly related to Finland’s Valmet M62 assault rifle, Helsinki’s take on the AK, and early versions of the Galil even used Finnish receivers.

The Galil is capable of both semi-automatic and fully automatic rates of fire, the latter at up to 650 rounds per minute. The Galil AR, the main version of the Galil platform, weighs 8.7 pounds. It has an overall length of 29.2 inches with stock folded, and 38.6 inches with stock fully extended. The 18.5-inch barrel has a 1-in-12 inch right-handed rifling twist matched to the U.S. M193 5.56-millimeter round. The weapon used fixed Tritium night sights that allowed faster target acquisition at night and during low light conditions, effective night firing.

The Galil was a box magazine-fed weapon. It could not use M16 magazines, despite the existence of M16A1s in Israeli service and the sharing of a common caliber and round. The Galil used proprietary 35-round magazines, holding five more rounds than AK-47 or M16A1 30-round magazines.

Israeli Military Industries developed a number of Galil variants. The Galil ARM was meant to function as either an assault rifle or squad automatic weapon, and featured a built-in bipod and carrying handle. The SAR carbine featured a shorter 13.5-inch barrel and was just twenty-four inches long with the stock folded. A 5.56-millimeter Marksman’s Assault Rifle featured a 1-in-7 inch rifling twist to complement the newer NATO SS109 round. It also featured a chrome-lined barrel. Like the AK-series rifles, the optical sight is attached to the left side of the receiver. An even heavier Galil in 7.62-millimeter was the standard sniper rifle for the IDF. The Galil sniper rifle featured a 6x sight, two-stage trigger, combined muzzle brake and flash hider, and a suppressor.

One problem with the Galil was its exceptional weight. A Galil AR rifle weighed 8.7 pounds, or two more pounds than an AK-47 and 1.7 pounds more than an M4 carbine. The use of steel in many parts of the rifle, particularly the folding stock is responsible for the relatively high weight. While the weight increase helped with recoil reduction while firing fully automatic, Israel could have clearly had a lighter weapon had it chosen to use aluminum alloys instead of steel.

The Israeli Galil was adopted in 1972 and soldiered on for nearly three decades, through the Yom Kippur War, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and anti-terrorism actions through the 1990s. The Galil experienced limited export success, with the most visible (and controversial) sale to Apartheid-era South Africa. Israel’s experience with the Galil gave it valuable experience in the field of small arms and the assault rifle was superseded by the Tavor bullpup assault rifle in 2001. Although the Galil may be out of service today, the rifle helped create what is today a small arms industry all out of proportion to tiny Israel’s size.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Galil/IWI.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

How would you punk the U.S. Navy if the lords of naval warfare handed you the keys to, say, China’s navy?

Here's What You Need to Remember: China’s navy, in short, could ape the Cylons’ strategy. In purely martial terms, posing missile, gun, and torpedo threats from many points of the compass from as many domains as possible—from the surface, the depths, and aloft—would compel a ship’s beleaguered defenders to cope with more challenges, perhaps, than they could manage.

How would you punk the U.S. Navy if the lords of naval warfare handed you the keys to, say, China’s navy? Well, you might do the obvious thing: read or watch some science fiction!

In the latest Star Trek flick, for instance, a new foe harnesses swarm tactics to eviscerate the starship Enterprise. A coordinated stream of small craft overpowers the starship’s defenses through the simple expedient of presenting more targets than the Enterprise crew can shoot down. Its overseer then concentrates fire at vital nodes to dismember the ship’s structure.

Such tactics are an otherworldly counterpart to saturation missile barrages meant to overwhelm U.S. surface combatants’ Aegis combat systems. Rather than try to evade Aegis defenses, attackers simply aim more rounds at this combination radar, fire-control and surface-to-air missile system than it can handle. Some get through—and sow havoc. Life imitates sci-fi.

And then there’s Battlestar Galactica, a TV show with a similar ripped-from-the-headlines feel. The conceit behind the show: rather than risk a slugfest against the human colonies’ fleet of capital ships and their Viper fighter squadrons, the archenemy Cylons insinuate a computer virus into the fleet. The virus spreads through the ubiquitous computer networks whereby commanders coordinate their endeavors. It disables heavy ships and fighter spacecraft alike, leaving the fleet easy prey.

Sound strategy, that. Why duel a stronger antagonist and risk losing when cyberwarfare can nullify combat power before shots are fired? Galactica, an aged man-of-war, rides out the onslaught because her old-school commander, William Adama, refuses to permit the computers on board to be networked. When modern Vipers—the F-35s of this faraway universe—shut down, the battlestar’s deck crew salvages obsolescent fighters. Old tech proves too low-tech for viruses to infect—yet still lethal enough for skilled aviators to repulse attack.

“Network-centric warfare” remains U.S. forces’ warfighting method of choice, even though the phrase has fallen out of fashion. It comes with grave perils. Live by the computer network, die by the computer network.

But Battlestar Galactica also hints at subtler ways to outfight a stronger opponent. The weak need not vanquish the strong outright. They can harry the strong—enfeebling them until their margin of supremacy vanishes.

Wise combatants, then, study their foes, discern their strengths and frailties, and design operations to tame the former while exploiting the latter. A prospective enemy like China would try to divine the American “center of gravity” or, as Carl von Clausewitz describes it somewhat mystically, the “hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” Should a fight erupt, Chinese forces would then aim “blow after blow” at that center of gravity—pounding away until U.S. forces capitulated or, more likely, lost heart and went away.

There’s a curious thing about centers of gravity, though. They can be innocuous. Petroleum refineries turned out to be a center of gravity for Hitler’s war machine, humble freighters and tankers for Tojo’s. By pummeling industry and merchantmen from sky and sea, the Allies starved Axis forces of irreplaceable war materiel.

A related idea from Prussia’s master of strategy: Clausewitz advises strategists that, in the folksy terms I like to employ in Newport, the enemy is not a potted plant. In strategy, in other words, one antagonist doesn’t work its will on a lifeless mass that’s unable to strike a counterblow. Rather, warfare involves an intensely interactive “collision of two living forces”—both imbued with ingenuity and with zeal for their causes. It’s the Golden Rule of combat: the foe does unto you even as you do unto him.

But here’s the thing. It may be possible, through dexterous strategy and operations, to transform a foe into a potted plant—dulling his reactions and material capacity until he’s little more than an inert mass with little prospect of protecting himself or thwarting your will. Better yet, such operations could yield an opponent prone to self-defeating mistakes. Inert pugilists make easy pickings.

By the Golden Rule, moreover, he may do things to reduce you to a potted plant, hampering your ability to adapt to change to the tactical surroundings—change he himself may have wrought. If he renders you inert, you can no longer compete effectively or efficiently. He imposes his will on you—and wins.

Which brings us back to the sci-fi universe. In the very second episode of Battlestar Galactica, titled “33,” the Cylons hit upon an ingenious stratagem: weary Galactica’s and the colonial fleet’s defenders through small-scale but frequent assaults, then strike a fatal blow against a foe too tired, addle-brained and mistake-prone to fight back effectively.

Clausewitz would instantly recognize the approach. He notes that the components of combat strength are force—material capability—and resolve. Quite so. The Cylon onslaught targets both the hardware and human dimensions, enervating the colonial fleet over time. The Cylons smuggle a homing device onto a transport to track its movements, then repeatedly “jump” in faster-than-light strike forces to menace the fleet. Cylon fighters appear every thirty-three minutes. It becomes plain to Galactica’s leadership that the attacks’ purpose is less to inflict damage than to compel the fleet to keep jumping. Relentless assault prevents repairs and upkeep to fighting ships while keeping crews awake.

The campaign takes its toll on hardware and bodies, debilitating the fleet’s fighting power. Think about scrambling an air wing for action every half-hour: you assemble pilots for a preflight briefing, launch, do battle, and recover through “combat landings” that require pilots to slam fuselages on the ship’s flight deck to get the squadron aboard fast. Little maintenance gets done under such circumstances. Machinery needs downtime, and it dislikes transients. Repeatedly starting and stopping it is stressful—even leaving aside the rigors of deep-space combat.

Nor do the equipment’s operators fare much better. “We’re getting slower,” observes Commander Adama grimly after fatigue cascades into computer problems that in turn delay a faster-than-light jump out of harm’s way. The mistake almost subjects not just the battlestar but its consorts—mostly unarmed transports—to Cylon missile fire. Laments the weapons scientist and turncoat Gaius Baltar, “there are limits” beyond which human physiology can’t be pushed. It’s just a matter of time, observes Baltar, before the fleet’s defenders commit a fatal blunder.

And that’s the impact of wearisome tactics on a ship of war that appears amply stocked with manpower. Throughout most of its history, the U.S. Navy manned its ships under a similar philosophy, reasoning that it takes a surplus of manpower to fight a ship in combat. Combat means losses. Now imagine Cylon pinprick attacks’ impact on Galactica and her coterie were it “minimally manned”—that is, if every crewman were assigned multiple jobs, and if the vessels lacked any manpower reserve when (not if) battle damage and casualties occur.

In all likelihood, colonial commanders would have committed a final mistake sooner rather than later, as demands on crews mounted to unbearable proportions. Humanity’s end would have come with it.

This foray into sci-fi represents a roundabout way of proposing that personnel policy may constitute a U.S. Navy center of gravity. Late-model surface vessels—ranging from diminutive littoral combat ships to hulking Zumwalt-class destroyers and Ford-class aircraft carriers—are indeed minimally manned. The logic behind this approach is simple: U.S. defense budgets are stagnant, sailors are expensive. Ergo, substitute technology for people to save taxpayer dollars. The navy doesn’t have to pay, say, an automated firefighting or ammunition-loading system a salary or pension, or fund its health care. The leaner the crew, the greater the savings.

Now, minimal manning may make sense for routine peacetime steaming. Transiting from point A to point B on the nautical chart represents a steady-state environment, entailing predictable demands and few extra stresses to wear down crews. It’s worth noting, though, that every crewman shoulders lots of different duties for different situations—even during everyday operations. That’s true even of ships manned under the traditional, more generous personnel policy. The same sailor might help launch or recover aircraft, take on fuel or supplies from a logistics vessel, fight fires or flooding, and on and on, depending on what the ship’s doing at the time.

Capping the number of crewmen caps the supply of labor. That means automation must reduce the demand for labor enough to keep supply in sync with demand. Can it? Color me skeptical. It’s an open question whether enough shipboard tasks can be automated, wholly or partially, to sustain that balance. I served in a warship operated by half the manpower that operated it in its first life, during World War II. You can indeed reduce manpower by replacing sailors with gee-whiz technology—to a point. It worked for us, but there were times when the makers of Galactica could have cast our crew as characters in “33.” We were the walking dead.

But if minimal manning may suffice for peacetime operations, when no enemy is trying to turn American shortcomings to advantage, what about combat—an environment without a manageable, predictable rhythm? War unfolds not by peacetime cost-benefit logic but by its own paradoxical logic, the logic of unforeseen reversals of fortune. It’s a helter-skelter realm that comes complete with antagonists bent on enfeebling and defeating warriors and materiel.

“Redundancy” is the traditional antidote for battle damage and other emergencies. It imparts resiliency to a combat unit. In hardware terms, redundancy means furnishing a spare of everything you can—shipwrights installing duplicate machinery so that a vessel has an extra generator, pump, piping system, whatever. Lose one widget, and you put a duplicate in service. Excess capacity thus lets crews reroute around damage. It lets a unit sustain its fighting strength despite absorbing a pounding. Spare manpower serves the same purpose. It provides skippers replacements for those who fall in action. Individuals may be incapacitated; the ship as a whole fights on.

If you’re China and confront an antagonist that opts to do without redundancy, you can deploy a troublemaking strategy. You whittle away at the center of gravity manifest in minimal manning. The object of such a strategy? Tire and bewilder crews that may already be overworked. Fling a variety of challenges at them, along as many axes as you can, as simultaneously as you can. Give each crewman more to do than he can, on the Cylon-esque reasoning that imposing numerous, repeated contingencies compounds the demands on people and hardware. Such tactics constitute the precursor to a crushing blow—or to an American withdrawal under duress.

China’s navy, in short, could ape the Cylons’ strategy. In purely martial terms, posing missile, gun, and torpedo threats from many points of the compass from as many domains as possible—from the surface, the depths, and aloft—would compel a ship’s beleaguered defenders to cope with more challenges, perhaps, than they could manage. Flooding an embattled zone with China Coast Guard vessels, fishing craft, and purportedly civilian sea and air traffic—interspersing combat units among nonmilitary ships and planes—would further complicate U.S. commanders’ picture of the surroundings. It would be hard to act for fear of hitting the wrong target—and having pictures of an errant shot splashed across TV and computer screens around the world.

That’s a fate few captains relish. And Chinese commanders would doubtless deploy deceptive measures to make the campaign even more wearisome. To glimpse the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) mindset toward deception, dust off that old copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Among other things, Book I of the Chinese masterwork instructs generals to “feign disorder,” “feign incapacity,” sow confusion among the enemy leadership, divide an enemy host and fall on the weaker fractions, and generally deploy “normal” and “extraordinary” forces in mercurial combinations to confound and weaken opponents. Such ideas find their way into contemporary works on PLA strategy.

Do all that, and a weaker but resolute China stands some chance of overcoming its brawnier foe. It could land a heavy hit or, failing that, simply outlast the foe. How to respond? First and foremost, the U.S. Navy should acknowledge—should grok, as sci-fi master Robert Heinlein might say—that a manpower deficit represents a grave weakness in a hot war. Taking the problem seriously constitutes the first step toward a solution.

Second, it should conscript some imaginative tacticians to play the “red team,” projecting how PLA forces might harness troublemaking strategies. Realistic wargames illuminate the contours of problems while hinting at workarounds.

Third, there may be no substitute for stationing sailors aboard American surface combatants in greater numbers. The service leadership already expanded the crew of littoral combat ships by 25 percent. That’s a welcome boost in percentage terms, but a 25 percent boost equates to just ten more seafarers. Exercises will show how many more mariners are needed, and what skills they should boast to bolster these vessels’ resiliency.

And lastly, the nation is poised to undergo a change of presidential administrations that will usher in a president inclined to bulk up the U.S. Navy, along with a secretary of the navy reportedly inclined to agree. The next few months, then, represent the ideal time for the navy leadership to put the case for new policies—including less minimal manning—before a political leadership favorably disposed toward such policies.

Let’s hand them a sci-fi tract while we’re at it. Therein lies wisdom.

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

Image: Reuters.