Diplomacy & Crisis News

A senior lawmaker fears drastically reduced U.S. diplomatic and aid footprint could pave the way for Islamic State comeback.

In his daily briefing to the press on Friday, World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that supplies of medicine are at risk of disruption due to the epidemic, given that China - the worst hit nation so far - is a major producer of pharmaceutical ingredients.

The UN human rights office is calling on authorities in Yemen to revoke death sentences imposed against 35 parliamentarians allegedly for treason charges.

Sharing the burden of keeping down the Islamic State makes sense. But U.S. and NATO leaders should be coldly realistic about what European allies can do—and avoid their mistakes in Afghanistan.

The war in Idlib is a growing humanitarian crisis, a potential disaster for Ankara—and a problem that doesn’t bear on Washington.

Robert Farley

Security,

We know how to kill carriers.

Key Point: The impact of cyberattacks against carriers could vary widely; at a minimum, they could effectively blind the carrier, making it more difficult for the ship and its aircraft to carry out their mission.

As long as they serve usefully in that role, nations will seek means to neutralize them. The aircraft-carrier form has proven remarkably flexibly, serving in one way or another for nearly a hundred years. From the USS Forrestal on, the U.S. Navy supercarrier has existed in basically the same form since the 1950s, and is expected to continue operating into the latter half of the twenty-first century. At some point, the game will be up; carriers will no longer pack the offensive punch necessary to justify their vulnerability. It’s not obvious when that day will come, however; we may only find out after the destruction of one of the Navy’s prize possessions.

We know how to kill aircraft carriers—or at least we know how best to try to kill aircraft carriers. Submarine-launched torpedoes, cruise missiles fired from a variety of platforms and ballistic missiles can all give an aircraft carrier a very bad day. Of course, modern carriers have ways of defending themselves from all of these avenues of attack, and we don’t yet have any good evidence of the real balance between offensive and defensive systems.

But what of the future? How will we plan to kill carriers thirty years from now? Here are several of the problems that the next generation of aircraft-carrier architects will need to worry about.

Undersea Unmanned Vehicles

Submarines have long posed the deadliest threat to aircraft carriers. In World War II, every major carrier fleet suffered losses to submarines; in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy viewed Soviet subs as a critical problem. Against modern antisubmarine warfare capabilities, the biggest difficulties faced by a submarine involve finding a carrier, then getting into firing position (with either missiles or torpedoes) before the carrier’s aircraft and escorts can detect and kill the sub. If the boat’s commander isn’t suicidal, finding a potential avenue for escape is also an issue.

Unmanned submarines solve several of these problems. They can wait indefinitely along the likely avenues of approach, only moving to attack after they detect the carrier. And robot submarines don’t worry too much about how their families will manage once they’re gone. Armed with only a few weapons, undersea unmanned vehicles, operating autonomously under preset conditions, could give future aircraft carriers a very serious headache.

Cyberattacks

Aircraft carriers already consist of a terrifyingly complex system of systems, from the ship itself to the air group to the escort task force. The Ford-class CVs will expand this even farther, operating as part of a system of weapons and sensors that can span across hundreds, even thousands, of miles. The digital linkages of this network will be well protected, but hardly impermeable; it is likely that any foe will take steps to attempt to disrupt and compromise the computer systems that allow the Fords to have the greatest effect.

The impact of cyberattacks against carriers could vary widely; at a minimum, they could effectively blind the carrier, making it more difficult for the ship and its aircraft to carry out their mission. It could also reveal the carrier’s location, making the ship vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including missiles and submarines. At the extreme, a cyberattack could disable key systems, making it impossible for the ship to defend itself.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In Peter Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet, American UAVs destroy two carriers (the Russian Kuznetsov and the Chinese Shandong) at the end of a carrier battle in the North Pacific. In some sense, of course, drones represent nothing new; on the one hand, cruise missiles are little more than suicidal drones, and on the other hand, planes have been sinking aircraft carriers since the 1940s. But modern, manned aircraft seeking to hit an aircraft carrier face near insurmountable obstacles; modern air defenses make a conventional approach suicidal. Cruise missiles help extend the range, but face the same problem in penetrating air defenses.

Autonomous UAVs, capable of using both stand-off and close-range weapons, have the flexibility to overwhelm air-defense networks, especially when they don’t need to worry about the survival of their pilots. They can dispatch weapons at various ranges, then close with the target and use themselves to inflict fatal damage on the carrier. There’s nothing in the world more dangerous than a robot with nothing left to lose. . . .

Hypersonic Weapons

China, Russia and the United States have all devoted extensive attention to hypersonics, which pose a threat in many ways similar to that of ballistic missiles. Unlike ballistic missiles, however, hypersonics can approach a target from a trajectory that makes them extremely difficult to target with defensive weaponry. They combine the most lethal aspects of both ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and with inertia alone can cause enough damage to a carrier to kill a mission, if not the entire ship. And hypersonics may become more politically palatable than ballistic missiles, largely because of the association of the latter with the delivery of nuclear warheads.

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Orbital Bombardment

Aircraft carriers are inherently unstealthy; they cannot be made invisible to sensors in the same way that a plane, submarine, or even surface ship can be rendered effectively invisible. However, aircraft carriers have always derived a certain degree of their usefulness from their mobility. The disadvantage of a static airbase is that the enemy always knows where it is; the tactical problem becomes a simple question of offensive versus defensive weapons. Aircraft carriers can use their mobility to take advantage of the difference between seers (surveillance systems) and shooters (stand-off weapon systems).

Orbital bombardment systems (nicknamed “Rods from God”) can solve that problem. Satellites equipped with tungsten rods, or really any other kind of kinetic weapon, can simultaneously identify aircraft carriers and attack them, without messy problems associated with networked communications. The Rods from God, using kinetic energy alone, could deliver a tremendous blow to a surface target, either sinking a carrier or rendering it useless.

Can the Carrier Endure?

Aircraft carriers are instruments of geopolitical influence. As long as they serve usefully in that role, nations will seek means to neutralize them. The aircraft-carrier form has proven remarkably flexibly, serving in one way or another for nearly a hundred years. From the USS Forrestal on, the U.S. Navy supercarrier has existed in basically the same form since the 1950s, and is expected to continue operating into the latter half of the twenty-first century. At some point, the game will be up; carriers will no longer pack the offensive punch necessary to justify their vulnerability. It’s not obvious when that day will come, however; we may only find out after the destruction of one of the Navy’s prize possessions.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. This article first appeared earlier this year. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

No way to counter it?

Key point: China has no good way to defend itself against India's missiles. However, both countries are nuclear powers and so will deter each other.

While many of us remain mesmerized by the unfolding shambles in the Middle East, the world’s two most populous countries have gotten into a tiff over missiles. And I’m not referring to the ballistic kind for once.

“India deploying supersonic missiles on the border has exceeded its own needs for self-defense and poses a serious threat to China’s Tibet and Yunnan provinces,” complained the People’s Liberation Army Daily. “The deployment of BrahMos missile is bound to increase the competition and antagonism in the China–India relations and will have a negative impact on the stability of the region.”

“Our threat perceptions and security concerns are our own, and how we address these by deploying assets on our territory should be no one else's concern,” an Indian military source sniffed in response.

We’ll first look at the BrahMos’s capabilities and why they are considered a big deal, then plunge into why their deployment and export by is perceived as such a threat by China.

Indeed, the BrahMos cruise missile is stealthy, fast and extremely difficult to shoot down. It also has become a point of contention in a complicated web of overlapping alliances between India, China, Russia and potentially Vietnam.

Supersonic Carrier Killers

BrahMos began in the 1990s as a joint project between Russia and India to develop an Indian version of the P-800 Oniks cruise missile. The missile’s name is a portmanteau of the rivers Brahmaputra and Moskva in India and Russia, respectively.

Cruise missiles are designed to be fired at long ranges from their targets so as not to expose the launching platform to enemy retaliation. The quintessential cruise missile is the Tomahawk, developed in the United States. Fired by ships and aircraft, the 2,900-pound missile can cruise up to one thousand miles (depending on the model) at a speed of five hundred miles per hour—roughly the speed of a typical airliner—before slamming into its target.

During the Cold War, Russia developed a different style of cruise missile designed to take out American aircraft carriers. These flew over the speed of sound to better evade the carrier’s defenses—which include air-to-air missiles fired by fighters, surface-to-air missiles and Gatling-cannon Close-in weapon systems, or CIWS. They were also larger to increase the likelihood of achieving a kill in one hit.

Ramjets were used to maintain high speeds over long distances. A ramjet uses incoming air at high speeds to achieve compression instead of using a compressor, saving on fuel. However, a ramjet needs a boost from another source to help it achieve that airflow in the first place. In the case of the BrahMos, a rocket provides the initial acceleration before the ramjet takes over.

The BrahMos is actually slightly faster at Mach 2.8 than the P-800. It also weighs twice as much as a Tomahawk, at six thousand pounds.

The combination of twice the weight and four times greater speed as a Tomahawk result in vastly more kinetic energy when striking the target. Despite having a smaller warhead, the effects on impact are devastating.

Even more importantly, the BrahMos’s ability to maintain supersonic speeds while skimming at low altitude makes it very difficult to detect and intercept. To cap it off, the BrahMos performs an evasive “S-maneuver” shortly before impact, making it difficult to shoot down at close range.

A modern ship targeted by the BrahMos could respond with layered defenses to shoot down the missiles: ripple-fired medium- and short-range antiaircraft missiles and close-range CIWS. But an effective attack would involve firing multiple missiles in order to overwhelm these defensive countermeasures.

If the attack is launched within 120 kilometers of the target, it can skim at very low altitude the entire way to the target. While missiles can be detected earlier if benefiting from AWACs aircraft, a ship would likely detect a sea-skimming missile at range of only thirty kilometers, affording the vessel only a thirty second time window to respond. One intriguing analysis argues that a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, with its layered air defenses, could not handle more twelve BrahMos missiles at once and that an entire carrier battle group would be saturated by more than sixty-four.

Of course, though India has some unpleasant memories of an encounter with a U.S. carrier group in the past, they probably have a different foe in mind.

In any case, the BrahMos has a major limitation…

The Missile Technology Control Regime

The BrahMos has a relatively short range—only 190 miles (290 kilometers)—under half the range of the Russian Oniks missile. This means that BrahMos launch platforms need to be relatively close to their targets—potentially within ranges they may be detected and fired back at.

This was purposefully done in order to conform to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a partnership of thirty-five countries which restricts the export of cruises missiles with ranges over three hundred kilometers. Russia is a member of the partnership—and just this June 28, India acceded into membership. And here we get into some interesting geopolitical strategy.

China is not a member of the regime, but would dearly appreciate the chance to deal in the market. India, on the other hand, would like to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group which regulates which nuclear technologies are permitted for trade. But China blocked its accession in June this year.

By adhering to the MTCR, India gained access to it—and now hopes to use that access as leverage versus China. Notionally, they could arrange a quid pro quo trading Indian NSG membership for Chinese admission to the MTCR. Whether it will work out that way remains to be seen.

Multiple Targets for Multiple Launchers

The BrahMos isn’t just an antishipping weapon—it also can hit ground-based targets, and is ideal for precision attacks against fixed installations such as radars, command centers, airbases and enemy missile batteries. It can also potentially carry a 660-pound nuclear warhead, though that doesn’t appear to be its primary intended use.

There are quite a few variants of the BrahMos missile designed to be used by the different platforms of the Indian military against either land or naval targets.

The Indian Navy’s BrahMos missiles mostly use eight-cell Vertical Launch System launchers. Six of its frigates and two destroyers have a single BrahMos launcher, while three of its destroyers have twin launchers. More BrahMos equipped ships are under construction.

The Navy has also successfully tested in 2013 a submarine-launched version which is expected to enter service in future vessels. Submarine-launched BrahMoses could potentially be launched fairly close to the target without being detected.

India has also developed the BrahMos-A, designed to be launched from its Su-30MKI strike fighters. Finding a ways to mount such a heavy missile on a fighter plane has taken years of work—in the end, the Su-30s had to be specially modified for the task. The first test flight was carried out in June this year. India has already requisitioned two hundred BrahMos-As, and plans to convert forty Su-30MKIs to carry them. This offers yet another flexible means to deliver the missiles close enough to their intended targets.

Finally, there are ground-launched Mobile Autonomous Launcher systems mounted on twelve-wheeler trucks. These are organized in regiments of five launchers with over 100 missiles. India is deploying a fourth missile regiment to Arunachal Pradesh, reportedly at cost of over 4,300 crore (over $640 million dollars.)

These are what have spooked the Chinese military, particularly since the new Block III missiles are designed to steep dive at seventy-degree angles to hit targets on the rear slopes of mountains. This has obvious application against the heavily militarized Himalayan border with China.

that India is pressing ahead with the development of even deadlier BrahMos variants. To begin with, some reports imply India tested in 2012 a version with a new satellite guidance system and a range of five hundred kilometers. Some argue that even the regular BrahMos may be capable of going further than its claimed 290-kilometer range.

India will also soon introduce the next-generation BrahMos-NG, which is smaller (only three thousand pounds,) faster (Mach 3.5,) and stealthier (smaller Radar-Cross Section.) It should be deployable from land, sea and air systems, including multiple missiles carried on fourth-generation fighters.

Additionally, India will soon be testing a scramjet-powered hypersonic BrahMos II missile capable of zipping along at Mach 7. Needless to say, these would be even harder to detect and shoot down and afford defending ships just seconds to react. The U.S. military has only just begun development a hypersonic missile of its own.

Russia, for its part, has appreciated the BrahMos’s commercial success, but seems to have only limited intention of fielding it: it may potentially deploy the system to Gorshkov-class frigates. It has more capable Zircon missiles (believed to be the model for the BrahMos II) in development and longer-range Oniks missiles already in service.

Showdown Over the Himalayas—and the South China Sea?

The BrahMos is a new game piece in India’s tense relationship with China. Chinese troops invaded India’s Himalayan border in a 1962 war that is still bitterly remembered in India. In the last decade, the Chinese border garrisons began to rapidly increase in size, leading to similar escalation on the Indian side. China’s close relationship with India’s historical enemy, Pakistan, and its development of military base in Gwadhar, Pakistan—seen as an attempt to encircle India—are another source of tension.

In the fall of 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India in order to improve relations. However, a group of Chinese border troops appeared to have disregarded the civilian leadership and launched an embarrassing (though fortunately nonviolent) standoff that cast a shadow on any progress made.

The BrahMos cannot reach very far into Chinese. Although China is upset about the BrahMos missile’s presence on its border, it probably should be more worried that India is announcing it is close to a deal for selling the weapon to Vietnam.

Suffice to say, relations between China and Vietnam have a very long and complicated history, including a war in 1979. They recently have chilled over Chinese claims to the South China Sea. A particularly low point came with a Chinese oil expedition in 2014 that began drilling in Vietnamese-claimed waters, causing violent protests and a naval confrontation.

The Vietnamese Navy isn’t going to match China’s rapidly expanding flotilla any time soon. But small Vietnamese ships with BrahMos missiles could pose a major threat to China’s larger military vessel. Thus, if Vietnam does acquire the weapon, this would affect the balance of power in the Pacific.

Therefore, India may attempt to cultivate an alliance with Vietnam in order to counterbalance China.

Other countries interested in the BrahMos include Malaysia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, South Africa and Indonesia.

Reading the Cruise Missile Tea Leaves

The politics of the BrahMos system also highlights the limited potential of a Chinese-Russian alliance. Russia historically has strong ties with both India and Vietnam. It’s relationship with China has been more complicated (notice how that word keeps showing up?) After an energy agreement in 2014, there has been much speculation of a Chinese–Russian alliance based on shared authoritarian ideology and a desire to counterbalance the United States. However, the sale of the BrahMos missile to India and Vietnam illustrates that while Russia wishes to remain on good terms with all three countries, it is not yet committed to an alliance with China the expense of its economic interests or its own concerns with its powerful neighbor.

What can China do in response to the threat posed by the BrahMos missile?

Simple! It can de-escalate the conflict with India. India is a democracy with all the messy internal political deliberations that implies—it’s not about to launch a massive surprise invasion of the Himalayas. A well-managed de-escalation wouldn’t have to carry a huge political cost. The average Chinese citizen likely doesn’t have strong feelings on the precise boundaries of the McMahon line.

Disputes over lightly populated Himalayan mountains shouldn’t constitute a truly substantive conflict of interest between the two countries—but they have been allowed to flourish into full blown military competition. It is obvious the two Asian powers are wary of each other. But both would be better served by reciprocated détente, allowing billions spent fortifying the border to be redirected to the economic needs of the two countries.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Reuters

When Iran takes revenge for the killing of Qassem Suleimani, history suggests it could happen in Latin America.

As the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread globally, the UN’s top human rights official appealed on Friday to put rights “front and centre” when implementing preventative measures. 

The benefits of gender equality are not just for women and girls, but “for everyone whose lives will be changed by a fairer world”, the chief of UN Women said in her message for International Women’s Day (IWD) at UN Headquarters on Friday, being celebrated in New York, ahead of the official day.

Bradley Bowman, Andrew Gabel

Security, Asia

These systems enable Beijing to target ships and bases in the region, potentially creating no-go zones for the U.S. military and its partners.

Key point: The U.S. military has struggled to receive the timely, sufficient, and predictable funding necessary to support current operations, maintain readiness, and modernize the force. 

This week, the People’s Republic of China celebrated the 70th anniversary of its founding by holding a massive military parade. The parade featured a number of formidable weapons systems that demonstrate the growing capability of the Chinese military, the erosion of U.S. military superiority, and the need for continued action by Washington and its partners.

As expected, the parade featured the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (or “carrier killer”) as well as the DF-26 missile. The latter is a ground mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile, which extends Beijing’s near-precision strike capability as far as Guam. These systems enable Beijing to target ships and bases in the region, potentially creating no-go zones for the U.S. military and its partners. If successful in this effort, Beijing may conclude it could successfully undertake military aggression, for example against Taiwan.

This week’s parade also included the debut of the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It is a ground-mobile ICBM with a maximum range of 9,300 miles, capable of carrying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. That range provides Beijing the means to target the mainland United States. China has also been developing maneuverable warheads, decoys, chaff, and jamming techniques that could make the DF-41 more difficult to intercept.

Beijing also exhibited the JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile, which is designed to be launched from one of China’s four operational Jin-class ballistic missile submarines. The JL-2 has a range nearly three times greater than that of its predecessor, the JL-1.

The Chinese also displayed the DF-17, a ballistic missile booster and hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade U.S. missile defenses. As the 2019 U.S. Missile Defense Review notes, China is “developing advanced cruise missiles and hypersonic missile capabilities that can travel at exceptional speeds with unpredictable flight paths that challenge existing defensive systems.” To intercept such a system, the U.S. must first be able to track it – underscoring the U.S. need for a space-based hypersonic and ballistic missile tracking sensor. Such a sensor would take advantage of the large area viewable from space and enable the U.S. to track and target advanced threats.

In addition, the parade included two new unmanned aerial vehicles and an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). The GJ-11 Sharp Sword drone boasts stealth characteristics, and the WZ-8 is believed to be a rocket-powered, high-altitude reconnaissance vehicle. Also on display was the HSU-001, a large UUV featuring dual screws to enhance cruising speeds.

The U.S. military has struggled to receive the timely, sufficient, and predictable funding necessary to support current operations, maintain readiness, and modernize the force.  Meanwhile, Beijing has studied how America fights and has modernized its military accordingly. As a result, in some areas, U.S. military superiority has eroded or vanished. The DF-41 and DF-17, as well as other capabilities displayed this week by Beijing, underscore once again the need for a fully modernized U.S. nuclear triad, increased U.S. firepower in the Indo-Pacific, as well as better homeland missile defense.

Thanks to the well-formulated 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy, belated clarity regarding the China threat, and robust and timely defense funding over the last two years, the Pentagon has initiated one of the most aggressive and important modernization efforts in decades.

But these steps will require timely, sufficient, and predictable funding from Congress. Absent that, the security of the American people will further erode, and U.S. troops may find themselves in a future conflict they will struggle to win against an increasingly capable Chinese military.

Bradley Bowman is senior director for the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Andrew Gabel is a research analyst. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CMPP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

This article first appeared at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies last year.

Image: Reuters.

James Clark

History, World

Goodness!

Key point: There were most close-calls than most people realize during the tense days of the Cold War. If things had gone differently, America and the Soviet Union would have wiped each other out.

In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The standoff occurred over the installation of nuclear missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from the states. Though the stalemate ended after 13 grueling days, it was neither the first or last time the two world powers would very nearly come to blows.In the following years, until 1991 when the Cold War officially ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, America’s military and its Russian counterpart incited mass panic and narrowly avoided World War III no fewer than five times.

While some of these incidents sound like they’re plucked out of “Dr. Strangelove,” they’re real.

Between fried computer chips, playing the wrong tape, or misinterpreting a signal, it’s a wonder that we’re still here.

Here are five times that a dumb mistake nearly ended the world in giant ball of nuclear fire.

That time someone accidentally triggered the Emergency Broadcast System.

In 1971, though Cold War tensions had simmered, compared to their high point in the early ‘60s, the war in Vietnam was still in full swing, which explains the mass confusion that occurred on Feb. 20, 1971, when the Emergency Broadcast System was accidentally triggered at 9:33 a.m.

For the next 40 minutes, regularly scheduled programming was put on hold as listeners and broadcasters anxiously waited to hear an announcement from the White House. Fortunately, it was a mistake, there were no nuclear missiles hurtling toward the United States, or hostile military forces advancing on U.S. territories.

The error highlighted some problems with the Emergency Broadcast System’s safeguards and procedures. Roughly 20% of the outlets followed the correct procedures and cleared the air, the rest either started to, but stopped, or just ignored the alert completely. After operators at the National Emergency Warning Center in Colorado realized their mistake, they sent cancellation messages; however, they failed to use the correct codeword — “impish” — so that slowed things down a bit.

In 1979 the U.S. military thought its own training simulation was real and almost started World War III.

Referred to as “the training tape incident,” on Nov. 9, 1979, the computers at North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD, showed a massive nuclear strike aimed at U.S. command posts and nuclear forces. Launch control centers for America’s nuclear warheads received preliminary warning that the United States was under attack and fighter planes were prepared to intercept enemy bombers: World War III had begun.

Except it hadn’t. A realistic training tape was accidentally inserted into the computer that ran the nation’s early-warning programs. Fortunately the mistake was discovered within minutes after the raw data from satellites and early-warning radar systems showed no inbound missiles or enemy bombers.

Then, less than a year later, there was another computer glitch.

On June 3, 1980, U.S. military command received a warning that the Soviet Union had launched a nuclear strike. Same as before, the military scrambled interceptors, missile launch crews were put on red alert, and bombers were readied. There’s no way it could be another mistake, right? Wrong.

Fortunately, a threat assessment conference was immediately convened and again scoured the raw data, discovering no missiles had actually been launched. Turns out, a single computer chip on the monitor had failed and caused random numbers of attacking missiles to appear on the screen.

A Russian commander avoided the end of the world by not telling his superiors about a possible nuclear attack.

At midnight on Sept. 26, 1983, a Soviet missile detection bunker went into a panic when an alarm sounded, signaling that United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles toward Russia.

In reality, the warning was a false alarm caused by the the Soviets mistaking a glint of sunlight off clouds near Montana as a missile launch. Though protocol demanded that the bunker report any signs of a missile launch to Soviet high command, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov knew the satellites were prone to errors and reasoned that an actual preemptive nuclear strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not five. Given the high tensions in both the Soviet Union and the states, Petrov’s decision to follow his gut and not report it may have averted a nuclear holocaust.

Speaking of tension, a few months later the Soviet Union thought a NATO training exercise was a preemptive strike.

Though it was not widely known at the time, in November 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to starting World War III than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. During a NATO war game in Europe, dubbed Able Archer 83, the U.S. military moved 19,000 troops to the area, relocated its command elements, and raised its alert status — all steps that would typically be taken in a time of war.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was losing its mind on the other side of the iron curtain. According to documents declassified decades later, relations with the Soviet Union were “on a hair trigger.” The Soviet military was on high alert, its nuclear arsenal was readied, and units in East Germany and Poland had fighter jets prepared for takeoff, due to concerns that NATO’s war games were a ruse ahead of a preemptive strike. The country remained at that readiness level until the training exercise ended on Nov. 11 of that year.

This article by James Clark originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.

(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in 2016.)

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TNI Staff

Security,

It tried it before.

Key point: A modern incarnation of a manned carrier-based long-range penetrating strike aircraft might be a solution to the Navy’s range problem.

During the closing stages of the Cold War, the United States Navy was developing a new long-range stealth bomber that could strike at even the most heavily defended targets from the deck of an aircraft carrier. But the ill-fated program was cancelled; leaving a gap in naval aviation capability that has not been filled to this day.  

Called the McDonnell Douglas/General Dynamics A-12 Avenger II—a product of the Advanced Tactical Aircraft (ATA) program—the new bomber would have replaced the long-serving Grumman A-6E Intruder. However, as the Soviet threat evaporated, then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney cancelled the A-12 program on January 7, 1991, due to massive cost and schedule overruns as well as severe technical problems. But while the stealthy A-12 had its problems, the bomber’s demise led the Navy to today’s problem: A carrier air wing that does not have the range or penetrating strike capability to defeat advanced anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities.   

While the Lockheed Martin F-35C Joint Strike Fighter will finally bring X-band stealth technology onboard the carrier and the forthcoming MQ-25 Stingray unmanned aerial refueling tanker will help to extend the range of the existing air wing, those aircraft do not make up for the lack of a heavy hitting long-range bomber platform that can strike deep into the heart of enemy territory. Even with the F-35C and MQ-25, the Navy’s carrier air wings would not be able to strike at Chinese targets in the Western Pacific without putting the carrier at considerable risk. Beijing is able to threaten U.S. Navy carriers with anti-ship ballistic missiles such the DF-21D and the DF-26— the later of which has a range of roughly 2000 nautical miles—by forcing those vessels to operate further out at sea.

The Navy had envisioned the need for a carrier-based penetrating strike aircraft with extended ranges during the 1980s given rapidly advancing Soviet capabilities. Indeed, as former Center for a New American Security scholar Jerry Hendrix, a retired naval aviator, noted, the initial requirements for the A-12 called for an aircraft with a 1,700 nautical mile combat radius and an internal payload of 6,000lbs with a radar cross section comparable to the Northrop B-2 Spirit strategic bomber.

Had the A-12 program panned out, the Navy would still have a potent long-range carrier-based penetrating strike capability that would have been superior to anything currently envisioned. However, technical problems and requirements changes—all of which negatively impacted strike capability—whittled the A-12’s unrefueled combat radius down to 1,000 nautical miles and eventually down to 785 nautical miles. Eventually, as technical problems and program snafus mounted—largely due to “criminal” program management—Cheney was forced to cancel the entire program.

Though it was not immediately apparent at the time, with the cancellation of the A-12 program and the retirement of the A-6E, the U.S. Navy gave up its long-range strike capability in favor of an air wing that focused on sortie generation. While that was not a problem in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, with Russia resurgent and the emergence of China as a great power challenger, it is a serious issue for the viability of the carrier fleet. The Navy’s carrier air wings would have greatly benefited from an A-12-like capability had the program survived.

Analysts have proposed solutions such as a long-range stealthy unmanned strike aircraft as a solution to the Navy’s long-range penetrating strike gap, however, there are problems with that solution. Current Pentagon policy prohibits autonomous weapons from making the decision to take a human life on its own volition, which means that human operators have to be in the loop even when the aircraft is deep inside enemy territory. However, adversaries such as Russia and China will attack the vulnerable data-links that control such an unmanned aircraft through electronic attacks, cyber-warfare or a combination of methods. Drones have been hacked before—by insurgents, no less—thus positive control cannot be guaranteed.

Human pilots, however, cannot be hacked and can make on-the-spot judgments to engage or change targets etc. without the need to home phone—so to speak. Thus, a modern incarnation of a manned carrier-based long-range penetrating strike aircraft might be a solution to the Navy’s range problem. Modern materials, sensor and propulsion technology—particularly advanced adaptive-cycle engines that are currently in development—would solve most of the technical challenges that stymied the A-12 program.

Given that advanced adaptive cycle engines which are currently in development promise to reduce fuel burn by more than 35 percent, a new carrier-based bomber should be able to meet a 1100 nautical mile combat radius requirement even given the size constraints of carrier aircraft. Thus, the Navy should consider the development of a next-generation carrier-based long-range penetrating strike aircraft. Like the original ATA, which was also slated to replace the Boeing F-15E, a modern incarnation of such a warplane could also replace the Strike Eagle while supplementing the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-35C on the carrier flight deck. It will not be cheap, but given that President Donald Trump has signaled his intent to invest heavily in the nation’s defense, it is an option that the Navy should consider.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

Image: Wikipedia.

A la veille de la reprise des travaux du premier congrès du syndicat Solidarité, M. Stéfan Olszowski, membre du bureau politique du parti ouvrier unifié polonais (POUP), a suggéré la formation d'un « front national » regroupant le parti, l'Eglise et Solidarité. Le premier ministre lui-même, le général (...) / Pologne, Politique - 1981/10

Beijing seeks to deflect criticism that its carelessness caused a global crisis.

TNI Staff

Security,

The final operational version of the F-23 would have offered much better range than the Raptor.

Key point: The Air Force ended up with an excellent plane with the Raptor—but both the YF-22 and YF-23 were outstanding designs.

In 1991, Lockheed won the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) competition and went on to develop the stealthy world beating F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter.

While in many ways, Northrop’s losing YF-23 was a much better design, but the U.S. Air Force chose the Lockheed aircraft because it believed that company would better manage the development program—and because the service thought the Raptor would cost less.

At the time, Northrop was in the doghouse with the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress because of massive cost overruns on the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and several other projects. Meanwhile, partner McDonnell Douglas wasn’t faring much better. “I don't know how the Air Force decided which contractors would build the ATF, but I can only assume that there was some long-overdue consideration of Northrop's dismal track record of test fraud, contract suspension and fines,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) told the LA Times years ago.

But what would an operational F-23 have looked like? And what if General Electric’s revolutionary variable-cycle YF120 had carried the day?

Even in 1991, in terms of raw performance, the General Electric-powered YF-23 was acknowledged to have been the best performer even compared to its Pratt & Whitney YF119-powered twin. The YF-23 had much better supersonic cruise performance, stealth and was only slightly less maneuverable at extremely low airspeeds.

“Interestingly the YF-22 and YF-23 had exactly the same trimmed AoA of 60°. The YF-23 could do it without thrust vectoring. Those V-tails were very powerful especially when coupled to an unstable airframe,” said one source who is intimately familiar with both the YF-23 and the Raptor. “The YF-22 probably had an advantage at very, very low airspeeds but neither company had enough time to investigate dynamic low speed, high AOA maneuvering. This was a good example of how a competition needs to consider the PR value of flight test events. Lockheed understood this and did high AOA and shot missiles and pulled 9Gs. All single point, benign condition events but they left an impression.”

The source added that in some ways, it might have cost Northrop the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition—barring the other factors involved in the selection.

“ACC [Air Combat Command] pilots were enamored with dogfighting and Lockheed gave a good visual demonstration of high AOA—albeit a very limited and benign test,” the source said. “Northrop chose not to do high AOA during DemVal and that was a mistake. Both airplanes could do the same exact maneuver—trimmed, high AOA. As it was, the YF-22 ‘appeared better’ because they did something visually exciting and Northrop couldn't—or so it was inferred.”

But what would all of that have meant for an operational aircraft? In either case, the U.S. Air Force would have received an outstanding air superiority fighter that has no equal. But while the Lockheed Martin F-22 is bar none the best air superiority fighter the United States has ever produced, an operational F-23 might have offered an even greater performance margin over potential adversaries than the Raptor currently does.

The final operational version of the F-23 would have offered much better range than the Raptor—especially at supersonic speeds—especially if powered by the YF120. That would have come in handy over the Pacific. It would also have been stealthier and it would have been almost as maneuverable as the Raptor—or possibly more so at different speeds and altitudes.

Both the Raptor and a fully operational F-23 would have carried eight air-to-air missiles internally—that was the Air Force requirement. Moreover, the operational jets were essentially identically in terms of avionics—both competitors had proposed similar avionics suites. In fact, the Raptor ended up with the radar that was originally proposed for the YF-23.

Ultimately, the Air Force ended up with an excellent plane with the Raptor—but both the YF-22 and YF-23 were outstanding designs. Had Northrop won the competition, the F-23 might have been a better overall performer, but it would have likely been more expensive. With the F-23, the Air Force would have a greater margin of superiority over potential threats like the Chinese J-20 or the Russian PAK-FA.  But would that have been worth the price differential? Hard to say—but one can only imagine.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

Image: Flickr.

Urgent resources are needed to support countries in southern Africa and the Great Lakes region which are hosting more than 900,000 refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and partners said in a $621 million appeal launched on Friday. 

Netanyahu's planned land grab in the West Bank will undermine bipartisan support for U.S.-Israel defense ties—endangering the special relationship and Israelis’ security.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

Nonalignment remains a powerful strain in Indian foreign policy. Still, India and the United States have fashioned placeholders in case things take a drastic turn for the worse in South Asia—one that might prompt New Delhi to tilt toward Washington.

India and the United States are natural allies, according to Alice G. Wells, the acting U.S. secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs. Wells touted the U.S.-India relationship on the eve of President Donald Trump’s state visit to India, which took place last week. The alliance has been twenty years in the making, she said; it dates back to a speech by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who coined the phrase natural allies during a visit to Washington DC in 2000.

Now, just as two decades ago, there is ample reason to doubt the hype about an impending alliance. It’s always impending. If a union between America and India is natural, then nature is taking her time to cement the arrangement. That, however, may be sufficient. 

To make sense of this slow-moving process, let’s briefly uncage our inner political scientist. During the late Cold War, Steve Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote about and the factors that unite and divide international fellowships. Now, Walt is an über-realist. Like all good international-relations realists, he dwells on power politics. The chief factor that brings together nations, he maintains, is mutual interests. Meeting mutual threats constitutes an especially powerful adhesive. Security, after all, is the top priority for any polity that hopes to endure. 

Next in importance come political, social, and cultural affinities. Similar languages, political traditions, customs, and mores tend to draw international partnerships together. Allies that see the political and strategic setting the same way are apt to agree on how to manage it. Like gravitates toward like.

Lastly, Walt espies purely material factors that could consolidate alliances. A wealthy ally could bankroll the endeavor, offering others cash or other incentives to join. A strong ally could strongarm reluctant but weaker partners into a pact, coercing them into doing its bidding. Walt vests little confidence in such arrangements, depicting them as brittle and transient. And for good reason. If you rent an ally, then the alliance endures only so long as you pay the rent. If you point a gun at your ally, then the ally remains faithful only as long as the gun remains locked, loaded, and on target. Managing alliances to which allies aren’t sincerely committed saps the leading power’s resources while diverting attention from more pressing matters.

Threats, sociopolitical affinities, matériel—in descending order of strength and importance—are what bind alliances together if a person subscribes to Walt’s paradigm. Surroundings full of menace spur like-minded societies to make common cause. That’s doubly true if a leading power is willing to bear most of the economic, manpower, and military burden. Attenuate any factor and loyalties begin to falter. Prospects for joint action dim as apathy takes hold.

Now, apply this model to the supposedly natural U.S.-India alliance. Threats first. Beyond question, dangers are gathering in the Indian Ocean region. In recent years, Communist China has mostly dropped its “smile diplomacy,” its effort to persuade other Asian countries that it is an inoffensive and trustworthy—if not beneficent—great power. It is domineering at times. Its Belt and Road Initiative has delivered lodgments for commercial and military endeavors in South Asia. After years of protesting that China would never erect foreign military bases, it summarily did so. Chinese forces squared off against the Indian Army across the Doklam Plateau. And on and on.

Forbearance, it seems, was a tactic Beijing deployed to defuse opposition to its rise to great power. It is not something intrinsic to Chinese diplomacy and strategy, let alone an indicator of China’s future conduct. Like all tactics, it can be amended or discarded once it outlives its usefulness. And yet. Do China’s moves in the Indian Ocean region, each modest in itself, add up to a threat imposing enough to unite India with America? It doesn’t seem so. If New Delhi interpreted things that way, then some sort of alliance—a mutual defense agreement codified by treaty—would have come together by now. But it hasn’t. Nor will it, in all likelihood, unless China makes itself an irrefutably overbearing power in India’s environs.

Next, sociopolitical affinities. Yes, India and the United States are the world’s biggest and its oldest democracies, they share a common language, and they’re scions of the erstwhile British Empire. These are building blocks for an alliance. But they are not enough in themselves. The two societies tote around heavy baggage from the Cold War. Rather than take sides in the East-West struggle, India assumed a nonaligned posture after winning its independence from Great Britain. Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding prime minister, was one of the prime movers who impelled much of the developing world to join a Nonaligned Movement.

Nonalignment remains a powerful strain in Indian foreign policy. While formally nonaligned, however, New Delhi tilted toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Indians were good democrats, to be sure, but they also practiced a form of democratic socialism that saw much to admire in the Soviet model. They also saw the United States as an unreliable partner with a propensity for, say, withholding spare parts, ammunition, and other military supplies during India’s hour of need—chiefly during wars with neighboring Pakistan. They resented the Nixon administration’s deployment of the USS Enterprise aircraft-carrier task force to the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, viewing the expedition as a hamfisted attempt to coerce India.

Such bad memories thin the political, social, and cultural glues that might otherwise cement an alliance. In the 1990s, moreover, Washington set itself against New Delhi’s nuclear-weapons efforts for the sake of nonproliferation. The Clinton administration’s policy made perfect sense, embodying the spirit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It also worked against Indian national security interests as Indians construed them. Both India and Pakistan had undertaken serious bomb-making efforts by then. They conducted near-simultaneous nuclear tests in 1998, joining the circle of unofficial nuclear-weapon states. Complying with U.S. demands for disarmament would have meant surrendering the advantage to Islamabad in atomic diplomacy. That verged on unthinkable for New Delhi.

Clearly, then, the two countries suffer from a fraught past. Only after the turn of the century did Washington begin to mute its criticism. In 2008, the two governments struck a civil nuclear deal whereby the United States lifted a longstanding moratorium on nuclear-related trade with India while consenting to provide support for Indian ventures in civilian nuclear energy and satellite technology. It’s no surprise that talk of a natural U.S.-India alliance got its start as the two governments progressed toward a bargain. They had begun to put the past behind them.

Such gradualism is far from unprecedented. Loosely speaking, in fact, current circumstances resemble Anglo-American relations around 1900. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States and Great Britain haltingly set aside their differences, which dated back to the late unpleasantness known as the War of American Independence and the War of 1812. By 1823, the two countries were able to work together at sea. For instance, the Royal Navy and U.S. Navy patrolled the Caribbean Sea cooperatively to quash the slave trade. Rancor returned during the American Civil War, when London permitted shipbuilders to fit-out Confederate raiders, warships that went on to ravage Union commercial fleets. In the 1890s the Grover Cleveland administration demanded the right to mediate a dispute over borderlands between Venezuela and British Guiana.

Like the U.S.-India relationship, that is, the Anglo-American relationship underwent highs and lows—notwithstanding the two countries’ common heritage. As Walt might have predicted, it took a compelling threat—namely the rise of imperial Germany—to unite them temporarily. London struck up an arrangement with Washington whereby the Royal Navy mostly withdrew from the Western Hemisphere while the United States agreed to tend British interests there. That allowed Britain’s navy to compete against the German High Seas Fleet building in the North Sea, hard by the British Isles.

The United States eventually sided with the Allies in World War I, helping subdue the Central Powers by 1918. Even so, President Woodrow Wilson regarded the British ally as little better than the German foe. Britannia was a maritime tyrant in Wilson’s eyes, just as Germany was a terrestrial tyrant. In fact, Wilson threatened to run a naval arms race against America’s ally if British leaders balked at his scheme for postwar order on the high seas. Not until World War II and the early Cold War did the special relationship familiar to Americans and Britons really take root.

It seems dangers must be clear and present to unite standing alignments such as NATO or the U.S. -Japan alliance. Just as America was loath to abandon its Monroe Doctrine, its venerable policy of nonalignment, it may take a threat on the order of an Axis or a Soviet empire to induce India to put aside its own tradition of nonalignment. If New Delhi comes to see China as a menace of that amplitude, then it may rally with Washington with more alacrity than has been the case since Vajpayee broached the idea of a natural alliance. Until an overbearing threat takes form, India will continue with its leisurely approach—an approach that may or more may not culminate in a formal defense accord.

Rapprochements, then, take time and effort—even between societies that are relatively friendly. U.S. leaders have granted India “major defense partner” status, opening the way for tighter defense collaboration. Combined military and naval exercises continue on a regular basis. The Indian and U.S. armed forces now furnish each other with logistical support. India, the United States, Australia, and Japan confer about political and security affairs under an informal consortium known as the “Quad,” or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. In short, India and the United States have fashioned placeholders in case things take a drastic turn for the worse in South Asia. They are building habits and hardware for working in harmony.

In other words, the partners are putting the workings of an alliance in place. They are creating opportunities. Diplomats can take care of the parchment later should the two capitals see fit. An entente cordiale is enough for now.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the coauthor of Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century. The views voiced here are his alone.

Image: Reuters