The National Interest

Alex Hollings

Security, Americas

With the addition of 21st century avionics and more capable engines, it seems likely that the F-15 will maintain its advantage of the competition.

On Tuesday, the first ever F-15EX took to the skies in a test flight that brought the U.S. Air Force that much closer to fielding what may be the most capable 4th generation fighter on the planet. The F-15 has been in service for more than 45 years to date, and is widely regarded as the most successful air superiority fighter in history.

“Today’s successful flight proves the jet’s safety and readiness to join our nation’s fighter fleet,” said Prat Kumar, Boeing vice president and F-15 program manager.

“Our workforce is excited to build a modern fighter aircraft for the U.S. Air Force. Our customer can feel confident in its decision to invest in this platform that is capable of incorporating the latest advanced battle management systems, sensors and weapons due to the jet’s digital airframe design and open mission systems architecture.”

The last time the U.S. Air Force took delivery of an F-15 was in 2004, but the aircraft’s design has not stagnated in the 17 years since. Boeing, who absorbed the F-15 program when they merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, has been updating and improving the F-15 for foreign sales throughout. In fact, foreign purchasers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar have funneled more than $5 billion into improving the F-15 Eagle as America moved on to sourcing more advanced, stealth fighters. The result of all this time and money is an incredibly capable iteration of the F-15 that couples advanced avionics with the low maintenance cost of non-stealth fighter.

Most of the world still relies on 4th generation fighters for engagements in the sky, which means the F-15EX may have some stiff competition… but this new bird isn’t resting on the F-15’s historic laurels. Instead, it just may be the baddest fighter of its generation anywhere on the planet.

Why doesn’t the Air Force just buy more F-35s?

In this era of flying stealth supercomputers like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor, many have questioned the wisdom of purchasing a slew of new old fighters. The F-15EX does not boast any stealth capabilities, nor does it have the same knack for sensor fusion that has earned the F-35 the unofficial nickname of “quarterback in the sky.” Despite this apparent lack of capability, the Air Force is procuring F-15EXs at a cost of around $87.7 million each, as compared to the now lower F-35 price of just $77.9 million per aircraft.

This price differential only emboldens the F-15EX’s critics, who point out that the F-35 offers a far wider variety of capabilities and is considered much more survivable in contested airspace (thanks to its stealth capabilities). When you only consider those figures, the F-15EX may seem like a pretty poor choice.

However, the reality of military acquisitions and combat capability are far more nuanced than a side-by-side tale of the tape might represent. While the F-15EX may indeed cost more per airframe than the latest batch of F-35s, it may actually be the savvier purchase. The F-35 is intended to have an operational lifespan of around 8,000 hours, whereas each F-15EX is expected to last 20,000. In other words, in order to fly the same number of hours as an F-15EX, the Air Force would need to purchase not one, but three F-35As.

That price reduction is further bolstered by operational costs. Keeping a high performance fighter in tip-top shape is expensive and time consuming, but in that portion of the ledger, the F-15EX once again shines. The Air Force expects to spend around $29,000 for every hour the F-15EX is in the air, far cheaper than the F-35’s figures recorded in 2018 of around $44,000 per hour. Now let’s do a bit of back-of-the-envelope math to assess how much these aircraft will actually cost in a fight.

The F-15EX costs $87.7 million per aircraft, and can fly for up to 20,000 hours at a cost of $29,000 per hour. So $29,000 per hour x 20,000 hours + $87.7 million for the aircraft comes out to a pretty serious $667.7 million dollars.

In order to match that operational lifespan, it would take three F-35As. So the math would look like $44,000 per hour x 20,000 hours + $233.7 million for three F-35s… and it comes out to more than a jaw dropping $1.1 billion. The F-15EX, then, offers a saving of around $446 million per aircraft over the lifespan of the jet (if things were this simple, anyway).

To give the F-35 a slightly more realistic shake, let’s use larger volumes of aircraft, rather than 1:1 comparisons. The Air Force plans to purchase at least 144 F-15EXs, but for the sake of simple math, let’s call it 100. The above per-aircraft cost times a hundred comes out to $66,770,000,000 spent on aircraft and 2,000,000 flight hours. You would need 250 F-35s to match the same flight hour total, which combined with operating costs come to $109,925,000,000. In this more realistic comparison, the F-15EX offers a less pronounced advantage, but still comes to the tune of some $43,155,000,000 in savings over the span of the program. $43 billion is certainly nothing to scoff at.

Now, it’s important to note here that this math is egregiously simplified: Lockheed Martin and the Air Force are already working tirelessly to reduce the operating costs of the F-35 (because the Air Force says they can’t afford them if they don’t).

The cost per hour of the F-35 is sure to drop in the years to come — and just as importantly, the F-35 is a stealth platform built largely to engage ground targets. The F-15EX, on the other hand, is an air superiority fighter designed to duke it out in the skies. Both of these aircraft are capable of either role, but at a fundamental level, these jets simply aren’t built to do the same jobs. It might help to think of them as NASCAR and Formula 1 racers: Both are extremely capable platforms, but they’re each highly specialized for their specific use. The new F-15EXs the Air Force buys won’t fill F-35 spots, but will instead replace aging F-15s in America’s existing arsenal.

What makes this new F-15 better than our old ones?

The United States currently maintains a fleet of around 230 F-15s in various trims (C/D). These jets represent the crux of America’s fourth generation air intercept fighters. The F-22 Raptor was intended to serve as a replacement for the F-15, but the program was canceled after just 186 Raptors were delivered.

The new F-15EXs boast updated cockpit systems, an enhanced sensor suite and data fusion capabilities, and the ability to carry up to 29,500 pounds of ordnance split into 12 air-to-air hard points or 15 air-to-ground hard points. Its new twin engines aren’t just more efficient, they’re also more powerful, making the fastest fighter in America’s inventory even faster.

The F-15EX isn’t stealthy, but it does boast an electronic warfare suite that will help make it more survivable in contested airspace. Its streamlined pilot interface borrows from some 5th generation technology, integrating information into easier to manage displays that allow the pilot to focus more on the battle space than the gauge cluster. This not only improves pilot performance, it also reduces fatigue on long missions.

In order to keep pace with new weapons as they emerge, the F-15EX leverages what Boeing calls an Open Mission System architecture designed specifically to be able to absorb new tech as it reaches the field. Importantly, however, the new F-15s retain around 80% of the old F-15 design, making them easy for maintainers to adapt to. Instead of having to train for an entirely new platform, they need only to train for the more modern additions to a jet they’re already intimately familiar with.

How does the F-15EX stack up against the top fighters from other countries?

Despite its upgrades, the new F-15EX remains squarely within the 4th generation of fighters. There are currently four operational 5th generation fighters on the planet: America’s F-35 and F-22, Russia’s Su-57, and China’s J-20. If the F-15EX were to square off against these platforms, it would be at a huge disadvantage–and platforms like the F-35 or F-22 would likely be able to engage and destroy the F-15 before its pilot was even aware of their presence. Questions remain about the stealth and avionics found in the J-20 or Su-57, but even if their stealth isn’t quite as advanced, they’d still have a real leg up on the F-15EX.

But to be honest, the chances of such an engagement are incredibly small. Russia’s troubled Su-57 program has seen setback after setback, and to date, there are only around 13 of the fighters in existence. Production is expected to pick up, but Russia lacks the funds to really field a large scale fleet of these stealthy fighters. China’s J-20 has also faced woes in its engine compartment, though China has managed to field more than 50 of these jets already. The new J-20B will incorporate thrust vector control (like America’s F-22) and is expected to be an even more capable aircraft… but again, it exists in extremely limited numbers.

Their rarity notwithstanding, if American jets were to square off against Chinese or Russian ones, America would leverage its fleet of hundreds of F-35s and F-22s. There would be no reason to send the F-15 into such a fight. However, F-15EXs could see a great deal of use in the uncontested airspace of trouble spots like Syria and Iraq, where stealth is as unnecessary as it is expensive.

But what about the 4th generation fighters that make up the backbone of Chinese and Russian air forces? The Su-35, operated by both Russia and China, as well as the J-10 operated by China are both considered to be highly capable platforms, and the MiG-29 operated by a number of nations is also considered rather formidable (among others). However, the F-15 has already squared up against a number of capable fighters and emerged on top. In fact, of the 104 air-to-air duels the F-15 has entered, it has lost exactly zero of them. Not too shabby.

With the addition of 21st century avionics and more capable engines, it seems likely that the F-15 will maintain its advantage of the competition.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article first appeared on Sandboxx News.

Image: Boeing / YouTube

David Axe

Security, Americas

Fewer squadrons, but more planes per squad.

Here's What You Need to Remember: But in cannibalizing the 95th Fighter Squadron, the Air Force reduces its overall squadron count to 311, down one compared to late 2018. The reduction runs counter to the flying branch's stated goal of expanding to 386 squadrons over the next decade or so, an expansion that could require the Air Force to buy hundreds of additional aircraft potentially costing tens of billions of dollars.

There was a silver lining in the hurricane that devastated Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida's panhandle region in October 2018.

The storm forced the U.S. Air Force to redeploy Tyndall's resident squadrons of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters -- and gave the flying branch the chance to boost the size of other F-22 units, making them more efficient.

In that sense, Hurricane Michael helped the Air Force to accomplish something that the Government Accountability Office had argued the flying branch should do. Equip each front-line unit with no fewer than 24 planes.

"The Air Force’s organization of its small F-22 fleet has not maximized the availability of these 186 aircraft," the GAO warned in a 2018 report.

But there's a downside. Growing five front-line F-22 squadrons at the expense of the sixth squadron also undermines the Air Force's ambitious plan to expand the overall force from 312 to 386 squadrons.

Hurricane Michael wreaked havoc on Tyndall, uprooting trees, flattening buildings and ripping the roofs off of hangars. Prior to the storm, two Tyndall squadrons -- the 43rd Fighter Squadron, which is a training unit, and the combat-coded 95th Fighter Squadron -- together operated 55 F-22s.

With its complex avionics and delicate stealth coating, the F-22 is a difficult airplane to maintain. Tyndally airmen were able to fly out just 38 of the 55 Raptors prior to the storm. The remaining 17 jets -- nearly a tenth of all F-22s -- rode out the wind and rains in hangars. Some suffered damage.

Airmen quickly repaired many of the jets. Official photos depicted small numbers of F-22 departing Tyndall on Oct. 21 and 24, 2018. The last three F-22s left Tyndall on Nov. 16.

With Tyndall likely to need years of work costing billions of dollars, the Air Force announced that all F-22s would relocate to other bases. The 43rd Fighter Squadron, the training unit, set up shop with 28 F-22s at Eglin Air Force Base in western Florida.

That's three fewer F-22s than the squadron possessed prior to the storm, implying that at least three Raptors suffered storm damage requiring long-term repairs.

The combat-coded 95th Fighter Squadron meanwhile dispersed its own F-22s to the three other bases with front-line Raptors. "We have recommended that the best path forward to increase readiness and use money wisely is to consolidate the operational F-22s," Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said.

Langley in Virginia, Elmendorf in Alaska and Hickam in Hawaii together house five F-22 squadrons. At the time of the storm, Langley's two squadrons each had 23 F-22s. Elmendorf's two squadrons together possessed 47 Raptors. Hickam's sole squadron, an Air National Guard unit, operated 20 F-22s.

Spreading the 95th Fighter Squadron's 24 F-22s across the other five units would allow the surviving units to maintain 24 jets of their own, Air Force Times reported. In fact, the five squadrons between them needed just seven extra Raptors to boost their inventories to 24 planes apiece.

The balance of the 95th's jets -- 17 Raptors -- likely are undergoing repairs for storm damage or are going into the Air Force's attrition reserve. Lockheed Martin built just 195 F-22s before production ended in 2011. Eight were test models. By 2018 just 183 F-22s were operational.

Leaving aside the recent hurricane damage, accidents have destroyed at least two front-line F-22s and two test planes and badly damaged several others. Raptors are in such short supply that the Air Force spent tens of millions of dollars and four years repairing one F-22 that suffered damage during a training flight at Tyndall in 2012.

The flying branch likewise invested millions of dollars and years of labor restoring an old test-model F-22 for an additional few years of trials. In breaking up the 95th Fighter Squadron and redistributing its planes, the Air Force arguably improved the overall force.

Since fighters often operate in four-plane formations, 24-plane units can launch more sorties than an 18-plane squadron can do. Moreover, a squadron typically can manage 24 planes as easily as it can manage 18 planes. Thus a unit with more jets makes more efficient use of its manpower. "Larger, traditional Air Force squadrons and deployable units provide a better balance of equipment and personnel," the GAO explained.

But in cannibalizing the 95th Fighter Squadron, the Air Force reduces its overall squadron count to 311, down one compared to late 2018. The reduction runs counter to the flying branch's stated goal of expanding to 386 squadrons over the next decade or so, an expansion that could require the Air Force to buy hundreds of additional aircraft potentially costing tens of billions of dollars.

Critics have attacked the expansion plan as unaffordable. It's worth noting that, when the opportunity afforded itself after Hurricane Michael, the Air Force opted to have fewer but larger squadrons.

David Axe serves as the new Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Charles K.S. Wu, Yao-Yuan Yeh, Fang-Yu Chen, Austin Wang

Security, Asia

Fears that Beijing will launch a full-blown invasion are likely overblown.

As Biden begins his presidency, it is time we review the perennial question—will China go to war with Taiwan?

Pessimists who argue that a cross-Strait war might break out recently, particularly during the Trump-Biden transition, base their arguments on two beliefs. First, unlike the Trump administration that was overly supportive of Taiwan and antagonistic toward China, the new President, Joe Biden, is likely to be more friendly to and, relatively, more tolerant of China’s hostile actions toward Taiwan. Second, the new administration could be just too busy to keep cross-Strait relations in check. Before the inauguration, the new administration was still bracing for the impact of a divided nation and was worried that similar incidents like the capital invasion could strike again. At the same time, American casualties from the pandemic were continually hitting record highs. China could undoubtedly have seized the moment for a surprise attack.

These reasons for believing they could have, or may still act, are cogent. True, in recent weeks, we did see China ramping up its military actions toward Taiwan, such as invading Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) repeatedly and excessively. However, close examination reveals that China crossing the median line is not new behavior; in fact, it seems so ritualized now that it could generate less anxiety than the new scares of a coronavirus outbreak in Taiwan. Simply put, for the Taiwanese public, these Chinese military “demonstrations” are symbolic and largely meaningless as they do not sway public attention and insert fears.

We do not believe that a cross-Strait hot war will happen anytime soon. In fact, several reasons are leading us to believe that such a possibility is unfounded. For starters, though not exactly on par with the United States, China’s international status has ascended significantly in recent years. In international politics, hegemons are supposed to care about their reputation; China should not be an exception. As Washington reneged on international agreements and scraped multilateral deals in the past several years, Beijing took the advantage to step in as a provider of the common goods to many countries (e.g., The Belt and Road Initiative). While this new role gives China more global influence, it inadvertently forces it to behave somewhat like a hegemon. In fact, to effectively replace America’s role, China needs to cultivate an image of a benign hegemon if it intends to prolong this status.

Note that we are not saying that China will become a benign hegemon, just like the United States. Instead, we argue that to continue to advance its national interests and win cooperation from others, especially Western democracies such as European states, China will likely want to present or at least feign an amicable and accommodating image. We are not making assumptions about China’s intentions in international politics. In fact, China may well be harboring a revisionist agenda based on aggression (looking at how Beijing is dealing with domestic dissidents and border disputes). These claims may well be true. However, on balance, to continue its global quest for supremacy, China would have to at least seriously consider being viewed as a cooperative rising hegemon by many, especially to European and other major powers, which could still block its rise. This rationale also explains why China vehemently objects to claims that accuse it of spreading the coronavirus worldwide. Over the past decade, China has been effortlessly trying to convey a benign image to foreign countries through its soft power and diplomatic and media means. This is known as the “Grand External Propaganda Strategy,” which was initiated in 2009 and emphasized by Xi Jinping. Simply put, China is undoubtedly making substantial efforts to shape its positive image worldwide.

The implications for a reputation-conscious China on a cross-Strait war is that it would force China to think twice or thrice before acting. A cross-Strait war—for the purpose of national unification while obliterating the efforts of self-determination of citizens in Taiwan and a solid democratic state in East Asia—is likely to wreck China’s effort at building its reputation of peacefully rising, especially if Taiwan does not provoke the conflict by proclaiming de jure independence. Regardless of how China might justify its actions (e.g., internal affairs), the invasion would certainly be viewed as an act of expansionism and norm-breaking by the international community. Thus, we predict that a shooting war is unlikely to materialize in the next several years, although existing military actions such as sending aircraft into Taiwan’s ADIZ are likely to continue, as they show the Chinese domestic audience that China is still attempting to unify Taiwan. Nevertheless, those actions are variants of a paper tiger.

Some might argue, however, at times, the internal pressure within China, such as ethnic tensions or economic strains, might lead the Chinese Communist Party to resort to diversionary use of force against Taiwan. But if history could provide examples, we could not find any. In fact, Taiwan is a poor target for several reasons. First, it would hurt China’s reputation, as stated before. Second, diversionary action and success in military action depend on nationalism targeted at a common external party/threat. Whereas strong nationalism against Japan was seen in the early 2000s, nation-wide protests asking the government to invade Taiwan were rare or nonexistent. Anti-Taiwan sentiment often becomes visible only when Chinese leaders covey messages to Taiwan’s administration, as a coercive signal, and when Chinese netizens and other digital “50 Cent Party” paid trolls are directed to flood into Taiwanese internet outlets. For these reasons, we doubt that Chinese authorities would be willing to muster popular support for a diversionary war against Taiwan.

In fact, for China to divert domestic criticism, logic would dictate that the United States would be the prime choice. The ages of humiliation, unfair treatment throguh trade and commerce, and even requests to improve its environment and human rights by the United States are ready narratives to construct a common Chinese foe; such an action might even be necessary for a Sino-U.S. hegemonic transition. However, China is reasonably hesitant to select the United States as a target as Beijing understands that, once successfully triggered, the mounting nationalism, anti-Americanism, and the U.S. retaliation might backfire to destabilize the regime. Thus, to strike a balance between the effectiveness of diversion and management of escalation or risks, China might instead resort to a target with more confidence to deal with, such as Japan or India, where negative public sentiments could be managed with more ease. But again, with India being a nuclear power and Japan under the mutual defense treaty with the Washington, China really should refrain itself from the use of force, no matter how severe the domestic turmoil is.

On top of the above reasons, do not forget that the U.S. implicit security commitment to defend Taiwan, stemming from the concept of strategic ambiguity, is likely to stay during Biden’s presidency. Strategic ambiguity has been and will continue to be a strong deterrent to China with the intention of maintaining the status quo. Although the U.S. does not explicitly utter the conditions under which it would come to Taiwan’s defense, both the U.S. and China know that the U.S. is likely to intervene in a cross-Strait conflict if China starts this war. It is undeniable that the U.S. still holds a significant military advantage, and China is very aware of this situation. In addition, compared to the Trump administration, the new administration is buoyed by a bi-partisan consensus on the U.S. relationship with China. In addition to maintaining its credibility at assisting Taiwan, the new administration can help keep cross-Strait relations at peace by including the issue in a multilateral framework. As the United States is preparing to reenter multilateral agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and international organizations (e.g., the World Health Organization), there will be ample opportunities for America and China to exchange ideas, build confidence, and defuse tensions when it comes to Taiwan issues. There will be layers of buffers before each side meets each other on the battlefield.

In conclusion, despite numerous preoccupations that paint a bleak picture of cross-Strait relations, war is unthinkable and unlikely to happen for the following reasons. First, it would hurt China’s international reputation. Second, Taiwan does not serve as a good target for diverting domestic problems; there simply might be no viable options for China. Third, the war may attract unnecessary attention from the United States and force it to alter its strategic ambiguity policy. Keep in mind, as China continues to gain status and influence in the international society, it has to be more conscious of its reputation and avoid actions that tarnish it. Before the hegemon transition completes, if that day ever arrives, China would not want to be bogged down in a conflict that hurts its legitimacy. If the United States wants to contain the rise of China, instead of employing Trump’s style of confrontational and unilateral approach to China, it will need to gain a higher ground of reputation by reemphasizing its longstanding positions on democracy, human rights, and freedom. Policymakers and international observers certainly need to keep an eye on the future progression of cross-Strat relations, but for now, do not let the possibility of a cross-Strait wait keep you awake at night.

Charles K.S. Wu (wu721@purdue.edu) is PhD candidate of Political Science at Purdue University. Twitter: @kuanshengtwn

Yao-Yuan Yeh (yehy@stthom.edu) is Associate Professor of International Studies and Chair of the Department of International Studies and Modern Languages at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Twitter: @yeh2sctw

Fang-Yu Chen (chenfan6@msu.edu) is PhD in Political Science at Michigan State University. Twitter: @FangYu_80168

Austin Wang (austin.wang@unlv.edu) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Twitter: @wearytolove

Robert Farley

Security,

Big ships with heavy armor are unlikely to solve the A2/AD dilemma.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Big ships with effective systems of defense components, combined with a large number of extremely lethal offensive systems, can go a long way toward defeating a system of anti-access systems. In this sense, the “battleship” could return, although it will play a role more like a classic monitor (intended to fight against shore-based systems) than a line-of-battle-ship.

Is it time to bring back the battleship? 

(Recommended: 5 Most Powerful Battleships Ever)

For decades, naval architects have concentrated on building ships that, by the standards of the World Wars, are remarkably brittle. These ships can deal punishment at much greater ranges than their early 20th century counterparts, but they can’t take a hit. Is it time to reconsider this strategy, and once again build protected ships? This article examines how these trends came about, and what might change in the future.

Why We Build Big Ships

The label “battleship” emerges from the older “ship of the line” formulation, in the sense that a navy’s largest ships participated in the “line of battle” formation that allowed them to bring their broadsides to bear on an opposing line. After the development of ironclad warships, the “battle ship” diverged from the armored cruiser based on expectations of usage; “battleships” were expected to fight enemy “battleships.” The modern battleship form settled around 1890, with the British Royal Sovereign class. These ships displaced about 15,000 tons, with two heavy guns each in turrets fore and aft, and steel armor. The rest of the navies of the world adopted these basic design parameters, which provided a ship that could both deal out and absorb punishment. The process of ensuring survivability was simplified, in these early battleships, by the predictability of the threat. The most likely vector of attack in the late 1890s came from large naval artillery carried by other ships, and consequently protective schemes could concentrate on that threat.

(Recommended: The Super Battleship America Never Built)

The limitations of fire control meant that lethality didn’t increase much with size; HMS Lord Nelson, laid down 15 years later, displaced only 2000 tons more.  On roughly the same size hull, however, HMS Dreadnought took advantage of a number of innovations developed in the ensuing years, and with ten heavy guns became a far more lethal platform at roughly similar cost to previous ships. As a consequence, the survivability of smaller battleships dropped substantially, even against naval artillery.

From that point on, lethality and survivability increased dramatically with ship size, and the navies of the world responded accordingly. By 1915 the first line battleships of the Royal Navy would displace 27,000 tons; by 1920 the world’s largest battleship (HMS Hood) displaced 45,000 tons.  In 1921 international agreements would constrain warship size, although the Germans and Japanese in particularly imagined battleships of staggering proportions.

Why the Big Ships Went Out of Style

With the advent of the age of airpower (and missile power), size no longer dramatically increased lethality for surface warships. At the same time, a proliferation of threats made ensuring survivability more difficult. The huge battleships of the Second World War could not survive concerted air and submarine attack, and could not punch back at sufficient range to justify their main armament. Except for aircraft carriers, where lethality still increased with size, naval architecture took a turn for the petite. The chief surface ships of the U.S. Navy (USN) today displace less than a quarter that of the battleships of World War II.

Post-WWII ships also, broadly speaking, discarded the idea of armor as a means of ensuring survivability. There remains considerable debate as to how traditional battleship belt (side) armor could resist cruise missiles. Cruise missiles generally have less penetrating power than the largest naval artillery, although they have other advantages. Deck armor proved a more serious problem, and the demands of ensuring survivability from bombs, pop-up cruise missiles, and (more recently) ballistic missiles quickly outpaced the improved lethality of a large, heavily armored ship.  And perhaps most importantly, no one figured out how to eliminate (as opposed to ameliorate) the problem of underwater attack; torpedoes continued to pose a lethal threat to even the most heavily armored of warships.

Which isn’t to say that people haven’t tried. Several navies have played with the idea of large surface warships since the end of World War II. The Royal Navy considered redesigning and completing at least one member of the Lion class, abandoned in 1939. Studies eventually determined that the level of deck armor necessary to protect the ships from bombs would prove prohibitive. The Soviets maintained plans to build traditional gun-toting battleships into the 1950s, when the death of Stalin ended such a fantasy. France completed Jean Bart in 1952, and kept her in partial commission into the 1960s as a training and accommodation ship.

A new wave began in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union started construction on the Kirov class heavy missile cruisers, which quickly took on the name “battlecruisers.” The USN responded, in part, with the refurbishment of the four Iowa class battleships, which acquired long range missiles but remained in service for only a few years.

More recently, Russia, the United States, and China have all considered the construction of large surface warships.  The Russians periodically promise to build new Kirovs, a claim to take as seriously as the suggestion that Russia will build new Tu-160 strategic bombers.  One of the proposals for the CG(X) program involved a nuclear powered warship approaching 25,000 tons. The media has treated the Chinese Type 055 cruisers as a similar super-warship, but reports now indicate that the ship will displace around 12000-14000 tons, somewhat smaller than the US Zumwalt class destroyer.

What Has Changed?

Big ships still have some lethality advantages.  For example, bigger ships can carry larger magazines of missiles, which they can use for both offensive and defensive purposes.  Advances in gun technology (such as the 155mm Advanced Gun System to be mounted on the Zumwalt class destroyer) mean that large naval artillery can strike farther and more accurately than ever before.

But the most important advances may come in survivability.The biggest reason to build big ships may be the promise of electricity generation. The most interesting innovations in naval technology involve sensors, unmanned technology, lasers, and railguns, most of which are power intensive. Larger ships can generate more power, increasing not only their lethality (rail guns, sensors) but also their survivability (anti-missile lasers, defensive sensor technologies, close-defense systems). The missile magazines that large ships can carry allow them to draw together these elements and lethality and survivability better than their smaller counterparts.

What about a true successor to the classic battleship, designed to both deal out and absorb punishment?  Advances in materials design have certainly increased the ability of other military systems (most notably the tank) to survive punishment, and a serious effort to create an armored ship would undoubtedly result in a well-protected vessel. The problem is that passive systems need to protect a ship from a wide range of different attacks, including cruise missiles, torpedoes, ballistic missiles, and long-range guns. Keeping a ship well-protected from these threats, all of which it could anticipate facing in an anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) situation, would likely prove cost-prohibitive. It’s also worth noticing that while the battleships of yore could continue to sail and fight despite heavy damage to their various components, modern warship carry far more sensitive, deeply integrated technology, systems that might react poorly to otherwise-survivable ballistic missile strikes.

Parting Shots

Big ships with heavy armor are unlikely to solve the A2/AD dilemma.  However, big ships with effective systems of defense components, combined with a large number of extremely lethal offensive systems, can go a long way toward defeating a system of anti-access systems. In this sense, the “battleship” could return, although it will play a role more like a classic monitor (intended to fight against shore-based systems) than a line-of-battle-ship. And these new “battleships” will survive less because of their ability to absorb hits, than to avoid hits altogether.

Robert Farley is 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. Follow him on Twitter:@drfarls.

This first appeared in 2015 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Security, Europe

Charles de Gaulle has served effectively in keeping France a viable, even necessary presence in the Western multilateral intervention scene.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Almost all of the significant military activities undertaken by France since 2001 (and indeed before) have come in the context of a multilateral, cooperative effort with other major countries. This has meant that Charles de Gaulle can contribute, and contribute effectively, but that her periods of refit do not come at the expense of the coalition’s overall military power.

France’s first carrier entered service in the interwar period, but for a very long time, the French navy trailed behind international counterparts in naval aviation. This changed in the Cold War, however, and today France operates the world’s most advanced carrier outside of the U.S. Navy. How did France build its naval aviation force, what does it do today and what direction will France take next?

The History of French Carriers

Soon after World War I, France joined the international carrier community through the conversion of the battleship hulk Bearn. Although large, Bearn did not carry many aircraft and never actively participated in combat, even during World War II. The construction of two additional large carriers was suspended by World War II, but after the war the French navy gained access to light carriers transferred from Britain and the United States.

Four in total, these carriers helped the French navy develop its naval aviation muscles. The next step was big; France constructed a pair of CATOBAR aircraft carriers, Clemenceau and Foch. Commissioned in 1961 and 1963, the ships displaced 30,000 tons and could carry around forty modern aircraft. A third carrier, the much larger Verdun, was cancelled before being laid down. Clemenceau and Foch, operating the F-8 Crusader and later the Super Etendard, would form the backbone of the world’s second-largest carrier force for the latter half of the Cold War. After nearly forty years of hard service, the two ships were decommissioned in favor of France’s next carrier, the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle.

The Current State of French Naval Aviation

Charles de Gaulle (CdG) entered service in May 2001, after a troubled fifteen-year construction period. Displacing 42,000 tons, Charles de Gaulle can make twenty-seven knots, and operates up to forty aircraft. She is the only carrier in the world outside of the U.S. Navy to use catapults to launch aircraft, and consequently carries conventional CATOBAR-capable jets such as the Dassault Rafale and the E-2C Hawkeye. CdG is also the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to serve outside the U.S. Navy.

France also has a trio of assault carriers, the Mistral-class ships Mistral, Tonnerre, and Dixmude. At 20,000 tons, the Mistrals can carry around thirty helicopters of various types. During operations off Libya, the Mistrals were pushed into a strike role, serving as platforms for attack helicopters conducting attacks against Libyan government positions.

Strategic Rationale

France’s carriers have contributed in a variety of ways to France’s strategic security vision. From the beginning, the French navy appreciated that its carriers might play a role in high-intensity combat against the Soviets, and accordingly the carriers prepared for that mission. Clemenceau and Foch were equipped for nuclear deterrence, as is Charles de Gaulle. But France also regarded itself as having responsibilities to its (soon to be former) empire, and French carriers served in the Indochina War, as well as the Suez Incident.

French carriers have made their greatest contribution over the past two decades in support of multilateral military operations. Clemenceau and Foch both participated in various operations in support of UN missions in Israel; Clemenceau supported coalition operations in the 1991 Gulf War, while Foch operated in the Adriatic in support of UN and NATO ops in the former Yugoslavia. Charles de Gaulle has conducted repeated operations off Afghanistan since 2001, often filling in for U.S. carriers called to other duties. She served off Libya in 2011, and has conducted airstrikes against ISIS in Syria since 2015.

The Future for French Carriers

France cancelled a second carrier, based on the design of the British Queen Elizabeth–class ships, in 2013. France and the United Kingdom differed over propulsion, and the French are unlikely in any case to have settled for a ski-jump carrier. However, the cancellation of the second ship violates a cardinal rule of carrier acquisition, as France is effectively without a significant proportion of its naval power every time CDG enters refit. Indeed, at the moment, the carrier has been in refit since February 2017.

Charles de Gaulle is expected to serve until 2040, and the French government has authorized studies on the construction of a replacement, which could potentially overlap with CdG’s final years in service. Any future ship or ships would likely retain nuclear propulsion, adopt the EMALS catapult system, and operate conventional CATOBAR aircraft. Would France build two? The United Kingdom has done it, and the French navy has often chafed at the capability hit it endures with Charles De Gaulle enters refit. But much depends on France’s financial and security situation in the late 2020s and early 2030s, and these factors are extremely hard to predict. It is also unclear what sort of aircraft the next generation of French carriers will fly. By 2040 the Dassault Rafale will be quite old, and the future of France’s “sixth-generation” fighter project remains murky.

Conclusion

France’s experience with CdG demonstrates that for a country in France’s position, one aircraft carrier can be made to work. Almost all of the significant military activities undertaken by France since 2001 (and indeed before) have come in the context of a multilateral, cooperative effort with other major countries. This has meant that CdG can contribute, and contribute effectively, but that her periods of refit do not come at the expense of the coalition’s overall military power. Indeed, even the Mistrals helped fill in during the Libya campaign, taking up the slack left by CdG’s refit.

In any case, it is unlikely that the French government will want to go without a naval aviation capability as CdG nears retirement. Charles de Gaulle has served effectively in keeping France a viable, even necessary presence in the Western multilateral intervention scene. Notwithstanding changes in technology that make the environment more dangerous for carriers, it is very likely that France will construct at least one replacement carrier, thus maintaining her naval aviation tradition for another half-century.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, 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 first appeared in April 2018.)

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security,

Nations often linger on their military defeats as long as, or longer than, they do on their successes.

Here's What You Need To Remember: American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

Nations often linger on their military defeats as long as, or longer than, they do on their successes. The Battle of Kosovo remains the key event of the Serbian story, and devastating military defeats adorn the national narratives of France, Russia and the American South. What are the biggest disasters in American military history, and what effect have they had on the United States?

In this article, I concentrate on specific operational and strategic decisions, leaving aside broader, grand-strategic judgments that may have led the United States into ill-considered conflicts. The United States may well have erred politically in engaging in the War of 1812, World War I, the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, but here I consider how specific failures worsened America’s military and strategic position.

Invasion of Canada

At the opening of the War of 1812, U.S. forces invaded Upper and Lower Canada. Americans expected a relatively easy going; the notion that Canada represented the soft underbelly of the British empire had been popular among American statesmen for some time. Civilian and military leaders alike expected a quick capitulation, forced in part by the support of the local population. But Americans overestimated their support among Canadians, overestimated their military capabilities, and underestimated British power. Instead of an easy victory, the British handed the Americans a devastating defeat.

American forces (largely consisting of recently mobilized militias) prepared to invade Canada on three axes of advance, but did not attack simultaneously and could not support one another. American forces were inexperienced at fighting against a professional army and lacked good logistics. This limited their ability to concentrate forces against British weak points. The Americans also lacked a good backup plan for the reverses that the British soon handed them. None of the American commanders (led by William Hull, veteran of the Revolutionary War) displayed any enthusiasm for the fight, or any willingness to take the risks necessary to press advantages.

The real disaster of the campaign became apparent at Detroit in August, when a combined British and Native American army forced Hull to surrender, despite superior numbers. The British followed up their victory by seizing and burning several American frontier outposts, although they lacked the numbers and logistical tail to probe very deeply into American territory. The other two prongs of the invasion failed to march much beyond their jumping off points. American forces won several notable successes later in the war, restoring their position along the border, but never effectively threatened British Canada.

The failure of the invasion turned what Americans had imagined as an easy, lucrative offensive war into a defensive struggle. It dealt a major setback to the vision, cherished by Americans, of a North America completely under the domination of the United States. Britain would hold its position on the continent, eventually ensuring the independence of Canada from Washington.

Battle of Antietam

In September 1862, Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland with the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s objectives were to take advantage of foraging opportunities (the movement of armies across Virginia had left the terrain devastated), support a revolt in Maryland and potentially inflict a serious defeat on Union forces. Unfortunately for Lee, information about his battle disposition fell into the hands of General George McClellan, who moved to intercept with the much larger Army of the Potomac. President Lincoln saw this as an opportunity to either destroy or badly maul Lee’s army.

The Battle of Antietam resulted in 22,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest day in the history of the Americas. Despite massive numbers, a good working knowledge of Lee’s dispositions and a positional advantage, McClellan failed to inflict a serious defeat on the Confederates. Lee was able to withdraw in good order, suffering higher proportional casualties, but maintaining the integrity of his force and its ability to retreat safely into Confederate territory.

McClellan probably could not have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam (19th-century armies were devilishly difficult to annihilate, given the technology available), but he could have dealt it a far more serious setback. He vastly overestimated the size of Lee’s force, moved slowly to take advantage of clear opportunities and maintained poor communications with his subcommanders. A greater success at Antietam might have spared the Army of the Potomac the devastation of Fredericksburg, where Union forces launched a pointless direct assault against prepared Confederate positions.

Antietam was not a complete failure; the Army of Northern Virginia was hurt, and McClellan forced Lee out of Maryland. President Lincoln felt confident enough following the battle to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, promising to free slaves in rebellious states. Nevertheless, Antietam represented the best opportunity that the Union would have to catch and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, which remained one of the Confederacy’s centers of gravity until 1865.

Operation Drumbeat

On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Germany’s treaty obligations to Japan did not require action in case of Japanese attack, but Germany nevertheless decided to make formal the informal war that it had been fighting with the United States in the Atlantic. Historically, this has been regarded as one of Hitler’s major blunders. At the time, however, it gave German submariners their first opportunity to feast upon American coastal shipping.

In the first six months of 1942, the U-boat force commanded by Admiral Doenitz deployed into the littoral of the eastern seaboard. The Germans had observed some restraint prior to Pearl Harbor in order to avoid incurring outright U.S. intervention. This ended with the Japanese attack. The German U-boats enjoyed tremendous success, as none of the U.S. Army Air Force, the U.S. Navy, or American civil defense authorities were well prepared for submarine defense. Coastal cities remained illuminated, making it easy for U-boat commanders to pick targets. Fearing a lack of escorts (as well as irritation on the part of the U.S. business community), the U.S. Navy (USN) declined to organize coastal shipping into convoys. The USN and U.S. Army Air Force, having fought bitterly for years, had not prepared the cooperative procedures necessary for fighting submarines.

The results were devastating. Allied shipping losses doubled from the previous year, and remained high throughout 1942. German successes deeply worried the British, such that they quickly dispatched advisors to the United States to help develop a concerted anti-submarine doctrine. Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) was (and is) immensely complicated, requiring a great deal of coordination and experience to pull off correctly. The United States had neither worked diligently on the problem prior to the war, nor taken the time to learn from the British. However, the USN would make good its mistake later in the war, developing into a very effective ASW force, and deploying its own submarines to great effect against the Japanese.

Across the Partition, 1950

Following the successful defense of Pusan, and the stunning victory on the beaches of Inchon, the United States Army and Marine Corps, with support of Republic of Korea forces, marched deep into North Korea in an effort to destroy the Pyongyang regime and turn over full control of the Korean Peninsula to Seoul. The United States saw a counteroffensive as an opportunity to roll back Communist gains in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, and punish the Communist world for aggression on the Korean Peninsula.

This was an operational and strategic disaster. As American forces approached the Chinese border on two widely divergent (and mutually unsupportable) axes, Chinese forces massed in the mountains of North Korea. Beijing’s diplomatic warnings became increasingly shrill, but fresh off the victory at Inchon, few in the United States paid any attention. China was impoverished and militarily weak, while the Soviet Union had displayed no taste for direct intervention.

When the Chinese counterattacked in November 1950, they threw back U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces with huge loss of life on both sides. For a time, it appeared that the People’s Liberation Army’s counteroffensive might completely rout United Nation forces. Eventually, however, the lines stabilized around what is now the Demilitarized Zone.

This failure had many fathers. While General Douglas MacArthur pushed most aggressively for a decisive offensive, he had many friends and supporters in Congress. President Truman made no effort to restrain MacArthur until the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. U.S. intelligence lacked a good understanding of either Chinese aims or Chinese capabilities. The invasion resulted in two more years of war, in which neither China, nor the United States could budge the other very far from the 38th parallel. It also poisoned U.S.-Chinese relations for a generation.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army

On May 23, 2003, Paul Bremer (chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority) ordered the Iraqi Army to disband. It is difficult to overstate the unwise nature of this decision. We don’t need hindsight; it was, as many recognized, a terrible decision at the time. In a moment, swept aside was the entirety of Iraqi military history, including the traditions and communal spirit of the finest Iraqi military formations. Eradicated was the best means for managing the sectors of Iraqi society most likely to engage in insurgent activity.

It’s not hard to see the logic of the decision. The Iraqi Army was deeply implicated in the Baathist power structure that had dominated Iraq for decades. Many of its officers had committed war crimes, often against other Iraqis. It was heavily tilted towards the Sunnis, with few Shia or Kurds in positions of responsibility. Finally, it had, from the American perspective, a recent history of appallingly poor military performance. As Bremer argued, it had largely dissolved in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But this was not how many Iraqis viewed the army. The Royal Iraqi Army had come into existence in the early 1920s, when Iraq remained a protectorate of the British Empire. It had revolted in 1941, but the British made the wise decision to keep the force together so as to maintain order. In 1948, its units fought against Israeli forces during the wars of Israeli independence, and it participated in the 1967 war, if briefly. In the 1980s, it waged an eight-year struggle against Iran. While its legacy was complex, for many Iraqis, service in the Army (and in particular its performance against Iran) remained a source of personal and national pride. Eradicated was eighty years of institutional history.

It’s impossible to say how the reconstruction of the Iraqi Army might have played out differently, but then it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been worse. The Iraqi Army has consistently failed in the most elementary of military tasks when not directly supported by American forces. It remains unpopular in broad sectors of Iraqi society, and its performance against lightly armed ISIS fighters has made it the laughingstock of the region.

Conclusion

American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests. Nevertheless, each of these avoidable defeats proved costly to the United States—in blood, treasure and time.

This first appeared in 2014 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Michael Peck

Technology, Europe

Hard to believe, isn't it?

Here's What You Need to Remember: America's wars over the last century have all been fought overseas, where the U.S. could tap its industrial and technological resources to field expeditionary forces plentifully supplied with advanced equipment. For Russia, the last century was marked by two immense invasions by the Germans, as well as huge land battles against the Japanese, the Poles and even other Russians during the Russian Civil War.

Surprise! America's F-35 stealth fighter is too complicated and expensive, claims a Russian military expert interviewed by Russian media.

Hard to believe, isn't it? Yet while the Sputnik News interview might be dismissed as tendentious at best and propaganda at worst, it perfectly illustrates how Russia and the West view weapons technology.

"The F-35 is a very complex system and, as such, it has lots of holes, bugs and other things, and it is very difficult to debug it," Dmitry Drozdenko told Sputnik News. "Like other problems, all this is because it is an excessively high-tech aircraft."

Sound familiar? Russia would have made the same argument in 1943, when hordes of uncomplicated T-34 tanks faced formidable but heavily engineered and expensive German Tiger and Panther tanks. Or the American M-16 versus the AK-47, or the F-4 Phantom versus the MiG-21.

Americans are horrified when their soldiers don't receive the most cutting-edge equipment. Russia is willing to sacrifice sophistication for simplicity.

Drozdenko also declared to Sputnik News that "unlike us, the Americans rely too much on stealth. However, radar technology is developing fast and invisibility is no longer a sure-fire guarantor of air supremacy."

“Dogfights haven’t gone anywhere," he added. "They will fire from a distance the first day, but a couple of days later, we’ll be flying like we always did before."

Note the words "flying like we always did before." As far back as the 1950s, the U.S. thought the future of air combat would be aircraft engaging each other with missiles at long range (which proved a fallacy in the skies over North Vietnam). The whole concept of the stealth F-35 and F-22 is that they can blast a MiG out of the sky without the MiG knowing it's there. But to Russia, the good ol' days of close-range aerial knife fights aren't over.

Drozdenko does make a point about the F-35 that would have many Americans nodding in agreement. “The Americans tolerate this plane because it’s a very big and expensive business with contracts running into trillions of dollars. While they keep making the F-35s, the Americans are modernizing their fourth-generation-plus F-18s and F-15s trying to bring them up to par with Russia’s Su-35,” he noted.

What's important here isn't the mudslinging about who has better weapons, or the merits and demerits of the F-35. As Drozdenko points out, technological advances like stealth are transitory.

It's the rival conceptions of military technology, and by extension how to wage war. These are concepts rooted in history and circumstances. America's wars over the last century have all been fought overseas, where the U.S. could tap its industrial and technological resources to field expeditionary forces plentifully supplied with advanced equipment. For Russia, the last century was marked by two immense invasions by the Germans, as well as huge land battles against the Japanese, the Poles and even other Russians during the Russian Civil War. Conflicts fought on underdeveloped, rugged or frozen battlefields are harsh on equipment.

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Of course, these images are partly stereotypes. Russia is indeed capable of making advanced weapons such as hypersonic missiles. And while simplicity is a virtue, it has its drawbacks, such as Russian jet engines that wear out too quickly. American weapons may be costlier and fancier than they need to be, but they can be quite effective if used by nations that know to operate and maintain them, as the Israelis have demonstrated time and again.

Still, it's hard to argue with Drozdenko's observations that war and technology are not the same. “Imagine a BMW and a Russian Niva on a bumpy road somewhere deep in Russia," Drozdenko says. "Which of the two will wear out? Technology is technology, but war is war."

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared in August 2018.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Doug Bandow

Politics, Asia

The bad was bad policy, but that was a choice that only Seoul could make.

Successive U.S. presidents and Congresses claimed the Republic of Korea to be a close ally. Candidate Joe Biden made improving alliances a key plank in his campaign. Yet Washington has never treated the ROK as a full partner. That remains the case today.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) announced that he intends to hold a hearing in March on South Korean legislation that bans leafletting into North Korea. A member of the GOP minority in the House, Smith no longer can direct committee action. However, he still co-chairs the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which shames rather than legislates.

In December Smith targeted the South Korean National Assembly’s passage of a law, which takes effect next month, prohibiting the release of propaganda materials, money, and goods into North Korea. He criticized the “inane legislation criminalizing humanitarian outreach” which he said was “frightening in its implications for democracy and liberty.” He explained: “I am troubled that legislators in an ostensibly vibrant democracy would contemplate criminalizing conduct aimed at promoting democracy and providing spiritual and humanitarian succor to people suffering under one of the cruelest communist dictatorships in the world.”

At the same time, Rep. Michael McCaul, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denounced the South Korean measure: “Freedom of expression is a core democratic value and bipartisan majorities in the U.S. Congress have long supported efforts to make outside information available in North Korea’s closed dictatorship.’ He added that “A bright future for the Korean Peninsula rests on North Korea becoming more like South Korea—not the other way around.”

Criticism of the Moon government, which backed the legislation, and the ruling party, which pushed it through the National Assembly, has been widespread. In the ROK human rights activists, North Korean defectors, and conservative politicians denounced the legislation. It also drew opposition from international and foreign groups, such as Human Rights Watch and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Finally, then-Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun “privately conveyed” the Trump administration’s opinion, which likely was quite negative.

I added my voice, contending that the measure was wrong-headed and counterproductive. The prohibition punished people for exercising their fundamental right to express themselves by criticizing an oppressive government. Even worse, Seoul was seeking to sever one of the few means to reach the North Korean people, circumventing controls by a government fearful of any outside communication. Over the long-term the best hope for fundamental reform in the North is internal. The more people in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea know about the South and the rest of the world, the more likely and faster such change is to occur.

Nevertheless, the Moon government backed and the National Assembly approved the legislation. Smith justified his official criticism of the ROK: “No government is above scrutiny, not even that of a long-time ally.” True enough, but should the U.S. Congress then hold what amounts to a human rights hearing on a policy difference—an important one, to be sure, but something that falls far short of what the Commission normally considers to be worthy of its attention?

Consider the body’s most recent hearing topics: “Conflict and Killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt,” “The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas,” “Enforced Disappearance in Latin America: Taking Stock,” “Religious Freedom in China: The Case of Bishop James Su Zhimin,” and “Human Rights in Haiti: Ideas for Next Steps.”

Alas, the topic “Should South Korean Activists Be Allowed to Send Balloons into Angry, Unreasonable, and Unpredictable Well-Armed Adversary Next Door?” seems to fall a bit short of the others. Yet Smith abandoned any sense of proportion. In December he fulminated: “If they pass such a law, I call upon our State Department to critically re-evaluate the Republic of Korea’s commitment to democratic values in its annual rights report, as well as in its report on international religious freedom. It may very well be that we will see South Korea put on a watch list, which would be a very sad development indeed.”

Really? Is applying an official genocide designation the next step? How about imposing economic sanctions to match those currently on the North?

Better would be to treat the ROK as the friend that it is and engage its arguments. Before the measure’s passage Smith called on Seoul to remember its better angels. As he put it: “Given the great accomplishments of the people of South Korea, I truly hope this legislative proposal is an aberration, and that cooler heads will realize that this bill is not just ill-conceived, but frightening in its implications for democracy and liberty.”

The Moon government contended that the measure would protect people living near the border from possible North Korean retaliation. According to KBS World Radio, last week Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung wrote congressional leaders expressing concern that “moves by U.S. lawmakers to hold hearings on the matter could hinder a legitimate exercise of South Korea’s sovereignty aimed at protecting the lives and safety of its people.”

Added KBS, “The governor, who is considered a leading presidential hopeful, also stressed in the letter that the law is a peaceful means that can prevent military tensions and confrontation with North Korea, as well as improve strained inter-Korean relations, according to provincial government officials.” These points are not idle concerns, given the DPRK’s brutality and volatility. Indeed, a few years ago there was an exchange of fire between the DPRK and South Korean militaries when the former sought to shoot down some balloons after their release.

Nevertheless, meekly yielding to the North’s demand that Seoul halt leafletting is more likely to increase than decrease Pyongyang’s demands. The word appeasement naturally comes to mind. Historically, addressing other nations’ grievances was a time-honored diplomatic strategy, but the 1938 Munich Agreement on Czechoslovakia demonstrated the danger of attempting to accommodate those who refuse to be appeased. Which appears to be the case today in North Korea.

Despite the Moon administration’s great efforts to promote inter-Korean exchanges and improve inter-Korean relations, Kim Jong-un has responded with actions that range between chilly and contemptuous, highlighted by the dramatic demolition of the joint liaison office in June. Yet with the change in administrations in Washington the North needs a better relationship with the ROK more than ever. Instead of kowtowing northward, the Moon government should toughen its stance. Seoul should indicate its continued desire to work with the DPRK, but insist on respectful treatment in return.

Whatever the arguments, however, this issue doesn’t seem appropriate for congressional hearings and threats to have Washington rate South Korea the same as Pyongyang, China, and Saudi Arabia. Put the ROK on a watch list? Good grief!

With great power comes great arrogance, at least in the case of U.S. policymakers. They ooze sanctimony as they attempt to micromanage the globe and express outrage when other nations don’t play their assigned roles. So it is with congressional attacks on the ROK’s leaflet legislation.

The South Korean ban on offending Pyongyang is bad policy. But the decision is up to the South, its officials and people. If the new U.S. administration and Congress are serious about strengthening their ties with the ROK, they should go light with fevered and public criticism. And behave like Americans expect their friends to act.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World and co-author of The Korean Conundrum: America’s Troubled Relations with North and South Korea.

Image: Reuters.

Regina Smyth

Politics, Eurasia

Since 2011, Navalny has played a long game, challenging the regime through protest and elections and influencing the political agenda. That strategy is gaining traction among ordinary Russians.

Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and his team have stunned the Russian government again, forcing President Vladimir Putin and his allies to confront significant protest led by a foe they hoped to first sideline and, more recently, eliminate.

Navalny was nearly killed in August by the Novichok nerve agent in what most experts believe was an assassination attempt by the Kremlin. But he survived, after being airlifted from Russia to Germany, where he spent five months recovering.

The Kremlin discouraged Navalny from returning to Russia by revoking his probation on previous charges and issuing an arrest warrant.

In response, Navalny said, “Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, I miss them.” He flew back on Jan. 17 and was immediately detained.

Navalny didn’t go quietly: His call for protests against his detention brought Russians to the streets in late January, in the largest opposition events in a decade and the most geographically widespread actions since the late Soviet period.

A controversial leader

I write about Navalny’s opposition strategy in my book “Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008-2020,” which explores the nature of Navalny’s threat to the Kremlin.

Since 2011, Navalny has been often quoted saying that his goal is to live in a normal country that is fair and can realize its economic potential. When he ran for Moscow mayor in 2013, his campaign slogan was “Change Russia, Begin with Moscow.”

Rivals in the opposition and in the regime dispute his motivations. During his early political career, Navalny espoused ethnic nationalist beliefs, and participated in the far right’s annual Russian March. He supported Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and used racial slurs to call for the deportation of Georgians and illegal Central Asian migrants. This rhetoric generated enduring distrust among the democratic opposition.

Kremlin officials dismiss him as an ambitious megalomaniac, implying that he wants power and wealth. These claims limited his personal support.

Anti-corruption campaign

Navalny began as a lawyer, challenging the large Russian energy companies by buying stock and thus gaining the right to attend shareholders’ meetings. He used his access to confront corporate leadership, demanding transparent corporate governance.

He established the Anti-Corruption Foundation, or FBK, to collect citizens’ reports of corrupt government practices. The project engaged Russians in everyday politics, a core element of the Navalny strategy. But it is now branded a “foreign agent” under Russian law, a move made by the government with no explanation. The designation subjects an organization to disruptive government oversight.

Navalny amplified his anti-corruption fight during Russia’s 2011 parliamentary election, when he labeled Putin’s political party, United Russia, the “Party of Crooks and Thieves.” Navalny was at the fore as these efforts contributed to mass protest sparked by evidence of significant electoral fraud.

He used his platform to build a team of committed activists who extended his reach across the country. Drawing on the resources of past protests, the team crafted an opposition strategy to confront the regime at every step of the election process, from candidate registration to vote tabulation.

His canny combination of investigative journalism and social media provided new evidence of government corruption. In 2017, Navalny released an exposé, “Don’t Call Him Dimon,” lampooning the deep corruption of former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev by showing his vast sneaker collection and an elaborate duck pond at his estate. Both ducks and sneakers became opposition symbols.

In response, tens of thousands of young people took to the streets in 2017, shocking a country that believed Putin’s opposition had waned. Months later, those young people flocked to join Navalny’s presidential campaign.

Since 2011, Navalny has played a long game, challenging the regime through protest and elections and influencing the political agenda. That strategy is gaining traction among ordinary Russians.

Navalny’s return strategy

Social media was key to Navalny’s plans for his return to Russia.

Before he left Germany, Navalny released an interview with a Russian security service officer who allegedly participated in the Novichok attack against him. The officer confessed the details of the assassination plot, revealing that the poison was delivered in Navalny’s boxer shorts. A new protest symbol emerged: blue boxers.

Navalny then headed home. As supporters gathered at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, the Kremlin diverted his plane to a different Moscow airport, Sheremyetovo, to avoid media coverage. Yet reporters from international and Russian alternative media outlets on the plane recorded his trip. They live-streamed Navalny and his wife Yulia embracing before police led him away.

Yulia addressed supporters outside the airport: “Alexei is not afraid. I’m not afraid either, and I call on you all not to be afraid.” The message echoed across social media.

As he was transferred to prison, Navalny called Russians to the streets to demand his release. His team called for actions across Russia on Jan. 23.

In a video posted to Twitter, Navalny spoke from a makeshift courtroom. He counseled supporters, “There is only one thing to be afraid of, that’s your own fear.” TikTok was overrun with videos of young people expressing support.

Three days before the protests, Navalny dropped a new exposé that violated the unwritten code in Russian media against revealing details of Putin’s personal life. The film focused on a US$1.35 billion Black Sea compound that allegedly belongs to Putin, linking Kremlin theft to its failure to improve everyday lives. Navalny ended the video urging Russians to vote, using his Smart Vote app.

Putin’s childhood friend, oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, claimed ownership of what he called the apartment-hotel project.

“Putin’s Palace” has been viewed over 100 million times. The “Palace” rooms became fodder for internet memes and protest icons.

Renewed protest

The return, the video and the protests combined to defy the Kremlin’s version of reality: that Navalny was an unimportant tool of the West.

Instead, what happened next illustrated Navalny’s influence, despite limited personal support. The resulting protests began on Jan. 23 in Russia’s Far East and cascaded west through 11 time zones.

Navalny’s mobilization strategy reflects his deep understanding of changes in Russian society. New research shows that the extension of 3G internet across the globe decreases trust in government and increases perceptions of corruption by giving users free access to information. In Russia, the expansion of internet coverage fueled activism, even in remote areas.

Navalny has also tapped into generational change that divides young people – who rely on new media for information – from their elders, who remain loyal to state television.

The crowd on Jan. 23 reflected this. A survey revealed that protesters’ median age was 31. Women participated equally with men. Over 42% of respondents were first-time protest participants.

Navalny’s team called for renewed protest on Jan. 31, provoking a nationwide government intimidation campaign. Police raided homes and detained protest leaders, including Navalny’s brother. The Federal Investigative Committee posted humiliating apology videos of protesters, who were facing serious charges from the previous week.

The government fined social media corporations and arrested alternative journalists and new media users under expanded censorship laws.

Despite these efforts, nationwide protest continued on Jan. 31 even while police blocked city centers. The actions met with mass arrests and unprecedented police violence.

Russia’s top prosecutor warned that if the protests turned violent, participants would be charged with joining in a mass riot. This suggests a new round of demonstration trials designed to discourage participation.

While the Kremlin’s repressive response risks backlash at the polls and on the streets, Navalny is proving to be an unexpectedly persistent challenge to Putinism. Having survived the assassination attempt, his return to Russia reignited the opposition.

This story incorporates material from a previous article, published Aug. 21, 2020.

Regina Smyth, Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Stuart MacLennan

Coronavirus, Europe

EU Law is only a small part of the picture. Because these export controls relate to the EU’s trade with the rest of the world, restrictions are subject to the rules of the World Trade Organization.

The European Commission has temporarily restricted exports of vaccines produced in the EU following a dispute with AstraZeneca about supplies to member states. It says that it has invested in the development process and is concerned about the way some manufacturers are handling orders. This comes after AstraZeneca told the EU it would not be able to supply as many vaccines as expected to EU countries in the immediate term.

The temporary restrictions ultimately mean that, for the next few months, in many cases, express authorisation will need to be requested from the member state in which a vaccine is manufactured before it can be exported. The decision has been controversial on many fronts but particularly in relation to the UK, which is miles ahead on its vaccine rollout and now potentially faces difficulty getting more doses.

The question must be asked: is this legal?

According to EU law, the European Commission does have the right to subject exports to authorisation in cases where it needs to “prevent a critical situation from arising on account of a shortage of essential products”.

On the basis of the “principle of solidarity”, various low and middle-income countries, as well as certain favoured partners in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, are exempted from this regulation. This is because, in the words of the regulation, “the single market for medical products is closely integrated beyond the boundaries of the union” – meaning supply chains for medicines spread beyond the border of the EU to its neighbours and trading partners too.

This is undoubtedly true, and particularly so in the case of a neighbouring state which was, until very recently, a full member of the EU’s internal market. The United Kingdom’s exclusion from the favoured list, therefore, undermines this purported rationale.

WTO law

EU Law, however, is only a small part of the picture. Because these export controls relate to the EU’s trade with the rest of the world, restrictions are subject to the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

WTO rules prevent the EU from imposing restrictions on the volume of imports and exports, including export controls, on trade in goods between WTO member states such as the UK. There are exceptions, however. The WTO prohibition on export controls does not apply to “export prohibitions or restrictions temporarily applied to prevent or relieve critical shortages of foodstuffs or other products essential to the exporting contracting party”.

The threshold for this exception to apply, however, appears to be quite high. In a case relating to the export of raw materials from China, the WTO ruled that the commodities in question have to be “absolutely indispensable or necessary” and the shortage must be “critical”. While it might seem evident that vaccines are indispensable, the EU’s shortage is no more critical than the rest of the world’s.

Alternatively, another WTO rule permits states to stray from their obligations where it is “necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health”. The question of necessity, however, is highly debatable.

In a 2001 case on importing products containing asbestos, the WTO made it clear that if a WTO member could find an alternative, less restrictive way to achieve its goal, it would be less likely for a trade restriction to be permissible.

That would suggest that it might not be legal for the EU to impose restrictions on vaccine exports because there are alternative actions it could take other than imposing export controls. Europe is a world leader in pharmaceutical production so you could certainly argue that the EU could temporarily change its patent laws to allow other manufacturers to more easily produce vaccine doses. This would almost certainly be far more effective in alleviating Europe’s vaccine shortage than the imposition of export controls.

On a more general level, you could argue that export controls don’t actually solve any problem, given this is a global crisis. If nations beyond the EU’s borders can’t get to grips with COVID-19, it won’t be able to “protect human, animal or plant life or health” within its borders.

A bad idea anyway

The legal situation around the EU’s manoeuvring is evidently complex and it may take a long time to work out whether this temporary restriction is permissible. In the meantime, however, some things are clear.

The European Commission has deals for the supply of vaccine doses with a number of manufacturers. Of these, the only exclusively European product is the German-made CureVac vaccine which, at time of writing, has not yet been authorised for use in the EU. The EU’s supply contracts for authorised vaccines are with Pfizer-BioNTech (American-German) and AstraZeneca (UK-Swedish); and for vaccines pending authorisation with American companies Johnson & Johnson and Moderna. The global nature of vaccine development and supply means that any retaliatory measures could easily offset any advantage gained by restricting exports.

What’s more, Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union states that one of the EU’s key objectives in its relationships with the rest of the world is to “encourage the integration of all countries into the world economy, including through the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade”. For the European Union to be the first major economy to indulge in “vaccine nationalism”, therefore, sets a dangerous example for the rest of the world. It’s debatable whether it’s legal – but it’s certainly not a good idea.

Stuart MacLennan, Associate Professor of Law, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Michael W. Charney

Politics, South Asia

Military control of the government is nothing new for the Burmese people. In one way or another the military has controlled the country since 1962.

The military once again hold the reins of power in Myanmar. Citing constitutional provisions that give the military control in national emergencies, army officers detained government leaders in the early hours of February 1 2021, including state counsellor and popular national leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

An announcement on military television said the move was in response to “fraud” during last year’s general election. A spokesman said power had been handed to the army’s commander-in-chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, who would hold power for one year, after which there would be new elections.

Military control of the government is nothing new for the Burmese people. In one way or another the military has controlled the country since 1962. The post-independence civilian government got off to a bad start in 1948. In July 1947 the charismatic nationalist leader General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was assassinated and leadership was inherited by the less politically agile U Nu.

Civil War broke out in 1949 between the government and an array of different insurgent forces, including communist and ethnic armies. As the civil war waged on and national politics became increasingly divisive, the military came to see itself as the only force that could hold the country together.

General Ne Win, who took power in a military coup, took the country economically and politically down a road informed by a new ideology that mixed together Buddhism and Marxism, known as the “Burmese Way to Socialism”. It brought an end to democratic institutions and civil liberties. Nationalisation of the economy and the forced sales by farmers of produce to the government removed private incentives and ruined the economy, leading to mass protests in the rainy season of 1988.

These displays of pent-up frustration including hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets forced Ne Win to step down. This brought to the fore Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi and a new political force, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Another military takeover followed, overtly to “restore order”, with the promise of new general elections in 1990.

When Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD swept the elections, the military cried foul and arrested her, preventing the NLD from taking power.

Military motivations

During nearly six decades in power, the military has been guided by several motivations. Chief among them are the army’s majoritarian nationalism dominated by the Burmese-speaking, Budhdist, Bamar ethnic group and the fear of any open democracy in which ethnic minorities, roughly 30% or so of the population, might gain too much power.

But the most durable motivation is that keeping control of – or at least maintaining a secure veto – over civilian government is a permanent necessity for the Burmese military. The upper echelons of the military and their families have used their control to enrich themselves, largely at the expense of pre-existing political and social elites. The continued wealth of their families would be threatened by any new government that could punish the corruption, reverse the land transfers and demand transfer of foreign bank accounts whose existence explains in part why most Burmese are so poor.

The military has followed a pattern of controlling the government for as long as it can in one guise and then, when a crisis hits, reinventing the official purpose for its continued control under another guise – and another name. So the Revolutionary Council in 1962 gave way to the Burma Socialist Programme Party government in 1974. This gave way to the State Law and Order Restoration Council in 1988, followed by the State Peace and Development Committee in 1997, which in turn was replaced in 2010 by the Thein Sein interim government.

What had been touted as a true democratic transition when the 2008 constitution was implemented, actually set up a system whereby the military still maintained enough power, through its veto power and control of a 25% block of parliamentary seats, to block any reforms that would lead to real change. This was particularly the case given they had banned NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president.

But this changed in 2016 when the NDL, having won won an earlier round of elections in 2015, created the office of state counsellor for Aung San Suu Kyi. The move allowed to take her place as de facto leader, with Win Myint as the figurehead president.

Strange allies

In 2017, the Myanmar military launched a brutal assault on the Rohingya ethnic group in the province of Rakhine in Western Myanmar. Thanks to social media campaigns on platforms such as like Facebook, the majority Bamar Budhdist population had been whipped up into an anti-Islamic frenzy. Aung San Suu Kyi did not oppose the military’s actions as the military had hoped, which would have lost her a great deal of popular support.

Instead she denied the military’s culpability, joined in the military’s political game of not recognising the Rohingya as a nationalist cause, supported the arrest of journalists who had discovered evidence for the military’s actions and even defended the military, most recently in 2019 in the International Court of Justice. These actions were the reason she has lost the human rights halo she once held in the eyes of the world.

But rather than win the military’s favour, army leaders were perturbed that their actions had not cost her and the NLD Burmese public support. Her continued popularity was demonstrated in November 2020 when the NLD swept the elections. The military’s fear that it was losing the nation, and that Aung San Suu Kyi might use this support to force constitutional changes, override the military’s control and bring their game to an end, meant that something had to be done.

The current military front party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), claimed election fraud – perhaps drawing a lesson from Donald Trump in the United States. On January 28, Myanmar’s election commission rejected these claims and validated the NLD victory.

Planning for the takeover of the government evidently began immediately. I have been told privately that there were two days of Chinese-brokered negotiations between NLD leaders and the military that came to naught when Aung San refused to budge to military demands. The military moved the next morning and Burmese woke up to yet another version of military control.

As so many times after so many coups and “corrective moves” made before, the future of the country is in the military’s hands. Sooner or later military rule in Myanmar will assume yet another guise – with another claim that it marks the beginning of a real transition. But only until it threatens to actually lead to real change. Then Myanmar is likely to see the cycle repeated again. Politics moves slowly in Myanmar – the military likes it that way.

Michael W. Charney, Professor of Asian and Military History, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Bradley Bowman

Security, Americas

The events last month in D.C. demonstrate the National Guard's value and suggest decision makers should think twice before withdrawing U.S. ground forces abroad from key locations at the frontiers of freedom.

The failure to protect the U.S. Capitol from an insurrectionist attack on January 6 is understandably dominating headlines. Leaders and investigators are right to ask how such a horrible breach of security happened—and what must be done to ensure it never happens again. There are also serious concerns about the role of veterans in the attack last month.

But as vital investigations and reforms proceed, Americans should not miss the other lessons on display. Foremost among them is the extraordinary role the U.S. National Guard played in securing the constitutional transfer of power and how properly positioned ground forces can provide powerful deterrence.

Most Americans appreciate that governors lean heavily on their Guard units to deal with both natural and man-made crises in their respective states. Many may also know the Department of Defense could not have completed its missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere over the last two decades without the National Guard's essential contributions.

Until last month, however, many Americans may not have fully appreciated the importance of the Guard here at home.

Following the January 6 attack, Americans should consider the role the National Guard played, once it was called upon, in standing between insurrectionists and our Constitution.

It is worth remembering that members of the armed forces swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

For this commitment and the sacrifices associated with military life, members of the National Guard deserve our respect and admiration.

At the same time, members of the military, including the Guard, are not super-humans. They are us. They come from every county in our country. Their backgrounds are diverse, and they struggle with the same challenges and maladies as those who do not serve in uniform.

That is what makes what transpired in Washington after January 6 so impressive.

Once assistance from the National Guard was finally requested, the D.C. Guard arrived at the Capitol Hill complex within hours, followed quickly thereafter by units from Maryland and Virginia. Guard units from other states followed, ultimately creating a force of 25,671 troops.

That is essentially a force the size of an Army corps. To put that number in perspective, the United States currently has fewer than 6,000 service members in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—combined.

In addition to deployments in Washington, governors used an additional 7,102 activated Guard members to protect 26 state capitals.

All 54 state and territory governors mobilized their National Guards in support of state or national requirements.

These mobilizations included Army and Air Guard members, for example, from military police, engineer, infantry, transportation, explosive ordnance disposal, chemical, and civil support units.

Out of the 25,671 troops who deployed to D.C., the Pentagon, as a precaution, proactively pulled 12 Guard members out of duty—12 out of 25,671.

Our nation was tested, and members of the National Guard honored their oaths, maintained the peace, and enabled the constitutional transfer of power.

But it is not surprising to those who understand the American military’s deep institutional commitment to country and Constitution.

The coup this week in Burma demonstrates what can happen when a military puts power over democratic principles. 

Of course, that is not to say that there are no problems within the ranks of the American military. But as we seek to address those problems, we should take a moment to appreciate the Guard’s performance in defending the seat of our democracy and the constitutional transfer of power.

And what was the result of that Guard deployment in Washington, DC.?  With only a few exceptions, the insurrectionists did not even show up in D.C. once the National Guard arrived.

That brings us to the second lesson on display—the role of ground forces in deterrence.

Our nation is currently engaged in a debate about what military forces the United States must deploy abroad to secure our homeland and our interests. Within that discussion, there is also a lively policy debate—with important budgetary implications—regarding the role of the U.S. Army relative to the other services.

America certainly needs a larger Navy and Air Force. But the role of the U.S. Army remains vital in Europe, the Middle East, and yes, in the Indo-Pacific.

If America comes to blows with China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, we will certainly need modernized air and naval forces with sufficient capabilities and capacities. But it would be better if those conflicts never happen in the first place.

The Guard's role last month in D.C. vividly demonstrates the potentially decisive deterrent value of American ground forces when properly equipped, trained, and positioned.

While there is certainly a difference between armed domestic violent extremists and nation-state adversaries abroad, Americans have seen the same deterrent benefits of forward-positioned forces abroad. In 1997, a high-ranking North Korean defector stated that U.S. military forces in South Korea were the only thing deterring North Korean aggression.

In Europe, Moscow has invaded non-NATO countries such as Ukraine and Georgia in recent years. But after more than seven decades, the Kremlin has never invaded a NATO member country. The presence of joint U.S. combat forces, including ground forces, in Europe, makes clear to Moscow that America and its NATO allies have the military capability to defend against an attack.

The events last month in D.C. demonstrate the National Guard's value and suggest decision makers should think twice before withdrawing U.S. ground forces abroad from key locations at the frontiers of freedom.

Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

This article first appeared on RealClearDefense.

Image: Reuters

Alexander Kurov

economy, The Americas

Some have portrayed GameStop as a David vs. Goliath story. According to that narrative, the big guys on Wall Street have been getting rich gambling on the stock market for years. What’s the problem when the little guy gets a chance?

Shares of GameStop and other companies or assets that shot up in value in recent weeks are now dropping like stones. While I feel sorry for the many investors who will likely lose a lot of money, the stocks’ return to Earth is actually a good thing – if you want to avoid financial meltdown to the long list of crises the U.S. is facing.

The reason has to do with what financial markets are – and what they are not – as well as what happens when prices of stocks and other securities become untethered from the fundamental value of the assets they’re meant to represent.

As a finance professor who does research on how markets respond to new information, I believe it is important to maintain a close link between security prices and fundamentals. When that stops happening, a market collapse may be not far behind.

Capital markets aren’t casinos

Some have portrayed GameStop as a David vs. Goliath story. According to that narrative, the big guys on Wall Street have been getting rich gambling on the stock market for years. What’s the problem when the little guy gets a chance?

The first thing to keep in mind is that markets aren’t a big casino, as some seem to believe. Their core purpose is to efficiently connect investors with companies and other organizations that will make the most productive use of their cash.

Accurate market prices, meant to reflect a company’s expected profits and overall risk level, provide an important signal to investors whether they should hand over their money and what they should get in return. Companies like Apple and Amazon simply would not exist as we know them today without access to capital markets.

The more jaundiced view of markets focuses on episodes when markets seemingly go crazy and on the speculative gambling behavior of some traders, such as hedge funds. The GameStop saga feeds into this storyline.

But GameStop also illustrates what happens when stock prices don’t reflect reality.

The GameStop bubble

GameStop fundamentals are, to put it mildly, lackluster.

The company is a brick-and-mortar chain of video game stores. Most video game sales now take place as digital downloads. GameStop has been slow to adapt to this new reality. Its revenue peaked in 2012 at US$9.55 billion and had dropped by a third as of 2019. It hasn’t earned a profit since 2017. Put simply, it is a money-losing company in a competitive and quickly changing industry.

The recent speculative frenzy, however, increased the GameStop stock price from under $20 in early January to as high as $483 in a little over two weeks, driven by retail investors on Reddit who coordinated their buying to harm hedge funds – costing the professionals billions of dollars.

It is clearly a speculative price bubble and has some characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. Many small investors who “get on the train” late and buy at the inflated prices – especially those attracted by the extreme price moves and media coverage – will be left holding the bag.

And sooner or later, the stock price will likely come back to Earth to a level that can be supported by the fundamentals of the company. Before midday on Feb. 4, shares were trading near $70 for the first time since Jan. 25.

The problems begin when that doesn’t happen until too late.

Bubbles are made to pop

Financial markets are made up of people. People are imperfect, and so are markets. This means market prices are not always “right” – and it’s often hard to know what the “right” price is.

That is true when it comes to the price bubbles in individual stocks like GameStop. But it’s also true on a much bigger scale, when it comes to a market as a whole.

Price bubbles and crashes are good for neither Wall Street nor Main Street. When the dot-com bubble popped in 2000 – after prices of dozens of tech stocks soared exponentially in the late 1990s – an economic recession followed soon after. The bursting of a housing bubble in 2008 triggered a global financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Too much momentum

So markets fail sometimes, and we need sensible regulation and enforcement to make such failures less likely.

Taken in isolation, the GameStop craze is unlikely to trigger a disruption to the overall stock market, especially if its price continues to fall more in line with the company’s fundamental value. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. Nor was GameStop the first sign of problems.

In recent days, Reddit users have also driven up the prices of silver and companies such as BlackBerry and movie theater giant AMC Entertainment. Popular trading apps like Robinhood have made trading easy, fun and basically free.

The share price of Tesla, for example, skyrocketed 720% last year, in large part when investors bought the stock because it was already rising. This is called momentum investing, a trading strategy in which investors buy securities because they are going up – selling them only when they think the price has peaked.

If this continues, it will likely lead to more financial bubbles and crashes that could make it harder for companies to raise capital, posing a threat to the already limping U.S. economic recovery. Even if the worst doesn’t happen, large price movements and allegations of price manipulation could hurt public confidence in financial markets, which would make people more reluctant to invest in retirement and other programs.

Warren Buffett once said about stock market behavior: “The light can at any time go from green to red without pausing at yellow.”

What he meant was that markets can turn on a dime and plunge. He saw these moments as opportunities to find deals in the market, but for most people they result in panic, heavy losses and economic consequences like mass unemployment – as we saw in 1929, 2000 and 2008.

There’s no particular reason it won’t happen again.

Alexander Kurov, Professor of Finance and Fred T. Tattersall Research Chair in Finance, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

The Navy was caught off guard, but it still managed to win.

Key point: Nothing about this fight went as planned, with the Americans falling into a trap. However, America had six escort carriers in this battle and Imperial Japan had none.

In the pre-dawn glow of October 25, 1944, four tubby TBF Avenger torpedo bombers took off on a routine patrol from the USS St. Lo. She was one of sixteen small escorts carriers in Taskforce 74.4 steaming sixty miles east of Samar island in the Leyte Gulf—protecting the invasion fleet which had landed the 6th Army on Leyte Island to liberate the Philippines after three brutal years of Japanese occupation.

Suddenly at 6:37, Avenger pilots William Brooks reported a nightmarish sight: a powerful Japanese fleet—four battleships, eight cruisers, and ten destroyers—only twenty miles to the west, steaming directly towards the lightly defended carriers.

Twenty-two minutes later, the gigantic 18.1” guns of the battleship Yamato opened fire from over nineteen miles away. The 3,300-pound shells straddled the carrier White Plains, a near miss buckling her hull and tripping her circuit breakers. Shells from the other battleships loaded with green, pink and red dye (to assist in ranging) rained down amongst the unarmored flat-tops.

For only the second time in history, enemy battleships had managed to close within gun-range of aircraft carriers. But in the Battle of Samar, nothing went as expected for either side.

Halsey’s Fatal Mistake

In the four-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Imperial Japanese Navy deployed most of its remaining capital ships to counterattack the landing in the Philippines—resulting in the largest naval battle in history in terms of sheer tonnage.

The Japanese planned to lure American surface combatants into chasing the sacrificial Northern force, composed of largely empty aircraft carriers—leaving the Central and Southern forces to ravage an unguarded Leyte beachhead.

Admiral Takeo Kurita’s Central Force included the two largest battleships ever built, the 65,000-ton Yamato and Musashi. However, on October 23, U.S. submarines detected the force and sank two cruisers, including Kurita’s flagship. Then, air strikes from U.S. fleet carriers sank the Musashi on October 24. A shaken Kurita pulled his bloodied fleet out of range.

Assuming the Center Force was dealt with, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey reassigned the fast battleships of Task Force 34 covering the beachhead to assist his 7th Fleet in crushing the Japanese Southern Force in the Battle of Surigao Straits on the night October 24-25.

But Halsey had gambled recklessly. Kurita doubled the Central Force back through the San Bernardino Strait into Leyte Gulf, intending for his capital ships to fall upon the virtually defenseless invasion transports like wolves amongst sheep.

Taffy 3’s Last Stand

All that stood in Kurita’s way was Task Force 77.4, which was divided into three squadrons named Taffy 1 through 3.

Taffy 3 under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague was closest to Kurita’s fleet. It consisted of six 7,800-ton Casablanca-class escort carriers mass-produced to defend convoys from aircraft and submarines, freeing larger fleet carriers for heavier combat duties. The “jeep carriers” were crewed by over 900 personnel, typically carried 28 aircraft, and could only attain 20 knots (23 mph) at full steam compared to the 30-33 knots of fleet carriers.

Screening the carriers were three 2,000-ton Fletcher-class destroyers and four smaller 1,370-ton Destroyer Escorts—anti-submarine frigates in modern parlance. Their radar-guided 5” guns were fast-firing and accurate, but lacked the range and penetration to duel cruiser and battleships. Their short-range torpedoes, however, could pose a threat.

Sprague immediately appreciated Taffy 3’s peril: the escort carriers were too slow to outrun the Japanese capital ships, and even if they did escape, that would leave the beachhead exposed. His superior, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, sent multiple requests for reinforcements to Halsey without reply. Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet, chimed in “Where is Task Force 34?”

Intentionally or by coincidence, that message ended with the code hash “The world wonders.” The seeming rebuke so incensed Halsey he did not dispatch Task Force 34 until 11:15 AM, hours too late.

To buy time for his pokey carriers to escape, Sprague had his destroyers lay a thick smoke screen (photo here) while the carriers belted eastward into a sea squall, temporarily obscuring his ships from Japanese gunners.

Meanwhile, every available plane was scrambled to harry the Japanese battle force. Combined, Task Force 74.4’s carriers mustered roughly 250 FM-2 Wildcat fighters and 190 Avenger TBM torpedo bombers. However, these were loaded with high-explosive bombs, depth charges and rockets for attacking ground targets and submarines, not anti-ship torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs.

Nonetheless, the swarming warbirds didn’t hesitate to lob anti-submarine depth charges, strafe armored decks with machineguns, and even buzz overhead with depleted weapons in an effort to draw fire away from the vulnerable escort carriers, before landing at Tacloban on Leyte to reload and refuel.

Kurita, meanwhile, released his ships with a “general attack” order to chase down the carriers —a decision which caused the Japanese formations to blunder into each other’s path.

However, Taffy 3’s eastward course was drawing it further away from hoped-for reinforcements. At 7:30, Sprague reluctantly ordered a hard turn to the south. To prevent Kurita’s ships from heading him off, he instructed the escorts to launch torpedo attacks.

Popping in and out of concealing smoke screens, the destroyers Hoel, Hermann and Johnston, and the destroyer escorts pressed the attack against ships many times their size. The self-sacrificing “charge of the tin-can sailors” is described in a companion article.

The destroyer’s sacrifice bought time, but by 8:30 Japanese cruisers had closed within ten miles of Taffy 3’s trailing ships. The closest carrier, Gambier Bay, was struck by 8” shells from the heavy cruiser Chikuma, then battered by Yamato’s huge turrets. Her engines crippled, the carrier was consumed by fire and capsized around 9 AM—the only U.S. carrier sunk by naval gunfire in combat.

The Casablanca-class carriers were only armed with a single 5” gun in a tail “stinger.” This proved perfectly situated to exchange fire with cruisers and destroyer hot on their stern. Though early carriers often carried heavier gun armaments, Taffy 3’s “pea-shooter”-armed flat-tops of were the only to ever engage enemy surface combatants in a gun duel.

The Kalinin Bay was struck by at least fifteen 8” and 14” shells—several of which penetrated clean through her unarmored hull without detonating. In reply, her 5” battery hit two pursuing cruisers and a destroyer. After missing with shellfire, Japanese destroyers launched a volley of torpedoes, but the Kalinin Bay and an Avenger gunned down three “tin fish” seconds before impact.

St. Lo too managed to score three hits on the charging cruisers while sustaining minor damage in return. 5” shells from the White Plains, assumed to have been disabled early in the battle, detonated a Long Lance torpedo on the deck of heavy cruiser Chokai, knocking out her rudder and engines.

By then, Avengers re-loaded with torpedoes and bombs began swooping back into the fight. One dropped a 500-pound bomb that exploded Chokai’s engine room, setting the cruiser ablaze. She was scuttled shortly afterward.

Aerial bombs also detonated a Long Lance on the deck of the cruiser Suzuya, after she had already lost her rudder to torpedoes. A torpedo from another Avenger slammed into the Chikuma, disabling her port screw and rudder. The crippled cruiser was then struck twice more. Both ships were eventually abandoned.

Even the mighty Yamato was forced to break formation to evade incoming torpedoes. Finally, at 9:20, Kurita signaled to begin withdrawing through the San Bernardino Strait. He misidentified the light ships of Taffy 3 to be full-size fleet carriers and cruisers and feared the 3rd Fleet would arrive momentarily.

Kamikaze Debut

Taffy 3’s ordeal was not yet over. At 10:47 land-based Zero fighters laden with 550-pound bombs came barreling towards the escort carriers in the first Kamikaze strike ever attempted. Their leader, 23-year-old Lt. Yukio Seki, had expressed his disapproval of “bleak” Kamikazi tactics to a journalist but insisted he would follow orders.

The carriers’ 40-millimeter flak guns stitched the sky with black puffs of smoke, destroying three Zeroes before they could impact. But Seki smashed his A6M2 into the deck of St. Lo. At first, the carrier seemed likely to weather the new hole in her flight deck but an internal explosion in her hangar full of fuel and bombs tore the ship open, sending her aircraft elevator spinning a thousand feet into the sky (pictured here).

Kalinin Bay was also struck by two kamikazes, losing her smokestack and the port-side flight deck. Three other carriers sustained minor damage.

Consumed by gasoline fires and secondary explosions, the St. Lo slipped under the waves thirty minutes later, her surviving crew having abandoned ship.

Taffy 3’s officers and seamen had skillfully strung along Kurita’s faster and more heavily armed ships on a wild goose chase. The escort carriers’ swarming airplanes were more effective at range than the Yamato’s 18” guns, and even the carriers’ “pea-shooters” gave a surprisingly good account of themselves.

But that victory was paid for with extraordinary acts of sacrifice, with two escort carriers, two destroyers and destroyer escort consigned to the deep waters of the Philippine Trench. 1,583 Americans perished, mostly on the destroyers—five times more casualties than incurred in the Battle of Midway. Around 2,000 survivors waited two days for rescue, many succumbing to shark attacks and exposure.

Kurita’s fleet, meanwhile, limped home, less three heavy cruisers. He could have pressed his attack and likely sunk more ships and ravaged the beachhead, but lingering in the Leyte Gulf would likely have resulted in his force’s destruction. The IJN did not attempt any major offensive operations again for the remainder of the war.

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

Image: Wikimedia

Steve Cimbala, Adam Lowther

Security, The Americas

Although the arms control community is focused on the opportunity to cut the nuclear deterrent, the President has a responsibility to listen, as well, to the expert advice of his uniformed military advisors who must plan for, operate, and deploy nuclear and conventional forces.

President-elect Joe Biden recently indicated that he would review the nation’s nuclear deterrence strategy and weapons modernization program, focusing on reducing their role in national strategy. The review will also look to reduce funding for nuclear modernization. Depending on the administration's actions, there is a real risk of compromising the credibility of American deterrence when both China and Russia see the United States as a weakened great power. 

Although the arms control community is focused on the opportunity to cut the nuclear deterrent, the President has a responsibility to listen, as well, to the expert advice of his uniformed military advisors who must plan for, operate, and deploy nuclear and conventional forces.

Undoubtedly, pressure exists within the Democratic party to do anything that seems anti-Trump. Tossing out the Trump administration’s nuclear modernization program would certainly fit that bill, but the Trump plan mostly followed the Obama script in calling for preserving all three legs of the strategic nuclear triad. 

Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review added a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, but experts suspected that this was a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Russia. The Obama and Trump administrations also favored replacing aging launch systems with new generations of SLBMs and heavy bombers. Some within the Obama administration favored replacing the 1970s-era Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and others preferred upgrading the existing platforms.   

In our judgment, until the future prospects for nuclear arms control are clearer, the prudent course for the Biden administration would be to maintain all three legs of the strategic nuclear triad and to replace aging systems with modern technology. There is broad support in Congress for this approach.

In passing its version of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in December 2020, Congress approved funding for the Columbia class strategic submarines ($4.46 billion); the B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber ($2.8 billion); the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) to replace Minuteman III ICBMs ($1.51 billion); the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO) nuclear cruise missile for the Air Force ($444 million); and additional modernization for the existing Trident II SLBM ($1.2 billion).  In addition, Congress also approved an expenditure of about $2.7 billion for nuclear warhead modernization.

Arms control advocates contend that the US can save money and contribute to arms control by downsizing its strategic nuclear triad to a “dyad" of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bombers. Opponents of ICBM modernization argue that strategic land-based missiles are especially destabilizing because they are vulnerable to first strikes and create unnecessary pressure for a preemptive launch during a crisis. This assertion is untrue and inconsistent with what we know about how the United States operates its ICBM force.

While deriding ICBMs as a Cold War relic, critics never address the fact that America’s adversaries (China and Russia) are focused on the modernization of their own ICBM forces. If ICBMs are relics of a bygone era, why are the Chinese and Russians spending the bulk of their modernization effort on them?

The opponents of ICBM modernization fail to appreciate that the synergy of the American nuclear triad is the key to its survivability and resilience. Each leg contributes to an important set of attributes. In short, ICBMs are responsive. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are survivable—so long as quantum computing does not eliminate the opacity of oceans. Bombers give an adversary time to contemplate nuclear destruction, encouraging better choices, and support crisis management. Each of these attributes is critical to deterrence stability.

As to the alleged vulnerability of land-based missiles, those very “vulnerabilities” are part of the deterrence calculous that any adversary must account for when considering how aggressive they should act toward the United States. The next generation of ICBMs need not necessarily be based only in silos. Some, or all, might be deployed in mobile platforms on roads or trains, thus increasing their survivability and our ability to wait.

Past efforts to explore these options for ICBMs were faced with opposition in US domestic politics on the grounds of cost and conservation.  On the other hand, if mobility is infeasible, silo-based ICBMs might be better protected by companion small radars and ballistic missile defenses. Reducing an adversary’s probability of killing an American ICBM, even by a small amount, greatly increases the number of weapons required to strike the United States—making the decision even tougher.   

Old debates about nuclear weapons are fast proving antiquated as China is adding an unprecedented threat into the bilateral face-off that was once the purview of Russia and the United States. Hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, robotics, and other technological developments are also dramatically changing the debate. The entire choreography of US nuclear modernization and arms control planning will have to change to address these challenges. 

The canonical nuclear first strike scenario of the Cold War is outdated by advances in military technology and new thinking about strategy. New strike systems, including hypersonic conventional and nuclear weapons, will challenge existing assumptions about stability. Space also looms large as the new "high ground" not only for information warfare but also for kinetic attack.  Future defense planners must assume that a “nuclear first strike” will be preceded by knockout blows against early warning and command and control systems, including those based in space and terrestrial.

Thus, efforts to kill a leg of the triad appear premature and mistaken. The United States needs every tool in its kit for an uncertain future.

Given the uncertainty we face, there are useful steps the Biden administration can take to support the furtherance of peace.  

Useful Efforts

The New START treaty with Russia is set to expire in February 2021. Coordinating treaty-consistent limits on numbers of deployed and other nuclear weapons might lead to reduced expenditures for nuclear modernization, but only if the administration can get the Russians on board.

Extension of the New START agreement should not be controversial. Both countries can modernize their nuclear arsenals, replacing aging systems with new and more reliable systems—all without increasing the number of deployed and nondeployed launchers and weapons. During the notional five-year extension of New START, the door is open for a more extensive agreement to limit strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons of shorter ranges. 

If President Biden is successful in seeing New START renewed, Moscow and Washington could also discuss measures to improve transparency in bilateral military-to-military forums, including de-escalation protocols for avoiding inadvertent clashes between American and Russian forces and their proxies. The United States and Russia could also address the consequences of the expiration of the INF Treaty for strategic stability.

An arms race in conventional weapons of intermediate range (500-5,500km) in either Europe or Asia could raise the likelihood of a large scale conventional war with the potential for nuclear escalation. Working to reduce those prospects is well worth the effort and would serve the prospects of peace far more successfully than eliminating ICBMs.

The United States is facing an unprecedented challenge on two fronts (Russia and China). This challenge is far more dangerous than the Soviet menace of the twentieth century. Reducing the nation's nuclear arsenal's size and capability will not signal China and Russia that we mean no harm. It will signal weakness and weakness is provocative.

American resolve should never be a point of contention. Both China and Russia possess national cultures that respect strength. Thus, eliminating the American ICBM force will have the exact opposite effect as suggested by detractors. They are well worth the security and stability they provide.

This article was first published by Real Clear Defense.

Image: Reuters

Kyle Mizokami

History, Europe

America's Iowa-class battleship would likely wipe out the Bismarck.

Key point: America's battleships were large and powerful. But they also had radar-guided guns.

Despite the vast scope of the Second World War, the navies of the United States and Nazi Germany fought few, if any, direct surface engagements. By the time of America’s entry into the war the Royal Navy had already sunk or neutralized the lion’s share of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, with only Hitler’s U-boats remaining a substantial German threat.

But what if the UK’s Royal Navy hadn’t been as successful as it was, and the U.S. was forced to hunt down the German Navy’s major surface combatants? What if the Iowa-class fast battleships had been sortied into the Atlantic to square off against their counterparts, the Bismarck-class battleships?

The Bismarck-class battleships were the largest surface ships built by Germany before and during the Second World War. Germany had been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles to build warships over 10,000 tons, but the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935 implicitly allowed them—though the German Navy was not to exceed thirty five percent the size of the Royal Navy.

With that restriction out of the way, Germany immediately began construction on the Bismarck-class battleships. Two ships, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, were planned. The ships were 821 feet long and displaced up to 50,000 tons fully loaded. Twelve high-pressure boilers powered three turbines, giving the ship a top speed of 30.1 knots. Three FuMo-23 search radars could detect surface targets at more than thirteen miles.

The Bismarck class had eight fifteen-inch guns, each capable of hurling an armor piercing, capped round up to 21.75 miles. The 1,764-pound killer shell traveled at 2,960 feet per second out the bore, faster than the bullet of a high-powered rifle. At 11 miles, it could penetrate 16.5 inches of armor, or roughly to the horizon at sea level, although it could theoretically hit targets much further.

Both battleships were heavily protected, with 12.5 inches of steel at the main belt, 8.7 inch armored bulkheads, and 14.1 inches of armor on the main gun turrets. The eight guns were installed in four turrets of two guns each. This spread the battleship’s main armament out among more protected turrets, increasing their survivability in a gunfight.

Overall, the Bismarck class was an impressive combination of firepower, speed, and protection.

The Iowa-class battleships were the most powerful battleships built for the U.S. Navy. Four ships: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin were built. Each was approximately 861 feet long and weighed 52,000 tons. Eight water boilers connected to General Electric steam turbines propelled the battleships along at a speedy 32.5-knot maximum speed.

Iowa had nine sixteen-inch guns. Each Mark 7 gun could launch a 2,700 pound armor piercing shell 11.36 miles to penetrate 20 inches of steel plate—and even farther to a lesser penetration. In addition to search radar, the Iowas had Mk 13 fire control radars, allowing them to engage targets at extreme ranges and at night. The Mk 13 had a theoretical range out to 45 miles, and could even spot where the Iowa’s errant rounds landed, making aiming corrections much easier.

The Iowas too were heavily armored, with 12.1 inches at the main belt, 11.3-inch bulkheads, and an amazing 19.7 inches of armor on the main turrets. The ship’s vital combat information center and ammunition magazines were buried deep in their armored hulls.

Now, on to the battle. It’s 1942, and the new American battleship Iowa has been rushed into service to hunt the Bismarck. Bismarck, her sister ship Tirpitz, and other large German combatants have made the Atlantic too dangerous to send convoys across, something the United Kingdom desperately needs.

A fast battleship designed to operate alongside aircraft carriers, Iowa can cover a lot of ocean. Operating alone, she detects Bismarck—also operating alone. The duel is on.

Despite the Bismarck’s well-trained crew, good design and powerful weapons, Iowa has one technological innovation the German battlewagon doesn’t: radar-directed main guns. Iowa can fire much more accurately at longer distance targets. This allows Iowa to “out-stick” the Bismarck, which must close to within visual range for its fire control systems and procedures to work effectively. While Bismarck would avoid a nighttime duel, Iowa would welcome it—and its 2.5-knot advantage in speed means it can force a night battle if it wants to, chasing Bismarck down before sunrise.

Iowa’s combination of the Mk 13 fire control radar and Mk 7 shells means it can fire first, hit first, and hurt first. While Bismarck’s armor protection and distributed firepower could help ensure it lasts long enough above the waves to damage Iowa, it’s unlikely could save itself, damaging the American battleship enough to make it break off the attack.

Iowa wins.

The larger context of the battle—the U.S. Navy being forced to take on the German Navy—would have had serious repercussions for the Pacific theater. Germany was, after all, considered the primary threat, with Japan second and Italy third. A more powerful German Navy (or weaker Royal Navy) would have had second order consequences for the Pacific, delaying the Solomons campaign, including the invasion of Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Coral Sea, and even the Battle of Midway.

U.S. Navy planners in the Pacific, still overestimating the value of battleships, could have been less daring in their absence and fought a holding action until late 1942 or 1943. Had things been different we might think of America’s initial war against the Axis as taking place in the Atlantic and not the Pacific, the Marines hitting the beach in Iceland and not Guadalcanal, and the cataclysmic battle between the battleships Bismarck and Iowa.

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 posted due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

The new generation of hardware is coming.

Here's What You Need to Remember: To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

The U.S. Army is at a crossroads as the Pentagon is reorienting itself to fight a capable great power opponent after nearly two decades focused on counter-insurgency conflicts.

Russia poses a traditional land-power challenge for the U.S. Army with its large mechanized formations threatening the Baltics, as well as formidable long-range ballistic missiles, artillery and surface-to-air missiles.

By contrast, a hypothetical conflict with China would focus on control of the sea and airspace over the Pacific Ocean. To remain relevant, the Army would need to deploy long-range anti-ship-capable missiles and helicopters to remote islands, allied nations like Japan and South Korea and even onto the decks of U.S. Navy ships.

Almost all the Army’s major land warfare systems entered service in the 1980s or earlier. Five ambitious programs to replace aging armored vehicles, artillery and helicopters consumed $30 billion only to fail spectacularly.

Thus, in 2017 the Army formed eight cross-functional teams led by brigadier generals to rapidly cost-efficiently develop a new generation of hardware. These far-reaching modernization initiatives are collectively called “the Big Six.”

1. Long-Range Precision Fire (Artillery)

The U.S. Army was famed for its lavish, rapid and accurate use of artillery support during World War II. However, in recent conflicts, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on air strikes using precision-weapons over artillery barrages.

But on-call air support would be far from given when facing a peer enemy possessing formidable air defenses. In fact, long-range missile and artillery strikes might be needed to destroy air defenses, “kicking in the door” for air power.

Thus the Army’s top priority is “Long Range Precision Fire.” a half dozen projects seeking to enable accurate ground-launched strikes against targets dozens or hundreds of miles away.

To begin with, the Army seeks to further upgrades its tank-like 1960s-era M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers with long-barreled Extend Range Cannon boosting regular attack range to forty-three miles, and possibly even ram-jet -assisted shells extending range to eighty-one miles.

The artillery branch’s other mainstay, the truck-based M270 and smaller M142 Multiple Rocket Launcher Systems, will receive extended-range rockets doubling reach to ninety-three miles. Moreover, their capability to launch a single large, 180-mile range ATACMS tactical missile will be replaced with two smaller Precision Strike Missiles with a range of 310 miles that can hit moving targets (ships).

Following the killing of the INF treaty, the Army furthermore is developing two even longer-reaching weapons: a hypersonic missile with a range of 1,499 miles, which could prove extremely difficult to defend against and boast deadly anti-ship capabilities, and a gigantic Long Range Strategic Cannon supposedly boasting a range of one thousand miles.

2. Next Generation Combat Vehicle (Armor)

The Army’s second priority is to replace its increasingly vulnerable and underpowered M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. In 2018, the Army decided to proceed with improving the Bradley’s power train but canceling replacement of its turret.

Instead it seeks an Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) capable of carrying larger squads, a thirty- to fifty-millimeter automatic cannon (the Bradley has a twenty-five-millimeter gun), and new missiles and active protection systems. Current competitors include the Raytheon/Rheinmetall Lynx, the General Dynamics Griffon III and the BAE CV-90 Mark IV.

The separate Mobile Protected Firepower program seeks a fast and air-transportable light tank. Currently, a dozen 105-millimter gun-equipped M8 Bufords with scalable armor are set to compete versus Griffin II tanks armed with 120-millimeter guns.

The Army has also begun procuring turretless Bradleys to serve as Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, replacing old M113 APCs in support roles such as combat engineering, utility transport, ambulance duty, command post, and mortar carrying. And some of its wheeled Stryker APCS are receiving “Dragoon” turrets with thirty-millimeter cannons and Javelin anti-tank missiles to give the lighter vehicles a fighting chance versus enemy mechanized forces.

The Army is also installing Trophy and Iron Fist Active Protection Systems on Abrams and Bradley tanks. These detect incoming missiles and jam or shoot them down before impact. As long-range anti-tank missiles have destroyed hundreds of tanks in Middle Eastern wars, including Saudi-operated Abrams, APS could significantly improve survivability.

3. Future Vertical Lift (Aviation)

Helicopters are essential for battlefield and operational mobility—however they are also expensive, relatively slow (150–200 miles per hour), short-ranged and vulnerable to enemy fire.

The Army is looking ahead to a radical new “Future Vertical Lift” system to eventually replace its over two thousand Blackhawk medium transport helicopters and its heavily armed and armored Apache gunships.

Two innovative flying prototypes are competing. The Bell V-280 Valor is a tilt-rotor aircraft: it can rotate its engines from a helicopter to an airplane-like configuration. The likely more complex and expensive Valor would boast greater speed (320 miles per hour) and range.

The Sikorsky SB-1 Defiant is a compound helicopters with two counter-rotating blades atop each other and pusher rotor. The Defiant likely is better at helicopter-style low-speed maneuvers—at the expense of speed and fuel efficiency.

The Army also retired its last OH-58 scout helicopters in 2015, only to discover that Apache gunships were a poor replacement. As a result, the Army is searching for an agile scout helicopter separately from FVL.

4. Network

The Army would like a brand-new unified, field-deployable Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) network tying together its land-warfare systems.

The last attempt to field such a network, called WIN-T, was cancelled after $6 billion in spending due to its vulnerability to electronic-and cyberwarfare. In 2014, the Army observed how Russia forces extensively jammed, hacked and geo-located Ukrainian command-and-control nodes—and even targeted them with lethal attacks.

The Army intends to buy as much of the software off-the-shelf as possible to avoid spending years and dollars building a new system from the ground up. The new network needs to be standardized yet modular, transportable, and cybersecure.

A separate “Assured Position Navigation & Timing” team is developing redundant navigational aids so that ground forces smoothly function under GPS-denied circumstances, particularly by using ground or air-deployed “pseudo-satellites.”

5. Air & Missile Defense

In the last half-century, air supremacy courtesy of the U.S. Air Force has reduced the demands on the Army’s ground-based air defenses, which have been heavily downsized. However, new threats posed by swarming drone attacks and proliferating cruise and ballistic missiles have made re-building the air defense branch a huge priority.

The Army is currently focusing on “Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense”—vehicles accompanying frontline troops to shoot down low-altitude threats. The Army plans to field 8 x 8 Strykers armed with Stinger and Hellfire missiles, anti-drone jammers and thirty-millimeter cannons. It’s also interim procuring Israeli Iron Dome missile systems, the munitions from which may eventually be adapted to Multi-Mission Launcher.

The Army is also developing a vehicle-mounted 100-KW laser that could be used to cost-efficiently burn drones out of the sky.

For longer-range air defense, rather than develop new missiles, the Army is spending billions to improve its existing Patriot and THAADS systems by tying together their dispersed radars and fire-control systems into an Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) network.

6. Soldier Lethality

Close-combat infantrymen account for only 4 percent of the army’s personnel but have suffered 90 percent of the casualties in conflicts since 2001. The “Soldier Lethality” initiative is divided in two teams.

One focuses on improving “human” factors using more realistic training simulators, and retaining experienced NCOs and officers through better perks and incentives.

The other team plans to procure “Next Generation” assault rifles and light machine guns—likely using the 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor round, which is deemed to have superior penetrating power versus body armor. The Army also is devising an infantry “Head’s Up Display” with integrated (and improved) night-vision, tactical data and targeting crosshairs.

Implementation

The Army is killing or curtailing 186 older programs and procurements, including down-sizing CH-47F heavy transport helicopters and JLTV Humm-Vee replacement orders, to ensure the Big Six’s 31 initiatives receive a targeted $33 billion in funding through 2024.

To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

Time will tell whether the Army’s new, seemingly more agile approach will dodge the bullets that have taken down prior modernization efforts.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense

Michael Peck

History, Europe

Here is one of the more interesting Cold War stories.

Key point: Not every spy missions goes right and drones can do the wrong thing. This is the tale of a spy plane that flew itself straight into enemy hands.

In November 1969, the U.S. Air Force sent Russia an early Christmas gift.

It was a sleek flying machine that bore an uncanny resemblance to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The American generosity was purely unintentional. The aircraft was actually a cutting-edge drone dispatched on a mission to photograph Communist Chinese nuclear sites. And the drone did what it was supposed to until it failed to turn around, and kept on going north into Siberia before crashing.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Russia paid the skilled aircraft designers at Lockheed the highest compliment: they tried to copy their work.

The drone in question was the D-21. With its graceful delta wings, the D-21 resembled a miniature SR-71, which was no coincidence given that they were products of Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works, the originator of many an amazing secret project. In fact, the D-21 was originally designed to be mounted and launched from the tail of an SR-71, itself famous for its Mach 3 speed and its 85,000-feet maximum altitude.

The D-21 was conceived in the mid-1960s as a solution to the problem of spying on the Soviet Union. Soviet surface-to-air missiles, like the one that downed a U-2 over Russia in 1960, were making photo missions over Communist territory more hazardous. The SR-71 could fly high and fast enough to be safe, but why risk a manned aircraft and its pilot when a robot could do the job?

The idea was for the D-21 to be mounted atop an M-21, a specially modified two-seat SR-71, according to documents recently declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office. After completing its mission, the drone would eject its film canister, which would be snatched in mid-air by a C-130 transport. But launch problems, including an accident that crashed the launch M-21 and killed one crewman, saw the B-52H as the new launch vehicle for the improved D-21B.

Unfortunately, the project didn’t work out as planned. There were four D-21B flights, carried by B-52s launched from Guam. Their target was Communist China, specifically China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nor. All of them failed. Out of the last three, mid-air recovery failed to recover film canisters from two of them, which crashed into the Pacific on the flight out, while one drone crashed in China.

It is the fate of the first mission, in November 1969, that’s interesting. The D-21B crossed into China – and kept going into the Soviet Union, where it crashed.

“This proved to be of great interest to the Soviet aircraft industry, as it was a fairly compact machine equipped with up-to-date reconnaissance equipment and designed for prolonged reconnaissance flights at high supersonic speeds under conditions of strong kinetic heating,” write Russian aviation historians Yefim Gordon and Vladimir Rigamant. “Many leading enterprises and organizations of the aircraft, electronic and defense industries were commissioned to study the design of the D-21 together with the materials used in its construction, its production technology and its equipment.”

The result was the Voron (“Raven”) project to develop a supersonic strategic reconnaissance drone. The Voron would have been launched by a Tu-95 or Tu-160 bomber. After separation, a solid-fuel booster would have accelerated the drone to supersonic speed, at which point the ramjet would have kicked in, according to Gordon and Rigamant. The craft would then follow a pre-programmed flight path using an inertial navigation system. Once the unmanned aircraft returned to base, the film canister would be ejected and land by parachute, after which the drone itself would land.

But much like manned reconnaissance aircraft, the Voron idea fell victim to the advent of spy satellites that could soar over foreign territory without fear of being shot down. Another advantage is that satellites would not crash-land and have their secrets recovered by the enemy, as happened to the D-21.

But at least no one can accuse the Soviets of being ungenerous. In the mid-1980s, Ben Rich, a Lockheed engineer who worked on the D-21, recalled being given a metal panel by a CIA employee. It was a piece of the D-21 that had crashed in Siberia, and which had been recovered by a shepherd. The piece was returned by a KGB agent.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared earlier and is being posted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Not all A2AD systems are as technically mature and operationally effective as they are made out to be.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Undeniably, A2/AD weapons can threaten large areas and will likely shape operations in the regions where they are present. However, they cannot “shut down” access to a region by themselves, and their threat can be mitigated through appropriate planning using existing technologies and tactics.

On March 7, 2019 defense analysts from the Rand Corporation told a panel, “In our [war]games, when we fight Russia and China, blue [the U.S. and its allies] gets its ass handed to it.”  The scenarios were defenses of the Baltics and Taiwan from invasions by Russia and China, respectively.

In both cases, Russia and China leveraged long-range cruise and ballistic missiles to sink U.S. ships hundreds of miles away at sea, destroy forward air bases that short-range F-35 stealth fighters depend upon, and interdict airspace against non-stealth aircraft.

The huge ‘bubbles’ of interdicted space generated by such ‘anti-access/areas-denial’ weapons (or A2/AD) impede a U.S. counterattack long enough for locally superior attackers to overwhelm defenders in the region.

However, just a few days earlier the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) released the report ‘Bursting the Bubble?’, described in this earlier article by The National Interest’s David Axe. It arrived at a very different conclusion:

“Much has in recent years been made of Russia's new capabilities and the impact they might have on the ability of NATO member states to reinforce or defend the vulnerable Baltic states in case of crisis or war. On closer inspection, however, Russia's capabilities are not quite as daunting, especially if potential countermeasures are factored in. In particular, surface-to-air missile systems currently create much smaller A2/AD bubbles than is often assumed...Experiences from Syria also raise questions about the actual capabilities of such systems in combat…Anti-ship and anti-land systems pose a greater threat but, here too, countermeasures are available.”

In FOI’s view, A2AD is an overhyped buzzword leveraged to create an excessive sense of vulnerability—intimidating potential adversaries before the match even begins.

Back in 2016 the U.S. Navy apparently came to a similar conclusion—practically banning the term ‘A2/AD’ in its internal strategy documents on the grounds that the term ceded adversaries too much credit by conflating ability to threaten a space with successfully controlling it.

How can the same premises lead to such dissimilar conclusions? In fact, many of the analysts’ insights on the strengths and limitations of A2AD strategy can be reconciled.

There are different correlations of forces in Baltic Sea and the Western Pacific Ocean.

The Swedish study understandably focuses on the Baltics, while the Rand panelists also referred to potential conflict with China in the Western Pacific. However, China has a more dominant military posture in East Asia than Russia does in Europe. Furthermore, despite starting technologically behind, Beijing has demonstrated a greater capacity to sustainably develop and deploy advanced systems.

Russia wins when it adversaries fail to counter-mobilize.

Rand’s pessimistic projections regarding a Russian invasion of the Baltics date back to 2016.  However, its wargames have tended to pit a mobilized Russian invasion force against un-mobilized NATO forces. However, it’s questionable that Russia could spend weeks massing the forces necessary for an invasion without detection and some counter-mobilization by NATO, particularly given capabilities of modern surveillance systems. ‘Strategic surprise’ can be achieved—but is harder than ever before.

FOI, for its part, argues that NATO should simply deploy more troops in Eastern Europe to deter Moscow. Many of Russia’s anti-access capabilities in the Baltics center around its exclave in Kaliningrad, which itself could be made quite vulnerable, surrounded as it is by Polish territory.

Not all A2AD systems are as technically mature and operationally effective as they are made out to be.

The Swedish report points out that Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system (also in service in China) has yet to actually receive its vaunted 250-mile range 40N6 missiles. Furthermore, very long-range interceptions are only viable against large, slow aircraft (think tankers, cargo planes and AWACS radar planes) flying at high altitude. ‘Pushing back’ vital support planes is still useful, but agile war planes may only become vulnerable within a few dozen miles of a SAM site.

Another intimidating new technology, anti-ship ballistic missiles, has only been tested against naval targets a few times, and never in combat

On the other hand, cruise missiles and short-range land-attack ballistic missiles have seen extensive combat employment in the last half-century, blasting Middle Eastern cities and sinking Royal Navy ships in the Falklands. Land-based missile transporters have proven easy to conceal and difficult to hunt down.

The FOI study also points out that short-range air defense systems like the Pantsir-S have repeatedly failed to stop U.S. cruise missile barrages and constant Israeli air strikes.

A2AD systems can’t see as far as they can shoot.

A 40N6 missile (when and if it enters service) may threaten aircraft up to 250 miles away. A DF-21D may be able to sink a carrier a thousand mile away.

However, neither missile batteries’ organic fire control radars can realistically acquire targets that far over the horizon due to the curvature of the Earth. Both would need to cue targeting data by networking with remote AWACS radar and maritime patrol planes, drones, surveillance satellites, and distant land and sea-based radars.

Forming such a ‘kill-chain’ is doable—but it’s technically challenging task that requires practice and is vulnerable to disruption at any point in the chain. For instance, the surveillance and communication assets could be destroyed, or their communication links to firing platforms jammed.

Both China and Russia, however, are assembling the surveillance capabilities to form kill chain, however, by expanding its satellite surveillance assets and deploying new airborne radar planes.

‘Threatening’ an area doesn’t have to mean ‘denying’ it.

In recent conflicts, U.S. air and naval forces have benefited from technological ‘offsets’ allowing them to bombard adversaries from afar at virtually no risk to return fire. For example, the U.S. did not lose a single warplane to enemy fire in its 2011 intervention against Libya.

However, when combating a peer adversary, Western forces may simply have to accept higher degrees of risk in order to complete their missions. In other words, A2/AD systems may take out some ships or aircraft, but not necessarily impose high enough costs to defeat operations in a region before they are neutralized.

For example, during World War II land-based bombers posed a deadly anti-access threat to warships that passed within their range. However, that didn’t prevent Allied naval forces from taking what lumps they had to when evacuating troops at Dunkirk and Crete, or conducting amphibious landings in Dieppe, Sicily and Normandy.

Counter-measures against A2AD strategy and technologies already exist.

The Rand analysts argue the U.S. military could address its weaknesses versus anti-access weapons by re-allocating roughly $24 billion of its roughly $700 billion annual budget to existing systems. In their view, sacrificing funding for, say, one or two carriers, makes sense if it pays for capabilities that make the remaining nine floating airbases much more survivable.

Basically, the analysts think the U.S. needs a larger supply surface-strike missiles to threaten enemies at long range; and a much larger capacity to defend against incoming long-range missiles with counter-missiles.

In other words, fight fire with fire and water.

Naturally, greater numbers of long-range, high-capacity launch platforms are desirable.

On the offense side, promising new long-range strike weapons include the LRASM anti-ship missile, the stealthy JASSM-ER cruise missile and the Army’s multi-faceted Long-Range Precision Fire program. On the defense side, the Army’s maneuver short-range air defense program and the Navy’s SM-3 and SM-6 offer promising force protection capabilities.

Taking the analysts’ conclusion together, one can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by anti-access weapons. Undeniably, A2/AD weapons can threaten large areas and will likely shape operations in the regions where they are present. However, they cannot “shut down” access to a region by themselves, and their threat can be mitigated through appropriate planning using existing technologies and tactics.

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 two years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters. 

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

The U.S. Navy’s placid-looking E-6 Mercury, based on the 707 airliner, seems particularly inoffensive, but that is a lie.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The E-6 platform should remain in service until 2040 thanks to a service-life extension program and continual tweaks to its systems and radios. While the Mercury has demonstrated its usefulness as an airborne communication hub for supporting troops in the field, the airborne command post will be considered a success if it never has to execute its primary mission.

In a military that operates Raptor stealth fighters, A-10 tank busters, B-52 bombers and Harrier jump jets, the U.S. Navy’s placid-looking E-6 Mercury, based on the 707 airliner, seems particularly inoffensive. But don’t be deceived by appearances. Though the Mercury doesn’t carry any weapons of its own, it may be in a sense the deadliest aircraft operated by the Pentagon, as its job is to command the launch of land-based and sea-based nuclear ballistic missiles.

Of course, the U.S. military has a ground-based strategic Global Operations Center in Nebraska, and land-based transmitters for communicating with the nuclear triad. However, the E-6’s sinister purpose is to maintain the communication link between the national command authority (starting with the president and secretary of defense) and U.S. nuclear forces, even if ground-based command centers are destroyed by an enemy first strike. In other words, you can chop off the head of the U.S. nuclear forces, but the body will keep on coming at you, thanks to these doomsday planes.

The E-6’s basic mission is known as Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO). Prior to the development of the E-6, the TACAMO mission was undertaken by land-based transmitter and later EC-130G and Q Hercules aircraft, which had Very Low Frequency radios for communication with navy submarines. Interestingly, France also operated its own TACAMO aircraft until 2001, four modified Transall C-160H Astarté transports, which maintained VLF communications with French ballistic-missile submarines.

The first of sixteen E-6s entered service between 1989 and 1992. These were the last built in a very long line of military variants of the venerable Boeing 707 airliner, in particular the 707-320B Advanced, also used in the E-3 Sentry. Bristling with thirty-one communication antennas, the E-6As were originally tasked solely with communicating with submerged Navy submarines. Retrofitted with more fuel-efficient CFM-56 turbojets and benefiting from expanded fuel tanks, the E-6A could remain in the air up to fifteen hours, or seventy-two with inflight refueling.

To use its Very Low Frequency radios, an E-6 has to fly in a continuous orbit at a high altitude, with its fuselage- and tail-mounted VLF radios trailing one- and five-mile-long wire antennas at a near-vertical attitude! The VLF signals can be received by Ohio-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines hiding deep underwater, thousands of miles away. However, the VLF transmitters’ limited bandwidth means they can only send raw data at around thirty-five alphanumeric characters per second—making them a lot slower than even the old 14k internet modems of the 1990s. Still, it’s enough to transmit Emergency Action Messages, instructing the ballistic-missile subs to execute one of a diverse menu of preplanned nuclear attacks, ranging from limited to full-scale nuclear strikes. The E-6’s systems are also hardened to survive the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear weapons detonating below.

Between 1997 and 2006, the Pentagon upgraded the entire E-6A fleet to the dual-role E-6B, which expanded the Mercury’s capabilities by allowing it to serve as an Airborne Nuclear Command Post with its own battle staff area for the job. In this role it serves as a backup for four huge E-4 command post aircraft based on the 747 Jumbo jet. The E-6B has ultra-high-frequency radios in its Airborne Launch Control system that enable it to remotely launch land-based ballistic missiles from their underground silos, a task formerly assigned to U.S. Air Force EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft—yet another 707 variant. The E-6’s crew was expanded from fourteen to twenty-two for the command post mission, usually including an onboard admiral or general. Additional UHF radios give the E-6B access to the survivable MILSTAR satellite communications network, while the cockpit is upgraded up with new avionics and instruments from the 737NG airliner. The E-6B can be distinguished in photos by its additional wing-mounted pods.

The Mercury’s abundant communications gear allows it to perform nonnuclear Command, Control and Communications (C3) operations as well. For this reason, E-6s have at times been deployed to Europe and the Middle East to serve as flying C3 hubs. For example, VQ-4 was deployed in Qatar for three years from 2006 to 2009, where it relayed information such as IED blast reports and medical evacuation requests from U.S. troops in Iraq who were out of contact with their headquarters.

Two Navy Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadrons currently operate the E-6: VQ-3 “Ironmen” and VQ-4 “Shadows,” both under the Navy Strategic Communications Wing 1. These have their home at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, but also routinely forward deploy out of Travis AFB in California and Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. At least one E-6 is kept airborne at all times. E-6s on the submarine-communication mission often fly in circles over the ocean at the lowest possible speed—for as long as ten hours at a time. Those performing the nuclear command post mission typically remain on alert near Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The E-6’s nuclear mission has also made its operations occasional fodder for conspiracy theorists and foreign propaganda outlets.

The E-6 platform should remain in service until 2040 thanks to a service-life extension program and continual tweaks to its systems and radios. While the Mercury has demonstrated its usefulness as an airborne communication hub for supporting troops in the field, the airborne command post will be considered a success if it never has to execute its primary mission. The heart of nuclear deterrence, after all, is convincing potential adversaries that no first strike will be adequate to prevent a devastating riposte. The E-6s are vital component in making that threat a credible one.

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

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

Image: Wikipedia.