The National Interest

TNI Staff

Security, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security,

What stopped them?

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

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

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

Post-War Proposals: 

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

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

Iowa Class:

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

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

Soviet approach:

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

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

The Last Salvo: 

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

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters.

Alex Hollings

History, Americas

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

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

The nuclear days before we got MAD

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

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

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

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

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

Launching winged cruise missiles from submarines

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

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

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

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

The plan to build submarine aircraft carriers

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

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

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

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

The challenges of flying a fighter from a submarine aircraft carrier

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

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

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

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

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

This article first appeared at Sandboxx.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

Douglas MacArthur seemed to think so.

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

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

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

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

The Situation:

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

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

Strategic or Tactical:

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

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

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

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

War Situation:

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

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

The Final Salvo:

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

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Middle East

This weapon functions well and is popular for export.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Galil/IWI.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Reuters.

Joseph Trevithick

History, Europe

The attack would have involved cutting off communications and even using nuclear weapons.

Key point: Deterrence is a constant tension between keeping your weapons safe and only used when needed vs ensuring they can be used once they are supposed to me. Here is how Washington worried about the security of its nuclear missile submarines if the Cold War ever turned hot.

A key component of the U.S. doctrine of mutually assured destruction — commonly and appropriately known as MAD — was that American troops would still be able to retaliate if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. But for a time, the Pentagon was seriously worried that its own nuclear missile submarines wouldn’t get those orders in time.

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

In 1968, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Scientific Advisory Committee found dangerous gaps in the communications network supporting the nation’s so-called Fleet Ballistic Missile boats, or FBMs. The FBM fleet included more than 40 submarines of five different classes all capable of carrying up to 16 Polaris nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, collectively known as the “41 for Freedom.”

The agency included the report in a response to a private individual’s Freedom of Information Act request. The website GovernmentAttic.org published the collection of documents totaling more than 1,000 pages.

Despite being heavily redacted, the report offers a candid and worrisome assessment of one of Washington’s key nuclear deterrents during the Cold War:

1. The Polaris weapon system may be targeted against time-urgent or assured destruction targets.

In the first case, the message to fire must be received [redacted] whereas in the second case a delay [redacted] may be acceptable to allow reliable transmission of the “go” message. Primary reliance for communication of this message to the Polaris submarines is placed [redacted.] Backup is provided by [redacted] as well as by other transmitters [redacted.]

2. When the Polaris weapon system is targeted against time urgent targets, very severe constraints are imposed on the deployment and the command and control doctrine for the system. The Soviet capability for [redacted] a most serious threat to the Polaris command and control system under these constraints. Therefore, it is the opinion of the DIA/SAC that the U.S. cannot depend with high confidence in the present situation on the Polaris weapon system to strike time-urgent targets. On the other hand, the capability of the Polaris system for assured destruction, i.e., for attack of non-time urgent targets, is high.

The analysts reported that some of the biggest factors were the nature of the communications sites and the cost of keeping the networks running. The physical transmitters were “quite soft” and vulnerable to atomic bombs or sabotage, according to the committee.

To be ready to send out urgent messages at a moments notice, the Pentagon would apparently have to keep significant resources on call at the communication centers. “This is inherently expensive and is not current practice,” DIA noted.

And while the scientific advisers said Polaris could still be an important part of any nuclear war, they recommended the Pentagon start work on an improved and standardized communications arrangement as soon as possible:

7. In view of the difficulty the Soviets would have in maintaining [redacted] for a long period and the opportunity we would have to use redundant communication links and tactics, it is our opinion that the “go” message could ultimately be received to allow the Polaris weapon system to fulfill its assured destruction role provided appropriate procedures for wartime operating conditions exist. To insure that the message ultimately reaches the Polaris submarines, it is imperative that a communication network be established, with the technical and operational characteristics to permit the use of alternate paths in the presence of enemy action.

A plan for such a network, MEECN (Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Net), is in its formative stages in the [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. However the MEECN does not exist today as an operational command and control network nor has a plan been approved yet to meet command and control or [redacted.] A serious deficiency in applying a variety of alternative communication links to transmission of the message from NCA (National Command Authority) to the Polaris weapon system is the lack of commonality or significant compatibility among the present terminals, as for example between the [redacted.]

Today, the U.S. Navy flies a number of E-6B Mercury planes as part of its Take Charge and Move Out system, or TACAMO. Based on the Boeing 707 airliner, the aircraft would help make sure the “go” codes got to the sailing branch’s nuclear missile boats in a crisis.

But since TACAMO has been around since the early 1960s, the Pentagon likely put other, still classified measures into place after reading the results of the DIA study.

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

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security,

These 5 armies will make sure of it.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Like its American counterpart, the ground force of the PLA must share the financial pie with a pair of voracious partners. The era in which China focused on ground power at the expense of sea and air power has decisively ended. Also, the PLA can never detach itself fully from the factional struggles within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the two are too closely intertwined for anything approaching Western style civil-military relations to take hold.

The focus of ground combat operations has shifted dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Relatively few operations now involve the defeat of a technologically and doctrinally similar force, leading to the conquest or liberation of territory. Preparation for these operations remains important, but ground combat branches also have a host of other priorities, some (including counter-insurgency and policing) harkening back to the origins of the modern military organization.

What will the balance of ground combat power look like in 2030, presumably after the Wars on Terror and the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation (more to come on this idea below) shake out?

Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but a few relatively simple questions can help illuminate our analysis. In particular, three questions motivate this study:

• Does the army have access to national resources, including an innovative technological base?

• Does the army have sufficient support from political authorities, without compromising the organization’s independence?

• Does the army have access to experiential learning; does it have the opportunity to learn and innovate in real-world conditions?

Given these questions, most ground combat forces of 2030 will very much resemble the most lethal forces of today, with perhaps a couple of important changes.

India

The Indian Army is poised to stand alongside the world’s most elite ground combat forces. The Army has dealt with combat operations across the intensity spectrum, contending against a Maoist insurgency at home, a Pakistani-supported insurgency in Kashmir, and a variety of other, smaller domestic operations. At the same time, the Indian Army remains well-prepared for high intensity combat against Pakistan, having long accepted the need for realistic combat training. Altogether, these experiences have helped hone the force into an effective tool for New Delhi’s foreign and domestic policy.

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While Indian Army equipment has lagged behind competitors in important ways, India now has access to nearly the entire universe of military technology. Russia, Europe, Israel, and the United States all sell their wares to India, complementing a growing domestic military industrial complex. Despite the need to compete with the air and naval services, the Indian Army should have greater access to advanced technology in the future than it has in the past, making it an ever more formidable force.

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France

Of all the European countries, France will likely retain the most capable, lethal army in the future. France remains committed to the idea of playing a major role in world politics, and clearly believes in the necessity of effective ground forces to fulfill that role. This should continue into the future, and perhaps even accelerate as France takes on greater control of the military and security apparatus of the European Union.

France’s military industrial complex remains robust, both on the domestic and the export fronts. The Army has modern command and communications equipment, and provides the backbone for most multilateral European Union forces. It also enjoys access to excellent field equipment, including tanks and artillery. The commitment of the French government to maintaining a strong domestic arms industry works in the Army’s favor.

The French Army has considerable experience with operations from the low to medium arcs of the combat spectrum. It has served in the Afghan and North African theaters of the Wars on Terror, using regular and elite forces to support locals and defeat enemy irregulars. The Army also enjoys the support of the two other French services; the Marine Nationale has creditable expeditionary capabilities, and the Air Force has increasingly focused on support operations, including battlefield strike, transport, and reconnaissance. The modular, professional nature of the Army makes it easily deployable across a wide range of territory.

Russia

The Russian Army went through a wrenching transformation at the end of the Cold War, losing much of its access to resources, to political clout, and to manpower. The military-industrial complex that had supported the Red Army collapsed in slow motion, leaving the force with outdated and poorly-maintained equipment. Morale dropped, and the Army struggled in combat against irregulars in Chechnya and elsewhere.

(Recommended: China and America Go To War in South China Sea: Who Wins?) 

Not everything has turned, but some things have. Improvements in the Russian economy allowed for more investment in the force. Reform, especially in the elite forces, helped Russia win the war in Chechnya. In 2008, the Russian Army quickly defeated Georgia, and in 2014 it spearheaded the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Together, we might call these the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation, a conflict that may not yet have ended. The Russian Army continues to play the central role in Moscow’s management of the near abroad, even as it has ceded some space to naval and air forces over the past couple of years.

The Russian Army will remain a lethal force in 2030, but nevertheless will have serious problems. Access to technology could become a greater problem in the future. The death throes of the Soviet military-industrial complex have finally played out, leaving a system of innovation and production that has struggled on both sides of the coin. Manpower may also prove problematic, as the Army seems stuck between the old conscription model (supported by a dwindling population), and the volunteer system that makes elite forces so special. Still, Russia’s neighbors will continue to fear the size and prowess of the Russian Army (especially in so-called “hybrid” operations) for a long time.

United States

The United States Army has represented the gold standard for a ground combat force since at least 1991. The defeat of the Iraqi Army in 1991, and the consummate destruction of the same in 2003, remain the most impressive feats of ground combat since the end of the Cold War. Over the last fifteen years, the Army has continued field operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; special operators have gone much farther afield.

The US Army continues to have access to a formidable system of military innovation. It shares the pie with the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, but notwithstanding sluggish growth in the last decade, the pie remains very large. While some of the equipment used by the US Army still dates to the Cold War, almost all such material has undergone a series of upgrades to bring it up to the standards of modern, networked warfare. The Army has the world’s largest array of reconnaissance drones, connecting forward observation with lethal, accurate fires.

Moreover, the Army has fifteen years of combat experience in the Wars on Terror; the longest period of consistent combat operations since at least the Indian Wars. To be sure, this experience holds dangers, not least of organizational exhaustion. This is particularly concerning given the apparently endless nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the US Army should remain the most powerful ground combat force in the world in 2030, and not by a small margin.

China

Since at least the early 1990s, the People’s Liberation Army has engaged in a thorough-going reform of its ground forces. For decades, elements of the PLA acted as the guarantors of specific political factions within the Chinese Communist Party. As reforms took hold, the PLA became a commercial organization as much as a military one, taking control of a wide variety of small enterprises.

This situation began to turn as the Chinese economy erupted in the 1990s and 2000s. With access to funding and an increasingly innovative technology sector, the ground element of the PLA began to slim down and reform itself, becoming a modern military organization.

Like its American counterpart, the ground force of the PLA must share the financial pie with a pair of voracious partners. The era in which China focused on ground power at the expense of sea and air power has decisively ended. Also, the PLA can never detach itself fully from the factional struggles within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the two are too closely intertwined for anything approaching Western style civil-military relations to take hold.

Reform has included massive equipment modernization projects, realistic training, and steps toward the professionalization of the force. While the PLA does not enjoy the same level of funding as the US Army, it does have access to nearly unlimited manpower, and it controls greater resources than almost any other army in the world. The one thing the PLA lacks is real-world experience; it has not conducted live combat operations since the Sino-Vietnamese War, and has played no role in the major conflicts of this century. Still, there is no reason to believe that existing trends in PLA modernization and reform will change direction in the next fifteen years.

Concluding Thoughts

In the end, the answers to “how do we build a powerful army” remain painfully simple. States that have access to enthusiastic populations with high human capital, that can cull the most innovative technologies from robust, modern economies, and that can structure their civil-military relations with just-enough-but-not-too-much independence will tend to do very well. Experience doesn’t hurt, either. The simplicity of the answers does not imply that the prescriptions are easy to achieve, however.

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, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This article first appeared last year and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

Even before the Snowden leaks established extensive Chinese industrial espionage, Americans analysts suspected that China was stealing information.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Though China's own innovations are nothing to scoff at, much of its military technology has been purloined from the rest of the world - be it the United States, Western Europe, or Russia.

As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerged from war and revolution in 1949, it became apparent that the Chinese economy lacked the capacity to compete with the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. in the production of advanced military technology.  Transfers from the Soviet Union helped remedy the gap in the 1950s, as did transfers from the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, the Cultural Revolution stifled technology and scientific research, leaving the Chinese even farther behind.

Thus, China has long supplemented legitimate transfers and domestic innovation with industrial espionage.  In short, the PRC has a well-established habit of pilfering weapons technology from Russia and the United States.  As the years have gone by, Beijing’s spies have become ever more skillful and flexible in their approach. Here are five systems that the Chinese have stolen or copied, in whole or in part:

J-7:

In 1961, as tensions between the USSR and the PRC reached a fever pitch, the Soviets transferred blueprints and materials associated with its new MiG-21 interceptor to China. The offering represented an effort to bridge part of the gap, and suggest to China that cooperation between the Communist giants remained possible.

The offering didn’t work. Sino-Soviet tensions continued to increase, nearly to the point of war in the late 1960s. The Chinese worked from the blueprints and other materials, and eventually produced the J-7, a virtual copy of the MiG-21.  The Chinese eventually sold the J-7 (F-7 export variant) in direct competition with the MiGs sold by the Soviets.  Indeed, after the US-PRC rapprochement of the early 1970s, the Chinese sold J-7s directly to the Americans, who used them as part of an aggressor squadron to train US pilots to fight the Soviets.

J-11:

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s heralded a thaw in Russia-China relations.  Russia no longer had strong reasons to withhold its most advanced military technology from the Chinese.  More importantly, the huge Soviet military industrial complex needed customers badly, and the Russian military could no longer afford new equipment. For its part, the PRC needed new sources of high technology military equipment after Europe and the United States imposed arms embargoes in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Accordingly, the 1990s saw several huge arms deals between Moscow and Beijing.  One of the most important involved the sale, licensing, and technology transfer of the Su-27 “Flanker” multirole fighter. The deal gave the Chinese one of the world’s most dangerous air superiority fighters, and gave the Russian aviation industry a lifeline.

But the era of good feelings couldn’t hold.  Details remain murky and disputed, but the Russians claim that the Chinese began violating licensing terms almost immediately, by installing their own avionics on Flankers (J-11, under Chinese designation).  The Chinese also began developing a carrier variant, in direct violation of agreed-to terms.  The appropriation of Russian technology undercut the relationship between Russia and China, making the Russians far more wary of transferring their crown jewels to the Chinese military.

J-31:

Even before the Snowden leaks established extensive Chinese industrial espionage, Americans analysts suspected that China was stealing information associated with the F-35.  The likely reality of this theft became clear when information about the J-31 stealth fighter became available.  The J-31 looks very much like a twin-engine F-35, without the VSTOL capabilities of the F-35B.

The J-31 also presumably lacks much of the advanced avionics that have the potential to make the F-35 a devastating fighter.  Nevertheless, the J-31 may eventually operate from carriers, and could potentially compete with the Joint Strike Fighter on the export market.

UAVs:

In 2010, China lagged woefully behind the United States in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology.  Since that time, the Chinese have caught up, and are now producing drones capable of competing with US models on the international arms market.  How did the Chinese catch up so fast?

According to US intelligence, Chinese hackers appropriated technology from several sources, including the US government and private companies (General Atomics) associated with the production of UAVs. The newest Chinese UAVs closely resemble US aircraft visually and in performance, a remarkable turn-around time for China’s aviation industry.

Night Vision Technology:

After the Vietnam War, the United States military decided that it would invest heavily in an effort to “own the night.”  This led to major advances in night vision technology, including equipment that allowed individual soldiers, armored vehicles, and aircraft to see and fight in the dark. This equipment has given the US a huge advantage in several conflicts since the 1980s.

China is seeking to end this advantage, and has geared some of its espionage efforts towards acquiring and replicating US tech in this area.  This has included some cyber-theft, but also several old-style ops in which Chinese businessmen illegally acquired export-controlled tech from US companies.

The Last Salvo:

The United States has become increasingly aggressive about slowing down or halting China’s industrial espionage efforts. This has included indictments of PLA officers, broad condemnations of Chinese spying, and targeted reprisals against some Chinese firms. But given the extensive commercial contacts between China and the United States, stopping the flow of technology is virtually impossible. Moreover, China has developed a large, innovative technology economy in its own right. Indeed, as Chinese technology catches up with American (and in some cases exceeds Russian) we may see the Chinese run into the same problems with foreign espionage.

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, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This article first appeared in August 2016. 

Image: Reuters. 

Peter Suciu

Security, Europe

The entire is a bizzare, Cold War-like fever dream.

Key Point:  Nuclear bomb drones sound scary and they are. But that is because they are more destabilizing than helpful.

The second Russian Navy submarine to serve as a basic carrier of the Poseidon nuclear-capable underwater drone will be floated out in late June, the state media reported. The Khabarovsk will reportedly be able to carry up to six Poseidon unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).

"The Khabarovsk [Project 09852] will be floated out in late June at the earliest. There is no exact date so far," a source from the Russian defense industry told TASS.

Naval News, with data from Covert Shores, has described the new submarine as similar but smaller than the Project 955 "Borei" SSBN. The estimated length of the new submarine is about 120 meters compared to the 160 meters for the BOREI. In addition, it was noted that it is even possible that the submarines may share many components and even hull sections.

Khabarovsk, the lead boat of the Project 09851, is the first of four planned nuclear-powered submarines and it was laid down in 2014 with plans for it to be launched this year. The Khabarovsk-class boats should be capable of carrying weapons such as torpedoes, anti-ship and land attack missiles—and as these will be fitted with a nuclear reactor and pumpjet propulsion system should have unlimited range, while sea endurance will be limited only by food supplies.

The Poseidon is a unique UUV with a nuclear propulsion system and nuclear warhead, and it can operate as an autonomous nuclear torpedo with a nearly unlimited range. The Pentagon reports confirmed the existence of the UUV in 2016. It can reportedly carry a nuclear warhead with a blast yield of two megatons (MT), and it can reach underwater speeds of 108 knots—significantly faster than traditional torpedoes.

The weapon platform is capable of destroying enemy infrastructural facilities, aircraft carrier strike groups (CSG) and other targets. The Poseidon drones, along with other nuclear-power submarines, which act as the carriers for the weapons, make up part of Russia's so-called oceanic multipurpose system. A source in the Russian defense industry told TASS that the Poseidon drone is capable of destroying an enemy naval base or hit at an enemy's important coastal economic facilities—which could be read to include a city such as New York or Boston.

In the March 2018 state-of-the-nation address to both houses of the Russian parliament, President Vladimir Putin mentioned for the first time Russia's efforts to develop a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle that could carry both conventional and nuclear warheads.

The first basic carrier of the Poseidon was the Project 09852 special-purpose nuclear submarine Belgorod, which was floated in April of last year and which is expected to enter service with the Russian Navy this coming September. In addition to carrying the Poseidon, the Belgorod was developed to carry rescue deep-water drones.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This first appeared earlier in 2020 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley

History, Asia

Modern scholarship on the history of the CCP has demonstrated that Mao rarely, if ever, had complete control over the Party machinery. He struggled through his entire tenure against competitors, both bureaucratic and ideological.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Mao was the 'Great Helmsman' leading the Chinese revolution forward. However, he was far from the only revolutionary around, and was surrounded by other well-known leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. If he had died early on, one of them might have taken over - although some amount of chaos would have almost certainly followed.

For thirty-seven years, Mao Zedong occupied a singular position atop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), governing organization of the world’s largest country. For over a dozen years, Mao had led the CCP through wilderness (literally), fighting off factional opponents, the armies of Chiang Kai Shek, and the invading forces of the Empire of Japan. In the next decades, Mao would put a deep imprint on the politics and history of China, rarely for the good.

Modern scholarship on the history of the CCP has demonstrated that Mao rarely, if ever, had complete control over the Party machinery. He struggled through his entire tenure against competitors, both bureaucratic and ideological. Many of the decisions Mao made had strong support from the rest of the CCP, and emerged more from consensus that from authoritarian diktat. Nevertheless, the CCP and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bore the special imprint of Mao’s ideological conviction and genius for infighting.

What if Mao had died in 1949, shortly after the declaration of the existence of the People’s Republic of China? How might China’s domestic and foreign policy have fared in the absence of the Great Helmsman?

Ideology and Factionalism:

For better or worse, Mao Zedong supplied a strong ideological foundation for the existence of the CCP, and for its provision of single-party control over the PRC. This melded a modified form of Marxist economic doctrine with Soviet state Leninism, leavened by a strong dose of anti-colonial thought. This ideological foundation, and the cult of personality that the CCP established around Mao, helped provide unity for the party and the state throughout the PRC’s early years, allowing it to weather such crises as the Korean War, the ongoing challenge of the survival of Chiang Kai Shek’s regime on Taiwan, and the Sino-Soviet Split. It also helped drive crises, including the Great Leap Forward, the aforementioned split with the USSR and the Cultural Revolution.

But Mao Zedong was far from the only important figure in the CCP in 1949. The struggle against Chiang and the Japanese had given many prominent commanders and administrators the chance to prove their worth. Other major political players in 1949 included Peng Dehuai, senior PLA commander; Liu Shaoqi, a key theorist and administrator; Zhou Enlai, Mao’s long-time right-hand man; Lin Biao, another senior commander and close confidant of Mao; Zhu De, founder of the PLA; Gao Gang, Bo Yibo, and Chen Yun, chief economic administrators; Deng Xiaoping, protégé of Liu Shaoqi, and Yang Shangkun, military and political leader during the Revolution.

Mao’s prominence among this group played an important role in stifling infighting; he could command sufficient legitimacy inside and outside the party that the other major players remained in check. It is unlikely that any other figure in the PRC could have provided the same degree of prestige and ideological heft. This would have made it difficult, at least in the early going, to pursue a “cult of personality” state-building strategy.

In Mao’s absence, the factions that formed around these prominent figures (and others) might have descended into open combat with one another. As is often the case with revolutionary insurgencies, the Chinese Communist Party was riven with factionalism even as it took power in Beijing in 1949. Different components of the People’s Liberation Army had fought entirely different wars, in different areas, with different tactics and organizational structures.

Powerbrokers within the CCP commanded the allegiance of portions of the PLA, which provided them with security from factional conflict. Without Mao to keep them in check, the PLA itself might have become embroiled in political infighting. Moreover, the USSR (which had substantial influence in the 1950s) might have decided to support one faction or another, leading to even more fighting.

Domestic Policy:

Mao Zedong was the primary driver behind the Great Leap Forward, a project designed to spur industrialization but that instead resulted in massive famine. Mao wasn’t alone; much of the rest of the CCP supported, or at least acquiesced, in the project. However, Mao’s idiosyncratic views on expertise, and his faith in the power of the peasantry, made the Great Leap much worse than it otherwise might have been. In the end, millions died in a campaign that Liu Shaoqi himself declared resulted from “70% human error.” The Great Leap also resulted in the purging of Peng Dehuai (critic of Mao), and the sidelining of Mao from the day-to-day domestic decision-making process. Under the guidance of Liu Shaoqi or similar figure, China would likely not have embarked on such a risky, dangerous course towards modernization, and millions might have lived.

The sidelining of Mao after the Great Leap Forward helped set the stage for the next great upheaval. The Cultural Revolution did not spring fully formed from the mind of Mao Zedong, but he did drive most of its main elements, and the ideological brew it created benefitted Mao at the expense of his competitors. Mao fueled the sense of ideological resentment among a younger generation of Chinese students in order to break the back of the parts of the CCP that opposed him and that, in the early 1960s, had worked hard to sideline him. The impact was dreadful in nearly every way imaginable; millions died, Chinese state capacity atrophied, science and innovation slowed, and the PRC withdrew from the international community. While some of the underlying tensions in China would have existed even without Mao, he played a key role in activating those tensions, and creating a political disaster of epic proportions. Without Mao, China might not have lost an entire decade of economic, social, and technical progress.

Foreign Relations:

The PRC stood in precarious position in the wake of its declaration. The Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai Shek, remained in existence on Formosa, with the United States acting as apparent security guarantor. The Soviet Union offered ideological, military, and economic support, but at the price of full alignment. For a decade, the PRC took this deal. The Soviets supplied support for Chinese military operations in Korea, and helped lay the foundation for the PRC’s military-industrial complex. The Soviets also helped jumpstart China’s nuclear weapons program.

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev’s turn against Stalin’s cult of personality cut hard into Mao’s own ideological foundation. Tensions increased as China and the USSR pursued divergent approaches to confrontation with the West; Mao preferred taking risks, while Khrushchev wanted to play it safe. Mao had managed to maintain control over the greater part of the foreign policy apparatus of the PRC, giving him ample space to carry out a feud with the USSR. While other voices within China also resented the Soviets, Mao’s ideological convictions, along with his special role at the top of the CCP, helped poison Sino-Soviet relations and bring about a dramatic split between the two countries.

Ten years later, Mao would override many of the rest of the senior leadership (Lin Biao, longtime confidant, died under suspicious circumstances) to seek an opening with the United States. This decision, which permanently detached China from the increasingly moribund USSR and paved the way for opening the PRC’s economy and society, remains Mao’s most meaningful positive contribution to China’s success. Without Mao, the PRC might have pursued Lin Biao’s preferred policy of re-engaging with the Soviet Union.

Parting Thoughts:

China would have struggled to emerge from civil war and its agrarian roots regardless of who guided the ship of state. The establishment of the cult of personality around Mao undoubtedly helped prevent some nasty conflicts between the leaders of the CCP, and assured a degree of unity against foreign foes. But it also gave Mao Zedong, a man with a special talent for human misery, the ability to guide the destinies of hundreds of millions of people for several decades.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

James Holmes

Security, Americas

America needs to ensure it can deter, and defeat, any enemies.

Key point: The number of ships matters. However, it is a bad idea to only use that metric when deciding what kind of a navy is needed and how it stacks up vs other countries.

The walking dead are ravaging Capitol Hill—again! I refer not to literal ghouls but to misleading ideas about navies that refuse to die in policymaking circles. The living dead shamble around during election season or just after—in other words, at times of political flux like this one, when one house of Congress has changed hands and the other is undergoing a leadership shakeup.

Take out one zombie factoid with a shot to the head and ten or a hundred more just like it trample the fallen corpse to get at you.

The latest to traffic in undead ideas is Sen. David Perdue, representing my erstwhile home state of Georgia. He’s taking over as chairman of the Seapower Subcommittee, an arm of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. The new chairman exhibits a gratifying sense of urgency about America’s return to history after its post–Cold War strategic holiday, and about the need to bulk up the sea services to wage protracted strategic competitions against peer competitors.

That’s the good news. In stating his case, though, Senator Perdue uttered a factoid that is as manifestly incomplete as it is commonplace as an index of naval power. “Today we have the smallest Army since WWII, the smallest Navy since WWI, and the oldest and smallest Air Force ever,” he told Defense News. “At the same time, we face complex threats from China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.”

That’s a dark picture to paint, and Perdue is correct in a strict factual sense: at 287-odd ships, there are fewer vessels in the U.S. Navy inventory now than at any time since the Great War. (Actually, the inventory has rebounded after bottoming out in the 270s—but only by a handful of vessels.) But the important question is whether the navy is powerful enough to accomplish the goals assigned it by senior commanders and their political masters. Naval power is not solely a function of hulls in the water. Think of ships as delivery vehicles. They deliver combat power to a particular scene of action at a particular time, in concert with friendly sea, ground, and air forces, to overcome the combat power a particular foe has staged there.

If the U.S. and allied force outguns the antagonist at the decisive place and time, it is sufficient regardless of how many or few ships take part in the engagement. If not, then U.S. naval commanders have a problem. So we should divorce calculations of naval might from brute numbers of hulls, which reveal little about whether a given fleet size is adequate to apply enough combat power at likely hotspots to fulfill U.S. strategic goals.

What U.S. maritime strategy calls on the navy to do matters a great deal to this calculus. For instance, a 287-ship force might well suffice to mount a hemispheric defense of the Americas, working alongside allied forces from Canada and Latin America. It would probably boast surplus capacity for such humble duty. Yet a fleet that size might be woefully understrength to take the fight to China in the South China Sea, Russia in the Black Sea, or Iran in the Persian Gulf. In short, reaching back to World War I to compare raw numbers reveals little about the outcomes of probable encounters in the here and now, and thus about the prospects for U.S. tactical, operational, and strategic success or failure.

Tallying up ship numbers, then, makes poor shorthand for U.S. naval power. Bean counting yields one datapoint, albeit an important one. There is some bare minimum of assets needed to concentrate strength at scenes of battle. But bean counting not only disregards the enemy, the surroundings, and the goals set by the navy’s overseers, it doesn’t differentiate among ship types. A century ago a battleship counted as a ship of war, and so did a winsome destroyer. A fleet made up entirely of battleships would have been the same as a fleet composed of destroyers by Perdue’s standard. It would have been an entirely different creature.

Today, similarly, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier bearing scores of warplanes counts as a ship. But so does a littoral combat ship with light armament and one-thirtieth the flattop’s tonnage. So does a lumbering amphibious assault ship that deposits marines and cargo on embattled shores rather than assail enemy fleets. Simple ship counts obscure elementary distinctions like these while making no judgment about the balance among ship types and missions within the fleet.

Statistics can lie. If you couple the “smallest navy since World War I” talking point with the results of realistic wargames showing that the U.S. Navy fields too few vessels vis-à-vis prospective foes under realistic circumstances, though, then you have the makings of a useful benchmark to gauge whether U.S. naval means are sufficient to advance U.S. strategic and political ends. And in turn you can bellow forth a rallying cry to lawmakers, administration officials, and the electorate to furnish more shipbuilding resources.

Apart from gamesters, you can consult scholarly work for informed opinion about these matters. For instance, back in 2010 a team of scribes from the Center for Naval Analyses compiled a study postulating that the U.S. Navy stood at a force-structure “tipping point” beneath which it would no longer be the globetrotting service it has been since Congress passed and Franklin Roosevelt signed the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940.

If the sea service dwindled much further in numbers and especially in capability, maintained the CNA team, it would possess too few assets to discharge the missions entrusted to it. The U.S. Navy would revert to the regional force it was before World War II.

The fleet still hovers around that tipping point nine years hence. At least Senator Perdue errs in the right direction by fretting over fleet numbers. In all likelihood the U.S. Navy is too small, even when you redefine ships as delivery vehicles for combat power and estimate U.S. battle strength through that unorthodox but illuminating technique. Still, friends of American sea power need more than soundbites to lend punch to their pleas for a larger fleet.

Now, so as not to pick on Senator Perdue too much, it’s worth noting that the World War I comparison is far from the most loathsome zombie to stampede through force-structure debates at times of political change. However flawed, Perdue’s talking point at least alerts Washington and the nation to danger. Taking other ubiquitous factoids at face value could induce America to relax its guard at a time when relaxing is the last thing it should do.

Two such fallacies come to mind. One holds that the U.S. Navy is “larger” than the next X navies combined, X usually being some double-digit number. That being the case, it should smash smaller rivals into kindling with ease, right? But this factoid makes no sense whatever when cross-referenced against numbers of hulls. Reputable estimates indicate, for instance, that China’s navy will boast over 500 vessels by 2030, even as the U.S. Navy struggles to field a 355-ship fleet. How could America’s navy constitute the larger force?

It turns out that this living-dead factoid refers to the total tonnage of the U.S. Navy fleet vis-à-vis foreign navies. On average American ships displace—or, roughly speaking, weigh—more than their counterparts overseas. Like numbers of hulls, tonnage is not a meaningless figure. Larger vessels can carry more fuel, armaments, and stores. Bigger is better—to a point.

But aggregate tonnage must also be taken in context. For one thing, the size of a ship says little about the armament and sensors installed aboard. A mammoth vessel could bear minimal armament. Combat logistics ships—transports for fuel, ammunition, refrigerated stores, and the like—are a case in point. Undefended by escort vessels, a large ship can make easy pickings for a much smaller foe such as China’s fleet-footed Type 022 Houbei catamarans. These lightweight 225-ton craft pack a heavy wallop in the form of eight anti-ship missiles. Offensive power need not correlate with tonnage, in other words.

For another, U.S. Navy men-of-war must carry more supplies than probable adversaries. After all, likely battlegrounds lie thousands of miles from North American shores. U.S. expeditionary forces must haul everything they need to fight in a China’s, Russia’s, or Iran’s backyard, or they may as well stay home. Meanwhile local defenders may get away with smaller vessels because they operate close to home—near their supply and operational bases—and because they’re backed by the combined firepower of shore-based air and missile forces. Antagonists, in other words, might make do with lesser craft and still attain their goals. The Type 022 is not a war-winning craft on its own. It is a formidable craft when integrated into a defensive thicket made up of ships and shore-based weaponry.

It’s a fallacy, then, to compare the tonnages of U.S. and foreign navies and conclude the battle result is a foregone conclusion. Doing so oversimplifies radically. In reality the bulkier U.S. Navy will square off not against a hostile navy but against a hostile joint force—a composite of sea, air, and ground forces operating close to home. In warfare as in sports, the advantage goes to the team making a home stand. Girth is no guarantee of victory for the visitors.

The second noxious factoid relates to budgets. All too often even knowledgeable pundits or officials cite the U.S. defense budget relative to likely competitors and conclude American supremacy is guaranteed. Because Washington spends more than the next Y powers combined—Y, like the X in tonnage comparisons, being some double-digit figure—then victory must be a sure thing. If you spend more you must have purchased superior strength. Right?

Not necessarily. He who spends the most may not win, just as he who weighs the most may not. Officialdom must not draw false comfort from budget comparisons suggesting that the United States holds a lopsided advantage over its rivals because it outspends them. Again, think about where likely sea fights will take place: in waters and skies close to hostile shorelines. The U.S. military must maintain pricey base infrastructure, not to mention those bigger, more expensive ships, planes, and armaments, merely to get into the battle zone. Fighting close to home is cheap by contrast. Advantage: red teams. Prevailing against distant opponents off their own coasts tends to cost you more than it costs them.

Factor in such disproportionate expenditures and the margin between U.S. and foreign spending doesn’t gape nearly so wide as budgeteering implies.

You would think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had put paid to the conceit that the bigger, higher-tech, more expensive force inevitably triumphs. Substate enemies brandishing makeshift weaponry gave the U.S. and coalition armed forces fits during those conflicts. Afghanistan is sputtering to an indecisive conclusion at best. It’s hard to imagine that China, or Russia, or Iran would fare more poorly than the Taliban or Iraqi militant groups considering all the resources these martial states can tap.

That’s the trouble with the undead: you can’t reason with them. You have to shoot down ghoulish ideas one by one when the herd swarms. Looks like we’d better stockpile ammunition for a long siege.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Security, World

The F-5E modernization program continued through the 2000s and 2010s, with the final jet being delivered in 2013.

Here's What You Need To Remember: If you're a developing country without a monstrous military budget, the F-35 isn't for you. The F-5, a sleek, fast, and affordable upgraded third-generation fighter, might be.

The F-5E “Tiger” is one of U.S. aerospace industry’s largest export successes. Designed as a budget lightweight fighter, the F-5E is still operated by many nations around the world despite the availability of more modern fighters.

Its continued service is enabled by miniaturization of electronics, which allows for more powerful radars and more systems to be integrated into the same spaces as the original system. This approach is exemplified by the F-5EM operated by Brazil, one of the most advanced variants of the F-5E flying today.

Brazil first acquired F-5Es in 1974 after comparing it to rival NATO light fighters like the Harrier, Jaguar, Fiat G.91 and A-4 Skyhawk. Forty-two units were purchased originally, followed by twenty-six more in the 1980s.

These aircraft served in without much modification until CRUZEX I aerial exercise in 2002. The exercise simulated conflict between the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) and a French Armee de l’Air force equipped with Mirage 2000s with E-3 Sentry AWACS support. The results were abysmal, with France expected to take air superiority in a real conflict despite some good simulated kills by FAB Mirage IIIs.

This sparked a significant push to modernize the FAB’s capability to defend Brazil’s airspace. Modernization of the Mirage III was explored but deemed to be cost ineffective. The F-5E showed much more promise.

In the 1990s, Chile, facing a similar need to modernize, created their own variant, the Tiger III Plus with assistance from Israel Aircraft Industries. A similar program with newer technology could be done with the FAB’s F-5Es.

The program began in the 2000s when a contract was awarded to the Brazilian firm Embraer to modernize forty-six F-5Es with European and Israeli technology. The key aspect of the modernization was to “extend” the legs of the F-5E from being a short-range “point defense” fighter to something that could cover more ground over Brazil’s rather large borders.

To this end, the radar was upgraded to the SELEX Grifo-F, which involved lengthening the nose cone of the aircraft to account for the larger radar antenna. But while the new radar was better, the F-5EM was designed with a secure data link to connect to FAB E-99 AWACS aircraft and ground radars, which were envisioned to vector the F-5s onto a target.

The role of the data link in FAB doctrine is significant. In addition to the dominance displayed by the French Mirages working with E-3s during CRUZEX, the FAB always favored vectoring their fighters from more powerful radars due to poor experience with the original F-5E radar. During a night intercept of a British Vulcan bomber in 1982, the F-5E’s onboard radar was unable to effectively search for the massive aircraft, the fighters were reliant on ground radar.

To take advantage of the additional range given by the data link and radar systems, the Israeli Derby active-radar medium-range air-to-air missile was integrated into the F-5EM. While lighter and shorter ranged than heavier missiles like the AMRAAM and R-27, the missile gave the FAB much-needed beyond-visual-range capability in air-to-air combat, the third nation after Chile and Venezuela to gain such capability.

Many other systems were added or upgraded on the F-5EM. In addition to the Derby, Israeli Python III short-range missiles were integrated. The Israeli DASH helmet mounted display was installed in the cockpit to cue those missiles, making the F-5EM a formidable close range fighter.

A radar-warning receiver, onboard oxygen generation system, hands-on throttle and stick, and INS/GPS navigation are all included. The addition of all these systems came at a cost though. The starboard M39A2 20mm cannon was removed to make space for electronics in the jet.

Finally to address the F-5E’s meager internal fuel capacity, provision for air-to-air refueling was added.

The F-5E modernization program continued through the 2000s and 2010s, with the final jet being delivered in 2013. Eleven additional F-5Es were acquired from the Jordanian Air Force in 2009 to increase the number of the type in FAB service.

The type is expected to serve on to 2025, with the integration of the new A-Darter beyond visual range air-to-air missile expected to happen soon. The new Gripen Es being acquired by the FAB are expected to supplement the shorter ranged F-5EMs.

Brazilian experts stress that the FAB’s capability gap with neighboring air forces was only narrowed by the upgrade and that the F-5EM still remains an outclassed fighter in modern air combat due to its shortcomings and old-school design. Regardless, it was the best the FAB could do on a limited budget and the resulting craft was quite good for the money spent.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues. This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Americas

Learning from past battles will help ensure U.S. flattops can keep sailing and survive modern threats.

Key point: Battleships lost their purpose due to advanced technological threats. Today, aircraft carriers are also threatened by powerful weapons.

How can the U.S. Navy prolong the relevance of its big-deck aircraft carriers amid increasingly menacing surroundings? In part, through hindsight. The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor rudely evicted dreadnought battleships from their perch atop the navy's pecking order. The day of the aircraft carrier had arrived. And yet battleships found new life for a time, pressed into service for secondary but vital functions. That could be the flattop's eventual fate as well. Naval-aviation proponents may find insights from battleship history discomfiting. They should study them nonetheless.

Amphibious operations, not sea fights against enemy surface fleets, gave battleships renewed purpose after Pearl Harbor. Dreadnoughts took station off the Solomon Islands scant months later, pummeling Japanese Army positions to support U.S. Marines embattled on Guadalcanal. The opposed landing is among the most grueling missions amphibian forces can undertake. Debarking from amphibious transports, making the transit from ship to shore in fragile landing craft, and clawing their way onto the beach under fire constitute the most delicate part of the endeavor.

Carl von Clausewitz pronounces defense the stronger form of war. Never is this more true than in amphibious combat. Defenders strew obstacles along the beaches, position gun emplacements to rake landing craft approaching through the surf and make things hellish while soldiers and marines are at their most vulnerable. Nor is island warfare any cakewalk, even after the force is ashore. Softening entrenched enemy defenses, then, is imperative both before sea-to-shore movement commences and after the fighting moves inland.

Battlewagons rendered yeoman service as shore-bombardment platforms throughout World War II. Reactivated Iowa-class battleships, moreover, saw action during the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. Nor is this purely an Asian enterprise. Indeed, this Friday marks seventy years since swarms of Allied ships descended on the French coast. Troops stormed the Normandy beaches in history's most epic opposed landing. Some 10,800 Allied combat aircraft dominated the skies, flying from airfields in nearby Britain. Battlewagons, cruisers, and destroyers cruising offshore rained gunfire on German strongpoints.

To deadly effect. Battleship gun rounds are comparable in weight to a Volkswagen Bug. Imagine flying economy cars exploding in your midst and you get the idea. So lethal was Allied naval gunfire that Desert Fox Erwin Rommel informed his Führer that "no operation of any kind is possible in the area commanded by this rapid-fire artillery." Quite a testament coming from one of history's great commanders.

And yet furnishing fire support was quite a comedown in status for the battlewagon, once the pride of navies from London to Washington to Tokyo. Seafarers reared on the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett assumed fleets of "capital ships"—battleships escorted by their lighter, but still-heavily-gunned, thickly armored brethren—would duel for maritime supremacy at the outbreak of war. By sinking or incapacitating an enemy battle fleet, the navy would secure the blessings of "command of the sea." That meant virtually unfettered freedom to blockade enemy shores, assail enemy merchantmen, or project power ashore.

The battleship once performed the glitziest of missions, but Pearl Harbor demoted it to secondary, unglamorous duty. Ships built to withstand hits from exploding VWs could venture within reach of shore-based enemy defenses—artillery, tactical aircraft, and the like—with good prospects of survival. And commanders could risk them with impunity. If the aircraft carrier was now the centerpiece of naval warfare, it was imperative to conserve flattops for future actions. After December 7, by contrast, the dreadnought was a wasting asset searching for a mission.

So why not send these vessels into harm's way? Once dethroned from the battle line, in short, battleships became expendable assets. In so doing they became ground-pounders' favorite ships. Therein lies wisdom. Herewith, are five lessons from the battleships' twilight years, applied to today's high-tech, access-denial/area-denial age:

Extend striking reach: As noted before, modernized battleships saw action in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. But these were relatively permissive surroundings where few defenders could do serious damage to armored vessels. More forbidding settings might have told another story. To be sure, battleship guns boasted extravagant range by gunnery standards. They could send rounds over twenty miles downrange. But that's short range for today's speedy attack aircraft and antiship missiles. Closing in on enemy coastlines, perversely, compresses the time available to ward off attack. That would render a battleship's staying power doubtful despite its ability to take a punch. Boosting the range of a ship's main armament, it seems, is critical to survival in this age of gee-whiz antiship weaponry. The farther away from enemy countermeasures, the better a man-of-war's prospects for staying alive—and accomplishing its goals.

Boost shipboard defenses: On the other hand, the laws of physics are a stern taskmaster. Battleships could disgorge one or two rounds per minute from each of their nine big guns. Hence, their devastating impact on defenders at Normandy. But the rate and volume of fire may suffer as the range separating the firing platform from its targets increases. Long range also reduces the amount of territory a vessel can reach. These problems are acute for a carrier, which reuses the delivery systems—the aircraft—that put ordnance on target. Aircraft have to launch, make their way to the combat zone, turn loose their weapons and make it back to the ship to refuel and rearm. That cycle takes time—and the farther offshore the flattop, the longer it takes. The strike group, thus, needs to get as close to its objectives as possible. Consequently, anything ship designers can do to harden ships against air and missile attack will improve the carrier's, and its escorts', ability to stand into danger at acceptable risk. Rugged construction, stealth, exotic weaponry, such as lasers and electromagnetic railguns—any of these will enhance warships' capacity to withstand landward assault and project power. Suffice it to say, striking the balance between self-protection and offensive firepower is a dicey prospect.

Don't cling too tight to the old: Seamen have a habit of falling in love with ships, ship types, and missions. Letting go is hard to do—even when circumstances warrant. Mahan defined capital ship broadly, to mean any warship capable of meting out and taking heavy blows. Naval commentators, nonetheless, construed his writings as advocacy on behalf of a specific ship type—the armored battleship. Once that assumption found its way into U.S. Navy strategy and doctrine, it took incontrovertible evidence—such as Japan's air assault at Pearl Harbor—to shatter habitual ways of thinking about sea combat. Better to remain intellectually and doctrinally nimble and repurpose old ships, aircraft and armaments when need be. Remember Rommel's verdict on naval gunfire at D-Day. Naval gunfire exuded little sex appeal. But it was a decisive factor in France.

Embrace the new: The reciprocal is that navies tend to see new, experimental ships as fleet auxiliaries—as assets that help the existing fleet execute what it already does, only better. Early on, for instance, naval officers considered the submarine an adjunct to the battle fleet. Aircraft carriers and their air wings were "the eyes of the fleet," scouting and screening for battleships, rather than offensive weapons in their own right. The dreadnought thus lingered on long after its successor, the flattop, hove into view. (Today the U.S. Navy may be repeating the pattern with unmanned-aircraft development. Having debated whether UAVs should emphasize ground attack or surveillance, navy potentates evidently favor the latter. A new set of eyes for the aircraft-carrier strike group may be in the offing.) Hanging onto old hardware and doctrine can represent a grievous mistake—so can being standoffish toward novel warmaking methods.

Find an alternative: It is entirely possible that the technical challenges cataloged here are insoluble at any affordable cost, much as restoring the dreadnought's supremacy was impossible in World War II. Accordingly, it behooves the U.S. Navy and friendly services to experiment with new technologies and concepts now, in case the sunset of the aircraft carrier approaches. We make much of the abrupt switch between battleships and carriers as the capital ships of choice. But navy leaders didn't conjure the carrier into being in 1941, when they needed a new capital ship. Rather, farsighted leaders such as Admiral William Moffett—a battleship-officer-turned-air-power-enthusiast—had pushed the development of naval air during the era of battleship supremacy. Hence, the implements to prosecute an aviation-centric strategy already existed when the navy needed them. Commanders merely had to divine how to use them. As things worked out, the ex-capital ship performed support duty while its replacement bore the brunt of navy-on-navy fighting. Not a bad division of labor.

In short, battleship history suggests that today's leaders face an array of technical, tactical and operational challenges. It also suggests that imagination poses the stiffest challenge. One hopes there's a William Moffett out there thinking ahead to the next big thing.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, just out in Mandarin from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He was the last gunnery officer to fire battleship guns in anger, in 1991. The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Americas

There are several lessons that could be applied to a modern war with China today.

Key point: There are three important take away from that costly, but effective, campaign. Here is how America won—and would win again.

This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The battle is one of seven naval engagements that—together with hard-ground fighting on the part of the U.S. Marines and Army—make up a six-month bloodletting known to history as Guadalcanal. It’s a struggle replete with insights into martial strategy and operations.

There are three big ideas that come out of studying the Solomon Islands campaign. First of all, the physical setting may impel strategic and operational deliberations. The Solomon Islands is a chute of an island chain. Guadalcanal constitutes its southeastern terminus, while the Japanese fortress at Rabaul lay just beyond its northwestern terminus in yesteryear. The Solomons commands little intrinsic value apart from its strategic geography. It invites the greats of literature to turn eloquent phrases disparaging it. James Michener, to name one, terms Guadalcanal “that godforsaken backwash of the world.”

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

Yet “location, location, location” makes as good a slogan in strategy as in real estate. War is a business of positions, as the little Emperor Napoleon liked to point out. Position augmented by military power translates into strategic advantage for a site’s holder.

And the Solomons abounded in geostrategic potential during World War II. Imperial Japanese Navy warplanes based on Guadalcanal could fan out, menacing shipping steaming along sea routes connecting North America with beleaguered Australia. They could help isolate a crucial American ally in the Pacific War. They could stop the U.S. armed forces from commencing their long march up the island chain toward the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul, the Philippine Islands—which had fallen during the onslaught that engulfed Pearl Harbor—and thence toward Japan itself. And Imperial Japanese Navy warbirds could help Japan stake its claim to even more South Pacific turf.

The U.S. high command, spurred by Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King, pronounced surrendering such strategically located ground unacceptable. Admiral King agitated constantly on behalf of offensive action in the Pacific theater—and he made the Solomons his project in mid-1942. The fight in and around the Solomons would last for twenty-six weeks, from the American amphibious landings in August 1942 until the Japanese pullout in February 1943. That’s a lot of resources, manpower and time to expend on something about which you care little.

Lesson one: it may be worthwhile to undertake a campaign to deny an adversary something rather than wrest it away for yourself. If so, you surrender some strategic autonomy. You go somewhere because an antagonist precedes you there. Contenders, in short, may not get to fight on ground of their choosing. Sometimes they fight where and when they wish. Other times they fight where and when they must. And once in awhile neither combatant especially cares to contest a particular battleground. They bestride the field to deny it to each other.

Such was the case with Guadalcanal. American and Japanese forces waged a “bloody and desperate campaign” for—as historian Samuel Eliot Morison puts it—real estate that “neither side really wanted, but which neither could afford to abandon to the enemy.” It’s doubtful the U.S. leadership would have felt constrained to go to Guadalcanal had the Imperial Japanese Navy not gone there first and commenced constructing an airstrip, which was dubbed Henderson Field once it was under U.S. Marine management.

For their part, it’s doubtful Japan’s military rulers would have elevated the Solomons above their principal objective in the South Pacific, Port Moresby in Palau, had the U.S. sea services not contested Guadalcanal and Henderson Field with such ferocity.

Second, setting and enforcing priorities proves dicey in theater-wide contests, let alone in contests spanning the globe. Scatter forces across the map in smaller and smaller packets, and you render each packet weaker and weaker—perhaps subjecting each one to defeat, and dooming the force to piecemeal defeat. U.S. commanders and their political masters had to juggle not just commitments within the Pacific Ocean, but between the Pacific and European theaters.

Top political leaders had agreed to defeat “Germany first” even before America entered the war. The Germany-first covenant wrong-footed partisans of naval action in the Pacific for quarrels over how to apportion resources for what amounted to two full-blown wars—both of which commanded compelling importance.

Protagonists of the European theater had official policy on their side. They argued, in contemporary parlance, that the Allies should hold in the Pacific until they could win in the Atlantic. Only then would they turn full force to the war against Imperial Japan. “Holding” for Europeanists meant parrying Japanese blows while doing little, if anything, offensive in reply. It connoted passive defense. Doing the minimum against Japan would allow Washington to conserve manpower, military hardware and resources of all sorts to thrash the Axis in Europe.

Sometimes the highest authority has to adjudicate such disputes, and so it was in 1942–43. As Morison observes, preparations for Operation Torch—the invasion of North Africa—represented the marquee show in the Atlantic theater that fall, even while battle raged in the Solomon Islands (D-Day in North Africa came that November). In October, nevertheless, President Franklin Roosevelt overruled his Europe-first military chiefs. He instructed them to reinforce on Guadalcanal while still pressing ahead with Torch.

Offensive action in the Solomons meant foregoing a cross-English Channel invasion of France in 1943—an offensive the Joint Chiefs longed to mount.

Japanese ground and naval commanders had to balance among commitments as well. Tokyo had taken on a land war on the continent of Asia—a full-blown war in itself—alongside multiple maritime entanglements in the South Pacific. Army and navy chieftains wrangled over priorities but ultimately felt obliged to follow the U.S. Navy and Marines to Guadalcanal. The Japanese high command doubled down by the close of August, several weeks into the struggle. Military rulers downgraded Port Moresby temporarily until Japanese forces could win in the Solomons.

Lesson two: no combatant can do everything everywhere on the map at the same time and expect to triumph. Japan, in particular, had to husband resources, as it was battling a foe boasting many times its economic strength—and thus many times its latent military strength. The United States found itself in similar straits into 1943, when industry had geared up to produce war materiel in vast quantities.

Wise leaders interject themselves in strategic debates when necessary—refereeing among proponents of competing courses of action.

Lesson three focuses on a more general proposition: we err when we distinguish too sharply between “Eastern” and “Western” warmaking methods. Western commentators make much of Mao Zedong’s concept of “active defense.” Mao represents the theorist of the weaker contender, not to mention a practitioner of his own strategy—a strategy meant to help the weak turn the tables on the strong. Wittingly or not, Westerners depict him as the purveyor of some esoteric Oriental art of strategy premised on deception and guile.

And indeed, Mao does draw heavily on the writings of Sun Tzu, China’s martial philosopher of undying fame. Master Sun predicates his philosophy of warfare on being nimble, wily and deceptive. Yet Mao’s writings are no mere knockoff of Sun Tzu’s. Far from it. They owe as much to Western scribe Carl von Clausewitz as to any Asian master. Maoist active defense, for example, is about luring stronger foes onto onto one’s home ground. They have to advance across significant distances just to reach the battlefield—and overextend or even exhaust themselves in the process.

The Maoist concept derives in part from Clausewitz’s observation that the combatant that seizes the offensive at the outset of war sees its strength attenuated as its forces close in on the defender. The invader gets more and more remote from his bases. His logistics grow increasingly tenuous. The enemy, perhaps aided by partisan warfare, harries the invader’s flanks with minor tactical actions, sapping his combat power. Meanwhile the defender falls back on his own bases and sources of supply—exploiting the advantages that go to the home team protecting its home ground.

Ultimately the invader passes the “culminating point of the attack,” a crossover point beyond which the defender holds the upper hand. Reversing the balance of forces empowers the erstwhile weaker contender to take the offensive—and win a conventional trial of arms. Mao distills his doctrine of active defense from this insight. Chinese statements about strategy remind us, time and again, that active defense, a product manufactured partly in Europe, remains the “essence” of Chinese martial thought and the strategies to which thought gives rise. Maoist ideas thus represent an amalgam of purportedly Eastern and purportedly Western concepts about warlike enterprises.

Pretty Oriental, eh?

But the same works both ways. Americans involved with the Guadalcanal campaign formulated Maoist-sounding ideas for holding the Solomons. Allies such as Winston Churchill’s Great Britain preferred that the United States do as little in the possible in the Pacific theater—thus shunting the overwhelming bulk of manpower, hardware and other resources into the European theater and speeding the Grand Alliance along its road to victory. Skeptics branded Admiral King’s Pacific strategy “defensive-offensive,” evidently as a term of derision. Yet his logic was sound, and Mao would have grasped it immediately: hold if you must, wage offense as soon as you can.

Gen. Alexander Vandegrift, who oversaw ground combat on Guadalcanal during its earliest, most grueling phase, likewise hit on a notion he termed “active defense.” Once U.S. Marine defenders had withstood the shock of early Japanese efforts to wrest back Henderson Field, and once American convoys had replenished manpower and war materiel on Guadalcanal, General Vandegrift started mixing offensive tactical forays into his predominantly defensive posture. The result: a hybrid form of defense that wore down a formidable, resolute foe, enabling U.S. forces to hold the airfield—America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Solomons. Mao would recognize and applaud Vandegrift’s operational artistry.

Lesson three: let’s not overstate the disparity between Eastern and Western ways of war. The great Michael Handel counsels that the differences are largely illusory, and that a universal logic of strategy transcends civilizations, ideologies and historical epochs. Not just Mao but King and Vandegrift fashioned virtually identical strategies for the weaker combatant. So, for that matter, did Julian S. Corbett. Such parallelism is no mere accident.

Guadalcanal, then, teaches that lesser priorities can upstage operations in ostensibly more pressing theaters of conflict. Strategists constantly evaluate and reevaluate their relative importance. The campaign also reminds us that strategists don’t vary radically from place to place or time to time. Not bad for a seventy-five-year-old fight over seemingly worthless ground.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). He recently deployed to the Pacific with Carrier Strike Group 9, embarked in USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

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James Holmes

History, Asia

Tokyo could have decided not to attack America, but instead found another way to avoid or win the war.

Key point: A good look at history requires considering realistic alternative scenarios. Here is how tensions between Washington and Tokyo could have played out differently.

Suppose Robert E. Lee had laid hands on a shipment of AK-47s in 1864. How would American history have unfolded? Differently than it did, one imagines.

Historians frown on alt-history, and oftentimes for good reason. Change too many variables, and you veer speedily into fiction. The chain connecting cause to effect gets too diffuse to trace, and history loses all power to instruct. Change a major variable, especially in a fanciful way—for instance, positing that machine-gun-toting Confederates took the field against Ulysses S. Grant’s army at the Battle of the Wilderness—and the same fate befalls you. Good storytelling may teach little.

What if Japan had never attacked Pearl Harbor? Now that’s a question we can take on without running afoul of historical scruples. As long as we refrain from inserting nuclear-powered aircraft carriers sporting Tomcat fighters into our deliberations, at any rate.

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When studying strategy, we commonly undertake a self-disciplined form of alt-history. Indeed, our courses in Newport and kindred educational institutes revolve around it. That’s how we learn from historical figures and events. Military sage Carl von Clausewitz recommends—nay, demands—that students of strategy take this approach. Rigor, not whimsy, is the standard that guides ventures in Clausewitzian “critical analysis.” Strategists critique the course of action a commander followed while proposing alternatives that may have better advanced operational and strategic goals.

Debating strategy and operations in hindsight is how we form the habit of thinking critically about present-day enterprises. Critical analysis, maintains Clausewitz, is “not just an evaluation of the means actually employed, but of all possible means—which first have to be formulated, that is, invented. One can, after all, not condemn a method without being able to suggest a better alternative.” The Prussian sage, then, scorns Monday-morning quarterbacking.

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That demands intellectual self-discipline. “If the critic wishes to distribute praise or blame,” concludes Clausewitz, “he must certainly try to put himself exactly in the position of the commander; in other words, he must assemble everything the commander knew and all the motives that affected his decision, and ignore all that he could not or did not know, especially the outcome.” Critics know how a course of action worked out in retrospect. They must restrict themselves to what a commander actually knew in order to project some realistic alternative.

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It doesn’t take too much imagination to postulate alternative strategies for Imperial Japan. Indeed, eminent Japanese have themselves postulated alternatives. My favorite: the high naval command should have stuck to its pre-1941 playbook. The Pearl Harbor carrier raid was a latecomer to Japanese naval strategy, and it was the handiwork of one man, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Had Yamamoto declined to press the case for a Hawaiian strike, or had the high command rebuffed his entreaties, the Imperial Japanese Navy would have executed its longstanding strategy of “interceptive operations.”

In other words, it would have evicted U.S. forces from the Philippine Islands, seized Pacific islands and built airfields there, and employed air and submarine attacks to cut the U.S. Pacific Fleet down to size on its westward voyage to the Philippines’ relief. Interceptive operations would have culminated in a fleet battle somewhere in the Western Pacific. Japan would have stood a better chance of success had it done so. Its navy still would have struck American territory to open the war, but it would have done so in far less provocative fashion. In all likelihood, the American reaction would have proved more muted—and more manageable for Japan.

The Hollywood version of Yamamoto puts the result of Pearl Harbor well, prophesying in Tora! Tora! Tora! that “we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” That’s a rich—and rather Clausewitzian—way of putting it. Clausewitz defines a combatant’s strength as a product of capability and willpower. Yamamoto alludes to the United States’ vast industrial and natural resources, depicting America as a giant in waiting. He also foretells that the strike on Battleship Row will enrage that giant—goading him into mobilizing those resources in bulk to smite Japan.

Assaulting the Philippines may have awakened the sleeping giant—but it’s doubtful it would have left him in such a merciless mood. He would have been groggy. Here’s Clausewitz again: the “value of the political object” governs the “magnitude” and “duration” of the effort a belligerent mounts to obtain that political object. How much a belligerent wants its political goals, that is, dictates how many resources—lives, national treasure, military hardware—it invests in an endeavor, and how long it sustains the investment.

It pays a heavy price for goals it covets dearly. Lesser goals warrant lesser expenditures.

The Philippine Islands constituted a lesser goal. The archipelago constituted American territory, having been annexed in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the islands also lay on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from American shores. And they had been absent from daily headlines since the days when imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt wrangled publicly with anti-imperialists like Mark Twain about the wisdom of annexation. Americans reportedly had to consult their atlases on December 7 to find out where Pearl Harbor was located. The Philippines barely registered in the popular consciousness—full stop.

Regaining the Philippines, then, would have represented a political object commanding mediocre value at best—especially when full-blown war raged in Europe and adjoining waters, beckoning to an America that had been Eurocentric since its founding. Chances are that the U.S. effort in the Pacific would have remained wholly defensive. The U.S. leadership would have concentrated resources and martial energy in the Atlantic theater—keeping its prewar promise to allied leaders in deed as well as in spirit.

Bypassing the Hawaiian Islands, in short, would have spared Japan a world of hurt—as Admiral Yamamoto foresaw. Forbearance would have granted Tokyo time to consolidate its gains in the Western Pacific, and perhaps empowered Japan’s navy and army to hold those gains against the tepid, belated U.S. counteroffensive that was likely to come.

Now, let’s give Yamamoto his due as a maritime strategist. His strategy was neither reckless nor stupid. Japanese mariners were avid readers of the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, and going after the enemy fleet represents sound Mahanian doctrine. Crush the enemy fleet and you win “command of the sea.” Win maritime command and contested real estate dangles on the vine for you to pluck afterward.

And indeed, the Mahanian approach did pay off for the Imperial Japanese Navy—for a time. Japanese warriors ran wild for six months after Pearl Harbor, scooping up conquest after conquest. But a vengeful giant can regenerate strength given adequate time. As Yamamoto himself predicted, Japan could entertain “no expectation of success” if the war dragged on longer than six months or a year.

Doing less—or forswearing an effort entirely—always constitutes a viable strategic option. Doing nothing was an option Japan should have exercised rather than assail Pearl Harbor. That’s the lesson from alt-history.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

Beijing’s attempts to seize other countries’ territories cannot be allowed to stand.

Key point: China is building artificial islands and is claiming areas of ocean that belong to other countries. Will they get away with it?

It feels like 2014 again. That’s when it came to light that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had embarked on a seemingly quixotic project: manufacturing islands out of reefs and atolls in the South China Sea and then fortifying them to extend its sway vis-à-vis Southeast Asian rivals impertinent enough to insist on their maritime rights. The region was a fixture in headlines that year and into the next while Washington and Beijing traded barbs accusing each other of “militarizing” the situation.

This week the Trump administration renewed the controversy, issuing a revised “U.S. Position on Maritime Claims in the South China Sea.” In the key paragraph Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proclaimed that “the world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire. America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources, consistent with their rights and obligations under international law. We stand with the international community in defense of freedom of the seas and respect for sovereignty and reject any push to impose ‘might makes right’ in the South China Sea or the wider region.”

Now, empire is a freighted word for sure. Communist China defines itself in opposition to European and Japanese imperialism, a scourge CCP leaders decry for inflicting a “century of humiliation” on Asia’s leading power. Unsurprisingly, then, China’s embassy in Washington DC leapt to deny Pompeo’s accusation.

And indeed, the CCP is not seeking an empire in the South China Sea, strictly speaking. An empire exercises dominion over foreign territories from an imperial center. Beijing wants far more than a maritime empire. It covets ownership. It wants to make the South China Sea what Romans once called the Mediterranean Sea—namely mare liberum, or “our sea.”

CCP magnates make no effort to conceal their aims. Since 2009, in fact, officialdom has frankly and regularly avowed that its paramount goal is “indisputable sovereignty” within a “nine-dashed line” enclosing the vast majority of the South China Sea. This is an extravagant claim. Think about what sovereignty is. A sovereign government exercises a monopoly on the use of armed force within borders inscribed on the map. It ordains and others obey. The law of the sea, which proscribes national ownership of maritime space—with few, specific, and narrowly drawn exceptions, none of which justify Beijing’s claims—will be no more in the South China Sea if Xi Jinping & Co. get their way.

The waters and land features within the nine-dashed line will be Chinese territory.

And an awful precedent will have been set. Surrendering the South China Sea would embolden other coastal states to repeal the law of the sea by fiat if they felt strongly about offshore seas and possessed sufficient physical might to enforce their will. Hence Secretary Pompeo’s warning against letting the primeval principle that might makes right—that the strong seize what they want in international affairs and the weak accommodate themselves to the strong—prevail.

Freedom of the sea is a pressing interest for the United States and any seafaring society. It should be nonnegotiable.

But there are reasons apart from international law why Americans should care whether the Chinese Communist Party rules a faraway expanse of which they know little. First, access. As Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out a century ago, the paramount goal of maritime strategy is to ensure commercial, diplomatic, and military access to important trading regions such as East Asia. Commerce is king. Military access assures political access assures commercial access and the blessings trade brings. At the same time access is a crucial enabler for maritime strategy. Commerce generates wealth sufficient to fund a navy to protect commerce. Acquiescing in Beijing’s maritime claims would encumber freedom of movement for merchantmen and warships—threatening to interrupt this virtuous cycle and hurt American prosperity.

It’s never a good time to put prosperity at hazard. Doing so in a pandemic year—a year rife with economic uncertainty—would amount to strategic malpractice. What happens in Southeast Asia has direct implications for Americans.

Second, geopolitics. If U.S. foreign policy has aimed at securing commercial access since the age of Mahan, it also aims at keeping the “rimlands” of East Asia and Western Europe from falling under the dominion of some hostile power or alliance. North America occupies a fortunate geographic position, buffered against Eurasian enmities by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. If some geopolitical competitor unified one of the rimlands under its rule, however, it might wrest away martial resources sufficient to reach out across the ocean and do the United States harm in its own hemisphere.

To keep the rimlands fragmented among competing powers and hold danger at bay, U.S. diplomats and seafarers have to be able to get to the rimlands. Consequently, the U.S. Navy, affiliated joint forces, and allied military services must rule what geopolitics sage Nicholas Spykman termed the “girdle of marginal seas” adjoining the Eurasian perimeter. The South China Sea figures prominently among these marginal waterways—and thus to America’s rimlands strategy. Washington cannot let it go.

And third, friends and allies. The United States has no strategic position in the Western Pacific without local partners and the harbors and bases they supply. It must keep its commitments to treaty allies such as the Philippine Islands lest they resign themselves to Chinese Communist supremacy and close their soil to U.S. forces. America could find itself locked out of the region. Its commercially and geopolitically driven foreign policy would falter as a result. Manila is a primary target of CCP abuse in the South China Sea, having seen waters apportioned to it under the law of the sea purloined by China’s maritime militia, coast guard, and navy. Deterring new aggression while reversing past transgressions must be central to U.S. strategy.

Clearly, then, failing to honor longstanding security guarantees to the Philippines and other allies would place U.S. foreign policy and strategy in jeopardy in manifold ways. If Americans prefer a world of wealth and safety, they have ample reason to take an interest in Southeast Asian affairs. Abandoning the region to a Roman fate risks sacrificing our own future.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. The views voiced here are his alone. This appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

There is no room for hubris when planning for (and attempting to win) a war.

Key point: Ignoring, disparaging, and looking down on your enemies does feel good. But it creates blindspots and prevents you from seriously planning for the worst.

Admirals say the darnedest things. Over at the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, retired U.S. Pacific Command Intelligence Chief Capt. Jim Fanell takes PACOM kahunas, past and present, to task for disparaging China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Respect for prospective foes, proclaims Captain Fanell, constitutes the most prudent attitude.

Such counsel is evergreen.

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Military folk must beware of hubris, the worst of all strategic habits. As ancient Greeks warned, hubris begets nemesis, meaning divine retribution. It’s insidious—especially for a force like the U.S. Navy. After all, it’s been twenty-six years since the Cold War. Few sailors or naval aviators now in uniform have known anything except American maritime supremacy. Such a historical interlude can give rise to triumphalism that taints assessments of rising challengers.

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Last month, for instance, erstwhile PACOM commander Adm. Dennis Blair told a naval conference that China’s military has failed to amass “maritime and air superiority” and thus cannot degrade American deterrence or treaty commitments in the Far East. Around the same time, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, current PACOM supremo, Adm. Harry Harris, likened comparing PLAN and U.S. Navy submarines to “comparing a Model T with a Corvette.”

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The impression conveyed in both instances: nothing to worry about here, move along.

Fanell takes exception to these statements on two grounds. First, that disparaging the PLAN flouts the reality of mounting Chinese martial prowess and material capability. And second, that insinuating the PLAN isn’t battleworthy betrays a political tin ear. Pooh-poohing the challenge damps congressional and popular support for the larger U.S. Navy that the Trump administration and Navy leaders have been pushing. Thus, the admirals convey a false impression of China’s navy and then compound that error by sapping political support for rebuilding the U.S. Navy.

This amounts to self-defeating conduct on naval potentates’ part. After all, if China’s navy remains little more than a nuisance, as not just admirals but learned commentators sometimes say, why should lawmakers fund a pricey naval buildup to counter it?

Let’s take Fanell’s points in turn, starting with Admiral Blair. By “maritime superiority,” Blair presumably means “sea control,” the usual term. My colleague, professor Milan Vego, defines sea control as “one’s ability to use a given part of the ocean/sea and the associated air (space) for military and nonmilitary purposes and to deny the same to the enemy in a time of open hostilities.”

U.S. Air Force doctrine, meanwhile, depicts “air superiority” as “that degree of control of the air by one force that permits the conduct of its operations at a given time and place without prohibitive interference from air and missile threats.” It may be “localized in space and time,” or “broad and enduring.”

The common denominator is physical space. Sea control and air superiority connote imposing enough control of physical space to fulfill one’s purposes while preventing a foe from fulfilling its purposes.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Blair has it right and China’s military can’t wrest sea or air superiority from the U.S. military and its partners—even in China’s own environs. Isn’t it reasonable to conclude that an inferior PLAN cannot degrade American deterrence or security guarantees?

Well, no. By deploying even lesser forces with skill and dexterity, PLA commanders can sow doubt among U.S. allies fearful of being abandoned to the wrath of Asia’s would-be hegemon.

Henry Kissinger’s workmanlike formula for deterrence constitutes a serviceable formula for reassurance as well. Deterrence, writes Kissinger, is a product of three variables: “power, the will to use it, and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor.” All three are critical. And because “deterrence is a product of those factors and not a sum,” deterrence drops to zero if any one variable does.

Deterrence, then, is about fielding formidable capabilities and mustering the moxie to use them. Capability and willpower represent the two basic components of strength for any combatant. But deterrence comes down to making the antagonist a believer in one’s capability and resolve. The most musclebound, most stalwart competitor cannot deter an unbeliever.

The same goes for reassurance except the target audience is different. An ally must convince its partners that it is strong and resolute enough to uphold its security guarantees. If an ally comes to doubt a fellow ally’s power, or an allied leaders’ gumption to use it, then the consortium could falter or fall through altogether. Unbelief could seep into friendly capitals.

So how can China implant doubt in U.S. allies’ minds if the PLA still holds a weaker hand? Simple: it can execute its longstanding strategy of anti-access and area denial—a strategy premised on persuading U.S. leaders that they cannot win a Pacific war at a cost they’re willing to pay.

As strategic grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz observes, the value a combatant affixes to its political aims determines how many resources it invests to attain those aims, and how long it keeps up the investment. How badly that combatant wants its goals, in other words, determines how lavishly it spends on them, and for how long. If an East Asian venture’s price tag is too high—or if China’s armed forces can drive it too high—U.S. leaders may conclude the venture isn’t worth the expense.

If so, Clausewitz would counsel them to forego it.

China, consequently, doesn’t need to command sea or sky, either partially or wholly, to prevail in a trial of arms—let alone to deter in peacetime. It only needs to convince Washington, DC the price of, say, defending the Senkaku Islands is too steep considering the meager value Americans attach to the archipelago.

Beijing can ask, sotto voce: how many American lives, and how many aircraft carriers, destroyers, or fighter aircraft, is a group of uninhabited islets worth to you? If the PLA can plausibly threaten to inflict costs greater than that outlay, then U.S. leaders may do the Clausewitzian thing and abjure the effort. In light of that possibility, Tokyo could come to question whether Washington will really keep its pledge to defend the Senkaku Islands.

Doubt would have been sowed, and the U.S.-Japan alliance would have wavered—all without Chinese forces’ seizing maritime or air superiority through combat. This is the logic of anti-access and area denial. The weak need not prevail on oceanic battlegrounds. They only need to prevail in their enemies’ minds, skewing cost/benefit calculations to China’s benefit. So it is China that could deter—and loosen U.S.-led alliances in the bargain.

Blair’s blithe dismissal of Chinese military power scants all of this.

Now for Admiral Harris. As Jim Fanell notes, comparing Chinese with American submarines misleads. PLAN commanders envision using diesel boats to ambush oncoming U.S. Pacific Fleet surface forces in times of war, elevating the costs of entry into the Western Pacific. Kilo- or Yuan-class boats will blast away with anti-ship cruise missiles, exacting as high a toll as they can. Undersea warfare, then, represents one of the pillars of China’s anti-access strategy.

Yet the PLAN submarine fleet is not a fleet meant for fighting other submarines. That’s why Admiral Harris’s quip deceives. One of these things is not like the other. Boat-for-boat comparisons reveal little.

Now, U.S. Navy nuclear-powered attack boats (SSNs) would hunt PLAN submarines should war come, and they indeed embody the state of the art. They are also few—and dwindling—in numbers, and they carry only short-range armament. Indeed, American boats must get within about ten nautical miles to launch their torpedoes. Swing a circle with a ten-nautical-mile radius around a point on your map of the Pacific Ocean. That’s the area where a U.S. Navy submarine cruising at that point can strike. You’ll notice that area is microscopic amid the ocean’s empty vastness.

Will U.S. anti-submarine forces really—as Harris implies—make short work of silent-running PLAN diesel boats dispersed for picket duty within this broad expanse? Color me skeptical.

So U.S. Navy SSNs may be Corvettes relative to PLAN Model Ts, but it may not matter much. Primitive implements can do many jobs. The Corvette is an artisanal vehicle, manufactured in small batches for well-heeled sports-car enthusiasts. The Model T was an inexpensive automobile mass-produced for Americans shopping on a budget. And yet both vehicles got drivers and passengers from point A to point B at acceptable speeds and in acceptable comfort for their day.

Now transpose Harris’s analogy to naval warfare. Long-term strategic competition involves competing on the cheap while goading competitors into competing at exorbitant cost. Is the U.S. Navy competing cost-effectively? Well, the latest-model Chevy Corvette Z06 runs over $80,000. One imagines some carmaker could put the 1927-vintage Ford Model T back into production for a minuscule fraction of that (assuming there was a market for creaky low-tech vehicles).

Similarly, a Virginia-class SSN sets back the U.S. Navy some $2.7 billion. Beijing divulges few details about how much platforms or weaponry cost, but the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force can acquire a Soryu-class diesel sub for about $540 million, one-fifth of the sticker price of the Virginia’s class. The Japanese boat is a rough counterpart to PLAN diesel boats, so use it as a yardstick. If China can purchase five submarines that meet its needs for the same price the United States can purchase one, then who’s competing more efficiently and effectively?

Which brings us to a basic point: “good enough” constitutes the standard of excellence for military hardware. If China’s navy can execute its strategy with an armada of Model Ts while the U.S. Navy bankrupts itself struggling to procure enough Corvettes, then who gets the last laugh? The answer is far from obvious. Practitioners of competitive strategies—the art of competing at low cost to oneself and high cost to rivals—would applaud the miser while fretting over the spendthrift’s prospects.

American seafarers, accordingly, had better heed Fanell’s critique. We should respect a potential foe able to make do with Model Ts, not scoff at it. That’s an adversary well equipped to compete over the long haul. Heck, if it’s smart, then the U.S. Navy might afford China the sincerest form of flattery—and kick the tires on some Model Ts itself.

James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.