The National Interest

Robert Kozinets

Politics, Americas

Both support for socialism and attacks on it appear to be on the rise.

The word “socialism” has become a trigger word in U.S. politics, with both positive and negative perceptions of it split along party lines.

But what does socialism actually mean to Americans? Although surveys can ask individuals for responses to questions, they don’t reveal what people are saying when they talk among themselves.

As a social media scholar, I study conversations “in the wild” in order to find out what people are actually saying to one another. The method I developed is called netnography and it treats online posts as discourse – a continuing dialogue between real people – rather than as quantifiable data.

As part of an ongoing study on technology and utopia, I read through more than 14,000 social media comments posted on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube in 2018 and 2019. They came from 9,155 uniquely named posters.

What I found was both shocking and heartening.

Loyalty and Fear

Both support for socialism and attacks on it appear to be on the rise.

Socialism can mean different things to people. Some see it as a system that institutionalizes fairness and citizen rights, bringing higher levels of social solidarity; others focus on heavy-handed government control of free markets that work more effectively when left alone. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, emphasized the right to quality health care, education, a good job with a living wage, affordable housing and a clean environment in a 2019 speech.

A 2019 Gallup Poll found that 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of socialism – up from about 20% in 2010; 57% view it negatively.

Prominent elected “democratic socialist” officials include six Chicago City Council members, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.

These and other advocates point to a version of socialism called the “Nordic model,” seen in countries like Denmark, which provide high-quality social services such as health care and education while fostering a strong economy.

Critics call socialism anti-American and charge that it undermines free enterprise and leads to disaster, often using the unrealistically extreme example of Venezuela.

President Trump has portrayed socialists as radical, lazy, America-hating communists. His son, Donald Trump Jr., has posted tweets ridiculing socialism.

During the 2020 election season, Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised that his party could win by being a firewall against socialism. He was on point: Fear of socialism may have been a reason why the Republicans gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

A ‘Tug of Words’

Although I wasn’t initially looking for posts on socialism or capitalism, I found plenty of them in my online investigation. Many were what I call a “tug of words” in which people asserted which system was better. People from opposite ends of the political spectrum made pithy observations, posted one-liners or launched strong, emotionally worded broadsides. There was often little dialogue – those who posted were shouting at each other as if using a megaphone.

I also found a large number of short, nonconversational, megaphone-like posts on visual social media like Instagram and Pinterest.

But some people were more circumspect. While they were often reactive or one-sided, they raised questions. For example, people questioned whether business bailouts, grants, lobbying or special tax treatment showed that capitalism’s “free markets” weren’t actually all that free.

And some considered what “socialism” actually means to people, linking that meaning to race, nationality and class.

Overcoming Primitive ‘Isms’

Amid all the sound and fury of people shouting from their virtual soapboxes, there were also the calmer voices of those engaging in deeper discussions. These people debated socialism, capitalism and free markets in relation to health care, child care, minimum wage and other issues that affected their lives.

One YouTube discussion explored the notion that we should stop viewing everything “through the primitive lens of the nonsensical ‘isms’ – capitalism, socialism, communism – which have no relevance in a sustainable or socially just and peaceful world.”

Other discussions united both left and right by asserting that the real problem was corruption in the system, not the system itself. Some used social media to try to overcome the ideological blinders of partisan politics. For example, they argued that raising the minimum wage or improving education might be sensible management strategies that could help the economy and working Americans at the same time.

New Forum for Discussions

As America’s post-election divisions fester, my work gives me reason for hope. It shows that some Americans – still a small minority, mind you – are thoughtfully using popular social media platforms to have meaningful discussions. What I have provided here is just a small sample of the many thoughtful conversations I encountered.

My analysis of social media doesn’t deny that many people are angry and polarized over social systems. But it has revealed that a significant number of people recognize that labels like socialism, free markets and capitalism have become emotional triggers, used by some journalists and politicians to manipulate, incite and divide.

To unify and move forward together, we may need to better understand the sites and discussion formats that facilitate this kind of thoughtful discourse. If partisans retreat to echo chamber platforms like Parler and Rumble, will these kinds of intelligent conversations between people with diverse viewpoints cease?

As Americans confront the financial challenges of a pandemic, automation, precarious employment and globalization, providing forums where we can discuss divergent ideas in an open-minded rather than an ideological way may make a critical difference to the solutions we choose. Many Americans are already using digital platforms to discuss options, rather than being frightened away by – or attacking – the tired old socialist bogeyman.

Robert Kozinets, Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair in Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

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

Image: Reuters.

Robert Beckhusen

Military History, Europe

It was the first time the Canal Defense Light saw combat.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Canal Defense Light was extremely bright at some 13 million candlepower — far surpassing the U.S. Army’s “ambush light” deployed in Vietnam.

In March 1945, the rapidly advancing U.S. Army’s 9th Armored Division — to its surprise — found itself at Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagan; one of the two surviving bridges into the heart of Germany. The bridge was a considerable prize and its capture would shorten the war. The Germans, desperate to stop the offensive, threw everything that had at the bridge in repeated attempts to destroy it.

German troops rigged the Ludendorff Bridge with explosives, which only partially detonated — failing to bring down the structure. Ground attacks, artillery and a 24-inch super-heavy Karl-Gerät mortar also failed. U.S. troops even captured a barge full of German soldiers carrying explosives as they floated down the river toward the bridge.

Finally, and incorrectly believing the bridge had been destroyed, German commando Otto Skorzeny ordered Waffen SS frogmen to float down the river using oil drums, with their objective to blow up a nearby pontoon bridge. Along the way, beams from extremely bright Canal Defense Lights attached to American M3 Grant tanks illuminated the group — exposing them to U.S. fire which killed two frogmen. U.S. troops captured three others.

It was the first time the Canal Defense Light saw combat. The term “Canal Defense Light” itself was an odd one for giant lamp attached to a battle tank, but that was deliberate — an anodyne-sounding codename to confuse spies. First developed by Greek inventor Marcel Mitzakis, the British War Office took interest, ordering 300 lights for trials beginning in 1940.

Recommended: America Has Military Options for North Korea (but They're All Bad)

Recommended: 1,700 Planes Ready for War: Everything You Need To Know About China's Air Force

Recommended: Stealth vs. North Korea’s Air Defenses: Who Wins?

The actual devices themselves used a series of mirrors to reflect a powerful arc-light beam through narrow slit — making them challenging to disable with fire.

The British first used Matilda II tanks for the lights, and later, twin-cannon M3 Grant tanks supplied under Lend-Lease. Mitzakis derived the idea with Royal Navy Cmdr. Oscar De Thoren, inspired by naval searchlights. Their connection to the British military industry came through J.F.C. Fuller, an occultist-inspired military theorist and proponent of psychological warfare whose fascist sympathies later precluded him from the war effort.

The Canal Defense Light was extremely bright at some 13 million candlepower — far surpassing the U.S. Army’s “ambush light” deployed in Vietnam. The M3 Tanks with the blinding illuminators came to be known as CDL Tanks or “Gizmos,” with the CDL inside a rebuilt turret. One advantage of using the Grant tanks is that the tank’s main 75-millimeter cannon sat in the hull, allowing it to keep its main weapon.

The War Illustrated, a popular war-era magazine, reported that the lights did not live up to all of their promises. But they still had their uses — if they only saw limited service and only late in the war. During the crossing of the Rhine, CDL Tanks helped blind German defenses on the east bank of the river.

When C.D.L. tanks were used to light up a wide front they could turn night into local day and thus enable the pursuit of a defeated enemy to continue throughout the 24 hours. The aimed fire-power of the tanks themselves, even if not augmented by infantry, ordinary tanks and artillery, was impressive: direction-keeping on a night advance or assault was greatly facilitated and might prove decisive against an enemy on the run.

The U.S. military later ordered CDL Tanks for the invasion of Okinawa, but they arrived too late to participate in the battle and saw no further action.

This article originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Michael Peck

Security,

Pro-Russian media claims so.

Here's What You Need to Know: More than circumstantial evidence is needed to give the claims any credence.

Did a Russian anti-aircraft missile hit one of Israel’s new F-35 stealth fighters?

Pro-Russian media claimed that an Israeli F-35I was hit and damaged by a Russian-made S-200 surface-to-air missile during an Israeli air strike in Syria back in 2017. Israel says one of its F-35s was damaged—after colliding with a bird.

The story begins on October 16, when Israel announced that its aircraft had struck a Syrian SAM battery near Damascus that had fired two hours earlier on Israeli reconnaissance planes flying over Lebanon. The attack damaged the missile battery, and no Israeli aircraft were hit, according to Israel. Coincidentally or not, the incident happened the same day that Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, arrived in Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

However, Southfront.org, a website that covers the Russian military and its intervention in the Syrian Civil War, suggested a different story. “According to the available information, the Syrian Defense Forces used a S-200 missile against the Israeli warplane,” Southfront claimed.

Southfront could not resist pointing out that a much-vaunted F-35 stealth fighter had been hit by a missile that dates back to the 1960s. “This Soviet-made missile is the most advanced long range anti-aircraft system operated by the Syrian military. Even in this case, it’s old-fashioned in terms of modern warfare.”

However, the evidence cited by Southfront seems rather tenuous. Hours after the Israeli military announced the strike on the Syrian missile battery, Israeli media reported that an Israeli F-35 had been damaged by a bird strike two weeks before (Google translation here). The plane reportedly landed safely, but the Israeli Air Force did admit that it wasn’t sure whether the plane will fly again. Israel has taken delivery of only seven F-35Is so far, with a total of fifty on order.

“The incident allegedly took place ‘two weeks ago’ but was publicly reported only on October 16,” Southfront noted. “However, Israeli sources were not able to show a photo of the F-35 warplane after the ‘bird collision.’”

Southfront didn’t explain why the Israeli Air Force would feel a need to release a photo of a damaged stealth aircraft. As U.S. defense website The Drive points out, the F-35 is just entering Israeli service now, and wouldn’t likely be flying missions over Syria just yet unless there was some kind of emergency (and Israel has plenty of F-15s and F-16s to handle those right now). Nor is it optimized for the kind of photographic reconnaissance missions that Israel flies over Lebanon.

As The Drive summed up rather neatly, “Although we cannot rule the possibility out entirely, as Freud would say—sometimes a bird strike is just a bird strike.”

In any event, what’s most interesting about this story isn’t whether an F-35 was hit by a Russian missile. Like the existence of UFOs, the story may or not be true, but we need more than circumstantial evidence to give it any credence.

No, the interesting part is that the F-35 has become such a symbol of U.S. technological prowess—or incompetence—that any rumor that an F-35 has been damaged or shot down in combat will draw attention. Russia and its boosters will pounce on any suggestion that an F-35 has been hit, and no doubt the pro- F-35 crowd will counter those suggestions accordingly.

Already there are reports—again, just reports—that Israeli F-35s have flown combat missions. Given that the U.S. and Israeli air forces are among the most active in the world, sooner or later the F-35 will really, truly see combat. But the rumors are out there now.

This is just the beginning.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Embassy Jerusalem

Marc Zimmer

Science, World

AlphaFold and its offspring will certainly change the way computational chemists work, but it won’t make them redundant.

Takeaways

• A “deep learning” software program from Google-owned lab DeepMind showed great progress in solving one of biology’s greatest challenges – understanding protein folding.

• Protein folding is the process by which a protein takes its shape from a string of building blocks to its final three-dimensional structure, which determines its function.

• By better predicting how proteins take their structure, or “fold,” scientists can more quickly develop drugs that, for example, block the action of crucial viral proteins.

Solving what biologists call “the protein-folding problem” is a big deal. Proteins are the workhorses of cells and are present in all living organisms. They are made up of long chains of amino acids and are vital for the structure of cells and communication between them as well as regulating all of the chemistry in the body.

This week, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind demonstrated a deep-learning program called AlphaFold2, which experts are calling a breakthrough toward solving the grand challenge of protein folding.

Proteins are long chains of amino acids linked together like beads on a string. But for a protein to do its job in the cell, it must “fold” – a process of twisting and bending that transforms the molecule into a complex three-dimensional structure that can interact with its target in the cell. If the folding is disrupted, then the protein won’t form the correct shape – and it won’t be able to perform its job inside the body. This can lead to disease – as is the case in a common disease like Alzheimer’s, and rare ones like cystic fibrosis.

Deep learning is a computational technique that uses the often hidden information contained in vast datasets to solve questions of interest. It’s been used widely in fields such as games, speech and voice recognition, autonomous cars, science and medicine.

I believe that tools like AlphaFold2 will help scientists to design new types of proteins, ones that may, for example, help break down plastics and fight future viral pandemics and disease.

I am a computational chemist and author of the book The State of Science. My students and I study the structure and properties of fluorescent proteins using protein-folding computer programs based on classical physics.

After decades of study by thousands of research groups, these protein-folding prediction programs are very good at calculating structural changes that occur when we make small alterations to known molecules.

But they haven’t adequately managed to predict how proteins fold from scratch. Before deep learning came along, the protein-folding problem seemed impossibly hard, and it seemed poised to frustrate computational chemists for many decades to come.

Protein Folding

The sequence of the amino acids – which is encoded in DNA – defines the protein’s 3D shape. The shape determines its function. If the structure of the protein changes, it is unable to perform its function. Correctly predicting protein folds based on the amino acid sequence could revolutionize drug design, and explain the causes of new and old diseases.

All proteins with the same sequence of amino acid building blocks fold into the same three-dimensional form, which optimizes the interactions between the amino acids. They do this within milliseconds, although they have an astronomical number of possible configurations available to them – about 10 to the power of 300. This massive number is what makes it hard to predict how a protein folds even when scientists know the full sequence of amino acids that go into making it. Previously predicting the structure of protein from the amino acid sequence was impossible. Protein structures were experimentally determined, a time-consuming and expensive endeavor.

Once researchers can better predict how proteins fold, they’ll be able to better understand how cells function and how misfolded proteins cause disease. Better protein prediction tools will also help us design drugs that can target a particular topological region of a protein where chemical reactions take place.

AlphaFold is Born from Deep-Learning Chess, Go and Poker Games

The success of DeepMind’s protein-folding prediction program, called AlphaFold, is not unexpected. Other deep-learning programs written by DeepMind have demolished the world’s best chess, Go and poker players.

In 2016 Stockfish-8, an open-source chess engine, was the world’s computer chess champion. It evaluated 70 million chess positions per second and had centuries of accumulated human chess strategies and decades of computer experience to draw upon. It played efficiently and brutally, mercilessly beating all its human challengers without an ounce of finesse. Enter deep learning.

On Dec. 7, 2017, Google’s deep-learning chess program AlphaZero thrashed Stockfish-8. The chess engines played 100 games, with AlphaZero winning 28 and tying 72. It didn’t lose a single game. AlphaZero did only 80,000 calculations per second, as opposed to Stockfish-8’s 70 million calculations, and it took just four hours to learn chess from scratch by playing against itself a few million times and optimizing its neural networks as it learned from its experience.

AlphaZero didn’t learn anything from humans or chess games played by humans. It taught itself and, in the process, derived strategies never seen before. In a commentary in Science magazine, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote that by learning from playing itself, AlphaZero developed strategies that “reflect the truth” of chess rather than reflecting “the priorities and prejudices” of the programmers. “It’s the embodiment of the cliché ‘work smarter, not harder.’”

CASP – the Olympics for Molecular Modelers

Every two years, the world’s top computational chemists test the abilities of their programs to predict the folding of proteins and compete in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.

In the competition, teams are given the linear sequence of amino acids for about 100 proteins for which the 3D shape is known but hasn’t yet been published; they then have to compute how these sequences would fold. In 2018 AlphaFold, the deep-learning rookie at the competition, beat all the traditional programs – but barely.

Two years later, on Monday, it was announced that Alphafold2 had won the 2020 competition by a healthy margin. It whipped its competitors, and its predictions were comparable to the existing experimental results determined through gold standard techniques like X-ray diffraction crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Soon I expect AlphaFold2 and its progeny will be the methods of choice to determine protein structures before resorting to experimental techniques that require painstaking, laborious work on expensive instrumentation.

One of the reasons for AlphaFold2’s success is that it could use the Protein Database, which has over 170,000 experimentally determined 3D structures, to train itself to calculate the correctly folded structures of proteins.

The potential impact of AlphaFold can be appreciated if one compares the number of all published protein structures – approximately 170,000 – with the 180 million DNA and protein sequences deposited in the Universal Protein Database. AlphaFold will help us sort through treasure troves of DNA sequences hunting for new proteins with unique structures and functions.

Has AlphaFold Made Me, a Molecular Modeler, Redundant?

As with the chess and Go programs – AlphaZero and AlphaGo – we don’t exactly know what the AlphaFold2 algorithm is doing and why it uses certain correlations, but we do know that it works.

Besides helping us predict the structures of important proteins, understanding AlphaFold’s “thinking” will also help us gain new insights into the mechanism of protein folding.

One of the most common fears expressed about AI is that it will lead to large-scale unemployment. AlphaFold still has a significant way to go before it can consistently and successfully predict protein folding.

However, once it has matured and the program can simulate protein folding, computational chemists will be integrally involved in improving the programs, trying to understand the underlying correlations used, and applying the program to solve important problems such as the protein misfolding associated with many diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease.

AlphaFold and its offspring will certainly change the way computational chemists work, but it won’t make them redundant. Other areas won’t be as fortunate. In the past robots were able to replace humans doing manual labor; with AI, our cognitive skills are also being challenged.

Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut College

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

Image: Reuters.

WarIsBoring

Security,

The ship would have been a nightmare for the U.S. Navy.

Here's What You Need to Know: Russia's Ulyanovsk is a tantalizing “almost” of history.

Had she ever sailed, the Soviet supercarrier Ulyanovsk would have been a naval behemoth more than 1,000 feet long, with an 85,000-ton displacement and enough storage to carry an air group of up to 70 fixed and rotary wing aircraft.

With a nuclear-powered engine—and working in conjunction with other Soviet surface warfare vessels and submarines—the supercarrier would have steamed through the oceans with a purpose.

Namely, to keep the U.S. Navy away from the Motherland’s shores.

But the Ulyanovsk is a tantalizing “almost” of history. Moscow never finished the project, because it ran out of money. As the Cold War ended, Russia plunged into years of economic hardship that made building new ships impossible.

The Ulyanovsk died in the scrap yards in 1992. But now the Kremlin is spending billions of rubles modernizing its military—and wants a new supercarrier to rival the United States.

Big Goals, Bad Timing:

Builders laid the keel for the Ulyanovsk in 1988, just as the Soviet empire began to break apart. The ship was such a large project that builders wouldn’t have finished her until the mid ’90s.

Construction took place at the Black Sea Shipyard in Ukraine—often called Nikolayev South Shipyard 444. It’s an old facility, dating back to the 18th century when Prince Grigory Potemkin signed orders in 1789 authorizing new docks to repair Russian naval vessels damaged during the Russo-Turkish War.

The famous Russian battleship Potemkin—scene of the famous 1905 naval mutiny and the subject of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film—launched from the same shipyard.

Early in the Soviet period, the shipyard constructed battleships. During the ’60s and ’70s, workers built Moskva-class helicopter carriers and Kiev-class carriers at South Shipyard 444.

But none of these ships came close to the Ulyanovsk.

Named after Vladimir Lenin’s hometown, everything about the supercarrier was huge, even by Russian standards.

Her propulsion system would have comprised four KN-3 nuclear reactors, a model originally used to power enormous Kirov-class battlecruisers, such as the heavy guided-missile cruiser Frunze. Ulyanovsk could have easily reached 30 knots while under way.

The carrier would have carried at least 44 fighters on board—a combination of Su-33 and MiG-29 attack jets configured for carrier operations. Ulyanovsk’s two steam catapults, ski-jump and four sets of arresting cables would have created a bustling flight deck.

The ship’s designers planned three elevators—each capable of carrying 50 tons—to move aircraft to and from the cavernous hanger deck. Plus, the carrier would have had helicopters for search-and-rescue work and anti-submarine warfare missions.

The Soviets planned a complement of 3,400 sailors—roughly half of the crew aboard an American Nimitz-class carrier, but sizable compared to other Soviet vessels.

Why Build It?:

That the Soviets even wanted a supercarrier was remarkable. The massive ships have never figured significantly in the Soviet or Russian naval inventory.

Currently, Russia has only one carrier—the significantly smaller Admiral Kuznetsov—launched in 1985. Multiple mechanical problems have plagued the ship ever since, and she doesn’t go anywhere without an accompanying tug vessel.

But there was a logic behind the Ulyanovsk. James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, explained that the Soviets wanted to create a defensive “blue belt” in their offshore waters.

The “blue belt” was a combination of land, sea and air power that would work together to thwart U.S. carrier and submarine forces. Russia could defend the homeland while providing safe patrol areas for ballistic-missile subs performing nuclear deterrent missions.

“Those ‘boomers’ need to disappear for weeks at a time into safe depths,” Holmes said. “Soviet supercarriers could have helped out with the air- and surface-warfare components of a blue-belt defense, chasing off U.S. Navy task forces that steamed into Eurasian waters.”

But pride and national honor also prompted the decision to build the Ulyanovsk.

“There’s also the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect to carrier development,” Holmes continued. “If the U.S. is the world superpower and the U.S.S.R. wants to keep pace, then Soviet leaders want the same toys to demonstrate that they’re keeping pace. It sounds childish, but there are basic human motives at work here.”

“It’s not all about the roles and missions carriers execute,” he said. “It’s about national destiny and dignity.”

But by the mid ’90s, Russian naval vessels were rusting at their moorings, sailors served without pay and the United States stepped in to help deactivate Soviet-era nuclear submarines and provide security for the Russian nuclear arsenal.

“The Soviets weren’t dumb,” Holmes explained. “They wouldn’t spend themselves into oblivion to keep up with the Joneses, and as a great land power, they obviously had enormous claims on their resources to fund the army and air force. There was only so much to go around for ‘luxury fleet’ projects.”

“Bottom line, if you can’t afford to keep the existing fleet at sea, where are you going to get the money to complete your first nuclear-powered supercarrier, a vessel that will demand even more manpower that you can’t afford?”

Moscow’s Military Rises Again…or Not?:

But Russia now seems willing to revive its supercarrier dream. “The navy will have an aircraft carrier,” Russian navy chief Adm. Viktor Chirkov recently said. “The research companies are working on it.”

Other Russian media reports indicate that designers are in the early phases of planning a new carrier class that would be slightly larger than the Nimitz class—and capable of holding an air wing of 100 planes.

But economic problems — including a looming recession — and the expense of maintaining and modernizing the rest of the nation’s aging fleet makes it doubtful whether Russia can build such an expensive ship.

Holmes estimates the cost of a new Russian carrier could be as much as $8.5 billion and take up to seven years to complete. But the professor also said the Russian quest for a carrier is serious.

Great nations have carriers, Russia considers itself a great nation, and therefore the ship would be a symbol of national revival and destiny. In other words, a new carrier would be one more reason to forget the bad old days when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

“We think of the Soviet Union as a dreary place, but Russians also remember that it wielded great power,” Holmes continued. “That’s a potent memory.”

For Moscow’s navy, the failure of the Ulyanovsk project is one of the biggest, baddest memories of them all.

This first appeared in 2015.

Image: Reuters

Christopher Miskimon, Warfare History Network

History, Asia

Largely ignored in the West, Japan and China fought a bloody large-scale battle for the city of Shanghai from July to November 1937.

Here's What You Need to Know: In 1937, the Battle of Shanghai foreshadowed the grim urban combat in the Great War that was to come.

The 1930s was a decade full of World War II’s antecedents. Fighting broke out at various points around the globe during this decade, and many consider the period to be a training ground for 1939-1945. In particular, fighting broke out between several nations in Asia; among these the fighting between Japan and China was no doubt the largest. It was a bloody and vicious series of conflicts that essentially bled into World War II.

China had mass going for it. The Chinese could raise large armies, but training, equipment and unity were lacking. The country also needed foreign advisors to have any hope of well-organized and planned operations. The Japanese were, with exceptions, better trained and uniformly equipped. Being a more homogeneous nation they were better able to field disciplined formations and generally acted with professionalism in their planning. However, they could not hope to match the Chinese in numbers.

Largely ignored in the West, Japan and China fought a horrible large-scale battle for the city of Shanghai from July to November 1937. Though it happened at times, urban combat was not the norm during this period; Shanghai proved a terrible exception and provided a taste of things to come for anyone who was paying attention.

The battle began with small skirmishes and riots between various Chinese elements and local Japanese in Shanghai, some civilian, some military, mostly Japanese marines based near the International Settlement. Longstanding enmity meant the situation would eventually boil into open fighting, and now it did. The Japanese occupied a fortified position and had to keep the road to the nearby consulate and Japanese portion of the Settlement open. The Chinese sent in several of their best trained divisions to push their hated foes out of the city before enemy reinforcement could pour in.

Unfortunately for them, most Chinese formations were not yet fully trained and their attacks, though fierce, were poorly coordinated between their infantry, artillery, and what little armor there was. The battle began before Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were fully prepared. The Japanese, though outnumbered, were well coordinated, and Imperial Navy ships on the Yangtze River did terrible damage with their guns. Overhead, each nation’s air force vied for supremacy, but over time superior Japanese experience paid off.

Originally Published February 6, 2019

This article by Christopher Miskimon originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Sebastien Roblin

Military History, Asia

The Barb sank seventeen ships totaling ninety-seven thousand tons of shipping according to the most conservative count. Other tallies are considerably higher.

Here's What You Need to Remember: At midnight on July 23, the Barb slipped up to within a kilometer of the shore, and a landing party commanded by Lt. William Walke, paddled quietly to the beach. While three men took up guard positions—they encountered a sleeping Japanese guard in a watchtower, whom they left unharmed—the other five buried the demolition charge and managed not blow themselves up jury-rigging the detonation circuit. They were furiously rowing back to the Barb when a second train passed.

In the closing months of World War II, heavy losses and depleted fuel stocks kept many of Japan’s remaining combat aircraft grounded and warships in port, awaiting an anticipated amphibious invasion. Starting in July 1945, Allied battleships embarked on a series of naval bombardments of coastal cities in Japan in an effort to draw these forces out to battle—with little success. However, a week before the battleships began lobbing their massive shells, a legendary U.S. submarine toting a rocket launcher began its own campaign of coastal terror that foretold the future of naval warfare—and also engaged in the only Allied ground-combat operation on Japanese home-island soil.

Recommended: The Colt Python: The Best Revolver Ever Made?

Recommended: Smith & Wesson 500: The Gun That Has As Much Firepower As a Rifle

Recommended: Smith & Wesson's .44 Magnum Revolver: Why You Should Fear the 'Dirty Harry' Gun

Submarines still made use of deck guns during World War II, most of them ranging between three and five inches in caliber. These were used to finish off unarmed merchant ships or sink smaller vessels that could evade torpedoes—but also were occasionally directed to bombard coastal targets, such as in early-war Japanese raids on the coasts of California and Australia. The problem was that a single gun was unlikely to inflict much damage in a short amount of time, and the submarines were highly vulnerable to air, sea and land attack as long as they remained surfaced.

In 1942, the German Kriegsmarine actually tested submarine rocket artillery that could be fired underwater, but gave up on the idea due to its impracticality. Rumors that Germany had modified their subs to launch V-2 ballistic missiles at the United States led to a vigorous and bloody submarine hunt in the closing weeks of World War II.

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, considered a much cruder solution: taking one of the Mark 51 rocket launchers it used on some of its LSM landing ships and strapping it to the main deck of a submarine. The twelve spin-stabilized 127-millimeter rockets mounted on the launch rack could only be fired while surfaced, and had a maximum range of three miles. However, a full volley could be ripple fired in the space of five seconds. The fixed launcher was unable to traverse, so the entire submarine had to turn to adjust the aim laterally.

Capt. Eugene Fluckey of the Gato-class submarine USS Barb volunteered his boat to try out the experimental rocket launcher in 1945. At the time, the Navy was actually testing the weapon’s viability as an anti-kamikaze weapon, but Fluckey managed to cajole the R&D staff into releasing the Mark 51 in time for his patrol, making the Barb the only rocket-launching submarine of the U.S. Navy in the conflict. You can check out footage of the rocket launcher on the Barb here.

The Barb, which displaced 2,400 tons submerged, was one of the top-scoring Allied submarines of World War II. By the most conservative count, it sank seventeen ships totaling ninety-seven thousand tons of shipping. Other tallies are considerably higher.

In January 1945, on his fourth patrol as commander of the Barb, Fluckey snuck his boat into the shallow waters off of Namakwan Harbor off the coast of China and torpedoed six ships before hightailing away, an action that earned him the Medal of Honor. Despite this exploit, Fluckey was concerned it would be difficult to find much enemy shipping on his fifth and last war patrol, so he was keen on being well equipped to attack targets on land.

The Barb set sail from its base in Midway on June 8 loaded with one hundred rockets. It arrived off the Japanese home islands on June 20. At 2:30 am on June 22, it surfaced off of the town of Shari in northeastern Hokkaido Island, unleashing a volley of twelve rockets into the slumbering community. It then sailed northward to the coast of Southern Sakhalin Island, then known as the Japanese prefecture of Karafuto. (All of Sakhalin is presently administered by Russia.)

Over the following month, the Barb expended sixty-eight rockets on Shikuka, Shoritori and Kashiho, mostly firing late at night at near-maximum range. She also used her four-inch deck gun to bombard the towns of Kaihyo To, Shibertori and Chiri. The attacks targeted civilian industrial sites, including a cannery, seal rookery, lumber yard, paper factory and several small shipyards, as well as a military radio, radar and lighthouse stations. When Japanese seaplanes began hunting the sub during the day, Fluckey retaliated with a volley of rockets aimed at the Shikuka military airfield. The Barb’s guns also destroyed more than three dozen civilian sampans, while its homing torpedoes took out local trawlers, tugboats and a few large merchant ships.   

The Barb’s most famous exploit did not involve those weapons. Observing trains passing along the Japanese coastline, Captain Fluckey hatched a scheme to dispatch a landing party to blow up one of the trains by burying the Barb’s fifty-five pound scuttling charge (essentially a self-destruct device) under the tracks. Rather than using a timer, the explosives would be jury-rigged only to blow when the pressure of a passing train completed the circuit, a trick Fluckey likened to a childhood walnut-cracking prank. A landing party of eight was selected on the basis of their unmarried status and membership in the Boy Scouts. Fluckey believed the scouts would have better pathfinding skills.

At midnight on July 23, the Barb slipped up to within a kilometer of the shore, and a landing party commanded by Lt. William Walke, paddled quietly to the beach. While three men took up guard positions—they encountered a sleeping Japanese guard in a watchtower, whom they left unharmed—the other five buried the demolition charge and managed not blow themselves up jury-rigging the detonation circuit. They were furiously rowing back to the Barb when a second train passed.

Fluckey described what happened next in his autobiography Thunder Below!: “The engine’s boilers blew, wreckage flew two hundred feet in the air in a flash of flame and smoke, cars piled up and rolled off the track in a writhing, twisting mass of wreckage.”

All sixteen train cars derailed, killing 150 passengers. The Barb’s crew added a train to the tally of enemy ships sunk on their battle flag. Its landing party had just performed what would be the only U.S. ground operation on the Japanese home islands during World War II. The Barb continued its rampage along the Sakhalin coastline through July 26 before returning safely back to its base in Midway Island on August 2.

The Barb’s raids on the Japanese coast—and even those performed by Allied battleships—were premised on the Japanese military’s inability, by 1945, to effectively defend the home-island coastlines, which included a lack of coastal-defense guns. Many of the casualties of the Barb’s attacks were likely civilians in largely undefended towns. On the other hand, targeting civilian merchant ships was a standard practice undertaken by all sides in World War II.

While the rockets the Barb employed appear to have been effective, it’s not clear that they were superior to having another deck gun. But within a decade of the Barb’s last mission, new rocket-based technologies in the form of guided cruise and ballistic missiles drastically reduced the relevance of big guns on warships or coastal defenses. The new weapons could be launched by a submerged submarine a long distance from the shore, safe from immediate retaliation.

Thus the Barb’s last rocket-laden patrol presaged the future of undersea warfare. Submarines, such as the enormous Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, which has a variant carrying 154 land-attack cruise missiles, can pose a threat even to a nation with a well-defended coastline. The Barb’s month-long seaside rampage will remain a unique incident for some time to come.

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

This first appeared last year. 

Image: WIkimedia Commons

Ethen Kim Lieser

Public Health, Americas

Thankfully none of the side effects last long or are especially bad.

Coronavirus vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna are considered to be very safe, with only 10 percent to 15 percent of volunteers during the trials reporting side effects that were “significantly noticeable,” according to Operation Warp Speed chief science advisor Dr. Moncef Slaoui.

He added that the side effects have the potential to last up to a day and a half and most had only reported redness and pain at the injection site, as well as fever, chills, muscle aches, and headaches.

“The longer, more important kind of adverse events such as some autoimmune disease or others have not been reported in a different way between the placebo group and the vaccine group in these two trials, which is very reassuring,” Slaoui said Tuesday during a video conversation with the Washington Post.

“I always make sure we say that (while) we know the short term and I’m going to call it midterm effects of the vaccine is now well understood, the very long-term safety is not yet understood by definition.”

Despite the lack of data regarding long-term side effects, he contended that it is important to get the vaccine doses deployed nationwide as soon as possible.

“It will be very important for the most susceptible parts of our population get these vaccines,” Slaoui said. “And we will be looking at the safety of these vaccines in real life through very elaborate … processes and report on it on an ongoing basis.”

The vaccine expert’s comments come as states are busy preparing to distribute the vaccine in as few as two weeks. Moderna and Pfizer both requested emergency use authorization for their respective vaccines last month.

The reviews by the Food and Drug Administration are expected to take several weeks—although the agency has scheduled a meeting for December 10 to discuss Pfizer’s request specifically.

On Tuesday, health-care personnel and residents of long-term care facilities were tabbed by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—an outside group of medical experts that advise the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—as the first groups that would have access to a coronavirus vaccine. Children and young adults are expected to get the vaccine last.

When an FDA-approved vaccine is eventually rolled out, another challenge likely awaits. A recent Gallup poll has revealed that only 58 percent of surveyed adults said that they would roll up their sleeves for a shot once a vaccine is approved. Similar results were seen in a Pew Research Center survey in September when nearly half of U.S. adults (49 percent) said they definitely or probably would not get a coronavirus vaccine at this time.

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

Image: Reuters.

Michael Peck

Security, Asia

The best answer is to look at what happened to Germany.

Here's What You Need to Know: Germany was not alone in its development of combat jets in World War II.

It is a fallacy that Germany was the only nation to develop combat jets in World War II. In truth, while Germany had the most advanced technology, all of the major powers had jet aircraft projects during World War II, including the United States, Britain, Russia, Italy and Japan.

The most well-known Japanese jet—and the only one that saw combat—was the Okha, a rocket-propelled and human-piloted kamikaze. But another Japanese jet actually flew before the war ended, and would have seen combat had it continued: the Nakajima Kikka.

Japanese scientists had actually studied jet engines as far back as the 1930s, despite little government support, and even a turbojet prototype by 1943. Tokyo also knew of German research due to Japanese observers who witnessed early tests of the legendary German Me-262 jet fighter in 1942, But it wasn't until the summer of 1944, when U.S. B-29 bombers began to pound Japan, that the Japanese Navy asked for the Kokoku Heiki No. 2, or Kikka ("orange blossom").

That the Kikka resembled an Me-262 is no coincidence—nor was it a matter of simple imitation. Japan's jet program was heavily derived from German research, but the aid was hardly straightforward. In July 1944, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering ordered that Japan be provided with blueprints for the Me-262, the Junkers Jumo 004 and BMW 003 turbojet engines, and even an actual Me-262 aircraft.

Yet the Japanese submarine carrying the plans from Germany to Japan was sunk by U.S. forces, though not before a Japanese envoy got off at Singapore with just a single cutaway drawing of the BMW 003 (arguably just as important as the blueprints for the Me-262, given that early jets were only as good as their unreliable engines). That was enough for Japanese engineers to build the Ne-20 turbojet, an engine that was superior to the homegrown Ne-12 that was originally supposed to power the Kikka.

There were two striking aspects to the Kikka. The most obvious is that it looks like a smaller version of the Me-262, though the similarities were mostly skin-deep. Unlike the German jet, the Kikka had straight instead of swept-back wings, which hampered its performance. The other striking aspect was that it was originally designed as a kamikaze. "In keeping with the shimpu [kamikaze] mission of the aircraft, the initial design had no landing gear and was to be launched from catapult ramps, boosted with RATO [rocket-assisted take off] units," writes aviation historian Edwin Dyer. "The calculated range was a mere 204km (127 miles) due to the designated engine, the Ne 12, which burned fuel at a rapid rate. At sea level the estimated speed was 639km/h (397mph). A single bomb fixed to the aircraft was the only armament. Another feature was the inclusion of folding wings to allow the aircraft to be hidden in caves and tunnels and protected from bombing attacks."

By March 1945, the Kikka's mission changed to a tactical bomber, and an interceptor armed with 30mm cannon. Its engine changed from the Ne-12 turbojet to the Ne-20 (though shortages of key metals reduced the Ne-20's efficiency). But design was one thing: building jets in 1945 while Japanese aircraft and engine factories were being pounded by U.S. bombers was another. Nonetheless, on August 7, 1945—the day after Hiroshima became the first atomic victim—test pilot Lt. Cdr. Susumu Takaoka made the first (nonkamikaze) flight of a Japanese jet. However, a second flight on August 11, two days after Nagasaki, resulted in a crash landing that damaged the Kikka prototype beyond repair.

Not that it mattered. While plans called for producing almost 500 Kikkas by the end of 1945, those plans were dashed by Japan's surrender on August 15. Just one aircraft had been completed by war's end.

How did the Kikka compare to the Me-262s that worried the Allied air forces in 1944–45? The Me-262A1A had a top speed of 540 miles per hour, which left in the dust American pilots flying P-51D Mustangs (maximum speed 437 miles per hour). Plans for the interceptor version of the Kikka called for a maximum speed of 443 miles per hour. In other words, its maximum speed was about the same as a Mustang, and the early jets of World War II were neither known for maneuverability or engine reliability.

The most intriguing question, of course, is whether Japanese jets could have changed the outcome of the Pacific War had they been fielded in time. The best answer is to look at what happened to Germany, which actually produced 1,400 Me-262s, some of which saw combat between November 1944 and May 1945. Though quite disturbing to the Allies, the jets didn't save the Third Reich. There were too many Allied aircraft, the Anglo-American air forces mounted standing patrols over airfields to catch the Me-262 during their vulnerable take-off and landing runs, and Nazi Germany was being overrun Allied tanks.

With an even worse fuel and raw-materials situation than Germany, Japan probably would have fared no better. The Kikka would have been overwhelmed by the massive U.S. land-based and carrier-based formations that roamed over Japan in the last days of the war. If it had been fielded earlier, perhaps it could have made some difference over battlefields such as the 1944 U.S. invasion of the Philippines. Yet even there, the Kikka's short range would have rendered it unsuitable for the long-distance flying that characterized the Pacific War. The Kikka might have been relegated to a defensive role over the home islands, intercepting daytime B-29 raids—except the Americans eventually switched the B-29s from day raids to night, when the radar-less Kikka could not fly.

Like its big brother the Me-262, the Kikka was too little, too late.

Suggested Reading: Japanese Secret Projects 1: Experimental Aircraft of the IJA & IJN 1939-1945, by Edwin Dyer.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Silver

Technology, Americas

At the time of its launch, Walmart+ established a minimum of $35 on online orders from Walmart.com. Now, the company has announced that starting this Friday, the minimum will be lifted.

Earlier this year, Walmart announced the launch of Walmart+, a membership program that the retail giant is using to compete with Amazon Prime. The program offers such features as unlimited free delivery, fuel discounts, and Scan & Go app, and more. The membership costs $98 per year.

At the time of its launch, Walmart+ established a minimum of $35 on online orders from Walmart.com. Now, the company has announced that starting this Friday, the minimum will be lifted. However, deliveries from Walmart stores, of groceries and other items, will retain the $35 minimum. 

“It feels like a life hack is needed now more than ever and Walmart+ is here to help,” Janey Whiteside, chief customer officer of Walmart, said in a statement.

“No other membership allows customers across the country to get everything from gingerbread cookies and eggnog to holiday decorations and toys delivered for free as soon as the same day. Walmart+ is designed to make life easier—giving customers an option to not have to sacrifice on cost or convenience.”

The company also announced that Sam’s Club fuel stations will now be eligible for the program’s fuel savings. 

“Customers have been clear—they want this benefit. Being able to toss an item into your cart, regardless the total, and checkout right away lets them knock little things off their to do list in no time,”  Whiteside said in the press release.

Walmart had been rumored for much of the year to be launching a Prime competitor, and reportedly planned to launch it the spring before delaying their plans due to the pandemic.

Walmart+ costs less than Amazon Prime per year, although the prices offered per month are closer together. Per CNBC, Walmart has not released any figures about how many customers have signed up for the Walmart+ service. Amazon, meanwhile, has over 126 million Prime subscribers in the United States. 

Even before the launch of Walmart+, Walmart reportedly put pressure on top TV manufacturer Vizio to remove the Amazon Prime Video button from the remotes on its TVs. There have been rumors that Walmart, like Amazon, may eventually launch a content component along with Walmart+, although there has been no announcement of that yet.

In early October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart was in talks with Comcast to launch TV sets that would run Comcast’s software, with a third party manufacturing the sets themselves but basing their interface on Comcast’s X1 interface or something like that. Comcast was reported a couple of months earlier to be in talks with TV manufacturers about putting their software on televisions. There has not as of yet been anything official announced about either set of negotiations. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters

 

 

TNI Staff

Security,

A full-scale military campaign against Iran would require the United States to destroy the Iranian air force. The best of Iran’s decrepit fighter aircraft fleet is the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.

Here's What You Need to Know: The F-14A was amongst the most capable fighters developed by the United States during the late 1960s.

With the United States withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran, a war with Tehran seems to be a distinct possibility.  In the event of a military conflict between Washington and Tehran, there is also the ever growing possibility that the White House might seek regime change in Iran.

A full-scale military campaign against Iran would require the United States to destroy the Iranian air force—which to this day flies American-built warplanes. The best of Iran’s decrepit fighter aircraft fleet is the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. The Imperial Iranian Air Force purchased 80 of the powerful fourth generation fighters before the 1979 Islamic revolution, but deliveries were halted at 79 aircraft. Additionally, Iran had purchased 714 Hughes (now Raytheon) AIM-54A Phoenix long-range semi-active/active radar guided air-to-air missiles, which have a range of roughly 100 nautical miles.

When the F-14A was developed, it was amongst the most capable fighters developed by the United States during the late 1960s. The jet entered service with the U.S. Navy in 1974 equipped with the AWG-9 long-range pulse Doppler radar, which had a range of over 115 nautical miles and was the first American radar set to incorporate a track while scan mode to allow for a multiple shot capability. Coupled with the AIM-54, the AWG-9 could target six enemy bombers simultaneously. On paper, the Tomcat provided the fleet with a potent capability—though the reality did not quite meet the Navy’s public relations hype.

Iran has upgraded its Tomcats with new avionics and potentially new weapons, but only a handful of Tehran’s F-14s are in flyable condition—perhaps as few as 20 aircraft. However, other than perhaps 20 Russian-made Mikoyan MiG-29 Fulcrums, the venerable Tomcat is the Islamic Iranian Air Force’s most capable fighter. In the event of a war, the F-14 would be Iran’s first line of defense against an American onslaught.

The stealthy Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor air superiority fighter would almost certainly lead an American attack. Compared to the antiquated F-14, the Raptor is a technological marvel and is equipped with some of the most sophisticated sensors ever developed for a military aircraft.

The F-22 combines extreme stealth and sustained supersonic speed—it can cruise at just above Mach 1.8 without afterburners—with integrated avionics and extreme agility. The Raptor’s Northrop Grumman AN/APG-77 (V)1 active electronically scanned array radar and ALR-94 passive electronic support measures suite would spot an F-14 from many tens of nautical miles away before the Tomcat had any idea that an F-22 was in the vicinity.

The Raptor, having detected a flight of Iranian F-14s and given the go-ahead to engage, would likely turn toward the enemy and launch its Raytheon AIM-120D AMRAAM missile—which reported has a range of 96 nautical miles when launched from a conventional fighter—from high supersonic speeds exceeding Mach 1.5 and at altitudes well above 50,000ft. It would be all over for the Iranian F-14s before anyone in the enemy formation would have any idea they were under attack.

Even if the Raptors had run out of AMRAAMs and were forced to engage within visual range, the F-22s can use their stealth to close in unobserved to less than 1000ft to either kill the F-14s with Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinders or 20mm Vulcan cannon fire. Indeed, F-22 pilots flying during exercises such as Red Flag or Northern Edge will often sneak into guns range to make unobserved kills from very close distances by taking advantage of the Raptor’s stealth. More often than not, the Raptor’s quarry is caught completely unaware.

However, if by some bizarre circumstance the F-22 is embroiled in a dogfight with the F-14, the chances are the Raptor will kill the Tomcat unless the American pilot suffers from extremely bad luck or makes a serious error. The Raptor holds all of the cards in terms of instantaneous and sustained turn rates—which in the F-22’s case is greater than 30 degrees per second—and energy addition. The Raptor’s incredible specific excess power and sheer maneuverability combined with its new AIM-9X missiles makes it so that the odds are grotesquely stacked in the F-22 pilot’s favor. 

Of course, that’s just in the case that Iran’s leaders are foolish enough to take the United States head on. It would be much smarter for Iran to use asymmetric means to take on the United States instead of challenging America in the air.

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The exact nature of the Baton Rouge’s espionage activities has never been clarified.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Russian submarine would also have had little chance of detecting the quieter Los Angeles–class submarine. More powerful fixed antisubmarine sensors might only have been effective at ranges of three to five kilometers in such conditions, too short to reach the Baton Rouge’s position. Submarines can also deploy towed sonar arrays behind them to increase their sonar coverage, but these are difficult to control in shallow waters and were therefore not in use during the incident.

It’s tempting to think of sonar as a sort of radar that works underwater. However, water is a far less compliant medium than air even for the most modern sensors, and wind conditions, temperature variations and sounds rebounding off the ocean floor can all dramatically degrade its performance. When attempting to detect the extremely quiet submarines currently in use, just a few adverse factors can turn a very difficult task into an impossible one.

Recommended: Stealth vs. North Korea’s Air Defenses: Who Wins?

Recommended: America’s Battleships Went to War Against North Korea

Recommended: 5 Places World War III Could Start in 2018

Therefore, a submarine spying close to an adversary’s home port might not be able to spot another submarine heading towards it until after the collision—which can be worse than embarrassing for everyone involved.

On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge, a nuclear-powered Los Angeles–class attack submarine, was lurking twenty meters deep in the shallow waters off of Kildin Island, fourteen miles away from the Russian port of Murmansk. The Soviet Union had dissolved just two months earlier—but the Navy still wanted to closely monitor what had become of Russia’s powerful navy.

The exact nature of the Baton Rouge’s espionage activities has never been clarified. It could have involved recording the sounds produced by Russian submarines for later identification, or depositing and recovering intelligence-gathering devices.

At 8:16, something massive struck the 110-meter long Baton Rouge from below, scratching the nuclear-powered submarine’s hull and causing tears in its port ballast tank. Fortunately, the American submarine’s hull was not further compromised.

It turned out a Russian Sierra-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, the B-276 Kostroma, had attempted to surface underneath the American submarine. Swimming at around eight miles per hour, the Russian boat’s conning tower had impacted the belly of the American ship. The titanium-hulled Kostroma’s sail was partially crushed from impacting the Baton Rouge’s belly, and pieces of the American submarine’s anti-sonar tiles were later found embedded in its surface.

Both submarines were designed to launch cruise missiles from their torpedo tubes, some of which could theoretically be armed with nuclear warheads. However, Russia and the United States had recently agreed to withdraw such warheads under the START I treaty, and it was likely that the Baton Rouge at least no longer carried them. Still, a worse collision could have breached the reactors on either vessel, irradiating the submarines and the surrounding waters.

Fortunately, this did not occur. The Baton Rouge circled around and contacted the other submarine to make sure it wasn’t in need of assistance, and then both vessels returned to port for repairs.

The accident caused one of the United States’ first diplomatic incidents with the newborn Russian government, with Secretary of State James Baker having to meet in person with Yeltsin and assure him that the United States would scale back its spying in Russian waters, a message belied the following year by another submarine collision off the Kola peninsula.

The incident also highlighted differences on the definition of “international waters.” The United States follows the standard of measuring them twelve miles away from the nearest landmass. The Baton Rouge was in compliance with this principle. Moscow, however, defined them as extending twelve miles from a line formed by the two sides of a gulf, by which standard it considered the Baton Rouge in violation of its territorial waters.

The second in the prolific Los Angeles class, the Baton Rouge was only seventeen years old. However, the cost of repairing the 110-meter-long vessel, combined with the already scheduled expenses of nuclear refueling, was judged excessive and the boat was decommissioned in January 1995.

The Kostroma, however, was repaired and put back to sea by 1997, and remains active to this day. Russian sailors have painted a kill marking on its conning tower to commemorate the “defeat” of the Baton Rouge.

Stealth in Shallow Water

How did this accident even happen? Some articles in the press characterized the subs as having been involved in a cat-and-mouse game that had gone too far. Indeed, such games were common between the attack submarines of rival nations, and had resulted in collisions in the past.

However, that account remains unlikely because a submarine can only play a cat-and-mouse game if it is able to detect the other ship. And in the shallow waters off of Kildin Island, it is unlikely either vessel could.

This is because in shallow water, breaking waves create at least ten times the background interference for sonar operators, making it extremely hard to discern a submarine’s quiet propeller screw. Furthermore, even signals that are detected will have reflected off the ocean floor and the surf so that it would become difficult to isolate them against the background interference.

Analyst Eugene Miasnikov calculated in 1993 that the detection range using passive sonar of a slow-moving Sierra-class submarine in such a noisy environment would likely have been between one hundred and two hundred meters, or fewer if it was a windy day. And detection range might have fallen to zero if the Russian sub approached from a sixty-degree arc behind the Baton Rouge, which is not covered by the submarine’s fixed sonar array.

The Russian submarine would also have had little chance of detecting the quieter Los Angeles–class submarine. More powerful fixed antisubmarine sensors might only have been effective at ranges of three to five kilometers in such conditions, too short to reach the Baton Rouge’s position. Submarines can also deploy towed sonar arrays behind them to increase their sonar coverage, but these are difficult to control in shallow waters and were therefore not in use during the incident.

A submarine or surface ship could also use active sonar to emit sound waves that would reflect off another submarine’s hull. In shallow water, this might have increased detection ranges to a few kilometers. However, doing so would also reveal the platform using the active sonar.

The Baton Rouge surely did not use active sonar so as to remain undetected. Nor did it detect active sonar from the Kostroma. Thus, neither vessel was using active sonar, and their passive sonars were likely not strong enough to detect the other in the noisy shallows.

This explains why submarines measuring longer than a football field in length can run into each other, oblivious to the other’s presence until the crunch of impact. As evidenced by the alarming collision in 2009 between the nuclear missile–armed French Triomphant and the British Vanguard, the risks of underwater collisions between nuclear submarines remain quite real today.

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

This first appeared in 2016. 

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The F-117 shootdown was an embarrassing incident that the U.S. Air Force would rather like to forget.

Here's What You Need to Know: Stealth aircraft are not truly ‘invisible’ to detection.

At 8 p.m. on March 27, 1999, a bizarre-looking black painted airplane cut through the night sky over Serbia. This particular F-117 Nighthawk—a subsonic attack plane that was the world’s first operational stealth aircraft—flew by the call sign of Vega-31 and was named “Something Wicked.” Moments earlier, it had released its two Paveway laser-guided bombs on targets near the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Its pilot, Lt. Col. Dale Zelko, was a veteran with experience in the 1991 Gulf War.

A dozen Nighthawks had deployed to Aviano, Italy on February 21 to participate in Operation Allied Force—a NATO bombing campaign intended to pressure Belgrade into withdrawing its troops from the province of Kosovo after President Slobodan Milosevic initiated a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign seeking to expel the Kosovar Albanian population.

The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) possessed a mix S-75 and S-125 surface-to-air missile systems dating back to the 1950s and 1960s, as well as more recent 2K12 Kub mobile SAMs and MiG-29 Fulcrum twin-engine fighters. Together these posed a moderate threat to NATO warplanes, forcing them to fly at higher altitudes and be escorted by radar-jamming planes like the EA-6B Prowler.

However, that evening the Prowlers were grounded by bad weather. Something Wicked and her three flight mates were dispatched anyway because their faceted surfaces drastically reduced the range at which they could be detected by radar and shot at.

Suddenly, Zelko spotted two bright dots blasting upwards through the clouds below, closing on him at three-and-a-half times the speed of sound. These were radar-guided V-601M missiles, fired from the quadruple launch rails of an S-125M Neva surface-to-air missile system. Boosted by a two-stage solid-fuel rocket motors, one of the six-meter long missiles zipped so close that it shook Vega 31 planes with its passage. The other detonated its 154-pound proximity-fused warhead, catching Zelko’s jet in the blast that sprayed 4,500 metal fragments in the air.

Something Wicked lost control and plunged towards the ground inverted. The resulting g-force was so powerful Zelko only barely managed to grasp the ejection ring and escape the doomed Nighthawk.

How had a dated Serbian missile system shot down a sophisticated (though no longer state-of-the-art) stealth fighter?

Zelko’s adversary that evening was Serbian Col. Zoltán Dani, commander of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade. Dani was by all accounts a highly motivated commander who studied earlier Western air-defense suppression tactics. He redeployed his Neva batteries frequently, in contrast to the static posture adopted by ill-fated Iraqi and Syrian missile defenses in the Middle East. He permitted his crews to activating their active targeting radars for no longer than twenty seconds, after which they were required to redeploy, even if they had not opened fire.

The S-125M wasn’t normally considered a ‘mobile’ SAM system, but Zoltan had his unit drilled to redeploy the weapons in just 90 minutes (the standard time required is 150 minutes), a procedure facilitated by halving the number of launchers in his battery. While his batteries shuttled from one site to another, Dani also setup dummy SAM sites and decoy targeting radars taken from old MiG fighters to divert NATO anti-radiation missiles.

Thanks to the decoys and constant movement, Zoltan’s unit didn’t lose a single SAM battery despite the twenty-three HARM missiles shot at him by NATO war planes.

Dani had noticed that his battery’s P-18 “Spoon Rest-D” long-range surveillance radar was able to provide a rough track of Nighthawks within a 15-mile range when tuned down to the lowest possible bandwidth—so low, in fact, that NATO radar-warning receivers were not calibrated to detect it. (Dani initially claimed he had modified the P-18’s hardware to achieve this, but later admitted this was a hoax.)

However, low-bandwidth radars are imprecise and cannot provide a ‘weapons-grade’ lock. However, that the NATO mission planners had complacently scheduled the stealth bombers on predictable, routine flight patterns. Worse, the Serbs had managed to break into NATO communications and could overhear conversations between U.S. fighters and the airborne radar planes directing them, allowing Dani to piece together a accurate picture of those routines.

The missile commander decided to set an ambush for the stealth jets, deploying S-125M batteries with a good firing angle on the NATO jets as they flew back to Italy. The thing is, stealth jets can be detected by high-band targeting radars at short distances. However, that still requires sweeping the sky for targets, and in the process illuminating themselves to enemy radars. That not only gave adversaries a chance to direct stealth aircraft away from the threat, but invited a potential strike by a HARM anti-radiation missile.

Therefore, Dani kept the battery’s targeting radar inactive, but cued them towards the approximate position of the stealth aircraft reported by the P-18 radar. Obligingly, the battery’s P-18 radar detected Something Wicked and three other F-117s—but when the high-band targeting radar activated for a twenty second ‘burst,’ it couldn’t acquire a target.

Dani claims that he had been alerted by spies in Italy that the Prowlers were grounded for that day, so he was willing to take greater risks and reactivated the targeting radar a second time rather than immediately relocating—still without result.

Finally, on the third try an S-125M battery locked onto Something Wicked when it was just eight miles away. Dani claims the window of opportunity came when the F-117 opened its bomb-bay doors to release weapons, causing its radar cross-section to briefly bloom.

After bailing out, Zelko concealed himself an irrigation ditch and only narrowly escaped capture by Serbian search parties that combed within a hundred meters of his position. The following evening, he was whisked to safety by an Air Force combat search and rescue team deployed from an MH-60G Pave Hawk special operations helicopter.

Dani’s unit later claimed the only other Yugoslav aircraft kill of the war, shooting down a U.S. F-16 on May 2. Another F-117 was damaged by a missile on April 30 but managed to return to base.

Something Wicked impacted Yugoslav soil upside down near the village of Budanovci. Parts of the wreckage can be seen today at the Serbian Museum of Aviation in Belgrade. Components were also flown to Russia and China and studied to inform their own stealth aircraft programs. Dani kept the plane’s titanium engine outlet as a memento.

The F-117 shootdown was an embarrassing, though fortunately non-fatal, episode for the U.S. Air Force. It has been endlessly cited since as ‘proof’ that supposedly radar-invisible stealth planes could ‘easily’ be shot down by even dated Soviet-era SAM systems.

The truth is more complicated. Zoltan’s ploy of using low-bandwidth radars to track stealth aircraft from afar indeed remains a cornerstone of counter-stealth tactics today. (Another is using infrared sensors, though these remain limited to around thirty to sixty miles in range.)

However, getting a platform with a high-bandwidth radar or heat-seeking weapons close enough to actually shoot at a stealth plane remains a major challenge. Afterall, the stealth jet could detect and simply avoid or shoot at an approaching threat. Dany benefited from having good intelligence of the F-117’s flight path that allowed him to position a missile battery very close to Vega-31’s avenue of approach.

Furthermore, the Nighthawk was a 1970s-era design with a larger radar cross-section than the F-22 and F-35. These modern stealth jets furthermore come equipped with their own onboard radars and carry a greater diversity of weapons, making them more dealing with surface- and air-based threats.

The takeaway, ultimately, is that stealth aircraft are not truly ‘invisible’ to detection, and that sufficiently cunning adversary may find ways to ambush or corner them. However, while Col. Dani’s leadership did exemplify many best practices of air defense warfare, his ambush of Vega-31 does not offer a ‘cookie-cutter’ solution to combating stealth aircraft, particularly as both low-observable airplanes and the SAM systems and fighters hunting them improve in capability.

Zelko and Dani would later meet under friendlier circumstances in 2011. The Serbian missile commander had resumed his profession as a baker in his hometown of Skorenovac. The former adversaries recorded a documentary about their meeting and subsequent friendship. For all the considerable ingenuity it invests in high-tech warfare, humankind fortunately also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation under the most unlikely circumstance.

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

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Depertment of Defense

Michael Rubin

Security, Middle East

The late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” By that standard, locals no longer consider Hezbollah a thoroughbred racehorse, but rather a lame pony.

NABATIEH, LEBANON—Hezbollah flags fly from lampposts and billboards feature the faces of Hezbollah members killed in action in this southern Lebanese town which, by some estimates, is now Lebanon’s fifth-largest. Bearded men belonging to the group drive around the streets in new BMWs whose lack of license plates reaffirms their position above Lebanese law. 

Nabatieh is Hezbollah’s heartland, less than fifteen miles from Lebanon’s border with Israel. When Israel occupied a southern Lebanon buffer zone, Nabatieh was just outside and so a frontline post for Hezbollah. During the Operation Grapes of Wrath (or the “April War” as Hezbollah calls it), Israel bombed sites in the city. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in May 2000 bolstered Hezbollah by transforming it into the first Arab force to defeat the Jewish state in war. Hezbollah—and Nabatieh—both suffered during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War but the end to hostilities and Hezbollah’s subsequent rearmament against allowed the Iranian-backed militia to depict itself as strong.

Sitting at a tea house on the outskirts of town, locals—including veterans of the fight against Israel—now tell a different story. There are three types of Hezbollah members now, they say. The first are the true ideologues, the second initially embraced Hezbollah’s mission but are now embarrassed by its actions and antics, and the third just signed up for the money.  

All have trouble reconciling the group’s rhetoric with reality. While once Hezbollah slogans written on banners and plastered on billboards promised security and prosperity, today locals have neither. Hezbollah members may still receive salaries far above the local rate, but Iran’s financial troubles and subsequent diminishment of its subsidies to Hezbollah lead the group to half their payments leading to grumbling from within and ridicule from without.

The true ideologues, meanwhile, who once painted themselves as the vanguard of a new order must now explain how they and Iran remain impotent in the face of the U.S. assassination of Iranian Quds Force chief Qassim Suleimani on January 3, 2020, and, more recently, the death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program, who was assassinated on November 27. Iran, many locals and Western journalists are attributing the assassination to Israel. Iranian leaders and Hezbollah swore they would revenge both attacks but they have been unable to do anything but have like-minded proxies fire a few missiles at U.S. forces and facilities in Iraq, most of which missed or did little damage.

Locals also point to the four thousand Hezbollah members dead in Syria and question not only why an organization that depicted itself as a Lebanese nationalist not only allowed its members to serve as mercenaries for Iran and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria but also why they fared so poorly as they did so. Some ridiculed Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah as a fifth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle since he must be hiding out in the sewers of Beirut’s southern suburbs in fear that if he emerges in person, he will quickly join Soleimani and Fakhrizadeh. 

Importantly, citizens in Nabatieh and other towns controlled by Hezbollah or its rival-turned-ally Amal are no longer limiting their criticisms to whispered conversations. Protests erupted last October against the political elite in Lebanon, and young Lebanese—men and women—from Nabatieh joined them. Women took off their scarves and men removed their face masks. Simply put, as Hezbollah becomes a shell of its former self, locals are losing their fear. There is a certain irony that in Washington, DC, Democrats loudly and Republicans a bit more softly suggest that the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran to be a failure, but in the heart of Hezbollah country, residents tell a different story. Hezbollah is cash-poor, resented, and has lost its luster.

The late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” By that standard, locals no longer consider Hezbollah a thoroughbred racehorse, but rather a lame pony. The question moving forward is whether the Biden administration, in its animosity to President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by pumping resources into the Islamic Republic of Iran, a gravy train which will benefit not ordinary Iranians or the citizens of southern Lebanese towns like Nabatieh, but rather groups like Hezbollah who locals say are a shadow of their former selves. 

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent author for TNI. 

Ethen Kim Lieser

Technology, Americas

The best-selling items included Amazon’s new Echo Dot, one of several products made by the company and discounted during the holiday season, former President Barack Obama’s latest book, A Promised Land, the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer Hot Air Brush, and the Lite-Brite Ultimate Classic.

As the months-long coronavirus pandemic has forced more people than ever to do their shopping online, Amazon has indeed become the destination of choice.

Driven largely by online sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the e-commerce giant has announced that this year's holiday shopping season was the biggest in the company’s history.

Amazon did not provide specific financial figures on how much was spent during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The retailer, though, did note that independent businesses selling on the platform surpassed $4.8 billion in worldwide sales between the two large-scale shopping events—a surge of 60 percent from last year. It added that more than seventy thousand small and medium-sized businesses were able to enjoy sales of more than $100,000 in this holiday season.

“In a holiday season unlike any other, it’s clear that customers still want great deals on gifts for their loved ones or a little something extra for themselves, and we’re glad to help deliver smiles throughout the season,” Jeff Wilke, the chief executive officer of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, said in a blog post.

“Thank you to our customers, employees, and selling partners around the world for making this our biggest holiday season to date, and for everything you’re doing to support our communities and each other now and throughout the year.”

The best-selling items included Amazon’s new Echo Dot, one of several products made by the company and discounted during the holiday season, former President Barack Obama’s latest book, A Promised Land, the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer Hot Air Brush, and the Lite-Brite Ultimate Classic.

With the pandemic on the minds of most people across the country, Black Friday foot traffic in stores cratered 52.1 percent compared to last year, according to Sensormatic Solutions. However, with a record number of consumers pivoting to shopping on computers and smartphones instead, online spending surged nearly 22 percent to hit $9 billion, according to data from Adobe Analytics.

Consumers spent $6.3 million per minute shopping online on Black Friday—or $27.50 on average per person. About $3.6 billion was spent via smartphones, a 25.3 percent increase compared to last year, reaching 40 percent of all online spending.

As for Cyber Monday, consumers opened their wallets to the tune of $10.8 billion, setting a record for the largest internet shopping day ever in the United States. Spending climbed 15.1 percent compared to the year prior, according to Adobe, which cut its online sales forecast for the entire holiday season to $184 billion—still a hefty 30 percent increase from last year. The original forecast called for sales of $189 billion.

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

Image: Reuters

Daniel R. DePetris

Politics, Asia

Beijing has many reasons to keep Pyongyang afloat.

In what will very likely be the last major speech on North Korea before the Trump administration leaves office, deputy U.S. envoy Alex Wong delivered remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies on November 30. The topic: the current state of the U.S.-North Korea dialogue. The prognosis was grim; the Kim dynasty, Wong said, has demonstrated no interest whatsoever in implementing the Singapore joint statement President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed in June 2018.

The speech, however, was just as much about China as it was about North Korea—or more to the point, China’s refusal to abide by the numerous U.N. Security Council sanctions it voted for over the last fourteen years. Wong was emphatic that the Chinese are not only turning their eyes from illicit North Korean coal exports in their territorial waters, but are actually deliberately hampering the U.N. sanctions regime. “I’ve spoken with enough Chinese diplomats to understand clearly what course of action the Chinese government is advocating,” Wong told the think-tank. “They are seeking to undo the UN sanctions regime they themselves voted for in 2006, in 2009, in 2013, in 2016, and in 2017.”

Beijing choosing to relax their sanctions enforcement, of course, is not unprecedented. Indeed, it would be more extraordinary if Chinese custom officials searched every box coming to and from North Korea or the Chinese navy intercepted every cargo ship carrying North Korean coal or seafood. What was interesting, however, was that Wong had concrete numbers to share. “On 46 separate occasions going back to 2019,” the deputy envoy said, “U.S. vessels provided information to nearby Chinese Navy or Coast Guard vessels that ships involved in DPRK fuel smuggling were fleeing into Chinese coastal waters. The Chinese authorities did nothing to stop these vessels in response. Not once.” The Chinese Communist Party, it appears, has made a concerted decision that it will let its North Korean neighbor export and import whatever it needs to survive at a time when the Kim dynasty is undergoing the triple-whammy of coronavirus-related restrictions, weather events, and U.S.-led sanctions. 

We can speculate as to why China is doing this. The most obvious reason cited is that the Chinese crave stability along their border and recognize that some level of trade with the North is required in order to stem an extreme humanitarian crisis. But one can’t help but notice that China’s lax sanctions enforcement is also occurring during a period when Beijing’s relationship with the United States is getting worse for the wear. It is highly likely China is using North Korea as a card in its wider competition with Washington.

Why is this relevant? Because President-elect Joe Biden’s entire North Korea strategy is predicated on the notion that his administration will be able to pressure or encourage the Chinese to crank up the economic pressure on the North and thereby force Kim into a new nuclear negotiation. Biden has made this link on numerous occasions throughout the presidential campaign, including during a Democratic presidential debate back in January. “I met with Xi Jinping more than anyone else,” Biden said at the time. “I would be putting pressure on China to put pressure on Korea, to cease and desist from their nuclear power...their efforts to deal with nuclear weapons.” The then-presidential candidate offered up a similar answer during his last presidential debate with Trump, recalling a time when as vice president he told Chinese President Xi Jinping that he would have to “step up and help” on the North Korea issue if he didn’t like what Washington was doing in the region.

Collaborating with China to tighten the economic screws on Pyongyang has been a bipartisan strategy that multiple U.S. administrations have tapped into since at least George W. Bush. Given North Korea’s dependence on China for approximately 90% of its total trade, it only makes sense for U.S. policymakers to probe whether their Chinese counterparts are willing to assist. Yet the Chinese have never believed bankrupting the Kim dynasty is a particularly effective way of increasing the odds of getting a denuclearization agreement or promoting peace and stability in their region. China can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea—what it can’t live with is millions of desperate, hungry North Koreans streaming across the border. 

Convincing China to cooperate on North Korea is tough on a good day. But it’s likely to be downright impossible when Washington and Beijing are on the opposite side of so many issues, from trade and technology to the South China Sea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Joe Biden’s North Korea policy is in effect anchored by a mirage—that a willing Xi Jinping will be a key partner in Washington’s maximum pressure campaign against the North. 

To be fair, Biden has yet to roll out an official North Korea policy. All we have at the moment are his words on the campaign trail. The Biden administration will do what other U.S. administrations have done since time immortal: launch a months-long inter-agency review in order to determine what U.S. objectives on the Korean Peninsula are, what combination of tools are appropriate to realizing those objectives, and how the administration will go about negotiating with the Kim dynasty. Back in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un will be watching, waiting, and wondering whether the new U.S. commander in chief will offer up a different strategy from what previous presidents have settled on over the last thirty years.

Daniel R. DePetris is a columnist at Newsweek and a contributor to the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Jason Bartlett

Security, Asia

How legit was the alleged $3.2 million fuel and weapons deal?

The Mole: Undercover in North Korea is a ten-year sting operation documenting an alleged $3.2 million fuel products and arms deal in 2018 with constituents from North Korea, Jordan, and Uganda. Aired on the BCC and Nordic television in early October, this documentary immediately received a mixture of praise and speculation. While the credibility of the documentary itself is highly contested, the plausibility of North Korea evading U.S. and United Nations sanctions by selling weapons and narcotics through a third-party to non-sanction-abiding nations is unquestionable. 

For years, North Korea has sought overseas assistance to facilitate weapons and drug trade under the radar of U.S. and UN economic sanctions through ally countries and foreign nationals. Examples include a fifty-ton shipment of North Korean industrial-scale chemical weapons to Syria in 2016, a multinational attempt to bring 100kg of North Korean methamphetamine into the United States through British, Chinese, and Filipino dealers in 2013, an attempt to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Azerbaijan through a British arms dealer in 2012, a 20kg shipment of North Korean methamphetamine in Thailand in 2012, a secret North Korea-designed nuclear reactor built in the Syrian Desert in 2007, and $100 million building projects in Namibia starting in 2002. The alleged illicit arms deal featured in this documentary accurately depicts North Korea’s ability to exploit global corruption and third-party criminals to its benefit under strict economic sanctions. 

In The Mole, sleeper agent Ulrich Larsen gained access to several alleged North Korean government officials through befriending Alejandro Cao de Benós, the founder of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA), a pro-North Korea international organization stationed in Spain. The proposed arms deal involved a $3.2 million contract, exchanging oil and petroleum with ballistic missiles and “pharmaceuticals/medicines” heavily implied to be methamphetamine. Signed in Pyongyang, the contract bore the signature of Kim Ryong Chol, the president of the Korea Narae Trading Corporation. The UN Panel of Experts August 2020 report described Kim as heavily involved in overseas North Korean proliferation finance efforts. The contract stipulated that “Narae will build the equipment factory in a third country to manufacture “military equipment and medicines” and “provide the technical staff to operate the factory.” This is a clear violation of global sanctions on North Korea as the purchase and distribution of weapons is outlawed through various UN resolutions and U.S. Executive Orders. 

The alleged triangular trade deal was planned in typical North Korean sanction-busting fashion. First, the third-party, who was one of the undercover agents unbeknownst to North Korea, will purchase the oil and petroleum on behalf of North Korea from a Jordanian businessman, Hisham El Dasouki of the Aktham Trading Establishment. Second, Hisham will illegally export the fuel products through his contacts in Russia, Dubai, and Jordan to North Korea via maritime trade obfuscation practices. In his own words: “Each time I export to [North] Korea, when I come back, I change the name of the ship….when you import or export, don’t sail your ship directly. There must be a point to stop and change documents, and then go.” After North Korea receives the fuel products, the third-party will then travel to Pyongyang under the guise of delivering humanitarian aid and load all the “contracted items” onto an aircraft before flying to the secret location in the third country. 

The North Korean officials chose Africa as the ideal location for a secret weapons factory but opted against Namibia due to UN pressure levied on the country for past sanctions violations related to illicit North Korean activity. If true, this represents both a victory and defeat for UN sanctions. According to this documentary, although North Korea no longer considers Namibia an ideal hotspot for sanctions noncompliance, it simply chose a less legally abiding nation in the same region, Uganda. Unless all UN Member States comply with UN sanctions, there will always be vulnerabilities for North Korea to exploit. 

The third-party then traveled to Uganda on behalf of North Korea to strike a deal with local officials and real estate brokers to purchase a secluded Ugandan island for $5 million USD. During the meeting, a Ugandan real estate broker informed the moles that he falsely told the island residents that they will build a hospital to control social unrest while constructing the facility. This is another indication of how widespread corruption and weak legal framework contribute to North Korea’s ability to evade even the strictest of economic sanctions. 

The documentary concludes with the mole, Ulrich Larsen, and the filmmaker, Mads Brügger, video calling their initial contact in the KFA from Denmark to inform him of their plan to expose North Korea’s global illicit activity. Their contact then immediately ends the call. Both Larsen and Brügger are currently in correspondence with the United Nations to discuss their alleged findings. Regardless of its disputed credibility, this documentary accurately represented the elaborate and innovative methods North Korea uses to evade U.S. and UN sanctions abroad. No other documentary has captured the international breadth of North Korea’s illicit arms and drug trade. When imposing economic sanctions against North Korea, U.S. policymakers should consider the plausibility of enforcing these measures abroad in regions where corruption and weak legal framework give room for continued illicit activity. 

Jason Bartlett is a Research Assistant for the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He previously worked at CSIS Korea Chair and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. He tweets at @jasonabartlett. 

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

Technology, Americas

The dispute between Dish and Nexstar affects even more stations, 164 around the country, and if the parties don’t reach an agreement by the Wednesday deadline, it will go down as the largest blackout of its kind in history. 

Heading into this week, both of the major satellite TV services, DirecTV and Dish Network, were facing deadlines for carriage agreements with owners of TV stations that could result in subscribers losing large numbers of channels.

Now, the DirecTV dispute with one of the companies, Tegna, has resulted in those channels disappearing, from both that satellite service and its sister service AT&T U-Verse. The sides failed to reach an agreement prior to the deadline Tuesday night. 

The blackout affects sixty-four stations in fifty-one markets, which are affiliates for all different networks, including NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and The CW, depending on the market.

“Unfortunately, DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse have not reached an agreement with TEGNA to keep our stations on the air,” Tegna’s Twitter account tweeted late Tuesday. “As we continue negotiating in good faith, you can watch your TEGNA station on other local providers or streaming services. And we’re always free over-the-air.” 

AT&T, the owner of DirecTV, responded in that tweet’s replies. 

“We can assure you we have every intention of getting TEGNA’s stations back as soon as possible, but the law grants TEGNA exclusive control over which homes can have their channels,” the account said. "We share your frustration and appreciate your patience.”

Also in the replies, one man complained that the blackout may cause him to miss Alex Trebek’s final shows as the host of “Jeopardy!,” which were recorded prior to the beloved host’s death last month. 

“In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, Tegna is demanding the largest rate increase we have ever seen and intentionally blacking out its most loyal viewers,” AT&T said in a separate statement to several media outlets.

“We challenge Tegna to return its local stations immediately while we finalize a new agreement and pledge to pay Tegna retroactively whatever higher rates to which we eventually agree. We share our customers’ frustration, appreciate their patience and intend to do all we can to resolve this matter soon.”

According to its brands page, Tegna owns such stations as WUSA in Washington, DC, WATL in Atlanta, KUSA and KTVD in Denver, Colorado, KSDK in St. Louis, Missouri, WCNC in Charlotte, South Carolina, KARE in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, KPNX in Phoenix, WWL in New Orleans, Louisianna, KHOU in Houston, Texas, KING and KONG in Seattle, Washington, and WFAA in Dallas, Texas. The company also owns the True Crime Network. 

DirecTV also faces the loss of its NFL Sunday Ticket package, although it maintains exclusivity through the end of the 2022 NFL season. 

The dispute between Dish and Nexstar affects even more stations, 164 around the country, and if the parties don’t reach an agreement by the Wednesday deadline, it will go down as the largest blackout of its kind in history. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters

Caleb Larson

Security, Asia

It’s the latest in a recent flurry of construction aimed at bolstering the United States’ Pacific presence.

A local Mariana Islands newspaper recently quoted the Governor of the Northern Mariana Islands regarding an Air Force divert airport planned for Tinian, a part of the Northern Mariana island chain, saying, “it’s happening.”

Previously, the Department of Defense had signed a $21.9 million, forty-year lease with the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands government. The 2019 construction deal’s goal was airport infrastructure modernization, including running a fuel pipeline from the seaport to the airport, and expanding Tinian’s airstrip to allow for more and heavier aircraft to land with the intention of facilitating smoother aerial tanker refueling.

Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

The CNMI, more commonly known as the Mariana Islands, form the westernmost point of United States territory. As such, the group of islands jut outward into the Pacific nearly 4,000 miles west of Hawaii.

Currently, the United States has a large military presence on Guam, (geographically part of the Mariana Islands, but administratively separate), including a brand-new Marine Corps base named Camp Blaz. Blaz is the first new USMC base in nearly seventy-five years, and a place that 5,000 Marines will eventually call home.

Andersen Air Force base, also located on Guam, is one of the most important air bases in the western Pacific, and is also the only base west of Hawaii that is capable of servicing the United States’ strategic bomber platforms: the B-1 Lancer, B-2, and B-52. Naval Base Guam is the naval component of the Joint Region Marianas, the region’s management authority.

Tinian

Located about 120 miles northeast of Guam, Tinian is well-positioned as a divert airfield. In that secondary capacity, Tinian’s expanded facilities could be used in the event that support infrastructure on Guam is not available, due to a natural disaster—or war.

A 2016 article published by Stars and Stripes, an American military newspaper, quoted the then Chief of Staff of the Air Force, who stated that “The divert initiative in CNMI will create the only divert airfield in the Western Pacific and provide the U.S. Air Force the capability to conduct either temporary or sustained refueling operations from an additional location in the region… It will also give us another location to use when supporting contingency or natural disaster responses in the region.”

Postscript

Exactly when the expanded Tinian airstrip and infrastructure will be finished is unclear, though one thing is sure: the United States is rapidly expanding its Pacific presence at a time when tensions with China are rising. And in the event of a conflict, Guam and Tinian could likely form the tip of the American military spear.

Caleb Larson is a Defense Writer with The National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture.

Image: Reuters.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Health, Americas

Nearly a third of Americans will likely be infected with the virus by the end of 2020. 

The nation’s top infectious disease expert is anticipating a “surge upon a surge” of coronavirus cases just weeks away from Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

“If you look across the United States, we are really in a public health crisis right now,” White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told Colorado Gov. Jared Polis during a livestream session on Tuesday.  

“Now that we’re in the mid- to late fall, merging on into the winter, we’ve seen, because a variety of circumstances, a surge that has really surpassed the others.”

Despite stern calls from health officials to stay home over the holiday, more than 9.4 million people were screened in the Thanksgiving travel period, which started on the Friday before the holiday, according to data from the Transportation Security Administration. On Sunday alone, when many Americans were returning home from their Thanksgiving travels, the TSA revealed that it screened 1.17 million people.

Since the pandemic ground air travel to a halt in mid-March, checkpoints have screened more than one million passengers in only five days. Four of those days came over the Thanksgiving holiday period.

Given the high number of people who traveled and shared meals in close proximity with family and friends, the United States will likely see a “surge upon a surge” in new cases, Fauci said.

“One of the things that you should keep your eye on is that as we get two to three weeks beyond the Thanksgiving holiday, that it is likely . . . you’re going to start seeing the curve that had gone to flatten out go back up again, unless people really have done a considerable degree of mitigating,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases added.

More troubling is the fact that cases were already rising before the Thanksgiving holiday and that trend has only continued. 

New daily cases in the country recently reached a grim single-day record of 200,000, and the rolling seven-day average of new cases is now more than 160,000. Florida on Tuesday became the third state to surpass one million confirmed cases, joining Texas and California.

On Monday, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned that nearly a third of Americans will likely be infected with the virus by the end of 2020.  

In all, there are roughly 13.8 million confirmed coronavirus infections in the United States, along with 271,000 related deaths. The virus is now killing, on average, more than 1,400 people each day in the country, according to the latest data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.  

“This is something that is quite problematic, and to say it’s challenging is to really say the least,” Fauci said.   

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

Image: Reuters