The National Interest

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

The Scharnhorst was far from the most heavily armed battleship deployed by the Kriegsmarine—but she arguably was its most successful.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The more numerous and powerful radars on Force 2’s Duke of York finally picked up the Scharnhorst twenty-five miles away after 4 p.m. Her sole forward radar knocked out, and nightfall and blizzard decreasing visibility, Scharnhorst was blind to the powerful British force barreling towards her from the west. Force 2 finally opened fire at six-miles range.

The Scharnhorst was far from the most heavily armed battleship deployed by the Kriegsmarine—but she arguably was its most successful. She and sistership Gneisenau were laid down in 1935 with nine 283-millimeter guns with a range of twenty-five miles—significantly smaller than those on British battleships so as not to spook London over German rearmament.

Nonetheless, Scharnhorst measured 234 meters, which is longer than two football fields, and displaced a massive forty-two thousand tons fully loaded with fuel, ammunition and a wartime-crew of nearly two thousand men. The ship’s three Swiss-built steam turbines allowed her to attain flank speeds of thirty-one knots or higher—fast enough to outrun most warships. Indeed, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser designed to chase down and overmatch smaller vessels rather than duel enemy battleships.

The Scharnhorst’s guns were mounted in 750-ton triple-gun turrets named Anton and Bruno in the bow, and Caesar on the stern. Twelve quick-firing 150-millimeter guns provided additional firepower. The Scharnhorst’s two Seetakt radars, one forward and one rearward-facing, had a surface-search range of around ten miles and were primarily used for gun-laying. Three Arado 196 seaplanes served as the battlecruiser’s long-range “eyes.”

For air defense, the Scharnhorst additionally mounted seven twin 105-millimeter flak turrets that could spit air-bursting shells up to forty-thousand-feet high, and dozens of smaller thirty-seven-millimeter and twenty-millimeter auto-cannons for close defense. She was well-protected from long-range hits by up to fourteen inches of Krupp cemented steel girding her turrets, bridge and hull. However, her two-inch deck armor was vulnerable.

For all her speed, the Scharnhorst was not highly maneuverable and frequently returned to port damaged by rough seas. In sea trials after commissioning in January 1939, the Scharnhorst’s bow took on so much water she was promptly refitted with a flared “clipper-style” bow.

Despite these flaws, the Scharnhorst proved far more than the Kriegsmarine’s other capital ships. On her maiden war-cruise in November 1939, she sank the auxiliary cruiser HMS Rawalpindi. Then in June 1940, the battlecruiser ambushed the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, sinking her and two escorting destroyers, though Scharnhorst sustained a torpedo hit in battle.

Like an outlaw continually outwitting justice, the Scharnhorst was a notoriously “lucky” battleship, weathering numerous attacks by British bombers. In 1941, she managed to slip into the Atlantic and sink ten merchant ships, then evaded retribution under cover of sea squall to make port at Brest, France where she was outfitted with six torpedo tubes.

Heavily damaged in a July 1941 air-raid, Scharnhorst joined other German capital ships five months later in the notorious “Channel Dash” that was staged under the nose of Britain’s coastal defense, though she struck two mines in the process.

However, by 1943, German capital ships had fallen out of favor with Hitler after the Battle of the Barents Sea, a botched attack on an Arctic convoy carrying Allied aid for the Soviet Union. The Fuhrer had to be talked back from scrapping all his capital ships.

As the Wehrmacht’s woes in Russia mounted, in December 1943 Adm. Karl Donitz decided to again attempt a surface sortie targeting the Arctic convoys as they skirted past German-occupied Norway—and tapped Scharnhorst for the job.

However, not only were the British listening in to Donitz’s radio messages, but Home Fleet commander Adm. Bruce Fraser was already planning to lure the Scharnhorst into battle. Though the Royal Navy far outnumbered German surface combatants, it had to devote disproportionate resource to guard against possible sorties.

Fraser planned to use JW 55B as bait, reinforcing her ten escorting destroyers with three cruisers in “Force 1” under Vice Adm. Robert Burnett, which had just escorted a preceding convoy. Meanwhile, “Force 2” would sortie from the west, including the battleship Duke of York, the heavy cruiser Jamaica and four S-class destroyers.

The Brits made no effort to prevent German patrol planes from spotting the convoy on December 22. On Christmas Day, Fraser was pleased to learn that Scharnhorst and five destroyers had departed Altafjord at 7 p.m. under command of Adm. Erich Bay.

However, the German force failed to contact the nineteen-ship convoy. This far north, there was less than an hour of daylight, and gale-force winds were gusting heavy snowfall over the water. Bay fanned out his destroyers to extend his search—ultimately depriving his flagship of badly needed support.

At 9 a.m., the light cruiser Belfast of Force 1 picked up the Scharnhorst with her superior radar. The two sides finally spotted each other at a distance of about 7.5 miles and exchanged fire. While Scharnhorst missed, she was struck twice. One 8-inch shell fatefully smashed the battlecruiser’s forward-looking radar, crippling her situational awareness and the accuracy of her guns.

Scharnhorst disengaged, while the British escorts withdrew to screen the convoy as Force 2 raced to support them. But Bey circled Scharnhorst around and at noon bumped into Force 1 a second time. This time the battlecruiser’s guns twice struck the Norfolk, the huge 727-pound armored-piercing rounds passing clean through, knocking out a gun turret and radar.

Bey then decided to head south back to port with Force 1 in pursuit—though only the lighter Belfast could keep up.

However, the more numerous and powerful radars on Force 2’s Duke of York finally picked up the Scharnhorst twenty-five miles away after 4 p.m. Her sole forward radar knocked out, and nightfall and blizzard decreasing visibility, Scharnhorst was blind to the powerful British force barreling towards her from the west. Force 2 finally opened fire at six-miles range.

Norman Scarth, a sailor onboard the destroyer Matchless described the moment in a BBC interview:

All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells, which fired into the sky like fireworks, providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.

One huge fourteen-inch shell jammed the in Anton turret, silencing its triple-guns. Another strike triggered an ammunition fire in Bruno, forcing the gun crew to flood the turret to avoid an explosion. Now only Caesar could return fire—and fire she did, in turn knocking out a radar on the Duke of York.

However, the superior British fire-control radars gave British warships greater accuracy, while their flash-less charge left them difficult to spot with the naked eye.

Bey tried tacking back north away from Force 2, only to run afoul of the cruisers of Force 1. The battlecruiser finally began pulling away eastward at maximum speed. However, a long-range fourteen-foot abruptly penetrated Scharnhorst’s belt armor and blew apart one of her boiler rooms, reducing her speed to just twelve knots. Bey radioed his superiors “We will fight on until the last shell is fired.”

As the British barrage relentlessly crippled Scharnhorst’s main guns, smaller British destroyers swarmed in to attempt torpedo runs. Some of Scharnhorst’s smaller guns remained active, though, and one blasted a shell straight through the fire control tower of the Saumarez, killing eleven crew. Meanwhile, the Savage and Norwegian destroyer Stord dashed up to within a mile of the beleaguered battlecruiser and slammed three twenty-one-inch torpedoes into her port side approaching 7 p.m.

For nearly an hour more, the British ships relentlessly pounded the crippled Scharnhorst, with shells and torpedoes. The latter were known to occasionally sink capital ships with just a few lucky hits. The Scharnhorst, however, sustained nineteen torpedoes before she finally capsized.

As Scarth recounted:

She looked magnificent and beautiful . . . She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a twenty-millimeter cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.

A twenty-millimeter cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle . . . And that's one of the things that remains in my memory—a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.

Afterward, Matchless and Scorpion picked up just thirty-six survivors from the freezing Arctic waters before receiving the order to abandon the rest for fear of a counterattack.

German battleships never engaged their British peers again in battle. Fifty-seven years later, a Norwegian-led expedition located the Scharnhorst’s mangled wreckage 290-meters deep on the seafloor.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared in December 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Caleb Larson

Security, World

Russia is apparently the first country to field submarine-based hypersonic missiles.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin do further develop hypersonic vehicles, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is further developing the appropriate engines after stopping research in 2010–2011. A step in the right direction. Still, let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

As recently detailed, Russia’s new hypersonic Zircon missile will soon be submarine based. This diversifies Russia’s hypersonic capabilities—from air and at sea, to underwater, for greater strategic advantage. America and U.S. allies beware.

Better than Greased Lightning

But first, what is a hypersonic missile? And why is it so dangerous? Although there are different delivery systems, hypersonic missiles are essentially a new class of missile that flies fast—extremely fast—the Zircon soars in excess of Mach 8. Hypersonic missiles targets would have very little time to react, either by evading or trying to shoot the missile down. Hypersonic missiles are so fast, they don’t necessarily need to carry any explosives, as the impact of something traveling hypersonically would create a terrific explosion.

Evasive maneuvers are difficult against hypersonic weapons because the weapons themselves are highly maneuverable. Using kinetic interceptors to shoot down a hypersonic missile would be like shooting a bullet with a bullet. Further complicating the problem is the fact that most missile defense systems are generally optimized to counter specific, existing threats and hypersonics traveling close to two miles a second are just not on their menu.

One of the truly frightening aspects of hypersonic missiles are the potential stealth capabilities inherent to some of their design. Because they move so quickly through the atmosphere, such missiles generate a plasma field around themselves that is radar absorbent, making them harder to detect. Bad news for aircraft carriers, cities, or other potential targets.

Location, Location, Location

So why are submarine-based hypersonic missiles such a big deal? After all, Zircon and other hypersonic missiles are relatively new, but not unknown, and being deployed at sea is no big secret.

One word: survivability. Russia is apparently the first country to field submarine-based hypersonic missiles. This arrangement is particularly dangerous because submarines can hide underwater for days, or even weeks. Submarines are highly protected if they stay below the surface, and very hard to detect, especially if a sub commander is willing to sail slowly, or not at all.

Like conventional submarine-based ballistic missiles, shooting a hypersonic missile at a target on land or at sea could happen very quickly, without even needing to surface. Blisteringly high speed, combined with close proximity to targets that submarines can provide would give an opponent a laughably low reaction time.

Falling Behind

The United States is falling behind. Michael D. Griffin, the current serving Under Secretary for Defense and Engineering has repeatedly spoken on Capitol Hill about the plight of the United States in relation to its adversaries in the realm of hypersonics. “We, today, do not have systems which can hold them [Russia and China] at risk in a corresponding manner, and we don’t have defenses against those systems…Should they choose to employ them, we would be today at a disadvantage,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up ball.” Not a great game to be playing.

His comments are supported by the findings of the Congressional Research Service (CRS). In fall of 2019, the CRS, Congress’s think tank, released a report that detailed the hypersonic state of the art. Their firm conclusion was that Russia is seeking to perfect maneuverable hypersonic weapons to perforate American missile defense and, therefore, to ensure a measure of “strategic stability” in relation to the United States. According to CRS, Zircon will be operational by 2023.

The Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin do further develop hypersonic vehicles, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is further developing the appropriate engines after stopping research in 2010–2011.

A step in the right direction. Still, let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics, and culture.

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Security, Asia

Dennis Killinger, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of South Florida, called the idea “intriguing.”

Here's What You Need to Know: China claims to be developing “magnetized plasma artillery.”

The Chinese military recently published a notice inviting researchers to devise a weapon that sounds like a sort of electromagnetic rail gun—which uses magnetism instead of gunpowder to fire shells—that several nations are developing. But actually deploying railguns has been hampered by the size of the weapon and especially the vast amount of electrical energy needed to propel a shell to speeds of greater than Mach 7. For example, despite years of research and vast sums of money, the U.S. Navy appears less than optimistic about fitting railguns on its warships.

But Chinese scientists believe that magnetized plasma artillery will be so light and energy-efficient that it can be mounted on tanks.

“The notice invites tenders for a theory-testing and a launch system for magnetized plasma artillery,” said China’s state-owned Global Times. “Although the weapon sounds as if it comes from a sci-fi movie, it will probably not shoot high-energy plasma but ultra-high velocity cannon shells.”

But how exactly does magnetized plasma artillery work? Global Times helpfully noted that a Chinese-approved patent is available on Google Patents. Here is the text of the patent:

The invention discloses magnetized plasma artillery. A magnetic field is arranged in an artillery body pipe, the direction of the magnetic field points to an artillery port along the direction of an axis of the artillery body pipe, the magnetic field strength is gradually reduced from an inner wall of the artillery body pipe to the axis of the artillery body pipe, and the gas in the artillery body pipe can be ionized into the plasma for forming a plasma sheath layer on the inner wall of the artillery body pipe under the action of the magnetic field while the artillery is launched. The magnetized plasma sheath layer formed on the inner wall of the artillery body pipe of the magnetized plasma artillery has stress anisotropic characteristic and has thermal insulation function, and then, the radial force for the artillery body pipe is greatly reduced, the driving force for the bullet is greatly improved, the heat resistance of the artillery body pipe is greatly improved and the service life is prolonged.

In other words, the magnetized plasma layer protects the gun barrel from wear and heat, and allow the projectile to achieve a higher launch velocity.

Chinese military analyst Wei Dongxu told Global Times that the new technology “would extend the range of a conventional 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer from 30 to 50 kilometers [19 to 31 miles] to 100 kilometers [62 miles]. The plasma layer might also reduce friction between the barrel and rounds, making the weapon more accurate.”

Dennis Killinger, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of South Florida, called the idea “intriguing.” “The idea seems possible,” he told the National Interest. “My main question is what is the lifetime of the plasma and is it sufficient during the launch time inside the barrel.”

It is also a different approach than a railgun. “I don’t think that you can think of it as an offshoot of the classic railgun technique since the railgun is more a linear motor (moving mag field) approach using a fixed stator (i.e., bullet) similar to the linear accelerators used for the newer roller coasters. This new, patented technique uses a plasma which interacts with the magnetic field and serves as a liner for the barrel.”

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

This article appeared last year.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History,

The Navy's experience was gained with blood, but it would help again against the Nazis during the Second Battle of the Atlantic.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The most successful anti-submarine ships were agile “torpedo-boat destroyers,” which sank U-Boats using deck guns and even ramming. Starting in 1916, Royal Navy vessels carried depth charge designed to detonate underwater, rupturing a submarine’s hull. These proved effective if the ship captains could guess the sub’s position. Statistically, naval mines proved deadliest, accounting for one-third of U-Boat losses.

When Congress voted on April 6, 1917 to declare war on Imperial Germany, the task before the U.S. Navy was clear: it needed to transport and supply over a million men across the Atlantic despite the Imperial German Navy’s ferocious U-Boat campaign, which reached its peak that month, sinking over 874,000 tons of shipping.

Indeed, Germany’s decision to recommence unrestricted submarine warfare in February was one of the decisive factors driving the United States, and later Brazil, into finally joining “the war to end all wars.”

While World War I submarines could only remain submerged for brief periods, they were highly successful at picking off unescorted merchants ship in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Neither active sonar nor radar yet existed with which to track submarines, though the British had begun using hydrophones to listen for the noise of a submarine’s diesel engine.

The most successful anti-submarine ships were agile “torpedo-boat destroyers,” which sank U-Boats using deck guns and even ramming. Starting in 1916, Royal Navy vessels carried depth charge designed to detonate underwater, rupturing a submarine’s hull. These proved effective if the ship captains could guess the sub’s position. Statistically, naval mines proved deadliest, accounting for one-third of U-Boat losses.

For years, the Royal Navy resisted instituting a convoy system to guard merchant ships, preferring not to divert warships from offensive missions and believing the decrease in throughput from adhering to a convoy schedule would prove worse than the losses inflicted by U-Boats.

But that April, U-Boats had sunk one-quarter of all merchant ships bound for the UK, leaving it with just six week’s grain supply. Threatened with economic collapse, the Royal Navy finally instituted the convoy system. But the Brits had a problem: they could divert only forty-three out of the seventy-five destroyers required to escort convoys.

Naval liaison Rear Admiral William Sims convinced the navy to dispatch thirty-five U.S. destroyers to bases at Queenstown (modern-day Cobh), Ireland to fill in the gap. These began escorting convoys on May 24, usually supported by navy cruisers. In 1918, an even larger escort flotilla began operating out of Brest, France.

The U.S. Navy itself began the war with only fifty-one destroyers. It immediately faced a classic military procurement problem: politicians and admirals wanted to build more expensive battleships and battlecruisers, construction of sixteen of which had been authorized by the Naval Act of 1916.

But the Royal Navy already had the German High Seas fleet effectively bottled up in port with its larger force. While five coal-burning and three oil-burning U.S. battleships did join the blockade in 1918, they never saw action. Common sense prevailed, and battleship construction was halted in favor of building 266 destroyers.

More rapidly, the Navy commissioned hundreds of small 70-ton wooden-hulled “sub-chasers” equipped with hydrophones, 3” deck guns and depth charges. Civilian yachts were similarly converted. The Navy’s eleven L-class and K-class submarines were also deployed to Berehaven (now Castletownbere), Ireland and the Azores respectively to hunt (surfaced) U-Boats, but none encountered enemy forces during the war.

Hundreds of twin-engine HS maritime patrol planes were also procured to scour the seas for submarines. Though the seaplanes sank few if any submarines, they disrupted numerous attacks by forcing U-Boats to dive and abort their torpedo runs.

The convoy system proved a dramatic success, cutting shipping losses to less than half their peak. U-Boats simply lacked unprotected targets and were more likely to be lost combating escorts. Shipping losses gradually fell to roughly 300,000 tons per month, while U-Boat losses increased from three per month to between five and ten.

However, submariner-hunting remained a dangerous business in which a hunter could swiftly become hunted. On Nov. 17, 1917, the destroyer USS Cassin was pursuing U-61 near Ireland when the U-Boat counterattacked. Spotting a torpedo rushing towards the depth-charge launcher on the ship’s stern, Gunner’s Mate Osmond Ingram lunged forth to jettison the explosive charges but was caught in the blast that tore away the destroyer’s rudder. The Cassin remained afloat and shelled U-61’s conning tower, causing her to disengage. Ingram was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The destroyer Jacob Jones was not so fortunate when she was struck in the rudder by a torpedo fired by U-353 near Brest on December 6. Sixty-six crew perished abandoning ship as her depth charges detonated. Gallantly, U-Boat captain Karl Rose rescued two of the crew and radioed the position of the other survivors.

U.S. sub-hunters did score some successes. On November 17, the destroyers Fanning and Nicholson forced U-58 to the surface with depth charges, then engaged her with deck guns until her crew scuttled her. The converted yacht Christabel crippled a U-Boat with depth charges in May 1918 off the coast of Spain.

That month, the Imperial Navy began dispatching long-range U-Boat “cruisers” with huge 150-millimeter deck guns to maraud the U.S. coast. These sank ninety-three vessels, mostly small civilian fishing boats. The Germans hoped this would spread panic, causing the Americans to withdraw assets in Europe for home defense.

Notably, on July 18 the boat U-156 surfaced off the coastal town of Orleans on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and proceeded to destroy a tugboat, four barges and the nearby shoreline with its cannons. Nine Coast Guard HS and Model R-9 seaplane bombers scrambled from NAS Chatham and peppered the withdrawing U-boat with bombs—none of which exploded.

The following day, the armored cruiser USS San Diego struck a mine probably lain by U-156 south of Long Island. The explosion flooded her engine room, causing the cruiser to sink with the loss of six hands—becoming the only capital ship lost by the navy. U-156 proceeded to sink twenty-one fishing boats in the Gulf of Maine, and even commandeered a trawler to assist in its rampage. But though the navy instituted coastal convoys, it didn’t withdraw ships from Europe.

U-Boats were also active in the Mediterranean, and Gibraltar-based American subchasers—often little more than civilian yachts fitted with 3” guns and depth charges—twice clashed with them, sinking at least one.

Perhaps the Navy’s most swashbuckling episode of the war occurred on October 2, 1918, when twelve U.S. subchasers covered an Italian and British surface force raiding the Albanian port of Durazzo. Dodging shells from shore batteries, the subchasers cleared a path through the defensive minefield for the accompanying capital ships. They then hounded away the submarines U-29 and U-31, heavily damaging both.

The navy’s deadliest anti-submarine measure was the North Sea Mine Barrage, a 230-mile-long chain of 100,000 naval mines between the Orkney islands and Norway. U-Boats seeking passage to the Atlantic had to wend through eighteen rows of Mark 6 mines concealed at depths of twenty-four, forty-nine and seventy-three meters deep, strung together with piano wire. Each of the horned steel spheres contained three hundred pounds of TNT. The barrage cost $40 million ($722 million in 2018 dollars) and required the deployment of eight large steamships. However, it sank between four and eight U-Boats—including the infamous U-156—and damaged another eight.

Ultimately, 178 out of 360 operational U-Boats were sunk during World War I. In return, the German subs sank 5,000 merchant ships totaling 12.8 million tons, killing 15,000 mariners. The U.S. Navy lost 431 personnel and five ships—its worst loss occurred when the collier USS Cyclops vanished with 306 crew in the Bermuda Triangle.

Despite its unglamorous duties, the U.S. Navy learned valuable lessons in the Great War about employing convoys, smaller submarine-hunters and maritime patrol planes that would save many lives in the even more destructive conflict that followed two decades later.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared in December 2018.

Robert Farley

History, Americas

Washington nearly made different spending choices when it came to battleships vs battlecruisers.

Key point: America got along okay during the start of the war with battleships instead. But imagine if Washington had built a class of battlecruisers during the build up to the conflict.

The United States Navy (USN) entered World War II when Japanese aircraft battered its fleet of old, slow battleships at Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, newer, faster ships would soon enter service, but the USN nevertheless fought the opening battles of the Pacific War without the support of fast battleships.

Had the U.S. Navy made different, better choices at the end of World War I, it might have begun World War II with battlecruisers that could have supported its fast carrier groups. The names of these ships might have been USS Lexington and USS Saratoga.

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

The Battlecruiser Turn

The United States Navy began to think about battlecruiser construction even before HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible entered service. Prior to the construction of Dreadnought, the USN had built two different kinds of capital ship. Large, slow, well-armored battleships would engage enemy battleships in set-piece battles, while large, fast, poorly armored cruisers would raid and disrupt enemy commerce. Although the battleships were starting to trend larger, at the turn of the century cruisers and battleships were of roughly the same size.

The Dreadnought Revolution changed the equation. Britain, Germany, and Japan began to build all-big-gun battleships, but supplemented these battleships with battlecruisers. Faster but less heavily armed and armored than their cousins, battlecruisers would serve as the scouting wing of the battlefleet, but could also operate in traditional “cruising” roles, such as commerce raiding or protection.

The Lexingtons

The United States, on the other hand, focused entirely on battleships. Not until the 1910s, when it became apparent that Japan was about to acquire four large, fast battlecruisers, did the USN begin to take the battlecruiser seriously. The first designs resembled modified Wyomings, dropping a turret or two and using the saved weight to increase speed. This superficially resembled British practice of the day, in which battleships and battlecruisers shared core design elements in order to save time and expense.

The Lexingtons were to be a class of six battlecruisers that would close the gap with the British, Germans, and especially the Japanese. The USN discarded the idea of simply modifying an existing battleship design (these designs were in flux, anyway) and started from scratch. The first efforts were . . . sketchy, resulting in huge, fast, poorly protected ships with bizarre configurations (one design had seven funnels). The 1916 design specified a displacement of thirty-five thousand tons, a speed of thirty-five knots, and main armament of ten fourteen-inch guns in four turrets.

Of course, reality intervened and the Lexingtons were delayed by war requirements. Fortunately, the Royal Navy offered its assistance, having won hard experience with battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland. British intervention resulted in significant design changes that increased the size of the ships but left them more well-balanced. The USN also opted to shift to sixteen-inch guns, which alleviated some design problems.

When wartime demand for escort craft receded, the United States Navy resumed construction of its battlefleet. The U.S. Navy decided to commit to construction of the Big Five, advanced Standard Type battleships that included two ships of the Tennessee class and three ships of the Colorado class. One of the Big Five was laid down in 1916, two in 1917, and two in 1919.

Interwar

The USN finally began construction of the Lexingtons in the early 1920s. But by that time the strategic landscape had changed once again, as the United States entered the Washington Naval Treaty with Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. That story is well-known; the United States was granted the right to convert two capital ships into aircraft carriers, and it chose Lexington and Saratoga. Both ships served with distinction in the war; Lexington was sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea, and Saratoga in the post-war atomic bomb tests.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the USN would have entered the Treaty system with two fewer battleships and two more battlecruisers. The Navy would likely have selected two other ships (for convenience sake Constellation and Constitution) for refit into aircraft carriers, so it’s unlikely that this would have changed the composition of the carrier fleet. The overall impact depends greatly on where in the design process the USN would have changed its mind. The earliest designs for the Lexingtons were a bit of a disaster and would have resulted in ships requiring immense modification during the interwar period. Still, even the early problematic designs would have left the USN in possession of two large, well-armed, fast battlecruisers. The Navy devoted immense resources to rebuilding its battleships in the interwar period anyway, and it’s possible that it could have remedied many of the core problems with the Lexingtons.

World War II

Of course, speed wouldn’t have helped the Lexingtons if they’d been trapped at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. But then the battlecruisers might not even have been in Pearl on December 7. The battlefleet remained home while the aircraft carriers conducted missions around the Pacific because the battleships could not keep up with the carriers. Had battlecruisers been available, they might well have escorted Enterprise and Lexington on their ferry and patrol missions, and thus missed the attack. Alternatively, the USN might have posted the ships to the Atlantic, as it did with the North Carolina class fast battleships when they entered service.

If the Lexington and Saratoga survived Pearl Harbor, they would have immediately offered the USN a capability that it did not have until mid-1942, and in some sense not until late 1943; a fast battleship that could provide high-speed carrier escort in engagements across the Pacific. The Lexingtons might have seen duty at Coral Sea, Midway, and the Doolittle Raid, offering anti-aircraft and anti-surface protection for USN carriers. In late 1942 they could have operated as the core of cruiser divisions in the Guadalcanal campaign.

In short, like their Japanese counterparts the Kongos, they would have been among the busiest ships in the fleet. Of course, the story of the Kongos ended badly, with two of the four sinking during the Guadalcanal campaign. The Lexingtons would also have sailed into harm’s way, and wouldn’t have enjoyed the protection of fast battleships like USS Washington or USS South Dakota. Of the seven battlecruisers to enter World War II, only one (HMS Renown) survived the conflict.

Wrap

The USN prioritized slow, well-armored battleships that could operate together in a line-of-battle. Had the Navy paid more attention to European trends in shipbuilding, it might have gone ahead with the Lexington-class battlecruisers, which would have offered U.S. commanders in the Pacific better tools for fighting the war. The USN might well have lost the ships in the bitter, hard-fought battles of World War II, but this is always the potential fate for useful, in-demand warships. In light of wartime experience, where the utility of the fast battlecruisers of the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy became clear (notwithstanding the vulnerability of the ships), the USN ought to have prioritized battlecruisers over the advanced “Big Five” battleships that it began to build in 1917.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government This first appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Health, Americas

Researchers have discovered was that there was a sizable 26-percent decline in coronavirus antibodies just within three months.

For the vast majority of individuals who have been infected with the novel coronavirus, immunity to the disease will last for at least five months, according to a new study conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The research findings, which were published in the journal Science, added that 90 percent of people who recover from the virus are able to develop a stable overall antibody response.

In making its conclusions, the team examined more than 30,000 coronavirus-positive patients and then closely studied 121 patients who recovered and donated their plasma at various months.

“While some reports have come out saying antibodies to this virus go away quickly, we have found just the opposite—that more than 90 percent of people who were mildly or moderately ill produce an antibody response strong enough to neutralize the virus, and the response is maintained for many months,” the study’s co-author Florian Krammer, a professor of vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a release.

“Uncovering the robustness of the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2, including its longevity and neutralizing effects, is critically important to enabling us to effectively monitor seroprevalence in communities and to determining the duration and levels of antibody that protect us from reinfection. This is essential for effective vaccine development.”

One such report, which came out of Britain earlier this week, stated that immunity against the coronavirus gradually wears off as patients recover from the disease. The research—available in a pre-print report and will eventually be submitted for peer-review—gathered results of more than 365,000 home finger-prick tests that were given out randomly in England.

What the researchers discovered was that there was a sizable 26-percent decline in coronavirus antibodies just within three months.

Although the new study may seem to contradict other research that has delved into the connections between coronavirus infections and immunity, the Mount Sinai researchers noted that there is more than one wave of infection control in the human body.

After an initial infection, the body generates large amounts of immune compounds that often die off quickly. Studies that show declining antibody response in the first months after infection might be only measuring this first wave because the body is still busy at work building up new lines of defense.

“Although this cannot provide conclusive evidence that these antibody responses protect from reinfection, we believe it is very likely that they will decrease the odds ratio of reinfection,” the study’s authors wrote.

Other medical experts admit that there is still so much unknown about the virus. But the fact that there is some semblance of robust immunity after infection is positive news ahead of a possible green-lighting of a viable coronavirus vaccine in the coming months.

“I think, at this point, we are still trying to figure out the immunity question, but the recent study is encouraging. Unfortunately, this might be a question that only gets answered as time passes,” Dr. Jason Keonin, of Northwest Iowa Surgeons PC in Spencer, Iowa, told The National Interest.

“I think most scientists and doctors believe that immunity will last at least long enough to make vaccines effective, at least in the short term, which would still make a huge impact.”

Keonin was impressed by the data from Mount Sinai’s study but added that “it’s still important to emphasize that we need to suppress the virus.”

“From what we know now, there’s no guarantee that someone who has been infected or receives the vaccine will be immune forever, so attempting a herd-immunity approach could fail and be disastrous,” he said. “We must take steps to mitigate and suppress the virus while we wait for more research and vaccines.”

The controversial herd-immunity approach—similar to what was pursued in Sweden—aims to have enough people within a population become immune to a disease, often through vaccination or natural infection, to make its spread unlikely. As a result, the entire community is protected, even those who are not themselves immune, according to Harvard Medical School.

The threshold for herd immunity to the coronavirus is estimated between 60 percent and 80 percent of the population.

The United States, however, is nowhere near that level, even though more than nine million people have tested positive for the virus and nearly 230,000 have died since the pandemic began, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

“If we’re waiting until 60 percent to 80 percent of people have it, we’re talking about 200 million-plus Americans getting this—and at a fatality rate of 1 percent, let’s say, that’s two million Americans who will die in this effort to try to get herd immunity,” Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore, said in an interview last month.

“Those are preventable deaths of our loved ones that we can just not let happen under our watch.”

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

If the Korean War wasn't bloody enough, part II would be even worse. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Pyongyang won't go down without a fight, and they'd take millions with them.

North Korea’s unpredictable leader Kim Jong-un has many ways of making war upon his neighbors. He can unleash commandos, or cyberweapons, or threaten to utilize weapons of mass destruction unless the world complies with his wishes.

Whether Kim Jong-un will live to see the results is another matter.

He might be assassinated by U.S. and South Korean special forces, or buried in his bunker by a bunker-buster bomb. Other smart bombs might take out his command posts and nuclear facilities. The authoritarian state of North Korea could become a state without authority, its leadership decapitated by precisely targeted strikes.

Or at least that seems to be America’s plan for fighting the next Korean War. And with North Korea conducting a new wave of ballistic missile tests, and U.S and South Korean forces practicing how to destroy North Korean nuclear sites, that plan is becoming more relevant.

Exactly what U.S. Operations Plan 5015 (OPLAN 5015) entails is classified. Fragments have been reported in the Japanese and South Korean press. But what details have emerged indicate that in 2015, a new approach was taken toward the old problem of how to fight a bellicose North Korea and its huge arsenal of conventional and unconventional weapons.

For years, the expectation had been that a second Korean War would resemble with the first, a big-unit conventional war with U.S. and South Korean forces first stopping the enemy and then counterattacking into North Korea. But OPLAN 5015 reportedly takes a more twenty-first century approach of limited war, special forces and precision weapons. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported in 2015 that the plan resembled guerrilla warfare, with special forces assassinations and targeted attacks on key facilities. The goal was to consolidate several older war plans, minimize casualties in a war and even prepare for the possibility that the North Korean regime might collapse.

Most important, OPLAN 5015 envisaged the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea.

“The new plan was said to adapt to changes in the security environment by focusing on making a swifter and more energetic military response than the previous OPLAN 5027, incorporating the concept of a preemptive strike,” according to Globalsecurity.org. With North Korea’s localized provocations becoming more frequent, there was an increasing risk of escalation. OPLAN 5015 articulated ways to respond to these threats with U.S.-ROK combined forces and, in the event of escalation, to respond to the threat of North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons.

Echoes of this can be seen in the current U.S.-South Korean exercises, designated Foal Eagle 2017, which will involve more than 300,000 personnel for two months of live and computer-simulated training. Citing Korea’s Yonhap news agency, the Washington Post reported that “the joint forces will also run through their new ‘4D’ operational plan, which details the allies’ preemptive military operations to detect, disrupt, destroy and defend against North Korea’s nuclear and missile arsenal.”

The question is how much stock to put in OPLAN 5015. David Maxwell, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who now teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, warns against taking OPLAN 5015 too literally. “My recommendation is not to try to read too much into the plans,” he tells the National Interest.

Military planners are by nature worst case planners but they also plan to provide multiple options to national decision makers for responding to crisis based on the mostly likely enemy course of action to the most dangerous enemy course of action. While there is likely Option A, B and C for every contingency, often what gets executed is Option D that is developed from A, B and C and the actual assessment of enemy actions.

As Globalsecurity.org noted,

Although the new plan reportedly focused not on a full-blown war but on limited warfare, a preemptive strike can escalate from a small skirmish into a large-scale war. It is hard to understand how the Korean troops would play a leading role while should a war start, Korea would not have military operational control. If that meant Korean soldiers would mostly engage in ground warfare while the US military provided naval and aerial support as some experts alleged, some South Koreans said the plan needed to be reconsidered.

Then there are the political questions, especially for those nations who will actually the bear the brunt of a North Korean attack. South Korean lawmakers were furious in 2015 when their government balked at telling them details of OPLAN 5015.

“Although the new scheme reportedly focuses not on a full-blown war but on limited warfare, a preemptive strike can escalate—unnecessarily and disastrously—in what could go from being a small skirmish into a large-scale war,” complained an editorial in The Korea Times.

It is also hard to understand how the Korean troops would be able to play a leading role while everyone knows here that should a war start, Korea will not have military operational control. If that possibly means Korean soldiers will mostly engage in ground warfare while the U.S. military provides naval and aerial support as some experts allege, the plan needs to be reconsidered.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared in March 2017.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

For decades, the South Korean military has had to prepare for a conflict in which its cities, especially the capital of Seoul, would be on the receiving end of a North Korean artillery, chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Eventually, South Korea intends to procure forty F-35 Lightning stealth fighters for the third phase of the F-X program while retiring its venerable F-4 Phantoms. Seoul is also planning to produce 200 home-designed cruise missile to be mounted on its indigenous KF-X jet fighter, when and if that materializes. Until those are ready, the powerful Slam Eagle will remain South Korea’s top jet fighter—and one that plays an especially critical role in that country’s defense.

On September 13, 2017 the Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) test-fired a Taurus cruise missile in response to a North Korean ballistic missile test. In this video, you can see as an F-15K launch the boxy weapon, which plunges straight through the roof of a practice target, penetrating into the ground below before its main warhead detonates.

For decades, the South Korean military has had to prepare for a conflict in which its cities, especially the capital of Seoul, would be on the receiving end of a North Korean artillery, chemical weapons and ballistic missiles. Now, such an onslaught might potentially include nuclear warheads. Though such a scenario must be avoided at all costs, should it occur, it would be vital for South Korean and U.S. forces to destroy these heavily fortified missile and artillery sites as swiftly as possible.

That’s the mission assigned to the sixty F-15K Slam Eagles in the Republic of Korea Air Force. Based on the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter bomber in U.S. Air Force, the Slam Eagles have souped-up sensors and electronic warfare systems, and now are loaded with bunker-busting cruise missiles to blast open North Korean missile silos.

Those weapons could also be employed in an attempt to decapitate North Korean leadership in a fortified bunker, a point the South Korean military surely hoped to illustrate when it released the video.

South Korea’s Slam Eagles

The Strike Eagle is a fighter-bomber variant of the F-15 Eagle, loaded with extra weapons pylons, fuel tanks and sensors at the cost of modestly decreased thrust-to-weight ratio and maneuverability. The two-seat jets can still sprint at two-and-a-half times the speed of sound, and can lug an extraordinary 23,000 pounds of weapons, nearly three times the bomb load of a strategic bomber in World War II. On the downside, the large, twin-engine F-15 is much more expensive to operate than, say, a single-engine F-16, though the additional turbofan does contribute to a lower accident rate.

South Korea chose to procure forty F-15Ks in 2002 for $4.2 billion as the first part of a three-phase F-X program to modernize its jet fighter force, beating out the Eurofighter Typhoon, the French Rafale and an earlier variant of the Su-35. Nearly 40 percent of the components were built by Korean firms, including fuselage, wings, and much of the avionics, then were assembled by Boeing in St. Louis, Missouri.

Because the new Slam Eagles came more than a decade after the F-15E entered service, they could be outfitted at the outset with then-new technologies including flat-screen displays in the cockpit that are compatible with night-vision goggles, and a Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System permitting a pilot to acquire aerial targets for short-range AIM-9X missiles merely by pointing his or her head at them.

The Slam Eagle was also one of the first variants of the F-15 to trade out the original F100 engines for F110 turbofans which could generate roughly 10 percent more thrust. You can see the difference in the engine nozzles here.

In 2008 Seoul ordered a second batch of twenty-one F-15Ks for Phase II of the F-X program to replace the F-5B Freedom Fighters it was retiring. (The order included one extra aircraft to fill in for an F-15K which fatally crashed in 2006 when its crew passed out performing a high-G maneuver.) These planes featured Sniper-XR targeting pods, and reverted to F100 PW-229 engines to benefit from parts commonality with the engines on Korea’s KF-16 fighters.

Unlike its American counterpart, the F-15K also boasts an AAS-42 Infrared search-and-track system, allowing the Slam Eagle to stalk aircraft at shorter ranges without turning on its radar. The F-15K also initially benefited from a superior APG-63 (V)1 radar, which boasted a sea-search and target-identification mode to facilitate the F-15K’s use in a naval strike role. However, the U.S. Air Force later began upgrading its F-15E fleet with new APG-82 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars with a decisive edge in resolution and stealth. Though the APG-63’s antenna could be upgraded to an AESA type, it is not clear if and when the ROKAF would pursue the upgrade. This may be because Pyongyang’s air force remains quite obsolete, with only thirty-five MiG-29s purchased in the 1990s standing out as somewhat modern fighters.

On the other hand, North Korea has quite a few surface-to-air missiles, though again only a fraction of them are modern types. To counter that threat, the F-15K boasts a lighter but more powerful Tactical Electronic Warfare Suite than found on the F-15E, including an ALQ-135M countermeasure system with faster processors that can track and jam multiple incoming SAMs and an ALE-47 chaff and flare dispensers that times and aims the release of the decoys for maximum missile confusion.

Taurus Missile, Meet Missile Silo

The F-15K fleet is all assigned to the 11th Fighter Wing based in Daegu, 170 miles south of the demilitarized zone. This rearward deployment reflects that the longer-range jets are not serving as frontline tactical fighters for rapid response, but instead are intended for offensive and strategic missions. This is because the F-15K is the only Korean fighter capable of hauling the deadly 3,000-pound Taurus missile.

South Korea initially ordered 170 of the weapons from their German and Swedish manufacturers, with delivery of that batch completing in 2017. The five-meter long jet-powered missile, known as the KEPD-350K, soars just below the speed of sound and can hit targets more than 300 miles away—far enough to strike any location in North Korea when launched from within South Korean airspace.

To evade detection, the Taurus skims at around 130 feet above the ground, and furthermore boasts a stealthy radar profile and jam-resistant countermeasures. The missile uses four different navigational systems (GPS, inertial, infrared and terrain-referencing) for guidance, so that it can remain on course even if one of them fails. It can even be programmed to scan for a three-dimensional image of the target once it’s close to its destination, and can abort the attack without causing collateral damage if it can’t be found.

As it closes in on the target, a Taurus rears up higher into the air and then plunges down at a steep angle for optimal penetration of its two-stage Mephisto warhead. A precursor charge blasts open the hardened exterior of the target or blows away obstructing soil, then a delayed fuse munition detonates once the bomb has penetrated inside. This missile can pierce concrete walls up to six meters thick, precisely the kind of capability necessary to knock out hardened missile and artillery sites poised to rain death on South Korea.

In fact, in December 2016 the Republic of Korea ordered ninety additional KEPD-350s, due to the ever-increasing tempo of Pyongyang’s missile tests. Furthermore, Seoul is interested in fielding a lighter version of the Taurus missile with a range of 250 miles that it could fit on its growing fleet of FA-50 Golden Eagle light attack jets. Of course, in a conflict with its northern neighbor, South Korea would receive massive additional fire support from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighters and bombers, as well as Tomahawk missiles fired by warships and enormous Ohio-class cruise missile submarines.

However, this impressive firepower could only mitigate rather than prevent North Korea from inflicting thousands of civilian casualties in the opening days of a conflict. While some artillery and missile systems are fixed in heavily fortified positions, others are mobile and can be rapidly repositioned to avoid retaliatory fire and render intelligence obsolete. The last time the United States attempted to hunt mobile ballistic missile launchers—Iraq’s Scud missiles in 1991—the results were dismal, with postwar intelligence unable to confirm a single Scud launcher destroyed from the air. Tactics and technology have evolved since then, of course, but that’s no reason to disregard the proven difficulty of such an endeavor.

The Slam Eagle, and its U.S. counterparts could therefore only hope to mitigate a ruinous North Korean bombardment over time, not eliminate the threat from the onset. No one should delude themselves into thinking a preemptive strike, or a rapid counter-strike, would contain the loss of life to an acceptable level. That doesn’t make the F-15K’s role any less vital. Indeed, should the worst come to pass, thousands of lives in South Korea and perhaps even on U.S. soil would be affected by how quickly the North Korean batteries could be silenced.

Eventually, South Korea intends to procure forty F-35 Lightning stealth fighters for the third phase of the F-X program while retiring its venerable F-4 Phantoms. Seoul is also planning to produce 200 home-designed cruise missile to be mounted on its indigenous KF-X jet fighter, when and if that materializes. Until those are ready, the powerful Slam Eagle will remain South Korea’s top jet fighter—and one that plays an especially critical role in that country’s defense.

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. This first appeared several years ago. 

Image: Wikipedia.

David Axe

Technology, Asia

Taiwan is counting on drones to counter China’s expanding advantage in ships, planes and troops. China can muster potentially thousands of aircraft, hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of troops for a possible invasion of Taiwan.

Here's What You Need To Remember: A suicide drone essentially is a small, inexpensive cruise missile, usually possessing some loitering capability. They might include a simple seeker head. Alternately, their operators remotely could steer them toward their targets.

A new suicide drone appeared at the August 2019 edition of the biennial Taipei Aerospace & Defense Technology Exhibition in the island country’s capital.

The unmanned aerial vehicle bears a strong resemblance to the small, hand-launched drones that are popular with U.S. forces. The other clearly draws inspiration from Israel’s Harpy anti-radar drone.

A suicide drone essentially is a small, inexpensive cruise missile, usually possessing some loitering capability. They might include a simple seeker head. Alternately, their operators remotely could steer them toward their targets.

Often based on commercial UAVs, suicide drones typically pack a small, grenade-size explosive warhead.

The Fire Cardinal drone, which first appeared at the Taipei trade show, is “an air-to-ground strike assault UAV,” according to the aviation-news website Alert 5, citing information from the show.

The twin-propeller Fire Cardinal is around four feet long, has a six-foot wingspan and weighs around 15 pounds. It includes an electro-optical and infrared sensor and selects its target using what Alert 5 described as an “intelligent object-detection system.”

Alert 5 did not speculate as to Fire Cardinal’s range, but it’s roughly the same size as the U.S. Army’s hand-launched Puma surveillance drone. The propeller-driven Puma can range as far as 10 miles at an altitude of 500 feet and a maximum speed of around 50 miles per hour.

A human operator controls a Puma via radio. It’s safe to assume the Fire Cardinal, with its own modest range and performance, features a similar control system. Ground troops in close proximity to enemy forces could lob many Fire Cardinals into the air in the hope of overwhelming the enemy’s short-range air defenses.

That’s the tactic that militant forces in the Middle East have employed with their own, custom-made suicide drones. In January 2018 a swarm of 10 explosives-laden small drones, apparently controlled by Syrian rebels, attacked two Russian bases in western Syria.

Meanwhile, three drones attacked Russian facilities at the nearby port of Tartus. The Kremlin claimed that a Pantsir-S air-defense system shot down seven of the drones while Russian electronic-warfare specialists hacked six of the UAVs and ordered them to land.

Taiwan’s other suicide drone targets the air-defenses themselves. The Chien Hsiang first appeared in 2017 at the Taipei trade show. It bears a striking resemblance to the eight-foot-long Israeli Harpy UAV. The Harpy packs a relatively powerful, 70-pound warhead and cruises as fast as 115 miles per hour out to a distance of nearly 300 miles.

Taiwan Air Force’s Air Defense and Missile Command said it would spend $2.5 billion developing the truck-launched Chien Hsiang through the early 2020s.

“The domestically produced anti-radiation UAV can detect and attack radar emitters on enemy vessels or electromagnetic wave sources in their weapon systems,” UAS Vision noted, citing Taiwanese media. “Their flight range is said to be able to cover radar stations along China’s southeastern coast.”

Taiwan is counting on drones to counter China’s expanding advantage in ships, planes and troops. China can muster potentially thousands of aircraft, hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of troops for a possible invasion of Taiwan.

Taiwan’s own military fields fewer than 300 fighters, just a few dozen major warships and 100,000 ground troops. The island country has rushed to develop a wide array of missiles and drones to boost its invasion-defenses.

Taiwanese media on Aug. 4, 2019, reported that the country’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology had cleared the Yun Feng cruise missile for mass production.

The supersonic land-attack missile has been under development since the 1990s. It can fly as far as 1,200 miles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

That range could allow Taiwan to threaten many of the airbases, ports and other facilities from which China likely would stage any attempt to invade Taiwan.

Taipei reportedly is building an initial 20 Yun Feng missiles as well as 10 truck-based launchers. Taiwan’s Up Media described the missiles as “the top priority of the various studios of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”

Taiwan also is developing a new air-launched cruise missile -- and reportedly has attempted to reverse-engineer old, U.S.-made J85 engines apparently to power the munition.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix,War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Reuters.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Technology, Space

The fix involved Deep Space Station 43 in Australia.

NASA has finally broken through to Voyager 2 after seven long months of not being able to command the record-setting craft. 

The breakdown in communication began in mid-March when NASA announced that Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43) in Canberra, Australia—the only antenna on the planet that can send commands to Voyager 2—needed critical upgrades. One of its two radio transmitters had not been upgraded in nearly fifty years. 

DSS-43 was slated to be shut down for nearly a year, but enough of the upgrades were completed for communication with the craft to start again. The work on the antenna is still underway and will likely be finished in February. 

Suzanne Dodd, the director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Interplanetary Network Directorate and project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, told The National Interest that she was satisfied with the work on the antenna and knew that sending commands to Voyager 2—currently about twelve billion miles away from Earth—would begin again relatively quickly. 

“The work on the antenna upgrades went smoothly, especially considering travel to Australia was very restricted,” she said. “We were not able to send the engineers from JPL that we normally would have to participate in the work. But the team in Australia did a great job in keeping the work on schedule and consulting with JPL engineers remotely.” 

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched a few weeks apart in 1977 and were given the monumental task of performing an unprecedented “grand tour” of the solar system’s giant planets. Voyager 1 managed to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 followed suit and then zipped past Uranus and Neptune as well. 

In August 2012, Voyager 1 made its historic entry into interstellar space, a first for a man-made object. Then Voyager 2 did the same on November 5, 2018—amazing to think that these two probes, launched four decades ago, are still technically within our solar system. 

And they won’t be leaving anytime soon, as the boundary of the solar system is considered to be beyond the outer edge of the Oort Cloud, an assortment of objects that are still under the influence of the sun’s gravity. It will likely take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly 30,000 years to fly past it. 

Voyager 2’s achievement in reaching interstellar space was confirmed by comparing data from different instruments—namely, the cosmic ray subsystem, the low-energy charged particle instrument, and the magnetometer—aboard the spacecraft. Mission scientists have determined that the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our sun. This particular boundary, which is called the heliopause, is where the hot solar wind meets the cold and dense interstellar void. 

For Chris Laws, teaching professor of astronomy at University of Washington, he believes that “since the region of interstellar space around the sun is not especially well understood, any direct data we can get is immensely valuable.” 

“I also think it’s important from a somewhat more emotional, existential point of view,” he told TNI. “Voyagers 1 and 2 really introduced us to the outer solar system, and they represent the parts of us that have traveled farthest from home—it’s good to hear from your students, and to know that they’re doing well.” 

The Voyager probes are powered by using heat from the decay of radioactive material, which is contained in a device called a radioisotope thermal generator. The power output falls by about four watts per year, which means that they will run out of power supply likely within this decade. 

“The Voyager spacecraft were designed very robustly, with the goal of getting all the way to Neptune for Voyager 2. Obviously, it has lasted another thirty-one years since then, traveling through the heliopause and now since November 2018 through interstellar space. Its longevity is a testament to the excellent spacecraft design and the hard work of dedicated engineers who have stayed with the mission for the last three decades,” Dodd told TNI. 

“It’s anticipated the Voyager spacecraft will continue operations for another five-plus years, assuming that no anomalies occur. We are turning off science instrument heaters and science instruments yearly in order to reduce the power consumption as the power output gets less each year.” 

When that dreaded day eventually arrives, Dodd said that it will be “very difficult to say goodbye to Voyager.” 

“It’s had such a long and exciting mission,” she added. “It will be missed by the team members, but also by all the folks in the general public who follow the mission.” 

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

Mark Episkopos

Security, Asia

In fact, China published a white paper on its defense.

Key point: Beijing is singalling to the world that it knows it has new muscles to flex. What might China be planning next?

First published in 1995, China’s biannual White Paper has long been regarded as one of the foremost sources of Chinese strategic messaging. What does its 2019 edition, “China’s National Defence in the New Era,” tell us about the PRC’s security orientation?

Popular news coverage has focused on the report’s repeated insistence that Chinese “national sovereignty” is irreconcilable with Taiwanese independence, and rightly so; the White Paper reaffirmed that China “makes no promise to renounce the use of force”, and reserves “the option of taking all necessary measures” to reunify with the wayward island off its east coast. So as to preempt any ambiguity, the report confirms that these “necessary measures” include a military solution: “the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) will resolutely defeat anyone attempting to separate Taiwan from China and safeguard national unity at all costs.

A great swathe of the report is devoted to similar kinds of political signalling vis-à-vis the US and China’s Asia-Pacific competitors, but interspersed throughout the White Paper is a trove of valuable information concerning China’s defense priorities.

Despite colossal advancements in military hardware modernization over the past several decades, the report concludes that there is much more work to be done and more investments to be made if the PLA is to meet all of its ambitious modernization targets by 2035: “... the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has yet to complete the task of mechanization, and is in urgent need of improving its informationization. China’s military security is confronted by risks from technology surprise and growing technological generation gap. Greater efforts have to be invested in military modernization to meet national security demands. The PLA still lags far behind the world’s leading militaries.” China’s upcoming type 15 tank, type 052D destroyer, J-20 fighter, and DF-26 ballistic missile were cited as some of the hardware pillars of the standardized, interoperable force that the PLA seeks to evolve towards.

Briefings on the PLA’s hardware modernization progress have long been a mainstay of China’s White Papers; however, the PLA’s newfound emphasis on rethinking not just equipment, but “military policies and institutions,” marks a departure from recent iterations. Chapter four, “Reform in China’s National Defense and Armed Forces,” outlines a series of changes in military training regimen, the restructuring of the PLA’s army groups from 18 to 13, and consolidated military education program. In a clear confirmation of the PLA’s aggressive reorientation toward Air-Sea conflict preparedness, the PLA ground forces were hit by a personnel reduction of 300,000, accompanied by slight personnel increases for the PLA Navy and Rocket Force.

Other changes include an increasingly meritocratic officer promotion system, as well as new military policing and justice measures aimed at “uprooting peacetime ills” and weeding out corruption within the upper echelons of the PLA. The latter is being supplemented by what the White Paper advertises as a drastically reformed command structure, notably condensing the seven former military regions into five Theater Commands.

Finally, the Chinese military has taken a major step in streamlining and consolidating its cyber, space, and electronic warfare operations with the establishment of a People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLASSF) that reports directly to the Central Military Commission (CMC).

As China continues to “narrow the gap between its military and the world’s leading militaries,” the 2019 White Paper is the clearest statement yet of Beijing’s struggle to establish sound military institutions to keep pace with the PLA’s rapid technical modernization.

Mark Episkopos is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and serves as research assistant at the Center for the National Interest. Mark is also a PhD student in History at American University. This first appeared in July 2019.

Image: Reuters. 

James Holmes

Security, Americas

Steam isn’t dead, but it is a technology of the past—just like 16-inch guns.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The function of a capital ship is a vessel that can both give out punishment and receive it. This was the role battleships filled during the Second World War, and it's a need that hasn't entirely gone away. But bringing the old behemoths themselves back would present a dizzying array of logistical problems.

There’s a mystique to battleships.

Whenever inside-the-Beltway dwellers debate how to bulk up the U.S. Navy fleet, odds are sentimentalists will clamor to return the Iowa-class dreadnoughts to service. Nor is the idea of bringing back grizzled World War II veterans as zany as it sounds. We aren’t talking equipping the 1914-vintage USS Texas with superweapons to blast the Soviet Navy, or resurrecting the sunken Imperial Japanese Navy superbattleship Yamato for duty in outer space, or keeping USS Missouri battleworthy in case aliens menace the Hawaiian Islands. Such proposals are not mere whimsy.

Built to duel Japan in World War II, in fact, battleships were recommissioned for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. The last returned to action in 1988. The Iowa class sat in mothballs for about three decades after Korea (except for USS New Jersey, which returned to duty briefly during the Vietnam War). That’s about how long the battlewagons have been in retirement since the Cold War. History thus seems to indicate they could stage yet another comeback. At this remove from their past lives, though, it’s doubtful in the extreme that the operational return on investment would repay the cost, effort, and human capital necessary to bring them back to life.

Numbers deceive. It cost the U.S. Navy $1.7 billion in 1988 dollars to put four battlewagons back in service during the Reagan naval buildup. That comes to about $878 million per hull in 2017 dollars. This figure implies the navy could refurbish two ships bristling with firepower for the price of one Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. One copy of the latest-model Burke will set the taxpayers back $1.9 billion according to Congressional Budget Office figures. Two for the price of one: a low, low price! Or, better yet, the navy could get two battlewagons for the price of three littoral combat ships—the modern equivalent of gunboats. Sounds like a good deal all around.

But colossal practical difficulties would work against reactivating the dreadnoughts at low cost, despite these superficially plausible figures. First of all, the vessels no longer belong to the U.S. Navy. They’re museums. New Jersey and Missouri were struck from the navy list during the 1990s. Engineers preserved Iowa and Wisconsin in “reactivation” status for quite some time, meaning they hypothetically could return to duty. But they too were struck from the rolls, in 2006. Sure, the U.S. government could probably get them back during a national emergency, but resolving legal complications would consume time and money in peacetime.

Second, chronological age matters. A standard talking point among battleship enthusiasts holds that the Iowas resemble a little old lady’s car, an aged auto with little mileage on the odometer. A used-car salesman would laud its longevity, assuring would-be buyers they could put lots more miles on it. This too makes intuitive sense. My old ship, USS Wisconsin, amassed just fourteen years of steaming time despite deploying for World War II, Korea, and Desert Storm. At a time when the U.S. Navy hopes to wring fifty years of life out of aircraft carriers and forty out of cruisers and destroyers, refitted battleships could seemingly serve for decades to come.

And it is true: stout battleship hulls could doubtless withstand the rigors of sea service. But what about their internals? Mechanical age tells only part of the story. Had the Iowa class remained in continuous service, with regular upkeep and overhauls, they probably could have steamed around for decades. After all, the World War II flattop USS Lexington served until 1991, the same year the Iowas retired. But they didn’t get that treatment during the decades they spent slumbering. As a consequence, battleships were already hard ships to maintain a quarter-century ago. Sailors had to scavenge spares from still older battleships. Machinists, welders, and shipfitters were constantly on the go fabricating replacements for worn-out parts dating from the 1930s or 1940s.

This problem would be still worse another quarter-century on, and a decade-plus after the navy stopped preserving the vessels and their innards. Managing that problem would be far more expensive. An old joke among yachtsmen holds that a boat is a hole in the water into which the owner dumps money. A battleship would represent a far bigger hole in the water, devouring taxpayer dollars in bulk. Even if the U.S. Navy could reactivate the Iowas for a pittance, the cost of operating and maintaining them could prove prohibitive. That’s why they were shut down in the 1990s, and time has done nothing to ease that remorseless logic.

Third, what about the big guns the Iowa class sports—naval rifles able to fling projectiles weighing the same as a VW Bug over twenty miles? These are the battleships’ signature weapon, and there is no counterpart to them in today’s fleet. Massive firepower might seem to justify the expense of recommissioning and maintaining the ships. But gun barrels wear out after being fired enough times. No one has manufactured replacement barrels for 16-inch, 50-caliber guns in decades, and the inventory of spares has evidently been scrapped or donated to museums. That shortage would cap the battleships’ combat usefulness.

Nor, evidently, is there any safe ammunition for battleship big guns to fire. We used 1950s-vintage 16-inch rounds and powder during the 1980s and 1990s. Any such rounds still in existence are now over sixty years old, while the U.S. Navy is apparently looking to demilitarize and dispose of them. Gearing up to produce barrels and ammunition in small batches would represent a nonstarter for defense firms. The navy recently canceled the destroyer USS Zumwalt’s advanced gun rounds because costs spiraled above $800,000 apiece. That was a function of ordering few munitions for what is just a three-ship class. Ammunition was simply unaffordable. Modernized Iowas would find themselves in the same predicament, if not more so.

And lastly, it’s unclear where the U.S. Navy would find the human expertise to operate 16-inch gun turrets or the M-type Babcock & Wilcox boilers that propel and power battleships. No one has trained on these systems since 1991, meaning experts in using and maintaining them have, ahem, aged and grown rusty at their profession. Heck, steam engineers are in short supply, full stop, as the navy turns to electric drive, gas turbines, and diesel engines to propel its ships. Older amphibious helicopter docks (LHDs) are steam-powered, but even this contingent is getting a gradual divorce from steam as newer LHDs driven by gas turbines join the fleet while their steam-propelled forebears approach decommissioning.

Steam isn’t dead, then, but it is a technology of the past—just like 16-inch guns. Technicians are few and dwindling in numbers while battleship crews would demand them in large numbers. I rank among the youngest mariners to have operated battleship guns and propulsion-plant machinery in yesteryear, and trust me, folks: you don’t want the U.S. Navy conscripting me to regain my proficiency in engineering and weapons after twenty-six years away from it, let alone training youngsters to operate elderly hardware themselves. In short, it’s as tough to regenerate human capital as it is to rejuvenate the material dimension after a long lapse. The human factor—all by itself—could constitute a showstopper for battleship reactivation.

Battleships still have much to contribute to fleet design, just not as active surface combatants. Alfred Thayer Mahan describes a capital ship—the core of any battle fleet—as a vessel able to dish out and absorb punishment against a peer navy. While surface combatants pack plenty of offensive punch nowadays, the innate capacity to take a punch is something that has been lost in today’s lightly armored warships. Naval architects could do worse than study the battleships’ history and design philosophy, rediscovering what it means to construct a true capital ship. The U.S. Navy would be better off for their inquiry.

Let’s learn what we can from the past—but leave battleship reactivation to science fiction.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. This article was first published in 2019.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Middle East

Missile and suicide boats could be part of the trick.

Key point: The catch would be to lure the U.S. ships in close and near Iran's coastline. From there, hidden missile batteries could strike.

Recent events, particularly the downing of a U.S. Navy MQ-4 Triton by Iranian military forces, again raise the possibility of war between the United States and Iran. The on again, off again standoff between Washington and Tehran, now in its fourth decade is periodically instigated by both sides, and each time Iran grows stronger. If Iran decides to stage an attack against a larger target, such as an American destroyer or even aircraft carrier, how might it use its missile force to do so? 

Iran has invested considerable resources in its ballistic missile forces over the past forty years, for the same reason China and North Korea did: military aviation is an expensive proposition, and developing and maintaining an air force to rival the United States is very expensive indeed. Ballistic missiles offer a relatively inexpensive way to launch conventional, chemical, biological, and even nuclear payloads long distances. As an added bonus intercepting such missiles is complex and itself an expensive undertaking. All three countries developed large ballistic missile arsenals of varying sophistication, occasionally trading in illicit information among themselves and others. 

Iran, as The National Interest pointed out last month, has a large and varied ballistic missile arsenal. It is difficult to pin down with certainty Iran’s capabilities, as information inside the country is tightly controlled and the government often exaggerates or is evasive regarding its military capabilities. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that Iran possesses the missiles as described by The National Interest, such as missiles with infra-red seekers for terminal guidance (Fateh Mobin) and an anti-ship ballistic missile with a 434-mile range. Iran would need such a capability to even consider hitting ships at sea. 

Perhaps just as important as having ballistic missiles is the “kill chain” of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets required to keep constant tabs on a U.S. Navy battle group, allowing Iran’s missileers to launch their missiles with the most current targeting information available. U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and their escorts can steam at speeds of up to 35 knots, making information even just an hour old useless for targeting purposes. 

Experts reckon that China will have a similar requirement for persistent ISR across the vastness of the Pacific, but Iran will have a considerably easier task. The Islamic Republic’s southern borders run the length of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, a coastline longer than that of California, Oregon, and Washington combined, and both are less than three hundred miles wide at their widest. Even a country like Iran, lacking sophisticated reconnaissance assets, would find it easy to keep track of something as large as a carrier battle group. Military assets including outdated military aircraft and helicopters, the many small boats and ships of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranian intelligence agents, and regime-friendly civilian vessels could keep track of a fleet of U.S. ships relatively easily. 

Iran would likely want to pull an American carrier battle group as close to the Iran coastline as possible. This would allow the country to disperse its fleet of ballistic missiles across a wider area and farther inland, giving them a better chance of escaping detection before launch. U.S. reconnaissance assets such as JSTARS, the RQ-4 Global Hawk, and others can peer into Iran without entering Iranian territory, making detection of missile movements possible without entering Iranian airspace. As Iranian missiles gain in range and sophistication, such missiles could be deployed deeper within the country’s interior where they are more difficult to detect. It is worth keeping in mind Iran is a large country of approximately 636,000 square miles, making it larger than California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Utah combined. 

In the event of an attack, Iran would likely launch every missile it could possibly throw at a carrier strike group, ideally scores or even hundreds of missiles. Even missiles that have no reasonable chance of striking a moving warship, the vast majority of the missile force, would be launched in order to overwhelm the carrier’s defenders with threats. Iran, which pioneered the use of small boats armed with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and artillery rockets during the Iran-Iraq War, has long been a fan of overwhelming enemy forces with obsolete or ineffective weapons to conserve combat power. A missile attack would likely be no different. 

An alert carrier battle group’s defenses, directed by a guided missile cruiser armed with the Aegis Combat System, would likely take out most of the incoming missiles. Shorter-range ballistic missiles launched from the coastline would be engaged with SM-6 air defense missiles, and the more common Standard SM-2 Block IV has a limited anti-ballistic capability. It might be necessary to use SM-3 ballistic missile interceptors against longer-range Iranian missiles. Most Iranian missiles would miss, having never had a reasonable chance of hitting, contributing best as a means of confusing the enemy. 

Could a lucky Iranian missile actually sink an American carrier? It’s unlikely. The missiles with the best chances of hitting, short-range missiles with terminal guidance like the Fateh Mobin, have the smallest warheads and move at the slowest speeds. Such a missile would have to carry a nuclear warhead to pose a mortal threat to a 100,000-ton warship, and Iran lacks the fissile material and expertise to build such a warhead. A smaller target, such as a destroyer, would be more vulnerable but also more difficult to hit.

Even under ideal circumstances, Iran’s missile arsenal is unlikely to pose a credible threat against the U.S. Navy. That having been said, Iran can be expected to continue to develop longer-range missiles with greater throw weights and improved accuracy. The time may come when the Pentagon, out of an abundance of caution, might decline to send carriers beyond the Gulf of Oman--but that time is not now. 

This first appeared in 2014.

Image: Reuters

Jared Keller

Security, Asia

Photos of the J-20 provide an up close and personal look at the fuselage of the new interceptor. But the photos also appear to show a sensor system that looks awfully similar to the Lockheed Martin Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) on the front of the F-35 Lighting II.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Does the sensor system on China's J-20 fighter jet look familiar to you? It should. 

Photos from a few years back of the J-20 provide an up close and personal look at the fuselage of the new interceptor. But the photos also appear to show a sensor system that looks awfully similar to the Lockheed Martin Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) on the front of the F-35 Lighting II.

There’s a reason for this: In 2007, Lockheed Martin dealt with something of a cyber Ocean’s 11 when Chinese hackers stole technical documents related to the development of the F-35. The details on the hack, eventually revealed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, are just one example of Chinese attempts to steal foreign aviation technology; as recently as 2017, Chinese hackers went after Australian F-35 defense contractors, nabbing even more info on the cutting-edge fighter.

Although the two electro-optical systems pictured above are not identical, they share quite a few similarities in shape and placement: compared to the Eurofighter or Su-57’s electro-optical systems and Infrared Tracking Systems (IRTS), respectively, which are also mounted on top of the fuselage, the differences between the Lockheed Martin and J-20’s Systems are relatively minor. The system’s positioning under the nose of the aircraft also reinforces that the J-20 is probably designed for both long-range strike missions against ground targets and interceptor duties. However, the J-20 EOTS appears to be less capable than the F-35 equivalent, judging by the size and layout of the J-20 EOTS enclosure.

Much about the J-20 is shrouded in secrecy, but the plane is most likely powered by the same two AL-31F engines which are used in the Su-27, a Russian fighter that is capable of a top speed of Mach 2.3. But the J-20 could also be flying with indigenous (but less reliable) WS-10B engines, due to a lack of Russian engines or as a stopgap until the more powerful WS-15 jet engines are ready for operational use. And while parts of the design of the J-20 appear to resemble the F-22 and it’s stealthy curves, these similarities could be skin deep as the angularity on the jet inlets and wings remain quite different, and the J-20 lacks all-aspect stealth. Recently the Indian Air Force claimed they could track the J-20 using the Su-30MKIs electronically scanned ‘Phazotron Zhuk-AE’ radar.

Although the J-20 has been pushed into service, recent problems with the J-15 carrier-based fighter suggest that the Chinese answer to the F-22 isn’t quite ready for prime-time despite propaganda from Chinese-owned media outlets that portray the J-20 as a fully-armed and operational battle station. That certainly sounds familiar …

This first appeared in Task and Purpose here. 

Image: Reuters. 

John Venable

Security, Eurasia

Saturating an area with unmanned hunter-killer systems like the Orbiter 1K and Harop drones can overwhelm even the best air defense artillery and missile systems currently fielded, which is one reason both China and the United States are researching technologies that feature swarms of drones.

Worldwide military use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) or drones has grown by leaps and bounds since the mid-1990s when the first General Atomics MQ-1 Predator took to the air.  Over the last twenty-five years, the number, type, and mission set of drones has expanded considerably, and the ongoing Armenia-Azerbaijani conflict suggests that drones will play an increasingly significant role in future conflicts. 

Originally, the Predator served exclusively as a reconnaissance platform. That changed in 2001 when an MQ-1 successfully launched a Hellfire missile and hit its target on a test range in Nevada. 

The MQ-1 and its younger sibling, the MQ-9, have been used as if they were manned light reconnaissance and attack platforms instead of autonomous systems. They have logged more hours per aircraft than any other manned reconnaissance platform and probably more than all manned fighters in the U.S. arsenal. These two aircraft are at the upper end of tactical drones with regard to size, weight, complexity and cost, and they have been incredibly effective for the United States and its allies.

Military UAS platforms in the medium to small categories run from hand-launched, short-range reconnaissance drones with electro-optical/infrared sensors, to medium-sized drones with several hours of endurance that can be used for reconnaissance and/or attack. And every system is capable of delivering significant tactical effects for the warfighter.

In January 2018, a swarm of “home-built” drones carrying small explosive devices attacked Russian forces at Hmeimim Air Base (AB) and Tartus Naval Base in Syria.  While neither the damage inflicted nor the effectiveness of Russian counter-drone systems has been independently verified, there is little doubt that the swarm of thirteen drones presented a significant targeting challenge to the defenders. The small size of the drones and their low radar cross-section made them hard to detect, and recent engagements of state of the art hunter-killer drones prove that, when the drones get through, they are deadly.

In the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Azerbaijanis have employed three different drones against Armenian armor and personnel to great effect. The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 is a large drone, in the same class as the MQ-9 Reaper. It carries laser and infrared-guided anti-tank munitions. The Israeli Obiter 1K and Harop drones have been used for reconnaissance and recovered to fly again, or employed as kamikaze attack drones.  Collectively, these three types of drones reportedly destroyed more than eighty Armenian armored vehicles in the first few weeks of fighting.  Each has a significant loiter capability, and video from the ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict appears to show numerous systems operating in concert.   

Saturating an area with unmanned hunter-killer systems like the Orbiter 1K and Harop drones can overwhelm even the best air defense artillery and missile systems currently fielded, which is one reason both China and the United States are researching technologies that feature swarms of drones. 

China’s recent swarming experiments involve dozens of explosive-filled suicide drones launched simultaneously from specially designed vehicles and aircraft.  Once airborne, the drones can loiter over the battlefield hunting for targets or an operator can designate a target and send the drones to move together and destroy it.

While it may be hard to visualize the size and overwhelming nature of swarming drones, testing conducted by the U.S. Navy in 2016 graphically demonstrated the hopelessness one would feel as a target in the center of such an attack.    

In that test, three FA-18s released 103 micro-drones over China Lake, California. The UAVs executed several missions/maneuvers showing the ability to operate together, deconflict flight paths and then simultaneously attack a single target.  The eyewatering video demonstrates the incredible tactical impact even the smallest drones will have on battlefields of the future.  

For now, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict highlights the deadly mechanisms at play in modern warfare where drones can find and destroy virtually any target on the battlefield.  As long as these unmanned aerial systems have free movement above the enemy, they will wreak havoc on their armor, vehicles and fielded forces.   

America has both a technological edge and decades more operational experience with offensive unmanned aerial systems than its global competitors. While that is a significant advantage, the losses that will come without an effective means of detecting and then countering or destroying the offensive drones of those who would do us harm will be substantial.    

The Defense Department’s first joint strategy to counter small drones is about to hit Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s desk. That’s a step in the right direction. But DARPA and the Defense Department as a whole must put the development of counter-drone systems that can handle swarms of drones near the top of its growing list of priorities.

A twenty-five-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, John “JV” Venable is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense. 

Image: Reuters

Dov S. Zakheim

Politics, Americas

Donald Trump’s four years in office have exhausted the nation. Even Republican legislators are already beginning to back away from him. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, the country will as well.

Joe Biden has won. The Republicans appear likely to retain control of the Senate; they also have eaten into the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. For Americans who desperately seek stability, there could not be a better outcome. 

Biden is not a socialist, as Donald Trump alleges. Nor does he favor, or is a favorite of, the extreme left-wing of the Democratic Party. Were the Democrats to pull off a miracle and take over the Senate, for example, if they were to take both Georgia seats should both be contested in that state’s January 11 run-off election, which together with the vice president’s tiebreaker vote would give them a majority, Biden would be unable to prevent a sharp lurch to the Left. He would become a hostage to “the squad” and other extreme progressives in the House and have to cope with Bernie Sanders as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. It is an unenticing prospect for the vast majority of Americans, and probably for Biden too.  

On the other hand, a Republican majority Senate, with Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell returning as majority leader, would serve as a backstop against the more wild-eyed, high-cost proposals that Bernie Sanders, “the squad” and their fellow travelers might offer. Biden could tell his more progressive supporters that he could not do more than extort a compromise from McConnell.  

The majority leader could pitch the same message to those elements of his own party who hanker after unvarnished Trumpism, be it border walls, further restrictions on immigration, or legislation to undermine the Affordable Care Act. The result of the separate posturing by Biden and McConnell could be deadlock. On the other hand, it could also lead to compromises that might include dealing with the pandemic; responses to China’s theft of intellectual property; immigration reform including writing DACA into law; infrastructure modernization; and the renaming of military facilities currently bearing the names of Confederate officers. To anticipate compromise is not a drug-infused hallucination. After all, Biden and McConnell were colleagues in the Senate for over three decades and both are not strangers to reaching across the political aisle. Moreover, and importantly, and there is little evidence of any personal animosity between them. Indeed, they co-sponsored several bills in the Senate and in 2012 negotiated the extension of most of the 2000 tax cuts that were due to expire, a deal that exasperated the Democratic progressives. 

Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede defeat; he claims the election is rigged and points to Biden’s margins in what he terms “corrupt” democratic cities. He clings desperately to the safety that the White House affords him. Once he leaves office, he will be vulnerable to certain indictment in New York for tax fraud and other criminal violations.  

Trump will rail against his enemies and against standard election procedures. He will pursue a scorched earth policy to the very end. He will press lawsuits as far up the judicial chain as he possibly can. He will issue a flurry of executive orders that reflect the most extreme position that his supporters can conjure up. He will veto any legislation that is put before him. And he will refuse to permit anyone to cooperate with the incoming transition team.  

His four years in office have exhausted the nation. Even Republican legislators are already beginning to back away from him. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, the country will as well. 

Dov S. Zakheim served as the undersecretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the deputy undersecretary of defense (planning and resources) from 1985–1987. He also served as the DoD’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

Both countries are cooperating more than ever, but would Moscow really help Beijing in that way?

Key point: Russia has the knowledge, but China has the money. Would Moscow help Beijing for the right price?

It appears that China is relying on Russian know-how and experience to develop the reactor for its first nuclear aircraft carrier. As the South China Morning Post reports, China appears to be studying the nuclear reactors on Russia’s largest icebreakers, an approach that the Soviet Union also took when it planned to build nuclear carriers in the 1980s. Specifically, Russia has invited China to bid on the construction of a new class of nuclear icebreaker, necessarily requiring the development of surface-ship based reactors. This approach stands in contrast to how the United States and France developed nuclear reactors for their largest carriers, but probably represents the best choice for China at this point. 

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

History: 

To appreciate what’s at stake in China’s pursuit of nuclear-powered surface warships, it’s important to review the experience of the United States and the USSR. After the successful development of the USS Nautilus and the Skate class nuclear attack submarines (as well as the merchant ship NS Savannah) provided proof-of-concept regarding nuclear propulsion, the USN began to evaluate nuclear power for surface warships. The first USN nuclear surface warship was the cruiser USS Long Beach, commissioned in 1961. Long Beach was powered by 2 C1WS reactors, generating around 120 MW, enough power to produce a speed of 30 knots for the 17,000-ton cruiser hull. The USN rapidly followed up with USS Enterprise, powered by 8 A2W reactors, each quite similar in construction and output to the C1W. Those reactors generated 120 MW each, translating to 280,000 SHP, driving the 100,000-ton Enterprise at up to 33 knots.

A few other nuclear cruisers and destroyers followed, but the advantages of nuclear power in surface warfare ships was limited by cost. Aircraft carriers were a different story. The Nimitz class, which began to enter service in 1975, use two A4W reactors, each rated at 550 MW. The recently commissioned USS Gerald R. Ford carries two A1B reactors, capable of generating 700 MW. The extra power generation capacity of the Fords has little to do with speed. Rather, the power provides a surplus usable for a variety of different systems, including EMALS and highly sophisticated sensors. Down the road, the extra energy may power point-defense lasers and similar equipment. Overall, the reactors open up space to modernize and modify the Ford-class vessels, keeping them effective for their decades of project life.

The Soviet Experience: 

The Soviet experience was somewhat different. While the Soviets enjoyed considerable success in developing nuclear reactors for submarines, they approached the question of surface warships much more carefully. The first nuclear powered Soviet ship was the icebreaker Lenin, commissioned in 1959 with three OK-150 reactors (90 MW each). Between 1975 and 1990, the Soviets would commission nine more nuclear icebreakers of the Arktika and Taymyr classes, generally displacing between 20,000 and 25,000 tons and carrying two OK-900 reactors, capable of 150 MW. 

These ships provided valuable experience, but the Soviets were slow to make the leap to nuclear-powered surface combatants, in part because Soviet warships were expected to operate closer to home than their U.S. counterparts. In 1974, however, the Soviets began building the first of four ships of the Kirov class, 26,000-ton battlecruisers with both nuclear and conventional propulsion. Reports differ on the power capacity of the two KN-3 reactors, with a range from 150 MW to 300 MW. These reactors would also have powered the Ulyanovsk class supercarriers, a class of ships that was canceled upon the collapse of the USSR. 

What China Wants: 

The Chinese are undoubtedly thinking along lines similar to those of the late Soviets. Expectations for Carrier 004 (003 will be a conventional CATOBAR carrier) suggest a ship roughly the size and sophistication of the Ford-class, which of course would require immense power-generation capabilities. Like the United States, China wants excess power generation in order to field a suite of future weapons and sensors. For this purpose, China needs reactors more powerful than those that it currently uses on its submarines, and building icebreakers for Russia may provide the necessary experience.

This approach stands in contrast to that of the French Navy, which decided to upscale based on experience building nuclear reactors for submarines. While France has enjoyed success with nuclear subs, the Charles De Gaulle is widely believed to be underpowered relative to other fleet carriers. Charles de Gaulle uses two Areva K15 reactors, the same type as employed on French submarines. These reactors provide 150 MW each, but only drive the 43,000-ton carrier some 27 knots. It’s worth noting that India considered, but wisely rejected, the idea of building INS Vishal as a nuclear carrier, largely because of the technical challenges of developing a powerful enough reactor.

Parting Thoughts: 

The idea of using Russian technical data and nuclear know-how certainly makes sense from the perspective of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The PLAN doesn’t have the luxury of the incremental approach adopted by the United States, and has good reason to find the French approach insufficient to its needs. That the Russians seem okay with letting the Chinese study their icebreakers suggests, once again, that Moscow and Beijing currently see cooperation as in their long-term interests. Of course, nothing will be certain until China’s first nuclear carrier actually enters service, perhaps sometime around 2030.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed here are his personal views and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the Army War College, or any other department or agency of the U.S. government. This first appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Technology, Europe

What is the future of this excellent design?

Here's What You Need to Know: The MiG-31 is the standard long range interceptor of the Russian Air Force and is expected to serve into the 2030s.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’ s Air Defense Forces (VPVO) needed a series of heavy interceptors to patrol its massive borders. Most regular “light” fighters like the early MiGs were not up to the task, as they lacked the range and speed to intercept to rapidly climb and intercept supersonic American bombers, who were expected to zoom over the Arctic to drop bombs on the Soviet Union.

As a result, a specialized class of aircraft was created for this purpose. The first was the Tupolev Tu-28 and Tu-128. These aircraft would lay the template for later interceptors: they were large for good endurance, fast, and were armed solely with missiles.

This design was obsolete from the time it entered service in the 1960s, as the B-58 Hustler that was in service at the time could outpace it. However, the MiG-25 “Foxbat” was also in development at the time. This aircraft would go on to become the definitive interceptor of the VPVO.

Blisteringly fast and armed with the massive R-40 air-to-air missiles, the Foxbat stood ready to defend the Soviet Union’s borders against all threats. Its airframe also saw adaptation into more tactical roles, photo reconnaissance and strike versions of the MiG-25 were created for the Soviet Air Force (VVS).

In the 1980s, the MiG-25 was followed up by the MiG-31, which added in a second weapons systems officer on all models and increased the flight performance, radar and weapons of the craft. Early versions also featured a cannon, but this was quickly deleted once it was determined that such extras were not necessary on a pure interceptor.

Nowadays the MiG-31 is the standard long range interceptor of the Russian Air Force (the VPVO was merged with the VVS in the 1990s) and is expected to serve into the 2030s. A “mid-life upgrade” of the MiG-31 is currently being procured: the MiG-31BSM. This modification integrates many new strike weapons onto the MiG-31 and modernizes most systems. The MiG-31 was also chosen as the primary carrier aircraft for the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

But in August 2018, Russian outlets announced that experimental design work was beginning on a next generation pure interceptor that is meant to replace the MiG-31. Following the naming convention of Russia’s other next generation aircraft projects (PAK (XX)), the new interceptor project is called PAK DP, or Prospective Aviation Complex Long-range Interceptor.

The continuation of a line of dedicated interceptors is interesting because the existing PAK-FA/Su-57 fighter in many ways could fulfill the same role as the MiG-31. It has a highly advanced radar, it can supercruise (maintain Mach 1+ flight without the use of afterburners), and it could be armed with long range air-to-air missiles.

While the range is less than a MiG-31, air-to-air refueling can make up the gap. But since the capabilities as they stand are so similar, why the need for a separate airframe? Sukhoi fighters have also served in the interceptor role before, the Su-27P variant of the Flanker was meant explicitly for the VPVO. There are a couple reasons why the Russian government still considers the PAK DP to be necessary.

The first is that the PAK DP might build off the multirole nature of the earlier MiG-31 and MiG-25 conversions. An aircraft close to the original conception of the F-111 could be in the cards for Russia in the PAK DP: something that can carry a ton of long-range missiles and also perform strike with a wide range of munitions (including hypersonic ones)while moving very fast.

Another possible reason is that Russia wishes to keep the heritage of MiG alive within United Aircraft Corporation (UAC). Since Sukhoi has done the majority of the design work and has had its name attached to the PAK FA (in the Su-57 designation), MiG needs a next generation project of their own to work on. The MiG-35, while advanced, is still not of the PAK family of next-generation craft and MiG not have an aircraft to work on in the future.

The last reason is that the VVS might want to future proof their interceptor force against future developments in UAV technology. While the PAK FA is fast, it does represent a step backward in speed compared to the MiG-31. While the SR-71 Blackbird is retired, UAVs incorporating some of its technology may come online in the future. Russia might need a plane that can really push the limits of speed to intercept them and keep its airspace safe.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues.

This article first appeared in August 2018.

Image: Flickr

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

When Japan launched her surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and on British and Dutch possessions in East Asia, the 521 Zeroes serving in the Japanese Navy quickly became the terror of Allied fighter pilots

Here's What You Need To Remember: Both the Zero and Wildcat saw action through the remainder of World War II, many of the former ending their days as Kamikaze aircraft. The Wildcat carried on a little-known but surprisingly successful career with the U.S. and Royal Navies in the European theater, dueling French fighters over North Africa, flying from small escort carriers to hunt Nazi bombers and submarines, and even embarked on the last Allied air raid of the war, sinking a U-Boat in Norway on May 5, 1945.

Japan began the Pacific War with two major technological advantages over the U.S. Navy: the much more reliable Long Lance torpedo, and the Mitsubishi A6M Zero carried-based fighter, a design that defied expectations by outperforming land-based fighters when in it was introduced into service in 1940.

Designer Jiro Horikoshi maximized the Zero’s performance by reducing airframe weight to an unprecedented degree by cutting armor protection and employing an “extra super” duralumin alloy.  Combined with an 840-horsepower Sakae 12 radial engine, the A6M2 Type Zero could attain speeds of 346 miles per hour, while exhibiting extraordinary maneuverability and high rates of climb. For armament, the Zero boasted two punchy Type 99 20-millimeter cannons in the wing—though only with sixty rounds of ammunition—and two rifle-caliber machine guns firing through the propeller.

The elegant airframe weighed only 1.85-tons empty, giving the Zero a tremendous range of 1,600 miles—very useful for scouting for enemy ships and launching long-distance raids. By comparison, Germany’s excellent contemporary Bf 109 fighter could fly only 500 miles, fatefully reducing its effectiveness in the Battle of Britain.

The Zero debuted fantastically in combat in July 1940, with thirteen land-based A6M2 Zeros shooting down twice their number of Russian-built I-16 and I-153 fighters in a three-minute engagement.

When Japan launched her surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and on British and Dutch possessions in East Asia, the 521 Zeroes serving in the Japanese Navy quickly became the terror of Allied fighter pilots. U.S. Army P-39 Airacobras struggled to match the Zero’s high altitude performance. Even the pilots of agile British Spitfires found they were likely to be out-turned and out-climbed by a Zero.

The U.S. Navy at the time was phasing in the Grumman F4F Wildcat at the expense of the infamously awful F2A Buffalo. The tubby-looking Wildcat was heavier at 2.5 to 3 tons and had a range slightly over 800 miles. The Wildcat’s supercharged 1,200 horsepower R-1830 radial engine allowed it to attain speeds of 331 mph while armed with four jam-prone .50-caliber machine guns, or 320 mph on the heavier F4F-4 model with six machine guns and side-folding wings for improved stowage.

Thus the U.S. Navy’s top fighter was slower and less maneuverable than the Zero. But unexpectedly—after a rough start, and despite starting the war with less combat experience, Wildcat pilots managed to trade-off evenly with Zeroes. At Wake Island, just four Marine Wildcats helped repel besieging Japanese forces for two weeks and even sank the destroyer Kisaragi. In February 1942, Wildcat pilot Edward “Butch” O’Hare managed to shoot down three Japanese bombers and damage three more during a raid.

Though the Wildcat didn’t claim air superiority over the nimble Japanese fighters, they performed well enough to allow American dive and torpedo bombers to sink five Japanese aircraft carriers in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway—finally turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.

How did they pull it off?

The Zero’s lack of armor and a self-sealing fuel tank (which have internal bladders that swell to close off holes) meant they were infamously prone to disintegrating or catching fire after sustaining light damage. Meanwhile, once a Zero pilot expended his limited supply of 20-millimeter shells, the remaining rifle-caliber machine guns struggled to down better-armored Wildcats. Navy and Marine Wildcat pilots learned to make slashing attacks from above leveraging their superior diving speed. But it simply wasn’t always possible to avoid getting into a turning dogfight with a Zero.

Contemplating this problem, naval aviator John Thach, devised the tactic called the Thach Weave in which two Wildcats flying side-by-side laid a trap for pursuing Zeros. Both the “bait” and “hook” plane would complete two consecutive 90-degree turns towards each other, forming a figure eight. A Zero choosing to pursue the bait plane would end up having its tail in the sights of the hook.

After successfully testing the maneuver with Wildcat ace Edward O’Hare, John Thach had a chance to try his Thach Weave the Battle of Midway. On June 4, Thach’s six F4Fs of VF-3 squadron from the carrier Yorktown were escorting Devastator torpedo bombers when they were bounced by fifteen to twenty Zeros, one of which immediately set a Wildcat ablaze while another knocked out the radio on the Wildcat of Thach’s wingman.

Thach called on the radio for rookie pilot Ram Dibb to help him perform the Weave maneuver. Steve Erling’s book Thach Weave recounts what happened next:

“With so many enemy planes in the air, Thach was not sure anything would work, but the answer came when a Zero followed Dibb during one of his turns… Thach found himself angry that the young inexperienced Dibb was the target of this Zero. Wisdom called for a short burst of shells to hopefully cause the Zero to break off the pass, but it was apparent this Zero was not going to break off. Anger rising, Thach continued straight ahead, the firing button depressed, rather than ducking under the Zero. At last the Zero broke off, and as he passed close by, Thach could see flames pouring from its underside.”

“Continuing the weave now discouraged the Zeros from following the Wildcats in their turns, but one made the same mistake as Thach’s first kill, and when he was too slow in his pullout, Thach shot him down and added a third mark on his kneepad. Soon after, Dibb erased another enemy fighter converging astern of Thach and Macomber.

By then the Zeros had shot down all but two of the torpedo bombers and might have finished off the Wildcats. But at that moment, two squadrons of SBD dive bombers came screaming out from the clouds on the now unprotected Japanese carriers. The Zeros were too low and far afield to intercept them, and bomber proceeded to fatally cripple the carriers Akagi and Kaga.

The Thach Weave was subsequently adopted by other Navy and Marine squadrons, and top Japanese ace Saburo Sakai described the maneuver vexing a squadron mate’s attack run over Guadalcanal in his biography.

The Wildcat never exceeded the Zero in performance, but over time the non-existent armor protection and loss of entire carriers took a heavy toll on Japanese aviators, eroding their experience advantage. In 1943, new, much faster U.S. fighters such as the F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair decisively won air superiority for the Allies. In the 1944 Great Marianas Turkey Shoot over the Philippine Sea, Allied fighters and flak gunners shot down over 500 Japanese warplanes for just 123 USN aircraft lost.

Both the Zero and Wildcat saw action through the remainder of World War II, many of the former ending their days as Kamikaze aircraft. The Wildcat carried on a little-known but surprisingly successful career with the U.S. and Royal Navies in the European theater, dueling French fighters over North Africa, flying from small escort carriers to hunt Nazi bombers and submarines, and even embarked on the last Allied air raid of the war, sinking a U-Boat in Norway on May 5, 1945.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared in December 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

Much of the credit goes to spies like Yoshikawa, a youngish looking naval reserve ensign who had only arrived in Hawaii nine months earlier.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Japan’s successful intelligence-gathering operation on Oahu in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the United States to tighten its national security efforts in the decades that followed.

“You are probably the nearest to war that you’ll ever be without actually being in it,” said Commander Harold M. “Beauty” Martin as he addressed his men on the morning of December 6, 1941, at Kaneohe Naval Air Station on Mokapu Peninsula, located less than 15 miles east-northeast of Pearl Harbor. “Keep your eyes and ears open and be on the alert to every moment,” said the well-respected commander.

One fellow who was keeping his eyes wide open that day was Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa. He closely observed the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor on the south side of Oahu late in the afternoon from vantage points at Aiea Heights and the Pearl City Landing. Later the same day he sent a coded report to Tokyo noting that the U.S. Army had ordered equipment for barrage defense balloons, but none was yet on scene, and he opined that torpedo nets probably were not in place to protect the battleships at anchor in Pearl Harbor. “I imagine that there is considerable opportunity left … for a surprise attack,” he added, as the clock continued ticking.

Meanwhile, Commander Martin’s somber, cautionary message earlier in the day was being widely debated by the American sailors, a number of whom belittled the racial and intellectual capabilities of the Japanese, especially their ability to handle fast-moving aircraft. Some even argued that any aggressive Japanese actions against the United States would be quashed within two weeks.

But within 24 hours those men and their American compatriots at Pearl Harbor would be in the fight of their lives against two waves of incoming Japanese bombers and fighters. Within 90 minutes of the first attack early on December 7, the Japanese had sunk four battleships and damaged another four of the large ships, three cruisers, and three destroyers and consigned nearly 200 American aircraft to the scrapyard. Worse yet, more than 2,400 Americans were killed and more than 1,175 wounded in the surprise attack.

Raid on Kaneohe Naval Air Station

Those at the Kaneohe Naval Air Station were among the first to face the enemy onslaught that Sunday morning. The nimble Mitsubishi A6M Zeros came in at 7:48 am, strafing a small utility plane and fanning out over the station and firing promiscuously. The officer on duty called nearby Bellows Field requesting help, but his message was treated as a joke. Kaneohe contractor Sam Aweau called both Bellows and Hickam airfields, but his warnings also were met with disbelief.

Commander Martin, for his part, was gulping a cup of coffee in his quarters and preparing hot chocolate for his 13-year-old son when the youth reported seeing the Japanese planes maneuvering above. Once Martin spotted the Rising Sun emblem for himself, he quickly tossed his uniform on over his blue silk pajamas and dashed for the car. Screeching through the still-quiet residential neighborhood at upward of 50 miles per hour, Martin managed to park near his command post and run toward it amid a hail of bullets.

The first parked plane was already in flames when Martin arrived at Kaneohe, and soon the Japanese bombers joined the fray. He was proud of how his men responded, many of whom were newcomers to the service. “There was no panic,” he said. “Everyone went right to work battling back and doing his job.”

Unfortunately, Kaneohe had no antiaircraft guns. Sailors and marines fired their pistols and rifles at the low-flying aircraft without success. Once the first wave of attackers disappeared, the men dashed to the hangars and planes. The ordnance staffers began issuing rifles and machine guns and disbursing ammunition from locked storage areas.

Aviation Chief Ordnanceman John W. Finn positioned both a .30-caliber and a .50-caliber machine gun on the parking ramp for the Consolidated PBY Catalinas (PBY) and began dueling with the Japanese Zeros as they strafed Kaneohe. Finn moved back and forth between the two weapons, but he spent most of his time at the .50 caliber. As he fired, he was assisted by sailors who replenished his ammunition. Finn’s steady firing damaged several Zeros. No one knows for sure whether it was Finn or someone else, perhaps an ordnanceman named Sands, who fired the rounds that struck flight leader Lieutenant Fusata Iida’s aircraft.

The nine Zeros led by Iida were beginning to reassemble to head back to the carrier fleet when Iida motioned to his wingman that he had sustained damage to his fuel tanks and would not be able to make the return flight. He therefore decided to make a kamikaze run on Kaneohe’s armory. As he lined up and flew toward the armory, more ground fire struck his aircraft. The plane missed the armory and crashed into the ground.

By the time the fighting was finished at Kaneohe, the Japanese had destroyed or damaged 33 PBYs, killed 19 servicemen, and caused major damage to the installation. Despite the great risk they took, the Japanese suffered few losses in the audacious attack against the home of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Takeo Yoshikawa: Japanese Spy at Pearl Harbor

Much of the credit goes to spies like Yoshikawa, a youngish looking naval reserve ensign who had only arrived in Hawaii nine months earlier. He was employed as a cover by the Japanese foreign ministry using an alias while actually working for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had been providing continuous and rather thorough updates on U.S. Navy deployments, arrivals and departures from Pearl Harbor, centerpiece of U.S. naval operations in the Pacific. Yoshikawa was scrupulously careful, carrying no camera, maps, or documents with him and never jotting down notes on what he observed on his outings around Hawaii.

In many ways, Yoshikawa was the perfect man for the mission. He had a solid naval background, having graduated in 1933 from the Japanese Naval College as well as from torpedo, gunnery, and aviation programs in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He also had served as a code officer aboard a cruiser. He then had worked three years in Tokyo with the Imperial Japanese Navy’s British affairs section before expressing an interest in working abroad as an agent. That led to his assignment in Hawaii working for Japan’s foreign ministry as a cover.

Yoshikawa did not have diplomatic immunity, and he was not officially linked to the Imperial Japanese Navy when he arrived in Hawaii. Otherwise, he would have been known to the American counterintelligence officials nearly immediately. Only Nagao Kita, the new consul in Hawaii, and Vice Consul Okuda, who had done some prior spying in Hawaii, were aware of Yoshikawa’s true role in providing Japan with updates on the U.S. Navy.

Yeoman First Class Harry T. Thompson

American security had tightened before Yoshikawa’s arrival, in part due to deteriorating relations between the two countries. The deteriorating relations were a result of Japan’s continued aggression in China and concerns about future potential moves against such Western interests as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

Two Japanese spying incidents on the American mainland in the 1930s had put the United States on alert. One involved former Navy Yeoman First Class Harry T. Thompson who had been discharged from service for problems relating to alcohol, overspending, and “an appetite for attractive young men,” according to one source. His services were retained by the Japanese, and he used a chief yeoman’s dress uniform, purchased at a tailor shop near a base, to gain entry to American bases and ships, thanks to his uniform, lax security, and fast talking. He managed to obtain gunnery manuals and reports on the 8-inch guns carried by the USS Pensacola, the first of a new class of cruisers capable of 32 knots and costing Japan its previous technical advantages in the cruiser category.

Toward the end of 1934 Thompson was able to board a number of ships stateside where he obtained important quarterly schedules of employment for battleships and cruisers, as well as information on main batteries, torpedoes, and related intelligence. He boarded the USS Mississippi in December and managed to abscond with a 230-page U.S. Navy gunnery school publication from a confidential file. He reboarded the ship the next month and purloined reports on the main gun batteries and torpedoes.

His former live-in boyfriend exposed Thompson’s homosexuality to Navy officials. Officials followed Thompson for a while, gathered additional evidence, and questioned him about his suspicious activities. At that point, Thompson confessed to working as a spy for the Japanese. When efforts by the Office of Naval Intelligence to have Thompson cooperate as a counterspy failed, he fled using funds supplied by the Japanese. He was apprehended and in mid-1936 was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.

John S. Farnsworth: Japanese Spy in the Naval Academy

Even more troublesome for U.S. officials and perhaps the American public was the case involving John S. Farnsworth, a 1915 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had been selected for postgraduate work at Annapolis as well as postgraduate work in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had commanded Marine Observation Squadron Six, Aircraft Squadrons’ Scouting Fleet, before being relieved of command in 1927 and court-martialed. He was cited for drinking, gambling, and borrowing money from an enlisted man and refusing to pay it back as well as submitting falsified affidavits regarding the matter.

That resulted in a six-year downward spiral of drinking that led to his spying for the Japanese using an American-owned business as cover. His efforts to obtain classified aeronautical information caused suspicion among the tight-knit community of Naval Academy graduates who ran the U.S. Navy in the prewar years, especially because of his earlier court-martial. The head of naval intelligence got wind of Farnsworth’s snooping efforts and sent a cautionary bulletin out, effectively cutting him off from information that would prove useful to Japanese intelligence.

Farnsworth’s drinking increased substantially, and he became more desperate as his money problems escalated to the point where he appeared at his former business partner’s Washington office in an effort to get a place to sleep. In mid-1936 he contacted a Hearst-owned news service with a scheme to sell his tell-all story for $20,000 while he was also working his Japanese contacts to obtain another $50,000 for past and future services.

Both the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI were on his tail by then and he was picked up on July 13. He signed a confession admitting to some of his espionage and was found guilty and sentenced to four to 12 years in federal prison. His Japanese contacts were conveniently out of the country, having been transferred home.

A Shift Toward Homegrown Spies

Despite increased American security measures, the Japanese continued efforts to obtain information both on the American defense industry and bases in the continental United States and Hawaii. It was probably because of the Japanese military’s experiences with Farnsworth and Thompson that they began to rely more heavily on homegrown spies like Yoshikawa.

Yoshikawa, for his part, was exceptionally security conscious. In sallying forth from the consulate, he dressed casually and conscientiously refrained, for the most part, while associating with Japanese Americans, with the exception of his two trusted drivers. They drove him around Oahu in their personal vehicles rather than in consulate cars to avoid unwanted attention.

The drivers, especially Richard M. Kotoshirodo, who had been born in Hawaii and who had received his early education in Japan, proved exceptionally reliable. Kotoshirodo was coached by Yoshikawa so he was able to correctly identify ships by their silhouettes and conduct surveillances by himself. This effectively added another set of skilled and trustworthy eyes to his spying effort.

Yoshikawa’s Views of the Harbor

One of their favorite haunts became the Pan American Clipper Landing at Pearl City near the moorings for the U.S. carriers. Yoshikawa also liked to visit Eto’s Soda Stand adjacent to the Pearl City Landing, a popular transit point for Ford Island and ships’ personnel going or returning from leave. He and his drivers arrived at the landing dressed as workmen and blended with the workers to pick up tidbits of useful information and observe work in the East Lock where the aircraft carriers were provisioned and fueled. They also counted the number of vegetable trucks at the landing to determine the projected upcoming timing of departures for maneuvers and the length of time planned at sea.

They also went to Aiea Heights, located just north of the harbor, for a panoramic view of the area. From this vantage point, they were able to monitor all of the U.S. naval and aircraft assets in Pearl Harbor.

Yoshikawa often took in the view from the Shuncho Ro Japanese Teahouse on the heights that conveniently had a second-floor telescope for viewing the harbor. And the teahouse was owned by a friendly Japanese woman born in the same region as the intrepid spy. Yoshikawa also befriended a waitress there who he often brought along to provide cover while on espionage trips around the island.

He even took a sightseeing flight in the early fall over Oahu, bringing a geisha along as cover. While the flight was not permitted over Pearl Harbor, he was able to tally the airplanes and hangars at Wheeler and Hickam airfields, and see the battleship anchorages. He was also able to calculate air turbulences and currents along the route, which was crucial information for the Japanese pilots who would participate in the attack.

He found that Hickam Field, located just southeast of Ford Island, was difficult to observe from afar. He solved that by attending an August 6 open house to observe the Curtiss P-40 Warhawks on the ground and in the air. He took note of the hangars and the length and width of the multiple runways at Hickam Field.

Commander Martin’s air station at Kaneohe also drew Yoshikawa’s attention with its PBY reconnaissance aircraft and recent construction work there. He took a number of commercial tourist boat trips around Kaneohe and used a nearby elevated roadway for an additional view of the base.

Bernard Otto Kuehn: An Asset From Nazi Germany

Yoshikawa’s increasing and detailed reports proved exceptionally useful to his employers in Japan, who had also developed a stay-behind agent in Hawaii named Bernard Otto Kuehn. A German national who arrived in Hawaii in 1935, Kuehn was already employed as a spy for Nazi Germany. Although initially believed too nervous for the assignment, the Japanese did bring him on board in the late 1930s, providing him with a small radio transmitter with a range of 100 miles. He was to use it to relay messages on ship movements and construction to Japanese submarines which, in turn, would relay them to Tokyo.

It was vital that he remain well below the radar of American intelligence officials, but his spending habits, lack of employment, and careless pro-Nazi comments had brought him to the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence. His wife’s early 1940 trip to Japan to obtain bank funds in $500 bills and his family’s flashing of crisp, new $100 bills raised eyebrows as did using cash to pay off a second mortgage on one of his houses.

The Kuehn family seemed oblivious to the need for stealth. His daughter Ruth worked as a modest hairdresser, but she paid her bills with large denomination currency. She also compared her success in collecting contributions to a local charity to her previous experience raising funds for Hitler in Germany. And the supposed need for additional family funds prompted the hapless spy to make at least three direct visits to the Japanese consulate to make a plea for funds.

Discovering the Spies

Interestingly, Yoshikawa was activated on October 2 when he was sent directly to the Kuehn house to deliver $14,000 in new Federal Reserve bills along with a note that Kuehn was to test his radio transmitter. The German passed a note back to Yoshikawa saying he was unable to make the test.

Kuehn was hesitant to use the radio transmitter for fear that the U.S. military might discover and locate his signals. They then developed a system of rather strange visual signals that could use car headlights, lights flashed from the upper levels of his home, and symbols hung from Kuehn’s sailboat. All would necessitate a Japanese submarine sailing rather dangerously close to shore to see the signals.

The hapless German, who had been under surveillance for years, was arrested on December 7, tried in Honolulu, found guilty of espionage in February 1942, and sentenced to death by firing squad. The evidence obtained after his arrest was rather substantial and included monies given to him by Yoshikawa, extensive binders with newspaper clippings on the U.S. fleet, its bases, and aircraft, along with an array of photographs of navy ships. Kuehn’s sentence was later reduced to 50 years in prison once Yoshikawa was identified as the main spy behind the attack.

Yoshikawa, for his part, had sailed for Japan in a diplomatic exchange after the attack and well before his role was discovered during interrogations of his driver Kotoshirodo. Kuehn and his family were sent back to Germany after the war.

Japan’s successful intelligence-gathering operation on Oahu in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the United States to tighten its national security efforts in the decades that followed.

Originally Published January 27, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikipedia