The National Interest

James Holmes

Security, Middle East

The whole idea is a stupid one.

Key point: Iran does not have a capacity to inflict major damage, let alone conquer the Middle East. Therefore, fighting Iran does not make much sense.

When pondering some strategic quandary you can get oriented by postulating what the greats in the field would say about it. What they said or wrote about roughly similar circumstances furnishes clues to what they might say about today’s strategic conundrums. This is the beginning of wisdom. The classics seldom furnish ready-made solutions. They almost always furnish a platform for launching into original thought.

Yes, you have to be humble when extrapolating from someone else’s words. Time, technology, and human society march on, and it’s hard to say for sure what some figure from the past would make of material and social trends since then. And yes, avoid treating their writings as gospel. To be great is not to be infallible. Sometimes sages get things wrong—even in their own time.

Still, situations rhyme between ages while principles endure. Ideas from the strategic canon retain their power to help posterity make sense of today’s controversies. Case in point: Iran is much in the headlines of late. What would the legendary geopolitics scholar, Yale professor Nicholas Spykman, say about the sputtering confrontation between the United States and Iran?

He would have plenty to say about the feud, first and foremost that Washington should continue trying to blunt Iranian ambitions. Not for him the passive approach. He was no proponent of “offshore balancing,” the conceit that America should stay mostly aloof from foreign entanglements, sending armadas and armies across the broad main only if inhabitants of the Far East or Western Europe proved unable to withstand a domineering power—an imperial Japan, a Nazi Germany, or a Soviet Union—on their own.

Spykman faulted administrations from both political parties for remaining diplomatically and militarily quiescent during the interwar years. They had allowed dangers to fester, and through neglect had compelled the United States to fight a second world war scant decades after the first. He found this unacceptable. Spykman harbored little desire to go abroad in search of monsters to slay. He wanted to go abroad to confine monsters to their lairs.

Or, better yet, he believed proactive U.S. involvement would keep predators from gestating in the first place. Acting early and forcefully would prevent would-be hegemons from conquering the “rimlands” of Western Europe and East Asia. They would find it hard to lash out at the Americas across the Atlantic or Pacific without the resources from those rich regions. No brute would need slaying if the United States made common cause with opponents of aggression ahead of time.

In other words, Spykman was an onshore balancer. But does his forward strategy apply to the Persian Gulf region today? For it to do so the Islamic Republic must be a Middle Eastern counterpart to Germany, Japan, or the Soviet Union—a powerhouse driven to unite the Gulf region or South Asian rimland under its yoke, harvest the resources it acquired to build up martial might, and hence constitute a menace to the New World.

Yet Iran falls woefully short of hegemonic status. Iranians certainly long for the glory days when the Persian Empire bestrode the Middle East and South Asia and, for a time, even threatened to bring Europe under the Great Kings’ suzerainty. Contemporary Iran is no Persia. It lacks the economic and military resources for enterprises of such sweep. And without that overbearing power, it stands little chance of overawing others into bandwagoning with Tehran and doing the mullahs’ bidding.

In other words, the prospects for an imperial Iran appear dim. Survey the region through Iranian eyes. To the west, you will espy the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. None of these Sunni Arab states could stand up to Iran in a one-on-one scrap. Collectively, though, they field serious military power funded by oil wealth that—unlike Iran’s—is unencumbered by economic sanctions. The GCC promises to remain a formidable contender so long as its members stand together.

Even if all sanctions disappeared today, it would take the Islamic Republic decades to rejuvenate the economy, amassing national wealth and transmuting it into military prowess and diplomatic clout sufficient to coerce this standing Arab coalition. Tehran’s capacity to steamroller the Gulf region or intimidate the GCC states into submission seems doubtful.

To Iran’s northeast lies Central Asia, while to its southeast lie Pakistan and India. Afghanistan and its neighbors are strategically inert at best. If Tehran covets an alliance with them, let’s cheer it on. Such allies would be dead weight rather than an asset to Iranian strategy. Pakistan fronts on the Arabian Sea, along the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz, and boasts a nuclear arsenal. Geography and the military factor make it a more viable partner for Iran. Still, that’s pretty weak adhesive to cement an alliance between Shia Iran and Sunni Pakistan.

Most importantly, India is the resident hegemon of South Asia and overshadows Iran by diplomatic, economic, and military measures. The idea that New Delhi would submit to Tehran’s will or join it at the head of an anti-Western alliance verges on whimsy.

In short, it’s tough to posit any realistic scenario whereby the Islamic Republic overruns its near abroad or attracts a serious alliance—staging a Middle Eastern equivalent to the German or Japanese conquests that spurred Nicholas Spykman to enunciate his forward strategy. And even if Tehran did manage such an improbable feat, would success empower it to reach out and smite the New World? Color me skeptical.

Look at the map again. Gazing out from American seacoasts, the Indian Ocean region is a faraway and inaccessible theater by contrast with Western Europe and East Asia—rimlands from which a hostile power would enjoy direct and uncluttered routes to American rimlands. Iranian forces would have to travel much farther than forces based in Europe or the Far East. Furthermore, maritime geography would force them to transit nautical chokepoints to exit or reenter the Indian Ocean—and it’s a straightforward matter for some foe to contest passage through straits and kindred narrow waterways.

The verdict? Iran clearly boasts enormous capacity for mischief-making, it clearly relishes tweaking the Great Satan, and it has options. For example, Tehran will probably develop a modest nuclear arsenal over time. Doomsday weaponry would give U.S. rimlands strategy in South Asia a twist that Spykman—who perished before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—could never have foreseen.

Alliance making and breaking represent another option. Tehran can court fellow opponents of American dominance, chiefly China and Russia, and bog down U.S. forces at a time when Washington prefers to apply itself to great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic rather than some Middle Eastern bywater. It can try to divide the West against itself, as it has sought to do for many years. And on and on.

All the same, the ghost of Spykman can rest easy with regard to the southerly rimlands. Iran is a troublemaker for sure. But it is neither 1914 nor 1939 in the Gulf region.

Now, it’s possible this relatively upbeat strategic diagnosis and prognosis would leave Spykman feeling conflicted. If he accented the imperative to manage events in intermediate zones joining the sea to the heartland, he also acknowledged that a distant maritime power must command the sea in order to execute a balancing strategy in Eurasia. Maritime command is a necessary enabler. Lose command, you lose access; lose access, you lose your ability to project armed might; lose your military say-so, your rimlands strategy fails.

History amply demonstrates the importance of access. Spykman observes that Great Britain basked in an empire on which the sun never set precisely because its Royal Navy ruled the “girdle of marginal seas,” semi-enclosed bodies of water that lap against the Eurasian periphery. These seas gave Britannia conduits for projecting influence and control onto remote shores. Expanses such as the Mediterranean Sea, the South China Sea, and, yes, the Persian Gulf are inlets into the Eurasian landmass. From their confines, a dominant navy can radiate military and thus political power deep inland.

Today they are American conduits, and central to any Spykmanesque balancing strategy. But if coastal states could bar the U.S. Navy—today’s answer to the world-straddling Royal Navy of yore—from the marginal seas, they could vitiate Spykman’s maritime geostrategic vision. Or even if local defenders failed to deny access altogether, they could make it costly and treacherous for American task forces to venture into near-shore waters. U.S. officials would think twice before paying a heavy price in lives, ships, and planes. They might blanch unless the need was truly dire.

Even partial success at access denial, then, would work to Iranian strategic advantage. If Washington did balk at dispatching naval forces to the Gulf region or its approaches, Tehran would have deflected U.S. efforts to project power; discredited U.S. alliance commitments to neighbors Iranian magnates wanted to cow; and in the process won the freedom to pursue power and influence by such means as clerical leaders saw fit to deploy. Turns out mischief-making advances larger purposes.

What sort of strategy would Spykman prescribe to cope with a troublesome but less than overbearing Iran? He might counsel Washington to continue taking an active part in managing events in South Asia and the Gulf region, in keeping with his onshore leanings. He would urge America to keep its alliances in the region strong, helping allies help U.S. naval forces gain access to the rimlands in times of strife. But at the same time he would exhort officialdom to keep its priorities in order. Iran poses no direct or immediate threat to the Western Hemisphere, but there are aspiring hegemons out there that warrant renewing his resource-intensive rimlands strategy. They must take precedence.

Strategy is the art and science of setting and enforcing priorities. The Pentagon has rightly designated great-power competition as its top priority. It would make little sense to commit heavy resources to offset a secondary worry such as Iran—especially if the opportunity costs were losing out in the Western Pacific, the Mediterranean, or elsewhere around the Eurasian periphery. Let’s keep things in perspective.

Sound about right, Professor Spykman?

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and author of “Visualize Chinese Sea Power,” in the current issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Security,

Washington will have to go unmanned.

The U.S. Navy’s Battle Force 2045 plan calls for a 500-ship fleet, and this ambitious expansion is meant to out-match fast-growing rival forces—notably those from China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, which recently earned the distinction of being the largest naval force in the world.

The U.S. Navy has already begun to ramp up efforts to introduce and deploy large numbers of interwoven, armed surface drones.

This could boost the global maritime unmanned vehicle market.

“The U.S. government is hoping that implementing a modern and distributed force structure to the U.S. Navy will allow it to operate effectively both in open seas and littoral waters,” said Captain Nurettin Sevi, Turkish Navy (Retired), aerospace and defense analyst at analytics firm GlobalData.

“However, the more immediate benefit of the plans to contract 140 unmanned surface and 240 underwater vehicles will be for the defense companies who are already vying for contracts,” added Sevi.

Big Investments 

The U.S. Navy’s has announced plans that call for a significant increase in spending on robotics platforms in the coming years. The service’s future defense programs could include about $12 billion for unmanned aircraft, surface vessels and underwater systems in fiscal years 2021 through 2025.

“The U.S. Navy has been making several investments, including awarding a $35 million contract to L3 Technologies for the development of a prototype medium unmanned surface vehicle (MUSV), which could grow to $281 million if options for eight follow-on craft are exercised; and a $42 million contract awarded to Huntington Ingalls (HII), Lockheed Martin, Bollinger Shipyards, Marinette Marine, Gibbs & Cox and Austal USA for Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) studies,” said Sevi.

“Moreover, the Navy aims to procure extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles (XLUUV) at a rate of two per year from FY2023, in addition to the XLUUV being built by Boeing,” he added. “With the implementation of this plan, leading companies are likely to increase their investments and it is expected to enhance cooperation between companies in artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced material technology, which are critical in the construction of unmanned systems.”

Tight Budgets and Other Challenges 

While the Navy has set a goal of 2045 to reach the sizable increase in the fleet, it will come at significant costs. It is unclear whether Congress will simply open the coffers to pay for it, and additionally operations, maintenance and personnel costs could squeeze modernization accounts in the coming years.

Yet, in the long term this could be a true investment in the future, as unmanned vessels are expected to be less expensive to procure, operate and maintain than manned platforms. That alone could make them far more attractive as the sea service invests in new capabilities.

“In order to enable unmanned and manned platforms to operate together, significant changes and modifications will need to be made in the existing task organizations, operational doctrines and operator training,” said Sevi. “Unmanned vehicles are being used for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as mine countermeasure operations. Once they have matured and are proven autonomous systems, they will be used along with the manned platform in other operations—primarily underwater threats.”

The Navy may need to make some internal adjustments as it transitions to vessels that operate with fewer or in many cases no sailors on board those warships. And this could truly change the way the U.S. Navy operates.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Peter Suciu

Israel, Middle East

This next generation of missile boats have been seen as crucial to defending Israel’s offshore strategic natural gas industry from the threat of terrorist groups, such as the Lebanese-based Hezbollah.

While one of the State of Israel’s smaller military branches, the Israeli Navy is actually active in multiple theaters including the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea. It is also believed that the Israeli Navy is responsible for maintaining the nation’s offshore nuclear second strike capability.

Currently, the Israeli Navy—which was founded in 1948 and has some 10,000 active duty personnel—consists of three Sa’ar 5-class corvettes, eight missile boats, five submarines and some forty five patrol boats as well as two support ships. Beginning this year the Israeli Navy will see a significant upgrade when it receives the first of the German-made Sa’ar 6 missile corvettes from the “Project Magen.”

Four of the warships were ordered in May 2015, and in March of this year a photo released online showed the first of the vessels—named INS Magen—undergoing sea trials. The Sa’ar 6 corvette class vessels are now being built by the German TKMS for Israel, and the warships are based on the design of the German-made MEKO 100 patrol corvette. The ships will have an overall length of 90 meters, a maximum beam of 13.2 meters and a height of 21.5 meters. Displacement of the Sa’ar 6 will be approximately 2,000 tons.

According to Naval Recognition, INS Magen was built utilizing stealth technology construction techniques that could make the vessel harder to detect by one or more radar, visual, sonar or infrared methods.

Delivery of the vessels, which cost a reported $480 million with the German government covering about one quarter of the cost, were scheduled to arrive earlier this year but were delayed to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.

Defending Israel’s Waters 

This next generation of missile boats have been seen as crucial to defending Israel’s offshore strategic natural gas industry from the threat of terrorist groups, such as the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. The vessels will be at the forefront of INS efforts to protect the more than 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which has become a significant national asset for the Jewish state.

Additionally, Israel has seen a rising threat from the navy capability of Hamas, which has been training commando teams to operate a “frogmen team” to strike against Israel targets along the Gaza coast.

The corvettes will certainly be a significant deterrence and are armed with an Oto Melara 76 mm main gun, two Typhoon Weapon Stations, 16 vertical launch cells for Barak-8 surface-to-air missiles,40 cells for the C-Dome point defense system, 16 anti-ship missiles, the EL/M-2248 MF-STAR AESA radar, and two 324 mm torpedo launchers. The warships will also have hangar space and a platform able to accommodate a medium-class SH-60-type helicopter.

When the first of the vessels, INS Magen—Hebrew for “Shield”—arrives later this year, it could certainly live up to its name and help protect the Israel coast and its crucial gas reserves from threats.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Technology,

Going bigger is fine, but these OLED screens are good enough that you do not need to worry about crowding around even a smaller TV.

In today’s high-end HDTV universe, the runaway choice for MVP is likely LG’s much-vaunted forty-eight-inch CX Series OLED.

This particular model from the Korean tech giant—which can be yours for $1,500 at Best Buy—is jam-packed with all of the eyebrow-raising power and next-generation perks that you need to create the best picture and viewing experience on the planet.

But at a measly forty-eight inches—considering today’s ubiquitous mammoth-panel standards—is it too small for your movie-watching and gaming needs?

From the perspective of pricing, going up to fifty-five inches would indeed be a smart move, as it would only cost $100 more. But if you desire a sixty-five-inch panel, that will set you back $2,300, while the seventy-seven-inch monster is retailing for $3,700.

Whatever size you settle on, know that all of these dimensions will provide a top-of-the-line, blemish-free panel. Here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll get: sleek and slim design, fantastic picture quality, accurate colors, deepest blacks, and inimitable uniformity and contrast ratios. And like the little brothers B9 and C9 Series, this CX model also proves that its wide-angle viewing is second to none. 

Powered by the α9 Gen 3 AI Processor 4K, the CX also features the much-coveted HDMI 2.1 features—including eARC—and comes with full-fledged support for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple AirPlay 2. The ultra-handy remote control also lets you speak to those voice assistants. The set also features Cinema HDR, which does a marvelous job of supporting a wide range of formats for scene-by-scene picture adjustment—including the must-haves Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG. 

And for all the diehard gamers out there waiting patiently for the arrival next month of the next-generation consoles from PlayStation and Xbox, know that the CX flawlessly supports the Nvidia G-Sync standard and AMD FreeSync, which help to eliminate any screen tearing and stuttering. The end result is noticeably smoother gameplay—no matter how graphics-intensive the games are.

As many avid gamers are known to crowd around screens, perhaps staying with the forty-eight inches isn’t such a terrible idea. Obviously, you will be saving some cash and space, but as an OLED panel, you will be on the receiving end of immaculate picture quality driven by millions of next-generation self-emissive pixels—no matter if you’re off to the side or sitting a bit closer to the TV than you should be. 

However, the one caveat is to be aware that like all OLED TVs, the CX is susceptible to suffer from image retention or burn-in—although this pesky issue has become less common with further advances in OLED technology. 

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: LG.

 

Warfare History Network

History, Asia

The plane looked impressive, but it had too many flaws.

Key point: The Ki-43 scared many Allied pilots. However, it eventually became outclassed and suffered from low armor around its vulnerable oxygen tanks.

At the start of World War II, Japanese airpower ruled the skies over China and the Pacific. Japan’s modern, highly maneuverable fighters, flown by well-trained and combat-tested pilots, outperformed anything the Chinese, British, or Americans could get airborne to oppose them.

When the Mitsubishi A6M Type 0 naval fighter first appeared over China in 1941, Allied aviators were astonished. Not only was the Zero more agile than anything they had ever seen, but its speed and heavy armament guaranteed almost certain victory in a dogfight. Quickly this new airplane earned a terrifying reputation for flying circles around the Hawker Hurricane or Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk.

Few Westerners realized at the time that most of these so-called Zeros were actually Nakajima-designed Japanese Army Air Force (JAAF) aircraft. Known as the “Army Zero” and later code-named “Oscar,” the Ki-43 Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon) became the JAAF’s most important fighter of World War II.

The Hayabusa served throughout the Pacific War, undergoing several design upgrades to improve performance, protection, and firepower. Some 5,919 were built, more than any other Japanese aircraft except the Zero. Almost all the JAAF’s top aces scored kills with this nimble little fighter, a capable workhorse in skilled hands right up to war’s end.

A Reliance on Speed and Agility

In 1937, a Nakajima design team headed by Hideo Itokawa began work on a successor to its Ki-27 fighter, known as the Type 97. The Japanese Army required a lightweight, maneuverable air superiority fighter that would clear the skies of enemy aircraft so ground forces could operate unimpeded. The Ki-27 met this requirement but was already getting long in the tooth compared to Anglo-American aircraft then in development.

Itokawa’s engineers set out to design a fast, modern interceptor possessing superb maneuverability. The low-wing, single seat Ki-43 would feature all metal construction, a streamlined canopy, retractable landing gear, and a 950-horsepower Sakae radial engine propelling it to over 300 miles per hour. To meet JAAF weight specifications, Nakajima designers chose to omit armor protection and self-sealing fuel tanks. Pilots would rely on the machine’s speed and agility to close with an enemy, finishing the job with two Type 89 7.7mm machine guns.

Yet, when the Ki-43 prototype first flew in January 1939, it performed poorly. Test pilots complained the Nakajima design was unresponsive, sluggish, and not much faster than the Ki-27 it was intended to replace. Clearly, Itokawa’s design needed work.

It took Nakajima 18 months and 13 separate modifications to deliver an acceptable aircraft. Engineers trimmed every ounce of extra weight from the Ki-43, as well as increasing wing area and redesigning the canopy. They also installed a set of paddle-shaped “butterfly flaps” under the wing roots to boost maneuverability.

The newly modified interceptor performed wonderfully. It could reach an altitude of 38,500 feet with a 3,900 feet per minute rate of climb. Maximum speed was 308 miles per hour at 13,000 feet. Its butterfly flaps enabled the Hayabusa to turn inside any aircraft then flying, even the Zero.

The Nakajima Ki-43-I Sees Production

Nakajima’s Ki-43-I, as the modified design became known, measured 28 feet, 11 inches long, with a wingspan of 37 feet, six inches. It weighed 3,483 pounds empty and 4,515 pounds combat loaded. Armament was initially two 7.7mm machine guns in the front cowling, later replaced by one or two heavier Ho-103 12.7mm aircraft cannon as those weapons entered service.

Full-scale production of the Peregrine Falcon began in April 1941. The JAAF accepted it as the Army Type One interceptor, and Ki-43-equipped squadrons entered service in October. Before long the Hayabusa was battling P-40s of the legendary Flying Tigers and British-flown Brewster Buffalo fighters over Burma.

As war spread across Asia and the Pacific, Allied fliers learned to fear Japan’s angry little falcon. Tangling with a Ki-43 usually resulted in fiery death, so air tacticians such as General Claire L. Chennault of the Flying Tigers taught their pilots to avoid dogfighting with one at any cost.

It took time, however, for Chennault’s lessons to take hold. For the first year of the war Hayabusa aces such as Warrant Officer Iwataro Hazawa (15 kills) and Lieutenant Guichi Sumino (27 victories) racked up impressive scores against their Hawker-, Brewster-, and Curtiss-equipped adversaries.

On December 22, 1941, a flight of 18 Ki-43s encountered 13 Australian Brewster Buffalo fighters over Malaysia. Sergeant Yoshito Yasuda described his role in this air battle: “Luckily, Capt. [Katsumi] Anma found a fleeing Buffalo and attacked it from above and behind. My turn came when Anma’s guns jammed. I sent a burst into the Buffalo’s engine and saw it belch white smoke.” Hayabusa pilots claimed 11 kills that day for the loss of one Japanese plane; Australian records indicate three Brewsters were actually destroyed while two more made it home too badly damaged to repair.

Performance Issues of the Ki-43-I

Despite these early successes, JAAF aviators found fault with the Peregrine Falcon’s performance, firepower, and durability. In service the Ki-43 developed a fatal tendency to shed its wings during a steep dive. This was a direct consequence of Nakajima’s earlier weight saving modifications, and headquarters suspended all flight operations until strengthened wing spars could be installed.

Pilots also disliked the slow-firing Ho-103 cannon. A Japanese copy of the U.S. Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun, early models often jammed in combat. The Ho-103’s unreliability forced most pilots to keep one 7.7mm machine gun installed as a backup.

Nakajima designers watched with concern as modern Allied fighters like the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and Vought F4U Corsair took to the skies starting in late 1942. They began work to upgrade the Hayabusa, adding a more powerful 1,150-horsepower engine, self-sealing fuel tanks, and armor protection for the pilot. A reflector gunsight was also installed, and the Ho-103’s reliability problems were fixed. Subsequent modifications included bomb/drop tank racks, radio equipment, and clipped wings intended to improve the roll rate.

The Ki-43-II Against Allied Bombers

The updated Ki-43-II was faster, stronger, and no less maneuverable than older models. Remaining uncorrected, however, was the Peregrine Falcon’s alarming vulnerability to enemy gunfire. Allied fliers soon discovered that one burst of .50-caliber machine-gun bullets into the Ki-43’s unprotected oxygen tank would usually cause a catastrophic explosion.

The Hayabusa’s two-gun battery was one-third as potent as the six heavy weapons carried by most American fighters. Even firing explosive shells, the Ho-103 cannon proved woefully inadequate against tough-skinned Allied warplanes. When Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers began operating in Chinese airspace in late 1942, JAAF fliers had no choice but to attack them with their poorly armed Falcons.

It took great courage to intercept the formidable B-24s, and even greater luck to bring one down. Captain Yasuhiko Kuroe told his pilots to fly head-on into the American formations and concentrate on a single bomber. “Attack boldly,” Kuroe counseled. “Go into the wall of fire and take their bullets, be relentless.” Kuroe’s tactic worked, but often at great loss to the fragile Ki-43s.

The tables were turning for those brave aviators forced to fly this increasingly obsolescent fighter. Twelve-kill JAAF ace Captain Yohei Hinoki observed: “By the time the Hayabusa had become a good attack aircraft things were changing. It was now to be used for defense … so again its firepower was insufficient. The Hayabusa was coming to the end of its time.”

Japanese Army Air Force pilots continued to operate the aging Ki-43 simply because that was all they had. While JAAF-flown Hayabusas fought desperately against superior Allied fighters, development of more advanced aircraft like the Ki-84 Hayate remained a low priority. Perhaps the government believed its own propaganda; in 1942 only good war news reached the Japanese people.

Countering the Ki-43

Those fighting over China and the Pacific knew better. American aviators were learning how to cope with the Nakajima fighter, now code-named “Oscar.” Using team tactics, well-trained U.S. Navy and Army Air Corps fighter aces began scoring heavily against the diminishing number of skilled Hayabusa pilots.

On August 2, 1943, Captain James A. Watkins and 15 pilots of the USAAF’s 9th Fighter Squadron pounced on a large formation of Ki-43s over the Huon Gulf in New Guinea. Flying the powerful P-38 Lightning, Watkins quickly destroyed two Ki-43s before diving on a third Oscar that was running away at wave-top level. Trying to outturn Watkins’s plane, the Ki-43 accidentally dipped a wing into the water and cartwheeled into a thousand pieces. This splasher was Watkins’s 11th career kill, seven of which were Hayabusas.

U.S. Navy aviators also encountered the Peregrine Falcon in combat. Lieutenant Ralph Rosen, piloting a Grumman F6F Hellcat from the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill, recounted how he shot down one Ki-43 on October 12, 1944: “An Oscar passed almost in front of me in a steep dive, apparently going for some F6Fs below. The Jap pilot apparently did not see our section, and I managed to get on the Oscar’s tail. After a short burst, the wing root exploded and then the whole plane caught on fire and went down.” This victory was one of three Hayabusas Rosen would claim over Formosa that day.

The Late Ki-43-III

By mid-1944, the Ki-43 was hopelessly outclassed as a fighter interceptor. This did not stop Nakajima from fitting it with an uprated 1,230-horsepower engine and twin 20mm cannons in a desperate attempt to again improve performance. The Ki-43-III was a case of too little, too late—for now there was a fearsome new threat making its presence known over Japan.

When Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers began flying combat operations, most surviving Ki-43s were withdrawn to the home islands. There they served in an air defense capacity, occasionally downing an American bomber despite the Hayabusa’s deficiencies in speed, protection, and armament. Often, fliers chose to ram their targets, a tactic usually fatal to both the Falcon and the B-29.

Other Hayabusas rammed Allied warships in their final role as kamikaze planes during the war’s last months. Those remaining soldiered on to the bitter end. After VJ-Day, captured Ki-43s continued to fly for several years in Chinese, North Korean, and Indonesian service. One Indochina-based French air squadron even briefly operated a few leftover Hayabusas against Viet Minh rebels.

Its sleek lines and impressive handling characteristics endeared the Ki-43 Hayabusa to its pilots but masked many serious flaws. An obsolete design, this workhorse could not compete against the increasingly more capable opponents it faced in combat. In the end, Japan’s angry little Falcon and the daring men who flew it were simply overwhelmed by superior Allied production, training, and technology.

Originally Published December 18, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia

Kris Osborn

Security, Americas

The need to stop hypersonic weapons attacks is growing in significance and urgency, according to many senior Congressional and U.S. military leaders. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Jim Inhofe, said China was in fact ahead of the United States regarding hypersonic weapons development.

The Pentagon is taking rapid new steps to defend against advanced hypersonic missile attacks in space through its ongoing efforts to engineer new Overhead Persistent Infrared early warning missile detection satellites.

“The satellites will be able to provide missile tracking data for hypersonic glide vehicles and the next generation of advanced missile threats,” Derek Tournear, the director of the Space Development Agency, said according to a Pentagon report.

Two companies were awarded OPIR development deals, L3Harris and SpaceX. The Pentagon reports says each company is expected to build four overhead persistent infrared imaging, or OPIR, satellites for the tracking layer of the NDSA. The satellites are slated to be ready by the end of fiscal year 2022.

“The transport satellites are the backbone of the National Defense Space Architecture,” Tournear said. “They take data from multiple tracking systems, fuse those, and are able to calculate a fire control solution, and then the transport satellites will be able to send those data down directly to a weapons platform via a tactical data link, or some other means.”

More sensitive and better networked missile-warning satellites are increasingly important to the Pentagon for obvious reasons, given that both Russia and China have been weaponizing space for quite some time. Both countries are known to have hypersonic weapons and ASAT, or anti-satellite systems. Russia is reported to be developing satellite-launched weapons. 

Speaking recently at an event at The Heritage Foundation, Justin T. Johnson, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, said Russian and Chinese weapons could threaten “missile warning systems, precision, navigation and timing technologies and weather forecasting.”

The challenge of tracking high-speed hypersonic weapons is also bringing new dynamics to space warfare, given that they can travel at more than five-times the speed of sound. This threat naturally requires what industry and Pentagon weapons developers explain as a need to develop a “continuous track” following the entire trajectory of an incoming hypersonic weapon. 

The need to stop hypersonic weapons attacks is growing in significance and urgency, according to many senior Congressional and U.S. military leaders. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Jim Inhofe, said China was in fact ahead of the United States regarding hypersonic weapons development.

“Last October, China paraded a hypersonic weapon, showing off a technology we don’t even have yet,” Inhofe said earlier this year on the Senate floor, when talking about the need for a very strong 2021 military budget.

Part of the effort to better network satellites hinges upon the rapid addition of new satellite constellations to include Medium and Low-Earth Orbit systems, faster, lower-flying systems able to build in redundancy, closely track ground threats and share information more seamlessly. 

This phenomenon explains part of why the Missile Defense Agency is working quickly to refine and integrate space-based sensing and command and control, as higher speed approaching missiles will need closer and more continuous tracking.

“We call it 'tracking' because it's missile tracking—so it provides detection, tracking and fire control formation for hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missiles ... any of those kinds of threats,” Tournear said.

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

Image: Reuters

 

James Holmes

Security,

Imperial Japan stood next to no chance of winning a fight to the finish against the United States. Or did they? 

Here's What You Need To Remember: By 1945, American boats dismembered the island empire by severing the shipping lanes connecting its parts. Japanese submarines were the equals of their U.S. Navy counterparts. IJN commanders should have looked at the nautical chart, grasped the fact that U.S. naval forces must operate across thousands of miles of ocean simply to reach the Western Pacific, and directed sub skippers to make the transpacific sea lanes no-go zones for American shipping.

Let's face it. Imperial Japan stood next to no chance of winning a fight to the finish against the United States. Resolve and resources explain why. So long as Americans kept their dander up, demanding that their leaders press on to complete victory, Washington had a mandate to convert the republic's immense industrial potential into a virtually unstoppable armada of ships, aircraft, and armaments. Such a physical mismatch was simply too much for island state Japan -- with an economy about one-tenth the size of America's -- to surmount.

Quantity has a quality all its own. No amount of willpower or martial virtuosity can overcome too lopsided a disparity in numbers. Tokyo stared that plight in the face following Pearl Harbor.So Japan could never have crushed U.S. maritime forces in the Pacific and imposed terms on Washington. That doesn't mean it couldn't have won World War II. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? But the weak sometimes win. As strategic sage Carl von Clausewitz recounts, history furnishes numerous instances when the weak got their way. Indeed, Clausewitz notes that it sometimes makes sense for the lesser contender to start a fight. If its leadership sees force as the only resort, and if the trendlines look unfavorable -- in other words, if right now is as good as it gets -- then why not act?

Editor's Note: Please see our other "Five Ways" articles including: Five Ways D-Day Could Have Been  a Disaster and Five Ways a Nuclear War Could Still Happen. 

There are three basic ways to win wars according to the great Carl. One, you can trounce the enemy's armed forces and dictate whatever terms you please. Short of that, two, you can levy a heavier price from the enemy than he's willing to pay to achieve his goals. The value a belligerent assigns his political objectives determines how many resources he's prepared to expend on those objectives' behalf, and for how long. Taking measures that compel an opponent to expend more lives, armaments, or treasure is one way to raise the price. Dragging out the affair so that he pays heavy costs over time is another. And three, you can dishearten him, persuading him he's unlikely to fulfill his war aims.

A disconsolate adversary, or one who balks at the costs of war, is a pliant adversary. He cuts the best deal he can to exit the imbroglio.

If a military triumph lay beyond Tokyo's reach, the second two methods remained available in the Pacific. Japanese commanders could have husbanded resources, narrowing the force mismatch between the warring sides. They could have made the conflict more costly, painful, and prolonged for America, undercutting its resolve. Or, alternatively, they could have avoided rousing American fury to wage total war in the first place. By foregoing a strike at Hawaii, they could have enfeebled the opponent's resolve or, perhaps, sidelined the opponent entirely.

Bottom line, no likely masterstroke -- no single stratagem or killing blow -- would have defeated the United States. Rather, Japanese commanders should have thought and acted less tactically and more strategically. In so doing they would have improved Japan's chances.

Which brings us to Five Ways Japan Could Have Won. Now, the items catalogued below are far from mutually exclusive. The Japanese leadership would have boosted its prospects had it embraced them all. And granted, enacting some of these measures would have demanded preternaturally farseeing leadership. Foresight was a virtue of which Japan's vacillating emperor and squabbling military rulers were woefully short. Whether it was plausible for them to act wisely is open to debate. With these caveats out of the way, onward!

-       Wage one war at a time. Conserving enemies is a must even for the strongest combatants. It's imperative for small states with big ambitions to avoid making war against everyone in sight. Imposing discipline on the war was particularly hard for Japan, whose political system -- patterned on Imperial Germany's, alas -- was stovepiped between the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy (IJA and IJN), with no meaningful civilian political oversight. Absent a strong emperor, the army and navy were free to indulge their interservice one-upsmanship, jostling for influence and prestige. The IJA cast its gaze on continental Asia, where a land campaign in Manchuria, then China proper, beckoned. The IJN pushed for a maritime campaign aimed at resources in Southeast Asia. By yielding to these contrary impulses between 1931 and 1941, Japan in effect surrounded itself with enemies of its own accord -- invading Manchuria and China before lashing out at the imperial powers in Southeast Asia and, ultimately, striking at Pearl Harbor. Any tactician worth his salt will tell you a 360-degree threat axis -- threats all around -- makes for perilous times. Tokyo should have set priorities. It might have accomplished some of its goals had it taken things in sequence.

-       Listen to Yamamoto. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reputedly cautioned his superiors that Japan must win a quick, decisive victory lest it awaken the American "sleeping giant" with fateful consequences for Japan. The IJN, prophesied Yamamoto, could run wild for six months -- maybe a year -- before the United States mustered its full power for combat. During that interval, Japan needed to stun American society into a compromise peace -- in effect a partition of the Pacific -- while firming up the island defense perimeter enclosing the Asia-Pacific territories won by Japanese arms. What if its efforts fell short? U.S. industry would be turning out armaments in massive quantities, while new vessels laid down under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 -- in effect a second, bulked-up U.S. Navy -- would start arriving in the theater. The balance would shift irretrievably. In short, Yamamoto warned military leaders against "script-writing," or assuming the enemy would do precisely what they foresaw. The admiral knew a thing or two about the United States, and understood the American propensity to defy preconceptions.

-       Don't listen to Yamamoto. If Admiral Yamamoto rendered wise counsel on the strategic level, it was suspect on the operational level. His solution to the problem of latent U.S. material superiority was to strike at what navalists saw as the hub of enemy power -- the adversary's battle fleet. For decades IJN planners had envisioned waging "interceptive operations" to slow down and weaken the U.S. Pacific Fleet as it steamed westward, presumably to the relief of the Philippine Islands. Once aircraft and submarines deployed to outlying islands whittled the Pacific Fleet down to size, the IJN battle fleet would force a decisive battle. Yamamoto, however, convinced IJN commanders to jettison interceptive operations in favor of a sudden blow at Pearl Harbor. But in reality, the battle line stationed in Hawaii wasn't the core of American naval strength. The nascent Two-Ocean Navy Act fleet was. The best that Yamamoto's scheme could accomplish, consequently, was to delay an American counteroffensive into 1943. Tokyo may have been better off sticking with the interwar plan, which would have driven up U.S. costs, protracted the endeavor, and potentially sapped U.S. perseverance.

-       Concentrate rather than disperse resources. Just as Japanese officials seemed incapable of restricting themselves to one war at a time, they seemed incapable of limiting the number of active operations and combat theaters. Look no further than Japanese actions in 1942. IJN task forces struck into the Indian Ocean, inflicting a Pearl Harbor on the British Eastern Fleet off Ceylon. They saw the need to shore up the northern flank at the Battle of Midway by assaulting the remote Aleutian Islands. And they extended the empire's outer defense perimeter -- and assumed vast new waterspace to defend -- by opening a secondary theater in the Solomon Islands, in a vain effort to interrupt sea routes connecting North America with Australia. It's incumbent on the weaker combatant to ask itself whether the gains from secondary enterprises are exceptional, and what it risks in the most important theaters, before undertaking new adventures. Japan, which had fewer resources to spare, raised the costs to itself -- more than the United States -- through its strategic indiscipline.

-       Wage unrestricted submarine warfare. Inexplicably, the IJN neglected to do what the U.S. Pacific Fleet set in motion while Battleship Row was still afire: unleash its submarine force to sink any ship, naval or merchant, that flew an enemy flag. By 1945, American boats dismembered the island empire by severing the shipping lanes connecting its parts. Japanese submarines were the equals of their U.S. Navy counterparts. IJN commanders should have looked at the nautical chart, grasped the fact that U.S. naval forces must operate across thousands of miles of ocean simply to reach the Western Pacific, and directed sub skippers to make the transpacific sea lanes no-go zones for American shipping. It's hard to imagine a more straightforward, cost-effective scheme whereby Japan's navy could exact a heavy toll from its opponent. Neglecting undersea warfare was an operational transgression of the first order.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own. This first appeared last year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Peter Suciu

Security,

The Constellation will be the first warship in the Navy’s new program to build a class of 20 guided-missiles frigates, where were funded by United States Congress in fiscal year 2020 (FY2020) at a cost of $1.28 billion. The new frigates will be able to operate independently or as part of a strike group.

On Tuesday, from the museum ship USS Constellation in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Secretary of the Navy Kenneth J. Braithwaite announced that the lead vessel in the new class of guided missile frigates—FFG(X)—would be named for the nineteenth century sloop-of-war.

The name was selected to honor the first U.S. Navy ships authorized by Congress in 1794. The original six heavy frigates, which helped establish the Continental Navy as an agile, lethal and ready to fight force for the nineteenth century, were named United States, Constellation, Constitution, Chesapeake, Congress, and President. FFG-62 will be the fifth U.S. Navy vessel named Constellation.

“As the first in her class, these ships will now be known as the Constellation Class frigates, linking them directly to the original six frigates of our Navy, carrying on the traditions of our great service which have been passed down from generation to generation of sailors,” said Braithwaite from the second vessel—the nineteenth-century sloop-of-war—to bear the name. “While providing an unmatched capability and survivability for the twenty-first Century, Constellation Class Frigates will honor our Navy’s historic beginnings as we continue to operate around the world in today’s era of Great Power Competition.” 

The FFG(X) Program 

The Constellation will be the first warship in the Navy’s new program to build a class of twenty guided-missiles frigates, where were funded by United States Congress in fiscal year 2020 (FY2020) at a cost of $1.28 billion. The new frigates will be able to operate independently or as part of a strike group.

Each warship can deliver an Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR), Mk 41 Vertical Launching System, and Baseline 10 (BL 10) Aegis Combat System capabilities. The vessel’s lethality, survivability, and improved capability will further provide Fleet Commanders multiple options while supporting the U.S. National Defense Strategy across the full range of military operations.

It is a multi-mission small surface combatant that was designed to conduct anti-air warfare (AAW), anti-surface warfare (ASuW), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and electromagnetic warfare (EMW) operations.

The future warships will be built at Marinette Marine Corporation in Marinette, Wisconsin with the first ship scheduled for delivery in 2026. It should reach initial operational capability by 2030, while the fleet should grow by two hulls or more a year after that.

The Multiple Constellations  

A total of four U.S. Navy warships have been named Constellation. In addition to the original heavy 38-gun frigate, which was named to represent the “new constellation of stars” on the United States flag, and the nineteenth century sloop-of-war; USS Constellation (CC-2) was a battlecruiser that was laid down in 1920 but cancelled in 1923, while USS Constellation (CV-64) was a Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier that served from 1961 until 2003. In addition to supporting operations during the Vietnam War, the first Persian Gulf War and both Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, the carrier suffered several catastrophic fires.

The choice of names for the new class of frigates is notable in that previous classes of U.S. Navy frigates, along with destroyers, have generally been named for naval leaders and heroes, USNI News reported, citing a Congressional Research Service report on ship naming conventions.

Other names considered included Agility, which was favored by former Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, who suggested the name would evoke a “uniquely American brand of agility—agility that wins, and agility that will shape our maritime presence and ability to fight wherever we are called upon to do so.” The names Dauntless, Endeavor, and Intrepid were also on the short list according to a memo obtained by USNI shortly before Modly resigned as acting secretary.

However, as the Navy secretary has total discretion on names, the new class of guided missile cruisers will be the Constellation-class. 

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

What would you do to join the best? There’s writing endless resumes—and then there’s running forty miles at night on an uneven forest trail while lugging a fifty-pound rucksack

Here's What You Need To Remember: The unit’s brutal selection and training process is revealed to have a purpose beyond physical fitness fetishism—it’s to help identify the kinds of individuals with the physical prowess and motivation to repeatedly undertake dangerous missions which may indeed at times prove to be impossible.

Just how much torture is a person willing to undergo to get a prestigious job? Given that an average of 250 resumes are submitted for every job position in the United States, one would assume quite a lot.

But there’s writing endless resumes—and then there’s running forty miles at night on an uneven forest trail while lugging a fifty-pound rucksack—with more weight added upon achieving each waypoint.

And to even get into the application pool for that particular job, you first have to master the art of willingly jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane.

This refers, of course, to the admission process for the U.S. Army’s top commando unit.

Eric Haney described the experience of one of the long-distance hiking in his book Inside Delta Force:

“I had covered just slightly over thirty miles by now, but still had more than twenty to go. It was getting more and more difficult to do speed computations in my head. My hands were tingling from the rucksack straps cutting into my shoulders, pinching the nerves and arteries, and restricting the blood flow to my arms.

I was bent forward against the weight of the rucksack. It felt like I was dragging a train behind me, and my feet hurt all the way up to my knees. I don’t mean they were just sore, I mean they felt like I had been strapped to the rack and someone had beaten the balls of my feet with a bat. I tried to calculate the foot-pounds of energy my feet had absorbed so far today, but I had to give up the effort. I only knew that the accumulated tonnage of all those thousands of steps was immense. And it was only going to get worse.”

Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta—or “Delta Force”—remains cloaked equally in official secrecy and popular legend. 

Technically an elite counter-terrorism Special Missions Unit, Delta Force has been involved in virtually every major U.S. military action since the 1980s—whether attempting to rescue political prisoners from a fortified prison in Grenada, nabbing Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, hunting Scud missiles behind Iraqi lines, battling Somali warlords, assassinating ISIS leaders, and even assisting Mexican marines in a deadly gun battle that saw the capture of drug kingpin “El Chapo.” 

And one can only speculate about all the missions that remain classified.

The unit’s existence remains ritually unacknowledged by the U.S. government, despite its organization and aliases (a common one is “Combat Application Group” (CAG)) being reasonably well-documented in books by former members and its exploits celebrated in movies like Black Hawk Down and television series like The Unit.

Delta Force was founded by Colonel Charles Beckwith, who had served in the 1960s as an exchange officer with the British Special Air Service while it was engaged in a grinding but successful counterinsurgency campaign against Communist guerillas in Malaysia.

Beckwith was one tough cookie. During his stint commanding SAS troops in the jungle, he nearly died from a bacterial infection. Then, while commanding Green Berets in Vietnam he was struck by a .50 caliber slug—and survived after being triaged as a lost cause.

These experiences left their impression on the Georgia native, who went on to devise the rigorous “Q-Course” used to train the Green Beret special operations forces of today.

Beckwith was convinced the Army needed an even more elite direct action unit with the mental and physical fortitude to operate independently at length in the field. Furthermore, he emphasized that unit should only be composed of experienced officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who had already proven their skills in the field.

Today, Beckwith’s vision still informs Delta Force’s selective training regimen. To even qualify for the Delta Operator Training Course (OTC), Delta recruits must possess years of experience, with qualification for parachute operations, a “Secret” security clearance, and a clean disciplinary record.

Reportedly, these requirements mean that three-quarters of Delta Force recruits are sourced from the Army’s two other primary Special Operations units: the 75th Ranger Regiment—which often engages in larger-scale operations behind enemy lines—and the Green Berets, who specialize in embedding with, training and leading local forces in foreign countries.

The Operator Training Course itself places heavy emphasis on perfecting marksmanship—especially in hostage-rescue contexts. Several facilities are maintained solely to practice hostage rescue scenarios in realistic environments ranging from large civilian buildings, to airliners and warships.

Delta trainees also receive instruction in demolitions, lock-picking and even bomb-making techniques. They are trained by CIA operatives in espionage techniques from shadowing persons of interest to transmitting intelligence via dead drops and even aggressive “tactical driving”—yes, the kind you thought was only a fantasy reserved for action movies.

Only a fraction of those selected to undertake the OTC manage to complete it.

Obviously, it takes a rare individual to muster the physical endurance, mental adaptability and sheer ambition to first qualify and then complete the six-month Operator Training Course.

But there’s also a sobering sub-text to the extreme training regimen: Delta Force has historically often been called upon to perform missions with a high risk of failure.

Operation Eagle Claw, the only Delta mission led by Beckwith, was an attempt to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran in 1979. It ended in flames before even encountering enemy forces when one of the helicopters involved crashed into the tanker it was refueling from, killing eight.

In October 1993, Delta snipers Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon Delta hopped off an orbiting helicopter, having insisted they need to insert on the ground to save crashed Army helicopter pilot Michael Durant from a besieging mob in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Both were killed minutes later, along with three other Delta operators who perished in a day-long battle that left roughly a thousand dead.

During the early years of the hunt for Bin Laden, Delta operators saw action in Afghanistan—at one point coming to the rescue of Afghan President Hamid Karzai after he was nearly killed by an errant laser-guided bomb—and more discreetly in Pakistan and India’s Kashmir province. They also participated in numerous raids during the invasion of Iraq and the lengthy counterinsurgency conflict that followed. Near the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq in 2009, the Washington Post reported roughly half of all Delta operatives in Iraq had received Purple Hearts for being injured in combat.

In this light, the unit’s brutal selection and training process is revealed to have a purpose beyond physical fitness fetishism—it’s to help identify the kinds of individuals with the physical prowess and motivation to repeatedly undertake dangerous missions which may indeed at times prove to be impossible.

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

Image: U.S. Army Flickr.

Caleb Larson

Security, World

What would be in your list?

While many experts may have different perspectives, here is a short compilation of what I would argue are the top military planes on the planet today: 

One of Russia’s most capable fighters is the Su-33 carrier-capable fighter. Derived from the legendary Su-27 fighter of Soviet vintage, the Su-33 fighter jet is larger and can fly farther. In a nod to the platform’s intended carrier role, the Su-33 jet’s wings fold upwards for storage aboard Russia’s sole aircraft carrier.

The twin-engine Su-33 jet features a number of improvements over its Su-27 parent that address the stresses of aircraft carrier landings and result in a more robust platform. At the front of the plane, the Su-33 jet has canard winglets mated to leading-edge root extensions, granting the airframe a degree of maneuverability not often seen for carrier-based fighters. Altogether, the airframe's large wing area and numerous control surfaces result in a fighter capable of both low landing speeds and high maneuverability.

Despite the Su-33 jet’s remarkable characteristics on paper, the platform is severely limited by Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, which is noted for its unreliability and lack of proper repair equipment. China has a knock-off Su-33 jet in service, which they dub the J-15, though their copy is noted for being extremely unreliable. Despite the promise the platform held, the airframe has been decidedly unsuccessful on the export market, and its days may be close to over.

Need for Speed

Currently, the one fighter that easily takes the cake is the U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. The F-22 jet was originally designed to take on the best of the Soviet Union’s fighters in air-to-air combat, as in this role is easily the world’s deadliest air superiority fighter. And, not only is the F-22 fighter jet fast, with a maximum speed of just over Mach 2.2 (albeit with afterburners when at altitude), but it is also highly maneuverable.

In one noteworthy episode, an F-22 jet is said to have intercepted an Iranian F-4 Phantom near Iran. In this interception, the F-22 jet was actually able to speak up on the Iranian plane and visually inspect what the F-4 Phantom’s weapon loadout was—without the pilot even registering that the F-22 jet was in the area, a clear demonstration of just how tough the F-22 jet is to spot.

Bombs Away

On the bomber side of the flight, another American plane is a clear winner. The Northrop Grumman designed B-2 Spirit bomber benefits from a highly stealthy, flying-wing design. In addition to an internally-carried weapons load and stealthily serrated bomb bay doors, the B-2 Spirit bomber also features serpentine engine air intakes that hide the bomber's engine blades from radar detection.

Besides being very hard to detect, like the F-22, a B-2 bomber has never been lost in combat the strategic B-2 bomber is equipped to carry nuclear weapons, making it quite possibly the deadliest airplane ever built though perhaps not for long.

B-21 Raider

The yet-to-be-seen B-21 Raider is the spiritual successor to the B-2 bomber, and from what precious little information about the airframe can be learned, is outwardly similar as well. It too is a flying wing design, though more concrete facts about the airframe are difficult to independently verify.

Upgrades would likely include an improved, smaller radar cross-section, perhaps faster maximum speed, as well as a higher payload capacity. A reduced exhaust heat signature could also be in the works.

Caleb Larson is a defense writer for the National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture.

Image: Wikimedia

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

On June 25, a South Korean salvage team recovered the boat from one hundred feet underwater and an elite team bored into the hull. They found a horrid tableau inside.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The incident underscored South Korea’s inability to consistently detect and interdict North Korean mini-submarines, leading some commenters to joke that the nation relied on fishermen and taxi drivers (as occurred in the Gangneung incident) to patrol her waters. To be fair, however, small submarines like the Yugo-class boats are extremely difficult to detect in the shallow waters off the Korean coast, a threat underscored by the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010.

At 4:30 p.m. on June 22, 1998, Capt. Kim In-yong noticed a curious site from the helm of his fishing boat as it sailed eleven miles east of the South Korean city of Sokcho: a small submarine, roughly sixty feet in length, caught in a driftnet used for mackerel fishing. Several crew members were visible on the submarine’s deck, trying to free their vessel. Upon noticing the fishing boat, they gave friendly waves of reassurance.

Captain Kim was suspicious. The entangled submarine was located twenty miles south of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. Likely, he recalled an incident two years earlier when a North Korean spy submarine ground ashore further south near the city of Gangneung. Rather than surrendering, the heavily armed crew first turned on itself and then tried to fight its way back to the border, resulting in the death of thirty-seven Koreans from both nations. Perhaps he was aware that while Republic of Korea Navy operated three Dolgorae-class mini-submarines at the time, North Korea had roughly fifty small submarines of several classes. So the South Korean fisherman informed the Sokcho Fishery Bureau.

The submarine, meanwhile, freed itself from the nets and began sailing north, with Captain Kim following it at a distance. However, before long the submarine rolled on its belly, stalled and helpless in the water.

By 5:20 p.m. the Republic of Korea dispatched antisubmarine helicopters, and the submarine’s location was confirmed nearly an hour later. The vessel was a Yugo-class mini-submarine, imported from Yugoslavia to North Korea during the Cold War. The boats in the class vary from sixteen to twenty-two meters long and seventy to 110 tons in weight, and can’t go much faster than ten knots (11.5 miles per hour), or four knots underwater. Though some carried two torpedo tubes, they were primarily used to deploy operatives on spying missions, with the five-man vessels able to accommodate up to seven additional passengers. Later inspection of the Yugo-class boat revealed it had a single rotating shaft driving its two propellers, which had skewed blades for noise reduction, and that the hull was made of plastic to lower visibility to Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.

ROK Navy surface ships surrounded the vessel and attempted to communicate with the stranded boat, first via signaling charges and low-frequency radio, then loudspeakers and even hammers tapped on the boat’s hull—without response. Unwilling to risk opening the submarine while at sea, the South Korean sailors ultimately hitched the mini-sub to a corvette at 7:30 that evening and began towing it for port of Donghae.

The timing was inauspicious. South and North Korea were about to hold their first major talks in years at Panmunjom. Recently elected South Korean president Kim Dae-jung was promoting his “Sunshine Policy,” attempting to promote reconciliation and openness between two nations that had been officially at war since 1950. On January 23, North Korea declared that a submarine had suffered a “training accident.” According to Pyongyang, the submarine’s last communication reported “trouble in nautical observation instruments, oil pressure systems, and submerging and surfacing machines.” South Korean officials told the New York Times they didn’t believe the Yugo-class boat had actually been involved in a spy mission.

There was of course something a bit comical about the South Korean Navy coming to the unwanted rescue of a submarine that was spying in its waters. However, as frequently happens in tales of North Korean espionage, the absurd becomes horrific.

South Korea had readied a special team to open the ship and negotiate with the North Korean crew, including defector and former submariner Lee Kwang-soo, one of only two North Korean survivors of the Gangneung incident. However, while still being towed on July 24, the submarine sank abruptly to the bottom of the ocean. South Korean officials were uncertain: had the boat succumbed to mechanical difficulties, or had it been scuttled by the crew?

On June 25, a South Korean salvage team recovered the boat from one hundred feet underwater and an elite team bored into the hull. They found a horrid tableau inside.

The submarine’s interior had taken on only two and a half feet of water—but the five submariners had been gunned down, with bullet wounds visible across their bodies. Four elite North Korean Special Forces also lay dead, each shot in the head. North Korean military culture stresses that its soldiers should kill themselves rather than accept capture. It seemed likely that the more fanatical Special Forces had murdered the crew—perhaps after they had refused an order to commit suicide—then killed themselves. The nine dead men aboard the submarine were buried in South Korea’s Cemetery for North Korean and Chinese Soldiers, as Pyongyang has mostly refused to accept back the remains of its own spies and soldiers.

The more than two hundred items recovered from the submarine were also revealing. The crew had been packing AK-47s, machine guns, grenades, pistols, a rocket-propelled grenade and three sets of “American-made infiltration gear.” The presence of an empty South Korean pear juice container also suggested that the Special Forces personnel had made it ashore, as did a 1995 issue of Life magazine. If there was any doubt of the boat’s espionage activities, the ship’s log indicated the submarine had landed agents into South Korea on multiple occasions in the past.

The incident underscored South Korea’s inability to consistently detect and interdict North Korean mini-submarines, leading some commenters to joke that the nation relied on fishermen and taxi drivers (as occurred in the Gangneung incident) to patrol her waters. To be fair, however, small submarines like the Yugo-class boats are extremely difficult to detect in the shallow waters off the Korean coast, a threat underscored by the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010. Shallow, rocky waters also led to a collision between much larger Russian and American submarines in 1992, due to their inability to detect each other over background noise.

Despite the death of its crew, Pyongyang did not make a big fuss as it was eager to receive South Korean economic aid to assist its recovery from a devastating famine. Seoul did it best to overlook the spying in an effort to make the Sunshine Policy work.

However, North Korea never ceased its espionage activities, nor did it change its death-over-surrender policy. In July that year, South Korea recovered the body of an armed North Korean agent with an underwater propulsion unit. And in December, another North Korean mini-submarine opened fire when challenged by South Korean ships, resulting in the Battle of Yeosu, the subject of the next piece in this series.

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 piece was originally featured in March 2017 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Media: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Security,

As the United States has stepped up its military commitments around the globe and embarked on a program of modernizing its weapons, the M2 has also had to change.

Here's What You Need To Remember:

The M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun is one of the most famous American weapons. Serving since the 1920s, the gun has been a favorite of soldiers in practically every conflict since. It remained the same throughout most of the Cold War, retaining the iron sights, simple pintle mounts, and tripods that were designed for it many decades prior.

But as the United States has stepped up its military commitments around the globe and embarked on a program of modernizing its weapons, the M2 has also had to change. Since 2003 a myriad of improvements have come out for the M2 machine gun to improve its usability, accuracy, and reliability. But even with these upgrades, will they be enough to keep the M2 in service?

The biggest upgrade to the M2 was the transition to the M2A1 model in the 2000s. The standard model for most purposes was the M2HB, an air cooled version with a heavy barrel. Changing the barrel on the M2HB was an involved process that required adjusting the “headspace” (the distance between the bolt face and the cartridge) and the timing of the machine gun for every new barrel.

During sustained fire, this was never ideal, as the process would always take a significant amount of time, but changing barrels is a necessity during sustained fire to avoid overheating. The adjustable headspace and timing were necessary at the time, as parts could not be built to the consistent enough tolerances to have a fixed headspace.

However, a few decades later, quick change barrels were becoming the norm. The German MG34 and MG42 that the M2HB faced in World War II both used quick change barrels that could be swapped extremely rapidly. During the Cold War, the Soviets used .50 caliber machine guns (in their own 12.7 x 108 millimeter caliber). The Soviet NSV was lighter than the M2HB, and featured a quick change barrel.

Despite innovation elsewhere, M2HB’s design was not revised to incorporate these new features. The same design, tripods and mounts continued serving up until the 2000s. At that point, the U.S. military held a competition to develop a quick change barrel kit for existing M2s. General Dynamics won the competition for the kit, and it was adopted as the M2A1.

While the primary change was the addition of a quick change barrel kit, the M2A1 also added a four-pronged flash hider to the barrel, reducing the flash of firing, which especially improves the ability to shoot at night with the weapon, as it makes it less prone to washing out NVGs. The barrel extension is also made of a harder steel.

The Army has replaced all of its M2HBs with M2A1s, and the Marines are looking to do the same. A similar setup is being offered as a whole new machine gun as the M2HB QCB by FN Herstal. Some countries have adopted it under that name.

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Another upgrade that’s common recently is the attachment of optical sights to the M2. While Carlos Hathcock famously made an optic mount for a M2HB during his service in Vietnam, optic mounts were not standardized until much later. In comparison, the Soviet NSV came with a standard optic rail, which was commonly used with a 4x to 6x sight.

But nowadays there is a lot of interest for optic mounts for the M2. The Korean company DI Optical is one of the leaders in this space, producing red dots for the M2HB that have seen use with foreign militaries. Trijicon, who makes the ACOG which has seen wide use also makes a machine gun red dot.

The tripod has also seen improvements. The old M3 tripod of World War II vintage is on the way out in the U.S. Army, being replaced by the new M205 lightweight tripod. The new tripod is sixteen pounds lighter, and has increased traverse and depression range relative to the old tripod.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. This article was originally posted last year.

Image: Wikipedia.

John Sohrawardi, Matthew Wright

Politics, Americas

Deepfakes are here to stay. Managing disinformation and protecting the public will be more challenging than ever as artificial intelligence gets more powerful.

An investigative journalist receives a video from an anonymous whistleblower. It shows a candidate for president admitting to illegal activity. But is this video real? If so, it would be huge news – the scoop of a lifetime – and could completely turn around the upcoming elections. But the journalist runs the video through a specialized tool, which tells her that the video isn’t what it seems. In fact, it’s a “deepfake,” a video made using artificial intelligence with deep learning.

Journalists all over the world could soon be using a tool like this. In a few years, a tool like this could even be used by everyone to root out fake content in their social media feeds.

As researchers who have been studying deepfake detection and developing a tool for journalists, we see a future for these tools. They won’t solve all our problems, though, and they will be just one part of the arsenal in the broader fight against disinformation.

The Problem with Deepfakes

Most people know that you can’t believe everything you see. Over the last couple of decades, savvy news consumers have gotten used to seeing images manipulated with photo-editing software. Videos, though, are another story. Hollywood directors can spend millions of dollars on special effects to make up a realistic scene. But using deepfakes, amateurs with a few thousand dollars of computer equipment and a few weeks to spend could make something almost as true to life.

Deepfakes make it possible to put people into movie scenes they were never in – think Tom Cruise playing Iron Man – which makes for entertaining videos. Unfortunately, it also makes it possible to create pornography without the consent of the people depicted. So far, those people, nearly all women, are the biggest victims when deepfake technology is misused.

Deepfakes can also be used to create videos of political leaders saying things they never said. The Belgian Socialist Party released a low-quality nondeepfake but still phony video of President Trump insulting Belgium, which got enough of a reaction to show the potential risks of higher-quality deepfakes.

Perhaps scariest of all, they can be used to create doubt about the content of real videos, by suggesting that they could be deepfakes.

Given these risks, it would be extremely valuable to be able to detect deepfakes and label them clearly. This would ensure that fake videos do not fool the public, and that real videos can be received as authentic.

Spotting Fakes

Deepfake detection as a field of research was begun a little over three years ago. Early work focused on detecting visible problems in the videos, such as deepfakes that didn’t blink. With time, however, the fakes have gotten better at mimicking real videos and become harder to spot for both people and detection tools.

There are two major categories of deepfake detection research. The first involves looking at the behavior of people in the videos. Suppose you have a lot of video of someone famous, such as President Obama. Artificial intelligence can use this video to learn his patterns, from his hand gestures to his pauses in speech. It can then watch a deepfake of him and notice where it does not match those patterns. This approach has the advantage of possibly working even if the video quality itself is essentially perfect.

Other researchers, including our team, have been focused on differences that all deepfakes have compared to real videos. Deepfake videos are often created by merging individually generated frames to form videos. Taking that into account, our team’s methods extract the essential data from the faces in individual frames of a video and then track them through sets of concurrent frames. This allows us to detect inconsistencies in the flow of the information from one frame to another. We use a similar approach for our fake audio detection system as well.

These subtle details are hard for people to see, but show how deepfakes are not quite perfect yet. Detectors like these can work for any person, not just a few world leaders. In the end, it may be that both types of deepfake detectors will be needed.

Recent detection systems perform very well on videos specifically gathered for evaluating the tools. Unfortunately, even the best models do poorly on videos found online. Improving these tools to be more robust and useful is the key next step.

Who Should Use Deepfake Detectors?

Ideally, a deepfake verification tool should be available to everyone. However, this technology is in the early stages of development. Researchers need to improve the tools and protect them against hackers before releasing them broadly.

At the same time, though, the tools to make deepfakes are available to anybody who wants to fool the public. Sitting on the sidelines is not an option. For our team, the right balance was to work with journalists, because they are the first line of defense against the spread of misinformation.

Before publishing stories, journalists need to verify the information. They already have tried-and-true methods, like checking with sources and getting more than one person to verify key facts. So by putting the tool into their hands, we give them more information, and we know that they will not rely on the technology alone, given that it can make mistakes.

Can the Detectors Win the Arms Race?

It is encouraging to see teams from Facebook and Microsoft investing in technology to understand and detect deepfakes. This field needs more research to keep up with the speed of advances in deepfake technology.

Journalists and the social media platforms also need to figure out how best to warn people about deepfakes when they are detected. Research has shown that people remember the lie, but not the fact that it was a lie. Will the same be true for fake videos? Simply putting “Deepfake” in the title might not be enough to counter some kinds of disinformation.

Deepfakes are here to stay. Managing disinformation and protecting the public will be more challenging than ever as artificial intelligence gets more powerful. We are part of a growing research community that is taking on this threat, in which detection is just the first step.

John Sohrawardi, Doctoral Student in Computing and Informational Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology and Matthew Wright, Professor of Computing Security, Rochester Institute of Technology

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

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Asia

While the growing threat posed by Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles, potentially with nuclear armament, is of greater concern, the effects of a sustained deluge of high explosive or chemical shells on a city with a population of ten million—greater than New York City—is still hair-raising to consider.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Seoul has many times the population of Aleppo or Grozny, so casualty rates would likely be greater; nearly twenty-four million people, roughly half of South Korea’s population, are concentrated within the wider metropolitan area. Most casualties from artillery attacks come in the initial moments of the barrage before the victims have a chance to take cover; therefore, a short, unexpected barrage would still inflict a disproportionate number of casualties.

Seoul has to cope with an unusual urban planning program for a huge, modern metropolis: the northern side of the capital lies little more than thirty miles from the border of North Korea, within range of hundreds of enemy artillery pieces—a zone that Pyongyang has threatened to turn into a “sea of fire.” City planners have gamely built more than twenty-three square kilometers of bomb shelters in the South Korean capital as a precaution.

While the growing threat posed by Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles, potentially with nuclear armament, is of greater concern, the effects of a sustained deluge of high explosive or chemical shells on a city with a population of ten million—greater than New York City—is still hair-raising to consider.

However, only a small number of North Korean artillery systems have the long reach to threaten Seoul from across the DMZ. Chief among them are North Korea’s five hundred enormous 170-millimeter Koksan self-propelled guns. The combat-tested system can fling shells at targets as far as thirty-seven miles away when using rocket-assisted projectiles.

The Koksan is a throwback to a class of enormous long-range guns that proliferated in the first half of the twentieth century, with a mission of cracking open the heaviest fortifications and hitting high-value targets well behind the front lines, such as ammunitions dumps, headquarters, logistical chokepoints and enemy artillery batteries. In the 1950s, these heavy guns were increasingly deployed on lightly armored self-propelled carriages, and also acquired the role of firing tactical nuclear munitions. However, systems such as the American 175-millimeter M107 and 203-millimeter M110 were phased out of service, because their mission was superseded by the use of air strikes, tactical missiles and even improved munitions used by smaller 155-millimeter artillery.

However, the constrained, mountainous terrain on the Korean Peninsula and the heavily fortified nature of the demilitarized zone heavily favor the use of artillery. Indeed, American self-propelled artillery played an important role during the Korean War in repelling North Korean and Chinese human-wave attacks. Furthermore, North Korean troops can’t count on having air support at their disposal, nor other types of precision-guided weapons.

The North Korean weapon is of mysterious origin; even the designation M1978 Koksan is not its real name, but simply that of the North Korean county where it was first spotted by Western intelligence in 1978. Most indigenous North Korean weapons are derived from Soviet designs, but the Soviet Union never developed a 170-millimeter weapon. Instead, the Koksan may actually be derived from Japanese coastal guns or German K18 pieces used during World War II.

The M1978 mounts its enormous gun on the hull of a Chinese Type 59 tank—but the crew loading and operating the weapon are exposed to the elements and enemy fire, like the configuration of the American M107 and M110. The 1978 model also does not have any onboard ammunition capacity, and thus relies on soft-skinned ammunition vehicles or pre-positioned stores to sustain a bombardment.

Of course, North Korean artillery would likely fire from Hardened Artillery Sites (HARTS) sprinkled across the border. Many are tunneled into the side of mountains, ingeniously designed for concealment and protection; some even accommodate living quarters. It’s hard to beat having a mountain between you and counter-battery fire.

The Koksan actually has a track record of being used for strategic attacks, as in 1987 North Korea sold several battalions of the system to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The type still appears in military parades staged by Tehran; you can see photos of it here.

In 1986, Iranian forces managed to capture the Al-Faw Peninsula, which lay next to oil fields in Kuwait—then seen as a major ally of Iraq (yes, alliances in the Middle East can shift very quickly). The Koksans were therefore deployed to bombard the Kuwaiti oilfields, disrupting their production. Finally in 1988, Iraqi forces supported by chemical weapons launched a surprise attack during Ramadan and overran the Iranian positions. Several Koksans were captured and subsequently paraded and then inspected by American officers—who noted traces of the Iraqi chemical agents.

Around that time, North Korea began deploying the M1989 variant of the Koksan, which featured a lengthened (and thus more stable) chassis with an enclosed cab for four personnel, similar to that of the Soviet 2S7 Psion system; one crew member is often seen in parades wielding a Strela or Igla man-portable surface-to-air missile. Another four ammunition loaders ride on accompanying vehicles.  The M1989 also added onboard ammunition capacity of twelve rounds. This last feature could allow the M1989 to make an initial “burst” of fire as high as three or four rounds in a minute, before decreasing to a more typical rate of one round per minute.

Would Seoul Be Consumed by a “Sea of Fire”?

In 2012, the Nautilus Institute published a very detailed study arguing that the threat posed by Koksan and long-range 240-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers is exaggerated. More recently the National Interest’s Kyle Mizokami advanced a similar argument; both articles are well worth reading.

To start with, even the long-reaching Koksan would have to be deployed on a very narrow stretch on the edge of the DMZ to hit only the northwestern edge of Seoul. The attacking batteries would promptly be subject to scouring counter-battery fire, air strikes and ground-based attacks.

Furthermore, it took months of sustained bombardment to ravage cities such as Aleppo in Syria or Grozny in Chechnya, while a second Korean War would likely resolve itself in weeks. Additionally, it is far from certain that the North Korean military would concentrate firepower on civilian targets, as it would pay an opportunity cost of failing to destroy actual military targets, and also would likely cause the death of hundreds of Chinese nationals living in Seoul, incurring the wrath of Beijing.

However, there are some qualifications to consider. First of all, Seoul has many times the population of Aleppo or Grozny, so casualty rates would likely be greater; nearly twenty-four million people, roughly half of South Korea’s population, are concentrated within the wider metropolitan area. Most casualties from artillery attacks come in the initial moments of the barrage before the victims have a chance to take cover; therefore, a short, unexpected barrage would still inflict a disproportionate number of casualties.

Even the Nautilus report estimates casualties as high as twenty-nine thousand—even though such a death toll would not correspond to the city being “flattened.” Nonetheless, the effects of panic could lead to hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding limited road networks with calamitous consequences from both a humanitarian and military point of view, as proved to be the case during the Korean War.

North Korean guns might also increase lethality, and spread chaos by making use of chemical warheads, which are believed but not confirmed to be available for the Koksan. Finally, if South Korea and the United States were compelled to expend disproportionate resources to counter the strategic artillery threat, then arguably the guns may have served their intended purpose.

The presence of huge guns along the border underscores that a conflict between North and South Korea would involve a terrible cost in civilian lives. However, the threat posed by the Koksan needs to be kept in chilling perspective: the huge guns could inflict terrible suffering if turned on civilian targets, though not on the scale that Pyongyang boasts, due to limitations on range, logistics and the need to survive counterattack. Their use in an urban barrage designed to maximize body count would be of dubious military utility and trigger retribution, likely leading to the destruction of the North Korean regime, a prospect one hopes is appreciated in Pyongyang.

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 piece was originally featured in October 2017 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Media: Wikipedia

Carol Kwiatkowski

Health, Americas

Hundreds of scientists are calling for a comprehensive, effective plan to manage the entire class of PFAS to protect public health while safer alternatives are developed.

Like many inventions, the discovery of Teflon happened by accident. In 1938, chemists from Dupont (now Chemours) were studying refrigerant gases when, much to their surprise, one concoction solidified. Upon investigation, they found it was not only the slipperiest substance they’d ever seen – it was also noncorrosive and extremely stable and had a high melting point.

In 1954 the revolutionary “nonstick” Teflon pan was introduced. Since then, an entire class of human-made chemicals has evolved: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS. There are upward of 6,000 of these chemicals. Many are used for stain-, grease- and waterproofing. PFAS are found in clothing, plastic, food packaging, electronics, personal care products, firefighting foams, medical devices and numerous other products.

But over time, evidence has slowly built that some commonly used PFAS are toxic and may cause cancer. It took 50 years to understand that the happy accident of Teflon’s discovery was, in fact, a train wreck.

As a public health analyst, I have studied the harm caused by these chemicals. I am one of hundreds of scientists who are calling for a comprehensive, effective plan to manage the entire class of PFAS to protect public health while safer alternatives are developed.

Typically, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assesses chemicals for potential harm, it examines one substance at a time. That approach isn’t working for PFAS, given the sheer number of them and the fact that manufacturers commonly replace toxic substances with “regrettable substitutes” – similar, lesser-known chemicals that also threaten human health and the environment.

Toxic Chemicals

A class-action lawsuit brought this issue to national attention in 2005. Workers at a Parkersburg, West Virginia, DuPont plant joined with local residents to sue the company for releasing millions of pounds of one of these chemicals, known as PFOA, into the air and the Ohio River. Lawyers discovered that the company had known as far back as 1961 that PFOA could harm the liver.

The suit was ultimately settled in 2017 for US$670 million, after an eight-year study of tens of thousands of people who had been exposed. Based on multiple scientific studies, this review concluded that there was a probable link between exposure to PFOA and six categories of diseases: diagnosed high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

Over the past two decades, hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers have shown that many PFAS are not only toxic – they also don’t fully break down in the environment and have accumulated in the bodies of people and animals around the world. Some studies have detected PFAS in 99% of people tested. Others have found PFAS in wildlife, including polar bears, dolphins and seals.

Widespread and Persistent

PFAS are often called “forever chemicals” because they don’t fully degrade. They move easily through air and water, can quickly travel long distances and accumulate in sediment, soil and plants. They have also been found in dust and food, including eggs, meat, milk, fish, fruits and vegetables.

In the bodies of humans and animals, PFAS concentrate in various organs, tissues and cells. The U.S. National Toxicology Program and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed a long list of health risks, including immunotoxicity, testicular and kidney cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility and thyroid disease.

Children are even more vulnerable than adults because they can ingest more PFAS relative to their body weight from food and water and through the air. Children also put their hands in their mouths more often, and their metabolic and immune systems are less developed. Studies show that these chemicals harm children by causing kidney dysfunction, delayed puberty, asthma and altered immune function.

Researchers have also documented that PFAS exposure reduces the effectiveness of vaccines, which is particularly concerning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Regulation is Lagging

PFAS have become so ubiquitous in the environment that health experts say it is probably impossible to completely prevent exposure. These substances are released throughout their life cycles, from chemical production to product use and disposal. Up to 80% of environmental pollution from common PFAS, such as PFOA, comes from production of fluoropolymers that use toxic PFAS as processing aids to make products like Teflon.

In 2009 the EPA established a health advisory level for PFOA in drinking water of 400 parts per trillion. Health advisories are not binding regulations – they are technical guidelines for state, local and tribal governments, which are primarily responsible for regulating public water systems.

In 2016 the agency dramatically lowered this recommendation to 70 parts per trillion. Some states have set far more protective levels – as low as 8 parts per trillion.

According to a recent estimate by the Environmental Working Group, a public health advocacy organization, up to 110 million Americans could be drinking PFAS-contaminated water. Even with the most advanced treatment processes, it is extremely difficult and costly to remove these chemicals from drinking water. And it’s impossible to clean up lakes, river systems or oceans. Nonetheless, PFAS are largely unregulated by the federal government, although they are gaining increased attention from Congress.

Reducing PFAS Risks at the Source

Given that PFAS pollution is so ubiquitous and hard to remove, many health experts assert that the only way to address it is by reducing PFAS production and use as much as possible.

Educational campaigns and consumer pressure are making a difference. Many forward-thinking companies, including grocers, clothing manufacturers and furniture stores, have removed PFAS from products they use and sell.

State governments have also stepped in. California recently banned PFAS in firefighting foams. Maine and Washington have banned PFAS in food packaging. Other states are considering similar measures.

I am part of a group of scientists from universities, nonprofit organizations and government agencies in the U.S. and Europe that has argued for managing the entire class of PFAS chemicals as a group, instead of one by one. We also support an “essential uses” approach that would restrict their production and use only to products that are critical for health and proper functioning of society, such as medical devices and safety equipment. And we have recommended developing safer non-PFAS alternatives.

As the EPA acknowledges, there is an urgent need for innovative solutions to PFAS pollution. Guided by good science, I believe we can effectively manage PFAS to reduce further harm, while researchers find ways to clean up what has already been released.

Carol Kwiatkowski, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University

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

Image: Reuters.

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

The Glock 17 handgun shook up the gun industry in a big way.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The G17 can stand up to a wide array of physical abuse, including being run over by a car and frozen in ice, as well as dust and other environmental factors while remaining completely reliable. The Glock’s seventeen-round magazine had the highest ammunition capacity of any commercially available pistol of its time.

(This is a combination of several pieces posted last year merged into one post for your reading pleasure.) 

5 Best Glocks

The Glock 17 handgun shook up the gun industry in a big way. Gaston Glock’s polymer pistol masterpiece, with its emphasis on ruggedness and reliability, swept the military and law-enforcement world and conquered the civilian market. Slowly, the company has introduced new handguns, all based on the original design, to compete in virtually every niche of the handgun market, from large-bore semiautomatics to discreet concealed carry. Here are five of Gaston Glock’s best designs.

Glock 17

The handgun that started it all, Gaston Glock’s first handgun was originally designed to win a contract to supply the Austrian Army with handguns. It is a remarkable piece of engineering for someone who had only studied, but never designed, handguns of his own. The polymer lower receiver reduced the handgun’s weight where metal was unnecessary while keeping a traditional all-steel frame. The G17 can stand up to a wide array of physical abuse, including being run over by a car and frozen in ice, as well as dust and other environmental factors while remaining completely reliable. The Glock’s seventeen-round magazine had the highest ammunition capacity of any commercially available pistol of its time.

Glock 21

One of the first Glock variants, the Glock 21, was simply the original Glock 17 scaled up to accept the .45 ACP round. The result was a high-capacity .45 pistol, something that wasn’t exactly common. The Glock 21 could carry thirteen .45 ACP rounds while the standard .45 pistol, the Colt 1911A1, could carry seven or eight. The use of weight-reducing polymers was particularly useful in the G21, as it offset the weight of a magazine full of .45 rounds. The introduction of the Glock 21 early in the company’s line proved that Glock understood many American shooters were skeptical of what they considered the relatively low-powered nine-millimeter round, and that the basic design could scale up to accommodate more powerful, higher recoil ammunition.

Glock 19

The Glock 17 was a very popular handgun but, designed for military service, it was a bit larger than what many enthusiasts, concealed-carry wearers and home-defense users wanted. The result was the Glock 19. The Glock 19 was designed as a compact version of the Glock 17, approximately half an inch shorter than the G17 in overall length, height and barrel length. Ammunition capacity was decreased only slightly, to a still-respectable fifteen rounds. The G19, while not designed as a service pistol, has attracted a military following, with Navy SEALs and U.S. Army Rangers choosing it as their standard sidearm. A modified Glock 19, the 19X, was submitted to the U.S. Army’s Modular Handgun System competition.

Glock 43

Designed as a subcompact carry pistol, the G43 is Glock’s first “single stack” handgun, featuring a thin magazine carrying six nine-millimeter rounds in a single vertical column. The G43 is one of the smallest pistols in the subcompact category, just 6.26 inches long and four and a quarter inches high. The pistol is just one inch thick, and loaded weighs just 22.36 ounces. This combination of small size and light weight makes the Glock 43 exceptionally easy to conceal on one’s person. While the relatively small ammunition capacity is a bit unusual for a Glock, concealed carry pistols in general are strictly defensive firearms and the low round count is a tradeoff.

Glock 18

In Glock’s entire inventory of handguns, there is one gun not available for sale in the United States to regular gun owners. This particular gun, the Glock 18, has a selector switch located on the slide that allows for two modes: traditional semiautomatic fire and fully automatic fire. The Glock 18 is a Glock 17 full-size pistol with the ability to fire at rates of up to 1,200 rounds per minute. In addition to seventeen-round magazines, Glock also manufactures thirty-three-round magazines that fit in the magazine well of most nine-millimeter Glocks, and would be particularly useful in the G18. Saddam Hussein had a Glock 18C, a version with a built-in compensator to deal with the recoil of fully automatic fire, on him when he was captured by U.S. forces in December 2003. The gun was later presented to former president George W. Bush as a war trophy.

The Swiss-German company Sig Sauer has been in the arms business for a long time. Swiss SIG (Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft) a company founded in 1853, partnered with the German Sauer in 1976 to produce firearms. The joint company rode the European wave of handgun manufacturers in the late 1980s and 1990s with its series of handguns based on the original P210 platform.

Today Sig Sauer sells a full line of handguns and modern sporting rifles in the United States, and has penetrated both the military and law enforcement markets. Although the company failed to sell the P226 handgun to the U.S. Military in 1984—losing out to Beretta of Italy—in 2017 it succeeding in winning the contract for the Beretta’s replacement, the M17 Modular Handgun system. Here is a list of some of Sig Sauer’s best service pistols.

5 Best from Sig Sauer

Sig P210

The Sig P210 is the original handgun that started the company’s entire line of P2XX pistols. The P210 is generally regarded as one of the best-designed pistols of the twentieth century. Adopted in 1949 by the Swiss Army, it replaced a Swiss copy of the Luger P08 pistol, the Model 29. The P210 is also considered one of the most accurate pistols ever built.

The P210 is built as one might expect a Swiss watch: “beautifully made” with carefully fitted parts. The design itself is based on the locked breech, short-recoil pistol operating system devised by John Moses Browning, and disassembles like a standard Colt-Browning type pistol. The P210 is chambered in 9mm and its only drawback was an eight-round magazine, which was remarkable then but about half the size of today’s magazines. The P210 was used by the Swiss Army, Danish Army and West German Border Guard.

Sig P220

The next pistol in the Sig line that rose to prominence was the M75, otherwise known as the Sig P220. The M75 was adopted by the Swiss Army in 1975, and was a logical evolution of the P210. The pistol internally was similar to the P210, with the incorporation of a manual decocker that lowered the hammer into a safety notch without pulling the trigger. It also featured a firing pin lock that prevented the gun from being fired even if dropped while cocked.

The P220 also different from the P210 in having a shorter barrel and larger trigger well. Still in production, the pistol is offered in 9mm, .45 ACP and 10mm Auto. The P220 found success in law enforcement organizations worldwide—including Sweden and the United States—and is the sidearm of the Japan Self Defense Forces.

Sig P226

The P226 was Sig’s breakout gun in the U.S. market and its most popular pistol. The P226 was actually developed for the U.S. Army’s competition to replace the World War II–era M1911A1 handgun with a modern design. Although it lost to Beretta, a series of dangerous accidents involving Berettas in Navy service caused the SEALs to switch to the P226 instead.

Armed with SEAL cachet and exploiting the explosion in high-capacity 9mm handguns caused by Glock, the P226 became a very popular handgun.

Internally, the Sig P226 is similar to its predecessors, having a double action/single action design: the first shot requires a long ten-pound trigger pull to cock and then fire the pistol, while subsequent shots have a lighter 4.4-pound pull. Unlike previous Sig P2XX guns, the P226 had a double-column magazine that widened the grip but allowed fifteen 9mm rounds—nearly twice as as previous Sigs—to be carried in a single magazine.

Sig P229

The Sig P226 is a large steel pistol that is not easy to carry concealed. As an alternative, Sig Sauer developed the P229. The P229 is a smaller, shorter pistol in the same size and weight range as the Glock 19 and the Smith & Wesson M&P Compact.

The P229 is a scaled-down P226, with a barrel .4 inches shorter than its predecessor. The pistol retains the 9mm, fifteen-round magazine and still has an all-metal firearm, resulting in a pistol that weighs thirty-four ounces loaded—five more ounces than the Glock 19. At 1.5 inches, it is also a third of an inch wider than the Glock 19. Nevertheless, for those used to the Sig’s manual of arms or the need for a decocker, the P229 is an excellent compact pistol.

Sig P320/M17 Modular Handgun System

In 2017, Sig Sauer beat Glock, Beretta, and other competitors for the U.S. Army’s M17 Modular Handgun System (MHS). The M17 is based on the Sig Sauer P320 and appears similar on its surface to other Sig pistols—but has several new internal updates from previous designs. The MHS consists of the full-sized M17 pistol and the compact M18, both of which are chambered for 9mm and distributed with seventeen- and twenty-one-round magazines.

Unlike previous Sig handguns, the P320 is a striker fired pistol that does away with a hammer and firing pin. The P320 also has a manual safety, a key Army requirement. The pistol is double action only, meaning a single trigger pull will both cock the pistol and release the firing pin, firing the gun. The P320 for civilians is available in 9mm, .357 SIG, .40 Smith & Wesson and .45 ACP.

5 Best from Smith & Wesson: 

Smith & Wesson is one of the oldest, and most storied names in American firearms. Founded in the 1800s, the company specialized in revolvers and guns such as the No.3 and Schofield became synonymous with the Old West. Although Smith & Wesson is best known for its handguns,the company now makes guns of all stripes, from revolvers to pistols to their own version of the AR-15 rifle. Here are five of the storied company’s best contemporary offerings.

Smith & Wesson 686

Smith & Wesson categorizes its revolvers using a system of letters, with the so-called “L” frames set in the middle between small and large caliber guns. One of the most popular “L frames” is the Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum. The 686 is capable of shooting both high powered .357 Magnum and lighter .38 Special ammunition. This gives shooters the option of training on .38 Special until they know the ins and outs of the revolver and then stepping up to the more lethal .357 Magnum when they feel comfortable.

The 686 has a four-inch barrel, an overall length of 9.6 inches, and weighs two and a half pounds. It also adjustable sights, a satin stainless steel finish, double action firing system and a six or seven round cylinder.

Smith & Wesson Model 29

The Smith & Wesson Model 29 was one of the first revolvers chambered for the powerful .44 Magnum round. A blued, six cylinder revolver with wooden grips and a classic style, the Model 29 became particularly popular after its use in the “Dirty Harry” series of films. The Model 29 is an all-steel handgun with heft, all the better to soak up the punishing level of recoil a user experiences when fired. Barrel length ranged from four to ten inches. The powerful .44 Magnum cartridge was particularly popular with gun enthusiasts and hunters who stalked dangerous prey. Discontinued in 1999, Model 29 was recently put back into production.

Smith & Wesson Model 442 Pro Series

In Smith & Wesson’s lettering system the smallest revolvers use the so-called “J frame,” and one of the smallest revolvers of all is the Model 442 Pro Series. Designed as a concealed carry revolver, the 442 is chambered in .38 Special and can handle more powerful, higher pressure +P rounds. The revolver frame is made of aluminum alloy to reduce overall weight with the cylinder itself made of carbon steel and barrel made of stainless steel. The 442’s cylinder holds five rounds, resulting in a narrower pistol that is easier to carry concealed. The revolver is double action only, meaning a single pull with both advance the cylinder to fresh round and release the firing pin, firing the gun. The 442 lacks a hammer, allowing for a smoother draw from under clothing.

Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0

Smith & Wesson’s successful “wonder nine” pistol, the M&P followed in the footsteps of the Glock to produce a highly effective, high capacity polymer frame pistol. The Military & Police Model, currently in version 2.0, has a low bore axis, which the manufacturer claims reduces muzzle climb and allows the shooter to get sights back on target faster. The M&P 2.0 incorporates a five-inch stainless steel barrel into a pistol with an overall length of eight inches. The double action pistol is available in nine millimeter and .40 Smith & Wesson, with the 9mm version sporting a seventeen round magazine plus one in the chamber, for a total of eighteen rounds. The pistol also features an optional loaded chamber indicator and optional thumb safety. Somewhat unique among pistols it comes with four different palmswell grip inserts for maximum ergonomic comfort.

Smith & Wesson 1911A1

The patent on John Moses Browning’s 1911 handgun design ran out long ago, and nearly all gun companies now manufacture their own versions of this iconic handgun. Smith & Wesson is no exception, producing its own S&W1911 E-Series pistols. The pistols are generally true to the final version of the 1911A1, with the exception of stainless steel barrels, skeletonized hammers, and in some cases an accessory rail for the mounting of lights and lasers. The company makes both full-size Government and smaller Commander handguns, the latter with a barrel three quarters of an inch shorter than the five-inch Government barrel and a slightly shorter slide. Commanders also feature bobtailed mainspring housings and aggressive checkering to help the shooter stay on target. The 1911 E-Series is generally true enough to form to satisfy 1911 purists.

5 Best from Ruger: 

Sturm Ruger & Company, also known as Ruger Firearms, is one of the most well known and respected names in the American gun industry. Founded in 1949 by gun designers Bill Ruger and Alexander McCormick Sturm, the company started out producing an accurate and relatively inexpensive target pistol before branching out to other handguns and eventually long guns.

In 2016, the company reported manufacturing just under two million firearms, making it the second largest gun manufacturer in the U.S. Ruger is second only to Smith & Wesson in the handgun market and Remington in the pistol market. Here are five weapons that exemplify the company’s broad and varied line of firearms.

Ruger American Rifle:

First launched in 2011, the Ruger American Rifle was designed to be an accurate, inexpensive, mass-produced bolt action rifle for the modern hunting market. The American Rifle incorporates a number of features that used to be the province of more expensive hunting rifles, but due to modern manufacturing techniques could be brought down to a lower price point.

The American Rifle includes three features that make it an attractive rifle out of the box. The barrel is cold hammer forged steel, for long barrel life. The Ruger Marksman Adjustable Trigger has a pull weight of 3-5 pounds, allowing the shooter to customize the pull to whatever they feel most comfortable. The lightweight, synthetic stock is free floated, meaning the barreled does not touch the stock past the rifle’s action. This prevents undue pressure from being exerted on the barrel that could throw off accuracy.

The Ruger American Rifle is chambered in a wide variety of calibers, from .270 Winchester to .338 Winchester Magnum and including the new 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor round.

Ruger LCR:

One of Ruger’s most technically interesting new weapons is the Ruger LCR revolver. Introduced in 2009, the LCR was a new design that fully took advantage of the latest in polymer and metal technologies to create one of the lightest revolvers on the market.

The Ruger LCR weighs just 13.5 ounces unloaded, achieving significant weight savings with its combination polymer and aluminum frame. Although common in high capacity autoloading pistols, the use of polymers in handguns is unusual. The LCR uses polymer where metal-quality strength is not an issue, such in the grip frame, but uses aluminum in the rest of the frame. The revolver uses a steel cylinder to safely handle high chamber pressures.

The LCR is equipped with a five-round cylinder and is capable of shooting both .38 Special and higher pressure .38 Special +P rounds. The gun is just 6.5 inches long and—coupled with a dehorned frame and lack of an external hammer the gun—is easy to draw from behind clothing. A rubber Hogue grip fully encases the backstrap, making the revolver more comfortable to shoot.

Ruger Precision Rifle:

Just as the Ruger American Rifle brought an inexpensive, accurate hunting rifle to the masses, so did the Ruger Precision Rifle. Built using modern manufacturing techniques, the RPR as it is known to fans is a quick way to get into the precision shooting hobby. Mated with a suitable optic, the RPR is capable of consistently making accurate long distance shots right out of the box.

Introduced in 2015, the Ruger Precision Rifle is based on the action of the Ruger American bolt action rifle inserted into an aluminum chassis of Ruger’s own manufacture. The Ruger also uses the same three lug bolt action for quick and positive lockups, as well as a cold-hammer forged steel barrel. The barrel is finished off with the Ruger Hybrid Muzzle Brake, which minimizes barrel flash while lessening noise and pressure waves to the left and right of the shooter—a welcome addition to those who regularly shoot from crowded shooting ranges.

The Ruger RPR weights just 9.8 pounds, relatively light for a precision rifle, and includes a hinged stock for portability. The RPR comes in barrel lengths including 20, 22, and 26 inches, and calibers include .308 Winchester, 6-millimeter Creedmoor, 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor, .300 Winchester Magnum and .338 Lapua Magnum. The rifle uses industry standard Accuracy International magazines.

Ruger Mini-14:

The Ruger Mini-14 is one of the company’s most popular weapons. Essentially a scaled down M-14 battle rifle chambered in .223 Remington, the Mini-14 is the quintessential general-purpose semi-automatic rifle, used by ranchers, police forces, and shooters who need a durable, rough-use long gun capable of quick follow-up shots.

Developed by Bill Ruger and firearm designer James L. Sullivan in the late 1960s, the Mini-14 is a short-stroke, gas piston rifle with a rotating bolt. In that respect, it is similar to the M-1 Garand, M-14, and even the AK-47. The Mini-14 weighs 6.39 pounds unloaded, has a practical rate of fire of 40 rounds per minute and can accept 20 and 30 round magazines.

The Mini-14’s does not have a pistol grip, meaning it was not affected by the 1994 to 2004 federal assault weapons ban. In 1987, Ruger released a version chambered in 7.62x39, giving users a gun capable of using Chinese and Soviet exported ammunition and a weapon that met the minimum caliber standard for deer and similar-sized game. Recently the company released a Mini-14 in .300 Blackout, a new round that offers superior ballistic performance at short range.

Ruger American Pistol:

Although one of the largest gun manufacturers in America, a U.S. military contract has eluded Ruger. The company designed and released the Ruger American Pistol to compete in the U.S. Army’s Modular Handgun System, a contract that would replace the U.S. Army—and later the entire U.S. military’s—arsenals of M9 Beretta handguns with a new, modern pistol.

Ruger’s pistol didn’t win the Army contract, but it was released to the civilian market in 2015. Released as the American Pistol, the gun is a striker-fired double action pistol with a trigger weight of 5.5 pounds. A locked breech and short recoil pistol, at its heart, is a stainless steel removable chassis. Matched Ruger’s polymer grip and steel frame, the pistol has an overall length of 7.5 inches and a weight of 30 ounces. New compact versions shed some length and weight to make a weapon more suitable for concealed carry. The pistol is available in 9-millimeter and .45 ACP.

One of the major benefits to the American public to come from the Modular Handgun System was the requirement for enhanced ergonomics. The pistol comes with three different backstraps to fit a wide variety of hand sizes, and the pistol is fully ambidextrous. Going forward, these features will likely become standard on handguns sold in the United States.

Kyle Mizokami is a writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This article first appeared in 2019 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Reddit.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

America’s navy can use all the joint-service help it can get as it squares off against China and Russia in their home waters.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Competitive strategy is a mode of competition worth rediscovering. The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft. In so doing they can deny China the access it must have to transact commerce, diplomacy, and military affairs in faraway regions.

The feel-good story of last month comes out of the U.S. Marine Corps, whose leadership has set in motion a crash effort to field anti-ship missiles for island warfare. Grabbing headlines most recently is the high-mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. In effect, HIMARS is a truck that totes around a launcher capable of disgorging a variety of precision-guided munitions. Some can pummel ships at sea.

And devil dogs will grin. As will their U.S. Navy shipmates. America’s navy can use all the joint-service help it can get as it squares off against China and Russia in their home waters. The Marine Corps Hymn proclaims that marines are “first to fight,” and that remains true in this age of Eurasian seacoasts abristle with long-range precision-guided armaments and missile-armed ships and planes prowling sea and sky. But that fight will commence at sea, not on distant beaches. Marines realize they may never reach Pacific battlegrounds without first winning command of waters that furnish an avenue into contested littorals.

Marine Commandant Robert Neller is fond of telling his comrades they must “fight to get to the fight.” His logic is remorseless. And marines will take up arms in company with navy and merchant-marine sailors who man the fleet. Expeditionary forces can’t even begin prying open the halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli until they defeat hostile navies and batter down “anti-access” defenses. But it goes further. In all likelihood, the fight will involve more than just the naval services. U.S. Air Force aviators may bear a hand in future high-sea imbroglios. Even the U.S. Army stands poised to get into the action as soldiers prepare for “multi-domain operations” spanning the terrestrial, air—and, yes, saltwater—domains.

In other words, future fights promise to be joint fights that mesh capabilities from naval and non-naval services. In that sense, the future promises to be a throwback to Pacific campaigns of old. It’s fitting, then, that marine magnates are peering both ahead and back in time as they orient the Corps toward today’s challenges. They want to harness newfangled technology to help win the war at sea while returning the service to its maritime heritage after seventeen years of battling insurgents and terrorists on dry land. In so doing they intend to bolster the efficacy of American maritime strategy.

First, technology. Nowadays sea power is no longer purely a matter for fleets. To the extent it ever was: that a ship’s a fool to fight a fort is an old adage, not one of recent coinage. Nor is sea power an exclusive province of navies. It is a joint enterprise whereby seagoing, aviation, and ground forces concentrate firepower at embattled scenes on the briny main to impose their will on the foe. The logic is plain. More and more shore-based weaponry can strike farther and farther out to sea as sensor technology and precision guidance mature. Fleets are beneficiaries of fire support from that weaponry so long as they cruise within its range.

Or as General Neller puts it, “There’s a ground component to the maritime fight.” Marines constitute “a naval force in a naval campaign; you have to help the ships control sea space. And you can do that from the land.”

And you can do it best from the land you already occupy. Emplaced on islands dotting the Pacific Ocean, HIMARS and kindred missile launchers could give Chinese ships of war a very bad day. If positioned along the “first island chain” paralleling the mainland’s coastline before the outbreak of war, marines and their joint-service and allied brethren could plausibly threaten to bar access to the Western Pacific and points beyond. And they could execute the threat in wartime, confining Chinese merchantmen, warships, and aircraft to the China seas to exact a frightful economic and military penalty should Beijing do things the United States and its allies hope to deter.

The Marine Corps’ missile procurement blitz will be instantly familiar to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In fact, the marines are mounting a version in miniature of the PLA’s “anti-access/area-denial,” or A2/AD, strategy. China’s armed forces want to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint forces out of the Western Pacific or take a heavy toll should they try to break in. Advanced technology likewise super-empowers U.S. and allied forces. They could strew anti-ship and anti-air missiles on landmasses comprising the first island chain while deploying additional munitions aboard aircraft, submarines, and surface craft lurking nearby.

Land forces—marines and soldiers, American and allied—can anchor the ground component of U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. Like A2/AD, island-chain defense leverages the symbiosis between sea- and shore-based implements of sea power. Joint firepower will help expeditionary forces fight their way to the fight. Or, in the case of the first island chain, likely battlefields already belong to allies or friends. Island warriors only need to hold friendly soil—and as military sages from Clausewitz to Moltke the Elder teach, tactical defense represents the strongest form of warfare.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Beijing ought to feel flattered indeed. And dismayed!

Second, culture. Sophisticated implements like HIMARS accomplish little unless used with skill and verve. The naval services are trying to rejuvenate martial cultures deadened by three ahistorical decades. Once upon a time—in fact, throughout their history until recent times—the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy assumed they had to fight for command of the sea before they could harvest the fruits of command. In other words, they assumed they had to wrest control of important waters from local defenders in order to render seaways safe enough to land troops, bombard coastal sites, or, in the air and missile age, loft firepower deep into the interior. They had to make the sea a protected sanctuary.

In other words, they assumed they had to do what naval services have done throughout history. Yet service chieftains instigated a cultural revolution in 1992, declaring in effect that the sea services were now exempt from the rigors of peer-on-peer combat. That year they issued a strategic directive titled “. . . From the Sea” proclaiming that, with the Soviet Union dead and the Soviet Navy rusting at its moorings, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could afford to reinvent themselves as “fundamentally different” sea services. With no peer antagonist to duel and none on the horizon, they were at liberty to assume away their most elemental function.

Not only could the sea services drop their guard; the leadership ordered them to. And they complied. Tactics and weaponry for prosecuting major combat languished in the wake of “. . . From the Sea.” The services first lost their fighting edge during the strategic holiday of the 1990s, and then while waging irregular warfare in the years since 9/11. Small wonder the services find themselves struggling to refresh their cultures for the new, old age of great-power strategic competition that’s upon us.

Few in uniform today remember the Cold War, when the prospect of battle was a daily fact of life. Preparing for strategic competition demands more than upgrading equipment or relearning skills grown stale. It demands that officialdom and senior commanders imprint bloody-minded attitudes on the sea services anew. Only thus will they extract maximum combat power out of new weapons and sensors, assuring hardware fulfills its potential.

And third, strategy. If highfalutin’ technology and the cultural counterrevolution pan out, the U.S. Marines and fellow services will have positioned themselves to execute a strategy that could give rival great powers fits. Look back again to look ahead. During the late Cold War, the founding chief of the U.S. Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, exhorted the Pentagon and the armed forces to fashion “competitive strategies” whereby they could compete at a low cost relative to American economic means while compelling the Soviets to compete at a prohibitive cost relative to their means. Over time the approach would render waging cold war unaffordable for Moscow.

Competitive strategy is a mode of competition worth rediscovering. The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft. In so doing they can deny China the access it must have to transact commerce, diplomacy, and military affairs in faraway regions. And they can close these narrow seas with systems such as HIMARS. While HIMARS anti-ship rounds are not cheap in absolute terms, dislodging rocketeers from Pacific islands would prove far more burdensome for the PLA. An allied strategy can compel Chinese forces to fight to get to the fight—flipping the logic of anti-access and area denial against them.

In short, island-chain defense is strategy on the cheap in relative terms. It’s an approach that would conjure a glint in Andrew Marshall’s eye.

Let’s call it a “Great Wall in reverse” strategy, with islands comprising the guard towers and joint sea power stationed on and around the islands forming the masonry in between. The legendary Great Wall was built to keep out Central Asian nomads who ravaged China from the steppes. Properly fortified, an archipelagic Great Wall can barricade China within the China seas—and thereby force the PLA to compete on allied terms at a fearsome cost to itself.

HIMARS, then, may look like a humble truck. In reality, it is far more: a tactical implement commanding significant strategic import. As the Marine Corps girds to fight in the air, on land, and sea, it ought to procure anti-ship weapons in bulk—and in haste.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, and author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. The views voiced here are his alone. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Flickr.

Richard Douglas

Security,

This is the complete guide to home defense guns

Here's What You Need To Remember: If you’re looking for a fast and accessible firearm, then go for a semi-automatic pistol. In many gun experts’ opinions, it’s the best firearm type for home defense. It’s cheap, concealable, accurate, and very fast. It’ll be ready whenever you need it.

This is the complete guide to home defense guns. In this in-depth guide, you’ll learn:

-What to look for in a home defense gun

-The pros/cons with each firearm type

-What’s the best home defense gun for you

- And much more

 So if you’re trying to look for the best home defense weapon that’ll protect you and your family, this guide is for you. Let’s dive right in.

There’s no such thing as a one size fits all for home defense.

It depends on you and your needs. More specifically, it boils down to your proficiency (or comfort) with your firearm. For example, if all you do is practice with a pistol, then that’s the right gun for you. Likewise, if you only practice with a rifle, then that’s your best home defense weapon. Why is that so?

Stress. When the stressful home invasion occurs, you won’t have time to think. You’ll only have time to act. So choosing a gun that you’re proficient with will help you respond faster, saving you and your families’ life.

That said, here’s the complete breakdown of each firearm type with pros, cons, best use, and even recommendations.

Rifles

Rifles are a great home defense choice. Why? Rifles are insanely accurate, fast, and have the largest magazine. This is great for multi-intruder home defense scenarios. But is it the right choice for you? Here the complete breakdown:

Pros

-Lethal

-Very accurate (longer sight radius)

-Low recoil (depending on your caliber)

-Large magazine (30 rounds)

-Highly modifiable

-Designed to engage multiple targets

Cons

-Expensive

-Heavier (reduces handling speed)

-Easier to disarm (due to barrel size)

-Over-penetration (hits more than the intended target)

-Decreased maneuverability (can’t easily be moved in small spaces)

Best Uses

If you want an edge over your intruders, then get a rifle.

It has a larger magazine, more accurate, and incapacitates quickly. You can take an army with a rifle. In fact, that’s how a veteran took out a three-man armed robbery. That’s why I highly recommend a rifle (if you can afford one). It gives you the firepower necessary to overpower your intruder(s).

Recommendation

Smith & Wesson M&P15 Sport II: A very popular 30 round AR-15. It’s an affordable, close-quarters AR-15 that’s designed for home defense. Bonus tip: throw on some game-changing accessories like an AR-15 optic, light and an adjustable stock, and you’ll be ready-to-go.

Shotguns

Shotguns are usually recommended for home defense. It’s great at short-range, scary, and very reliable. Here’s the breakdown:

Pros

-Affordable

-Doesn’t jam

- Doesn’t over-penetrate (depending on gauge)

-Racking sound scares intruders

-Works great in low light

-Weapon-of-choice for wild animals and zombies (just kidding)

Cons

-Heavier

-Strong recoil

-Shorter magazine (5-6 rounds)

-Slow reloads

-Short-range use only

-Not precise (can hit friendlies due to spread)

-Needs to be aimed (at home defense ranges)

-Weak stopping power (may not incapacitate targets immediately)

Best Use

If you potentially deal with wild animals or you want to intimidate your intruder, then choose a shotgun. Otherwise, opt-in for another firearm type.

Why? The spread. Let’s say the bad guy’s got your wife in a headlock. Will a shotgun be able to accurately (and safely) take down the bad guy without hitting your wife? No, it wouldn’t.

You’d probably end up hitting your wife because of the spread. Not to mention, most shotguns have a 5-6 shot magazine, so you’ll be out of ammo very fast. That said, I have nothing against shotguns. A lot of people prefer them for home defense with wonderful results. I’m just breaking it down on paper.

If you like a shotgun and you’re proficient with it, then go with one! I agree: it’s an intimidating gun and can save you a firefight when you rack the gun. Yet, it does have its flaws (as mentioned above).

Recommendations

Remington 870: A reliable (and popular) pump-action shotgun. It’s lightweight, intimidating, and affordable.

Benelli M2: A semi-automatic shotgun that doesn’t require you to pump the handle. Just aim and fire.

Revolvers

A revolver (or a “hand cannon”) is a simple and reliable handgun. It’s small, deadly, and affordable. It’s also terrifying. That’s why some prefer a revolver for home defense. But is it any good?

Let’s break it down:

Pros

-Reliable

-Easy-to-operate (aim and pull)

-Scary

Cons

-Troublesome recoil

-Requires more skill to fire

-Fires slower (due to trigger)

-Reloads slower (due to revolver’s cylinder)

-Smaller Magazine (6 rounds)

Best Uses

If you’re a “revolver” kind of guy, then go for a revolver. But be warned: it’s not very effective.

It has a small magazine, a bit of a kick, takes longer to reload, and requires more skill to shoot accurately. That’s why law enforcement (minus old cops) stopped using revolvers. They replaced it with a semi-automatic pistol (I’ll cover why below).

That said, if you’re a revolver man, you don’t need a recommendation. But if you do, here it is.

Recommendation

Smith & Wesson Model 66: A 6-shot, .357 Magnum revolver. It’s got an adjustable sight and concealable.

Semi-Automatic Pistol

A semi-automatic pistol is the most common home defense weapon. It’s lightweight, accurate, easy to use, and concealable. It also fits in cramped locations like hallways and doorways. That’s why Law Enforcement and FBI prefer it. But is it the right choice for home defense? Here’s the full breakdown:

Pros

- Inexpensive

-Lightweight

-Accurate

-Concealable

-Fast Target Acquisition

-Requires only one hand

-Maneuverable in tight spaces (like small rooms)

Cons

- Short-range

-Shorter Mag (potential ammo shortages)

-Less control (smaller grip surface)

-Can over-penetrate (depending on caliber)

Best Uses

If you’re looking for a fast and accessible firearm, then go for a semi-automatic pistol. In many gun experts’ opinions, it’s the best firearm type for home defense. It’s cheap, concealable, accurate, and very fast. It’ll be ready whenever you need it.

Recommendation

S&W M&P9c: A polymer-frame, striker-fired double-stack 9mm pistol. It’s affordable, accurate, ergonomic and very concealable.

What’s The Best Gun For Home Defense?

The truth is, it doesn’t matter what weapon you choose. You can choose a shotgun, pistol, revolver, or rifle. They all do the same job—incapacitate whomever it’s pointed at.

Sure, some guns do it better than others. But honestly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you choose a weapon and practice with it. Because let’s face it:

In a stressful home defense situation, you’re not going to have time to “remember” how to use a gun. You’ll be relying on your training instincts. The better trained you are, the better instincts you’ll have at your disposal.

So keep it simple. First, choose a weapon you like. Then, take it out to the range. And continuously practice. The more you practice, the better the gun (and you) become at home defense. But that’s enough from me.

What’s Your Favorite Home Defense Weapon?

Maybe you like a shotgun? Or an AR-15 equipped with an optic? Either way, let me know what you think in the comments below. 

Richard Douglas is a firearms expert and educator. His work has appeared on large gun publications like The Daily Caller, ODU Magazine, American Shooting Journal, SOFREP, and more. In his free time, he reviews various optics and guns on his Scopes Field blog. This first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

Technology,

Nuclear-powered submarines have traditionally held a decisive edge in endurance, stealth and speed over cheaper diesel submarines.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Who would have guessed nuclear reactors are incredibly expensive? AIP powered submarines have generally cost between $200 and $600 million, meaning a country could easily buy three or four medium-sized AIP submarines instead of one nuclear attack submarine.

Nuclear-powered submarines have traditionally held a decisive edge in endurance, stealth and speed over cheaper diesel submarines. However, new Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) technology has significantly narrowed the performance gap on a new generation of submarines that cost a fraction of the price of a nuclear-powered boat.

A conventional submarine’s diesel engine generates electricity which can be used to drive the propeller and power its systems. The problem is that such a combustion engine is inherently quite noisy and runs on air—a commodity in limited supply on an underwater vehicle. Thus, diesel-powered submarines must surface frequently to recharge their batteries.

The first nuclear-powered submarines were brought into service in the 1950s. Nuclear reactors are quieter, don’t consume air, and produce greater power output, allowing nuclear submarines to remain submerged for months instead of days while traveling at higher speeds under water.  

These advantages led the U.S. Navy to phase out its diesel boats in favor of an all-nuclear powered submarine fleet.  However, most other navies have retained at least some diesel submarines because of their much lower cost and complexity.

In the 1990s, submarines powered by Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) technology entered operational use. Though the concept dated back to the 19th century and had been tested in a few prototype vessels, it was left to Sweden to deploy the first operational AIP-powered submarine, the Gotland-class, which proved to be stealthy and relatively long enduring. The 60-meter long Gotlands are powered by a Stirling-cycle engine, a heat engine consuming a combination of liquid oxygen and diesel fuel.

Since then, AIP powered-submarines have proliferated across the world using three different types of engines, with nearly 60 operational today in fifteen countries. Around fifty more are on order or being constructed.

China has 15 Stirling-powered Yuan-class Type 039A submarines with 20 more planned, as well as a single large Type 032 missile submarine that can fire ballistic missiles. Japan for her part has eight medium-sized Soryu class submarines that also use Stirling engines, with 15 more planned for or under construction. The Swedes, for their part, have developed  four different classes of Stirling-powered submarines.

Germany has also built dozens of AIP powered submarines, most notably the small Type 212 and 214, and has exported them across the globe. The German boats all use electro-catalytic fuel cells, a generally more efficient and quiet technology than the Stirling, though also more complex and expensive. Other countries intending to build fuel-cell powered submarines include Spain (the S-80), India (the Kalvari-class) and Russia (the Lada-class).

Finally, France has designed several subs using closed-cycle steam turbine called MESMA.   Three upgraded Agosta-90b class subs with MESMA engines serve in the Pakistani Navy.

Nuclear vs. AIP: Who Wins?:

Broadly speaking, how do AIP vessels compare in performance to nuclear submarines?  Let’s consider the costs and benefits in terms of stealth, endurance, speed and cost.

Stealth:

Nuclear powered submarines have become very quiet—at least an order of magnitude quieter than a diesel submarine with its engine running.  In fact, nuclear-powered submarines may be unable to detect each other using passive sonar, as evidenced by the 2009 collision of a British and French nuclear ballistic missile submarines, both oblivious to the presence of the other.

However, there’s reason to believe that AIP submarines can, if properly designed, swim underwater even more quietly. The hydraulics in a nuclear reactor produce noise as they pump coolant liquid, while an AIP’s submarine’s engines are virtually silent. Diesel-powered submarines can also approach this level of quietness while running on battery power, but can only do so for a few hours whereas an AIP submarine can keep it up for days.

Diesel and AIP powered submarines have on more than one occasion managed to slip through anti-submarine defenses and sink American aircraft carriers in war games. Of course, such feats have also been performed by nuclear submarines.

Endurance:

Nuclear submarines can operate underwater for three or four months at a time and cross oceans with ease. While some conventional submarines can handle the distance, none have comparable underwater endurance.

AIP submarines have narrowed the gap, however.  While old diesel submarines needed to surface in a matter of hours or a few days at best to recharge batteries, new AIP powered vessels only need to surface every two to four weeks depending on type. (Some sources make the unconfirmed claim that the German Type 214 can even last more than 2 months.) Of course, surfaced submarines, or even those employing a snorkel, are comparatively easy to detect and attack.

Nuclear submarines still have a clear advantage in endurance over AIP boats, particularly on the long-distance patrols.  However, for countries like Japan, Germany and China that mostly operate close to friendly shores, extreme endurance may be a lower priority.

Speed:

Speed remains an undisputed strength of nuclear-powered submarines. U.S. attack submarine may be able to sustain speeds of more than 35 miles per hour while submerged. By comparison, the German Type 214’s maximum submerged speed of 23 miles per hour is typical of AIP submarines.

Obviously, high maximum speed grants advantages in both strategic mobility and tactical agility.  However, it should be kept in mind that even nuclear submarines rarely operate at maximum speed because of the additional noise produced.

On the other hand, an AIP submarine is likely to move at especially slow speeds when cruising sustainably using AIP compared to diesel or nuclear submarines.  For example, a Gotland class submarine is reduced to just 6 miles per hour if it wishes to remain submerged at maximum endurance—which is simply too slow for long distance transits or traveling with surface ships.  Current AIP technology doesn’t produce enough power for higher speeds, and thus most AIP submarines also come with noisy diesel engines as backup.

Cost:

Who would have guessed nuclear reactors are incredibly expensive?  The contemporary U.S. Virginia class attack submarine costs $2.6 billion dollars, and the earlier Los Angeles class before it around $2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.  Mid-life nuclear refueling costs add millions more.

By comparison, AIP powered submarines have generally cost between $200 and $600 million, meaning a country could easily buy three or four medium-sized AIP submarines instead of one nuclear attack submarine. Bear in mind, however, that the AIP submarines are mostly small or medium sized vessels with crews of around 30 and 60 respectively, while nuclear submarines are often larger with crews of 100 or more.  They may also have heavier armament, such as Vertical Launch Systems, when compared to most AIP powered vessels.

Nevertheless, a torpedo or missile from a small submarine can hit just as hard as one fired from a large one, and having three times the number of submarine operating in a given stretch of ocean could increase the likelihood chancing upon an important target, and make it easier to overwhelm anti-submarine defenses.

While AIP vessels may not be able to do everything a nuclear submarine can, having a larger fleet of submarines would be very useful in hunting opposing ships and submarines for control of the seas. Nor would it be impossible to deploy larger AIP powered submarines; China has already deployed one, and France is marketing a cheaper AIP-powered version of the Barracuda-class nuclear attack submarine.

It is no surprise that navies that operate largely around coastal waters are turning to cheap AIP submarines, as their disadvantage are not as relevant when friendly ports are close at hand. The trade off in range and endurance is more problematic for the U.S. Navy, which operates across the breadth of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. This may explain why the U.S. Navy has shown little inclination to return to non-nuclear submarines. However, AIP submarines operating from forward bases would represent a very cost-effective and stealthy means to expand the Navy’s sea-control mission.

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.

James Holmes

History,

These battleships were rightly feared during their time.

Key point: These five battleships helped to revolutionize naval warfare. Here is why history remembers them.

Ranking the greatest battleships of all time is a tad easier than ranking naval battles. Both involve comparing apples with oranges. But at least taking the measure of individual men-of-war involves comparing one apple with one orange. That's a compact endeavor relative to sorting through history to discern how seesaw interactions shaped the destinies of peoples and civilizations.

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

Still, we need some standard for distinguishing between battlewagons. What makes a ship great? It makes sense, first of all, to exclude any ship before the reign of Henry VIII. There was no line-of-battle ship in the modern sense before England's "great sea-king" founded the sail-driven Royal Navy in the 16th century. Galley warfare was quite a different affair from lining up capital ships and pounding away with naval gunnery.

One inescapable chore is to compare ships' technical characteristics. A recent piece over at War Is Boring revisits an old debate among battleship and World War II enthusiasts. Namely, who would've prevailed in a tilt between a U.S. Navy Iowa-class dreadnought and the Imperial Japanese Navy's Yamato? Author Michael Peck restates the common wisdom from when I served in mighty Wisconsin, last of the battleships: it depends on who landed the first blow. Iowas commanded edges in speed and fire control, while Yamato and her sister Musashi outranged us and boasted heavier weight of shot. We would've made out fine had we closed the range before the enemy scored a lucky hit from afar. If not, things may have turned ugly.

Though not in so many words, Peck walks through the basic design features that help qualify a battleship for history's elite -- namely guns, armor, and speed. Makes sense, doesn't it? Offensive punch, defensive resiliency, and speed remain the hallmarks of any surface combatant even in this missile age. Note, however, that asymmetries among combat vessels result in large part from the tradeoffs naval architects must make among desirable attributes.

Only sci-fi lets shipwrights escape such choices. A Death Star of the sea would sport irresistible weaponry, impenetrable armor, and engines able to drive the vessel at breakneck speed. But again, you can't have everything in the real world. Weight is a huge challenge. A battleship loaded down with the biggest guns and thickest armor would waddle from place to place. It would make itself an easy target for nimbler opponents or let them run away. On the other hand, assigning guns and speed top priority works against rugged sides. A ship that's fleet of foot but lightly armored exposes its innards and crew to enemy gunfire. And so forth. Different navies have different philosophies about tradeoffs. Hence the mismatches between Yamato and Iowa along certain parameters. Thus has it always been when fighting ships square off.

But a battleship is more than a machine. Machines neither rule the waves nor lose out in contests for mastery. People do. People ply the seas, and ideas about shiphandling and tactics guide their combat endeavors. Great Britain's Royal Navy triumphed repeatedly during the age of sail. Its success owed less to superior materiel -- adversaries such as France and the United States sometimes fielded better ships -- than to prolonged voyages that raised seamanship and gunnery to a high art. Indeed, a friend likes to joke that the 18th century's finest warship was a French 74-gun ship captured -- and crewed -- by Royal Navy mariners. The best hardware meets the best software.

That's why in the end, debating Jane's Fighting Ships entries -- lists of statistics -- for Iowa, Yamato, and their brethren from other times and places fails to satisfy. What looks like the best ship on paper may not win. A ship need not outmatch its opponents by every technical measure. It needs to be good enough. That is, it must match up well enough to give an entrepreneurial crew, mindful of the tactical surroundings, a reasonable chance to win. The greatest battleship thus numbers among the foremost vessels of its age by material measures, and is handled by masterful seamen.

But adding the human factor to the mix still isn't enough. There's an element of opportunity, of sheer chance. True greatness comes when ship and crew find themselves in the right place at the right time to make history. A battleship's name becomes legend if it helps win a grand victory, loses in dramatic fashion, or perhaps accomplishes some landmark diplomatic feat. A vessel favored (or damned) by fortune, furthermore, becomes a strategic compass rose. It becomes part of the intellectual fund on which future generations draw when making maritime strategy. It's an artifact of history that helps make history.

So we arrive at one guy's gauge for a vessel's worth: strong ship, iron men, historical consequence. In effect, then, I define greatest as most iconic. Herewith, my list of history's five most iconic battleships, in ascending order:

Bismarck. The German Navy's Bismarck lived a short life that supplies the stuff of literature to this day. Widely considered the most capable battleship in the Atlantic during World War II, Bismarck sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, with a single round from her main battery. On the other hand, the leadership's martial spirit proved brittle when the going got tough. In fact, it shattered at the first sharp rap. As commanders' resolve went, so went the crew's.

Notes Bernard Brodie, the dreadnought underwent an "extreme oscillation" in mood. Exaltation stoked by the encounter with Hood gave way to despair following a minor torpedo strike from a British warplane. Admiral Günther Lütjens, the senior officer on board, gathered Bismarck crewmen after the air attack and "implored them to meet death in a fashion becoming to good Nazis." A great coach Lütjens was not. The result? An "abysmally poor showing" in the final showdown with HMS Rodney, King George V, and their entourage. One turret crew fled their guns. Turret officers reportedly kept another on station only at gunpoint. Marksmanship and the guns' rate of fire -- key determinants of victory in gunnery duels -- suffered badly.

In short, Bismarck turned out to be a bologna flask (hat tip: Clausewitz), an outwardly tough vessel that shatters at the slightest tap from within. In 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder lamented that the German surface fleet, flung into battle long before it matured, could do little more than "die with honor." Raeder was righter than he knew. Bismarck's death furnishes a parable that captivates navalists decades hence. How would things have turned out had the battlewagon's human factor proved less fragile? We'll never know. Doubtless her measure of honor would be bigger.

Yamato. As noted at the outset, Yamato was an imposing craft by any standard. She displaced more than any battleship in history, as much as an early supercarrier, and bore the heaviest armament. Her mammoth 18-inch guns could sling 3,200-lb. projectiles some 25 nautical miles. Armor was over two feet thick in places. Among the three attributes of warship design, then, Yamato's designers clearly prized offensive and defensive strength over speed. The dreadnought could steam at 27 knots, not bad for a vessel of her proportions. But that was markedly slower than the 33 knots attainable by U.S. fast battleships.

Like Bismarck, Yamato is remembered mainly for falling short of her promise. She provides another cautionary tale about human fallibility. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, a task force centered on Yamato bore down on the transports that had ferried General Douglas MacArthur's landing force ashore on Leyte, and on the sparse force of light aircraft carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts guarding the transports from seaward assault.

Next ensued the immortal charge of the tin-can sailors. The outclassed American ships charged Yamato and her retinue. Like Lütjens, Admiral Takeo Kurita, the task-force commander, appeared to wilt under less-than-dire circumstances. Historians still argue about whether he mistook Taffy 3, the U.S. Navy contingent, for a far stronger force; lost his nerve; or simply saw little point in sacrificing his ships and men. Whatever the case, Kurita ordered his fleet to turn back -- leaving MacArthur's expeditionary force mostly unmolested from the sea.

Yamato met a quixotic fate, though less ignominious than Bismarck's. In April 1945 the superbattleship was ordered to steam toward Okinawain company with remnants of the surface fleet, there to contest the Allied landings. The vessel would deliberately beach itself offshore, becoming an unsinkable gun emplacement until it was destroyed or its ammunition was exhausted. U.S. naval intelligence got wind of the scheme, however, and aerial bombardment dispatched Yamato before she could reach her destination. A lackluster end for history's most fearsome battlewagon.

Missouri. Iowa and New Jersey were the first of the Iowa class and compiled the most enviable fighting records in the class, mostly in the Pacific War. Missouri was no slouch as a warrior, but -- alone on this list -- she's celebrated mainly for diplomatic achievements rather than feats of arms. General MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender on her weatherdecks in Tokyo Bay, leaving behind some of the most enduring images from 20th-century warfare. Missouri has been a metaphor for how to terminate big, open-ended conflicts ever since. For instance, President Bush the Elder invoked the surrender in his memoir. Missouri supplied a measuring stick for how Desert Storm might unfold. (And as it happens, a modernized Missouri was in Desert Storm.)

Missouri remained a diplomatic emissary after World War II. The battlewagon cruised to Turkey in the early months after the war, as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and communist insurgencies menaced Greece and Turkey. Observers interpreted the voyage as a token of President Harry Truman's, and America's, commitment to keeping the Soviet bloc from subverting friendly countries. Message: the United States was in Europe to stay. Missouri thus played a part in the development of containment strategy while easing anxieties about American abandonment. Naval diplomacy doesn't get much better than that.

Mikasa. Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's flagship is an emblem for maritime command. The British-built Mikasa was arguably the finest battleship afloat during the fin de siècle years, striking the best balance among speed, protection, and armament. The human factor was strong as well. Imperial Japanese Navy seamen were known for their proficiency and élan, while Tōgō was renowned for combining shrewdness with derring-do. Mikasa was central to fleet actions in the Yellow Sea in 1904 and the Tsushima Strait in 1905 -- battles that left the wreckage of two Russian fleets strewn across the seafloor. The likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan considered Tsushima a near-perfect fleet encounter.

Like the other battleships listed here, Mikasa molded how subsequent generations thought about diplomacy and warfare. IJN commanders of the interwar years planned to replicate Tsushima Strait should Japan fall out with the United States. More broadly, Mikasa and the rest of the IJN electrified peoples throughout Asia and beyond. Japan, that is, proved that Western imperial powers could be beaten in battle and ultimately expelled from lands they had subjugated. Figures ranging from Sun Yat-sen to Mohandas Gandhi to W. E. B. Du Bois paid homage to Tsushima, crediting Japan with firing their enthusiasm for overthrowing colonial rule.

Mikasa, then, was more than the victor in a sea fight of modest scope. And her reputation outlived her strange fate. The vessel returned home in triumph following the Russo-Japanese War, only to suffer a magazine explosion and sink. For the Japanese people, the disaster confirmed that they had gotten a raw deal at the Portsmouth Peace Conference. Nevertheless, it did little to dim foreign observers' enthusiasm for Japan's accomplishments.Mikasa remained a talisman.

Victory. Topping this list is the only battleship from the age of sail. HMS Victory was a formidable first-rate man-of-war, cannon bristling from its three gun decks. But her fame comes mainly from her association with Lord Horatio Nelson, whom Mahan styles "the embodiment of the sea power of Great Britain." In 1805 Nelson led his outnumbered fleet into combat against a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar, near Gibraltar. Nelson and right-hand man Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood led columns of ships that punctured the enemy line of battle. The Royal Navy crushed its opponent in the ensuing melee, putting paid to Napoleon's dreams of invading the British Isles.

Felled on board his flagship that day, Nelson remains a synonym for decisive battle. Indeed, replicating Trafalgar became a Holy Grail for naval strategists across the globe. Permanently drydocked at Portsmouth, Victory is a shrine to Nelson and his exploits -- and the standard of excellence for seafarers everywhere. That entitles her to the laurels of history's greatest battleship.

Surveying this list of icons, two battleships made the cut because of defeats stemming from slipshod leadership, two for triumphs owing to good leadership, and one for becoming a diplomatic paragon. That's not a bad reminder that human virtues and frailties -- not wood, or metal, or shot -- are what make the difference in nautical enterprises.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

Editor's Note: This piece first appeared on December 26, 2013. It is being recirculated due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters