The National Interest

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Trooper Lud Labutka of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, fought his way through Normandy, Holland, and the Battle of the Bulge.

Key Point: "I would never jump from an airplane again, unless somebody called me a chicken."

In an effort to calm his nerves just before he jumped into Normandy on D-Day, Lud Labutka thought it might be a good idea to accept the drink being offered from the paratrooper sitting across from him on their C-47 transport as it crossed the English Channel. It didn’t matter to him at the time whether it came from a bottle of blended Scotch or from a bottle of after-shave lotion. Labutka was simply looking for a little kick to help him get over the anxiety he felt about jumping from an airplane into Nazi-occupied Europe.

“There was a guy on our plane named Albert Jones,” Labutka says. “He looked over at me and said, ‘Lud, do you want a drink?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Do you want a drink?’ I still didn’t think he had anything to drink until he pulled out a big bottle of Aqua Velva. I said, ‘You’re crazy!’ He opened it and sucked down a drink. I said to him, ‘Jones, if you’re crazy, I’m crazy, too.’ This was 20 minutes before we jumped! So I took a big drink. When I jumped into Normandy, I was heaving. I was puking on the Germans. That stuff made me sick.”

History has failed to record whether Labutka’s stomach contents had any effect on enemy troops; what is certain, however, is that never again would he consider drinking after-shave for a quick buzz, just as jumping from an airplane had never crossed his mind in 1939 when he joined the Pennsylvania National Guard as a 17-year-old high school graduate. Even to this day, more than 60 years after the war, a fear of heights has kept his feet planted on the ground.

“I wouldn’t even go on the Ferris wheel at a fair,” he says. “I still haven’t been on one. I’m afraid of heights.”

If that is the case, then how does this retired factory worker from Ford City, Pennsylvania, explain his wartime experience as a Screaming Eagle with the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, duty that not only took him into the night skies of France but also into Holland during Operation Market-Garden? It is because someone, at some point, questioned whether he had the intestinal fortitude to jump from an airplane. In other words, it was the result of a dare.

From Fort Benning to England

“In 1942 the Army was taking transfers into the Air Cadets,” Labutka says. “We were kids, just 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds. Somebody mentioned Airborne and I said, ‘Airborne? Are you crazy? I’m not going to jump out of an airplane.’ So somebody called me chicken. That’s all it took. I was going. We all figured that we’d make a difference, so three of us—Rich Dinger, Joe Miklos, and myself—went to see the first sergeant of our National Guard company and told him to transfer us to the Airborne.”

Labutka entered training on October 19, 1942, at Fort Benning, Georgia, where troops were hooked onto guide wires and slid to the ground from 40-foot towers. “Scary” training is what he calls it. This progressed to actual jumps from an airplane, five of which were required to qualify for Airborne duty.

“The first time I was up in an airplane I jumped. Back then we packed our own parachutes. At that time they were round, really huge things. Then, after jump school, riggers packed them. Every time I jumped I always wondered if the riggers had placed that little rubber band where it was supposed to be. It held the end of the parachute to the static line.”

Labutka left Benning for the rigors of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the new home of the 101st, where its men trained by making more practice jumps, often in front of such dignitaries as Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. They also endured 25-mile forced marches without canteens, running the last mile back to camp in cadence.

“At first during these marches, the route took us through a creek and some of us didn’t mind scooping up a handful of water to drink. But after about three days of this our sergeant caught on and we were punished. We were made to do push-ups.”

Labutka was assigned to the division’s 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment (referred to as the “Five-O-Two”), 2nd Battalion, Company E, 1st Platoon, which left for Europe on September 5, 1943, in a convoy from Camp Shanks, New York, aboard an aging British transport. The ship encountered engine trouble six days out, left the group, and put in at the small Newfoundland harbor of St. John’s, where repairs were made. But as the ship headed to sea once again, it scraped bottom, forcing it back to port. Arrangements were then made for the troops to make their Atlantic crossing on the SS Ericsson, which left in another convoy and arrived at Liverpool on October 19. It took Labutka 44 days to reach England on a voyage usually made in a week.

“The convoy we joined contained Company C of my old National Guard outfit,” he says. “By then they were the 28th Division. I didn’t know it at the time, but I went overseas with my old buddies from Company C of the National Guard.”

Once on British soil, men of the 502 lived in tent cities at Denford Lodge near Hungerford where they made more practice jumps in preparation for their assigned role on D-Day. Since the division had no battle history up to that point and its men were an untested force, it seemed to the other GIs stationed in England that these so-called “Screaming Eagles” were a group of overpaid and overly cocky servicemen. They appeared more famous for their fancy jump boots than for anything else. All of that changed, however, when they jumped from their C-47 transports in the predawn darkness of Normandy, fulfilling what General William C. Lee, the division’s first commanding general, described as their “rendezvous with destiny.”
Four objectives were assigned the 101st in Operation Overlord, the invasion of the European continent: The paratroopers were first to secure the roadway leading from Utah Beach where the U.S. 4th Division was to land; second, they were to eliminate a battery of large German guns that threatened that beach; third, they were to establish contact with the 4th Division as it headed inland; and fourth, with those missions accomplished, they were to attack and occupy the French town of Carentan, an important road junction leading to the Cotentin Peninsula and the port of Cherbourg. Labutka’s 2nd Battalion was part of the force charged with eliminating the four-gun battery of 122mm howitzers at St. Martin de Varreville, two kilometers west of Utah Beach. General Omar Bradley, U.S. ground commander, called the guns a danger to the invasion forces and insisted they be eliminated.

Another anticipated danger for the D-Day invaders, this one limited to Airborne troops only, was the ability to recognize friend or foe in the Normandy darkness. Brig. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, who had assumed command of the 101st in March 1944, solved this dilemma by introducing one of the most ingenious tools used in the invasion: the cricket. Basically a kid’s toy, similar to those sold in five-and-tens at the time, it proved extremely helpful for paratroopers to identify one another in the dark. The toy clicked when the tab on its back was pressed and released. One push asked, “Who’s there?” Two presses in reply meant “Friend.” A last-minute idea of Taylor’s, the crickets arrived about four days before the invasion.

The Jump Into Normandy

By late May the 101st was moved into new tent cities near the airfields from which the men would fly to assault German positions in France. On June 5 at about 5:30 PM, they ate their last preinvasion meal, consisting of pork chops and mashed potatoes, and returned to their assembly areas to take on their gear. Labutka says it included an M-1 rifle with eight or 10 clips of ammunition, six grenades, two canteens, two parachutes, flares, a medical kit, compass, and enough C-rations for three days. All told, their equipment weighed about 70 pounds. As evening drew on, Labutka’s platoon leader, 1st Lt. Wallace C. Strobel, called his men away from their packing for some last-minute instructions. As they gathered outside their tents, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, paid them a visit. A photograph was taken of this encounter and it became one of the most famous of the invasion. In it, Eisenhower is standing on the left talking to Strobel. The two are shown in an apparent conversation about the invasion. When asked years later about what was said, Strobel, who died in 1999, recalled that, in part, it went like this: “Where are you from, lieutenant?” Eisenhower asked. “Michigan, sir,” replied Strobel. “Michigan, eh?” Eisenhower commented. “Good fishing in that country.”

Labutka, standing behind several other men and unseen in the photo, says he never heard the conversation.

“We heard earlier that Ike might come by and wish us luck,” he says. “But I have no idea what he said to Lieutenant Strobel. I wasn’t close enough. Believe me, if I had known they were going to take a picture, I would have gotten my mug in it somehow.”

The men entered their C-47s at around 9 PM through the aircraft’s rear door, which stayed open for the entire flight. They moved in single file with the first man headed to the front of the plane. The 16 paratroopers took their seats, located on both sides of the aircraft, facing one another. Along the ceiling of the plane’s compartment stretched the static lines to which their parachutes were hooked just prior to the jump. The pilots were told to fly in a “V” formation of three planes each at an altitude of 500 feet to avoid German radar detection over the English Channel. Once they crossed the coast of France, the planes were to climb to 1,500 feet and then descend to 400 feet for the jump. Pilots were instructed not to veer from their assigned flight paths. The distance to their drop zone was 136 miles, and it took about an hour to reach it.

“We knew that it was about a hundred miles from where we were in England to where we were going,” Labutka says. “We were told to take out these guns. They didn’t tell us why, just that we had to take them out.”

The flight was uneventful until they reached the French coast and German guns began firing. Since Labutka and others of 2nd Battalion were in some of the first planes of the assault, they reached France relatively unscathed.

“Once we got over Cherbourg you could see the enemy shooting at us,” Labutka says. “It looked like the tracer bullets were coming out of a barrel. We could hear them hitting the wings going ‘knick, knick, knick.’ I was scared.” That was when Labutka took the healthy swallow of Aqua Velva. With his stomach now churning, the C-47, piloted by men of the 438th Troop Carrier Group, neared its drop point and a red light flashed, telling the paratroopers that their jump time was near. It was shortly after midnight when a sergeant yelled, “Stand up and hook up!” Moments later a green light flashed and Labutka was the sixth or seventh man to leave the plane.

“The sergeant hit the first guy on the ass and said, ‘Go!’ We were lined up tight, right against each other,” Labutka explains. “We were taught to count, ‘One thousand, two thousand’ when we jumped. If we got to the third count and the ’chute didn’t open, we were to pull the reserve parachute. That one was on our belly. The only thing I remember thinking when I jumped was, ‘I hope I land.’”

He did land, near the town of St. Marie du Mont just north of Carentan and south of the guns his battalion was ordered to destroy. “I landed in a farm courtyard, all brick and all fenced in, right beside a hay wagon,” he says.

“The machine gunner landed in one corner of the courtyard. His name was Dempsey, from Rome, Georgia. In the other corner was Golembeski, the assistant machine gunner, from Pennsylvania. They both came over to me and said, ‘Lud, what are we going to do?’ Here, both of them were Pfcs and I was just a private, their ammo carrier, and they’re asking me what to do! So I said to find a door so we could get out of this courtyard. The night was very dark. We found a door, or a gate, and went out and bumped into a guy here and a guy there until there were six of us. We walked around, snuck around, crawled around. We didn’t meet anybody else. None of us fired a shot. Finally, when it was just getting light, about 5:30, we were walking around this hedgerow and saw a road.

“We crouched down because we heard people walking and talking,” Labutka continues. “These guys with me said, ‘Lud!’ And I said, ‘Shhhh!’ I had my clicker and when the noise got near I went ‘click-click’ with the cricket. Boy, the nicest sound that I ever heard came back: ‘click-click, click-click.’ So we jumped out on the road. I’d say there were about 60 people there including a lieutenant colonel, a lieutenant, and a couple of sergeants, and we joined them.”

Others in the drop were not so lucky, particularly those who came after the first wave. As the surprised Germans grasped the scope of the situation, these later planes received heavy doses of antiaircraft fire. Some pilots took evasive action, broke formation, and went off course. Paratroopers were scattered around the countryside. Many landed in swamps, rivers, and flooded fields. Others found themselves stuck in trees or in the middle of minefields. Some planes took direct hits and crash-landed or burst into flames before impact. Because of the ground fire and confusion, the drop zone resembled a rectangle of about 25 miles by 15 miles. Scattered troops sought each other throughout the day and into the next.

Taking Out the German Guns

The gun emplacements at Varreville did not pose a problem when Labutka saw them on June 6. They had been destroyed by Allied bombings just prior to D-Day and were void of German troops. It was there that Labutka met his battalion commander, Colonel Steve Chappuis, whose drop put him close to the guns.

“I’m glad we had the Air Corps,” states Labutka. “They knocked out a bunch of German guns. When I saw Colonel Chappuis, he was sitting cross-legged on this cement curb. He said, ‘Well, it looks like the Air Force took care of the guns.’”

With that threat neutralized, the gathered troops of 2nd Battalion moved toward the road leading south from Utah Beach. Securing it was the primary responsibility of Lt. Col. Robert G. Cole’s 3rd Battalion. By 1 PM on D-Day, Cole and his men had made contact with elements of the U.S. 4th Division coming inland from the beach, and the paratroopers found their numbers increasing. Throughout June 6-7, those scattered in the drop linked up into larger fighting groups. The massed paratroopers set their sights to the south and the division’s final objective, the town of Carentan.

“I don’t think we really got together with any sizable force until about a day and a half after we landed,” Labutka says, estimating that they then numbered about two regiments strong. “None of us had gotten any sleep, unless we slept standing up. It’s hard to believe, but we did sleep standing up.”

Carentan was a high-priority target assigned to the 101st because its main highway and railroad connected Cherbourg to St. Lô, and ultimately Paris. If American forces did not take the town, it could be used as a corridor for a counterattack against Utah Beach. Army intelligence estimated the size of the German garrison there at a battalion. As it turned out, the enemy was apparently more plentiful and extremely stubborn. The division’s route of attack was down a causeway that ran through flooded fields and swamps. Labutka remembers that paratroopers called it “Purple Heart Lane,” for obvious reasons. The 502’s 3rd Battalion was assigned the lead.

“The first time I really heard gunfire was going toward Carentan. The Germans had machine guns pointed right down this road going into the town. There were four bridges we had to cross and swamps were on both sides of us. As we fought our way down the road we had to run this way, run that way, run this way, kind of zigzag our way down it.”

It was here that Labutka first experienced the effects of the German 88mm gun, one of the most devastating artillery pieces used by either side during the war. He also encountered two Airborne buddies from home, and both were wounded.

“Once we started down this road I met Joe Miklos,” Labutka says. “He got hit from a bomb burst. There was shrapnel in his leg, and he was going back. After we crossed the second bridge, who do I see but Rich Dinger with a patch on his shoulder. He was hit pretty bad. He said, ‘Lud, don’t go down there. It’s hell down there.’ I said, ‘Dick, I have to. My company’s going down there.’ Dinger was eventually shipped home. Farther down the road I came across this poor soldier who was hit right above his ear. I could see the matter leaking out. He tried to talk to me. He wanted morphine. I asked him if he’d had any but he couldn’t answer. He was gone. He must have been from the 3rd Battalion, Dinger’s outfit, because they went in ahead of us.”

The German 88s were finally silenced, but not before the road’s second bridge was shattered to pieces. This kept supplies from being brought in and the wounded taken out. It also prevented any possibility of retreat. Regardless, the paratroopers advanced, crossed the third bridge, and ran into their stiffest resistance on the other side of the fourth bridge. It was a heavily defended farmhouse about 150 yards away. With Colonel Cole and men of 3rd Battalion still in the lead, intense fire from German machine guns, mortars, and artillery pinned them to the ground for an hour. Knowing his men were low on ammunition, Cole ordered an attack with fixed bayonets and personally led the charge over open ground, eventually flushing the enemy from their positions. A bridgehead was gained across the Douve River, and Cole earned the Medal of Honor, the division’s first award in Normandy. He would be killed by a sniper’s bullet in Holland just months later.
“That Cole was a soldier,” Labutka offers. “I know Miklos didn’t like him much because he was too hard on the men. But he was a soldier through and through.”

While division engineers worked to make bridge No. 2 passable, the badly depleted 3rd Battalion was replaced on the front by 2nd Battalion. More fierce fighting ensued. At one point the Germans counterattacked and some Americans thought the order was given for them to withdraw. It had not been, and reversing their rearward momentum was a challenge.
The American line held, but a final German attack neared success once again until a five-minute barrage from division artillery stopped it. Afterward, the fighting diminished as glider troops from east of Carentan joined the fight.

“After that we got to the edge of this hedgerow and the guys in front of us must have had luck because the Germans backed off,” Labutka recalls. “We were involved in a lot of hedgerow fighting, a heck of a lot of it.”

The hedgerows in Normandy were an obstacle underestimated by the Allies. For centuries farmers had fenced their small fields with solid walls of dirt, often four feet high, and topped them with hedges whose tangled roots bound each row into a natural fortification. They were created to prevent erosion, but the Germans used them for lines of defense and counterattack. Many little battles were fought around the hedgerows. When attacking Americans approached one row, they found a strong force of defenders behind it and properly emplaced machine guns at both ends. If the enemy were dislodged or fell back, German troops behind another hedgerow went into action with mortars or artillery.

“Finally, we got in a line across this last hedgerow and went into Carentan. That’s when I saw dead Germans stacked like cordwood. Honest to God! We were shooting blind into the town, and when we got there, their bodies were stacked up just like logs. The Germans themselves must have stacked them that way. Somebody did.”

On June 12, Carentan was declared clear of the enemy, and the town was occupied. The final job for the 101st in Normandy was to maintain positions at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. As June turned into July this area proved relatively quiet, manned largely by Allied patrols and inhabited mainly by wandering cows. “It was about a month after the landing before we had a chance to get off the line,” says Labutka. “We had no change of clothes and no showers during that time, but afterward we were eating steak. We’d kill a cow and cook it over a fire. We had steak for breakfast and steak for dinner.”

“The Wrong Plan at the Wrong Time in the Wrong Place”

The 101st was relieved after 33 days of continuous combat, and moved by trucks to an area behind Utah Beach on July 10. The division history records that in little more than a month of combat, the 101st suffered 4,670 casualties. According to E Company historian Emmanuel Allain of Normandy, France, Labutka’s company of the 502 lost only three men during that time: one officer and two NCOs were killed in action.

The paratroopers were taken to England by landing craft from July 11-13 and returned to their old quarters north of London. At least one month of back pay awaited them, and leaves were approved. Labutka says most of the men who were given passes went to London to celebrate. “I went to London for booze and women. Don’t forget,” he says, “I was just a kid.”

The division was replenished and took part in further training over the next two months. More Airborne missions were proposed, but each time they were canceled due to the rapid Allied advance in France. But the good life in England didn’t last, as the 101st was slated to take part in a plan to liberate Holland and advance quickly into the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany. Dubbed Operation Market-Garden and developed by British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, it called for Airborne forces (the Market phase) to drop behind German lines and secure a hundred-mile corridor as British armored forces (the Garden phase) came up from Belgium to capture vital bridges over the lower Rhine River.

Strategically the plan failed. Eisenhower had been reluctant at first to support the mission, but eventually he relented. Bradley called it “the wrong plan at the wrong time in the wrong place.”

The three parachute regiments of the 101st had separate assignments in Holland. The 502 was charged with securing its landing zone near Eindhoven, capturing a bridge over the Dommel River, and attacking the village of Best to protect the lower section of the British thrust. The paratroopers were loaded with the same amount of equipment as in Normandy, and the September 17 daylight drop into Holland was picture perfect.

“It was nothing like Normandy; it went off like a practice jump. There was no opposition.” The only obstacle Labutka encountered in the jump was barbed wire, which gave him a cut above his right knee. The scar it caused has remained with him. “They wanted to give me a Purple Heart, but I turned them down. Why should I accept a medal for a scratch when guys around me were getting killed?”

While the paratroopers had an uneventful flight from England and an easy drop, it was different for the division’s glider troops. Of the 70 gliders that took part, only about 50 made it to Holland intact. Some landed far behind German lines, some were hit by flak, and some were crashed upon landing by obstacles planted in the fields.

“The Germans had sticks, trees actually, buried in the ground every 10 feet, which ripped those gliders apart,” Labutka says. “Some of them contained jeeps and cannon and when they hit the poles there was equipment all over the place.”

Capturing Best

With the landing zone secured and the Dommel River crossed, the march on the bridge that crossed the Wilhelmina Canal at Best commenced. Just as intelligence reports of enemy troop strength at Carentan were in error, so it was there. The Germans who defended the area were thought to be of poor quality, and Allied planners anticipated that a platoon could handle the mission. When enemy defenses stiffened, a company was sent to help. Later, both 2nd and 3rd Battalions joined the attack. At one point, 2nd attacked with three companies in line across an open wheat field and took serious losses from artillery, mortars, and machine guns.

“Some of the guys near me were bunched up,” Labutka explains. “I even yelled at them to scatter. You’re never supposed to get close to the next guy. That’s what they taught us— don’t bunch up because that’s what the enemy is looking for. Then a mortar shell hit three of them. One guy was hit right in his lap. Another one of them was dying. He had me recite the Act of Contrition to him. He died right there in my arms.”

Another fatality was Colonel Cole of 3rd Battalion. After calling for air support, friendly fire began taking its toll on American troops, so Cole decided to place orange panels in front of the line to benefit Allied pilots. While he was doing so, an enemy sniper killed him with a shot to his temple. Cole died never knowing that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the bayonet charge at Carentan. When the battle for Best ended, nearly half of the 101st had been involved, along with a column of British tanks. The area had been defended by about a thousand enemy troops.

“We captured about 200 German soldiers at Best, kids and old men,” Labutka says. “They just threw down their guns. Two guys with bazookas were taking them back to the rear when somebody said, ‘OK, we’re moving.’ So I was walking behind this machine gunner and he threw his machine gun over his shoulder and must have pulled the trigger. There was one shell in it and it hit my helmet, put a nick in it, and boy did I hit the ground. I gave him hell. I said, ‘You’re supposed to clear your gun.’ He said, ‘I thought I did.’”

Moving Up the Ranks

After the fall of Best, the 502 was ordered to hold defensive positions in the area. Company E lost 18 men killed in action in the operation, 12 of whom had been with the outfit when they jumped into Normandy.

“Up to this time I was still a private,” Labutka says. “But shortly after Best I went, on one order, from private to Pfc to corporal to sergeant to staff sergeant to tech sergeant. Three up and two down. That’s how many guys got wounded or killed. In one order I went from private to platoon sergeant. I had 47 guys under me—three rifle squads and a mortar squad. That’s when I was issued a Thompson submachine gun.

“This one time in Holland,” he continues, “I was looking through my field glasses and saw Germans about a hundred yards away. They were squatted, with their pants down, so I radioed over to my mortar sergeant, Earl Rodd, and asked, ‘Do you see that?’ He said, ‘How about me going back and laying a couple of shells in there?’ I said, ‘That’s just what I want you to do when I let you know there are more Germans.’ So he went back and I was on the radio with him and about five or six more of them came down. I said, ‘Earl, lay a couple in there now.’ He did. They were all tree bursts, hitting these big fir trees. Those Germans scattered all over. You should have seen them run with their pants halfway up. I laughed. I think it was the first time I laughed like that since I’d gotten over there.”

It was also in Holland that Labutka had a chance encounter with the division’s artillery commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe, who later gained fame with his “Nuts” response to a German surrender order at Bastogne. After their Holland jump, the paratroopers were told to take off their jump boots and wear regular-issue combat boots so the Germans could not identify them as Airborne if they were captured.

“One day, this was also after Best, General McAuliffe, accompanied by my platoon leader, Bill Parks, was checking our company area. Lieutenant Parks called me over and General

McAuliffe said, ‘How are your men eating, sergeant?’ And we had just passed third platoon, and they had a pig on a spit. I said, ‘We’re eating well, sir.’ He said, ‘So I guess you are.’ And then he asked me, ‘How do you like your combat boots?’ I said, ‘I hate them, sir.’ He said, ‘You do know why we can’t wear jump boots?’ I said, ‘Sure, the enemy will know we’re paratroopers.’ He said, ‘That’s right, sergeant.’”

Whether German forces would have treated Airborne troops any differently from the regular infantry if they were captured, Labutka is not sure. But the switch of boots would be repeated again when the division was sent to Bastogne.

Breakthrough in the Ardennes

Since the main objective of Market-Garden, an advance into the Ruhr, never materialized, the operation failed. However, the Allies did drive 65 miles through German lines, crossed two major rivers, seized airfield sites, and created a buffer to protect the port of Antwerp. By mid-November, after 72 days of combat, the 101st was moved to its base at Camp Mourmelon, a one-time airfield in France, where paratroopers received passes to Paris, enjoyed good food and champagne, and experienced frequent USO performances.

“Bob Hope came one time. But that wasn’t my cup of tea. I never went to a movie or saw a show,” smiles Labutka. “I was busy drinking and playing poker. I had to be the unluckiest poker player in the world. Maybe I drank too much when I played. But what else was there to do? There were no women around.”

Once again the good times were about to end as German forces opened their last offensive in Western Europe through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Their attack, launched on December 16, 1944, rolled through the sparsely held line of either inexperienced or battle-weary American troops. The 101st was soon in the center of the action during what has come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

“I was AWOL in Paris when they attacked,” Labutka says. “I had a pass, but it was overextended. You see, me and my first sergeant were close. He gave me a pass whenever I wanted one. All I had to do was sign somebody’s name to it and show it to the bus driver. He didn’t know one lieutenant from another. It was easy. So me and a buddy were in Paris. I think we’d been there four days and were planning to visit the Folies Bérgère, the famous nightclub. But before we got there we stopped at this little outside café drinking gin and orange juice. We never got to the nightclub because somebody rolled us. It was probably one of the girls we met.

“So without any money we went back to Rainbow Corner. This was a place in Paris where all the GIs went. A lieutenant came by and said, ‘Sergeant, I got bad news for you. Be at Rainbow Corner at 5 o’clock tomorrow morning.’ I asked, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘Breakthrough.’ There were about two truck-loads of guys from our outfit in Paris and we went back to Mourmelon.”

The surprise German attack easily knifed through the American lines. Poor visibility grounded Allied planes, and over the next three days the situation worsened for the Americans. One option for Eisenhower was to commit his reserve units, one of which was the 101st. With its division commander in the United States and assistant commander in England, the job fell to General McAuliffe to lead the paratroopers into battle. But this time they did not drop from the air. They went on trucks and arrived in Bastogne, a key Belgian crossroads town, on December 19. This was the southern sector of the German thrust guarded in part by the tired U.S. 28th Division, which had been sent to that area for rest. The division had seen action since just after the Normandy landings, and more recently had been involved in the desperate fighting in the Hürtgen Forest. The 28th also contained men from Labutka’s hometown National Guard unit. As the Germans advanced, the 28th fell back and the 101st moved in.

“Going into Bastogne I was in charge of two trucks,” recalls Labutka. “That’s when I heard that the National Guard from Pennsylvania was there. I knew guys in Company D from Butler, and naturally I knew guys in Company C from Ford City. So here they were, the 28th Division, coming out of Bastogne while we were going in. One of the guys I knew I did see coming out, Pete Rhodes from Company C.”

Once in Bastogne, the 101st immediately set up a defensive perimeter in all four directions around the town, a radius of about 16 miles. The paratroopers were surrounded by German forces, and Labutka found himself on the northwest side of Bastogne during the worst winter in years, as nighttime temperatures frequently dropped below zero. When men touched a gun barrel, their skin stuck to it. Snow was as constant as the American patrols probing the German lines.

“We didn’t go too far out on patrols,” he recalls. “They just wanted to see how far [away] the Germans were. This one time we were on patrol and my radio operator, Jimmy Agnostis, was behind me. I was up the field a way, and I stopped because I thought I saw some German troops about 200 yards away. Then I heard this ‘pow-pow’ from behind me and damn if I wasn’t hit in my helmet again! I said, ‘Jimmy, you SOB! That’s twice I almost got killed with our own guns!’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”

“The Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne”

The Germans underestimated American resolve to defend the town, and overestimated their own ability to take it. Four Germans approached U.S. lines south of Bastogne on December 22. One of them carried a white flag, and another held a message that proposed the Americans, since they were surrounded, should surrender. If the offer was rejected, the note promised that Bastogne would be destroyed by heavy guns. When the ultimatum reached McAuliffe, his first reaction was “Nuts.” That answer was eventually delivered, but the German envoy did not understand its meaning. The American officer in charge said through a translator: “If you don’t understand what ‘Nuts’ means in plain English, it’s the same as ‘Go to hell!’”

The German bulge in the American lines was reaching its high-water mark when the offensive began to run low on supplies and meet stiffer Allied resistance. By December 24, Hitler was said to be so incensed that such a small town could be such a big thorn in the German drive that he ordered Bastogne annihilated.

“The Germans did bring in tanks and shot 88s into our third platoon,” Labutka says. “They got hammered. For the most part, my platoon was in reserve. That’s why I didn’t get into contact with German tanks. But our third platoon from E Company took it bad.” E Company losses were 11 KIA, three of whom had jumped with the company on D-Day.

As Christmas Day neared, the visibility cleared enough for Allied planes, at times flying 250 sorties a day, to drop supplies to the beleaguered paratroopers who were now running low on everything. Most air drops reached American hands, although some landed too far away. Labutka remembers celebrating the holiday with an ice cream-like concoction made by putting snow in a canteen cup and adding lemonade powder from dropped C-rations.

“When those skies brightened and I heard those planes coming over to give us ammunition, food, everything we needed,” he says, “I thought that was the nicest Christmas present I ever got.”

A U.S. armored division finally arrived from the south on December 26 and pushed its way into Bastogne a few days later. This corridor was eventually widened, and on January 18, 1945, the 101st was poised to exit the town it had called home for a month.

“We marched out of Bastogne and got on trucks. Outside of town, somebody had put up this big sign: The Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne.”

A Stay in the House of Eva Braun

Now on trucks once again, the division was sent to Luxembourg and later to the Alsace region of France. Stationed there until mid-February, the paratroopers saw little action. Afterward, they returned by train to their camp at Mourmelon where, on March 16, the 101st became the first division in history to receive the Distinguished Unit Citation (now called the Presidential Unit Citation) as an entire division. General Taylor also addressed the men in Mourmelon, telling them that when the war in Europe was over the division would probably be sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. It did not go over well.

“He said that, if possible, we were going to Japan and finish off the Japs,” Labutka remembers. “We weren’t in the mood for that. Do you know what he heard? From the rear ranks: ‘Boo!’ Then louder: ‘Boo!’ Then finally from the entire division: ‘Boo!’ Can you imagine what that sounded like from a whole division?”

American forces by this time were well east of the Rhine River, and the 101st was ordered to Düsseldorf and then to southern Germany and finally to Bavaria, where Allied leaders expected diehard Nazis to put up their last fight. The division’s final assignment of the war was to capture Berchtesgaden where Hitler had maintained his mountain home. That was accomplished on May 5, and two days later radio reports told that the Germans had agreed to unconditional surrender. The next day it became official, and the war was over.

“We were billeted in a nice house in Kempton, just outside Berchtesgaden,” Labutka says. “At the time, people who owned the house could put their valuables in a room or on the third floor and lock it up. The house I was in belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. It had lots of big rooms, high ceilings, but little furniture because it was all locked up. So somebody from my platoon broke into one of the rooms and took a bunch of stuff, mostly jewelry. We had a meeting with the company commander the next day, and he said, ‘We’ll give you guys ’til Reveille to put everything back. If not, there’s going to be repercussions.’

“At 5:30 the next morning, nothing was returned. So the next day they made us go on a 25-mile forced march with a full pack—rifle, blanket, no water. They said we were going to do that every day until everything was put back. That night, after our march, the guys who took the jewelry put it all back. Three or four guys were involved. We knew who they were, and everybody wanted to beat them up. And they would have been beaten up if it had gone on any longer.”

“As a Unit We Never Lost a skirmish”

Labutka left Europe from the southern French port of Marseilles on September 6, 1945, and arrived Stateside eight days later. He was discharged on September 21.

“I wouldn’t take a million dollars to do it over again,” he says. “And you couldn’t give me a million dollars not to have gone through it. I’m glad I went through it. I was lucky. The Lord took care of me because I’m still here. But I know one thing. I would never jump from an airplane again, unless somebody called me a chicken.”

Perhaps the most fitting tribute a soldier can receive comes from the men who served with him. “Lud was a leader even before he became our platoon sergeant,” offers Tony Diarchangelo of suburban Philadelphia, who served in Labutka’s platoon through Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne. “He was one hell of a soldier, a great soldier, always calm, cool, and collected. As a unit we never lost a skirmish.”

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

History,

Hitler wasn't the Royal Navy's only target.

Key Point: Britain sank numberous Japanese warships.

During World War II, after the Royal Navy’s traumatic departure from the Pacific Ocean in early 1942, the 4th Submarine Flotilla and its depot ship, the HMS Adamant, operated with the Eastern Fleet based at Trincomalee––a large, natural harbor located on the coast of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Dutch submarines joined them and were placed under British operational control after the fall of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese.

The number of boats making up British submarine operations in the Pacific remained small, sometimes no more than four at any one time, until after the Italian surrender in September 1943 when reinforcements began to be deployed to the Indian Ocean. By late 1944 a maximum of 40 submarines were active with the Eastern Fleet. However, the length of individual boat deployment was limited by the fact that they could not be refitted in India and had to return to Britain for major repairs.

During all of 1944 through January 1945, three British subs were sunk and one severely damaged by enemy action in the Indian Ocean. In September 1944 British submarines commenced combat patrols in the Pacific under the command of Vice Admiral Thomas. C. Kinkaid, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

Since British subs were smaller and had less endurance than American boats, they were considered more suitable for inshore operations in the Southwest Pacific. By this stage of the war the force had grown to three flotillas: the 2nd, 4th, and 8th. The last moved to Fremantle, Australia, and comprised six “S” and three “T’ class vessels. The former operated in the Java Sea, the latter in the Sea of China.

The “S “ class had a speed of 10 nautical knots and a range of up to 7,000 miles and carried enough supplies on board to allow it to remain at sea for 30 days. “T” class subs, having roughly the same performance capability as the latest American submarines, could cover 12,000 miles and stay at sea for 50 days.

American subs had been based at Fremantle since 1942, and the 8th Flotilla had to fit in with the established American routines and practices. This was greatly facilitated when the U.S. Navy made available to their British counterparts Fremantle’s repair facilities as well as two U.S. Navy submarine tenders.

The 8th Flotilla’s day-to-day activities were controlled by the Commander Submarines U.S. Seventh Fleet, Rear Admiral J. Fife, who was headquartered at Perth. In April 1945, he moved his command post along with the 8th Flotilla to Subic Bay in the Philippines; the 8th Flotilla was replaced at Fremantle by the 4th Flotilla. At Subic Bay the Americans did all they could to share their repair facilities with the British submariners.

On April 1, 1945, the 2nd and 8th Submarine Flotillas were transferred to the administrative control of the British Pacific Fleet, although they still came under the operational control of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Rather more than half the days on patrol were spent on passage, and by mid-1945 there were few Japanese targets to intercept.

British submarines were capable of operating a “wolf pack,” or coordinated patrol by two or more submarines working together. In this way they achieved success against low-speed targets. During this time, they sank 13 vessels, of which six were warships, in the Java and Flores Seas.

One of these victims was the heavy cruiser Ashigara, the last major Japanese warship to be sunk by a submarine in World War II. She was sunk by HMS Trenchant, which had sailed on patrol to Pulo Tengol in May 1945. Five of eight aimed torpedoes from the British sub fired at 4,000 yards found their mark, and the Japanese vessel sank 30 minutes after the attack. She had been carrying a large number of soldiers from Java intended to reinforce the Japanese garrison at Singapore; most of them went down with the ship.

In addition to looking for enemy shipping to sink, a number of submarines carried out special operations. These included landing clandestine parties on islands involved in intelligence work and resupplying or recovering them.

The sphere where submarines interfaced most closely with the British Pacific Fleet’s surface task forces was in the provision of air and sea rescue to retrieve downed Allied pilots. These boats normally operated near enemy-held coasts, and the proximity to Japanese territory posed grave danger to them.

A typical example of this type of sub operation was the 55-day patrol (the longest for a British submarine during World War II) of the Tantalus,part of the 8th Flotilla. From early January to late February 1945, she prowled the South China Sea looking for downed Allied pilots. Although she was never called upon to rescue any ditched airmen, her travels took her across the paths of several enemy luggers, lighters, and a tug boat, which she destroyed using gunfire.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Stratfor Worldview

Security, Europe

The Arctic is heating up as an area of great power competition and Moscow is way ahead with the highest number of icebreakers.

Russia's surge of Arctic activity reflects the economic significance of the region and the impact of shifting climate patterns that now offer the prospect of an extended Russia maritime frontier. Russia has rebuilt and expanded its Cold War-era security architecture along its Arctic frontier, significantly increased natural gas production from its operations on the Yamal Peninsula, and laid out a 15-year plan to improve land-, air- and sea-based infrastructure connecting the Northern Sea Route to northern Russia and farther south. The thawing Russian coastline is both a strategic opportunity and challenge, one that may fundamentally reshape Russia's relations with its European and Asian neighbors, and with the United States. 

Enclosed Geography

One of the core tenets of geopolitics is the significance of geography in setting the stage for foreign and domestic policy. As American geopolitician Nicholas Spykman noted in his 1942 America's Strategy in World Politics, "Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent." Geography's importance is often altered by technology, from canals and railroads to new critical minerals or changing energy sources. But rarely does geography itself change enough to alter the constraints and compulsions on states, at least not in a short time frame or outside localized events or disasters. The warming of the Arctic, however, is changing the core realities of Russia's geography, and it is happening at a pace that allows and compels a Russian response. 

A key characteristic of geography that has shaped Russia over the centuries has been its lack of riverine connectivity. Unlike Europe or the United States, Russia's rivers rarely served to link agricultural zones and population centers, or connect the interior to the coasts. Rather, the major river drainage systems empty into the landlocked Caspian; into the constrained Black and Baltic seas; and most of all, into the iced-over Arctic Ocean. This constraint also offered a measure of security: Russia historically has proven incredibly resilient to invasion, particularly by sea. This river drainage system was one of the primary characteristics of Russia that led British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder initially to identify the Russian region as the geographical pivot of history, and later to identify it as the Eurasian heartland.

Russia's rivers and population density.

Russia long sought to break out of its continental heartland, pushing for sea access on the Pacific, seeking to expand its frontiers in the Baltic, and pressing south toward India and the Middle East (the latter being the subject of the so-called Great Game between Britain and Russia.) The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 made the weakness of Russia's limited maritime access manifest. Japan defeated the Russian Pacific fleet based in northern China, and it took Russia's Baltic Fleet — unable to reach East Asia via the Arctic Sea — some seven months to sail around the world only to meet defeat in the Tsushima Strait. 

Arctic Opportunities 

That inaccessibility is changing rapidly. Coastal navigation along the Northern Sea Route now starts earlier in the year, lasts longer and is even reaching the point that several passages have little need for icebreakers. Moscow's response has been to increase investment in both resource extraction and infrastructure development and to rebuild its Cold-War era military positions along the Arctic coast, updating with new equipment and technology. This year, Moscow established a special security council commission on the Arctic, and Russia produced a 15-year plan for Arctic development.

Russia has some 24,000 kilometers of Arctic coastline, compared to less than 20,000 kilometers of total U.S. oceanic coastline. The Russian Arctic accounts for more than 10 percent of national GDP, some 90 percent of Russian natural gas production and is a major contributor of strategic minerals, including nickel and palladium. An early sign of the potential future value of Russian Arctic ports came in the early years of World War II, when the allies supplied Russia through Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The rest of the Northern Sea Route, however, remained unusable, and played little role in Russia's support of anti-Japanese fighters in the Far East, nor in the final days of the war when Russia declared war on Japan. 

Today's changing climate is allowing not only greater access to the Russian Arctic frontier, but more reliable transportation of key commodities out of the Arctic. Already, Russian LNG from the Arctic has shipped to as far away as India, and this year saw the first tanker shipment of Russian Arctic oil to China. Russia has plans to develop large ports at each end of the Northern Sea Route for both containers and commodities, allowing ice-class vessels to move more frequently within Arctic waters and shifting cargos to traditional vessels for the rest of the journey to Europe or Asia. 

China has shown strong interest in using the Russian Arctic seaways, and has been a major funder and consumer of Russian Arctic natural gas production. Japan and South Korea have also shown interest in the Northern Sea Route and Russian resources, and Russian and Finnish companies are cooperating on a possible undersea fiber cable through the Russian Arctic connecting Northern Europe to Japan. An opening Arctic provides opportunities for resource extraction, transportation and communications connectivity, and provides Russia with a shorter maritime route between its east and west coasts, the Northern Sea Route serving in that sense as a greatly extended Panama Canal. 

Arctic Challenges

This international interest may also prove a challenge to Russia. China is funding Russian Arctic resource extraction, but it is also carrying out its own energy exploration in Arctic waters, and is exploring ways to bypass the Northern Sea Route, or at least the requirements Russia puts on its use. China's reach into the Arctic matches a push through Central Asia and one through the Indian Ocean, all parts of the Belt and Road Initiative, and together wrapping around Russia and its traditional areas of influence, forcing an eventual Russian response. The opening Arctic seas have spurred Russia to restrengthen its Arctic defenses, but this has reawakened the United States and Europe to the strategic challenges of the same region, and seen renewed defense activity and repositioning of forces to match.

What once served as a largely impenetrable wall of ice protecting Russia's back is now an opening avenue exposing a long Russian coastline with little infrastructure and few population centers. Russia's Arctic coastline is largely empty. The government is offering incentives to increase migration to the region, to start businesses and develop infrastructure, but even with the melting sea ice, the area remains inhospitable and difficult territory. Changing permafrost patterns and poor quality construction and maintenance of Soviet-era infrastructure are adding to the cost of future development.

Most Russian Arctic development is in the west along the Kola Peninsula and at the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas, where the Ob River empties into the Kara Sea. There are also mineral developments in the Arctic areas of Krasnoyarsk Krai and The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), as well as plans for expanded port infrastructure on the Chukchi Peninsula at the eastern end of the Northern Sea Route. The nearly 2 million people in Russian Arctic territories may be the largest Arctic national population, but this is far shy of what it would take to develop a truly connected and robust region capable of sustaining a broad economic base or supplying the manpower and presence necessary to ensure security along the long opening coastline.

What to Watch

For Russia, then, the opening Arctic provides both opportunity and risk. For much of Russia's history, the country has been oriented south, looking to spread its influence and at times its borders to warmer seas. The Arctic was a shield, even during the Cold War when the polar route was the shortest for strategic aircraft and nuclear missiles. An open Arctic coastline increases foreign activity along Russia's north, and draws increasing interest from Asian nations seeking resources and routes. Russia's FSB has already raised concerns that foreign actors are trying to use Arctic native populations in Russia to undermine Russian strategic security, and the government has established a new review of foreign investment and economic activity in the Arctic to ensure Russian national interests. 

New Russian naval development will need to take regular Arctic operations into consideration, not merely through the construction of more than a dozen new icebreakers, but from the design of ships themselves. The longer coastline and increased maritime traffic require a robust observation and communications infrastructure, linked into territorial defense and search and rescue. Russian aviation is expanding Arctic operations, from plans to add heavy drones to maintain surveillance to additional fighter aircraft, and even experiments once again as the Soviets did during the Cold War era with establishing temporary airfields on ice to ensure expanded operational capabilities. Russia is also modifying existing weapons systems and designing new ones for Arctic conditions. 

Arctic infrastructure, resource extraction, transit safety and national security all require expenditure, and while the Arctic is a critical component of Russia's GDP, it does not provide the needed resources to fund the rising infrastructure and development needs. Yet for Moscow, Arctic development isn't an option, it is increasingly a necessity. The Russians may have a head start in rebuilding Arctic defense structures and in deploying and building icebreakers, but they are also dealing with a 24,000-kilometer coastline that now needs securing. In the global naval race, Russia remains far behind the United States and China. Russia's Arctic development is a new priority for Moscow, adding to its existing long land borders, its troubled relations along its former Soviet European frontier, its expanded activity in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the face of a rising China. As we look over the next decade, the shift in Russian geography will play a significant role in how Russia reassesses its international relations and its national priorities.

Russia's Emerging Arctic Maritime Frontier is republished with the permission of Stratfor Worldview, a geopolitical forecasting and intelligence publication from RANE, the Risk Assistance Network + Exchange. As the world's leading geopolitical intelligence platform, Stratfor Worldview brings global events into valuable perspective, empowering businesses, governments and individuals to more confidently navigate their way through an increasingly complex international environment. Stratfor is a RANE (Risk Assistance Network + Exchange) company.

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Security, Asia

America has beat submarines in two world wars. But how does that experience translate into modern warfare?

Key point: Newer and better weapons will allow the Navy to locate and destroy submarines. However, submarines have gotten better too.

With things heating up in the South China Sea (SCS), much attention has been paid to the ships and submarines that could potentially square off against each other in the region. This ignores a key asset of most navies that is already on the “front lines” and shaping military interactions—Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA). Skillful use of these aircraft may determine how an engagement plays out, or it could prevent one from happening in the first place.

MPA have been around almost as long as combat aircraft. Navies quickly realized the potential of aircraft when it came to patrolling the sea, as they could move far more quickly than boats and had the significant advantage of altitude.

But modern MPA use advanced sensors to detect to see far more than what can be seen with the naked eye—Magnetic Anomaly Detectors (MADs) can detect underwater submarines, and radar systems are used to detect ships that might just be specks on the horizon. Infrared/thermographic cameras allow MPA to identify vessels even at night.

MPA can also deploy sonobuoys, floating sensors that either detect noises or send out pings to find submarines. ELINT sensors can detect the radar emissions of enemy MPA or ships. All of these sensors means that MPA are incredibly useful in peacetime as well as wartime.

One way they could deter potential escalation is through detecting potential violations of EEZ or civilian ships in contested waters ahead of time through the use of radar and infrared. Since modern MPA have all-weather detection capability, they can watch for fishing vessels day and night, and give a navy an advanced warning of such violations so they can be headed off before a more violent encounter up close.

MPA also can provide critical information in tracking enemy submarine posture. While this is a more intensive and not “guaranteed” way to track submarines—as the battle between submarine stealth and submarine detection is ongoing—determining the patrol routes and positions of enemy submarines is critical information. Such intelligence may allow nations to avoid potential losses to convoy raiding (if it occurs) and set up anti-submarine warfare plans before the event of war.

In their traditional role in the detection of surface ships, MPA are critically important in the SCS region. Due to the relatively short distances between islands, MPA flying out of Japan or Taiwan could potentially track the movement of ships from base to base in China.

Basic MPA surveillance radars like the Seaspray 5000 have publicized ranges of around 200 nm. The more advanced AN/APS-115 and AN/APS-137D(V)5s mounted on Japan, and Taiwan's P-3C MPA undoubtedly have better performance. Even with a 200 nm range, an MPA flying over the East China Sea could easily track ships moving south along China's coast.

This could yield significant strategic intelligence on the development and deployment of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). In addition, the ELINT suite onboard these aircraft could provide insight into the capabilities of Chinese radars.

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However, MPA still face considerable limitations from the human component. Crews get tired and need to be rotated out, and MPA—like other aircraft—are expensive to fly and operate. Therefore, the future will see navies using UAVs to accomplish the MPA mission, assisting manned MPA and also surveying without them independently.

The U.S. Navy has already made significant steps in this direction with the acquisition of MQ-4C Triton UAVs, which can augment the P-8A in surveillance and patrols. As multiple UAVs can accompany a single manned aircraft, the amount of area patrolled can increase drastically with the integration of UAS, bringing even more benefits.

Most militaries in the region appear to have recognized the importance of MPA in securing their maritime borders. While not in the SCS, Japan's Defense Forces have one of the best MPA fleets, the star of which is their purpose-built Kawasaki P-1, which boasts advanced sensors and even artificial intelligence to reduce the crew workload.

Taiwan is also no slouch, acquiring twelve American P-3C Orions MPA in 2017. Other militaries in the region (such as Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines) field lighter MPA, mostly converted civilian light propeller planes as opposed to heavier purpose-built aircraft. While these converted aircraft are sufficient for tracking surface ships, purpose-built aircraft are far superior for tracking submarines, due to features like the extended tail on the P-3C, which houses the magnetic anomaly detector.

China's premier MPA is the Y-8Q, which is a rough analog to the P-3C in function. Like the P-3C it has a distinctive tail boom for detecting submarines, and a powerful surface search radar in a radome under the cockpit.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues. This first appeared in 2018 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Huan Zhu

Technology, The Americas

WeChat does present some risks, but banning it nationwide is overkill. As I explain below, a more targeted approach, such as banning the app on work phones of defense department employees, like the Australian government did, or even for all government workers, is more reasonable.

WeChat is an internet application owned by Chinese tech company Tencent. It may not sound familiar to most Americans, but it is a tool widely used in China and among Chinese communities world‐​wide. It is a one‐​stop‐​shop that combines payment services, social media, messaging platforms, and news outlets. This app is now facing a ban in the United States.

Last month, President Trump issued an executive order related to WeChat, under which “any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” would be banned. The rationale was that WeChat “continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The order itself lacks details on how exactly a ban would work, and the Department of Commerce is expected to issue implementing rules by September 20. The scope of the regulation could range from banning the app from smartphone app stores, to banning all U.S. firms, even ones located outside of the U.S., from dealing with WeChat. The ban would affect both individual users of the app and businesses who rely on it.

WeChat does present some risks, but banning it nationwide is overkill. As I explain below, a more targeted approach, such as banning the app on work phones of defense department employees, like the Australian government did, or even for all government workers, is more reasonable.

As noted, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the executive order. With regard to individuals in particular, it is unclear what “transactions” would be covered. If the ban is intended to take the application off the various mobile marketplaces, it will seriously disrupt person‐​to‐​person communications that have been crucial for the 19 million active WeChat users who live in the United States. For some of these users, WeChat is their main channel of keeping in touch and a primary source of information; for others, the app is one of the tools they use to make money and earn a living.

The inability to use WeChat in the United States could spook many potential Chinese students and visitors, resulting in a likely drop in school enrollment and tourism revenues. Chinese students contribute approximately $15 billion to the U.S. economy every year, and Chinese tourists contribute $36 billion. The number of Chinese students and tourists was already declining due to deteriorating U.S.-China relations and the COVID-19 pandemic. The WeChat ban, which makes the United States less attractive to Chinese visitors than other countries who allow the app, can only exacerbate this trend.

In addition, the ban could go well beyond personal access to the app and extend to associated business activities. The President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai has noted that all American companies, regardless of their location, could be barred from any transactions related to the WeChat application. Because WeChat is so deeply embedded in the Chinese people’s daily life and has become a platform for a wide range of activities, a ban on transactions related to WeChat would include sales, promotions, payments and other business activities. For instance, Starbucks and McDonald’s use the application as a marketing and sales platform. Filmmakers use WeChat to promote their movies and make ticket sales. Walmart and many other venders use the app to sell products. In fact, the app accounts for as much as 30% of all Walmart sales in China. A WeChat ban could cost corporate users significant revenues.

A ban could also result in a 30% decline of iPhone sales. Many Chinese netizens have said that if they have to choose between iPhone and WeChat, they will ditch their iPhones in a heartbeat.

According to a survey conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, nine out of ten companies forecast that the ban would have a negative impact on their business in China, with nearly half of them predicting a loss of revenue because of the ban. Furthermore, a WeChat ban could add more fuel to the already tense relations between the United States and China, making it more difficult for businesses to operate. So far, 86% of companies have reported a negative impact on their business with China as a result of the growing tensions. The situation will only get worse with a WeChat ban.

Clearly, the WeChat ban comes with huge costs, but are their offsetting benefits? How big a security risk is WeChat, and would a ban mitigate this risk? With an increasingly hostile geopolitical rivalry brewing, the U.S. government needs to look carefully at the cyber practices coming out of China. The Executive Order indicates that the ban will protect user data from the Chinese government and fight against China’s “disinformation campaigns.” Will they do so?

Despite a lack of direct evidence on this point, there have been concerns that WeChat would share data with the Chinese government. If the administration is concerned about this with average citizens (as opposed to military personnel or other government employees, where special considerations apply), instead of banning the app, it could simply warn consumers of such risks and let the them choose whether to use the application. Individuals should have the freedom to decide the level of risk they are willing to take with regard to their personal information. It’s worth noting that the issues related to consumer data are much broader than WeChat. The Chinese government has other ways, such as through web tracking and datasets available on the Dark Web, to obtain users’ information. A better way to protect consumer data, from not only the Chinese government but all governments, is to establish more general domestic and international rules on data protection and hold countries and companies accountable for violating these rules.

The Executive Order also highlighted that a ban of the WeChat application will help to mitigate “disinformation campaigns.” As with user data, if the administration is concerned about campaign meddling, it is a much larger problem than WeChat and is happening on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and through other means such as hacking. Focusing on only one application is insufficient and could distract from other campaigns coming from other countries.

When foreign government try to collect data on American citizens and non‐​citizens living in America, for the purpose of manipulating them for political or other reasons, it is a serious issue. The U.S. government needs to get a handle on this problem immediately. In the case of WeChat, however, any national security benefits of a total ban are outweighed by the disruptions to people’s personal lives and the potential economic losses for individuals and businesses that would likely materialize in the presence of a ban. There are real concerns related to WeChat, but more targeted actions like the Australians have taken make more sense. A total ban on WeChat simply goes too far.

This article was first published by the Cato Institute.

Image: Reuters

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

SS Colonel Joachim Peiper was a ruthlessly efficient officer who drove his armored spearhead toward the River Meuse as rapidly as possible.

Key Point: The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's last major offensive on the Western Front.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle America has ever fought, Hitler chose the Sixth Panzer Army for the German juggernaut’s most important role. The decisive spearhead was given to a combat group commanded by a young lieutenant colonel named Joachim Peiper. The planning for the Ardennes offensive of 1944 was conducted with such secrecy that Peiper did not receive his formal mission briefing until two days before the assault.

The offensive was Hitler’s last desperate gamble in the West. His plan was to overrun lightly defended portions of the Allied line in the Ardennes Forest and drive across the River Meuse all the way to the Belgian port of Antwerp. The capture of the major port would effectively split the Allied armies in the West in two while disrupting supply and troop movements. The Western Allies might be compelled to sue for peace.

Although Peiper had over 100 tanks under his command, two pieces of disturbing news were brought to his attention. First, the route Hitler selected for him was, Peiper said, “not for tanks, but for bicycles.” Second, he would have to rely on capturing American gasoline along the way to help meet the demands of his thirsty Panzer IV, Panther, and Tiger tanks. Peiper’s corps commander SS Lieutenant General Hermann Priess reassured him, “If you get to the Meuse with one damned tank, Joachim, you’ll have done your job!”

Peiper’s Blitz and the Malmedy Massacre

When the offensive began on Saturday, December 16, 1944, Peiper’s tanks were delayed by the onrush of traffic and a minefield the Germans had laid down in retreat months earlier. It was not until Sunday that Peiper’s task force reached the town of Honsfeld, Belgium. There it surprised an array of American forces from the 394th Infantry Regiment and 32nd Calvary Squadron to the 801st and 612th Tank Destroyer Battalions. Four German tanks were knocked out, but Peiper captured 15 U.S. tank destroyers and 50 reconnaissance vehicles.

The Americans who were not killed or captured were forced into a desperate retreat. Hearing about an American fuel dump in Büllingen, Peiper proceeded there. The town was quickly overrun, and several Americans from the 2nd Infantry Division’s Quartermaster Company and a recon platoon of the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion were captured. Peiper’s task force also seized about 50,000 gallons of gasoline and forced the American prisoners to refuel the German tanks at gunpoint.

When Peiper’s task force arrived south of Malmedy at the crossroads hamlet of Baugnez, it encountered American trucks from Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. When the German column opened fire, the Americans abandoned their vehicles in panic. As the men began to surrender, Peiper passed by in his command vehicle. Moving westward, he neared the town of Ligneuville, where General Edward Timberlake and his staff were about ready to enjoy a hot lunch at the Hôtel du Moulin. It was the headquarters for the U.S. 49th Antiaircraft Artillery Brigade, which protected Liege from V1 buzz bomb attacks. General Timberlake and his men were so surprised by the speed of Peiper’s advance that they narrowly escaped capture.

Meanwhile, at Baugnez American prisoners were being assembled in a field near the Café Bodarwé. Lieuteant Raphael Schumacker remembered escaping from the Germans with two other Americans. He heard either two pistol or rifle shots followed by machine-gun fire. The two men attempting to escape with him were killed along with many other unarmed prisoners. The SS troopers, according to sworn statements from 21 American survivors, then stepped through the bodies lying in the snow, stopping to shoot those who showed any signs of life. At least 86 Americans were killed and 25 wounded in what became known as the Malmedy Massacre.

After the war, Peiper said, “I recognize that after the battle of Normandy my unit was composed mainly of young, fanatical soldiers. A good deal of them had lost their parents, their sisters and brothers during the bombing. They had seen for themselves in Köln thousands of mangled corpses after a terror raid had passed. Their hatred for the enemy was such, I swear it, I could not always keep it under control.”

Roadblocks Near the Ambléve River

By Sunday evening, Peiper was near Stavelot. He was confident of reaching the River Meuse the following day. General Courtney Hodges, commander of the U.S. First Army, had good reason to be concerned. Peiper’s advancing task force was about 18 kilometers southwest of the Hotel Britannique in Spa, which served as his headquarters. Between Spa and Stavelot lay two major Allied supply depots containing one of the greatest concentrations of gasoline on the Continent. Depots No. 2 and No. 3 contained more than three million gallons of motor fuel, enough to power Peiper’s panzers all the way to Antwerp.

A task force led by Major Paul Solis was sent to Stavelot to assist Captain Lloyd Sheetz of the 291st Combat Engineer Battalion in establishing roadblocks near the Ambléve River. By 3:45 am on Monday, December 18, elements of the 526th Armored Infantry and 825th Tank Destroyer Battalions had passed near the fuel depots and arrived in Stavelot.

Captain Charles Mitchell, commander of the 526th Armored Infantry Battalion, remembers, “Major Solis, Captain Sheetz, Lieutenant Doherty, and I proceeded by jeep to Captain Sheetz’s command post near the bridge crossing the Ambléve River. We discussed the situation, and Major Solis ordered my company to defend the bridge…. I was not informed, nor was I aware that the bridge was supposed to have been mined for detonation.” Company C of the 202nd Engineers had quit guarding it before midnight.

Engaging Peiper’s Panzergrenadiers

At 4:30 am on Monday, Mitchell ordered his 2nd and 3rd Platoons to proceed in their half-tracks across the Ambléve River bridge. The 2nd Platoon, under Lieutenant Harry Willyard, made its way up a hill on a road called the Vieux Chateau and established a roadblock and listening post. The men radioed Captain Mitchell with news of troop movement and the noise of armored vehicles. He then ordered them to return toward the bridge. On the way the men encountered some of Peiper’s panzergrenadiers.

John Sankey, an enlisted man with the 2nd Platoon, recalled, “There was Germans standing at the buildings firing machine guns at each half-track as they went by.” Two half-tracks from the 2nd Platoon were lost, but Willyard managed to lead the rest back across the bridge.

Lieutenant Doherty, commanding the 1st Platoon of A Company’s 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, sent two gun squads commanded by Sergeants Jack Armstrong and Jonas Whaley with their half-tracks across the bridge. James Hammons, who served under Whaley wrote, “Sergeant Armstrong’s unit was first up the hill and we followed…. In just a few minutes as we reached the top, a flare went up from a trip wire and the Germans opened up with fire power. Our own troops back across the river began to shoot and we were caught in the crossfire. We tried to retreat but the Germans had pulled a tank or an ‘88 in a curve and began to shoot, hitting Sergeant Armstrong’s unit, setting it on fire. We were behind them and trapped so we had to leave our unit for cover. I was handed a 30 caliber M.G. from the pedestal mount and four of us took shelter inside a tin shed. Momentarily, the German infantry came in droves and we ran into a house and upstairs by a window. The only weapon we had was the machine gun and a carbine with the barrel filled with mud. Naturally, we had to hold our fire as we were outnumbered by the Germans. We watched as they used a burp gun to kill Sergeant Armstrong and part of his crew, trying to get out of the burning unit.”

Anthony Calvanese was shot in the left thigh while jumping from the half-track. Fellow squad member Bernard Gallagher was shot and fell on top of him. “He was huge,” remembered Calvanese. “I had to struggle to get out.” Calvanese dashed into the nearest building and propped his leg up on a chair to dress his wound. Outside he saw flames coming from his squad’s half-track.

Calvanese would never forget what he saw next. “There was a German officer, he had a long trench coat on … he’s got a gun. He’s pointing it directly at me.” The German fired his Luger, hitting Calvanese in the left ankle.

In desperation, Calvanese looked for an escape. “I tried to go out the side window, I couldn’t; there was a machine gun nest there. I didn’t have a hand grenade or nothing. There was nothing I could do. So I jumped out the back window into a courtyard. I tried to get into the building down below. There were these elderly people, they wouldn’t let me in. They were telling me to get away from there. I could understand that.”

Calvanese was unable to put any weight on his left leg now and began to crawl for his life. “And along came this fellow, Marcel Ozer. He told me to follow him, which I did. I crawled in back of him all the way to the dairy, where they were using it as a shelter for the civilians.” The Belgians tended to his wounds, hiding him from the Germans.

Swimming Under the Ice

Enlisted men William Kenny, Jim Landgren, and Steve Howell from A Company, 526th Armored Infantry Battalion had crossed the Ambléve River to set up a machine-gun emplacement. “We heard a lot of rifle fire and machine-gun fire,” remembers Kenny. “So we realized real quick that we were in a bad spot. We were between our fellows and the Germans up behind us on the hill.” The trio made their way to the bank of the Ambléve River where Landgren decided to go one direction, Kenny and Howell the other.

To escape the German threat, they were going to have to cross the river. Howell did not take to this idea so well. Kenny remembered, “I said, ‘What’s the matter,’ and he said, ‘I can’t swim.’ Holy gee-wiz, so can you imagine under fire like this giving instructions on how to swim.” The river was frozen about a half-inch thick. “We broke through into the water and swam as far as we could, holding our breath under the ice until our air exhausted. We had to come up and break the ice again to get up to the surface, to get air again.”

Kenny and Howell reunited with their battalion. Jim Landgren, who had taken the alternate route, failed to return to friendly lines and was hidden by a Belgian family and later captured.

Peiper’s Assault on the Bridge

In downtown Stavelot things were heating up for the rest of its defenders. “The Germans have a way of scaring you to death before they kill you,” remembered Captain Mitchell. In the wake of a terrifying rocket and mortar assault, Peiper’s infantry force began to charge toward the Ambléve River bridge. “I told the machine gun squads to wait till they got close over on [our] side of the bridge and then open up on them. Then here comes the troops across the bridge. So we could handle that, with the machine guns and my men. We stopped that, right then, and they retreated back across the bridge.”

At about 8 am, Peiper’s tanks began their assault. “I listened and I heard a big rumble and I heard them tanks coming down. I knew we could not handle the tanks!” said Mitchell.

Two 76mm antitank guns under Lieutenant Doherty were moved into position to fire on the German tanks. Sergeant Martin Hauser, commanding one of the gun squads, remembered, “When them tanks started coming down off the hill they scared the hell out of everybody. Seeing them great big monsters, we did the best we could to put them out of business.”

From across the river, Hauser’s squad aimed its gun at the tracks of the enemy tanks, disabling two of them. “And the guys got out of the tanks. We could see them. They jumped up on the roofs of the buildings over there. So we just started peppering the building, started cutting the building down,” he recalled.

Cutting Down Buildings

Lou Celentano, who commanded the other gun squad, remembered, “We decided to cut down more of the buildings because they seemed to be hiding behind them. We really tore those buildings down. The .50-caliber [mounted on the half-track] did a heck of a job and we were shooting some 3-inch rounds into it and finally cleared it enough so that we started seeing the turrets. Eventually we got so that we had demolished the homes completely and we were able to see the tanks themselves, the entire tanks. So we concentrated on knocking out either the turret or the tracks. The tracks were the best first shot and fortunately we had two great gunners. My gunner was Corporal Roy Ables and Hauser’s was Corporal Paul Lenzo. We managed to stop the first and the last tanks almost immediately…. The second tank was the one that started turning its turret toward us. And I don’t know who hit the turret but he was within a few feet of being able to hit one of us when the turret was stopped and he fired, he actually fired. One shot went completely over our heads…. If he had been able to lower his gun he would have gotten me. I’m almost sure of that. When I say me I’m talking about my crew. But he wasn’t able to get off another shot and that’s when the turret opened up and a man started to climb out.

Celentano continued, “There was smoke coming out of it … out of the hatch…. And by now that’s when [Ben] Bodziner was on the [half-track’s .50-caliber] gun, and unfortunately he froze. It was extremely cold and he had taken off his gloves. His fingers were on the trigger, but he couldn’t move them. And I went up and hit him on the hands to try and wake him up. And one shot went flying. I say one shot because I don’t remember whether there was anything following up on it. And it hit the man coming out of the tank. It hit him square in the center of his forehead.”

With a pair of binoculars, Celentano saw the German fall from the tank. The antitank gun crews continued to load and fire the 76mm shells. Celentano remembered, “We were firing rapid fire and needed a constant supply of shells. The ammo truck was quite a distance from us and the shells we used had to be carried for quite some distance and it was here that a comic relief was added to the horrible scenario of the moment. Lives were being lost and buildings were falling to the ground. While I was giving firing directions to my crew and worrying about the tanks coming down the hill to battle us, yelling above the roar of our fire, out of the corner of my eye I saw a sight that could have been shot in a keystone [Keystone Cops] comedy film. Our ammo was being delivered to us by Jol Torre at 4 feet, 9 inches tall, and his closest friend from their first day in the 825th TD, Alex Aleskavitch. Picture about a 6 foot box weighing at least 80 pounds being carried by a 6-plus footer trying to come down to match a less than 5 footer’s level. This was Hollywood comedy, but I didn’t stop to laugh…. I have no idea how many [shells were fired] but I know there was an awful lot of brass laying on that ground afterwards.”

Four Tanks Disabled

The shelling took its toll on the German column as witnessed by Karl Wortmann, who commanded a flakpanzer self-propelled antiaircraft vehicle in 10th Company’s Panzer Regiment 1. “It had cost us several panzers and wounded, but the bridge over the Ambléve was open,” he remembered. A Panther tank commanded by Eugene Zimmermann of the 1st SS Panzer Company had been selected by Peiper to lead the attack through Stavelot. In his briefing he was told an American antitank gun would contest his advance.

“Noticing a tank approaching the bridge, I alerted Sergeant Smith of the antitank squad,” recalled Mitchell. “We watched as it slowly crossed the bridge,” he said. “Just as it left the bridge, my antitank gun fired, but unfortunately caused no damage.” Three more shots were fired at the German Panther with no effect before it overran the crew’s position.

Although the Panther had an excellent combination of speed, armor, and firepower, it was the Tiger that gained the reputation as the most feared tank on the battlefield during World War II. As the enemy armor rolled into Stavelot, a Tiger tank turned on the Avenue Ferdinand Nicolay, where Sergeant Martin Hauser’s gun crew was positioned.

“At first I couldn’t see him go across the bridge but I could hear him coming,” remembers Hauser, “and the first thing I see when he came around the building was that big 88 sticking out there. Then they turned and faced us and we were standing there. We were on one end of the street and they were on the other end and they start firing with their machine guns and that’s when we cut loose with a couple of rounds of our ammunition off our 3-inch gun and we hit him up in the turret.”

Nearby, Lieutenant Doherty and his driver escaped from their jeep just before it was set ablaze by the Tiger’s machine guns. Hauser remembers, “I had my half-track right behind his jeep and if they would have shot in there with an 88 they would have got both of them.”

The massive Tiger backed into a building, sending bricks crashing down upon it, and Hauser witnessed the enemy crew exiting the disabled tank. Hauser and Celentano were awarded the Bronze Star for knocking out or disabling four German tanks. As reported in the newspaper Stars and Stripes, Doherty’s platoon sergeant, Vestor Lowe, remarked, “Hitler would be damned unhappy if he knew that the two guns which caused so much trouble were commanded by an Italian and a German— Celentano and Hauser.”

Allied Air Support

Peiper’s column continued passing through Stavelot. “My troops did their best as they fought street by street,” recalled Mitchell. Some of the men from his 3rd Platoon withdrew north on the Francorchamps road toward fuel depot No. 3, the smaller of the two depots in the region holding 1,115,000 gallons of 80-octane gasoline. Evacuation of the fuel had already begun. Fearing that German forces were going to seize the fuel, Belgian guards and men from the 3rd Platoon of Mitchell’s company set a section of the depot on fire. Peiper knew nothing of these depots, and as 124,000 gallons of fuel were going up in flames his main column was advancing toward the crucial bridges of Trois Ponts, where the Ambléve meets the Salm River.

As Peiper’s task force lunged for the crossings at Trois Ponts, Company C, 51st Combat Engineer Battalion detonated charges on the key bridges, sending them crashing into the Ambléve and Salm Rivers below. With the favored route now denied, Peiper’s main column detoured northwest to the town of La Gleize and then southwest into the village of Cheneux. With clearing weather, Allied fighter-bombers took to the skies, and as U.S. Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and British Hawker Typhoons struck the German task force, Peiper took cover in an old concrete bunker.

The Germans returned fire with their four-barreled Wirbelwind 20mm antiaircraft guns that were mounted on type IV tank chassis. One P-47 was shot down and eight others damaged. About eight vehicles were hit during the air attack, but the major loss for Peiper was precious time.

The Allied air attack delayed the German advance, providing time for A Company, 291st Engineers to prepare charges on the Neufmoulin bridge. As the lead Panther approached the bridge over the Lienne River, it was blown in their faces. With no other bridges in the vicinity capable of handling the weight of heavy German tanks, Peiper was forced back toward La Gleize. His fuel was critically low, and a number of his tanks ran out of gas. Belgian observers reported 125 German vehicles including 30 tanks passing through the town of Rahier. Peiper spent the night resting in the Chateau Froidcour just east of Stoumont.

“Those So and So’s are German Royal Tigers”

Throughout the night of December 18, men from the 119th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Battalion settled into Stoumont. James Pendleton of Headquarters Company recalled, “We just parked our vehicles in the street, went in the buildings, and laid down. We had been on the road for two days and most of two nights. And along about … two o’clock in the morning I was awakened by … Lieutenant Goodman…. He came up and nudged me with his foot and he said, ‘Jim you hear that noise out there?’ And I said, ‘Yes sir, I do. Why don’t those so and so’s lay down and go to sleep?’ And he said, ‘Those so and so’s are German Royal Tigers….’”

Lieutenant Walter J. Goodman ordered Pendleton and two machine gunners from I Company to prepare a roadblock with antitank mines. Staff Sergeant Walter Kos, 1st Platoon, I Company, received orders from Captain George D. Rehkoph, “There’s somebody out there running around with a lot of tanks and I want you to find them.”

Kos and four others traveled by jeep to the area east of Stoumont. The driver stayed behind while the others proceeded through a wooded area on foot until they came upon the enemy from a concealed position. “They were washing up, eating, making a fire, and changing their clothes,” remembers Kos. “There were 30 … tanks there.” Kos reported the findings to his company commander, who relayed them up the chain of command.

The previous night Robert Hall and two others with Headquarters Company had been ordered by Lieutenant Goodman to set up an observation post on a hilltop overlooking the east side of Stoumont. They found a small farm house, and Hall remembered, “We tried to get a little sleep and then at the break of dawn we look out and here comes the whole German Army, tanks and soldiers…. I ran down into Stoumont and I couldn’t go any further because they were coming right at us. So I went into this house and went down to the cellar. There was  20 to 25 of us soldiers there. I knew they were coming now, so I went to the cellar window and looked out and I could see about 10 feet away an infantry soldier with his rifle.”

Hall, who had received a Silver Star while serving in Normandy, looked around for some place to take cover. Without no other option, Hall and the others surrendered.

A Silver Star For Sergeant Kos

Meanwhile, Sergeant Kos and the men were ordered to stall the enemy’s advance into Stoumont. The lieutenant in charge abandoned the platoon. “He had it planned, I think, to get the hell out,” said Kos. “He knew that place was hot and I did too. We were in front for a delaying action.” Over the radio Kos remembered Captain Rehkopf informing him, “Don’t forget now, you’re in charge…. If you get out of this, I’ll make sure you have your own platoon.”

For the actions that followed, Kos would be decorated with a Silver Star, undergo five back surgeries, and receive decades of psychiatric treatment.

When German tanks approached the 3rd Platoon’s position, Kos helped direct the fire of two Sherman tanks from C Company, 743rd Tank Battalion. He gave the signal as soon as the lead German tank was about to come around a corner.

“So the two Shermans fired at the lead tank, knocked the track off of it and damaged the turret,” said Kos. Gallantly moving through a murderous hail of machine-gun, small-arms, and tank fire, Kos continued directing fire that destroyed two enemy half-tracks. The heroic action delayed the enemy long enough for a new defensive line to be established.

When an advancing enemy tank rammed its own disabled tank off the road, Kos’s position was jeopardized. He recalled, “That’s when they started coming after us. We were fighting them house to house and then I got separated from the other guys.”

Kos ducked into one of the houses and went upstairs. “I could see the tank and six Germans, six SS guys coming down the road,” he said. “I knew that if I shot a couple of them, which I could of, that they were going to get me anyway.” When one of the SS troopers came to the front door of the house, Kos decided to escape out the back window of the second floor. The SS trooper threw a grenade into the room, and as Kos opened the window the blast sent him flying to the ground below.

Kos landed on his back hard, but with adrenaline masking the pain he ran into a nearby house. Inside about a dozen men from 3rd Platoon were hiding from the enemy. As the German tank approached, the men decided to run for it. Kos remembers. “The guys started crossing the road. The Germans were picking them off left and right. They wanted to escape. They heard about … the massacre at Malmedy. So they figured they didn’t want to get shot…. But they had that road zeroed in, I told them don’t go, don’t cross that road…. So they start crossing it. Jeez! They were getting shot and we tried to pull them back in. They were wounded. We couldn’t, because as soon as you went out there, hell … they were shooting and their Tiger was coming down.”

The German tank stopped outside the house and an SS trooper called out in German, “You’re surrounded.”

Kos remembered, “We knew what the hell that meant—put your hands on your head—so we came out. They lined us up and they start marching us to the rear and they were kicking us, gave us all a whack. As they were marching us up the German troops start coming in. Everybody took a whack at us, oh with the guns and every damn thing, my neck, my back.”

“Well, I’ll Give Up”

As German tanks in Peiper’s column forced their way through the streets of Stoumont, James Pendleton of Headquarters Company placed his allotted antitank mines in the path of the oncoming enemy. He saw a German tank run over one of the mines and burst into flames.

“I had two I Company machine gunners with me,” Pendleton said. “I had a guy from Hagerstown, Maryland, by the name of Red Aldrich and also a guy from Memphis, Tennessee … we called him Memphis, that’s the only nickname I knew him by.”

When the Germans opened their hatches in an attempt to escape the burning tank, Aldrich and Memphis “took care of them as they crawled out….” With the onslaught of German tanks and infantry pouring into Stoumont, the men were soon forced to take cover in a storeroom with a large front window.

“A German tank rolled up and stuck the barrel of the 88 through the glass front,” recalled Pendleton. “And a guy raised the turret and a German said, he had on a G.I. uniform, ‘You give up, or you want me to blast you.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ll give up.’ And the jeep was parked at a side door. So we had to come out the side door anyway and the jeep was sitting there idling. And I told the guys, I said, ‘I’ll drive it. You guys ride it.’ The two guys that were with me, Aldrich and Garrison, they filed in the back of the jeep and I jumped in the driver’s side.”

Pendleton sped off in a desperate attempt to put as much distance between the jeep and the German tank as possible. He recalled, “Well this tank, he backed out and he started shooting point-blank, 88 shells at us. And I got down the road about 50 feet and there sat a German half-track with twin mounted 20s on it. And as I passed him, he shot down on the side of me and I pulled the jeep from second gear down to high gear and that time the shell hit my right arm.”

The antiaircraft shell took off about four inches of the radius and ulna bones near the elbow of Pendleton’s forearm. The jeep lost control as it neared a curve in the road and flipped over, throwing its occupants through the air. Aldrich and Memphis scrambled to their feet and managed to take cover behind some bushes.

Pendleton’s Escape

“It was humanly impossible to get out of the situation I was in after I was shot,” said Pendleton. “I said, ‘Lord if you won’t save my body, save my soul,’ and that gave me courage…. Well, I get on my feet and there was a building next door and I ran in that door. The room was full of Germans…. And a big red-headed German stuck a burp gun in my face and I grabbed it with my left hand and shoved it away and he either fired it empty or it jammed. I don’t know which and when it quit I sailed out the door again. But the street was moving with tracers. You could see it, just like sheet metal moving down the street. Anyhow there was a wireman nearby by the name of Joe Duval. He was from Indiana and he stopped just a second and cut my sleeve off and tied a tourniquet on me and on he went. I stood there and I was getting weak. There was no place to go.”

German vehicles and infantry continued through Stoumont. Pendleton leaned against a building to rest and gazed at the street corner where his jeep had overturned. Aldrich and Memphis were nowhere to be seen. Then from around the corner a Sherman tank appeared and fired its gun. The Sherman withdrew and then reappeared to fire again. It continued this strategy for some time, and finally Pendleton was able to attract the tank crew’s attention by leaping out in the middle of the street.

Pendleton yelled, “Come and get me, I’m an American!” The tank fired and then withdrew again. When it returned one of the tankers yelled from an open hatch, “We can’t get you in, but we can get you on the left side of the road if you could ride the barrel out. When I rev it three times you’ll know I’m coming all the way.”

The tank continued to maneuver from around the corner. Upon hearing the Sherman’s engine rev three times, Pendleton moved to the location as instructed, and when the tank reappeared the barrel was positioned for him to grab.

“I hooked my left arm and grabbed a hold of my belt and he rode me back around the curve,” says Pendleton. “I was suspended in the air on the opposite side of the road from where the Germans were. They sandblasted the tank…. They shot all the paint off of it.” With exhaustion setting in, Pendleton’s grip around the barrel loosened, and he fell to the ground, nearly being crushed by the tank that had just saved his life. The 119th Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion suffered 267 casualties defending Stoumont. Most of the 152 left behind to cover the battalion’s withdrawal were captured.

2,226,000 Gallons of Gasoline

Peiper sent a small probing force west past the hamlet of Targnon until three of the leading Panthers were destroyed. By Tuesday, December 19, his task force had advanced over 100 kilometers, farther than any other German unit. However, supply shortages, particularly fuel, were becoming critical. “We began to realize,” he said, “that we had insufficient gasoline to cross the bridge west of Stoumont.”

In an ironic twist of fate, that very afternoon one of Peiper’s reconnaissance groups probing a secondary road from La Gleize to Spa had narrowly missed 2,226,000 gallons of gasoline. To prevent fuel depot No. 2 from falling into German hands, a minefield had hastily been laid and Headquarters Company of the U.S. 9th Armored Group had been ordered to provide a radio security net for the First Army.

When radio net officer 1st Lt. Walter R. Butts heard enemy activity in the area he requested additional support. The 110th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion sent in two 90mm antiaircraft guns and four M-51 quadruple .50-caliber machine guns. Peiper’s reconnaissance group of two armored cars, two trucks, and two self-propelled 88mm guns reached a point about a mile north of Cour, near the southern edge of the minefield. Two Germans got out of the leading armored car and walked to the minefield.

An American opened up with a .50-caliber machine gun, and the Germans immediately returned fire, killing the gunner. Then all the machine guns opened up while other Americans let loose with small arms fire.

“Jerry must have thought he hit a regiment,” Butts said. “I don’t know how much damage we did; we made a hell of a lot of noise. After 10 minutes, the [German] column pulled out….”

“We Got the Daylights Kicked Out of Us”

By Wednesday, December 20, Peiper faced his enemy on three fronts. Throughout the day and into the night the main concentration of his forces, spread through Stoumont, Cheneux, and La Gleize, fought off elements of the U.S. 30th Infantry, 82nd Airborne, and 3rd Armored Divisions. Three separate task forces from the 3rd Armored Division’s Combat Command B were involved. Task Force Lovelady was given the important job of cutting off the Stavelot-Stoumont road to prevent supplies from getting to Peiper. Task Force Jordan made a thrust toward Stoumont and was beaten back when two American tanks leading the column were knocked out.

Task Force McGeorge attempted to advance into the northeastern outskirts of La Gleize. Charles Ley, a loader in a Sherman tank with I Company of the 33rd Armor Regiment recalled, “We were at the crest of the hill … waiting for our armored infantry to come up…. It was so foggy down below, you couldn’t see anything…. All of a sudden the Lieutenant gets on the horn and says, ‘Okay fellows button up, prepare to fight…. We got up to the corner and the road turned to the right leading into the town. Our lead tank got hit and knocked out and that was the end of our push up that hill.”

When the fog lifted for a short time a German knocked out another Sherman commanded by Lieutenant Wanamaker. When the Sherman advance toward La Gleize stalled, the infantry continued. “We got the daylights kicked out of us, boy we ran into an ambush,” remembers Robert Kauffman who served in D Company, 36th Armored Infantry Battalion. Under the cover of darkness, the men crossed a small narrow bridge and then made their way up a hill.

Kauffman recalled, “We had just crossed over a brook, and when we heard the bolt of a machine gun being put into the firing position everybody hit the ground. All of a sudden there was firing all over the place, and they were dropping grenades in on us. Fortunately, the machine gun had been preset to fire on the bridge and that’s where the fire was going, the bridge that we had crossed. We were all, of course, flattened out, and then they were yelling at us to surrender. That becomes very disconcerting when the enemy starts yelling at you, and word was passed up the line that we should pull back. One of our guys crawled in the wrong direction, and he was captured. I don’t know why he did that, but anyway we had to cross this little stream and there was a barbed wire fence that went … parallel with the stream. It was too low to go under it, too high to go over it. So the guy that was behind me became impatient, and he literally pushed me over the barbed wire across to the other side of the brook.”

With intense fire still coming from the Germans, Kauffman began to crawl down the hill. “I was passing guys lying there, and I was sure they were dead,” said Kauffman. When he was out of the trajectory of fire, he got up. “Finally there was another guy and I ; we made it down the hill, but we couldn’t use the bridge to get out of there. We had to ford the stream that the bridge ran over, and this is December you know so it was pretty chilly water. I seen a lot of the guys come through the stream, but I don’t know how many got off the hill.”

Major Hal McCown’s Encounter With Joachim Peiper

Fighting on three sides, Peiper’s task force was considerably weakened. By Thursday, December 21, Peiper consolidated his forces to the more easily defendable hilltop village of La Gleize. Task Force McGeorge continued to press an attack on the village, making little headway. To avoid the tragedy of forcing Sherman tanks into La Gleize, where the heavy German tanks waited, the Americans relied on artillery. An intense artillery barrage blanketed the town as Peiper established his command center in the cellar of a large house.

Major Hal McCown, the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, had been taken prisoner. He met with Peiper in his command and later wrote, “I have met few men who impressed me in as short a span of time as did this German officer…. He was completely confident of Germany’s ability to whip the Allies. He spoke of [SS Reichsführer Heinrich] Himmler’s new reserve army at quite some length, saying that it contained so many new divisions, both armored and otherwise, that our G-2s would wonder where they all came from. He did his best to find out from me of the success the V-1 and V-2 were having and told me that more secret weapons like those would be unloosed…. The German Air Force, he said, would now come forth with many new types and which although inferior in number to the Allies would be superior in quality and would suffice their needs to cover their breakthrough in Belgium and Holland and later to the French coast.”

At 5 am on Friday, December 22, following a six-hour meeting with Peiper, Major McCown was taken to a cellar with four other American officers. He vividly remembered, “All that day American artillery pounded the town incessantly, even the guard detachment—consisting of 5 Germans—came down into our cellar with us, which was heavily overcrowding the tiny room. In the afternoon a 105 shell made a direct hit on the wall of our cellar, throwing the German sitting beside me half-way across the room. A hole approximately 2½ feet in diameter was knocked in the wall. Lieutenant Henley and Lieutenant Youmans of my regiment helped pull the German out from under the rubble and got him on the floor of the undamaged part of the cellar. Within a few minutes another shell landed a few feet outside the hole in the cellar wall, and shrapnel and stone flew through the room. Lieutenant Henley was killed instantly, and three Germans were wounded. One of the Germans died within about 30 minutes. We administered first aid as well as we could. For several hours then the shelling continued without appreciable letup, and the dead and wounded together with those who were unhurt were cramped close together in the unharmed half of the small cellar.”

Late in the afternoon, parties of American enlisted men came to the cellar and removed the dead and wounded; the litter bearers told me that German casualties had been heavy throughout the town.

The Offensive Runs Out of Fuel

The Germans engineered the most powerful tanks of World War II, but without the fuel to run them they were useless. Between 2 and 3 am on Sunday, December 24, Peiper and about 800 of his unwounded men walked out of La Gleize. Most of the vehicles they left behind were out of fuel.

On Christmas Day, elements of the 740th Tank Battalion recovered an unwrapped gift, a Tiger II left behind by the 3rd Company of Peiper’s 501st SS Heavy Tank Battalion. It was shipped to the United States and examined at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds. The tank was later displayed at the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and now rests in a warehouse at Fort Benning, Georgia.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Lionel P. Fatton

Security, Asia

Only America can stop it from occurring.

Stuck between an assertive China, a nuclearizing North Korea, and an increasingly unreliable United States, Japan is mulling the acquisition of strike capabilities. Its upcoming missile defense policy could destabilize East Asia. The United States must act.

While Americans are absorbed by the battle against coronavirus, street protests, violence, and the presidential campaign, the rest of the world is moving fast. In Japan, where Yoshihide Suga replaced Shinzo Abe as prime minister following the latter’s abrupt resignation, an upcoming revision of its missile defense policy raises the prospect of regional tensions, destabilization, and ultimately, conflict. Washington should pay close attention to this development and respond appropriately, or face long-lasting and serious consequences for its interests in the Asia-Pacific.

Since 1951 and the conclusion of the Mutual Security Treaty, Japan has relied on the alliance with the United States for security. By 1960 and the revision of the original treaty, Japanese parliament resolutions and government decisions had enshrined the principle of “exclusively defense-oriented policy.” The spear and shield alliance structure was born: the United States would use bases in Japan to protect its ally and project military power globally, while Japan would provide host nation support and focus on defending its own territory.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, missile threats from North Korea and China rose to prominence. Japan faced the menace through the alliance. The country strove to build a missile defense system made of land-based and sea-based interceptors. The United States, in addition to helping Japan in its endeavor, maintained the offensive capabilities necessary to punish other countries for potential attacks on its ally. Deterrence was guaranteed by the combination of the Japanese shield and American spear.

Japan’s geostrategic situation has deteriorated significantly over the past few years. China has grown increasingly assertive and North Korea has continued to expand its nuclear and missile arsenals. Japan initially focused on reinforcing its shield against missile threats. In late 2017, a year marked by tensions between the United States and North Korea, Tokyo decided to introduce a new missile defense asset, the Aegis Ashore. In June of this year, however, the Japanese government suspended its deployment due to cost issues and safety concerns for local communities. This reversal triggered renewed debates about Japan’s missile defense policy, decisionmakers being aware that the current missile shield is inadequate to protect the country.

Although the option of strengthening the missile defense system further is still on the table, including through the construction of ships exclusively dedicated to this mission, an alternative is gaining momentum: the acquisition of strike capabilities. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party proposed in August to consider the “possession of the ability to intercept ballistic and other missiles even in the territory of an opponent.” And outgoing Prime Minister Abe, while not mentioning offensive capabilities, declared a few days ago that a new missile defense policy would be unveiled by the end of the year. Tokyo may not content itself with a shield anymore, it may want its own spear.

If Japan takes this path, the consequences for the stability of East Asia will be far-reaching. Given historical and political animosities between Japan and its neighbors, the acquisition of strike capabilities would raise tensions and the prospect of a regional arms race, with China in particular. Commenting on the possible introduction of ships solely dedicated to missile defense, China Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, said this “could trigger an arms race of missiles” and result in “regional peace and security [being] severely undermined.” One can only speculate about Beijing’s reaction to Tokyo’s purchase of offensive capabilities, but it is unlikely to be benign.

Another effect of Japan’s potential acquisition of strike capabilities concerns alliance dynamics with the United States. If the asymmetric spear and shield structure puts part of the burden of Japanese defense on the United States, leading President Donald Trump to describe the alliance as “unfair,” it also provides Washington with substantial control over Tokyo’s security policy and behavior, especially when it comes to offensive operations. From the American viewpoint, this reduces the risk of Japan acting recklessly. In case Japan obtains the capacity to autonomously attack an opponent’s territory, Washington’s ability to restrain Tokyo in its tense relations with neighboring countries will decline, raising the specter of entrapment.

The prospect of entrapment is even higher when one takes into account that wielding the spear demands expertise and experience. To forestall attacks or provocations with offensive capabilities does not only imply know-how in terms of military assets’ deployment, readiness and use, it also requires sending clear and timely signals to the intended audience about acceptable behaviors and redlines. This necessitates seamless cooperation at the highest level between the government, the ministry of defense and the ministry of foreign affairs. Japan has had no experience in handling offensive capabilities since 1945, and state institutions are still plagued by balkanization. Given the tense regional environment, the possibility of uncontrolled escalation cannot be ruled out.

What should the United States do? To answer, one needs to recognize that Tokyo’s intention to acquire strike capabilities for missile defense is puzzling because, within the alliance framework, the United States already contributes to the defense of Japan with such assets. Then, one ought to admit that this potential duplication of American forces would largely be explained by the fact that the United States is not the reliable ally it used to be.

Although structural factors dating back to the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras enter the picture, Trump’s unpredictable and transactional diplomacy has pushed alliance uncertainty to new heights. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January 2017 as the first major decision of his presidency raised doubts about the United States’ engagement in the Asia-Pacific. The threat of tariffs on Japanese car imports to force Japan into a trade deal in late 2019, which arguably ran against Article II of the alliance, triggered distrust and resentment in Tokyo. And Mr. Trump’s alleged request for a fivefold increase in Japan’s host nation support gives Tokyo the impression that American soldiers are mere mercenaries, and thus that Japanese and American strategic interests diverge. When asked by The New York Times what would be his reaction if allies refused to share the burden of American troops’ presence on their territories, Trump replied: “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”

Washington has little control over the Chinese and North Korean components of Japan’s security equation. It can and should, however, reassure Japan about its security commitments. While  Suga’s decision to pick a novice defense minister in the person of Nobuo Kishi, Shinzo Abe’s younger brother, may indicate a low priority for security issues, American decision-makers have until the end of the year to make sure the new Japanese missile defense policy does not take the wrong path. The time is running out; urgent action is needed. Otherwise, the United States could wake up from the presidential election with another Asian headache.

Lionel P. Fatton is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Webster University Geneva. His research interests include international and security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific, China-Japan-U.S. relations and Japan’s defense policy. His latest book, Japan’s Awakening: Moving toward an Autonomous Security Policy, was published in 2019.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security, Americas

Thanks to the Air Force.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Despite this widespread belief that the B-21 is a revolutionary stealth platform, perhaps the greatest margin of difference with the new bomber is in its onboard computing, mission systems, avionics and internal technical configuration. Not only will the platform draw upon advanced artificial intelligence and information processing, but its data management systems are said by senior Air Force weapons developers to incorporate never-before-seen technologies.

Will the new B-21 stealth bomber effectively carry and release weapons? Will its next-generation stealth technology keep its infrared (IR) signature low and help it evade complex air defenses? Will its structure, airframe and flight envelope hold up as expected? What about its mission systems and onboard avionics? 

These questions encompass the focus of U.S. Air Force testers now laying the groundwork and conducting simulations in anticipation of the first flight of what many regard as the greatest stealth platform ever to exist, the new B-21. 

Sometime next year, the new bomber will take off for the first time from Edwards Air Force Base, California, at the U.S. Air Force Test Center.

“With a program like the B-21 we are doing firsts. We are exceptional risk managers. We live for doing firsts, so our team will figure out a way to manage that first flight,” Major General Christopher Azzano, Commander, Air Force Test Center, told The National Interest in an interview. 

While the first flight will likely just be a short trip to test the basic structure of the airframe and the aircraft’s flight envelope, the flight will begin an elaborate process of preparing the bomber for war. 

“These systems are so complex. There will be basic airframe evaluations, proof or expansion of the flight envelope and assessments of all of the mission systems that need to be proved out. With every aircraft we have to feel confident that we meet our design specifications,” Azzano said. 

Moving forward, other assessments will include tests of the landing gear, additional structural dynamics such as the load on the airframe and onboard avionics. 

Azzano emphasized that he would discuss the general procedural aspects of the test program, explaining the details regarding key elements of technological development were being addressed by other senior Air Force weapons developers. Citing the work of the B-21 Special Program Office, Azzano made a point not to elaborate upon weapons specifics, technologies or other nuances of the aircraft’s developmental trajectory.

Naturally, for the B-21 many are placing special emphasis upon computational thermodynamics and assessments of the IR signature. The aircraft is reported to be the stealthiest ever to exist, and while many technical details regarding its composition are likely not available for security reasons, images of the airframe indicate what could easily be called an unprecedented demonstration of advanced stealth technology. 

For example, not only is the blended wing-body even more horizontal and gradually sloped than its predecessor the B-2, but its fuselage also appears to have a more gradual incline. Moreover, perhaps of greatest significance, there do not appear to be any external exhaust structures. All of these changes in the plane’s shape will help to reduce its radar signature and keep the bomber stealthy.

Furthermore, in addition to having a buried engine and IR suppressants, the aircraft may contain unprecedented innovations in the areas of heat management, heat emission and temperature control. The lower the difference in temperature between an aircraft and its surrounding atmosphere, the less detectable it is. 

Despite this widespread belief that the B-21 is a revolutionary stealth platform, perhaps the greatest margin of difference with the new bomber is in its onboard computing, mission systems, avionics and internal technical configuration. Not only will the platform draw upon advanced artificial intelligence and information processing, but its data management systems are said by senior Air Force weapons developers to incorporate never-before-seen technologies. Such a scenario could bring new levels of in-flight, intelligence-driven re-targeting, threat identification and sensor fidelity. 

The technical elements of the aircraft are also intended to support and further key Air Force strategic and tactical aims, such as the current move to improve “networking” and information sharing across the force. Azzano emphasized this, explaining that major platforms like the B-21 will no longer merely function as attack-combat platforms, but also operate as essential “nodes” throughout a meshed, interwoven cross-domain warfare data-sharing network. 

Azzano also said that advanced computing can really help pave the way for advanced testing, given that so much of the modeling, designs and internal systems are able to be replicated by computers.

“We are doing a lot of modeling and simulation so that the first time we take the aircraft airborne, we have done our due diligence,” Azzano said.

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

Image: Wikimedia.

Asaf Romirowsky

Security, Middle East

How can the United States make progress beyond the Arab states normalizing ties with Israel?

Against the backdrop of normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and more recently Bahrain, are continued condemnations by Palestinian leaders. Palestinian president Abbas called the moves a “stab in the back,” “despicable,” and a “betrayal.” Even so, rumors regarding Saudi normalization continue to circulate.

Momentum is palpable. How then to move forward with an “outside in” strategy for Palestinian-Israeli peace? Keeping pressure on Palestinian leaders while finding new means to address Palestinian needs is key.

First should be new emphasis on high-level U.S. diplomacy in Europe and the Middle East aimed at convincing donors to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the internationally funded welfare agency for Palestinians, to rechannel funds away from the organization and towards targeted education, social service, health, and development programs aimed at the Palestinians. UNRWA remains a mainstay of Palestinian rejectionism, characterized by advocacy for the “right of return.” Perhaps as important, UNRWA is a European fetish.

For better and for worse, the only person capable of doing this is President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Only Kushner has the president’s full trust and understands his uniquely transactional mindset. And in contrast to the post-war decades of seeing the Palestinian issue as an isolated issue with unique importance, the Trump Administration sees it as merely one of many, tied to broader questions of peace, economic development, and a reduced American security footprint.

Tying changes in governmental funding for UNRWA (and for politicized NGOs that Europeans fund) to other issues of concern to European and Middle Eastern states is simple politics. This approach will be more successful than inertia-bound funding for UNRWA and the search for a perfect solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A second area for the administration combines foreign and domestic policy: the continued draining of the Washington “swamp,” which among other things has impeded Israeli-Palestinian peace. For example, for decades the U.S. Consul in East Jerusalem acted as the de facto ambassador to the Palestinians, undercutting broader U.S. policy. This politicized position has been eliminated. The longer term “Arabist” mindset within the State Department also contributed to mixed messages being spread regarding U.S. policy throughout the Arab world. Parallel attitudes immersed in intellectual and bureaucratic inertia have prevented long-overdue rethinking about NATO and other issues.

As was seen from the outside, the “Deep State”—the permanent foreign policy, intelligence and security apparatuses—resisted Trump’s policy changes. This was done mostly covertly, as State Department representatives refused to implement changes in policy, sometimes criminally, as the “Russiagate” scandal has shown.

Identifying, reassigning, firing, and otherwise changing the culture of these immense establishments is critical for American democratic accountability as well as for the execution of policy by the executive branch. The Palestinian issue is no exception.

But a critical complement to “draining the swamp” in Washington is draining the swamp in New York. Beyond UNRWA, Americans should be shocked at the extent to which the United Nations (to which the United States contributes approximately $10 billion) is uniquely dedicated to the Palestinian cause. In addition to the $1.4 billion UNRWA budget (to which the United States no longer contributes), the UN claims to spend another $400 million of the “State of Palestine.” This is approximately twice as much as it spends on Mozambique—a country with a population of 29.5 million.

It is unclear whether this figure includes funds spent by the UN on its vast internal Palestinian support infrastructure. This includes the General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs’ Division for Palestinian Rights, the unique database called the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” the “Quartet,” the countless reports, conferences, newsletters, and bulletins, or funds spent by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Security Council, the Human Rights Council (with its Special Rapporteur), or the Economic and Social Council, and their “civil society partners,” most of which support the Israel boycott movement.

Needless to say, no other cause receives even remotely this much money or institutional devotion from the UN. American policy should zero out contributions that are used by the UN to prolong the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a fight aimed at subverting Israel’s legitimacy as a state, promoting the Palestinian narrative of their martyrdom at the hands of Israel, and the international community’s putative responsibility to support them until their perfect solution is achieved.

It is a telling sign—of either desperation or overconfidence, certainly born of hope that the Democrats will retake the White House—that UNRWA is undertaking joint events with a leading U.S. boycott organization, American Muslims for Palestine. Former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to restore at least $350 million in UNRWA funding, as well as increasing funding to many other UN programs, including rejoining the World Health Organization. And while Biden himself has been firmly opposed to the Israel boycott movement, his campaign has reached out vigorously to anti-Israel activists.

The “outside-in” approach of defying conventional wisdom, taking chances, and demanding risk-taking and concessions on the part of allies like Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, has paid significant dividends. Furthering that cause by defunding and redefining dysfunctional institutions both at home and internationally, getting U.S. aid directly to those in need, and creating a sense of urgency about opportunities that may be lost, should be expanded regardless of who occupies in the White House in 2021.

Alex Joffe is a Ginsburg-Milstein Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Asaf Romirowsky is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a fellow at the Middle East Forum. Both are senior nonresident scholars at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Image: Reuters.

Warfare History Network

History,

The B-29’s revolutionary gunnery system made a Japanese fighter pilot’s job neither pretty safe nor interesting.

Key Point: The Superfortress was key to American strategy in World War II.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a game changer. First rolling off the assembly line as a production aircraft in July 1943, the Superfortress was the answer to America’s need for a high-level long-range strategic bomber. Conceived in 1938, the Superfortress was designed to increase the range, payload, and speed of its predecessors and was ultimately slated for service in the Pacific Theater of Operations only. The B-29 had a loaded range of around 4,000 miles, could carry a bomb load of up to 20,000 pounds, had a combat ceiling in excess of 36,000 feet, and travelled at a maximum speed of over 350 miles per hour with a cruising speed of 230 miles per hour. No other bomber in the world approached its capabilities.

The Superfortress also influenced American strategy in the Pacific. Already masters of the Solomon, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands, American strategists elected to bypass the Japanese stronghold in the Caroline Islands and instead turn their attention to the Marianas Islands. Their decision was influenced in part by the availability of the new B-29 bomber, which could easily reach the mainland of Japan some 1,500 miles away from the Marianas islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.

The B-29 also brought a number of technological innovations to America’s existing air arsenal. It was the first plane to feature a heated, pressurized crew cabin, which greatly improved crew comfort and combat effectiveness while decreasing their fatigue. With pressurization, the B-29 could operate at significantly higher altitudes than previous bombers and often above the ceiling of enemy fighters. It was also the first bomber to pioneer dual-wheeled tricycle landing gear. Previously, the B-17 Flying Fortress featured a tail wheel and the B-24 Liberator a single nose wheel, which made the latter notoriously unstable on landing. Without discounting these aeronautical innovations, what really distinguished the B-29 from every other bomber in the world was its state-of-the-art gunnery system, which made it quite literally a flying superfortress.

The aircraft featured a General Electric Company model 2CFR55B1 centralized fire-control system, or CFC, which transformed bomber defensive gunnery from a loose collection of independent guns into an integrated gunnery system. The major components of the CFC system were five gunsights, five remotely controlled turrets, five targeting computers, and an electric gun-switching system. Each of the five turrets was operated remotely by a gunner stationed in one of five sighting stations located throughout the aircraft. The firing trajectory was calculated by five targeting computers, each associated with a sighting station and each connected to one or more turrets that could be operated from that single sighting station.

Two turrets were located in the forward section of the aircraft, with the upper forward turret on top of the fuselage and the lower forward turret on the bottom, both positioned slightly aft of the forward pressurized crew compartment where the pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, and navigator sat. Similarly, the upper aft and lower aft turrets were located on the top and bottom of the fuselage toward the rear of the aircraft forward of its tail fin. The fifth was mounted in the tail facing the rear.

The B-29 carried a crew of 11 airmen, five of whom were gunners. The fire control officer, also called the ring gunner or top gunner, sighted through a plexiglass blister on top of the fuselage and were seated in the middle pressurized crew compartment in a tall chair known as the “barber chair.” The right- and left-side gunners, or blister gunners, were stationed below the top gunner, sighting through blisters on opposite sides of the fuselage. The bombardier sat in the nose of the aircraft, forward of the pilot and co-pilot, and functioned as the nose gunner when not engaged in the actual bombing run. The nose gunner’s gunsight retracted to be stowed out of the way when he turned his attention to the bombsight, which was affixed to the floor between his feet. Finally, the tail gunner sat in the rear of the airplane alone in the aft pressurized compartment.

One gunner was assigned primary control or “first call” on the use of each of the five turrets. Through a series of electrical switches, control of the turret could be passed to a secondary gunner who could operate it alone or in conjunction with his primary turret. The nose gunner had primary control of both forward turrets. Secondary control of the upper forward turret fell to the top gunner; the lower forward turret was controlled by either of the side gunners. The top gunner had primary control of the upper aft turret and secondary control of the upper forward turret. The side gunners had primary control of the lower aft turret with secondary control of the lower forward turret and the tail turret. The tail gunner could only control the tail turret.

With all the overlapping fire control possibilities, proper communication among the gunners via the aircraft’s interphone system was paramount, with the fire control officer quarterbacking the whole process. The gun positioning system, with the exception of the tail mount, contained fire interrupter cams, which prohibited the guns from firing on their own aircraft’s wings or tail. However, the guns could fire on their own formation if the weapons were active at the time when control switched between gunners and the guns swung around to the second gunner’s targeting position.

Each of the five turrets featured two air-cooled Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns. In response to the relative effectiveness of frontal attacks, later versions of the aircraft included two additional .50s in the upper forward turret. To avoid overheating the guns, gunners were instructed to fire in short bursts and then count to three before firing again. Hot gun barrels would expand, decreasing accuracy, or could rupture completely or “cook off” the next round by thermally induced firing. A maximum of 25 rounds could be fired at once but then required at least 15 seconds of cooling off, which must have seemed like eternity when engaged with the enemy. Early B-29 models also included a 20mm cannon in the tail mount. The cannon was controlled by the same sighting and firing mechanism as the rear machine gun turret and could be fired in conjunction with the machine guns but not alone. The 20mm round weighed about twice as much as the .50-caliber round but packed nearly three times its force.

Each gunner manually operated a gunsight, which was connected electrically to the CFC system and contained a 2-inch by 3-inch glass eyepiece. The glass optics had two interchangeable sky filters, enabling the gunner to maintain a clear view of his target through the optics in nearly dark conditions or even sighting an enemy attacking from out of the sun. A reticle consisting of a circle of dots aligned around a center dot, similar to the crosshairs on a rifle scope or the focusing marks on a camera viewfinder, was reflected on the optical glass by a reticle lamp of adjustable illumination.

When a target was encountered, the gunner was required to first visually identify the type of enemy aircraft and then adjust the target size knob on the gunsight from 35 feet to 150 feet to correspond with the wingspan of the target aircraft. The projected reticle size changed as the target size knob was adjusted, showing the current target size setting in feet at the 12 o’clock position on the reticle circle. Placing the center dot of the reticle on the center of the target, the gunner would then adjust the gunsight’s range wheel until the target aircraft’s wings completely filled the reticle circle.

Tracking the target then required the smooth movement of the gunsight on both the vertical axis, or elevation, and on the horizontal axis, or azimuth, to keep the target aircraft centered in the reticle and properly ranged within the bounds of the reticle circle. Changes in azimuth were affected by the gunner rotating the gunsight horizontally along with his body, while changes in elevation required moving the gunsight vertically by rotating the two hand wheel grips that were located on the outsides of the gunsight frame. Friction adjustments allowed the gunner to customize the touch of the gunsight’s movements to his preference.

Each movement in the gunsight, whether in elevation or in azimuth, resulted in an electrically activated corresponding movement to the guns (elevation), the turret (azimuth), or both. The mechanism for transmitting these movements involved differential selsyn generators in the gunsight and at the gun emplacement as well as a servo amplifier and two amplidyne generators, which drove the two motors that moved the guns.

With the exception of the tail mount, the turrets could rotate 360 degrees in azimuth and the guns could incline to 90 degrees in elevation relative to the body of the aircraft. The firing triggers were not “pulled” per se, but rather were buttons located adjacent to the hand wheels and depressed by either of the gunner’s thumbs. An action switch depressed by the gunner’s left palm while in contact with the hand wheel served as a control override for the sighting station. If the action switch was not depressed, such as in the event the gunner was incapacitated, the guns could not be fired from that sighting station. Control of the turret(s) then passed to another gunner’s sighting station regardless of the current settings of the electrical control switches, ensuring that all turrets remained operational.

While in contact with the enemy, the gunner simply needed to properly size, range, and track the target with his gunsight and then fire at the appropriate effective range. The CFC system moved the guns while the computer continuously calculated all the corrections needed for the fired projectile to hit the target. With computer-calculated targeting, the effective range of the guns was 900 yards, 50 percent farther than manually sighted guns and over twice the effective range of most enemy fighters’ guns.

The computer introduced the correction as a deviation from the parallel mirroring movements between the gunsight and the guns as transmitted by the system of selsyns. The total calculated correction was the sum of individual corrections for ballistics, parallax, and lead. Ballistics corrections compensated for the deflection of the projectile caused by gravity and by wind as the projectile exited an aircraft traveling around 250 miles per hour. Since the guns themselves were remote from the gunsights, parallax correction allowed for the distance along the length of the aircraft between the gunsight and the gun barrels. Lead correction allowed for the travel distance of the target aircraft during the time the projectile was in the air.

To perform its correction calculations, the computer required a number of pieces of input information obtained from several different sources. These inputs included the current position of the guns in both elevation and azimuth; the aircraft’s true air speed, altitude, and outside temperature, which were input by the aircraft’s navigator; the range to the target obtained from the gunsight as the gunner tracked the target and adjusted the range wheel; and the relative velocity of the target received from two gyroscopes located on the gunsight as the gunner tracked the target.

Depending on the type of parallax, two different models of computers were used. A single-parallax computer, the General Electric model 2CH1C1, was used at sighting stations that had parallax between the gunsight and only one gun location, such as the tail gunner station, which controlled only one turret, or the nose gunner station, whose two turrets were located above and below each other almost equidistant longitudinally from the gunsight. A double-parallax computer, the model 2CH1D1, was used for the three top and side gunners’ sighting stations since all three gunners could simultaneously control two turrets of differing parallax from their gunsight. Although the side gunners were capable of controlling three different turrets via the control switching system, they could only operate two at any one time.

All inputs to the computer were electrical, but the computer itself performed its calculations mechanically since a purely electrical calculator lay outside the reach of existing technology in the era of vacuum tubes with their appetite for electrical current and enormous heat output. Aboard an aircraft, size and weight were further concerns. Conversion of the electrical inputs into the mechanical calculation system was achieved through an array of selsyns and potentiometers.

The computer itself was really several separate but interconnected calculating units contained within the same chassis, which was the size of a suitcase and weighed more than 50 pounds. The ballistic calculating unit was programmed with the known effects of gravity and the ballistic characteristics of a .50-caliber shell fired from the Browning M2, such as its muzzle velocity. To make the ballistics correction calculation, the ballistic unit needed to know the current gun position for the angle of initial velocity, the range to the target, the current true air speed, which affected windage, and the aircraft’s current altitude and outside temperature, which affected the air density and thus the drag on the bullet. Similarly, the parallax computing unit was programmed with the longitudinal distance(s) between its gunsight and the turret(s) that sight could control, but it needed to know the current gun position and the range to the target to compute the parallax correction trigonometrically. Finally, the lead calculating unit computed the lead correction from the range and the relative velocity of the target along with the ballistic characteristics, which affected the time of the projectile to the target.

The computer’s output, which consisted of the parallel signal received from the gunsight selsyn adjusted for the sum of the three calculated corrections, was then converted back into electrical impulses, which fed a servo amplifier, or feedback controller, that drove the two gunpositioning motors, one for elevation and one for azimuth. Thus the computer’s correction was introduced as an alteration to the position of the guns and of the turret from that which would have been exactly parallel to the gunsight’s position.

Because they were connected electrically, the computers did not have to be physically located with either the gunsights or the turrets. The nose gunner’s computer was located in the forward pressurized cabin aft of the pilot’s armor, while the other four computers were placed under the floor in the radar operator’s compartment near the back of the middle pressurized cabin surrounded by armor. In case of a computer failure or combat damage, an override switch allowed the gunner to bypass the computer completely and operate the guns without its correction using a retractable flip-down peep sight on the gunsight.

According to U.S. Army Air Forces records, a total of 3,760 production Superfortresses were delivered, around 70 percent of which were built by Boeing at its plants in Wichita, Kansas, and Renton, Washington. The rest were produced in Marietta, Georgia, by the Bell Aircraft Company and in Omaha, Nebraska, by the Glenn L. Martin Company, later part of Martin-Marietta.

After assembly was complete but before the aircraft was combat ready, the guns were harmonized and the targeting computers tested. First, both guns in a single turret were aligned to parallel target marks by use of a bore sighting tool with alignment made by changes to adjustment screws. Then each turret was aligned with each of the sighting stations that could control it by using a predefined harmonization target placed at least 100 feet away from the aircraft. Adjustments were made to either the selsyn at the sighting station or to the one at the turret, depending on which gunsight and turret combination was being adjusted. After the guns and sighting stations were harmonized, the targeting computers along with all the input systems and calculating components were tested using a comprehensive testing device containing on its face over 50 dials, meters, and switches.

Aircraft production quickly outpaced the manufacturers’ capacity to set up the revolutionary CFC systems, so the USAAF began training its own crews to ensure that the otherwise combat-ready bombers were not delayed in deployment. USAAF Corporal Robert W. “Bob” Truxell of Lansing, Michigan, was part of the first class to graduate from the B-29 CFC and computer training schools at Lowry Field in Denver, Colorado. Truxell had previously washed out of air cadet pilot training due to a three-month bout with rheumatic fever, which permanently disqualified him from serving in a flight crew. The illness proved to be fortuitous since most of his air cadet squadron was later lost in the ill-conceived raid on the Ploesti, Romania, oil refineries on August 1, 1943. After recovering from his illness, Truxell was reassigned from air cadets to aircraft armament, where he completed the remote control turret mechanic course.

After the turret course, Truxell was tapped for the 16-week B-29 CFC specialist course because he had begun studying engineering, including taking trigonometry, at the General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan, before enlisting in February 1943. Corporal Truxell finished first in his CFC class, earning entrance into targeting computer school and a third stripe upon its completion. Shortly thereafter he was given command of the first graduating class and a staff sergeant’s rocker. The new crew’s first assignment was in Georgia.

Truxell writes, “We were all sent to the [Bell Aircraft] B-29 factory in Marietta, Georgia, where completed B-29s were lined up for a mile awaiting proper alignment of the gun turrets and central computer.” He vividly recalls using a fire extinguisher to flush civilians sleeping on the clock at government expense out of the bombers’ pressurized crew tunnels so his crew could access the aft areas of the aircraft. Once the backlog in Georgia was cleared, the crew leapfrogged to various stateside air bases where B-29 squadrons were ready for overseas deployment—except for the final adjustment of their gunnery systems. After a particular squadron deployed, the gunnery crew moved on to the next base. Truxell calls his service a “pretty safe and interesting job.”

The B-29’s revolutionary gunnery system made a Japanese fighter pilot’s job neither pretty safe nor interesting. According to the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest published in December 1945, in the 13-month period from August 1944 to the war’s end in August 1945, B-29s were responsible for the destruction of 914 enemy aircraft in the air with a loss of just 72 of their own to enemy aircraft during more than 31,000 combat sorties flown.

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

If China and America come to blows, it will be here.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Accidental war is rare, but not impossible. Common to all of these scenarios is the potential that Chinese (or less likely, American) public opinion might become so inflamed as to box in policymakers. If Xi Jinping, who has made assertive foreign policy a cornerstone of his administration, feels that he cannot back down and survive politically, then things could get unpredictable very quickly.

Neither China nor the United States want war, at least not in the near future.  China’s military buildup notwithstanding, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its components are not ready to fight the United States.  The U.S., for its part, would surely prefer to avoid the chaos and uncertainty that any military conflict with China would create.

Nevertheless, both China and the United States are making commitments in the South China Sea that each may find difficult to back away from. Over the past two weeks, these commitments have generated a war of words that analysts of the relationship have found troubling.  The key problems focus on China’s efforts to expand (or create) islands in the Spratlys, which could theoretically provide the basis for claims to territorial waters.  The insistence of the United States on freedom of navigation could bring these tensions to a boil. Here are three ways in which tensions in the South China Sea might lead to conflict.

Island Hopping in the SCS

Over the past several months, China has stepped up construction of what observers are calling “The Great Wall of Sand.”  This “great wall” involves expanding a group of islands in the Spratly chain so that they can support airstrips, weapons, and other permanent installations. It appears that Beijing is committed to defending these new islands as an integral parts of Chinese territory, a position that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does not support.  Washington has other ideas, and has maintained that it will carry out freedom-of-navigation patrols in areas that China claims as territorial waters.

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The prospects for conflict are clear. If U.S. ships or aircraft enter waters that China claims, then Chinese sailors, soldiers, and pilots need to take great care about how they respond.  A militarized response could quickly lead to escalation, especially if American forces suffer any kind of serious damage.  It’s also easy to imagine scenarios in which island-building leads China to become embroiled against an ASEAN state. In such a case, a freedom-of-navigation patrol could put China in an awkward position relative to the third party.

Excitable Fighter Jocks

China and the United States have already come close to conflict over aircraft collisions.  When a P-3 Orion collided a PLAN J-8 interceptor in 2001, it led to weeks of recriminations and negotiation before the crew of the P-3 was returned to the United States, and the plane was returned… in a box.

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It’s easy to imagine an even more serious confrontation in the SCS.  Another accidental collision would be bad enough, but if a scenario developed similar to that of the downing of KAL 007, with a Chinese fighter jock actually opening fire on an American plane, the situation could get ugly very quickly.  And if an American pilot fired upon a Chinese plane, the reaction of the Chinese public could become too much for Beijing to reasonably handle.

If China decides to go ahead and declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea, matters could become even more complicated.  The United States made an elaborate display of ignoring China’s ADIZ in the East China Sea, but China has greater interests and a greater presence in the South China Sea. Another declaration would almost certainly incur a similar reaction from the United States, putting American and Chinese planes into close proximity.

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Submarine Misunderstanding

In the Cold War, the Soviet Union and NATO suffered innumerable submarine “near misses,” as boats hunted each other, and occasionally bumped each other, in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. The dynamics of U.S.-Chinese sub interaction hasn’t yet played out in quite the same way, in part because China has yet to establish a sustained SSBN patrol, and I part because Chinese boats do not range as far as their Soviet counterparts. But as the submarine force of the PLAN becomes more adventurous, submarine incidents may increase.

Many analysts are arguing that the PLAN needs to push its submarines past the first island chain in order to seriously threaten U.S. access to China’s littoral.  Preparing for this would require increasing the tempo of the PLAN’s submarine operations, which would more often put China’s boats in proximity with Japanese and American subs.  To be sure, Chinese submarines are loud enough that U.S. boats should have plenty of time to get out of their way, but the same could be said of Soviet boats for much of the Cold War.

If a major submarine incident happened between the United States and China, the nature of the medium might offer some hope for de-escalation (we often don’t hear about these accidents until much later). But such an incident would also put more lives and property at stake than a fighter collision.

Concluding Thoughts

Accidental war is rare, but not impossible. Common to all of these scenarios is the potential that Chinese (or less likely, American) public opinion might become so inflamed as to box in policymakers. If Xi Jinping, who has made assertive foreign policy a cornerstone of his administration, feels that he cannot back down and survive politically, then things could get unpredictable very quickly.

As Denny Roy has argued, China is playing offense in the South China Sea. By establishing facts on the ground (indeed, establishing “ground”), it is creating a situation in which normal U.S. behavior looks like destabilizing intervention. What’s less than clear is that Beijing fully understands the risks of this strategy, or the dangers of pushing the United States Navy on freedom of navigation, one of the long-term core interests of the United States. And given that governments sometimes don’t even understand that they’re playing a dangerous game until they find themselves in the middle of it, a great deal of caution is warranted.

This article first appeared in 2015. 

Image: Reuters.

Elena Pokalova

Security, Middle East

Foreign fighters who are left behind are only destined to rejoin the Islamic State at the first opportunity. But a different trajectory is possible for others if they are repatriated, brought to justice, and returned to a peaceful life.

The United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to address the fate of the foreign fighters remaining in Syria and Iraq on August 21, 2020. The draft resolution called on member states to prevent future security threats from “foreign terrorist fighters” (FTFs) “by bringing them to justice, preventing the radicalization to terrorism and recruitment of FTFs and accompanying family members, particularly accompanying children, including by facilitating the return of the children to their countries of origin, as appropriate and on a case by case basis.”

Around forty thousand people from all over the world had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for such terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State. Many of those people perished on the battlefield or have returned home. However, an active group of foreign supporters of the caliphate stayed until the Islamic State lost territory and collapsed in early 2019. Since then, thousands of foreigners have remained in detention facilities such as the Kurdish-controlled al-Hol or al-Roj camps.

While the draft resolution focused on the rehabilitation and reintegration of such foreign fighters, it did not include the repatriation of foreign fighters to their countries of origin. This was the reason for the U.S. veto. Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, explained that the resolution failed “to even include reference to the crucial first step—repatriation to countries of origin or nationality.”

Repatriation of foreign fighters has been a highly contentious issue. Some countries, like Macedonia, have taken their foreign fighters back. Others, like France, have been more open to repatriating children. Many repatriation efforts have faced resistance from the public and pushback from politicians. For instance, in Norway, a decision to repatriate a Norwegian woman and her two children from Syria prompted the collapse of the governing coalition.

European countries have been especially averse to bringing their foreign fighters back. After all, Europe has had experiences with terrorist attacks at the hands of foreign fighter returnees. The 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the 2015 attack on the Thalys train in France, the 2015 Paris attacks, and the 2016 bombing at the Brussels airport all involved ISIS returnees from Syria and Iraq. The fear is that repatriated foreign fighters could plot similar attacks once at home.

However, returnee perpetrators in those attacks returned back to Europe under the radar of security services. Mehdi Nemmouche, the man who attacked the Brussels Museum, made his way back through Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong to avoid detection. In the case of the Paris attacks, the perpetrators exploited refugee routes to smuggle foreign fighters back. 

In contrast, repatriated foreign fighters would remain visible to security services and security risks would actually be reduced. First, returnees could be prosecuted for crimes committed in Syria and Iraq and be placed in prison. Second, various administrative measures such as passport revocation would allow the authorities to significantly restrict the potential movements of suspect individuals. Finally, keeping track of repatriated returnees and providing them with rehabilitation assistance would offer venues for monitoring their activities.  

If security risks become more manageable in cases of controlled repatriation, then the world faces greater uncertainty if foreign fighters remain in Syria and Iraq. Returnees are not the only individuals that pose a threat. Lessons from history indicate that foreign fighter relocators can pose equal, if not greater, threats.  

After the Soviet-Afghan war, foreign fighters who were denied an opportunity to return home joined numerous armed conflicts around the world. Those relocating foreign fighters helped spread jihadist ideologies around the globe and promoted the use of terrorism. For instance, American Christopher Paul traveled to Afghanistan and Bosnia before making his way to Germany to train Islamist cells there. In the 1990s, some foreign fighter relocators found refuge in Europe, where some helped build European jihadist networks. Thus, Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri was active in London’s Finsbury Park Mosque where he disseminated militant jihadist ideas. Currently, the danger remains that if foreign fighters are not repatriated from Syria and Iraq, then they might similarly move on to other locales to further spread Islamic State ideals.  

While many countries are paralyzed with indecision, the Islamic State is taking advantage of the situation. Kurdish authorities have reported that Islamic State members have made prison escapes. Numerous reports have warned that the Islamic State is regaining strength and has been successfully mounting terrorist attacks in the region. Foreign fighters who are left behind are only destined to rejoin the Islamic State at the first opportunity. It is too late for some foreign fighters who have already done so. But a different trajectory is possible for others if they are repatriated, brought to justice, and returned to a peaceful life.

Elena Pokalova, PhD, is an associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University in Washington, DC, and author of Returning Islamist Foreign Fighters: Threats and Challenges to the West. The views expressed in the article are her own.

Image: Reuters

Ross Harrison, Alex Vatanka

Security, Middle East

The agreement with Iran could end up being the first major foray of many that gave Beijing a long reach into the Middle East at the expense of the United States, and even Russia.

Given today’s contentious global geopolitical map, the budding China-Iran relationship seems like a perfect marriage. China needs to buy oil and gas to fuel its economic growth, and Iran desperately needs revenue to sustain its flagging economy. This is particularly true given the collapse of global oil prices and the punishing sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran.  

The cooperation between Tehran and Beijing, however, extends way beyond the energy sector. Iran figures into China’s plan to extend its economic influence across Eurasia through its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Iran needs foreign direct investment. This strategic alignment explains the twenty-five-year, $400 billion economic deal presently under discussion between China and Iran. If this agreement is fully implemented between the two countries, then its ramifications will not be limited to China-Iran relations. In fact, they will have repercussions for Washington’s standing in the Middle East and beyond. 

China, Iran and the American Foe 

With a U.S. presidential election looming, and with all of the fanfare of the Israel-U.A.E.-Bahrain deals, Washington does not seem terribly alarmed about the possibility of a stepped-up Iran-China relationship. In fact, there is skepticism about whether the twenty-five-year agreement can be sustained. Claims about the strategic nature of the partnership have been dismissed as hyperbole. Skeptics claim that the deal is essentially an entirely Iranian-made wish-list presented to the Chinese, without any proof that Beijing is willing to fully sign it.   

But Washington should not be complacent. As China’s global footprint expands, and Tehran remains incentivized to resist U.S. pressure, the two states have a basic, powerful, and potentially enduring shared motivation for cooperation: to push back against U.S. efforts in the Middle East.

While it is still unclear how the relationship will play out, the geographic area for potential cooperation is surprisingly vast, extending from the Mediterranean coast of Syria to the steppes of Central Asia, and from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. If implemented, the deal could act as a force multiplier for Iran at a time when Washington claims its maximum pressure campaign is severely diminishing the country’s strategic punch.

While negotiations could progress slower than Iran would like, there are few baked-in historical conflicts that would completely derail a deal with China. Without any major substantive disputes and absent a fraught political history, the relationship between Tehran and Beijing will likely endure and even strengthen if the deal is implemented.

That having been said, one should be careful not to conclude too quickly that strong Iran-China relations in the coming decade will be trouble-free, or beyond the point of no return. In fact, there are several possible paths Iran-China relations could take in the future. One scenario could be that the agreement with Iran ends up being the first major foray of many that gave Beijing a long reach into the Middle East at the expense of the United States, and even Russia. Perhaps this agreement will signal that Iran is permanently giving up on what it sees as an unreliable and hostile West, and tacking toward more predictable Eastern partners.

But this future scenario is not inevitable. Another possible scenario could be that the benefits prove to have been more tactical than strategic, and limited to the economic sphere. 

Washington’s Choice

Washington needs to understand that these two future realities could hinge on the policy choices it makes today. In other words, the United States could be the wildcard driver of Iran’s relationship with China in the future. 

This claim is not pure conjecture. The partnership between Tehran and Beijing has already gotten ballast from actions taken in Washington. Trump’s trade war against China has given Beijing an incentive to challenge U.S. interests globally. After all, the U.S. renouncement of the 2015 international nuclear deal (JCPOA) gave Tehran a strong motivation to seek safety in China’s embrace.  

This deal might have taken place regardless of the nuclear deal’s demise. Unfortunately, America’s hostile policies have given both countries added incentives to make it successful. Iran, counterintuitively, has become one of China’s biggest champions in the Middle East and the broader Islamic World, despite Beijing’s blatant persecution of its Chinese Muslim (Uyghurs) minority population. The perceived need to keep China close is so great that officials in Tehran have gone as far as suggesting that the Muslims under pressure in China are “bad” [allegedly of jihadist persuasion] and China is doing the world a favor. This logic is only a smokescreen for Tehran’s need to sidle up to Beijing at a time when Iran is under siege from the United States. From the Chinese side, at the diplomatic level, Beijing protects Iran in places like the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors as a way to signal to Washington that it cannot be pushed around.

Aside from trying to resist pressure from the United States, behind the scenes, there are powerful domestic forces at play that are giving impetus to Iran’s relations with China. The dominant faction in power in Tehran needs Chinese diplomatic and economic cover as it tries to cement its hold on power, prepares for a presidential election in 2021, and is faced with a looming, yet unpredictable, succession crisis, should Iran’s eighty-one-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, be incapacitated or die.

At the moment, China is in a position to dictate to Tehran. Besides giving the Chinese economic interests preferential treatment, Washington should worry that Iran can be a passageway for Beijing’s rise as a powerhouse in the Middle East and beyond. For example, growing military-to-military ties between Iran and China, including the sale of sophisticated military equipment,  such as anti-ship missiles that can threaten U.S. naval supremacy in the Persian Gulf, as well as sophisticated surveillance capabilities, should be a concern to Washington. If this happens, then Beijing’s primary aim will not be financial. Instead, it will use the opportunity to challenge the U.S. position in the Middle East through Iran.

This concern about Iran’s growing military capabilities was one of the reasons Trump gave for tearing up the nuclear deal. It was a concern that has become even more intense due to Iran’s relations with China (and Russia). But the concern started much earlier and is nothing new. As early as 1992, U.S. Naval Intelligence warned that the United States might not be able to “safely deploy a carrier in the Persian Gulf” due to Iranian capabilities. Back then, the fear was that Moscow would be Iran’s supplier. Today, under Trump’s policies toward Iran and China, Beijing is also likely to provide advanced military systems to the Islamic Republic.

But that does not have to be the case. Policy choices going forward, either under a Biden or Trump administration, still matter. While Iran clearly wants the United States out of the Middle East, China does not want the United States to totally withdraw. Washington has underwritten the defense of the Persian Gulf, which serves Chinese economic interests quite well. Beijing’s goal is for the United States to continue to bear the costs of providing Gulf security, but to limit the geopolitical and economic benefits to Washington for doing so. In other words, Beijing wants the United States to underwrite the costs, while China reaps the political and economic spoils.

Another potential wedge between Iran and China could be that Beijing has interests across the Middle East that extend beyond Iran. It has, for example, very good ties with the Gulf States and Israel, something it is intent on preserving. If Iran thinks that China will reflexively side with Tehran against all of its rivals, then it is mistaken.

Moreover, should China have a greater presence in the region and need to juggle multiple interests, Tehran might feel pressure from Beijing to change aspects of its revisionist policies. This might include Tehran’s hostility toward Israel as well as Tehran’s support for militant non-state actors. Ironically, these would be the same irritants that put the United States and Iran at loggerheads.

Iran and China are, in fact, strange bedfellows. The world’s largest Islamic theocracy and the world’s largest communist system have many inherent incompatibilities. One will be hard pushed to come up with a list of common values other than a joint desire to hang on to power and assist each other on the international stage as much as possible.

Washington has choices to make. It can continue on the warpath with Iran and its trade war with China. But this course of action will increase the probability that the China-Iran connection will flower and grow into a strategic alliance that will work against U.S. interests. Or the United States can try to find a way back towards a diplomatic track with Tehran that might benefit the region in terms of tamping down instability, but also exploit some of the inherent cracks in the nascent China-Iran relationship. China’s global rise is inevitable and ineluctable. But the United States should take diplomatic action to ensure that Iran does not become the path of least resistance for China to get there faster.    

Ross Harrison is a senior fellow and director of research at the Middle East Institute. He is also on the faculty of the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he was a professor in the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. With Paul Salem, he co-edited Escaping the Conflict Trap: Toward Ending Civil Wars in the Middle East (2019) 

Alex Vatanka is the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. He is the author of two books: “The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979” (2021) and “Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence” (2015). You can follow him at @AlexVatanka.

Image: Reuters

Thomas Trask, Jonathan Ruhe

Security, Eurasia

Two initially separate trends are coming together to drastically reshape the region with new opportunities and challenges for the United States.

Given everything that’s happened this year, and now that we’ve filled the “double hurricane” box, perhaps it wouldn’t be that surprising to see “armed conflict within NATO” as the winning square on our 2020 bingo card. This is precisely what could happen without overdue U.S. leadership in the increasingly volatile and strategically important Eastern Mediterranean.

Washington largely overlooked the area for decades after the end of the Cold War, both because it could afford to and because it had more pressing problems elsewhere. But two initially separate trends are coming together to drastically reshape the region with new opportunities and challenges for the United States.

The first is Turkey’s transformation under President Recep Erdoğan. What used to be a secular and democratic Western partner guarding NATO’s southeastern flank is now much more Islamist, nationalist and autocratic. A key feature of this new Turkey is its interventionism around the Eastern Mediterranean, featuring a very Turkish version of gunboat diplomacy.

The second is the discovery of sizable undersea energy reserves by Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and potentially other regional actors in the future. Combined these constitute some of the largest offshore natural gas finds anywhere in the world over the past decade. 

These two trends first came to a head late last year when Turkey intervened militarily in Libya’s civil war. In exchange for saving it from defeat, Ankara secured from the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Tripoli government a maritime boundary agreement purporting to recognize vast Turkish offshore territorial claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Not accidentally, this agreement directly threatens everyone else in the neighborhood. Unlike its neighbors, which agree on applying the Law of the Sea, Ankara uniquely contends that islands cannot be part of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Thus its agreement with Tripoli extends nearly to the shorelines of Cyprus and Greek islands like Crete and Rhodes, threatening efforts by those countries to explore for additional energy and—along with Israel—deliver it via pipeline to Europe.

Now tensions are heating up. To demonstrate its expansive new EEZ claim, Turkey sent energy exploration ships with naval escorts into Cypriot and, just last month, Greek waters. Along with Ankara’s growing military and economic footprint in Libya, these provocations have almost triggered shootouts with naval vessels of Turkey’s NATO allies France and Greece. In recent days and weeks Turkey, Russia, France, the UAE, Greece and Cyprus have each bolstered the presence of their military in the region. 

Brussels and Berlin have tried to defuse these tensions while expressing support for Greece and Cyprus, but further Turkish escalation appears likely. Even when speaking with one voice, the European Union lacks credibly strong disincentives to deter Ankara, especially now as economic deterioration inside Turkey—made worse by the coronavirus—increases Erdogan’s temptation to stoke nationalism and seek diversions abroad.

Thus far, the United States has largely allowed the situation to deteriorate by standing aside. As the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) has laid out in several recent reports, Washington must reassert its former stabilizing role in the region to address these proliferating crises and protect U.S. interests.

A crucial step will be to appoint a U.S. Special Envoy for the Eastern Mediterranean. 

He or she should work with the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum—Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority—to create a clear counterweight to Turkey’s growing obstruction of regional energy development. 

American diplomatic leadership also could help de-escalate tensions between Ankara and Athens, both of whom remain open to talks. And last month’s EEZ agreement between Greece and Egypt, reached in accord with international law, did not foreclose future negotiations between Turkey and Egypt. 

A special envoy also must end a decade of “leading from behind” on Libya, where Turkey and Russia appear to be establishing permanent beachheads and coordinating to shape the country’s future, despite being on opposing sides of the conflict. Among other priorities, U.S. officials should focus on limiting Ankara’s influence over the Tripoli government. These limitations should include leveraging options to redeploy U.S. military assets out of Turkey, and perhaps consider basing them in Greece.

As a complement to stronger diplomacy, the United States also must bolster its military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Deeper defense ties with Athens would help counter both Turkey and Russia. This could be achieved through additional U.S. rotational deployments, increased foreign military financing for Greek purchases of U.S. weapons, and perhaps even permanent basing in Greece. 

A recent decision by Washington to loosen the arms embargo on Cyprus should be viewed as a productive step toward eliminating Russia’s own presence on the strategically vital island in exchange for closer U.S. defense cooperation with Nicosia.

Amid nearly unprecedented tensions within the transatlantic alliance, these initial measures would go a long way toward promoting U.S. interests in stability and peaceful energy development.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Trask (ret.), former vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, serves on the Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), where Jonathan Ruhe is Director of Foreign Policy. 

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

Security, Asia

Such a feat would require major changes. Could China pull it off?

Key Point: This mysterious plane could be Beijing's version of the F-35. No doubt it was made from stolen U.S. technologies but China needs to improve its copy to make it carrier-worthy.

The Chinese appear to be preparing to launch a first-of-its-kind new-generation fighter jet in 2021, a move which could signify a large step forward in power-projection and air-attack capability for a country seeking to strengthen its global influence.

Citing an “aviation industry report,” the Chinese-backed Global Times stated that the new plane is likely to be a carrier-launched fighter variant of its fifth-generation J-31 stealth fighter jet. It has long been discussed that China may engineer a new, carrier-based variant of its J-31 jet, in what might appear as a transparent attempt to rival America’s F-35 fighter jet. 

The report speculates that the new plane could be the now-in-development Shenyang J-15 fighter jet but is more likely an FC-31 carrier variant of the J-31 jet. The Global Times reports said the Chinese have been rumored to be amid ongoing modifications to its J-31 jet for the specific purpose of engineering a carrier-launched variant.

The existence of an aircraft such as this could provide some kind of counterbalance to the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B fighter jet and the U.S. Navy’s F-35C fighter jet, depending upon its level of technical sophistication. An expeditionary fifth-generation stealth fighter able to operate from Chinese amphibious ships and aircraft carriers does bring new attack possibilities for maritime commanders seeking to project power. The possibility certainly does align with China’s well-known work to build its own indigenous fleet of aircraft carriers.

While there has been much discussion about the extent to which China’s J-31 fighter jet clearly seems to replicate the U.S. F-35 fighter jet in terms of external configuration, many of its internal components may simply not be fully known. Despite what appears to be a transparent attempt to possibly “rip off” F-35 design specs, it is not at all clear if an FC-31 would in fact rival a Navy F-35C. Much of this would rely upon sensor technology, weapons range and onboard computing, as those areas encompass many of the attributes unique to the F-35 fighter jet.

For instance, the F-35 fighter jet not only provides armed multirole air attack support but also functions as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aerial node able to find and transmit threat information at long ranges, at times beyond the horizon. The F-35s Distributed Aperture System surround cameras and Electro-Optical Targeting System enables it to operate in a sensor-drone type capacity as well as an attack platform. While designed to be maneuverable, the F-35 fighter jet is engineered to detect threats well in advance of being close enough to require dog-fighting.

A carrier-launched fifth-generation stealth fighter would massively expand China’s ability to project power internationally, especially in places such as the South China Sea where it may be difficult to build runways for a fixed-wing attack. A sea-based fighter could surveil or target island areas without needing to take off and land from one of the islands themselves, thereby making themselves less vulnerable to ground or runway strikes against their air operations. It also goes without saying that fifth-generation air support would change the threat equation for Taiwan should it face an amphibious attack. 

After all, having just fourth-generation aircraft able to launch from carriers, such as U.S. F/A-18s, may limit an ability to conduct operations over areas with extremely advanced air defenses. A stealthy fighter, however, while still at risk against some emerging air defenses, enables global power projection in a substantially different way. It takes little imagination to envision China’s grand ambitions for expanded global influence, as having attack-power projection fortifies their current efforts to expand into many areas of Africa, the Middle East and of course Southeast Asia. 

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

This article first appeared earlier this year and is reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Carlo J. V. Caro, Sasha Dov Bachmann

Security, Asia

Since 1983, Beijing has been a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty which prohibits new territorial claims, other than the seven original ones. If China decided to alter this position, it would have to abandon the treaty or push for a reform in 2048.

Climate change has started to show its undeniable effects in global geopolitics. Its first consequences are seen in both polar continents, as their ice caps are increasingly melting. The United States, China and Russia are justling for influence in the Arctic, while the Antarctic has begun to experience similar characteristics, with the additional involvement of other European and Latin American powers.

The growing access to the Arctic ocean has transformed the region into a front of geopolitical tension because of its value as a commercial route and its natural resources. The Arctic has around 13 percent of non explored oil reserves, 30 percent of gas, and an abundance of uranium, minerals, gold, and diamonds. Greenland possesses the largest reserves of minerals outside China needed for the production of batteries and phones. For China itself, it is an important source of minerals and for the establishment of a route towards the United States. China seeks to develop a polar silk road as part of its global program in the construction of railways, ports, and other works in dozens of countries.

While mining in Greenland has high costs due to the environment, these can be reduced as the ice caps melt. This allows demand for potential buyers. From a strategic point of view, Greenland forms part of what the United States considers a crucial path for naval operations in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. It is also important because of its proximity to the United States. For these reasons the former U.S. secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, retired pressured Denmark to reject Chinese financial investments into three commercial airports in Greenland.

China uses its Belt and Road initiative as a debt trap, investing in regions to create debts that cannot be repaid. In exchange, Beijing steals strategic assets. In this manner, China has acquired strategic assets like a port in Sri Lanka. It is China’s belief that the polar regions will contribute to its development even though they are located far from them. Beijing, therefore, plans to emulate its actions in the South China Sea for the Arctic and Antarctic. In the South China sea, it slowly invaded disputed areas, establishing infrastructure and avoiding conflict. In this way, it, therefore, expanded its economic and military capacities, as well as its interests and sovereignty.

Beijing is planning the construction of submarines to operate in the arctic and it has examined how to build submarines capable of surfacing out of the ice caps. The Chinese icebreaking vessel Xue Long II was sent to the thirty-sixth Antarctic mission of China to supply the scientific base of Zhonstan, one of the four which China maintains in the area. This was the first time that type of Chinese vessel arrived in the Antarctic, demonstrating Beijing’s growing interest to consolidate its presence. This natural resources-rich region has been disputed by numerous countries, although litigations have been practically frozen since 1961 by the Treaty of the Antarctic. China has therefore forced itself into a complex system of relations, having launched its first expedition only in 1983. In comparison, the countries that have been historically connected to the region like Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Norway, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have undertaken missions since the nineteenth century, and the seven territorial claims date to the first part of the twentieth century.

China’s relations with Latin America cannot be separated from its ambitions in the Antarctic and will be fundamental for its expansionism in the years to come. In the 1990s, as military dictatorships were falling in Latin America, President Bill Clinton sought to promote neoliberalism in the region. But the failure of this policy and the rise of local nationalistic leftists left the United States with few friends in Latin America. After the financial crisis of 2008, China took advantage of the economic conditions in Latin America to expand their presence. Washington’s policies under President Donald Trump toward Latin America have allowed China to continue to consolidate itself in the continent.

Aside from its wealth in natural resources and its potential to supply Chinese markets with commodities, Latin America has a strategic significance. Since Washington has a network of alliances neutralizing Beijing’s expansionism in the Pacific, China’s aim is to ship its influence to the Western hemisphere. This encirclement includes Beijing’s aim to end the external recognition of Taipei by using its leverage on Latin American countries, many of whom have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Panama, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador are some of the most recent countries to have dropped recognition of Taiwan.

China’s economic and geopolitical interests are therefore interrelated. Beijing has invested in great infrastructure projects, from the Tren Maya connecting the beaches of Riviera Maya and destinations in the Yucatan peninsula, to a space monitoring station in Argentina. These investments stimulate their economies, while allowing Beijing the capacity to exercise their power over critical sectors and making Latin America dependent on China. Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela are countries that are increasingly falling into this debt trap. Already, China has overtaken the IMF and the World Bank as Latin America’s largest lender. China aims to facilitate the acquisition of projects for its companies, to assure Chinese products have a competitive edge in Latin America against the United States, and to internationalize its currency. Moreover, these investments also change the conditions of employment, as there is uncertainty of whether the jobs created are for locals or to create Chinese immigration to Latin America.

Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina under President Mauricio Macri, two U.S allies, have both employed tough anti-China rhetoric, only to find out their economies cannot survive without Beijing’s demand for their production of soy and raw materials. Not only has the role of the United States in Latin America’s trade gone down nearly 20 percent from 2000 to 2015, but Washington is also a competitor in agricultural production. Additionally, Beijing projects itself as a cyberpower, and has become part of the construction of the 5G network in Colombia, the country frequently described as the “U.S staunchest ally in Latin America.” In Argentina, the Chinese space monitoring station, managed by an agency linked to the People’s Liberation Army, is fenced off to Argentine officials, with no idea what communications it might be capturing in the region.

For the last ten years, Argentina has sought to pass laws that seek to reclaim their continental platform which they believe extends to the Antarctic. This year, Governor of Buenos Aires Axel Kiciloff indicated that the largest province in the country was the Antarctic, assuming the province of Buenos Aires was not considered. This reflects the notion for Buenos Aires the British Empire amputated its territorial integrity. Chile’s and Argentina’s relationship is also complex, reaching times bordering on war. With the arrival of President Alberto Fernandez, the relationship has experienced strong disagreements around maritime delimitations and Buenos Aires has sought to neutralize Chine’s projection towards the Antarctic. This same year, Uruguay received the Russian research vessel Admiral Vladimirsky on its way to the Antarctic to celebrate the 200-year-old discovery by Russian explorers, an event disputed by the British, and conduct a research expedition. China aims to catch up and it has mobilized towards the region since it experienced economic growth in 1990. Beijing considers it highly strategic, something shared by the rest of the world. China’s four bases and the construction of a fifth one, are dispersed throughout the Antarctic giving it a wide and ample reach into the continent.

Since 1983, Beijing has been a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty which prohibits new territorial claims, other than the seven original ones. If China decided to alter this position, it would have to abandon the treaty or push for a reform in 2048. This treaty has been instrumental in avoiding conflicts between the numerous countries that have territorial claims and also between those that possess research centers since it forbids military activities and establishes freedom for scientific work. The treaty also prohibits mining in order to protect the environment. While the Antarctic is rich in petroleum, gas and other minerals, it’s tough climatic conditions have made it expensive for its exploitation.

But the increasing Chinese interest in the Antarctic, especially after Xi Jinping took over, has generated worries to all the signatories of the treaty, especially those with claims in areas that have Chinese bases. Since 2013, China has pressured for the establishment of a Specially Designated Area in the Arctic. It has argued that it wants to protect the environment around its base. Nevertheless, this is a false pretense, and it is viewed with suspicion by the other powers.

The Kunlun station was established in 2009 and it is located in one the highest points of the antarctic, with both potential military and civilian applications. The center has been used for the Chinese space program and it has become a matter of pride for Beijing due to their belief they have reached parity in scientific research with the United States and Russia in the South Pole. More specifically, the Antarctic has a special role to play in the modernization and expansion of the Chinese Armed Forces. The base is essential for the development of a Chinese satellite system of navigation, similar to the GPS, Galileo, and Glonass. Satellite navigation systems are crucial in times of war since they are used to position and measure the timings of missiles. This station is perfectly positioned to increase the precision of Chinese navigation systems, therefore increasing their capacity.

To undertake military research is a violation of the Antarctic Treaty. The treaty allows members to conduct inspections but they are highly expensive and dangerous due to climatic conditions. This does not allow an efficient process of inspection, especially in areas like that are very remote.  If China is able to get the Specially Designated Area, then it will have increased influence over its activities around Kunlun station. But until now, this initiative has not been welcomed by the other signatories of the treaty even though Beijing has exerted pressure on Australia, the UK, France, Argentina, Norway, and New Zealand.

Carlo J. V. Caro researches U.S. Foreign Policy and Terrorism. He holds advanced degrees in Security Studies, and Islamic Studies from Columbia University.

Sasha Dov Bachmann is a professor of Law at the University of Canberra, Australia, and Research Fellow at NATO SHAPE Pacific, Hybrid Threats and Lawfare.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

Security, Asia

The Great War at sea presents an example worth emulating in certain respects and modifying or rejecting in others.

Here's What You Need To Remember: It’s doubtful any East Asian fight would be a one-on-one affair. This makes a heartening departure from the First World War precedent. While Japan is not today’s reigning maritime hegemon, it is the beneficiary of a preexisting and durable alliance with the reigning maritime hegemon, the United States. What it lacks in innate strength it can make up in allied solidarity so long as the transpacific relationship endures.

The First World War is the gift that keeps on giving when surveying modern Asian geopolitics and pondering how to manage it.

Consider what the Great War has to say about the military balance between China and Japan and how an East Asian war might unfold. Conventional opinion in Japan has long held that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would more or less steamroller the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) in wartime. Demographics, economics, defense budgets, you name it: they all line up on China’s side.

And there’s no gainsaying the impact of decades of meteoric economic growth and defense-budget increases on the mainland coupled with economic malaise in the island state. A productive economy furnishes the resources to amass military might while a stagnant one withholds warmaking resources. Beijing has availed itself of the opportunity flowing from its economic reform and opening project. To all appearances the balance of forces now tilts alarmingly toward the PLA.

Game over.

But not so fast: brute numbers of ships, planes, and missiles aren’t everything in combat. Far from it. The ability to combine all available assets for tactical and operational gain is what counts, and the order of battle—the panoply of hardware making up the military inventory—comprises only part of a nation’s martial portfolio. For example, the geographic setting matters. That’s why Clausewitz counsels commanders to evaluate the strength and situation of potential combatants when undertaking a net assessment. Tallying up hardware tells only part of the story.

And situation—geography—takes rank with Japan.

In that sense the island state resembles another island state situated off a great continent and squaring off against a continental aggressor. Namely, fin de siècle Great Britain. The British Isles stand athwart the sea lanes connecting the Low Countries, Germany, and Baltic countries to the broad Atlantic Ocean. A strong British fleet can barricade northwestern European navies within the North or Baltic seas with ease compared to, say, a blockade of France, which features Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts populated by multiple seaports.

British seamen had to block two seaways. Sealing the narrow English Channel was a fairly simple prospect. It could be done with minefields, small torpedo craft, and gunnery arrayed along the shoreline. That left the wide northern corridor between Scotland and Norway. Some 250 nautical miles of open sea separate the Royal Navy station at Scapa Flow, in Scotland, from the Norwegian coast. Britain’s Grand Fleet thus had to erect a defense perimeter spanning those waters to wall in the German High Seas Fleet. That made for an asset-intensive but workable strategy.

Now, the resemblance between the two offshore contestants is admittedly inexact. All comparisons are. Britannia ruled the waves in yesteryear whereas Japan isn’t the global marine hegemon of its day. It can nevertheless contemplate blockading the north Chinese seaboard—just as Britain cordoned off the North Sea and English Channel and mostly penned up the German surface fleet within.

Asian geography is even more auspicious for offshore combatants. The Japanese home islands and southwestern islands—the Ryukyus and Senkakus—enclose the mainland coast north of Taiwan. Sea traffic must exit the “first island chain” through the straits puncturing the island chain. The defense perimeter already exists, and it has immovable guard towers in the form of islands. Fortify the islands, array combat vessels or warplanes to close the straits, or both, and you confine Chinese shipping and aircraft to the China seas.

China depends on ready access to the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean for economic and military ventures. If the JSDF throttles that access, it can make major trouble for China—and that prospect would discourage PLA mischief-making. China could be deterred where imperial Germany was not.

Best of all, swarms of small craft and planes, manned or unmanned, could spearhead island-chain defense alongside land-based armaments such as anti-ship and anti-air missiles. Such implements are cheap compared to, say, Aegis destroyers. They can be built in abundance. This is an affordable strategy—helping Tokyo offset China’s advantage in defense budgets and force structure. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) doesn’t need latter-day counterparts to pricey Royal Navy battleships and cruisers to patrol the blockade line. It can make do with “flotilla” craft reminiscent of the rudimentary subs and torpedo craft of yore.

Plugging the English Channel, a narrow sea, makes a better metaphor for JSDF strategy than does guarding the Scotland-Norway corridor. Japan can wage perimeter defense on the cheap.

U-boat blockade runners were another problem for Britain. They simply swam underneath Royal Navy blockade craft prowling the surface and made their way out to the high seas to sink merchant shipping. But here too the comparison works in favor of contemporary Japan. Undersea terrain in and around the straits imparts predictability to submarine movements. It compels skippers to traverse predictable pathways to reach high-seas operating grounds. Terrain also limits how deep they can dive while essaying a breakout. Narrowing subs’ operating space simplifies matters for sub hunters.

In short, the JMSDF and fellow services could pull off the same feat the Royal Navy did a century ago—an effective blockade—without deploying the same weight of armed force. In Clausewitzian parlance: the advantage in military strength goes to China, the advantage in geographic situation to Japan. It’s far from obvious who commands the overall advantage in a one-on-one fight.

But it’s doubtful any East Asian fight would be a one-on-one affair. This makes a heartening departure from the First World War precedent. While Japan is not today’s reigning maritime hegemon, it is the beneficiary of a preexisting and durable alliance with the reigning maritime hegemon, the United States. What it lacks in innate strength it can make up in allied solidarity so long as the transpacific relationship endures.

Aggregating JSDF capabilities with those supplied by U.S. forces in the Pacific paints a truer picture of the force balance.

What if a proven Anglo-American alliance had been in place by 1914, when the guns of August rang out? The United States had not consummated its ascent to world power by then, but it was a power on the make. Its economic and industrial might waxed even as British supremacy started to wane relative to continental foes. It’s conceivable Kaiser Wilhelm & Co. would have desisted from invading Belgium and France had yet another great power arrayed itself with the Entente before war broke out. Peace may have held had America made its weight felt in European geopolitics.

It has made its weight felt in Asian politics for many decades now. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty dates from the 1950s—1960 in its current form—and held firm through the Cold War, the post-Cold War doldrums in Asian geopolitical competition, and China’s rise to regional eminence. No pact commits one ally to automatic war should another do something rash, but the U.S.-Japan alliance comes as close as any multinational arrangement could. The Security Treaty represents the gold standard for alliance solidarity alongside the North Atlantic Treaty that underwrites NATO.

So the East Asian military balance appears ambiguous when comparing orders of battle, while the U.S.-Japan alliance commands a pronounced geographic advantage. That leaves foreseeing and “gaming” out battle scenarios to determine whether the allies have the implements they need to prosecute real-world operations. True-to-life wargames will expose shortfalls and help commanders and officials align force design with strategy.

Great Britain came out of an age of “splendid isolation” under the press of great-power war a century ago. That involved wrenching change and encouraged Berlin to doubt the scope and fervency of British commitments on the Continent. Tokyo knows it does not have to face the PLA alone—and Beijing knows it too.

And then there’s the question of skill and valor in the services. War is a human affair. As Admiral Bradley Fiske observed during World War I, navies are fighting machines. (The same goes for armies and air forces.) Machines underperform without skilled users. Proficient mechanics wring maximum work out out of their machines, harnessing all of their theoretical potential. Machines operated by slipshod or lackadaisical users fulfill only part of their potential. Two contending forces could deploy exactly the same armaments, sensors, and related equipment. One would still lose. And in all likelihood it would lose because of training deficiencies, a deficit of strategic, operational, or tactical vision, or basic human frailties such as tepid fighting spirit in the ranks.

Intelligence specialists can count up forces, more or less, and estimate how they may perform in action. Human prowess is harder to measure but no less crucial. China has not fielded a serious oceangoing navy since the Ming Dynasty six centuries ago. It is a newcomer to martial strife at sea and has little relevant heritage to tap for inspiration and insight. Japanese mariners, by contrast, enjoy a great legacy: the enviable record compiled by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Japan scholar Alessio Patalano notes that for obvious reasons the JMSDF skips over the World War II imperial navy when seeking inspiration. Instead seafarers look back to the Meiji navy headed by Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō—the service that defeated Chinese and Russian navies, and did so mere decades after its founding. That’s a legacy to take heart in.

Japan has overcome bulkier foes before—and done so with panache.

As it turns out, then, gauging the outcome of a Sino-Japanese war is anything but simple or straightforward. And that’s a good thing! Forbearance may reign in Beijing so long as Chinese leaders doubt they can get their way in Asian quarrels by force of arms. Doubt and fear in Chinese minds are friends to the U.S.-Japan alliance.

So the Great War at sea presents an example worth emulating in certain respects and modifying or rejecting in others. Let’s devise forces capable of mounting a low-cost strategy, keep the alliance sturdy, and cultivate mariners, soldiers, and aviators who extract full value from their fighting machines. Do that and Tokyo may yet prevail.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition due out next month). The views voiced here are his alone.​ This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Security,

To make peace, be ready for war?

Here's What You Need To Remember: “We want to raise the threshold to the highest level possible and let adversaries know we can counter any action that they may take and deliver consequences should deterrence fail. Deterrence is the ultimate goal, and this allows us to deter along the full spectrum of conflict. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the adversary does not miscalculate and think we have a weakness in this area,” Clark explained.

It might seem like a paradox: be ready to fight a limited “tactical” nuclear war and maintain an ability to ensure catastrophic annihilation of an enemy with nuclear weapons to keep the peace. 

This contradiction in terms, one might say, forms the conceptual basis for the Pentagon’s current nuclear-weapons strategy which not only calls for a new generation of ICBMs, but also directs the development and deployment of several low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons options. 

This includes nuclear-armed cruise missiles, submarine-launched nuclear weapons with low-yield warheads, and scalable air-launched nuclear missiles and glide bombs. 

“The central idea is we must be able to survive in a conflict where the environment is characterized by the use of a nuclear weapon,” Lt Gen Richard M. Clark, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, told the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace in a video discussion. 

The strategic basis for this, Clark maintained, is grounded in what he called CNI, meaning Conventional-Nuclear Integration. Such a tactical aim incorporates the development of dual-use weapons systems such as the emerging Long-Range Stand-Off weapon air-launched nuclear cruise missile which can fire with or without a nuclear payload. 

The Pentagon has already deployed a new “low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile,” armed with a nuclear payload enabled by a modified Trident II D5 re-entry body.  The weapon, Pentagon officials tell TNI, is called the W76-2. The Pentagon used to have a nuclear-armed Tomahawk missile, something which seems to introduce some interesting questions about additional applications for low-yield warheads.

The Air Force is now refining a CNI Capstone Concept and report for Congress and the Pentagon leadership on the topic, to ensure that weapons development continues to incorporate a full-spectrum of nuclear-weapons capabilities. 

The goal of developing tactical or “lower-yield” nuclear weapons, Clark explained, is quite different than that pursued by the U.S. during the Cold War. 

“This is different from a Cold War mentality where we had nuclear artillery, short-range rockets where we had weapons that would allow us to fight tactically in a conflict. Today we are trying to prepare ourselves to respond with whatever force is necessary in a nuclear environment. It is not just to fight tactically but the ultimate goal is to deter,” Clark explained. 

Interestingly, some have raised a concern that developing nuclear and conventional variants of the same weapon might lead an adversary to mistake a conventional attack for a nuclear one, therefore causing major unwanted escalation and starting a nuclear exchange. Others also maintain that there should not, in any fashion, be room for the concept of a “tactical” or “limited” nuclear war. Any use of nuclear weapons, the thinking goes, should result in complete and total nuclear destruction of the attacker. 

Responding to some of these concerns, Clark maintained that there is a significant need for the U.S. to have and deploy a wide range of nuclear weapons for the specific purpose of ensuring an adversary does not ever “attempt” to use low-yield nuclear weapons by virtue of being assured they would face immediate nuclear retaliation. 

“We want to raise the threshold to the highest level possible and let adversaries know we can counter any action that they may take and deliver consequences should deterrence fail. Deterrence is the ultimate goal, and this allows us to deter along the full spectrum of conflict. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the adversary does not miscalculate and think we have a weakness in this area,” Clark explained. 

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. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Europe

Moscow has long lauded the plane as revolutionary, but is it the plane ready for real-life combat?

Key Point: The secretive plan is shourded in mystery. It could be a big deal if Moscow can get it right.

Russia has reportedly begun construction of its next-generation PAK DA stealth bomber as part of an apparent strategic effort to usher in a new era of stealth bombing technology. Moscow hopes to get ahead of the U.S. Air Force’s emerging B-21 stealth bomber and China’s H-20 strategic bomber.

A report in the Russian News Agencies’ TASS says the first prototype is expected to be finished by the end of next year. Later, more prototypes are slated to be ready for testing by April 2023, something which puts the bomber’s production schedule on roughly the same anticipated timeframe as the U.S. B-21. 

Interestingly, its configuration seems to parallel elements of the U.S. B-2 and emerging B-21 bombers, with some key differences. Of course, its horizontal blended wing-body shape is to be expected for these kinds of stealthy platforms, yet available renderings of the PAK DA show rectangular-shaped inlets aligned with or somewhat parallel to the top of the fuselage. 

While upon initial examination, more rectangular inlets may seem less stealthy than the more rounded inlets seen on the B-2, the Russian bomber seems to create a distinct horizontal line or clear linear configuration across the inlets and fuselage in a clear effort to reduce or eliminate and return radar signature potentially enabled by having peaks and valleys between the inlets and fuselage. Even if rounded, an indent or downward slope between the inlets and fuselage is decidedly less horizontal and potentially less stealthy. 

This might explain why the Air Force B-21’s inlets are even more indented and rounded than the B-2, and the new B-21 bomber does have a smaller or more blended incline between the fuselage and wings. Granted, protruding configurations of any kind, if even rounded or covered in a radar-absorbing exterior, are more likely to generate some kind of radar “ping” return from ground-based air defense systems. Vertical structures and uneven contours are therefore more likely to generate radar returns, as electromagnetic “pings” will discern the differences in shape. 

The concept with these kinds of stealth bombers is to not only elude surveillance radar systems but also evade higher-frequency, more precise engagement radar, ensuring that the platform will not only be difficult or impossible to hit, but also remain completely undetected. The idea is for adversaries to “not even know something is there.” A stealthy platform can succeed by appearing as a “bird” or “insect” to enemy radar. 

The back of the PAK DA does appear somewhat analogous to early models of the B-21 in that there appears to be little or no protruding external exhaust or heat release area; such a configuration does seem to suggest that perhaps some newer kind of internal heat dissipation or cooling technology has been discovered and applied as part of an effort to minimize heat signature. 

Some reports say the PAK DA may place Russia as the global leader in stealth bomber technology, however much of its actual technical sophistication may remain a bit of a mystery. One area in which Russia may have an advantage in is the area of air-launched weapons, as the TASS report says. “The PAK DA is expected to deploy Kh-102 nuclear tippled stealthy cruises missiles, and a number of newer hypersonic designs including derivatives of the Kh-47M2,” the TASS story writes.

That being said, the U.S. B-21 is slated to deploy with a new, high-tech Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) weapon, a conventional or nuclear-armed cruise missile reported to be the most advanced in the world. Now in development by the U.S. Air Force, the LRSO is expected to bring new dimensions to cruise missile attack possibilities by introducing longer ranges, advanced guidance systems and new weapons’ payload options. 

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.

This article first appeared earlier this year and is reprinted due to reader interest.

 

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

95 year-old Luftwaffe ace Hugo Broch took to the skies for the first time in a Supermarine Spitfire.

Key Point: After flying high over Britain in the Spitfire, Broch heaped praise on his former adversary’s formidable fighter plane.

When Hugo Broch flew his fighter for the Luftwaffe, he probably didn’t imagine he would ever find himself in the cockpit of a Supermarine Spitfire. That, however, is precisely what happened when the 95 year-old fighter ace took flight in one of Britain’s last operable Spitfires, a two-seat Tr.9 MJ627 trainer.

The flight over the skies of Kent in the vintage aircraft gave Broch an authentic view of what the war would’ve been like for his adversaries: during World War II, there were over 20 RAF bases in Kent, many of which supported fighter squadrons engaged in the Battle of Britain.

Hugo Broch, Luftwaffe Ace

Broch served with the Luftwaffe fighter wing Jagdgeschwader 54 (JG 54) on the Eastern Front from 1943 to1945. In that time, he scored 81 victories in 324 mission against Soviet aircraft in a Messerschmitt Bf. 109 and a Focke-Wulf FW. 190. These included 18 kills against Sturmoviks, the Soviet Air Force’s deadly analogue to the Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive bomber, along with twelve double victories and three triple victories.

Broch’s impressive tally was, in fact, not uncommon for German pilots in WWII, especially on the Eastern Front. Broch is surpassed by 155 other Luftwaffe fighter pilots. The highest German ace of the war, Erich Hartmann is credited with 352 kills. He served with JG 52 on the Eastern Front.

Could Broch Have Encountered a Supermarine Spitfire on the Eastern Front?

While the Spitfire did its lion’s share of work on the Western Front, the aircraft saw service around the world during the war, including with the Soviet Air Force. 1,200 Spitfires of numerous variants were donated to the Soviet Union, however they were withdrawn from service nearly as quickly as they were introduced.

The Spitfire entered active duty with the Soviet Air Force in April 1943. It was soon discovered that the Spitifire, which Stalin had requested from the British in name, was wholly incompatible with the doctrine of the Soviet Air Force. Landing on rough Russian dirt runways exposed the Spitfire’s structural weaknesses. Soviet pilots were also unaccustomed to the aircraft’s wing-mounted guns, as opposed to the fuselage-mounted guns of most Soviet fighters. Most importantly, the Spitfire’s silhouette was often mistaken for that of the Messerschmitt Bf. 109 by pilots and anti-aircraft gunners. As a result, numerous Soviet Spitfire pilots fell victim to the fire of friendly guns. By June 1943, the Spitfire was largely phased out of Soviet combat duty.

Consequently, Broch likely never spotted the Supermarine Spitfire on his missions on the Eastern Front. However he was likely aware of the wide renown the British fighter had gained as a thorn in the side of the Luftwaffe over the skies of Britain.

The Spitfire’s reputation within the Luftwaffe is perhaps best illustrated by a quip made by Gruppenkommandeur Adolf Galland to Field Marshal Hermann Göring. On a visit to the Jäger squadrons in France at the height of the Battle of Britain, Göring asked his Jäger officers what he could do for them. Adolf Galland gave a biting answer: “I should like an outfit of Spitfires for my Jägdgeschwader.”

What Does Hugo Broch Think About the Spitfire?

After flying high over Britain in the Spitfire, Broch heaped praise on his former adversary’s formidable fighter plane: “The Spitfire was greatly respected. With these machines you have a feeling of being free, and being able to do what you want.”

“The Spitfire is a good machine, wonderful, he’s a good pilot and I have again experienced what flying is and how beautiful flying is.”

This article first appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons