The National Interest

The decision by the United States and NATO to provide Abrams and Leopard II main battle tanks to Ukraine for its war against Russia is a logical follow-on to the events of the past calendar year. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine in February 2022 did not turn out as well as the Kremlin expected. Instead of a coup de main that toppled the government in Kyiv, Russia has found itself locked into a costly protracted war of attrition. The Russian forces’ military performance has also been disappointing to its political and military leadership, and a periodic reshuffling of field commanders has not improved matters very much. Heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continues in the east and south of Ukraine. Russia is now maintaining a 1,300-kilometer defensive line and regrouping in order for what many expect will be a major offensive later this year.

To meet the expected Russian offensive in the late winter or early spring, Ukraine needs additional components for modern air-land battle, including main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, long-range artillery, advanced missile defense systems, and trained operators who can use this up-gunned equipment to good effect. Thus the announcements by President Joseph Biden and NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg on January 25 that the United States would send thirty-one Abrams tanks to Ukraine—in order to clear the way for Germany, Poland, and other NATO members to send hundreds of Leopard tanks to that beleaguered country—appears as only an incremental upping of the ante. 

But Russia may not see it that way. The problem of escalation in times of war has at least two parts: the military-technical and the political-psychological. The military-technical aspect is the conduct of battle and the provision of the necessary ingredients for doing so: troops; equipment; ammunition; command, control, and communications; intelligence; and so forth. These components of the effective management of the battlefield are challenging enough. Few battles ever go exactly as planned, and a great deal of uncertainty, chaos, and friction can be expected as the fighting continues. 

The political-psychological aspect of escalation is even more challenging. This aspect appears in two ways: first, in the perceptions and expectations of political leaders and their senior military advisors; and, second, in the views of the major domestic political forces in each country, including elite influencers of various sorts and the mass public. 

With respect to the political-psychological aspects of escalation, it appears that Russia has already taken a considerable hit. Its subpar military performance compared to prewar expectations has embarrassed the Kremlin’s leaders and senior military commanders. Troop morale has lagged and widespread resistance to calling up reserve forces has been outspoken. Putin appears to believe that he has convinced the Russian public of the necessity for this prolonged war. But that presumed approval is fragile, and it depends on the ability of Russian forces to provide convincing evidence of meaningful progress on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Ukrainian military forces have outperformed most prewar expectations. This has led Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors to believe that more state-of-the-art military equipment from NATO, together with other support that includes intelligence, training, logistics, and command-control systems, will permit Ukraine’s forces to go on the offensive and retake territory previously occupied or declared annexed by Russia.

Going forward, there are at least two potential scenarios of escalation: vertical and horizontal. Vertical escalation would imply the use of larger and more destructive conventional weapons and, in the worst case, the resort to short- or medium-range tactical nuclear weapons by Russia. Horizontal escalation implies an expansion of the conflict into other countries, including possibly some NATO member states. From Russia’s perspective, NATO is already engaged in a proxy war against Russia, and the symbolism of American tanks and trainers being forward deployed in Ukraine might appear as a very personal challenge to Putin and his military leadership by Washington.

In addition to horizontal and vertical escalation, either Russia or NATO might engage in domain escalation. One example of domain escalation would be large-scale cyberattacks by one side against the other side’s military, economic, or social assets. We know that major powers already have the capability for constant probing of one another’s military and civil computer and communications networks. In the event of war, even more aggressive efforts to steal secrets and to plant destructive bots can be expected. A side that feels it is losing the kinetic war might turn to cyber war in order to compensate by escalation into another domain

Another example of domain escalation could be more widespread uses of drones for attack or defense of military and other assets which Russia has already done much more than Ukraine. Both sides have used drones for reconnaissance, command control, and strikes. The expansion of limited drone attacks into more massive sorties as the technology improves will appeal to technology-minded commanders and software engineers.

Domain escalation might also take the form of targeted assassinations against political or military leaders, a tactic that Russia, not Ukraine, has repeatedly used. In fact, allegations of Russian clandestine efforts to take out Ukrainian leaders during the early stages of the war were widely reported. In addition to hit squads of commandos, Russia might also use advanced technologies for precision strikes with drones, microwaves, or lasers, among other possibilities, against individual Ukrainian leaders or vital centers of decisionmaking in Ukraine.

Finally, and most regrettably, escalation can take the form of crimes against humanity. The purposeful targeting of civilians for terror and shock effect, apart from any legitimate military purpose, is one option that appeals to frustrated leaders facing battlefield disappointments. In this regard, Russia has deliberately targeted missile strikes against Ukrainian civilians, including attacks on schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and electric power grids. This shock and awe against civilians by Russia is intended to discourage support for the war, but it has had the opposite effect in Ukraine. Public support for the war against Russia and for the Zelenskyy government has remained strong—Russian atrocities only serve to delegitimate the Kremlin’s rationale for war, and thereby, serve to further empower Ukraine and NATO to accomplish their objective of preventing Russia from taking permanent control of any part of Ukraine, no matter how long it takes.

Stephen Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State, Brandywine.

Lawrence Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Image: DVIDS.

This week is critical for Sudan’s Western orientation. The country’s military leaders and political and civilian actors will develop a roadmap for implementing the Framework Agreement, which they signed last month and pledges the organization of elections in Sudan after a two-year transition period. Upon the signing of the Framework Agreement, the United States, in a joint statement with Norway, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, welcomed it as “an essential first step toward establishing a civilian-led government and defining constitutional arrangements” and called for “continued, inclusive dialogue on all issues of concern and cooperation to build the future of Sudan.”

This week's negotiations are an important component of this dialogue, and the United States and its partners should view them as an opportunity to assess how various Sudanese actors will implement the Framework Agreement. The United States should also use the negotiations as an opportunity to assess the role of these Sudanese actors in building support for the Framework Agreement, ensuring there is ongoing engagement with and support for those in Sudan who can further pro-Western policies and prevent the expansion of Russian, Chinese, and extremist influence in the country.

The Framework Agreement, signed on December 5, was the culmination of months of political unrest following the October 2021 coup by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan that ousted the government headed by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. The coup frayed relations between Sudan’s military, political parties, and civil society, resulting in violent clashes between protesters and the military, which led to Hamdock’s reinstatement two months later. Still, Hamdock resigned in January 2022 amid ongoing demonstrations against the government.

Given Sudan’s fragile start to pluralistic governance, which began following the overthrow in 2019 of the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, the Framework Agreement signed by the country’s military leaders and forty political and civil society groups is the best path toward peace in the country, which the United States and its partners recognize. However, as negotiations get underway this week, it will not be easy to reconcile the contentious issues on the agenda, which include transitional justice, security and military reform, the implementation of the October 2020 Juba Peace Agreement between Sudan’s transitional government and representatives of armed groups in Darfur, and the dismantling of the Bashir regime’s residual power structures.

Recognition of the difficulty that lies ahead must be accompanied by an assessment of what is at stake for the United States in Sudan: mutually beneficial counter-terror cooperation; Sudan’s recognition of Israel following its signing of the Abraham Accords, and efforts to further Sudan-Israel ties; and the need to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the country, especially when it comes to Sudan’s naval and port facilities along the Red Sea. The stakes are indeed high for U.S. interests. As such, the United States must work with the Sudanese leaders who backed the Framework Agreement to create an incentive structure for Sudan’s elites to implement the agreement and pursue a pro-American course for the country.

One such Sudanese leader is Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, who publicly denounced the October 2021 coup as a failure and advocated for the military to join the December 5 Framework Agreement. It is important to recognize that the agreement, which is the first step toward elections in Sudan, would not have happened without the support of Hemeti, arguably the most influential decision-maker in Sudan. Hemeti, moreover, has advocated for a greater U.S. presence in Sudan and has been the primary Sudanese leader in expanding the country’s military, economic, and political ties with Israel. While military actors in Sudan and throughout the region have poor human rights and governance records, it is critical that the United States recognize when these actors align with pro-American policies and that Washington increase cooperation with them when they do.

Some segments of the U.S. foreign policy establishment would like to eschew military engagement for civilian engagement in Sudan. This would not serve to further U.S. national security but would instead curtail American influence in Sudan and the broader region. All non-extremist actors are coming to the table to negotiate the conditions for an electoral process in Sudan. The success of these negotiations will depend on agreement by all parties—civilian and military. Attempting to work solely with civilian actors would be a short-sighted approach by the United States, imperiling Sudan’s first real chance at progress since Bashir was overthrown in 2019.

Washington should increase its engagement with all relevant actors in Sudan who support U.S. policy priorities to transform Sudan into a permanent Western ally.

Dr. Felipe Pathé Duarte is an Assistant Professor at the Higher Institute of Police Sciences and Internal Security, Autonomous University of Lisbon.

Image: Flickr/U.S. State Department.

It has been 342 days since the Russian invasion began. On Tuesday, there was heavy fighting on the ground in the Donbas as the Russian forces tried to take advantage of Ukrainian weak spots and achieve a breakthrough.

Fighting in the Donbas

There is heavy fighting to the southwest of Donetsk City around the towns of Pavlivka and Vuhledar.  A Russian brigade-sized force is trying to push the Ukrainian forces back from the Kashlahach River, a small water obstacle that had been the frontline for several months. 

The Russian forces had been conducting probing assaults in the area for weeks now, but now there are throwing more units into the fray. Russian commanders have tried to achieve a breakthrough in the area before. The Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade suffered extremely heavy casualties trying to capture Pavlivka back in November.

In the east, the Russian forces are trying to regain lost ground around the town of Kreminna, while the Ukrainian military is conducting counteroffensive operations to the northwest toward Svatove, a key logistical hub. The two towns have been at the center of the fighting in the region since September.

The situation in the south has remained unchanged.

Russian casualties

Every day, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is providing an update on its claimed Russian casualties. These numbers are official figures and haven’t been separately verified.

However, Western intelligence assessments and independent reporting corroborate, to a certain extent, the Ukrainian casualty claims. For example, the Oryx open-source intelligence research page has visually verified the destruction or capture of close to 1,700 Russian tanks (which amounts to more tanks than the combined armor capabilities of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) and more than 8,300 weapon systems of all types; this assessment has been confirmed by the British Ministry of Defense.

The same independent verification exists for most of the other Ukrainian claims. Recently, the Pentagon acknowledged that the Russian military has lost thousands of combat vehicles of all types, including over 1,000 tanks, and dozens of fighter jets and helicopters.

Furthermore, more recent reports that are citing Western intelligence officials indicate that the Russian military has suffered more than 100,000 casualties (killed and wounded) in the war so far.

In the summer, Sir Tony Radakin, the British Chief of the Defence Staff, had told the BBC that the West understands that more than 50,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the conflict thus far. If we were to take the Ukrainian figures as accurate, the number mentioned by Sir Radakin is on the low side of the spectrum.

In November, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley shared the U.S. military’s assessment that the Russian military has lost way more than 100,000 troops so far in the war.

Yet, it is very hard to verify the actual numbers unless one is on the ground. However, after adjusting for the fog of war and other factors, the Western official numbers are fairly close to the Ukrainian claims.

As of Tuesday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is claiming the following Russian casualties:

* 127,500 Russian troops killed (approximately three times that number wounded and captured)

* 6,378 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles destroyed

* 5,048 vehicles and fuel tanks

* 3,201 tanks

* 2,197 artillery pieces

* 1,951 tactical unmanned aerial systems

* 796 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses

* 454 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS)

* 293 fighter, attack, and transport jets

* 284 attack and transport helicopters

* 221 anti-aircraft batteries

* 200 special equipment platforms, such as bridging equipment

* 18 boats and cutters

* four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems

On Tuesday, Ukrainian forces continued to inflict the heaviest in the direction of Bakhmut, which is located in the south of the Donbas, and along the Kreminna-Svatove line in the east.

The stated goal of the Russian military for the renewed offensive in the east is to establish full control over the pro-Russian breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk and create and maintain a land corridor between these territories and the occupied Crimea.

This article was first published by Sandboxx.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ). Johns Hopkins University. You will usually find him on the top of a mountain admiring the view and wondering how he got there.

Image: Dredger/Shutterstock.com.

In 2006, a team from Boeing proposed an incredible new use for America’s legendary F-15 Eagle that called for mounting a 45-foot rocket to its back. This rocket-carrying fighter would be given the seemingly logical (while still entirely dramatic) moniker of F-15 Global Strike Eagle, and it could have revolutionized how America deployed hypersonic weapons or put small payloads into orbit.

The idea was to use the Eagle’s powerful afterburning turbofan engines and the incredible amount of lift offered by its design to ferry rockets up to high speeds and altitudes before releasing them to ignite and fly the remainder of the journey into orbit. Launching orbital payloads from an aircraft would eliminate the need for expensive rocket launch facilities while making it possible for F-15s to rapidly deploy small payloads into orbit from anywhere on the planet with an airstrip and a hangar.

It was a relatively low-cost solution to a very expensive problem America’s military, particularly the Space Force, continues to tangle with today. But despite a very realistic approach to the Global Strike Eagle design, Boeing’s pitch likely still seemed a bit too crazy to put into practice… at least as far as we know.

The idea and its accompanying designs may look more like something Wile E. Coyote might build than anything to come out of Boeing’s brain trust, but the official proposal offers a number of startling conclusions about the feasibility of such an effort. In fact, although Boeing’s Global Strike Eagle never made it past the proposal stage, their data seems to suggest that a rocket-packing Eagle could actually work.

Why the F-15?

When the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle first took to the skies in 1972, the stakes felt a lot higher than we can really appreciate today. Just five years earlier, American analysts had gotten their first glimpse of the Soviet’s newest and most capable fighter, a platform that evoked chilled whispers about broken speed and altitude records for years before any American had even seen it. Within the halls of the Pentagon, this powerful new fighter was known only by its prototype designation: the Ye-155.

But the United States and its NATO allies would soon have another name for their Mach 3 boogeyman: The MiG-25 Foxbat.

The Foxbat, America wouldn’t know for years to come, was more about propaganda than power, and while the MiG-25 would fail to live up to its reputation, the F-15 McDonnell Douglas produced to counter it would be everything America had hoped and then some. With a top speed in excess of Mach 2.5, a climb rate of more than 67,000 feet per minute, low wing loading, and a high thrust-to-weight ratio, America’s new Eagle became the game changer the Pentagon feared the Foxbat already was, and it would go on to prove it in fight after fight. Eventually, the F-15 would rack up an incredible 104 wins against enemy aircraft, and all without ever losing a single jet in an air-to-air scrap.

With the immense success of the Eagle, it wasn’t long before the U.S. began exploring other uses for their powerful and acrobatic new airframe. By 1986, just ten years after the first F-15s entered active service, flight testing began on the next iteration of the Eagle lineage; the ground-attack-oriented F-15E Strike Eagle. With the same pair of Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-220 afterburning turbofan engines pumping out a bit more than a combined 58,000 pounds of thrust and new hard points and avionics to support a broad variety of conventional and even nuclear payloads, the Strike Eagle quickly followed in the Eagle’s footsteps, making a name for itself as an attack aircraft with such potent air-to-air capabilities that it had no need for a fighter escort.

Over the span of the past 50 years, the F-15 has proven so incredibly capable that it’s been considered by the Navy for duty aboard aircraft carriers, been modified to take off at speeds at low as 42 miles per hour, been landed by a student pilot after losing an entire wing, scored an air-to-air kill with a bomb, and even nearly got the stealth treatment complete with conformal weapons bays. In fact, today, 46 years after entering service in the U.S. Air Force, brand new F-15s, dubbed F-15EXs, are still rolling off the assembly line and straight into Uncle Sam’s hangars.

F-15s have been chosen for plenty of other experimental efforts too, from launching hypersonic Phoenix missiles for NASA to literally shooting down a satellite, but as incredible (or even downright crazy) as many of these efforts may have been, they all pale in comparison to one 2006 Boeing proposal that aimed to mount a 45-foot-long, three-stage rocket to the Eagle’s back.

Why add a rocket to a fighter jet at all?

The first and most obvious use for an F-15 with a rocket on its back would be the rapid deployment of orbital or suborbital munitions like many modern hypersonic glide-body weapons, and indeed, mention of using this system to deploy America’s Mach 5 “Common Aero Vehicle” did make its way into the proposal. But the bigger benefit, Boeing seems to suggest, would be as a readily available, low-cost launch platform that could put small payloads into Low Earth Orbit from practically anywhere on the globe.

Despite a greater availability of space-launch platforms than ever before, America’s orbital efforts have long faced challenges related to launch infrastructure and the incredibly high costs associated with single-use rockets. But despite the waiting lists for launch complexes and the immense expense, America and most of the world continues to find itself more reliant than ever on space-based assets for everything from the operation of advanced combat systems to streaming the first season of “How I Met Your Mother.”

For the most part, these jobs are filled by large, complex, and expensive satellites in high geosynchronous orbits that take years to get from the designer’s pad to the launch pad. As a result, cutting-edge defense and intelligence satellites are often already outdated by the time they reach orbit.

“Today our satellites are very exquisite. And they’re the world’s best but they’re not cheap, and they’re not something that we can procure overnight. They take time to acquire … We put a lot of mission assurance on it, which then drives increased costs and increased timelines, because you can’t take the risk of failure,” Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, chief of the U.S. Space Force, explained last year.

In the United States, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station sees the majority of large American launches aiming for a West-East orbit, while Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is America’s primary gateway to North-South orbits. These facilities are designed specifically to manage large rockets carrying heavy payloads, but the U.S. also uses contractors and international partnerships to launch payloads aboard smaller rockets from facilities the world over.

America’s “exquisite” satellites are extremely vulnerable

The lengthy timelines associated with deploying new satellites aren’t just a problem for observation and deterrence. Were a conflict to break out between the United States and a near-peer opponent like Russia or China, America’s fragile satellite infrastructure would be among the first targets. Both Russia and China have demonstrated the ability to engage satellites with kinetic weapons, and in recent years, both have deployed “inspector” satellites capable of grabbing, interfering with, or destroying other satellites in orbit. Russia has secretly deployed and tested weapons in space before, including a cannon, and it stands to reason that these nations may have orbital assets the general public is unaware of.

Unfortunately, many of the satellites America’s defense apparatus relies on were designed and built in an era when space-based conflicts seemed more like science fiction than the disconcerting reality of today.

“We built exquisite glass houses in a world without stones,” former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson explained about the vulnerability of America’s satellite infrastructure in 2018.

So, to put a fine point on it, America’s commercial, defense, and intelligence sectors all rely on a constellation of extremely expensive satellites that take years to design and build, cost a fortune to launch, and are extremely vulnerable to attack. It’s the perfect recipe for a very bad day, and that’s exactly why the U.S. Space Force was founded with satellite security and redundancy as one of its primary goals.

In order to help accomplish this mission, the Space Force is placing a new focus on quickly fielding a much larger number of smaller, cheaper satellites that would fly in Low Earth Orbit to supplement the bigger, more expensive platforms. These satellites could fill gaps created by damaged satellites, provide rapid communications or intelligence information in areas that would otherwise be very difficult to do so, and even help to locate the sources of radio frequency jamming that’s interfering with access to those higher-flying and more capable assets.

But in order to leverage this approach amid a large-scale conflict with a technologically capable opponent, America needs a method of getting a high volume of small satellites into Low Earth Orbit very quickly and from locations all around the globe.

And it would seem that in 2006, Boeing took a look at their incredibly powerful F-15, and thought to themselves, “that thing might just work as a launch vehicle…“

The F-15 GSE Global Strike Eagle concept

On April 24, 2006, a Boeing team led by Timothy T. Chen, Preston W. Ferguson, David A. Deamer, and John Hensley attended the 4th Responsive Space Conference in Los Angeles with their unique proposal in hand. The proposal, which came in the form of a 17-slide PowerPoint and accompanying 10-page write-up, was built upon a previous study conducted by a team of seven Boeing staffers led by Payloads and Structures Engineer (at the time) Tom Mead.

Of course, there had been plenty of crazy proposals to come out of aviation firms over the years, from massive nuclear-powered flying aircraft carriers to genuine flying saucers — but despite targeting space itself, this proposal was decidedly quite grounded. The idea behind the Global Strike Eagle wasn’t to sell the U.S. government on developing a pricey new aircraft for space launch operations. Instead, Boeing aimed to take the equipment Uncle Sam already had laying around and assemble it in a way that would offer a groundbreaking new capability for an extremely low cost.

As the proposal puts it: “The utilization of the F-15 as the initial stage of the launch system provides not only the expected performance benefits – reduced velocity requirements for the rocket stages, lower aerodynamic drag, and decreased atmospheric pressure but also the operational advantages inherent in using the existing support infrastructure.”

In keeping with that low-budget mindset, the proposal calls for using an existing F-15C or D with “high hours” as the initial technology demonstrator intended to serve as an airborne launch platform for a small rocket (likely from under-wing or center-line pylon), with plans to move on to using a more highly modified F-15E Strike Eagle as the basis for what would become the first true Global Strike Eagle.

How do you attach a 45-foot rocket to an F-15?

Of course, the first significant hurdle the concept would have to overcome was already apparent at this stage: despite the power and payload capabilities offered by the F-15 airframe, it would be utterly impossible to mount a rocket of this size or weight beneath the fighter. Previous studies of F-15E payload capabilities suggested that under-wing pylons couldn’t manage anything heavier than 220 pounds. NASA would successfully mount a 1,000-pound, 13-foot AIM-54 Phoenix missile on a custom center-line hard point devised for their F-15B in 2006, but their limited success in the effort only further confirmed that mounting a 45-foot, 30,000-pound rocket to the bottom of this aircraft would prevent it from rolling down the runway at all, let alone pitching up for take-off.

As a result, the decision was made to mount the rocket launch vehicle on top of the F-15, taking advantage of the wide tail span between upright stabilizers to allow for a larger diameter rocket. This new top center-line pylon concept was substantiated by testing originally intended for added ordnance, and according to Boeing, four internal bulkheads within the fuselage would provide adequate strength to support their massive rocket.

But even with the rocket now riding atop the fighter, its massive size still created problems for the Global Strike Eagle concept. The rocket’s nosecone would not only cause clearance issues with the cockpit canopy, it would interfere with the F-15’s ejection apparatus if used… and by interfere, Boeing meant that any pilot crazy enough to fly an F-15 with a rocket on its back would also be unable to eject without hitting the rocket itself. This seemed like reason enough to eliminate the pilot altogether and convert the Global Strike Eagle to use a communication link-based flight control system like those employed by Boeing’s X-45 or X-36 technology demonstrators. This change also offered the added benefit of not having to find a pilot with an affinity for rockets and a death wish.

Of course, operating an aircraft without a pilot is nothing out of the ordinary for the U.S. Air Force, which operates a wide variety of uncrewed platforms. The branch even has experience with converting crewed fighters into uncrewed jets, with none other than Boeing assisting in fielding QF-16 aerial target drones made from retiring F-16 airframes.

Because there would be no pilot onboard, the conversion from Strike Eagle to Global Strike Eagle would require very little in the way of avionics or system changes, and in fact, many systems, like onboard radar, could be removed entirely because of the aircraft’s non-combat role.

The Air Force already operates more than 400 F-15 Eagles and F-15E Strike Eagles the world over, so the vast majority of the infrastructure required to operate the Global Strike Eagle already exists, and many of the aircraft’s systems could be maintained by existing Air Force personnel. This offered both a means of reducing costs and of ensuring the Air Force could have orbital launch capabilities from practically any airfield found under a friendly flag, and just as importantly, it could be done quickly.

Theoretically speaking, a Global Strike Eagle and its support team could be flown to any airstrip with a few thousand feet of runway, prep their aircraft for launch, and deploy a payload into orbit in fairly short order. When conducting these operations from military airstrips with existing F-15 infrastructure, these launch operations could be easily hidden, as most of the launch preparations that would take place outside the hangar would look like any other F-15 sortie.

How to launch a rocket from an F-15

Like the fighter launch platform, the rocket carried by Boeing’s Global Strike Eagle would also be a bargain. Boeing intended to use off-the-shelf solid rocket motors in conjunction with solid rocket motors already produced for America’s arsenal of ICBMs. Using rockets America already had a supply of wasn’t just a cost-saving measure, however, it would substantially reduce development time.

The first stage of the Global Strike Eagle’s “Launch Vehicle” rocket would carry an SR-19 solid rocket engine sourced from the second stage of a Minuteman II ICBM, producing 60,300 pounds of thrust for 287.5 seconds. The second stage would carry an Orion 50XL sourced from the third stage of the same Minuteman II, which would provide another 34,500 pounds of thrust for the next 289 seconds. Finally, the third stage would pack an Orion 38 rocket motor used in a variety of small rockets, which would provide 10,600 pounds of thrust for 289.6 more seconds of powered flight, finally putting the payload into Low Earth Orbit.

The rear portion of the rocket would carry a cone-body during flight for improved aerodynamics that would be ejected almost immediately after the rocket separated from the F-15. According to Boeing’s study, the F-15’s aerodynamic design would not only sustain adding a rocket to its back, but some elements even seemed well suited for it.

“Preliminary computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling was conducted on the F-15GSE/ LV configuration to ensure no aerodynamic show- stoppers,” the Boeing proposal reads. “The analysis indicates only minor reduction in F-15 lift due to the payload/ LV and increased vertical tail loading, which is compensated by a change of aircraft’s angle of attack by 1 degree.”

In order to eventually ferry rockets as big as 30,000 pounds into the sky (with payloads as large as 1,200 pounds), Boeing suggested incorporating “JATO” (Jet-Assisted Take Off) rocket boosters on the F-15 itself. They also suggested leveraging a technique known as mass injection pre-compression cooling (MIPCC) for a bit more power throughout the flight envelope. MIPCC is effectively a water or coolant injection ahead of the engine’s compressor that evaporates and cools as it passes through. This cooling effect allows the engine to operate at higher velocities and altitudes than the heat produced by the engine would normally allow.

It’s not quite like Dom hitting the NOS in his fart-canned Supra, but it is a cheap and effective way of pulling a bit more power out of an existing jet engine.

Boeing’s approach called for the Global Strike Eagle to begin the launch process by pitching upward at a 40.4-degree angle and increasing speed to Mach 1.7 at an altitude of 27,700 feet. At 47,800 feet and a speed of Mach 1.35, the rocket launch vehicle would detach from the F-15 and give the fighter enough time (about four seconds) to pitch down and away before the first stage rocket motor ignited.

From there, the rocket would do what rockets have long done best: burn through each successive stage until payload separation occurred in Low Earth Orbit approximately 400 seconds (an ominous 6.66 minutes) after the F-15 began the launch maneuver.

If this concept could work, why haven’t we seen it happen?

To be clear, despite the proposal offering a number of promising claims about the feasibility of the Global Strike Eagle concept, that seems to be as far as this concept has gone, at least publicly.

If we take Boeing’s claims at face value, this concept could indeed offer the U.S. Air Force a comparably inexpensive option for launching the very sort of micro and nano-satellites the Space Force is now placing an increased emphasis on rapidly fielding, seemingly making this fighter-based launch system even more promising than it was when first proposed in 2006. But the United States has a number of rocket launch options available to it and no pressing need to invent novel ones that include strapping really big rockets to perfectly good F-15s, at least not yet.

Today, the United States is investing heavily in hypersonic weapons ranging from scramjet-powered cruise missiles to glide-bodies that could indeed be launched from rockets like those proposed for the Global Strike Eagle, but that might actually be a big part of the reason this effort didn’t go any further. The air-launched hypersonic weapons the United States is developing don’t require a 45-foot rocket to be mounted atop the fighter that launches them. It would be cheaper to convert an F-15 into a Global Strike Eagle to deploy these weapons in testing, but in practical application, a weapon that can be mounted under the wing of a bomber just has far more strategic value than one that requires a specially modified and rare launch platform.

But that doesn’t mean this concept doesn’t have some intriguing benefits, especially for the rapid launch of small satellite payloads into low earth orbit. We may never see the Global Strike Eagle manifest as it appears on the pages of these Boeing documents, but there are a number of publicly disclosed efforts to get payloads into space from aircraft, and almost certainly a number of others tucked behind a curtain of classified funding.

So, while the Global Strike Eagle may seem crazy, the impetus behind it and the approach it takes to deploying payloads aren’t really all that crazy at all.

This article was first published by Sandboxx.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

Image: Flickr/U.S. Air Force.

Nikki Haley isn’t cowering before Donald Trump. Unlike other potential Republican contenders, Haley is trying to demonstrate her mettle by getting in the ring with him right away. Can she deck him?

Trump may be the GOP frontrunner, but he looks wobbly. He’s mired in a variety of lawsuits and potential indictments, ranging from New York to Georgia. Even Stormy Daniels is back. Then there is his Potemkin campaign for the presidency. Trump, whose speeches have been lackluster, has not demonstrated that he can recapture the mojo that propelled him to victory in 2016.

As the former governor of South Carolina, Haley would appear to be well-positioned to capture the state in the Republican primaries. Her appeal to independent voters and suburban women is assuredly more potent than Trump’s. She would be the first woman and non-white candidate to secure the nomination. In 2015, Haley signed a bill that hauled down the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol. But she also made sure to campaign for candidates who backed Trump’s bogus election fraud allegations. Still, she is politically ambidextrous enough to point to the fact that Trump’s record in the midterm elections, when Republicans failed to capture the Senate and lost key governorships, can hardly be termed as anything but abysmal.

But in jabbing at Trump, it is her old job as United Nations ambassador that may actually come to the fore. Like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who also sees himself as presidential timber, Haley represents the Republican old guard, at least when it comes to foreign policy. Put otherwise, she is a foreign policy hawk who has never made the least effort to disguise her plumage. She was UN ambassador when Trump exited the Iran nuclear deal, the bête noire of the right as it was signed by Barack Obama.

The issue that could sunder the Republican party in the upcoming election is Ukraine. Support for the war is eroding, at least among Republicans. America has spent over $27 billion in military aid over the past year for Ukraine. According to a new Pew Charitable Trust poll, the share of adults who believe that America is providing excessive aid to Ukraine has grown by six percentage points since last September. Right now, 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that America is doing too much.

Former British prime minister Boris Johnson is currently visiting America to try and drum up support for the war and, incidentally, to boost his own political prospects back home. Much like Trump, he wants another go at high office. But unlike Trump, who has been blasting away at Ukraine, claiming he could solve the war “within twenty-four hours,” most likely by handing Kyiv over to Russian president Vladimir Putin on a silver platter, Johnson is pleading with House Republicans to remain steadfast. As Alistair Dawber reports, Johnson is meeting today with the House Republican Study Committee. But convincing recalcitrant Republicans to back Ukraine could make Brexit look like a tea party.

William Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, said:

Republicans are going to have to work out for themselves in the midst of a primary campaign whether they want to return to the approach of George W. Bush, [which] people like Haley represent, or something closer to where Trump was headed in breaking the status quo in the party and opening up debate about what America First ought to entail.  The Ukraine debate on the Right highlights the tensions in the party right now. If establishment hawks like Haley, Pence, and Pompeo jump into the race, this will provide an opportunity for Trump or DeSantis or another candidate to differentiate themselves and speak for Americans who liked the idea of ending endless wars and putting our vital interests first. It certainly helped Trump in 2016 to do so.

The blunt truth is that the GOP may be moving further away from its traditional hawkish positions. Whether Trump can capitalize on this trend is an open question. But he will almost surely try to deploy it as a battering ram against his Republican opponents. A battle royale may be about to begin in the GOP over America’s commitments abroad.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest.

Image: Lev radin/Shutterstock.com

Last month, Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu unveiled a new plan to restructure the Russian military away from the brigade model and back to its pre-2008 division structure. These details are being announced as the Russian military struggles to maintain momentum in Ukraine and as NATO membership for Finland and Sweden looms into 2023. Even though implementing such military reforms is not new in the history of the Soviet and Russian militaries, these new restructuring attempts seek to create a new army postured to safeguard Russian interests vis-à-vis NATO, closely mirroring Soviet threat perception of large-scale war.

Even though Russian proposals and their outcomes are often quite different, Western analysts will soon have to contest the feasibility of these reforms and how they will affect Russian force posture across Eastern Europe. The Russian Armed Forces will have to make drastic investments in human capital, both in manpower and training and in equipping these new formations. After massive losses in Ukraine, reaching these new goals can prove troublesome for the Kremlin.

Soviet and Russian Reforms

A brief history of Soviet and Russian military reforms, their aims, and their outcomes are essential when considering what comes next.

During the late Stalin era, the emphasis on Soviet military strength was on a massive ground force. After World War II, the Soviets envisioned a third World War that resembled World War II, albeit enhanced with nuclear weapons. The Soviet military experienced considerable changes in the late 1950s and 1960s, and between 1968 and 1987, the Soviet Ground Forces grew from 138 divisions to 220.

After the disaster in Chechnya in the 1990s, the Russian General Staff was compelled to create mixed units from all military districts to sustain a relatively small-scale conflict, highlighting a degraded force from its Soviet past. As early as 1992, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (MoD) began cutting Russian formations as the Russian economy collapsed. Even though military officials and policymakers aimed at restructuring the decaying Russian military, the 1990s mostly brought troop reductions and not genuine military reforms, and between 1992 and 2000 the Russian Ground Forces shrank from 1.4 million to 348,000. It was not until 2008, with the poor performance of the Russian Ground Forces in Georgia, that Anatoly Serdyukov, the Russian minister of defense, began massive cuts in the Russian Armed forces, moving from the division to brigade model and reducing the size of the officer corps by 57.7 percent. Serdyukov’s reforms, generally known as the New Look Reforms, likewise reduced the size of the Armed Forces by 278,500 personnel. At the time of the Russian attack on Georgia, the Russian military consisted of 80 percent legacy Soviet weapons. Serdyukov’s reforms aimed at reducing the size of the military to ensure proper investment in Russian State Armament Programs.

Putin’s Reforms 

The special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine has not delivered the intended outcomes for the Kremlin. After a disastrous northern offensive to Kyiv from Belarus, Russia shifted its operational objectives in favor of an attack on Donbas in late March. In a clear shift in threat perception and to expand the overall combat capacity of the Russian armed forces, Putin unveiled a plan that called for a 30 percent increase in the military, which would increase the size of the Russian army from 1.15 million to 1.5 million, and an additional 300,000 Kontraktniki, or contract service members. Overall, Putin’s plan would increase the size of ground forces by 22 total divisions and include two new divisions in the Russian VDV (airborne forces), bringing the VDV to a force structure force equal to Soviet times. One of these VDV divisions, the 104th Guards Air Assault Division, has already been formed against the backdrop of the former 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade and is currently operating in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Lastly, five naval infantry divisions would be raised from five existing naval infantry brigades. According to Shoygu, two motorized rifle divisions will be formed in the occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The new plan also reestablishes the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts, opposite NATO, from the current Western Military District, whose dismal failures during the SMO may have contributed to its downfall. Shoygu likewise highlighted the creation of an army corps in Karelia, opposite the Finnish border with Russia, and aviation support brigades and regiments who would support the Combined Arms Armies. 

Russia’s proposal, although ambitious, must be compartmentalized for proper analysis. For example, if the new motorized rifle divisions that Shoygu mentioned mirror those in the existing Russian force structure, equipping the force will be challenging. Take the 2nd Guard Motorized Rifle Division in the Western Military District: this division has three regiments, encompassing two motorized rifles and one tank regiment. Given the current table of organization & equipment of Russian divisions, each motorized rifle division requires 264 BTR-80s or 82s, plus 124 T-72s, 80s, 90s. If this number were consistent with the announced divisions, it would make Russian requirements for new Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) and tanks for the new ground troops at 2,640 IFVs and 1,240 tanks. The two VDV divisions would require 588 BMD-4Ms plus the additional artillery support that each regiment and division demands. 

Replacing these losses will prove difficult for the Russian Armed Forces. According to Oryx, a Dutch open-source research organization that analyzes military losses during conflicts, Russia has lost 1,642 tanks, 1,958 infantry fighting vehicles, 291 armored personnel carriers, and 759 armored fighting vehicles—a figure difficult to replace, given that Russia has lost 47 percent of its best tank force since the start of the SMO. At the current level of maintenance, force degradation in Ukraine, and Russian production capacity, it will be difficult for Russia to equip the existing force and raise 17 new divisions. The only way the Russian MoD can supply these new divisions is by digging into storage; however, these are older model T-72s whose performance in the SMO has been abysmal and are in less-than-optimal operating conditions after years of neglect in Russian open storage facilities. The Russian military industry will have difficulty adjusting personnel and production rates and decreasing dependency on foreign parts, which Western sanctions will probably strain. Russian production manpower will also be an obstacle, as it faces a shortage of 400,000 people in its production line. Lastly, the MoD began modernizing 800 T-62 tanks, first seen in the early 1960s, for deployment to Ukraine—a clear indication of the growing shortfalls. 

In keeping with the Russian military tradition of artillery use, Shoygu announced that Russia would create five new artillery divisions and five new heavy artillery brigades. This would enhance Russian artillery, as there are no artillery divisions in the Russian Armed Forces, and constitute a significant increase in firepower, adding to the notion of mass over precision as the common practice of the Russian military in Ukraine. Even though the Russian military does not have artillery divisions in its current force structure, a look at Soviet and early Russian artillery divisions may help predict how these new divisions may be manned and equipped. Take for instance the 34th Guards Artillery Division, formed in 1945 and disbanded in 2009. The division had a structure of 288 152MM guns per division. If Shoygu’s plan for five divisions mirrors a similar structure, the Russian Armed Forces would require 1,440 guns to fully equip these new formations, on top of backfilling losses to the existing figures currently fighting in Ukraine, whose artillery losses now stand at 475, according to Oryx. The heavy artillery brigades would likely deploy the 203MM 2S7 Pion howitzers and 240MM 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortars to enhance the strategic direction of the maneuver unit. Currently, Russia maintains 68 2S7s or 2S7Ms, of which six have been destroyed in Ukraine, and 40-50 2S4 with 400 in storage, of which four have been destroyed in Ukraine. As of July 2022, the 94th Arsenal in Omsk maintained 110 2S7s. Some of these 2S7 are in poor readiness and may be more suitable for parts after years of maintenance issues and corruption cases. Adding these weapons to the proposed formations may seem numerically feasible, given the amount of equipment in storage. However, Russia must invest considerable resources to restore them properly. Even if the Russian military can man and equip these formations with older weapons like modernized T-72s and T-62s, they will have a sizeable qualitative disadvantage with other NATO members whose stocks include newer generation tank platforms, artillery, and multiple launched rocket systems (MLRS). 

Properly training and manning military formations has placed the Russian military in precarious positions even before the breakout of the war when Russian units were consistently below their manning structure. Russia’s mobilization in September worked as intended in that the MoD added a substantial force to immediately stabilize the lines as the Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kharkiv collapsed Russian defenses in the region. With the 2nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division again as the model to follow, Russia would need 144,500 soldiers to man these new motorized rifle divisions; 11,000 new soldiers for the VDV; 5,000 for the artillery brigades; and 12,500 naval infantry (marines). Even though questions regarding proper training and officer billets in this new structure still loom, the manning portion of the proposal seems attainable, given that Russia’s twice-a-year draft, which calls up about 263,000 conscripts a year and allowing new conscripts to sign contracts from day one, can provide forces to man these new formations and reconstitute the existing force. Going back to a two-year compulsory service will likely improve manning issues within the Russian Armed Forces. Moreover, according to Russian open-sourced information, seven motorized rifle divisions will be raised from the seven existing brigades within the Southern and Western military districts and the Northern Fleet. Even though some of these brigades have been reconstituted multiple times after being destroyed in Ukraine, manning the divisions from the existing brigade personnel will ease the burden. 

Closing Thoughts

In contrast with Serdyukov’s reforms of 2008, in which Russia sacrificed manpower to invest in weapons development, the new reforms show a significant increase in manpower while at the same time investing in new weapons, backfilling the existing force with new equipment, and also standing new divisions. Serdyukov’s plan created a Russian military posture against internal and external threats and away from large-scale war in the European plain or China. These formations performed well, highlighting their combat potential in 2014 and Syria.

However, the real test had not come until earlier last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine. With this move, Russian signals that the primary threat has shifted from small-scale combat operations, which saw terrorism as its main threat, to a large-scale conflict, in which NATO is once again the main danger. But Russia is not the Soviet Union, and many barriers will prevent the MoD from successfully implementing these reforms, at least in how the Kremlin envisions them. Russia’s ability to use all available methods to man these formations will likely yield enough personnel. The issue is that modernization and procurement of existing and new systems will suffer, creating an army that will be quantitatively inferior to NATO forces.

Jorge L. Rivero is a Foreign Area Specialist concentrating in Europe and Eurasia for the U.S. Marine Corps and is currently stationed in Quantico, Virginia. Jorge focuses on the Russian military and Russian information operations. The views expressed here are his own.

Image: Shutterstock.

When news broke on January 24 that German chancellor Olaf Scholz relented to demands by Ukraine and its closest European allies to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, Europe’s heads of state weren’t exactly lining up to congratulate Scholz for his decisive leadership. Instead, many people fear the decision came too late and due to outside pressure—not because of German resolve to show a united front against Russia

Honoring the Élysée Treaty’s sixtieth anniversary, Scholz met with French president Emmanuel Macron last Sunday to toast, walk and talk about European security, energy, and economic policy, in an attempt to squelch criticism that the Franco-German partnership is faltering.

Meanwhile, former British prime minister Boris Johnson received a hero’s welcome in Kyiv, as if he had never left Downing Street. The UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which connects the Nordic and Baltic countries through British security assurances, has also lately been seen as a viable alternative to full NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, given Turkey’s opposition to NATO’s expansion on the disputed claims that Sweden supports Kurdish terrorist groups.

Although the Franco-German strategic partnership is in trouble, an unlikely candidate to take the lead in European security matters has now appeared: Great Britain. The first major European power to send tanks to Ukraine, Britain has once again become the leader in European security policy, despite having left Europe politically. Britain’s post-Brexit domestic political challenges don’t seem to have dampened the ambitious foreign policy of a successive row of British governments, each one positioning itself as a staunch supporter of Ukraine. This has won the backing of the EU’s eastern flank members, all of whom worry they’ll become the next victims of Russian aggression, should Ukraine fall.

Although Britain has won the hearts of the EU’s most pro-Ukrainian countries, Germany is shouldering increasing criticism for not contributing enough to the Ukrainian cause. Yet the critics have been less harsh with France, whose prewar economy wasn’t as tied to Russia as was Germany.

In fact, substantial differences separate France and Germany. On geostrategic issues and the meaning of what both call a “sovereign” Europe, Germany is more attached to NATO and the United States, while France adheres to the Gaullist tradition of Europe as a mediating and “balancing” power among the great world powers. Differences also abound in energy policy: France continues to support nuclear energy, while Germany is in the final phase of denuclearization.

The issue over sending German tanks to Ukraine underscores a more significant question about the future of European leadership, symbolized by the famous misquote often ascribed to former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” The looming question on everyone’s minds is the future of U.S. commitment to European security. Without Washington’s nuclear umbrella, would Germany seek to develop its own nuclear capabilities, leading to a more sinister Franco-German relationship? Germans can’t be sure the United States will continue to extend its nuclear umbrella over Germany unconditionally. No American president will risk nuclear war on behalf of Berlin under any circumstance. Having another nuclear power, Great Britain, firmly committed to European defense could allay German concerns and diminish the prospects of an escalating rivalry between Paris and Berlin.

Sixty years ago, Charles de Gaulle characterized the postwar Franco-German reconciliation as the “miracle of our time,” following the nationalistic excesses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In retrospect, de Gaulle’s optimism was not naive, as the Élysée Treaty he signed with Konrad Adenauer in 1963 has survived even George Pompidou and Chancellor Willy Brandt’s ostpolitik era of “exemplary but non-exclusive” relations.

With journalists and political pundits focused on Germany’s Leopard tanks and Boris back in Kyiv, the real question we ought to ask ourselves is if what we’re witnessing is actually the first act of the British returning to the EU fold—this time as heroes who have led European efforts to save Ukraine. This certainly would be, in the words of le général, a true miracle of our time.

Diana Mjeshtri is Policy Analyst at Impact Innovation Institute. Both are members of the Councilors Program at the Atlantic Council.

Image: Andrew Harker / Shutterstock.com

“Globalization,” the bête noir of isolationists, protectionists, and labor and environmental activists for nearly a decade, is now considered by many reasonable, centrist individuals to be dying, if not dead already.

However, there is compelling empirical evidence to the contrary. Just recently, Apple announced it would manufacture 25 percent of its products in India due to disruptions in China. TSMC, the world’s biggest maker of advanced computer chips, committed $12 billion to build an Arizona-based semiconductor plant in 2020, and has since announced the opening of the company’s second chip plant there, raising its investment in the state to $40 billion. Meanwhile, Noah Itech, a Chinese supplier for Tesla, has invested $100 million in a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico, and the Brazilian multinational personal care cosmetics group Natura has expanded its presence to seventy-three countries across all continents except Antarctica.

In reality, a major source of pessimism and attacks on globalization is the widespread confusion between “globalization” and “globalism,” with the latter undermining the former.

Globalism is an ideology, a firm set of beliefs that goods, services, capital, and people should be able to move unfettered across borders and that trade agreements should be set in place to foster interconnectedness and interdependence. Globalization, on the other hand, is the dynamo, the actual process of cross-border exchanges of products, services, people, information, and finance. It is a process that is agile and resilient, though often impacted by external factors such as a pandemic, natural disaster, climate change, civil unrest, and public safety.

In response to those who claim we have entered an era of deglobalization, one could point out that world trade volume and value have expanded by 4 percent and 6 percent, respectively, since the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995. Moreover, services trade, excluded in global trade reporting, is ever-increasing, now exceeding $6.1 trillion, over one-fifth of total world trade in goods and services. Notable also is that services trade, in contrast with merchandise trade, produces a yearly surplus for the United States.

Whereas globalism is static—after all, it is a credo—globalization is evolving. Recognizably, trade among nations ebbs and flows. To illustrate, U.S. imports of goods from China dropped to less than 17 percent last year from a high of 22 percent in 2017. Countries such as Mexico, Vietnam, and South Korea have gained a share over China, with Vietnam boosting its exports to the U.S. to $120 billion, a more than tenfold increase since 2007. At the same time, China’s footprint in the Americas is increasing dramatically, and Beijing is now the second-largest trade partner in the region after the United States.

Another feature of globalization today is concentration. No region is close to being self-sufficient. Every region relies on trade with others for more than 25 percent of at least one important type of good. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, 40 percent of global trade is “concentrated.” To illustrate, the United States imports nearly all of its semitrailer trucks and light goods vehicles from Mexico, while Mexico imports nearly all of its maize, propane, and refined petroleum products from the United States. This concentration improves efficiency and product availability, but complications can ensue, especially when products are harder to replace on short notice. Pandemic lockdowns in China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are two examples.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of supply chains has moved from the back burner to the front burner. Shortages of personal protection equipment, congested ports, and the limited number of supply sources for certain inputs, such as semiconductors, served as a wake-up call for companies to diversify and build redundancies into their supply chains and, where feasible, onshore or at least nearshore production.

Finally, neglected in discussions of trade and globalization is “domestic capability and domestic demand”—locally produced goods for both foreign and domestic markets. Firms like the Mexican auto parts producer Delphi supply both internal and external markets. As technical capabilities increase among suppliers and local consumer demand grows, producers with large domestic markets, such as China, Brazil, and India, can direct more of their production internally, reducing their dependency on exports. This creates the illusion of decreased globalization.

Global trade hit a record $32 trillion in 2022, according to the United Nations. And despite the lingering impact of the pandemic, high energy prices and interest rates, sustained inflation, and negative spillovers from the war in Ukraine, world trade in goods and services and commercial interconnectedness will continue unabated.

In his 1997 volume Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, Harvard professor Dani Rodrik highlights the severe tension between the market and broad sectors of society. His assessment of globalization today is that it is not collapsing but being reshaped. Whatever the case may be and regardless of one’s position on globalization, one thing should be perfectly clear: while globalism may be debatable, globalization has evolved to a point where it is not reversible.

Jerry Haar is a professor of international business at Florida International University and a global fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

Ricardo Ernst is a professor of operations and global supply chains and the Baratta Chair in Global Business at Georgetown University.

Image: VladSV/Shutterstock.

Most of the world has been focused on the brutal kinetic war that has been waged in Ukraine for almost a year. But from day one, this conflict has predominantly been a societal confrontation. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has sought to keep Ukraine as a proxy devoid of an independent identity. Since 2014, Moscow has tried to subdue Ukraine (and deter the West from integrating it into its midst) through a combination of subversion and intimidation short of war. The failure of this approach led in late February 2022 to a brief but equally dismal flirt with blitzkrieg-style conquest, whose rapid unraveling led Russia to refocus its strategy on waging a war of attrition aimed at crushing Ukrainian society's collective resolve and the Western public’s staying power, while ensuring the Russian people's forbearance and mobilization.

In pursuing its society-centered strategy, Russia has viciously and unconscionably applied covert action, conventional weapons, nuclear threats, economic (and especially energy) leverage, information control and manipulation, cultural and religious influence, and even population transfers. Countering the Russian onslaught in their own ways and subject to dramatically different ethical standards, Ukraine and the West have also leveraged many of these very tools to thwart Russia’s grand design. Their focus has been directed at reviving Ukraine’s independent cultural and political identity while building up a separate Orthodox religious affiliation. These means have been harnessed to shore up Ukrainian endurance and mobilization for war and solidify the West’s commitment to and material support for Kyiv, notwithstanding the toll it exacts on their societies. In parallel, this approach has sought to undermine the Russian public’s tolerance and mobilization for the war and international support for Moscow.

These actions and interactions have served the three protagonists both well and poorly. All sides have thus far managed to stay the course, to an astonishing degree in the case of Ukraine and to a surprising extent by its Western allies. However, the war has exacted a huge toll on all sides, and no side has approached anything even remotely resembling victory. As a result, the confrontation has become a drawn-out war of attrition, a destructive, painful, and costly struggle of societal endurance and patience with an end neither in sight nor easy to imagine. These costs have been exacerbated further by the protagonists' open-ended commitment to total victory, which appears unrealistic. Russia is pursuing the annexation, destruction, and subjugation of Ukraine while leveraging its energy assets to stay afloat economically and harm Europe. Ukraine courageously defends itself but also professes its intent to militarily reclaim all its lost territory, including Crimea. And the West dreams of routing the Russian military (and its Wagner and Chechen proxies) by providing unprecedented levels of military, intelligence, and economic support to Ukraine and stirring dissent in Russia by imposing ever harsher economic sanctions. The resulting situation appears static, but it is inherently unstable.

After nearly a year of massive bloodletting, destruction, and monetary hemorrhage, none of the parties can articulate a credible theory of victory. Each is mobilizing for a long war, one that both Russia and Ukraine increasingly portray as existential. Yet societal patience with the open-ended confrontation and the costs it exacts is beginning to wear thin in Russia, Europe, and even the United States. It is difficult to tell where it will collapse first, as it may snap unexpectedly as patience wanes over an open-ended conflict that is taking a toll on all three societies. This impatience is reinforced by anxiety over further escalation—Belarus’ entry into the war, Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia, spillover into Transnistria/Moldova or the Baltic states, even Russian demonstrative nuclear use—happening in a desperate effort to break the stalemate or as a rage-driven response to a real or imagined grievance.

There is a fully understandable desire to see the Russian aggressor defeated, punished, and dissuaded from contemplating a replay against Ukraine or any other country. But the odds of securing all three exclusively by military means are close to zero. Hope for bringing an end to this tragic, dangerous quagmire hinges on recognizing the fundamentally society-centric nature of the conflict. Leaders must internalize the realization that the end of this dreadful duel of societal endurance will not come from a breakthrough on the physical battlefield. It will have to come from tapping the most potent societal emotions—fear and hope—to break the stalemate by encouraging all sides to contemplate heretofore unthinkable compromises in their respective war aims.

Sage leadership will henceforth be tested by leaders’ willingness and ability to internalize and credibly invoke fear and inspire hope to convince all societies involved to lay down their arms, even if they insist on sustaining other forms of hostile behavior toward each other thereafter. More specifically, they would need to acknowledge the fear that an open-ended conflict looks grim for all: further carnage, destruction, and economic devastation in Ukraine and Russia; the possible expansion and escalation of the conflict, and the prospect of their internal acquiescence and external support collapsing in the short run; and traumas haunting their societies for decades to come. But they must also inspire hope in their societies that deconfliction will usher in better times in the domains they really care about. Where could this hope and fear come from?

For Western European leaders, fear would build on anxiety about the prospects of severe popular backlash from their citizens, who are already struggling to cope with high energy prices, inflation, and the costs of supporting Ukraine, and fear the impact of further intense fighting—possible spillover of the war westward, more (permanent) Ukrainian exiles and refugees, energy insecurity, and acute governance challenges. Hope could be primarily predicated on the promise of a reliable and affordable energy supply to guarantee comfortable survival through the apex of Europe’s energy vulnerability, the winter of 2023. Hope could be further inspired by Europe’s success in sustaining alliance cohesion, resisting Russian aggression, rebuilding its military might, and stymieing Russia’s future ambitions to destabilize its neighbors.

For its part, the Biden administration must begin to fear that its population—which has borne the brunt of providing intelligence, financial, and material assistance to Ukraine—will dread the price of keeping Ukraine afloat. It must also begin fearing the distraction and partisan rancor in Washington that will come not just from staying the course, but also from gearing up to respond militarily should an increasingly frustrated Vladimir Putin elect to expand and extend his war effort. But the administration can find and inspire hope that America’s success in dealing such a blow to Russia will not only dissuade it from future adventures but also impress on China what it would risk by trying to take Taiwan by force. Additionally, Washington can expect that the cessation of overt hostilities in Europe will free its hands to focus on its internal woes and compete economically with China (and prepare for a possible military clash with Beijing).

The two hardest societies to win over and empower to weigh in with their leadership will be Putin’s Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. As both leaders have so much vested in the fight, they will not be easily swayed. But even in Russia and Ukraine, the odds look more favorable now than at any time over the last year.

For the brave and patriotic Ukrainians, fear would build on the real possibility that the future holds in store for them many more scars than they have already endured: hundreds of thousands of casualties, extensive devastation of national infrastructure, millions of displaced citizens, more abducted children, and a daily struggle to cope with the adversities of war. It would feed on the sure prospects of a continued Russian campaign to physically destroy Ukraine’s livelihood and infrastructure, exacerbated by the all but certain resumption of intense fighting in the spring. This fear would be further amplified by concerns of diminished European or U.S. support, not only now but also later, when a massive reconstruction effort will be required to put Ukraine back on its feet and woo back its refugees.

Zelensky has thus far managed to hold his people together with his admirable courage and leadership, steadfastly upholding harsh conditions for any ceasefire or settlement. But even he cannot ultimately remain indifferent to signs of domestic fragility and growing impatience among Kyiv’s backers. Zelensky and his supporters might be swayed to soften their demands and carry their population with them in return for tangible steps capable of inspiring hope: a promise of additional military support if Russia continues fighting, ironclad Western security guarantees against renewed Russian aggression, a smooth path to European Union accession (and close affiliation in the interim), and a major commitment for reconstruction aid once the conflict abates.

Similarly, for Russia, fear would come from the likelihood of an open-ended confrontation in which Ukraine enjoys extensive military support—including the major combat platforms it will soon receive from its Western supporters—as well as precise targeting information, which has already shown its efficacy against vulnerable and chaotically managed Russian forces. Even the remarkably adamant and aloof Putin cannot remain completely oblivious to the increasingly palpable signs of domestic fatigue and anxiety resulting from Russia’s many casualties (including among forcibly recruited reservists), the public’s loss of confidence in the military’s competence, and the mounting costs of the war and Western sanctions.

While Putin has similarly held fast thus far, he must also be realizing that Russia’s bag of tricks to subdue domestic opposition, heighten the population’s anxiety about Western or “Nazi” plots, and drum up popular support for the war effort keeps dwindling. But like the case of Ukraine, for these sentiments to hold any promise of producing a more conciliatory Russian approach toward a settlement, there must be an injection of hope for Russians: that Western sanctions will be eased and subsequently removed, that NATO will not be further expanded eastward, and that a genuine effort will be made to reintegrate Russia into the mainstream—economically, politically, and, perhaps most importantly, symbolically—if its orientation fundamentally changes. Additionally, the West must also reluctantly commit not to go after Putin (if and when he relents and accepts the conditions it lays out), leaving the job of removing him from office to divine intervention or the Russian people themselves.

Ariel (Eli) Levite is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Technology and International Affairs Program.

Image: kibri_ho/Shutterstock.com

In an op-ed retweeted and hailed by the Atlantic Council, National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn emphasized that Germany’s decision to send tanks to Ukraine will help crush Russia. He underscored several points that led him to the conclusion that Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed his death warrant by invading Ukraine. His assessment was eloquent, sweeping—and wrong.

Heilbrunn is on his strongest ground in arguing that the Western alliance, in contradistinction to what Putin had expected, has cast its die not only to outlast him in Ukraine but also to crush Russian aspirations for hegemony in Europe once and for all. He contended that whereas Berlin’s decision has symbolically freed Germany from the strictures that it operated under after World War II, it has practically liberated countries such as Poland and Finland to transfer German-made tanks to aid a forthcoming Ukrainian offensive this spring. Next he stressed that Putin was time and again wrong in his miscalculation that he would swiftly sweep over Ukraine and break up the Western alliance. Fundamentally, Heilbrunn argued that Putin—by rejuvenating the Western alliance, inadvertently arousing America from its post-Cold War torpor and unifying Ukrainians against him—has faced a “fight to the finish” which he cannot win.

I fully agree with Heilbrunn that Putin has miscalculated. Indeed, he committed a strategic blunder by invading. Moscow has already lost the war for Kyiv. But the story does not end there even if Heilbrunn is too blind to recognize it. The cold, hard truth is that Putin will never concede defeat and will stand his ground in the Crimea and Donbas, which he will fight for until the “finish” using nuclear warheads should the need arise to secure his survival there.

I also fault Heilbrunn for contextualizing the Ukraine crisis within a Western political mindset incognizant of both the weight of history and geography on Russia’s collective consciousness and the ramifications of the crisis for the international order in general and American global power in particular. The notion that Russia aspires for hegemony in Europe is bogus. Whatever policies and actions Moscow has pursued towards Europe have been essentially directed to foil any Western attempt to choke Russia into indefensible borders that would deprive it of a global role. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, the heir of imperial Russia, has transformed a once ambitious and assertive empire into a state striving to conceal its insecurities. Although Russia posed no threat to the West following the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has relentlessly expanded to the doorstep of Russia. NATO towered over the historical capital of Peter the Great, and Washington planned to bring Kyiv and Tbilisi into the orbit of NATO, effectively completing the encirclement of Russia. In 2008, the year that President George W. Bush called for extending NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, President Dmitry Medvedev addressed Euro-Atlantic security and Russia’s security concerns in Evian, emphasizing:

The real issue is that NATO is bringing its military infrastructure right up to our borders and is drawing new dividing lines in Europe, this time along our western and southern frontiers. No matter what we are told, it is only natural that we should see this as action directed against us.

This expansion of NATO, in the aftermath of the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq, compounded by NATO’s key role in ousting Muammar Qaddhafi’s regime in Libya, reified Russian perception of NATO’s leader United States as a global hegemon cavalierly indifferent to Russia’s true national security concerns.

It follows from this that Heilbrunn’s contention that Berlin’s decision to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine to help it battle Russia and to symbolically free Germany from the strictures that it operated under after World War II is imprudent. From the Russian standpoint, this decision conjures up Russian images of German tanks leading the Nazi blitzkrieg into Russia, which was only reversed at a staggering human cost. In fact, this decision flouts the historical ideational foundation that Russia has played a key role in shaping our geopolitical role, which clearly has not yet ended. It is incontrovertible that Moscow’s bloody battles against both Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 and Adolf Hitler in 1941 paved the way for the success of the Waterloo and Normandy landings, both of which shaped our contemporary geopolitical world.

These feats colored in spilled Russian blood are ingrained in the country’s collective consciousness and psyche that the West tends to forget to the chagrin of Moscow. Freeing up Germany, Poland, and Finland to send German tanks to aid a Ukrainian spring offensive to cross Kherson into the Donbas and Crimea is tantamount to jangling Moscow’s sensitive historical, political, and cultural nerves. Herein lay the Western alliance and Heilbrunn’s misguided view of Russia’s eventual indetermination to hold onto these territories. In other words, the Western alliance is waging a war ignorant of Russia’s red lines and how it may unfold. It is ignoring Russia’s historical, cultural, and political bonds to these territories, and more specifically discounts Russia’s possible wide-ranging responses to defend these territories.

The Donbas has been integral to the formation of Russia and thereafter the Soviet Union since Moscow’s defeat of the Mongols in the fifteenth century. Significantly, Crimea and its vicinity in eastern-southern Russia figured prominently in Moscow’s drive to expand, protect, and project the power of the Tsarist Empire. Early on, Peter the Great set his sights on the Sea of Azov and Crimea. He seized the Azov fortress from the Ottomans, formerly known as Azak fortress, overlooking the port of Azov, and in September 1698, he founded the first Russian Navy base, Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. Catherine the Great continued his imperial project and seized Crimea and its vicinity in 1774, whereupon Moscow established its strategic naval base at Sevastopol, which has served as the main base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Moscow not only established a strategic foothold on the Black Sea but also projected its power over the restive Caucuses. From Moscow’s past to the present, Crimea and Donbas have constituted a center of geopolitical gravity and prestige for Moscow as a big power.

Putin has not only underscored their historical, strategic, and cultural importance but also made them a testament to his legitimacy as the leader who reconstituted Russia as a big power. In his address to the Duma in March 2014, for example, Putin stressed:

Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.  

He then added:

It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered… Now, many years later, I heard residents of Crimea say that back in 1991 they were handed over like a sack of potatoes. This is hard to disagree with. And what about the Russian state? What about Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was going through such hard times then that realistically it was incapable of protecting its interests. However, the people could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice.

Putin’s speech underscored the humility with which Moscow had to deal with in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But more importantly, Putin stressed the notion that Crimea is an inseparable part of Russia and a cornerstone of its emergence as a civilization and an empire. Keeping Crimea is an act of righting an egregious historical injustice committed against Moscow. Crimea and Donbas are Russia’s red lines.

Indeed, as Heilbrunn rightly postulates, Putin has revivified the Western alliance, aroused America from its post-Cold War torpor, and unified Ukrainians. But what he, along with the Western alliance and mainstream media, fails to realize is that Putin may have lost Kyiv but he will not lose Crimea. Medvedev recently emphasized that “the defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war." Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, said in a sermon: "We pray to the Lord that he bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world."

One may assume that these statements reflect Russia’s recognition that it may lose on the battlefield. But these statements are illustrative of how Russia perceives itself as a proud nation with a unique history and culture that has paid a staggering price to help shape our geopolitical world. It would behoove the Western alliance to realize that to overplay its hand is to flirt with playing with nuclear fire. The notion that someone armed with a nationalist history and the largest inventory of nuclear warheads—whose use in conventional warfare is official military doctrine—will go quietly into the night is far-fetched.

Contrary to Heilbrunn’s optimistic predictions, I foresee something far darker—a broken world bedeviled by nuclear anarchy and perilous insecurity. I see a Western alliance waging a war of conscience whose cost will be prohibitive to humanity. Why Heilbrunn, normally an astute observer of international affairs, cannot discern these palpably obvious perils is baffling to me.   

Dr. Robert G. Rabil is a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of highly commended peer-reviewed articles and books including: Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (2003); Syria, the United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (2006); Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon (2011); Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism (2014); The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Lebanon: The Double Tragedy of Refugees and Impacted Host Communities (2016, 2018);and  White Heart (2018). He is the author of the forthcoming Lebanon: From Ottoman Rule to Erdogan’s Regime (2023). He served as the Red Cross’s Chief of Emergency in Baabda region, Beirut, during Lebanon’s civil war. He was the project manager of the US State Department-funded Iraq Research and Documentation Project. He was awarded the LLS Distinguished Faculty Award and the LLS Distinguished Professor of Current Affairs. He was also awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Humanities from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He can be reached @robertgrabil.

Image: Salma Bashir Motiwala/Shutterstock.

When Alan Turing cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War, neither the United Kingdom nor the United States immediately published a paper announcing the achievement. Instead, they kept it to themselves so they could keep reading Nazi messages encrypted using Engima machines. Last month, in contrast, Chinese academics from government-run laboratories and research organizations published a paper claiming to have developed a new mathematical strategy to break RSA encryption, today’s standard.

If the Chinese government can crack RSA encryption, then they can break into every U.S. government and private sector system, seeing and exfiltrating anything and everything, achieving true information dominance over Washington and its allies and partners.

There are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the paper’s claims, however, and even more reasons to question why Chinese researchers would show their hand if they really cracked our codes.

Some day, computer scientists will break RSA encryption. But before that happens, they will need to have the right tools. Based on the current understanding of math, breaking RSA encryption will require quantum computers, which harness the principles of quantum physics to accelerate problem-solving exponentially.

The race to quantum computing is well underway. In November, IBM launched the largest quantum computer yet, the Osprey. This milestone “brings us a step closer” to “the coming era of quantum-centric supercomputing,” IBM’s director of research said. But the Osprey cannot yet solve the complex mathematical problems facing those who want to break RSA encryption. Beijing, however, claims it can break RSA encryption with a hybrid approach combining classical computing and quantum computing using a smaller quantum computer.

If China really broke RSA encryption, they wouldn’t tell us. Perhaps China is trying to get a seat at the table, seeking invitations to collaborate with quantum research facilities overseas. These invitations may have dried up after Washington enacted a series of policies blocking quantum technology sharing with China because of quantum’s military applications. If invitations were the goal, however, the Chinese paper’s authors may have shot themselves in the foot by revealing they are lagging years behind foreign competitors. The approach the researchers take in their paper is similar to one described in another paper published five years ago by an American quantum software company, explains Kevin Kane, the CEO of American Binary, a cybersecurity company focused on security in the quantum era.

Beijing has previously published what appears to be cutting-edge research in efforts to garner praise, only to have that research debunked later. This seems to be the case yet again. Numerous quantum and computer science experts have already raised doubts about the new paper’s findings. The mathematical strategy the paper explores is not scalable to very large numbers, explains Kane. Nevertheless, he warns if the paper is truthful, it indicates China is further ahead than we thought and is making important progress. University of Austin computer science professor Scott Aaronson, meanwhile, pans the Chinese academics for misleading claims that their approach is faster than classical computing when in fact it appears not to be.

Given the scale of the threat, however, dismissing the Chinese claims as mere boasting would be dangerous. For a moment, set aside the question of whether or not the math works. Why would China sacrifice significant strategic advantage for academic bragging rights?

Perhaps the Chinese government is trying to convince the world that it has cracked RSA encryption to build a kind of deterrence. If one repeats false information often enough, others may start believing it, especially if they are scared to begin with. The quantum paper could be part of a series of efforts to convince the United States that China has obtained unsurpassable technological dominance. Beijing may be betting that, facing a stronger adversary, American decisionmakers will acquiesce to China’s will on various global issues.

Discerning Beijing’s motivations may be challenging, but one should recall Sun Tzu’s words: “Those skilled in warfare move the enemy and are not moved by the enemy.” Beijing’s strategic planners are no doubt watching to see how America and its allies respond—how much handwringing Washington engages in, how much reactive behavior, and how much resignation. The Chinese academics may have revealed their hand, but Washington should not. Part of America’s assessment of its next actions should be an evaluation of what lessons China might learn from how the U.S. government reacts.

Regardless of why the paper was published, the day is rapidly approaching when quantum computers will break today’s encryption. America and its allies must reach this milestone first while also raising security and encryption standards to protect against an adversary with advanced, encryption-breaking capabilities. Both of these steps require government and private investment in quantum research and development and in cultivating the skilled workforce needed to conduct this research and realize solutions.

Dr. Georgianna Shea is the chief technologist of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Annie Fixler is the director of CCTI and an FDD research fellow. Follow Annie on Twitter @afixler.

Image: Flickr/IBM Research.

In 2013, a political counselor at the Turkish embassy in Washington asked me out to lunch to discuss my plans and vision for the Institute of Turkish Studies, which I was then executive director of. After ordering a meal at Zorba’s, a Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle, we sat outside on a sunny day and began talking in Turkish. A few minutes later, our server brought over our dishes and asked where in Turkey we were from. After telling her, she said she was Cypriot and extolled a short tale of her childhood memories on the now-divided island with her Greek and Turkish Cypriot friends. After she left, we continued our discussion, only to see her come back one more time to offer us a complimentary dessert that was backed with her hope that one day, the island would be reunited. Today, I cannot envision a Turkish diplomat asking me out to lunch—and even if they did, it would not likely be at a Greek restaurant. Turkey’s stance in the Eastern Mediterranean since 2019 has increased tensions to the point that armed conflict is possible. That being said, a negotiated settlement in Cyprus may be the key to regional peace and stability. It’s a problem that the United States has the clout to resolve.

Put simply, the resolution of the Cyprus question, the last divided island in Europe, will be vital for stability in the Eastern Mediterranean and could also yield a long list of benefits that surpass the geographical interests of regional actors. To be clear, attempting to resolve the Cyprus question is no simple task: entire military, diplomatic and political careers have begun and ended in Cyprus since the 1974 Turkish invasion divided the island and embittered relations between Turkey and actors in the Eastern Mediterranean. Resolving it would require considerable diplomatic investment by the United States, comparable to the role it played in resolving the Northern Ireland conflict and the Balkan wars. That being said, the United States is already aware of the value of Cyprus, albeit to a very limited degree. For instance, by recently lifting an arms embargo that had been imposed on the island since the late 1980s, the United States freed the Republic of Cyprus (the internationally recognized government on the southern part of the island) to facilitate the shipment of its existing stockpiles of Soviet-era weaponry to Ukraine.

The Biden administration needs to go further and unlock the full potential that a negotiated settlement of the Cyprus question can offer. Failing to resolve the Cyprus question continues to bring the region and the rest of the world closer to war. This has never been more important than in the new epoch of great power competition we have entered. Indeed, without a viable solution to the Cyprus question that is acceptable to the involved parties, Western security will remain in a perpetual state of fragility.

A negotiated settlement over Cyprus came close to success in 2004 under the auspices of United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Dubbed the “Annan Plan,” the settlement would have reunified the island by integrating the Turkish-occupied northern part of the former British-Ottoman colony into a single unified country made up of two constituent states. The negotiations were long and painful, with each side having to make hard concessions. Turkey, for its part, would have agreed to remove the bulk of its military presence from the island, which hovers around 30,000 troops. Ankara also agreed to relinquish territories it seized during the invasion. The Greek Cypriots would have had to come to terms with sharing power with their Turkish counterparts in governing the island. Moreover, had the deal succeeded, Turkish would have become an official European Union (EU) language, advancing Turkey’s efforts to become a full member of the EU.

Even though the details were agreed upon by all sides, the deal ultimately collapsed due to a “no” vote by Greek Cypriots in a public referendum. The referendum failed for one simple reason: the Republic of Cyprus was going to be allowed to enter the EU regardless of whether a settlement was reached with the Turks. In other words, the leadership had little incentive to let the plan succeed. Following the plan’s demise, the ensuing years have resulted in all sides reverting to blaming one another for the lack of a new settlement. Furthermore, the Republic of Cyprus’ entry into the EU as a divided island has worsened relations between Ankara and Brussels. At this point, neither Turkey, Greece, nor the two sides in Cyprus are close to a settlement. Turkey insists on the unrealistic position of a two-state solution, while Cyprus and Greece feel relatively vindicated in doing the bare minimum to return to the negotiating table.

One could shrug their shoulders and say this is just a European problem, or even merely the problem of the disputing sides. They would be wrong.

While the Republic of Cyprus is a member of the EU, it is not a member of NATO. And while Turkey is a member of NATO, it is not a member of the EU. Both Cyprus and Turkey prevent the other from joining the entity of which they are a member because of their political differences over the future status of Cyprus. Collaboration to secure a common European and transatlantic security framework that is part and parcel of both NATO and the EU is arguably the most important strategic security consideration since the end of the Cold War. Russia’s ability to invade Ukraine without batting an eye is arguably linked to the lack of comprehensive security architecture uniting NATO and the EU. If one doubts this, one only needs to consider Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine knowing full well that the EU would not pose a military obstacle to his ambitions. While Putin may have (thus far) miscalculated Europe’s economic resolve to punish Russia, this has not impacted his determination to press on with his “special military operation.” Future attempts to prevent Russian irredentist actions lie in developing an integrated and reimagined Western security architecture that brings NATO and the EU together. The only way to accomplish this is to resolve the Cyprus question, which will finally allow Cyprus to join NATO and Turkey to once again re-engage in its EU membership bid or at least be included in any emerging European security framework.

Related to this is Europe’s now urgent need to end its dependence on Russian natural gas. Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Europe has witnessed a dramatic cut in its gas supplies from Russia. An alternative and viable source of natural gas to serve Europe’s demand lies within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Cyprus. Through cooperation with the countries that now comprise the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), the extraction of gas sources to Europe via Greece stands a good chance of being commercially viable. However, Turkey is not part of the EMGF, primarily because it does not recognize Cyprus. As a result, Ankara contests Cyprus’ right to award drilling contracts to Western oil companies, mainly by deploying its own exploration and drilling vessels into Cypriot (and Greek) waters, often escorted by elements of the Turkish Navy. While the Republic of Cyprus has the diplomatic upper hand in being the internationally recognized government of the island, this does not resolve the risk that conflict may arise due to some miscalculation by either the Turkish, Greek, or Cypriot militaries. This would be a catastrophic development that would engulf Europe into a state of war; at least two of the warring parties would be NATO members and two would be EU states. The future of a stable Mediterranean gas supply to Europe must come at the tail end of a political solution to Cyprus. This would result in the reunification of the island, with Turkey establishing full diplomatic ties with Cyprus. In doing so, the question of contested waters, EEZs, and bilateral tensions would be addressed through diplomacy, paving the way for conflict-free gas supplies to reach Europe and further reducing Russia’s importance as a gas supplier.

Finally, and possibly tangentially, a U.S.-brokered Cyprus deal could ignite the spark to rekindle American and Turkish ties, which began sharply deteriorating over significant differences over Syria and the fight to eliminate the Islamic State. Since then, the bilateral relationship between the supposed “strategic partners” has worsened substantially, to the point that the Trump administration was forced to sanction Turkey due to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s insistence on purchasing Russian missile defense technology in 2019 instead of Western alternatives. Driven by a fundamental loss of trust on both sides, the toxicity in the relationship has reached unprecedented levels. President Joe Biden did not speak with Erdogan in the first eighteen months of his term, while Turkey continues to block Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO. An American diplomatic investment in the Cyprus problem may be just what is required to rekindle the partnership.

While establishing trust between the American and Turkish governments will be hard in the short term, U.S. diplomatic efforts to settle the Cyprus dispute could be seen as sincere by the Turks and could go a long way to re-establishing meaningful dialogue between the Cold War allies. The benefit to the United States and West could be huge: a reset between Washington and Ankara over the Cyprus issue could incentivize Turkey to distance itself from Moscow, which it has been reluctant to do since the mid-2010s. A dialogue focused on resolving the issue could pave the way to rebuilding trust, offer Ankara alternatives down the road to offload its Russian S-400 missiles, and help the Turkish military acquire its much-needed F-16 fighters.

This brings us to the question of why Washington should broker a negotiated settlement in Cyprus and how it could actually succeed. Put simply, the United States is the only actor with enough diplomatic clout to be considered credible by all sides in the dispute. The Obama administration missed an opportunity to take on this issue, mainly because it considered it relatively unimportant. This mistake should not be repeated. This is a festering issue that carries with it the potential to embroil the whole of the Western hemisphere in a catastrophic military conflict that would destabilize NATO’s eastern flank. But through a settlement, NATO and European security could be enhanced by resolving the Turkish and Cypriot objections that prevent defense integration.

Unfortunately, the EU is not a credible entity in the eyes of Turkey, as Cyprus and Greece are already members. This is a non-starter. The UN is often thought to be the next logical choice. After all, it was the main force behind the 2004 negotiations. However, in this climate, the UN does not have the ability to arm-twist and offer incentives like the United States. A special envoy tasked by the White House to oversee negotiations is the only viable option to resolve the Cyprus quagmire.

The United States has several cards up its sleeve that could prove decisive in moving the needle toward an equitable solution. First, Washington is a relative novice with the issue and is looked upon less suspiciously by all parties. Second, the United States has a proven ability to get conflicting sides to the table. For instance, Washington brought together Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Sinn Fein and the British government, and Israel and the signatories to the Abraham Accords.

As far as convincing Turkey to come to the table and abandon its insistence on a two-state solution, Washington could entice Ankara with conditional commitments on F-16 sales, provided that Turkey moves decisively to divest itself of its S-400 inventories (and generally become a more amicable member of NATO). Of greater interest to Ankara would be for the United States to pitch a free trade agreement. This would be an important gain, as it would provide an economic dimension to anchor the U.S.-Turkish strategic partnership, which has always been missing since the beginning of the Cold War. With increased economic ties, Turkey and America’s likelihood of falling out with one another would be reduced.

Arm-twisting the Greek Cypriots may be a little harder. That being said, they are interested in acquiring U.S.-manufactured weapons systems, which could be made contingent on their willingness to negotiate in good faith. America could also convince the United Kingdom to transform its sovereign bases on the island into NATO bases—something the Greek Cypriots would very much welcome. Obviously, these are initial suggestions that only demonstrate the bargaining power that the United States may possess. Reaching a negotiated settlement is likely to be challenging due to long-standing issues such as the status of Turkish troops on the island, property/land disputes, and the future of settled Turks on the island.

It’s understandable that Washington is focused on the war in Ukraine and the pacing threat of China. However, a price is attached to being the leader of the liberal international order. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of American leadership in major theaters is being preyed upon by China and Russia. Cyprus is one such theater. Peacefully resolving this intractable problem will yield much more than merely mending relations between Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. It will be a fundamental component of efforts to limit Russian influence over allies such as Turkey, secure energy sources independent of Moscow, and integrate the European and transatlantic security framework.

This is easier said than done. Prioritizing Cyprus will require vision and leadership. Sadly, this is largely absent in Washington—a problem not confined to the United States. The Western hemisphere is bereft of effective leaders. Reuniting Cyprus through a negotiated settlement—and reaping the array of rewards it would bring—will require not just a vision but a fundamental rethinking. Western leaders must focus on the costs of not taking action rather than the costs of taking action. This approach helped create a robust and attractive world order after World War II. Without such leadership and strategic foresight, turbulence and decay in the Eastern Mediterranean may lead to armed conflict.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). He is also an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Command and Staff College-Marine Corps University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Image: Ververidis Vasilis/Shutterstock.com

Suppose one were to plot out on a map the progress of two jihadist insurgencies in Africa: the Islamic insurgency in the Maghreb and the Boko Haram insurgency. The former began in Algeria after the 2002 Algerian Civil War and has since spread east into Libya, northwest into Morocco, southwest into Mauritania, and south into Mali. The latter insurgency began in the extreme northeast of Nigeria and has since spread east into Chad, north into Niger, and west into Benin. If one were to do this, shading in each country along the way, one would see that a single, little-known country stands in the way of both insurgencies, impeding their expansion and separating their fighters in the field. That country is Burkina Faso.

Last weekend, the military government of Burkina Faso demanded that France withdraw its last 400 special forces troops from the country. France had kept the fighters in Burkina Faso after a recent series of troop withdrawals on the continent to assist in the fight against jihadist insurgents. The current Burkinabe military government took power in September 2022 in a coup against the old military government over its failure to handle the nation’s insurgency. Likewise, the previous military government took power in a January 2022 coup against former President Roch Marc Christian Kabore over his failure to handle the nation’s insurgency. The French troops in Burkina Faso had been sent by French president François Hollande in 2013 at Mali’s request after jihadist groups overran the northern half of the country. Moreover, the French troops proved effective. In 2014, France launched Operation Barkhane and, within a year, rolled back jihadist gains and confined the insurgents to a few remote pockets deep in the country’s interior. If the last French troops leave within a month, as the new Burkinabe government demanded, jihadist groups operating in Africa may be encouraged to redouble their efforts against the governments of the Maghreb and the Sahel.

It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of all of Africa might hang in the balance. As Burkina Faso goes, so will the continent.

The southern half of Burkina Faso lies in the lush Sudanian savannah. This savannah is the type of landscape that most Americans associate with Africa—a luxuriant, tropical grassland broken by trees and shrubs. Burkina Faso’s northern half, however, lies in the Sahel, which stretches across the African continent, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. The Sahel abuts the Sahara Desert and often features in global news cycles because of the many famines and droughts brought about by its harsh, semi-arid climate. It is important to recall that most African countries have only a wet and a dry season. In the savannah, the dry season means the trees lose their leaves, the shrubs shrink back, and the grasses dry out, only to bounce back in greater abundance when the rains arrive. In the Sahel, however, the wet season means that pastoralists hurry to graze their herds on the region’s sparse grasses before the dry season reduces the area to a desert.

Just as the Sudanian savannah teems with exotic wildlife, the Sahel brims with people; indeed, the region contains countries with some of the world’s highest birth rates. This vitality has also led to a troubling trend from which the Sahel gains most of its notoriety. Jihadist insurgent groups prowl about the region’s isolated settlements, terrorizing civilians and seeking recruits. The Sahel’s climatic volatility aids the jihadists in this latter endeavor, as desperate young men with no other source of employment can easily see in these jihadi groups a solution to their economic insecurity. When jihadism is the only show in town, an AK-47 becomes a meal ticket.

Traditionally, the Burkinabe government has handled the vast difference between its two main biogeographic regions and its peoples by applying a simple policy: in the wet season, maximize the country’s agricultural and pastoral productivity, especially in the fertile south, and use the taxes and other proceeds to employ workers in the north during the dry season, lest they become targets for jihadi groups. Under President Blaise Compaore, who took power in 1987 and resigned during a constitutional crisis in 2014, this policy smoothed over the seasonal transitions and ensured peace and stability. Compaore also enjoyed productive relations with regional Islamic organizations, managing to peacefully free many hostages. However, Compaore’s administration suffered from a failure in succession planning: he sought to cling to power with a constitutional amendment and made no provision for how to peacefully contain protests in the event of a public uprising. Within weeks of the proposed changes, Compaore had no choice but to step down and allow a military government to take power.

After Compaore stepped down, Burkina Faso went through six short-lived administrations. During that period, rival claimants to the presidency obstructed the smooth collection and spending of government funds to mitigate climatic concerns and their political repercussions. The exact chronology of what happened next is complicated due to the number of insurgent groups involved and their tendency to merge, split, and reconfigure themselves, but the upshot is that insurgents moved into northern Burkina Faso from Mali, adding a theater to the Islamist insurgency in the Maghreb and exposing a previously stable country to the ravages of opportunistic militant groups. Meanwhile, Nigeria—which had faced a devastating civil conflict since 2009, when Boko Haram launched its rebellion against the Nigerian government with the intent of establishing an Islamic state—saw an escalation in its conflict with Boko Haram when the jihadist group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, kidnapped 276 schoolgirls, and embarked on a campaign of daily attacks against Christians and government officials. During that time, the French-led Operation Barkhane employed thousands of French and allied African troops to push back against militant groups. It proved successful until the 2021 Malian coup caused France to wind down and finally end operations in Mali.

Now that the Burkinabe government has announced its desire for a full French withdrawal, the security situation seems poised to deteriorate further. The worst case scenario is that jihadi fighters from the Maghreb insurgency could establish a foothold in Burkina Faso, swarm across the narrow territory of Togo, link up with Boko Haram insurgents in Benin, and from there flood into southern Nigeria. The best case scenario is that these jihadi groups resume their old rivalries instead of joining forces and devote more time to fighting each other than securing areas of the Sahel and Sudanian savannah to prepare for attacks, including against Europe and the United States.

There are no easy solutions or obvious paths forward for the worsening security crisis in West Africa. The situation is made even more complicated by Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo’s allegations that the Burkinabe government hired the Wagner Group to help combat jihadists.  If true, such a deal could precipitate further escalation between the West and Russia. Furthermore, the United States and its allies ought to have been humbled by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and should approach any long-term military entanglement with caution.

However, the United States and its allies might do well to employ a strategy that seems obvious but wouldn’t attract the same attention as a military response: economic incentives. So far, the French and their West African partners have sought to reduce the number of jihadist fighters in the most traditional way: killing them. By way of historical analogy, the current French war on jihadism in West Africa seems to resemble the French campaign in Egypt and Syria from 1798 to 1801. Despite a string of early successes under Napoleon, the French ultimately had no choice but to withdraw their Armee d’Orient for lack of military and material support. Operation Barkhane sought to build on the success of Operation Serval but failed for the same reasons.

Instead, the French should recall another episode: the Viking siege of Paris in the ninth century. After the Frankish successors of Charlemagne proved incapable of deterring Viking attacks, the Vikings grew bold and, for the first time, settled in for a long siege instead of launching one of their usual raids. The Frankish king, Charles the Fat, ultimately opted to pay the Vikings 700 pounds in silver to abandon their siege and attack a rebellious region of the Frankish empire instead. Though fighting and raiding played a key role in Viking religion and culture, Viking raids also had clear economic motives. In the Sahel, where an AK-47 is like a meal ticket for desperate young African men in the way a battle axe might have once been a meal ticket for desperate young Scandinavian men, perhaps it is not necessary to kill insurgents if it is possible to disincentivize insurgency itself. Direct cash payments for public service or other projects could have a deterrent effect, as might grants to establish small businesses for aspiring entrepreneurs or feed depots for herders.

Jihadist insurgency in West Africa seems like both an intractable long-term threat and a present danger. Still, the United States ought to help France formulate alternative approaches to the problem to avoid repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result. One of the key consequences of the Viking siege of Paris was the Franks’ acknowledgment of the strategic importance of Paris. Perhaps the present crisis will at least alert the United States and its allies to the strategic importance of Burkina Faso, the linchpin of security in the Sahel and West Africa.

Anthony J. Tokarz is a banker, political consultant, and amateur historian from northern New Jersey. Additionally, Anthony occasionally moonlights as a policy consultant for the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE), a Brussels-based NGO that advocates for the rights of families and children in the European Union and at the Council of Europe. The views expressed in his writing are his own.

Image: DVIDS.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of August 2022 is the cornerstone of the Biden administration’s energy and climate change policy, earmarking $369 billion for energy security and climate change. It is also galvanizing the creation of a North American Battery Belt. The matrix of battery and electric vehicles (EVs) manufacturing plants stretches from the old Rust Belt states in the Great Lakes region through Tennessee and Kentucky and into a swath of southern states. It also reaches parts of Canada and Mexico. For those states where the battery belt is expanding, this means jobs, revenues, and better infrastructure. The Battery Belt and, by extension, the EV industry, is a substantial development for the U.S. economy. But the process of developing this broad expanse—as currently envisioned—is going to be a slower and more challenging process than its promoters are portraying. 

Why a Battery Belt?

Why create a Battery Belt in North America? One of the main drivers is the EV. In making the great energy transition from fossil fuel dependence to a world powered by clean energy (or renewables), gas-guzzling autos are being relegated to the dustbin of history, replaced by the no carbon footprint EV. President Joe Biden has indicated that the goal is for the U.S. auto industry to make EVs 50 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030. While that target may be overly optimistic, IRA is accelerating the process. And batteries, made of lithium, cobalt, graphite, and nickel, are central to the process. No batteries, no EVs. 

Equally important in the great energy transition and driving demand for batteries is the development of stationary energy systems. These are needed for the national power grid to store energy storage when wind and solar power generation may not match demand. 

A major challenge for the U.S. energy transition is the heavy dependence on China for batteries, especially in regard to the EV industry. In 2022, Chinese companies dominated the top 10 suppliers of batteries for EVs, accounting for 56 percent of world production. Chinese battery makers are also major suppliers to Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Volvo, and Volkswagen.

China has been relentless over several decades in knocking other producers out of the industry, making adept use of a lighter environmental regulatory regime, considerable state support, and an innovative cadre of business leaders. Equally important, China’s economic statecraft is supportive of those companies that provide the raw material for batteries: its lithium mining companies are now active in South America’s lithium triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, which account for around 30 percent of the world’s lithium. China also provides considerable support for its other mining companies securing supplies of cobalt and nickel. 

If You Build It, They Will Come

The U.S. response to China’s dominance is a combination of protectionism and government support policies to develop the local battery industry (built up around gigafactories which combine lithium-ion battery and EV component production), the development of alternative battery chemistries, and battery recycling. While the latter two options are being pursued, they require long development periods before they become cost-efficient to meet demand from EVs and other battery users. 

Earlier efforts to support the United States had a mixed record. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, an initial wave of investment came after the Great Recession, driven partially by $2.2 billion of funding allocated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. However, the early battery plants were of relatively modest size, following relatively low sales of EVs. U.S. capacity fluctuated through the next decade—as China’s industry boomed. 

Three factors changed the EV battery business landscape. First, U.S.-Chinese relations soured during the Trump administration. This forced a major reassessment of U.S. supply chains and the need to bolster domestic production, including batteries. In 2022, the Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act (from the Korean War era) with the intention of boosting the domestic supply of battery metals, with $2.8 billion going to companies working on EV battery supply chain projects in the United States. The Biden administration also entered into a pact to invest in critical mineral projects with allies such as Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the UK.

The second factor was that EVs began to sell in greater numbers, hitting record numbers globally in 2021. This was due to growing concern over climate change as well as the major U.S. auto companies recognizing that change was inevitable and that they need to compete with not only Tesla but a growing range of Chinese EV automakers, such as Great Wall and Aiways. 

The third factor was IRA, which has raised investment in the battery sector to new levels. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, since IRA’s signing around $13.5 billion worth of investments have been announced, most of them clustered in the south up through the Midwest and Northeast.

The geography of the Battery Belt is being determined by proximity to auto production facilities, namely with the major U.S. companies, GM and Ford, as well as foreign companies like Toyota, Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler-PSA Group), and Volkswagen. This benefits states like Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, and Michigan—as well as Canada and Mexico. States outside of the new Battery Belt include California and Nevada. 

Clean Energy, but…

While the development of a Battery Belt is a positive development for the U.S. economy, there are challenges. These include environmental concerns, indigenous peoples’ rights, finding enough skilled workers, and energy supply. In January, it was announced that the Australian lithium company Ioneer had secured a conditional commitment for a loan of up to $700 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a lithium site that, when fully operational, will supply 400,000 EVs per year. Ioneer has already secured agreements with Ford and Toyota. While this indicates a degree of momentum in developing the U.S. battery and EV business, the permitting process for new lithium mines is lengthy. What could kill the project is a rare wildflower, Tiehm’s buckwheat. The Center for Biological Diversity is arguing that the lithium mine represents an “existential threat” to the flower.

Another proposed lithium mine in Nevada, Thacker Pass, is also being opposed by conservation groups. In North Carolina, another proposed mine has been stalled over regulatory issues. Currently, the United States has only one operational lithium mine, which cannot possibly meet American battery demand. This means that U.S. EV batteries will use Canadian, Argentine, or Chilean lithium. 

One last consideration is the issue of financing. For all the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for the development of a Battery Belt, ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) represents a challenge to the mining part of Battery Belt development. Mining runs into a wall of concerns over biodiversity, ecosystem services, water management, mine waste, carbon footprint, hazardous substances, indigenous peoples’ rights, vulnerable people, and mine closure/after use. 

The U.S. battery belt is already having an impact on state and local governments in terms of jobs, revenues, and infrastructure. But Americans should be careful about the sales pitch – there is not going to be a rapid and easy transformation of energy generation and transportation. The push-pull of national security and economic needs vis-à-vis environmental concerns is part and parcel of the process. Indeed, the battery belt (and by extension critical metals mining) faces the same challenge facing wind and solar power; people support it, but don’t want it in their own backyards. There are tough choices to be made: do we keep a rare wildflower alive for future generations and not build a mine… or do we develop the mine, make batteries and EVs, and herald in a new energy age? Once the flower is gone, it cannot be replaced. 

Time is a factor in dealing with the environment. It is also a factor in geopolitics; China has little hesitation in securing access to critical metals even if the process includes environmental degradation both at home and abroad. And China wants a highly competitive battery and EV industry. This can cost the United States both jobs and revenue, as well as leave the country dependent on a rival power. America is putting the right tools on the work table to enhance its competitiveness with both batteries and EVs, but time is slipping away. Americans should remember the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Lost time is never found again.”

Dr. Scott B. MacDonald is the Chief Economist for Smith’s Research & Gradings, a Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Consortium, and a Research fellow with Global Americans. Prior to those positions, he worked for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Credit Suisse, Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, KWR International, and Mitsubishi Corporation. His most recent book is The New Cold War, China and the Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

Image: Shutterstock.

The Air Force has been clear about its plans to retire the F-22 Raptor in the 2030s, seemingly drawing a parallel between it and another legendary air-to-air fighter that flew into the sunset sooner than many had hoped — the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat.

You may be asking yourself, how are older jets like the F-15 and F-16 still in service if the F-22 is aging out of relevance? It’s a fair question — and like the Tomcat in the early 2000s, the answer comes down to a simple matter of cost versus capacity.

Unlike the Raptor, which has been out of production for more than a decade, the F-15 and F-16 never really stopped rolling off the assembly line floor. America’s new F-15EX, for instance, benefits from a breadth of avionics upgrades that required the same sort of hardware changes that seem prohibitively expensive for the Raptor — but most of those upgrades were actually funded over time by foreign customers like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Importantly, because these aircraft are widely operated and still in production, sustainment costs are lower, logistics are simpler, and parts are much easier to come by. The F/A-18 Super Hornet is also an older platform that remains in service, but it too is now expected to retire sometime in the 2030s.

The balance of cost versus capacity

The Air Force has to make some tough decisions about cost because it has very little leeway when it comes to requirements for capacity — or the number of jets needed to fill America’s defense obligations. The fact of the matter is, no matter how capable a single fighter may be, it can still only be in one place at a time — and that means ensuring the Air Force has enough fighters to meet its needs.

One Raptor may have a decent shot at downing three F-16s in a single sortie, but it can’t actually do the jobs of those three F-16s all at once. In other words, capability is sometimes just not as valuable as capacity. If you need 400 fighters to fulfill your mission requirements but can only afford 200 stealth jets, you may need to operate just 100 stealth jets and 300 cheaper 4th-generation fighters in order to get the job done.

This question of cost versus capacity isn’t a new one. In fact, it was presented as justification for the early dismissal of another dogfighting dynamo that was beloved by just about everyone (except by its maintainers and the DoD’s accountants) — the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.

The Raptor and the Tomcat

Entering service in 1974, the F-14 has been called the world’s first 4th generation fighter by some, and while that title is subject to debate, the F-14’s sheer combat potential coupled with its wild popularity following its appearance in 1986’s Top Gun could be seen as a parallel to today’s Raptor. While all of America’s fighters have fan clubs of their own, few are as widely beloved among aviation fans as the Tomcat or the Raptor.

In fact, the F-14’s $38 million price tag back in the early ’70s may seem like a bargain today, but when adjusted to 2022’s inflation, it comes out closer to $230 million per airframe — only a million more than the F-22’s per-unit price of $150 million per airframe when also adjusted to today’s inflation. And while the troublesome radar-absorbent coating and limit-pushing performance of the Raptor reportedly require between 40 and 43 hours of maintenance for every flight hour, the Tomcat reportedly needed as many as 50 hours of work or more for each hour in the sky, thanks to its complex variable geometry wings and… well, its limit-pushing performance.

Like the Tomcat, the Raptor was built to win a global conflict that never came and that would have justified its immense expense and maintenance requirements against a backdrop of looming nuclear annihilation. When these threats passed, the high costs of these fighters became harder to justify in political debate, resulting in the early retirement of both in comparison to their peers.

It’s entirely likely that, like the F-14, the F-22 will retire without ever seeing the war it was designed to fight. And like the Tomcat, some of the credit for deterring that terrible war rests squarely on the Raptor’s wings.

This article was first published by Sandboxx.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

Image: DVIDS.

In Late December, the U.S. Treasury Department issued new regulatory filings as part of what it billed as a “historic” effort to address the humanitarian cost of sanctions. The core of the new regulatory exemptions is an effort to ease sanctions-related obstacles that prevent the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and charities from reaching populations. More broadly, these new measures are part of the Treasury Department’s ongoing effort to address the harm that sanctions often cause.

These concerns are certainly well-founded. As both scholarship and many United Nations reports have made clear, sanctions cause a significant increase in unemployment, inflation, and poverty in targeted states. Sanctions can severely restrict access to essential goods, including food and medicine. They have also often had a negative impact on a variety of other non-economic factors. Scholars largely believe that economic sanctions tend to reduce the level of democracy in states, expand corruption, and undermine human rights. This became a particular cause of concern in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as sanctioned countries struggled to acquire vaccines and basic medical necessities. Medical researchers decried these broad sanctions campaigns as a form of collective punishment and as “barbaric.”

The Folly of Smart Sanctions

This isn’t the first time the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions have come into the spotlight. After the disastrous effect of the comprehensive economic embargo on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a great degree of hesitation, including in the UN and among European countries, to engage in such campaigns. This was a problem for Washington and security-focused elites in major European capitals, who saw broad sanctions efforts as key to a variety of post-9/11 foreign policy goals.

The tattered reputation of sanctions resulted in an effort to devise “smart sanctions.” Smart sanctions should be viewed less as a new form of economic sanctions but as a new strategy of sanctioning. In this context, rather than sanctioning an entire economy, targeted sanctions would be imposed on elites closer to decision-making circles, and the general population would be spared the effects of sanctions. The problem was that this form of sanctioning ultimately proved ineffective in coercive missions. Elites had a greater capacity for circumventing economic sanctions, greater ideological commitment to state goals, or some combination thereof.

But while smart sanctions failed to produce a more humanitarian form of sanctioning, they did rehabilitate the reputation of sanctions, which helped gain support for the new form of “comprehensive” sanctions, where economies would be broadly targeted through a barrage of financial and sectoral sanctions. Even the most aggressive and broad sanctions campaigns, such as the one implemented against Iran between 2010 and 2013, were cloaked under the banner of “smart sanctions.”

Sanctions Objectives and Humanitarian Harm

As many scholars have argued, imposing pain on the population is often the purpose of sanctions. A broad sanctions campaign may be formally designed to reverse a particular policy in the target state, but it often hopes to achieve this by causing instability or regime change.

But even when the formal goals of the sanctions policy can be taken at face value, achieving them requires harming the population. U.S. sanctions architects have specifically pointed to exacerbating unemployment and inflation as key goals for sanctions efforts and have used terms like economic “strangulation” to describe their endeavors.

Arguably, the most frequently sighted goal of sanctions is to deny the target country funds with which to carry out the policies being objected to—for example, a military or proliferation-related policy the sanctioning country finds objectionable. So the policy effectively becomes limiting, as best as the sanctioning country can, the target’s access to necessary financial resources. But it is important to remember that the budget from which the military of a country is financed is the same budget that a variety of other services, such as education, healthcare, and pensions, receive their funds.

Financial Sanctions and Humanitarian Harm

Ultimately, even if the will to protect civilians existed, the fundamental problem is that one cannot impose widespread sanctions while sparing the target country’s population. Central to the twenty-first-century sanctions campaigns pursued by the United States is the imposition of financial sanctions. As financialized globalization makes participation in international value chains and the U.S. dollar increasingly important to any country’s development strategy, Washington can restrict a country’s trade flows without the need for the kind of broad trade embargo imposed on Iraq in the 1990s.

As U.S. sanctions designers have themselves made clear, key to this effort is convincing international banks at the center of interstate trade to sever all lines of interaction, including all financial channels and correspondent banking relationships, with the financial sector of the target country. This means that even medical and food-related transactions (so-called “humanitarian trade”) are usually not possible in large volumes, as the means for such transactions do not exist even when such transactions are statutorily exempted from the sanctions campaign. When small transactions are possible, their financial viability for the bank is overwhelmed by the substantial compliance costs imposed by sanctions measures. As Obama administration sanctions architect Richard Nephew stated while discussing the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, despite formal exemptions for the commerce of medical equipment, “in reality … [f]or Iranians with almost non-existent commercial and financial ties with the outside world, it is difficult to import spare parts for medical equipment, ventilators, and protective gear.”

Even making the mentioned humanitarian trade exemptions viable would require the re-establishment of banking channels that would, at least to some extent, undermine the financial sanctions at the core of sanctions pressure campaigns. According to Lee Jones, when reacting to the UN’s endorsement of smart sanctions, one UN ambassador rejected any changes to the basic structure of sanctions, noting that they would be “inimical to their basic purpose: to cause civilian suffering. To reform sanctions, he said, would be to weaken them.”

The New ‘Historic’ Measure

The new regulations issued by the Biden administration are far from historic. They are largely focused on extending exemptions to NGOs and multinational institutions of credit and standardizing ineffective existing exemptions around humanitarian trade across different sanctions programs. This does not sufficiently address the many problems with these exemptions. An accompanying FAQ issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the agency that issues designations and enforces financial sanctions—reasserts that banks are allowed to facilitate financial transactions involving exempted economic activity, but provides little guidance on how that can be practically done beyond what has already been said in the past.

Ultimately, it is unlikely that the new measures introduced by the Treasury Department will meaningfully alter this dynamic. The fact that these measures are predominantly focused on NGOs and charities is an effective admission that imposing broad sanctions regimes and maximum pressure campaigns that do not immiserate the population or at least endeavor to do so is not a viable notion. NGOs and charities may be able to provide limited relief in countries suffering severe devastation, such as Afghanistan. Still, they have neither the means nor the resources to have a measurable effect in addressing the harm brought about by sanctions in the vast majority of target countries.

The Treasury Department clearly feels no need to go further. Sanctions have long enjoyed a “misleading reputation of harmlessness.” Bombing hospitals attracts scrutiny in a way that depriving them of funding and medicine does not. As the West is now looking to sanctions as the tip of the spear to thwart Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the humanitarian devastation of sanctions is likely to be further marginalized in the public discourse. Recent concerns about the severe situation in Afghanistan seem to have resulted in pressure on the Treasury Department, leading to the issuance of these recent exemptions. But a more meaningful reckoning with the severe harm sanctions impose on civilians will likely not be on offer anytime soon.

Ali Ahmadi is a scholar of sanctions and geoeconomics. He is currently an Executive Fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy (GCSP) and a Research Fellow at the Brussels-based Vocal Europe foreign policy think tank. You can follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.

Image: Flickr/White House.

There is a Turkish proverb: When an idiot throws a stone into a well, forty wise men can’t pull it out. Well, that’s what an anti-Muslim activist succeeded in doing last Saturday when he burned a Quran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

According to the perpetrator, Rasmus Paludan, the leader of a fringe Danish party, Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”), he was put up to the idea by a consultant for the right-wing Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats), who paid $30 for his demonstration permit. The Sweden Democrats provide parliamentary support for the Swedish government, but their view of Sweden’s NATO membership is ambivalent. Whatever the motive for the provocation, it has thrown a spanner in the works.

Adding insult to injury, ten days earlier a pro-Kurdish group hanged an effigy of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan upside down from a lamppost outside Stockholm’s City Hall.

At the best of times, the Turkish president has a short fuse but burning the Quran played into his hands. With popular support, he roundly condemned the provocation and declared Sweden could no longer expect Turkey’s support for its application for NATO membership. A visit by Sweden’s minister of defense has been canceled, and Turkey has postponed NATO accession talks with Sweden and Finland.

Protests have also spread to the Middle East, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population. However, Paludan’s provocation is not the first time this has taken place in Scandinavia.

In 2005 the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in protest against the fact that a Danish writer couldn’t find an illustrator for a children’s book about the Prophet. Eleven Muslim ambassadors called on the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen “to take all those responsible to task under law of the land.” Rasmussen replied that “The freedom of expression has a wide scope and the Danish government has no means of influencing the press.”

There were widespread demonstrations, some of them violent, in a number of Muslim countries and a boycott of Danish goods. Turkey, as it already intends to do in the present situation, made political capital out of the situation, and strongly opposed Rasmussen’s appointment as NATO’s new secretary-general.

America also has its Bible burners, but their activities are met with a shrug. However, there is no doubt Paludan’s demonstration is gratuitously offensive and has met with international condemnation.

In Erika López Prater v. Trustees of the Hamline University of Minnesota  America faces a conflict similar to that of the cartoon crisis in Denmark. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, showed a fourteenth-century painting of the Prophet Muhammad in a lesson on Islamic art, and was fired because the university considered her conduct “undeniably Islamophobic.”

Hamline has admitted its action was “a misstep” but López Prater has opened a lawsuit claiming religious discrimination and defamation.

On the whole, there seems to be confusion as to what constitutes Islamophobia and criticism of political Islam. The Turkish constitution states in its preamble that sacred religious feelings shall absolutely not be involved in state affairs and politics as required by the principle of secularism.

Further, in Article 24, “no one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political interest or influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political, and legal order of the State on religious tenets.”

Yet, as I have pointed out here, Erdogan has imposed his Islamist mindset not only on Turkey’s domestic policy (including the economy) but also foreign policy.

With regard to freedom of expression, there is also a conflict of interest between the Islamic and Western views. The Islamic definition, as defined by the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (1990), limits the expression of opinion to a manner that would not be contrary to Sharia—Islamic law based on the Quran—which is incompatible with the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

But Turkey is a signatory to both the Cairo Declaration and the International Covenant. Furthermore, as a member of the Council of Europe, it is also a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Erdogan’s chief advisor and spokesperson, Ibrahim Kalin, in his keynote speech at the Istanbul Forum in 2012, mentioned the growing gap between Islamic and Western notions of what constitutes sacred religious rights and freedom of expression.

In Wednesday’s meeting of the Turkish National Security Council, it was underlined that states wishing to join NATO should also act in accordance with the law and spirit of the alliance.

It would be timely to point out that NATO in its preamble states that the organization is founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law.

Robert Ellis is an international advisor at the Research Institute for European and American Studies in Athens.

Image: Mustafa Kirazli / Shutterstock.com

Planned economics is enjoying yet another revival. Climate protection advocates and anti-capitalists are demanding that capitalism be abolished and replaced with a planned economy. Otherwise, they claim, humanity has no chance of survival.

In Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (The End of Capitalism) is a bestseller. Its author, Ulrike Hermann, has become a regular guest on all the talk shows. She openly promotes a planned economy, although this has already failed once in Germany—just like everywhere else it has been tried. Unlike under classical socialism, in a planned economy, though companies are not nationalized and are allowed to remain in private hands, it is the state that specifies precisely what and how much is produced.

There would be no more flights and no more private motor vehicles. The state would determine almost every facet of daily life—for example, there would no longer be any single-family houses and no one would be allowed to own a second home. New construction would be banned because it is harmful to the environment. Instead, existing land would be distributed “fairly,” with the state deciding how much space is appropriate for each individual. And the consumption of meat would only be allowed as an exception because meat production is harmful to the climate.

In general, people should not eat so much: 2,500 calories a day are enough, says Herrmann, who proposes a daily intake of 500 grams of fruit and vegetables, 232 grams of whole meal cereals or rice, 13 grams of eggs, and 7 grams of pork. “At first glance, this menu may seem a bit meager, but Germans would be much healthier if they changed their eating habits,” reassures this critic of capitalism. And since people would be equal, they would also be happy: “Rationing sounds unpleasant. But perhaps life would even be more pleasant than it is today, because justice makes people happy.”

Such ideas are by no means new. Popular Canadian critic of capitalism and globalization Naomi Klein admits that she initially had no particular interest in climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Why did she suddenly become so interested? Well, prior to writing this book, Klein’s main interest was in the fight against free trade and globalization. She says quite openly: “I was propelled into a deeper engagement with it partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.” She calls for a “carefully planned economy” and government guidelines on “how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last…how large our homes are.” She also embraces a suggestion that the most well-off 20 percent of the population should accept the largest cuts in order to create a fairer society.

These quotes—to which many more such statements in Klein’s book could be added—confirm that the most important goal of anticapitalists such as Herrmann and Klein is not to improve the environment or find solutions for climate change. Their real goal is to eliminate capitalism and establish a state-run, planned economy. In reality, this would involve the abolition of private property, even if, technically, property rights continued to exist because all that would be left is the formal legal title of ownership. The “entrepreneur” would still own his factory, but what and how much it produces would be decided by the state alone. He would become an employed manager of the state.

The biggest mistake planned economy advocates have always made was believing in the illusion that an economic order could be planned on paper; that an author could sit at a desk and come up with the ideal economic order. All that would be left to do would be to convince enough politicians to implement the economic order in the real world. It may sound cruel, but the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia also thought that way.

The most radical socialist experiment in history, which took place in Cambodia in the mid to late 1970s, was originally conceived in the universities of Paris. This experiment, which Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot called the “Super Great Leap Forward,” in honor of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, is most revealing because it offers an extreme demonstration of the belief that a society can be artificially constructed on the drawing board.

Today, it is often claimed that Pol Pot and his comrades wanted to implement a puritan form of “primitive communism,” and their rule is painted as a manifestation of unrestrained irrationality. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The Khmer Rouge’s masterminds and leaders were intellectuals from upstanding families who had studied in Paris and were members of the French Communist Party. Two of the masterminds, Khieu Samphan and Hu Nim, had written Marxist and Maoist dissertations in Paris. In fact, the intellectual elite who had studied in Paris occupied almost all of the government’s leading positions after the seizure of power.

They had worked out a detailed Four-Year Plan that listed all the products the country would need in exacting detail (needles, scissors, lighters, cups, combs, etc.). The level of specificity was highly unusual, even for a planned economy. For example, it said, “Eating and drinking are collectivized. Dessert is also collectively prepared. Briefly, raising the people’s living standards in our own country means doing it collectively. In 1977, there are to be two desserts per week. In 1978 there is one dessert every two days. Then in 1979, there is one dessert every day, and so on. So people live collectively with enough to eat; they are nourished with snacks. They are happy to live in this system.”

The party, the sociologist Daniel Bultmann writes in his analysis, “planned the lives of the population as if on a drawing board, fitting them into pre-determined spaces and needs.” Everywhere, gigantic irrigation systems and fields were to be built to a uniform, rectilinear model. All regions were subjected to the same targets, as the Party believed that standardized conditions in fields of precisely the same size would also produce standardized yields. With the new irrigation system and the checkerboard rice fields, nature was to be harnessed to the utopian reality of a fully collectivist order that eliminated inequality from day one.

Yet the arrangement of irrigation dams in equal squares with equally square fields in their center led to frequent flooding because the system totally ignored natural water flows. 80 percent of the irrigation systems did not work—in the same way that the small blast furnaces did not work in Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Throughout history, capitalism has evolved, just as languages have evolved. Languages were not invented, constructed, or conceived. Rather, they are the result of uncontrolled spontaneous processes. Although the aptly named “planned language” Esperanto was invented as early as 1887, it has completely failed to establish itself as the world’s most widely spoken foreign language, as its inventors had expected. Socialism has much in common with a planned language, a system devised by intellectuals. Its adherents strive to gain political power in order to then implement their chosen system. None of these systems have ever worked anywhere—but this apparently does not stop intellectuals from believing that they have found the philosopher’s stone and have finally devised the perfect economic system in their ivory tower. It is pointless to discuss ideas like Herrmann’s or Klein’s in detail because the whole constructivist approach, i.e. the idea that an author can “dream up” an economic system in their heads or on paper, is wrong.

Sociologist and historian Rainer Zitelmann is the author of the book In Defense of Capitalism, published in 27 languages.

Image: Flickr/White House.

“Every ten years, it is decline time in the United States,” wrote journalist Josef Joffe in 2009. Yet the story of U.S. decline has constantly turned out to be the story of the boy who cried wolf. Time and again the United States has shown that its leading position in international politics, what some have classified as a hegemony, is unique and capable of withstanding a variety of economic, political, and security crises.

What is distinctive about U.S. hegemonic endurance, however, is that it does not rest primarily on coercive power, international regimes, capitalist ideology, or sheer wealth. As data shows, U.S. relative power is declining in all of the aforementioned dimensions. Yet this is not the case when it comes to the U.S. global monetary centrality. Even in times of severe economic and monetary crisis, such as the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, or the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, we have not witnessed such a decline. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The U.S. dollar fortified its global centrality after each and every crisis. This remained the case, currently as well, during the global pandemic of 2020–22 and its related economic aftershocks. Recognizing the link between monetary centrality and overall international influence is critical if the United States policy is to sustain U.S. power globally.

Predictions suggesting that perhaps the euro, renminbi, or IMF special drawing rights (SDR) would replace the dollar have not panned out, primarily because the system surrounding the U.S. dollar reinforces its centrality. But what if the fundamentals of that system were displaced through a new modality of currency—a change not simply in who stood behind the currency but a change in currency form itself? Our research indicates that this prospect is what should concern American decision-makers and those that rely heavily on American centrality.

Little Snakes

Two of the most often evoked substitutes for the U.S. dollar are the euro and the renminbi. However, both lack the market, institutional, and geopolitical fundamentals for such an endeavor. As such, they do not generate confidence, which is the crucial criterion for a currency to be central to global economic activity. Both alternatives remain subject to greater uncertainty, and thus reliability, than the U.S. dollar.

Looking at the euro first: the European financial system is still dependent on the United States and the U.S. dollar. U.S. financial markets account for 30 percent of the movement in the euro financial markets, whereas the number is only 6 percent in reverse. The eurozone lacks a clear authority. In contrast, everyone knows that behind the U.S. dollar is a political entity and an institution that makes decisions and vouches for those decisions. Who is the Euro’s political head, who is the Euro’s guarantor? There are no eurobonds. Lastly, the euro does not reach beyond its region. Almost two-thirds of all Euro “banknotes exports” stay on the European continent as they are obtained by non-eurozone European states, and only 50 percent of EU trade is invoiced in euros. Benjamin Cohen stated in 2009: “Europe’s money in a sense could turn out always to be the ‘currency of the future’—forever aspiring to catch up with the dollar but, like an asymptote, destined never to quite get there.”

Regarding the renminbi, Standard Chartered Bank’s index of renminbi globalization displays global stagnation since 2015. There is no genuine global demand for the renminbi. This is not a surprise as the Chinese economy’s foundations are underlined by demographic decline, falling labor productivity, issues with transparency and property rights, housing and financial bubbles, and rising debt. Institutionally, China lacks the political will to change domestic policies that would enable the renminbi a greater global role: open financial accounts within the balance of payments, floating not managed exchange rates, full foreign access to China’s asset market with legal and property rights, and central bank independence. It is difficult to see how China might move forward with necessary reforms since party elites, state-owned enterprises, and local governments that currently dominate China’s political economy all have everything to lose with such relaxation. Moreover, Chinese foreign loans are by and large denominated in U.S. dollars, not in renminbi. China is thus a bank-driven economy, which is potentially prone to burst. Again, fundamentals that do not inspire confidence.

A Crucial Threat: Central Bank Digital Currencies

A third, and we argue a more likely threat to U.S. dollar centrality, are Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Our claim rests on the assumption that cryptocurrencies indicate a changing nature of the economy—akin to the introduction of fiat money or financial economy.

By and large, there are three types of cryptocurrencies: private cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and CBDCs. Although all are tokens of a new era (pun intended), only the latter present a challenge for the U.S. dollar, while the first two suffer from embedded flaws that will cap their potential preeminence.

Private cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin suffer from several deficiencies contributing to their volatility and, in the words of former IMF director and current Europen Central Bank president Christine Lagard, “le Bitcoin, ce n’est pas une monnaie.” They do not function as a currency (i.e. as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange). Rather, they should be understood as (risky) financial assets. Stablecoins are digital assets that are pegged to a traditional currency. So, when the latter moves, this puts pressure on the issuer of the former to assure the peg. There are legitimate empirical doubts if stablecoins can deliver when the situation will be dire’—i.e. if each stablecoin can indeed be backed by its respective currency.

Finally, there are CBDCs. Our proposition is that it would be incorrect to assume the digital economy and digital monetary relations as merely an extension of the traditional economic world. Although the actors are the same in both worlds, their respective power is not. It is possible that the fundamentals in the digital space can reset and therein lies the threat to U.S. global monetary centrality. The relations between the state, individual, private bank, and international relations will be profoundly impacted by the introduction of CBDCs. Although the political and legal authority is not questioned when it comes to CBDC, its revolutionary potential comes in a new source of monetary power and monetary relations.

Specifically, CBDCs potentially can leapfrog the intermediary role of private banks, which has been a mainstay of traditional economic activity. Under fully implemented CBDC arrangements, efficiency and profitable economic activity may dictate that citizens and business hold their electronic wallets directly with a central bank. In other words, private banks could potentially run out of business as the transactional activity of economic exchange bypasses them and central banks managing CBDCs become direct support institutions. Policy surrounding the introduction of CBDCs is not being coordinated globally. This could exacerbate market forces driving a change in this fundamental institutional arrangement. Central banks are closely observing each other’s CBDC activities. Some even cooperate in pilot projects and research. Yet, even joint research about an interoperability system for CBDCs, the most advanced is the mCBDC endeavor, does not constitute nor assure a coordinated approach in designing the international CBDC architecture.

Perhaps the best example of how the introduction of CBDCs could threaten the centrality of the U.S. dollar is the eurodollar market. This market has been a crucial mainstay reinforcing U.S. dollar centrality. But what would a digital eurodollar market look like? Would this market even exist under the architecture of no intermediate banks? If not, then what would generate preferences for the usage of e-dollar not e-euro nor e-yuan? There are multiple scenarios and designs of how CBDSs can be introduced. We can assume that there will be a period of trial and error, in which multiple alternative architectures will exist. These are the questions and challenges that the United States needs to face if it wishes to solidify its global economic centrality.

One of the reasons why no one challenges the greenback is that there is no alternative. In the emerging digital currency economy this is not the case. The advantages of the real U.S. dollar are not transcended onto the e-dollar automatically. Potentially, the e-yuan, the Chinese CBDC, could have a first-mover advantage. If e-yuan really takes off as an internationally leading CBDC, then China would be in a good position to determine the rules, standards, and economic trends of CBDCs globally. Or in other words, China would center the global digital economy around itself—which in fact is essential for hegemony.

Although the e-yuan project has several deficiencies, the United States should not be a passive observer assuming its traditional dollar advantages will hold against this new technology. Ultimately, setting up an international CBDC order will not be a consequence of “being the first,” but “getting it right” if U.S. policy recognizes how this all relates to its position in the world. Questions of security, personal freedom concerns, a transparent legal framework, universality, and the very manner in which a CBDC is introduced (token or account based) can outweigh the first-mover advantage—but only if the United States positions itself in a strategic fashion. Whatever the Chinese do technically, it will not be simply adopted by others without the aforementioned ethical and political considerations. Therefore, the United States should step up with its own CBDC project as part of an international strategy.

What Should the United States Do?

In the past, U.S. hegemony endured because it withstood the test to renew itself and incorporate new technologies and innovations that reinforced an imbalance of global power in its favor. The United States was able to generate the buy-in dynamic of the rest of the world regardless of the novel nature of the economy. Its objective in digital monetary relations should be the same – meaning it should seek a policy environment in which other states in the system reinforce continued centrality as it introduces the e-dollar.

We endorse proposals made by the Roosevelt Institute to build efficient, inclusive monetary and financial systems, expand the emerging FedNow payment system, take on a serious study of a public option for banking offered by the U.S. Federal Reserve or Treasury Department, and regulate the stablecoin market. We view these as necessary tactical advancements. Yet, without a strategic framework guiding them, they will not reinforce the core element that itself reproduces American advantages.

The United States should as soon as possible explore the introduction of the e-dollar with a strategic objective to advance the principles that have supported the liberal economic order it created at the end of the Second World War. Rapidness is necessary so that it signals to the world that it is aware of the changing nature of the economy.

Second, it should strategically seek a public-private alignment for the future in which its big-tech retail companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others, universally accept payments also in e-dollars. Subsequently, it should make efforts to other companies to follow suit.

Next, it should make clear that changes to the architecture of the e-dollar are likely to be made in the future—it should create an early regulatory oversight mechanism that is flexible and allows for adaptive change as clarity about fundamentals become clearer. As the digital economy evolves, so too will solutions for assuring the advancement of liberal democratic values such as privacy and transparency. The United States, if it seeks to continue to lead in the latter twenty-first century, must intentionally serve as the vanguard for introducing new digital financial instruments. This is why close cooperation with the fintech industry, think tanks, and other stakeholders is necessary along with cooperation with other liberal democratic currencies. Essentially, the United States should lead the development of e-financial markets.

Lastly, the United States should develop a network of bilateral relations with other states issuing CBDCs and design bilaterally tailored agreements that would include the determination of the exchange rate of their CBDCs, exchange of information and innovations, and other rules for joining the two e-financial markets. Such bilateral approaches will serve as confidence-building mechanisms and are easier to address than multilateral larger arrangements.

Change is coming. The potential for CBDCs must be regarded not as a technical extension of current economics, but as a resetting of some core fundamentals. The United States cannot be on auto-pilot and expect its global dominance to sustain. That will require strategic action that shapes the emergence of CBDCs. Ceding the initiative to others in this area is not simply about an economic transactional mechanism—it is about the centrality of American global power. A centrality that must be protected now.

Dr. Igor Kovac is Secretary at the Government Information Security Office of the Republic of Slovenia and a Research Affiliate at the Center for Cyber Strategy and Policy at the University of Cincinnati.

Professor Richard Harknett is Co-Director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute.

The views expressed are the authors’ and do not represent any department or agency of the governments of the United States or Slovenia.

Image: Shuttersock.

Despite the F-22 Raptor’s reputation as the world’s most capable air superiority fighter, the stealth jet has lost a number of notional dogfights over the years to older and less advanced platforms like the F-16 and even the Navy’s electronic-warfare specialist, the EA-18G Growler. But few exercises have done more damage to the mighty Raptor’s reputation than a series of training dogfights with German Eurofighter Typhoons that took place just about a decade ago.

These losses may have been notional, but some people clearly took them seriously. So seriously, in fact, that German Eurofighters were spotted wearing F-22 kill markings on their fuselages after telling the press that they had “Raptor salad for lunch.”

With the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter cruising toward service in the coming decade, it now seems likely that the mighty Raptor will retire without ever firing a shot at another aircraft in anger, making these simulated combat exercises and a handful of exciting intercepts the extent of the Raptor’s air-to-air legacy.

So what is that legacy exactly? Is the F-22 truly as dominant as people believe? Or is this fighter’s biggest advantage not stealth… but hype?

Where it all started…

Arguments about the F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon largely stem from German Eurofighters’ participation in the Air Force’s large-scale Red Flag air combat exercises over Alaska in 2012.

Red Flag is an advanced aerial combat training course that pits a wide variety of aircraft, often from multiple nations, against large-scale and realistic threats meant to simulate a real near-peer fight.

That year, Germany sent 150 Airmen and eight Eurofighter Typhoons from JG 74, or the Luftwaffe’s 74th Tactical Air Force Wing, to Eielson AFB in Alaska to participate in a wide variety of missions over two weeks. Included among them was a series of close-range Basic Fighter Maneuver (BFM) drills with America’s Raptors. BFM, of course, is fighter-pilot parlance for dog fights.

After the exercises were over, Germany’s Eurofighter pilots arrived at 2012’s Farnborough International Air Show, where they were quick to discuss their victories over the F-22. According to David Cenciotti’s coverage for The Aviationist, Germany’s Typhoon pilots explained that when the F-22 was flying with external fuel tanks attached and fighting within-visual range, Typhoons were often able to outclass the Raptor.

How does the Eurofighter Typhoon compare to the F-22 Raptor?

Despite their generational differences, the F-22 Raptor and Eurofighter Typhoon actually have a number of things in common. They were both originally designed to serve as air superiority fighters born out of the Cold War, with the Typhoon first taking to the skies in 1994 and the F-22 following behind in 1997. Likewise, both fighters ultimately entered service in the early-to-mid 2000s, with the Typhoon entering active duty in 2003 and the Raptor, once again, following behind in 2005.

But despite these aircraft being designed at around the same time to serve in similar capacities, they differ dramatically in how they go about accomplishing their mission.

The F-22 Raptor was always meant to be a revolution in airpower, leaning heavily into America’s groundbreaking stealth technology to produce what was—and remains—the stealthiest operational fighter on the face of the planet. But it’s not just stealth that makes the Raptor a capable platform. It also boasts a high degree of sensor fusion and advanced avionics that allow for an extreme degree of situational awareness while reducing cognitive load for the pilot. In other words, the F-22’s onboard computers allow the pilot to devote more attention to the fight and less to operating the aircraft.

“When you’re flying the Raptor, you’re not thinking about flying the Raptor,” explained F-22 pilot Randy Gordon in a lecture he gave at MIT, “You’re thinking about employing the Raptor. Flying is secondary.”

But the F-22 isn’t all about stealth and sensor fusion. It also incorporates elements of what might be considered 4th-generation dogfighting design: like thrust vector control — or the ability to orient its jet nozzles independent of the airframe to perform incredibly aerobatic maneuvers, a high thrust-to-weight ratio, and an M61A2 20mm Gatling gun that can fire its onboard 480 rounds at a blistering rate of 6,000 per minute.

“Raptor has vector thrust: Typhoon doesn’t,” RAF Typhoon pilot and squadron commander Rich Wells told Breaking Defense in 2013. “What the aircraft can do, it’s incredible. The Typhoon just doesn’t do that.”

And while it usually carries a total of eight weapons internally (six AMRAAMs and two AIM-9 Sidewinders), it can be fitted with four external pylon stations for additional munitions when it’s tired of speaking softly and decides to become its own big stick.

As a result, the F-22 bridges two combat philosophies — offering such a high degree of stealth and situational awareness that it can win most fights before the opponent even knows that it’s there, alongside a highly respectable slew of traditional dogfighting traits that allow it to stand and swing with the most dynamic hotrod dogfighters of the previous generation.

The Eurofighter Typhoon, on the other hand, wasn’t aiming to reinvent the existing air superiority model, so much as to perfect it as it was. Its delta-wing design, a shape nearly adopted by the F-22’s defunct bomber sibling, offers a high degree of subsonic maneuverability alongside increased lift and range. The design, as well as the materials that make up the Typhoon, all lend it a higher degree of stealth than you might find in most comparably advanced 4th-generation fighters.

In fact, according to Eurofighter promotional materials:

The aircraft is built with advanced composite materials to deliver a low radar profile and strong airframe. Only 15% of the aircraft’s surface is metal, delivering stealth operation and protection from radar-based systems

Like many other fighters, including the F-22, the Typhoon also leverages electronic warfare capabilities to obscure its radar return. And unlike the maintenance-heavy Raptor, the Typhoon was designed to be easy to maintain, assembled out of 15 interchangeable modules to minimize repair time. When up close and personal, the Typhoon’s Mauser BK27mm gun fires at either 1,000 or 1,700 rounds per minute, with 150 rounds carried onboard.

Since entering service, the Typhoon has matured into an extremely capable multi-role platform, leaving its air superiority roots behind to become one of the most well-rounded fighters in service today, leveraging its 13 hard points for a wide variety of mission sets.

“The Eurofighter is certainly, as far as smoothness of controls and the ability to pull (and sustain high G forces), very impressive,” explained Gen. John P. Jumper, former Air Force Chief of Staff and among the few pilots to have seat time in both the Raptor and Typhoon. “That is what it was designed to do, especially the version I flew, with the avionics, the color moving map displays, etc. — all absolutely top notch. The maneuverability of the airplane in close-in combat was also very impressive.”

The Typhoons pair of Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofan engines aren’t quite as powerful as the Raptor’s, propelling the Eurofighter to a top speed of Mach 2, vice the Raptors 2.25 — but top speed doesn’t mean much in a fight, and the Eurofighter’s comparatively lower weight allows for a better thrust-to-weight ratio for the Typhoon (in its interceptor configuration) than a similarly equipped Raptor.

F-22 vs. Eurofighter Typhoon: What do we know about the exercises?

Although many details remain murky, there are some things we know for sure about these 2012 dogfight exercises. Based on pilot statements, we know that at least some (if not all) of them were one-on-one engagements. Most importantly, they occurred within visual range with a number of reports stating that the Raptor was carrying stealth (and aerobatics) hindering external fuel tanks.

This distinction is essential because it means the fighting began under a forced pretense that effectively neutered the Raptor’s greatest strength: its ability to use stealth and situational awareness to dictate how an engagement begins and, if the reports of fuel tanks are true, its aerobatic maneuverability.

In real life, F-22 pilots would almost certainly be aware of the Typhoon before the Typhoon was aware of it, allowing the Raptor to put itself into an advantageous position before the fighting began (or simply taking out the Typhoon from beyond visual range). And it practically goes without saying that no pilot would dogfight for their lives with external fuel tanks still hanging from their wings.

This type of exercise is common in military training, however, and could be compared to offensive and defensive positions in scholastic wrestling. A neutral start in wrestling begins with both athletes on their feet — this would be like two fighters flying into an exercise in the same way they might in real life.

Starting in a defensive (or disadvantaged) position, on the other hand, is when one wrestler begins the period on their hands and knees, with their opponent next to them on one knee with an arm over their back (the advantage). In the case of these specific exercises, the F-22 played the role of the disadvantaged wrestler starting from its knees — playing to the Eurofighter’s strengths, rather than its own.

But like in wrestling, we should note that starting in a defensive or disadvantaged position isn’t an excuse for losing. It’s just part of the game.

Some allowances were also made for the Eurofighter before the fighting began. While the F-22 was carrying external fuel tanks that, to some extent, compromise both its aerobatic and stealth performance, the Eurofighter Typhoon that participated in one-on-one dogfights against the Raptor was allowed to fly not only without fuel tanks, but without any external munitions at all. This not only improved the Typhoon’s maneuverability, but it also couldn’t happen in a real fight lest the Eurofighter be left with nothing but its guns.

“There were two mornings where we flew against them 1v1. We pulled off all the tanks to get the most alpha [angle of attack]; the Eurofighter really is an animal with no tanks,” Germany’s Maj. Marc Gruene, one of the pilots that participated in the drills, explained.

How many of each fighter participated in these drills, what the rules of engagement were, and what the final kill ratios for each fighter were are all details that neither nation has disclosed, though there have been a number of claims made online. While these claims haven’t been confirmed, they all report more wins for the F-22 than the Eurofighter, but F-22s clearly took home some losses as well.

Today’s Eurofighter Typhoons come equipped with both a helmet-mounted targeting system to engage enemy fighters off-boresight (without aiming the nose of the aircraft at them), as well as the PIRATE infrared search and track (IRST) system that’s potentially capable of spotting stealth fighters at distances as great as 30 miles out. This would have been a significant advantage over the F-22 — which carries neither capability to date — but at the time of these dogfight exercises, these systems were still being rolled out to Germany’s Air Force, and the Typhoons that participated in the drills did not have them.

What happened when the F-22 and Eurofighter squared off?

According to the German pilots, once the fighting began, the F-22’s thrust-vector control (TVC) actually hindered the Raptor, rather than helping it when sparring in close quarters with the Typhoon.

“The key is to get as close as possible to the F-22 and stay there. They didn’t expect us to turn so aggressively,” Gruene told Combat Aircraft magazine back in 2012. “As soon as you get to the merge… the Typhoon doesn’t necessarily have to fear the F-22.”

The Merge, for clarification’s sake, isn’t just the name of a great aviation newsletter. It’s also what fighter pilots call it when two fighters meet head-on in a close-quarters pass.

TVC does allow a fighter to perform extreme maneuvers, but they come at a high cost. In a dogfight, airspeed is life, and the exotic displays TVC allows all scrub a great deal of it. When the F-22 uses its thrust-vectoring nozzles to turn on a dime, the jet is vulnerable until it can regain airspeed. If it doesn’t manage to score a kill immediately after performing such a maneuver, the Raptor becomes easy prey until its powerful pair of F-119-PW-100 turbofan engines can get all 70,000 pounds of fighter moving again.

Here’s how it was explained by an unnamed Eurofighter test pilot to Cenciotti:

If you are ‘defensive’ and your aircraft has Thrust Vectoring, you can possibly outturn your enemy, but that most likely won’t prove to be a great idea: an energy fighter like the Typhoon will conveniently ‘use the vertical’ to retain energy and aggressively reposition for a missile or gun shot. Also the subsequent acceleration will be extremely time (and fuel) consuming, giving your opponent the opportunity to tail chase you forever, exploiting all its short range weapon array.

But even on the offensive, using TVC to quickly orient the nose of your fighter toward the enemy isn’t always a good idea either. Because aggressive maneuvers strip the fighter of energy, you may score a kill against the opponent in front of you, but you’re left vulnerable to any others nearby. This inherent issue with thrust vectoring combat tactics is really why no other American fighters are equipped with it, and in fact, Raptor pilots themselves will tell you that the real benefit of TVC in their aircraft is maintaining a degree of maneuverability while flying at a high angle of attack when control surfaces aren’t as effective, rather than performing air show maneuvers in a dogfight.

We know for sure that at least some (likely two) Eurofighters actually scored notional kills against their F-22 opponents in these drills. That story was quickly picked up by news outlets around the world, eager for a story about America’s expensive Raptor failing to live up to expectations.

What we don’t know, however, is how many kills Raptors scored against Typhoons, though it seems clear from official statements that the number was definitely not zero. In other words, the story wasn’t that Raptors consistently lost to Eurofighters, but rather, that sometimes they did.

So what does that mean, exactly?

When aviation buffs start squaring off in the comments sections below articles and videos about their favorite (or least favorite) fighter platforms, it usually doesn’t take long for the discourse to stop sounding like a well-informed debate and start sounding like 3rd graders arguing about whose dad can beat up who’s. The complex context of air combat gives way to oversimplification and hyperbole until everything devolves into ad hominem attacks and seemingly made-up and uncitable statistics.

What can I say — Airplane folks go hard.

There are, however, reasonable arguments to be made from both sides of this debate — which I’ll try to capture below:

The Raptor Fan Argument

Those in the Raptor camp will contend that exercises like these, with their contrived circumstances and intentionally one-sided rules of engagement may be good for training, but they’re a poor measure of a fighter’s actual performance in the absence of broader context. The very nature of these exercises set out to put the Raptor at a disadvantage, eliminating the platform’s greatest strengths — its stealth and beyond-visual range capabilities, in favor of an old-fashioned shoot-out the likes of which haven’t been seen at scale since the Vietnam War. According to media reports, the F-22 “decimated” the Typhoon when able to engage from beyond visual range because it didn’t have to fly with one wing tied behind its back.

In a real fight, the F-22 would likely be aware of the Typhoon’s presence well before the Typhoon was aware of it, and even if the Eurofighter and pilot proved too quick on the stick to be taken out with an AMRAAM at long distance, the Raptor could use its superior situational awareness and low observability to close in on its European foe from an advantageous position, greatly improving its chances of success.

And perhaps most importantly of all, Raptor fans will argue that Germany was bragging about scoring a few kills against the Raptor… but they never once claimed that the Eurofighter won more sparring matches than the Raptor did. They simply claimed that it won some, and that was with a number of distinct advantages handed to them.

The fact of the matter is, the headline-grabbing story wasn’t about Eurofighters dominating the F-22… It was about two of them managing to score wins at all against an aircraft many think of as invincible.

The Typhoon Fan Argument

Those in the Eurofighter Typhoon’s camp, on the other hand, will argue that these exercises, like real combat, aren’t about being fair. The Eurofighter’s ability to stand and scrap with the Raptor in close quarters is proof positive that the Typhoon is capable of competing with the most advanced (and expensive) fighters on the planet when it comes to close-quarters air combat.

And that, combined with its improved avionics and beyond-visual range capabilities that have manifested since that interaction, make the Eurofighter Typhoon one of the best pound-for-pound fighters anywhere on the planet.

Its foreign-sales price is, after all, right around $124 million — which is an incredible bargain compared to the estimated $400 million or so per Raptor, at least, when you include its research and development costs in each F-22’s price tag.

Even if Raptors did score more kills against Typhoons than the Germans did against Raptors as a number of sources have reported, the fact that the 4th generation Eurofighter was a genuine threat to the F-22 at all proves that its supremacy isn’t as assured as so many Raptor fanboys like to believe.

Both of these arguments are right. The F-22 Raptor isn’t considered the most dominant air superiority fighter in the sky because it can’t lose. That’s not how combat works — heck, it’s not how any kind of fighting works. No matter how capable, no matter how advanced, no matter how well trained, anyone can find themselves knee-deep in a disadvantage they can’t overcome.

Eric Wicklund, a former Operations Specialist in the U.S. Navy, made this point rather eloquently earlier this year:

World War 2 ace, Erich Hartmann is the highest scoring ace, ever, with 352 kills. That doesn’t mean he never lost. He got shot down 16 times! He’s still the greatest ace, because he won much more often than he lost.

The F-22’s advanced avionics, high degree of maneuverability, and extremely low observability all make it an incredibly capable platform, but nothing makes a fighter invincible. If you stack the deck against anything, it’ll find its limits — and it’s important to note that finding those limits, of both the pilot and the platform, is the real reason these exercises exist.

Red Flag isn’t about winning internet dog fights, it’s about going on to win real ones. Taking home a few W’s in a series of staged exercises doesn’t mean nothing, but it doesn’t mean everything either.

The truth is, the Eurofighter Typhoon is an incredibly capable 4th generation fighter, but when you pit it against a 5th generation fighter, that stealthy opponent — be it F-22, F-35, or maybe even J-20 — is likely going to win most engagements in a relatively boring (and rather sneaky) way.

But if these stealth jets happen to find themselves within gun’s reach of the Eurofighter, the victor isn’t as easy to divine. And that’s an important lesson for both 4th and 5th generation pilots to take away from these exercises.

This assertion is substantiated in numbers we can confirm — in its earliest appearances at Red Flag back in 2006 and 2007, F-22s racked up 144 and 241 wins respectively, but lost a handful of jets as well to lowly 4th generation fighters like the F-16C — which was the first platform ever to down an F-22. in a mock dogfight. In fact, in the F-22’s first air-to-air outing (without being limited to within visual range), it took out eight F-15s without them ever managing to paint it with a target.

But… if you can get in close with the F-22 and eliminate its technological advantages, the Raptor is just another aircraft in a fight for its life.

“The Raptor’s unique capabilities are overwhelming, but as soon as you get to the merge, which is [admittedly] only a very small spectrum of air combat, the Typhoon doesn’t necessarily have to fear the F-22 in all aspects. We gain energy better than the F-22 when we are slow, for example,” Fighter Wing 74 commander Col. Andreas Pfeiffer said of the mock engagements.

This all reminds me of something an American intelligence contractor told me years ago about U.S. special operations units. They’re the most elite operators in the world with the best training, the best equipment, and the best support… but just about every Navy SEAL, Delta operator or Army Ranger who’s been killed in combat over the past two decades wasn’t taken down by a similarly elite group of ISIS or Al-Qaeda commandos. More often than not, it’s a poorly trained young man with a poorly maintained AK-47, no body armor, and some luck on his side.

You can give your warfighters all the advantages in the world, but nobody knows how a fight will play out until it does. In fact, according to Air Force Col. Thomas Bergeson, in Red Flag exercises, “you have a great day if you lose only 10 percent of your forces.” And he’s not alone.

“If you see numbers where you never have a loss, I don’t think you’re training to your full ability,” explained Lt. Col. Wade Tolliver, 27th FS commander, back in 2007. “If you don’t, at some point, have that simulated loss, we’re not going to push ourselves to be as capable as we are.”

That’s the unfortunate reality of defense technology analysis. The real answer is rarely pithy, rarely simple, and rarely can stand on its own without some broader context. The internet prefers that we speak in concise absolutes, but the only incisive answer you can really give when asked which out of two contemporary platforms is best is… it depends.

It depends on the mission, the circumstances, the rules of engagement, the pilots, the mission planning, the training, the budget, the over-arching combat doctrine, and if any of the pilots had two extra cups of coffee this morning and is distracted by the pressing need to find a toilet.

“No matter how magical the F-22, any pilot can make a mistake, explained Air Force Lt. Col. Dirk Smith in 2007. “The beauty of Red Flag is that we were able to go out and practice our tactics in a challenging scenario, make a mistake, learn a lesson, and be that much better prepared for actual combat.”

So what’s the verdict between the F-22 Raptor and Eurofighter Typhoon?

Can the Eurofighter Typhoon beat the F-22 Raptor in a dogfight? The answer is an unequivocal yes. It’s a very capable jet and, under the right set of rare and unusual circumstances, just about anything could beat the F-22. In fact, if you were really impressed by the F-22 kill markings on those Typhoons, you should know that they’ve been applied to other aircraft after notional victories… including at least one A-10 Warthog (alongside another mark for an F-16 kill).

But are F-22 pilots losing sleep over this? The answer there is no.

“When the sensors work and each plane talks to each other, the Raptor is nearly untouchable when things are right,” F-22 pilot Mike ‘Dozer’ Shower said in Bertie Simmonds’ book, “F-15 Eagle.”

“The F-22 versus a 4th-generation fighter is like having two football teams against each other and one of them [the F-22] is invisible!”

People don’t call the F-22 Raptor the reigning king of the skies because it never loses. Having the F-22 Raptor on your wing in the sky, like Micheal Jordan on the basketball court or Chesty Puller on the battlefield, isn’t a guarantee of victory. They all have a few L’s on their resumes.

Nobody wins all the time. Not even the mighty Raptor.

But if you want to get a fight going in the comments anyway… I still think my dad could have beaten up yours.

This article was first published by Sandboxx.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

Image: Flickr/Department of Defense.