The National Interest

Stephen Silver

Security, Americas

The company, per Zacks Equity Research, beat estimates of analysts with their financial performance. This means the company has beaten consensus EPS estimates four quarters in a row.

Device maker Roku announced its third-quarter earnings after the bell Thursday, and the company posted surging revenue and profit. According to the company’s quarterly shareholder’s letter, the company posted revenue of $452 million in the third quarter, a 73 percent increase. Roku also posted an operating profit of $12 million, compared to a loss of $26.5 million in the same quarter the year before.

The company, per Zacks Equity Research, beat estimates of analysts with their financial performance. This means the company has beaten consensus EPS estimates four quarters in a row.

The huge amount of pandemic-related streaming continued in the third quarter as Roku added 2.9 million active accounts, to bring its total to 46 million. And total streaming hours increased by about 200 million hours from the second quarter to 14.8 billion.

“In Q3, Roku delivered outstanding financial and operational results led by robust demand for TV streaming products, strong growth in advertising and the expansion of content distribution partnerships,” The company said in its shareholder letter.

“As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continued to accelerate the shift of viewing away from traditional linear and pay TV, we continued to invest in competitive differentiation and execute well against our strategic plan.”

Roku also said that its player unit sales over 57 percent year over year, and also touted the products it introduced in the quarter, such as the Roku Ultra, as well as its agreement with NBC Universal to allow the Peacock streaming service on the Roku platform, which still does not carry the HBO Max streaming service.

And the company said its partners had “very strong sales” of Roku TV models during the quarter, and that some of their newer partners “achieved substantial year-over-year unit share gains in the U.S.”

In the earnings call, founder and CEO Anthony Wood was asked a question from an analyst about the future of sports and streaming.

“If I could wave my hand, I would – sure, I think, the best thing for sports would be for them to start selling [subscription video on demand] services like for regional sports networks as an SVOD service or the NFL as an SVOD service. I mean that’s what – that’s, I think, the way consumers want to sign up and consume sports in a streaming world. That’s how they sign up and see other streaming products on à la carte basis.”

“Despite continued uncertainties caused by the pandemic, we are pleased with the trajectory of our business and believe that Roku remains well-positioned to help shape the future of television – including TV advertising – around the world,” Wood added in the shareholder letter.

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

Image: Reuters

Desmond Lachman

economy, EU

At a time that U.S. health experts are warning of a dark U.S. coronavirus winter, one has to hope that U.S. economic policymakers are taking note of the gathering of European economic storm clouds and of the implications that this might have for the global economic outlook.

The last thing that a highly indebted and weak European economy now needs is another supply-side shock that could tip it into a double-dip recession and a prolonged period of price deflation.

Yet that is precisely what a renewed wave of the coronavirus pandemic is now threatening to do to Europe. This does not bode well for the European economy nor for the rest of the global economic recovery. This is especially the case given Europe’s large share in the world economy and the real risk that there could be another round of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

Even before the latest wave in the pandemic, the European economy was not in good shape. While the economy did experience a strong bounce from its earlier spring collapse, it still remains well below its pre-pandemic level. As a result, it has now lapsed into deflation. 

At the same time, European budget deficits have ballooned as a result of bold fiscal measures taken to fight the pandemic as well as of a collapse in tax collections in a weaker economy. As budget deficits have widened, the public debt levels in highly indebted countries like Italy, Portugal, and Spain have skyrocketed to postwar records. This is now raising questions anew about the ability of those countries to repay their debts.

The pandemic’s renewed wave now threatens to cause a double-dip in the European economic recession, which would exacerbate the Eurozone’s deflation problem. This would seem to be especially the case considering that France,  Germany, Italy, and Spain have all already been forced to substantially roll back the earlier easing in their lockdown restrictions. In the same way that the earlier lifting of the lockdown caused the economies of those countries to bounce, the world must now expect that the reimposition of coronavirus restrictions will cause the European economy to relapse into recession.

Another leg down in the European economy and a prolonged period of price deflation will increase the Eurozone’s debt servicing burden and make it all the more difficult for Italy, Portugal, and Spain to grow their way out of their debt problems. As underlined by their 2010 experience with budget austerity during the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, any attempt by those countries to improve their public finances by budget belt-tightening would only deepen their economic recessions. Stuck within a Euro straitjacket that has deprived them of their own currencies, those countries would not be in a position to cushion the economic blow of fiscal austerity by reducing interest rates or by resorting to currency depreciation.

A double-dip economic recession would also highly complicate the European Central Bank’s (ECB) fight against deflation, never mind allow it to meet its “close to but below 2 percent” inflation target. With European interest rates already in negative territory, any attempt at interest rate reduction would run the risk of putting further stress on Europe’s already shaky banking sector. At the same time, any effort to substantially increase the size of the ECB’s bond-buying program would run the risk of inviting a strong political backlash against such activities especially in Germany, the ECB’s largest shareholder.

In principle, the Eurozone does have a way out of its present dismal economic predicament. It would be to move rapidly to a fully-fledged fiscal union.  Such a move would allow a large region-wide fiscal stimulus package for Europe of the sort in which the United States periodically engages. That would provide a way of getting around the present constraints on a further budget stimulus that very high debt levels place on those countries in the Eurozone’s periphery.

The fly in the ointment, however, is that such a move is highly improbable anytime soon. It is not only that there is strong German political resistance to any notion of a European fiscal union. It is also that there is similar opposition to such an idea in the so-called frugal four countries of Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

At a time that U.S. health experts are warning of a dark U.S. coronavirus winter, one has to hope that U.S. economic policymakers are taking note of the gathering of European economic storm clouds and of the implications that this might have for the global economic outlook. Maybe then they will realize the urgency of finding an early compromise on a large second U.S. stimulus package to ensure that the United States, too, does not succumb to a double-dip economic recession.

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund's Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. 

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

Japan bombed Pearl Harbor to strike back against a U.S. oil embargo.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Undeniably, the U.S. oil embargo had backed Imperial Japan into a corner. The Japanese military’s instincts, supported by a succession of victorious conflicts against numerically superior foes, was to strike out. Tokyo trusted in the valor and prowess of its soldiers and the incompetence of its enemies rather than deciding to back down before a superior correlation of forces.

The day after roughly 350 Japanese warplanes came screaming down over Pearl Harbor and sank or crippled eight of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s battleships over a span of ninety minutes, Japanese newspapers published a statement by Emperor Hirohito declaring war with the United States and the United Kingdom and outlining its rationale for the attack.

“It has been truly unavoidable and far from Our wishes that Our Empire has been brought to cross swords with America and Britain… They have obstructed by every means Our peaceful commerce and finally resorted to a direct severance of economic relations, menacing gravely the existence of Our Empire. Patiently have We waited and long have We endured, in the hope that Our government might retrieve the situation in peace. But Our adversaries, showing not the least spirit of conciliation, have unduly delayed a settlement; and in the meantime they have intensified the economic and political pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission.”

Why exactly did Japan elect to attack a country with twice the population, five times the steel production and seventeen times the gross national income? The answer all came down to a U.S. embargo on imposed in response to Japan’s brutal invasion of China.

The fateful collision course between the United States and Japan was set ninety years earlier when in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in a feudal, isolationist Japan and demanded it open itself to foreign trade. In the ensuing Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Emperor seized power from the feudal shogunate and implemented a policy of rapid modernization to avoid being exploited by Western imperialists as happened to China and India.

In practice, this meant Japan not only industrialized and modernized its armed forces, but also sought its share of colonial spoils. In 1894-95, the Japanese fleet defeated a beleaguered China, then effectively seized and colonized the “Hermit Kingdom” of Korea. Then in 1904-1905, the Imperial Japanese Navy defeated Tsarist Russia in the first major victory by an Asian country against a European power in modern times. Finally, early in World War I Japanese forces captured Germany’s colonial possession in China on behalf of the Franco-British Entente alliance. Tokyo was rewarded with permanent control of those territories post-war—much to the anger of the Chinese, who had also supported the Entente’s war effort.

The Japanese military had its sights set on grabbing more Chinese territory. Using the pretext of an attack on a Japanese railroad in Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) actually staged by a nationalistic Japanese officer, Japanese troops seized Manchuria, assaulted the Great Wall of China in 1933, and created the puppet state of Manchukuo. Then the absurd Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 was used to justify a wider Japanese invasion in 1937 that seized most of China’s wealthy coastal cities.

Japan’s civilian government was not universally supportive of the military’s aggressive campaigns. However, several anti-war politicians were brazenly assassinated by Japanese officers, and the civilian government came to be completely marginalized by the military.

Tokyo eventually dubbed its rapidly growing empire the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Sphere was intended to rally nationalists across Asia opposing the depredations of Western imperialism. However, while the Sphere did attract some supporters such as Thai Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, in practice the Co-Prosperity Sphere simply meant exchanging one form of foreign exploitation for another.

But the Japanese invasion of China caused relations with Washington to deteriorate. The United States was not entirely innocent of Asian colonialism—it too profited from the increased trade enabled by the Opium Wars, deployed soldiers to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, and effectively occupied the Philippines between 1898 and 1935. However, Washington had cultivated ties with the Chinese Nationalists and was alarmed by Japan’s military buildup. Moreover, America was ill-inclined towards Tokyo due to increasing reports of Japanese atrocities which included massacres such as the rape of Nanjing and the operational testing of biological weapons on Chinese civilians.

Finally, after Japanese forces invaded French Indochina (modern Vietnam and Cambodia) in June 1941, President Roosevelt implemented a ban on iron, steel and oil exports to Japan jointly with Australia and the United Kingdom.

Japan’s Pacific-spanning Empire depended on oil—and Japan had been importing 80 percent of it from the United States. Tokyo did have fifty-three million gallons of oil in reserve—a supply which could sustain its Empire for roughly a year.

Japan would have to withdraw from its Empire unless it could get more oil. There was a convenient supply of oil nearby at hand in the Dutch colonies of the East Indies. As the United Kingdom was tied down fighting Nazi Germany and the Netherlands was already occupied, Japan forces could likely use their existing oil reserve to capture the vital oil wells—but with the likely consequence of drawing the United States into war.

Thus, Tokyo began looking into a military option to cripple the U.S. military long enough to secure the Dutch oil wells and present a defeated U.S. public with a fait accompli.

Admiral Yamamoto warned Japanese militarists that he could only guarantee six months of victories—but he dutifully went ahead and planned the Pearl Harbor attack, which by any conventional military standard was an extraordinary success. Japan’s simultaneous invasions of the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya and the Philippines likewise initially succeeded spectacularly.

But if the Pacific War were a board game, Japan had set up its pieces to pull off a series of killer movies early in the first few turns—but was still playing with a lot fewer pieces. Moreover, the Pearl Harbor raid failed to remove the most important U.S. pieces—its force of aircraft carriers, each carrying a hundred fighters and bombers that could attack targets hundreds of miles away.

After six months of Japanese victories, U.S. carriers sank four Japanese carriers in the Battle of Midway in June 1942—and subsequently embarked on an “island hopping” campaign that relentlessly dismantled the Japanese Empire over the next three years.

Undeniably, the U.S. oil embargo had backed Imperial Japan into a corner. The Japanese military’s instincts, supported by a succession of victorious conflicts against numerically superior foes, was to strike out. Tokyo trusted in the valor and prowess of its soldiers and the incompetence of its enemies rather than deciding to back down before a superior correlation of forces.

It follows that diplomatic compromises between Washington and Tokyo could have averted the Pacific War—but only with the consequence of enabling Japan’s brutal occupation of China, which is estimated to have caused the death of three to five million Chinese citizens.

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

Image: Wikimedia

Kris Osborn

Security, Europe

It is a war that no one in their right mind would want to right.

Key point: Neither side could win outright, especially since the loser might resort to nuclear weapons. Hence, thankfully MAD keeps the peace.

How much of a threat do Russia's emerging 5th-generation stealth fighter, nuclear arsenal, high-tech air defenses, anti-satellite weapons, conventional army and submarines pose to NATO and the U.S.?

Current tensions between Russia and NATO are leading many to carefully assess this question and examine the current state of weaponry and technological sophistication of the Russian military -- with a mind to better understanding the extent of the kinds of threats they may pose. 

Naturally, Russia’s military maneuvers and annexation of the Crimean peninsula have many Pentagon analysts likely wondering about and assessing the pace of Russia's current military modernization and the relative condition of the former Cold War military giant’s forces, platforms and weaponry.

Russia has clearly postured itself in response to NATO as though it can counter-balance or deter the alliance, however some examinations of Russia’s current military reveals questions about its current ability to pose a real challenge to NATO in a prolonged, all-out military engagement.

Nevertheless, Russia continues to make military advances and many Pentagon experts and analysts have expressed concern about NATO's force posture in Eastern Europe regarding whether it is significant enough to deter Russia from a possible invasion of Eastern Europe. 

Also, Russia’s economic pressures have not slowed the countries’ commitment to rapid military modernization and the increase of defense budgets, despite the fact that the country’s military is a fraction of what it was during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s.

While the former Cold War giant’s territories and outer most borders are sizeably less than they were in the 1980s, Russia’s conventional land, air and sea forces are trying to expand quickly, transition into the higher-tech information age and steadily pursue next generation platforms.

Russia’s conventional and nuclear arsenal is a small piece of what it was during the Cold War, yet the country is pursuing a new class of air-independent submarines, a T-50 stealth fighter jet, next-generation missiles and high-tech gear for individual ground soldiers.

The National Interest has recently published a number of reports about the technological progress now being made by Russian military developers.  The various write-ups include reporting on new Russian anti-satellite weapons, T-14 Armata tanks, air defenses and early plans for a hypersonic, 6th-generation fighter jet, among other things. Russia is unambiguously emphasizing military modernization and making substantial progress, the reports from The National Interest and other outlets indicate.

For instance, Russia has apparently conducted a successful test launch of its Nudol direct ascent anti-satellite missile, according to The National Interest.

"This is the second test of the new weapon, which is capable of destroying satellites in space. The weapon was apparently launched from the Plesetsk test launch facility north of Moscow," the report from The National Interest writes.

In addition, The National Interests' Dave Majumdar reported that Russian Airborne Forces plan six armored companies equipped with newly modified T-72B3M  tanks. Over the next two years, those six companies will be expanded to battalion strength, the report states.

Russia is also reportedly developing a so-called "Terminator 3" tank support fighting vehicle.

During the Cold War, the Russian defense budget amounted to nearly half of the country’s overall expenditures.

Now, the countries’ military spending draws upon a smaller percentage of its national expenditure. However, despite these huge percentage differences compared to the 1980s, the Russian defense budget is climbing again. From 2006 to 2009, the Russian defense budget jumped from $25 billion up to $50 billion according to Business Insider – and the 2013 defense budget is listed elsewhere at $90 billion.

Overall, the Russian conventional military during the Cold War – in terms of sheer size – was likely five times what it is today.

The Russian military had roughly 766,000 active front line personnel in 2013 and as many as 2.4 million reserve forces, according to globalfirepower.com. During the Cold War, the Russian Army had as many as three to four million members.

By the same 2013 assessment, the Russian military is listed as having more than 3,000 aircraft and 973 helicopters. On the ground, Globalfirepower.com says Russia has 15-thousand tanks, 27,000 armored fighting vehicles and nearly 6,000 self-propelled guns for artillery. While the Russian military may not have a conventional force the sheer size of its Cold War force, they have made efforts to both modernized and maintain portions of their mechanized weaponry and platforms. The Russian T-72 tank, for example, has been upgraded numerous times since its initial construction in the 1970s.

On the overall Naval front, Globalfirepower.com assesses the Russian Navy as having 352 ships, including one aircraft carrier, 13 destroyers and 63 submarines. The Black Sea is a strategically significant area for Russia in terms of economic and geopolitical considerations as it helps ensure access to the Mediterranean.

Analysts have also said that the Russian military made huge amounts of conventional and nuclear weapons in the 80s, ranging from rockets and cruise missiles to very effective air defenses.

In fact, the Russian built S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft air defenses, if maintained and modernized, are said to be particularly effective, experts have said.

Citing Russian news reports, the National Interest reported that the Russians are now testing a new, S-500 air defense systems able to reportedly reach targets up to 125 miles.  

In the air, the Russian have maintained their 1980s built Su-27 fighter jets, which have been postured throughout strategic areas by the Russian military.

Often compared to the U.S. Air Force’s F-15 Eagle fighter, the Su-27 is a maneuverable twin engine fighter built in the 1980s and primarily configured for air superiority missions.

Rand Wargame:

While many experts maintain that NATO’s size, fire-power, air supremacy and technology would ultimately prevail in a substantial engagement with Russia, that does not necessarily negate findings from a Rand study released last year explaining that NATO would be put in a terrible predicament should Russia invade the Baltic states.

NATO force structure in Eastern Europe in recent years would be unable to withstand a Russian invasion into neighboring Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the Rand study has concluded.

After conducting an exhaustive series of wargames wherein “red” (Russian) and “blue” (NATO) forces engaged in a wide range of war scenarios over the Baltic states, a Rand Corporation study called “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank” determined that a successful NATO defense of the region would require a much larger air-ground force than what is currently deployed.

In particular, the study calls for a NATO strategy similar to the Cold War era’s “AirLand Battle” doctrine from the 1980s.  During this time, the U.S. Army stationed at least several hundred thousand troops in Europe as a strategy to deter a potential Russian invasion. Officials with U.S. Army Europe tell Scout Warrior that there are currenty 30,000 U.S. Army soldiers in Europe.

The Rand study maintains that, without a deterrent the size of at least seven brigades, fires and air support protecting Eastern Europe, that Russia cold overrun the Baltic states as quickly as in 60 hours.

“As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members. Across multiple games using a wide range of expert participants in and out of uniform playing both sides, the longest it has taken Russian forces to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and/or Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga, respectively, is 60 hours. Such a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options,” the study writes.

“AirLand” Battle was a strategic warfighting concept followed by U.S. and allied forces during the Cold War which, among other things, relied upon precise coordination between a large maneuvering mechanized ground force and attack aircraft overhead.  As part of the approach, air attacks would seek to weaken enemy assets supporting front line enemy troops by bombing supply elements in the rear. As part of the air-ground integration, large conventional ground forces could then more easily advance through defended enemy front line areas.

A rapid assault on the Baltic region would leave NATO with few attractive options, including a massive risky counterattack, threatening a nuclear weapons option or simply allowing the Russian to annex the countries.

One of the limited options cited in the study could include taking huge amounts of time to mobilize and deploy a massive counterattack force which would likely result in a drawn-out, deadly battle. Another possibility would be to threaten a nuclear option, a scenario which seems unlikely if not completely unrealistic in light of the U.S. strategy to decrease nuclear arsenals and discourage the prospect of using nuclear weapons, the study finds.  

A third and final option, the report mentions, would simply be to concede the Baltic states and immerse the alliance into a much more intense Cold War posture. Such an option would naturally not be welcomed by many of the residents of these states and would, without question, leave the NATO alliance weakened if not partially fractured.

The study spells out exactly what its wargames determined would be necessary as a credible, effective deterrent.

“Gaming indicates that a force of about seven brigades, including three heavy armored brigades—adequately supported by airpower, land-based fires, and other enablers on the ground and ready to fight at the onset of hostilities—could suffice to prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states,” the study writes.

During the various scenarios explored for the wargame, its participants concluded that NATO resistance would be overrun quickly in the absence of a larger mechanized defensive force posture.

“The absence of short-range air defenses in the U.S. units, and the minimal defenses in the other NATO units, meant that many of these attacks encountered resistance only from NATO combat air patrols, which were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The result was heavy losses to several Blue (NATO) battalions and the disruption of the counterattack,” the study states.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia could be likely Russian targets because all three countries are in close proximity to Russia and spent many years as part of the former Soviet Union, the study maintains.

“Also like Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia are home to sizable ethnic Russian populations that have been at best unevenly integrated into the two countries’ post-independence political and social mainstreams and that give Russia a self-justification for meddling in Estonian and Latvian affairs,” the study explains.

The Rand study maintained that, while expensive, adding brigades would be a worthy effort for NATO.

Buying three brand-new ABCTs and adding them to the U.S. Army would not be inexpensive—the up-front costs for all the equipment for the brigades and associated artillery, air defense, and other enabling units runs on the order of $13 billion. However, much of that gear—especially the expensive Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles—already exists,” the study says.  

The actual NATO troop presence in Eastern Europe is something that is still under consideration and subject to change in this new administration. For quite some time, NATO and the US have been considering adding more troops to the Eastern flank as a way to further deter Russia.

The Pentagon’s European Reassurance Initiative, introduced last year, calls for additional funds, forces and force rotations through Europe in coming years, it is unclear what the force posture will ultimately be. 

At the same time, the Pentagon’s $3.4 Billion ERI request does call for an increased force presence in Europe as well as “fires,” “pre-positioned stocks” and “headquarters” support for NATO forces.

Officials with U.S. Army Europe tell Scout Warrior that more solidarity exercises with NATO allies in Europe are also on the horizon, and that more manpower could also be on the way.

For example, NATO conducted Swift Response 16 from May 27 through June 26 of last year in Poland and Germany; it included more than 5,000 soldiers and airmen from the United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.

This first appeared in Scout Warrior here.

This article first appeared several years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History, Middle East

Israel’s initial battlefield defeats seemed so severe, that on October 9 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli nuclear strike planes and missiles to go on alert.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Yom Kippur war resulted in the death of 2,500 to 2,700 Israelis and an estimated ten to 16,000 Arab soldiers—and wounded over twice that number. The IDF lost roughly 1,000 tanks destroyed or temporarily knocked out and 102 jets, while Arab forces lost 2,400 armored vehicles and over 400 hundred aircraft. The IDF would later recover 400 knocked-out T-55 and T-62 tanks for IDF service.

During the Cold War, the armies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact stood poised to wage devastating, large-scale mechanized warfare using a bewildering arsenal of modern weapons including main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, short-range ballistic missile launchers, supersonic bombers, surface-to-air missile systems, and tactical nuclear artillery.

Yet fortunately for humanity, that conflict never took place. Despite numerous bloody proxy and civil wars, there were few interstate clashes between large mechanized armies. The handful of exceptions notably include the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistani conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. However, the most intense mechanized battles since World War II took place in October 1973 when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault on the Israeli border fortifications during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.

The Arab and Israeli armies were lavishly equipped with then state-of-the-art tank, jets, and missiles from the Soviet Union and West respectively, including new types of weapons that would see their first major combat test. The result was a hi-tech slugging match of unprecedented scale and tempo.

The war was conceived by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad to recapture the Golan Heights and Sinai, which had been seized by Israeli forces in the humiliating Six Day War. The wide-open deserts of the Middle East heavily favored armor and air power, and the IDF's tank and fighter units had significantly outperformed their adversaries.

Syria and Egypt sought to improve their officer corps and imported large quantities of modern Soviet weapons, as well as advisors to instruct in their use—though, by 1973, Egypt was already courting Washington's favor at the expense of Moscow's. Sadat also waged a ‘War of Attrition' attempting to wear down IDF border positions with shelling and air attacks. However, the Israelis dealt back more punishment than they received, and Sadat acceded to a ceasefire on August 1970.

Israel’s defensive strategy during the Six Day War was based on launching a preemptive strike before an Arab attack. By early October 1973, Tel Aviv was aware of Arab preparations for war—including a warning delivered secretly in person by King Hussein of Jordan! But U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Israel not to initiate hostilities, or risk losing U.S. support. At an 8 AM meeting on October 6, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir considered launching a preemptive strike—and decided against.

Six hours later, over 2,000 Egyptian howitzers, siege mortars, and rocket launchers unleashed a titanic barrage on the Israeli fortifications of the Bar Lev Line on the east bank of the Suez Canal. Overhead, 200 MiG and Sukhoi jets roared over the frontline to plaster Israeli airbases, artillery batteries and command posts.

Meanwhile, the first 4,000 Egyptian infantrymen crossed the canal using inflatable boats in a meticulously planned assault codenamed Operation Badr. The Egyptians also deployed amphibious PT-76 tanks and BTR-50 personnel carriers to ford the Greater Bitter Lake unopposed, and dispatched Mi-8 helicopters on suicidal missions inserting Sa'iqa commandos behind Israeli lines to slow down counterattacks.

Egyptian troops used flamethrowers and rocket-propelled grenades to clear out several of the concrete Israeli outposts, and by 6 PM had secured a two-mile-deep bridgehead. Once the crossing was secured, engineers began erecting pontoon bridges to allow tanks and the first of over 200,000 Egyptian troops. Special pumps were rafted over and used to blast paths through huge obstructing sand embankments built by Israeli engineers.

IDF armored units deployed in reserve rolled forth to counterattack. IDF tanks expected the Arab infantry to be vulnerable, with their heavy weapons still on the western bank, and charged into the fray without artillery or infantry support.

However, Egyptian troops had crossed with an extra-large supply of portable Malyutka (AT-3 Sagger) wire-guided anti-tank missiles. While an RPG remains accurate only up to one to two hundred meters, the Soviet-supplied Malyutka were effective up to two miles away. The AT-3 teams planted their portable launch units on the ground, then took cover nearby and remotely fired the projectile towards the approaching tanks. The missiles remained connected by a huge spool of wire to the launcher, and their operators used a joystick interface to guide the weapons on target manually.

As the Israeli Patton tanks barreled onwards, Malyutkas began sailing towards them at a fast 380 feet per second, their shaped charge warheads easily blasting through armor despite their low velocity. Over 100 Israeli tanks were lost on the first day alone. Two days later, Egyptian signals intelligence intercepted plans for a counterattack by the 162nd Armored Divisions. General Hassan Abu Sa’ada orchestrated an ambush that knocked out 75 tanks in a matter of hours.

Surely, the formidable Israeli Air Force could fly into the rescue? Fly in it did—only to encounter a barrage of surface-to-air missiles. Before the war, Egyptians had relentlessly construed a long string of air defense radars and potent S-125 and mobile 2K12 (SA-6) surface-to-air missiles on the western bank of the canal. Though Israeli forces had hammered the batteries during the War of Attrition, the Egyptians finally completed a deadly integrated air defense system following the ceasefire.

As Israeli F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks winged towards the frontline, SA-6 missiles began plucking them from the sky—leading to the loss of 34 Skyhawks in the first four days of the war. Initial attempts to take the SAMs out backfired disastrously, with six Phantoms lost in one failed strike.

However, Israeli fighters did trounce opposing MiGs and Sukhois in air-to-air combat, eventually shooting down two to three hundred opposing fighters for around five losses. At sea, the Israeli missile boats sank nineteen Arab surface combatants—and, accidentally, a Soviet merchant ship—without loss, dodging 52 anti-ship missiles fired in response.

Last Stand on the Golan Heights   

At the same hour as the Egyptian assault, no less than 800 Syrian tanks supported by 188 artillery batteries and 28,000 troops stormed towards the Israeli fortifications on the Golan Heights. The IDF had only two tank units facing them, the 188th Barak and 7th Armored Brigades with 180 Centurion tanks between them, supported by a paratrooper brigade and eleven artillery batteries.

The two brigades needed to hold out for two days against these impossible odds before reserve armor and artillery unit could relieve them. The IDF’s Centurion tanks—later joined by M48 Patton, and even M4 Shermans from World War II, upgraded with powerful 105-millimeter L7 guns—were mostly equally matched with the Soviet T-55 and T-62 tanks barreling towards them, benefiting only from a modestly better fire control, and ramp-like earthworks for cover. The Syrians also mustered new BMP-1s, highly mobile troop transports sporting tank-busting Malyutka missiles and short-range 73-millimeter guns.

However, IDF tankers were vastly better trained and led, while Syrian forces suffered massive communication and coordination problems. Small numbers of Israeli tanks picked off dozens of Syrian T-55s and T-62s, which struggled to spot the source of incoming fire. On several occasions, fire from a lone Israeli tank caused Syrian commanders to halt promising attacks.

Still, the Syrian numerical advantage ground down the Israeli defenders. While the 7th Brigade successfully held the Quneitra gap to the north, the 188th, defending flatter ground to the south, was virtually wiped out in twenty-four hours, its commanders killed and only five tanks left operational by the end of the fighting. While Syrian armor broke through, commandos deployed by helicopter captured a critical Israeli intelligence outpost 2,000 meters above sea level on Mount Hebron.

Israel’s initial battlefield defeats seemed so severe, that on October 9 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli nuclear strike planes and missiles to go on alert. When the United States found out, it began transferring enormous quantities of conventional weapons to bolster the Israelis, including 72 Phantom and Skyhawk jets, 200 Patton tanks, then state-of-the-art TOW missiles and heavy artillery.

Israel Strikes Back

By October 8th, however, IDF reserves were already pouring into the Golan front and swiftly began driving the Syrian troops back. Desperately, the Syrians unleashed FROG-7 rockets on military and civilian targets in Israel. In retaliation, Israeli Phantom jets blew up the Syrian Army General Staff Headquarters in Damascus—causing Assad to pull back air defense units from the frontline, leaving his troops exposed to Israeli airpower. By the 10th the IDF tanks were rolling towards Damascus. Only the intervention of two Iraqi armored divisions and Jordanian brigades slowed down the IDF’s advance.

Egyptian forces were initially content to sit on the recaptured Sinai—but the Syrian collapse prompted the Egyptian 2nd and 3rd Armies to finally launch an armored thrust beyond the umbrella of their anti-tank teams and fixed air defense missiles on October 14.

By then, Israeli General Ariel Sharon had revised tactics, making sure tanks were support by artillery and infantry to suppress anti-tank missiles. Israeli armor smashed the attack, knocking out 250 tanks for just six lost Israeli tanks and 34 damaged. Immediately, Sharon riposted with an assault that broke through the northern flank of the Suez bridgehead.

Israeli commando units using captured amphibious tanks slipped across the Suez and began destroying artillery and anti-aircraft batteries along the west bank. Weathering constant artillery fire, Israeli engineers hastily built two pontoon bridges over which Israeli armored units followed, throwing the Egyptian rear line into chaos. Again, the collapse of the air defense system allowed Israeli airpower to come into full effect.

By then, Arab nations were pressuring the Western world through an oil embargo. Washington and Moscow were actively resupplying the opposing sides—and inching dangerously close to war. Both superpowers convened in the UN and hastily imposed a ceasefire on October 22. Minutes before it came into effect, Soviet technicians unleashed three Egyptian Scud missiles on Israeli positions, killing seven—the weapon’s first operational test.

The ceasefire almost immediately broke down, and the IDF resumed its advance, threatening Cairo and leaving the Egyptian 3rd Army trapped on the eastern side of the canal. Aware of the army’s precarious situation due to intel from Blackbird spy planes, Henry Kissinger pressured Golda Meir into agreeing to a second ceasefire in a bid to salvage Egyptian pride and secure Cairo’s future good will. This second ceasefire on October 25 stuck despite a flurry of initial violations.

By then, the IDF had advanced within 25 miles of Damascus and was bombarding it with M107 self-propelled artillery. The ceasefire narrowly averted a planned all-out Syrian counter-attack using newly imported Soviet tanks, though sporadic fighting would continue in Golan through 1974.

The Yom Kippur war resulted in the death of 2,500 to 2,700 Israelis and an estimated ten to 16,000 Arab soldiers—and wounded over twice that number. The IDF lost roughly 1,000 tanks destroyed or temporarily knocked out and 102 jets, while Arab forces lost 2,400 armored vehicles and over 400 hundred aircraft. The IDF would later recover 400 knocked-out T-55 and T-62 tanks for IDF service.

At the time, the Yom Kippur war highlighted how long-range anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles would reshape modern battlefields, proving that tank and aviation units needed to adapt to new tactics and technology. The extraordinary pace at which the conflict consumed men and material would be even greater today in an era of longer-range missiles, more powerful networked sensors and far more precision-guided weapons. However, the war also showed that tactical prowess and sound operational leadership could result in lopsided loss-ratios between forces of similar technical capability.

Despite its losses, Egypt emerged from the conflict energized by the sentiment that its honor had been restored by the initial recapture of the Suez canal. Five years later, Sadat would effectively bring an end to three decades of bloody Egyptian-Israeli conflicts with the Camp David Accords—which handed a demilitarized canal zone back to Egypt and cemented long-lasting ties between Cairo and Washington. Tel Aviv and Damascus, however, never reconciled and remain locked in proxy conflicts to this day.

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

Image: Wikimedia

David Axe

Security, Asia

Even America made its own experimental flying saucer back during the Cold War.

Key point: Beijing likes to hype up some of its new weapons. This UFO is no different and probably is not worth mass producing.

A Chinese firm claimed it’s developing a flying saucer-like vehicle for military use.

Don’t be surprised or impressed. What Chinese media described as a “sci-fi-like aircraft” in fact is a simple ducted-fan vehicle. Instead of mounting its propellers in forward-facing nacelles or on top, like planes and helicopters do, a ducted-fan craft contains its propeller inside a large housing -- the “duct.”

While strange-looking, ducted-fan designs have been around for decades, periodically falling in and out of favor among plane-developers without ever offering any clear advantages over conventional aircraft.

“China has showcased an attack helicopter model that looks just like a flying saucer, a scale prototype of which is scheduled to make its maiden flight in 2020,” Global Times reported.

Nicknamed “Super Great White Shark,” the 20-foot-long saucer vehicle was on display at the 5th China Helicopter Exposition in Tianjin.

According to the information board at the exposition, inside the ring there is a coaxial rotor system with a diameter of [16 feet], which will likely provide vertical lift. On two opposite sides of the ring, both parallel to the direction the cockpit is facing, there are two turbojet engines that could provide huge horizontal thrust for high speed movement.

Two pilots can fit in the cockpit, and can steer the direction of the aircraft by controlling a set of rudders located under the rotor system. The rudders could also work with the rotor system to provide a small horizontal thrust for low speed movement.

The flying saucer could boast a maximum takeoff weight of 13,000 pounds, a top speed of 400 miles per hour and a ceiling of 18,000 feet, Global Times reported. “Its fuselage is coated with stealth materials.”

But it’s unclear whether the ducted-fan saucer ever would perform better than a conventional helicopter or airplane. As far back as 1956, the U.S. Army and NASA experimented with a plane with ducted-fan propulsion.

In 1960 John Campbell, then a NASA researcher, explained to lawmakers the advantages and disadvantages of the Army’s Doak VZ-4 and other ducted-fan designs. “A ducted fan might simply a propeller with a ring or shroud around it,” Campbell said.

“The principal advantage claimed for these ducted-fan machines over machines with unshrouded propellers is that they afford you more thrust with the same amount of power for a given propeller diameter,” Campbell added. “Or another way to look at it [is], with a given amount of power and thrust you can keep the propeller diameter smaller.

“Also it is suggested that the shroud serves as a guard,” Campbell said, meaning a ducted-fan vehicle could safely operate in close proximity to people without risking injury. “Whether these advantages outweigh the disadvantages of these ducted fans remains to be seen. Actually the ducted fan has the disadvantage of the additional weight and drag of this duct itself, and also it introduces several undesirable stability characteristics.”

The market certainly hasn’t rewarded efforts to develop ducted-fan designs. The Army never seriously pursued the DV-4 or other ducted-fan vehicles. Israeli firm Urban Aeronautics for years has been working on ducted-fan aircraft for military and civilian use, but the company has yet to secure firm orders.

Will the Chinese flying saucer be any different? “Attracted by the futuristic design of the aircraft, Chinese military observers pointed out that the aircraft's high-speed and stealth capabilities could give the weapon an edge on the battlefield,” the Global Times stated, without specifying exactly how the flying saucer is stealthy.

But the Chinese flying saucer seems likely to meet the same fate as older ducted-fan designs, Global Times conceded. “Others questioned the helicopter, saying that it could be unstable and might not be able to fly safely. They noted that foreign countries including the U.S. had made experiments with similar ideas in the past which had failed to be put into practice.”

“Chinese military experts said on Friday [Oct. 11, 2019] that though the aircraft is highly experimental and may not be put into practical use anytime soon, it is beneficial to China's technology development for future helicopters,” Global Times concluded.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This first appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: South China Morning Post/Weibo.

William Jeynes

North Korea, Asia

The twentieth century has often been called the “American Century.” Part of that greatness was a result of the nation’s leaders building upon the successes of previous presidents, even if they were of a different political party. One can only hope that President-elect Biden will lay the previous pejorative political rhetoric aside and build upon the progress in American-North Korean relationships that were built under the Trump Administration.

The 2020 election meant a great deal to Pyongyang, because of the very special relationship that exists between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. How will Biden’s apparent election victory affect relations with North Korea?

The question has profound implications. During the November 2016-January 2017 transition from President Obama to newly elected Donald Trump, Barack Obama warned that North Korea was the thorniest quagmire that the nation faced and it could easily lead to war. The situation in late 2016 was bleak. According to Watergate famed reporter Bob Woodward, in his book Fear: Trump in the White House, President Obama considered a limited pre-emptive surgical military strike because of the combination in September 2016 of North Korea conducting its fifth nuclear test and shooting a medium-range missile 1,000 kilometers into Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the North Korean test missile that landed 150 miles off Japan's coast. "It's a serious threat against our country's security," Abe told reporters. "This is an outrageous act that cannot be tolerated."

In one of President Trump’s greatest international victories, a special relationship burgeoned between him and Kim Jong-un. However, Biden has been quite caustic in his criticism of North Korea’s leader. Biden and North Korea have engaged in an ongoing exchange of name-calling. In the most recent presidential debate, Biden called Kim Jong-un a “thug.” For their part, the North Korean media has called Biden an “imbecile” and “a rabid dog.” Biden has promised that he would continue Barack Obama’s policy toward North Korea that is dependent on North Korea promising to give up part of their nuclear arsenal before talking. However, many American political leaders are concerned, because in the past that approach brought the United States to the brink of war.

President-elect Biden has criticized the progress that has clearly been made between the two nations and this has deeply tested the patience of both Trump and Kim Jong-un. Now that Biden’s presidential election victory is confirmed, one can only hope that common sense will prevail and Biden will continue to build on the foundation of warmer relations that has been established.

Sadly, there has been an increasing tendency in America over the last twenty years to almost automatically decry the foreign policy initiatives of the President, when he has been from the opposing political party. Recently, Donald Trump was nominated for his third Nobel Peace Prize. The most recent one was for the “Trump Doctrine.” David Flint, an Australian law professor, described the reason for this most recent nomination. Flint shared, “He’s reducing America’s tendency to get involved in any and every war.” In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, if the President of the United States or Secretary of State made substantial progress toward real peace, political leaders on both sides of the aisle would profusely lionize the peacemakers. Americans lavished much praise on Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and President Ronald Reagan’s agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, which ushered in the end of the Cold War.

Whatever one might think of President Trump overall, he has brought the United States from the possible brink of war with North Korea, under the Obama Administration, to something of a special relationship between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Does former President-elect Biden really want to regress back to North Korean missiles landing near the coast of Japan and videotapes of North Korea nuking San Francisco? The twentieth century has often been called the “American Century.” Part of that greatness was a result of the nation’s leaders building upon the successes of previous presidents, even if they were of a different political party. One can only hope that President-elect Biden will lay the previous pejorative political rhetoric aside and build upon the progress in American-North Korean relationships that were built under the Trump Administration.

William Jeynes is a professor at California State University at Long Beach and a Senior Fellow, at Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

The concept of the diving shell came about by accident.

Here's What You Need To Remember: American tests of a diving shell similar to the Type 91 confirmed that it maintained a good underwater trajectory and that it had consistent success against lightly armored ships. Its effectiveness against heavier armor proved to be very poor. The U.S. Navy decided that a diving shell would not make a worthwhile addition to its inventory.

The eight-inch shell that penetrated the cruiser’s hull and threatened to blow up her forward magazines was a Type 91 armor-piercing shell, which had been designed to continue through the water when it fell short of its target and penetrate the ship’s hull below the waterline. The damage done by this type of projectile, sometimes called a “diving shell,” was intended to be more like that inflicted by a torpedo than by a conventional shell.

The concept of the diving shell came about by accident. During gunnery trials in 1924, Japanese officers noticed that some “shorts” continued their trajectory through the water and pierced their targets below the waterline. Not only did these shells explode inside the target ship; they also caused considerable flooding. Because of their ability to inflict damage by both flooding and explosion, it was decided to investigate the possibility of introducing diving armor-piercing shells into the Japanese Navy’s arsenal.

After much testing and study, it was discovered that making a shell with a very blunt or nearly flat nose eliminated any tumbling or lateral movement under the water, which had been a problem with conventional shells. The flat shell stayed on an even trajectory after it broke the surface. The projectile was given a pointed ballistic cap that broke away upon impact with the sea, allowing a good trajectory through the air as well as under the water.

An entire range of diving shells was created, eight-inch and larger. In spite of the confidence shown by Japanese officers, the only known instance of a Type 91 shell actually penetrating its target below the waterline was at Cape Esperance against USS Boise.

After a thorough inspection of Boise and the damage done to her hull, American ordnance and ballistics experts were able to work out the properties of the Type 91 shell. American tests of a diving shell similar to the Type 91 confirmed that it maintained a good underwater trajectory and that it had consistent success against lightly armored ships. Its effectiveness against heavier armor proved to be very poor. The U.S. Navy decided that a diving shell would not make a worthwhile addition to its inventory.

This first appeaerd in Warfare History Network here.

This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Middle East

How did a weapon only produced in the final years of World War II begin appearing in a Middle Eastern civil war seventy years later?

Here's What You Need To Remember: East Germany was hardly alone in selling ex-Nazi armaments to the Middle East, nor of selling German rifles in particular. The Third Reich’s genocidal regime made extensive use of slave labor factories, particularly in occupied Czechoslovakia. Afterward, the Czechs not only exported the Nazi weapons on they had on hand, but even manufactured their own versions both for domestic service and export.

In 2012, rebels of the Free Syrian Army posted a video in which they uncovered an arms cache containing five thousand assault rifles. Though not an uncommon episode in a civil war then in its early stages, what was truly bizarre was that the rebels had uncovered a cache of Sturmgewehr 44s—an assault rifle designed by Nazi Germany seventy years earlier.

How did a weapon only produced in the final years of World War II begin appearing in a Middle Eastern civil war seventy years later?

Despite its limited impact on World War II battlefields, the Sturmgewehr is already legendary for being the first successful, mass-produced “assault rifle”—a weapon capable of accurate single shots at a long distance and deadly automatic bursts at shorter range.

The standard infantry weapon during World War II was the bolt-action rifle, long bulky weapons with heavy bolts that needed to be manually pulled before each shot. These used high-powered rifle cartridges that remained accurate at long distances. However, infantry squad leaders were often assigned less bulky submachineguns using pistol rounds. These were much deadlier at close quarters than a rifle but lost power and accuracy beyond one hundred meters (roughly the length of a football field.)

However, battlefield research showed that except for highly-trained snipers, the average soldier rarely fired at long range, and rifle rounds accounted for few casualties compared to machineguns capable of accurate automatic fire.

Exceptionally, the Soviet Union experimented with equipping entire companies only with PPsH submachineguns instead of rifles, making them extremely deadly in close combat in urban environments—but ineffectual in longer-distance fighters over open ground. Meanwhile, the U.S. made large-scale use of semi-automatic M1 Garand rifles and M1 carbines, which were better but still lacked automatic fire capability save for the latter’s M2 variant. (Germany and Russia also deployed semi-automatic rifles on a more limited scale.)

Based on research showing that infantry rarely fired at targets further than two hundred to three hundred meters away, the German Army became interested in developing a rifle using intermediate-strength 7.92x33 millimeter kurze cartridge that could fire accurately beyond three hundred meters, but could still switch to automatic fire for a close engagement without excessive recoil. The weapon produced a muzzle velocity of 685 meters a second, nearly twice that of a submachinegun round, and 92 percent as powerful as a standard German Kark 98k bolt-action rifle.

Using a curved thirty-round magazine, the StG-43 could achieve a cyclical rate over five hundred rounds per minute. While burst fire tends to be inaccurate, it is also more effective at suppressing opponents, preventing them from firing back. This ability to provide covering fire while assaulting an enemy position to its designation as a “Sturm” (“storm” or “assault”) rifle.

German paratroopers had already been issued a small number of FG.42 rifles capable of automatic fire, but the expensive and complicated weapons used 7.92x57 millimeter rounds that produced greater flash, noise and recoil.

However, Hitler objected to the German army’s plan and demanded new submachine guns instead. Accounts claim he either insisted that the bolt-action rifle’s better long-range accuracy remained essential or perhaps more astutely worried that the beleaguered Third Reich lacked the industrial resources to scale up production.

However, the German armament office went behind the Fuehrer’s back and ordered the weapon anyway, disguising it with the designation Machine-Pistol 43. Hitler learned of the deception, halted the program, then changed his mind after a successful trial program, and allowed it to enter full-scale production. This led to the weapon being variously designated the MP-43, the StG-43 and the StG-44.

Germany managed to churn out over 426,00 StG-44s out of 4 million planned before its defeat. Initially assigned to elite units, StG-44s were increasingly delivered to low-quality Volksturm militias in the hopes increased firepower would counterbalance inferior training and physical fitness. Thus, while the weapon performed well, its battlefield impact was inevitably limited.

The Nazis characteristically devoted resources to developing exotic specialized variants it probably could not afford. The Vampir, for example, had an infrared night-fighting scope with a battery life of 15 minutes and a range of 200 meters, while the Krummlauf featured a barrel curved at a thirty-degree angle to safely shoot around the corners of street blocks!

However, the implications of the StG-43’s versatility were widely appreciated, particularly in the Soviet Union. In 1947, Soviet weapon designer Mikhail Kalashnikov combined the features of the StG-43 with the American M1 Garand rifle to form the Avtomat Kalashnikova—the AK-47. The rugged assault rifle soon proved deadly, reliable and iconic in conflicts across the globe.

However, Communist East Germany’s police and army continued using MP-43s through 1962 until they were replaced with AK-47s, SKS carbines and PPsH submachineguns. Yugoslavia also used MP-43s with select units and its successors continue very limited-scale production of the rare 7.92x33 millimeter ammunition. And the weapons were only slightly modified to appear as the rebel sci-fi blasters in wintery in The Empire Strikes Back.

This brings us to the real-life rebels using StG-44s in Syria today. As East Germany began receiving new weapons from the Soviet Union, sold 4,500 of its World War II-vintage assault rifles to Syria in 1964, along with ammunition, conducted under relative secrecy. This was followed by additional shipments to Syria and Palestinian militant groups which also included T-34 tanks and PPsH-41 submachine guns.

East Germany was hardly alone in selling ex-Nazi armaments to the Middle East, nor of selling German rifles in particular. The Third Reich’s genocidal regime made extensive use of slave labor factories, particularly in occupied Czechoslovakia. Afterward, the Czechs not only exported the Nazi weapons on they had on hand, but even manufactured their own versions both for domestic service and export.

An extremely breakdown-prone Czech variant of the famous Messerschmitt 109 fighter was also adopted by nascent Israeli Defense Force. Four of these undertook a near-disastrous strafing run on an Egyptian column advancing on Tel Aviv that nonetheless may have saved the newborn Jewish state by bringing the attack to a halt.

Later, the Czechs began exporting Nazi Panzer IV medium tanks and turretless Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers to Syria which saw use against Israel during the 1960s. The Czechs also exported 10,000 “self-loading rifles” including StG-44s, along with 500,000 rounds of ammunitions—deals for which Syria eventually still owed $900 million in payment by 1990.

As Syria acquired a more complete inventory of Cold War-era weaponry and the rare 7.92x33 millimeter ammunition grew scarce, the guns were eventually placed in long-term storage—which is how they came to fall in the hands of Syrian rebels in 2012.

For four years, the weapons were widely photographed and filmed in combat with Syrian rebel factions, including ISIS and Kurdish fighters, as you can see with this link. However, by 2017 the ammunition had become so scarce that the weapon’s black-market value in Syria collapsed and its appearances grew more infrequent.

Thus, hopefully closes the final chapter on the combat employment of a weapon that continues to impact how wars are fought to this day.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

The U.S. Army took the drastic step of arming its tank, the M1 Abrams, with the ultimate upgrade: a tank-killing round made of uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The use of depleted uranium as a penetrator has resulted in superior armament for U.S. tankers crossing the battlefield. Nobody knows how long the one-two combination of the M256 gun and DU ammunition will continue to overmatch enemy armor, but given DU’s superior armor piercing capability, it’s a fairly sure bet DU will arm the next generation of Army tanks as well.

A tank is a fast-moving, well-protected, heavily armed behemoth designed to dominate the land battlefield. As the primary offensive weapon in any army, nations compete to field the best tanks in both peace and war. In the 1980s, the U.S. Army took the drastic step of arming its tank, the M1 Abrams, with the ultimate upgrade: a tank-killing round made of uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth. The result is an unmatched tank killer capable of destroying any fielded tank.

The M1 Abrams tank was first fielded by the U.S. Army in the 1980s. The Army had preferred the 105-millimeter gun, the British-designed Royal Ordnance L7, also known in the United States as the M68. The M68 had armed the M60 series of tanks for decades and was considered a proven “good enough” gun. The M1’s turret could only accommodate fifty-five rounds of 105-millimeter ammunition, a reduction from the sixty-two rounds the older M60 tank could carry. An even larger gun would further reduce ammo capacity to a mere forty rounds.

Pentagon officials, on the other hand, wanted to equip the M1 with the larger German-designed Rheinmetall M256 120-millimeter smoothbore gun. The civilian leadership felt obliged to use the gun in part as a way to offset German participation in the NATO AWACS program. A larger gun would also “future-proof” the M1, allowing it to defeat future tanks with heavier armor. A compromise resulted, in which the M1 would be initially manufactured with the M68 gun, but would be upgradable to the M256 at a later date. Moreover, a later version of the tank, later called M1A1, would come standard with the larger M256.

While the tank was now future-proofed, the point about smaller ammunition capability still stood. The fire control system on the M1 was so advanced that it could hit a moving target at two thousand meters with 90 percent accuracy. The problem was not going to be missses and wasted ammunition, but ensuring that hits translated into kills.

At the same time, the United States was researching the use of depleted uranium as an armor penetrator. A byproduct of nuclear reactor fuel, depleted uranium was harder and denser than existing tungsten-tipped penetrators. Accelerated to extremely high speeds, this allowed a depleted-uranium (DU) round to smash through an unprecedented amount of armor. The pyrophoric nature of uranium and steel would cause the DU to catch fire upon penetration, causing catastrophic damage inside the tank.

The standard tungsten antiarmor round for the M60 tank, the M735, could penetrate 350 millimeters, or 13.7 inches, of steel rolled homogenous armor (RHA), the standard measurement for armored vehicle protection. The M833 DU round, however, could penetrate 420 millimeters of RHA positioned at a sixty-degree angle for maximum armor thickness. By comparison, the larger Soviet 125-millimeter gun on the T-72 tank could penetrate 450 millimeters of armor. Most importantly, the M774 could penetrate the T-72’s frontal hull and turret armor, where armor was the thickest.

Meanwhile, efforts to future-proof the M1’s armament were coming in handy. The Soviet Union was known to be deploying a new main battle tank, the T-80. U.S. intelligence believed that the T-80, like other modern tanks such as the M-1 and Leopard 2, had shifted away from an all-steel armor to a mixed composite matrix that included ceramic armors. The result was dramatically improved “composite” armor protection. The T-80 had a frontal turret protection of five hundred millimeters of RHA, and glacis plate (frontal hull) protection level of 450 millimeters of RHA. The 105-millimeter gun had finally run its course as an effective armament.

Improved M1A1 tanks equipped with the larger 120-millimeter gun began rolling off assembly lines starting in 1985. The 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq saw the M829A1 depleted-uranium round used by M1A1s against Iraqi T-72s with devastating effect. Nicknamed the “Silver Bullet,” the round could penetrate an estimated 570 millimeters at two thousand meters, giving it good penetration against even a T-80 at typical range. Amazingly, the M829A1 has a flat, laser-like trajectory out to 3,600 meters, meaning it does not incur ballistic drop due to gravity over a distance of two miles. That gives one an idea of the pure power behind the 120-millimeter gun.

The latest generation of the M829 series round, M829E4, is designed to penetrate even further than previous versions, the exact extent of which is classified, and to defeat active protection systems such as those built on the latest Russian tanks. Whether or not the M828E4 can penetrate the armor of the new Russian T-14 Armata tank is publicly unknown. The U.S. Army has not pushed to arm the M1 with a longer gun barrel (to increase muzzle velocity) or a larger diameter gun since Armata’s introduction, an interesting nondevelopment in the face of a new threat tank.

The use of depleted uranium as a penetrator has resulted in superior armament for U.S. tankers crossing the battlefield. Nobody knows how long the one-two combination of the M256 gun and DU ammunition will continue to overmatch enemy armor, but given DU’s superior armor piercing capability, it’s a fairly sure bet DU will arm the next generation of Army tanks as well.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Public Health, Europe

Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, plans to cull all fifteen million mink in the nation to contain a mutated form of the novel coronavirus.

Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, plans to cull all fifteen million mink in the nation to contain a mutated form of the novel coronavirus.

The country’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, noted during a press conference that the mutated virus has the potential to spread to other countries and it “may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine.” 

“We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well,” she said.

Frederiksen added that the decision had been made with a “heavy heart,” but the action was necessary based on the recommendation of local health officials. National police chief Thorkild Fogde urged that the culling “should happen as soon as possible” with the help of Denmark’s police and army.

The mutated virus was discovered in more than ten people. According to Health Minister Magnus Heunicke, roughly half of the nearly eight hundred confirmed human coronavirus cases in northern Denmark “are related to mink.”

Despite repeated efforts to cull the infected animals since June, outbreaks of coronavirus at mink farms have continued. In October, one million mink within a five-mile radius of a suspected or confirmed farm infection were destroyed.

On Friday, more than a quarter million Danes went into lockdown in a northern region of the country where a mutated variation of the coronavirus was found.

In seven northern Danish municipalities with 280,000 residents, all sports and cultural activities have been suspended, public transportation has been halted, and regional borders have been closed.

Frederiksen warned that more restrictions could be introduced in Hjorring, Frederikshavn, Bronderslev, Jammerbugt, Vesthimmerland, Thisted, and Laeso municipalities.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has already called for scientific investigations of the mink infections, which in turn have transmitted the virus back to the human population.

In the United States, nearly ten thousand mink at nine fur farms in Utah have died from coronavirus complications. According to the Department of Agriculture, about fifty different animals—including dogs, cats, tigers, and lions—in the United States have been infected by coronavirus.

Mink have also been culled in the Netherlands and Spain after infections were discovered there.

According to government estimates, culling Denmark’s mink population could cost up to $785 million.

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

Image: Reuters

David Axe

Technology, Americas

The ships are weak, lack good protection or firepower, and are just plain useless.

Here's What You Need to Know: The LCS program has been an expensive boondoggle.

After spending $30 billion over a period of around two decades, the U.S. Navy has managed to acquire just 35 of the 3,000-ton-displacement vessels.

Sixteen were in service as of late 2018. Of those 16, four are test ships. Six are training ships. In 2019 just six LCSs, in theory, are deployable.

While that number should increase as the remaining ships in the class finally commission into service, the LCS’s low readiness rate calls into question the wisdom of the Navy’s investment in the type.

Indeed, the Navy in 2018 didn’t deploy a single LCS, USNI News reported. “The service was supposed to push forward three ships in Fiscal Year 2018, after a 2016 overhaul of LCS homeporting, command and control and manning constructs.”

“However, USNI News first reported in April 2018 that zero LCSs would deploy in [fiscal year] 2018. Since then, the Navy had not talked publicly about progress made towards getting ready to deploy its first LCSs since ships from a block-buy contract started delivering to the fleet at about four a year.”

Navy officials in early 2019 claimed at least three LCSs would deploy before the end of the current fiscal year in September 2019.

“We’re deploying LCS this year, it’s happening,” Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Richard Brown told reporters. “Two ships are going on the West Coast; one ship is going on the East Coast, followed shortly [by a second] in the beginning of ‘20. And that marks the deployment of LCS; there will always be LCS forward-deployed now, just like we designed the program.”

Brown said the LCSs USS Montgomery and USS Gabrielle Giffords would deploy from San Diego to the Western Pacific while USS Detroit deployed from Florida. USS Little Rock in early 2020 also would deploy from Florida.

U.S. Southern Command in February 2019 announced that Detroit would conduct counterdrug operations. "We expect to have a littoral combat ship this year, and that will be a big benefit for our exercise program for our engagement with partners and because of the flexibility it brings for counter-narcotics interdiction," SOUTHCOM commander Adm. Craig Faller said.

When the Navy in the 1990s first began shaping the LCS program, the idea was for the ships to be small, fast, inexpensive and lightly-manned “trucks” into which the sailing branch could plug a wide array of “modules” carrying equipment for specific missions including surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare and minesweeping.

In a bid to speed up the production of as many as 55 LCSs, the Navy selected two shipyards -- Lockheed Martin’s facility in Wisconsin and an Austal yard in Alabama -- each to build their own variant of the class. Complications and cost compounded.

“The Littoral Combat Ship program has been unnecessarily complicated from the beginning,” the Project on Government Oversight explained in 2016. “Initially the Navy aimed for each ship to cost $220 million, but the Government Accountability Office estimates procurement costs for the first 32 ships is currently about $21 billion, or about $655 million per ship—nearly triple what they were supposed to cost.”

“The program’s three mission packages, according to the latest select acquisition report, add about $7.6 billion.”

In the decade and a half since the program was first sold to Congress, the LCS has already been forced into multiple major program changes, initially driven by large cost overruns, the lack of combat survivability and lethality discovered during operational testing and deployments, the almost crippling technical failures and schedule delays in each of the three mission modules.

Now the Navy has announced it is abandoning the two fundamental concepts behind the program: a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules and a radically new way of manning it. Instead, each LCS hull will have a single mission and a significantly larger crew assigned a single primary skill set.

It took the Navy nearly two decades to realize the LCS program had failed. The sailing branch in 2014 cut LCS acquisition from 55 ships to 32. Congress eventually added three vessels, boosting the class to 35 ships.

In place of the 20 canceled LCSs, the Navy plans to buy 20 new missile frigates. The service in 2019 asked Congress for around $1 billion for the first ship in the new class.

In contrast to the LCS in its original guise, the new frigate will be a conventional vessel with a large crew and hard-wired systems.

The Navy surely hopes the new vessel is more deployable than the LCS has proved to be. A warship that can’t leave port hardly qualifies as a warship.

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

This article first appeared in August 2019.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Navy

Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

North Korea should by all rights be a naval power.

Here's What You Need To Remember: North Korea’s reliance on submarines exposes a harsh reality for the country: U.S. and South Korean naval and air forces are now so overwhelmingly superior that the only viable way for Pyongyang’s navy to survive is to go underwater. While minimally capable versus the submarine fleets of other countries, North Korea does get a great deal of use out of them.

North Korea should by all rights be a naval power. A country sitting on a peninsula, Korea has a long naval tradition, despite being a “shrimp” between the two “whales” of China and Japan. However, the partitioning of Korea into two countries in 1945 and the stated goal of unification —by force if necessary—lent the country to building up a large army, and reserving the navy for interdiction and special operations roles. Now, in the twenty-first century, the country’s navy is set to be the sea arm of a substantial nuclear deterrent.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

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The Korean People’s Navy (KPN) is believed to have approximately sixty thousand men under arms—less than one-twentieth that of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) ground forces. This, as well as comparable budget makes the KPN’s auxiliary role to the KPA. KPN draftees spend an average of five to ten years, so while Pyongyang’s sailors may not have the latest equipment, they do end up knowing their jobs quite well.

A substantial number of these sailors serve in the KPN’s submarine fleet, which is one of the world’s largest. In 2001, North Korea analyst Joseph Bermudez estimated that the KPN operated between fifty-two and sixty-seven diesel electric submarines. These consisted of four Whiskey-class submarines supplied by the Soviet Union and up to seventy-seven Romeo-class submarines provided by China. Seven Romeos were delivered assembled, while the rest were delivered in kit form. Each Romeo displaced 1,830 tons submerged, had a top speed of thirteen knots and was operated by a crew of fifty-four. The Romeo submarines were armed with eight standard-diameter 533-millimeter torpedo tubes, two facing aft. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was filmed touring and taking a short voyage on a Romeo-class submarine in 2014.

Despite such an endorsement, the submarines are generally considered obsolete and are being phased out. In 2015, the Pentagon believed that North Korea has seventy submarines of unknown types on active duty. A multinational report on the sinking of the South Korean corvette ROKS Cheonan states that the KPN operated twenty Romeo-class submarines, forty Sang-O (“Shark”) class coastal submarines (SSCs), and ten midget submarines of the Yono class.

The Sang-O class of coastal submarines is approximately 111 feet long and twelve feet wide, and displaces 275 tons. It can do 7.2 knots surfaced and 8.8 knots submerged. There are two versions, one with torpedo tubes and another where the torpedo tubes are replaced with lockout chambers for divers. The latter are maintained by the KPN but operated by the Reconnaissance Bureau’s Maritime Department. An improved version, informally known as the Sang-O II, is 131 feet long, displaces between 350 and 400 tons, and reportedly has a top speed of thirteen knots. The armed variant is believed to be capable of carrying, in addition to torpedoes, sea mines, while the Reconnaissance Bureau’s version carries between thirty-five and forty passengers and crew.

Finally, North Korea has about ten Yono-class midget submarines (SSm). Derived from an Iranian design, the Yono class displaces 130 tons submerged, with two 533-millimeter torpedo tubes and a crew of approximately twenty. The submarine can make an estimated eleven knots on the surface, but only four knots submerged.

North Korea’s submarine fleet, while smaller and less well funded than the other armed services, has generated an outsized number of international incidents. On September 18, 1996, a Sang-O SSC operated by the Reconnaissance Bureau ran aground near Gangneung, South Korea. The submarine, which had set a three-man party of commandos ashore two days before to reconnoiter a South Korean naval base, had failed to pick up the party the the previous night. On its second attempt, the submarine ran aground and became hopelessly stuck within sight of the shoreline.

Aboard the submarine were twenty-one crew and and the director and vice director of the Maritime Department. South Korean airborne and special-forces troops embarked on a forty-nine-day manhunt that saw all of the North Koreans except for one killed or captured. Many committed suicide or were murdered by their superior officers to prevent capture. The remaining North Korean sailor, or agent, is believed to have made his way back across the DMZ. Eight ROK troops were killed, as were four South Korean civilians.

In 1998, a Yugo-class midget submarine, predecessor to the Yono class, was snared in the nets of a South Korean fishing boat and towed back to a naval base. Inside was a macabre sight: five submarine crewmen and four Reconnaissance Bureau agents, all dead of gunshot wounds. The crew had been murdered by the agents, who promptly committed suicide. The submarine was thought to have become entangled in the fishing boat’s net on its way back home to North Korea, after picking up a party of agents who had completed a mission ashore.

In March 2010 the corvette ROKS Cheonan, operating in the Yellow Sea near the Northern Limit Line, was struck in the stern by an undetected torpedo. The 1,500-ton Cheonan, a Pohang-class general-purpose corvette, broke into two halves and sank. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed and fifty-six were wounded. An international commision set up to investigate the incident pinned the blame on North Korea, in large part due to the remains of a North Korean CHT-02D heavyweight acoustic wake-homing torpedo found at the location of the sinking. The submarine responsible is thought to have been a Yono-class midget sub.

North Korea’s latest submarine is a step in a different direction, the so-called Sinpo or Gorae (“Whale”) class ballistic-missile submarine (SSB). The SSB appears to blend submarine know-how from previous classes with launch technology from the Soviet Cold War–era Golf-class ballistic-missile submarines; North Korea imported several Golf-class subs in the 1990s, ostensibly for scrapping purposes. Both the Golf and Gorae classes feature missile tubes in the submarine’s sail. The tubes are believed to be meant for the Pukkuksong-1 (“Polaris”) submarine-launched ballistic missiles currently under development. If successful, a small force of Gorae subs could provide a crude but effective second-strike capability, giving the regime the opportunity to retaliate even in the face of a massive preemptive attack.

North Korea’s reliance on submarines exposes a harsh reality for the country: U.S. and South Korean naval and air forces are now so overwhelmingly superior that the only viable way for Pyongyang’s navy to survive is to go underwater. While minimally capable versus the submarine fleets of other countries, North Korea does get a great deal of use out of them. Although old and obsolete, North Korea’s submarines have the advantage of numbers and, in peacetime, surprise. Pyongyang’s history of armed provocations means the world hasn’t seen the last of her submarine force.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Security, Europe

Russia wants to make money while showing off its weapon systems.

Here's What You Need to Know: Moscow likes to export its weapons.

While Russia’s next-generation Armata has not yet officially entered service, buzz has already been created on what countries other than Russia might field it.

Russians are no stranger to cooperative weapons development (as seen in the Brahmos missile) and even offering to export products before they are finished (as seen with the Su-57).

What countries might field the Armata in the future? Here is a few ideas:

1. India:

India is looking to be the primary export partner for the T-14 Armata, with the Armata fulfilling the requirements for India’s FRCV open contract.

Other tanks that could compete against the Armata within the FRCV contract requirements are the Korean K2 Black Panther and Ukrainian BM Oplot. Most current Western tanks like the Leopard 2A7 and M1A2 Abrams are too heavy for Indian terrain.

The Armata also faces domestic opposition in the Arjun Mk. 2, but it’s unsure if the latest version of the Arjun can overcome the poor reputation and controversies of its predecessor.

2. China:

Despite its own burgeoning arms industry, China continues to acquire advanced Russian military equipment such as the Su-35S and the S-400.

In doing so, it’s continuing a relationship that began in the 1990s in which China buys expensive and close to cutting edge equipment from Russia then incorporates its features into its own products, as it has done with the J-11B and HQ-9.

As such, China will likely try to buy Armatas, if only in limited numbers to evaluate them, adopt what technology they think is good, and perhaps produce their competing version of the Armata for export.

3. Algeria:

Algeria has a long standing defense relationship with Russia and fields some of the most advanced Russian weapons in its military. They operate T-90s, S-50, and Su-30MKAs, which are an advanced variant of the Su-30.

They even have bought more recent Russian developments such as versions of the BMPT infantry support tank and Yak-130 fighter trainer.

Russia appears to trust them as a partner in advanced weapons development programs, and has asked them to be partners in the PAK FA (Su-57) project and appears to be willing to export the advanced fighter to them.

Algeria acquiring Armatas would ensure their supremacy as one of the most powerful militaries in their region and the Maghreb, and even Africa. However, given the large number of already advanced (for the region) T-90s they field, it’s unlikely Algeria will acquire more than a handful of Armatas due to the expensive cost.

4. Egypt:

Similar to Algeria, Egypt has gravitated towards purchasing Russian equipment recently, including T-90s and MiG-35s. Interestingly, both Egypt and Iraq have shifted from using U.S.-made export versions of the Abrams back to Russian-manufactured armor in their recent T-90 purchases.

For Egypt, this ends an almost thirty year relationship with the United States, in which they first bought M60 Pattons and then M1A1 export Abrams. Despite the recent pivot towards Russian products, Russia appears to trust Egypt and has offered the Su-57 to export to them as well.

As such, Egypt is a likely Armata export customer. That being said, they’re unlikely to procure them in the near future. The Egyptian Army placed an order for T-90s to augment their Abrams fleet in 2017, so they are unlikely to make another order for modern tanks for quite some time.

5. United Arab Emirates:

Similar to Algeria and Egypt, the United Arab Emirates has been cited as a potential export customer for the advanced Su-57 fighter, indicating a Russian willingness to cooperate on military and technical affairs.

Russia has been attempting to align the UAE’s armament procurement towards it more recently, offering it access to the Russian GLONASS GPS-equivalent satellite network.

With regards to armor, the UAE fields both Russian BMP-3 tracked infantry fighting vehicles and Ukrainian BTR-3 wheeled armored personnel carriers. Its entire tank fleet is comprised of French LeClerc Main Battle Tanks, which are of a fairly advanced type and which have been receiving considerable upgrades since being adopted.

According to this French blog, the type has performed satisfactorily in Yemen, suffering minimal losses.

Despite the strategic successes of the LeClerc, it was noted that the tank was penetrated on the frontal arc by an old Konkurs anti-tank guided missile. The projectile killed the driver and wounded the tank commander.

As a result, the UAE looked into upgrade kits for the LeClerc, including soft and hard-kill systems. However if France is unable to deliver or if the Armata’s solution to these problems is evaluated to be superior, the UAE might find itself procuring the Armata in the near future.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. This first appeared in November 2018.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

For the first time, the Wehrmacht had encountered a tank that completely that outmatched its own.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The lumbering Char B1 didn’t really suit the Heer’s style of high-speed armored warfare. However, a victorious Germany decided to employ more than 161 captured Char B1s, overhauled and designated Panzerkampfwagen B2 740(f), in more static roles. Some were used in the invasion of Russia. Others fought huge partisan armies in the Balkans. Panzer Battalion 213 was even deployed to the Channels Islands that Germany captured from England.

At five o’clock in the morning on May 16, 1940 a company of the 8th Panzer Regiment lay in an ambush position along a rubble-strewn street of the French town of Stonne. The day before, the unfortunate village had changed hands several times as French troops attempted to stem the tide of German armor headed toward the English channel, threatening to trap Allied forces in Belgium.

Three squadrons of Stuka dive bombers ravaged Stonne, as well as both French and German artillery. That morning, the Panzer IIIEs and IVDs—then the best tanks in German service—deployed to stave off a French counterattack.

Suddenly, a squat green tank lumbered around a street block directly before of the German unit. This was Eure, a 31.5-ton Char B1 bis tank commanded by Capt. Pierre Billotte. His driver, Sergeant Durupt, triggered the 75-millimeter howitzer fixed in the front hull roared, smashing the Panzer III to the rear of the column. At the same time, Billotte swiveled the smaller 47-millimeter high velocity cannon in the turret and picked off the lead tank—a mere 30 meters away.

The wrecks trapped the Panzer company in a head-to-head confrontation with the Gaelic behemoth. 37-millimeter rounds cracked from the long barrels of Panzer III tanks and ricocheted off Eure’s turret. Low-velocity 75-millimeter shells made basso thuds as they spat out the stubby guns of Panzer IV tanks, only to shatter in clouds of shrapnel against the French tank’s glacis.

More than 140 shells cratered Eure’s armor—but none penetrated. Billotte coolly blasted one Panzer after another.

Once he had destroyed the entire company—11 Panzer IIIs and two Panzer IVs in all—Billotte continued his advance and added two 37-millimeter anti-tank guns to the tally. By 7:00 A.M., Stonne was back under French control and would remain so for the rest of the day. The same day, the tank Riquewhir would charge into a column of enemy infantry, its blood-stained tracks causing the German 64th Schutzen Regiment to panic and flee an entire sector of Stonne.

For the first time, the Wehrmacht had encountered a tank that completely that outmatched its own.

France will of course go down in history for being defeated by tanks in World War II, but it was not due to lacking tanks—the French army fielded nearly 4,000 tanks of more than a dozen different types, most of them well-armored. Rather, poor organization, confused doctrine and disastrous operational conduct defeated the French military.

The Char B1 was conceived only a few years after World War I as an infantry support tank with a heavy assault role. The “battle tank” would tackle enemy fortifications, artillery and tanks head-on, prevailing through superior firepower and armor. The slow heavies would punch holes allowing faster “cavalry tanks” to penetrate behind enemy lines.

The resulting design revealed its World War I-era pedigree with huge tracks as tall as the hull intended to ford trenches with ease—as well as its multiple cannon armament. A heavy 75-millimeter howitzer was fixed with only vertical traverse in the hull for blasting pillboxes. It was operated by the driver via a sophisticated Naeder hydraulic system for precise aiming, and serviced by a loader. Additionally, a small turret on top mounted a 47-millimeter gun for hunting tanks. There were also machine guns in the turret and hull for close defense against infantry.

It took nearly a decade and a half before the first B1 was ready to enter production in 1937. A short initial run of 35 Char B1s was quickly superseded by the B1 bis model, with higher-velocity SA35 47-millimeter gun for busting enemy tanks and a 300-horsepower engine. Most notably, the B1 bis boasted 55 to 60 millimeters of armor on all sides, leaving it virtually without major weak points. For comparison, the Panzer III and IV had only 20 to 35 millimeters of armor.

Despite completely overmatching its peers in firepower and armor, the B1 had major flaws. It could only achieve a maximum speed of 17 miles per hour while contemporaries typically averaged 25 miles per hour. The B1’s range of 110 miles wasn’t actually worse than that of German medium tanks, but it required tons more fuel. The French army even experimented with having the B1s tow extra fuel supplies in a trailer, then decided to rely on fuel trucks, which were vulnerable and in short supply.

The B1 also suffered from the one-man turret endemic to French tanks. A B1’s commander had to give verbal commands to his crew and possibly the other tanks in his unit, aim and fire the 47-millimeter gun in the turret and reload the gun. It was simply too much do efficiently. Even though the turret gun could theoretically fire up to 15 rounds a minute, a rate of fire of four rounds per minutes was more typical.

A final weakness of the Char B1 was its rudimentary ER53 radio, through which the operator could only transmit simple commands via Morse code! Even though an audio receiving model later became available, it was considered inferior because it was drowned out by the roar of the engine. By contrast, German Panzers all had excellent radio communications, affording commanders much finer tactical and operational control.

At least 369 B1 Bis were manufactured by Renault and four additional French companies. Each was individually named after a French city, colony or even wine. They were not cheap — 1.5 million francs each, four or five times the cost of a light tank. Three B1 ter prototypes were also constructed with five-man crews, 70-millimeters armor plates and 350-horsepower engines, but the Third Republic fell before they could enter production.

France entered World War II with only four battle tank battalions, or BCCs, each with 33 B1 tanks. By the time major ground operations began in May 1940, two BCCs each served in three reserve armored divisions, or  DCRs, that were intended to support the infantry. A fourth DCR was hastily formed under command of Gen. De Gaulle, as well as five independent companies for supporting infantry formations.

Unfortunately, the DCRs were gravely lacking in logistical and repair services, a weakness compounded fatally by the Char B1’s high fuel consumption and frequent breakdowns. As air strikes and armored columns caused the French logistical system to collapse, more Char B1s were abandoned for lack of fuel or necessary repairs than were destroyed in combat. The DCRs’ infantry regiments also lacked motorized transport to keep up with the tanks. Invariably, the B1s roamed ahead into battle without infantry support.

Nonetheless, the B1s were very tough—flat-out invulnerable to the 20-milimeter gun on the Wehrmacht’s most numerous tank, the Panzer II. Panzer III, 38t and IV tanks only had a slim chance of penetrating at ranges under 100 meters. All were easily destroyed by both of the B1’s cannons.

Only 88-millimeter flak guns could reliably take out a B1. For example, Jeanne d’Arc continued running despite being struck by 90 shells and losing both of her main guns, before finally being dispatched by a flak gun.

The French tanks occasionally were disabled by smaller guns. In the first day of the battle for Stonne, a Panzer IV knocked out the B1s Gaillac and Hautvillier, while an anti-tank gun destroyed Chinon with a hit aimed at the side armor. Billotte’s unit, the 3rd DCR, was eventually deployed elsewhere, and Stonne fell to German forces on May 19 after changing hands 17 times.

However, a concurrent French counterattack in Flavion, Belgium better illustrates how the near-impenetrable armor, superior firepower and bravery and determination of the French tankers could not makeup for failures in logistics and combined-arms coordination.

On May 15, the 62 Char B1s and 80 H39 light tanks of the 1st DCR rolled forward to block the advance of more than 546 tanks of the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions, the latter commanded by Erwin Rommel. The lopsided numbers were typical of the German superiority at concentrating their armored forces to decisive effect.

The B1s deployed to battle at 8:00 A.M. short on fuel, many of their supply trucks already lost due to air attacks. Just 26 tanks of the 28th BCC rolled forward to block the 7th’s path. Four had already broken down. From atop a hill, they began picking off swarming Panzer IV and 38t tanks. The German armor charged, closing within 100 meters, only to be scourged by 47- and 75-millimeter shells. Sousse took out seven tanks, Phillipeville six and other tanks averaging three each. In return, only a single B1 was knocked out and another damaged. The Panzers retreated.

Rommel then committed a Panzer regiment to a flanking attack which was countered by a company of B1s—some of which ran out of fuel in the process, forcing them to manually rotate their turrets. Three immobilized B1s were swarmed by a dozen German tanks each, their armor scoured by small-caliber shells until the crews were forced to bail. But the German probe turned back.

Rommel then called in artillery and dive-bomber strikes on the hill. His Panzer IVs had exhausted their 75-millimeter shells to little effect on the B1s’ heavy armor.

Around noon, the 37th BCC dispatched its 2nd company to roll to the assistance of the 28th, but fuel shortages and mechanical breakdowns reduced the unit to only five running tanks when they were ambushed by anti-tank guns and 30 Panzer IIIs and IVs hiding in the Biere l’Abbé woods. The vastly outnumbered heavy tanks took out 15 Panzers, but three B1s succumbed to the sheer weight of incoming fire. The remaining Guynemere, Ourcq and Isere retreated, heavily damaged.

The other two companies of the 28th began to withdraw. While the 1st company got out cleanly, the 3rd bumped into a battalion of powerful 88-millimeter Flak guns and 105-millimeter howitzers near Denée. After losing all but seven of his B1s, Lehoux ordered his company to charge, even though he lacked infantry and artillery support. The heavy guns wiped out the French tanks—but not before the French crushed several 37-millimeter guns under their treads, and destroyed eight of the German flak and field pieces with direct fire.

Back at Flavion, the 37th BCC single-handedly continued to hold up an entire Panzer division. Growing desperate, Rommel deployed 88-millimeter flak guns a kilometer away. These begin picking off the fuel-starved French tanks, which could barely move to fire back with their hull-mounted howitzers. A final charge by the Panzers caused the signal to retreat to be sounded at 6:00 P.M. Between the lack of fuel, mechanical breakdowns and enemy fire, only three of the battalion’s B1s escaped.

Though a battalion and a half of French tanks had knocked out roughly 100 Panzers, a failure to support their actions with artillery, infantry and air support meant the tankers’ sacrifice had been in vain.

Char B1s continued to see action into June 1940, frustrating German efforts at the local level. In five days, three B1s defending the bridges at Rethel knocked out 20 German tanks, nine armored cars and 38 motor vehicles. Legendary general Heinz Guderian even notes the hassle a lone Char B1 caused in his memoir Panzer Leader: “All the shells I fired at it simply bounced harmlessly off its thick armor. … As a result, we inevitably suffered sadly heavy casualties.”

But such actions could not shift the overwhelming tide of events.

The lumbering Char B1 didn’t really suit the Heer’s style of high-speed armored warfare. However, a victorious Germany decided to employ more than 161 captured Char B1s, overhauled and designated Panzerkampfwagen B2 740(f), in more static roles. Some were used in the invasion of Russia. Others fought huge partisan armies in the Balkans. Panzer Battalion 213 was even deployed to the Channels Islands that Germany captured from England.

Under personal consultation of Hitler, the German military and tank manufactures tinkered with the French tanks. Sixty B1s had their hull-mounted howitzers replaced with flamethrowers on flexible mounts. These first saw action in the 102nd Flame-tank Battalion as part of Operation Barbarossa, assaulting Soviet border fortifications in Western Ukraine on June 1941.

Two of the tanks were knocked out, however, and the unit suffered so many breakdowns that it was withdrawn from action in July. The Germans busily went about redesigning the flame tanks, and deployed an upgraded design in the 223rd Captured Tank Company to the siege of Sevastopol in the summer of 1942, again with little success.

Another 16 B1s had their turret ripped off, and replaced with 105-millimeter howitzers enclosed with an armored cab to serve as self-propelled artillery. These served in the 93rd Artillery Regiment in the garrisons of occupied France and then Sardinia.

In June 1944, American and British troops encountered B1s in Cherbourg during the battle of Normandy, then again in Arnhem and Oosterbeek in Holland during Operation Market Garden. By this late stage in the war, Sherman tanks and bazookas easily outgunned the early war design. Still, the B1 could still dish out quite a bit of anti-personnel firepower and the Germans still had 40 in service entering 1945.

French resistance fighters managed to get their hands on a handful of the abandoned heavy tanks and used them in the liberation of Paris. While the front-line units of the Free French Army under DeGaulle primarily used U.S. armor such as M10 tank destroyers, they still rounded up 19 Char B1s they found in Renault factories and assigned them to 2nd Squadron of the 13th Dragoon Regiment.

The Dragoons were dispatched to assist in the siege of the last fortified pockets of German forces in Royan and La Rochelle. Facing limited anti-tank defenses, the Free French Chars blasted German pillboxes in Saint-George de Didonne, which surrendered on April 1945, and then besieged the German garrison at La Rochelle. The French heavy tanks were finally retired in 1946.

A final two Char B1s were modified as minesweepers in April 1945. They contributed to cleaning up the terrible mess of a war, that for all their formerly impermeable armor, they could not win by themselves.

This first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: Wikipedia.

This article first appeared several years ago.

James Holmes

Security, Asia

A new, old, plan for the South China Sea.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Adding American boats would impart mass to the fleet—further easing the challenge of keeping enough boats plying the deep. The more subs in the rotation, the shorter voyages can be. Bottom line, having the fleet make its home near likely Asian hotspots would solve many ills, as would expanding and diversifying logistics arrangements.

What madman would propose adding diesel submarines to the U.S. Navy’s all-nuclear silent service?

There are a few. The topic came up at an early March hearing before the U.S. House Seapower and Force Projection Subcommittee. Representatives from three teams that have compiled competing “Future Fleet Architecture” studies convened to debate their visions with the committee. Published by the Navy Staff itself, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the MITRE Corporation, the studies explore everything from overall ship numbers to the types of hulls comprising the future fleet to the mix between manned and unmanned platforms.

Navy potentates will now evaluate and compare the studies. The end product will be an official navy statement about force-structure questions, useful to Congress as lawmakers determine how many—and which—ships, planes, and armaments to fund. One consensus, however, already unites the protagonists to this debate: the U.S. Navy needs more of just about everything. The navy estimates it needs 355 vessels to fulfill its missions in increasingly contested settings, principally around the margins of Eurasia. That portends about a 30 percent boost to the force.

A naval expansion of such proportions will put a premium on low-cost yet effective platforms that can be acquired in bulk. Diesel-electric submarines constitute one such platform. The last boat in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s (JMSDF) Soryu class—a class widely acclaimed the world’s finest of its kind—ran Japanese taxpayers $540 million. Let’s use that as a benchmark for discussion. Meanwhile, each Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack boat sets back American taxpayers a cool $2.688 billion. That’s five for the price of one—a low, low price by any standard!

Reports Megan Eckstein of USNI News, however, Charles Werchado, the deputy director of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ assessments division, “firmly denounced” the MITRE analysts’ vision of a hybrid nuclear/conventional submarine force. Quoth Werchado:

“If I was a country like China, I would buy a lot of diesels because I know you’re going to come and fight me here at home. We have to deploy, and the only way to deploy is to bring your own fuel with you. When we buy a Virginia, it comes with a lifetime of fuel. So I have nothing against diesel submarines, but you have to say, am I’m going to be fighting within 200 miles of where I’m based at? Or else now I have to buy extra oilers. I’m going to make them vulnerable when I refuel them; they’re going to have to snorkel and they’ll become vulnerable. It’s just not an option for us as long as we have to be a global navy."

He thus objected to diesels based on geography, logistics, and military capability. Let’s take those objections in turn. First, geography. Werchado’s critique seemingly presupposes that a U.S. diesel contingent would be based on U.S. territory—in other words, no closer to East Asia than Guam. QED: diesels are a non-starter. They would be positioned too far from the Yellow and East China seas, a likely combat theater, to do much good. And indeed, the cruising-range limitations on diesel boats are real and immutable. But let’s not overstate their impact. Distance can be managed through savvy force dispositions on the map.

In fact, if it does things wisely, the U.S. Navy can turn technical shortcomings to strategic and political advantage. Here’s how: it could procure a squadron of diesel boats in large numbers, station it permanently in the Far East, close to potential scenes of action, and place it under a combined U.S.-Japanese submarine command. Doing so would confer a host of benefits. Forward basing would obviate the range problem. For instance, Soryu-class boats boast a cruising range of 6,100 nautical miles—more than adequate for prowling the depths in Northeast Asia. A U.S.-Japanese force founded on a common hull—whether the Soryu or some other design—could presumably match or exceed this performance.

Nor would this represent some leap in the dark. Diesel subs have proven themselves in Northeast Asia across many decades—witness the U.S. submarine campaign against Japan during World War II. And after six-plus decades of practice dating to the JMSDF’s founding, Japanese subs excel at regulating east-west movement through the first island chain, as well as north-south movement along the East Asian periphery. Indeed, undersea warfare represented one of Japan’s chief contributions to allied strategy during the Cold War. Japanese boats lurked along the island chains to detect and trail Soviet subs trying to exit the Seas of Japan and Okhotsk for the broad Pacific Ocean. Soviet skippers commonly sheltered within Asia’s near seas rather than make the attempt.

This constitutes an ideal approach for an age when island-chain defense is regaining its prominence in allied maritime strategy. Want to deter China from seizing the Senkaku Islands or venturing other forms of aggression? Threaten something Beijing prizes dearly, namely ready access to the Western Pacific. Proliferate subs in Northeast Asia, and demonstrate the capability to use them to bar the straits piercing the first island chain. That should give Beijing pause when the leadership contemplates adventurism. If it’s good for China to procure diesels for anti-access/area-denial purposes in the near seas, then it’s good for Americans and Japanese if they want to deny the denier access it covets.

So the strategic logic cuts both ways. Now think about such a deployment from an alliance-relations standpoint. China is a breaker of alliances. It hopes to divide the allies into manageable bits while dislodging the United States from its strategic position in the Western Pacific. Accordingly, Tokyo fears abandonment by its superpower patron. How better to make a statement about American steadfastness than by permanently forward-deploying a fleet of submarines to Japan while embedding U.S. boats and crews within a multinational command? That would show America is in Asia to stay.

And heck, if Tokyo and Washington were willing to take the diplomatic heat from Beijing, they could even equip the Taiwan Navy with a flotilla of diesel boats built on the common design. The George W. Bush administration offered Taipei eight diesel submarines sixteen years ago. But no American shipbuilder has constructed conventional subs in decades, while no foreign government was prepared to help construct the craft—and thereby incur Beijing’s wrath. The deal languished.

Now might be the time to consummate it. Supplying the boats would help Taiwan defend itself, replacing its flotilla of two Dutch-built subs of 1980s vintage and—astonishingly—two World War II-era relics. And furnishing Taipei with boats interoperable with the U.S.-Japanese diesel fleet would allow for coordinated operations should the allies summon the political moxie to work with Taiwan. A diesel program, then, could open new strategic and diplomatic vistas.

Second, logistics. The U.S. Navy combat-logistics fleet doubtless needs expanding, but not because of prospective conventional subs. Forward-deployed U.S. boats would presumably adopt Japanese logistical patterns, meaning they would go on patrol and refuel in port after returning from sea. Now, the allies could stand to bolster their shore logistical arrangements. China’s military would not exempt Japanese seaports such as Yokosuka and Sasebo from attack in wartime. If it did so it would grant its foes a safe haven for naval warmaking. Missile strikes would be sure to come, and might impair or disable shore infrastructure—starving the fleet of precious fuel and stores.

To cope with this prospect, the allies should rediscover their Pacific War past. During its westward advance across the Pacific, the U.S. Navy fashioned techniques and hardware to refuel, resupply, and repair ships from dispersed, often improvised island bases. The allies should ransack history for insight—thinking ahead about how to use Japan’s many islands and inlets as impromptu logistics hubs. But again, the allies need to make themselves resilient as a matter of course. After all, the conventionally powered surface fleets based in Japan need fuel too. And nuclear-powered warships need every other form of replenishment except fuel for their main engines. (Try running aircraft-carrier flight operations without jet fuel.) Logistical demands, in short, are hardly unique to diesel subs.

And third, diesel subs’ supposed vulnerability. Diesel subs have to surface periodically to snorkel, taking in air to help power their engines. They’re exposed to radar detection while snorkeling. Soryu-class boats, however, sport “air-independent propulsion” that lets them stay submerged for up to two weeks. JMSDF commanders and their political masters evidently find the design wholly adequate, while Japanese submariners have mastered tactics and deployment patterns that let them reach Northeast Asian patrol grounds, loiter on station for a satisfactory amount of time, and return to port.

Adding American boats would impart mass to the fleet—further easing the challenge of keeping enough boats plying the deep. The more subs in the rotation, the shorter voyages can be. Bottom line, having the fleet make its home near likely Asian hotspots would solve many ills, as would expanding and diversifying logistics arrangements. Such measures, furthermore, would cow prospective antagonists while comforting allies and friends. This constitutes a promising venture in manifold respects.

The MITRE proposal, then, deserves a fair hearing—not denunciation. Every ship in a global navy need not be a globe-spanning ship. Diesel submarines are an option for the future U.S. Navy. Whether to exercise that option is the question before Congress and the navy.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). The views voiced here are his alone. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Reuters.

Fahmida Zaman

Bangladesh, Indo-Pacific

The rise of digital authoritarianism has become a troubling trend. For countries like Bangladesh, where civil and political rights of citizens have never been consolidated, authoritarian behavior online by governments is even more troubling.

On October 13, the home ministry of Bangladesh government issued a statement “forbidding people at home and abroad from spreading ‘false, fabricated, confusing, and inciting statements’ on social media about government, military, police officials and members of different other law enforcement agencies.”

The statement went on, “The government has observed the activities of such people with patience and has come to the conclusion that it is necessary to take legal action against such people to maintain the stability, domestic security and public well-being.” The statement also threatened legal actions “according to the law of the land” against the public. Presumably, the cited law of the land is the 2018 Digital Security Act. On October 7, the Department of Secondary and Higher Education directed students and teachers to refrain from “writing, sharing, "liking", or posting anything that ‘ruins the image of the government or the state’, or ‘disrespects any important person, institution or profession’” on social media.

The government’s effort to restrict freedom of expression online has not been limited to circulating statements. In June of this year, Bangladesh police arrested a fifteen-year-old boy near Dhaka for allegedly “defaming” the country’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in a Facebook post. After a local supporter of the ruling Awami League filed a case accusing that the teenager had “badmouthed...our mother-like leader,” the boy was quickly arrested and sent to jail. Earlier in June, two university teachers were arrested and sent to jail for allegedly mocking the former health minister on Facebook who died of coronavirus. All three of these cases were filed under the Digital Security Act, and these cases are not exceptions. Critics have dubbed the law as draconian, and with good reason.

The Digital Security Act 2018 was supposed to replace the infamous Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT) 2006, in particular section 57 of the act. Section 57 has been used extensively to crackdown on dissenting voices of journalists, academics, human rights activities, and members of the public especially since the controversial 2014 national election. Yet, the Digital Security Act (DSA) reinforced even more punitive measures to curb freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The act authorizes law enforcement agencies to search or arrest anyone without any warrant and imposes harsh prison sentences for vaguely worded offenses—including online defamation, hurting a person’s religious feelings, and spreading propaganda and campaigns against the liberation war of Bangladesh others, among other things.

Since its implementation in October 2018, more than 1,000 cases have been filed under the act against ordinary citizens, activists, academics, and journalists for “criticizing” the government policies or its political leadership. The number of cases and arrests under DSA has significantly increased since the beginning of 2020. A UK based media-watchdog reported that from January to June of 2020, 113 cases have been filed accusing a total of 208 people, of whom 53 are journalists. Of the accused, 114 were arrested immediately. In May, at least 11 people were charged with “spreading rumors and misinformation on Facebook” for posting about the government’s ill-fitted response to the pandemic. At this rate, there have been three cases on average per day leading to an anticipated 60 percent increase in the number of cases and arrests in 2020 under DSA.

The Digital Security Act came into effect in October 2018, months before a national election that secured a consecutive third term in government for the ruling Awami League party. When Awami League won a landslide victory in 2008 after two years of an unelected military-backed government, it presented hopeful possibilities for a return to democracy. Yet, in 2011, the government took advantage of its majority in the parliament to remove the Caretaker government provision that, until its removal, mitigated deep mistrust between the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the country’s main opposition party. The provision also ensured relatively fair elections and peaceful changes of power. This caretaker provision, in essence, called for a temporary government to be appointed as polls approached in order to oversee a smooth and fair election process. The next national poll, in 2014, was boycotted by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, witnessed unparalleled election violence, and led to 153 out of the 300 parliamentary seats going uncontested. This resulted in a “legally and constitutionally legitimate” yet morally questionable election victory for Awami League.

The 2014 election also marked a decisive turn towards authoritarian practices. Following the election, section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology Act was used to operationalize a deliberate campaign to silence dissenting voices in the press and among citizens. Political opposition members including the former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, among others, were jailed. In addition, the government instigated an anti-narcotics drive leading to significant increases in extra judicial killings ahead of the 2018 election. Human rights organizations and civil society alleged that the anti-narcotics drive “was a government effort to exert increased political control over the populace.”

In the national election of December 30 of 2018, the ruling Awami League led alliance won 288 of the 300 parliamentary seats, an overwhelming 90 percent of the vote. Such a rate of victory, however, has been questioned and is widely believed to be rigged as witnesses reported ballot-box stuffing, intimidation of voters, and election violence.

Reinforcing the government’s determination to restrain civil and political rights, an effort that began in 2014, the unparalleled number of cases and arrests under the Digital Security Act in Bangladesh demonstrates Dhaka’s authoritarian behavior. It also makes the country an embodiment of a global phenomenon—the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Cyber Tyranny

In recent years, internet and social media platforms have become highly useful tools for authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian and repressive governments are surveilling and repressing dissent not only by creating restrictive laws such as the Digital Security Act in Bangladesh or the new internet law in Turkey, but also by taking active legal steps against citizens for expressing critical opinions on the internet.

Of the 65 countries assessed for the 2019 Freedom on the Net report by Freedom House, law enforcement agencies in 47 of them arrested people for posting political, social, or religious content online. Additionally, 40 of the 65 countries instituted advanced social media surveillance programs. For 15 of these 40 countries using advanced social media surveillance, such programs have either expanded or been newly established. As a result, 89 percent of internet users around the world, close to three billion people, are being monitored on social media, the 2019 Freedom House assessment reported.

Efforts to control the internet and social media reflect governments’ concerns about their ability to maintain domestic political control. Governments that perceive their power or legitimacy to be threatened by a mass display of dissatisfaction online or through protests are more likely to enhance restrictive measures online. Such restrictive measures online are aimed to limit the role of the internet and social media in spreading critical discourse or mobilizing protests. This is evident by how quickly governments in India, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, and Belarus—among others—have suspended, shut down, or slowed down internet connections amidst protests.

In Bangladesh, digital authoritarianism is reflected not only through the Digital Security Act but also through the state’s increased capacity for internet and social media surveillance; increased arrests based on political content; the tendency to block critical websites, including local and international news sources; and the limits placed on internet access—and particularly following critical moments such as anti-government protests and national elections.

The government has also repeatedly blocked or threatened to block social media platforms, and particularly Facebook—which is arguably the country’s most-used social media platform. In addition, the government has established significant control over online content. It has also been accused of state-sponsored monitoring and hacking of Facebook accounts of journalists, political dissidents, and opposition figures.

Bangladeshi Issues

Although the DSA is a relatively recent development in controlling cyberspace in Bangladesh, it highlights a larger problem in the country.

First, it demonstrates the government’s authoritarian behavior both online and offline. Before the implementation of the Digital Security Act, a similarly draconian law—section 57 of the ICT Act—was used for the strategic silencing of any criticism of the government and for curbing press freedom. Overall, an astonishingly high number of enforced disappearances, crackdowns on any critics, jailing of political opponents, and the routine targeting of democracy advocates and citizens under the Digital Security Act show the abysmal state of civil and political rights in the country. The most devastating impact of these actions is perhaps that self-censorship has become a common practice—so much so that Human Rights Watch reports that news editors themselves suppress 50 to 90 percent of the news at hand. Given the government’s repressive behavior both online and offline in recent years, by no measure can the country be called democratic.

Second, like everywhere else where governments are practicing tactics of digital authoritarianism, Bangladesh’s actions are aimed to limit the spread of unfavorable information, particularly during critical moments such as a large-scale road-safety protest in 2018, the 2018 Election, and even coronavirus. The 2018 road-safety protests, led by students, began after two students were killed by an unlicensed bus in Dhaka in early August and spread quickly across the city. One may argue that the protests were fueled by accumulated anti-government sentiments in an ever-shrinking space for freedom of expression. When the prominent photojournalist Shahidul Alam pointed out these underlying causes of the protest in an interview with Al Jazeera, he was arrested within hours of the interview and detained for 102 days. During the protests, the government shut down mobile internet service as the protests utilized social media platforms to mobilize. Additionally, during the national election in December 2018, two journalists were arrested while covering the 2018 national election under the Digital Security Act for “false information” about voter-turnout. Several others were attacked and denied entry to polling centers.

In May 2020, two months after the first cases of coronavirus in Bangladesh, the government issued an order warning officials not to make negative comments on social media about “[the] state or its important persons,” declaring that any violator would face personal repercussions and legal actions. The instructions explicitly commanded public servants “not to upload, share, comment on or react to social media posts, including image, audio or video, with ‘damaging’ messages.” The number of legal cases under the Digital Security Act against journalists and ordinary citizens has significantly increased as people suffer the consequences of an ill-planned and ill-implemented response to coronavirus in Bangladesh, and of the rampant corruption in the health sector.

As such, controlling the flow of information by curbing freedom of expression online and offline while criminalizing even mildly opposing views undoubtedly constitutes a brutally effective political strategy for the ruling party in Bangladesh.

Digital Bangladesh

The rise of digital authoritarianism across the globe, led by China and Russia, has become a troubling trend, from Turkey to Sudan to India to Zimbabwe to Brazil. However, for countries like Bangladesh, where civil and political rights of citizens have never been consolidated, authoritarian behavior online by governments is even more troubling. In the absence of democratic models of digital governance, Chinese and Russian’s leadership in exporting digital authoritarianism may lead us to unfamiliar and damaging territory within the realm of digital governance, and particularly in already authoritarian countries like Bangladesh. Competitive democratic models of digital governance that counter China and Russia as role models of digital authoritarianism need to be championed by the United States and other established democracies. Such a task should also engage in public diplomacy—creating awareness about digital civil and political rights, empowering citizens to challenge digital authoritarian behavior, and promoting digital critical thinking skills. 

The government of Bangladesh headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has extensively campaigned for, and promised its citizens, a “Digital Bangladesh” ever since it came to power in 2008. In 2019, Hasina claimed that her government has made the dream of a Digital Bangladesh a reality. And yet, the presence of a powerful Digital Security Act that aims to control what can be said online, and the punishment of citizens for any remotely unfavorable online content, make the prime minister’s proclamations about a “Digital Bangladesh” ring hollow.

Fahmida Zaman is a doctoral student with the University of Delaware’s Department of Political Science & International Relations. She was a research intern at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC this past summer.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

A U.S. F-117 Nighthawk faced trouble over Serbia.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Getting a platform with a high-bandwidth radar or heat-seeking weapons close enough to actually shoot at a stealth plane remains a major challenge. Afterall, the stealth jet could detect and simply avoid or shoot at an approaching threat. 

At 8 p.m. on March 27, 1999, a bizarre-looking black painted airplane cut through the night sky over Serbia. This particular F-117 Nighthawk—a subsonic attack plane that was the world’s first operational stealth aircraft—flew by the call sign of Vega-31 and was named “Something Wicked.” Moments earlier, it had released its two Paveway laser-guided bombs on targets near the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Its pilot, Lt. Col. Dale Zelko, was a veteran with experience in the 1991 Gulf War.A dozen Nighthawks had deployed to Aviano, Italy on February 21 to participate in Operation Allied Force—a NATO bombing campaign intended to pressure Belgrade into withdrawing its troops from the province of Kosovo after President Slobodan Milosevic initiated a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign seeking to expel the Kosovar Albanian population.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared in November 2017.

Image: Wikipedia.

David Axe

Security,

A recent simulation underscores the importance of sealift to U.S. war plans, as well as the shortage of naval escorts.

Here's What You Need to Know: Adding more than 60 ships to the sealift fleet is a tall order and could cost billions of dollars. But experts’ warning have not gone entirely unheeded.

Aconvoy of five American cargo ships made a simulated run through hostile waters in September 2019 during a sprawling, short-notice test of the U.S. fleet’s ability to ship people and cargo during a major war.

The simulated, World War II-style convoy underscored the importance of sealift to U.S. war plans, as well as the shortage of naval escorts that has incited a minor panic among military planners.

The five ships in the East Coast convoy test included the roll-on/roll-off cargo vessels USNS Benavidez, USNS Gilliland, and USNS Mendonca, USNS Pfc. Eugene A. Obregon and USNS Sgt. Matej Kocak.

All five vessels belong to U.S. Military Sealift Command, the quasi-military transport branch of the U.S. Navy. MSC operates more than 100 vessels. Many of them lie inactive in major ports during peacetime. During a crisis, Navy and civilian mariners quickly would reactive the ships.

The September 2019 transportation “stress test”  activated a total of 33 sealift ships on both U.S. coasts. As part of the exercise, the five East Coast ro/ro ships simulated an unescorted convoy moving through waters where enemy submarines and sea mines posed a threat.

“The convoy sailed through a simulated minefield while limiting visual and sound signatures,” USNI News reported, citing an MSC statement. “Crews stopped using all personal electronic devices to decrease transmissions from the ships and operated in a ‘darken ship’ mode to prevent light from emanating from the ships.”

“We were also training the crews to sail their ships as quietly as possible to counter ships’ electromagnetic signatures because our vessels also could face anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, fighter aircraft and enemy bombers,” Capt. Hans Lynch, MSC’s Atlantic commodore, said in the official statement.

The training belies a serious shortage of surface warships that could function as escorts. In October 2018, U.S. Maritime Administration head Mark Buzby said the Navy admitted it wouldn’t be able to escort sealift ships during a major war with Russia or China.

The Navy is struggling to expand the fleet from around 290 front-line ships in 2019 to as many as 355 in the 2030s. But the cost of building and maintaining the extra ships has cast into doubt the sailing branch’s ability to meet its expansion goal.

The Congressional Budget Office consistently has maintained that Navy shipbuilding accounts are billions of dollars too low on an annual basis in order to fund the bigger fleet.

With too few warships to escort the sealift vessels, MSC crews would be on their own. To help them survive, they should “go fast and stay quiet,” Buzby said the Navy told him.

That’s exactly what the crews of the five East Coast MSC ships did in September 2019. Between 80 percent and 85 percent of the ships in the wider shipping stress test successfully met the underway evaluation criteria, a U.S. Transportation Command spokesperson told USNI News.

But the U.S. sealift force has other problems. For one, it’s too small, the Washington, D.C. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment warned in a May 2019 report.

The civilian merchant marine, which during wartime would become an auxiliary force under the Navy, possesses around 180 U.S.-flagged vessels. Add in MSC’s own ships and the overall U.S. sealift force numbers around 300 ships.

But by 2048 it needs to grow to 360 ships in order to successfully support the Navy and resupply U.S. military forces during a major war, CSBA asserted. The fleet should add 48 tankers ships to its current 21 tankers, add 20 salvage ships to the five it has in 2019 and boost the number of repair tenders from two to 17. Munitions ships should number 25, up from 12 in 2019. There should be seven hospital ships, up from two.

“Failing to remedy this situation, when adversaries have U.S. logistics networks in their crosshairs, could cause the United States to lose a war and fail its allies and partners in their hour of need,” CSBA warned.

Adding more than 60 ships to the sealift fleet is a tall order and could cost billions of dollars. But experts’ warning have not gone entirely unheeded. Kevin Tokarski, a senior official with the U.S. Maritime Administration, in May 2019 told USNI News that he was considering reflagging some ships working for American companies in order quickly to grow the sealift force.

David Axe served as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Navy

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

In 2017 the Army formed eight cross-functional teams led by brigadier generals to rapidly cost-efficiently develop a new generation of hardware

Here's What You Need To Remember: To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

The U.S. Army is at a crossroads as the Pentagon is reorienting itself to fight a capable great power opponent after nearly two decades focused on counter-insurgency conflicts.

Russia poses a traditional land-power challenge for the U.S. Army with its large mechanized formations threatening the Baltics, as well as formidable long-range ballistic missiles, artillery and surface-to-air missiles.

By contrast, a hypothetical conflict with China would focus on control of the sea and airspace over the Pacific Ocean. To remain relevant, the Army would need to deploy long-range anti-ship-capable missiles and helicopters to remote islands, allied nations like Japan and South Korea and even onto the decks of U.S. Navy ships.

Almost all the Army’s major land warfare systems entered service in the 1980s or earlier. Five ambitious programs to replace aging armored vehicles, artillery and helicopters consumed $30 billion only to fail spectacularly.

Thus, in 2017 the Army formed eight cross-functional teams led by brigadier generals to rapidly cost-efficiently develop a new generation of hardware. These far-reaching modernization initiatives are collectively called the “the Big Six.”

1. Long-Range Precision Fire (Artillery)

The U.S. Army was famed for its lavish, rapid and accurate use of artillery support during World War II. However, in recent conflicts, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on air strikes using precision-weapons over artillery barrages.

But on-call air support would be far from given when facing a peer enemy possessing formidable air defenses. In fact, long-range missile and artillery strikes might be needed to destroy air defenses, “kicking in the door” for air power.

Thus the Army’s top priority is “Long Range Precision Fire.” a half dozen projects seeking to enable accurate ground-launched strikes against targets dozens or hundreds of miles away.

To begin with, the Army seeks to further upgrades its tank-like 1960s-era M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers with long-barreled Extend Range Cannon boosting regular attack range to forty-three miles, and possibly even ram-jet -assisted shells extending range to eighty-one miles.

The artillery branch’s other mainstay, the truck-based M270 and smaller M142 Multiple Rocket Launcher Systems, will receive extended-range rockets doubling reach to ninety-three miles. Moreover, their capability to launch a single large, 180-mile range ATACMS tactical missile will be replaced with two smaller Precision Strike Missiles with a range of 310 miles that can hit moving targets (ships).

Following the killing of the INF treaty, the Army furthermore is developing two even longer-reaching weapons: a hypersonic missile with a range of 1,499 miles, which could prove extremely difficult to defend against and boast deadly anti-ship capabilities, and a gigantic Long Range Strategic Cannon supposedly boasting a range of one thousand miles.

2. Next Generation Combat Vehicle (Armor)

The Army’s second priority is to replace its increasingly vulnerable and underpowered M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. In 2018, the Army decided to proceed with improving the Bradley’s power train but canceling replacement of its turret.

Instead it seeks an Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) capable of carrying larger squads, a thirty- to fifty-millimeter automatic cannon (the Bradley has a twenty-five-millimeter gun), and new missiles and active protection systems. Current competitors include the Raytheon/Rheinmetall Lynx, the General Dynamics Griffon III and the BAE CV-90 Mark IV.

The separate Mobile Protected Firepower program seeks a fast and air-transportable light tank. Currently, a dozen 105-millimter gun-equipped M8 Bufords with scalable armor are set to compete versus Griffin II tanks armed with 120-millimeter guns.

The Army has also begun procuring turretless Bradleys to serve as Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, replacing old M113 APCs in support roles such as combat engineering, utility transport, ambulance duty, command post, and mortar carrying. And some of its wheeled Stryker APCS are receiving “Dragoon” turrets with thirty-millimeter cannons and Javelin anti-tank missiles to give the lighter vehicles a fighting chance versus enemy mechanized forces.

The Army is also installing Trophy and Iron Fist Active Protection Systems on Abrams and Bradley tanks. These detect incoming missiles and jam or shoot them down before impact. As long-range anti-tank missiles have destroyed hundreds of tanks in Middle Eastern wars, including Saudi-operated Abrams, APS could significantly improve survivability.

3. Future Vertical Lift (Aviation)

Helicopters are essential for battlefield and operational mobility—however they are also expensive, relatively slow (150–200 miles per hour), short-ranged and vulnerable to enemy fire.

The Army is looking ahead to a radical new “Future Vertical Lift” system to eventually replace its over two thousand Blackhawk medium transport helicopters and its heavily armed and armored Apache gunships.

Two innovative flying prototypes are competing. The Bell V-280 Valor is a tilt-rotor aircraft: it can rotate its engines from a helicopter to an airplane-like configuration. The likely more complex and expensive Valor would boast greater speed (320 miles per hour) and range.

The Sikorsky SB-1 Defiant is a compound helicopters with two counter-rotating blades atop each other and pusher rotor. The Defiant likely is better at helicopter-style low-speed maneuvers—at the expense of speed and fuel efficiency.

The Army also retired its last OH-58 scout helicopters in 2015, only to discover that Apache gunships were a poor replacement. As a result, the Army is searching for an agile scout helicopter separately from FVL.

4. Network

The Army would like a brand-new unified, field-deployable Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) network tying together its land-warfare systems.

The last attempt to field such a network, called WIN-T, was cancelled after $6 billion in spending due to its vulnerability to electronic-and cyberwarfare. In 2014, the Army observed how Russia forces extensively jammed, hacked and geo-located Ukrainian command-and-control nodes—and even targeted them with lethal attacks.

The Army intends to buy as much of the software off-the-shelf as possible to avoid spending years and dollars building a new system from the ground up. The new network needs to be standardized yet modular, transportable, and cybersecure.

A separate “Assured Position Navigation & Timing” team is developing redundant navigational aids so that ground forces smoothly function under GPS-denied circumstances, particularly by using ground or air-deployed “pseudo-satellites.”

5. Air & Missile Defense

In the last half-century, air supremacy courtesy of the U.S. Air Force has reduced the demands on the Army’s ground-based air defenses, which have been heavily downsized. However, new threats posed by swarming drone attacks and proliferating cruise and ballistic missiles have made re-building the air defense branch a huge priority.

The Army is currently focusing on “Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense”—vehicles accompanying frontline troops to shoot down low-altitude threats. The Army plans to field 8 x 8 Strykers armed with Stinger and Hellfire missiles, anti-drone jammers and thirty-millimeter cannons. It’s also interim procuring Israeli Iron Dome missile systems, the munitions from which may eventually be adapted to Multi-Mission Launcher.

The Army is also developing a vehicle-mounted 100-KW laser that could be used to cost-efficiently burn drones out of the sky.

For longer-range air defense, rather than develop new missiles, the Army is spending billions to improve its existing Patriot and THAADS systems by tying together their dispersed radars and fire-control systems into an Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) network.

6. Soldier Lethality

Close-combat infantrymen account for only 4 percent of the army’s personnel but have suffered 90 percent of the casualties in conflicts since 2001. The “Soldier Lethality” initiative is divided in two teams.

One focuses on improving “human” factors using more realistic training simulators, and retaining experienced NCOs and officers through better perks and incentives.

The other team plans to procure “Next Generation” assault rifles and light machine guns—likely using the 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor round, which is deemed to have superior penetrating power versus body armor. The Army also is devising an infantry “Head’s Up Display” with integrated (and improved) night-vision, tactical data and targeting crosshairs.

Implementation

The Army is killing or curtailing 186 older programs and procurements, including down-sizing CH-47F heavy transport helicopters and JLTV Humm-Vee replacement orders, to ensure the Big Six’s 31 initiatives receive a targeted $33 billion in funding through 2024.

To avoid the earlier dramatic failure of “super programs” like the Future Combat System, the Army plans to adopt off-the-shelf solution where possible, and operationally test numerous projects before deciding which merit the funding to ramp up to full-scale development and production.

Time will tell whether the Army’s new, seemingly more agile approach will dodge the bullets that have taken down prior modernization efforts.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared in May 2019.

Image: DVIDS