The National Interest

Stephen Silver

North Korea, Asia

North Korea, facing potential economic devastation, is considering at least partially reopening its border with China. 

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, North Korea has taken extraordinary efforts to keep its border with China closed. While North Korea has claimed throughout the pandemic that it has zero cases of the coronavirus, its regime appears to have long been fearful that the virus could cross the border from China. 

Now, a new report says that North Korea, facing potential economic devastation, is considering at least partially reopening its border with China. 

According to Yonhap News Agency, the North Korean regime “appears to be making earnest preparations to reopen its train routes with China after a period of COVID-19-induced border controls.” 

This would follow the reopening of sea routes for the receipt of medical supplies. 

A spokesperson for South Korea’s unification ministry told Yonhap that the South Korean government “has detected signs indicating preparations for a trade resumption in the regions bordering China, such as the construction of a quarantine facility.” South Korea’s assessment is based on intelligence from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), which also reported that the North Koreans are talking with China and Russia to continue train operations.

“It’s hard to predict the exact date of their resumption. We will continue closely monitoring related movements,” the South Korea spokesperson told Yonhap. 

The report also said that, as Kim Jong-un’s tenth anniversary in power approaches, the regime has “removed portraits of Kim’s father and grandfather, former leaders Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, respectively, from the backdrop of official meetings in an apparent move to depart from the shadow of his predecessors.”

The regime has also begun using the term “Kimjongunism,” as a successor to Kimilsungism and Kimjongilism, as South Korean intelligence has determined, per Yonhap. 

Also, this week, a UN General Assembly committee approved three separate resolutions related to North Korea, including one demanding the “complete, verifiable and irreversible” abandonment of its nuclear program. 

“Other provisions would have the Assembly reaffirm its commitment to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible abandonment of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in accordance with relevant Security Council resolutions,” a summary quoted by Yonhap said. 

“The Assembly would reiterate its condemnation of the six nuclear tests conducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in violation of relevant Security Council resolutions and urge that country’s full compliance… it would welcome all efforts and dialogue to that end, including inter‑Korean summits and summits between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” the summary continued.

The resolution was rebuked by a North Korean delegate, the report said. The resolutions come as a push is underway for an end of the Korean war declaration.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, 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

Ethen Kim Lieser

Coronavirus,

It could be caused by overconfidence and America’s poor vaccination numbers. 

Recent data indicate that new coronavirus infections in the United States have plunged nearly sixty percent since the September spike that was brought on by the highly contagious Delta variant.

However, there are still several states that are struggling to handle rising cases, especially as colder weather brings more people indoors and may make viral transmission much easier. The complacency that comes with improved data combined with the still high numbers of unvaccinated Americans could, in fact, help start a deadly fifth wave of the virus, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

“Just remember that sixty-five million Americans who could be vaccinated right now are not. That is more than enough human wood for this coronavirus forest fire to burn. So, we’ll see when the case numbers come down with this surge, just as we have with the previous surges,” Osterholm noted in a recent interview on Minnesota Public Radio.

“And you may recall last spring that I thought the darkest days of the pandemic were ahead of us. And we were facing that June period when everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s done.’ We’ve got vaccines, hardly any cases—and then look what happened. Well, that's going to happen again because you have places like New York City, L.A., and other large metropolitan areas with lots of people. … I can’t say this enough times: If you are not vaccinated, this virus will find you. And you will know a COVID-19-related outcome. We could see again major activity. (It could be this) winter, next spring, I don’t know when but it’s not done. It is not done. The one thing that will help us get it done is to get vaccinated,” he continued.

Osterholm is also a strong proponent of booster shots, saying that they “are absolutely a part of the future. When you think about what we’ve done with these vaccines over the course of the last eighteen to twenty months … these vaccines are really incredible, but they’re not perfect.”

COVID Becoming Endemic?

As to whether COVID-19 will eventually become endemic like the seasonal flu, Osterholm stated that he believes “that will happen … [but] I don’t know when.”

“Every morning I get up I scrape those five inches of crusted mud off my crystal ball. And every day, it seems cloudier and cloudier. If we see a major change and variant, and they do something different than they’re doing now, that could surely cloud the picture of: When does it just become like flu? Like every year, we have some cases, we may have some moderate increase in cases,” Osterholm added.

“But that is not what it’s doing now. I think we forget about the fact of just what damage this virus has done with over the seven hundred thousand deaths that have occurred—one out of every five hundred Americans has died from this virus. That’s amazing when we look at the fact that there are now over a hundred forty thousand kids in this country who have been orphaned, or whose sole caregiver has died, because of COVID-19,” he concluded.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-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. 

Stephen Silver

DirecTV,

DirecTV’s exclusivity is set to expire after the 2022 season, and the NFL has been vocal about wanting to go with a different partner. 

It’s been known for quite a while that the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, which has been exclusive to DirecTV since it first launched in 1994, is going to come up for bid in the near future. DirecTV’s exclusivity is set to expire after the 2022 season, and the NFL has been vocal about wanting to go with a different partner. 

This week, the NFL commissioner made that clear in public comments. 

According to CNBC, the issue came up at NFL owners’ meetings in New York this week, the first time since the pandemic it occurred in person. And while the CNBC story concentrated on recent controversies involving the e-mail scandal of former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden and allegations of misconduct at the Washington Football Team, the Sunday Ticket issue was still raised. 

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell called Sunday Ticket a “streaming product,” and indicated that it will move from a satellite project to a digital one, as CNBC characterized his comments. 

“I think that is best for our fans to make it accessible on a digital platform,” the commissioner said. 

The report, cited “a person familiar with the NFL’s thinking about Sunday Ticket” told the network that “several tech companies” are interested in the package. The story also said that “in league circles, the rumblings suggest the NFL eventually wants to lure Apple to take it over.” 

CNBC reiterated that the NFL would like to offer creative options in Sunday Ticket, including “giving consumers the option to purchase individual team games,” as well as possibly allowing different streaming services to carry the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) packages, the way those conferences are split between CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoons. 

Some reports of late have stated that DirecTV could retain the satellite side of the Sunday Ticket package, but the CNBC story did not mention that possibility. Also reported by CNBC was that the NFL hired Goldman Sachs last year to find investment partners in NFL.com and the NFL Network. 

The report added that the NFL hopes to for an agreement with a new partner before the start of next season, even though it wouldn’t go into effect until the season after that. 

Earlier this year, the NFL extended its standard TV deals, maintaining Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC/ESPN as partners, while adding streaming elements to the package. Those include Amazon Prime as the new exclusive home of the Thursday Night Football package. Amazon has also been mentioned as a possible partner for Sunday Ticket. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, 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

Caleb Larson

Drones,

The Pentagon awarded development contracts to two of America’s unmanned aerial vehicle heavyweights to develop a new UAV as soon as next year.

The United States Department of Defense has awarded development contracts to Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems to develop an Off-Boarding Sensing Station (OBSS) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Both contracts, which were awarded separately, cover “the design, development, and flight demonstration in an open architecture aircraft concept to achieve the goals of rapid time-to-market and low acquisition cost,” with both companies’ work anticipated to be completed by October 31st, 2022. The Department of Defense awarded both companies about $17.7 million each and included an option for the companies to increase their payouts to just under $32 million.

Kratos’ Off-Boarding Sensing Station 

Kratos’s statement regarding the award explains that the OBSS will be an entirely new unmanned aerial system. However, like Kratos’s other offerings, it is “intended to be an affordable, highly modular conventional takeoff and landing jet-powered” aerial vehicle.

While details on the new UAVs are murky, Kratos asserted that the “OBSS solution incorporates innovative manufacturing techniques that enhance its ability to not only provide significant performance for sensor extension missions for manned jet aircraft but also will accommodate significant offensive weapons volume to also act as a weapons bay extension for manned aircraft.”

Furthermore, the OBSS is “a new addition to the Kratos family of low-cost Autonomous Collaborative Platforms (ACP) designed to employ weapons, sensors, and other effects that generate affordable, force multiplier combat power with a forward force posture.”

General Atomics’s Off-Boarding Sensing Station

Even less is known about General Atomics’s OBSS. However, the company has a very long track record building unmanned aerial vehicles and has been a prolific designer of UAVs over the last several decades.

General Atomics’s legendary Reaper and Predator drones made their combat debuts during America’s recent conflicts in the Middle East. More recently, General Atomics unveiled the new Predator C Avenger. Powered by a single jet engine buried in the platform’s fuselage and featuring a stealthily designed fuselage, General Atomics calls this Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS)  the next generation in remotely piloted aircraft.

General Atomics has also participated in the U.S. Air Force’s Skyborg program, an effort to develop low-cost unmanned aerial platforms capable of flying alongside manned aircraft. Flying in tandem, these expendable aircraft would fly far ahead into contested airspace, finding and assessing threats. In some cases, armed unmanned vehicles could also eliminate threats on their own.

Both General Atomics and Kratos will have to submit prototypes by next year. However, if they exercise the additional funding option, they will have until early 2024 to finalize designs.

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and Defense Writer with the National Interest. He lives in Berlin and covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society.

Image: Reuters

Charlie Gao

Singapore, Asia

While it’s clear Singapore’s Air Force packs a significant air-to-air punch, its mission is not to just protect Singapore itself but its interests in the immediate region.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Overall, unlike their neighbors, Singapore has gone “all in” with Western tech. The common origins of their aircraft probably make resupply and maintenance easier. This trend looks to continue now that Singapore is looking into the F-35 as a replacement for their F-5Es. They also have the significant advantage of having AWACS aircraft, unlike their two closest neighbors.

Despite its small geographical size, Singapore fields one of the most advanced and well-equipped militaries in South East Asia. It spends more on its military than any of its neighbors. Being a tiny city-state, one of the strongest arms of the Singaporean military is the Republic of Singapore Air Force. But how does it stack up against its neighbors, from the small to the big? Does Western tech really provide the level of advantage it needs to defend itself?

The backbone of the RSAF is a fleet of F-15 and F-16 fighters. The RSAF fields forty F-15SG Eagles, forty F-16Ds, and twenty F-16Cs. These are augmented by around thirty F-5S Tiger II and some A-4 Skyhawks in storage. Singapore also fields an AWACS capability with five Israeli modified Gulfstream 550 jets.

Out of all those aircraft, Singapore’s strongest fighter is definitely the F-15SG, itself a variant of the F-15E. The most important advantage the F-15SG has is the APG-63(V)3 AESA radar, which one of the best aircraft mounted radars on any fighter in the region.

AESAs also have the capability to perform electronic warfare (EW) tasks: they can actively degrade the lock of an active radar guided missile while scanning at the same time due to their electronic nature. The RSAF F-16s are also rumored to be undergoing similar upgrades to receive AESAs of their own.

The F-15SG also has an IRST system, which gives it the capability to detect and lock onto aircraft with infrared missiles without even switching on the radar. The IRST bulb is positioned on a pod pylon under the left engine of the F-15SG and is directly integrated into the plane.

To make the actual kill, the F-15SG wields the advanced AIM-9X Block II air-to-air missile. This is integrated with the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System helmet, which allows the seeker to track where the pilot is looking, allowing for the missile to lock onto targets off boresight.

While the Soviet Air Force pioneered this capability with the R-73 and Su-27/MiG-29 aircraft (including those fielded by its neighbors), the JHMCS and AIM-9X Block II take it to even further levels, with a wider seeker lock angle than what can be achieved with the Russian system.

For longer range targets, Singapore has access to advanced long-range active radar homing air-to-air missiles: the AIM-120C-7. It also has stocks of the medium-range AIM-120C-5. These can be fired from both the F-15 and F-16s Singapore has, although it’s likely the F-15 will be able to achieve a lock earlier on with its AESA radar.

While it’s clear Singapore’s Air Force packs a significant air-to-air punch, its mission is not to just protect Singapore itself but its interests in the immediate region. As a result, they have significant stocks of the AGM-154 JSOW, a long ranged American glide bomb that can fly up to 130km away. While these could be used to deliver an alpha strike against an opponent, Singapore is expected to use them more in an anti-shipping role.

One of Singapore’s greatest fighter threats might come from Indonesia, which bought the advanced Su-35S earlier this year. However, they are fewer in number than Singapore’s F-15SG fleet. Indonesia also fields many more different types of aircraft: the Indonesian Air Force has F-16s, original Su-27s, two different variants of the Su-30, and F-5E Tiger II s as well. Obviously, this results in greater maintenance and sustainment issues for Indonesia.

Another strong air force that could face Singapore is China’s PLAN aviation. China also has J-15 carrier fighters. These largely are Chinese-developed variants of the first-generation Su-27S Flankers China first received in the 1990s. While on paper they have the same capabilities as the F-15SG (ARH missiles, IRST, advanced radar), China’s Flankers are still considered to be underpowered due to their engines.

Malaysia also is a strong contender, fielding a weird mix of Western and Eastern planes like Indonesia. Unlike Indonesia, most of their Flankers are of older variants, and a good portion of their fighter fleet is relatively obsolete MiG-29s. They also do field the AIM-9X Block II like Singapore.

Overall, unlike their neighbors, Singapore has gone “all in” with Western tech. The common origins of their aircraft probably make resupply and maintenance easier. This trend looks to continue now that Singapore is looking into the F-35 as a replacement for their F-5Es. They also have the significant advantage of having AWACS aircraft, unlike their two closest neighbors.

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

This article first appeared in August 2018 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Arms Sales, Middle East

Critics of the deal have been vocal that the Biden administration’s deal with Saudi Arabia contradicts the spirit of the White House’s policy to bar all “offensive weapons sales” to the kingdom, as those weapons could be used against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Last month the United States Department of State approved a potential agreement for a sale of up to $500 million of military hardware to Saudi Arabia. The agreement was the first major defense agreement with the Middle Eastern nation to be sent to Congress for review since President Joe Biden took office in January.

However, the agreement has opened up a number of questions and follows criticism of U.S. ties to the kingdom over its human rights record, as well as Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the ongoing civil war in Yemen.

According to the State Department, the package of military equipment would also provide continued maintenance support services for a wide range of helicopters, including a future fleet of Boeing CH-47D Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, Reuters reported in September.

“This proposed sale will support U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives by helping to improve the security of a friendly country that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic growth in the Middle East,” the State Department said in a statement.

Contradicting White House Policy?

Critics of the deal have been vocal that the Biden administration’s deal with Saudi Arabia contradicts the spirit of the White House’s policy to bar all “offensive weapons sales” to the kingdom, as those weapons could be used against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

President Biden previously pledged to end the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, and to end all support for the civil war, which the administration maintains has created “a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”

And yet, as The Guardian reported this week, “Saudi Arabia was given permission by the state department to enter a contract to support the Royal Saudi Land Forces Aviation Command’s fleet of Apache helicopters, Blackhawks, and a future fleet of Chinook helicopters. It includes training and the service of 350 U.S. contractors for the next two years, as well as two U.S. government staff.”

Critics of the decision argue that it contradicts Biden’s very first foreign policy objective.

“To my mind, this is a direct contradiction to the administration’s policy. This equipment can absolutely be used in offensive operations, so I find this particularly troubling,” Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, told The Guardian.

It is clear that despite the harsh rhetoric from the White House earlier this year, it now seems that the administration is softening its stance with Saudi Arabia, which remains a key U.S. ally in the region.

Experts who have studied the conflict in Yemen have said they believe the Saudis have used the Apaches in operations along the Saudi-Yemen border, but to what extent isn’t clear. Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has suggested that the U.S.-made aircraft had been primarily used in “defensive” operations along the border and that the sale of the maintenance contract shouldn’t be seen as contrary to Biden’s policy.

The State Department also told The Guardian that the United States would continue to work with the kingdom “to help strengthen its defenses, as necessitated by the increasing number of Houthi attacks into Saudi territory. This proposed continuation of maintenance support services helps Saudi Arabia maintain self-defense capabilities to meet current and future threats. These policies are intertwined with the direction by President Biden to revitalize U.S. diplomacy in support of the UN-led process to reach a political settlement and end the war in Yemen.”

It is likely that the Biden administration now fully understands that even as it touted a strong stance against Saudi Arabia on the campaign trail, the situation with Yemen is far more complex. The reality is that the United States can’t afford to let the conflict in Yemen spread into the kingdom, and the United States certainly can’t leave Saudi Arabia unable to defend itself from attacks nor have its hands tied in how it can respond. Thus it will have to accept that the weapons will be used defensively—even if sometimes the best defense means going on the offensive.

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

Image: Flickr

Trevor Filseth

Capitol Riot,

The release of a trailer for Carlson's new "Patriot Purge" special prompted immediate backlash online, and a number of observers highlighted factual inaccuracies it contained.

On Wednesday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced that the network would be airing a documentary on the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. 

A trailer for the documentary, entitled “Patriot Purge,” briefly outlined its content, arguing that the U.S. government had shifted its “war on terror” from Islamist terror groups abroad to right-wing groups in the United States. The trailer describes the government’s investigation into these groups as a “plot against the people” and claims that the Biden administration is attempting to criminalize dissenting views.

“The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and they’ve landed here at home,” Carlson claimed in a voiceover, suggesting that U.S. resources directed towards Afghanistan had been redeployed against American citizens.

The trailer’s release prompted immediate backlash online, and a number of observers highlighted factual inaccuracies it contained. One of the trailer’s interviewees dubiously suggested that conservatives had been imprisoned in America’s controversial Guantanamo Bay detention camp in southern Cuba. This is not true. According to the government, around forty prisoners remain in Guantanamo’s detention facility; none of them are U.S. citizens, although at least one U.S. citizen has been imprisoned in the camp in the past. 

The trailer also featured a speaker who claimed that the January 6 incident was a “false flag” attack planned by government agencies to discredit the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement seeking to overturn the results of the November 2020 election. This claim echoes a false theory popular in the aftermath of the attack that claimed it had been instigated by “Antifa” militants disguised as pro-Trump protesters.

In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, more than 650 attendees have been arrested and charged with illegally entering the building, although the FBI’s investigation remains open and it has continued to search for more attendees. 

Democrats and moderate Republicans quickly condemned the documentary trailer, describing it as an incitement to violence.

“It appears that Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson a platform to spread the same type of lies that provoked violence on January 6,” Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), a prominent anti-Trump legislator and one of the two Republican members of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, tweeted.

“Anyone working for Fox News must speak out. This is disgusting. It appears Fox News isn’t even pretending anymore,” Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the other Republican committee member, wrote.

Some conservative sources, however, defended the trailer, insisting that government informants had infiltrated the preparations for the January 6 attack and had done nothing to prevent it.

Carlson claimed on Wednesday that he was “proud” of the documentary series, and described it as “the best thing we’ve ever done.”

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Flickr/Gage Skidmore

Trevor Filseth

Facebook,

Can a name change help Facebook shake its bad PR?

Following weeks of rumors, Facebook has rebranded itself as “Meta,” expanding its identity beyond the flagship social network that has come under increased scrutiny for its alleged reluctance to filter extreme or toxic content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed the move as a shift towards the creation of a “metaverse,” an augmented virtual reality in which people can interact with each other, both for business and for entertainment.

“The metaverse is the next frontier,” Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s virtual Connect conference on Thursday. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”

Zuckerberg justified the name change on the basis that the company’s brand was closely linked to “one product that can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future.” Another reason he cited for the changes was the company’s attempt to refocus on young adults, who have increasingly begun to use competitor apps such as ByteDance’s TikTok. 

Left unmentioned was Facebook’s ongoing public relations problem, made acute by the release of thousands of internal company documents by whistleblower Frances Haugen to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. While the company has argued that selecting a small subset of its internal discussions amounts to cherry-picking, the revelations in the leaks have led to a media firestorm and prompted a congressional investigation.

Another concern for the company’s future regards user privacy and the extent to which services such as Facebook and Google collect, log, and sell users’ information. Zuckerberg promised that the future “metaverse” would have full disclosure about its data use, a feature that Facebook has substantially lacked.

Zuckerberg confirmed that the name change would not affect any of the company’s day-to-day operations.

While the company’s vision for the ‘metaverse’ will not be achievable for some time, it has already begun marketing virtual-reality (VR) technology, including its Oculus VR headsets. Meta announced that its investments in its VR division, now known as “Reality Labs,” would cost the company around $10 billion in operating profit. 

Facebook, which will remain the company’s flagship service, is now used by around 3 billion people worldwide, more than one-third of the global population. In terms of market capitalization, it is estimated to be the sixth-most valuable company in the world, with revenue of nearly $120 billion. The company also owns the popular image-sharing platform Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Graham Allison

Taiwan, Asia

The era of U.S. military primacy is over.

During a town hall last week, when asked whether America would defend Taiwan against a Chinese assault, President Joe Biden answered: “yes.” In response, China’s foreign ministry stated unambiguously that, to prevent the loss of Taiwan, Beijing is prepared to go to war. If China were to attack Taiwan, and the United States sent military forces to Taiwan’s defense, could the United States lose a war with China?

When current Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks and her fellow members of the National Defense Strategy Review Commission examined this question in 2018, they concluded: maybe. In their words, America “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose a war against China.” As they explained, if in response to a provocative move by Taiwan, China were to launch an attack to take control of that island that is as close to its mainland as Cuba is to the United States, it might succeed before the U.S. military could move enough assets into the region to matter. As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral James Winnefeld and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell wrote last year, China has the capability to deliver a fait accompli to Taiwan before Washington would be able to decide how to respond. 

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who served under three Secretaries before retiring in 2017, has been even more explicit. As he has stated publicly, in the most realistic war games the Pentagon has been able to design simulating war over Taiwan, the score is eighteen to zero. And the eighteen is not Team USA.

This scorecard might shock Americans who remember the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-1996 when China conducted what it called “missile tests” bracketing Taiwan. In a show of superiority, America deployed two aircraft carriers to Taiwan’s adjacent waters, forcing China to back down. Today, that option is not even on the menu of responses that Chairman Mark Milley would present to the President.

How did so much change so quickly? A forthcoming report from Harvard’s China Working Group on the Great Military Rivalry documents what has happened in the military race between China and the United States in the past decades, and summarizes our best judgments about where the rivals now stand.

First, the era of U.S. military primacy is over. As Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it starkly in his 2018 National Defense Strategy, “For decades the U.S. has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.” But that was then. “Today,” Mattis warned, “every domain is contested—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.”

Second, in 2000, A2/AD—anti-access/area denial systems by which China could prevent U.S. military forces from operating at will—was just a People's Liberation Army (PLA) acronym on a briefing chart. Today, China’s A2/AD operational reach encompasses the First Island Chain, including Taiwan and Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. As a result, as President Barack Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy put it, in this area, “the United States can no longer expect to quickly achieve air, space, or maritime superiority.”

In the current climate where American political dynamics are fueling increasing hostility to China, insistence on recognizing the military realities may seem unhelpful. But as former Deputy Secretary Work has noted, the Chinese leadership is more aware of everything he has made public than are most members of the American political class and policy community who have been expressing views about these issues.

The reason for confronting ugly realities is not to counsel defeatism. On the contrary, it is meant as a call to act now to change these facts. There are many things Taiwan could do to make itself a much harder target, including deploying a protective barrier of smart mines. There are many asymmetric systems the U.S. military could deploy that would raise the costs and risks for China of a military assault on Taiwan. There is an even longer and likely more impactful agenda of initiatives the United States could undertake with the other instruments of American power in the DIME—diplomacy, informational, military, economic—arsenal that would make China’s leaders worry that the costs and risks of an attack on Taiwan would exceed the benefits.

Unfortunately, a clear-eyed observer would remind us that Taiwan and the United States had similar opportunities a decade ago. Nonetheless, previous failures need not be a predictor of future performance. The question now is: will they?

In the meantime, clear-eyed recognition that the current military balance over Taiwan has shifted dramatically in China’s favor does not mean that the United States would not come to Taiwan’s defense. Chinese strategists remember 1950 when the Truman Administration declared unambiguously that Korea was beyond the U.S. defense perimeter. Despite those declarations, when Communist China’s ally in North Korea launched an assault on South Korea, the U.S. did come to South Korea’s defense. China and the United States soon found themselves at war. While the United States had taken no position on Taiwan prior to the Korean War, during the war, the 7th Fleet positioned itself in the strait between China and Taiwan, effectively creating a de facto American security umbrella. For the Chinese, this was the beginning of the enduring narrative that they lost Taiwan for a generation.

Finally, the biggest takeaway from the recent history of Taiwan is that imaginative diplomacy offers a much better way for parties to both secure their interests and avoid war. When the United States and China established formal relations under Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, statesmen recognized that the issue of Taiwan was irresolvable—but not unmanageable. The diplomatic framework they created wrapped irreconcilable differences in strategic ambiguity that has given all parties five decades of peace in which individuals on both sides of the strait have seen greater increases in their well-being than in any equivalent period in their history. Much has changed over these decades in China, in Taiwan, and in the United States.  In this grave new world, the most urgent and consequential international challenge for President Biden and his team is to craft a twenty-first-century analog that will extend this peace for another half-century.

Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

Taiwan, Asia

Taiwan can lean on the United States as a support in its defense against China, but it cannot depend on it. 

Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s defense minister, said on Thursday that the island’s military forces could not rely on outside help in the event of an attack from mainland China, and would need to mount their own defense.

“The country must rely on itself,” Chiu said. “If any friends or other groups can help us [...] we’re happy to have it, but we cannot completely depend on it.” 

Chiu’s remarks came after a questioning session from the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s unicameral parliament, raised concerns about Taiwan’s ability to protect itself from a Chinese invasion following rising tensions between Beijing and Taipei. Although the relationship between the mainland and the island, which China regards as a rebellious province, has never been friendly, it is now at its most adversarial level in decades. Since the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding in early October, China has sent hundreds of fighter jets into the airspace surrounding Taiwan—an area known as an “air defense identification zone” (ADIZ) over which Taiwan does not claim sovereignty, but actively tracks incoming planes. 

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry has warned on other occasions that, if current trends persist, China would have the “comprehensive” ability to invade and conquer the island by 2025, pushing its leadership to invest increasingly in defense and maintain cordial relations with the United States.

In an interview with CNN, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen optimistically suggested that the United States would likely help to defend the island if China attempted to invade, citing the “long-term relationship we have with the U.S., and also the support of the people of the U.S. [and] Congress.”

Tsai confirmed that U.S. forces were present on the island training Taiwanese troops—a point on which the U.S. Defense Department had previously been ambiguous. 

As part of its relationship with Taiwan, America has sold billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to its military, and sales noticeably increased under the Trump administration. The Biden administration’s most recent sale took place in August when it sold the Taiwanese military a self-propelled howitzer system for $750 million.

As tensions have escalated between China and Taiwan, President Joe Biden suggested that the United States had an obligation to defend Taiwan, seemingly contradicting Washington’s longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity” on whether or not it would. 

The White House later claimed that the president’s remarks were not indicative of a policy change.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Booster Shots,

Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized booster shots of all three available vaccines for certain people, which include the elderly and those who are immunocompromised.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated its coronavirus vaccine guidance, now saying that those who are considered immunocompromised might need another shot, which in some cases would be their fourth dose.

It was back in August when the CDC recommended that immunocompromised individuals who were vaccinated with either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna mRNA vaccine should get another dose. Do take note that the extra shot, though, was not considered a booster, but rather an integral part of their primary vaccination series.

Recent data from the CDC are indicating that booster shots are needed for certain populations. “Studies show that after getting vaccinated against COVID-19, protection against the virus may decrease over time and be less able to protect against the Delta variant. Although COVID-19 vaccination for adults aged sixty-five years and older remains effective in preventing severe disease, recent data suggest vaccination is less effective at preventing infection or milder illness with symptoms,” the agency writes.

Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized booster shots of all three available vaccines for certain people, which include the elderly and those who are immunocompromised.

Moderately to severely immunocompromised individuals include people who are in active treatment for cancers, certain organ transplant and stem cell recipients, those with advanced or untreated HIV, and those who take high-dose corticosteroids or other drugs that could suppress their immune systems.

The CDC has estimated that between 2 and 3 percent of the U.S. population fit into this category. 

“We know that six months after you reached a good level of protection, your protection has waned … and we need to boost that,” Dr. Dorry Segev, professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, told NBC News. “That’s for people with normal immune systems and people who are immunocompromised.” 

However, he did admit that not all immunocompromised individuals will need a fourth vaccine dose.

“Out of the eleven million immunocompromised people in this country, some of them were fine with two doses,” Segev noted.

“Some of them were not fine with three doses. Some of them do need a fourth dose,” he continued.

According to the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, a group of leading U.S. and international scientists, including those from the FDA and the World Health Organization, recently contended that boosters are not needed currently for the general public.

The experts were aware of the fact that vaccine effectiveness against the coronavirus likely wanes over time but did note that protection against severe disease could persist.

“Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high,” the team writes.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-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

Trevor Filseth

Sudan, Africa

The Sudanese won’t let their prospects for democracy go without a fight. 

Following the country’s coup d’etat on Monday, the military government of Sudan under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has attempted to consolidate its control over the country. Sudanese troops have occupied key positions in Khartoum, and the internet in the country’s capital had reportedly been cut off on Monday morning following the putsch.

Even so, Sudan’s population, from pro-democracy activists and working professionals to employees of the country’s state-run oil firm, has taken to the streets to protest against the overthrow of the civilian government. The military has attempted to curtail the protests, leading to further violence; Al Jazeera reported that another protester had been killed on Thursday, marking at least eight since the protests began. 

The international community has uniformly condemned the coup. Several developed nations, including the United States and Germany, suspended aid to the country until the civilian government was restored, as did the World Bank. The UN and the Arab League condemned the coup, calling on Burhan to step down and restore the country’s civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, to office. The African Union suspended the country from its ranks until Hamdok is restored to power. Sudan is the third government it has suspended for a coup this year, following putsches in Mali in May and Guinea in September.

President Joe Biden indicated on Thursday that the United States supported the street protests. “Our message to Sudan’s military authorities is overwhelming and clear: the Sudanese people must be allowed to protest peacefully and the civilian-led transitional government must be restored,” a White House statement read.

For his part, Burhan has claimed that the military intervention was necessary to prevent the country from falling into chaos. He asserted that he would continue to implement Sudan’s democratic transition independent of its pre-coup Sovereignty Council, which he dissolved. Burhan also announced that he had freed Hamdok from captivity following his arrest on Monday morning. The former prime minister is now at his home, although he remains under effective house arrest.

Sudan’s political situation has remained precarious since the overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Bashir, who had ruled the country since his own military coup in 1989, was removed by the military, led by Burhan, after months of civilian protests. Because both the military and civilian protesters had played a role in his ouster, the transitional government that succeeded him included leaders from both the military and the protest movement, causing prolonged unrest prior to the coup.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Social Security,

The 5.9 percent cost of living adjustment is the biggest in decades, but retirees shouldn't count on maintaining their current lifestyle.

There is no question that Social Security benefits have become an integral financial aspect of most seniors’ retirement plans.

That’s why many retirees rejoiced when the Social Security Administration (SSA) recently confirmed that there will be a 5.9 percent cost of living adjustment (COLA) for next year. That figure may look great on the surface, but will it really make a noticeable difference?

“This would be the highest COLA that most beneficiaries living today have ever seen,” Mary Johnson, the Social Security and Medicare policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League, said in a press release earlier this month.  

But the group also pointed out that millions of retirees have been faced with COLAs that are too low for decades, which has led to a massive loss of purchasing power.

“Over the past twelve years, COLAs have averaged a meager 1.4 percent,” the press release said. “The COLA in 2021 was just 1.3 percent, and raised average benefits by about $20. The 2022 COLA will increase an average monthly retirement benefit of $1,565 to roughly $1,657, an increase of $92.”

Making matters worse is the high inflation rates which have caused prices for goods and services to skyrocket in recent months.

“Over the past 21 years, COLAs have raised Social Security benefits by 55 percent but housing costs rose nearly 118 percent and healthcare costs rose 145 percent over the same period,” Johnson said. 

“COLAs are intended to protect the buying power of Social Security benefits but, according to consumer price data through July of 2021, Social Security benefits have lost nearly one-third of their buying power, 32 percent, since 2000, about the length of a typical retirement. Even worse, it appears that inflation is not done with us yet, and the buying power of Social Security benefits may continue to erode into 2022,” she warns.

The Senior Citizens League also reported that food prices for home consumption are expected to increase between 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent in the next year. Meanwhile, food prices for food purchased away from home will surge between 3 percent and 4 percent. Moreover, the cost to heat a home is slated to climb between 21 percent and 25 percent. Premiums for prescription drug plans will head north by about 5 percent.

“Retirees should take the Senior Citizens League’s warning to heart and not assume their high COLA will actually allow them to maintain the same spending habits without any lifestyle changes,” writes Christy Bieber of the financial site Motley Fool.

“Living on a budget to carefully manage spending during these times of high inflation will be crucial to protecting financial security in their later years,” Bieber says.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-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

Alireza Ahmadi

Sanctions, United States

Its attention, or lack thereof, to humanitarian issues associated with sanctions disappointed many advocates and non-profits, but its outlook on the problems with America’s sanctions approach also left much to be desired.

The Treasury Department formally released its year-in-the-making and long-awaited review of U.S. sanctions policy on October 18. As asserted in the document, and in a roll-out event at the Center for a New American Security that was attended by Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo, the review included a long series of consultations with a variety of stakeholders and experts to conduct a top-down comprehensive review of sanctions. But what emerged was somewhat shallow. Its attention, or lack thereof, to humanitarian issues associated with sanctions disappointed many advocates and non-profits, but its outlook on the problems with America’s sanctions approach also left much to be desired.

There are some positive aspects to this report. The document does acknowledge various issues with regard to U.S. sanctions strategies. It argues that sanctions implementation should be part of a coherent overall strategy and that it should include “clear criteria” for the use of sanctions. It emphasizes the need for clarity in the development of sanctions and the coordination with U.S. allies. Unfortunately, aside from the lack of details, which would be expected from a document only seven pages long, it also undercuts some of its most important recommendations.

Not Rocking the Boat

Historically, sanctions scholars have viewed sanctions as a means of causing policy modification in the target state, either through restoring some status quo ante or some kind of compromised agreement. But some of the recent literature and opinion have identified the weight of seeking retribution in Washington’s sanctions-related decision making over policy modification. This is at least one major reason for the reckless proliferation of sanctions often without consideration for consequences and divorced from strategic logic. It is also what raised some alarm outside the beltway and prompted a Congressional request for this analysis.

If anything, the review seems supportive of the mentioned trend by describing the purpose of sanctions as to “deter or disrupt behavior that undermines U.S. national security and signal a clear policy stance.” This sets a very low bar that any sanction or sanctions campaign, unless entirely incompetent, can theoretically clear in some way even if it fails to advance U.S. interests. Under this rubric, Washington’s various maximum pressure campaigns, now being pushed forward under a new administration, can be deemed “effective” as they have certainly disrupted and signaled, albeit also being severely counterproductive to U.S. interests in the calculation of most observers.

When outlining when sanctions should be used, the review sees little reason for limitations. It says sanctions should be used in cases such as “countering forces that fuel regional conflict, ending support to a specific violent organization or other malign and/or illicit activities, stopping the persecution of a minority group, curtailing nuclear proliferation activities, enhancing multilateral pressure, or ceasing specific instances of atrocities.” Without very much overinterpretation, there is hardly any U.S. national security challenge or power projection adventure that cannot be fitted into one of these categories.

When pondering whether the use of sanctions should require more international cooperation, the review strongly encourages cooperation, as U.S. officials always have, in the abstract but seems reticent to meaningfully consider the preferences of even America’s own allies. What many other countries around the world, including and especially America’s allies in Europe, have requested of Washington is that it partner with them rather than imposing secondary sanctions and then pressuring them to follow along or complain softly.

The review says the United States should work through the United Nations when “possible and appropriate.” This is not the multilateral approach U.S. allies have demanded of their senior partner. Rather, it’s a reflection of the “assertive multilateralism” approach that has been the core of U.S. policy since at least the end of the Cold War. Under this framework, the United States acts as it wishes, and others join it and entertain limited concessions to allies on occasion, such as providing them with temporary licenses.

Addressing the Politics

One could argue that the Treasury Department placing many of the concerns about sanctions in a formal document is itself valuable—though it is not the first time it has done so. The Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried and Brian O’Toole argue that provided this effort is expanded and scaled out with verifiable policy goals, it can address many issues. But I believe that this ignores the more structural political problems.

For example, it’s hard to imagine any meaningful effort by the Treasury to make the language of sanctions clearer. The vagueness of the sanctions is a significant part of what makes them effective at creating harm. Banks and firms, confronted by ambiguous mandates, have no choice but to over comply in order to ensure compliance and avoid falling into the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC) sights. As sanctions expert Richard Nephew stated, “When actively sanctioning, this level of ambiguity can be helpful to impose sanctions, creating an incentive for over-compliance.” Clearer or broader humanitarian exceptions are likely to be just as ineffective as the most potent financial sanctions often render them effectively unusable. Many in Washington clearly see the harm of exacerbating the Covid-19 outbreak in countries like Iran as an asset rather than a problem to be addressed.

As mentioned, the review does include some positive prescriptions. But to be clear, these recommendations have been made by academics and policy professionals for decades. Daniel Drezner is right in that these recommendations may constitute an appropriate framework for improvement. But that would require converting decades-old guidance into something approximating actionable advice. Treasury had an opportunity to, in some way, argue that the United States needs to put some guardrails around its use of financial statecraft.

Treasury could have proposed that coordination with allies begin in the decision-making and design phase. It could have made lawmakers aware that sanctions are effective in some cases and for some purposes and not others. It could have outlined the gravity of some of the more destructive comprehensive campaigns. Instead, it stopped short of doing any of that and, in fact, seems to more often affirm the post-Cold War status quo.

When Bill Clinton sought to consolidate American power globally after the fall of the Soviet Union, he emphasized the use of sanctions. When George W. Bush sought to make American hegemony more coercive, he invaded nations but also emphasized the use of sanctions. When Barack Obama was wary of the military boondoggles of the Bush administration, he emphasized sanctions. When Donald Trump wanted to dismiss international constraints while not taking political risks, he emphasized sanctions.

The attractiveness of the sanctions weapons lies in its ability to strike at America’s adversaries, whether in pursuit of policy modification or just simple revanchism, in ways that are emotionally cathartic and an asset on the campaign trail. It has had an undeserved reputation for effectiveness since the end of the Cold War that has only soared over time. The review prominently echoes the triumphalist and problematic “sanctions brought Iran to the table” rhetoric with no nuance or introspection considering the failure of the maximum pressure campaign. The review even repeats former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s highly questionable claim that sanctions have cratered Hezbollah’s finances. As the efficacy of military options is called into question, the United States is set to become further reliant on sanctions often, it seems, to avoid having to acknowledge failure. The maximum pressure campaign against Syria is an obvious example of that.

Put simply, much of the concerns acknowledged by the review, including the notion that over-sanctioning can provoke balancing behavior against the U.S. dollar and financial system by actors around the world—friend and foe alike—cannot be addressed without a discussion of over-sanctioning. Whether the Treasury Department and OFAC have the capacities required to engage with these issues is up for debate. However, if Treasury is, as it has long insisted on being, the combatant command for sanctions, it must be willing to in some way. Unless these political issues are addressed, this document is more likely to be remembered as an affirmation of the status quo than a framework for change. 

Ali Ahmadi is a graduate student at the University of Tehran and an analyst focused on economic statecraft and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His work has been published by The Diplomat, The National Interest, Palladium Magazine, and others.

Image: Reuters

Michael Rubin

Turkey, Middle East

Turkey’s president is seeking American support for its policies in Syria and Libya. The Biden administration should proceed with caution given Erdoğan’s track record.

Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long been the president-whisperer. His democratic backsliding began during the George W. Bush administration, yet Bush still sang his democratic praises.

“I appreciate so very much the example your country has set on how to be a Muslim country and at the same time, a country which embraces democracy and rule of law and freedom,” Bush said while visiting Erdoğan’s Ankara residence.

President Barack Obama famously called Erdoğan one of his top foreign friends. He even quipped that he sought Erdoğan’s advice about how to raise daughters. Never mind that the murder rate of women and girls had already increased 1,400 percent during Erdoğan’s tenure. 

President Donald Trump took a tough stand on Turkey to compel the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson, but turned a blind eye toward Turkish-sponsored jihadism. Trump also betrayed America’s Kurdish allies when he greenlighted Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria, and then praised Erdoğan effusively even as Congress focused its ire on Erdoğan for purchasing the S-400 missile system from Russia.

When Joe Biden entered office, he recognized Erdoğan’s reality and appeared determined to deny Erdoğan the benefit of the doubt. It took ninety-three days, for example, for the first phone call between Biden and his Turkish counterpart, a slight not lost on the Turkish audience. Unfortunately, while Biden and his team refrained from his predecessors’ praise, they nevertheless fell into his trap by taking offers of Turkish diplomatic cooperation at face value.

Contrary to the talking points put forward by Turkey’s official and unofficial lobbyists in the United States, Turkey’s offers of cooperation are neither altruistic nor beneficial to U.S. strategic goals.

After it became clear that Biden would uphold his campaign rhetoric to leave Afghanistan, Erdoğan suggested Turkey could take over operations at the Kabul airport. This move was in Turkey’s interests. For more than a decade before his premiership, Erdoğan had cultivated close ties to Afghanistan’s most militant Islamists. Even as the Taliban insurgency raged, Erdoğan made clear he bore no ideological animus to the group. Whether or not U.S. troops and fellow NATO members departed, Turkey signaled that its investment and its nationals’ presence would continue, even if many of its troops returned home. Simply put, Turkey had a financial interest in keeping the airport open. Erdoğan also saw an opportunity to ensnare Biden in a diplomatic bargain.

“We want America to meet some conditions,” Erdoğan explained. “Firstly, America will stand by us in diplomatic relations. Secondly, they will mobilize their logistical means for us... and the other one is that there will be serious problems on financial and administrative issues, and they will give necessary support to Turkey.”

Effectively, Erdoğan wanted Biden’s support in his continued land grabs and in ethnic cleansing campaigns against Kurds and Yezidis. He also pushed for the Biden team to intercede with the judiciary to derail sanctions-busting and assault cases against Turkey and its agents. Erdoğan wanted to collect American concessions for a policy that Turkey would pursue regardless. Qatar ultimately stepped in to help with the airport, but Biden’s willingness to consider Turkey’s offer—and the State Department’s reluctance to hold Turkey to account while negotiations—affirmed Erdoğan’s strategy.

Murat Mercan, a longtime Erdoğan loyalist whom Erdoğan appointed as Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, recently published an op-ed largely acknowledging the strategy.

“Turkey is at the epicenter of a complex web of fault lines throughout Greater Eurasia,” he explained. “Turkey stands as a reliable ally that can deliver at the moment of crisis—a friend in need…Turkey and the United States must work together.”

Specifically, he said that Turkey can “mobilize grassroots support for stabilization efforts and its security-related efforts, such as those in Libya and Syria.” In exchange, all Turkey would need is U.S. appreciation and understanding.

Consider what this would mean, however. In Syria, Turkey provided logistical support, weaponry, and safe haven not only for Al Qaeda-linked groups but also for the Islamic State. While Turkish officials justify their actions in countering alleged Kurdish terrorism, the evidence suggests terrorism goes the other way: Turkish-backed proxies regularly attack Kurds and kidnap and rape women, while Turkish drones seldom differentiate between alleged militants and schoolchildren. It was Turkey’s enabling of the Islamic State that forced the United States into its relationship with Syria’s Kurds in the first place, ultimately leading to a Kurdish victory at the siege of Kobane. For the United States to compromise with Turkey in Syria would enable militancy and undercut stability and security across the region. Put another way, to trust Turkey on Syria is akin to trusting China on Taiwan. Besides, Washington’s choice in Syria is not merely between Erdoğan and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; the Kurds offer a third path.

While Mercan is correct that Libya is a mess, the greatest problem at present is the presence of foreign fighters—Russian paramilitaries and the Wagner Group on one hand, and Turkish mercenaries and Turkey-backed proxies on the other. There is broad consensus in the international community that the best path forward is a withdrawal of all foreign forces from Libya. While Europe is willing to make this demand without exception, the State Department has repeatedly sought to dilute criticism of Turkey’s interference. The Erdoğan regime now tries to convince officials in Berlin and Washington that a revival of a NATO role could give cover for Turkey to remain while compelling Russia’s withdrawal. This would be shortsighted, however, given Turkey’s efforts to overturn more than a century of maritime law precedent and its willingness to support not the UN-recognized government but rather militants only loosely aligned but functionally independent.

Erdoğan has become the Typhoid Mary of diplomacy. Turkey’s track record belies Erdoğan’s sincerity. Rather than treating Erdoğan’s initiatives as sincere, it is time for the Biden administration to recognize Turkey’s diplomacy for what it is: A self-serving attempt to avoid accountability for policies that Erdoğan remains ideologically committed to continuing. 

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East. He also regularly teaches classes at sea about Middle East conflicts, culture, terrorism, and the Horn of Africa to deployed U.S. Navy and Marine units. You can follow him on Twitter: @mrubin1971.

Image: Reuters.

Blaise Misztal, Jonathan Ruhe

Iran, Middle East

Tehran claims to have nearly enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, but this is just a ploy to extract concessions in negotiations.

Iran is running an elaborate nuclear shell game. While vaguely promising to resume negotiations over its nuclear program, it repeatedly stokes fears about its progress enriching uranium. Recently, for example, Tehran announced it now has 120 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium, dangerously close to the quantity needed, with further enrichment, for a nuclear weapon.

But such declarations are mere bluster meant to extract U.S. concessions and obscure serious setbacks in Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran has claimed major enrichment breakthroughs three times this year. In April, it took the unprecedented step of producing 60 percent enriched uranium, just below the level needed for a nuclear warhead. Tehran then audaciously overstated its 20 percent stockpile in June, followed by last week’s alarmist claim.

Yet, the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) data indicates Iran’s output of 60 percent uranium is too small, for now, to significantly reduce the time required to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. It had far less 20 percent uranium in June than it asserted. Its latest claim of 120 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium is misleading since it continually diverts this stockpile for uranium metal, thereby rendering it unsuitable for further enrichment. At current rates, it won’t have a bomb’s worth of either 60 or 20 percent uranium until mid-2022 at the earliest.

Iran is being deceptive because its enriched uranium stockpiles are the easiest metric of progress toward a bomb. By exaggerating them, Tehran hopes to scare the Biden administration into paying any price to keep it from crossing that dangerous threshold. Just days before its latest misrepresentation, Tehran suggested Washington should release $10 billion in frozen Iranian funds before it would resume negotiations.

Even though the Biden administration has refused such payments, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned there is only a “limited runway” that is “getting shorter” to prevent a nuclear Iran. Such statements likely suggest to Tehran that its ruse is working as intended, with Washington growing desperate enough to accept any deal as soon as possible.

Tehran also hopes its enrichment claims obscure serious setbacks in other key areas of its nuclear program stemming from three covert attacks since July 2020. The most serious of these knocked out several thousand rudimentary IR-1 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility in April 2021.

Following that attack, Iran initiated ambitious plans to triple its enrichment output by replacing the destroyed IR-1s with thousands of more advanced centrifuges. According to a new JINSA analysis, by late August it was operating enough of these new machines to negate the setbacks from April’s explosion. This installation of large numbers of advanced centrifuges, not slowly growing uranium stockpiles, has been driving Iran’s real and dangerous nuclear progress.

But now Tehran is reaching a new roadblock: It is struggling to build more centrifuges. A July 2020 attack destroyed a centrifuge production site near Natanz; one recent assessment suggests this facility won’t be online until 2023. Just days after the last Vienna negotiations concluded in June, another attack significantly damaged the Karaj centrifuge plant.

For now, while relying primarily on surplus IR-1s, Iran can only expand its enrichment capacity incrementally, at best.

This offers the United States precious time to build bargaining power while avoiding a rush back into a bad deal. The Biden administration should put negotiations on hold and focus instead on restoring its leverage over Tehran.

This means preparing alternatives to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action rather than reentering talks and letting Iran play for time to reconstitute its centrifuge production capacity. The Biden administration should build on its own declarations that its ability to wait is “not indefinite” and “if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options” by making those options clear. A good start would be reiterating President Barack Obama’s 2009 assertion that “all elements of American power” are on the table for preventing a nuclear Iran.

The Biden administration also needs to credibly strengthen the military elements of that power. This includes measures to enhance readiness, like updated contingency plans for operations against Iran’s nuclear sites, deploying strategic airpower to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and conducting relevant military exercises with regional allies.

The White House also must forge ahead with Israel on a “Plan B.” This will entail backing its ally’s freedom of action, which has done more than negotiations or sanctions to tangibly extend the runway between here and a nuclear Iran. Top priorities are ensuring prompt transfer as Israel procures key capabilities like aerial refueling tankers and fighter aircraft, and ensuring an adequate supply of precision munitions. 

Rather than falling for Iran’s con, the United States should make it clear to Tehran that time is not on its side.

Blaise Misztal is the vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Twitter: @BlaiseMisztal.

Jonathan Ruhe is the director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Twitter: @JCB_Ruhe.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Type 093A, Pacific

It now seems that with the enhancements the Type 093 is well on its way to being a world-class attack submarine.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Type 093A Shang-II isn’t the world’s best attack submarine, but it should highlight the fact that Beijing continues to make progress on all fronts. Just as China’s PLAN is becoming a force to be reckoned with in terms of carriers, so too could be a serious submarine force.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is now the largest naval force in the world, and a lot of attention has been paid to its two aircraft carriers, while a third flattop is reportedly on the way. This is in addition to its naval expansion, which includes assault carriers, cruisers and destroyers.

However, the more significant threat from Beijing may not be the carriers or other surface vessels, or even its aircraft carrier “killer” missiles—but rather its Type 093A attack submarine.

The first iteration of the Type 093 dates all the way back to 2005, but it was not without problems—and it offered little improvement over its problem-plagued, noisy predecessor, the Type 091. However, the Type 093 has been steadily improved.

It now seems that with the enhancements the Type 093 is well on its way to being a world-class attack submarine.

According to submarine expert H I Sutton, writing for Naval News, the Type 093A Shang-II class is the most powerful attack submarine in China’s arsenal today. The roughly 7,000 ton nuclear-powered submarine is roughly the same size as the Royal Navy’s Astute-class, which puts it in between the French Navy Suffren-class and the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class.

While nuclear-powered submarines tend to be louder than their diesel-electric counterparts, the Type 093A reportedly uses some of its larger size for noise-reducing features including acoustic stealth. Improvements in reactor coolant pump design may have helped reduce the Shang-class’ acoustic signature.

Beijing hasn’t shared any specific details, but Chinese sources have reported that its teardrop hull with a wing-shaped cross-section provides both improved speed and stealth. A 2009 U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report listed the Chinese Type 093 as being noisier than the Russian Navy’s Project 671RTM submarines, which entered service with the Soviet Navy in 1979. However, the Type 093A could be far quieter due to its altered hull form.

The Type 093A is also reported to be quite well armed, and is capable of carrying the YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missiles. It is a solid-fuelled rocket that can be launched from a buoyant launch canister. The missile lacks a solid booster and has an operational range of only about forty-two kilometers, but it is still a serious threat to enemy warships.

The submarine can also carry the YJ-82 anti-ship missile, rocket mines and torpedoes including the Yu-6 thermal torpedoes. The heavyweight thermal torpedo, which is essentially the Chinese counterpart of the American Mark 48 torpedo, is wire-guided and has active/passive acoustic-homing and wake-homing sensors.

The Type 093A Shang-II isn’t the world’s best attack submarine, but it should highlight the fact that Beijing continues to make progress on all fronts. Just as China’s PLAN is becoming a force to be reckoned with in terms of carriers, so too could be a serious submarine force.

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

This article first appeared in November 2020 and is being reprinted for reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Dan Goure

ScanEagle,

What's not to love about lower costs?

Here's what you need to remember: Equipping surface ships with small unmanned aerial systems expands their surveillance horizons, lethality, and overall effectiveness at a low cost.

The world’s oceans and seas are vast. Maritime challenges to U.S. interests and international legal and humanitarian responsibilities are increasing in both quantity and quality. But the number of Navy and Coast Guard ships available is relatively small, and given current budget realities, not likely to grow sufficiently to meet increasing demand. In addition, the Defense Department is considering restructuring Navy forces, including among other things, reducing the number of large-deck aircraft carriers on which the Fleet relies for much of its at-sea surveillance capabilities. 

If the Navy and Coast Guard are going to continue using aircraft carriers for a broad range of missions, then it will be vital to enhance their airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. Equipping surface ships with small unmanned aerial systems (UASs), such as Insitu’s ScanEagle and Blackjack, expands their surveillance horizons, lethality, and overall effectiveness at a low cost. Moreover, small UASs are easy to launch and recover. 

For several decades, the Sea Services have sought to use UASs to supplement their fleets of manned platforms. UASs, or drones, are particularly useful for conducting routine missions that require a long time on station, such as maritime ISR. While quite capable, platforms such as the MQ-4C Triton, the new MQ-25 Stingray, and the proposed SeaGuardian variant of the MQ-9 Predator B, are big undertakings requiring a lot of personnel. This limits their deployments to airfields or ships with large decks such as aircraft carriers. In addition, these systems are expensive to operate, albeit less costly than most manned platforms.

One challenge to deploying UASs on surface ships has been the lack of space for them. Even ships designed with a flight deck and hangar, such as the Navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships and the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutters (NSCs), have limited space for which UASs must compete with manned helicopters.

Today, both the Navy and Coast Guard are deploying a set of small ship-based UASs to supplement manned assets, performing many of the same roles that they do to support military and law enforcement missions. Two UASs that provide all the advantages of operating drones from surface ships while reducing their impact on other activities are the ScanEagle and the Blackjack. With their unique launch and recovery systems, these UASs permit expanded at-sea operations with minimal impact on ship efficiency.

Designed to be low-cost, easily repairable, rapidly modified, and with moderate manning requirements, the ScanEagle has proven a remarkable success since the first version was deployed to support the U.S. military almost twenty years ago. With its stabilized turret housing an advanced electro-optical or infrared sensor, ScanEagles conducted hundreds of thousands of hours of airborne surveillance in support of U.S. Marines in Iraq, transmitting high-resolution day/night images. While it operates at low altitude, the ScanEagle is so small and its engines so quiet that it is virtually undetectable to human observers. The ScanEagle family has logged more than 1.3 million operational hours supporting the U.S. military and numerous friends and allies.

The current version of this UAS, the ScanEagle 3, has a new design, better engines, improved power generation, and a greater carrying capacity–nineteen pounds–than its predecessors. As a result, it can launch with multiple payloads simultaneously while staying in the air for up to 18 hours. Depending on the mission and desired range at which the platform will operate, the ScanEagle 3 can carry a sensor package consisting of an electro-optical/infrared camera, a laser pointer, a communication relay, an Automatic Identification System interrogator, and Vidar (visual detection and ranging, a surface search capability).

ScanEagle uses a unique launch and recovery system. It is launched via a pneumatic launcher and is recovered using a hook on the end of the wingtip to catch a rope hanging from a thirty-to-fifty-foot pole. This system is particularly well-suited to operations from unimproved land locations or surface ships with limited open spaces. It also requires a small launch and recovery crew.

The ScanEagle is currently aboard all nine of the Coast Guard’s new Legend-class NSC. ScanEagle more than doubles the range at which an NSC can conduct ISR relying solely on its onboard sensors, from thirty-five miles to as much as seventy-five miles. This represents a total area search volume four times greater than would possible in the absence of ScanEagle.  

Coast Guard Commandant Karl Shultz has effusively praised the ScanEagle: “ScanEagle is truly a game changer for our crews and I’m proud to report that this technology is coming to every National Security Cutter in our fleet. But, and there’s always a but, not quickly enough. I’d like to accelerate the fielding of this technology, doubling the delivery schedule of this key enabler from two to four systems per year. At that rate, by the end of my tenure as commandant, we will field full ScanEagle capability across our entire National Security Cutter fleet.” 

Insitu’s newest entry in the small UAS market is the RQ-21A Blackjack. Derived from the ScanEagle, and originally called the Integrator, the Blackjack won the competition to be the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps’ next-generation Small Tactical UAS. Larger than the ScanEagle, it is capable of flying farther, faster, and at higher altitudes. It has an operating range similar to that of the ScanEagle. The Blackjack has a payload of about fifty pounds, allowing it to carry a multi-intelligence sensor package that currently consists of electro-optical zoom and mid-wave infrared cameras, plus an infrared marker and a laser rangefinder. The Blackjack can remain airborne for up to twenty-four hours. Launch and recovery methods for the Blackjack are the same as that used for the ScanEagle and employ the same equipment. 

New communications technologies could radically expand the search envelope of the Blackjack by no longer requiring the UAS to operate within its pilot’s line of sight. By employing a lightweight satellite communications system, the Blackjack’s operational range could be increased to more than three hundred miles from its launch location while remaining on station for about fourteen hours. This would increase the area a Blackjack-equipped ship could search by nearly an order of magnitude. With an extended-range Blackjack, a handful of Navy destroyers or Coast Guard NSCs could provide blanket ISR coverage of the western Pacific. 

Dan Gouré, Ph.D., is a vice president at the public-policy research think tank Lexington Institute. Goure has a background in the public sector and U.S. federal government, most recently serving as a member of the 2001 Department of Defense Transition Team. You can follow him on Twitter at @dgoure and the Lexington Institute @LexNextDC.

This article first appeared earlier in 2021 and is being reprinted due to reader interest. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

David Axe

PLA Air Force, Asia

The exercise was a wake-up call for China. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: On day three, the Thai pilots “shot down” 19 J-11s for a loss of three Gripens. Over the final three days of the war game, the Thais killed 22 Chinese jets and lost three of their own.

A 2015 war game in Thailand underscored the enduring flaws in Chinese aerial-warfare tactics. Despite flying a modern fighter type, Chinese fighter pilots in Thailand were vulnerable to long-range attacks and slow to react to aggressive tactics.

Exercise Falcon Strike 2015, which ran at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base for two weeks in mid-November 2015, was the first-ever joint exercise between the Chinese and Thai air forces.

The Chinese brought J-11 fighters to the war game. The Thai air force operates F-16s from Korat, but the for the war game the Thai air arm sent Gripen fighters from Surat Thani Air Force Base.

The Thai air force operates 12 JAS-39C/D Gripens.

For seven days straight the J-11s tangled with the Gripens. The J-11, which is a Chinese variant of the Russian Su-27, proved to be the superior dogfighter, a Chinese participant in the exercise explained in a presentation at China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University on Dec. 9, 2019. But in Thai hands the Gripen was a better long-range shooter.

Aviation website Alert 5 was the first to report on the presentation.

During the first day of mock combat, the J-11s and Gripens fought visual-range battles. The result was a lopsided victory for the Chinese air force. The powerful, twin-engine J-11s with their internal cannons and infrared-guided short-range missiles -- possibly PL-8s -- “shot down” 16 Gripens for zero losses.

In Thai service, the single-engine Gripen for close-range combat is armed with AIM-9 infrared-guided missiles and an internal cannon. It’s worth noting that the Gripen has a relatively poor thrust-to-weight ratio compared to many other fighter types. That limits its maneuverability in dogfights.

The Chinese pilots scored nine kills for one loss on day two. But as the war game continued, the Chinese pilots struggled to repeat their early successes.

The exercise shifted to beyond-visual-range engagements, where the Gripen armed with AIM-120 medium-range missiles proved to be the better fighter than the J-11 with its own medium-range missiles, possibly PL-12s.

On day three, the Thai pilots “shot down” 19 J-11s for a loss of three Gripens. Over the final three days of the war game, the Thais killed 22 Chinese jets and lost three of their own. The final tally for the exercise favored the Thai air force. The Gripens shot down 42 J-11s while the J-11s shot down just 34 Gripens.

Overall, 88 percent of the Thais’ kills occurred at a range of at least 19 miles, while the Chinese scored just 14 percent of their kills at the same range. The Gripens scored 10 kills at a distance of more than 31 miles. The J-11s scored no kills at this range.

“The Chinese pilots had poor situational awareness,” Alert 5 reported, citing the presentation. “Too much focus was on front of the aircraft rather than all around.” In phases of the war game where J-11s escorted other planes, there was a “lack of coordination.”

Chinese pilots “were not experienced in avoiding missile shots,” Alert 5 continued. “Their responses were too mechanical and [they] could not judge correctly the evasive techniques for missiles with different ranges.”

Beijing knows its pilots need better training. Around 2005 the Chinese air force began organizing realistic aerial war games in the vein of the U.S. Air Force’s Red Flag exercises. But these training events have yet to produce skilled pilots who are capable of fully exploiting the best Chinese-made warplanes.

"Numerous professional articles and speeches by high-ranking Chinese officers indicate the [Chinese air force] does not believe that its past training practices prepared its pilots and other per­sonnel for actual combat,” the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency explained in its January 2019 report on the Chinese military. “Unrealistic training manifested itself in multiple ways that hin­dered the [Chinese air arm]’s air-combat capabilities."

The Chinese military "recognizes that a gap exists between the skills of its pilots and those in 'the air forces of powerful nations," the DIA continued in its report. "To address training weak­nesses, [a former air force] commander said that when the [air force] trains, it must 'train for battle' instead of 'doing things for show…[or] going through the motions.'"

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 January 2020 and is reprinted here due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters. 

Kyle Mizokami

Aircraft Carriers, Americas

The naval gunfire argument rages on to this day.

Here's What You Need to Know: Even in the age of drones and precision warfare there are still occasional calls to bring the heavily manned, imprecise Iowa class back to service.

In the early 1980s, four Iowa-class fast battleships originally built during World War II—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin—were taken out of mothballs and returned to active duty.

Nearly 900 feet long and displacing close to 60,000 tons, the battlewagons could fire a nine-gun broadside sending 18 tons of steel and explosives hurtling towards their targets.

The battleships were modernized to include cruise missiles, ship-killing missiles and Phalanx point-defense guns. Returned to the fleet, the ships saw action off the coasts of Lebanon and Iraq. At the end of the Cold War the battleships were retired again. All were slated to become museums.

Few knew, however, that returning the battleships to service in the ’80s had been only part of the plan. The second, more ambitious phase was a radical redesign of the massive warships that would have combined the attributes of battleships and aircraft carriers.

The resulting ship, a “battlecarrier,” was merely one of many schemes over the span of 30 years to modernize the most powerful American battleships ever built. The various proposals—all of them nixed—had the World War II-era ships carrying hundreds of U.S. Marines or launching Harrier jump jets or even firing atomic projectiles.

A hole in the Navy

Before World War II, planners had assumed that the big-gun ships would win wars by duking it out with enemy vessels of the same kind. Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway dispelled that notion, as the flexibility and long-range striking power of aircraft carriers proved superior to battleships’ broadsides.

The battlewagons were relegated to a secondary role in the fleet, shelling shore defenses ahead of landings by the Army and Marines. And after the war, the Navy shed most of its heavy cruisers and battleships while retaining its aircraft carriers. The rush to embrace missiles further reduced the influence of the big-gun vessels, and the era of the battleship appeared to be over for good.

For the U.S. Marine Corps, this was a worrying trend. The seaborne invasion of Inchon during the Korean War showed that the age of amphibious assaults was not yet over. Military planners liked aircraft for their flexibility, but from the Marines’ perspective a ship that could sit off a coastline and bombard it with heavy guns for hours on end was vital.

There was a solution. The four Iowa-class battleships, in mothballs since World War II, were briefly reactivated during the Korean War to provide gunfire support for U.N. forces—and retired again after the war was over.

For some Navy planners, battleships were back in vogue. There were frequent attempts to return the battlewagons to service.

Nuclear battleship

In 1958, the Navy proposed overhauling the Iowa-class ships by removing all of the 16-inch guns and replacing them with anti-aircraft and anti-submarine missiles.

The new “guided missile battleships” would also carry four Regulus II cruise missiles, each of which could flatten a city a thousand miles distant with a nuclear warhead more than 100 times as powerful as the bomb used on Hiroshima.

The result would have certainly been the most powerful battleship ever, but the concept was riddled with inefficiencies. Under the proposal, 2,000 sailors would have had to sail into hostile waters in an expensive, 900-foot vessel to attack just four targets with nuclear weapons. An Air Force bomber could attack as many targets, at a greater range, with fewer than a dozen crew.

And at $1.5 billion in today’s dollars, the conversion would have been expensive.

At the same time, the Navy had put in orders for submarines to carry Polaris ballistic missiles. The proposed missile submarines could attack targets more than twice as far away as the Regulus II-armed battleship could, while carrying four times as many missiles and spending most of their time underwater avoiding detection.

The nuclear battleship concept was dead in the water.

Amphibious battleship

In 1961 a new proposal would have utilized the Iowa-class battleships to increase the navy’s troop-carrying capability. The rear turret and its three 16-inch guns would have been removed. In its place would be a hangar and a flight deck capable of carrying 30 helicopters.

The ship would also haul 14 landing craft to bring tanks and vehicles ashore. Accommodations for 1,800 Marines would be added.

Each of the amphibious Iowas would have been a one-ship expeditionary force.

Capable of laying down its own fire support with the remaining six 16-inch guns and deploying a battalion-sized Marine amphibious unit by air and sea, the ship would have been a hive of activity.

But it would still be expensive to convert and operate, and the Navy had many surplus aircraft carriers that could more cheaply be converted to amphibious platforms. Three such older carriers were modified, and the Iowa-class again stayed in mothballs.

Battlecarrier

The cost of the Vietnam War put a temporary hold on talk of reviving the Iowas in some new form. One of the battleships, New Jersey, was briefly reactivated to serve in Vietnam.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration began an ambitious shipbuilding program. It was decided to yet again bring back the four Iowas. In phase one, the ships were modernized with the addition of Tomahawk land attack missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Phalanx defense guns. By the mid-1980s, all four had returned to duty.

There was a phase two that was never executed, and it was more interesting.

This phase again involved removing the rear 16-inch gun turret. In its place would be built an overhanging flight deck and two forward-facing ski jumps that would hurl Marine Corps Harrier jump jets into the air. The ship would carry up to 20 Harriers, as well as a hangar and an aircraft elevator.

And that’s not all. Nestled between the two ski jumps would be a large field of missile silos, each holding Standard anti-aircraft or Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.

The firepower of the battleships—and their destructive range—would have increased substantially. Trading one turret for 20 Harrier jets was a pretty good deal. Add the Tomahawks and their ability to strike with precision at a thousand miles and the improvements looked even better. The resulting warship would have equaled the firepower of a Nimitz-class supercarrier.

But as before, the Iowas’ inherent inefficiencies worked against them. With a crew of nearly 2,000 each, the ships’ high personnel costs made them prohibitively expensive to run in an all-volunteer navy. Harrier jets could already be carried by the Tarawa-class landing ships, and missile silos were proliferating across the fleet.

The Navy came to the conclusion that if the country was going to get its money’s worth from the four battleships, the vessels had to concentrate on their unique abilities: firing massive artillery shells at the enemy.

That meant keeping all three main gun turrets. The cool conversion schemes would have to stay just that, schemes.

Future battlewagon

Today the naval gunfire argument rages on. Even in the age of drones and precision warfare there are still occasional calls to bring the heavily manned, imprecise Iowa class back to service. There’s a certain romance to battleships, and having four Iowas sitting around in good condition has beguiled naval enthusiasts and planners for more than 60 years with schemes to bring them back.

The upcoming Zumwalt-class destroyers will go a long way towards providing battleship-quality naval gunfire support for the Marines. Minimally manned, relatively small, stealthy and precise, the Zumwalts are the antithesis of the Iowas, but functionally their successors.

Although each Zumwalt can only provide the explosive mass of a single one of an Iowa’s 16-inch guns, the newer ship can fire its smaller shells with GPS-aided precision up to 83 miles away, versus 20 miles for an Iowa.

Should the Zumwalt design be successful, the torch of the battleship could finally be transferred to them, and the Iowas can finally slumber in peace as museums, safe from the schemes of those who would revive them.

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons