Agrégateur de flux

Dans les Balkans, envoyer un colis dans un pays voisin relève encore bien souvent de la mission impossible. Mieux vaut donc passer par un intermédiaire de confiance : un chauffeur de bus ou un passager que l'on connaît plus ou moins. Récits de voyage, avec accusé de réception, entre Sarajevo, Belgrade et Pristina.

- Articles / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Kosovo, Kosovo 2.0, Serbie, Société

Dans les Balkans, envoyer un colis dans un pays voisin relève encore bien souvent de la mission impossible. Mieux vaut donc passer par un intermédiaire de confiance : un chauffeur de bus ou un passager que l'on connaît plus ou moins. Récits de voyage, avec accusé de réception, entre Sarajevo, Belgrade et Pristina.

- Articles / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Kosovo, Kosovo 2.0, Serbie, Société

Dans les Balkans, envoyer un colis dans un pays voisin relève encore bien souvent de la mission impossible. Mieux vaut donc passer par un intermédiaire de confiance : un chauffeur de bus ou un passager que l'on connaît plus ou moins. Récits de voyage, avec accusé de réception, entre Sarajevo, Belgrade et Pristina.

- Articles / Bosnie-Herzégovine, Kosovo, Kosovo 2.0, Serbie, Société

Nada Dimić aurait eu cent ans aujourd'hui. Mais elle n'en avait pas 19 quand elle est morte dans un camp oustachi. Cette toute jeune partisane yougoslave avait été élevée au rang d'héroïne nationale pour sa courageuse résistance antifasciste. Aujourd'hui, la gauche croate tente de sauver sa mémoire de l'oubli.

- Articles / Novosti, Croatie, Histoire, Personnalités

Journalist Maher Mezahi writes that despite his immigrant father's cynicism, he fell in love with Algeria.

In comments given to the National Interest, former Trump National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert C. O'Brien explained that the U.S. Air Force needs 300-400 B-21 Raider stealth bombers considering the growing threat from China's rising military might. 

O'Brien's B-21 comments are significant considering the role he could play in a future Republican Administration in 2025 and beyond, helping set defense and national security policy.

O'Brien was considered by most who observed the Trump national security team up close in Washington as knowledgeable, politically connected, and able to move between the MAGA/populist wing of the GOP and more neoconservative elements.

Many Republican defense hawks would consider O'Brien an excellent pick for Secretary of Defense, State, or even an outside chance at Vice President. 

The B-21 Raider: '300-400 Range' 

"The U.S. Air Force has placed an initial order for 100 Raiders. It has acknowledged a need for 175-200 bombers. In light of the rapidly growing PLA Navy fleet and recent reporting that the PLA Rocket Forces are building 1,000 ICBM silos, it is clear that the B-21 fleet should be in the 300-400 range," explained O'Brien to the National Interest. 

"Although the [B-21 Raider] program has been well run to date, given the poor performance of the Pentagon on recent major programs such as LCS and F-35, I am not sure the Air Force will ever reach the needed numbers for its bomber fleet."

'At Least 200' Needed: Other Conservative Military Analysts Agree on B-21

Mackenzie Eaglen, a prominent defense analyst for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, also had high hopes for a large fleet of new B-21 Raider bombers regarding the threat from China but explained that challenges remain. 

"America’s bombers are unique instruments of national power projection capable of striking any target, anywhere, at any time and therefore bolstering deterrence—or the prevention of war," explained Eaglen

She continued, noting that: "The Air Force’s new medium bomber means the United States is the only country on the planet that can hold targets at risk inside mainland China. This capability to carry more and larger missiles and sensors is especially needed at a time when it is increasingly harder to outrun, avoid, or defeat enemy missiles. Absent this new bomber capability, tomorrow could be the day Xi Jinping wakes up and decides using force to take Taiwan is a reasonable bet for his regime and his military.

But America’s bomber gap is wide and growing. The bomber fleet has plummeted from a high of over 400 aircraft at the end of the Cold War to today’s dangerously low level of 141. Global requirements currently demand an additional 50 Raiders above current plans of 100 or so.

But even the ambitious plans of the previous two national defense strategies are likely underestimating the expenditure rates of modern combat against highly-capable adversaries, or what would be required of bomber fleets in two conflicts simultaneously. The United States must avoid getting mugged by reality and build in slack and margin for its bomber fleet of this century and field at least 200 B-21s."  

O'Brien Seems Prescient on B-21 Challenges

While many analysts and top policymakers agree that the B-21 Raider is vital to the U.S. Air Force, building the new B-21 stealth bomber in large numbers won't be easy, something NSA O'Brien and Eaglen seemed to be hinting at.

A recent article in Forbes magazine argued that large numbers of Raider bombers won't be easy to field quickly as only ten can be acquired per year - by sometime in the 2030s.

About the Author and His Expertise 

Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula or Email: hkazianis@nationalinterest.org) is the new Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest. He also serves as Executive Editor of its publishing arm, The National Interest. He previously served as part of the foreign policy team for the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz and the John Hay Initiative. Kazianis, in the past, also managed the foreign policy communications efforts of the Heritage Foundation, served as Editor-In-Chief of the Tokyo-based The Diplomat magazine, and as a WSD-Handa Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): PACNET. Kazianis has held foreign policy fellowships at the Potomac Foundation and the University of Nottingham. He has provided expert commentary, op-eds, and analysis for many outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Yonhap, The New York Times, Hankyoreh, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, and others.

In May 2011, the world got its first glimpse of America’s secret stealth Black Hawk helicopters after one of them crashed during Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that ultimately led to the death of Osama Bin Laden.

This is Part 2 of our series diving into the origins, development, and history of these clandestine rotorcraft. In Part 1, we discussed how these helicopters were revealed to the public and the unique challenges inherent to stealth helicopter design.

THE RAH-66 COMANCHE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON AMERICA’S STEALTH BLACK HAWK

In the 1990s, just a few years before America’s stealth Black Hawks were said to be built, Boeing and Sikorski teamed up to design and field a new stealth reconnaissance and attack helicopters for the U.S. Army. The effort ultimately led to the construction of two Comanche prototypes that underwent flight testing between 1996 and 2004, before cost overruns and technical delays ultimately saw the program’s cancellation. The Comanche may now be defunct, but it still offers us a worthwhile peek into how stealth can be incorporated into a rotorcraft, and by taking a closer look at some of its design cues, we can imagine how they might be leveraged in a larger utilitarian platform. 

It has long been rumored that this stealth helicopter program, devised in part by the same firm responsible for the H-60, played a vital role in the subsequent design work for the stealth Black Hawks to come, and to be clear, this seems entirely feasible. 

The Comanche’s angled and faceted body helps to reduce radar detection, while the exhaust from the aircraft’s two T800 turboshaft engines is ducted further toward the tail with inlets that funnel cool air into the outflowing exhaust to mitigate infrared detection. 

But in today’s world, it’s not enough to mask the heat produced by an aircraft’s engines. Early-generation infrared-guided missiles may have honed in on exhaust plumes, but more modern systems detect what’s known as “Band IV” electromagnetic energy, which can be produced by something as simple as the heat produced by the friction of traveling through the air at high speeds. Like mitigating radar detection, minimizing a rotorcraft’s IR signature is an exercise in compromise, balancing performance trade-offs against detectability, and accepting that some degree of detection will always be possible. 

The hub for the main rotor was shrouded to minimize radar-reflecting surfaces and noise, and the tail rotor is ducted and enclosed for the same reasons, though it’s evidence that stealth Black Hawk’s tail rotor was not enclosed in the same fashion.

Perhaps most importantly, the Comanche’s fuselage is made up of composite materials that include a radar-absorbent skin similar to what you’d find on the F-22 Raptor or B-2 Spirit. These radar-absorbent materials are among the most closely guarded secrets in defense today, and are said to be capable of absorbing upwards of 80% of inbound electromagnetic energy, or radar waves. 

Another way to reduce the noise level produced by a helicopter is to increase the number of blades on the main rotor, which reduces what’s known as blade passage frequency. Put simply, the movement of each blade creates noise while generating lift, but by distributing that load across more blades, you can reduce the overall amount of noise they produce. The Comanche, for instance, leveraged a 5-blade design, as opposed to the two or four-blade designs leveraged by the Cobra, Kiowa, and Apache. It’s been reported that the stealth Black Hawks used a similar 5-blade design to the Comanche. 

The Comanche also eliminates many common components we’re accustomed to seeing hanging off the outside of a helicopter’s fuselage, like stub wings for armaments, antennas, and landing gear, all of which can wreak havoc on a low-observable platform’s radar return. 

THE ORIGINS OF THE ARMY’S STEALTH BLACK HAWK HELICOPTERS

The H-60 Black Hawk series of helicopters was developed in the late 1960s as a replacement for the UH-1 Iroquois (Huey) helicopters used during the Vietnam War. The UH-1s had demonstrated the effectiveness of rotorcraft in combat but were highly vulnerable to enemy fire, with some 3,300 of the 7,000 UH-1s used in Vietnam ultimately lost in combat. Bell proposed a ruggedized version of the Huey, but the Army opted for Sikorsky’s proposed Black Hawk instead.

The Black Hawk incorporated various features to enhance survivability, including self-sealing fuel tanks, ballistic-resistant rotor blades, a bullet-proof cockpit, and redundant hydraulic and electrical systems. The new H-60 Black Hawk entered service in 1979, with a variety of specialized variants following suit, including at least four publicly disclosed special operations variants operated first by Task Force 160 in 1981 — a unit that would go on to become the now legendary 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

For some time, the presumption was that the stealth helicopters operated by the 160th during the Bin Laden raid had evolved out of these spec-ops iterations of the platform, but that idea was actually proven false by well-known aviation journalist David Cenciotti all the way back in 2011. Cenciotti uncovered a little-known report produced by Sikorski a full year before the Black Hawk had even entered service and notably four years before the F-117 Nighthawk would secretly become the world’s first operational stealth aircraft.

This 1978 report dubbed, “Structural Concepts And Aerodynamic Analysis For Low Radar Cross Section (LRCS) Fuselage Configurations,” may sound like just another Pentagon report, but in reality, it was a thorough exploration of exactly how to build a stealth Black Hawk.

This 139-page report explored three different potential configurations for such a rotorcraft, highlighting the need to adjust the incline of exterior body panels in the same way we’ve seen in stealth aircraft. It also highlights in plain detail how modifications to the Black Hawk’s design intended to increase stealth had an inverse effect on the helicopter’s performance — and importantly — static stability, calling out the very issue that would ultimately reveal these stealth helicopters’ existence more than three decades later.

This report, however, did not include the substantial changes we would later see to the Black Hawk’s tail, but does potentially shed light on what led to its development.

“Compared to the UH-60A, the LRCS2 and LRCS3 configurations demonstrate a substantial reduction in static stability which will require a redesign of the horizontal stabilator. This is primarily due to a reduction in tail effectiveness and an increase in fuselage instability,” the report concluded.

It seems Sikorski believed a redesign of the stealth helicopter’s tail, specifically the horizontal stabilator (moving stabilizer) could improve vertical stability. 

While it’s very unlikely that the stealth helicopters used in the Bin Laden raid were built this far back, it’s all but certain that this study informed their eventual construction.

HAVE GLASS HELICOPTERS

It should come as little surprise that there isn’t much in the way of confirmable facts when it comes to the radar-absorbent skin of America’s stealth black hawks. The actual makeup and outer limits of these materials are among the most closely guarded secrets in Defense technology, but the color of the tail section left behind may give us some clues. Despite the common depiction of these stealth helicopters as black in popular media like the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” images of the tail left behind after Operation Neptune Spear clearly show a silver coating instead. 

Longtime stealth aircraft spotter Steve Douglass, whose name you may recall from our dive into the TR-3B, has posited that the silver color suggests the use of materials from the Air Force’s HAVE GLASS program, and while we can’t confirm that to be the case, it does seem likely. 

The HAVE GLASS program began in the early 1990s with the aim of reducing the radar cross section (return) of non-stealth 4th generation fighters — in particular, the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The first iteration of HAVE GLASS treatments included a layer of indium-tin-oxide applied to the fighter’s canopy to deflect radar waves away from the litany of right angles found in the cockpit, but before long, the program expanded to include the application of radar absorbent coatings to several parts of the airframe that tend to produce the most prominent radar returns, like the air intake and leading edges of the wings. 

With approximately 60% of the F-16’s fuselage coated in a 10-12mm-thick layer of this material and the cockpit canopy coated like a new pair of sunglasses, the HAVE GLASS treatments of the early 2000s were said to add approximately 100 kilograms (220 pounds) to the jet’s empty weight, but in return, reduced its radar cross section by an estimated 15%. As you might imagine, a much larger helicopter coated entirely in this material would likely tip the scales even further, which was almost certainly part of the added weight said to compromise the stealth Black Hawk’s performance. 

As we’ll discuss later, it now seems evident that America’s stealth Black Hawks were built in two separate batches, with the first two likely being constructed sometime in the late 1990s to early 2000s, chronologically in line with the emergence of the widespread use of HAVE GLASS I and II. However, the second, reportedly larger batch of stealth helicopters are said to have been constructed after the Bin Laden raid in 2011. In 2012, the first HAVE GLASS V F-16s also began taking to the skies, offering a significant boost to their radar-defeating qualities. 

It’s been reported that HAVE GLASS V reduced the estimated radar cross-section of the F-16 from approximately 5 square meters to around 1.2 square meters, nearly in line with some estimates for Russia’s 5th-generation Su-57. That amounts to a 76% decrease in radar return, and while the significant differences in design between an F-16 and Black Hawk make it impossible to simply apply that same reduction to the Black Hawk, it seems likely that the second iteration of stealth helicopters saw an even more significant reduction in radar detectability. 

In our next story, we’ll dive headlong into Operation Neptune Spear, focusing not on the SEALs on the ground, but instead on the complex air operation going on overhead, what went wrong that led to one of the stealth Black Hawks crashing, and more.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

America doesn't have enough ships and building more takes far too long.

A war with any level of attrition in the Pacific could quickly turn catastrophic without sufficient warships, combat logistics vessels, and merchant ships. Outnumbered and without the capacity to replace, refuel, and provision our troops, we would struggle to deliver victory.

This precarious situation carries significant implications for our economy, national security, and international standing. Consequently, America must act now, before it is too late, to set a new maritime trajectory by building a coherent national maritime strategy.

Chinese Communist Party leaders are students of history, and they recognize America’s arsenal of democracy all but ensured America's triumph in the Pacific in World War II. Overwhelming numerical force, new ships, and maritime shipping secured our victory.

Now, the Pentagon considers China the world's top shipbuilder, not America. China controls the world's 4th largest shipping company, and its Navy is the world's largest.

Meanwhile, America's maritime enterprise reflects years of neglect and decline, despite being the world's largest economy, and relying heavily on global maritime trade.

Following World War II, American commercial shipbuilding led the world in output and tonnage. Today, the United States ranks just 19th in shipbuilding and produces less than ½ a percent of the world's commercial ships.

The fate of our shipping heritage is no different. In 1947, the United States fleet of over 5,000 vessels represented 40% of the world's shipping capacity. By the 1960's, however, America's nearly 3,000 ships only carried 16% of the world's cargo. Most recently, our nation's international trading fleet consisted of merely 80 ships, accounting for less than 1.5% of global trade.

What about the United States Navy? During the late 1980s, the fleet size was nearly 590 ships, but it has dwindled to about 290 ships today. Meanwhile, China's naval forces have soared to 340 warships, with hundreds more guided missile patrol boats and armed maritime militia vessels.

These trends directly translated into a decline of our nation’s power and influence.

Rebuilding that power through maritime strength requires a holistic approach, considering the readiness of our entire maritime machinery – infrastructure, workforce, technology, policies, industry, shipping fleets, and sea services. We need our own National Maritime Strategy to pull all these elements together and provide a true strategy for competing with China on the high seas, growing our maritime economy, protecting the freedom of the seas, and sustaining our oceanic resources.

Such a strategic design starts with recognizing our nation needs American-built and crewed ships, but we also need help changing our nation’s maritime trajectory.

We are in a race against time since China now has more than 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. Of course, we prefer all our ships be American built. But, in the race with our greatest adversary, we need a mix of US, Japanese, South Korean, and European-built ships in a Reagan-style build-up. I applaud efforts like our Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, but that program is spread over 20 years and is focused solely on public shipyards. That’s too little too late.

We must complement efforts to improve shipbuilding capacity by using drones. Smaller, cheaper platforms are easier to build and provide an affordable path for quickly ramping up the size and reach of our nation's fleets. Let's not reinvent the wheel but instead tap into the wealth of existing technology and operations to scale our military, civil, and commercial fleets.

Finally, Congress should cultivate a finance and regulatory environment to make civil and commercial shipbuilding and shipping industries more competitive globally. Close loopholes that permit private equity funds to flood Chinese shipyards and harness those resources for domestic projects.

This means writing new laws that encourage and protect private investment in shipbuilding, shipping, and projects of national interest. Make it easier, safer, and more profitable for Wall Street firms, private equity, and the American public to invest in our nation’s naval activities.  

Only Congress can provide the funding, prioritization, and accountability necessary to revitalize and sustain our maritime enterprise and position America for success on the seas. The strategic maritime environment demands urgent action to develop a national maritime strategy that synchronizes stakeholders, resources, and policy, leading to unity of maritime effort.

As a direct response to this vital need, I sponsored legislation in this year's NDAA to hold the administration accountable for producing such a design. I will continue working with my colleagues Roger Wicker, Trent Kelly, and Rob Wittman on this national security crisis. Working hand in hand with the people of this great nation, we will ensure America’s place as a global leader on the seas.

Mike Waltz represents Florida’s 6th Congressional District and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, and Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a Green Beret veteran of the war in Afghanistan, a former White House counterterrorism policy adviser, and a defense policy director for secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.

This article was first published by RealClearDefense.

On April 15, Sudan became the fourth Arab Spring country to slip into civil war, pinning Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Foreign nationals and diplomatic officials, whose intelligence services are regularly monitoring such situations, were totally blindsided by the intensity and speed at which the conflict began and escalated. The immediate departure of foreign diplomatic missions was followed by the gradual displacement of residents from Khartoum and Darfur, the two regions most affected by the fighting. Hopes of a quick resolution were dashed when the trend pointed to escalation rather than abatement.

The United Arab Emirates’ involvement in the conflict in Sudan is readily apparent. While diplomats were leaving Sudan, local reporters picked up on the absence of the Emirati ambassador, Hamad Aljneibi, in Khartoum when the war began. This was followed by his sudden return to Port Sudan by sea in the early days of the conflict. This came at a time when airspace was closed country-wide following the outbreak of violence.

While this was all done under the guise of humanitarian and peacemaking efforts, the Wall Street Journal broke an investigative piece confirming what many already suspected, weapons shipments from the UAE being passed off as humanitarian aid headed to Amjadrass in Chad via Uganda. 

These armaments were destined for the UAE’s local proxy, the RSF, in Sudan’s western region. In addition, CNN exposed that the shipments of surface-to-air missiles were destined for the RSF via flights shuttling the hardware from Latakia, Syria, to Khadim, Libya, and then airdropped to northwestern Sudan, where the RSF enjoys a strong presence.

There is evidence that the UAE has been funding Wagner in Libya to help reduce the financial burden on Russia for its Libyan operations and has been deploying these forces to prop up its ally, General Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting the UN-recognized Government of National Accord in Tripoli.

The relationship between the UAE and the RSF is well-documented. A Sudanese force composed primarily of RSF fighters has even been deployed in Yemen to fight as part of the Saudi-UAE coalition to restore the toppled Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. The RSF also dispatched the bulk of the Sudanese forces that were deployed to Libya to help Haftar’s forces take Tripoli.

Hemedti made billions off his outsourcing of troops as well as his Gold trading operations with the Wagner group and the UAE, where most of Sudan’s undeclared gold ends up. He then deployed some of these funds to stabilize the Sudanese economy after the 2019 revolution with a billion-dollar bank deposit into the Central Bank. The move was meant to whitewash Hemedti’s checkered past as a militia leader in Darfur, but it instead prompted more questions about why he had so much money to begin with.

While Abu Dhabi has been fanning the flames of the conflict, the events have not been in favor of its custodian in Sudan. Al-Burhan managed a surprising breakout from the Army HQ in Khartoum, where he was held up since fighting started on April 15. Surrounded by RSF fighters, Burhan’s unexpected escape was a shock to all, especially for the RSF, which was intent on capturing or killing the SAF leader as per Hemedti’s pronouncement, Burhan was a “criminal.”

While details are scant, Burhan’s subsequent visit to Egypt, the SAF’s closest ally, along with the head of the General Intelligence Service, Ahmad Ibrahim Mufaddhal, was clearly centered on procuring military assistance. Burhan has since made international trips to South Sudan and Qatar, shoring up more support and legitimacy for his campaign against the paramilitary group, meanwhile, Hemedti’s lack of physical public appearances since July has fueled rumors of his death or incapacitation. The appetite of foreign leaders to engage or associate with Hemedti, assuming he is alive and well, is also likely to diminish given the grave and systematic human rights violations committed by RSF soldiers.

Despite its firm grip over Khartoum and Darfur, the RSF has not had any decisive victories outside of those areas and has not captured any of the SAF’s airforce or infantry bases in seventeen out of Sudan’s eighteen states. Its forces have instead made themselves hard to dislodge by commandeering civilian homes in Khartoum and looting vehicles that are either kept by its soldiers, sold for profit, or used as part of the RSF’s operations to help them avoid detection by SAF planes.

The atrocious violations the RSF has committed in Khartoum and Darfur have effectively extinguished Hemedti and the RSF’s political future. The sultan of the Masalit Tribe in Darfur, Saad Bahreldin, appeared on Aljazeera recently to point the finger squarely at the RSF for its massacring of civilians and his tribesmen in the region. In addition, Hemedti’s brother and deputy, Abdelrahim Dagalo, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on account of the leadership role he holds over forces that “engaged in acts of violence and human rights abuses, including the massacre of civilians, ethnic killings, and use of sexual violence.”

As a result of the RSF’s assault on civilian life, an overwhelming number of Sudanese now rally behind the SAF, with tens of thousands volunteering for conscription and widespread endorsement of the decision to disband the RSF by Burhan, acting in his capacity as chairman of the technically-still-ruling Sovereign Council.

While the situation is bleak, a return to relative peace in Sudan is possible in the case of a negotiated settlement or a decisive SAF victory,  given that the conflict is not yet as internationalized as the conflicts in Libya, Yemen, or Syria. Domestically, other armed actors exist, but they are small, poorly disciplined, and lack any serious foreign backing to pose an existential danger to the SAF. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North led by Abdelaziz El Hilu gained ground in South Kordofan, ostensibly seizing the moment to gain leverage against the SAF and the future government in future negotiations over the fate of the war-torn region.

Beyond that, however, the only force that poses an existential threat to the SAF, the last standing pillar of the Sudanese state, is the RSF, which is a key ally of the UAE-Wagner-Haftar axis. The support afforded to the RSF in the form of arms will continue to fuel death and destruction. The war, therefore, can only end when these supply lines are cut and these munitions dry up.

For the UAE, betting on the RSF is a losing proposition for multiple reasons. Firstly, the public image of the RSF has been tarnished beyond repair. While before the war it was seen by the global community and Sudan’s political elite as a potential partner in the country's transition to a civilian-led government, it is now becoming increasingly isolated and is reviled as a genocidal militia.

Secondly, the RSF looks unlikely to win the war given the fact that its forces have concentrated their efforts on Khartoum and its point of origin, Darfur. These forces, therefore, have embedded themselves in neighborhoods and have seized civilian infrastructure to wage a war that they know the SAF cannot win without leveling the capital and battle-scarred cities in Darfur such as  Nyala, El-Fasher, and El-Geneina. This has created a stalemate situation that is setting the country up for a long-term state of war.

Thirdly, the UAE’s ties to the group have already tainted Abu Dhabi’s image among Sudanese and will curb its influence on Sudan’s politics in the future. Pro-democracy protestors that led the Sudanese revolution in 2018/2019 were vocal in their opposition to the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s support for the Transitional Military Council, the body that united both the RSF and SAF when their relations with each other were still warm.

Banners that condemned the Emiratis and Saudis’ propping up of the Sudanese defense complex were widespread at the site of the June 3 massacre, in which both the SAF and the RSF were implicated. The current war serves to further reinforce the prevailing perception that the UAE is a saboteur of Sudan’s democratic transition.

Lastly, the UAE’s own economic and strategic interests are in areas firmly controlled by the SAF.  The multibillion-dollar Abu Amama Port on the Red Sea, which was to be developed by the Abu Dhabi Ports Group, and the hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land developed and slated for cultivation by Emirati development funds and corporations are largely in states held by the SAF.

For Washington, its continued inaction vis-à-vis the UAE’s hawkishness in Sudan will only result in yet another collapsed state in an already fragile neighborhood. Empowering the UAE to fill the void after the U.S. withdrawal from the region has actually undermined Washington’s own goals of promoting stable and democratic regimes in the region. Instead, the chaos that enveloped Yemen, Libya, and Syria will play out again in Africa’s third-largest country in a more magnified form as long as the UAE’s support for the RSF continues.

Elfadil Ibrahim is a writer and analyst focused on Sudanese affairs. Previously written for The Guardian, Open Democracy, and the Sudan Tribune.

Image: Shutterstock.

In the not-too-distant future, the face of American airpower will dramatically shift away from a relatively few highly capable and crewed platforms and toward an overwhelming avalanche of unmanned systems, ranging from single-use munitions all the way to multi-million dollar multi-role UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles).

With new initiatives underway within the Pentagon to rapidly field thousands of drones the United States is now looking to return to the World War II methodology of peace through superior numbers. In order to do so, American Defense officials are aiming to push the boundaries of what we’ve commonly seen as science fiction, turning over vast portions of the warfighting enterprise to rapidly advancing, and often AI-enabled, robots.

Earlier this month, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative, which aims to field “multiple thousands” of low-cost drones operating in air, land, and sea within the next two years, but remarkably, without requesting any additional funding. Instead of seeing this as a new program, Replicator might be better thought of as a new philosophy – steering the priorities of new acquisition efforts toward what the U.S. Air Force has long called, “affordable mass.”

“Replicator is not a new program of record,” Hicks explained. “We’re not creating a new bureaucracy and we will not be asking for new money in [fiscal 2024]. Not all problems need new money.”

While this concept seems to go hand in hand with the Air Force’s recent efforts to develop and field highly capable Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs), or AI-enabled drones, to fly alongside its most advanced fighters into combat, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall was quick to point out that CCA is not a part of the Replicator effort.

This is almost certainly because, as Hicks laid out, Replicator aims to field a large volume of inexpensive drones with a shelf life of just a few years each, whereas the Air Force’s CCA program aims to field extremely capable UCAVs with modular payloads and at least some degree of stealth. In other words, the CCA program is looking to field far more expensive platforms than Replicator, but the one thing these efforts have in common, of course, is a transition away from manpower as a measure of military might.

The truth is, despite the significant reach of the Replicator initiative, this transition is already well underway with or without it.

THE US MILITARY HAS BEEN SHRINKING FOR DECADES

Despite America’s massive defense expenditures, the number of warships, fighter planes, and similar platforms in the U.S. arsenal has been steadily decreasing for decades now. This has come, in large part, thanks to rapid advances in a variety of technologies that allow fewer platforms to fill multiple roles. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the realm of tactical aircraft.

On the flight decks of America’s aircraft carriers, for instance, we’ve seen a rapid consolidation of airframes since the end of World War II, with specialized bombers, attack aircraft, reconnaissance platforms, and more being replaced by more broadly capable fighters. Even the Navy’s primary electronic attack aircraft today, the EA-18G Growler, is fundamentally a fighter as it shares an airframe with the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carries air-to-air missiles for self-defense.

America’s multi-role approach to air warfare has allowed it to focus on fielding some of the most advanced and broadly capable tactical aircraft ever to take to the skies, each equipped to fly a multitude of missions depending on operational requirements. There’s no denying this has been an extremely cost-effective approach to power projection throughout the asymmetric conflicts of recent decades, but in a high-end fight, it creates problems. No matter how multi-role your aircraft is, it can still only be in one place at one time… and with fewer platforms than ever, losing a single modern fighter represents a much more significant loss than in past eras.

As Marine aviator Dennis Santare and Navy veteran Chris Trost wrote for the Oliver Wyman consultancy earlier this year, “Superior technology is an advantage the United States military has historically leveraged to deter, fight, and win wars. But it’s not just advanced weaponry that has helped us fend off enemies. Our strength has also depended on our ability to mass combat power to overwhelm adversaries.”

Building a single F-35C, the carrier-capable iteration of the stealth fighter, requires a jaw-dropping 60,121 combined man-hours, according to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office. Conversely, it was reported during World War II that 20 carrier-capable F4U Corsair fighters could be built in 240,000 man-hours, which shakes out to approximately 12,000 man-hours per carrier fighter. In other words, takes approximately five times the man-hours to replace a modern carrier fighter than it would have 80 years ago.

By the end of World War II, the United States was operating nearly 300,000 military aircraft of all sorts, today, that number has dwindled to fewer than 14,000.

When you consider the broad range of capabilities delivered by America’s modern multi-role fighters, this disparity certainly makes sense, but that doesn’t change the problem this shift represents. America’s platforms may be incredibly capable, but they’re extremely expensive, hard to replace, and exist in too few numbers to withstand a large-scale conflict against a near-peer. And that’s before you consider the potential losses of aviators and crews, or longstanding concerns about readiness rates among America’s most advanced systems.

The solution, the Pentagon has assessed, is not a complete return to the old-school approach of rapidly fielding relatively inexpensive crewed aircraft and accepting that a large volume of those platforms, and their pilots, will be lost. Instead, Uncle Sam is now looking to a fusion of doctrines, combining even more modern and advanced platforms like the forthcoming Next Generation Air Dominance and F/A-XX fighters with a large volume of cheaper, more specialized drones that can be lost and replaced without overwhelming American budgets or production infrastructure.

INEXPENSIVE, ‘ATTRITABLE’ AIRPOWER

The Air Force has been using the word attritable to describe platforms that are inexpensive enough to accept high levels of risk in combat for years now, seemingly intent on turning the hair of copy-editors the world over prematurely grey. But even if the word choices leave something to be desired, the concept itself could provide the United States with a massive leap in capability in both the short and long term.

This concept is embodied by platforms like the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie – a low-cost and low-observable UCAV that’s capable of carrying a 600-pound internal payload while flying at high-subsonic speeds at altitudes as high as 45,000 feet and to ranges as far as 3,000 nautical miles (around 3,450 miles). The capabilities the Valkyrie brings to bear are certainly potent, but its most impressive feat is its cost. The most capable top-of-the-line Valkyries are projected to cost just $6.5 million each, less than one hundredth the cost of a B-21 Raider and less than a tenth of the cost of an F-35.

In fact, a single XQ-58A Valkyrie costs only slightly more than a single AGM-88G anti-radiation missile used by American fighters to take out enemy air defense radar arrays. And, it goes without saying that missiles can only be used once. Kratos officials have gone on record to say that if orders exceed 50 airframes, costs may be reduced to as little as $4 million per Valkyrie, and if production runs to 100 airframes or more, the unit price could drop to just $2 million.

That would put these low observable UCAVs on a pretty equal financial footing with America’s current preferred form of kinetic diplomacy, the Tomahawk cruise missile.

“The category/class called ‘attritable aircraft’ really refers to an affordability objective solution to a UAV problem/need without an expectation for the aircraft to be in service forever. This class seeks an optimization of capability versus cost and life. It’s certainly not the intent to use these assets once and throw them away, but they are also not intended to remain in service for 100 years like the B-52 for example,” explained Steve Fendley, president of Kratos’ Unmanned Systems Division.

But as cost-effective as the Valkyrie may ultimately be, others will be far cheaper. Last year, for instance, it was announced that another Kratos drone, the MQM-178 Firejet-based Air Wolf, which started out as a target drone for air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, is being tested for a wide variety of battlefield roles, including deploying Switchblade loitering munitions to expand sensor reach and engage targets on the drone’s behalf.

At just about $450,000 a piece, these low-cost UCAVs are launched via pneumatic catapult, giving them exceedingly small logistical footprints to be deployed from ground or even ship-based launcher

Other efforts, like the X-61A Gremlin, are designed to be deployed and recovered by airborne cargo aircraft like the C-130 Hercules, but not everything about this new approach to affordable mass is reusable.

BLOTTING OUT THE SUN LIKE PERSIAN ARROWS

While much of the Defense Department’s focus is now on low-cost and reusable combat platforms, other efforts are focused on developing new methods of deploying existing munitions to reduce costs and deliver greater battlefield effect. And by effect, of course, I once again mean volume.

Chief among these efforts is the Air Force Research Lab’s Rapid Dragon program, which aims to allow cargo aircraft like the C-130 and C-17 to deploy dozens of long-range cruise and anti-ship missiles in a single volley. Rapid Dragon includes a modular palletized munition system that allows for stacks of six missiles per pallet in the C-130 and as many as nine per pallet in the larger C-17. These pallets were designed to accommodate the AGM-158 Joint Air to Surface Stand-off Missile (JASSM), but it stands to reason that they can deploy the longer-ranged JASMM-ER as well as the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile as well, as they share the exact same exterior dimensions.

The pallets are rolled out the back of the aircraft like any other airdrop. Once deployed, a parachute opens to stabilize the pallet as the onboard control system fires the missiles to begin their trek of more than 500 miles (and potentially greater than 1,000) to their targets where they will deliver 1,100-pound explosive warheads to land or sea targets.

Last December, U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, often seen as a relic of a bygone era, began training to support this new approach to overwhelming enemy air defenses through chaotic volume by incorporating ADM-160 Miniature Air Launched Decoys (MALDs) into their arsenals. The A-10 can be fitted with as many as 16 of these handy decoys, which puts it on par with the much larger B-52 Stratofortress.

The nine-foot-long, 300-pound MALD looks like a missile, but instead of an explosive payload, it carries a Signature Augmentation Subsystem (SAS) that can broadcast the radar return of any aircraft in the U.S. arsenal to spoof enemy air defenses into targeting the MALD instead of nearby missiles or aircraft. The latest in-service iterations, the ADM-160C MALD-J, also include a modular electronic warfare capability developed under the name CERBERUS. Much more than a single radar jammer, CERBERUS offers a variety of interchangeable electronic warfare (EW) payloads that can be swapped in and out in less than a minute, allowing for tailored EW attacks for a variety of battlefield conditions.

In other words, the small and expendable MALD-J is capable of fooling enemy air defenses into thinking they’re all sorts of incoming aircraft, and can also jam early warning and targeting radar arrays to further complicate matters for defending forces.

With a range in excess of 500 miles and a new, even more capable iteration (known as the MALD-X) in development, these air-launched decoys can significantly bolster the efficacy of other aircraft and weapon systems. And at around $322,000 a piece, these systems are inexpensive enough to be leveraged in great numbers without breaking the bank.

As just one hypothetical use-case, these two efforts alone would allow a very small number of A-10s and cargo aircraft like the C-17 to deploy a massive amount of decoys, jammers, and firepower in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. As Chinese warships attempted to ferry troops across 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait, a fleet of just four C-17s and four more A-10s could lob 64 jamming decoys and 180 long-range anti-ship missiles from 500 miles away, overwhelming air defenses and wreaking havoc on the Chinese fleet before a single fighter, bomber, or done has even flown a sortie.

IF IT’S NOT CHEAP, IT BETTER BE MODULAR

Of course, all of this focus on low-cost volume doesn’t change America’s affinity for advanced (and supremely expensive) platforms, and even this shift toward advanced drones can’t change that. Some of the most expensive uncrewed platforms to emerge in the coming years will almost certainly evolve out of today’s Combat Collaborative Aircraft (CCA) efforts to field AI-enabled drone wingmen to fly alongside America’s top-tier fighters.

These drones will carry a variety of payloads and take their cues from advanced fighters like the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, the Navy’s F/A-XX fighter, and the forthcoming Block 4 F-35. These drones will extend the sensor reach of their crewed fighters by flying out ahead, carrying electronic warfare equipment to jam enemy defenses, deploying air-to-ground and even air-to-air munitions on behalf of the crewed fighter and more – effectively turning every one piloted fighter into an entire formation unto themselves.

A number of firms are currently competing for a piece of the CCA enterprise and many of these efforts remain shrouded in a veil of secrecy, but one program that has been revealed to the public that we can use as an example is Boeing’s Australia-led MQ-28 Ghost Bat. This 38-foot UCAV operates like any other fighter and offers a range of more than 2,000 nautical miles (more than 2,300 miles).

Like other CCA platforms, the MQ-28 is designed to accommodate and rapidly swap out modular payloads, allowing the aircraft to serve in a variety of rules with a very short turnaround. This ability can give commanders in-theater more flexibility in deciding how best to leverage the UCAVs, but more importantly, it will also allow for rapid updates and upgrades as new technologies emerge.

Arguably, the most important part of this endeavor is the artificial intelligence required to operate these aircraft. The U.S. Air Force is already hard at work developing multiple AI Agents (as they’re called) for this role, with one specially modified F-16, dubbed the X-62A, completing its first air combat exercises with AI in control last December. This year, six additional and fully combat-coded F-16s are being modified to accommodate AI pilots as part of the Air Force’s Project VENOM to further mature the concept.

These AI-enabled F-16s will fly in a variety of exercises and combat simulations with human pilots onboard, so the artificial intelligence can learn directly from human operators how best to manage aviation tasks with increased complexity, culminating in what will eventually be nearly autonomous platforms that can execute complex orders as delivered by a human operator in a nearby stealth fighter.

THE FUTURE MAY BE ABOUT DRONES, BUT PILOTS AREN’T GOING ANYWHERE

Despite rapid advances in AI and automation, as well as the Pentagon’s renewed focus on low-cost combat drones, human pilots will still play an integral role in American air combat operations for years to come. Even the most advanced AI-enabled platforms are still being designed to be effectively operated by human pilots in nearby fighters. Rather than thinking of these drones as autonomous warfighters, it might be more apt to think of them in the same way we might think of a sensor pod carried underwing. Ultimately, these programs, systems, and platforms are being designed to serve as weapons in the hands of the modern warfighter, rather than as replacements for the warfighters themselves.

But while the United States has long used technology as a force multiplier, these new efforts will finally allow for the use of that term in a very literal sense.

To return to the World War II comparison, aircraft of that era may have required fewer man-hours to build… but a single B-29 Super Fortress required a crew of 10-14 to operate. In the not-too-distant future, that ratio will be turned on its head, with just one or two human operators controlling five, 10, or even more platforms simultaneously.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

The Ukrainian military will be receiving an advanced missile system that could change the war.

According to reports coming out of the White House, President Joe Biden has given the Pentagon the green light to supply Ukraine with an unspecified number of MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS.

With the Ukrainian counteroffensive gaining momentum, the potential delivery of ATACMS to the Ukrainian military would enable additional deep strikes against the faltering Russian logistical system and other strategic targets.

TIME FOR THE ATACMS 

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United States for the second time since the Russian invasion of his country. Although this time he didn’t address Congress, Zelensky managed to persuade President Biden of the need to send the Ukrainian military ATACMS munitions.

Ukraine has been trying to get the ballistic missile system for months. The White House’s green light, thus, is a milestone for Ukraine. The U.S. had been hesitant to send the munitions for fear of provoking a Russian escalation and because it only has around 3,000 ATACMS.

The number of ATACMS munitions the U.S. will send to Ukraine will firstly depend on the number of deliveries: If the U.S. is tilting toward one big delivery, then the number of munitions might be smaller compared to a scenario in which the Pentagon sends several waves of ATACMS over the next months.

Another consideration is the status of Ukraine’s artillery arsenal. Ukraine is going through several thousand artillery shells – particularly 155mm rounds – daily and between 150,000 and 200,000 a month. Even though the Pentagon alone has sent Kyiv more than two million 155mm shells, the U.S. and the West are having a very hard time meeting the Ukrainian artillery’s needs. Sending ATACMS munitions would slightly ease the need to send seemingly inexhaustible batches of rounds to Ukraine.

To be sure, the Ukrainians won’t be using precious ATACMS rounds against most targets that 155mm rounds are being used for, but the Ukrainian military could use ATACMS against high-value targets that are also within range of its 155mm guns.

A FORMIDABLE WEAPON 

The ATACMS is a series of short-range, surface-to-surface ballistic missiles that have been in service for more than three decades.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started working on what would eventually become the ATACMS back in the 1970s as part of the Assault Breaker program with the goal of developing deep-strike munitions. The U.S. military first used them in anger against the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War in 1991.

The U.S. will likely send either the Block 1 or Block 1A ATACMS to Ukraine.

Weighting almost 3,700 pounds, the older Block 1 version has a range of up to 103 miles and can carry a single warhead of up to 1,250 pounds. The main available Block 1 warhead is essentially a big cluster munition that can pack almost 1,000 M74 bomblets that are designed to kill and maim enemy infantry and destroy weapon systems through blast and fragmentation.

The newer Block 1A version has a similar weight but a much longer range which depends on the warhead it packs. It can either carry a cluster warhead with 300 M74 bomblets for a range of 186 miles or a unitary high explosive 350-pound warhead for a range of 168 miles.

Cluster munitions have proven extremely effective on the ground, and even the Russian military leadership is warning about the danger. An ATACMS Block 1 strike against a concentrated large Russian force could completely wipe it out and stop an offensive or counteroffensive in its tracks.

On the other hand, a Block 1A with a high explosive unitary warhead can take out a whole Russian command and control element or targets of similar importance in a single strike.

In the current battlefield, Block 1 ATACMS munitions can reach almost all of Russian-occupied Ukraine. The longer-ranged Block A1 ATACMS missiles can also reach the southern parts of the Crimean Peninsula, as well as portions of Russia.

ATACMS munitions are solid-propellant fueled and have internal GPS systems to ensure pinpoint accuracy.

The ATACMS can be fired by either the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) or the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). The Ukrainian military has used both the M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS to great effect in the war, taking out a considerable amount of Russian logistical nodes, fortified positions, troop concentrations, important infrastructure, and high-value targets.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations and national security. He is a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and is pursuing a J.D. at Boston College Law School.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Mike Mareen / Shutterstock.com

An undisclosed number of American M1 Abrams main battle tanks have now arrived in Ukraine, giving the embattled nation a small boost in armored capability amid its ongoing counter-offensive.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took to X (previously known as Twitter) to announce their arrival on Monday morning. 

“Good news from Defense Minister Umerov. Abrams are already in Ukraine and are preparing to reinforce our brigades. I am grateful to our allies for fulfilling the agreements! We are looking for new contracts and expanding the geography of supply,” Zelensky wrote.  

The United States has promised Ukraine a total of 31 Abrams tanks, amounting to less than 10% of at least 321 total Western tanks headed for – or already in – the European nation. Exactly how many Abrams have arrived is unclear, but Politico reported in June that the first delivery of American tanks would include 10 M1A1 tanks, with the subsequent 21 coming later in the fall. According to the New York Times, anonymous sources within the Pentagon said the tanks arrived in-country on Saturday. The decision to provide Ukraine with refurbished M1A1s, rather than more modern M1A2s, was based on trying to expedite their arrival. 

However, despite the M1 Abrams’ now-legendary prowess on the battlefield, this small number of tanks is unlikely to play a massive role in Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Instead, the Biden administration’s decision to provide Ukraine with these tanks could arguably be considered a diplomatic move, as it was America’s commitment to send tanks that many credit with Germany’s ultimate decision to allow countries to provide Ukraine with other heavy weapons and platforms, like Leopard 2 main battle tanks.

Leopard 2s quickly became the first Western tanks to see action on Ukraine’s behalf in June of this year, with videos of their participation in the counteroffensive surfacing shortly thereafter. In August, it was reported that Ukraine had received at least 71 Leopard IIs already, and had lost only five in combat up to that date. 

While older than America’s top-of-the-line Abrams, the M1A1s Ukraine is receiving will still present a serious threat to the variety of Russian tanks, some of which are extremely dated. In particular, the Abrams optics will enable better night-fighting capabilities, while the tank’s armor and defensive systems offer a greater degree of survivability. The Abrams, for instance, stows its 120mm main gun ammunition in a sealed compartment on the back of the turret. As a result, a direct hit that manages to penetrate its armor will blow the shells out the back, rather than killing the tank’s occupants. Many Russian tanks like the T-72 and T-80, however, store their ammunition in the turret itself. When hit, this results in a catastrophic failure many have taken to calling the “jack in the box” effect, blowing the turret high into the sky and killing the tank’s crew. 

“As President Zelensky said earlier today, the first batch of the 31 Abrams tanks have arrived in Ukraine. The mere presence of Abrams tanks serves as a potent deterrent. By having these tanks in their arsenal, the Ukrainian Army can more effectively discourage aggressive actions. Providing the Abrams tanks signifies a tangible commitment to Ukraine’s defense and stability, underscoring U.S. support for its partners facing external pressures. We will continue to focus on what we can do to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield and protect its people,” a Pentagon statement sent to the Warzone said. 

However, these Abrams may not see the battlefield any time soon. The initial batch will likely be kept in hiding to avoid being taken out by Russian missiles until the rest arrive and they can be used in larger numbers. The last thing Ukraine wants to happen is to lose these tanks before they even enter the fight. 

M1 Abrams Tank. Image Credit: DoD. 

But even once all 31 Abrams have arrived, that will still only amount to a single Ukrainian tank battalion, which is unlikely to play a pivotal role in the overarching conflict. However, if used in the right circumstances, the heavy armor, firepower, and situational awareness provided by the American vehicle could make a tactical difference.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: PhotoStock10 / Shutterstock.com

The Biden administration faces a massive foreign policy vulnerability because it has shown weakness in the face of multiple forms of Communist China’s aggression—and none more serious than espionage.

Chinese espionage and covert influence are likely only to increase as the 2024 presidential campaign heats up, as the U.S. government becomes less and less inclined to take bold action in advance of an election. 

China recruits spies inside the United States, including members of our military. In August, two Navy sailors were arrested for passing sensitive military information to Chinese intelligence.

One of the sailors was still a Chinese citizen when he enlisted in the Navy, making him a prime target for Chinese intelligence officers, who falsely believe that every individual of Chinese ethnic descent owes a duty of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

China also sends operatives to penetrate our military bases. They pose as wayward tourists so they can test security procedures and learn how to circumvent defenses in a future crisis. 

These reports of human espionage come on the heels of news that Chinese hackers have penetrated the networks of U.S. critical infrastructure, giving China the ability to cripple power, water, and communications to American military bases in a time of crisis.

And just a few days earlier, press reports exposed a web of covert Chinese efforts to influence American politics flowing through left-wing activist groups such as Code Pink. 

China’s influence efforts targeting the U.S. are modeled on its successful campaigns in other English-speaking countries.

In Canada, the government has launched an investigation into reports that China’s Ministry of State Security secretly organized campaigns against members of Canada’s Parliament who advocated tough-on-China policies. China funneled money and votes toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in advance of the Canada’s 2021 elections. 

And in Australia and New Zealand, China for years has attempted to use its economic clout to influence dozens of politicians and media outlets.

How has the Biden administration reacted? Last year, despite the realities of the espionage threat, Biden’s Justice Department shut down the China Initiative begun during the Trump administration, bowing to pressure from activists who said the initiative was inherently racist and xenophobic.  

At the same time, the Biden administration’s efforts to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, have stalled. For more than two years, the administration has negotiated with TikTok through the interagency process of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States without reaching an agreement to mitigate the app’s enormous potential to influence American politics and blackmail targets of espionage.

Congress could still act, but TikTok is breathing a sigh of relief as the House and Senate face a jam-packed legislative calendar without a consensus on blocking the app. 

The dithering has extended beyond TikTok, as the White House spun its wheels for months on action to regulate U.S. investment in advanced technology research in China.

When an executive order arrived in August, it merely kicked off the start of a new deliberative process while the Treasury Department writes regulations that cover only a few industries, leaving most of China’s advanced research untouched. The result?  No action before 2025 at the earliest.

All the while, high-ranking U.S. officials have made pilgrimages to Beijing, hoping to secure a change in China’s behavior. Visits by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and, most recently Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (whose emails the Chinese hacked earlier this year) all delayed U.S. responses to China’s aggression while obtaining seemingly little in return. 

Through a combination of misguided decisions and inaction, the Biden administration has given up American leadership in the fight against the Chinese Communist Party’s influence. America deserves better.

Michael Ellis is a visiting fellow for law and technology in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

This article was first published by the Daily Signal.

Image: Shutterstock.

The US has received plenty of criticism for acceding to Iran’s policy of hostage-led negotiation for which Tehran has plenty of form. But there are a number of very knowledgeable Middle East hands in President Joe Biden’s administration with significant experience in the demanding theatre of negotiations with Iran. They include Biden himself, who was Barack Obama’s vice president when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was negotiated and signed. So, they are neither neophytes on this issue nor naive about the risks involved in achieving an obviously humanitarian outcome in this manner. Rather, to understand why the administration took this step it’s necessary to first understand how it viewed the detainee situation as part of its broader Iran policy.

First, the security priorities of both the Obama and the Biden administrations with respect to Iran have focused on counterproliferation. The JCPOA, as flawed as it was, represented the Obama administration’s belief that only a negotiated approach to limiting Tehran’s nuclear development program could work effectively. The unilateral trashing of the agreement under Donald Trump’s presidency provided the proof, if any was needed, of what Iran could do in the absence of any negotiated constraints on its program.

By contrast, Iran’s influence-peddling and military support for regional non- and semi-state actors represents a real, but nevertheless second-order, security priority. The prevailing political and social realities in countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq mean that Iranian-supported groups are significant, if not the dominant political actors, and therefore eliminating Tehran’s influence is essentially impossible. Without changing the political system of the country or the behaviour of actors in that system, constraining Iran’s behaviour, rather than eliminating its influence, becomes the achievable short- and medium-term aim.

Given this, the Biden administration’s decision to secure the hostages’ freedom and to release Iranian funds frozen in South Korea is easier to understand. The release of detainees has been high on Biden’s list of priorities. As he said in March: ‘Returning wrongfully detained and people held hostage—and particularly Americans and their families—is a top priority for this administration. And we’ll continue our work to bring home all Americans held hostage or unjustly detained.’

Nobody begrudges the fact that the detainees have been returned to the United States. Rather, the questions are whether the type of exchange that was undertaken should have been done, the price that was paid and whether this simply reinforces the utility of such a strategy in the eyes of the Iranians. The price paid was probably the least contentious—the difficulty with blanket sanctions against totalitarian regimes is that those who suffer are often the least culpable. The funds frozen in Seoul were for Iranian oil imported by South Korea that hadn’t been paid for by the time Trump imposed his unilateral sanctions.

To the Biden administration, those funds were a casualty of a Trump decision it never agreed with, so it doesn’t feel beholden to. The current agreement also requires that the disbursement of the funds will be overseen by Qatar and they will be used only for humanitarian purposes. Whether that is the case in practice will remain to be seen, but throughout all the years of sanctions against it, Tehran was still able to fund its regional activities and so the release of these funds is no game-changer.

As to whether the exchange will lead to more detentions of US citizens, it’s easy to make that argument because the logic appears straightforward. Yet the jury is out on whether this has been the case in the past (given the current detainee exchange is by no means the first of its kind).

With that in mind, the Biden administration has taken a calculated risk while it continues to warn American citizens about the risks of travelling to Iran and the fact that Washington can’t guarantee their return if they are detained.

On the question of whether this swap should have been done (outside of the obvious benefit for the freed detainees), one must understand it as part of the broader counterproliferation policy of the Obama and now the Biden administrations.

If one accepts that the JCPOA was effective in limiting Iran’s nuclear program and the Trump policy of ‘maximum pressure’ achieved the exact opposite, then a negotiated limit to Iran’s nuclear program is the only real way to achieve meaningful counter-nuclear-proliferation outcomes with Tehran. And to get to the negotiating table, viewing the detainee swap as a preliminary step to such an outcome makes a lot of sense.

There has been media reporting that Iran’s supreme leader has given approval for direct talks with the US on the issue, though both countries have denied this report. Whether the restart of negotiations is possible therefore remains up in the air.

The Biden administration likely thinks the prisoner swap was worth trying as the only way of achieving its broader non-proliferation goal. But if it doesn’t establish the conditions for future negotiations, at least five people are no longer detained in Iranian prisons.

Rodger Shanahan is a former Australian Army officer and Middle East analyst. 

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

 

Back in the summer last week, Iranian officials drew headlines with their claims of being able to detect and track American F-35s flying over the Persian Gulf. This prompted a flood of claims on social media about the $1.7 trillion stealth fighter program no longer offering a strategic edge over the aggressive nation.

“Over the past days, several of these planes were flying over the Persian Gulf and were fully monitored by our radars from the moment they took off,” an unnamed Iranian official was quoted as saying by the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen news, an outlet that is frequently criticized for its bias toward authoritarian regimes in Iran, Syria, and the militant group Hezbollah.

Is this claim true? The truth is… it’s pretty likely – but that wouldn’t have the implications many may think it does. Stealth fighters have long been detectable via certain radar frequencies and that’s neither new nor troubling for military planners. This story, like many that have come before it, is leveraging popular misconceptions about stealth, rather than the science associated with this technology, in an attempt to paint modern 5th generation fighters as less capable than they truly are. And make no mistake, the F-35’s detectability is not unique to its airframe – every 5th-generation fighter regardless of origin can be detected under the right circumstances.

It’s targeting those aircraft that can be tough.

THE CLAIM

According to several Iranian-bases news outlets, Brigadier General Reza Khajeh, the deputy commander of operations of the Iranian Army Air Defense Force, was the first official to come forward with the claim that Iran has been detecting and potentially even tracking F-35s in the region. This claim follows the deployment of about a dozen F-35s to the U.S. Central Command region following a series of aggressive encounters involving Russian aircraft over Syria and Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz.

According to General Khajeh, all flights in the region have been monitored by Iranian air defense systems, bolstered by what he referred to as “eavesdropping systems,” going on to claim that they have yet to detect a sortie via those listening methods that they weren’t also able to track on radar.

And based on the responses we’ve immediately seen popping up on social media, it’s clear that many are convinced, based on these claims, that Iran has cracked the code to peering through the most advanced fighter on the planet’s stealth capabilities.

THESE CLAIMS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT STEALTH FIGHTERS

Stealth aircraft are designed to delay or sometimes even defeat detection via a variety of means, including radar and infrared, but it’s commonly understood that stealth is not invisibility. That is to say that under the right circumstances, these aircraft are often detectable – especially when we’re talking about stealth fighters, in particular.

However, there is a significant difference between being able to detect a stealth fighter and being able to effectively target one, and these claims out of Iran (and subsequent media stories) rely on the average reader’s lack of awareness when it comes to this important distinction.

Modern stealth fighters are designed to delay or prevent detection specifically from high-frequency radar arrays that are capable of providing a “weapons-grade lock” – or radar arrays that can guide a missile to a target. Lower frequency radar arrays are not capable of guiding weapons with this sort of accuracy but are often capable of spotting stealth fighters in the sky. This is neither new nor unusual.

THE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING ABLE TO DETECT A STEALTH FIGHTER AND BEING ABLE TO TARGET ONE

“The Radar Game: Understanding Stealth and Aircraft Survivability” by Rebecca Grant, Mitchell Institute, 2010

Different radar arrays broadcast in different wavelengths and frequencies for different reasons. The types of design elements that can help delay or prevent detection from one type of radar frequency won’t necessarily help prevent detection from another.

As a result, stealth fighter designs are specifically intended to limit detection from the types of radar arrays that can effectively guide a weapon to its position. While stealth aircraft are still not invisible to radar arrays that work within these bands, the goal is to make their radar returns small enough to delay detection, allowing the stealth fighter to either engage a target or escape without ever being targeted itself.

Radars operate by broadcasting electromagnetic energy (radar waves), usually in the L, S, C, X, or K bands. Each band uses a different wavelength and frequency, with only higher frequency (smaller wavelength) systems providing the image fidelity needed to accurately target an aircraft.

In other words, only certain types of radars can be used to guide a missile toward a target and get it close enough to destroy it. Lower frequency arrays are often capable of spotting stealth fighters in the air, but because of their larger wavelengths, can’t provide accurate enough data to actually lock onto an aircraft with a missile.

Stealth fighter designs only limit detection against higher frequency radar arrays, including parts of the S-band and the C, X, and Ku bands to prevent being targeted. Because these fighters are still visible on lower-frequency radar bands operating on S and C bands, these arrays can be leveraged effectively as early warning systems, notifying defensive forces that stealth fighters are in the area, and allowing for other defensive systems to be oriented in the right direction. But importantly, low-frequency arrays can do little more than point systems toward the area a stealth fighter is in. An effective stealth fighter design remains difficult to target via a high-frequency array even with this head start.

In fact, because most air traffic control towers operate radar arrays in the S-band, they can often spot stealth fighters without much difficulty.

Stealth bombers, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to detect via even lower-frequency arrays, thanks to their lack of common fighter design elements like standing vertical tail surfaces. As a result, when stealth fighters are operating over your nation, air defenses are often aware, but unable to target them. When stealth bombers are overhead, many national air defense systems may never even know at all.

In other words, it’s not particularly unusual to spot an inbound stealth fighter using even quite dated low-frequency radar arrays, but actually shooting them down is another question entirely. Low-frequency arrays aren’t capable of guiding a weapon accurately to a fighter-sized target. They can only point in a general direction and say, “There’s a target somewhere over there.”

STEALTH FIGHTERS HAVE MORE THAN ONE TRICK UP THEIR SLEEVE

It’s not at all uncommon for stealth fighters like the F-35 to fly with radar reflectors on to both render them more detectable and mask their actual radar profiles while operating in regions with enemy air defense systems that are eager to gobble up data about their radar returns. These reflectors, often called Luneburg lenses, aren’t always easy to spot with the naked eye, but they render even the stealthiest aircraft easy to detect on radar.

In other words, it’s entirely possible that American F-35s operating in the Middle East may be flying with these lenses on specifically to make it more difficult for enemy air defense systems to work toward figuring out how to detect these aircraft more readily.

And considering the United States sent these fighters to the region as an intentional message to aggressive Iranian and Russian forces, advertising their presence is an intentional decision. That much was made clear by the Pentagon’s public announcement of their deployment prior to the F-35s even arriving in the region.

“In coordination with our regional allies, partners, and the U.S. Navy, the F-35s will partner with A-10s and F-16s already in theater helping monitor the Strait of Hormuz,” Air Forces Central (AFCENT) spokesman Col. Mike Andrews said in a statement last month.

In other words, there’s a multitude of reasons why Iran might be able to detect F-35s operating over the Persian Gulf, from Luneburg lenses to low-frequency radar arrays. In fact, it would be somewhat damning if they couldn’t. But just as Russia leveraged confusion about the definition of modern hypersonic missiles to claim their Kh47M2 Kinzhal was more than a simple air-launched ballistic missile, Iran is now leveraging confusion around the word stealth in a similar manner.

So, did Iran detect F-35s over the Persian Gulf last week? It’s pretty likely. But is that anything American military planners are sweating?

Almost certainly not.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

America’s next stealth fighter in active development is going to be very pricey, with some estimates now reaching as high as $300 million per airframe. But while that figure is sure to give plenty of folks a serious case of sticker shock, the truth is, even at that high a price, this fighter may still be a serious bargain.

There’s no denying that Uncle Sam has an affinity for expensive military platforms, with today’s F-35 Lightning II effort currently holding the title for most expensive military program in history at an estimated $1.7 trillion over the jet’s service life. And with the F-35A’s per unit price now floating at around $80 million each, forking over $300 million for another new stealth fighter does sound shocking.

But it’s important to remember that the F-35’s price has come down dramatically thanks to the fact that a whopping 17 countries have placed orders for the advanced fighter and more than 1,000 F-35s have already been delivered to customers. In other words, despite a high operating cost, the F-35 has become one of the most widely operated fighters on the planet, and high volume has a way of bringing down costs.

Conversely, the Air Force intends to purchase just 200 or so fighters from the Next Generation Air Dominance program, with these next-generation jets expected to fly alongside another 300 advanced new Block 4 F-35s and at least 1,000 artificial intelligence-enabled drone wingmen.

This relatively short production run will place the NGAD fighter on fairly equal footing, in terms of total numbers, with the very fighter it’s slated to replace: the F-22 Raptor. And the truth is when comparing the NGAD’s projected cost to fighters like the Raptor, or even the venerable F-14 Tomcat… that sticker shock soon gives way to a sense that NGAD may actually be a pretty good deal, even at $300 million per airframe.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT NGAD FIGHTER AND ITS COST SO FAR?

The Next Generation Air Dominance program has been, until fairly recently, more about developing new aviation technologies than specifically fielding a new fighter platform. These technologies all fell within one of four categories:

1. Propulsion — The Air Force intends to field these new fighters with advanced adaptive cycle engines that will offer more power, more fuel economy, better heat regulation and power production, and greater loiter times than were possible with earlier engine designs.
2. Uncrewed Systems — The NGAD fighter will fly alongside a constellation of AI-enabled drone wingmen to extend sensor reach, increase combat capacity and survivability, and more.
3. Materials — Advances in material science are often among the most secretive elements of stealth aircraft design, as today’s Radar Absorbent materials are rated to absorb as much as 80% of inbound radar waves, but limit fighter performance due to their fragility. Improved RAM could reduce maintenance costs, improve stealth, and allow for greater performance.
4. Sensors — The NGAD program leans further into the F-35’s air combat methodology of detecting and targeting enemy aircraft from greater ranges than ever before, allowing the fighter to engage and destroy enemy jets before they ever even know the fighter was there.

However, as these technologies matured, the focus of the effort transitioned toward combining these new technologies into a single crewed airframe, culminating in a classified contract solicitation released last month for final design proposals. The Air Force now intends to choose a winning design next year, with aggressive plans to begin fielding operational jets by the end of this decade.

At this stage, the Air Force couldn’t offer an accurate projected per-unit cost for this fighter, as a design hasn’t even been chosen yet, but Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has gone on record to say that it will likely cost “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars” per jet.

While technically a separate program being developed under the same Next Generation Air Dominance moniker, the Navy’s forthcoming F/A-XX fighter is expected to share some common modular systems with the Air Force’s new fighter.

Based on renders we’ve seen of this new fighter released by the U.S. Air Force and defense contractors alike, it seems likely that the new jet will omit some traditional fighter control surfaces — namely the standing vertical tails, in favor of an even stealthier profile. The result may be a fighter that isn’t quite as aerobatic as previous top performers like the F-22 Raptor, but will almost certainly be the stealthiest fighter to see the sky to date.

NGAD WON’T NEED TO REPLACE OLDER FIGHTERS AT A 1:1 RATE

Arguably the most important difference between this new NGAD fighter in development and previous top-tier jets like the Raptor or Tomcat is how America’s next air superiority fighter is being designed to operate alongside a bevy of AI-enabled drone wingmen.

These wingmen aircraft will use onboard AI to allow them to complete complex tasks as assigned by the pilot onboard the NGAD fighter. They could extend the aircraft’s sensor range by flying out ahead, its payload capabilities by engaging targets on its behalf, and even its survivability by absorbing missiles on the crewed fighter’s behalf or engaging enemy targets before they have a chance to cause harm.

But importantly, these drone wingmen will also allow a single crewed NGAD fighter, flying alongside two or three drone wingmen, to replace entire formations of older generation jets that each require a pilot of their own. As a result, F-15s and F-22s won’t need to be replaced on a one-to-one basis in order to maintain the same level of combat capability.

Related: Voodoo II: Could a simple patch give us a sneak peek at NGAD?

AVOIDING THE F-35 PROGRAM’S ‘ACQUISITION MALPRACTICE’

The F-35 may be the most technologically advanced fighter in service today, but the budget-busting acquisition boondoggle that got it there is something the Air Force is working hard to avoid doing again. Sandboxx News has covered the poor decisions that led to the F-35’s ballooning development costs and production setbacks at length in previous articles. Among the most glaring issues that led to such costs were, first, giving Lockheed Martin an effective monopoly on aircraft design, production, and sustainment for decades to come with little incentive to come in under — or even at — projected cost; and, second, beginning production long before testing was complete, forcing older jets to undergo expensive refits once issues were identified.

In order to avoid these sorts of setbacks in the future, the Air Force is reshaping how it executes fighter contracts, separating design and production from long-term sustainment to force competition between firms, and perhaps most important of all, ensuring Uncle Sam owns at least a significant portion of the “data rights” or intellectual property associated with the new fighter and its design, rather than allowing a corporation to maintain a monopoly on the fighter going forward.

Of course, even if everything goes exactly as the Air Force plans (which is almost certainly not going to happen), that won’t alleviate the immense cost associated with fielding the most advanced fighter on the planet.

But then, paying a premium to own the skies is something Uncle Sam is already pretty accustomed to…

AN AIR FORCE STUDY SHOWED RESTARTING F-22 PRODUCTION WOULD COST $330 MILLION PER RAPTOR IN 2023 DOLLARS

Many have questioned the wisdom of developing and fielding an entirely new air superiority fighter to replace the F-22 Raptor at all. After all, despite being the first and oldest stealth fighter on the planet, it remains the stealthiest and arguably most dominant of the bunch. Rather than spending a fortune on a new jet, why not just build more F-22s?

Well, the Air Force thought of that. Back in 2017, the Air Force commissioned a secretive study into just how much restarting F-22 production would cost — and the report’s conclusions were bad news for Raptor fans. Because much of the F-22 production line was cannibalized for F-35 production after the Raptor’s cancelation, restarting the production line would mean establishing new production infrastructure practically from scratch.

As a result, with startup costs included, a batch of 194 new F-22 Raptors was projected to cost approximately $50.3 billion, which adjusted to 2023’s inflation, skyrockets up to around $62.5 billion. That averages out to a current cost of about $330 million per new Raptor if the U.S. were to restart production today.

It’s important to remember that the F-22’s first flight came more than 10 years before the first iPhone was released, and much of the aircraft was designed in the early 1990s. In other words, it would likely cost the same or even more to build new old Raptors than it would to simply start from scratch on a 21st-century design.

F-22S COST $270 MILLION APIECE WHEN ADJUSTED TO 2023’S INFLATION

Even when F-22 production was still going at full steam ahead back in 2010, the Congressional Research Service reported that the United States was paying approximately $186 million per aircraft — assuming you don’t roll research and development costs into the per-unit price, as that would skyrocket the Raptor’s price to $369.5 million each in 2010 dollars. However, $186 million in 2010 adjusts to approximately $260.4 million in 2023.

So, even if production had simply paused, rather than halted and we could somehow restart F-22 production today exactly as it left off, new Raptors would still be creeping up on the $300-million-per-airframe mark, especially if systems that were left out of the original Raptor but are now considered necessary, like infrared search and track or helmet-cued targeting, were incorporated into the design to bring it on par with its more modern competition.

Related: America’s F-22 will see serious upgrades before retirement

THE F-35’S ORIGINAL PER-UNIT COST WOULD BE MORE THAN $330 MILLION TODAY

As we discussed earlier, the F-35 Lighting II borne out of the vastly expensive Joint Strike Fighter program has been getting consistently cheaper over the years thanks to a laundry list of customers and high production volume. However, that wasn’t always the case.

Back when the F-35 began its production run in 2007, it was quite a bit more expensive… at approximately $221.1 million per airframe. When adjusted to 2023’s inflation, that comes out to approximately $331.5 million per fighter today.

However, it’s important to note that the F-35’s per-unit cost dropped dramatically in its first years of production, with Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) Lot 2 following that same year at just $161.7 million per aircraft, which shakes out to about $242.3 million per fighter. And by 2012, it had dropped all the way to $107 million per jet, or about $143 million today.

Related: What kind of fighter could the latest military tech really build?

ADJUSTED FOR 2023’S INFLATION, MAVERICK’S F-14 TOMCAT COST $270 MILLION EACH

Air dominance has always been expensive. Nowhere is that more clear than in the Navy’s legendary F-14A Tomcat made famous in 1988’s Top Gun.

In 1973, the U.S. Navy was purchasing these Tomcats at approximately 38 million each, which as compared to the numbers we’ve been throwing around thus far in this article, seems like a downright bargain. But inflation can be tricky, and many have forgotten in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union that the United States was sometimes devoting as much as a whopping 10% of its gross domestic product (GDP) to defense during the Cold War.

For context there, America’s massive 2022 top-line defense budget of $857.9 billion represents a reported 3% of its GDP. If the U.S. were still spending at the rate it did during points of both the Cold War and Vietnam, today’s defense budgets would be closer to $2.5 trillion.

The Tomcat is a perfect example of just how much the U.S. was willing to spend on defense. Adjusted to today’s inflation, each F-14A would ring in at an astonishing $270 million.

AIR DOMINANCE AIN’T CHEAP

We may not know much about America’s next air superiority fighter being developed within the Next Generation Air Dominance program, but one thing we know for sure is… that it won’t be cheap. The United States has long led the world in airpower. From being the first country to field military aircraft; the first to arm aircraft; the first to conduct mid-air refueling; fly bombers around the world; build stealth attack planes, fighters, bombers, and more, America has long been willing to invest in the ability to take the fight to its opponents from the sky, and to do so with such overwhelming power, capability, and volume to dominate the airspace over any fight it’s in.

This approach to warfare is more than a habit, it’s baked into nearly every facet of America’s warfighting doctrine. America’s approach to war splits a conflict into six phases: shaping, deterring, seizing the initiative, dominating, stabilizing, enabling civilian authority, and then a return to shaping.

As Dr. Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research, pointed out in Air Force Magazine some 13 years ago, airpower plays a role in each and every phase — and is absolutely vital for a handful of them.

The fact of the matter is, the United States’ way of war doesn’t include dominating the skies… it mandates it. And as we’ve seen from the 1970s straight through to today… dominating the skies is an expensive endeavor.

So, if we do come to learn that the NGAD fighter does indeed cost around $300 million per fighter, we should see that not as an immense leap in price over the jets that came before it, but rather as the going rate for air supremacy.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Mike Mareen / Shutterstock.com

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