Diplomacy & Crisis News

Peter Suciu

Russian Army, Eurasia

These soldiers practiced using ropes to quickly land from a helicopter.

Key point: Don't try this at home. Highly trained paratroopers are able to use ropes to hit the ground and attack with suprising speed.

Last week during the Friendship 2020 joint military drills, Russian and Pakistani paratroopers took part in a unique airborne assault training exercise. What made this particular drill notable is that the paratroopers didn’t actually use parachutes, but instead practiced a fast-rope technique from helicopters that hovered high above the ground. 

“The servicemen of Russia and Pakistan practiced the tactic of parachute-free landing from domestically-made helicopters as part of the joint Russian-Pakistani military exercise Friendship 2020,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement, reported by Tass.

This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

The exercise, which involved 150 personnel from the special operations company of the 49th combined arms army of Russia’s Southern Military District and Pakistani special operations forces, was conducted at the Tarbela special operations training ground in Pakistan. During the drills, Mi-17 helicopters—the export version of the Russian Mi-8—hovered at an altitude of 20 meters in the air while the Russian and Pakistani airborne commandos descended using a special rope. After descending, the paratroopers practiced defending the area of landing and repelling a “terrorist attack.”

Fast One 

This type of “fast-roping” quick descend was first developed by the British military and was used in combat during the Falklands War. The original ropes were thick nylon that allowed Royal Marines to descend in a manner similar to sliding down a fire pole.

The type of rope used as well as the technique to descend has evolved over the years—and today the rope needs to be at least 1.6-inches or 40mm thick to prevent it from being jerked about from the rotor blast, while some even have a weighted core or ballast to help maintain stability.

Friendship 2020 Drills 

Fast-rope descents are increasingly used around the world by military forces, and while it may look simple it actually requires extensive training as there is no safety line to prevent a solider from falling.

The training drills played a significant role in this year’s Russian-Pakistani Friendship joint exercises, which have been held annually since 2016 alternately in each of the nations. 

This year’s maneuvers involved some seventy servicemen from the Russian special forces unit, while the drills are running in three stages. The first stage has been taking place at the Pakistani Army’s Tarbela special operations training ground from November 9-14 and it has involved solo training and exercises as well as team drills. The next two stages will take place at the Pakistani National Counter-Terrorism Center in Pabbi from November 16-19. 

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, personnel from both countries will take part in training exercises to exchange experience and practice inter-operability in accomplishing a broad range of missions. In particular, this includes eliminating illegal armed formations and conducting reconnaissance and search measures employing aircraft and technical reconnaissance capabilities 

The training between Russia and Pakistan follows a similar training exercise that involved U.S. and Ukrainian special operations forces (SOF) last month’s Fiction Urchin drills. The multinational exercises involved ten allied and partner nations and consisted of special forces operators conducting fast rope insertion and extraction systems. 

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 earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

The UN and international partners working to support a lasting peace and democratic election process across Somalia, said on Sunday that they were highly concerned by the current situation there, calling on Somali leaders to “prioritize the national interest” and resolve their political impasse.

Peter Suciu

Hypersonic Missiles, Americas

Experts fear that the missiles could be impossible to defend against and could reshape warfare.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Hitting the specific location of a carrier at such distance, even with a hypersonic weapon, wouldn't be the easiest thing to pull off. Current ballistic missiles that can achieve hypersonic speed follow a predictable flight path, but a concern is that these missiles could be able maneuver in unexpected ways.

Aircraft carriers have always faced seriously deadly threats. In the past, it was submarines, which long posed the most danger to carriers. Modern anti-submarine warfare (ASW) has given the advantage back to the carrier strike groups, which can better screen and protect the capital ship. While unmanned submarines could present a new problem, the greatest danger could come from hypersonic missiles.

The Russian Kinzhal is the world's first hypersonic aviation missile system, and if the claims are to be believed it has a range of 3,000 kilometers when launched from an aircraft such as the Tupolev Tu-22M3 Backfire supersonic bomber. Even if those ranges are exaggerated the platform still presents a very serious threat to U.S. warships, notably aircraft carriers.

Because of the speed at which hypersonic missiles travel the force is so significant that these can inflict damage by sheer "kinetic" impact without needing explosives. Experts fear that the missiles could be impossible to defend against and could reshape warfare. This is why some have suggested that the U.S. military invests in the technology rather than massive warships – in part because the weapons could quite easily destroy those warships.

The Japanese military is already exploring ways to develop and deploy hypersonic weapons with a special warhead that could penetrate the decks of an aircraft carrier – and it is abundantly clear that Chinese carriers could pose a serious risk to the waters around the Japanese home islands.

Carrier Killer

The Stalker Zone website recently explored a hypothetical strike on a large carrier – in this case the U.S. Navy's USS George H. W. Bush, which has a displacement of 97,000 tons and a length of 333 meters. The carrier, which has a crew of 3,200 plus 2,500 military personnel that make up the aviation wing, is quite a sizeable target for any weapon, but getting past its air defenses including its screen of destroyers would be no easy task.

Here is where a hypersonic missile could be a truly devastating game changer.

As the exercise suggested, the current characteristics of the U.S. Navy's carriers cannot counteract hypersonic missile weapons. While it might seem that a hit on the command room would be the best place to aim, the deck of the carrier may be the most effective. The mass – 500kg – of the Kh-47M2 "Kinzhal" traveling at Mach 12 would do considerable damage.

"Even if the carrier can stay afloat for the first moments after the strike, the potential of its aircraft wing will be reduced to zero by the damage caused to the deck," the Stalker Zone noted. "In addition, such a strike can lead to the defeat of at least one of the two naval Westinghouse A4W reactors. The total capacity of these reactors is 1,100 MW. A missile with a half-ton warhead moving at high speed can not only destroy the coolant circulation circuits, but also lead to the explosion of the nuclear reactors themselves during their active operation when an aircraft carrier performs a combat operation."

Such a strike from even a single hypersonic "Kinshal" missile could be enough to completely destroy an aircraft carrier but would have the potential create a chain reaction that could take out an entire carrier strike group!

Countering the Threat

Hitting the specific location of a carrier at such distance, even with a hypersonic weapon, wouldn't be the easiest thing to pull off. Current ballistic missiles that can achieve hypersonic speed follow a predictable flight path, but a concern is that these missiles could be able maneuver in unexpected ways.

Yet, it is still easy to see why there is such concern.

This is why the military is working as hard – possibly even harder – to develop counter systems to stop a hypersonic attack. Not doing so would be accepting that any nation that could acquire such weapons could devastate a fleet.

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 first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Kyle Mizokami

War on Terror, Middle East

Canada has done its part in fighting global terrorism, including taking on ISIS.

Key point: This Candian sniper has set a record. Here is how the impressive shot was taken.

In mid-2017, the sniping community was rocked by incredible news: a Canadian sniper team operating in the Middle East had made a successful kill at a distance of more than two miles. The team, deployed to fight the Islamic State, killed an ISIS fighter at a distance of 3,871 yards. The shot was a record breaker and more than a thousand yards farther than the previous world record. The shot, which bordered on the impossible, was made only slightly less so by the skill of the snipers involved.

This article appeared earlier and is being republished due to reader interest.

On June 22, 2017 the Globe and Mail reported that two snipers assigned to Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s elite special forces unit, had shot an Islamic State fighter in Iraq at a distance of 3,540 meters, or 3,871 yards. The sniper team was stationed on top of a highrise building when it took the shot, which took almost ten seconds to reach its target. The sniper and his spotter had used a McMillan TAC-50 .50 heavy caliber sniper rifle. According to the Globe and Mail, the kill was verified by video “and other data.”

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To understand the complexity of the shot, it’s best to start with a sniper maxim: sniping is weaponized math. Although a .50 caliber sniper rifle bullet can fly as far as five miles, a host of factors including gravity, wind speed and direction, altitude, barometric pressure, humidity and even the Coriolis Effect act upon the bullet as it travels. Even worse, these effects increase the farther the bullet travels. A successful sniper team operating at extreme distances must do its best to predict exactly how these factors will affect the bullet and calculate how to get the bullet back onto target.

The first and most influential factor on a bullet is gravity. A bullet begins to lose energy as soon as it leaves the muzzle of a gun, and as it loses energy it loses the ability to counteract gravity. The farther and slower a bullet flies, the more Earth’s gravity will pull the bullet downward. This is known as “bullet drop,” and even the most powerful bullet, such as the .50 caliber round used by the TAC-50, will invariably experience it.

In most shooting shooting situations, bullet drop is only a matter of a few inches or more. The Canadian snipers, on the other hand, had to deal with a phenomenal amount of bullet drop: at 3,450 meters, the bullet would be expected to drop 6,705 inches! Ryan Cleckner, a former U.S. Army Ranger sniper and author shows the ballistic data for the shot here. As the bullet is traveling subsonic at a spend of 940 feet per second, the bullet is diving an average of nearly two inches per foot of forward travel, with the problem getting much worse as distance increases.

In order to make the shot the Canadian snipers had to counteract the staggering amount of drop. Being on a highrise building, or hilltop was a must. The rest of the drop correction had to be done within the rifle’s scope, which can be adjusted for drop, and a scope mount that was angled upward for extreme long distance shooting.

Cleckner’s data also provides other useful information. Bullet flight time, from the muzzle of the Canadian sniper’s gun to target was just over seven seconds. The bullet was traveling at 940 feet per second when it hit, which means it slowed to below the speed of sound. Finally, after traveling more than two miles the bullet hit with 1,472 foot pounds of energy, greater than most M16 bullets at point blank range.

Another major factor that would have affected the shot was windage. When shooting at extreme distances, even a mild wind of five miles an hour will have an effect on the flight of a bullet, slowly but surely nudging it off its flight path toward the direction of the wind. At 400 yards, a .50 caliber bullet will be nudged 2.5 inches off its path by a five mile an hour wind. At 3,800 yards that balloons to an incredible 366 inches. In other words, the snipers had to assume their bullet would impact just over thirty feet in the direction of wind travel and plan accordingly.

Other environmental factors played a hand in the shot. Air pressure (generally a function of altitude), temperature, and humidity are factors most shooters at ranges of 500 yards or less rarely encounter, become major issues at 3,800 meters. These factors are mitigated by the use of wind sensors, barometric pressure readers, and a knowledge of local weather conditions. To complicate matters, these conditions may change so that a shot taken on a cold morning will be much different in the heat of the afternoon and snipers must recalculate the shot accordingly.

Earth itself, and the position of the shooter and target on the globe become factors at long range. The Coriolis Effect dictates that bullets shot in the northern hemisphere drift to the right, while those shot in the southern hemisphere drift to the left, and this phenomenon increases the farther one gets to the poles. Furthermore, shooting east with the rotation of the earth will cause bullets to strike high, while shooting west will cause the same bullet to strike low.

Even the construction of the rifle itself affects the shot. A high quality barrel will naturally be more accurate and the rifle involved in the shot, the McMillan TAC-50, is one of the best around. The barrel rifling, a spiral-like pattern that makes the bullet spin in flight, stabilizing it, imparts “spin drift.” According to Cleckner, a rifle with a right-hand spiral twist will send a bullet up to ten inches to the right at 1,000 yards. How much spin drift would affect the shot at 3,800 yards was essential information for the Canadian snipers.

In taking their record-breaking shot, the Canadian sniper team had to consider all of these factors—merely misjudging one would have caused a clean miss—and it is an incredible testament to their skill that they were successful. The average man-sized target is just twenty-four inches wide, leaving zero room for error in a two mile shot. The shot took place at the extreme edge of viability, given the current levels of sniper technology. While the JTF-2 shot will almost certainly be equalled, it seems unlikely it will be decisively beaten for the foreseeable future.

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

Image: Reuters.

Tim Murtaugh

U.S.-China Relationship, Asia

For a guy who expresses complete confidence that no one sees things as clearly as he does, Joe Biden sure botches a lot of things.

The U.S. relationship with China under the Biden administration is off to a rocky start if the first high-level meeting between the two nations is any indicator.

President Joe Biden, who cast himself as someone who would smooth relationships with foreign adversaries, can’t have been happy to see the American delegation embarrassed by the Chinese during a recent summit in Alaska.

The widely reported gathering in Anchorage saw Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi lambaste the United States directly to Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s face.

“Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States,” Yang asserted, referencing the Black Lives Matter movement. “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

Rather than defend the United States against this charge, Blinken incredibly chose to concede the point, saying, “A confident country is able to look hard at its own shortcomings and constantly seek to improve, and that is the secret sauce of America.”

Even liberal publications were aghast at the way the Chinese steamrolled the apparently unprepared American contingent.

Around the world, those who support the Chinese position were jubilant in their celebration. “The Chinese-language coverage of what happened in Anchorage is very, very proud,” noted China expert Dean Cheng, calling it a propaganda victory for the communists.

The Biden administration did subsequently announce sanctions against two Chinese government officials over the nation's horrific record of human rights abuses and ongoing genocide. But this is barely a slap on the wrist in light of the magnitude of the offenses. “China and the Chinese Communist Party think that they're winning,” said former Trump National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster.

But being way off base on matters concerning the Chinese Communists is nothing new for Biden.

On the presidential campaign trail in 2019, Biden infamously downplayed China as an economic power, declaring that they were “not competition.” He acted incredulous that anyone could ever believe the opposite, asking condescendingly, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.”

“I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us,” he continued, making clear that not only was he wrong, but he was certain of it.

Biden’s penchant for fumbling China issues continued into 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began to sweep the globe. For example, when former President Donald Trump moved to restrict travel from China to the United States, Biden opposed it, calling it “xenophobia” and “fear-mongering.”

More than two months later, after it was clear that Trump’s travel restrictions had saved American lives, Biden’s campaign played clean-up for him. A spokesperson claimed Biden had always supported the ban, although no one—including the candidate himself—had ever said so.

Meanwhile, China lied to the entire world about the scope and deadliness of the virus outbreak and enlisted the aid of the World Health Organization (WHO) in that deception. Incredibly, China even blamed the American military for spreading the virus. In fact, the Chinese continue to allude to American military involvement to this day.

Against this backdrop, Trump rightly determined that American taxpayers would no longer help fund the WHO if it continued to defer to China. Upon taking office, however, Biden unconditionally reversed that decision and effectively rewarded the bad actors who had impeded the global response to the pandemic in the first place.

Biden’s mistakes regarding China are alarming enough on their own, even without considering the financial ties to China his son Hunter has maintained for years. While his father was vice president, Hunter Biden rode aboard Air Force Two to Beijing, conducted meetings, and scored a massive deal with the state-owned Bank of China. One of Hunter Biden’s former business partners alleged that Joe Biden was aware of the various schemes and even had a part of some of them.

There’s a reason former Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Joe Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

For a guy who expresses complete confidence that no one sees things as clearly as he does, Joe Biden sure botches things a lot.

Tim Murtaugh is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is the former communications director of President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.

Image: Reuters

/ Proche-Orient, Syrie, Migrations, Réfugiés, Violence, Guerre civile, Frontières - Migrations et réfugiés / Proche-Orient, Syrie, Migrations, Réfugiés, Violence, Guerre civile, Frontières - Migrations et réfugiés

Peter Suciu

History, Americas

Boeing donated the sole YF-118G Bird of Prey to the museum in 2002 and it has been on display since 2003.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The lasting legacy of the Bird of Prey was its ability to demonstrate advances in stealth concepts, notably the "gapless" control surfaces that were developed to blend smoothly into the wings to reduce radar visibility, while the engine intake was completely shielded from the front.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force outside of Dayton, Ohio is home to more than 360 aircraft and missiles. Its collection includes such truly notable airplanes as the B-29 "Bockscar" that dropped the "Fat Man" atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the B-17 "Memphis Belle" and the Boeing VC-137C SAM 26000 that had the callsign Air Force One when it was used by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

In the Cold War gallery of the museum, near a Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor is a truly special aircraft – the one-of-a-kind Boeing YF-118G, a black project aircraft that was developed to demonstrate stealth technology. Developed by McDonnell Douglas and Boeing in the 1990s it was soon dubbed "The Bird of Prey," named for its resemblance to the Klingon spacecraft from the science fiction series Star Trek, as well as the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

The secret project ran from 1992 to 1999 and the single-seat aircraft was a demonstrator used to test "low observable" stealth techniques as well as new methods of aircraft design and construction. The aircraft, which was tested at the top-secret "Area 51," first flew in 1996 and made a total of 38 flights, where it was used to determine ways to make aircraft less observable not only to radar but also to the eye.

The program also validated new ways to design and build aircraft using large single-piece composite structures, as well as "virtual reality" computerized design and assembly and disposable tooling. It was powered by a single Pratt & Whitney JT15D-5C turbofan that provided 3,190 pounds of thrust and had a maximum speed of 300 miles per hour, and a ceiling of 20,000 feet.

The aircraft made its final flight in 1999 and it was declassified three years later when its design techniques had become standard practice. Boeing has used those techniques in the development of X-32 Joint Strike Fighter demonstrators and later in its X-45A Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle prototype.

The lasting legacy of the Bird of Prey was its ability to demonstrate advances in stealth concepts, notably the "gapless" control surfaces that were developed to blend smoothly into the wings to reduce radar visibility, while the engine intake was completely shielded from the front. Yet, despite its advancements, the National Museum of the United States Air Force noted that it still utilized some "off the shelf" technology to reduce costs while also speeding the production. This included a control system that is all-manual with no computer assists, while its landing gear was adapted from Beech King Air and Queen Air aircraft.

Boeing donated the sole YF-118G Bird of Prey to the museum in 2002 and it has been on display since 2003 – where despite its stealthy technology is ready to be seen and photographed by visitors!

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 first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Peter Suciu

Iran Missiles, Middle East

Iran is going down a road other “isolated” nations have been forced to travel—developing a local way to produce weapons.

Here's What You Need to Know: Arms could be a future revenue stream for the country, and potentially an important one as its oil reserves certainly won’t last forever. 

This past January Iran launched a number of ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in response to the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Quads Force commander. The strikes weren’t complete misses but were largely seen as militarily ineffective.

Multiple experts suggested Iran “missed” on purpose so as not to escalate the crisis, but by launching its missiles still, the Islamic Republic was able to save face by responding to Suleimani’s assassination in a U.S. drone strike. 

Experts also warned that next time Iran could respond with its combat-tested and highly combat-capable cruise missiles. This includes its Mobin, which was displayed at the MAKS 2019 defense trade show in Russia last summer. That cruise missile has a range of 280 miles, a speed of 560 miles per hour and can carry a warhead of up to 265 pounds, while it also has a low radar cross-section and high radar-evading capability. 

Iran has the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East—one that includes land-attack cruise missiles as well as anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from land, sea or air. Stopping a cruise missile isn’t impossible, but right now there are no operational weapons systems that can provide air defense against terrain-hugging cruise missiles over land.   

Exporting These Weapons 

While Iran hasn’t been able to build up a robust domestic defense industry, the Islamic Republic has looked to eventually export its indigenously-developed cruise missiles.

“Iran’s displays of advancements in arms development and production are not only a strategic exercise to attract new buyers, but also reveals the possibility of the country being a bedrock of arms imports to fill gaps in its capabilities,” Mathew George, Ph.D., aerospace & defense analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, said in an email to the National Interest. 

“Iran has developed its military capabilities domestically over the past decade or so to circumvent the arms embargo, leading to the occasional demonstration and announcement of new aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and developments in armaments,” George added. “Yet, concerns still exist around whether the specifications mentioned are definite capabilities or whether they are hyped versions of older devices, with the latest Qasem Soleimani missile looking identical to the older Shahab 3 ballistic missile.” 

Regional Stability 

Iran is going down a road other “isolated” nations have been forced to travel—developing a local way to produce weapons. This is because western sanctions and arms embargoes that have been directed against Iran have only served to create a vacuum that the country’s nascent has struggled to fill. Iran has what can be described as an enthusiastic, if not quite cutting-edge military-industrial complex. 

Now it is beginning to take the first step toward being an arms supplier—something that could be a concern to the stability in the Middle East and beyond.

“While these developments are a cause of concern for many countries in the region, an additional supplier of arms into the global market will be welcomed by many countries interested in these technologies, but without the deep pockets and rigorous prerequisites required to purchase from traditional suppliers,” explained George.  

However, those embargos and sanctions can go both ways. So not only can Iran not purchase small arms, but it could be very difficult for the Middle Eastern nation to actively try to sell its wares on the open market—at least not without any potential buyers facing their own sanctions from the UN or United States. 

“Iran will work to ensure that nothing domestic will hamper the lifting of the arms embargo,” added George.  

Arms could be a future revenue stream for the country, and potentially an important one as its oil reserves certainly won’t last forever. 

“Stakeholders will most likely allow for the embargo to be lifted and a new round of arms commerce to ensue until an event linked to spurious organizations and clear evidence of Iranian support of that event leads to another suspension of arms trade with the country.”

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 earlier this year.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Russian Navy, Europe

The Kilo II builds upon the powerful Kilo I-class of submarines and showcases how quite and modern Russian boats can be.

Key point: If you want to hide underwater and surprise your enemies, then silence is king. Here is how Moscow is expanding and maintaining its Kilo II-class fleet, what some naval experts call the "black hole".

The Russian Navy’s effort to upgrade its Pacific Fleet has continued in earnest this year. Over the summer Moscow announced that the Pacific Fleet would receive fifteen new warships and supply vessels that would operate in the Far East by the end of this year. Last week the Russian Navy inched closer to those goals when it announced that the Project 636.3 diesel-electric submarine Volkhov would enter service with the Pacific Fleet on Oct. 24.  

“The submarine Volkhov, the second in a series of six ships under construction at the Admiralty Shipyard for Russia’s Pacific Fleet, will be accepted for service with the Russian Navy on October 24 in compliance with an order by Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov,” Russian Navy spokesman Captain 1st Rank Igor Dygalo told Tass.

The ceremonial raising of the St. Andrew’s flag, Russia’s naval ensign, aboard the submarine will take place at the Admiralty Shipyard.

The submarine, which was laid down in 2017 and floated out in December 2019, completed its sea trials over the summer. From the end of June to the end of July the shipbuilders checked the sub’s sonar, radar, communications and life-support systems as well as other equipment. The Volkhov also successfully accomplished its planned submergences, while all the systems and mechanisms were reported to have operated in the normal mode and in complete compliance with the stated operational characteristics.

Second of Six 

The Project 636.3 Varshavyanka-class submarines (NATO reporting name: Improved Kilo-II) has been referred to as the third generation of large diesel-electric underwater cruisers in service with the Russian Navy. The improved Kilo-class subs, which have been nicknamed “Black Holes” by the U.S. Navy, are meant for operations in shallower, coastal waters and are tasked with anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare. They carry a crew of fifty-two submariners. 

The Volkhov is the second of the six diesel-electric submarines built by the Admiralty Shipyard for the Pacific fleet. The first boat of this Project, the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, was delivered to the Navy last December, while the Admiralty Shipyard is currently constructing two more submarines of this type for the Pacific Fleet: the Magadan and the Ufa. 

Russia has been steadily increasing its submarine fleet in recent years, and three of the Varshavyanka-class submarines were also delivered by Admiralty Shipyards to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in 2014. 

The Project 636.3 submarines are 74 meters long and displace more than 3,900 tons, and due to their strong hull, the submarines have an operational depth of 240 meters and can dive to a maximum depth of 300 meters. The submarines have an operational range of up to 7,500 miles. The Russian submarines have been considered among the world’s quietest underwater cruisers, and the boats can travel at speeds of up to twenty knots, while they have sea endurance of forty-five days.

The boats are armed with Kalibr-PL cruise missiles that are launched from torpedo tubes from the sub’s submerged position. They are also furnished with modern radar and communications systems, sonars and 533-millimeter torpedoes.

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 earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

History,

The Renzan ("Deep Mountain") met the demands for a long-range bomber, and it had a maximum speed of 320 knots (370 mph) and was able to carry a bomb load of 8,800 pounds some 2,300 miles.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The aircraft could have been a threat to the U.S. Navy's fleet earlier in the war, but in 1945 the bombers would have had a hard time getting past the vast air net that protected the American carriers and other warships. Without a forward base, any hopes of striking the United States were also a pipedream.

Armchair historians, as well as studied academics, continue to debate why Nazi Germany failed to develop a long-range bomber before the outbreak of the Second World War. The United States, Great Britain and even the Soviet Union all developed long-range heavy bombers, but the Axis powers failed to develop similar aircraft. The German efforts included the He-177, a twin-engine bomber that earned infamous nicknames such as the "Flaming Coffin;" while the BF 110 medium bomber had the range but was unable to fend off enemy fighters.

Germany instead put much of its efforts into jet aircraft, while the efforts to develop a long-range bomber bordered on the fantastical. That included the Messerschmitt Me 265, which was part of the Amerikabomber program. The idea of the strategic bomber was one that could strike New York City from bases in France or the Azores. While three prototypes were built, production was abandoned in the fall of 1944.

The Imperial Japanese Navy also developed a four-engine long-range bomber – but as with many of the "miracle weapons" produced by the Axis powers, it proved to be too little, too late.

The Nakajima G8N Renzan – originally designated Type 18 experimental land-based attack aircraft – was developed by the Nakajima Aircraft Company, which had developed the KI-43 fighter plane as well as the Kokoku Heiki No. 2, or Kikka ("orange blossom"), a jet aircraft similar in design to the German Me-262.

The Renzan ("Deep Mountain") met the demands for a long-range bomber, and it had a maximum speed of 320 knots (370 mph) and was able to carry a bomb load of 8,800 pounds some 2,300 miles. In addition, it could carry a reduced bomb load up to 4,600 miles. Compared to other Japanese aircraft, which were largely antiquated by the latter stages of the Second World War, the Renzan was modern, with tricycle landing gear and a large single-fin rudder.

The bomber was powered by four 2,000 horsepower Nakajima NK9K-L "Homare" 24 radical engines with Hitachi 92 turbosuperchargers and four-bladed propellers. Its armament included twin 20mm Type 99 cannons in power-operated dorsal, ventral and tail turrets, two 13mm Type 2 machine guns in power-operated nose turret and one flexible 13mm Type 2 machine gun in each of the port and starboard beam positions. The aircraft was crewed by three but carry as many as 42 passengers. To man the machine guns the Renzan had a crew of 10.

As noted the Renzan simply arrived too late to make any contribution to the war effort. The aircraft made its first flight in late October 1944 and the Imperial Japanese Navy had planned to have 48 assembled by September 1945, but only a total of four were built by the time Japan surrendered in August 1945. Even if the Japanese military had built 48 or even 100 for that matter the aircraft likely could have done little to turn the tide.

The aircraft could have been a threat to the U.S. Navy's fleet earlier in the war, but in 1945 the bombers would have had a hard time getting past the vast air net that protected the American carriers and other warships. Without a forward base, any hopes of striking the United States were also a pipedream.

One of the four prototypes was taken to the United States for testing, but it was scrapped. For so many reasons the Nakajima G8N Renzan remains little more than a curiosity of the war.

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

U.S. Navy,

As Navy innovators work intensely to pioneer new methods of undersea communication, many might wish to reflect upon the decades of technical challenges associated with bringing any kind of undersea real-time connectivity to submarine operations.

As Navy innovators work intensely to pioneer new methods of undersea communication, many might wish to reflect upon the decades of technical challenges associated with bringing any kind of undersea real-time connectivity to submarine operations. Historically, certain kinds of low-frequency radio have enabled limited degrees of slow, more general kinds of communication, yet by and large submarines have had to surface to at least periscope depth to achieve any kind of substantial connectivity.

The advent of new kinds of transport layer communications, coupled with emerging technologies woven into unmanned systems, are beginning to introduce potential new avenues of data processing and transmission intended to bring greater degrees of real-time undersea data transmission to fruition.

Sea water diminishes the power of electrical transmission, challenges identified many years ago by the Navy and some of its partners who have been working on under communication for decades such as Northrop Grumman. Northrop’s efforts date back to the World War II era and, along with the Navy and other industry contributors, helped pioneer the innovations that helped adapt RF communications architecture to sonar today. Considering this history, there are some interesting synergies woven through various elements of undersea warfare radio communications.

A 2014 essay by Carlos Altgelt, titled “The World’s Largest “Radio” Station,” details some of the historic elements of how the U.S. Navy pursued Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) undersea connectivity. Through its discussion of low-frequency ELF connectivity, the essay explains the technical challenges associated with undersea communication, which seem to align with how Northrop Grumman innovators describe how undersea communications will need to largely evolve in the areas of acoustics and optics.

As Altgelt notes: “As a result of the high electrical conductivity of sea water, signals are attenuated rapidly as they propagate downward through it. In effect, sea water ‘hides’ the submarine from detection while simultaneously preventing it from communicating with the outside world through conventional high-frequency radio transmissions. In order to receive these, a submarine must travel at slow speed and be near the surface, unfortunately, both of these situations make a submarine more susceptible to enemy detection.”

Alan Lytle, vice president of Strategy & Mission Solutions, Maritime/Land Systems & Sensors division, Northrop Grumman, told The National Interest about several innovations intended to address some of these challenges. For example, regarding a need to “see” and “detect” more undersea, Lytle said Northrop Grumman’s µSAS synthetic aperture sonar can combine with advanced machine-learning algorithms, to automatically detect threats on the bottom.

Some of the technical challenges and communications form part of the inspirational basis for newer kinds of undersea drones engineered with advanced levels of autonomy, such that they can find, track, detect and even detonate or explode enemy targets, such as sea-mines, without needing human intervention.

As part of this manned-unmanned teaming equation, the Navy seeks to further harness its growing fleet of air, surface, and undersea drones, according to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday’s CNO NAVPLAN 2021.

 “They (unmanned systems) will expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage, add depth to our missile magazines, and provide additional means to keep our distributed force provisioned,” Gilday writes.

Gilday’s text brings a few things to mind, as he mentioned drones in the specific context of ISR, something which of course pertains to undersea connectivity and reconnaissance missions. His reference to a “distributed” force also seems quite deliberate, as longer range, higher-fidelity, secure undersea connectivity is crucial to the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations strategy, which envisions a disaggregated, yet networked force intended to leverage newer, longer-range kinds of surveillance technologies. This is precisely the kind of tactical circumstance in which unmanned undersea drones can play an integral part, especially when empowered with higher-speed, GPS-like undersea connectivity.

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

Image: Reuters.

Kris Osborn

Underwater Drones,

Sensors enabled by newer computer applications can see farther and much more clearly underwater.

Could newer kinds of AI-enabled undersea drone data processing and analysis introduce new breakthrough possibilities when it comes to solving the longstanding challenge of achieving high-speed, real-time connectivity?

Submarine commanders and weapons developers explain that UUV undersea functionality is dependent upon limited battery power and would therefore be further enabled by an ability to “process the data at the source of the sensor” to distinguish and transmit only the most critical information needed by human decision-makers.

“That’s the concept, how do you get all of that information back to a human to analyze. Maybe you don’t want to do that? Maybe you want to allow the UUV to do some initial analysis and make some modifications to its behavior autonomously?” Alan Lytle, Vice President of Strategy & Mission Solutions, Maritime/Land Systems & Sensors division, Northrop Grumman, told The National Interest in an interview.

Organizing and optimizing information at the source, Lytle says, requires less power and makes real-time undersea transmission more effective, something which might remove the need to have a forward-operating undersea drone gather data, which can only then be analyzed upon return to the host platform to be downloaded.

“You significantly improve the mission effectiveness of the UUV if you can process data at the source of the sensor, the power and bandwidth required to send back key critical information is significantly lower,” Lytle explained.

This is where AI comes in, as Northrop Grumman developers are working to develop and refine advanced algorithms able to take in “gathered” information, perform analytics and make determinations regarding moments of relevance or significance to commanders. Lytle’s point about forward-operating sensing and computing applies here, as AI-enabled computer systems could take in acoustic or optical sensor data, bounce it instantly against a vast database to make identifications, draw comparisons and perform analysis at the point of collection so as to streamline data transmission and selectively feed the information most crucial to human decision-makers.

Northrop Grumman’s sensing and AI-related computing efforts in this capacity seem to align with Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday’s 2021 NAVPLAN, given that his text makes reference to ongoing work to deploy resilient systems able to “operate with infrequent human interaction.”

“Through analysis, simulations, prototyping, and demonstrations, we will systematically field and operate systems that possess the endurance and resilience to operate with infrequent human interaction,” Gilday writes.

Newer, more advanced computer algorithms allow submarine commanders to operate sensors with much greater degrees of resolution and return-signal image fidelity. Sensors enabled by newer computer applications can see farther and much more clearly underwater.

“With our latest systems, you can get down to less than one-inch resolution. It is the difference between being able to discern a World War II aircraft that crashed into the sea bed, or see much more precisely such that submarine personnel could view bullet holes in the fuselage that must have caused it to be shot down,” Lytle said.

From a tactical circumstance, given that attack submarines and nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines are likely to conduct large amounts of clandestine patrols, it seems as though an ability to avoid having to surface would bring an extraordinary operational advantage. This is particularly critical given that nuclear-armed submarines certainly can’t risk giving up their position. Additionally, attack submarines are increasingly being developed for undersea ISR missions as they can more effectively access areas along enemy coastlines, where more detectable surface ships might be less effective. As part of this operational equation, Virginia-class attack submarines continue to receive cutting-edge upgrades adding new quieting technologies making them much harder to detect.

 “A large part of success in the undersea theater is the deterrence value. There is a tremendous conventional deterrence value, because an enemy does not know where the submarine is or know where the unmanned underwater system is... and if you don’t know exactly where it is, you have to search this massive swath of ocean. What we are trying to enable is an operational circumstance wherein the boat never has to come to periscope depth,” Lytle says.

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

Image: Creative Commons.

Peter Suciu

History, Americas

It was intended to hold up to 11,000 gallons of fuel that would allow it to remain in the air for up to 24 hours at a time.

Here's What You Need to Remember: By the time the first prototype was built it was apparent the XB-19 was already obsolete given the quick advancements that occurred during the war. While it was the largest bomber of the era, it simply wasn't the most advanced and by the time it finally took flight the XB-35 and XB-36 bombers were already being developed.

What was the largest American bomber built during World War II? Most would answer the B-29 Superfortress, the four-engine heavy bomber designed by Boeing and which was used to carry the atomic bombs that ended the war. However, that answer isn't technically the correct one.

It is a trick question.

An even bigger bomber, the Douglas XB-19, was developed and a single prototype was built. While it was flown a handful of times during test flights beginning in June 1941, it never entered active service. The experimental aircraft had a wingspan of 212 feet, while it was 132 feet in length – dwarfing every other World War II aircraft with the exception of the Hughes H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose). The XB-19 displaced 130,230 pounds and had a maximum take-off weight of 164,000 pounds.

The four-engine bomber was advanced when it was developed in the late 1930s and it began as a top-secret, top priority project. However, due to inconsistent funding, the production of the prototype dragged on for more than three years.

Yet even when it was completed the all-metal prototype was different from other bombers as it featured an unfinished silver metal skin, heavily-glazed nose section and stepped cockpit flight deck. Its fuselage was a smooth, teardrop-shaped design that featured a deep belly for the internal bomb bay, and it tapered exceedingly at the rear. The aircraft was among the first bombers to feature a tricycle landing gear as opposed to the "tail-dragger" design that was incorporated on many of the bombers of the era.

It was intended to hold up to 11,000 gallons of fuel that would allow it to remain in the air for up to 24 hours at a time. As a result, it was equipped with bunks and even a galley kitchen.

Due to the size of the aircraft and to accommodate the five M2 .50 caliber machine gun positions, six M1919.30 caliber machine gun positions and two 37mm autocannons the XB-19 carried a crew of 16, but also had provisions for two additional flight mechanics. A six-man relief crew could also be accommodated for long flights.

Outdated On Arrival:

By the time the first prototype was built it was apparent the XB-19 was already obsolete given the quick advancements that occurred during the war. While it was the largest bomber of the era, it simply wasn't the most advanced and by the time it finally took flight the XB-35 and XB-36 bombers were already being developed.

In 1943 the aircraft's Wright R-3350 engines were replaced with Allison V-3420-11 V engines and efforts were made to turn the XB-19 into a transport aircraft. However, the modifications were never completed and the XB-19 made its final flight in August 1946.

After the war, there were efforts to preserve the sole prototype, but those proved futile as there was nowhere to properly display the airframe as the National Museum of the United States Air Force hadn't been constructed at that point. As a result in 1949, the aircraft was scrapped.

Today only two of its enormous main tires remain on display – one is at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force while the other is at the Hill Aerospace Museum.

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Peter Suciu

U.S. Navy Destroyer, Americas

Now the Navy is reportedly taking another look at the Arleigh Burke-class for guidance as it begins the development of a “next-generation destroyer.”

Here's What You Need to Remember: According to the Navy’s 2020 thirty-year shipbuilding plan, the service would start to acquire new vessels beginning in 2025, but it could take a while to get such a ship designed, and it is unlikely the DDG Next would be able to meet the time constraints.  

The U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class of guided missile destroyers was developed during the Reagan era and first entered service when President George H. W. Bush was in office. It has had the longest production run of any post–World War II U.S. Navy surface combatant. To date sixty-eight out of a planned eighty-nine have entered service, and the with the decommissioning of the last Spruance-class destroyer in 2006, the Alreigh Burke-class was the sole active U.S. Navy destroyer until the Zumwalt-class was commissioned in 2016.  

Now the Navy is reportedly taking another look at the Arleigh Burke-class for guidance as it begins the development of a “next-generation destroyer.” Last week while speaking at the Defense One’s State of the Navy event, Adm. Michael Gilday said that the Navy’s future destroyer—dubbed DDG Next—would likely be smaller than the Zumwalt-class but would be more heavily armed with a larger missile magazine than the Arleigh Burke-class. 

“When you talk about large surface combatants, people in their mind’s eye, they’re thinking battleship,” Gilday was quoted of telling the virtual audience at the Defense One event.

“That’s not where we’re going. We’re talking about a ship that’s going to be probably smaller than a Zumwalt, right? I don’t want to build a monstrosity,” Gilday added. “But I need deeper magazines on a manned ship, deeper than we have right now.”

Not Too Big, Not Too Small 

The Cold War era Arleigh Burke-class of warships have an overall length of 500 to 510 feet and a displacement that ranges from 8,230 to 9,700 tons—significantly smaller than the 610 feet and nearly 16,000-ton displacement of the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000).  

Gilday suggested that the DDG Next would be based on the DDG Flight IIIs, the most recently updated version of the Arleigh Burke-class, including its weapons capabilities. However, the Flight III variants are limited in terms of what can be added to the ships. The best option would be to use those systems but on a newly built platform.  

“The idea is to come up with the next destroyer, and that would be a new hull,” said Gilday. “The idea would be to put existing technologies on that hull and update and modernize those capabilities over time.”

While many of the weapons could be from the Flight III variants, the DDG Next would also get a little bit of technology from the Zumwalt-class, notably its power generation capabilities, which could be used to sustain directed energy weapons that could make the warship and the wider U.S. Navy’s entire fleet far more survivable in a future conflict. 

The Thirty Year Plan 

According to the Navy’s 2020 thirty-year shipbuilding plan, the service would start to acquire new vessels beginning in 2025, but it could take a while to get such a ship designed, and it is unlikely the DDG Next would be able to meet the time constraints.  

However, it seems that the Navy has a vision for a ship that could be just the right size, and more importantly which could be developed quickly using the technology of today while being upgradeable as new hardware comes online. 

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Caleb Larson

Marines, World

Here's a breakdown of the strengths, weaknesses, and roles of five notable Marine Corps from around the world.

Here's What You Need to Know: True strength ultimately lies not in equipment or money, but in people and relationships.

America’s most famous Marine, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, coined the phrase, “no better friend, no worse enemy” to describe the United States Marine Corps. The USMC is world-renowned, but does any other country have a Corps that can compare? A breakdown of the strengths, weaknesses, and the roles of five notable Marine Corps from around the world.

United States

If sheer size were the deciding factor, the USMC would win in a heartbeat. With an end-strength of around 186,000 (FY 2017 numbers), and around 38,000 Marine Reservists, some estimate that the USMC is as large as the next ten Marine Corps combined.

The USMC is widely considered to have the longest and hardest basic training of all the American services. At thirteen weeks long, it is indeed grueling. Recruits go through four phases of initial training, where they learn swimming survival basics, conduct rifle qualification, among other things, and peppered throughout with a great deal of physical training. Lastly, the recruits must pass The Crucible, a fifty-four-hour field training exercise in which everything the recruits have learned will be tested. Given little food and little sleep, the recruits are challenged with mental and physical obstacles.

Despite being the smallest and least funded of the armed services, the Marine Corp fields several weapon systems unique to itself. One of these is the versatile Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Using two rotatable rotors, the Osprey can hover like a helicopter, eliminating the need for a runway, and rotate it’s rotors in-flight, functioning like a fixed-wing aircraft and combining the best of helicopters and airplanes.

For a branch dedicated to the common good of the Corps, the Marines are surprisingly individualistic when compared to other branches. The Marine Corps wear the visually distinct, but highly concealing, MARPAT pattern. the MARPAT pattern is reserved exclusively for Marines and certain Navy personnel that work closely with the Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps has also started issuing a new rifle, and perhaps the best rifle in the world, the M27. The M27 was developed in tandem with the German firm Heckler & Kock as a successor to the M4/M16 family of rifles. Featuring a short-stroke piston action, the M27 is more reliable than its M4/M16 predecessors. It is also much more accurate, with an effective range of nearly 800 meters and a Minute of Arc of 2 (a measure of accuracy), compared with the M16 MOA of 4.5.

Nearly all Mission Occupational Specialties, or MOS, in the Marine Corps exist to support the infantryman. Marine air supports Marines on the ground, and organic armor and artillery simplify their support, as they do not necessarily need to coordinate with other services during combat.

At the end of the day, it’s the people that make the USMC so unique. It is the most lopsidedly male of the armed services, and the youngest—without an age waiver, you can’t join over 28 years old. Despite their youth and small size, they are formidable.

Russia

Like their American counterparts, the Russian Naval infantry’s insignia features a fouled anchor, signifying the trials and hardships that Marines face on sea and land. Russian Naval Infantry, as their Marine Corps is known as, serve in a similar role as American Marines— Russia’s expeditionary force in readiness, specializing in ship-to-shore assault operations.

Although Russian landing craft are multitude, much of their landing equipment is legacy Soviet, including a neat amphibious tank, the PT-76. Originally designed in the early 1950s, the PT-76 continues to be in active use, despite its early vintage. Due in part to a modest armor package and hollow rubber capped roadwheels, it is positively buoyant, and can ford most bodies of water, excepting rough sea conditions. Two hydrojets propel the tank in both forward and reverse, and a retractable trim vane helps to streamline the hull in the water, in addition to providing a modest amount of additional armor on land.

In the mid 1990s, American Marines and Russian Naval Infantry conducted joint exercises together in both the United States and in Russia. The Exercise Cooperation from the Sea was a disaster relief exercise that simulated the aftermath of natural disasters and aimed to improved joint relief interoperability. This series of exercises, which ended in 1998, saw U.S. Marines in Vladivostok and elsewhere in Russia, while Russian Naval Infantry got the better deal— conducting joint exercises in Hawaii.

In addition to the singularly unique VSS Vintorez and AS Val rifles, some Naval Infantry operators deployed to Crimea in 2014 were photographed with the not-often-seen OTs-14, a derivative of the AK-74. This odd-looking and rarely-seen bullpup is an even further compacted derivative of the ASK-74, and has a surprisingly long barrel for its compact size.

As a part of the Naval Infantry’s mission as a force-in-readiness, worldwide deployment is something that they are familiar with. In Syria, elements of Naval Infantry reportedly contributed heavily to the Syrian Army’s retaking of Palmyra from ISIS. According to Bellingcat, an investigate journalism site that specializes in open resource intelligence and deep fact-checking, members of Russia’s 61st Naval Infantry Brigade actively “participated in combat activities in the Luhansk Oblast in 2014.”

Seen cumulatively, the Naval Infantry’s combat experience in Ukraine and Syria contributes to its perception as a highly trained and combat effective fighting force. The 61st in particular is regarded by some as the most combat-experienced units in the Russian military.

Royal Marines

The special relationship between the United States and United Kingdom extends to both countries' Marine Corps. Technically known as the Corps of Royal Marines, the Royal Marines are the UK’s light infantry force-in-readiness, albeit at a much smaller scale than their American counterparts, numbering some seven thousand.

Unlike the Marine Corps, the Royal Marines are arranged into battalion-sized units, each with a slightly different mission profile, ranging from cold weather combat, shore assault and raids, to direct-action operations and maritime operations.

Unlike the Marine Corps, the Royal Marines do not operate any heavy armored units. Instead, they favor lightly-armored, highly mobile platforms like Land Rover Wolf, a highly-modified Land Rover Defender, or the MWMIK Jackal vehicle. An open-top 4x4 or 6x6, the Jackal is designed for reconnaissance, fire support, and rapid assault, and trades protection for mobility and battlefield awareness.

The Royal Marine standard-issue rifle is the SA80 chambered in 5.56x45 NATO. A bullpup, SA80 assault rifle is compact platform that has had a multitude of development and reliability issues since becoming the standard issue rifle of the British Armed Forces.

In a recent move, the Royal Marines announced a significant restructuring. In addition to new uniforms distinct from those of the Army (a move done by the USMC in 2002), and trading the problematic SA80 platform for the Colt C7, the Royal Marines are moving towards employing a higher number of smaller units, in line with the approach taken by the United States Marine Corps, which maintains a number of special-operations capable units.

In addition to the smaller units, the Royal Navy is acquiring Littoral Strike ships (quite similarly to the USMC), to further enhance their world-wide, ship-to-shore amphibious capability.

Despite the significant structural changes to an organization firmly rooted in tradition, a Royal Marines spokesperson said that “there are no plans to change anything that denotes the strong history and identity of the Royal Marines, including the Green Beret.” The Royal Marines are here to stay.

South Korea

The South Korean Marine Corps is large when compared to the rest of the world— as of 2018, they numbered 29,000 strong. It is also a relatively young Corps, founded in 1949. Despite their size and age, the Republic of Korean Marine Corps, or ROKMC, packs a serious punch.

ROKMC was trained by the United States and thus fills a similar role as the United States Marine Corps, equipped with armor intended to support the infantry, although they depend on the Navy and Air Force for aerial support. Like the USMC, the ROKMC is also subordinate to the Navy, which it depends on for lift capabilities.

Because of the Korean peninsula’s extensive coastline, the ROKMC plays a crucial role in the ROK armed forces. Their main mission profile is as a quick-reaction force and a strategic reserve that could support Army operations elsewhere on the peninsula. Due to both their coastline and close relationship with the United States military, the ROKMC maintains hundreds of American-derived Assault Amphibious Vehicles.

The ROKMC had developed in tandem with North Korea’s nuclear program. In 2016, as a response to North Korea’s nuclear- and conventional-missile progress, the ROKMC announced the formation of a three-thousand-strong quick-reaction “Spartan 3,000” unit. These three thousand could deploy anywhere on the Korean peninsula in under twenty-four hours in the event of a conflict with the North. Their stated purpose is “destroying key military facilities in the North's rear during contingencies,” which would almost certainly be one of the most dangerous of missions if war broke out between North and South Korea.

China

The Chinese Marine Corps (PLANMC) has an essentially different mission profile than that of the United States Marine Corps. Whereas the USMC is technically subordinate to the Navy, it is a distinct branch of the United States Armed Forces. Numbering around 186,000 the USMC is comparatively massive. Until a 2017 restructuring, the PLANMC numbered a minuscule 10,000.

Post-reorganization, the PLANMC tripled to around 30,000 and is a Marine Corps in the traditional sense, operating from naval ships and bases, providing port and ship security, and an assault capability. All essentially in support of the Navy. Their uniforms support this mainly littoral mission profile, which being blue and white, would be counterproductive as camouflage.

China’s relatively recent acquisition of an over-seas base Djibouti and ongoing disputes in the South China Sea point to an expanding role for the PLANMC, which seems to be gearing towards operations farther removed from China’s immediate border. The PLANMC would likely be China’s readiness force in the event of a conflict in the South China Sea, and has made a showing in joint operations with other countries, including Russia.

Significantly, the PLANMC has no combat experience to speak of. Until 2018, both American and Chinese Marines participated in joint-combat exercises in the Pacific, when the PLANMC was disinvited from participating, due to their destabilizing moves in the South China Sea.

Still, China is aware of its military’s inexperience, and appears to be trying to be making up for this deficiency by partnering more closely with the Russian Navy and Naval Infantry through their bilateral Joint Sea naval operations, where they practice and gain experience in offshore operations.

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

No conversation about Marines or Naval Infantry is complete without mentioning the United States Marine Corps, undeniably the largest, best-equipped, and most self-sufficient Marine force. This is due in large part to the sheer size of the DoD budget, and USMC organic armor and air elements. Still, at the end of the day, the secret strength of the USMC is its relationships. If war would break out with North Korea, China, or Russia, American Marines would no doubt be augmented by Royal Marines, the ROKMC, or other NATO allied Marine forces. Therein lies their true strength, not equipment or money, although important, but people and relationships.

Caleb Larson holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy. He lives in Berlin and writes on US and Russian foreign and defense policy, German politics and culture.

This article first appeared in November 2019.

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

B-2 Stealth Bomber,

"It's really hard to communicate to the average American citizen the strategic security umbrella and blanket that the B-2 provides."

Here's What You Need to Remember: Since its introduction, the B-2 has gone through weapons upgrades, and in 2018, the bomber test-dropped an upgraded, multi-function B61-12 nuclear bomb, which was designed to improve accuracy, integrate various attack options into a single bomb and change the strategic landscape with regard to nuclear weapons mission possibilities.

There is no denying that the U.S. Air Force's B-2 Spirit bomber – the nation's only stealth bomber in service today – can do things other aircraft simply can't do. It has the ability to fly 6,000 nautical miles without refueling, travel at high subsonic speeds, and essentially reach any part of the world within hours. This is why during the opening stages of Operation Enduring Freedom it was called upon to deliver a mighty punch to Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Since its introduction in 1997, the Northrop Grumman B-2 has often been the first to fight. It was designed to penetrate anti-aircraft defenses and can deploy both conventional and thermonuclear weapons. It is also the only acknowledged aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.

The B-2 can carry up to sixteen B-61 or megaton-yield B-83 nuclear gravity bombs on the rotary launchers inside its two bomb bays. The aircraft's avionics are even hardened versus the electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear blasts.

More Miles Ahead

Currently, there are twenty of the B-2s in service, and the Air Force plans to operate them until 2032 at least, when the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider is expected to replace it. By that time the B-2 could have served a total of thirty-five years, which is barely middle age for an aircraft today.

In fact, the early Cold War-era B-52 Stratofortress is actually considerably older than the B-2 Spirit and could remain in service far longer – possibly into the 2050s.

So why might the B-2 have a shortened "dog years" of life left in it?

The main reason is that the B-2 was pushed hard during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and after two decades the Spirit requires intense effort to keep the aircraft flying and effective. However, the fact also remains that the Air Force needs the B-2 bomber at this point and must do everything it can to keep the airframes flying high.

This task of ensuring that the twenty B-2s in the Air Force's bomber fleet continue to dominate and remain operational falls to the Air Force's Life Cycle Management Center Program Office. It is leading a number of initiatives to upgrade and sustain the bomber.

"We are committed to keeping the B-2 flying and ensuring they remain effective for the crucial strategic defense, strategic deterrence mission set," said Col. Cory Brown, the B-2 Program Manager. "We are fielding new software [on the plane], developing classified networks, making sure the low observable [stealth] nature of the plane remains effective, and addressing unscheduled maintenance drivers."

Next Gen Programs

The B-2 Program Office has recently undertaken the Next Gen Zonal Radar Program, which will provide a handheld device to maintainers, which could more effectively evaluate low observable (LO) nature of materials on the aircraft. That could be vital to ensuring the plane's stealth capabilities aren't compromised. It will be available in fiscal year 2021 (FY21).

The program office also undertook a project to redesign a panel on the nose of the bomber, which improved the panel's LO signature but also saved the government more than $40 million.

Brown's team is now working to update the monitors on the aircraft that are used to allow pilots to plan missions. A request for proposal (RFP) was released to Northrop Grumman on Aug. 31, and the goal of the Program Office is to retrofit the entire fleet of twenty aircraft by no later than 2026.

Weapons of the Future

Since its introduction, the B-2 has gone through weapons upgrades, and in 2018, the bomber test-dropped an upgraded, multi-function B61-12 nuclear bomb, which was designed to improve accuracy, integrate various attack options into a single bomb and change the strategic landscape with regard to nuclear weapons mission possibilities.

The Program Office has continued to prepare the aircraft for future weapons.

"We are in the mist of fielding a current operational baseline that will bring B61-12 – next nuclear bomb – software capability to the platform," said Brown. "We will continue to modernize the software baseline to be able to carry future weapons on the aircraft."

The Positive Spirit

While the bomber may only have another decade or so left, Brown and his team are committed to ensuring that the bomber will be able to be relied upon until the B-21 Raider can take over.

"It's really hard to communicate to the average American citizen the strategic security umbrella and blanket that the B-2 provides," added Brown. "It's one leg of a nuclear triad that you would have a hard time arguing that it is not one of the reasons we've had many years of peace where two great nations haven't come together and collided, with a loss of life on a huge magnitude. It's because you have capabilities like the B-2 to ensure that nobody thinks that the United States doesn't have the will or the way to protect its interests."

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kris Osborn

F-16 Fighter,

The Air Force tested whether air-dropped bombs were able to share target-sensitive data with each other in flight to adjust attack specifics, find GPS-jammers, and optimize the speed and precision with which attack operations can be conducted.

Air Force weapons developers see new opportunities with an emerging high-tech program intended to enable in-flight weapons networking or “collaboration” to optimize targeting and flight-path trajectory.

Earlier this year, the Air Force Test Center tested “Collaborative Small Diameter Bombs,” an innovation drawing upon computer algorithms to facilitate in-flight networking with weapons on route to targets. The program, according to an Air Force report, is called Golden Horde. It is built upon the technical concept of Networked, Collaborative and Autonomous, or NCA, weapons.

The test, flying an F-16 fighter jet armed with the bombs, was not a complete success, Air Force Research Lab Commander Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle sees new improvement opportunities with the program.

The Air Force tested whether air-dropped bombs were able to share target-sensitive data with each other in flight to adjust attack specifics, find GPS-jammers, and optimize the speed and precision with which attack operations can be conducted.

“It was another great learning opportunity, as you mentioned. So on the positive side, nine of 13 test objectives are met,” Pringle told The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in an interesting video interview. 

An Air Force description of the Golden Horde technology describes it as a “new capability including a home-on-GPS-jam seeker that gathers information about the battlespace, a software defined radio for communication between weapons and a processor preloaded with collaborative algorithms.” 

While the assessments with the F-16 fighter test revealed certain shortcomings or glitches with some of the technology, something which the Air Force has now corrected, Pringle said. 

The technology is intended to work by loading pre-mission software onto the weapons to enable advanced autonomy such that in-flight weapons can detect, and even avert, enemy countermeasures to locate targets and, if needed, redirect munitions in flight.

The weapons used in the test, Pringle told Mitchell, “couldn’t accept updated flight profile information from the autonomous onboard processor. And so ultimately, the initial flight profile that was in it is where it ended up. So there were no updates. And the flight never changed. But we have done the forensics on it, we’ve corrected what needed to happen..”

The technical and tactical concept of the weapons collaboration, Air Force assessments explain, are designed to enable sensors integrated into the weapons themselves to discern new information, assess it in relation to front-loaded mission specifics, and perform the analytics needed to make in-flight course adjustments. While fully bringing this to fruition may require even more advanced AI-enabled autonomy, it represents the cusp of very significant breakthrough technology.

Pringle emphasized that additional testing is now underway to address and rectify some of the glitches, and build upon success. She mentioned assessments with as many as four collaborative small diameter bomb weapons and efforts to explore time on targets.

“This program is still progressing and we’re really excited about where it is going in 2021,” Pringle added.

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

Image: Flickr.

Peter Suciu

History, Europe

The room was part of the Catherine Palace near St, Petersburg and it was last seen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg in East Prussia.

Here's What You Need to Remember: A full reconstruction of the Amber Room was created at Tsarskyoye Selo based on eight-six black and white photographs taken of various fragments of the room. The construction process, which began in 1979, was finally completed in 2003 at a cost of $11 million.

It was dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” a golden-hued, jewel-encrusted chamber that was made of several tons of gemstones, gold and amber. The opulent “Amber Room” disappeared during the Second World War and was considered a casualty of the conflict, but now divers off the coast of Poland believe they may have found the lost Tsarist-era treasure.

The room was part of the Catherine Palace near St, Petersburg (Leningrad during the war), and it was last seen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad) in East Prussia. After that point its location was lost to time, and it was long assumed the panels that once graced the walls of the palace were destroyed.

However, it has been suggested that instead the Amber Room may have been loaded onto a ship, and now divers believe it could be on the steamer Karlsruhe, which set sail from Königsberg in early 1945 laden with cargo and subsequently sunk after being attacked by Soviet airplanes.

Divers from Baltictech Group have found the wreck after more than a year of searching.

“We have been looking for the wreckage since last year when we realized there could be the most interesting, undiscovered story lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea,” said Tomasz Stachura, one of the team divers, according to the UK Guardian newspaper. “It is practically intact. In its holds, we discovered military vehicles, porcelain and many crates with contents still unknown.”

The steamer had been taking part in Operation Hannibal, which was one of the largest sea evacuations in history. The operation helped more than a million German troops and civilians escape from East Prussia as the Soviet’s Red Army advanced in the closing months of the war.

According to documentation the vessel left the port with a large cargo and 1,083 people on board.

“All this, put together, stimulates the human imagination,” added Tomasz Zwara, another of the divers on the team. “Finding the German steamer and the crates with contents as yet unknown resting on the bottom of the Baltic Sea may be significant for the whole story.”

Origin of the Amber Room

While the Amber Room has been closely associated with Imperial Russia, it was truly an international effort. It was first designed in the early 18th century by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram for the Prussian Monarchy in 1701. It was first housed at Charlottenburg Palace, home to the first king in Prussia, Friedrich I.

Czar Peter the Great of Russia admired the room so much during a visit that in 1716, the Prussian ruler presented it as a gift to his Russian counterpart and it cemented a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.

The Amber Room was shipped to Russia in some eighteen large boxes and installed in the Winter House in St. Petersburg as part of a larger European art collection. However, in 1755 Czarina Elizabeth had the room moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, then named Tsarskoye Selo (Czar’s Village). Italian designer Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli was called upon to redesign the room to fit into its new, larger space and this included the installation of additional amber that was shipped from Berlin.

A Wonder of the World

When the room was expanded in the Catherine Palace it came to total more than 180 square feet, and it consisted of six tons of amber panels, backed with semi-precious stones and gold leaf. It was valued at approximately $176 million dollars in today’s money.

It was not a room for the Russian people in any way.

It was used as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Empress Catherine the Great and later a trophy space for “amber connoisseur” Czar Alexander II.

While only few lucky visitors to court ever saw the room, its reputation spread across Europe. It even became associated with the decadence of Imperial Russia. Yet, the room survived the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, and unlike with the later Chinese Cultural Revolution, which would have destroyed such a wonder, the new Soviet rulers saw the beauty in the room and apparently never considered destroying it.

The Amber Room and World War II

During the Second World War, with the German Army approaching the village, officials and curators of the Catherine Palace tried unsuccessfully to disassemble and hide the Amber Room, but the dry amber was too fragile and began to crumble. Instead an attempt was made to hide the room behind thin wallpaper.

However, the Germans who occupied the palace saw through the crude camouflage.

Under a pair of experts, once again the Amber Room was disassembled. The amber panels, mirrors, cherubs and nymphs were all carefully packed up. On October 14, 1941, Rittmeister Graf Solms-Laubach, who was in charge of the disassembly and packing, ordered the twenty-seven crates shipped to Königsberg and reinstalled in the castle museum on the Baltic Coast.

The museum’s director, Alfred Rohde, was also an amber aficionado of sorts, studied the room’s panel history while it was on display for the next two years.

When the tide of the war turned, Rohde was ordered to dismantle the Amber Room yet again, and he successfully had the contents crated up before the city and castle were bombed in August 1944. That is where the trail has ended, apart from one small panel that was found in western Germany in 1997 after an attempted sale. The Italian stone mosaic was known to have been part of the room. It had been owned by the family of a soldier who had helped pack the Amber Room at Königsberg in January 1945, and this “soldier’s souvenir” sheds some light on the fate of the Amber Room, confirming that it was packed up.

However, it has been suggested that the contents never actually left the castle courtyard and were destroyed during the bombing, while others suggested it was buried in a mine. The most common theory is that it was loaded onto a ship, and perhaps it will be found on the sunken steamer Karlsruhe.

A Modern Replica

A full reconstruction of the Amber Room was created at Tsarskyoye Selo based on eight-six black and white photographs taken of various fragments of the room. The construction process, which began in 1979, was finally completed in 2003 at a cost of $11 million. The new room was dedicated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to mark the 300-year anniversary of St. Petersburg in a unifying ceremony that echoed the peaceful sentiment behind the original Amber Room.

It is on display to the public at the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum Reserve outside of St. Petersburg.

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Kris Osborn

Submarines,

How to subs communicate with the rest of the fleet and overall military. While not an easy challenge to solve, the U.S. Navy has a few ideas. 

Sub-hunting spy planes armed with torpedoes, maritime drones armed with missiles, high-resolution, surface scanning cameras, and fast-moving surface ships dragging sonar sensors while conducting surface reconnaissance are all fast-growing threats to U.S. Navy submarines.

Part of the challenge is finding ways to minimize Navy submarine vulnerability to enemy detection and attack by simply remaining at safer depths, yet in order to achieve a high-degree of high-speed connectivity, submarines need to break the ocean surface by coming to “periscope depth,” which is closer to the surface.

The U.S. Navy is working with a number of industry partners such as Northrop Grumman to identify, evolve and refine new kinds of undersea communications technology.

“Today, the submarine comes to periscope depth and conducts the majority of its transmissions at this depth. Capabilities we’re developing at Northrop Grumman will allow the submarine to never have to come up to the surface, because it is at its most vulnerable when at periscope depth,” Alan Lytle, vice president of Strategy & Mission Solutions, Maritime/Land Systems & Sensors division, Northrop Grumman, told The National Interest in an interview.

Interestingly, while most people might immediately associate Northrop Grumman with high-profile programs such as its B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers, the company’s history with undersea warfare goes back nearly 100 years, including substantial World War II efforts. Years ago, Northrop Grumman was involved in adapting radio frequency (RF) technologies to undersea acoustic systems and developed the first electric torpedoes for Navy submarines.

“We have been working in the undersea domain for well over 50-years, and our support for the Navy stretches back even further,” said Jenny Roberts, director of strategy, investments & integration, Maritime/Land Systems & Sensors division, Northrop Grumman.

Roberts, who formerly worked as a director for undersea influence at the Navy’s Undersea Warfare Division, says Northrop Grumman innovators seek to align closely with the sense of mission and purpose now driving the U.S. Navy’s push to stay in front of undersea warfare technology.

“We bring together the power of the corporation’s continuous innovation to provide capabilities our Navy customers need for mission success,” Roberts explained to The National Interest. As part of the ongoing effort to synchronize efforts with the Navy, Northrop Grumman developers are placing a special premium on innovation in the areas of undersea warfare and cross-domain networking.

For instance, perhaps a surface drone, submarine, ship, or fighter jet can identify and share time-sensitive targeting data across domains in near real-time, integrating crucial threat information exponentially faster than ever before. The ultimate goal of this is to massively truncate sensor-to-shooter timelines. Perhaps an undersea drone could identify an enemy subsea target, pass the data back to an undersea-warfare commander who in turn instantly sends coordinates to a helicopter armed with Very Light Weight Torpedoes. This innovative kill-chain concept was demonstrated by Northrop Grumman in a Navy exercise.

“To deter future conflict or to ensure we win if future conflict arises, we need to provide capabilities which expand the influence of the undersea force, including connectivity across all domains,” Lytle added.

In light of this, Northrop Grumman developers discuss their efforts to link undersea and space domains in the context of the Pentagon’s fast-evolving Joint All Domain Command and Control initiative. JADC2, as it is called, seeks to engender a kind of multi-node connectivity between otherwise disparate pools of information across multiple domains.

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

Image: Reuters.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

Following two decades of experimentation, Marine Corps tank units had their moment of truth at the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Despite the heavy losses suffered by Marine tanks units, it was clear they had spared the lives of thousands of Marine riflemen, making them “the most effective supporting weapon” according to the commander of the 9th Marine Division.

After nearly eighty years of continuous service, in March 2020 the Marine Corps announced it planned to retire its three remaining tank battalions in a bid to re-model the force for a great-power conflict. This article is the second part of a series that looks at the unique history of the Marine armored branch.

Following two decades of experimentation, Marine Corps tank units had their moment of truth at the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943. As recounted in an earlier article, though most of the invasion force’s medium tanks were lost in the first few hours of a disastrous amphibious landing, three Sherman tanks survived and became the bulwark behind which hard-pressed Marines rallied and cleared out Japanese fortifications.

The tank had proven its value in supporting Marine amphibious landings, but its use clearly needed perfecting. The process by which the Marines modified their tanks and tactics to the realities of the Pacific is brilliantly detailed in Steven Zaloga’s U.S. Marine Corps Tanks of World War II.

Stuart light tanks, for example, lacked adequate armor and firepower, so Marine tank battalions—six of which with 46 tanks each saw action by the war’s end—converted to diesel-engine M4A2 Shermans, though some smaller support units still fielded M3 and M5 Stuart light tanks.

Tank-infantry cooperation in Guadalcanal and Tarawa had been crude, with several tanks lost attacking without infantry support. Problematically, grunts lacked reliable means of talking with tankers short of clambering on the hull and knocking on the hatch.

That changed with the installation of “tank telephones” on the hull. Some Marine tanks even began lugging SCR-300 infantry radios as well as spigoted water tanks on their backs to keep the grunts hydrated, as difficulties supplying freshwater infamously bedeviled landing operations. Shermans with hydraulic dozer blades also proved useful for burying fortified caverns, clearing roads and even pushing knocked-out tanks out of the way.

Japanese infantry and artillery could reap a terrible toll on attacking infantry—but their 37-millimeter anti-tank guns could not penetrate the Sherman’s three inches of armor. Even high-velocity Type 1 47-millimeter anti-tank guns introduced in 1943 (2,300 built) could only reliably pierce a Sherman’s side or rear armor. Some heavy anti-aircraft guns, like the 75-millimeter Type 88, could overmatch an M4’s armor, but these were not designed for field mobility and were mostly reserved for the defense of the home islands.

Great Tank Battles of the Pacific Theater

In June 1944 U.S troops began a series of amphibious assault on the Mariana Islands in order to secure bases from which B-29 strategic bombers could strike Japan. The 2nd and 4th Tank Battalion landed on Saipan June 15 with their turret tops painted red or yellow so they could be distinguished from Japanese tanks by U.S. Navy pilots. That proved a wise precaution, because little island became the site of the largest tank battle of the Pacific Theater.

First, on the evening of June 16, Shermans defeated a night attack by Japanese Special Naval Landing Force marines and their Type 2 amphibious tanks. Then at dawn, forty-four Type 97 and Type 95 tanks from the 9th Tank Regiment swarmed over a ridge and stormed the beachhead. In the hours-long brawl that followed 33 were knocked out by Marine Shermans, bazookas and anti-tank artillery including towed 37-millimeter guns and 75-millimeter-gun armed half-tracks. You can see footage of the aftermath here.

In July, the 4th tank battalion wiped out another company-sized tank unit on Tinian, while the 3rd destroyed the last two companies of the 9th Tank Regiment (29 tanks) as it engaged in another futile counterattack at Guam.

Despite their bravery, Japanese tankers faced impossible odds—with little over an inch of armor at best, the 18-ton Chi-Ha were effortlessly penetrated by Marine anti-tank weapons, but could only threaten a 30-ton Sherman’s side or rear armor. The 8-ton Type 95 Ha-Go lacked even that scant hope—and 75-millimeter armor-piercing shells from Shermans were known to punch clean through one side of a Ha-Go’s thin armor and out the other.

Turning up the Heat

But Japanese fortifications proved more resilient to 75-millimeter shells, so Marines increasingly turned to flamethrowers, horrifying weapons capable of flushing out the most fanatical defenders. However, infantry flamethrowers could not reach much further than 30 to 40 meters, limiting an operator’s life expectancy.

Initially, the Marines tried installing M1A1 infantry flamethrowers to fire out the ‘pistol ports’ in tanks, but this proved unwieldy when combat-tested in the battle of Arawe.

Later, mechanics in Hawaii swapped out the main guns on twenty-four M3A1 light tanks with Canadian-built Ronson Mark IV flamethrowers fed by 170-gallon fuel tanks. The projectors on these M3A1 Satan tanks had a range of 75 meters, but limited turret traverse to 180 degrees.

Two companies, each with twelve Satans and three gun-armed M5 escorts, saw action on Saipan and Tinian, where they were used with some success to evict defenders holed up in fortified caverns. But the Ronson’s bulk made the light tank’s interior impossibly cramped, so thereafter the Marines focused on two types of Sherman-mounted flamethrowers.

Roughly half the M4A2 tanks in each battalion ha their hull machineguns replaced with shorter range (65 meters) E4-5 “auxiliary” flamethrowers while retaining their 75-millimeter main gun. Mixed in were smaller numbers of more-effective Sherman POAs with Ronson flamethrowers fed by 290-gallon tanks installed in place of the main gun.

The Marines developed a “corkscrew and blowtorch” tactic, in which gun-armed Shermans cracked open bunkers with 75-millimeter shells before using flame-tanks to douse the insides with burning fluid.

Beefing Up Protection at Peleliu

In the ensuing Marine landing at Peleliu on September 15, 1944, Shermans of the 1st Tank Battalion easily eradicated another armored counterattack by fifteen Type 95 tanks threatening to overrun Marines attempting to secure an airstrip.

But Japanese infantry were well-fortified in the volcanic island and used a network of underground passages to attack from unexpected directions. While Marine riflemen took the worst of the ensuing grim battle of attrition, 45 of the 1st battalion’s 46 tanks were knocked out at some point (nine of them permanently) and two-thirds of the unit’s 31 officers were killed or wounded.

An even tougher fight lay ahead for the Marines on Iwo Jima, to which were committed the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Tank Battalions.  Confronting them were five battalions of anti-tank guns, the 26th Tank regiment with twenty-two dug-in Type 97 tanks, and scores of anti-tank mines with ceramic cases that didn’t trip metal detectors.

Though the Sherman’s frontal armor considerably over-matched Japanese anti-tank gun, they still needed protection from close assaults by Japanese infantry who, lacking portable ranged anti-tank weapons, resorted to suicidally lunging at tanks with grenade bundles, satchel charges or mines on the tip of a pole.

Type 99 magnetic mines designed to latch onto a tank’s metallic hull posed the greatest threat. As a countermeasure, Marine tankers bolted wooden planking onto their side hulls, and later sandwiched in a coating of concrete for additional protection. At Okinawa, units even girded their suspension bogies with wooden slats to protect against satchel charges.

As Japanese infantry often planted charges on the hatches, Marine mechanics welded-on wire ‘bird cages’ to prevent direct contact, and lined the hatches and turret top with spiky penny nails.

As more anti-tank artillery was encountered, Marine tankers piled on sandbags or welded on spare tracks onto the front, side and rear-decks of their tanks, placing additional inches of material between them and 47-millimeter shells racing towards them at two-and-a-half times the speed of sound.

Despite the heavy losses suffered by Marine tanks units, it was clear they had spared the lives of thousands of Marine riflemen, making them “the most effective supporting weapon” according to the commander of the 9th Marine Division. But the armor branch had one sharp fight ahead of it in Okinawa that April as recounted in the next article in this series.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.