The National Interest

Robert Farley

Security, Europe

The states occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the war remain deeply suspicious of Russian intentions.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: The war between Germany and the Soviet Union officially began in late June 1941, although the threat of conflict had loomed since the early 1930s. Germany and the USSR launched a joint war against Poland in September of 1939, which the Soviets followed up with invasions of Finland, Romania, and the Baltic states across the following year.

After Germany crushed France and determined that it could not easily drive Great Britain from the war, the Wehrmacht turned its attention back to the East. Following the conquests of Greece and Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941, Berlin prepared its most ambitious campaign; the destruction of Soviet Russia. The ensuing war would result in a staggering loss of human life, and in the final destruction of the Nazi regime.

The Fight on Land: 

On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe struck Soviet forces across a wide front along the German-Soviet frontier. Romanian forces attacked into Soviet-occupied Bessarabia on the same day. The Finnish armed forces joined the fight later that week, with Hungarian troops and aircraft entering combat at the beginning of July. By that time, a significant contribution of Italian troops was on its way to the Eastern Front. A Spanish volunteer division would eventually join the fight, along with large formations recruited from Soviet prisoners of war and from the local civilian population of occupied Soviet territories.

The course of the war is far too complicated to describe, Suffice to say that the German enjoyed overwhelming success for the first five months of the war, before weather and stiffening Red Army resistance led to a Soviet victory in the Battle of Moscow. Germany resumed the offensive in 1942, only to suffer a major defeat at Stalingrad. The Battle of Kursk, in 1943, ended the Wehrmacht’s offensive ambitions. 1943, 1944, and 1945 saw the pace of Soviet conquest gradually accelerate, with the monumental offensives of late 1944 shattering the German armed forces. The war turned the Wehrmacht and the Red Army into finely honed fighting machines, while also draining both of equipment and manpower. The Soviets enjoyed the support of Western industry, while the Germans relied on the resources of occupied Europe.

The Fight in the Air: 

Mercifully, the nature of the war did not offer many opportunities for strategic bombing. Russia launched a few sorties against German cities in the first days of the war, usually suffering catastrophic casualties. For their part, the German Luftwaffe concentrated on the tactical support of the Wehrmacht. Germany did launch a few large air raids against Russian cities but did not maintain anything approaching a strategic campaign.

Notwithstanding the improvement of the Soviet Air Force across the war, and the effectiveness in particular of attack aircraft, in general, the Luftwaffe mauled its Soviet foe. This remained the case even as the Soviet aviation industry far outstripped the German, and as the Combined Bomber Offensive drew the attention of the Luftwaffe to the west.

The Fight at Sea: 

Naval combat does not normally loom large in histories of the War in the East. Nevertheless, Soviet and Axis forces fought in the Arctic, the Baltic, and the Black Sea for most of the conflict. In the north, Soviet air and naval forces supported convoys from the Western allies to Murmansk and harassed German positions in Norway. In the Black Sea, German and Romanian ships struggled against the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, winning important victories until the tide of the land battle turned. In the Baltic, Russian submarines and small craft fought a guerilla conflict against Germany and Finland for the first three years, although the Germans successfully leveraged their surface naval superiority in support of retreats in the final year of the war.

The Fight Against Civilians: 

The Holocaust is perhaps the most remembered legacy of the War in the East. The invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union brought the bulk of Eastern Europe’s Jewish population under Nazi control, facilitating a German policy of extermination. For non-Jews, German occupation policies were nearly as brutal, although populations sympathetic to the anti-Soviet crusade were sometimes spared.

Towards the end of the war, the Soviets did their best to return the favor. Soviet depredations against the German civilian population of East and Central Europe do not generally receive the same degree of attention as German actions, in no small part because of an enduring (if problematic) sense that the German deserved what they got. Other Eastern European populations were caught in the crossfire, suffering starvation and other depredations from both sides. Nevertheless, there is no question that the Soviets (and the peoples of Eastern Europe) suffered far more deeply from the war than the Germans.

The Costs

The raw statistics of the war are nothing short of stunning. On the Soviet side, some seven million soldiers died in action, with another 3.6 million dying in German POW camps. The Germans lost four million soldiers in action and another 370000 to the Soviet camp system. Some 600000 soldiers from other participants (mostly Eastern European) died as well. These numbers do not include soldiers lost on either side of the German-Polish War, or the Russo-Finnish War.

The civilian population of the territory in conflict suffered terribly from the war, in part because of the horrific occupation policies of the German (and the Soviets), and in part because of a lack of food and other necessities of life. Around 15 million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed. Some three million ethnic Poles died (some before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but many after) along with around three million Jews of Polish and another two million of Soviet citizenship (included in the Soviet statistics). Somewhere between 500000 and 2 million German civilians died in the expulsions that followed the war.

Statistics of this magnitude are inevitably imprecise, and scholars on all sides of the war continue to debate the size of military and civilian losses. There is little question, however, that the War in the East was the most brutal conflict ever endured by humankind. There is also little question that the Red Army provided the most decisive blows against Nazi Germany, causing the vast majority of German casualties during World War II as a whole.

Postwar:

The end of the War in the East left the Soviet Union in control of a vast portion of the Eurasian continent. Red Army forces occupied Germany, Poland, Czechosolvakia, parts of the Balkans, the Baltic states, and parts of Finland. The Western allies remained in control of Greece and much of western Germany, while Joseph Tito established an independent communist regime in Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union redrew the map of Eastern Europe, annexing large chunks of Poland, Germany, and the Baltics, and ceding much of Germany to Polish control. Russian domination over the region would last into the early 1990s when the layers of the Soviet Empire began to peel away.

The scars of the war remain, not least in the absence of the populations exterminated during the conflict. The states occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the war (including Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine) remain deeply suspicious of Russian intentions. For its part, memory of the war in Russia continues to condition Russian foreign policy, and Russia’s broader response to Europe.

Robert Farley is a frequent contributor to TNI, is the author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat.

This article was first published in October 2015.

Image: 

Lyle J. Goldstein

Chinese Navy, Asia

U.S. submarines may well be extremely quiet, yet still vulnerable to detection by active pinging from dipping sonars deployed by helicopters.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The above brief survey of recent Chinese writings on ASW force development provides additional evidence to support the apparently growing notion that U.S. undersea superiority could be a gradually, but steadily, fleeting advantage. An obvious policy recommendation may follow that the U.S. submarine force must be large enough that it can sustain losses in battle against improving adversary ASW capabilities. 

In January 2011, the cover of the Chinese naval magazine 现代舰船  [Modern Ships], which is published by giant state-owned shipbuilding conglomerate CSIC, carried a simple and elegant headline: “056来了” [The 056 has arrived]. In an impressive display of shipbuilding muscle, Beijing has proceeded in the 4.5 years that followed in building nearly 20 of this new type of light frigate or corvette. 

For an interesting comparison, the U.S. Navy has launched less than half that number of its own small surface combatant, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) over a longer span of time.  Never mind that LCS still lacks for an anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM), so it is quite clearly “out-sticked” by the Chinese variant. But what is really impressive about the Type 056 is its ability to fill in a much needed niche-capability in China’s naval arsenal:  the requirement for a small, cheap, versatile, rugged and well-armed patrol ship to show the flag in proximate maritime disputes.  One obvious lesson from the conspicuous buildup described above is to watch the cover of现代舰船  [Modern Ships] carefully.

Last year, two covers of that magazine were dedicated to “coming attractions” in naval aviation:  new anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopters are in the pipeline and may well even enjoy prioritized development.  One cover (4A) showed a modernized, ASW-optimized version, likely called “Z-18F,” of a large workhorse of Chinese naval aviation, the Z-8.  Another somewhat more shocking design gracing the cover of Modern Ships last year (2A) was designated as “Z-20,” and seemed to be a near carbon copy of the SH-60 Sea Hawk, the frontline naval helicopter operated by the U.S. Navy in a variety of roles, including ASW. 

This edition of Dragon Eye will survey some recent developments in Chinese ASW development, emphasizing the surprisingly noteworthy future roles of the two new helicopter variants mentioned above.

But returning momentarily to our theme of Modern Ships magazine covers, yet another issue (3B) from early 2014 shows an illustration of a Type 056 from the stern quarter deploying a prominent variable depth sonar (VDS) as it hunts a nearby adversary submarine.  A variety of sources took note of this major design adjustment for the Type 056 with the first of these ASW-optimized light frigates, featuring the much larger aperture in its stern for the VDS, appearing in late 2013. 

It is true that Beijing has been experimenting with towed arrays since the 1980s.  But most new surface vessels have deployed with long linear-type passive towed arrays.  The new VDS will give the 056 additional active sonar capabilities (along with the bow array) that can “ping” more effectively from within or below thermal layers.  According to the Modern Ships rendering, surface ships that “用主动模式工作，让潜艇无所遁形” [employ active sonar methods of operation will render submarines unable to hide].  Coupled with the possibility of new weapons, such as “火箭自导弹”[homing depth bombs] or even “新型反潜导弹”[a new type of ASW missiles], these forces promise a much more formidable challenge.  Let’s not forget, moreover, that even as the Chinese Navy has been upgrading the sonars and ASW weaponry in its surface fleet, it has also been pushing ahead with an ambitious program to set up fixed sonar arrays on the sea bed in its proximate waters as well.

Undoubtedly, a Chinese move toward more regularized “far seas operations”—quite visible in a variety of realms—will require a renewed emphasis on airborne ASW.  Quite simply, fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft make for highly potent ASW platforms because of their speed, range, search rate and near invulnerability to submarine-launched weapons.  Despite these advantages, aerial ASW has long been an Achilles heel of the Chinese Navy—a fact widely acknowledged in Chinese naval circles.

A decade ago, the PLA Navy may have had as few as a couple of dozen large Z-8 helicopters, progenitor of the new Z-18F.  However, production was radically increased in the 2004-07 time frame, according to the 2014 covers story in Modern Ships, indicative of a new priority for naval aviation.  The same article highlights the much more prominent surface search radar on the new helicopter’s chin.  This radar is said to be capable of picking up submarine masts and periscopes at ranges of at least 40-70 km.  A rather detailed article on the Z-18F appeared in another prominent defense magazine, 航空知识 [Aerospace Knowledge] in late 2014.  This report seems to confirm a graphic that accompanied the Modern Ships report, which had previously suggested that the Z-18F could heft up to four ASW torpedoes—a significant improvement over its predecessor, the Z-8.  Perhaps some skepticism is warranted on this point given perennial difficulties with Chinese helicopter engines. The same report also suggests that the Z-18F will likely have more sonobuoy dispensers than the U.S. Navy’s SH-60 Sea Hawk.  The author says its size may imply that only the European EH-101 has comparable range and capabilities.  According to this report, the Liaoning aircraft carrier is planned to have a complement of six Z-18Fs.  More interesting still is the suggestion that each new Type 055 cruiser will carry two Z-18Fs.  That may partially explain that vessel’s expected large displacement.

Even if the Z-18F can shoulder much of the ASW burden for China’s emerging carrier task groups, there still arises a definite need for a sturdy all-purpose helicopter than can fly off the decks of China’s expanding fleet of modern frigates and medium-sized destroyers (Type 052 variants).  The 2014 cover article on the Z-20 confirms that the current standard bearer, the Z-9C, has proved disappointing, since it apparently is not capable of carrying all the requisite sensors and weapons.  While Chinese analysts do note certain superior characteristics of the Russian Ka-28 even versus the American SH-60—for example, with respect to range—they maintain that its electronics and sensors are outdated.  Thus, the claimed detection range of the Russian dipping sonar (6-8 km) is said to be half of what the Chinese Navy seeks at this point.   In general, the Modern Ships cover story on the Z-20 cites the difficulty of continuously upgrading and also integrating an imported Russian helicopter into the evolving Chinese ASW system.  This article is not shy about the close connection between China’s Z-20 and the American Blackhawk, which after all was exported to China back in the 1980s. 

The Z-20 is said to have first flown back in late 2013, but the available photograph of the prototype does not clarify whether the naval variant has reached the testing stage.  Curiously, neither the Z-20, nor the Z-18F, are discussed in the spring 2015 report by the Office of Naval Intelligence on “The PLA Navy: New Capabilities and Missions for the 21st Century.”

The initiatives described above should be sufficient to convince any analyst that the PLA Navy is poised to make a major push to improve its heretofore weak ASW capabilities.  But there are other major fixed-wing programs including a large ASW-optimized maritime patrol aircraft called “Gaoxin-6” that was recently profiled on the front page of the major Chinese newspaper 国际先驱导报[International Herald Leader].  Another Chinese fixed-wing program that surely has an ASW component is an on-going Chinese effort to produce the world’s largest seaplanes. It is, moreover, highly likely that China will follow the American lead in preparing to deploy drones of all types in the ASW fight.

The above brief survey of recent Chinese writings on ASW force development provides additional evidence to support the apparently growing notion that U.S. undersea superiority could be a gradually, but steadily, fleeting advantage. An obvious policy recommendation may follow that the U.S. submarine force must be large enough that it can sustain losses in battle against improving adversary ASW capabilities.  After all, U.S. submarines may well be extremely quiet, yet still vulnerable to detection by active pinging from dipping sonars deployed by helicopters.  As Chinese aerial ASW improves, moreover, US submarines should perhaps be equipped with weaponry to strike back against the rapidly growing force of adversary aerial targets.  For now, the United States still retains a significant advantage in undersea warfare, but Washington cannot permit superiority to result in complacency.

Lyle J. Goldstein is Associate Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. The opinions expressed in this analysis are his own and do not represent the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. Government. This article first appeared several years ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Editor’s Note: The following is part ten of a new occasional series called Dragon Eye, which seeks insight and analysis from Chinese writings on world affairs. You can find all back articles in the series here.

Image: Flickr.

Adam Lammon

Jordan, Middle East

Jordan has weathered a series of dire challenges in recent years, including the hosting of millions of refugees and new stresses brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Saturday, Jordanian authorities arrested nearly twenty people and placed the kingdom’s former crown prince under house arrest. As first reported by the Washington Post, Jordanian officials moved swiftly to quash a “well-organized” and “far-reaching” alleged coup attempt against King Abdullah II, who has ruled Jordan since 1999 and is a close U.S. and Israeli ally. In a noteworthy statement, Petra, the official Jordanian news agency, further said that the purported plot is known to have unspecified “foreign” backing. The apparent coup attempt comes at a moment when the Hashemite kingdom confronts a welter of problems, at home and abroad.

Although security officials have stressed that Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, the kingdom’s former crown prince and the eldest son of the late King Hussein, had not been arrested, he has reportedly been “asked to cease all movements or activities that could be employed to target Jordan’s security and stability.” In a video provided to the BBC, Prince Hamzah stated that the chief of the general staff of the Jordanian Armed Forces had informed him that he was not allowed to leave his home, communicate with others, or access social media because of his connections to “meetings” and “criticisms” against the country’s political leadership. The prince, whose phone lines have been cut, denied any wrongdoing and further stated that some of his friends, whom the Guardian revealed as Sharif Hassan bin Zaid (a member of the Jordanian royal family and a former envoy to Saudi Arabia) and Bassem Ibrahim Awadallah (a former head of the royal court who is said to be close to King Abdullah), had been arrested.

Despite that investigations are ongoing and additional arrests are expected, governments near and far wasted no time in expressing support for Jordan’s government and King Abdullah II. Not long after reports surfaced, Ned Price, spokesman for the U.S. State Department in Washington, stated that “We are closely following the reports and in touch with Jordanian officials. King Abdullah is a key partner of the United States, and he has our full support.” Responses from regional Arab states followed suit. According to Reuters, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, Palestine, and the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab League all issued statements in support of Jordanian sovereignty, security, and stability. Officials in Israel have not commented on the alleged coup plot as of the time of writing but were reportedly briefed by the Jordanians on the security situation.

Stability in Jordan is certainly of interest to the wider Middle East and the international community at large. Jordan, which has maintained a peace treaty with Israel since 1994 and is considered a crucial U.S. regional ally, has weathered a series of dire challenges in recent years, including the hosting of millions of refugees and new stresses brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. A small country of just over ten million people, Jordan is currently home to over 1.3 million Syrian refugees and the world’s second-largest refugee camp, where conditions are poor and underfunded, and people lack access to healthcare and employment opportunities. This responsibility has strained Jordan’s finances, overburdened its schools, and taxed its infrastructure, Jordan’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation told the Associated Press in 2019.

The coronavirus pandemic, too, has heightened tensions in the kingdom. Although Jordan was previously regarded as an international success story following its quick decisions to close its borders and enact restrictive lockdowns, the country experienced a sharp increase in cases last fall, before seeing another wave of cases spike in March. Now counting over 622,000 cases of Covid-19 and more than 7,000 related deaths, the kingdom is hoping that vaccines can be its way out of a prolonged crisis that is overwhelming hospital wards and cemeteries alike.

Protests against the government over seemingly endless lockdowns, perceived political corruption, and economic problems have also become more commonplace. For instance, Amman’s efforts to secure International Monetary Fund loans by implementing austerity reforms have provoked sustained public opposition and assertions that the government is selling out its politics to foreign donors. Moreover, following widespread demonstrations in response to the government’s repression of a teacher’s strike and anti-lockdown protests, the deaths of nine coronavirus patients who ran out of oxygen in a government hospital have resulted in increased demands for the government’s resignation.

These internal problems also follow a slew of external political challenges for the kingdom. It is well known that Amman was not a fan of former President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plans; King Abdullah warned Trump against moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and rejected Trump’s Middle East “peace to prosperity” plan while having to contend with the protests that the U.S. president regularly instigated. The adoption of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain further shifted the ground beneath the kingdom’s feet. Until recently, Jordan had been one of only two Arab countries that maintained close relations with Israel. The accords, and speculation that Saudi Arabia may be next to normalize relations with Israel, have changed this dynamic; Amman may not be considered the vital interlocutor it once was—especially now that Arab capitals are moving closer to Israel despite a lack of Israeli-Palestinian peace. If this trend continues, Jordan will have to make tough decisions about its place in this emerging regional order, regarding both the Palestinian refugees that live within its borders and the funding from Gulf capitals on which its survival continues to depend.

Adam Lammon is assistant managing editor at The National Interest. Follow him on Twitter @AdamLammon.

Image: Reuters.

The Conversation

Health, Americas

Cocaine is a dangerous substance on its own, but becomes particuarly deadly when combined with alcohol. 

When anyone under the age of 40 is admitted to a hospital emergency department complaining of chest pain, the doctor is likely to ask if the patient has taken cocaine. Cocaine use is a risk factor for heart attacks, but that risk is magnified when combined with alcohol.

According to EU data, around 2.3m young adults (aged 15-34) in Europe used cocaine in the last year. And cocaine use in the UK has been increasing rapidly, with Bristol and London leading the way.

Londoners consume twice the amount of any other European city – roughly 23kg of the class A drug every day. This works out at more than half a million doses of cocaine, with an estimated street value of £2.75m.

What makes this data more striking is that while the cost of a gram of cocaine has historically remained the same, the purity has increased dramatically, from 20% in 2009 to 50% in 2016, with some reports of super-strength (100%) cocaine being sold.

How cocaine works

Cocaine has many effects on the body but has several target organs: the brain, heart and liver. Cocaine affects the brain by increasing the amount of a chemical called dopamine in the brain, which causes a person to feel euphoric, have more energy and feel more confident. Cocaine stimulates the reward centre of the brain within seconds to minutes. But the effects are short-lived, lasting between five and 30 minutes, which partly depends on how it is taken. Injecting or smoking cocaine results in a shorter-lasting high (five to ten minutes) than snorting (15 to 30 minutes).

The short-lasting effects cause a user to repeat taking cocaine for the rewarding stimulus, which can result in a person eventually becoming addicted. The consequences of long-term use include an increased risk of stroke, heart attack and depression.

Dangerous by-product

Many people who take cocaine drink alcohol at the same time. This is in part because of the opposing physiological effects of each drug. Cocaine can increase anxiety, whereas alcohol acts as a depressant, which relieves anxiety. The combination can also enhance the euphoric effect, fuelling the brain’s reward system. Despite this, an unknown consequence to many regular or even recreational users is that combining alcohol with cocaine is cardiotoxic.

The liver is the major organ where cocaine is metabolised (broken down). But when cocaine is taken with alcohol, the liver produces a new byproduct called cocaethylene. It is thought that about 20% of the cocaine that is consumed is turned into this new chemical. Cocaethylene also remains in the blood circulation three to five times longer than cocaine.

Cocaethylene has considerably greater potency than cocaine, increasing the heart rate and blood pressure, which can lead to increased risk of stroke, arrhythmia and heart attack. Some studies suggest a 20-fold increased risk of a heart attack when cocaine and alcohol are used together. Alcohol’s toxic products can also directly affect the heart, lowering blood pressure and causing an increase in heart rate. Our group has shown that binge drinking can increase the risk of a heart attack.

As cocaethylene blocks the reabsorption of dopamine in the brain, it produces higher euphoric effects for both cocaine and alcohol, which can create a vicious cycle of taking more of each drug. A person is also more likely to engage in risky and violent behaviour.

Both alcohol and cocaine alone can cause inflammation (hepatitis) to the liver, however, when taken together where cocaethylene is produced, studies have reported greater liver injury.

As cocaine is more readily available in many cities across the world, it is important for users to be fully aware of the short- and long-term health risks of using cocaine and alcohol because the consequences can be fatal.

Vinood Patel is a Reader in Clinical Biochemistry, University of Westminster

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

Image: Reuters 

Richard Douglas

Guns,

Though its price slightly above average, the Ruger SP101 is very durable and an excellent choice for anyone who needs a solid revolver for personal defense.

Ruger’s SP101 is a small, durable, and elegant-looking revolver that’s great for concealed carry, personal defense, or even home defense. It’s available in a variety of calibers, including .357 Magnum, .38 Special, .327 Federal, and .22 LR. Throughout my years of owning this little revolver, I’ve never had any failures whatsoever. It’s incredibly reliable and built for years of consistent service.

The SP101 features a triple-locking cylinder, locked into the front, bottom, and rear of the frame to ensure dependability and positive alignment. There’s also a transfer bar safety, which will prevent any accidental discharges during concealed carry. The SP101 is very easy to take down for cleaning or maintenance, and requires no special tools to do so.

It comes with a sleek, brushed stainless steel finish for extra aesthetic appeal. While it’s not quite as nice as what you might find on a Smith & Wesson revolver, it’s still very high-quality. The SP101 also features a cushioned rubber grip with either a black synthetic or hardwood insert, depending on which model you choose. It feels nice in your hand, and there’s no exposed metal in the backstrap to further ensure a secure, comfortable grip. It’s great for me, but if the grip doesn’t quite meet your standards, the frame easily accommodates custom grips as well.

Most SP101 models come with a five-round capacity, apart from the .22 LR model (which comes with an eight-round capacity) and the .327 Federal (six-round capacity). You can shoot the revolver in double-action or single-action by manually cocking the hammer. I’d recommend shooting in single-action for a quick, light pull that breaks around 4 lbs, as the double-action pull can be long, gritty, and quite heavy, breaking around ten to eleven pounds.

This revolver comes in several different barrel lengths, including 2.25-inch, 3-inch, and 4.2-inch. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and designed for ultimate concealability and easy storage. Weighing in at around twenty-five ounces, it is a bit heavy for its size. However, this heft does help to mitigate some of the recoil.

Just like the Taurus 380, it’s relatively soft shooting despite its small size. The .357 loads are much more snappy than .38 loads, but the combination of the revolver’s heavier weight, solidity, and cushioned grip make the recoil much more manageable than most snubnose revolvers.

As far as accuracy goes, you’ll have the best chance at hitting your target from short distances. Shooting in single-action helps with accuracy, as well. In fact, when I switched from double-action, I was able to cut my five-shot groups in half! My average grouping in single-action was just 1.5 inches from twenty-five yards, using various .38 Special loads. Getting small groupings from close distances (up to thirty yards) is easy, but anything further requires a bit of practice.

It comes standard with some basic sights, lowered to reduce the chances of snagging on your clothes when you draw the revolver from the concealed carry position. Both are adjustable for windage and elevation and set within the frame.

The MSRP of the Ruger SP101 is between $719–$769, depending on which model you choose, but you can usually find them online for around $550. It is a higher-than-average price, but extremely durable, soft shooting, and an excellent choice for anyone who needs an easy-to-conceal revolver for personal or home defense.

Richard Douglas writes on firearms, defense and security issues. He is the founder and editor of Scopes Field, and a columnist at The National Interest, 1945, Daily Caller and other publications.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Stealth Bomber,

The YB-49 prototypes suffered an unusual run of bad luck.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The B-2 Spirit, while utilizing radically different technology, bears a strong visual resemblance to its distant cousin. Indeed, the two aircraft share exactly the same wingspan. Northrop adopted the flying wing shape for the B-2 because it offers the advantage of a low radar cross-section.

As the United States approached World War II, it enjoyed the luxury of many innovative aircraft companies, and a ton of money to spend.  Part of this bounty went to pursuit aircraft, part to tactical attack planes, and part to long-range bombers. This last generated one of the most interesting failures ever to emerge from the U.S. aviation industry; the Northrop YB-49 “flying wing” bomber.

The Flying Wing

Early aviation engineers appreciated the potential for a “flying wing” design. A flying wing, which minimizes fuselage and usually eliminates the tail, reduces many of the aerodynamic compromises associated with a normal fuselage, reducing overall drag. However, many of these features enhance stability, meaning that a flying wing often lacks the stability of a traditional airframe. This makes the aircraft more difficult to fly, especially before the advent of fly-by-wire technology. A flying wing can also struggle with creating space for crew, payload, and defensive armament, as any of these can reduce the aerodynamic advantages than the shape offers.

Nevertheless, engineers (especially in Germany and the Soviet Union) tried repeatedly in the interwar period to develop a viable flying wing, either for transport or for military purposes. While these efforts yielded useful data, they rarely resulted in practical airframes. Near the end of World War II, the German successfully developed a jet fighter flying wing, although it did not enter mass production.

From XB-35 to YB-49

In the early years of World War II, U.S. strategists realized that it might become necessary to bomb Germany directly from the United States, especially if Great Britain left the war. A U.S. Army Air Corps request triggered proposals from a Boeing-Consolidated alliance (eventually Convair) and from Northrop. The former resulted in the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, the latter in the XB-35. The B-36 had a relatively conventional design; it looked more or less like a bigger version of the extant bombers of the time, although it had innovative features. The XB-35, on the other hand, was something new to U.S. military aviation; a flying wing. It was smaller than the B-36, but comparable in many performance features.

By 1944, the XB-35 had fallen behind the B-36 (although both suffered significant technological problems), and in any case the immediate strategic necessity for a trans-continental bomber had waned. The Air Force, which acknowledged that both the B-36 and the XB-35 were largely obsolete, canceled the latter instead of the former because it believed that the problems of the B-36 were easier to solve. However, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) found the flying wing concept sufficiently intriguing that it proposed redesigning the XB-35 airframe around a jet, rather than piston, engines. Northrop developed a plan to re-engine a number of incomplete XB-35 frames with jets, eventually completing three such conversions and preparing several more.

The jet engines improved the top speed of the bomber to 493 miles per hour, an improvement of about 20% over its antecedent. The service ceiling of the YB-49 also increased, an important consideration for escaping Soviet interceptors.  However, the fuel-hungry engines shrank the YB-49s combat radius, making it more comparable to a medium bomber than to the long-range B-36. Unfortunately, while the YB-49 could outrun the B-36, it lacked the speed of Boeing’s new B-47 Stratojet medium bomber.

Sabotage?

The YB-49 prototypes suffered an unusual run of bad luck. One prototype was lost with five crew members in June 1948, when the aircraft broke up in midflight. Another was lost during taxi when the nosewheel collapsed, leading to a fire that destroyed the entire aircraft. The Air Force cancelled the contract for the YB-49 in May 1950, shortly after this second accident. The last prototype, a recon variant, flew until 1951 and was scrapped in 1953.

Advocates of the YB-49 long nursed the belief that the Air Force had deliberately sabotaged the program in preference for the B-36 and other, later bombers. Jack Northrop, founder of the company, believed that the Air Force canceled the YB-49 because he would not agree to a merger with Convair. A few dark rumors implied that the accidents suffered by the YB-49 prototypes had not been accidental at all, but rather the result of sabotage. No meaningful evidence has ever emerged to substantiate these allegations.

B-2

Northrop would not realize success in an all-wing airframe until decades later. The B-2 Spirit, while utilizing radically different technology, bears a strong visual resemblance to its distant cousin. Indeed, the two aircraft share exactly the same wingspan. Northrop adopted the flying wing shape for the B-2 because it offers the advantage of a low radar cross-section. Advances in fly-by-wire technology have made the B-2 much easier to fly than the YB-49 (or the YB-35). All indications suggest that Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber will have a similar configuration, as will the Xian H-20 strategic bomber and the Tupolev PAK DA. 

Although the YB-49 never reached full production, experience with the frame helped validate the concept which now dominates international thinking on strategic bomber design.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Security, Americas

Instead of an easy victory, the British handed the Americans a devastating defeat.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: 

American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests. Nevertheless, each of these avoidable defeats proved costly to the United States—in blood, treasure and time.

Nations often linger on their military defeats as long as, or longer than, they do on their successes. The Battle of Kosovo remains the key event of the Serbian story, and devastating military defeats adorn the national narratives of France, Russia and the American South. What are the biggest disasters in American military history, and what effect have they had on the United States?

In this article, I concentrate on specific operational and strategic decisions, leaving aside broader, grand-strategic judgments that may have led the United States into ill-considered conflicts. The United States may well have erred politically in engaging in the War of 1812, World War I, the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, but here I consider how specific failures worsened America’s military and strategic position.

Invasion of Canada

At the opening of the War of 1812, U.S. forces invaded Upper and Lower Canada. Americans expected a relatively easy going; the notion that Canada represented the soft underbelly of the British empire had been popular among American statesmen for some time. Civilian and military leaders alike expected a quick capitulation, forced in part by the support of the local population. But Americans overestimated their support among Canadians, overestimated their military capabilities, and underestimated British power. Instead of an easy victory, the British handed the Americans a devastating defeat.

American forces (largely consisting of recently mobilized militias) prepared to invade Canada on three axes of advance, but did not attack simultaneously and could not support one another. American forces were inexperienced at fighting against a professional army and lacked good logistics. This limited their ability to concentrate forces against British weak points. The Americans also lacked a good backup plan for the reverses that the British soon handed them. None of the American commanders (led by William Hull, veteran of the Revolutionary War) displayed any enthusiasm for the fight, or any willingness to take the risks necessary to press advantages.

The real disaster of the campaign became apparent at Detroit in August, when a combined British and Native American army forced Hull to surrender, despite superior numbers. The British followed up their victory by seizing and burning several American frontier outposts, although they lacked the numbers and logistical tail to probe very deeply into American territory. The other two prongs of the invasion failed to march much beyond their jumping-off points. American forces won several notable successes later in the war, restoring their position along the border, but never effectively threatened British Canada.

The failure of the invasion turned what Americans had imagined as an easy, lucrative offensive war into a defensive struggle. It dealt a major setback to the vision, cherished by Americans, of a North America completely under the domination of the United States. Britain would hold its position on the continent, eventually ensuring the independence of Canada from Washington.

Battle of Antietam

In September 1862, Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland with the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s objectives were to take advantage of foraging opportunities (the movement of armies across Virginia had left the terrain devastated), support a revolt in Maryland and potentially inflict a serious defeat on Union forces. Unfortunately for Lee, information about his battle disposition fell into the hands of General George McClellan, who moved to intercept with the much larger Army of the Potomac. President Lincoln saw this as an opportunity to either destroy or badly maul Lee’s army.

The Battle of Antietam resulted in 22,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest day in the history of the Americas. Despite massive numbers, a good working knowledge of Lee’s dispositions and a positional advantage, McClellan failed to inflict a serious defeat on the Confederates. Lee was able to withdraw in good order, suffering higher proportional casualties, but maintaining the integrity of his force and its ability to retreat safely into Confederate territory.

McClellan probably could not have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia at Antietam (19th-century armies were devilishly difficult to annihilate, given the technology available), but he could have dealt it a far more serious setback. He vastly overestimated the size of Lee’s force, moved slowly to take advantage of clear opportunities and maintained poor communications with his subcommanders. A greater success at Antietam might have spared the Army of the Potomac the devastation of Fredericksburg, where Union forces launched a pointless direct assault against prepared Confederate positions.

Antietam was not a complete failure; the Army of Northern Virginia was hurt, and McClellan forced Lee out of Maryland. President Lincoln felt confident enough following the battle to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, promising to free slaves in rebellious states. Nevertheless, Antietam represented the best opportunity that the Union would have to catch and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, which remained one of the Confederacy’s centers of gravity until 1865.

Operation Drumbeat

On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Germany’s treaty obligations to Japan did not require action in case of Japanese attack, but Germany nevertheless decided to make formal the informal war that it had been fighting with the United States in the Atlantic. Historically, this has been regarded as one of Hitler’s major blunders. At the time, however, it gave German submariners their first opportunity to feast upon American coastal shipping.

In the first six months of 1942, the U-boat force commanded by Admiral Doenitz deployed into the littoral of the eastern seaboard. The Germans had observed some restraint prior to Pearl Harbor in order to avoid incurring outright U.S. intervention. This ended with the Japanese attack. The German U-boats enjoyed tremendous success, as none of the U.S. Army Air Force, the U.S. Navy, or American civil defense authorities were well prepared for submarine defense. Coastal cities remained illuminated, making it easy for U-boat commanders to pick targets. Fearing a lack of escorts (as well as irritation on the part of the U.S. business community), the U.S. Navy (USN) declined to organize coastal shipping into convoys. The USN and U.S. Army Air Force, having fought bitterly for years, had not prepared the cooperative procedures necessary for fighting submarines.

The results were devastating. Allied shipping losses doubled from the previous year, and remained high throughout 1942. German successes deeply worried the British, such that they quickly dispatched advisors to the United States to help develop a concerted anti-submarine doctrine. Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) was (and is) immensely complicated, requiring a great deal of coordination and experience to pull off correctly. The United States had neither worked diligently on the problem prior to the war, nor taken the time to learn from the British. However, the USN would make good its mistake later in the war, developing into a very effective ASW force, and deploying its own submarines to great effect against the Japanese.

Across the Partition, 1950

Following the successful defense of Pusan, and the stunning victory on the beaches of Inchon, the United States Army and Marine Corps, with support of Republic of Korea forces, marched deep into North Korea in an effort to destroy the Pyongyang regime and turn over full control of the Korean Peninsula to Seoul. The United States saw a counteroffensive as an opportunity to roll back Communist gains in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, and punish the Communist world for aggression on the Korean Peninsula.

This was an operational and strategic disaster. As American forces approached the Chinese border on two widely divergent (and mutually unsupportable) axes, Chinese forces massed in the mountains of North Korea. Beijing’s diplomatic warnings became increasingly shrill, but fresh off the victory at Inchon, few in the United States paid any attention. China was impoverished and militarily weak, while the Soviet Union had displayed no taste for direct intervention.

When the Chinese counterattacked in November 1950, they threw back U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces with huge loss of life on both sides. For a time, it appeared that the People’s Liberation Army’s counteroffensive might completely rout United Nation forces. Eventually, however, the lines stabilized around what is now the Demilitarized Zone.

This failure had many fathers. While General Douglas MacArthur pushed most aggressively for a decisive offensive, he had many friends and supporters in Congress. President Truman made no effort to restrain MacArthur until the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. U.S. intelligence lacked a good understanding of either Chinese aims or Chinese capabilities. The invasion resulted in two more years of war, in which neither China, nor the United States could budge the other very far from the 38th parallel. It also poisoned U.S.-Chinese relations for a generation.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army

On May 23, 2003, Paul Bremer (chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority) ordered the Iraqi Army to disband. It is difficult to overstate the unwise nature of this decision. We don’t need hindsight; it was, as many recognized, a terrible decision at the time. In a moment, swept aside was the entirety of Iraqi military history, including the traditions and communal spirit of the finest Iraqi military formations. Eradicated was the best means for managing the sectors of Iraqi society most likely to engage in insurgent activity.

It’s not hard to see the logic of the decision. The Iraqi Army was deeply implicated in the Baathist power structure that had dominated Iraq for decades. Many of its officers had committed war crimes, often against other Iraqis. It was heavily tilted towards the Sunnis, with few Shia or Kurds in positions of responsibility. Finally, it had, from the American perspective, a recent history of appallingly poor military performance. As Bremer argued, it had largely dissolved in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But this was not how many Iraqis viewed the army. The Royal Iraqi Army had come into existence in the early 1920s, when Iraq remained a protectorate of the British Empire. It had revolted in 1941, but the British made the wise decision to keep the force together so as to maintain order. In 1948, its units fought against Israeli forces during the wars of Israeli independence, and it participated in the 1967 war, if briefly. In the 1980s, it waged an eight-year struggle against Iran. While its legacy was complex, for many Iraqis, service in the Army (and in particular its performance against Iran) remained a source of personal and national pride. Eradicated was eighty years of institutional history.

It’s impossible to say how the reconstruction of the Iraqi Army might have played out differently, but then it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been worse. The Iraqi Army has consistently failed in the most elementary of military tasks when not directly supported by American forces. It remains unpopular in broad sectors of Iraqi society, and its performance against lightly armed ISIS fighters has made it the laughingstock of the region.

Conclusion

American military failures have undoubtedly had an impact on the country’s strategic position, but have yet to fundamentally undercut national power. The United States recovered quickly from Operation Drumbeat, Antietam, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the defeat in Korea.

National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests. Nevertheless, each of these avoidable defeats proved costly to the United States—in blood, treasure and time.

This article was first published in 2014.

Daniel Khalessi

U.S. Democracy, Americas

An old adage warns us that people who stand for nothing fall for anything. March 27, 2021, marked the passing of a great Cold War diplomat and professor who stood for something: Charles Hill.

An old adage warns us that people who stand for nothing fall for anything. March 27, 2021, marked the passing of a great Cold War diplomat and professor who stood for something: Charles Hill. From his time as a young China watcher during the Sino-Soviet split to his experiences as a career diplomat and trusted adviser to former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Hill committed his life and teaching to the cause of upholding world order.

As a Yale professor, he co-founded the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy and pushed his students to think critically about the competing forces of world history. In his book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, he argued that effective leaders made sound strategic decisions because they could “sense the course of history.” He called this a strategist’s “sixth sense”—the ability to “size up the situation at one glance and decide how to incorporate it, or not, into your grand strategy.” 

To this end, Hill pushed his students to study oratory, geography, literature, classics, and philosophy. He viewed these disciplines as integral to leadership, diplomacy, and strategy—despite the fact that the many universities and public policy schools had long abandoned them. To Hill, the idea that policy schools would purport to teach “diplomacy” but fail to introduce students to the time-honored arts of great diplomats was irrational. For Hill, strategy was not political science; it was more of a philosophy of history.  

The central theme in Hill’s philosophy of history was that the international state system is under siege by modern-day empires and revisionist powers. A rising China, revanchist Russia, revolutionary Iran, and resurgent right-wing extremism in America threaten the international state system. In Hill’s view, America is the only nation with the creed, capacity, and coalitions congruent with establishing a balance of power that preserves world order.

To be sure, America cannot and should not extinguish any and every threat to the international state system. Prudent strategy requires an ecological view of tectonic shifts, prioritizing objectives, building coalitions, balancing opposing forces, and not losing sight of America’s highest national interest: preventing threats to order and liberty at home.

Hill would often point to Alexander Hamilton as an American strategist who understood well that the demands of statecraft must trump soulcraft. As the Jeffersonians pushed for America to support the French Revolution, Hamilton argued that American involvement would lead to a war “with greater dangers and disasters than that by which we established our existence as an independent nation.” The survival of the fledgling American republic was more important than the rigid pursuit of ideology through military adventurism.

At the same time, American leaders must not become paralyzed by the fear of war. The first rule of strategy, Hill noted, is to “never tell your opponent what you are not going to do.” Today, the word diplomacy has lost meaning. For too many, its practice has become synonymous with accommodation, concession, détente, or even appeasement. But historically, the purpose of diplomacy has been much more: to extract concessions, forge coalitions, and construct international rules and procedures. Accommodation was not its sole purpose. In the Cold War, Paul Nitze argued that American diplomacy was analogous to Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity. As Hill explained, America would need to be “adversarial and accommodating at the same time.”

Absent meaningful diplomacy and strategic foresight, world order can collapse in three different ways. First, America surrenders its leadership role out of a fear of war. Second, America sleepwalks into a nuclear war through miscalculation. This war, Reagan famously noted, that “cannot be won and must never be fought.” And third, despotism emerges in America.

The remedy to the first is American economic, diplomatic, scientific, and military strength. The remedy to the second is the marriage of prudence with deterrence. The third, however, will require nothing short of a societal renewal of America’s commitment to law, national service, and civic engagement.

If despotism were to “spring up amongst us,” as Lincoln argued in his Lyceum Address, then “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The collapse of American democracy would pose the greatest threat to world order in a trial of a thousand years, and thus America must stand for something, so it falls for nothing.

Daniel Khalessi is a J.D. Candidate at Stanford Law School and a former student of Professor Hill’s in the Yale Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.  

Image: Reuters

The Conversation

Culture, Britain

Easter Eggs are plentiful in Great Britain today, but that was not always the case. 

For weeks (and weeks) in the run up to Easter, brightly packaged chocolate eggs fill the shelves of British supermarkets. Piled high and sold cheap, they are easy to get hold of – even hard to avoid.

But this wasn’t always the case. For almost a century after the first ones were produced in the 1870s by Fry’s and Cadbury’s, chocolate eggs were a luxury product. They were expensive, and difficult to find, with specialist confectioners often requiring orders to be made several months in advance.

The ease of buying an Easter egg changed dramatically for British consumers in the middle of the 20th century, as they appeared in a wider range of retail outlets. Just a few years after the end of wartime rationing, Easter eggs were widely available in 246,400 outlets and thousands more co-operative shops.

But even then, matching supply and demand was a real headache for both manufacturers and retailers. After Easter Sunday, remaining stock was difficult to sell, potentially wiping out profits.

Shopkeepers did not want to over order because they had much less power over how much they could charge for sweet treats. Manufacturers were allowed to fix the prices of chocolate and confectionery until 1967 through Resale Price Maintenance legislation. If a shop wanted to discount Easter goods after the festival ended, they had to ask the permission of the manufacturer.

Although it sounds like manufacturers had it all their own way, confectionery producers made only slightly higher margins on Easter eggs compared to other chocolate goods – and eggs were much more difficult to make.

Meanwhile, self-service was becoming the major innovation in post-war British retailing. The number of supermarkets grew from approximately 50 in 1950 to 572 by 1961, and by 1969 there were as many as 3,400. Self-service operations (including smaller stores and supermarkets) accounted for around 15% of grocery turnover in 1959, rising to as much as 64% ten years later. Specialist confectionery shops were worried by the trend – and rightly so.

Then in 1967 the abolition of price fixing legislation led to Easter-themed goods becoming increasingly important in the supermarkets’ calendar. Ever since, they have offered cut-price chocolate eggs before Easter to attract shoppers into their stores.

Competing for for the deepest discounts and the largest sales, the pressure switched to manufacturers who had to meet demand, but risk over production.

How do you eat yours?

In the 1970s, supermarkets routinely cut the price of Easter eggs, meaning shoppers were shielded from some of the worst effects of inflation and soaring cocoa prices.

Yet despite the difficult economic environment, in 1974, Grocer magazine reported that Cadbury’s aimed to significantly boost its share of the annual Easter egg business, which was worth around £23m. The following year, Cadbury’s hoped to gain 45% of the market with 21 items in its Easter range.

Since the 1980s, manufacturers have invested heavily in technology and production abroad, in a bid to reduce their costs. And to meet supermarket demands for heavy discounts, they have reduced the variety of Easter eggs they produce.

Consequently, the consumer price of chocolate eggs has remained broadly similar for the last 40 years or so. Taking into account retail price inflation, an egg costing two shillings in 1962 should be around £2.20 today, which isn’t too far from what we would expect to pay in most supermarkets for a chocolate egg in 2018 (despite the rising costs of cocoa over the past ten years).

The Easter Bank Holiday is a time when shoppers spend money on groceries, which means that attracting people into stores is a particularly important objective for retail managers at this time of year. One way to do this is through big discounts on traditional chocolate treats.

Nobody remembers resale price maintenance now, but we are left with the effects of this change in supermarkets up and down the country. The cut price Easter egg is now a major feature of our supermarkets – and is likely to stay.

Changes in the law and the rise of self-service shopping have provided a huge boost to the total Easter chocolate trade. Worth an estimated £10m in 1960, it has jumped to around £364m today.

The real losers from this were smaller sweet shops, who lost out as sales migrated to supermarkets. And although Easter eggs are big business, it is likely that we don’t value them as much today. There is less variety, less novelty and our way of buying them has changed.

And this bountiful supply of cheap chocolate also means we are eating more of the stuff. By some measures Britons currently eat an average of 8.4kg of chocolate per year. That’s double the amount reported before 1967’s pricing rule change – and proves the confectionery industry is still on a roll.

Adrian Bailey is a Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

Image: Reuters 

Robert Farley

Russian Air Force, Europe

This excellent warplane was made to take on American jet fighters and is now used by countries such as China.

Key point: The Su-27 flexible, powerful, and affordable. Here is how it projected Soviet power and how the Chinese made their own copies.

To the West, most of the legendary Soviet aircraft of the Cold War came from the design bureau Mikoyan Gurevitch, which spawned such aircraft as the MiG-15, MiG-21 “Fishbed,” MiG-25 “Foxbat” and MiG-29 “Fulcrum.” The single best Soviet fighter of the Cold War, however, was Sukhoi’s Su-27 “Flanker.” Intended both to defeat U.S. fighters over central Europe in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict and to patrol the airspace of the Soviet Union against U.S. bomber incursions, the Su-27 survived the end of the Cold War to become one of the world’s premier export fighters.

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

Origins

The Flanker emerged as part of the high part of the high-low fighter mix that both the United States and the Soviet Union adopted in the 1970s and 1980s. In the U.S. Air Force this manifested in the F-15 and F-16; in the U.S. Navy, the F-14 and F/A-18. The MiG-29 “Fulcrum” played the light role in the Soviet partnership.

Sukhoi designed the Flanker with the capabilities of the F-15 Eagle firmly in mind, and the aircraft that emerged resembles the fast, heavily armed, long-ranged Eagle in many ways. Whereas the Eagle looks healthy and well-fed, the Flanker has a gaunt, hungry appearance. Although designed as an air superiority aircraft, the Su-27 (much like the Eagle) has proven flexible enough to adapt to interceptor and ground strike roles. Sukhoi has also developed a wide family of variants, specialized for particular missions but retaining overall multirole capabilities.

The Su-27 entered service more slowly than its fourth-generation counterparts in the United States (or the MiG-29, for that matter). A series of disastrous tests bedeviled the program’s early years, with several pilots dying in early versions of the Flanker. As it entered service in the mid-1980s, production problems slowed its transition to front-line status. And of course, the end of the Cold War curtailed the overall production run of the aircraft.

The Su-27’s capabilities are formidable. The Flanker can reach Mach 2.35 with a thrust-to-weight ratio above one (depending on fuel load). It can carry up to eight air-to-air missiles (generally of short to medium range; other variants specialize in Beyond Visual Range combat) or an array of bombs and missiles. In the hands of an experienced pilot, the Su-27 can carry out a bewildering array of maneuvers, many of which have delighted air show audiences across Russia and Europe.

The basic Su-27 frame has proven remarkably flexible. The Russian Air Force has modified most of its existing Flanker fleet with a variety of advanced avionics, improving its air-to-air capacity and also giving it an effective ground attack capability. Several Flanker variants have acquired their own designations, especially on the export side.

Export

The original version of the Flanker has enjoyed tremendous export success, and still flies in eleven air forces around the world. The bulk of aircraft fly in Russian (359) and Chinese (fifty-nine) service. In some smoldering conflicts (Russia-Ukraine, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Vietnam-China) both sides fly Su-27s. Overall, 809 Flankers have entered service, plus large production orders for several variants.

The transfer of Su-27s to China caused a surprising amount of friction between Moscow and Beijing. China purchased some Flankers off the shelf, agreed to coproduce another batch, and acquired a license for production of additional aircraft. However, Russia soon accused China of violating the terms of the agreement by installing its own avionics on the J-11 (as the Chinese designated their own Flankers), appropriating Russian intellectual property and developing a carrier variant (eventually the J-16). The dispute cooled Russian enthusiasm for arms exports to China, a situation that persists today.

Combat

For such a remarkable aircraft, the Su-27 has seen relatively little combat. It has flown combat missions in several theaters across the world, although it has yet to serve in a sustained air superiority campaign. Flankers flew in some of the wars that characterized the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and have constituted the core of Russian airpower in the Wars of Russian Reconsolidation. Indeed, Su-27s have flown on both sides of the spasmodic conflict in Ukraine. Su-27s in Russian service also currently fly in Syria. In foreign service, the Su-27 has flown in the Angolan Civil War and the Ethiopia-Eritrea War, scoring its only air-to-air victories (over Eritrean MiG-29s) in the latter.

The Su-27 was the last of the major fourth-generation fighters to enter service, and has proven an exceedingly successful design. Big enough and powerful enough to sustain a number of modifications and improvements, the Flanker should continue to see service (and even production) for quite some time. This is especially true given the uncertainty associated with the future of the PAK FA, the fifth-generation stealth fighter intended to replace both the MiG-29 and the Su-27.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Israel Military, Middle East

These weapons are the foundation of why Israel is a military power no one wants to mess with.

Here's What You Need to Remember: When considering the effectiveness of Israeli weapons, and the expertise of the men and women who wield them, it’s worth noting that for all the tactical and operational success the IDF has enjoyed, Israel remains in a strategically perilous position.

Since 1948, the state of Israel has fielded a frighteningly effective military machine. Built on a foundation of pre-independence militias, supplied with cast-off World War II weapons, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have enjoyed remarkable success in the field. In the 1960s and 1970s, both because of its unique needs and because of international boycotts, Israel began developing its own military technologies, as well as augmenting the best foreign tech. Today, Israel boasts one of the most technologically advanced military stockpiles in the world, and one of the world’s most effective workforces.

Here are five of the most deadly systems that the Israeli Defense Forces currently employ--the foundation of why Israel is a military power no one wants to mess with.

Merkava: 

The Merkava tank joined the IDF in 1979, replacing the modified foreign tanks (most recently of British and American vintage) that the Israelis had used since 1948. Domestic design and construction avoided problems of unsteady foreign supply, while also allowing the Israelis to focus on designs optimized for their environment, rather than for Central Europe.  Around 1,600 Merkavas of various types have entered service, with several hundred more still on the way.

The Merkava entered service after the great tank battles of the Middle East had ended (at least for Israel). Consequently, the Merkavas have often seen combat in different contexts that their designers expected. The United States took major steps forward with the employment of armor in Iraq and Afghanistan (particularly in the former) in a counter-insurgency context, but the Israelis have gone even farther. After mixed results during the Hezbollah war, the IDF, using updated Merkava IVs, has worked hard to integrate the tanks into urban fighting. In both of the recent Gaza wars, the IDF has used Merkavas to penetrate Palestinian positions while active defense systems keep crews safe. Israel has also developed modifications that enhance the Merkavas’ capabilities in urban and low-intensity combat.

Indeed, the Merkavas have proved so useful in this regard that Israel has cancelled plans to stop line production, despite a lack of significant foreign orders.

F-15I Thunder: 

The Israeli Air Force has flown variants of the F-15 since the 1970s, and has become the world’s most versatile and effective user of the Eagle. As Tyler Rogoway’s recent story on the IAF fleet makes clear, the Israelis have perfected the F-15 both for air supremacy and for strike purposes. Flown by elite pilots, the F-15Is (nicknamed “thunder”) of the IAF remain the most lethal squadron of aircraft in the Middle East.

The F-15I provides Israel with several core capabilities. It remains an effective air-to-air combat platform, superior to the aircraft available to Israel’s most plausible foes (although the Eurofighter Typhoons and Dassault Rafales entering service in the Gulf, not to mention Saudi Arabia’s own force of F-15SAs, undoubtedly would provide some competition. But as Rogoway suggests, the Israelis have worked long and hard at turning the F-15 into an extraordinarily effective strike platform, one capable of hitting targets with precision at long range. Most analysts expect that the F-15I would play a key role in any Israeli strike against Iran, along with some of its older brethren.

Jericho III: 

The earliest Israeli nuclear deterrent came in the form of the F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers that the IAF used to such great effect in conventional missions in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. Soon, however, Israel determined that it required a more effective and secure deterrent, and began to invest heavily in ballistic missiles. The Jericho I ballistic missile entered service in the early 1970s, to eventually be replaced by the Jericho II and Jericho III.

The Jericho III is the most advanced ballistic missile in the region, presumably (Israel does not offer much data on its operation) capable of striking targets not only in the Middle East, but also across Europe, Asia, and potentially North America. The Jericho III ensures that any nuclear attack against Israel would be met with devastating retaliation, especially as it is unlikely that Israel could be disarmed by a first strike. Of course, given that no potential Israeli foe has nuclear weapons (or will have them in the next decade, at least), the missiles give Jerusalem presumptive nuclear superiority across the region.

Dolphin: 

Israel acquired its first submarine, a former British “S” class, in 1958. That submarine and others acquired in the 1960s played several important military roles, including defense of the Israeli coastline, offensive operations against Egyptian and Syrian shipping, and the delivery of commando teams in war and peace. These early boats were superseded by the Gal class, and finally by the German Dolphin class (really two separate classes related to the Type 212) boats, which are state-of-the-art diesel-electric subs.

The role of the Dolphin class in Israel’s nuclear deterrent has almost certainly been wildly overstated. The ability of a diesel electric submarine to carry out deterrent patrols is starkly limited, no matter what ordnance they carry. However, the Dolphin remains an effective platform for all sorts of other missions required by the IDF. Capable of maritime reconnaissance, of sinking or otherwise interdicting enemy ships, and also of delivering special forces to unfriendly coastlines, the Dolphins represent a major Israeli security investment, and one of the most potentially lethal undersea forces in the region.

The Israeli Soldier: 

The technology that binds all of these other systems together is the Israeli soldier. Since 1948 (and even before) Israel has committed the best of its human capital to the armed forces. The creation of fantastic soldiers, sailors, and airmen doesn’t happen by accident, and doesn’t result simply from the enthusiasm and competence of the recruits. The IDF has developed systems of recruitment, training, and retention that allow it to field some of the most competent, capable soldiers in the world. None of the technologies above work unless they have smart, dedicated, well-trained operators to make them function at their fullest potential.

Conclusion: 

When considering the effectiveness of Israeli weapons, and the expertise of the men and women who wield them, it’s worth noting that for all the tactical and operational success the IDF has enjoyed, Israel remains in a strategically perilous position. The inability of Israel to develop long-term, stable, positive relationships with its immediate neighbors, regional powers, and the subject populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip means that Jerusalem continues to feel insecure, its dominance on land, air, and sea notwithstanding. Tactics and technologies, however effective and impressive, cannot solve these problems; only politics can.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs.He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter:@drfarls.

This first appeared in May 2015 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters.

Robert Farley

Superweapons,

The effect of the B-70 on the Air Force would have, on balance, been quite negative.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Technology undoubtedly matters, but only rarely in the sense that an isolated technological achievement lends decisive advantage in tactical engagements. Rather, technological innovations and choices shape the ways in which military organizations, and the broader defense-industrial complex, approach the prospect of war.

Weapons die for all kinds of different reasons. Sometimes they happen at the wrong time, either in the midst of defense austerity, or with the wrong constellation of personnel. Sometimes they fall victim to the byzantine bureaucracy of the Pentagon, or to turf fights between the services. And sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough.

This article concentrates on five systems that died, but that might have had transformative effects if they had survived. These transformations would only rarely have changed the course of wars (countries win and lose wars for many reasons besides technology), but rather would have had ripple effects across the entire defense industrial base, altering how our military organizations approached warfighting and procurement. Not all the changes would have been for the best; sometimes programs are canceled for sound reasons.

AH-56 Cheyenne

In the early 1960s, the Army was just beginning to appreciate the value of helicopter aviation. The Army had used helicopters at the end of World War II, and used them extensively in Korea for reconnaissance and evacuation purposes. As the sophistication of the machines grew, however, the Army began to see the prospect for much more advanced helicopters that could conduct a wide variety of missions.

The star of the show was supposed to be the AH-56 Cheyenne, a radical design that combined high speed with punching power. The Cheyenne could escort other helicopters in transport mission, or conduct ground support and attack ops independently. In particular, it contained a magnificent propulsion system that could offer speeds of up to 275 miles per hour.

But the Cheyenne fell victim to its own promise. The technologies that made the Cheyenne possible weren’t yet mature, and the early prototypes suffered from teething problems, leading to a fatal crash. The Air Force hated the whole idea of the Cheyenne, believing that the Army was trying to steal close air support and interdiction missions for itself. The Air Force went so far as to propose a fixed-wing attack aircraft (which would eventually become the A-10) in its effort to kill the program. Finally, the Vietnam War put enormous pressure on the defense budget, both in terms of making it harder to sell particular programs, and in diverting funds to directly support the war effort.

And so the Cheyenne never happened. Although, a few years later, the Army would push forward with the AH-64 Apache. In this sense, the cancelation of the Cheyenne merely delayed an advanced attack helicopter capability. But the Apache was also a much safer machine than the Cheyenne, and going with the more conventional system has undoubtedly limited the horizons of Army aviation.

B-70 Valkyrie

The B-70 Valkyrie deserves its own operatic cycle. Envisioned as the replacement for the B-52 Stratofortress and the B-58 Hustler, the B-70 was designed to penetrate Soviet airspace at high altitude, and upwards of Mach 3. Beloved of the “Bomber Mafia,” a generation of senior officers who had cut their teeth in World War II’s Combined Bomber Offensive, the B-70 represented, to many, the future of the Air Force.

And just to show I’m not a hard-hearted guy, and it’s not all dollars and cents, the B-70 was a beautiful aircraft. Long and sleek, the Valkyrie resembles a space ship more than an aircraft. The surviving prototype remains on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

But the Valkyrie was enormously expensive, and this expense made it vulnerable. First President Eisenhower, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were less than enchanted with the idea of spending enormous sums on another heavy bomber when ICBMs showed great promise in delivering nuclear weapons to the Soviet homeland. Advances in Soviet interceptor and surface-to-air missile technology were also making the B-70’s mission considerably more dangerous than first anticipated.

After constructing only two prototypes (one of which was lost during a PR stunt), the Air Force shut production down. Fifteen years later, the B-1B, with some superficially similar characteristics, would enter service.

The effect of the B-70 on the Air Force would have, on balance, been quite negative. Devoting tremendous resources to the procurement of another strategic bomber would have drawn attention away from both the tactical air force and the missile force. B-70s might (in desperation) have been committed to the bombing of Vietnam during Operations Linebacker I and II, but they would likely have performed no more effectively than the B-52s they were replacing. And both the B-52 and the B-1B have proven remarkably flexible in terms of missions and update technologies, in part because they have space for a larger crew (4 and 5, respectively) than the Valkyrie (2). McNamara saved the Air Force from itself by preventing a long, deep procurement chasm that would have lasted thirty years.

A-12 Avenger

What if we had a stealthy strike bomber that could take off from aircraft carriers? In the mid-1980s, the Navy needed a replacement for the beloved-but-venerable A-6 Intruder. Building on expectations about the progress of stealth technology, McDonnell Douglas developed the A-12 Avenger, a subsonic “flying wing” bomber that visually resembled a miniature B-2 Spirit. Combining stealth with the flexibility of carrier ops, the A-12 promised an unparalleled deep strike capability. Even the Air Force expressed interest in the A-12 as a replacement for the F-111 Aardvark.

But there were problems. Early expectations about the stealth coating proved optimistic, and the fixes substantially increased the Avenger’s weight. Expenses soared, but the aircraft did not. The biggest problem, however, was that the Avenger entered the design and production cycle just as the Cold War came to a close. Facing a tight defense budget, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney decided to kill the A-12 in favor of less risky programs.

The effects of the cancelation remain with us today. Instead of acquiring an advanced stealth bomber, the Navy settled on the Super Hornet, a significant, but conventional, upgrade on the F-18s it already possessed. Eventually, the continuing need for a stealthy, carrier-borne strike aircraft would manifest in the F-35C, a program that continues to teeter between “disaster” and “epic disaster.” Even if the F-35C somehow works out, the Navy gave up the deep strike mission when it settled on the Super Hornet. The Air Force is now concentrating on the Next Generation Bomber, a project that closely resembles the A-12 in many ways. The death of the A-12, in effect, transformed the nature of the USN carrier wing for a generation or more.

Future Combat Systems

In the early 21st century, the body of theory known as the Revolution in Military Affairs resulted in a major Army procurement plan known as “Future Combat Systems.” In brief, the application of RMA theory to modern operations suggested that the combination of precision-guided munitions, high processing speeds, real time communications, and all-encompassing sensor capabilities would transform the way in which armies fought. Future Combat Systems envisioned an integrated system of weapons, vehicles, and sensors that could prove lethal and decisive across the combat spectrum. The Army expected every element of the system to support the goal of linking sensors to shooters, enhancing killing power while reducing footprint. Army planners also intended FCS to result lighter, more deployable brigades.

But then the Bush administration dropped the Iraq War on the US Army. Iraq created major problems for the development of the FCS program. Intellectual energy and material devoted to developing the FCS concept to its fullest went, instead, to fighting the war. The conflict demanded systems (such as the MRAP) that did not fit into the FCS concept. Perhaps most important, the course of the war threw RMA theory into question, with guerrilla fighters consistently bloodying the nose of their technologically sophisticated American foes.

And so FCS died a slow death. The vision of a coherent system-of-systems surrendered to the need to get particular capabilities into the field in piecemeal fashion, regardless of their role in the larger puzzle. The Army fought the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars with a mix of new and legacy systems, combined with weapons that had no place in its future expectations. While individual parts of the FCS vision survive, the ideal has yielded to budgetary and military reality.

Sea Control Ship

What if, instead of a few very large carriers, the United States Navy had undertaken to build a large number of small carriers? In World War II, the Royal Navy and the US Navy (USN) employed large numbers of escort carriers, small flattops that could support anti-submarine and amphibious operations.

In the early 1970s, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt pushed the idea of the Sea Control Ship (SCS), a small carrier that would defend sea-lanes against long-range Soviet strike aircraft and Soviet submarines. Faced with the growing expense of modern supercarriers (the first Nimitz class carrier would enter service in just a few years) and the impending retirement of the venerable Essex class carriers, Zumwalt sought a low cost option for air operations that did not demand the full capabilities of a major carrier group. Escort carriers had helped win the Battle of the Atlantic, and Sea Control Ships might make a similar contribution in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict.

The USN tried the concept with the helicopter carrier USS Guam for a couple of years, adding Harrier fighters to its complement of choppers. Eventually, however, the Navy decided that the expense of the new ships, and the risk that they might cut into resources dedicated to supercarriers, were too great, and nixed the idea.

Eventually, the big amphibious ships of the Tarawa and Wasp classes would take over the sea control role. In effect, the USN acquired Sea Control Ships, although we call them amphibious assault ships and delegate to them a broader array of tasks. We also rely on other countries to build small carriers to fulfill the missions envisioned by the SCS; many of the flattops operated by the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and Japan essentially fulfill an SCS role.

Pursuit of the Sea Control Ship would obviously have led to a different naval force structure, as well as changes in the composition of naval aviation. The biggest difference, however, might have been conceptual; the Sea Control Ship might have changed the way we think about how naval aviation contributes to international security. The ability of small carriers to contribute to a variety of different missions and needs might draw us away from the (if incorrectly applied) Mahanian conception of naval power to a more Corbettian “dispersal” concept. And at a time when even strong advocates of the modern CVN have begun to buckle under the enormous cost of the great ships, the SCS might have offered a different way of approaching the projection of naval power.

Conclusion

Technology undoubtedly matters, but only rarely in the sense that an isolated technological achievement lends decisive advantage in tactical engagements. Rather, technological innovations and choices shape the ways in which military organizations, and the broader defense-industrial complex, approach the prospect of war. Each of these systems involved a radical rethink of organizational roles and priorities, and the cancelation of each left huge holes in capabilities, holes that continue to be filled in novel ways.

Honorable Mentions

USS United States class aircraft carrier, USS Montana class battleship, USS Lexington class battlecruiser, B-49, F-23 “Black Widow” and the F-20 Tigershark.

This first appeared in 2014 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.

Pedro Gonzalez

HR 1, Americas

To start, HR 1 would grant federal voting rights to convicted felons, enabling people who have been sentenced for cruel crimes to cast ballots so long as they aren't serving a sentence in a correctional facility at the time of the election.

The concept of a Trojan Horse may be something of a political cliché but it is hard to think of a better analogy for HR 1, also known as the For the People Act. It sits at the legislature’s gates now as an election reform bill formally designed to redress racial grievances. The reality, however, is very different.

To start, HR 1 would grant federal voting rights to convicted felons, enabling people who have been sentenced for cruel crimes to cast ballots so long as they aren't serving a sentence in a correctional facility at the time of the election. What about felons out of confinement? In 2017, Brian Golsby abducted, raped, murdered a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State named Reagan Delaney Tokes. Golsby had just gotten out of prison after serving a six-year sentence for abducting a pregnant woman and her child and raping the woman. He was staying in state-contracted housing at the time of the crime.

Golsby raped Tokes, then marched her into a field and shot her in the head. He didn’t even bother removing the GPS monitor issued to him by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Would HR 1 have allowed him to vote? The answer appears to be yes.

“Under the Democrats’ radical plan to give the vote to everyone, even violent felons including rapists and murderers who were just released can cast a ballot,” said Sean Kennedy in an interview for this story. Kennedy is a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute who has written extensively on felon voting rights and COVID releases. “The bill specifies that the individual only need be currently incarcerated so all probationers and parolees including those under home confinement or GPS monitoring could legally vote including dangerous predators like Golsby.”

He warns that many of the worst types could benefit from HR 1. “Thirty states currently restrict the ballot to only those who have completed their sentence or had their rights restored by a court, so over two-thirds of released felons would be instantly eligible to choose their Congressman, school board president, and local water board officials with a vote equal to their victims and their families.”

“So far,” he adds, “over 100,000 prisoners have been released due to ‘COVID concerns,’ many of which have gone on to commit heinous acts including murders, rapes, and hate crimes.”

Indeed, HR 1 would effectively codify as federal law the massive, emergency expansion of mail-in voting implemented in response to the pandemic while eliminating basic election integrity measures. HR 1 would dramatically expand ballot harvesting and remove limits on how many ballots a single person could return on behalf of others. It would compel states to accept mail-in ballots postmarked before or on election day—without requiring any standard of proof—if received within ten days after the election. The bill prohibits states from requiring a voter to provide an ID to vote by mail or require notarization or witnesses of voters’ signatures to cast an absentee ballot. It consequently paves over federal election laws that received bipartisan support, like the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

HR 1 registers to vote virtually anyone who interacts with the federal government for a variety of reasons. As a result, the bill’s authors anticipate noncitizens to be registered, so they include a provision to protect them from prosecution if and when they are automatically registered in error. Further, it would impose, as the MinnPost put it, “new safeguards against improper purges of voting rolls to prevent voters being incorrectly removed from their voter registration.” That is another way of saying it would make it more difficult to clean up and upgrade states’ voter databases.

In 2012, on top of millions of invalid voter registrations, the Pew Center on the States found more than 1.8 million dead people registered to vote across the United States, and approximately 2.75 million people with registrations in more than one state. Our voting systems, the authors warned, “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence, and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.” As a result, elections can suffer from “the perception that they lack integrity or could be susceptible to fraud”—and that would only worsen under HR 1.

The bill would also eliminate all voter ID laws. “If ‘John Jones’ says he wants to vote, there's no way to prove that ‘John Jones’ is ‘John Jones,’” worries Raynard Jackson, CEO of the political consulting firm Raynard Jackson and Associates. He told The National Desk’s Jan Jeffcoat that there would be “no way to prove that ‘John Jones’ hadn't voted at five other locations, he just kept driving around town, voting multiple times.” That may or may not be an exaggeration, but all that would take the place of voter ID is a sworn statement. At a time when “interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline,” HR 1 attempts to institute voting by the honor system.

The rebuttal goes that voter ID is intimately connected to the specter of Jim Crow. However, that is complicated by the fact that recent polling shows 69 percent of Black people and 82 percent of other minorities say voters should be required to present photo identification before being allowed to vote. Support for voter ID laws has actually increased from 67 percent to 75 percent since 2018 among likely voters.

But the worst, most significant aspect—and the real purpose—of HR 1 is hidden in plain sight. “It would abrogate the authority of state legislators to draw the boundary lines of congressional districts and transfer it to so-called independent redistricting commissions,” explains Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. As with all the other provisions, the justification for these commissions is anti-racism.

He notes that to be in the “selection pool” for one of these commissions, an applicant would, among other things, have to disclose their “race, ethnicity, [and] gender.” HR 1 requires that membership on the redistricting commission be “representative of the demographic groups [including racial, ethnic, economic, and gender] . . . of the State.” This is a racial- and gender-quota system that appears conspicuously at odds with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Like most affirmative action-type policies, these requirements would likely result in discrimination against white Americans.

Put simply, HR 1 would not make elections fairer, securer, or safer. There is certainly room and a need for reform, but HR 1 would be iatrogenic in its effects: its prescriptions would cause more harm. However, that’s beside the point.

Independent of its formal aims, the effective truth of HR 1 is the usurpation and centralization of individual states’ constitutionally assigned functions into bureaucracies that would serve above all the political party that created them—there is no such thing as an “apolitical” institution or commission. And Democrats, who control or benefit from much of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the managerial regime, know this.

Some of HR 1’s opponents have struggled to formulate a response to the anti-racism narrative behind the bill beyond merely yelping about double standards. Thus, it may be worth reflecting on the concept that Pierre-André Taguieff, a French philosopher who has specialized in the study of racism, likens to totalitarianism. President Emmanuel Macron himself reportedly uses Taguieff's work to better understand the dangers facing France from the social theories on race imported from American universities. Politicians and prominent intellectuals alike view them as an existential threat to the French Republic and French identity.

According to Taguieff, society is currently in the presence of “antiwhite anti-racism,” or what is a new, disturbing form of “politically and culturally acceptable political and cultural racism.” Some people believe that white people are “systemically” guilty of racism because they are white and Black people are “systemically” victims of racism—which is “white” by definition—because they are Black. “This militant definition of racism, known as 'structural' or ‘systemic,’ further implies a dogmatic definition of anti-racism as the fight against white racism, and nothing else,” Taguieff explains. “And if said racism is ‘systemic,’ then anti-racist action must aim at destroying the ‘system’ that produces racism by its very functioning.”

Taguieff adds that this definitional “sleight of hand” precludes “the very possibility of anti-white racism and conferred a revolutionary final telos on the anti-racist struggle.” Therefore, he concludes, “Marxists of all persuasions welcome these anti-racist anti-white mobilizations, in which they see the Revolution on the march.”

Though the ends of HR 1’s promoters may or may not be as lofty as Lenin’s, the means are more or less the same: by portraying the “system” as racist, its deconstruction is justified and opposition to HR 1, by definition, is racist in the Taguieffian sense. It is therefore irrelevant that some of HR 1’s provisions are, in fact, discriminatory, because this view renders “the existence of anti-white racism theoretically impossible.”

Taguieff’s advice is to explicitly reject intimidation from the hucksters of professionalized anti-racism and all the schemes they attempt to justify by those means. Americans should take a page out of his book before it’s too late.

Pedro L. Gonzalez is a Senior Writer for American Greatness.

Image: Reuters

Steve Weintz

Security,

It was definitely crazy, and wouldn’t have been cheap.

Here's What You Need to Remember: So are there deep bunkers carved into the American soil still hiding in the dark? Vast sums have been spent since 9/11 and much is unaccounted for. But the same concerns that kept super bunkers from being built - cost, capacity and effectiveness—mitigate against any grand caverns of doom.

With the arrival of the Bomb and its immense destructive power, the efforts to protect elites and commoners alike from swift destruction assumed novel and at times grotesque forms. Civil defense foundered in America upon the sheer scale of the problem—getting tens of millions of urbanites out of cities and into shelters before enemy nukes arrived. Ultimately the United States quietly gave up on protecting the majority of its residents from nuclear attack via shelter, and opted for a grand technological fix in missile defense.

Elite shelter concepts, however, had better success. Ostensibly, this makes sense; targeting the enemy leadership can sometimes win a struggle. The assassination of Admiral Yamamoto by the U.S. Navy in 1943, for example, derailed Japan’s defense of its island conquests. But such a policy opens a door into a very dark room, as many leaders instinctively know.

So from early on in the Nuclear Age the U.S. government explored numerous ways to keep itself safe during and after Armageddon.

The Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia, a grand old vacation destination abounding in stately elegance, now includes a Cold War extra amongst a tour of its premises: the congressional bunker built in the late 1950s under the guise of a resort expansion. The Greenbriar bunker is a true time capsule, its rotary-dial phones and fusty office chairs ready for the cast of a period movie.

The Greenbriar bunker was never used for its intended purpose and was decommissioned in 1992 after a news expose. When members of Congress evacuated the Capitol on September 11, 2001, they flew to the Mount Weather emergency command facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Now run by FEMA, Mount Weather can shelter several hundred people from all three branches of government for months.

Along with Congress agencies such as the Federal Reserve made accommodations for apocalypse, including giant vaults full of currency. As Strangelovian as it sounds, the work of returning American society to some semblance of pre-war routine would depend on cash and banking.

As aircraft became faster and missiles faster still the warning times for nuclear attack shrank from hours to minutes. Even as Greenbriar and Mount Weather were conceived and built,  the evolving threat demanded more urgent safety measures. As Mark, the author of Atomic Skies blog writes:

“Two solutions were considered: mobility and hardness. Mobility meant keeping the president on the move, on plane or train or ship, so that the Soviets could not find and kill him. Hardness meant burying the president, deep underground, deeper than even a nuclear weapon could reach.”

Early in the Eisenhower administration a plan was devised to spirit the president away from Washington aboard a fast Navy boat down the Potomac (helicopters being then too unreliable for Presidential transport) to a waiting Navy ship, which would head to sea. The naval aide in charge of this plan, Captain Edward Beech, later commanded a nuclear sub, the USS Triton, big enough to function as “Navy One”—a submerged presidential command post.

During the Kennedy Administration mobile solutions expanded to include airborne command posts—first 707s then 747s—capable of supporting the executive branch during and after World War III. Spiriting away the President into the sky remains the preferred option.

But if ICBMs left no time to get the President and other leaders to safety, then only the deepest of bunkers would suffice. In 1963 the Pentagon proposed a whopper: the Deep Underground Command Center (DUCC).

DUCC would have been a shock-mounted capsule dug into the living rock 3,500 feet below the nation’s capital, accessible by tunnels from the White House, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon. Up to three hundred people could shelter there for up to a month after bombardment by three-hundred-megaton warheads. Evacuation would take only fifteen minutes, enough time even with minimal warning.

But there were problems. The DUCC was small and half its personnel would be needed just to keep the shelter running. It was expensive, costing as nearly much as all the mobile command posts combined. It wasn’t certain that the Soviets couldn't just build bigger bombs. Contact with the outside world would be tough if the explosions vaporized the communications antennas.

And there was, at least among some of President Kennedy's advisers, just a little uncertainty about the Pentagon’s views. “Basically,” said Harold Brown, a future Secretary of Defense, “the Chiefs probably aren’t interested in having the civilian command survive. If we were to come to a war, they would only get in the way.”

The Joint Chiefs’ lack of enthusiasm and the Vietnam War, along with a general slide in American focus on civil defense, led to the DUCC proposal fading away by the mid 1960s. The flying and floating command posts were upgraded and existing facilities like Mount Weather were hardened. But, writes Mark, during the Carter Administration the Army Corps of Engineers revisited the concept.

We know they did because a few scraps of evidence surfaced before the project ended/evaporated/went dark:

“Special Projects Office (later to become the Protective Design Center) was created in 1977 to work on a classified Department of Defense program. The Alternate National Military Command and Control Center Improvement Program involved criteria development, studies, and preliminary design of a deep underground highly hardened and survivable command and control center. The center included separate structures for command personnel, power, fuel, and water. Over 3 miles of air entrainment tunnels were required as well as access shafts to the surface.

“Although canceled in 1979, the experience, expertise, and leadership in protective design and classified programs that Special Projects gained from this work brought other unique projects and major programs to the District.”

The one photo associated with the project depicts a model of a spherical structure like a buried moon base, cocooned in rock and encased in a lattice of shock absorbers. It looks very safe. It doesn't look cheap. And nothing more is known about it.

So are there deep bunkers carved into the American soil still hiding in the dark? Vast sums have been spent since 9/11 and much is unaccounted for. But the same concerns that kept super bunkers from being built - cost, capacity and effectiveness—mitigate against any grand caverns of doom.

Steve Weintz, a frequent contributor to many publications such as WarIsBoring, is a writer, filmmaker, artist, animator. This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Few airmen cringed at the indiscriminate use of air power.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Dave Nagel, an engineer and gunner with the 305th Bomb Group, said, “If you saw London like I saw it, you wouldn’t have any remorse. I don’t know anyone who was remorseful. We didn’t know whether an area was populated or not. We were supposed to be over a target, normally a factory, when we let the bombs go, but we assumed it was surrounded by civilians.”

Behind the strategy that governed the American air war in Europe during World War II lay events and ideas that dated back to World War I and the 1920s. The first strategic bombing raid in 1915 deployed not airplanes but German Zeppelins, rigid airships that dumped ordnance on the east coast of Great Britain. Two years later Germany’s Gotha bomber, a machine capable of a round trip from Belgian bases, struck at Folkestone, a port through which British soldiers embarked for the front. This raid killed 300 people, including 115 soldiers. The bomber had proven itself as a weapon against a military target.

A few weeks later, 14 Gothas attacked London in the first fixed-wing assault upon civilians and their institutions. The dead and wounded totaled 600, and the raid wrought consternation among the public and the government. The British hastily summoned fighter units to gird the cities. To counter the defensive cordon, the Gothas flew night missions. With primitive navigational tools and no bombsights, the raiders drizzled explosives without any pretense of hitting military or industrial targets. Theoreticians of war now had a new factor to enter into equations: the terror of massive strikes upon workers producing the stuff of war.

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Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who had only earned his wings in 1916, commanded the air force for General John J. Pershing and his American Expeditionary Force in France. Mitchell met Maj. Gen. Hugh M. Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps, who quickly persuaded the American that the “airplane is an offensive and not a defensive weapon.” Mitchell grasped the possibilities of taking the war behind the lines and plotted a huge raid that would blast German military and industrial targets in the autumn of 1918. A correspondent for the Associated Press wrote, “His navy of the air is to be expanded until no part of Germany is safe from the rain of bombs…. The work of the independent force is bombing munitions works, factories, cities and other important centers behind the German lines…. Eventually Berlin will know what an air raid means, and the whole great project is a direct answer to the German air attacks on helpless and unfortified British, French and Belgian cities.”

World War I ended before Mitchell could demonstrate what his “navy of the air” might achieve, but he continued to expound his ideas. While accepting the need for control of the skies through destruction of the enemy air forces, he said, “It may be … the best strategy to damage and destroy property, and to kill and disable an enemy’s forces and resources at points far removed from the field of battle of either armies or navies.” Implicitly, Mitchell accepted war on civilians.

In 1921 and 1923, Mitchell demonstrated that bombers could sink some anchored warships. The experiments confirmed that aircraft could destroy substantial stationary targets, but admirals scoffed that vessels under way could easily avoid the attacks. The Army dismissed the show as irrelevant for its vision of warfare, which was to slug it out with hostiles while capturing territory.

While Mitchell and Trenchard promulgated their ideas of aerial offensives, a contemporary Italian, General Giulio Douhet, preached that modern war involved the entire society, including “the soldier carrying his rifle, the woman loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing his wheat, the scientists experimenting in the laboratory.” Douhet spoke not only of smashing wartime production but argued, “How could a country go on living and working, oppressed by the nightmare of imminent destruction.” He conceded that such a war without mercy eliminated considerations of morality.

Americans partially bought into the Douhet’s theories. They buried the idea of indiscriminate raids that slaughtered nonmilitary people and emphasized hitting industrial production, transportation facilities, and military centers. Promoters of strategic bombing hypothesized that by destroying the goods of war and the will of the people to resist, conflicts could be shortened and the wholesale carnage of the World War I battlefield avoided.

Mitchell’s outspoken demands for an independent air force ended his career, but acolytes like Henry “Hap” Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Ira Eaker retained positions in the military hierarchy. They successfully promulgated the doctrine of strategic bombing, accurate targeting of enemy installations and facilities. Toward that end, in 1933 the War Department approved a prospectus for a plane capable of traveling at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour and with a range of more than 2,000 miles. The new bomber could be used to defend either coast, but if deployed overseas it would require bases in England or sites like the Philippine Islands. Boeing produced the first model of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, which roared through the sky at 232 mph during a 2,100-mile trip from Seattle to Dayton. The advocates of air power were delighted, but unfortunately the prototype crashed and burned on a test flight. Instead of ordering 65, the War Department scaled back to a mere 13.

To carry out daylight precision bombing the Army adopted a tool ordered and then discarded by the Navy as unsuitable for dive-bombers: the Norden bombsight. In the crucial seconds over an objective, a bombardier manipulated the device to guide the plane as he lined up the target and then released the explosives.

“I Can Shoot Those Things Down Very Easily.”

Douhet also taught his disciples that heavily armed bombers in mass formations could operate by day against fighter defenses. The publicity on Boeing’s creation hailed the new airplane as a “Flying Fortress,” but it was hardly as impregnable as the name indicated. The first B-17s lacked armor plate to protect the crew, carried only five machine guns, and made no provision for a tail gunner. The B-17 faithful believed that was sufficient since, in their minds, the aircraft could attain altitudes beyond reach of interceptors. In the late 1930s, a hot shot fighter pilot, Lieutenant John Alison, confounded the assurance of promoters of the early B-17 when he convincingly demonstrated he could push his fighter close enough to the weaponless rear of a Flying Fortress and shoot it down. His feat, however, did not immediately persuade the bomber command to install a tail gun. Nobody in the Air Corps was going to listen to a pursuit pilot, a second lieutenant who claimed, “I can shoot those things down very easily.”

The conviction that strategic bombers could operate unmolested by enemy aircraft influenced the development of U.S. fighters. Escorts to protect the big planes would be unnecessary, and the design for a fighter focused upon a machine that would protect the ground forces. Not until the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the appearance of the Messerschmitt Me-109 did the American experts realize that the speed and altitude of an enemy fighter challenged their assumptions about the invulnerability of the B-17. The standard American fighter, the Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk—a good gun platform, while speedy in a dive—had a limited ceiling and rate of climb. It would not be deployed in the European Theater.

Desire for an interceptor with longer range and performance higher in the sky had belatedly resulted in the twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and aeronautical engineers returned to their drawing boards to blueprint what would become the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and the North American P-51 Mustang. At the same time manufacturers modified the big bombers, now including the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which had slightly more range and bomb weight capacity than the B-17, adding better means to defend themselves: up to 12 .50-caliber machine guns, a tail gunner, and armor for the crew. When the enemy changed tactics during World War II and began head-on attacks, a chin turret would be added to give greater firepower forward.

From the start of World War II, the British intended to follow Trenchard’s maxims on carrying the war to the industrial centers and the population of the foe. In May 1940, when the Royal Air Force attempted daylight strategic raids by its fleet of bombers, German ack-ack and interceptors killed more flyers than the enemy lost on the ground. B-17s purchased from the United States carried out a few daylight missions with dismal results and curdled RAF enthusiasm for the Flying Fortress. American analysts noted that the Brits insisted on operating above 30,000 feet, which overloaded the oxygen systems, froze weapons, and reduced airspeed, making the planes vulnerable to the Me-109s. The RAF B-17 missions relied on an inferior bombsight, and the maximum number of aircraft in formation was a mere four. The British, using their own bombers, switched to nighttime assaults, on industrial areas. They made no pretense of discriminating between residential neighborhoods and factories.

The British tried to convince the Air Corps that it too should operate after dark. That would have negated the entire basis for the designs of the B-17 and B-24 and wasted the hundreds of hours training of bombardiers with the Norden device. Faith in daylight precision bombing thus remained intact as the United States entered World War II. There was no disagreement with the British on the purposes and potentials of air power. Maj. Gen. Ira Eaker, who headed the American bomber command in 1942, said, “After two months spent in understanding British Bomber Command, it is still believed than the original all-out air plan for the destruction of the German war effort by air action alone was feasible and sound and more economical than any other method available.” He did agree that since the resources then available were limited, a ground effort might be required.

The Eighth Air Force opened for business in England in May 1942, but neither B-17s nor B-24s were available. Most of the handful of combat-ready heavyweights had been sent to the Philippines, where Japanese attacks destroyed many of them. As a result, when the Eighth inaugurated its campaign against the Axis powers on July 4, 1942, the mission had little resemblance to strategic bombing. The 15th Bombardment Squadron borrowed 12 A-20 twin-engine Bostons from the RAF, and only half of these were flown by U.S. crews. They struck at four airfields in Holland, flying at an extremely low level before unloading their bombs and strafing the base. They inflicted minor damage, and three were shot down.

Not until some six weeks later did the Eighth launch a true daylight strategic bombing mission. On a beautifully sunlit day, a dozen B-17s from the 97th Bomb Group headed for the Rouen (France) railroad yards. Accompanied by RAF Spitfires, they encountered light flak and no serious interference from German fighters. All returned safely, leaving behind them, said Eaker, head of the Eighth Bomber Command who flew in the lead plane, “a great pall of smoke and sand.” General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Air Corps commander, declared, “The attack on Rouen again verifies the soundness of our policy of the precision bombing of strategic objectives rather than the mass bombing of large, city size areas.”

The Rouen raid achieved only nuisance value, and euphoria dissipated rapidly as the strategic bombing campaign intensified. Practice revealed substantial holes in theory. The Luftwaffe, manning high-performance Me-109s and Focke Wulf 190s, greeted marauders with a skill and savagery that tore huge holes in the fabric of the Eighth. Losses of from 10 to 20 percent frequently resulted from the deadly combination of flak and fighters. Air Corps analysts calculated that adequate self-defense required a minimum of 300 bombers, a figure difficult to achieve during the first 18 months of U.S. aerial combat in Europe. Nevertheless, the Americans strove to meet their responsibilities for round-the-clock assaults. The RAF, exclusively bombing at night, including an occasional thousand-plane raid, endured heavy losses of air crews to flak and night fighters. Post-mission photo analysis indicated their destruction of industrial works was far from commensurate with the casualties.

By the spring of 1943, the Allied air command realized that there were not sufficient aircraft to hammer day and night the entire war industry of occupied Europe and Germany with precision. The RAF had no accuracy with its night raids, and the scattershot approach of the Eighth Bomber Command did not cripple production. Eaker, as commander of the Eighth’s Bomber Command, proposed a “Combined Bomber Offensive,” suggesting “it was better to cause a high degree of destruction in a few really essential industries than a small degree of destruction in many industries.”

Toward this end, the U.S bomber command mounted an attack on Romania’s Ploesti oil fields and refineries using B-24s flying from fields in North Africa. To avoid detection and increase accuracy, the participants in Operation Tidal Wave flew at low level. The raiders inflicted modest harm. Ploesti had been functioning well below capacity, and it was a simple matter for production to recoup. The Tidal Wave bombers suffered horrendous losses: more than 300 killed, hundreds wounded or captured, 79 interned in Turkey. Just 33 of the 178 Liberators involved could be listed as fit for duty after the mission. No one could seriously propose any further low-level daylight attacks for the heavyweights.

Because of the Luftwaffe’s success and with an eye to controlling the air when the time arrived for an invasion of Europe, in June 1943 the Allied high command created Operation Pointblank, announcing, “It has become essential to check the growth and to reduce the strength of the day and night fighter forces which the enemy can concentrate against us … first priority in the operation of British and American bombers … shall be accorded to the attack on German fighter forces and the industry upon which they depend.” German airbases and factories producing planes and essentials like ball bearings drew priority.

General LeMay Calculated That Flak Gunners Needed to Fire 372 Rounds to Guarantee a Hit on a B-17

The enemy met Pointblank with ferocity. In August 1943 a maximum effort that put up 300 bombers to strike Schweinfurt and Regensburg cost the Americans 60 planes—600 crewmen—shot down with many additional aircraft badly damaged. A basic problem lay in vulnerability to interceptors. Spitfires, with a range limited to 100 miles beyond the British coast, could not provide protection on longer missions. Bereft of escorts, the 10 or 12 .50-caliber machine guns of the B-17s and B-24s were not enough to fend off the swarms of Me-109s and FW-190s. Another weakness centered on use of the Norden bombsight, which required a clear view of the target and a steady hand. In the cloudless, peaceful skies over Texas, it might have been possible for a skilled operator in the boast of the times to put a bomb in a pickle barrel. But frequently over Europe heavy rain or snow, thick overcasts, and buffeting winds obscured or misled bombardiers. Even when the target was clearly visible, torrents of antiaircraft shells intimidated the men at the toggle switches and those in the cockpits. Bombs fell away prematurely, or the plane suddenly veered off because the pilot seized the controls and yanked the ship out of imminent danger.

General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 305th Bomb Group, after analyzing the photo reconnaissance intelligence, decided a prime culprit for poor accuracy was failure to maintain a steady course. He decreed that none of his pilots could take evasive action over a target. He had calculated that flak gunners needed to fire 372 rounds to guarantee a hit on a B-17 in level flight. Whether his arithmetic was correct or not, LeMay sought to persuade his subordinates by announcing he would fly the lead aircraft on missions. In fact, the first ship over a target had a better chance for survival because antiaircraft personnel adjusted for range and speed as a flight passed. Disciplined behavior, however, added effectiveness, although no one could compensate for weather that obscured a target.

LeMay also innovated a better defense for the big bombers. He insisted upon a tight, stepped-box formation that enabled gunners to provide mutual assistance. A bomb group could bring to bear from 200 to 600 machine guns on an attacker. His demands for more training by navigators and bombardiers and closed-in formations earned him his nickname of “Iron Ass,” but the 305th proved his point with more effective results and fewer losses.

In contrast to LeMay’s carefully worked out stepped-box formations, inexperienced Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, newly installed as an air division commander, ordered the 95th Bomb Group to use a flattened formation, with aircraft wingtip to wingtip. Over Kiel, the Luftwaffe feasted upon the 95th, shooting down eight, including the bomber carrying Forrest. The disaster proved the efficacy of LeMay’s design.

Pointblank failed to halt aircraft manufacture because the enemy had decentralized its critical industries. In particular, the Third Reich had arranged to import vital ball bearings from neutral Sweden. To inflict lasting damage required repeated raids on factories, and in 1943 the Air Corps lacked enough planes and crews. It was also during Pointblank that the initial desire to minimize civilian casualties by concentrating on military installations, manufacturing plants, and transportation hubs began to give way. Bomber command directed the crews on a mission against the rail junction at Munster to unload on the city center, hitting the town’s workers. According to one historian, the attack upon civilians “did not produce any moral qualms among the airmen; some cheered … their own sufferings had bred bitterness.”

Throughout the last months of 1943, the U.S. bomber campaign staggered from the continued onslaughts of German fighters and the increasingly effective flak aided by improved German radar systems. Losses continued to soar above a prohibitive 10 percent. P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts with American pilots had replaced the Spitfires, but without drop tanks they could only venture as far as the Rhine River, leaving the big fellows exposed to the depredations of interceptors. At the beginning of 1944, newly arrived P-51 Mustangs equipped with Rolls Royce engines debuted and quickly won recognition as the best fighter in the theater.

The tide turned with Big Week, starting February 20, 1944. The occasion introduced new features to the American effort. Lt. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle had replaced Eaker at the helm of the Eighth Air Force. Doolittle modified his predecessor’s policy that no fighters, the Little Friends, could ever leave the bombers to chase the enemy. Doolittle ordered the P-38s, P- 47s, and P-51s to attack the Luftwaffe on sight, provided they left some guardians to screen the Big Friends. The open season on German fighters was a product of an abundance of fighter squadrons and the development of fuel drop tanks that gave the Lightnings, Thunderbolts, and Mustangs hundreds of additional miles of flight distance. The Germans, in spite of the raids upon their industrial areas, were able to replace downed aircraft, but the predatory tactics of the Americans slashed the number of skilled, experienced pilots dueling with the Allied air arm. As the war progressed into 1944, the reservoir of capable German airmen suffered severe attrition.

For the first day of Big Week, the Eighth Air Force, working with British Bomber Command and the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force operating from Italy, dispatched 880 Fortresses and Liberators along with 835 fighters deep inside Germany. The Eighth alone claimed 115 enemy fighters shot down. That may have been an exaggeration, but the ability to launch similar massive raids six times within seven days surely knocked the Luftwaffe back on its heels. The incessant battering of German cities and their people forced the Third Reich to withdraw some fighter squadrons from the Eastern Front and bring others back from France and the Low Countries to protect the home front. Similarly, antiaircraft batteries were redeployed from both fronts.

With Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, now planned for June, Allied strategy switched from attacks deep inside Germany and began to work over the defensive infrastructure along the French coast: rail lines, roads, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and the communications network. While the bombers struck at German airfields and marshalling yards, the P-47, equipped with bombs, proved to be a great train buster and general interdiction tool. Gradually, many of the Thunderbolt squadrons transferred to the Ninth Air Force, which was more of a tactical support weapon, while the Eighth added P-51s to its rosters.

On D-day, a thick, nearly impenetrable overcast of more than 10,000 Allied bombers and fighters hovered over the English Channel and the Normandy shoreline. The pre-D-day campaign had produced sensational results. At most two or three German planes dared to appear as the invaders struggled ashore. The Luftwaffe preferred to husband its assets rather than risk confrontation with the canopy of American bombers and fighters, along with numerous planes from the RAF.

Fighter pilot Martin Low, in a P-38, said, “From June 6th until about 10 days later, we flew three missions a day, bombed and strafed anything that moved within 50 to a hundred miles of the coast, mostly trains.” The air attacks sharply curtailed movement of German reinforcements to help defend the beaches. Patrols like that mentioned by Low menaced daylight convoys or trains. One serious failure of the Allied air effort was the inability to destroy the blockhouses and emplacements that guarded the shores. Fearful of dropping bombs on friendly forces, the landing area missions were confined to drops a few miles beyond the beaches, and most of the bombs exploded harmlessly in empty fields.

Lt. Gen. Fritz Bayerlein Reported That 70% of His Soldiers Were “Either Dead, Wounded, Crazed or Dazed.”

Six weeks later, as the U.S. Third Army prepared to break out of Normandy toward the end of July 1944, it was exposed to the perils of high-altitude bombing aimed at tactical situations. Poor visibility prevented two-thirds of the scheduled 900 bombers to even reach the target near St. Lo, but 343 B-17s and B-24s unloaded on a poorly defined zone outlined by ground forces commander General Omar Bradley. Many of the bombs fell in no-man’s land between the opposing armies, but some exploded among GIs, killing 25 and wounding more than 60. A subsequent 1,500-plane attack that included fighter-bombers from the Ninth Air Force and the dreadnoughts of the Eighth devastated the Germans. Lt. Gen. Fritz Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr Division said, “Artillery positions were wiped out, tanks overturned and buried, infantry positions flattened and all roads and tracks destroyed… The shock effect on the troops was indescribable. Some of my men went mad and rushed around in the open until they were cut down by splinters.” He reported 70 percent of his soldiers “either dead, wounded, crazed or dazed.” The aerial assault opened the gates for the St. Lo breakout.

Campaigns like Overlord and the St. Lo mission mandated detours from the strategic bombing program. Similarly, when the first V-1 pilotless bombs struck London in June 1944, the British demanded immediate attacks to neutralize the launch installations near the French coast. Starting June 16, bombers with fighter escorts in what were called Noball raids hit several of the V-1 emplacements. By September, the advances into Normandy by the invaders eliminated the V-1 bases, but the more deadly V-2, a rocket-propelled explosive with a primitive guidance system fired from territory still held by the Third Reich, killed more than 9,000 Londoners. The Allies attempted to erase the source of the rockets with assaults on Peenemunde, where German rocket engineers using slave labor developed and then deployed the V-2.

During the run-up to D-day, there had been one exception to the concentration on the defenses against the Allied invasion. After much debate about priorities for bombing campaigns, the British and Americans agreed to target oil, which was critical to the enemy war effort. Although the initial strike at Ploesti cost the Air Corps dearly, Allied planes pounded the Romanian fields and refineries regularly, reducing the flow to Germany. After the Soviet Red Army invaded Romania, driving the country to change sides and shut off the spigot, the Third Reich relied on its reserves and production of synthetics.

Starting in May 1944, the Americans struck at depots and manufacturing sites for ersatz oil 127 times, while the RAF mounted 53 raids. Acutely aware of the threat to their lifeline, the Germans massed antiaircraft around the synthetic fuel installations. Tail gunner Eddie Picardo recalled one mission: “The flak was so thick it blotted out the sun. For a full 10 seconds it was like a total eclipse.” The ship next to his disappeared in a bright flash of fire. His plane returned home with basketball-sized holes in the fuselage.

On a single day in October 1944, during the missions to Politz, Ruhland, Bohlen, and Rothensee, the Eighth Air Force counted 40 planes shot down, only 3 percent of the more than 1,400 on the raid, but still more than 358 air crew missing in action. Furthermore, 700 bombers reported damage. However, the campaign against synthetic petroleum paid off. The amount available to the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe fell to half the total needed. The Me-262 jet fighters were towed to runways by cows, recruits received ever fewer hours of flight instruction, and artillery literally depended on horsepower to move.

As the strategic bombing campaign resumed in earnest after D-day, the Allied air forces attempted to extend their reach farther east. Diplomatic negotiations resulted in an agreement that U.S. bombers flying out of England could blast the most distant targets of the Third Reich and then continue several hundred miles to land at Soviet airbases. Refueled and rearmed, they could hit enemy installations on the way back to their home fields. The Soviets welcomed planes and crews. Unfortunately, their hospitality did not include the right for P-51s to fly protective patrols while the hosts threw a lavish banquet for their guests. A German reconnaissance plane discovered the sleek bombers sitting on the ground. A subsequent raid wrecked nearly 70 aircraft. The shuttle program fizzled out after a few more operations.

“If You Saw London Like I Saw It, You Wouldn’t Have Any Remorse. I Don’t Know Anyone Who Was Remorseful.”

With streams of bombers blasting targets even as far as Poland, there was talk of using the aircraft to halt the genocidal program at the Auschwitz concentration camp, either by targeting the buildings there or the rail lines that hauled the condemned to the gas chambers. The U.S. War Department opposed any diversion for that purpose as weakening “decisive operations elsewhere.” It was suggested that surely a handful of aircraft could have been spared from the thousand plane raids, but a detour that split off a few bombers would have denied them the protection of the massive formations. Furthermore, high-altitude strikes often missed small objectives like a rail line or bridge and the enemy could repair smashed tracks rather quickly. In any event, there was little political or military desire to attack the murder camps.

While the British openly wreaked havoc on civilians, the United States claimed it restricted its bombing to war facilities. That may have been a guiding principle, but invariably American bombers killed or maimed noncombatants. In the turbulence of flak and enemy fighters, with targets obscured by weather, and due to navigation errors, ordnance frequently exploded well off the mark. A miss by only 500 yards could plant a bomb in a residential area, and there were instances in which the drop struck miles from the objective. Toward the end of the war, the U.S. air command accepted the RAF policy and struck Berlin and Dresden without any firm strategic goal.

Few airmen cringed at the indiscriminate use of air power. Dave Nagel, an engineer and gunner with the 305th Bomb Group, said, “If you saw London like I saw it, you wouldn’t have any remorse. I don’t know anyone who was remorseful. We didn’t know whether an area was populated or not. We were supposed to be over a target, normally a factory, when we let the bombs go, but we assumed it was surrounded by civilians.”

Curtis LeMay, who departed Europe to direct the devastation from the air upon Japan, said, “As to worrying about the morality of what we were doing, nuts! I was a soldier, soldiers fight. If we made it through the day without exterminating too many of our own people, we thought we’d had a pretty good day.”

The advocates of strategic bombing and carrying the war to the civilian population had argued that these campaigns would bring the Third Reich to its knees without the need for brutal, bloody combat on the ground. They were wrong. By May 1945, the people of Germany may have lost their enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler’s regime and its wars, but they continued to carry on. It was only after the Allied armies with their superior manpower and firepower overran the German forces that surrender came.

A post-V-E Day survey estimated that Germany lost less than 4 percent of its productive capacity, and even a devastated city like Hamburg recuperated to 80 percent of its output within a few weeks. That said, the air war contributed significantly to the eventual defeat of the enemy. Foremost, the raids on fuel depots and synthetic plants curtailed the Luftwaffe’s ability to train pilots and deploy their new jet fighters in sufficient numbers. The Allied ground forces operated without interference from the air. The attacks on fuel sources destroyed the vaunted mobility of German armor, and the battering of rail and road nets strangled supply lines.To be sure, the successes of the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front played a major role in weakening the ability to resist, but at the same time, the armies on the Western Front could not have advanced as swiftly without the strategic bombing campaigns.

Acclaimed author Gerald Astor has written numerous books on the topic of World War II, including Voices of D-Day and The Mighty Eighth. He resides in Scarsdale, New York.

This article originally appeared on Warfare History Network. This article first appeared in 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

While the B-29 was responsible for the three deadliest bombing raids in history, its successor the B-50 never dropped a bomb in anger.

Here's What You Need to Remember: A half-century later, the C-135 family of planes based on the 707 airliner continue to perform the numerous support roles the B-50 had pioneered—especially the air-to-air refueling technology which continues to undergird U.S. airpower into the twenty-first century.

Quiz time! Which secret American military project during World War II proved even more expensive than the $2 billion Manhattan Project which developed U.S. atomic bombs?

That would be the $3 billion B-29 Superfortress—the huge four-engine bomber designed to fly across huge distances and drop those atomic bombs.

The silver-skinned B-29’s four huge turbo-supercharged R-3350 Duplex Cyclone radial engines allowed the 37-ton aircraft (when empty!) to fly relatively fast at 290 to 350 miles per hour and at altitudes exceeding 30,000 feet, making it extremely difficult for Japanese interceptors to catch up with them.

But even as World War II ground on to its conclusion, the Air Force appreciated that the Superfortress’s advantages would soon vanish due to the advent of turbojet-powered fighters. As the Cold War gathered momentum in the late 1940s, it further became vital for the Air Force to have a nuclear bomber that could strike Russia from U.S. bases.

These needs culminated in a new B-29D model with engine power cranked up nearly 60 percent using a 3,500 horsepower R-4360 Wasp Major engine and a skin made of stronger but lighter 75-S aluminum alloy. Together, this lowered the weight of the wings by 600 pounds and increased speed to nearly 400 miles per hour. Other trimmings included a taller tail fin, hydraulically assisted controls, and wing and window de-icing systems.

The end of World War II saw the cancellation of B-29 orders. To rescue the program, the military redesignated the B-29D as the B-50 to imply the aircraft incorporated more original design features than was actually the case—hardly the first nor the last time misleading aircraft designations have been adopted for political purposes.

Only a small run of sixty B-50As were produced in Washington, and these went onto become the tip of the newly-formed Strategic Air Command’s nuclear deterrence fleet in 1948 until huge B-36 Peacemaker and B-47 Stratojet jet bombers could enter service.

A small number of B-50Bs were then built with lighter-weight fuel cells, until the Air Force settled on the B-50D to commit to larger-scale manufacture of 222 bombers. The last model downsized the crew from eleven to eight, had provisions for external fuel tanks, featured a simplified nose cone, and included a built-in inflight-refueling boom.

The B-50 fleet suffered its share of teething issues too due to defective pressure regulators, engine problems, and cracking of its aluminum skin which took several years to iron out. Furthermore, as the Pentagon kept on rapidly deploying new types of nuclear bombs, the B-50 bombers had to be repeatedly converted to fit them in their bomb bays.

When the Korean War broke out in the 1950s, only the older B-29s were called into perform non-nuclear strikes—where they suffered unexpected losses to Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters. With speeds approaching 680 miles per hour and high climb rates, the MiG-15 demonstrated that even the B-50’s higher speeds and altitudes were of little advantage due to advancing jet technology. This led to the cancellation in 1949 of an experimentally re-engined model first called the YB-50C with 4,500-horsepower engines.

However, the B-29 and B-50 by then were at the forefront of pioneering air-to-air refueling technology, which would allow the kind of extended range bombing raids the SAC was aiming for. Initially, this involved converting B-29s into KB-29s tankers, that would use a long hose to refuel nuclear-armed B-50s.

In 1949, the B-50A Lucky Lady II became the first aircraft to fly around the world in an epic ninety-four-hour flight between February 26 and March 2. (An earlier attempt by B-50 Global Queen, had to be aborted due to engine failures.) She was refueled by no less than four pairs of KB-29M tankers flying out of the Azores, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Hawaii along its 23,452 mile-long journey. This record would finally be beaten in 1956 in less than half the time by a brand-new B-52 jet bomber.

Before that, in 1953 jet-powered B-47s began entering service while B-29s came to be retired, so it naturally fell to B-50s to take on the support duties. Ironically, the B-50 would go on to see far more action in these support roles than as a bomber.

Altogether 136 B-50s were converted into KB-50 tankers. Starting in 1956, 112 were further modified into the KB-50J model by adding J-47 turbojet engines from the B-47 bomber to help them sustain higher speeds and altitudes to keep up with the bombers they were refueling. The add-on turbojets boosted the KB-50J’s maximum speed to 444 miles per hour—slightly faster than a World War II-era Mustang fighter.

The RB-50B and RB-50E were photo-reconnaissance planes dispatched on increasingly dangerous overflights over Soviet and North Korean airspace. Some of these “ferret” missions were even intended to provoke Soviet intercepts, allowing U.S. spies to listen in on the resulting radio chatter and radar activity, studying what kind of defenses were in place.

The RB-50G was an electronic spy plane full of special consuls, with an expanded crew of sixteen. This too proved a risky mission: in 1953 the RB-50G Little Red Ass was shot down over the near Vladivostok by two MiG-17 fighters. Of aircraft’s eighteen crew that managed to bail out, only the co-pilot survived the freezing waters of the Sea of Japan to be rescued by a U.S. destroyer.

There was even the WB-50D, a “hurricane hunter” plane operated by the National Weather Service to track violent weather events—and also sample radiation levels in the to monitor Soviet nuclear tests during the early 1950s. These saw so much rough duty that six WB-50s were lost with the total loss of their crew. Weather reconnaissance reports from WB-50s were instrumental in planning the U-2 spy plane flights that discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The various B-50 variants were finally retired in the 1950s, their aluminum airframe aging poorly after seeing much hard use. A half-century later, the C-135 family of planes based on the 707 airliner continue to perform the numerous support roles the B-50 had pioneered—especially the air-to-air refueling technology which continues to undergird U.S. airpower into the twenty-first century.

While the B-29 was responsible for the three deadliest bombing raids in history—the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—its successor the B-50 never dropped a bomb in anger.

However, it would not be entirely accurate to say it never fired a shot in combat. The RB-53G that was shot down near Vladivostok fired back ineffectively at its pursuers. And in March 15, 1953 a WB-50 flying in international airspace near the Kamchatka peninsula was intercepted by two MiG-15 fighters. These tailed weather-recon plane for a while before one opened fire, and the WB-50’s tail gunner shot back. Fortunately, this time everyone returned to base.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

David Axe

Security,

And U.S. adversaries are taking notice.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The defunct bomber-rotation was “a tremendous success,” they wrote. “It clearly communicated U.S. readiness to act decisively when U.S. and allied interests were challenged.”

In mid-April 2020 the Air Force abruptly ended its 16-year-old rotation of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

At least one expert believes the abrupt end to the Continuous Bomber Rotation effort signals a further decline in the Air Force’s ability to project long-range firepower.

“The Air Force knows this mission area is stretched too thin,” retired Air Force major general Larry Stutzriem and Douglas Birkey wrote in Defense News.

Stutzriem is the director of studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Virginia. Birkey is the institute’s executive director

The flying branch, however, put a happy spin on the decision to halt the bomber rotation, which since 2004 has maintained a small force of bombers in the western Pacific region in order to deter Chinese aggression.

Bombers aren’t necessarily going to deploy less often or in fewer numbers, the Air Force implied. Rather, they’re simply going to deploy less predictably under a new scheme the service calls “dynamic force employment.”

“Our diverse bomber fleet – B-52, B-1, and B-2 – allows us to respond to global events anytime, anywhere. Whether they’re launched from Louisiana, Guam or the U.K., long-range strategic bombers have and will remain a bedrock of our deterrence!” Air Force Global Strike Command tweeted on April 16, 2020.

The Air Force six days later launched its first dynamic bomber sortie. A single B-1 took off from its base in South Dakota and, over the course of a 30-hour sortie, flew all the way to Japan and formed up with Japanese air force F-2 and F-15 fighters and locally-based U.S. Air Force F-16s before turning back toward the United States.

The B-1 sortie might have seemed to underscore the Air Force’s continuing commitment to a global bomber presence despite the flying branch also planning on cutting its 157-strong bomber fleet by one B-2 and 17 B-1s.

The service as part of its 2021 budget submission has asked Congress for permission to begin decommissioning the bombers. The B-1s, in particular, suffered from overuse over Afghanistan and the Middle East in the decades following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks -- and also suffered from a dearth of maintenance.

The result in 2019 was an abysmal readiness rate for the swing-wing bomber. In July 2019 just seven of 62 B-1s were fully mission-capable, South Dakota senator Mike Rounds revealed. Readiness somewhat improved in 2020.

The Air Force framed the first “dynamic” B-1 mission as evidence of the service’s enduring an undiminished ability to deploy long-range airpower. But Stutzriem and Birkey see the situation differently.

The defunct bomber-rotation was “a tremendous success,” they wrote. “It clearly communicated U.S. readiness to act decisively when U.S. and allied interests were challenged.”

Halting the bomber rotation “now sends the opposite message, just as the region grows more dangerous,” Stutzriem and Birkey added. “This is a decision with significant risk, yet it is an outcome compelled by past choices resulting in a bomber force on the edge.”

David Axe was defense editor at The National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This article first appeared last year.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, World

should the Air Force devote a share of its funding to procuring a new version of its oldest fighter, the F-15 Eagle, or devote every available dollar to its newest, the F-35 Lightning?

Here's What You Need to Remember: At short range—where most air-to-air kills have been scored historically—the F-15 would retain an energy advantage compared to the F-35, which would also be more susceptible to detection by infrared and radar. Compared to the highly agile F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, the F-35 is less optimized for WVR combat though it can reportedly maintain high angles of attack.

The U.S. military’s over $738 billion dollar budget is unprecedented in human history—but that only makes the struggles for a piece of that monetary pie all the fiercer.

One of the battles currently raging revolves over a seemingly simple question: should the Air Force devote a share of its funding to procuring a new version of its oldest fighter, the F-15 Eagle, or devote every available dollar to its newest, the F-35 Lightning.

Complicating matters is that the two aircraft are built to do different things. 

The single-engine F-35A is designed to launch penetrating strikes into defended enemy airspace relying on its stealth characteristics and powerful sensors to evade enemy forces. 

The Air Force’s soon-to-be-retired twin-engine F-15C fighters are air-to-air-only aircraft that patrol the airspace around the United States and foreign military bases, fending off intruders and potential attackers. The F-15 is non-stealthy as a fighter can get, but has a 33 percent higher maximum speed of Mach 2.5 and a longer range.

As foreign air forces have ordered more and more heavily modernized F-15s over the last few decades, Boeing is offering to an F-15EX variant that will incorporate all those new bits of technology (detailed here)—while also incorporating the multirole capability the F-15C lacks. 

Though the F-15EX’s proponents argue that the money spent wouldn’t detract from F-35 funding, Lockheed and most of the air force brass don’t see it that way and strenuously object. In the last few years, the Defense Department has repeatedly tilted towards Boeing in competition, and one of the acting defense secretaries was a former Boeing executive.

For now, eight F-15EXs are on an initial order for $1.1 billion—with that possibly serving as a precursor for 144 more.

So just how well can these aircraft perform various missions?

Penetrating Strike

Russian, China and their export clients are increasingly fielding powerful radars and surface-to-air missile systems that can detect and shoot missiles at conventional fighters like the F-15EX from over 100 miles away.

To survive those kinds of defenses, fourth-generation jets must engage in elaborate anti-SAM games of cat and mouse involving jamming aircraft, HARM anti-radar missiles and Wild Weasel strike planes, and use expensive long-range standoff missiles. Such intensive operations can open narrow windows of vulnerability, and over days or weeks, gradually dismantle an air defense network—but don’t initially permit round-the-clock strikes.

By comparison, because a stealth aircraft’s reduced radar cross-section means they will only become vulnerable to targeting radars at short range, they can more easily infiltrate between the “bubbles” of enemy air defense radars and employ cheaper, shorter-range guided weapons. That means the F-35s can more freely operate over enemy airspace on “Day One” of a conflict.

Furthermore, F-35 advocates argue that using stealth jets saves the need to deploy huge strike packages incorporating dozens of aircraft, as were fielded by the Air Force in the 1991 Gulf War.

Air Support and Interdiction in Permissive Environments

When fighting against foes like the Taliban or ISIS without high-altitude anti-aircraft weapons, stealth capabilities become superfluous. Instead, the ability to loiter at length over combat zones and precisely deliver large payloads of weapons is key.

Normally, an F-35 is limited to four or six munitions stored in its internal bay.  Theoretically, in a permissive combat scenario where stealth isn’t a factor, a “Beast Mode” F-35 can be loaded down with four to six additional air-to-surface weapons on external racks.  But this much-touted capability has not actually been developed yet.

While the old F-15Cs were not configured for ground attack, the F-15EX will be—and should be able to carry a heavier ground-attack payload underwing.

Still, the F-35 does bring a different advantage to the table: its networked sensor suit may be better suited for locating enemy positions and sharing that information with friendly forces.

Interceptor/Air Sovereignty

The F-15EX is primarily supposed to replace F-15Cs performing routine air patrols around U.S. airspace and near key overseas military bases. These frequently intercept Russian or Chinese aircraft that test the boundaries of the sectors they are assigned to defend. 

Therefore, the F-15C’s replacement must be judged by how efficiently it performs that mission in peacetime as well as how viable it is in a high-intensity conflict scenario.

The F-15 is well-suited for peacetime patrols because its greater combat range of 1,200 miles allows it to embark on long patrols, and requires less aerial refueling, compared to the 770-mile range of the F-35A. Furthermore, the fact the Eagle has two engines means the aircraft is less likely to be lost if one fails—a factor manifested in significantly higher accident-rates of single-engine F-16 fighters compared to twin-engine F-15s. 

In a shooting war, higher maximum speed and a larger maximum missile load—up twenty missiles using special quad-racks instead of the F-35’s six—allow an F-15 to intercept bombers faster and launch more missiles in an emergency scenario.

F-35 proponents argue, however, that stealth would give F-35s the advantage of surprise versus enemy bombers—increasing the likelihood of killing bombers before they flee—as well as protect the interceptor from falling victim to enemy escort fighters.

Air Superiority

Air superiority refers to seizing control of the skies by beating enemy fighters at their own game—not just playing defense against enemy intruders. Traditionally, an air superiority fighter must be maneuverable for within-visual range (WVR) combats, as enemy fighters will have decent odds of evading beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles.

Undoubtedly, the F-15EX will be more vulnerable to enemy fighters in BVR, particularly advanced 4.5-generation jets like the Su-35, as well as stealth aircraft like China’s Chengdu J-20. Quite simply, while F-15s may be able to shoot at enemy 4.5-generation aircraft from afar—and launch many missiles due to their quad racks—they will, in turn, be equally vulnerable.

At short range—where most air-to-air kills have been scored historically—the F-15 would retain an energy advantage compared to the F-35, which would also be more susceptible to detection by infrared and radar. Compared to the highly agile F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, the F-35 is less optimized for WVR combat though it can reportedly maintain high angles of attack.

But the Air Force insists that its Red Flag military exercises have repeatedly shown that its F-35s consistently trounce non-stealth aircraft by lopsided 20:1 kill ratios.

The Battle of the Books: Taxpayer Burden and Bureaucratic Support

Contrary to one might expect, the F-35A is no more expensive than an F-15EX—at around $85 million each. That reflects success in cutting initially alarming F-35 costs thanks to massive economies of scale in its favor—the Pentagon expects to order over 2,000 F-35s.  

However, if the F-15EX has a cost advantage, it comes in terms of operating costs. The F-15EX is forecast to cost $27,000 per flight hour, while the Air Force is struggling to get F-35 operating costs to $34,000 an hour.  As the Air Force is also very familiar with F-15 after forty years of service, the F-15EX likely benefit from higher readiness rates than the notoriously low ones currently afflicting the F-35.

But the F-15EX’s fortunes may ultimately revolve more around political factors: it is perceived as being foisted upon the military by civilian appointees, rather than having a strong bases of support within the Air Force brass. Thus, the F-15EX program may not survive a change in administration.

If the Air Force does dispense with the F-15EX down the line, however, it should consider developing a longer-endurance model of the F-35 for the interceptor/air sovereignty mission—particularly as in 2019 the Air Force appears increasingly disinclined to develop an entirely new manned sixth-generation fighters for that job.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Mizokami

Security,

But which is the best of the best?

Here's What You Need to Remember: Smith & Wesson’s successful “wonder nine” pistol, the M&P followed in the footsteps of the Glock to produce a highly effective, high capacity polymer frame pistol.

Smith & Wesson is one of the oldest, and most storied names in American firearms. Founded in the 1800s, the company specialized in revolvers and guns such as the No.3 and Schofield became synonymous with the Old West. Although Smith & Wesson is best known for its handguns,the company now makes guns of all stripes, from revolvers to pistols to their own version of the AR-15 rifle. Here are five of the storied company’s best contemporary offerings.

Smith & Wesson 686

Smith & Wesson categorizes its revolvers using a system of letters, with the so-called “L” frames set in the middle between small and large caliber guns. One of the most popular “L frames” is the Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum. The 686 is capable of shooting both high powered .357 Magnum and lighter .38 Special ammunition. This gives shooters the option of training on .38 Special until they know the ins and outs of the revolver and then stepping up to the more lethal .357 Magnum when they feel comfortable.

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The 686 has a four-inch barrel, an overall length of 9.6 inches, and weighs two and a half pounds. It also adjustable sights, a satin stainless steel finish, double action firing system and a six or seven round cylinder.

Smith & Wesson Model 29

The Smith & Wesson Model 29 was one of the first revolvers chambered for the powerful .44 Magnum round. A blued, six cylinder revolver with wooden grips and a classic style, the Model 29 became particularly popular after its use in the “Dirty Harry” series of films. The Model 29 is an all-steel handgun with heft, all the better to soak up the punishing level of recoil a user experiences when fired. Barrel length ranged from four to ten inches. The powerful .44 Magnum cartridge was particularly popular with gun enthusiasts and hunters who stalked dangerous prey. Discontinued in 1999, Model 29 was recently put back into production.

Smith & Wesson Model 442 Pro Series

In Smith & Wesson’s lettering system the smallest revolvers use the so-called “J frame,” and one of the smallest revolvers of all is the Model 442 Pro Series. Designed as a concealed carry revolver, the 442 is chambered in .38 Special and can handle more powerful, higher pressure +P rounds. The revolver frame is made of aluminum alloy to reduce overall weight with the cylinder itself made of carbon steel and barrel made of stainless steel. The 442’s cylinder holds five rounds, resulting in a narrower pistol that is easier to carry concealed. The revolver is double action only, meaning a single pull with both advance the cylinder to fresh round and release the firing pin, firing the gun. The 442 lacks a hammer, allowing for a smoother draw from under clothing.

Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0

Smith & Wesson’s successful “wonder nine” pistol, the M&P followed in the footsteps of the Glock to produce a highly effective, high capacity polymer frame pistol. The Military & Police Model, currently in version 2.0, has a low bore axis, which the manufacturer claims reduces muzzle climb and allows the shooter to get sights back on target faster. The M&P 2.0 incorporates a five-inch stainless steel barrel into a pistol with an overall length of eight inches. The double action pistol is available in nine millimeter and .40 Smith & Wesson, with the 9mm version sporting a seventeen round magazine plus one in the chamber, for a total of eighteen rounds. The pistol also features an optional loaded chamber indicator and optional thumb safety. Somewhat unique among pistols it comes with four different palmswell grip inserts for maximum ergonomic comfort.

Smith & Wesson 1911A1

The patent on John Moses Browning’s 1911 handgun design ran out long ago, and nearly all gun companies now manufacture their own versions of this iconic handgun. Smith & Wesson is no exception, producing its own S&W1911 E-Series pistols. The pistols are generally true to the final version of the 1911A1, with the exception of stainless steel barrels, skeletonized hammers, and in some cases an accessory rail for the mounting of lights and lasers. The company makes both full-size Government and smaller Commander handguns, the latter with a barrel three quarters of an inch shorter than the five-inch Government barrel and a slightly shorter slide. Commanders also feature bobtailed mainspring housings and aggressive checkering to help the shooter stay on target. The 1911 E-Series is generally true enough to form to satisfy 1911 purists.

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 first appeared in 2018.

Image: Reddit.

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Europe

The seamen cheered their support.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Years after Sablin’s failed plan, U.S. historian Gregory Young pieced together accounts of the mutiny in a thesis later read by an insurance salesman named Tom Clancy. Inspired by the story and that of a previous Soviet defector, Jonas Plaskus, Clancy went on to write Hunt for the Red October.

On the evening of November 8, 1976, Captain Anatoly Potulny, commander of the Soviet anti-submarine frigate Storozhevoy (“the Sentry”) was informed that several of his officers were drunk below deck in the forward sonar compartment. This was reported by the ship’s charismatic political officer, Captain Valery Sablin, responsible for maintaining crew morale and loyalty. Potulny went below deck but saw nothing amiss—then he heard the click of the hatch locking above him.

“Sorry, I could not do otherwise,” Sablin told him as the captain pounded on the hatch. “Once we arrive at our destination, you will be allowed to choose your destiny.”

The 37-year old commissar had always stood apart for his exceptional idealism. While a cadet, he had even written Nikita Khrushchev offering pointed advice on Leninist reforms. Now he was critical of Premier Leonid Brezhnev, who during the ‘Era of Stagnation’ focused spending on military projects and walked back political reforms. Sablin was upset by the privilege and corruption of the Soviet bureaucratic elite in a supposedly classless society.

The commissar told his aid, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Shein, to take up guard, handing him a pistol. Then Sablin convened the ship’s sixteens officers and revealed his plan: to sail the Storozhevoy from its quay in Riga, Lithuania to Leningrad 500 miles northeast. The frigate would berth at Kronstadt Island—the site of past naval mutinies that had inspired Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917. (The former was commemorated in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which Sablin played in the background.) There he would broadcast his call for a new Leninist revolution.

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The ship's officers voted whether to support Sablin by casting black and white checker pieces in a cup—resulting in a tie. However, most of the ship's crew took Sablin's side and locked the dissenting officers in their cabins. Sablin then gave a speech:

"The leadership of the party and the Soviet government have abandoned the principles of the revolution. There is no freedom, nor justice. The only way out is a new communist revolution… It is assumed that the current state apparatus will be cleared away, and some of its institutions broken up and cast into the dustbin of history. Will these issues be addressed through the dictatorship of the proletariat class? Necessarily! Only through the greatest national vigilance is there a path to a society of happiness! "

Sablin envisioned the Storozhevoy’s politically independent crew daily broadcasting calls for reform across the nation, while furnished with necessary supplies and immunity from prosecution.

The seamen cheered their support. However, one of Sablin’s supposed supporters, Lt. Firsov, snuck off the Storozhevoy and alerted the incredulous guards of a nearby submarine.

Sablin had planned on leaving with the fleet the following morning before peeling away north. Realizing his plot risked exposure, Sablin slipped the frigate out at midnight with radar and running lights deactivated, braving the treacherous shoals of the Daugava River.

The Soviets Strike Back

To get to Leningrad, Sablin first had to cruise north into the Baltic Sea—towards Sweden. As the Soviet Baltic Fleet slowly grasped what was happening, it assumed the Storozhevoy was defecting to the Scandinavian nation. After all, this had happened before in 1961, when Lithuanian Captain Jonas Plaskus surrendered his submarine tender at Gotland Island.

However, the 18-month-old Storozhevoy was one of the Navy’s advanced Burevestnik-class frigates (NATO codename Krivak I). It was designed to hunt U.S. submarines from up to fifty miles away using short-range RBU-6000 rockets and far-reaching SS-N-14 Metel (“Snowstorm”) missiles. It would be a disaster for the sophisticated sub-hunter to fall into Western hands.

A Vice Admiral futilely begged Sablin on the radio to turn around, promising forgiveness. Finally, Premier Brezhnev was woken from his sleep at 4:00 AM with the bad news. He authorized using lethal force to prevent a humiliating defection.

Eleven fast attack boats were dispatched from Riga and Liepiejaie, Latvia to chase the rogue frigate. Meanwhile, Soviet Navy Il-38 turboprop patrol planes and Tu-16 Badger jet bombers began scouring the seas. They were joined by Soviet Air Force’s 668th Bomber Regiment’s Yak-28I and-28L ‘Brewers,' hulking twin-engine jets with transparent glass noses allowing a crewmember to aim its four unguided bombs.

However, visibility was poor, and the silent-running Storozhevoy was hard to locate in the open Gulf of Riga. But at 6:00 AM, Storzhevoy herself encountered dense fog, causing Sablin to activate his radar to avoid collisions with commercial traffic. Furthermore, as she was passing the Irbe Strait, she was spotted by a lighthouse.

Yak-28s vectored to Irbe spotted a ship and lobbed FAB-250 bombs that raked her hull with shrapnel—but that vessel was actually a Soviet freighter bound for Finland.

Then around 8:00 AM, Tu-16s closed around the Storozhevoy's radar emissions. The huge jet bombers were armed with radar-guided KSR-5 ‘Kingfish' cruise missiles programmed to hone in on the first target acquired. But the frigate was now in the international waters of the Baltic Sea, and the pilots refused to fire, either unwilling to risk hitting a neutral ship or possibly unwilling to fire on fellow Soviets. Swedish radar operators observed the frenetic Soviet air and naval activity and listened in on their radio traffic.

Finally, all thirty-six Yak-28s of the 668th were scrambled to join the hunt—narrowly avoiding a fatal collision on the runway. Meanwhile, two missile boats under Captain Bobrikov closed within the fifty-mile attack range of their P-15 Termit anti-ship missiles.

However, the Yaks struck first. One silvery jet pocked the port side of the Storozhevoy with twenty-three-millimeter cannon shells. The frigate boasted two rapid-fire three-inch dual-purpose guns on the stern and SA-N-4 Osa anti-aircraft missiles but did not fire back, either lacking loaded ammunition or under orders from Sablin not to return fire.

The jets began making repeated bombing runs, causing water to geyser over the frigate from near misses. But one FAB-250 smacked into the stern of the ship, blasting off the rear deck cover and jamming the steering gear. Taking on water, Storozhevoy began circling before coming to a halt only fifty nautical miles from Swedish waters.

Meanwhile, three crew members broke Captain Putolny out of the sonar compartment. Taking a pistol, he stormed onto the bridge and shot Sablin in the leg. At 10:32 AM he desperately messaged: “The ship is stopped. I have taken control.”

The Yaks aborted their attack runs, but not before one group mistakenly attacked Soviet pursuit ships and was fired upon in return, without effect. Naval Infantry then boarded the Storozhevoy and arrested her crew.

Moscow covered up the incident by staging naval exercises the next day. The bomber pilots were reprimanded for the friendly fire incidents and logistical confusion. The Storozhevoy’s crew were detained for months, but in the end, only a handful of officers were tried. Of those, just two convicted—Lt. Shein, who received eight years in prison, and Sablin. Convicted for treason, he was executed on August 3, 1976, and buried in an unmarked grave. In 1994, he was posthumously re-sentenced to ten years for disobeying orders.

Years after Sablin’s failed plan, U.S. historian Gregory Young pieced together accounts of the mutiny in a thesis later read by an insurance salesman named Tom Clancy. Inspired by the story and that of a previous Soviet defector, Jonas Plaskus, Clancy went on to write Hunt for the Red October. But unlike the novel’s disillusioned submarine captain Marko Ramius, Valery Sablin risked all not to defect, but in a quixotic attempt to reform the Soviet system he passionately believed in.

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

Image: Wikipedia.