Diplomacy & Crisis News

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank presents a peer challenge to the Abrams.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Army is currently planning to develop a more radical upgraded Abrams.

Back in the 1990s I recall reading Tom Clancy’s loving paean to the M1 Abrams, Armored Cav, in which he related that the unkillable tank had never been knocked out by hostile fire. The Abrams’ 120mm cannon effortlessly peeled the turrets off of T-72 tanks in the Gulf War, while Russian anti-tank missiles and 125mm shells couldn’t pierce the American tank’s Chobham armor. In fact, the Abram’s own gun reportedly struggled to penetrate the Abram’s depleted uranium armor.

Since then the Abrams has been involved in a lot more war, and it has had to forsake its invincible reputation. During the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, several were knocked out by massive IEDs or RPGs in the vulnerable rear armor, others by advanced Russian-made anti-tank missiles such as the AT-14 Kornet. In the ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Iraq, dozens of Saudi and Iraqi Abrams have been taken out by such missiles. 

The Abrams also hasn’t encountered modern tanks. In fact, the Abrams is hardly unrivaled in its (very heavy) weight class: other vehicles such as the German Leopard 2, the British Challenger 2, the French Leclerc, and Israeli Merkava 4 possess similar firepower and protection levels, though of course each type has its advantages and disadvantages.) However, none of them were likely to ever be shooting at an Abrams, so it wasn’t a problem. For decades, the most threatening potential opponent was the Russian T-90 tank—a vehicle which has a fighting chance against the Abrams, but is hardly a peer.

Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank finally does present a peer challenge to the Abrams. While the Abrams still appears to have a slight edge in conventional armor, the Armata compensates with a combination of explosive-reactive armor and a sophisticated radar-guided Afganit Active Protection System (APS) intended to shoot down incoming projectiles. The T-14’s new 2A82 125mm also has improved armor penetration, meaning the Abrams’s frontal armor may be vulnerable at shorter combat ranges (possibly 1,500 meters and less).

While it’s still debatable which is the superior tank—they clearly both are capable of destroying one other—the point is that the Abrams can no longer assume the inferiority of opposing tanks.

The SEP V3 Abrams

Another thing they used to say in the 90s was “The Army doesn’t do cities.”

During the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which involved a gazillion Military Operations in Urban Terrain, a Tank Urban Survival Kit (TUSK) was rushed into service with a number of upgrades to cope with potential ambushes from any direction. Many of those upgrades have been standardized in later Abrams, including improved belly armor, a Crew Remotely Operated Weapons Station (CROWS)—basically, a remote-controlled .50 caliber machine gun so that the crew isn’t exposed when firing—and add-on Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) to the vulnerable sides of the turret.

The U.S. Army had long eschewed ERA, as it can wound nearby friendly infantry and can get “used up”; however, it served as a relatively lightweight and inexpensive means of defending the Abram’s vulnerable side armor from concealed enemy rocket-propelled grenade teams.

The latest Abrams variant is an upgrade package, the M1A2 SEP V3. Many of its features are practical rather than sexy: upgraded computers, and a new Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) that allows the Abrams to keep its sophisticated systems running while the engine is off, improving the fuel efficiency of the Abram’s notoriously thirsty turbine engines. Maintainability is improved with modular, replaceable cabling.

There are some lethality upgrades, notably a datalink to connect with new Advanced Multi-Purpose programmable airburst shells. These will allow the Abrams’ main gun to shoot high explosive shells that detonate directly above enemy troops in cover—an ability hoped to counter to enemy anti-tank missile teams. Other detonation modes, including one optimized for penetrating walls, are also available. An improved Forward Looking Infrared Sensor (FLIR) will upgrade the Abrams’s detection capabilities and main gun accuracy. A revised, lower-profile remote-controlled machine gun also sports improved cameras.

Finally—and possibly, most importantly—the M1’s depleted uranium armor package has been improved. How much, you ask? The Defense Department sure ain’t telling! ERA, however, does not appear in the default package. A jammer for disabling wireless IEDs has also been installed.

Critical Add-Ons: News Ammunition and Active Protection

A number of the most important upgrades to the Abram’s capability maybe come independently from the SEP V3 upgrade package.

The first already began entering service in 2015: the M829A4 Armor Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot shell, the latest ammunition type for the Abram’s 120mm M256 cannon. The M829A4 has a segmented depleted uranium penetrator, and has been specially designed to defeat the Relikt explosive reactive armor on the latest Russian tanks, including the T-14 Armata. Future improvements to the Abram’s firepower are likely to come by improving the capabilities of munitions, as they are easier to upgrade and replace than the main guns.

Another innovation, Active Protection Systems (APS), have the potential to revolutionize tank defenses—the best combine ‘soft kill’ measures that obscure the tank and mislead guided missiles, as well as ‘hard kill’ measures that literally shoot down incoming projectiles. These are generally most effective against missiles, though theoretically may be effective against tank shells; the M829A4 shell is supposedly designed to overcome them.

The Israeli Trophy APS has a proven record shooting down deadly anti-tank missiles in recent conflicts. The United States military has attempted to develop its own indigenous system—but recently, the Army and Marines began testing Trophy on M1A2 tanks. Trophy can basically be purchased “off the shelf” and installed relatively quickly, so if the Defense Department decides the Abrams needs the capability, it could pursue the upgrade relatively quickly.

Another upgrade that could be installed quickly if desired would be a Laser Warning Receiver (LWR). An LWR would notify the Abram’s crew if their vehicle was being painted by an enemy laser-range finders and guidance systems—giving the crew an opportunity to hit the reverse pedal and back the tank out of danger.

It should be stressed there are no definitive plans to install the latter two technologies in the SEP V3 Abrams. However they are obvious upgrades that could be implemented quickly and at reasonable cost.

The Future

The Army is currently planning to develop a more radical upgraded Abrams by 2020, the M1A3. Details are sketchy, but reducing the Abram’s roughly seventy-ton weight appears to be one of the priorities. Certainly, weight has limited the ability to deploy the Abrams around the world and restricted which bridges it can cross. Features specifically mentioned include a lighter-weight gun, replacing the wiring with fiber-optic cables to shave off two tons of weight, improved suspension, and adding a Laser Warning Receiver. Other improvements are doubtlessly being considered, but specifics are lacking for now.

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 2016.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Army photo by Visual Information Specialist Gertrud Zach

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

The Russian Navy maintains ten to eleven Akulas, according to Jane’s accounting in 2016, but only three or four are in operational condition.

Here's What You Need to Know: Despite the Akula’s poor readiness rate, they continue to make up the larger part of Russia’s nuclear attack submarine force.

The Soviet Union produced hot-rod submarines that could swim faster, take more damage, and dive deeper than their American counterparts—but the U.S. Navy remained fairly confident it had the Soviet submarines outmatched because they were all extremely noisy. Should the superpowers clash, the quieter American subs had better odds of detecting their Soviet counterparts first, and greeting them with a homing torpedo. However, that confidence was dented in the mid-1980s, when the Soviet Navy launched its Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Thirty years later they remain the mainstay of the Russian nuclear attack submarine fleet—and are quieter than the majority of their American counterparts.

Intelligence provided by the spies John Walker and Jerry Whitworth in the 1970s convinced the Soviet Navy that it needed to seriously pursue acoustic stealth in its next attack submarine. After the prolific Victor class and expensive titanium-hulled Sierra class, construction of the first Project 971 submarine, Akula (“Shark”), began in 1983. The new design benefited from advanced milling tools and computer controls imported from Japan and Sweden, respectively, allowing Soviet engineers to fashion quiet seven-bladed propellers.

The large Akula, which displaced nearly thirteen thousand tons submerged, featured a steel double hull typical to Soviet submarines, allowing the vessel to take on more ballast water and survive more damage. The attack submarine’s propulsion plant was rafted to dampen sound, and anechoic tiles coated its outer and inner surface. Even the limber holes which allowed water to pass inside the Akula’s outer hull had retractable covers to minimize acoustic returns. The 111-meter-long vessel was distinguished by its elegant, aquadynamic conning tower and the teardrop-shaped pod atop the tail fin which could deploy a towed passive sonar array. A crew of around seventy could operate the ship for one hundred days at sea.

Powered by a single 190-megawatt pressurized water nuclear reactor with a high-density core, the Akula could swim a fast thirty-three knots (thirty-eight miles per hour) and operate 480 meters deep, two hundred meters deeper than the contemporary Los Angeles–class submarine. More troubling for the U.S. Navy, though, the Akula was nearly as stealthy as the Los Angeles class. American submariners could no longer take their acoustic superiority for granted. On the other hand, the Akula’s own sensors were believed to be inferior.

The Akula I submarines—designated Shchuka (“Pike”) in Russian service—were foremost intended to hunt U.S. Navy submarines, particularly ballistic-missile submarines. Four 533-millimeter torpedo tubes and four large 650-millimeter tubes could deploy up to forty wire-guided torpedoes, mines, or long-range SS-N-15 Starfish and SS-N-16 Stallion antiship missiles. The Akula could also carry up to twelve Granat cruise missiles capable of hitting targets on land up to three thousand kilometers away.

Soviet shipyards pumped out seven Akula Is while the U.S. Navy pressed ahead to build the even stealthier Seawolf-class submarine to compete. However, even as the Soviet Union collapsed, it launched the first of five Project 971U Improved Akula I boats. This was followed by the heavier and slightly longer 971A Akula II class in the form of the Vepr in 1995, which featured a double-layer silencing system for the power train, dampened propulsion systems and a new sonar. Both variants had six additional external tubes that could launch missiles or decoy torpedoes, and a new Strela-3 surface-to-air missile system.

However, the most important improvement was to stealth—the new Akulas were now significantly quieter than even the Improved Los Angeles–class submarines, although some analysts argue that the latter remain stealthier at higher speeds. You can check out an Office of Naval Intelligence comparison chart of submarine acoustic stealth here. The U.S. Navy still operates forty-three Los Angeles–class boats, though fourteen newer Seawolf- and Virginia-class submarines still beat out the Akula in discretion.         

However, Russian shipyards have struggled to complete new Akula IIs, which are not cheap—one figure claims a cost of $1.55 billion each in 1996, or $2.4 billion in today’s dollars. The struggling Russian economy can barely afford to keep the already completed vessels operational. Two Akula IIs were scrapped before finishing construction and three were converted into Borei-class ballistic-missile submarines. As for the Akula II Vepr, it was beset by tragedy in 1998 when a mentally unstable teenage seaman killed eight fellow crewmembers while at dock, and threatened to blow up the torpedo room in a standoff before committing suicide.

After lingering a decade in construction, the Gepard, the only completed Akula III boat, was deployed in 2001, reportedly boasting what was then the pinnacle of Russian stealth technology. Seven years later, Moscow finally pushed through funding to complete the Akula II Nerpa after fifteen years of bungled construction. However, during sea trials in November 2008, a fire alarm was triggered inadvertently, flooding the sub with freon firefighting gas that suffocated twenty onboard, mostly civilians—the most serious recent incident in a long and eventful history of submarine disasters.

After an expensive round of repairs, the Nerpa was ready to go—and promptly transferred on a ten-year lease to India for $950 million. Redubbed the INS Chakra, it served as India’s only nuclear powered submarine for years, armed with the short-range Klub cruise missile due to the restrictions of the Missile Technology Control Regime. In October 2016, Moscow and New Delhi agreed on the leasing of a second Akula-class submarine, although it’s unclear whether it will be the older Akula I Kashalot or never-completed Akula II Iribis—though the steep $2 billion price tag leads some to believe it may be the latter. This year, the Chakra will also be joined by the domestically-produced Arihant class, which is based on the Akula but reoriented to serve as a ballistic-missile sub.

Today the Russian Navy maintains ten to eleven Akulas, according to Jane’s accounting in 2016, but only three or four are in operational condition, while the rest await repairs. Nonetheless, the Russian Navy has kept its boats busy. In 2009, two Akulas were detected off the East Coast of the United States—supposedly the closest Russia submarines had been seen since the end of the Cold War. Three years later, there was an unconfirmed claim (this time denied by the U.S. Navy) that another Akula had spent a month prowling in the Gulf of Mexico without being caught. The older Kashalot even has been honored for “tailing a foreign submarine for fourteen days.” All of these incidents have highlighted concerns that the U.S. Navy needs to refocus on antisubmarine warfare. In the last several years, Russia has also been upgrading the Akula fleet to fire deadly Kalibr cruise missiles, which were launched at targets in Syria in 2015 by the Kilo-class submarine Rostov-on-Don.

Despite the Akula’s poor readiness rate, they continue to make up the larger part of Russia’s nuclear attack submarine force, and will remain in service into the next decade until production of the succeeding Yasen class truly kicks into gear. Until then, the Akula’s strong acoustic stealth characteristics will continue to make it a formidable challenge for antisubmarine warfare specialists.

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 March 2017.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

James Holmes

History, Asia

The shocking turnaround was something akin to a miracle.

Key point: The battle was only six months after Pearl Harbor and the outcome was far from certain. Here is how America managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

A devil’s advocate is a precious commodity. That has to be one of the takeaways from revisiting the Battle of Midway seventy-five years on, and it should be etched on the internal workings of any martial institution that wants to survive and thrive amid the rigors, danger, and sheer orneriness of combat. Despite Japanese mariners’ tactical brilliance and élan, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) leadership was prone to such ills as groupthink and strategic doublethink. Worse, the IJN fleet was cursed to be led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—a leader of such stature and mystique that subordinates deferred to him out of habit. Never mind whether his ideas concerning operations and strategy made sense.

As they sometimes didn’t. The result of Japanese seafarers’ deference prior to Midway: the needless loss of the Kidō Butai, the IJN’s aircraft-carrier fleet and main striking arm. Worse from Tokyo’s standpoint, Midway halted the Japanese Empire’s till-then unbroken string of naval victories. The Kidō Butai had rampaged throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans for six months following its December 1941 raid on Pearl Harbor, only to come to grief at the hands of a ragtag three-carrier U.S. Navy force composed of USS Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet and commanded ably by admirals Ray Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher.

Japanese industry was unable to construct enough new flattops afterward to replenish the fleet, at the same time that American industry was laying the keels for—among other things—the seventeen-ship Essex class of carriers. Japanese naval aviation never recovered fully from Midway. A tactical defeat entailing strategic repercussions of such import constitutes a grave price for foregoing debate about contending courses of action. Such debates are a must—and the more rambunctious the better.

Hence the need for contrarians. The concept of the devil’s advocate originated within the sixteenth-century Catholic Church. It calls on church fathers to appoint an attorney to raise all conceivable objections to a candidate’s beatification and canonization—in other words, to the candidate’s elevation to sainthood. Even trivial character defects and foibles are fair game. According to one definition, the advocate’s duty demands that he “prepare in writing all possible arguments, even at times seemingly slight, against the raising of any one to the honors of the altar.” Even hairsplitters, then, have something pivotal to contribute to church deliberations. The consequences of making the wrong person a saint are too grievous to risk overlooking one scintilla of contrary evidence.

As it was in church deliberations, so should it be in military deliberations. Naval officialdom in Japan would have been wise to embrace the Catholic approach. Irving Janis, the godfather of the concept of “groupthink,” exhorted the leadership of any group to designate a devil’s advocate, and to make that person’s professional advancement, awards, and other career incentives contingent on executing the contrarian function with vigor and resolve. Notes Janis, groups subject to groupthink refuse to rethink assumptions, pressure would-be dissenters into remaining silent about their doubts, and thus cherish—and enforce—the illusion that the group is unanimous and infallible.

The Japanese naval staff fell prey to every one of Janis’s deadly sins of organizational decision-making. The result was a kind of strategic doublethink. The notion of doublethink, of course, comes from the great George Orwell. In 1984 Orwell defines doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Such mental gymnastics are inescapable when Big Brother demands it—and threatens to stamp on your face forever. But they distort thinking even in less menacing settings.

Why fight at Midway, a flyspeck a thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands? Simple: U.S. Pacific Fleet carriers had launched the Doolittle Raid at Tokyo in April 1942, imperiling the emperor’s life while humiliating the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Japan’s military rulers wanted to coax the American flattops out of Hawaii and sink them—putting an end to their U.S. Navy problem for a time if not for all time. Yamamoto’s basic logic about how to bring about a fleet action was sound. Sea-power scribe Julian Corbett urges a stronger fleet that wants to compel a weaker fleet to do battle to attack something the weak must defend—whether they want to or not.

Yamamoto believed Midway Island represented such an object. If so, the island held such importance as a stepping stone across the Pacific Ocean that the U.S. Pacific Fleet must defend it even after being battered at Pearl Harbor and the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea—and despite steaming into action at a 4-3 disadvantage in flattops. (It could have been 5-3 or even 6-3 had Japanese commanders exercised some self-discipline.) Yet IJN officers founded their battle plan on two contradictory assumptions about how U.S. Navy commanders would react to a Japanese attack on Midway Island. In effect Yamamoto and his lieutenants foretold both that Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet would fight and that it wouldn’t.

Yamamoto, that is, believed that the Americans’ will to fight was lackluster but the American fleet would counterattack anyway. Prophesied the official IJN “Estimate of the Situation”: “Although the enemy lacks the will to fight, it is likely that he will counterattack if our [amphibious landing operations on Midway] progress satisfactorily.” The IJN brass talked themselves into believing U.S. Pacific Fleet commanders would accept combat but would comport themselves meekly and passively in action. In effect they assumed the U.S. Navy was an inert mass on which they would work their will. The Pacific Fleet would venture out to fight yet await its destruction passively.

In effect the IJN leadership wished away the U.S. Navy’s capacity to stage an active defense, luring the Kidō Butai deep into waters off Midway before pummeling it from its northeasterly flank with carrier dive bombers and torpedo planes. But that’s precisely the scheme Nimitz, Fletcher, and Spruance devised. Reducing a foe to a potted plant, it seems, comprises a blunder of the first order.

And yet as historian Craig Symonds tells it, IJN commanders made only a perfunctory effort on the eve of battle to unearth flaws in their plan. They convened aboard the battleship Yamato from May 1-5 for tabletop exercises that Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully ridicule as “four days of scripted silliness.” No one assumed the role of devil’s advocate of his own accord, and senior leaders assigned no one to play it. Groupthink and doublethink prevailed absent a skeptic to contest the assumptions underlying the wargames.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Admiral Yamamoto was no Big Brother who stamped out dissent. The trouble was that his fellow seamen stood in awe of him. He commanded such personal prestige that few subordinates—and indeed, precious few of his nominal superiors in Japan’s military government—were inclined to find fault with his guesswork about how battle would unfold off Midway. The upshot: the Kidō Butai and accompanying surface forces steamed into action assuming their enemy had no will to fight yet would counterattack. Janis and Orwell would chuckle knowingly.

It’s a scourge to be led by a great man, then, unless the great man is open-minded and big hearted enough to encourage others to take issue with his thinking. If not, the collective military mind closes. Doubt dissipates when it’s needed most—in the topsy-turvy realm of violent interaction among combatants determined to impose their will on one another. An institution unable or unwilling to entertain second thoughts about its assumptions or reasoning is an institution that has set itself up for failure. So it was for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway. So it could be for today’s U.S. Navy, or any other institution.

Certitude is the bane of group decision-making. Physicist Richard Feynman beseeches researchers to “leave the door to the unknown ajar,” even when a scientific law appears settled. That’s doubly true for military and naval bureaucracies. After all, martial science is never settled. We should all be doubters—and seek out skeptics of Feynman’s ilk to poke holes in our schemes. Whether his input is right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the devil’s advocate invigorates strategic and operational discourses—subjecting proposals to penetrating scrutiny and bolstering the final product.

Those church fathers were no slouches.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018). He traveled to Pearl Harbor last month to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Midway on board the battleship Missouri and sites around Oahu. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest

Image Credit: Creative Commons. 

James Holmes

History, Asia

This fight, combined with Midway, changed the war and sealed Tokyo’s fate.

Key point: This fight was brutal and it also showed how Imperial Japan would be unable to build enough ships to replace their losses. In fact, industrial might would be a major reason America would win the war.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf was a tough slog, where U.S. maritime forces reclaimed a beachhead in the Far East after being expelled in 1941-1942. In reality, Leyte Gulf was a series of naval engagements sprawling across the map of Southeast Asia. Three were centered on the gulf and its approaches, taking place in the San Bernardino Strait, the Surigao Strait and the waters off the island of Samar. A fourth pitted carrier fleets against each other in the open sea off Cape Engaño. Each ended in triumph for the U.S. Navy. The battle fulfilled General Douglas MacArthur’s vow to “return” to the Philippine Islands, but salving his wounded prestige was least among the fruits of victory. Victory conferred a host of operational and strategic benefits.

Just look at the map. Wresting the islands of Leyte and Luzon from Japan capped MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign, a string of consecutive amphibious operations that spanned the South Pacific. Luzon was the major prize. It lay athwart the sea routes that skirt north-south along the Asian seaboard. It also overshadowed east-west movement through the Luzon Strait, which connects the South China Sea with the Western Pacific. Capturing it fractured Japan’s innermost defense perimeter. The Battle of Leyte Gulf drove a stake into the empire, splitting off Tokyo’s Southeast Asian holdings from Japan proper. And it furnished U.S. commanders a launching pad for sea and air assaults against the Ryukyu Islands and the Japanese home islands.

In short, Leyte was a tactical action with strategic and political moment. Its dimensions were epic. As emeritus Naval War College professor George Baer points out, Leyte “was, in tonnage engaged and space covered, the greatest naval battle of all time.” Now any sea-power expert worth his salt—doubtless including Professor Baer—will tell you that tonnage and square miles are imperfect proxies for naval might. Firepower is another, arguably more reliable proxy. Partisans of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance use it to make the case that the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the mid-1944 invasion of the Mariana Islands that Spruance oversaw, qualifies as history’s greatest.

And it’s tough to gainsay such claims. Think about it. If size were everything, a fleet of mammoth container ships, some bulking half a million tons, would be today’s strongest navy. Tremble before the power of the Maersk Line! That, of course, is nonsensical. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet was indeed formidable in terms of concentrated striking power. In terms of operational results, moreover, the Philippine Sea covered the amphibious landings on Saipan, which from then on provided the Army Air Force an outpost to launch strategic bombing raids against Japan proper. Such strikes demolished Japanese naval aviation. Indeed, the fracas was so lopsided that American flyboys dubbed it the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

So debilitated was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) flying corps after the encounter with Spruance’s carrier task forces that IJN flattops steamed out for Leyte Gulf virtually bare of pilots and planes. The force that had struck at Pearl Harbor with such skill and verve was reduced to a decoy, sent forth in hopes of luring American strength away from the Philippines.

Nor is a battle’s geographic sweep an infallible yardstick for its importance or results. If it were, that would imply that scattering forces hither and yon charts a route to strategic success. That may be, but more likely isn’t, a general rule. Carl von Clausewitz deems concentrating superior might at the decisive place and time the simplest and highest law of strategy. That could mean endeavors spanning a large area, but Clausewitz seems to envision a focal point where overpowering the foe makes all the difference. It’s hard to generalize. In short, ranking fleet actions against one another by metrics A, B, C or some combination of metrics is a dicey business.

But let’s leave the blood sport of ranking battles to historians. Baer also observes that Leyte was “the last great naval battle” of World War II. It broke the back of Japanese sea power, finishing what the Philippine Sea started. It forced the IJN into desperate—and increasingly futile—expedients in its bid to forestall defeat. No longer could Japanese mariners compete for mastery with any genuine hope of success.

Those are serious results. They affixed an exclamation point to what had gone before. As historian Samuel Eliot Morison recalls, logistics had already deranged Japan’s strategic position before Leyte. Fuel shortages compelled IJN commanders to disperse assets, thinning out the navy’s combat power   while accepting the danger of piecemeal defeat. Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s surface fleet had withdrawn to South China Sea anchorages to be close to its fuel supplies, while Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa’s aircraft carriers remained in Japan’s Inland Sea to train air groups to replace the ones devastated by repeated blows, most recently at the Philippine Sea.

Interposing U.S. forces at Luzon, where they could put the “cork in the bottle” of the South China Sea—to quote Admiral Ernest J. King’s evocative metaphor for Formosa—confirmed that the IJN would remain fragmented. Commanders couldn’t have it both ways. Surface task forces could stay in the “Southern Resource Area” and replenish their fuel tanks, or they could remain in Northeast Asia, close to supplies of ammunition, spare parts and stores. Picking among equally indispensable commodities represents an impossible choice for any sea service. Navies need all of them in lavish quantities to function.

What should posterity take away from the Battle of Leyte Gulf? For one thing, Leyte wasn’t just the last major fleet engagement of World War II. It was history’s last major fleet engagement—to date. Reflecting on it figures into the larger debate over whether the age of great-power conflict has drawn to a close, or whether history is simply taking a breather before resuming its bloody onward march. This isn’t the first time such a debate has taken place. Naval warfare paused for decades following the nineteenth century’s epochal fleet battle, the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). As any patriotic Briton of the day would have reminded you, Britannia ruled the waves for the rest of that century. (Boy, that must’ve gotten tiresome.) Imperial police actions, not combat against peer navies, constituted the rule of the day.

So is sea combat passé, or are the past seventy years simply a holiday from history? This is worth pondering. If navies no longer fight for maritime supremacy, why invest in aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers and other pricey hardware? Those carry heavy opportunity costs. Better to reconfigure navies for police duty, fielding swarms of small, lightly armed craft suitable for battling seaborne terrorists, lawbreakers of various stripes and weapons traffickers. If no future Leyte lies in store, navies should spare themselves—and taxpayers—the bother and expense of preparing for such a showdown.

For another thing, Leyte may be not just the biggest and last, but also the most thoroughly studied naval battle ever. It was a staple of the Naval War College operations curriculum when I was a student—a distressingly long time ago—and remains so to this day. And that’s right and fitting, so long as we attach an asterisk to our analytical pursuits. Strategic godfather Bernard Brodie warns against what specialists in logic term the “fallacy of composition.” Naval battles, confides Brodie, come along so seldom that it’s perilous to draw too confident conclusions from them. (We might add that they also come along too rarely to correct false lessons learned from past engagements, or to show when true lessons have been overtaken by new realities.)

We blunder, then, by reasoning from part of something to the whole—from trying to learn too much from too little information. Extrapolating from a single example is especially misleading. Shift a few minor variables—an unlucky break here, a loss of nerve by a commander there, a faulty tactical decision there—and the entire pattern of an engagement can shift. Historians and strategists could distill faulty lessons from reviewing battles whose outcomes were far from foreordained.

In other words, the sample size for them to review—the amount of data—is too small to allow analysts to generalize with any precision. It’s doubtful changing a few variables would have let Japan prevail at Leyte. The material mismatch yawned too wide after years of sanguinary combat. Yet the battle could have taken on a different cast—leading future generations to draw different, and perhaps wrong, conclusions from studying it.

And lastly, there are pitfalls to making historical events into legends. Leyte bears the hallmarks of a legend. If you doubt me, scope out James Hornfischer’s Last Stand of the Tin-Can Sailors. Few could read about the heroism of a Commander Ernest E. Evans who led the destroyer Johnston in a gallant—and successful, if also fatal—charge against Kurita’s battleship fleet off Samar, without a lump in the throat. Scholars and practitioners of sea power must guard against letting such tales color their appraisals of past events.

Leyte wouldn’t be the first legend to captivate subsequent generations to the detriment of wise strategy. Think about the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), where Lord Horatio Nelson’s outnumbered Royal Navy fleet vanquished a Franco-Spanish fleet near Gibraltar. Trafalgar swiftly took on sacral overtones. The clash even came complete with its own secular saint, Lord Nelson, who fell during the engagement. The historical Trafalgar soon degenerated into “Trafalgar,” a parable of naval strategy and derring-do whose lessons the Royal Navy old guard deemed beyond criticism.

Indeed, maritime historian Sir Julian Corbett may as well have been uttering heresy when he reprimanded Nelson for risking a “mad perpendicular attack” on the Franco-Spanish battle line. The guardians of tradition rejected much of Corbett’s sea-power theory simply because he departed from that tradition. Clinging too tightly to a navy’s heritage—or to any particular idea about how fleets should transact business—risks applying cultural blinders to strategic deliberations. Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, called the Navy Department a “dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his Prophet, and the United States the only true church.”

Stimson was referring to the baleful effects of making a cult out of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s sea-power theories. But he could just as easily have been warning against extracting a set of fixed, simple lessons from complex events. Unless strategists and tacticians remain intellectually nimble, they can erect impediments to creative strategic thought. By all means, let’s study the Battle of Leyte Gulf and other great enterprises. But let’s also keep our findings provisional—subject to revision as time, technology and warmaking methods move on.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest

Image: Wikimedia.

Kris Osborn

Security, Americas

For the first time in history, an AI-enabled computer algorithm operated onboard a military aircraft while in flight, coordinating navigational details, sensor information, and reconnaissance missions alongside a human pilot.

For the first time in history, an artificial-intelligence-enabled computer algorithm operated onboard a military aircraft while in flight, coordinating navigational details, sensor information, and reconnaissance missions alongside a human pilot.

The AI algorithm, called ARTUu, flew along with a human pilot on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, performing tasks that would “otherwise be done by a pilot,” a U.S. Air Force report explained.

It is described as manned-unmanned teaming, or human-machine interface, a process intended to optimize the best of how computers and humans can perform. The human-computer team flew a reconnaissance mission during a simulated missile strike.

“ARTUu’s primary responsibility was finding enemy launchers while the pilot was on the lookout for threatening aircraft, both sharing the U-2’s radar,” the Air Force report said.

The combination represents the cutting edge or prevailing thinking regarding how best to leverage the benefits and promises of AI; given rapid advances in processing speed and AI-capable algorithms able to perform real-time analytics on fast arriving volumes of new information, computers are of course much faster and more efficient, in an exponential way, when it comes to performing crucial procedural functions.

“Putting AI safely in command of a U.S. military system for the first time ushers in a new age of human-machine teaming and algorithmic competition. Failing to realize AI’s full potential will mean ceding decision advantage to our adversaries.” Air Force Acquisition Executive William Roper said in the Air Force report. 

Multiple data streams can be simultaneously gathered, pooled and organized in milliseconds, bounced off a known database of seemingly limitless volume to make comparisons, perform analyses and solve problems.  Data compilation, organization and analysis, coupled with increasingly unprecedented computer processing speeds, can enable AI-empowered technology to discern critical distinctions and similarities between otherwise completely separated sources of incoming information, offering humans a previously impossible integrated picture.

At the same time, human cognition remains uniquely positioned to address certain nuances less calculable by mathematically-oriented computer programs. Many kinds of fast-changing dynamics, particularly those involving concepts or more subjectively determined variables, are at least at the moment best left to humans. For instance, to what extent could a computer discern “feelings” or “intent” as they may pertain to a combat engagement. Perhaps a pilot gets scared and makes an abrupt, unanticipated move? Perhaps a number of conflicting or different circumstances merge together into what might seem like a confusing mess? Can even the best AI-capable algorithms make sense of all of these kinds of phenomena? Particularly as they collide with one another?  Many of these kinds of more subjective challenges, according to the best expert assessments of progress with AI, are still much better off addressed by humans.

Therefore, given that AI-empowered computing and subjective human cognition seems to possess distinct, discernable advantages, the best tactical approach to combat may be simply to leverage the best of each and combine them together. That is exactly what the Air Force is seeking to accomplish, an optimal blend of man-machine characteristics collectively able to maximize performance capability.

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

Wikimedia Commons: U.S. Air Force

Charlie Gao

Security, Eurasia

Blisteringly fast and armed with the massive R-40 air-to-air missiles, the Foxbat stood ready to defend the Soviet Union’s borders against all threats.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The plane continues to be the backbone of Russia's air-interception program.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’ s Air Defense Forces (VPVO) needed a series of heavy interceptors to patrol its massive borders. Most regular “light” fighters like the early MiGs were not up to the task, as they lacked the range and speed to intercept to rapidly climb and intercept supersonic American bombers, who were expected to zoom over the Arctic to drop bombs on the Soviet Union.

As a result, a specialized class of aircraft was created for this purpose. The first was the Tupolev Tu-28 and Tu-128. These aircraft would lay the template for later interceptors: they were large for good endurance, fast, and were armed solely with missiles.

This design was obsolete from the time it entered service in the 1960s, as the B-58 Hustler that was in service at the time could outpace it. However, the MiG-25 “Foxbat” was also in development at the time. This aircraft would go on to become the definitive interceptor of the VPVO.

Blisteringly fast and armed with the massive R-40 air-to-air missiles, the Foxbat stood ready to defend the Soviet Union’s borders against all threats. Its airframe also saw adaptation into more tactical roles, photo reconnaissance and strike versions of the MiG-25 were created for the Soviet Air Force (VVS).

In the 1980s, the MiG-25 was followed up by the MiG-31, which added in a second weapons systems officer on all models and increased the flight performance, radar and weapons of the craft. Early versions also featured a cannon, but this was quickly deleted once it was determined that such extras were not necessary on a pure interceptor.

Nowadays the MiG-31 is the standard long range interceptor of the Russian Air Force (the VPVO was merged with the VVS in the 1990s) and is expected to serve into the 2030s. A “mid-life upgrade” of the MiG-31 is currently being procured: the MiG-31BSM. This modification integrates many new strike weapons onto the MiG-31 and modernizes most systems. The MiG-31 was also chosen as the primary carrier aircraft for the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

But in August 2018, Russian outlets announced that experimental design work was beginning on a next generation pure interceptor that is meant to replace the MiG-31. Following the naming convention of Russia’s other next generation aircraft projects (PAK (XX)), the new interceptor project is called PAK DP, or Prospective Aviation Complex Long-range Interceptor.

The continuation of a line of dedicated interceptors is interesting because the existing PAK-FA/Su-57 fighter in many ways could fulfill the same role as the MiG-31. It has a highly advanced radar, it can supercruise (maintain Mach 1+ flight without the use of afterburners), and it could be armed with long range air-to-air missiles.

While the range is less than a MiG-31, air-to-air refueling can make up the gap. But since the capabilities as they stand are so similar, why the need for a separate airframe? Sukhoi fighters have also served in the interceptor role before, the Su-27P variant of the Flanker was meant explicitly for the VPVO. There are a couple reasons why the Russian government still considers the PAK DP to be necessary.

The first is that the PAK DP might build off the multirole nature of the earlier MiG-31 and MiG-25 conversions. An aircraft close to the original conception of the F-111 could be in the cards for Russia in the PAK DP: something that can carry a ton of long-range missiles and also perform strike with a wide range of munitions (including hypersonic ones)while moving very fast.

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Another possible reason is that Russia wishes to keep the heritage of MiG alive within United Aircraft Corporation (UAC). Since Sukhoi has done the majority of the design work and has had its name attached to the PAK FA (in the Su-57 designation), MiG needs a next generation project of their own to work on. The MiG-35, while advanced, is still not of the PAK family of next-generation craft and MiG not have an aircraft to work on in the future.

The last reason is that the VVS might want to future proof their interceptor force against future developments in UAV technology. While the PAK FA is fast, it does represent a step backward in speed compared to the MiG-31. While the SR-71 Blackbird is retired, UAVs incorporating some of its technology may come online in the future. Russia might need a plane that can really push the limits of speed to intercept them and keep its airspace safe.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

More than 5,000 of these heavy supersonic fighters were built, and hundreds continue to serve and even see combat in several air forces today.

Here's What You Need to Know: The Phantom has proven both versatile and adaptable over time.

The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II is a legendary aircraft — an icon of the Vietnam War and the archetype of the third-generation jet fighter designs that entered service in the 1960s. More than 5,000 of these heavy supersonic fighters were built, and hundreds continue to serve and even see combat in several air forces today.

But the Phantom’s record in air-to-air combat over Vietnam — especially when compared to its successor, the F-15 Eagle, which has never been shot down in air-to-air combat — has left it with a reputation of being a clumsy bruiser reliant on brute engine power and obsolete weapons technology.

This is unfair.

The Phantom’s fundamental flaws were corrected by 1970 — while more recently, Phantoms have had their avionics and ordnance upgraded to modern standards. These modernized Phantoms flown by the Turkish and Greek air forces can do pretty much what an F-15 can do … at a much lower price.

Baptism of Fire:

When the F-4 came out it in 1958 it was a revolutionary design — one that went on to set several aviation records.

Weighing in at 30,000 pounds unloaded, its enormous J79 twin engines gave (and still gives) the aircraft excellent thrust, propelling the heavy airframe over twice the speed of sound at a maximum speed of 1,473 miles per hour.

The early Phantoms could carry 18,000 pounds of munitions — three times what the huge B-17 bombers of World War II typically carried. The weapons officer in the rear-seat could operate the plane’s advanced radar, communication and weapons systems while the pilot focused on flying.

Furthermore, the F-4 came in both ground- and carrier-based models and served in the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines. The only other frontline fighter to serve in all three services before or since is the F-35.

But when the F-4 confronted the lighter-weight MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters of the North Vietnamese air force in 1965, the Phantom suffered.

In the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force had shot down between six and 10 enemy fighters for every one of its aircraft lost in air-to-air combat. In Vietnam, the ratio was closer to two to one (including other aircraft types besides the Phantom).

The F-4’s primary problem was that it had no built-in cannon. Instead, it relied entirely on newly-introduced air-to-air missiles — the radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow, the heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder and the older AIM-4 Falcon.

The Air Force didn’t realize those early missiles were terrible.

Studies showed that 45 percent of Vietnam-era AIM-7s and 37 percent of AIM-9s failed to either launch or lock on, and after evasive maneuvers, the probability of achieving a kill fell to eight percent and 15 percent for the two types, respectively. The Falcon missiles were even worse, and the Pentagon later withdrew them from service.

The North Vietnamese MiGs, equipped with both cannons and missiles (on the MiG-21), would outmaneuver the heavier F-4, which for all its speed, was not especially agile. Worse, American pilots weren’t trained for close range dogfights, as the Air Force assumed air-to-air engagements would occur at long range with missiles.

Furthermore, the Phantom’s J79 engines produced thick black smoke, which combined with the aircraft’s larger size, made it easier to spot and target from a distance. On the other hand, the rules-of-engagement over Vietnam prohibited U.S. pilots from shooting at unidentified targets beyond visual range, further crippling the advantages of the missiles.

Improvements:

However, the F-4’s problems began to recede. Air-to-air missile technology dramatically improved with later versions of the Sparrow and Sidewinder. The F-4E model finally came with an internal M161 Vulcan cannon.

Before, some Phantom units made do with external gun pods that vibrated excessively.

In 1972, an F-4 piloted by Maj. Phil Handley shot down a MiG-19 with his plane’s gun — the only recorded aerial gun kill performed at supersonic speed.

Eventually, the Air Force upgraded all of its F-4Es with wing-slats that significantly improved maneuverability at a slight cost in speed. New J79 engines even dealt with the problem of the F-4’s visible black smoke.

The Navy, in contrast, perceived the problem as being a lack of Air Combat Maneuvering training, and instituted the Top Gun training program in 1968. Navy pilots went on to score a superior kill ratio over Vietnam of 40 victories for seven planes lost in air-to-air combat.

The Air Force’s Phantoms claimed 107 air-to-air kills for 33 lost to MiGs, and the Marine Corps claimed three. Ground fire shot down 474 Phantoms in all services, as the heavy-lifting Phantom fighters did double duty as ground-attack aircraft.

Two sub-variants of the Phantom also distinguished themselves — the RF-4 photo reconnaissance plane, optimized for speed, and the Wild Weasel, specialized in attacking enemy surface-to-air missiles defenses.

The last American F-4s would see action during Operation Desert Storm, before being retired in 1996. The Pentagon later converted some into QF-4 target practice drones.

Phantoms in the Middle East:

However, the Phantoms proliferated around the world. The F-4 saw extensive use in Israeli service, scoring 116 air-to-air kills against the Egyptian and Syrian air forces, starting in 1969 during the War of Attrition.

In one engagement on the first day of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, 28 Egyptian MiGs attacked Ofir Air Base. Just two Phantoms managed to scramble in defense, but they shot down seven of the attackers.

The Israeli Phantoms’ primary target — and most deadly foe — during these campaigns were Arab surface-to-air missile batteries. SAMs accounted for most of the 36 Israeli Phantoms lost in action.

The swan song of the Israeli Phantom force came during Israel’s 1982 intervention in the War in Lebanon, when Phantoms — escorted by new F-15s and F-16s — wiped out all 30 of Syria’s SAM batteries in the Bekaa Valley in one day without losing a single plane in Operation Mole Cricket 19.

Iran received 225 F-4s from the United States prior to the Iranian Revolution. These formed the backbone of the Iranian fighter force during the nine-year-long war with Iraq. The Phantom reportedly acquitted itself well versus Iraqi MiGs, and carried out several long-range raids on the Iraqi airfields. The actual number of air-to-air kills remains disputed.

21st century Phantoms:

The Phantom still sees service. But it’s somewhat of an anomaly. Just compare it to F-15 Eagle.

The F-15, which entered service in 1975, is emblematic of fourth-generation fighter aircraft that remain the mainstay of modern air forces today. The F-15 is also deliberately unlike the F-4. It’s a heavy, twin-engine, two-seat fighterand an agile dogfighter.

When the F-15 and the lighter F-16 saw their first major air action over Lebanon in 1982, they shot down more than 80 Syrian third-generation MiGs at no loss.

The supremacy of the fourth-generation was confirmed again in the Gulf War, in which Iraqi fighters shot down only one fourth-generation fighter (an F/A-18 Hornet) for the loss of 33 of their third-generation aircraft. How could the F-4 possibly keep up in this new environment?

Easy — by integrating the same modern hardware used in the fourth generation.

The Phantoms flown by the Turkish and Greek air forces both have modern pulse-doppler radars, which give the F-4 “look down-shoot down” capabilities. In the past, high-flying radars had trouble detecting low-flying aircraft because the radar waves bouncing off the ground created a cluttering effect. Active Doppler radars cut through the ground clutter.

Modern F-4s can also fire the full range of modern ordnance such as the advanced AIM-120C AMRAAM air-to-air missile with a range of 65 miles, precision-guided munitions such as the AGM-65 Maverick, and late model Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles.

As combat aircraft are essentially weapons platforms, these capabilities mean that the F-4s can handle most of the same offensive tasks a fourth-generation F-15 or Su-27 fighter can do.

But surely the electronics and instruments are out of date? Not really. For instance, modernized F-4s have improved Heads Up Displays (HUDs) so that pilots don’t have to look down from the canopy to check on their instruments.

Germany flew upgraded F-4Fs until 2013, and maintains them in stock in case of future need. South Korea still has 71 F-4Es (only modestly upgraded) in its 17th Fighter Wing. Japan maintains the same number of F-4EJ Kais upgraded with pulse-Doppler radars and anti-ship missiles.

The Israelis pioneered the art of Phantom upgrades in the 1980s with the Phantom 2000 Kurnass, or “Sledgehammer.” Though retired from Israeli service in 2004, Israeli firms went on to upgrade Greece’s 41 Peace Icarus Phantoms, equipping them with ANPG-65 pulse-Doppler radars and the ability to fire AMRAAM missiles.

Israeli upgrades contributed to the Turkish air force’s Terminator 2020, which has additional wing strakes for improved maneuverability.

The 2020s have had 20 kilometers of wiring replaced for a net loss of 1,600 pounds in weight. The Turkish versions also feature a diverse array of modern sensors and electronics. Like other modern F-4s, they can deploy advanced ordnance such as Paveway bombs, HARM anti-radar missiles and 3,000-pound Popeye missiles with a range of 48 miles.

The Terminators are primarily ground-attack planes … with some notoriety. They’ve bombed Kurdish PKK fighters in Turkey and Iraq in 2015 and 2016. An RF-4 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Syria in 2012, and three F-4s crashed in 2015 — earning them the appellation “Flying Coffins” in the Turkish media.

The Iranian air force in 2009 claimed to operate 76 F-4Ds and Es, and six RF-4s. Tehran has reportedly modified the planes to fire Russian or Chinese air-to-ground and anti-shipping missiles. They still rely on AIM-7 Sparrows acquired second hand.

Likewise, Iran relies on smuggled and improvised spare parts for its F-4s, just like its F-14 Tomcats.

Iranian Phantoms bombed Islamic State targets in Iraq’s Diyala province in December 2014, and they continue to play cat and mouse games with U.S. patrols and drones over the Persian Gulf.

But are souped-up F-4s really equal to fourth-generation fighters? None of these 21st century Phantoms have flown in air-to-air combat — but F-4s Phantoms have engaged in non-lethal dogfights with Greek F-16s on several occasions.

They also tangled with Chinese Su-27s in a 2010 exercise — and according to some reports on the internet won zero to eight.

And if you compare videos of F-4s with wing slats making a tight, 180 degree turn (see 4:25 above) compared to F-15s doing the same maneuver, you will note that they both average seven to eight seconds to complete the turn, even though the latter is purportedly more maneuverable.

This doesn’t prove upgraded F-4s are superior to later designs, of course — but it does show they capable of pulling their considerable weight when compared with fourth-generation fighters.

The Phantom has proven both versatile and adaptable over time. Few of those present for its first flight in 1958 could have imagined that it would remain in frontline service nearly 60 years later.

Rudolph Emilio Torrini contributed to this article.

This piece first appeared in WarIsBoring here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Agriculture’s importance for the labor market cannot be underestimated—especially amid a historic pandemic.

Fiona Harrigan

Security, Middle East

The conflict does not advance U.S. interests and only causes unnecessary harm.

President Donald Trump will soon be leaving the White House, but the shadow of his four turbulent years of foreign policy will linger. President-elect Joe Biden was already in for the formidable task of regaining international trust. But the president’s past few weeks have been filled with last-ditch efforts to solidify a legacy abroad that has been confrontational, especially with Iran.

Those efforts include a promise to impose new sanctions on Iran, State Department visits to the Golan Heights and the West Bank, and an intended sale of $23 billion in arms to the United Arab Emirates. 

This is all quite calculated. A State Department source shared with CNN that the Trump administration trying to make it more difficult for Biden to undo his policies. Sparks are flying across the Middle East, but no place is more ablaze than Yemen. And for Biden, who has sworn that he’ll end U.S. support for the war in Yemen, Trump’s last-minute measures there are bound to be trouble.

Trump plans to designate the Houthi rebel group as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The Houthis are currently embroiled in the Yemeni Civil War as they combat the internationally-recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. They have certainly committed atrocities—including strikes on civilian targets and recruiting child soldiers—and Washington has designated several Houthi leaders as terrorists. A collective FTO designation would freeze Houthi assets, bar members from traveling to the United States, and prohibit Americans from “providing material support or resources” to the group.

While that might sound justified, the material support clause could prove disastrous to Yemeni citizens who find themselves under Houthi rule. The designation would force humanitarian groups to navigate restrictive rules of conduct, as their activities constitute “material support and resources” and they must engage with the Houthis in order to deliver assistance. The Houthis control most of northern Yemen, where 70 percent of the Yemeni population lives, and aid provision there could be delayed or prevented altogether. 

Yemen is already destitute and the Houthis are isolated to the point where the designation likely wouldn’t accomplish much. Even United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hinted at the foolishness of such a measure, requesting that “everyone avoids taking any action that could make the already dire situation even worse.” Currently in the throes of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemen is teetering on the edge of a famine so catastrophic that “millions of lives may be lost,” according to Guterres. 

The designation wouldn’t be a particularly effective blow to the Houthis, nor would it help Yemeni citizens. What it would be, however, is a gift to Saudi Arabia. Long an enemy of Iran, the kingdom would see the blacklisting of the Iran-backed Houthis as a symbol of solidarity against Tehran. 

Trump’s steadfast support for Saudi Arabia has been one of his foreign policy calling cards. His presidency began with a massive gift to Riyadh—namely, the $350 billion arms deal he signed with the kingdom on his first foreign trip in office—so it would only be appropriate for it to end with another. 

Any gift to Saudi Arabia will be a headache for Biden. On the Democratic debate stage last November, Biden committed to making Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” He’s not alone in the sentiment, and a newly-introduced bill calling for an end to U.S. involvement in Yemen could be critical to his promise. Given the bipartisan support a similar measure accrued last year before being vetoed by Trump, the new bill will likely be successful. 

The Houthi FTO designation, however, would be more difficult for Biden to overcome, given how difficult it is to roll back such classifications. In the short term, humanitarian groups will struggle to help vulnerable Yemenis. And in the long term, the designation may push peace talks hopelessly out of reach as Houthi leaders grow increasingly unwilling to join the negotiation table. 

It would’ve been foolish to expect a sudden change in Trump administration policy, but even so, the Houthi designation would be a new low. It would only be the latest action the president has taken to remain in league with Saudi Arabia and complicate a devastating war. Biden has made his goals for the region clear—but he’ll be forced to tidy up Trump’s trail before he can accomplish them. 

Fiona Harrigan is an Openness Fellow for Young Voices and a Marcellus Policy Fellow for the John Quincy Adams Society, where she researches U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations. Find her on Twitter: @Fiona_Harrigan.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Americas

War Plan Orange was wise and ahead of its time.

Key point: America needs to plan for every contigency. And that means learning from past scenarios and think carefully about how to win a possible war with Beijing.

Everyone says it: Newport, as in where the U.S. Naval War College is located and where yours truly works, underwent a golden age of strategy-making during the interwar decades. It must usher in a new golden age to prevail in strategic competition against the likes of China and Russia. Revisiting the service’s and Naval War College’s roots will shed light on the new, old dilemmas besetting them.

Indeed it may—if posterity understands that long-ago age.

Here’s the legend. Godlike figures such as W. S. Sims bestrode Naval War College game floors during the years following World War I, bequeathing wisdom to posterity. (Theodore Roosevelt instituted war planning vis-à-vis Japan in 1897, while serving as assistant secretary of the navy, but planning didn’t really hit its stride until after the Great War.) The product of their labors was War Plan Orange, which set forth the basic design for war against Japan. The U.S. Pacific Fleet sallied forth starting in December 1941 and smote down the foe by putting the design into practice.

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

So brilliant were their deliberations, vouchsafed Admiral Chester Nimitz after World War II, that next to nothing took U.S. naval commanders by surprise in Pacific combat. Only kamikaze tactics caught them off guard, according to Nimitz.

Like many legends, this one conveys essential elements of truth. But the passage of decades tends to rub the rough edges off any story, especially a tale of military triumph. The reality of naval war planning was messier than mythmaking implies—not to mention more interesting and more instructive for strategists gazing across the Pacific toward a new antagonist a century hence. The process of wrangling over, drafting, critiquing, and periodically revising Plan Orange bore little resemblance to dispassionate Platonic debates carried on while strolling across sunny uplands of martial enlightenment. It bore more resemblance to grinding sausage.

Strategic ideas clashed in those days, in other words, but there was more to strategy-making than high-minded exchanges of views. Edward S. Miller retells the story in War Plan Orange: The U.S. Plan to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945. Generations clashed. Oldtimers steeped in the lore of Spanish-American War victories at Manila Bay and Santiago de Cuba quarreled with youngsters of a more cautious, methodical bent. Intuitive planners clashed with professionals. Over time, as idea collided with idea and faction with faction, the conceit that the U.S. Navy could lunge across the Pacific and rescue the Philippine Islands and Guam from a Japanese assault yielded to a more prudent view.

The less gung-ho construct forecast that America’s Western Pacific possessions would fall to Japanese arms. U.S. forces stationed in the region stood little chance of overpowering the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in Asian waters, by then a marine preserve for the Rising Sun. To undo aggression, the U.S. Pacific Fleet would have to fight its way back into the theater, undertaking a campaign that would span years and exact bitter costs. And indeed, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) intended to mount “interceptive operations” from formerly German-held islands awarded to Tokyo as a “Mandate” under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the covenant terminating World War I.

Under interceptive operations, IJN commanders envisioned staging combat aircraft from airstrips on the Mandate islands and submarines in the waters between. These superempowered light craft would repeatedly ambush the Pacific Fleet with bombs or torpedoes as it lumbered westward. Attrition from pinprick strikes would cut the fleet down to size as the precursor to a decisive battle somewhere in the Western Pacific. A less numerous but materially excellent and spirited Japanese navy would prevail over a larger opponent by increments.

Americans came to agree with their future antagonists about how a future war would play out. Miller documents how the realities of Japanese local supremacy, not to mention the logistical rigors of a cross-Pacific offensive, gradually dawned on the Orange planners. They came to assume America would lose at the outset in the Western Pacific while standing in the Eastern Pacific. Naval forces would then be compelled to steam across thousands of miles of ocean—much of it under fire. They estimated IJN subs and planes would contest the last 3,000 miles of the voyage. A counteroffensive might consume years. This stark reality disabused the Orange planning community of any lingering boosterism.

Their slow, fitful journey from hubris to sobriety is worth bearing in mind as the U.S. Navy resumes war planning in earnest. Substitute Communist China for Imperial Japan. To what extent would a nouveau War Plan Orange resemble its forerunners from the interwar decades? Well, it would parallel the Orange plans of old in certain respects while diverging in others. China can take comfort in some of the parallels; others should discomfit it. The reciprocal is true of the United States and its Asian allies and friends. What works to China’s advantage should worry them, while what wrongfoots China constitutes their opportunity.

Now, likely U.S. political and strategic aims raise a troublesome prospect: that the U.S. Pacific Fleet may not enjoy the luxury of what Miller terms a “cautionary” advance across the Pacific. Reconquering the Philippines or Guam could wait; today the United States may have to win quickly or not at all.

U.S. forces, that is, may have to attempt an express “Through Ticket” advance of the sort beloved of the early Orange planners—and court the hazards, costs, and logistical overstretch a cross-Pacific charge entailed, and that planners ultimately pronounced unacceptable. Why? Because China will have time on its side in most contingencies, from wresting Senkaku, Spratly, or Paracel islands from their occupants to venturing a cross-strait assault against Taiwan. U.S. forces must contend with the tyranny of distance—a tyranny People’s Liberation Army (PLA) defenders can compound by strewing sensors, ships and planes, and armaments across Western Pacific seas and skies, and by lofting shore-based munitions seaward toward the approaching U.S. force.

Japan could contest 3,000 miles of ocean; the uppermost estimate for the range of China’s ship killing DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile is 2,500 miles. And it’s far more convenient and less arduous for China to contest geographic space. The DF-26 and its shorter-legged cousin, the DF-21D, are truck-launched missiles that can be fired from the mainland. The IJN had to disperse clots of combat power around the Mandate islands to oppose a U.S. naval advance. The PLA can essay an “access-/area-denial” strategy without bothering to occupy and defend outlying real estate—flyspecks vulnerable to being seized from their defenders, isolated, or bypassed. And PLA access deniers enjoy the concentrated magazine capacity of Fortress China, whereas Japan had to disperse resources throughout the Western and Central Pacific to mount a forward defense against Americans.

It's starting to feel like the interwar decades again—but only in some ways.

Suppose Beijing opted to risk a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. Take it from an old naval artilleryman: amphibious operations are no simple matter even when the auguries are good. And an attack on Taiwan would be far from auspicious for PLA forces. If you transpose a map of probable landing beaches on Taiwan onto the map of the actual Allied landings in Normandy in 1944, the imagery is striking. The two amphibious zones are comparable in size, while Taiwan’s coastal terrain rivals Normandy’s as an obstacle to troops storming ashore. PLA soldiers and marines will have their work cut out for them should the Chinese Communist leadership ordain that the island be taken by force.

But the fact remains: Allied forces did plow into the teeth of Nazi defenses in June 1944, they did establish a beachhead in France, and they did break out of their coastal enclave into some open-field running by late July. The Reich fell less than a year after D-Day. The Allies deemed the costs and perils of amphibian warfare worthwhile, and they won. So the D-Day precedent—far from soothing misgivings among Taiwan and its patrons—implies that PLA troops could barge ashore within a few days or weeks, blast their way off the beaches a few weeks or months after that, and subdue the island’s guardians within a year of opening hostilities. Nor does the fact that Germany confronted a second front in the form of an ascendant Soviet Army ease such worries. The mainland coast overshadows the island—opening up countless operational vistas. Any PLA generalissimo worth the name will have incorporated a secondary assault into the overall war plan. Like the German Army will see manpower and resources siphoned to other points of impact.

In short, the political and strategic disjuncture between then and now should set Chinese hearts aglow. If the PLA can protract a future Pacific war the way the IJN did, it may well achieve its goals. If it took U.S. forces a year or more to reach the scene of combat, and if the PLA indeed met the Normandy standard for operational tempo, then Chinese force would be dug-in by the time U.S. forces got into action. Would they land on the island to dislodge PLA defenders? Doubtful. Speed, then, will be of the essence as U.S. forces try to succor Taiwan. With no leisure for the plodding, methodical, and, in relative terms, safe advance that saw the U.S. Navy through the Pacific War, today’s Seventh and Pacific fleets may have to charge into action—punching their Through Ticket to Asia. It’s a cross-Pacific dash or nothing. Advantage: China.

On the other hand—President Harry Truman’s wish for a one-handed economist comes to mind when pondering Pacific affairs—the strategic setting at large appears far more favorable to the United States than during the heyday of War Plan Orange. While the U.S. Navy has kept a squadron in the Far East since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the United States has only been a resident power in Asia since the Spanish-American War ensconced it in the region. Back then its chief strategic assets were the Philippine Islands, Guam, and a series of island stepping-stones stretching back toward Hawaii. These assets were invaluable in that they assured access to Far Eastern soil. Equal partners in U.S. strategy they were not.

But today?

Washington presides over a fellowship of formidable allies that stretches from South Korea and Japan to the north to the Philippines and Australia to the south. South Korea, Japan, and Australia play host to U.S. forces, a mutual defense pact binds the Philippines to the United States, and Taiwan is an informal ally. PLA commanders, in other words, must contend with U.S. allies that occupy the offshore “first island chain” enclosing the mainland’s coastline—a geographic asset ideal for troublemaking.

Chinese commanders must also come to grips with frontline allied forces that need not battle their way overseas from Hawaii or North America to make their weight felt in Asian affairs. The U.S. Seventh Fleet and affiliated joint forces call Japan home. Together they and the Japan Self-Defense Forces comprise a potent multinational fighting force. The Republic of Korea Navy and Royal Australian Navy field imposing if compact fleets complete with Aegis destroyers. European navies are even making their return to Asia. This correlation of forces is a far cry from the early twentieth century, when the U.S. Asiatic Fleet—less a battle force than a hodgepodge of misfit ships—anchored the U.S. presence in a Western Pacific dominated by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Such are the realities before planners. A latter-day War Plan Orange ought to rhyme with the past in certain respects while acknowledging today’s new normal. The contrast between past and present suggests a few precepts for contemporary war planning. One, an uptempo counteroffensive appears crucial. Once China grabs what it wants, there may be no reversing its gains. It’s hard to imagine the United States and its allies mounting a Normandy-scale campaign of their own to evict the PLA from Taiwan. Two, speed kills even though it’s essential. U.S. forces will encounter some of the same problems the Orange planners foresaw for a cross-Pacific rush toward Japan. Puncturing China’s anti-access defenses, girding for a duel with the PLA Navy surface fleet, and supplying adequate logistical support are just three of the challenges before U.S. planners and mariners.

But three, U.S. forces forward-deployed to the Western Pacific can expedite the Pacific Fleet’s access to regional waters and skies, working in concert with fraternal Asian armed forces. Deploying armaments along and around the first island chain would confine the PLA Navy and Air Force to the China seas, muting the impact of Beijing’s anti-access strategy. Dispatching submarines or unmanned vehicles on raids within the first island chain would throw the PLA Navy onto the defensive, distracting attention and resources from the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And on and on. Any effective war plan will put this advance guard to work, helping the Western Pacific Express arrive in time to make the difference in combat.

War planners of old deserve their encomia, but their work is not done yet. They can render yeoman service from beyond the grave, illuminating the challenges, dangers, and opportunities before the U.S. Navy today. Let’s dust off those old archives, explore the world of War Plan Orange—and grind some fresh sausage.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Security, Americas

Some changes are needed if the service is to be ready.

Key point: Yesterday's Navy might not be what is needed for tomororw's wars. How can America be sure it has the right kinds and numbers of ships for the job?

Were the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps after the Cold War and the hippy movement of 1968 separated at birth? In a sense, yes. Both made it an article of faith that history had ended or was simply irrelevant. Both took to extremes Henry Ford’s quip that “history is more or less bunk”—a paean to historical forgetfulness if there ever was one. “We don’t want tradition,” declared Ford in the Chicago Tribune in 1916. “We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” Their extremely American conviction that history was bunk liberated the 1960s types and sea warriors from the customs and ways of thinking that had stood the test of time—or so they thought. Both groups had to relearn what they had deliberately forgotten, at considerable peril to the republic and themselves. The hippies constituted a menace to public health; neglect of basic martial missions, tactics, and hardware endangered the ability of the sea services to enforce freedom of the sea. 

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

That is my reading of the lessons from a comical albeit macabre story about San Francisco during the 1960s, related by the novelist and gadfly Tom Wolfe. Hippies inhabiting communes in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district had declared it “Year Zero.” They proclaimed that benighted past generations had nothing to teach that was worth learning. They would build an all-new world from scratch, learning everything for themselves. Hence, it was known as Year Zero. The enlightened 1960s generation thus made a conscious choice to forget the accumulated wisdom of the ages—including such fundamentals as basic sanitation and hygiene! The ensuing downturn in public health flummoxed doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Wolfe reports:

Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or . . . without using any sheets at all or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . the laws of hygiene . . . by getting . . . diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

But that isn’t quite right, is it? Getting sick “exposed the hippies to the consequences of their folly”? Whether they learned from the grunge or the rot was up to them. Learning demanded a painful mental readjustment. It demanded that they amend or discard Year Zero thinking, a core precept of commune life. Having consciously decided to reject all lessons bequeathed by past generations, the 1960s generation now had to decide to take the past seriously again, in whole or in part. For Wolfe this was the moral to the story—that the hippies’ ahistorical and arrogant worldview compelled them to undertake a “Great Relearning” of basic truths in order to rejoin modern society as functioning members.

You can disparage those who went before or declare past experience irrelevant. That doesn’t make what your forebears learned about reality any less true. And reality has a way of exacting its revenge. When it does, you can undertake your own Great Relearning or suffer the consequences.

 

Now, the United States Navy and Marine Corps are not some bunch of smelly hippies per se. But in a way the seniormost naval leadership announced that Year Zero had arrived with the downfall of the Soviet Union and Soviet Navy. Uniformed and civilian officials declared an end to naval history in 1992, at almost precisely the same moment the social scientist Francis Fukuyama was proclaiming an end to political history. (Fukuyama floated the notion of an “end of history” in these pages in 1989 and expanded it to book length in late 1992.) A whiff of Haight-Ashbury wafted through naval precincts when “. . . From the Sea: Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century,” the U.S. Navy and Marines’ first effort at making strategy for the brave new world following the Cold War, stated that:

• The West ruled the sea now that the Soviet Navy was no more;
• No peer antagonist could rival the U.S. or allied navies for mastery of the maritime commons, and none would for the foreseeable future;
• And therefore the U.S. sea services could afford to transform themselves into a “fundamentally different naval service” that had little need to gird for surface, anti-air, or anti-submarine warfare against enemies comparable in size and capability to Western forces.

The sea services, that is, could lay down arms and transform themselves. Though not in so many words, sea-service chieftains contended that victory in the Cold War had abolished the chief function of navies, namely fighting enemy battle fleets for maritime command in Mahanian fashion. Since there was no one left to fight, American and friendly forces could skip straight to projecting power from this offshore safe haven. They could land troops on combat missions or errands of mercy, launch air strikes from carrier flight decks, or pelt targets with cruise missiles with impunity. “. . . From the Sea” broadcast a powerful and resonant signal to the sea services. From then forward, hardware, tactics, and skills for dueling peer navies languished—and languished on explicit orders from naval prelates.

History has now debunked the notion that history is bunk. Like 1960s denizens, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps must now undertake their own Great Relearning if they mean to compete effectively against such formidable potential foes as China’s People’s Liberation Army, which is busily fielding a great surface navy backed by an array of missile-toting submarines and patrol craft, not to mention shore-based aircraft and missiles in bulk. The ghost of Tom Wolfe smiles knowingly at the sea services’ plight. The hippies had to learn not to share toothbrushes. We have to relearn and reequip ourselves for our core function of high-seas battle if we are to resume custodianship of an increasingly competitive maritime world. In both cases it’s back to basics after insisting the basics no longer matter.

How do we gauge how well we are faring in this gathering strategic competition? Let’s answer briefly from the standpoint of the United States as a whole and then circle back to the sea services, the long arm of U.S. foreign policy, to see what our Great Relearning involves. As the keeper of an established status quo, America counts it as a strategic success when nothing happens—or at any rate nothing that upsets that status quo. Scholar-statesman Henry Kissinger counsels superintendents of a regional or world order to found their efforts on justice and on a balance of power. If stakeholders in the system accept the system as a legitimate mechanism for settling their differences, then they have little reason to challenge it; they see it as just on the whole and acquiesce in its workings. If a daunting balance of power confronts would-be challengers, then they can cherish few hopes of toppling the system. Either way, nothing happens; the established order stands.

You would think things should be okay today. Communist China freely assented to the “international rules-based order,” which lamentably now seems to have acquired its own acronym, IRBO. It took up a permanent seat in the UN Security Council in the 1970s. It signed on as a charter member of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in the 1980s. Beijing seemed to accept the rules-based order as a device for settling disputes, as Kissinger doubtless hoped it would. But the leadership has evidently had second thoughts in recent years, particularly when it comes to managing events in the China seas. The Chinese Communist Party leadership harbors few objections to a rules-based order in offshore waters. It simply believes the rules should be made in Beijing—not in The Hague, New York, or, worst of all, Washington, DC.

Hence the fervent claims from Xi Jinping and his supporters to “indisputable sovereignty“ over maritime space adjoining mainland shores. Such claims would negate the principle that the high seas are a “common,” an expanse that belongs to everyone and no one. If China is sovereign over swathes of the high seas, then it wields a monopoly on the legitimate use of armed force there. The Chinese Communist Party ordains, others obey. The common is no more. So the diplomatic challenge before the United States and fellow liberal-minded seafaring states is to make every effort to coax China back into the rules-based order as it currently stands; to refuse to grant concessions to Beijing that tacitly nullify the rules on which the system rests; and to shore up the regional balance of power in case China keeps stubbornly rejecting the rules. Conciliate Beijing while convincing Xi and his lieutenants they cannot get away with subverting the regional or world order, and a wonderful thing may happen.

Nothing.

This is the first measure of strategic success. How can the sea services help bring it about? Our task is to put steel behind diplomacy and thus face down challenges to the rules-based order—making the favorable balance of power Kissinger espouses a reality. We need to make an impression—a political impression. The strategist Edward Luttwak urges fleet overseers to configure and move forces around to cast a “shadow” across an opponent’s strategic and political calculations. We want Beijing to fret about the consequences it may incur from whittling away at the status quo. The longer and darker the shadow U.S. Navy and Marine forces cast when they cruise from place to place on the map and flex their combat capabilities, the better Washington’s chances of deterring Beijing. Doubt and fear are our friends in this endeavor.

Henry Kissinger devises another simple formula to guide our efforts. He depicts deterrence as a multiple of capability, resolve, and belief, namely our capability and resolve to use it under certain circumstances coupled with the opponent’s belief in our capability and resolve. To deter we must assemble physical capability sufficient to make good on our deterrent threats; display the willpower to use that capability should the opponent defy our deterrent threats; and make that opponent a believer in our capability and resolve. Kissinger hastens to restate his premise: deterrence is a product of multiplication—not addition. If any one of these factors is zero, then so is deterrence.

That’s why the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ renown as fighting forces is so critical to foreign-policy success. The sea services are capability manifest in steel and flesh. So to track success in strategic competition, mariners need to estimate how they are influencing the three variables comprising deterrence. They must fortify their material and human prowess, project confidence in their ability to fight and win, and help diplomats and policymakers convince Beijing they can and will carry out Washington’s deterrent threats if so instructed. If we can convince China’s leadership it cannot prevail in a trial of arms—or, short of that, that it cannot prevail at a cost Xi and his advisers are prepared to pay—then deterrence ought to hold.

If justice cannot keep the peace, in other words, then the sea services must deploy old-fashioned hard power in concert with U.S. Army legions and Air Force squadrons. Whatever maritime forces do to bolster capability, resolve, and belief helps cast the deep shadow America must cast to deter China—and act as a trustworthy steward over the system. This is my second measure of strategic success.

And lastly, seafarers must reform their institutional culture. Culture—crudely put, “how we do things here”—instills attitudes and habits within an institution and the people who comprise it. A naval culture that is gimlet-eyed yet upbeat will stand the sea services in good stead in strategic competition. It should be gimlet-eyed in that it rejects fanciful claims like those found in “. . . From the Sea.” Victory over a specific competitor may be permanent. Victory over the Soviet Navy is a settled fact, since that antagonist is no more. (Its successor is another matter.) And if the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are fortunate enough to get through the ongoing competition with China and Russia, then they may earn a new reprieve from high-seas strategic competition.

But reprieves are transitory. There will always be a next challenger, and the sea services must feel that conviction in our marrow. Strategic competition never finally ends. We must never again delude ourselves into thinking a momentary triumph, however complete and satisfying, has annulled our first and paramount naval mission—the fight to rule the waves. Mariners must constantly keep pushing themselves to get better at that mission, even if no new foe has yet appeared on the horizon. In that sense a tragic if not fatalistic mindset must guide everything we think and do. We should regard claims that Year Zero is at hand, or that history has ended, with a jaundiced eye.

If naval culture should be fatalistic about elemental purposes, then we should also make it upbeat. It should reflexively deplore orthodoxy while celebrating entrepreneurship that helps the sea services fulfill their purposes. The longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer—another Bay Area dweller, although from the Grapes of Wrath rather than the hippy generation—teaches that innovative ages are mirthful, even whimsical ages. Hoffer says change is an ordeal for all of us, but devil-may-care times make it less trying. Freewheeling times reward experimentation; they may even make it fun. In such times any crank feels free to formulate a harebrained idea, put it to the test of reality, and discard it for the next harebrained idea should the hypothesis fail that test—as most will; but not all.

Ancient Athens was one bubbly, entrepreneurial society students of strategy and foreign-policy encounter when canvassing history for insight. Even the city’s enemies paid homage to Athenian dynamism. Other dynamic epochs, says Hoffer, include early Islam, the European Renaissance, and Restoration-era England. By contrast, orthodox ages are dour. They frown on cranks. Senior leaders obsess over administrative perfection and spit and polish. They gather control of most everything into their hands, attempting to choreograph—in minute detail—endeavors best left to more junior folk. In short, they stifle and punish enterprise. Hoffer says such an outlook deadens creativity, and he is right. Instituting the right rules, regulations, and career incentives can nudge the institutional culture in a direction hospitable to invention. Senior civilian and naval leadership must exercise trusteeship over the culture.

Let’s make nurturing a cultural renaissance a third measure of strategic success. If a healthy culture shapes our thoughts and deeds, then we are likely to compete to good effect. May dynamism—not stasis, orthodoxy, or control freakism—prevail. Let’s tend to the system, deter challengers, and reform ourselves. These efforts are our counterparts to refreshing personal hygiene in the communes of Haight-Ashbury. Take care of the basics and we may go far.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Michael Peck

History, Americas

It could have been a real killer, but the Navy instead went with the F-14.

Key Point: The services do not always like buying each other's equipment. This is especially true if doing so will require a lot of costly changes to the other's war machine.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Dynamic Duo symbolized U.S. military airpower. The Air Force had its powerful F-15 Eagle air superiority fighter. But the Navy had the sophisticated swing-wing F-14 Tomcat, glamorized by the movie Top Gun.

Yet had events worked out differently, the aircraft that Tom Cruise flew could have been an… F-15 Eagle?

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

For a time, the Navy actually considered a carrier version of the F-15. The F-15N, or "Sea Eagle" as it was unofficially dubbed, was proposed by McDonnell Douglas in 1971, according to author Dennis Jenkins in his "McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle: Supreme Heavy-Weight Fighter."

The Sea Eagle would require some modifications, such as folding wings and stronger landing gear. But McDonnell Douglas's position was that "due to its excellent thrust-to-weight ratio and good visibility, the F-15 could easily be adapted for carrier opera­tions," Jenkins writes.

For a sketch of what the Sea Eagle might have looked like, go here.

The early 1970s were an opportune time for McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) to make its pitch. The F-14, first deployed in 1974, was under fire because of the troublesome and underpowered Pratt & Whitney TF30 engines initially fitted to the fighter. Nor did the price tag help: An F-14 cost $38 million in 1998 dollars, versus $28 million for the Air Force's F-15A.

The F-15N would probably have been faster and more maneuverable than the F-14, as well as cheaper. But the carrier modifications would have rendered the Sea Eagle 3,000 pounds heavier than the land-based version. Perhaps more important, the initial F-15N design was only armed with Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles as well as a cannon. What it didn't have was the long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missile that the Navy counted on to stop Soviet bombers well before they could attack the fleet.

A Navy fighter study came up with another tack: an F-15 armed with Phoenix missiles and their associated long-range AN/AWG-9 radar. But the Phoenix Eagle would have weighed 10,000 pounds more than the F-15A, which meant that it wouldn't have offered any performance advantage over the Tomcat. McDonnell Douglas and Phoenix manufacturer Hughes countered with the F-15(N-PHX), which kept the Phoenix missiles but ditched the AN/AWG-9 radar for an enhanced version of the AN/APG-63 radar on the Air Force F-15A.

A Senate subcommittee began examining the naval F-15 in March 1973. "At this point the F-14 program was having difficulties, and the subcommittee want­ed to look at possible alternatives, namely lower-cost (stripped) F-14s, F-15Ns, and improved F-4s," Jenkins writes. "There were even proposals by Senator Eagleton for a ‘fly-off’ between the F-14 and F-15, but this never transpired."

In the end, the Navy stuck with the Tomcat. But something did come out of the Sea Eagle project. The Senate hearings, "along with some other considera­tions, led to the forming of Navy Fighter Study Group IV, out of which the aircraft ultimately known as the F/A-18A was born," Jenkins writes.

Was the Sea Eagle a viable concept? The problem is the one that we are seeing with today's F-35: an aircraft that must serve more than one master inevitably sacrifices performance in some area (in fact, the F-14 was born after the Pentagon's abortive attempt to make the ill-fated F-111 a joint Air Force and navy fighter). To turn the F-15 into a carrier-based interceptor like the F-14 would have required so many design changes that the hybrid beast would probably have been inferior to either the F-15 or F-14.

Which points to the real problem: The Air Force and Navy have always had different requirements. In the 1970s, the Air Force wanted a powerful, highly maneuverable dogfighter to prevent a repeat of what happened when its F-4 Phantoms battled more nimble MiGs over Vietnam. Though ironically, the Air Force did at one point consider the F-14 as a replacement for the F-106 interceptor.

But the Navy needed an interceptor that could stop Soviet bombers and anti-ship missiles. This meant an aircraft with a high-powered radar as well as big, long-range air-to-air missiles. Like the F-35, attempting to use the same platform for dissimilar missions means a circle so squared that it becomes unrecognizable.

And of course, there was politics. The Air Force and Navy will only buy each other's aircraft if the politicians force them to do so. The Sea Eagle was probably not a good idea to begin with, but it certainly was doomed without a powerful backer in the Pentagon or White House.

Fortunately, in the end, the Air Force and the Navy got the fighters they wanted. Just not the same fighters.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Will 2021 be full of foreign-policy crises and domestic drama or dull compared to 2020?

The UN chief on Friday welcomed the release of more than 300 schoolboys forcibly taken from their school in northwest Nigeria a week ago, although others reportedly remain missing.  

The Treasury’s decision to label both Switzerland and Vietnam currency manipulators was unusual—and leaves the Biden administration with some tough choices to make.

As governments move to secure COVID-19 vaccines for their populations, choosing these treatments should not be viewed as “some kind of nationalistic footrace”, with some countries winning and others losing, a senior official with the World Health Organization (WHO) told journalists on Friday. 

The country’s contrarian approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was meant to prove that trust in authorities could avert lockdowns. Instead, mixed messaging and political squabbles have led to an exploding epidemic.

Craig Singleton

Health, Americas

If America remains a member of the World Health Organization without extracting any meaningful concessions, then that would be tantamount to foreign policy malpractice.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies appear to have the inside track in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine. As expected, these breakthroughs have been greeted with sighs of relief by Main Street America and Wall Street.

And yet, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) muted response speaks volumes, as does its unwillingness to conduct a transparent investigation into the virus’s Chinese origins. By any measure, the WHO’s perceived deference to Beijing has left its credibility and that of its leaders on life support.

If public and institutional distrust is a symptom of a larger disease, then the WHO is clearly unwell.  

Could U.S.-led coronavirus diplomacy cure its ills?

Not surprisingly, the contest to develop a vaccine has devolved into a great-power war game. While the United States has pursued a reliable, albeit accelerated, path forward, the same cannot be said of its strategic competitors.

Eager to repair the damage stemming from its coronavirus deceptions and ensuing “wolf warrior” diplomacy, Beijing has turned to a familiar playbook, attempting to steal information about U.S. vaccine programs. China’s willingness to cut corners has also included inoculating thousands outside of supervised trials, as well as convincing vulnerable governments to offer their own citizens as guinea pigs in exchange for relief. The Russian government has also performed as expected, downplaying the virus’s death toll and pushing unverified claims about the efficacy of its Sputnik V vaccine.

Although President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the WHO, the next administration is certain to reverse course. However, nursing the organization back to health and championing top-to-bottom reform will not come easily.

With America’s rivals knocked off balance, and to achieve its aims of overhauling the WHO and restoring America’s reputation, the next administration and its allies should move swiftly to administer a more aggressive Western antidote, albeit one hard for the WHO to swallow. 

While U.S. vaccines are in production, the question of distributing them around the world remains unanswered. The Achilles heel to the WHO’s response lies with its COVAX program, which is tasked with procuring vaccines for developing countries. At present, COVAX remains woefully mismanaged and severely underfunded, as many countries harbor reservations about the WHO’s reliability. Without significant restructuring, COVAX is unlikely to succeed. The situation is further complicated by rampant G-20 vaccine nationalism, in which leaders are prioritizing inoculations for their citizens and in effect relegating developing countries to the back of the line.

If America’s successful AIDS programming in Africa is any indication, then this need not be the case. What’s more, re-capturing the hearts and minds of these developing countries will be key to establishing an international coalition to confront China’s increasingly malign behavior.

Remaining in the WHO without extracting any meaningful concessions would be tantamount to foreign policy malpractice. As a first step, the provision of any additional COVAX funding, administrative support, or vaccine assistance should be tied to a full, fast-tracked audit of the COVAX program and the WHO’s initial response to the pandemic, specifically focusing on the organization’s interactions with Beijing. This audit should also scrutinize COVAX’s vaccine approval process to ensure the WHO never greenlights unsafe Chinese and Russian vaccines for distribution.

Given concerns about undue Chinese influence at the United Nations, these investigations should be led and paid for by the WHO’s top Western contributors and COVAX partners, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. To be sure, such institutional shock therapy is all but certain to clash with established diplomatic norms; however, continued stonewalling on these issues will only compound pre-existing concerns that the WHO is simply beyond repair.

As more information comes to light and with pressure building in anticipation of a vaccine rollout in mid-2020, the WHO’s bureaucratic dam will eventually break, leading to leadership resignations and a global reckoning for China. Only then will the United States and its allies be positioned to exercise greater control over the organization and its inoculation protocols.  

Of course, immunizing billions will cost billions and investing even more in the WHO will be a hard sell for many leaders. Moreover, U.S. taxpayers and members of Congress have every reason to remain skeptical, although skepticism alone has done little to dent U.S. contributions to the UN’s coffers over the years.

To their surprise, congressional watchdogs may realize that the way to establish greater control over the WHO—a goal that has remained elusive—is to actually increase U.S. support for the UN body, albeit in a reformed institution with the United States and its allies at the helm. 

Experimental treatments, and particularly those that stray from standard operating practices, are certain to be met with suspicion and even derision. In this case, the patient may even revolt, although doing so would seal the WHO’s fate and lead other countries to partner with the United States on independent vaccine initiatives.

If that is the worst side-effect, then so be it. It sure beats the alternative of placing the world’s fate in the hands of a compromised WHO and its enablers in Beijing. 

Craig Singleton is a national security expert and former diplomat who currently serves as an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) for its China Program. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues. 

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Technology,

AT&T knows that its DirecTV division, for which it paid a whopping $49 billion in 2016, is failing miserably—and perhaps the only way to save it is by selling it.

AT&T knows that its DirecTV division, for which it paid a whopping $49 billion in 2016, is failing miserably—and perhaps the only way to save it is by selling it. 

In just the past quarter, AT&T announced that it lost 590,000 subscribers to its “Premium TV,” a category that includes DirecTV satellite service, U-verse wireline TV, and the online service known as AT&T TV. The telecommunications giant also shed 37,000 customers from AT&T TV Now, the streaming service formerly known as DirecTV Now. 

DirecTV and AT&T’s premium services lost 897,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2020, and 886,000 in the second quarter. AT&T now has 17.1 million premium TV subscribers, after losing more than three million over the course of the last year. To put those figures more in perspective, in 2017, there were more than twenty-five million subscribers.  

Accordingly, revenue for video entertainment plunged to just under $7 billion last quarter, which is 16 percent less than what was registered in 2018.  

As for DirecTV itself, it has gone from twenty-one million subscribers in 2017 to roughly 13.6 million this past quarter, according to Statista. 

With the satellite TV provider being such a huge part of the problem, it’s no wonder that AT&T is looking to cut ties with it. Dish Network has long held out hope that a merger with DirecTV would help the company get out of its years-long economic doldrums.  

Dish’s CEO Charlie Ergen has even repeatedly stated that he considers a merger of the two satellite TV providers to be “inevitable,” even though such a business deal would likely face significant regulatory scrutiny.  

It does appear that an actual sale is creeping closer—but Dish isn’t seen as one of the potential buyers. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that AT&T has received bids from the auction it’s held for DirecTV—and that such bids have valued the unit upwards of $15 billion including debt. The paper added that the sale “could be completed by early next year.” 

There could also be more pain in the offing for AT&T as DirecTV might lose its exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the popular NFL package that offers every out-of-market game to football fans. While equivalent packages for other sports leagues are available on multiple platforms, DirecTV has had the exclusive on NFL Sunday Ticket ever since it first launched way back in 1994.  

The current agreement expires after the 2022 season, and Amazon, Disney-owned ESPN+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and sports streaming service DAZN have all expressed interest in garnering the rights to the package.  

AT&T currently pays $1.5 billion per year to carry NFL Sunday Ticket, but the cost might be too high now considering that the company has been actively working to reduce its debt.

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

Image: Reuters

Paul R. Pillar

Security, Middle East

Transactional diplomacy in which prices are paid is not inherently bad. Countries do it all the time. But when the United States pays such a price, it ought to be in return for something in U.S. interests, or in the more general interest of peace. It ought not to serve instead the territorial ambitions of a foreign state.

For Americans, the Western Sahara is a faraway land about which they know little. There is no good reason for the United States to separate itself from the mainstream of international opinion about the long-running conflict in that territory. There is even less reason for the United States to support the claim of a neighboring state that, enjoying local military dominance, wants to annex the territory. Yet that is what the administration of Donald Trump, acting very much alone, has done by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. 

Conflict in the Western Sahara dates back to local resistance against Spanish colonial rule, eventually led by what became known as the Polisario Front. When Spain, in Francisco Franco’s dying days, pulled out of the territory in 1975, the Polisario Front’s struggle became one against the bordering states of Morocco and Mauritania. Mauritania, the weaker of these two states, stopped contesting the territory in 1979, and the war became one between the Polisario Front and Morocco. 

A cease-fire in 1991 left Morocco in control of more than three-fourths of the Western Sahara. The Moroccans constructed a long earthen berm to separate what they control—which includes the territory’s economically important phosphate deposits—from the remaining desert that is left to the Polisario. The most significant breach of the cease-fire occurred just last month, touched off by Moroccan military movements near a border post that followed nonviolent protests obstructing truck traffic to Mauritania.

Various peace efforts through the years, including one led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker acting as a United Nations envoy, have centered on the concept of self-determination for the Sahrawi people, with a referendum to determine the will of those people. Disagreement over who ought to be on the voter rolls has prevented any referendum from being held.

The prevailing international perspective toward the conflict is very much in line with the concept of Sahrawi self-determination, and not at all in line with Moroccan annexation. The United Nations considers the Western Sahara to be a non-self-governing territory and the Polisario Front to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Sahrawi people. Forty countries recognize the “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic” that the Polisario Front declared in 1976. SADR is a full member of the African Union. Morocco has not received comparable support for its claims from the Arab League, which has offered only a vague statement about respecting Moroccan territorial sovereignty.

The Trump administration’s move does nothing for the people of the Western Sahara, nothing for the cause of self-determination, and nothing for efforts to resolve the Western Sahara dispute. It can only make resolution of the conflict less, not more, likely than before—especially coming amid a breakdown of the cease-fire between Morocco and the Polisario. It also increases U.S. isolation on yet another international issue, identifying the United States with a might-makes-right approach to territorial control. 

And what did the administration get in return for incurring these costs? Nothing for the United States. Instead, the deal reached with the Moroccan regime of King Mohammed VI was part of the administration’s campaign on behalf of the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to get Arab states to upgrade their relations with Israel. It is transactional dealing in support of Likud. 

The upgrade deals that the administration has struck with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and now Morocco are not “peace” agreements, much less the “breakthroughs” that the administration likes to describe them as. None of these states was at war with Israel. Instead, they already had extensive cooperation with Israel, including on security and defense matters. Morocco even had previously exchanged diplomatic liaison offices with Israel following the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, although those offices were closed after a new Palestinian uprising in 2000. This month’s deal merely reopens those liaison offices. 

Netanyahu’s government strongly wants more extensive relations with Arab states as a way of having its cake and eating it too—that is, as a way of losing its pariah status while continuing its occupation of Palestinian territory. Far from advancing peace, this process sets back any prospects for peace. It reduces further any incentive for the Netanyahu government to make the sort of policy changes necessary for resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has paid other peace-eroding prices in its campaign on behalf of the Israeli government. F-35 stealth jets and other advanced military hardware were part of the price paid to the UAE—a transaction that, thanks partly to Trump’s veto threat, evidently will be completed despite significant congressional opposition. The deal risks stoking an arms race in the Persian Gulf, and at a minimum intensifies the lines of conflict in that region. It also provides advanced weapons to a regime that has used the military aircraft it already has for such destabilizing activities as intervening in Libya’s civil war and adding significantly to the death and destruction there. 

The Trump administration’s motives in all this clearly have to do with catering to those domestic political elements, consisting mainly of the Christian evangelical part of Trump’s base, that see as good anything that conforms with the wishes of the Israeli government. More personal urges may be in play as well, especially for Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who reportedly was in the middle of the deal-making with Morocco. 

Transactional diplomacy in which prices are paid is not inherently bad. Countries do it all the time. But when the United States pays such a price, it ought to be in return for something in U.S. interests, or in the more general interest of peace. It ought not to serve instead the territorial ambitions of a foreign state. 

The transaction with Morocco has a perverse symmetry. A deal in which one side’s motivations involve sustaining occupation of a territory and subjugation of its people (the Palestinians) helps the other side sustain another occupation and subjugation of a people (the Sahrawis). The connection is not lost on foreign observers.

Paul R. Pillar is a Contributing Editor at the National Interest and the author of Why America Misunderstands the World.

Image: Reuters