The National Interest

David Axe

Taiwan, Asia

Taiwan is betting big that mines can deter China's impressive navy. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Taiwan’s loading up on new minelaying vessels. And it’s not hard to see why. With no realistic prospect of matching the Chinese navy warship for warship, the Taiwanese fleet is hoping that underwater minefields might help to sink an invasion fleet.

Lungteh shipyard on April 17, 2020 laid the keel for the third and fourth Min Jiang-class minelayer. The Republic of China Navy plans to begin accepting the minelayers in 2021.

The Taiwanese fleet’s existing minelayers are modified landing craft.

The Min Jiangs are not large. Just 120 feet long and displacing around 400 tons, they are lightly built and minimally armed with a handful of guns. Their mission, in wartime, is to use their automated mine-deploying systems quickly to lay minefields in the path of a Chinese invasion fleet.

The minefields presumably would be close to shore. “The minelayer ships were designed to face down an attack by amphibious vehicles trying to land in Taiwan,” a Taiwanese defense official said at the keel-laying ceremony for the first Min Jiang.

Sea mines are among the most dangerous naval weapons. It’s not for no reason that Iran leans heavily on mines in its strategy for closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz. It only helps navies such as Taiwan’s that many rival fleets struggle to maintain adequate minesweeping forces.

The Min Jiangs are part of a three-way approach to an “asymmetric” naval strategy. Instead of trying to match China’s scores of big, heavily-armed -- and expensive -- frigates, destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers, Taiwan plans to exploit specific Chinese weaknesses in order to raise the cost of an invasion.

In addition to the Min Jiangs, Taiwan also is building at least 11 new catamaran missile corvettes of the Tuo Chiang. Each of the speedy, 600-tons-displacement vessels carries 16 anti-ship missiles. The Tuo Chiangs will complement 42 older missile boats when they enter service beginning in 2021.

The third part of Taiwan’s asymmetric naval strategy lags by a few years. In addition to minelayers and missile corvettes, Taiwan is trying to build eight new diesel-electric attack submarines to replace four very old submarines currently in the fleet.

Since none of the world’s major submarine-builders will risk China’s wrath by selling an existing sub design to Taiwan, Taipei is spending potentially billions of dollars developing the submarines on its own, albeit with the help of foreign consultants.

Work on the new boats began in May 2019 at a shipyard in Kaohsiung. The coronavirus pandemic that swept East Asia starting the following December slowed the work. Taipei’s ban on foreign visitors, meant to halt the virus’s spread, also denied entry to Taiwan for dozens of foreign consultants working on the submarine project.

Expect work to resume as soon as possible. The submarine program and the other asymmetric naval efforts are top priorities in Taiwan.

After all, losing a large number of amphibious ships and landing craft to submarines, missiles and sea mines could compel China to call off an invasion, or at least delay the invasion long enough for U.S. forces to intervene.

David Axe was defense editor of The National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This article is being republished due to reader interest. 

Image: Reuters. 

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

Skunk Works has been deeply immersed in the study and exploration of fifth-generation platforms for more than a decade.

The world’s first-ever stealth aircraft, the U-2 spy plane, the fastest manned aircraft in existence and the first fifth-generation fighter jet were all created by the highly secretive Skunk Works division of Lockheed Martin. The Gulf War debut of the F-117 Night Hawk introduced the world to stealth technology, the SR-71 Blackbird set unprecedented speed records and the F-22 Raptor is credited as the world’s first-ever fifth-generation platform. 

How did something so impactful and famous begin? Part of its origin can be traced to Nazi fighter jets such as the World War II plane which made up the bulk of Germany’s Luftwaffe, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Beginning in the early 1940s, the dangers presented by the German aircraft drove the United States to fast track its first jet-propulsion fighter jet, the XP 80 Shooting Star.

“Take yourself back to the late 1930s and early 1940s. World War II is ongoing. All of a sudden, jet propulsion is a thing but hasn’t really deployed operationally,” Renee Pasman, Integrated Systems Director, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works®, told the National Interest. “All of a sudden, the Germans start showing up with the Messerschmitt Bf 109 . . . and the U.S. didn’t really have an immediate answer.”

Amazing to think that Nazi Germany’s jet-propulsion fighter jet laid part of the comparative foundation for the United States to designate special teams of highly expert innovators such as scientists, researchers and weapons developers. Since its inception, the premise of Skunk Works has been based upon being proactive and not merely “reactive.”

“We prefer to be disruptors instead of being disrupted,” Pasman said. “If we see a problem coming, we want to make sure that, you know, as a nation we’re prepared to respond. Skunk Works was really set up to do one thing, which was to solve a national need and do things that hadn’t been done before by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

Given this history, which included early work on what became the F-35 fighter jet, many might wonder what Skunk Works is working on now. Who knows? Most of its work is, by design, secret for obvious security reasons.

Part of the innovation philosophy is to pair or team up collections of otherwise disconnected experts who might specialize in different, yet potentially overlapping areas of expertise, Pasman explained. It would make sense as this kind of “teaming” might give rise to unanticipated synergies or potential avenues of exploration.

For instance, take the now airborne sixth-generation stealth fighter jet. While previous concepts and planning predicted the new potentially paradigm-changing plane would emerge in the 2030s, early prototypes are already airborne. There are likely a number of reasons for its acceleration and developmental success, which include things like digital engineering. It is unsurprising that Skunk Works has been deeply immersed in the study and exploration of fifth-generation platforms for more than a decade. While the specifics of what Skunk Works contributed to the technology are naturally unavailable, it would not be a huge stretch to imagine it has had much to do with advancing the technology so that it could be used much sooner than expected. 

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

Image: Flickr / U.S. Air Force

Michael Peck

Tanks, Eurasia

A renowned tank program gets evaluated.

Here's What You Need to Know: Tanks may differ across nations, but not the challenges of modern armored warfare.

Which tank does Russia love most?

Russia operates a variety of tanks, including the T-72, T-80 and T-90. In an interview with the military newspaper Red Star [English translation here], Major General Sergey Kisel, commander of the First Guards Tank Army, offered his assessment of the various tanks operated by his unit.

Kisel should know. The First Guard Tanks Army is arguably the most famous Russian armored formation, spearheading the Red Army’s drive to Berlin in 1945. Disbanded in 1998, it was reactivated in 2016 in western Russia, where it would in the forefront of a conflict with NATO.

The workhorse of the First Guards Tank Army is the T-72B3, which Kisel described as “a reliable tank.” An upgraded version of the venerable Cold War T-72, the fifty-ton T-72B3 has better armor, thermal imaging sensors and improved fire control. “Our main battle tank, the T-72B3, possesses sufficient specifications to detect and destroy any enemy on the battlefield,” said Kisel. “Their electronics make it possible significantly to enhance the accuracy of hitting targets.”

 “It differs from foreign models in that it is far smaller - which makes it less vulnerable,” he added. “At the same time, it has a faster rate of fire and possesses good marching capabilities.”

In contrast, the forty-six-ton T-80 is the racehorse built for mobility. As with the U.S. M-1 Abrams, the gas-turbine engine on the T-80 has been panned for being a fuel guzzler. But the T-80BV and T-80U “have gotten a good name for themselves,” says Kisel, who notes that the T-80 was originally developed as a breakthrough tank and can reach a speed of 90 kilometers per hour [56 miles per hour].”

 “The armament system on the T-80BV is the same as on the T-72B3 and the T-90,” he adds. “A special feature of the T-80BV is that this tank is capable of operating at low temperatures. Its gas turbine engine, whose design does not provide for a cooling liquid, is undemanding in frosts. The T-80BV and the T-80U are distinguished by unique marching specifications and are capable of covering large distances in a short space of time.

Kisel did not have as much to say about the T-90, other than that the 1st Guards Tank Army has “subunits with T-90 tanks that differ fundamentally from other vehicles in terms of the degree of protection for the crew, the long firing range, and more powerful engine.” Essentially a heavily modernized T-72, the fifty-one-ton T-90 is equipped with the Shtora defensive countermeasures system and explosive reactive armor to deflect anti-tank weapons. Its 125-millimeter 2A46M smoothbore cannon can fire both conventional shells and AT-11 Sniper anti-tank guided missiles.

What’s also interesting are Kisel’s observations on tank warfare. Tanks may differ across nations, but not the challenges of modern armored warfare. When asked by Red Star about the impact of technologies such as drones, robot vehicles and computerized systems, Kisel’s observation could have been uttered by an American or Israeli commander.

“The introduction of increasingly complex technical systems requires constant raising of the servicemen’s level of knowledge and combat training. Thus, a tankman is obliged to have thorough knowledge of hardware, ballistics, and the special features of modern combined-arms combat, which has become exponentially more complex in recent decades. Today demands are made of a tank commander that at one time were made of commanders of large subunits.”

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

Robert Farley

F-14, United States

The F-14 became an iconic fighter after going through some early growing pains.

Here's What You Need To Remember: In its early years, the Tomcat itself faced problems. The engines were temperamental, and the fighter was both heavy and costly. Design decisions, including swept-wings, made the Tomcat a complex beast to manage.

What if the F-14 Tomcat had never happened? The iconic fighter served the U.S. Navy for more than thirty years before finally (and some say prematurely) being retired in 2006. Over time, the F-14 shifted from its initial long-range fleet air-defense role to a ground-attack mission. But what if the problems that plagued the program in the 1960s and 1970s had proved insoluble? How would the Navy have filled the gap?

The Problem:

The F-14 grew out of the F-111 project, pushed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a fighter that could serve in both the Navy and the Air Force. USN and USAF's needs differed, however; the Navy wanted for a long-range carrier-based interceptor came from concern over Soviet air-launched cruise missiles. Soviet bombers could strike American carrier battle groups from a great distance, without entering the envelope either of ship-based SAMs or short-range fighters. This disrupted the layered missile, interceptor, and gun systems that the Navy had developed for air defense since World War II.

Unfortunately, the F-111 did not work out; too many capabilities were pushed into the frame, resulting in a fighter too large for the Navy’s needs, and not particularly well-suited to the air-superiority mission. By the mid-1960s the Navy began work on an alternative project, which eventually became the F-14. The Tomcat contributed to solving the Soviet bomber problem by combining long-range and high speed with the Phoenix missile, which could kill targets at extreme BVR.

But in its early years, the Tomcat itself faced problems. The engines were temperamental, and the fighter was both heavy and costly. Design decisions, including swept-wings, made the Tomcat a complex beast to manage. Congress complained, comparing the performance of the Tomcat unfavorably with the Air Force’s new heavy fighter, the F-15 Eagle. With the general post-Vietnam drawdown in full swing, the Tomcat’s journey to operability was touch and go; a decision at several points could have ended the project.

Substitutes:

What would have taken the Tomcat’s place? The F-14 began to enter service in 1974; the F/A-18 would not reach the Navy until 1983. This would leave a nine-year gap, not to mention the substantial capabilities gaps between the two aircraft. How would the Navy have filled it?

One alternative would simply have been to retain the F-4 in its interceptor and air superiority roles. The Phantom was more than adequate for such missions, although it lacked the range and BVR capability of the Tomcat. Indeed, the F-4 remained in Navy service until the F/A-18 came online, in large part because of the need to populate the decks of USS Midway and USS Coral Sea. But of course, the F-4 was not the Tomcat, and the balance of capabilities would have tilted in the direction of the big Soviet bomber formations, especially after the deployment of the Tu-22M “Backfire.”

Another alternative would have involved developing a naval version of the F-15 Eagle. Much thought was given to this in the early 1970s, with various concepts hitting the drawing board. After considerable modification to operate off carriers and carry the long-range Phoenix missile, the “Sea Eagle” might have made an adequate fighter, although probably not the equal of the Tomcat. And the Navy has consistently resisted efforts to force it to buy the same aircraft as the Air Force.

Bigger Changes:

In the early 1970s, as today, the Navy debated the future of the big carrier. Much like today, some argued that the ships were simply to expensive, wrapping up too much value into one vulnerable platform. After the order of the USS Carl Vinson in 1974, the future of the big carrier was an open question. Had the Tomcat not offered a resolution to at least one of those threats (long-range Soviet bombers) alternative arguments might have carried the day.

One option popular in the early 1970s, as the Essex class carriers were approaching the end of their useful service lives, was the “Sea Control Ship.” Light carriers dedicated to the anti-submarine mission, these fourteen-thousand-ton ships would have carried VSTOL fighters (such as the Harrier) and helicopters. Far cheaper than the big carriers, they offered a means of defending the trans-Atlantic corridor from Soviet submarines at a reasonable cost and were probably too small to attract the attention of the Soviet bomber formations.

Another option involved retooling the surface fleet to take on some of the roles played by carriers. The nuclear strike cruiser project offered a large surface combatant bristling with missiles and carrying an early version of the Aegis combat system. This ship would have combined strike and air defense capabilities at lower cost than a carrier battle group and would have been supported by additional Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers.

Parting Thoughts:

The Navy eventually worked out the problems with the F-14, and the Tomcat became a superlative air defense fighter. Eventually, it even gained a ground-attack mission. The temperamental nature of the design, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the success of the Super Hornet made the Tomcat superfluous by the 2000s, however, and the Navy now lacks a long-range interceptor. The main threats to carrier battle groups no longer come from flights of bombers, but rather from ballistic missiles, and no fighter has yet demonstrated much promise at the ABM mission. Nevertheless, the Tomcat contributed a core defensive capability during one of the critical periods of the development of the supercarrier.

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

Image: Wikipedia.

This story was originally published in July 2018.

Robert Farley

Air Force, Canada

The CF-105 is one of the great "What If" designs of the Cold War.

Here's What You Need to Know: The CF-105 had the potential to be a deadly Cold War-era interceptor, but changes in the strategic environment made it uneccesary. 

In the early 1950s, the Canadian government began to solicit orders for a new high-speed interceptor. The explosion in jet technology had rendered Canada’s first- and second-generation interceptors obsolete; in order to patrol Canada’s vast airspace, the Royal Canadian Air Force would need something awesome.

Avro Canada answered the call with the CF-105 Avro Arrow, a high-performance interceptor on the cutting edge of existing aviation technology. A big, beautiful fighter, the Arrow offered a promise to patrol Canadian airspace for decades, while also throwing a lifeline to Canada’s military aviation industry.

But the Arrow was not to be. Changes in technology, politics and defense priorities would work to kill the CF-105, and with it the greater portion of Canada’s defense aviation industry. Still, the legend of the Avro Arrow would survive for a very long time.

An Interceptor

The Arrow emerged as part of the same intellectual and engineering ferment as the B-58 Hustler and the MiG-21 Fishbed. The early 1950s saw remarkable leaps in airframe and engine technology, such that developmental aircraft offered enormous improvements in capability over existing warplanes. Jets designed in the early part of the decade were utterly obsolete by the end.

The expansion of Soviet Long-Range Aviation provided the strategic backdrop. In the late 1940s, the USSR built its first fleet of strategic bombers around the Tu-4, a copy of the American B-29 Superfortress. The next generation of Soviet bombers could fly faster and higher, and would undoubtedly cross Canadian airspace on its way to targets in the United States. Canada’s interceptor of the early 1950s, the CF-100 Canuck, could neither catch nor kill these fast bombers.

Enter the CF-105 Avro Arrow. The Arrow’s mission mirrored that of the later MiG-25 Foxbat; hunt and destroy high-flying Soviet bombers as they entered Canadian airspace. Initial testing indicated that the Arrow could, with Orenda Iroquois engines (then under development) exceed Mach 2 for a sustained period. The Arrow would have carried between three and eight long-range air-to-air missiles, and had the capacity to launch nuclear-tipped antiair rockets. In overall performance, the Arrow was not altogether dissimilar from the Convair F-106 Delta Dart, a close contemporary in design.

In an interesting parallel to the F-35, Canada pursued a no-prototype policy, meaning that the design changes continued as the earliest planes reached flight status. Although fifty years apart, this resembles the “concurrency” effort with the F-35, which relied on computer simulation and testing to push aircraft into flight status sooner.

The End

But, as flight testing ensued and initial production expectations ramped up, the Arrow ran into strategic problems. The first issue pitted the Arrow against the surface-to-air missile (SAM). The appearance of effective SAMs made life difficult to impossible for high-flying bombers, meaning that they had to change tactics (either flying low and slow, or using long-range cruise missiles) or disappear. Suddenly, an integrated air-defense network that focused on high-speed interceptors seemed more expensive and less effective than one that concentrated on SAM installations. A world-class defense network included both, of course, but the role of the interceptor became less central. Second, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (Avro introduced the Arrow on the same day that Sputnik reached space) made it difficult to imagine that any defensive network could successfully protect the Canadian homeland.

The United States and the United Kingdom both concluded that the future did not lie with high-speed interceptors, and canceled projects in development (although the F-106, for example, would remain in service for many years). Canada followed suit on February 20, 1959. The decision had a devastating ripple effect across Canada’s defense aviation industry; Avro Canada would shut its doors within three years (Hawker Siddeley picked up the pieces) and Orenda Engines was sharply curtailed.

Instead of the CF-105, the RCAF invested in a variety of Century Series fighters from the United States. These included the F-104 Starfighter (46 percent of which were lost in Canadian service), and (more controversial, given the cancellation of the Arrow) the CF-101 Voodoo. The Voodoo served as an interceptor, but at a level of performance generally below that expected of the Arrow.

The death of the Arrow also played a role in Canada’s decision to unify its three military services. Although the proximate causes of unification included concerns over civilian control during the Cuban Missile Crisis and a funding crunch, the interservice conflicts of the 1950s (the Army and Navy had sharply disagreed with the decision to pursue the Arrow) played a role. Moreover, with the death of the Canadian military aircraft industry, the Royal Canadian Air Force lost a key advocate outside of government.

The Legend

But the legend of the Arrow did not die with its cancellation. Because of the circumstances associated with the end of the plane, including the scrapping of all extant prototypes and all industrial tooling associated with the program, a series of conspiracies emerged regarding the causes of its demise. Many of these concentrated on the United States, suggesting that Washington had used nefarious influence to somehow kill the Arrow and prevent it from competing with less advanced U.S. designs.

To this day, the saga of the CF-105 remains near and dear to the hearts of many Canadian aviation enthusiasts. Some still claim that one of the prototypes was hidden from destruction, which (while deeply unlikely) would be a huge boon for a lucky museum someday. In 2012, some commentators suggested (seriously or not) redeveloping the Arrow as a replacement for the troubled F-35. The Canadian government rejected the proposal out of hand. And many Canadians still recognize the Arrow’s distinctive silhouette; in 2015, Canadian travel security personnel recognized a pair of die-cast CF-105 toys in the author’s luggage from the x-ray alone.

In some sense, the Arrow would have been a Foxbat before the Foxbat; a super high-performance interceptor with some glaring flaws as an air superiority fighter. Advances in technology could have increased the Arrow’s speed (although not to that of the Foxbat), but the design had many problems common to second- and third-generation fighters. Like the Foxbat (or the F-106), the Arrow could have served in an attack role only with great difficulty. Given the sharp turn towards multirole fighter-bombers that would ensue in the 1970s, the Arrow would likely before long have begun to resemble a white-and-orange elephant.

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005.  He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2004.  Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect.  Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Michael Peck

Drones, Eurasia

In November 1969, the U.S. Air Force sent Russia an early Christmas gift.

Here's What You Need to Know: The D-21 was conceived in the mid-1960s as a solution to the problem of spying on the Soviet Union.

In November 1969, the U.S. Air Force sent Russia an early Christmas gift.

It was a sleek flying machine that bore an uncanny resemblance to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The American generosity was purely unintentional. The aircraft was actually a cutting-edge drone dispatched on a mission to photograph Communist Chinese nuclear sites. And the drone did what it was supposed to until it failed to turn around, and kept on going north into Siberia before crashing.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Russia paid the skilled aircraft designers at Lockheed the highest compliment: they tried to copy their work.

The drone in question was the D-21. With its graceful delta wings, the D-21 resembled a miniature SR-71, which was no coincidence given that they were products of Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works, the originator of many an amazing secret project. In fact, the D-21 was originally designed to be mounted and launched from the tail of an SR-71, itself famous for its Mach 3 speed and its 85,000-feet maximum altitude.

The D-21 was conceived in the mid-1960s as a solution to the problem of spying on the Soviet Union. Soviet surface-to-air missiles, like the one that downed a U-2 over Russia in 1960, were making photo missions over Communist territory more hazardous. The SR-71 could fly high and fast enough to be safe, but why risk a manned aircraft and its pilot when a robot could do the job?

The idea was for the D-21 to be mounted atop an M-21, a specially modified two-seat SR-71, according to documents recently declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office. After completing its mission, the drone would eject its film canister, which would be snatched in mid-air by a C-130 transport. But launch problems, including an accident that crashed the launch M-21 and killed one crewman, saw the B-52H as the new launch vehicle for the improved D-21B.

Unfortunately, the project didn’t work out as planned. There were four D-21B flights, carried by B-52s launched from Guam. Their target was Communist China, specifically China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nor. All of them failed. Out of the last three, mid-air recovery failed to recover film canisters from two of them, which crashed into the Pacific on the flight out, while one drone crashed in China.

It is the fate of the first mission, in November 1969, that’s interesting. The D-21B crossed into China – and kept going into the Soviet Union, where it crashed.

“This proved to be of great interest to the Soviet aircraft industry, as it was a fairly compact machine equipped with up-to-date reconnaissance equipment and designed for prolonged reconnaissance flights at high supersonic speeds under conditions of strong kinetic heating,” write Russian aviation historians Yefim Gordon and Vladimir Rigamant. “Many leading enterprises and organizations of the aircraft, electronic and defense industries were commissioned to study the design of the D-21 together with the materials used in its construction, its production technology and its equipment.”

The result was the Voron (“Raven”) project to develop a supersonic strategic reconnaissance drone. The Voron would have been launched by a Tu-95 or Tu-160 bomber. After separation, a solid-fuel booster would have accelerated the drone to supersonic speed, at which point the ramjet would have kicked in, according to Gordon and Rigamant. The craft would then follow a pre-programmed flight path using an inertial navigation system. Once the unmanned aircraft returned to base, the film canister would be ejected and land by parachute, after which the drone itself would land.

But much like manned reconnaissance aircraft, the Voron idea fell victim to the advent of spy satellites that could soar over foreign territory without fear of being shot down. Another advantage is that satellites would not crash-land and have their secrets recovered by the enemy, as happened to the D-21.

But at least no one can accuse the Soviets of being ungenerous. In the mid-1980s, Ben Rich, a Lockheed engineer who worked on the D-21, recalled being given a metal panel by a CIA employee. It was a piece of the D-21 that had crashed in Siberia, and which had been recovered by a shepherd. The piece was returned by a KGB agent.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in April 2019.

Image: U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons

Robert Farley

Security, United States

The combination of new technologies in a proven airframe design means the F-15 will be flying for decades to come.

Here's What You Need to Know: At the very least, the F-15EX project means that the Air Force will have new, advanced airframes capable of doing the jobs that F-15s have been doing for decades. 

As was widely reported in July 2020, the Air Force has decided to acquire a large number of F-15EX fighters over the next several years. The F-15EX was initially expected to replace the elderly F-15 C/D, but the latest reports indicate that it may also replace the Air Force’s fleet of F-15Es.

Essentially, the F-15EX concept binds generations of technological innovation into the very old F-15 airframe. The F-15EX uses the classic F-15 frame but incorporates a host of technological improvements developed over the course of the last thirty years. 

Serial production of the F-15, driven largely by foreign sales in recent years, enables the integration of new technologies and keeps both the workforce and the manufacturing facilities fresh. The logic of replacing the F-15E (alongside the F-15C/D) is straightforward:

• the F-15 and the F-35 have overlapping, non-identical missions and capabilities; 
• the F-15EX significantly expands the capabilities of the existing F-15 fleet
• Eliminating the need for expensive service life extension programs. 

At the very least, the F-15EX project means that the Air Force will have new, advanced airframes capable of doing the jobs that F-15s have been doing for decades. 

More interesting, however, is the idea that the F-15EX may offer a pathway into the Digital Century Series (DCS). To review, the Century Series concept (associated most notably with Air Force chief of acquisition Wil Roper) involves designing and building an evolutionary set of airframes in small batches with open-source architecture. Roper has embraced the “Century Series” metaphor, notwithstanding the lack of success of the first “Century Series” which produced a set of mediocre aircraft soon eclipsed by the F-4 Phantom II, and critiques that the focus on manned aircraft is misplaced, and that the attention given to the DCS would be more profitably spent on unmanned aerial vehicles.

In the DCS concept, digital engineering technologies would allow the separation of production and design, while the use of 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing technologies would remedy some of the problems associated with the multiplication of spares and maintenance procedures. More importantly, the system would enable to continuous integration of new technologies into new airframes, as opposed to the much slower process necessitated by the precise requirements of stealth airframes. Thus, the “Digital Century Series” represents an entirely new way of thinking about aircraft acquisition, and indeed could lead to a substantial restructuring of the US aerospace industry. 

It’s wrong to say that the F-15EX is the first stage of the DCS. Stephen Trimble argues that while the F-15EX program uses many of the same tools that the Digital Century Series envisions, including advanced computer modeling and a modular platform, it is not part of the DCS per se. Trimble also discusses some differences in the handling of intellectual property between the two systems, as Boeing retains substantial rights over the F-15EX while the DCS system envisions full ownership of the relevant IP by the Air Force.

But this does not mean that the F-15EX experience will not serve as a useful test for the DCS process. Boeing has noted that the F-15EX will include a set of design features that will enable rapid upgrades, and also access to the Air Force’s new battle management system, a key part of DCS thinking. Roper himself has touted the connections between the F-15EX and the DCS, notwithstanding the evident architectural gaps.

Not least important, the F-15EX ensures that Boeing will remain a player in the fighter business.  Part of Roper’s objective in pursuing the DCS has been to limit and possibly reverse the industry consolidation that occurred in the military aerospace sector from the 1990s on. Some DCS advocates have even suggested the nationalization of certain aspects of the military aerospace industry, which would resemble in some ways the Soviet system of separate state-owned design bureaus and production facilities. This seems perhaps a step too far, given the history of the US defense industrial base and existing U.S. political realities. But the ability of Boeing to use digital tools to design and produce the F-15EX necessarily makes it a player in the next stage of the Air Force’s project development.

The F-15EX is hardly an inexpensive aircraft, with the cost of new models exceeds that of the F-35A. From the basis of a very old airplane, however, it offers the potential for a new way of thinking about how the Air Force will manage the age-old problem of balancing the existing fleet needs against the relentless advance of technology. If the F-15EX program leads to important lessons learned that enables the DCS, it resolves the problem of putting all of the Air Force’s eggs into a single high-technology basket, such as the F-22 or F-35. But the practical application of this theory of design remains untested, and it cannot be denied that building legacy fighters during a period of resurgent great power competition opens up many questions about the ability of the US aerospace industry to offer long-term defense solutions.  

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005.  He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

This article first appeared in September 2020.

Image: Flickr.

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

What can people who became unemployed during the pandemic look forward to? 

Much to the dismay of millions of Americans, the enhanced federal unemployment insurance benefits of $300 per week came to a screeching halt over Labor Day weekend.  

Approximately ten million Americans on unemployment lost those enhanced weekly benefits, according to a study conducted by the People’s Policy Project, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

But with many still on the employment sidelines due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, some of the most cash-starved individuals now have to be on the lookout for other sources of government-issued direct cash payments and tax credits or eviction moratoriums. Here’s what some unemployed Americans can look forward to.  

State Eviction Protection 

The Supreme Court struck down the most recent extension to the federal eviction ban, but renters in a few select states may still be protected by local eviction moratoriums. California, Illinois, New Mexico, and New York have eviction bans in place currently. Moreover, some states like Minnesota, Nevada, and Washington are offering rental assistance to those who apply.  

Child Tax Credit 

The expanded child tax credits, a major part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, began rolling out in mid-July and will continue through the end of the year. Parents who are eligible for this program are able to collect as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. This means that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be directly deposited each month. 

Pause on Student Loan Payments 

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education decided to extend the moratorium through January 31 for payments and interest of federal student loans. What this means is that more than forty million borrowers saddled with sizeable student debt will not have to make payments on most federal loans until next February.  

Child Care Tax Credits 

Another important part of Biden’s stimulus bill, parents who pay out of pocket for child care services are now eligible to recoup those related expenses in the form of tax credits of $8,000 for one child and up to $16,000 for two or more children. In order to qualify for the full amounts, a family’s adjusted gross income must not exceed $125,000. If the income earned eclipses that figure though, then the credits will phase out at a 50 percent clip. The rate phases down again to 20 percent for those earning $183,000 and will stay at that level until income hits $400,000. The credits will completely phase out for those individuals earning $438,000 or more.  

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

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley

Submarines, United States

Several of these submarines are still in service 30 years after the end of the Cold War

Here's What You Need to Know: For the purposes of this list, we’re excluding ballistic missiles submarines or boomers, which have an entirely different mission from attack boats, built for different requirements. Instead, this list will focus on submarines optimized for killing surface ships or other submarines.

History’s three great submarine campaigns include the First Battle of the Atlantic, the Second Battle of the Atlantic, and the US Navy’s (USN) war against Japanese commerce in World War II. The contestants fought these campaigns through asymmetrical means, with submarines doing battle against aircraft and surface escorts.

But the greatest true submarine campaign never (or only intermittently) went “hot.” Waged with advanced, streamlined submarines, hunting each other from the polar ice cap to the Eastern seaboard, the Cold War undersea “game” lasted for over three decades. In case of real war, these submarines would safeguard (or destroy) NATO’s trans-Atlantic lifeline, and would protect (or sink) much of the nuclear deterrent of America, Russia, Britain, and France.

So what were the best submarines of the Cold War era? For the purposes of this list, we’re excluding ballistic missiles submarines or boomers, which have an entirely different mission from attack boats, built for different requirements. Instead, this list will focus on submarines optimized for killing surface ships or other submarines. The criteria should be familiar from previous lists; to what extent did the vessels perform its strategic mission at a price that its nation could afford?

Cost: Submarines compete with other providers of national security. If they break the bank, they risk crowding out the other capabilities that a nation requires for its defense.

Reliability: When submarines have accidents, the results can be catastrophic. And showing up is half the battle; boats stuck in port can’t fulfill national objectives.

Effectiveness: Could the submarine do the job? How did it stack up against its contemporaries?

Permit Class: 

Large, fast, and quiet, the Permit class set that standard for American and British submarines for the rest of the Cold War. Developed with a series of innovations that set them apart from their predecessors, the Skipjack class, the Permits immediately became state of the undersea art. These innovations included powerful bow sonar, a streamlined, deep-dive capable hull, and advanced quieting technology. Among the first submarines conceived an optimized for an anti-submarine mission, the Permits could threaten not only the Soviet deterrent, but also the Russian capacity for disrupting the trans-Atlantic lifeline.

The first of fourteen Permits entered service in 1961, the last in 1968. Most of the boats served through the end of the Cold War. Displacing 4200 tons, the Permits could make 28 knots, and could fire both advanced torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

The lead ship of the Permit class was Thresher, commissioned in 1961. On April 10, 1963, she was lost with all hands while conducting a diving test. The tragic loss of Thresher, which imploded after a still-disputed systems failure, overshadowed the long careers of the rest of the class. However, that loss was critical to developing the safety standards that would prevent future accidents. The loss of Thresher, in a very important sense, led to the long history of safety success in the USN’s submarine fleet.

Swiftsure Class: 

The United States and the Soviet Union were the main players in the Cold War submarine campaign, but were hardly the only entrants. The Royal Navy, initially with some US assistance, developed a series of lethal nuclear submarine designs, eventually making a more than creditable contribution to NATO’s undersea posture. One submarine, HMS Conqueror, remains the only nuclear submarine to have destroyed an enemy ship in anger.

Following up on the Churchill class, the Swiftsures were of innovative design, both in terms of hull technology and propulsion. They were the first full class of submarines to employ pump jet technology, which made propulsion more efficient while reducing noise. The enlarged but simplified hull redistributed machinery allowed a much deeper diving depth than previous Royal Navy subs.

Displacing 5000 tons submerged, the Swiftsures could make some 30 knots submerged. They carried standard torpedoes, as well as Harpoon and (in some boats) Tomahawk cruise missiles. The six Swiftsures entered service between 1973 and 1981, with the last decommissioning in 2010.

The Swiftsures had their problems, including a series of bizarre accidental collisions, some structural failures, and some minor reactor troubles. Nevertheless, they served the Royal Navy very effectively against the Soviets, and would have won victories in the Falklands if the politics had played out differently.

Type 209:

Not every navy can afford an advanced nuclear attack submarine. Nevertheless, submarines solve strategic problems, and not every great submarine needs to be a Porsche. The German Type 209, first built in 1971, served as the strategic answer for a great many navies in the Cold War, and continues to serve today.

For obvious reasons, German submarine development stalled at the end of World War II. Although the Type XXI set the standard for post-war boats, legal restrictions prevented both East and West Germany from building any submarines in the first decade of the Cold War. After a series of designs that ran from non-to-moderately successful, HDW developed the Type 209 class for export.

A diesel-electric, the Type 209 displaces between 1200 and 1800 tons (depending on variant), and can make 23 knots submerged. It can launch both torpedoes and anti-ship weapons, such as the Harpoon. The basic hull design has proven remarkably flexible, spawning a series of variants specialized for different tasks. The Type 209 gives small navies a viable anti-submarine option, as well as the capacity to threaten the surface forces of much larger, more powerful fleets.

Since 1971, 61 Type 209s have entered service with thirteen navies. 59 of those boats remain in service, with two more scheduled for delivery to Egypt in 2016. The ability of the Type 209 to remain in service in so many different fleets, often in widely varying maintenance conditions, attests to the robust nature of the initial design.

Project 949 (Oscar):

The Oscars were the apogee of the Soviet cruise missile submarine, a type that began with the Echo and continued with the Charlie. The first Oscars entered service in 1981,and immediately presented a serious challenge for Western naval planners. Designed specifically for anti-shipping attacks, these subs could strike NATO carrier groups with P-700 Granit missiles from a range of up to 300 miles. This widened the area that American anti-submarine vessels needed to patrol, and meant that attacks could come from unexpected vectors. Equipped with a conventional warhead, the Granit could easily cause a mission kill. With a nuclear warhead, it could give a carrier battle group a very bad day.

And the Oscars were huge. Displacing 16500 tons, they could make 32 knots submerged. They carried 24 Granit missiles, in addition to a bevy of torpedo launched weapons.

The United States and the United Kingdom would eventually adopt the same practice as the Russians, although instead of dedicating specific sub types to cruise missile launches they would focus on converting missiles for launch from conventionally designed nuclear attack subs. Later boats in the Los Angeles class would carry dedicated cruise missile silos, technically making them SSGNs instead of SSNs, although the designation never changed in practice (until the conversion of four Ohio class boomers to the cruise missile mission). The real utility of cruise missiles has been land attack rather than naval attack, as cruise missiles launched from US subs have proven quite effective in several recent conflicts.

The Soviets completed only five Oscars before the end of the Cold War, and another eight after. One, the Kursk, was lost in one of the most horrific accidents in submarine history. Several others, however, remain in service with the Russian Navy.

Shchuka-B (Akula):

The United States enjoyed technology and designs advantages for most of the Cold War that allowed its submarines to operate much more quietly than their Soviet counterparts. US technological innovation and industrial practice made it possible for the USN to develop and maintain submarines with advanced noise-suppression technology. The USSR’s tried to answer through raw weight, both in terms of size and number of boats.

Soviet espionage also tried to even the score. The fruits of the Walker spy ring and the Toshiba-Konigsberg scandal spread across several classes of Soviet submarine, but the Akulas benefitted most of all. The Akula’s were the first Soviet submarines to compete with American submarines on noise, reportedly matching the Los Angeles class at most speeds. Displacing 8000 tons, the Akulas could both outrun and outgun the American Los Angeles class, making up to 35 knots and carrying a larger array of torpedoes and cruise missiles.

Steel hulled (unlike their Sierra and Alfa predecessors), the Akulas also achieved cost-savings while improving mission capability, a rare feat for a modern weapon system. Five Akulas entered service before the Cold War ended, with a total of fifteen eventually entering service. Nine remain in Russian service, with another on loan to the Indian Navy.

The basic design concepts of Cold War submarines were, fortunately, never tested in direct combat. However, the long, quiet struggle nevertheless led to consistent technological innovation across several different countries. Many of the boats designed and built during the Cold War remain in service today, and concepts developed will continue to guide submarine construction for the foreseeable future.

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005.  He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2004.  Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect.  Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

This article first appeared in April 2018.

Image: Wikipedia

Michael Peck

Espionage, World

A collection of documents compiled by the nonprofit National Security Archive shows just how extensive America's campaign was to obtain the latest Russian gear.

Here's What You Need to Know: Washington went to great lengths to steal Soviet technology.

Sometimes the Cold War seemed like one big treasure hunt. When one side came out with a new weapon, the other side made every effort to get their hands on a copy to analyze, reverse-engineer or give it to guerrillas fighting the opposition.

The United States termed this Foreign Military Exploitation (FME). A collection of documents compiled by the nonprofit National Security Archive shows just how extensive America's campaign was to obtain the latest Russian gear.

For example, a 1951 U.S. Air Force intelligence report described how America got the chance to examine a MiG-15, the Soviet jet fighter that shocked U.S. pilots over Korea. After a dogfight northwest of Pyongyang on July 9, 1951, a MiG-15 pilot was seen bailing out before his fighter crashed in shallow water off the west coast of Korea. British aircraft found the wreckage, but a U.S. Air Force recovery team was unable to retrieve it.

In late July 1951, a combined U.S.-British naval and air task force tried again. Despite fire from Communist forces—which also attempted their own retrieval operation—the Anglo-American force was able to recover virtually the entire aircraft, which was then shipped to the United States for analysis. Other wrecked Soviet aircraft proved a goldmine, such as the Yak-28 Firebar interceptor that crashed in West Berlin in April 1966.

Perhaps the most famous case of grabbing Soviet technology came in the early 1960s, when the CIA "borrowed" and photographed a Soviet Luna satellite on display in Mexico. In 1965, the CIA arranged to get a new Soviet Mi-8 transport helicopter, and also requested $100,000 to obtain a Soviet Minsk-2 digital computer (no mention if the operation was successful).

The constantly shifting alliances of the Cold War meant that weapons given to a Third World ally would end up being given to the opposing superpower once that ally changed sides. Hence, in 1966 the CIA acquired Soviet antiaircraft weapons supplied to Ghana, which then offered them to the United States (likewise, the Soviets probably got a look at the F-14 and other American weapons supplied to Iran after the Islamic revolution took power).

The problem with intelligence operations is that it is often not clear whether the results justify the effort. But the declassified documents make clear that getting hands-on with Soviet equipment and technical manuals bore fruit, particularly for the U.S. Air Force.

Take the July 1966 memo sent by the Air Force to the CIA regarding the Soviet SA-2 antiaircraft missile. "You are undoubtedly aware that our Navy and Air Force pilots have been having considerable success in avoiding losses to the SA-2 system in North Vietnam," wrote Air Force Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll. "A part of this success is attributable to the manuals and other information which were secured by your Agency and turned over to DoD for study."

However, the Air Force memo also lamented that the United States had not yet obtained an actual SA-2 system to study. That opportunity arose after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured some from Egypt.

Indeed, America's best source for review copies of Soviet weapons was Israel, which collected a vast arsenal of Russian weaponry courtesy of the Arab armies in 1967, 1973 and 1982. But that relationship was less than smooth. For example, a June 1967 memo said that much of the equipment captured in the Six-Day War "is critically needed by the Department of Defense for intelligence exploitation." However, a September 1967 Air Force memo complained that while Israel had granted the United States access to much equipment, the Israelis had displayed "marked hesitancy" in allowing inspection of high-priority items, especially the SA-2 missile (the Air Force suggested the Israelis were aiming to trade access in return for American arms).

Nonetheless, the United States eventually gained full access to the captured Soviet equipment, including SA-2 missiles and their Fan Song radar (which the Americans desperately wanted to examine for jamming purposes), antiaircraft guns, radios and tanks. "This overall exploitation effort is expected to fill many U.S. intelligence and research and development gaps, some of which are directly associated with the Southeast Asian conflict," the Air Force said. These insights spanned Soviet "design criteria, production quality control and research and development philosophy."

Soviet weapons were desired for more than their intelligence value. Those arms could be supplied to groups fighting the Soviets and their allies, notably Afghan rebels battling the Soviet occupation. Again, Israel was seen as a source after it captured vast stocks of Soviet equipment during the 1982 Lebanon War. Though that conflict caused tensions between America and Israel, it also gave the Pentagon priceless information on advanced Soviet weapons such as the MiG-23 fighter and T-72 tank.

Ironically, the Washington thought it should receive the goodies from Israel as a freebie (or as a thank-you for U.S. aid). "While we recognize our current bargaining position with the Israelis is very low," CIA Director William Casey wrote Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, we nevertheless request your assistance… to apply the leverage necessary to acquire these weapons at little or no cost to the U.S. government."

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in February 2018.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Caleb Larson

Supersonic Jets, Americas

Introducing quiet supersonic-travel by Lockheed Martin and NASA

Here's What You Need to Remember: The X-59's cruising speed will be around Mach 1.4, and is estimated to produce a mere 75 decibels or sound, roughly comparable to a home vacuum cleaner.

Commercial travel at supersonic speeds has been something of a wild goose chase. There are a number of technically challenging engineering obstacles that have to be overcome in order for a supersonic jet airliner to be both just possible—and importantly, commercially viable. Though difficult, there have been several supersonic jet airliners built, though they enjoyed varying degrees of success.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

The Soviet Union was the first in the supersonic airliner field. Beginning with their Tu-144 jet, built by the venerable Tupolev design bureau, the Soviets owned the skies—for a very short time. The Tu-144 was based on the Anglo-French developed Concorde jet, as evidenced by their strikingly similar geometry.

Though first, the Tu-144 was not the best. It suffered from high weight, thanks in part to a larger landing gear design. It further suffered from high fuel consumption due to the high-output jet engines it needed to keep it airborne. The Tu-144 flew just a paltry 102 commercial flights, only about half of which carried any passengers—making it a commercial failure. The rival it was modeled on, the Concorde, was considerably more successful.

Anglo-French Cooperation

The European venture into the supersonic airline industry was the pride of the French and the Brits. They couldn’t match the United States’ nor the Soviet Union’s space programs—but they could build a supersonic passenger jet. So they did.

The Concorde flew for about a quarter of a century, not exactly a star compared to other commercial jet designs like the 474, but it was at the top of the supersonic pack. It was lighter, and somewhat smaller than the Soviet copycat. It offered quick service between western Europe and the East Coast, though exclusively for the luxury air travel crowd.

One of the Concorde’s drawbacks, like the Tu-144, was its loud sonic boom. To reduce disturbances to residents on the ground, the Concorde’s throttle was restricted over land, taking advantage of its supersonic top speed only over the ocean. This obviously hampered its utility.

The Americans Return

Like their Soviet rivals, the United States’ original foray into supersonic air transport was a disaster—worse even than the Soviets. The American jet didn’t make it past the mockup stage, as testing in the mid-1960s revealed that public opinion was deeply opposed to sonic booms, which were jarring to residents. For this reason, the American supersonic project was abandoned. It has recently made a comeback, however.

NASA is back in the supersonic passenger jet game. In tandem with Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division, research is being done into lowering sonic boom decibel levels. The test airframe, the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology jet is “on a mission to achieve supersonic speeds over land that create no more than a sonic “thump” to those below.”

An X-59 project manager described the project’s ultimate goal, “The X-59 is designed so that, as it flies faster than sound, any sonic booms that reach the ground are so quiet they can barely be heard—if at all.”

In order to achieve this goal, NASA and Lockheed Martin built a pretty strange-looking plane. Its cruising speed will be around Mach 1.4, and is estimated to produce a mere 75 decibels or sound, roughly comparable to a home vacuum cleaner.

This optimistic sound estimate is hope to be achieved through the X-59’s long and narrow fuselage, and two forward canard wings, which are designed to prevent or disperse shock waves that cause a sonic boom. Initial flight tests are scheduled for sometime in 2021. Is this the future of commercial aviation?

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

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Hypersonic Missiles, Americas

Intercepting a ballistic missile with an anti-missile has been likened to "hitting a bullet with a bullet."

Here's What You Need to Know: A leak-proof shield that can reliably stop a massed salvo of hypersonic glide vehicles seems doomed to failure. But is it?

DARPA calls it "counter-hypersonics."

The rest of us would call it a way -- or a prayer -- to stop nuclear warheads coming down on our heads at 20 times the speed of sound.

DARPA, the Pentagon's pet research agency, wants an interceptor that can stop weapons that are hypersonic (travel faster than Mach 5). The agency has begun soliciting proposals for Glide Breaker , its project to stop boost-glide vehicles that are lofted high into the atmosphere atop a ballistic missile, and then glide down to Earth. The current exemplar is Russia's Avangard, touted by President Vladimir Putin as unstoppable by anti-missile defenses. The Avangard is lofted by a giant RS-28 Sarmat ICBM, and then glides down to its target at Mach 20. But China and the U.S. are also developing boost-glide vehicles.

DARPA seeks to "develop and demonstrate a technology that is critical for enabling an advanced interceptor capable of engaging maneuvering hypersonic threats in the upper atmosphere." And it wants this technology in a hurry: Glide Breaker should be tested in 2020.  Meanwhile, the Missile Defense Agency -- the Pentagon organization charged with stopping ballistic missiles -- also has its program to develop defenses against hypersonic weapons.

There's a reason for the rush. Hypersonic weapons may be able to penetrate U.S. missile defenses or streak past the defenses of U.S. aircraft carriers. Even more worrisome, they might be armed with conventional warheads to destroy targets -- notably ICBMs in hardened silos -- once thought invulnerable to anything but nuclear weapons.

DARPA's solicitation is light on unclassified details, though it says it wants "innovative solutions" to stop boost-glide vehicles. That's putting it mildly. If shooting down ballistic missiles is hard, then boost-glide vehicles, also known as hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), is even harder.

For starters, the gliders don't traverse outer space like an ICBM, but instead soar through the thin upper atmosphere, where they can achieve extremely high speeds while flying too low to be easily detected by early warning radars designed to track ballistic missiles arcing through outer space. For another, while an ICBM warhead follows a predictable (and Mach 23) path as it descends through the atmosphere, a boost-glide vehicle -- like a hobby glider -- can maneuver, which make it much harder to an interceptor to hit.

Intercepting a ballistic missile with an anti-missile has been likened to "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Imagine if the bullet were taking evasive action.

Or put another way, counter-hypersonics encounters all the difficulties of ballistic missile defense against ICBMs, and then some. "The most obvious challenge is the maneuverability of HGVs, which makes it very difficult to maintain track on the vehicle and plan an intercept course using our current capabilities," George Nacouzi, an engineer at the RAND Corp. think tank, told the National Interest . "Flight altitude is also challenging for our current systems. The HGV may fly too high for many endo-atmospheric interceptors and too low to be detected and tracked early by long range radars."

Nacouzi believes there are ways to shoot down HGVs, "but they would involve using a nearly ubiquitous surveillance and tracking system accompanied by strategically positioned very high performance interceptors or, possibly in the future, directed energy weapons." The U.S. is developing these solutions for intercepting ballistic missiles, but they all have drawbacks: directed energy weapons such as lasers can be affected by weather, while having armed drones or aircraft constantly hovering over North Korean missile sites could trigger a war.

James Acton, an arms control expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that despite their speed, hypersonic weapons can be destroyed by some ballistic missile defense systems such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. The problem is that THAAD is a point-defense weapon designed to protect a small area: covering the entire United States with THAAD-like defenses would be prohibitively expensive.

So, given current technology, a leak-proof shield that can reliably stop a massed salvo of hypersonic glide vehicles seems doomed to failure.

But maybe the value of counter-hypersonics isn't shooting down these lethal gliders?

DARPA may have captured the real value of counter-hypersonic defenses in a notice for a July 2018 Proposer's Day , where industry had a chance to learn about the project. The notice stated that "a key figure of merit is deterrence: the ability to create large uncertainty for the adversary’s projected probability of mission success and effective raid size."

Note the significance of that phrasing: anti-hypersonic defense is successful not by necessarily destroying every incoming boost-glide vehicle, but by making a potential adversary uncertain of which hypersonic vehicles will get through. It's the equivalent of body armor that will stop only 50 percent of bullets fired at it -- but the attacker can't be sure of whether a particular bullet aimed at a vital spot will hit its target.

That's been the whole basis of nuclear deterrence since the early days of the Cold War. Even if a first strike could destroy much of the enemy's nuclear missiles and bombers, an attacker couldn't be sure that enough nukes would be left over to mount a devastating retaliation.

However, the Achilles heel of ballistic missile defense has been that it's cheaper for an attacker to build an overwhelming mass of missiles and warheads than it is for the defender to build interceptors to stop them. It remains to be seen whether the economics of hypersonic missile defense will be the same.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in January 2019.

Image: REUTERS/Steve Dipaola

Robert Farley

Navy, Asia-Pacific

Political obstacles and allies make the issue a moot point for the Japanese.

Here's What You Need to Know: The only serious obstacles to Japan’s construction of fleet carriers are political. But political obstacles are still obstacles, and the appearance of Shokaku and Zuikaku would have significant repercussions at home and abroad.

Japan decided to refit its Izumo-class light carriers to operate the F-35B stealth fighter. So modified, the Izumos will carry about a dozen F-35Bs each, giving the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force a small but significant aviation combat capability.

The question now is “what comes next?”

Japan and China

In 2006 Japan laid down the first of two fourteen-thousand-ton Hyuga-class helicopter destroyers at IHI Marine United Yokohama Shipyard. In 2012, Japan laid down the twenty-thousand-ton Izumo, a light carrier in all but name, followed shortly by her sister Kaga. While the Hyugas could conceivably operate the F-35B, there is no indication thus far that the JMSDF intends to retrofit them.

During the same period, China (Japan’s most likely strategic competitor) acquired and refurbished an old Soviet STOBAR carrier, and then built another STOBAR carrier to a modified design. The sixty-thousand-ton Chinese carriers can carry more aircraft than the Izumos, but of older vintage than the F-35B. Between them, Liaoning and her as-yet-unnamed sister can carry some sixty J-15 “Flying Shark” fighters, in addition to helicopters and support aircraft. China’s future plans remain somewhat murky, but it is widely believed that the PLAN intends to build one or two ships to an advanced, conventional CATOBAR design, and then potentially move on to nuclear-propelled supercarriers. J-31 stealth fighters may eventually fly from the decks of these ships.

Long story short, the retrofit of the Izumos represents a real increase in capability for the JMSDF. Nonetheless, China is now several years ahead of Japan, not only in terms of the availability of platforms, but also in the development of naval aviation experience. Japan does not need to compete directly with China over the number of jets launched from flight decks, but China’s increasingly formidable naval aviation force seems to have had some influence on Japanese thinking. So, will Japan decide to compete?

Japan’s Options

Japan is an exceedingly wealthy country with a large, robust, and technologically sophisticated shipbuilding industry. If it wants to supersede the Izumos with larger, more capable carriers then it can do so; the only obstacles are political.

The main questions are what such ships (which for the sake of convenience we will call “Shokaku” and “Zuikaku”) might look like. Japan is unlikely to order a large carrier from a foreign yard, and not just because very few countries can build such ships. Rather, Japan would want to develop and retain the expertise associated with the construction of large, modern aircraft carriers, a project that it has already begun with the Hyugas and Izumos.

Something like the sixty-five-thousand-ton Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier is not at all beyond Japanese shipbuilding capabilities. With the F-35B, such a ship would immediately be competitive with, and indeed likely superior to, China’s Liaoning-class aircraft carriers. However, the dependence on the F-35B would limit Japan’s options down the road. Unless Japan decided to develop its F-3 stealth fighter as a STOVL aircraft, the F-35B would be the only plausible shipborne fighter for the operational lifespan of Shokaku and Zuikaku. However, these ships could still operate an array of advanced unmanned aircraft, as well as any F-35B replacements developed by the United States. Experience gained by operating the F-35B with the Izumos would feed directly into a “Queen Elizabeth” style ship. Pilots and crew will develop invaluable experience with landings, takeoffs, and shipboard maintenance that Japan has lacked since 1945.

But unlike China, Japan enjoys the benefit of extensive military and industrial relationships with countries that currently operate aircraft carriers, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, Japan does not necessarily need to take the kind of slow, methodical approach to carrier development that China has taken. Instead, Japan could build Shokaku and Zuikaku as full CATOBAR carriers. It can license or acquire the necessary technology (presumably EMALS launch systems) from the United States, and it could utilize the decks of USN supercarriers to develop the cadre of pilots and aircrew it would need to populate such carriers. If Japan decides to go the CATOBAR route, Shokaku and Zuikaku could become some of the world’s most formidable warships, outside of the Nimitz and Ford class supercarriers.

Although the ships would benefit from the range and power-generation capacity offered by nuclear propulsion, Japan lacks any experience with nuclear warships, even at the submarine level. But the United States operated conventional supercarriers for a very long time, under more demanding global requirements than a Japanese carrier would face. Moreover, a CATOBAR carrier would have the option of flying the F-35C or any other carrier-launched aircraft that Japan could develop or acquire in the future. This would give Shokaku and Zuikaku longer range and heavier punch than a Queen Elizabeth style STOBAR carrier.

Parting Thoughts

To repeat: the only serious obstacles to Japan’s construction of fleet carriers are political. But political obstacles are still obstacles, and the appearance of Shokaku and Zuikaku would have significant repercussions at home and abroad. Indeed, the existence of such obstacles would seem to demand a gradual approach. Still, the decision to refit the Izumos to fly modern stealth attack aircraft suggests that the current Japanese government is willing to run some risks. There can be little doubt at this point that Japan will someday build a successor class to the Izumo; the only questions are when, and what those ships will look like.

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005.  He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2004.  Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect.  Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

This article first appeared in February 2019.

Image: U.S. Navy Flickr

Kris Osborn

MADL F-35, Americas

MADL is essential for the growing multinational role of the F-35 program. It gives NATO and other allied countries that fly the jets an opportunity to conduct synchronized operations and explore previously unprecedented missions.

The F-35 fighter is well known for its fleet-wide, secure Multifunction Advanced Datalink (MADL), which connects many of the fifth-generation stealth fighters together. This datalink expands the type of missions that F-35 jets can conduct and enables the real-time sharing of targeting data between aircraft in warfare operations. 

All About the MADL: What Is It? 

MADL is essential for the growing multinational role of the F-35 program. It gives NATO and other allied countries that fly the jets an opportunity to conduct synchronized operations and explore previously unprecedented missions.

MADL, when operated in conjunction with other F-35 sensors, can achieve the much sought-after goal of sharing threat data and helping the jet find and destroy enemy targets from ranges where it remains undetected. This ability, shown in several wargames in recent years, is something that F-35 pilots point to as a defining reason for its superiority. 

“Having sensor fusion and MADL (Multifunction Advanced Datalink), all of those potential dogfighting engagements can be avoided before we ever even get within visual range, let alone actually have to dogfight in the air, whatever the opponent is,” Monessa “Siren” Balzhiser, F-35 Production and Training Pilot, Lockheed Martin, told the National Interest. “The tactical scenario, more often than not, is going to be solved much further out, which is going to give us the advantage.”

Why It Matters 

It is unsurprising that the Air Force and other F-35 operating services, such as the Navy and Marine Corps, have in recent years been working on additional communications technologies for the F-35 jet to expand its operations. The MADL-like ability will be included on F-22 Raptors and fourth-generation aircraft too. 

“It's not just fighting against fourth-generation threats where the F-35 stands out, but also integrating with other U.S. military platforms and other NATO platforms to meet a strategic objective,” Balzhiser said. 

While MADL and the F-35 sensors and computers are, of course, fundamental to any offensive attack operation. Pilots explain that more recent innovations are increasing the jet’s ability to share information with fourth-generation fighters and even other platforms.   

“[The F-35] is not just good fighting against fourth-generation [aircraft] and it’s not just about all the capabilities we have against fourth-generation [aircraft], it’s also about integrating with fourth-generation fighters,” Tony “Brick” Wilson, the chief of Fighter Flight Operations for Lockheed Martin, told The National Interest. “I’ve gotten to fly the F-16 in a number of large force exercises with F-35s and F-22s and we were all embedded in one strategic goal for the entire ‘war.’”

The Comms Revolution

These efforts, ongoing now for several years, have taken many forms. For instance, the F-35 jet can now engage in two-day connectivity with F-22 Raptors using LINK 16 as a result of certain modifications. Building upon this effort, the Air Force is working with industry partner Northrop Grumman to test a new software-programmable radio prototype designed to enable F-35 jets to connect with F-22 Raptors while preserving “stealth mode.”  

The Freedom 550, as its called, works by sending Internet Protocol (IP) packets of data through waveforms to transmit combat-relevant information. Colin Phan, the director of Strategy and Tech Communications for Northrop Grumman, told the National Interest earlier this year that there can be one multi-function box that does as many as twenty-five different functions. Stealth mode is sustained by using a smaller number of modules to connect the two data links together through a converter, Phan explained. Fewer modules help preserve stealthy communications by virtue of decreasing the emissions of an omnidirectional antenna which is more likely to be detected. The broader the signal and the wider the emission, the larger the potentially detectable electronic signature, something which can of course present a risk of being detected.

LINK 16 advances and the Freedom 550 radio are a few of the efforts to support the F-35 jet’s “flying computer” role as a data manager or aerial quarterback in the sky. This fortifies and improves what is already an advantage built into the F-35 jet, which is the ability to organize and streamline data to reduce the need for extraneous data exchange. 

“Targeting assignments can be seen and checked by flight leads to make sure that everyone is targeting appropriately,” Chris “Worm” Spinelli, an F-35 fest pilot for Lockheed Martin, said. “There’s a vast amount of information that the jet is able to absorb, process, and present to not only the pilot in his or her aircraft but his or her wingman via datalink that significantly cuts the amount of comms required, which again, allows that pilot to become a true tactician.”

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

Image: Flickr / U.S. Air Force

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit, United States

The expanded child tax credits approved under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan appear to have done a remarkable job in feeding the nation’s hungriest families.

The expanded child tax credits approved under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan appear to have done a remarkable job in feeding the nation’s hungriest families.

Since the child tax credit payments began rolling out in mid-July, the number of adults living in households with children that reported not having enough to eat has plummeted by 3.3 million—a total reduction of about one-third, according to data compiled from the latest Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

“A key reason these payments likely reduce hardships like food insecurity is that the American Rescue Plan’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit made children in the lowest-income families eligible for the full credit for the first time. Previously, some twenty-seven million children received only a partial Child Tax Credit or no credit at all because their family’s incomes were too low,” wrote Claire Zippel, senior research analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and author of a recent report on the topic.

“Congress should make it a top priority to extend the monthly payments and ensure that the full credit remains permanently available to children in families with the lowest incomes,” she continued.

Due to the president’s ambitious stimulus bill passed last spring, eligible parents are now able to receive as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. Broken down, this means that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be direct deposited each month through the end of the year.

Helping the Hardest Hit

Zippel added that these timely credits have been especially beneficial to Black and Latino households, who’ve often suffered the most due to the ongoing pandemic.

“The improvement has been dramatic for all racial and ethnic groups but particularly for Black and Latino people,” she noted.

“The number of Black, Latino, and white adults with children in households where someone didn’t get enough food has each fallen between one-fourth and one-third since early July. These declines are especially important among Black and Latino people, whose food hardship rates were—and remain—about double the white rate,” she continued.

Lifeline to Low-Income Households

The survey also revealed that the most common way parents with household incomes below $25,000 used the credit payments was for food, followed by utilities, clothing, rent or mortgage, and education-related costs.

“Households with incomes above $25,000 also spent a sizable portion of the credit on these kinds of necessities but less than lower-income families, which face more difficulties affording the basics,” Zippel said.

“Compared with those with less income, the households with incomes above $25,000 were, for example, more likely to pay down debt or save the funds for later use,” she added.

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

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

X-44 MANTA, Americas

Like the F-22 on which the X-44 was based, it would have been highly stealthy and may have even been stealthier than its F-22 parent.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The X-44 was one of a number of designs that Lockheed Martin designed and pitched to the U.S. Air Force as a way to augment the branch’s stealthily airframes, though this particular design may be the only one that was tailless. With F-22 production lines long since shuttered, it is unlikely we’ll ever get to see the X-44 MANTA in flight.

The X-44 MANTA, which stands for Multi-Axis No Tail Aircraft, was a futuristic-looking derivative of Lockheed Martin’s iconic F-22 design. According to Air Force Magazine, Lockheed Martin may have designed up to six different airframes similar to the F-22 Raptor that were offered to the Air Force. Though none of them were picked up, this particular design is said to have drawn the interest of NASA as a research platform with which to test controlling tailless designs using thrust vectoring. Meet the X-44 MANTA.

Stealthy by Design

Like the F-22 on which the X-44 was based on, it would have been highly stealthy and may have even been stealthier than its F-22 parent. Renderings of the X-44 concept indicate that it would have carried over the F-22’s air intake inlets that are designed to diffuse enemy radar inside of them rather than reflecting radar outwards.

Like the iconic B-2 stealth bomber, the X-44 design was tailless. Sans tail, these tailless designs are inherently stealthier than other tailed airframes—the X-44 would have had a very low radar signature. Instead of using standard control surfaces to maneuver while in flight, the MANTA maneuvered using thrust vectoring, in which the dual engine’s exhaust nozzles could direct exhaust in various directions.

Though innovative, thrust vectoring designs are nothing new. One successful Russian design in service with the Indian Air Force, a variant of the Sukhoi Su-30, benefits from very high maneuverability thanks to its thrust vectoring engine nozzles.

The modified delta wing design also had a couple of benefits over its predecessor. By design, delta wings have more surface area internally and externally than traditional swept wings and can, therefore, hold more fuel. Using so-called wet wings, also known as integral fuel tanks, a greater volume of fuel could be stored internal in the plane’s wings.

This kind of fuel storage is relatively common and allows for a large amount of fuel to be carried. In addition to higher fuel capacity, the X-44 would have benefited from a more aerodynamic airframe, resulting in lower drag while in flight.

Postscript

The X-44 was one of a number of designs that Lockheed Martin designed and pitched to the U.S. Air Force as a way to augment the branch’s stealthily airframes, though this particular design may be the only one that was tailless. With F-22 production lines long since shuttered, it is unlikely we’ll ever get to see the X-44 MANTA in flight.

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

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Peck

World War II, Europe

Five lessons from the failed operation.

Here's What You Need to Know: The operation will always be a great "what-if" of history.

(This article first appeared in October 2019.)

On the afternoon of September 17, 1944, the death blow to Hitler’s Germany seemed to blossom in the skies over Holland.

It was 75 years ago when two American and one British airborne division landed in a carpet of parachutes that stretched 60 miles from Eindhoven in southern Holland north to Arnhem on the Rhine River. Instead of the chaos that afflicted the early night airborne landings in Sicily and Normandy, the landings on that warm Sunday went remarkably smoothly, with the troops landing on their drop zones smoothly with light losses.

It was an auspicious beginning to what the Allies hoped would be the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. Just three months ago, the American, British and Canadian armies had been stuck in Normandy, penned in by hedgerows and panzer divisions. But in August, the Germans had broken apart and the Allies had broken out, in an advance that took them 500 miles into Germany itself. The once-invincible Wehrmacht, already being hammered in the East by the Soviet juggernaut, seemed to be falling apart.

But guarding Western Germany like a moat was the mighty Rhine River. Once sheltered behind it, the battered German columns fleeing France could rest and regroup. But what if the Allies could bounce the Rhine in one quick, audacious advance? Once across the waterway, they could race across the North German plain to seize the industrial heartland of the Ruhr – and then on to Berlin. Perhaps the war in Europe would end by Christmas!

The problem was how to quickly cross the numerous rivers and canals that crisscross the Netherlands, This was where the 35,000 paratroopers of the First Allied Airborne Army came in: they would swoop down to seize several bridges across the Netherlands, creating an corridor that would let the tanks race the Dutch polder (land protected from the water by dykes) until they reached the British 1st Airborne Division securing the bridge across the Nederrijn at Arnhem.

Yet just eight days later, the last exhausted survivors of the 1st Airborne Division – that had triumphantly seized the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem -- paddled back across the river. Instead of a highway to the Reich, the Allies had achieved a 60-mile corridor to nowhere.

Operation Market-Garden will always be a great what-if. Had it succeeded, it would have gone down as one of the most brilliant audacious operations in history. But it didn’t succeed, and the reasons why still matter today.

Here are some lessons of an operation that was “a bridge too far:”

Don’t assume a defeated enemy will stay defeated: 

Buoyed by their sizzling advance across France and Belgium, the Allies were so confident of German collapse in autumn 1944 that they became complacent. Market-Garden was essentially a British operation. And if anyone should have known better, it was the British, who had painfully learned how skillful the Germans were at improving during a crisis. There was no excuse for assuming that the Wehrmacht would not find the resources and willpower to resist a 60-mile thrust into their lines. The same wishful thinking can be seen in U.S. assessments that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam just before Tet Offensive, or the assumption that capturing Baghdad in 2003 would mean the end of the Iraq War.

Details matter:

The same planners who meticulously worked out every detail of D-Day – the largest amphibious invasion in history – failed to consider basic details such as coordinating ground and air operations. British commander disregarded aerial reconnaissance and Dutch Resistance reports that two SS panzer divisions that had sent spotted near Arnhem. The 1st Airborne seized the Arnhem bridge, but couldn’t receive reinforcements, supplies or even air support because their radios had been sent to the wrong frequencies. Then again, the U.S. Army and Marines couldn’t communicate with the Navy and Air Force during the 1982 invasion of Grenada.

What can go wrong, will go wrong:

When the 19th Century German military thinker Carl von Clausewitz spoke of the inevitable “friction of war,” he must have had a clairvoyant vision of Market-Garden. As soon as the operation began, it began to unravel. The paratroopers mostly secured their objectives on the first day, but shortages of transport aircraft and bad weather hindered aerial reinforcement and resupply. The Germans recovered the complete Market-Garden plan from the body of a dead Allied officer. The British armored advance was confined to a single road (“Hell’s Highway”) on a narrow causeway above flooded terrain continually blocked by German counterattacks. Napoleon Bonaparte, who might have won at Waterloo had it not rained, would have sympathized.

Use the right army for the right job:

America and Britain fielded different armies in World War II. The Americans were more willing to take risks. But short of manpower after five years of war, and scarred by the slaughter of an entire generation in the First World War, the British tended to favor methodical offensives designed to minimize casualties. Though Operation Market-Garden relied on a rapid ground advance to relieve the lightly armed paratroopers at Arnhem, the British armored columns were criticized for moving too cautiously. It would be 20 years later, in Vietnam, when it would be the American military’s turn to fight a war it was unsuited for.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew:

“I think we may be going a bridge too far,” one British commander is reported to have said about the plan for Market-Garden. Relying on paratroopers to seize multiple bridges across a 60-mile corridor would have been an ambitious endeavor under the best of conditions. However, Hitler also took too big a bite when he tried to conquer Russia. He paid the price.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in October 2019.

Image: An aerial view of the bridge across the Waal River at Nijmegen, September 1944 / Wikimedia Commons

Andrew Doran

War on Terror, Middle East

The present humiliation should be borne by foreign policy elites, the generals, the best and the brightest, not by the American people—and especially not by those who served, though they doubtless feel it more viscerally than the hawkish elites who counseled war.

War invariably falls hardest on common people, but until recent decades, senior officials were often held to account for failure. Statesmen and generals might pay for disaster with exile or even execution; at a minimum, they were forced to leave office in disgrace. Modern warfare is often harsher for soldiers and civilians alike but is somehow easier for elites. After Vietnam, a disgraced figure such as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara could go on an apology tour and reclaim some measure of respectability. Today, there is no accountability at all.

Foreign policy elites with careers unblemished by success live in comfort far from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, and die in their beds while thousands of Marines and soldiers followed such American Bourbons to humiliating defeat, only to end up in humble graves in parts of America as alien to ruling elites as Afghanistan is to troops from Appalachia. Thousands more live with physical and psychological wounds. It is long since time to hold the foreign policy elites and generals who failed America to account.

Historian Charles Norris Cochrane described the Peloponnesian War as, “a terrifying record of human energy and resources dissipated to no profitable end.” Future historians may give a similar assessment of the last two decades of U.S. failure in the Middle East.

Where did the United States go wrong? Much has been written and much more will be written, but a few general trends emerge. First, the enemy, “terror,” was an abstraction, and it’s impossible to wage war on an abstraction. Second, we didn’t understand the nature of Afghanistan—or of Iraq, or Syria, or Libya. America was successful at rebuilding post-tribal, modern societies like Germany and Japan, but not premodern societies. No one thought to ask whether the democratic institutions that emerge in high-trust societies can be replicated in societies with traditions of religious and ideological extremism, literacy rates below one-third, or consanguineous marriage rates of nearly fifty percent—a strong indicator of low social trust. Third, we possessed neither concrete objectives, nor a coherent strategy, nor a definite timeline. Essentially tactical approaches like counterinsurgency and counterterrorism served as substitutes for strategy, and few elites took notice. Then, as is often the case in the region, militaries that cohere around a religious identity proved stronger than those that cohere around a national identity. Perhaps above all, there was a misplaced confidence in the tools of the state and of statecraft. As many have noted, America is itself in need of nation-building and is in no position to lecture others.

The hubris of U.S. foreign policy elites over the past twenty years followed in large part from the misapplication of the lessons of World War II to the Global War on Terror. America was the only real victor of World War II, while the other great powers were devastated. So, we inferred that war could solve more problems than it actually can. Nevertheless, the last two decades of failed policy in the Middle East have produced several victors: China and Russia, Iran, and perhaps also Turkey. And arguably the Taliban, and even Al Qaeda and its outgrowths.

The reckoning for U.S. foreign policy elites—politicians, policymakers, generals, diplomats, think tanks that had access and influence—is long overdue. It’s time for a painstaking inquiry into what went wrong to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in the era of great power competition. One model for accountability could be the Church Committee hearings of 1975, which exposed abuses by the intelligence community and federal law enforcement that so shocked Americans that some agencies were nearly shut down altogether. Americans today would likely be similarly outraged as they learn that senior officials were aware not only of the impossibility of victory but also of rampant bacha bazi (pedophilia), bribery, and corruption, and other scandalous conduct in Afghanistan.

In 1992, U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf wrote, “I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit—we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.” There will be other tar pits to avoid in the decades ahead. Terrorist attacks will occur, terrorists may flourish, but the United States must remain focused on national security priorities, starting with great power competition.

For its part, the Biden administration and its glittering Ivy League elites now stand over the wreckage of the failure in Afghanistan like the French nobles at Agincourt. The present humiliation should be borne by foreign policy elites, the generals, the best and the brightest, not by the American people—and especially not by those who served, though they doubtless feel it more viscerally than the hawkish elites who counseled war.

The Afghanistan failure has a thousand fathers. The hubris, naïve optimism, and overextension that has long been plain to most Americans have yet to be fully grasped by some foreign policy elites. It is these elites, rather than the heroes who served there, who should go cap-in-hand and live the rest of their days as base panders—in shame, and eternal shame.

Andrew Doran is a senior research fellow at the Philos Project. From 2018-21, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Peck

Weapons, Americas

So why buy American weapons?

Here's What You Need to Know: American weapons remain the world's best.

The U.S. government has a message for those nations that would buy Russian and Chinese weapons: buyer beware.

“We have come a long way since the AK-47 became the ubiquitous symbol of Soviet-backed insurgencies from Southeast Asia to Africa,” R. Clarke Cooper, Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs, said during a speech at the Meridian International Center.  “Today, Russia is working hard to foist variants of its S-400 air defense system around the world, while China is supplying everything from armored personnel carriers to armed drones.  To quote another Latin phrase – caveat emptor! – Buyer, beware.  We have seen countries around the world leap at the chance to obtain high-tech, low cost defensive capabilities, only to see their significant investments crumble and rust in their hands.”

Cooper cited examples where Chinese weapons haven’t lived up their sales pitches. “In Africa, Cameroon procured four Harbin Z-9 attack helicopters in 2015: one crashed shortly after being handed over.  Kenya invested in Norinco VN4 armored personnel carriers – vehicles that China’s own sales representative declined to sit inside during a test firing.”

“And similarly, amongst our partners in the Middle East, we’ve seen instances in which countries that have procured Chinese CH-4 armed drones have found them to be inoperable within months, and are now turning around to get rid of them,” he added. “Caveat emptor!”

Cooper’s sales pitch for U.S. weapons comes as U.S. weapons have taken a bit of a black eye. The recent drone and missile attack on Saudi Arabian oilfields, launched by Iran or its Houthi allies, led to criticisms that Saudi Arabia’s array of American-made Patriot air defense missiles had failed to detect and destroy the hostile munitions. Naturally, Russia hasn’t missed the opportunity to tout its S-400 air defense system as the better option.

Significantly, Cooper mentioned the S-400 twice in his speech.

Curiously, Cooper did not offer specific instances of Russian weapons failures, though there have been no lack of examples in conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli wars. Instead, he accused Russia of aggressive sales tactics. “Through the targeted marketing of systems like the S-400, Russia seeks to exploit the genuine security requirements of partners to create challenges in our ability – legal and technological – to provide them with the most advanced defensive capabilities.  And through a combination of cut-price systems such as unmanned aerial systems, predatory financing mechanisms, and sometimes outright bribery, China is using arms transfers as a means of getting its foot in the door – a door that, once opened, China quickly exploits both to exert influence and to gather intelligence.”

Cooper also took aim at Chinese training of foreign soldiers. “Foreign trainees may be wooed by the offer of unit-scale training in China, but on arrival they are disappointed to find themselves not spread among the elite Chinese training academies, but are lumped together with forces from around the world of significantly varying quality in China’s International Military Education Exchange Center – a facility whose lackadaisical approach to military education is well below the standard China provides to its own officers. Caveat emptor!”

The American view is that Russia and China can make arms sales because they have few scruples about whom they sell weapons to. Yet Cooper acknowledged that there are concerns about the reliability of the U.S. as an arms supplier, for which he blamed the U.S. Congress, which enacted a block on arms sales to Saudi Arabia that was only overturned by a veto by President Trump.

So why buy American weapons? Cooper said there are three reasons: quality, transparency, and accountability.

“The U.S. defense industry produces the best defensive equipment on the planet,” he claimed. In addition, U.S. arms export policy is not hidden. “Unlike the determinations made in Beijing or Moscow, our major foreign military and direct commercial sales are managed via a process whose policies are clear and transparent, and whose approvals are public.”

Ironically, while blasting Russian and Chinese arms sales, Cooper said the U.S. had sweetened its own Foreign Military Sales program. “We made the foreign military sales process faster and cheaper, reducing the time it takes from receipt of a partner’s request to making an offer by nine percent, while reducing the overhead fees captured by the FMS Admin surcharge from 3.5 percent to 3.2 percent and lowering several FMS Transportation rates by between one percent and 7.5 percent, saving foreign partners approximately $180 million in the past year alone.”

“When you buy FMS you obtain the same pricing as the U.S. military services; you participate in a system that is resistant to corruption; and, you get the total package approach: not just a defense article, but a defense capability, from the training required to use, maintain, and integrate it into your doctrine and operations, to the parts and components required for long-term maintenance and support.”

Whether this argument will be persuasive enough to induce other nations to buy American weapons remains to be seen.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

This article first appeared in November 2019.

Image: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Peter Suciu

Guns, Americas

This Arms Trade Treaty could require all firearms purchased by Americans to be tracked, and guns registered to ensure compliance with the treaty. 

The United Nations was created to help maintain peace and stability, but in recent years critics of the organization have argued that it often engages in considerable overreach in its efforts. This is especially true in how certain aspects of its efforts to reduce conflict around the globe could violate the rights of American citizens. This is most evident in the Second Amendment and the UN’s attempts to regulate the sale of firearms. 

At the center of the issue is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a multilateral treaty that regulates the international trade in conventional weapons. It has been in effect since 2014 and while it was meant to regulate the sales and transfers of tanks, military aircraft and other military hardware, its critics—including the National Rifle Association (NRA) and National Shooting Sports Foundation—have warned that it could impact U.S. gun owners by limiting the availability of commercially-made firearms and parts. 

To date, 110 nations have ratified the treaty, while 32 have signed but not ratified it. Among those latter nations is the United States. In fact, two years ago then President Donald Trump withdrew from the treaty and in a statement at the time said, “We will never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”

Biden Reverses Course 

Just as it was expected that the Trump administration would withdraw from the treaty, it has been expected that the Biden administration would seek to rejoin, and even push for ratification.  

“I have come from Washington, D.C., this week to take the floor on the agenda item Treaty Universalization to underscore the continuing commitment of the United States to responsible international trade in conventional arms,” William Malzahn, deputy director for Conventional Arms Threat Reduction in the Department of State, said at the 7th Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty. 

“The United States has long supported strong and effective national controls on the international transfer of conventional arms, and the Arms Trade Treaty is an important tool [for] promoting those controls internationally,” Malzahn added. “The new CAT Policy will better frame the intent and priorities of the Biden/Harris administration and formalize the approach of the administration as adopted on arms transfer decisions that have been in effect since President Biden entered the White House in January.”

Gun Registration Plan? 

The Arms Trade Treaty could go further than reducing conflict, warned critics. The NRA has said that it could require all firearms purchased by Americans to be tracked, and guns registered to ensure compliance with the treaty. 

“ATT has consequences for American gun owners,” the NRA said in a statement via its official social media account on Twitter. “If the UN gets its way, its deliberately undefined & loose terminology will be used to mandate the provision of personal info related to any American that purchases a firearm manufactured overseas to the origin country’s govt.”

“This is the first step towards creating a global firearms registry,” the group added.

Since taking office in January, President Joe Biden has pushed for gun control, including calling for enhanced background checks, banning the sale of parts that can allow individuals to build their own firearms and even calling for a ban on many popular semi-automatic rifles. The president also has sought to overturn a law that would allow firearms companies to be sued when their products are used in illegal activities. 

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

Image: Reuters