The National Interest

Sebastien Roblin

Chemical Weapons, Middle East

No wonder these weapons of war are banned.

Here's What You Need to Know: As early as 1925, the Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons in international conflicts.

The residents of Khan Sheikhoun probably thought they were in for just another ordinary day of civil war when they woke up early in the morning of April 4 to the whine of approaching Syrian Air Force Su-22 attack jets. The town of around fifty thousand people was situated west of Aleppo in Idlib Province, long a stronghold of rebel groups opposing the government of Bashar al-Assad since 2011. Artillery and air attacks were a horribly routine aspect of daily life there, as they are in many parts of Syria, divided by numerous warring factions.

Residents later reported that the munitions dropped by the jets released clouds of poisonous gas. Even this was hardly unheard of in Idlib Province. Even while Assad handed over his stockpiles of mustard gas and deadly nerve agents, government helicopters launched at least a dozen chlorine-gas attacks on communities in Idlib Province alone in 2014 and 2015. However, while chlorine gas causes horrifying respiratory problems, particularly in children and the elderly, it usually killed “only” a handful of people per attack, if any.

However, rescuers arriving from outside Khan Sheikhoun beheld an unexpectedly nightmarish sight: more than six hundred civilians lying paralyzed in their homes or helpless on the ground, limbs convulsing, saliva foaming from their noses and mouths as they gasped for breath. Local first responders—the lucky ones that hadn’t died or fallen violently ill when arriving on the scene—were frantically spraying the twitching bodies with hoses.

These symptoms correspond to the effects of sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent that disrupts acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that helps a muscle relax once it has completed an action. By blocking the enzyme, sarin has the effect of continuously triggering those muscles, making breathing effectively impossible as well as causing the breakdown of other bodily functions, and leading to the discharge of bodily fluids.

Though inhalation of the vapors is the primary vector of the agent, even skin contact can transmit a fatal dose of sarin to victims, who may die within one to ten minutes of exposure due to asphyxiation and the loss of bodily functions. Those surviving initial exposure may suffer permanent brain damage if they do not receive swift treatment. Even worse, particles of the gas cling to clothing, food and water, and can remain lethal for up to thirty minutes. That was why responders were washing the victims with hoses.

Reports currently suggest that eighty to one hundred of the residents were killed, and over six hundred injured. On Thursday, a Turkish hospital claimed its examination of the victims confirmed the use of sarin gas.

Chemical weapons are often collectively labeled weapons of mass destruction, but many of them—fortunately—have a low fatality rate, serving principally as weapons of terror rather than attrition.

Sarin and other nerve agents are a notable exception. Only thirty-five milligrams of sarin per cubic meter are necessary to kill a human being after two minutes of exposure, compared to nineteen thousand milligrams for chlorine gas, or 1,500 for phosgene gas, the deadliest chemical weapon used in World War I. The latter invisible gas often killed those affected the day after exposure, meaning it was not especially practical for achieving battlefield objectives. Mustard gas, which was highly visible and widely feared, caused horrible blistering injuries on contact with the skin, but killed only two percent of those it scarred.

The first nerve agent was accidentally discovered by German scientist Gerhard Schrader in 1938, who had to be hospitalized for three weeks after exposing himself to a partial dose of tabun. Realizing the gas’s potential as a weapon, Nazi Germany developed four different “G-Series” nerve agents and produced tens of thousands of tons of the deadly poisons—at the cost of a dozen workers, killed by contact with the deadly liquid despite the use of protective suits.

Fortunately, Hitler ultimately shied away from using nerve agents. This wasn’t because of some deeply buried shred of decency. When Hitler inquired about using sarin against the Allied powers, he was told by IG Farben chemist Otto Ambrose—who himself had tested the gas on human subjects—that the Allies probably had nerve agent stocks too, and would likely retaliate on an even greater scale. This was a fortunate misperception, as the Allies did not possess any nerve agents at all and were completely unaware the Germans had them.

After World War II, both the Soviet Union and Western nations studied up on the German poisons and developed even deadlier “V” series nerve agents, most notably the VX gas rather inaccurately depicted in the 1996 film The Rock. However, the taboo against using lethal chemical weapons on the battlefield was mostly respected—with some notable exceptions.

Egypt dropped mustard and phosgene gas from Il-28 bombers over villages in North Yemen between 1963 and 1968, killing an estimated 1,500 people. Nerve agents may also have been used by Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, Cuban troops in Angola and the Pinochet regime in Chile. Iraq unleashed mustard and sarin gas during the Iran-Iraq War on poorly armed Iranian militias executing human wave attacks. Then on March 16, 1988, Iraqi aircraft bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with a mixture of both gasses, massacring between three and five thousand people in just five hours.

As my colleague Paul Iddon pointed out in a recent article, there’s a common thread in the use of chemical weapons since World War I: they’re nearly always used by governments against victims that lack the ability to retaliate in kind.

Even as far back as World War I, the opposing armies successfully phased in training and equipment that limited the effectiveness of chemical weapons. Whenever one side employed a new type of gas, the other soon copied it and retaliated. Chemical attacks failed to change the outcome of a single major battle, despite their horrifying effects. Even worse, unpredictable winds frequently blew the poisonous clouds back onto friendly troops or towards civilians, who were much less well prepared to deal with them. That explains why many armies otherwise bristling with more and more deadly weapons aren’t begging to bring gas warfare back.

As early as 1925, the Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons in international conflicts, and was succeeded in 1993 by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which further forbade their stockpiling and production. (Syria is a signatory to the former but not the latter.) The United States renounced first use of chemical weapons in 1969 under Nixon, and then committed itself to destroying its stockpiles under George H. W. Bush in 1991—a process which was reportedly 89 percent complete in 2012.

Syria came to the brink of war with the United States after a sarin gas attack on August 2013 that killed hundreds of Syrians in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. It was a clear violation of the international taboo against chemical weapons (which Syria denied even possessing at the time), and more specifically, the “red line” threat made by President Obama. However, Russia brokered a deal in which Assad pledged to give up his military-grade chemical arms in order to avert a U.S. attack. The process of destroying nearly six hundred tons of mustard, sarin and VX gas was officially completed in August 2014, and involved many international observers and contractors.

However, this did not bring a halt to government air attacks using chlorine gas to terrorize rebel-held communities. Because of its broad civilian applications, there is no way to “ban” chlorine. Syrian rebels—mostly, but not exclusively, belonging to ISIS—have also occasionally launched rockets laden with chlorine or mustard gas on government-held territory in Syria and even Iraq.

Meanwhile, there were persistent rumors that the Syrian army’s destruction of its chemical stocks was less than comprehensive, and that the Assad regime had hidden away small quantities to serve as a future deterrent. International inspectors also reported discovering trace quantities of sarin, VX and ricin in facilities that had not been listed as storing chemical weapons by the Syrian government.

Damascus admitted to launching the airstrike on Khan Sheikhoun with Su-22 fighter-bombers, but maintains its warplanes did not use chemical munitions. Predictably, Moscow claimed the chemical attack was the opposition’s fault, alleging Syrian bombs had hit a rebel chemical-weapons workshop. This was far from the first time the allied governments have advanced some variant of the classic “they bombed themselves” defense in regards to chemical attacks that mostly land in rebel territory.

However, chemical-arms experts don’t buy it, pointing out that even if opposition fighters had somehow managed to produce and store sarin agents with the binary precursors side by side for rapid use, blowing them up with a bomb would simply not have dispersed the gases to such murderous effect. They argue that such a deadly attack could only have been carried out by properly deployed chemical munitions.

It is vital that the Syrian Civil War not lead to a further breakdown in international norms against chemical warfare, resulting in their more frequent use in conflicts across the world. Chemical weapons have repeatedly proven to be inherently indiscriminate terror weapons, and have killed far more civilians than combatants in the Syrian conflict.

However, the vast majority of civilian deaths in Syria occur due to bombardments by conventional artillery, mortars and aerial bombs—including those dropped by Russian and American warplanes as well as the Syrian Air Force. Even without the use of chemical weapons, the suffering experienced by Syrians on all sides of the conflict will continue for some time if a viable political solution does not silence these “conventional” death machines.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States.

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: A U.N. chemical weapons expert, wearing a gas mask, holds a plastic bag containing samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Ain Tarma neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria, August 29, 2013. REUTERS / Mohamed Abdullah

Stephen Silver

Child Tax Credit,

There have been two payments so far, in July and August, and a new study says that the July payment had a major effect in alleviating child poverty.

Full-on stimulus checks may be a thing of the past, but one series of payments from the American Rescue Plan Act is continuing: the expanded child tax credit, which is conferring monthly payments to Americans with children every month between July and December.

There have been two payments so far, in July and August, and a new study says that the July payment had a major effect in alleviating child poverty.

According to a study from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy, the July payment alone lifted millions of children from poverty.

“Using our innovative approach to tracking monthly poverty rates, we project that ongoing COVID relief efforts continue to have a sizable effect on reducing child poverty keeping six million children from poverty in July 2021 alone (a reduction of more than forty percent),” the Columbia study said. “This impact also resulted in a notable drop in child poverty between June and July 2021, due primarily to the rollout of the expanded Child Tax Credit. On its own, this new payment kept three million children from poverty in its first month.”

The six million figure refers to all coronavirus relief efforts, while the three million refers to the number of people who benefited from the first month of the Child Tax Credit by itself.

The Center predicted continued good outcomes from the rest of the Child Tax Credit payments.

“As rollout continues, the expanded Child Tax Credit has the potential to achieve even greater child poverty reduction,” the report said. “If all likely eligible children are covered, it has the potential to reduce monthly child poverty by up to forty percent on its own; in combination with all COVID-related relief, it could contribute to a fifty-two percent reduction in monthly child poverty. Expanding coverage to all eligible children is key to achieving the Child Tax Credit’s full anti-poverty potential, with the greatest gains to be realized for Black and Latino children.”

As of now, the expanded child tax credit is for 2021 only, although there have been proposals to extend it further. The $3.5 trillion Democratic budget proposal would extend the Child Tax Credit, with the Senate Democrats’ fact sheet including a “Child Tax Credit/EITC/CDCTC extension” as part of the framework for the bill. However, there isn't a lot of specific detail about exactly how the extension will work, as the bill itself has not yet been written. The president, in his American Families Plan that served as a template for the budget bill, had proposed to extend the child tax credit through 2025.

The next part of the expanded child tax credit will arrive in mid-September.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Flickr

Trevor Filseth

Afghanistan, Asia

Pelosi described the incident as “deadly serious” and suggested that their committee assignments could be affected by the trip. 

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) condemned on Wednesday a trip that two House representatives took to the Kabul airport, which is where thousands of Americans remain pending evacuation.

Earlier in the week, it emerged that Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) had secretly flown to Afghanistan to evaluate the U.S. withdrawal effort, prompting anger from the White House, State Department, and Defense Department. 

Critics of the representatives highlighted the fact that their presence required resources to be diverted to protect them and update them on the situation. The trip was conducted without consulting the Defense Department, which allegedly learned of their presence after their plane was cleared to land at the airport.  

Moulton and Meijer’s critics have also noted that their presence took up airplane seats which could have been used to evacuate more people, although the two representatives have denied this, noting that they were sitting in empty staff seats rather than with passengers.  

Pelosi described the incident as “deadly serious” and suggested that their committee assignments could be affected by the trip. 

In a joint statement, the two representatives, both U.S. military veterans who served in the Iraq War, defended their decision and argued that further oversight was needed. 

The Defense Department has reported that nearly twenty thousand people were evacuated from Afghanistan in the past day, and President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States intends to adhere to the August 31 withdrawal date demanded by the Taliban. However, Moulton and Meijer emphasized in their statement that the August 31 withdrawal would be logistically impossible. “After talking with commanders on the ground and seeing the situation here,” the statement reads, “it is obvious that because we started the evacuation so late, that no matter what we do, we won't get everyone out on time, even by September 11.” 

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby described the trip as a “VIP visit” and noted that their presence “certainly took time away from what we had been planning to do that day.” Kirby indicated that the representatives had not consulted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin before the trip.  

However, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) defended Moulton and Meijer in his own press briefing, citing the frustration of the two veterans with the confusing and chaotic situation at the airport.  

“It’s not the best idea to go there,” McCarthy said, “but I understand their frustration.” 

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. 

Sebastien Roblin

North Korea, Asia

And it paid the ultimate price.

Here's What You Need to Know: North Korea has never ceased its espionage activities.

At 4:30 p.m. on June 22, 1998, Capt. Kim In-yong noticed a curious site from the helm of his fishing boat as it sailed eleven miles east of the South Korean city of Sokcho: a small submarine, roughly sixty feet in length, caught in a driftnet used for mackerel fishing. Several crew members were visible on the submarine’s deck, trying to free their vessel. Upon noticing the fishing boat, they gave friendly waves of reassurance.

Captain Kim was suspicious. The entangled submarine was located twenty miles south of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. Likely, he recalled an incident two years earlier when a North Korean spy submarine ground ashore further south near the city of Gangneung. Rather than surrendering, the heavily armed crew first turned on itself and then tried to fight its way back to the border, resulting in the death of thirty-seven Koreans from both nations. Perhaps he was aware that while Republic of Korea Navy operated three Dolgorae-class mini-submarines at the time, North Korea had roughly fifty small submarines of several classes. So the South Korean fisherman informed the Sokcho Fishery Bureau.

The submarine, meanwhile, freed itself from the nets and began sailing north, with Captain Kim following it at a distance. However, before long the submarine rolled on its belly, stalled and helpless in the water.

By 5:20 p.m. the Republic of Korea dispatched antisubmarine helicopters, and the submarine’s location was confirmed nearly an hour later. The vessel was a Yugo-class mini-submarine, imported from Yugoslavia to North Korea during the Cold War. The boats in the class vary from sixteen to twenty-two meters long and seventy to 110 tons in weight, and can’t go much faster than ten knots (11.5 miles per hour), or four knots underwater. Though some carried two torpedo tubes, they were primarily used to deploy operatives on spying missions, with the five-man vessels able to accommodate up to seven additional passengers. Later inspection of the Yugo-class boat revealed it had a single rotating shaft driving its two propellers, which had skewed blades for noise reduction, and that the hull was made of plastic to lower visibility to Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.

ROK Navy surface ships surrounded the vessel and attempted to communicate with the stranded boat, first via signaling charges and low-frequency radio, then loudspeakers and even hammers tapped on the boat’s hull—without response. Unwilling to risk opening the submarine while at sea, the South Korean sailors ultimately hitched the mini-sub to a corvette at 7:30 that evening and began towing it for port of Donghae.

The timing was inauspicious. South and North Korea were about to hold their first major talks in years at Panmunjom. Recently elected South Korean president Kim Dae-jung was promoting his “Sunshine Policy,” attempting to promote reconciliation and openness between two nations that had been officially at war since 1950. On January 23, North Korea declared that a submarine had suffered a “training accident.” According to Pyongyang, the submarine’s last communication reported “trouble in nautical observation instruments, oil pressure systems, and submerging and surfacing machines.” South Korean officials told the New York Times they didn’t believe the Yugo-class boat had actually been involved in a spy mission.

There was of course something a bit comical about the South Korean Navy coming to the unwanted rescue of a submarine that was spying in its waters. However, as frequently happens in tales of North Korean espionage, the absurd becomes horrific.

South Korea had readied a special team to open the ship and negotiate with the North Korean crew, including defector and former submariner Lee Kwang-soo, one of only two North Korean survivors of the Gangneung incident. However, while still being towed on July 24, the submarine sank abruptly to the bottom of the ocean. South Korean officials were uncertain: had the boat succumbed to mechanical difficulties, or had it been scuttled by the crew?

On June 25, a South Korean salvage team recovered the boat from one hundred feet underwater and an elite team bored into the hull. They found a horrid tableau inside.

The submarine’s interior had taken on only two and a half feet of water—but the five submariners had been gunned down, with bullet wounds visible across their bodies. Four elite North Korean Special Forces also lay dead, each shot in the head. North Korean military culture stresses that its soldiers should kill themselves rather than accept capture. It seemed likely that the more fanatical Special Forces had murdered the crew—perhaps after they had refused an order to commit suicide—then killed themselves. The nine dead men aboard the submarine were buried in South Korea’s Cemetery for North Korean and Chinese Soldiers, as Pyongyang has mostly refused to accept back the remains of its own spies and soldiers.

The more than two hundred items recovered from the submarine were also revealing. The crew had been packing AK-47s, machine guns, grenades, pistols, a rocket-propelled grenade and three sets of “American-made infiltration gear.” The presence of an empty South Korean pear juice container also suggested that the Special Forces personnel had made it ashore, as did a 1995 issue of Life magazine. If there was any doubt of the boat’s espionage activities, the ship’s log indicated the submarine had landed agents into South Korea on multiple occasions in the past.

The incident underscored South Korea’s inability to consistently detect and interdict North Korean mini-submarines, leading some commenters to joke that the nation relied on fishermen and taxi drivers (as occurred in the Gangneung incident) to patrol her waters. To be fair, however, small submarines like the Yugo-class boats are extremely difficult to detect in the shallow waters off the Korean coast, a threat underscored by the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010. Shallow, rocky waters also led to a collision between much larger Russian and American submarines in 1992, due to their inability to detect each other over background noise.

Despite the death of its crew, Pyongyang did not make a big fuss as it was eager to receive South Korean economic aid to assist its recovery from a devastating famine. Seoul did it best to overlook the spying in an effort to make the Sunshine Policy work.

However, North Korea never ceased its espionage activities, nor did it change its death-over-surrender policy. In July that year, South Korea recovered the body of an armed North Korean agent with an underwater propulsion unit. And in December, another North Korean mini-submarine opened fire when challenged by South Korean ships, resulting in the Battle of Yeosu, the subject of the next piece in this series.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States.

This article first appeared in March 2017.

Image: Reuters

Sam Sweeney

Iraq War, Middle East

The United States should still strive to align its interests with its values and try to do the right thing when it acts in the Middle East. It should not, however, believe that people in the region will see it as a white knight riding in to save the day.

Peter van Buren’s 2011 book We Meant Well sums up a common theme when Americans look back about the Iraq War: The country went into it with good intentions but didn’t understand the country being invaded and was thus unable to make any sort of positive change. Perhaps there was ill intent within the Bush administration, but the effort itself as carried out by the U.S. military and the foreign policy bureaucracy was a noble but tragic one. The United States got rid of a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, but made things worse as the government clumsily fumbled its way through an occupation or liberation, depending on your preferred term. At the very least, the war did not make things better. Van Buren asks how we ended up “accomplishing so little when we meant well?” His book, a well-written account of his time working to stabilize Iraq for the State Department, attempts to answer that question in between anecdotes of all the things that went terribly wrong. It also reveals, unintentionally, the massive gap in how Americans perceive the intentions behind the war and how Iraqis perceive those intentions.

Van Buren was not alone in his assessment of the war as one of good intentions gone awry. The war enjoyed widespread public support, with 72 percent approving of the decision to invade in the first few weeks after the invasion. Support waned significantly as the war dragged on, but the initial reasons for going to war were convincing to the American public. As the war’s failure became apparent, many continued to insist that the initial intent had been good. John Agresto, an academic adviser in the country after the invasion, wrote a book called Mugged By Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions. Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institute, writing in 2008 in the New York Times, said that “if we leave behind a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms, then no one will care how well-intentioned our motives.”

However, this perception of the Iraq War as one of good intentions gone wrong is the most common point of contention I find between Iraqi narratives of the war versus American narratives. By and large, Iraqis I talk to do not believe the United States had good intentions when they removed Saddam in 2003, and this opinion is shared by those who believe removing Saddam was a good thing and those who do not. A poll of Baghdad residents in 2003 showed that just 5 percent of Baghdadis thought the United States’ main intention during the 2003 invasion was to help the people of Iraq, while 43 percent believed the primary intent was to take Iraq’s oil reserves.

A good example of Iraqi perceptions of the war, by no means unique, is a book called Baghdad Melodies [maqamat baghdadiyya] published in Arabic in 2006 by Sahar Taha, an Iraqi musician who passed away of cancer in 2018. Taha was a famous player of the oud, a stringed musical instrument from the Middle East, and she was a regular on Arabic television during her career. Iraqi by birth, she married a Lebanese man and made her career in Lebanon, ultimately gaining Lebanese citizenship as well. Shortly before the U.S. invasion of March 2003, she visited her family in Baghdad, then continued to write a diary of sorts about the war from Lebanon, where she watched events unfold on TV and in phone conversations—when possible—with family still in Iraq. She later published this diary as a book with Riyad el-Rayyes, one of the most prominent Arabic-language publishing houses.

To take an example of the gap in perception, one of the widely acknowledged mistakes of the early days of the war was the United States’ inability to prevent the looting of Iraqi governmental institutions in the first days after the fall of the Iraqi government. In the American telling of the issue, soldiers were not given proper orders to become the country’s police force, and the confusion led to a breakdown in law and order. Soldiers blamed the looting on a desire for revenge among Iraqis against their oppressive government, but they were unable to intervene. As then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, “Freedom's untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things.” This was not how many Iraqis saw it. In her book, Taha recalls watching the looting on TV, and quotes a bystander interviewed in Basra: “They could simply impose order. There’s no explanation for them just standing by neutrally unless they mean for this to happen.” Taha agrees, wondering: “Is the destruction, theft, and burning of the official institutions of the government and ministries a coincidence?” She also wonders about the disappearance of thousands of pieces from the national museum overnight: “A museum with thousands of pieces is emptied overnight? That is what they want us to simply and naively believe? Is there a rational person who would believe that this is the result of general chaos, and merely theft? Or was it planned and trained for months before the invasion…?” As I’ve heard from countless other Iraqis, Taha saw a plan in the chaos.

Equally important is the question of why the United States suddenly opposed Saddam despite previous support for him. Even in the United States, much was made of the sharp turn in American engagement with Iraq between the Iran-Iraq War and the first Gulf War. Within a few short years, the United States went from supporting Saddam against Iran to fighting a war against Iraq in Kuwait. A decade later, the United States removed Saddam from power. Iraqis like Taha were skeptical of America’s intentions in “liberating” the country, given the American relationship with Saddam in the days when he was still a brutal dictator but less of a nuisance regionally. “Most Iraqis are convinced today that Iraq has been afflicted with wars that were programmed from the time that Iraq was reaching the height of its power,” Taha wrote. “The result was that Saddam was put in power, by the Americans themselves, so that they could eventually reach this exact point.” It would be hard to find an American to make this claim and be taken seriously, but it is not a rare opinion in the Middle East, where America is generally considered capable of planning decades in advance and carrying out its plans to the letter, with intended effect.

Indeed, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait revealed much about Arab feelings towards the United States. For example, Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh was in the al-Muslimiyah prison in Aleppo at the time (he was a political prisoner from 1980 to 1996). Prisoners “were divided sharply over the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait,” he wrote in his 2012 book about Syrian prisons. “In the beginning it looked to all of us that this invasion was a step beyond the countless other repugnant transgressions between Arab countries engrained in the memory of our generation.” However, as the Americans moved against Saddam, public opinion also began to shift among the prisoners towards tacit sympathy with Iraq.

The decisive factor in my position was my opposition to the Americans, and to the Syrian regime, which had participated in the international coalition [against Saddam]. It was necessary to turn a blind eye to the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Meanwhile, the motivating factor in the opposing position was opposition to the Iraqi regime, which also necessitated a degree of overlooking the view of Americans and the international coalition. As for Kuwait itself, it took a secondary position in forming all of our opinions.

Note the tone here towards the Americans: Even those opposed to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait supported the war against Saddam despite the American involvement, not because of it. America’s participation did little to improve its image among those who supported ending Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait.

Barely a decade later in 2003, Taha had no doubt that the Americans were invading Iraq to benefit from its economic resources. She laments that the average Iraqi has little access to information about the actual value of their country’s resources. All-knowing America, however, must know in detail what resources exist in Iraq, and that explains their interest in the country. As always in the Arab understanding of the United States, the American government is omniscient: “There is no doubt that America must be watering at the mouth because of the vast and indisputable evidence [of economic resources], given that they are suffering from a real economic crisis.” America’s war, in other words, was intended to boost America’s economy by invading Iraq and stealing its resources. No matter the massive increase to America’s national debt and the several trillion dollars spent on the war effort, many Iraqis remain convinced that the United States benefited greatly from the Iraq War.

In neighboring Syria as well there remains a widespread belief that America is taking Syria’s oil, in no small part because Donald Trump announced that this was the explicit purpose of the ongoing American presence there. I asked a Syrian there recently about the oil, and he simply said that some is refined locally, and the Americans take the rest. This is not factually true—in reality, a complex network of local and regional actors collude to smuggle the oil out of northeastern Syria, and more recently an American company was briefly involved—but the perception is logical from the average Syrian’s perspective: When the American president announces that his country will take the oil, and his country’s troops are the most powerful actor in the country’s oil-producing region, and the oil is being shipped out of the country in long lines of oil trucks, why would the average person doubt that America’s intention is to take the oil, and that it is doing so? In the same way, Sahar Taha and many Iraqis like her are making a logical assumption when they assume the United States wanted to invade Iraq for economic reasons.

Most Iraqis would be surprised to know how inept the U.S. government is. They assume that the government of the world’s most powerful country must necessarily be competent and all-knowing. What Iraqis see as a grand strategy to weaken Iraq and steal its resources was, in reality, the missteps of a country that naively assumed that by installing democracy from the outside, it could simultaneously change the domestic situation of the Iraqi people and ensure the United States’ own national interests in the region. This misperception of the abilities of the U.S. government may be the biggest underlying cause of the gap in understanding the intentions behind the Iraq War.

America would do well to bear this in mind: When we act in the Middle East, few perceive our intentions to be pure or altruistic. Even those who work with the United States believe, rightly, that America is acting in its own interest, not the interests of Iraq, Syria, or any other country. The United States should still strive to align its interests with its values and try to do the right thing when it acts in the Middle East. It should not, however, believe that people in the region will see it as a white knight riding in to save the day. Knowing this fact will help us avoid getting stuck in situations where we make strategic mistakes of the tallest order—like invading Iraq—on the assumption that doing so will earn us goodwill in the region. There are plenty in Washington, DC who still say that had we intervened in Syria, the country would be a pro-American beacon of democracy in the region. We thought that about Iraq as well, and the difference between Iraqi and American perceptions of the war remain some of the strongest proof that no intervention in Syria would have led to a sudden burst of goodwill towards America in the region.

Syria scholar Dawn Chatty interviewed a Syrian-Armenian named Vahan in Damascus in 2005, whom she quoted in her book Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State. Vahan drew an interesting parallel between the European meddling in Ottoman affairs, which he believed was a contributing factor to the Armenian genocide, and the U.S. war in Iraq, saying:

I don’t justify what the Turks have done, but Europe wanted to destabilize the Ottoman Empire for various reasons; for colonialism, or for the colonial extension. So Europe encouraged our young people to use the same slogans that they are now using to destabilize the Arab world. You see “Freedom, This and This”, “Social Justice”, “Dictatorship”…By killings tens of thousands of people they think they can extend Democracy.

Particularly among religious and ethnic minorities in the region, who have borne the brunt of the region’s recent instability, this view has only increased in prominence since 2005.

Whether or not one agrees with Vahan’s assessment of the West’s meddling in the Middle East, then or now, his and others’ reaction highlights the important point that the West should not assume that its efforts, however noble the intention, will be met with goodwill on the part of those we mean to help. I have no doubt that Americans will continue to understand the Iraq War as a misguided but noble effort gone wrong, and that many—probably most—in Iraq will continue to understand the war as one of bad intentions that went just the way America planned. The practical implications of this are potentially deadly, and as such, when a future war in the Middle East is justified on the basis that it will improve our image in the region, rest assured the messenger is either naïve or disingenuous. Judge their plan accordingly.

Sam Sweeney is a writer and translator based in the Middle East. He is a former Congressional staffer and has a Master's degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from l’Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. He is also the president of the Mesopotamia Relief Foundation, which works in northeastern Syria.

Image: Flickr.

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

If rivals see their courses as preordained and Thucydides’ supposed trap as inescapable, both will gird for what they regard as inevitable.

Here's What you Need to Remember: It’s crucial for Washington to undertake some soul-searching as it declares that a new age of great-power competition is upon us, and as U.S. leaders try to discern how their counterparts in Beijing, allied capitals, and third parties see matters.

A panel at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis once asked whether—as Professor Graham Allison’s book contends—China and the United States are “destined” for war. Indeed, Professor Allison numbered among the panelists who discussed the new China challenge.

The short answer from the gathering: maybe.

Commentators have held forth on this topic from antiquity till the present day. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus taught that character is destiny. Herodotus maintained that custom is destiny. We hear that geography is destiny, or demographics is, or some other factor is. This time of year sports commentators even tell us football teams can control their destiny—chiefly by winning every game against opponents that also want to win. In that spirit, one literature specialist counsels that destiny goes by many names, including “God, gods, fate, accident, fortune, necessity, [and] circumstance.”

An enormous amount turns on how you define terms like “destiny,” or the “trap” part of Allison’s signature catchphrase “Thucydides Trap.” The latter refers to the conceit of established great powers using armed force to maintain their standing atop the pecking order or when upstart challengers reach for the sword to seize that lofty status for themselves. Geopolitical asymmetries ensnare hegemons and would-be hegemons alike—speeding them along the path to war.

If rivals see their courses as preordained and Thucydides’ supposed trap as inescapable, both will gird for what they regard as inevitable. If they believe they enjoy some say-so over the workings of destiny, then they might find some way to navigate their differences. And if one contender accepts the logic of the Thucydides Trap while the other rejects it, watch out: strategic competition could take on a seesaw character as action begets misperception begets reaction, and on and on. The action-reaction cycle could set war loose through different understandings of the dynamics at work.

Far from an exercise in hair-splitting, then, this is a philosophical debate pregnant with fateful consequences. The central question: does destiny master us or can we master it? If America and China are captive to destiny and destiny is remorseless, then there’s little for the U.S. naval and defense establishment to do except get ready. The sea services and land-based arms of military might must ready themselves for inevitable combat. If force is the only option, then the only questions left involve where, when, with what, and with which allies the U.S. armed services will attempt to crush or dishearten the foe. The reciprocal is true for China’s People’s Liberation Army.

If on the other hand, it is possible for the contestants to take charge of their destiny—in whole or in part—then they might find some way through the quarrels and disparate visions that separate them. Some mix of deterrence, diplomacy, and economic outreach or coercion could forestall war.

Now, entertaining the possibility of peace scarcely exempts American military planners from getting ready. Not for nothing did founding father George Washington proclaim—channeling the classics—that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” After all, the point of peacetime naval and military diplomacy is to cast a “shadow” over an antagonist’s deliberations and actions. The greater the possibility of defeat appears to foes who square off against the U.S. military, the longer and darker the shadow cast—and the likelier they are to desist from actions Washington deems objectionable.

Here’s one way to think through this question of whether armed strife is preordained. Crudely speaking, scribes from Greek antiquity forward have crafted three ideas about destiny. The first is fate. Fate is implacable and inescapable. The concept of irresistible fate feels very Calvinist, entailing preordination. We are the playthings of fate. Vast forces sweep us along wherever they will. Think about Odysseus, buffeted around the Mediterranean Sea for twenty long years on his return voyage from the war against Troy. The adventurer from Ithaca could do little except comply with the whims of fate. Even the gods and goddesses of Olympus found it hard to speed his return home (in part because they were working at cross purposes, as was their wont).

The classics sometimes set forth a less fatalistic concept of destiny. Playwrights and philosophers commonly warn mortals not to choose to do things that offend the “deathless gods” lest the gods exact terrible vengeance and impose a bleak destiny on the offenders. Retribution for hubris—overweening pride—constitutes a staple of classical literature. Hubris brings on Nemesis as surely as night follows day. The Greeks never quite say so, but it is possible that other vices also elicit divine retribution. Bottom line, this variant of destiny permits human beings the power to choose. It’s up to them to exercise that power wisely.

And then there’s the manageable, if still stubborn, variety of destiny. Riffing on the classics, Niccolò Machiavelli terms it "fortune." Fortune, proclaims the Florentine philosopher-statesman, is like a violent river that sweeps everything and everyone before it after a storm. But Machiavelli adds that human beings can exercise foresight during tranquil times before the onset of a tempest. They can construct dams and other engineering works to block or divert flood waters when they come. We can master fortune, in other words, by peering ahead into the future and being venturesome in the here and now—guarding against its wiles. This is a comforting interpretation coming from a writer known for his bare-knuckles approach to politics.

So who’s right? Does destiny exist in geopolitics, and if so, how much scope for free will does it allow societies and statesmen? Is it possible for rising and falling nations and their allies to be destined for war? The answers potential antagonists give will prod them to design and deploy strategy, forces, and operational methods in a certain fashion. Believers that war is fated will comport themselves as though battle is imminent. Those convinced they can master fortune dwell in the realm where military implements can persuade or dissuade. Different strategies result.

What about the trap in Professor Allison’s Thucydides Trap? Enlightenment might likewise come from parsing this everyday metaphor. Traps come in endless varieties. People lay some traps. People stumble into others. Some are visible, others hidden. Some are inescapable, others easy to evade or escape. Some inflict fatal consequences; others exact lighter damage. Is the Thucydides Trap a steel trap that a hunter lays to pinion an animal’s leg? Or is it a sand trap that a dexterous golfer can exit without losing more than a shot or two from his overall tally?

These are questions of the significant moment. That being the case, it’s crucial for Washington to undertake some soul-searching as it declares that a new age of great-power competition is upon us, and as U.S. leaders try to discern how their counterparts in Beijing, allied capitals, and third parties see matters. This is no idle philosophical musing. It could shape Asia’s—and the world’s—future.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming next month). The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

The Khmer Rouge waged a bloody guerilla resistance war against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, assisted by two more Western-aligned resistance groups.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Khmer Rouge’s ultra-nationalism made them violently suspicious of the Vietnamese Communists, even though the Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia had only been possible with Hanoi’s support.

The fall of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, was preceded two weeks earlier by another Communist victory: the capture of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.

Yet less than four years later, Vietnamese troops would engage in a second conquest—this time targeting its erstwhile allies, using many of the tanks and aircraft it captured from South Vietnam.

The Khmer people of Cambodia have ethnic ties to southern Asia and practice a hybrid Buddhist-Hindu faith. Just as the Vietnamese historically resisted imperial occupation by China, the Khmer historically were subject to foreign encroachment from Vietnam.

The Khmer Rouge had been formed by a clique of Marxist students educated in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, adopting a uniquely extreme ideology combining fervent Khmer nationalism with Maoist-style communism, which emphasizes revolution by the rural peasantry rather than an urbanized working class.

However, the Khmer began with only limited domestic support in Cambodia. Their conquest of Phnom Penh was only possible with aid from North Vietnam, which armed and organized the Khmer Rouge to so it could infiltrate its forces through Eastern Cambodia with less interference from the politically-divided Cambodian government. A massive bombing campaign by U.S. warplanes devastated rural Cambodia, delaying but failing to prevent a Communist victory, and may have increased pro-Communist sentiment amongst the peasantry.

The ruling clique renamed their country the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and implemented a spectacularly self-destructive and brutal police state unlike any other Communist regime. Not merely content to promote rural interests, the Khmer forced Cambodian city-dwellers from their homes, emptying the cities so that urbanites could live an ‘authentic’ life in the countryside. The regime implemented Chinese Great Leap-style agricultural policies that predictably led hundreds of thousands to die from famine.

Hundreds of thousands more Cambodians suspected of political disloyalty or "immorality" were murdered in the infamous Killing Fields. Even adult victims’ children and babies were killed, smashed to death against tree trunks to save bullets. Xenophobic and obsessed with Khmer racial purity, the Khmer Rouge also targeted minorities and people of mixed descent. In four years of rule, these genocidal follies killed between 1.5 to 3 million people in a country of only 8 million.

The Khmer Rouge’s ultra-nationalism made them violently suspicious of the Vietnamese Communists, even though the Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia had only been possible with Hanoi’s support. As early 1974, the Khmer Rouge began purging Vietnamese-trained members from its ranks and skirmishing with Vietnamese troops. Increasingly, the Cambodian Communists turned to China for support, which furnished Kampuchea with economic and military aid.

Still, Communist Cambodia and Vietnam remained officially friends at first, and continued diplomatic outreach even while their troops clashed violently over border towns and outlying islands. But the Khmer Rouge felt that Vietnamese border towns as belonging historically into the Khmer—and it asserted its claims with habitual violence, dispatching troops on cross-border raids that massacred thousands of Vietnamese civilians.

Hanoi finally responded to the attacks in December 1977 with a punitive multi-division invasion supported by air power. However, though the Khmer Rouge’s forces were steam-rolled in combat, the Khmer to escalate hostilities even further with more cross brutal cross-border raids, peaking with the merciless slaughter of 3,157 villagers at Ba Chúc in April 1978, leaving only two survivors.

Hanoi then tried to unseat the Khmer Rouge regime using its own Maoist ‘People’s War’ doctrine, by organizing a rural insurrection amongst sympathetic elements of the population. Ironically, the Maoist doctrine proved unsuccessful in the face of the zealousness of the Khmer Rouge’s secret police, which learned of the subversive elements and crushed them.

By this point, the conflict increasingly was drawn into the dysfunctional relations between Communist states. Beijing wanted to cultivate Cambodia as an outpost of its influence. Vietnam, seeking to keep the Chinese out, signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, which by then was possibly on worse terms with Beijing than with Washington, securing the military and political support for a Cambodian invasion.

The Vietnamese Army assembled 150,000 troops in thirteen divisions on the Cambodian border. It could draw upon a pool of 900 tanks—a mix of T-54 and Type 59 medium tanks, PT-76 and Type 63 amphibious tanks, and captured U.S. M41 Walker Bulldogs. Its Air Force counted over 300 warplanes including squadrons of A-37 Dragonfly attack jets and F-5 Freedom fighters captured from South Vietnam, as well as older Soviet MiG-21 and MiG-19 jets and beefy new Mi-24A Hind armored attack helicopters. These were vectored to targets by observers in slow Cessna UH-17 and O-1 utility planes. In addition, the Vietnamese organized three regiments (15,000 men) of Cambodian fighters that would form the nucleus of a new Cambodian government.

The Kampuchean Revolutionary Army mustered only seventy thousand troops and far fewer tanks. Its fledgling Air Force retained some twenty abandoned Huey helicopters and twenty-two T-28 Trojans trainers, and sixteen Shenyang J-6 fighters (MiG-19 clones) received from China, which also dispatched thousands of advisors.

Vietnamese troops began a limited invasion of north-eastern Cambodia on December 21, 1978, then four days later launched the main offensive on three axes in the southeast, converging on the capital of Pnomh Penh. The Vietnamese advanced blitzkrieg-style, using armored columns supported by airpower to "fix" enemies in place, and then having the reinforcement waves bypass identified enemy positions to sustain the advance and cut enemy lines of supply. Regional capitals Kracheh and Stung Treng were captured in five days, then the port in Kampot was seized by an amphibious landing

The Khmer Rouge regime tried tackling the Vietnamese attacks head-on, but its starving and demoralized troops failed to mount an effective resistance. After just two weeks of fighting, Pol Pot’s clique ordered its troops to melt into the jungle to wage a guerilla resistance war and fled Phnom Penh in five Huey helicopters—only narrowly dodging a Vietnamese airstrike.

Only January 7, Vietnamese tanks rolled into Phnom Penh, linking up with commandos earlier landed by helicopter, and installed a new government under Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander. The Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later by the Vietnamese Navy in a bloody battle that saw twenty-two ships sunk.

China, infuriated by the overthrow of its client-state, launched a punitive invasion of mountainous Northern Vietnam on February 17. However, the People’s Liberation Army’s inexperienced troops and tanks sustained heavy losses from the defending Vietnamese. The invasion failed to divert Vietnamese troops from Cambodia, and a ceasefire was declared after a month.

The invasion brought an end to the Khmer Rouge’s monstrous genocide, but not to the war itself. The Khmer Rouge waged a bloody guerilla resistance war against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, assisted by two more Western-aligned resistance group.

Hanoi found to its surprise that it had become internationally ostracized for the invasion. Isolated from international aid, Vietnam suffered economically and became closely dependent on the Soviet Union. Many Khmer, for their part, saw the Vietnamese intervention as vindicating the Khmer Rouge’s worst fears of Hanoi’s imperial designs on Cambodia.

Throughout the 1980s, the United States, smarting over its defeat in Vietnam, collaborated with Thailand and China to funnel arms and support to resistance armies, some of which wound up in Khmer Rouge hands. The Vietnamese army ironically found itself on the other side of a brutal counterinsurgency war not unlike the one it had waged against the U.S. forces during the 1960s and 1970s.

The decades-long war finally wound to its end in the 1990s, with a Vietnamese withdrawal, deployment of a UN peacekeepers and the disbanding of the Khmer Rouge. The Hun Sen regime managed to subvert provisions for democratic elections, however, and remains in power to this day, now again courting Chinese support.

Vietnam’s invasion brought an end to a horrifying genocide. Furthermore, Hanoi can hardly be faulted for using force after foreign troops repeatedly invaded its territory and massacred thousands of its civilians.

However, Vietnamese generals and politicians have made clear the invasion was meant to serve Vietnam’s interests in expelling Chinese influence over Cambodia, not a humanitarian mercy mission. For some Khmer, the Vietnamese were seen as yet another foreign invader.

Thus the tragic conflict defies the natural desire to define the war in terms of black-and-white morality.

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

Image: Flikr.

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

There are several ways that the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency and industry partners are working to accomplish this feat in a matter of seconds. 

The Defense Department is interested in the technology seeing, tracking and finding hypersonic missiles is a crucial technology needed for defense, yet it is simply not enough. Threat information regarding the maneuvering, high-speed missile transiting between radar fields must be tracked, processed and communicated. Crucial data such as information about the flight trajectory needs to be organized, processed, sent through command and control and ultimately given to an interceptor or countermeasure of some kind. How can this happen? Can it happen fast enough to stop a hypersonic threat? 

“There’s a tremendous amount of data that comes out of that space,” Mike Ciffone, the director of Northrop Grumman’s Strategy, Capture and Operations for overhead persistent infrared and geospatial systems, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “How do you effectively utilize that data in terms of integrating that with your weapon?” 

There are several ways that the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency and industry partners are working to accomplish this feat in a matter of seconds. 

“One method is obviously data fusion and doing what fusion implies,” Ciffone said. “I need to get that data that comes from the satellites down to the ground and to weapons as quickly as possible. A method of doing that is potentially processing some of that data in real-time to a weapons database and transfer that data from the satellite system down to the weapon.”

Some of the data processing, for instance, can potentially be artificial intelligence-enabled and also performed at the point of data receipt, essentially wherever the incoming sensor data first arrives. Computer processing is becoming much faster and artificial intelligence-enabled due to a series of technical breakthroughs which enable incoming sensor data to be instantly analyzed, organized, assessed and streamlined. With this, key points, moments or objects of relevance can be found and sent to commanders at speeds exponentially faster than what may have previously been possible.

The success of this also naturally depends upon networking satellites and sensor nodes to one another, something which is a major focus for Pentagon, Missile Defense Agency and Northrop developers. This may be one key reason why the military services are quickly building and deploying faster, smaller and better networked Low and Medium Earth Orbit satellites. These new systems complement larger Geospatial satellite networks and are designed to closely cover wide swaths of expansive geographical areas by networking. This is exactly why Northrop Grumman is engineering, testing and planning to deploy a new network of smaller, high-resolution satellites called Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space and Sensor program. 

“When you look at a system like this where we have a constellation of many dozens of satellites in the future, you want to get a model of the performance of that integrated constellation,” Ciffone said. “And so having the digital engineering capability and the modeling and simulation tools allows us to model the performance of those complex architectures and get to optimize the system in a way now that we wouldn’t have traditionally been able to do with legacy methods. When it comes to national security, failure is not an option. The nation can’t afford to rely on unproven technology when lives are at stake.” 

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

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

The Red Army was an early practitioner of mechanized warfare.

Here's What You Need to Know: For armament, the KV-1 had a single short-barrel seventy-six-millimeter L11 gun in the turret, as well as 7.62-millimeter machine guns in the hull and turret. There was even a third machine gun in the rear of the turret to fend off ambushing infantry.

In the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, the brutal Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Panzer tanks overran hundreds of miles of Soviet territory and reached the outskirts of Moscow before winter weather and reinforcements from Siberia brought a halt to their advance. In a period when the Red Army seemed on the verge of collapse, a lumbering forty-eight-ton heavy tank that could absorb German tank shells like so many spitballs was one factor that bought it badly needed time.

The Red Army was an early practitioner of mechanized warfare, with thousands of light T-26 and BT tanks in its operational units when Germany invaded. It also also developed huge T-28 and T-35 multiturret heavy tanks to punch through enemy defenses. However, these hulking “land battleships” proved ill conceived: they had great difficulty negotiating rough terrain, and their large hulls were surprisingly poorly armored.

Therefore, in the late 1930s, designer Josef Kotin rushed into production the simpler, more densely armored Kliment Voroshilov, named after the Soviet defense minister. The early-model KV-1s boasted an extraordinary seventy to ninety millimeters of armor, rendering them impenetrable to the standard thirty-seven- or forty-five-millimeter antitank guns of the day. By contrast, early war German Panzers ranged in armor from ten to thirty-five millimeters and weighed less than half that.

For armament, the KV-1 had a single short-barrel seventy-six-millimeter L11 gun in the turret, as well as 7.62-millimeter machine guns in the hull and turret. There was even a third machine gun in the rear of the turret to fend off ambushing infantry.

The KV-1 debuted promisingly against the Finnish during the 1939–40 Winter War, with only one lost in action. The Soviets busily iterated, and the 1940-model KV-1s added higher-velocity seventy-six-millimeter F32 guns to that could bust Panzers with ease, and caked on even more armor. The KVs were organized into small sixteen- to twenty-two-vehicle battalions which served alongside T-34 mediums tanks in mixed brigades. The T-34 was cheaper and faster, had similar armament, and was also quite tough—but still not as tough as the KV-1.

The Soviets also produced over three hundred KV-2 tanks, which had a huge boxy turret mounting a massive 152-millimeter howitzer for swatting concrete bunkers. Though its shells could annihilate anything they hit, the fifty-seven-ton KV-2 was so unstable it couldn’t fire when on uneven terrain or while moving, and it did not reenter production after nearly all were lost in 1941.

Roadblock at Raseiniai

The Soviets Union only disposed of 337 KV-1s and 132 KV-2s in the Western military district when the Nazis invaded. German intelligence somehow failed to identify the threat they posed. However, the Wehrmacht should have had an inkling of its heavy tank problem from its experiences in the Battle of France, when Panzers faced heavily-armored Matilda II and Char B1 tanks that their guns could not penetrate. Unfortunately, the Allied heavies lacked the combined arms and logistical support to capitalize on initial battlefield success.

German commanders had also countered with heavy antiaircraft guns or howitzers in direct-fire mode to penetrate heavy armor. This was not ideal for an army on the attack, however, as the artillery had to be towed into position by soft-skinned vehicles and required minutes of setup time. Deploying them in front of advancing enemy tanks bristling with firepower was a risky business.

The shortcomings of this approach became evident in the Battle of Raseiniai, in the opening days of Operation Barbarossa. On June 23, German tankers in Czech-built 35(t) tanks were startled when KVs of the Second Tank Division rolled straight through their regiment, unperturbed by ricocheting thirty-seven-millimeter shells, to rampage amongst the infantry behind them. The 35(t)s had to wheel around and chase after the Russian heavies, eventually immobilizing some with hits to the tracks and driving off the rest.

However, one of the KVs penetrated far behind German lines before running out of fuel directly in the supply lines of the Sixth Panzer Division on June 24. When a fuel-and-ammunition convoy attempted to pass the seemingly abandoned tank, it opened fire and set twelve of the trucks ablaze. A battery of fifty-millimeter antitank guns began smacking the tank with high-velocity shells, but the Russian behemoth wiped it out it with cannon fire.

Then the Germans tried setting up a more powerful eighty-eight-millimeter flak gun seven hundred meters away to destroy the Russian tank, but it too was knocked out before it could land a shell on target.

That night, German pioneers tried sneaking up to the tank and blow it up with satchel charges. But as the sappers made a dash for the tank, its machine guns blazed into action, foiling the attack.

Perturbed that a single Russian tank had delayed an entire Panzer division for twenty-four hours, Gen. Erhard Raus coordinated a tank-infantry-artillery assault the following morning. The crew was stunned by repeated hits, including several penetrating shots from flak guns. German Schutzen finally climbed on top of the tank’s hull only for the turret to begin rotating! They hastily chucked grenades through some of the shell holes, bringing an end to the crew’s heroic stand.

Shock at Kamenevo

Despite the intimidating armor and firepower of the T-34 and KV tanks, the Wehrmacht seemed to roll on to victory after victory. After encircling and destroying over six hundred thousand Soviet troops in Kiev in September, the Germans finally committed to a drive on Moscow. The tip of the armored spear piercing northeast towards the Soviet capital was led by the Fourth Panzer Division’s Kampfgruppe Eberbach. This combined arms force included a motorcycle-infantry battalion, five companies of Panzer III and IV tanks, and nine towed eighty-eight- and 105-millimeter guns.

On the morning of October 6, 1941, the Kampfgruppe overran infantry and T-26 light tanks defending the town of Kamenevo, close to Mtsensk, 170 miles southwest of Moscow. However, as the Panzers rolled up the road leading to Tula, they were started to behold a vast armada of T-34 and KV tanks charging towards their left flank across an open plain. The night before, Col. Mikhail Katukov had hidden his Fourth Tank Brigade in an ambush position. The Soviet armor now pounced in a concentrated rush.

Heavy guns deployed on an overlooking ridge began picking off Soviet tanks, but there were too few to stem the tide. The armored horde overran the ridge, crushing several of the guns under their treads, and plunged into a wild melee with the undergunned Panzers. The only bright side for the Germans was at that short range, they had a slightly better chance of penetrating the thick Russian armor from the side.

Amidst the chaos of milling Russian tanks, Eberbach was eventually able to fall back, losing around a dozen tanks destroyed or damaged while knocking out eight of the Russian heavies—at least by their own count. The first winter snow arrived the following day. The Wehrmacht would secure the Mtsensk region three weeks later, but Katukov’s counterattack had fatally upset the pace of their advance, which fell just short of Moscow before the Russian winter froze it for good.

That victory came at great cost. The Red Army had lost nine hundred KV-1s and 2,300 T-34s by December 1941.

Unreliable Steel Beast

Through 1943 the Soviets built more than four thousand KV-1s, with successive model initially bolting on more and more armor to the overloaded vehicle. This trend peaked with model 1942 KV-1c, which boasted a ZiS-5 seventy-six-millimeter gun, a maximum of 130 millimeters of armor—and a road speed of just seventeen miles per hour! These assumed a major role in the Soviet offensives of 1942. There was also a run of around seventy KV-8s sporting flamethrowers in place of their main guns.

However, while the KVs were nearly invulnerable to early-war German tanks, they suffered from terrible visibility and defective transmissions. Frequent mechanical breakdowns and slow speed meant they struggled to keep up with the T-34s alongside which they served.

Finally recognizing these crushing defects, Soviet factories followed up with the lighter KV-1S, which selectively trimmed armor down to seventy-five millimeters, while fixing the transmission and vision slits. The more reliable vehicle could keep pace at twenty-eight miles per hour.

But by that time, new German tanks with improved armor and long-barreled seventy-five- or eighty-eight-millimeter guns could penetrate the KV’s formerly near-impervious armor. While the KVs were still tough, that no longer made up for their high expense and by then merely average firepower.

Thus, the KV-1 was fated to fade from prominence, unlike its stablemate the T-34. Only a few battalions of KVs served in the Battle of Kursk, the titanic armored clash of the summer of 1943. These proved completely outclassed in confrontations with new German Tiger and Panther tanks.

To counter that threat, Soviet factories churned out 148 KV-85s, a stopgap model upgraded with an eighty-five-millimeter gun. However, tank designers were already working on installing the gun on the T-34 tank, while the more heavily armed and armored Joseph Stalin series of tanks took over the KV’s role. Still, small numbers of surviving KV-1s would serve through the remainder of the war, including in the siege of Leningrad, the recapture of Crimea and the invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria in August 1945.

Despite their superior armor, the KV tanks simply sacrificed too much mobility, reliability and cost-efficiency to equal the success of the T-34. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the formidable tanks and their crews served as a vital bulwark in the desperate early months of the Nazi invasion.

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

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft.

Here's What You Need to Remember: China's island-chain defense is strategy on the cheap in relative terms. It’s an approach that would conjure a glint in Andrew Marshall’s eye.

The feel-good story of last month comes out of the U.S. Marine Corps, whose leadership has set in motion a crash effort to field anti-ship missiles for island warfare. Grabbing headlines most recently is the high-mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. In effect, HIMARS is a truck that totes around a launcher capable of disgorging a variety of precision-guided munitions. Some can pummel ships at sea.

And devil dogs will grin. As will their U.S. Navy shipmates. America’s navy can use all the joint-service help it can get as it squares off against China and Russia in their home waters. The Marine Corps Hymn proclaims that marines are “first to fight,” and that remains true in this age of Eurasian seacoasts abristle with long-range precision-guided armaments and missile-armed ships and planes prowling sea and sky. But that fight will commence at sea, not on distant beaches. Marines realize they may never reach Pacific battlegrounds without first winning command of waters that furnish an avenue into contested littorals.

Marine Commandant Robert Neller is fond of telling his comrades they must “fight to get to the fight.” His logic is remorseless. And marines will take up arms in company with navy and merchant-marine sailors who man the fleet. Expeditionary forces can’t even begin prying open the halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli until they defeat hostile navies and batter down “anti-access” defenses. But it goes further. In all likelihood, the fight will involve more than just the naval services. U.S. Air Force aviators may bear a hand in future high-sea imbroglios. Even the U.S. Army stands poised to get into the action as soldiers prepare for “multi-domain operations” spanning the terrestrial, air—and, yes, saltwater—domains.

In other words, future fights promise to be joint fights that mesh capabilities from naval and non-naval services. In that sense, the future promises to be a throwback to Pacific campaigns of old. It’s fitting, then, that marine magnates are peering both ahead and back in time as they orient the Corps toward today’s challenges. They want to harness newfangled technology to help win the war at sea while returning the service to its maritime heritage after seventeen years of battling insurgents and terrorists on dry land. In so doing they intend to bolster the efficacy of American maritime strategy.

First, technology. Nowadays sea power is no longer purely a matter for fleets. To the extent it ever was: that a ship’s a fool to fight a fort is an old adage, not one of recent coinage. Nor is sea power an exclusive province of navies. It is a joint enterprise whereby seagoing, aviation, and ground forces concentrate firepower at embattled scenes on the briny main to impose their will on the foe. The logic is plain. More and more shore-based weaponry can strike farther and farther out to sea as sensor technology and precision guidance mature. Fleets are beneficiaries of fire support from that weaponry so long as they cruise within its range.

Or as General Neller puts it, “There’s a ground component to the maritime fight.” Marines constitute “a naval force in a naval campaign; you have to help the ships control sea space. And you can do that from the land.”

And you can do it best from the land you already occupy. Emplaced on islands dotting the Pacific Ocean, HIMARS and kindred missile launchers could give Chinese ships of war a very bad day. If positioned along the “first island chain” paralleling the mainland’s coastline before the outbreak of war, marines and their joint-service and allied brethren could plausibly threaten to bar access to the Western Pacific and points beyond. And they could execute the threat in wartime, confining Chinese merchantmen, warships, and aircraft to the China seas to exact a frightful economic and military penalty should Beijing do things the United States and its allies hope to deter.

The Marine Corps’ missile procurement blitz will be instantly familiar to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In fact, the marines are mounting a version in miniature of the PLA’s “anti-access/area-denial,” or A2/AD, strategy. China’s armed forces want to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint forces out of the Western Pacific or take a heavy toll should they try to break in. Advanced technology likewise super-empowers U.S. and allied forces. They could strew anti-ship and anti-air missiles on landmasses comprising the first island chain while deploying additional munitions aboard aircraft, submarines, and surface craft lurking nearby.

Land forces—marines and soldiers, American and allied—can anchor the ground component of U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. Like A2/AD, island-chain defense leverages the symbiosis between sea- and shore-based implements of sea power. Joint firepower will help expeditionary forces fight their way to the fight. Or, in the case of the first island chain, likely battlefields already belong to allies or friends. Island warriors only need to hold friendly soil—and as military sages from Clausewitz to Moltke the Elder teach, tactical defense represents the strongest form of warfare.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Beijing ought to feel flattered indeed. And dismayed!

Second, culture. Sophisticated implements like HIMARS accomplish little unless used with skill and verve. The naval services are trying to rejuvenate martial cultures deadened by three ahistorical decades. Once upon a time—in fact, throughout their history until recent times—the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy assumed they had to fight for command of the sea before they could harvest the fruits of command. In other words, they assumed they had to wrest control of important waters from local defenders in order to render seaways safe enough to land troops, bombard coastal sites, or, in the air and missile age, loft firepower deep into the interior. They had to make the sea a protected sanctuary.

In other words, they assumed they had to do what naval services have done throughout history. Yet service chieftains instigated a cultural revolution in 1992, declaring in effect that the sea services were now exempt from the rigors of peer-on-peer combat. That year they issued a strategic directive titled “. . . From the Sea” proclaiming that, with the Soviet Union dead and the Soviet Navy rusting at its moorings, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps could afford to reinvent themselves as “fundamentally different” sea services. With no peer antagonist to duel and none on the horizon, they were at liberty to assume away their most elemental function.

Not only could the sea services drop their guard; the leadership ordered them to. And they complied. Tactics and weaponry for prosecuting major combat languished in the wake of “. . . From the Sea.” The services first lost their fighting edge during the strategic holiday of the 1990s, and then while waging irregular warfare in the years since 9/11. Small wonder the services find themselves struggling to refresh their cultures for the new, old age of great-power strategic competition that’s upon us.

Few in uniform today remember the Cold War, when the prospect of battle was a daily fact of life. Preparing for strategic competition demands more than upgrading equipment or relearning skills grown stale. It demands that officialdom and senior commanders imprint bloody-minded attitudes on the sea services anew. Only thus will they extract maximum combat power out of new weapons and sensors, assuring hardware fulfills its potential.

And third, strategy. If highfalutin’ technology and the cultural counterrevolution pan out, the U.S. Marines and fellow services will have positioned themselves to execute a strategy that could give rival great powers fits. Look back again to look ahead. During the late Cold War, the founding chief of the U.S. Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, exhorted the Pentagon and the armed forces to fashion “competitive strategies” whereby they could compete at a low cost relative to American economic means while compelling the Soviets to compete at a prohibitive cost relative to their means. Over time the approach would render waging cold war unaffordable for Moscow.

Competitive strategy is a mode of competition worth rediscovering. The United States and its allies are developing hardware and methods for closing the straits puncturing the first island chain to Chinese vessels and aircraft. In so doing they can deny China the access it must have to transact commerce, diplomacy, and military affairs in faraway regions. And they can close these narrow seas with systems such as HIMARS. While HIMARS anti-ship rounds are not cheap in absolute terms, dislodging rocketeers from Pacific islands would prove far more burdensome for the PLA. An allied strategy can compel Chinese forces to fight to get to the fight—flipping the logic of anti-access and area denial against them.

In short, island-chain defense is strategy on the cheap in relative terms. It’s an approach that would conjure a glint in Andrew Marshall’s eye.

Let’s call it a “Great Wall in reverse” strategy, with islands comprising the guard towers and joint sea power stationed on and around the islands forming the masonry in between. The legendary Great Wall was built to keep out Central Asian nomads who ravaged China from the steppes. Properly fortified, an archipelagic Great Wall can barricade China within the China seas—and thereby force the PLA to compete on allied terms at a fearsome cost to itself.

HIMARS, then, may look like a humble truck. In reality, it is far more: a tactical implement commanding significant strategic import. As the Marine Corps girds to fight in the air, on land, and sea, it ought to procure anti-ship weapons in bulk—and in haste.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, and author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in 2019.

Image: Reuters 

Stephen Silver

Politics, Americas

In the meantime, more rounds of stimulus appear unlikely to arrive, at least not from the federal government.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The borrowing took place in 2020 before it was clear that more stimulus would pass from the federal government, although just such a bill was passed in March of 2021 after President Joe Biden took office. The American Rescue Plan Act, in addition to its checks to individuals, provided a massive amount of aid to state and local governments. 

Back in December, the city of Chicago took out $500 million in short-term debt. More recently, the city announced that it will be using money from the American Rescue Plan Act to pay down that debt, according to a Marketwatch report.

The report explained how the maneuver worked. 

“Last November, facing a near–$800 million fiscal 2020 budget gap, due mostly to the pandemic, city managers decided to take on $450 million in short-term debt, plus interest. City managers reached out to several banks and found JPMorgan Chase & Co. offered the best rate. The deal was finalized in December. The one-year credit line offered a set of advantages. Most notably, it bought the city time to see whether more fiscal stimulus money would become available.” 

The borrowing took place in 2020 before it was clear that more stimulus would pass from the federal government, although just such a bill was passed in March of 2021 after President Joe Biden took office. The American Rescue Plan Act, in addition to its checks to individuals, provided a massive amount of aid to state and local governments. 

Some have questioned whether the move on Chicago’s part was proper. 

“State and local governments aren’t supposed to borrow to keep their budgets balanced,” according to the Marketwatch report. “While many use lines of credit or short-term debt (often called Revenue Anticipation Notes), those are primarily for expected, ongoing revenues that just happen to be lumpy throughout the fiscal year, leaving certain periods of time with no money coming in to support ongoing spending.”

Amanda Kass, who was a source for the Marketwatch story, talked about Chicago’s move on her blog. She said that while the move itself isn’t particularly problematic, the lack of transparency is. 

“One reason the Mayor’s ARPA spending plans are confusing for a general audience is that the discourse used to explain the plans is largely directed at the municipal bond market, including credit rating agencies, bank underwriters, and investors,” Kass wrote in the blog post. “At the May 2021, investor conference, city officials made it clear that the Mayor is proposing to use 40% of Chicago’s ARPA funds to pay-off short-term borrowing and cancel long-term debt refunding and restructuring (or “scoop-and-toss”) that the City Council had previously approved (see a screenshot of the slide below).”

In the meantime, more rounds of stimulus appear unlikely to arrive, at least not from the federal government. None of the negotiations in Washington have anything to do with additional checks, and it does not appear that political will is there in either party to pass more checks for everyone, or massive aid to cities and states.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

Meet Skunk Works: America’s Secret Weapon Program 

Key point: This special division helped to invent many important weapons, including stealth planes. What is the history of this amazing group of engineers?

In June 1943, aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson received a momentous request. The Nazis were only a year away from deploying the first operational jet fighter into service in World War II, which would have a tremendous speed advantage over Allied piston-engine fighters. The Pentagon wanted Johnson to develop an operational jet fighter, using then-new turbojet engines as quickly as possible—and it didn’t want Johnson to wait for the fine print to be signed in the contract.

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

Kelly was told he had just five months (150 days) to produce a flying next-generation jet prototype.

The Michiganian of Swedish descent had originally joined Lockheed as a tool designer with an $83 monthly salary. However, after devising an innovative fix for the Model 10 airliner, he rose through the ranks to become the company’s chief designer in 1938.

Johnson’s first major military design was the P-38 Lightning, a very fast, hard-hitting and far-flying twin-engine fighter that used a twin-boom configuration unlike any other aircraft then in service. Johnson assembled a small team of engineers, walled them off from other company operations, and settled on the Lightning’s design after exploring numerous other unconventional concepts.

Johnson used similar methods to structure his XP-80 project at a new, top-secret facility in Burbank, California, adjoining a local airport. Johnson handpicked a team of thirty engineers and thirty mechanics who began working on the XP-80 under the shadow of a huge circus tent. One of them was a Cherokee mathematician named Mary Golda Ross, who had earlier helped fix aerodynamic flaws in the P-38s and became the first Native American flight engineer.

A nearby chemical factory nearby caused an unpleasant stench to drift over facility, leading to the nickname “Skunk Work,” adapted from a foul-smelling moonshine factory depicted in the satiric comic strip Li'l’ Abner. Later, copyright concerns led the nickname to be changed just as aptly to “Skunk Work,” reflected in the branch’s skunk logo to this day.

Johnson’s management philosophy, later consolidated in a list of “Fourteen Principles,” focused on moving rapidly to prototype development rather than sweating every last detail; maintaining creative autonomy from other company operations; remaining externally secretive, but transparent to government clients; keeping diligent monthly accounting of expenses to avoid cost overruns; and minimizing bureaucratic red-tape of all varieties by simply implementing fixes instead of subjecting every little change to review by committee.

Just 143 days later—seven days ahead of schedule—the Skunk Works team had produced a flying XP-80 prototype which would become the U.S.’s first operational jet fighter. Though too late to fly more than a few patrols at the end of World War II, the F-80 Shooting Star production model would see extensive action in the Korean War, and possibly scored the first jet-on-jet kill in history.

Design Philosophy

Engineering cutting-edge aircraft requires both creative vision and scientific rigor. Innovative out-of-the-box ideas must be subjected to mathematical scrutiny and then relentlessly tested to determine whether they actually work when subjected to the harsh and often inscrutable laws of physics. And unforeseen problems inevitably crop up.

Project managers need the freedom to explore diverse concepts and repeatedly iterate upon the more promising ones until they deliver results, while exercising the discipline to prevent projects from running way over schedule and budget, like the infamous Spruce Goose—a huge mega-transport plane that only flew once for thirty seconds.

These qualities fly in the face of the usual bureaucracy required in the military industrial-sector. Governments, understandably, want to ensure every tax dollar is spent on projects with low risks of failure—and examples of expensive projects sucking billions of dollars in funding only to fail abound.

Johnson’s high-independence, low-red tape model for the Skunk Works proved so successful a template that “Skunk Works” became a byword for any task force within a company assigned additional independence to pursue innovative, cutting-edge projects. Lockheed’s competitor Boeing, for example, has a Phantom Works division which recently was awarded a contract for a new tanker drone.

In the 1950s, Johnson was made the manager of the Burbank facility, technically designated the “Advanced Development Projects.” Under his management, the ADP developed a remarkable number of revolutionary new aircraft—many of which made their mark on American history.

The U-2, for example, was a bizarre super-high-flying spy plane originally modeled off a concept for a spy glider. A U-2 spy mission brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union when it photographed Soviet nuclear missiles recently deployed to Cuba in 1962.

By the late 1950s, however, Johnson was aware the U-2 could not fly high enough to evade Soviet missiles and interceptors. Thus the Skunk Works then set out to develop the Blackbird family of aircraft—codenamed Archangel—that would use speed and radar stealth for protection. Lockheed had to sneakily purchase titanium from the Soviet Union through shell companies and develop new tools to work the super-hard metal.

The Blackbird was certainly fast, able to blaze past missiles while cruising at Mach 3.2, but even its angular profile failed to evade radar detection. In the mid-1970, the Skunk Works made a second go at developing a stealth jet. Johnson, who was then retiring, originally proposed curved surfaces for the new stealth plane. However, his friend Ben Rich convinced him that stealth could be achieved with faceted surfaces that the design computers of the time were more capable of handling.

The concept led to the aerodynamically unstable Have Blue prototype tested in Area 51, that evolved into the faceted F-117 Nighthawk attack jet. Though the Nighthawk’s capabilities were limited in many respects, it was the first true stealth aircraft to enter operational service.

In 1989, the Skunk Works moved to a new facility in Palmdale, California. Johnson passed away the following year. By then the division was working on two new projects that will continue to define U.S. airpower well into the twenty-first century: the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II.

The twin-engine Raptor essentially married the high-performance characteristics of fourth-generation fighters like the F-15 Eagle with the stealth capabilities that far exceeded those of the Nighthawk—resulting in the world’s reigning air superiority fighter.

The single-engine F-35 fulfilled a very different concept of an affordable multirole stealth fighter that could be exported abroad and operated by the Marines, Navy and Air Force. However, designers in the Skunk Works again pursued an innovative but still controversial solution: instead of pursuing high kinematic flight performance as was done for the F-22, the F-35 instead relies on advanced sensors and computers to stay out of the detection range of opposing fighters or air defense missiles, and either engage them with long-range missiles or shuffle that targeting data to another “shooter.”

Though Kelly’s earlier projects certainly experienced growing pains, the F-35 has proven slower and rockier than its predecessors. Its developers intended to build a versatile swiss-army knife of a plane that could be upgraded with new capabilities via software patches. The many ambitious new technologies proved difficult to integrate, leading to major delays and cost overruns.

Today, the Skunk Works appears to be working on another unconventional project to build a (likely unmanned) hypersonic spy/bomber jet unofficially dubbed the SR-72. It has also developed numerous spy drones that remained veiled in secrecy, particularly the RQ-170 stealth drone.

As jet fighters grow more expensive and vastly more complex, the innovative high-speed project management methods used by the Skunk Works may prove harder to sustain due to the need to integrate more and more advanced avionics and computers developed by industrial partners.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s innovation-focused approach made an invaluable contribution to an understanding in sectors ranging well beyond military aviation that groundbreaking achievements sometimes require allowing a small team of brilliant thinkers to assume more risk and responsibility.

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

Image: U.S. Air Force

James Holmes

Military Affairs, Global

Ship types have displaced one another from the cores of fleets across the decades and centuries. But maybe it’s time to unseat the "ship" itself. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Customizing a fleet for likely battle settings constitutes the challenge before U.S. maritime strategists and the warriors who will prosecute strategy. Breaking the mold might mean demoting the ship from its central place in sea power. It certainly demands a supple way of thinking about warlike encounters at different places and times, and against different antagonists.

Is the “ship” still the arbiter—and the proper unit of measurement—of naval power? Perhaps not. Maybe fleet designers need to shatter their fealty to tradition and do something altogether new to win future high-seas wars. They may need to fashion a new U.S. Navy “fleet” that incorporates ships alongside such not-strictly-naval implements as unmanned vehicles prowling sea and sky, U.S. Air Force bombers unleashing anti-ship missiles or minefields, or even U.S. Army rocketeers equipped to pummel enemy ships and warbirds. Artfully constituted, this hybrid fleet will bring to bear any asset able to shape events at sea.

And so it should. When tabulating naval power, estimate strength relative to opponents; don’t count up widgets except insofar as they buttress strength.

Such ships as help make up this new-age fleet may look drastically different from traditional men-of-war. They could be winsome diesel-electric submarines of a sort the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated in decades. Converted merchantmen or even superempowered fishing craft could act as fighting ships. Vessels could be manufactured at foreign yards or leased from foreign navies or commercial fleets. Imagination must roam free when you need lots of platforms in a hurry, and on the cheap, to haul ordnance to scenes of battle and deposit it on target.

This wouldn’t be the first time some mix of gee-whiz technology and novel warmaking methods turned the world upside down. According to maritime historian Julian S. Corbett a “revolution beyond all previous experience” upended fleet design more than a century ago, when the sea mine, torpedo, and submarine debuted—rendering hulking battleships and cruisers suddenly vulnerable. The aircraft carrier eclipsed the battleship during World War II. The nuclear-powered submarine has arguably eclipsed the carrier since the Cold War.

And on the rhythm of naval history goes. No ship type rules the waves forever.

That being the case, it may be possible to wring decisive combat power out of the current U.S. Navy fleet of 280-odd ships without building up to 355 hulls, the figure Congress wrote into law to help the navy cope with this age of great-power competition against the likes of China and Russia. Whether such a feat is possible is one question among many tackled by last week’s “Breaking the Mold 2.0” workshop in Newport. My boss, Rear Adm. Jeff Harley, charged the gathering with devising “novel and radical” ideas to break the “mold” manifest in orthodox thinking.

Ship types have displaced one another other from the cores of fleets across the decades and centuries. Maybe it’s time to unseat the ship itself. That would fulfill Admiral Harley’s mandate on behalf of radicalism.

Whence comes orthodoxy? It stems in part from human nature, as transcribed into institutional and even national culture. Philosophers warn that the timber of humanity primes us to project past trends into the future, assuming that past performance guarantees future results. Breaking the mold is hard absent some cataclysm that breaks it for us. The carrier and its complement of fighter and attack planes existed at the outbreak of war in 1941 thanks to naval visionaries. Yet it still took the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor to jolt U.S. naval potentates out of their battleship-centric worldview.

Bureaucracy is like a machine. It exists to perform a repertoire of routine functions over and over again, the same way every time. This is its blessing and its curse. It handles mundane tasks with efficiency, yet it prejudges the answers to important questions. When the time comes to retire a ship or aircraft type, the bureaucratic machinery tends to replace it with an improved version of the old—a new ship or aircraft that executes the same basic missions with better sensors and armaments. Lawmakers and the electorate reinforce this mass-production mindset. Try explaining to Congress or the American people that the U.S. Navy need not be made up of ships!

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The workshop organizers saw tapping outsiders and youthful voices as one way to smash the mold of conventional maritime thought. Three-quarters of the Breaking the Mold attendees were new to the series, which got its start last March. A third of them held the rank of O-5 or below, meaning they were U.S. Navy commanders or below or their equivalents from the Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force. A handful of whippersnapper civilian officials also took part. This was no colloquium for gray-haired eminences. Not entirely, at any rate.

One imagines mixing youth with age would have set Theodore Roosevelt’s heart aglow. After all, this was someone who empowered youth and moxie. When junior officer Lieutenant W. S. Sims saw his proposals for improving the dismal state of U.S. Navy gunfire control rebuffed by senior leadership, he wrote directly to President Roosevelt—and the president put him in charge of target practice for the whole navy. TR steamed to Newport late in his presidency to preside over a conference designed to break the mold in battleship design, then the state of the art in naval technology. The “Battleship Conference” gave junior to mid-career officers a voice vis-à-vis the highest authority.

And TR seemed sincere about affording youngsters their say. Late in 1908 the president informed Congress that “wise radicalism and wise conservatism go hand in hand, one bent on progress, the other bent on seeing that no change is made unless in the right direction.” At the time Roosevelt was musing about social and industrial conditions that demanded progressive reform, not about naval or military affairs. Still, his formula—mold-breakers push for change while conservatives try to preserve what exists and works—bolsters the likelihood of productive debate.

Including debates about maritime strategy, doctrine, and force design. Wise radicals formulate wacky-sounding hypotheses. Wise conservatives object that all such hypotheses must undergo the test of reality before the establishment endorses them. Naysayers demand proof, insisting—rightly—that to leap without looking courts disaster.

In theory, then, the push-and-pull interplay between radicalism and conservatism should beget an experimental ethos within the sea services. Young Turks in the ranks might decry gauging naval power by the number of ships in the inventory. That’s oldthink, they might say. Ripostes from the old guard would accent the perils and downsides of decoupling force design from time-tested methods. Rigor in field trials would be oldtimers’ watchword. Insurgents would hit the gas on change, traditionalists the brakes. The scientific method would help the U.S. Navy identify and avoid dead ends and stay moored in reality while also embracing ideas that prove their worth.

Grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz would nod knowingly at this debate. “The best strategy,” proclaims the Prussian sage, “is always to be very strong; first in general, and then at the decisive point. Apart from the effort needed to create military strength, which does not always emanate from the general, there is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated. No force should ever be detached from the main body unless the need is definite and urgent.”

Ground warfare between contiguous nineteenth-century European states constituted Clausewitz’s frame of reference. He was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, with their massed formations of infantrymen, cavalry, and artillerymen. Yet he refuses to be held captive by his times. He declines to designate specific army formations or weaponry as universal repositories of combat power. The point of strategy, maintains Clausewitz, is to concentrate superior firepower at the decisive place on the map at the decisive time in order to overcome the foe. To be stronger when and where it matters, in other words, while abjuring lesser commitments that attenuate battle strength.

The Prussian master declines to specify what form strength should take. It seems the delivery system for firepower represents a secondary matter for him.

Clausewitz paid waterborne combat next to no attention, but he would doubtless project his principles seaward if asked. He would exhort U.S. naval officialdom to amass superior strength, making itself more powerful on the whole than likely antagonists. And he would urge strategists to study where likely hotspots lie on the nautical chart and to devise forces to make America the dominant contender there. There is no preordained determinant of high-seas battle power.

What type of fleet the U.S. Navy and its fellow services field may vary from theater to theater and contingency to contingency—and should. Carrier battle groups might remain the primary implements for waging, say, expeditions off the northern coast of Norway or Russia, where land-based weaponry is sparse. Seagoing forces stand mainly alone. Light surface combatants, conventional submarines, minelayers, and missile-armed ground forces might be the instruments of choice for slamming shut the first island chain to Chinese shipping and aircraft. Nuclear-powered attack subs might play the dominant part in Eastern Mediterranean or South China Sea imbroglios. U.S. Coast Guard cutters might spearhead operations in Arctic climes.

Customizing a fleet for likely battle settings constitutes the challenge before U.S. maritime strategists and the warriors who will prosecute strategy. Breaking the mold might mean demoting the ship from its central place in sea power. It certainly demands a supple way of thinking about warlike encounters at different places and times, and against different antagonists. The right fleet inventory might include 280 ships or even fewer, or it might include 355 or far more.

It depends. There’s no substitute for exercising imagination in an effort to foresee what prospective adversaries want at different places, how much they want it, how many and what forces they might deploy to get it, and how they might wield those forces in times of strife. These—not arbitrary ship counts—are the metrics against which American sea power will be judged. Only through such acts of foresight can U.S. naval commanders and their political masters determine the composition of the future fleet as well as the best ways to handle the fleet in action.

TR and Clausewitz would tell wise radicals and wise conservatives to hop to it.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Reuters.

Muhammad Bakr Ghbeis, Mohammed Alzoubi

Syrian Civil War, Middle East

The Syrian uprising was born in Daraa, and it would be poetic justice after all the loss if it is there that the Assad regime goes away for good.

The Syrian uprising erupted in the southern province of Daraa when kids wrote on public walls “your turn has come Doctor Assad.” Since then, Daraa has proven to be one of the icons of the Syrian uprising and calls for freedom, democracy, self-governance, and rule of law in Syria. The Assad government has responded to those calls with live bullets, siege, murder, and destruction. The city and province of Daraa hold a critical geopolitical role in the country. It borders two of the United States’ strategic partners, Jordan and Israel. The main trade pathways through Syria must go through Daraa, from the Arabian Gulf countries all the way to Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe. The Nassib Jaber border crossing port represents the busiest Syrian port of its kind.

I, Dr. Ghbeis, write as an American medical doctor of Syrian descent. I was educated in Syria and the United States, and in the past decade returned to Syria several times to support those Syrians most in medical need. I witnessed first-hand the devastating, inhuman conditions internally displaced Syrians have gone through. I witnessed how whole neighborhoods have been affected by a strategy of siege by the Assad government and its backers, which have targeted the most vulnerable components of society in Syria, the elderly, and children.

Unfortunately, that same strategy of siege has been used by the Syrian government on Daraa al-Balad for the past several weeks. As a result, the humanitarian and medical conditions of 55,000 men, women, and children have become unbearable. The regime is using collective punishment measures and reprisal against large groups of civilian populations in Daraa, both of which are recognized crimes against humanity. Furthermore, in Daraa, all the medical supplies provided to local hospitals and clinics by western NGOs were stolen by Assad’s government-backed militia for financial gain on the black market. What makes the situation even worse is the lack of doctors in Daraa because they, too, were targeted by the Syrian government since the peaceful uprising began a decade ago. Many doctors have fled, but others have not made it out. They and their families were assassinated before they could get out from under the siege.

Since the uprising began, Bashar al-Assad has made every effort to label those opposing it, including doctors, as terrorists. The regime’s false narratives include stating that Daraa’s residents are seeking to build a radical Islamic government in the southern part of Syria. In fact, as time passed, the province has proven to be one of the most resilient against extremist ideologies, despite the terrible hardship. ISIS was unable to hold territory in the area despite the government’s efforts to infiltrate it with ISIS cells, such as the “Yarmouk Martyrs” militia. Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades in Daraa seized the opportunity to fight extremist groups, including the Yarmouk Martyrs, and for several years, up until 2018, they maintained a tough stand against these groups. In 2018, Daraa province was handed over to Assad under the guise of “reconstitution. At that point, Assad claimed that his regime would take extremist elements and move them to other territories in the Syrian desert and areas near Deir ez-Zor under the watchful eye of the regime and its backers.

Following a 2018 agreement, brokered mainly by Russia and the Trump administration, control of the southern region of Syria was handed back to Assad. Among other things agreed upon in 2018, it is important to highlight the presence of Iranian militias and the requirement to keep them at a distance of no less than fifty miles from the Syrian borders adjacent to Jordan and Israel. This condition, however, was never met. On the other hand, a number of other key provisions in the agreement were met, including regime forces not being allowed to enter Daraa; local FSA fighters handing over heavy weapons and maintaining only small arms, and some of the FSA fighters being rolled into a new brigade under Russian command.

In the meantime, Iranian militias were infiltrating Syrian communities and neighborhoods in different ways across the country. Some of the militias operate under the leadership of Lebanese Hezbollah and other militias under different names, such as Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun. These foreign militias move around Syrian society wearing the same military fatigues as members of Assad’s army. Some are organized under the Syrian Army’s 4th Division, which is commanded by Assad’s brother, Maher. This Syrian army division is fully controlled by Iranian interests. The siege in Daraa and the effort to displace the 55,000 Syrian civilians from their homes there in order to tighten control of the southern Syrian region was notably conducted by Assad’s government forces and Iranian militias.

Iran is clearly seeking to control areas in southern Syria, such as Daraa, in order to expand its influence in a wider space in Syria. Iran had done the same in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah. Eventually, Iranian influence expanded in Lebanon to areas far beyond southern Lebanon including the capital, Beirut. In fact, Iran would like to use southern Syria as it did southern Lebanon all in the name of the goals of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. 

The Iranian initiative in Syria is unacceptable to the people of Daraa. The opposite is true. While the residents of southern Lebanon may have shared sectarian beliefs with Iran, the same is not the case in southern Syria, which is a melting pot of Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and the Shia sect presence is weak in the area.

Prior to 2018, the United States supported Syrian society in southern Syria and backed FSA fighters as well. It was a positive influence on local Syrian communities, in places like Daraa, helping to maintain stability and counter efforts at radicalization as well. However, in 2018, American engagement and influence were lost in that part of Syria to Russia and Iran. The recent escalation in Daraa presents an opportunity for the Biden administration to re-engage communities in this critical region of Syria and impact them in positive ways. Such U.S. engagement will in turn put pressure on Assad and his backers to re-engage diplomatically toward a negotiated settlement on the future of Syria.

The recent events in Daraa make it very clear that the communities in southern Syria are not interested in taking orders from the regime despite the terrible human toll suffered because of it. It would be timely indeed if the United States and its allies fully understood this point and led a diplomatic initiative to end Syria’s decade-long humanitarian crisis by calling the regime to the table and insisting that it compensate the millions of Syrians that have suffered from its policies. Assad will not compromise if he is not made to understand that to do otherwise is far more dangerous for him. Daraa and southern Syria represent an opening to a much-needed political transition in Syria for the sake of all Syrians and the international community. The Syrian uprising was born in Daraa, and it would be poetic justice after all the loss if it is there that the Assad regime goes away for good.

Dr. Muhammad Bakr Ghbeis is the President of C4SSA. Ghbeis was born and raised in the Damascus suburbs and graduated from Damascus University’s School of Medicine before immigrating to the United States in 2004. He now serves as a staff cardiac critical care physician and instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and has worked for several American NGOs including the Syrian Expatriates Organization; the Syrian American Medical Society; the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, and Kayla's list PAC.

Mohammed Alzoubi is a board member of C4SSA. He is originally from Daraa, in southern Syria. He is a founder and a board member of an NGO called Promise for Relief and Human Development, which established and managed a university and two colleges in Syria from 2016 to 2018. The program had more than 1200 students and employed more than 175 staff.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

America might be underestimating Chinese strength.

Here's What You Need to Know: If China commands South China Sea waters and airspace—or can deny the U.S. Navy the use of the regional commons—it can turn Mahan’s island-defense logic to its advantage. This is a real prospect. Think about the DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) paraded through Beijing. Lower-end estimates peg that bird’s range at 1,800 miles, upper-end estimates at 2,500 miles. Use the lesser figure for the sake of discussion. Pick up a compass, set it to 1,800 miles according to your map’s scale, and swing a circle around China’s Hainan Island.

It’s dangerous to live by the unexamined assumption. Exhibit A: the oft-heard claim that U.S. sea and air forces sporting precision-guided arms will make short work of military facilities on South China Sea islets. “So what?” says one Pentagon official of Beijing’s island-building project. “If China wants to build vulnerable airstrips on these rocks, let them—they just constitute a bunch of easy targets that would be taken out within minutes of a real contingency.”

RAND, too, softpedals the islands’ longevity in combat. In a generally estimable report on the correlation of forces between America and China, RAND researchers maintain that South China Sea outposts could host only “a handful of SAMs and fighter aircraft.” It’s doubtful, they say, that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces forward-deployed to “reclaimed” reefs or atolls would comprise “a significant factor in high-intensity military operations beyond the first hours of a conflict.” Nothing to see here, move along.

The syllogism behind such wartime prognoses seems to go like this: Island fortresses can’t stand against assault unless they’re entirely self-sufficient. China’s manmade islands aren’t self-sufficient in terms of defenses or logistics. So why fret about them?

To start with, a fundamental point: assuming away a foe’s ingenuity, martial skill, and thirst for victory ranks among the most egregious sins a strategist or tactician can commit. As military sage Carl von Clausewitz counsels, the enemy isn’t some lifeless, inert mass on which we work our will. Instead war involves a “collision of two living forces,” both intent on getting their way. “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent,” he adds, “I am bound to fear that he may overthrow me.”

“Thus,” concludes Clausewitz, “I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” Or, in simpler terms, respect the adversary. No serious competitor is a potted plant.

On to operational specifics. At first blush it makes sense that U.S. forces could pummel airfields, piers, and shore infrastructure from the sea and sky. We’ve seen missiles lofted by aircraft, surface vessels, or submarines hitting targets on CNN for the past quarter-century. And there’s no gainsaying the fact that these are tiny sites. Sparse real estate will compel their occupants to group warplanes, ships, and infrastructure closely—packaging targets neatly for destruction.

Right? Well, yes, if PLA commanders leave their island bastions isolated and exposed, subjecting them to American attack. But why would they? China is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, nor the Taliban, nor al Qaeda. It is a near-peer competitor vis-à-vis the United States. The PLA bears a panoply of high-tech armaments, is amassing more with gusto, and will be fighting on home ground. Unlike the second-tier adversaries the U.S. armed forces have faced since the Cold War, PLA gunners can shoot back with real prospects of success.

PLA commanders are apt to envelop the islands with overlapping, interlocking fields of fire emanating from nearby islands, ships and aircraft, and metropolitan China. Sea-power historian Alfred Thayer Mahan illuminates the intricacies of seizing and defending islands. Yes, he makes position, strength, and resources the litmus tests for coastal or island bases. Strength means defensibility, resources the base’s capacity to replenish stores and armaments without undue enemy interference.

Taken in isolation, no manmade Southeast Asian island fares well by Mahanian standards. Each is weak, and unable to resupply itself. But Mahan also notes that whoever commands the seas adjoining an island will ultimately control the island. If forces friendly to its defenders dominate the sea—and the sky, in this air-power age—they can guard it, augmenting its defenses, while ferrying stores to its tenants to help them ride out enemy action.

An island’s innate strength and resources recede in importance under these circumstances. Islands and naval forces, then, are interdependent—a point Mahan hammers home while recounting the Anglo-French maritime war of 1778. He likens naval war in the Caribbean Sea to a “war of posts”—the islands over which Britain and France were wrangling being the posts. Navies were the arbiters of maritime command in the age of sail. Mahan reproaches the French Navy in particular for shunning a decisive engagement against its British enemy.

Instead French commanders focused on wresting islands from Great Britain. Making real estate the main goal was their mistake in Mahan’s eyes. Defeat the forces that control the commons, and the islands will wilt on the vine—letting the victor collect the spoils. Fail to go after the enemy fleet, and the islanders may hold out.

If China commands South China Sea waters and airspace—or can deny the U.S. Navy the use of the regional commons—it can turn Mahan’s island-defense logic to its advantage. This is a real prospect. Think about the DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) paraded through Beijing last month. Lower-end estimates peg that bird’s range at 1,800 miles, upper-end estimates at 2,500 miles. Use the lesser figure for the sake of discussion. Pick up a compass, set it to 1,800 miles according to your map’s scale, and swing a circle around China’s Hainan Island.

You’ve just traced out the DF-26 range arc. You’ll notice that it spans the entire South China Sea—well beyond in many places. The contested Spratlys and Paracels nestle deep within. If the new missile, its fire control, and associated sensors pan out for PLA rocketeers on the technical side—always a fitting disclaimer when appraising new military technologies—then ships cruising within that arc are cruising within reach of shore-based PLA firepower.

Do the same using a 900-mile radius, and you’ve sketched the range arc for the older-generation DF-21D ASBM. The DF-21D envelope too encompasses much of the contested zone. That one-two punch makes for an intensely menacing tactical setting—even leaving aside the missile-armed tactical aircraft, patrol boats, and subs prowling sea and sky to drive up the costs of American access to Southeast Asia.

Mahan condemned “fortress fleets” like imperial Russia’s, which during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) huddled within reach of protective gunfire from coastal fastnesses like Port Arthur. He deemed relying on land-based firepower a “radically erroneous” warmaking method. Shore gunnery generally outranged and outmatched shipboard gunnery, making it perilous for ships to fight forts. But even land-based guns had short range in those days—meaning they could sweep only small sea areas of hostile fleets. Skippers who sheltered within range of shore fire support, consequently, were timid and defensive-minded. Seldom were they venturesome—or victorious.

Hence Mahan’s ire. Multiply the range of the fort’s guns from under 10 to 900 or 1,800 miles, though, and you change his calculus entirely. One doubts he would object to a navy like China’s that could roam the China seas—and far beyond—while remaining the beneficiary of fire support from Fortress China. PLA Navy skippers can be awfully offensive-minded within that vast maneuver space. Long-range fire support, then, represents a difference-maker for the PLA Navy. It likewise promises to be a difference-maker for air or naval forces forward-deployed to the artificial islands. Insignificant in themselves, these static bastions could become useful outer sentinels once integrated into a defense-in-depth merging ships, planes, and missiles.

That puts a different gloss on matters, doesn’t it? It suggests that U.S. forces will pay a price—potentially a heavy one—for pelting South China Sea airstrips and support infrastructure from the sea. The U.S. platforms doing the pelting may have to venture into harm’s way to accomplish their goals. The penalty island defenders levy against U.S. forces could come in direct costs, measured in ships and aircraft lost in the attempt. Such are the hazards of confronting peer adversaries.

U.S. forces, moreover, will certainly pay a penalty manifest in opportunity costs. U.S. Navy ships and submarines disgorge missiles from vertical launchers that can’t be reloaded at sea. They will expend rounds against the islands that can’t be replaced short of returning to base to rearm. That takes time, a commodity in short supply in wartime, while exposing them to further attack as they exit and reenter the battle zone. All of this depletes U.S. forces’ battle potential: a task force with half-empty or empty magazines accomplishes less and less.

Circumstances thus may compel naval commanders to delay follow-on combat operations, curtail them because ammunition is short, or forego them entirely. Inflicting combat losses, disrupting enemy logistics, throwing a kink into an enemy campaign: pretty valuable contributions for a bunch of rocks, aren’t they?

Think about a land-warfare (and, as a bonus, pop-culture) analogy from a bygone Southeast Asian conflict: the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago next month, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Hal Moore’s airmobile unit vaulted into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam by helicopter—and found itself alone and badly outnumbered and outgunned. It was stranded like, well, like an island in a hostile sea. To use the RAND team’s words, few observers would have thought a detachment from the 7th Cavalry would represent a significant factor in high-intensity military operations beyond the first hours of a conflict.

And yet Moore & Co. weren’t just relevant. They prevailed in the Battle of Ia Drang despite an overpowering numerical mismatch. On-call artillery from rear areas coupled with air strikes from U.S. Navy and Air Force warplanes overhead evened the balance against the North Vietnamese Army. Distant fire support empowered the American contingent to fight and win. Ripping a local tactical engagement out of its larger context, then, can mislead observers about the likelihood of victory or defeat. Flyspecks in the South China Sea may look helpless on the map—but they could prove far from helpless if the PLA can support them from afar.

Yes, this is an age of precision weaponry—but more than one combatant fields a precision-strike complex in Asia. And it’s the home team, boasting all the advantages defending your own turf confers. Take it from a one-time denizen of the fire-support and precision-strike worlds: don’t discount the island-building enterprise in Southeast Asia so blithely.

This is a grim diagnosis, to be sure. What’s the remedy? For one, take a page from Clausewitz. Refuse to lowball the rival competitor’s creativity and desire to get its way. Dredging up artificial islands would have sounded like a madcap idea as recently as two years ago, wouldn’t it? And yet here we are, debating how to manage these artifacts of Chinese ingenuity. Once Washington and its allies take the challenge seriously, they will improve their prospects of managing the situation in Southeast Asia in the cause of peace and maritime freedom.

Bear in mind that I’ve consciously oversimplified the situation in the South China Sea—and understated the PLA’s potential options in the bargain. For example, Hainan is far from the only candidate site for anti-access forces (although it does occupy a central, if northward, position). PLA commanders could compound the difficulties confronting U.S. air and sea forces by, say, forward-deploying mobile ASBMs to sites farther to the south. Including the islands themselves: military engineers could build hardened emplacements to protect these truck-launched weapons from enemy fire until the time comes to use them. That may or may not provide foolproof protection, but in all likelihood it would consume additional U.S. rounds during an offensive—raising the cost to the United States of reducing the islands.

Or, why should the PLA settle for static defenses? If ASBMs prove affordable in substantial numbers, why not deploy them aboard mobile landing platforms, or even aboard merchantmen anchored or loitering within reach of the islands? Doing so would extend PLA missile coverage even farther beyond the South China Sea rim. Better yet from Beijing’s standpoint, launch platforms could move around periodically to complicate the task of finding and targeting them. And think about the political optics: if a U.S. missile struck a harmless-looking commercial vessel, who would look like the bad guy once propagandists in China spun their narrative about the incident?

For another, U.S. military officials should lose no opportunity to fashion creative options of their own. If the South China Sea constitutes an increasingly lethal environment for airmen and surface-ship mariners, it also affords opportunities. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Why not take a page from the PLA’s playbook, for example, and transform islands into outposts of sea power? The Philippines is an archipelago, and it’s on the business end of Chinese aggression. Beleaguered Manila might well grant the U.S. Army permission to station missile-armed ground units on outlying islands—thence to threaten PLA ships, aircraft, and ground support facilities from dug-in positions. Let’s ask.

If the army wants to find its place in Asia-Pacific strategy, there could scarcely be a better venue. Ground pounders could help conserve precious U.S. Navy and Air Force platforms for bigger things. In so doing the army would spare the platforms able to penetrate the anti-access envelope with relative impunity—chiefly B-2 stealth bombers, nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or nuclear-powered attack submarines fitted with extra missile payload capacity—from wasting rounds better used to defend Taiwan, or Japan, or whatever may have come under threat.

Call it asymmetric warfare, American style, or archipelagic defense, or whatever your favorite catchy slogan might be. Let’s borrow from Mahan and stage some mutual access denial. Denying the PLA control of the seas and skies around its artificial islands would consign them to oblivion, should the worst happen. Knowing that, Beijing might refrain from further troublemaking in the region so long as the deterrent remains robust. Prolonged, uneasy deterrence is not a strategy to relish—just better than the alternatives.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in October 2015.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

The Zumwalt class destroyer is a one-dimensional vessel, while battleships remained multimission vessels throughout their service lives.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The only sense in which the DDG-1000’s plight does resemble a battleship is that Ii’s a heavy hitter whose reach is woefully short. Defense firms are developing new long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The U.S. Navy has experimented with repurposing land-attack cruise missiles for surface warfare—resurrecting a capability the leadership shortsightedly allowed to lapse after the Cold War.

Over the years it’s become commonplace for writers to sex up their descriptions of guided-missile destroyer (DDG) Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy’s newest surface combatant. Commentators of such leanings depict the ultra-high-tech DDG-1000 as a battleship. Better yet, it’s a “stealth battleship”—a fit subject for sci-fi!

Not so. And getting the nomenclature right matters: calling a man-of-war a battleship conjures up images in the popular mind of thickly armored dreadnoughts bristling with big guns blazing away at one another on the high seas, pummeling shore targets in Normandy or Kuwait, or belching smoke and flame after Nagumo’s warplanes struck at Pearl Harbor.

Such images mislead. Battleships were multi-mission warships capable of engaging enemy surface navies, fighting off swarms of propeller-driven aircraft, or pounding hostile beaches with gunfire. The DDG-1000 is a gee-whiz but modestly armed surface combatant optimized for one mission: shore bombardment. The shoe just doesn’t fit.

Now, there’s no problem affixing the label stealth to Zumwalt, which at present is undergoing its first round of sea trials off the New England coast. Shipbuilders went to elaborate lengths to disguise the ship from radar detection. Radar emits electromagnetic energy to search out, track and target ships and aircraft. It shouts, then listens for an echo from hulls or airframes—much as sightseers shout and listen when visiting the Grand Canyon.

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Quieting the echo is the trick. This 15,000-ton behemoth displaces half-again as much as a Ticonderoga-class cruiser yet reportedly has just one-fiftieth the radar cross-section of the fleet’s workhorse Arleigh Burke-class DDGs. While not entirely undetectable, DDG-1000 will look like a fishing vessel or other small craft on enemy radar scopes—if it’s picked up at all. Blending into surface traffic is no mean feat for an outsized destroyer.

How did shipwrights pull this off? For one thing, the geometry of the DDG-1000’s hull, superstructure, and armaments deflects rather than reflects electromagnetic energy. Right angles and surfaces perpendicular to the axis of EM radiation bounce back energy—boosting an object’s radar signature. Accordingly, the DDG-1000 design includes few right angles. Everything slopes. And while radar antennae, smokestacks, and other fittings clutter the decks of conventional warships, such items are mostly concealed within Zumwalt’s hull or deckhouse. That accounts for the vessel’s clean, otherworldly look.

For another, radar-absorbent coatings slathered on the ship’s external surfaces muffle such radar returns as do occur. While hardly invisible to the naked eye, this big ship will prove hard to detect—let alone track or target—while cruising over the horizon.

If stealth is an accurate adjective, though, dubbing Zumwalt a battleship conveys false impressions. First of all, there’s the matter of linguistic hygiene. It’s all too common among laymen to use battleship as a generic term for any ship of war. Indeed, I got my start as a columnist in 2000 precisely because reporters took to labeling the destroyer USS Cole a battleship. An explosives-laden small craft struck that unfortunate vessel in Aden, blowing a massive hole in her side. How could that happen if Cole was a battleship? Battlewagons are ruggedly built, with vulnerable spaces sheathed in a foot or more of armor. They were built on the assumption that they would take a punch in a slugfest with enemy battleships.

Destroyers aren’t built on that assumption. Describing Cole as a battleship obscured a basic fact about modern warships. U.S. mariners try to bring down the “archer,” namely a hostile ship or warbird, before he lets fly his “arrow,” a torpedo or anti-ship missile. That’s because few ships are built to withstand battle damage. Crewmen call them “tin cans” for a reason: it’s easy to pierce an American ship’s sides should an enemy round evade the ship’s defenses. So it should have come as no surprise that a small craft packed with shaped-charge explosives could land a crushing blow against one of the U.S. Navy’s premier combatants. Again: calling things by their proper names constitutes the beginning of wisdom.

Second, those who portray Zumwalt as a dreadnought seem to be thinking of dreadnoughts not in their prime but in their age of senescence. This too blurs important facts. Aircraft carriers supplanted battleships as capital ships—the fleet’s heaviest and rangiest hitters—during World War II. Dreadnoughts found new life as auxiliary platforms. They pummeled enemy beaches during amphibious operations. They rendered escort duty, employing their secondary batteries to help screen carrier task forces against aerial attack.

The DDG-1000 is optimized for that sort of auxiliary duty. In particular, the vessel sports a couple of long-range guns optimized for bombarding foreign shores, along with eighty vertical launchers capable of lofting land-attack cruise missiles hundreds of miles inland. The vessel thus meets the navy’s need to supply offshore fire support to troops fighting in coastal areas. Gunfire support is a capability that lapsed when the last battleship retired in 1992. In a narrow sense, then, it’s fitting to liken the Zumwalts to battlewagons.

But battleships never fully relinquished their multimission character. In their days of nautical supremacy, they dueled hostile battle fleets to determine who would command the sea. They then protected cruisers, destroyers, and amphibious craft that fanned out in large numbers to exploit maritime command. Dreadnoughts retained that primacy until the flattop and its air wing came into their own during World War II.

But they remained hard-hitting surface-warfare platforms even after being eclipsed. Carrier aviation didn’t render them obsolete. For example, the battleships Washington and South Dakota played a pivotal part in the naval battles off Guadalcanal in 1942. The Pearl Harbor fleet got some vengeance in a surface gun battle in Surigao Strait in 1944. Surigao Strait comprised part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, history’s last major fleet action. Iowa-class battlewagons resumed their surface-warfare function during a short-lived revival during the 1980s and 1990s. Equipped with Harpoon and Tomahawk anti-ship missiles to complement their nine 16- and twelve 5-inch guns, they formed the core of surface action groups while also discharging shore-bombardment missions.

In short, battleships remained multimission vessels throughout their service lives—even after technological progress relegated them to secondary status. The Zumwalt is one-dimensional by contrast. Each ship is armed with two “advanced gun systems” capable of raining precision fire—albeit with lightweight projectiles compared to battleships’ 1,900- and 2,700-lb. rounds—on land targets some 83 nautical miles distant. Marines will welcome the backup.

It remains unclear, however, how capable the advanced gun will prove against enemy surface fleets. For example, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service pays tribute to the gun’s long-range land-attack projectiles but makes scant mention of how the DDG-1000 would fare in surface warfare. The gun’s manufacturer touts the weapon’s “highly-advanced gunfire capabilities for anti-surface warfare,” yet—like the ship’s other boosters—overwhelmingly emphasizes the littoral-combat mission. To date, then, surface action appears to be an afterthought for the DDG-1000s—unlike their dreadnought forebears. That’s another nuance masked by the moniker stealth battleship.

In that vein, it’s fair to say the DDG-1000 suffers from the same problem bedeviling the rest of the U.S. Navy surface fleet. Assume the advanced gun system eventually boasts the same range against warships it boasts against land targets, eighty-three nautical miles. Guns can disgorge a large volume of fire, to the tune of hundreds of rounds, compared to the ship’s eighty-round missile magazine. That’s good.

But it matters little if the ship never gets within range to fire its guns. However impressive for a gun, eighty-three nautical miles is only a fraction of, say, the range sported by China’s YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile. Currently being deployed aboard People’s Liberation Army Navy ships and subs, the YJ-18 can strike at targets 290 nautical miles distant. Nor, apparently, will the Zumwalts carry Harpoons, whose range falls short of the advanced gun system’s in any event.

Like the rest of the surface warships, then, the DDG-1000 will find itself sorely outranged by the missile-armed submarines, warplanes and surface combatants that comprise the core of naval fighting forces around the Eurasian perimeter. Chinese or Russian forces can blast away from beyond the reach of American guns or missiles. And if U.S. forces try to close the gap, they will do so under fire—fire that will enfeeble them on the way.

In that the DDG-1000’s plight does resemble the battleship’s plight after Pearl Harbor. It’s a heavy hitter whose reach is woefully short. Defense firms are developing new long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The U.S. Navy has experimented with repurposing land-attack cruise missiles for surface warfare—resurrecting a capability the leadership shortsightedly allowed to lapse after the Cold War.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This piece first appeared several years ago and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: U.S. Navy Flickr.

James Holmes

China, South China Sea

An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena.

Here's What You Need to Know:  It’s the job of all strategic leaders to prepare for confrontation. To do otherwise courts disaster should confrontation come. But few sane leaders crave strife.

It’s been said that groupthink is a bad thing, that creative tension is a good thing and that appointing a “devil’s advocate” represents the best way to counteract the former while generating the latter. With any luck the give-and-take of debate yields better insights into ambient circumstances and how to manage them. To assure there is some give-and-take against the pressure of groupthink, the wise leader nominates a devil’s advocate to his team—namely a contrarian whose appointed task is to confound emerging wisdom by lodging arguments fair or foul.

The ornerier the better when you’re playing the part of Screwtape. So it’s with a whiff of fire and brimstone that I take issue with my friend Gordon Chang, who maintains that “China Wants Confrontation in the South China Sea.” Hence Beijing’s decision to disclose that USS Hopper executed a freedom-of-navigation cruise last week while Washington initially remained silent about it. Gordon regards Chinese bombast as proof that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders are spoiling for a fight of some sort, rather than as yet more proof that bombast is encoded in Communist China’s political DNA.

Keyword: wants. It’s the job of all strategic leaders to prepare for confrontation. To do otherwise courts disaster should confrontation come. But few sane leaders crave strife.

That includes Chinese leaders. We make much of Chinese sage Sun Tzu’s maxim that winning without fighting constitutes the supreme excellence in statecraft. Short of that, Master Sun implores generals and sovereigns to take enemy states intact, and to wage short, sharp wars in order to avoid bankrupting the treasury and national manpower. Their paramount mission is to win. Next most important is to hold down the expense in resources and lives for both combatants. Sun Tzu’s Art of War remains a staple of strategic discourses in China today, and justifiably so.

CCP chieftains may be pursuing self-defeating policies and strategies in the South China Sea. They may have resigned themselves to a rumble. And opportunism is their watchword: they will doubtless attempt to turn such encounters as do occur to diplomatic and strategic advantage.

But wanting to fight is another thing altogether—and would warrant different American and Asian countermeasures. An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena. Word choices matter. As the quintessential devil’s advocate Mark Twain wisecracks, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Strategists in the United States, its allies, and its friends should respond to Chinese deeds far differently if the problem is a lightning bug as opposed to a lightning strike. Mistake one for the other and you’re apt to overreact, underreact or mis-react (if that’s a word). Gordon takes his brief for Chinese belligerence just a trifle too far—but that’s a trifle that could beget errant strategy.

Nor, it bears mentioning, is the quest for bloodless victory an exclusively Eastern specialty. Strategists and philosophers from the Western canon tell us so. But their insight should come as cold comfort: winning without fighting should not connote collegial, noncoercive negotiations that yield compromises everyone can live with.

Sunny uplands do not await. Indeed, martial thinker Carl von Clausewitz interprets this phenomenon in characteristically bleak Prussian terms, vouchsafing that

[The] aggressor is always peace-loving (as [Napoleon] always claimed to be); he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it. In other words it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order not to be overwhelmed. Thus decrees the art of war.

If we submit to an aggressor’s demands or succumb to gauzy illusions that artful diplomacy always triumphs, we’re apt to find ourselves in a Clausewitzian predicament.

Linguistic precision, then, constitutes a virtue of no small moment not just for commentators, but for practitioners of statecraft. It helps us calibrate words and deeds to the surroundings.

Which brings us back to the voyage of USS Hopper. The linguistics of freedom of navigation—or, more accurately, freedom of the sea—matter just as much as how we describe China’s intent to seek or shun conflict on the briny main. As Maritime Executive and other press accounts report, an anonymous U.S. official classified the operation as an “innocent passage” close to Scarborough Shoal while maintaining the passage sent the same “message” as a freedom-of-navigation demonstration.

Not so! Under the law of the sea innocent passage is something vessels do when passing close aboard territory belonging to sovereign coastal states. This legal regimen obliges warships to desist from any activity that infringes on the coastal state’s security, such as military surveys, flight operations and the like. In other words, ships may transit through territorial waters—and do nothing else. So if Hopper indeed executed an innocent passage past Scarborough Shoal, and if the Pentagon branded it as such, then the operation conceded what it purported to dispute: that China can command sovereignty over geographic features deep within a neighboring coastal state’s offshore exclusive economic zone.

The cruise thus broadcast no other message than that anonymous spokesmen in Washington are befuddled—and that the Pentagon, which has stopped publicizing its efforts on behalf of nautical freedom, might be as well. Advantage: China.

Mischaracterizing your own actions, in short, amounts to self-defeating behavior in strategist-speak—or to shooting yourself in the foot in layman’s terms. And that leaves aside the fact that Scarborough entitles its owner to no jurisdiction over surrounding waters in the first place: it doesn’t even qualify as a rock by treaty standards, and thus bestows no rights or privileges on anyone that relate to freedom of the sea. Ships of any nation can lawfully do most anything there except fish or extract undersea natural resources. And they should.

While China has asserted squatter’s rights to the reef by virtue of its powerful navy and coast guard, the Philippines enjoys the sole right to harvest natural resources around the shoal. It enjoys that right not because Scarborough is a land feature conferring such jurisdiction, but because Scarborough lies within 200 nautical miles of Philippine shorelines—deep within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. So here again, portraying Hopper’s passage as an innocent passage affirms what friends of maritime freedom ought to contest, early and often. Seafarers must do nothing—wittingly or unwittingly—that ratifies lawless territorial claims.

Classical Chinese philosopher Confucius proclaims that calling things by their correct names constitutes the beginning of wisdom. What holds in life holds in diplomacy and strategy. Any devil’s advocate would agree.

James Holmes is the inaugural holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in January 2018 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

China, East Asia

Washington should be wary about a Beijing that has taken incremental steps toward small-stick diplomacy.

Here's What You Need to Know: Over the past couple of decades, likewise, Beijing has devised a variety of stratagems to flummox those who defy its claims to sovereignty over islands, sea, and sky. China started out with light-gray, largely inoffensive gray-zone tactics twenty-five years ago, but they darkened into coercion over time as its ambitions and power mounted.

Deterring aggression in the “gray zone” is hard. The keeper of an existing order—an order such as freedom of the sea—finds itself conflicted. That’s because gray-zone aggressors deliberately refuse to breach the threshold between uneasy peace and armed conflict, justifying a martial response. Instead they demolish the status quo little by little and replace it with something new.

Piecemeal assaults compel the status quo’s defenders to consider unappealing options. They can act first and bear the blame for the outbreak of war, for taking excessive risk, for provoking the revisionist power or for destabilizing the peace. Or, unwilling to incur such costs, they resign themselves to inaction or half-measures. Predisposed to put off difficult decisions, politicians can waffle, and surrender the initiative. Or they can escalate, and see their nation branded a bully.

An unpalatable choice. Gray-zone strategies are designed precisely to impose such quandaries on custodians of an existing order.

The stepwise approach is reminiscent of the late Thomas Schelling’s parable of the rebellious child who whittles down his parents’ willpower at the seashore. “Tell a child not to go in the water,” maintains Schelling, “and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet ‘in’ the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.”

Over the past couple of decades, likewise, Beijing has devised a variety of stratagems to flummox those who defy its claims to sovereignty over islands, sea and sky. China started out with light-gray, largely inoffensive gray-zone tactics twenty-five years ago, but they darkened into coercion over time as its ambitions and power mounted.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership codified its claim to offshore territory in domestic law in 1992, proclaiming that China held jurisdiction over disputed land features in the East and South China seas along with the surrounding waters. Western governments and press outlets deemed this development barely newsworthy, in large measure because Beijing made little effort to enforce the law. Though light in tincture, however, this Law on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone comprised an extravagant statement of purpose toward China’s near seas.

This largely forgotten edict prepared the way for additional assertions of legal authority while justifying more muscular gray-zone strategies. In 2009, for instance, the CCP leadership delivered a map of the South China Sea to the United Nations bearing a “nine-dash line” that delineated its claim to “indisputable” or “irrefutable” sovereignty over some 80–90 percent of that waterway. It later flouted a 2016 ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration that gutted its legal case for sovereignty. Beijing, it seems, has little fealty to commitments it has freely undertaken—commitments such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—when operating in the gray zone.

China also projected its claims skyward. In 2013 the leadership declared an air-defense identification zone over the East China Sea, encompassing Japanese- and Korean-administered islands. It asserted the power to regulate air traffic moving up and down the Asian seaboard, parallel to the coast, rather than traffic bound for China. Controlling airspace—not defending China against inbound aircraft—represented its true aim. Yet here, too, Beijing has only halfheartedly sought to enforce its air-defense zone—most recently by challenging a U.S. Air Force bomber bound for South Korea. Its skyward strategy remains light gray in execution, if not in principle.

Second, China’s “smile diplomacy” ranked as the lightest of light-gray ventures. Commencing in the early 2000s, Beijing fashioned a diplomatic narrative drawing on the charisma of China’s ancient mariner, Zheng He. The Ming Dynasty admiral commanded a series of “treasure voyages” six centuries ago, reinvigorating China’s tribute system in Southeast and South Asia without indulging in territorial conquest. Modern-day officialdom took pains to reassure fellow Asians that China would follow Zheng He’s pattern. It would make itself a potent yet beneficent sea power. It could be trusted not to abuse lesser neighbors.

In short, smile diplomacy constituted an effort to brand China as a uniquely trustworthy great power—and mute resistance to its maritime rise. Until the late 2000s, when China turned more assertive, regional audiences were by and large receptive to this soothing message.

Third, gray-zone tactics tended in a darker, more coercive direction after Beijing unveiled the nine-dash line in 2009. Zheng He found himself summarily jettisoned in favor of what we dubbed “small-stick diplomacy.” Rather than flourish the big stick of naval power, that is, CCP leaders unlimbered the small stick of maritime law enforcement coupled with militiamen embedded within the fishing fleet. Small-stick diplomacy represented a masterful gray-zone strategy. The small stick was big enough to cow Asian neighbors whose navies barely rated as coast guards, but it was too small to goad the United States into sending its navy to defend allies and friends.

Routine harassment of Asian coastal states projected the image that China’s coast guard and maritime enforcement services were simply policing waters that had belonged to China since remote antiquity. It was an effort to quash lawbreakers trespassing on Chinese territory. Small-stick diplomacy, in short, comprised a gray-zone strategy vis-à-vis the U.S. Navy but exhibited a dark, coercive hue toward Asian claimants. And that dualism suited Beijing just fine.

Fourth, China attempted a variant of small-stick diplomacy in the East China Sea but found the setting far less permissive. Since 2010 or thereabouts, China’s coast guard has conducted regular patrols in the waters around the Senkaku Islands. Its purpose: to challenge Japan’s administrative control of the islands and adjoining seas. For its part, Tokyo has staged a standing coast-guard presence in the archipelago’s territorial sea, buttressing its own control. The result is a curious form of joint Sino-Japanese administration of waters around the islets. Both sides police what they regard as their own.

While the Obama administration and Trump administration reaffirmed that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands, obliging Washington, DC to help defend them against attack, China’s East China Sea strategy displays the same kind of dualism as in the South China Sea. It’s coercive toward Japan yet stops short of triggering U.S. countermeasures. This tactic was enough to alter the status quo in China’s favor but not enough to trigger escalatory action-reaction cycles with Japan. And it keeps in play Tokyo’s insecurities about America’s commitment to Japan’s defense, granting China leverage over the alliance. In all likelihood this state of affairs will persist so long as Beijing refrains from trying to wrest the islets from Japan—so long, that is, as China keeps its strategy gray.

And fifth, CCP chieftains have discovered that building artificial islands—or fortifying existing ones—constitutes an effective gray-zone strategy. Its island-building enterprise has taken several forms over the years. In 1994, for example, China occupied Mischief Reef, deep within the Philippine exclusive economic zone. It commenced constructing structures at the reef soon afterward, converted it into a military outpost in 1998, and expanded it sufficiently to host an airstrip and defensive armaments by 2016.

If gradualism suited its purposes at Mischief Reef, China has exercised even more forbearance at Scarborough Shoal, another feature within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Its occupation of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 marked the final transition from smile diplomacy to small-stick diplomacy. China’s seagoing law-enforcement services shooed away Philippine mariners from this traditional fishing ground, imposing control over access to the shoal. Engineers, however, have yet to begin reclaiming seafloor around it to erect another armed redoubt.

Why such restraint? Geography may have dissuaded Beijing from acting. Unlike the other contested features, Scarborough Shoal perches near the principal Philippine island of Luzon. China’s leadership may fear drawing in the U.S. military, which is obligated to defend the Philippines under a longstanding mutual-defense pact, if it constructs a fortified outpost so close to an American ally. Politics is at work as well. Elected in 2016, furthermore, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has signaled his willingness to loosen the alliance with America while cozying up to China. That being the case, refraining from provocative acts probably appears prudent to CCP leaders. Why alienate a prospective ally?

And lastly, China went big, and fast, elsewhere in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagoes. Starting in 2013, civil engineers manufactured island bases from rocks and atolls scattered across the South China Sea. Chinese president Xi Jinping pledged not to “militarize” the artificial islands, freezing any serious response from the Obama administration, only to proceed with construction of airfields and other infrastructure. The result: a fait accompli.

It’s one thing to deter an aggressor from seizing ground, quite another to evict an aggressor from ground it has already seized. Island-building tactics of all three varieties have left China in possession of territory—and it’s hard to see how such gains can be reversed short of open warfare. Beijing has, in essence, forced the region and the United States to live with a new and largely irreversible strategic reality.

This typology of gray-zone tactics suggests that China is bringing to bear all elements of national power on the maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas. Beijing has employed legal, diplomatic, maritime and material elements of statecraft to chip away at the U.S.-led liberal international order. Even its construction prowess, honed over decades of massive infrastructure-building, has been on dazzling display in the heart of the South China Sea—contributing to strategic success.

For custodians of the current order, consequently, it is not enough to think exclusively about the marine dimensions of strategy. To balk China’s gray-zone stratagems, Washington and its allies must take a page from Beijing and adopt a holistic, grand-strategic posture that applies patient, vigilant countervailing pressure on many fronts simultaneously. In short, the defenders of the status quo must think in shades of gray and must accustom themselves to acting in the twilight between peace and war. To do any less would concede to China the initiative—and the future shape of the regional order.

Thomas Schelling would nod knowingly at the challenges before Washington and its partners. Unlike his milquetoast parents, let’s muster some strategic discipline.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

Toshi Yoshihara, also a coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

This article first appeared in May 2017 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

The Defense Department is moving quickly to deploy this new missile detection technology given the seriousness of the growing Chinese missile threat.

The Defense Department is accelerating a new program intended to bring an entirely new dimension to missile warning operations, by engineering a new Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) detection system intended to both identify the heat signature generated by the launch of an enemy missile as well as establish a flight track of a threat as it transits through space. 

Developers say next-generation OPIR includes several key upgrades over the existing Space-Based Infrared Satellites (SBIRS). First, OPIR detects more missiles including dimmer and quicker boosting types. Second, it provides coverage of missile targets with higher accuracy by using a more sensitive, accurate and faster frame rate sensor. Third, its sensors can resolve multiple targets with an image that is 25 percent better quality than SBIRS that improves incoming missile target counting. Finally, the hardened spacecraft includes modern cybersecurity plus significant other measures for added resiliency and survivability against potential adversary space capabilities. 

It is unsurprising that the Defense Department is moving quickly to deploy this new missile detection technology given the seriousness of the growing Chinese missile threat. China has new weapons, and more of them are capable of reaching the United States

“Commercial satellite imagery discovered what is accepted to be nuclear missile fields in Western China. Each has nearly 120 ICBM silos,” Admiral Charles Richard, Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, said at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. 

The challenge of organizing or distilling information while networking, pooling or aggregating vast volumes of information has inspired Lockheed Martin’s OPIR to connect with Raytheon Intelligence & Space and focus on an innovative approach called the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) Mission Data Processing Application Framework.

The OPIR-Integrated FORGE system helps architect the technical apparatus to gather, store, safeguard and network OPIR-related sensor information. It involves synchronizing fixed ground terminals with other nodes such as air and space assets; it also leverages cloud technology. In effect, when Spaced-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) sensors detect the key indicators of an important mission event, the data is then pooled, organized, analyzed and made available to key decisionmakers. This process will be substantially faster, more streamlined and comprehensive when networked with the merging OPIR system. 

Air Force’s strategic vision regarding the evolution of modern space and air warfare, as thinking regarding a technical and tactical transition from SBIRS to OPIR has been evolving along an interesting and highly impactful trajectory.  

A 2013 op-ed published by the Air and Space Journal from the Air Force’s Air University discusses the strategic transition inspired in large measure by the advent of new technology platforms such as OPIR, and data application systems such as FORGE. As part of a discussion about the architectural transition concepts from SBIRS to OPIR, the analysis, makes a point to address the advent of “disaggregation.”

“Initial concepts introduced by the center (Space and Missile Systems Center) include changing from SBIRS to a wide field of view (WFOV) disaggregated approach,” the paper writes.

This WFOV is exactly what OPIR seeks to establish, meaning that it is not only more precise, cyber hardened, resilient and networked, but it also removes any potential “gaps” or area in the GEO orbit in which a target could be tracked. 

“Although the OPIR mission area has existed for decades as overhead non-imaging infrared with SBIRS and other systems, it is now the new kid on the block, integrating target-signature nuances, time, and place into persistent intelligence and operational products,” according to the authors of the op-ed, Jeffrey Harris and Gilbert Siegert.

By operating without risky “gaps” in coverage, OPIR can perform the increasingly crucial task of establishing a continuous “track” on a fast-moving threat, such as hypersonics. There is great concern with certain threats which move beyond the earth’s atmosphere into space at unprecedented speeds, transitioning from one radar aperture field of view into another. As a threat travels from one segmented field of view to another, it can get lost and make it extremely difficult for sensing systems and networks to establish a continuous “track” of a fast target such as a hypersonic missile traveling at five times the speed of sound. 

This is why OPIR is being engineered with a decided emphasis upon upgradeability, meaning it is architected with a set of common, modular technical standards such that it can easily accommodate or integrate next-generation sensing technologies as they emerge. In fact, the Air Force has fast-tracked its efforts to obtain OPIR using something called 804 funding to create a compressed schedule that preserves quality yet expedites development to meet a pressing need. 

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

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

The time-tested method is to gather freighters, transports and tankers into convoys, provide them a retinue of escort ships—generally light surface combatants such as corvettes, frigates, or destroyers—and send them on their way through embattled waters.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Convoy duty is strategically defensive but tactically offensive in outlook. During the transit, in other words, the escorts keep company with the civilian vessels entrusted to them and await attack. When submarines or surface raiders come calling, the defenders try to blunt the attack and then hunt down the assailants. Through offensive defense they safeguard the merchantmen and the precious supplies they bear.

Jerry Seinfeld could make convoys the subject of a standup routine: what’s the deal with them? Or, more to the point, what’s the deal with navies that seem bent on unlearning hard-won lessons from past oceanic wars? Navies such as our own. The U.S. Navy leadership has reportedly informed the chiefs of the U.S. Military Sealift Command and Maritime Administration that “you’re on your own” when trying to run supplies or manpower across the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian oceans to support operations along the Eurasian rimlands. The navy can spare no escort ships to protect them.

That’s right: the threadbare U.S. sealift fleet must shift for itself in a far more lethal strategic environment than merchant mariners faced during the world wars, when the likes of Germany and Japan sought to cut the sea lanes U.S. armies, air forces and their logistical trains had to traverse just to reach battlegrounds in Western Europe and the Far East. It appears about 231 civilian ships are available for the logistical effort. That sounds impressive—until you consider that Axis submarines and surface raiders sank or damaged over five hundred U.S. merchantmen in 1942 alone.

And Axis boats were rudimentary diesel contraptions, not the nuclear-powered killers bristling with anti-ship missiles and sophisticated torpedoes that now prowl the deep. The logic behind open-seas raiding is simple and irresistible: defeat the logistical effort supporting a great-power military operating far from home and you defeat that military. The most overpowering expeditionary army accomplishes little if it can’t reach the theater of conflict or has little food to eat, ordnance to fire or spares to repair equipment.

If there’s one lesson high-seas warfare teaches, then, it’s that lesser powers go after merchantmen. Revolutionary America did it; Napoleonic France did it; Imperial and Nazi Germany did it; Imperial Japan did it. Weaker antagonists strive to interrupt shipments of manpower, ordnance and stores of all sorts needed to support expeditionary operations on distant battlegrounds. Or they damage the commerce on which seafaring nations depend to fund war making. Either way, a weaker antagonist can do a stronger foe grave harm by chipping away at its merchant fleet. Better yet, the weak can strike piecemeal without risking a toe-to-toe battle they might lose.

How to counter raiders? The time-tested method is to gather freighters, transports and tankers into convoys, provide them a retinue of escort ships—generally light surface combatants such as corvettes, frigates or destroyers—and send them on their way through embattled waters. Convoy duty is strategically defensive but tactically offensive in outlook. During the transit, in other words, the escorts keep company with the civilian vessels entrusted to them and await attack. When submarines or surface raiders come calling, the defenders try to blunt the attack and then hunt down the assailants. Through offensive defense they safeguard the merchantmen and the precious supplies they bear.

Over the years I’ve postulated that convoy operations bear a striking resemblance to counterinsurgent (COIN) operations in certain respects. Both strategies aim at defending the defenseless—villagers in the case of COIN, freighters, tankers and transports in the case of convoy duty. Thus, they deny attackers what they crave, namely access to the village or convoy. If predators come after villages or merchantmen, the wise protector stations sentries sporting superior firepower to guard them. After all, defenders know the foe must either show up on the scene or forfeit its strategic aims. The enemy has to come to you if you’re the guardian of a village or convoy.

But there’s another parallel between counterinsurgent warfare and convoy duty: armed forces hate both chores. They’re unsexy. They offer little glamour or renown, unlike big-unit battles. There’s no way to win in an afternoon. You have to win by increments and over time. Over time, commanders either grow neglectful toward the “other war,” expend their energies chasing around enemy main units in the countryside or the brine, or both. Few relish the humdrum, less than satisfying, day-in-and-day-out missions needed to vanquish insurgents or saltwater predators.

The U.S. Army resolved never again to fight insurgents after the debacle in Vietnam. It deliberately forgot—and had to rediscover the art and science of counterinsurgent warfare in the crucibles of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence the acclaim heaped on General David Petraeus’ brilliant “new” COIN manual for Iraq—a manual that refurbished time-worn, but forgotten ideas.

Nor is forgetfulness a solely American thing. Having grudgingly embraced convoys during the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain’s Royal Navy had to learn afresh during World War I, when Imperial German U-boats transformed the Atlantic Ocean into a killing ground for Allied merchantmen. Britain could have well starved under the press of undersea warfare. And having entered the Great War because of unrestricted submarine warfare and spent 1917–1918 combating the U-boat menace, the U.S. Navy had to relearn elementary facts about anti-submarine warfare during World War II. Hence the grievous losses off American shores in 1941–1942. These were the wages of institutional forgetfulness.

It seems the Seinfeld effect spans centuries of sea combat. What’s the deal?

Something even more basic may help account for such myopia. It may be that there’s a quirk to dominant combatants’ cultures. A force accustomed to dominating all it surveys may assume away challenges from lesser foes, especially if such foes have proved troublesome in the past. Having been stymied by Vietcong fighters and their North Vietnamese backers, U.S. Army commanders in effect erased counterinsurgent warfare from their institutional memory. The Vietcong were at once beneath notice and unbeatable at a price America was prepared to pay.

Dominant navies—the Royal Navy in its imperial heyday, the U.S. Navy today—likewise prefer to gird against rival battle fleets rather than invest scarce resources in vessels, methods and tactics useful for escort duty. The greats of maritime history would be aghast. Sir Julian Corbett, arguably Britain’s premier sea-power theorist, portrays control of the sea lanes as the core purpose of maritime strategy. In turn, the purpose of sea-lane control is to allow friendly merchantmen to pass across the oceans unmolested. The battle fleet is merely the protector of unarmed shipping and an enabler for this unglamorous-seeming function. If a major battle takes place, it takes place to protect commerce and logistics that underwrite the war effort on land.

No one covets sentry duty. British tars found naval raiders and privateers of old an unworthy but also stubborn foe. U.S. mariners may be repeating their mistake. If so, the first year of the next war could be 1942 all over again. That’s a trauma no one should want to relive.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

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

Image: Flickr.