The National Interest

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit,

There are still reports abound that parents have yet to see the funds in their respective bank accounts.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Do take note that after sending out last month’s Child Tax Credit payments, the IRS admitted that some “mixed-status” families—those with one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is an immigrant—didn’t immediately see the funds in their bank accounts.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department have confirmed that they are in the process of successfully disbursing the second batch of advance monthly payments worth approximately $15 billion from the expanded Child Tax Credits, but there are still reports abound that parents have yet to see the funds in their respective bank accounts.

According to the agencies, one glitch is due to an unspecified issue, and that up to fifteen percent of families who received the payment in July via direct deposit now will be getting a paper check via the post office this month.

“Like the first payments, the vast majority of families will receive these payments by direct deposit,” the IRS noted in a release. “For those affected, no additional action is needed for the September payment to be issued by direct deposit. Families can visit the Child Tax Credit Update Portal to see if they’re receiving a direct deposit or paper check this month.”

Getting one’s hands on the Child Tax Credits via traditional mail could potentially take a week or longer. “Be sure to allow extra time for delivery by mail through the end of August,” the agency advised.

Glitch No. 2

Do take note that after sending out last month’s Child Tax Credit payments, the IRS admitted that some “mixed-status” families—those with one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is an immigrant—didn’t immediately see the funds in their bank accounts.

The agency confirmed that the nonpayment was indeed a mistake and proper steps have been taken to rectify the matter. 

Lacking Necessary Information

Other eligible parents who may have not received their tax credits might not have the required information—such as an address and routing and bank account numbers—on file at the tax agency. Due to this issue, a recent report released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has indicated that roughly four million children from low-income families are at risk of not receiving any funds from the expanded credits.

For months, the IRS has asserted that the fastest way for Americans to get their hands on the credits or any of the three stimulus checks is to file a federal tax return as soon as possible. The public can also take advantage of the recently launched Non-filer Sign-up Tool, which will help disburse the credits promptly.

The expanded Child Tax Credits, approved under President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan last spring, now allow eligible parents to collect as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. Broken down, that means a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be deposited each month through the end of the year.

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

The latest estimates suggest that about thirty-six million American families are currently receiving the monthly payments, but the agencies have made it known that it isn’t too late to sign up for the recurring funds.  

Here's What You Need to Remember: A recent report released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that approximately four million children from low-income families are at risk of not receiving the monthly payments if the tax agency doesn’t have the required personal and financial information.

The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department already are two months into the disbursement of the expanded child tax credits that were approved under President Joe Biden’s ambitious American Rescue Plan. 

The latest estimates suggest that about thirty-six million American families are currently receiving the monthly payments, but the agencies have made it known that it isn’t too late to sign up for the recurring funds.  

Bigger Monthly Checks 

In fact, if a person chooses to sign up now, then the remaining payments would indeed be even bigger compared to those who have been receiving the checks since July.  

The chief reason is that the money is an advance on tax credits—of which half is to be delivered this year and the rest to arrive when individuals file their federal tax returns next year. Therefore, even if a person signs up late for the credits, the agencies will try to issue the entire first half of the credits by the time 2022 rolls around.  

For example, if a family missed the child tax credit payments in July but was able to sign up this month, there would indeed be a slight bump in the monthly checks.  

“This means that the total payment will be spread over five months, rather than six, making each monthly payment larger,” the IRS noted in a statement.  

“For these families, each payment is up to $360 per month for each child under age six and up to $300 per month for each child ages six through seventeen,” it continued.  

For weeks, the IRS has been urging potentially eligible Americans to take advantage of the Non-filer Sign-up Tool that will give the tax agency the necessary information—such as an address and routing and bank account numbers—to promptly disburse the funds.  

The IRS has also launched a brand-new feature that enables any eligible family to update their mailing address using the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, which can be found on IRS.gov.  

“This feature will help any family that chooses to receive their payment by paper check avoid mailing delays or even having a check returned as undeliverable,” the IRS says in a release.  

Focus on Low-Income Households  

Being able to reach the nation’s poorest households has become a primary goal of the agency.  

“This important new tax change affects millions of families across the nation, and the IRS wants to do everything it can to help people get the payments,” IRS Wage & Investment Commissioner Ken Corbin, who also serves as the agency’s Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer, said in a statement. 

“Many people miss out on tax benefits simply because they don’t file a tax return,” he added. 

A recent report released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that approximately four million children from low-income families are at risk of not receiving the monthly payments if the tax agency doesn’t have the required personal and financial information.

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

Image: Reuters

Michael Peck

Japan, East Asia

The U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B—its version of a fighter being fielded by the Air Force and Navy—has vertical landing capabilities, but those may have compromised some aspects of the Lightning II’s performance.

Here's What You Need To Know: If Chinese ships and aircraft can isolate the Senkakus, then it will be easy for Chinese troops to occupy them. And very difficult to Japan to recapture them: the special amphibious brigade created by Japan would be a sitting duck. But even a few F-35Bs operating from rough airstrips—and perhaps armed with hypersonic anti-ship missiles—could disrupt a Chinese amphibious landing.

Japan may deploy its new F-35 stealth jet fighters to an airbase in southwestern Japan.

The location is not coincidental: Nyutabaru Air Base, in Miyazaki Prefecture, is situated nearer to Japanese islands and waters claimed by China.

“The envisioned deployment of the aircraft to Nyutabaru Air Base is aimed at keeping in check China’s maritime assertiveness around the area, including the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea,” according to an article in the Japan Times. China claims the islands, which are located near China and Taiwan, as its own, and has repeatedly sent ships and aircraft into the area.

“With Beijing’s increasing maritime activities in mind, Japan is stepping up its capabilities to protect the Nansei Islands covering Okinawa and the Senkakus,” the newspaper said.

Government sources told Japan Times that “the F-35Bs are expected, after being deployed to the Nyutabaru base, to conduct joint exercises with other F-35Bs already deployed at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture. It is also envisaged that eventually upgraded Izumo-class flat-top helicopter carriers will transport and launch fighter jets such as F-35Bs, the U.S. Marines variant of the F-35 stealth plane made by Lockheed Martin Corp.”

However, local opposition could derail the planned deployment, the newspaper noted.

Japan is buying two versions of the F-35: 105 F-35A land-based fighters for the Japanese air force. The first batch are already deployed at Misawa Air Base in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, watching Japan’s other main security threat, North Korea.

Japan also plans to acquire forty-three F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) jets by 2023, with the first models arriving by 2023. Some would be stationed at Nyutabaru.

How Japan is deploying the two different F-35 models reveals the multiple—and vastly different—security challenges confronting the Japanese military. The more powerful F-35As are stationed in northern Japan, facing North Korea. While North Korea’s conventional military is no particular threat to Japan, North Korea’s ballistic missiles—which could carry nuclear warheads—do worry Tokyo. The F-35s—which the United States has already tested in a missile defense role—could be used to shoot down ballistic missiles or use its stealth capabilities to destroy North Korean missile and nuclear weapons sites.

China presents a different threat. Though Beijing has ballistic missiles aplenty, China has a large air force and navy that is rapidly growing in sophistication, including aircraft carriers and hypersonic missiles that could damage U.S. and Japanese airbases. During a wargame conducted by the Washington-based Center For a New American Security thinktank last year, the Chinese team used ballistic missiles to devastate Okinawan airfields packed with U.S. and Japanese aircraft.

If airfields on Okinawa are vulnerable, then how about the Senkakus, small, barren and uninhabited pieces of rock that lack infrastructure, are uncomfortably close to mainland China, and would be extremely difficult to defend?

All of which suggests that conventional fixed-aircraft—the F-35As and F-15s that are the backbone of U.S. and Japanese air arms—may find themselves trying to operate from bombed-out airbases and cratered runways on Okinawa and other Japanese islands. Which is exactly the kind of predicament that the F-35B is designed for.

The U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B—its version of a fighter being fielded by the Air Force and Navy—has vertical landing capabilities, but those may have compromised some aspects of the Lightning II’s performance. On the other hand, such landing capabilities does allow the F-35B to operate from rough airfields. For the U.S. Marines, who prefer their own in-house air support rather than relying on the Air Force and Navy, the F-35B could operate from crude airstrips on a newly-seized amphibious beachhead.

Whether this is actually true is a different matter: just because the F-35B can land on any bare patch of ground, that doesn’t mean that fuel, ammunition, spare parts and trained mechanics will be there. Nonetheless, if Japanese planners have to reckon on the possibility that permanent airfields could easily be devastated by Chinese missiles, then Tokyo has a problem.

As Japan discovered in World War II, the only real defense against amphibious invasion is for air and naval defenses—and mostly airpower—to stop the invasion. If Chinese ships and aircraft can isolate the Senkakus, then it will be easy for Chinese troops to occupy them. And very difficult to Japan to recapture them: the special amphibious brigade created by Japan would be a sitting duck. But even a few F-35Bs operating from rough airstrips—and perhaps armed with hypersonic anti-ship missiles—could disrupt a Chinese amphibious landing.

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

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

Image: Flickr.

Michael Peck

Hypersonic Weapons Defense,

Russia is developing a new defense against hypersonic missiles: MiG fighters armed with long-range, multiple-warhead missiles.

Here's What You Need to Know: Most likely, if Russia’s MiG-based hypersonic defense works, it will work against tactical hypersonic missiles rather than ICBMs. While Russia claims its Avangard nuclear-armed glider has a reported speed of Mach 20-plus, tactical hypersonic missiles such as Russia’s Zircon anti-ship weapon, or a land-based U.S. hypersonic missile which may be fielded by 2023, seem to have speeds of Mach 8 to 10.

Russia is developing a new defense against hypersonic missiles: MiG fighters armed with long-range, multiple-warhead missiles.

But how feasible is the concept remains to be seen.

“The Ministry of Defense made a fundamental decision to develop for the MiG-31 fighter and the promising MiG-41 a multifunctional long-range interceptor missile system (MPKR DP) capable of hitting hypersonic munitions,” according to state-owned Russian newspaper Izvestia last yer. “Theoretical studies have already been carried out on an ultra-long-range air-to-air missile with a multiple warhead.”

The MiG-31 (NATO code name: Foxhound) is an air defense interceptor descended from the Cold War MiG-25 Foxbat. The MiG-41 is reportedly a developmental project to develop a MiG-31 replacement.

Using multiple warheads for missile defense is particularly interesting. Russia appears to be envisioning a single missile that will dispense several sub-missiles that will intercept hypersonic weapons, which travel faster than Mach 5. “Airborne heavy ammunition will deliver a warhead with several modern air-to-air missiles over a distance of several hundred kilometers,” explained Izvestia. “Then they will separate from the carrier and begin to search and attack targets on their own. An active homing head with its own radar will help them in this.”

“All warheads will be displayed at a pre-calculated point on the trajectory of a flying munition and attack it in the nose. The use of ultra-long-range missiles will expand the area of ​​destruction of the interceptor.”

The theory seems simple enough: launch enough radar-guided warheads at a hypersonic target, and you’re bound to hit something. “An ordinary anti-aircraft missile has one warhead,” Russian defense expert Dmitri Kornev told Izvestia. “The probability of a miss on a hypersonic maneuvering target is very high. But if one ammunition carries several homing shells, then the chances of hitting a high-speed object increase significantly.”

The U.S. uses a similar approach for ballistic missile defense against ICBMs. Interceptor rockets will launch “kill vehicles” with multiple warheads, each equipped with sensors as well as thrusters for rapid maneuvering.

Which raises a question: if many critics doubt that ballistic missile defense is even feasible -- “like hitting a bullet with another bullet,” as the saying goes -- then what about hypersonic missiles?

Izvestia paints a scenario where the process works smoothly. “Especially effective is the use of the system during aircraft operations as part of a single information space. Aerial targets, cruise or hypersonic missiles can be detected by ground-based radars, early warning radars, or an attack warning system. The fighter will only need to launch an ultra-long-range missile in the desired area. At the same time, the interceptor will not have to risk itself entering into an air battle.”

Yet U.S. ballistic missile tests have experienced numerous failures: President Ronald Reagan’s grandiose vision of a “Star Wars” total missile shield has shrunk to a minimalist defense against a few North Korean ICBMs. Hitting Mach 20 with a warhead is no easy feat, especially when the warheads are accompanied by decoys to confuse anti-missile defenses.

Most likely, if Russia’s MiG-based hypersonic defense works, it will work against tactical hypersonic missiles rather than ICBMs. While Russia claims its Avangard nuclear-armed glider has a reported speed of Mach 20-plus, tactical hypersonic missiles such as Russia’s Zircon anti-ship weapon, or a land-based U.S. hypersonic missile which may be fielded by 2023, seem to have speeds of Mach 8 to 10. That’s slower than an ICBM warhead, but still quite fast: unlike ballistic reentry vehicles, hypersonic missiles can also maneuver within the atmosphere to avoid interception. An object streaking through the air at ten times the speed of sound doesn’t leave much time for reaction or detection.

All of which means that merely firing a salvo of air-to-air homing missiles, and hoping that one will hit the target, may be a bit of wishful thinking.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter, Facebook, or his website.

This article appeared earlier this year.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Stephen Silver

DirecTV,

Now, we have some details about how the changeover will work.

Earlier this year, AT&T announced that it was spinning off DirecTV into a separate business entity, one in which AT&T will continue to own a majority stake. Earlier this summer, the deal was closed. 

As part of the deal, the service formerly known as AT&T TV (and before that, DirecTV Now) will rebrand as DirecTV Stream. Now, we have some details about how the changeover will work. 

According to Streaming Clarity, the changeover will take place on August 26, as confirmed in a series of notifications sent to customers of the service. It’s also been implied to subscribers that nothing of substance will change, in terms of plans or pricing. 

DirecTV will likely continue to offer the Entertainment, Choice, Premier, and Ultimate live TV packages, as before. 

“The rebranding is expected to happen automatically so subscribers should not have to do anything now or once the apps transition over to the new logo,” the Streaming Clarity reported. 

Streaming Clarity did suggest that the continuity could be temporary, with more changes to come later on. 

“Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any changes at all. It is likely that along with the change in name, branding, and logo, the apps may encounter other design and interface tweaks. Not to mention, there is the possibility that under DirecTV Stream, the service may become available on even more devices in the future. Either way, the extent to the immediate changes should start to become clear before the end of this month.” 

The company, on the day the closing of the spinoff was announced, laid out how DirecTV Stream would work. 

“For those who stream it, the newly branded DIRECTV STREAM will become the single brand for video streaming services previously launched by AT&T, excluding HBO Max,” the company said. “The transition will happen later this month, and service will continue to be available with no term commitment or hidden fees. To enjoy the best of live TV and on-demand, customers can either bring their own streaming device or use DIRECTV’s exclusive streaming device. Those with DIRECTV’s streaming device can build a complete, integrated, and customized entertainment experience with the ability to watch and pause live TV on up to twenty devices in their home. It also allows consumers to get all their favorite entertainment in one place with easy access to apps like HBO Max, Netflix, Prime Video, and more.” 

The same announcement of the deal said that over the next few months, DirecTV Stream “will prominently feature its bold new look across its video services, and new and existing customers will experience several touchpoints with it.” 

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: Reuters

Mark Episkopos

J-20,

China's answer to the F-22 is perhaps not all it's talked up to be.

China’s answer to the likes of the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet, the Chengdu J-20 is the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s (PLAAF’s) most advanced fighter jet to date.

The J-20 emerged from a 1990’s Chinese program to develop a fifth-generation fighter. The program’s early development efforts are a continued source of speculation, with vague reports of early concept fighters that may or may not have been directly related to the project. The first J-20 prototype emerged in 2010 and undertook its first flight test in the following year.

The J-20 “Mighty Dragon” is a single-seat, twin-engine, fifth-generation fighter. Boasting an elongated fuselage with a dual-wing configuration, the J-20 appears to be somewhat larger than its F-22 and F-35 counterparts. The fighter is believed to support a maximum speed of up to Mach 2.5, with a range of around 5,500 km. But, as previously noted by The National Interest’s Kris Osborn, a fighter’s “top speed” does not necessarily translate into sustained speeds. Despite the claims of Chinese defense observers, it is not clear if the J-20 can supercruise—that is, sustain supersonic flight without the use of stealth-compromising afterburners. Part of the confusion over the J-20’s precise aerodynamic performance stems from ongoing engineering difficulties surrounding the fighter’s engine. The J-20 requires its bespoke Xian WS-15 engines to support any degree of supercruise capability, but performance and reliability difficulties compelled the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) to accept the initial batches of serial J-20 fighters with stopgap WS-10C and Russian AL-31F engines instead. The current status of the WS-15 engine is unclear, with reports suggesting that it is still under development and could be completed by 2023.

The J-20 is commonly described as a stealth air superiority fighter with secondary precision strike capabilities. The fighter supports a versatile suite of air-to-air weapons, including PL-10 and PL-12 missiles that fill the short and medium-range engagements respectively. But the J-20 seems more suited for engaging aircraft at longer ranges with its formidable PL-15 and PL-21 missiles. The ramjet-powered, hypersonic, beyond-visual-range (BVR) PL-21–which is roughly comparable to the Russian R-37M missile that will reportedly be supported by the Su-57–can feasibly hold high-value aerial targets at risk and is a potent addition to China’s air power arsenal. The fighter carries its payload in internal weapons bays, consistent with its long-range, stealthy air-to-air mission purpose. The fighter likewise boasts four external hardpoints, which are believed to be primarily used for transporting fuel tanks during non-combat missions.

A twin-seat J-20 variant was spotted several months ago in PLAAF promotional materials. Chinese state media reports that the two-seater is intended to be used for dedicated drone control, bombing missions, and electronic warfare, but there are currently no concrete production and delivery timelines for this version of the fighter.

As of the summer of 2021, it is estimated that around forty to eighty J-20 fighters have been produced. Prominent People's Liberation Army watchers have suggested that the PLAAF seeks 200 serial J-20’s by 2027, rivaling the U.S. F-22 fleet in quantity if not in quality, but only time will tell how closely this early projection will correspond to China’s production output over the coming years.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

History, World

This Star Wars-esque ball tank was almost a reality. 

Here's What You Need To Remember: Plated in 5 millimeters of steel, the Kugelpanzer rolled on massive rollers 1.5 meters in diameter, manned by a single crew member sitting on motorcycle-style saddle. The driver could peer out into the battlefield through a narrow viewing slit and fire a single machine gun through a slot underneath the viewport.

The Star Wars prequel movies featured various monowheel robots and vehicles amongst its various fantastical elements. After all, who in real life would be crazy enough to invent such impractical designs?

Why, the Nazis, of course!  

The unique Kugelpanzer, or “ball tank”, was built in Germany and at some point shipped over to Japanese-occupied China. The sole prototype was then captured by the Russian Army in 1945 during its invasion of Manchuria. Plated in 5 millimeters of steel, the Kugelpanzer rolled on massive rollers 1.5 meters in diameter, manned by a single crew member sitting on motorcycle-style saddle. The driver could peer out into the battlefield through a narrow viewing slit and fire a single machine gun through a slot underneath the viewport.

A two-stroke 25 horsepower piston engine drove the bizarre conveyance, which was steered by a runner wheel on a tail extension which also must have contributed to stability. An article in Russian Popular Mechanics estimates the 1.8 ton Kugelpanzer wasn’t likely to win any races, rolling at a brisk jogging pace of 5 miles per hour.

The Kugelpanzer can now be seen at the Kubinka Tank Museum outside Moscow (check out the image here), stripped of its internal components and designated only as “Object 37.”

What on Earth was this vehicle intended to do? The plaque at Kubinka states the Kugelpanzer was intended as a reconnaissance vehicle.  A single machine gun and five millimeters of armor certainly was not going to make a major impression on the battlefields of World War II, so a reconnaissance role might make sense if one overlooks the vehicle’s low speed. Other light combat tasks proposed for the vehicle include artillery observation and cable-laying.

One author speculates to the contrary that the Kugelpanzer might have been conceived as a suicide vehicle for ramming into enemy troops and tanks. Certainly, the Japanese deployed a number of specialized suicide weapons, such as the Kaiten manned torpedo, the Ohka rocket-powered flying bomb, and Shinyo motorboat units.

However this theory does not sit well with the German origin of the vehicle. True, Nazi Germany flirted with a number of weapons that were practically suicidal by the end of the war—particularly their own human torpedoes, which had an 80% fatality rate for the pilots. However, after developing a manned version of the V-1 “buzz bomb” called the Fi-103, war production minister Albert Speer persuaded Hitler to cancel the program on the grounds that suicide attacks were not part of Germanic warrior culture.

Thus, the Kugelpanzer was likely designed with some other purpose in mind. After all, the Nazis transferred incredible quantities of technology to Japan on submarines during World War II, including impractical designs such as the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter.

In theory, large-diameter wheel designs benefit from low ground pressure and center of gravity, and excellent characteristics for climbing over vertical obstacles and traversing ditches. Similar rolling tanks were proposed but not built in Germany, Russia and the United States, such as the Texas Tumbleweed tank showcased in a 1936 issue of Popular Mechanics. For this reason, the Kugelpanzer’s combination of low speed and good all-terrain ability might have lent it more to serving as an infantry support vehicle rather than a scout.

In fact, there are some precedents that were actually constructed, including the German World War I Treffas Wagen. Completed in February 1917, it sported enormous wheels 3.35 meters in diameter that sandwiched a narrow armored hull mounting a 20 millimeter cannon on the front and machine guns on the side for sweeping out trenches as it rolled over them. Two runner wheels at the rear were used for steering, giving it a bizarre 2x2 format. The 18-ton beast was passed over in favor of the A7V tank, which was produced in small numbers and saw action against British armor in 1918. The Treffas-Wagen, on the other hand, was scrapped in order to recover the steel.

An even larger rolling tank straight out of Star Wars is the 40-ton Russian Tsar tank built in 1915, which used 9-meter diameter tricycle wheels instead of caterpillar treads. The 12 meter-wide monster was intended to mount multiple cannon turrets, but development was abandoned after the 250 horsepower motor proved to be too underpowered for cross-country mobility.

The kinship with World War I-era prototypes ties the Kugelpanzer’s concept to an era in which the tank’s advantage in “mobility” related to its ability to negotiate the cratered and trench-strewn battlefields of World War I, rather than execute Blitzkrieg-style rapid advances. It therefore seems likely the spherical tank’s designers abandoned the Kugelpanzer because of its inability to keep up with the mobile warfare raging across Europe. The Nazis may then have been passed it on to the Japanese in case they could find some use for it.

However, the total lack of records regarding the Kugelpanzer confines historians to the realm of conjecture. Nonetheless, the Nazi rolling ball tank illustrates how bizarre science fictional concepts sometimes came closer to becoming a reality than one would think.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Global

At its peak, the aggressive Imperial German Navy's U-Boat campaign was sinking over 874,000 tons of shipping in a month. 

Here's What You Need To Remember: While World War I submarines could only remain submerged for brief periods, they were highly successful at picking off unescorted merchants ship in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Washington had to do something about that. Enter the convoy system, which proved to be a dramatic success at decreasing ship losses. 

When Congress voted on April 6, 1917, to declare war on Imperial Germany, the task before the U.S. Navy was clear: it needed to transport and supply over a million men across the Atlantic despite the Imperial German Navy’s ferocious U-Boat campaign, which reached its peak that month, sinking over 874,000 tons of shipping.

Indeed, Germany’s decision to recommence unrestricted submarine warfare in February was one of the decisive factors driving the United States, and later Brazil, into finally joining “the war to end all wars.”

While World War I submarines could only remain submerged for brief periods, they were highly successful at picking off unescorted merchants ship in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Neither active sonar nor radar yet existed with which to track submarines, though the British had begun using hydrophones to listen for the noise of a submarine’s diesel engine.

The most successful anti-submarine ships were agile “torpedo-boat destroyers,” which sank U-Boats using deck guns and even ramming. Starting in 1916, Royal Navy vessels carried depth charges designed to detonate underwater, rupturing a submarine’s hull. These proved effective if the ship captains could guess the sub’s position. Statistically, naval mines proved deadliest, accounting for one-third of U-Boat losses.

For years, the Royal Navy resisted instituting a convoy system to guard merchant ships, preferring not to divert warships from offensive missions and believing the decrease in throughput from adhering to a convoy schedule would prove worse than the losses inflicted by U-Boats.

But that April, U-Boats had sunk one-quarter of all merchant ships bound for the UK, leaving it with just six week’s grain supply. Threatened with economic collapse, the Royal Navy finally instituted the convoy system. But the Brits had a problem: they could divert only forty-three out of the seventy-five destroyers required to escort convoys.

Naval liaison Rear Admiral William Sims convinced the navy to dispatch thirty-five U.S. destroyers to bases at Queenstown (modern-day Cobh), Ireland to fill in the gap. These began escorting convoys on May 24, usually supported by navy cruisers. In 1918, an even larger escort flotilla began operating out of Brest, France.

The U.S. Navy itself began the war with only fifty-one destroyers. It immediately faced a classic military procurement problem: politicians and admirals wanted to build more expensive battleships and battlecruisers, construction of sixteen of which had been authorized by the Naval Act of 1916.

But the Royal Navy already had the German High Seas fleet effectively bottled up in port with its larger force. While five coal-burning and three oil-burning U.S. battleships did join the blockade in 1918, they never saw action. Common sense prevailed, and battleship construction was halted in favor of building 266 destroyers.

More rapidly, the Navy commissioned hundreds of small 70-ton wooden-hulled “sub-chasers” equipped with hydrophones, 3” deck guns and depth charges. Civilian yachts were similarly converted. The Navy’s eleven L-class and K-class submarines were also deployed to Berehaven (now Castletownbere), Ireland and the Azores respectively to hunt (surfaced) U-Boats, but none encountered enemy forces during the war.

Hundreds of twin-engine HS maritime patrol planes were also procured to scour the seas for submarines. Though the seaplanes sank few if any submarines, they disrupted numerous attacks by forcing U-Boats to dive and abort their torpedo runs.

The convoy system proved a dramatic success, cutting shipping losses to less than half their peak. U-Boats simply lacked unprotected targets and were more likely to be lost combating escorts. Shipping losses gradually fell to roughly 300,000 tons per month, while U-Boat losses increased from three per month to between five and ten.

However, submariner-hunting remained a dangerous business in which a hunter could swiftly become hunted. On Nov. 17, 1917, the destroyer USS Cassin was pursuing U-61 near Ireland when the U-Boat counterattacked. Spotting a torpedo rushing towards the depth-charge launcher on the ship’s stern, Gunner’s Mate Osmond Ingram lunged forth to jettison the explosive charges but was caught in the blast that tore away the destroyer’s rudder. The Cassin remained afloat and shelled U-61’s conning tower, causing her to disengage. Ingram was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The destroyer Jacob Jones was not so fortunate when she was struck in the rudder by a torpedo fired by U-353 near Brest on December 6. Sixty-six crew perished abandoning ship as her depth charges detonated. Gallantly, U-Boat captain Karl Rose rescued two of the crew and radioed the position of the other survivors.

U.S. sub-hunters did score some successes. On November 17, the destroyers Fanning and Nicholson forced U-58 to the surface with depth charges, then engaged her with deck guns until her crew scuttled her. The converted yacht Christabel crippled a U-Boat with depth charges in May 1918 off the coast of Spain.

That month, the Imperial Navy began dispatching long-range U-Boat “cruisers” with huge 150-millimeter deck guns to maraud the U.S. coast. These sank ninety-three vessels, mostly small civilian fishing boats. The Germans hoped this would spread panic, causing the Americans to withdraw assets in Europe for home defense.

Notably, on July 18 the boat U-156 surfaced off the coastal town of Orleans on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and proceeded to destroy a tugboat, four barges, and the nearby shoreline with its cannons. Nine Coast Guard HS and Model R-9 seaplane bombers scrambled from NAS Chatham and peppered the withdrawing U-boat with bombs—none of which exploded.

The following day, the armored cruiser USS San Diego struck a mine probably lain by U-156 south of Long Island. The explosion flooded her engine room, causing the cruiser to sink with the loss of six hands—becoming the only capital ship lost by the navy. U-156 proceeded to sink twenty-one fishing boats in the Gulf of Maine, and even commandeered a trawler to assist in its rampage. But though the navy instituted coastal convoys, it didn’t withdraw ships from Europe.

U-Boats were also active in the Mediterranean, and Gibraltar-based American subchasers—often little more than civilian yachts fitted with 3” guns and depth charges—twice clashed with them, sinking at least one.

Perhaps the Navy’s most swashbuckling episode of the war occurred on October 2, 1918, when twelve U.S. subchasers covered an Italian and British surface force raiding the Albanian port of Durazzo. Dodging shells from shore batteries, the subchasers cleared a path through the defensive minefield for the accompanying capital ships. They then hounded away the submarines U-29 and U-31, heavily damaging both.

The navy’s deadliest anti-submarine measure was the North Sea Mine Barrage, a 230-mile-long chain of 100,000 naval mines between the Orkney islands and Norway. U-Boats seeking passage to the Atlantic had to wend through eighteen rows of Mark 6 mines concealed at depths of twenty-four, forty-nine, and seventy-three meters deep strung together with piano wire. Each of the horned steel spheres contained three hundred pounds of TNT. The barrage cost $40 million ($722 million in 2018 dollars) and required the deployment of eight large steamships. However, it sank between four and eight U-Boats—including the infamous U-156—and damaged another eight.

Ultimately, 178 out of 360 operational U-Boats were sunk during World War I. In return, the German subs sank 5,000 merchant ships totaling 12.8 million tons, killing 15,000 mariners. The U.S. Navy lost 431 personnel and five ships—its worst loss occurred when the collier USS Cyclops vanished with 306 crew in the Bermuda Triangle.

Despite its unglamorous duties, the U.S. Navy learned valuable lessons in the Great War about employing convoys, smaller submarine-hunters, and maritime patrol planes that would save many lives in the even more destructive conflict that followed two decades later.

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 in December 2018 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Creative Commons 

Michael Peck

Luftwaffe, Europe

The problem is that the Luftwaffe doesn’t have enough flyable planes for its pilots to fly.

Here's What You Need to Know: The success of the air forces of America and Israel over the past seventy-five years has rested on well-trained aircrews. Some analysts note that today’s Russian military pilots receive fewer training flight hours than their Western counterparts. Allowing German pilot training standards to lapse will erode a key NATO edge over a potential Russian adversary.

German air force pilots don’t have enough flight time to meet NATO training requirements.

But that’s not because of poor training. The problem is that the Luftwaffe doesn’t have enough flyable planes for its pilots to fly.

“Almost half of the Luftwaffe’s pilots were unable to meet NATO’s target of 180 flight hours last year because their aircraft were grounded by maintenance issues,” according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. Only 512 of the air force’s 875 pilots met the number of required flight hours, German officials told government Bundestag legislators.

“The Luftwaffe is at a low point,” Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, said last month. “Aircraft are grounded due to a lack of spare parts, or they aren’t even on site since they’re off for maintenance.”

Germany’s armed forces, dreaded during World War II and respected during the Cold War, have been ridiculed in recent years as budget cuts have resulted in a military that seems barely functional. In the summer of 2018, only ten of the Luftwaffe’s 128 Eurofighters were rated fit to fly because of spare parts shortages. In February 2019, “on average only 39 of Germany’s 128 Eurofighter jets and 26 of its 93 older Tornado fighters were available for combat or training last year,” the Telegraph said.

“There are now concerns that pilots are leaving the air force in frustration at being unable to fly. Six pilots resigned in the first half of last year, compared to a total of 11 in the five previous year.”

German military strength has declined since the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet threat that compelled Germany to build well-trained and well-equipped armed forces. The immediate problem is anemic defense spending, at 1.3 percent of GDP rather than the NATO goal of 2 percent (not that many European NATO members are meeting that threshold).

In 2018, German submarines were found to be in no condition to sail, new helicopters and transport aircraft were unable to fly, and armored vehicles have been sidelined. The situation is so bad that if Russia invaded the Baltic States, Germany would require a month to mobilize and transport a single armored brigade to the rescue, according to an American study.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Germany is stuck with poorly trained pilots. Nonetheless, the success of the air forces of America and Israel over the past seventy-five years has rested on well-trained aircrews. Some analysts note that today’s Russian military pilots receive fewer training flight hours than their Western counterparts. Allowing German pilot training standards to lapse will erode a key NATO edge over a potential Russian adversary.

Ironically, lack of training was a major cause for the destruction of the old Luftwaffe in Nazi Germany. In 1939, German pilots would go into battle with more than 200 hours of flight time—significantly more than their opponents. This enabled German aces to rack up dozens or hundreds of kills. By 1944, with training crippled by fuel shortages, and with its fighters suffering severe losses against American heavy bombers, the Germans were forced to commit pilots into battle with perhaps 50 or 100 flight hours, compared to 300 or more hours for American and British pilots (Soviet pilots would receive about 100 hours).

The result was a vicious cycle where pilot shortages forced the Luftwaffe to commit untrained pilots, who were quickly killed or wounded, which meant that more rookies had to be sent into battle.

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

This article first appeared in August 2019.

Image: Wikipedia.

Sebastien Roblin

World War II History, Europe

It is a delicate balancing act to have air support close enough to be helpful in a battle and not turn those warplanes towards our own troops. 

Key point: Weather delays and unclear communication led to disastrous results. 

Allied troops spent six bloody weeks stuck in dense hedgerows of Normandy after the D-Day landings, fighting the German Wehrmacht one cow pasture at a time. U.S. Army general Omar Bradley cooked up a plan to break through the German defenses by calling upon the heavy four-engine bombers of the 8th Air Force.

What followed was one of the worst friendly-fire incidents in the history of the U.S. Army — and one of its greatest military victories.

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

The D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 in Normandy are famous for being one of the costliest military operations in American history. What’s less appreciated is that the following two months of combat in the farmlands of Normandy were just as nightmarish.

The problem was the terrain. Farmers in Normandy divided up their pastures with tall hedgerows called bocage that were impassible to most vehicles. Even though the Allies possessed tremendous numerical superiority and greater mobility due to their vast motor pool, the hedgerows forced them to fight in one short-range ambush after another through predictable corridors — a tremendously advantageous situation for the defending German army.

Deadly MG.42 machinegun nests and portable Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons defended each field, backed up by pre-registered mortar and artillery bombardments.

Allied tanks attempting to advance up the narrow country lanes had to contend with well-concealed anti-tanks guns and German armor, including Tiger and Panther tanks with frontal armor nearly impenetrable to most Allied tank guns.

U.S. troops sustained some of the heaviest casualties in the war in Normandy, advancing just a few hundred meters a day. Some U.S. divisions took greater than 100-percent casualties — but they avoided bleeding out through a steady flow of inexperienced replacements.

The Americans nonetheless managed to slowly creep forward over the course of six weeks at tremendous cost — 39,000 killed or wounded by the end of June alone.

The Allies’ greatest advantage was air superiority — swarms of American fighter-bombers roamed over Normandy, largely unopposed by German fighters, devastating German units attempting to move in daylight. American troops also called on them to take out enemy strongpoints and tanks — but often battles in the bocage were fought at such short ranges that it was unsafe to call in air support.

In an effort to break through the bocage, the British forces on the eastern flank of the Allied beachhead under the leadership of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery on July 18 launched a massive tank assault toward the city of Caen called Operation Goodwood.

Preceded by carpet bombing that leveled much of the city — killing around 3,000 civilians and largely missing German front-line units — the British tanks surged forward without infantry support and ran straight into anti-tank guns and panzers rushed in as reinforcements, including massive King Tiger tanks.

Accompanied by too little infantry to ferret out the ambushes, the British lost no fewer than 300 tanks in three days and Goodwood ground to a halt. Supporting attacks by Canadian troops met a similar fate.

Supreme Allied commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious with Montgomery, who maintained in his defense that the real goal of Goodwood had been to draw away the German panzer divisions in reserve, allowing the Americans to launch the real breakout.

While it remains debatable that this was what Goodwood has been intended to accomplish, it was undeniably a consequence — six panzer divisions had been deployed to the British sector, while only two faced the American sector to the west.

Bradley’s Plan:

American general Omar Bradley had identified the main German defensive line as running along the east-to-west road connecting the cities of St. Lo and Perrier. He wanted to blast a hole in it through the through which his tank divisions could drive into the open country south of Normandy.

The secret weapons for the attack, called Operation Cobra, were the massive four-engine strategic bombers of the 8th Air Force.

The famous B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator were designed to carpet-bomb factories and cities, not take out troops on the front line. A Flying Fortress could drop up to 17,000 pounds of bombs, sending massive explosions rippling over large swaths of the ground.

Bradley designated a zone five kilometers long by two kilometer deep to the west of the city of St. Lo that he wanted the 8th Air Force to blast into oblivion.

However, his troops needed to advance next to the German defensive line so that they could immediately exploit the shock of the bombardment. On July 18, American infantry drove the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Corps out of St. Lo at a cost of 5,000 casualties. The American lines to the west were now directly facing the infantry and tanks of the Panzer Lehr Division.

Panzer Lehr had been reduced to just 2,200 soldiers and 47 operational Panzer IV and Panther tanks, roughly a quarter of its theoretical strength. A poorly-trained 500-man parachute regiment and a small reserve battlegroup of 450 men accompanied it.

However, Bradley’s plan had a significant problem. Weapons as imprecise as a B-17 were as likely to hit friendly troops as they were the enemy. Bradley reassured the 8th Air Force that he would pull back his troops 800 meters just before the bombardment. The Army Air Force generals insisted the minimum safe distance was 3,000 meters. After some haggling, they settled on a gap of 1,200 meters.

Bradley also stipulated that the bombers approach parallel to the front-line troops, so if any of them released their bombs too early, they wouldn’t land on the American lines.

The VIIth Corps, comprising six divisions, would lead the attack under Gen. Joseph Collins. On the left and right flank were the 9th and 30th Infantry Divisions respectively. Both divisions had seen heavy combat and sustained over 100-percent losses in the preceding weeks, and were reduced to a hard core of exhausted veterans surrounded by hordes of rookies. The fresher 4th Infantry Division would attack down the center.

Waiting in reserve were the 1st Motorized Infantry Division and the powerful 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions. These were the only two heavy armored divisions in the U.S. Army, each with more than 300 Sherman and Stuart tanks in six battalions, instead of the usual compliment of around 200.

The Americans had a new trick to deal with the Normandy hedgerows. When a fellow soldier suggested the tanks needed giant hedge clippers to traverse the bocage, Sgt. Curtis Culin went ahead and made some out of scrap metal from D-Day beach obstacles.

“Rhino tanks” fitted with the metal prongs could plow through the hedgerows without exposing their thin belly armor. Up to 60 percent of the VII Corp’s tanks were equipped with the device before the attack.

Nonetheless, Bradley didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of operation Goodwood. Tanks were vulnerable in the close Normandy terrain to ambushes. He intended to have infantry lead the initial assault with only limited tank support. Once the German defenses were breached, the armored divisions could plunge through the gap.

But timing was key — if he waited too long to unleash the armor, the Germans would have enough time to form a new defensive line.

Waiting in the wings was Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army. Normandy’s cramped front line and limited road network had prevented the 3rd Army from being deployed into battle. If Bradley’s attack succeeded, then it would finally have enough space to go roaring through the German rear lines.

False Start:

After several delays because of bad weather, on July 25, clear skies were recorded and the bombers of the 8th Air Force leaped into action. However, as the bomber formations approached Normandy, grey clouds reappeared.

The attack was called off — but not before over 100 aircraft dropped their bombs. Sixteen B-17s dropped their bomber two kilometers north of their target, hitting the 30th Infantry Division. Twenty-five American soldiers were killed and over 130 wounded. Enraged troops of the 120th Infantry Regiment even opened fire on the American planes.

Bradley was furious — the aircraft had approached perpendicular, not parallel, to the American lines. The commander of the 9th Air Force, Gen. Elwood Quesada, whose fighter bombers had approached parallel, sent a reproachful message to the 8th, as well.

The Army Air Force generals argued that approaching parallel would not prevent collateral damage and would expose the lumbering bombers to flak for a prolonged period. Besides, it would take days to draft a new plan of attack.

Worse, the U.S. troops then had to attack to recapture all the ground they had ceded when pulling back for the bombardment. This was accomplished at the cost of 174 killed or wounded by German troops who had infiltrated the abandoned positions. The Panzer Lehr Division lost 350 men and 10 tanks in the day’s action, but its commander, Gen. Fritz Bayerlein, assumed it had successfully resisted the main assault.

The Germans were bewildered and elated when American infantry withdrew from their positions again early the next morning. “It seems as if they’ve chickened out!” observed a divisional operations officer.

The bombardment

Clear weather on July 26 allowed the 8th Air Force to go in for real. The attack began with dive bombing, strafing and rocket attacks by 550 fighter bombers. Then the entire strength of the 8th Air Force, over 1,800 bombers, flew in.

Pulitzer-winning journalist Ernie Pyle described the scene. “A new sound gradually droned into our ears — a gigantic faraway surge of doom-like sound. It was the heavies. They came on in flights of 12, three flights to a group and in groups stretched out across the sky. Their march across the sky was slow and studied. I’ve never known anything that had about it the aura of such a ghastly restlessness.”

The heavies carpeted the front line with more than 12 million pounds of bombs, turning the land into a cratered moonscape.

German 88-millimeter flak guns fired back at the bombers, shooting down five — but the guns were spotted by low-flying L-4 observation plans, which directed artillery batteries to silence them. More than 50,000 shells were fired by no fewer than 1,000 artillery pieces in 47 artillery battalions to support the bombardment.

To cap it off, another wave of 350 P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers and 396 B-26 Marauder medium bombers pounded the German lines, many of them unloading canisters of napalm.

Once again, the bombers flew perpendicular to the allied lines. Many used the smoke from earlier bombing as a guide for where to drop their bombs, but unfortunately the wind began blowing the smoke toward the north. This time, 77 dropped too soon.

A 4th Infantry Division battalion commander described the feeling of dread. “The dive bombers came in beautifully, dropped their bombs right in front us just where they belonged. Then the first group of heavies dropped theirs. The next wave came in closer, the next one closer, still closer. Then they came right on top of us. The shock was awful.”

Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair, one of the chief brains behind the Army’s training program and doctrine, had advanced to a foxhole at the tip of the attack in order to boost morale.

“The ground belched, shook and spewed dirt to the sky,” Bradley wrote in his autobiography A General’s Life. “Scores of our troops were hit, their bodies flung from slit trenches. Doughboys were dazed and frightened … A bomb landed squarely on McNair in a slit trench and threw his body 60 feet and mangled it beyond recognition except for the three stars on his collar.

The short bombing killed 111 American soldiers and wounded 490, the majority in the 30th Division. The entire headquarters staff of a battalion in its 47th regiment was wiped out save for the commander.

Eisenhower was so furious that he declared he would never employ strategic bombers on tactical targets again. But the German troops suffered even worse from the bombing.

“The long duration of the raid, without any chance of fighting back, created depression, a feeling of powerlessness and weakness and inferiority,” Gen. Fritz Bayerlein recounted:

Some of the soldiers went crazy; others remained prostrate on the ground, incapable of doing anything. I found myself personally at the heart of the bombardment on the 24th and 25th July, and I was enormously affected. I, who always found myself in the most exposed places in war, it was my worst experience ever.

The well-dug-in infantry were crushed in their foxholes by the bombs, killed and buried by the explosions …

The bombardment zone was transformed into a field of craters in which not a single human remained alive. Tanks and cannons were destroyed or over turned without any hope of being recovered because all of the roads were blocked. Once the bombardment had begun, all telephone lines were cut. Because most of the command posts were caught in the bombardment, there was not any radio communication, either.

Upon receiving orders from Kluge to hold the line, Bayerlein famously responded, “Out in front, everyone is holding out. Everyone. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews — they’re all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post They’re lying silent in their foxholes because they are dead.”

It is estimated 1,000 Germans were killed by the bombardment. The rookie German parachute regiment simply evaporated, its survivors fleeing or surrendering. The Panzer Lehr Division had only a dozen operational tanks left.

The Infantry Go In:

The American infantrymen were badly shaken by the friendly bombing but were swiftly thrust out into the attack — and soon had the impression the German were unaffected by the bombardment. Machine-gun fire stitched across their advance, and surviving German tanks and artillery were soon raining shells upon them.

The 9th Infantry Division on the west flank made little progress as it attacked through wetlands towards the village of Marigny. The 30th Infantry Division on the east flank founds it advance blocked by three deadly Panther tanks. An American tank attack left three Shermans in flames for little gain — it wasn’t until midnight that the 30th secured its minimum objective for the day, the nearby village of Hébécrevon.

The 4th Division in the center made the most progress. One of its battalions stalled facing two Panzer IV tanks supported by infantry. G.I.s eventually knocked out the tanks with bazookas, and a late-arriving company of 18 Sherman tanks blasted out the infantry. The 4th made it to the ruins of Saint Chapelle-le-Juger that evening.

In the first day of Cobra, the VII Corps had only advanced 2,000 meters. The Germans were still fighting back as hard as ever. Collins wasn’t sure if he needed to give the infantry more time to clear out the German defenses, or if he should send his armor divisions out to attempt a breakthrough.

If deployed too early, the tanks might get bogged down in ambushes and cause traffic jams on the limited road network, bringing an end to the Americans hope of a break out.

Collins had noted that the German defenders were no longer coordinated in a single defensive line. He decided to unleash the armor. By the morning of July 27, tanks from the 2nd and 3rd Armored Division were rolling down to the front line.

The armor breaks through

Collins had gambled well. Only a thin crust of German defenders fighting from isolated strongpoints remained. They had no reserves behind them. Supporting attacks by American and Canadian troops to the west and east respectively had pinned down other German units in Normandy.

While Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored Division wasn’t able to secure Marigny to the west, to the east the 2nd Armored roared ahead at full speed. At Saint Gilles it encountered four German Panzer IVs and a Sturmgeschutzassault gun, but a combination of Sherman tanks and tactical air strikes dealt with the enemy armor.

By the end of the day, the 2nd had advanced 12 kilometers at cost of just three tanks. There were no enemy units left in front of it.

Field Marshall Günther von Kluge, commander of German forces in Western Europe, realized the gravity of the situation — he ordered troops along west of the breakthrough to retreat 30 kilometers to avoid being pinched off against the French coast. But the order came too late.

By July 28, the 2nd Armored Division managed to encircle the retreating Germans around Coutance, cutting off the remaining German units on the Cotentin peninsula. American tanks rolled by Bayerlein’s headquarters. “My division no longer effectively exists,” Bayerlein reported to his superiors.

The commander of the German 7th Army had to dodge fire from American Greyhound armored cars. Christian Tychsen, the chief of the 2nd S.S. Panzer Division Das Reich who had ordered the reprisal execution of 99 innocent French civilians in Tulle a month earlier, was killed when his Schwimmwagenattempted to run a road block of the 2nd Armored Division.

That night, the encircled German troops — including dozens of tanks — attempted to slip through the American lines. Some evaded the net — others fought frantic battles against American blocking forces.

In one incident, a German tank column caused an American infantry company to route. As the German tanks pursued, they bumped into the bivouac of M7 Priest self-propelled howitzers of the 78th Armored Field Artillery. Generally used to fire indirectly at distant targets, the 78th lowered it guns for direct fire and knocked out seven Panzer IVs, causing the remainder to retreat.

On the other hand, Hans Schabschneider, a sergeant in a German munitions unit, managed not only to lead his group safely, but captured 120 American soldiers and 12 trucks while doing so.

Overall, over 7,500 German troops were captured or killed in the Roncey pocket, and over 250 vehicles and 100 tanks were found destroyed or abandoned. On July 31, American units driving south seized Avranches, giving the Allies free range of France’s western coastline, including Brittany.

On Aug. 1, Patton’s Third Army roared through the breakthrough and turnedeast, seeking to encircle the German troops engaged with British and Canadian Forces. Soon the entire German front line came unglued as divisions retreated in a desperate effort to avoid being caught in the Falaise Pocket.

Patton’s Army continued its historic advance, liberating more than half of France, including the city of Paris on Aug. 25. After troubled campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the U.S. Army’s moment of glory had finally come.

Bradley’s attack succeeded because of its application of combined arms warfare using the strengths of infantry, armor, artillery and air power. While the aerial bombardment played an important role in opening the breach, the friendly casualties were a result of disregarding the inability of the strategic bombers of the time to act as precision weapons.

Allied bombing in Normandy in June and July is also estimated to have killed 50,000 French civilians and destroyed roughly 75 percent of the buildings in its major cities. Americans, Germans and the French all paid aid a terrible cost in the campaign that finally broke the Nazi occupation of Northern France.

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

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

History,

Asia's stealth arms race is here. 

Here's What You Need To Remember: Singapore’s purchase of the F-35 reaffirms its commitment to defense cooperation and integration with these regional allies. Singapore’s decision to announce the F-35 purchase during a series of disputes with Malaysia suggest that the F-35s capability could become a “big stick” that it might wield in the future in regional affairs. While Malaysia’s air force is good for the region, the latest aircraft it is considering purchasing are only fourth generation and would probably only be comparable to the upgraded F-16s Singapore already fields. The F-35 would be a significant strategic advantage, and could pressure Malaysia to perhaps look to Russia for more advanced anti-access weapons.

On January 2019, Singapore announced that it planned to buy a limited number of F-35 fighters for evaluation purposes. While this didn’t come as a surprise to many Singaporean military watchers, the decision comes at a tense time for Singapore, with China becoming more assertive and rising tensions with Malaysia.

Could the F-35 purchase accelerate the arms race in the region? How might the F-35’s unique technical characteristics make it suitable for Singapore’s tactical environment?

In order to understand the effect that the F-35 will have on Singapore’s national defense, it is important to recognize that they are slated to replace Singapore’s advanced F-16 variants. Singapore operates around 60 F-16 Block 52s, which are underwent an upgrade program that gave them more advanced features such as AESA radars. Nevertheless, the Singapore defense ministry (MINDEF) expects that these aircraft will be obsolete by 2030.

In Singaporean service, the F-16 serves in a multirole capacity. However, the most recent upgrade appears to have prioritized its role as a strike aircraft rather than air-to-air combat. While some air-to-air missiles are included in the package, they are short range AIM-9X.

The majority of equipment purchased is meant for the strike mission, from laser guided kits for bombs to the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missile. For a pure air-to-air mission, Singapore is likely to rely on it’s F-15SGs, which are optimized for the role with additional systems like infrared search and track (IRST).

As such, if the F-35 is expected to replace the F-16, it is likely because it is seen by MINDEF as the most survivable light strike aircraft in an airspace that will be filled with increasingly deadly threats. While the number of F-35s the SAF fields may not be enough for saturation strikes on large opponents like China which possess significant anti-access capabilities, the F-35 may significantly decrease the risk of preemptive strikes against less prepared opponents like Malaysia. Preemptive strikes are an important part of Singaporean doctrine given that the city-state has no defensive depth, so increased capability in that realm might have a deterrent effect.

The F-35B variant could also significantly increase survivability in event of runway destruction by a surprise strike due to its VTOL capability. Because Singapore is very small, the airbases it has are prominent targets. While a strike to these could knock out the ability for F-16s or F-15s to fly sorties, the VTOL capabilities of the F-35 might allow it to stay in the fight longer than traditional platforms.

Singapore maintains the capability to create field-expedient airfields in their Air Power Generation Command, the short takeoff runs of the F-35 would allow this command to do far more with less.

The F-35 also integrates well with the other American aircraft Singapore fields: it uses the same datalinks, radar, and pilot ergonomics. It also integrates well with modern Singaporean doctrine. The Singaporean military is striving to be a highly networked, agile force, in what they call IKC2, Integrated Knowledge-based Command and Control. The ability of the F-35 to provide a rich sensor picture of a tactical environment would make it a very important asset in the IKC2 doctrine.

Moving onto strategic considerations, Singapore’s decision to buy F-35 puts it in what China derisively calls the “U.S. F-35 friends circle”, a group of nations that border China that have bought F-35s to counter China’s increasingly powerful air force. This group currently includes South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Singapore’s purchase of the F-35 reaffirms its commitment to defense cooperation and integration with these regional allies, in what some call the “strategic quadrangle”.

Singapore’s decision to announce the F-35 purchase during a series of sea and airspace disputes with Malaysia suggest that the F-35s capability could become a “big stick” that it might wield in the future in regional affairs.

While Malaysia’s air force is good for the region, the latest aircraft it is considering purchasing are only fourth generation and would probably only be comparable to the upgraded F-16s Singapore already fields. The F-35 would be a significant strategic advantage, and could pressure Malaysia to perhaps look to Russia for more advanced anti-access weapons.

The author would like to thank Timothy Soh of Defense Politics Asia for assistance.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues. This first appeared in January 2019.

Image: Flickr.

Sebastien Roblin

WWII Semi-Automatic, Europe

During the Battle at Itter Castle German, American, French and eastern European defenders of the castle acted on their own initiative to salvage the situation, rather than act at the behest of higher commanders. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Battle at Itter Castle is filled with crazy twists and turns and is notable for two reasons. First, it is quite possibly the only battle where the Nazis and Americans fought on the same side. Second, it is a powerful example of soldiers acting on their own rather than at the behest of their commanders to salvage a situation. 

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an all-around monster, decided it would be a good idea to take the top members of France’s political and cultural elite and imprison them in a medieval castle in Austria. That sentence alone should tell you that the Nazis’ predilection for acts of Hollywood villainy was deep-seated and incurable. But real events soon became stranger than fiction. A small American recon platoon managed to liberate the captives during the closing days of the war, and fought a desperate last stand to prevent their SS captors from returning.

Fighting alongside the small American force against the Waffen SS were more than a dozen Wehrmacht (Army) soldiers—making the Battle at Itter Castle possibly the only engagement in which U.S. and German troops fought on the same side in World War II.

This unique conflict has been most thoroughly documented in The Last Battle by Stephen Harding, whose book has since been optioned as a movie—and inspired a heavy-metal music video. Harding’s work particularly focuses on the fourteen French notables stuck in the castle, which included both French prime ministers at the start of World War II, Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, and top military commanders Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin. For a good measure they also threw in Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the sister of the current leader of the Free French; Michel Clemenceau, son of the French leader during World War I; and French tennis star Jean Borotra—because, well, why not? There were also several wives and one husband who elected to join their partners in the prison.

This forced reunion of French VIPs, many of whom passionately hated each other, included both Vichy collaborators, such as Borotra and Weygand, and members of the Resistance, some of them transferred there from concentration camps. It had the making of a grotesque hostage situation—or, the captives feared, a soon-infamous massacre.

Itter Castle, actually a nineteenth-century construction built upon the site of a thirteenth-century century fortress, was situated atop a nearly seven-hundred-meter-high hill just a few miles south of the town of Wörgl. Seized by Himmler in 1943, it was administratively attached to the Dachau concentration camp, which contributed a staff of eastern European prisoners to serve as the prison’s staff.

However, it doesn’t seem Himmler ever attempted to leverage the captives in Castle Itter to his political advantage, and the American troops advancing into Austria in May 1945 had no idea of its significance. Indeed, even the prison’s commandant, Sebastian Wimmer, ran away from his charges on May 4, promptly followed by the rest of the guards. The liberated prisoners snatched up the small arms that had been left behind and even enlisted a wounded SS officer, Kurt Schrader, to help protect them. However, they were still surrounded by hostile SS troops. Though the imprisoned Croatian resistance fighter Zvonimir Cuckovic managed to slip away on the pretense of running an errand and contact U.S. troops on May 3, an attempted rescue effort was aborted in the face of German shellfire and concerns about intruding into a neighboring American unit’s operating area (truly!).

On May 4, the castle’s Czech cook, Andreas Krobot, rode away on a bicycle in a second attempt to find help. He finally encountered the unit of Maj. Josef Gangl in the town of Wörgl. The Austrian major had commanded howitzers on the Eastern Front and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers in the Battle of Normandy. Ordered to make a last stand against the advancing U.S. Twelfth Armored Division, he had instead contacted the local Austrian resistance under Alois Mayr, providing them with weapons and agreeing that they needed to prevent a destructive battle on Austrian soil at all costs. The SS had orders to shoot Austrians who showed signs of welcoming the incoming Allies, and Gangl’s troops were ready to fight back—but he hoped that American troops would arrive before that was necessary. After speaking with Krobot, Gangl agreed to dispatch his small force to protect the prisoners in Itter in case the SS tried to take it back.

On the way, Gangl’s troops—embarked on a Kübelwagen command car and a truck—encountered a reconnaissance unit from the Twenty-Third Armored Battalion in the village of Kufstein, operating well in advance of its parent formation. Commanding the unit’s four running Sherman tanks was First Lieutenant John “Jack” Lee. Gangl raised a white flag and explained the situation at Castle Itter. The New Yorker decided to help out—and they headed down to Itter together, overcoming a bridge wired to explode along the way, and scattering SS troops setting up a machine-gun nest.

The liberation force was eventually pared down to only fourteen Germans and ten Americans, as the other tanks were left behind to man roadblocks. This left only Jack’s tank Besotten Jenny, an upgraded “Easy 8” Sherman tank named with a high-velocity seventy-six-millimeter gun, with several African American soldiers from the Seventeenth Armored Infantry Battalion riding on top.

The French prisoners were unimpressed by the rescue party—Reynaud later wrote that Lee was “crude in both looks and manners.” Nonetheless, Lee quickly deployed his handful of troops and the armed French captives into defensive positions and positioned Besotten Jenny in front of the gatehouse.

This was fortunate, as troops from the nearby Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier (Armored Infantry) Division soon began moving against the castle. That night, an SS infantry force raked Castle Itter’s walls with rifle and machine-gun fire, but the defenders beat them back with their own small arms. By the following morning, around 150 to two hundred SS troops had massed to besiege Castle Itter, setting up a deadly eighty-eight-millimeter antitank gun and a twenty-millimeter flak gun on a hill eight hundred yards away. Meanwhile, just two additional members of the Austrian resistance arrived to reinforce the castle’s defenders.

The SS artillery began systematically blasting apart the crenellations and windows the castle’s defenders were shooting from. An antitank round blew through the side hull of Besotten Jenny, with the crew barely escaping before the tank brewed up in flames. The SS infantry then stormed towards the castle, despite taking losses to the defenders—which included both of the aged French former prime ministers and the seventy-year-old Michel Clemenceau! The tennis star Borotra volunteered to run the SS lines to look for help. He jumped the wall, dashed across forty meters of open ground, evaded the encircling SS troops in the woods and eventually linked up with American soldiers of the 142nd Regimental Combat Team.

But the SS attackers continued to advance. Several of the German defenders of Castle Itter were killed, including Major Gangl, mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet. By the afternoon, a German antitank team was coming into position to blow up the fortress’s main gate with Panzerfaust rockets.

Suddenly, cannon fire rang from behind the German attackers—Jenny’s sister tank Boche Buster, accompanied by a company of American infantry, was riding into the rescue. They were later joined by troops from the 142nd battalion, led by Borotra, sporting an American uniform. He had led in the infantry of G Company supported by a tank platoon. Along the way, they knocked out several machine-gun nests, and narrowly dodged an ambush by a self-propelled seventy-five-millimeter gun on a German 251/22 halftrack before destroying it with a seventy-six-millimeter shell.

The relief forces captured over a hundred SS prisoners. By that evening, the French prisoners were being driven to Paris. Nazi Germany surrendered three days later on May 8.

In all honesty, it’s not clear whether the SS troops were actually under orders to deliberately massacre the French elites, as has been alleged. However, it would have been very bad if they had, intentionally or in the heat of battle, as the French Republic was in the painful process of reconstituting itself. Following the war, both Reynaud and Daladier would go on to hold political office.

What’s striking about the battle at Itter is how the German, American, French and eastern European defenders of the castle acted on their own initiative to salvage the situation, rather than at the behest of higher commanders. Of course, it’s hard to know precisely what motivated Gangl and his followers to finally turn against the excesses of an evil regime in its final hours. Regardless, France can be thankful that the German major went out of his way to do the right thing, making the ultimate sacrifice protecting both French leaders and his fellow Austrians.

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 is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Creative Commons. "Major Josef 'Sepp' Gangl"

Michael Peck

Military History,

There are lessons to be learned from the Pacific War, says Yoshiaki Nakagawa, a retired lieutenant general the Japanese Self Defense Force

Here's What You Need To Remember: It is true that Japan forced the United States to commit huge ground, air, and naval resources to bloody assaults on islands like Tarawa and Iwo Jima. But Japan's original strategy in 1941 had been to create a defensive system of island outposts and airbases, which would tie down U.S. forces while the Japanese fleet and long-range bombers rushed to the scene to destroy the invaders. That strategy failed.

Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. The assault by U.S. Marines in February 1945 on the small island—just eight square miles of volcanic rock—cost the United States more than 25,000 casualties. The Japanese garrison, more than 20,000 strong, fought and died virtually to the last man.

Is this a guide for how Japan can stop China?

There are lessons to be learned from the Pacific War, says Yoshiaki Nakagawa, a retired lieutenant general the Japanese Self Defense Force. To be clear, Nakagawa is not calling for Japanese soldiers to again launch suicidal banzai charges. But he does point out how the Pacific War proved that storming a defended island requires an attacker to commit vastly more resources than the defender.

Nakagawa's analysis is part of a RAND report titled “The U.S.-Japan Alliance and Deterring Gray Zone Coercion in the Maritime, Cyber, and Space Domains.” Written by U.S. and Japanese researchers, the study examined Chinese "gray zone" warfare, or actions meant to coerce the United States and Japan while not triggering a war." These range from fishing boats and maritime police vessels entering disputed Japanese waters, to cyberattacks, to high-profile space launches.

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The report concluded that there are strategies that the United States and Japan can pursue to stop or deter Chinese provocations. Among them are Nakagawa's contention that Japanese ground troops can deter China from the Ryukyu (Nansei in Japan) and Senkaku islands, which are owned by Japan but claimed by China.

"Through the emplacement of an appropriately dug-in and well-provisioned defending force, the Japanese Imperial Army determined that it could force its U.S. adversary to expend between three and five times the number of forces Japan had deployed in order to occupy and use the islands," who Nakagawa, who notes the Japanese Ground Self Defense Forces have taken this lesson to heart.

Japanese troops armed with antiship missiles can foil a Chinese landing, or fight a delaying action to render the island unusable until help arrives. Assuming the Japanese navy and air force can secure control of the waters around an island, Japanese ground troops can retake it. If the provocation is small, such as "armed fishermen" planting a flag on an island, the Japanese coast guard—backed if needed by Japanese soldiers—can deal with it.

Japan already has one airborne brigade, a battalion-sized special forces group, and will have a rapid-reaction regiment equipped with air-transportable armored vehicles by 2018. A planned 3,400-strong amphibious assault brigade will have sufficient amphibious lift to move 2,000 infantry and their equipment. Guard units totaling 500 to 800 men, armed with antiship and antiaircraft missiles, are also being stationed in the Ryukyus. According to Nakagawa:

Given the presence of deployed JGSDF forces, together with the standing up of an amphibious assault brigade, an adversary looking to invade an important area of the Nansei Islands (for example, Miyakojima) must be able to mobilize 3,000-10,000 amphibious troops or more to overcome the advantages of dug-in defenders. . . . The size of the invading units as measured by vessel volume will be about 60,000-200,000 tons, which represents a substantial set of logistical and lift requirements for the invading side. If the deployment of a rapid-reaction regiment to the Nansei Islands can be completed before enemy forces arrive, the level of invading troops required by the adversary will be even greater.

Nakagawa concedes a few problems with this approach. Japan would need air and naval control around the island to move troops, which in turn might require U.S. muscle. There are Japanese civilians on the island that would need to be protected, supplied and possibly evacuated. And a 500-strong garrison and a 3,400-strong amphibious brigade isn't much of a defense against Chinese invasion, or much of an amphibious counterattack force to retake lost islands.

Nonetheless, Nakagawa hits on the key point: an amphibious assault against an island defended even by a small number of well-armed defenders with long-range weapons is difficult, which is one reason why the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are worried about their ability to conduct invasions. A Japanese garrison could either deter or repel provocations by irregular Chinese forces. Or, their presence would force China to mount a large-scale military invasion, which would trigger the U.S. defense treaty with Japan, and would also force China to openly use force instead of gray warfare.

On the other hand, basing a strategy on Japan's World War II experience is a mixed bag. Leaving aside how the symbolism of the Pacific War will play out in China—which still remembers Japanese atrocities—Imperial Japan's strategy could hardly be called a success.

It is true that Japan forced the United States to commit huge ground, air, and naval resources to bloody assaults on islands like Tarawa and Iwo Jima. But Japan's original strategy in 1941 had been to create a defensive system of island outposts and airbases, which would tie down U.S. forces while the Japanese fleet and long-range bombers rushed to the scene to destroy the invaders. That strategy failed. Once the Americans had worn down the Japanese fleet and airpower, and the islands were cut off, there was no escape. The garrison was doomed, and the outcome was merely a question of how long the battle and how swollen the body count.

Japan may repeat this strategy, but they will hardly desire to emulate the outcome.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. This article first appeared in 2017.

Image: Reuters

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Sam Lewis

Taiwan,

Those inclined to get jittery about whether the U.S. can be trusted as a long-term ally in Asia should remember the situation in Taiwan and South-East Asia is very different from that in Afghanistan.

As the Taliban breached the gates of the Afghan capital and citizens fled for their lives in scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975, Chinese news agency Xinhua spat that “The fall of Kabul marks the collapse of the international image and credibility of the United States.”

A mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, The Global Times went further and used the fall of Kabul as an opportunity to crow that those with high opinions of the U.S. in Taiwan “cannot count on Washington,” that the U.S. would “cast Taiwan aside just as it has done with Vietnam, and now Afghanistan.” 

That’s absurd. 

Though commentary in the West has questioned how far the U.S. will go to maintain the international order from now on, we should not get carried away with ourselves. To suggest that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan means Taiwanese leaders should prepare themselves for inevitable betrayal is wrong for several reasons.

First, Taiwan is already a fully functioning democracy in a way Afghanistan never was. The 2020 Taiwanese Presidential election drew a turnout of 74.9 percent—figures most democracies can only dream of. In comparison, due to threats from the Taliban, the Afghan Presidential election in 2019 drew a turnout of only twenty percent. The countries bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever. Afghanistan has been on the brink of civil war for over a decade. Taiwan hasn’t. Although Taiwan is not a part of the UN, it is an important example of the liberal international order at work—something all Western nations have expressed an interest in defending.

What’s more, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was never declared to be a long-term plan. Thanks to some poor decisions, and as President Joe Biden outlined Monday in his first speech since Kabul fell, the reason the U.S. went was to “get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001.” In an attempt to create long-term stability, the United States and its allies initially engaged in the time-consuming process of nation building, but as the President pointed out, “a decades long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently remake and change Afghanistan” was unsuccessful. 

East Asia, on the other hand, is entirely different. The U.S. has maintained a presence there since the end of WWII. With 38,000 U.S. service members stationed in Japan and over 28,000 stationed in South Korea, interests in the area are far better defined. Any change in the region caused by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would alter the balance of power in a way that even a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would not. Keeping shipping lanes open in the East and South China Seas is of far greater concern to the United States than stability in the vast plains of Central Asia. That is why U.S. Presidents have consistently sold arms to Taiwan, most recently at the beginning of this month.

Finally, there comes the question of political will. It has been the case for a number of years that many Americans, and indeed Western allies, have been against the U.S. staying in Afghanistan. A June 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey of thirteen NATO countries by the German Marshall Fund found sixty-six percent of U.S. respondents wanted to reduce or withdraw all troops from Afghanistan—sixty-nine percent of British and sixty-four percent of French respondents felt the same way. The opinion polls have been clear for a while—withdrawal was inevitable.

Taiwan, on the other hand, has received an uptick in support from the publics of Western countries and, conversely, the actions of the Chines Communist Party have increased skepticism of the Chinese. A Pew Research poll towards the end of last year found increasingly negative opinions of China across the board, with seventy-three percent of respondents in the United States reporting unfavorable views and similar numbers elsewhere. Perhaps most strikingly, of respondents from Japan, the one nation whose deputy Prime Minister advocated for defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, eighty-six percent reported unfavorable views of China. The political will to defend Taiwan is there in a way that it hasn’t been for Afghanistan. 

When Joe Biden declared “America is back” at his inauguration, no one foresaw the scenes of chaos at Kabul airport. The United States and its allies have taken a hammering for its actions these past few weeks and perhaps rightly so—the withdrawal didn’t have to be this chaotic. But as President Biden made clear, Afghanistan was about counter-terrorism, not nation-building. U.S interests in East Asia involve the future of the international order, and the United States just freed up a lot of time, energy, and resources to focus on the region. 

Those inclined to get jittery about whether the U.S. can be trusted as a long-term ally in Asia should remember the situation in Taiwan and South-East Asia is very different from that in Afghanistan. Don’t listen to those that suggest otherwise.

Sam Lewis is a Young Voices contributor and author of the blog ‘East Asia Insider’

Image: Reuters

Michael Peck

World War II History,

Ironically, the battlefield results of a Japanese invasion of Siberia would have been relatively minor.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The ultimate question for a 1941 Russo-Japanese War may actually be psychological. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown when Germany, with whom Russia had a nonaggression pact, launched its massive Barbarossa surprise attack. How would he have reacted to the news that Japan was attacking from the other side of the Soviet Union?

Fighting a war on two fronts is the military equivalent of driving a car while texting. It’s just a really bad idea, as Germany can attest. One reason Germany lost two world wars is because its forces were split between East and West. America and Britain also fought World War II in Europe and Asia.

In contrast, the Soviet Union could concentrate its forces against Germany, thanks to a 1941 neutrality pact with its long-time rival Japan. This became painfully obvious to Hitler during the 1941–42 Battle of Moscow, when the Red Army’s well-trained and well-equipped Siberian divisions reinforced the battered Soviet armies defending Moscow. Trained to operate in the harsh cold of Siberia, these fresh troops shattered the frozen German spearheads and sent them reeling from the gates of Moscow.

But what if the Soviet Union had also faced a two-front war? One of the great what-ifs of the Second World War is what would have happened if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Soviet Union seemed at defeat’s door as the German panzers drove deep into Russia.

The traditional narrative is that in mid-1941, Japanese leaders were split between the “strike north” faction, championed by the Imperial Army, which wanted to attack Russia. Opposing them was the Navy-backed “strike south” faction pressing for seizing the resources of Southeast Asia from their American and European masters. In the fall of 1941, with the German armies approaching Moscow, Japanese leaders made the fateful decision to declare war against the Western powers. The immediate impetus was a series of American and European embargoes in 1940–41, most importantly of oil, which left Japan facing the prospect of running out of fuel for its factories and ships. However, Stalin learned from Richard Sorge, a well-placed Soviet spy in Tokyo, that Japan would not invade Siberia, which the Soviet dictator to shift his elite Siberian troops from the Far East to Moscow, just in time to save the Soviet capital.

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What would have if Japan had struck north after all, attacking Russia from the east while Germany relentlessly advanced from the west? Would it have changed the course of World War II? Like most great what-if questions, the answer depends on the assumptions you make. Consider this: if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, would isolationist America would have declared war on Japan? And if Japan had attacked Russia, which certainly would have compelled the Western powers to tighten their embargo, how would the Japanese economy have fared?

Militarily, the outcome of a 1941 Russo-Japanese war would have been far from certain. Russia had been defeated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and during its intervention in the Russian Civil War, Japanese troops had advanced all the way to Lake Baikal. But closer to World War II, Russian tanks and artillery won the Khalkin Gol border battle in 1939, while the Red Army’s armored blitzkrieg smashed Japan’s Manchurian Kwantung Army in 1945. But a 1941 clash would have been interesting. The Japanese Army was not mechanized by Western and Soviet standards, putting them at a disadvantage against Soviet armor, while the logistics of supplying even a lightly equipped Japanese offensive into the Siberian wilderness would have been daunting.

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On the other hand, Japan was not one of Germany’s satellite armies on the Eastern front. Italy and Romania were like the seven dwarves to the Aryan Snow White, and the Red Army smashed them with ease. But the Imperial Japanese army in 1941 was battle-hardened—but not yet worn down—by the China War. It could move fast, fight just as fanatically as Soviet troops, and was skilled in infiltration tactics and night fighting. It would have enjoyed powerful air and naval support. Spared from battle with the Americans, the Imperial Navy could have employed naval gunfire and its elite, long-range Zero fighter squadrons to ensure air superiority for a drive on the vital port of Vladivostok.

As it bravely but ineptly demonstrated against the Finns and Germans, the Red Army in 1941 had been devastated by Stalin’s purges. At least the Siberian troops were good, but in 1941, they were at the end of a long supply line from western Russia that would have been disrupted by the German capture of factories and resources. Given a choice between retaining Moscow or Vladivostok, Stalin would have prioritized defending the Soviet capital, so Japan might have taken Vladivostok and the Siberian coast without too much effort.

But then what? Advance six thousand miles down the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow? Garrison vast Siberia while still attempting to subdue the vast population of China? Incorporate Kazakhstan into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? One wonders how much Japan would ultimately have gained from this war.

Ironically, the battlefield results of a Japanese invasion of Siberia would have been relatively minor. The real action was a continent away, in Moscow. The Soviet Union could lose Vladivostok (even though much American Lend-Lease came through that port), but Moscow was a different matter. Thus a 1941 Russo-Japanese War boils down to two questions. First, if the Battle of Moscow was one of the turning points of World War II, then would Japan pinning down the Siberian reinforcements have crippled the Soviet counteroffensive? The German armies in front of Moscow were depleted, exhausted, unsupplied and freezing. Yet many of the Soviet armies at Moscow were hastily thrown together, inexperienced, poorly led and still struggling to regain their balance from the German onslaught. It seems likely the Soviet counteroffensive would have thrown back Hitler’s armies without the Siberians, but would have inflicted less damage. If so, the real impact might have been in 1942. Germany came close to capturing Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields before the Soviets launched their devastating counteroffensive in November 1942; would sending forces to stop, or at least delay, a Japanese advance have meant no Stalingrad catastrophe for Germany?

The ultimate question for a 1941 Russo-Japanese War may actually be psychological. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown when Germany, with whom Russia had a nonaggression pact, launched its massive Barbarossa surprise attack. How would he have reacted to the news that Japan was attacking from the other side of the Soviet Union? The Red Army suffered four million casualties in 1941; it had enough problems attempting to build new divisions and control the ones it already had in western Russia, without having to deal with a Siberian front.

The Russo-German War was a war of annihilation. Peace was not possible until one side or the other was conquered. But could Stalin have conceded Siberia to Japan in return for an armistice? Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (whom the Nazis classified as honorary Aryans) were loose allies at best. A separate peace might have been possible. At the least, a Russo-Japanese war would have diverted Soviet resources away from Germany and thus prolonged the European war, though perhaps America would have found Japan less difficult to subdue.

Had Japan declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941, the East might have been Red, as the Communist Chinese song goes. But it might have been the red of the Rising Sun.

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

This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Asia

Modernization efforts of the People's Liberation Army began in 1991 when Beijing realized its dated WWII-style military was insufficient. 

Here’s What You Need to Remember: Transforming rigid command and control and logistical systems, and rooting out endemic corruption, is one of the chief aims of the reforms. So is implementing realistic combat training emphasizing joint operations, instead of reputation-burnishing scripted exercises. The radical reorganization of the PLA shows awareness at senior levels that overcoming the PLA’s shortcomings isn’t only a matter of procuring better technologies, but changing how the military uses them.

The PLA was formed in 1927 as a Communist revolutionary force to oppose the Nationalist Kuomintang government and (later) invading Japanese forces. Unlike Western militaries, the PLA remains loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, not a theoretically independent Chinese state. A cadre of political officers (commissars or zhengwei) still operate at every level of the command structure to ensure loyalty and manage personnel.

Even after securing the mainland in 1949 and sprouting Navy and Air Force branches, the PLA adhered to a defensive “People’s War Strategy” which assumed that technologically superior foreign invaders (the United States or the Soviet Union) would need to be lured deep into Chinese territory to be worn down by guerilla warfare and superior numbers.

Serious PLA modernization efforts began in 1991 when the trouncing of Iraq’s huge mechanized army in the Gulf War caused Beijing to realize its dated, World War II-style military was similarly vulnerable. By 2004, a new doctrine focused on proactively defeating enemies beyond China’s borders, including through preemptive strike if necessary, as well as undertaking global governance missions befitting its superpower status.

Between 2000 and 2016, while the Chinese economy averaged official annual growth rates around 7-8 percent, the PLA’s budget grew even faster at 10 percent. Despite that, the PLA’s current roughly $200 billion dollar budget totals less than one-third of U.S. defense spending. However, China pays much lower costs for hardware and personnel because of China’s “latecomer advantage” as the DIA report explains:

“China has routinely adopted the best and most effective platforms found in foreign militaries through direct purchase, retrofits, or theft of intellectual property. By doing so, China has been able to focus on expediting its military modernization at a small fraction of the original cost.”

Prominent examples include China’s aircraft carriers and its J-11 jet fighters.

By 2017, Chinese defense spending growth declined to 5-7%percent and the PLA shed 300,000 personnel, bringing it down to 2 million-strong—still the largest armed force on the planet. This transition sought to remodel the PLA into a leaner, more flexible force suited for fast-paced modern warfare.

Indeed, that year Beijing fundamentally restructured how the PLA worked, consigning the traditionally dominant ground forces to their own branch on equal footing with the PLA Air Force, Navy, Rocket Force, and a brand-new Strategic Support Force. This last addition combines satellite-launch and satellite-killing capabilities, with elite hacker and electronic warfare units to collect vital intelligence while disrupting the adversary’s own recon capabilities.

Rather than being siloed in their respective branches, operational units now fall under five regional commands, each with its own Joint Operations Command Center to enable air-, land- and sea-warfare branches of the PLA to rapidly coordinate using robust and redundant communication networks and inter-service chains of command.

The theater commands fall under the ultimate control of a Central Military Committee. The Army’s large division-sized units have mostly been dissolved, with assets devolved to seventy-eight combined-arms brigades mixing together armor and infantry with organic artillery and anti-aircraft units. Special forces and helicopter units also doubled in number.

The new organization allows lower-ranking officers to act more flexibly without depending on higher headquarters for orders and support assets. However, the transition is proving culturally difficult for the traditionally hierarchy-obsessed PLA and complicates logistics and training for units now combining several types of equipment.

Nonetheless, transforming rigid command and control and logistical systems, and rooting out endemic corruption, is one of the chief aims of the reforms. So is implementing realistic combat training emphasizing joint operations, instead of reputation-burnishing scripted exercises.

Beijing’s Strategic Forces

The PLA’s huge Rocket Force has a diverse array of over a thousand ballistic and cruise missiles armed with both conventional and nuclear warheads, most of them short- or intermediate-range weapons to strike targets in Asia and the Pacific, as well as a smaller number of inter-continental ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. cities. New truck-launched DF-21D missiles may uniquely boast the precision-guidance capabilities to strike aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away from China.

China’s arsenal of around 300 nuclear warheads is primarily delivered by the Rocket Force, but the PLA Navy also operates nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, which may soon have the ability to strike U.S. targets without sortieing far from the Chinese coast. In 2017, the PLA reintroduced a nuclear role for the Air Force, likely to be fulfilled by the forthcoming H-20 stealth bomber.

However, Beijing has a no-first-use nuclear policy: it only plans to launch nukes if attacked with them first. A network of hardened underground facilities means the Rocket Force is likely to survive a first strike to inflict a retaliatory attack. China does not stockpile biological or chemical weapons.

The PLA’s New Mission

The PLA’s strategic objectives have expanded from territorial defense to achieving regional military dominance over East Asia and the western half of the Pacific, as well as expansion into the Indian Ocean. Beijing eventually aims to displace or render indefensible the Pentagon’s East Asian footholds, notably island bases in Guam and Okinawa and alliances with South Korea and Japan.

Regional hotspots include a border dispute with India, potential instability in North Korea, and maritime sovereignty disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Beijing also requires the PLA to maintain a credible capability for invading Taiwan, including fighting off or deterring U.S. intervention on Taipei’s behalf. The PLA Navy operates Yuzhao-class Landing Platform Docks, and its Marine Corps recently tripled in size to around 35,000 personnel in seven brigades. The Army also maintains six combined arms brigades equipped with amphibious tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

Operations other than war are also of increasing importance to the PLA, including suppressing protest and unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang—where reportedly hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs have been placed in forced labor camps—as well as providing disaster relief and evacuating nationals abroad in emergencies.

Though the PLA is focused on fighting regional, not global conflicts, it’s developing a limited capacity for global expeditionary operations—particularly evident in the opening of its first overseas base in Djibouti. Beijing is preparing the ground for additional overseas bases in Pakistan, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and various Pacific islands. The introduction of huge new Y-20 “Chubby Girl” transport planes will significantly improve China’s global logistical capabilities.

These technologies and reforms have only begun to address longstanding PLA deficiencies in command-and-control, logistics, unrealistic training, and lack of recent combat experience. Furthermore, while the PLA does field cutting-edge systems like the Type 99 tank, J-20 stealth fighter, and Type 055 destroyer, roughly 40 percent of its armor and fighter units still use outdated 1950s-era hardware like Type 59 tanks, Type 63 APCs, and J-7 fighters. The rapidly growing PLA Navy still relies on many noisy diesel submarines, and its two new carriers are less capable than U.S. nuclear-powered carriers.

Despite these weaknesses, the radical reorganization of the PLA shows awareness at senior levels that overcoming the PLA’s shortcomings isn’t only a matter of procuring better technologies, but changing how the military uses them.

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.

Image: Creative Commons "Chinese Sailors on Visit to Portsmouth" by Defence Images is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sebastien Roblin

Soviet Navy, World

The Navy could hear an Alfa-Class submarine coming, but could it outrun one?

Key point: The Alfa represented a design paradigm for “small but fast” attack submarines that would ultimately fall out of favor compared to “big but stealthy” designs; though isolated media reports have revealed some interest in future Alfa-like boats. Yet stealth, not speed, reigns as king in modern submarine warfare tactics.

The Project 705 Lira—better known abroad as the Alfa-class submarine by NATO—was basically a submarine race car, and looked the part with svelte tear-drop shaped hull, rakishly trimmed-down sail designed to minimize aquadynamic drag, and even its convertible-style pop-up windshield.    

Military vehicles are generally designed out of a relentless quest for efficiency, but the Alfa’s iconic shape exemplifies how kinematically optimal designs often possess a striking aesthetic of their own. 

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

Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarines tended to be faster and deeper-diving than their Western counterparts—though they were also noisier and more prone to horrifying accidents. 

The Project 705, however, originated as a 1958-design concept to push the speed advantage to the maximum, allowing the submarine not only keep pace with but overtake NATO carrier task forces typically cruising at 33 knots—while keeping one-step ahead of enemy torpedoes and out-maneuvering enemy submarines.

This extraordinary performance would be achieved by ruthlessly maximizing speed and subtracting from weight. Thus the Alfa featured a relatively small hull made of titanium alloy. Titanium is a rare metal which can create surfaces as strong as steel for roughly half the weight. It is also paramagnetic, making the submarine’s hull more difficult to detect for maritime patrol planes using Magnetic Anomaly Detectors.

However, titanium can only be welded in an inert argon or helium atmosphere. This led U.S. engineers to assume it was simply impractical to weld large pieces of titanium on the scale necessary for a submarine hull. They underestimated Soviet determination: workers in pressurized suits would work in huge warehouses flooded with argon gas to assemble sheets of the shiny, rare metal.

The resulting Project 705 submarine measured 81-meters long but weighed only 3,200-tons submerged. For comparison, the 84-meter-long American Permit class submarine displaced 4,800 tons submerged. 

The Alfa featured a typical Soviet double-hull configuration, but only one of its six internal compartments was intended for habitation by the crew. Extraordinary degrees of automation allowed a complement of 15 officers cooped together in the heavily protected third compartment of the vessel, instead of the roughly 100 personnel typical on contemporary SSNs. 

In fact, only eight crew could operate virtually every system on the submarine from the command center thanks to its highly automated systems, allowing for very fast reaction times in combat. In the event of misfortune, the crew could make use of a spherical escape capsule built into the sail—the first to be found on a Soviet submarine.

The Alfa’s complement would later be doubled to 32 crew—but no enlisted ratings were invited onboard. 

However, as the U.S. Navy discovered decades later while developing the Littoral Combat Ship, this degree of automation meant the small crew was incapable of performing maintenance and repairs while at sea.

The Alfa relied upon reactor consuming 90% enriched uranium-235 fuel, and liquified lead-bismuth-eutectic for cooling to produce 155 MW of power. As the liquified metal would solidify at temperatures below 257 degrees Fahrenheit, the reactors typically had remain warm lest the liquefied metal freeze, rendering the reactor non-functional. 

Each Project 705 carried eighteen to twenty 533-millimeter torpedoes which could be automatically loaded into six tubes which could pneumatically ‘pop’ the weapons upwards to engage ships overhead. Optionally, RPK-2 “Starfish” nuclear anti-submarine missiles and ultra-fasted Shkval super-cavitating torpedoes could also be carried. Alfa variants armed with ballistic missiles (705A) or gigantic 650-millimeter torpedo tubes (the 705D) were conceived but never built.

After spending nine years in development, four Alfas were laid down in Severodvinsk and Lenningrad between 1967 and 1969. However, only one—K-64 Leningrad, had been launched and commissioned by the beginning of 1972. That same year, K-64 experienced both cracking in its titanium hull and a leaking liquified metal ‘froze’ on the exterior of the reactor causing irreparable damage. The super-submarine was decommissioned and scrapped just a few years after going on duty.

After several years of tweaking, six more Alfas were finally commissioned between 1977-1981, with later 705K boats using a moderately more reliable BM-40A reactors.

Undeniably, the Project 705 exhibited impressive performance. In a minute and a half, an Alfa could accelerate up to 41 knots (47 miles per hour) while submerged—though some sources claim eve higher speeds were achieved. Their high degree of reserve buoyancy also made them capable of executing fast turns and changes in attitude, and they could dive—and attack from!—depths that NATO torpedoes struggled to atain.

When racing at maximum speed using its steam-turbined turned five-bladed propeller, the Alfa-class was unsurprisingly noisy. But an Alfa commander in need of discretion had another trick he could pull from his sleeve: a secondary propulsion system in the form of two tiny electrically turned propellers that allowed the Alfa to slink around very quietly at low speeds.

The CIA initially mis-identified the Alfas as being diesel-electric submarines due to their small size. But two determined CIA case officers, Herb Lord and Gerhardt Thamm, began closely analyzing photo intelligence and reports on titanium components flowing to mysterious facilities in shipyards in Leningrad and Severodvinsk, as described by Thamm in this article. This led to a more accurate estimate the capabilities of the ‘titanium submarines’ by 1979, prompting the development of more agile Mark 48 ADCAP and Spearfish torpedoes by the U.S. and U.K. respectively. 

However, the Pentagon appears to have been fooled by misinformation suggesting much larger-scale production of the Alfa than was the case. In fact, the Alfa had big problems to match its extraordinary speed.

As the special facilities required to keep the liquid metal reactors were often missing or broken-down, Alfa crews resorted to keeping the reactors running full time even while in port, making the reactors very difficult to maintain and unreliable. And the Alfas’ hot-burning reactors had to be replaced entirely after fifteen years in service. 

The Alfa’s low reliability and maintainability at sea meant the submarine was conceived of as a sort of “interceptor,” kept ready at port to dash after key surface warships targets. In this role the Alfa amounted to a formidable foe to NATO submariners.

But all but one of the Alfas had been decommissioned by 1990, four of them having had their reactor coolant freeze while deployed at sea. The last ship, K-123, was refit with a pressurized water reactor and was finally decommissioned from duties as a training ship in 1996.

Safe disposal of the Alfa reactor cores encrusted with solidified lead-bismuth also proved quite challenging. Furthermore, over 650 tons of weapons-grade U-235 fuel used by Alfas was found unsecured in warehouses in Kazakhstan in 1994, where they had attracted interest from illegal arms dealers. The uranium was ultimately extracted to the United States using huge C-5 Galaxy cargo planes in a covert operation known as Project Sapphire.

The Alfa represented a design paradigm for “small but fast” attack submarines that would ultimately fall out of favor compared to “big but stealthy” designs like the Russian Akula-class and U.S. Sea Wolf-class SSNs—though isolated media reports have revealed some interest in future Alfa-like boats. Yet stealth, not speed, reigns as king in modern submarine warfare tactics.

That said, for all its serious shortcomings, the Alfa was undeniably a striking and ambitious design that pushed the limits of submarine performance in ways few modern designs even attempt.

Kyle Mizokami is a writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and The Daily Beast. In 2009 he co-founded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. This first appeared in 2019 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reddit 

Mark Episkopos

Russia China,

Whatever their technical benefits, the exercises augur a new wave of Russian-Chinese cooperation.

Reaping the windfall of their ongoing cooperation in Afghanistan, Russia, and China seek to further deepen their military ties.

Chinese and Russian forces conducted the ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 joint drills earlier this month at a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) base in West China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

The drills involve as many as 13,000 troops and 400 pieces of military hardware, including 200 pieces of armor, 90 artillery units, and 100 aircraft. The exercises notably featured China’s fifth-generation J-20 stealth fighter jet, marking the first time that the fighter participated in joint exercises. The Russian side was represented by forces from the country’s Eastern Military District, bringing air defense systems, motorized divisions, and Su-30SM fighter jets.

The course of the drills remains largely unclear, with previous statements from Russian and Chinese officials suggesting that the exercises encompassed joint reconnaissance, early warning, and electronic warfare tasks, as well as combined arms strike operations against notional terrorist outposts. Experts say ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 is the first China-hosted Russian-Chinese drill hosted on Chinese soil; it is also the first joint drill held in China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, who attended a portion of the drills, reportedly commended the joint forces’ “coherent operations” and their “high professionalism.” Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe echoed Shoigu’s sentiments about the high level of Russian-Chinese military interoperability while offering even stronger praise. "Amid sweeping changes and the pandemic, the drills reflect the invariable support between China and Russia and show the high level of inter-army ties,” Fenghe said. "This fully testifies to close relations between China and Russia, the indestructible ties between the Chinese and Russian servicemen and the strong and durable friendship between us personally.”

Fenghe averred that the "these drills are yielding obvious results as real warfare can be simulated at a very high level,” but some military experts have cast doubt on that assessment. Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, told CNN that the drills were too choreographed to yield concrete military results; that they lacked the crucial component of commanders making unscripted decisions with an impact on the course and outcome of a battlefield engagement. "Free play is what hones military skills, not highly choreographed airshow-like events," Layton added.

Chinese state news outlet the Global Times shot back at the CNN report in a heated rebuttal piece, insisting that the drills demonstrated the ability of Russian and Chinese troops to jointly fight “the forces of terrorism, extremism and separatism.” The Global Times article added that “CNN's badmouthing of China-Russia military strategic cooperation will be of no use, nor will it succeed in trying to drive a wedge between the two countries.”

With key operational details from ZAPAD/INTERACTION-2021 still mired in mystery, it is difficult to fully evaluate the drills’ instructional value. But whatever their technical benefits, the exercises augur a new wave of Russian-Chinese cooperation that was recently illustrated in Afghanistan, where the two sides reached a consensus around backing the Taliban’s legitimacy in the weeks following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

A sizable PLA contingent is expected to make an appearance during the 2021 edition of the International Army Games, a Russian-hosted annual military sports event.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

U.S. Air Force, Americas

The Harvest Hawk is a KC-130J tanker that Marines modified to fit their needs. 

Here's What You Need to Know: The Harvest Hawk has worked so efficiently because it operates in “permissive” environments where adversaries lack the anti-aircraft weapons to effectively shoot back. In these situations, the speed and defense capabilities of expensive, fuel-gulping jet fighters are superfluous, and a lumbering cargo plane can virtually hover in place in relative safety while benefiting from greater endurance and payload. The Hawk thus is an investment not only in conventional warfighting capability but in providing both ISR and close air support capabilities for counter-insurgency missions. 

Dropping bombs out of cargo planes has been a common measure of desperation for under-equipped air forces and opportunistic mercenaries throughout the history of aviation. However, in 2009 the U.S. Marine Corps found a way to make a virtue out of flexibility by developing Harvest Hawk, a kit that allowed their new KC-130J refueling tankers to double as missile-toting gunships and creepy aerial spying platforms that would put the Eye of Mordor to shame.

Heavily armed Hercules transports have existed since the feared AC-130 Specter gunship debuted during the Vietnam War, and the Air Force currently operates several different types. In 2009, the Marines joined in by developing the Hercules Airborne Weapons Kit, which can be bolted on to the service’s KC-130J refueling tankers.

While the Air Force and navy operate KC-135 and KC-10 tankers based on jetliners, the Marines instead adapted C-130 Hercules transport planes to serve as slower, more versatile platforms that can refuel helicopters and Osprey tilt-rotors as well as fixed-wing jets. Even better, a KC-130 can top up two helicopters at a time via drogue-hoses which can pump 300 gallons a minute. A KC-130J can carry 60,000 pounds of fuel and cargo—or 84,000 pounds without cargo.

Six $22 million HAWK kits were assembled, and ten KC-130Js modified to accept them. The kits added an AAQ-30 Targeting Sighting System sensor pod under the KC-130J’s left wingtip fuel tank which can spot individuals up to ten miles away; an M299 quad-launcher capable of carrying four AGM-114P2 Hellfire II anti-tank missiles (or P2A anti-personnel models) under the right wing; and a box-launcher loaded with ten smaller AGM-176 Griffon GPS-guided missile on the cargo ramp. That’s right, the beast had to lower the cargo-bay door midflight to fire the Griffons.

The Hawk’s crew of seven included a pilot and co-pilot, two fire control officers operating a fire control system fixed on a cargo palette, a crewmaster and two cargomasters that double as Griffon missile operators.

Harvest Hawks provide ‘overwatch’ for friendly ground troops by spending hours slowly orbiting overhead, using their sensor balls to scan huge swathes of terrain and spy on what the locals below are up to. As Hawk crewmember Major Mark Blankenbricker told defense media, “We use our cameras to look at villages, watch pattern of life and assess what is going on in the [area of operation] at that time.” No less than seven onboard radios allow close coordination with ground forces and friendly aircraft. If the grunts on the ground run into trouble, the Hawks sling guided missiles fairly precisely on top of the hostiles.

A Harvest Hawk was deployed by Marine Air Refueling Squadron 352 to Afghanistan in October 2010 and first saw action at Sangin on November 4 while supporting 5th Regiment Marines, killing five Taliban insurgents with a Hellfire missile. The lone Hawk soon proved to be under constant demand by ground troops.

Improved with Experience

By 2012, Harvest Hawks were a reliable fixture of Marine air support over Helmand Province, Afghanistan as detailed profile by Code One Magazine in which Marine Major John Bulter of VMGR 252 shared a starting figure: “Our launch total was considerably more than Marine Harriers, Navy Hornets, and even Air Force A-10s. With only one aircraft, we shot close to half of all the kinetic weapons launched in theater in the nine months we were there.” The armed tankers averaged four flight hours a day, though could remain aloft as many as ten hours if necessary.

The aircraft’s sensors reportedly could distinguish humans from animals, and even adults from children. In one incident, a HAWK crew spotted a group of Taliban firing on U.S. troops while using children “as a buffer” and to resupply ammunition. Unwilling to launch missiles, the pilots instead buzzed low overhead while spraying out a rain of defensive flares. The insurgents and their captives dispersed.

Over time, the Harvest Hawks were improved. The cheaper Griffon missiles were rarely used at first because depressurizing the cargo bay to fire them was such a pain—so a new ‘wine rack’ launcher was developed poking out the side of the paratrooper jump door. The new “Derringer Door” could also launch GBU-44/B Viper Strike glide bombs—designed to deliver very precise strikes with minimal collateral damage due to their 2-pound warheads and sub-one meter accuracy. You can see the newly configured Harvest Hawk fire Griffon and Maverick missiles in this video.

Additionally, new Intrepid Tiger electronic warfare pods gave Hawks the ability to jam hostile radio signals—particularly those that might trigger an IED from under the feet of troops on the ground. Marines in the field even scrounged a ground-based ROVER video receiver and installed it in the cargo bay of KC-130s, using it to collect video feed from all kinds of drones and aircraft.

In 2016, the Marines formulated a major upgrade called Harvest Hawk+, and announced plans to introduce HAWK-compatibility on the sixty-nine remaining un-upgraded KC-130Js. The new format swaps out the AAQ-30 bolted on the left wing for a higher-quality L3 Wescam MX-20 sensor turret permanently installed under the nose. Additionally, an ALQ-23 Intrepid Triger II electronic warfare pod allows selective jamming or spying on different radio frequencies, and may be eventually upgraded for area radar jamming capability. Finally, compatibility was added for the AGM-114P4 Hellfire, which has improved maneuverability for hitting moving vehicles. In June 2018, the Harvest+ successfully completed a five-week live-fire training at the Naval Weapons Station at China Lake. Compatibility with additional weapons such as Small Diameter Bombs, 70-millimter guided rockets, a more prodigious Hellfire missile rack, or a long-promised but long delayed 30-millimter side-firing cannon, could eventually follow.

An Osprey Hawk?

Intriguingly, the Marine Corps also declared in 2016 its interest in upgrading its fleet of MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft with many of the Hawk+ systems. The very flexible, but expensive and accident-prone Osprey was criticized for its lack of effective armament when delivering troops to hot drop zones in Iraq.

The laundry list of proposed upgrades would turn the Osprey into a true multi-role platform: aerial refueling capability with other Ospreys, a self-defense jamming pod, a Forward-Looking Infrared Sensor for both scanning for hostiles and assisting in landing, a laser designator for targeting precision-guided munitions, an MX-20 sensor ball under the chin, and even capability to guide Switchblade kamikaze drones that can be literally chucked by hand out the side door. Of course, whether funding will materialize for such an ambitious and expensive upgrade is to be determined.

The Harvest Hawk has worked so efficiently because it operates in “permissive” environments where adversaries lack the anti-aircraft weapons to effectively shoot back. In these situations, the speed and defense capabilities of expensive, fuel-gulping jet fighters is superfluous, and a lumbering cargo plane can virtually hover in place in relative safety while benefiting from greater endurance and payload. On the other hand, the Hawk mission may reduce KC-130 availability for the aerial refueling missions, which has already suffered due to the grounding of the majority of the Marine’s older KC-130T tankers after a deadly crash in July 2017.

The Hawk thus is an investment not in conventional warfighting capability, but in providing both ISR and close air support capabilities for counter-insurgency missions—a need which unlikely to go away soon as Washington doubles down on military commitments in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan.

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

This article first appeared in June 2018.

Image: Reddit

Michael Peck

U.S. Military,

News last month that Britain is boosting its hypersonic weapons program didn’t come as a surprise. Many other nations are doing it.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In other words, hypersonic engines won’t turn a Typhoon, F-15 or F-22 into a Mach 5 jet. Instead, hypersonic missiles will do the work. It’s the same approach that allows sixty-year-old B-52s to remain formidable weapons, by arming them with smart bombs. The platform remains the same, but the payload is updated as technology advances.

Can an F-35 be turned into a hypersonic aircraft?

News last month that Britain is boosting its hypersonic weapons program didn’t come as a surprise. Many other nations are doing it.

What caught everyone’s attention was that there are plans to rework the jet engines on the 1990s Eurofighter Typhoon—which propel the aircraft to Mach 2—into hypersonic engines that could achieve Mach 5 or faster.

Which naturally led to a question: can existing fourth- and fifth-generation fighters—which operate at speeds of around Mach 2 or less—become Mach 5 speed demons?

The technology in question is the Sabre engine from British firm Reaction Engines. Sabre aims to combine the advantages of both conventional jet engines with rocket engines. Ground tests have shown that demonstrated that the engine is capable of flying faster than Mach 3, according to Defense News.

“SABRE’s unique feature is a precooler which reduces the temperature of the incoming compressed air,” explains British defense site Forces.com. “This means the engine does not need to cope with extreme temperatures which requires special materials.”

“At high altitudes, it is a rocket, but, at lower altitudes, it works like a jet engine - sucking in and compressing air.”

One option that the RAF is considering for development of hypersonic engines is to add pre-cooler technology to the EJ-200 gas turbine engine that currently powers the Typhoon.

Alas, that isn’t the same as sticking a hypersonic engine on an older fighter.

“You shouldn’t read into that we are somehow going to achieve a hypersonic Typhoon,” said Air Chief Marshal Stephen Hillier.

There is more to developing a hypersonic aircraft than sticking a new engine in an old airframe. To turn a fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft, such as the F-16 or F-35, would invoke a variety of airframe, aerodynamic and avionics issues.

Instead, Britain’s new £10 million ($12.2 million) hypersonics program will be used to thrust Britain into the hypersonic race that is currently dominated by the U.S., Russia and China. For example, hypersonic research is expected to bear fruit in engine development for the Tempest, Britain’s planned sixth-generation fighter.

With 80 percent of Western fighters expected to be fourth-generation for the foreseeable future, hypersonic missiles are a way to keep older jets relevant. “We are working with some other people to see whether we can generate a Mach 5 capability in four years,” said Air Vice Marshal Simon Rochelle, chief of air staff capability. “There will be others pursuing higher and fast speeds … but much beyond that speed you start to change the chemical properties, the physical properties and metallic properties within the actual weapon system.”

“Part of the reason for rapidly developing high-speed weapons was to enable those aircraft to maintain their edge," Rochelle said. “There is a challenge and competition now going on at range, at speed, at pace and we have to mobilize ourselves to be ready to take that on.”

In other words, hypersonic engines won’t turn a Typhoon, F-15 or F-22 into a Mach 5 jet. Instead, hypersonic missiles will do the work. It’s the same approach that allows sixty-year-old B-52s to remain formidable weapons, by arming them with smart bombs. The platform remains the same, but the payload is updated as technology advances.

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

This article originally appeared several months ago and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.