The National Interest

Sebastien Roblin

Tanks, Middle East

It was not the leap forward Moscow was hoping for. 

Here's What You Need to Know: The underwhelming combat test in Syria highlights why robot tanks haven’t shown up on the battlefield sooner, despite the component technologies have been available for decades. Developing reliable long-distance communication links, sophisticated autonomous operation algorithms, and well-integrated sensors and targeting systems to allow a distant operator to identify and engage targets all pose significant practical challenges.

In May 2018, the Russian military revealed it had combat-tested its Uran-9 robot tank in Syria. The diminutive remote-control tank is noted for its formidable gun and missile armament.

However, just a month later Defense Blog reported that Senior Research Officer Andrei Anisimov told a conference at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg that the Uran-9’s performance in Syria revealed that “modern Russian combat Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are not able to perform the assigned tasks in the classical types of combat operations.” He concluded it would be ten to fifteen more years before UGVs were ready for such complex tasks.

This stands in contrast to a source that told Jane’s that the system had “…demonstrated high performance in an operational environment.”

Robotic armored vehicles are in development across the world, with the U.S. Army planning for its Bradley fighting vehicle replacement to be “optionally-manned.” However, Russia arguably has more aggressively moved towards combat-deploying UGVs. In 2015 Russia’s Military Industry Committee announced its objective of deploying 30 percent of Russia’s kinetic weapons on remote-control platforms by 2025. Current projects include the MARS six-seat infantry carrier, the robotic BMP-3 Vihr (“Hurricane”) fighting vehicle, robotized T-72 tanks, and tiny Nerekhta UGVs that can evacuate wounded soldiers, fire a machine gun or kamikaze charge enemy positions.

The Russian Army reportedly procured twenty-two Uran-9s in 2016 from the JSC 766 UPTK company. The robo-tanks are apparently attached to support infantry and engineer units by engaging in reconnaissance and fire support missions, rather than being concentrated in independent maneuver formations. The Uran-9 is also being offered for export by the state-owned Rostec Corporation and was photographed being inspected by General Min Aung Hlaing, commander of Myanmar’s armed forces.

The first UGVs were developed a century ago during World War I. By the 1930s the Soviet Union deployed two battalions of remote-controlled “Teletanks” armed with flamethrowers and demolition charges which saw action during the 1939-1940 invasion of Finland. Today, UGVs such as Russia’s Uran-6 have are being successfully employed to clear mines and IEDs in the Middle East and Central Asia. However, few UGVs have been operationally deployed for such complex tasks as detecting and engaging enemy forces.

The rhombus-shaped Uran-9 weighs twelve tons and measures five meters long, one-fifth the weight and just over half the length of a T-90 tank. A diesel engine allows the vehicle to accelerate to twenty-two miles per hour on highways, or six to fifteen mph off-road. The robot’s steel armor plates reportedly protect it from shell splinters and small-arms—though implicitly it may remain vulnerable to other relatively common weapons such as RPGs or heavy machine guns.

Two Uran-9s are transported to the battlefield by a large truck, and then radio-controlled by an operator and commander in an armored 6x6 Kamaz truck. Thermal and electro-optical sights and sensors mounted atop the turret allow the operators to “see” through the tank. There is also a hand-held control unit option.

A “Skynet” Unified Tactical Management system allows up to four Uran-9s to network together, either spread out up to four miles apart or strung together in a column formation. The robo-tanks do have some limited autonomous capabilities if they lose their signal—particularly for maneuvering around obstacles when moving along pre-programmed paths. Some sources claim the Uran-9 may also be able to detect, identify and engage enemy forces without manual human direction.

The robo-tank’s turret mounts a rapid-firing 2A72 30-millimeter autocannon that can blast light-armored vehicles and infantry to deadly effect, as well as a 7.62-millimeter machine gun. Furthermore, a firing rack can extend from the turret to launch two or four 9M120-1 Ataka anti-tank missiles which can spin away to bust tanks up to 3.7 miles away while guided by a laser. And top that off, a further six to twelve Shmel flamethrower rockets with air-combusting thermobaric warheads can be mounted on two rotating launchers on top of the turret to flush out entrenched infantry up to a mile away. If there’s a threat from low-flying aircraft, those rockets can be swapped out for Strela or Igla short-range anti-aircraft missiles.

You can see the Uran-9s moving about and shooting in one of several music videos.

However, all that impressive firepower is only useful if the Uran-9 and its operators can actually detect enemy forces and fire accurately at them—and that turned out to be a problem when field-tested in Syria.

To start with, according to Anisimov, the Uran-9’s thermal and electro-optical sensors proved incapable of spotting enemies beyond 1.25 miles—one-third of the 3.75-mile range in daytime or half that at night officially claimed. He also stated, “The OCH-4 optical station does not allow detecting optical observation and targeting devices of the enemy and gives out multiple interferences on the ground and in the airspace in the surveillance sector.”

Furthermore, the sensors, and the weapons they guided, were useless while the Uran-9 was moving due to a lack of stabilization. When fire commands were issued, on six occasions there were significant delays. In one case, the command simply didn’t go through.

The Uran-9’s tracked suspension also was reportedly frequently bedeviled by unreliable rollers and suspension springs, requiring frequent repairs that effectively limited the duration of any deployment.

Arguably most problematic of all, however, was the discovery that the remote-control system, which officially had a range of 1.8 miles, only proved effective up to 300 to 400 meters in a lightly urbanized environment. Over such short distances, the control vehicle is likely to become exposed to enemy fire.

Unlike high-flying drones, remote-controlled vehicles are susceptible to having their control signals disrupted by hills, buildings and other terrain features. During field-testing in Syria, this caused Uran-9s to suffer seventeen lapses of remote control lasting up to one minute, and two events in which they lost contact for as long as an hour-and-a-half.

The problem grows more acute when considering that modern war zones like Syria already experience extraordinary electromagnetic activity from communication signals and drone-links—as well as extensive jamming, spying, and other forms of electronic warfare. The bandwidth consumed by the Uran-9s might not only limit how many can be deployed in a given sector but may make them a conspicuous target for hostile electronic attacks, despite the manufacturer’s claims that the data-links are hardened against such interference.

According to Jane’s, Rostec is still working to improve the Uran-9’s range, response-time, and data-bandwidth. During the huge Vostok 2018 military exercise, the robot-tanks were reportedly deployed to provide overwatch fire support for Uran-6 de-mining UGVs and combat engineers while they cleared simulated defensive obstacles.

Theoretically, the Uran-9 could be useful at reducing the risk of losing human lives in high-risk operations such as scouting out the location of concealed enemies or providing covering fire for assaults on well-defended positions. However, unless reliability can be improved and the “tether” distance between the robo-tanks and their command vehicles can be extended, the Uran-9s would be of limited military use except in static, set-piece scenarios.

In a sense, the underwhelming combat test in Syria highlights why robot tanks haven’t shown up on the battlefield sooner, despite the component technologies have been available for decades. Developing reliable long-distance communication links, sophisticated autonomous operation algorithms, and well-integrated sensors and targeting systems to allow a distant operator to identify and engage targets all pose significant practical challenges.

Thus, the Uran-9’s unflattering debut will serve as a valuable, if cautionary, learning experience for engineers working to perfect forthcoming robotic ground warfare systems.

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 January 2019.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

U.S. Navy, Global

Although the stealthy and heavily armed Seawolf allows it to dodge sonar, it cannot avoid its hefty price tag. 

Here's What You Need To Remember: Demand for the Seawolf’s high-end capabilities may rise, however, due to the return of an undersea arms race involving the United States, Russia, and China.

Late in the 1950s, the Soviet Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines—starting with the November-class attack submarine—could dive twice as deep as most of their American counterparts and often had higher maximum speed. But they had a conspicuous flaw: they were a lot noisier.

That meant American subs were routinely detecting and trailing the Soviet submarines from a distance without being detected in return—a huge advantage had there ever been a conflict. In the 1980s, however, the Soviet Navy began to improve its acoustic stealth game. The Japanese Toshiba and Norwegian Kongsberg firms had sold propeller-milling technology to the Soviets that allowed for a much quieter seven-bladed propeller on its new Akula-class attack submarines.

U.S. Navy studies concluded the Akula exceeded the mainstay of the U.S. submarine force, the Los Angeles class, for acoustic stealth and roughly matched the Improved Los Angeles variant. As the Pentagon was flush with money during the Reagan administration, in 1983 the Navy began designing the biggest, baddest—and fastest and quietest—attack submarine possible to restore its edge over the Soviet Navy.

The resulting Seawolf laid down by Electric Boat in October 1989 had a wider hull than the 7,000-ton Los Angeles, displacing over 9,000 tons submerged and measuring 108 meters in length. Whereas the Los Angeles carried 37 torpedoes in four tubes, the Sea Wolf could lug fifty heavy-weight 533-millimeter Mark 48 torpedoes or Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which it could launch through eight over-sized 660-millimeter torpedo tubes. (The tubes size was meant to future-proof in case the Navy adopted larger weapons. It didn’t.) The Seawolf could also use the tubes to launch surface-attack Tomahawk missiles.

The Seawolf submarine was built entirely out of higher-strength HY-100 steel so that it could endure dives as deep as 490 meters. Its sail (conning tower) was reinforced for operations Arctic ice, where Soviet ballistic-missile submarines were known to lurk. Moreover, its S6W pressurized water reactor gave the Seawolf an extraordinary maximum speed of 35 knots (40 miles per hour), allowing it to chase down disengaging adversaries.

But most impressive were the Seawolf’s advancements in acoustic stealth: a Seawolf was an order of magnitude quieter than even the Improved Los Angeles boats at 95 decibels. Oceanic background noise averages 90 decibels.

Even better, the Seawolf’s propeller-less pump-jet propulsion system allowed it to maintain acoustic stealth even when cruising a brisk 20 knots, whereas most submarines are forced to crawl at 5-12 knots to remain discrete. Its huge 7.3-meter diameter spherical sonar array on the bow was supplemented by wide-aperture flank arrays and TB-16D and TB-29 towed arrays. These feed sensor data to the Seawolf’s BSY-2 combat system, which can engage multiple targets simultaneously using Mark 48 torpedoes directed either via a wire connected to the sub, or using their own organic sonar.

Thus, the Sea Wolf was designed as the ultimate submarine-hunter: stealthier, more heavily armed, and able to match or exceed its adversaries in speed and maneuverability.

These exquisite capabilities came at a steep price—namely $33 billion for twelve Seawolves, cut down from the initial plans for 29. Adjusted for 2018 dollars, that comes out to nearly $5 billion per sub, three times the cost of the Los Angeles boats. The HY100 steel also particularly suffered extensive weld-cracking problems, necessitating additional reconstruction.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Seawolf’s premium capabilities and expense could hardly be justified as large numbers of Russian submarines rusted away at their docks. Thus the Seawolf order was downsized to just three submarines which launched between 1995 and 2004: the Seawolf, the Connecticut, and the Jimmy Carter, numbered SSN-21 through 23. All three are based on the Pacific Ocean at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Washington State.

The last boat, the Carter uniquely was modified at an extra cost of $887 million into the ultimate spy and special operations submarine. Its hull was lengthened by 30 meters to incorporate a special Multi-Mission Platform that can carry divers or manned or unmanned underwater reconnaissance vehicles which can be deployed using special locks. The 12,000-ton Carter also boasts thrusters allowing it to maneuver more precisely while in treacherous shallow waters and ocean floors. It is also understood to carry instruments allowing it to tap the undersea cables through which the internet and other long-distance communications travel.

Naturally, the Carter’s clandestine activities remain a secret, though its reception of numerous unit citations for unspecified reasons suggest an eventful operational career. It’s known to have deployed an aerial drone to spy on North Korean coastal artillery, and it returned to port in 2017 flying a black pirate flag—traditionally flourished by a submarine returning from a patrol in which it has scored a victory.

In fact, all of the Seawolf-class submarines remain shrouded in secrecy, with very few photos or articles released to the press. What reports are available suggests the subs frequently traverse under the polar ice of the Arctic Ocean, at times testing specialized sonars and communications equipment.

None of the Seawolf subs are known to have engaged in combat, however—unless you count the attack of a polar bear on the Connecticut's rudder after it surfaced through the Arctic in 2003. You can see a picture of the engagement taken via the periscope here.

Meanwhile, more affordable ($1.8 billion each) Virginia-class submarines better suited for littoral engagements are entering service, retaining many of Seawolf class’s advanced features such as the stealthy pump jets while ditching some of the bulk and gold-plating and making greater use of off-the-shelf technologies. Later Virginias also sport vertical launch cells for rapid land-attack capabilities.

Demand for the Seawolf’s high-end capabilities may rise, however, due to the return of an undersea arms race involving the United States, Russia, and China. China’s submarine fleet will likely soon exceed America in numbers, though the majority of it consists of shorter-range diesel-electric submarines, and even its nuclear submarines are considered to be significantly noisier than their U.S. counterparts. Russia continues to operate stealthy Akula and Borei-class boats and is developing improved successors as well as Poseidon strategic nuclear torpedoes designed to destroy coastal cities.

Thus the U.S. Navy reportedly sees the beefier, more heavily armed characteristics of the Seawolf as a model for its next SSN(X) submarine—even if it comes at a similar cost of $5.5 billion per submarine.

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 piece first appeared in 2019 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Cold War, Americas

If you assume nuclear weapons will be used, you would want to be sure your planes and tanks can survive to keep fighting.

Key point: During the early days of the Cold War, it was assumed that nuclear weapons might well be used in the next war. Naturally, the U.S. Air Force needed to test the durability of its aircraft. The results of these tests and the durability of the XF-90 might shock you. 

In 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force issued a requirement for a “penetrating escort” jet that could accompany comparatively ponderous B-29 and B-50 strategic bombers all the way to targets over the Soviet Union. It wanted that jet to be capable of supersonic speeds, boast a combat radius of 900 to 1,500 miles, and for the sake of versatility, also be capable of hitting ground targets.

The Air Force’s first operational jet, the Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star, was a reliable workhorse but its straight-winged configuration limited its potential at high speeds. Kelly Johnson, the chief designer at Lockheed’s innovative Skunk Works facility in California, initially thought to overcome this limitation with a delta-wing configuration, but this would have degraded lift and thus low-speed performance. He iterated through sixty-five different concepts before settling on using swept-wings, which delay the formation of shockwaves at high speeds.

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

The needle-nose XF-90 retained the basic contours of the F-80, but with a pointed needle-nose, 35-degree swept wings and horizontal tail stabilizer, and a vertical tail stabilizer that could move forward and backward.

The jet’s side-mounted Westinghouse J34 turbojets would eventually include the Air Force’s first afterburners, which allow pilots to inject fuel straight into the jet pipe for bursts of added speed, though at a cost to fuel efficiency. Six 20-millimeter M39 cannons mounted in two rows under the nose would serve for armament, while wingtip fuel pods extended the XF-90’s range to a projected 2,300 miles.

As Chuck Yeager only achieved the first manned supersonic flight on October 14, 1947, Johnson’s team could only hypothesize that supersonic speeds would impose extreme stress on the airframe. This led them to over-compensate by using extremely high-strength 75T aluminum alloy instead of the standard 25T.

This made the XF-90 as tough as “bridge girder,” resulting in one of the largest and heaviest single-seat fighters ever made at the time. It weighed nine tons empty, comparable to the C-47 cargo planes that dropped paratroopers over Normandy, or a modern F-16 jet. The XF-90’s aluminum skin could withstand twelve times the force of gravity, while most modern fourth-generation jets are rated for nine Gs.

Johnson also incorporated relatively new elements including an ejection seat, wingtip fuel tanks that extended range to 2,300 miles, and Fowler flaps. These last can extend horizontally, increasing wing surface and lift at little cost to drag, as well as bend down vertically to induce more drag.

Lockheed built two prototypes, the XF-90 numbered 46-687, and an XF-90A #46-688 with an afterburning J34-WE-15 engine—the first U.S. fighter to be designed with the now-standard technology.

On June 3, 1949, test pilot and former aerial racing champion Tony Levier took the XF-90 out for its first flight. However, the J34’s engines proved underpowered, leaving it slower than the Air Force’s excellent F-86 Sabre fighter jet and resulting in long takeoff and landing distances. The afterburner-equipped XF-90A only boosted maximum level speed to 665 miles per hour, a disappointing performance for a plane dubbed ‘the big-breasted turkey.’

However, the XF-90 could attain more impressive speeds while in a shallow dive. In a fascinating article by Jorge and Karen Escalona for Air & Space, Lockheed engineer Ernest Joiner recalled:

“The test program was to conduct power-on dives to work up to the so-called sound barrier. We were on the radio with Tony as he made a dive at fairly low altitude. We could see the airplane on the other side of the dry lakebed. It disappeared in the haze. At that moment we heard a tremendous explosion.

There is no doubt that both Kelly and I thought that the airplane had augured in. I was afraid that Kelly was going to have a heart attack. Within a very short time Tony called in on the radio. Talk about relief! He had dived the airplane to Mach 1.12 and everything was fine. You have to realize that we hadn’t heard a sonic boom before.”

The XF-90 reportedly achieved supersonic speeds fifteen times. However, in August 1950 the XF-90 was pitted in a fly-off against the McDonnell Douglas XF-88 Voodoo, which used the same two J34 engines but weighed only six tons. The XF-90 promptly lost the competition.

However, the XF-88 fared little better in the long run, as the tactical airpower demands imposed by the Korean War led the Air Force to abandon its long-range escort fighter project. The XF-88 would eventually evolve into the F-101 Voodoo, the reconnaissance variant of which saw extensive action during the Vietnam War.

Ironically, that same year, the XF-90 was catapulted to fame as the then super-popular Blackhawks comic books series made it the steed of choice for the titular squadron of ace pilots. The single-engine “F-90B” was featured on the cover of issue #68 and even had its schematics compared to a Soviet MiG-15 fighter in issue #52. Starting in 1957, the artists switched to a sleeker rendition of the XF-90 with a mid-fuselage wing.

The reality was less glamorous for the XF-90. In 1952, XF-90 46-687 was shipped to the NACA (predecessor to NASA) testing facility in Cleveland, Ohio where its sturdy aluminum frame was subject to stress tests until it was apparently destroyed.

The Pentagon had even harsher treatment in store for 46-688, which was moved to the Frenchman’s Flat testing range in Nevada. In an era when nuclear war seemed imminent, the Pentagon wanted to know just how likely parked aircraft were to survive a nuclear first strike by enemy bombers—as you can see in this old documentary footage.

So on April 15, 1952, a B-50 bomber dropped a 1-kiloton Mark 4 nuclear bomb just a half-mile away from the XF-90, with its nose pointed towards ground zero. Inspection afterward revealed the jet to be cracked but intact, in need of 106 hours of repairs. You can briefly see post-strike footage here.

A week later, a 33-kiloton nuke was dropped on the same spot—this time, dinging the XF-90A’s nose.

Finally, on May 1, a 19-kiloton bomb blasted the XF-90, which was this time rotated perpendicular to the shockwave. The detonation blasted off its tail and landing gear and seared and warped its wings. The contaminated hulk was then transferred to Nevada Area 11 as part of a training exercise.

The XF-90A might well have rusted away into obscurity in the desert had not scientist Robert Friedrich recognized the irradiated wreck while flying overhead. In the late 1980s, he lobbying to have the unique jet preserved for display.

Finally in 2001 specialists in hazmat suits disassembled the jet down to its rivets, spraying away the radioactive sand encrusting it and evicting a colony of antelope squirrels that had nestled inside. They found the J34 engines in surprisingly intact condition.

The decontaminated parts were transported via a huge C-5 Galaxy transport plane to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio, where it was decided to preserve its nuke-blasted condition rather than fully restore it. The airframe currently remains there in storage.

While the XF-90 was not a successful design, it gave U.S. engineers their first experience developing a clean-sheet jet with afterburning engines, ejections seats, and Fowler flaps. For every famous jet fighter like the F-86 Sabre or F-16 Falcon, there is often a connective sinew of prototypes pushing the technological envelope that never make it into service, whether due to teething issues or external factors.

Ironically, seventy-years later, the Air Force has returned to the same concept it ordered for the XF-90: it plans for its sixth-generation stealth jet to be a “Penetrating Counter-Air” fighter to protect stealthy but slow B-2 and B-21 bombers deep over enemy airspace.

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

Image: Creative Commons.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit,

If the Senate Budget Committee’s proposal gains approval, it will also extend the spectrum of who is covered and will aim to take out all tax liability for those government-issued payments.

For millions of cash-strapped American parents with multiple children to take care of amid the ongoing pandemic, the current third round of $1,400 coronavirus stimulus checks approved under President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan likely did little to assuage their financial pain.

However, there appear to be brighter days ahead, as these same parents could be in line to see even bigger payments from the expanded Child Tax Credits starting next year.

If the Senate Budget Committee’s proposal gains approval, it will also extend the spectrum of who is covered and will aim to take out all tax liability for those government-issued payments.

More importantly, for those who are wishing that these expanded credit payments won’t have an end date, the proposal will essentially make them permanent, paid both in installments and as a lump sum.

As it currently stands, due to Biden’s stimulus bill, the federal government now allows 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. This all means that a $250 or a $300 cash payment for each child will head into the bank accounts of eligible parents every month through the rest of the year.

Democratic Support

Several high-ranking Democratic lawmakers already have been pushing for months to attach a permanent status to these credits.

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) recently told reporters: “We all talk about how important families are and raising our children are the most important thing we can do but so many people can’t do it. It’s such a challenge. Raising kids is work. We should reward families and give families a chance.”

Other notable supporters include Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), the chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, who also shared similar sentiments.

“For our economy to fully recover from this pandemic, we must finally acknowledge that workers have families, and caregiving responsibilities are real,” he said.

Credits Already Improving Lives

Recent studies and surveys have also proven that the initial batches of the Child Tax Credits are already making a difference. For example, according to the latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, parents who have received the credit funds reported less trouble affording food and paying for basic household expenses.

In addition, it indicated that approximately ten percent of American households with children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past week—the lowest percentage registered since the pandemic started a year and a half ago.

In a separate report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the data revealed that a permanent expansion could potentially lift more than four million children out of poverty.

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

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Tu-95, Europe

The bear was the brainchild of the Soviet Union's desire to develop its own strategic bomber force.  Few aircraft are as distinctive as the massive Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear."

Here's What You Need to Know: The Russian military today maintains a diverse fleet of bombers capable of carrying heavier payloads and flying at faster speeds than the Tu-95. However, the venerable Bear remains well adapted to the job of hauling heavy cruise missiles and keeping a watchful eye over the Pacific and Atlantic—especially when being discreet is not merely unnecessary for the mission, but contrary to its purpose.

Few aircraft are as distinctive as the massive Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear,” a four-engine Russian strategic bomber and maritime patrol plane with a gigantic unicorn-like refueling probe, giving it the appearance of a monstrosity lurching in from prehistoric times—or at least from shortly after World War II, as is in fact the case.

Don’t let its looks deceive you. Over sixty years later, the Tu-95 remains in service because few aircraft can cover such great distances for such long periods of time while carrying a hefty payload. Which is to say, the Tu-95 is Russia’s B-52—but one with a decidedly maritime bent and a habit of knocking at the door of coastal air-defense systems in Europe, Asia and North America.

Cold War Nuclear Bomber

The Bear was born from the Soviet Union’s desire to develop its own strategic bomber force to match the one fielded by the United States in World War II. Soviet planners requested in 1950 a four-engine bomber that could fly five thousand miles to hit targets across the United States while hauling over twelve tons of bombs.

The jet engines of the time, however, burned through fuel too quickly. Thus, the design bureau of Andrei Tupolev conceived of an aircraft using four powerful NK-12 turboprop engines with contrarotating propellers.

Each of the NK-12s has two propellers, the second one spinning in the direction opposite the first. This not only counteracts the torque created by the rotational airflow of the first propeller, but harnesses it for greater speed. Contrarotating propellers are therefore modestly more efficient—but because they are more expensive to produce and maintain, and also unbelievably noisy, they have not been widely adopted. In fact, the noise produced by Tu-95s has reportedly been remarked upon by submarine crews and jet pilots.

On the Tu-95, however, the unconventional engines paid off: the enormous Tu-95 is actually one of the fastest existing propeller planes, capable of going over five hundred miles per hour. The tips of its eighteen-foot diameter propellers actually spin at slightly over the speed of sound. The Bear is also one of very few propeller planes with swept-back wings, which only benefit aircraft capable of flying at higher speeds.

The Tu-95 also had tremendous fuel capacity and could fly over nine thousand miles just using internal fuel. After the initial production variant, later types added the distinctive in-flight refueling probe, even further extending their range. Typical patrols during the Cold War lasted ten hours, but some Tu-95 flights lasted nearly twice as long.

Tu-95s had crew of six to eight depending on the type, including two pilots and two navigators, while the remaining crew operated guns or sensor systems. The original version of the Bear had two twin-barreled twenty-three-millimeter cannons in the belly and tail, and a single fixed gun in the nose, all intended to ward off enemy fighters. This kind of armament became increasingly obsolete in the age of long-range air-to-air missiles, so the later models got rid of all but the tail gun. (To be fair, tail gunners on B-52s did score two or three kills over Vietnam).

The Bear’s original intended mission was fairly clear-cut: in the event the Cold War became really hot, dozens of individual Bears would fly across the Arctic Circle and drop nuclear bombs on targets over the United States. Even if many fell victim to surface-to-air missiles and defending fighters, the reasoning was that some would get through.

This mimicked the U.S. Air Force’s own war plans, immortalized in the film Dr. Strangelove. However, the Soviet Union did not maintain a twenty-four-hour force of airborne nuclear-armed bombers like the United States did.

Along these lines, Tu-95s were also used in nuclear weapon tests. A Tu-95V dropped the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated over Severny Island in 1961, the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba. Deployed by parachute, Tsar detonated four kilometers above the ground, sending a mushroom cloud over forty miles into the sky. The shock wave tossed the Bear a thousand meters towards the ground, but the pilot managed to retain control and return to base. The crew had earlier been informed they had only a 50 percent chance of surviving the test.

Maritime Marauders

By the 1960s, the Soviet Union wisely concluded that a nuclear strategic bomber force attempting to drop nuclear gravity bombs over the United States was a wasteful proposition, given the increasing effectiveness of air defenses and the comparatively lower cost of unstoppable ballistic missiles. New variants of the Tu-95 were therefore developed to pursue different missions.

One means of getting around the bomber’s vulnerability to interception was to use them as a platform for long-range cruise missiles. The Tu-95K variant could carry the enormous Kh-20 nuclear cruise missile, known by NATO as the AS-3 Kangaroo. The missile had a range of three hundred to six hundred kilometers, and looked like a wingless airplane because it more or less was one—it was modeled off the fuselage of a MiG-19.

Another mission assigned the Bear was to shadow U.S. carrier battle groups. Even with state-of-the-art sensors, finding and tracking ships across the vastness of the ocean was a challenging endeavor. However, if a U.S. carrier group could be located, it could be pounced upon by swarms of land-based bombers. The Bear, with its ability to fly over the ocean for hours on end and cover vast territories, was ideal for ferreting out the position of U.S. fleets and tracking their movements.

The Tu-95RT maritime reconnaissance variant was produced to specially perform this duty: it had surface-search radar in a belly pod and even added a glass observation blister just behind the tail gun position.

Not only was tracking fleet movements useful in the event of a war, but it also served as a psychological tactic to emphasize the Navy’s vulnerability to air attack. U.S. carrier fighters were often scrambled to chase off the intrusive Bears. Photographs of the many Bear-on-fighter encounters are icons of the Cold War era.

Tu-95 Variants

There was a multitude of experimental Bears, including the Tu-95LAL, which was powered by a nuclear reactor, and the Tu-95K, designed to carry MiG-19 fighters for airborne deployment.

Models that entered production included the Tu-95MR photo-reconnaissance aircraft, and the improved Tu-95K and KM with better sensors and the capability of launching Kh-22 missiles

The Soviet Union eventually developed a specialized antisubmarine reconnaissance plane from the Bear, the Tu-142. This arose out of fear of the new Polaris Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM), which performed the first underwater ballistic-missile launch in 1960. The Tu-142 is distinguished by its Berkut (Golden Eagle) surface-search and targeting radar. A boom in the tail houses a Magnetic Anomaly Detector useful for finding submarines. The Tu-142 is stretched a bit longer to accommodate all of the sensors packed inside it.

These systems had to be upgraded several times during the Cold War to keep up with U.S. submarine technology. The current variant, the Tu-142MZ, can use superior RGB-16 and RGB-26 sonar-buoys and has more powerful engines. On repeated occasions, Tu-142s succeeded in detecting U.S. submarines and following them for hours at a time. Two special Tu-142MRs designed to communicate with Russian submarines were also produced.

The Russian Naval Air Arm still operates fifteen Tu-142s today. One was recently spotted in Syria—either using its systems to spy on Syrian rebel positions or monitor U.S. fleet movements.

The Indian Navy has operated eight Tu-142MK-Es since 1988—though they are due to be replaced by twelve P-8I Poseidon aircraft in the near future.

The Bear was also developed into Russia’s first AWACs aircraft—the Tu-126—and the Tu-114 airliner which carried Khrushchev on a nonstop eleven-hour flight from Moscow to New York in 1959. However, neither type still flies today.

Besides the Tu-142, the only Tu-95s in service today are over fifty Tu-95MS aircraft, actually developed from the Tu-142 airframe to serve as a cruise-missile carrier capable of firing Kh-55 missiles, also known as the AS-15 by NATO. They have recently been upgraded to carry sixteen cruise missiles each, and outfitted with new navigation/targeting systems. The Kh-55 comes in many variants, both conventional and nuclear, with ranges as long as three thousand kilometers and as short as three hundred.

The Tu-95MSM variant can also fire the Kh-101 and nuclear Kh-102 stealth cruise missiles which skim at low altitude and boast a reduced radar-cross section. These missiles can reach up to 5,500 kilometers away.

Despite such deadly payloads, the Bear may be suffering from its age. In the summer of 2015 they were briefly grounded after suffering their second accident in two years.

The Tupolev Today

The Bear is still flying across the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean in the twenty-first century. One of its principal missions can be described as trolling other countries.

Tu-95s have been detected buzzing by the coast of England, fifty miles west of California, into the Alaskan air defense identification zone, and inside Japanese airspace. The closer flights usually provoke a fighter interception in response. Most of the time they don’t actually violate foreign airspace.

Such patrols, routine during the Cold War, were resumed by Putin in 2007. Although these are theoretically surveillance missions, their main intention is to remind other countries that Russia remains capable of sending nuclear-armed bombers close to their airspace if it chooses to.

Regular flights by U.S. RC-135 spy planes are also known to elicit interceptions by Chinese and Russian fighters. However, the RC-135 cannot carry any weapons.

Of course, the Bear is anything but stealthy and could not survive against modern air- and surface-launched antiaircraft missiles. However, a Bear launching cruise missiles doesn’t have to get close to air defenses in the first place.

In November 2015, fifty-nine years after entering service, the Tu-95 finally saw combat as a bomber. Videos from the Russian Ministry of Defense in the fall of 2015 show them launching cruise missiles that went on to pound the positions of Syrian rebels. Moscow’s first-time deployment of the cruise missiles on air and naval platforms has been interpreted as a means of demonstrating its military capabilities to the world.

The Russian military today maintains a diverse fleet of bombers capable of carrying heavier payloads and flying at faster speeds than the Tu-95. However, the venerable Bear remains well adapted to the job of hauling heavy cruise missiles and keeping a watchful eye over the Pacific and Atlantic—especially when being discreet is not merely unnecessary for the mission, but contrary to its purpose.

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 September 2016.

Image: Creative Commons "TU-95 Bear bomber aircraft - 25423" by North Dakota National Guard is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Graham Allison

Afghanistan, Middle East

The ugly reality is that American presidents have to make hard choices from a menu that offers no good options. In choosing to withdraw, Biden accepted increased ownership of the risk that a Taliban-governed Afghanistan could indeed become the haven for a future mega-terrorist attack on the United States.

Could Afghanistan become the base for another 9/11 terrorist attack that kills thousands of Americans here at home? Watching images of the collapse after two decades of investment in Afghanistan, it is easy to agree that we should have managed a less chaotic exit. But the current frenzy of second-guessing will soon be behind us. The consequential question for Americans is: what comes next? And there, the biggest red flag being waved by critics of President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all American combat troops is the specter of another 9/11. As former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster put it on Sunday: “We learned 20 years ago on September 11, jihadist terror in Afghanistan won’t stay in Afghanistan.”

The speed at which Afghanistan’s 300,000-strong American-trained and equipped security forces melted under attack by a Taliban force of fewer than one-third their numbers has been surprising. But not the outcome. When Biden and his national security team decided to withdraw all American forces from combat there, they understood that this would very likely mean a Taliban victory.

They also knew that today’s Taliban is the same extremist Islamist group that had ruled Afghanistan before 9/11. They reflected on the fact that it had given sanctuary to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorists who killed 2,977 individuals in their attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Thus, when announcing on April 14 that all American forces would be out of Afghanistan before September 11, Biden was fully aware of what happened on the eleventh day of the ninth month of President George W. Bush’s first year in office.

So why withdraw now rather than kick the can down the road as his predecessors had? Even critics who believe that Biden made the wrong choice have to acknowledge that it was considered—and consistent with the view he has advocated for more than a decade. In 2009, a newly elected, young, inexperienced President Barack Obama wanted to withdraw from what he saw as a losing war. In the debate within his new administration, his vice president, Joe Biden, argued that the United States should focus like a laser beam on American national interests in Afghanistan. Specifically, that meant eliminating bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us and preventing Afghan territory from being used by terrorists to plot future attacks.

When Biden became president seven months ago, he entered office with the settled view that this mission had been accomplished. After twenty years during which the United States had lost 2,448 servicemen’s lives and spent two trillion American taxpayer dollars, if the leaders and army of Afghanistan could not successfully fight for their own freedom now, the likelihood that they would be able to do so after another year of our efforts, or even another decade, was not worth more American blood and treasure.

Nonetheless, in making this fateful choice, he certainly listened carefully to the counsel of his military advisers—most of whom opposed it—and reflected deeply on the risks. Among these, none loomed larger than the possibility that a future Taliban government could host a successor to Al Qaeda that could execute another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland.

Could it happen again? The answer is obviously and unambiguously: of course. But does that mean that the decision to withdraw was a mistake? Before again answering “yes,” we must also consider how many other locations there are from which another major terrorist attack on the United States could come. Most of the commentators today seem to have forgotten that while bin Laden’s headquarters was in Afghanistan, his lieutenants who planned and prepared the attack on the World Trade Center did so from Hamburg, Germany. And the Al Qaeda operatives who hijacked U.S. commercial airliners, converted them into guided cruise missiles, and drove them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon spent the week before boarding those aircraft in Boston and Newark.

The brute fact is that there are literally hundreds of spaces around the globe—from Pakistan, Sudan, Lebanon, and Ethiopia to France, Mexico, and even the United States—that could house terrorists who could organize attacks on the American homeland. (Prior to 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack on Americans was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 masterminded by an American veteran, Timothy McVeigh.) Some of these spaces are governed, some ungoverned. Some of the governments are democratic, some autocratic, some oppressive, and some essentially permissive.

What has so far successfully prevented another 9/11 is not U.S. combat forces fighting on the ground—since we have no fighting forces in most of these places. Instead, it is the remarkable, robust defensive and offensive capabilities the U.S. government has built in the two decades since 2001. These include a major expansion of the seventeen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community (Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, etc.), creation of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, and the development of unprecedented offensive counterterrorism capabilities by the U.S. military’s Special Forces.

U.S. counterterrorism strategy consists of three tightly linked layers: defenses to prevent terrorists entering the United States or operating from American soil; offenses that “find, fix, and finish”—to quote the mantra of America’s Special Forces—terrorists planning attacks on the United States and our allies wherever they are; and deterrent threats to governments of countries and groups governing parts of countries that are home to terrorist groups.

A network of exquisite intelligence collection technologies now collects signals of all types and integrates them to allow Special Forces and CIA to target individuals and groups who may be planning attacks. In the last two decades, the United States has conducted more than 15,000 precise counterterrorism strikes in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, as well as Afghanistan. The U.S. base in Bagram served as the headquarters for many of these strikes. Thus, as part of his decision to withdraw, Biden also authorized an expansion of “over the horizon” capabilities to sustain America’s counterterrorism campaign. In the Biden administration’s current review of the national security posture it inherited, it should identify additional steps to strengthen each layer of the counterterrorism strategy, beginning with securing borders.

In sum: the ugly reality is that American presidents have to make hard choices from a menu that offers no good options. In choosing to withdraw, Biden accepted increased ownership of the risk that a Taliban-governed Afghanistan could indeed become the haven for a future mega-terrorist attack on the United States. If this were to happen, the commentariat will condemn Biden’s decision as a foolhardy unforced error. Politically, the safer option would have been a redefinition of the mission that kept the government in Kabul on life support and allowed U.S. combat troops to hold onto bases from which the counterterrorism campaign could carry on.

Biden’s willingness to accept this calculated risk in order to extract the United States from a failing effort in a misguided mission was, in my view, a commendable profile in courage. As he said in this week’s speech to the nation, he was elected president, and “the buck stops with me.”

Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Image: Wikipedia.

Ian S. Lustick

Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East

There is hope that defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan will help those brave American politicians who will object in the future to hitting nails in the Far or Middle East with the American military hammer.

Editor’s note: In early August, The National Interest organized a symposium on American foreign policy in the Middle East under the Biden administration. A variety of scholars were asked the following question: “Given Joe Biden’s recent decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the president right to be reducing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East?” The following article is one of their responses:

American national interests are not the aspirations that some Americans have for their country on the world stage. Some citizens, for example, may want the United States to be the world’s predominant economic, military, and political power, able to assert itself incontestably in every important world region. Some may entertain particular goals so deeply—such as defending Ukraine against Russian encroachment, ridding Cuba of communism, and stopping Hamas attacks against Israel—as to portray them as vital to the country.

To qualify as a national interest, however, a foreign policy objective must attract the committed support of a vast majority of Americans. To be sure, some operational goals, such as retaliating against Al Qaeda after 9/11 or “bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” may enjoy that kind of broad support. However, they do not qualify as vital national interests because they are not enduring. They cannot serve as touchstones for U.S. foreign and national security policy over decades and generations. Only widely shared aspirations attached to long-term goals can be usefully treated as national interests, capable of guiding policy across both decades and partisan lines.

Washington’s virtually unlimited military, economic, and diplomatic aid to Israel and its close security and economic ties to the Gulf oil kingdoms and to Egypt show that President Joe Biden’s decisions to accept defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq by ending U.S. combat deployments there do not mark a complete withdrawal from the Middle East. But they do indeed reduce U.S. clout in the region by signaling that American military might does not translate confidently into stable political architectures, and that implicit or explicit promises from Washington to use its military strength for such ends cannot be relied upon.

On the other hand, Biden’s decisions do not damage U.S. national interests. Aside from planetary survival, America’s most vital interest is avoiding destructive, catastrophically costly, and unwinnable conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These wars were by far the most serious blows inflicted on our country since World War II and they were, let us never forget, almost entirely self-inflicted.

One can say that America’s humiliation in Vietnam helped prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions of central Americans or Angolans in American interventional wars that did not occur in the 1980s because of lessons learned, at least temporarily, following defeat in Vietnam. So too we may hope that defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan will help those brave American politicians who will object in the future to hitting nails in the Far or Middle East with the American military hammer. Their struggle, in the name of America’s real national interests, to resist the dangerous combination of U.S. military superiority and domestic political incentives to attack the country’s enemies, may well be assisted by elites in future target countries who refuse to believe American promises to save and protect them in return for supporting the American war effort. These elites may learn from Afghanistan and Iraq that, except for a lucky few thousand who wangle U.S. passports, most will end up on the wrong side of history in their countries once the Americans leave.

Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

economy, Americas

Tax preparers have been warned to watch out for a series of telltale signs.

The Internal Revenue Service’s Security Summit this week issued some warnings to tax professionals about the problem of identity theft.

“There are tell-tale signs of identity theft that tax pros can easily miss," IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in the announcement. "Identity thieves continue to look for ways to slip into the systems of tax pros to steal data. We urge practitioners to take simple steps and remain on the lookout for signs of data and identity theft. They are a critical first line of defense against identity theft."

Tax professionals are also warned, by the IRS, to “contact the IRS immediately when there's an identity theft issue while also contacting insurance or cybersecurity experts to assist them with determining the cause and extent of the loss.”

The Security Summit is looking at identity theft as the fifth of a five-part series. The identity theft portion is officially titled “Boost Security Immunity: Fight Against Identity Theft.” 

Tax preparers were warned to watch out for a series of telltale signs. These include “Client e-filed returns rejected because client's Social Security number was already used on another return; more e-file acknowledgments received than returns the tax pro filed; clients responded to emails the tax pro didn't send.” They are also warned to look out for “low or unexpected computer or network responsiveness such as software or actions take longer to process than usual, computer cursor moves or changes numbers without touching the mouse or keyboard [and] unexpectedly locked out of a network or computer.” 

The Security Summit is described on its website as an “unprecedented coalition of state tax agencies and the private-sector tax industry officials to begin a difficult task—fighting back against emerging criminal syndicates, based here and overseas, that were filing fraudulent returns for refunds.” It was created in 2015.  

This year has been quite an eventful one for the IRS. The agency, in addition to the normal tax season, has distributed the stimulus checks from the American Rescue Plan, and more recently the expanded child tax credit, which has gone out to Americans once a month starting in July. The Biden Administration has proposed giving the IRS more funding, and even proposed greater IRS enforcement, as a way to pay for his proposed spending packages. However, Republicans in Congress have pushed back on that idea.  

In a fact sheet for his American Families Plan, the Biden administration laid out how that enforcement would work.  

“A recent study found that the top one percent failed to report 20 percent of their income and failed to pay over $175 billion in taxes that they owed. But today, the IRS does not even have the resources to fully investigate this evasion. As a result of budget cuts, audit rates on those making over $1 million per year fell by 80 percent between 2011-2018,” according to the fact sheet. “The President’s proposal would change the game—by making sure the wealthiest Americans play by the same set of rules as all other Americans.”

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

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

B-2 Spirit, Americas

The end of the Cold War meant that the B-2 seemed less necessary 

Here's What You Need to Know: The U.S. only has 20 B-2 Bombers. Many defense writers have lamented the small number of B-2s procured. However, the B-2 cut was a ‘bet’ on a lack of great-power confrontation the Pentagon is probably thankful for today, sparing the Air Force from spending the last twenty-five years paying for dozens of additional stealth bombers.

Since its inception in 1947, the U.S. Air Force has been deeply invested in operating long-range strategic bomber for nuclear deterrence. However, by the 1960s it grew clear that high-flying B-52 bombers had poor odds of surviving the Soviet Union’s growing network of high-speed interceptors and surface-to-air missiles. The Air Force instead invested in supersonic FB-111 and B-1 bombers designed to penetrate hostile airspace at low altitude, where radar detection was more difficult. But Pentagon strategists knew the Soviets were developing doppler radars and airborne radars to cover that blindspot.

By then, U.S. aviation engineers were aware that radar-absorbent materials and non-reflective surfaces could reduce a plane’s radar detection range drastically, features implemented to modest results in Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Lockheed’s Have Blue prototypes led to the first operational stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk strike plane.

The Pentagon wanted its next stealth plane, the Advanced Technology Bomber, to address the strategic nuclear strike role. By then Northrop had tested at Area 51 in Nevada a bizarre-looking stealth demonstrator called ‘Tacit Blue’ (also known as the “Whale” or “alien school bus”). Earlier in the late 1940s, the firm had developed a gigantic 52-meter wingspan flying-wing jet bomber called the YB-49. When Lockheed and Northrop went head-to-head in the ATB competition in 1981, Northrop’s larger, tailless fly-wing concept won out.

The “grey” project’s existence was announced to the public, but further details remained highly classified, with the Pentagon procuring parts from mystified subcontractors using dummy companies. Nonetheless, two B-2 engineers were arrested for industrial espionage in 1984 and 2005. Over the next eight years, the bomber was expensively redesigned for low-altitude penetration, leading development costs to overrun to $42 billion, generating political controversy.

The Spirit was finally unveiled in 1988 and made its first flight the following year. But even before it began production in 1993, the Cold War abruptly ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, largely taking the rationale for a nuclear-armed super bomber with it.

The Air Force still wanted B-2s, but the expensive program was on the chopping block with other premium weapons like the Sea Wolf-class submarine. The Pentagon hastily placed new emphasis on developing the B-2’s non-nuclear capabilities—after all, a stealth bomber could theoretically reduce the number of escort aircraft required in the opening days of a conflict. (In practice, Spirits have often been accompanied by EA-6B Prowler aircraft to provide jamming and anti-radar support—just in case.)

The Spirit procurement was first reduced to seventy-five, then cut to twenty by the Bush administration in 1992. An additional B-2 prototype was converted to operational status under Clinton, for a total of twenty-one. This caused the B-2’s half-billion dollar unit price to surge to $737 million—or $929 million counting spare parts, upgrades, and technical support. With development factored in, the Spirits come out to $2.1 billion—by far the most expensive airplane ever built.

All but one test aircraft serves today with the 509th Bomb Wing based in Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, a unit descend from the group which dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. The Spirits are flown by an elite corps of around eighty pilots who often fly globe-spanning missions directly from Whiteman, though B-2s have also been forward based at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Guam, and England.

Each Spirit is named after a U.S. state, starting with the Spirit of Missouri. The exception is Spirit of Kitty Hawk, said to be possessed because it once mysteriously started its engines in the hangar while unmanned. In 2008, Spirit of Kansas crashed shortly after takeoff in Guam due to an air-moisture sensor miscalibrated by a storm led to a malfunction of the fly-by-wire system. Thankfully, the crew successfully ejected from the most monetarily expensive airplane crash in history.

Like today’s F-35, early production B-2s were not really delivered ‘feature complete,’ lacking full payload, weapons, navigation, and defensive systems. Over time, Northrop Grumman phased in two improved models, introducing a Terrain Following System, GPS navigation, satellite communications via laptop (instead of very terse high-frequency radio messages), and most importantly, integration of smart bombs and cruise missiles. Today, the Air Force continues to invest billions updating the B-2’s radar-absorbent materials, fiber-optic wiring, computer processors, and datalinks.

The B-2 received “Initial Operating Capability” in 1997 and saw their combat employment in March 24, 1999 by kicking off the NATO bombing campaign pressuring Yugoslavia to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. B-2s based in Missouri flew fifty 30-hour sorties across the Atlantic, successfully penetrating the Yugoslav air defense network to drop roughly a third of the ordinance released in the first two months of the campaign.

The B-2 was the first plane to use GPS-guided JDAM bombs marking a turning point in aerial warfare towards the widespread use of cheaper precision-guided weapons. However, the war also illustrated that greater precision didn’t help if intel failed to distinguish targets correctly. A Spirit dropped five JDAMS on the Chinese embassy, wrongly identified as a weapons depot by the CIA, killing three and causing serious diplomatic fallout.

Two years later, the Spirits were back in action, flying six 70-hour missions involving layovers in Diego Garcia (where a replacement crew was mustered) to blast Taliban targets in Afghanistan—the longest combat sorties in history. Two years later, the B-2 was finally declared ‘fully operationally capable,’ with just six Spirits striking ninety-two targets in the opening days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq

B-2s kicked off another U.S. war in 2011, the intervention against Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, destroying most of the Libyan Air Force on the ground at Ghardabiya Air Base using JDAMs. The Spirit’s most prominent recent mission was a strike killing eight-five ISIS militants camped out in the Libyan desert on January 19, 2017—detailed in this excellent article by William Langwiesche, who points out that the billion-dollar-bombers were dispatched to wipe out bedraggled insurgents lacking anti-aircraft weapons.

The Air Force’s twenty Spirits remain an intimidating “silver bullet” first strike weapon that can drop heavy conventional or nuclear payloads onto even well-defended command bunkers, air defense radars, or strategic weapon sites with little advance warning.

But the B-2’s weren’t just expensive to build—they cost a fortune to operate, with every flight hour costing a staggering $163,000 dollars per flight hour and sixty man-hours of maintenance. (It used to be closer to 120!) Simply maintaining each B-2 costs $41 million per year, and that with mission-capable rates hovering around 50 percent or lower.

Furthermore, each Spirit requires a special extra-wide $5-million air-conditioned hangar to maintain its radar-absorbent coating. And every seven years, the Spirits receive a $60 million overhaul, in which the RAM is carefully blasted off the skin with crystallized wheat starch and the surfaces meticulously inspected for tiny dents and scratches.

Many defense writers have lamented the small number of B-2s procured. However, the B-2 cut was a ‘bet’ on a lack of great-power confrontation the Pentagon is probably thankful for today, sparing the Air Force from spending the last twenty-five years paying for dozens of additional stealth bombers specialized in high-intensity warfare while the United States was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, China and Russia have recently emerged as formidable potential near-pear adversaries, giving the B-2’s long-range strategic strike mission greater relevance. However, the Pentagon is procuring a stealthier, and (ostensibly) more cost-efficient B-21 Raider to meet that contingency. After all, the B-2’s stealth capabilities are no longer cutting-edge, with newer F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters boasting between one-tenth and one-hundredth the B-2’s .1 to .05 meter squared radar cross-section.

The B-21 very much resembles a Spirit 2.0, and will incorporate more cost-efficient radar-absorbent materials baked into the skin of the airframe and networked computers for sensor fusion with friendly forces, allowing it to double as a surveillance platform.

As the B-2’s capabilities would be fully subsumed by the B-21’s, the Air Force plans to retire the Spirit around the year 2036 as the Raiders phase in. Of course, the B-2 story suggests that the biggest question may be whether the B-21 can stay on budget, and just how many Washington will be willing to pay for when the bill comes due.

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 November 2018.

Image: Creative Commons "B-2 Bomber" by bobbrown.co is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Trevor Filseth

Afghanistan, Asia

The central bank’s vaults contained around $160 million in gold and silver, and the “Bactrian Treasure,” a priceless hoard of golden artifacts from Afghanistan’s past.

The Taliban captured Kabul on August 15 and gained access to the headquarters, main vault, and cash reserves of Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which is the country’s central bank. The country’s central bank had an estimated value of $10 billion. This has prompted early fears that Afghanistan’s new rulers could seize the money for themselves.

Unfortunately for the Taliban, the bank’s cash reserves—consisting of hard currency, gold, and a variety of other valuables—mostly remain far beyond their reach. The majority of Afghanistan’s financial reserves are held within the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which houses the gold reserves of many developing nations for safekeeping.  

A year-end DAB report dated from December 2020 revealed that the central bank had stored gold worth 100 billion afghanis—or $1.32 billion—inside the Federal Reserve. The statement also revealed that around $6 billion of the bank’s holdings had been invested in U.S. Treasury securities inside the United States. 

The Biden administration was quick to confirm that none of Afghanistan’s reserves held in the United States would be allowed to be released to the Taliban, and on Tuesday, an administration official officially confirmed that the United States had frozen $9.5 billion in Afghanistan’s assets. 

DAB’s governor, Ajmal Ahmady, fled the country on Sunday. He described the series of events leading to his exile on Twitter. 

The Taliban are also likely to be denied access to Afghanistan’s “special drawing rights,” or SDRs, held by the International Monetary Fund, according to Reuters. 

While the Taliban are unlikely to recover most of the previous government’s reserves, the Taliban did gain a substantial amount of money from its rapid offensive in July and August. Some of DAB’s foreign currency reserves, overwhelmingly in the form of U.S. dollars, were stored at the bank’s various branches throughout Afghanistan, which are now entirely under the group’s control. The value of these holdings is estimated at around $360 million.  

The central bank’s vaults also contained around $160 million in gold and silver, and the “Bactrian Treasure,” a priceless hoard of golden artifacts from Afghanistan’s past. It is unclear how much of this the group was able to obtain, as the administration of President Ashraf Ghani had several weeks to send it to safekeeping before the Taliban’s capture of the city.  

In Kabul, the Taliban has maintained its control of the treasury building, and issued a statement on Saturday that it would be “strictly guarded.” 

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

Image: Reuters

Lawrence Davidson

Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East

Joe Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan, and hopefully Iraq, is a belated recognition that the military strategy has not, and will not, work.

Editor’s note: In early August, The National Interest organized a symposium on American foreign policy in the Middle East under the Biden administration. A variety of scholars were asked the following question: “Given Joe Biden’s recent decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the president right to be reducing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East?” The following article is one of their responses:

Let’s ask the question in a different way. Has a military presence in the Middle East served important U.S. national interests? For instance, has it protected the country from attack? The answer is no. In fact, one could make a good argument that U.S. military outposts in the Middle East were themselves targets of attack and finally helped provoke the attack on 9/11.

That attack did not come out of nowhere. Our interference in the region, aiding and abetting right-wing dictatorships (both secular and religious) rather than the growth of democratic processes earned us our enemies. Our singular backing of ever-evolving Israeli racism and illegal territorial expansion (I value international law over the Old Testament) earned us our enemies.

The counterargument that the Arabs should look to their own faults and stop blaming the West is really a red herring. Arab faults (which are real) do not exonerate Western, or U.S., wrongheaded behavior (which mainly reinforces Arab faults).

Joe Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan, and hopefully Iraq, is a belated recognition that the military strategy has not, and will not, work. Yet, Biden’s planned actions cannot be seen as a strategically definitive shift in policy. As the president never tires of telling us, he is an “ironclad Zionist.” As long as the United States continues its role as the ally and financial backer of a regime that violates international law, perpetuates anti-democratic and racist based political policies, and relies on military force rather than diplomacy to settle disagreements, our nation will not only violate its own alleged ideals and values—it will, in doing so, continue to earn its enemies in the Middle East.

Lawrence Davidson is professor emeritus at West Chester University.

Image: Flickr.

Sami Jabarkhail

Afghanistan,

In his desperate pursuit for power, Ghani tried every feeble excuse he could think of to postpone and undermine peace talks.

The world woke up on Sunday, August 15 to the unprecedented triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Their victory raises serious questions about who is responsible and who must be held accountable to the Afghan people. But the answer is no a brainer: President Ashraf Ghani. However, explaining why Ghani is responsible is no simple matter.

On February 9, 2020, the United States inked a landmark peace agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar. One of the four principal points agreed upon was that the Taliban will start peace negotiations with the Afghan government on March 10, 2020. After signing the peace agreement with the Taliban, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad visited Kabul on March 1 to inform Afghan leaders about the historic opportunity for peace and encouraged them to send an authoritative delegation to Doha to negotiate peace with the Taliban.

While in Kabul, Khalilzad was able to meet every influential Afghan leader except the former, and now runaway, president, Ashraf Ghani. Ghani refused to meet Khalilzad, starkly expressing his disinterest in peace as well as his inability to recognize the strength of Washington’s conviction to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan.

In his desperate pursuit for power, Ghani tried every feeble excuse he could think of to postpone and undermine peace talks. From calling an unnecessary Loya Jirga (grand council) to enlisting more than two hundred delegates to create parallel institutions, Ghani exhausted every avenue to remain in control.

Following immense pressure from senior officials in Washington, Ghani formed a team of negotiators. However, the Afghans and their international partners expected that Ghani would assign a small yet influential team of negotiators and give them enough power to effectively negotiate on behalf of the republic. In contrast to that anticipation, Ghani chose to send a large number of representatives to Doha. The Afghan negotiators, while diverse, had little or no leverage to engage the Taliban in meaningful peace talks.

In the meantime, Ghani and his team in Arg, Afghanistan’s presidential palace, worked deliberately to discredit Khalilzad and suppress pro-peace activists in Kabul. Moreover, Ghani and his associates attempted to lobby Washington to remove Khalilzad from his post and convince U.S. officials to maintain its military presence indefinitely in Afghanistan.

But Ghani was not the only one against peace with the Taliban. Afghanistan’s second in command, Amrullah Saleh, was yet another major obstacle to peace. He had been making not only disparaging remarks about peace with the Taliban but also tweeting war-mongering messages.

Before fleeing the country, Ghani had shown no signs to engage in serious negotiation with the Taliban. In one of his conversations in the Arg, Ghani had mocked the delegation by comparing it to a kite whose string he masterfully controlled and maneuvered from Kabul.

Afghan commentators who were criticizing Ghani’s fallacious intentions were effectively marginalized and even intimidated by his gang of security personnel.

Meanwhile, the Taliban, which felt emboldened after dragging the mighty United States to the negotiating table, had already realized that Ghani was not sincere about peace and decided the only way to accomplish its objective, which is to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan, was to resort to force. The Taliban then began to seize hundreds of districts.

After Ghani’s final refusal to a proposal offered by the Taliban for a peaceful settlement that required him to resign from office and allow for a transitional government, the Taliban moved quickly to capture large cities across Afghanistan. Within two weeks, the Taliban changed Afghanistan’s map from being mostly government-run provincial capitals to bringing the whole country under Taliban control, including the capital city, Kabul.

Yet before the Taliban entered Kabul on Sunday evening August 15, 2021, Ghani had successfully escaped with his wife and close aides to an unknown country.

Today, Ghani is on the run and his whereabouts remain unknown. He has abandoned the Afghan people and destroyed their hopes for freedom. What is known is that Ghani and his wife left with loads of money. Some bags of cash were so heavy that they couldn’t carry them and were left behind, according to Nikita Ishchenko, spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Kabul.

Ghani is already being slammed by Afghans from different walks of life for misleading the nation about the peace process and pursuing divisive politics. 

Afghanistan’s history has been harsh on leaders who have abandoned the Afghan people and escaped with their lives. Ghani will be judged bitterly, especially about a promise he made in one of his recent speeches.

While speaking with local governors on August 4, Ghani distinguished himself from King Amanullah Khan who had fled office in the face of an uprising during the early twentieth century by saying, “I did not like that Amanullah Khan run away, but I will never run away.”

Sami Jabarkhail is a Ph.D. Candidate in Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University and a delegate to the 2014 NATO Future Leaders Summit in Wales, United Kingdom. Follow him on twitter @SamiJabarkhail

Image: Reuters.

Jay Mens

Iran, Middle East

A nuclear agreement with Iran is likely to be reinstated in Vienna by the end of this year. If it is successful, then it will delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions for another decade at most.

In 1963, the young Harvard professor Henry Kissinger contemplated how the United States might approach a rapidly growing Soviet nuclear program. In doing so, he described the dilemma of the statesman as “the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making an assessment which requires more effort.” Six years ago, Kissinger’s biographer, Niall Ferguson, invoked this “problem of conjecture” to consider the Iran nuclear deal. The problem of conjecture remains an apt prism through which to think about Iran’s nuclear program because as in Kissinger’s Soviet example, whatever a policymaker does about the program, he will “never be able to prove that his effort was necessary. . . . If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky. It is a terrible dilemma.”   

Conjecture is the simultaneous attempt to interpret the present and to guess how the future will unfold. In the wacky world of punditry, conjecture about Iran’s nuclear program usually falls into one of two camps. The first argues that Iran is rushing towards nuclear weapons in order to fulfill a destructive, messianic ambition. The other argues that Iran’s push towards nuclear weapons can be indefinitely restrained by agreements like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Both assessments are what Kissinger referred to as “assessments which require the least effort.” A different conjecture, which admittedly requires more effort, would view the danger of a nuclear Iran through a prism that unites most of the modern Middle East’s problems: an endemic deficit of legitimacy, and the consequent potential for political instability.   

The argument that the Islamic Republic desires nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel in an orgy of messianic fervor is fantastical. The evidence suggests that, far from being a nuclear suicide bomber, the Islamic Republic is obsessed with survival. A regime that regards itself as the standard-bearer of the Islamic world and is consumed with the violent repression of domestic protest is not a regime with a death wish. The function of the Islamic Revolution was, in the words of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to create “a point in the start of the revolution of the great world of Islam.” This sense of mission has persisted to this day: it is the bedrock of the regime’s identity and gives the regime a will to survive, not to die. The idea that Iran would commit suicide with a first strike is far-fetched. But the argument for keeping calm and carrying on is just as thin.   

The argument that Iran will rush to obliterate Israel after acquiring nuclear weapons enables Iran’s apologists to caricature those worried about a nuclear Iran as swivel-eyed doomsayers. Yet Iran’s nuclear research has gone far beyond performative provocation, and its leaders boast a consistent fifty-year track record of calling for the destruction of Israel in addition to threatening Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with the same demise. Ignoring the pace of Iran’s nuclear research and the extraordinary record of Iran’s threats is absurd. For that reason, both types of short-term conjecture are too short-sighted. In reality, however, if Iran does cross the nuclear threshold, the danger will come not when Iran acquires nuclear weapons but quite some time afterward. 

“If Sparta and Rome have perished, what state can hope to last forever?” This was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s pessimistic assessment in The Social Contract. It holds especially true for the Islamic Republic. Iran’s population is becoming younger, much more secular, and more connected to the rest of the world. The regime’s authority is the product of a unique moment in history. Its authority will continue to dwindle as the Iran of today moves further away from the revolutionary moment in which it was conceived. Endemic corruption and economic mismanagement will continue to undermine a regime based on moral purity and will create the conditions for revolution. Dreams of the Islamic Republic becoming a flourishing “Islamic Civilization” are as premature as the late shah’s dreams for the Persian Empire. If the collapse of the Islamic Republic is more a question of when than if, then the question then begs: what happens after the fall?   

From the deposition of the Sassanids by Iran’s nobles to Nader Shah’s 1736 counterrevolution to the 1921 Cossack coup that brought the Pahlavi family to power, Iranian regimes have historically succumbed to mutiny. Today, overwhelming popular unrest would likely see the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the modern equivalent of the Cossacks, come to power. They would do so by rescuing, not deposing, the revolutionary system. Were this to happen, Iran’s foes would be unlikely to resist the temptation of outfitting Iran’s armed domestic opposition groups. A bloody civil war could ensue. The regime could use nuclear weapons against backers of insurrection or could threaten to do so, bringing about a first nuclear strike on Iran. And if the regime really stood no chance of survival, it could opt for messianic suicide, taking Riyadh and Tel Aviv down with Tehran. This marriage of nuclear weapons with an unstable regime would make feasible contingencies much more dangerous. But not just in Iran.   

Were Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Egypt would move to do the same. For Saudi Arabia, it is an official position; Turkey has intimated that it would follow suit, and Egypt began hedging when early revelations about Iranian nuclear weapons appeared in the early 2000s. Some argue that the region would break into peace under the shadow of a Damocles’ mushroom cloud. Yet while mutually assured destruction is perhaps reasonable for most states, Iran and the countries that would follow in its nuclear footsteps are susceptible to state collapse. Adding a nuclear element into such contingencies would be extraordinarily dangerous.   

Saudi Arabia is currently in the process of renegotiating its social contract. A Saudi nuclear weapon would enormously raise the stakes of the kingdom’s successful political and economic transition. The outcome of that transition is far from certain. If it fails, then Saudi Arabia lacks any deeply rooted institution that could take over. The endurance of radical Islamist groups in the kingdom—as well as historic attempts by those organizations to seize the reins of power—offers a grim picture of where a Saudi nuclear weapon could go. While the risk of a Saudi nuclear weapon is the uncertainty of the kingdom’s political future, for Turkey, it would make the country’s current trajectory much more dangerous.

With its rapid march towards authoritarianism and a determined ideological agenda, Turkey’s ruling AK Party is transforming its political system and engendering a broad domestic opposition. The military has been purged since a 2016 coup attempt, and the AKP has since developed a band of well-armed partisans. It now has plans for constitutional reform which will most likely prolong President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s stay in the exorbitant White Palace. Beyond the AKP’s plans for how Turkey should look at home, it also has an expansive agenda for what Turkey should be doing abroad. With nuclear weapons, the AKP would likely press ahead with its ambitious regional agenda. Its record of using foreign policy crises to bolster its popularity could lead to a third marriage of nuclear weapons and regime stability and would give the world yet another unwelcome gift of more nuclear brinkmanship.

Since the Arab Spring, little progress has been made in creating durable bases of political legitimacy in the region. This undermines political stability and creates opportunities for ideological fanatics to take the reins of power, in Iran and across the region. The danger of a nuclear Iran must be understood in this context, and Iran’s own history best demonstrates the risks at play. Had the shah succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons prior to the Islamic Revolution, then those weapons could have fallen into the hands of today’s regime. The next fifty years provided numerous occasions whereby those weapons could have been used against Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. Were Iran and its neighbors to acquire nuclear weapons, then the potential for such counterfactuals to occur in real life would be greater than ever.   

Crises, like pandemics, come in multiple waves. Contingency produces contingency, and nowhere would this be more the case than an Iranian nuclear weapon. The danger of a nuclear Iran is that it would enable extraordinary, entirely plausible contingencies to take place by arranging the marriage of nuclear armament and political instability in not just one, but at least three instances. The JCPOA is more likely than not to be reinstated in Vienna by the end of this year. If it is successful, then it will delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions for another decade at most. Yet this policy is the product of short-term conjecture. Most people are tired of hearing about Iran’s nuclear program because it has been given too much attention and treated with too little detail. Teasing out the longer-term consequences of vexatious foreign policy questions can require some effort but offers a view into the profound consequences of action and inaction. The problem of conjecture is alive and well with Iran and presents a terrible dilemma.   

Jay Mens is executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Forum, a think-tank researching Middle East politics and policy at the University of Cambridge.  

 Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

A deployable, road-mobile hypersonic weapon could introduce an entirely new sphere of problems and complications for one of America’s adversaries.

The urgency of the Pentagon’s need to accelerate and deploy hypersonic weapons is serious, according to senior U.S. weapons developers who have expressed extreme concern about Russian and Chinese weapons.  

“We are number three in this race. We have to catch up,” Robert Strider, the deputy director of the Army Hypersonic Project Office, told an audience on August 11 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. Strider was referring to fast-emerging Russian and Chinese progress with hypersonic missiles, which is a concern often discussed by Pentagon leaders. This concern is likely a primary inspiration for the Army’s current success in developing an emerging weapon called “Dark Eagle.” The new missile, known as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), will be ready for war by 2023.  

By this time, Strider explained, the new LRHW will be able to travel aboard an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III to a hostile forward location, set up for a launch, and destroy enemy targets at hypersonic speeds before returning to home base. This level of independent warfare ability with hypersonic missiles, expected by 2023, will be preceded by a series of what Strider called Joint Flight Campaigns involving tests, assessments and technological refinements of the weapon.

Initial configurations include plans to deploy a missile battery of four launchers and a battery operations center. Interestingly, the LRHW is a joint Army-Navy weapon that uses a common warhead projectile for ground and maritime attacks. Each launcher contains two hypersonic missiles, indicating a total of eight LRHWs in a battery.  

“Our all up round is a thirty-four-inch booster which will be common between the Army and the Navy,” Strider said. “We will shoot exactly the same thing the Navy shoots out of a sub or ship.”  

Transportable on board an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, the LRHW is intended to be road-mobile such that it can hold targets at risk from multiple changing locations to maximize surprise and speed of attack.

“We took existing trailers and modified them with hydraulics and electronics and everything associated with being a launcher,” Strider explained. “We know what these systems are capable of.” 

The first missile to be shot off of a transporter will occur in 2022 as part of the Joint Flight Campaign 2.

A deployable, road-mobile hypersonic weapon could introduce an entirely new sphere of problems and complications for one of America’s adversaries. If a battery capable of firing eight LRHWs were to arrive at a secretive launching area close to a U.S. adversary with the ability to quickly power up and launch from changing locations on a mobile launcher, then that would put an adversary’s forces at great risk of destruction. Should a hypersonic weapon—one that is able to travel at five times the speed of sound— land in closer proximity to a set of enemy targets, then such a weapon could destroy high-value targets at a much faster rate and make it extremely difficult for that adversary to defend them. Perhaps most of all, having a mobile, expeditionary hypersonic attack capability in this fashion would surely make launch locations much more difficult to locate and destroy. An enemy might not have the ability to find that launch point due to the LRHW. 

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Michael M. Gunter

Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East

The Biden decision to draw down in the Middle East is more of an adjustment than a seismic sea change.

Editor’s note: In early August, The National Interest organized a symposium on American foreign policy in the Middle East under the Biden administration. A variety of scholars were asked the following question: “Given Joe Biden’s recent decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the president right to be reducing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East?” The following article is one of their responses:

The Biden administration’s recent decision to reduce the U.S. military presence in the Middle East can be seen in terms of two different perspectives: first, the background of a partial return to the traditional U.S. policy of isolationism; and/or second, a more immediate, mid-course adjustment in pursuing its present, active foreign policy goals.

For most of its history, the U.S. national style was characterized by isolationism regarding political entanglements in foreign policy along with a self-righteous, almost missionary emphasis on its own exceptionalism and aversion to power politics. War, of course, constituted a necessary exception to such isolation. However, as soon as peace returned, the U.S. national style demanded a return to its traditional stance of political detachment toward the rest of the world. Only the changed international balance of power after World War II began to alter this traditional state of affairs and force the United States into a more normal involvement in world affairs. Nevertheless, its traditional isolationism continues to influence its foreign policy positions to take what it considers to be the morally correct position, in this case, seemingly to reduce its Middle East presence.

However, on a more immediate level, Joe Biden’s decision can be seen as a necessary mid-course correction of faulty mission creep in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the United States initially and justifiably entered Afghanistan in force to punish Al Qaeda’s attack on September 11, 2001, and terminate its leader, Osama bin-Laden, this limited goal was partially accomplished almost immediately by overthrowing the Taliban government and more than a decade ago with bin Laden’s death. However, during these twenty long years, the United States lost sight of its original goal and fell into the trap of mission creep and its false goal of nation-building.

In an ideal world, of course, women’s rights and the full panoply of human rights would prevail in Afghanistan, but even U.S. power has its limitations. In this particular case, the United States cannot bring Afghanistan into the twenty-first century against its will. If anybody is going to do this, it would be the mainstream Islamic world. The United States, acting through the United Nations and other multilateral bodies, could offer background support. Indeed, its supposed withdrawal from this “endless war” remains only partial as U.S. air support for the incumbent government remains. Further, if deemed necessary, a return to full U.S. involvement again remains just “over the horizon.” However, the time has come to direct U.S. resources abroad toward more important threats such as China, where recently the total Chinese naval tonnage has actually forged ahead of that of the United States, while its nuclear missile stockpile has been rapidly expanding. 

As for the Biden withdrawal from Iraq, this too is not only the correct policy but less than meets the eye. Some U.S. troops, as well as air power, remain. And if necessary, they can easily return as they did when ISIS struck in 2014. This admittedly ignores whether ISIS ever would have struck in the first place if the United States had not earlier withdrawn from Iraq at the end of 2011 and failed to get more involved in the Syrian civil war that also began in that year—actions that arguably opened the space for ISIS to arise so shockingly.

In conclusion, the Biden decision to draw down in the Middle East is more of an adjustment than a seismic sea change. It is in no way comparable to the British decision a half-century ago to withdraw from east of Suez. Furthermore, U.S. support for Israel and the Kurds in Iraq and Syria will continue as it will for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, among others deemed necessary. On the other hand, hostile Iran also will continue to require close attention.

Dr. Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee.

Image: Flickr.

Charlie Gao

MiG-29,

These Russian jets forced NATO to change its war plans.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The modular design of R-27 missiles allows them to be used in both Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters. Additionally, the Russian Air Forces still continues to field R-27ER missiles because their long-range outclasses that of lesser adversaries who are less likely to use active radar homing. 

When the Su-27 “Flanker” and MiG-29 “Fulcrum” came onto the scene in the 1980s, they represented a significant generational leap in technology compared to earlier Soviet fighters. The missiles they carried also represented a generational leap in their own way.

Indeed, both the R-73 short-range air-to-air missile and R-27 medium-range air-to-air missile which were first fielded on those aircraft serve on to this day. But the R-27 design in particular has proven to be particularly adaptable and resistant to replacement by more modern designs. But why has the design proven to be so long-lived?

In 1974, the Central Committee of the CPSU approved for work to begin on the 4th generation of fighters—the MiG-29 and Su-27. As a result of this, the Vympel missile design bureau began work on the R-27 (referred to as the K-27 during prototyping and testing) missile.

It was first envisioned that there would be two different variants of the R-27 in service, a lighter K-27A for the MiG-29 with shorter range and a heavier K-27B for the Su-27 with longer range. As a result, the propulsion system for the missile was designed to be modular.

Due to the Soviet trend of creating both radar and IR-seeking versions of missiles, the R-27 was also designed with a modular seeker. This would come in handy later as many different variations of the R-27 were made with different seekers.

Another interesting design decision was the selection of the “butterfly” shaped control surfaces in the center of the missile. This was not uncontroversial. Some designers wanted a scheme similar to the earlier R-23 missile where control surfaces were mounted on the tail of the missile, as it afforded less air resistance at low angles of attack and was considered to be generally aerodynamically superior. However, the need for the missile to be modular took priority and that design was rejected, as mounting control surfaces on the rear would compromise the modularity of the propulsion system.

Also interesting is that the designers of the R-27 thought that even with advancements in Soviet technology the possible radar power and radar seeker sensitivity of the R-27 and its launching aircraft would be inferior in power and sensitivity to Western aircraft. To counter this, Soviet designers improved the lock on after launch (LOAL) capabilities of the missile.

While the earlier R-23 missile had inertial LOAL, where the missile’s seeker could home in on a target after being launched and flying without a lock for some time with an inertial navigation system keeping the missile flying straight, the R-27 improved upon this by adding the ability for the aircraft to issue course corrections via a radio datalink to the missile.

Tests were carried out at the end of the 1970s, with K-27s being fired from MiG-23s, although these were simply to test the telemetry of the missile and were not guided shots. The thermal version was also tested from the MiG-23, being shot at parachute targets. Test K-27 missiles were also shot from a prototype MiG-29 in 1980 with the thermal missile, though the prototype MiG-29 didn’t have a radar installed at the time.

Testing continued throughout the 1980s, with state trials concluding in 1984. The K-27 missile was finally adopted in 1987 as the R-27R and R-27T missiles, with R being the semi-active radar homing variant and the T being the heat-seeking variant.

At the same time, the K-27B “heavy” missile originally intended for the Su-27 had its designation changed to the K-27E, with the E indicating it would have more energy (longer range). It went through a longer development cycle than the lighter K-27 missile due to redesigns of the Su-27’s radar system to improve it and make it more competitive. Additional challenges posed by the extended range at which the K-27E was expected to operate at also caused a longer development cycle.

Testing for The K-27E was finally adopted in 1990 as the R-27ER and R-27ET, and the creators of the missile were awarded a state prize in 1991.

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During the long development cycle of the R-27, it was realized that the semi-active radar homing (in which the missile homes in on a radar signal created by the launching aircraft) on which these missiles was based might become obsolete. Studies were made into creating an active radar homing (ARH) version of the missile. ARH missiles have a small radar in the seeker, which allows the missile to self-illuminate the target instead of relying on an external aircraft.

This version was called the R-27EA. Drafted in 1983, it also underwent develop during the 1980s, but difficulties creating the small radar in the seeker delayed development. The fate of the project is uncertain, but most sources say major development was stopped around 1989 in order to focus on the R-77 missile instead, although work may have continued in private.

Overall, the main advantage of the R-27 series of missiles is the range on the ER variants, which is said to be around 130 km. This is far longer than any variant of the AIM-7 Sparrow, the closest NATO equivalent. The primary problem with the R-27 is that the long development cycle allowed American missiles to surpass it.

One example of this is the mid-course datalink course correction feature of the R-27. While it was originally designed with this feature in the 1970s, the final missile only reached service by 1987. By that time, American engineers had incrementally added updates to their existing AIM-7 missile, including the same capability by the AIM-7P Block II, which was also adopted in 1987.

The compromise nature of the control surfaces probably also contributed to the decision to not further develop the missile. The next-generation ARH missile that was meant to arm the Soviet Air Force, the R-77, featured grid-fins on the rear of the missile for better maneuverability. Since the R-27 would never reach the level of aerodynamic performance of the R-77, it probably was determined to be a waste of further effort to give the missile ARH capability.

In many ways, the R-27ER can be seen as the “last gasp” of the SARH. It was designed to be one of the most advanced missiles of its type with long range and mid-course correction capability, but by the time it entered service, its type of missile was nearing obsolescence. America fielded its first ARH missile in 1991, the AIM-120 AMRAAM, only one year after the R-27ER entered service.

The Russian Air Force probably continues to field them because their long-range outclasses most lesser adversaries who are unlikely to utilize ARH missiles. However, as seen in Syria, when danger is posed by a peer or near-peer air force, the R-27s will come off in favor of the R-77s.

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 August 2018.

Image: Wikipedia.

Stephen Silver

Stimulus,

You might be eligible. 

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has announced a rule change, so that benefits received through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) will not be affected by the recipient having received stimulus checks, and other certain government benefits.

As pointed out by Disability Scoop, after the rule change, “people with disabilities can save money received through stimulus checks and other COVID-19 relief programs indefinitely without losing out on their Supplemental Security Income benefits.”

“We recently changed our rules about what financial assistance can affect your eligibility for SSI or your monthly SSI payment amount,” the SSA said on its coronavirus website.

“Specifically, we no longer count the financial assistance listed below against your eligibility or payment amount. We are reviewing SSI claims and other SSI records going back to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to restore SSI payments for people whose SSI was affected by receiving any of the assistance listed below.”

Those benefits include “Economic Impact Payments”—the official name for stimulus checks from the federal government—as well as most state-issued stimulus payments, unemployment assistance, loan forgiveness from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Also included are benefits from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) Program, the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, the COVID-19 Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, COVID-19 Funeral Assistance, the Emergency Rental Assistance Fund, the Emergency Assistance for Rural Housing/Rural Rental Assistance, the Homeowner Assistance Fund, Housing Assistance and Supportive Services Programs for Native Americans, the Tribal Payments from the Coronavirus Relief Fund and the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, Supporting Foster Youth and Families, the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, the Emergency Assistance to Children and Families through the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund, the Farm Loan Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers, and the USDA Assistance and Support for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers, Ranchers, Forest Land Owners and Operators, and Groups.

What should beneficiaries do if they are affected by this change?

“In most cases, you do not need to do anything. If we do not need any information from you to restore your SSI payment, we will restore your SSI payment and we will mail you a letter explaining the change,” the SSA coronavirus page says. “We will send the letter to the most recent address we have available for you. If you have an appointed representative, or a representative payee, we will also send this information to your representative.”

Back in July, Democrats in Congress announced a proposal to expand SSI benefits.

“Disabled people and the poorest of the poor haven’t had really any help in years,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said in a July Time Magazine article about the push. “They’ve just been forgotten and neglected. So it’s time we do something about 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

Charlie Gao

ZTZ-96,

Although China's ZTZ-96 tank is a Lethal Threat, it is developmentally immature at least in contrast to the latest American and Russian tanks. 

Here's What You Need to Know: China's military capabilities are increasing. 

What's up with China's tanks? Can they keep up with the Armata and the M1A2D?

One interesting aspect of China’s tank fleet is that all of the designs are relatively young compared to European, American or Russian designs. Most of the predominant tank designs in the world originated in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but China’s ZTZ-96 and ZTZ-99 tanks only began development in the late 1980s and entered service in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But have Chinese designers taken advantage of the advances in technology that have occurred during the meantime?

The ZTZ-96 could be considered China’s first modern main battle tank. It grew out of a program to modernize the older ZTZ-88 tank, which was a stopgap design between the older Type 59s for the 1980s. The first ZTZ-96 was adopted in 1999.

It swapped the 105mm cannon that armed the earlier ZTZ-88s for a 125mm ZPT98 smoothbore cannon, a copy of the Soviet/Russian 2A46M. The fire control system (FCS) was based on earlier Marconi fire control systems imported and used by China. The FCS included a laser rangefinder (LRF), gun stabilization, and optic stabilization (for the gunner’s sight). However, for a 1999 tank, it was underpowered with only a 780hp power plant.

Overall, the tank was okay, but the armor left much to be desired. The armor was still a relatively old composite design, which would be almost totally ineffective against contemporary Russian and Western designs. For reference, the US was fielding M829A2 at the time, which was meant to cut through Russian tanks with heavy Kontakt-5 Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) in front of composite armor. The basic ZTZ-96 did not even have light ERA.

As a result, armor upgrades composed the bulk of the changes when it came to the ZTZ-96A, adopted in 2009. It added significant amounts of armor to the basic ZTZ-96 chassis, then added ERA on top of that. As a result, the ZTZ-96A has a significantly different turret shape than the basic ZTZ-96. Slat armor was also removed on other portions of the tank and replaced by ERA. Some technology used to make the turret was taken from the later ZTZ-99.

The FCS and turret controls received a slight upgrade as well, though nothing too important. A laser-warning receiver was also added to the rear of the turret to improve defensive capabilities. A thermal imager was also added in the ZTZ-96A.

The weight of all these upgrades caused the ZTZ-96A to be rather underpowered with its 780hp power plant. Chinese tankers who utilized the ZTZ-96A during the 2014 Russian Tank Biathlon complained about being left in the dust by T-72B3s, which utilized more powerful 1000hp engines.

As a result, the ZTZ-96B upgrade includes a substantial engine upgrade, up to 1130hp. It also adds new FCS, crew environmental systems, and a remote weapons station. Other upgrades are also possible, but details on the ZTZ-96B are hard to come by as it is a very recent upgrade.

Despite the upgrades, the ZTZ-96B is based on very old designs. The Chinese military has known this for a long time: the ZTZ-99 was in development concurrently with the ZTZ-96B. As opposed to the ZTZ-96, which was meant to also kind of be a “stopgap” tank, the ZTZ-99 was meant to be a true competitor to international designs like the Abrams, Leopard 2, and T-80.

The design of the first ZTZ-99s was finalized around 1998, and the tank was first seen on parade in 1999. These pre-production models feature flat turret faces and are armed with the same 125mm cannon that the ZTZ-96 uses.

The basic model of the ZTZ-99 (9910) was equipped with an independent commander’s sight, a significant improvement over the ZTZ-96 and a feature the M1A1, Leopard 2A4, and T-72B lack. It also features a 1200hp engine in the basic model, which is more powerful than basic T-72B3s.

However, this design did not enter production due to perceived flaws in its armor layout and design. Rather, the tank went back into development. A slightly revised version called ZTZ-99 Phase-I Improved entered production. In 2008, further development was completed, resulting in the ZTZ-99 Phase-II. This new iteration featured angled turret faces similar to the Leopard 2A5, and ERA modules on the hull.

The entire tank underwent a large redesign yet again in the ZTZ-99A, where a new, more powerful 1500hp engine was placed in the tank. The hull’s shape is redesigned, and now resembles the M1 Abrams series of tanks with a rough wedge shape more than the Soviet T-series earlier hulls resembled. The turret is also redesigned, being wider and featuring thicker armor. The tank also has all the features you’d expect on a modern tank: thermal commander and gunner’s sights, hunter-killer capability, a soft-kill APS with laser warning receiver.

So how capable are the ZTZ-96 and ZTZ-99 in all their variants? The ZTZ-96B probably still relatively weak compared to other “frontline” tanks due to its antiquated armor. ERA can only improve armor so much. With the 125mm gun and modern fire control system, it likely will prove a lethal threat to targets, albeit one that is easily knocked out.

The ZTZ-99A is another beast. Given its armor and advanced networked and sensor systems, it’s likely to be a tough opponent. However, the quality of Chinese thermal imagers is uncertain. The latest American M1A2C tanks are said to be equipped with third generation thermal imagers, which may increase detection and identification ranges out past earlier Chinese thermals, giving the Abrams the edge. The existence of such a site does put it in front of most T-72B3s.

The Chinese tanks also use Russian/Soviet-style carousel autoloaders, which will probably not be very safe for the crew in the event of a hit. It’s surprising that the ZTZ-99A was not designed with a bustle autoloader, as many later third generation tank designs (including the Japanese Type 90 and Type 10 and Korean K2) utilize bustle autoloaders for increased safety. It’s possible Chinese designers thought the additional complexity and cost were not worth it.

In the end, the ZTZ-99A is likely a lethal threat for the older tanks in the American tank fleet and the majority of the Russian tank fleet, but both the latest versions of American and Russian tanks are likely to beat it in a fight. The constant flux of basic turret and hull designs being manufactured suggests that China is not really sure what its requirements for a tank are, and thus the ZTZ-99A is probably fairly developmentally immature, at least in contrast to the latest American and Russian tanks.

The M1A2D and Armata are likely to leave the ZTZ-99A in the dust. It’s unlikely for the Chinese military leadership will want to prioritize another new tank project, however, as the PLAN seems to have been the focus of recent developments.

Some details taken from The Technical Development of China's Tanks from the Type 59 to the Type 88 Main Battle Tank by Wu Zheren and Hu Xiaofang.

Charlie Gao studied Political and Computer Science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national security issues.

This article first appeared in November 2018.

Image: Creative Commons "Tanks in Beijing" by gadgetdan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Stephen Silver

Social Security Disability,

President Biden said in July that long COVID could soon qualify as a disability under federal law.

Most people who suffer from the coronavirus, and survive, recover relatively quickly. But other survivors keep suffering symptoms and effects for a long time afterward, in a phenomenon known as “long COVID’ or “long-haul COVID.”

Can those who have suffered from long COVID qualify for Social Security disability benefits? CNBC recently explored that question.

“We certainly have seen an increase of claims because of COVID-related issues, including long haulers,” one advocate who handles Social Security disability claimants told CNBC. That person added that while some in that situation have been awarded benefits, “the majority of those have been people with lingering complications from being put on ventilators.”

Most of those who receive Social Security disability benefits are those who have suffered an illness for twelve months or longer, and not many sufferers of long-haul COVID have had the disease for that long.

President Biden said in July that long COVID could soon qualify as a disability under federal law, per NBC News.

"We're bringing agencies together to make sure Americans with long COVID who have a disability have access to the rights and resources that are due under the disability law, which includes accommodations and services in the workplace and school, and our health care system so they can live their lives in dignity," the president said last month.

The same week, the Biden Administration issued a “fact sheet” listing resources available to those suffering from long COVID. The announcement came on the anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

‘Today the Administration is also releasing a package of guidance and resources to support individuals experiencing the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 or ‘Post- Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC),’ known commonly as 'long COVID,'” the administration said in the fact sheet. "The announcements from the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, Education, and Labor provide information about where individuals can access resources and accommodations and clarifies the rights for health and educational services and supports.”

The Office for Civil Rights at HHS and Department of Justice both issued guidances, “explaining that some individuals with long COVID may have a disability under various civil rights laws that entitles them to protection from discrimination.”

Also released were guidelines from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, aimed at helping children who have suffered from long COVID.

In addition, the Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) launched a website with information about benefits available to those with long COVID, such as job accommodations and employee benefits.

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

Charlie Gao

T-10 Tank,

The reason why the T-10M stuck around was likely institutional inertia. 

Here's What You Need to Know: The T-10M served for over 40 years before being decommissioned, making it one of the longest-lived tank designs in the world. Soviet doctrine, during the 40-year reign of the T-10M called for an extremely heavily armed breakthrough tank, and it was the tank for that job.

The T-10 is one of the longest-lasting tank designs in the world. Adopted in 1953, the tank served for over 40 years before finally being decommissioned in 1997.

Along the way, the design underwent several revisions to keep it modern, from the T-10A to the ultimate variant, the T-10M.

But what made the T-10 design so enduring? Just how good was the T-10M? Why was it kept in service so long?

The story of the T-10 beings in 1949. Originally called the IS-8 and IS-9 during development, the T-10 was a continuation of the Iosef Stalin line of heavy breakthrough tanks that debuted during WWII.

IS-2 heavy tanks were the standard late-war heavy tank of the Soviet Army, possessing a powerful D-25 122mm gun that could blast through enemy tanks and bunkers alike.

That gun would go on to be a hallmark of the IS-series, arming the later IS-3, IS-4, and eventually, the IS-8, which would be adopted as the IS-10. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the IS-10 was renamed T-10 as part of the destalinization process.

The T-10 itself was a modernization of the IS-3, featuring the same “prow” front hull design, complete with the centrally situated driver’s position. The turret and hull were enlarged from the IS-3 to accommodate more armor. This necessitated the addition of another road wheel.

The D-25 was also beefed up with a longer barrel and bigger muzzle brake to allow for the firing of advanced armor-piercing rounds.

To help address a common weakness of the IS-series, low rate of fire, an electromechanical rammer was added to the T-10 to assist the loader. 30 rounds were available in an ergonomic configuration superior to earlier IS-tanks.

Altogether, this made for an incredibly formidable tank in the 1950s, with very thick armor and impressive lethality to boot. While not as nimble as upcoming Western tank designs, the T-10 was meant to be able to survive a hit.

The first upgrade for the T-10 came in 1956 in the T-10A. The T-10A was a fairly straightforward lethality upgrade. A fume extractor was added to the D-25, and the “Uragan” vertical-axis stabilizer was added to the T-10. This improved the ability of the T-10 to fire on the move by 5-6 times.

The T-10B came shortly afterward in 1957, featuring a 2-plane stabilizer.

The final variant, the T-10M was adopted in 1962. It was an almost total overhaul of the design, with the original D-25 cannon being swapped out for a more modern M62T2 cannon which featured yet another new muzzle brake and fume extractor. It also had a newer, more effective stabilizer.

The coaxial armament was also improved, swapping the 12.7mm DShK machine guns for 14.5mm KPV machine guns.

A myriad of other improvements round out the T-10M: night vision equipment for the gunner and driver, improved nuclear protection measures, and better sights.

But at that time the next generation of Western and Soviet tanks was well into development. The original T-10 had far better armor than the T-55s and T-54s that were its contemporary, but the T-10M didn’t possess significant advantages versus the T-62, much less the upcoming T-64 which utilized composite armor.

In the end, the reason why the T-10M stuck around was likely institutional inertia. Soviet doctrine called for an extremely heavily armed breakthrough tank, and the T-10M was the tank for that job.

This doctrine didn’t stick around for much longer given the suitability of faster, lighter tanks at exploiting breakthroughs, but at the time, it was a perfectly valid reason to keep churning out T-10s.

The T-10 was actually better in some ways than the newer tanks, perhaps simply due to its size. The stabilizer was more effective than the T-62s, and of course the high caliber coaxial and commander weapons fit is nothing to scoff at. These aspects would likely have made it a force to be reckoned with on the breakthrough in the 1960s when ATGMs were still in their infancy.

Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues.

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Creative Commons "Soviet Heavy Tank T-10. 1953. Тяжелый советский танк Т-10." by Peer.Gynt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0