The National Interest

Nader Entessar

Afghanistan, Middle East

Several countries in the region, especially Afghanistan’s neighbors, have concluded that without the Taliban’s acquiescence and involvement, not only will peace remain ephemeral in that country, but their own national security interests will be endangered.

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:

These questions do not lend themselves to a simple “yes” or “no.” Perhaps we can answer these questions with more certainty a decade from now. However, what is clear is that the U.S. military involvement and heavy presence in the greater Middle East in the past two decades has not served American national interests. Authoritarianism and war are more prevalent today in the region than before the U.S. military build-up of the past twenty years. Post-Saddam Iraq is still a fractured country that suffers from a myriad of economic, social, and political malaise and has become a battleground between domestic Iraqi groups and regional contenders for influence. There is no guarantee that the Islamic State (ISIS) or its offshoots will not once again threaten Iraq’s territorial integrity and become a serious threat to Iraq’s neighbors, especially to Iran’s national security. In fact, Iraq today is in a state of suspension between a failed state and a permanently unstable and fractured entity.

Furthermore, reports of the U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East are exaggerated. The Biden administration may reduce overt U.S. military presence here and there, but these may simply be either repositioning the military presence or redefining it. For example, the Biden administration has announced the termination of the U.S. combat presence in Iraq but not the U.S. military presence in that country.

The desire to disengage the United States from the Afghan conflict, its longest war in history, was first manifested in the Trump administration. After years of maintaining a significant military presence in Afghanistan, the Biden administration must have concluded that there is no end in sight to the internal conflict in that country and that the United States was not “winning” the war there. Consequently, the United States began to engage in a series of talks with the Taliban, its previous nemesis, to prepare the ground for the termination of its official military involvement in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.

What can be observed at this time is that several countries in the region, especially Afghanistan’s neighbors, have concluded that without the Taliban’s acquiescence and involvement, not only will peace remain ephemeral in that country, but their own national security interests will be endangered. That is why some of Afghanistan’s neighbors have sought to arrange peace talks between the Taliban and the other contenders for power in that country, including Ashraf Ghani’s ruling government.

Iran has tried to mediate between Afghan groups by arranging talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Iran shares a long 921 km porous border with Afghanistan with several security threats emanating from that border area. Today, Iran fears that a forceful and violent takeover of Afghanistan will result, inter alia, in another massive refugee influx. Although the Taliban’s advances in the current conflict have been generally in areas away from the Iran-Afghan border regions, we are already witnessing a massive influx of would-be Afghan refugees to the Iranian border waiting to cross into Iran. If conditions continue to deteriorate inside Afghanistan, Iran will take a more active role in securing its border from the refugee influx and Taliban threats. Even Beijing, which only has a short and relatively unpassable 76 km border with Afghanistan, may feel compelled to try to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan to secure China’s Tajikistan flank which will become a transit point for extremism in Central Asia.

Nader Entessar is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of South Alabama.

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Chinese Army,

Just because the day ends, does not mean the fighting does. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: The BBG-011A is clearly a clone of the Thales LUCIE night vision goggles, a popular European NVG that has seen use with the German Bundeswehr and French Army. The LUCIE is notable for being relatively “flat”, having the form factor of a rectangular box with a lens in the upper right corner. The choice to clone the European LUCIE device instead of American or Russian monocular-style devices is interesting, given that monoculars are generally held to have far more advantages over offset-lens binoculars.

Recently, various Chinese military night vision units have been showing up on the Chinese domestic market. This provides an interesting opportunity to evaluate the capability of such units, as manufacturers publish the specifications and characteristics of these units. However, as with most night vision technology, there are caveats. Typically a night vision unit consists of two basic elements, the image intensifier (I2) tube, and the housing. The tube generally is the largest determinant of the quality and resolution of the image, while the housing affects how the unit is mounted, how durable it is, and its other ergonomic properties. While the housings available on the civilian market are fairly representative of Chinese military stock, the I2 tubes in the housings may not be representative of what’s actually issued to the Chinese military.

The BBG-011A is an interesting example of a Chinese military night vision unit on the civilian market. The unit is clearly a clone of the Thales LUCIE night vision goggles, a popular European NVG that has seen use with the German Bundeswehr and French Army. The LUCIE is notable for being relatively “flat”, having the form factor of a rectangular box with a lens in the upper right corner. The offset lens is controversial among users of the LUCIE, with users often complaining that the offset lens makes “close up” work unintuitive and clumsy. However, it’s possible that the lens is offset to interface well with carryhandle mounted optics on the FAMAS rifle, which makes sense given that the Chinese QBZ-95 is set up in a similar way.

The BBG-011A on the civilian market comes with one of three I2 tubes, the NT-3, CNT-4, and DNT-6. NT-3s have figures of merit (FOMs) of around 1200, CNT-4s have FOMs of around 1440, and DNT-6s have FOMs of around 1960. DNT-6 tubes also have autogating technology, which helps preserve tube life when bright light sources are viewed through the tube. All of the I2 tubes the BBG-011A is available with are Gen 2+, which is behind the Gen 3 tubes commonly used by the US military. Most US military NVGs have FOMs of over 2000, with some even going above 2500. Modern Generation 3 military-used Chinese tubes are probably over 2000 FOM, but are not seen on civilian-available examples, and would probably not be used in the BBG-011A, as it is an older design.

The BBG-011A has a dovetail mount which is proprietary. PLA standard operating procedure appears to be the mounting the BBG to a headclamp style mount, which a ballistic helmet is then worn over. This is not ideal, as headclamp mounts are generally considered to be uncomfortable, especially with a helmet worn over them. Adapters are available that allow the BBG-011A to be mounted on a standard Notoros Rhino or Wilcox L4G24 mount that American PVS-series night vision are generally mounted on.

Overall, the BBG-011A is an interesting look into Chinese night vision development. The choice to clone the European LUCIE device instead of American or Russian monocular-style devices is interesting, given that monoculars are generally held to have far more advantages over offset-lens binoculars. But perhaps the desire for passive-aiming capability through a reflex sight and the similarities in layout between the FAMAS and QBZ-95 rifles lead to the adoption of the BBG-011A.

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

Image: Creative Commons "140410-Z-NI803-447" by Matt Hecht is marked with CC PDM 1.0

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

There are more than five online petitions that are demanding recurring monthly stimulus checks of $2,000 until the health crisis ends—the most well-known being the Change.org petition that was launched by Denver-area restaurant owner Stephanie Bonin. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Moreover, several members of the influential House Ways and Means Committee stated in a letter to Biden that the “pandemic has served as a stark reminder that families and workers need certainty in a crisis. They deserve to know they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.” 

Throughout this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Congress has approved the delivery of three stimulus payments to most Americans—a $1,200 check in April 2020, $600 in December, and the current $1,400 payments under President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan.  

Despite these timely checks entering the bank accounts of tens of millions of financially struggling Americans, both Congress and the president are still being bombarded with questions regarding another round or two of stimulus checks.  

Ordinary Citizens Speak Out 

There are more than five online petitions that are demanding recurring monthly stimulus checks of $2,000 until the health crisis ends—the most well-known being the Change.org petition that was launched by Denver-area restaurant owner Stephanie Bonin. And over this past weekend, it eclipsed 2.8 million signatures—putting it just two hundred thousand short of its target.  

“My name is Stephanie, and I am one of millions of Americans who fear for my financial future because of this coronavirus crisis. . . . I’m calling on Congress to support families with a $2,000 payment for adults and a $1,000 payment for kids immediately, and continuing regular checks for the duration of the crisis," Bonin stated in the petition. “Otherwise, laid-off workers, furloughed workers, the self-employed, and workers dealing with reduced hours will struggle to pay their rent or put food on the table. Our country is still deeply struggling.”

“Our restaurant community is wrestling with seeing everything we all have worked so hard for irrevocably changed,” she continued. “Our hearts were breaking as we watched our staff divide the ingredients in our kitchen to bring to their homes: a dismal token for employees who worked tirelessly every day. Our talented and cherished team, some of whom have been with us since we opened our doors fifteen years ago, are now without an income. Like our team, my family has lost all of the income from our restaurant, and business owners and the self-employed can't claim unemployment. This is the story of America right now.”

Bonin’s petition has received so much support that the Change.org platform has recognized it as one of the top ten petitions that changed the year 2020.  

Stimulus Coming? 

However, whether or not this popular petition will have any actual impact on passing another round of stimulus remains to be seen. The Biden administration has yet to hint at any real plan for such an endeavor, but it appears that it is open to ideas.  

During a press briefing earlier this summer with reporters, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki noted that “(President Biden) is happy to hear from a range of ideas on what would be most effective and what’s most important to the economy moving forward.”  

Moreover, several members of the influential House Ways and Means Committee stated in a letter to Biden that the “pandemic has served as a stark reminder that families and workers need certainty in a crisis. They deserve to know they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.” 

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit,

Approved under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the federal government is now allowing eligible parents to collect as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey showed that parents who have received the funds reported less trouble paying for food and basic household expenses. It further revealed that about ten percent of households with children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past week—the lowest percentage registered since the health crisis started in early 2020.

Last Friday, the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department confirmed that the second batch of advance monthly payments worth approximately $15 billion from the expanded Child Tax Credits (CTC) were disbursed to about thirty-six million American families.

There was, however, a noticeable wrinkle that has the potential to confuse many cash-strapped parents who are waiting to receive the funds. Apparently, due to an unspecified issue, the tax agency announced that up to fifteen percent of families who received the cash payment in July via direct deposit now will be getting a paper check this month.

“Like the first payments, the vast majority of families will receive these payments by direct deposit,” the IRS said in a release.

“For those affected, no additional action is needed for the September payment to be issued by direct deposit. Families can visit the Child Tax Credit Update Portal to see if they’re receiving a direct deposit or paper check this month,” it continued.

Staying Patient

The tax agency also mentioned that for those who are receiving their credits via the post office, “be sure to allow extra time for delivery by mail through the end of August.”

Future payments from the child tax credits are slated to head out on the fifteenth of each month through December.

Approved under President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the federal government is now allowing eligible parents to collect as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen—meaning that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be deposited each month through the end of 2021.

Benefits of CTC

Recent polls and studies also strongly support the fact that the Credits are already offering timely support to low-income households amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey showed that parents who have received the funds reported less trouble paying for food and basic household expenses. It further revealed that about ten percent of households with children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past week—the lowest percentage registered since the health crisis started in early 2020.

According to a separate analysis released by the Niskanen Center, it contended that the recurring monthly checks will help propel $27.6 billion in new household spending and support more than half a million new jobs.

“While only enacted for one year, the expanded CTC is expected to reduce child poverty by forty percent and support investments in children that promote family stability,” the think tank stated in a release.

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

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley, James Holmes

Submarines, World

Ranking the greatest battleships of all time is a tad easier than ranking naval battles.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In short, Bismarck turned out to be a bologna flask (hat tip: Clausewitz), an outwardly tough vessel that shatters at the slightest tap from within. In 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder lamented that the German surface fleet, flung into battle long before it matured, could do little more than "die with honor." Raeder was righter than he knew.

(This is a series of 5 pieces combined for your reading pleasure that have ranked as some of our most popular ever.)

5 Best Battleships:

Ranking the greatest battleships of all time is a tad easier than ranking naval battles. Both involve comparing apples with oranges. But at least taking the measure of individual men-of-war involves comparing one apple with one orange. That's a compact endeavor relative to sorting through history to discern how seesaw interactions shaped the destinies of peoples and civilizations.

Still, we need some standard for distinguishing between battlewagons. What makes a ship great? It makes sense, first of all, to exclude any ship before the reign of Henry VIII. There was no line-of-battle ship in the modern sense before England's "great sea-king" founded the sail-driven Royal Navy in the 16th century. Galley warfare was quite a different affair from lining up capital ships and pounding away with naval gunnery.

One inescapable chore is to compare ships' technical characteristics. A recent piece over at War Is Boring revisits an old debate among battleship and World War II enthusiasts. Namely, who would've prevailed in a tilt between a U.S. Navy Iowa-class dreadnought and the Imperial Japanese Navy's Yamato? Author Michael Peck restates the common wisdom from when I served in mighty Wisconsin, last of the battleships: it depends on who landed the first blow. Iowas commanded edges in speed and fire control, while Yamato and her sister Musashi outranged us and boasted heavier weight of shot. We would've made out fine had we closed the range before the enemy scored a lucky hit from afar. If not, things may have turned ugly.

Though not in so many words, Peck walks through the basic design features that help qualify a battleship for history's elite -- namely guns, armor, and speed. Makes sense, doesn't it? Offensive punch, defensive resiliency, and speed remain the hallmarks of any surface combatant even in this missile age. Note, however, that asymmetries among combat vessels result in large part from the tradeoffs naval architects must make among desirable attributes.

Only sci-fi lets shipwrights escape such choices. A Death Star of the sea would sport irresistible weaponry, impenetrable armor, and engines able to drive the vessel at breakneck speed. But again, you can't have everything in the real world. Weight is a huge challenge. A battleship loaded down with the biggest guns and thickest armor would waddle from place to place. It would make itself an easy target for nimbler opponents or let them run away. On the other hand, assigning guns and speed top priority works against rugged sides. A ship that's fleet of foot but lightly armored exposes its innards and crew to enemy gunfire. And so forth. Different navies have different philosophies about tradeoffs. Hence the mismatches between Yamato and Iowa along certain parameters. Thus has it always been when fighting ships square off.

But a battleship is more than a machine. Machines neither rule the waves nor lose out in contests for mastery. People do. People ply the seas, and ideas about shiphandling and tactics guide their combat endeavors. Great Britain's Royal Navy triumphed repeatedly during the age of sail. Its success owed less to superior materiel -- adversaries such as France and the United States sometimes fielded better ships -- than to prolonged voyages that raised seamanship and gunnery to a high art. Indeed, a friend likes to joke that the 18th century's finest warship was a French 74-gun ship captured -- and crewed -- by Royal Navy mariners. The best hardware meets the best software.

That's why in the end, debating Jane's Fighting Ships entries -- lists of statistics -- for Iowa, Yamato, and their brethren from other times and places fails to satisfy. What looks like the best ship on paper may not win. A ship need not outmatch its opponents by every technical measure. It needs to be good enough. That is, it must match up well enough to give an entrepreneurial crew, mindful of the tactical surroundings, a reasonable chance to win. The greatest battleship thus numbers among the foremost vessels of its age by material measures, and is handled by masterful seamen.

But adding the human factor to the mix still isn't enough. There's an element of opportunity, of sheer chance. True greatness comes when ship and crew find themselves in the right place at the right time to make history. A battleship's name becomes legend if it helps win a grand victory, loses in dramatic fashion, or perhaps accomplishes some landmark diplomatic feat. A vessel favored (or damned) by fortune, furthermore, becomes a strategic compass rose. It becomes part of the intellectual fund on which future generations draw when making maritime strategy. It's an artifact of history that helps make history.

So we arrive at one guy's gauge for a vessel's worth: strong ship, iron men, historical consequence. In effect, then, I define greatest as most iconic. Herewith, my list of history's five most iconic battleships, in ascending order:

Bismarck:

The German Navy's Bismarck lived a short life that supplies the stuff of literature to this day. Widely considered the most capable battleship in the Atlantic during World War II, Bismarck sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, with a single round from her main battery. On the other hand, the leadership's martial spirit proved brittle when the going got tough. In fact, it shattered at the first sharp rap. As commanders' resolve went, so went the crew's.

Notes Bernard Brodie, the dreadnought underwent an "extreme oscillation" in mood. Exaltation stoked by the encounter with Hood gave way to despair following a minor torpedo strike from a British warplane. Admiral Günther Lütjens, the senior officer on board, gathered Bismarck crewmen after the air attack and "implored them to meet death in a fashion becoming to good Nazis." A great coach Lütjens was not. The result? An "abysmally poor showing" in the final showdown with HMS Rodney, King George V, and their entourage. One turret crew fled their guns. Turret officers reportedly kept another on station only at gunpoint. Marksmanship and the guns' rate of fire -- key determinants of victory in gunnery duels -- suffered badly.

In short, Bismarck turned out to be a bologna flask (hat tip: Clausewitz), an outwardly tough vessel that shatters at the slightest tap from within. In 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder lamented that the German surface fleet, flung into battle long before it matured, could do little more than "die with honor." Raeder was righter than he knew. Bismarck's death furnishes a parable that captivates navalists decades hence. How would things have turned out had the battlewagon's human factor proved less fragile? We'll never know. Doubtless her measure of honor would be bigger.

Yamato:

As noted at the outset, Yamato was an imposing craft by any standard. She displaced more than any battleship in history, as much as an early supercarrier, and bore the heaviest armament. Her mammoth 18-inch guns could sling 3,200-lb. projectiles some 25 nautical miles. Armor was over two feet thick in places. Among the three attributes of warship design, then, Yamato's designers clearly prized offensive and defensive strength over speed. The dreadnought could steam at 27 knots, not bad for a vessel of her proportions. But that was markedly slower than the 33 knots attainable by U.S. fast battleships.

Like Bismarck, Yamato is remembered mainly for falling short of her promise. She provides another cautionary tale about human fallibility. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, a task force centered on Yamato bore down on the transports that had ferried General Douglas MacArthur's landing force ashore on Leyte, and on the sparse force of light aircraft carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts guarding the transports from seaward assault.

Next ensued the immortal charge of the tin-can sailors. The outclassed American ships charged Yamato and her retinue. Like Lütjens, Admiral Takeo Kurita, the task-force commander, appeared to wilt under less-than-dire circumstances. Historians still argue about whether he mistook Taffy 3, the U.S. Navy contingent, for a far stronger force; lost his nerve; or simply saw little point in sacrificing his ships and men. Whatever the case, Kurita ordered his fleet to turn back -- leaving MacArthur's expeditionary force mostly unmolested from the sea.

Yamato met a quixotic fate, though less ignominious than Bismarck's. In April 1945 the superbattleship was ordered to steam toward Okinawain company with remnants of the surface fleet, there to contest the Allied landings. The vessel would deliberately beach itself offshore, becoming an unsinkable gun emplacement until it was destroyed or its ammunition was exhausted. U.S. naval intelligence got wind of the scheme, however, and aerial bombardment dispatched Yamato before she could reach her destination. A lackluster end for history's most fearsome battlewagon.

Missouri:

Iowa and New Jersey were the first of the Iowa class and compiled the most enviable fighting records in the class, mostly in the Pacific War. Missouri was no slouch as a warrior, but -- alone on this list -- she's celebrated mainly for diplomatic achievements rather than feats of arms. General MacArthur accepted Japan's surrender on her weatherdecks in Tokyo Bay, leaving behind some of the most enduring images from 20th-century warfare. Missouri has been a metaphor for how to terminate big, open-ended conflicts ever since. For instance, President Bush the Elder invoked the surrender in his memoir. Missouri supplied a measuring stick for how Desert Storm might unfold. (And as it happens, a modernized Missouri was in Desert Storm.)

Missouri remained a diplomatic emissary after World War II. The battlewagon cruised to Turkey in the early months after the war, as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe and communist insurgencies menaced Greece and Turkey. Observers interpreted the voyage as a token of President Harry Truman's, and America's, commitment to keeping the Soviet bloc from subverting friendly countries. Message: the United States was in Europe to stay. Missouri thus played a part in the development of containment strategy while easing anxieties about American abandonment. Naval diplomacy doesn't get much better than that.

Mikasa:

Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's flagship is an emblem for maritime command. The British-built Mikasa was arguably the finest battleship afloat during the fin de siècle years, striking the best balance among speed, protection, and armament. The human factor was strong as well. Imperial Japanese Navy seamen were known for their proficiency and élan, while Tōgō was renowned for combining shrewdness with derring-do. Mikasa was central to fleet actions in the Yellow Sea in 1904 and the Tsushima Strait in 1905 -- battles that left the wreckage of two Russian fleets strewn across the seafloor. The likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan considered Tsushima a near-perfect fleet encounter.

Like the other battleships listed here, Mikasa molded how subsequent generations thought about diplomacy and warfare. IJN commanders of the interwar years planned to replicate Tsushima Strait should Japan fall out with the United States. More broadly, Mikasa and the rest of the IJN electrified peoples throughout Asia and beyond. Japan, that is, proved that Western imperial powers could be beaten in battle and ultimately expelled from lands they had subjugated. Figures ranging from Sun Yat-sen to Mohandas Gandhi to W. E. B. Du Bois paid homage to Tsushima, crediting Japan with firing their enthusiasm for overthrowing colonial rule.

Mikasa, then, was more than the victor in a sea fight of modest scope. And her reputation outlived her strange fate. The vessel returned home in triumph following the Russo-Japanese War, only to suffer a magazine explosion and sink. For the Japanese people, the disaster confirmed that they had gotten a raw deal at the Portsmouth Peace Conference. Nevertheless, it did little to dim foreign observers' enthusiasm for Japan's accomplishments.Mikasa remained a talisman.

Victory:

Topping this list is the only battleship from the age of sail. HMS Victory was a formidable first-rate man-of-war, cannon bristling from its three gun decks. But her fame comes mainly from her association with Lord Horatio Nelson, whom Mahan styles "the embodiment of the sea power of Great Britain." In 1805 Nelson led his outnumbered fleet into combat against a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar, near Gibraltar. Nelson and right-hand man Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood led columns of ships that punctured the enemy line of battle. The Royal Navy crushed its opponent in the ensuing melee, putting paid to Napoleon's dreams of invading the British Isles.

Felled on board his flagship that day, Nelson remains a synonym for decisive battle. Indeed, replicating Trafalgar became a Holy Grail for naval strategists across the globe. Permanently drydocked at Portsmouth, Victory is a shrine to Nelson and his exploits -- and the standard of excellence for seafarers everywhere. That entitles her to the laurels of history's greatest battleship.

Surveying this list of icons, two battleships made the cut because of defeats stemming from slipshod leadership, two for triumphs owing to good leadership, and one for becoming a diplomatic paragon. That's not a bad reminder that human virtues and frailties -- not wood, or metal, or shot -- are what make the difference in nautical enterprises.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College

*****

5 Best Aircraft Carriers:

Anyone who's tried to compare one piece of kit—ships, aircraft, weaponry of various types—to another will testify to how hard this chore is. Ranking aircraft carriers is no exception. Consulting the pages of Jane's Fighting Ships or Combat Fleets of the World sheds some light on the problem. For instance, a flattop whose innards house a nuclear propulsion plant boasts virtually unlimited cruising range, whereas a carrier powered by fossil fuels is tethered to its fuel source. As Alfred Thayer Mahan puts it, a conventional warship bereft of bases or a coterie of logistics ships is a "land bird" unable to fly far from home.

Or, size matters. The air wing—the complement of interceptors, attack planes and support aircraft that populate a carrier's decks—comprise its main battery or primary armament. The bigger the ship, the bigger the hangar and flight decks that accommodate the air wing.

Nor, as U.S. Navy carrier proponents like to point out, is the relationship between a carrier's tonnage and number of aircraft it can carry strictly linear. Consider two carriers that dominate headlines in Asia. Liaoning, the Chinese navy's refitted Soviet flattop, displaces about sixty-five thousand tons and sports twenty-six fixed-wing combat aircraft and twenty-four helicopters. Not bad. USS George Washington, however, tips the scales at around one hundred thousand tons but can operate some eighty-five to ninety aircraft.

And the disparity involves more than raw numbers of airframes. George Washington's warplanes are not just more numerous but generally more capable than their Chinese counterparts. U.S. flattops boast steam catapults to vault larger, heavier-laden aircraft into the wild blue. Less robust carriers use ski jumps to launch aircraft. That limits the size, fuel capacity, and weapons load—and thus the range, flight times and firepower—of their air wings. Larger, more capable carriers, then, can accommodate a larger, more capable, and changing mixes of aircraft with greater ease than their lesser brethren. Aircraft carriers' main batteries were modular before modular was cool.

And yet straight-up comparisons can mislead. The real litmus test for any man-of-war is its capacity to fulfill the missions for which it was built. In that sense George Washington, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, may not be "superior" to USS America, the U.S. Navy's latest amphibious helicopter carrier, or to Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force "helicopter destroyers"—a.k.a. light aircraft carriers—despite a far more lethal air wing and other material attributes. Nor do carriers meant to operate within range of shore-based fire support—tactical aircraft, anti-ship missiles—necessarily need to measure up to a Washington on a one-to-one basis. Land-based implements of sea power can be the great equalizer. Like any weapon system, then, a great carrier does the job for which it was designed superbly.

And lastly, there's no separating the weapon from its user. A fighting ship isn't just a hunk of steel but a symbiosis of crewmen and materiel. The finest aircraft carrier is one that's both well-suited to its missions and handled with skill and derring-do when and where it matters most. Those three indices—brute material capability, fitness for assigned missions, a zealous crew—are the indices for this utterly objective, completely indisputable list of the Top Five Aircraft Carriers of All Time.

5. USS Midway (CV-41):

Now a museum ship on the San Diego waterfront, Midway qualifies for this list less for great feats of arms than for longevity, and for being arguably history's most versatile warship. In all likelihood she was the most modified. Laid down during World War II, the flattop entered service just after the war. During the Cold War she received an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and other trappings befitting a supercarrier. Indeed, Midway's service spanned the entire Cold War, winding down after combat action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991. Sheer endurance and flexibility entitles the old warhorse to a spot on this list.

4. USS Franklin (CV-13):

If Midway deserves a place mainly for technical reasons, the Essex-class carrier Franklin earns laurels for the resiliency of her hull and fortitude of her crew in battle. She was damaged in heavy fighting at Leyte Gulf in 1944. After refitting at Puget Sound Navy Yard, the flattop returned to the Western Pacific combat theater. In March 1945, having ventured closer to the Japanese home islands than any carrier to date, she fell under surprise assault by a single enemy dive bomber. Two semi-armor-piercing bombs penetrated her decks. The ensuing conflagration killed 724 and wounded 265, detonated ammunition below decks, and left the ship listing 13 degrees to starboard. One hundred six officers and 604 enlisted men remained on board voluntarily, bringing Franklin safely back to Pearl Harbor and thence to Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her gallantry in surviving such a pounding and returning to harbor merits the fourth position on this list.

3. Akagi:

Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's flagship serves as proxy for the whole Pearl Harbor strike force, a body composed of all six Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) frontline carriers and their escorts. Nagumo's was the most formidable such force of its day. Commanders and crewmen, moreover, displayed the audacity to do what appeared unthinkable—strike at the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its moorings thousands of miles away. Extraordinary measures were necessary to pull off such a feat. For example, freshwater tanks were filled with fuel to extend the ships' range and make a transpacific journey possible—barely.

The Pearl Harbor expedition exposed logistical problems that plagued the IJN throughout World War II. Indeed, Japan's navy never fully mastered the art of underway replenishment or built enough logistics ships to sustain operations far from home. As a result, Nagumo's force had too little time on station off Oahu to wreck the infrastructure the Pacific Fleet needed to wage war. And, admittedly, Akagi was lost at the Battle of Midway, not many months after it scaled the heights of operational excellence. Still, you have to give Akagi and the rest of the IJN task force their due. However deplorable Tokyo's purposes in the Pacific, her aircraft-carrier force ranks among the greatest of all time for sheer boldness and vision.

2. HMS Hermes (now the Indian Navy's Viraat):

It's hard to steam thousands of miles into an enemy's environs, fight a war on his ground, and win. And yet the Centaur-class flattop Hermes, flagship of a hurriedly assembled Royal Navy task force, pulled it off during the Falklands War of 1982. Like Midway, the British carrier saw repeated modifications, most recently for service as an anti-submarine vessel in the North Atlantic. Slated for decommissioning, her air wing was reconfigured for strike and fleet-air-defense missions when war broke out in the South Atlantic. For flexibility, and for successfully defying the Argentine contested zone, Hermes rates second billing here.

1. USS Enterprise (CV-6):

Having joined the Pacific Fleet in 1939, the Yorktown-class carrier was fortunate to be at sea on December 7, 1941, and thus to evade Nagumo's bolt from the blue. Enterprise went on to become the most decorated U.S. Navy ship of World War II, taking part in eighteen of twenty major engagements of the Pacific War. She sank, or helped sink, three IJN carriers and a cruiser at the Battle of Midway in 1942; suffered grave damage in the Solomons campaign, yet managed to send her air wing to help win the climatic Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; and went on to fight in such engagements as the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. That's the stuff of legend. For compiling such a combat record, Enterprise deserves to be known as history's greatest aircraft carrier.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College

*****

5 Best Submarines: 

There have been three great submarine campaigns in history, and one prolonged duel. The First and Second Battles of the Atlantic pitted German U-boats against the escorts and aircraft of the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans very nearly won World War I with the first campaign, and badly drained Allied resources in the second. In the third great campaign, the submarines of the US Navy destroyed virtually the entire commercial fleet of Japan, bringing the Japanese economy to its knees. US subs also devastated the Imperial Japanese Navy, sinking several of Tokyo’s most important capital ships.

But the period most evocative of our modern sense of submarine warfare was surely the forty year duel between the submarines of the USSR and the boats of the various NATO navies. Over the course of the Cold War, the strategic nature of the submarine changed; it moved from being a cheap, effective killer of capital ships to a capital ship in its own right. This was especially the case with the boomers, submarines that carried enough nuclear weapons to kill millions in a few minutes.

As with previous “5 Greatest” lists, the answers depend on the parameters; different sets of metrics will generate different lists. Our metrics concentrate on the strategic utility of specific submarine classes, rather than solely on their technical capabilities.

· Was the submarine a cost-effective solution to a national strategic problem?

· Did the submarine compare favorably with its contemporaries?

· Was the submarine’s design innovative?

And with that, the five best submarines of all time:

U-31:

The eleven boats of the U-31 class were constructed between 1912 and 1915. They operated in both of the periods of heavy action for German U-boats, early in the war before the suspension of unrestricted warfare, and again in 1917 when Germany decided to go for broke and cut the British Empire off at the knees. Four of these eleven boats (U-35, U-39, U-38, and U-34) were the four top killers of World War I; indeed, they were four of the five top submarines of all time in terms of tonnage sunk (the Type VII boat U-48 sneaks in at number 3). U-35, the top killer, sank 224 ships amounting to over half a million tons.

The U-31 boats were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary; they represented the latest in German submarine technology for the time, but did not differ dramatically from their immediate predecessors or successors. These boats had good range, a deck gun for destroying small shipping, and faster speeds surfaced than submerged. These characteristics allowed the U-31 class and their peers to wreak havoc while avoiding faster, more powerful surface units. They did offer a secure, stealthy platform for carrying out a campaign that nearly forced Great Britain from the war. Only the entry of the United States, combined with the development of innovative convoy tactics by the Royal Navy, would stifle the submarine offensive. Three of the eleven boats survived the war, and were eventually surrendered to the Allies.

Balao:

The potential for a submarine campaign against the Japanese Empire was clear from early in the war. Japanese industry depended for survival on access to the natural resources of Southeast Asia. Separating Japan from those resources could win the war. However, the pre-war USN submarine arm was relatively small, and operated with poor doctrine and bad torpedoes. Boats built during the war, including primarily the Gato and Balao class, would eventually destroy virtually the entire Japanese merchant marine.

The Balao class represented very nearly the zenith of the pre-streamline submarine type. War in the Pacific demanded longer ranges and more habitability than the relatively snug Atlantic. Like their predecessors the Gato, the Balaos were less maneuverable than the German Type VII subs, but they made up for this in strength of hull and quality of construction. Compared with the Type VII, the Balaos had longer range, a larger gun, more torpedo tubes, and a higher speed. Of course, the Balaos operated in a much different environment, and against an opponent less skilled in anti-submarine warfare. The greatest victory of a Balao was the sinking of the 58000 ton HIJMS Shinano by Archerfish.

Eleven of 120 boats were lost, two in post-war accidents. After the war Balao class subs were transferred to several friendly navies, and continued to serve for decades. One, the former USS Tusk, remains in partial commission in Taiwan as Hai Pao.

Type XXI:

In some ways akin to the Me 262, the Type XXI was a potentially war-winning weapon that arrived too late to have serious effect. The Type XXI was the first mass produced, ocean-going streamlined or “true” submarine, capable of better performance submerged than on the surface. It gave up its deck gun in return for speed and stealth, and set the terms of design for generations of submarines.

Allied anti-submarine efforts focused on identifying boats on the surface (usually in transit to their patrol areas) then vectoring killers (including ships and aircraft) to those areas. In 1944 the Allies began developing techniques for fighting “schnorkel” U-boats that did not need to surface, but remained unprepared for combat against a submarine that could move at 20 knots submerged.

In effect, the Type XXI had the stealth to avoid detection prior to an attack, and the speed to escape afterward. Germany completed 118 of these boats, but because of a variety of industrial problems could only put four into service, none of which sank an enemy ship. All of the Allies seized surviving examples of the Type XXI, using them both as models for their own designs and in order to develop more advanced anti-submarine technologies and techniques. For example, the Type XXI was the model for the Soviet “Whiskey” class, and eventually for a large flotilla of Chinese submarines.

George Washington:

We take for granted the most common form of today’s nuclear deterrent; a nuclear submarine, bristling with missiles, capable of destroying a dozen cities a continent away. These submarines provide the most secure leg of the deterrent triad, as no foe could reasonably expect to destroy the entire submarine fleet before the missiles fly.

The secure submarine deterrent began in 1960, with the USS George Washington. An enlarged version of the Skipjack class nuclear attack sub, George Washington’s design incorporated space for sixteen Polaris ballistic missiles. When the Polaris became operational, USS George Washington had the capability from striking targets up to 1000 miles distant with 600 KT warheads. The boats would eventually upgrade to the Polaris A3, with three warheads and a 2500 mile range. Slow relative to attack subs but extremely quiet, the George Washington class pioneered the “go away and hide” form of nuclear deterrence that is still practiced by five of the world’s nine nuclear powers.

And until 1967, the George Washington and her sisters were the only modern boomers. Their clunky Soviet counterparts carried only three missiles each, and usually had to surface in order to fire. This made them of limited deterrent value. But soon, virtually every nuclear power copied the George Washington class. The first “Yankee” class SSBN entered service in 1967, the first Resolution boat in 1968, and the first of the French Redoutables in 1971. China would eventually follow suit, although the PLAN’s first genuinely modern SSBNs have only entered service recently. The Indian Navy’s INS Arihant will likely enter service in the next year or so.

The five boats of the George Washington class conducted deterrent patrols until 1982, when the SALT II Treaty forced their retirement. Three of the five (including George Washington) continued in service as nuclear attack submarines for several more years.

Los Angeles:

Immortalized in the Tom Clancy novels Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, the U.S. Los Angeles class is the longest production line of nuclear submarines in history, constituting sixty-two boats and first entering service in 1976. Forty-one subs remain in commission today, continuing to form the backbone of the USN’s submarine fleet.

The Los Angeles (or 688) class are outstanding examples of Cold War submarines, equally capable of conducting anti-surface or anti-submarine warfare. In wartime, they would have been used to penetrate Soviet base areas, where Russian boomers were protected by rings of subs, surface ships, and aircraft, and to protect American carrier battle groups.

In 1991, two Los Angeles class attack boats launched the first ever salvo of cruise missiles against land targets, ushering in an entirely new vision of how submarines could impact warfare. While cruise missile armed submarines had long been part of the Cold War duel between the United States and the Soviet Union, most attention focused either on nuclear delivery or anti-ship attacks. Submarine launched Tomahawks gave the United States a new means for kicking in the doors of anti-access/area denial systems. The concept has proven so successful that four Ohio class boomers were refitted as cruise missile submarines, with the USS Florida delivering the initial strikes of the Libya intervention.

The last Los Angeles class submarine is expected to leave service in at some point in the 2020s, although outside factors may delay that date. By that time, new designs will undoubtedly have exceeded the 688 in terms of striking land targets, and in capacity for conducting anti-submarine warfare. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles class will have carved out a space as the sub-surface mainstay of the world’s most powerful Navy for five decades.

Conclusion

Fortunately, the United States and the Soviet Union avoided direct conflict during the Cold War, meaning that many of the technologies and practices of advanced submarine warfare were never employed in anger. However, every country in the world that pretends to serious maritime power is building or acquiring advanced submarines. The next submarine war will look very different from the last, and it’s difficult to predict how it will play out. We can be certain, however, that the fight will be conducted in silence.

Honorable Mention: Ohio, 260O-21, Akula, Alfa, Seawolf, Swiftsure, I-201, Kilo, S class, Type VII

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

*****

5 Best Bombers:

Bombers are the essence of strategic airpower. While fighters have often been important to air forces, it was the promise of the heavy bomber than won and kept independence for the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force. At different points in time, air forces in the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Italy have treated bomber design and construction as a virtually all-consuming obsession, setting fighter and attack aviation aside.

However, even the best bombers are effective over only limited timespans. The unlucky state-of-the-art bombers of the early 1930s met disaster when put into service against the pursuit aircraft of the late 1930s. The B-29s that ruled the skies over Japan in 1945 were cut to pieces above North Korea in 1950. The B-36 Peacemaker, obsolete before it was even built, left service in a decade. Most of the early Cold War bombers were expensive failures, eventually to be superseded by ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

States procure bombers, like all weapons, to serve strategic purposes. This list employs the following metrics of evaluation:

· Did the bomber serve the strategic purpose envisioned by its developers?

· Was the bomber a sufficiently flexible platform to perform other missions, and to persist in service?

· How did the bomber compare with its contemporaries in terms of price, capability, and effectiveness?

And with that, the five best bombers of all time:

Handley Page Type O 400:

The first strategic bombing raids of World War I were carried out by German zeppelins, enormous lighter than aircraft that could travel at higher altitudes than the interceptors of the day, and deliver payloads against London and other targets. Over time, the capabilities of interceptors and anti-aircraft artillery grew, driving the Zeppelins to other missions. Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and others began working on bombers capable of delivering heavy loads over long distance, a trail blazed (oddly enough) by the Russian Sikorsky Ilya Muromets.

Even the modest capabilities of the early bombers excited the airpower theorists of the day, who imagined the idea of fleets of bombers striking enemy cities and enemy industry. The Italians developed the Caproni family of bombers, which operated in the service of most Allied countries at one time or another. German Gotha bombers would eventually terrorize London again, catalyzing the Smuts Report and the creation of the world’s first air force.

Faster and capable of carrying more bombs than either the Gotha IVs or the Caproni Ca.3, the Type O 400 had a wingspan nearly as large as the Avro Lancaster. With a maximum speed of 97 miles per hour with a payload of up to 2000 lbs, O 400s were the mainstay of Hugh Trenchard’s Independent Air Force near the end of the war, a unit which struck German airfields and logistics concentration well behind German lines. These raids helped lay the foundation of interwar airpower theory, which (at least in the US and the UK) envisioned self-protecting bombers striking enemy targets en masse.

Roughly 600 Type O bombers were produced during World War I, with the last retiring in 1922. Small numbers served in the Chinese, Australian, and American armed forces.

Junkers Ju 88:

The Junkers Ju-88 was one of the most versatile aircraft of World War II. Although it spent most of its career as a medium bomber, it moonlighted as a close attack aircraft, a naval attack aircraft, a reconnaissance plane, and a night fighter. Effective and relatively cheap, the Luftwaffe used the Ju 88 to good effect in most theaters of war, but especially on the Eastern Front and in the Mediterranean.

Designed with dive bomber capability, the Ju 88 served in relatively small numbers in the invasion of Poland, the invasion of Norway, and the Battle of France. The Ju-88 was not well suited to the strategic bombing role into which it was forced during the Battle of Britain, especially in its early variants. It lacked the armament to sufficiently defend itself, and the payload to cause much destruction to British industry and infrastructure. The measure of an excellent bomber, however, goes well beyond its effectiveness at any particular mission. Ju 88s were devastating in Operation Barbarossa, tearing apart Soviet tank formations and destroying much of the Soviet Air Forces on the ground. Later variants were built as or converted into night fighters, attacking Royal Air Force bomber formations on the way to their targets.

In spite of heavy Allied bombing of the German aviation industry, Germany built over 15,000 Ju 88s between 1939 and 1945. They operated in several Axis air forces.

De Havilland Mosquito:

The de Havilland Mosquito was a remarkable little aircraft, capable of a wide variety of different missions. Not unlike the Ju 88, the Mosquito operated in bomber, fighter, night fighter, attack, and reconnaissance roles. The RAF was better positioned than the Luftwaffe to utilized the specific qualities of the Mosquito, and avoid forcing it into missions in could not perform.

Relatively lightly armed and constructed entirely of wood, the Mosquito was quite unlike the rest of the RAF bomber fleet. Barely escaping design committee, the Mosquito was regarded as easy to fly, and featured a pressurized cockpit with a high service ceiling. Most of all, however, the Mosquito was fast. With advanced Merlin engines, a Mosquito could outpace the German Bf109 and most other Axis fighters.

Although the bomb load of the Mosquito was limited, its great speed, combined with sophisticated instrumentation, allowed it to deliver ordnance with more precision than most other bombers. During the war, the RAF used Mosquitoes for various precision attacks against high value targets, including German government installations and V weapon launching sites. As pathfinders, Mosquitoes flew point on bomber formations, leading night time bombing raids that might otherwise have missed their targets. Mosquitos also served in a diversionary role, distracting German night fighters from the streams of Halifaxes and Lancasters striking urban areas.

De Havilland produced over 7000 Mosquitoes for the RAF and other allied air forces. Examples persisted in post-war service with countries as varied as Israel, the Republic of China, Yugoslavia, and the Dominican Republic

Avro Lancaster:

The workhorse of the RAF in World War II, the Lancaster carried out the greater part of the British portion of the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO). Led by Arthur Harris, Bomber Command believed that area bombing raids, targeted against German civilians, conducted at night, would destroy German morale and economic capacity and bring the war to a close. Accordingly, the Lancaster was less heavily armed than its American contemporaries, as it depended less on self-defense in order to carry out its mission.

The first Lancasters entered service in 1942. The Lancaster could carry a much heavier bomb load than the B-17 or the B-24, while operating at similar speeds and at a slightly longer range. The Lancaster also enjoyed a payload advantage over the Handley Page Halifax. From 1942 until 1945, the Lancaster would anchor the British half of the CBO, eventually resulting in the destruction of most of urban Germany and the death of several hundred thousand German civilians.

There are reasons to be skeptical of the inclusion of the Lancaster. The Combined Bomber Offensive was a strategic dead-end, serving up expensive four-engine bombers as a feast for smaller, cheaper German fighters. Battles were fought under conditions deeply advantageous to the Germans, as damaged German planes could land, and shot down German pilots rescued and returned to service. Overall, the enormous Western investment in strategic bombing was probably one of the greatest grand strategic miscalculations of the Second World War. Nevertheless, this list needs a bomber from the most identifiable bomber offensive in history, and the Lancaster was the best of the bunch.

Over 7000 Lancasters were built, with the last retiring in the early 1960s after Canadian service as recon and maritime patrol aircraft.

Boeing B-52 Stratofortress:

The disastrous experience of B-29 Superfortresses over North Korea in 1950 demonstrated that the United States would require a new strategic bomber, and soon. Unfortunately, the first two generations of bombers chosen by the USAF were almost uniformly duds; the hopeless B-36, the short-legged B-47, the dangerous-to-its-own-pilots B-58, and the obsolete-before-it-flew XB-70. The vast bulk of these bombers quickly went from wastes of taxpayer money to wastes of space at the Boneyard. None of the over 2500 early Cold War bombers ever dropped a bomb in anger.

The exception was the B-52.The BUFF was originally intended for high altitude penetration bombing into the Soviet Union. It replaced the B-36 and the B-47, the former too slow and vulnerable to continue in the nuclear strike mission, and the latter too short-legged to reach the USSR from U.S. bases. Slated for replacement by the B-58 and the B-70, the B-52 survived because it was versatile enough to shift to low altitude penetration after the increasing sophistication of Soviet SAMs made the high altitude mission suicidal.

And this versatility has been the real story of the B-52. The BUFF was first committed to conventional strike missions in service of Operation Arc Light during the Vietnam War. In Operation Linebacker II, the vulnerability of the B-52 to air defenses was made manifest when nine Stratofortresses were lost in the first days of the campaign. But the B-52 persisted. In the Gulf War, B-52s carried out saturation bombing campaigns against the forward positions of the Iraqi Army, softening and demoralizing the Iraqis for the eventual ground campaign. In the War on Terror, the B-52 has acted in a close air support role, delivering precision-guided ordnance against small concentrations of Iraqi and Taliban insurgents.

Most recently, the B-52 showed its diplomatic chops when two BUFFs were dispatched to violate China’s newly declared Air Defense Zone. The BUFF was perfect for this mission; the Chinese could not pretend not to notice two enormous bombers travelling at slow speed through the ADIZ.

742 B-52s were delivered between 1954 and 1963. Seventy-eight remain in service, having undergone multiple upgrades over the decades that promise to extend their lives into the 2030s, or potentially beyond. In a family of short-lived airframes, the B-52 has demonstrated remarkable endurance and longevity.

Conclusion

Over the last century, nations have invested tremendous resources in bomber aircraft. More often than not, this investment has failed to bear strategic fruit. The very best aircraft have been those that could not only conduct their primary mission effectively, but that were also sufficiently flexible to perform other tasks that might be asked of them. Current air forces have, with some exceptions, effectively done away with the distinctions between fighters and bombers, instead relying on multi-role fighter-bombers for both missions. The last big, manned bomber may be the American LRS-B, assuming that project ever gets off the ground.

Honorable Mention

Grumman A-6 Intruder, MQ-1 Predator, Caproni Ca.3, Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear,” Avro Vulcan, Tupolev Tu-22M “Backfire.”

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

*****

What are the five greatest fighter aircraft of all time?

Like the same question asked of tanks, cars, or rock and roll guitarists, the answer invariably depends on parameters. For example, there are few sets of consistent parameters that would include both the T-34 and the King Tiger among the greatest of all tanks. I know which one I’d like to be driving in a fight, but I also appreciate that this isn’t the most appropriate way to approach the question. Similarly, while I’d love to drive a Porsche 959 to work every morning, I’d be hesitant to list it ahead of the Toyota Corolla on a “best of” compilation.

Nations buy fighter aircraft to resolve national strategic problems, and the aircraft should accordingly be evaluated on their ability to solve or ameliorate these problems. Thus, the motivating question is this: how well did this aircraft help solve the strategic problems of the nations that built or bought it? This question leads to the following points of evaluation:

Fighting characteristics: How did this plane stack up against the competition, including not just other fighters but also bombers and ground installations?

Reliability: Could people count on this aircraft to fight when it needed to, or did it spend more time under repair than in the air?

Cost: What did the organization and the nation have to pay in terms of blood and treasure to make this aircraft fly?

These are the parameters; here are my answers:

Spad S.XIII:

In the early era of military aviation, technological innovation moved at such speed that state of the art aircraft became obsolete deathtraps within a year. Engineers in France, Britain, Germany and Italy worked constantly to outpace their competitors, producing new aircraft every year to throw into the fight. The development of operational tactics trailed technology, although the input of the best flyers played an important role in how designers put new aircraft together.

In this context, picking a dominant fighter from the era is difficult. Nevertheless, the Spad S.XIII stands out in terms of its fighting characteristics and ease of production. Based in significant part on the advice of French aviators such as Georges Guynemer, the XIII lacked the maneuverability of some of its contemporaries, but could outpace most of them and performed very well in either a climb or a dive. It was simple enough to produce that nearly 8,500 such aircraft eventually entered service. Significant early reliability problems were worked out by the end of the war, and in any case were overwhelmed by the XIII’s fighting ability.

The S.XIII filled out not only French fighter squadrons, but also the air services of Allied countries. American ace Eddie Rickenbacker scored twenty of his kills flying an XIII, many over the most advanced German fighters of the day, including the Fokker D.VII.

The Spad XIII helped the Allies hold the line during the Ludendorff Offensive, and controlled the skies above France during the counter-offensive. After the war, it remained in service in France, the United States, and a dozen other countries for several years. In an important sense, the Spad XIII set the post-war standard for what a pursuit aircraft needed to do.

Grumman F6F Hellcat:

Of course, it is not only air forces that fly fighter aircraft. The F6F Hellcat can’t compare with the Spitfire, the P-51, or the Bf 109 on many basic flight characteristics, although its ability to climb was first-rate. What the F6F could do, however, was reliably fly from aircraft carriers, and it rode point on the great, decisive U.S. Navy carrier offensive of World War II. Entering the war in September 1943, it won 75% of USN aerial victories in the Pacific. USN ace David McCampbell shot down nine Japanese aircraft in one day flying a Hellcat .The F6F was heavily armed, and could take considerably more battle damage than its contemporaries. Overall, the F6F claimed nearly 5,200 kills at a loss of 270 aircraft in aerial combat, including a 13:1 ratio against the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

The USN carrier offensive of the latter part of World War II is probably the greatest single example of the use of decisive airpower in world history. Hellcats and their kin (the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber and the Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber) destroyed the fighting power of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), cracked open Japan’s island empire, and exposed the Japanese homeland to devastating air attack and the threat of invasion.

In 1943, the United States needed a fighter robust enough to endure a campaign fought distant from most bases, yet fast and agile enough to defeat the best that the IJN could offer. Tough and reliable as a brick, the Hellcat fit that role. Put simply, the Honda Accord is, in its own way, a great car; the Honda Accords of the fighter world also deserve their day.

Messerschmitt Me-262 Swallow:

The Me 262 Schwalbe (Swallow, in English) failed to win the war for Germany, and couldn’t stop the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO). Had German military authorities made the right decisions, however, it might at least have accomplished the second.

Known as the world’s first operational jet fighter, full-scale production of the Me 262 was delayed by resistance within the German government and the Luftwaffe to devoting resources to an experimental aircraft without a clear role. Early efforts to turn it into a fighter-bomber fell flat. As the need for a superlative interceptor become apparent, however, the Me 262 found its place. The Swallow proved devastating against American bomber formations, and could outrun American pursuit aircraft.

The Me 262 was hardly a perfect fighter: it lacked the maneuverability of the best American interceptors, and both American and British pilots developed tactics for managing the Swallow. Although production suffered from some early problems with engines, by the later stages of the conflict, manufacturing was sufficiently easy that the plane could be mass-produced in dispersed, underground facilities.

But had it come on line a bit earlier, the Me 262 might have torn the heart out of the CBO. The CBO in 1943 was a touch and go affair; dramatically higher bomber losses in 1943 could well have led Churchill and Roosevelt to scale back the production of four engine bombers in favor of additional tactical aircraft. Without the advantage of long-range escorts, American bombers would have proven easy prey for the German jet. Moreover, the Me 262 would have been far more effective without the constant worry of P-47s and P-51s strafing its airfields and tracking its landings.

Nazi Germany needed a game changer, a plane capable of making the price too high for the Allies to keep up the CBO. The Me 262 came onto the scene too late to solve that problem, but it’s hard to imagine any aircraft that could have come closer. Ironically, this might have accelerated Allied victory, as the Combined Bomber Offensive resulted in not only the destruction of urban Germany, but in the waste of substantial Allied resources. Win-win.

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 “Fishbed”: 

An odd choice for this list? The MiG-21 is known largely as fodder for the other great fighters of the Cold War, and for having an abysmal kill ratio. The Fishbed (in NATO terminology) has served as a convenient victim in Vietnam and in a variety of Middle Eastern wars, some of which it fought on both sides.

But… the MiG-21 is cheap, fast, maneuverable, has low maintenance requirements. It’s relatively easy to learn to fly, although not necessarily easy to learn how to fly well. Air forces continued to buy the MiG-21 for a long time. Counting the Chengdu J-7 variant, perhaps 13,000 MiG-21s have entered service around the world. In some sense, the Fishbed is the AK-47 (or the T-34, if you prefer) of the fighter world. Fifty countries have flown the MiG-21, and it has flown for fifty-five years. It continues to fly as a key part of twenty-six different air forces, including the Indian Air Force, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the Vietnamese People’s Air Force, and the Romanian Air Force. Would anyone be surprised if the Fishbed and its variants are still flying in 2034?

The MiG-21 won plaudits from American aggressor pilots at Red Flag, who celebrated its speed and maneuverability, and played (through the contribution of North Vietnamese aces such as Nguyễn Văn Cốc ) an important role in redefining the requirements of air superiority in the United States. When flown well, it remains a dangerous foe.

Most of life is about just showing up, and since 1960 no fighter has shown up as consistently, and in as many places, as has the MiG-21. For countries needing a cheap option for claiming control of their national airspace, the MiG-21 has long solved problems, and will likely continue to serve in this role.

McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle: 

What to say about the F-15 Eagle? When it came into service in 1976, it was immediately recognized as the best fighter in the world. Today, it is arguably still the best all-around, cost-adjusted fighter, even if the Su-27 and F-22 have surpassed it in some ways. If one fighter in American history could take the name of the national symbol of the United States, how could it be anything other than the F-15?

The Eagle symbolizes the era of American hegemony, from the Vietnam hangover to the post-Cold War period of dominance. Designed in light of the lessons of Vietnam, at a time where tactical aviation was taking control of the US Air Force, the F-15 outperformed existing fighters and set a new standard for a modern air superiority aircraft. Despite repeated tests in combat, no F-15 has ever been lost to an aerial foe. The production line for the F-15 will run until at least 2019, and longer if Boeing can manage to sell anyone on the Silent Eagle.

In the wake of Vietnam, the United States needed an air superiority platform that could consistently defeat the best that the Soviet Union had to offer. The F-15 (eventually complemented by the F-16) provided this platform, and then some. After the end of the Cold War, the United States needed an airframe versatile enough to carry out the air superiority mission while also becoming an effective strike aircraft. Again, the F-15 solved the problem.

And it’s a plane that can land with one wing. Hard to beat that.

A Contest Based on Parameters:

Again, this exercise depends entirely on decisions about the parameters. A different set of criteria of effectiveness would generate an entirely different list (although the F-15 would probably still be here; it’s invulnerable). Nevertheless, the basic elements of the argument are sound: weapons should be evaluated in terms of how they help achieve national objectives.

Honorable mentions include the North American Aviation F-86 Sabre, the Fokker D.VII, the Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, the Supermarine Spitfire, the North American Aviation P-51 Mustang, the McDonnell Douglas EA-18 Growler, the English Electric Lightning, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the Sukhoi Su-27 “Flanker,” and the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon.

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

Robert Farley , a frequent contributor to TNI, is a Visiting Professor at the United States Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Image: Flickr.

Trevor Filseth

economy, Americas

Social Security is a key government program that has helped millions of seniors in the United States to enjoy their retirement without fear of running out of money.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Social Security reform has long been regarded as a “third rail” of American politics—resulting in lethal consequences for politicians that try to touch it. However, an overnight 20 percent cut in retirees’ Social Security benefits would be absolutely unthinkable.

Social Security is a key government program that has helped millions of seniors in the United States to enjoy their retirement without fear of running out of money. While the benefits, averaging $1,500 per month apiece, cannot assure anyone a comfortable life without supplementary income from a nest egg, they can keep elderly retirees from worrying about the most basic financial concerns, such as access to money for food or rent. 

Unfortunately, there is a problem with Social Security: it is running out of money. 

The cause for this is simple. The Social Security Administration operates a pair of trust funds to pay for the ongoing benefits—one devoted to retirement benefits, the other to disability benefits, both of which the SSA has been tasked with managing. Since 1935, the year that the Social Security Administration was created, the population of the United States has historically been skewed toward the young over the old. Because young people pay into the Social Security trust fund, in the form of Social Security tax revenue, and old people withdraw from it, in the form of benefits, the proportion of young to old determines the long-term financial viability of the trust fund; an abundance of young people contributing taxes increases the size of the trust fund, while an abundance of retired beneficiaries diminishes it. 

Unfortunately, after the Baby Boomer generation—born 1946 through 1964—entered retirement, the trust fund began to lose money each year. At its current rate of depletion, the fund is estimated to run out by 2035. 

The fear that Social Security will collapse is vastly overstated. The U.S. workforce continues to pay Social Security taxes, which means the SSA has a reliable year-by-year inflow of cash that it can use to cover benefits as needed. However, by collecting taxes alone, the SSA will not be able to pay for all existing benefits; if nothing else changes, seniors’ benefits will simply have to be cut by roughly 20 percent to cover the shortfall. 

Social Security reform has long been regarded as a “third rail” of American politics—resulting in lethal consequences for politicians that try to touch it. However, an overnight 20 percent cut in retirees’ Social Security benefits would be absolutely unthinkable. Given Social Security’s massive popularity among Americans, and the vast influence of the program’s foremost defender, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) on Capitol Hill, there is little doubt that a solution will be worked out in advance. This solution will most likely raise Social Security taxes and possibly marginally cut existing or future benefits, although most Americans and the AARP have opposed this. 

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

China, Asia

PLA Navy flattops at Gwadar: that prospect should give Indians pause.

Here's What You Need to Know: Indian dignitaries seem to think China can’t mount a naval threat to India in the Indian Ocean, whereas I think it could but has little incentive to do so. Change the incentives, though, and the situation could change abruptly—to India’s detriment.

There are worse things than fleeing the bleak New England midwinter for warmer climes—such as Jaipur, India’s famed “Pink City.” So cold was it when I departed Providence in February 2016 that the nozzle on my plane’s fuel hose froze shut, grounding the plane until the crew could unfreeze it.

Frolicking around in shirtsleeves at a Mughal dynasty fort in Rajasthan was a welcome relief from frostbite. The occasion for the trip, though, was three days of “quad-plus dialogue” about sundry topics important to Indian Ocean powers. The “quad,” or standing membership for these unofficial “track II” gatherings, refers to India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Sri Lanka is the “plus,” or rotating participant, for this year.

Maritime governance in the Pacific and Indian oceans was the subject of my panel. China came up repeatedly during the gathering, which should shock no one. After all, China—a great power on the make—constitutes a menace to freedom of the seas in East Asia. Communist Party apparatchiks and ordinary Chinese alike seem to view water and sky as territory to be occupied, controlled and ruled through domestic law. And the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), predictably, is militarizing the South China Sea with verve, protestations from top leaders notwithstanding.

How to manage a great-power challenge to nautical freedom is a question of a higher order altogether than how to police the Indian Ocean. Think about it. Ne’er-do-wells like corsairs, weapons traffickers and seagoing terrorists are the main threats to free navigation in maritime South Asia. Everyone, including Beijing, can agree to work together to combat brigandage in the Gulf of Aden or Bay of Bengal, expanses largely free of great-power entanglements. China plays reasonably well with others to the west of Malacca.

To date, anyway. During the Q and A following our panel, I got into a cordial shouting match with a retired Indian admiral and general about how long the present era of good feelings would endure. (We almost had to resort to pistols at daybreak.) The debate boils down to this: When will the PLA Navy be strong enough to overpower the Indian Navy in the Indian Ocean, an expanse that New Delhi considers an Indian preserve, if Beijing gives the word?

The good news: we all agreed that doom is not nigh. While occasionally irksome, the burgeoning PLA Navy presence in regional waters poses little threat for now. But we arrived at that happy conclusion by different routes, and drew different implications from it. The Indian delegates cited shortfalls in Chinese “capability,” opining that it will take the PLA Navy “at least fifteen years” to station a standing, battle-worthy naval squadron in the Indian Ocean. Such a sanguine view rules out a Chinese threat; it lulls Indians.

That might not be such a good thing, considering the growth of Chinese military might over the past couple of decades. Nonetheless, let’s parse the optimists’ view. What constitutes “capability” for the PLA Navy? By that, Indians must be referring to some amalgam of technologically sophisticated hardware; the number of ships, planes and armaments cranked out by defense production lines or procured abroad; and the seamanship, tactical prowess and élan displayed by the mariners who operate this shiny new kit.

“Capability” also encompasses logistics—especially when a navy contemplates instituting a standing presence in distant seas. Modern navies are far from self-sufficient. Ships of war, even nuclear-powered ones, cannot ply the briny main for long without a ready supply of bullets, beans and black oil. That’s U.S. Navy shorthand for the manifold stores demanded by fuel- and maintenance-intensive vessels. And ships and warplanes need regular upkeep. It’s most convenient to perform maintenance in the theater—close to likely hotspots—rather than subject hulls and crews to long voyages back home for overhaul.

To deploy a fleet permanently to remote waterways, in short, a navy needs bases—facilities complete with supply and ammunition depots, dry docks, all manner of workshops, and more. Without one or more lavishly appointed naval stations, Beijing will find it hard to stage more than a fitful presence in the Indian Ocean.

It may be taking steps to correct the logistical shortfall. Last month, engineers broke ground on what reporters touted as China’s first overseas naval base, at Djibouti in East Africa. Well, maybe. In all likelihood the facility will remain a more humble affair than American naval stations such as Yokosuka and Sasebo, which anchor the U.S. Seventh Fleet presence in Japan. It’s worth pointing out, moreover, that the U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force also operate out of Djibouti.

And China does need some sort of logistical hub. The PLA Navy generally keeps a three-ship squadron on station for antipiracy duty. A small flotilla demands logistical support, but can get by without a true naval base. Each flotilla rotates back home once another takes its place. Returning ships undergo major maintenance at Chinese shipyards.

Nevertheless, construction at Djibouti furnishes an index for tracking China’s naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean. Monitoring what Chinese engineers build and how seafarers use it may help fellow Indian Ocean powers glimpse what comes next for the PLA Navy in the region. Minimal infrastructure implies a transitory presence, commensurate with police duty, while major infrastructure suggests something bigger. Beijing may want to lay the groundwork for a presence aimed less at scouring the sea of lawbreakers and more at entrenching Chinese naval power in South Asia.

Indians afford such developments close scrutiny, as they have for at least a decade. I lost count of the number of times various quad-plus interlocutors stated, more or less as fact, that China is fashioning a “string of pearls” in the region. That’s the commonplace imagery for an array of Chinese naval bases. It could mean full-fledged naval stations. It could connote lesser arrangements—say, agreements with coastal-state governments that open their seaports to China, letting PLA Navy vessels tarry there routinely but impermanently.

Or a string of pearls could combine both types of arrangements, much as U.S. Navy fleets make their homes at hubs like Yokosuka and Bahrain, yet call at harbors like Singapore for sustenance and R&R from time to time.

And China? It’s doubtful that China is operating under some grand plan to make itself master of the Indian Ocean. In all likelihood, Beijing is amassing options for itself should it someday see the need for a standing presence in the region. Bankrolling development of strategically located seaports like Gwadar in western Pakistan, or Colombo in Sri Lanka, stores up goodwill with prospective host nations while presumably creating a sense of indebtedness on their governments’ part. China could call in such favors during future negotiations over naval access.

It would consolidate its strategic position in the Indian Ocean in the process. The phrase string of pearls, accordingly, has taken on sinister overtones for many Indian observers. One quad-plus delegate upbraided China for encroaching on India’s environs, voicing a wish that New Delhi and friendly governments will prod Beijing to keep its naval expeditions in the region brief, episodic and geared to specific missions, such as succoring those struck by natural disasters. Indians, in short, want China to forego permanent bases—the logistical pillar of sea power.

One Chinese ship type in particular rankles with Indians: submarines. The Indian delegates at Jaipur fretted repeatedly at PLA Navy subs’ presence in regional waters. Beijing has pushed the official line that Chinese boats cruise the Indian Ocean to battle piracy. Indians regard this as a charade. Undersea craft are decidedly suboptimal platforms for chasing speedboats around the Gulf of Aden. Skeptical Indians thus view Beijing’s story as flimsy cover for missions that are meant to acquaint Chinese submariners with future patrol grounds.

Taken in total, this seems to be what Indians mean by capability: naval hardware, access to seaports, the human factor and familiarity with operating terrain. Whether it would really take the PLA Navy fifteen years to amass the makings of Indian Ocean sea power, however, remains an open question. Resolute nations have built great regional navies from scratch in about fifteen years, global navies in about thirty—and China is hardly starting from scratch, two decades into its naval enterprise. The Indian take on China’s maritime prospects seems unduly upbeat.

As for me, I’d say Beijing could stage a potent force in the Indian Ocean almost overnight—if it were prepared to make the PLA Navy battle fleet an expeditionary fleet, and thus if it accepted major risk to its interests and purposes in the China seas. And, of course, such a strategy would turn on whether regional partners proved willing to host such an imposing fleet while riling up India, South Asia’s natural hegemon.

The bottom line is that, if China trusted its anti-access/area-denial weaponry to fend off competitors closer to home, then it could outmatch the Indian Navy in its home region. Do the arithmetic: the PLA Navy boasts the numbers to do so.

That’s a lot of ifs, though. Diverting most of the navy would leave the China seas largely unguarded by heavy forces—an unappealing prospect for Beijing. China will keep its strategic priorities straight unless something truly dire happens in the Indian Ocean, reconciling the leadership to hazards at which it would usually blanch. Those priorities lie mainly off the East Asian coast—mandating that the fleet remain close to home to defend them.

In short, strategy—not capability per se—will dissuade China’s leadership from mounting a major naval presence in South Asia. Look to the strategic canon to see why. Sea-power sage Alfred Thayer Mahan explains how to size fleets for battle. Says Mahan, naval officialdom must apportion a fleet enough ships and armaments to “fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it.” Shortchanging a formation on numbers or capability, or ignoring what a foe is apt to do with its navy, courts defeat and disaster.

All well and good. Estimating relative combat power is far from simple, but it is doable: tabulate the quality and quantity of platforms deployed by each contender, estimate how a foe’s tactics and skill measure up to yours, add a little surplus, and you have a contingent that can enter the lists with reasonable prospects of success. But what about Mahan’s element of probability? How big a fraction of its strength is that opponent likely to commit to potential scenes of action?

Do some red-teaming to find out. Get to know the adversary and the logic impelling its decision calculus. For that, there’s no better than to start with another of the greats, a man who scarcely acknowledged that oceans and seas exist—namely, Prussia’s Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz was forever urging statesmen and generals to stay on target. Once military leaders define an enemy’s “center of gravity,” they should rain “blow after blow” against that “hub of all power and movement” until the foe either calls “uncle” or can no longer put up a fight.

Clausewitz’s monomania primed him to set a high standard for diverting manpower and material into secondary theaters or operations. A combatant, he writes, should refrain from lesser pursuits unless deemed “exceptionally rewarding.” But even if the likely rewards appear exceptional, generals should abjure secondary endeavors unless undertaking them won’t imperil the main theater. For Clausewitz, then, only “decisive superiority” of forces in the main theater warrants detaching resources for peripheral efforts. Stay on target!

And China? It’s far from clear that the PLA Navy commands decisive superiority in the China seas, even when backed up by shore-based fire support—as it is when cruising within reach of airfields and missile batteries arrayed along the mainland’s coastlines. Nor does China stand to gain anything exceptional in the Indian Ocean at present. Yes, Beijing cares deeply about the safety of merchantmen crisscrossing the Indian Ocean. But the PLA Navy can help ward off nonstate scourges like pirates without running undue risk in East Asia—as it has since joining the antipiracy expedition seven years ago. Modest rewards, for modest expenditure of naval resources.

Here’s the crux of our dispute in Jaipur: the Indian dignitaries seem to think China can’t mount a naval threat to India in the Indian Ocean, whereas I think it could but has little incentive to do so. Change the incentives, though, and the situation could change abruptly—to India’s detriment. Never discount the possibility of a “Black Swan.” And bear in mind that Clausewitzian logic will prove less and less forbidding for Beijing over time. As the PLA Navy matures and swells in numbers, China may come to command decisive superiority in the most crucial theater (the Western Pacific) with forces to spare for Indian Ocean adventures. The ghosts of Clausewitz and Mahan will smile.

So the quad-plus dialogue exposed a significant difference in perspectives—one worth belaboring. Let’s not assume away the potential of Chinese sea power, and let’s not assume away Chinese political resolve, the instigator for martial enterprises. Last week one leading Chinese commentator, Fudan University’s Shen Dingli, prophesied that Beijing could summon the resolve to dispatch aircraft-carrier task forces to the Indian Ocean to “hurt” India. If India joins a seafaring league alongside America and its allies, says Shen, “of course we can put a navy at your doorstep.”

PLA Navy flattops at Gwadar: that prospect should give Indians pause.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific and Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in March 2016.

Image: Wikipedia.

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

For millions of hardworking parents out there, the disbursement of the newest payment was indeed welcome news. However, there were still reports of some eligible parents who have yet to see the money land in their bank accounts.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Be aware that babies born this year will indeed make parents eligible for the credits if an extra step is taken. On the aforementioned Child Tax Credit Update Portal, parents are able to report any newborn throughout the year, and by doing this, the payment should automatically be sent out.  

The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department on Friday confirmed that the second batch of advance monthly payments from the expanded child tax credits was issued to approximately thirty-six million American families. 

Approved under President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the expanded credits allow eligible parents to net 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. That means a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be paid out on a monthly basis through the end of 2021.   

For millions of hardworking parents out there, the disbursement of the newest payment was indeed welcome news. However, there were still reports of some eligible parents who have yet to see the money land in their bank accounts.

Handy Portals

According to the IRS, concerned individuals have the option to utilize the Child Tax Credit Update Portal to see their monthly payment history. If the payments are indeed pending, then that information should be present on that page. Also, if the payment was said to be already delivered, then make sure to double-check that the home address and banking information, such as the account and routing numbers, are free of mistakes. 

Do take note that the same portal can be used to change how one would like to be paid, such as from paper checks to direct deposit. It offers other handy options, too, such as opting out of receiving the monthly payments so that they could potentially be eligible for a one-time lump sum during tax season next year.

For those people who haven’t filed their federal tax returns yet, know that the Non-filer Sign-up Tool should definitely be the go-to stop to give the IRS the required information so that it can promptly issue the funds.  

Bank Account Active? 

Keep in mind that there could be other reasons why one has yet to receive their child tax credit payment. First, it is entirely possible that the IRS tried to direct deposit the cash into a closed or inactive bank account.  

If the tax agency indeed attempted this, then the deposit will likely be rejected—which would initiate the mailing out of a paper check via the post office to the home address on record. This process could take a couple of weeks in some instances.  

Moreover, be aware that babies born this year will indeed make parents eligible for the credits if an extra step is taken. On the aforementioned Child Tax Credit Update Portal, parents are able to report any newborn throughout the year, and by doing this, the payment should automatically be sent out.  

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit, Americas

A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests that about four million children from low-income families are at risk of missing out on the recurring monthly payments if the tax agency does not get that necessary personal and financial information on time.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Broken down, what this all means is that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be deposited into the bank accounts of parents each and every month through the end of 2021—and possibly for years to come if the American Families Plan is ever green-lighted by Congress.

The Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department announced on Friday that the second batch of advance monthly payments worth about $15 billion from the expanded child tax credits were issued to thirty-six million families. 

The agencies added that “like the first payments, the vast majority of families will receive these payments by direct deposit,” according to an IRS press statement.

However, “the IRS wants to alert some recipients who received direct deposits in July that they will receive the August payments by mail. Due to an issue expected to be resolved by the September payments, a percentage of these recipients—less than 15 percent—who received payments by direct deposit in July will be mailed paper checks for the August payment. For those affected, no additional action is needed for the September payment to be issued by direct deposit,” the statement explained.

The next payments are slated to head out on the fifteenth of every month through December.  

Focus on Low-Income Households 

The IRS has also made it known that “it’s not too late for low-income families to sign up for advance CTC payments,” urging people to take advantage of the Non-filer Sign-up Tool that will give the IRS the necessary information—such as an address and routing and bank account numbers—to promptly disburse the funds.

Being able to reach the nation’s poorest households has been a primary goal of the agency, and in an effort to achieve that, it has partnered with nonprofit organizations, churches, and community groups to get the word out regarding the new tax credits.

“This important new tax change affects millions of families across the nation, and the IRS wants to do everything it can to help people get the payments,” IRS Wage & Investment Commissioner Ken Corbin, who also serves as the agency’s Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer, noted in a press statement. “Many people miss out on tax benefits simply because they don’t file a tax return.”

A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests that about four million children from low-income families are at risk of missing out on the recurring monthly payments if the tax agency does not get that necessary personal and financial information on time.

Payments Broken Down

These child tax credit payments—seen by many as being similar to another round of stimulus checks—were approved under President Joe Biden’s highly ambitious American Rescue Plan, which now allows eligible parents to receive as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen.

Broken down, what this all means is that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be deposited into the bank accounts of parents each and every month through the end of 2021—and possibly for years to come if the American Families Plan is ever green-lighted by Congress.

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

Image: Reuters

Peter Suciu

Afghanistan, Asia

Wars are costly affairs though.

As American's longest war comes to an end, the Taliban have essentially retaken control of the nation, and for the insurgent forces, it is almost as if the past twenty years didn't matter. 

Their resolve was greater and Kabul is under their control again.  

The lives of women will likely change, TV and social media will likely be banned, and the country will fall into its old ways. Whether the country once again harbors terrorist groups like Al Qaeda is a variable that can't truly be answered yet, while other questions will likely remain just as elusive to determine an answer for now.

It will forever be impossible to ever know “if it was worth it” in regards to the U.S.-led coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

The Human Cost 

While the war will likely be debated for years to come, possibly with many different opinions, it is even now possible to put the cost of it in perspective.  

According to figures from the Associated Press, 2,448 U.S. service members gave their lives, while the BBC reported that more than 450 British military personnel were killed. In total, since the war against the Taliban began in 2001, there have been more than 3,500 coalition deaths—while a further 20,660 U.S. personnel were injured in action.

Upwards of 66,000 Afghan national military and police personnel were also killed through April of this year. A total of 444 aid workers and 72 journalists also saw their lives cut shot in Afghanistan since 2001.

Additionally, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, some 111,000 civilians have been killed or injured since it became recording the numbers in 2009. That would not account for those injured or killed in the years between 2001 and 2008, nor from the most recent fighting.

The Financial Burden 

Wars are costly affairs, and according to U.S. Department of Defense figures, between October 2001 until September 2019, the total military expenditure in Afghanistan reached $778 billion; meanwhile, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent $44 billion on reconstruction projects.

However, that number doesn't include the spending in Pakistan, which has been used as a base for Afghan-related operations. In total, based on figures from a Brown University study from 2019, the total spending was $978 billion.

Moreover, before the withdrawal of forces was completed, the United States and NATO had pledged to provide the Afghan government with $4 billion until 2024 to fund the Afghan military. However, given that the country has fallen to the Taliban, it is likely NATO will save on that amount!

The Lingering Human Toll 

Even as the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and continues to scale back in Iraq, a Harvard University’s Kennedy School and Brown University Costs of War project study found that the United States will continue to pay for the health care, disability, burial and other costs for the roughly four million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, costing taxpayers some $2 trillion.  

Those costs will only peak after 2048, according to the Associated Press.  

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

Image: Reuters

Trevor Filseth

Retirement, Americas

The income from the benefits is designed to replace 40 percent of a person’s pre-retirement income, according to the Social Security Administration itself. But 40 percent of one’s pre-retirement income is not enough for most Americans to live comfortably on, especially without other sources of money.

Here's What You Need to Remember:  If a person is able to save $5,000 per year from the age of twenty-five until the age of seventy and deposit it into a Roth IRA with an average yearly return of 8 percent, by the age of seventy, they will be sitting on more than $2 million, although this amount will decrease somewhat in real terms because of inflation.

When Americans reach retirement age, it is expected that they will file for Social Security, which pays a reliable monthly benefit for the rest of their life. The program, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal in 1935, was regarded as an effective anti-poverty program for elderly Americans, and quickly became one of the most popular government programs in the United States. It still is; according to AARP, a senior citizens’ advocacy group, 96 percent of Americans want to continue or increase the payments.

However, while Social Security unquestionably keeps elderly Americans out of poverty, its ability to provide for them above a basic level is limited. The income from the benefits is designed to replace 40 percent of a person’s pre-retirement income, according to the Social Security Administration itself. But 40 percent of one’s pre-retirement income is not enough for most Americans to live comfortably on, especially without other sources of money.

There are some ways that this income can be supplemented. A key way is to wait as long as possible to claim benefits. Waiting until the age of seventy to file for Social Security, for instance, can increase the monthly payments by 25 to 30 percent. Retiring later can also help a person increase the size of their benefits, since the monthly amount is based on the thirty-five highest-paying years of a person’s career and most people make more money at the end of their careers than at the beginning.

Even so, these tricks can only increase the amount by so far. While it is possible to live on nothing except Social Security payments, the limited quality of life that they provide is not what many people hope for in their retirement. To enjoy a more comfortable retirement, it is vital for families to save money and create a nest egg.

There are several ways that this can be done, but the two most effective are by opening a 401(k) and a Roth IRA account during one’s career. Although these differ slightly, they are both essentially tax-free retirement accounts that can be invested during one’s life. Although they cannot be withdrawn until a person’s retirement, they can grow considerably if invested in a relatively safe fund with a reasonable rate of return—such as an S&P 500 index fund, which averages a return of 10 percent per year.

Consider the following. If a person is able to save $5,000 per year from the age of twenty-five until the age of seventy and deposit it into a Roth IRA with an average yearly return of 8 percent, by the age of seventy, they will be sitting on more than $2 million, although this amount will decrease somewhat in real terms because of inflation.

Even if the annual deposit is decreased to only $2,000, the amount is still more than $800,000—and in both scenarios, the retirees will receive Social Security payments on top of this.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for The National Interest. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

Pandemic, Americas

The California doctor was charged with one count each of wire fraud and of false statements related to health care matters.

As vaccine mandates begin to go into effect everywhere from New York City restaurants to the Las Vegas Raiders’ home stadium to next January’s International CES, the idea is to incentivize people to get vaccinated. 

This has, as expected, led to demand for fake vaccine cards, or even repurposing real ones for sale. And now we have one of the first major arrests for carrying out such a scheme. 

Recently, a Chicago pharmacist was arrested for selling more than one hundred coronavirus vaccination cards to eleven buyers on eBay. The thirty-four-year-old man sold the cards for $10 each, according to the Department of Justice. He was charged with twelve counts of theft of government property. 

The pharmacist worked at a company that distributed vaccines for the coronavirus.  

It’s important to note that while there has been concern about the forgery of the vaccine cards, the Chicago case concerned vaccination cards that are genuine.

“We take seriously, and will vigorously investigate, any criminal offense that contributes to the distrust around vaccines and vaccination status,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a press statement. “The Department of Justice and its law enforcement partners are committed to protecting the American people from these offenses during this national emergency.” 

“Knowingly selling COVID vaccination cards to unvaccinated individuals puts millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death,” Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie Jr. of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office said in the press statement. “To put such a small price on the safety of our nation is not only an insult to those who are doing their part in the fight to stop COVID-19, but a federal crime with serious consequences.”

Back in July, a naturopathic doctor in California was arrested and charged with both selling “homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets” and with falsifying coronavirus vaccination cards.  

The California doctor was charged with one count each of wire fraud and of false statements related to health care matters, in what the federal government described as “the first federal criminal fraud prosecution related to homeoprophylaxis immunizations and fraudulent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 vaccination record cards.” 

Back in April, months before the California case, a group of state attorneys general wrote a letter to the CEOs of Twitter, eBay, and Shopify, warning of the “deceptive marketing and sales of fake COVID vaccine cards.”  

“It has come to our attention that your platforms are being used to market and sell blank or fraudulently completed COVID vaccine cards bearing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logo,” the letter stated. “We are deeply concerned about this use of your platforms to spread false and misleading information regarding COVID vaccines. The false and deceptive marketing and sales of fake COVID vaccine cards threatens the health of our communities, slows progress in getting our residents protected from the virus, and are a violation of the laws of many states.” 

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Tax Refund,

These particular refunds are due to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was able to waive federal tax on up to $10,200 of unemployment benefits, or $20,400 for married couples filing jointly, that were received by taxpayers last year. Unemployment benefits are generally treated as taxable income, according to the tax agency.

Here's What You Need to Remember: According to the National Taxpayer Advocate, “this filing season was the quintessential definition of a perfect storm—a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from several negative and unpredictable factors—resulting in tens of millions of taxpayers experiencing hardship and uncertainty in trying to reach a live assistor.

It has, unfortunately, been the same old story for the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department, which have for months have been struggling to keep up with their ongoing responsibilities to promptly issue the various government-issued payments to eligible Americans.

Do take note that just a few weeks ago, the agencies were able to disburse a sizeable batch of 1.5 million refunds averaging $1,686 from 2020 unemployment benefits—and more checks are slated to head out to Americans this month. 

These particular refunds are due to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was able to waive federal tax on up to $10,200 of unemployment benefits, or $20,400 for married couples filing jointly, that were received by taxpayers last year. Unemployment benefits are generally treated as taxable income, according to the tax agency.

The IRS has noted that since May, it has issued in total nearly nine million unemployment refunds with a value of more than $10 billion.

“The IRS will continue reviewing and adjusting tax returns in this category this summer,” the tax agency said in a release. “The IRS continues to review the simplest returns and then turns to more complex returns.”

Refunds Sent Out Automatically

In order to receive the refunds, for most Americans, there is no action needed on their part. The IRS has confirmed that it will automatically adjust tax returns if individuals are indeed eligible for any cash refund.

“Because the [approval of the refund] occurred after some people filed their taxes, the IRS will take steps in the spring and summer to make the appropriate change to their return, which may result in a refund,” the agency states.

In addition, “taxpayers will receive letters from the IRS, generally within thirty days of the adjustment, informing them of what kind of adjustment was made (such as refund, payment of IRS debt payment or payment offset for other authorized debts) and the amount of the adjustment.”

IRS Overwhelmed

Do understand that throughout the past several months, the IRS has worked around the clock to issue tens of millions of $1,400 stimulus checks, the monthly expanded child tax credits, and “plus-up” payments—not to mention the traditional refunds from federal tax returns.

Because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and staff shortages, the agency has reported that it still has more than thirty-five million individual and business tax returns to process—a massive backlog that is believed to be four times larger compared to the end of the 2019 filing season.

According to the National Taxpayer Advocate, “this filing season was the quintessential definition of a perfect storm—a particularly bad or critical state of affairs, arising from several negative and unpredictable factors—resulting in tens of millions of taxpayers experiencing hardship and uncertainty in trying to reach a live assistor. … In the coming months, the IRS must work through its backlog of tax returns and be current in processing its correspondence while focusing on rebuilding itself to become a more efficient and taxpayer-centric organization.”

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy, Americas

“Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America,” the Social Security Administration claims on its website.  

Here's What You Need to Remember: “Question whether the other person or organization truly needs to know your child's SSN. And ask whether you can share other information instead. Keep private documents secure. You may also want to get a safe and keep all your private documents locked up, including birth certificates, Social Security cards and tax forms.”

As a proud parent of however many children one may have, it might never have crossed one’s mind why fraudsters would want to get their hands on Social Security numbers of minors.

But a 2018 child identity fraud study conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that more than one million children, with the majority being seven years old or younger, fell victim to identity fraud the previous year. 

“Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America,” the Social Security Administration claims on its website.  

The research further revealed that children were more likely to become victims of identity theft than adults following a data breach.  

“These breaches can occur at different organizations that commonly have children’s data, including schools, doctors’ offices, daycares, and summer camps. Thieves may also target parents and try to get them to share their children’s Social Security number and other personal information,“ according to the financial site myFICO. “These attacks could come in a variety of forms, from phishing emails to dumpster diving. As is always the case, be cautious about what you share online and over the phone.“

Moreover, in what may be a surprise, “the fraudster isn’t always a stranger. In many cases, the thief may be a parent, family friend or relative who has access to the child’s SSN. Familiar fraud can be particularly difficult to deal with as you might not want to press charges against a close friend or family member,” it adds.  

Children Targeted

Children aren’t able to obtain a bank loan or sign up for a credit card on their own, but the lack of credit history could work in the favor of thieves.  

“In a sense, they’re clean slates. Plus, parents rarely try to check their child’s credit, which means the fraud might not be detected right away,” according to my FICO. 

“Rather than using the child’s identity directly, fraudsters often use a stolen SSN to create a synthetic identity,” the financial website states. “To do this, they combine the real SSN with fake identifiers, such as a fake name and date of birth. They can then use the synthetic identity in many of the same ways, but there’s even less of a chance that the SSN holder will find out. And, in some cases, the same stolen SSN gets used to create dozens of synthetic IDs.” 

Preventing Identity Theft

For most victims of child identity theft, the parents necessarily won’t be aware until years later—perhaps when the minor tries to get his or her first bank account or loan. But before having to be mired in such an unsavory situation, there are indeed steps that parents can take right now to prevent identity theft.

“Limit what you share about your children on social media. While you may want to share big announcements and pictures online, the information (such as their birthday) could be compromising,” the website asserts.

“Don’t share their SSN,” the website warns. “Question whether the other person or organization truly needs to know your child's SSN. And ask whether you can share other information instead. Keep private documents secure. You may also want to get a safe and keep all your private documents locked up, including birth certificates, Social Security cards and tax forms.”

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

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

economy,

The 6.2 percent bump may be music to the ears of many Social Security recipients, but according to the financial site Motley Fool, the program has been stingy on its adjustments for far too many years.

Here's What You Need to Remember: It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own. Consistently funding an IRA or 401(k) plan could make it so that seniors are less reliant on Social Security—and more financially stable once their time in the workforce comes to an end.

For the past several months, the consumer price index, the primary indicator of inflation in the United States, has been steadily trending upward—and there appears to be no end in sight.

As inflation continues on its current trajectory throughout this year, Social Security’s cost of living adjustment (COLA) for 2022 is expected to receive a major boost as well. COLA is calculated each year based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W.

Higher Estimate

Just how much? According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, the data now points toward a possible 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients for 2022. This new figure is up from the 6.1 percent estimate that the group projected last month—and it would be the largest increase in nearly forty years.

“The estimate is significant because the COLA is based on the average of the July, August, and September CPI data,” Mary Johnson, a Social Security policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League, said in a statement.

“With one-third of the data needed to calculate the COLA already in, it increasingly appears that the COLA for 2022 will be the highest-paid since 1983 when it was 7.4 percent,” she continued.

For comparison, in 2021, the Social Security COLA was only 1.3 percent. That amounted to a roughly $20 extra monthly payment for the average retiree.

SSA Too Stingy?

The 6.2 percent bump may be music to the ears of many Social Security recipients, but according to the financial site Motley Fool, the program has been stingy on its adjustments for far too many years.

“Seniors on Social Security are entitled to an annual raise known as a cost-of-living adjustment or COLA. The purpose of COLAs is to help seniors maintain their buying power when living expenses inevitably rise,” the expert wrote.

“But over the past twelve years, Social Security COLAs have averaged just under 1.4 percent. That’s hardly been enough to keep pace with inflation,” she added.

With this in mind, the expert noted that younger people should save more during their working years so that they are “less reliant on Social Security.” According to recent data released by the Social Security Administration (SSA), approximately 20 percent of married couples and 40 percent of singles receive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security benefits.

“Unfortunately, Social Security isn’t perfect, and it’s seniors who have been paying the price for a long time. It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own. Consistently funding an IRA or 401(k) plan could make it so that seniors are less reliant on Social Security—and more financially stable once their time in the workforce comes to an end,” she advises.

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

Image: Reuters.

Charlie Gao

Military Technology,

The Israeli service often extensively modifies American military equipment to fit the IDF’s unique mission.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Israel's operating conditions of harsh desert and urban conditions require modifications to American equipment to allow the American equipment to thrive in the environment encountered by the IDF. Here are four great examples of how American military equipment has been adjusted to fit the needs of IDFs unique mission.  

The Israel Defense Forces field a wide variety of American military equipment, due to significant amounts of American military aid to Israel. However, American equipment has not always been the best suited to the tough desert and urban conditions encountered by the IDF. As a result, American equipment in Israeli service is often extensively modified to fit the IDF’s unique mission. Here are some unique derivatives of American equipment that the IDF fields.

1. MAPATS Antitank Missile

The IDF has had a long relationship with the antitank guided missile. In the long desert approaches that surround Israel, antitank missiles can direct the flow of combat and are very effective weapons. While the first ATGMs fielded by Israel were the French SS.10 and SS.11, it was replaced in the late 1970s by the American TOW (Orev in IDF service) missile. However, due to its wire-guided nature, the TOW has range limitations and cannot be used in all circumstances. Bodies of water, trees, and power lines can disrupt the TOW’s guidance or endanger the TOW’s operator. As a result, the Israelis developed a version of the TOW that used laser guidance to avoid these issues. A new engine and improved warhead also gave it superior penetration and speed to the original TOW. The MAPATS has seen export success, although it is being replaced by other, newer Israeli ATGMs of wholly indigenous design.

2. Israeli M16 and CAR-15 Variants

While nominally most of the IDF has switched over to the Tavor, variants of the M16 continue to serve in the IDF. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, these rifles were the frontline rifles of the IDF, replacing the heavier FN FAL and the Israeli Galil (although Galil carbines remained in service in the Armored Corps, due to their shorter lengths with stocks folded). In the aughts, Israel set about modernizing these rifles. Due to the largely urban nature of combat the IDF Infantry engaged in, the long twenty-inch and 14.5-inch barrels of the M16s and Colt 653s were deemed too long. The barrels were sawn off to around 12.5-inch length, and the resulting carbines were called “mekut’zrar.” Furniture on these varied, but always had an eye towards the practical. Fabric bands could be wrapped around the plastic handguards to make them more rigid and stop them from creaking, red dots were added straight onto the carry handles, and stocks were often replaced with modern six-position M4 stocks. The results were relatively modern, lightweight carbines on the cheap. Mekut’zrar carbines are still seen in service today, although they’ve been supplanted by new stocks of M4s and the Tavor series.

3. Machbet Self-Propelled Antiaircraft Gun

While the M163 VADS was always considered to be kind of a “stopgap” solution for the short-range antiair defense solution for the U.S. military, the VADS saw significant Israeli service in the 1982 Lebanon War. In addition to scoring a kill on a Syrian MiG-21, they provided valuable ground support, suppressing infantry in urban and mountainous areas with their rapid-fire twenty-millimeter cannons. While they were phased out of American service in the 1990s and replaced with the better-armored but slower-firing M6 Bradley Linebacker, Israel opted to upgrade its VADS to the new “Machbet” standard instead, fitting an optoelectronic tracking system, better radar, a quad-Stinger pod, and an ADA network datalink to the VADS to make it effective against a wider variety of targets and faster reacting.

4. The F15 Baz Meshopar

Israel was one of the first customers for the American F-15 fighter. It has served admirably as the backbone of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) throughout the late 1970s to the present day. In addition to its superb performance in the air-to-air role during the 1982 Lebanon War, the F-15 was also used in Operation Opera and Operation Wooden Leg, both long-range-strike missions. These were done with the addition of some indigenous guidance and sensor pods. While Israel later acquired variants of the ground-attack F-15E Strike Eagle under the name F15I Ra’am, they also updated their first- and second-gen F-15s to a new standard with indigenous electronics and parts, under the name F-15 Baz Meshopar, or Baz 2000. The upgrade included a new radar with AIM-120 and Israeli Python missile compatibility, redone cockpits with a new throttle and stick and glass cockpit, and improved electronic-warfare capability. This upgrade program ran from 1995 to 2001, and these upgraded F-15s are expected to continue to serve far into the future.

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 last year.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

military, Americas

The vessel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2008.

In 1996, actor Kelsey Grammer starred in the largely forgettable military comedy Down Periscope, in which a disgraced U.S. Navy officer is given command of an obsolete diesel submarine that was recommissioned to participate in a special naval war game. The movie's screenplay should have been “deep sixed” before the film was actually made, but one takeaway from it is that the U.S. Navy by the 1990s was a fully nuclear-powered fighting force. 

Yet, it had been only a few years earlier that the Navy retired and decommissioned the USS Blueback (SS-581). Laid down by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation of Pascagoula, Mississippi in April 1957 and launched in May 1959, she was the last non-nuclear submarine to enter service in the U.S. Navy. Serving until October 1990, she was also the final conventionally powered combat-capable submarine to be decommissioned. 

The U.S. Navy had only become a fully nuclear submarine fleet some six years before Down Periscope was made, and moreover, the fleet still maintained the research submarine USS Dolphin, which wasn't retired until 2007. Perhaps some screenwriters should have done their homework! 

The Barbel-Class 

In addition to being the last combat-capable diesel-electric attack submarine commissioned into the U.S. Navy, the USS Blueback was also notable for being just one of three Barbel-class boats to be constructed, and the only of the three to be maintained as a museum ship. 

The class was notable in that it actually incorporated numerous, even radical engineering improvements over the previous diesel-electric subs, including the first to be built with the “teardrop-shaped” hull that had been tested on the USS Albacore (AGSS-569), as well as the first to feature a single propeller. The hull design was critical in that it increased underwater speed dramatically while it also enabled the submarine to be far more maneuverable.  

Additionally, the Barbel-class utilized a combined control room, attack center and conning tower in the same space in the hull.  

Notable USS Blueback Accomplishments 

During her thirty-one years in service with the U.S. Navy, USS Blueback participated in Pacific Fleet operations, which included a transiting of the Panama Canal. In September 1961, she also set a record by traveling 5,340 miles from Yokosuka, Japan to San Diego entirely submerged.  

The submarine also earned two battle stars for her service in the Vietnam War.

Shortly before her decommissioning in 1990, USS Blueback was provided by the U.S. Navy for use in the film The Hunt for Red October, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. Standing in for a Soviet submarine, a film crew was reported to have been allowed to film in the torpedo room, while some of her crew were said to have been paid to wear Soviet Navy uniforms. The submarine had previously appeared in the 1970s TV series Hawaii Five-O.  

After her decommissioning, the USS Blueback was struck from the Naval Vessel Register. In February 1994, the boat was acquired by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), which towed her back to Portland. She serves as a maritime memorial and is an interactive part of the museum. Visitors can walk through the 219-foot submarine to get a glimpse of how the crew of eighty-five sailors and officers lived on the boat. There are two tours for guests—a basic forty-five-minute guided tour and a two-hour long tour that is guided by a submarine veteran, who provides insight on the technical workings of the submarine.

The vessel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in September 2008.

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ethen Kim Lieser

Social Security,

According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, that boost could come in the form of a 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment, which would be the highest registered in nearly forty years.

The data over the past several months have signaled that the consumer price index (CPI)—the primary indicator of inflation in the United States—has been steadily pointing north.

And as inflation continues on its current trajectory, millions of senior citizens across the country have voiced frustration that their dollars just won’t stretch far these days. In the worst cases, some seniors are even being forced to choose between medicine and food.

However, there could be much-needed help in a few months, as Social Security’s cost of living adjustment (COLA) for next year is expected to receive a major boost. According to the Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan senior group, that boost could come in the form of a 6.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment, which would be the highest registered in nearly forty years. Last year, the Social Security COLA was only 1.3 percent.

“The estimate is significant because the COLA is based on the average of the July, August, and September CPI data,” Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League, said in a statement. “With one-third of the data needed to calculate the COLA already in, it increasingly appears that the COLA for 2022 will be the highest-paid since 1983 when it was 7.4 percent.”

Short-Term Solution?

The sizeable bump in Social Security payouts may solve the financial problems of some seniors, but there are experts who believe that the Social Security Administration (SSA) needs to be even more aggressive with its adjustments going forward.

“We’re not seeing any improvement in the share of people who have incomes above the Elder Index (a measure of the cost of living for older U.S. adults),” Jan E. Mutchler, professor of gerontology and director of the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said in an interview with CNBC. “We’re seeing sustained high levels of people who do not appear to have the resources they really need to get by in retirement.”

Diversify Income

According to the SSA, approximately twenty percent of married couples and forty percent of singles receive at least ninety percent of their income from the Social Security program.

“Over the past twelve years, Social Security COLAs have averaged just under 1.4 percent,” a Motley Fool expert wrote. “That’s hardly been enough to keep pace with inflation.”

Against this backdrop, the expert suggested that younger workers need to start preparing for their retirements now.

“Unfortunately, Social Security isn’t perfect, and it’s seniors who have been paying the price for a long time,” she said. “It’s important that current workers recognize the program’s limitations and take steps to save aggressively for retirement on their own.”

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

Image: Reuters

Stephen Silver

North Korea, Asia

North Korea was scheduled to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, although negotiations stalled at some point.

Since the start of the pandemic, North Korea has continued to claim that it has zero cases of coronavirus, much to the disbelief of the worldwide medical and diplomatic establishments.

Some reports earlier this month indicated that North Korea appears not to have a strategy for mitigating the virus. The Voice of America has reported that the North Korean regime “has done little to advance the process to receive vaccines from COVAX,” which is an international organization for distributing coronavirus vaccines.

North Korea was scheduled to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, although negotiations stalled at some point.

“News of countries vaccinating their people or life returning to normal is rarely, if ever, transmitted within North Korea, perhaps over fears that it might trigger resentment against the regime for its failure to secure shots,” Pratik Jakhar of BBC Monitoring wrote in an op-ed published by Foreign Policy this month. “In contrast, the propaganda apparatus has been unusually quick to report on cases rising abroad and the spread of COVID-19 variants.”

Now, a new report says North Korea is once again reporting zero positive tests.

The North Korean regime has told the World Health Organization (WHO)    that they still have no cases, following the testing of 693 people. That brings the total of those tested in North Korea to 35,947, according to NK News.

An Amnesty International report last July looked at North Korea’s claims about having zero coronavirus cases.

“North Koreans are well aware that when making contact with family or friends living in South Korea, there is always a chance that they are being wiretapped,” a North Korean pharmacist told Amnesty International. “So phone calls and letters are usually made under the premise that someone might be listening to or reading their conversations. They will never say a word related to COVID-19, as this can cost their lives.” 

Last week, the president of South Korea said in a speech that he hopes to cooperate with North Korea on fighting the pandemic. This includes inviting North Korea into the Northeast Asia Cooperation Initiative for Infectious Disease Control and Public Health. That organization currently consists of South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Mongolia, and the United States. Its goals include “information sharing, shared stockpiling of medical supplies and joint training of COVID-19 response personnel.” 

“It is clear that the COVID-19 threat is not temporary, which makes [the initiative] even more important,” Moon Jae-in said in the speech.  

“For us, division is the greatest obstacle to our growth and prosperity and a tenacious barrier that obstructs permanent peace,” the South Korean president added. “We can also remove this barrier.”

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

John Allen Gay

Afghanistan, Asia

The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.

“Afghanistan,” wrote Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands in 2019, “is best seen not as a morality play but as a classic foreign policy dilemma in which all the options are bad ones.” The tragic scenes unfolding in the country this week must be understood in this context. Some pundits are proclaiming that the U.S. withdrawal was an evil act and that continued U.S. participation in the conflict was clearly the morally superior choice. They hold that the ongoing U.S. presence was cheap—their view of tens of U.S. casualties and tens of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Their position ignores the high moral costs of remaining in the war, our duties to our own nation, and the profound moral failures of our partner government. Afghanistan was a land of nasty tradeoffs that any moral declamations must reckon with. These are tradeoffs that we will no longer be making.

The price of fighting

Above all we must remember that war is a morally costly activity. Even the most careful and well-intentioned major military operation will kill many civilians, displace many more, and devastate civilian property. This was especially true in Afghanistan. Like many insurgent forces, the Taliban do not wear uniforms and can operate in civilian areas. As the conflict grew more unpopular, the U.S. assistance mission had turned to airstrikes to keep the Taliban at bay while keeping U.S. casualties down. This had driven up civilian casualties. With the Taliban growing in strength and the regular Afghan military hesitant to fight without air support, these casualties would likely have remained high.

Fighting in the conflict had been heavily concentrated in rural areas; Kabul had been safer for the common Afghan. And our view of Afghanistan is heavily shaped by Kabul—it is more accessible to journalists, especially Western journalists, and is home to many English-speaking professionals. This is the part of the country that had benefited the most from the establishment of the 2001-2021 Afghan government. As Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown, writing with former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan John R. Allen, pointed out, drawing on survey work she had done in Afghanistan,

Urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks. For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women.

It is unsurprising that the media’s parachute regiment thus found a country eager to continue the war, eager to have American forces remain and American airstrikes continue—and a country that would change profoundly under new rulers.

The picture in rural areas was more complicated, Felbab-Brown and Allen wrote:

For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. […] Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live—experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life.

What does that add up to? They write: “peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.” Felbab-Brown’s survey is not the only data point here. 2018 saw a public peace movement in Afghanistan, one that pressured Taliban and government alike, with demonstrators marching barefoot hundreds of miles through dangerous terrain to show support for a peace process. Voices like the rural women or the peace marchers do not fit in a clean narrative of good and evil, of a battle between miniskirted modernity and bearded barbarism. The war was costing Afghanistan tens of thousands of lives and regular mass displacement, and many Afghans had come to favor peace at any price.

The price for America

The war’s cost for the United States was high, too, even if it wasn’t like that of Vietnam or World War II. U.S. casualties would surely have followed had we broken the Doha Agreement that had kept the Taliban off our backs for more than a year. Too many in Washington see our side of the war as an abstraction and speak of U.S. involvement in conflicts in euphemisms like “kinetic action,” “presence,” or “light footprint.” Consider, then, this recent Associated Press profile of a chaplain who had spent the War on Terror caring for the families of U.S. war dead and for the mortuary technicians who prepared bodies for funerals:

Some families seem to sink into a catatonia that he knows means he should give them space. Others come clutching photos of the lost or otherwise tip [him] off that his conversation might help. […] Sometimes, he’ll find a child hasn’t been told why they’re there. Others pose wrenching questions, like a boy who asked the minister who would play catch with him now that his father was gone. […] The work can bring some of the steeliest to crumble. He’s seen drivers who transported families of the dead bawling and embalmers who reached their breaking point and found a new profession. A handful of times over the years, a mortuary staffer has died by suicide or suffered through an attempt.

The war had also produced a swarm of veterans bearing physical, mental, and moral injuries. Some came back as different people. Some hid their problems in alcohol or drugs. Some died by their own hand. And even the many who came back well lost time with family—something that surely has been one factor in the many divorces in the military community.

There was also a military cost to the war. Time spent preparing for deployment, deploying, and redeploying is time unavailable for training more relevant to current U.S. security needs. Our air forces have spent the last two decades flying racetracks over places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, waiting to be called for a strike; they spent the decade before that enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq. All that time, effort, and money went into present-tense consumption of military power, not future-tense development of military power. We spent the first decades of the “Pacific Century” using land power, not building sea power. We operated in uncontested airspace with persistent surveillance and reliable communications, an environment nothing like what we’ll confront in a major power war. Our military was eating its seed corn; China’s was putting every last kernel in the ground. That fact has a moral reality, too. Every day it looks more and more likely that U.S.-China relations will define the middle of the century. Our military is less prepared to play its part in that. In conflict, that could end up costing us more dead in a few hours than we’ve lost in Afghanistan in a few decades. It could make that conflict more likely.

And, of course, the war’s financial cost was nothing to sneeze at. We were slated to spend $14 billion this year, and, as RAND’s Michael Mazarr pointed out, this number could have climbed if we’d stayed and the Taliban had continued to advance. That means we would be spending around what the federal government spends every year on children’s health insurance. It’s about half of what we spend on health research and training. It’s roughly what the Navy spends on shipbuilding or the amount the Navy and Air Force each separately spend on buying aircraft. It’s about the value of United Airlines. And it’s certainly a big amount for a country to be sending abroad when more than two million of its own citizens don’t have running water or indoor plumbing.

A bad government

Working with the Afghan government had a moral price, too. We had to overlook a lot of corruption—much of which was fueled by the money we pumped into Afghanistan. Uprooting that corruption would have been akin to uprooting the Afghan system. We had to overlook massive poppy production—and when we fought it, we pushed money toward the Taliban. We had to overlook pedophilic kidnappings by Afghan military leaders. We had to overlook nasty partners like General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who once suffocated hundreds of prisoners of war and who has twice caused political crises by kidnapping and torturing high-profile rivals. U.S.-backed strike teams and militias were no strangers to serious abuses too.

The Afghan military and Afghanistan’s political leaders bear the most moral responsibility, after the Taliban, for the situation in the country now. After decades of fighting, these men gave up and cut deals with the Taliban. Those who wanted to stand their ground found themselves isolated and abandoned by their comrades in arms. Pundits may speak of Biden abandoning the women of Afghanistan. This is navel-gazing. The women of Afghanistan were abandoned by their husbands, sons, and fathers. The Afghan military’s surrender was an act of cowardice and injustice against their own country and their fellow citizens. We would be outraged if our military did this to us. To be sure, the United States could have better prepared for Kabul’s fall, and there have been ignominious moments in the withdrawal—see the aerial evacuation of dogs, for example. But the ugly scenes at Kabul’s airport would not have happened had the Afghan military held its ground.

The higher levels of Afghanistan’s military leadership failed, too. They obviously did not prepare a competent fighting force. Their corruption certainly helped with that—some frontline personnel had not been paid in months, and many lacked supplies. Yet they also failed to deploy what they had well. All of Afghanistan’s major cities fell in a matter of days because the Taliban had methodically cut them off, one by one, in the preceding weeks and months. The Afghan military lost everything because it had tried to hold too much.

Afghanistan’s political leaders deserve the blame most of all. They oversaw all of this, and their venality, selfishness, and incompetence undercut support for the government.

This cuts into a set of deeper moral issues for the United States. It is right for us to wish the people of other lands well and at times to help them. Indifference would be a failure of solidarity—a denial of our common humanity. But a solidarity-only ethic denies subsidiarity. Humans are not abstractions—rational souls floating in the void. We are incarnate. We live in particular times, places, and cultures. These particularities impose duties on us—to our family and polity—that are more immediate than our duties to humanity at large. It is natural and just that Americans rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and not after, say, the fall of Mekelle or Kilinochchi. The Afghan state and its security forces bore the same duties to Afghanistan—duties they abandoned. Thus President Joe Biden’s statement Monday: “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”

Behind all this, we must remember that the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place because we were victims. The de facto government of Afghanistan hosted a notorious international terrorist group. That group then killed thousands within the United States. We drove out this government and replaced it with a better one. We then spent nearly two decades strengthening the new government and providing reconstruction aid. We sacrificed thousands of our troops’ lives. We went above and beyond any reasonable duty that could be imposed on a victim of aggression. Was Abyssinia obliged to rebuild post-Mussolini Italy? How many decades of support did China owe post-Imperial Japan?

The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.

John Allen Gay is executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society.

Image: Reuters.