How the Air Force Lost Its Way: Jerry Hendrix, National Review, Jan. 28, 2019 — The United States Air Force has lost its way. It has forgotten what business it’s in, mistakenly believing that itsraison d’être is air supremacy while forgetting that the core of its mission is a long-range strike.
Japanese F-35 Crashes. Now the Search Is on For Wreckage and Reasons: Brad Lendon,CNN, Apr. 11, 2019 — A Japanese F-35 fighter crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, raising questions about reliability and security of the most expensive weapons system ever made.
How Did Israel’s Enemies Become Experts in Tunnel Warfare?: Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2018 — In April 2017, a lumbering MC-130 with its four whirring propellers flew over a mountainous area in eastern Afghanistan. Just before eight in the evening, the plane dropped a 9,797-kilogram bomb, known as a GBU-43, the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used, on a tunnel network used by Islamic State in Afghanistan.
On Topic Links
Nuclear Commander Defends Deterrence: Jamie McIntyre. Washington Examiner, Mar. 5, 2019 – The following is a condensed and edited version of testimony that Air Force Gen John Hyten, the U.S. strategic commander in charge of America’s nuclear forces, gave the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday.
Court Tosses Rulings from Military Judge in Setback for USS Cole Bombing Case at Guantanamo Bay: Jerry Dunleavy, Washington Examiner, Apr. 16, 2019 — A federal appeals court tossed years of court rulings on Wednesday in a terrorism case being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba focused on the deadly terrorist bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.
Introduction: An Assessment of U.S. Military Power: Heritage, Oct. 4, 2019 — America is a global power with global interests. Its military is meant first and foremost to defend America from attack.
The Future of Technology in Warfare: From Drone Swarms to VR Torture: Thomas Macaulay & Tamlin Magee, Tec World, Apr 18, 2018 — Warfare and technology make the perfect partners of destruction.
DAVID J. BERCUSON: NATO HAS PROBLEMS
David J. Bercuson
National Post, Sept. 4, 2018 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sick and no one is trying to cure the alliance. While NATO’s last meeting in Europe seemed to focus on which members were meeting the two percent of GDP expenditure on defence and which were not (Canada was far from the goal), the real problems afflicting the alliance today went undiscussed.NATO was born almost 60 years ago to contain the Soviet Union and to deter any efforts by the U.S.S.R. to either openly attack non-Communist countries there or to intimidate them to follow the Soviet line even if they were not Communist. The latter condition was dubbed “Finlandization,” because although Finland was a functioning social democratic nation, it lay along the Soviet border and thus virtually every aspect of its foreign and defence policy had to line up with Moscow, or else.But the Soviet Union is long gone, the Cold War is over and although Russia under President Vladimir Putin is trying to resurrect the military power that once marked the Soviet Union, it is a shadow of its former military self even though it holds the largest collection of nuclear warheads on the face of the planet. The Russians are trying to modernize and reorganize their military as fast as they can, but they have neither the money nor the intellectual resources to match the United States, let alone NATO.So why does NATO even exist? In the decade or so after the end of the Cold War, NATO became the waiting room for the European Union. Countries that had once formed part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact broke free and yearned for entry into the European Union where capitalism would, they believed, free their people and their economies of the dead hand of Marxian economics. The first step to that goal was almost always membership in NATO.
And thus, NATO expanded but as it did so, serious problems began to appear, beginning in the 1990s. During NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Serbian troops in Kosovo in 1999, NATO was far from united in its goal of forcing the Serbs to stop persecuting the Muslim population of Kosovo. Some member nations were dead set against the military mission, others were neutral. And that reflected NATO divisions that had emerged even earlier during Operation Desert Fox when U.S. and U.K. aircraft flew countless missions over Iraq under Saddam Hussein to both keep the Iraqi airforce on the ground and conduct surveillance missions over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction sites.
When NATO entered the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, many NATO countries placed caveats on their troops limiting how they could be used in military operations. Some nations did not allow their troops to operate at night. Some did not allow their militaries to conduct offensive operations. Others limited their troops to relatively placid areas of the country, thus avoiding the real hotspots in the south in Kandahar and Helmand provinces or in the northeast in the Korengal Valley. The problem of the caveats effectively divided the NATO presence in Afghanistan into troops that would fight, troops that would not, and troops that might fight sometime if the conditions set for them by their home governments were just right. This significant problem has never been resolved… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
HOW THE AIR FORCE LOST ITS WAY
Jerry Hendrix
National Review, Jan. 28, 2019
The United States Air Force has lost its way. It has forgotten what business it’s in, mistakenly believing that its raison d’être is air supremacy while forgetting that the core of its mission is long-range strike. If the nation is to be successful in the great-power competition it finds itself in, the Air Force will need to find its way home and regain its strategic relevance in an environment dominated by anti-access/area-denial systems employed by China and Russia.
The present situation is not unlike the scenario that confronted Apple founder Steve Jobs when he returned to the company in 1997. Building upon the core small-personal-computer market that had characterized the company at its inception, Jobs’s successors had branched out, adding multiple software and hardware lines of operations, with declining results. By the time Jobs returned, the company was two months from bankruptcy.Jobs’s prescription was to cut staff, simplify production back to one basic desktop computer, reduce retailers, and wait. These initial actions stabilized the company and bought time, but Jobs’s lack of action to plot a new course for the company raised questions. One strategic consultant asked him, “So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?” Jobs’s cryptic reply was, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”
Jobs’s actions when the technology that let him move forward with the iPod and the iPhone became mature demonstrated that he understood the company’s true strategy, which was not building desktop computers but rather making data, information, and entertainment more accessible to the public. Jobs restored his company’s ethos.
The Air Force once understood its purpose with stark clarity. In the first half of the 20th century, air-power advocates continually stressed the importance of bypassing tactical skirmishes and penetrating to the enemy’s vital centers to coerce either the foreign government or its population to submit. Independent air forces in Great Britain and Italy focused their procurement efforts on larger and longer-range heavy bombers. Non-independent air forces, such as the U.S. Army Air Corps, sought the same even as their parent service (the U.S. Army, in the American case) pressed them to buy tactical aircraft and perform direct-combat air-support missions for ground infantry and armor units. This made some sense during World War II, when long-range bombers found themselves in need of fighter escorts to fend off enemy fighters and establish temporary air dominance for the bombers to get through to their targets. But after the war, science and engineering combined to alter circumstances.
The jet engines that came to dominate aircraft design during the early years of the Cold War changed the nature of force employment, as jet fighters no longer had the range to escort the jet bombers of the newly established and very powerful Strategic Air Command to targets inside the Soviet Union. Fighters then became specialized for air-defense and air-dominance missions within a radius of a couple of hundred miles of fighter bases. Strategic Air Command bombers, which numbered in the thousands, soon began to specialize themselves, evolving towards designs that could fly higher and faster in order to penetrate Soviet air defenses. The Soviets responded by building new surface-to-air missiles and high-altitude/high-speed interceptors to rob American bombers of their advantages. It was only at the end of the Cold War, with the introduction of the stealth B-2 Spirit bomber,that bombers regained the upper hand in the U.S.–USSR strategic competition. But by then, the Strategic Air Command had been disestablished, and the Air Force felt that its mission had changed… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
JAPANESE F-35 CRASHES. NOW THE SEARCH IS ON
FOR WRECKAGE AND REASONS
Brad Lendon
CNN, Apr. 11, 2019
A Japanese F-35 fighter crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, raising questions about reliability and security of the most expensive weapons system ever made. The stealth jet disappeared from radar minutes into a training mission from Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. Defense officials said its pilot signaled the need to abort the mission shortly before the plane was lost.
Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya said debris from the plane, parts of its two tail fins, was found early Wednesday. Japanese and US planes and ships, including a US guided-missile destroyer, were continuing to search for the pilot, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said, adding that the unnamed aviator was a male in his 40s with more than 3,200 hours of flying experience.
He was flying what is considered the best stealth jet technology in the skies. With the world’s most advanced avionics, engines and weaponry, the Pentagon touts the F-35 as the “the most affordable, lethal, supportable and survivable aircraft ever to be used.”
As of August 2018, more than 310 F-35s have been delivered to militaries around the world, according to the plane’s maker, Lockheed Martin.
Japan’s first squadron of the $100 million fighter jets went operational just 11 days ago, with 13 of the jets forming the 302nd Squadron at the Misawa base, according to a report from The Diplomat.com. Iwaya said Japan’s remaining dozen F-35s would be grounded until the cause of Tuesday’s crash is determined.
But early reports suggest system failure and that’s troubling because it might mean that something had been missed in the production process, said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy officer, andprofessor at Hawaii Pacific University. “Certification, when it’s new, is pretty demanding. The checkout is very thorough in early production models,” he said.
While most F-35s are made in the United States, the one that crashed Tuesday was the first to come off an assembly line in Nagoya, Japan, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said.
Peter Layton, a former Australian Air Force officer and analyst at the Griffith Asia Institute, said the Japanese assembly line would be one of the first places to look for answers. “There are several hundred F-35sflying (worldwide) suggesting a local not fleet wide problem,” he said.
The fact that the Japanese pilot called for a mission abort but apparently did not issue a mayday call indicates a possible instrumentation problem, possibly with the plane’s wiring, Layton said. “The pilot appears to have thought he was in command and not in imminent danger,” Layton said. It’s possible as the aviator was trying to troubleshoot, he flew straight into the ocean, he said… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
HOW DID ISRAEL’S ENEMIES BECOME EXPERTS
IN TUNNEL WARFARE?
Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2018
In April 2017, a lumbering MC-130 with its four whirring propellers flew over a mountainous area in eastern Afghanistan. Just before eight in the evening, the plane dropped a 9,797-kilogram bomb, known as a GBU-43, the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used, on a tunnel network used by Islamic State in Afghanistan.
Thirty-six ISIS members were killed in the massive explosion that followed, according to US estimates. The ISIS tunnel network was more complex than the one that Hezbollah has built in southern Lebanon, but just as the US has had to contend with terrorist tunnels, Israel and all countries facing terrorism are increasingly forced to fight an underground war.
The complexity of caves and tunnels is one of many used by terrorist groups in Afghanistan. ISIS, like many terror groups, have become experts in tunnels. They didn’t invent this on their own. They graduated from what other terror groups have used and used tunnels that have existed in places like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan for decades. Some of these are bunker complexes that various regimes built, improved upon by terrorists, or they may be terror tunnels built by other groups such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
In Douma in Syria, the Syrian rebels built a massive complex of tunnels. BBC called it “quite a work of engineering.” It was excavated from solid clay and stones and was big enough to “drive a vehicle down.” One reporter who went down into the tunnels in Douma called it was a “subterranean life.”
Hezbollah’s tunnels into Israel have now been revealed in a recent video after Israel began operation Northern Shield. So far, the tunnels under the border have not consisted of such massive complexity and are not equipped with places for vehicles. To understand their origin and the kinds of difficulty in confronting this issue, we must look back at the Second Lebanon War of 2006.
Hezbollah spent decades improving its terror infrastructure in southern Lebanon. After Israel withdrew in 2000 from Lebanon the leaders of Hezbollah planned an extensive network of what was labeled “nature reserves” by Israel, complex tunnels and bunkers designed to conceal the growing arsenal of the group. They attempted to make them not only difficult to find but also difficult to bomb, according to a 2016 article by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. According to the report, they built fortified areas in 200 villages. In an article published by the US Army Combined Arms Center in 2008, the authors looked at Hezbollah’s tunnel expertise.
According to this study, which quoted an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officer, Hezbollah had “North Korean advisors [who] had assisted Hezbollah in building tunnel infrastructure.” One tunnel was supposedly 25 kilometers long. This extraordinary claim, printed in Asharq Al-Awsat, may not be accurate. One IDF soldier remarked that after the 2006 war, he found a bunker near Maroun al-Ras. It was 25 feet deep, linked several rooms, and had a camera that Hezbollah used to monitor outside movement.
The US army report suggests that Hezbollah – which was born in the 1980s – might have been inspired by the Viet Cong who used tunnels to confront the US military in Vietnam in the 1960s. The Viet Cong dug massive tunnel systems. One at Cu Chi was 250 kilometers long. Hezbollah might have sought to copy the Vietnamese, but it also wanted to exploit modern technology. Tunnels that were found in 2006 included some with hydraulic steel doors… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
