Naval blockades

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Naval blockades have a terrible image. The ongoing illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is an important example, but there were much more famine-causing naval blockades. I guess few may remember or know about the Biafra genocide (1967-1970). The famine in Germany during winter 1916/17 is another example that slipped into obscurity of history, known mostly to history or WWI nerds. The Israeli naval blockade of Gaza Strip is a necessary component of its genocidal effort to liquidate the Palestinian population presence in the Gaza Strip. Relatively little-known in the West is the famine in Yemen, created in part by a naval blockade.

To cause a famine via a naval blockade has been recognised as a war crime for a long time. 

Blockade of Toulon, 1810-1914

 

I will argue that naval blockades can be used for good and lessen the horrors of war.

The American efforts by submarines and air power against Japanese maritime transport during 1942-1945 did contribute to a famine in Japan, but they also did ensure Japanese defeat, even without any spectacular sea battles, continental land battles or city bombing. The Japanese war effort relied on maritime transportation and Japan was short of transport ships by war's start and captured just barely enough transport ships in the opening weeks of the conflict to satisfy its minimum transportation needs.

Imagine Ukraine had launched a campaign of distant naval blockade against Russia by using armed merchantmen with helicopters for boarding. These ships could have departed from foreign ports, met up with a helicopter coming from an airport and at sea they could be commissioned into a warship. The helicopter could transport all the arms & explosives equipment needed for the cruise (transported to the airport by diplomatic luggage). Russia would not be starved at all due to ongoing ability to import food by land routes, but its export revenue and thus its ability to economically support the war effort would largely have collapsed.

Argentina occupied the Falklands Islands (and South Georgia) by force in 1982. The British responded by sending the navy, some land forces, a few strategic bombers and submarines to retake the islands by force. About 900 people died. Alternatively, the UK could have declared it's acting in national defence and just sent a SSN or two as well as a support and garrison to Ascension. The submarines could have established a naval blockade indefinitely. Only outgoing ships would be engaged in order to not accidentally sinking a ship going to Uruguay instead and in order to avoid sinking incoming ships with humanitarian goods. Argentina has enough food production to not need any food imports and was easily able to import medical goods via land, of course The blockade would merely have crushed the Argentinian export economy. A single SSN at the Rio de la Plata could neutralise seven Argentinian ports if aided by reports from diplomats in Uruguay telling about which ships actually left Uruguayan ports rather than Argentinian ones. Argentina's foreign trade would have been crushed and it would have been forced to evacuate the occupied territories within months or a few years. The total loss of life would have been in the low hundreds, very likely none British (other than the one man who died during the invasion).

Israel could be pressured to end its still ongoing genocide effort against Gaza and its ethnic cleansing efforts in West Bank and (apparently also in) Southern Lebanon by a naval blockade at the straits of Gibraltar and Bosporus (plus closed Suez Canal). There wouldn't even be a need to blockade the Bab-el-Mandeb (Red Sea) because the Israeli port of Eilat has too little capacity and the impact on maritime trade would be compounded by a similar air traffic embargo and by the strength of the political signal.

Morocco could be forced to end its illegal occupation of West Sahara (equal to Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, but never treated as harshly by the UN) via maritime blockade. Its ability to maintain air traffic over the Atlantic and maybe trade via land route would be insufficient to resist the blockade. Morocco has a lot more ports, but Spain has enough naval and air power to succeed with such a blockade without any foreign assistance. It could recognise the Western Saharan exile government, conclude a mutual defence treaty and then I suppose it would be authorised under international law to enact a naval blockade. Cargo ships loaded with food or medical supplies only could visit a Spanish port for inspection before safely cruising to a Moroccan port. To liberate the entire country of Western Sahara might cost less than a hundred, certainly less than a thousand lives.

Indonesia could be forced to let Papua go via a naval blockade, but the effort required would be disproportionate considering the population sizes and the dependence of Indonesia on maritime transport. The many ports and routes would reduce a submarine campaign to a campaign of harassment anyway. The Indonesian government could reimburse companies for lost ships and cargo to maintain maritime trade despite harassment and bleed out financially, but the harm done would still be disproportionate to the

Northern Cyprus is a too tricky case as well. The Turkish occupation could be sustained by airlift and Turkish maritime trade could be substituted with land trade or hidden among the maritime trade through the Bosporus.

Iran could have defeated the Iraqi war of aggression in the 1980's via naval blockade if the U.S. hadn't intervened and de facto broke the legitimate naval blockade. 

Most European navies have followed two paths, with some overlap: Land attack navy with a nuclear deterrence submarine fleet (U.S., less so UK and France) and/or inefficient balanced miniature navy (a couple frigates, maybe one or two submarines operational at a time, possibly one or two small to medium-sized aircraft carriers).

They forfeited the convoying concept and also the concept of directly securing maritime lanes in favour of defeating hostile submarine fleets in port, by anti-submarine blockade ("GIUK gap" obsession) or by aggressively hunting them. They are not optimised for wartime naval blockade, albeit some offshore patrol vessels and poorly armed frigates were built especially with enforcing UN embargoes at sea without much violence in mind.

We still have many ways of enacting a naval blockade despite this lack of optimisation.

- - - - -

A wartime naval blockade can be maintained by

• sustaining a surface warship patrol at a strait or canal entrance/exit
• land-based aerial reconnaissance & strikes by fixed and rotary wing air power
• submarines of sufficient quantity, readiness, range and endurance (not necessarily SSNs)
• armed merchantmen as commerce raiders, preferably with helicopters (the lowest cost approach)
• blocking a strait (especially if there's no international waters passage through it) 

It's better to use torpedoes, missiles and bombs rather than mines because it would be exceedingly difficult to hit only the correct ships with mines. Published naval mine danger zones could be employed to channel the targets into fewer and narrower lanes for easier picking by submarine ambush or boarding, though.

Western navies could do it in some scenarios, but they're not built for it. The British would be hard-pressed to sustain a Strait of Gibraltar blockade with more than one SSN plus one frigate or destroyer, for example. Their combat ship and submarine fleets are at very low readiness and their replenishment fleet is in total shambles. As of now, five container sets (to turn a feeder container ship into an armed merchantman) and a list of civilian helicopters to commandeer would yield better readiness to conduct a naval blockade against Russia or China than the existing royal navy IMO.

I shall not end this pointer without pointing out non-lethal close relative to the naval blockade; cutting communication cables, pipelines and power lines at sea, overseas asset freezing, trade embargo, blacklisting embargo breaking ships for ports/flag/shipping insurance, confiscating assets by embargo-violating companies and individuals, embargoing trade partners, driving prices of export goods of the targeted country down or import prices up.

 

related:

/2015/09/naval-commerce-raiding-today.html 

/2021/12/future-naval-commerce-raiding.html 

/2024/03/a-ukrainian-merchant-raider.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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Civilian Germany doesn't understand the scale of wastefulness in the military

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This guy wasted about 2.3 billion Euros by grossly mishandling protective mask purchases during the Corona pandemic. His level of competence and his level of ethics fits to his party, so he's now his party's 2nd most powerful member and currently very influential on federal legislation.

 

I could tell more (very!) bad things about this very unnecessary person, but I'm writing this blog post in reaction to the disinformation in the screenshot. It's taken from one of the less terrible German media organisations that's usually not under suspicion of campaigning for his party (unlike many others).

They claim his waste of public funds (a.k.a. taxpayer money) is likely the greatest any German politician is responsible of.

This is a symptom of the widespread defence policy illiteracy - and this media outlet (or at least its print twin) is one of the more active and history-rich ones in terms of reporting on bad military or defence policy. 

2.3 billion Euros damage - here's a short list of worse waste of money that politicians bear responsibility for (IMO the minister of defence bears full responsibility albeit members of parliament and career officers effed up as well, of course):

• near-useless Tiger helicopters
• near-useless NH-90 helicopters
• useless heavylift helicopter (CH-47) order
• useless F 125 frigates
• F-104 Starfighter (corruption and tunnel vision, not plain incompetence)
• F-35 (2.3 billion € spent fixed cost for nothing so far)

To compile this list took a minute. There's more, so much more.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Constellation class program aborted

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The U.S. government (mostly) cancelled its navy frigate program that was meant to slightly adapt a foreign frigate design for the USN so a lower cost general purpose ships could do all the escort tasks that Arleigh Burke destroyers cannot do because they're busy escorting carriers.

The NAVSEA bureaucracy ruined the program with so many changes that the program turned into a mess. They didn't get much of anything right post-Cold War anyway. The Arleigh Burke was the last important ship class that was not a mess - but even its fist batch of ships was flawed due to the lack of a helicopter.

 

Some background: 

The Americans always followed a general purpose ship design philosophy regarding escorts for four decades, while some European countries use smaller ships dedicated to either air defence or anti-submarine warfare. There are also some general purpose ships in Europe and both some Europeans and the Japanese have ships that are Arleigh Burke equivalents, but the Americans clearly favour general purpose (GP). GP nowadays means not just AAW and ASW, but also defence against quasiballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles. The use of quasiballistic missiles by the Houthis against ships now help to justify this. I believe the GP approach is the correct one for such warships, my reasoning is here. 

 

So there we have one of the reasons why it's so difficult for the American naval bureaucracy to exercise self-restraint and modesty. They want a first rate AAW ship that's also a first rate ASW ship and has the endurance for transoceanic escorting. There's just no way that's going to end up being compact or cheap, especially if you have the hypersonic missile threat in mind. That's why they de facto stick with the Arleigh Burke class, albeit that hull is kinda overburdened by now (both the newest hulls and upgraded ones).

The feasible quantity of frigates wouldn't have sufficed for much ambition anyway. The hopes of the Americans for the case of a Sino-American war rest on holding the so-called island chains as bases for air power so the carriers (their aircraft are rather too short-ranged for much direct attack on the PRC early in such a war) would only have to sortie if some task force or convoy attempts to run the blockade or knock out / invade one of those islands. The Chinese submarine fleet isn't terribly big (in relation to possible tasks) or of a high quality and would rather not bring Pacific & Indian Ocean maritime transport to a standstill. It might not even be able to cut the Tokyo-Hawaii route.

The need for American frigates only exists if Chinese naval or air power can somehow run the blockade and get into position to attack whatever the frigates would be tasked to protect. 

I wrote some suggestions how the USN should reform and I can live with nothing of it being done.

 

In my opinion the Americans do not need frigates so much - even though that's widely regarded to be an extremely obvious need. 

 

The U.S. armed forces need to prepare differently for a Sino-American War:

1. container sets to create armed merchantmen from container ships for a distant blockade enforcing role
2. container sets to create self-protecting armed merchantman convoys capable of (at least mostly) surviving a weak air attack and a single submarine in blue water
3. some form of transport to resupply forwardmost island chain bases with kerosene*
4. composite island garrison regiments (USMC&USAF) that defend and run an airbase on an island (including jump ski** and arrestor gears to reduce dependence on long runways)
5. many more munitions, especially anti-ship missiles and anti-submarine munitions (the USN should introduce Type 07, as it's much superior to VL ASROC)
6. preparations to use C-17s as missile saturation attack launch platforms
7. USAF fighter/strike fighter procurement of CVN-compatible aircraft (replace F-35A with F-35C with additional interface for USAF-style midair refuelling) to ensure the carrier don't easily run out of aircraft due to combat attrition and the island chain airbases can operate without lengthy runways 
8. A-10s transfer to ANG or some kind of USMC reserve with 99% of their role being buddy-buddy tanker so F-35s based on island chain airbases can be refuelled without using giant long runway-dependent tankers
9. figure out how to convince the PRC leadership to take an exit from war once it's started

 

Meanwhile, European countries should in my opinion use a rather non-military approach to deter the PRC:

1. We should establish a "Stay out of Europe doctrine" regarding East Asian powers and enforce it.
2. No patrols of European warships between Singapore to Alaska
3. Clarify in public that Europeans would join a Sino-American War only if Article V North Atlantic Treaty gets triggered (Chinese aggression including attack on CONUS)
   /2017/07/just-reminder-about-north-atlantic.html
   /2018/11/natos-boundaries.html
   This would serve as a deterrent against escalation of a hot conflict.
4. Clarify in public that Europeans would enact a total economic, communications, travel embargo and asset freezes against whoever starts a war between the PRC & Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines and/or the U.S..

 

related:

Eight part series about escorts (I'm still 95+% fine with what I wrote there)

/2021/05/navies-obsession-with-peacetime-hull.html 

/2023/04/chinas-naval-geography-problem-and-usn.html

/2023/07/shipbuilding-disparity-and-usn.html
 

 

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

 

*: There are two historical (mostly WW2) precedents: Fast surface combat ships (mostly destroyers and fast minelayers) use as fast transports that run a blockade by sprinting (not very promising nowadays) and transport submarines.

**: To use a fixed jump ski (not facing into the wind) approximately halves the necessary runway length for take-off with high trust to weight aircraft such as F-35.

Army vehicle size limits

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It's often said that the CVR/T tank family of the British was required to be narrow enough to fit between the rubber trees on Malaysian plantations due to the British experiences in the late 40's conflict there.

(c)Irish Defence Forces

I don't care whether it's an myth or true - it inspired me to think of what we should require regarding vehicle maximum sizes in Europe. I do explicitly exclude heavy logistics and support vehicles as well as tanks here; just thinking of common battlefield used by forces in or close to a battle such as cars and APCs.

The war in Ukraine has shown the importance of being able to hide troops, vehicles and supplies once again. It also had and has a substantial share of combat inside woodland, even including tank actions.

 

Garage doors aren't standardised even in Germany, but they are very commonly sized to fit at most a medium-sized SUV.

Doors aren't fully standardised either, but there's a certain common size that could inform requirements regarding UGVs and all kinds of manually-moved containers on wheels belonging to headquarters, field kitchens and the like.

One thing is for sure: We should NOT permit battlefield vehicles to be needlessly too tall for concealment. Vehicles so tall that to disguise them as a building is the only promising approach should not exist. 

"Boxer" - some geniuses want to add a turret on top

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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How many generals do we need? Or: The case against generals

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This blog post will be close to maximum disrespectful towards general ranks. The two reasons for my disrespect are the reasoning I will lay out and military history.

Today's armies (and air forces) have great many officers at general rank on active duty. A ratio of personnel strength to quantity of generals close to 1,000:1 is not unusual nowadays (edit: German military as a whole in 2019: 935:1 for troops to generals+admirals, assuming no vacancies among generals and admirals). The U.S. armed forces had a ratio of about 8,000:1 between overall personnel and generals plus admirals by late WW2, for comparison.

 

So, how many generals do you need?

I'll begin with the field army. One might think a brigade is commanded by a brigade general, but in many armies it's commanded by a colonel. So for a high scenario you need one general per brigade (none per independent regiment), but none for a low scenario.

The commonly most-respected ratio of brigades to divisions is three brigades in a division. The division commander has a general rank, but his executive officer and second in command doesn't need to have one. Moreover, we could use four brigades per division, but I won't choose that for the high scenario. So the high scenario is at five general ranks per division, low one is at one.

Next, the corps level. A corps usually also follows the rule of three, a corps with only two divisions only makes sense if the mobilised strength of an army is either two or five divisions. We can safely assume that the second in command of a corps is at general rank like the commander himself. Let's add one reserve general. So we're at 17 generals for an army corps in the high scenario and six for the low scenario.

The entire German field army as of now and into 2030 is not going to need more than 17 generals and could very well make do with six.

 

So why are there so many more generals? They're not needed for the field army. Instead, they're in management jobs, comparable to management board members in a public company.

And here's the thing; we could hire civilian managers for most of those jobs. (Junior) officers of the reserve often advance in business leadership positions, so there's enough of a reserves pool and they can be called up even at high age (not just 45 years of age as is the limit for ordinary conscripts in some countries).

Imagine a mobilised army strength of two army corps. The 2nd (reserve) corps would need 6...17 general rank officers, but it would be inactive in peacetime. These general rank officers could be in exactly the kind of management positions where a civilian manager (even if he/she/it is a captain in the reserves) would be insufficient: Leading the military schools, doctrine development, future force planning.

Many Western countries are in NATO, and the "O" stands for organisation, but by now it should be a "B" for "bureaucracy". Great many career officers have jobs in said bureaucracy and in NATO HQs of often questionable usefulness beyond logistics management purposes. You cannot have a lean army with few general ranks and still play the games at this bureaucracy, for you would have to send generals to fit general rank positions in this bureaucracy. My advice is to largely stop wasting money on the NATO bureaucracy. The degree of influence on the largely pointless work there is small even for a country such as Germany. Command structures above Corps are the only really interesting HQ structures anyway. A country such as Spain would suffer practically no real negative effects if it ceased to participate in the NATO bureaucracy and command structure, for example.

 

So in the end, a bloated, top-heavy army of today could be crashed from around 200 general ranks to less than 40 (at two corps mobilised strength) without loss of deterrence or defence strength. You just need a couple years for the conversion and you need to make sure they never meet in the same room.

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de 

P.S.: I could make a case that a European air force only needs two general ranks because so much operational decisionmaking happens at below general rank level. And don't get me started on admirals!

 

edit: The Bundeswehr had 211 generals (not just army generals) and admirals in 2019. I cannot find any more recent figure, it doesn't seem to have been disclosed any more. So we had about 100 generals in an army that could be described as having a corps-sized field army and hardly any ability to mobilise reserve combat formations.

And don't get me started about the quality of the generals. We promoted the wrong people and turned the right people into wrong people. The problems already begin at lieutenant level - many of those are simply not suitable to become officers. Some of them aren't even suitable to be volunteer soldiers.

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Drone cloud support to battlefield drones

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Here's one thing that drones can do that manned aviation did not do in either world war nor in the Vietnam War:

A huge quantity of cheap yet EM-hardened drones with about 30 km flying range can saturate any counter-drone defence and thus protect much fewer actual scout and attack drones in the air.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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Artillery fires types

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The literature (including field manuals) usually discerns three kinds of artillery fires for lethal munitions*:

Destructive fires, neutralising fires, suppressive fires

The required munitions are the greatest for destructive fires, somewhat less** for neutralising fires (though the fire mission for this has to last quite long) and smallest for suppressive fires.

The usual literature approach is to pretend the target is infantry that has dug in or has some other cover.

Suppressive fires shall scare enough to make them combat ineffective during the suppressive fires, while neutralising fires are meant to shell-shock them into combat ineffectiveness that lasts long enough to complete an assault on the position after the artillery fires ceased.

This thinking about infantry targets with cover fits WWI thinking, but it's not very realistic even in modern trench war IMO.

The use of artillery differs greatly between high force density and low force density battle. High force density battles (such as WW2 Eastern Front) put a premium on the shelling of marshalling areas in which troops prepare for an assault. To shell such areas was reported to have caused more harm than the artillery actions during the by comparison very brief assault. Furthermore, it was reported from WW2 experience that most failed infantry attacks failed before they got into small arms range; so most successful positional defences were entirely carried by artillery and mortars (air power played a negligible role).

 

So for low force density conflicts, I'd say

• destructive fires on point targets of justifying value 
• ad hoc firing missions on moving or briefly halting forces, trying to achieve whatever best effect can be achieved in the brief time available to hit them
• obscuration for force protection
• (IR) illumination to enhance friendly forces' vision at night and possibly to damage the enemy's night vision tech

 Whereas for high force density, I'd additionally say

• destructive fires of heavy munitions (100+ kg or FAE rather than 155 mm shells) on known enemy point positions
• destructive fires on area targets if the enemy is expected to largely lack cover and hardening
• neutralising fires on known but somewhat dispersed positions (such as a platoon spread out on 1+ km of trenches or scattered 3-men positions)
• suppressive fires on suspected enemy positions while friendly are in field or view or about to enter it

I suppose this is roughly similar to the actual opinions in the Western artillery communities.

You can see that low force density battle such as fighting Taleban in Afghanistan emphasises accuracy and small dispersion - essentially precision guided munitions.

A high density conventional warfare on the other hand has good use for very destructive munitions (up to very heavy bombs) and a large quantity of dumb lethal munitions such as 155 mm HE shells.

155 mm DPICM shells are vastly more lethal on paper, but not so when fired into forests with a high tree canopy. This happens to be the most typical kind of marshalling ground for massing forces for and before an assault, though. The second most-typical one is for all I know villages - and DPICM isn't known for great lethality through roofs, while 155 mm HE has quite a reputation for ruining homes.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Other artillery purposes include propaganda (leaflet) munition delivery, illumination, obscuration (smoke) and some shots to measure the weather (multiple rocket launcher batteries used to shoot one rocket, sense its wind drift by radar until the rocket's self-destruction in the air, then compensate the aim for the real salvo). Lethal (high explosive) munitions can also be used for demolition, mostly demolition of buildings including bridges and intentional cratering of routes.

**:Whether the used amount was enough will only be known once line of sight combat troops are in contact. 
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Mysteries of the Russo-Ukrainian War

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Where are the machineguns? I saw a few photos of heavy (and ancient) machineguns in field fortifications, but other than that - crickets. Machineguns shooting down quadcopters? Haven't seen that.

Are mortars proving themselves or not? I have read a bit about Russian mortar teams, but those may have been the weird Russian long-barrelled mortar-guns rather than normal mortars. I've also seen footage of mortar bombs being delivered by motorcycle, that's all. I suspect the short range makes resupply too troublesome by now, but what did mortars do in 2022-2024? 

What about artillery radars? I understand they wouldn't last this long far enough forward to be of use now, but what about 2022/23? NATO expected WW3 to include lots of artillery duels based on artillery locating radars. Sure, modern navigation did lead to individual gun placement rather than battery placement, but I saw some photos of Russian batteries, so they did exist. Were they hit with help of radars or not? What about the battlefield surveillance radars?

What altitude do Russian cruise missiles cruise at? I saw video that seemed to suggest rather 60...100 m than 30 m (Russians don't use ft. Terrain-following radars of the 70's were capable of ~60 m autopiloted flight, ~30 m is reasonable for less than 45 minutes with manual flight with good visibility). 

Did the Iskander cruise missiles turn out to exceed the INF treaty limit of 500 km or not?

Did the Iskander quasiballistic missiles turn out to exceed the INF treaty limit of 500 km or not?

Why are the Russians unable to procure heavy payload multicopters in quantity when they're supposed to be backed by China? 

Did Nozh ERA work well or not?

I have seen almost no footage of MBT vs. MBT actions. Were they common in the first weeks? 

What's better to destroy the Crimea Bridge; Mephisto warhead of Taurus into the foundations or continuous rod warheads against the suspension part's cable bundles?

Why are TM-62 anti-tank mines used so widely for demolition work? It should be easily possible to provide demolition charges for demolition jobs, even civilian companies have those for demolition work.

Are anti-tank mines still important or is the stopping power now vested in battlefield interdiction based on drones?

Does Russia use satellites for GPS jamming or not? (Satellites could not be countered by phased directional antennas.)

Was the WW2 data about infantrymen getting near-useless after a certain quantity (IIRC 130) of combat days confirmed?

Did any Russian tanks with Arena or Drozd hard kill defences show up in combat?

Did the trade show-grade BMP-3s with lots of heavy ERA show up in combat? 

Are tethered drones in use?

Why aren't the Russians able to regularly find & hit Ukrainian air defence radars or combat aircraft on the ground?

Related to the previous question: How useful is Russian satellite reconnaissance for battlefield uses?

How quickly can Russian artillery and mortars react to calls (I understand this is going to be a huge range of response times, so a distribution would be interesting)? 

Why can't the Russian navy reliably kill off simple motorboats? Even WW2 radars were already able to detect a periscope!

Why can't the Russians stop Ukrainian very low level air attacks despite having missiles such as R-37M and 9M96E2?

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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CAS over Ukraine

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So far the most effective* close air support (CAS) over Ukraine appears to be toss bombing of guided bombs.

It's similar to the graphic below, save for greater range with glide kits and greater accuracy if the guidance does its job.

The aircraft arrives very low (maybe 100 ft), pulls up, releases flares and chaff, releases the bomb, escapes at very low altitude (again maybe 100 ft).

 

U 

The advantage over artillery is mostly that the munitions are much heavier. Huge craters by delay-fuzed heavy bombs can destroy underground field fortifications or sewers, a single bomb can destroy a large building.  

The speed of the vehicle should be high subsonic in order for the munition to have much kinetic energy (and thus range) upon release.

 

This doesn't look like the "Americans bomb brown people" guided bomb attacks from above ManPADS ceiling (at about 15k ft) or dive-bombing from such safe altitude and it doesn't look like the A-10 concept of CAS, either.

 

Post-WW2 versions of toss bombing were initially developed for free-fall nuclear bombs, as the pilot wanted to get away from the blast in time. Later on, the skills were used by Israelis in 1973 and the British in 1982 when they faced effective air defences and didn't dare to fly in range and in line of sight to said air defences for more than a few seconds.

 

We could dismiss the Ukraine CAS experience as irrelevant to NATO because NATO would go after the air defences, but

1. anti-radar missiles aren't terribly plentiful (we had shortages in 1999 already)
2. even radar-based air defences survive anti-air defence campaigns for long if the air defence officers are smart (see 1999 Kosovo Air War and 2022-2025 Ukraine air warfare)
3. not all air defences require radar (examples IRIS-T SLM and VL MICA IR missiles) and radar-independent air defences are very difficult to suppress.** In fact, medium range air defences based on thermal cameras may be more useful than ones based on x-band radars because of RF stealth aircraft. 

So what should we do based on the observations from Ukraine?

 

I stick to my opinion that we need eyes in the sky, but fires can come from the ground. Air/Ground bombing does not seem to promise a good overall package (cost, uncertainty, rapidity of effects) in peer wars in my opinion. That being said, Russia is no peer to NATO. We can deal with Russian air defences well-enough to rip open gaps in the SAM belt or we would find enough gaps between dispersed air defence umbrellas to bomb enough  (even with unguided 'iron' bombs) for decisive effect.

So we should look at Chinese air defences, really. They haven't been exposed to war and are thus of unknown quality, but a couple of their air-to-air missiles proved to be effective over Pakistan.

 

related:

/2008/11/wurfgert.html

/2010/07/first-week-of-peer-vs-peer-air-war.html 

/2018/03/luftwaffe-f-35-or-typhoon-for-airground.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: There were also super-inaccurate unguided missile attacks and unguided bomb attacks with approx. toss bombing profile and at least some guided glide bombs appear to have been released at high altitude where no area air defences made that intolerably dangerous. 

**: Radars are active emitters. These emissions can be detected, direction finding to the emissions' origin can be used to find the emitter. Triangulation by aircraft (or detector on the surface), detection by satellites and anti-radar missile simply flying towards the emitter are frequently used options. To search for a thermal camera (imaging infrared sensor) in a large area is futile by comparison.

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My critique of Israel

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I did a search in the blog archive to see how much I criticised Israel after all.

 

January 2009 Called Israel a source of alienation between NATO members and Arab countries

April 2009 Claimed that Israel alienated Western nations with its behaviour for decades

December 2008 Expressed doubts that Israel's self-defence against Hamas/Gaza was proportionate / implying it was excessive.

July 2009 Called Israel's behaviour unacceptable, singling out the bombing of other countries 

July 2010 'tail wags the dog' graphic symbolising Israel-U.S. relationship 

May 2011 Called Israel a "regional troublemaker" 

September 2011 Claimed that Israel has a "usual" disrespect against Muslim nations 

November 2011 "Expect a revolt if you run the largest prison on earth." [Gaza] 

December 2012 Insisted that Israel is no ally to the U.S., using the concept of an "ally" that's dependent on a signed & ratified two-way alliance, not mere good relations. I repeated this briefly in April 2018.

July 2014 A blog post mentioning the lopsided casualty figures in a Israel-Gaza/Hamas conflict at the time. I also supposed that Israel&Egypt could be pressured into peace with Gaza becoming Egyptian. 

July 2014 Criticism of Israel's grand strategy as stupid, drawing parallel to the Crusader states that were dependent on outside support, too. 

May 2015 Israel as #5 threat future threat to Germany, but rated "utterly unrealistic"  

July 2015 "Israel has earned a reputation for not necessarily letting refugees return" 

April 2017 "Israel's attempt to hold on to occupied territories since 1967 in spite of repeated UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal"

August 2018 Claimed that Israel deviated from Western norms and "Apartheid light, routine disregard of international norms" 

May 2019 Indirectly called Netanyahu corrupt

October 2020 Called Israel an illegal occupier of the West Bank

June 2021 Linked without comment to an article of HRW and another from The Intercept that were criticising Israel

October 2021 Mentioned Israel hacking, assassination and subversive actions without elaborating

January 2022 Mentioned without elaboration habitual Israeli occupation and bombing of foreign lands 

February 2022 Linked to an article about allegations that Israeli police illegally wiretapped Israeli citizens

February 2022 Called Israel an aggressor and occupier since 1967

February 2022 One post that is all about Israel's offences and I called it "unacceptable behaviour"

July 2022 Called Israel 5th most important threat to Germany due to the range of its nuclear-tipped missiles (later quoted this part in July 2024)

October 2023 I wrote that peace in Near East should be pursued by forcing a solution on the regional countries, not by negotiating with them.

November 2023 I wrote "Israel has to leave the occupied territories and go back to its pre-1967 borders. The state of Israel is only legitimate within the pre-1967 borders." and that the naval (longtime) blockade of Gaza by Israel was illegitimate

April 2023 Mentioned that Israel habitually commits wars of aggression

January 2024 Mentioned that Israel demolitions buildings in Gaza outside of combat.Also claimed that Israel "played the victim card too brazenly" (overplayed it).

I did NOT count my comments in the comment sections for economy of effort reason.

Now put these 28 instances in perspective; about 2,500 blog posts were written in total!

 

Looking back, I think not one of those statements is indefensible.

The "habitual", the #5 threat ranking, the opinion that Near East parties should be dictated/forced into peace rather than negotiation partners are unusual opinions, for sure. Definitely outside of mainstream. Still, in hindsight I still think of them as reasonable.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Ethnic cleansing complicity by accepting refugees?

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Here's a difficult thing about ethnic cleansing. Suppose the evil party wants a people gone, ded or alive. Just gone from a specific area. They inflict harm on them. Now there's a third party and it has to decide whether to accept refugees.

To accept refugees means to assist the evil party in its plan. Such acceptance of refugees may even be a necessary part of the evil plan. To not accept them means they will suffer harm.

The right thing to do would be to intervene and force the evil party to stop its evil actions, but suppose that would not be practical for whatever reason: 

Should the refugees be accepted or not?* 

Would help in evacuation / resettling equal complicity in ethnic cleansing?

 

The international law scholars certainly have opinions on this and possibly they even have a consensus. I didn't bother to check this, for this time I'm rather thinking about the ethical dimension than the legal one.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

 

*: Pretend it's only about the quesiton of agreeing with another country taking them in, suhc as permitting evacuation flights over territory if an aversion to let certain brown people into your country gets in the way of thinking clealry and within the limits of this case / model.

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The finiteness of self-defence

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I wrote about extremist warfare in 2009. The idea was that maximalist war objectives such as total annexation or unconditional surrender raise the bar to victory because they provoke maximalist hostile efforts. The effect is that wars are unnecessarily long and destructive compared to the case of more moderate objectives.

Now I'd like to point out something similar:

Some countries becomes extremist in response to being under attack. They have the legitimate and legal right to self-defence, but then they just keep going, inflate and exceed this right, up to "forever conflicts" where supposedly all military action for all eternity isjustified by the original offence.

I strongly suppose that the right to self-defence ends when the hostilities have ceased (including blockades and occupations by the aggressor being lifted) and only renews when a new aggression occurs. Any remaining entitlements to compensation of damages is then a legal affair that does not justify violence.

Examples for such 'forever' conflicts:

• American derangement about the Iranian embassy crisis 
• Israeli conflicts with Syrians, Palestinians, Hezbollah
• The Frozen Korean War (some people pretend the lack of a peace treaty means an attack on North Korea would still be legal) 
• The American sustainment of their conflict with Iraq from 1991-2003

I wanted to raise awareness about the problem and shed some light on it, but the latter intent is difficult to realise. I simply don't see any justification for such an open-endedness of a right to commit violence.

Proportionality is for all I know a universally accepted principle in law. An aggression from decades ago that was already punished ten times over cannot possibly be considered to justify further violence. It would simply not be proportional. And I'm not even discussing the "ten times over" part, right now I just take offense at the abuse of the "self defence" or ' UN authorised military action' authorisations of violence by pretending that they are endless.

 

We should go beyond accepting that self-defence is a right and pay A LOT more attention to the limits of self-defence. Civilised countries did this in criminal law, it's about time the public does it in regard to military actions (and subversive, sabotage and assassination activities).

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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Guilty or not?

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Suppose a man gets killed in his home. He had a long and violent dispute with his neighbour.

 

Should the police investigate said neighbour as suspect even though his grandma was murdered 80 years ago?

 

Or does this mean the neighbour cannot be guilty?

 

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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A track record that needs no hiding

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I searched for an old blog post to quote and instead found a blog post-sized comment of mine (colouration added):

I covered Russia previously
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2007/08/no-major-war-in-europe-in-next-ten.html
and as much as I like low military spending, it's a bit more complex than what you suggest.
I don't expect them to turn on us militarily in a few years (rather on Ukraine), but don't exclude it as a possibility.


First problem: Lags (a.k.a. initiative)
The reacting powers would react with a lag of about three years due to imperfect information collection, processing and distribution.

Second problem: Aggressor's timing advantage
An aggressor can plan ahead to be ready for war in year x (Hitler planned 1940 for basic readiness, 1944 for full readiness against Russia and 1947 for naval readiness against the UK).
He can ensure that his forces are fit at that time. A reacting power - no matter whether low or high expenditures in peacetime - is at a disadvantage.
High peacetime expenditures can even be a disadvantage, as the equipment will be older on average than the aggressor's (example France 1940 - it still had many WWI guns).

My conclusion (I wrote several blog posts around it) is that we need to be aware that conventional warfare is the only truly threatening one (besides genocidal nuclear warfare). Militias at the end of our world will never touch us much, they cannot invade us or cut our sea lanes. Conventional warfare deserves our attention.

Our policy as well as our armed services need to be fit to react quickly.
We need good education for the relevant politicians, a good cultivation of military competence (including a reserve of trained soldiers; basic infantry training suffices to save 6+ months of lag) and we need always competitive hardware designs.
That's more easily done by many incremental steps instead of 35-year- development and replacement cycles as usual for much of our hardware.

Finally, we need to prevent that these precautions take effect - we should prevent WW3. Reduce reasons for war, don't create new ones - and avoid wasteful arms races and wars.

Published in February of 2009. The typical contents of military blogs and military news were still dominated by the occupation war in Iraq at that time.

 

I can proudly state that I'm still 100% behind those statements and feel pretty good compared to most people who actually got paid in the 2009...2021 period for commentary or studies on military affairs.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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The direct/indirect/antiair fires tank concept

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I wrote in the past about tanks that have a unusually high maximum elevation of their main gun and can be used for indirect fires and for short range air defence.

/2010/04/medium-calibre-allround-option.html 

/2017/01/42-elevation-tank-turrets.html

/2023/04/a-compact-and-agile-exploitation-brigade.html

/2023/09/the-directindirect-fires-armour.html

 

I have never elaborated on the technical side of the shot, but the technical details matter for understanding the concept.

A tank gun has a very high muzzle velocity even with a high explosive shell (it won't be less than 700 m/s). A variable propellant strength may be used and special shells or fuses may increase drag to brake the shell, but a basic tank gun HE cartridge is going to produce a cannon-like, very flat trajectory.

This makes it difficult to hit a flat target with a point detonating (impact) fuse. A slight error in elevation or a slight deviation of muzzle velocity leads to a much greater range error of the shot than the shot's lethal radius. 

Historically, the best use for cannons in indirect fire at short and medium distances was to use a bouncing shot (cannon shells bounce off flat ground when fired at no more than 10° elevation as a rule of thumb). A delay fuse would then cause the explosion  when the shell is airborne after bouncing off the ground. The fragmentation effect of this would be greater than with point detonation, but the dispersion would be bad.

How about proximity fuses? Again, quite the same as with point detonating, just worse. The fuse may trigger much too early, especially when it overflies a building. Even a time-gated proximity fuse wouldn't be satisfactory. 

Normal time fuses use 0.1 second intervals. A shell travelling at 600 m/s would thus fuse somewhere within 60 metres - unsatisfactory, as the lethal radius even of a 120 mm HE shell in much smaller. 

The technical solution is to use more modern fuses that deliver accuracy of about ten metres. The elevation may still be off a little, but an explosion 3 m lower than intended or 3 m higher than intended isn't a too terrible variation.

Here's an example of such a very accurately fusing fuse.

 

This can be used to explode the shell inside a building (setting the timing accordingly and disabling a point detonation feature if present).

This can be used to shoot at aerial targets in the way heavy anti-air artillery did in WW2, just much more accurately.* 

Ideally, the fuse would have selectable point detonation (quickest direct fire shot mode that's somewhat useful on everything, including messing up a T-14 tank turret) and delay (for exploding BMPs, BTRs and rooms in a building)

 

The technology for proper fuses for very flat trajectory shots hasn't been available for very long. Most main battle tanks of today are from a 1970's conceptual design and prototyping generation, when such fusing wasn't on the horizon yet. The Chinese have newer designs, but they were catching up. The South Koreans have a newer MBT design, but they have mostly hilly to mountainous terrain. Same with the Japanese. The current equipment is thus no argument against the validity of the direct/indirect firepower tank concept. It makes sense that the in-service tanks lack it and at the same time the concept  may be entirely valid with our current technology.

Back to bending that flat trajectory a bit: The muzzle velocity depends on the propellant temperature. One might have a cool/cooled and a warm/heated cartridge compartment to enable a choice between two muzzle velocities. The difference wouldn't be great, though. This would not enable shooting over most hills in the line of sight.

Another possibility is to use a fuse or shell feature that deploys a braking element, such as in trajectory-correcting munitions. Another analogy is the nose or drag ring that can be added to rockets of manually loaded multiple rocket launchers to slow them down and thus reduce the often terribly long minimum shot distance. 

High tech approaches include variable injection of liquid propellant, use of electro-chemical-thermal gun principle and so on, but such already researched and tested technologies appear to find no users for good reasons.

In the end, a fixed cartridge with combustible case is realistic, a semi-fixed cartridge for varying the propellant strength by adding or removing modules would only be reasonable if the tank is used mostly in indirect fires. Another option is to simply have two different kinds of HE cartridges with combustible case; one for high muzzle velocity and one for low muzzle velocity. The latter could be used to shoot over hills, but it would have a reduced maximum range and longer time of flight. The shell orientation at explosion would also differ, leading to a different optimisation for fragmentation pattern and thus a different shell design.

 

The great potential of the concept of a direct/indirect/antiair firepower tank is in the versatility. This may go so far as to enable a much smaller and thus much more agile tank brigade without a dedicated artillery component. I described that concept in the 3rd and 4th link above. The same brigade would have dozens of assets capable of sniping away observation drones without need for any dedicated air defence vehicle.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Proximity fusing may be preferable for this, but ordinary artillery proximity fuses meant to fuze a couple metres above ground don't work on air targets. Their safety feature keeps them from exploding before the zenith of the trajectory was passed.

Due to recent events...

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I'd like to remind you that any NATO member attack on another country without permission by the United Nations is a violation of the North Atlantic Treaty. 

Article 1

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm

The U.S. has ONCE AGAIN intentionally, habitually and grossly violated its obligations to the NATO other members.

The high risk of this happening again was obvious for days, but the terrible NATO general secretary didn't put it on the agenda during the NATO meeting. Instead, the "5%" brain fart of a lying moron was to be discussed.

/2008/09/overly-aggressive-allies.html

/2010/09/anglophone-disrespect-for-international.html

/2014/03/hypocrisy-in-effect.html 

/2017/04/the-us-blatantly-violated-north.html 

/2018/04/comment-on-recent-cruise-missile.html

 

It was completely unnecessary, actually. 

And it's not sure at all whether the supposed goal will be achieved. It's not a nature's law that a nuclear weapons program needs to be confined to a few locations. A dispersed enrichment program could lead to a simple gunshot uranium fission device. Iran is likely holding back from expending some of its better rockets.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Hostility caused by fundamental misunderstanding

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I ask you to read this (shockingly, already 15 years old!) blog post first:

/2010/09/do-opponents-misunderstand-each-other.html

So, Iran is sponsoring terrorism abroad, right?

graphic taken from U.S. Congress

 

Well, look at the following map and search for "coincidences":

regarding copyright: see lower bound of image

The so-called proxies turn out to be Shia / Shi'ite groups outside of Iran.

 

This opens the possibility that the Western public (not terribly literate on such issues) misunderstands Iran's policy regarding support for outside groups. It might actually be about

• support for religious fellows who are (or feel) oppressed by sunni-dominated governments
• an effort to overcome the solitude as only Shia country by having at least some friends abroad 

Again (I wrote so previously), maybe the best approach to overcome the war in Yemen including the Red Sea crisis and missile launches on Israel is to split Yemen into a Shia state and a Sunni state. The unification of both Yemens was an obvious mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen_Arab_Republic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen

We should have a peace conference with incentives to both Houthis and their main opponents to agree to a partition (preferably with better-drawn borders, but a decent seaport for the Houthis) rather than focusing on shooting down Houthi munitions and bombing them targets in Houthi-controlled territory.

 

Lebanon's issues could be addressed by replacing the Shia sponsor Iran with a more secular, more international order-focused sponsorship.

 

 

Last but not least another thought; even a democratic Iran would still be majority Shia and might still behave very similarly, feeling solidarity with Shias abroad, supporting their cause in some way, including arming them!

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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