Euro Hawk is a no-go for the Bundeswehr

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"Eine Milliarde Euro versenkt: Euro Hawk wird nicht zugelassen"

Marco Seliger, F.A.Z. (German newspaper article)

Northrop Grumman RQ-4, the base model for Euro Hawk

 

Long story short; the thing did cost a lot already, but our military bureaucracy should have been / was aware that it wouldn't be certified for flying in German airspace. Or the airspace of just about every other country. The lack of a collision avoidance system is apparently a key problem.

The article presents the technical and legal issues, the costs and summarises the very limited quantity of airframes meant to be procured.

It's missing some relevant info, though:

(a) The system cost per unit was in the league of the price for a fully equipped combat aircraft, a small warship, a tank battalion or a reconnaissance satellite.

(b) The platform was never even supposed to be survivable in a war between great powers, in a war where hostiles challenge NATO and force it into a defensive war. In other words; the project was useless for the constitutional mission of the Bundeswehr, which makes it even more difficult to justify it in a cost/benefit guesstimate.

(c) The Bundeswehr has also botched its other major drone procurement program, SAATEG. Michael Förster, the late "Mr. Geopowers", chronicled this mess in about a dozen articles. The late Cold War-era drone projects were also a huge mess (KZO/Brevel, which took a quarter century, for example). Only the very small drone projects appear to be a kind of success (Mikado, Luna).

(d) The pet project that kind of preceded the Euro hawk project (LAPAS, early 90's) was a mess, too. It involved extremely high-flying motor gliders of the company Grob. The project collapsed when it got involved in a corruption scandal. Again, the slow & high altitude & high endurance approach looked usable for peacetime electronic sniffing, and useless for wartime use.

It appears that the procurement bureaucracy in general is a mess. This is but one example; there are many. Naval procurement projects have had the smell of shipyard subsidising for a long time, but it also turned towards ship types that are largely useless for collective defence (K130 = patrol ship without a helicopter and F125 = oversized patrol ship claimed to be a frigate, but armed like a missile boat).

Luftwaffe procurement is no more impressive (just look at the MEADS project with its substantial development costs for tiny numbers planned). Heer procurement isn't impressive either. The de-standardisation of armoured trucks was so extreme, I can't even recall how many up-armoured versions of the Wolf/ Mercedes G wagon exist. They saw the problem as well and responded with a standardisation program - on top of the inventory, instead of for replacing it! And of course they included a light protected vehicle category which proved to be physically impossible with known technology. The LeFlaSys and mortar projects are about such ludicrously small quantities that their frustration potential even exceeds their comedic potential.

So basically, the Bundeswehr is only occasionally good at managing procurement projects. Its readiness to enter not only procurement, but also development projects for a projected quantity of platforms below 20 is astonishing and can only be described as disproportionate. That's wasting of taxpayer money.

Times of tight budgets should in theory motivate the bureaucracy to focus on the activities with the best pay-off. Sadly, the bureaucracy's interests and national interests are so very much out of synch that this effect is not working to our advantage now. Nor has it for the last two decades.

The problem is not with the bureaucrats; they're what they are, even if they think of themselves as soldiers first. Bureaucrats behave as bureaucrats almost without exceptions.

The problem is the weak political oversight. The civilian leadership was mostly either disinterested or weak (an accurate description for many of the past ten years). As of now, I have not learned about anything that would indicate to me that the current minister is different and really working on getting the military bureaucracy in line with national interests. In fact, I don't even think he's trying hard to do get it in line with what he himself perceives as national interest (= involves great power games than I think are in our national interest).

The military bureaucracy is running on autopilot, and the billion bucks wasted on drones that are apparently not even allowed to take-off is but one symptom. It is a classic principal-agent problem with the principal not doing his oversight job thoroughly.


S O

P.S.: Obviously, I'm not trying to cozy up to the establishment and get government contracts. Having worked on some in non-defence topics made me thoroughly disinterested in working for the government ever again. The biggest such project slowly chipped away parts of my soul, being almost entirely a waste of taxpayer money in favour of a clique which had hijacked part of a federal ministry's bureaucracy.

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Defence tasks in NATO and EU

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Article 3 

In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. 

North Atlantic Treaty

I'm idealist and pragmatist enough to believe the military should be meant for national security - specifically defence, or collective defence against paramilitary or military attack.

Thus I take the alliance defence thing seriously and actually wasted some thoughts on it. In fact, I even looked at some maps.

NATO members in Europe

European NATO members (c) Marco Kaiser

 
EU members

EU members (+ Croatia in July 2013) (c) ssolbergj

North America is safe from a geography point of view. The main benefit of NATO to the U.S. is that some Europeans get motivated to debase themselves by providing auxiliary troops for U.S. great power gaming and that NATO keeps Europe and the U.S. from becoming rivals, sabotaging each others' foreign policy.

The Western and Northwestern frontier of Europe is the North Atlantic, and all that really counts there is the protection of maritime trade. I suppose that's simply not going to be satisfactory. It took mobilisations and the construction of hundreds of escort ships to secure the North Atlantic shipping lanes in both World Wars. I don't expect NATO to be able to maintain a large-enough and correctly designed force to actually secure North Atlantic shipping in a major conflict right away. This is thus more a challenge of maintaining and developing basic competences and of maintaining a large enough industrial base (which Europe probably still has, but the U.S. hasn't). Let's face it, almost all shipbuilding is now in East Asia:

 

(wikipedia)

This extreme outcome is new, for we had a much less extreme one till a few years ago (with another metric):

(wikipedia '2008)

I suppose whatever North Atlantic shipping defences we could build in wartime could not rest mainly on newly-built hulls. We could reconfigure existing civilian ships for operation of naval helicopters, towing sensors and decoys, launching decoys and launching munitions from containers instead. It is about time we pay more attention to this, and the existing containerisation of much naval equipment in the MEKO concept could be a starting point just as the Arapaho concept. I suppose this is more important than the question whether a new destroyer can mount a super-heavy radar for ballistic missile intercepts.

The offensive defence of North Atlantic shipping lanes (offensive minelaying, air attack on hostile naval bases, sealing off the Strait of Gibraltar) would also be relevant.

One thing which I miss in collective defence efforts is a more serious preparation for high seas ("blue water") shipping lane defences. The big Western navies have become too obsessed with meddling and bullying in distant places, and some of the smaller ones are still too distracted by embargo and anti-piracy patrols.

Naval bureaucracies want many impressive ship hulls, many jobs for officers and much money. The relatively cheap preparations for a mobilisation of five hundred ASW/AAW armed merchantmen (precursor) within six months is not in their bureaucratic self-interest.

The Southern frontier of Europe is basically the Mediterranean. The Southern neighbours lack the military capacity to be dangerous or to become dangerous in the medium term. I suppose security policy here would first and foremost be about maintaining and progressing competency in naval warfare. Again, this is not about ships. The only warships that are required for defence in the Med are mine countermeasures (MCM) ships, and even they could largely be replaced by a concept with remote-controlled and semi-autonomous drones with control centres on land. Much of NATO's MCM capability isn't in its Med countries; maybe this should change. Again, there's a sexiness and bureaucratic self-interest problem; MCM is not sexy and provides few officer jobs.

Most naval action in / over the Med could easily be done by air power.

I don't believe that it would make sense to escalate a Southern conflict into a land war, so no amphibious capability of large scale would be necessary.

The Southeastern frontier of Europe is Turkey. It's the joint to the Caucasus region, Iran and the Arab world. It's the joint between Black Sea and Med and between Europe and Asia.

To secure this frontier is first and foremost a question of remaining allied or at least friendly with Turkey. The Turkish terrain is hugely problematic for land campaigns, as it is quite easily defensible. Air warfare in the region is mostly challenged by the question of airbase capacity. The Gulf region powers can maintain some semi-credible air power, but European air power could easily keep it in check by itself. I suppose that's going to be true for many years to come unless the Arab air forces become much better and Europeans hesitate too much with adopting new air warfare technology (the PAK-FA is a bit concerning).

Finally, the Eastern frontier of Europe (EU and NATO Europe, that is). I admit, it takes some conscious effort for me to not write "Eastern front". No, just kidding. Still, to me it's the only frontier with a huge land warfare potential. Much bigger land warfare is possible if not likely in the Far East (/= defence for Europeans), but THE land warfare scenarios Europeans should prepare for are mostly about the EU's and NATO's Eastern Front. I mean frontier.

This is a case where division of tasks within NATO and EU makes a lot of sense. I think of the following groups:

Frontier countries unable to resist invasion, but able to delay it:

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

Frontier countries which would (in darker times) be required to be first day responders to a crisis:

Norway, Finland, Poland, Romania

Countries which would be first week responders to a crisis:

Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria

Countries which would be limited first week responders to a crisis with air power and airlifted/airborne troops only (and other forces much later):

France, UK, U.S., Italy

Countries which would have niche roles or no important roles in a crisis:

Iceland (= only a base), Luxembourg (lends its flag to AWACS aircraft), Malta, Cyprus

Finally, all else, most of which would struggle to field a corps and more than a wing or two of combat aircraft unless there had been some extended arms race prior to the crisis.

________________

I recall discussions about whether for example the Baltic countries should specialise their military on some niche competence for providing auxiliary troops to distant great power games. Obviously, I still think of actual collective defence instead of such crap.

The grouping of member countries above could - if anyone cared about it - inform force structure reforms. 

The first day responders would need especially survivable military basing concepts, near-paranoid alarm exercises (such as 80+% of army manoeuvre and recce forces ready to go within three hours 24/7, for example).

The first week responder countries would need to have very road-mobile forces, which can deploy a thousand or more kilometres within days. I personally don't think there are enough tank transport trailers in these countries to pull this off well. These countries would also not need to pay much attention to transport aviation of intercontinental range. These countries would also host lots of consumables and pre-positioned heavy weapon system depots.

The limited first week responders would need to think a lot about air deployment, and especially about the capabilities of their airborne brigades in face of heavy troops. More important would be their ability to deploy 'heavy' or 'medium' troops to the frontier within weeks, though.

The "all else" category could - except the very far Southern countries which would look southward first -  reduce their ground forces to forces of very long-serving part-time troops, for example. A readiness for deployment within 60 days could suffice. These forces could be the bulk of forces for a strategic counter-offensive.

In fact, the threat of this wave of reinforcements arriving after about 60-80 days on the battlefield could help politicians to turn off the war before this stage of escalation.

This small exercise for my brain cells shows that very different approaches to NATO (and EU) defence than the 'bureaucratic autopilot + great power games by pols' scheme are imaginable - and probably better.

We are safe and don't need more collective military power, but by orientating it better our collective military power could become much more efficient, allowing us to save much military spending and allocate it at improving the sustainability and growth paths of our economies.

Furthermore, it's a good idea to spend enough for deterrence, but it's wasteful to spend so much on defence that conventional threats can justifiably get laughed off right away.

S O
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What does this tell about the West?

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The Carnegie Endowment has a study about China and the usual suspects for a clash with China.

NextBigFuture offered this table as a summary for their scenarios:

H/T Nextbigfuture,
graphic should enlarge if clicked

Have a look at the line with "Defense spending as % of GDP". The "aggressive ultranationalism" scenario is the one with more than 2%.

Context:

source: CIA World Factbook

I created this diagram with data from the CIA World Factbook, showing only developed countries with military ("defense") spending of more than 2 %. Omitted are countries with a domestic civil war or other unique national defence challenges (Turkey, Israel). Also omitted are European countries which enacted drastic cuts (Greece, Portugal). I did not regard some Central Asian former USSR countries as developed countries. The U.S. military spending has also taken a drastic cut, but is no doubt still above 3% GDP.

Let's think about the de facto allegation that more than 2% GDP military spending would indicate aggressive ultranationalism in the case of China.

There are two major way of looking at national defense requirements; either you assume that the difference between wealthy and very wealthy does change the actual need (not "want") for military capabilities or it doesn't. %GDP as a metric has the advantage that the increase of personnel and other costs by the increased GDP should not show up in this metric.

Now if you believe that a bigger economy does require more military spending - and this seems to be the position of the crowd that thinks military spending should be oriented at a %GDP figure - then you should agree that the Chinese need to raise their military power as their economy grows. And this would not necessarily indicate any tilt towards aggressiveness. 

The second graphic can be read as indicating that more than 2% GDP military spending is hardly an indicator for "aggressive ultranationalism".

Or maybe you think the military spending needs for national security do not depend (much) on the country's economic power. Well, in this case one ought to ask how much spending they need to defend themselves. Judging by the military spending of the countries threatening China and its lack of useful allies, one could this way easily justify the Chinese spending a third of world-wide military spending. (They have much less.)

Furthermore, the Chinese do have a LOT of maritime overseas trade. They (their wealth) are dependent on imports and exports, including energy imports. Judging by how Westerners talk about military "needs", the Chinese can easily claim their "need" of dominating the western Pacific Ocean and the northern Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. That's about the level of ambition I read in American and British, at times even Australian or German, sources.

This is of course ludicrous. We cannot provide great security to our maritime trade while they provide great security to theirs - that is unless there is absoluteley no conflict potential between 'the West' and China, or unless we cooperate* to provide security to maritime trade of Westerners and Chinese.

This goes at the heart of the problem of some more militarily ambitious Western countries: They strive for perfect security (expressed by their intolerance for even minor threats). Perfect security for one power or bloc means perfect insecurity or dependence for everyone else, of course.

I suppose this is a kind of overambition and intellectual laziness that came up when the Soviet Union disappeared. Previously, almost everybody was aware that perfect security is an aim only for fools. Ambitions were more modest. That's kind of why the West did not spend that terribly much more on the military before 1990 than today (related). There was a huge, impressive adversary bloc - but our military spending was modest. Today there's just a list of ridiculous bogeymen - and we still spend a lot.

I suppose China has in part legitimate national security concerns and as a great power and generally a power representing more than a fifth of mankind it's understandable that they don't want their maritime trade 'secured' by another not very much friendly great power.

Two per cent GDP military spending in the long run would hardly signify aggressive ultranationalism. I guesstimate that more than about six per cent would signal a commitment to military strength that would justify much concern in North America and Europe.

Many people are nowadays in the business of building up China as the next huge bogeyman, to secure a steady and rising supply of money into the military-industrial complex. There is very little money to be earned by playing down China as a threat or rival, leading to an almost inevitable bias of the voices heard on the topic.

The Carnegie Endowment study I mentioned is actually quite uninteresting to me. It's just an example for the general attitude and hypocrisy.

Western countries can supposedly bully other countries at will and apply measures out of proportion, while in the case of China even quite defensive military power such as what's known as the DF-21D "anti-access" missile gets talked up as if it was aggressive.**

In fact, China does so far very little of significance beyond its own region. They don't have a military port in the Atlantic or regular carrier patrols along the Europe-US maritime trade route, for example.

 

I ask my readers to run a hypocrisy check every time they read about some supposed aggressive, non-allied power. Such as China, Iran, maybe in the future Russia again, and in the past Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Remember the most aggressive stances that are deemed fine for Western powers, and compare them to what the supposedly evil foreigners actually did. Such as; when did China bomb some other country recently, and when did Iran invade another country the last time?***

S O

*: Such as adding credibility to the Charter of the United Nation's intolerance for aggressive bilateral behaviour instead of undermining it!?

**: These "anti-access" systems may deny U.S. carrier battlegroups access to places from where they could launch air strikes at China effectively.

***: I didn't find later examples than 1979 and  1738, respectively.

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Offiziere.ch: "Americans, Afghans and Battlefield Agility"

 

The Afghan soldiers sprint ahead, exposed to any bombs but unafraid. U.S. squad leader Sgt. Mason Mullins yells to them to slow down. “We don’t move that fast!”
Time and again this happens: the Afghans outpace the Americans and the Americans must reel them back in. The pace of the raid slows even further when the combined patrol rounds up several Afghan villagers and must enroll them in a biometric database using wireless devices that take 20 minutes to boot up.
By the time they surround Mohammad’s brother’s compound, the Taliban commander and his host are long gone — apparently having fled on a motorbike.

"Americans, Afghans and Battlefield Agility"

Offiziere.ch

This happens when troops know that the war is not worth their sacrifice (or much else).

The real problem isn't mission failure in an unimportant land-locked country far, far away. The real problem is that a generation of Western army troops and in other ways also Western combat aviation have become used to such a mode of warfare. A mode they won't see again when sometime in the -hopefully distant- future there's a war that can actually remind us why a great part of the peacetime budgets and peacetime efforts for improvement, improvement, improvement* were justified.

S O

*: (or at least matching the levels of performance demonstrated by ancestors)

Bündnisverteidigung / collective defence

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Germany's constitution takes a quite firm stand on the purpose of the Bundeswehr (even though that's increasingly been ignored since the early 90's):

Article 87a [Armed Forces]
(1) The Federation shall establish Armed Forces for purposes of defence. Their numerical strength and general organisational structure must be shown in the budget.
(2) Apart from defence, the Armed Forces may be employed only to the extent expressly permitted by this Basic Law.

German national defence is nowadays alliance defence; either NATO or EU defence. Either way, the most significant and least unlikely scenario for the Bundeswehr would be a conflict in the East.

Troops stationed in Germany could be first or at the latest second week responders to a border conflict or similar on an Eastern ally's border. Only airborne troops could deploy more quickly, and again airborne troops stationed in Germany could likely be amongst the very first.

Now if we took collective defence seriously and did not spend much attention on great power gaming (small wars) instead, what would the Bundeswehr need to do?

I suppose it would need to take a look at how to deploy a meaningful brigade-sized airborne force in few days to the East of Warsaw and at how to deploy several combat brigades, higher echelon support units and lots of supplies to the East of Warsaw on road within at most a week. It is possible to drive the distance in two days at most (tracked vehicles probably three days, with a substantial share being broken down en route). Organising tank travel by rail could add many days to the duration of the movement, and rail lines could be interrupted anyway.

Road movement into the Baltic region would be very troublesome, as the road connection between Poland and the Baltic has almost no alternatives. There's but one fine road and a lesser one - both aren't even close to motorway standards. Maybe the EU should think about improving the infrastructure there.

We had some exercises with entire brigades moving hundred of kilometres in a day on roads alone during the Cold War, but such exercises are expensive in spare parts and fuel. We rarely do such movements these days. A bi-annual deployment exercise to East of Warsaw for every German brigade would probably be a major diplomatic irritant anyway.

The Luftwaffe would also need to look closely at at least how to deploy wings to East German airbases and commercial airports, if not motorways. Such movements would need to happen amidst air-refuelling-enabled combat missions (or patrols) and only few military cargo aircraft would be available if there's a parallel airlift of airborne troops. So again, lots of trucks would need to move over the road network to their destinations.

The navy finally would need to think about what the winter-time ice on the far eastern Baltic Sea means for naval operations. Our submarines could hardly interfere with amphibious hovercraft movements or even truck movements over the ice, after all.

A much less likely scenario would require German military power in the Mediterranean (not require it militarily, but rather politically). Naval forces (frigates, subs, mine countermeasures, supply ships) could cruise at very different cruise speeds to the Med through the Strait of Gibraltar (with frigates arriving first).

The Luftwaffe and airborne troops could arrive within a week, but only with very much stretched supply lines. A deployment of the heavier army brigades to the Mediterranean region would likely lead to administrative movement by rail, and could take weeks till the troops and their supplies are ready for action. Again, peacetime exercises could help to reduce this time and to improve the shape of the arriving forces.

This is the kind of deployability we should think about. By comparison, a deployment of less than brigade-sized forces with little heavy material into a distant civil war is not exactly a topic close to the national interests or the constitutional mission.

This blog post has probably provoked the ubiquitous responses; maybe you considered this all Cold War-era talk, as there are no real threats to NATO's frontiers.

Well, in this case feel free to try to reconcile this thought with the inability of the marginal benefits from small wars missions to justify the gazillions of military spending in Europe. Either it makes sense to prepare for actual defence OR small wars are profitable and able to justify more than € 20bn military budget of Germany annually. I suppose the ISAF mission cannot be valued at anywhere close to €20bn annually, so I suppose the real job is the constitutional job: (collective) defence.

Let's focus at this instead of being easily distracted by pointless small wars.

S O

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[Blog] Draft texts held back

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Maybe you wonder why I don't write more blog texts. Well the problem is not in the writing, but in the publishing. Here's a list of draft texts held back (working titles):

"Barbarossa What ifs"

Old draft. This stuff has been debated endlessly in books and a blog is unlikely to add anything valuable, so I gave up on it. Research was also a concern. My central thesis was about capacity limits of rail road connections limiting the choices.

"On recruitment for software-based conflicts"

Cyberwarfare stuff; lost interest.

"Future threats"

All future major war scenarios for Germany I came up with looked too outlandish.

"The historical problem of carrier-borne reconnaissance"

Held back as analogy used in the book draft.

"Grüne"

Basically a smackdown of the German greens who turned from minority politicians who criticised a militarised foreign policy into a pro-war ruling coalition junior party in no time.

"About the Watadas and Pfaffs of this world"

Lost interest during the research.

"A few link recommendations"

Not that good ones.

"Public debt after war with conscription"

Econo-wonkish, and I have no confidence in my own thesis.

"Warfare best practices"

This went nowhere either.

"Some old aircraft"

Just some aviation porn.

"Some martial arts references"

This went out of steam, and I actually made use of one reference in an old blog post anyway.

"On the nature of non-battlefield electronic warfare"

Cyberwarfare stuff; lost interest.

"Light infantry platoons"

Decided to not publish this. It could do harm if it is correct.

"What does this tell about the west?"

About hypocrisy concerning China.

"Operational Planning Processes and Tactical Decisionmaking"

I held this back for a book draft chapter.

"Definition of "shock""

Turned out to sound most trivial, albeit it isn't.

"On army field formation structures"

I scrapped many drafts like this. In the end, there's too much to say about the topic for a mere blog. A comprehensive approach exceeds my motivation for research.

"Income distribution and freedom"

Wonkish, and I have no confidence in my own thesis.

"A Nimrod anecdote"

Held back because I wasn't able to find critical sources again.

"Future of Warfare in low GDP countries"

Working on it.

So basically there is more than one month worth of blog texts in draft status, and more were already deleted without ever being published. The occasional periods of four to six days without a blog texts are typically not periods without writing, but periods without satisfactory writing. Many more texts were never even drafted for this blog because they were included in the book draft instead. (By the way; the book won't be published in 2013 as I will be terribly busy till January at the very least.)

S O
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Investment priorities and a cleared-up view at military affairs

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It's been said that Afghanistan is easy to invade, but difficult to occupy. The events since about 1979 have seemingly reinforced this insight which originated from military history of Alexander the Great's era up to the 19th century.

The difficulties of occupation aren't actually that big, though. Even the not very lethal French Résistance was a much, much more lethal foe than the Afghan tribes or more specifically Pashtuns are or have been.

The frustrations are rather two-fold: 

Occupation has little lasting impact. The Soviets' impact on society did not leave many socialist-secularist-European features intact in the Afghan society of the late 90's. I suppose the Western occupation and corruption of the country is not going to leave many desirable features left by 2020.

The other frustration is that Afghanistan is basically not worth it. There's nothing to be gained in this country. The British efforts of the 19th century paid negligible dividends. The Soviet efforts are widely considered to have accelerated the downfall of the Soviet system by their costs and demoralising effects. The Western efforts since 2002 have delivered about nothing. Some people talk about some paper tiger project of some pipeline and some mining operations, but those would be dwarfed by the occupation's expenses even if it had been in full operation all the time.

The Western military bureaucracies, military-related think tanks, authors and pundits have not addressed these fundamental issues much. Instead, they looked for some magic policy or strategy, often even tactics, to make Western troops more effective in such occupations. I don't doubt that defeating the Taliban is possible politically and at least temporarily also militarily. Their defeat wouldn't change the two aforementioned troubles, though.

The whole issue is symptomatic of small wars in general: The benefits are negligible, the costs of the operations vary, but maintaining the capability to play in such small wars without a dominance of improvisation is very expensive.

This could be considered a preferences-justified luxury if Western societies had a lot of excess energy.

Fact is, they are rather mature instead. The cake was already 100% distributed, almost all governments have net debts and many Western countries don't have enough capital investments to grow their capital stock (and thus their economic capacity) adequately. We are playing with camouflaged toys in marginal-dividend political games and neglect our investments in our future. 

We shouldn't only invest more in our future - we should grow reserves to meet unexpected challenges. You know, back in the 18th century many governments were wise enough to have a state/royal treasure instead of a net debtor position. The only modern Western country with such a thing is Norway as far as I know.

For years I've faced people who wank off on fantasies about nuclear weapons, military or military budget sizes, big tanks, fancy combat aircraft, many warships, big warships, the ability to bully about anyone et cetera.

I did not meet or discuss many people who thought of the military as something that is easily justified up to the point of actual defence (preparations) and 100% subject to cost-benefit considerations beyond.* In fact, many, many people can't even tell that what they consider "defense" is actually strategic offensive action or capability. They mistake bullying, invading and occupying with defence. This confusion is a product of governments, of course. There are no war departments and more, but defense departments.

I propose (totally in vain, of course) to separate the discussions:

(1) Collective security topics

These would be about the deterrence or at worst repelling of overt aggression against our alliance only.

(2) Great power gaming topics

This would be about the excess military capabilities and their use. That's the bully, invade and occupy part. Anybody who muddles the water by calling this "defense" should be called out and rebuked.

This is 100% not going to happen, and that's a pity if not doomed to end in tragedy.

S O

* Andrew  Bacevich is a prolific author and commentator who gets this right.
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About unguided torpedoes

This blog post is going to be reminiscent of my much earlier blog post about late propeller era combat aircraft, as it attempts to sum up concisely an obsolete topic. From time to time I gather the necessary motivation for such blog posts out of sheer frustration that I did not find such a summary anywhere.

The introduction of the steam engine in warships by the mid-19th century returned an element of independence from wind that battle fleets outside the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea had not enjoyed for centuries. Soon thereafter, said battle fleets rediscovered both the potency and the difficulties of ramming tactics. More warships have been sunk by accidental ramming than by intentional ramming during the past 150 or so years, but the initial interest in the rediscovered tactic was great and battleships showed off their impressive ramming bows well into the First World War.

A much safer approach to sinking ships close-up was to use the self-propelled torpedo (torpedo initially being a word for naval mines), after its invention by Whitehead in the early 1860's. The earliest torpedoes had indeed such poor characteristics that they were at best a weak replacement for ramming. Later on, more capable torpedoes eventually replaced ramming entirely when improved gunnery made gun firepower unbearable at short ranges.

Torpedoes replaced the hazard of more disastrous accidental collisions with the hazard of possible secondary explosions (if stored above waterline).

The Whitehead torpedo, late 19th century

The torpedo created new warship classes, forced navies to alter their tactical doctrines and provoked quite extreme ideas about its relative merits in comparison to the very expensive gun-armed battleships.

A most important tactical characteristic is that its speed was (and is) not much higher than the target's speed. The best ratio to be expected against a warship fleet in not extraordinarily rough seas was 52 kts versus 18 kts, pitting Japanese high-performance torpedoes of WW2 against a battleship line including the slowest British or American battleships of the time. The ratio between artillery shells and ships is incomparable: More than 1,300 kts to 18 kts.

As a result, the relative position and vectors of movement were very important for the utility of a torpedo. The shorter the running time till impact, the lesser the problems of dispersion, poor fire control and evasion.

Case #1

Case #2

First, an illustration about the use of a torpedo against a ship while on pursuit. The torpedo speed shall be four, both ships' speeds shall be three. The illustration shows the difficulty of catching up. The torpedo takes a usually unacceptable long time to reach the target.

Second an illustration of the opposite case: The pursued ship fires the torpedo on a pursuer. The speed of torpedo and target add up and the torpedo quickly reaches (or misses) its target. Meanwhile, the torpedo user can get away and avoid closing with the pursuer.

The third case shows two ships at equal position, in a broadside duel. The torpedo would need to be fired with deflection and would thus need to run a longer distance than the distance between the combatants. The duration required was usually unsatisfactory under such circumstances.

The fourth illustration shows two ships in a broadside duel with one enjoying the advantage. The speed of both torpedo and target ship add up at least partially and the odds of a hit under such circumstances were often satisfactory unless the combat ranges were long.

Case #4

Case #3

Please note that case three can easily be turned into case four by altering one's course some degrees away from the enemy. The transformation to case four is complete once the aggressive enemy pursues.

The torpedo was favouring the defence in a surface tactical engagement. It was very well-suited as an anti-pursuit weapon.

A 1930's baseline technology torpedo (wet heater type)

The use of torpedoes as envisaged by pre-First World War navies was never very successful: The navies expected seagoing fast and small torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers to rush through the friendly battle line towards the enemy battle line well into range for a torpedo attack. Two reactions were advisable for the battle line attacked like this: A simultaneous turn of direction either away from the threat or towards the threat. Either move would expose a much shorter effective target length to the torpedoes. The move towards the threat could protect the vulnerable aft section with its shafts, screws and rudder while the more careful turn away from the threat would exploit case one's dynamic and offer a better chance to avoid a hit altogether.

These overt attacks were historically not very successful, and this is more a problem of the aforementioned reaction (the British Grand Fleet turned away from the torpedo threat in 1916) than of the torpedo's performance.

These overt attacks lacked the one ingredient that proved to be a huge success multiplier in the employment of unguided torpedoes: Surprise.

There were several ways of achieving surprise:

  

(1) Unexpected long effective range (Japanese torpedoes in 1942)

  

(2) Employment by hardly visible vehicles under limited visibility conditions (submarines, torpedo boats, British nightly torpedo bomber attacks in 1941/42)

  

(3) Avoidance of the tell-tale sign of a visible stream of bubbles (German G7e torpedo, Japanese Type 92, 93 and 95 torpedoes).

   

(4) Unexpected high speed, pre-empting evasion manoeuvres (Japanese type 93; up to 52 kts)

The most powerful surface combatant of the Second World War for short and medium range combat was probably the Japanese light cruiser Ōi, which was one of two cruisers re-built into torpedo cruisers. It carried up to forty torpedo tubes for 610 mm Type 93 torpedoes and could have wreaked havoc on a hostile battleship line if positioned as in case four. The range, speed and explosive power came as a surprise to the Allies in 1942, and some cruiser and destroyer battles in the Salomon island campaign were decided by a weaker torpedo salvo than Ōi's twice 20 torpedoes.

The IJN's cruiser Ōi before it was rebuilt into a torpedo cruiser

No submarines were equipped with a comparable torpedo salvo capability, albeit not the least the minelayer submarine designs showed that such a design was likely feasible. The submarine's assumed stealthiness and ability to close with the enemy for aimed torpedo employment and the costs of torpedoes were likely the reasons for this. A typical torpedo costed about as much as an early 1930's fighter plane without engine. The slower, shorter-ranged yet bubble-free electric engine torpedoes with energy storage in batteries were much cheaper. The Japanese torpedoes with highly concentrated oxygen as oxidizer were more expensive, as the engineering problems caused by the aggressive oxygen required a more sophisticated production.

Late-WW2 autopilots for unguided torpedoes such as the German FAT autopilots which made torpedoes run in circles or other patterns in order to increase the chance of a lucky hit after an initial miss were worth their money. Still, this added to the price of an already very expensive piece of ammunition. Torpedoes were in short supply until about 1943 because of the difficulties and expenses of production.

There were two substitutes for surprise in torpedo employment: Numbers and coordinated multi-axis attacks.

Multi-axis attacks were feasible almost exclusively for aircraft, which had enough of a speed advantage over warships to manoeuvre into position quite freely.  A simultaneous torpedo bomber attack from two directions (90° or more angle) left no promising evasive manoeuvre options to the attacked ship's captain. Even a non-simultaneous attack from two torpedo bomber teams offered an advantage, as a turning ship quickly lost speed and could not recover it quickly. The maximum deflection required for a hit during a follow-up attack would thus be smaller than during the first attack.

A note about aerial torpedoes; the first ships were sunk by aerial torpedoes during the First World War, but the device used back then were about as small as today's lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes and it took till the 1930's for really good aerial torpedoes to appear.

First World War: Sopwith Cuckoo releases a torpedo

The mature unguided aerial torpedo was robust enough for a drop from impressive altitudes and at impressive speeds. Some poor designs from the 1930's were still capable of withstanding drops only from ludicrously low altitudes (such as 25 m) and at slow speed. Later, reinforced designs could be dropped from hundreds of metres and at speeds above 400 kph.

These relatively high drops didn't only make the attack much easier for the pilot and possible at night in the first place (altimeters of the 1930's were unreliable at low altitude because ground level air pressure was unknown - radio altimeters solved this problem during WW2). The torpedo travelled at approx. aircraft speed for the seconds till impact on the water, and this was much faster than its own submerged speed. This capability allowed drops from much longer distances (important in face of effective light anti-air weapons) or alternatively made the torpedo speed much less relevant for drops at short ranges.

Aerial torpedo attacks benefited as much from surprise as other torpedo attacks. The Royal Navy's Swordfish torpedo bombers were so very much obsolete in their performance that they had to prefer night attacks, and their successes against both the Bismarck (1941) and the Italian fleet at Taranto (1940) were impressive. German torpedo bombers also preferred low visibility conditions and often timed their attack into a time window of a few minutes at dawn when their targets' silhouettes were easily visible while the two-engined torpedo bombers were hardly visible.

Torpedoes were usually fused by an impact fuse in the nose, but other fuses appeared later and were quite successful. The most notable one was a magnetic fuse. Fuses caused great problems to the British (malfunction of aerial torpedoes, Germans (torpedo crisis early in WW2) and Americans (torpedo crisis till autumn 1942). The old impact fuse had provoked torpedo defence systems for battleships, which often involved an anti-torpedo bulge that added displacement and depth and was meant to absorb the explosion. The ships with such protection were few, though. The great strength of the impact fuse remained; it provoked the damaged ship to list, counter-flood (almost doubling the water intake) or risk capsizing.
The magnetic fuse was meant to detonate under influence of the ship's magnetic field distortions. The explosion was meant to happen below the ship, avoiding the bulges. The proper countermeasure was a triple bottom with empty compartments at the bottom followed by heating oil-filled compartments above. The detonation's power (apparently aided by a bubble effect) would largely be absorbed by the empty compartments. A magnetic fused torpedo's great strength was its ability to cut small ships in half or to cut off end portions of a large ship (even battleships had no substantial armour at their ends, concentrating their armour protection on firepower- and mobility-related compartments only).
The introduction of the tiny and relatively cheap magnetic fuse did thus cause major headaches to battleship and at times also cruiser designers and influenced battleship designs a lot.
 

I hope this will save others the effort and time to accumulate all this from a multitude of sources over time. I release this blog post into the public domain.

S O

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The Russians are serious about equipping their airborne forces

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Quick inquiry

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... about Information Dominance et cetera, all those military theory projects and doctrines that reset heavily on the assumption that collecting, disseminating, analyzing more information will provide a decisive advantage in battle:

As anybody aware of a psychology- or neurology-rooted critique of these whole concepts?

(I am aware of one angle of critique or rather I applied some such published research insights to this military stuff, but I'm researching if there are more such fundamental problems.)

S O
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