The New Russian Artillery

King of Battle!

The performance of Russian artillery in Ukraine strongly demonstrates that, over the past two decades, the Russians have gotten a technological jump on us. The United States’ strategic drones, the ones that plink terrorists from bases in Nevada, are more advanced than Russia’s. But Russian tactical drones, which spot for artillery, are far superior (and far more numerous) than ours. In 2014, when the Battle of Debaltseve began, the Ukrainians reported that as many as eight Russian tactical drones orbited over their heads at any one time. 

Additionally, the electronic warfare technology demonstrated by the Russians in Ukraine is the best in the world, far better than ours. During the 240-day siege of the Donetsk airport, the Russians were able to jam GPS, radios and radar signals. Their electronic intercept capabilities were so good that the Ukrainians’ communications were crippled. Ukrainian commanders complained that a punishing barrage would follow any radio transmission within seconds.

Does this mean that the Russian army is superior to ours? No, not at all. If we fought the Russians today, we would win. Ours is a highly trained force of half a million soldiers. Two-thirds of Vladi­mir Putin’s 800,000 soldiers are one-year conscripts whose fighting skills are questionable. The Russian air force is also no match for ours. 

But the Ukrainian experience tells us that the cost in blood of any such contest would be high.

A tragic decline of a war-fighting arm that once was our Army’s most lethal should serve as a cautionary tale. This diminution of war-fighting capability in our European army comes at an inauspicious time: when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly questions the value of defending Europe and the 44th administration is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on big, high-tech systems optimized to fight at sea in Asia. 

Yet in today’s wars, more prosaic weapons such as small arms, mines and artillery are killing our soldiers. Add in the fact that we have forfeited what formerly was an overwhelming U.S. battlefield capability, and we can only imagine what deadly consequences may result from our good intentions.

WoW!!

WoW - the Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.

 

Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t) 

Council Winners  

• *First place with 2 2/3 votes!–Bookworm Room – With Islam it’s always about sex
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes – Joshuapundit–A Few Things About Hypocrisy, Politics And A Certain Mr.Khan…
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Razor – The Internet’s Designated Nazi Rule
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Glittering Eye –The View From the Trenches
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –VA Right! – WikiLeaks Emails: DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda Looking for a ‘F*ck You’ Emoji
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Stately McDaniel Manor – The Freddie Gray Case, Update 38: Destruction and Decontamination
• Fifth place with 1/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – AirStation

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 votes! –Dr. Rich Swier – Letter from a Blue Star Mother to the Muslim Gold Star father that spoke at the DNC submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place with 1 2/3 votes –Dennis Prager – Did #NeverTrumpers Hear Hillary Clinton’s Frightening Speech? submitted by The Watcher
• Third place with 1 1/3 votes – Sultan Knish –Stop Lone Wolf Terrorism By Ending Muslim Immigrationsubmitted by The Daley Gator
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Elliot Abrams/ Council on Foreign Relations – The New State Department Assault on Israel submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Ron Fournier/The Atlantic – Why Can’t Hillary Stop Lying submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Victor Davis Hanson –A Convention of the Absurd submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Wayne Gruden/Townhall–Why voting for Trump is a morally good choicesubmitted by Bookworm Room
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Daily Mail –This is Why We Hate You submitted by The Razor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Justin Raimondo/L.A. Times – To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!

North Korean Threat

Kim Jong Un's "Hermit Kingdom" is amassing a nuclear arsenal that could reach South Korea, Japan — and even the U.S. Here's everything you need to know.


How large is Kim's nuclear arsenal?
His tyrannical regime now has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads — and is adding a new weapon to that stockpile every six weeks or so, experts believe. North Korea has also been steadily upgrading its ballistic missiles. It has already successfully mounted a small nuclear warhead on a 1,500 km–range Rodong missile that can reach South Korea and Japan — and is on course to develop 13,000 km–range intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting the continental U.S. by early next decade, according to observers at Johns Hopkins University. 44 and his predecessor, 43, allowed North Korea's nuclear escalation to take a backseat to other threats, like Iran, largely dismissing Kim's threats to burn Seoul and Manhattan "down to ashes" as bluffs and posturing. But the U.S. ignores North Korea's growing nuclear arsenal — and the instability of its erratic leader — at its peril, says Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Just because Pyongyang wants us to pay attention," Fitzpatrick told The Economist, "that doesn't mean we shouldn't."

 How worried should we be?
It's difficult to say, given the secrecy surrounding the Hermit Kingdom. Many of its missile and nuclear tests have failed or been hyped. In January, for example, Pyongyang claimed to have detonated its first hydrogen bomb, but experts said the tremors were smaller than expected for an H-bomb. Nevertheless, the Kim regime appears to be compiling all the pieces for a deliverable atomic device. Kim recently posed with a miniaturized atomic warhead supposedly light enough to ride atop a rocket that could span the Pacific. "Their systems never work first time," says aerospace engineer John Schilling, "but they persevere."

Would sanctions stop them?
They haven't so far. The U.N. Security Council has just passed the toughest sanctions in two decades, however — banning the export of coal, iron, and other minerals that provide vital funds for the government's nuclear program. The success of the sanctions will depend almost entirely on China — Pyongyang's most influential ally, and the nation with which it does 90 percent of its trade. Beijing officially opposes Kim's bid to become a serious nuclear power, and is becoming more frustrated by the belligerent ruler every day. But China's leaders will never risk punishing North Korea so severely that its regime would collapse, sparking regional chaos and sending millions of North Koreans fleeing across the border into China.

What else can the U.S. do?
Not a lot, except strengthen its missile defense systems at home and abroad. Last week, the Obama administration announced it would deploy the new Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, to reduce the chance of an attack from Kim's regime. "But that doesn't mean you just build more missile defenses and walk away," says former White House nuclear adviser Gary Samore. The THAAD system can destroy about 90 percent of what is fired toward South Korea, but if just one nuclear warhead slips through that net, it could kill and injure an estimated 420,000 people in Seoul. "We need some kind of process to begin to freeze what [the North Koreans] are doing," says Samore. But nothing, including positive inducements to negotiate, has served to restrain Kim's reckless behavior.

What are Kim's intentions?
His primary goal is to stay in power, but otherwise, he's a mystery. Kim's former classmates at his Swiss boarding school have described him as "unpredictable" and "prone to violence." South Korea's intelligence agency recently reported that he's obsessed with the fear that he will be overthrown, and that the 5-foot-9-inch dictator has swollen to 285 pounds because he copes with his anxiety by bingeing on food and alcohol. In his paranoia, Kim has presided over several brutal purges in his military; in 2013 he executed his uncle, Jang Song Taek, calling him a traitor and "despicable human scum." International security analyst Alexandre Y. Mansourov of the Nautilus Institute warns that if the volatile tyrant believes he's about to be attacked, he could do the unthinkable. "Pyongyang will likely assume the worst," Mansourov says, "and rush to use the nuclear weapons out of fear of losing them to allied preemption."

Regime collapse: The aftermath
One of the biggest dilemmas China faces is trying to rein in its North Korean ally with economic sanctions — but without tipping Kim Jong Un's regime over the edge. If the regime collapses, experts agree, there will be absolute chaos. There would be widespread looting by the country's starving citizens, and violence in the gulags holding the country's 120,000 political prisoners. Millions of people would rush the border into China, and South Korean and U.S. troops would be forced to occupy a devastated and dysfunctional country. In his final days, Kim might choose to pass the nuclear weapons under his control to terrorists — or even launch them himself, as a final act of suicidal revenge. The regime's collapse would probably spark a brutal civil war with very high stakes, says North Korea expert Andrei Lankov — like "Syria with nukes."

Expeditionary Force

After more than a decade of expansive stability operations in the Middle East, the U.S. Army is embracing a more expeditionary posture. 

This shift finds America’s primary land power institution returning to its origins as a more modestly sized, but tactically effective, fighting force. During the final decade of the 18th century and throughout the 19th—with the exception of the Civil War—the Army predominantly operated in small garrisons across expanding frontiers while occasionally massing in distant theaters.

As the Army’s first successful major campaign far beyond home territory, the Northwest Indian War of 1794 set a precedent for the expeditionary warfare the Army is embracing now. In this conflict, a combined arms brigade under Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary War veteran, deployed to the Ohio territory to prosecute national interests.

Called the Legion of the United States, America’s first standing Army formed in 1792 to contest British influence and Native American control of the lower Great Lakes region after two previous militia offensives suffered devastating defeats. Under orders from Secretary of War Henry Knox to “make those audacious savages feel our superiority in Arms,” Wayne trained a professional force of approximately 5,000 infantry, dragoons and artillerymen in Pennsylvania.

The Legion then marched west beyond support range, secured extended lines of communication, defeated a confederation of Native American warriors at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and ultimately established American dominance in Ohio. The war ended as an instructive, if nakedly aggrandizing, example of the U.S. Army enabling strategic gains abroad and preceded more than two centuries of foreign campaigns.

Small Forces, Distant Theaters
The Legion’s victory on the Ohio frontier is relevant for today’s paradigm and holds lessons for future campaigns where modestly sized American joint forces will again unite in distant theaters. The Army’s tenets of unified land operations contained in Army Doctrine Publication 3-0: Unified Land Operations offer a modern doctrinal framework that can place its first, and largely forgotten, foreign expedition in a comparable and understandable context. Though separated by hundreds of years and dramatic technological advances, the Northwest Indian War is a valuable case study for modern military leaders when it is assessed against the six tenets of flexibility, integration, lethality, adaptability, depth and synchronization.

The first tenet, flexibility, is defined as “a versatile mix of capabilities, formations, and equipment for conducting operations.” The American Army that invaded the Ohio territory in 1794 embodied this fundamental by adopting a unique combined arms profile. While standard European armies were typically structured with pure regiments, Wayne designed his brigade with combined arms “sublegions” that each comprised two battalions of assault infantry, one rifle battalion of skirmishers, one dragoon troop and one light artillery battery.

Similar to the Army’s current modular brigade combat teams, Wayne created a versatile command that could fight both centralized and decentralized. When put to the test, this flexibility allowed him to defeat hybrid indigenous forces throughout the advance, at the decisive engagement and during subsequent clearing operations.

The second tenet centers on integrating Army forces with other elements of military and national power. Though the Ohio expedition lacked joint cooperation with naval forces, it included a different kind of unity: augmentation by state militia and allied Native Americans. While the Kentucky volunteers provided a highly mobile, if undisciplined, mounted force to augment Wayne’s dearth of cavalry, Native American contingents contributed indigenous reconnaissance to guide his advance into the Northwest frontier. This “total force” and multinational cooperation consequently negated the Legion’s structural inadequacies in tactical mobility and intelligence collection while preserving assault battalions for decisive maneuvers.

Technological, Tactical Overmatch
Modern U.S. Army doctrine defines the third tenet of lethality as “the capacity for physical destruction.” It “is fundamental to all other military capabilities.” Like the tactical overmatch enjoyed by American forces in recent decades, the Legion relied on technological and tactical overmatch to allow it to win convincingly at the culmination of the campaign.

At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on Aug. 20, 1794, south of then British-held Detroit, Wayne unleashed forward skirmishers with precision rifles, main force infantry with musket volleys, light field artillery fires, and charging horsemen armed with sabers and pistols. This lethality distribution, which surpassed the Native American armament, allowed the Americans to attrite, fix, flank and overwhelm with combined arms attacks.

The fourth tenet, adaptability, is a crucial quality that expeditionary forces must possess as they enter, sometimes forcibly, into unpredictable and unfamiliar environments. Though he anticipated fighting a “Heterogeneous Army composed of British troops, the militia of Detroit, & all the hostile Indians NW of the Ohio,” Wayne carefully engaged the Native Americans while only intimidating, and thus preventing, unwanted escalation with the more powerful British Empire. This ability to defeat one enemy while deterring another stemmed from his nuanced appreciation of the strategic setting and President George Washington’s intent to secure Ohio while avoiding a larger nation-state conflict.

Previous Armies Defeated
Fifth, Army doctrine defines depth as “the extension of operations in time, space, or purpose … to achieve the most decisive result.” In the Ohio campaign, American ground forces advanced steadily and securely into hostile territory where two previous armies had recently suffered costly defeat. When the Native American alliance attacked the Legion’s forwardmost outpost at Fort Recovery on July 1, the defenders repelled a force 10 times their size through superior firepower and preserved Wayne’s operational reach.

This ability to secure extended lines of communication in-depth allowed the American main force to rapidly advance deep into the heart of Native American territory—similar to the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003—and ultimately compelled the Native Americans to accept a general engagement to protect their domestic centers.

The final tenet of unified land operations is the requirement to synchronize military actions to maximize capabilities and effects. As a veteran of numerous battles, Wayne knew the value of applying combat power at the ideal time and place. When the Legion approached the Native Americans’ strongpoint, the veteran commander arrayed his forces to integrate each subordinate elements’ strengths in reconnaissance, marksmanship, close combat assault and mobility while converging their effects at the decisive point.

This reinforcing scheme, in addition to the synchronization of advance, main body and logistical elements during the preceding march into Ohio, created favorable conditions for operational, and ultimately strategic, success.

21st Century Lessons
The Army’s victory at Fallen Timbers opened the way for American settlement across the lower Great Lakes region. After the battle, Wayne and the Legion remained in Ohio to clear the immediate area of Native American resistance. While the tactical gains were crucial, Wayne’s success in separating the Native Americans from their British sponsors held even greater import. The Europeans, who had encouraged Native American militancy by providing armament and promises of support, abruptly closed their forts to the retreating warriors largely because of demonstrated American resolve. In a book published several years before he became president, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the campaign “was one of the most striking and weighty feats in the winning of the West,” assessing it with little sympathy for the Native Americans who lost their ancestral lands.

Since the Legion’s decisive victory in 1794, the Army has conducted dozens of expeditionary campaigns. However, the fundamental tenets that made America’s first standing Army successful in its first foreign war remain unchanged. By incorporating flexibility, integration, lethality, adaptability, depth and synchronization, Wayne’s combined arms team managed to, as defined by Army doctrine, “gain and maintain a position of relative advantage in sustained land operations through simultaneous offensive, defensive, and stability … operations.” Like nearly all victorious expeditionary armies, it achieved this by arranging tactical actions to enable strategic ends in a distant theater while fighting on unfamiliar terrain with limited support.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley recently stated that America’s premier land power institution “must be lethal, agile, adaptive, innovative and expeditionary” and “armed with leader, technological and training overmatch” to achieve success in the contemporary security environment.

 As the U.S. enters an era of evolving complexity and instability, its ground forces must incorporate these qualities as they deploy across oceans and continents to serve national interests.

Missile Defense

Both Iran and North Korea are rogue nations developing and testing new missile technologies at an alarming rate. Iran threatens U.S. forces and has missile technology to carry out those threats. North Korea has successfully tested missiles that can be fired from submarines and is threatening to use them. 

Years ago, their test failures gave us some sense of breathing room. But recent technological advances, make them dangerous and their threats credible. China has been building a world-class, blue-water navy to challenge the United States and power its aggression in the South China Sea. Russia is flexing its muscles, orchestrating attacks against its neighbors, working to weaken NATO, and advance its global expansion.

The importance of missile defense in this environment is clear. To protect ourselves from these growing threats, the United States must continue to invest in technological improvements to help our combatant commanders and warfighters protect against growing missile threats at home and abroad. That is why it is critical that we continue to invest in, and modernize, proven upper-tier missile defense systems like the Patriot Missile, a highly mobile integrated air defense system; Terminal High Altitude Air Defense, which protects us from short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles; Ground-based Midcourse Defense, which protects the homeland from long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles; and the Aegis Combat and Aegis Ashore systems, which track and guide weapons to destroy enemy targets from the sea and land.


To counter the growing risks we face, and to make upper-tier missile defense a reality, our military must have enough of the right tools for the job. Tools like the SM-3 missile, for example, deliver the effective variant that can accurately intercept a ballistic missile threat. Should our high-tech radars locate an incoming missile, our warfighters will need to have the proper arsenal of SM-3s to ensure they can take on any inbound missile. Without enough SM-3 variants, we leave ourselves open to attack and rogue nations are empowered.

In tight budget times, it has been tempting to cut procurement of missiles here and there. They aren’t sexy and they don’t generally grab headlines. But they will, if we fail to defend ourselves due to a shortage. Without at least another 35 SM-3 missiles, we are putting both the nation and our warfighters at risk.
Congress must provide funding for at least another 35 SM-3 missiles. This ends up being a modest investment of $189 million to insure that we can defend our warfighters who are often closer to rogue nations with missiles, and our homeland from missile attack.

To any normal person, $189 million is a lot of money. But in the big picture of defending this nation, it is an it is an absolute bargain. To this day, it isn’t clear to me what the Department of Labor does to justify spending almost $40 billion annually. But to put the cost of the needed SM-3 rockets into perspective, the cost is less than one-half of 1 percent of the Department of Labor’s annual budget.

Congress must provide our warfighters with the tools they need to defend our nation. The Iranian mullahs recently published a paper outlining plans to launch a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack to bring us to our knees. To ignore these dangers is insane, if not criminal. Failure to provide our military with the required tools is effectively an invitation to our enemies to attack.

 More than 200 years ago, George Washington correctly said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Congress can preserve peace, in part, by insuring that our defenders are given the necessary amount of SM-3 missiles to keep us safe. 

Congress must take seriously its obligation to prevent the catastrophic human and economic costs of a nuclear missile attack by consistently making the necessary commitment to missile defense. The headlines make it clear — there is no more time to wait.

AirStation

"Air Launch Drones!"

Airplanes are expensive, powerful, fancy targets. To protect their pilots and keep the investment in the planes safe, the United States Air Force has for decades pursued stealth technologies, designed at hiding planes from hostile sensors. Yet stealth, too, is expensive, and with the increased abilities of unmanned aircraft, in the future there doesn’t have to be a pilot that needs protecting onboard every aircraft. With lots of cheap drones, for the first time in decades the Air Force could fill the skies with aircraft it isn’t afraid to lose.


The biggest challenge, then, is keeping those drones cheap. If the airplane doesn’t need to fly long distances, it can use less fuel or electrical power, and work with smaller engines. The Air Force is already working on these drones. That's fine if the drones will launch from airfields near the action, but war doesn’t always give time for that preparation, so what’s needed is a way to carry the small planes there.

DARPA’s plan is for the drones to launch from adapted cargo planes, and then fly back and land there too. A pair of aviation companies, SAIC and ArcXeon, have an alternative idea: what if the drones took off from and landed on airships, instead?

The concept is called “AirStation”, and it will be a home for “unmanned aerial systems,” the current in-vogue term among defense contractors for drones. From Aviation Week: 

Airships themselves have been proposed as long-endurance surveillance platforms, but U.S. Army and Air Force programs started during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ultimately canceled. Instead, says [SAIC senior aerospace engineer Ron] Hochstetler, the trend has been toward a more distributed, multiplatform, multisensor capability using small- and medium-size UAS.

But conventional UAS require support infrastructure and “their ground- and ship-based launch sites cannot be quickly relocated as needed, and are often unable to operate on land or ocean areas due to political sensitivities,” Hochstetler argues. “For UAS operations to fully reach their maximum capability, they require the mobility and geographical independence of an airborne support platform dedicated to UAS launch and recovery operations,” he says.

To misuse a saying of questionable origin: If you want to drone fast, drone alone. If you want to drone far, drone together.

Win Syria - Target Hiz'B'Allah

Covertly since 2012, and overtly since 2013, Hezbollah has deployed forces inside Syria, where its thousands of fighters are aligned with Assad’s army and mainly Shiite and Alawite militias against mainly Sunni forces that Assad regards as terrorists. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps pays Hezbollah’s bills and provides its command-and-control operations. Hezbollah forces have been particularly effective along the border with Lebanon, which provides it with strategic depth and supply lines.

Along with the Russian air intervention begun last September and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah’s fighters have enabled Assad to make progress against his opponents, especially those associated with the Free Syrian Army fighters backed by the United States. That progress has hardened Assad’s negotiating stance and blocked the UN search for a political solution. 

 A shift in the military balance is essential to ending the war, which is what Washington says it wants. But 44 has steadfastly refused to go to war against the Syrian, Iranian or Russian government. 


But Hezbollah is a non-state actor. 

It’s also a US-designated terrorist group that has murdered Americans, among many others. Most Republicans and Democrats would applaud an attack on Hezbollah, even if some in both parties would bemoan a move that suggested widening commitments overseas.

Washington could inform Tehran, Moscow and Beirut that Hezbollah should withdraw from Syria by a certain date or the United States would target any of its troops attacking non-extremist opposition forces in and around Aleppo and elsewhere. If Hezbollah failed to withdraw, the United States would then need to be ready to attack as soon as the ultimatum expired.

Hezbollah’s withdrawal or US targeting of Hezbollah would send a strong but still limited message to the Syrian opposition and its allies in Turkey and the Persian Gulf, as well as to Iran and Russia.

How would the players in Syria react? Hezbollah would likely try to strike at accessible US assets or citizens in neighboring countries, most likely in Lebanon or Iraq. It might also launch rockets into Israel. 

The Islamic State, which uses Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria as a recruiting tool, would be undermined.

Russia and Iran could in theory up the ante, escalating their involvement in Syria, but in practice they both appear to be close to the limit of lives and treasure they are willing or able to expend there. Assad would be outraged and promise revenge, but the Syrian government is even more clearly at the limit of its capabilities.

Meanwhile, the non-extremist Syrian opposition would applaud and press hard against the territory where Hezbollah is deployed. Gulf states would likewise welcome the US action and redouble their efforts to support the opposition.

In short, US targeting of Hezbollah would mostly please and embolden Washington’s friends and discomfit its antagonists. It would also reassert US commitment to fighting terrorism of all sorts, renew Washington’s commitment to holding Hezbollah accountable, hasten an end to the Syrian civil war and make a political settlement more likely.