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Over at the Naval Institute blog, Craig Hooper harps on one of my big complaints with much of the current China analysis: engaging in simplistic bilateral comparisons of U.S. and Chinese military power. As history teaches us, great power rivalries never occur in isolation, there are always lesser powers that either get sucked in or willingly go along for the ride. China’s strategic situation is more complicated than many assume. On its western flank sits Japan, the world’s third largest economy and possessor of a thoroughly modern military. To its south sits India (which Hooper excludes), a growing power in its own right and one that is rapidly modernizing its military. China’s rise doesn’t sit well with either country; both fought bloody wars against China in the 20th century. But back to shipbuilding, Hooper provides a useful service by comparing China’s recent burst of shipbuilding with the U.S. and China’s neighbors. “Using the official DOD Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the PRC 2005 and 2009, it looks like China’s Navy is growing. But…when China’s rate of growth is compared with other neighbors, that burst of growth over the past five years looks a lot less daunting. Read the rest of this entry »
March 17th, 2010 | China Rising, Uncategorized | 6 Comments » 
The Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship, USS Freedom, netted a pair of cocaine seizures on its first operational deployment to the Caribbean, even running down a “go fast” boat with its embarked MH-60 helicopter. “This is a perfect demonstration of what the LCS was designed for,” LCS builder Lockheed Martin’s Paul Lemmo tells Ares defense blog. Yet, acting as naval constabulary is only one of the missions the Navy has in mind for LCS. The real test will come when the LCS must fight a swarm of small boats in the littorals, according to some analysts. As the Navy’s attention has shifted from the blue waters to the strategically vital inshore waters, it has sought out the right vessel for a more flowing style of fighting against swarms of fast attack boats, a threat that the traditional surface warfare group is ill-suited to combat. When it comes to small boat swarms, Iran invariably comes to mind. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps operates hundreds of speedboats armed with machine guns and rockets (Iran is thought to have around 1,000 small armed craft) that ply Gulf waters and it regularly war games swarming tactics to shut the strategically vital and really narrow Straits of Hormuz. Iran is also indigenously producing a number of different anti-ship missile armed fast attack craft. Milan Vego, a professor at the Naval War College, says the Navy went with the LCS design without adequately assessing the fights it was likely to get in, which will be in confining waters against small boat swarms, where the LCS won’t do much to boost the Navy’s fighting abilities. The LCS is too lightly armed, “too large and insufficiently agile to engage such threats,” he writes in the September Proceedings. Read the rest of this entry » March 17th, 2010 | Ships and Subs | 16 Comments » 
I was on a conference call last week with JIEDDO commander Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who discussed IED networks in Afghanistan, where IED attacks have doubled over the past year. While Oates was careful not to reveal much in the way of breaking news, he provided some interesting detail on the bomb networks in Afghanistan. Bomb networks in Afghanistan differ somewhat from those in Iraq. Iraqi IED cells were largely funded by Saddam Hussein loyalists and sympathetic Sunnis in the Arab Gulf states. Bomb emplacers were the disenfranchised and the unemployed and most bombs were randomly placed. As an intelligence officer in Baghdad once told me, an emplacer would simply walk out his front door and drop a bomb onto the highway. In Afghanistan, the networks have “almost a military-style organizational structure,” with top level direction of IED placement. Bomb emplacers follow directives from the “chain of command,” and the emplacers are usually trained fighters. “There’s a direction for where they should be emplaced, and the order is given and they’re emplaced,” he said. I asked Oates about the Haqqani network, the military’s most lethal foe in Afghanistan; Bill Roggio of the long War Journal labels the Haqqani network “al Qaeda’s Afghan branch.” Oates said the Haqqani network was the “senior” Taliban faction operating in Afghanistan and it’s signature bomb is the “potassium chlorate-based homemade explosive.” Read the rest of this entry » March 16th, 2010 | Afghan Update | 24 Comments » 
One of the most interesting bits of news to come out over the weekend was this report by Mark Perry, at Foreign Policy, that Gen. David Petraeus put in a request to Joint Chiefs chair Adm. Mike Mullen that his Central Command (CENTCOM), take over responsibility for the Palestinian occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Those areas, along with the entire Levant, fall under EUCOM. Petraeus was frustrated by the U.S. inability to make any progress on what is the major flashpoint for Arab anger, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, when his constituency is predominantly Arab, says Perry. CNAS’s Levant expert, Andrew Exum, for one, says such a move makes eminent sense from a strategy perspective, “it doesn’t make sense to decouple what’s going on with respect to the Middle East Peace Process and the command in charge of the Middle East.” But he also highlights some of the difficulties such a move would entail: “What is the optic we send when a senior commander of U.S. troops in the region makes a visit to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt… and then caps his trip off with a visit to Israel?” He notes EUCOM would vigorously resist the move as a further dilution of its already wan influence. Petraeus testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning on the CENTCOM budget request. Hopefully there will be at least one Senator of curious mind present who might compel the general to explain his thinking on the matter and publicly make the case for why such a move makes strategic sense. Update: Well, Petraeus touched on the Israel-Palestinian issue in response to a question from Sen. John McCain, and it was a bit of a punt. He said at “various times” CENTCOM “staff members” have discussed asking that the Palestinian territories be included in the CENTCOM AO, although he himself has never made a formal request to the White House for such a change. He did call for some signs of progress in the peace process as it would make his job easier. – Greg March 16th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment » 
A few years back a friend of mine, who works for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told me a full blown war was breaking out in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, opposite El Paso, where he works. At the time I thought he was just being hyperbolic, as drug gangs routinely assassinate market rivals, and my attention was focused on America’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, he wasn’t exaggerating. Nearly 10,000 Mexican troops, with U.S. agency support, occupied Ciudad Juarez nearly two years ago, a move that has had little effect on levels of violence there; some 10 murders occur every day in that city. Mexico’s vicious drug cartels have now expanded the war with Saturday’s targeted killings of two American officials from the U.S. consulate in Juarez. I don’t know enough about the drug war in Mexico, although I’m working on redressing that deficiency, and I’ll be posting more about the war there, because I truly believe it is a war. I saw the handiwork of vicious drug cartels when I lived in Peru for a couple of years, at the height of that country’s war against the Shining Path insurgency, which I guess was more a mix of traffickers and anti-government guerrillas. For some reason, perhaps because of the enormous sums of money involved, cartel enforcers constantly try to outdo each other with the depravity of their acts. The violence in the Mexican border towns reads like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel (You know the one, Blood Meridian. If you haven’t read it, do so. I consider it quite possibly the best novel I’ve ever read). Here, for example, is just a single AP news report from a single day in Ciudad Juarez, from early January: Read the rest of this entry » March 15th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 29 Comments » 
Last week, Taiwan stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to sell the country new, upgraded F-16s, something this administration, like the Bush administration before it, refuses to do to avoid antagonizing China. The latest Taiwanese move came from its defense ministry, which released a report saying that China’s continued modernization of its fighter fleet has shifted the cross-strait military balance decidedly in China’s favor. The report says Taiwan’s ageing fleet of some 400 locally built fighters, French made Mirage 2000s, and 146 F-16A/Bs, are outmatched by China’s massive fighter fleet, particularly with China’s growing numbers of Russian built Su-30s. Only Taiwan’s F-16A/Bs have an edge over Chinese fighter aircraft, the report says. Taiwan requested some 66 F16C aircraft from the U.S. in 2006. Over at right-leaning think tank AEI’s defense blog, Michael Mazza raises the alarm: “Are policymakers considering the implications of this? The smaller and more antiquated the Taiwan air force is, the greater the number of American pilots in harm’s way should the U.S. ever need to go to the island’s defense. It’s not clear that anybody is doing this math, as simple as it is.”
Actually, RAND did the math on this one in a report last year, in typical RAND style, using sophisticated modeling to simulate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the 2010–2015 timeframe. RAND’s conclusion was that the addition of a few dozen upgraded F-16s would have little to no impact on the cross-strait balance. In fact, RAND found that in the event of a Chinese attack, “the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue air force has even fired a shot.” Read the rest of this entry » March 15th, 2010 | Eye on China, Uncategorized | 86 Comments » 
By Kevin Coleman Defense Tech Chief Cyber War Correspondent Black-Cyber-Operations have become all too common, launching highly sophisticated cyber actions against their targets that go undetected for months or years. A black operation (black-op) is generally accepted worldwide by militaries and intelligence agencies to represent specific types of covert operations typically involving activities that are either secret or of questionable legitimacy and often violate international law and demand deniability. Russia began developing black-cyber-ops teams as far back as the early 1990s. But Russia is not the only military with these capabilities. A Chinese black-ops team is credited with the design and execution of the “Titan Rain” initiative that long went unchecked and undetected deep inside the U.S. Department of Defense networks. This cyber event is said to be second only to the cyber attack that hit the Pentagon in 2008 and impacted both theaters of operation (Afghanistan and Iraq). These highly specialized teams are rarely talked about in the open media, but sometimes come up in quiet, off-line conversations at conferences. Recently, at a cyber warfare event, the lunch break conversation turned to cyber weapons. “If I were to start a business today, I would start a black-cyber-ops and cyber weapons development organization,” I told those sitting nearby. Somebody (from a three letter organization) leaned over, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’ll be your first customer.” As the conversation went on, another said, “We need the equivalent of a Cyber Blackwater” (or Xe). While there are black-cyber-ops organizations around the world and cyber arms developers and dealers, this appears to be an underserved market niche. Given the attention cyber warfare is now receiving, you can bet there will be more such organizations going active in the next few years. FACT: Black-Cyber-Ops are often used for political, military, intelligence and business reasons. FACT: The only difference between a cyber weapon and a security or capacity testing tool is the intent of the individual using it. FACT: There is a reference to at least one Black-Cyber-Ops Conference that was said to involve the Israeli Military and the Mossad. March 15th, 2010 | Cyber-warfare, Uncategorized | 6 Comments » 
Author, historian and former Marine Steven Pressfield is on what I consider the dream tour of Afghanistan with Marine Gen. James Mattis, commander, Joint Forces Command. You know that question, “Who would you want to be sat next to on an interminably long plane flight?” My answer would be Mattis, he is whip smart, a keen student of history and a seasoned combat commander. Well, Pressfield sat across from Mattis on a G5 across the Atlantic and then joined him on a tour of the Afghan war zone, including visits with VIPs, grunts and Afghan troops, and blogs about at his site. I’m envious to say the least. Mattis really impressed me when he came out against the first Fallujah assault as response to the killing of the Blackwater personnel; he argued his Marines shouldn’t be used as an instrument of revenge. I’ve been further impressed with what’s been coming out of JFCOM under his direction. I’m told he’s been looking into various Air Force/Navy and Army/Marines projects that lack joint context to solving what are joint problems. I really liked Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire”, first rate historical fiction, though haven’t read any of his other books. It’s well worth your time to read his blog posts of his trip with Mattis. Pressfield also gives what I thought was a pretty darn insightful summary of his visit to the war zone, even if it was from within the “bubble,” as he characterized it. While he says he’s not a journalist, he clearly has a good eye for detail, and he does a good job capturing the big picture of the challenges we face in Afghanistan. I’ve got to think, spending as much time as he did with the good general, it reflects more than a bit of Mattis’ own thoughts on the situation. Read the rest of this entry » March 14th, 2010 | Afghan Update | 6 Comments » 
The Army is fast tracking a GPS guided 120mm mortar round to Afghanistan in response to an urgent request for precision mortar fire from commanders on the ground there, and should be fielded by the end of the year. Called the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI), it improves upon the current round’s 136-meter Circular Error Probable (CEP) reducing it to about 10-meters. “This is designed for a precision capability such as against a sniper in a building, or enemies in a bunker or trench. If you were to engage with a conventional mortar round, you would have to fire 8-to-10 rounds to kill or suppress the target. With APMI, you will probably be able to do the same thing with one or two rounds,” said Bruce Kay, systems coordinator for the Army’s mortar programs in a press release. The Army will soon down-select from one of three competing industry teams: Raytheon-Israeli Military Industries, General Dynamics and ATK. This is another example of the Army redressing a long neglected weapon that will be hugely important in the small unit, infantry battles that will dominate current and future wars. – Greg March 12th, 2010 | Afghan Update, Ammo and Munitions, Big Army, Uncategorized | 42 Comments » 
AvWeek’s Bill Sweetman, who has been tracking the Joint Strike Fighter program for a long time, says people are missing the elephant that was in the room at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on JSF yesterday, and that elephant is about to take a dump all over Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ office carpet. It’s called the acquisition “death spiral”: as a program’s costs go up the unit numbers purchased drop, hence per unit costs climb even more, fewer bought, etc. etc. We’ve raised this issue here before. If the price of a unit of goods doubles, economic theory, and Pentagon acquisition history, teaches us that the quantity bought drops. Yesterday, Pentagon cost assessment and program evaluation director Christine Fox told the SASC that each JSF will now cost at least $80-$95 million, compared to an estimated $50 million back in 2002. Sweetman thinks that’s still a low ball figure. GAO puts the current per aircraft price tag at $112 million. The reason that elephant’s going to do his business, Sweetman says, is that everybody is dividing the total production costs of the JSF by the planned Pentagon buy of 2,443 aircraft and foreign buys of around 700 aircraft. Those numbers are no longer realistic. Yet, as he notes, nobody at the hearing was willing to delve into aircraft production rates or total buys. The winner in all of this has got to be Boeing, Sweetman says, who will be pushing the virtues of an $80 million F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. He also thinks some expected JSF customers, such as the Israelis, will take a new look at the F-15E. For one, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway must be spitting mad about right now. His service has held off buying new attack jets for a long time expecting the vertical take-off and landing F-35B would soon be on line. I’ll be curious to see how long he holds out before buying more Hornets. – Greg March 12th, 2010 | F-35 Watch | 27 Comments » | |
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