Category Archives: Air and Naval Weapons

Remember those supposedly buried Spitfires?

Spitfire MkIIA. Are more of these about to be found? Stay tuned.

Spitfire MkIIA. Some 35 Spitfires of the 7,000 odd made are airworthy today. Are more of these about to be found? Stay tuned.

We’ve been pretty skeptical, and still are. Back last April, when we wrote about this project, we thought that whether they “are in good order of not is the big question.” It’s not answered yet. But the latest news from Burma is more encouraging than disappointing:

A team searching for scores of lost Spitfire planes that were packed in crates and buried in Burma during the last days of World War II believes it may have hit paydirt.

David Cundall, whose 17-year quest to unearth the long-lost planes has cost him his life savings, told a news conference today that searchers have found a crate buried in muck in the northern Kachin state capital Myitkyina. Images transmitted by a camera lowered into the wet ground were inconclusive, but Cundall called the discovery “very encouraging.”

“We’ve gone into a box, but we have hit this water problem. It’s murky water and we can’t really see very far,” Cundall told reporters in Rangoon, Burma’s main city. “It will take some time to pump the water out… but I do expect all aircraft to be in very good condition.”

via Search for missing WWII Spitfire planes may have hit paydirt in Burma | Fox News.

Read The Whole Thing™ if only for the tale of the nonagenarian RAF veteran who’s assisting the Anglo-Burmese exploration team. And read our last story (in the link in the first graf) for the significance of the Spit as a weapon. It was one of two successful fighters that were built against a British Air Ministry specification that called for an then-unheard-of eight (instead of two, the standard since WWI) rifle-caliber machine guns. An aerial armament arms race was on! (Later marks had fewer but heavier guns, as enemy designers armored their planes against the Spit’s .303 Brownings).

It would be wonderful if more Spitfire airframes were recovered. Personally, we take a somewhat  dimmer view of the prospects of something made principally of untreated aluminum, with significant components of magnesium and steel, doing terribly well under water for 65 years or so.

But we’re also mindful of two things:

  1. Other aircraft have been recovered from deep in lakes in Norway and Russia and been restoried to airworthiness. It all depends on the conditions “down there.” This is one reason there are more World War II aircraft flying every year. Another is:
  2. A rare and desirable aircraft like a Spitfire is well worth restoring. Airworthy examples sell for millions of dollars, and some restorations begin with little but a data plate, crash debris, and a series of period drawings.

So overall, we are resistant to getting our hopes up; but we’d really like to see the doughty Mr Cudnall’s efforts crowned with success.

Hey, what’s the Navy’s biggest problem?

We're scrapping carriers, but our focus on sailors carrying children...

We’re scrapping carriers, but our focus on sailors carrying children…

As we recently told you, the Air Force woke up from a spending binge with a bad hangover and no sign of the computer system they spent over a billion dollars on. Not to be outdone, the navy woke up with a bad hangover — and pregnant.

The Stars and Stripes tells the tale of woe and morning sickness:

Facing a staggering 74 percent unintended pregnancy rate, the Navy has launched a family planning awareness and information campaign.

We know what that means: they’ll have lots of mandatory death-by-powerpoint briefings, the Armed Forces network will put “don’t get knocked up” PSAs in the rotation with the usual “stop beating your wife” PSAs, and the problem won’t get any better.

Actually, maybe the public service announcements worked, and when sailors stopped beating their sailor wives, next thing you know….

The Navy’s peer-mentoring program Coalition of Sailors Against Destructive Decisions is holding informational sessions on family planning throughout January covering topics that include parental leave, operational deferment and the best forms of birth control.

Nearly three-fourths of all Navy pregnancies were unplanned, according to a recent parenthood survey conducted by the service. Of those, only 31 percent of the couples were using birth control at the time they conceived. With pregnancies involving enlisted servicewomen, 70 percent of the fathers were also in the military.

We have to scrap boomers, but the admirals' worry is the baby boom aboard

We have to scrap boomers, but the admirals’ worry is the baby boom aboard

You might wonder why the Navy is so keen on pregnancy prevention. They’re not. This is a shot across the baby bump. as it were, for the next Administration initiative: abortion benefits for military servicewomen and wives (the NDAA authorizes abortion, but only for rape and incest cases. Extending this benefit to all servicewomen and all service spouses is a major DOD priority — much higher than, say, fighting the war). Let’s hear the next talking head tut-tut over the veritable monsoon of dropping infants:

“It is a very high number,” said Eleanor Schwarz, director of the Women’s Health Services Research Unit at the University of Pittsburgh. “It probably does point to a need to try to improve the situation.”

Of course, the “Women’s Health Services Reseatch Unit” promotes birth control and abortion. A couple months ago, Schwarz was promoting mandatory reporting of womens’ contraceptive decisions as a way to promote mandatory contraception counseling.

In the military, mandatory has another ring entirely.

As part of the awareness campaign, the Navy is highlighting the impact unplanned pregnancy can have on a servicemember’s career. A pregnant sailor can be disqualified from a sea duty position needed for career advancement. An unexpected spike in personal and financial responsibilities can also “jeopardize operational mission readiness,” and disrupt careers, according to the Navy news release on the awareness campaign.

via Navy seeks to combat high rate of unplanned pregnancies – News – Stripes.

Is there any way the Navy, or any service, could implement this without pressuring women on birth control, and, once the Administration has secured it as a benefit for the troops and their families, abortion?

As guys we’re neutral on the whole abortion thing, and we’re generally in favor of birth control. We just think the decision ought to be made by the woman, not her (or her husband’s) commanding officer.

And the idea that pregnant women are the Navy’s biggest problem… if anyone in the Navy spaces in the E Ring believes that, he’s gone full retard and needs to go to the one room on USS Boat where the Marines hold the key. Every single woman in the Navy could get knocked up tonight and take to her bed with complications tomorrow, and it wouldn’t hit the service as hard as budgetary reality is going to.

Yet they’re planning for Case A and not Case B.

The trouble with drones

predator-firing-missile4There are a number of problems with a drone war, as some in Washington prefer to wage it. One of these, and one which fits their worldview in which all veterans are damaged goods, is explained by this Spiegel article about a drone pilot who claims to have been traumatized to the point of dysfunction. It’s in three parts so we’ll give you the three links:

  • The woes of an American drone operator

OK, we get it, the guy not only has a sore callus on his button-pushing finger, he’s twaumatized. Roger that.

We have another objection to Air Force style push-button war: it doesn’t work. No matter how good your multispectral multisensor electronic ISR is, you still don’t know what (or whom) you’re unloading on, and that means you have no idea what the immediate effects will be, let alone the second and third order effects.

A look at the history of war technology shows that each new advance has been marked by commentators and theorists as an end to the old way of war, in which boots (formerly sandals) and bayonets (formerly spears) took and held contested ground to impose national will. A few examples of these:

  • The Maxim gun, some theorized, made war so terrible that no one would try. The First World War showed the truth of the “terrible” bit, although a greater killer was artillery, and a greater terror, phosgene and mustard gas; that same war disproved the second half of the theory thoroughly.
  • Inter-war theorist Giulio Douhet was deeply influential on world air forces, with his belief that strategic bombing alone could bring a combatant nation to its knees in total war. (He expressed this in a novel which most people who think they understand him have never read, The War of 19–, as well as in a theoretical book, Command of the Air). His theory was thoroughly believed by not only the Italian but also the American, British and German air arms. It was the essence of the theory taught at the US Air Forces Tactical School between the wars, which formed the conceptual firmament of the WWII and Cold War Air Force. His theory has a number of flaws, as you might expect from a theoretician who had no practical experience of war and limited understanding of the technology, aviation, that he was promoting. In fact, long before bombing makes an enemy give up, it stiffens his will to resist; and despite devastating bombings, German war production kept increasing until the factories began to be overrun by Allied … boots.
  • The nuclear weapon changed everything, to the point where the US cut back its Navy greatly and very nearly disbanded its Army in the 1950s. After all, what problems can’t you solve with a copy of Douhet and a few nukes? Most of them, it turns out.
  • In the 1970s, CIA Director Stansfield Turner downgraded espionage and special operations capabilities because with signals intelligence, imagery and other technological intelligence disciplines that can be operated from DC via satellite, face-to-face dealing with bad people in bad places is obselete. We’ve been blinded in most conflicts since.
  • After Vietnam, it was precision-guided munitions. No more need for muddy boots; we’ll just push these buttons and blow the sensor-derived targets to Kingdom Come. Of course, the Serbs, being rational and intelligent humans, concealed their high-value targets and fed our sensors and the Turnerites who were reading them all the sensor signatures a bombing campaign could ask for. Our PGMs (completely apart from ) blew the living daylights out of 1950s fighter jets and World War tanks that the Serbs dragged out of their museums to decoy us. Let’s not dwell on the own goal caused by bombing French and Chinese embassies… which was caused by Turnerite sensor-happiness.

That was then, drones is now. Expect it to end well?

A flamethrower on whaaat? An airplane?

 

A Heinkel 111 tests the defensive flamethrower. February 9, 1940 at Tarnewitz.

A Heinkel 111 tests the defensive flamethrower. February 9, 1940 at Tarnewitz. LuftArchiv.de picture.

Somebody actually did do this, and imagine our lack of surprise that it was the Germans in World War II, those same whacky guys who never let mere impracticality stand in the way of weapons development. These are the same guys who came up with explosive robot tanks that were tethered to the human operator by a short and vulnerable control wire, and a sound-pressure weapon that could shatter enemy troops and aircraft with sound waves (technical problem: it was also fatal to any human operators, which turned out to be an unavoidable impediment to combat deployment). So why not a flamethrower on an airplane?

Hell, why not two?

The German aero-military historical page, LuftArchiv.de,  has a short blurb on this with two photos of one of the weapons (it’s at the end of the page that has some other interesting weapons, including a quasi-automatic 88mm recoilless rifle with a ten-shot drum magazine and a 10 rounds per minute rate of fire). Here’s their explanation:

Bereits Ende 1939 machte Leutnant Stahl, Technischer Offizier beim KG 51, den Vorschlag, angreifende Jäger durch im Heck der Bomber und Fernaufklärer eingebaute Flammenwerfer abzuwehren. Der angreifende Jäger sollte in die ausgestoßene Ruß-Ölwolke hineinstoßen, so dass seine Kabinenscheiben schlagartig blind wurden. Im Februar 1940 fanden entsprechende Versuche mit He 111 und Ju 88 in der Erprobungsstelle Tarnewitz statt. Das Gerät wurde dann auch probeweise bei Beginn des Russlandfeldzugs beim KG 51 eingesetzt, scheint sich aber bei der Truppe nicht durchgesetzt zu haben. Als Angriffswaffe wurden die Flammenwerfer »Gero 11« A, Bund C bei der Fw 190 für Tiefangriffe verwendet.

What’s that? You don’t read German? How does it feel to be dumber than a third-grade kid… in the German-speaking countries? Here it is in quick and dirty English, for you monoglots (or polyglots who are not Teutonglots, a word we just made up):

By the end of 1939, Lieutenant Stahl, the technical officer at KG (Bomber Wing) 51, had made the proposal to defend bombers, and long-range reconnaissance airplanes, against attacking fighter aircraft, by means of flamethrowers built into the rear of the airplane. The attacking fighters would be caught in soot from oil smoke, so that their windscreens would be struck blind. In February, 1940, experiments with a Heinkel 111 and Junkers 88 took place at the Tarnewitz test center. The device was also used experimentally by KG 51 at the beginning of the Russian campaign, but does not seem to have actually been employed by the troops.

The last line of that paragraph addresses the second flamethrower developed by the Luftwaffe: “As an offensive weapon, the “Gero 11″ A, Block C was used by the FW190 for low-level attacks.” ["Gero 11 A Block C" is a reference to a Luftwaffe nomenclature model that sorted modified weapons into "Bunds" or batches, so we've translated it as "Block" as the USAF uses such as "F-15C Block 52," it's also like the US Navy's Mark X Mod Y nomenclature system].

Ganz einfach, as the Germans say.

Junkers 88 A-4 Flamethrower test, date unk. Must have been impressive live and in color!

Junkers 88 A-4 Flamethrower test, date unk. Must have been impressive live and in color! LuftArchiv.de picture.

The problems with the defensive flamethrower are obvious. It brings more inflammable material into the fuselage of the plane (the He111 and Ju88 were well designed, with the highly inflammable avgas being in the wings, giving the crews — who were clustered near the nose of the plane in both designs — a fighting chance at escape from a torched plane. Fear of fire was a very real thing for the WWI veterans who dominated Luftwaffe command in the years between the wars; the Imperial Air Service had been the first to issue parachutes to pilots in the Great War, and Nazi disregard of human life didn’t extend to the lives of expensively trained technical specialists like aircrews.

But the inflammability of the mixture aboard the plane is the least of it. The sooting-out-the-windows approach seems to depend on fighter pilots willing to cooperate by flying into the plume, or staying in it. In other words, fighter pilots with really crappy reflexes, a very small subset that is not likely to be effective at shooting down bombers in the first place. The defensive flamethrower just wouldn’t work 99 times out of a hundred. And worse, the long plume would draw attention to the plane. Air-war stories, from any war, are full of The One that Got Away because the fighter pilot lost sight of him. A plane trailing one length of fire and three more of black, billowing smoke would ring the dinner bell for every fighter for miles around.

Ju88 in Romania, 1941, KG51.

Ju88 in Romania, 1941, KG51, showing flamethrower nozzles.

Now one possible use might be to allow a plane to “play dead.” The idea being, to make the fighter pilot think, “Hey, I flamed him, let’s go find another target.” But the Germans don’t seem to have conceived it that way.

As far as actual flame effect on fighters, Lt. Stahl was too technically astute to suggest that. As you can see, the flame extends barely a planelength behind the hurtling bomber.

One gets the sense that some of these German development programs were followed not because they had hope of practical result, but because a a couple of engineers were taken with the technical challenge — the WWII equivalent of “sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads.”

The pictures are from LuftArchiv.de and we strongly suggest you spend some time there, particularly on the Bordausrüstung and Bordwaffen pages.

UPDATE: Turns out that it may have been more widely used that LuftArchiv.de thinks. This forum page contains a picture of a Ju88 of KG51, Lieut. Stahl’s unit, in Romania in 1941. The page also describes a combat use of a flamethrower by a Do17 of another unit, KG76,which is well documented by both the British attackers (who shot the plane down) and the surviving German aircrew. The Dornier was captured nearly intact; its disposition is unknown but it was probably scrapped during or soon after the war.

We’ll be uploading the photo of the KG51 Junkers’s tail area with a crewman, once we fix a small problem with the image file.

Here’s a Vietnam story Hollywood would never make

Fortunately, the US Navy did. Yes, it’s an hour long.

Make the hour. Thank us later.

 

We should probably rathole this thing for April 30th next year, but we just watched it and have to share the story with you.

Sometimes, you go off to war and wind up someplace else entirely. Such was the case for the crew of USS Kirk, a Destroyer Escort/Frigate that led the greatest naval rescue, in terms of live saved, of all time.

Kirk sails on under a new name and pennant number in the Navy of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Not Guilty!

scales_of_justiceC-17 pilot Jared Foley was acquitted on all charges by a 10-officer panel on Friday. As we reported previously, he was being tried for a variety of procedural errors on a flight that ended with several West Virginia National Guard SF soldiers off the drop zone at Camp Harrison, MT, and one of the Green Berets, Francis Campion, dead.

The Olympian reported:

He embraced a courtroom full of supporters, most of them Air Force officers in flight suits or brown leather jackets.

His case caught the attention of airmen throughout the service because Foley was a well-respected pilot who believed he was following Air Force regulations when he permitted what became a fatal airdrop on July 10, 2011 over a Montana air field.

Foley maintained that the Army leaders on the ground and in the air cleared the last jump even though a previous one had resulted in a soldier landing outside the established drop zone. The soldiers said the jumper landed off course because of his own error.

Furthermore, Foley said yesterday that the feedback he received from computer reports and service members on five previous passes over the airfield showed that the mission was going well.
Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2012/12/14/2353704/accused-jblm-pilot-not-guilty.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

The ambitious JAG who’d been looking for Foley’s scalp, Captain Mark Rosenow, and his staff apparently fled the courtroom without speaking to the press. Foley and his defense attorneys were visibly moved — one of them, Capt. Sarah Carlson, to tears — but the defense lawyers too declined to speak to the media.

SGT Francis Campion, USSF, WV ARNG. RIP.

SGT Francis T. Campion, III, USSF, WV ARNG. RIP.

The SF guys, Campion’s friends, didn’t support the court-martial of Foley, and blamed their own unit’s failure to follow procedures, which led to underreporting the winds on the DZ. Campion’s mother and sister attended the trial, but made it clear they were looking for facts, not a guilty verdict. Foley’s own commanders testified in his defence: “One of the finest officer I’ve worked with, and “Above reproach,” was Lt. Col. James Sparrow’s assessment of Foley.

Rosenow, an ambitious Academy graduate (2003) from an Academy family, and a non-pilot in a pilot’s service, may have overreached when he lectured the jury — containing 3 aviators and 7 support officers — about Foley’s alleged pilot errors and about black-letter Air Force regulations.

The particular regulation at issue, Rosenow complained, required a drop to be aborted any time any personnel or cargo landed outside the surveyed area of the drop zone. But there are several versions of the regulation, which themselves are  inconsistent; and the Air Force is only one partner in the air delivery equation. The unit on the ground (and in personnel drops, on the jump) is also a factor. The regulation, in Rosenow’s interpretation, rejects, denies, abnegates all agency for the jumpers and ground unit.

Speaking from retrospect of 27-odd years SF service, some of it in the NG SF, many if not most jumps include a tree or other obstacle landing. We’ve personally touched down in trees, bushes, snowbanks, hard runways, aluminum bleachers. swamps, rivers and creeks (never a lake or the ocean, except deliberately), and on top of a (shut down) CH-54 Tarhe helicopter. We’ve near-missed farm-machinery and the wreckage of a MiG. We’ve watched fellow jumpers whack wires. buildings, a greenhouse, trucks, cars, vans, a tank, and a dumpster. In no case was the remainder of the jump canc’d. The only way you learn to steer your chute is by steering your chute.

Another regulation Foley supposedly broke was programming an airdrop computer system using the descent profile for an MC-1 chute instead of the SF-10s that Campion and his teammates were jumping. Rosenow, again, a well-connected career lawyer who chose to depart the Academy and go right to political fellowships and law school instead of squadron service and flight school, excoriated Foley for this, but it’s a distinction with very little difference.

A certain factor in the acquittals was not mentioned in the news coverage that we have read: the building that Campion hit was a surveyed obstacle on the DZ survey, and it was briefed to the jumpers in the Jumpmaster brief. In other words, all the jumpers heard about it, they all knew it was a hazard, they all had steerable chutes. It’s possible that Campion was avoiding other jumpers or other obstacles and put himself on collision course with the structure. These things can happen during descent, and sometimes you’re unimaginably busy all the way down. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive to tell us.

Foley’s co-pilot, Captain Joy Zayzatz, earlier opted to separate from the service in lieu of court-martial, a decision that may do her lifelong career and reputational damage. She was charged with dereliction of duty and reckless endangerment.

Mark Rosenow. US Air Force Academy Association photo

Mark Rosenow. US Air Force Academy Association photo

What happens after this is not clear, but we can make some suppositions. Foley has been resoundingly cleared, but just the fact of a court-martial is very damaging to an officer’s career, especially in a climate of retrenchment and drawdowns. Where does he go to get his reputation back? Rosenow, for his part, is so well-connected, with so many AFA grad family members larded through the Air Force, that he’s probably completely unscathed by the failure of his overreach here. (We don’t blame the Academy. Heck, we knew at least two Air Force Academy grads in Army SF, both good officers. They probably ticked off the Rosenow in their year group to have to change services).

What this means to the future of personnel airdrops is another question. The Air Mobility Command, already buried in bureaucracy, is likely to get even more legalistic and bureaucratic. Aircrews are going to be much less willing to work with Army and other ground units for airdrop missions, and the buzz in the Air Force is that pilots, especially C-17 pilots, are looking for ways to avoid airdrop qualification or let it lapse.

But before we close — let us never forget Francis T. Campion, III.  He was an intelligent, enthusiastic outdoor athlete who volunteered over and over and cleared every hurdle in the long steeplechase that is Special Forces qualification. He was a combat veteran of Afghanistan. Whatever else ensues, he’s still dead at a too-young 31, and nothing can change that. It would be nice if JAGs stopped trying to frame operational guys, but we all know that’s not going to happen. It would be nice if the Air Force began putting some trust in their crew dogs, but a service marbled through with Rosenows, that’s not going to happen either. Perhaps the Air Force can rewrite its regulations so that they’re clearer, and so that they’re interpreted sensibly, not with a Rosenow’s timid risk-averse approach. But what we can do is remember Campion.

And, folks: what we do is dangerous. We do it as safely as we can, but we can’t prepare Green Beret wearers for combat operations without taking risks. Let’s remember Francis Campion who risked all on a roll of the dice that came up snake eyes. Tonight he dines in Valhalla with the legends of the ages. It could have been any of us, brother.

Other Olympian coverage of the trial’s last day:

SF soldier dies, AF pilot faces trial

SF-10 parachutes

The SF-10 parachute was developed for the Forest Service’s smoke jumpers. It provides a slower descent and better steerability than the MC1-1C chute it replaced for SF.

In a highly unusual trial, an Air Force C-17 aircraft commander is facing trial for the bad outcome of a July, 2011 training mission. A 31-year-old Special Forces NCO, SGT Francis Campion of a West Virginia company of the National Guard 2nd Battalion,19th Special Forces Group (Airborne), died after his round steerable SF-10 parachute deposited him on the roof of a building, then jerked him off his feet. He fell approximately 25 feet to his death.

Campion was a relative newcomer to SF, but he was a lifelong outdoorsman and an enthusiastic member of the unit. He was one of a stick of four SF soldiers trying to hit Marshall Field at Camp William Harrison in Montana. He missed the small DZ by about 100 meters. His teammates landed safely, but not all on the DZ.

The Air Force has charged pilot Captain Jared Foley with three offenses, each of which could net him six months in prison, for a variety of procedural violations. The court martial is taking place this week. Yesterday, Foley pled not guilty, and several superior officers who thought highly of him were excluded from the jury — they may testify for Foley.  Today, the prosecution starts to make its case.

The Air Force accuses Foley of reckless conduct for his alleged approval of the late jump. His three counts of dereliction of duty are:

• Failing to refrain from executing an additional airdrop after passing a drop zone.

• Failing to obtain approval to carry out that jump.

• Failing to enter accurate data into his mission computer.

Another factor in this has to be the 50-years-behind-the-state-of-the-art steerability of the round chute. The TU modification was pretty slick in 1955, but that ship has sailed. The SF-10 is better than the MC1-1C, On the other hand, using static line (or freefall) steerable canopies, you’re probably going to get more injuries and deaths overall than with the current chutes. Because they enable new kinds of serious and injurious errors.

Ready to jump!

A short stick of jumpers waits for the green light on a C-17 (file photo).

Reading the articles, they’re trying to fry this guy, it looks like, for leaving the green light on at the trailing edge of the drop zone, or for taking one more racetrack than he had flight-planned.

This has been a bone of contention between troop carriers and SF static line jumpmasters for decades. Our guys want them to give a green light when the AC is safe and on the final course, and let the JM judge the release. Their command wants them to use the computers and give the JM zero discretion — go on green, stop on red. But the Air Force’s equipment is not accurate enough to drop personnel safely, especially on small Drop Zones or in broken terrain — we might use it in wartime, but nobody’s going to trust them over our own jumpmasters at home.

Even if Foley had given the red light, there’s a 99% probability that Campion would have jumped anyway. Our ethos is to keep the team together, if you’re tail-end charlie then you’re not going to stay in the plane alone on a red light, even if the pilot had put it on.

Air Force culture is probably a factor in these charges, possibly the primary factor. Over the years, the troop carrier units once part of the Tactical Air Command were subsumed in the bureaucratic, procedure-forward, vastly overheadquartered Military Airlift Command, which completely lacked the combat and tactical orientation of the old TAC. But it didn’t end there: MAC was replaced by the even more bloated and ineffective Air Mobility Command, in which even more generals and even more staffers micromanage ever fewer air delivery crews.

So the bottom line is, so far, that this sounds like a prosecution of a mission-oriented guy by desk pilots. Or by anti-warfighting judge advocates. Although we’re persuadable if the prosecution has more than that.

Finally, here’s an exercise  for the reader: if the Judge Advocate General corps was, to a man, in the pay of Al-Qaeda and other real and potential enemies, of the USA, what would they do different?

Remember Pearl Harbor?

Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero at Pearl Harbor. Illustration by Darryl Joyce. (Actually, we think he has the plane’s color wrong for 1941. Nice picture, though).

Fewer living Americans remember this event every year, and its echo through the generations grows weaker. This morning, a 13-year-old had no answer as to why the flags downtown were at half-staff. Worse, he thought the Chinese — our allies in that war — were the perpetrators. To the extent the battle is taught, the instruction often is so laden with political correctness that the  message coming through is that, as the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum once set up to illustrate, we had it coming and the poor Japanese were just defending themselves. Lord love a duck.

The historical background to the battle is clear. A United States obsessed with economic disaster and mismanagement at home allowed its armed forces to decline both in technology, so that American arms lagged the state of the art, and numbers, so that they were stretched unbearably thin. As it was, the weakness invited a knockout blow from a nation with a third our population and a tenth or so (as the .pdf link shows, comparing these data is non-trivial) of our GDP.

Only Divine Providence (if you’re Mikey Weinstein, blind luck) had the Japanese strike when two US aircraft carriers were out of port, so the thunderous Japanese victory was a victory over the obsolete half of the Navy: the battleships and those admirals who clung to them in bitter denial of what Mitchell, Arnold and others had accomplished two decades earlier.

Despite Japan’s economic weakness vis-a-vis the mid-20th-Century USA, by ordering her society along Spartan, militaristic lines, Japan was able to punch above her demographic and economic weight for quite a span of time. Less than a century after Japan opened to the outside world and began to adopt modern technology, she was able to field complex weapons (aircraft carriers, aircraft, submarines) that were competitive with (and occasionally superior to) those of her enemies.

Japan still flies the same Naval Ensign, but the ships are fewer, and the policies that they sail to defend are less threatening to the neighbors.

But any hope of a Japanese win depended on a fast win, because the Japanese forces were not resilient, or in Nassim Taleb’s elegant neologism, antifragile. Their logistics systems, particularly, were dependent upon a web of international, interisland, and coastal shipping that was vulnerable to submarine and aerial attack. In contrast, American logistics were robust and antifragile. Even most of the wrecks and hulks that the celebrating Japanese fleet left behind in Pearl would rise to rejoin the battle. Indeed, some of the sunken battleships only sank because of failures in the antifragility that should have been designed into their systems or trained into their crews.

In the end, Pearl Harbor, the great Japanese victory, sealed the doom of Japanese militarism — not for years, and not without a great deal of blood, tears, sweat and toil (sometimes a phrase can’t be improved upon, can it? It can only be pilfered from Churchill). But the attacks of 7/8 December 1941 and the campaigns that immediately followed them in Malaya, Singapore and the Phillipines were the apogee of the Japanese Empire’s ballistic trajectory, and a fiery and steep re-entry was coming.

SOF Truths, blue-suit edition

Last year the Air Force revised its Special Operations doctrine and we just went through the relevant document, Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 2–7, Special Operations. Most of the changes are yawnsome (really, most doctrine publications are dry as the bleached bones in the Dasht-i Margo. That’s just the way it is). But one of the changes was to insert an Air Force-ized version of the Special Operations Truths into the preface, as follows.

As we read AFDD 2-7, it is essential we keep the basic SOF truths in mind. AFSOF cannot be mass produced. AFSOF is centered on people and not platforms and therefore quality is always better than quantity. It takes years to produce a strategic SOF Airman. History has demonstrated that we cannot produce competent AFSOF after an emergency arises. Our AFSOF must remain strong and ready to serve. Finally, as we employ AFSOF, All Air Force Airmen must be prepared to enable the AFSOF mission with agile combat support capabilities.

As long-time boosters of The Truths, we think that’s a good development. We think that the Special Ops Truths are remarkably useful and widely applicable. The Air Force version makes them a bit wordier and harder to memorize and internalize than the telegraphic, canonical version, but they’re still good. Far beyond combat or special operations force procurement, we’ve found them to be worthwhile lodestones even in civilian business and family decisions. The secret is to do like the Air Force has done here, and adapt them.

There’s also one SOF Truth that we disagree with, at least to some degree. That’s “Competent SOF cannot be produced after an emergency occurs” and its variants. I’d change that to “Competent SOF cannot be produced instantly.” Many of the SOF warriors involved in highly consequential operations, from Eben Emael to the Long Range Desert Group to many of the SF soldiers running recon in SOG were products of a few months to a year of training. It takes a decade to make a well-rounded Green Beret, but some of the Rangers that dropped on Grenada and Panama, and fought like lions in Mogadishu, had only been in the Army a few months. The Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc had more time to prepare, and theirs was a unit created after the crisis was underway!

If we bog down in thinking it takes forever to train the best, we create an asymmetric vulnerability. The Taliban take only days to train a suicide bomber or motivate a green-on-blue attacker to zap some of those expensive and patiently trained Americans. (Kipling explored this asymmetry in a poem called The Cheaper Man).

A classic example of self-inflicted asymmetry was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s system of selecting and training pilots in the era of Japanese Imperialism (you can start counting in 1927, 1933, 1937, or 1941, but scholars all agree the era ended in 1945). They took pains to select perfect physical specimens and train them in many warrior arts before they ever got near an airplane. The process took forever and most of the trainees flunked on one thing or another. (Presumably, they wound up back in the ranks, chipping paint). The resulting elite pilots were able to exploit the technical superiorities of their airplanes well enough that many young Allied pilots, trained to a less exacting standard, never lived to figure out what the technical superiorities of their aircraft were, and how to exploit them.

But in war, some days even an average pilot gets lucky, and even the best pilot may only get to have one bad day in his life — the last one. And when the Japanese aces went down, the long-apprenticeship training method failed Japan rather dreadfully. Hasty measures to cheap out on training meant that the field was never able to catch up with the attrition of pilots, even as the skills of the new guys plummeted.

Meanwhile the Allies created a gigantic training infrastructure that turned out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of good-enough pilots, and it salvaged the human capital sunk in the washouts by repurposing them as crewmen on bombers. The Allies didn’t set the bar too high, and they didn’t get obsessed about raising standards to an abstract level. In pedagogical terms, their standards were criterion-referenced.

In economic terms, to use a concept we have visited before in these pages, it was a satisficing, not an optimizing, strategy.

Sometimes our obsession with military quality is a bit reminiscent of the Japanese pilots. Yes, individual troopers and units should be constantly striving to raise the bar on their own performance. But the bar for the standard should get set in one place, and only moved for compelling reasons.

So, can competent SOF be created after a crisis begins? Maybe. Depends on how fast the crisis comes on.

Last Flying B-29 Needs Our Help

As we’ve commented before, after a war, the high tech, iconic weapons of the conflict pass through a long period in which they’re “old junk” before someone realizes that they’re rare and deserving of preservation. This is what happened to the B-29 bomber, a plane once produced in such masses that a single raid by them over Tokyo once killed more people with conventional weapons than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki did.

Many ywars afterward, private enthusiasts rescued one from a Navy gun range where the swabbies had lost track of it on its way to being blown up as a target. That turned out to be the last one. (A later attempt to rescue a B-29 in Greenland failed due to one of the plane’s in-service problems — fire). That last surviving airworthy B-29, FIFI, is likely the only one that will ever fly again; a couple of dozen other airframes exist in museums, storage, and in various states of repair. but those capable of restoration to flight will likely never leave museums, and those in the hands of would-be restorers are in sad shape, mostly.

During the last airshow flight of the season, the number two engine experienced a loss of power. The crew returned safely to the airport, but it was soon determined the engine would need major repairs. At nearly $10,000 and 100 volunteer hours per hour of flight, keeping FIFI in the air is daunting.

This iconic B-29 is a traveling piece of military history. FIFI flies to air shows and tour stops all over the country giving children of all ages the sight, smells and sounds of history. These personal experiences perpetuate the spirit in which these aircraft were flown in defense of our nation –honoring the courage, sacrifice and legacy of the greatest generation. FIFI represents that generation and the best of America.

Our goal is to raise $250,000 to repair the damaged engine and to purchase a spare engine ensuring continuous operation and flight. Please help us!

Your tax deductible donation will keep FIFI flying!

via Keep FiFi Flying A2.

Scan of a page of the B-29 Gunner’s Information File showing the rear upper turret with the fairing off and breeches open. Source: twinbeech.com

The B-29 was not only a landmark weapons system in its own right, it also contained defensive systems that were milestones of technology. Instead of the manned turrets and free waist guns of the B-17, B-24 and earlier bombers, which produced massive drag while exposing gunners to the elements (-40F @ 250 kt), the -29 used a Central Fire Control system which used optical and hydraulic systems to allow fewer centrally located gunners to operate slave turrets in a shirtsleeve, pressurized, climate-controlled enviroment. Mechanical computers using adding-machine technology handled questions of parallax. This let the gunners stay inside the pressure vessel and gave the bomber more speed and altitude capability, which itself complicated Japanese interception. The Japanese pilot who struggled, alone, to the service ceiling of his plane to tangle with a formation of B-29s was either very brave or foolhardy, and everyone on both sides of the fight knew it. (Later, the defensive system would finally fall short when facing MG-15 fighter jets; in Korea, the B-29s were forced to bomb at night. But it met the initial threat for which it was designed).

Similar remote turrets were used in at least two other late-war entrants, the North American P-61 Black Widow night fighter, and the Douglas A-26 (later B-26) Invader, an ambitous project which was meant to, and ultimately did, replace the B-25 Mitchell, B-26 Marauder, and A-20 Havoc light bombers (The A/B-26 soldiered on into the 60s, serving with distinction in the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, although by then its simplified Sperry CFC system was removed).

Ironically, the organization that operates FIFI, the Commemorative AIr Force, started almost as a joke by several Tezan pilots, was called the Confederate Air Force until the 1990s. They changed the name because deep-pocketed corporate donors’ timidity ran headlong into the poorly-educated public, most of whom learn nothing about the Confederacy except that it was racist (true) and evil (probably true, but not exactly for the reasons that are taught in schools today). The organization was never meant as a neo-Rebel or racist organization, the name was a joke, and we are officially a country that can’t take a joke these days.

In any event, when the phone doesn’t ring at the CAF these days, it’s those rich corporate donors not calling. So they’re begging for table scraps from the public. You can donate at the link if you’re so inclined; they have various chachkas they give donors of various levels, it’s just like a PBS telethon but absent the certainty of the Government stepping in to fund any shortfalls…

The CAF was vital to that critical middle period of preservation, before the public at large realized that World War II Aircraft were a vital historical resource. The lack of any equivalent organization for Cold War aircraft is part of the reason why so many of them have vanished without a trace, and so few were preserved in flying status.

Hat tip: AOPA.