As is well known to readers of this site, I am a connoisseur of military museums of various types. And in my visiting of every museum I pass by that Lord Nelson doesn't drag me away from, I've noticed a problem. Most air museums aren't very good, because planes are big.

The basic problem is simple. It's very rare to find an artifact (broadly defined) which can hold a typical visitor's interest for more than 30 seconds, maybe a minute at the outside. Which is fine if your museum is full of small things (Roman weapons, paintings, 16th-century dresses, Pokemon plush) so you can put dozens into each room. But this poses an obvious problem for air museums, whose artifacts are each the size of a room. A few museums (Dayton, Pima and Udvar-Hazy spring to mind) are able to bury this problem under the sheer number of planes they have, but most museums can't do that. A typical small air museum has at most a dozen planes, and even if they try to stretch their artifact count with an engine here and a flight suit there (as most of them do) that's still maybe a half-hour visitor experience. Read more...

The last few days have seen a great deal of excitement in the area around the Bab-el-Mandeb,¹ the strait that separates Yemen from Somalia at the southern end of the Red Sea.

The Bab-el-Mandeb is a vital chokepoint for global sea commerce, sitting astride the path between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal. Something like 9% of the world's seaborne oil trade passes through, along with huge numbers of container ships and bulk carriers. And unfortunately for those who would very much like these vessels to pass unhindered, it happens to be adjacent to some of the most unstable countries on Earth. 15 years ago, the main threat in the region was piracy from Somalia, which was brought under control via a combination of naval patrols, better anti-pirate measures aboard merchant ships, and attempts to reduce the pirate population at the source. But as those efforts bore fruit a decade ago, civil war broke out in Yemen and the Houthis, who have been trying to overthrow the previous government and defeat its Saudi patrons, have occasionally lobbed missiles at passing ships. The most notable incident until recently took place in 2016, when catamaran HSV-2 Swift was attacked off the coast of Yemen, prompting the dispatch of destroyers Mason and Nitze. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Mine Warfare Part 2, A Brief History of the Aircraft Carrier, Eilat, and for 2022, The Defense Information Pipeline and Hypersonic Weapons.

Also, I'm going to try another virtual meetup before the end of the year. We'll do it next Saturday, 12/16, at 1 PM Central (GMT-6). Meetup will be held in the Discord.

Reader Incurian has given me permission to repost his writeup on the basics of artillery, originally written for DSL in the immediate aftermath of the Ukrainian war.

Introduction

Lately there has been a good deal of discussion and speculation on what sorts of things artillery ought to be able to do in different circumstances; I'm reluctant to provide object-level answers (guesses) regarding current events, but I think this may be a useful primer for thinking about the subject and might help our discussions to be more productive.

I was an artillery officer in the US Army for a few years in the 2010s. I deployed to Afghanistan in a fire support capacity a few times. The following will be based on my narrow experiences filtered through my stupid brain, but it mostly won't be conjecture. Read more...

While in Dallas recently, Lord Nelson and I toured Frontiers of Flight, an air museum at Love Field, the old airport near downtown Dallas that mostly plays host to Southwest these days.

The main collection, bunched up for an event

Website

Now, for the first thing: for reasons that are unclear, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is home to about half a dozen air museums of varying size and focus. I was only able to visit one (Lord Nelson has completely unreasonable expectations about the appropriate amount of time to spend on things that aren't military/air museums) and picked Frontiers of Flight on the basis that it looked to have the most impressive collection. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you like, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Hope my American readers had a good Thanksgiving.

Overhauls are Iowa Part 4, Falklands Part 8, Missouri Part 3, The Navy and the Space Program, Falklands Part 19, Naval Bases from Space - San Diego, and for 2022, my review of Udvar-Hazy and The Case for the F-35.

The Naval Institute Press is the foremost naval and military history publisher in the United States, and every year, they run a major sale for the holidays. The standard offer, which they've done again this year, is 50% off everything that isn't on clearance and free shipping. Typically, I give this analysis in an open thread, but I decided to split it out this year.

First, a few words about USNI's IT, which has been bad this year even by the rather low standards they've set in previous years. Most, but not all, full-price books have an automatic holiday coupon when you put them in your cart that gives you 50% off. Stuff in the Clear the Decks Clearance and a some books coming out Spring 2024 don't have this coupon. And you only get free shipping if you put something with the coupon in your cart, but if you do have the coupon, it applies to everything in the cart. I've been in touch with them about this, and hope they get things fixed. Read more...

Netflix recently had Midway available, so I decided to give it a watch. Not the abomination from a few years ago, because I've already watched it once and don't hate myself enough to go through that again, but the 1976 version. It opens with a declaration that they're going to use as much combat footage as possible, which is I suppose the best way to handle this in that era. And, wonder of wonders, it skips Pearl Harbor, jumping straight to...the Doolittle Raid. Sort of out of the frying pan and into the fire there in terms of "things bean thinks are overdone", but points for originality and they don't feel the need to rub the whole thing in our faces, getting it over within the credits sequence. Oh, and the bombers aren't hitting Tokyo in formation for once.

Now, for the bad things. The effects aren't great, and the action sequences are made far worse by the fact that this was clearly not a production with a large budget, so a ton of footage was reused, either from previous films or color combat footage, which mostly appears to be from later in the war. This is occasionally amusing (the Kates on the way to Midway carry torpedoes, battleship masts appear at Midway and Hiryu launches her last strike at dawn) but mostly just serves to completely destroy any narrative to the action. It's lots of swooping planes (sometimes even the right type) intercut with closeups of the participants, but no sense of how the battle is going beyond the dialog. There's also wildly variable film quality, and lots of the real footage is very clearly wrong, ranging from 5"/38s appearing on the Japanese side to Yorktown sprouting Bofors as a defensive measure while under air attack. And while they don't slam you in the face the way Michael Bay does with the Spru-cans, there's a lot of 70s-era ships on screen in the new footage (all of which in fairness did serve in WWII) and Yorktown at one point grows a steel flight deck and deck-edge elevator. Read more...

It is time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you like, so long as it isn't culture war.

Unfortunately, it looks like the USNI sale is currently down, but when it is back, it will be excellent.

Overhauls are Ballistics, Iowa Part 3, the Alaska class Parts One and Two and for 2022, Taranto and Museum Review - DC Redux.

Read more...