The last time the US had gone after bin Laden, in retaliation for the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, it had used Tomahawk cruise missiles, flying through Pakistani airspace. But cruise missiles alone were clearly an inadequate response if the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, and a plan was put together under the codename Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).² Fortunately for the US, there was an active civil war in Afghanistan, with the so-called "Northern Alliance"³ still holding onto a significant corner of the country. Both sides were poorly equipped, but with US air support, coordinated by CIA and special forces teams, there was a good chance the Northern Alliance could rout the Taliban with minimal American presence on the ground.

But that was a very different thing from "minimal American presence", and planners and diplomats quickly set to work assembling the basing and overflight rights necessary to support this campaign, as well as the units required to execute it. The most important problem was Pakistan. The bulk of any US air effort would clearly come in from the south, either from carriers operating in the Arabian Sea or bombers flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and that would mean transiting Pakistani airspace. But while Pakistan had been an American ally during the Cold War, most prominently when America was providing support to the mujahideen fighting against the Soviets, relations had grown frosty in recent years, particularly after Pakistan first tested a nuclear weapon in 1998 and a military coup a year later. Making matters worse, Pakistan had been the Taliban's major sponsor, seeing it as a way of ending the anarchy that had gripped Afghanistan,⁴ and public opinion in Pakistan was fairly hostile to the United States. The Bush administration gave Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf a clear choice: either support the US in its new "War on Terror" and be rewarded with sanctions relief and increased aid, or be added to the enemies list. Despite all of the problems, Musharraf officially chose to side with the US, and American airpower had its route into Afghanistan.⁵

Bush and Musharraf

Pakistani support alone wouldn't be enough to enable the campaign that Central Command (CENTCOM)⁶ wanted to fight. Sending American aircraft over Afghanistan without CSAR⁷ support was risky, and while units based in Pakistan, Oman or on aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea could provide cover in the southern portion of the country, the operations in the north would need support from CSAR units based somewhere in one of the former Soviet republics. And because all of the organized opposition was in the north, an air campaign limited to the south wouldn't be all that effective relative to one where the US could embed CIA and special forces teams with the Northern Alliance and provide air support for troops on the ground. Tajikistan was quick to offer a base, but getting into Afghanistan from there would involve navigating high and treacherous mountains, while the Uzbek-Afghan border was relatively flat.

A CSAR MH-53J is offloaded during OEF

But even though Uzbekistan had hosted a secret CIA Predator base for several years, the government was being difficult, holding out for increased US aid, including against its own homegrown Islamist movement. Some of this might have been because it was not on good terms with Russia, whose new President, an obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin, had offered Russia's full support to the war on terror.⁸ Uzbekistan finally agreed to allow CSAR to be based in its territory on October 1st, although getting the unit ready in time for the anticipated kickoff on the 7th would be difficult, given the primitive facilities and the need to send in 67 C-17 flights to set up the CSAR team there.

Carl Vinson replenishes during Enduring Freedom

The logistics situation was slightly better in the south. The Enterprise group had been just about to head home when the attacks happened, while Vinson was on her way to take over in CENTCOM, and both carriers were ordered to stay on station in the Arabian Sea. The Roosevelt group had been preparing to deploy, and was ordered to join them from Norfolk, while Kitty Hawk, stationed in Japan, was ordered to CENTCOM sans air wing, to be used as a "lily pad" for special forces operating in southern Afghanistan. But they'd need a base further forward for good CSAR coverage, and a place to divert if any of the aircraft had serious problems. Musharraf agreed to allow the Americans to use an airfield near Jacobabad, halfway between the coast and Kandahar. Security there would be provided by a detachment of Marines from the 15th MEU(SOC),⁹ aboard the Peleliu Amphibious Ready Group, which had rushed to the area from Australia.

A Hornet refuels over Afghanistan

If the Navy was going to contribute to the air campaign, it was also going to need quite a bit of help from the Air Force. Much of the fleet's striking power was provided by short-legged Hornets, which were going to struggle to get past 250 nm on internal fuel, so multiple aerial refuelings would be required to reach targets in Afghanistan, which were at least twice that far away. To maintain safety margins, at least two refuelings were needed each direction, requiring an elaborate plan to make sure nobody had to land in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Some of the fuel could be provided by S-3 Vikings off the carriers, but the bulk would need to come from land-based tankers, flying either from Diego Garcia or the various nations on the shores of the Arabian Gulf. The US had an extensive network of bases there, heavily used in the campaign against Saddam, although the Saudis, concerned about domestic reaction to Americans bombing a Muslim country from their territory,¹⁰ came close to refusing to allow CENTCOM to use the new air operations center that had opened at Prince Sultan Air Base just months before. The other Gulf States were more cooperative, and Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman all played host to tankers and other support aircraft.

An RAF Tristar passes fuel to Hornets

And it was here that international support for the US showed itself beyond simply basing and overflight rights. There was no way the British could stay out of such an insane aerial refueling plan, and RAF VC10s and Tristars served alongside KC-135s and KC-10s, providing about 20% of all tanking for the Navy's effort. The RAF also contributed Nimrods and Canberras to gather information for targeting purposes, while Australia sent fighters to defend the base at Diego Garcia, home not only to tankers but also to B-52 and B-1 bombers, the Air Force's way of making sure it didn't feel left out from the fun.

Bombs are readied aboard Vinson

Things began to kick off in late September, when the CIA started infiltrating members of the secretive Special Activities Division into the country to meet up with the Northern Alliance and prepare for the arrival of uniformed special forces units, which would first arrive in mid-October. Before they could get there, the air campaign began, with the first bombs falling on October 7th. The initial targets were what passed for the Taliban's air defenses, mostly systems inherited from the Soviet-backed government that had fallen in 1992. About 100 MiG-21 and Su-22 fighters were in the country, although only half were even vaguely operational, and there weren't enough pilots even for those. The same could be said of radar and SAM systems, with only a few SA-3s near Kabul and Kandahar that could pose any threat to US aircraft at medium or high altitude. Lower down, AA guns and shoulder-fired SAMs were more dangerous, but easy enough to avoid. Still, there was no point taking chances, and the highest-risk targets would be dealt with by a pair of B-2s flying direct from Missouri carrying 32 JDAMs between them, with numerous aerial refuelings during their 44-hour mission. Other targets, including tank concentrations and Al Qaeda training camps, were hit by 5 B-1s and 10 B-52s from Diego Garcia, as well as 25 fighters from the carriers. All told, the attacks on the first night, which also included 50 TLAMs from destroyers and submarines (including the British SSNs Triumph and Trafalgar), went after 31 targets with 275 individual aimpoints, destroying about 85% of them.

John Paul Jones launches a Tomahawk into Afghanistan

But taking out the Taliban's air defenses, and even some strategic targets, would not be enough to topple their government. That would take American soldiers on the ground to provide air support for the Northern Alliance, and ultimately a wholesale occupation of the country, a topic we will turn to next time.

A PAC-3 missile with a defective casing

Obviously, I think all of this is nonsense. First, let's be clear what we're talking about. These are missile casings, basically mildly specialized pieces of metal. Shaping metal is not a particularly new technology, and I find it hard to believe that casings are the main limiting factor in expanding PAC-3 production. Seekers, warheads and motors are all much more specialized and much harder to expand. The most likely reason behind all of this is that there was some hiccup on the part of whoever normally makes the casings, and Lockheed turned to GM to bail them out. I spoke to an industrial engineer who has experience in missile production, and she said that 3 weeks would be a reasonable turnaround time for this kind of thing in the civilian world if the customer supplied the tooling. GM probably did some extra work to avoid the delays you frequently get on defense projects, but it's either a short-term stopgap or the whole thing was a publicity stunt, and Lockheed is now holding onto a bunch of casings that they won't use until mid-February.

But it's also worth noting that this isn't GM's only foray into defense production. They famously built a lot of stuff in WWII, everything from trucks to airplanes to weapons. After the war, they stayed in the industry. Besides building various vehicles, they owned Allison, a major jet engine manufacturer, as well as being heavily involved in military electronics, most notably inertial navigation systems, through its AC Spark Plugs/Delco division. In the mid-80s, they bought Hughes Aircraft, becoming a major player in the satellite and missile spaces. But as GM got into deeper and deeper financial trouble during the 90s and 00s, these were all sold off, with Allison going to Rolls-Royce, the satellite divisions to Boeing and most of the rest of the business to Raytheon. The last bit to be sold was the ground vehicle group, which became part of General Dynamics Land Systems shortly after it won the contract for the Stryker.

An early Stryker exercise

I bring this all up mostly as a way to remind people that the history of the defense industry is complicated, and that a lot of the reports of consolidation are overblown. Many of you have probably seen the chart from the "18 theses" advertisement for Palantir, which shows 51 primes falling to 5. At least three different groups mentioned in the previous paragraph are listed separately among the 51, and the people who made said chart played similar games elsewhere. Most notably, at least three different divisions of General Dynamics are shown as separate "primes", rolling up to Lockheed and Raytheon, even though GD is one of the 5 current primes. And Avondale Industries, Litton Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding are all shown rolling up into Northrop Grumman, even though the vast bulk of those businesses was spun off as Huntington Ingalls in 2011. Yes, I'm sure they can point to some bits of those companies that Northrop kept, but HII is the 7th largest defense contractor, behind the big 5 and L3Harris.

ATF prototypes

But even if we ignore the many flaws in the chart, the basic thesis behind it is deeply flawed. 1980 wasn't some golden age when "51 primes" rushed in to bid on every possible defense contract. The defense industry is big and specialized, and many of the "primes" in question only did one or two things. Boeing didn't build tanks, Chrysler didn't build airplanes and "Jappesen Sanderson" didn't exist.¹ A lot of the movement on the chart is reflective of the stock market's growing distaste for general-purpose conglomerates, which has applied far outside the defense industry. This isn't to say that there hasn't been actual consolidation in terms of "how many companies could plausibly bid on this contract", because there absolutely has been, but it's closer to 50% than 90%. For instance, in 1986 the Advanced Tactical Fighter program that ultimately became the F-22 attracted bids from Boeing, General Dynamics, Grumman, Lockheed, Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and North American Rockwell, whereas the only competitors for a similar program today would be Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. But this mirrors a general drop in budgets. Keeping design and production capability around is expensive, and if we wanted more people able to do it, we would need to pay for it somehow.

An M1297 Army Ground Mobility Vehicle

But another part of the "defense reform" thesis is that outside companies are somehow more efficient, because they're subject to market discipline rather than being able to grow fat and lazy servicing the undemanding DoD.² But GM itself gives us one of the better tests of this. They returned to the defense business 10 years ago, focusing on military applications of their existing automotive technologies. And while they've done some development work, their main focus has been on competing in the Army's ongoing efforts to provide a light, airmobile vehicle for its normal "leg" infantry. The first competition was held in 2014, and while GM entered a vehicle based on their Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 off-road truck, they found themselves up against a field largely of more bespoke off-road vehicles, including the purpose-built General Dynamics Flyer 72, Polaris DAGOR and Boeing Phantom Badger. The Flyer won the initial round, becoming the M1297 Army Ground Mobility Vehicle, but a second round saw GM triumph with the M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle.

M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle

I don't want to get into the debates about the soundness of the idea behind the M1301,³ and instead look at the finances, at least as far as that makes sense given the usual wackiness of military pricing. For a start, a civilian Colorado ZR2 looks to be running $50-55k, while the cost of one M1301 per the FY 2027 justification book is about $190k. I honestly don't find this all that surprising. GM may claim 90% off-the-shelf parts, but I think some of those aren't on the base ZR2, and the military is a terrible and annoying customer, so 3x the price isn't that weird.⁴ Perhaps a better comparison is how the cost of GM's approach compares to other vehicles. One place to look is at Army budget projections before and after the contract went to GM in 2020. The FY21 book, submitted Feb 2020, shows a predicted FY21 cost of $190k per ISV, while the FY22 book, submitted in May 2021, shows only $150k per vehicle in FY 21. So it does look like this produced some real savings relative to what the other options probably would have cost, although it's on the order of 20-25%, and we don't know what other tradeoffs the lower-cost vehicle may have required. But it's also worth noting that the same FY22 book shows the per-unit cost for the new-production M1152A1 HMMWV, a significantly larger vehicle without a civilian production line to draw from, at $144k per unit.

The lesson that should be drawn from all of this is that there is no silver bullet for the problems plaguing American defense procurement. Outsiders may have advantages over the incumbents, but these tend to be small and swamped by the mess built into the structure of the system. If all you look at is the headline figures, you'll be deeply confused about the problems, which in turn leads to ineffective solutions.

Overhauls are Understanding Hull Symbols, Auxiliaries Part 3, ICNW Part 5, the Arleigh Burke class, Standard Part 1, Evan's review of Turner Joy, and for 2025, Exotic Hulls Parts two, three and four, as well as Fighting the Last War.

Hornet from the ferry

Website

Hornet is one of the Essex class carriers that won the Pacific War, having been named after the previous Hornet, sunk during the fighting in the Solomons. She racked up an impressive score in WWII, then was modernized to fly early jets, with steam catapults and an angled deck. However, she missed out on the second round of modernization and was reclassified as an anti-submarine carrier (CVS), flying SH-3 Sea King helicopters and S-2 Tracker ASW aircraft as a companion to the strike carriers.¹ Just before her retirement in 1970, she was the recovery ship for the Apollo 11 and 12 missions, and the deck is marked with the spot where Neil Armstrong took his first steps after his return to Earth.

Pieces of space history

As a museum, Hornet was more or less like I'd found her when I was last aboard, although they'd clearly been doing work to make her better in the last few years. The planes had been moved around a bit, with their Phantom now looking great and the Tomcat at the back of the hangar being repainted. The flight deck is busier, with the S-2 and A-4 joining the S-3 and T-28 to represent the last planes to operate from her, and the A-4 is on the catapult with a bridle installed, which was something I'd never seen before. Signage was kind of a mixed bag. When they had it, it was generally quite comprehensive, but coverage was spotty, and there were more errors than I would like.² The only thing I really missed from last time was the Mk 45 ASTOR, but that was apparently put into storage as part of their revamp of the torpedo room, which looked amazing. They'd opened up the torpedo magazine down below the workshop so you could see into it, giving a much better sense of how the space actually worked, and the only thing they could do to make it better would be to get a real Mk 13 and open it up so you can see the guts.

The torpedo magazine

The only real problem came when we decided to try out one of the docent tours. These are $12 per person, and there are four, covering the island, life aboard, weapons and engines. This is good pricing, and they're supposed to run an hour each, maybe a bit more for the weapons tour. I was with Rebecca Friedman, who cooks for the meetups, and she really wanted to see the galleys, so we signed up for the life aboard tour, starting at 1 PM. The sign said something like 40-50 minutes. The docent in question took 2 hours and 15 minutes for the tour before we basically ran away. Now, there are undoubtedly a few people who could have used that amount of time well on what we saw (which, in fairness, was a lot), but he did not, often rambling and occasionally saying things that were simply untrue. I interacted with a number of docents who seemed competent, and we may have just gotten unlucky, but his tour ran so long that the last weapons tour of the day, which I had been sort of hoping to do, departed before we were done.

Unfortunately, the Mk 45 was gone and the B57 was roped off

But that aside, we had a good time. A lot of the ship is open, even without the docent tours, although the routing is kind of a mess, to the point that I found her somewhat difficult to navigate. If you're planning to travel to visit a carrier, you should go to Midway instead, but she's definitely worth a look if you live in the area or happen to be in the Bay for another reason. Just make sure there's not a furry convention before you plan your visit.

Damage to Houston's stern after the second torpedo hit

The crew quickly swung into action, building shoring around the forward bulkhead of the hangar to make sure that the flooding didn't spread, using up the last of their materials in the process and having to scavenge whatever wood they could find elsewhere on the ship, including 14 planks usually used to support men cleaning and painting the sides. But there were other problems to deal with. The hit aft had sent shocks ripping through the ship, exacerbating the structural damage caused by the first torpedo hit, although the stress amidships was reduced by the additional weight aft. More urgently, leakage from the hit had shorted out the main emergency generator, and with only the secondary generator, there wasn't enough power to provide the crew remaining onboard with anything like adequate sanitation or food. 300 of the 550 men aboard would need to be transferred to the escorting destroyers, but the seas were too rough for them to come alongside.

The solution was simple, if a bit odd. Each of the three destroyers receiving the transferred crew would come astern of the towed cruiser in turn, and 100 sailors would be ordered over the side, where the destroyer would fish them out of the water. Everyone who remained aboard would be a volunteer with useful skills for saving the ship, and there were more than enough candidates. Houston was low enough in the water that the transfer was a simple matter of putting on a life jacket and stepping into the ocean, then waiting for the destroyer to show up. One sailor used the process as an opportunity for a nap, only to be awakened by rifle fire from the destroyer. He initially thought they had mistaken him for a Japanese sailor, but after being brought aboard, learned that they had spotted sharks in the water near him. Despite this, the process went smoothly, and all 300 men had been transferred within an hour.

An improvised stiffener on a cracked longitudinal

The bulk of the remaining sailors were divided into three salvage crews, spread out throughout the ship to prevent a third hit from killing all of the experienced people still aboard. Their main task was to preserve the ship's stability, with reinforcing the ship's structure, wracked by the two torpedo hits and battered by the sloshing water, a close second. One by one, partially flooded compartments were entered and the leaks, often sprung rivets, were plugged, and then pumps were brought in to empty them out. Elsewhere, broken longitudinal beams were reinforced by welding plates together to make new girders. Thanks to "midnight requisitions" at Boston Navy Yard, Houston had significantly more than her normal outfit of the plates normally used to make such repairs, as well as a pair of high-capacity welders, but even the excess plates were quickly used up, and the salvage crews had to begin scavenging from the ship's non-essential structure for further reinforcements.

This allowed them to help solve another problem: stability. The sloshing water meant that Houston was still in danger of capsize, and the scavengers concentrated their efforts as high as possible to reduce topweight. 200 tons of 6" shells from the 2nd and 3rd shell decks were moved down to the lower handling rooms, an effort which produced many sore backs among officers and chiefs unused to manual labor. And every piece of spare equipment topside was heaved overboard, down to the searchlights and their platforms. Belowdecks, poor ventilation meant that there was constant risk of electrical fires, and emergency power systems were strung along the overheads to reduce the risk, while flammable materials were jettisoned and compartments soaked in fuel oil after the hit were scrubbed down.

Water sloshes in the hangar

The lack of ventilation meant that sleeping in the normal quarters was impossible, so the remaining crew moved into temporary quarters in the superstructure. But life aboard wasn't all bad. The refrigerators were still working, as were the electric ranges, so steak was the order of the day, and the beer aboard for the occasional "steel beach" was served with dinner to anyone who didn't want the slightly oily water from the void tanks. Finally, on the morning of the 17th, the seas moderated enough for a boat from Pawnee to come alongside and pass over extra pumps and uncontaminated fuel. Soon, a steady stream of other material, be it shoring, welding equipment, breathing apparatus or the vital pumps, came aboard via high wire from the other ships of CripDiv 1.

Houston was finally drawing clear of the biggest threat. Despite the occasional electrical fire, and the presence of Japanese snoopers throughout the 17th and 18th, things were fairly calm. More importantly, while they were still well over a week away from Ulithi and safety, the Japanese had bigger problems to worry about. The Japanese had sighted the vanguard of the 7th Fleet, heading for the landings at Leyte, and realized that Halsey was also "RETIRING TOWARD THE ENEMY FOLLOWING THE SALVAGE OF ALL THE THIRD FLEET SHIPS RECENTLY REPORTED AS SUNK BY RADIO TOKYO." Two damaged cruisers were small fry compared to the need to finally fight the "Decisive Battle" that the Japanese Navy had planned for so long.

''Houston' under tow

But they weren't entirely out of the woods yet. On the evening of the 18th, CripDiv 1 turned south, lengthening the trip to Ulithi to dodge a typhoon coming out of the southwest Pacific. Despite the efforts of the salvage crews to reinforce the cracked longitudinals, the bow and stern were still visibly working independently, and her odds of surviving a serious storm were low. The detour lasted 30 hours, but kept the ship safe. And in better news, on the morning of the 20th, another pair of tugs arrived to supplement the hard-working Munsee and Pawnee. By taking the tow in tandem, the formation's speed could be increased to 6 kts, a welcome relief for everyone in CripDiv 1.

That same day, with the group well clear of any Japanese air threat, the carriers Cabot and Cowpens were detached. Now, the only real option the enemy had for striking them was submarines, and a group built around escort carrier Hoggatt Bay moved in to screen against them. Morale aboard Houston began to improve, even as the work of keeping the ship afloat continued. The pace of jettisoning had slowed slightly, and valuable bits of salvage were now being passed to accompanying destroyers. The cooks had gotten the ovens working and could make bread, although 20 gallons of ice cream from the destroyer Bell were still welcomed with open arms. The lack of fresh water meant that hygiene remained a problem, particularly for men who worked in oily water. Many found that cleaning clothes was too difficult, and simply scavenged new uniforms every day. Belowdecks, the crews had managed to free the rudder, but experimentation found that the ship towed the best with the rudder set to right 23°, suggesting it had been bent by the second hit.

Shoring on the forward bulkhead for the hangar

On October 23rd, the gunnery officer attempted to help their progress along by rigging an improvised sail. To nobody's surprise, it did nothing to propel the ship, but the pressure did help her ride a bit better. That evening, one of the screening destroyers thought it made a submarine contact, and the men aboard the cruiser made her as watertight as possible and prayed they wouldn't have to deal with a third torpedo hit. Fortunately, it appeared to be a false alarm, but further contacts over the next few days, along with fires, the pervasive stench of dead bodies and the grinding work of keeping the ship afloat meant that the crew was on the edge of breakdown by the time they reached Ulithi on October 27th, 1944. But the salvage officer dispatched to look over the crippled cruisers was initially unsure if he could even keep her afloat inside the harbor. Getting her ready for a tow to the nearest drydock, 900 miles away in Manus, would be an enormous job, and we'll pick up the story there next time.

A week ago, I visited the Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum in Fort Worden, Washington, at the gateway to Puget Sound. Tomorrow, September 7th, 2026, is their last day after 50 years.¹ And I, crazy person that I am, said "well, I'm going to be on the West Coast anyway, might as well tack on a couple days and see it before it closes." So I left Lord Nelson among the Pokemon people of San Francisco and flew up to Seattle, then drove out to see what there was. And it was a nice little museum. It's clearly a smaller operation, with laminated printouts for signage and displays that show what they have, rather than a carefully-selected subset of the collection to best tell the story they're trying to tell. But those can be lovely and charming. That was more or less how the 45th Infantry Museum felt, and I regularly miss it now that it's been replaced by something more modern and sterile. As for this museum, well, it wasn't going to set the world alight. It wasn't even the best one I visited that day. (Turner Joy down in Bremerton is one of the best-executed museum ships I've ever seen. Review coming at some point soon.) But they did a pretty good job of telling the story of coastal defenses in the early 20th century, and it's a story that is pretty hard to find elsewhere. I've tried quite often to visit coastal fortifications, and it's generally been a frustrating experience in some dimension. The concrete may be there, but the stories aren't. The Fort MacArthur museum seems to have folded at some point in the last couple years, and there wasn't anything in the area around San Francisco except for Fort Point, which is from an older generation. Here, there was not only a place to learn the stories, but also several lovely batteries to go hike around, and I'm sad that only the second half will remain for visitors after tomorrow.

But at the same time, isn't this the fundamental paradox of working in history? I'll never see a battleship at sea, her broadside throwing a dozen tons of steel and explosives at the enemy and shaking everything around. I was born too late for that, but I'm still fascinated by it, and I've spent a decade trying my best to capture a facsimile of that and so much else that is, fundamentally, lost to the mists of time. Museums are some of our best tools to fight back against time, to preserve bits from the flow and show them off to the public. I think that's why I love them so much. At their best, they're shrines to the past, to things interesting in their own right, things worth remembering.

So I came here, to this little town on the edge of Washington State, to take a look at this before it's gone. To capture that experience for myself before it's gone, and to share what I can of that with the internet. And maybe, if I'm very lucky, with readers in the distant future who are, for whatever reason, interested in this little museum that, for half a century, told the story of the men who guarded Puget Sound. They created a lovely little space, covering everything from the strategic reasons for the fort to the man it was named after to the experience of being stationed there throughout the fort's history. There was a little bit of detail on the weapons, and some lovely dioramas of the various batteries installed over the years. There was a room with a fire control table, although annoyingly little detail on how the process worked, and a room full of a random collection of guns that someone had, most of which had no connection to the fort. There was a rack of fake shells and real powder cans, and a video that explained that the coastal defense mortars worked because "although the sides of the ship were armored, most ships at the time still had wooden decks".² It had docents who were very nice, even when I insisted on arguing with their video. It was slightly weird and charming and I'm glad I got to see it before it was gone, and to write this obituary, at least for the physical space. They're going to try to continue digitally at https://coastartillery.org/, and I wish them the best of luck.

But it's also a lesson for those who are interested in history.³ Keeping this stuff doesn't just happen. It takes work to keep open the peepholes in the curtain of time, and to get people to look through them. And, yes, the artifacts will go off to different places, and the books will still exist, but it won't be here, within an easy hike of one of the best collections of preserved concrete in the country. And we'll lose the men and women who spent years working with the material, and who probably heard some stories from the men who were there that never got written down. So if you have the ability, support preservation efforts. Volunteer. Donate. Go visit, and see this stuff, so that if someday that museum shuts down, at least you can say you went and peeked through before time won and closed the hole.

The basic setup I used for all of these tests was fairly simple. I set up a grid of 10 medium buildings (130' x 80') in CMO and then on the opposite side set up a nearby airbase with 12 planes of the type under test. All were given the same loadout (usually the heaviest one for the weapon in question) and set up to attack one at a time, using only one bomb at a time on a given target to prevent overkill from messing up my numbers. I would run the scenario until either all of the targets were destroyed or all of the planes had flown their sorties. Variables included the plane, the weapon, attack altitude and environmental conditions (day/night and weather).

For my first test, I ran a simple scenario: a modern fighter (Super Hornet) using dumb bombs, able to attack as low as it liked, with no weather conditions or other problems. The results were pretty straightforward:

So at this point, it's probably worth talking a bit about methodology. I'm going to count as a hit any bomb which does damage to the target, which can include both direct hits (16 of the 27 here, and, yes, many buildings survived direct hits) and bombs that don't hit directly but still do damage. Average miss counts the distance as 0 for direct hits, which is obviously somewhat optimistic (the target does have dimensions, so add maybe 25-30' to get actual CEP). For the next run, let's use the same loadout, but raise the altitude to 12,000', the sort of altitude you'd use if you wanted to avoid being shot at with MANPADS and guys with rifles.

Obviously, performance this time was significantly worse, with a lot of the bombs falling so far wide that they did no damage, although there were also 12 direct hits on the 10 buildings, which strongly suggests that the direct hits do the vast majority of the damage, an impression confirmed by later tests. That said, this one took long enough that several of the buildings were only damaged by the bombs and ultimately destroyed by fire. But the obvious next question is how this would work with bigger bombs, so I replaced the Mk 82s (500 lb) with Mk 83s (1000 lb) and ran the scenario again.

We see slightly better performance here, mostly due to the greater lethal radius of the bombs. In terms of total tonnage, it took slightly more Mk 83s, but fewer sorties because there were more bombs per plane. But it's also worth going up the final step and seeing what happens if we use 2000 lb Mk 84s.

This was the clear winner in terms of number of bombs required, although relative to the Mk 83, 6 sorties were required rather than 5 because the plane could only carry half of the bomb load. But with that baseline out of the way, I think I'm going to go with the Mk 83 for further tests with factors that could affect unguided bombs. First, I'll get a low-altitude baseline for comparison in various conditions:

It's worth noting that the low-level attack with Mk 83s required only about half the bombs that the Mk 82 version did, largely because the bombs were far more likely to destroy the building in a single hit. This definitely confirms the decision to use the Mk 83 as my standard test bomb when possible. Next, let's see what effect night has on the attack.

This test showed very slightly worse performance in terms of miss distance than the low-level day attack (hit percentage was higher, but the only "miss" in the day test was a bomb that malfunctioned). But it's not really that surprising that a fully kitted-out Super Hornet, with ATFLIR and ASG-34 IRST can deliver weapons nearly as effectively in the dark. Let's see how well that holds up to going to medium altitude.

The medium altitude results are quite similar to the daytime ones in terms of average miss distance and total bombs required. Hit percentage was substantially higher, although I think this is probably not the best metric to evaluate these tests by. It counts any bomb which does any damage, so it's easy enough for a lot of bombs landing 250'+ out, which really aren't doing very much to the building, to count as hits.

But now that we have a modern baseline, it's time to start looking back. I'm going to start with one of the earliest multirole fighters in this database,¹ the F-4J Phantom II, largely because it can carry the same Mk 83 bombs that I've been using here. We'll start at low altitude.

Here, we see a significant falloff in ability to do damage. Most of the bombs are still getting close enough to do damage, but it's gone from 14 to 26 to wipe out all the buildings. I'm going to try taking this to altitude next, although there's an obvious problem waiting. The Phantom's bombload is only 3 bombs, and it took 38 for the Super Hornets to destroy all the buildings from medium altitude. I'm going to set each of the Phantoms up to fly twice, to ensure a reasonable number of bombs get used.

This was obviously a massively different result than the Hornets from medium altitude, and a good indication of why the arrival of PGMs was so revolutionary. At the same time, the Phantom was not exactly known for being one of the best bombing platforms of the day, so let's try a different plane, the 1975 version of the A-6 Intruder, again attacking from medium altitude.²

This was an interesting comparison to the Phantom. The average performance was significantly better, with a lot fewer genuine flyers landing 1000'+ from the target, but it wasn't all that much better at actually landing the sort of hits that counted. Yes, it got all buildings in 74 bombs instead of 8/10 in 72, but most of the "hits" were 200'+ away and didn't do all that much damage.

I ran a night test with the Phantoms, and the results were extremely similar to the day test, at least until I tried to send out the second wave and it wouldn't launch, because that bombing mission was day-only. I'm not sure how I got the first flight off, or how the game models night in general, but I think this post has run its course. I'll pick up the subject later.

Also, on an unrelated note, CMO has just rolled out multiplayer for the standard game, so if anyone is interested in contributing to future posts like this by letting me put humans on multiple sides, let me know. To be clear, this is less "let's see who is better" and more research like in this post. But I'm curious to see what I can do in cases where I'm less limited by my ability to script things.

Overhauls are Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, Falklands Part 5, The Battleship of the Future?, Wedding Decorations, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Naval Radar - More Advanced Stuff, Speed and Range in Battleships, and for 2025, SCUBA Parts one and two, The Tanker War Part 2 and Exotic Hulls Part 1.

The most obvious problem that any series like this is going to run into is simply how to divide up the war, because even with 26 episodes, a lot is going to be left out. TWAW handled this particularly well, abandoning any real pretense that it was going to be comprehensive and instead making each episode a self-contained story about a specific aspect of the war. This could be a battle or a campaign, the home-front experience of some nation or it could be something narrower like the Holocaust or the occupation of Holland. Particularly groundbreaking at the time was a significant focus on Russian experience during the war, and those portions were still some of the most interesting to me, as it's not an area I've studied extensively. But more importantly, each story generally does a really good job of balancing the human stories with the broad operational story of the war. Often history focuses either on "what happened and why?" or on "what was it like to be there?", and TWAW manages to balance both rather well.

But more than that, there's a definite choice to present a wide array of different pieces of the war to choose from. The Burma episode (a particular standout) covers not only the back-and-forth fighting and interviews soldiers from both sides about the experience of the war, from battle to mud, but also includes a section about Vera Lynn's morale tour to the theater. There's some really lovely variety, and it shows what can be done with the documentary format when the people doing it take seriously their responsibility both as historians and as producers of entertainment. I also respect its commitment to using archive footage, which is extensive, and almost all of the people interviewed are speaking from first-hand experience.

This isn't to say that the series is perfect. Some of this is simply a matter of age and improved historical understanding of the events in question. On the whole, I think they did very well for the time, and I was frequently surprised at what they got right, but there are a few areas worth mentioning where they didn't. One obvious example is Ultra, which was revealed to the public a year or so after the series was broadcast, and significantly changed our understanding of the Battle of the Atlantic, among others. On the other hand, the current picture makes Ultra so prominent that it's almost a useful corrective. Another is their episode on the German home front, which draws heavily on Albert Speer's version of events (including interviewing him), another person history (and by history, I mostly mean Adam Tooze) has not been kind to. And I think their episode on the atomic bombing is a bit too sympathetic to the view that Japan would have surrendered without the bombs being dropped. There's probably other errors I didn't catch, but that's always a risk when dealing with older works of history, and in at least some cases, the quality is high enough to be worth that tradeoff.

I only have two major complaints about the series. First, I think it generally does not do a particularly good job of dealing with the naval aspect of the war. The only episode dedicated to naval matters covers the Battle of the Atlantic, and coverage elsewhere is spotty. A lot of this is probably downstream of their admirable commitment to the use of real footage and interviews with participants, and the simple fact that naval battles are hard to film compared to their counterparts in the air and particularly on land, limiting how much raw material they had to work with, and it was generally done well enough that I didn't find it too irritating most of the time.

Second, the series' coverage of the Pacific War is very limited. Of the 26 episodes, only five are about the Asia-Pacific side of the war: one on the early Japanese victories, one on Burma, one on the Japanese experience during the war, one on the atomic bombing and the Japanese surrender and one to cover the entirety of combat in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945.¹ The last one in particular is clearly overstretched for a single episode, and the situation was made far worse by the selection of a director, John Pett, whose style was entirely unsuited to telling that story, and who turned in the worst example of ignoring naval aspects of the entire series. Pett also did the episodes for Burma and the Normandy landings, and in all three concentrated largely on the experience of the men on the front lines. This was an entirely reasonable decision for the other two episodes, both of which cover relatively simple campaigns where the guy with the rifle is clearly at the center. But it completely fails when it's used on the episode with the largest scope in the entire series. The only naval battle to get any serious coverage is Philippine Sea, with 9 minutes of a 52-minute episode. There's a few minutes on the experience of being under Kamikaze attack at the end, but three-quarters of the episode's runtime is taken up by a discussion of fighting ashore, most notably Tarawa and Iwo Jima, sections that felt so padded that I initially suspected that the episode had been originally planned as two separate episodes, hastily stitched together at the last minute, before I went digging and confirmed that, no, this was intentional.

The handling of Leyte Gulf was particularly bad. There's a nice 20-second setup for a quick description of the battle, laying out roughly where everything is, and I was fully prepared for at least a few minutes of discussion of some of the most interesting actions of the war. Instead, the setup is followed series of pans over still photos of the battles, and the narration "After a series of confused engagements hundreds of miles apart, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered heavy losses. It ceased to be an effective fighting force." Then things move on to land fighting in the Philippines. The largest naval battle in human history got the same amount of screentime as the bombing of Darwin or the rocket bombardment of Okinawa, and half the time that was spent showing newsreel footage of Peleliu with neither narration nor interview voiceovers.

Pett said in an interview that he wanted to do a naval battle, but didn't have the footage for it, and I agree that this is probably true if he was wanting to do 10 minutes of basically unbroken newsreel footage on Leyte Gulf. But I'm pretty sure there's enough out there that a clever filmmaker who wanted to talk about the battle would have been able to give it at least a few minutes without actively cheating. Interview a few participants (Leon Kintberger, captain of Hoel, was still alive at the time) and use them talking to the camera to pad things out. Use graphics to illustrate where everyone was. And get off your high horse about not having enough footage that's 100% accurate, because you illustrated a lot of Philippine Sea with footage of Corsairs landing at dusk despite the fact that there were a grand total of four of them with TF 58 during that battle. Show the battle line at Surigao doing a bombardment. Find some footage of one of the carriers in Taffy 3 doing something. Or if you absolutely cannot bring yourself to do that, spend 10 minutes on the experience of the fleet, because I know there's plenty of footage of that.

But that one episode aside, it's a remarkably good series. The use of almost entirely real footage makes it visually distinct, and the tone is serious rather than sensational. One failed episode aside, I've never seen a better exploration of WWII in documentary form, and I don't think I ever will.

A C-1 Trader

The Navy ultimately chose to procure the C-1 Trader, a variant of their existing S-2 Tracker ASW aircraft with an enlarged fuselage. Entering service in 1956, the Trader would go on to serve for three decades in the USN, ultimately becoming the last operational piston-engined aircraft to fly from American carriers. But it was slow and limited in range, and, more importantly, it was soon unable to carry the largest jet engines in use by the fleet. The Navy again turned to Grumman to adapt an existing design with a new fuselage, turning the E-2 Hawkeye into the C-2 Greyhound. Ultimately, it would serve for almost 60 years until the growth of jet engines, in particular the F135 for the F-35C, caused the Navy to procure a new COD airplane capable of carrying it. The winner in this case was the CMV-22,² based on the V-22 Osprey beloved of the Marines and loathed by budget analysts.

The Hercules aboard Forrestal

But while only three aircraft have actually served in the COD role since the mid-50s, there have been numerous other proposals, often for larger and longer-ranged aircraft. In 1963, looking for an emergency option that could better the C-1 Trader's range, the Navy carried out tests aboard Forrestal using a barely-modified KC-130F Hercules borrowed from the Marines. A pair of experienced carrier aviators were checked out on the Hercules and sent to conduct the tests about 500 miles out in the Atlantic. They were able to successfully conduct 29 touch-and-go landings, 21 full stop landings and 21 takeoffs, all without the assistance of the carrier's catapults and arresting gear. Famously, one test saw the Hercules stop opposite the ship's island with "Look Ma, No Hook" painted on the side, and it set a record for the heaviest aircraft operated from a carrier that stands to this day. But there were also problems. The biggest is that while it was technically possible, getting the necessary stopping distances required reversing their engines 3-4' off the deck, a maneuver that is generally frowned upon. The second was that the C-130 is a very big airplane by carrier standards, and landed straight down the deck instead of using the angle, which required the deck to be almost entirely clear of other aircraft. Since the days of Langley, the USN has kept a lot of planes on deck, so even landing a C-130 for five minutes would be extremely disruptive to normal operations, and it was way too large to park out of the way if something went wrong or they needed to wait. As a result of all this, despite the success of the tests, the procedure has never been repeated.

A C-2 lands aboard Lincoln

The Navy was still interested in the idea of a COD plane with more range and capacity than the C-2, and conducted a number of studies over the years. Because it was likely to be a small fleet, and the available funds were limited, very few of these were designed from scratch. Some were intended, like the C-2, to share commonality with other carrier aircraft,³ while others were based on whatever sub-C-130 transport was on the drawing board at the time. But the most interesting were a few proposals to use airliners as the basis for COD planes.

A 737-200 in gray with "United" on the side, so it's basically a USN jet

When I first heard this, I assumed it was a joke, or possibly the result of a gross violation of General Order 99. And while much of me still has a hard time believing it's real, and the former airline structures guy is still running around in terror,⁴ the math is just plausible enough to warrant investigation. The first round of proposals came in the early 70s, with a DC-9-10⁵ and a 737 variant of some sort⁶ put forward as candidates. I'm going to focus on the DC-9, as I have a spec sheet for the military version of the DC-9-30 and I don't have anything equivalent for the 737-200Adv.⁷ Both would have been big for carrier operations, but they were significantly smaller than the later members of their family, and just might have squeezed aboard.

A C-9 flies past a carrier, though not to land on it

Now, to be clear, neither would have fit aboard very well, but the biggest problem the C-130 had was its 132' wingspan, while the DC-9-10's was 89' and the 737Adv was about 93'. While this was still significantly wider than anything regularly flown from a carrier (at this point, that was probably the A-3 Skywarrior at 72.5') the extra 40' and the fact that they were planning to use arresting gear and catapults meant that they could slot (probably fairly awkwardly) into the existing flight deck ops instead of having to kick everyone off. Obviously, sticking around might be a problem but COD birds were generally expected to fly aboard, unload, get refueled and then leave again. Of course, other modifications would be required, and McDonnell Douglas planned to fit not only a tailhook, but also a new nosewheel that incorporated catapult fittings and could be extended to give a higher angle of attack for takeoff, an in-flight refueling probe, and strengthened structure to take the loads of carrier operations. Folding wings were even proposed, though don't seem to have been accepted as part of the initial study.

But all of this assumes that it's physically possible to land and take off in the appropriate distances. Sure, you can do it with a C-130, a plane deliberately designed for short-field operations, provided you have enough wind over deck, but these are airliners designed to operate from relatively big runways. They may not chew up tarmac like the first generation of jets, but would they really be small and slow enough to be compatible with the equipment on a carrier?

An F-111B lands on Coral Sea

Let's start by looking at the problem of landing. Per the SAC, for the design mission (10,000 lb of cargo), the C-9B should be landing at around 73,000 lb, with a power-off stall speed of 85 kts. If we assume 40 knots wind-over-deck, then it's going into the arresting gear at something like 45 kts, but it's also going to be landing at a similar weight to the weight the A-3 Skywarrior, the heaviest plane to regularly operate from a carrier, took off. But weight is only half the story. Speed is the other half, and it's here that I found something surprising. Looking through possible comparison aircraft, I found the F-111B, the result of an extremely dumb attempt to turn an Air Force light bomber into a Navy missile-slinger. It was cancelled before entering service, but it was definitely carrier-capable and even flew a few carrier tests. And at the maximum listed landing weight of 57,000 lb, it was stalling at about 100 kts, for a speed relative to the deck of 60 kts. If we assume that the arresting gear is basically limited by the kinetic energy of the landing aircraft⁸ then the total kinetic energy of the F-111B is 102.6⁹ while the C-9B comes in at only 74.1, a value lower enough that I'm actually reasonably confident that this could have worked, structural issues aside.

A Skywarrior prepares to launch, also from Coral Sea

But what about launch? Here, we're going to use the A-3B, the heaviest plane regularly to take off from a carrier,¹⁰ as our exemplar. It took off at 73,000 lb and a power-off stall speed of 124 kts. The C-9B's numbers are a takeoff at 99,700 lb and a power-off stall speed of 100 kts. If we again assume 40 kt wind over deck, we see the A-3 needing to get 257.5 from a combination of its engines and the catapult, while the C-9B needs only 179.5. Weirdly, it looks like the C-9 actually has a slightly higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the A-3, so again, we pass a plausibility check for this scheme.¹¹

An F-28 from a carrier navy on final approach, sadly sans tailhook

Despite the fairly impressive performance (10,000 lb of cargo for 2,200 nm) the plans for the C-9 COD went nowhere. But it was far from the only airliner proposed for conversion, either in the early 70s or later. I've already mentioned the Boeing alternative, but at the same time, Hawker-Siddley proposed a version of their HS 748 turboprop airliner, with folding wings and the usual structural modifications, but it seems to have gone even less far than the jet alternatives. Later, in the 80s, when the Navy was looking at a new COD plane to replace the C-2, they seriously investigated the Fokker F28, a somewhat smaller airliner than the DC-9 and 737, but ultimately decided to build more C-2s instead. And it looks like we'll probably never see such proposals again. Modern airliners are less rugged, because structural weight costs money to haul around, and there's just not much demand for a long-range high-capacity COD, particularly now that the CMV-22 has aerial refueling capability. But it's an interesting rabbit hole of history to go down.