It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it's not culture war.
I have a request for help. There's an article from Norman Friedman on the 3T missiles in Warship from the mid-80s. It's collected in Volume VI, and I think was originally in Issue 22. Both are a bit too expensive to just buy, and while I've got an interlibrary loan request out, it may take a while or just not work. If anyone has access to either, I'd really appreciate a copy.
Besides the ongoing USNI sale, I have a non-USNI book recommendation. Tower of Skulls by Richard B. Frank is a history of the opening of the Pacific War, from its beginning of 1937 to May 1942. I'm most of the way through my copy, and it's great. Frank is a good historian and a good writer, and the book came out within the last year, so he's able to take advantage of the latest scholarship on the war in ways that a lot of older books can't. Highly, highly recommended.
2017 overhauls are Iowa parts seven and eight, Mine Warfare Part 2, Ironclads, and my posts on the losses of HMS Victoria and Force Z. For 2018, overhauled posts are G3 and Nelson, Commercial Aviation Part 2, Japanese Battleships in WWII, A Brief History of the Aircraft Carrier and Falklands Part 9. And from 2019, we have Riverine Warfare - Southeast Asia Part 1, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 4, my review of the National Atomic Museum and Billy Mitchell Part 2.
Also, I have engaged the nuclear option in the war on spam, so any comment containing the word "essay" should hopefully be blocked.
Comments
Funny, given that we're overhauling the Billy Mitchell posts, that he's popped up in two books I've been reading (Indestructible by John R. Bruning and Enduring Courage by John Ross, FWIW).
Now I'm curious how closely their portrayal matches mine.
If they had better intelligence, would it have been possible for the US Navy to execute something similar to the Midway battle plan during the attack on Pearl Harbor?
I’m imagining: * Ground-based fighter aircraft are placed on alert very shortly before attack, and are able to inflict substantial casualties on the attacking Japanese air wings.
Is this plausible, or would it have been crazy to risk Enterprise and Lexington in this way?
Even a few minutes warning would have made a huge difference in how the Japanese fared. Note how much higher casualties were during the 2nd attack, or even the tail end of the first wave. The big issue with trying a trap is that you run the risk of scaring the Japanese off or worse, hitting them before they hit you. That's going to bring down everyone involved, right up to Roosevelt. But it could have worked. Call it a super-Midway.
@bean:
Indestructible: very conventional wisdom; he is noted as the namesake of the B-25 and how he challenged the orthodoxy and showed how "aircraft could destroy ships" (despite discussing how badly level-bombing actually worked in practice). I should note that I'm pretty sure this book also used the word "hidebound" to describe the views of USN leadership on how to use aircraft, so it falls very squarely into the "Aircraft upset the establishment!" school of thought. The book is pretty good in the micro, but not great in the macro is my overall assessment so far. Makes me want to read a really good back about the fall of the Philippines (maybe that's Tower of Skulls!), because the logistical and training deficiencies discussed are fascinating and relevant today, IMHO.
Enduring Courage: sticks to his work in WW1 and his relationship with Eddie Rickenbacker, which makes sense since overall it's a bio of Rickenbacker. Quotes a few stories of his regarding Eddie, noting that these are Mitchell's memories of a guy who was famous when Billy was writing them but not when Eddie was actually serving under him (well, I mean, kinda, but it's not the same), so it admits the possibility that Mitchell is fluffing the stories up a bit. It does praise his work in getting the air elements of the AEF organized and into action.
Also, I will send an email back to you with my thoughts on your post later today.
I don't think that a Midway-style plan during Pearl Harbor would have worked as well then as it did at Midway, though I could see it crippling or sinking one or two Japanese carriers. At Midway, there was approximate parity between the US and Japanese carrier-based aircraft (American carriers had larger air groups than their Japanese counterparts and the latter weren't operating full complements of aircraft because of the effects of 6 months of high-tempo operations) and the addition of land-based aircraft from Midway gave the US a significant numerical advantage. Another key difference is that in 1942, Yorktown at least had experience fighting other carriers, and it showed (Yorktown was the only American carrier at Midway to successfully launch multi-squadron attacks). And then there is the number of flight decks - at Midway it was four to three, in this hypothetical scenario, it is six to two. And while the problems with Japanese carrier operations doctrine would be the same, those limitations didn't prevent Hiryu's much-diminished air group from attacking and disabling Yorktown at Midway. Since American doctrine had each squadron attack a different carrier, it is unlikely that a strike from Lexington and Enterprise would have disabled more than two of the six Japanese carriers, leaving four more carriers to launch a counterstrike that would likely have sunk or seriously damaged both American carriers.
On another note, can anyone recommend a good book on the Guadalcanal campaign or the Solomon Islands campaign more generally?
@Blackshoe
Tower of Skulls does go into that a bit, but it's a pretty high-level survey. The stuff is there, but you'll have to go into other books to get the details.
Much appreciated.
@Grant
I'm not so sure of this. The Japanese had no reason to suspect they'd be facing other carriers, so the first warning they'd have of the American carrier's presence would be when the planes appeared overhead. (This was not the case at Midway.) At that point, their planes were prepping for the second attack on Hawaii, so you're looking at having to re-brief the pilots and possibly mess with the armament on the planes, and then get them airborne, while taking aboard the remains of the first strike. Once they find the American carriers, then you can launch the strike.
For that matter, it's not like Hawaii was denuded of planes, and if you had the warning to set this up, there would be a lot more land-based planes attacking too. And the Japanese wouldn't be sure the planes were coming from carriers. Also, there were two dive-bomber squadrons on each carrier.
Of course, if your intel is really that good, the best option might not be to go with a carrier strike at all. Just meet them with the battle line at dawn. Two Kongos vs eight standards isn't going to end well for the Japanese.
Two (well, three) of note would be Samuel Eliot Morison's The Struggle for Guadalcanal and Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier. Heavily focused on the naval aspects, but really good. If you want something newer, a weird tie-in to my post recommendation would be Richard B Frank's Guadalcanal. Haven't read it, but I've liked everything of his I have read, and it's well-regarded. Not sure of the exact focus.
I was implicitly assuming that the USN couldn't get the battleships out of the harbor without tipping off the Japanese. I assume Yoshikawa would have noticed the activity and could have notified the Foreign Ministry, which could then have passed it along to the fleet. Even if they didn't expect a trap, the IJN probably would have hesitated to attack an empty harbor - there needed to be something there as "bait".
The new 30-year shipbuilding plan is out. I'm sure this one will last the administration change.
@grant
the first team at guadualcanal is also very good, though focused on the air operations.
@Alex
Don't underestimate the time required to get a message from Oahu, up to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo (assuming anyone there was even listening for an unscheduled message from Yoshikawa), across to the IJN General Staff in Tokyo, down to Yamamoto with Combined Fleet, and finally passed down to Nagumo with the First Air Fleet... Over the course of a Sunday afternoon and evening, Tokyo time... With the messages needing to be encrypted prior to transmission and decrypted after reception at every stage of the trip except, possibly, from the Foreign Ministry to the Navy. If Kimmel had sailed out of harbor shortly before sunset on the 6th, I think it's very likely that any potential ambush would have been over and done with (one way or the other) before Nagumo could have been warned to call things off.
@Grant
Another major difference between Pearl Harbor and Midway is that the Japanese plan for the Hawaii Operation never contemplated keeping any strike aircraft in reserve - the only reason they attacked in two waves an hour apart was because the Kido Butai physically couldn't launch their full air complement any faster than that. So by the time Fuchida ran into the hypothetical fighter-and-flak trap over Oahu, the second wave would already have been aloft and well on their way. That would give Lexington and Enterprise a window of 4-5 hours in which they could hit Nagumo's force with impunity: when even if Nagumo had known exactly where his tormentors were, he would have had no strike aircraft on hand to do anything about it. And also, IIRC, Nagumo had orders to turn tail and run if something like this happened, partly because his ships didn't have the fuel to fight a major naval battle at that distance from their bases of supply and partly because of the threat of aircraft from Oahu joining the fight.
Though for extra bonus fun, as long as we're assuming near-perfect intelligence a couple of weeks in advance of the attack, it might have been worthwhile to hit Kido Butai's tankers prior to attacking Kido Butai directly.
I don't think an advance attack against the Kido Butai was workable. For political reasons, they needed Japan to launch an unambiguous first strike. You'd need it to be something you can do after the bombs start dropping. For the same reason, you don't move out early unless you're sure that you're well inside their reaction time - blowing the op just means they call it off and strike back (with better security) when you actually aren't expecting it.
That said, putting the planes and AA guns on high alert, and trying to get the carriers into the right place for a quick and unexpected counter-attack? That's very workable. (Even better if you can lay down some torpedo nets in front of battleship row under cover of darkness, the night before the attackers hit.) With better intel, I'd likely have done something like that. This might make a good alt-history story, tbh...
Would the Japanese literally have to fire the first shot, or would 180+ armed aircraft arriving over Oahu unannounced have been considered sufficient provocation to open fire given the state of relations between the US and Japan? After all, nobody complains about USS Ward firing on the Japanese midget submarine. (Though perhaps they would do if the incident hadn't been followed shortly thereafter by the air attack.)
I don't think this is true. Note that Pearl Harbor wasn't an isolated event. It was part of a wide-ranging strategy to attack American, British and Dutch forces throughout the Pacific. Given the communication technology of the day, there was probably no way to call the whole thing off, and I doubt the Japanese had even thought about it. So there's going to be a war next time, which makes pulling this off a thousand times harder. Particularly because the US will be in the war, if not quite as mad.
@Philistine
Ward fired on a minisubmarine that was clearly inside US territorial waters. That's very not normal on several levels. Shooting at a carrier group not in US territorial waters is a different thing, unless they hit first.
@Blackshoe
The next few years are going to be rough from an inter-service rivalry perspective. I think the Navy is going to have a hard time getting the funding for this shipbuilding plan, because the Air Force is also ramping up its B-21 project, as well as looking at the next generation of fighter aircraft to replace the F-22. Meanwhile the Army is looking at completely overhauling its helicopters, with the "Future Vertical Lift" program.
As I see it, the only service that actually seems to be taking the reality of flat budgets seriously is the Marine Corps. They're the only service that's actively discussing what they'll need to cut. Everyone else seems to be gambling that when the music stops, they'll have a chair.
@bean
Minor typo: "my review of teh National Atomic Museum"
For those so interested, here is the National Commission of Military Aviation Safety's recent report. It covers all branches and is rather sobering.
Cliff's Notes version is that proficiency in both flying and maintaining is decreasing. Indeed I have heard this from the mid 80's onward, but I can't help but be taken aback by some of what is in the report. Even the exec summary is worth a look.
Bottom line is that one aspect of attaining solid proficiency in anything means doing it frequently in a focused manner.
https://www.militaryaviationsafety.gov/index.html
bean:
The standards were too slow to give chase if the carriers (or even the Kongos) run away so you'd be relying on them staying and fighting an obviously superior force and as mentioned upthread they had orders to turn away if something that like happened, OTOH that could also be useful for herding them into the path of US carriers.
quanticle:
Not really a surprise.
quanticle:
Better nuke him for that.
I know the Standards were too slow to run the Kido Butai down. Hence why you'd have to approach under cover of darkness after knowing where they were. Gun range for the oldest ships was about 17 nm (didn't check others, but I'd expect them to be equal or greater) so if you can get to 10 nm, you're looking at ~40 minutes of engagement time, or an hour against Kaga. It probably will not take that long to do serious damage to a carrier. Oh, and you'd combine it with an air strike to slow anything that got away.
"The Standards were too slow to give chase if the carriers (or even the Kongos) run away"
They could absolutely give chase, they'd just have had to rely on endurance rather than speed to bring the prey down. Nagumo didn't have the fuel to run all the way home at 28 knots; at least some of his ships couldn't even have reached the Marshalls if they'd had to sprint all the way there.
I don't think that would work. Trying to chase 28 kt ships with 21 kt ships is a bad plan. All they really need to do is get out of range and then they can slow to a more reasonable speed, which should give them enough endurance to reach the Marshalls. Trying to bull through the Marshalls in pursuit is a bad plan for very obvious reasons. Not to mention the difficulties of tracking them over the horizon after nightfall. The British had ASV in service, but I don't think the Americans had deployed it yet. And without that, there's no way to keep contact while they run.
The AskHistorians subreddit was fielding one of its periodic questions on the sinking of the Bismarck, and user fourthmaninaboat posted this fairly involved answer as to why the British fleet was using the Fairey Swordfish in the first place. The short answer is that the procurement system for the Royal Navy was a royal mess, which the RN was only beginning to dig itself out of when war broke out.
That's a good find. I got most of that when I read Fighters Over the Fleet a couple years ago, but the emphasis there was slightly different. One aspect he doesn't mention is that Britain entered the war two years before the US, which definitely had a big impact on things like aircraft procurement. Also, he's wrong about Zeppelins being shot down, but I only know that because of recent research.
Part 5 of the Hardcore History "Supernova in the East" podcast series on the war in the Pacific was released a couple weeks ago. The whole series has been great, and this episode includes coverage of the Guadalcanal campaign and Midway, so Naval Gazing readers would probably be interested.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-66-supernova-in-the-east-v/
Speaking of budgets, I just saw a discussion of the Canadian plan to replace most of our surface fleet with the British Type 26 frigate design. Fifteen new frigates, which will be most of our fleet for the next few decades. Which is nice - we need new hulls.
But the cost for them is $70 billion. In fairness, that's a lifetime cost (with maintenance etc. included), and it's in Canadian dollars, so about $55B USD. As a rough estimate, call it $2B USD per hull for the procurement. For an 8,000 ton frigate. Does this seem insane to anyone else? I know our procurement is pork-laden, even by military procurement standards, but that's just appalling.
As for that link on RN WW2 biplanes, that was a really good read. Thanks, quanticle.
@Alsadius,
I know nothing about this, but at a wild guess: if the Canadian navy is going to be all Frigates, then the Frigates have to fulfill roles that in a larger Navy (errr.. USA ) would be fulfilled by larger vessels.
So, you'll need to pack those Frigates with capabilities that someone with carrier groups/cruisers/destroyers could leave out, because they have the big boys to do that sort of thing.
Hence, I wouldn't be surprised if a Frigate Navy frigate has to be more capable, and hence more expensive, than otherwise.
A lot of that is going to be the "built in Canada" tax. You're including a lot of overhead for yard facilities and training and such that other places which build heavy surface warships more regularly don't have to pay/can spread out across more hulls.
Something has been bothering me and this seems like the right place to ask. I basically understand why FACs are a non-threat to carriers and don't look all that hot against warships in the pretty broad range of bigger than a FAC but smaller than a carrier. From there I can see why they don't look good for sea control. However, it seems like they should good enough at commerce and costal raiding to be useful for sea denial or at least forcing your enemy to devote disproportionate resources to countermeasures, e.g. assigning enough warships to convoy duty to provide anti-missile screening to their entire merchant marine. I can see some ways this could fail (not enough range on the FACs is the main one), but I really don't have enough domain knowledge to evaluate them. Can anyone tell me if FACs are potentially useful in this role, and if not why?
But doesn't that price mostly reflect onboard equipment, rather than hull tonnage? If anything, I'd imagine high-performance stuff costs more, the smaller and lighter it is, which would also allow putting more of it on the ships.
You hit upon one disadvantage of fast attack craft, which is their lack of range. Another disadvantage is their lack of defenses. Fast attack craft don't have a whole lot in the way of anti-aircraft (or even anti-helicopter) defenses. I recall that during the Gulf War, the US was able to take out most of the Iraq fast attack craft with attack helicopters. Fast attack craft do well when they're operating from friendly shores, where they can hide near shore-based defenses before sprinting out, launching their missiles, and sprinting back before the adversary can pinpoint where the attack came from. But if they're caught in the open, they're easy pickings.
If I were worried about Fast Attack Craft attacking my merchant shipping, I wouldn't bother trying to shoot down the arrows, when the archers are so vulnerable. I would position my forces to try to detect and attack the FACs before they get a chance to launch. Even if I'm not entirely successful in preventing a salvo this time, if I can sink enough of the FACs on the way out and on the way home, I significantly diminish the threat against my merchant shipping in the future.
To follow up, I think the scenario where FACs really shine is in opposing amphibious landings. There the adversary has no choice but to come to you, so the disadvantages of the FAC (lack of range, lack of defenses) are nullified, as the adversary has to operate within striking distance of your shore (and, more saliently, within the range of shore-based aircraft and anti-aircraft defenses). Fast attack craft, by being able to attack from many different angles against an oncoming amphibious landing force, force the adversary to spread out, reducing their ability to punch through your coastal defenses at any given point.
@megasilverfist
FACs are decent at denying close coastal waters, although not great. But you rarely need to have your merchant ships use enemy coastal waters, except maybe during an amphibious landing. There’s the range issue, and more importantly the sensor issue. FACs are bad sensor platforms, and sending one into the open sea to hunt enemy commerce isn’t going to end well. It will probably stumble around doing minimal damage until the enemy gets a frigate nearby and kills it with a couple of hellfires. If you can give it targets from offboard sensors, you can probably use aircraft against those targets more effectively.
Beyond that, what quanticle said.
@AlexT
The relationship between price and tonnage is complicated. Larger ships usually cost more because there's more room to put stuff, and it's a rare designer who can resist filling up their design to the limits allowed by the available tonnage (minus margins, obviously). The only case I know of where this was done well was the Spruance class.
But things get much worse when tonnage gets limited first in an attempt to hold down cost, and the designer then starts using lighter-weight systems to cram as much combat power as they can in under the tonnage cap. If you want to hold down price, pick a price and ask for that. Then raise it some when it turns out you aimed too low and the result is useless. (The ships developed under Zumwalt are a good example of this, particularly the FFG-7s and early Aegis studies.)
Regarding FACs for commerce raiding: it occurs to me that the easiest way to create an armed merchantman in the 21st century is to put a helicopter and some support facilities on any clear spot on the deck. For a container ship, this could be a standardized system built into a set of intermodal shipping containers that any port can install in a day; tankers and the like would require only minor modifications. And as quanticle notes, FACs are sitting ducks to helicopters.
If you're short on helicopters, they can self-shuttle between merchant ships (or naval auxiliaries) as they move into and out of the danger area.
Second thought: If you want to do high-seas commerce raiding in the 21st century, helicopters on merchant ships might be the right tool for that. If you can build an actual hangar out of shipping containers (or into empty cargo space), your freighter looks just like everyone else's until someone actually puts a boarding party on it. And if someone else's freighter just had a helicopter put a missile into its bridge and/or a boarding party on its deck, who's to say which of the many generic merchant ships within a hundred miles is home to the helicopter?
@quanticle: back at the end of the Obama admin, I learned about the Terrible 20s from the blogger CDR Salamander. And this was before COVID hit.
The sad thing is, shipbuilding will take a hit, but not as much as maintenance and accelerated decomms will. As I've said before, shipbuilding gets support from Congresscritters because it means jobs; maintenance and support? Not so much. It's going to be 90s all over again.
This is not a Culture War comment (though someone could interpret it that way, but don't read it), but: I have seen a lot of people talking about how a Biden administration will mean a huge difference in foreign policy. I fully believe that the tone of it will be different, but I also fully believe (and have said on a different forum) that the direction will remain more isolationist, mostly because a) the most pressing issues for the US are domestic, and b) the budgetary pressures are going to force cuts somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be the military. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.
@john schilling
A shipping container box launcher doesn't seem to be that tough either, something in the Penguin to Exocet range would do a lot of damage and not require a lot from the launching ship.
@Alsadius: $2B per for frigates is a bit much, but also:
-Lulz at an 8K ton "frigate" (some of this is just Commonwealth ship-type naming conventions, though). Like, FLT1 DDGs were 8800 tons and were $1.8B in 1985 (counting weapons), so it's not even that bad in terms of inflation.
-bean is right that this is the price you pay for Canadian construction.
@John
With you on the armed merchantman. That was my proposed solution for anti-piracy work off Somalia. Charter some container space on a ship going that way anyway, stick the containers on, fly the helo on when you get close, fly it off when you're through and onto a ship going the other way. I've heard occasional plans for such things, but never seen anything concrete on them.
Any halfway-competent intelligence analyst working from OSINT data can narrow that down a bunch. The task is very similar to what the US successfully did in the blockade of Iraq 30 years ago, and the concept itself dates back to the OIC in WWII, and arguably to Jackie Fisher in the Med. You'd do better assuming that the ship will be caught almost immediately, and just firing a bunch of containerized missiles. Maybe spot for them with a helicopter, probably a drone.
@Blackshoe
That makes a lot of sense. Everyone has been saying to expect flat defense budgets for the next few years. I don't think there's likely to be huge hits, simply because there's too much opposition to them both in Congress and in the public, but it's not going to be great.
That said, the big question is how the money gets distributed. Do we just do the usual across-the-board thing, or do we actually look at our needs? The Marines seem to be assuming we'll do the latter, and positioning themselves for it. The Navy might be waking up that, too. The real losers in that case will be the Army, because neither we nor our close allies have a land border with China. But with a former general running the Pentagon, that may be a tough sell.
On FACs: in terms of commerce raiding (and expanding to include this FIACsin the discussion), that was basically how Iran used them in the Tanker Wars, and how pirates use them today. It's just there's only a few spots where there are important straits that can be ranged effectively by FAC/FIAC. Like the Baab al-Mandeb, the Horn of Africa, and the Strait of Hormuz.
They are also a useful weapon if you have an area available where there is a lot of small white (ie neutral or civilian) shipping where you can hide in and you also can assume your opponent won't just start fragging neutrals; they will have to spend some time developing some maritime domain awareness and figure out exactly who is who before they release weapons.
Also, as I've noted before WRT armed merchantmen or using them to hunt other merchant ships: I always see the biggest problem with this is that the countries who would be most willing to go rogue on arming merchant ships in contravention of international laws are also the people who own/flag all the merchant ships, and it feels kind of counter-productive. Granting that I've always thought "international warfare laws are just norms that can change really rapidly if someone wants to just ignore them (eg the distant blockade in WW1), but it's hard for me to see the countries who own most of the merchant ships being willing to let them be armed.
@bean: I suspect a focus on China will be ramped down by the new admin; the names floating around like Susan Rice and Michelle Fluornoy, along with Austin's initial announcement not even mentioning China suggest a desire for more rapprochement with the Central Kingdom.
And if you think you can get away with better relations with China, there's less reason to break the current system out of mandated-by-law even distribution of budgets.
Real (armed merchant)men use Hurricanes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
How important would the hide and seek aspect of 21st c. commerce raiding be? If finding your opponent is the key thing, then cheap reconnaisance UAVs might be the answer.
@bean:
Still not as bad as what happened with the Short Stirling. "We don't want to have to build long runways, so we need to make sure the new bomber designs aren't too big." writes a 100-foot wingspan limit into the spec "Oh dear, this new bomber is too heavy for its wingspan, so it has a really long take-off run." Face, meet palm.
@Blackshoe
Wasn't there a huge push a number of years ago for better relations with Russia? What makes you think this new one with China will work any better(at all)?
quanticle:
A combination of aircraft and submersible surface vessels would do even better, even where FACs are at their best their main purpose in combat is still likely to be as target practice for their enemy, not actually killing their enemy.
bobbert:
Wishful thinking.
So it sounds like range limits + helicopters as a cheap (compared to warships) counter mean that FAC raiders aren't going to revolutionize warfare. OTOH FAC raiders could be worth deploying in some plausible conflicts in a way that isn't true of FAC carrier
killersannoyers.If I remember correctly, that is what some private security companies did with armed guards for ships. The guards would get on a ship going one way and when it had finished crossing, they'd transfer to a ship going in the other direction. They also had some dormitory ships on either end where guards could stay if they needed to wait shipping going the other way.
Regarding launching missiles from shipping containers, both Russia and China are (allegedly) have systems that can be disguised as ordinary shipping containers. I say "allegedly" because the only source I could find on the Chinese system was that one story from the Washington Free Beacon, and I don't know how reliable it is. All the other stories I found about the YJ-18C referred to the one I linked above.
@bobbert:
Yes, the infamous Reset. To be clear, I don't think it will work at all; I think like Tanner Greer that China doesn't care about harmonious relations with the US. But I think the people in the incoming admin will want to do it.
IIRC this is discussed elsewhere on the blog, but, assuming the battle line is NOT (temporarily)resting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor on the 8th of December, how much longer does it let the battle line live, and delay the All Carrier USN?
Also, pretty much at the same time as the Pearl Harbor attack, MacArthur is waking up to being bombed by the Japanese as well, yes? If our intel is good enough to know about the Pearl Harbor raid, do we know about the Philippines attack? (Vague memory of Saburo Sakai's memoir saying he was part of that attack?)
I wasn't paying all that much attention at the time, what territorial concessions was the US prepared to offer in exchange for a alliance with Russia, or did I just put my finger on why the negotiations failed?
More or less. From a realist (term for a specific set of international relations theory) perspective, the "reset" failed because it didn't actually change any of the conditions that were driving Russia's decisions. It boiled down to the Obama Administration saying "we want to be friends", and Russia responded "yes, but we don't".
I mean we all know Bean is very smart, but it kind of scary to realize that he is smarter than the entire US State Department put together.
What sort of concessions would Russia want?
To somehow kick the baltics out of NATO?
@bobbert
I take it you haven't spent much time studying the State Department.
@Lambert
Probably. But it's kind of late for that if we want NATO to not become a complete joke.
If you like war movies, and particularly grim, gritty war movies, I suggest you check out the 2017 film Unknown Soldier directed by Aku Louhimies. The film follows a Finnish machine-gun company through the Continuation War, from the easy progress of the early months, to the final defeat and armistice. There's a lot of movie there, a good three hours of it, well worth watching.
"Unknown Soldier" is a bit difficult to find in North America, but it's available on iTunes.
Anyone have a take on this report that Boeing somehow interfered with pilots involved in testing their changes to the 737 MAX?
I suspect the Senate doesn't really understand what was going on. Any test is going to have specific parameters, and the pilots will be reminded of them ahead of time. If you're wanting to test human reaction stuff, the proper place is the simulator. If you want to see how the plane responds in the air, you want the pilot hitting the button at the right interval. There could have been some interference, but I'd guess there wasn't anything really going on.
As for coordinating with the FAA ahead of certification, that's normal and necessary. I've worked with the FAA on certification matters (even once briefing the LA certification office), and they don't have the people to give timely responses to stuff that goes at them cold. As usual, people don't understand the certification process.
Re: MCAS test coaching
In videogames, some usability problems are only clear when an untrained player tries something. Trained players can be so used to reflexively adjusting that they aren't even conscious of a problem. Or their accustomed patterns may be limited to some area, and they never think to try something. So a new player comes along, and needs to pick up some skill all the others forgot existed years ago. Or does something a different way.
Another way to say it is that coaching may change someone's priors, affecting how they react in a situation.
Hypothetically, the FAA may be looking for an issue of the same type. Pilots not given special coaching have one set of priors that makes one reaction the clear correct response. Coached pilots know the response that works because of some quirk of MCAS. The FAA wants the safe response to be the one that matches what pilots do without the extra coaching, because every extra piece of coaching needed makes mistakes a tiny bit more likely.
@Kyzentun
All true, but I think the Senate confused something normal with that. Those are the kind of tests that should and do get run, but in a simulator, not on a real jet. On a real jet, you're trying to do something very different, and in that case, saying "make sure you hit the switch within this amount of time" is standard procedure because you're trying to figure out what the plane actually does when the switch is pushed at a certain time. My guess is that someone who wasn't familiar with flight testing overheard and went running to Congress.
Currently reading a book called Nelson's Blood, about rum in the Royal Navy, and there was a note about the allowance for wine to various ranks of officers in the Victorian period. A lieutenant or other commissioned officer was authorized 1/2 ton (105 gallons) of wine a year, complements of His/Her Majesty the King/Queen. A captain of a non-rated got a ton, moving up until you get to be a full admiral, who could look forward to 6 tons of wine a year.
The lowly captain of a non-rate had to subsist with his meagre allowance of {checks notes} the equivalent of 1272 bottles of wine a year. It was good to be an Admiral, where you could have almost *21 bottles of wine a day *
Wait, what? I strongly suspect that the math was bungled, or that they aren't telling the whole story. Yes, I'm sure the Admiral's allowance contained a fair bit that was expected to be used for entertaining, but that's still an awful lot of wine. Or was most of it taken as money equivalent instead of alcohol?
Sounds reasonable. Ships were rated by number of guns, and officers were rated by number of wine bottles.
But seriously, it makes sense to provide limitless alcohol to senior officers. An Admiral who wants to get drunk all the time, probably should be kept drunk all the time.
Did someone confuse ton and tun?
In the penultimate episode of The Mandalorian Season 2, there's a couple of 40mm quad mounts decorating a set, as one does in a Galaxy Far Away. Straight off a late WWII ship
I found the article on the Boeing MAX article to be frustrating in its lack of context--and I say that as one who greatly admires the number of the first-rate aviation journalists who write on such issues.
I was left wondering if what some are raising as a "coaching" issue was not merely what the test card/profile was trying to determine. In other words, one does not write the test profile and fire up the jet without there being a clear goal as to what data are to be gathered, what flight characteristics are noted, etc. This is what the test crew needs to know before stepping out the door and thus no surprise as to what one is expecting.
While that does not exonerate Boeing if there are other issues behind the accidents, it is confusing. There are at least two things that needed happen to restore confidence in the type. The MCAS has to meet rigorous design criteria such as redundancy and verification of signal input as well as regular ("average" pilot per FAA certification if I remember the wording correctly) line pilots being given enough warning and feedback as to what state the aircraft is in. Granted, if the pilots take deliberate action to work against those warnings or control feel there is not much one can do.
We can be certain the test crew were briefed what the MCAS will do in this near stall state. They then see how flight test corresponds to what the control feel was. That, to me, is not coaching but rather a determination if the MCAS was doing what it was designed to do. Again, there can have been fleets of other issues, but that speaks to other testing problems.
The test crew cannot replicate (for the most part) the aspect of what does a pilot does when surprised by these warnings, control feel, etc. That is the surprise factor. This is one of those things that is, as Bean says in reference to another aspect of this, more fitting to the simulator.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/12/how-the-army-out-innovated-the-islamic-states-drones/
Ran across this article today, and it's significantly shifting my priors relative to the effectiveness of improvised drones, from a tool with limited capabilities but providing opportunities for short term asymmetric airspace dominance to this is a problem for second rate militaries, unprotected structures (though only for the first few months before the drone modifying network gets taken out), and folks with their pants caught down....and to a lesser degree, folks with a very low risk tolerance/high cost of failure....but having a worse tradeoff than an American solider on the ground in Mosul is a high bar
On the subject of wine allowances.
When I was working in large mines, the mid level bosses would be going through maybe a carton of beer a day at a minimum, maybe more.
Not because they were drinking that much (most days) but because beer was used as an informal currency to get things done outside of the formal company processes.
"Hey Pat, can you stay after work for a couple of hours and help clean out that grinding mill? I know you're supposed to finish at 6 but you can take a carton of XXXX when we've finished up."
It seems obvious to me that a lot of the allocation for senior officers was for entertaining (not quite the same thing, but similar enough) but the scale, particularly for Admirals, seems excessive. Were they really hosting parties that go through 140 bottles of wine a week? That seems unlikely.
I think that if we make allowance for how prodigiously men drank in that place and time, these numbers are reasonable. An officer who consumed two bottles of wine by himself over a long dinner wasn’t a drunk, he was a moderate fellow. So if our hypothetical admiral didn’t want to look mean, he had to calculate at about 2.5 bottles per guest, and his ration of 140 would only accommodate 56 people a week. Given an admiral’s diplomatic and political roles, that wasn’t excessive provision.
We should recall too Jack Aubrey’s all-purpose bonding mechanism, “A glass of wine with you, sir”. A lot of wine will have been poured for social purposes but not drunk. You can see the same thing in East Asia today—ten barely-sipped beers around the boss by the end of the evening.
I'm also reminded of some comment about soldiers stationed in the Wild West of the USA during the 19th century.
They were issued, as standard, something like 10 pounds of buffalo meat per person per day. (I can't remember the number, but something like that).
Which sounds like they were big eaters, but
1.1 And any kids.
Who divided up these buffalo? Some army butcher with a great big chopper. Today you get 10 lbs of (tough) meat, tomorrow you get a big chunk of gristle and bone that's barely usable for soup. You need to average enough to live on.
Man does not live on meat alone. YOu'll take any extra meat to a local and swap it for vegetables, bread, beer etc.
I suspect that some or all of these might apply.
So, I'll quote the relevant paragraph from Capt Pack, RN, so we can parse it out (p 59 of the USNI version):
Now, it appears I got it wrong that it was provided by HM the King (although I don't know what "obtained" actually means here in practice); I also got it wrong that it wasn't all officers, just the officers commanding. It's also possible that he's using a different measurement of gallon and/or ton than we are (his ton works out to 210 gallons per, Google suggests current English Water Ton is 224 gallons). I also don't know how often English Admirals would actually embark onboard ships, and how much wine they could carry. Also, people do seem to have drank more; Pack notes on page 55 that the (reduced!) gill of rum allotted to enlisted men "then was equal in strength to at least 4 double whiskies today". Also, Napoleonic officers at least were encouraged socially to live and spend like kings, even if they couldn't afford it. I also don't know if an admiral was also providing for his staff/servants, as well.
But! I think my main point stands that Royal Navy officers could get their hands on a crazy amount of wine.
Those being the duty-free allowances for COs makes a lot more sense. You're not handing a random lieutenant on a 74 a huge quantity of wine just for showing up. There's going to be a big entertaining allowance mixed in, and it's not actually coming out of the government's pocket directly.
Identify the ships!
Hint: four navies are represented in this photo
(Note: to keep the game from being too easy, I have blacked out the hull numbers)
OK. I have pretty good ideas on three of those ships. The most distant one is the only one I can't place relatively easily, and that's mostly because I don't want to go through every frigate in the PACOM AOR.