If great power competition can lead to great power wars, are we sure we are investing the right amount of time thinking about the right kind of weapons we will have for use in 2025 or 2030?
What is worrying me about our focus this week? The small imperial conflicts in Asia and the Middle East that distracted us this century? Not what I’m thinking about. It isn’t the previous generation’s focus on Air-Land Battle or the prospect of global nuclear war either? Nope. Something more basic.
What is the most likely weaponeering – offensive or defensive – benchmark we should be looking at right now with the prospect a few POM cycles away of being challenged west off Wake?
Ponder with me a bit.
The People’s Republic of China shares a few critical vulnerabilities with other nations that go back to the edge of written memory – and especially in living memory; she is dependent on the sea.
She relies on her ready access to the sea to project power and to secure her sea lines of communication so she can import food and fuel. Those SLOC go through some very narrow waters. If war comes between her and the USA that is there that the war will be won or lost.
It is exciting – and I’m guilty of this as well – to focus on the number and reach of your warships and aircraft; the capabilities and vulnerabilities of submarines; the lethality of existing and future missiles; cruise, ballistic, hypersonic … all of them.
I’m not thinking of them either right now. No. You know what it is. In the back of your head, you worry about it too.
What are we willfully neglecting?
What has always been both unsexy and easy to ignore in peace … but also terrifying at war? What capability did we, for all the reasons above and subtle reminders later – just decide to forget … perhaps from boredom?
From inside my living memory at least, let’s look at the 1974 RAND report for the USAF on the accurately titled WWII offensive action against Imperial Japan, “OPERATION STARVATION.” Read the whole thing, but here’s from the opening;
For emphasis, let’s pull that last bit out again;
…the total tonnage of Japanese shipping sunk and damaged (immobilized) by mines in the last six months fo the war was greater than that which can be attributed to all other agents combined, including submarines, ships’ gunfire, and Allied bombing.
Some lessons are forgotten and then relearned over and over again.
“…the greatest single success ever achieved by a minefield was by the one laid off Cape Juminda in the Gulf of Finland. This field inflicted great damage to the Soviet forces withdrawing from Tallinn (Reval) in August 1941. Out of the 195 warships, transport vessels, auxiliaries and 23,000 people that evacuated Tallinn, 53 ships and 4,000 lives were lost en route. Among the ships sunk were 25 out 29 of the larger transports, five destroyers, two corvettes, two submarines and two patrol boats. Some 2,828 German and Finnish moored mines were laid, mostly contact types along with some antenna types. In addition, about 1,500 explosive anti-sweeping devices were deployed in this field.”
Another data point for everyone. When we think of the German U-Boat successes of WWI and WWII, we usually visualize a bearded guy, eye on the scope, white combo cover pushed back on his head, sneaking up on a convoy … right?
Via U-boat.net;
Going back only a little more than a century, we seem to have forgotten our own history and what one little submarine can do to an entire seaboard;
On April 18th, 1918, U-151 deployed from Kiel, Germany bound for the American coastline. Despite information provided by British intelligence to Admiral Sims on May 1st, the Navy was unable to locate U-151 until May 19th, when the American steamship Nyanza reported that she was under attack by a German U-boat approximately 300 miles off the coast of Maryland. Subsequent reports sent by American merchant steamers indicated U-151 was headed to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. On May 22nd U-151 laid the first minefields on the East Coast. One in the mouth of the Chesapeake and another in the Delaware Bay. On June 1, the Germans sunk a merchant vessel, Texel, from their mine-laying campaign. The steamship Texel sank during its voyage from Puerto Rico to New York. Two days later, on June 3rd, the Texel’s crew reached shore in Atlantic City, New Jersey and reported two U-boats were off the American coast. Unknown to the Americans, U-151 had already begun its journey back to Kiel, Germany.
Do we give mine warfare – especially the offensive side of the game – the amount to time it deserves?
So, as we invest time talking about things that might or might not be a threat or even go in to production … could we invest some time as well in things we know are a threat, are an asset … and unless things have changed a lot recently … we have stored in some quantity in various bunkers hither and yon?
