Spooooky!

Visions of a Terrifying Future

• No Cold War with China – Instead, great power competition, which has never ended better than a cold war.
• Buying two Fords at once? – Twice the carrier, twice the budget overrun!
• The Naval Strike Missile might be entering service ahead of schedule – How is it terrifying? Picture them flying around the South China Sea! (Okay, yes, it’s a bit of a stretch.)
• Prepare for war, Xi Jinping tells military region that monitors South China Sea, Taiwan – No commentary needed here.

Crumbling, Decaying Armed Forces Etc.

• More F-35s grounded
• The US merchant marine is in sorry, sorry shape
• Air Force secretary details plans to increase fighter readiness – I’ll believe it when I see it.
• USAF wants more airlift capacity, but the C-17 is out of production – Hmm. Troublesome.
• Should the Air Force rebuild Tyndall? – Important to note: Tyndall has easy access to the Joint Gulf Training Complex, where a good deal of high-altitude supersonic combat training is done. Personally, though, I’m fine if they just move it all to Nevada.

Horror-Movie “Don’t Do That You Idiots!” Moves

• Voters poised to hand total control of NY legislature to the Democrats – Follow @upstatefederlst on Twitter if you want a depressing look at New York state politics.
• The USAF faces some tough procurement decisions – … because all of its procurement programs lately have been so horribly run and so delayed that they’re all starting to stack up.
• Speaking of, the Air Force has a $1300 coffee mug – Also, the handle breaks when you drop it, and you can’t buy replacement handles. Granted, they’re fancy mugs with internal heating elements and a plug to connect to aircraft power, but still. To their credit, airmen at Travis AFB pointed out that this was a ridiculous price, and the Air Force is looking into fixing it.
• Should the Navy buy AIP diesel boats?

Monstrous Concepts and Miscellaneous Violence

• An Apache with a jet exhaust and a pusher prop – Somehow, still a better idea than a combat tiltrotor.
• Big Kuz’s drydock sinks – Also, Big Kuz’s drydock knocks a giant hole into her side.
• A tour of Big Kuz
• During NATO exercises in Iceland, US troops drank all the beer in Reykjavik – Bravo Zulu, soldiers!

Yes, it’s the Wednesday What We’re Reading post, definitely posted today, which is Wednesday.

Defense

• Should Big Army buy tiltrotors for combat? – As a rotorhead, I’m not at all sure I would want to make the switch. Tiltrotors are compromise designs: landing vertically is useful for a transport plane, as is going fast, and they’re competing goals. An attack helicopter has much less need to fly at airplane-like speeds, and is more likely to want to sit in a hover for an extended time. Much better to stick with tradition for now.
• Did that Su-35 pilot actually spot an F-22? – RealClearDefense reports. (Random aside: Su is pronounced like ‘sous’, not ‘ess-you’. So also with Il and Ka.)
• More on how the Navy is too small to do convoy protection – And as much as I’m in favor of FFG(X) rather than the LCS program, a $700 million frigate isn’t going to solve the problem. ASW corvettes with a little 8-cell VLS, mark my words!
• Air Force mum on Tyndall AFB F-22s – If they aren’t saying anything, it’s bad news.
• It isn’t just the Air Force who took hits from Michael – The Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutter contract is held entirely by Eastern Shipbuilding Co., of Panama City, Florida. Which is a shame, too, because the first unit was only going to cost $110 million, per the contract. Slap a VLS in (or even some box launchers!), bolt some torpedo launchers to the deck, and install a towed array and some sonobuoy launchers, and suddenly you have an inshore patrol craft and convoy escort for I-can’t-imagine-more-than-$200-million each.
• Singaporean defense blog Senang Diri visits the Kaga – “[Kaga visits Singapore] without bombing it first,” parvusimperator remarks. Featuring pictures of the hangar deck, in addition to some good commentary.
• Everything we know about China’s H-20 stealth bomber – To sum up: not much.
• Navy to build new SSN(X), rather than just improving the Virginias like underwater Arleigh Burkes – All the commentary you need is in the link text.
• More on NATO plans to brush up on ASW
• Marine snipers lose to Coast Guard at the 2018 International Sniper Competition – Every man an automatic rifleman! Long-range combat is for wimps?
• Belgium picks the F-35 over the Eurofighter – Planning now to retire its F-16s, is Belgium. Sad for the Vipers, but another they-must-know-something-we-don’t win for the F-35. Then again, with the UK buying F-35s for its carriers and France snootily building its own fighters, maybe Belgium doesn’t want to tie its air defense to das Luftwaffische Wunderkampfjet.
• Two articles on the loss of the Komsomolets
• The US Army’s 2018 Weapons System Handbook
• Ever wondered what a Humvee sees when you drop it from a plane?

Guns

• Photos from a Russian hunting and sporting arms show in Moscow – Maybe a someday trip for me. Then again, I certainly wouldn’t relish flying into Russia with ‘American’ and ‘journalist’ on my visa.

FOOTBALL

• How to build a successful college offense

In local news, it’s your correspondent’s birthday this weekend.

Defense

• The Drive: AUSA 2018 roundup
• Red Storm Rising: the Marines practice beach landings in Iceland
• Related: Navy to Military Sealift Command: we don’t have enough to escort you
• Time to get rid of ICBMs? – A surpassingly stupid take, in my opinion. The author argues that having a bunch of ICBMs in the US means that any nuclear exchange is going to involve a bunch of bombs landing on the continental US. What the author fails to recognize is that any exchange which involves striking at the US missile force is probably a pretty all-out nuclear war anyway. Even if I don’t much like big cities, it’s inarguably better that any nuclear foe has to spend a few hundred warheads bombing the snot out of Nowhere, Montana than on, say, having them to hit metro Los Angeles.
• 80% of F-35s return to flight – Apparently, it was a fuel tube of some kind. I think the real story is that 20% of F-35s have a part sufficiently faulty as to ground them.
• France thinking EMALS for its next carrier – The way I see it, there are only two countries on the planet which currently operate real aircraft carriers, the definition of ‘real’ being ‘CATOBAR’. Good on France for staying in the club.
• Relatedly, footage of the first shipboard rolling vertical landing on Britain’s fake carrier – I think it’s an obvious good idea, if you’re not going to use catapults and arresting gear like a proper carrier ought. A few months ago, I did a similar landing in DCS using the Harrier.
• In USNI Proceedings, someone argues that seagoing landing craft are obsolete – I’m not sure how I feel about this one. It seems to gloss over an awful lot of helicopter vulnerability, to say nothing of the difficulty in landing, say, a tank via helicopter.
• India discovers that aircraft carriers are hard
• Early feedback on the F-35C is good – Having flown the DCS Hornet for a little while now, one thing I notice about the F-35C is how much less rugged its landing gear looks. I wonder how the F-35’s relatively straight, non-gigantic-trailing-arm gear will hold up in the long run. Also, I’ve heard rumors about issues with nosewheel strut bouncing on catapult launches and unexpectedly rapid tailhook wear. The article doesn’t address those directly, but hopefully they’re sorted out.
• Some MiG-29K cockpit video from a Russian pilot – In the comments, he says that they’ve phased out the R-27 for BVR air-to-air combat in favor of the R-77 and derivatives, which is interesting news if true.

Hurricane Michael and Tyndall AFB

• The Drive with pictures
• The Drive on why you can’t just fly fighters away
• Air Force Magazine has pictures, too

Defense (China-focused)

• China deploys a submarine on anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean – Submarines, of course, are an excellent fit for the anti-piracy role, which requires high visibility as a deterrent, as well as naval guns or autocannon to drive off pirate vessels too small to hit with a missile or torpedo.
• The Diplomat on China’s surface ASW setup… and their ASW aviation
• On the topic of aviation, Japan wants more F-35As to counter China – This goes to one of parvusimperator’s favorite thought experiments: if the F-35 program was in as dire shape as is reported in public sources, why would places like Israel and Japan with an existential dependence on good fighters be so eager to buy them, and to buy more of them? Also, it has a current F-35A price of $140 million, although it isn’t clear exactly what that includes.
• Japan is also buying more E-2Ds – When the war with China comes, I’m sure it’ll be nice to have familiar AEW&C assets handy.

Grab Bag

• Watch this newsreel about Caligula’s pleasure barges! – And read the whole Twitter thread, while you’re at it.
• Bloomberg’s Big Hack story: is there anything there? – At present, the answer remains, “Unclear.”
• A DC Democrat asks: does Trump have a strategy? – He seems to settle on this answer: “Whether or not he does, it seems to be working.”
• The Russian Orthodox Church splits with Constantinople – Enormous ecclesiastical news, this. The magnitude is similar to the Reformation, or indeed the Schism of 1054 which created the Orthodox-Catholic divide in the first place. The Russian patriarchate is the biggest Orthodox church, but junior to the Constantinople patriarchate (to simply things a bit). Constantinople granted the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly, which pulls Ukraine (at least officially) out of the Russian Orthodox orbit. State propaganda organ Russia Today, in the article above, says that this is terrible and that Ukraine is properly Russian Orthodox territory, hence the split.

A long one this week, courtesy primarily of the Association of the United States Army and the plans to replace the Bradley.

AUSA 2018

• A Bradley replacement is top priority
• Raytheon and Rheinmetall offer the Lynx – And a video thereof
• BAE showcases the CV90 Mark IV – Parvusimperator notes that it has a modular turret, lots of range, and 8 dismounts.
• 1000 horsepower out of a four-cylinder opposed pistol engine – And the press release
• General Dynamics throws a hat into the ring – And video
• A new 50mm gun! – Not, it should be noted, the 50mm Supershot parvusimperator has written on in the past, however.
• The Stryker Command Vehicle, photos of
• A 1000-mile cannon is on the Army’s list – If you launch an IRBM from a gun barrel, is it a gun or a missile?

Other Defense

• Japan’s ‘helicopter carrying destroyers’ could be used to carry F_35s? – What? Perish the thought! That’s absolutely impossible, and definitely not something we’ve predicted multiple times.
• F-35-cued HIMARS rocket shot – Now that is cool.
• Shot: the French are causing problems with the Australian sub program – The country which took its ball, kicked sand in the Eurofighter’s face, then went home and built its own fighter is hard to work with? C’est pas vrai!
• Chaser: Japan’s latest Soryu-class has lithium-ion batteries – Are you paying attention, Australia?
• Boomer: RealClearDefense asks whether Australia develop a nuclear deterrent – Yes, but only because we like Australia, is our answer.
• Russia preparing an undersea Atlantic battlespace – Western institutions may have forgotten how far ahead they were during the Cold War, but the Russians haven’t forgotten how far they had to catch up.
• New hovercraft to enter service – Bougainville, third in the America-class, has a well deck, conveniently.
• MiG-31 ASAT? – Maybe, but I suspect Russia, like presumably the US and China, is focusing more on having its satellite-killing capabilities already in orbit. Sidebar: in a war where satellite-killing is a thing, SpaceX (or more generally reusable boosters) could be a decisive strategic advantage.

Guns

• Weekly Weaponsman: the rise and decline of .25 Browning
• SiG presents some drop-dead gorgeous guns to The Old Guard

Football

• An average Steelers team
• The jet sweep and other outside running plays are doing well this year; here’s how they work

Technology and Other

• Don’t bother buying an RTX2080 or 2080Ti – Paying a huge premium for the first version of next-generation technology is not generally smart. (Sounds like a procurement maxim, too.)
• The Soapbox congratulates Mike Goulian, Red Bull Air Race Indy winner – And the first American to win a US air race in ten years. Take that, rest of the world. We invented airplanes, we can take you all on.
• Bloomberg reported on a hardware hack which allegedly hit a number of US companies – I’m still not 100% sure if I believe it. Bloomberg stands by it, and Motherboard has a good roundup of further reporting and investigation into the story.

Lots of F-35 news today.

Defense

• The F-35 has flown its first combat mission – Good job, Marines. Extra credit for flying off of a ship called Essex.
• Foxtrot Alpha on the F-35 crash – It was an F-35B, so the smart money is on some vertical landing problem.
• The British once again have a carrier capable of supporting modern aircraft – HMS Queen Elizabeth may be uncommonly ugly, even for an aircraft carrier, but welcome back to the carrier club, Royal Navy! The shipboard rolling vertical landing is an interesting technique, and although I don’t believe they’ve tested it yet, it should do wonders to increase the F-35’s bringback weight in British service.
• If you can’t deploy, you can’t be a sailor, Navy says – Seems… accurate? Uncontroversial?
• US Patriot systems to be removed from the Middle East – Israel: “Okay, we’ll just use ours.”
• US carrier deployments hit a 25-year low – Alternate title: sustainment and tempo are hard.
• The US tweaks China by overflying the South China Sea – If we really want to get on their nerves, we should change that body of water’s name to the West Philippine Sea.
• Boeing-Saab consortium wins the T-X contract – As a massive Saab fanboy…
• Infantry carry too much, October 2018 edition – Parvusimperator says they don’t get any credit for the reporting, because they don’t suggest any fixes.
• The USAF wants 386 squadrons; how do they get there? – My preferred method would be large sacks with $ printed on, but that seems unlikely.
• MiG-31 roles may include anti-satellite attacks – Well, it is super-fast and high-altitude-capable. That’s pretty much what you want to hit something in orbit.
• USNI Proceedings with a long piece on littoral submarine operations – My bread and butter.
• Weaponsman on paratroopers vs. tanks in the late Second World War
• The War Thunder crew measures the Abrams
• The Navy’s transition from C-2A to CMV-22B for COD continues – Still no word on how they’re going to move spare F-35 engines.
• India prepares to buy S-400s; US prepares to impose sanctions – Or, and I’m just spitballing here, we could let India buy S-400s, then ask nicely to see their new toys, then see their new toys, because the Indians are generally our friends and are often willing to bring fancy, modern Russian export gear to American exercises.

Guns (etc.)

• Geissele’s Nano-Composite Coatings have been released – After 450,000 simulated rounds, the hammer hadn’t even worn through its place on the bolt carrier. That’s really something.

Miscellaneous

• A particle discovery which upends the Standard Model? – Could be.
• Real-life Dr. Nick isn’t nearly as funny as Simpsons Dr. Nick – It’s mind-boggling that this went on for as long as it did.

Books

• Parvusimperator is now onto Volume 3 of Shelby Foote’s Civil War! Much like McClellan on the Peninsula, I am constantly looking at Volume 1 and saying, “I can take it, I just need another cup of coffee.”

Defense

• Taiwan can win a war with China – A particularly spicy take, but a long and well-researched read (as you usually get with Foreign Policy). I thought we’d talked about defending Taiwan in the past, maybe as a podcast segment, but I have a hard time finding it. Private browsing evades the paywall.
• The Drive argues that Syrian S-300s won’t stop Israel – I believe it. Nothing stops Israel.
• The Army buys MH-139s to replace UH-1Ns – Don’t worry. We aren’t buying weird pasta helicopters to do real combat tasks. They’re just for VIP transport and missile silo security in the US.
• Russian fighters purportedly intercept an F-22?
• The Drive to the rescue, with more detail – I buy that a Su-35 could find an F-22 via IRST, especially if (as the Russians say) the Su-35 were behind the F-22. I don’t know if I buy the accuracy of the Russian story, just on principle, but it does at the very least pass the smell test.
• Perennial favorite CDR Salamander argues for hanging pirates – Soapbox editorial stance: wholehearted approval.
• Thursday bonus article: The US should buy diesel subs – Written by a perennial favorite here, James Holmes, who became much harder to find on Google following the Aurora theater shooting. The headline might make you say, “Don’t be absurd,” as it did me, but once you get about halfway through, you hit the wham line which made me say, “Oh, that’s actually not a bad idea.”

Guns (etc.)

• An article from Weaponsman on the M9’s locking block – Though sadly lost to the living, Hognose’s archive is full of worthwhile reads.

Miscellaneous

• The ABC Conjecture: proved or not? – I share this in large part because Quanta is reliably excellent math, science, and technology writing, and deserves to be on your reading list.
• Catholic drama in China – The short version is, the Vatican struck a deal with the Chinese Communist Party to let the CCP have a say in the nomination of local bishops. In doing so, they’ve robbed themselves of some legitimacy there, in favor of not rocking the boat too much. Especially in authoritarian places, Christianity is by nature a boat-rocking religion.

Books

• Parvusimperator and I are both still plowing our way through Shelby Foote’s book. I’m still on Volume 1; he’s nearly through Volume 2.
• He recommends Whitman Publishing’s edition of U.S. Army in World War II, because of full-color gatefold maps.
• I recommend the official in-house Many Words Press tabletop roleplaying game system, RPJ, because I wrote it and think it’s cool.

Defense

• Defending tankers and transports – The article doesn’t actually go into all that much detail, but it does raise an interesting question.
• Can we call it BB-X? – It’s either that, or embrace the ludicrous and call a 27,000-ton ship a destroyer. (Displacement not actually known.)
• Army speeds up future Modular Active Protection System for combat vehicles
• Challenger 2 Mark 2 photos
• The Drive, on the Il-20 shootdown over Syria – The Drive’s reporting on military stuff is consistently solid.

Guns (etc.)

• Gothia Arms Historical Society – A collection of articles on a number of topics, including parvusimperator’s favored Fairbairn-Sykes knife.

Hail to Nuffle (a joke for the Blood Bowl players)

• The Pittsburgh Steelers defense is too predictable
• The Pittsburgh Steelers nearly tied the Kansas City Chiefs on a last-second almost-blocked punt

Slim pickings this week, in part because I did not do my usual defense news trawl every morning. My bad.

Books

• I’m still plowing through Volume 1 of Foote, having now made it past Grant’s victory at Shiloh, the entirely unsuccessful Confederate attempts to march through the desert Southwest to California, and the capture of New Orleans. It’s worth remarking how the story of the Civil War is the Confederacy winning slightly in one place and losing badly in four other places.

Defense

• On the new KC-46 – We’ll see how the next year or two goes, but the KC-46 might end up on our list of procurement successes.
• The GAO to DoD: “Stop spending so much on redundant bureaucracy – ‘Redundant bureaucracy’ is itself redundant.
• Which defense companies make the most money? – Kawasaki Heavy Industries tops the revenue growth list, thanks to CDR Salamander.

Guns

• The AK Guy makes an AK – And I, for one, think it’s a pretty good deal.
• CMP 1911 prices are out – And they’re very expensive.

Football

• NFL Coaches already on the hot seat – Not wasting any time.
• Why the Patriots Suck – Because we hate them.

Miscellaneous

• Capitalist markets in North Korea – My opinion on the currently-ruling Mr. Kim is that his secret desire is to be remembered as a liberalizer who brought North Korea out of darkness and into the modern age, owing to his evidently-long childhood in the West, but that his ability to do so is limited by the North Korean power structure. Not to say our man Jong-un is anything but a brutal dictator even by the standards of brutal dictators, which is what the preponderance of the evidence suggests, but brutal dictators who liberalize tend to be treated decently by the world, whereas the rest of the North Korean government would pretty much all end up on trial for crimes against humanity.
• From the gee-who’d-have-thunk file, a novelist who wrote about how to murder your husband has been charged with murdering her husband.

At least it’s on Wednesday today!

Books

• Parvusimperator is up to volume two of Shelby Foote’s three-volume Civil War set, which means I’m now on Volume 1. Foote’s narrative is, so far, excellent and comprehensive.

Defense

• Revisiting the Russo-Georgian War
• A fuller account of the Russo-Georgian War
• Russian performance in the Syrian War – notable for its brief treatment of Russian precision munitions, which aren’t so much precision munitions, generally, as precision attack systems in the aircraft delivering them. Per War on the Rocks above, this has changed somewhat, with greater numbers of actual guided weapons now in Russian stocks.
• Boeing wins the MQ-25 contract – good job, Boeing. You’ve had a bit of a tough go of it with contracts lately, but between the KC-46 and the MQ-25, you’re now the acknowledged leader in air-to-air refueling worldwide. Also, way to go, Navy, for finally realizing that a dedicated tanker is important. It remains to be seen whether a drone tanker is a good idea, but buddy refueling definitely has its limits. Speaking of…
• Navy F-35C and F/A-18F involved in air-to-air refueling accident – oops. Apparently, the F-35 managed to ingest the end of the drogue. No details on the actual extent of the damage, but the Navy said it’s a Class A Mishap, which means damage exceeded $2 million. Now we’ll get to see how good the LockMart repair manuals are.

Guns

• The Last Enfield – my favorite bolt-action battle rifle, in its ultimate form.

Football Is Pretty Much Here, So Educate Yourself

• Via parvusimperator, a long list of American Football 101 articles from Bleacher Report. Buckle up.
  • Power Running
  • Deep Throwing
  • Cover 2
  • O-line and D-line Assignments
  • Linebacker Assignments and Alignment
  • Prevent Defense – a.k.a, Losing to the Patriots 101
  • Trap Coverage
  • Football 101 Cover 2 102: Breaking Down the Cover 2
• Your hometown Pittsburgh Steelers may have scored with current backup and last year’s draft pick Josh Dobbs. I don’t know if I believe that.

Miscellaneous

• My wife and I started doing some miniature painting, and only came across Larry Correia’s tutorials (#1, #2) afterward, but they seem pretty good.
• NPR with honest reporting on a gun issue? Weird.

Are we the kind of people to publish an article on Thursday, backdate it to Wednesday, and still call it ‘Wednesday What We’re Reading’? Evidently, yes. Also, I was on vacation over the weekend and only got back on Tuesday, so it’s going to be a little lighter than last time.

Books

• On my trip, I read Blind Man’s Bluff, subtitled The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, which is very much worth a read. As a sim-submariner, I thought from the introduction that it was going to be a bit of a lightweight puff piece, but it quickly got better.
• Parvusimperator is working his way through Shelby Foote’s three-volume Civil War set.

Defense

• The UN wants to ban killer robots – I’m not sure what the Soapbox’s editorial position on killer robots is.
• Orders of battle for the PLAAF and PLANAF – Wargame away!

Guns

• Forgotten Weapons takes a look at a Swedish bullpup – How do I not own one already?
• Stop worrying about overpenetration – parvusimperator recommends this website in general, too.
• An automatically-actuated AR-15 bolt release – Insert a magazine, and the bolt closes it. Useful or gimmick? I don’t have the spare cash for it right now, and parvusimperator leans, I think, toward gimmick, so a review will have to wait.

Football Fast Approaches

As red-blooded Americans, we’re big NFL fans, so there’ll be some content of that flavor for the next six or seven months.

• The Bills Suck – Courtesy of western NY native parvusimperator.
• Your Team Sucks Too – Deadspin’s annual classic on why you should feel bad about your football team.

Miscellaneous

• Teeth-chattering winter in the cards? – Sure, they do about as well as chance, but it feels like it’s going to be a long, cold winter here in western Pennsylvania, so there’s that.
• Socialism is a crime against humanity – That’s definitely a Soapbox editorial position.