Some have also shown behaviors suggesting attempts to avoid detection

April 20th, 2026

CNN and environmental news outlet Mongabay tracked eight Chinese research vessels that have undertaken deep-sea mining exploratory missions over the past five years:

During that period, the ships spent only around 6% of their total open water time in areas reserved for exploration by Chinese companies, according to an analysis of data from MarineTraffic, a ship tracking and maritime intelligence provider, and the platform Deep Sea Mining Watch.

[…]

Some have also shown behaviors suggesting attempts to avoid detection, including hundreds of instances of “going dark” by disabling the mandatory Automatic Identification System (AIS), a vessel’s self-reporting system that broadcasts its identity and position.

[…]

Experts say Chinese research vessels may very well be prospecting for minerals beyond their assigned exploration zones: In December 2025 and January 2026, the Shi Yan 6, or “Experiment 6,” appeared to operate within India and Germany’s exploration area in the Indian Ocean; in November, the Chinese vessel Shen Hai Yi Hao, or “Deep Sea No. 1,” appeared to operate within South Korea’s exploration area, also in the Indian Ocean. Throughout 2024, it repeatedly seemed to be operating in other nations’ contracted areas too, including those of Poland, France and Russia.

The South Korean, Polish and French licensees told CNN and Mongabay that China had alerted them in advance to the visits and that research in such areas is permissible under UNCLOS. Germany said it was unaware of the Shi Yan 6’s visit and India and Russia declined to comment.

Experts say the pattern of Chinese activity could reflect a broader strategy to lead in deep-sea mining once commercial extraction begins.

[…]

One of the eight vessels tracked by CNN, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao, or “Marine Geology No. 6,” traveled towards a Chinese license area in the Northwest Pacific Ocean in September 2025, but instead appeared to survey an area just outside of it.

On its return, in October, it transited through the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth that serves as a vital military hub, before loitering up and down its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and that of Guam, a US territory.

“That’s on the route that US submarines might transit from Guam to places west,” explained Tom Shugart, a former US Navy submarine warfare officer and maritime expert focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Asked about its choice of path, Shugart said it’s “certainly possible” that the Chinese vessel could be leaving behind sensors at 4,600 meters (15,000 feet) below to record a submarine’s unique sound signature.

A month later, in November, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao took a week-long journey through Micronesia, an island nation that includes the state of Yap, where the US Air Force is investing $400 million to extend the island’s international airport runway to support American military operations. Guam and Micronesia are considered part of the “Second Island Chain,” a US line of defense against potential Chinese military aggression and a component of US Indo-Pacific strategy under Trump.

[…]

In May 2024, shortly before its visit to a Chinese ISA area, the Xiang Yang Hong 06 (Facing the Red Sun 6), scanned the seabed just west of Guam, a 210-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean and home to Andersen Air Force Base — a key deployment base for US Air Force bombers and home port to US nuclear attack submarines that could be vital in any defense of Taiwan.

[…]

Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council Minister said in January that 41 Chinese research vessels had been detected by the Taiwanese coast guard in waters around Taiwan over the past three years. “They have trampled on our waters, and likely know the ins and outs of waters surrounding us,” Kuan Bi-ling said.

[…]

For example, in November 2023, the Xiang Yang Hong 03 (Facing the Red Sun 03) spent 48 hours doing survey work over a known trans-Pacific cable, covering around 400 square nautical miles — an area smaller than other surveys the vessel conducted, possibly indicating a more targeted investigation to pinpoint objects of interest.

The vessel “made a fairly direct line straight to one particular part of the ocean,” where undersea cables had been laid three years prior, said Mark Douglas, a Starboard analyst. It then continued to do what appeared to be “a very focused little bit of survey work over the course of a couple of days over (the) top of the cable,” before it left the area. Douglas called the vessel’s movements “a smoking gun,” that points to likely dual-use operations.

[…]

In August 2024, the deep sea vessel Ke Xue (Science) transited Alaska’s Aleutian Islands — within the US EEZ — three times before returning to Qingdao, a strategic naval port and the headquarters of the Chinese navy’s North Sea Fleet.

The Xiang Yang Hong 01 made a similar journey. Shortly after operating in its deep sea mining license areas in the Northwest Pacific, the vessel entered the Bering Sea in August 2024 and operated for several days inside Russia’s EEZ, a move described by Ryan D. Martinson of the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute as “very rare, maybe unprecedented.” During this visit, the Xiang Yang Hong 01 gained access to Avacha Bay, a key hub for Russia’s Pacific Fleet and submarine forces.

Then, in August 2025, five Chinese research and icebreaking vessels — including the deep sea vessel Tan Suo San Hao (Exploration No. 3) — drew significant attention from the US Coast Guard, after two vessels from the fleet entered the American Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) in Arctic waters west of Alaska.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Fiction writers who have attempted to predict future wars and their consequences have a checkered history

April 19th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFiction writers who have attempted to predict future wars and their consequences, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, have a checkered history:

Some have amounted to blatant propaganda. A famous example was Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Published in England in 1903, it was republished by the Naval Institute Press in 1991 and made into a movie. Childers creates the story of two Englishmen on holiday who sail their yacht among the islands and tidewaters along the North Sea coast of Germany. They discover a fleet of barges moored in Imperial Germany’s coastal estuaries in preparation for a surprise invasion of England. Childers was obsessed with the prospect of an unexpected landing on the English coast, which he feared could overcome the feeble British army. His vivid novel drew the attention of the press, the public, and the admiralty, which was his purpose. The Riddle of the Sands lives on in Oxford and Cambridge student culture as mythology more attuned to modern ears than Beowulf or The Iliad. It is the best of its time. But, as Eric Grove writes in his introduction to the recent republication, “His book was far from being the only exercise in literary scaremongering at the time.” Grove lists half a dozen others, including The Great War in England in 1897, by William Le Queux.

Similar in impact to Childers’ work but intended as entertainment, is Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising. Published in 1986, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it describes the “real” war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and includes some campaign moves and countermoves by the opposing sides that broke through the then-rigid boundaries of conventional Pentagon gaming and analysis. By the time the book went on sale, U.S. naval planning had become relatively stereotyped. Clancy’s imaginative ideas were treated with respect and examined closely. Such works of fiction involve the thoughts and actions of the imagined participant in vivid detail. Unlike the body of science-fiction tracing from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, some of them are relevant enough to be taken seriously by war-planners.

A recent book, Ghost Fleet, by Peter Singer and August Cole, rivals Red Storm Rising for thought-provoking insights that draw attention to creative steps that a first-class enemy could take to defeat the U.S. Navy today. The story is about a twenty-first-century attack on Oahu by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. Instead of bombing and neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet as the Japanese did on 7 December, China conducts a surprise invasion. Aided by worms planted in the combat systems of American warships to incapacitate their sensors and missile systems, Chinese warships, aircraft, and missiles are able to neutralize the U.S. warships that would have defended Hawaii. Unmanned Chinese aerial vehicles, flying from innocent-looking commercial ships, then destroy American ground defenses. Their manned and unmanned ground vehicles complete the invasion and occupation.

One might question Ghost Fleet’s logic of China’s commencing a war this way, but the surprise attack is no more a strategic folly than was Tom Clancy’s initiation of a fictional World War III with a surprise Soviet attack on NATO. The thrust of the Singer and Cole book is to create a strategic setting in which they can describe modern information warfare. They identify a host of potential vulnerabilities in the American armed forces that in real life should not be ignored. They back up their descriptions of the Chinese technologies used in the book with extraordinary technological detail, validated by more than 400 endnotes supporting each of the crippling cyber, robotic, and malware attacks. On the American side the Navy initially descends into a thick fog of operational helplessness, the defenders of Hawaii are baffled and blinded, and chaos reigns throughout the United States as the Chinese shut down utilities and power systems fail from coast to coast—until Singer and Cole imaginatively describe how the United States achieves a comeback to defeat the Chinese attackers.

I have mentioned Red Storm Rising before, if only briefly,

Ghost Fleet, on the other hand, has come up multiple times:

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

It works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts

April 18th, 2026

Researchers at Kyushu University in Japan were seeking complex, expensive methods to extract hydrogen from methanol:

“In what can only be considered incredible serendipity, we found in one of our control experiments mixing methanol, iron ions, and sodium hydroxide, and then irradiating it with UV light, generated a considerable amount of hydrogen gas,” [Takahiro Matsumoto, lead author and Associate Professor at Kyushu University‘s Faculty of Engineering] added.

[…]

The simple iron mixture produced 921 mmol of hydrogen per hour per gram of catalyst. That is a technical way of saying it works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts.

The process, known as alcohol dehydrogenation, releases the hydrogen stored in compounds such as alcohols, such as methanol.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

The evolution of firepower warrants deep reflection

April 17th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsThe evolution of firepower warrants deep reflection, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains:

The development of the torpedo at the beginning of the twentieth century enabled an inferior force to defeat a superior one because the new weapons delivered a highly effective pulse of firepower that could be delivered from many small torpedo boats or from an undetected submarine. The effect of this on tactics in World War I was astonishing.

In World War II, aircraft became the means of delivering fatal “salvoes” because an air wing could reach out 200 nautical miles or more, and the effect on tactics was even more stunning.

In the modern missile age, this salvo threat has achieved new status. When the “pulsed power” is a missile salvo, a weaker side that is outnumbered by as much as two to one can win—if it employs better scouting and command-and-control that enable it to “attack effectively first.”

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia

April 16th, 2026

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia, Nature acknowledges:

Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness — directional selection — from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.

Posted in Science | 6 Comments »

There is no compelling rationale for sending large, expensive, and highly capable warships into contested coastal waters

April 15th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFleet Tactics and Naval Operations looks at modern tactics and operations:

If Trident submarines could be targeted, they would go down with many warheads—more than the number of nuclear weapons that would be expended to sink them. These huge submarines seem to have been designed on a cost-effective basis—that is, economies of scale drove the concentration of twenty-four missiles in each vessel, each missile armed with eight multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle warheads (MIRVs), without regard for the possibility that the submarines might be detectable someday. Had the designers factored even the remote possibility that these boats might be tracked at sea or else attacked in port or at dispersed harbors they would have distributed Trident missiles on more submarines, even though that would have been less expedient.

The most striking illustration of the concentration of warheads in the modern nuclear arsenal was the MX missile, which carried about ten. A natural but unforeseen consequence of the first strategic arms limitation treaty, or SALT I, which counted missile launchers rather than warheads, is that the land-based MX system was considered destabilizing because it offered the enemy an opportunity to destroy many warheads with one in a first strike.

[…]

The most recent ASCM attacks from warships or aircraft were in the Falklands War in 1982 and in the extended Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. This should be no reason for complacency. First, new missiles have become hotter and harder to defend against. Second, although there have been no recent sea-launched missile attacks on ships, there have been a great many attacks from the sea, using land-attack missiles. On land it is much harder to assess the number of hits achieved, the effects on the different conflicts, or the recovery time needed to restore an airfield, replace a missile launch site, or reopen a factory. Partly as a result of land-attack missiles from the sea, both states and insurgents have increased the numbers and ranges of missiles to counter them. Third, attacking ships by missiles is less costly than defending against them with hard-kill systems, especially with surface-to-air defensive missiles. Fourth, saturation attacks, in which many missiles arrive on a target simultaneously, have not yet occurred, but such tactics seem likely to be used in the future.

[…]

It is a reminder that the decision to mass or disperse depends on defensive considerations, not offensive ones, and it has done so since World War II, when aircraft carrier battle tactics were developed. In cases when defenses are likely to be stronger when the ships are concentrated, the fleet should be massed the way the U.S. carrier fleets were concentrated in 1944. If defenses are weak, however, as they were against attack from the air in 1942, then a dispersed force is more effective and the need to out-scout the enemy and attack effectively first will be more urgent.

[…]

The principle abides: a fleet that cannot reliably attack first must mass for effective defense. If its defense cannot be made effective, then it must fight dispersed and win by out-scouting the enemy so as to avoid all attacks.

[…]

There is no compelling rationale for sending large, expensive, and highly capable warships into contested coastal waters unless they are able to take several hits and continue fighting without missing a beat. It is better to fight fire with fire, using expendable, missile-carrying aircraft or small surface craft. In fact, ever since the introduction of numerous torpedo boats, coastal submarines, and minefields early in this century, contested coastal waters have been taboo for capital ships, and have become the almost exclusive province of flotillas of small, swift, lethal fast-attack craft.

[…]

A warcraft with great offensive firepower and little means of defense is extremely vulnerable and creates a highly unstable tactical situation. To perform effectively, it depends on a first strike, a stealthy attack, or a better combination of scouting and weapon ranges. A warcraft with such a mix of attributes is an anomaly. Why is such a “mistake” built? Ostensibly, because designers believe that in cases when the measure of effectiveness is simple firepower, ? or ?, it is cost-effective to put many good shots in each craft. But that ignores the force-on-force nature of battle. A better measure of effectiveness is how much deliverable firepower it can muster over its combat life, which is a combination of offensive firepower and counterforce.

[…]

A major consequence of massing for defense is the guarantee that the enemy will be aware of the fleet and its general location. In such cases, electronic-warfare tactics should be designed not to mask the presence of the fleet, which is impossible, but to complicate the enemy’s efforts to track and target the key units that constitute its striking power.

[…]

Some countries will use fishing boats and small vessels that resemble innocent coastal traffic to detect and report enemy presence.

[…]

In cluttered, confined waters the normal advantage of longer-range weapons aided by targeting with satellites and over-the-horizon radar is muted or lost. The cost of individual missiles is also more important in coastal combat because more warships and UAVs likely will be engaged, and running out of ordnance is an important consideration.

[…]

Remotely controlled surface vessels can remain on-station for long periods of time and carry relatively large payloads—both valuable for deterrence. The growing potential for autonomous undersea surveillance and for attack in shallow or confined seas will increase the threat to high-value nuclear submarines and other capital assets, making less expensive manned and unmanned nonnuclear submersibles all the more useful in waters such as the Yellow, Arabian, and Baltic Seas.

The fact that precise homing enables tacticians to equip smaller platforms with offensive capability has led to two recent advancements in missile warfare. One is a system called Club K, developed by the Russian armed forces, in which box launchers are carried on trucks, where they can be at least partially concealed, and can be dispersed widely. The vehicle mobility gives an attacker both maneuverability and survivability at low cost. The mobile launchers also can be used to replace or expand offensive power at sea quickly in cases where larger warships are damaged and cannot be repaired immediately; the launchers can be installed on a wide variety of vessels of varying sizes.

[…]

A disadvantage of the concept is its very invisibility. Influence requires that in edge-of-war scenarios and crises, the deterring force must present the threatening enemy with a visible threat—a task that usually requires the presence of clearly identifiable warships.

[…]

Cares’ analysis is both startling and compelling, showing how, by forcing the enemy to spread his attention among many separate units, a force of ships carrying unmanned attackers and defenders can defeat similar numbers of enemy ships. Cares demonstrates mathematically that because of the power of a numerical advantage, adding only one unmanned surface vehicle in each LCS dramatically increases combat effectiveness.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits

April 14th, 2026

Captive of the Labyrinth by Mary Jo IgnoffoThe lore that Sarah Winchester built her mansion to house ghosts killed by Winchester rifles is likely just gossip and marketing, Drew Breunig says, citing a piece that summarizes Captive of the Labyrinth:

Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits. She believes that what drove Sarah Winchester to build was her desire to be an architect.

Sarah Winchester lived at a time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture.

Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.

We aren’t as rich as Sarah Winchester, Drew Breunig says, but when AI-generated code is cheap, we don’t need to be:

After Opus 4.5 and recent work enabling Agent Teams, the average net lines added by Claude per commit is now smooth and steady at 1,000 lines of code per commit.

1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.

If you search for human benchmarks, you’ll find many citing Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month while claiming a good engineer might write 10 cumulative lines of code per day. If you further explore, you’ll find numbers higher than 10 cited, but generally less than 100.

[…]

Unfortunately, everything else remains roughly the same cost and roughly the same speed. Feedback hasn’t gotten cheaper; the “eyeballs” that guided the software developed by the bazaar haven’t caught up to AI.

There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself. You’re there to prompt, you’re there to review. You don’t need to recruit testers, run surveys, or manage design partners. You just build what you want, and use what you build.

And that’s what many developers are doing with cheap code: building idiosyncratic tools for ourselves, guided by our passions, taste, and needs.

(Hat tip to Gaikokumaniakku.)

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Soldiers are more cautious when excessive boldness results in death rather than embarrassment

April 13th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsOne of our most realistic ways to teach ground tactics, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, is on instrumented ranges that substitute lasers for deadly bullets and shells:

English tactical analyst David Rowland, however, discovered the troubling fact that in infantry battles the difference between casualty rates inflicted in actual combat and those estimated on an instrumented range was less by a factor of seven. Soldiers are more cautious when excessive boldness results in death rather than embarrassment.

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Former member of US Army’s elite Delta Force unit arrested for leaking secrets to reporter

April 12th, 2026

Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth HarpIt seems a stretch to call her “a former member of the US Army’s elite Delta Force,” but she has been arrested for leaking classified secrets:

Courtney Williams, 40, was arrested Wednesday in connection with her alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist.

While the affidavit doesn’t name the journalist, Williams is cited heavily in Seth Harp’s book ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces‘ and was featured in a Politico profile by Harp, both published last year.

The article, titled ‘My Life Became a Living Hell: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit‘ detailed her time as a ‘signature reduction specialist.’

Court documents claim that between 2022 and 2025, Williams spoke via phone and text to Harp about her time working with the elite unit, which required her to sign a Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement when she was hired and fired.

In the affidavit, Special Agent Jocelyn Fox cited a text between the two she said occurred on or about the day the book and article were published.

‘Other than a few factual errors, I would definitely have been concerned with the amount of classified information being disclosed,’ Williams’ text read.

‘I thought things I was telling you so you could have a better general understanding of how the (SMU) was set up or operated would not be published and it feels like an entire TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) was sent out in my name giving them a chance to legally persecute me.’

[…]

When Williams was fired, she filed an EEOC complaint and eventually settled for an amount she claimed was ‘sufficient to buy a small house in North Carolina.’

[…]

Harp wrote that Williams’ job meant she managed ‘valid but fictious passports’ and other identification for special forces operators on overseas missions.

His story also details accusations of what Harp described as gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

One incident mentioned Williams being forced to bend over for a supervisor ‘to assess whether her underwear could be seen through the fabric.’

[…]

On the day both the profile and the book were released, Williams admitted to Harp in a text message she was ‘concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.’

She sent someone else a message writing: ‘I might actually get arrested . . . for disclosing classified information.’

In another message, she admitted she was ‘probably going to jail for life.’

When she was asked if she knew there could be legal consequences, she responded: ‘I have known my entire career, they tell you everyday . . . 100 times a day.’

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

Some clues will not reach the enemy decision-maker

April 11th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsHarvard professor Barton Whaley’s study of strategic deception, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, led him to make certain recommend­ations:

Most deception in the twentieth century was supported by commun­ications and other electronic media. Only 23 of the 115 deceptions that Whaley investigated from 1914 to 1968 involved naval operations, such as Pearl Harbor and Midway, and most of those dealt with amphibious assaults, such as the Normandy invasion.

Nevertheless, many of Whaley’s general conclusions regarding successful deception are robust for fleet tactics and campaigns as well. His prescriptions include

  • Reinforcing preconceptions or expectations of the enemy commander; then do something different.
  • Using deception, which he says is a low-risk endeavor, whether it works or not.
  • Using multiple false clues—say up to six—because some clues will not reach the enemy decision-maker, and using more than one clue adds credibility to the ploy.
  • Employing strategic deception does not cost much in forces or dollars, but it involves some devoted thinking by the deceiver and his staff. It is not certain that tactical deception will be similarly inexpensive in terms of the number of forces that are needed to achieve it.

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They stopped asking Bill to fill out the form

April 10th, 2026

I somehow missed Andy Hertzfeld’s –2,000 Lines Of Code back in the day:

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw’s region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

(Hat tip to Gaikokumaniakku.)

Posted in Business, Technology | 2 Comments »

Even Communist regimes publish military theory openly

April 9th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFleet Tactics and Naval Operations discusses the great variables in naval warfare:

In his book Discussion of Questions in Naval Tactics, Russian Vice Admiral Makarov related a remark that Napoleon made to the Russian ambassador to France in 1812: “All of you think that you know war because you have read Jomini. But if war could be learned from his book, would I have allowed it to be published?”

True, if theory won battles, theory would be a state secret. But it does not win battles. Even Communist regimes publish military theory openly in the interest of fostering a unified purpose. Theory falls short because it cannot predict the variables that decide battle tactics and outcomes. Theory sees trends and constants, but not the contexts of time, place, and policy—that is, those determinants of tactics that are unknown in advance of war and those variables in each commander’s equation that change from battle to battle, region to region, season to season.

[…]

Peacetime commanders are the professional ancestors of men who fight. In the Navy’s inner circles we honor leaders such as William Moffett, Joseph Reeves, and William Pratt who helped prepare for our battles, but who were never privileged to lead them. Charitably, we forget others—officers who were devoted to inspections, paperwork, freshly painted hulls, and elegant wardroom appointments.

[…]

Having been so heavily committed over the years to widely dispersed operations in small detachments around the world with the aim of preventing or containing war, the U.S. Navy of today will be ill-prepared to fight as a coordinated fleet of many ships.

[…]

A fleet fights on the momentum of two flywheels. One is fleet doctrine; the other is stability in the fighting force. Woe is the fleet that is sent into battle with neither.

[…]

Mission and forces should match hand and glove. The U.S. Navy invented task forces years ago to coordinate the two. The task force is a marvelous concept—an assembly of just the right forces in the right numbers to carry out a specific task.

[…]

The basic premise of naval strategy is that the destruction of the enemy’s fleet opens all doors. In practice, a great battle for command of the sea seldom occurs unless both sides choose to fight. What Clausewitz said of war applies here to decisive naval battles—that the decision for war originates with the defense, not with the aggressor; the ultimate object of the aggressor is possession, not fighting. Naval history is replete with examples of one side deciding to avoid decisive battle, which helps explain why there have been so few battles at sea.

There was a time when a group of ships was kept in port as a “fleet-in-being.” The idea was to prevent the defending force from being defeated without having inflicted enough damage on the attacking force to deny them the opportunities they could otherwise enjoy after winning. A survey of modern naval weapons suggests that keeping a fleet-in-being is more difficult than it once was, but that it is not yet an outmoded strategy in conventional war.

[…]

Yet, these operations are unique to World War II. From the centuries spanning Hannibal’s campaign and Tsushima, one searches in vain for an example of an overseas operation succeeding on the ground without the attackers having gained control of the intervening sea.

[…]

In the European and Central command regions, from 1970 until 1990 the average of new crisis responses involving naval forces was 2.9 a year. From 1990 to 1996 the average was 5.0 crisis responses a year. (In all, there were 91 crisis actions over 27 years, or an average of 3.4 a year.) At the same time, the active fleet shrank by 40 percent. Perhaps even worse, the duration of each crisis increased by more than an order of magnitude, from a median length of less than a month through 1989 to more than a year from 1990 on.

[…]

The shore facility is more survivable in theater war, but in general war it will be pre-targeted, so a mobile afloat facility is preferable. Airborne command posts are survivable, but ingenious provision must be made for their logistic support after a matter of only a few hours. A seaplane command post—a craft that can sit on the water but also move quickly to avoid attack—is a better way to combine survivability and greater logistic endurance.

[…]

What have been the options of the inferior navy? One is to maintain a fleet-in-being, as the Germans did with their High Seas Fleet after Jutland and the French often did with their sailing navy. But the competence of an inactive navy withers away and over time the superior navy will be able to take successively greater risks to exploit its command of the sea.

A second possibility is to try to whittle the enemy down to fair odds in decisive battle. That was the wartime objective of the High Seas Fleet before Jutland and the training objective of the Imperial Japanese Navy before World War II. The High Seas Fleet developed tactics that emphasized deception and trickery to gain an advantage in battles between small detachments. The peacetime Japanese developed tactics appropriate to inferiority—and later exercised them from habit during the war, when Japan actually enjoyed superiority.

A third approach, when the ratio of forces gives the smaller fleet a chance, is to catch the enemy with a temporary vulnerability and exploit it to gain command of the sea. The inferior navy cannot base its actions on enemy capabilities, but must be prone to accepting risk and willing to act on an estimate of enemy intentions. Doubtless that was what Nimitz had in mind before the Battle of Midway, when the American fleet was outnumbered. His orders to Fletcher and Spruance were to fight on the basis of calculated risk. 5 An inferior navy should put unstinting emphasis on superior scouting. Nimitz and his two combat commanders based their battle plans on good intelligence from code work. To attack effectively first, an inferior force must overcome its limitations by some combination of initiative and surprise.

A fourth approach is to establish local superiority, as the Germans did in the Baltic during much of World War II and the Italian navy and air force did at times in the Mediterranean.

The fifth possibility for an inferior navy is simple sea-denial. The goal of sea-denial is to create a vast no-man’s-land. Why should command of the sea be necessary for a continental power to achieve its purpose on land? Denying the coast to the enemy may suffice. The U-boat campaign against British shipping in two world wars was an unambiguous attempt at sea-denial in the service of continental aggrandizement. The British submarine, surface, and air campaign against Rommel’s sea line of communication is another, less pure, example. Sea-denial, extended long distances at sea by air and submarine attacks, was the core Soviet naval strategy against NATO and the U.S. Navy.

[…]

There is another possibility that Mahan’s disciples tend to slight. The continental power may achieve a maritime objective by action on land.

[…]

In World War I, when France survived with Britain’s help, Germany had to base its fleet and U-boats in the North Sea. In World War II, after France was overrun, the U-boats were unleashed from the Bay of Biscay, and if Hitler had chosen he could have devastated Allied shipping with aerial attacks from French airfields.

[…]

Sir Francis Bacon’s hoary dictum, “He who commands the sea … may take as much or little of the war as he will,” has to be considered next to Clausewitz’s observation that when one takes little of a war, one is in peril of giving the enemy what he seeks.

[…]

If the strategic commander has an abundance of forces available, as was the case at Grenada, time and timing come to dominate the calculations. The assembly and deployment of more force always takes more time, and time is as precious to strategists as it is to tacticians.

[…]

There is another way to look at forces vis-à-vis mission: for the strategic commander to tailor the task to an existing force. The advantage of this is coherence of operations.

[…]

The term “correlation of forces” is so concise and expressive that it is a wonder how military officers have been able to communicate without it.

[…]

Most tacticians accept Thomas Carlyle’s philosophy that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and they reject George Orwell’s notion that leadership is only doing what is expected of a nominal leader—merely “shooting an elephant” to please the crowd.

[…]

The untried commander should assume that he or she has average skill and not presume that he can overcome disadvantage with talents he may not possess. If a commander has talent, it will grow. A good reputation may be worth more on the battlefield than good attributes, and a bad reputation will mute even the best attributes. That is why Napoleon sought “lucky” generals.

[…]

A Navy study in the 1960s concluded that ASW ships escorting military convoys across the Atlantic could easily run out of torpedoes by firing at false contacts—a prognostication that was corroborated during the Falklands War, when the British navy fired hundreds of ASW weapons against an effective Argentine order of battle that contained only one submarine. After the U.S. Navy’s study, torpedo magazine capacity was tripled in the ship class involved. Tactics are affected when there is a real danger of running out of weapons—missiles, for example.

In the October War of 1973 the Israeli navy’s fast patrol boats were able to close and sink Egyptian craft that carried missiles with nearly double the range of the Israelis’ own by inducing the Egyptians to empty their missile magazines without effect.

[…]

It is important to assess fuel capacities in battle planning. The Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August 1942 gave us a memorable example of what happens when this area is neglected. Instead of three carriers, Fletcher had only two in the battle, because he had sent the USS Wasp south to fuel. She missed all the fighting and was sunk by a submarine soon after. Tactical endurance hardly ever enters into amateur force correlations, and, being a distraction, an aggravation, and a great source of friction, it is rarely given the place it deserves. Knowledge of the enemy’s endurance deficiencies can lead to a decisive tactical advantage, as Togo demonstrated at Tsushima.

[…]

A theme of this book is that sea battles differ from land battles because there is less influence of geography at sea. The closer the battle is to land, the more the shape of the land and the continental shelf change this general truth.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Because of the way that CRAM lights up the night sky and how much noise it makes, it is hard to keep its operation secret

April 8th, 2026

David Hambling explains why U.S. Gatling guns are not stopping Iran’s Shahed drones:

The Centurion C-RAM (“Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar”) was first deployed in Iraq in 2006 and is a land-based variant of the original Phalanx CIWS (“Close In Weapon System”) used by the Navy since 1980. It is the last line of defence when urgent action is needed to prevent casualties. The land version is a self-contained unit weighing around 24 tons and costing something over $4 million.

As the name suggests, C-RAM was introduced to protect bases against rocket, artillery and mortar fire. It has an integrated radar which tracks incoming projectiles as well as the stream of rounds fired by the 20mm M61A1 Gatling gun to put them on target.

The cannon is the same as that carried by F-15 and F-16 fighters. Its distinguishing feature is its phenomenal rate of fire, the six electrically-powered spinning barrels selectively firing 3,000 to 4,500 rounds per minute – that is 50 to 75 per second — producing a sound like a buzzsaw, often rendered as “Brrrrt.”

While the Navy version fires solid tungsten projectiles, CRAM uses the M940 Multi-Purpose Tracer – Self-Destruct round. This weighs 3.5-ounces/99 gram and consists of a tungsten cone to punch through the target skin, and a body which explodes in a dense mass of fragments inside the target. “Tracer” means the round produce a visible glow, and in operation the stream of projectiles appears as a bright ribbon reaching out towards the target. Automated tracking shifts aim until that ribbon overlaps the target.

The “Self-Destruct” part means that the rounds automatically explode at a range of around 2,300 meters if they miss the target, an effect also highly visible on videos of CRAM engagements. CRAM is a point defense system placed to protect high-value assets. If a drone strikes just couple of miles away the operators can only watch.

CRAM has a magazine of 1,500 rounds. This sounds like a lot, supplying 30 one-second bursts of 50 rounds each. But it is only enough for 10 two-second bursts at the higher rate of fire. It reportedly takes some 30 minutes to reload CRAM manually with 15 boxes of ammunition each weighing around 60 pounds.

Each M940 round costs $168, so a 150-round burst costs around $25k, comparable to the price of a Shahed.

Because of the way that CRAM lights up the night sky and how much noise it makes, it is hard to keep its operation secret.

[…]

What we do know is that the reported success rate against rockets and mortar shells in Iraq was reportedly 70-80% with an average of 300 rounds per engagement. These are relatively convenient targets because, although they are moving fast, they come in on a very predictable trajectory and they descend from high in the sky making them easy to pick out on radar.

Tackling drones may be more difficult. Being made of composite material rather than metal, they may have a small radar reflection. And Shaheds can fly at extremely low level, sometimes at under 100 feet with a flight path that takes them between buildings. The level of background clutter will make radar tracking challenging.

[…]

Unlike rockets and artillery, Shaheds do not need to fly on a predictable path. Some of the Russian versions automatically carry out evasive maneuvers when they sense a threat. As the videos show the stream of rounds can be seen and potentially evaded. This dodging would at the least increase the number of rounds needed for a kill. Russian Shaheds are also accompanied by numbers of low-cost Gerbera decoys to distract and deplete defenses. Iran does not yet seem to have either capability.

[…]

The U.S. Army only acquired about 20,000 rounds of M940 this year, which one weapon could burn through in five minutes of firing.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Many people in this country believe secret weapons are proper public news

April 7th, 2026

Fleet Tactics and Naval OperationsFleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains the trends and constants of technology:

DePuy, in unpublished papers, accumulated evidence that in ground combat the impact of a new weapon upon the outcome of a war usually has been local and almost always has been transitory. He believed that a technological surprise by itself never has won a war on land, but that technology accompanied by a tactical revolution has. Napoleon’s tactical use of mobile artillery was revolutionary; the field artillery itself was not new. It is ironic that the Germans exploited tanks so effectively with their Blitzkrieg, for one of their victims, the French, possessed more and better tanks, and another, the British, had invented them. In these instances the new tools, artillery and armor, were no secret at all. In contrast, when tanks were a surprise, first used in substantial numbers by the British at Cambrai in World War I, the British forces achieved local successes but could not exploit their new weapons. Some argue that the British prematurely squandered tank technology before the accompanying tactics had matured.

[…]

Because there are fewer big battles at sea, the potential for decision by technological surprise is greater. At least one weapon is comparable in decisiveness to cryptanalysis, which wrought the great increase in Allied scouting effectiveness: it is the kwi-suns, or turtle boats, of Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, which in 1592 helped win two decisive battles against the Japanese at Pusan and in the Yellow Sea.

Another secret weapon sprung long after its prewar invention was the Japanese Long Lance torpedo. As late as the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy did not know exactly what the Japanese weapon was or why it had been so effective. The Long Lance had been developed in the early 1930s, and Japanese cruiser and destroyer men had trained extensively with it. American scorn for Japanese technology takes much of the blame for the U.S. Navy’s overconfidence at the start of the Pacific war, which was almost as foolhardy as German and Japanese overconfidence in the immunity of their own ciphers.

Then there is the atomic bomb. Although it was not specifically a naval weapon and not numerous enough to be regarded as tactical, the bomb was the shocking weapon that administered the coup de grace to Japan in 1945. The science and technology took four years to develop, and only two bombs were built.

Is it possible to keep the development of an “ultimate weapon” a secret in peacetime? Evidence suggests that it is not possible, at least not in the United States. Many people in this country believe secret weapons are proper public news.

[…]

Here are some examples of weapons, mostly naval, that brought disappointment in World War II:

  • Magnetic influence mines. Germany introduced them against shipping in the estuaries of the British Isles. They were effective, but they were used prematurely. As a result, they turned out to be vulnerable to countermeasures.
  • Magnetic exploders in American torpedoes. Developed before the war, they worked badly and were a great setback to U.S. operations. In a short war, American torpedoes would have been an unmitigated disaster. The British and Germans also experienced early problems with their sophisticated torpedoes.
  • Proximity fuzes. For much of the war they were restricted to use over water out of fear that the Germans would recover one and adopt the technology against U.S. strategic bombers.
  • Night fighters. These were highly effective, but there were too few of them to be decisive.
  • Submarines. They had a powerful impact, but their role against warships was well recognized before World War I.
  • Sonar. This was a crucial response to the submarine, developed in secrecy. It was not enough to neutralize the threat.
  • “Window,” the strips of aluminum foil used to jam enemy fighter-direction radars. The Germans had window early in World War II, but they delayed its application until the Allies used it in the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Both sides appreciated the fact that window was a doubled-edged tool of war—of value to both sides.
  • Jet aircraft, V-1 and V-2 missiles, and snorkeling submarines. All arrived too late in the war to have much effect.

Here are some reasons that new weapons, whether secret or known, do not always deliver what they promise:

  • Production limitations, as with magnetic mines
  • Testing limitations, as with torpedo exploders
  • Great complexity, requiring skilled operators and integration into fleet tactics, as with radar and night fighters
  • Great simplicity, threatening adoption and exploitation by the enemy, as with window
  • The risk of failure after introduction, as with the U.S. magnetic torpedo
  • Exaggerated expectations, as with sonar
  • The penalty for maintaining secrecy during a lengthy period of development, as with Nazi Germany’s secret weapons

[…]

There are many examples in which important improvements in combat capability have been hidden. One is the rifling of gun barrels. Another is the improved fire-control systems in dreadnoughts. New engines barely can be detected from an aircraft’s appearance, but they can vastly change the plane’s performance. Changes in computer reliability or cryptology or in scouting systems in outer space are invisible, at least to an amateur observer.

Karl Lautenschlaeger asserts that the most important characteristic of the Soviet Oscar-class submarine was not its great size, but the likelihood that its missiles were guided by space-based sensors.

Submarines that depend on acoustic stealth are in a continuing competition to operate more quietly than the enemy; the quieter they become, the more “invisible” they are.

[…]

Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.

[…]

Usually more than one piece of technology is required to create a revolution. Sail and cannon together replaced the oared galley. Steam power alone was not enough to replace the ship of the line; it took the steam engine, the screw propeller, and the metal hull all together, which in turn made possible the big gun and the marriage of rifling, breech-loading, and an effective fire-control system. Big aircraft carriers were nothing without powerful aircraft engines to lift bomb-loads worthy of the name, and big aircraft required powered elevators, catapults, arresting gear, and the science of long-range navigation over water.

[…]

Even the Polaris submarine, the embodiment of a naval revolution as neat and swift as we are apt to see, would not have arrived without the inspired marriage of two technologies, nuclear propulsion and solid-fuel rocketry; and the work of two great technical leaders, ADM Hyman Rickover, USN, and VADM William F. “Red” Raborn, along with Arleigh Burke, a Chief of Naval Operations who understood warfare, politics, and the value of swift action.

[…]

It is impossible to design the perfect weapon for large-scale production and employment without practicing with it; even then, it takes three or four generations of hardware before a weapon realizes its full potential.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Does gun ownership predict homicides taking race into account?

April 6th, 2026

If you plot gun-ownership vs. gun deaths, they correlate, Emil Kirkegaard notes, but that includes suicides. If you plot gun-ownership vs. homicides, they don’t. The real question is, Does gun ownership predict homicides taking race into account?

But then again, we know that homicide rate is mostly related to which % of the state is Black. The leftists are trapped. To show that gun ownership causes homicides — how could they not? it’s an effective and easy to use method — they need to control for the confounders. But that would mean doing regressions and seeing that Black% is the main variable, a big no-no.

[…]

Overall, though, it does seem like more guns means more homicides in general, net of demographics, and our county-level analyses back this up, just not entirely convincingly so.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 2 Comments »

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