Isegoria

General Groves was highly impressed with Curtis Lemay, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project:

It was very evident that he was a man of outstanding ability. Our discussion lasted about an hour, and we parted with everything understood and with complete confidence in each other. This feeling lasted throughout the operation and into the years since then.

I explained to him the anticipated outcome of our work, describing the probable power of the bombs, their expected delivery dates and probable production rates, and said that we fully expected to drop each bomb as soon as it was ready. I also went into the general organization and state of training of the 509th Group; the responsibilities of the supporting groups from Los Alamos; the factors governing the altitude from which the bomb would have to be dropped, which was approximately the maximum altitude of the B-29; the approximate weights of the two types of bomb; the targets that we had selected; and the type of instructions that would be issued to the field. I made it perfectly clear that the conduct of the operation would be entirely under his control, subject, of course, to any limitations that might be placed upon him by his instructions. Finally, I explained the roles of the two weaponeers, Parsons and Ashworth—the men who would actually arm the bomb—giving him a resume of their particular qualifications.

LeMay asked a few very pertinent questions, and then announced that he would want to carry out the bombing operation using a single unescorted plane. In explaining his reasons for preferring this radical tactic, he pointed out that the Japanese were unlikely to pay any serious attention to a single plane flying at a high altitude, and would probably assume that it was on either a reconnaissance or a weather mission. I replied that I thought his plan was sound, but that this phase of the operation came under his responsibility. I added, however, that some arrangement should be made for the necessary observation planes to be present in the general area at the time the bomb was dropped.

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Because they had been modified to carry the atomic bomb, the B-29’ s of the 509th Group could not easily carry standard conventional bombs. They could, however, deliver bombs having the same shape as the Fat Man, and such a bomb had been developed and produced to provide training and experience to the crews. Known as the Pumpkin, this bomb contained 5,500 pounds of explosives, and was designed for blast effect only, with a proximity fuse that would permit its use for an air burst. Although it was primarily a training device, we had always recognized that it could have tactical uses; now as part of the group’s security cover, we let it leak out on Tinian that its mission was the delivery of Pumpkins in battle. We also hoped that analysis of the results obtained by the use of the Pumpkins might help us to refine the ballistic data for the real bomb.

The Pumpkins began to arrive at the end of June. Reaction to these bombs were mixed. The members of the 509th who, with a few exceptions, still did not know the real reason for their training, were somewhat disappointed that they had spent so much time in practicing to deliver this fairly modest weapon. On the other hand, some members of the other Air Force units based on Tinian, who likewise did not know what the 509th’s real purpose was, became quite enthusiastic about the effectiveness of the Pumpkin’s air bursts over enemy targets and set up a clamor to have more of them made available to their theater.

[…]

As I have explained, a high air burst was necessary for maximum results. It was also dictated by our desire to eliminate, if possible, or in any case to decrease, residual radioactivity on the ground below the burst; to decrease to a negligible degree any harmful fallout downwind; and to diminish to a minimum serious radioactive injuries to the population in the bombed area. We felt that the high burst would confine casualties for the most part to nonradioactive injuries; namely, those due directly and indirectly to the force of the unprecedented explosion.

To be well removed from the point of burst, the bombing plane would have to maneuver as no heavy bomber had ever had to maneuver before. As soon as the bomb was “away,” the plane was to make a sharp diving turn to get as far as possible from the point of explosion. This was one of the reasons why the run was made at the then unprecedented altitude of some thirty thousand feet. The high altitude also greatly reduced the danger of gunfire from enemy airplanes, permitting the removal of the fuselage turrets and all other armament except for the tail guns. This weight reduction appreciably increased the plane’s range and the height at which it could fly.

Studies made at Los Alamos had determined that with a bomb of twenty thousand tons of TNT equivalent, a B-29 plane ten miles away from the burst would be safe from destruction by a factor of two. Under these conditions, the aircraft, which had been designed to withstand a force of four times gravity, would be subjected to a force equivalent to no more than two times gravity. It was calculated that by making a sharp diving turn, the sharpest possible consistent with safety, the B-29 could reach a point at least ten miles from the burst by the time the bomb exploded.

A BBC defence correspondent in Kyiv reports on their secret missile factory:

We’re driven blindfolded to a secret location where Ukraine is making one of its latest weapons.

We’re told to turn off our phones — such is the secrecy around the production of Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile.

For Ukraine, dispersing and hiding the production of weapons like this is key to survival. Two factories belonging to the company that makes it — Fire Point — have already been hit.

Inside the one we’re visiting we’re told not to film any features such as pillars, windows or ceilings. We’re also asked not to show the faces of workers on the assembly line — where Flamingo missiles are at various stages of completion.

Even under fire, Ukraine is ramping up its arms industry. President Volodymyr Zelensky says the country now produces more than 50% of the weapons it uses on the front line. Almost its entire inventory of long-range weapons is domestically made.

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The head of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, says Ukraine’s long-range strikes have already cost the Russian economy more than $21.5bn this year.

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Of course Russia has been doing the same, and on a greater scale. On average it has been launching around 200 Shahed drones a day; Ukraine’s response has been about half that number.

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Fire Point didn’t even exist before Russia’s full-scale invasion. But the start-up is now producing 200 drones a day. Its FP1 and FP2 drones, each the size of a small aeroplane, have carried out 60% of Ukraine’s long-range strikes. Each drone costs around $50,000 — a third of the price of a Russian Shahed drone. Russia is still producing nearly 3,000 of those a month.

[…]

Until the end of last year, under President Biden, the United States supplied nearly $70bn-worth of military support to Ukraine. That was soon stopped under President Trump — instead he has set up a scheme to allow European Nato to purchase US weapons.

Ukraine still needs outside help, not least with intelligence, targeting and money. But it is trying to be more self-sufficient.

The third function Russian fighters are optimized for, escort and interdiction, is carried out by a range of aircraft, from the Su-30SM and MIG-31BM to the Su-35S, and will likely involve the Su-57 in the future:

In these missions, Russian aircraft fly beyond the protection of friendly air defences. They are also tasked with trying to disrupt the penetration of Russian airspace by NATO very-low observable (VLO) aircraft. As a result, these mission sets are also those where the gaps between Russian and NATO aircraft are most problematic for the VKS. Conceptually, the Russians want to increase the zone of contested airspace. By expanding the launch points for aero-ballistic missiles, such as the Kinzhal, and low-signature cruise missiles, such as the Kh-69, they hope to reduce NATO’s comfort zone. Because aircraft are exposed during these missions, it is critical for them to reduce the radar cross-section (detectability) of the aircraft. It is important to note that demonstrating an ability to have a reduced radar cross-section airframe — even if not a VLO one — allows Russia to suggest to the world that it can keep up with evolving technological trends. While the Russians therefore use a variety of aircraft in this mission set, it is the future procurement of the Su-57 that will be critical to Russia’s ability to credibly undertake this mission.

While the inherent flexible nature of airpower means that Russia can employ combat aircraft in a wider set of roles — as it attempted in the opening phase of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — its failures reflected in 2022 how an air force can struggle to operate beyond what it is trained for. Considering, however, the clear tasks for which Russia has optimised its aircraft and aircrew training, it is reasonable to assess that investment within Russian aviation will continue to prioritise Su-34, Su-35S and Su-57 models. The key point is that despite technological inferiority, Russian combat aircraft make a material contribution to Russian combat power, but as Russia’s struggle to build a VLO aircraft demonstrate, the capacity of its aerospace sector to continue to innovate and modernise is fundamental to the capacity of the VKS to expand its opportunities on the battlefield. NATO should therefore be closely concerned with the performance of this sector.

The second function Russian fighters are optimized for is the delivery of precision firepower in support of ground operations, with a particular emphasis on the reduction of enemy strong points rather than interdiction:

The second mission set — delivering firepower in support of ground manoeuvre — follows a well-established Soviet tradition of having an Air Army support each operational direction to provide additional firepower. The approach, however, has had to change due to an evolving threat environment. Soviet concepts of air operations, from the Il-2 of the Second World War to the Su-25 Frogfoot, emphasised direct attack with guns, rockets and gravity bombs, initially meant to assist with delivering concentrated fire at the point of breakthrough, and thereafter to extend the depth of strikes of Soviet manoeuvre forces, thereby advancing beyond the range of concentrated artillery groups. The growing effectiveness of NATO fighter aircraft, however, pushed the Russians to transition to precision-guided bombing and then to undertake stand-off attacks using glide bombs. These types of attacks allow Russian aircraft to stay well behind the defensive screen of friendly air defences. Hence, Russia has emphasised the delivery of precision bombs with their own inertial and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) guidance, to deliver munitions with a far larger payload than ground-launched munitions suitable for large-scale employment. Such strikes target identified strong points, fighting positions and other targets where a large payload is critical to achieving lethal effect.

During Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russians have moved away from both medium-altitude precision bombing and lobbed rocket salvos by aircraft at low altitude, to instead employ gravity bombs augmented with a glide and guidance kit (UMPK). In 2022, Russia assessed what capabilities would achieve the greatest damage for the lowest price per unit and identified the UMPK fitted to its FAB-500, FAB-1000 and FAB-1500 bombs as the most promising capability against this metric. Primarily dropped from Su-34, glide bombs are now systematically used as part of Russian preparatory fires, destroying defensive positions in advance of Russian ground force operations. Hundreds of glide bomb strikes are recorded each week along the front. The Armed Forces of Ukraine recorded 3,370 UMPK strikes in February 2025, 4,800 in March, over 5,000 in April, 3,100 in June, 3,786 in July and 4,390 in August.8 Production of UMPK kits has risen dramatically, from several thousand in 2023 to 40,000 in 2024, and a production target of 70,000 in 2025.9 The accuracy of these glide bombs has varied over the course of the war, depending on the performance of Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) against Kometa jam-resistant GNSS navigation modules. Degradation in accuracy, however, is temporary as the Russians modify the Kometa-M regularly. With around a 50–70-km stand-off range, VKS aircraft conducting UMPK strikes are hard to intercept.

A tank designed for urban terrain would have radically different design requirements than a main battle tank designed for open warfare:

Main battle tanks rely primarily upon their speed and long-range firepower and are willing to sacrifice extra armor to retain mobility. In urban combat, however, the reverse is true: fights are at much closer ranges, mobility is measured by the ability to navigate sharp turns and tight/narrow streets, and speed can be sacrificed to retain maximum armor protection. Other unique requirements are the ability to shoot in multiple directions at once, shoot around 90-degree corners, increased importance on the ability to shoot at high and negative elevations, and designing the hull to carry cage armor and/or active protection systems.

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The first, most important, hard factor in an urban tank is its armor. Urban tanks will routinely fight at close range, and so every trick in the book will be necessary to ensure safety and survivability. Armor should be uniformly thick on the front, sides, and rear, since attacks from every angle are to be expected. A pentagon-shaped hull can offer the benefits of sloped armor and V-hulls for protection from mines. A slightly more complex alternative is an octagon-shaped hull, which can offer more angles and smaller flat surfaces for increased shot deflection. Additional armor modules, like cage armor and active protection systems, will not replace or reduce the hull armor’s thickness, and the chassis must be designed to carry them all at once without overloading.

The second hard factor, relating directly to the first, is the vehicle’s engine and mobility. Rather than being built for speed, a tank’s engine will instead resemble a bulldozer engine. An urban tank will be a very heavy vehicle, and so a bulldozer-style engine will be capable of both handling the sheer weight of the vehicle and will allow the tank to overpower obstacles.

Obstacle clearing must be an expected, routine occurrence for urban tanks, and the ability to smash through them and other man-made fortifications without requiring a separate armored bulldozer will be advantageous.

The third hard factor is the tank’s guns. An urban tank will use short-barreled guns, since longer barrels are difficult to maneuver in tight spaces and the tank is less likely to engage in long-range shooting. As a bonus, short-barreled guns are quicker to acquire targets. High-elevation and negative-elevation shooting also benefits from this quicker target acquisition.

An urban tank would have a mixture of gun calibers for its main turret and side turrets/sponsons, since it will need to be capable of firing in multiple directions at once. Side turrets and sponsons will not necessarily require large-caliber guns, but they will require rapid-fire guns. These will often be fired around street/building corners and into buildings from the street to provide flanking fire in support of advancing infantry. Urban tanks may also incorporate a flamethrower in front. The flamethrower would be desirable for covering a tank’s underbelly from attackers in spider holes, tunnel entrances such as manholes, and/or basement windows. It can also thwart attempts to drag mines into the tank’s path and reduce ground-level enemy gun positions designed to provide grazing fire.

A major development in modern tank design is the unmanned turret. As mentioned before, urban tanks must expect enemy fire from multiple directions simultaneously, and thus would benefit from having multiple turrets like a 1920s tank or a pre-dreadnought battleship. The 1920s designs were a failure because the turrets needed to be manned.

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Unmanned turrets, however, allow modern side turrets/sponsons to be much smaller and more compact than their 1920s ancestors, and keep the operators at a safe distance in the event of a direct hit and/or ammunition cook-off. Unmanned turrets can also be placed farther forward on the hull than manned turrets, since they weigh less and thus pose less risk of causing balance/center-of-gravity issues. Placing side turrets further forward, in turn, enables urban tanks to fire around 90-degree corners while exposing as little of its hull as possible. The controls for these would ideally be constructed like the A-10 Warthog’s controls, with redundancy and mechanical backups for all automated systems.

A second soft factor design element is the inclusion of escape hatches on all sides and the rear of the tank, a move that necessitates placing the engine and side turrets/sponsons towards the front of the vehicle.

[…]

Classic urban antitank tactics involve firing down onto the tank from above; while this will be less damaging to an urban tank than a main battle tank on account of its uniformly thick armor, limiting urban tankers to exiting via top hatches noticeably reduces their likelihood of escaping safely when bailing out under fire. This survivability need will also affect the design and employment of cage armor; cage armor designs must not block escape routes, and the escape routes must not widen the cage armor profile any more than is necessary. If the tank becomes too wide, then its usefulness in narrow streets declines rapidly.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith released the Force Design 2030 update, which calls for building out the Corps’ logistics capabilities abroad to better resupply and sustain forces in the Pacific in the event of a major conflict:

Some solutions to the logistics issue include a dozen expeditionary fabrication labs, which can manufacture pieces and parts for in-the-field repairs rather than wait for parts to be shipped out from domestic factories. Other high-tech options include newer uncrewed vehicles, such as the Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel, to transport equipment and supplies with minimal risk to personnel. And then there are some low-tech plans, including one to simply set up more pre-placed stockpiles in the Indo-Pacific so that Marines can more easily access weapons and ammunition.

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The other major focus is on building out the Marine Corps’ firepower. The update noted that the corps has been able to field multiple offensive weapons including the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, that fires ship-killing missiles, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems or HIMARS. It also has started fielding air defense systems including the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, which are meant to counter drones and missiles. Last month, Marines brought the NMESIS and MADIS systems to Japan for a two-week exercise with the Japanese Self-Defense Force that focused on coastal island defense. This coming week III Marine Expeditionary Force is set to test HIMARS near Mount Fuji, according to III Marine Expeditionary Force.

The actual document opens with these words:

The Marine Corps is a naval expeditionary warfighting organization. We exist for one purpose: to fight and win our Nation’s battles. That truth has not changed since 1775, and it remains the measure of our relevance today.

We are modernizing at a time when the character of war is shifting rapidly. Adversaries are fielding advanced weapons and employing new methods designed to erode our warfighting advantages. Drones, long-range precision fires, cyber effects, and electronic warfare are now daily features of conflict. The lessons drawn from contemporary battlefields underscore what Marines have long understood: combat is unforgiving, and victory belongs to the side that adapts faster, fights harder, and endures longer.

Force Design is how we ensure our Corps stays ahead of this change and is driven by a continuous Campaign of Learning tested in wargames, refined in exercises, and proven in real-world operations. We are equipping Marines with the tools to thrive in contested environments: precision fires, unmanned systems, advanced mobility, resilient command and control, and data-driven decision-making. Yet technology alone will never define us. While the character of war evolves, its nature endures, and our ethos remains aligned to that truth. We do not man the equipment, we equip the Marine. Discipline, toughness, and initiative will always remain the decisive factors in battle.

The Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle, successor to the Humvee, is built by GM Defense, based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck, using 90% Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) parts — including Chevrolet Performance off-road racing components:

It’s basically a stretched-out, stripped-down all-terrain vehicle without doors or a roof with seating for as many as nine soldiers.

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Thousands of pounds lighter and $80,000 cheaper than the Humvee, the Infantry Squad Vehicle is based on the Chevrolet Colorado truck built in Missouri.

“You can repair it anywhere on earth as long as you have access to commercial parts rather than a special military vehicle with special military parts,” said Miller, the Army’s top technical adviser.

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The vehicle isn’t meant to withstand an attack, the official said. It’s designed to whisk soldiers within a few miles of the frontline and allow them to walk a short distance to the fight.

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Its lighter weight, relative to a Humvee, means the Infantry Squad Vehicle can be carried by a Black Hawk helicopter for a short distance with a sling. A twin-rotor Chinook helicopter can carry two of the trucks inside its cargo bay for a greater distance. A Humvee’s weight requires a Chinook, and then just one can be carried in a sling.