Bombs and rockets – Page 15 – a sibilant intake of breath

GONAVY: The Language of Trident launches on television

From a number of perspectives, I find YouTube videos which include demonstrations of Trident D5 missile launches from American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines highly interesting:

I find the first of the three clips (USS Nebraska) especially intriguing because of the highly stylized, almost theatrical language of the exchange between the bridge officers authenticating the emergency action message. In the second and third clips (USS Kentucky and USS Pennsylvania), the process is either simplified or not shown. The deliberateness of orders being given and then repeated back, with each action then being completed by a two-man team, seems demonstrative of a training culture and a concept of operations based around the two man rule. The way in which certain messages are broadcast on loudspeaker to the entire crew is also interesting from a security and system design perspective.

There is clearly a substantial recruiting angle to such ‘documentaries’, which helps explain why the navy would tolerate the bother and potential security risks associated. A related dimension is helping to justify the huge costs associated with a fleet of 18 multi-billion dollar submarines, each with 24 $37 million dollar missiles, each capable of carrying 12 nuclear warheads.

It also seems plausible that publicly demonstrating the functioning of such systems adds to their credibility in the eyes of potential adversaries.

The launch procedures above are interesting to contrast with those depicted for a British Vanguard-class boat (HMS Victorious) carrying the same missiles. The protocol of using a yellow stick to guard the launch code safe is an especially amusing British security strategy. This depiction, straight from the Royal Navy (HMS Vigilant), is more serious in tone, though it still lacks the drama of the American variations.

“Rickover and Rolls Royce” or “How England Got Nuclear Submarines”

This remarkable interview with Robert Hill, Former Chief Naval Engineer Officer of the Royal Navy, discusses the peculiarities of Hyman Rickover, including some very revealing stories, as well as Rickover’s role in developing the civilian reactor at Shippingport. The description of Rickover’s interaction with the chairman of Rolls Royce is quite amusing, though it also highlights the absurd degree of capricious control one unpopular admiral had over the proliferation of military nuclear technologies.

It also makes me want to find this 1962 paper “Submarine Propulsion in the Royal Navy”.

Part of the same set of interviews is another remarkable one with Stanley Orman, Former Deputy Director of the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. He seems to clearly provide classified nuclear weapon information, for instance on the details of uranium oxidation in oxygen and nitrogen; plutonium-tritium interactions and how to inhibit them; long-term plastic and rubber degradation as major issues in maintaining weapon functioning; and details on systems to prevent unauthorized nuclear detonations.

An Abwehr agent in Canada

There were large expanses of the globe where spying, or even a pretence of it, seemed an unproductive activity because they were strategically irrelevant. When a question was raised in London about running some double agents out of Canada, the responsible MI5 officer — Cyril Mills, of the well-known British circus-owning family — demurred. Even the Abwehr, he said, could see that nothing of much importance was happening in Canada. [Abwehr chief] Canaris disagreed. On 9 November 1942 a U-boat landed his man Wener Janowsky on the Gaspe peninsula. Following his subsequent arrest he was found to be carrying a Quebec driving license taken from a Canadian PoW captured at Dieppe, but with an Ontario personal identification and address. Most of the $5,000 in Canadian currency with which Janowsky was supplied was time-expired — a mistake which prompted his capture after he used it to pay a New Carlisle hotel bill. He had already roused the proprietor’s suspicions by smoking German cigarettes and taking a bath at mid-morning. Among the possessions appropriated by the Canadian police were a Wehrmacht travel pro forma and diary, a .25 automatic pistol, radio, knuckle-duster, five US$20 gold pieces, a microfilm copy of coding instructions and a copy of Mary Poppins as a code crib. Janowsky was a thirty-eight-year-old former French Foreign Legionnaire who had a wife living in Canada, and knew the country. But no Allied secret service, even on a bad day, would have dispatched an event into the field — at the cost of a substantial investment of Nazi resources, including the U-boat — so absurdly ill-equipped. Janowsky was fortunate to survive the war in British captivity.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 466–7 (hardcover)

Enigma decrypts and the Battle of Crete

Spring brought an increasing flow of decrypts about Wehrmacht operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Senior officers strove to streamline the transfer of information from Bletchley to battlefields, so that material reached commanders in real time. One of the most significant intercepts, detailing German plans for the May 1941 invasion of Crete, reported ‘probable date of ending preparations: 17/5. Proposed course of operation … Sharp attacks against enemy air force, military camps and A/A positions … Troops of Fliegerkorps XI: parachute landing to occupy Maleme, Candia and Retiomo; transfer of dive-bombers and fighters to Maleme and Candia; air-landing operations by remainder of Fliegerkorps XI; sea-transport of flak units, further army elements and supplies.’ Churchill personally annotated the flimsy: ‘In view of the gt importance of this I shd like the actual text transmitted by MOST SECRET together with warnings about absolute secrecy.’ This information was passed to Wavell and Freyberg, the relevant commanders, at 2340 on 6 May. The loss of the subsequent Battle of Crete, following the German invasion which began on the morning of the 20th, emphasised a fundamental reality about Enigma decrypts: they could change outcomes only when British commanders and troops on the ground were sufficiently strong, competent and courageous effectively to exploit them. Stuart Milner-Barry of Hut 6 said that he and his colleagues looked back on Crete as ‘the greatest disappointment of the war. It seemed a near certainty that, with … every detail of the operation spelt out for us in advance … the attack would be ignominiously thrown back.’

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 84 (hardcover)

Note: this accords with historian John Keegan’s analysis of the WWII Battle of Crete in Intelligence in War.

Hastings on GCHQ and cracking Enigma

Hut 8 [of Bletchley Park] now had enough information to read some U-boat signals, but the seizure which opened the traffic to fluent decryption was the fruit of chance and high courage, rather than of design. On 9 May 1941 a convoy escort group attacked and forced to the surface Julius Lempe’s U-110. A boarding party from HMS Bulldog commanded by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme secured the submarine, prevented its sinking, and brought back to his destroyer pearls beyond price: documentation for current Enigma. Though U-110 later sank under tow — fortunately so, from a security viewpoint — the short signal book, officer ciphering instructions and other material reached Bletchley safely, and the secret of the submarine’s capture was preserved beyond the war’s end. An Enigma machine was also recovered, but perversely this was the least useful element of the booty, because Bletchley had one already, together with assorted rotors seized in other ‘pinches’. Within days, Hut 8 was reading a steady stream of German naval messages. Ralph Erskine, one of the foremost experts on codebreaking at Bletchley, believes that the Park was already close to reading the Kriegsmarine traffic, even without the U-110 haul. What is for certain, however, is that it was impossible to break the U-boat ciphers without the assistance of captured material, which would again become a vital issue later in the war.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 83 (hardcover)

Civilians in intelligence

Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey [head of British naval intelligence] at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who — after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognized — progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 69 (hardcover)

The responsibility to protect versus humanitarian intervention

In Massey College’s Upper Library today, Ramesh Thakur gave an interesting presentation on changing international ideas about the use of military force in response to human rights violations, emphasizing the distinction between the concept of humanitarian intervention and the idea of the responsibility to protect (R2P).

I got photos of the event.

During the question and answer period Jeffrey Goldberg’s article on Obama’s foreign policy came up – specifically, the comment to Samantha Power: “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book”.

Jeffrey Goldberg on Obama’s foreign policy

The Atlantic has a long and interesting article about Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

It discusses the use of chemical weapons in Syria; Obama’s take on Churchillian rhetoric; Obama’s appreciation for elements of the George H. W. Bush foreign policy; disagreements within the Obama foreign policy team; Obama’s views on Israeli security; Obama’s “secret disdain” for the Washington foreign policy establishment; his limited respect for foreign leaders (aside from Angela Merkel); a bit of his perspective on climate change (a “comparatively slow-moving emergency” and “a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it”); Obama’s views on ISIS (which he compares to the Joker in The Dark Knight); his perspective of the central role of U.S. leadership in international cooperation; the use of drones with “near-certainty of no collateral damage”; Pakistan as a “disastrously dysfunctional country” and questionable U.S. ally; the impact of tribalism and misogyny in the Middle East; America’s misunderstanding of Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis; America’s overblown fear of terrorism (“Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do”); his frustration with “free rider” allies who don’t contribute to the costs of U.S. foreign policy objectives they support; and his views on the scope of executive power in foreign policy.

It describes the resentments which Obama had developed by 2013:

He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

On climate change, Obama is quoted saying:

“As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face,” he said. “If you start seeing more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease—this makes every other problem we’ve got worse. That’s above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop.”

The article also includes some interesting analysis of how Obama adjusted his strategy in response to particular events, as well as interpersonal disagreements among his key advisors.

Another interesting comment is that Obama sees the Middle East as “soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy” “thanks to America’s energy revolution”. It would be interesting to know if he means the noble course of improved efficiency and the deployment of climate-safe energy sources, or the massive expansion of oil and gas production which he has helped drive.

Fick on leaving the Marines

I left the Corps because I had become a reluctant warrior. Many Marines reminded me of gladiators. They had that mysterious quality that allows some men to strap on greaves and a breastplate and wade into the gore. I respected, admired, and emulated them, but I could never be like them. I could kill when killing was called for, and I got hooked on the rush of combat as much as any man did. But I couldn’t make the conscious choice to put myself in that position again and again throughout my professional life. Great Marine commanders, like all great warriors, are able to kill that which they love most — their men. It’s a fundamental law of warfare. Twice I had cheated it. I couldn’t tempt fate again.

Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Houghton Mifflin; Boston. 2005. p. 364 (hardcover)

Fick on the mask of command

“Sir, what the fuck were the commanders thinking, sending us in there with no armor to clear a fucking town? We could have all been killed, and for what? We’re sitting in the same goddamn field we were in last night, as if nothing had happened, except we got the shit shot out of us and lost a great team leader.”

I walked a fine line. As an officer, I couldn’t badmouth decisions the way a lance corporal could. Even as a lowly first lieutenant, I simply had too much rank, too much authority and influence. It would be disloyal and insubordinate, a transgression both moral and legal. At the same time, though, to smile in the face of stupidity and say something about liberating the Iraqi people or living up to the example of Iwo Jima and Hue City would neuter me in the eyes of the men. Men shrink in combat to little circles of trust: us versus them. A platoon that puts its commander in the “them” category is a dangerous place to be. Every young officer learns the difference between legal authority and moral authority. Legal authority is worn on the collar — the gold and silver rank insignia that garner salutes and the title “sir.” It doesn’t win firefights. Moral authority is the legitimacy granted to a leader who knows his job and cares about his men. In combat, I learned to rely on moral authority much more than on legal authority.

So I conceded part of the Marine’s statement. “That was bullshit, bad tactics. After all the artillery prep and with the air escort, no one expected that ambush to happen. We were all wrong. I can’t speak for the battalion, but I can tell you that will never happen again in this platoon.” I paused and locked eyes with the Marine to be sure he knew I wasn’t just talking. “I’m sorry about Pappy. I don’t know if we’ll be fighting for another three days, three weeks, or three months, but I can tell you one thing. We have to learn from what we do right and what we do wrong, then move on. There were twenty-three of us, back to back. Now there are twenty-two. We have to get each other home in one piece.”

The Marine nodded, accepting this line of reasoning. Strong combat leadership is never by committee. Platoon commanders must command, and command in battle isn’t based on consensus. It’s based on consent. Any leader wields only as much authority and influence as is conferred by the consent of those he leads. The Marines allowed me to be their commander, and they could revoke their permission at any time.

Fick, Nathaniel. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Houghton Mifflin; Boston. 2005. p. 276 (hardcover)