Diplomacy & Crisis News

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged countries to fulfil their obligations to prevent and prosecute cases of enforced disappearance, a “cowardly practice” which the COVID-19 pandemic has made even more difficult to combat.

Interrogé en décembre 1998 sur la rareté de l'information internationale dans son journal télévisé, l'un des rédacteurs en chef de TF1 avait répliqué : « Vous voulez des nouvelles sur le Venezuela ? Regardez la chaîne vénézuélienne. Sur le Soudan ? Regardez les chaînes africaines. » Le 24 mars dernier, la (...) / Kosovo, Médias, Réfugiés, Guerre du Kosovo 1999, Infoguerre - 1999/05

With the needs of Afghan children greater than ever before, the world “cannot abandon them now”, a senior official with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Sunday after concluding a visit to the country.

For millions of villagers in Indonesia’s remote areas, a 12-hour-per-day erratic electricity supply is the norm. With students studying by candlelight at night and health centres not running at full capacity, these communities face an uphill struggle to improve their well-being. 

Countries which have not yet ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) are urged by UN Secretary-General António Guterres to do so without delay.

Dans les premières années de la révolution russe, une vive effervescence saisit tous les domaines de l'art, et notamment le théâtre. Anatoli Lounatcharski, responsable de la politique culturelle, en fut le garant et l'un des théoriciens. Le réalisme socialiste, promu sous Staline en 1934, y mit un (...) / Russie, URSS, Art, Communisme, Culture, Histoire, Idées, Idéologie, Théâtre, Marxisme - 2016/06

Innovators are joining Paralympians to discuss how sport can help to build a more inclusive society in a series of online discussions organized by the UN to coincide with the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, which continues until 5 September.

With medical stocks dwindling in Afghanistan, and insecurity at the airport in the capital, Kabul, following the terrorist attack on Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to examine ways to deliver much-needed supplies to the country, a senior official told journalists in Geneva. 

The global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is progressing at “two alarmingly different speeds”, UN agency leaders said in a statement on Friday, noting that less than two per cent of adults are fully vaccinated in most low-income countries compared to almost 50 per cent in high-‑income nations.   

Droite réactionnaire ou droite ultralibérale ? Verdict le 5 juin. Le premier tour de l'élection présidentielle péruvienne a marqué une nouvelle étape du virage conservateur en Amérique latine. À Lima, la formation pilotée par la fille de l'ancien dictateur Alberto Fujimori dispose déjà d'une écrasante (...) / Amérique latine, Pérou, Citoyenneté, Criminalité, Démocratie, Narcotrafic, Élections, État, Industrie, Parti politique, Pauvreté, Personnalités, Politique, Environnement, Répression, Néolibéralisme, Autoritarisme, Corruption - 2016/06

Soucieux de transformer sa richesse en puissance et influence, le Qatar multiplie les opérations de prestige, comme l'organisation de la Coupe du monde de football en 2022. Mais ces grands chantiers publics et leur lot d'accidents ont révélé l'archaïsme et la brutalité d'un système de parrainage des (...) / Golfe, Exclusion sociale, Immigrés, Industrie, Mondialisation, Multinationales, Pauvreté, Syndicalisme, Travail, Violence, Qatar, Esclavage - 2016/06

More girls and boys than ever are on the move, with 35.5 million having lived outside their country of birth in 2020 and an additional 23.3 million displaced internally, according to a new report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) published on Friday.

The UN Security Council on Friday underlined the importance of combatting terrorism in Afghanistan following the deadly attack at the airport in the capital, Kabul.   

/ France, Armée, Conflit, Impérialisme, Terrorisme, Tchad, Sahel, Afrique centrale, Afrique de l'Ouest - Afrique / France, Armée, Conflit, Impérialisme, Terrorisme, Tchad, Sahel, Afrique centrale, Afrique de l'Ouest - Afrique

Trevor Filseth

Child Tax Credit,

These payments—particularly for large families—can be worth thousands of dollars.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The increase in the Child Tax Credit will only last until the end of 2021, despite the attempts of some lawmakers to extend it; after this, the payments will return to being worth $2,000 per year and become non-refundable once more. This means that the relevance of the higher payments in future divorce cases is likely to decrease.

The March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided for six early payments of the Child Tax Credit, a tax break intended to help cover the expenses of parents with children during the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to March, the credit was set at $2,000 per child per year, and made non-refundable, so parents owing less than $2,000 in taxes would not be able to fully benefit from it.

The ARPA increased these payments by fifty percent, to $3,000 per month. It also added a $600 bonus for the parents of children under the age of six, and it made the tax credit fully refundable, meaning that families who did not owe enough in taxes would receive the difference as a cash payment. Lastly, it arranged for half of the credit to be sent out in the form of six advance checks—the first of which was sent on July 15, and the third of which will be sent on September 15.

These payments—particularly for large families—can be worth thousands of dollars. It comes as no surprise, then, that they often make their way into divorce cases, along with other tax breaks such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. In particular, though, the fully refundable status of the Child Tax Credit separates it from other tax credits, which generally require the recipient to work and pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. This means that the Child Tax Credit is increasingly worth fighting over in divorce court.

Given this, rules have been established for how the Child Tax Credit is given out. The recipient must cover at least fifty percent of their child’s expenses and live with them for at least half the year. This usually means that the parent who gains custody of the children will receive the tax credit. There is, however, a form—Form 8332—for parents who willingly give up the tax credit to the other parent, even if they do not technically meet the guidelines required.

One possible reason is that the credit has an upper-income limit. In previous years, this limit has been $200,000 for single tax filers and $400,000 for couples filing jointly. However, the ARPA reduced this level to $75,000 for single filers, $112,500 for heads of families, and $150,000 for couples filing jointly.

In this case, if one person makes $200,000 per year, and the other makes $60,000, it makes little sense for the higher earner to claim the credit since for them it would be worthless.

It is not clear how much longer the current situation will last. The increase in the Child Tax Credit will only last until the end of 2021, despite the attempts of some lawmakers to extend it; after this, the payments will return to being worth $2,000 per year and become non-refundable once more. This means that the relevance of the higher payments in future divorce cases is likely to decrease.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Ethen Kim Lieser

Unemployment Benefits,

With this in mind—and even with the delivery of three stimulus payments to most Americans over the past year—studies and polls are suggesting that millions of Americans are still struggling to make ends meet amid the surge in new coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant.

States that decided to withdraw early from enhanced federal unemployment benefits witnessed slightly higher job growth—but it was also responsible for a $2 billion cut in overall household spending, according to a new study authored by economists and researchers at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Toronto.

Governors of the twenty-six states opted out of the unemployment program that tacked on $300 in weekly enhanced benefits several weeks before they were set to expire on Labor Day. The mostly Republican governors had long argued that the benefits kept some unemployed Americans from seeking work.

Spending Cut

According to the study, the states that ended the federal benefits early witnessed employment rise 4.4 percentage points compared to the states that continued with the benefits. However, that translated to just one in eight unemployed individuals in the “cutoff states” who eventually found employment.

More concerning, these same states also saw a twenty percent cut in weekly spending from residents—amounting to roughly $145 each week. As a result, the economies of the states that declined the benefits had to endure a reduction of nearly $2 billion in consumer spending from June through early August, the study noted.

Come Labor Day, a recent study conducted by the People’s Policy Project, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, revealed that approximately ten million more Americans on unemployment will lose those benefits.

With this in mind—and even with the delivery of three stimulus payments to most Americans over the past year—studies and polls are suggesting that millions of Americans are still struggling to make ends meet amid the surge in new coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant.

Calls for Assistance

In recent weeks, both ordinary citizens and some lawmakers have been calling on the White House and Congress to quickly approve more financial assistance to Americans.

“For our team and other Americans who can claim unemployment, even the maximum payments will not be enough for most people to continue paying their bills—and avoid slipping into poverty,” contends one highly popular Change.org petition that has garnered more than 2.8 million signatures.

“The facts are, even successful small businesses can’t go months with their doors closed. But supplying Americans with monthly support until they can get back on their feet can save our communities from financial ruin,” it adds.

Moreover, twenty-one Democratic senators have signed off on a letter to President Joe Biden to take necessary action.

“While we are pleased that the American Rescue Plan included a one-time direct payment and an extension of federal unemployment insurance programs, a single direct payment will not last long for most families,” they wrote. “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

USS Halibut, Asia

A submarine unlike any other.

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Halibut and other submarines began regular courier runs to install new tapes on the tap while bringing back the old tapes for analysis by the NSA in what was called Operation Ivy Bells. However, it was human frailty, not sea storms or Soviet sonars, which brought an end to the intelligence bonanza. When the Parche went to pick up the latest tape, the tap was missing.

Since 2015, there have been reports of Russian submarines and spy ships trawling the waters near the ocean-spanning underwater fiber-optic cables vital to trans-oceanic Internet access. In fact, reported activity by spy ship Yartar off the U.S. nuclear-armed submarine base in King’s Bay, Georgia is likely in search of secret military cables used exclusively by the Pentagon.

The Russians might be interested in hacking into those cables because the U.S. Navy pulled of such an exploit forty-six years earlier using a specially-modified spy submarine, a nuclear-powered wiretap, and some helium-swilling aquanauts.

The Halibut, Missile-Sub Turned Spy Submarine

Commissioned in 1960, the USS Halibut was a one-of-a-kind nuclear-powered submarine designed to launch Regulus II nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The 5,000-ton submarine housed two 17.5-meter-long Regulus II missiles in a grotesquely bulged hangar on her foredeck. The missiles were launched while surfaced from a hydraulically extended ramp to strike targets up to 1,150 miles away.

However, by the time the Halibut entered service, the Navy had developed the Polaris, the U.S.’s first Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile, which could be fired from underwater into space to strike target nearly 3,000 miles away. The obsolete Regulus II was canceled a year before the Halibut was commissioned in 1960, and the submarine spent four years lugging five older Regulus I missiles on deterrence patrols before these too were retired.

Still, the Navy saw useful potential in the Halibut’s unconventional layout, and in 1968 she received a unique overhaul. The bulged missile hangar was converted into the ‘Bat Cave’ (inspired by comic book character’s lair) stuffed full of spy equipment, including a rare 60s-era 24bit UNIVAC computer, a retractable seafloor-scanning sonar, and a photo-developing lab. A well underneath the Bat Cave could deploy two 2-ton ‘Fish’—remotely operated underwater spy vehicles. Halibut’s lower hull had special thrustors and anchoring winches to maintain its position on the sea floor and later received four skids allowing it to safely ‘land’ there.

An apparent mini-submarine was prominently strapped onto the Halibut’s rear deck, which the Navy publicly boasted was a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) simulator. This was a deception: the pod actually housed a special pressurized chamber for use by saturation divers, with an integrated diving lock.

Deep-sea divers risk decompression sickness (the ‘bends’) caused by gas bubbles forming within the body when reacclimatizing to regular air pressure. Based on technology pioneered in the SEALAB underwater habitats, the pressure chamber was designed to give divers a long-term pressure-stable habitat so they would only need to depressurize once at the end of their mission. The divers used oxygen mixed with helium rather than heavier nitrogen to aid acclimatization. You can see an amazing diagram by HI Sutton of the Halibut and its gadgets here.

The Halibut’s first mission was to locate the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, which on March 8, 1968 sank nearly 5,000 meters to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean under mysterious circumstances. The Soviet Navy searched for K-129 for months, but it was the Halibut that finally found her with her “Fish” that August, after having the search radius narrowed to ‘only’ 1,200 square miles using data from the Navy’s SOSUS hydrophone network.

In 1972, the Captain James Bradley of the Office of Naval Intelligence thought of a new use for the Halibut. The Soviet Navy maintained a major nuclear-missile armed submarine base at Petropavlovsk on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Bradley felt it was likely that the base maintained an undersea communication cable to transmit messages directly across the Sea of Okhotsk.

However, the cable’s presence was not even confirmed, so how was it to be located? Bradly was inspired one day by recollecting the signs he had seen on the side of the Mississippi River warning ships not to lay anchor in areas near underwater cables. (Anchors remain a frequent cause of damaged cables.)

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Reasoning the Soviets would use similar signs, he dispatched the Halibut off the coast of Kamchatka to search for them. The Halibut was not particularly quiet by the standards of modern submarines, and she risked being attacked if she was discovered penetrating the perimeter formed by Soviet naval bases on the Kuril Islands seized from Japan at the end of World War II. In fact, the Halibut had a self-destructive device to ensure she and her crew could not be captured.

After a week of snooping, the Halibut’s crew finally spotted beach signs in Cyrllic warning ships not to lay anchor. Discretely, the technicians in the Bat Cave began scanning the seafloor with her ‘Fish’, and in a matter of hours spotted the cable 120-meters below the sea via a grainy video feed. The 5,000-ton submarine carefully settled close to the seafloor, deploying her special anchors. The elite saturation divers in the pod swam out to the cable and wrapped a three-foot long magnetic induction device around the cable. Rather than risking damage and detection by piercing inside cables, the tap recorded the activity passing through the cable.

The operation was considered so secret that most of the Halibut’s crew were told their mission was to recover fragments from a P-500 “Sandbox” missile test for analysis. The supersonic anti-ship missile was rumored to use an advanced infrared-seeker. To reinforce the cover, after recording several hours of conversation, the Halibut sailed to the site of the test and her dovers did recover two million tiny P-500 missile fragment, which were reassembled jigsaw-like until it was discovered that Sandbox used only radar guidance!

The brief tape was brought back to Pearl Harbor and found to be highly promising. The Navy rapidly commissioned a new six-ton wiretap device from Bell Laboratories called ‘the Beast’ (photo here) which used a nuclear power source and a massive tape recorder to records of weeks of conversation across multiple lines at the same time.

The Halibut returned and installed this new device, and the sub’s crew were soon listening in on Soviet telephone conversations, celebrating their success by feasting on a spider crab scooped up from the sea floor.

Thenceforth, the Halibut and other submarines began regular courier runs to install new tapes on the tap while bringing back the old tapes for analysis by the NSA in what was called Operation Ivy Bells. The Halibut herself was decommissioned in 1975, and the courier runs taken over by the USS Parche, Sea Wolf and Richard B. Russell.

The tapped cables provided a treasure trove of intelligence for the NSA: mixed in between personal calls to family and sweethearts were private conversations on sensitive political topics and detailed information on Soviet submarine operations. Much of the Soviet traffic was unencrypted because cables were considered a highly secure form of communication.

This candid, unfiltered portrait of the Soviet Navy’s state of mind vis-à-vis the United States reportedly influenced U.S. military leaders to deescalate activities which were threatening to panic Moscow, and also apparently informed the Washington’s negotiating posture for the SALT II treaty which limited the size of strategic nuclear weapons forces.

Cheap Betrayal

The cable-tap operation did have its risks. In Sherry Sontag’s book Blind Man’s Bluff, he describes how on a later tape-recovery mission, a sea storm bucked the Halibut to and fro until her anchors snapped, causing her to begin rising uncontrollably with divers trapped outside. The Halibut risked exposure in Soviet territorial waters, and her tethered divers risked death from rapid decompression. Captain John McNish decided to flood the Halibut until it smashed onto the seafloor and brought the divers back into their pressure habitat. But now the Halibut was dangerously mired.

After completing the planned data collection, the Halibut tried a dangerous emergency blow to free herself from seabed sediment, followed by an immediate dive to avoid breaching the surface. The submarine had only enough compressed air to try the maneuver once—and luckily, it worked.

In 1980 mishap also befell the USS Sea Wolf, which was uniquely equipped with a liquid metal-cooled nuclear reactor. On one tape-recovery mission, a storm caused her to crash into the seafloor and become stuck, with mud and mollusks gumming up her insides. Her captain considered scuttling the vessel before he managed to wriggle it free to surface in a noisy emergency blow out. After this incident, Soviet ships were observed heading towards the site of the cable tap.

However, it was human frailty, not sea storms or Soviet sonars, which brought an end to the intelligence bonanza. When the Parche went to pick up the latest tape, the tap was missing.

In July 1985 Soviet KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko revealed that Ronald Pelton, a heavily indebted former analyst for the NSA, had walked into the Soviet embassy on January 14, 1980, and sold the secret of Ivy Bells for $5,000—with an additional $30,000 paid for later consultation. This led to the tap’s removal by Soviet divers, though it’s possible that the Soviets might have planted misleading information in the cable traffic before doing so.

Nonetheless, Ivy Bells proved one of the greatest coups by U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. The U.S. Navy maintained its undersea espionage capabilities today, particularly in the super-stealthy Sea Wolf-class submarine USS Jimmy Carter, which has a special chamber for splicing undersea cables.

And what came of the tapping device installed on the cable in Okhotsk? It can be seen today in the Great Patriotic War Museum in Moscow.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article first appeared two years ago.

Image: Wikimedia Commons. 

Sebastien Roblin

Su-25, Europe

The Su-25 is a flying tank that can pack a huge punch.

Key point: The Su-25 is the Russian version of the deadly American A-10 Warthog. Here is how it helps Russian ground forces win their battles.

The Su-25 Frogfoot, known as the Grach or “Rook” by Russian pilots, is one of those aircraft that may not be at the cutting edge of technology, but still has seen widespread service around the world because it offers an effective and useful solution to the need to blast targets on the ground.

As such, its obvious stablemate is the American A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane. But while the U.S. Air Force wants to retire the A-10 starting in 2022, the Su-25 is undergoing extensive upgrades to keep with the times.

This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Also unlike the Thunderbolt, it has been disseminated it all over the world and seen action in over a dozen wars, including in the air campaigns over Syria, Iraq and Ukraine.

Not only has Russia had a lot of experience flying Su-25s in combat—it has shot several down as well.

During World War II, Russia’s armored Il-2 Sturmovik attack planes, nicknamed “Flying Tanks,” were renowned for their ability to take a pounding while dishing it out to German Panzer divisions with bombs, rockets and cannon fire.

Unlike the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s, which was enamored with the concept of “winning” nuclear wars with strategic bombers, the Soviet air service, the VVS, placed more emphasis on supporting ground armies in its Frontal Aviation branch. However, no worthy successor to the Shturmovik immediately appeared after World War II

In 1968, the VVS service decided it was time for another properly designed flying tank. After a three-way competition, the prototype submitted by Sukhoi was selected and the first Su-25 attack planes entered production in 1978 in a factory in Tbilisi, Georgia. Coincidentally, the American A-10 Thunderbolt had begun entering service a few years earlier.

Like the A-10, the Su-25 was all about winning a titanic clash between the ground forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact by busting tanks and blasting infantry in Close Air Support missions. This meant flying low and slow to properly observe the battlefield and line up the plane for an attack run.

Flying low would also help the Su-25 avoid all the deadly long-range SAMs that would have been active in a European battlefield. However, this would have exposed it to all kinds of antiaircraft guns. Thus, the pilot of the Su-25 benefited from an “armored bathtub”—ten to twenty-five millimeters of armor plating that wrapped around the cockpit and even padded the pilot’s headrest. It also had armored fuel tanks and redundant control schemes to increase the likelihood of surviving a hit. And in their extensive combat careers, Su-25s have survived some really bad hits.

Despite the similarities with the A-10, the Su-25 is a smaller and lighter, and has a maximum speed fifty percent faster than the Thunderbolt’s at around six hundred miles per hour. However, the Frogfoot has shorter range and loiter time, can only operate at half the altitude, and has a lighter maximum load of up to eight thousand pounds of munitions, compared to sixteen thousand on the Thunderbolt.

More importantly, the types of munitions usually carried are typically different. The Thunderbolt’s mainstays are precision-guided munitions, especially Maverick antitank missiles, as well as its monstrous, fast-firing GAU-8 cannon.

The Su-25’s armament has typically consisted of unguided 250 or 500 kilogram bombs, cluster bombs and rockets. The rockets come in forms ranging from pods containing dozens of smaller 57- or 80-millimeter rockets, to five-shot 130-millimeter S-13 system, to large singular 240- or 330-millimeter rockets. The Su-25 also has a Gsh-30-2 30-millimeter cannon under the nose with 260 rounds of ammunition, though it doesn’t have the absurd rate of fire of the GAU-8.

The lower tip of the Frogfoot’s nose holds a glass-enclosed laser designator. Su-25s did make occasional use of Kh-25ML and Kh-29 laser guided missiles in Afghanistan to take out Mujahideen fortified caves, striking targets as far as five miles away. KAB-250 laser-guided bombs began to see use in Chechnya as well. However, use of such weapons was relatively rare. For example, they made up only 2 percent of munitions expended by the Russian Air Force in Chechnya.

The Su-25 was still packing plenty of antipersonnel firepower—and that’s exactly what was called for when it first saw action in Afghanistan beginning in 1981. The Su-25 was the workhorse fixed-wing attack plane in the conflict, flying more than sixty thousand sorties in bombing raids on mujahedeen villages and mountain strongholds. They often teamed up with Mi-24 attack helicopters to provide air support for Soviet armored units.

However, as the Afghan rebels began to acquire Stinger missiles from the United States, Su-25s began to suffer losses and the Soviet pilots were forced to fly higher to avoid the man-portable surface-to-air missiles. In all, some fifteen Su-25s were shot down in Afghanistan before the Soviet withdrawal.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Su-25s were passed onto the air services of all the Soviet successor states. Those that didn’t use Su-25s in local wars—on both sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, for example—often exported them to countries that did. Frogfoots have seen action in the service of Macedonia (against Albanian rebels), Ethiopia (against Eritrea, with one shot down), Sudan (target: Darfur), and Georgia versus Abkhazian separatists that shot down several. And that list is not comprehensive.

In one notable episode, Cote d’Ivoire acquired several Su-25s and used them in its civil war. When the government of President Laurent Gbagbo was angered by the perceived partisanship of French peacekeepers, his mercenary-piloted Su-25s bombed the French camp, killing nine. Whoever ordered the attack didn’t consider that there was a French contingent stationed at the Yamoussoukro Airfield where the Frogfoots were based. The French used anti-tank missiles to destroy the fighter bombers on the ground in retaliation.

Russian Su-25 were back in action in the Chechnya campaign of 1994 to 1995, flying 5,300 strike sorties. Early on they helped wipe out Chechen aircraft on the ground and hit the Presidential Palace in Grozny with anti-concrete bombs. They then pursued a more general bombing campaign. Four were lost to missiles and flak. They were again prominent in the Second Chechen War in 1999, where only one was lost.

Of course, it’s important to note at this juncture that the Su-25 is one of a handful of Soviet aircraft that received its own American computer game in 1990.

Modern Su-25s

In addition to the base model, the Frogfoot also came in an export variant, the Su-25K, and a variety of two-seat trainers with a hunchback canopy, including the combat-capable Su-25UBM.

There were a number of projects to modernize the Su-25, including small productions runs of Su-25T and Su-25TM tank busters. But the Russian Air Force finally selected the Su-25SM in the early 2000s for all future modernization.

The SM has a new BARS satellite navigation/attack system, which allows for more precise targeting, as well as a whole slew of improved avionics such as news heads-up displays (HUDS), Radar Warning Receivers and the like. The Su-25SM can use the excellent R-73 short-range air-to-air missile, and has improved targeting abilities for laser-guided bombs. Other improvements reduce maintenance requirements and lower aircraft weight.

The National Interest’s Dave Majumdar has written about the latest SM3 upgrade, which includes the capacity to fire Kh-58 anti-radar missiles, which could enable Su-25s to help suppress enemy air defenses, as well as a Vitebsk electronic-countermeasure system that could increase its survivability against both radar- and infarred-guided surface to air missiles.

Georgia and Ukraine also have limited numbers of their own domestically upgrade variants, the Su-25KM and the Su-25M1 respectively. You can check out the Su-25KM variant, produced with an Israeli firm, in this video full of unironic 1980s flair.

Speaking of Georgia, things got messy in 2008 when both Russia and Georgia operated Frogfoots in the Russo-Georgian War. The Georgian Frogfoots provided air support for Georgian troops seizing the city of Tskhinvali. Then Russian Su-25s assisted Russian armor in blasting them out. Russia lost three Su-25s to MANPADS—two likely from friendly fire—and Georgia lost a similar number to Russian SAMs. To the surprise of observers, however, the Russian Air Force did not succeed in sweeping Georgian aviation from the sky.

In 2014, Ukraine deployed its Frogfoots to support ground forces combating separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine. They assisted in the initial recapture of the Donetsk airport in May, would be followed over a half year of seesaw battles ending in a separatist victory in 2015. Ukraine lost four Su-25s in the ensuing ground-attack missions—three were hit by missiles (one MANPADS, two allegedly by longer-ranged systems across the Russian border), and a fourth was reportedly downed by a Russian MiG-29. Two others survived hits from missiles. As a result, Su-25 strikes were sharply curtailed to avoid incurring further losses.

In 2015, the Russian separatists of the Luhansk People’s Republic claimed to have launched airstrikes with an Su-25 of their own. Depending on who you ask, the airplane was restored from a museum or flew in from Russia.

The Iraqi Air Force has deployed its own Su-25s in the war against ISIS, purchasing five from Russia in 2014 and receiving seven from Iran that had been impounded during the 1991 Gulf War.

Finally, in the fall of 2015, Russia deployed a dozen modernized Su-25SMs in support of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Many observers noted that of the aircraft involved in the mission, the Su-25s were the best adapted for the close air-support role. The Frogfoot flew 1,600 sorties against rebel-held Syrian cities, and expended more than six thousand munitions, mostly unguided bombs and S-13 rockets. They were withdrawn this year, leaving attack helicopter behind to perform more precise—and risky—close air support missions.

Lessons Learned from Flying Tanks?

While it’s fun to admire high-performing fighters like the MiG-29 or F-22 Raptor, the unglamorous Su-25 has so far had a greater impact on a wide range of conflicts. We can draw a few lessons from its recent combat record.

First, the significant losses suffered by Su-25s demonstrate that without effective air-defense suppression and electronic counter-measures, low-and-slow ground support planes are poised to take heavy losses against Russian-made surface-to-air missiles deployed in sufficient numbers.

Second, observation of Russia’s Syrian contingent suggests that despite possessing a diverse arsenal of precision guided munitions, the Russian Air Force continues to rely primarily on unguided bombs and rockets for the close air support mission.

Lastly, aircraft capable of delivering punishing attacks on ground targets while retaining a good chance of surviving hits taken in return are going to remain in high demand worldwide.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Stephen Silver

Electric Cars,

Lucid will bring out two different editions of its Air Dream car, which will be called the Dream Edition Performance and the Dream Edition Range.

Lucid Motors, the electric car company based in California, is known to have been working on the next big electric car, with the car’s arrival likely not that far away.

The company, formerly known as Atieva, got its start as a producer of batteries for other electric cars but has since pivoted to making its own models.

The Lucid Air will be the first car to arrive from the company.

“Our [Air] reservations have just exceeded 10,000,” the CEO, Peter Rawlinson, told Yahoo Finance, from Lucid’s just-opened New York City studio back in July. “They are bona fide reservations with appropriate deposits. Some people have even paid over a $7,000 deposit.”

Now, Lucid has announced more about its rollout plans.

Lucid will bring out two different editions of its Air Dream car, which will be called the Dream Edition Performance and the Dream Edition Range.

“Dream Edition Performance will feature a powertrain optimized for speed and acceleration, with 1,111 horsepower,” the company said. “Dream Edition Range will deliver 933 horsepower while embodying Lucid’s exacting focus on maximizing range.”

Both will have a price of $169,000, or $161,500 after the U.S. tax credit for electric cars.

“As a technology company, we seek to exceed expectations and this is clearly evident with our Lucid Air Dream Edition Performance and Range variants,” said Rawlinson said in the press release. “I’m delighted to provide our Dream Edition customers with this additional choice and breadth of capabilities.”

Deliveries of the Lucid Air Dream Edition will begin “later this year,” the company said, with the Lucid Air Grand Touring coming “shortly thereafter.”

Earlier this week, the 2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition got its first drive with the media, as MotorTrend took it for a spin.

“The Lucid Air Dream Edition R reminds me of a Nissan GT-R, especially one of the NISMO GT-Rs. The Air's handling is the big surprise. You know a 933-hp car will be quick, and I'd ridden around Laguna Seca in an Air before, so I knew how ridiculously quick the Air is, and how lovely its interior is,” the MotorTrend writer said. He also praised the car’s interior, comparing it favorably to that of Tesla’s cars.

“I even knew Lucid's 500-mile-or-more range claim was legit. I assumed the Air Dream Edition R would be decent enough to drive around big sweepers, but about ten miles into our run-up Angeles Crest Highway, I discovered the car enjoyed being manhandled through tight corners. The harder I pushed, the better the Lucid Air got. It leaps and bounds out of corners, much like the way a NISMO GT-R behaves. The "throttle" pedal unleashes a tsunami of thrust that the smart all-wheel-drive system takes full advantage of—When you're mostly pointed straight, the Air is mostly rear-wheel drive.”

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

North Korea, Asia

America's military has suffered defeat before.

Here's What You Need to Know: Pyongyang always stands prepared for war.

At noon sharp on October 12, 1950, the minesweeper USS Pirate had just completed a busy but productive morning off the North Korean port of Wonsan when everything went wrong at once. 

Hours earlier, the small, 625-ton vessel had led the five ships of Mine Division 32 based in Sasebo, Japan through two belts of contact mines laid in a channel just one mile wide, and fourteen miles long leading into Wonsan Harbor in North Korea. 

At the time U.N. troops were on the offensive following a successful amphibious landing at Inchon on the western coast of the Korean peninsula. Therefore, a second landing called Operation Tailboard at Wonsan on the eastern coastline was planned. But that meant the minefields barring access to Wonsan had to be cleared first. 

This was no piece of cake, as North Korean boats had laid over 3,000 Soviet-supplied contact and magnetic mines in the 400 island-congested square miles surrounding the port.

Knowing the division was entering dangerous waters, skipper Lt. Cornelius McMullen ordered all non-essential personnel on deck with life jackets to minimize the number that might be trapped below should things go wrong. Cornelius’s superior, Lt. Commander Bruce Hyatt, was also aboard to coordinate the actions of the five-ship division.

But for the first few hours things went swimmingly. Pirate’s crew detected and disabled six mines spaced 50 meters apart using the vessel’s mechanical “sweep” that fanned the water behind it, cutting the cables connecting mines to the seafloor. The mines then floated to the surface where they could be blasted by the ship’s gunners. Fellow Admirable-class minesweepers Pledge and Incredible located another string of four.

But at a minute past noon, a Navy helicopter orbiting overhead reported a third, dense ‘cabbage patch’ of mines near Pirate’s position. At the same time, Pirate’s sonar operator reported multiple contacts all about her hull.

Then eight minutes later a lookout spotted a large spiky contact mine straight before the Pirate.

Pirate’s sweep was designed to disable mines behind her, but her current trajectory meant she was bound for a deadly collision.

McMullen faced a terrible choice, as turning risked triggering the mine as well.

Crew member Earl Richard, at the time manning an anti-aircraft gun close to the bridge, recalled what happened next to the CNO’s Naval History Division:

“The skipper called for a hard left rudder to try and turn away from the mine, but we were so close that by the time the ship began its turn, the port side of the ship came right on to the mine and it stuck the back quarter of the ship on the port side. The hole was wider than a two-car garage.

Everyone on the bridge was blown in different directions. Some were blown over the side, and I was blown to the main deck. I can only remember being showered by what smelled like diesel oil and tons of dust and debris.”

Her back broken in two, the Pirate’s separate halves rapidly sank. 

Richard recounted the horrifying four minutes:

“When I finally realized what had happened, I was picking myself up from the main deck and heard a shipmate yelling, only to find he was trapped under several hundred feet of 2 inch diameter mooring line that had been coiled on top of ventilating unit. When the ship listed the line slid off and trapped his legs. One other shipmate and myself were able to get him out from under at the same time the ship was going down. It had listed to the starboard side and when it came back to the port side, we slid off into the water. With the other guy and myself we were able to drag the injured guy away from the ship before it went completely under water which was in about four minutes.

I remember the water was very cold and at first most of the crew began swimming towards the shore until the beach guns opened fire and began blowing guys out of the water.”

The three coastal batteries were situated upon Sin Do island three miles to the southwest. Another battery of smaller, rapid-fire guns opened fire from Ryo-Do island to the southeast. This map shows the positioning of the minefield belts and the two islands here.

Fellow minesweepers Pledge, Incredible and Kite began dueling the battery with their single 3” deck guns. But the most effective fire came from beefier 1,600-ton USS Endicott, with her four 5” gun turrets. 

Six years earlier during World War II, the Gleaves-class destroyer had sunk two German corvettes in a swashbuckling action off southern France. Since then she had been converted into a “fast minesweeper,” but had not lost her fighting spirit (nor her guns).

Meanwhile, Pledge surged towards the Pirate’s position in an effort to rescue the scattered survivors but was bracketed by accurate shellfire.

Just ten minutes into the engagement, a second huge explosion announced that Pledge too struck a mine while engaged in a hard turn attempting to dodge shellfire.

For 45 minutes, skipper Lt. Richard Young led a frantic effort to save his wounded ship as water poured into her ruptured hull. But the North Korean shore gunners zeroed in on the floundering minesweeper.

Finally, Young too had to give the order to abandon ship.

It was the turn of the even smaller 320-ton USS Redhead—named after the duck, not gingers—to come to the rescue.

The YMS-1 class boat managed to weave around the numerous mines in the channel, but was repeatedly battered by North Korean shells as she trawled for thirty minutes picking up survivors, all the while her smaller 3” deck gun returned fire at her tormentors.

The Incredible too helped rescue twenty-seven sailors before her engines seized up and she had to disengage.

Soon, Corsair fighter bombers from the carrier USS Leyte came howling overhead, blasting gun positions with napalm, rockets and bombs. Meanwhile, a paunchy PBM5 Marine flying boat from Navy squadron VP-47 flew overhead to help the Endicott’s and Redhead’s shellfire.

Together, shells from Endicott and Redhead managed to silence all three North Korea batteries. Navy divers belonging the Underwater Demolition Teams swam and boats launched from the Endicott recovered additional sailors.

The four-hour rescue effort saved 170 crew from Pledge and Pirate—though a dozen crew from Pirate and Pledge would never make it back home. 

The following day, Navy divers swam to the sunken Pledge and Pirate and recovered their sensitive encryption systems, before demolishing the wrecks. The ships and their commanders would all be decorated for their valor in action.

The amphibious landing at Wonsan never took place as it would be overrun by U.N. troops advancing on land. But just a few weeks later Wonsan fell to a massive Chinese-North Korean counterattack. Beginning in February 1951, the port was subject to a U.N. naval blockade that would become the longest in modern history. During the 861-day long blockade, three more small boats were sunk by mines, and over two dozen more ships were damaged by them and coastal gunfire.

Two years after the traumatic incident, the Pirate’s skipper McMullen received a mysterious package in the mail: the Pirate’s flag, recovered by an anonymous benefactor.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States.

This article first appeared in September 2019.

Image: Reuters