Trump Is Calling for a Missile Defense System That Already Exists

As part of a potentially wide-ranging military buildup, President Donald Trump's White House has announced a vague plan to boost America's defenses against ballistic missile attack.

"We will provide our military leaders with the means to plan for our future defense needs," the Trump administration claimed in a statement it published on the White House website just hours after Trump's inauguration on January 20.

"We will also develop a state-of-the-art missile defense system to protect against missile-based attacks from states like Iran and North Korea," the statement continued.

Thing is, the US military already possesses the world's most extensive missile defenses—developed at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of decades. And they're already tailored for defeating the kinds of missiles Iran and North Korea are theoretically capable of developing.

And yet, they don't work very well.

A Ground-Based Interceptor test-launches from Vandenberg Air Force base in California in January 2013. Image: US Army

It's not clear what Trump could do differently to improve upon existing defenses without squandering potentially billions of dollars on risky new developments. Missile defense, which involves hitting an object traveling many times the speed of sound with another object traveling many times the speed of sound, is hard. And Trump should be careful not to overpromise.

Missile defense became a hot political issue in 1983, when then-President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative—"Star Wars," as it was popularly known. Wrongly perceiving that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead of the United States in nuclear missile technology, Reagan pledged to develop non-nuclear missile defenses.

"It took one kind of military force to deter an attack when, we had far more nuclear weapons than any other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground," Reagan explained.

Over the next decade, the Pentagon—at a cost of billions of dollars—experimented with a range missile-killing technologies, including jet-launched missiles and armed satellites. None of the major systems entered frontline service, however.

In the 1990s, US missile-defense strategy shifted. The Soviet Union had collapsed and President Bill Clinton's administration touted new threats from Iran and North Korea, which were both tinkering with modest long-range rockets and rudimentary atomic weaponry.

North Korea subsequently tested its first nuke in 2006 and began slowly working on farther-reaching missiles. Pyongyang has not yet tested a rocket that can hit the United States from the Korean Peninsula.

Read more: Donald Trump's Least Favorite Warplane Has Finally Been Deployed Overseas

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran helped to slow if not terminate Tehran's own nuke program. Trump has threatened to cancel the deal, potentially allowing Iran to eventually develop an atomic warhead.

With an eye toward Pyongyang and Tehran, in the 1990s the US military began working on aerial lasers, and missile interceptors launched from ship and ground. These were optimized to destroy small numbers of incoming rockets instead of the potentially thousands of rockets that the Soviets could deploy.

In 2002, President George W. Bush founded the Missile Defense Agency to oversee missile-defense efforts. Spending between $7 billion and $10 billion every year, the agency has concentrated its efforts on a host of space- and ground-based sensors, plus three main weapons—two ground-based systems for shooting down potential Iranian and North Korean nuclear missiles, respectively, plus a sea-based interceptor that's flexible enough to work against either country's rockets.

Well, in theory.

The so-called Ground-Based Interceptor system is a roughly 50-foot-tall missile that launches from an underground silo and aims to hit incoming ballistic missiles during the "mid-course" phase of their flight—basically, the top of their ballistic arc in low orbit.

Another Ground-Based Interceptor test flight at Vandenberg, this one from 2008. Image: US Air Force Photo/Staff Sergeant Vanessa Valentine

The US Army operates several dozen of the interceptors at Fort Greely in Alaska plus a few at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern California, in order to to intercept possible North Korean ballistic missiles heading toward the US West Coast.

To be clear, Pyongyang has not yet developed a rocket that can travel that far. All the same, the MDA is authorized to build up the GBI arsenal to 44 missiles by the end of 2017.

But the $40-billion GBI is unproven—and that's putting it kindly. Missile defense expert Phil Coyle described the missile's performance as "dismal." In 17 test firings since 1999, the GBI has missed its targets nine times.

The sea-based Aegis system is a little more reliable. Being fitted to scores US Navy destroyers and cruisers—43 by 2019, according to the current plan—the Aegis radar and its associated SM-3 missile are less powerful than the GBI missile but somewhat more accurate under test conditions.

The idea is for the warships to patrol along the coast of North Korea or Iran and shoot down ballistic missiles soon after they launch, when they're still at relatively low altitude and slow velocity.

Between 1997 and 2016, the Navy test-fired 40 of the 22-foot-tall SM-3 missile-interceptors and scored 33 hits. But the tests weren't always very realistic. It's not clear that a ship could detect and shoot at a launching rocket —especially a large, powerful intercontinental rocket —fast enough to hit it before it climbs beyond reach. "The boost phase for such missiles terminates at low altitude, making them very difficult to reach," the US National Research Council explained in a 2012 report.

The latest ground-based interceptor uses the same sensor and missile as the sea-based Aegis-SM-3 pairing. The Pentagon built one of these roughly billion-dollar "Aegis Ashore" systems in Romania in 2015 and is working on a second installation in Poland that it hopes to complete in 2018.

Both are meant to defend against "current and emerging ballistic threats from the Middle East," according to the Navy. In other words, Iran.

Since they can't move, the Aegis Ashore missiles can only intercept incoming medium-weight rockets that are aimed relatively near the Aegis installations. That is to say, Europe. Aegis Ashore can't really defend the United States because it's not capable of hitting the big, fast-moving Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that possess truly global range and could theoretically strike North America after launching from Iran or North Korea.

If Trump wants to take advantage of the decades of work and hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has already poured into missile-defense research and expand missile-defenses quickly—that is, during his first term—he'll have to boost production of an existing system.

And it just so happens that the only existing system with any chance of hitting an incoming Iranian or North Korean ballistic missile from US soil is also America's least reliable missile-interceptor.

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from Trump Is Calling for a Missile Defense System That Already Exists

Donald Trump’s Least Favorite Warplane Has Finally Been Deployed Overseas

Twenty-four years after it entered development, the US military's stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has deployed overseas for its first frontline missions.

On Jan. 18, 2017, 10 F-35Bs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 began landing at a Marine air base in Iwakuni, Japan after a nine-day, multi-leg journey from the squadron's previous base in Yuma, Arizona.

Once settled in, the newly-arrived squadron will be part of US Pacific Command's routine contingency planning for war with China or North Korea. If fighting breaks out in the region, the F-35s could go to war.

But that doesn't mean they'll win. The Joint Strike Fighter suffers serious, ongoing problems that cast doubt on its combat prowess. Especially in the Pacific region.

The Joint Strike Fighter suffers serious, ongoing problems that cast doubt on its combat prowess. Especially in the Pacific region.

Since initial development of the new plane began in 1993, the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 has weathered a three-year delay, cost overruns, technical malfunctions and harsh criticism from political leaders. Today a single F-35B—that's the Marines' vertically-launching "jump jet" version of the plane—set US taxpayers back as much as $250 million once you factor in development costs.

That's more than twice the price of a new Boeing F-15 Eagle or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. It could cost $400 billion to buy all 2,400 F-35s the Pentagon wants.

On Dec. 22, Pres. Donald Trump tweeted about the Joint Strike Fighter's "tremendous cost and cost overruns" and threatened to dump the plane in favor of the Super Hornet.

Based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!

Donald J. Trump December 22, 2016

To be fair, the F-35 has many supporters. In stark contrast to Trump, US Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine general, is a strong proponent of the Joint Strike Fighter—especially its potential to modernize not only the US military, but allied forces, too. "Many of our allies have got their air superiority on the F-35 program, and it bonds us tightly together with them," Mattis told a Senate committee on Jan. 12, 2017.

In any event, the F-35 has endured. But its ultimate fate still hasn't been decided. Early on, the Pentagon had hoped the single-engine, single-seat F-35 would replace nearly all other fighter jets in the inventories of the US Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and the air arms of friendly countries.

Image: JSF.mil

Now some politicians and military officials are already thinking about replacing the Joint Strike Fighter. That has increased the pressure on the Marine aviators in Japan to prove that their expensive new plane works—and should remain at the center of the Pentagon's plans to modernize American air power.

But the Pacific might not be the best possible place for the F-35 to demonstrate its worth. Flying from Iwakuni, the Marine Joint Strike Fighters could find themselves going up against the latest Chinese warships and stealth warplanes and deeply-entrenched North Korean forces.

It's not at all clear that the F-35s are up to all of those tasks. "As it stands now, the F-35 would need to run away from combat and have other planes come to its rescue," Dan Grazier and Mandy Smithberger, analysts with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., quipped in a recent op-ed.

Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 was the very first operational F-35 squadron. The Marine Corps declared the unit combat-ready back in the summer of 2015. But critics pointed out that "combat-ready" didn't really mean much.

The F-35 is still technically in its $55-billion "system development and demonstration" phase. Many of the plane’s capabilities are not ready for daily use, including its gun, many of its other weapons, and the special helmet the pilot wears. The Joint Strike Fighter's software—the most complex ever on a warplane—is buggy and incomplete.

Just getting the F-35 ready for its intensive, final test flights could take until 2018, possibly 2019, according to David Duma, the Pentagon's acting director of test and evaluation. In its latest annual report, released the day after the Marine F-35s left Yuma, Duma's office criticized the Joint Strike Fighter's developers for simplifying testing in order to speed up the schedule—a move Duma's team described as "risky."

The Joint Strike Fighter program office defended the F-35, highlighting the plane's "significant progress in maturing."

The program office's protestations don't change the fact that the Marines have sent incomplete aircraft to the Pacific front lines. Worse, the F-35s arrived at a time of heightened tensions. In January 2017, the Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier Liaoning sailed with her escorts on the vessel's first frontline deployment, passing close to Japan and Taiwan in a bold show of strength.

Around the same time, Beijing's air force was forming its first squadron of Chinese-made J-20 stealth fighters. Meanwhile, North Korea prepared to test at least one new type of long-range ballistic missile that could, in theory, be armed with a nuclear warhead and possibly reach the United States.

Designed in the early 1990s when the Pentagon was still preparing to refight the Gulf War, the F-35 is optimized for dropping a small number of smart bombs on a moderately sophisticated enemy. It wasn't supposed to sink ships or fight other, high-tech planes in the air.

That philosophy drove the Joint Strike Fighter's design. To preserve its clean lines and thus its ability to avoid radar detection, the F-35 normally carries its munitions in an internal weapons bay. There's just one anti-ship missile in development that fits inside the F-35's bay—the Joint Strike Missile, co-produced by US missile-maker Raytheon and Norwegian defense firm Kongsberg Gruppen.

It wasn't supposed to sink ships or fight other, high-tech planes in the air.

Norway plans to buy the new missile, but the United States doesn't. And that means the Chinese navy has little to fear from the Marine Joint Strike Fighters currently setting up shop in Japan.

The F-35's weapons bay imposes other limitations on the plane's capabilities. The bay and the downward-blasting lift fan—which gives the Joint Strike Fighter a vertical-launch capability in its F-35B version—dictated the fighter's bulky overall shape. And that shape means lots of aerial drag, which in turn impedes the plane's ability to maneuver.

Image: JSF.mil

In July 2015, someone inside the Joint Strike Fighter program leaked a memo written by an F-35 test pilot describing his disastrous mock dogfight against an Air Force F-16, one of the older planes the F-35 is supposed to replace. "The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage," the pilot lamented.

It's unclear how maneuverable China's J-20 stealth fighter is. But even if the Chinese jet lacks agility, it possesses at least one clear advantage over the F-35.

In its standard weapons loadout with missiles and bombs, the F-35 carries just two air-to-air missiles. A J-20 can carry at least four missiles, meaning the Chinese plane has more chances to shoot down the American. "I wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of the F-35 going in with only two air-dominance weapons," Maj. Richard Koch, a planner with the Air Force's Air Combat Command, told trade publication Aviation Week in 2008.

While a potentially lackluster dogfighter and impotent ship-killer, the F-35 might fare better against land-based threats in the Pacific region. If North and South Korea go to war over, say, Pyongyang's nuclear developments, the Marine F-35s in Japan could be among the first American reinforcements to reach the battlefield.

The Vermont Air National Guard, which is slated to receive F-35s in 2019, recently offered civilian pilot Adam Alpert a chance to fly the military's Joint Strike Fighter simulator—replicating a combat mission over North Korea. Tasked with hitting a heavily-defended nuclear facility, Alpert flew his F-35 right past North Korean planes and missile sites and lobbed a single GPS-guided bomb to destroy the target.

"If the simulator's stealth performance is representative, F-35 attacks on enemy air defenses will be devastatingly effective," Alpert wrote. "Engaging multiple ground and air targets during my flight, only once was I detected. The combination of electronic countermeasures, external airframe geometry, protective coatings and a bunch of secret things make the F-35 difficult to track."

It's not for no reason, perhaps, that South Korea is also buying F-35s to begin replacing some of its own, older fighters.

Still, a simulated F-35 is one thing. A real F-35 is quite another. Years away from final testing, the Joint Strike Fighter could be lacking critical capabilities if it finds itself fighting a Second Korean War in the near term. And the controversial warplane might never be ready to do battle with the Chinese air force and navy.

It's worth noting that the US Air Force is already working on concepts for a new fighter with better air-to-air capabilities than the F-35 possesses. "Today, advanced air and surface threats are spreading to other countries around the world," the Air Force noted in its Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan study, released in May 2016.

By 2030, the F-35 could be the most numerous plane in the Air Force's inventory. But "the Air Force’s projected force structure in 2030 is not capable of fighting and winning against this array of potential adversary capabilities," according to the study.

The Air Force wants a new fighter or some new combination of modernized older planes to handle the air-to-air mission, presumably freeing F-35s to do what they're good at—bombing targets on the ground. But this could mean fewer F-35s, if one key lawmaker gets his way.

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, proposed a new military force structure. McCain called for the Marines to buy more F-35Bs—and faster—in order to quickly replace existing Marine fighters that are among the oldest and least reliable in the US military.

But the Air Force—which anticipates buying more than 1,700 F-35s, by far the greatest share of Joint Strike Fighters—should work on "moving beyond the program as quickly as possible," McCain advised.

A new fighter might not come fast enough to save the current generation of F-35 pilots. If war breaks out between the United States and China or North Korea, the Marine squadron at Iwakuni—not to mention other Joint Strike Fighter units currently forming up—will go to war with the planes it has.

For better or worse.

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from Donald Trump’s Least Favorite Warplane Has Finally Been Deployed Overseas

Swarms of Tiny Drones Could Accompany US Fighter Jets

A secretive team of US military technologists has tested a new kind of tiny smart drone that can deploy in swarms from supersonic jet fighters.

The test of 103 so-called "Perdix" drones took place in October 2016 at a military test range in California. But it wasn't until January 9, 2017 that the Pentagon finally revealed the trial to the public.

The Perdix practice-run represented "one of the most significant tests of autonomous systems under development by the Department of Defense," the Pentagon stated.

The military hopes that the Perdixes or similar drones will one day accompany manned fighters into battle. The propeller-driven, winged robots, each the size of a beer can and weighing just one pound, could fly ahead of human pilots, scouting for targets, distracting enemy forces or even attacking targets on their own.

"It's a huge deal, not just for the future of war, but for robotics overall," Peter W. Singer, author of Wired for War, told Motherboard.

Perdix is a pet project of the Defense Department's Virginia-based Strategic Capabilities Office, a small, secretive, team—numbering just a few dozen scientists, engineers and managers—that Defense Secretary Ash Carter set up in 2012.

“We don’t have to develop fundamentally new weapons,” physicist William Roper, the office's director, told The Washington Post in March 2016. “But we have to work the integration and the concept of operation. And then you have a completely new capability, but you don’t have to wait long at all.”

Read more: The UK Wants Swarms of Drones for Defence Missions

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented the original version of the Perdix drone in 2011, intending the small unmanned aerial vehicle to support environmental monitoring. The Strategic Capabilities Office took notice and adopted the robot design in 2013. The military has spent just a few tens of millions of dollars on Perdix, so far—much less than the cost of one new manned fighter.

Perdix's first military test took place over Alaska in June 2015. An Air Force F-16 fighter flying at 430 miles per hour deployed a Perdix from its countermeasures-dispenser, a cluster of tubes that normally contain ejectable flares and radar-fooling metallic chaff.

All of the US military's roughly 3,000 fighters feature these dispensers—meaning that, in theory, all 3,000 fighters are potential hosts for Perdix drones.

Once deployed, a Perdix flutters toward the ground trailing a parachute. After a few seconds, the parachute separates from the drone and the robot’s wings—which fold against its body for storage —pop outward. The Perdix's motor fires up, driving the tiny machine forward.

Testers launched Perdixes a total of 72 times during the Northern Edge war game in June 2015. The October 2016 test over the China Lake testing range in California was much more ambitious. Three Navy F/A-18 fighters flying in formation released 103 Perdixes at once.

The drones "demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation-flying and self-healing," the Defense Department announced. In other words, they behaved much like a swarm of insects.

And like a swarm of insects, the Perdixes had no "leader." "Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals," Roper said in the Pentagon's official statement. "They are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature."

"Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team," Roper added.

Perdix concept. Image: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

If the military chooses to adopt Perdix for frontline use, the tiny drone could complement manned planes and larger drones in a wide range of missions. It could be a spy—swarming with its siblings over enemy territory, scanning with diminutive sensors. It could be a self-sacrificing decoy meant to distract enemy defenses.

More chillingly, a swarm of Perdixes—each fitted with a tiny warhead—could strike potentially hundreds of targets at a time in a small area. Like a smart version of the military's controversial cluster bomb.

But the military's work on Perdix has implications beyond war-making. "There are two very different directions that autonomy will head, with their parallels in nature," Singer explained. "One is where the intelligence is packed into one thing and it makes all its decisions on its own. Think how a person operates. This is what you see with things like large drones taking off from aircraft carriers or cars and 18-wheelers turned driverless."

"The other direction is where each part of a system is not all that smart on its own, but the network of them can do intelligent tasks," Singer continued. "In nature think how each ant is not all that smart, but they do amazing things together. That's what you have here with robotic swarming. And the tasks that they take on might be anything from gathering intelligence to delivery of goods or delivery of weapons."

The armed forces are taking steps to transform Perdix into a frontline weapon. The Strategic Capabilities Office is already looking for companies that can manufacture the drones in batches of 1,000, the Pentagon stated.

But for all its promise, the Perdix program could still fail. Small, cheap and the product of a fast-moving, innovative team, Perdix is the very opposite of most military tech-development efforts. That makes it vulnerable to mismanagement.

"The biggest risk is that senior leaders will recognize the value and importance of this project, then decide to 'help' it by adding a lot of funding, people, complexity, etc., and rolling it into the acquisition bureaucracy," Dan Ward, a former Air Force officer and author of The Simplicity Cycle, told Motherboard.

"That would remove many of the things that made it succeed in the first place," Ward warned.

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from Swarms of Tiny Drones Could Accompany US Fighter Jets

Russian Jamming Got You Down? Try Talking Underwater

Russia and China have been rapidly improving their ability to disrupt American military communications during wartime. Now the US Defense Department is waking up to the problem—and exploring new, harder-to-jam comms systems.

The latest might even be the most innovative so far. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is preparing to test a network of radio relays mounted on sea buoys and connected via hair-thin fiber-optic cable. If the DARPA system works and the Pentagon chooses to acquire it, there could soon come a time when American warplanes swap data via buoys bobbing on the ocean waves.

The jamming problem has been getting worse in recent years. Russian and Chinese forces have deployed increasingly powerful electronic warfare gear in the air, on the ground, and at sea—all aimed at denying the radio frequency, or RF, to the US military.

The Americans are uniquely vulnerable to RF jamming, as many US war-fighting concepts rely on the ability of ground forces, aircraft and warships to exchange information via radio networks.

Read more: Russia Plans to Turn Civilian Cell Phone Towers Into Cruise Missile Jammers

“We’ve just been assuming that the RF spectrum is a benign environment and nobody’s going to threaten us,” US Air Force general John Hyten, then head of Air Force Space Command, said at an electronic warfare conference in late 2015.

“The rest of the world’s been watching that, too,” Hyten said. “China and Russia in particular.”

To help preserve radio networks in the most electronically-intensive combat, in mid-2014 DARPA launched the Tactical Undersea Network Architectures. “The concept involves deploying RF network node buoys—dropped from aircraft or ships, for example—that would be connected via thin underwater fiber-optic cables,” DARPA stated.

The US government spent around $30 million on TUNA in 2015 and 2016.

Image: DARPA

TUNA could help US forces to power through electronic interference. Radio signals lose power over distance, making them progressively more vulnerable to jamming. Two jet fighters flying a couple hundred of miles apart and trying to directly exchange data via, for example; a Link-16 network could be particularly susceptible to enemy jammers targeting the Link-16 signal.

But if the first fighter instead communicated with a TUNA buoy a mere 25 miles away and that buoy relayed the data via fiber-optic cable to a second buoy just 25 miles from the second plane, then the distance between emitter and receiver—for both fighters—would be much shorter. The network would be less vulnerable to jamming.

The agency wants a TUNA buoy network to last 30 days—long enough, it believes, for US forces to establish more permanent data networks.

To work as designed, the buoys required two novel technologies. One, an ultra-thin but durable cable “able to withstand the pressure, saltwater and currents of the ocean,” according to John Kamp, DARPA’s TUNA program manager.

Second, DARPA needed some way to power the buoys. Heeding the agency’s call, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab developed a kind of “generator buoy” that produces electricity from wave motion.

Now that the cable and generator buoy are both ready, DARPA announced in January 2017 that TUNA is ready for at-sea testing. American forces are one step closer to communicating through the water and defeating enemy jamming.

This article was originally published on War Is Boring.

from Russian Jamming Got You Down? Try Talking Underwater

China Is Giving Back the Stolen US Underwater Drone. What Now?

The US Navy survey ship Bowditch was sailing 50 miles northwest of The Philippines' Subic Bay on December 15. As her crew worked to retrieve a data-gathering drone submarine from the water, a Chinese navy Dalang III-class salvage ship, a little over 100-feet-long and lightly armed, came up alongside the 328-feet-long Bowditch.

The Chinese crew launched a small boat, whose own crew snatched the unarmed drone from the water, and would hold the data-gathering robot for two days before Beijing agreed to return it.

As he is wont to do, US President-elect Donald Trump responded to the incident on Twitter, calling the theft "unpresidented" (sic). The real-estate mogul and reality TV star, who lost the popular vote amid relentless Russian hacking of his opponent Hillary Clinton's campaign, later corrected his spelling.

However you spell it, China's military hijinks in the China Seas are not unprecedented. In fact, the United States and China have been waging a little-known cold war in the region for decades—and it's only getting worse.

The South China Sea conflict pits the US against a rising, upstart China that's eager to undermine American power in the Pacific while boosting its own power. The forces waging this current, open-ocean conflict include some of the world's most heavily-armed warships, high-tech civilian science vessels, and lowly fishing boats operated by Beijing's fiercely-loyal sea militia, known to the US defense establishment as the "little blue men."

With two nuclear-armed states vying for influence in one of the world's most resource-rich regions, the stakes couldn't be higher. Especially as Trump's inexperienced, undisciplined administration assumes US leadership in coming weeks.

"The United States faces growing challenges in the South China Sea," wrote Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War college and the author of several books about China's maritime strategy. "How Trump handles such pressure will reverberate across the Asia-Pacific and around the world."

Image: US Navy

Bowditch, one of several Navy science ships that routinely sail the disputed China Seas, had deployed a six-foot-long, yellow-painted, remote-control drone—a "buoyancy glider," in naval parlance—to conduct "routine operations in accordance with international law," US Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook stated the day after the initial incident.

Science vessels such as Bowditch deploy these unarmed gliders, which are also known as "unmanned underwater vehicles," or UUVs, to "optimize ocean feature characterization," according to a Navy fact sheet. The gliders collect salinity and temperature readings, among other data. The Pentagon owns around 150 gliders and deploys them from research ships, warships, and vessels of allied countries.

Cook said Bowditch's crew radioed the Chinese ship to demand the drone's return. "The request was ignored," Cook said. "The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.”

Chinese military spokesman Yang Yujun insisted the drone posed a threat to ships in the area. The salvage ship's crew seized the glider “in order to prevent the device from harming the navigation safety and personnel safety of the ship,” Yang said in a statement.

"There was no threat to safety of navigation," tweeted Bonnie Glaser, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. In stealing the drone, China "violated high seas freedoms", Glaser continued, referring to the principle, widely embraced over the world, that waters more than 12 miles beyond a country's shores belong to no one and everyone, equally.

But navigation safety was never really the point.

"The US military has frequently dispatched naval vessels to carry out reconnaissance and military measurements in China’s water," spokesman Yang stated. "China resolutely opposes this and urges the US side to stop such activities."

Neither Bowditch nor her glider were in Chinese territorial waters. "China had no right to seize this vehicle," US Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a statement. "And the United States must not stand for such outrageous conduct."

But under successive presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican, the United States has tolerated escalating Chinese aggression. And for good reason: For years, it has been US policy to patiently wait for China's foreign policy to catch up to its swelling economic and military might. In other words, to wait for China to grow up.

Not everyone in the US government agrees with that philosophy, however.

"The current approach has been premised on the idea that China’s integration into the prevailing economic and security order not only is in China’s interest but also benefits the United States and the whole world," Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012, and Center for a New American Security analyst Ely Ratner co-wrote in a 2014 Washington Post op-ed. "Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening," Flournoy and Ratner said.

Bowditch at sea. Photo: US Navy

At any rate, this isn’t the first time Bowditch has found herself involved in the unofficial naval war between China and the US.

In March 2001, the 5,000-ton oceanic research vessel encountered a Chinese navy frigate off the South Korean coast. The frigate sailed menacingly close to Bowditch, forcing the American vessel to retreat.

A few weeks later, Chinese fighter jets intercepted a US Navy EP-3 spy plane flying in international airspace near China's Hainan Island. One of the fighters accidentally clipped the EP-3. The Chinese plane crashed and the pilot died. The American plane made an emergency landing on Hainan.

Chinese authorities held the 24-person US crew for 10 days, releasing the aviators only after the Bush administration apologized for the collision. Beijing kept the top-secret spy plane for three months, apparently dismantling and inspecting it before shipping it back to the United States.

Bowditch again had a run-in with Chinese government ships in 2002. And in 2003, in an apparent preview of things to come, Beijing claimed that a Chinese fishing boat bumped into the American vessel. Six years later, a flotilla of fishing boats intercepted the US Navy surveillance ship Impeccable in international waters in the South China Sea. The boats "shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity" to Impeccable, according to a Pentagon statement.

The boats were part of Beijing's maritime militia, an unofficial navy that the government pays to assert—alongside the Chinese navy and coast guard— its influence in the China Seas.

"Increasingly, these forces operate together ... to alter the status quo, and employing coercion as necessary, but without resorting to war," Erickson explained. "China’s irregular sea force is one of the most important — yet most under-considered — factors affecting US security interests in the South China Sea."

Read more: Why Trump's Plan For a 350-Ship Navy Doesn't Hold Water

The Obama administration has responded to China's escalating aggression by shifting more of the US Navy's ships to the Pacific and sending those ships on so-called "freedom of navigation" cruises through international waters that China claims.

But President Obama has combined his military push-back with his characteristic rhetorical restraint. His administration has, to a great extent, continued the tradition of being patient with a more and more militaristic China. That approach was evident in last week’s drone incident.

“Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the UUV to the United States,” Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, announced on December 17.

So the US Navy got its drone back. Which is not to say China won't try again to bully American forces operating legally in waters Beijing seeks to dominate. If trends hold, more confrontations are likely. A commentary published today in the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, said the remote-control US glider seized by China's navy is only the "tip of the iceberg in the US military strategy on China."

Trump, for his part, seems fed up with the state of affairs. "We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back," he tweeted on December 17. "Let them keep it!"

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from China Is Giving Back the Stolen US Underwater Drone. What Now?

Trump Could Pump Tens of Billions Into the Army, Only to Make It Worse

President-elect Donald Trump wants a much bigger and more powerful US military. More Navy ships. More Air Force fighter planes. And a much bigger Army with tens of thousands of additional soldiers.

But Trump and his administration should be careful. Lavishing the Army with money might result in a bigger Army, but it won't necessarily result in a better Army. America's ground-combat branch has a reputation for dramatically squandering huge cash windfalls.

Trump hasn't detailed exactly how he'll grow the military—or how much it might cost. But outside experts estimate Trump's Pentagon could cost US taxpayers an additional $900 billion over 10 years compared to President Barack Obama's current spending plan.

The president-elect's goal, according to conservative think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, should be to get the Pentagon back to a level of funding the Pentagon enjoyed in 2010, a time when the United States still had large occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is to say, no less than $700 billion a year.

Read more: Why Trump’s Plan for a 350-Ship Navy Doesn’t Hold Water

Traditionally, the Army gets around a quarter share of US defense spending. If Trump follows through with his plans and convinces Congress to pay for them, the Army could find itself with $175 billion to spend annually. That's $50 billion more than it's gotten in recent years.

There's risk in a sudden cash infusion. The last time the Army got a ton of money, it blew much of it on poorly-planned, sloppily-executed technology programs that ended up producing very little actual weaponry.

"All of the [military] services would very much like to see their budgets increased," Dan Grazier, a former Marine officer who is now an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, DC, told Motherboard. "But unless there is a strong leader at the top instilling discipline, they will continue to do what they have been doing—which is throw good money after bad or wasteful programs of dubious utility in real combat."

The most obvious example is also the most embarrassing for the Army. In the early 2000s, the Army conceived a nearly $200 billion plan to totally re-equip its brigades with hybrid-electric armored vehicles that communicated by way of a sophisticated wireless network and controlled swarms of tiny, lethal robots.

The Army's huge post-9/11 budget increases—which essentially doubled the branch's funding in just a few years—kept the lights on in the FCS office despite repeated delays in the program.

Future Combat Systems, as the scheme was known, might have seemed at place on the high-tech battlefield of some Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. But it was worse than useless in the gritty, grinding counterinsurgency campaigns that the Army found itself fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

XM1203 Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) prototype in 2009. Photo: US Army

The vehicles were too flimsy to survive the massive roadside bombs favored by insurgents. The communications network did little to help infantrymen hunt down fleet-footed terrorists in dense, unfamiliar cities. The robots were expensive luxuries when what the troops really needed was better rifles, more-comfortable body armor, and better-protected vehicles that could protect them from ambushes and bombs.

Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates canceled Future Combat Systems in 2009. "FCS vehicles—where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency and greater informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor—do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close-quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan," Gates explained.

FCS is hardly the only example of exorbitant waste on the Army's part. In 2002, the Pentagon canceled the Army's Crusader howitzer—a huge, 40-ton tracked cannon—after spending years and several billion dollars developing it. Military officials decided the gun was simply too big and heavy to deploy to remote, rugged war zones.

Likewise, in 2004 the military shit-canned the Comanche stealth scout helicopter after finally admitting that there was no point in trying to pile radar-evading technologies onto an aircraft that was meant to fly noisily and in plain sight directly overhead of friendly troops. The cancellation squandered nearly $10 billion worth of work.

In 2005, the Army began work on a new and much simpler scout chopper—the Arapaho—to replace the Comanche, and quickly. But the prototype was a sloppy rush-job. It suffered an engine failure during testing in 2007. The Army killed off the program a year later, flushing no less than $500 million down the drain.

RAH-66 Comanche with AH-64 Apache. Photo: US Army

To be fair, each failed program suffered its own unique problems. Some took so long to get off the ground that the world—and the Army's needs—changed around them. Some were under so much pressure to progress quickly that overworked planners and engineers got sloppy. Others were just bad ideas that evaporated once in contact with reality.

Ultimately, more money can't save bad ideas. In fact, more money sometimes encourages bad ideas.

"A sudden influx of resources reduces the pressure to prioritize and dilutes our attention," Dan Ward, a former Air Force technology-developer and author of The Simplicity Cycle, told Motherboard. "A sudden influx of money makes us sloppy and gets in the way of sound decision-making. Rather than focus on delivering capabilities that matter, as we do during lean budget years, we end up chasing shiny gadgets and adding extra features and functions to our system."

"The problem is that adding unnecessary complexity to our systems, even if we can afford the additions, does not make them better," Ward added. "It actually makes them more likely to underperform. Excessive complexity makes weapon systems more fragile, heavier, harder to maintain and debug, harder to learn and less likely to contribute meaningfully in real-world operations."

Amid the wreckage of canceled programs worth hundreds of billions of dollars, in early 2015 then-Secretary of the Army John McHugh finally admitted the obvious. "I’m very mindful of the spotty history of the United States Army on acquisition programs," McHugh told reporters. "But I do think, in fairness, we’ve got to say much of it is just that—history.”

McHugh insisted that the Army, by 2015, was doing better at managing its money and developing new gear. That assertion could undergo a stress test if and when the Trump administration opens the funding spigot. Considering the Army's terrible track record, there's reason to be skeptical that more money will mean more and better weaponry.

It just might mean the opposite. Trump could pump more cash into the Army, only to make the Army worse.

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from Trump Could Pump Tens of Billions Into the Army, Only to Make It Worse

The US Military’s Drone-Killing Planes Are Hunting ISIS’s Weaponized Quadcopters

Islamic State forces have begun weaponizing small commercial drones. And in response, the US military has deployed to the Middle East an undisclosed airborne electronic-warfare system. In other words, drone-killing planes.

Perhaps borrowing a tactic from Hezbollah—which in August released a video depicting one of the militant group’s small, quadcopter-style drones dropping a small explosive device on rebel fighters in Syria—ISIS has taken to booby-trapping its own commercial-grade unmanned aerial systems, or UAS.

Enter the US’s counter-drone planes. In October, American military forces in the region had at least two such aircraft types capable of jamming the radio signals used by insurgents to trigger bombs on the ground. The same aircraft could target an insurgent UAS and cut it off from its controller. The US anti-drone planes reportedly scored their first kill in October 2016.

Early that same month, pro-US Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq shot down an ISIS drone. As the Kurds dismantled the crashed robot, it exploded, killing two men. American military officials are increasingly worried about armed and booby-trapped UAS—in particular, their potential as terror weapons.

“If you’re under attack from a UAS, even if it is militarily insignificant, [it] leads to mission degradation,” Brig. Gen. Brian Killough, the Air Force’s director of strategy, concepts and assessments, said at a robotics conference in Virginia in mid-October.

Read more: Terror Groups Are Strapping Bombs to Cheap Consumer Drones

The Pentagon has launched several parallel efforts to develop counter-drone systems. The Marine Corps is developing a laser-armed truck for shooting down small flying robots. In April 2016, the Air Force asked the defense industry to work on a handheld drone-killing kit. “The defeat mechanism must disrupt or manage the control link between a commercial UAS and the pilot,” the proposal states.

Military leaders tasked the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, whose main job is developing technologies to counter roadside bombs, to also work on anti-drone systems.

At least one of the systems has already been deployed in the Middle East. On October 24, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told an audience in Washington, DC, that the flying branch had recently “shot down” an ISIS drone using electronic measures. “Fairly quickly we were able to bring it down,” James said, according to Air Force magazine.

The service was coy about the exact nature of the counter-drone system. Air Force spokeswoman Erika Yepsen told Air Force that two USAF intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets worked together to force down the ISIS drone near Mosul in less than 15 minutes.

Hezbollah's drone attack.

It’s likely that the “electronic measures” the ISR aircraft deployed were radio-frequency jammers, similar to the kind that JIEDDO developed to protect ground forces from IEDs during the heights of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The jammers disrupt the radio signals that insurgents use to detonate bombs. The command signals that connect drones to their operators on the ground are similar to the detonation signals for roadside IEDs.

The Air Force’s 43rd Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, based in Kuwait, operates a small number of jammer-equipped EC-130H Compass Call planes with a primary mission to disrupt enemy radars and communications.

“From a non-kinetic standpoint, they have played a significant part in the fight against Da’esh,” Col. Charles Bolton, commander of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing, which oversees the 43rd EECS, said of the EC-130Hs. (“Da’esh” is a pejorative term for ISIS.)

The Navy’s EA-18G electronic-attack jets, flying from the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—which arrived in the Persian Gulf this summer—can also jam radars and communications.

The Marines’ UH-1Y and AH-1Z helicopters can carry a podded communications-jammer called Intrepid Tiger II. While the helicopters have been active in the coalition campaign against ISIS in Libya, it’s unclear whether the same aircraft types were available in northern Iraq in October.

Moreover, the Marines generally don’t refer to the UH-1 and AH-1 as “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” aircraft.

Regardless of which aircraft type or types participated in the October shoot-down, it’s clear that the US military is taking seriously the threat that Islamic State’s killer drones pose—even if that threat is mostly psychological.

This story originally ran on War Is Boring.

from The US Military’s Drone-Killing Planes Are Hunting ISIS’s Weaponized Quadcopters