The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) approaches the fast combat support ship USNS Arctic (T-AOE 8) for a replenishment-at-sea. September 12, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Tristan Kyle Labuguen/Released)
Disabled refueler exposes fragility of US mission in Middle East
October 01, 2024
A U.S. Navy oil tanker running aground off the coast of Oman isn’t a huge event. The fact that it is the only tanker to refuel American warships in a Middle East conflict zone, is.
In fact, this only underscores the fragility of the Navy’s logistic systems at a time when the U.S. has chosen to lean in on an aggressive military posture when it may not have the full capacity to do so, and it may or may not be in the national interest for the Navy to be conducting these operations in the first place.
The first is a question for Naval experts, many of whom may not feel comfortable second guessing the mission. So let’s tackle that one first.
The issue: according to a statement by the U.S. Navy, “USNS Big Horn sustained damage while operating at sea in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations overnight on Sept. 23. All crew members are currently safe and U.S. 5th Fleet is assessing the situation.”
The Big Horn is a 33-year-old Kaiser class refueler. This ship is owned by the Navy and is operated by civilian mariners under the U.S. Sealift Command. These ships are responsible for getting jet fuel out to the carrier’s fighter planes and replenishments to the other escort ships at sea — in this case, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which has been serving in the Arabian Sea area since August. It includes the flagship carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the air wing (including 5th generation F-35s) and three destroyers.
It is the only replenisher nearby, making refueling tricky for the strike group, which is busy in the throes of a fight with the Houthis. The Lincoln had been accompanied by the Theodore Roosevelt strike group which had departed the area in mid-September, according to reports.
Sal Mercogliano, in his “What's Going on With Shipping?” podcast last week laid out where the other refuelers currently assisting other Navy assets are in the world right now: the Mediterranean, Singapore, the Western Pacific, two on the West Coast of the U.S., one on the Southern coast at Norfolk, and a number that are being fixed or ready for decommissioning at various shipyards across the globe. There aren’t many to spare.
“What this means is that the ability of the U.S. Navy to deploy and sustain its battle groups is very precarious,” Mercogliano points out. “So to support U.S. battle groups, whether it's an amphibious group or a strike group, requires vessels that can go from forward bases, fuel up, and bring the fuel, ammunition, dry cargo out to them.”
“You don't have a lot of back backup in this and that's a big problem,” he added, “because if you don't have backup, when you lose a ship like Big Horn, you've got to scramble to fix it.”
The Big Horn was tugged to a nearby port but it is not clear when and if it will be ready to get back to work. According to reports, including this one by John Konrad at gCaptain, the Navy may have to turn to a commercial tanker for refueling the strike group but that will pose its own difficulties. It would require retrofitting for special rigs, hoses, fuel pumps, communications and most importantly a special team to be flown out to the Middle East to oversee it all.
“Commercial tankers are significantly slower than Navy oilers, which could leave the USS Abraham Lincoln more vulnerable to attack during aviation fuel loading operations,” Konrad wrote.
Experts say the real problem is the shortage of fuelers and other support ships throughout the entire Navy. Not only that but there is a shortage of qualified crew.
According to Sam Lagrone at USNI news in August, the Navy is weighing whether to dock 17 support ships in a “great reset” plan because of the shortage. They need to free up the crew. “For every billet on an MSC ship there are about 1.27 mariners to fill the positions, a ratio that two former MSC master mariners told USNI News on Thursday was unsustainable,” wrote Lagrone.
At that ratio, a mariner would be at sea for four months and off for about a month and then return. “No one is able to have a healthy work-life balance and be able to get off the ship and get adequate time to go home, have time at home with their family, take leave, take care of medical requirements [in that timeframe],” a former mariner told USNI.
Meanwhile, the Kaiser class oilers are supposed to be replaced by the new John Lewis class ships, which feature “double-hull construction, improved safety, and enhanced fuel capacity.” Three have been built and christened so far and more on the way, but as Mercogliano points out, they already “have some substantial issues that need to be corrected, and so we don't have them yet” out at sea.
Some might comment that this is a microcosm of the U.S. military’s problems writ large. Right now there are current recruitment problems, consistent training and preparedness concerns, and the Pentagon is paying billions for big ticket ships and planes that are far behind schedule and do not meet standards.
Lyle Goldstein, who studies both Russian and Chinese militaries, said there are widespread issues confronting the U.S. Navy right now and the grounding of Big Horn “certainly illustrates this.”
He said there are similar issues with stretched oilers operating under the U.S. Pacific Fleet, which includes the 3rd and 7th Fleets, for a total of 200 ships, 1,500 aircraft, and 150,000 military and civilian personnel. “I have documents illustrating that Chinese strategists repeatedly identify weaknesses in the U.S. Navy logistics system stretching across the Asia-Pacific, particularly with respect to oilers,” he told RS.
Like other strategists he believes that the current capacity no longer matches the ambitions of the U.S. to be everywhere, all the time, and to engage in aggressive posturing in places like the Pacific while literally fighting a military upstart (Houthis) in the Middle East. American ships, along with the UK Royal Navy, have been intercepting and engaging Houthi attacks for almost a year. Critics say the kinetic mission is expensive and futile, and ultimately not in U.S. strategic interests.
On the Middle East, Goldstein said, “to me it is quite a dicey situation and may imply the need for a rethink of strategy across the board, including Naval strategy where clearly the force is over-taxed and there needs to be a readjustment and retrenchment. People should realize that we don’t need the largest Navy on Earth, but we need a competent Navy. And we will only have a more competent Navy if we rein in our objectives, train our crews closer to home, prioritize our people, and re-focus on warfighting competencies versus parading around to demonstrate 'presence."
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metamorworks via shutterstock.com
NATO takes the plunge into the world of venture capital
September 30, 2024
The NATO Innovation Fund, the “world's first multi-sovereign venture capital fund,” made its first investments earlier this summer in deep tech companies including British aerospace manufacturing company Space Forge and AI companies ARX Robotics and Fractile.
Modeled like the U.S. intelligence community’s venture capital arm IQT (In-Q-Tel), the fund’s intention is to focus on spurring innovation in areas including biotechnology, AI, space tech, and advanced communications.
As NATO Innovation Fund Board Chairs Klaus Hommels and Fiona Murray described the project's purview in Fortune in July: “By investing in and adopting emerging dual-use technologies, NATO can leverage the private sector’s innovation power and its transatlantic talent pool, while countering our strategic competitors’ influence and ambitions.”
Fund leadership believes that venture capital’s propensity for technological innovation can be NATO’s trump card in an increasingly perilous geopolitical context. But taking after the likes of venture capitalists isn’t exactly a recipe for global security and peace. If American VCs’ hawkish track record is any indication, rather, it’s one that promises to supercharge militarism on a transnational scale.Venture capital’s defense break
NATO Innovation Fund proponents propose that VCs take on the financial risk they perceive as necessary to develop cutting edge security- and defense-tech, which has lagged in places like Europe due to regional difficulties bringing start-ups to scale.
Venture capital is indeed a risky business, where VCs burn through large sums of money on smaller start-ups in a bid to grow them into large companies. If the companies they've invested in go public, VCs can then cash in on often extremely high rates of investment returns, sometimes worth hundreds of times their original investment.
When introduced to the defense space, however, VCs’ hunger for such investment returns ultimately puts ethics on the backburner in favor of gaming a primary client — governments — to produce business-sustaining contracts, supercharging militarism in the process.
Able to withstand the high failure rate of VC-backed startups due to their gargantuan wealth, controversial American VCs like billionaire investor Peter Thiel and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have spawned defense tech industry heavy hitters like Anduril, Rebellion Defense, and Hadrian, all while steering more tech companies towards developing more military applications for their products.
These VCs and the companies they’ve funded have honed tangible political power in the process, from funding successful congressional campaigns (including current Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s previous 2022 U.S. Senate campaign) and launching associates into positions in presidential administrations, to extensive DC lobbying and securing top-dollar military contracts.NATO’s VC plunge
American VC-backed defense tech companies are raking in monstrous profits amid bloody conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and beyond; the NATO Innovation Fund’s creation suggests outside VCs want in.
But to hope these VCs and the respective tech and defense startups they spawn won’t attempt to game the system for funds and influence like their American counterparts is foolhardy. Defense companies are increasingly lobbying EU officials in Brussels; prominent Thiel-backed AI research company OpenAI, meanwhile, is already lobbying against AI regulations in the European Union.
And while founded by NATO and funded by the contributions of two-dozen NATO states, the NATO Innovation Fund isn’t technically even NATO’s. Rather, the NATO Innovation Fund states on its website that it’s a privately owned, for-profit venture capital fund given permission to use the NATO name. NATO “is not invested financially or involved in [the Fund’s] decision-making.”
The Fund’s operations, in other words, appear opaque despite its possible impact on NATO’s military- and security-related capacities. Generally, NATO and associated projects’ funding arrangements suffer from a lack of transparency due to NATO’s complex, transnational composition and organization, which Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Editor Dr. Ian Davis fears invites “potential for ‘unwarranted influence’ by the military–industrial complex.”
As Ingrid Lunden highlighted in TechCrunch last year, it’s unclear whether there are any red lines regarding the types of companies the Fund would support or otherwise collaborate with. In this respect, American-based VCs’ abject lack of guardrails, where VCs have consistently invested in controversial AI-powered military technologies like lethal drones and military targeting systems, inspires little confidence.
Power competition through venture capital
Critically, the NATO Innovation Fund has been created in the name of great-power competition. Upon the Fund’s creation in 2022, NATO Secretary General Jans Stoltenberg emphasized a need for a technological edge against NATO’s adversaries: “Nations that do not share our values, like Russia and China, are challenging [our technological] lead in everything from Artificial Intelligence to space technologies…We [must] do everything in our power to remain at the forefront of innovation and technology.”
In December 2022, Atlantic Council nonresident senior fellow and former NATO Assistant Secretary General Giedrimas Jeglinskas even proposed that NATO-allied countries in Asia set up NATO Innovation Fund-aligned venture capital funds in a team effort to counter China.
Such language suggests that great-power competition and tech war rhetoric, are likely to worsen relations with countries, notably China and Russia, rather than improve them, and will heighten if North Atlantic-based VCs garner increased political influence via organizations like the NATO Innovation Fund.
Despite fraught circumstances, 24 NATO states are backing the Fund. And the European Investment Fund, which has also been working to bolster defense-focused VCs through efforts like its Defence Equity Facility, is now partnering with it.
Simultaneous efforts across the North Atlantic, meanwhile, are slated to further intertwine transnational defense with Big Tech. As an example, NATO’s DARPA-style Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), proposed in 2021 and made operational in 2023, has expanded in recent months, more than doubling its accelerator sites and test centers.
In addition to a European Defense Fund with a nearly $9 billion budget from 2021-2027, the European Union also unveiled the first ever European defense industry strategy to bolster military capacities earlier this year.
Prioritizing acquiring military might over genuine diplomacy, NATO’s recruitment of profit-minded VCs signals turbulent times are ahead.
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North Korean president Kim Jong Un (Alexander Khitrov/shutterstock)|
North Korean president Kim Jong Un (Alexander Khitrov/shutterstock)|
Nukes up: North Korea tests absent US policy
September 30, 2024
North Korea may carry out its seventh nuclear test to coincide with the U.S. presidential election, according to a briefing South Korean lawmakers received from their National Intelligence Service (NIS).
The last North Korean nuclear weapon test was in September 2017 during the heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang that year. A new test would be viewed as a serious provocation in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo, and it would almost certainly be a warning to the next administration that the U.S. will have to pay more attention to North Korea in the years ahead.
If the test does take place this fall, it will be a reminder of the consequences of Trump’s failed North Korea policy and an indictment of the Biden administration’s neglect of this issue. Another North Korean nuclear test should force Washington to rethink U.S. policy and make a renewed push for an arms control agreement with the DPRK no matter who wins the election in November.
Ever since the failed Hanoi summit in 2019, there has been no real U.S. attempt to resume diplomatic engagement with North Korea. For the remainder of Trump’s presidency, the issue was put on the back burner, and it remained there for the duration of Biden’s term. Aside from a few initial probes by U.S. officials shortly after Biden took office, there has been no interest in the White House in reopening negotiations.
Instead, it’s been the usual mix of sanctions and threats with predictably poor results. According to the same NIS briefing that mentioned the possible nuclear test, North Korea has amassed enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium to build dozens more nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong-un was embarrassed by the Trump administration’s refusal to accept his proposal at the Hanoi summit. Kim was never going to agree to Washington’s maximalist demands for the complete elimination of the nuclear weapons program, but he had been prepared to make some real concessions concerning their Yongbyon facility.
According to former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker in "Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program," the concessions offered at Hanoi were significant: “More importantly…was that without Yongbyon, the North could not produce additional plutonium and tritium, thereby limiting its ability to enhance the sophistication of its nuclear weapons.” By insisting on an all-or-nothing solution, Trump missed a key opportunity to make real progress in limiting North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
There might be a temptation in Washington to shrug off any new North Korean provocations as more of the same behavior that the U.S. has seen for years, but it would be unwise to be so complacent. In the absence of any constraints on North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal, the South Korean government will feel increasing pressure to consider developing their own weapons program.
The U.S. has correctly been discouraging South Korea from doing this, but if there is no credible arms control agreement imposing some limits on the growth and deployment of North Korea’s arsenal there may be no amount of “reassurance” from Washington that will satisfy our ally.
North Korea policy has received almost no attention from the candidates this year, except when Vice President Harris has wanted to criticize Trump for “cozying up” to dictators and Trump mused that Kim Jong-un was missing him. The North Korean government was quick to respond to Trump’s remarks, saying that they “don’t care” if he is elected and that they don’t expect any change from the U.S. The North Korean leadership felt burned by the experience of negotiating with Trump, and it seems that they aren’t eager for a second round.
The party platforms released this summer had very little to say about North Korea, and there was no evidence that either party was seriously contemplating a major diplomatic initiative. The Democratic Party platform touched on Trump’s North Korea record, but only to complain about how he had been “embarrassing the United States on the world stage including by flattering and legitimizing Kim Jong Un, exchanging ‘love letters’ with the North Korean dictator.” There was no suggestion that a new Democratic administration would pursue a different kind of diplomatic approach. The Republican platform said nothing at all about this issue.
Given the candidates’ apparent lack of interest in renewed diplomacy with North Korea, it is unlikely that arms control negotiations would normally be on the agenda for the next administration. If North Korea conducts a new nuclear test, that might be the external shock needed to focus Washington’s attention on this issue and force a serious reconsideration of existing policy. After almost 20 years of trying and failing to “denuclearize” North Korea, the U.S. will need to change course and set less ambitious arms control goals that can be reached.
North Korea’s growing arsenal cannot be ignored for another four years. Regardless of the election outcome, the U.S. does not have the luxury of relying on the same ineffective policy of sanctions and shows of force.
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