Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

USS Woodrow Wilson- Part of the 41 for Freedom SSBNs in service with the USN (Image credits- Wikimedia Commons) Source- The National Interest Author-  Joseph Trevithick A key component of the U.S. doctrine of mutually assured destruction — commonly and appropriately known as MAD — was that American troops would still be able to retaliate if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. But for a time, the Pentagon was seriously worried that its own nuclear missile submarines wouldn’t get those orders in time. In 1968, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Scientific Advisory Committee found dangerous gaps in the communications network supporting the nation’s so-called Fleet Ballistic Missile boats, or FBMs. The FBM fleet included more than 40 submarines of five different classes all capable of carrying up to 16 Polaris nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, collectively known as the “41 for Freedom.” The agency included the report in a response to a private individual’s Fr

USS Halsey (DDG-97) underway ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / United States Navy) Source- National Interest Author- Dave Majumdar While the U.S. Navy will start to build new Flight III Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers equipped with Raytheon’s new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar next year, the service will eventually have to develop a new surface combatant to replace the vintage DDG-51 and Ticonderoga-class hull-forms. Navy officials expect that such a new Future Surface Combatant (FSC) would enter service in the 2030s—but the Navy has to start planning for those vessels now since construction needs to start around 2028. No one—not even the Navy—knows exactly what those new ships might look like. But we can make certain assumptions even at this early stage. The new ship will need to generate a huge amount of electrical power to run future naval weapons which many predict will include lasers and railguns. It’s also very likely that the FSC will n

USS New Jersey ( Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Kyle Mizokami In the early 1980s, four Iowa-class fast battleships originally built during World War II—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin—were taken out of mothballs and returned to active duty. Nearly 900 feet long and displacing close to 60,000 tons, the battlewagons could fire a nine-gun broadside sending 18 tons of steel and explosives hurtling towards their targets. The battleships were modernized to include cruise missiles, ship-killing missiles and Phalanx point-defense guns. Returned to the fleet, the ships saw action off the coasts of Lebanon and Iraq. At the end of the Cold War the battleships were retired again. All were slated to become museums. Few knew, however, that returning the battleships to service in the ’80s had been only part of the plan. The second, more ambitious phase was a radical redesign of the massive warships

USNS Mercy hospital ship ( Image credits- US Navy) Source- The Diplomat Author- Prashanth Parameswaran From August 17-28, U.S. Navy ships will be in Vietnam for the annual U.S.-led Pacific Partnership mission, the largest annual multilateral humanitarian assistance and disaster relief preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Pacific region. Pacific Partnership, led by the U.S. Navy in partnership with other like-minded countries and non-governmental organizations, sees the combined force visiting several host nations every year and engaging in a variety of local outreach efforts to improve boost capabilities, build relationships and bolster collective ability to respond to natural disasters. It began in 2006 following the December 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Southeast Asia. Vietnam is one of the seven host nations on the list for this year’s Pacific Partnership in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations betwee

USS Parche ( SSN 683) ( Source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Steve Weintz Seemingly ripped from the pages and screens of a geopolitical thriller, one of the Cold War's most incredible adventures stretched from outer space to the ocean floor, involved bus-sized satellites and deep-diving subs, and pulled together sailors, spooks and scientists into a secret new national capability. On June 15, 1971, eleven years after the first spy satellite began taking its photos and the first submarine reached the bottom of Earth's oceans, a U.S. Air Force Titan III missile lofted a spacecraft the size of a Greyhound bus into orbit. The first of America's third-generation spysats, the KH-9 HEXAGON carried 33 miles of film and four recovery capsules to return it all to Earth. Its cameras and film stock could count the slices of a pizza from 100 miles up. In those pre-electronic-imaging days, large film cameras a

Tomahawk missile being fired from an American warship  ( Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Credits- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Zachary Keck This week the U.S. Navy detailed its plans to rectify the advantage China holds in the area of sophisticated anti-ship missiles. Starting in fiscal year 2017, the U.S. Navy will begin the Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (OASuW) Increment II program aimed at fielding a more advanced anti-ship missile to replace the aging Boeing RGM-84 Harpoons the navy current relies on. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC on Wednesday, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, the deputy chief of naval operations warfare systems (N9), said that the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) will compete with the new Tomahawk Block IV for OASuW II. “What I would like to see happen is take those capabilities that we need and start inserting those into a Block IV [Tomahawk], and [compare tha

LCS Independence ( Source- Wikimedia Commons / Credits- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- James Holmes The U.S. Navy, it seems, is undergoing what literary gadfly Tom Wolfe styles a “great relearning.” Wolfe recounts a 1968 visit to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, one of the meccas of hippiedom. Doctors at the district’s Free Clinic, he found, were “treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” Such maladies made a comeback because the hippies “sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.” In short, Sixties youth rejected all precepts bequeathed by their elders—including basic hygiene. Having scoffed at accumulated wisdom of the ages, the hippies had to either put up with the rot or r

INS Visakhapatnam ( Image credits- Internet Image) As India launches it's newest Destroyer, the stealthy INS Visakhapatnam, it is time to reflect on the quiet transformation that is taking place for the Indian navy.Indian Navy is in the process of inducting several ships that is highly capable that will see the Indian navy transforming itself to a young and a highly capable force having the capability to project force far away from it's shores achieving a truly blue water capability. OVERVIEW The legacy of the Indian navy dates back to the British raj when as part of the Royal Navy, the Indian navy played a crucial role during the second world war. Soon after the independence, the Royal Indian Navy was partitioned into two parts and assets divided between India and Pakistan. Those were transformative years for the navy. After India became a republic, the navy came to be known as the Indian Navy, dropping the Royal prefix. At this time, the ships of the Indian Navy