In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This fifth post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took, and a few other pictures.
This is a Halberstadt CL IV. This was a late war plane introduced in 1918. Mercedes 6-cylinder water-cooled in-line piston engine of 160 horsepower. Some 700 were ordered. Two forward firing fixed machineguns (LMG 08/15 “Spandau”), one ring mounted machinegun (Parabellum MG 14) for the observer.
This version is a replica and it does differ from the original in a number of areas.
Of interest is the rear mounted machinegun on an circular ring mount. This was something the Germans were doing but the allies were not. This does appear to be a precise recreation of the ring mount.
The exterior radiators do not appear to be “standard issue.” Probably a modern addition. Below is a picture of a CL IV in the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Source: From Wikipedia.
I do not think the high back seat is “original issue.”
And the cockpit. The windscreen is a modern addition. These airplanes did not have such a windscreen. Not sure how much of this cockpit is authentic.
A look from above with another museum piece. Note that ring mount is fundamentally different.
Source: Wikipedia taken by Eric Salard. Plane is at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
So this version in Virginia Beach does not appear to be a perfect reproduction, but it does fly.
In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This fourth post on the air show include some more Great War airplane pictures that I took, and a few other pictures.
Cockpit picture of a Nieuport 17, one of the most common of the French fighters (some 3,600 built). Now, I don’t know how authentic the cockpit is. They may have added some gauges for the sake of modern pilots, as this is a flying model. The sign that says “experimental” is not original issue. I gather it is there to meet an FAA requirement.
The plane was missing a gun. So, here is a period drawing of such:
The Alkan-Hamy synchonization gear installed in a Nieuport 17 (source: Wikipedia)
They also often just carried a Lewis gun on the top wing (or both)
Early Nieuport 17 in July 1916 with a Lewis gun and a cône de penetration (Source: Wikipedia)
In early October I spent the weekend in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This third post on the air show includes some more of the pictures I took, and a few other more “professional” pictures.
This is a flying model of the Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter. I have already posted this picture. The Sopwith 1 1/2 stutter did its first flight in December 1915 and was introduced to combat in April 1916. It was the first British aircraft to enter service with a forward firing synchronized machine gun that fired through the propeller. It was also the first airplane to have air brakes (the Wikipedia article on air brakes only started discussing their history in 1931). It had a 130 horsepower French built Clerget 9B 9-cylinder air-cooled rotary piston engine. I gather 1,280 were built in England and 4,500 were license-built in France by 11 different companies.
This picture below taken by a friend of the same plane at the same time. Not sure why his picture looks brighter and better than mine. We were both using Apple I-phones. But then, I am really not that patient enough to be a good photographer.
They also had one in the museum
This is the observers compartment. Note the control stick. I gather this is a field improvisation, but was done during the Great War.
Spent the week before down in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. This second post on the air show includes some more of the pictures I took, although they are far from “professional”
In their museum is a Bleriot XI. It did not fly. This airplane may have been the second most significant airplane in history, after the various Wright Flyers. It was primarily designed by Raymond Saulnier. It relied upon the Wright brothers “wing warping” for lateral control, vice using ailerons. Over a thousand were manufactured between 1909 and 1914.
Louis Bleriot flew this plane over the English channel in 1909. It was also used by Adolphe Pegoud for his various inverted flight and loop demonstrations in 1913. The first British pilots to conduct loops also used this plane.
You are able to get up close and personal with the planes.
Raymond Saulnier designed the very similar looking Morane-Saulnier, which Roland Garros flew across the Mediterranean from southern France to Tunis. The Morane-Saulnier was pretty much just copied to create the Fokker Eindecker that started the Fokker Scourge of 1915-1916.
Morane Saulnier G (from Wikipedia)Fokker E III Eindecker – 1916 (from Wikipedia)
I just found out this weekend that Nicholas Stephen Hordij Krawciw passed away on 29 September at Ft. Belvoir. He was 85 years old.
Nick Krawciw replaced Trevor Dupuy as the head of The Dupuy Institute in 1995 after the untimely death of Trevor Dupuy. He continued as head until 2005, when I was promoted to President and he continued as the Chairman of the Board. He continued in that role until 2015, when the Institute was transferred to me.
Nick Krawciw had a long and distinguished career in the army and a life that looked like it came out of a Hollywood movie.
He was born it Lvov, then part of Poland on 28 November 1935. His father was a Ukrainian journalist and writer. When the Soviet Union occupied that part of Poland in 1939, his father had to leave to avoid arrest (other relatives had been arrested and executed by the Soviet Union on an earlier trip to Russia). Nick Krawciw and his family followed shortly thereafter, except they were intercepted by Soviet patrols while crossing the Sian River, and Nick Krawciw, at the age of five, first came under machinegun fire.
He then spent most of World War II in Germany. They were in Berlin when their kitchen was destroyed by an allied bomb. So his mother applied for them to be farm laborers and the entire family moved to a family farm in southern Germany.
That area of Germany was then occupied in 1945 by the U. S. Army, but not before Nick Krawciw had come under artillery bombardment from them. His family, thanks to connections in the United States, then migrated to United States in 1949. He grew up in Philadelphia.
At his initiative, he went to a military high school in New Jersey, accruing a debt to pay for it, and then went to West Point, graduating second in his class in 1959.
He then served two tours in Vietnam and ended up as the senior U.N. peacekeeping forces representative in Middle East during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He was the commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division from 1987-1989.
He choose to retire from the army in 1990 because of health issues. He then started working with the DOD on Ukrainian issues and became a vice-president at The Dupuy Institute in 1995. He took over running the Institute after Trevor Dupuy passed away.
I did work for and with Nick Krawciw for over twenty years. It is hard to select from a long list of superlatives those which I would use to describe him. He displayed the finest traditions and standards of a U.S. Army officer and was a caring, loving family man. All who worked with him and knew him held him in the highest regard.
Spent this last week down in Virginia Beach at the “Warbirds Over the Beach” airshow. Also visited their museum. Took a few pictures, although far from “professional”
Here are some of the Great War planes lined up behind the hangers. These are all flying models:
The first plane is the Curtis Flyer, 1911. This is a reproduction. It did fly this weekend, lifting off from the airfield, but not too high, and then landing back down.
Next is the Fokker D VIII. It was the most developed and advanced Fokker of the war, with a few less wings then the more famous Fokker Triplane. It definitely flew with more power and gusto then the rest of the planes.
And then there are the Fokker DR1 of Fokker Triplanes, made famous by the Bloody Red Baron. They had two flying models.
And then there was the Sopwith Triplane. Note the minor design differences, in particular the “fourth wing” between the wheels of the Fokkers.
Finally, among the flying aircraft was a Sopwith 1/2 strutter two-seat aircraft. No Sopwith Camel though.
F.W. Lanchester famously reduced the mutual erosion of attrition warfare to simple mathematical form, resulting in his famous “Square Law,” and also the “Linear Law.” Followers have sought to fit real-world data to Lanchester’s equations, and/or to elaborate them in order to capture more aspects of reality. In Beyond Lanchester, Brian McCue–author of the similarly quantitative U-Boats In The Bay Of Biscay–focusses on a neglected shortcoming of Lanchester’s work: its determinism. He shows that the mathematics of the Square Law contain instability, so that the end-state it predicts is actually one of the least likely outcomes. This mathematical truth is connected to the real world via examples drawn from United States Marine Corps exercises, Lanchester’s original Trafalgar example, predator-prey experiments done by the early ecologist G.F. Gause, and, of course the war against German U-boats
This is an in-depth discussion of the subject of the use Lanchester equations by Dr. Brian McCue, previously of CNA (Center for Naval Analysis) and OTA (Congressional Office of Technology Assistance). We have also posted and written before about Lanchester (see War by Numbers). Some of our old blog posts on Lanchester are here:
Afghan police in training, near Jalalabad, 15 August 2010 (photo by friend of William A. Lawrence II).
This is a summation of the 13 posts drawn (copied) from Chapter 21: Relating a Force Ratio Model to Afghanistan (pages 253-273) of America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam:
At the time of that briefing, we had 110,790 troops there. The Dupuy Institute estimated insurgent strength between 15,000 and 25,000, with us leaning towards the higher figure. So if the insurgency was a regional or factional insurgency, then even at a force ratio of 4.43 to 1 (assuming 25,000 insurgents), we had an 84 percent chance of winning. Yet, it did not appear that we were winning. [bolding added for this post]”
The problem is if the insurgency is broadly based, then those surge forces needed to stay in place for the next ten years, with the expected continued losses and expenses. [bolding added for this post]
If history is a guide, then this government will be replaced one way or the other several years after we withdraw. What will replace it is hard to determine, but will probably include a return to some extent of the Taliban, or perhaps with them leading the new government. It is also distinctly possible that the country will return back into civil war. None of this fulfills our objectives.
Picture of area of the missing statue of the Buddah, destroyed by the Taliban government when they were in charge, near Bamiyan, August 2006 (photo by Nicholas Klapmeyer).
Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from pages 269-270 of America’s Modern Wars (2015):
CONCLUSIONS
One cannot but help to compare Iraq to Afghanistan. In the case of Iraq, we faced a regional or factional insurgency mostly based upon the minority Sunnis, we installed a government from the majority Shiite faction and then backed that with force ratios sufficient to suppress a regional or factional insurgency. We then bought off the Sunni insurgents by the tens of thousands bringing the violence rapidly under control, while at the same time conducted a surge. The end result was to create a very favorable situation on the ground, allowing us to withdraw and leaving behind trainers in a much more stable environment, and then withdrawn entirely in 2011. Still, the effort has been far from perfect, and the insurgency appears to be now renewed.
In the case of Afghanistan the government is under control of the majority ethnic group, with minority representation. The insurgency is also drawing mainly from that same majority ethnic group. The insurgency primarily appears to be domestically based. As the United Nations noted September 2006: “The insurgency is being conducted mostly by Afghans operating inside Afghanistan’s border. However, its leadership appears to rely on support and sanctuary from outside the country.” The attempts to buy off the insurgents have not met with much success. The current surge has create a force ratio that should be sufficient to control a regional or factional insurgency, given sufficient time.
On the other hand, if this insurgency is broadly based, then we do not have a sufficient force ratio regardless of time. So, in that case, if we cannot buy off the insurgents, then our only option is to add another 100,000 to 200,000 troops to the war and invest several more years, with the attendant casualties and costs, trying to turn the war into our favor. Obviously, this precludes meeting any set withdrawal date.
Still, in all reality the current administration is not going to commit another 100,000 to 200,000 troops to Afghanistan for the next five or more years. This is not in discussion. It does not appear to be in consideration by the U.S. opposition party either.
Given our unwillingness to step up our commitment, then the only questions is whether a slower withdrawal will provide more tangible benefits than a fast withdrawal. This we have not examined. Still, this is not “winning” the war in any sense of the word winning. It is withdrawing with the situation on the ground unresolved and a government that is far from democratic or stable. We will be leaving behind trainers and other support people, but limited combat troops. If history is a guide, then this government will be replaced one way or the other several years after we withdraw. What will replace it is hard to determine, but will probably include a return to some extent of the Taliban, or perhaps with them leading the new government. It is also distinctly possible that the country will return back into civil war. None of this fulfills our objectives.
This was written in early 2015. That ends my excerpts from Chapter 21: Relating a Force Ratio Model to Afghanistan, pages 253-273 (there were three pages of endnotes to the chapter).
U.S. Army near Kunduz, 5 May 2008 (photo by William A. Lawrence II).
Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from pages 266-269 of America’s Modern Wars (one table and the footnotes are not included):
POLITICAL WILL
The United States has lost 499 killed from all causes in Afghanistan in 2010. Compared to Vietnam, this does not seem like much, but when compared to all insurgencies; it is enough losses to favor the insurgents.
As we point out in Chapter Seventeen, the Burden of War:
It appears that when the average intervening forces killed [per year] exceeds more than 0.0001% of the population of the intervening country (more than 0.12 per 100,000 home population), then the counterinsurgency, intervention or peacekeeping operations fails in over two-thirds of the cases.
Furthermore, it appears that if the average intervening forces killed exceeds more than 0.00001% of the population of the intervening county (more than 0.01 per 100,000 home population) than the chances of failure rises to around 50% (p-value = 0.0006).
The average intervening forces killed data basically falls into three groupings:
Blue Wins Gray Results Red Wins
0 18 cases 16 0 2
0.01-0.09 17 cases 8 2 7
0.12-4.08 14 cases 3 1 10
—- — —-
27 3 19
Or to put in another format:
Percent Blue Wins Percent Red Wins
Low intensity cases 89% 11%
Medium intensity cases 47% 41%
High intensity cases 21% 71%
A nation with a population of 300 million would produce thresholds of 360 killed a year for .12 per 100,000 and only 30 killed per year for a value of .01 per 100,000. The U.S. population is a little over 300 million. As such, we were at the medium level of intensity for Afghanistan since 2002, and as of 2010, have crossed over to join the high intensity cases. Just for comparison, the U.S. in Iraq during 2004-2007 was between 0.22 to 0.25 killed (KIA) per 100,000 population. The U.S. peak in Vietnam was over 7 killed per 100,000 population (population as of 1968).
Does this mean we will now lose? What it means is that in the 14 cases we have where losses were so high, the counterinsurgents only won in three of them. Let us look at the data for a moment, just the cases where more than 0.12 were killed per 100,000 home country population:
…(skipped table)
Where are the three counterinsurgent wins? They are Angola Civil War, Tanzania in Uganda, and Yemen, with Iraq still unresolved. An examination of each of those cases provides cold comfort. In the case of the Angola Civil War, the Cuban army was heavily supplemented by Soviet aid, as was the entire nation of Cuba. Part of the reason they were getting such aid was to allow them to intervene in Africa. So while they were paying the cost in casualties, they were not paying the rest of the cost of the wars. Furthermore, Cuba kept the losses hidden from most of their population. Tanzania in Uganda was a successful intervention and overthrow of the government of Ugandan strong man Idi Amin and then stabilizing the government against his limited and furtive attempts to return to power. Perhaps they could even be considered to be the insurgents. Regardless, they did withdraw a year later and the Ugandan government seized power in violation of the election results. That government was later overthrown by insurgents lead by the legitimate head of state. Yemen was an Egyptian intervention, which by 1967 was already withdrawing and hastened that withdrawal when they became embroiled in a war with Israel. The war [in Yemen] continued for several more years after Egypt withdrew and the government eventually reached an agreement with the rebels in 1970 and effectively defeated the insurgency.
The U.S., has now stepped over the threshold of 0.12, although one could easily argue from the data above that the threshold should be higher (0.38 or greater) or lower (0.06). But, regardless of the exact break point, we are now at an uncomfortable threshold where the insurgents win in 70% of the cases. This does not mean that this is the case for Afghanistan, but it does indicate that we are now at a level of losses that forces nations to evaluate their levels of commitments to these wars. In some respects, this harkens back to the point made in Chapter Three, that the track record for winning large wars is not very good. Afghanistan is at the lower threshold of being a larger insurgency.
Now, the current administration has been withdrawing since July 2011. This has dropped our loss rates in 2012 down to 310 killed from all causes, or down below the threshold point (assuming it is not as low as 0.05). Losses in 2013 were much lower (127 killed from all causes) and the levels of commitment and losses in 2014 are even less. So, it appears that the issue of U.S. losses has been resolved by lowering the level of commitment, but it does not resolve the concern as to whether there is now sufficient force to suppress the insurgency.
