In 1979, the Shah of Iran was overthrown, bringing a new government, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, into power. Khomeini's vision of an Islamic state was very different than what had been there before, and the country was in chaos even before students seized the US embassy and kept its diplomats hostage for 444 days. Saddam Hussein, who had recently seized control of Iran's neighbor Iraq, was irritated by Khomeini's description of him as a "puppet of Satan", coupled with calls for the majority Shia population of Iraq to overthrow the Sunni-dominated government. There was also the question of who should control the Shatt al-Arab, the river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates that serves as an important outlet from Iraq to the sea. In 1975, Saddam had signed a treaty drawing the boundary at the center of the river, but in September 1980, he tore that up, reasserting Iraq's traditional claim to the entire river and ordering his forces into an Iran that he expected would be unable to effectively resist due to the tumult of the revolution.

In this, he would be gravely disappointed. Although his forces made reasonable gains early on, Saddam was not a particularly good commander and the war unified the Iranian people behind the new government. By the end of 1980, the Iraqi offensive had ground to a halt, and after staying stalemated through 1981, the Iranian counteroffensive in 1982 drove Iraq back to its start lines, often making use of human wave attacks, massed charges driven by religious fervor that were sometimes used to clear minefields in the fastest and highest-casualty way possible. But there was also enough technical skill left in Iran to conduct operations against the Iraqi Navy and generally make the Iraqi coastline unsafe, slashing oil revenues. After a key pipeline through Syria was closed, the Iraqi war effort was sustained only by loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,¹ as well as material and technical support from both sides of the Cold War, neither of which was eager to see Khomeini's version of Islam spread. Read more...

Things have settled enough that I'm going to give my current thoughts on the recent fighting between Israel and Iran.² This is approximately half commentary on the specifics of that conflict, and half broader lessons we can take from this and apply more generally.

I think the first and biggest lesson is that the results of battle, and thus the lessons to be drawn, are really contingent on the details of who is doing the fighting, and on the difficult-to-measure aspects of their competence and capabilities. If you look at the Ukraine War, ground-based air defenses (GBAD) looks formidable. Nobody dares fly over the enemy, and the most effective air-launched weapon is a long-range glide bomb. If you look at Iran, Israel has effectively neutered Iranian GBAD and rules the skies, striking what it wants. So, all we can definitively say is that Russia and Ukraine appear to be broadly matched in capability, while Israel is much better than Iran. We can't say for sure how Israel (or the US) would fare against Russia. Read more...

After our visit to Fort Point, we headed across the Golden Gate bridge to the Marin Headlands. The whole area on the north side of the Golden Gate used to belong to the Army, which installed numerous batteries there from the 1890s to the 1940s, many of which can be visited. But that was only secondary to our real objective, Nike Site SF-88, a Cold War-era SAM site that is the only real memorial to a massive network of air defenses built in the 1950s to protect America from Soviet bomber attack.

The Nike system grew out of concerns in late WWII that aircraft would soon be flying too high and too fast for existing gun-based systems to handle, necessitating a weapon that could alter its course in flight. The obvious answer was to use a rocket, and both Army and Navy began developing systems on that basis. The Army's was called Nike, and it was designed primarily to protect American cities and military bases from Soviet bombers. The first site became operational in 1954, and the system was rapidly built out, with a total of 265 batteries built around the country. The initial Nike Ajax missile, had a range of only 30 miles, and with no more than four launchers per site, it would likely be overwhelmed by a large attack. The answer was the bigger Nike Hercules missile, which could not only reach out almost 100 miles, but also carry a large nuclear warhead, hopefully capable of taking out multiple bombers at once. Most Ajax sites were modernized to take the new missile, although a fair number were shut down as no longer needed. The follow-on to Hercules, called Nike Zeus, would have been intended to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it was sadly cancelled. The majority of the American Hercules sites were shut down in 1974, leaving the country without any serious ground-based air defenses, although a few soldiered on for another 5 years. Read more...

While in the Bay Area for the DSL meetup, I finally managed to get inside a Third System Fort, specifically Fort Point, built in the 1850s to guard San Francisco Bay. It's a late addition to the Third System, and shows all of the various features developed during that system's life. And if the thought of mid-19th century coastal defenses isn't enough to excite you, you should consider going anyway, because it's right under the Golden Gate Bridge and the area is stunning.

The Golden Gate, the stretch of water between the Pacific and San Francisco Bay, is an obvious chokepoint for anyone trying to protect San Francisco, so the first fortification in the area was built by the Spanish in 1794, with only a handful of cannons. It fell into ruin after Mexico gained independence, but when gold was discovered in California in 1849, only a year after the US seized the territory from Mexico, there was interest in protecting the rapidly-growing city from attack. The result was the only Third System fort on the West Coast, started in 1850 and completed in 1860. Like most of the Third System, it was built with casemated guns inside the walls, although it is unusual in having three tiers of casemates instead of just one, as well as a barbette tier on top of the wall. Unfortunately, just after it was completed, the performance of several other brick forts in the Civil War, most notably Fort Pulaski, showed that rifled guns had made masonry forts like this obsolete, and the fort was placed in reserve, even as new batteries were built starting in the 1890s. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

The LA meetup last month was excellent, and everyone seemed to have a great time. Next year, the plan is to go to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. There may not be ships, but it is a really impressive museum, and unlike museum ships, I have much less concern about the size of the group. You should plan to come.

Overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts One and Two, FFG(X) and for 2024, reviews of Bovington Tank Museum, museums around Boston, places we went during last year's meetup and my piece on Eagle.

I attempted to visit Hornet while in the Bay Area as part of the DSL meetup in May 2025. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a long line to get onto the ship, as they were hosting a furry convention³ that day. Now, I have nothing against museum ships doing unusual things for money, and I'd heard of CarrierCon, a more general fandom convention hosted aboard Hornet, but that was a few months ago.⁴ The real problem was threefold. First, one member of our party had checked their website that morning, and not seen anything about this, so it was a unpleasant surprise to find the ship full of people, with an hour-long line. Second, upon arrival we were told that admission would require a con pass, which was $50 instead of the normal $25. Third, it was Memorial Day weekend, and while I'm sure that this wasn't one of their busier weekends,⁵ doing a convention of any sort⁶ on that weekend feels tacky and a bit disrespectful.

That said, I do want to zero in on the second of the three issues. My basic problem is that because the ship was hosting a con, the experience onboard would be much worse than it would normally have been. I got a look at their map, and pretty much every large public space aboard was being used for panels and the like, which is going to make talking about them much harder, even with the relatively small group (8 people) I had. The only open area on the ship looked to be the flight deck, which is fun, but not $50 worth of fun. And while I am sympathetic to the operational difficulties of trying to separate the general public from con guests, charging people who actually want to see your ship (instead of the thing on it) more for a worse experience isn't a great look. Read more...

While in LA for the Naval Gazing meetup, the group went to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance. It's a small, obscure museum that I hadn't even known about until a friend recommended it during the last LA meetup, but it seemed like a good thing to do on Friday as an appetizer before the battleship on Saturday.

The museum's party piece

Website

The museum is at the Torrance Airport, which is somewhat irritating to get to, given its distance from the freeways. And while it makes some attempt to chronicle the rich history of airplane production in greater LA, it started as Northrop's house museum, and that very much shows in the planes they have and what part of the story they are most interested in telling. The site is absurdly small, with only five jets on display and not really room for any more: a rather pretty F-86, a two-seat Harrier trainer (which may not be there long, but I'm sure they can find something to replace it), an early A4D-1 Skyhawk, and two Northrop products, an ex-Norwegian F-5 and one of two YF-23 prototypes, the other one of which is at Dayton. (Various places talk about an F-14 and a YF-17, but these appear to be parked elsewhere on the airport.) They did have a fairly large collection of models, engines, and so on to pad the museum out, including an R-4360 that was on Spruce Goose at one point. Read more...

Recently, Brian Potter of Construction Physics (whose work I am generally a fan of) and Austin Vernon (who I met in person two days ago and liked) have released a a blueprint for fixing US naval shipbuilding. I have mixed thoughts on their three points:

1. Instead of complex, multi-role ships which have expensive and often unnecessary features, the Navy should focus on simpler ships with narrower use cases.

2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

3. Production on ships should not begin until design is substantially completed.

Now, 2 is a position I've held for a long time, and really should write about more. I think they do a decent job of arguing for it, and I believe this is the thing they emphasized most in their policy paper, so I have no quibble at all here. 3 is patently obvious to everyone, and has been since forever. Unfortunately, this means that we'll need to go beyond simply pointing out that the problem exists, because if it was that easy to solve, someone would have solved it. The people who do this work are not stupid. I suspect political pressures are to blame here, but actually tracking down the drivers and providing solutions for them is not something I'm going to get into here. Read more...

I recently watched Pentagon Wars, a 1998 comedy that purports to portray the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I came away from it extremely irritated. It's a story based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems with defense procurement, treating complicated, difficult issues as things that would be simple if not for the interests of those with power. This is entirely contrary to my views on such things, and as a lot of people's best reference for military procurement, I think it has had a corrosive impact on the public discourse.

Now, for those who don't follow this, the Bradley is the US Army's main Infantry Fighting Vehicle, designed to move a small squad of infantrymen about and provide them with the bulk of their firepower in combat. The movie is based on a book by Air Force Colonel James Burton, who during a tour at the Pentagon had gotten into a fight with the Army about appropriate testing methodology for the Bradley. Things got so heated that Burton retired early and took his case to the public. Read more...

It's time once again for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Also, for those of you who missed the Naval Gazing meetup in LA, you can have a second chance at a ship tour in two weeks. I will be at the DSL meetup in San Jose, and we are touring Hornet on Saturday, starting at 1 PM. Feel free to just show up, although it would be nice to know if you are planning to come. I will be wearing an Iowa hat.

Overhauls are Main Guns Part 2, SYWTBABB Construction Part 3, my review of Ft. Sill, O'Callahan and the Franklin, Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers and for 2024, Air Attack on Ships Parts three and four, Thoughts on the Iranian Missile Attack and the Fatherly One's review of Cod.