By mid-1859, work was finally underway on the long-planned canal to unite the Mediterranean and Red Seas through Suez. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a disgraced French diplomat, had managed to overcome a tremendous tangle of financial and diplomatic obstacles to organize a company to build the canal, with the aid of Egypt's ruler, Said. The plan was relatively straightforward. While the final canal would run at sea level from Port Said in the north to Suez in the south, supplying water to workers in the desert would be extremely difficult, so another canal would be dug first, this one running from the Nile along the ancient canal route. Besides supplying the workers with water, it would also allow easier movement of material and allow irrigation of lands granted to the canal company by Said, which would help to finance the construction of the main canal. A great deal of work would also be required to turn Port Said into a suitable harbor for ocean-going ships.

Under the initial plan, the vast majority of this work was to be done by hand. Said had agreed to supply the company with labor from the corvee, an ancient practice where Egyptian peasants were liable for a certain number of days of unpaid labor each year. Corvee labor had built the Pyramids and the irrigation of the Nile Delta, and the Canal Company would be able to get its labor at far less than market rates. De Lesseps was concerned about how the wider world would react to his use of an institution that was essentially temporary slavery in a world where public opinion (at least outside the American South) was increasingly against any form of forced labor, but it was the only way to get sufficient manpower. At its peak, the company would have 60,000 peasants under the corvee, although only about 20,000 were actually working at any given time. And by the (admittedly fairly low) standards of forced labor, the workers were treated fairly well. They were actually paid a small wage, and the company was careful to make sure they were adequately supplied with food, water and medical care, although shelter was frequently lacking. The vast majority went home in good health, and some even chose to stay as paid labor when their term was done. 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.

I've found a couple of interesting things to read lately. First, a writeup of US satellite intelligence on the Kirov class, which covers several major topics here. Second, if you want to know about the continuing travails of the US icebreaker program, check out Sixty Degrees North, a substack that follows this in great detail.

Overhauls are my review of Mystic Seaport, The Arleigh Burke class, The Coast Guard and for 2023, VLS and Megasilverfist's review of the West Australia Shipwrecks Museum.

Man has traded across the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean for millennia, and with only a narrow stretch of land separating the two, the idea of completing a water connection between the two was equally ancient. In fact, the ancient Egyptians dug a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, although the history of the so-called "Canal of the Pharaohs" is rather unclear. What is clear is that the canal was repaired and closed several times before finally being shut in 767 during a rebellion in Muslim-controlled Egypt.

The route of the Canal of the Pharaohs

For the next century, cargo traveling through the Red Sea crossed the isthmus of Suez by camel caravan, and the canal was largely forgotten until the French revolutionary government, in a Churchillian move, decided that the best way to attack the British was to have Napoleon invade Egypt. The expedition had a number of goals, including an offhand reference to cutting the isthmus of Suez, and it included a large contingent of academics, whose work laid the foundations of Egyptology. Their discoveries kicked off a mania for all things Egyptian that lasted through most of the 19th century, but those tasked with making a survey of a direct canal route made a mistake in their calculations, believing the Red Sea at high tide to be about 30' higher than the Mediterranean. Read more...

When I visited Fort Sill back in 2019, I was very impressed by the Field Artillery Museum, but less impressed by the museum for the Air Defense Artillery. But they were in the process of moving to a new facility, and I knew it would be very cool if it was anywhere near as good at the artillery version. Unfortunately, when it finally opened, it was declared to be a Training Support Facility, which is like a museum except that for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons, it isn't open to the public. This was annoying, but I finally got in touch and the curator, Correy Twilley, was kind enough to show me around.

The Corregidor display at the TSF

The facility is new, and still far from complete, but even in its current state, it's an excellent look at the development of American ground-based air defense.¹ When you walk in, there's a lovely dioramacontextual training aid of a 3" M3 AA gun on Corregidor at the beginning of WWII, where the ADA gained its motto of "First to Fire". Then it starts with weapons of WWI, including the only example of the 3" M1918 left in the world. Oh, and because it's a TSF, they don't have to demilitarize stuff, so it's still operational, and could be used if Ft. Sill was attacked by biplanes. Next up was WWII, including a complete set of German 88mm AA guns (although not all were on display) as well as a lot of examples of supporting equipment like radar, searchlights, and tractors. There's also an extensive display on Pearl Harbor, discussing the things that went wrong there, and the lessons that the modern ADA needs to learn as it once again deals with a threat in the Pacific. 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.

Overhauls are my reviews of Salem and Nautilus, Standard Parts one and two, The DP Gun Problem and for 2023, Landlocked Navies and Honda Point Part 1.

When I was in middle and high school, I was a Star Wars geek. Besides binge-reading RPG sourcebooks, I was a big fan of the 90s Bantam novels, particularly those of Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, which are generally considered to be the best of that vintage.² But there was one other author from that era who I really liked, despite his stuff being rather more obscure. It was Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, and it took me quite a while to work out why I liked it so much.³

Unlike anyone else I've read in Star Wars, Kube-McDowell captured the flavor of a real-world military. There's the sense of dealing with an immense machine, made up of a zillion moving parts and roughly focused on a goal, with all of the scars of bureaucracy and lessons learned that implies. This starts on the first page of Chapter 1: "At the same time, the carriers and cruisers began to disgorge the bombers, transports, and gunboats they had ferried to the battle. There was no reason to risk the loss of one fully loaded—a lesson the Republic had learned in pain. At Orinda, the commander of the fleet carrier Endurance had kept his pilots waiting in the launch bays, to protect the smaller craft from Imperial fire as long as possible. They were still there when Endurance took the brunt of a Super Star Destroyer attack and vanished in a ball of metal fire." This is an excellent example of doctrine, dropped naturally into the text, a subject often ignored in fiction. Later on, we get a rough TOE for a New Republic Fleet⁴ and other doctrinal asides, as well as the general sense that we're looking at a group of dedicated professionals, not just a bunch of people having an adventure fighting the threat of the week who also happen to have ranks.⁵ Read more...

While reading Norman Friedman's British Carrier Aviation, I stumbled across a gem of a story that perfectly illustrated how important organizational structure can be to the design of things (in this case ships) in the physical world. More specifically, how the British decision to consolidate all of their aviation assets into the Royal Air Force in 1918 handicapped their carrier aviation two decades later.

USS Randolph and HMS Indefatigable together off Japan

The fact that naval aviation was under the control of the RAF posed two problems. The first, which I've discussed previously, is that the RAF focused primarily on the direct use of airpower, starving the naval aviation community of funding and leaving the RN with a small force of rather bad planes when war broke out. The second problem was more subtle. Even the naval aviation forces that did exist reported up to the RAF, which meant that they had an outsize voice in carrier design and operation. And while this was undoubtedly nice for the pilots, it turned out that what was good for the pilots wasn't necessarily what was best in wartime. 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.

A friend recently visited Missouri, and informed me that an important thing to know (particularly if you have a tour booked) is that access to the ship is rather complicated. You park in a remote lot, then take a bus to the ship, and the bus runs every 15 minutes. So if you are planning a visit and want to take the (very well-priced) engineering tour, show up early.

Overhauls are my reviews of Charleston Navy Yard and Battleship Cove, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Lasers at Sea Parts two and three and for 2023, Military Spaceflight Parts five and six.

Reader John Olsen has contributed a rare European museum review, this one of the Danish steam frigate Jylland, one of the ships that falls between the introduction of steam and steel.

Steam frigate Jylland, permanently drydocked in Ebeltoft, Denmark.

Website

Introduction

Launched in 1860, the Danish frigate Jylland (Jutland)⁶ was third in a series of four planned ships. Whereas her two older sisters Niels Juel and Sjælland were built with sails only, Jylland was built from the outset with a steam engine to supplement the sails. Niels Juel and Sjælland were later rebuilt to include a steam plant, while a fourth ship, the Peder Skram, was completed as a larger, and armored, evolution of the Jylland, based on lessons from the famed 1862 battle of Hampton Roads. Jylland herself would make her claim to fame at the Battle of Heligoland Bight,⁷ during the 1864 war between Denmark and an alliance of Prussia and Austria. Read more...

Critiques of the defense industry are not hard to find. Claims of overpriced, underperforming systems abound. These are often the result of ignorance, but even the industry's staunchest defenders have to admit that something is deeply wrong. And I agree, but I think that the standard narrative of why this happens fundamentally misunderstands the drivers of the problem, which means that things keep getting worse and worse. I'm not sure there is actually a solution, but at the very least, a better understanding of the problem will keep us from solving the wrong one.

I should lay my cards on the table here. I'm an engineer with a major defense contractor who you have almost certainly heard of.⁸ Much of this is based on my experience, closing in on seven years now, in the trenches, trying to deliver products to the military. Some of the stuff I've worked on has finally fielded. To some extent, this is an introduction to a contractor's-eye view of the issues in the industry, although I have tried to be fair to both sides. Read more...