Category Archives: United States

Britain, China, Government, History, Iran, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, United States, Yemen

Probing for weaknesses in the West’s defences

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: Drone strikes are probing for weaknesses in the West’s defences. Russia and China will be watching on with alacrity

COLONIAL history is no longer taught to young British Army officers at Sandhurst. And most American military planners and strategists might never have heard of the desperate battle to save an outpost called Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu Empire.

That Victorian battle was fought in 1879. But, along with the 1964 movie Zulu that was based on it, both have a crucial lesson for Allied forces now facing Islamist militias in flashpoints across the Middle East.

On screen, the Zulu chief sends a wave of warriors on a suicidal assault on the British outpost at Rorke’s Drift. Men are sent into battle armed with assegais or traditional spears but are met with a fierce resistance and gunned down by volleys of rapid rifle fire.

The African losses were heavy. Yet they weren’t trying to win this first assault: they were probing for weak points in the British defences, scoping out what weapons they had and how they used them.

There are strong parallels today with the situation in the Middle East.

The Iranian-backed drone attack on US army outpost Tower 22 in the Syrian desert – in which three marines were killed and 40 suffered horrific injuries – has echoes of long-forgotten colonial conflicts which helped to lay the gunpowder trail to the First World War, just as we could conceivably face another world war now.

Our enemies, the Houthis in Yemen attacking shipping in the Red Sea and Hezbollah guerrillas backed by Iran, are testing the West’s resolve and how we might fight back.

After several days of dithering, America “hit back” with B1 bombers and cruise missile attacks, blasting dusty and largely empty militia bases in the desert.

Since then, the world has witnessed a joint operation by the United States and the UK, which struck 36 targets across 13 locations in Yemen. They were backed by Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

The Ministry of Defence was at pains in recent days to emphasise that RAF strikes on Houthi targets were not intended as “an escalation”, rather a mission “to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom of navigation.”

The US Air Force’s high-tech weaponry have killed some 37 militants, but Washington has said they have no intention of striking Iran itself. The Americans have repeatedly stressed they do not want a war with Tehran.

These statements, however, signal to the Yemeni militias and their proxy backers that the West does not have the stomach for war and does not want to risk the lives of our own forces.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office insists, too, that: “We need to send the strongest possible signal to Iran that what they’re doing through their proxies is unacceptable. [They] will ultimately be held accountable for what they do.”

Precision strikes that do nothing but destroy a few temporary bases are not “the strongest possible signal”. Nor is the killing of a handful of Houthi rebels who treat death as martyrdom. Put simply, they are regarded by their puppet-masters in Tehran as expendable.

The Tower 22 bombing was carried out by the terrorist militia group Kataeb Hezbollah. This faction is not actually banned in the UK, and its supporters have been able to march down on Whitehall chanting anti-West slogans. Britain is trying to play an international role, but this demonstrates the ineffectiveness of even policing our own streets.

If the Americans are oblivious to the lessons of Rorke’s Drift, they should at least remember Vietnam. At the height of that gruelling war, US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara gave an interview explaining that his policy was to inflict enough deaths and damage on the North Vietnamese to make their Communist leaders back off from fighting the US Army.

President Ho Chi Minh listened to that in such disbelief that he asked for the tape to be replayed. Afterwards, he laughed. McNamara was revealing, he said, that lives mattered – to the Americans! All that mattered to North Vietnam’s fanatics was victory. No price or sacrifice was too high.

Ho Chi Minh’s strategic assessment was right. Far more of his soldiers and untold numbers of civilians were killed. But it was America that gave up paying the price of war. Today President Joe Biden dares not being drawn into an escalating Middle East conflict, particularly with an election due this year. Democrats won’t stand for it. The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, faces the same stark truth.

Britain herself is no position to wage war against Iran or anyone else. Our military inadequacy is reflected in the fiasco of our two aircraft carriers: HMS Prince of Wales is being rapidly prepared to be seaworthy after repairs to a crippled propeller shaft. The ship is needed to deputise for its £3.5billion sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth II, which is currently out of commission because of another propeller shaft breakdown.

Russia and China are watching closely as Iran, and her proxies, test the West on their behalf. For Putin and Xi Jinping, this has become a spectator sport, as they look for signs that we have failed these tests. Instead of responding to the Tower 22 attacks with real military might, we have staged pin-prick reprisals, designed to demonstrate Western technological superiority. But our timid hesitancy has done nothing to frighten our global rivals.

The battle of Rorke’s Drift was won because we were prepared to fight with a ferocity that equalled the attacks of our numerous enemies. Now we no longer have the ships, the men, or the resolve to do so. Our foes must be laughing.

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Environment, Science, Technology, United States

Ammonia is being developed as a low-carbon fuel

ENVIRONMENT

Intro: A start-up in America is developing world’s first ammonia-powered ships

THE Brooklyn Navy Yard’s sprawling industrial complex once employed 70,000 workers to build US battleships and aircraft carriers during the second world war. Almost 80 years later, it has become home to a New York city firm with a very different maritime mission – harnessing ammonia as a low-carbon fuel for the global shipping industry.

The start-up Amogy has already shown how ammonia-powered technology can work in a flying drone, a John Deere tractor and most recently a truck. Now, it is working on an ammonia-powered ship.

Most ships currently run on fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, accounting for 3 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. One alternative involves converting vehicles to hydrogen power that would only emit water. But hydrogen gas needs to be compressed and liquified at -253°C for storage and transportation.

Ammonia could serve as an alternative hydrogen-bearing fuel that is more easily stored and transported in a stable liquid form at room temperature.

Hydrogen can be extracted by heating ammonia to high temperatures, which is a process that comes with its own energy cost. This is where Amogy’s technology comes in. To make ammonia power more viable, the company has developed what it describes as a more efficient and miniaturised “ammonia cracking” method that can chemically extract hydrogen from ammonia at a lower temperature. It uses a proprietary catalyst to speed up the process inside a chemical reactor that feeds into a hydrogen fuel cell.

A leading chemist at Saint Mary’s College of California says that what Amogy was able to bring to the table is that by having better catalytic technologies (all proprietary) they were able to miniaturise their ammonia cracking units and put them on board vehicles.

It was in July 2021 when Amogy first showed that its system could supply 5 kilowatts of power to a drone. By comparison, a standard ammonia cracking system for extracting that amount of hydrogen power is usually the size of a large shipping container. It also paved the way for a 100-kilowatt tractor demonstration in May 2022. That was followed by a 300-kilowatt truck demonstration in January 2023. The firm is now working towards demonstrating a 1-megawatt system in a tugboat.

Many countries already have pipelines and port facilities for handling ammonia that is produced industrially as fertiliser for agriculture. The US alone has more than 5000 kilometres of ammonia pipelines compared with 2500 kilometres of pipeline for transporting hydrogen – though it will need more to support ammonia-powered vehicles.

Another challenge is that ammonia still “has a carbon footprint associated with the production” because the standard industrial process uses natural gas. Low-carbon ammonia production would require use of carbon capture.

Cleaner alternative methods could ideally use electricity from renewable power sources to split water into hydrogen for conversion to ammonia.

. Science Book: Chemistry

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Britain, Defence, Government, National Security, Society, Technology, United States

Menacing spies in the sky

NATIONAL SECURITY

ABOVE our heads – some 80,000 feet up – a high-tech tussle is under way, with our most closely guarded secrets and our national security at stake. The shooting down of a number of intelligence balloons in recent days seems closer to a fictional tale rather than the serious threat they pose.

Four mysterious aircraft have been shot down in just nine days over North America, three by the US Air Force and one by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The fictional perspective was primed when an American general sparked a storm of speculation when he said that he was not excluding extra-terrestrial origin for these intruders. General Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defence Command, when asked about the possibility of aliens, said: “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.”

For these are – quite literally – unidentified flying objects. The language used to describe them recalls the unexplained sightings that, for decades, have puzzled even seasoned observers. UFO enthusiasts are enthralled. In 2021, the Pentagon set up the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronisation Group to investigate more than 100 incidents.

One of the aircraft, downed last week over Alaska, was described as “cylindrical and silverish gray”, about the “size of a small car” and with “no identifiable propulsion system”. Another, brought to earth on the US-Canadian border, was a “small, cylindrical object”.

Such intruders may also have crossed British territory. Rishi Sunak, newly enthused by military matters, says we can and will shoot them down if necessary.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has ordered a review. For now, the questions are multiplying. Are they Chinese? The West seems to think so. The regime in Beijing has protested about the downing of two of them – just peaceful weather balloons, it insists.

Security officials in the West say that China’s stratospheric surveillance programme has operated for many years, and over five continents. It is the brainchild of the Strategic Support Force, a secretive component of the People’s Liberation Army. So, why now? Why have we not noticed this before?

The short and probable answer is that we weren’t looking. These balloons and drones move incredibly slowly at great heights. Our air-defence radar works at lower altitudes. Our missile defence-systems track fast-moving rockets. US officials are now scouring data collected in previous years for signs of intrusions that they may have missed. So far, the Pentagon says, four previous instances have been identified.

In any case, malevolent intruders can easily be missed amid the thousand of innocent weather balloons launched every day. Gathering meteorological data provides perfect cover for covert missions. China counteracts claiming that the US has repeatedly sent spy balloons into Chinese airspace. The Americans deny this.

THREATENING

THE question looms as to why China would invest so much in these missions when it has more than 260 spy satellites? Being only 15 miles above the earth’s surface – satellites are seven times higher – gives them a clear edge in taking photographs and hoovering up electronic information, such as the ultra-sensitive “friend-or-foe” systems that prevent us shooting down our own warplanes.

These satellites can loiter over sensitive military installations, such as the RAF base at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire, used by American spy planes. Gathering information about the temperature and density of the air at high altitudes could also give a crucial advantage to missile-guidance systems. These spycraft may also be sent to test national defences.

Most worryingly, China published in 2018 a video showing a balloon being used as a platform to launch hypersonic weapons. These can travel vast distances at high speed, evading our defences and delivering either nuclear warheads, or electromagnetic pulse blasts that devastate all electrical and electronic devices.

What keeps these machines aloft and on course, thousands of miles from home, nothing is said.

Some clues, however, may come from here in Britain. We have Stratospheric Platforms, a company that offers internet access from a drone that can stay in the atmosphere for a week at a time, powered by a hydrogen engine. Another British start-up, Avealto, has a solar-powered craft in orbit that targets the same market.

Speculation abounds about even more advanced technologies. Aviation experts are eagerly awaiting news from the wreckage of the recent devices shot down.

Could, for example, the Chinese have cracked the difficulties of “ion propulsion”, which uses blasts of electrically charged air to stay aloft, and requires no combustion or moving parts like propellers or jets?

Prototypes of aircraft using this technology already fly, but they use too much electricity to be viable. Or so we think.

Whatever the case, the wreckage recovered from the recent incidents’ will be eagerly inspected by American military technologists hoping to gain an edge in the battle against spy wars in the sky. The results of their investigations will be classified secret. Why give clues to the enemy?

One thing in this extraordinary story is clear. These balloons are far from innocent and have caught the guardians of our security napping. Vigilance has been poor.

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