Author: openjargon

• Ukraine wants to train another 30 pilots for the F-16s it's going to get, Politico reported.
• But training facilities in Arizona, Denmark, and Romania can't fill that demand, per the outlet.
• That means Ukraine will likely only have 20 pilots for the 85 F-16s it's receiving from Europe.

Ukraine is urgently pressing the US and its allies to free up seats at their F-16 training schools so Kyiv can use the dozens of warplanes gifted by NATO members, Politico reported.

But the outlet reported, citing three anonymous sources familiar with the situation, that Ukraine's Western allies cannot train all the pilots Kyiv is asking for.

Politico reported on Wednesday that Ukraine is expected to field about 20 F-16 pilots this year and is asking the US if it can train an additional 30.

Yet, the F-16 school in Tucson, Arizona, can at most accept only 12 Ukrainian trainees at a time since other countries also have contracts to train their pilots at the facility, per Politico.

"We understand they don't want to break those contracts, but they could move their American pilots to a different base for training," Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker who frequently lobbies Washington for aid to Kyiv, told the outlet.

The dozen Ukrainian F-16 pilots at Tucson are still being taught to fly their fighters or were part of the first batch reported in late May to complete their training, which the National Guard is providing.

There's also a training facility in Denmark. But, per Politico, it's only taken eight Ukrainian pilots and is set to close its F-16 program in November as it switches to the F-35.

Another training program in Romania, run by Lockheed Martin and subcontractor Draken, is expected to start soon. However, it's costly, and according to Politico, it plans to take only eight Ukrainian pilots.

With the Romania program not up yet, that means Ukraine is estimated to receive 20 F-16 pilots by year's end.

With operational F-16 squadrons usually including between 18 to 24 jets, Ukraine's unlikely to fly even a full squadron before 2025. Squadrons typically field several more pilots than the exact number of jets they have.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium are donating 85 F-16s to Ukraine, enough to form what Kyiv's air force hopes will be four squadrons of about 16 warplanes. Brand-new F-16s cost about $63 million each.

These donated fighters, built in the 1980s, are more modern upgrades to Ukraine's current slate of combat aircraft and were once considered a possible tool for Kyiv to achieve vital air superiority with better weapons and radar range.

But US officials have cautioned that the F-16s won't be a cure-all for Ukraine.

The warplanes "will give the Ukrainians an increment of capability that they don't have right now," Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in May 2023. "But it's not going to be a dramatic game changer, as far as I'm concerned, for their total military capabilities."

• D-Day on June 6, 1944 was a gargantuan feat. Is it the last invasion of its kind?
• In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before troops reached the beach.
• Modern weapons and surveillance systems give a defender more power to accomplish that.

D-Day is more than the largest amphibious invasion in history. Even 80 years after the battle, it still resonates as an epic of courage, endurance, and prodigious effort.

But was D-Day the last invasion of its kind? Could such immense resources be mustered again in a modern-day version of "Saving Private Ryan"-style landings?

World War II marked the zenith of wars waged between mass armies, an era that began in 1792, and modern weaponry, from guided missiles and spy satellites to nuclear bombs, has obviated large-scale amphibious invasions.

Even by the standards of WWII, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was gargantuan. Operation Overlord embraced more than 2 million personnel, 13,000 aircraft and 7,000 vessels from a dozen nations. Six infantry divisions — three American, two British and one Canadian — would hit the beach simultaneously, while three airborne divisions — two American and one British — landed in the German rear.

Some 160,000 troops splashed ashore that Tuesday morning, including around 75,000 American and 61,000 British soldiers, plus 13,000 Allied paratroopers descending from the skies. And these were only the tip of a spear across Europe and the Pacific: the US Army expanded to 11 million personnel during the war — including 2 million in the European theater alone — while the British Army grew to 3 million strong.

These forces today are only a fraction of what they were then. The entire US Army only numbers around 450,000 active-duty soldiers; for Britain, it's 76,000 and shrinking. There were 1,200 warships escorting the D-Day convoys of soldiers and equipment: today's US Navy has just 290 major warships and amphibious vessels spread around the globe, while the Royal Navy is down to 66 commissioned vessels. The Royal Canadian Air Force's 86 squadrons made it the world's fourth-largest air force in 1945, including nearly 40 squadrons that fought at Normandy: today it has just four fighter squadrons with 77 aging F/A-18 Hornet fighters.

D-Day's Allied planners were haunted by two fears: getting ashore despite German coastal defenses – and then surviving the inevitable German armored counterattack from Panzer divisions waiting behind the beaches. This meant there had to be enough transport capacity to land a large assault force and then quickly reinforce it with troops, supplies, and especially the tanks and artillery needed to even the odds in an armored fight.

More than 3,000 landing and transport vessels were tasked with this mission. The US Navy now aims for enough amphibious capacity to land just two Marine brigades on a hostile shore. More than 1,000 American C-47s transport planes dropped three airborne divisions on D-Day. With just over 200 C-17 cargo planes to meet worldwide airlift requirements, the current US Air Force would struggle to airdrop the entire 82nd Airborne Division.

All of which points to a fundamental difference between 1944 and 2024. The major combatants 80 years ago were committed to total war, in which they mobilized their human and industrial resources to the utmost. Today's Western militaries are much smaller volunteer forces, sustained by a defense-industrial base with only a fraction of its 1940s capacity. As shown by persistent shortages of weapons and ammunition in the Russo-Ukraine War, even if enough soldiers could be drafted to mount a Normandy-sized invasion, there wouldn't be enough equipment for them.

In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before the first troops stepped onto the beach. If the defender's navy and air force could destroy or turn back an invasion fleet, the landing would never take place. D-Day could only happen because, after a long and bloody struggle, the German surface fleet had been decimated, the U-boats suppressed, and the Luftwaffe mauled. Its forces defending French coasts were also spread thin because of the necessity of countering an advancing Soviet force of 140 divisions on the Eastern Front.

Though it must have seemed otherwise to troops splashing ashore under heavy fire, the very fact that the invasion was happening meant the battle for the beach already tipped in favor of the Allies. They could count on the naval bombardment and bombing runs to target German strongpoints and hammer its forces massing for a counterattack.

Isolated from reinforcement and resupply by US ships and aircraft, Japanese troops on Pacific islands, by contrast, could fight to the last man and inflict heavy casualties, but their destruction or isolation was only a matter of time. German counterattacks almost drove Allied landings at Sicily, Salerno and Anzio into the sea, but aided by devastating naval gunfire, the bridgeheads held on.

Hitler placed great hopes in the Atlantic Wall, a fortified belt across 1,700 miles of coastline. The bunkers and machine gun nests did inflict some losses at Normandy, especially during the bloodbath suffered by American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. But the Atlantic Wall was spread too thin to repel overwhelming Allied force at the landing sites.

In modern strategic parlance, stopping amphibious invasions is part of "anti-access/area denial," or A2/AD. Today's invasion planners worry that coastlines — and waters extending hundreds of miles from the beaches — are becoming no-go zones for warships and transports. Spy satellites and reconnaissance drones can discover an invasion fleet, exposing it to long-range attacks and giving the defender more time to mass troops and firepower in the likely landing zone. Coastal defense weapons include hypersonic anti-ship missiles streaking in at 10 times the speed of sound, GPS-guided cruise missiles and glide bombs, small but stealthy submarines, long-range guided artillery shells, and a variety of aerial and maritime drones. An enemy that has these can threaten the invasion armada and the landing force it launches as it chugs to the beach.

And it's not just major powers like Russia and China that have these arms: even smaller powers like Iran and North Korea could turn beaches into death traps.

There are already signs of this. In the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine Air Force — armed with bombs and a few Exocet anti-ship missiles — sank six British warships and transports, and nearly derailed the invasion. And in the ongoing Ukraine war, despite initial fears that the Russian Navy would shell cities and land amphibious troops, the Black Sea Fleet has lost two dozen warships and amphibious vessels to anti-ship missiles and small, robotic boats packed with explosives. Russia may have a much larger navy than Ukraine, but it doesn't dare venture closer to the Ukrainian coast.

Of course, it can be argued that technology works both ways. Smart bombs can destroy coastal defenses. Helicopters can ferry troops and supplies from an amphibious fleet hundreds of miles away. Drones likes unmanned tanks and mine-clearing robots can clear beach obstacles.

Yet ultimately, what has really killed massive amphibious invasions is the poisonous mushroom cloud. Even as far back as 1945, after the US atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nations realized that a single bomb capable of destroying a city could also wipe out an amphibious fleet. The U.S. Navy tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 vividly demonstrated how a nuclear blast could smash even battleships and aircraft carriers like bathtub toys. Russia for example is armed to the teeth with tactical nukes that could devastate a massed fleet.

This doesn't mean that amphibious operations are obsolete. They are still needed on a planet that is 71 percent water, and where the ocean is often the only feasible way to transport armies. But we should honor the memory of D-Day, because we shall never see another day like it again.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Germany has received its last VIP-equipped Airbus A350 plane, creating a uniform fleet.
• The aircraft got a paint job and a swanky new interior, though details of the cabin are scarce.
• The A350s replaced Germany's old VIP A340s after maintenance issues forced them out of service.

Boasting the country's national colors of black, red, and gold on the fuselage and wingtips, the German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, has received its third and final fully-equipped governmental A350-900.

Inside the aircraft, which is named "Kurt Schumacher" after the German politician, is a new VIP cabin retrofitted by the aircraft service provider Lufthansa Technik.

The jet is used for political and parliamentary transport, carrying top officials like Germany's president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

"Kurt Schumacher" was the first A350 built for the Luftwaffe, initially delivered in 2020.

Its Germany's third A350 aircraft fit with the swanky new cabin. The first two A350s complete with the VIP interior were sister planes "Konrad Adenauer" and "Theodor Heuss."

These aircraft were delivered factory-fresh in November 2022 and March 2023, respectively, with the new cabin already installed. The "Kurt Schumacher" A350 was sent back to Lufthansa Technik in early 2023 to get its retrofit.

"Only a few small accents in the interior, individual reminiscences of the respective namesakes, now distinguish "Adenauer," "Heuss," and "Schumacher" from each other," the company said.

Aside from the minor differences, Lufthansa Technik described the A350's new uniform fleet as having generous seating, an appropriate number of bathrooms, and a modern galley.

It represents a significant change from the interim cabin that was initially installed on the jet four years ago.

The "Kurt Schumacher" A350 once flew without a VIP cabin because, at the time, Germany was flying unreliable Airbus A340 government planes riddled with maintenance problems and needed replacements quickly put into service.

"In contrast to the [interim's] open cabin design, the various functional areas for political-parliamentary flight operations are now structurally separated from one another," Lufthansa Technik said after the delivery of the first VIP-equipped A350 in 2022.

The three A350 replacements cost Germany $1.3 billion, Aerotime Hub reported. This included about $325 million for the cabins and about $312 million for missile defense systems.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that, due to security reasons, interior shots of the aircraft have not been released to the public.

Given this is the first VIP A350 project for Lufthansa Technik, there are no prior fully-built cabin designs for reference. The company has a concept for a corporate A350 that it released in 2016, which includes things like a bed, showers, and a spa.

It's likely Germany's private fleet will have a similar grandiose design and aesthetic, but it will also have those specific governmental touches.

Other countries' widebody governmental airplanes can give an idea of what that might look like.

For example, the US government fleet consists of two specially modified Boeing 747-200B quad-jets to carry the president.

The "Flying Oval Office" has three levels, 4,000 square feet of floor space, dining and conference spaces, an executive suite, and an office for the president and his or her entourage.

Separate living areas are available for senior staff, the Secret Service, and the media, among other guests.

Mexico's former governmental Boeing 787 had similar luxuries, including a bedroom and dining and office spaces, as well as rows of business-class-like recliners.

The country sold the "ostentatious" airliner for $92 million last year because its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refused to use it.

• Children of Russian elites are addressing the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin's low-profile daughters are slated to speak at the event.
• Russia's flagship economic event used to attract high-profile international attendees before the Ukraine war.

It's the time of the year for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — or the "Russian Davos," as it's sometimes called.

For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin's flagship business and investment event has attracted the world's elites, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This list of high-profile world leaders has become substantially shorter since Russia invaded Ukraine, triggering sweeping sanctions against Putin's regime.

This year, the biggest names attending the event include Bolivian President Luis Arce and Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

But the four-day economic forum, which started on Wednesday, now also features the children of the Kremlin's top echelons, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

The nepo babies in attendance include Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, Putin's low-profile daughters.

Vorontsova, a 39-year-old endocrinologist, is representing the Russian Association for the Promotion of Science. She is slated to speak about bioeconomics.

Meanwhile, 37-year-old Tikhonova, who heads the Innopraktika center — backed by state-owned companies — is slated to join a panel to speak about the military-industrial complex.

Other Kremlin offspring addressing the event include Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of the former defense minister, who is slated to moderate a panel, and Kremlin Chief of Staff Anton Vaino's son, Alexander, per Bloomberg.

The second generation of Putin's inner circle appears to be stepping up now that their elders are aging; the Russian leader himself is 71 years old. However, the reason could also be tied to self-preservation in the authoritarian system, Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, told Bloomberg.

"To be safe, you have to be in the system," Schulmann told the media outlet.

In the past, Russia's elite were able to send their kids overseas to hedge their risks should anything go awry at home. But sanctions and heightened scrutiny have made this option much more difficult now.

"Now that this opportunity has become harder, the way to protect themselves is to appoint their children as bosses," Schulmann told Bloomberg.

Putin is scheduled to address the economic forum on Friday.

• Winning the AI race has long been a goal of Apple's. 
• The company brought in Google's AI chief John Giannandrea to lead their AI efforts back in 2018.
• But cultural clashes and insufficient computing resources set Apple's ambitions back.

Apple might seem like a laggard in the AI race right now, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

The Cupertino-based tech giant aimed to dominate the field when it recruited Google's AI chief, John Giannandrea, back in 2018.

Giannandrea's team, however, brought to the table as it was beset by cultural clashes and insufficient computing resources, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

According to the outlet, Giannandrea was brought in to lead the iPhone maker's AI strategy and improve the company's digital assistant, Siri.

The Scottish software engineer spent eight years at the search giant, where he led Google's machine intelligence, research, and search teams, before joining Apple.

But Giannandrea's team, which was largely made up of ex-Googlers and staff from Apple's startup acquisitions, had a tough time fitting in with the rest of the company.

Cultural clashes fuelled internal tensions

Even though Apple placed a huge emphasis on setting and meeting tight deadlines, Giannandrea's staff tended to emulate Google's approach of having loosely defined deadlines. And that culture clash made it difficult for other Apple engineers to work with Giannandrea's team, per The Journal.

In fact, some teams ended up ignoring Giannandrea entirely and went ahead with their own AI projects.

Former Apple employees told The Journal that the company's software chief, Craig Federighi, directed his staff to develop their own AI capabilities in image and video recognition.

Insufficient AI chips limited Apple's efforts

It also didn't help that Apple didn't manage to buy enough AI processors.

The chips, which are highly coveted by tech companies trying to establish themselves in the field, are critical for training AI models.

The shortage of computing resources ended up limiting Apple's AI efforts, with Giannandrea's team turning to external cloud services like Google to train their models, per The Journal.

Representatives for Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Apple's travails with AI underscore the immense challenges faced by tech giants trying to become dominant players in the field.

For one, great AI talent is scarce and hard to come by. This has turned recruitment into a zero-sum game, with tech giants brazenly poaching staff from one another with eye-watering pay packages.

Back in March, The Information reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was trying to recruit AI researchers from Google's DeepMind with personally written emails.

Even if money isn't an issue, tech companies still have to contend with the ongoing supply shortages for AI processors made by chip giants like Nvidia.

The mad dash for chips has been a huge boon for Nvidia's stock price, which has gained by more than 3,300% in the past five years.

On Wednesday, Nvidia's market capitalization soared above $3 trillion, pushing it past Apple to become the second most valuable company in the world.

For now, it seems that Apple will be trying to win the AI race with a different strategy — by partnering with Sam Altman's OpenAI.

Apple is set to announce its partnership with the ChatGPT maker during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, per Bloomberg. The company is also expected to unveil its AI offerings, which could include an overhaul of Siri.

• Apollo's Scott Kleinman warned of a "dry spell" for investors as deals from a friendlier era unwind.
• Managers must adjust financial projections from deals done in the zero-interest rate era.
• Investors want their money back, but managers often don't want to sell at a perceived discount.

A leading private equity executive just warned that investors are in for a "pretty dry spell for a few years."

"I'm here to tell you everything is not going to be OK," Scott Kleinman, the co-president of Apollo Global Management, said at a session during Berlin's SuperReturn International conference on Wednesday.

Managers have to adjust their financial projections for deals struck in the looser world of zero interest rates, when financing was cheap and consumers spent more.

"It's going to be a little bit tougher for private equity firms to see the types of returns they were looking for, versus in years past," Kleinman told Bloomberg Television on the conference's sidelines.

Some fund managers have to think creatively about how they wind down these deals, since the public markets have been touch-and-go for initial public offerings and potential private buyers have higher debt costs than a few years ago.

Private equity firms can't hold their investments forever. Their fund agreements typically limit their involvement to about 10 years, from fundraising to purchasing to selling, although it's become more common for investors to agree to extend the fund's life.

Investors don't want their money tied up for long, since they can't reinvest it. Across every stage of investing, from venture capital's startups to private equity's late-stage companies, investors are clamoring to get their money back. But managers don't want to sell at what they think is a discount to what the investment is worth.

"Eventually, sponsors are just going to have to accept that the valuation environment is lower and start selling companies," Kleinman said.

Apollo, long known for distressed investing, will be ready to invest: It had $65 billion of dry powder on hand at the end of the first quarter. The firm manages more than $670 billion overall.

• A retired UK colonel and a war historian are sounding the alarm on Britain's tank production.
• They warned against relying on advanced weapons too costly to scale up, a mistake Nazi Germany made.
• Their chief concern is with the Challenger-3 tank program, which is set to produce 148 vehicles.

A retired British Army colonel and a World War II historian are urging UK authorities to recalibrate weapons production, saying Britain is too fixated on building world-class military tech that it can't scale up.

This was the same problem that partially brought Nazi Germany to its knees, wrote Hamish de Bretton-Gordon and James Holland in a commentary published on Wednesday by The Telegraph.

"It would appear we are doomed to repeat the mistake Nazi Germany made in the Second World War — relying on sophisticated weaponry that is too expensive for mass production and will never produce decisive battlefield results," wrote the pair.

Holland is a World War II historian, and de Bretton-Gordon led several commands in his 23-year military career, including NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion and the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Regiment. Before he retired, de Bretton-Gordon was an assistant director in intelligence services.

Not enough tanks

One of the pair's major concerns is the Challenger-3 program, which aims to supply the UK with its latest, best-in-class tank fitted with a powerful 120mm smooth-bore gun.

But the UK is only planning to field 148 of them, and de Bretton-Gordon and Holland said that's far too few to fill the country's defense needs.

They recalled how Nazi Germany had obsessed over the quality of its tanks, chiefly the King Tiger, but meanwhile only managed to produce less than 500 of them. The tank most heavily produced by Germany at the time was the Panzer IV, but even so, Hitler's industrial complex built 8,500 vehicles at maximum.

Holland and de Bretton-Gordon contrasted that to the US producing more than 50,000 Sherman tanks and the Soviet Union building up to 84,000 T-34s.

In total, Nazi Germany built just under 50,000 tanks during the war, while the US built over 100,000. The Soviet Union built nearly 120,000 tanks.

The sheer numbers made a difference in World War II, and they'll make a difference now, de Bretton-Gordon and Holland wrote.

"The old adage of 'mass matters' is as relevant in the battle for the Donbas today as it was for the battles of Kursk, a few kilometers to the east in 1943," they wrote.

The UK's current main battle tank is the Challenger-2, with an estimated inventory of 227 vehicles. However, a UK Defense Committee report in March 2023 said that only about 157 are available for operations in a 30-day notice.

Western tanks such as the Challenger 2 and Leopard 2 might win against their adversaries in a one-on-one fight, but the Ukraine war is showing that they aren't making enough of a difference because Kyiv lacks the mass to push through Russian lines, the war experts wrote.

As the pair put it: "One leopard is no match for a pack of hyenas."

Advanced technology can still turn the tide of battle, but it must be a given that the enemy cannot counter the threat, they added.

Both called on UK authorities to "wake up," writing:

Whoever leads the country next needs an urgent Defence Review. Two massive aircraft carriers and 150 tanks are no deterrence to the likes of Russia or China. And it is these countries which we need to design our deterrence around, not some imaginary enemy that suits single service rivalries. Ten billion pounds spent on tanks rather than carriers would give us the conventional deterrence so lacking at the moment, for instance.

Notably, de Bretton-Gordon was also once a commander of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment.

Russia's mass-production game

In June 2023, de Bretton-Gordon praised British armor for its quality in his commentary on the war in Ukraine. He said that Kyiv's battle doctrine allowed it to effectively use tanks supplied by the UK against Russia's low-morale conscripted forces.

"As a former tank commander, I know the Challenger 2 vastly outmatches what's left of Russia's armor," de Bretton-Gordon wrote.

While de Bretton-Gordon continues to laud the capabilities of British tanks, the optimism and global conversation regarding Ukraine has shifted as Russia puts its economy on a war footing.

Moscow quickly expanded its defense manufacturing complex and recruitment drives to fuel mass reinforcements in Ukraine, prompting worries that it could sustain its heavy losses for several years.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is desperately trying to fill its ranks with more men and had a significant tranche of US aid delayed in Congress for months. While the flow of military equipment has resumed, Kyiv's need for manpower is still great.