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As the Navy retired its fleet of Grumman EA-6B Prowlers, they were relatively generous about letting various museums acquire them. For instance, my own Palm Springs Air Museum has one. And the Pacific Coast Air Museum in Santa Rosa also acquired one.  How does one get a Prowler to the museum? Well, usually, since a lot of air museums are located at airports, they just fly them there. After they land, a small team of Navy personnel drain all the fluids, and remove all the pryrotechnics (such as from the ejection seats) and any sensitive military equipment, such as secure communications items. That takes a couple days, but other than that, no other actions are usually needed.  There are exceptions, however. F-14s, because of the sanctions on spare parts to Iran, have to be pretty much gutted.

One cool thing. The very first Prowler delivered to the fleet at NAS Whidbey was flown in by a Navy pilot by the name of Fred Wilmot, in 1970, as I recall.  Fred eventually retired from the Navy, but still lives just off the end of the runway at NAS Whidbey.

When the time came for the Navy to send its final Prowler off to the Pt. Mugu Air Park, VAQ-129 called Fred, and invited him along. It is altogether fitting that Fred bookened the delivery, and sunset of the Prowler.

“What the U.S. is currently doing is called ‘innocent passage.’ Innocent passage refers to passage through a nation’s territorial waters by another nation’s military vessels within 12 nautical miles of the shore, taking only the minimum of action necessary and without causing any alarm or intimidation. The passage of military vessels is permitted so long as it is innocent passage. According to the statements by US Department of Defense, U.S. Navy vessels are making innocent passage. That is to say, their actions imply that they recognize the area as Chinese territorial waters, which has the opposite of the intended effect.”

via www.washingtontimes.com

I've made this point before.

Conducting "innocent passage" through the waters surrounding the artificial islands is worse than doing nothing at all.

Innocent passage, as a principal of international and maritime law, only applies to territorial waters of sovereign states. And international and maritime law does not, and has never, recognized that artificial islands are sovereign territory, with territorial waters.

But by conducting innocent passage, the US is de facto granting such status to the Chinese artificial islands.

As noted in the article, the US (and critically, its allies as well) must conduct actual operation in the waters to send the message that we do not recognize Chinese claims.

Such operations are not hostile acts, but merely the sort of operations that warships routinely conduct while at sea in international waters.

Will China object? Surely. But while deliberately provoking China isn't a good idea, ceding sovereignty of the waters to them is a far worse idea.

Via the Institute for the Study of War.

Via War is Boring:

On May 31, a rocket attack in the Water Tower neighborhood of the Malian town of Gao struck Chinese peacekeepers. The attack killed 29-year-old First Sgt. Shen Lianlian and injured several of his fellow soldiers. A separate strike the same day killed one French national and two Malians.

Beijing dispatched an investigative team of soldiers and diplomats to Gao. China’s ambassador to Mali, Lu Huiying, told Chinese media the team is to assist the United Nations as it probes the attack.

Read the whole thing.

China, for all its expansionistic actions in the waters off its eastern and southern shores, has steadfastly maintained a non-interventionist policy in Africa for decades. But as the article notes, that has changed considerably in recent years. Why the change?

Oil.

China’s impressive economic growth in the last three decades has relied heavily on coal, of which China has abundant supplies, but it is also increasingly reliant upon ever increasing use of oil. And securing oil is, for China as much as the US, a critical national security issue. Unlike the US, China has relatively little domestic production. And so they must turn to overseas sources. And for China, Africa is a very attractive place to invest in oil production infrastructure.

But while Africa may not be the mess the Middle East is, it is hardly the stable environment they might wish for. And so, they find themselves increasingly called to use their military to protect their investments. To be sure, to date the deployments have been small scale, but it is likely that they, like so many other nations, will see an expanding role and significant mission creep.

Even as the A-10 Warthog was entering service, the Air Force was beginning to worry about the ability of the low/slow airframe to survive in contested airspace such as that predicted in the event of war in Western Europe. The proliferation of radar laid anti-aircraft artillery and radar and infrared guided surface to air missiles in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany meant that any low level operations would require speed and maneuverability to survive, in addition to significant electronic countermeasures.

Casting about for a platform that could survive, and yet still fulfill the A-10’s mission of killing tanks, the Air Force decided to repurpose a portion of its existing F-16 fleet for the ground attack mission. Now, all F-16s have always had ground attack capability, of course. But one thing the A-10 had that the F-16 didn’t was the awesome GAU-8 Avenger 30mm cannon. The lethality of the 30mm gun against tanks was vastly greater than that of the 20mm M61A1 the F-16 was equipped with.

And so, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, General Electric, designers of the GAU-8, took the basic mechanism, and designed a much smaller variant, with only four barrels, and those much shorter, with a rate of fire of about 2400 rounds per minute. The gun itself was known as the GAU-13.* This shrunk down gun was stuffed into a pod about the size of an external fuel tank, known as the GPU-5.**

Original plans to hang a GPU-5 on about half the F-16 fleet slowly faded, especially as the Air Force fielded the infrared guided AGM-65D Maverick missile to the Falcon wings. The Maverick was just the thing to kill a tank, and its good standoff range meant the launching aircraft (either an F-16, or an A-10) greatly reduced its exposure to Soviet air defenses. That made the 30mm gun somewhat superfluous.

Still, once a procurement program gets started, it is often hard to stop. And so while not many GPU-5s were bought, enough were to equip an Air National Guard F-16 wing. And come January 1991, this wing found itself deployed to Desert Storm, and tasked to go kill tanks of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and southern Iraq.

The results were rather disastrous.

First, the gun pod wasn’t properly integrated with the F-16’s Heads Up Display for accurate aiming. Second, the shorter barrels of the gun meant greater dispersion of the rounds. Third, the enormous recoil forces on the pod caused it to vibrate and misalign, spraying shells all over the place. The accuracy of the pod was dismal. And so after the first day, the pods were dismounted,  never to be used again. Instead, the F-16s would attack armor with dumb bombs, cluster bombs, and Mavericks. Like they should have been doing from the start.

*GAU- Gun, Aircraft Unit

**GPU- Gun Pod Unit

A two-fer today, first a heartbreaker in the New Mexico. A Tier VI Ranked Battle that we juuuust barely lost. I was pretty pleased about sniping the Tier VI Soviet cruiser Budnyonny at very long range though.

Next up, going crazy in the Tier II US destroyer, the Sampson, taking out an enemy Sampson, an enemy cruiser, and the terrible Tier III US battleship, the South Carolina.