rational defense

Global reach has always been important for the American military. Situated securely between the world’s two largest oceans and at peace with its neighbors, any potential challenger is an ocean and half a world away. This is not just a late-breaking dynamic, either. The U.S. Navy began conducting long-range expeditionary operations with its first frigates and has since consolidated control of the world’s oceans, creating a foundational element of its profound geographic security.

The last military conflict to take place on the soil of the continental United States was the Civil War. And even before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in 1941, American engineers were designing an aircraft with the range to strike across oceanic distances.

This is a formative and fixed reality for American military power: the objective has consistently historically been at intercontinental distances from the United States. This has made air and naval bases around the world (from Guam to Diego Garcia) — like coaling stations before them — essential to the projection and sustainment of American military force far afield.

In the case of Iraq (both in 1991 and in 2003), allied airfields within the region could host fighter jets for the opening gambit of the air campaign — the ‘first-day-of-the-war.’[1] In the case of Afghanistan, however, the situation has been more challenging. Initial airstrikes were conducted by cruise missiles and the American long-range bomber fleet operating from bases like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. For strike fighters, the mission was initially solely reliant on carrier-based aircraft. In November 2001, the Marines and sailors of Task Force 58 flew nearly 450 miles inland (over Pakistan) from the sea to secure an airstrip in Afghanistan’s Rigestan Desert that would become known as Forward Operating Base Rhino. Even today, Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan — the base of operations for the principal aerial refueling mission for all of Afghanistan — is at risk.

While the quick availability of appropriate airbases in any potential conflict will inevitably be situationally dependent, the problem is not going away — and indeed has been a fairly consistent challenge for the U.S. Air Force in the 21st century. And while local airbases will inevitably need to be established in theater to sustain operations, having a base close enough for fighter aircraft to participate in the first-day-of-the-war is particularly time-sensitive. In addition, the proliferation of ballistic missile technology also potentially endangers nearby airbases, which are fixed and easy to target.[2]

When this problem cannot be resolved, the U.S. is left with two options: long-range strike aircraft and naval assets (both of which can launch salvos of cruise missiles). The latter is being pushed further and further offshore.

The modern American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier displaces 100,000 tons. There is little that can be done to hide it. And though it is protected by some of the best defensive systems in the world, it is increasingly vulnerable as more capable supersonic anti-ship missiles proliferate. Indeed, China has begun to work on anti-ship ballistic missiles, presenting yet another defensive challenge. Part of China’s naval strategy has long focused on delaying the approach of U.S. aircraft carriers to its coast in a potential conflict by making the surrounding waters sufficiently treacherous with anti-ship missiles as well as patrol and attack submarines that its escorts are forced to conduct painstaking clearing operations to protect their charge.

In short, the long-range bomber fleet is a precious commodity and – especially in the case of the twenty B-2A Spirit and sixty B-1 “Bone” bombers, which are survivable in a more dangerous threat environment – offer a unique option for global strike capability. It is a capability that is inherently necessary for the American geographic situation if Washington intends to be able to project military force anywhere in the world. And it is a capability and a force structure that is too-little discussed when ‘first-day-of-the-war’ discussions attempt to argue over the distinction between the range of the F-22 and the F-35.

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1 A term used to describe — essentially — the dynamic of being able to participate in air operations the day the shooting starts and often used to emphasize the increased demands of operating in a high threat environment before enemy air defenses have been suppressed or destroyed and air superiority effectively established.
2 The Pentagon is fielding both the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and Theater High Altitude Area Defense systems to provide protection against this threat.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) alone operates some 2,500 front-line fighter jets. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps combined bring more than 1,200 additional combat fighters to the table. (Indeed, counting its hundreds of helicopters, Marine aviation by itself is counted among the ten largest air forces in the world.)

With only about 160 heavy bombers, the long-range bomber fleet is a tiny fraction of that size, and just over half are B-52H Stratofortresses. Though a venerable aircraft that has been heavily upgraded, the B-52 design is the product of 1950s aerospace engineering, and even the youngest airframes are approaching fifty years of service. On the other end of the spectrum are the twenty remaining B-2A Spirit stealth bombers. A crash on Guam last year, which resulted in the loss of a single airframe, reduced the operational fleet by nearly five percent.

This was not always the balance. After World War II, it was the bomber community that was ascendant. Hundreds of airframes of each new bomber design were built (nearly 750 B-52 airframes were built before construction ended in the early 1960s). From 1961 when General Curtis LeMay (the mastermind behind the incidiary bombing of Imperial Japan) became Air Force Chief of Staff until 1982, only a single fighter pilot held the top post (in the late 1960s). An uninterrupted chain of bomber pilots held that top job for more than a decade.

But after that, it was the fighter community that ran the show until 2008, when a reform-minded special ops pilot was given the job by Defense Secretary Robert Gates specifically in order to break the fighter community’s grip on the service. Air combat losses in Vietnam were a formative experience for that community and raised concerns about the importance of close-in dogfighting in establishing and maintaining air superiority and air supremacy. The ultimate outgrowth of this concern is the new F-22 Raptor, by most reports an exceptional fifth generation air superiority fighter capable of both long-range engagement and close-in dogfighting. Indeed, with the Joint Strike Fighter program underway as well, the USAF has two separate fighter jet development and procurement programs running at the same time. In comparison, what is known as the ‘next-generation bomber’ is not only potentially on the chopping block but (even if all goes well) is not scheduled to have a testbed airborne for nearly a decade.

However, the current balance of fighters and bombers is not simply a matter of institutionalized proclivities. The original intention was to procure more than 130 B-2 airframes. The B-2 program has not been efficient or cheap, but it produced a high-end capability unmatched in the world, and offers the U.S. the capability to hold nearly any target on earth at risk. The USAF knew it wanted to invest in and build the transformational B-2 before it could actually do it (leading President Ronald Reagan to kickstart the B-1 program and aggressively produce the B-1B as an interim capability).

But the Soviet Union collapsed just as the first airframes were taking flight. The combination of 1990s defense spending cuts and the fundamental shift in the global military balance doomed the ambitious program to 21 (now 20) airframes with no replacement program on the horizon, and contributing directly to the current composition of the USAF bomber fleet.

In short, that fleet is essentially a fixed reality for the next decade. But one of the key points missing from the ongoing debate over the right balance of aircraft for the USAF is that range matters — and not just within the narrow band of distance between the reach of the F-22 and estimates of F-35 capabilities.

Two satellites collided in orbit Feb. 10 for the first time in history.[1] Nearly 500 miles above the vast emptiness of northern Siberia, Iridium 33 (NORAD ID 24946) – a communications satellite operated by the U.S. Company — and Cosmos 2251 (NORAD ID 22675) — a supposedly decommissioned Russian communications relay satellite — crashed into each other just before 1700 UTC on Feb. 10. At orbital velocities in excess of 15,000 miles per hour and impacting on nearly perpendicular orbits, the kinetic energy of the impact instantly tore the two satellites apart and left some 600 pieces of debris in orbit.[2]

Though this altitude is close to the most heavily populated band of low earth orbit (LEO), the collision is still, statistically speaking, extraordinarily unlikely — often likened to two ping pong balls floating in the Pacific Ocean accidentally colliding. Even though U.S. Strategic Command has cataloged and tracks some 18,000 objects orbiting the earth (only a few hundred are operational satellites), the chances of collision are extremely low because of the immense distances and vast swaths of empty space involved, and the timing and spatial alignment must all come together perfectly. (Indeed, the U.S. military attempts to plot and forecast potential collisions and help satellite operators avoid even near misses, though this effort is not as systematized as it might be.)

In short, there is a reason it has not happened before.

But that is also changing. Conspiracy theories aside, the long-term the trajectory is clear: LEO will only get more crowded. As that happens, systematic international coordination and cooperation will become increasingly necessary. (The international community already has standards for debris-mitigation in satellite launches and orbital insertions.) Much like confronting climate change, the sooner meaningful, comprehensive action is taken, the more manageable the traffic control and debris challenges will be.

And these challenges are already very real. It is not just about preventing useful satellites from colliding. The debris that such a collision — or the Jan. 11, 2007 Chinese test of an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) — creates can endanger other satellites and even manned spaceflight efforts. Though the skin on certain parts of the International Space Station already shows signs of minor impacts, something smaller than a bolt traveling at orbital velocities could actually cause potentially catastrophic damage to the Station or another manned spaceflight.

Indeed, some experts have estimated that as few as a dozen events like the Feb. 10 collision or the Chinese ASAT test could effectively render whole swaths of LEO essentially unusable. As such, more comprehensive international efforts to manage traffic in space, monitor debris and forecast potential impacts are necessary.

RD is not about to suggest that space is about to become the next Antarctica, where all the nations of earth can agree not to place military assests. There may not be weapons in space yet in the traditional sense, but LEO is better likened to airspace in the 20th century. Its military value is not only undeniable, but inescapable — already demonstrated quite clearly by the persistent orbits of RQ-1 Predators, MQ-9 Reapers and RQ-4 Global Hawks around the world controlled from the continental United States by satellite and every time the American Global Positioning System guides a Joint Direct Attack Munition precisely to its target.

Space is critical for modern military endeavors and as such will be exploited for military means. Adversaries will attempt to leverage space-based assets for military means and deny the use of those assets to the enemy. Defensive measures for satellites may well eventually include defensive weaponry. Space-based ballistic missile defenses (where the platform would be in the ideal position for an intercept) have also been discussed.

Indeed, as the collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 aptly demonstrates, an apparently incuous and even long-since decommissioned satellites also have the potential to be an effective ASAT. Though to have a true ASAT, precision maneuvering, guidance and targeting capabilities not necessarily inherent in the average satellite would be necessary, it would be impossible to ensure that every satellite put in orbit does not have these capabilities disguised beneath its interior.

The reality is that any treaty to ban the weaponization of space is effectively unverifiable due to the realities of the orbital environment. Without verifiability, no rational state could have reasonably full confidence in the treaty, which would only encourage clandestine ‘cheating’ to hedge against others doing the same.

Nevertheless, it does not mean that international cooperation on traffic management and debris monitoring and mitigation should not extend to discussions of preventing a devastating exchange of ASATs that could ruin LEO not just for the belligerants, but for all mankind.

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1 While there have been some impacts of small pieces of space debris with each other and even larger objects and anything in orbit is regularly peppered with microscopic matter, this is the first time two actual satellites have collided.
2 According to early estimates.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty prohibits all nuclear explosions for any purpose. Signed in 1996, the treaty has yet to be ratified by all parties and thus has not yet taken effect. Yet despite a handful of test by India and Pakistan in 1998 and a single ‘test’ in 2006 by North Korea[1], the ban has been observed in practice, over time establishing a taboo on further testing.

Obviously, even a signed treaty fully in force will not guarantee that even a signatory might not one day feel the need to test or use a nuclear weapon. RD is hardly professing a deep faith in the inviolability of written agreements when it comes to geopolitical struggles. But the more established that the ban becomes, the higher the cost of breaking it becomes. It does not actually prohibit anyone from anything, but it does change the calculus for testing and thus reduces its likelihood to some degree.

RD has argued that as long as this prohibition is observed, that it has profound implications for worldwide nuclear weapons development. In short, even crude nuclear devices are extremely complex mechanisms. Modern two-stage thermonuclear weapons are an intricate synthesis of a series of advanced technologies. Though obviously quite classified, current American warheads are widely thought to be two-stage thermonuclear designs, the newest with a non-spherical primary shaped like an egg. Translation: two distinct, but carefully timed nuclear chain reactions that must be precisely timed to a fraction of a fraction of a second. The non-spherical detail is important because it makes the already enormously complex implosion design even more intricate and complicated. Also hardened to endure not only the acceleration of launch, the cold vacuum of space and the immense heat of reentry but also electromagnetic interference, these warheads are then crammed into a steeply conical reentry vehicle composed of advanced composites to endure the heat of friction during reentry at extremely high speeds. These reentry vehicles are as small as six feet tall and less than two feet wide at the base. In sum, it is without exaggeration one of the most complex devices ever constructed by man.

These modern designs are the product of hundreds of nuclear tests (over a thousand in the American case) and dozens of operationally-fielded warheads over the course of nearly half a century. That testing is of paramount importance to the design of such a complex weapon. Though the U.S. National Labs now extensively use complex computer modeling, these models are informed by the data obtained through decades of testing.

In short, the testing freeze has the effect of severely curtailing the pace of global nuclear weapons development. Without testing, it is difficult for a country to make more than conservative evolutionary alterations to its existing, proven warhead architecture. Anything beyond conservative and evolutionary alteration would make certification without testing something of a gamble. Even with such a gamble, it would be difficult for a national command authority to have a particularly high confidence in such a warhead.

As such, the practical taboo against testing that gains credence with each passing year has the effect of removing much of the dynamism out of the global nuclear balance. The frantic pace of weapons development during the Cold War was only possible because of the equally frantic pace of testing. Without that testing, countries are in practice locked into conservative and evolutionary changes to the most modern warhead designs in their arsenals that they were able to verify through testing before the ban took effect. The more ambitious their changes, the more difficult those new designs become to accurately certify and the lower confidence will be that they will actually work.

So the test ban benefits most the countries that have the most advanced weapon designs: the United Kingdom, France, Russia but especially the United States (and perhaps Israel and China). Without the opportunity to validate extensive design changes and attempts at generational leaps in warhead architecture through actual testing, such weapons are difficult to certify. Ultimately, even with the inexorable improvement in computer modeling, without a resumption of testing on a broad scale,[2] the prospect for a highly dynamic nuclear balance reminiscent of the second half of the 20th century seems increasingly remote.

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1 Weak seismographic data from the October 9, 2006 North Korean nuclear ‘test’ suggests a yield of less than a kiloton — and perhaps as low as half a kiloton. Though some radioactive output was detected, this suggests that the device fizzled. In other words, Pyongyang has never conducted a successful nuclear test.
2 Should testing on a 20th century scale resume, of course, all bets are off.

Position Paper #1 — Aggressively pursue the most viable means of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent by building and fielding the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

RD has consistently argued in favor of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) on the basis that it is most viable means for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent while minimizing the chances of further nuclear testing.

The precise nature of nuclear weapons design is obviously highly (and legitimately) classified. But while the finer points of the technical debate are obviously limited to experts and a select few elected representatives, the broad strokes of the issue at hand are clearly discernible. (Indeed, RD has been founded in part on the belief that such broad strokes can and must be discerned and understood.)

The RRW program proposes modest and conservative design changes to Cold War-era warhead architecture that would seek to maximize safety, reliability and maintainability with an eye towards an essentially indefinite service life. With only modest and conservative tweaks, RRW is intended to be certified without requiring nuclear testing (though there admittedly cannot be any absolute guarantee of that in such an endeavor). New warheads would then be built to serve as the mainstay of the American nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future.

This proposal has experienced strong opposition from many in the arms control community, and the program was consistently denied funding by the 110th Congress. With an even stronger Democratic 111th Congress now in session, prospects appear bleak. In any event, little is likely to happen before the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States reports its findings April 1 (the Commission released an interim report last Dec. 15). Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is also moving to accelerate the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review process, which will help chart the Pentagon’s course well into the next decade. So despite the opposition of the 110th Congress, the issue of the RRW remains very much alive.

Indeed, Gates has argued consistently for RRW — most prominently in a speech late last year to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Gates expressed grave concerns about the long-term sustainability of the American nuclear arsenal and warned that without RRW, the existing arsenal would eventually need to be subjected to nuclear testing as it continued to age in order to maintain a high degree of confidence in reliability.

To have meaning, a nuclear deterrent must be credible in not just its existence but the much more complicated willingness to actually employ it — at the very least in a second or retaliatory strike. Inextricably linked to this is the issue of confidence. Both the government that commands the arsenal and those it is intended to deter must be confident that the delivery systems and the warheads actually work.

The incredible complexity of modern nuclear weapons makes that confidence a challenge — especially over time. Though obviously quite classified, current American warheads are widely thought to be two-stage thermonuclear designs, the newest with a non-spherical primary shaped like an egg. Translation: two distinct, but carefully timed nuclear chain reactions that must be precisely timed to a fraction of a fraction of a second. The non-spherical detail is important because it makes the already enormously complex implosion design even more intricate and complicated. Also hardened to endure not only the acceleration of launch, the cold vacuum of space and the immense heat of reentry but also electromagnetic interference, these warheads are then crammed into a steeply conical reentry vehicle composed of advanced composites to endure the heat of friction during reentry at extremely high speeds. These reentry vehicles are as small as six feet tall and less than two feet wide at the base. In sum, it is without exaggeration one of the most complex devices ever constructed by man.

This complexity makes reliability particularly challenging. The U.S. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories use the world’s most powerful supercomputers to model the effects of age on the existing arsenal as part of the current Life Extension and Stockpile Stewardship Programs (LEP and SSP).

But there are necessarily limits to what LEP and SSP can do. This has nothing to do with LEP and SSP and everything to do with the warheads they are working with. While safety, reliablitiy and maintainability have obviously always been key design considerations for nuclear weapons, other factors were extremely important in the Cold War arms race, during which and for which every warhead now in the U.S. arsenal was designed. For instance, high yield-to-weight ratios became an important metric in the Cold War, especially when mounting multiple warheads on a single missile (known individually as a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV). And maximizing accuracy was essential for counterforce targets like hardened missile silos. Accuracy favored particularly steep and narrow reentry vehicle cones (which were more stable during reentry and were almost certainly a key factor in the use of narrower non-spherical primaries).

Obviously weight and accuracy remain essential design considerations. But in the days of the Cold War, their importance was paramount, and design compromises were inevitably made that complicated warhead architecture from a sustainability standpoint. Indeed, at that time warheads were regularly displaced by newer, more advanced designs. The continual cycle of upgrades and replacements was simply part of the Cold War design paradigm. None of the warheads now in the arsenal would have been designed with the underlying consideration that they would be serving in an operational status essentially indefinitely.

Any nuclear warhead — like any weapon system — will invariably become increasingly complicated to retain in an operational status as it ages. But the existing arsenal was not optimized with such considerations in mind and consequently the challenges of sustainment will almost certainly come to a head faster.

Ideally, these mounting challenges to certification and thus confidence would be spotted years in advance, so that there might be time to begin designing a replacement warhead at that point. However, the current circumstances and the prohibition on nuclear testing now effectively in force (in practice, if not yet law) make the issue urgent even if (hypothecially) current modelling does suggest that LEP and SSP can continue to ensure confidence for some time to come.

This is because the engineers that had first-hand experience with nuclear weapons design during the Cold War and in the era of nuclear testing are aging. That expertise and experience not only would likely ensure a better design, but would also almost certainly play a role in minimizing the risk of nuclear testing becoming necessary for certification. As these engineers age and approach retirement, they will be transfering their knowledge and experience to the next generation of nuclear weapons engineers. But something will inevitably be lost in that transfer, and the subtlety and nuance of design work

As such, if the primary goal for the United States is to sustain a decisive U.S. nuclear deterrent indefinitely and to do so without full scale nuclear testing, the answer is RRW. RRW maximizes the long-term sustainability of the arsenal by being tailored for that mission. Pursuing RRW now also maximizes the experience and expertise of Cold War weapons engineers and consequently helps minimize the chances for full scale nuclear testing.

The new warhead would also have the benefit of drastically reducing the size of the nuclear stockpile by maximizing confidence and minimizing the need for hedge stocks, when compared to current requirements. The result is a streamlined and more cost-effective nuclear enterprise.

In sum, further disarmament is absolutely in the cards. But total disarmament — ‘getting to zero’ — remains unforeseeable in the current geopolitical climate.[1] While some may consider that an admirable goal, it would be irresponsible to bank on its success in the foreseeable future. And the longer the United States relies on its Cold War-era arsenal, the closer it gets to implicating itself in a nuclear test for certification. Meanwhile, the longer RRW is pushed to the right, the less Cold War-era expertise and experience the program will have in the design phase.

As such, RD believes that the the aggressive pursuit of RRW is the most viable means of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

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1 This is hardly a minor point, but not one RD intends to delve into here. In short, every other nuclear power in the world has made choices to modernize its arsenal or is actually manufacturing new warheads to sustain its arsenal well into the 21st century. This makes the American arsenal unique in that Washington has refused to bite the bullet and accept responsibility for the politically unpopular but nevertheless necessary decision to sustain the arsenal indefinitely.

Few nations on earth have the luxury of applying a such a generous budget to such forward thinking and innovative projects as the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Indeed, one of the central factors of global American military dominance is technological superiority. Advanced weapon systems and technological innovation have been at the heart of U.S. military successes like Desert Storm in 1991 and the (initial) success of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet even the United States, which has recently been spending more than the rest of the world combined on defense, has its limitations. Even with massive increases in the defense budget since September 11, 2001, the cost — not to mention the wear and tear — of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with failures in major acquisition programs in every branch of the military has driven the entire American defense budget into crisis. What’s more, defense spending is set to decline by the time the 2010 and 2011 defense budgets begin to take shape.

This means choices. There are indeed very real justifications for expensive, high-end weapon systems and technologies that offer American fighting forces a generational lead over adversaries. But cost-effective innovation and acceptance of the realities and budgetary limitations of even U.S. coffers will be absolutely essential to a cost-effective and flexible defense establishment in the coming years.

RD is hardly the first to make this point. Submissions to the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings have been lamenting the infeasibility of the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding plan for years — just to name one example. There is now wide agreement that the defense budget process and (especially) the procurement process are badly broken.

But this is not just a matter of cutting costs due to budgetary reality. RD was founded in part on the dangers of institutional inertia in defense establishments. Innovation and intellectual agility are a challenge in any organization the size of the U.S. Department of Defense.

One of the most clear instances of this is the F-35 Lightning II, the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. Even mentioning the F-35 in the blogosphere these days can bring down a storm of debate — often more of a post-by-post shouting match.

For RD, the problem begins with the genesis of the JSF program. Merged after the collapse of the Soviet Union from a number of U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps development programs, JSF sought to replace nearly all the strike fighters in the U.S. inventory with three variants of a single design.

There are two interrelated problems. The first is that the consolidation of such a broad spectrum of design requirements — from the austere, forward operations and short take-off and vertical landing requirements of the Marine Corps to the complex electronic warfare and delicate stealth requirements of the Air Force — would necessarily require compromises in almost every mission area and subsystem. This is the nature of the multi-mission platform. To be tailored for a variety of missions, that platform cannot be optimized for any one mission.

Consolidation is absolutely worthwhile, and reducing the variety of aircraft types in the inventory has very real benefits when it comes to manufacture, maintenance and training — benefits that can translate to lower life-cycle costs and the all-important bottom line of the budget. But just as specialization can go to far and lead to too many mission-specific platforms with too little wider utility, so too can consolidation go too far. When consolidation begins to build excessive cost and capability into each platform to the point where most of the expense and high-end capability will not be required for the bulk of its missions, the underlying rational of consolidation begins to crumble.

The counterpoint to the JSF is the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, which is at least a generation older and flew three decades before the production F-35 testbed. Purpose-built from the ground up for close air support, it is slow (but with exceptional handling characteristics at low altitude and low speeds) and low-tech (but durable and capable of absorbing damage from low-level ‘trash fire’) — and has been unpopular with some U.S. Air Force brass almost since its inception.

Continually refining and improving weapon systems is an important part of maintaining an edge over adversaries. But there are cases, like the Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun. In continuous service for nearly ninety years with the U.S. military, it continues to be issued to U.S. troops with only minor modifications to the original design, currently fielded as the M2 HB (for ‘Heavy Barrel’).

This is not to say that the very real subtleties of close air support (CAS) are akin to the basic requirement for a heavy machine gun. CAS in dense urban environments in Iraq has led to important refinements in the process, and live video feeds have become an important addition to the kill chain. But while the F-35 does undeniably promise some significant improved capabilities, it is essentially trying to improve upon the CAS version of the M2 HB.

In addition, the stealth characteristics and survivability in a high-threat environment of the F-35 come at a high cost when most U.S. CAS has been historically carried out in a relatively low or completely non-existent threat environment. What the mission often calls for is an aircraft that can loiter for long periods, carry a lot of ordnance and approach the target more slowly in order to have extra seconds to acquire a target in difficult or clustered terrain — be it an urban fight or a rural one where the potential for civilian collateral damage can be high.

The second problem is that two decades have elapsed since the predecessors to the JSF program were conceived. The adversary and the mission that the JSF’s underlying requirements were geared towards — World War III against the Soviet Union — has evaporated.

But more importantly, the years since its inception have seen the dawn of a new era in unmanned systems. The potential for applications to many aspects of the fight are only just now being explored.

Obviously, these systems may never completely replace human pilots. They certainly are not ready to do so today. But the distinction is that the F-22 Raptor is already in service, while the F-35 will in all likelihood still be ramping up production in a decade. While they are not the same aircraft, nor are they capable of all the same missions.

The problem is that one of the mission areas where unmanned systems are more aggressively employed is high-risk profiles. Robots have long played a role in explosive ordnance disposal. One of the areas in which unmanned aerial systems (UAS) may soon be playing an increasingly prominent role is in the early phases of an air campaign in a high threat environment, and particularly in the suppression of enemy air defenses. A computer may not be as adaptable as a human pilot, but in more dangerous mission profiles, the reduced flexibility may be deemed acceptable to avoid risking the life of the pilot, especially as unmanned capabilities improve. (And there are also cases in which software can react faster than humans and better compensate for battle damage, as DARPA demonstrated last year by blowing sixty percent of a wing off of a model airplane flying with damage tolerance software).

The point here is not to enter into a debate about the relative merits of manned versus unmanned flight, but rather to highlight the inexorable trajectory of increased usage of UAS, particularly in some of the high-threat environments that much of the F-35 design has been dedicated to working in.

In addition, new information management technologies are having to be developed in order for the sole pilot in an F-35 to cope with an unprecedented amount of information (and in all likelihood, the information management challenge is only going to continue to rise in the future). In other words, the F-35 is straining the mental and sensory bandwidth of its pilot essentially from day one. There is little room for growth in information management, or the ability to monitor and task potential combat UAS that will one day inexorably be flying and fighting alongside manned aircraft.

Taken as a whole, the F-35 is a multi-mission aircraft that has made too many compromises in too many mission areas and yet harbors aspirations of next-generation capability. The design attempts to be everything, and in the process stumbles badly. While there may be some place for it, the U.S. Air Force’s comprehensive acquisition of the F-35 is not striking a balance between high-end, technologically advanced weaponry and low-end capabilities like UAS.

In addition to attempting to give definition to the outside parameters of a defense debate — even if the operational capabilities that actually define those parameters are classified — there is also the matter of understanding internal technical restraints that prohibit the ways in which outside parameters are addressed or confronted.

The distinction is an important one, when understanding exactly what the wider public does not — and cannot — know in specific and concrete detail. The contribution of, for example, Tom Stefanick’s Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy or Air Power Australia is largely in defining the operating environment and demands that will be placed on a new technology or weapon system in the real world. Stefanick takes the nature of the environment and the limitations that the operating environment imposes in order to argue a larger point about the implications of a doctrinal choice to target Soviet ballistic missile submarines. Carlo Kopp and his associates at Air Power Australia define the future operating environment in order to argue that the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is insufficient to meet Australia’s needs. This is not to oversimplify or argue that Stefanick and Kopp have not also made contributions in other regards. But their emphasis has been to argue against a particular doctrinal or procurement choice (respectively) based on wider outside parameters.

But another class of consideration that is equally important to properly estimate and account for is internal technical and capability limitations.

This can at times be forgotten when the debate is taking place in the United States, where the technological edge — if not a generational lead — is percieved as the rule (if not always in practice). But other countries deal with this problem on a much more regular basis. With limitations in terms of funding, development timeline and existing technical capacity, there may not always be a technological solution to the problem. At the very least, the operating environment or the defined objectives can easily force new constraints on the problem and require sub-optimal counters and solutions.

The perfect example of this is the debate about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

The challenge in this case is not that the American nuclear enterprise does not have the technological know-how or the institutional knowledge necessary to design a first-rate and fundamentally new nuclear warhead (though it has nevertheless lost most of those who had first-hand experience with weapons design in the days of extensive nuclear testing — and the rest are on the cusp of retirement). The problem with such new weapon design is that it requires nuclear testing to develop and certify — something few are interested in — and almost no one is advocating for.

This is in part because the current modern nuclear weapons design is exceptional. In terms of its mission, the late two-stage thermonuclear warhead is exceptional. With highly accurate guidance and yields — sometimes selectable — in the 100-500 kiloton range (ten to twenty times or more the strength of the Hiroshima bomb), these modern weapons are sufficient to impact and ensure destruction. Even in the case of a pinpoint target like a specific missile silo, even if the silo is so hardened to nuclear attack that it cannot be destroyed directly through destructive force, the crater from the blast is thought to potentially be sufficiently wide enough to encompass the silo and its below-ground structure, depriving it of its very foundation. This is known as crater-death.

With such accuracy and destructiveness already achieved and the drive of intellectual and resource investment over the course of nearly half a century that made these designs possible, improvement in the post-Cold War world becomes a much more subtle — and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, much less urgent — matter.

But in the case of the RRW and the American deterrent, the defining characteristics of the requirement have already been made clear (if not explicitly):

1.) the desire to sustain, in one form or another, a decisive U.S. nuclear deterrent indefinitely
2.) to do so without full scale nuclear testing

These defining characteristics place immense constraints on the possible technological solutions. Without nuclear testing to certify new design changes or to continue to sustain a high degree of confidence in the existing arsenal indefinitely. Both of these routes almost certainly eventually implicate the Pentagon in nuclear testing, despite the impressive simulations and modeling that some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are undoubtedly capable of achieving.

The decisive constraint is the the existing design work — design work only achieved as the highly refined product of half a century of nuclear development that included not only the immense investment of resources, intellectual capital and money but extensive nuclear testing. This is not an RD argument for a renewal of testing. But the long-term solution in this case is rooted in the internal, technical limitations that a moratorium (in practice if not in legal effect) on nuclear testing carries with it.

RRW — or a fundamentally similar concept under a different name — would take existing design work and combine it with what remains of Cold War-era design and development experience and move to expediently refine existing designs. This refinement would be extremely conservative and limited tweaks in order to maximize long-term sustainability, maintainability and reliability along with the latest safety features.

While these have always been design considerations, they were not all the highest priority during the Cold War, especially when the continual development and fielding of replacement warheads was ingrained in the process. The best chance of doing this is the current moment, when the nuclear enterprise both still remembers (as an institution) the era of warhead design and testing as well as having accrued a great deal of first-hand experience with sustainability issues through the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs that have helped maintain the arsenal since the Cold War.

While the debate will undoubtedly rage over the next few years about the proper way to sustain the American nuclear arsenal, the debate must begin with the understanding of the internal constraints that leave very little maneuverability or options if the underlying objectives are sustainment and the avoidance of nuclear testing.

In 1987, Tom Stefanick published Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy. In it, he attempted to question a tenet of American naval strategy during the Cold War: the targeting of Soviet ballistic missile submarines and, more importantly, the implications of that doctrinal choice. During the Cold War especially, the tools of naval strategy — everything from sonar capabilities to the shape of a submarine’s propeller (known as the screw) — were deeply classified. Nevertheless, through research and analysis, certain parameters of a problem can be defined and intelligent questions can be asked. Based on those parameters, Stefanick was bold enough to ask whether, in the outbreak of war between the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact, would the loss of some of the Soviet strategic fleet (especially a precipitous loss) actually serve to further escalate the situation and thus increase the likelihood of a full-blown nuclear exchange, in part because Soviet second-strike capability had been degraded.

There are, of course, a mountain of suppositions in any World War III scenario during the Cold War. There was — and is — no way to answer that question for certain. Weighting heavily on the other hand are very compelling military imperatives that argue for the targeting of ballistic missile submarines — one of the most survivable platforms for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The comparative advantage of American submarine technology allowed the U.S. Navy to target Soviet boomers while American missile boats were comparatively safe from Soviet attack submarines. But it was a fair question for Stefanick to ask, even if his work at the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense Disarmament Studies may have brought certain ideological presuppositions to the table — and even if defining the parameters of his question was daunting and produced a book that is more than half appendices (appendices that make for particularly good open-source resources, it so happens). Indeed, my copy of his book was first owned and read by someone in the office of the U.S. Commander of Naval Forces, Japan.

It is this very sort of debate that RD considers essential and upon which it has been founded.

When it comes to debate about the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) these days, discussions tend to quickly descend into heated debates about performance parameters that are mostly classified.

Air Power Australia (APA) has attempted to provide the same sort of reasoned parameters for this debate that Stefanick did for his. Through its extensive website and broad analysis, APA has given some much-needed definition to the recent debate in Australia over whether the JSF program in which Canberra has long been a partner is really the right choice for Australia’s strategic needs. While it has established a reputation of hostility towards the F-35 (one grounded in its own analysis), it has attempted to take what information is publicly available and used it to model and make estimates about operational capabilities and performance envelopes in order to compare them to the missions that the new aircraft will be expected to perform (in this case, one of the major concerns for Australia has been the proliferation of late-model Su-30MK “Flanker” series fighter jets to not only China, but Malaysia and Indonesia).

Indeed, in what originated with a comment to a post about one of APA’s recent analyses on Ares, Bill Sweetman composed a rather exceptional post today that highlighted the deep need for debate. He pointed out that the “JSF business plan, if fulfilled, results in a virtual fighter monopoly in the West and its allies.” This gets to the root of the problem. Lockheed Martin stands to make over a trillion dollars on U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps orders alone — not to mention what promise to be extensive overseas sales. The program itself will essentially lock foreign buyers into a long-term service and support arrangement with Lockheed Martin. Very real and deeply entrenched interests have a great deal at stake. So does the American taxpayer. Compounding this, Sweetman points out, is that there has been no track record of success since the F-117 Nighthawk (he points out the prohibitive cost overruns of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber and concerns about maintenance, sustainability and life cycle costs with the F-22 Raptor.)

RD does not argue that every performance parameter and capability of a weapon system be unclassified. That is neither necessary nor prudent. But given the delays and problems with realizing the JSF program so far and legitimate and widespread questions and concerns from expert cicrles about the viability, applicability and necessity of the production-version of the aircraft, Sweetman parts with exactly the right sentiment:

If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you’ve got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or “trust me, but it’s secret.”

No nuclear weapons were tested in 1997 — only the second year since mankind detonated its first atomic bomb in 1945 that no testing took place. The 1990s saw what has proven to be — in effect — the end of Cold War-era nuclear testing. In 1998, of course, India and Pakistan both carried out a series of nuclear tests. But since that year, there has been only a single nuclear detonation: North Korea’s in 2006 (and the seismographic data from that test was not indicative of even a rudimentary nuclear device).

This has profound implications for the future of the world’s existing nuclear arsenals.

What has now become the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (founded in 2000) has argued, along with the current administration, that the current Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs are not sufficient for the long-term maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal, and that there is a mounting need for what has been dubbed the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). While there remains a need for a clear, concise and compelling articulation of the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century, there are very real constraints in play.

The concept of RRW is not about designing a new weapon tailored for the 21st century, but rather making carefully calculated tweaks to existing warhead designs in order to enhance reliability and maintainability and maximize sustainability and safety considerations.

The modern two-stage thermonuclear warheads currently in the arsenal are extraordinarily complex things. They are the product of literally hundreds of nuclear tests — both full-scale tests and even more subcritical experimentation (including hydronuclear and hydrodynamic techniques) — and are thought to contain non-spherical primaries, a particularly complicated design. These warheads were designed in the last days of the Cold War, and were designed to maximize accuracy and what is know as yield-to-weight ratio — maximizing the destructive power per pound, an important consideration for weapons to be mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At that point, these warheads were configured for use in multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, with multiple warheads mounted on a single ICBM.[1]

The U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise uses some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to run simulations and model the impact of age and time on the current arsenal. But ultimately, these Cold War-era warheads were designed in a paradigm of regular testing and ongoing weapons development. New weapons were expected to eventually replace them so indefinite shelf life was not a design consideration.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have stretched these designs, and there is no doubt that the current arsenal remains credible. This confidence is one of the most important considerations for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The nuclear weapons a country fields must be reliable and proven in order for both the government itself and other countries alike to have a high degree of confidence in the credibility of the deterrent itself.

But while the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have certainly achieved this objective (and could likely continue to do so for years to come), a degree of uncertainty and prudence has required the maintenance of two warhead types for each delivery system so that, in the event that one design is found to have an irreparable problem, it can be replaced without affecting the status of the American deterrent. This has resulted in many more warheads being kept in a reserve status than would otherwise be the case.

The question about how America prepares to sustain a nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future — i.e. indefinitely — is reaching a critical juncture. The engineers that have first-hand experience with nuclear weapons design and testing are approaching retirement age. Their personal and intimate knowledge about the smallest and subtlest design choices made in the current weapons architecture will soon test the institutional knowledge of their labs, and something will almost certainly be lost.

As attractive as it might be to think about scaled-down warhead designs or articulating a mission before the design process might begin, the reality is that the ultimate goal has already been articulated: a sustainable deterrent without further nuclear testing. The implication of that goal is a decisive constraint that defines the weapon to be built. It is, simply, the very weapons with which the current engineer pool — both the elder engineers that actually designed the warheads and the next generation that has come up learning the finer points of sustaining them — has the most intimate experience, and more pointedly the experience of working to sustain and extend service life. These are the most modern warheads in the arsenal and are equipped with the most advanced safety features.

This underlying design is the inescapable choice for a country that intends to sustain its arsenal indefinitely without testing. And if that is the goal, the way to maximize the chances for success without testing is to allow the nuclear weapons labs to design and build new warheads now based on the articulated objectives of the RRW program.

While total disarmament is a nice conversation to have, the geopolitical reality is that there remains a deep uncertainty about the future threat environment, and while reductions in the nuclear arsenal are absolutely in the cards, so long as America intends to forgo testing, the warheads of that arsenal are necessarily constrained to only modest and conservative tweaks to the designs of the warheads currently in the arsenal.

Ultimately, there are almost certainly — even necessarily — limits to what the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can accomplish because of the considerations that informed the original design of the warheads currently deployed. The finer points of this are obviously both classified and best left to the engineers themselves. But these underlying considerations make RRW (or a similar program under a different name) the path most likely to maximize the long-term sustainability of the arsenal and minimize the chances of further testing. But the problem with RRW, aside from the public distaste for it, is that the question has already been delayed for years and the way to both set up RRW to succeed and to maximize the chances for its success is to push forward as soon as possible.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can probably continue to do the trick for a decade or more. But at some point, a new design will likely become necessary. The further down the road that this point is reached, the more familiarity with the existing designs and the more first-hand experience with actual weapons design will have been lost.

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1 The exception to this is the cancelled MGM-134 “Midgetman” light ICBM, which was to be armed with a single Mk-21 reentry vehicle — the same multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle mounted in sets of eight to ten on the LGM-118A Peacekeeper heavy ICBM.

RD was founded in part on the belief that American nuclear weapons policy in the formative years of 1945-1949 was insufficiently debated and uniformed by public understanding and buy-in appropriate to a democratic society. The implication of that assertion, given that the current American nuclear weapons enterprise is still deeply rooted in Cold War conceptions — and remains entirely reliant on Cold War-era weapon systems — is that the people of the United States were not sufficiently conscious of the implications of their government’s nuclear weapons policies.

To be clear, RD is not arguing and does not advocate for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Obviously, nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented. They cannot be made to go away, and no country in the world has surrendered them once they have become firmly established as part of the defense establishment. (South Africa developed and fielded a handful of rudimentary nuclear devices after a suspected test in 1979, and subsequently dismantled them.)

But as the Soviet Union collapsed and the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the question of the underlying purpose of the nuclear weapons enterprise has again come to the fore. Obviously, during the Cold War, as the Soviet Union pursued — and ultimately surpassed — the American nuclear arsenal in quantitative terms, it was imperative for the United States to retain its qualitative advantage. Even after the Kremlin had successfully overtaken the Pentagon in raw quantitative terms of deliverable weapons, the Soviet military’s mindset quickly shifted towards conceptions of ‘deep parity,’ accounting for more than just warhead numbers and incorporating calculi of accuracy and penetration — essentially rationalizing even further expansions of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

But the United States and the Soviet Union began to find ways to step back from the brink and arrest the frantic pace of the nuclear arms race. The Cold War eventually saw the emergence of the arms control regime that still exists today with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I, set to expire in 2009) and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty, set to take effect and expire on a single day at the end of 2012).

The lesson from the 20th century — that the terrifying and ferocious pace of the nuclear arms race of the Cold War is neither sustainable nor desirable — is a premise for nuclear strategy in the 21st century. But while reorganization and reductions did take place in the American, Russian, French and British nuclear arsenals after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have largely been made from within the paradigm of 20th century thinking about nuclear weapons and necessarily remain dominated by Cold War-era weapon systems.

Since then, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty — though not yet legally in force — has been observed in practice since 1996 with only a few exceptions. The robust and extensive nuclear testing that allowed for rapid advances in weapons design is unlikely to re-emerge in the 21st century in the current geopolitical paradigm, leaving the world’s nuclear powers heavily reliant on the existing Cold War-era designs certified by testing.

As the theory goes, nuclear weapons serve as the ultimate guarantor of sovereignty. But their history has provided important counterpoints. The American nuclear arsenal did not deter the Chinese from surging ten divisions across the Yalu river into North Korea in 1950 in a surprise maneuver that cut off advancing American, South Korean and other units operating under the United Nations aegis (General Douglas McArthur subsequently advocated for and was denied permission to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield). Similarly, the Egyptians and the Syrians knew that the Israelis possessed nuclear weapons in 1973 when they invaded — briefly making significant advances into a country with no strategic depth, effectively threatening the very existence of Israel.

Nevertheless, despite the risk of nuclear apocalypse, nuclear weapons also appear to have played a very real role in preventing the Cold War from becoming the third World War. Both sides were checkmated, and knew it. While nuclear weapons obviously have not and will not prevent armed conflict, they may help deter one nuclear power from too aggressively challenging the fundamental national interest of another. The current tensions between India and Pakistan will serve as a rare case study in the 21st century (thus far in this century, times of heightened tension between New Delhi and Islamabad have not escalated into the nuclear realm).

Overall, the pace of change, the degree of uncertainty and the sense of urgency in global nuclear dynamics have largely declined in the last two decades. Though the Pakistani-Indian competition does make for a noteworthy exception, their nuclear postures have largely remained more restrained than that of the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War. Yet even as the United Kingdom and France have reaffirmed their commitment to the long-term maintenance of their own nuclear arsenals, there remain very real questions about what a nuclear weapons enterprise means in the 21st century, much less what role it serves.

Nevertheless, at this point, the debate about the future of nuclear weapons must begin with reality: their existence, their continued existence and the constraints on nuclear weapons design.