rational defense

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.