rational defense

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.