By Travis Sharp and Kingston Reif

Yesterday GSN’s Elaine Grossman had a huge scoop on the ongoing debate within the Obama administration about what is required to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear deterrent.  According to Grossman’s sources, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, with the support of Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, tried to revive the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program at a National Security Council Principals’ Meeting in early June.  Vice President Joe Biden was the only voice of opposition, arguing that designing and building new warheads would undermine the ambitious nonproliferation agenda laid out by the President in Prague.

As Grossman notes, this is hardly “the final word on the warhead-replacement matter.”  The issue is clearly being hotly debated in the context of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).  According to one senior Defense Department official consulted by Grossman, “It’s not clear where we’re going to go [on the warhead issue]….We need an effective stockpile [but] we haven’t got a consensus within the administration on what that means. And so I can’t say that, forever, this ‘replacement’ idea is verboten.”

The article is long, but a must read.  Below are some of our reactions.

History shows that once a strategic or political need for a defense program is established, the effort becomes extremely difficult to terminate.

Though they may be scaled back or transferred to “technology demonstrator” status, defense programs rarely die.

Take, for another example, the ongoing saga of a new U.S. spy satellite. The original effort, known as Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), was cancelled in 2005 after hemorrhaging $4 billion on what the Times labeled “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.” After several years operating the legacy production line in the wake of FIA’s collapse, Robert Gates and Dennis Blair announced this spring that work would soon begin on the Next Generation Electro-Optical System, which amounts to “a recovery plan from the FIA collapse.”

The technical and fiscal risks inherent in this approach are legion; nonetheless, once the rationale exists for a program – as it does (legitimately or not) for the RRW and the new spy satellite – the momentum carrying the program forward becomes self-sustaining. Even dormant periods with no activity or funding can be bridged successfully.

Vacuum Tubes!?  Seriously!?

That’s the G-rated version of our initial reaction upon reading Grossman’s account of the Principal’s meeting.  In supporting Gates’ position, Gen. Cartwright apparently cited vacuum tubes as a reason why the RRW is necessary.  As Jeffrey and Kingston have detailed on more than one occasion, vacuum tubes have no place in the modernization debate (vacuum tubes are not used in the physics package of a single nuclear weapon design; they’re currently used in only three modifications of one type of nuclear weapon – the B61; they can be replaced without nuclear testing; they continue to function reliably; etc.).

Even John Harvey, the former head of NNSA’s policy planning staff, thinks the vacuum tube argument is crazy.  At the same breakfast discussion on Capitol Hill cited by Grossman where Harvey threw his support behind the “spectrum of options” approach to modernizing the stockpile, he stated that there are many different ways we could address vacuum tubes, but in any case he didn’t have a problem with them. In fact, he said there are some circumstances where they’re preferable to newer semiconductor devices!

Domestic political factors (and vacuum tubes) are dominating what should be a technical debate about how best to maintain the stockpile.

Clinton argued that the RRW might be necessary for “domestic political reasons,” particularly to win support for a START follow-on treaty and the CTBT.  Yet such a judgment is premature since the text of the START follow-on treaty does not yet exist and many Senators have not given any thought to the CTBT since the last vote in 1999.  

It’s all on the President

As an anonymous RRW opponent cited by Grossman put it, “The president has to have the guts to say no…Almost everyone else is inclined to Clinton-vintage political triangulation.”  Those who have read Janne Nolan’s An Elusive Consensus, part of which tells the story of the failed 1993-94 NPR, know that the failure of the President to intervene in support of his agenda will result in an NPR that does not reflect that agenda.  

In a speech last week, Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation, made a forceful and convincing case for a START follow-on agreement.

The speech came at just the right time. Arms control opponents have blanketed the airwaves and op-ed pages with preemptive attacks on President Obama’s arms control agenda. Gottemoeller’s remarks, along with those by Ellen Tauscher a few weeks ago, demonstrate how persuasive this administration can be and how effectively it can rebut criticism from the usual suspects.

Gottemoeller’s and Tauscher’s speeches, though excellent, were not enough. We need to hear from the Pentagon and military leadership. We need to hear from Vice President Biden. And we need to hear from the entire Obama team more frequently and more rapidly, particularly when confronted with high-level political attacks.

While I understand that the White House has a lot of things on its plate at the moment, we are living in a seminal moment for the future arms control. Who knows the next time we will be presented with such excellent opportunities. The time for action, whether speech- or treaty-making, is now.

With that, I present the highlights from Gottemoeller’s remarks…

Six Reasons for START

1. “The first point is that [a START follow-on] will combine the predictability of START with the flexibility of the Moscow Treaty, but at lower numbers of delivery vehicles and their associated warheads. This flexibility gives us the freedom to determine our nuclear force structure within set limits to be established by this new treaty.”

2. “The new treaty will also draw from the START verification regime; and, therefore, will provide predictability regarding the strategic forces on both sides – both for existing force structure and modernization programs.”

3. “For the Administration, the new treaty is valuable in that it will enhance our national security. It will establish a strategic balance that reflects the current security environment in a way that benefits each party and promotes peace and stability.”

4. “Moreover, the ability of the United States to persuade other nations to act collectively against those states committed to developing nuclear weapons will be bolstered through reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. It is a matter of moral suasion.”

5. “The START Follow-on Treaty [i]s the first step in a process of pursuing further nuclear weapons reductions. I believe a new START Treaty is an essential step on the path to deeper reductions in the future.”

6. “Just as important, [a START follow-on] begins a new narrative for our post-Cold War world, one that recognizes the need to eliminate the paralyzing threat of nuclear war by eliminating nuclear weapons.”

Rebuttals to Criticisms of START

1. “Some say that START Follow-on will not induce other countries to give up their weapons programs. In and of itself, START Follow-on does not exist for that purpose…The ability of the United States to persuade other nations to act collectively against those states committed to developing nuclear weapons will be bolstered through reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. It is a matter of moral suasion.”

2. “Critics have also said that we are agreeing on the New START Treaty ahead of the completion of the Nuclear Posture Review. That is not the case. The Obama Administration tasked the NPR working groups, as a first step, to develop a nuclear force structure and posture for use in these negotiations. While the NPR’s work is still ongoing, it will continue to inform the positions taken by the United States as it negotiates the new START Treaty with Russia.”

Last Wednesday the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) released its report on the FY 2010 Defense Budget request.  In keeping with CSBA’s previous reports on the defense budget, this year’s version, authored by Todd Harrison, is another excellent contribution.

However, I’d like to quibble with the report’s assessment of the implications of the funding request for missile defense.  The FY 2010 request cut the overall missile defense budget by 16% in real terms (i.e. in FY 2010 dollars) relative to the previous year. According to Harrison:

The net effect of these changes is to shift the focus from national missile defense (NMD) systems, designed to protect the United States from strategic ballistic missile attack, to theater missile defense (TMD) systems, intended to protect forward-deployed US forces against shorter-range ballistic missiles.

Some of the advantages of this approach are that it is more affordable in both the near term and long term, and it invests money in systems that are proven effective. The programs that the budget proposes to cut or terminate, with the exception of GMD, are still in development and have significant technical hurdles that have yet to be overcome. On the other hand, this approach does not put the nation on a path to providing the same level of national missile defense protection in the future. In particular, reducing the number of operational Ground Based Interceptors to thirty with no replacement or replenishment program planned could result in too few missiles to provide a basic level of protection, especially as these missiles are depleted over time from regular test launches.

I realize that Harrison is approaching this issue from the perspective of a budgetary analyst and not a policy analyst, but there are a few problems with his bottom line.

Pointing to a shift in focus from NMD systems to TMD systems is in some ways misleading.  Total funding for NMD programs still greatly exceeds that of TMD programs.

That said, there is good reason the FY 2010 request begins to address this imbalance (by increasing funding for TMD systems such as Aegis and THAAD and decreasing funding for NMD systems such as GMD, MKV, and KEI.).  Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, the Director of the Missile Defense Agency, noted in a recent interview that 99% of the ballistic missile threat today is from short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.

GMD, like the other strategic defense systems the budget proposes to cut or terminate, has not been proven effective.  GMD’s test history has been mixed to say the least, even under the highly scripted conditions under which the system has been tested.  According to the office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense on testing of Department of Defense weapon systems,

[national missile defense] flight testing to date will not support a high level of confidence in its limited capabilities…additional test data under realistic test conditions is necessary to validate models and simulations and to increase confidence in the ability of these models and simulations to accurately predict system capability.

And I haven’t even mentioned the GMD-variant slated for deployment in Eastern Europe. This interceptor has not even been built, much less tested.

Capping the number of operational interceptors in Alaska at 30 is not likely to make the U.S. more vulnerable. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that

the program, as you suggest, was to grow from the 30 interceptors that we have now, to 44. And the advice that I got is, first of all, that system really is only capable against North Korea, and that 30 interceptors at the level of capability that North Korea has now and is likely to have for some years to come – 30 interceptors in fact provide a strong defense against North Korea in this respect. And that budget also includes robust funding for continued development and improvement of those ground-based interceptors.

Given these realities, the FY 2010 budget request is likely to make us less, not more, vulnerable.

In the latest issue of International Security, defense analyst Bruce Sugden’s article, “Speed Kills: Analyzing the Deployment of Conventional Ballistic Missiles,” weighs the pros and cons of deploying conventional ballistic missiles (CBMs) in support of the Prompt Global Strike mission.

Prompt Global Strike is an initiative that seeks to address rapidly emerging threats with non-nuclear means. Under both the ground- and sea-based iterations of the proposal, a conventional warhead would be mated to a long-range missile normally equipped with a nuclear payload. These conventionally-armed long-range missiles could then be used to engage time-sensitive targets globally, such as high-value terrorist encampments. CBMs based in the continental United States could strike an hour after the decision was made to launch, and would have a 15 minute advantage if forward-deployed on land or at sea.

Sugden evaluates the merits of short term deployment of CBMs versus both unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and manned aircraft based on nine attributes. He concludes that CBMs are superior in the short term in terms of prompt response (speed), combat radius, accuracy, and throw weight.

There are several limitations to deploying CBMs, however. The satellite technology used to identify targets is designed to monitor changes overtime, such as the movements of large military installations. The satellites are less useful for tracking small mobile targets like small groups of individuals. CBMs would also have to be paired with more persistent and multi-faceted surveillance such as localized human and aircraft reconnaissance. Thus, CBM prompt response and accuracy are contingent upon continued investment in, and reliance upon, multiple sources of quality ISR.

Former Secretaries of Defense Harold Brown and James Schlesinger, along with STRATCOM chief Gen. Kevin Chilton, have advocated deploying CBMs. But opponents express legitimate reservations. There is a real danger of a nuclear state confusing a CBM with a nuclear-armed missile and quickly launching a retaliatory response in order to avoid losing their weapons in what they believe is an incoming counterforce strike (the “use ‘em or lose ‘em” problem). Neither Russia nor China currently has the capability to distinguish between non-nuclear and nuclear missiles in the event of a fly-over, particularly in Russia’s case with its dilapidated radar infrastructure.

Nevertheless, Sugden recommends continued R&D and near-term (by 2013) deployment of the Navy’s conventional Trident missile.

For an comprehensive critique of Prompt Global Strike and the Conventional Trident Modernization program, see Steve Andreasen’s 2006 ACT article.

Last week I commented on Walter Pincus’ story on FOGBANK and the Kyl amendment(s).  Via Frank Munger, I see that NNSA has released a FAQ on FOGBANK (the full text is pasted below the jump).  The key takeaway: All issues involving Fogbank prod…