Global Strikeout

New weapons systems should always meet three requirements: They should be feasible, needed, and affordable. The proposed Prompt Global Strike program, which according to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been "embraced by the new administration," does not meet any. Using intercontinental ballistic missiles to hurl conventional warheads at caves is a truly bad idea. It would use technology that doesn't work for a capability the United States doesn't need at a cost it can't afford. Oh, and it could also start a nuclear war.

The plan is to build new weapons that can hit a target half a world away in under an hour. Defense contractors concerned about the shrinking market for long-range missiles began promoting this to George W. Bush's Defense Department, where it was rejected as unworkable. Now, as they take steps to reduce the U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons, Obama defense officials are resurrecting it.

Would such a system even work? The diagram of the concept is almost a Rube Goldberg scheme: an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches and releases a space plane that glides through the atmosphere and flies to strike area where it drops a bomb on target. A more complete schematic would include other necessary features like a heat shield that would try to stop the glider from melting on re-entry as it screams in much faster than the space shuttle. Proponents of the program say it will rely on "cutting-edge technology." (Read: "We don't know how to do it.")

It is not that America hasn't tried. This program is basically another version of the now discredited "space plane" -- a pipe dream that, as nonproliferation analyst Dennis Gormley notes, the United States has been chasing for decades. In 2001, President Ronald Reagan's former missile-defense chief, Henry Cooper, told a congressional panel that, after three decades of work and $4 billion in development, the U.S. program had only produced "one crashed vehicle, a hangar queen, some drop-test articles, and static displays." Now the contractors have repackaged the idea and are re-peddling it to the Pentagon.

But does the United States need this capability? No. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the United States would use this weapon. The Pentagon has better weapons in its arsenal that, if updated, could accomplish long-range strikes. Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright favors using modern, precision-guided conventional munitions to replace nuclear weapons now assigned to such missions. He's right.

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NEILSCHMEIL

9:49 PM ET

April 23, 2010

Typos

Good article but there's a couple typos.

"Without the intelligence the mility would..." I think you mean military.

"As Noah Shachtman’s at Wired's Danger Room blog notes,lthough the United States..." You forgot to put a space after the comma and the a is missing from although.

AMYFW

6:35 AM ET

April 24, 2010

I understand your outrage,

But some of your facts are thin. The Bush Admin never abandoned the effort to acquire a PGS capability relying on hypersonics or boost-glide. Its just that Cartwright put the conventional trident modification (CTM) higher on the list and on the fast track. But Congress refused to fund CTM (mostly because of the "misunderstanding whether its a nuke" issue), and put all the money into an R&D account. Throughout this time, the Air Force continued to quetly pursue the ballistic missile with a boost-glide vehicle on the front. That's what's in the news now. It never went away, it just went underthe radar, so to speak. Its always been a pet project for General Chilton. I talked to him about this when he was still at Air Force Space Command, and asked how he squared his support for a land-based system with General Cartwright's active advocacy of CTM, and he said there was no difference between them. There was a huge difference, but I guess the way to look at it now is that General Cartwright is the overall architect of PGS (keeping it alive in the Pentagon), while General Chilton is the guiding force helping to bring it to fruition in the Air Force.

A couple of other things. The idea that this is dangerous because Russia would not know if the missile were nuclear or conventional, and would react as if it were nuclear, is a bit of red herring, and was certainly more true for the CTM than for the current Air Force vision. There are steps you can take to mitigate that risk, particularly if the system is deployed on land and far away from nuclear missiles. Russia's objections to this actually stem from the fact that it is destabilizing becuase we might actually use it. They fear we could use it against strategic targets in Russia without going nuclear, and that would put them at great risk. And, because it is conventional, we'd be more likely to use it. That's why they wanted to ban it in new START.

China has the same problem with this. And they may be right. It is very easy to laugh at this as an over-the-top scheme for shooting at caves in Tora Bora. Even though that was the public justification for PGS 5-7 years ago, everyone realizes its not the real reason. Another justification for it was that it would provide the U.S. with the ability to attack missiles on launch pads or airplanes loaded with WMD on runways, before they took off and headed our way. This is hugely crisis destablizing, as it would encourage the bad guys to shoot these things off more quickly. But a more real, and fearsome reason why the services want this stuff... We can't reach central China, where China may deploy ASATs or other strike weapons, with systems based off shore. But we may want to attack these capablities promptly at the start of a potential conflict with China (take out those ASATs before they hit our satellites). And a PGS that can maneuver over Chinese territory answers this need.

The real weakness to PGS, for mobile targets, is that you need exquisite real time intelligence, and we don't have that capability yet. To solve most of the problems that we'd consider PGS for, we actually need a persistent capability, rather than a prompt capability.

JOECIRINCIONE

8:57 AM ET

Excellent Points

Thank you for adding to our understanding of this issue. It is hard to do it justice to the subject in a short article.

When I first heard of this idea during the Bush years, I have to admit I thought it was pretty cool. One of the original ideas was known as “Rods from God.” We would swap out a nuclear warhead from one of our existing missiles for tungsten rods. The kinetic energy of the incoming rods would pulverize even hardened targets. Variations of this are alive in the CTM program begun in 2006.

The CTM ran into intense skepticism in both Republican and Democratic Congresses, but is still alive. General Cartwright favors the program. A good, quick history is available on Jeffrey Lewis’ blog, ArmsControlWonk.com
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1456/anybody-got-a-conventional-trident-pe

The conventional Trident is, indeed, very difficult to distinguish from a nuclear-armed Trident. Particularly because some proposals would just have our SSBNs patrol with force loadings of 2 CTMs and 22 nuclear-armed Tridents.

There has been a lot of talk about creating clearly observable differences that would distinguish nuclear- from conventional-armed SLBMs. But remember, in 1995, the Russians thought a Norwegian-launched weather rocket was an American SLBM coming out of the Barents Sea beginning a nuclear assault. For the first time in the nuclear age, the Russian military opened up the nuclear “football” with launch codes for Russians nuclear forces and told then-President Boris Yelstin that the country was under attack. Fortunately, Yelstin did not initiate a counter-attack.

If this could happen when the two nations had very friendly relations and with a missile so obviously not an SLBM or ICMB, imagine how hard it would be to distinguish between two identical missiles with different warheads during periods of tension with the missile directed at sites close to Russia. I understand the Air Force says that the conventional-armed missiles would be based in California, not the Rocky Mountain states where most of our 450 nuclear-armed ICBMs are based. And there are proposals for having Russian inspectors come for on-site inspections.

But, really, would we trust the Russians if the situation were reversed? And what about the Chinese? Do they get to inspect?

We already keep about 1200 nuclear-armed missiles on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within 15 minutes. And so do the Russians. As long as this Cold War posture remains in place – and the new Nuclear Posture Review did nothing to change this obsolete, dangerous practice that keeps bright, young officers on long shifts in underground silos waiting for launch commands – it is foolish to add to the risk of global thermonuclear war for a capability we simply don’t need.

If the real reason some want these new weapons is China, then they should say so. Let’s have an honest debate.

2:51 PM ET

I don't question your conclusion...

Just the path you took to get there. My question has always been "what's the rush?" Cartwright preferred CTM over the Air Force version because he could have it in 2-4 years (and yes, rods from god, or, flechettes, were the preferred warheads), while the AF version would take 4-8 years. Well, we clearly weren't in that much of a rush, because we won't have CTM at all, never mind in 2-4 years. The second part of the question is "why do we have to get there in under an hour?" I know the internal answers to that, and I don't buy them. I don't think we'd have the intel we need to shoot that precisely at something that quickly. I think a persistent capability (as you said, with UAVs) is much more important than a prompt attack capability.

And you are right, no one is willing to say "China" out loud. Or maybe they think Congress would be more likely to fund it if they call it an anti-terrorism program (which it isn't 'cause we'd lack the necessary intel.)

TOMMYT

4:46 PM ET

April 25, 2010

IRAN, NK?

Is it not possible that the idea behind this weapons system is to prevent a possible launch by a so called 'rouge state'. If Iran or North Korea achieved the capability to launch a nuclear missile, surely they would only have very small numbers of missile's. So an American strike within the hour would destroy a launch attempt and discourage any retaliation.
Surely it would be clear to China and Russia that they were not the intended targets although i admit I don't now enough about satellite tracking to suggest China and Russia could realise the missile's intended destination. This would remove the issue of 'MAD' and the uncertainty of distinguishing between conventional and nuclear warheads.

SIR_MIXXALOT

7:23 PM ET

No, Tommy you are

No, Tommy you are wrong.

Knowing that they only have a short while to get their rocket off is called destabilizing: it encourages them to hasten their timeline.

And no, we don't have to guess what Russia and China say about this -- they have told us they dont like it one bit.

12:54 PM ET

April 26, 2010

even if they did hasten the

even if they did hasten the launch, a missile attack within the hour would still reach the missile site before they could launch.

i know china and russia might not like it, that wasn't my point, my point was about tracking systems.

IMERGENT_69

8:00 PM ET

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Foreign Policy Magazine

Global Strikeout

The Pentagon's new missile program is expensive, unnecessary, and insanely dangerous.

BY JOSEPH CIRINCIONE | APRIL 23, 2010

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