Russian Cruise Missiles

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Aaron Stein is still on indefinite paternity leave, so I've decided to call my old friend Tom Moore to talk about Russian cruise missiles.

Tom was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked a lot on arms control issues in the Hill, including the New START ratification. Okay, so the Russians have an enormous number of cruise missiles, so I think we should go through them in order. And the place that I think we should start is Kalibr, which we've seen for the first time, right?

The Russians fired a bunch of them at Syria. Not all of them got to Syria.

Tom Moore 1:02

Yeah.

Jeffrey 1:03

So you think that Kalibr is a follow-on to the Granat?

Tom 1:12

I think it's in the same family. It's just the ships have gotten smaller since the Soviet Union vanished, so you need a smaller cruise missile. But they also have improved guidance and potentially, depending on where they're fired from, pretty good capability on range. So it's a capable missile, whether you need to classify it as I might have done as grenade follow-on.

It's probably best not to because it is a different bird.

Jeffrey 1:38

But made by, I mean, Russia only has the one.

Tom 1:40

Made by the same, Novator. Yeah. Made by, so, I mean, Novator makes all of these.

Jeffrey 1:45

Yeah, it's the only, only cruise missile manufacturer. Yeah. So the, but for, for poor listeners who are going to have to jump between, we'll try, we should probably try to use the Russian designations. Okay. But, so the Granat was the SS-N-21. Mm-hmm. And the Kalibr is the SS-N-30.

Tom 2:03

A according to DOD.

Jeffrey 2:06

Yeah. What is the SSN 30? Is it something else?

Tom 2:09

I knew the answer to that yesterday, but not today. And I'm too lazy to go look at it. It is at least here in Virginia.

Jeffrey 2:17

Right. Okay. So, so that's a, that's a ship launch cruise missile. We've seen those come off of the what it was like the Dagestan class destroyers. Is that right? No, that's the Gepard class.

Tom 2:33

Karabal, Kraser, Russians have different – I mean it's – you know what the navies of the world are like, annoying when they name things. In any case, the Gepard class is what it fired off on the Caspian, and those are new. And today it fired off of the Gorchakov yesterday when they did the northern fleet tests, and that's a – hang on just a second here –

Jeffrey 2:59

That's a frigate.

Tom 3:00

So it's basically, you know, surface launches.

Jeffrey 3:04

And they can fire those off submarines. If they wanted to, I suppose they could. We'll talk about submarines in a second. But so those went, those went what? Like? 1,500, 2,000 kilometers? I forget. Over 1,000. Over 1,000, yeah, yeah.

Tom 3:20

I mean, it's a good number of clicks on the odometer.

Jeffrey 3:25

And they crashed. And so most of them went into Syria, but several of them clobbered in Iran. Well,

Tom 3:32

I watched the MOD video multiple times with the little Russian Google Earth floating below all these beautiful lines of attack, wondering what the targets were, honestly, because that's an expensive sortie of an unmanned cruise missile, right?

Jeffrey 3:48

Oh, you don't think they were just showing off?

Tom 3:51

Well, someone said October 7th is Putin's birthday, so this is his happy birthday present. God knows when he turns 70 what that will mean for us.

Jeffrey 4:01

But I don't know.

Tom 4:05

Honestly, I think this was as much a battle lab for the federal staff as it is anything else to test both the public and private, if you will, reactions.

Jeffrey 4:16

Nobody liked my idea that we should have put Jay Lenz in either Jordan or Turkey to watch the cruise missile firings.

Tom 4:22

Although had you said that during New Start, Jeffrey, you could have been a Republican senator.

Jeffrey 4:27

Well, you know, I'm actually now glad that nobody took me up on that idea after Jay Lenz went all free willy on us.

Tom 4:33

Yeah. Where is it now? Ohio on its way to Carmel?

Jeffrey 4:38

Somebody told me that like the locals shotgun blasted it.

Tom 4:42

I heard that and saw some tweets and immediately thought of, you know, what's the alien movie? The very famous one where there's a radio broadcast and people actually thought we were being invaded. Anyway.

Jeffrey 4:53

Yeah.

Tom 4:54

War of the Worlds, I'm sorry. That's what it conjured up in my mind.

Jeffrey 4:58

It's a UN blimp come to take our guns!

Tom 5:02

Ma, go grab the buckshot. They're here.

Jeffrey 5:06

Okay, so the SS-N-30, a.k.a. The Kalibr, that was like 1,500 kilometers long. Do you think they're patrolling – one of the conversations we had earlier was part of the reason for these missiles is that they can do conventional missions like that. But I know you and I have spent a lot of time talking about the possibility that the Russians might seek to – evade is not the right word.

There's an interesting gap between – or there's a limitation, right? The New START Treaty doesn't cover sea-launched cruise missiles.

Tom 5:47

Nothing does.

Jeffrey 5:48

Right. Nothing covers it.

Tom 5:49

Well, Pete and I, Presidential Nuclear Initiatives did, but as Nikolai pointed out a couple of weeks ago in your blog, they pretty much said bye-bye to that too. Russia.

Jeffrey 5:58

Well, actually, you know, so I went back and I dug up the actual commitment that Yeltsin made. I did too. And it's not very strong. It's sort of, well, we won't deploy them. And if you destroy them, we'll destroy them. But we didn't destroy them. So, you know, presumably that deal is off.

Tom 6:14

It's just a politically binding thing anyway. I mean, you know, it really is not. I don't care. Well, yeah, I think it's logical to infer that they'd want to make this to be dual capable, you know, general purpose to bring back that term forces.

Jeffrey 6:29

So I had argued that I thought the reason for the J-Lens deployment is because the Russians were probably putting these things on attack submarines. And there had been reports of attack submarines deployed. Going near the East Coast. I presume that that's what that is, that that is for them a deterrent patrol that isn't covered by any of the arms control agreements.

Tom 6:49

I, you know... I hope it's not the case that we're developing technology just because there's like a collapse in what treaties cover. But that's certainly not the way Northcom or anybody else was going to look at it. And Aberdeen, you know, isn't very far away from here. So, sure. I mean, it was a logical inference to make at the time.

But, you know. As you and I have said to each other, or you've made very clear multiple times, nothing covers this stuff. The seas are kind of, in this respect, wide open, and that's because glickums are what are under INF. So, of course, you can test fire a slickum off of a glickum platform if it's to be deployed as that, but...

We can get into the INF issue later, but now Kalibr is a very good system. I mean, I know people started to say not all of them connected with targets, but not all of ours connected with targets either.

Jeffrey 7:43

Yeah, well, we could talk about the clobbering because I wanted to ask what you thought that meant about the guidance. Yeah. Well, yeah, so do you think they clobbered? I mean, my assumption was that they were using... Oh, yeah. Okay, well, so then they shouldn't clobber, should they? Poor listeners are probably freaking out. That's okay. I have to explain to listeners clobbering.

So our cruise missiles... Use a combination of guidance systems, but one of them is terrain contour matching, which is they try to map where they are by looking at the ruggedness of the terrain below them, which is why they went through these crazy routes into Iraq. They couldn't fly over the flat, featureless desert because flat terrain is useless for mapping.

But sometimes that means... If you're in the wrong place, you're not looking forward. You're looking down. You fly into a mountain. And so we lost a bunch of cruise missiles, right, in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. I presume that that's what happened to those Russian cruise missiles in Iran. But do you –

Tom 8:52

In front of me. There, I hope, are people who watched it closely because then again, you know, that airspace that it transited, there's a lot of stuff flying in it. So, you know, I can't imagine that it was a good thing given the neighborhood, as I just said, and everything else. But after it was done, the Russians didn't seem to have gone to great steps to say that they didn't plunk or that they didn't fail.

But that's because ours did, in my opinion. That's OK. I mean, this is a battle lab. I don't want to use that word too often because it denigrates the suffering that's going on in a sense. But for Russia's military, this is their first expeditionary air mission. This is their first expeditionary naval operation. This is a lot of quote unquote out of area action for a military that has watched us do it for a long time.

So I expect there to be things that don't work well. And by the way, goodness, if you're going to do this in the middle East, you need to cooperate with people there as the Turkey incident has shown. So they're learning the hard way on some aspects of this, but you can't do everything with what a dozen and now less Sue 24s and Sue 30s.

It's, You need cruise missile strikes for certain targets. Now, as I said, those are expensive, but if you're going to do a test, this is a good time.

Jeffrey 10:10

Okay, so the last thought on the caliber before we move on is I have to get on my little hobby horse. We had this data exchange under the START agreement where the parties committed to not deploying more than a certain number of sea launch cruise missiles of any type. It was a ludicrously high number, so the limit wasn't important.

But there was a data exchange about how many were actually deployed. How many nuclear ones were deployed?

Tom 10:36

Zero and zero.

Jeffrey 10:37

Right. And we lost that data exchange in the new START agreement. And I have campaigned endlessly in the State Department to get them to try to – first of all, not to lose it, but then now to try to get it back.

Tom 10:51

Wrong agency. Go to the Navy first.

Jeffrey 10:55

Yeah, you're right. It's so true, right? I'm not kidding. No, you're right. You're right. You're right. OK, OK. So that's the caliber. I think it's interesting that they show it off in Syria. I am more worried about it prowling up and down the East Coast. Fair enough. Which brings me, right, to the club family, which you can purchase in a shipping container.

Tom 11:16

Well, yes, and not just any shipping container. Per advertising material widely available on YouTube and going all the way back to, geez, was it 2010 when they started to run ads for this, basically?

Jeffrey 11:29

Yes, like the little disco music.

Tom 11:32

Yeah, techie techno music. And, you know, the little blue country is being overrun by clearly American F-16s getting ready to launch on the airstrip. And, you know, and Aegis out at sea. And these like raptors of vengeance come flying. Sweeping in from rail cars and trucks and trains and ships, launching salvos of four of these things at a time, and a launcher that looks, gee, remarkably like the launcher Russia has released pictures of firing recently.

So, yeah. I mean, the only thing, though, Jeffrey, if you go back and take a look at that, I think the video presentation depicts these Club family missiles as being smaller than they really are. They look kind of weensy on those ads, so they're a little larger than that, and In any case, yes, you can get the Club K. You can buy Missile Container System is what it's called, and you can get basically four little launchers, and off you go on a train, a truck, or a ship.

Jeffrey 12:30

Right. And so the club family basically are reduced range versions of the caliber family, right?

Tom 12:35

Shorter range, yeah. They're kind of for coastal defense fires, or you've got to be, like on the ad, a small country next door to a sort of small country.

Jeffrey 12:45

Well, and they're short enough range that you can export them without violating the missile technology control regime guidelines.

Tom 12:51

Yeah, I mean, I don't think, no. I wouldn't put a nuclear warhead on that. That would be Speaking of failed launches not a good idea, but I know they're very short range.

Jeffrey 13:05

Well, I think, I think the reason I ask is because later when we talk about Iskander, I'm particularly taken by the idea that you might have the, the caliber, right? The SSN 30, a AKA the three M one, four, just the crowd number, right? Sorry folks. Yeah, I know. Right. It's horrible. But then the club, right, the 3M14E, E is for export.

Export. Right. So it's this idea that you have a cruise missile and you create a reduced range variant. Sure. Which you can sell is interesting because when we talk about Iskander, right, well, maybe what's on that is the reduced range version that complies with the INF Treaty. But we think that there's a big range version. I think there's a big range version that's about to come.

Tom 13:54

I don't know. I will say that there is no shortage of hunger in the world for concealed missile launch, particularly because of the fear of overhead and everything else. So it's never surprised me that people would. Covertly hide things not in an arms control sense but to frankly hide their weapons and I always thought it was pretty funny the Iranians would sit there and slowly fuel an intercontinental missile while we readied a conventionally armed missile to fire at it they're going to conceal launches and that's why it's a particularly nettlesome sucker and that being the Club K but there are others to talk about too

Jeffrey 14:29

Let me ask you about this. Have there been many Club K sales yet, or is it that we just don't know about them because the whole point of having them in a shipping container is secrecy?

Tom 14:41

Good point. No, the most recent data from the U.S. government was the Undersecretary McKeon, or McKeon, sorry, you'll hear this. Yes, I do remember how to pronounce your name, Brian. He said at the SASC, or excuse me, HASC hearing of a couple of years ago that they've seen it marketed, but they didn't see any exports. He said that in public, and I can't see any contracts, unlike S-300, which is marketed everywhere the United States has a problem.

I haven't seen Club K show up, and that might be because of what you just pointed to, that If we found out they were selling to, say, for example, Iran, Club K, speaking of ships and containers and aircraft carriers, I imagine they know that would be a big problem, but they're into that.

Jeffrey 15:26

Well, I'm sort of fascinated by the whole idea of disguising cruise missiles. I know we're talking about Russian cruise missiles, but did you see the Taiwanese had tried to deploy – Their land attack cruise missile in – Oh, yeah. Right. They painted to look like delivery trucks.

Tom 15:45

Right. And when was that?

Jeffrey 15:47

It was 2010, I think.

Tom 15:50

Yeah. Right about the time when we were recovering from accidentally sending them nuclear weapons parts.

Jeffrey 15:54

Yeah, that's right.

Tom 15:55

The Minuteman 3 nose cones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:58

That was – It turns out they did a bad job of it, right? Because they didn't – First of all, the delivery trucks looked like missile trucks painted white. But even though they had a company on it called Redbird Express, it didn't have a phone number or a web address, which typically when you're in business, you won't be able to contact you, so you'll purchase your services.

And they were driving them out of known missile bases that have missile displays in the front.

Tom 16:28

I think they would argue they were being transparent, Jeffrey. Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:32

But I do – there's this whole – I just think there's this whole interesting thing where people are really interested in the fact that cruise missiles are small enough that maybe you can hide them either in a shipping container or paint them to look like a delivery truck. And so I wonder if that's going to be a thing.

Tom 16:53

I don't know. I mean if it is, it's going to be a Russian thing at least in the export area right away. But technology proliferates and I told you years ago I think that – Basically, someone asked me what the future of nuclear weapons was, and I said, well, hypersonic glide, ixnay on that for the moment, but it'll come, and cruise missiles, particularly from the sea.

So if you're going to counter missile defenses that you either perceive to be effective or that become so, then you're going to need these trajectories. It's just that simple. And if you sell it, more people will have it, and that, by definition, means it'll proliferate. Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:30

Okay, so if you're following along at home, we did the caliber. We did the export short-range versions called the club. Now we should talk about Iskander and what's going on there because I think the Russians are violating the INF Treaty.

Tom 17:46

If they are finally doing it in a more overt way that everyone can see, and you might want to expound on why you think they are or aren't, But what I can say is it wouldn't surprise me and it would be consistent with accidentally flashing the status six slide that Putin used a few weeks ago. Here we go.

How many damn things do I have to remember here? They have a very time-honed practice of making sure signaling works both overtly and sort of not covertly but not overtly, just sort of a little mascarovka. You pull the shade down a little bit maybe to let the neighbors see in what's going on because you want them to look.

Jeffrey 18:35

And that's what's going on. I should say this for listeners. The issue is that the Iskander comes with a cruise missile called the R-500, which just is – Just. Just in compliance with the INF Treaty, right? It is right up against that threshold. And – And there was this curious... So the Obama administration has said that they see testing of a longer-range ground-launched cruise missile, but on the open-source side, There was this statement that was put up on the website of, is it Gosnip?

I can't. You speak Russian. I don't. Gosnip? The people who make the guidance systems. G-O-S-N-I-I-P, but the N-I-I-P are all capitalized.

Tom 19:21

Yeah, there we go.

Jeffrey 19:23

Gosnip. I can't do it. So that listed not only the R-500, it actually listed the caliber and the clubs, And it also listed the 9M728, which is the R-500. And then it listed something called the 9M729.

Tom 19:41

And I was like, huh?

Jeffrey 19:44

And the way Russian – for listeners, the way Russian GRAU numbers work, the first number is the – it's not exactly the service because they don't have nine services. But it's the – how would you describe that? Yeah.

Tom 20:00

Well, it depends. Technically speaking, going back to the old Soviet ground manual, there are systems of numbers for designating ground systems and for ground missiles.

Jeffrey 20:09

I call it the type of equipment.

Tom 20:12

It's a type of equipment.

Jeffrey 20:14

But like nine are army missiles. Right. But three, because we just talked about the 3M14, that's army and naval missiles. And naval missiles. Right. So nine means it's army.

Tom 20:31

It could mean anything.

Jeffrey 20:32

Wow, okay. I mean, it's... But M is missile. M is... Well, M can mean some other things, too. Sure. It's missile. You wouldn't expect... 9M sounds like an army missile. And I think... Now, this is where things get really messy, and I know that it's too imprecise, because they're not always this careful. But I think all of the elements...

Of the Iskander system have 720 numbers.

Tom 21:04

They do. It's pretty consistent throughout. And by the way, that goes with the chassis that are on the MZKT, which has a 7, I think, in it too, to start off with.

Jeffrey 21:14

Yeah, there is one difference, which I actually can't remember.

Tom 21:17

But generally speaking, but all the ordinates, right, has an NM7 number. So if it's a 729, to me...

Jeffrey 21:25

That implies that there is a follow-on to the R-500 for the Iskander. And the thing that the Russians have said their follow-on would be would be an INF – I mean the way they always would say it was, well, if there was no INF treaty, we could extend the range of that. And so now that it has like a number and the Russians announced that this thing with the number was tested, I don't think it's too difficult to believe what the administration is saying.

Tom 21:56

No, no. The administration's case is quite credible. It's just the unfortunate fact of either there's a lack of bilateral data you could rely on. In the first case, it's all classified. And secondly, as time and events ticked forward, you knew the Russians would, I hope, tip their hat. A little bit, and even their hand in the game.

And they have. So I'm waiting and praying and hoping this administration actually finally gets to the harder work of, not that things didn't get worse this morning or yesterday morning with respect to Turkey, but gets down to the hard work of talking to Russia about compliance.

Jeffrey 22:35

Yeah, so one... We've been measuring these missiles, and one thing that has popped up to us is that it looks like the... So we don't know what the 729 looks like, right? I would imagine it looks a lot like its sister. Right.

Tom 22:53

So we now have pictures of the SS-N-30, a.k.a. 3M14, a.k.a. Kalibr.

Jeffrey 22:57

And we have pictures of the 3M14E... AKA club. Right. And, and to me, the club just looks like a shorter, you know, not, or not as long version as the caliber.

Tom 23:22

No, they do have different lengths. Because they go in different size tubes, too. No, I think the diameter is... That's my one question.

Jeffrey 23:36

They look awfully close to me. It turns out it's really hard to measure things off of pictures. You get a lot of error. Which we have been – we've been making those errors. And I think the R-500 – so here's the interesting thing. And we're trying to come up with a way of measuring it. But when we look at the lengths and we look at the lines on the cruise missiles, right, that show the different sections, the R-500, right, which goes to about 500 kilometers, looks like a club which only goes to 300 kilometers except for it looks like it has an extra section.

Right.

Tom 24:11

I see what you're saying. I don't have a picture of it, but I have a picture in my mind.

Jeffrey 24:15

So I'm guessing that the R-500 follow-on, the NM729, which is the thing that we think that violates the treaty, I bet it maybe looks a lot like an SS-N-30A.

Tom 24:27

It's the thing you think violates the treaty. I can't really say we think it because I don't know yet. I haven't satisfied myself. Okay. It just needs to be. But –

Jeffrey 24:36

Well, going to a courtroom, no, but in terms of understanding what the administration is trying to say… It's pretty clear. I mean, to me, it seems like there is an SN30A clone or cousin that is bigger than the R-500… That probably can go to 1,500 kilometers. That's probably launched off the Iskander. That probably violates the INF Treaty, which if it's true, is an enormous mess.

Tom 25:09

If you can fire caliber off of the Caspian fleet and hit targets in Syria, it's not a big leap to do the same thing somewhere else. Yeah. That's about all I'd say. It's not hard. And frankly, we spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out whether this – and we should. Our function is semi-public, in my case, experts.

But you do have to figure that out. And you are the open sorcerer. So that is what you do. But I – my own personal feeling at this stage is they've demonstrated over and over again and have done so this morning off of the frigate Gorchakov. That they intend to show they have this crew strike capability. They want to conventionally arm it just like we do, but obviously they have a history of arming things with nuclear weapons.

So...

Jeffrey 26:01

If you want to say that's it, say that's it.

Tom 26:03

But I wish the administration would too, I guess, is what I'm really trying to say because I'd really like to get more of this debate out into public rather than just sitting around going – making accusations in compliance reports and then not even convening the verification commission.

Jeffrey 26:17

So someone asked me why the administration doesn't make a bigger deal out of this. And I have a charitable answer and I have a less charitable answer. I think the charitable answer is it's hard to – I mean I think Rose Gottmuller has said when she brings it up with the Russians, they basically just go fishing for the intelligence, right?

And so you want to be careful how you present the information because you don't want to compromise the methods that allow you to figure out that they're cheating in the first place. That's the charitable explanation. If they are testing something that looks like the SS-N-30A off an Iskander, that is an unsolvable arms control problem because the treaty would then require them to destroy all of their Iskanders.

Tom 27:05

Yes, it would.

Jeffrey 27:07

Which they're not going to do.

Tom 27:08

No, but you'd have to declare it first, and they're not going to do that either, pursuant to INF. Look, INF wasn't designed to apply, even though it does, forever, in my opinion. There are a lot of proposals for how to make it better. It did a very good job of what it needed to do while it needed to do it.

But we don't have the capability, and we can get into that if you want, to monitor it. Ding, ding, ding, production of these missiles. And as you and I both know, cruise missile verification is pretty hard.

Jeffrey 27:40

Right. So I think – I mean the uncharitable explanation is I think they don't know what they want to do about this problem.

Tom 27:50

And I think it makes it really hard for them to – oh my god, I'm attacking them and you're defending them. No, I think it's – Listeners should know that you're the Republican. Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:00

I think it's – You're sympathetic to them and I've had it.

Tom 28:04

Well, I'm – I'm nothing, not even just way above my pay grade to speculate, but I will. I think that charitably you have a pretty big policy disconnection in terms of their rhetoric, and this isn't really political so much as it is practical. President Obama wants to be someplace on this, all of this, and he knows he's not going to get there.

So being cautious bureaucrats and politicians themselves, interagency politicians won't Necessarily want to push the subject very hard. That's where Congress can come in very handy. And honestly, here, whatever everyone thinks about it, it did its job. It brought attention to this and started screaming about it, saying, look. So, I mean, and that's about all I can say.

Jeffrey 28:51

It's absolutely true that as much crap as I give the Republican Congress on this issue, they've been absolutely essential in

Tom 29:01

But they always have been, whether it's a Democratic Congress or Republican Congress. If you go all the way back, and I know you don't think Scoop Jackson was a Democrat, but he was. So, I mean, whether it was SALT or INF.

Jeffrey 29:13

He was a Boeing-crat.

Tom 29:15

Oh, careful. All right. Boeing does not pay me any money, so I just want to make that clear for everybody.

Jeffrey 29:22

Okay. So in my slightly paranoid, terrible world, we've got Russian cruise missiles sailing up and down the East Coast. We've got INF Treaty-violating cruise missiles crawling through the – What do you call the Russian forest?

Tom 29:44

Lesnitsa.

Jeffrey 29:44

Yeah, okay. And I suppose we should close this conversation out by noting the Russians are also showing off new air-launched cruise missiles. They are.

Tom 29:56

And they're very pretty. They have the same little blue warhead that no other puts on everything else.

Jeffrey 30:02

Although, you know, the R-500 seems to have an orangey-red nose cap. What's going on with that?

Tom 30:09

There used to be just Soviet green. If you remember that sort of light shade of green that the aircraft parts are still painted as the reddish, brownish, orangish colors have shown up off and on and things that they either paint on or, and there's gotta be a reason for it. And honestly, if I knew I forgot, and then obviously there's this newer blue, which, you know, I like the blue, you know, well, I don't know.

Why is Minuteman the color it is?

Jeffrey 30:39

Yeah, fair enough. Oh, actually, you know what? I know that. You know how the Minuteman has – it's the Minuteman, right, that has the cork? Yeah. No, it's the Peacekeeper. You mean at the top? No, it's the Peacekeeper that had the cork.

Tom 30:56

Which cork are you referring to, though?

Jeffrey 30:58

There's a blade of cork on it. Oh, yeah. And it's this weird green color. And I asked about that once. I'm sure it's the Peacekeeper. I've got to look it up. And it's the color of the fungicide. Because it's cork and it's underground, they... Spread it with fungicide.

Tom 31:21

Because you have to. It's in a cave that's murky and you don't want mold to ruin your war.

Jeffrey 31:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I've got to look it up. I think it's the Peacekeeper. I don't think it's the Minuteman.

Tom 31:31

If it works for wine, it'll work for nukes. Look, I think to go back to what you just said, though, on the administration just again, I didn't really expect them to fix this because – not because of necessarily the president or – Anyone, but primarily because of the inertia generally on this subject. Everyone's just sick of dealing with Russia in this administration.

It's across the board. They've sort of thrown up their hands. And every time they do that, it's dangerous because Putin stumbles, the bear stumbles into, you know, new territory when we do that. And I hate to say it, but their weakness is as provocative as their strength is some of the time. And I'm very worried about having these many military assets concentrated over such a tense area, and clearly we are too, but it would be nice if the Russians stopped leaking every video conference we held with them on this subject.

Jeffrey 32:20

By the way, it is the Minuteman III. The lower casing has an ablative layer of cork. It's susceptible to fungus and decay. It is treated with fungicide, which accounts for the missile's green color. I remembered it correctly.

Tom 32:33

Which stage is it on?

Jeffrey 32:36

It's the first stage. I think it's the top of the first stage.

Tom 32:38

It's on the tank.

Jeffrey 32:39

Okay. I, I don't know why. Okay. So the last thing we should talk about the outcome, which I thought was pretty interesting because in all the videos, the Russians released showing the bomber dropping the outcome. One thing that it, it shows the outcome fall out of the bomber out of a two one 60. Yes.

Tom 33:00

And it, but it, it, it doesn't show the outcome light Nope. It just shows it sort of sailing down on its way. So like most people, I was counting the seconds, right? Like most people. I'm sorry. Like you and me. Where's the ignition? And I didn't see it.

Jeffrey 33:20

Yeah, it's a five-second clip before they move away from them, and yeah. Why doesn't it ignite? What's going on?

Tom 33:25

Why doesn't it ignite? You tell me. We always show ours taking off. In fact, we rarely photograph them, or when we did, and we still, I should be fair, have AGM capability, but we rarely, if you go to these nice YouTube videos from the defense industry of yesteryear, it always shows them, you know, zip it along, Turcom on, everything, so...

What can I say, Jeffrey? I mean, bad production values from Russian MOD and, you know... Have you seen a DOD video lately? I mean, you know, it's not a Russian problem exclusively. Yeah.

Jeffrey 34:03

Okay. So, you know, like, what the hell do we do about this?

Tom 34:06

I mean, do we just fully fund LRSO and join... Or LRASM or any of the other... LRASM is this new concept Lockheed Martin's pushing very hard.

Jeffrey 34:20

I mean, I have real questions about what Russia's What dependence on cruise missiles does for nuclear stability, which is not, by the way, not the same thing as saying that I, you know, object to them doing it. I mean, I, I, I, you know, whatever. We, we like cruise missiles too but I, I, I worry that a universe in which there are.

Lots and lots of cruise missiles, including in shipping containers and on attack submarines, is not a stable deterrent for balance.

Tom 35:00

Unless, and again, God, I'm having a strange day here. I'll give you the Russian perspective, which is basically you people started this by using cruise missiles for everything. And we have watched for years while you did. Now, it's not, you don't have a right to that. We can do it too. The problem with Russia is, of course, obviously they have an enormous stockpile of small nuclear warheads for smaller nuclear warheads.

And so you don't need bigger granite systems necessarily. And so I think it has a context with respect to stability. Numbers do matter. We've kind of given the impression here that there are thousands of these things. Again, to allude to something I said a while ago when we were talking about INF, we've never really had, since that went away and Start One did, the ability to measure trucks that exit an area where these things are assembled.

So that was what we did. We measured the length of trucks that came out of places. So we had a sense, and we would and do, by the way, I apparently have it for when things leave, Votkinsk, as it's called, not Votinsk, as it was called variously for years on our side, at least in Congress. No, we're not going to get that back.

It's not in Russia's interest right now to bring those capabilities to a table where we bargain because, to be honest with you, do you – I mean you and I can nerdery ourselves to death over this and talk about it. But I honestly don't get the sense our four-star and above level is – they're communicating Russia as a threat.

They say it all the time. But then they don't have a good answer for when someone says, what are you going to do about it? Other than spend some money on some concepts to develop and maybe some OSD, Office of Secretary of Defense, directed studies on some things. And maybe we'll have a panel or two over at some think tank and Congress will appoint a panel of experts.

That's been our SOP in defense acquisition for sexy threats for a long time. Missile defense broke out of that, and there's still a lot of work in China over in DOD with respect to that program. But to get anything through our acquisition system right now, it would be amazing to me if we could all of a sudden, say, turn UAVs into cruise missiles.

But interestingly enough, that's what the Russians have accused us of, saying, well, you already violate INF.

Jeffrey 37:28

By the way, Lewis's dictum. Yes. That you will live to regret the concessions that you win in any arms control agreement in proportion to how hard you fought to get them. So we fought really hard to keep... Slickums out of the START treaty. And now we don't really...

Tom 37:55

I'm really sure I'm regretting that now. Well, Navy... I want to find the flag officer who wrote the guidance that went up to SecDef on these issues and, you know, Put them on trial. It's just you people had this idea we would always have this capability. And of course, the talking point's easy now, right? We got rid of TLAM and Russia has one.

Oh, yeah. And I appreciate the Navy doesn't care. You know, it's been other services that have shown, at least to me, interest. And I'm sure there'll be someone on Twitter going now more you're wrong. Here are five instances where someone said that it wasn't. But I don't really care. The bottom line is we talk a lot about this, but no one.

And you and I are the dumbest people in the world, but we're not.

Jeffrey 38:44

You know, the smartest people either.

Tom 38:47

And we're bumbling around here, and I don't get the sense that these interagency people are really doing much more than that at the sub-principals committee level and below.

Jeffrey 38:57

Okay, last question, and then I will let you go. Is part of the problem that we are treating these things separately, like there is the There is the INF problem, which gets put into one basket. There is the possibility of relatively large numbers of nuclear-armed cruise missiles at sea problem that gets put into another basket. There is the irritation of selling containerized cruise missiles that gets put into yet a third basket.

Would we do better to look at this challenge as something that is a Common problem arising from a change in how the Russians think about their forces?

Tom 39:43

I think you're right to say we should look at it in aggregate simply as an analytical matter because it's easier to get your mind around it other than doing what we did to Lister's, which is the finest dissection of capillaries, although not really. We could have gone into much more detail. The problem is essentially the United States military capability has given us a sense of security.

It's been used a lot, and that capability now isn't inherently ours, whether it's UAS, unmanned aerial systems, whether it's aerostatic vehicles, or whether it's cruise missile strikes from the ocean. The problem is, of course, we're not talking about Germany or Japan or the UK. We're talking about Russia and we're talking about Russia with Putin. So until we can get good Russians in charge of Russia, and I'm sure that comment will merit me some more appropriate insults online, but until we can get the right kinds of Russians back in charge, if we ever can, we need to start coming up with ways to ensure that both sides have a better picture of With regard to these very particular details, and I don't, you know, Mike Craypon said a few weeks ago at something I was at, you know, no one's talking to each other.

You know, what's the first thing the Russian military did? We're not going to talk to Turkey anymore. Forget that. If you want these complex air operations to work, you need partners. We do too.

Jeffrey 41:07

I know what we could do in the interim. We could get somebody to fund you to do a study of how to verify cruise missile production.

Tom 41:17

I have thoughts, but they would really, really annoy people if I started expanding on them here. No, I've thought a lot about it. I'll leave it at that for now.

Jeffrey 41:30

Hey, Tom, it was great to have you on. It was a pleasure. I'd be happy to come back.

Tom 41:36

All right.

Jeffrey 41:37

And as always, listeners, thanks for listening.