INF Basing Modes, Asia Edition

Aaron Stein 0:02

The treaty you need to pull out of is New START, not INF. Don't give anybody ideas, Jeffrey. And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Kariri Center for the Middle East. We've been separated again, Aaron. We are on our respective coasts, no longer together.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:41

That is right. How was your trip out to the worst coast? It was terrifying. Our plane almost crashed while it was landing. Back to Monterey? Because you didn't mention this when we sat down for coffee and recorded a podcast.

Aaron 0:54

No, I was still traumatized. No, it was landing at DCA. We got hit by a gust of wind and the plane twisted. There's actually a video of this happening to a plane in March, but I haven't seen a video of our plane. But we went... It would be an exaggeration to say that we went perpendicular to the runway, but we sort of, you know, twisted in that direction.

Yeah. And then the pilot hit it and aborted the landing and took off, circled around and tried it again. And it happened again, although this time he put it down pretty hard on the tarmac. The dude next to me puked his guts out.

Jeffrey 1:27

Oh, this is actually breaking news here on the pod, because we were together for breakfast last week because of our busy schedules, and you did not mention this, so happy you landed safely and happy you returned safely.

Aaron 1:37

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it was nice to see old friends. I am happy to be back in California, let's just say that.

Jeffrey 1:46

Yeah, and California, you know, you are closer to the Pacific Ocean, which is sort of the Centerpiece, if you will, about the debates about how to respond to Chinese missiles in the wake of the INF thing. It's all over the place in our community.

Aaron 2:04

I have to say, it's such a strange phenomenon that, you know, I mean... The president withdrew from the INF Treaty, citing the fact that Russia was in violation of it. You know, allegations that we have discussed in great detail. You know, we've discussed both the ground launch cruise missile the Russians are deploying that... The United States thinks is a clear violation in which, I don't know, don't want to put words in your mouth, but which you and I think is probably a pretty credible allegation.

But also the not violation that nonetheless was kind of a dick move of deploying an SS-20 clone in the form of the RS-26. But despite all that, it turns out there are a whole bunch of people who wanted out of the INF Treaty because China has intermediate range nuclear forces and we want to get some of those ourselves.

Jeffrey 2:57

Yeah, and so a lot of the pieces that have come out in the wake of – I guess the president's announcement to withdraw, not formal withdrawal, we aren't quite there yet, is that not only was the president correct, he may have gone about it poorly, but the – The strategic logic was there because we needed to begin to counter Chinese forces.

And one of the ways to do that was to go back to the ground launch cruise missile and to find places to put it in the Pacific. Would you say that's accurate?

Aaron 3:29

I mean, that seems to be what people are saying. Although, you know, just to be clear, Europe is a landmass. The Pacific is an ocean. Except for China, which is a landmass abutting the Pacific, largely looking... Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense for China, which is a landmass, to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range missiles. I'm just saying that if you put a ground-launched intermediate-range missile in the Pacific, it tends to sink.

Jeffrey 3:58

Right. I have a big zoom out of Google Earth and I'm basically looking at China and California or like the West Coast of North America. And there's Japan. And there's Hawaii. And other than that, it's basically just a whole bunch of blue. But the Earth is a sphere, as we like to say on the Arms Control Wong podcast.

So I think we should talk about some of these ideas about basing options on island outposts in the Pacific and how this is being justified as a conscientious, cost-saving move to offset Chinese missile superiority, or at least intermediate-range ground-launch missile superiority in terms of numbers.

Aaron 4:37

Yeah, I think I want to say at the outset, a lot of the pieces that I have read, you know, they kind of fall into two camps. I mean, some are like not aware that the Pacific is an ocean. It's a big ocean. Those are bad. There are smarter ones that start to grapple with the question of, you know, the INF Treaty prohibited...

Ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It did not prohibit sea and air-launched missiles with those ranges. And so the natural question is, if you are interested in having a capability that is symmetrical to China's missiles in that range, which the You know, symmetry may be overrated. Like, you know, the actual counter to those would be defenses.

And there's no reason that you couldn't use a longer range system or a shorter range system. But, you know, whatever. If you wanted things in that range category, the smarter argument is that the cost of placing missiles on aircraft or ships... Will be on a per unit basis more expensive than ground launch. I've seen that asserted a lot and it kind of makes sense because ships and aircraft are expensive, but I haven't seen anybody do a proper calculation and I think it's kind of apples and oranges because you do have to take into account ground launch basing modes which do require vehicles and then the standards for those vehicles are a function of where you deploy them And that may drive your requirements.

And so I thought it would make sense for us to talk a little bit about how the geography of the Pacific region interacts with what we know about the experience of procuring intermediate range ground launch cruise missiles in the 1980s.

Jeffrey 6:39

Yeah, and that's exactly where we wanted to start. And I just think just to pick up on sort of the Apples to oranges, you're, you're using a fruit metaphor. I would call it methodologically flawed is that we, the ground launch cruise missile is a single, single, it's a single use thing. It's not multi-purpose. And so our aircraft and our ships are not, you know, there are, they are multi-mission systems and therefore it's hard to compare the cost of Of a single mission thing, like a ground launcher to say a Navy ship that does any number of things, one of which would be to carry intermediate range cruise missiles.

And so it's hard to do that. And like one thing when we were talking off pod was just try, I mentioned that we can get the per unit cost of Tomahawk and you said, no, we need to talk about all these other things. So why don't we start there with the lessons from the 1980s? Yeah.

Aaron 7:33

And I should say, I mean, there is the unusual case of the four oldest Ohio-class submarines, which were ballistic missile launchers, which got converted to cruise missile submarines. And they, you know, I think they each carry 154 Tomahawks. It's something like that. So, you know, I mean, to a first approximation, the United States already does have, you know, the capacity to put, you know, something like 600 intermediate range cruise missiles in theater.

Just on ships. Just on those four ships, which is, you know, already... Quite a lot larger than the Chinese number of comparable cruise missiles and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Although they do have a pretty healthy number of short-range ballistic missiles. But that is the one case where you do have single-purpose ships.

Jeffrey 8:45

Right.

Aaron 8:46

But generally speaking, other ships would not be single-purpose.

Jeffrey 8:50

So why don't we start with... The, then you know, the comparative to the best that we can do here on the podcast, which is the experience of the 1980s, which is with the Griffin, which is the ground launch cruise missile that was ultimately deployed in West Germany and a few other places in Europe. Yeah, we haven't really done the calculation because it turns out the historical numbers are not super revealing.

Aaron 9:15

And so, like, I would encourage, and I think maybe over the long term you and I might want to do it, but it's just, I think the important thing to observe is that, you know, the Griffin had, well, Aaron, it was you who pointed it out to me, right? It was a, you've got a truck towing a strong back which has four missiles.

Correct. Right. And for a pair of those trucks, you have a third truck which serves as a launch control center?

Jeffrey 9:42

Yes. Okay.

Aaron 9:42

So you have three trucks per eight missiles. Correct. Which is, you know, pretty hardware. German trucks. Well, we'll talk about that in a second. But that's, you know, that's pretty hardware intensive when you, you know, I mean, as expensive as a ballistic missile submarine is, which it is, you know, there are 154 missiles sitting on it.

Jeffrey 10:09

Correct.

Aaron 10:09

You know, so it's like the cost of one ballistic missile submarine or, you know, the cost of, you know, the portion of a warship that you might dedicate to VLS tubes, you know, you have to compare that to the expense associated with the two strong backs and three trucks, one of which is a launch control center, which really can only accommodate eight missiles.

You know, so if you, you know, like I, you know, what the hell is 154 divided by eight, right?

Jeffrey 10:40

Luckily, I have an iPhone right next to me, so I can do those calculations on the floor.

Aaron 10:42

Yeah, I'm opening up my calculator.

Jeffrey 10:43

It won't let me open. Oh, that's because I have two screens open. 19.25, 154 divided by 8.

Aaron 10:51

Right, so you need 20 sets of three vehicles. So, you know, you're looking at like 60 vehicles. So, you know, you have to do the scaling right. And the cost growth for the GLICOM program in Europe was driven by the vehicles. It wasn't driven by the missiles, which really were just, you know, versions of the Tomahawk. So there was very little missile cost growth.

All of the cost growth, which was quite substantial, was driven by the vehicles. Which I think gets us to your lovely point about it being a German truck.

Jeffrey 11:29

You know, one of the things, and I was going back, because we had this conversation last week over coffee after your harrowing landing. And so I went back and started looking at all these old documents that I haven't looked at in a really long time, to be honest with you. And I was reading through how, about the trucks, and I learned that the trucks are made by a, I'm going to butcher the German, so I'm just going to call it MAN, Maschenfabrik Oxford Nuremberg, which was the trucks that the four missiles would sit on.

Aaron 12:00

Yeah, and your speculation, which we haven't been able to confirm, but just seems like such a safe bet given everything we know about defense procurement, was that maybe there was an offset involved.

Jeffrey 12:11

Yeah, or it was a lure to get German industry involved in this program because there were political concerns by the Germans at that time about taking the brunt or at least the most numbers of ground-launched cruise missiles. And I believe they also carried the Pershing. So, you know, it was the same prime mover. It was also used for the Army Pershing II.

So, yeah. One of the sweeteners, I have to think, and somebody could correct me in the pod or in the Slack channel, is that this was a little chit to German industry to get them to be more politically okay with deploying the vast majority of these systems.

Aaron 12:46

Yeah, I sometimes see references to both the German vehicle and then the U.S. had a common prime mover that was under development. I guess it was actually probably in service at the time, right? Which was the HEMTT, an acronym that I cannot remember off the top of my head. And so they looked at different truck options as a way of trying to keep down the cost of So, you know, it is not like I understand the first approximation point of saying, like, hey, it's not just the missiles, it's the basing mode.

And, you know, ships and aircraft are really expensive. That's true. But I haven't seen anyone do a proper calculation where they actually go ahead and and figure out, like, what is the what is the best apples to apples comparison of basing mode costs? Because it it might be cheaper.

Jeffrey 13:45

It probably is, but the numbers may be misleading, if that makes sense.

Aaron 13:50

I think that's right. And then particularly because, and this will get to this question of where you put these things, you know, you have to set requirements for the vehicles, and those can drive up costs.

Jeffrey 14:03

Right. It's heavy expanded mobility tactical truck, so H-E-M-T-T.

Aaron 14:08

This reminds me, Aaron, when I was at CSIS, you know, when we used to do, you know... Not saying this about CSIS today. I'm merely observing about my little program when I was in it 20 years ago. But we did a lot of things for money. Yeah. And I remember, you know, and there was still some integrity, like it's not that they wouldn't do anything for money, but like, you know, people, defense contractors would show up with a proposal and you'd kind of look at it, right?

Jeffrey 14:44

And be like, well, it's a lot of money, but it's not really all that interesting. Right.

Aaron 14:48

And there was one contractor that had this proposal for T-21, the 21st century truck, which probably was extremely important in a logistical sense, particularly when you look at Iraq, how fuel efficiency definitely drove vulnerabilities. Yeah, fuel convoys. Yeah, it's not like a knock on the project, but, like, we all looked at it and, like, does anybody want to work on the truck?

And, like, no one wanted to work on the trucks. So no matter how much I get into missiles, I still find trucks boring, even if I accept that they're important.

Jeffrey 15:25

Right, right, right. And... Yeah. And I think the requirements are important because if you think about how to target these things, so if you're on the other side, it's like the trucks are going to disperse. And so you need to take in the geography of both. You know, the three places we're going to look at are the ones with an intermediate range of China, which would be Okinawa, Guam.

In South Korea, but South Korea will come to last because it's a fun case study. Right.

Aaron 15:54

Well, we should cross Australia off the list because I sometimes hear people say Australia. But Darwin is, you know, the kind of the northern part of Australia where you might conceivably base such things. Is basically ICBM range from China. I mean, there are places that are like under 5,500 kilometers, but when you figure that you want to take advantage of the outback to like pull things back and drive around, and then you figure you want to be able to target things in most of China, not just like a tiny little slice yeah, the southern part, you know the treaty, if you want to put Either nuclear or conventionally armed missiles in Australia to target China, the treaty you need to pull out of his New START. Not INF. Don't give anybody ideas. Jesus Christ. I think, I mean, look, I mean, they, they know. Okay, I know they know we're just joking. And New START is next, so you know, you can go ahead and kiss that one goodbye too.

Jeffrey 16:58

Yeah, well, that's another pod. Just keep it going, guys.

Aaron 17:02

But actually, the basing, yeah, I think we should talk about Guam and Okinawa, which are real basing options, South Korea, which is a funny case, and we should probably throw in the Philippines because occasionally I see people think that we're going to be able to get our military bases back in the Philippines, which we can talk about.

Sure. Okay, which one should we do first? I want to start with Guam because I think Guam presents the most straightforward challenge, which is it is tiny.

Jeffrey 17:29

Yeah, I had a tweet where Guam is small, China has many missiles, therefore this is not a very hard targeting option for the Chinese if you were to put in ground launch cruise missiles.

Aaron 17:41

I took Alex Wellerstein's nuke map.

Jeffrey 17:45

Yeah, shout out to Alex Wellerstein.

Aaron 17:46

And I assumed – You know, China has these old 5 megaton warheads, but I just assumed they were going to use the fancy new 500 kiloton warheads. And I just optimized Airburst for 5 PSI, which is... Sort of kind of the barrier between what these vehicles can probably take and what they can't take. I think you could build military vehicles that could probably handle 5 PSI.

Then you get back to cost. Well, that's what I want to talk about. But you figure 5 PSI plus the chance that people are going to get sick from thermal radiation. Mm-hmm. Because, yeah, I wanted to explore hardening. You know, I can blanket Guam with nine warheads.

Jeffrey 18:37

At the five megaton?

Aaron 18:38

500 kiloton. 500 kilotons. It's much easier at five megatons.

Jeffrey 18:42

Seriously. I was about to say, that's a lot for 500.

Aaron 18:45

You know, and so, like, I just... You can harden... Against that psi and against that radiation but the point there is that's going to drive up cost which is what happened to the hard mobile launcher which was the u.s mobile launcher considered for the poorly named midget man missile yeah yeah yeah do you should we talk about that just really quickly what that is just for listeners that aren't aware of that that that late stage missile that never really got built or deployed Right.

So in the 1980s, there was the MX missile was going to be mobile. And that was just gobsmackingly expensive. And in the end, the Air Force just slid the Minuteman canisters down. Sorry, MX canisters into Minuteman silos. But the enthusiasm for mobility led to what was called a small ICBM, which nonetheless needed a very big truck. But because they wanted to make that truck very survivable against radiation and blast, it ended up being really very expensive.

Yeah. And, you know, in the end was, I think, one reason that that program, you know, ended up not happening. So, you know, like that's the problem with Guam. If you look at it, it illustrates really nicely that, you know, I do a lay down of eight or nine weapons and Guam is in a lot of trouble.

And you could conceivably imagine hardening...

Jeffrey 20:25

Against that but then you know, like, it's probably, there's, you know, at some theoretical point where it's just cheaper to have the ships get out in the ocean where they've got all the room in the world, right? Then it becomes cheaper to be able to scramble either air launch cruise missiles or to rely on, yeah you know, cruise missiles at sea to, to hold targets in China at risk. And Okinawa's bigger.

Yeah, so let's jump up to Okinawa.

Aaron 20:57

But it's like three, four times bigger. It's not, you know, it's still sort of within a reasonable build that the Chinese might engage in.

Jeffrey 21:06

It's also closer to China in terms of warning time.

Aaron 21:10

It comes under the threat of more types of systems. Right. And and and then it introduces, you know, what Guam doesn't have, which is, oh, the political joy in politically tense Okinawa of of having giant US mobile missile launchers rolling down the highway.

Jeffrey 21:34

And if you think about it, too, I mean, if you look at a satellite picture of Okinawa, like, your mobile launchers can really only go one way, because the bottom southern half of the island is so developed and urban, it doesn't seem politically feasible for the Japanese government to let U.S. glickums, you know, set up in the parking lot of their version of a Walmart.

Aaron 21:57

And I have heard people sort of dismiss this, like, you know, while you're saying we shouldn't do anything hard, like... I don't think people realize how tenuous and difficult U.S. military presence on Okinawa was. When I worked literally 20 years ago at the Defense Department, the summer after I left CSIS, we were working on Futenma relocation. Like, we're still working on Futenma relocation.

Jeffrey 22:31

Yeah, yeah. I mean, as my title would suggest at the opening of our podcast, I am not the most sort of adroit at Asian politics, but this is something I know a lot about and that it's just difficult.

Aaron 22:45

I mean, you know, like, you know, I mean, there's a freaking legal court case right now to stop it. And we were literally working this issue 20 years ago when I was spending my summer at OSD.

Jeffrey 23:07

I think I cut you off, though, because we did this before, Pod. How many warheads would you need with the Wellerstein map at 500 kilotons?

Aaron 23:13

Well, so I just, you know, you happily cut off the southern kind of urban part of the island. But I figured, nah, screw it, I'm going to nuke it all.

Jeffrey 23:27

You have to, right?

Aaron 23:29

Well, you know, it just depends how bloody-minded you want to be about it. You know, and that's like 30, 40 warheads. Okay. Depending on, again, at 500 kilotons. And, you know, like, you probably don't need to be as stupid about your targeting as I was. But, you know, like... You know, moving it to Okinawa, you get a little bit more room to drive around in, but you don't get, like, it's not impossible for the Chinese to outbuild it.

And then you run into, I think, a much more difficult political problem, which I like to emphasize because I think there's some revealed preference here. You know why? Why? Because Japan is not a party to the INF Treaty.

Jeffrey 24:15

Right, right.

Aaron 24:16

Japan can build as many conventionally armed long-range missiles as it would like. It is constrained only by its interpretation of the Constitution and the politics of doing so. And Shinzo Abe has repeatedly talked about how much, you know, Japan being a naval power, they'd like to buy sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, and he can't get that done in his own country.

Jeffrey 24:44

Correct. This is something we've talked about on the podcast before, way back, is about Japan's interest in both air and sea launch cruise missiles.

Aaron 24:51

Right.

Jeffrey 24:52

I think JASM and Tomahawk.

Aaron 24:53

He can't seem to make that happen, although I think they're going to get that. They were looking at that. Was it a Swedish? No, no, it was Norwegian. It was Norwegian. You know, you'd think I would know that because the Norwegians gave us the... The Isdal woman, do you know this? You know, this is a great BBC podcast. This woman turns up dead in Norway, just as the Norwegians were pioneering the, I think it was the Penguin anti-ship missile.

You don't know this? Oh my god, it's a great story. Anyway, she ends up dead with, like, she's cut all the labels out of her clothes, and she had checked into multiple hotels under fake identities, and people have no idea what she was up to. One hypothesis, which I'm not all that convinced by, was that she was somehow involved in spying on the Penguin tests, which were taking place in Bergen at the time.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. But anyway, the point is, the Norwegians have nice anti-ship missiles, and the Japanese want to buy one of them.

Jeffrey 25:53

Yes, and it's called the Naval Strike Missile. It made it easy for us. Fifth gen over the horizon, ready to go now. Norwegian Naval Strike Missile.

Aaron 26:04

Japan could purchase these things and deploy them. Japan chooses not to do this. Oh, by the way, the Naval Strike Missile is the successor to the Penguin, so there you go. Everybody should check out the Isdal Woman podcast. Japan could do this. They choose not to. Like, we did not need to leave the INF Treaty for Japan to deploy, you know, a couple hundred conventionally armed long-range missiles.

They don't do it because of the politics. And those politics, I don't think, get easier when they are American nuclear weapon or when they're American missiles that are conventional, but which, you know, arguably could be dual use. I think the politics get harder.

Jeffrey 26:50

Yeah. And just to pick up on that before we jump down to the Philippines, because one of the things you see a lot is that you could like forward stage a glickum in like Hawaii, you know, or something along those lines. And then in times of crisis, you could forward deploy as a mechanism of reassurance. I was just taken aback by that for exactly the political reasons in Japan.

Like, if you're not willing to accept them at times of peace, why would you be willing to accept them at times of conflict?

Aaron 27:18

Yeah, I think the idea that you're going to put something in in a crisis, like, that's one of those things that sounds wonderful over donuts at CSIS. It is a terrible idea in the real world. Because you're literally going to have a public debate or even a private debate that might leak to the public about deepening the crisis?

You know, I think you run every risk in a situation like that where you're like, we'd like to put the missiles in now. And, you know, the Japanese government says, no, screw Taiwan. And then I think, you know, I, yeah, no, that's not a good idea. Yeah, Philippines, like people forget that the Philippines basically threw the United States out.

Jeffrey 28:06

It's bigger.

Aaron 28:06

I mean, let's just first talk about that. It's big. Of course, I'm not sure I want to run them around, you know, what is it? Is it Mindanao?

Jeffrey 28:14

They have a little bit of an insurgency problem.

Aaron 28:16

There are places in the Philippines that are better than others. But, like, the Philippines were not delighted with the U.S. military presence. And, you know, like, yeah, there's been efforts to, like, you know, patch things up again. But, like... Jesus, that's really pushing it.

Jeffrey 28:37

Because I mean, I think it's important to step back and say what we're talking about here is the ground launch cruise missile we assume will be nuclear armed. And so this isn't just like building out a portion of an existing Air Force base that's already there in the case of Guam or in Okinawa. It is asking the government to accept American nuclear weapons.

Aaron 28:56

Well, you know, I can take it either way, right? I mean, you could imagine, I mean, I think Okinawa, you know, it reverted to Japan with a non-nuclear. So I don't think you could put nuclear weapons in Okinawa. You could do it in Okinawa.

Jeffrey 29:08

No, you could be conventional.

Aaron 29:11

Philippines would be complex. But I think to some extent it doesn't matter because whatever system you're going to put in will have a sort of inherent dual capability. It will be depicted as a nuclear capability. I think you will pay all of the political costs for doing that, I think even if we choose not to do that.

And frankly, if you choose to use conventional weapons, my guess is the footprint of the deployment will have to be significantly larger.

Jeffrey 29:43

Correct.

Aaron 29:44

So, you know, I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but I think it's complex both ways in ways that the public debate doesn't seem to capture.

Jeffrey 29:55

No, and it's actually extremely important as we as scholars and whatever happens have to think about is that whatever system goes in there will be inherently dual capable and how that impacts strategic stability beyond just sort of the fun stuff about where to put it in basing modes and stuff like that.

Aaron 30:11

And let me say, you know, on this subject, I mean, I guess maybe the last place to turn to is South Korea and then kind of, you know, comma, Taiwan. Because I think it'd be pretty hard to imagine putting them in South Korea politically. Putting them in Taiwan would, you know, probably go ahead and you might as well just put them in and plan to use them.

Correct. But... South Korea and Taiwan both have serious missile programs that are producing missiles, conventionally armed missiles, that fall in the range covered by the INF Treaty. You know? Yes. You have cruise missiles in Taiwan where the range is a little uncertain.

Jeffrey 31:01

Interesting basing mode.

Aaron 31:02

Yes. As we've discussed, they attempted to discuss them as delivery trucks. You know, that program a decade ago was, I think, already at, like, somewhere between, like, 300 and 500 kilometers. And my guess is, you know, they're probably roughly keeping pace. I would be shocked if they don't have a 1,000-kilometer range cruise missile program. On the drawing board at a minimum.

And we know the South Koreans have a cruise missile like that because they've tested it and shown it off. And they've been, you know, gradually working to reduce the range and payload restrictions on their ballistic missiles. So, you know, we've talked about the pretty hefty missile race that's underway. Like, those countries already have their own missiles in that range.

And so, you know, like, I mean, I think we talk about how the Chinese have this capability and we have to have our own counter, but... Like, we have sea-launched cruise missiles. We have air-launched cruise missiles. Our allies are developing their own capabilities, including long-range ground-launch cruise missiles. Like, that race is underway. It's not really clear to me that leaving the INF Treaty increases our flexibility in this regard significantly, and it's not clear to me that the capabilities we're talking about actually meaningfully offset that.

What the Chinese are doing, you know, because like, they have a rationale for those systems, and US having our own missiles doesn't really off, doesn't really defeat that rationale, unless we go for first and you know, start plinking missile bases throughout China, which I, I think is maybe not a great idea.

Jeffrey 32:48

Well, I mean, if we get to that point, you know, the great ideas have failed and we're in a whole big of a storm here that we're probably not going to live through.

Aaron 32:56

Well, that actually is a really important point because, you know, particularly when the Department of Defense started talking about, you know, air-sea battle, Caitlin Talmadge wrote this piece in Foreign Affairs, which picks up on a theme that You know, we've talked about a lot before, a lot of China's missiles are dual use. You know, the DF-26 has nuclear and conventional options.

Jeffrey 33:20

Mm-hmm.

Aaron 33:21

And so does the DF-21. And, you know, it's not clear to me, whenever I ask my Chinese colleagues about this, like, they think the U.S. can tell the difference.

Jeffrey 33:34

It's not clear to me the U.S. can tell the difference.

Aaron 33:37

And, you know, just... Yeah, so, you know, like, if we're going after conventionally armed missiles throughout China and we start hitting nuclear-armed locations, you know, are we really going to control escalation?

Jeffrey 33:54

I mean, you can put the same thing on the other side, is if we... Deploy dual-capable systems, because the ground-launched Tomahawk was nuclear-armed. Obviously, there are a lot of talks, and I fall into this camp, that you could do a conventionally-armed replacement in certain places. But if you're a country, you can't take things for granted, especially when politics get involved and defense planning gets involved, your worst-case scenario plan.

Aaron 34:27

Well, a great example being, you know, What if you have some reason to think that Glickums, whether they are conventionally armed or nuclear armed, maybe you don't know, right? The U.S. Glickums are sitting in Guam, and you know that they're going out into the field, but you don't know whether they're going out with conventional weapons or nuclear weapons.

You might, if you were the Chinese, feel a little tempted. Like, you know, I think that no first use is really a thing. But, like, I also see, you know, the reason I think no first use is still a thing in China is because military officers complain about it. This is the kind of thing they complain about.

So, you know, we are creating these incentives. That I'm not sure we like. And I recall somebody, oh, the person will remain unnamed because I've been too tough on him lately, was kind of worried about this and tried to like grapple with it seriously and was like, well, maybe we could do like a geographic set aside, you know, like, like we inform the Chinese that like everything in the, everything in the military region adjacent to Taiwan is fair game and we're going to knock the crap out of it.

So you better go ahead and keep your nuclear weapons in other areas, and that way we'll be able to, like, section off the nuclear from the conventional conflict, which, you know, again, like, makes a lot of sense on paper, but, like, talking the Chinese into that and making sure you know where all the sites are, like, we just, we aren't there yet, you know, so... And it's, I mean, maybe just as we pivot to wrap up here, it's one of those things, that strategic stability question is...

Jeffrey 36:15

If you put the politics aside and you have sort of the surge model is that you forward stage in Hawaii or Australia, someplace, I guess, relatively close given the size of the Pacific Ocean, and that as tensions escalate, you signal resolve, the R word, by surging. That also looks tempting. So your effort to de-escalate the conflict and to control escalation is viewed from the other side as an escalatory move and as a signal of imminent launch, and therefore your no-first-use policy, you don't think of it as we're violating that no-first-use policy.

You're thinking of it as the Americans are about ready to violate. Yes. The Americans are ready to fire on us, so we have to go first.

Aaron 37:04

Right. So that's a that's a problem I talk about in Paper Tigers, which I think is a real problem, which is when you look at the Chinese posture, which is pretty relaxed on a day to day basis. They have historically very much talked about putting forces on alert to signal will. And to signal that they are ready to respond if they are attacked.

And of course, putting forces on alert is indistinguishable from the first stages of a launch. And so if you find yourself in a situation where, say, even though I believe no first use is real, most U.S. policymakers don't. And I always worry about the situation where you've got a crisis. We take some step that prompts them to think that they need to respond.

They put those forces on alert. And some of the people in the room with the president will be saying that the things that we are detecting, which, of course, we don't have perfect vision of, you know, so it'll be dribs and drabs and hints. They will say that those are preparations for an attack. Not a, you know, psychological operation to demonstrate will.

And, you know, if you have a real dependence on land-based assets sitting in Guam and Okinawa, you know, it's like the old Rand bomber study.

Jeffrey 38:27

It's going to be like, not only are they getting ready to attack, these forces are vulnerable.

Aaron 38:31

Correct. You know, and so it kind of to cycle back to the beginning, like, I don't think it's that much cheaper to put them on land that but also you are buying something with your money to put them at sea. Right. You are buying stability. And so while I'm pretty skeptical of the value of these capabilities, just generally speaking, you know, whatever value they have, I think is maximized when they are operated with sea room.

Jeffrey 39:02

Yeah, and just last point on this is, like, these... The signaling is different in that scenario with the Glicum than it is if you pop up an Ohio-class submarine. Do you know what I mean? Because those are – do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. I do. I just – Because somebody, again, who remained nameless pushed back on my – I said this on Twitter and they pushed back and they said, what's the difference between this, sort of the Glicum thing we just talked about, and popping up a sub?

It's like, well, the subs are like – You assume that they're there.

Aaron 39:35

It has to go back underwater. It actually has to go back underwater to launch.

Jeffrey 39:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron 39:42

Actually, have they ever done a pop-up surface test? I actually don't know. Do they have to be underwater to launch?

Jeffrey 39:49

Well, I mean, I'm talking about in the reassurance story.

Aaron 39:51

No, I know. I just got lost in a kind of nerdy, nerdy question.

Jeffrey 39:54

Oh, no, no, because then I started thinking too. And, you know, we just... You know, I do see a... And really, this is the last sort of talk. I do see... A role for longer range, like army rocket artillery, like army surface-to-surface missiles for suppression of enemy air defenses and stuff like that, that have a specific mission set.

But I get lost in the Glickham conversation, if that makes sense. So I'm not against developing some, like, longer INF range systems for specific mission sets.

Aaron 40:31

Well, that would have been easy to do, you know, because the INF Treaty defines two different classes of missiles. And so there was a class of, you know, there were the intermediate range nuclear forces, but then there were the shorter range nuclear forces, right? Which were, I think, 500 to, I think, a thousand kilometers you know, they could have struck that from the treaty, you know, they could have said, you know, look, a thousand kilometers is fine you know, you could do things like that for sure.

Because you can update things to deal with problems, particular problems, changes in technology, changes in geopolitical situations. The fact that the border between NATO and Moscow is in a different place today than it was when we signed the treaty. You know, you could totally have considered altering the agreement to take into account new realities, but nobody, you know, nobody seems to have seriously considered that.

And the people who want out, I mean, I think it's very clear that they don't want out with the intention of replacing it with something else. They just want out.

Jeffrey 41:38

Right, and that's the subject of the last pod. And perhaps the best place to wrap this one up is it's not as easy as it looks, you know, in sort of the 800-word op-ed. There's some serious issues. Maybe we should take up that cost issue, you know, looking forward to how much these things actually do cost.

Aaron 41:55

Yeah, we could go do a little math. How exciting.

Jeffrey 41:57

Yeah, bust out the iPhone calculator. But I think with that, you know, it's actually pretty warm here on the East Coast. It's Halloween day, so it's actually my three-year-old's first time trick-or-treating. Oh, wow, cool.

Aaron 42:08

So it's, it's a good day for it, yeah. We oh, that's interesting. We, we are, you know, we have more, and so we are longer term trick-or-treaters, but we've got we've got the neighbor from Hello Neighbor, we've got the Halo Master Chief, and Tinkerbell, so real difference in personalities on display there.

Jeffrey 42:31

And we have Catboy from PJ Masks. He's very excited in his costume.

Aaron 42:35

That's so funny. My middle child hates PJ Masks.

Jeffrey 42:43

We have fit now. We have big disagreements. The two families came together, so we'll have to keep them apart. Although I think I've met your villain when he's older. I think he can take Ali in current status.

Aaron 42:56

That may be true.

Jeffrey 42:56

He's a rough and tumble little man.

Aaron 43:00

Yeah. Hey.

Jeffrey 43:01

We've gone off the rails.

Aaron 43:02

We have. Just like the INF treaty.

Jeffrey 43:04

Thank you, Jeffrey, for the podcast and good luck trick-or-treating tonight. For the listeners, head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast and if you're a student, it's No more than $3 a month. If you're everybody else, it is $5 a month. And with that, you also get access to our Slack channel where all sorts of nerdy and wonky conversations go on 24 hours a day.

You can drop in and talk about the podcast or anything you really want and get access to Brilliant Pebbles. So check it out.

Aaron 43:37

I am at this very moment answering a question in Slack about the 2020 commission.

Jeffrey 43:46

Well, there you go. And you buy the 2020 commission. Let's give you another plug. Why not?

Aaron 43:49

Oh, yeah. Buy the book. You know, sales are okay. They are not bad. We are about halfway through the first print run. So it's all right. Although, you know, only halfway through the first print run. So if there's a big rush, you can still get your book. Hey, Aaron. Yeah. Thank you for joining me. Always a pleasure.

Jeffrey 44:10

And thank you for listening.