I Sing of Arms and the Man

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog. Aaron's busy doing other things today, and so instead we have a special guest, CSIS's Tom Karako, who's written an article called Sing Missile Muse of Gods and Heroes, America's Most Fearsome Weapons Need Better Names in War on the Rocks.

How you doing, Tom? How you doing? Well, thank you, Jeffrey. Happy to be here. I am so excited. I loved this piece. And I know why I liked it. But I'm curious, why are you the other person in the world who cares about this? What on earth led you to write this remarkable thing?

Tom Karako 0:57

Well, it's one of those things that have just sort of been percolating in the back of my mind for, I don't know, years and years. Part of it is, you know, I think just a study of Cold War history, a study of the names that we've attached to, you know, the Atlas and the Titan and the Jupiter.

And then for the air and missile defense world, things like Nike, you know, Nike, goddess of winged victory. I mean, those were names where when we believed in the mission, as it were, We attached strong gods, marquee gods, to the missile names. And, you know, also just sort of being that type of person that pays a lot of attention to programmatics for air and missile defenses, but then also on the strike side.

And it's just been something that's percolating back there in the background of mine, and I think possibly my background in classics and political philosophy had something to do with it, too.

Jeffrey 1:51

Yeah, I wanted to ask you that because that came as a real surprise to me. And it's not a typical background for our field. So tell me about that for a second.

Tom 2:04

Yeah, well, I guess you could say this is a little bit of a coming out piece. You know, if you go to Capitol Hill and you pull out your business card and say, hey, I'm a PhD in political science, people tend to look at you funny. And so, too, when you talk to missile engineers or warfighters and say, hey, I studied political philosophy in college, they tend to look at you a little funny.

So I don't tend to talk about it much, but I spent a good bit of time both in undergrad and And graduate school, studying political philosophy, Homer, the classics, that sort of thing. You know, before Ajax was a toilet bowl cleaner, he was a character of a Sophocles play kind of thing. And I spent a lot of time on that.

Jeffrey 2:42

Well, you'll get no argument from me. I was a philosophy major in college. And I didn't like the ancients so much as I liked modern epistemologists. But... I found it was a fantastic education. And I will say that I do not regret picking that as my undergraduate major. I also have a soft spot for the classics because my sister is a classicist.

Tom 3:07

Well, I'd say the same thing. And I'll say that the further away I get from my liberal arts roots, the more I appreciate it. And the more you kind of recognize what you don't have when you When you don't know who Homer characters are or what have you. So I had a lot of fun with it from that reason.

But also, it's just words. I also have a bang the spoon on the high chair frequently about words like hypersonics being ungrammatical. And I tend to find that no or very few topics in defense policy are not informed by opening a dictionary. Or especially an etymological dictionary, and defining what it is that you're talking about. You know, whether it is multi-domain, this, that, or the other thing, or hypersonic, that thing.

Just open a dictionary. What literally does the word mean? That tends to be helpful.

Jeffrey 4:03

Yeah, I always found when people were curious, you know, what would you do with a philosophy degree? My answer would be like, yeah, what could I possibly do with an education and how to think correctly, clearly and rigorously about things? What could you ever possibly do with that? Right. So what kind of reactions are you getting to the piece?

Tom 4:23

Yeah, well, as you say, it's about the idea that our our major weapon systems ostensibly it's it's about the next ICBM currently called GBSD. But really, it's broader than that. It's about our major weapon systems need better names. And the reactions, I would say, fall into three categories. One, the first category is those that tend to be of a certain age that kind of smirk and say, hey, that's clever.

And I remember studying Homer in high school or something like that. Or reading Plutarch, and I get it. I get the joke. The second categories, you know, those that tend to be, especially of the classical bent, and like, oh my goodness, you know, this is what I study for a living, and nobody ever pays attention to this, and I didn't even know That there was this thing in the military aspect of this.

And the third reaction is those that have no idea what I'm talking about, and it's a little bit of a deer in the headlights. Like, what's the difference? Why can't we just name our missiles, our weapons with acronyms and bunches of letters and numbers?

Jeffrey 5:29

Well, I mean, so I have my own answer, but that does naturally lead to the question like, well, why can't you? Why isn't JASM good enough? I mean, as I say, I think it's self-explanatory, but you actually bothered to explain a rationale for why the modern naming conventions leave a lot to be desired.

Tom 5:52

Yeah, well, I think the answer, as a philosophy background person yourself, I think you appreciate this. The answer is that we are human beings. And that human beings, while Aristotle tells us human beings are by nature rational animals, as it turns out, we're not always entirely rational. We're appetitive, we're mimetic. And you know what? We need good stories.

And there is just some fundamental human desire that we need names. You and I don't walk around with serial numbers. We have social security numbers. And, you know, when you walk into the DMV or something, you're just a number. And yet to each other in our personal relations, we are we have names. And that is the source, fundamental source of our desire for naming things, whether it be animals or aircraft or what have you.

And so that, it's as rude as the fundamental cause. And I'll tell you, this came up in a recent Senate hearing. When Christine Wormuth, the nominee for the Secretary of the Army, she was asked by a senator, hey, what's up with PRISM and LRHW and Next Generation Combat Vehicle? Soldiers don't want to ride around in a Next Generation Combat Vehicle.

They want to ride around in Abrams. They don't want to shoot an IRCA, Extended Range Cannon Artillery. They want to shoot a Paladin. So there's just something about human beings that we want names of some quality.

Jeffrey 7:17

Yeah, I have to say one of the things that is a pet peeve of mine is when I'm I'm in a community where people don't value making things beautiful and nice and they treat that as kind of a frill or something frivolous. And certainly when I for me. That motivation to do things well and to do things beautifully is integral to the the commitment I bring to something. So I, we, we fight about this all the time at our office because I care really deeply that satellite images and the annotations we put on them look beautiful, and people are often like, I just slap some words on, and it's like, no, you want to engage with this stuff. So I I think that's exactly right.

One of the things I liked about the piece was that you spent a lot of time thinking about... What makes for a good name. And I was taken by your suggestion that, you know, that there are both rules, but then your sort of appreciation for the beauty that emerges from patterns, as well as for the opportunities to deviate from those patterns in meaningful moments.

So if you could just talk about kind of how you think about naming conventions, I would love that.

Tom 8:38

Thank you. Well, I think you're right that there are broad conventions, and there's a certain pride that warfighters, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and so on take from the names, whether it's the riding around a paladin or an Abrams or what have you, or sailors shooting a tomahawk missile, you know, these kind of things. But the beginning of all this was just to study the history and study the patterns of these things.

You know, the fact that Army tanks are almost invariably named after army generals, right? Or the fact that army rotary aviation, which is to say helicopters, are since 1947, I think it is, or 49, named after Native American Indian tribes, done with their consent and all this kind of respectful kind of way, all the way up until as recently as 2012 with the latest, I think it's Lakota.

But you kind of put all this together, and I try to... Piece these patterns together. And I came up with three broad categories for weapon systems. One, story, right? Which you'll appreciate, you know, yes, there's logos, there's the rationality of things, the serial numbers, but there's also the mythos. And human beings need Story or narrative. Whether it's the Air Force naming things after Star Wars characters, whether it's Russia naming things after anti-Tsarist poems and the like, we like story.

And there's a thousand examples of that. The second is honor. And what you hold up for praise or blame reflects what you hold dear, whether you are the Senate naming your office buildings, whether you're talking about Confederate bases, or whether you're talking about Virginia and Ohio class submarines, right? The Air Force names things after leading lights like Schriever and Whiteman and the like.

And then the third category is the past. And this tends to especially bleed into nuclear things. You know, it's just something about nuclear weapons Destruction that tends to bring to mind, you know, as Robert Oppenheimer said, you know, I have become death, the destroyer of worlds, that ancient text, or the fact that when Bernard Brody wrote about strategy in the Missile Age, he opens it with a rumination on Milton from Paradise Lost, something like that.

But, you know, likewise, there's the U.S. Navy, And resurrecting and reusing historical ship names. And by the way, there's no topic more controversial in Congress, I think, than naming ship names. But the fact that the Navy has reinvigorated kind of World War II era fish named submarines, and some of the first frigate names from the country's founding, and of course the Enterprise, As a four-class carrier.

I mean, that's a going back to the past and sitting within a certain pattern and all that sort of thing. So those are the three broad categories for weapons systems broadly. And then I kind of suggest there's special categories for nuclear-armed missiles, as it were.

Jeffrey 11:46

I wonder if you could talk about the patterns for nuclear-armed missiles, but you also had an observation that I thought was insightful, that three-syllable names tend to work, or at least no more than three syllables. And so I wonder if there are... Just kind of rules that you've come up with. I was a sucker for the three syllable names because the thing I always teach my students is the whole world is divided into twos and threes.

If you have a list of four, your list is too long. And I just I think it's how the human brain works. And so it was really interesting to me that you picked up that aspect of human nature that strikes me.

Tom 12:24

Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, if you just take a look at the DOD regulations, some of it's a little odd, but some of it's actually pretty sensible, which is you want to be consistent with your naming conventions. And this goes back decades and decades, by the way, consistent with past names. You know, if there's patterns, follow them to some extent, make it easily pronounceable, inspire pride.

You know, and so, for instance, the Army has some new short, medium range, long range missiles coming online. You know, they're going to want something to attach to those things that inspires pride in the young 18, 19, whatever year old soldier that's going to operate them. But then they have to be easily spoken. Again, this is human beings we're talking about.

And so, you know, it's like the way we talk about the Russian INF violating missile with a series of letters and numbers. Well, that's fine. But you want something that a sergeant can yell. Or that a soldier can yell with some pride. That's just, again, the fact that we're talking about human beings that want to have pride in the Minuteman missile that they're operating, as opposed to some series of letters and numbers.

Jeffrey 13:35

Yeah, we could talk in a second about other about the naming conventions that we apply to others. But I have to say, I love that the U.S. intelligence community decided to name that INF treaty violating cruise missile, the screwdriver, because they screwed us. But but but we'll hold that aside for a second. Yeah, I love our early missile names.

I like our later missile names sort of, you know, they're fine, but not quite as much. And I hate the jargon names. You know, I just don't I don't understand how you go from Atlas to GBSD. But but somehow we have. And I wondered if you you'd say something about the kind of the changing patterns and what's going on there.

Tom 14:21

Yeah, so what I would say, and look, I think there's an analogy here, which I make very subtly, which is, you know, in Greek mythology, there was the Titans, and then there was the next generation of the gods, the Olympians. And in the very early, in the beginning, when the world was young, when the Cold War was kicking off and nuclear weapons were a new thing, we reached to Greek mythology.

In those days, Homer, Plutarch, these kind of things were studied in school, and maybe it just sort of made instinctive sense to reach to the most destructive or the most archetypical ideas to reflect these things. Atlas, Titan, Thor, Jupiter, and the like. But the next generation, as you point out, was a different category. The name that I put to it is American heroes.

Now, there's a relationship between gods and heroes. It's a little subtle. I'm thinking here like Native American Indian tribes, Navajo, Tomahawk. And then you get like your peacekeeper missile, but of course also the Minuteman. And then there's the sort of the smaller things like the Honest John, which is a Texan who is maliciously and stereotypically prone to telling tall tales.

Yes, I'm from Texas. But ancient pagan gods, American heroes, those are kind of your first two categories. And my telling of the story here is that somewhere along the way, our weapon system namers lost their mojo. And it kind of is the late 90s or the early 80s, early 90s. And that's where you kind of see this acceptance, this tolerance, this crutch of acronyms.

So ALCOM, the ALCOM nuclear-armed cruise missile never got a proper name. Like, what's up with that? I don't understand. But there's a handful of others. And so you point out the GBSD and ALARSO and things like that. They're hopefully moving towards something proper. But, you know, is it going to be inspirational? Is it going to be something that is humane and appropriate to the thing being named?

Or is it going to be something a little bit more, I would say, less imaginative?

Jeffrey 16:28

Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that there's a whole generation of names that come out of a very specific period in American history where, like, there were a lot of Westerns on TV. And that's kind of what people gravitated toward. Yeah. But it is sort of sad.

Tom 16:47

You know, on that point, more movies have been made about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral than all U.S. presidents combined. There's something about the West that sings to the American soul.

Jeffrey 17:00

Yeah, but for some reason that stops, right? And I guess the two things I wanted to ask about are, you know, why do you think we lose the names from mythology, which I just love, right? I'm of a certain generation. I have a sister who's a classicist. You know, you call a missile Thor. I am there for that, right?

We're going to put somebody on the moon. I need a Saturn.

Tom 17:26

Yeah, yeah, I do.

Jeffrey 17:29

But But that's gone the way of the dodo bird.

Tom 17:37

Well, see, I tend to think that there's hope for a renaissance, to use a phrase, with that. And I point out, for instance, the Artemis. I don't think NASA could have come up with a more elegant and artful name for the successor to the Apollo, Than the twin sister, Artemis, which also, of course, reflects the intention to send a woman to the moon, of course.

But I would say there is a persistent and, if you look around, a recurring desire to get back to those, to walk with giants, as I say. And so the Marines' ground-based anti-ship missile is called Nemesis. Right now, that's an acronym for Navy Marine, you know, such and such. But the very fact that weapon system, I mean, look at DARPA RFIs and RFPs all the time.

The desire to make acronyms into classically sounding things that reflects that desire to get back to something a little better. Well, the other thing, of course, and this is a little bit more serious and fundamental, is the decline of the liberal arts and the decline of the study of the things that you're talking about. And I link to a story, for instance, or an article by Cornel West in the Washington Post recently, the moaning, the shuddering of the classics program at Howard University and what that reflects.

As sort of the decline of attention to these, to philosophy and the classics more generally, is a societal loss. And so I've had several classicists and types look at this before I went with it, and one of them said, you know, the problem, Tom, is nobody knows who the heck Ajax is, right? But nonetheless, there's a heuristic value to naming them for high things to point people So when the Navy talks about the Aegis weapon system, there is a built-in, forward-deployed metaphor to Aegis, the shield of Zeus.

Now, does every sailor coming into the Navy know that going in? No, but they'll learn it.

Jeffrey 19:42

Yeah, I'm half terrified that we're going to end up with missiles named after Marvel characters if we try to resurrect that. I mean, it seems to be where culture is at the moment. But you have some ideas. The things that we could do and things that can make that better. And I'm curious about your thoughts. And I know you have, for example, a better name for LRSO, which has to be the...

I just observe empirically when I tell people who aren't in the defense field, it's the worst acronym we have.

Tom 20:22

Well, I do point out that the B-21 used to be the LRSB. And the Air Force, to its credit, did come in and name that the Raider. So kudos for that. I'm hopeful, therefore, that it will get a good name. So, yeah, you're right. I do have ideas. And as it turns out, when you creak open the door to the Pantheon, not all the good names have been used.

There's still a lot of really, really good ones in there. And my suggestion for LRSO is a cruise missile. You want something that suits the features, the tactical characteristics of the thing being named. My suggestion is Ulysses. Ulysses the Wanderer. Because the long-range cruise missile that would loiter, evade, and be retargetable to new adventures is a metaphor for Ulysses, also known as Odysseus, who took a while getting home from the Trojan War and had all kinds of adventures on the way back.

But the point here is not to say it has to be this, but to say the pantheons are full. And if you just use a little bit of imagination, you can come up with some good stuff.

Jeffrey 21:26

Now, I am on the record of just wanting to put D5s in silos rather than doing GBSD, so I'm happy with Trident. But if we do go with GBSD, yeah, what are we going to do about that? Because that is also a terrible, terrible acronym.

Tom 21:44

Well, and as I say about GBSD, when you get rid of it, what is it? What is it that makes it terrible, though? What makes it, and my answer is, it's insufficiently human. It is a perfectly logical description of what it is. But it is too much logos and not enough mythos. And so my suggestion for ICBMs is kind of the premier category, that there's two categories, ancient pagan gods and American heroes.

And I suggest a few. I think my top suggestion here is Zephyr. First of all, it's got a little zip. It's easy to say. And oh, by the way, it is a sublime answer to the pacing threat of our time to China. What do I mean by that? China's Dong Feng or East Wind series, that's all their big missiles.

Well, I kind of like Zephyr, who is the god of the West Wind. So there's a little bit of poetry, but also, you know, as we say, great power competition kind of jazz going on there. But others like Nemesis, who is the god of, goddess rather, of rightful retribution, that strikes me as a good metaphor for deterrence as well.

Jeffrey 22:53

I love Zephyr. There was a minor league baseball team out of Denver in the 80s called the Zephyrs. I think that is just perfect. You mentioned naming other countries' missiles. I wanted to talk for a minute about countries you think that do a particularly good job of naming their missiles. And then, you know, maybe are there countries that like fall down a little bit on the job?

You know, Dongfeng is like fine, but it's like, It's a fairly anodyne communist thing, and they've been going at that one for 50 years. So I'm a little tired of it, but maybe some people are better.

Tom 23:33

I guess it is a little bit of a hitch to the whole godless, atheist, communist thing that you don't get a name after God. Although I will say the Chinese get a little bit of a credit for naming their most recent Mars rover after the ancient Chinese fire god. So, hey, that impulse, that impulse is ubiquitous because at the end of the day, we're not talking about An American idiosyncrasy, as you point out, this is something human.

It is an impulse to name the most terrible weapons of destruction after metaphors and personifications of the same. And so to answer your question, I got to say France does it probably better. They did it better than anybody with things like Hades and Pluton. You know, the gods of the underworld. I mean, very nice, very nice. The U.S., of course, had Project Pluto back in the day in terms of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

We didn't go anywhere with that. But regardless, the impulse to name it after such things, they get some credit. The U.K. had the Vulcan bomber. Israel, you know, goes back to the ancient the Jericho family. Right. The Iranians have various metaphors from the Koran. Pakistan is a little bit different. They kind of got famous generals from Islamic history.

But I got by the way, my favorite that I came across in this is is Russia. As one of the Russians, and that is that Alexander the Great, who was deified after death, still rides in conquest today in what we call the Iskander missile. That's the, I guess, the Persian version of Alexander. But, of course, as you know, North Korea's Hwasong is Mars, or a version of Mars, the god of war.

So, you know, this is an international impulse, I would say.

Jeffrey 25:21

The other thing I find really interesting is once you started talking about this, it caused me to pay a lot more attention to our naming conventions for other countries' systems. And so, for example, and possibly this is just an issue of time and attention, but for the Soviet Union, we went ahead and named their systems for them because we didn't know their names.

Sometimes were insulting, but I think by and large picked pretty cool names for them. but you know, we never really did that with China, right? So you know, where, whereas you get a, you know, you get an SS-18 Satan in China, you just get a CSS4 and it's got no name. and you know, the Koreans, the North Koreans, we just name things after places. And I, I, I will tell you, No Dong, I, I do think was probably probably somebody trolling the North Koreans a little bit.

But I, you know, I wonder about that. Do you think it is interesting that we no longer name other countries missiles, even when we don't know their designations?

Tom 26:28

Well, I have noticed the change that, you know, which is the KN, the stat of the other thing and numbers and all that sort of stuff. I guess it's always been there. It's kind of a. A mix of, as you say, the SS-18, but it was also the Satan, right? The Satan, ancient figure, but also the Styx.

So Styx was in there. That was a nice one, which I guess was the big cruise missile. But again, just watch the patterns. And so all of those SS, what does that stand for? Surface-to-surface. And then the CSS is the Chinese surface-to-surface. But they all began with an S. Good pattern, good consistency. There's a beauty to consistency here.

Then with the Soviet slash Russian surface-to-air missiles of various kinds, they always begin with a G, if I'm not mistaken. And so think your Griffin or your Gazelle and so forth. So I nevertheless think there's something to admire about the consistency, even if it kind of ran out of gas for the post-Soviet countries.

Jeffrey 27:35

Yeah. In addition, there was the Gorgon. And that's actually one of my favorite things I've ever seen in an interview where the director general of of the of the place that was making the surface air missiles actually got asked in Russian. And something gets lost in translation, which just makes this to me infinitely funny. He's talking about the A-135.

And he says, you know, so, you know, we've created the long range interceptor missile, the 5.1 T-6. And the person asks, is this the missile that NATO calls Gordon? Getting Gorgon wrong as Gordon. And just with total disgust, this guy says, we do not give names to our missiles. As though like he thinks that we're going around like this is Gordon and this is Tim and this is Alice.

So he didn't quite get it.

Tom 28:23

Well, he may have been smacking down the reporter a little bit, but the Russians have a lot of literary names. Yeah, they do. They have good names.

Jeffrey 28:31

For their artillery.

Tom 28:32

Right, right. Very literary. And they've got a, you know, when we talk about Russian history, they've got a lot to draw on. But they've got Russian artillery that's like named carnations. And so my joke in here is, you know, when the Tomahawk missile has the nickname of the Hallmark, Because it's about when the U.S. Navy cares to send the very best.

But the Russians, they send carnations, right? So there's a whole lot of literary and flora and fauna kinds of things out there all over the place.

Jeffrey 29:04

Yeah, I think it's just such a rich and interesting field, and I just am so happy that someone else appreciates The time and effort that comes into thinking about these systems in ways that aren't purely just sterile and dead, but trying to breathe a little life into them. You know, you said you were getting those different reactions.

I mean, are you finding that some people are willing to sort of pick up the mantle and say, you know, yeah, we need better names?

Tom 29:37

Absolutely. And again, that's why I'm hopeful about the renaissance here. I think, again, it showed up in that Senate hearing, but it's also shown up in other places. People recognize that, you know, I'll just say when a certain aircraft name comes out and it's just sort of bland, people comment on it. But when there's something lively and vigorous, it's like strong gods versus weak gods kind of a thing.

So I think there is a desire, and I give credit, for instance, to the Valkyrie. Valkyrie and Skyborg, I mean, those are kind of cool. Those are two Air Force drone programs. Again, the Valkyrie being from the –

Jeffrey 30:19

Scandinavian pantheon, but like that, that's, that's good. That's, that's the way we should be thinking. And the good news is there's a lot of names left. So again, the piece is called Sing Missile: Muse of Gods and Heroes, America's Most Fearsome Weapons Need Better Names in War on the Rocks. Tom Karako, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Jeffrey, and I'm glad there's somebody else out there that appreciates