Please sir, May I launch another?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

I would totally pat the D5. I might do more than pat the D5, Marty. I'm just saying I need some time alone in the room with the D5. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. 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 0:28

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East, in very wet and rainy Washington, D.C. Oh man, it's also raining here. I know. My mother in Los Angeles is having flooding issues. It hasn't rained in about 25 years.

Jeffrey 0:44

Yeah, it's really amazing. Our phones are going crazy with the flash flood warnings. You know, the best part for me is I forgot to get a new parking sticker. And I am now continuing to park in the faculty lot because I know there is exactly zero chance that our security people are checking parking stickers in a torrential downpour.

Aaron 1:01

Yeah. I think you're a bit of a rogue operator, so you're just enhancing your street cred in the nonproliferation crowd. Parks without a permit. Swear us on the podcast.

Jeffrey 1:13

Should we talk about Trident?

Aaron 1:16

I think we have to. It's been in the news, man.

Jeffrey 1:19

Man, people are really freaking out.

Aaron 1:22

Well, there's conjuring up images of a nuclear missile hitting Florida. Accidentally.

Jeffrey 1:30

Whoa, it would do like a billion dollars in improvements. I'm not going to say anything.

Aaron 1:35

Maybe I'll change the electoral map.

Jeffrey 1:42

Yes. So it appears that a test in June of a D5 from a British submarine went wrong and the missile veered off course. And so it was auto destructed.

Aaron 1:59

Right, because I think the concern was that it was flying the wrong direction.

Jeffrey 2:05

Right, and this has caused a shitstorm.

Aaron 2:10

Especially in British politics, absolutely, about the viability of their deterrent if this missile is reliable.

Jeffrey 2:17

Well, I think that's one – so those are the two questions we should discuss, right? One is what does a failed test mean in terms of the viability of the deterrent? And then I think the second question is why are people so worked up? And I think that actually has more to do with politics than reliability. What do you think, Aaron?

Aaron 2:34

Oh, totally. I mean – Well, it's a classic political scandal. I mean, it wasn't revealed. It comes out later in a leaked memo to the press and it comes amid, you know, the side that leaks is trying to kill something. And I think we've talked about this on the podcast before about questions about the future of the British deterrent.

Jeffrey 2:50

Right, so the... I mean, it is a classic scandal in the sense that the failed test seems to have occurred right before an important vote in the House of Commons on the Trident replacement program, which is awesomely named the Dreadnought.

Aaron 3:07

It's so British, I love it.

Jeffrey 3:09

I mean, Vanguard was fine, but Dreadnought is way cooler. And so before that vote, they didn't want to admit... That there had been a failure. And so, you know, at least from my perspective, you know, what looks bad is the coverup, right? More so than the failure. Although I saw Jeremy Corbin and others were trying to turn the failure into a a mortal threat to a mortal threat to what is there in Florida?

So it's like, what is it? Disney World. Orchids and meth labs. Oh, Disney, Disney World. Yeah. A mortal threat to Disney World.

Other voice 3:51

Small known fact, Disney World has one of the few operational THAAD batteries protecting it. Is that true?

Aaron 3:57

Is that really true?

Other voice 3:58

That's today's alternative fact.

Jeffrey 4:00

Well, you know, the reason I was asking is because, you know, there's that famous thing about, I think it was Disneyland had submarines. Do you know this? What?

Aaron 4:14

You don't know this? The little boat ride? The submarine boat ride that I went on as a kid?

Jeffrey 4:20

It was, yeah, it was called Submarine Voyage, right, with a Nautilus-themed submarine, which I think, I think I can't remember when it opened, but this is one of these, like, running jokes, you know, people would say, you know, Disney had the third largest submarine fleet or something. It's obviously tongue-in-cheek, right? Sorry, the eighth largest submarine fleet in the world, that's right.

Yeah. Khrushchev wanted to wanted to visit Disneyland and, you know, they wouldn't let him go. And so I think the Disney people joked about their submarine fleet anyway. Yeah. So the test veered off course and was destroyed. I mean, it's important to note that this was a test launch. And so it didn't have a warhead on it.

Right. It had it had it was in a test configuration. And the destruction, as far as I can tell, which by the way, it's been confirmed by us officials now to CNN. You know, that that was an automatic destruction when the missile went off range. And so, yeah, it's a problem, right? And it is embarrassing. And we can talk about the statistical implications of the failure for confidence.

But I think the real, the scandal in the UK is that that would have been really bad PR right before that vote. And rather than take the bad PR, they decided to cover it up, thus delaying the day of reckoning.

Aaron 5:48

Right, and it I mean, this was debated in Parliament to fund Dreadnought. It did go forward, and so people are relitigating it through this failed test. So I completely agree with you, is that this is domestic British politics more than it is an indictment on the missile itself, which I think we all agree is very reliable. I sort of shrugged my shoulders when I first saw it.

I said, oh, wow, we found out that the Trident D5 test didn't quite work out. Moving on, next click. We had a lot to take in over the weekend.

Jeffrey 6:21

Yeah, and I think for listeners, the reason that we shrugged is that the D5 has a pretty incredible reliability record. There were a series of failures at the very beginning, and it's always an interesting question statistically whether you want to count those because if you think about failures over the life of a program, it looks like a bathtub.

The theory is you have a bunch of failures at the beginning, and then you work out all of those problems. And then you have this reliability baseline, which then persists until the missile starts to age. And then, you know, you'll get a spike of failures again at the end. But one failure isn't enough to tell you that, like, a spike is coming.

And so, you know, I think we've got, what, since 1989, 161 successful D5 tests. And we were trying to figure out how many failures have been. We know about this one. And we suspect... That there was another one that wasn't reported because I think up through the first 135 or so, Lockheed Martin used to say this was the whatever consecutive successful test.

And then after that, they just kept counting. Yeah. Right. The successful tests. And so but even if you assume it's, you know, if it's two out of one hundred and sixty one, that's an incredible reliability record. And if you go up to even seven. Including the failures at the beginning and the birth defects period, which you probably shouldn't count.

We can talk about why. You're looking at somewhere below 1% up to almost 4%. I mean, that's still a really excellent reliability record.

Aaron 8:05

Yeah, and I think within the context of domestic British politics, as you see play out in the, I think the paper that broke it was the Sunday Times, was that their baseline for coming up with reliability was only pooling it within the British context. So it's been, I mean, I think just quoting from the piece, the failure means it is 16 years since vengeance, you know, the name of the submarine successfully fired a missile, but nevertheless was returned to active duty.

And so it's sort of wishy-washy, you know what I mean, in terms of how they are portraying the failure of the test in light of their own domestic politics.

Jeffrey 8:43

Yeah, that's right. You know, by the way, so the last time they did one of these tests was in 2012, and they actually released footage of it, which is awesome. Have you seen the footage of the 2012 launch?

Aaron 8:54

I've seen the GIF, I think. There's a GIF.

Jeffrey 8:59

It's, it's incredible. You know, I mean, the, the, the, there's this sort of nice floral pattern on the, on the, the commander's seat.

Other voice 9:08

Yes, yes, yes. I've seen this. We've talked about this, about tube one for day.

Other voice 9:12

So launch we, Oh, command Roger. We, Oh, has my permission to fire missile away.

Jeffrey 9:19

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's fantastic. We'll, we'll, we'll have to include a link in the show notes or, or maybe, maybe put it up on the Slack channel with the the Sunday times article. But yeah, I mean, it is true that the British only rarely do test firings themselves. And so it does allow one to say like, oh, well, you know...

The last successful firing was like four years ago, right? And I think that was a different boat. But, you know, and I keep running into this conversation. I think people don't understand. I think people believe that we have our D5s, which we built, and that they have their D5s. But in fact, the UK D5s are leased out of a common pool.

And so the reason that the... Submarine firing was off the coast of the United States near Florida is because the submarine has to come to Kings Bay in Georgia and it has to be loaded there. Right. And then it goes out. I think I think the test range goes from there to like like off the coast of West Africa.

So, you know, like, yeah, OK, so it didn't go well and we should definitely figure out what happened. But this is a common pool of missiles. The only difference is like maybe they paint them differently. And so the baseline reliability of the system is still that full universe of 160-odd tests. Right.

Aaron 10:57

But I think it is interesting to speculate about what exactly went wrong. I mean, we joked about wiping Florida off the face of the earth, but nevertheless, nobody wants to see Florida wiped off the face of the earth. Well, not really. Good Cubano sandwiches that would just go up in smoke.

Jeffrey 11:16

Oh, I have nothing against Florida. Sorry, I've been to Florida a couple of times. I really did not enjoy it. Obviously, I don't want a nuclear weapon. I don't even want an unarmed Trident missile to crash into Florida. I don't want anybody to get hurt. I don't. I just hate Florida. It's hot and it's muggy. Seriously, though, I wonder what was going on.

One thing that is interesting is the Trident program, there are constant changes to it to keep it to life extended. In the U.S., we continue to build the missiles still in production. But there are periods when the missile goes in and out of production, and there's other work that's done, and there's been a guidance replacement going on.

And so it could be a fault with some replacement program, which would be very serious, and one would have to take that seriously. There's also this interesting possibility, right, which is, The D5 is a really weird missile because the third stage, right? So the very top of the missile, I don't know if people have ever seen it, but you know how it has that super blunt nose?

Aaron 12:39

Yeah.

Jeffrey 12:39

You know, it's not pointy like a missile. It's blunt like a cigar.

Aaron 12:44

Yes.

Jeffrey 12:45

And that's because, you know, the third stage protrudes up through the deck of the spot where the warheads sit. And the warheads are actually... They ring the explosive, you know, the rocket fuel, the solid fuel in the third stage, which is like a very exciting arrangement, right, if you're concerned about safety. But they did that because they needed to keep the height of the missile limited so it would fit in the submarine, too.

And one thing that, yeah.

Aaron 13:23

Rocket engineers are high-fiving themselves that they were able to do that.

Jeffrey 13:28

Yeah, it's pretty impressive. And so it's got an aerospike to deal with the drag created by the blunt nose. But the UK does this really unusual thing, right? If you imagine warheads ringing, right, you need to keep them balanced, right? So in the US, we don't really go down... Well, the U.S. has an average of like four warheads.

And one of the big questions is how low can you go? Right. Because if you had just one warhead sitting on that platform, that would be really unbalanced. And so one of the questions is, you know, can you can how low can you go while adding other things, you know, like penetration aids before you just straight up need to add ballast?

To keep the thing stable. And the U.S., it's classified what the minimum number of warheads it will go out with, but there's a lot of press reporting that the U.K. does one warhead on some of its missiles, which is a really unusual configuration. Yeah. So I often wonder if maybe there's a – maybe they had a – it could have gone off course because there was a new guidance system.

It could have gone off course because it was old. It could have gone off course because they had this weird payload. I don't – I just don't know.

Aaron 14:52

Well, why would you change the payload?

Jeffrey 14:56

Well, you might – they may be – in the United States, we may want to pack as many – well, I shouldn't say as many. In the United States, we may want to put four or five warheads on every missile so that we have a lot of warheads at sea. But of course, that means we can't ever just use one, right?

Like if you've got – if you had a force where you had four warheads on every missile – Then if you wanted to use just one missile, you would still have to drop four warheads. For the U.S., that's not a big deal, right? Because if we have a one-warhead mission, we could use an airplane, right? Or an ICBM.

Although that seems like a weird decision. But whatever, you could do it. If you're Britain, you only have the sea-based deterrent. And so if there are any scenarios in which you want to use one warhead, then you need a missile with only one warhead. So, you know, it's hard to know what they were testing or what they were doing.

And, you know, they clearly seemed intent on covering it up to avoid the embarrassment in advance of the vote. But it will be interesting to see what went wrong, right? Whether it's a problem with the missile, a problem with like a guidance program, or whether they were just trying to do something weird.

Aaron 16:09

Yeah, I mean that's an interesting thing because it may have to do – I mean we're speculating here about Britain's posture in comparison to ours. Maybe within that substructure about how testing is affected. Right.

Jeffrey 16:25

But it is important I think to say that no matter what went wrong – And the U.S. has done an enormous number of D5 tests, including tests after that. I think we did some in September. And so those have worked. And so I think the reliability of the missile just statistically is still really, really high, especially if you don't count the failures at the beginning of the program.

You know, George Herbert was talking on Twitter about knowing a guy who worked on one of the early failures. And if you look at like the early failures, they're things that got fixed. You know, like I think there was a – oh, the way that the missile was configured in one of the early tests, I think the missile got hit by a jet of water as it was coming up, right?

So they fixed that. So that's not a failure that will ever recur. And so, you know, since 1989, the test record has been really outstanding. And I would say if I had to pick any system in the arsenal, I think the T-5 is the most reliable missile.

Aaron 17:28

You like the D5. I mean you proposed it, I mean I think sort of in one of the – to put it in silos. So just get it out of the sea entirely. I mean complement the sea-based one with the land-based one.

Jeffrey 17:43

Yeah, right. The D5 ashore. Yeah, sure. Well, OK. So I mean I understand in the British system. The debate is about whether to continue the fleet ballistic missile system in the form of the dreadnought with the D5, right?

Aaron 18:01

And the costs associated with it, whether Britain really needs it or can do something else.

Jeffrey 18:06

That's right. And so ultimately the debate in Britain is about is that good value, right? And so our friend Toby Fenwick, who came on the podcast, you know, Toby is of the view that an F-35 with a B61-12 – Is basically the same deterrence for the UK but cheaper, right, and can make use of existing conventional systems.

And so, you know, he would rather have the extra F-35s with a nuclear mission rather than fewer F-35s and a dreadnought. And so, you know, they're having this discussion about whether – The dreadnought right whether submarine launch ballistic missiles are really the best value for them and so it's not surprising that you've seen these stories where you know one is well will submarines truly be survivable right not something we're super worried about the United States at least in the near term but it's like a big deal in Britain because they're putting everything in into this particular technology there was this whole thing about you know the SSBN's using some windows for submarines and Which is a funny conversation to have some other time, right?

And I think this then feeds into that, right? Which is, well, maybe this missile system isn't that reliable, right? And so I understand the politics of it, and certainly it's embarrassing that the government tried to cover it up. In fact, I think the cover-up probably does more harm to Britain's deterrent than just admitting that there had been one failure.

But I, you know, I don't know. If you think the dreadnought is not good value... As, for example, Toby thinks. That's, I think, a respectable position. I don't think this failure strengthens that argument very much.

Aaron 19:55

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, Toby came on the pod and we talked about this. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I would say the geopolitical issues have changed considerably since then with concerns about Russia. And so the added dimension about the value, at least to the UK, of the nuclear mission, I completely agree with you.

I think covering up a failed test launch of a very reliable system doesn't necessarily undermine British deterrence or deterrence with the Trident, but undermines proponents of the system within the UK politics about trying to get funding for the four submarines and the Trident itself.

Jeffrey 20:38

Yeah. Well, right, because if the system had – if something had gone wrong, right, and MOD had said, oh, wow, hey, look at that. We're now – they've done two tests, and so I can't remember if this was like – I don't remember what test number this was. But like, oh, look at that. Triton is – it used to be that it was 153 successful tests and one failure, and now it's 153 and two failures.

It's still the most reliable large missile ever, right? That would have been one thing. But when you try to cover it up, you are... You're implicitly admitting the force of your opponent's argument, right? You are saying, yes, this was embarrassing. Yes, this could undermine our credibility in the term. Yes, this could cause us to lose this vote.

And so all of these absurd things that you're saying are actually true because we tried to cover it up. You know, to me, it seems like the cover up. You have no moral standing, right, to argue that the failure was not a big deal. If you tried to cover it up because you have revealed that you think the failure is a big deal, even if, you know, it's not the actual numerical reliability, it's contempt for the political class being able to understand that statistically this was, this was not an event.

So, yeah, I, I, I think that was, I, what did the there was a, one of the Oh, what an Admiral called it bizarre and stupid. Oh, Admiral Lord West. I think it is bizarre and stupid that they didn't say that there had been a firing and that there had been a missile malfunction, but it was a minor fault.

He is right. It was bizarre and it was stupid. They should not have done that.

Aaron 22:27

Yeah, and I think one thing we should mention is – In summer 2013, I want to say July, Whitehall put out its Trident Alternatives review. And so ostensibly a government-funded, not statement of policy, but potential alternative basing modes to maintain British deterrence. And they came back to Trident.

Jeffrey 22:51

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I don't know. I am of two minds on this. I mean, I do think that It is an awfully expensive capability. And I am sympathetic to Toby's argument that the United Kingdom is very unlikely if it invests in Dreadnought to make the other investments that I think are going to be necessary to preserve Western security against, I think, a surprising... No, not surprising.

I think a very bellicose Russia, right? So... I definitely worry about Dreadnought draining the coffers. At the same time, I'm an SSBN guy. I think that your survivability is maxed out by being at sea. You know, there's a lot of ocean room. Although, you know, we can talk about when the British and that French SSBN collided. Because even though there's all this room in the ocean, that statistically impossible thing happened, which suggests to me that actually they don't take advantage of all their ocean room and that they don't randomize their patrols.

Aaron 24:01

That's the hunt for Red October argument. It's like Thor's twin. Yeah. Red Route 1.

Jeffrey 24:05

Well, yeah, that's right. If you're not randomizing your patrols, If you have a... If you are trying to maximize survivability by employing a rule set based on a public fact like the surface of the earth, of the seafloor, right? Then I am not... Persuaded that you were thinking about this problem correctly because someone else can either steal through espionage, that rule set, or they can intuit it.

Right. And I think the French and the British running into one another suggests that smart people trying to maximize the patrol, the survivability of patrol patterns based on undersea geography May have made certain errors about how well they may have come to the same conclusion, right? And so, yeah, I, I would prefer, I think, random patrols, but you know, I don't know. Maybe, maybe something else is going on. Maybe one of them was trailing the other, you know. Maybe they were, maybe they were, they were playing games. I don't know. But the point is, I still think You know, that ultimately the SSBNs are the most survivable system.

And I still think, even with the failure, just statistically, the D5 is your most reliable missile system. So reliable that, as you said earlier, I want to cancel the GBSD, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent Program, and I just want to spend the money to put D5s in canisters in U.S. silos and call that our land-based ballistic missile.

Aaron 25:52

So... I have a question for you about that. One that, you know, is trying the D5.

Jeffrey 26:02

I might actually hate freedom, Aaron.

Aaron 26:05

There's a lot of jokes one can make about the embrace of freedom and liberal ideology in current day politics, but I'm not going to go there. But it's a highly accurate missile.

Jeffrey 26:19

Very accurate missile.

Aaron 26:21

And hence the interest in it for conventional attack, perhaps outfitted with some even improved guidance, GPS for conventional. I know this is your pet rock about putting them in silos. How do you think the improved accuracy with nuclear warheads on top of them from a ground-based thing changes the strategic stability calculus, if at all?

Jeffrey 26:51

Right. So one of the arguments against D5 and silos, and we can maybe walk through some of these, but there are a lot of not good arguments. And one of the first not good arguments was people said, well, D5 isn't as accurate as an ICBM. Right. And it turns out that is true if the D5 is sitting on a submarine because there is some error in the position of the submarine, right?

And submarines use inertial guidance with... Updates, they can use GPS but they can also use an under a bathymetric system. And so, there's some uncertainty where you start, and then if you don't exactly know where you start, then that error compounds. You don't exactly know where you end up. But there is something called super grooming. Have you heard about super groom? No, makes me take a skig, but Yeah.

Super groom is awesome. So super groom is so super grooming is not Donald Trump's quaff. Pete Nanos about 10, 15 years ago talked about this. He said, if you really wanted to optimize an engagement, what could you do? If you groom a missile, you freshly calibrate the guidance system, come to periscope depth, take GPS data to fill a Kalman filter with which to correct the ship's inertial navigation system, then immediately return to depth and launch it at a time such that the guide star for the stellar-aided inertial guidance system is exactly in the right place relative to the target, you can, for certain scenarios, have the CEP of the current Trident missile.

Holy crap, right?

Aaron 28:44

Yeah, that's unbelievable.

Jeffrey 28:46

Be- Because if you are putting these things in silos... You know exactly where you are. You are completely eliminating all of the positional error at the beginning. And so really the only other things are freshly calibrating the guidance system and the moment for stellar aided inertial guidance. You've got to wait for the star to be in the right place.

But holy crap, that would be a very accurate missile. So I think if you put D5s in silos, they would be really, really accurate. There's some, you know, the W76, just the warhead on the D5, got a new radar fuse. And so it has a hard target kill capability, even with the inaccuracy introduced by the location of the submarine.

Aaron 29:43

Uh-huh.

Jeffrey 29:44

And so I think in a silo, that would be a very fearsome system. But having said that, land-based missiles have this advantage, right, which is no matter how accurate they are, you're still going to want, I think, two for every land-based target you attack. And so whatever concerns I have about the alert rates of land-based missiles, and I know Bill Perry thinks that getting out of those alert games would be worth it.

I'm not sure. I disagree. But if you're going to have a land-based system and if you pay attention to issues like MIRVing and numbers, I think you can safely navigate the accuracy. But boy, it's a really accurate missile.

Aaron 30:35

Yeah, I mean... They can bust some stuff up.

Other voice 30:41

Right.

Jeffrey 30:41

Is my enthusiasm for D5 a little out of control?

Other voice 30:45

Not the missile.

Jeffrey 30:47

It's a wonderful missile. It's like the best missile ever made.

Aaron 30:51

I was about to say, it brings us full circle about the unneeded sort of kerfuffle about a failed test off of Florida. But how that really is just about British politics. This is a fine missile. Everybody needs to calm down.

Jeffrey 31:03

Yeah, if you don't like this missile, you just don't like missiles.

Other voice 31:07

We are so going to get an email from Martin Pfeiffer about fetishizing nuclear weapons now.

Jeffrey 31:12

I would totally pat the D5. I might do more than pat the D5, Marty. I'm just saying I need some time alone in the room with the D5. A little date night with the D5, yeah. So, I mean, I've gone through this, by the way. I've done a whole... George Herbert and I have been working on this.

Like, there is no reason not to put D5s in silos. They are wonderful. So, they have an amazing reliability record, right? Even with this failure... The reliability record is way better than anything else, right? And better than anything we could hope to build, particularly since we've already made the investment in gaining the reliability. It's going to be way cheaper.

And the thing is super duper accurate, right? And so I've been pressing people and I have these terrible arguments, right? So George Herbert and I have been going over this issue. And we have encountered a series of arguments, some of which we've already talked about, but for completeness sake, they are. D5 is not accurate enough. D5 does not have enough range.

D5 is too big to fit in silos. D5 cannot have the number of warheads reduced. D5 cannot be made mobile. I believe all of these arguments are somewhere between Incorrect and ridiculous. Should we go through them? Yeah, I mean, you're the D5 addict. Yeah, okay. So, let me, let me just, I'll run through them quickly, and we can, we can talk about them. So, accuracy, I think we've already discussed that is not an issue. If you put it in a silo and eliminate the uncertainty about the location of the submarine and do just a couple of other things, you can basically cut the accuracy in half, right? Which is a pretty, pretty impressive game The idea that D5 doesn't have the range is exactly this apples to oranges comparison, which makes me crazy.

And I think the people who do it know that it's wrong, right? The unclassified range of the D5 is always assuming a full complement of Warheads. And they compare that to the range of a Minuteman III using its range. Full complement of warheads, even though the Minuteman III carries fewer warheads. And in fact, the Minuteman III now carries one warhead.

And so if you... Look at John Harvey's paper, which he did a very nice unclassified analysis of a very classified subject. What happens when you start pulling warheads off the D5 and you don't have eight warheads on it? You have like four, which is about – I think the average now is like four and a half, right?

Yeah. You get this huge jump in range. And then the only question, which I think we should leave to the end, is whether you could do as the British apparently do, go down to one warhead without ballast. Because in that case, you've got just an amazing missile that can go anywhere. I love the argument that it's too big.

Because we literally took the Peacekeeper, which is a similarly diameter-sized missile but much, much taller. We put that thing in a canister and dropped that canister down into Minuteman silos, right? That thing fits. The D-5 fits. It's actually – it was not like – I know the Air Force didn't love it, right? Because they had to hire actual, like, skinnies.

They had to – literally, this is not an exaggeration. There was a size requirement, right? So you couldn't have, like, fat people working on the missile because it was pretty tight spaces. But you know that's like if you're cheap right if you don't want to spend the money on new silos which silos are if you know not that expensive but whatever but like it's just these consistent series of arguments of people who like I think just don't want to put a d5 ashore but I don't see any technical reason you can't other than you know one argument is maybe you can't make it mobile Although I have severe doubts of whether that's true, because you've got to transport the damn D5 in the first place, right?

And it's not clear to me we're going to spend the money to make it mobile. It shared a whole bunch of design elements with the Peacekeeper to save money in the 80s, and the Peacekeeper was mobile. But... There is this question of, yeah, how low can you go, right? Because you have this funny configuration where you have the warheads ringing the third stage, and you could, by the way and you can notice the National Academies did this. They looked at popping off that third stage and just putting a single conventional penetrator on, which would be like way heavier than a warhead and they got a lot of range, right? So, one question is, you could model it, you could just put a You could put one nuclear warhead on a two-stage D5, and I think that thing would cover most, if not all, of the targets we cared about.

But if it's true that the British can, you know, go to sea with one, you know, you probably can get... I think you can cover every target you want with a D5 in an existing silo. I'm excited about this idea. Because it would be so cheap!

Aaron 36:54

I think your argument is ultimately premised on the work you did a couple of years ago at CNS with this modernization mountains. And so you're going to have to begin to really start thinking through about how are you going to pay for next generation systems if indeed they are going to come to fruition. I would say that that is your backdrop to this.

Jeffrey 37:11

Yeah, I think the ICBM is not great value, right? It's a whole new program that you would have to start that will probably cost – I mean, I know the CAPE estimates run from – Sort of the, you know, I don't know, I can't remember what the low end of the CAPE estimate is, but it's kind of like, you know, $70, $80 billion.

And then the high end, you know, I think approximates the cost of the MX program, which if it had been fully done would have been like $120 billion. And so that's a lot of money. $100 billion is a lot of cash. And for a fraction of that, you could take the D5, which is in production, and just drop those canisters in silos.

It's so cheap. So I'm not convinced the ICBMs are good value. But this is so cheap that I kind of don't care. It's so cheap that it's like, okay, fine, do it. And it feels to me like the opposition to it is... Pure service pride. It's like the equivalent of why all the services have to have their own camouflage.

It's like the Air Force just won't take a Navy missile.

Aaron 38:35

Yeah. I mean I think that's the arguments against it. I mean that is – That's certainly a contributing factor into resistance of this missile. The other one is, you know, I think that they throw up impossible benchmarks that one would presume would fall by the wayside in any sort of follow-on program, like road mobile, for example. I mean, I just don't see that happening.

Jeffrey 38:55

I mean, isn't that clear to me that you can't take a D-5 canister and carry it around on a truck if you really want to do that? I mean, you know, first of all, It's mobile. You have to move it around. It's not like it's super fragile. And okay, it's not exactly designed for driving around on rough roads.

But a lot of that work you would take care of with the transporter. Yeah. You know, not the missile per se. And frankly, I think the reason we're not going to do a road mobile missile is the transporter would cost a ton of money. You know, we're not the Russians. We don't just slap the thing on any old truck.

When the U.S. tried to build a mobile missile launcher in the 80s, we came up with a hard mobile launcher, which was this absurdly expensive radiation-hardened mechanical wonder, you know, that could, like, dig itself into the ground. I mean, it was just... I just... I think the idea that you're going to spend $100 billion instead of $30 billion for a capability so that you can give yourself the option of spending another $50 billion or something on its launcher seems crazy to me.

And ultimately, they are mobile. We've got mobile missiles. They're... On submarines, and they're sailing around. And so, you know, the thing you're getting from the land-based ICBMs, I think, is questions of, you know, whether you want to try to compress attacker timelines by forcing them to hit land-based targets, thus giving you the... The warning you need in order to launch the SLBMs, you know, serving as a warhead sink to soak up Russian ICBMs, like all the things that I need land-based ballistic missiles to do, I actually don't think I need mobility to do it.

Aaron 40:56

I agree with you there. Besides, you know, the aforementioned cost, you know, and then weigh that cost and investment against whether or not the added flexibility or protection they would afford replaces the sea-based turrets. I don't think they do.

Jeffrey 41:11

Yeah, I mean I'm especially worried about this because – I mean I keep hearing this argument when we say like we don't think that there's going to be enough money, right? And in particular, we're worried that the tight replacement schedule means that some programs are going to be delayed and so numbers are going to come down anyway.

And we keep hearing like this kind of non-answer like, oh, but it's too important not to. It's like, well – Doesn't actually tell me how I'm going to pay for this right and so here we have this option and it's like oh okay like I actually think we could execute that we could execute that on a reasonable time frame and It would not break the budget.

Like it is a, it is a real option that the person, you know, like I, here I am, I'm sort of accused of like, Oh, you just want to, you know, you're using these cost estimates cause you, you want to, you just want to destroy the triad, you know? And it's like, no, no, no. Like this, this would work, right?

Like this is so cheap that, that I think it would be fine. You know, it's like, no, no, we don't want to do that. We, we, we, we want to go for the a hundred billion dollar route. It's like, Oh, okay.

Aaron 42:18

Yeah. And I think one of the, One of the interesting things, just to give the super back, is also within the cost of the F-35. All of these choices will have to be made about funding these plans and about whether or not the funding will eventually come through to fund them all and then perhaps put potential alternatives if there's not as much money allocated as it would take.

I think that's the point of the original study, but I read it a long time ago.

Jeffrey 42:51

Yeah, well, because you end up with reductions that don't make sense, right? Like they're already one of the ways that the Pentagon saved money was by delaying the SSBN builds. So there'll be like, I think, a 10 or 11 year period where the U.S. has only 10 boats and not 12. Right. And I think that that and they sort of promise that they'll build those last two at the end.

But I don't believe that. Like like they decided to go down to 10 boats with 16 tubes. So they are that is a cut. And I don't think we'll ever get those boats back. And we know that we're reducing the number of tubes. And so the sea base force is going down and it's it's not going to recover, I think, from that level.

And so I, you know, I worry that they if you keep pouring money. You know, into other programs. And, you know, they have their own little fund now, and so it's all supposed to be protected. But, you know, we'll see. You know, I wouldn't want to get to a world where we blow all this money on a new ICBM only to decide, like the Peacekeeper, that we're going to build some trivial number.

And then the consequence of that has been To dry up funding, and so we don't have money for capabilities that I really care about, like the SSPNs, or you know, conventional aircraft. Like, that would be the worst of all possible worlds, right? Is if you, you, you train wreck yourself into deep cuts that don't have any particular strategic logic, because then you get like, you've got deep cuts, but it's not stable, and you don't have any arms control, and that's like, oh, that's, that's not really what I wanted

Aaron 44:30

Right, and hence you get back to your love of the D5.

Jeffrey 44:33

I love D5. And I would say to our tea-sipping, marmalade-schmearing, crumpet-munching, G&T-swilling friends, we should figure out what happened. And maybe the submarines are way too expensive for you. But this is a truly, truly wonderful missile.

Aaron 45:04

Just chill. Chill out, bro. Like California and me. Just chill.

Jeffrey 45:09

Yeah. It's wonderful. The British are chill. They're stoic. This is the time for a stiff upper lip.

Other voice 45:23

Fair enough. Okay. I'm not going to add any more.

Jeffrey 45:27

Did I tell you my John Gower story?

Aaron 45:31

I've never heard the story, no.

Jeffrey 45:33

This is great. So there's an American Air Force general who shall remain unnamed, who's kind of well-known for his carelessness. And then there's a British admiral named him. John Gower, who's a really nice guy who came to a couple of meetings that – well, he came to a meeting that Bruno Tetre and I organized. And I just really like him.

But I saw a video of him at one of these STRATCOM deterrence symposia. And this Air Force general is sitting right next to him, right? And this Air Force general decides that he wants to take on this pernicious idea of minimum deterrence, right? And he just starts savaging the idea of minimum deterrence. And you just see – there's a video of this, which we put online.

Like, you just see Gower with this, like, absurd look on his face, like, staring at him, looking off, smiling, shrugging. Like, you know I'm sitting right here. Like, we have a minimum deterrent. Like – You know, like – and I know the Air Force guy. He's just – he's rattling the cup, right? He just – this is just a line of crap because he knows that this is what you're supposed to say if you're in the Air Force.

And you just – you know, you need the money for the ICBM force. But it's just so funny because he's – you know, here he is. He thinks he's in this, like, super friendly audience. But he is just literally – Running down the deterrent of our closest ally, right? With an incredibly important figure in the maintenance of that ally sitting next to him making faces. It is hilarious. Oh, so, yeah, you know, just like just like Gower was able to take that absurdity with equanimity I would hope our British friends would take this unfortunate event with the the same equanimity. Maybe a Maybe a silly face and then figure out what happened and moving on.

Aaron 47:23

And tell us so we can talk about it again.

Jeffrey 47:26

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, hey, Aaron. This was fun. I got to talk about D5 in silos.

Aaron 47:34

We aim to please here on the Opera Trollog podcast.

Jeffrey 47:38

Scott, you stayed on mute. You didn't jump in once.

Other voice 47:43

I didn't have anything fun to say. This was enjoyable, though. It was mainly stuff that was going to disparage our British friends, and I figured I should just keep that on mute, lest I make fun of them for not being able to develop their own SLBM.

Jeffrey 47:57

Oh, that hurts. That hurts, that hurts. Like the French do. Oh, shots fired. So we'll probably pick this up over at the Slack channel. Anything you want to tell us, Scott, about how things are going at the Slack channel or subscriber benefits?

Other voice 48:18

Slack is awesome. Subscriber benefits for $3. You too can be part of our excellent Slack community and have fun discussions about missiles. I have a feeling we're going to be talking about alternative basing modes since we're talking about dragging the D5 ashore, which means also everyone should go back and re-listen to the alternative basing modes episode.

Jeffrey 48:40

Yeah, and we'll probably post a whole bunch of the, I guess we'll post what we would call extended show notes over on the Slack channel.

Other voice 48:49

I think it's called a bibliography at that point.

Jeffrey 48:54

Ouch. I like extended show notes. All right. Well, guys, thanks for joining me.

Other voice 49:03

Thank you.

Jeffrey 49:05

And thank you for listening. If you like the show, consider leaving us a review on iTunes. That's how the charts work, and positive reviews help get the word about the show out. And if you really like the iPod, if you really like the podcast, take Scott up on the offer and chip in, and you can come play on the Slack channel.

So, as always, guys, thanks for joining me, and thanks for listening.