The Trillion Dollar Triad?

Aaron Stein 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Walk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I am a contributor to the Arms Control Walk blog, as well as an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute and a PhD candidate at King's College London.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the director of the East Asian Arm Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Walk blog.

Aaron 0:24

Well, it's budget time in Washington, and there's a big debate. So exciting, right? So exciting. And there's a big debate about nuclear weapons and how much the United States should spend on its nuclear weapons moving forward. And you have a column about that in Foreign Policy.

Jeffrey 0:41

I do. I do. I'm trying to, you know, I've got, I use the podcast to put one of my sons to sleep. I'm developing new sleep aids, which are columns on the budget process.

Aaron 0:52

Your son goes to sleep again because it's, I think it's the melodic sound of my voice. That could be it. Yeah. I put a lot of people to sleep in the podcast, including my mother.

Jeffrey 1:06

But back to the budget. So, you know, it's all jets and sharks in the U.S. Congress about how much we should spend on nuclear weapons.

Aaron 1:14

Yeah, I mean, I find it funny. I mean, we're having this big debate about nuclear weapons because I think people are starting to realize that in order to get New START passed, the Obama administration promised a lot of money for life extension programs for warheads as well as to replace the triad. And that's going to cost a lot of money.

And the Congress, in all of its wisdom, decided to impose austerity or all these sequestration cuts. So how is this going to get paid for moving forward? And I guess it speaks to a larger question is, does the United States have a plan for its nuclear weapons moving forward?

Jeffrey 1:56

Oh, of course they have a plan, Aaron. It's just that it's crazy.

Aaron 2:00

It's a little crazy. It's jarring to read on paper. So let's unpack this a little bit for the audience to say why it's crazy.

Jeffrey 2:06

Right. I guess I should say. So the column, what the column does is it takes some research we did for a project on the costs of nuclear modernization and presents the data. And I should say none of the cost estimates are our own. We sort of curated other people's estimates. And it presents that data because. There's a plan.

There's something called the 1251 report after a section of an earlier defense authorization bill that outlines the spending on all things nuclear, but it's terribly incomplete. And so we try to provide a complete picture. And what the column does is it lays out all of the things that we have to do over the next 30 years in order to make good on the promises that were made.

And it's... It would choke a horse. One defense official called it a modernization mountain. So the whole joke of the column is it's a riff on John Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Spoiler alert, lots of climbers die.

Aaron 3:11

Right. Well, I mean, I think it's important to note just the extent of... Of the task at hand to replace the triad. I mean, you're talking about a new long range bomber, a new submarine, and potentially a new ICBM to replace our current systems. And that's on top of Replacing, for our allies and deployments in Europe, the current dual-capable aircraft, or the short-range aircraft, which is now F-15, F-16, with the F-35, and that includes warhead modernization for the gravity bomb, the B-61, as well as the warheads, the W-78 and the W-88.

That's a lot of modernization, and that's a lot of systems.

Jeffrey 3:55

Yeah. So, I mean, the problem is everything that's in the triad now more or less dates to the Carter and Reagan administration. So it was one big buy. It's not exactly true, but it's pretty close to true. All of these systems either need to be replaced or pretty well underway, have a replacement underway by about 2030. And it's, you know, you can...

You get sort of different numbers, but it's about $100 million per leg of triad, maybe more if there's some cost growth. But what's really shocking about it is because it has to be well underway by 2030, we calculated it would be something like a trillion dollars over 30 years, which sounds like a big number, but... Trillion dollars doesn't go that far in Washington anymore. But the real problem is you have to have the new submarine and the new bomber very well underway by 2030, as well as a new ICBM. And so there's like a six-year period, and this is why that phrase modernization mountain comes up where the spending is really, really steep, and it's sort of like Reagan era steep.

Which seems like maybe not the most plausible thing given how tight defense budgets are going to be.

Aaron 5:25

Right. I mean, I think the debate is about the value that people still assign to nuclear weapons. I mean, obviously, if you believe that nuclear weapons are absolutely vital for the security of the United States moving forward, you're going to support this plan. Maybe not perhaps to the extent that it's envisioned on paper, but you're going to support large chunks of it.

Whereas others would probably look at this plan and say, that's a trillion dollars that can be spent elsewhere. Our roads are crumbling. Our schools are in trouble. Why are we spending all this money on nuclear weapons? And we haven't solved that debate yet. I mean, the Obama administration made some noises about decreasing the number of deployed strategic warheads, but not much has happened since the passage of New START.

Jeffrey 6:12

Right. Well, so what a colleague of mine once said, which I thought was pretty insightful when we were talking about why the U.S. nuclear arsenal really looked just like a slightly smaller version of the one we had in the Cold War, was, you know, he said, I will grant you that if I was starting from zero, this is not the arsenal that I would necessarily build.

But we're not starting from zero. Right. We inherit a legacy and we're making choices about what to keep and what to modernize and how to replace it. And so it's evolutionary. Right. And what I think is interesting is because we are at a point where we do actually have to replace all of these systems, there is this sense in which we are starting from zero, right?

We have to make an affirmative decision. Do we want a new submarine? Do we want a new bomber? Do we want a new ICBM? Do we want a new cruise missile for our bombers? Do we want new warheads? And so unlike in the past, where there was a huge inertia associated with the existing force, Now is really different because we actually have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend a trillion dollars over 30 years?

Or do we want to have a period in the 2020s where we're basically only buying nuclear systems? And that's a totally different debate than in the 1990s when we were thinking about cutting things. And you'd look at something and you'd be like, well, we don't really need it, but it's nice to have. So nice to have was a really powerful argument in the 90s, and it's not so good now.

Aaron 7:38

Right. I tend to agree with the fact that some of these systems need to be modernized. I mean, we need new submarines. We need a new long-range bomber. I'm just not sure that they need necessarily be solely dedicated to the nuclear mission. And our systems aren't solely dedicated to the nuclear mission now, but... Moving forward, if these systems are interchanged and interlinked and have nuclear roles, I can just envision problems with...

Signaling vis-a-vis Russia, given the current tensions, possibly problems with China, that there are overlaps in our systems between conventional and nuclear that could cause problems, maybe unforeseen problems if all of these systems are skewing heavily towards nuclear, but we also need them to perform conventional roles because they're so expensive. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 8:35

No, I do, and it's one of the reasons that I was a little bit nervous when there was a discussion about putting conventionally armed missiles on ballistic missile submarines. I should say the bomber is going to be dual capable, but that raises all kinds of really interesting Air Force budget politics issues because the bomber itself is supposed to be dual capable, and it's built that way.

But the Air Force's current plan is to delay certifying it to carry nuclear weapons for several years because they say that's too expensive. And they're trying to keep costs down. And we've already seen with the F-35, right, which is the new fighter, the Air Force keeps coming up with reasons why it's too expensive to make it nuclear capable, even though they said they would.

Aaron 9:25

Uh-huh.

Jeffrey 9:26

And so as this process kind of goes along, the Air Force is happy to highlight the nuclear mission when they think that it means they're going to get funding for the aircraft. But there's this interesting bait and switch that happens where, you know, you say like, whoa, well, so, you know, we need $500 million or something to make it, you know, nuclear capable.

And then suddenly the Air Force is like, oh, actually, you know, we'd rather have five more planes or something. Oh, I should say, I think I said $100 million per leg at the triad. I misspoke at the beginning, by the way. It's $100 billion.

Aaron 10:03

$100 billion per each leg of the triad. Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, besides that, I'll come back to that about whether we should still have a triad. But just going back to maybe the experience we're having now with the F-35, I mean, I think that you can take some parallels from that. I see two issues stemming from that.

One is... Making an aircraft sort of an all-in-one inevitably leads to cost overruns, as we've seen, developmental problems and delays, and perhaps you end up with a fire that is not, or a bomber in this case, that is not as capable as you want it to be because they're trying to jam too many doohickeys into it than there should be.

That's a technical term, jamming doohickeys. The second thing I see... It's more of the tangential issues associated with modernizing nuclear weapons, and this comes on to the warhead modernization side. It's that we have allies with which we store nuclear weapons, and many of which are, well, in the case of the Germans, aren't even buying the F-35, but will host nuclear weapons, and others who are now hesitating about buying the F-35 because it's so expensive.

It's just for alliance politics, I'm just curious about are these programs so expensive that they're pricing out the very allies that we're trying to reassure with them? And what will that do for nuclear politics, nuclear reassurance moving forward? Because the Air Force isn't the only one who's balking at the cost of the F-35 and looking at ways to cut costs.

Jeffrey 11:42

Well, you know, it's a – I'm struggling to answer a little bit because on the one hand, I agree with you that there is this kind of narrow problem of the way we talk about the importance of nuclear weapons. But then when we have these very expensive programs, the allies are like, oh, yeah, no, no, no. I mean, we said they were important.

We actually don't want to spend any money. I mean, my favorite example of this is when there was that security breach in Belgium. The reason that was possible is because the Belgians had been too cheap to hire a competent dog master to the base, which is why there were no dogs running around to keep the protesters out.

So there is that narrow problem. But I think it speaks to a bigger problem, which is really what the column is about, which is there is this plan on paper, which is essentially a political document, and it amounts to do everything. Because that is the politically safe thing to say, but it it's, it's unexecutable, but because of the way our politics work, everybody would rather say I was for this unexecutable plan and then blame the other side for not letting them execute it.

And so what I worry about with the allies is, as we go forward with this unexecutable plan, right, we go up this modernization mountain or we experience this budget train wreck, which is the other metaphor people use. Allies feel, if we screw up our modernization plan, if they spend all this money on the F-35 and we don't bother making it nuclear capable, or we don't Finish spending the money on the bomb they want.

I mean, I was saying I am someone who is basically for further reductions because I just, I don't think our nuclear policy is aligned to the threats we face. But there's a good way to make reductions and there's a bad way to make reductions. And, you know, like right now we're doing it the bad way.

Aaron 13:40

No, I agree. I, you know, and I agree that, you know, especially now, I mean, to the point where Obama had to give a speech today to, I mean, almost to quiet his domestic critics, critics about I guess problems or at least perceived problems with American leadership in the globe. Isn't this someplace that we should also pick up the ball and continue with it and, and get a handle on the number of nuclear forces we need and, and, Get us a real budgetary document out there that charts a path forward for either continuing the triad or not and trying to figure out a way to do it in a way that's not going to bring about budgetary Armageddon in the 2020s vis-a-vis nuclear weapons.

Yeah, go ahead.

Jeffrey 14:27

Well, I was going to say, I think the problem with that is that the politics in Washington right now are so poisonous. And so there is a push to have full accounting for the complete and year-by-year costs of modernizing the triad and to make sure that those are over 30 years instead of just 10 years because all the big bills come due after 10 years.

But it immediately becomes political because... There are a group of people on the Hill who think that that is intended as a stalking horse for budget cuts. I think there are a group of people for whom it is a stalking horse for budget cuts. And so it... Even the act of coming up with a number and counting becomes super, super political.

I think we should know how much these things cost, and we should be able to see on a year-by-year basis so that we aren't surprised. But that becomes super political, even with what seems like a pretty simple suggestion.

Aaron 15:35

No, and it speaks to something we were talking about off mic before we started. It seems like it's an area where actually Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree on, but they can't because the political football is too hot. In an era where Republicans want to spend less money – This seems to be a logical place to be able to cut, and Democrats who do favor lower nuclear numbers, at least more than Republicans, or arms control, I should say, this also seems like a place where they can come and reach some sort of agreement, but nobody seems willing to do it.

And I think we're living with A, the repercussions of something good that happened, new start, and B, the fact that nobody has the political will to say, oh, this isn't feasible. What the plan was put forward in order to get the 60 votes in the Senate was not feasible to begin with, and it's time to draw something up again.

Jeffrey 16:27

Yeah. I mean one of the things I say in the column, and it's something I have repeated a couple of times, I think the president is – Worried about appearing to cut too deeply. And so he is willing to put forward budgets that he ought to know are not likely to be sustainable when the big costs come due.

And his opponents would much rather criticize him for not doing enough. And then when there is a train wreck or there is a disaster on the mountain, they would much rather than just blame the president. And so there's no... You know, both sides are putting into place a glide path or a train wreck that will result in really deep cuts.

But nobody wants to do the politically dangerous thing of actually talking to the other side and making a compromise so that the cuts are maybe not quite as deep or at least not quite as irrational as I think they're going to end up being. So it's really – I don't know. One of the things I said in the column was I don't think the president supports unilateral disarmament.

But if he does, this would be a really good way to do it, right? Like keep trying to rebuy the entire triad.

Aaron 17:49

Right. And let's go there. I mean, it goes back to what we said earlier. It depends on how you calculate the cost. I mean, whether or not this becomes, quote unquote, worth it to at least try or to try and push the boulder up the hill. Do we need a triad in today's world? Can we look at ways to cut it perhaps by making the new bomber not nuclear capable or saying we don't need an ICBM force?

We can go to continuous at sea presence like the Brits. What do we need? There are lots of talk about that in the nonproliferation community, but they aren't filtering up at least into the budget documents.

Jeffrey 18:30

Well, certainly not in the budget documents. But you're right. So most of the discussions about what nuclear weapons cost are really a backdoor discussion about what the value of nuclear weapons are. And so I will say I'm someone who generally likes the idea of a triad, although maybe a triad with a small T instead of a capital T. And what I mean by that is I think the bulk of The value of nuclear weapons comes from deterring nuclear attacks.

I think the way that one does that is with the submarine force and that the other forces are in some senses backups or compliments. And so, you know, we've often thought of the triad as having three equal legs. I don't mind having an ICBM leg and I don't mind having a bomber leg. And I think there's some value to that.

But it may not make sense to, As we look at future expenditures to starve the SSBN program, the new submarine, in order to maintain three smaller equal legs. I think I would rather Invest as much as I could in the ballistic missile submarine, and I would rather have the Air Force have a really capable conventional bomber and then see what money is left over in order to see what I can sustain in terms of ICBMs and nuclear capabilities for aircraft.

But having said that, I like the idea of having a triad. It's just not clear to me that it has to be three equal legs.

Aaron 20:03

No, we actually didn't talk about this off mic, so this is impromptu, but I completely agree with you.

Jeffrey 20:10

It's just that I persuaded you. You were going to kill the bomber force there in just two seconds.

Aaron 20:13

No, no, not to kill the bomber force. I would rather – exactly as you said, and you did persuade me, I would rather have an extremely capable bomber than – But that would maybe skew more heavily towards the conventional mission and put my money on the nuclear mission at C-4s. And then focus heavily on the new SSBN.

Jeffrey 20:39

Well, and I will say – No one in the Air Force will say that, but there's this nice notion of revealed preference, right? Look at what people do, not what they say. And the Air Force loves to talk about how important the nuclear mission is for aircraft. But every time they have to choose between having more money to buy more aircraft or taking some of that money, making a slightly smaller buy and investing it and making those aircraft nuclear capable.

They seem to come up with a lot of excuses, right? Right. And so not too long ago, the former chief of staff of the Air Force floated a trial balloon where he said, well, maybe we should take the money that was going to be spent on making the F-35 nuclear capable, and maybe we should take that and we should pour that into the bomber.

And, you know, that was... On its surface, that was about preserving the nuclear mission for the bomber, but that actually was about taking money out of the nuclear pot and putting it in their precious bomber.

Aaron 21:38

Yeah, it actually speaks to the pivot, and I hate that word, pivot, because I don't like it, but let's call it the pivot.

Jeffrey 21:45

Aren't we saying rebalance?

Aaron 21:47

Rebalance, okay. We're going to the rebalance. And we look at our adversaries.

Jeffrey 21:52

That's where we talk about how much we hate the pivot.

Aaron 21:55

I hate the pivot. I hate the pivot. Our adversaries for the last 12 years now, people have talked about this ad nauseum, are very, very weak states. Afghanistan was a failed state, and then Iraq had an air defense system from the 1950s, excuse me, 1960s. Whereas as the rebalance comes and you have a revivalist Russia, we're starting to have some heavy-duty adversaries again, and the military is shifting its mission.

With that the bulk of the planning will be on the conventional side and if you ask me and what would I want to spend my tax dollars on it would be to focus on Outfitting our military with the most advanced conventional forces needed in order to defeat a large enemy like China or Russia, not on the nuclear mission, which would ultimately be the ultimate backstop, which would be deterrence.

So I am in favor of what the Air Force is hinting at strongly. Our bombers should be more capable, but not necessarily certified for the nuclear role, in order to give us, I guess, a better chance and to give our fighters more of an advantage.

Jeffrey 23:09

That's sort of where we're headed. You know, the, the Navy is going to support a full replacement of the submarine force the ballistic missile submarine force and the air force really wants the bomber. And so those are the things that are going to suck up all the resources.

Aaron 23:26

And that sort of means, I think we're staring at the ICBM force.

Jeffrey 23:30

Like, ah, look at you guys. You know as, as a friend of mine said The Air Force has – he called it the Holy Trinity. That was the F-35, the bomber, and the tanker. And he said if you're not on the list, you're on the table. And so this idea that we're going to either life extend or replace the ICBM force by 2030 – That, to me, seems like the least likely leg of the triad to survive because the Navy is so much behind the submarine, and the Air Force really is focused on procuring the bomber for conventional missions.

So, yeah, if there are going to be savings, I think they're going to come out of the ICBM force.

Aaron 24:20

I would agree with that. I mean, I think that's the way to go. I mean, they're the most vulnerable leg of the triad, and... I think a lot of people have been advocating for cuts to the ICBM force for a while, if you need to make cuts. And I think we're saying that we need to make cuts.

And I would rather put the money in the bomber and the new SSBN. The question is how many? And I think maybe we can end with this. How many boats do you think we need? And how many bombers do you think we need? Well, I guess how many bombers specifically slated for the nuclear mission do we need?

Jeffrey 24:55

Well, you know, it's a funny question to answer because I think in the old days we imagined coming up with numbers driven either by targets or some abstract calculation of damage, right? And so one did it that way. But I think if your goal is to make sure that you have enough survivable nuclear forces to To make the Russians or the Chinese really regret starting a nuclear war, it's not really that many nuclear weapons that you need, particularly when you consider all of the conventional options we have.

I think this is more like hot dogs and hot dog buns, which is to say that you always get a pack of what is it? It's like eight hot dogs, but it's only six buns. So if you want them to come out even, you've got to buy 24 or something.

Aaron 25:51

Yeah, that's the scene from – what's that? Father of the Bride.

Jeffrey 25:55

Right. So, well, that's the thing with nuclear weapons. You can't buy one missile. You have to buy a wing of missiles, and that's like 150. And you can't buy one submarine. You've got to have at least three or four to keep one at sea, and you probably need three times that many to... I mean, you need... You need sort of six to eight to at least support a submarine base.

You know, there are all of these organizational and operational things that, you know, you can't buy the one hot dog. You can't buy the one nuclear weapon. You got to buy them in bunches. And so I'm quite happy with a heavy SSBN force. That's in the kind of eight to 10 boat range. I'm not crazy that they reduce the number of launch tubes, but that's fine.

With multiple warheads on it. And so my goal would be to have 900 warheads out there. I'd like to get the Russians down to about the same number. And I sort of would backfill with maybe some capabilities. So maybe we wouldn't have any nuclear-capable bombers on a day-to-day basis, but we would have the ability to make them nuclear-capable if over time we decided that we wanted to go up to much higher numbers.

But I think I'd be happy with somewhere around 900 for the moment, just because I think I want to sustain a healthy SSBN force.

Aaron 27:30

Yeah, so, I mean, eight boats, there's 16 tubes per boat, aren't there?

Jeffrey 27:36

No, right now there are 24. 24 of them. And they're going to cut it to 20 under the new START treaty, but then the new boats, I think, are only going to have 16 tubes. So the numbers are coming down.

Aaron 27:49

Yeah, so 16 times 8, you can get your basic numbers, then we can see how many... About four and a half, yeah, like four and a half warheads per... Permissal. Right. Ish. Ish. Yeah. So maybe we did it. Maybe we solved it. Maybe the Air Force and the Navy can call us and listen to the podcast to get advice about how to plan out their future nuclear force.

They can comment about it in the comment section of this thing. With that said, I mean... I think we're both in agreement about the need to do something. I'm just not so sure if we're going to do something before we're sitting on top of Mount Everest and we're running out of oxygen. And we'll have to see what plays out with the numbers and the number crunching.

Jeffrey 28:39

Oh, come on, Aaron. We know exactly how it's going to play out. It's going to be a disaster.

Aaron 28:43

That's true. That's true. I'm trying to be positive because we always end our podcast on a terrible note.

Jeffrey 28:51

You don't get in the security planning business because you're an optimistic person, right?

Aaron 28:56

That's true. Well, here's to the pessimists, and good luck trying to figure this out in the 2020s to all of our policymakers. And I'm sure we'll be back on the Arms Control podcast, or somebody will have inherited this, and we'll be talking about it again then.

Jeffrey 29:11

No, no, I'll come back on and say, I told you so!

Aaron 29:13

That's right. Well, thanks for talking today. It's been good.

Jeffrey 29:17

Yeah, it's been fun.

Aaron 29:19

And I'll talk to you next week.

Jeffrey 29:21

Okay.

Aaron 29:21

All right, thanks for listening. Bye-bye.