Cruisin’

Jeffrey Lewis 0:00

I don't know, I can't, I can't come up with any other explanation for doing this away other than, you know, they were getting high at the Taiwanese Defense Ministry. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast. The leading, no, Jeffrey, we're the only. Okay, yeah, you're right. We're the only podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation.

I'm Jeffrey Lewis, a senior fellow at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog.

Aaron Stein 0:33

I'm Aaron Stein. I'm now a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Jeffrey 0:42

Today we're going to talk about Taiwanese cruise missiles. I have a new blog post up about Taiwan's HF-2E land attack cruise missile.

Aaron 0:51

I think it's your first blog post of the new year.

Jeffrey 0:54

Yeah, I've been a little bit lazy when it comes to blogging.

Aaron 0:58

We talk now. We don't write anything.

Jeffrey 1:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little later, we're going to have Dennis Gormley come on. He's pretty much the man on cruise missiles, as I think we've mentioned several times on the podcast.

Aaron 1:09

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But maybe first we can talk about my blog post. Yeah, I mean, let's just start right there. So Taiwan decided to deploy a cruise missile in a truck.

Jeffrey 1:21

What's up with that?

Aaron 1:25

What's up with that? Yeah, what's up with that?

Jeffrey 1:29

It's not every day you see cruise missiles in trucks. We're going to make Carl do some editing. Right. Yes. For listeners, in the last couple of years, the Taiwanese have deployed a new long-range land attack cruise missile, something called the HF-2E, which can go like 600 kilometers. And so that's a really serious kind of cruise missile. And what's interesting is The way that information has come out about the cruise missile and entered the open source.

And so I've got a blog post up that looks at two things that are particularly interesting to me. One is there are now pictures of what purports to be the engine from the cruise missile. But also there is this pretty hilarious story about the fact that the Taiwanese tried to deploy the HF-2E on launchers that were gussied up to look like delivery trucks.

Yeah.

Aaron 2:28

And then people found out that the delivery trucks were false and were able to track down what they were putting in the delivery trucks, which I find even funnier.

Jeffrey 2:36

Yeah. Do you want to talk about the engine or the delivery?

Aaron 2:38

Let's talk about the engine first. I was surprised they put pictures up of it. I'm staring at your blog post right now. Pretty detailed pictures, too. I mean, it's not every day that we get to see the engines of cruise missiles.

Jeffrey 2:54

Yeah, so there are two sets of cruise missile engine pictures that the Taiwanese have released. The first is at some kind of aerospace technology exhibition, and I haven't been able to figure out which exhibition it was or who took them, but there are pictures of the placards, and you can definitely tell that it's a Taiwanese-manufactured turbofan engine.

Aaron 3:14

It looks like a mock-up, doesn't it? I mean, I'm looking at your blog post, the one on the left, the lighter gray one.

Jeffrey 3:20

Yeah, it could be a mock-up. It's sort of bluish gray, right? Yeah. So I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm not able to stick my nose in it. But it does look – it looks exactly like the Williams engine that powers the U.S. Tomahawk. Right. They're identical. Yeah. Well, I shouldn't say identical, but they bear a really striking resemblance.

But what surprised me was there's not only those three pictures of that display, but then the Changshan Institute of Science and Technology, which is the big Taiwanese defense research institute, did a press conference where they released pictures of what I think is the same engine with the Changshan Institute of Science and Technology logo on the little podium.

And they seem to say that that's the HF-2E engine. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. But, man, I did not expect to see that particular display.

Aaron 4:28

Yeah. Is there a story behind why it looks so much like the Tomahawk or the Taiwanese would prefer not to tell us?

Jeffrey 4:34

Well, you know, I think it looks that way because that's kind of what cruise missile engines look like.

Aaron 4:39

Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:41

And I'm sure that there's design information that's out there floating around. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that it bears that really striking resemblance. But boy, it's really striking, right?

Aaron 4:56

Yeah, it's very striking.

Jeffrey 4:59

But we don't put our tomahawks in trucks.

Aaron 5:03

I have to get back to this.

Jeffrey 5:04

Sure don't. Yeah, okay. So this is hilarious, right?

Aaron 5:07

Yeah, we got to talk about this. Because it also touches on sort of the Arms Control Walk podcast favorite about how open source is unlocking doors that had hitherto been closed and more difficult to open.

Jeffrey 5:19

Right. So if you're sitting around in like a windowless conference room at a defense ministry, or maybe you're just hanging out with your buddies getting really high, it might sound like a good idea to take your cruise missiles and disguise them as delivery trucks.

Aaron 5:42

It's true, right? Dude. Dude. I totally know what we're going to do. I think the stoners who may listen to the podcast don't hang out with people like us. I think they have different conversations.

Jeffrey 5:53

Yeah. Well, I mean I just – I don't know. I can't come up with any other explanation for doing this away other than they were getting high at the Taiwanese defense ministry. But – They decided that they were going to take the launchers and they were going to repaint them so that instead of being military green, they were white.

The cab of the truck was white. And they put a – they turned the flatbed launcher into something that looked like a panel delivery truck, like a trailer truck. And on it, they painted, you know, Redbird Express, like it was some kind of delivery vehicle.

Aaron 6:32

Right, right, right.

Jeffrey 6:34

And started driving them around, right? But there were a number of problems with their approach, right? And the first is it doesn't look anything like an actual FedEx or UPS truck that you would see in Taiwan. I went through and I got pictures. And they tend to be a little bit smaller. Okay. But more importantly, they have things on them like telephone numbers, website addresses.

You know, because if you see the delivery truck and you're a real business, someone might want to call the business and use the service.

Aaron 7:14

Right. Keep going. It's a matter of where you park them and how easy it is to pick them up on satellite photos.

Jeffrey 7:22

Right. Well, so and then it's better because one of the things and Wendell Minnick, who writes for Defense News and a little bit for James, did a bunch of these interviews, which which is really great. And he's he's I think I think he's still in Taiwan. And these are you definitely have to read him if you want to read about Taiwanese defense issues.

And he's the one who picked up all of these stories a couple of years ago when they broke. But for some reason, they haven't been like put out into the The, the general population, and so the blog post kind of does this now, but one of the things is people in the neighborhoods were kind of like, why are there delivery trucks on our streets, right? Because they didn't live in like a neighborhood with like a bunch of businesses where people got things FedEx or UPS to them and so you know, they're driving around.

And so if you look at the delivery trucks, the chassis are very close to known Chinese, rather, well, the Chinese Republic of China, to Taiwanese missile launchers. The locals pretty quickly were like, hey, these are weird looking trucks driving around our neighborhood. What are they? And pretty quickly they guess, oh, they must be cruise missile launchers. And then I think the part you were laughing about is as soon as that happens, we know the neighborhoods they're driving around in.

We know what the trucks look like. And so some blogger goes to Google Earth and looks at one of the known military bases. And it's easy to spot because it's got Nike, Hercules missiles at the gate.

Aaron 8:55

Yep, there they are.

Jeffrey 8:56

And inside, there's a yard uncovered with all of these white cab trucks.

Aaron 9:04

Parked next to what you would expect, military green trucks.

Jeffrey 9:09

Right. I mean, just clear as a bell in a satellite photograph. And so he blogs this, and Wendell Minnick reports on this. And the Taiwanese say, oh yeah, that was a stupid thing we did. And then they cover up the lot. So they hadn't even bothered to stick a roof on the place. Yeah.

Aaron 9:24

Which I find hilarious because what they're worried about, I think we would agree, is that they're worried about counterforce targeting, wouldn't you say? Yes. The ability to take out their cruise missiles before they can fire them.

Jeffrey 9:34

They're worried that the Chinese are going to blow up their base.

Aaron 9:37

Right. But then they park – Easily discernible trucks from even the satellites with as – they're as good as Google Earth, but military satellites are better, in a sea of – at a known missile base and hope that they'll remain secret. I find that farcical.

Jeffrey 9:54

Well, this is why I made the joke about like sitting around and getting high because on the one hand, it's this seemingly such a clever idea. Oh, we'll disguise them as delivery trucks. But there's no attention paid to actual intelligence procedures. And so they don't put them at a different base. They don't park them inside. They don't deploy them in an area that's not populated.

You know, it's like you can't. Hide it in a delivery truck if you're then going to put the delivery truck in the open at a known base responsible for handling missiles.

Aaron 10:31

It kind of freaked me out.

Jeffrey 10:33

Because people are going to see the delivery truck coming in and out of the base.

Aaron 10:36

I know. It's ridiculous. I mean – What kind of made me uncomfortable about it is that there are too many countries out there – I'm thinking about the Russians in particular – who are thinking it's a good idea to put cruise missiles in containers as a means of hiding them. Oh, right.

Jeffrey 10:55

Yeah, this is the Club K. We should totally put this video up, by the way.

Aaron 11:00

Yeah, we'll do it. Yeah, exactly. So the video that you will be looking at beneath there is an advertisement for Russian cruise missiles in a shipping container because they're easy to hide. Correct? Right.

Jeffrey 11:16

Well, not only the cruise missiles, but also the launch control center also sits in a container. So you've got like two dudes hanging out in a shipping container, and they've got all these other shipping containers with cruise missiles in them.

Aaron 11:32

You know, I'm a follower of the Oryx blog, and we should also include a link to the bottom of this as well because they do amazing open source work. Yeah, fine and used. They're doing this stuff in Syria. The Syrian regime in Damascus is camouflaging some of their artillery rockets to look like – Civilian vehicles so they can shoot and scoot.

And there's speculation on the blog as well that a Chinese made that was then shipped to Iran, that was then shipped to Syria and then given to Hezbollah and then used against an Israeli naval ship, used a similar platform to disguise itself, the C-802 or the Noor, and that ship cruise missile. Is this not destabilizing the idea that you're putting in cruise missiles and in civilian looking trucks to destroy, to evade detection and counterforce strikes?

Jeffrey 12:22

I think if it's successful, that yes, it could be tremendously destabilizing. But I really have my doubts about whether the paint job of the final delivery vehicle Is the most important link in the intelligence chain that leads the United States Air Force to a particular launcher. So we see this a little bit in the Chinese case when they were building the first silos and rollout sites.

They would put up camouflage netting over the mountain valley where they were building these things so that we couldn't see what they were doing. But of course, that would draw the attention of the intelligence community. They'd be like, ooh, they've netted up a valley. And we would pay special attention to it. And invariably, there would be a day when the netting was off because they had to take it down and put it up and change it and do other things.

And so you can see in declassified documents that then the US intelligence community would be able to figure out what was beneath the netting. But more importantly... If you ask the question, okay, well, it's a silo. How do you know it's a silo for, say, a DF-5 instead of a DF-4? Again, this is all in declassified documents.

What the U.S. intelligence community was doing was watching the rail cars come in and out because the airframes and the propellants had special rail cars. And so when you kind of back up, it isn't like... The U.S. intelligence community just scours the world for little green blobs that are the right size, and that's helpful. But there is an effort, I think, to document the entire chain from the production of the missile to its deployment at a static location where guys can eat and sleep and take a dump.

And it's from there then that the unit may deploy out in a time of crisis. But this idea that the Taiwanese had that they could just stick it in a delivery truck and that would solve all their problems seems to me to be totally naive about how that entire process works. And now, of course, what they've done is they've made it worse because they've given us this beautiful MO because now we know when the missiles went to the bases, we know what the bases looked like, and then we know the changes they made to the bases to hide them.

Right, exactly. So you go through and you'll see when they retro... I mean, I haven't bothered to do it yet, but I'm sure the Chinese intelligence apparatus has.

Aaron 15:02

I was about to say, the Chinese are doing exactly what you're telling exactly now. They're laughing.

Jeffrey 15:06

They've gone through, and I'm certain they will have, looked at all the base retrofits and said, oh, well, if you retrofitted this base and this base and this base all by putting up the same building to hide the cruise missile launchers, I'm going to assume that there are cruise missile launchers there. So it's... It's really crazy that you do this.

On the one hand, I look at Club K, or I look at the things Assyrians are doing, and I see them disguising it. It does have some stability implications, although I think the bigger problem is probably arms control verification. I don't think it's going to really generate that much additional survivability.

Aaron 15:49

Yeah, I mean I guess so. I mean when you put it like that, that all makes perfect sense to me. Except for the fact that the Israelis missed that cruise missile when it plowed in the side of their Navy ship during the 2006 war and nearly sunk it. But I guess the flip side to that is like would they have missed it also if there wasn't – if it wasn't camouflaged like a truck?

Jeffrey 16:09

Yeah, I should say when I think about these problems, I mean no intelligence – Community is perfect, and so there will always be surprises, and you know, sometimes you'll miss things that you should have seen, and, and it's almost certainly the case that that camouflage could almost certainly the case, it could, that's a funny phrasing, certainly, I, I accept that camouflage could make it marginally harder to spot something, but having said that I can also see ways in which camouflage would reveal something.

And we see that in the case of Taiwan, and I think we saw that with the Chinese. And so it kind of raises this question of whether – I guess I would say it this way. It raises this question of how you think about stability. In the United States, we're really mathy. And so when we did our idea of the shell game, hiding ICBMs in shelters, We didn't build a bunch of fake shelters.

We built a ginormous number of shelters and planned to shuttle the missiles between them. So it was just straight math. You have to hit every shelter. Every shelter is real. The math is done. That's really different than I'm going to build a couple of real shelters and a bunch of fake ones and leave it to you to see if you can spot the difference.

It's a really different... It's a really different aesthetic or preference. And I think we draw tremendous comfort from the fact that we could do a calculation of survivability. And with real camouflage, I don't think you can do that, right? You don't really know how effective it is. And so you don't know what kind of number to assign it.

So I accept that it's kind of a different way of looking at the problem, but maybe I'm just hopelessly American. No, I don't think so. I'd rather have 5,000 people Cruise missiles, then hope that my 50 painted up to look like delivery trucks will fool you.

Aaron 18:16

I think that's a good way to look at it. I think before we turn it over and we give Dennis a call, what do we make of the fact that we're actually talking about a cruise missile, not a ballistic missile?

Jeffrey 18:26

Yeah, I think it's really cool, right? I mean, for years, the Taiwanese have talked about wanting a long-range ballistic missile. There are all these different names that have floated around associated with the program, Tianma, Tianshi, which I guess were real programs. There's a lot of different reporting about how far the Taiwanese ever got with any of these.

Yeah. And so I think for a long time it seemed obvious that we thought that the Taiwanese would go down the route that the South Koreans did, taking the Nike Hercules surface-to-air missiles and converting them over to surface-to-surface missiles and then building a missile program on top of that. And then when they're... You know, long-range precision missile shows up, it's a cruise missile.

And so I guess what that means is that Dennis, in his book Missile Contagion, was right about the future of missile proliferation.

Aaron 19:20

I think he was right. I think that's why we're having him on the show. I think so. Should we give him a call?

Jeffrey 19:25

I think we should. We're joined by Dennis Gormley, a senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. And I don't know, Dennis, can we call you the world's leading expert on cruise missile proliferation?

Dennis Gormley 19:39

No. No?

Jeffrey 19:42

Who gets that title?

Dennis 19:46

Actually, I have been identified as such, but those kinds of grandiose...

Jeffrey 19:52

Representations of one's talents are to be avoided. You know, that we have mentioned this like 10 times on this podcast because we've done a bunch of cruise missile conversations, we always talk about, you know, oh well, Dennis has known this for 20 years, and so it's actually really nice to have you on, and there's a story of, of Jeffrey and you, Dennis, in Italy, if I'm remembering correctly. That's right. yeah, I heard that and it brought back fond memories.

It was a really enjoyable train ride, I have to say.

Dennis 20:26

It was.

Jeffrey 20:26

It was indeed. So you have a new book out.

Dennis 20:30

Yes, I do.

Jeffrey 20:35

Yes, with Andrew Erickson and J.D. Yuan.

Dennis 20:38

That's right. Former Monterey. Right.

Jeffrey 20:41

As am I. Yes, as are you. So it's about Chinese cruise missiles. Right. Singularly. The Chinese cruise missile. Well, there may be more coming, right? That's the DH-10?

Dennis 20:59

I am responsible for the section of the book that deals with the land attack cruise missiles as distinct from anti-ship cruise missiles. And the book goes into great detail on both The land attack and anti-ship. And anti-ship, of course, have been around for many years. And the land attack developments are more recent, beginning as recently as 2003, 2004.

And those are to be, in my view, an important new dimension, not least because of the Poor performance of what we call our own cruise missile defenses, which are negligible at best. So there's great concern that as China's arsenal of land attack cruise missiles grows, it will further complicate the area denial challenges that China presents for the U.S., And that's what I'm focusing some of my future research on as well.

Jeffrey 22:19

On the need for better cruise missile defenses?

Dennis 22:22

Yes.

Jeffrey 22:24

What was the impetus behind the project?

Dennis 22:29

Actually, it was a selected solicitation by the government to... To pick a a good team. And we wrote a proposal that was a winning proposal. And and I, I think generally the the interest in it cut across both the the not just the land attack phenomenon, but the the Navy's interest in growing anti-ship cruise missile Capabilities on the part of China.

So that was the impetus behind it. And no one had gone into the kind of detail in terms of accessibility to Chinese sources that this book does. And there's something like on the order of, oh, three to four hundred Chinese sources that have been translated and gone through in great detail.

Aaron 23:47

Dennis, one thing that I've really enjoyed is this isn't your first book on cruise missiles. You started with Missile Contagion, which I think came out in 2008. And one thing, I think Jeffrey and I were talking about this before, and we talked about this on previous podcasts, is you almost beat everybody to the punch here. You identified the The risk or the threat of the proliferation of land attack of cruise missiles going back and sort of the complications they present for U.S. defenses.

I mean, how do you see like China's interest in this as part of like a longer trajectory of cruise missile proliferations? And what challenges do you think it portends for U.S. policymakers for defense in the future?

Dennis 24:27

Yeah, I mean, given the fact that China's first significant Land attack cruise missile test occurred in the early 2000s, suggests to me that, and the evidence I think supports this, that they had been working on, most notably with the Russians in the early 90s, In, in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union essentially taking advantage of a great knowledge base that essentially came to Shanghai and set up shop and and began to help the the Chinese battle with some of the stiffer challenges, most notably extending the range of their desired Long-range land-attack cruise missile.

And it's clear that the Russians assisted them, though it's not clear that they simply gave them the entire complete turbofan engine technology. Because the existing land attack cruise missiles, the DH-10, for example, still do not achieve the kind of range that Russian long-range cruise missiles have achieved on the order of 3,000 kilometers or so. And the DH-10 is thought to be in the neighborhood of perhaps up to 2,000 kilometers or so.

Jeffrey 26:23

I wanted to ask you to tell that story because that story about Russians showing up in Shanghai, it's a really good one. You mentioned it, but I'm not sure that it's one of these things that's all that well told other than in your work.

Dennis 26:42

Well, the background is somewhat sparse, and the source is a couple of And there's reason, like with every source you pick up in the open source literature, is subject to, you know, concern about the reliability of the reporting. But the two sources seem to agree that something along those lines occurred, and it's not... There are very solid evidence that the Russians in the aftermath of the breakup, I was in Moscow right when the communist government fell from power.

And the design bureaus that I visited suddenly became entirely open. And we had access to everything. Including walking around with cameras, taking pictures of heretofore absolutely impossible to gain access to technology. And the Russians just sat in their offices from that day forward, waiting for something to happen. They weren't being paid. They perhaps got some food as a result of going to work.

But they went to work and just waited for something to happen. And of course, not much happened in the way of paying them. And a lot of them just took off and went to places like North Korea, and in this case, reportedly Shanghai, and set up shop. And then the important variable in all of this is You know, we often think of the transfer of technology as being an easy process.

And as you two know, and anyone who's read my book Missile Contagion knows, that the creation of knowledge is a devilishly difficult process that depends on an appropriate social context. And that social context comprises not just the personal relationships that develop over time between, say, Russian and Chinese engineers, but obviously dealing with devolutionally difficult processes like language.

And can you communicate language? In either one or both languages back and forth to allow this relationship to mature in a way that creates knowledge. And so, unfortunately, in the absence of having access to anyone who directly participated, In the post-1993 period where they presumably set up shop in Shanghai, one doesn't know what that social context really consisted of and therefore it's hard to measure the amount of what's called tacit knowledge that was created and transferred to the Chinese.

Because, you know, from the 93-95 timeframe when all of this supposedly took place, there was another five to eight years of development before the first test of the DH-10. So there was a lot more to work on in the aftermath of this relationship being formed. And how long the Russians stayed, I still have no idea. But the longer they stay, the more rich the relationship in terms of the social context becomes evident and is able to influence the ultimate objective of transferring knowledge to them on these complex systems.

Aaron 31:14

One thing that we talk a lot about on the show, Dennis, is this use of open source knowledge. And what I'm curious is – Is it possible to discern how much tacit knowledge was gained by the Russians setting up shop in Shanghai from what we're seeing on the back end of Chinese tests? So, I mean, that's the first thing I'd like to ask.

And one thing you also brought up in Missile Contagion, which I really liked, was the availability of engines going around. And both the engines and the software needed to guide cruise missiles are being more attainable by China. By a greater group of new states. I mean, do you think we're seeing that? I mean, we talk a lot about proliferation, but how far along would you say is the Chinese cruise missile program?

And what do you think we can take from it in terms of how much they got from the tacit knowledge from the Russians?

Dennis 32:05

Yeah, I think the sum of what I just went over in terms of social context, tacit knowledge transfer, knowledge transfer in general, Would suggest to me a cautionary approach to assigning any – without rich access, direct contact with interviews with the primary people involved in this process – So to derive out of the – what you see in tests I think is a dangerous process because even in the test data that you can derive from open source material, it's basically listening to – People who have a stake in convincing you that the development is successful and they're well on their way to having 10 meters CEP which invariably shows up in everyone's land attack cruise missile program no matter who it is and so I suggest the buyer beware with respect to even with knowledge of what You know, this process of transferring knowledge to another state and the demands associated with, you know, setting up this social context over an extended period of time.

I would, you know, without access to people who are directly involved, I'd be a bit dubious about extracting anything from the end test program. And furthermore, Test programs are one thing. Using them in a wartime setting is quite another. And when I say that, I mean to suggest that land attack cruise missiles will be used not only with the huge arsenal of ballistic missiles that China has, but But also with aircraft.

And you've got to basically focus on integrating airstrikes, ballistic missile strikes, and cruise missile strikes, all with differing timing requirements. And that requires a very agile command and control system that I think our low visibility force multiplier requires. Most recent book goes into some detail explaining the background to what you need and suggesting that China has not demonstrated the kind of prowess that I would argue is truly needed to orchestrate a complex A set of requirements associated with integrating ballistic crews and aircraft strikes into the kind of, you know, crescendo of activity that has to occur to fully exploit Weaknesses that Taiwan has and weaknesses that even the U.S. would have in protecting air bases.

So it's a stiff demand for China to execute, and it's awfully difficult to do it in peacetime, even in peacetime tests, or to do a portion of it in peacetime tests and have confidence that you can do the full Monty, so to speak.

Jeffrey 36:01

Dennis, I wanted to jump to the other side of the strait because I'm putting up a blog post on Taiwan's development of its own land attack cruise missile. One of the reasons that I really admire Missile Contagion is I think you're probably one of the only people who's really spent any time looking at the Taiwanese cruise missile program.

I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that. I guess my first question is, did you see the pictures of the engine? Yeah, I did. Did you ever expect to see pictures of the engine?

Dennis 36:41

Inevitably, somebody is going to show a picture of an engine, and some people will draw the conclusion that it – It may be the engine for the DH-10. It could be – not the DH-10, but the – HF-2E. But it's clear that whatever engine it is, from everything I've read about the Taiwanese program, that they are still striving to exceed 600 kilometers range.

It it in terms of the end results, it's more equivalent to a not even a turbofan engine, but a turbojet engine. I mean, modern turbojet engines can achieve. Just as the French have demonstrated with their land-attack cruise missile program, that they can achieve ranges out to 600, 700, 800 kilometers. That's stretching it a bit. Taiwan would like to go out to as far as 2,000 kilometers, they've talked about.

And The interesting question behind Taiwan and missile range, in my view, is whether, and I don't mean to overcomplicate this, but what I've defined from my readings of what they're interested in is a debate going on as to whether counterforce or countervalue Targeting is the most appropriate – has the most bang for the buck. Excuse the – and I think in general, my conclusion is that they believe that the most bang for the buck comes from countervalue targeting.

Not counterforce targeting, believe it or not. And the reason for this is arguments that they make fairly much in the open. You've got to tease them out of the literature. It's not volumes of literature on this. But they basically think that they can get more bang for the buck out of threatening targets like – The economic infrastructure of Shanghai or the Three Gorges Dam than they can from trying to build an arsenal comparable, a land attack cruise missile arsenal or any kind of missile arsenal comparable to what China has already achieved.

So they believe that counter value targeting is – Is the path they should go. And of course, the U.S. has pressured them from absolutely avoiding this, even though we have, I would argue, and my book argues, that the Taiwanese have essentially, because they've been so... Driven by US pressure to avoid building any ballistic missile that they're fully capable of doing.

And mistakes that, in my view, that the US has made that have implicitly encouraged Taiwan To build land attack cruise missiles. First, it was anti-ship missiles.

Jeffrey 40:53

That was totally something that Aaron and I noticed as well, that there was this, there's a long way in this conversation about the time when he's building ballistic missiles, but in fact, right, they end up with a cruise missile. So that choice, that's a really interesting, you think that's a function of US policy?

Dennis 41:09

I think it is. And I, well, not, not, Fully calculated and articulated and well-considered U.S. policy. But the clumsiness that comes from the State Department and the NSC having the view that we should push Taiwan away. First, it was to push them away from developing any ballistic missile. And then once they were... They were given a go-ahead to, well, you can work on anti-ship cruise missiles.

And then suddenly somebody discovered that, well, an anti-ship cruise missile is kind of a land attack cruise missile if you make a few changes here and there. And they're substantial, but not nearly impossible by any means. Certainly for Taiwan, not impossible. And actually encouraging them to develop a rather Sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, which, as you guys are well aware, and a lot of our audience I trust, an air defense system can very quickly become a ballistic missile.

Jeffrey 42:32

I have a student doing a really cool paper on the history of surface-to-air missile conversions. Looking at the south koreans and the iraqis and and you know the chinese did it with a solid fuel surface air missile basically asking the question whether you could take an s300 if you bought it and turn it into a passable ballistic missile oh absolutely yeah yeah that turns out that's the answer right i i worked for seven years at harry diamond laboratories one of the

Dennis 43:05

One of the country's lead laboratories on lots of things from – well, I won't go into that. But among other things, Harry Diamond was involved in transforming the Nike Hercules from an air defense system into an offensive system. So it was done many, many moons ago, and it can still be done today for the state that has the technological wherewithal to do them.

And most of the folks we're talking about have that capability if they wish to go down that path.

Aaron 43:47

Did you see – Like U.S. policy in pushing the Taiwanese towards any ship cruise missiles as being reflective of the older belief that ballistic missiles were essentially only to carry WMD and that cruise missiles were the quote-unquote safer missile.

Dennis 44:03

Absolutely. You got it.

Aaron 44:08

But this is – Dennis, I'm taking your point here. But as more and more people started to devalue ballistic missiles, A, because they were too expensive or they were hard to acquire – Cruise missiles became sort of the poor man's air force, I mean, to call it like that. But they've grown in value, particularly in replicating US tactics, US practice, starting in the Gulf War in 91, all the way up until the opening salvo in the 2000 war against ISIS.

I mean, what do you make of this trajectory of land attack cruise missiles becoming the weapon of choice for precision strike?

Dennis 44:49

There's no doubt that that is the perceived value of land attack cruise missiles over a ballistic missile. But let's not forget that China has well over a thousand of missiles. Ballistic missiles that are used for conventional missions. And while they don't achieve the kind of accuracy that a land attack cruise missile does, they carry more weight and therefore have a larger warhead.

So the era where ballistic missiles Were only considered of value to deliver weapons of mass destruction, most notably nuclear weapons, is no longer with us. We now live in an era where you can transform a ballistic missile into a conventional delivery system. But I think there's always been this... In my book, I call it differentiation. Even though cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are given equal nominal treatment in the missile technology control regime, exceptions to the rules of the MTCR are more frequently made for cruise missiles than for ballistic missiles.

And that is driven by the perception that That, well, cruise missiles are really weapons of, I say this facetiously, weapons of mass discrimination. They're for very precise delivery, and therefore they're going to be used with conventional warheads. Of course, that's ignoring the fact that If you look at both the U.S. and Russian biological weapons program, which my wife has just published a book on, on the biological weapons issue, those programs were driven by the assumption that you needed a cruise missile to effectively deliver Biological agents for reasons that have to do clearly with, you know, the even streams that are created by a slow-flying aircraft.

And, you know, it's about an order of magnitude improvement in effectiveness for the calculations that have been done comparing ballistic and cruise for biological weapons delivery.

Jeffrey 47:48

Tell Sonia not to encourage them.

Dennis 47:52

No, actually, Sonia's – my wife's book is – the thrust of it is to suggest that we've grossly exaggerated the ease with which any state – And certainly terrorist group could easily acquire a biological weapon. It's more difficult than one thinks, thank God. And it's a great book. It's called Barriers to Bioweapons, for those of you who are interested in a new look at the biological weapons proliferation challenge.

So getting back to the differentiation that has taken place, a lot of that flows from the fact that most of the precision proliferation – That has occurred. This is a clumsy way of saying it. The systems that have proliferated are cruise missiles. And who has proliferated them? I mean, the United States is, if you look at cruise missile use from the end of World War II to 2003, as I document in my Missile Contagion book, The 99% of the weapons that have been used have been used by the United States.

So the United States views these weapons as weapons of great precision, not as weapons of mass destruction delivery. So when they make these differentiations with respect to the MTCR, they do it on the base as well. The cruise missile is an innocent weapon compared to You know, these states that want to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

Jeffrey 49:46

Yeah, we definitely saw that with the storm shadow sales to UAE and Saudi Arabia. I suspect we'll start screaming when Brahmos, the Russian Indian cruise missile, starts showing up places we don't like.

Dennis 50:00

Yeah.

Jeffrey 50:01

Hey, I wanted to ask you, did you see the bit about the Taiwanese deployment mode for the cruise missile on the delivery trucks?

Dennis 50:13

I did, and I must say that it was the first time I've seen the – Well, I think Hezbollah did it in the war with Israel in 2006. Yeah, it looks rather – I mean, the whole, the story, I was laughing during reading it, you know, when Jeffrey sent it to me. You know, I said, I don't know what to make of this.

And it's, well, you know, we've got to make something of it. We're going to talk about this. And, you know, I speculated last night going in a variety of different directions. One is they... What little we know about the Taiwanese cruise missile program, the land attack program, which I presume these are supporting.

Jeffrey 51:12

Yes, they've now – they sort of anonymously admitted that and then covered up the base.

Dennis 51:18

Right, right. So we forced them – or your colleague forced them to – To cover them up, which is, by the way, if you look at most programs that house important weapons systems, virtually every state that I'm aware of has always tried to cover them up. I know, right? Build a roof, guys. No. It's a tarp. And Jeffrey knows my story, which I really don't want to get into much detail, but there was great controversy over whether the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear weapons at facilities that we thought were conventional facilities.

And in fact, you can go and look at the most recent – I can't recall the name of the book. It's on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it shows single-fenced facilities in 1962 era.

Jeffrey 52:43

Is this the Dino Brugioni book, Eyeball to Eyeball?

Dennis 52:46

No, no. Michael, what... I'm not I'm in Alexandria, not in. It's OK. So I don't have access to the book.

Jeffrey 52:56

And it's a great thing about podcasts is we can just get the name and we can.

Dennis 53:00

Yeah, I'll send it. And this is very interesting because it shows a single fence facility housing nuclear warheads in in Cuba and. We were completely unaware of the fact that they were stored at this facility because the intelligence community said it only has a single fence.

Jeffrey 53:21

Right, right. Double fence. No, it's a total thing, right? Yeah. No, no. If it doesn't have two fences, I don't care.

Aaron 53:26

That's how we find the bunkers at all the NATO bases.

Dennis 53:29

Yeah. With two double fences. Talk about easy ways to deceive your adversary. Yeah.

Jeffrey 53:37

Well, so what I was really struck by in the Taiwanese case – and Aaron and I were discussing this because we were interested in both the Syria or the Hezbollah case and the fact that the Russians have been promoting these containerized cruise missiles – is how quickly – People in Taiwan figured out that this was a fake delivery company.

You know, it's one of these things that like, when you're sitting around in the office, probably sounds like a really good idea. Oh, we'll make them look like delivery trucks and nobody will be any of the wiser. But all of the little details that they didn't get right, you know, like they don't have a phone number on them.

They don't seem to be making any deliveries. They're driving around out of a military base. And, you know, I love that at the gate of the military base, there are all these Nike Hercules missiles.

Aaron 54:25

You can see on Google Street View, by the way, which I find even better. Right.

Jeffrey 54:28

They're like the delivery trucks are coming in and out of the base. You know, these people are like, oh, yeah, I wonder what those are.

Aaron 54:35

Yeah. Well, let me jump in there for a second. I mean is that – I mean is the fact that they felt they had to put them in delivery trucks symptomatic of their fear about Chinese cruise missiles? Do you know what I'm saying? Are they like so fearful of counter-strike and precision strike on the face of the Chinese that they actually launched this dumb idea?

Dennis 54:57

Well, if they were truly worried about that, you would think they would build sheds, right? Yeah. That would be a lot easier than a stupid truck. No, it's beyond me. I think a lot probably has to do with how many they have. The reporting that I've seen suggests that they initially set out to build 50 trucks. Of the HF2E.

And by a period of, I think it was 2010. And then after that, go to a total number of 500. Even at 500, that's a fairly small arsenal. And I think it also supports the notion that Even though the U.S. has pressured them into not saying that these systems will be counter value strike systems, the Taiwanese really would like China to think they are.

Counter value that they're going to strike cities and economic institutions and Hong Kong and not try to go counter force to counter force matching with a much larger arsenal that is presented by China. So if there's only a small number of these systems Which is what I derived from what I just said, then I would strongly encourage them to do a better job at supposedly hiding them.

Jeffrey 57:00

Well, yeah, one last question about that. So we have now seen this series of cases. So we've got the Hezbollah case. We've got the Taiwanese case. We have the Russian containerized cruise missiles, which is a marketing ploy. So it seems like there is this enthusiasm for the idea of hiding cruise missiles, even if it doesn't necessarily seem like it's going to be all that successful of an idea.

So do you have a sense of – Is this really a thing that we should expect a lot, that countries will try to hide cruise missiles in this way? Or is this just one of these things that seems like a really good idea at the time, but within a year or two won't be like a deal?

Dennis 57:46

That's a tough one. I think for a smaller-sized... Land attack cruise missiles like what the Russians have done, that seems like a nifty idea. Although, you know, with ranges of only 300 kilometers, you've got to get really perilously close to use them. And so even that has its limitations. As they get bigger, you know, The value of a cruise missile is that you can stuff several into a container and they're mobile.

You know, in terms of finding and proceeding with successful attacks against something as mobile as a land attack cruise missile compared to, say, ballistic missile systems, which are larger, heavier and, you know, can't do the off-road stuff. Routine that some of the smaller cruise missile systems can do, so they already have an inherent advantage. And why you have to put them in these dumb trucks is beyond me.

Aaron 59:12

But you highlighted one of the main issues is that even the dumb trucks aside, I mean, is that they are highly mobile. They're hard to track. They're hard to pick up on sort of early advanced satellite warning, which puts more and more pressure on developing what's called a passive system like missile defense. But as you make clear and I think as anybody who follows the topic, we don't have one or we don't seem to be investing much money in cruise missile defenses.

I mean I'm just wondering what you think about that, like state of US cruise missile defenses and perhaps maybe what we should do about it.

Dennis 59:47

I think it's a grievous shortcoming and something needs to be done and urgently. And it's not just hoisting a balloon at anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 feet that's going to protect Washington, DC. If you want to seriously complicate the kind of strategy that, for example, A war in Asia would entertain with the kind of challenges that I argued were stiff for China to orchestrate, you know, the integration of ballistic crews and aircraft and other weapon systems, actually, but those three primarily.

The best way to do it is to have not a perfect missile defense, but some kind of missile defense that enters in a A new complicating variable for that integration of those three missile capabilities or aircraft and two missile capabilities. And so even some modest investment in the sensor systems, overhead sensor systems and integration systems and command and control systems, Needs to be done, and it needs to be done fairly soon.

And I'm hopeful. There's supposed to be a Defense Science Board summer study that looks at what are we neglecting? The question is, what are we neglecting that we've forgotten to or haven't invested enough in? And It seems to me if I were asked the question, I would put cruise missile defense at the top of the list. And so, you know, I say China is not the only setting in which, you know, that kind of requirement could arise.

But it's certainly one that China has taken advantage of with its growing arsenal of land attack cruise missiles. It could be as high as 400 or so. And that number, I trust, will probably continue to grow. And we're incentivizing China to allow it to grow. Because we're doing virtually nothing with respect to cruise missile defense.

Jeffrey 1:02:31

Hey, Dennis, this has been really, really great. What are you reading? We're ending with a book recommendation now.

Dennis 1:02:43

Gee, I read so many different books, and right now I'm reading a book about the – Presidential club that you may have seen. I forget the author, but it's a great book on the club that was established in the aftermath of the demise of Franklin Roosevelt, in which Harry Truman being the first member of the club.

Jeffrey 1:03:15

This is the President's Club by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy?

Dennis 1:03:19

Yes, indeed. It's a great book. It's a good read. It's a fast read. And that's what I'm reading now. Let me see. What else? I usually have two or three other books around me. I reread my wife's book.

Jeffrey 1:03:49

Hey, you know what? No, you plug it. We have you on the plug. Yeah, absolutely.

Dennis 1:03:55

Well, I mentioned it before. Barriers to Bioweapons by Sonia Ben-Wagram Gormley. And it's published by Cornell University Press. And it just came out in December. And... It's doing well. It's been reviewed in the New Scientist with outstanding reaction to the book. And it raises the question based on five case studies. That look at the U.S. She and a colleague at Cornell have done a systematic set of interviews with the remaining Soviet era, and there are a lot more because the Soviet program continued to 1992.

There are a lot more of them who are younger and are still alive to interview. So lots of interviews in Russia and back here in the States with the remaining living members of the U.S. Biological Weapons Program at Fort Detrick. And then they also look at, in addition to the Soviet and U.S. era programs, they look at the Amshim-Rikio program, the Iraqi program, and – The South African program.

And she arrives at the conclusion that we have exaggerated the ease with which states and terrorist groups can act. Entertain the challenge of developing a usable, effective biological weapon. And the reason for that is because you're dealing primarily with a live agent. And we have overlooked the stiff challenges that relate to the creation of knowledge, the tacit knowledge issue, and also to the organizational and management requirements For such a complex system as a biological weapon is.

So it's a great book, and it's not suggesting that we not worry about the problem, but it's raising the question, are we, from a non-proliferation standpoint, focusing on the right questions?

Jeffrey 1:06:37

That sounds great. I'm totally, totally going to pick that up. Aaron, what are you reading?

Aaron 1:06:43

I am reading Jim Walsh's PhD thesis from MIT, Bombs Unbuilt, with envy.

Jeffrey 1:06:48

So if he's listening, it's really good. It's really, really good. I actually bought it using the ProQuest dissertation service and downloaded it maybe a long, long time ago.

Aaron 1:07:05

It's free now. It's free now. It's free now. I downloaded it for free right from the MIT's library. So everybody out there, it's free and read it.

Jeffrey 1:07:13

And it's great. It's a response to selecting on the dependent variable, right? It's looking at states that don't proliferate.

Aaron 1:07:22

Yeah, and it's a slight model for my dissertation, so there's a reason I'm rereading it. So I'm trying to take inspiration as much as I can.

Jeffrey 1:07:30

Great. Well, I have been reading or rereading C-3 Nuclear Command Control Cooperation by Valery Yurinich, who is a now deceased Soviet and Russian guy who worked in the Russian, the Soviet and the Russian command and control system, wrote this amazing book in 2003 that's probably the most explicit thing about Russian command and control cooperation. And for many, many years, it's not available.

It's out of print. You can't buy a copy. It's not online. And so I got in contact with Bruce Blair and Global Zero sent me their last copy. And we're going to digitize it and put it up online, maybe as part of something I'm going to write about command control and strategic stability.

Aaron 1:08:20

Well, this is good, Jeffrey. I wrote down all these book recommendations.

Jeffrey 1:08:24

That's great. Well, so thank you very much, Dennis, for joining us.

Aaron 1:08:30

It's been my pleasure. And as always, nice to talk to you, Aaron. Nice to talk to you, Jeffrey. And thanks to all the listeners for tuning in.