Military

It has long been said that the US has a “nuclear triad” made up of nuclear weapons that could be delivered by three different means- bombers, ground based missiles, and submarine launched missiles. Is that even accurate any longer? The short answer is no, it isn’t.

Our ground based bombers are no longer available as a part of the triad. Sure, we still have deliverable warheads, but there is no alert force, no SIOP, and no organized plan for delivering them. In fact, the US only has 66 nuclear capable strategic bombers remaining in our inventory. The B-1 bomber used to be able to deliver nuclear weapons. Nope. Not anymore. The B-52 can, but those bombers are older than the grandfathers of the pilots who now fly them. The B-2 Spirit can, but there are only a handful of those. At best, we could drop a few weapons, but the truth is that there just isn’t a way to deliver enough warheads by bombers to make that a credible deterrent. Don’t believe me, ask the Air Force, who has said:

You’re going to need more aviators, you’re going to need more Security Forces [personnel],  more maintainers … more bombers … infrastructure improvements at the [alert] facilities, and you’re going to need more tankers.

What about the Air Force’s ground based ICBMs? You mean the LGM-30 that was designed with a 10 year lifespan, but has been in service for over 50 years? The Minuteman III began development in 1964 and entered service in 1970 with a force of 550 missiles. There are 440 of them left, and 400 of them are on alert. The missiles originally carried a total of 1,500 warheads- most had three warheads each. As of June 16, 2014, on Obama’s orders, the U.S. Minuteman III missiles have only a single warhead. Now they carry only 400- a 75% reduction in deliverable warheads by this leg of the triad.

What about from the sea? When I was in the Navy, we had the capability to launch nuclear strikes from aircraft carriers. That capability was completely taken from the Navy by George HW Bush. That capability is gone, and cannot be replaced. The training and knowledge was lost when we eliminated the personnel whose job it was to make that happen.

The Navy also had the ability to use Tomahawk cruise missiles to deliver nuclear warheads. That’s gone as well.

Then there are the much advertised SLBMs. There are 18 of the Ohio class submarines, but 4 of them have been rendered incapable of carrying SLBMs, leaving 14 nuclear capable submarines in the Navy. Scheduling means that only 4 of them are on station at any given time, for a total of 80 SLBMs on alert at any given moment. As for the missiles themselves, they can carry up to 14 warheads each, but in practice they each carry four warheads, on average. So the Navy can deliver 320 warheads at any given time.

In total, adding them up, the US is capable of delivering less than 750 warheads in response to an enemy surprise attack. In October of 2022, US intelligence estimated that the Chinese had 450 land based ICBMs. They also estimate that the Chinese will have more than 1500 warheads by 2035.

US Air Force is removing all identification markings from their aircraft.

Many have suggested that the Air Force should have just shot down the balloon using a laser or bullets to pop the Chinese balloon, instead of a missile. The reason that the fly boys used a missile is because popping a rogue balloon has been tried before, and it doesn’t work.

It was 25 years ago when the Canadians shot a balloon full of 1,000 holes and they found that this didn’t pop it, because the pressure inside of a balloon at that altitude isn’t high enough to burst the balloon.

Now you know…

On a side note, I was surprised that an AIM-9, which is a heat seeking missile, was capable of locking on to something like a helium balloon.

The Pentagon was audited and couldn’t account for 61% of its assets. If a company did this, the executives would be in jail. How can Congress demand to review President Trump’s tax returns, when they can’t even keep track of their own funds?

Even as this happened, there is some PFC somewhere getting smoked because he didn’t tie a dummy cord to his NODs or some sailor is getting accused of gundecking because he used a 4 inch screwdriver when the MRC said it was supposed to be a 6 inch.

As our US Navy seems incapable of even getting in and out of San Diego harbor without nearly having a collision. Our military is filled with officers chosen for political reliability and not competence.

Why would you place a boomer in the Med? Why is doing so a provocation and not part of a defense strategy?

Normally, a submarine equipped with SLBMs will loft them in a ballistic arc: the missiles go high, then free fall back to earth, like a cannon firing shells over the heads of the enemy. A submarine being used in a deterrent role can then hide anywhere within the missile’s maximum range to its target, making it an effective deterrent as a second strike weapon. The older Tridents were well suited to this because they did not have the accuracy needed to strike hardened targets. This made submarines into a counter-value platform, aimed at areas where accuracy wasn’t critical- things like bomber bases and cities.

A missile that is fired on a depressed trajectory can travel in a much flatter arc, giving it much less range and less accuracy than one fired in a ballistic arc. A submarine firing its missiles in a depressed trajectory thus gives up range and has a much smaller area in which to hide. This lowers its survivability in the event that hostilities begin. The advantage here is that the missiles’ flight time is much shorter, giving a country less time to react to the launch. Now that the US has developed more accurate (D5) version that is accurate enough to hit small, “hard kill” targets like missile silos and C3 bunkers, it is conceivable that an SLBM fired in a first strike could “take out” the command and control of an enemy before they could react, thus making a boomer into a first strike weapon. This is also why hypersonic missiles are so scary. They can be on you and detonating before you even are aware that they were launched.

To make this more difficult for the Russians to do, the US placed all of its SAC alert facilities far from the coast, so there would be sufficient warning to get the ground alert bombers away before they could be destroyed. The Russians played the same game by putting a lot of their stuff on the south side of the country. A sub in the med and the Arabian gulf changes all of those calculations. Missiles now have longer range, more accuracy, and higher speeds. Stealthy aircraft are right there on Russia’s border. This makes a first strike from stealthy platforms like SSBNs and the F35 more than a possibility.

The Med is a relatively small sea, but it is quite deep. The average depth of the Med is nearly 5,000 feet. More than deep enough to hide a boomer. Missile flight times from the Ionian or Aegean sea would be quite short- on the order of 6 to 8 minutes or so.

What this means is that the US is sending a dual message:

• Our submarines are in a position to strike first with nukes, and you won’t have time to react,
• we don’t care that you know their location, because we are going to use them before you get a chance to sink them

The US is saying that at least two of their submarines are no longer deterrents to nuclear war, they are now first strike weapons. You better believe that the Russians (I keep wanting to say Soviets) got that message loud and clear.

Combine this with the story that the US is moving more B61s into Europe where they can be employed by F35s stationed there, and it becomes clear that the US is threatening a first strike, not a response to a possible Russian nuke.

This goes beyond MAD. This is making it appear like the US powers that be have decided that a nuclear war is winnable. The theory that was behind MAD was “no one can win.” This is more like “we can win by decapitating you before you even knew you were at war.”

Incidentally, this is also why the Russians are so opposed to Ukraine joining NATO. They don’t want nuclear missiles or nuclear armed stealth bombers sitting in positions where they could take out Russian leadership before they can react to an attack.

Look at this from a Russian perspective: They don’t want nukes on their border any more than the US did during the Cuban missile crisis. The difference between Khrushchev and Biden is that the Soviet Premier was smart enough to blink. I don’t think Biden is.

If nothing else, this is the beginning of a new cold war. It looks like our government has decided that they can win a nuclear war.

The days when the US can force the rest of the world to do their bidding have come to an end. After the debacle in Afghanistan, those days are over. The rest of the world has seen that our military is a paper tiger, so all Biden is left with is nuclear saber rattling. Like a school yard bully, he is trying to pick the one fight that he thinks he can win. He might just be wrong. He is betting the entire country on a pair of fives.