*All Options Are on the Table* Scraps – I Want That Special Delivery Edition

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Air Force deputy chief of staff for ISR, said last week that a new multi-role long-range bomber is his top purchasing priority. "We cannot move into a future without a platform that allows the United States of America to project power over long distances and to meet advanced threat systems in a fashion that gives us an advantage that no other nation has…We can’t walk away from that,” remarked Deptula. Discussion about a nuclear-capable next-generation bomber has simmered for years (see here and here for recent examples) and the Air Force remains strongly committed, perhaps because, as Loren Thompson noted, “The Air Force owes its existence to the strategic bombing mission.”

Inside Defense (subscription only) reported last week that the Navy is trying to figure out the best way to tell Congress that its $80 billion plan to buy 12 next-generation ballistic missile submarines could force shipbuilding cuts and lead to industry consolidation. Production of the next-generation subs is slated to begin in 2019 so that they will be ready when Ohio-class subs start retiring in 2027. The Navy’s 30-year planning document is due to Capitol Hill in two months.

Finally, the Center put together a new fact sheet detailing the pros and cons of bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs. Our objective was to preemptively referee intra-triad sniping, which we are already seeing now that delivery vehicle reductions may be forthcoming. Of course, none of this is new. As he was researching the fact sheet, Kirk found a great GAO report from 1993 which concluded that the vulnerability of each leg of the U.S. triad was consistently exaggerated during the Cold War by advocates of other legs. As GAO concluded about U.S. submarines:

For the sea leg, this [threat inflation] was reflected in unsubstantiated allegations about likely future breakthroughs in Soviet submarine detection technologies…The projected threat to the sea leg was…used frequently as a justification for costly modernizations in the other legs to “hedge” against SSBN vulnerability. Our specific finding, based on operational test results, was that submerged SSBNs are even less detectable than is generally understood.

Now who in the world would publish such unsubstantiated allegations?

(Yep, that’s a Puff Diddy Daddy reference in the title. Got a problem with it? Do something.)