The Bunker: A Petulantly Performative Pentagon
This week in The Bunker: The Defense Department’s civilian leader and his boss muster hundreds of top U.S. military officers so the pair could decant their favorite old whines into new bottles; rising costs of silo-based ICBMs resurrect a still-madcap scheme to put them on trucks; and more.
The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.
This week in The Bunker: The Defense Department’s civilian leader and his boss mustered hundreds of top U.S. military officers so the pair could decant their favorite old whines into new bottles; rising costs of silo-based ICBMs resurrect a still-madcap scheme to put them on trucks; and more.
STOIC STONEHENGE
A muted and measured response speaks volumes
Their blank countenance betrayed nothing as the Pentagon brass heard, but didn’t listen, to more tiring tirades from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump September 30. They were uniform, that’s for sure. “America’s generals and admirals sat stone-faced as they listened to Trump and Hegseth,” the Washington Post reported. “The uniformed officers sat stone-faced,” ABC News said. The Washington Examiner referred to “the stone-faced audience.” The Associated Press said the officers “sat mostly stone-faced” and NBC News reported they “sat largely stone-faced.”
Apparently, this unpresidented performance at Quantico, Va., had devolved into a rock concert. The nation’s solidly stolid senior military officers upheld their oath to the Constitution, unlike many lower-ranking troops at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg in June. Those soldiers cheered as Hegseth and Trump partisanly berated the military they inherited, smashing the nation’s once-sacrosanct wall between U.S. leaders and those wearing the nation’s uniform.
But it was different this time. Trump seemed flummoxed. “I've never walked into a room so silent before,” he said. “If you want to applaud, you applaud.” Of course, that tends to be your reaction when you exist in a cocoon filled with perpetual yes-people who tell you only what you want to hear.
Convened on short notice, these flag officers had to hit the pause button on their global hotspots to witness their boss play Patton before a huge U.S. flag. Speculation was rampant about what they’d hear. Perhaps a retooling of the relic that remains the formal U.S. defense strategy (PDF)? Maybe some new approach to stave off a nuclear war? Hardly. What they got was a defense secretary’s laser-like focus on “grooming standards” and “fat generals and admirals.” And ominous presidential warnings that the U.S. is “under invasion from within” and that its cities should be used as military “training grounds”.
While the roughly 800 officers gathered last week at that Marine base may have been uniformed, they were hardly uninformed. All knew, and surely most resented, being summoned from around the globe to hear the same strident gripes and grievances from their “superiors” they’ve been bombarded with since January.
The Bunker most assuredly isn’t endorsing the pre-Trump U.S. military. Both Democrats and Republicans have fumbled in their use of the U.S. armed forces in recent decades. The military has hardly honored itself with costly wars and weapons seemingly incapable of winning.
But a bright, shining line has been crossed. Politicians have long used U.S. troops as patriotic props. But until Trump and Hegseth, none has so overtly used them as partisan playthings. Trump is actively engaged in a cheapening of the U.S. military, even as he seeks to push a record $1 trillion annually into its coffers.
That’s why the sullen stony silence of those officers warrants a resounding round of applause from the rest of us.
MICBMs
“Mentally Incompetent Choice for Ballistic Missiles”
If you think the U.S. can build a “Golden Dome for America” to protect it from attack, you’re going to love the latest push to make the U.S. land-based nuclear missile force mobile. Just like President Ronald Reagan’s costly and ineffective Strategic Defense Initiative, trying to make the fixed-silo ICBM fleet mobile was also a Reagan administration threat dream.
The cost of replacing the current LGM-30G Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic-missile fleet with the LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM has skyrocketed to $140.9 billion, an 81% increase. The Air Force originally planned to reuse the Minuteman silos for the Sentinels but decided it couldn’t do so because it was shocked — shocked! — to find that the 1970s-era silos were … old and decrepit.
That sticker shock has led a trio of ICBM boosters to recommend that some of the new Sentinels be made mobile. “The next-gen Sentinel system continues to shock elected officials with its soaring cost,” an October 1 Heritage Foundation analysis said. “Now is the time for U.S. officials to take a serious look at a road-mobile version of the ICBM.”
Cheaply easy-peasy: “By putting Sentinel on road-mobile launchers, pulled by heavy trucks in military convoys operating in the sparsely-populated quarters of the U.S., the next-generation ICBM could be deployed quicker — and cheaper — than waiting for new silos to be constructed,” they write. Poppycock, as grizzled troops often say. Instead, it’s a perfect Pentagon recipe to double their cost, halve their reliability, and delay their deployment.
The Bunker went down this, um, road a generation ago, when the Air Force faced the same challenge with its MX Peacekeeper missile (1986-2005). There were plans to make many of these 100-ton atomic-tipped behemoths moveable to thwart Soviet targeteers.
The Air Force’s initial scheme called for them to be dropped out of airplanes (of course). The service then considered shuttling each MX among 15-mile “racetracks” with 23 shelters to mask its location. Next, they pondered hiding them in 20-mile “buried trenches.” They also studied putting them on above-ground rail cars. The proposals were so zany that then-Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) declared they were “like critics of the Three Stooges debating the right way to squirt seltzer up your nose.”
This is what happens when you have more money than cents. The U.S. military can fund a lot of futility when it’s spending $1 trillion a year. There is no need for this third leg, in addition to bombers and subs, of the $95 billion-a-year nuclear triad.
In fact, we already have plenty of mobile ICBMs invulnerable to attack.
While they’re not road-mobile, they are rowed-mobile. They’re cruising, right now, securely under the seas aboard Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarines. “The oceans are so big that short-range detective devices would be needed by the hundreds of thousands to make the strategic submarine force vulnerable to attack,” U.S. hydrogen-bomb developer Richard Garwin wrote (PDF). “Long-range detection mechanisms of strategic significance are limited to acoustic detection and are readily countered.”
Much has changed since Garwin, who died in May, wrote those words 42 years ago. But they remain true today, tomorrow, and as far as the eye, with or without periscopes, can see.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
The U.S. has finished deploying its newest space-based system, piggybacked atop GPS satellites, for detecting nuclear blasts anywhere on Earth, Kapil Kajal reported in Interesting Engineering September 26.
Following a classified briefing on Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, Senate Democrats expressed skepticism over its cost and feasibility, Breaking Defense’s Valerie Insinna reported September 30.
In 1984, U.S. nuclear strategists quietly gathered at a rustic Montana lodge and plotted how to avoid atomic war during some of the chilliest days of the Cold War, Fen Hampson reported September 30 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So far, so good.
Thanks for seeking shelter in The Bunker this week. Encourage your pals to subscribe here.
