The Bunker: Hiding-and-Seeking Beneath the Waves

This week in The Bunker: More U.S. national security Trumpfoolery; just how stealthy are submarines; drone-killing boom times; misplaced U.S. defense spending priorities; and more.

NO DEBUNKERING TRUMP OR HEGSETH THIS WEEK!

Except for this solo eye-opening paragraph…

The Bunker’s brow is beaded with sweat, suffering another week of PTSD — Post-Trump Symptoms of Derangement. It’s spreading like the plague: Opening a new front in the war on drugs in the Pacific; threatening ground strikes inside Venezuela, and dispatching a carrier offshore (while Congress keeps right on snoozing); Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barring military officials from congressional contacts; a $130 million donation to pay the troops during the continuing government shutdown; recruiting a right-wing press cadre to cover the Pentagon, replacing the heterogeneous mixture that had covered the building since World War II; &c. This fever has to break soon, for The Bunker’s health, as well as for that of the Republic. In the meantime, let’s return to our regularly scheduled programming on how and why we kit out our military the way we do.

FINDING NEMO

Are our “boomers” threatened?

Whenever the future of the nation’s nuclear triad is up for debate — as it well should be, seeing as we’re being asked to pay nearly $1 trillion for it over the next 10 years — the focus inevitably turns to the survivability of each of its three legs. Those are the Air Force’s bombers and land-based intercontinental missiles, and the Navy’s missile-launching “boomer” submarines. The purported logic is that if China or Russia is stupid enough to launch a nuclear war against us, at least one of those legs will survive to counter with a devastating retaliatory strike. “Mutually Assured Destruction” — aptly, MAD — in Cold War argot.

In typically stupid U.S. government style, all three of those legs are becoming old at the same time. That has led some to argue that the ICBM leg is a relic best consigned to history. We could safely jettison it, the thinking goes, given the invulnerability of the sub-based leg. Well, as predictably as the tides, there are now suggestions that the subs and the nuclear-tipped missiles they carry are increasingly vulnerable to detection and attack. Ergo, it’s too risky to give up the triad-and-true three-legged atomic stool.

Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer warned October 15 in Defense One that China is developing “an ‘invisible net’ across the western Pacific, a five-layer, seabed-to-space sensor architecture known as the Transparent Ocean strategy that challenges the ability of U.S. and allied submarines (our ‘black sharks’) to maneuver and hide.”

“By the 2030s, the world’s oceans may become as transparent to sensors as the skies became to radar in the 20th century,” adds David Stupples, an electronics whiz at the University of London. “With help from AI [artificial intelligence], multiple transmitters and receivers — mounted on ships, aircraft and USVs [uncrewed surface vehicles] — will be able to triangulate the positions of submarines in real time.”

We have seen (PDF) this movie before (PDF). Anti-submarine warfare is a nonstop game of cat-and-mouse, where the advantage shifts between the boomers and the would-be boomer killers. We don’t need all of our missile-firing nuclear submarines to survive to let us destroy another nation that may be out to destroy us. Perpetually pouring money into technologies to maintain a slim edge amid atomic warfare is a fool’s errand. And for too long those in charge, and we who have put them there, have been the fools.

EN-COUNTERING DRONES

Because that’s where the money is

You know a military technology has ripened when established powers begin spending money to thwart it. The drone revolution has been long in coming — The Bunker recalls reporting on Lockheed’s Aquila spy drone 40 years ago, and General Atomics’ Predator attack drone 24 years ago. But drone-centric warfare has become de rigueur following its explosion in the skies over Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion, compelling even stodgy military outfits like the Pentagon to react.

In recent days:

• The Army has tapped AeroVironment to build the new Freedom Eagle-1 drone-killing interceptor. It’s designed to shred an incoming enemy drone with a 20-pound blast-fragmentation warhead that detonates as it closes in on the drone, so it doesn’t require a direct hit.
  
• L3Harris Technologies has mounted its Vampire™ (just in time for Halloween!) drone-destroyer aboard a GM Defense Infantry Squad Vehicle. Yes, it’s a registered trademark, and it stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. The company is also developing its rapid-deploying “self-contained VAMPIRE-in-a box,” officially dubbed, of course, the CASKET, for Containerized Anti-drone System with Kinetic Effects Turret (Halloween 2.0!). This system kills enemy drones with guided rockets packing roughly 15-pound warheads (PDF).
  
• General Dynamics is partnering with Epirus to build the TRX Leonidas, designed to swat dozens of incoming drones with a single high-powered microwave pulse fired from the back of a military vehicle.

The good news is that such microwave weapons might be able to down an attacking drone flock with the push of a single button. The bad news is that it would likely fry any civilian wireless systems — like cell phone networks — nearby.

But beyond that is a more fundamental concern: The U.S. military likes to buy, build, and wage war with large and costly platforms — think warplanes, tanks, and aircraft carriers, for starters — that are increasingly vulnerable to swarms of far-cheaper drones. The Pentagon has “a lot of high, high-value targets, like F-35. They’ve got nuclear missiles,” Epirus CEO Andy Lowery warns. “They’ve got this, they’ve got that, and they’ve got a big drone problem.”

Exquisite weapons, it seems, are in danger of becoming exquisite targets.

MILITARY MYOPIA

Over-emphasizing the war-after-next

The Bunker has seen a blizzard of Pentagon factoids over the years, so he’s pretty inured to strange data points. Yet here’s one that recently caught his eye: The Air Force’s 2026 budget request is seeking $46.4 billion in research and development funds for future weapons, but only $36.2 billion for those being bought today. (“Only,” of course, being a relative term.)

“Recent U.S. defense budgets have disproportionately invested (PDF) in long-term developmental programs at the expense of producing sufficient capabilities available for the near term,” Carlton Haelig and Philip Sheers write in an October 21 report for the Center for a New American Security. “As a result, today’s [U.S. military] is smaller, older, and less capable than at any other time in recent history” they say in Stuck in the Cul-de-Sac: How U.S. Defense Spending Prioritizes Innovation over Deterrence.

This trend is rooted in the Pentagon’s pathological push for tomorrow’s silver bullets over today’s lead ones. That leads, among other things, to depleted ammo bins, highlighted by the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the world’s most costly military’s inability to dispatch enough munitions to help Kyiv counter Moscow’s invasion. It has also led to procurement disasters like the F-35 fighter being flown by the Air Force, Marines, and Navy, and the Navy’s foundering fleets of Littoral Combat Ships and Zumwalt-class destroyers.

Call The Bunker a frugal ol’ Yankee, but it seems you’ve got to be a dunderhead to be spending $1 trillion a year and ending up with a military that’s increasingly “smaller, older, and less capable.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Military-Industrial-Inferiority-Complex

The arsenal of democracy is sputtering, and Christopher Leonard tries to explain why in this October 27 Politico piece.

→ Dead Zeppelin

Robert Weintraub detailed 1933’s USS Akron airship disaster that doomed U.S. military dirigibles four years before the more-famous Hindenburg conflagration, in The Atavist Magazine August 22.

→ Torpedoing the Mall

General Dynamics’ Electric Boat division, one of two U.S. submarine builders, has bought the one-time retail shopping mecca known as the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, to house up to 5,000 workers. While the governor and the district’s U.S. representative hailed the move, the CT Mirror reported October 23 that not everyone is pleased. “It’s a real kick in the gut,” said the manager of the Toy Vault, one of the dwindling number of stores left in the mall.

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