The Bunker: Defining Deterrence Down

DETERRENCE ADRIFT

Weapon worries miss the bigger point

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill last week dismissing reports that the Pentagon’s munitions stockpiles have been dangerously drained by the war with Iran. “The munitions issue has been foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” Hegseth said. “We know exactly what we have. We have plenty of what we need.”

Fact is, it’s not the depleted ammo that’s important — it’s the depleted deterrence wrought by the flailing U.S. war effort against Iran that’s more critical. U.S. military power is always at its most mighty when its use is threatened. Deterrence is forged in perception but realized in action. Or inaction, as in Iran.

Once military might is unleashed — and if it doesn’t prevail — it risks stinking like a day-old fish (cf., “a fish rots from the head down,” interestingly). That’s one of the reasons why Oliver Cromwell told his Roundhead troops to “keep your powder dry” during the English Civil War nearly 400 years ago. Ducks in a row, and all that…

But the Trump administration stupidly poured water onto its powder by going to war with Iran without public, congressional, or allied backing. Consequently, now that the war has stalled, there is no reservoir of support to sustain it. Deterrence dies when it is not nurtured by a nation’s leaders. Alas, this is typical of a kinetic-centric nation, where too often unilateral shooting is followed by multilateral stalemate. Trump has repeatedly threatened military action against Iran, only to back down — most recently on May 18. (The Bunker is not advocating military action, but suggests that repeatedly unsheathing a sword, brandishing it wildly, and then returning the unbloodied blade to its scabbard only dulls its edge).

“Deterrence is our highest duty,” Admiral Samuel Paparo, chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said May 12, as the U.S. frittered it away amid an inconclusive conflict. True deterrence is more than bombs and bluster. “Deterrence does not reside in platforms, precision, or posture,” strategic scholar Natalie Treloar wrote the same day. “It resides in belief — specifically, the adversary’s belief that you are both capable of inflicting costs and willing to do so. Strip away that second element, and deterrence collapses into theater.”

Whether this unfolding performance ends up as tragedy or farce remains to be seen. For now, we are witnessing a U.S. president basically imploring Iran for a deal to get him off the hook for a war he began.

That’s not deterrence, but deference.

And that’s a bad look for the globe’s best military, which deserves better leadership.

DEPARTMENT OF BAD DATA DEPT.

“No trillion-dollar price tag for Golden Dome!”

There’s something almost pathetic about Pentagon officials predictably pooh-poohing outsider estimates about how much their weapons are going to end up costing. That’s because the Defense Department is state-of-the-art when it comes to low-balling the ultimate price tags of its programs, not to mention how much they’re going to be able to do. The Bunker has watched this tape loop repeatedly in his nearly half-century of covering the U.S. military. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders cycle out of government too often to be held accountable. Only taxpayers — and their progeny, given how much money the federal treasury is borrowing these days — are left holding the bag.

We hit the ol’ rewind button again last week. The chief of the Pentagon’s Golden Dome aerial shield rejected an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that his program’s cost could reach $1.2 trillion over 20 years (inflation not included). That’s a whopping six times the Pentagon’s own projected $185 billion price tag. The shield is being designed to knit together existing and future ground-, air-, and space-based systems to detect and destroy ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missile threats. “They’re not estimating what we’re building,” Space Force General Michael Guetlein insisted May 14. Of course, Guetlein acknowledged that the Pentagon has offered scant details about just what is being built “because the intelligence threat is so high.” (Interesting phrase, in this context: “intelligence threat.”)

Guetlein made a breathtaking pledge: “What we … deliver in the summer of ’28 will be operational. It will not be aspirational, it will not be a prototype. It will not be a demonstration. It will be operational capability.”

Long-time Pentagon realists — not cynics, or even skeptics, mind you — know that pledge is as flimsy as the phrase “operational capability” upon which it is built. It’s an ICBM-sized loophole that we flew through back in 2004. That’s when President Geoge W. Bush declared a national missile-defense system operational. Turns out it was designed to thwart only a limited attack from North Korea, and there are serious doubts it could do even that. While the new shield would be more capable, CBO projected that “the system could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary.”

This is a war movie that we have bought tickets to and seen before. Pass the stale, fake-butter popcorn, please.

STEAMING AGROUND

Radioactive battleships

The Navy revealed May 11 in its 30-year shipbuilding plan (PDF) that it wants its new Trump-class battleship to be nuclear-powered. The service also says it wants to make its Zumwalt-class destroyers the bridge to those future battleships. Looks like Trump’s boats are going to give the three existing Zumwalts, the Navy’s worst procurement debacle in a generation, a run for our money.

Even powered by splitting atoms, the $14.5 billion Trump battleships will not be able to outrun growing fleets of cheap drones and cruise missiles. Displacing 35,000 tons apiece, the 850-foot hulls will be huge targets. These attacking, sky-darkening flocks are rewriting the rules of war and will relentlessly hunt down such NAVYs (Nutso Armed Vanity Yachts) in any conflict.

The atomic announcement was a surprise. Trump-class battleships “would be conventionally powered (i.e., ‘fossil-fueled’) ships,” the Congressional Research Service stated flatly back in January. But the service’s top officer, Admiral Daryl Caudle, said May 14 that the Navy’s reluctance to fuel its warships with nuclear power (except for carriers and subs) was “one of the biggest mistakes” his service ever made because it limits combat flexibility.

Whether brilliant or blunder, there’s one thing nuclear power will surely do. “The change to nuclear-powered propulsion will add substantially to the cost of what is already an inordinately expensive ship,” says Dov Zakheim, who served as the Pentagon’s top bean-counter from 2001 to 2004. It would simply be the latest in a series of Pentagon raids on the Treasury, as Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information here at the Project On Government Oversight, recently noted.

The shipbuilding plan also said modifications being made to the Navy newest destroyers “will allow the Zumwalt class to be the bridge between existing [Guided Missile Destroyer] technologies and the Battleship.” Unfortunately, the Zumwalt-class of destroyers has been plagued by decades of poor planning (it has been searching for a mission for years) and poor procurement (they ended up costing $8 billion each).

When it comes to battleships, the Navy should have listened more to the Zumwalt-class’s namesake than a president preoccupied by documentaries hailing World War II-era battleships. Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt warned against placing all your eggs in one battleship basket when it comes to control of the seas. “In most cases seven or five or even three ships of moderate capability would contribute far more to the success of this mission than one supership,” Zumwalt said while serving as the Navy’s top officer in the early 1970s.

True enough. But also irrelevant inside a Pentagon where the military’s brass buttons risk popping off ever-tightening uniforms at supersonic speeds as they gorge on a budget slated to soar by nearly 50% to $1.5 trillion in 2027.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ Heads down!

Military snipers, among the most elite of uniformed killers, risk being put out of business by drones, Alistair MacDonald and Ievgeniia Sivorka reported May 13 in the Wall Street Journal.

→ Epic Futility

Virginia Burger, a Marine veteran now assessing U.S. military policy and procurement here at the Center for Defense Information, found the performance of the Pentagon’s defensive weaponry in the Iran war decidedly subpar in a May 15 analysis.

→ “Do you feel a draft in here?”

Some lawmakers are pushing to scrap the Selective Service System, primed to carry out a military draft. They’re doing so even as that federal office prepares to shift the burden of registering for possible conscription from individual young men to an automatic, data-driven operation, Military Times’ Tanya Noury reported May 15.

Thanks for volunteering to read The Bunker this week. Forward this newsletter on to friends and let them know they can subscribe here for Wednesday morning delivery.