The Bunker: Double-barreled dubiosity
This week in The Bunker: When the political atmosphere supports spending $1.5 trillion next year on national defense, some sketchy ideas will surely surface — like sketching out the need to wage war on the Moon; or sketching out blueprints for a newerest bomber before the Pentagon’s newest bomber has even gone operational; and more.
This week in The Bunker: When the political atmosphere supports spending $1.5 trillion next year on national defense, some sketchy ideas will surely surface — like sketching out the need to wage war on the Moon; or sketching out blueprints for a newerest bomber before the Pentagon’s newest bomber has even gone operational; and more.
LUNARCY
“Fight me to the Moon…”
When the Pentagon announces it plans to spend $1.5 trillion next year, it sets off a feeding frenzy. Especially among those seeking the continuous sugar high wrought by spending lots of your money on dubious notions. The latest: a push to deploy U.S. combat troops to the Moon.
To prevent, of course, China from getting there first.
Beijing, apparently, isn’t going to duck when it comes to conquering Earth’s nearest neighbor. And it could cost you a fortune, Cookie.
“Competition for control of lunar resources and territory will likely reach a tipping point, at which time the modern-day space race could turn into conflict,” the technically nonprofit Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies argues in a May 22 analysis (PDF). “The anarchic nature of the Moon combined with China’s record of belligerent use of hard power yields a predictable future where United States lunar interests are put at risk.” NASA, with its nearly 70 years of exploring space, is too nice to preserve U.S. heavenly hegemony, the report suggests.
Author Kyle Pumroy, a retired U.S. Space Force colonel, says the U.S. must be ready to scrap 1967’s Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (known more simply to its Earth-bound pals as the Outer Space Treaty). After all, the Chinese haven’t played nice in the western Pacific, where their non-pacifism has angered neighbors like Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Given that, the West would be wise to be skeptical of recent Chinese claims that it wants peace above (PDF). “We’ve seen year in and year out that here terrestrially China has violated existing norms, and so even if we establish them, would they adhere to them?” Charles Galbreath, director of Mitchell’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence, and also a retired Space Force colonel, said.
The Chinese are sure to cause trouble up there, Pumroy believes. “China is making considerable progress toward a credible plan to put Taikonauts on the Moon by 2030,” he writes (PDF). “The prospect of China exercising hard power projection on the Moon is a reasonable extension of China’s clear track record of terrestrial territorial expansion though military means.”
Perhaps. But it’s amazing that we’re debating war on the Moon between two prospective belligerents: one of whom can’t bomb Iran into submission, and a second whose Taikonauts — yep, Chinese astronauts — and their colleagues can’t take Taiwan.
There’s always background worth knowing when it comes to studies like this. First of all, Pumroy served as a Space Weapons Officer at U.S. Space Force, where he headed a “Space Aggressor Squadron” (PDF) to provide “realistic space domain threat training by replicating adversary weapon systems and tactics.” Second, he’s now a senior fellow at that Mitchell Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence (not-so-subtle acronym: MI-SPACE). Third, the Mitchell Institute is a branch of the Air & Space Forces Association, an independent group dedicated to spending more on both the U.S. Air and Space forces. Finally, Mitchell’s roster of corporate funders reads like a Who’s Who of defense contracting. It includes all five of the Pentagon’s biggest contractors — Lockheed, RTX (Raytheon), General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop.
None of those factors, of course, should keep Pumroy and the Mitchell Institute from advocating their point of view. It just suggests that the rest of us might want to take it with a thick slice of green cheese.
BOMBERS AWAY!
Gotta get to work on the next one…
You might think bombers are obsolete in a U.S. military filled with intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and a fleet of other, so-called standoff weapons. That’s also why you don’t work for the U.S. Air Force.
In fact, the Air Force remains so enchanted by bombers that it’s pumping $48.6 billion that could keep its 76 Eisenhower-era B-52s bombers flying for nearly a century. And the service wants to boost its planned purchase of yet-to-fly B-21 bombers from 100 to 145, perhaps launching a second production line to make it happen.
So, the Air Force raised eyebrows with a surprising entry (on page 454 of a 900-page volume) in its latest budget justification document (PDF). It calls for “initial planning activities to develop key performance parameters, key system attributes, and additional performance attributes for a follow-on heavy bomber in the USAF.” (The Air Force apparently prefers that we forget the handful of costly B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit bombers, bought between Ike’s B-52 Stratofortresses and the gleam-in-the-bombsight B-21 Raiders.)
This bumper crop of bombers has left some bombardier geeks scratching their flight helmets. “How a New Heavy Bomber program would fit into the Air Force’s portfolio of long-range strike projects … is not clear,” Steve Trimble noted in Aviation Week. “The Air Force is currently investing tens of billions each to field the stealthy Northrop Grumman B-21 for penetrating bombing missions and transform the Boeing B-52J to be able to continue functioning in the standoff strike role for at least a few more decades.”
Such skepticism is planely not official Air Force thinking. “Even with the planned modifications to the B-52 fleet these aircraft will be subject to the combined effects of continued structural fatigue and a diminishing capability for effective mission performance,” according to the service’s top officer. “I consider that the national security will continue to require the flexibility, responsiveness, and discrimination of manned strategic weapon systems throughout the range of cold, limited, and general war.”
Two things worth pointing out:
- General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, is the author of that once-secret memo detailing the B-52’s shortcomings. He wrote it on January 4, 1964. That was a month before the Beatles appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” for the first time. Its purpose — hold on to your moptop — was to advocate building a new Air Force bomber. But now the service is spending billions to keep that very same bomber flying for nearly a century.
- And the memo doesn’t surface in a Defense Department archive. Instead, it comes from a State Department repository. The Pentagon has decided, for whatever reasons, that a curated online public record of key U.S. military data, debates, and decisions isn’t worth the money. Its searchable databases have been lousy, partial, disjointed, uncoordinated, asynchronized, missing, and clunky since the Internet began. Perhaps it can invest some of next year’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget into making such valuable information more accessible to those of us footing the bill. That just might help us from making the same mistakes, over and over again.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
The Air Force is telling Congress that its MQ-9 Reaper drone has been the MVP of the air war against Iran, even as the service pours most of its aircraft account into crewed fighters, Air Force Times’ Michael Scanlon reported May 21.
Despite President Trump’s disdain for building alliances to carry out military missions, they are vital in an increasing multipolar world, retired Army special forces colonel David Maxwell wrote May 20 at Small Wars Journal.
The Navy needs to have three V-22 tiltrotors aboard its warships to keep two of them flying at any one time, retired Navy captain Sandy Clark wrote May 21 at Real Clear Defense.
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