William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Submarine Lovers United
Seems like there's a lot of submarine lovers out there, or at least military geeks, and I've gotten loads of comments and Emails about my USS Virginia posting. As bubblehead said, submarines don't get a lot of mention and when they do, the faithful want it to be factually correct and, of course, complimentary.
They're right about the first, they're wrong about the second.
Here are my sins: The first cruise was 77 days and not 90, according to one excited reader. I made a stupid mistake in naming Uruguay and not Paraguay as one of the countries in the tri-border area. Some complained that I suggested that the cost of the three submarines (boats 8, 9, and 10) was $24 billion rather than $2.4 billion each. I flippantly said that "post-construction work" for submarines equals more billions.
Hey, I also misspelled Colombia.
However, those in the threatened silent service do protest too much. I'm not suggesting we get rid of submarines; I don't play that game. And on some level I'm sorry I mentioned dollars at all in the article: if the Virginia class of submarines cost peanuts I'd still ask the question as to whether we buy submarines because they are needed or because we always have.
Criticisms about cost are silly. The ten submarines will cost $24 billion and post construction modifications and upgrades will certainly be in the billions. You do the math: The Navy asks for hundreds of millions annually for submarine upgrades and modifications.
It seems that I also didn't explicitly mention that the Virginia's first operational sailing was also a "shakedown cruise" and as a result some have asked whether it was really spying. Hey, I made it clear it was a practice run; I just didn't use the bureaucratic term.
And then there's this from amop33: "This article makes me chuckle and is a perfect example of why writers should just not write about the submarine force."
I'm almost ready to never write about submarines again (not!
but do point out that I'm quoting the commander of the boat, who told a Naval Submarine League meeting that the submarine spent its shakedown cruise -- see I can use official speak -- in "operations in support of the global war on terrorism in the U.S. Southern Command."
I guess the bottom line is that amop33 and bubblehead think I should either be for them or against them.
I don't have anything against submarines per se, and don't have anything against the Virginia class merely because each boat costs more than $2 billion.
However, today this traditional tool has become a combined intelligence platform, special operations base and missile shooter, all tasks that could probably be done better by others in the future.
One reader argues that the USS Virginia could not have spied on land-locked Bolivia -- I used it as an example of the political turmoil in Latin America now that might attract the U.S. to want to put a clandestine sub down there -- but that ignores land-locked Afghanistan, where subs played a role, shooting cruise missiles and snooping on Pakistan and others in the region.
Which brings me to the question of how to think about submarines if you're not a submarine lover to begin with: As far as I can tell, submarines exist just like we have an Army, Navy and Air Force, just like we have a Marine Corps that isn't the Army, just like we have fighters in the Navy, Air Force and Marines. They just are, because we do, because we always have.
Will there be some coastal country -- China/Taiwan/North Korea, duh! -- where stealth and closeness will demand submarines for special missions in the future? Of course, and I guess that's why we should have a few. A few.
What's not changing is the overall fundamental design of the military, the four services, the four air forces, the various branches and disciplines and baronies and special interest. Each gets a piece of the action, each is a constituency. The immutable structure doesn't leave much room for change, nor for flexibility.
You wonder why there's such a tendency to rely on ad hoc organizations to get anything done? It's because the existing organizations are often ill-suited and passive aggressive about being told to do windows.
One significant exception though is in the case of submarines, where there has been a mad post Cold War scramble on the part of submariners to become more relevant.
But what if we didn't have submarines, or have so many? What if other countries, say a Germany or Turkey or India, had the room and the vision to decide not to have them?
We all know that country x has to have submarines not just for "defense" but also to be a real military. In this way, submarines play together and bad-guy submarines provide some degree of justification for their existence in the first place. No one from country x is quite willing to say we don't really need submarines because that would connote that the military is not serious and not a varsity player.
But consider this: What if some significant European or Asian power said 'we're not going to have submarines' and instead decided to put that money into building some military capability that matched its national character and policies? What if a bunch of Europeans said 'you know we care more about nation building than old fashioned warfare' and we're going to completely restructure our militaries to reflect what we believe in. And not only that, we believe in alliances and burden sharing and are going to leave it to the United States and others to protect us if there is truly an external threat.
I can think of enormous reverberations in terms changing the rules of the game. What a wonderful world that would be.
Speaking of just doing what we always have, the incomparable Hans Kristensen of the Federation of the American Scientists writes in his NukeStrat website that the Joint Chiefs have decided to halt preparation of new doctrine manuals for nuclear weapons. I wrote about this in October, and many arms controllers and other criticized me for reporting that the Joint Chiefs were scrapping their new documents in response to outside criticism.
But the story is bigger than that: It is the United States military that is slowly, ever so slowly, moving away from nuclear weapons. It has been doing so for almost two decades. The Cold War notion that some Captain needs to be taught nuclear "doctrine" is absurd in today's world, and the Joint Chiefs have seen the obvious.
Of course like submarines, the nuclear faithful argue that we need some -- many -- nuclear weapons for our national security. And so no real changes can be made in the structure. The nuclear counter-attack has been successful ever since the mid-1980s in holding the line at many thousands of nukes.
No one in the current system or in this administration has the vision to say that is old think and we need to make a fundamental structural change. Like submarines, that change implemented over decades would signal to other country x's out there that possessing nuclear weapons is no longer an ambition that constitutes the final confirmation of greatness.
This brings me to the fact that in this week of a new defense budget and a Quadrennial Defense Review, it should be clear that there isn't a real visionary out there. I have an article in the February issue of Armed Forces Journal -- Spiraling ahead: With the loss of its greatest champion, whatââ¬â¢s to become of transformation? -- that tries to juxtapose the late Adm. Cebrowski and Donald Rumsfeld, arguing that the Secretary not only lacks the vision and moral depth of Cebrowski and other senior officers, but also that he has weakened U.S. defenses by abusing the engines of "transformation" to create indeterminate and vague policies.
Whether the subject is nuclear weapons or submarines, I know that there are insiders out there and more arguments to be made on both sides. On submarines, I know that all of the angles could hardly be given justice in a blog post, and that's why I'll do more. If someone would like to educate me on what submarines specifically doing to fight the GWOT or support current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm all ears.
Submarine Lovers United
Seems like there's a lot of submarine lovers out there, or at least military geeks, and I've gotten loads of comments and Emails about my USS Virginia posting. As bubblehead said, submarines don't get a lot of mention and when they do, the faithful want it to be factually correct and, of course, complimentary.
They're right about the first, they're wrong about the second.
Here are my sins: The first cruise was 77 days and not 90, according to one excited reader. I made a stupid mistake in naming Uruguay and not Paraguay as one of the countries in the tri-border area. Some complained that I suggested that the cost of the three submarines (boats 8, 9, and 10) was $24 billion rather than $2.4 billion each. I flippantly said that "post-construction work" for submarines equals more billions.
Hey, I also misspelled Colombia.
However, those in the threatened silent service do protest too much. I'm not suggesting we get rid of submarines; I don't play that game. And on some level I'm sorry I mentioned dollars at all in the article: if the Virginia class of submarines cost peanuts I'd still ask the question as to whether we buy submarines because they are needed or because we always have.
Criticisms about cost are silly. The ten submarines will cost $24 billion and post construction modifications and upgrades will certainly be in the billions. You do the math: The Navy asks for hundreds of millions annually for submarine upgrades and modifications.
It seems that I also didn't explicitly mention that the Virginia's first operational sailing was also a "shakedown cruise" and as a result some have asked whether it was really spying. Hey, I made it clear it was a practice run; I just didn't use the bureaucratic term.
And then there's this from amop33: "This article makes me chuckle and is a perfect example of why writers should just not write about the submarine force."
I'm almost ready to never write about submarines again (not!
but do point out that I'm quoting the commander of the boat, who told a Naval Submarine League meeting that the submarine spent its shakedown cruise -- see I can use official speak -- in "operations in support of the global war on terrorism in the U.S. Southern Command." I guess the bottom line is that amop33 and bubblehead think I should either be for them or against them.
I don't have anything against submarines per se, and don't have anything against the Virginia class merely because each boat costs more than $2 billion.
However, today this traditional tool has become a combined intelligence platform, special operations base and missile shooter, all tasks that could probably be done better by others in the future.
One reader argues that the USS Virginia could not have spied on land-locked Bolivia -- I used it as an example of the political turmoil in Latin America now that might attract the U.S. to want to put a clandestine sub down there -- but that ignores land-locked Afghanistan, where subs played a role, shooting cruise missiles and snooping on Pakistan and others in the region.
Which brings me to the question of how to think about submarines if you're not a submarine lover to begin with: As far as I can tell, submarines exist just like we have an Army, Navy and Air Force, just like we have a Marine Corps that isn't the Army, just like we have fighters in the Navy, Air Force and Marines. They just are, because we do, because we always have.
Will there be some coastal country -- China/Taiwan/North Korea, duh! -- where stealth and closeness will demand submarines for special missions in the future? Of course, and I guess that's why we should have a few. A few.
What's not changing is the overall fundamental design of the military, the four services, the four air forces, the various branches and disciplines and baronies and special interest. Each gets a piece of the action, each is a constituency. The immutable structure doesn't leave much room for change, nor for flexibility.
You wonder why there's such a tendency to rely on ad hoc organizations to get anything done? It's because the existing organizations are often ill-suited and passive aggressive about being told to do windows.
One significant exception though is in the case of submarines, where there has been a mad post Cold War scramble on the part of submariners to become more relevant.
But what if we didn't have submarines, or have so many? What if other countries, say a Germany or Turkey or India, had the room and the vision to decide not to have them?
We all know that country x has to have submarines not just for "defense" but also to be a real military. In this way, submarines play together and bad-guy submarines provide some degree of justification for their existence in the first place. No one from country x is quite willing to say we don't really need submarines because that would connote that the military is not serious and not a varsity player.
But consider this: What if some significant European or Asian power said 'we're not going to have submarines' and instead decided to put that money into building some military capability that matched its national character and policies? What if a bunch of Europeans said 'you know we care more about nation building than old fashioned warfare' and we're going to completely restructure our militaries to reflect what we believe in. And not only that, we believe in alliances and burden sharing and are going to leave it to the United States and others to protect us if there is truly an external threat.
I can think of enormous reverberations in terms changing the rules of the game. What a wonderful world that would be.
Speaking of just doing what we always have, the incomparable Hans Kristensen of the Federation of the American Scientists writes in his NukeStrat website that the Joint Chiefs have decided to halt preparation of new doctrine manuals for nuclear weapons. I wrote about this in October, and many arms controllers and other criticized me for reporting that the Joint Chiefs were scrapping their new documents in response to outside criticism.
But the story is bigger than that: It is the United States military that is slowly, ever so slowly, moving away from nuclear weapons. It has been doing so for almost two decades. The Cold War notion that some Captain needs to be taught nuclear "doctrine" is absurd in today's world, and the Joint Chiefs have seen the obvious.
Of course like submarines, the nuclear faithful argue that we need some -- many -- nuclear weapons for our national security. And so no real changes can be made in the structure. The nuclear counter-attack has been successful ever since the mid-1980s in holding the line at many thousands of nukes.
No one in the current system or in this administration has the vision to say that is old think and we need to make a fundamental structural change. Like submarines, that change implemented over decades would signal to other country x's out there that possessing nuclear weapons is no longer an ambition that constitutes the final confirmation of greatness.
This brings me to the fact that in this week of a new defense budget and a Quadrennial Defense Review, it should be clear that there isn't a real visionary out there. I have an article in the February issue of Armed Forces Journal -- Spiraling ahead: With the loss of its greatest champion, whatââ¬â¢s to become of transformation? -- that tries to juxtapose the late Adm. Cebrowski and Donald Rumsfeld, arguing that the Secretary not only lacks the vision and moral depth of Cebrowski and other senior officers, but also that he has weakened U.S. defenses by abusing the engines of "transformation" to create indeterminate and vague policies.
Whether the subject is nuclear weapons or submarines, I know that there are insiders out there and more arguments to be made on both sides. On submarines, I know that all of the angles could hardly be given justice in a blog post, and that's why I'll do more. If someone would like to educate me on what submarines specifically doing to fight the GWOT or support current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm all ears.
