Instead, I will use this space to make my argument. In order to manage your expectations, I would offer that a colleague recently referred to a less developed version of it as "fatuous" (adj. "silly and pointless") in a semi-public forum. So I've got that going for me.
First, some preliminaries.
1. Provision of nuclear deterrence is the critical foundation of our national security. I do not seek to suggest that we do not need nuclear deterrence. I question the manner in which it is provided and the logic upon which that provision is based.
2. I enter into this discussion under the impression that the making of strategy infers the making of choices, often tough ones. In that spirit, I assume that the fiscal condition of the country requires tough choices of the Navy, and that among those choices are the shedding or devaluation of missions. I make this assumption because I do not believe the money fairy is going to provide the resources the Navy needs to research, design, build, maintain and operate a recapitalized fleet of ballistic missile submarines--on top of its current budget projections. I have seen life cycle cost estimates (over 30 years) of as high as $347B for the OHIO replacement, and I believe all of those costs will be borne by the Navy.
3. One will most often hear of the SSBN leg of the triad as the most "survivable" leg, meaning that these nearly impossible to locate submarines deter nations capable of mounting a decapitating "first strike" on the United States because of the likelihood that such a strike would then be retaliated against by the awesome force of those (submarine based) missiles not subject to the first strike. Put another way, the deterrence resident in the SSBN force applies almost exclusively to the nations capable of mounting a debilitating first strike, which for our purposes I assume to be Russia and China. In my view, the weapons resident in our SSBN force add no unique level of deterrence (over and above that provided by the other two legs of the triad) for nations NOT capable of such a debilitating strike (i.e, North Korea and Iran are not especially deterred by SSBN's).
Now, the argument:
Nuclear war with Russia or China is extremely unlikely, but not nearly as unlikely as Russia or China mounting an unprovoked decapitating strike on the United States. To the extent that nuclear war with either of these "first-strike capable" countries could occur, it would almost certainly be the extension of conventional war. On the current trajectory, the recapitalization of the U.S. SSBN force threatens the capacity and capability of the rest of the Navy, the force most critical to the creation and sustainment of conventional great power war deterrence. Therefore, recapitalizing the SSBN force at the expense of the Navy's conventional deterrent makes nuclear conflict with the nations the SSBN is built specifically to deter--more likely.
Given the current level of resources afforded the U.S. Navy, it is in our long range national and strategic interests NOT to recapitalize the undersea leg of the triad; instead, all resources that would have been allocated to that task should be re-assigned to capabilities focused on conventional deterrence, with the nation's strategic deterrence borne solely by land and air-based platforms.
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The costs associated with the provision of undersea nuclear deterrence will threaten the nation's ability to deter conventional war, a task assigned primarily to American Seapower. One need only to look across the Atlantic at our British cousins to see this notion in action. The resources the UK will need in order to field its undersea deterrent (and to be fair, its aircraft carrier program) have driven the size of the surface fleet to nineteen vessels. Realizing that the capability of those vessels has increased over their forebears, we still arrive at the vexing physics problem of a ship being in more than one place at a time.
Given the mismatch between what the Navy budgets and what the Navy needs, the U.S. is currently on a trajectory to a 230 ship Navy, a figure which does not even take SSBN(X) into consideration. Should the SSBN(X) proceed as planned, its build profile will dominate the shipbuilding landscape for over ten years, and almost certainly shrink the fleet even further. This as China's fleet modernizes and its desire for influence in East Asia rises--neither of which trends is particularly welcomed by our friends and allies in the region or necessarily in our national interest. In order to continue with our post World War II role as East Asian security guarantor, the United States cannot afford to shrink from its responsibilities in the region or be seen to be shrinking from its responsibilities. In order to maintain the status quo, the United States will have to allocate additional warfighting capacity to East Asia, an effort in which the SSBN(X) plays virtually no role.
Obviously, there are strong counter-arguments. One can take issue with the weight I place on the importance of the Navy to conventional deterrence. One can take issue with my supposition that active conventional war is a required predicate for the "decapitating strike" attempt. One can take issue with my singling out of the undersea leg of the triad when others may appear more tempting and logical targets, but remember--I'm advocating a tough choice. Snuffing out another Service's capability doesn't exactly qualify as making a tough choice. One can take issue with the qualms I have with "survivability" as a discriminator--something I haven't fleshed out here but have elsewhere--but suffice it to say I find it to be a relic of the dying theology of nuclear deterrence theory. Here though, I haven't made it a centerpiece of my argument.
By way of a pre-emptive strike, those who would cite my years as a surface warfare officer as some kind of explanation for what appears to be a stance hostile to the submarine community will do well to review my writing here over the years and my steadfast assertion that our dominance of the undersea domain is the nation's number one military competitive advantage. Were every penny saved in not building the SSBN(X) invested only in SSN's, undersea weapons and UUV's, I'd be a very, very happy navalist.
Finally, I would very much like to see a world in which the Navy is funded sufficiently to build its conventional capability and capacity and its undersea strategic deterrent. This would be the best of all outcomes. I simply don't see this happening and wish to offer one possible way forward which maximizes the most important contributions the Navy makes to national security and offers a new logic to replace assertions worth questioning.
Unleash the hounds.
Bryan McGrath
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