POWER SHIFT

Pentagon presses ahead with battlefield nuke reactors

The Defense Department has always loved nuclear power. Wouldn’t you, if it provided the victorious exclamation point that ended the biggest, deadliest war in world history? But that affection has too often been unrequited: There’s the terror inherent in a weapon capable of destroying the world as we know it—on hair-trigger alert, no less; the $494 billion bill coming due to maintain our nuclear deterrent (according to the Congressional Budget Office); the $494 billion more needed the clean up the environmental mess created by willy-nilly nuclear-weapons production during the Cold War (according to the Government Accountability Office; striking that both watchdogs came up with the same estimate for markedly different nuclear programs). So, given that pair of bargains and legacy, it makes perfect sense to deploy micro-nuclear reactors to bases at home and battlefields overseas.

Figure 2 illustrates how a vSMR might be transported to the forward operating area.
Source: DOD Defense Science Board Report, "Task Force on Energy Systems for Forward/Remote Operating Bases," August 1, 2016.

The Pentagon awarded a trio of contracts to do just that on March 9, after a strong push from the nuclear-power industry. Deploying such reactors to overseas bases should cut down on the need for fuel convoys. U.S. troops trucking fuel to forward bases for electricity and vehicles accounted for more than half of the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2010, as our Military-Industrial Circus reported last April. But it also highlights the U.S. military mindset of occupying foreign lands indefinitely.

And it could turn such facilities into tempting targets for terrorists. “Even a reactor as small as 1 megawatt-electric would contain a large quantity of highly radioactive, long-lived isotopes such as cesium-137—a potential dirty bomb far bigger than the medical radiation sources that have caused much concern among security experts,” the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Edward Lyman has warned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “At best a release of radioactivity would be a costly disruption, and at worst it would cause immediate harm to personnel, render the base unusable for years, and alienate the host country.”

Of course, we’re pretty good at alienating host countries without having to go nuclear.

FLYING BLIND WITH FUELISH SPENDING

New Air Force tanker still tanking

Back in my prior life at Time magazine, we generally couldn’t do a “trend” story unless there were three examples of something noteworthy happening. The Pentagon is on the verge of generating just such a story, given its inability to get those gleaming new aircraft we’re buying into the fight. First, it took the U.S. military nine years to send the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor off to war. Declared ready for action back in 2005, it didn’t see combat until 2014. That’s when four F-22s bombed an Islamic State command post in Syria after sitting on the sidelines in Afghanistan and Iraq (Why $370 million fighters were needed to bomb a single scruffy insurgents’ HQ is a topic for another day).

Last week, the Air Force said its new KC-46 aerial tanker won’t be used to refuel fighters and bombers unless “a high-end contingency” breaks out against the usual bogeymen (i.e., China and/or Russia). The $44 billion program has been plagued with delays, as our Military Industrial Circus reported a year ago. The most vexing problem involves the tanker’s camera-operated boom used to funnel fuel to other aircraft. “Without a…fix in place, Airmen would not only deal with blurry vision,” Air Force Magazine reported March 3, “but also issues like a blinding glare off of the receiver airplane on clear, sunny days.”

That’s why the Air Force has launched a two-front aerial assault. Last Wednesday, it announced it was paying KC-46 builder Boeing $37 million more to “redesign” the boom:

But even if that works, the planes won’t be ready until at least 2023. So the Air Force has summoned aircraft operators to a confab to explore leasing their flying gas stations (a path the Air Force has tried before with notably bad consequences). This time it wants to “determine feasibility of a cost-effective, mission focused acquisition to provide critical air-to-air refueling capability”—given that the KC-46 is late, and the Air Force wants to retire 29 older tankers before the KC-46 is ready for prime time.

Yessiree, one more snafu like this and we may have ourselves a trend story.

MIDDLE EAST MAKEOVER

Time for some big thinking

Defense is a stodgy business. By that, I mean conservative. But not in the political sense. No, defense—especially as practiced by the Pentagon—has to sprain itself stretching to do incremental things. Yet the world is changing, certainly more than at any time in my 40 years in the military-scribe trade. Sure, the Cold War ended 30 years ago, but as far as the Defense Department was concerned, the U.S. military was a train simply shifting onto another track. If we could beat the Soviet Union, the thinking went, we could handle all those “lesser-included contingencies” that would follow its demise. And while that may be true in a strictly military sense (cf., Iraq 1.0), the rest of the world doesn’t seem willing to play by our Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Non-state actors, commercial plunder, climate change—even the coronavirus—are our key 21st Century foes.

That’s where Mike Sweeney’s report over at Defense Priorities, a think tank seeking a less-militaristic U.S. foreign policy, fits in. He suggests the Pentagon revert to the light footprint it had in the Middle East during the Cold War. A pair of permanent bases in Bahrain (Navy) and Turkey (Air Force)—should be our goal today, he argues. The 50,000 U.S. troops now in the region are spread among 24 bases. Not only are they expensive, but they could serve as a tripwire to launch America into an unneeded war. President Trump has threatened as much. Granted, Iran is a bad actor on the world stage. But why should we give Tehran the initiative on when we go to war?

President Jimmy Carter launched the U.S. military buildup in the region following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It was designed to keep the Persian Gulf, and its oil riches, out of Moscow’s hands. But U.S. oil imports from the Gulf have steadily dropped, from 2.1 million barrels a day in 2000, to 1.5 million in 2010, to 671,000 in October. Today, the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than any other country. Nearly a decade ago I asked if the U.S. had wasted $8 trillion defending the flow of oil from the Gulf, a figure that is well beyond $10 trillion now.

That ticking you hear is the time bomb that is the Middle East. “The political and societal pressures exposed by the 2011 Arab Spring have not been addressed and are likely to spark additional unrest throughout the Middle East in the years ahead,” Sweeney notes. “There are compelling reasons for the U.S. to consider watching these changes from an offshore posture.”

DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Fierce flying gunship comes to the rescue

Let’s face it: The AC-130 gunship, with that 105mm howitzer protruding from its belly, is one mean machine. It achieved unwanted notoriety in 2015 when it mistakenly blasted a hospital in Afghanistan, killing 42 (and leading the Pentagon to punish 16 of those involved). But if that flying beast comes to your rescue, it’s a whole ‘nother story. Last April, one of the Spookys protected a trio of medevac choppers in Afghanistan for nine hours as they plucked to safety 15 U.S. and allied troops wounded in an IED blast.

On March 2, the Air Force awarded 14 medals, including a pair of Distinguished Flying Crosses, to the AC-130’s crew for their rescue role. “From my wife and my son and my daughter—I want to thank you for your professionalism and for rising to the occasion,” Army Capt. Benjamin Carnell, one of those wounded, told the recipients. “I am indebted to you in a way that I can’t describe.”

SELF-LICKING ICE CREAM CONE

Missile defense goes off the deep end

Let’s face it: If you’re trying to do everything, you can do nothing well. That’s the fundamental problem with U.S. missile defenses, as a solicitation from the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency makes clear. Its “Advanced Technology Innovation Broad Agency Announcement for the Missile Defense Agency Advanced Technology” (got that?) acknowledges it’s merely a pie-in-the-sky wish list for its Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). But what a wish list:

Hey, like you, The Bunker is just a taxpayer. But knowing how well the Pentagon can inflate a threat to justify its solution, phrases like “advanced threat attacks…at all ranges…widening threats…unknown missiles, warheads, trajectories, flight paths and adversaries” gives it the heebie-jeebies. And speaking of adversaries, the only thing we have to fear, as FDR said, is fear itself.

WHAT WE'RE READING

Here’s what caught The Bunker’s eye recently

? Pentagon vacancies…

More than a third of the Senate-confirmed civilian slots at the Pentagon are empty or filled by caretakers, Politico reports. That’s the highest ever outside of the normal transition period when a new White House is putting its people into place. Among the 60 senior positions, 21 lack confirmed leaders. Thirteen have no nominees named, including the Defense Department’s top budget officer, its top international-affairs chief, and the head of space policy. On the other hand, Pentagon spending is under tight control, international affairs are going swimmingly, and President Trump just created the U.S. Space Force. All that suggests that at least those three posts are superfluous.

? How vulnerable are the Navy’s carriers?

As potential foes build better anti-ship missiles and submarines, are the guys and gals aboard our 10 U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in danger of becoming sitting ducks (the 11th, the brand new USS Gerald R. Ford, is still undergoing testing and likely won’t be ready for action until mid-2023). The Navy is planning to, ahem, launch a Future Carrier 2030 Task Force, Breaking Defense reports. It will try to peer into the future and determine if it’s too risky to keeping buying $20 billion carriers (including aircraft) that could be sunk with a $1 million missile or torpedo. According to the Navy’s acting secretary, one option already under consideration is not buying any more of the Ford.

? Electrifying…

We’ve been warned of an impending “Cyber Pearl Harbor” since, well it seems like almost since the real Pearl Harbor. If it’s not at the hands of Russian hackers, it could be the result of an electro-magnetic pulse generated by a nuclear blast high above the U.S. that fries our electronics. The Congressional Budget Office issued a report March 5 into the threat, and what can be done about it.

? Drafts all around?

A U.S. appellate court heard arguments March 3 about the fairness—no, make that the legality—of having young American men, but not women, register with the Selective Service for a possible military draft, the Associated Press reports. It may end up being moot: On March 25, a federal commission is slated to issue a report on the need for draft registration by anyone. The draft ended in 1973 in favor of an all-volunteer force, which has led to a more motivated, if caste-like, U.S. military.