January 12, 2022
THE PAPER CHASE
Interminable Confusion for Brain Matter (ICBM)
A new skirmish has broken out over the future of the nation’s land-based nuclear-missile force. This time it involves yet another think-tank report. “The $75,000 contract awarded in December to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will result in a five-to-seven-page unclassified paper later this month examining ‘the relative risks and benefits of various options regarding the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad,’” Bloomberg’s Anthony Capaccio reported January 5.
Those who want to see the nation’s Minuteman III missiles replaced with the still-on-the-drawing-board Ground Based Strategic Deterrent see the study as a Biden administration ploy to derail the new ICBM. “There’s no way yet another review can possibly provide any insights that would outweigh a decade’s worth of previous analyses,” said Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It’s puzzling why the administration has insisted on pursuing yet another review of the same thing.” Of course, if the government halted re-reviews of current and future U.S. defense strategies, scores of think tanks (PDF)reliant on such lucre would wither and die, forcing thousands of combat cogitators to find real jobs.
Inhofe pushed for language in the 2022 defense-policy bill demanding documents (PDF) related to any contract associated with extending the life of the current ICBM force, or its nearly $100 billion replacement (warheads not included). Bloomberg reported that Inhofe and Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the senior GOP member of the House Armed Services Committee, see the $75,000 study as “a waste of money.”
The ICBM imbroglio highlights the looming fight over the future of the nation’s Cold War-era nuclear triad. The Navy’s submarines and Air Force’s bombers are seen as more critical to the nation’s defense, leading some to suggest that the existing ICBMs be scrapped or modernized, rather than replaced (the Pentagon says it needs to replace its existing submarines and bombers, too, costing about $225 billion).
It’s funny, but another taxpayer-funded study apparently didn’t attract the lawmakers’ ire. Modernizing the U.S. Nuclear Triad is the name of a January 3 RAND Corp. study. Its subtitle makes its conclusion clear: The Rationale for a New Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It was written “to assist Air Force officials' decision-making,” RAND says.
Frank Klotz is co-author of the 62-page report, along with Alexandra Evans, a RAND researcher. Before joining RAND, Klotz served as the first commander of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, which oversees the service’s ICBM and nuclear-bomber forces. The think tank, a 1948 brainchild of the Air Force and a major defense contractor, knows which side its bread is gun-vs.-buttered on. “The RAND Corporation received, by far, the most funding from U.S. government and defense contractors of the 50 think tanks we analyzed, raking in a whopping $1.029 billion between 2014-2019 and accounting for approximately 95% of all the funding we tracked,” a 2020 report by the Center for International Policy said(PDF).
So let’s not quarrel with its work.