Wampum

Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it.

John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, commenting on the record of Dan Haloutz's leadership of Tsahal in the July War.

I've been meaning to write on strategic bombing since before we left Portland two and a half years ago, I can't lay my hands on the pdf of a master's thesis, or credit its author, but what I took from it was that an instance of coercion of political elites of a belligerent state via "strategic bombing" of a that state's industrial infrastructure was difficult to document. A non-military work in this area is Robert Anthony Pape's Bombing to Win. Which leaves SAC with nothing but "strategic bombing" as directly, rather than indirectly, effective in determining outcomes between belligerent states, nuclear packages and the Air Force with nothing but that, tactical bombing, and new missions as the packaging for its claims on the defense budget.

Last month Cheryl Rofer of WhirledView proposed a blogger discussion the policy choices concerning the existing inventories of nuclear weapons -- see The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy. I'm late for the party.

First, the point made by John Kerry in 2004 remains -- the greatest threat to the United States (as well as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Isreal, Europe, Canada, and the Russian Federation) is the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and the better policy is to allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament. The alternative "single weapon" risk model was articulated in the same debate by George W. Bush, and independently by Peter Daou's sometime employers, Mssrs. Ted Turner, Sam Nunn, Warren Buffett and others, and without loss of generality, by the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator proponents.

Restated, the greatest quantifiable risk has no agency, and cannot be "deterred" or engaged in human discourse. It is rust. Sensor failure. False alarm. The next greatest quantifiable risk has agency, but also cannot be "deterred" or engaged in political discourse. It is covert or overt expropriation of devices or fissiles. Restated, it is sensor and inventory control failure.

This isn't a blogger discovery, its the policy of the Federation of American Scientists, and others, for quite some time.

in all the games I've ever been aware of, the introduction of a package within the bounds of the game substantially alters the game. These are games held at the NPGS, CAC, and I suppose elsewhere, and Air Land presumed that the introduction of weapons packages in theater would generalize without bound, and therefore Air/Land had to be solved, by Red and Blue player alike, without recourse to "tactical" nuclear weapons. So, despite the fact that there are some 3k packages in the Red Player kit, and more than half that number in the Blue Player kit, with delivery capability measured in the hundreds of kilometers, there are no scenarios in which use of a package determines any outcome other than the use of more packages, until all available packages have been used, targeting data is exhausted, or command and control capabilities are terminated (end game).

So, there are a lot of tactical nuclear weapons, in more than two national inventories, the battlefield utility of nuclear packages is without proof.

Restated, the "tactical" vs "strategic" distinction, even in the US / RF context, is merely one of range of delivery system, and locus of command and control. After use, no distinction exists. All packages are "strategic", even where the delivery system has a design range of zero meters. So unlike some of the bloggers contributing to Cheryl Rofer's discussion, I think there are tactical weapons, between 30% and 40% of the US and USSR/RF weapons inventories, none of which have military justification, and it is an area where the existing treaties, the political agreements of weapons states on weapons policy, in particular the bi-lateral treaties between the US and the USSR/RF, do not match military utility.

Later I'll try again, but I'll close for now with a note from my BRAC series:

NB that the current BRAC round does not define "military necessity or utility" in a nuclear weapons capacity context, and that the bases identified by the current SecDef (and war criminal) for closure or re-alignment map much more closely to the Red/Blue political division of the United States than to obsoleted nuclear weapons capacities -- the bombers, missile fields and boomers are budgetary untouchables.