RAF Proposes Nimrod Modification
In June, a British newspaper reported that the Royal Air Force is trying to revive its strategic bomber arm, which was, in effect, abandoned forty years ago when Britain adopted an undersea deterrent. The decision, if in fact it has been made, has implications for the ongoing British aircraft carrier program, which is in some difficulty due to rising costs. Whether it is the right decision also carries implications for U.S. choices in weaponry. The Royal Air Force proposes to fit existing Nimrod airframes, conceived for maritime patrol, to carry and launch Black Shadow cruise missiles, which have a range of about 400 miles. Each aircraft could carry five such weapons, four underwing and one in the bomb bay. Nimrod itself is a heavily modified version of the old Comet airliner, and it has served as the standard British land-based maritime patrol aircraft since the 1970s. The current upgrade (remanufacture) maritime patrol program is in trouble due to rising costs and very late delivery, the projected number having been cut from 21 to 12. Even with the original number, there would have been airframes left over from previous versions of Nimrod, including an unsuccessful airborne early warning version. Now there are more. It is possible that the proposal, which calls for 25 bombers, was intended at least partly to reduce the unit cost of the maritime patrol version by increasing the number of airframes to be remanufactured.
The bomber (actually, missile) version is being advertised as equivalent to a B-52, in the sense that it offers the British the ability to attack targets throughout much of the world. Nimrod itself has an unrefuelled range of about 7000 nm. However, even five cruise missiles, each carrying perhaps a thousand pounds of explosive, are by no means the same as a bomber carrying perhaps a hundred or more bombs. In recent wars, the B-52s may have been most valuable in a role not too different from that of the battleships of the past: massive area bombardment. Due to their design heritage as carriers of early U.S. hydrogen bombs, the aircraft's most unique feature is its ability to deliver really massive bombs. Such bombs are the only current U.S. equivalent to the precision heavy bombardment capability represented in the past by the battleships. Certainly a B-52 can also deliver large numbers of precision weapons of the sort that fighters can also carry, but that may be much less significant.
The question is whether Britain (or the U.S. for that matter) desperately needs the ability to mount precision attacks across the world at very short notice. Certainly crises can arise with little notice, or at the least in ways not predicted by our governments. In a few cases such crises demand quick military responses. However, it is not clear that very small numbers of precision weapons have enormous impact in such cases. It seems more and more that persistence is much more valuable, and persistence requires larger numbers, usually delivered from shorter ranges-often, in recent years, from carriers. The weapons are usually delivered as part of a larger campaign, in which the significance of the targets themselves are defined largely by the progress of the ground fighting. Whatever delivers the weapons has to be able to respond very quickly to what is happening and so must be fairly close to the action. The ability to drop weapons from thousands of miles away seems to be impressive but largely irrelevant. It is very difficult to find recent cases in which long-range attacks without follow-up had much effect. Indeed, the unfortunate effect of the 1998 long-range strike against al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan might suggest exactly this conclusion-the attacks killed no one important, and their failure was used by al Qaeda to prove that it was divinely protected, in at least one recruiting video.
Officially, of course, the bomber version of Nimrod is not an alternative to the British carrier program. It is an entirely new capability. However, it is offered at a time when the British defense budget is in deep trouble. Like us, the British are caught up in an expensive war in Iraq. Their much smaller army is stretched thin. The Royal Navy's surface fleet is being cut drastically. Defense economies are particularly difficult to impose because they find it virtually impossible to withdraw from a multi-national fighter program. The Typhoon (Eurofighter) interceptor, an airplane often characterized as suited much more to the needs of the Cold War than to those of the present, appears functionally obsolete before it enters service. A few years ago it was reported that the RAF planned to sell off most of its Eurofighters rather than place them in service, because merely operating them would cut into the airplanes it really needed.
Under current British plans, the carriers are joint service platforms, and the RAF will operate many of the joint-strike fighters on board. However, the proposal for the Nimrod bomber cannot but remind many of the RAF's past attempts to kill off carriers so as to save its own programs. After Eurofighter, the carriers are the single largest item in the British defense program, and what seems to outsiders like dithering has seriously delayed their construction. The classic anti-carrier canard, that current commercial satellites can often find a carrier, is being trotted out. That the images are many hours late, that the carriers will generally be hundreds of miles away when they are being scanned, is easily forgotten. That the carrier is found only when it is in or very near a port is also easily glossed over. That this point is even being raised suggests that support for the carrier is less solid than might be imagined. Many in the Royal Navy likely remember the failure to get replacement carriers in the 1960s, and how difficult it was to obtain even the three small ones currently in service.
So just how much is it worth, in the end, to be able to pick up a phone in London (or Washington) and know that, within minutes or hours, a few hundred pounds of explosive will go off thousands of miles away? When money is short, some technologies may be elegant but not worth the price.
China Tests Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile
In June, the Chinese successfully tested their JL-2 submarinelaunched ballistic missile, which is to arm a new generation of strategic submarines. Range is 8000 km (about 4300 nm), which is enough to reach the western United States from Chinese waters. The missile is to enter service within a year or so. The effect on the Chinese of adopting such a missile may be something like the effect on the Soviets of adopting their first long-range submarine missile, SS-N-8 (on board Delta I class submarines). Suddenly it was possible to imagine a submarine weapon comparable to land-based strategic missiles, and potentially far more survivable. Until the advent of SS-N-8, Soviet submarines had to approach the U.S. coast (to within about 1500 nm) in order to fire. The potential operating area was on the American side of the mid-Atlantic ridge, and thus probably within sound surveillance system (SOSUS) detection range-hence within the range at which P-3 Orion anti-submarine aircraft might well be able to find and destroy the submarines. If, however, the missile could be fired from home waters, then the meaning of survivability changed. At least in theory, it would be the Soviet fleet that controlled the waters involved; they became the famous bastions. Suddenly their fleet had a crucial role: insuring the "combat stability" of the strategic submarines.
During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy turned this new key mission to its advantage: if it could threaten the bastions, it could keep much of the Soviet attack submarine fleet home, protecting the bastions, hence away from the vital shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. Forward operations could provide a decisive measure of sea control. That was much of the content of the very successful Cold War Maritime Strategy. One byproduct of forward operations by U.S. submarines was that, whenever the Soviets did detect them, they had to know that many other operations had gone forward undetected. They had to fear that their bastions were not sufficiently protected, and that further encouraged them to concentrate on home defense rather than on their own offensive operations.
What happens now? The Chinese lack choke points which can define Soviet-style bastions. However, it has been suggested that the bay formed by North Korea and Manchuria in the Yellow Sea might be seen as a potential bastion. If that idea is adopted by the Chinese leadership, North Korea gains importance from their point of view. Korean unification would become infinitely less acceptable, unless the future Korean peninsula is dominated by China. Otherwise the sanctuary will be subject to patrol by South Korean or U.S. forces. Even now, there must be some question as to whether the bay involved is particularly secure, given its wide opening and the proximity of U.S. and South Korean forces.
In this view, the South Korean program to acquire a substantial force of P-SCs would seem threatening. Since P-SCs are often in effect interceptors of submarines detected by other longerrange systems, one implication of the program would seem to be that the South Koreans either have, or have access to, a longrange submarine detection system analogous to the U.S. Cold War (SOSUS) system.
In recent years the Chinese have announced a policy of dominating successive offshore lines of islands. Although it seems unlikely that such a policy would be very workable, it may suggest that the Chinese see the South China Sea, whose islands they claim, as a future bastion. In order to threaten the United States from this area, they would need a much longer-range missile, carried by a larger submarine.
It is also possible that the Chinese doubt that a missile submarine operating in the large area defined by its missile range is particularly vulnerable. That has certainly been the U.S. position. In the Chinese case it may be bolstered if the Chinese have only limited respect for U.S. strategic ASW. That might be especially so if they have little such capability of their own. Their main access to strategic anti-submarine warfare systems may have been through the Russians, and the Russian systems put in place late in the Cold War and afterwards had ranges of hundreds rather than thousands of miles.
In that case the Chinese will have only limited interest in submarine sanctuaries. Very long missile range will be valued mainly because it will place much more of the United States at risk; a submarine off the Pacific Coast will be able to attack cities on the East Coast. In such a scenario, policy in Korea will have no connection with the future Chinese submarine deterrent.
Of course it is also quite possible that none of this logic has been worked through. Many national leaders imagine that buying weapons, without the requisite sensor or command and control back-up, provides military muscle. It is also quite possible that no one has really thought through Chinese submarine survivability issues. Current Chinese nuclear submarines are apparently quite noisy, having been designed many years ago. The coming attack and strategic submarines (Types 093 and 094) are always described as very quiet, but they do not yet exist, and our own experience in the past was that a submarine conceived as very quiet could turn out to be embarrassingly noisy (until it was very carefully, and often very expensively, modified). The Chinese leadership, which paid for the submarine and its JL-2 missile, has presumably been told that the submarine will be undetectable. We will have to wait a few years to find out whether that is so.