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Comment by anikan_vader | Hacker News Reader

>> you’ve never heard of

I suspect most Americans with a passing interest in nuclear deterrence have heard of this.

Moreover, the article is almost entirely about the sentinel land-based ICBM program, which is only 100 B of those 1.5 T. I would argue it is pretty shocking how cheap our nuclear deterrent is, especially compared to our conventional military budget (1.5 T per year).

The article includes the suggestion that the land-based nuclear fleet may be superfluous, but does not even attempt to explore the game theory behind keeping it intact (E.g., nuclear missile failure rates, warhead fratricide, the historical difficulty of keeping a boomer fleet stealthy, etc.)

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Indeed, it's a complex topic. I was reading an article just the other day on nuclear targeting strategy(1); the thought that goes into this and how it interacts with the greater warfighting strategy, or arms control agreements, is daunting.

Suffice to say, the land-based fleet still has a role to play. Other powers still have or are expanding theirs(2). Arms control talks need to get back on track. But until then, a balance needs to be kept.

As an aside, I read the book "Inventing Accuracy" a while back; a really interesting look at the technology that goes into missile guidance and how it drove policy and strategy. Great read(3)

1: https://warontherocks.com/2023/11/two-myths-about-counterfor... 2: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2021-09/news/new-chinese-mis... 3: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262631471/inventing-accuracy/

A fundamental reason behind the new expansion of the nuclear arms race is the spread of anti-ballistic technology (shooting down incoming warheads and missiles). The article doesn't mention it at all oddly enough but I think that's the primary driver behind things like hypersonic missile development, etc.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/12/13/u.s.-exit-from-anti...

> "Twenty years ago today, then-president George W. Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. This cornerstone of the Cold War arms control regime, signed in 1972, sought to cap the arms race by limiting homeland missile defenses, thus reducing pressures on the superpowers to build more nuclear weapons."

Many of the expensive US military programs are flyover state job creation programs masquerading as weapons programs.

That would be plausible except that in my experience they are scrambling to hire people. There’s not nearly enough talent. Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah. It would be kind of strange to create extra work in places where there’s already too much work.

> Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah.

I wish nobody wanted to move to UT I could've stayed in the state, but that stupid California money with the stupid tech bros came in and now it's freaking packed.

Somehow I have a hard time picturing a senator, member of Congress, governor or other high-level official turning down a pork barrel project for their state due to some difficulty hitting hiring goals.

I'm don't disagree with you, but all the senator from Nebraska / Utah wants is to advertise the number of jobs he created in the state. Whether they get filled or not is mostly irrelevant.

That's like 80% of military spending. It's literally just a massive jobs program that also keeps domestic American manufacturing (somewhat) relevant.

Not even doing a great job of that now that so many subcontractors quietly source from China.

An interesting byproduct of this "massive jobs program" is that it leaves in its wake the most powerful military force in history that can project power over the entire globe, 24/7. In fact the decades-old byproducts of this jobs program can be shipped across the planet and stand their own against the most cutting edge weapon systems that the US's "near-peer" adversaries are capable of fielding just 60 miles from their own border.

Crazy jobs program!

That the US has the most powerful Military force in history was mentioned on a radio program that just happened to be on in the car yesterday and it made me realize how far the US has fallen from its founding ideas of not having a standing army. But what can be done? If not the US, some other power will come in to fill the void.

This is an interesting topic. I don't think many Americans realize that the constitutional basis for the Regular Army (i.e. active duty troops) is pretty weak: Congress is given the power "To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;" From that perspective, it's kind of amazing that we've maintained it for almost 250 years and built it into the world's most capable land warfare service.

With that said, and I say all this as a career US Army officer, I think our advantage in land warfare is much more narrow than our advantages in sea and air power[1]. And the constitution does give Congress the power to simply "provide and maintain a navy;"

[1] For that matter, our Army's greatest advantages probably stem from our sea and air power. We can deploy anywhere in the world and be sustained by sea and air. The Army's own aviation branch is larger and more powerful than the air forces of most other nations, and we are very good at employing air fires.

Whats wrong with ppl downvoting you?

"America sucks... grrrrr" or "the military is bloated, therefore it's bad"

Two memes from people who don't think very hard about the situation.

The older I get the more I wonder if this "most powerful force" is simply to intimidate other nations to using dollars, because if they don't, our currency will lose value and we will implode under our $33T in national debt.

I mean I want to believe as much as the next person that it's to "ensure stability in $REGION" or to "provide aid to starving children" or whatever spin you see from time to time.

I also think that human suffering is a zero-sum game. It's trite to keep repeating it, but in the US, we spend trillions on the military but refuse to pay for our citizens medical needs (or homeless, or other $HUMANITARIAN_THING). It's impossible to measure, but I suspect that the slow, steady burn of our own citizens from this inequality could easily rival the suffering and death from having a skirmish or small war in $DISTANT_REGION.

Brazil and China are trying to transact without dollars. We'll see how that goes.

I do think the land-based deterrent could be regenerated as a mobile shell-game style force. The Chinese are clearly adopting this strategy and it would reduce the overall material and munitions costs/requirements while still requiring the target sponge allocation for the Western US that policymakers desire.

Why though? Just reflexively copying Chinese solutions is a pretty poor strategy, they aren't structuring their forces by considering what makes sense for the US to do if they were to copy them.

The Chinese are expected to do the the shell game simply because they don't have a ballistic submarine fleet that can be relied on to escape out into the Pacific, nor do they have enough nukes to fill all the silos they've made. The US has a fleet of ballistic submarines the Chinese can't touch, and full fields of silos that are truthfully simply left over from the cold war.

As I noted above the why is cost and reducing the number of weapons systems (absent cost benefit, still a net positive). Shell game for the US deterrent has been considered for some time.

The Us heavily looked into mobile land based missile launchers but they really don't make sense. For transportation that uses infrastructure (road based, rail based), most of that infrastructure is built close to population centers and is critical - you don't want to make it more of a target than it already is and security would be a nightmare. You can build lots of infrastructure in the middle of nowhere but that's super expensive. For off-road vehicles you have to develop such a mobile launcher with all its technical difficulties, you limit the size of your missiles, and you need to set aside much larger areas of land than a missile silo field - basically you're just making a worse version of naval deterrent. The most economical option is silo fields with just extra silos that you periodically transfer warheads between, but the cost of transferring the warheads back and forth regularly is more than just having a fully functional nuke in every silo, and dummy silos make arms control verification nearly impossible.

Perhaps some of the assumptions underlying these rationales have changed in the intervening decades, but I don't see any of these options getting more practical than they used to be.

> but does not even attempt to explore the game theory behind keeping it intact

As you say, the Pentagon theory is basically "we needed them in the past for technical reasons" followed by a firm plugging of the ears as people try to point out that the old technical restrictions no longer apply.

For the last two decades there hasn't been a coherent reason for the GBSD, which you can tell by how people say that the "GBSD is needed", that "China is building ICBMs", but never saying that the GBSD will be used to deter China. The reason only the most careless fools would explicitly say the GBSD is to be used against China is pretty simple: you would need to launch all your missiles toward Russia and pray really hard they don't interpret it as a first strike.

You'd have to launch all your missiles towards middle of nowhere Siberia. Combined with the inevitable back and forth in the lead up to a nuclear war between the US and china, it would be pretty obvious where the nukes were headed. And China's ICBMs would need to overfly the same territory.

Frankly, there are two realistic possibilities with regards to nuclear war: the US is facing both Russia and China, or one of them has agreed to stay out of it. In either scenario, the presence of one shouldn't prevent deterrence of the other.

I'm mildly skeptical that GBSD that makes sense, but the sorts of silly popular-level arguments you're describing on both sides are cartoons of the serious, careful arguments that do exist on this topic if you seek it out.

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