Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (31 page)

When all the investigations and reviews and task-force studies were completed, the consensus was clear: they all found erosion and degradation and a general web of sloth and anxiety within our nation’s nuclear mission. The root cause? Lack of
self-esteem. The men and women handling the nukes were suffering a debilitating lack of pride. Their promotion rates, it was noted, were well behind the service average. We had to remind them in big ways and small that they were important to us, that the “pursuit of the nuclear zero-defect culture” and “generating a culture of nuclear excellence” wasn’t just hot air. What the program needed was resources: better pay, new layers of high-level managers dedicated to the nuclear mission, upgraded computer systems for tracking all the nuclear nuts and bolts, a commitment to more (and more serious) nuclear-training exercises, and of course, you know, a bigger program to upgrade and modernize the hardware. Money! “Definitely,” the logistician Air Force general told the Senate’s key nuclear oversight committee, “a re-look at recapitalizing that.”

Do I hear nine trillion?

Even though there’s been a lot of blue-ribbon hand-wringing about how best to sustain and rejuvenate our big, leaky, can’t-quite-keep-track-of-our-warheads nuclear-bomb infrastructure, our worries about it haven’t caused us to re-ask the big question of
why
we still have it. Given the manifest difficulties of maintaining our apocalyptic nuclear stockpile, how many nuclear bombs does the United States need to complete every conceivable military mission in which we’d use them?

An attack with one of the nuclear weapons we’ve got now would cause an explosion about ten times the size of the one at Hiroshima. Can you imagine us setting off two such bombs now? How about five of them? Fifteen? Fifty? What do we imagine would be on the list of fifty targets for those fifty American nuclear blasts, each ten times the size of Hiroshima?

Our current arsenal of nukes is about 5,000 weapons. Of
those, between 2,000 and 2,500 are deployed and ready to use—about the same number as Russia has ready. Thanks to the New START treaty negotiated in President Obama’s first year in office, that number is slated to eventually go down to 1,500 in both countries. But to get the Senate to agree to the deal with Russia reducing our total number of ready-to-launch nukes, President Obama also agreed to a huge new increase in the size of America’s nuclear weapons infrastructure. Fewer weapons, but
more
money. A lot more. To secure the two-thirds vote necessary in the Senate to ratify the treaty, the initial Obama administration plan was to commit an extra $185 billion over ten years to our nukes—a nearly 10 percent annual increase. This was in 2009 and 2010, at a time when our economy was cratering and Republicans were insisting that the rest of the budget be slashed. “This might be,” noted one nuclear expert, “what’s necessary to buy the votes for ratification.”

Actually, it wasn’t enough. Republicans in the Senate thought this treaty-ratification fight was a good chance to monetize the nuclear-bomb infrastructure going forward. They evinced furrow-browed concern that the Obamanauts were not serious and might allow the whole reinvestment in nukes idea to “peter out.” Six months later, the Obama folks came back with more goodies. They added another whopping 10 percent to the next annual budget request, reiterated their promise to keep nuclear subs continuously patrolling both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to stand ready—in a phrase that seemed to have migrated from the previous administration—to “surge additional submarines in a crisis.” They agreed to spend whatever it took to keep the ICBMs and the B-52s ready to fly for another full generation.

Settle in, Missileers, it’s gonna be at least another few decades.

The Obama administration said it was even ready to fund
a new remote-controlled long-range nuclear bomber. How did eighty to one hundred nuclear-armed drones sound? Nuclear-armed flying robots. On remote control. What could possibly go wrong? “The most robust, sustained commitment to modernizing our nuclear deterrent since the end of the Cold War” was what the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration called Obama’s treaty-ratification goodie bag. “My predecessor put it best, saying he ‘would have killed’ for budgets like this.”

A couple of months after the Grand Bargain that bought the START treaty ratification, in 2011 a team of Air Force generals was back on Capitol Hill to share with a handful of senators the wonderful strides they had made in the three years since all that bad press that surrounded the six lost nukes; they were happy to explain just exactly what America was getting for the extra $650 million Congress had appropriated to shore up our nuclear program in the wake of Minot-to-Barksdale. For instance, there were the new posts manned by the generals testifying that day. (“The positions Lt. Gen. Kowalski, Maj. Gen. Chambers, and Brig. Gen. Harencak now hold were all established as a result of that mistake,” the subcommittee chairman noted by way of introduction.) The generals assured the congressional oversight committee that the Air Force’s relatively new oversight bureau, the Nuclear Weapons Center, was being spectacularly collaborative. The Pentagon had even invented a new someone with whom the Nuclear Weapons Center could exercise teamwork. “One of our most vital collaborations is with the newly created office of the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Strategic Systems. The PEO … has assumed the responsibility for the development and acquisition of future systems and for modernization efforts while [the Nuclear Weapons Center] focuses on day-to-day operations and sustainment.” The Nuclear Weapons Center commander assured Congress that they were also being more proactive and
forward-looking! They’d find problems before they hit the crisis stage; they’d train their personnel properly and give them working equipment and tools. (Let’s hope somebody thought of safety leashes for the socket wrenches.) They’d already merged databases so we’d no longer accidentally ship nuclear parts to warehouses in Taiwan or less-friendly countries. Oh, and they were determined to fix that problem with the sophisticated and complex Mk21 fuzes. They’d work that out.

Sadly, only two senators showed up for the hearing: the subcommittee’s chairman and its ranking member. And even those guys didn’t feel that we had too many nuclear doodads to keep track of. This was not what was keeping them up at night. In fact, Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama was mostly worried that the new nuclear arms reduction treaty was like some bureaucratic seductress beckoning us toward dangerous cuts in our nuclear forces. For the senator’s money, the president seemed awfully eager to actually comply with this new treaty.

Sessions wanted the generals to know he was going to make sure their new positions were safe and sound, that he was going to see to it that there was plenty of arsenal to keep them all busy for a very long time. “Last month, along with forty of my colleagues,” Senator Sessions told the military men, “I sent a letter to the president regarding our desire to be consulted on any further reduction plans to the nuclear stockpile. The New START treaty was only signed a few weeks ago, yet the administration is moving forward in my opinion at a pace that justifies the phrase ‘reckless,’ pursuing more reductions at an expedited and potentially destabilizing pace.”

Yeah, slimming down the stockpile of our thousands of nuclear weapons, that would be reckless. That would be unsafe.

HAVING GROWN UP IN THE SUBURBS IN CALIFORNIA, WHEN I
moved to rural New England I was surprised by how much god-awful work it takes to keep a still-life landscape looking unchanged. Leave stuff alone and it blows up. Not metaphorically, literally: if you leave wet hay in a silo, the decomposition of the plant material can make the hay (and your silo) catch fire. And when the trick isn’t keeping things dry, it’s keeping things wet. The logging company I buy firewood from turns its sprinklers on big piles of logs (hey, that’s my firewood!) to stop them from spontaneously combusting on cold days. Rot’s the problem there too—simple, inexorable decay. Rot makes heat, and if there’s dying wood in the
middle of that big pile, cold air hitting that rot-generated heat can create a chimney effect. If that channels enough heat over the dry layers of wood in there, then
kablooey:
your firewood pile has just turned itself into a bonfire without virtue of a match. It catches fire just from sitting there too long, unattended.

Our place in Hampshire County looked like a horror-movie haunted house when we moved in—broke-down busted, overgrown, spongy stairs, clapboards gaping like black teeth. It looked like that because it had been abandoned for … one winter. One long winter untended rendered the place virtually uninhabitable. In our beautiful, unforgiving little hamlet, we developed a shorthand for explaining what had caused the need for a repair of some kind: “The earth took it back.”

It is unsettling to realize that the earth takes back even nuclear missiles, that they’re growing wing fungus down in Shreveport. But stuff left sitting around, unused, still needs attention; there’s a cost and a duty that attend to everything we own. If we built it, we’re responsible for it, unless we take it down and take it apart. Maybe it’s a variation on Colin Powell’s cautionary “Pottery Barn Rule”—you not only own it if you break it, you own it if you build it too. If you’ve
ever
built it, you own it. And after two centuries of a standing army, and two generations of massive military buildup—the defense budget doubling and then doubling again—we’ve built ourselves a whole lot of national security state. We haven’t made a habit of taking this stuff down, ever, of taking it apart. And we haven’t made a habit of considering the consequences of just letting it roll along unchecked.

That’s not to say that some of it isn’t amazing. A fact that’s underappreciated in the civilian world but very well appreciated in our military is that the US Armed Forces right now are absolutely stunning in their lethality. Deploy, deploy,
deploy … practice, practice, practice. The US military was the best and best-equipped fighting force on earth even before 9/11. Now, after a solid decade of war, they’re almost unrecognizably better. Early worries such as how much gear we were burning through in Iraq were solved the way we always solve problems like that now: we doubled the military’s procurement budget between 2000 and 2010.

Consider also the state of the reserves. Thanks to the unprecedented deployment pace of the post-9/11 wars, gone are the days of the weekend warriors and the three-weeks-a-year training at some run-down outpost in the States. “For years, [reserve] soldiers would walk out the door on Fridays and say, ‘I’ve got to go play Army this weekend,’ ” the adjutant general of the Utah National Guard told a reporter from the
Salt Lake Tribune
. “I don’t think that’s the case anymore. We are the military to most citizens today. If you think of a uniform, you’re probably thinking of a Guardsman or a Reservist, who is your neighbor.” Probably your very physically fit neighbor. As a first sergeant who joined the National Guard in 1986 told the same paper, “There were a lot of overweight soldiers in the Guard back then who stuck around forever and talked big.” Not anymore. Not with the way we use the Guard and Reserves now, he explained: “You can’t [be overweight] if you have to put on body armor.”

America’s reservists have been in top gear or on high idle for ten years now, and their bosses say they want to keep them that way. “If we’re going to train to that level,” says the general in charge of the Army Reserves, “then my position is we’ve got to use them.”

Contrast that with LBJ explaining in 1965 that he didn’t want to call up the reserves because that would be “too dramatic”—it would be a shock to the nation’s system to tap the Guard and Reserves, even with eighty thousand US troops already deployed
in Vietnam. Peacetime and civilian life used to be the norm for reservists; war, the unsettling aberration. Now that’s reversed.

As the gap has closed between regular active-duty forces and the reserves, the gap between those fighters and the rest of us has never been wider. One of the stranger political developments of the post-9/11 era was the backlash against efforts to close that gap. On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, about a month after the first anniversary of the Iraq War, Ted Koppel announced that on Friday, April 30, his program,
Nightline
, would honor Americans killed in Iraq by showing their faces and reading all of their names. It would be a televised memorial to those who had died in a year of war. There are, of course, war memorials to fallen heroes in every town and hamlet in America, but critics pounced on Koppel as though he’d proposed mugging the wounded at Walter Reed rather than airing a solemn memorial to the dead. His critics accused him of undermining the war effort, of being unpatriotic. The pro-war
Washington Post
accused Koppel of mounting a cynical ratings stunt, headlining its news article on the subject “On
Nightline
, a Grim Sweeps Roll Call.” The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group immediately announced they’d boycott
Nightline
on all of their stations that were ABC affiliates.