Should New START lead to two more SSGNs?

This past week, General Robert Kehler of Strategic Command, the organization with most of the United States' fielded nuclear weapons, reported to the US Congress on what the recently ratified New START accord would mean for force structure. The Pentagon's plan for long-range nukes, the general explained, comprises the following:

420 LGM-30 Minuteman III missiles, each with one warhead
20 B-2A bombers, with gravity bombs or cruise missiles
40 B-52H bombers, again with gravity bombs or cruise missiles
240 UGM-133A Trident II missiles, each with four warheads, on 14 Ohio-class submarines

How did the military come to those numbers? The treaty calls for reductions by both the United States and the Russian Federation to 700 active long-range launchers, with not more than another 100 in reserve, and just 1550 warheads for all of them. As I hadn't quite grasped in my earlier writings about the treaty, there's an added allowance for bomber aircraft in the counting: regardless of how many missiles or bombs each carry, each aircraft gets counted as but a single launcher and warhead. Ships don't count themselves, or get such favorable treatment; rather, each missile launch tube is counted as a separate launcher, and each warhead on each missile as a separate warhead. Seems simple enough, right?

By that accounting scheme, the US winds up with 420 countable warheads on Minuteman IIIs, 60 on bombers, and 960 on Trident IIs. That's 1440 in all, and safely below the limit of 1550. What's mildly curious is the launcher total, which comes to 720. Presumably, one-third of the B-2As and B-52Hs will be considered inactive as well, because they'll be in depot maintenance or the like at any time. Given the age of the B-52s and the maintenance-intensity of the B-2s, that's not unimaginable.

The Navy's plan for the submarines is a little more complicated. Ships in refit don't carry weapons, and so are unloaded before entering the yards. Twelve of the fourteen are generally available at any given time, so that's 20 missiles per submarine. Since each ship has 24 countable tubes today, the Navy plans to disable four tubes on each ship. For long patrols, they could be turned into fresh water or food storage, or used to stash an extra stationary bicycle. It really doesn't matter—they just need to go for treaty compliance.

Unless, that is, the Navy just chose to take two more boats out of ballistic missile service. The service could save a lot in operating costs by just decommissioning them. And as the Russians only have ten active SSBNs anyway, it's not clear why the United States wouldn't be fine with just twelve—which is the number that the SSBN-X replacement plan calls for anyway! But wait—rather than paying them off, for just a billion dollars more, the Navy could get something considerably more likely to see combat than an SSBN, as it did once before.

After the ratification of the START II accord, the Navy converted the first four of the then-eighteen ships of the class—Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Georgia—to cruise missile submarines (SSGNs). The cost was about $500 million for each conversion, which is less than a quarter of what the Navy is paying for each new ship of the Virginia-class. Twenty-two of the tubes went from carrying a single Trident II to carrying seven Tomahawk missiles, for a total of 154 on board (or about ten times the Virginia's load-out). The remaining two tubes were converted into lockout chambers for SEALs.

Cruise missiles and SEALs: this has been a good spring for both. Florida in particular was spectacularly useful in March against the Qaddafyists, firing roughly 50 of the 112 cruise missiles that the US and Royal Navies used to flatten Libya's air defenses. Note that the ship unloaded only about a third of its ammunition, and probably (who can say for sure?) remains on station for further strikes as needed.

So what would another two add to the four? Assuming that the Navy continues to dual-crew these ships for maximum asset utilization, six on hand would generally mean four at sea. That's a considerable improvement over the two or three that the service can manage now. What would that mean practically? A lot with just the land-attack capabilities of the latest version of the missile, the Block IV, which now seems to be the opening act of any significant NATO air campaign.

But consider how much more these ships could do with Raytheon's proposed antiship upgrade to the Block IV. That would recover a long-range capability lost with the retirement of the UGM-109Bs. With a range of 900 miles, a submarine like this would stand a good chance of disabling any large warship over a huge stretch of ocean—with one shot. Consider, then, that any one of these ships could pretty much stop, say, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on its own—regardless of where the carriers were, and without anyone knowing it was around until it fired. That's pretty impressive, and any mission not quite that strenuous is just a lesser-included case. And as stressed as the Navy is about usable ship numbers, it seems a small price for so much capability.

Comments

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This is a good post on this topic.

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