Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (28 page)

A few days after we agreed to leave, the Pentagon announced it would be stationing as-yet-undetermined thousands of troops in Kuwait, just across the border, where we could jump into Iraq in case the security situation deteriorated in our absence. Don’t forget to make room for the Predator and Reaper drones in there too. And don’t forget the thousands of private American contractors who could stick around inside Iraq and help out with US foreign policy by proxy, without fear of congressional interference.

The Guard and Reserves were ready at a moment’s notice too. “We’re in a situation now where the soldiers we have recruited … want to serve, and if we don’t continue to challenge them and maintain that combat edge, we think we’re going to see soldiers leave us because what we recruited them for and what we promised them, we weren’t able to deliver on,” the acting director of the National Guard said in 2011. “This country made a huge investment [in the reserve component] to this point, and we think they’ll get short-changed if we don’t take advantage of this operational reserve.”

The military commissioned a study in 2011 of the Guard and Reserve in the post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan era. The lead
author told the
Army Times:
“Why would you want to take that progress and put it on the shelf and let it atrophy? You want to use it.…”

With the World’s Greatest Privately Augmented Standing Army in place, we are, as Jefferson feared, constantly scanning the horizon for “a speck of war.” When Gen. George Casey returned from his job as the honcho of the Iraq War in 2007 to take over as Army chief of staff, one of the first things he did was send his transition team out to take a wide-angle view of the world his Army faced. Then he shared the findings with the national press. “I said, ‘Go talk to people who think about the future. Ask them what they think the world is going to look like in 2020.’ And they did. They went to universities. They went to think tanks. They went around to the intelligence agencies. They went around the government. And they came back and they said, ‘You know, we’re surprised at the almost unanimity that the next decades that we face here will be ones of what they call persistent conflict.’ ” The Army was going to have to grow, he said.

In his farewell-to-the-Army speech in 2011, when he was moving over to the CIA, David Petraeus implored the nation to keep hold of the can-do-everything counterinsurgency doctrine. “We will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere,” the general said. “But again I know that that fact is widely recognized.”

In 2011, new secretary of defense Leon Panetta was running around Capitol Hill with his hair on fire saying cuts in the annual increase of the Pentagon budget would “hollow out” the military. “This is not as if we’ve come out of a major war and everything is fine,” Panetta said, lamenting “rising powers … rapidly
modernizing their militaries and investing in capabilities to deny our forces freedom of movement in vital regions.” He’s right. But the reason those foreign powers were rising in the first place is not necessarily because of their military strength but because of their economies—something this country had largely neglected in our decade of hot war.

However much blood and treasure we shoveled into the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Al Anbar Province after 9/11, we can look back at that expenditure now from a position of grave, grave weakness. Unless three-ton V-hulled armored MRAP trucks and pilotless flying killer robots are going to provide the basis of America’s new manufacturing base for the twenty-first century, we’ve built ourselves—to the exclusion of all other priorities—a military superstructure we can’t use for anything other than war and that we can no longer afford. And it’s going to be really hard to take this thing apart. Even the manifestly hilariously dangerously stupid parts of it we can’t take apart. Have you heard the one about the wing fungus?

SAY YOU’RE A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN 2007. WE’RE FOUR YEARS
into Iraq, and six years into Afghanistan. If you’re feeling a call to patriotic duty, a sense of adventure, thinking about the training opportunities offered by a career in the US Armed Forces, where do you tell that recruiter that you’d like to end up? Probably not in a missile silo in Minot, North Dakota. In the post-9/11 era, who’d want the job of sitting through the nuclear winter on the high plains, running maintenance on the thirty-five B-52s, guarding the “silos” that housed 150 giant and largely untested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), babysitting the hundreds of smaller nuclear warheads stored in sod-topped bunkers like canned fruit shelved in a tornado shelter? The munitions maintenance team and the weapons handlers and the tow crews in Minot could call those bunkers “igloos,” but giving stuff funny names didn’t make life there any more fun.

“Our younger airmen, once they’ve reached that decision point, if they have been stationed in one of our northern bases where the environment’s a little bit tougher, they tend to leave the service,” an Air Force general told the Senate. Those who didn’t leave the
service didn’t stick around the tending-the-nukes life for long. In 2007, an Airman assigned to a nuclear bomber wing could look around and note that more than eight in ten members of her wing’s security force were rookies. One senior officer in the Air Force’s nuclear enterprise admitted that standing alert duty in missile silos is not considered “deployed,” and “if you are not a ‘deployer,’ you do not get promoted.”

The Air Force pleaded for more missileers, but “deployments in support of regional conventional operations [i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan] decrease manpower available to the nuclear mission.” But even without Iraq and Afghanistan siphoning off military talent, would anyone expect that ambitious young airmen would be clamoring for silo duty?

“We need a nuclear career field,” concluded a Pentagon blue-ribbon task force on the nation’s nuclear mission in 2008. Sixty years into America’s nuclear superpower age, sixty years as the only nation to have ever used a nuclear weapon against an enemy in wartime, sixty years of hair-trigger nuclear alert, and we don’t have a nuclear career field? We used to have one, but it’s been eclipsed by changing times, changing wars.

That Pentagon report noted that “many Airmen were skeptical of hearing repeated pronouncements that the nuclear mission is ‘number one’ … No one explains to junior Air Force personnel why ICBMs are important.” But no matter what they might figure out to say about ICBMs being important, the Air Force’s actions spoke louder. Ask the staff sergeant who got written up for failing a Storage Access and Missile Safe Status Check inspection but still retained his position as a nuclear weapons handler. Status check? The airmen handling weapons capable of unleashing Armageddon were stuck on low.

So was the whole nuclear enterprise. It wasn’t just the personnel; it was the aging hardware, too. Consider page thirteen of a
recently declassified 2007 report on the care and feeding of our nation’s nuclear weapons at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana:

While our nuclear-armed cruise missiles were growing leading-edge wing fungus in the subtropical moisture of Louisiana, other US military flying hardware was having rather the opposite problem: in the words of
Defense Industry Daily
, they “were about to fly their wings off—and not just as a figure of speech.” In 2006, the Air Force embarked on an emergency (and expensive, at $7 million a pop) upgrade of the nation’s fleet of C-130 aircraft. After heavy service moving cargo and flying combat missions as retrofitted gunships, the huge planes’ wing-boxes were failing. Wing-boxes are what keep the wings attached to the fuselage.

So take your pick of your maintenance priorities, Taxpayer: wings falling off enormous gunships in the Middle East and central Asia from constant use in the longest simultaneous land wars in US history, or sedentary nuclear missiles in Shreveport growing fungus. At least we can easily tally the twenty-first-century benefits where the C-130s were concerned; those airplanes have moved a bucketload of troops—along with “beans, boots, Band-Aids, and bullets”—to the various war zones we’ve kept humming since 2001. Operationally speaking,
that workhorse fleet of no-frills, have-a-seat-on-your-helmet airplanes has been tremendously effective and cost-efficient.

The nuclear thing is harder to figure.

The United States, according to a 1998 study by the Brookings Institution, spent nearly eight
trillion
in today’s dollars on nukes in the last half of the twentieth century, which represents something like a third of our total military spending in the Cold War. Just the nuke budget was more than that half-century’s federal spending on Medicare, education, social services, disaster relief, scientific research (of the non-nuclear stripe), environmental protection, food safety inspectors, highway maintenance, cops, prosecutors, judges, and prisons … combined. The only programs that got more taxpayer dollars were Social Security and non-nuclear defense spending.

What do we have to show for that steady, decades-long mushroom cloud of a spending spree? Well, congratulations: we’ve got ourselves a humongous nuclear weaponry complex. Still, today. Yes, the Nevada Test Site is now a museum, and the FBI converted J. Edgar Hoover’s fallout shelter into a
Silence of the Lambs–
style psychological-profiling unit, but as atomic-kitschy as it all seems, the bottom line is this: twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a twenty-first-century year, we’ve still got thousands of nuclear missiles armed, manned, and ready to go, pointed at the Soviet Union.
Er …
Russia. Whatever. At the places that still have thousands of live nuclear weapons pointed at us.

Warheads, and the missiles that carry them, and all the nuts and bolts that support them from shelter to bomber wing and back again have been on the shelf for way too long. The nukes and their auxiliary equipment were generally designed to have a life span of about ten to twenty years. Constant manufacturing and modernization were the assumptions back in the glory days, especially with Team B’s armchair instigators kicking up
all that magic fear dust. But by the start of the Barack Obama presidency, some of that hardware had been in service for forty or even fifty years.

Bad enough that missiles were growing wing fungus and storage containers were rusting through, but at least those problems were mostly solvable with Lysol and Rustoleum. For the more serious nuclear maintenance issues, we had by then started shoveling money into something called the Stockpile Life Extension Program, which—even if you avoid the temptation to call it SchLEP—is still essentially a program of artificial hips, pacemakers, and penile implants for aging nukes. How’d you like to be responsible for operating on a half-century-old nuclear bomb?

These were fixes that required real, hard-won technical nuclear expertise—expertise we unfortunately also seemed to be aging out of. Fuzes, for example, were failing, and there was nobody around who could
fix
them: “Initial attempts to refurbish Mk21 fuzes were unsuccessful,” admitted an Air Force general, “in large part due to their level of sophistication and complexity.” The fuze that previous generations of American engineers had invented to trigger a nuclear explosion (or to prevent one) were apparently too complicated for today’s generation of American engineers. The old guys, who had designed and understood this stuff, had died off, and no one thought to have them pass on what they knew while they still could.

Then there was the W76 problem. W76s were nuclear bombs based mostly on the Navy’s Trident submarines. By refurbishing them, we thought we might get another twenty or thirty years out of them before they needed replacing. The problem with refurbishing the W76s—with taking them apart, gussying them up, and putting them back together—is that we had forgotten how to make these things anymore. One part of the bomb had
the code name “Fogbank.” Fogbank’s job was to ensure that the hydrogen in the bomb reached a high enough energy level to explode on cue. But no one could remember how to make Fogbank. It was apparently dependent on some rare and highly classified X-Men-like material conjured by US scientists and engineers in the 1970s, but no one today remembers the exact formula for making it. Very embarrassing.

The Department of Energy was not going to take this lying down; they promised the Navy, “We did it before, so we can do it again.” I like that can-do spirit! But sadly, no. It took more than a year just to rebuild the long-dismantled Fogbank manufacturing plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab, and from there, while a bunch of aging W76 warheads lay opened up like patients on an operating table, government scientists and engineers tried to whip up new life-extending batches of Fogbank. But even after years of trying, even after the Fogbank production program went to “Code Blue” high priority, the technicians were never able to reproduce a single cauldron of Fogbank possessed of its former potency. The Department of Energy, according to an official government report, “had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency.” The experts were gone. And nobody had bothered to write anything down!