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by sklargh 949 days ago
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.
2 comments
SiempreViernes 949 days ago
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.

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sklargh 949 days ago
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.
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jjk166 949 days ago
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.

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