This month’s Proceedings magazine is chock-full of techy goodness, including an in-depth essay by naval expert Norman Polmar on the recently defunct plan to put conventional warheads atop Trident D5 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles.
(For the record, Congress effectively killed the conventional Trident by zeroing funding in the FY 2007 budget.)
The most common criticism of this plan to arm each of the Navy’s 14 boomer subs (SSBNs) with two conventional missiles — alongside 22 nuclear missiles — is that foreign powers might mistake the launch of a conventional missile for a nuclear one, and might respond with a nuke of their own. In short, the conventional Trident was a diplomatic nightmare.
But there are other flaws, as Polmar points out in his article, which is unfortunately not available online:
Following a Trident SLBM launch, the missile’s third-stage booster, weighing several thousand pounds, will fall to earth. This concern could greatly inhibit conventional SLBM launch locations with trajectories over friendly or neutral territory.
There’s more:
Perhaps one-half of the Navy’s 14 Trident submarines are at sea at any given time — about seven submarines world-wide. … The number of SSBNs available to cover such terrorist-threat areas as the Middle East and North Africa with conventional Tridents would be limited.
Polmar proposes that outfitting the Navy’s 100-plus attack subs, destroyers and cruisers with faster cruise missiles would more than take the place of conventional Tridents — and do so with fewer diplomatic complications.
The Navy is already on it, moving ahead with its RATTLRS hypersonic cruise missile, which will also come in air-launched models.
–David Axe
I saw that Proceedings article as well. When the U.S. Naval Institute’s editors let a pretty stiff indictment of the Trident component of Rumsfeld’s ‘Prompt Global Strike’ plans into Proceedings, you know the idea has become unpopular among Navy leadership.
Hopefully that will be last we hear about that crack-pot scheme.
It should be noted that research on Trident conventionalization continues despite the lack of funds from Congress. DoD appears to have diverted funds from other programs to continue studying the problem, and Lockheed has gone ahead with research as well.
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