Prompt Global Strike

To just echo what Kevin Drum and Noah Shachtman have to say about it, continuing forward with the Prompt Global Strike concept is insane. The idea is to mount a conventional payload on an ICBM to let us strike super-fast anywhere around the world in a credible way. One problem is that if we launch an ICBM, irrespective of its actual payload, other countries aren’t going to be able to trust trust us that it’s not a nuclear first strike.

The deeper issue, I would say, is that the pursuit of whiz-bang air power capabilities is often done with no thought as to the strategic implications. Every time we develop new offensive weapons designed to let us attack anywhere around the world with impunity, the more we’re incentivizing other countries to develop WMD capabilities to counter us. The mentality inside the Air Force is a sort of autopilot pursuit of better and better equipment that’s detached from any realistic vision of what we’re trying to achieve as a nation.