I, Soldier - part 34

Alexandra continued to get funding for NASA projects. I could tell she was proud of that, as she spoke often of the various spacecraft and missions that were being planned. It was hard to keep up with the Apollo program while it was underway, as I was busy with college and later the Army. The space race did interest me as a kid. Sputnik was visible with a telescope and I remember building a crystal set radio to pick up its "beep beep beep" signal. 

I continued to write military articles for think tanks, though at a much-reduced pace. On the conventional side, I noted that the US military should greatly reduce airborne training given the high casualty rates from operations during WW2 as well the danger and expense of the training. It's a great for getting attention and I admit to enjoying the sight of paratroopers descending en masse. And of course there was my own experience from Vietnam, though I suspect my success in that raid was due more to luck than anything else. No one wants to admit how often the outcome of a battle or war hinges on luck or unforeseen factors. 

There was an amphibious landing during WW2 which failed because no one bother to check the phase of the moon, and so they miscalculated the tide. It was the Battle of Tarawa, I think. Because they overestimated the depth of the water, the landing crafts got stuck on the coral reef surrounding the island and the Marines had to wade several hundred yards to reach the shore, all the while under intense enemy fire. It was another one of those times when astronomy had military consequences. The exact event at Tarawa was an apogean neap tide, meaning the moon was at its apogee, or furthest point from the earth. There was another time during WW2 where a German submarine was able to take advantage of the opposite effect to enter a harbor and sink the HMS Royal Oak. 

In the realm of nuclear strategy, I was critical of the nuclear triad, that is, bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles. I noted that deploying a warhead from a land-based missile was about one tenth the cost of doing the same with a bomber or a submarine, and that in any case, we had almost 40 times as many nuclear warheads as what could possibly be necessary, even for a full-scale nuclear war. In my article, I noted:

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In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke felt that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.

Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that “a few hundred” missiles (armed with a few hundred warheads) was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.

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If Japan was forced to surrender with just two relatively weak atomic bombs, then surely a few hundred much more powerful hydrogen bombs would have an even greater psychological effect. Furthermore, if the idea was to deploy as many warheads as possible, land-based missiles would be the most effective way. 

I also wrote about the nuclear war maneuvers the Air Force conducted with bombers early on in the Cold War. Basically, large numbers of bombers were sent on practice bombing runs of American and European cities to test how well commanders could coordinate such operations. It's interesting that the US inadvertently became the beginning of the Soviet bomber force after an American B-29 bomber ditched in the USSR during WW2 and was reverse-engineered by Soviet technicians. The Soviets went on to produce hundreds of such copies which they called the Tu-4. 

I didn't expect my articles would have much of an effect. Too many people were getting rich off our bloated military, and when that many people are getting a piece of the action, the gravy train keeps rolling. It was frustrating to see the same mistakes being made as during the Civil War, where repeating rifles and Gatling guns were slow to be introduced despite Lincoln's orders. The established officers and military contractors stymied the reform.

There was an attempt in the 1950s to build a nuclear-powered bomber which could stay aloft for 120 hours at a time. JFK cut the funding to that project not long after taking office. By that time, it was clear that missiles and not bombers were the best tool for long-range nuclear attack. Unlike bombers or subs, land-based missiles require far less maintenance, and so all the expense of things like resupply at sea or port, aerial refueling, etc., is prevented.  

Meanwhile, the Soviet strategy for undermining the US did not rely on nuclear weapons at all. Instead, they focused on propaganda and psychological warfare. They weren't even much interested in espionage per se, as far as I could tell. The secret of nuclear weapons was lost to them during WW2, and that was the most important one we had.

By the time Reagan got elected a few years later, I all but given up on writing military articles, as I was sure they would fall on deaf ears. I do remember criticizing Reagan's so-called Strategic Defense Initiative as a provocative boondoggle and a technological pipe dream. In the press, the idea was derided as "Star Wars". It was one of the few times I agreed with the media on a military matter or even in general.