Today is an age of acceleration, a time when Moore’s Law is creating profound changes at diminishing intervals, making it difficult to anticipate strategic, social and technological developments. Some organisations facing these cascades of change, however, continue to plan for the Keynesian long term by adopting programs intended to endure for many years. One of those organisations is the US Navy, which sails a steady course, stabilised by personnel and program cycles and equipment lifetimes that unfold over several decades.

As a result, the United States has a plan and an existing program to maintain a nuclear deterrent onboard a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) fleet until the end of the 21st century. Unless strategists truly encounter a black swan at sea—an unanticipated event that shifts the course of history in significant ways—the US Navy will have 12 nuclear-capable Columbia class submarines by the early 2040s.

What explains this steadfast commitment to the SSBN in US nuclear strategy and how might it change?

SSBNs are extremely complex and costly machines that require highly trained and dedicated crews to operate in a most unforgiving environment. On a cost per warhead basis, they are probably the most expensive nuclear-weapon-basing scheme in existence. Americans are true aficionados when it comes to deterrence theory—they have taken the great works to heart and embrace the notion that the ability to hold targets at risk after suffering a nuclear attack or some other destructive insult is the sine qua non of nuclear deterrence.

The US national security establishment is in complete and enduring agreement about the imperative of maintaining the SSBN/SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) system. Both the Obama administration’s (2010) and the Trump administration’s (2018) nuclear posture reviews used virtually the same language to describe the benefits of retaining SSBNs as part of the nuclear deterrent: survivability, no near-term or medium-term threats, and the ability to upload warheads as a hedge against potential threats or failures affecting the other two legs of the US nuclear triad.

Which trends and black swans could affect the US SSBN program? The latest Congressional Research Service report (October 2019) on the Columbia-class SSBN highlights several issues confronting the program. Cost uncertainty, cost growth, scheduling and technical risks, and the fact that the Columbia-class program is linked to the British program to build the Dreadnought-class SSBNs are depicted as problems that could cause a delay in reaching an initial operational capability scheduled for 2031.

These types of problems often complicate big-ticket weapons programs, but the Columbia class is also part of an enduring trend—specifically, the steady decline in the size of the US SSBN fleet.

The US deployed 31 Lafayette/Benjamin Franklin-class SSBNs and 18 Ohio-class SSBNs, and is now planning on 12 Columbia-class boats. Admittedly, the Ohio class carried more missiles (24) than earlier classes, but the Columbia class is designed to carry only 16 SLBMs.

This reduction in the size of the SSBN force thus mirrors the overall reduction in the size of the US strategic deterrent, which is down from about 10,000 deployed warheads at the end of the Cold War to the New START Treaty level of 1,550 deployed warheads. Each new generation of US SSBN contains approximately 40% fewer ships than its predecessor.

If this trend continues, the next class of SSBN, which would be under development around 2060, would contain only seven boats, which would yield an incredibly high cost per deployed warhead. Given the many decades spanned by the Columbia-class program, what amounts to a trend towards disarmament might undermine support for the SSBN in the outyears. There’s a chance that some combination of the high cost of deploying so few warheads on such an expensive system and the perception of diminished need might make the Columbia class the last US SSBN.

The longevity of the Columbia-class program is also an anomaly in an age of acceleration. The combination of longevity and acceleration creates a setting where the emergence of a black-swan threat to the program appears likely.

These black swans might have innocuous beginnings, such as CubeSats revealing SSBN operational signatures that have so far remained unobserved. Alternatively, more deliberate technological innovation, such as artificial intelligence, might yield ways to identify SSBN operational signatures that remain unknown.

There might also be brute-force solutions to submarine surveillance—given sufficient computational power, the oceans might become increasingly transparent. Deliberate cyberattacks, cyber context (for example, unintended and unauthorised interaction between classified and public computer and communication networks), autonomous/robotic anti-submarine weapons, nanotechnologies, nanoenergetics and various forms of insider threats alone or in unanticipated combinations could potentially pose a threat to the SSBN.

Regardless of its technological or operational origins, a black swan that undermines the survivability of the SSBN will greatly undermine support for the SSBN/SLBM system. Survivability is the strength and the Achilles’ heel of the SSBN. The extraordinary cost of this nuclear-weapon-deployment scheme is only justified on the basis of survivability, and anything that calls that survivability into question will undermine support for the SSBN.

This sort of development, however, would have far-reaching consequences because the US would be forced to undertake profound operational and materiel responses across its deterrent force to compensate for the emerging threat to its primary nuclear second-strike capability.

There’s a paradox hovering around any assessment of the future of the US SSBN fleet. On the one hand, the US political and strategic commitment to the SSBN is firm and abiding. On the other hand, acceleration produces profound technological, social and political changes at diminishing intervals, placing a premium on rapid innovation, adaptability and diversity of systems that can respond to an increasingly chaotic environment.

The SSBN bucks this trend. It is a big-ticket item that resists modification. It is intended to last for decades. The SSBN places the US secure second-strike capability into a few extremely expensive baskets despite the fact that trends in just about every other industrial and technological domain favour rapid production of low-cost systems optimised to exploit short-lived technological advantages.

Oddly enough, those closest to the US SSBN programs don’t seem to recognise that this paradox exists. The failure to recognise and somehow respond to this longevity-acceleration paradox might, in fact, be the greatest threat facing the future of the next generation of SSBNs.

This piece was produced as part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy: Undersea Deterrence Project, undertaken by the ANU National Security College. This article is a shortened version of chapter 5, ‘The SSBN and US nuclear strategy: the future of the maritime deterrent’, as published in the 2020 edited volume The future of the undersea deterrent: a global survey. Support for this project was provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Originally published 11 July 2019.

This year is proving to be something of a watershed in technology. Government and professional bodies are considering or acting on controls around technologies such as artificial intelligence and encryption. The United States, like Australia and New Zealand, banned high-risk companies from being involved in its 5G systems. Data sovereignty policies are aiding protectionism and contributing to global economic decoupling. Social media, of as much interest now to politicians as it is to the average citizen and foreign operatives, is polarising opinions and potentially influencing elections.

For the first time since the Cold War, technology is re-emerging as a strategic, and not merely a political, instrument. The difference this time is that it’s thoroughly civilian rather than military technologies and information that act both as enablers and sources of vulnerability. And there are key differences in how different Western political cultures understand the strategic significance of technology.

In Europe, the political aspects of technology are well appreciated. For example, European conferences on the uses of technology focus much more on the human and the role of technology in mediating, for example, relations between managers and staff. In contrast, sister conferences in the United States tend to focus more on the technology itself.

The differences reflect a long tradition in Europe. The old continent has powerful memories of conflict and has frequently been at the receiving end of the application of new technology in war, including by authoritarian regimes. Moreover, the formation of the European Union, determinedly created to reduce conflict, holds consensus above all other concerns and so has established predictable—if elaborate—processes to consider, agree on and regulate all manner of internal affairs. As a result, the EU has developed an extensive regime around data, data privacy and human rights that has proved challenging for US-based companies and consumers to appreciate and meet.

Further, European strategic concerns remain focused on Russia, a product of long-term familiarity augmented by more recent concerns over energy vulnerabilities and the revanchist behaviour of its president, Vladimir Putin. But Russia, while threatening, is not the technological powerhouse that China has become, and only recently have European policymakers become sensitised to the challenge that China poses.

In contrast, America’s way has been to focus on building technology, leaving individuals and companies to take advantage of the opportunities as well as sort out the consequences. (The Manhattan Project and moon missions are something of an anomaly in that regard.) Technology helped America to win World War II and the Cold War. Long used to technological superiority, the US is now threatened by a genuine rival and is struggling to harness its more free-wheeling technology sector for national strategic purposes.

Efforts to bring the technology sector to heel have been more difficult than anticipated. Many of the big US tech companies—such as Facebook, Amazon and Google—are products of the post-Cold War world. Their leaders have little or no experience of true geostrategic competition. Nor do they have an institutional memory of an existential threat based on a contest of ideologies, despite the fact that the very technological advances underpinning their business models were born during the last time the world saw such a contest.

Those differences are making a broader Western strategic approach to meeting the challenges of technologically enabled authoritarianism harder to achieve. Witness the pushback from US companies on European data regimes and Europe’s determination to ensure its citizens are protected from the rapacious data collection practices of predominantly US companies. US tech giants and their adherents are now arguing that they are ‘too big to fail’, and that in a geostrategic competition, attempts to break them up or bring their practices under greater control would actually harm US interests.

But it’s hard to argue that the business interests of Facebook, Google, Amazon or lesser-known companies will automatically align with the national interests of the United States, let alone the rights of individual citizens or the interests of allies. Google’s project Dragonfly aimed to build a search engine for China that enabled surveillance and censorship. More common is ‘neutral’ technology, developed by ostensibly law-abiding Western businesses that is now used for surveillance and oppression in China, and exported to more illiberal regimes elsewhere. The same belief in the political neutrality of technology is also apparent in US President Donald Trump’s responses to the threat posed by Huawei and ZTE.

The power and consequences of modern technology are not as easily reduced to a Huawei component, a social website or a held-held device. Western governments understand only dimly the challenges presented by the data and technology platforms, and then mainly through their own cultural lens. Traditional societal concepts and tools of statecraft are proving ill-suited to the task.

We need new, shared conceptual understandings around technology and its strategic value to help strengthen the West’s position against digitally enabled authoritarianism.

The US Air Force Space Command has just released a thought-provoking report, The future of space 2060 and implications for US strategy. As the title suggests, it’s looking ahead to the possible ‘space futures’ that might emerge by 2060.

The report argues that economic, political, technological and military trends indicate that a ‘tipping point’ has been passed and space is fast becoming a key element of national power. China, the report notes, is ‘executing a long-term civil, commercial and military strategy to explore and economically develop the cislunar domain with the explicit aim of displacing the US as the leading space power’.

The focus on the moon and cislunar space—the region around the moon with a relatively shallow gravity well that makes it easier to access other locations such as near-earth asteroids (see diagram below)—throughout demonstrates sophisticated thinking on the nature of space power.

The moon as a rocket platform

This diagram shows the delta-v (and thus energy) required to reach various points from the earth and the moon, calculated using vis-viva equation. Not to scale.

Source: Jatan Mehta, ‘Launching rockets from the Moon is our ticket to a home on Mars’, Medium, 23 December 2017.

By no longer limiting our gaze to the region between low-earth orbit (LEO, from 160 kilometres to 2,000 kilometres above the earth’s surface) and geosynchronous orbit (GEO, at 35,786 kilometres), the report forces practitioners to think anew about how space competition might evolve as major powers extend their civil, commercial and military activities to the moon and its surrounding region. As our perspective on space terrain expands to encompass the cislunar region, it becomes more challenging for the US and its allies to develop strategies for defending their security interests, and commercial advantage, by ensuring access and presence.

Beijing is paying attention to this new high ground too. Some commentators suggest that a new space race between China and the US is on the horizon. That might include a race to determine a new order in space, in addition to establishing control over key regions of cislunar space.

The report posits eight scenarios for designing a long-term US national space strategy. They range from optimistic futures in which the US retains leadership and maintains laws and regulatory processes to support global civil, commercial and military activities that maintain peace, prosperity and human presence on the high frontier (referred to as the ‘Star Trek’ scenario) through to negative scenarios in which China dominates space and shapes the rules to benefit itself at the expense of US space leadership (named ‘Zheng He’ for the Chinese explorer and admiral).

Some assumptions are made—notably, that the new drive to return US astronauts to the moon in the 2020s is successful. In practical terms, America is well placed to achieve these goals, given the dramatic fall in the cost of accessing space as a result of the transformation of commercial space capabilities. It’s commercial players that are opening up the potential business case for sustaining a more ambitious return to human space flight than was promoted at the end of the Apollo era in the 1970s.

Appropriately, the tenor of the document is very much about how to protect US and allied space interests across the broader astrostrategic region out to the moon. That’s a vast region and exploiting it militarily will require innovation in strategic thinking and policy on employing US military and commercial, civil and allied capabilities in a coordinated manner.

Australia as a new space entrant has a valuable opportunity to think boldly about how it can play a role across the cislunar region as well. Space competition on the high ground of cislunar space may in part depend on who establishes the rules and regulatory foundations for human space activity out to the 2060s first. It’s better for Australia if a coalition of Western liberal democratic states, led by the US, shapes this new domain. The alternative is that others will make key decisions to our disadvantage.

Space law and arms control clearly need to be strengthened, but we must remember that many of these vital documents were formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, when global space competition was dramatically different and commercial space simply didn’t exist. Investing our entire diplomatic efforts on retrofitting the past, while China and Russia simply move ahead to shape a new order in space, would be a path to failure. A better approach would be to build close cooperation with the US on establishing new ground rules that prevent an adversary from simply establishing a fait accompli in space—much as China has done in the South China Sea.

In space, location is everything, and getting to the high ground of cislunar space and establishing a permanent presence there matters a great deal if we are to have a role in shaping the rules that will regulate human activity, including military activities, in that region. From a civil and commercial space perspective, it’s important for Australia to play a visible role in US-led space activities in cislunar space and on the lunar surface.

Such an Australian ‘moonshot’ goal would be consistent with the Australian Space Agency’s civil space strategy, and would directly draw on Australia’s space industry sector, in areas such as robotics and automation, access to space, and other ‘leapfrog’ research and development efforts. It would also allow Australia to directly support the primary recommendations of the 2060 report, which includes shaping the cislunar region’s rules-based order from the outset.

We need to think strategically about space. The moon and cislunar space are high astrostrategic terrain above earth’s deep gravity well useful for niche roles such as space-based space situational awareness with sensors gazing down into GEO and across cislunar space. An Australian contribution of sensors would support burden-sharing with the US and other partners by providing data on the activities of potential competitors. That situational awareness in turn would help policymakers in crafting new legal and regulatory mechanisms.

The overriding goal should be ensuring that Australia’s interests are protected as major powers establish a new rules-based order for a new era in human space activity. The US is clearly determined not to cede its interests in this new arena of competition to China. Australia should stand firmly alongside the US in shaping affairs on the high ground that extends out to the moon.

Saturday 20 July 2019 marks 50 years since the landing of Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility and that historic moment when Neil Armstrong took ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’.

But the excitement was short-lived. Interest in the moon waned as landings became more common and samples of lunar soil multiplied. Indeed, later this year—19 December, to be precise—the world will be able to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the last moon landing, by Apollo 17. Since then, no humans have set foot on the moon. The lack of progress, and associated attrition of skill sets, has been a source of frustration for many in the space community, and criticism has mounted over NASA’s inability to offer a credible and cost-effective strategy to build on the achievements of the Apollo program.

Now the human journey is about to begin again, with a recent commitment by the Trump administration to return to the moon by 2024 under Project Artemis. Rather than just flags and footprints, the new landings on the lunar surface will also establish a small lunar-orbit space station called the ‘Lunar Gateway’ to support future missions, which in turn will support an eventual human landing on Mars in the late 2030s. There’s recognition within the space community that the moon is not only a logical stepping-stone to Mars, but also a base from which to build and sustain a space-based economy that would fund more ambitious goals in coming decades. Getting back to the moon will make it easier to develop the necessary capabilities and skills to enable humans to set foot on the red planet in the 2030s.

The plan for Artemis bears a striking resemblance to the concept on which Apollo succeeded, though clearly the technology has moved on. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)—the ‘big booster’ that will launch the Orion spacecraft to get astronauts back to the moon—mirrors the 1960s Saturn V booster in capability. Orion is a slightly bigger and much more advanced vehicle than the Apollo ‘command and service module’.

Unlike in 1969, in 2019 there’s no formally declared space race. President Donald Trump’s space policy directive of 11 December 2017 commits the US to return to human space exploration beyond earth orbit. The Trump administration has since accelerated the original timetable of a return to the moon in 2028 to a landing by 2024, and is seeking this time to have a woman set foot on the moon.

The decision to accelerate the return aligns with Trump’s domestic political agenda and was pitched in the context of growing Chinese space activities. As I’ve noted previously, Beijing has serious plans for ‘taikonauts’ on the lunar surface by the 2030s. It’s conceivable that delays in the US program could encourage China to accelerate its own timetable for testing its Long March 9 heavy booster. That would give it a chance at winning the international prestige that would come with beating the US back to the moon. Then a new race would be on. NASA would be forced to respond under pressure both from the White House and from an ambitious Chinese space program.

The real race now, however, may be between NASA and commercial space players such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, which have ambitious plans for lunar missions of their own. For example, SpaceX’s proposed ‘Starship/Super Heavy’ booster and spacecraft will be fully reusable, and may fly around the moon by 2023.

It’s the innovative approach of commercial space operators that contrasts so sharply with NASA’s reliance on Apollo-era thinking. SpaceX and Blue Origin are emphasising full or partial launcher reusability, which reduces launch costs dramatically compared with the fully expendable NASA SLS. (SLS is estimated to cost US$1 billion per launch and may launch only once a year from 2021.)

By using on-orbit refueling, SpaceX’s Super Heavy can deliver 100 tons to the lunar surface, compared with just 45 tons for the NASA SLS in its most powerful variant, the Block 2 cargo, which may fly by the late 2020s. Rather than a race to the moon, it’s a race to innovate, and the private sector is clearly winning that one.

The space environment is also much more competitive now than it was in 1969. Other space powers—India, Japan and Europe—are all eyeing the moon and the potential resource wealth it offers. Like China, they have a second-mover advantage on the US. Over successive administrations, the US has lacked a coherent space policy, constantly shifting between ‘Mars first’ and ‘moon first’ policies.

Meanwhile, massive cost-overruns and delays on SLS have contributed to a sense that the US is adrift in space—a far cry from the decisive, goal-driven days of the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy said:

[W]e choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Much like in the 1960s, however, plans for a return to the moon are being made in the context of increasing military competition in space, which is diverting resources from human space exploration. But it’s a far more complex environment. China and Russia are developing counterspace capabilities designed to deny the US, and its allies, access to essential space systems. The US and others are responding with new approaches to ensuring space access—for example, the US is considering the potential for establishing a space force early in the next decade.

Getting back to the moon is not just a question of money. But a more complex and contested space environment increases the funding risk for Artemis. NASA is receiving far less funding now than during the Apollo era. The Apollo program cost US$25 billion between 1961 and 1973 (US$153 billion in 2018 dollars). NASA’s entire budget allocation in 2018 was only US$20.7 billion, which has to support other projects besides human space exploration, including ongoing and new unmanned missions; aeronautical research; work in earth sciences such as climate change research and education; and administrative costs.

In the 1960s, Apollo had money thrown at it. In the 2020s, Artemis is attempting to match that goal, and do more, on a comparative shoestring. If the US is to have a hope of achieving and sustaining the goals of Artemis, increased funding for NASA will be essential, or they must bite the bullet and hitch a ride on commercial rockets to the moon.

The strategic rivalry between the United States and China poses a sharp challenge to international organisations, which are now at risk of becoming mere pawns of either power. Whether multilateral institutions can retain a role in facilitating desperately needed international cooperation remains to be seen.

The Sino-American conflict is already replacing globally agreed rules with the exercise of raw power, as each side wrestles for access to resources and markets. The US is eschewing long-standing trade agreements in favour of unilaterally imposed measures. China is carving out its own economic and geostrategic sphere through bilateral partnerships and aid, trade and investment packages under its transnational Belt and Road Initiative.

The two rivals are also competing for control of new technologies and the data that enable them. Among the top 20 technology companies in the world, nine are Chinese and 11 are American. On the Chinese side, the tech giants enjoy access to a wealth of data, because they are backed by a government that is bent on collecting it for the purpose of surveillance and establishing a social-credit system. Equally, Chinese companies are expanding their reach and access to data, such as China’s CloudWalk deal to build facial-recognition software in Zimbabwe. On the US side, the tech giants are being supported through provisions in trade agreements like the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement, which requires cross-border data flows without restriction.

The strategic rivalry is a battle not just for control over resources, access to markets and technological domination, but also, more broadly, for control over the rules of the game. In 2015, when China created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a new multilateral institution, the US refused to join and pressured others not to do so, either. Earlier this year, when China and the US disagreed over who would represent Venezuela at the Inter-American Development Bank meeting (the US pressed China to accept a representative of the opposition to the government, and China refused), the institution’s Board in Washington cancelled the meeting in Chengdu just a week before it was due to take place.

This is not the first time that a great-power rivalry has threatened to marginalise international institutions. After its founding in 1944, the World Bank was soon sidelined in the reconstruction of Europe. With the Cold War came heightened strategic competition, leading the US to pursue more direct means of engagement through the Marshall Plan. The World Bank was relegated to a different job: lending to poorer countries.

Some commentators describe the BRI as ‘China’s Marshall Plan’. Yet the new strategic rivalry differs from the Cold War in many ways, starting with the fact that the US and China are economically interdependent to a degree that the US and the Soviet Union never were. Still, the principle of ‘mutually assured destruction’ created its own kind of interdependence, leading to cooperation on nuclear-arms control despite the intense rivalry.

One lesson of the Cold War may be particularly relevant today: attempts to establish broad rules, such as US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Basic Principles Agreement in 1972, proved less effective than narrower arrangements such as the 1955 Austrian State Treaty conferring neutrality on Austria, or the 1962 agreement establishing Laotian neutrality. By the same token, formal multilateral treaties and organisations worked best when they addressed specific dangers, as in the case of the 1971 Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement. All of these pacts were highly contested, but each played a role in managing the rivalry.

In the case of the Sino-American conflict, the challenge is to contain the trade war, which could have devastating consequences on other countries. Unfortunately, the current system of rules is already being eroded. The World Trade Organization’s dispute-settlement mechanism is being paralysed by the Trump administration’s refusal to allow any appointments to its appellate body.

Breaking the impasse will require creative thinking and perhaps a series of narrower agreements to breathe life back into the system. For example, countries with trade disputes could make better use of the WTO’s 60-day bilateral consultations requirement to reach a settlement on their own. WTO leaders could be far bolder and more creative in finding ways to support rules-based trade. They should recall the way leaders in the United Nations initiated ‘peacekeeping‘ (which is not mentioned in the UN Charter) and expanded the use of the office of the secretary-general to advance peace at the height of the Cold War.

Other multilateral organisations will also need to rethink their strategies. Regardless of whether larger powers are locking horns, the world desperately needs mechanisms to facilitate cooperation on issues such as climate change, biodiversity, cross-border infrastructure and the regulation of new technologies. International organisations can provide a forum for debating such matters, sharing information and arriving at common solutions. They can also play a crucial role as neutral monitors of previously agreed rules, reducing the temptation for any one country to cheat or pursue zero-sum, unilateral action.

China, the US and the rest of the world have shared interests across a wide range of issues. But to facilitate cooperation toward common objectives, international organisations will need to be renovated. The World Bank, for example, could create new instruments to address regional and global challenges, instead of remaining locked into single-country loans, and it could shed the ideological baggage preventing some countries from embracing its country policy and institutional assessment approach. Rather than lending to poor countries in ways that amplify the biases of the world’s largest bilateral donors, the bank should identify neglected areas and ensure balance in global development financing. It will also need to overhaul its governance structure to give both China and the US a sense of ownership and influence.

It is imperative that the Sino-American rivalry stops short of war. We know from history what can happen when national leaders define rivals as enemies and exploit national grievances for personal political gain. Right now, this tendency is on display in both China and the US.

To contain the new strategic competition, the rival powers, along with the rest of the world, should emulate the Cold War–era focus on narrowly defined, specific agreements rather than attempting to craft new broad-based rules. Multilateral organisations such as the WTO and the World Bank could play an important role in brokering such accords, but only if their respective leaderships are bold and creative, and if their stakeholder governments allow it.