In short, the United States faces a very different security environment from that of previous decades. More challengers exist, both traditional state-based competitors and non-state actors, and the means at their disposal to harm the United States, its allies and other interests abroad has increased dramatically. This 'democratization of destruction' makes it imperative that the United States field sophisticated long-range precision strike capabilities to meet these ever dangerous and diffuse threats. In that context, we can discuss the likely targets that long-range strike platforms would be called upon to address. ( More ... )

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Miller, Eric A. "Global Strike Capabilities: The Ballistic Missile Option." Astropolitics. Vol. 2 (2004): 1-31. [ 5 quotes ] [ page 5 ]

 

Members of the defense establishment consistently place HDBTs as the top priority for long-range precision strike. Finding ways to hold HDBTs at risk is a major defense priority because, as the NPR notes, 'at present the United States lacks adequate means to deal with these strategic facilities'. According to recent intelligence estimates, more than 70 countries now use underground facilities for military purposes, with over 10,000 facilities worldwide. Approximately 1,400 of these facilities house strategic sites, including WMD facilities, ballistic missile basing and leadership or top echelon command and control. HDBTs are classified into three categories -- 'cut and cover', simple tunnels and deeply buried facilities -- that can range in depth from 20m to 1km below ground. ( More ... )

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Miller, Eric A. "Global Strike Capabilities: The Ballistic Missile Option." Astropolitics. Vol. 2 (2004): 1-31. [ 5 quotes ] [ page 6 ]

 

The NPR noted that 'one of the greatest challenges today is accounting for the location uncertainty of mobile and relocatable targets'. These could include aircraft, ships, troop formations, mobile command, control, and communications (C3) facilities, mobile WMD facilities, leadership, or missile launchers. The use of Iraqi Scud missiles to attack Israel and US forces in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War underscores the requirement for capabilities that can be employed against such elusive targets. During Desert Storm, coalition aircraft carried out more than 1,500 strikes against Scud-related targets over a six-week period, but few, if any, mobile launchers were destroyed, and Iraq succeeded in launching almost 90 missiles. The potential use of mobile missiles to deliver WMD further intensifies this need. An effective theater missile defense system and the capability to locate and destroy such targets are crucial to protecting US allies, forces and regional population centers. ( More ... )

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Miller, Eric A. "Global Strike Capabilities: The Ballistic Missile Option." Astropolitics. Vol. 2 (2004): 1-31. [ 5 quotes ] [ page 7 ]

 

Ground targets might not be readily accessible due to distance, sophisticated defenses, or the lack of American or allied forces in the region. Concerns about overflight and collateral damage might impose political or operational restrictions. Therefore, as U.S. Space Command has argued in its Long Range Plan, the United States should have at its disposal military capabilities specifically tailored to quickly and precisely "produce reversible and permanent effects against all nodes of a potential adversary's space systems (emphasis added)." Additionally, such capabilities should be flexible enough to account for the fact that both friends and foes may be using space services from satellites in the same vicinity. According to U.S. Space Command, candidate systems that hold promise for meeting these desiderata over the next 10 to 15 years include ground-based lasers, and relocatable radio frequency and laser jammers. By the year 2020, its candidate list grows to also include space-based jammers and lasers, as well as a space operations vehicle (the current term of art for a military spaceplane). ( More ... )

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Klotz, Frank G. Space, Commerce, and National Security. Washington, D.C.: Council on Foreign Relations, January 1999. [ 12 quotes ] [ page 19-20 ]

 

While the United States maintains the strongest military around, it faces extreme challenges around the world ranging from cantankerous state actors to borderless/non state opponents. Henry Kissinger recently noted “Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order.” In space, the threats that our satellites were designed to see and sense, ICBM fields, electronic emissions, and infrared signatures, are evolving and becoming tougher to capture. No longer is the target an enemy armored Division or a fixed weapons site. Instead, the new target sets are what the military calls time critical or fleeting targets. Unlike traditional targets, these fleeting targets--terrorists, insurgents, weapons traffickers—are not suited to detection from space. ( More ... )

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Henderson, Scott A. The Third Battle: Is the U.S. Ready to Wage the Next Conflict in Space?. Maxwell AFB, AL: USAF Air University, March 2004. [ 7 quotes ] [ page 27-8 ]

 

Third, the US ability to hold targets in the enemy heartland at risk promises to impose costs on any adversary nation whose leaders decide to try to defend their deep targets. During the Cold War, one of the main arguments for going ahead with the B-1 (and, later, the B-2) was to impose the huge costs of maintaining territorial air defenses on the Soviets. The Troops of the National Air Defenses (originally PVO Strany, later Voyska PVO) were established as a separate service in 1948. This service persisted to the Cold War’s end whereas the United States began deemphasizing continental air defenses in the mid-1970s to reduce costs—a decision that certainly made sense given the lack of effective defenses against Soviet ballistic missiles. The point emphasized to senior US defense officials in 1976 was that the B-1, by posing a stressing challenge to the USSR’s air defenses, would maximize US leverage over Soviet military expenditures, channeling them into defense rather than offense, thereby posing the least direct threat to the United States. Thus, whereas the US defense establishment was able to decrease its territorial air defense burden by the early 1980s due to a greater willingness to rely on deterrence, the USSR’s defense establishment chose to continue bearing the full burden of territorial air defenses.

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Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 38 ]

 

The broad trend evident in these force developments is that foreign militaries that been paying close attention to evolving US conventional capabilities and are moving toward mobility, periodic relocation, camouflage and concealment, hardening, underground facilities, geographic dispersal, and positioning deep inside defended airspace to improve the survivability of their military systems and facilities. A telling example was the success the Serbs had in 1999 in keeping relocatable elements of their air defense system alive by displacing SAM launchers and radars as little as a few hundreds of yards overnight. These small displacements blurred the precise coordinates of these targets inside the cycle time of the NATO air-tasking-order (ATO) process, which meant that they could survive strikes by systems such as TLAM that targeted coordinates.

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Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 55 ]

 

This situation has far-reaching implications for LRS. Consider targets that are hidden most of the time, only vulnerable to attack during brief intervals when must expose themselves to fire on or otherwise engage US forces. It is possible that such targets will always be located in littoral areas or close enough national borders for their fleeting moments of vulnerability to be observed by standoff surveillance platforms such as the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) orbiting outside defended airspace. However, it is difficult to believe that military planners of countries with the geographic depth of China or Russia would fail to grasp the advantages of placing at least some important assets deep inland, well beyond the reach of American standoff surveillance short-range strike systems. Nor, given both demonstrated American proficiency against fixed targets and the difficulties US forces have experienced with more fleeting targets such as Iraq “Scud” launchers in 1991, is it plausible that future adversaries will neglect doing everything possible deny “precision” targeting information to American forces.

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Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 53 ]

 

The members of the defense establishment interviewed for this study consistently placed HDBTs as the top priority for long-range precision-strike. Finding ways to hold HDBTs at risk is a major defense priority because, as the NPR notes, “at present the United States lacks adequate means to deal with these strategic facilities.” According to recent intelligence estimates, more than 70 countries now use underground facilities for military purposes, with over 10,000 facilities worldwide. Approximately 1,400 of these facilities house strategic sites, including WMD facilities, ballistic missile basing, and leadership or top echelon command and control. HDBTs are classified into three categories—“cut and cover,” simple tunnels, and deeply buried facilities—that can range in depth from 20 m to 1 km below ground. For instance, North Korea is renowned for its tunneling ability. North Korea has hundreds of hardened artillery sites just north of the demilitarized zone, uses hardened facilities to house underground air and naval facilities, and, according to some sources, has built a uranium-enrichment plant underground.

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Miller, Eric A. and Willis A. Stanley. The Future of Ballistic Missiles. Fairfax, VA: National Institute of Public Policy, October 2003. [ 11 quotes ] [ page 9 ]

 

The United States has made little progress in developing a conventional “prompt global strike” capability, leaving the military few options short of a nuclear attack in certain scenarios, the head of U.S. Strategic Command said yesterday.

U.S. troops might not be able to respond quickly to a sudden military threat that has the potential for great harm to the United States, said Gen. James Cartwright.

Such troop movements could take three to five days, he said, and other conventional strike capabilities exist that could eliminate threats within a day or two. However, in cases in which a major threat must be addressed at intercontinental ranges immediately there is no option except for a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, Cartwright said in testimony before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

“In the diverse threats that we deal with, that is not necessarily appropriate across the spectrum,” he said. “We really need to be able to provide a capability for the nation below the nuclear threshold that can address these fleeting, high-value, high-regret factor type threats.”

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Fox, Jon. "Nuclear Attack Now Only Option in Some Cases, U.S. General Says." Global Security Newswire. March 9, 2007.