Merrick Carey: The Lexington Institute

 The realm of ideas is an underrated one in Washington.  Many observers are so focused on the "special interest" aspect of policy that they miss more transcendent factors like ideology or even simple ideas that help drive policy in our democracy.  Right under our noses for the last 12 years, for instance, were Paul Wolfowitz and his twin strategies of preemption and democratization.  He and a like-minded President found each other, and the rest of the world is still in shock, and awe.

 A more prosaic but nonetheless important example is the Trident conversion program, or SSGN. In the mid-90s a handful of defense intellectuals hatched the idea of converting older ballistic missile submarines into SEAL platforms and cruise missile shooters.  They found some allies in the Congress, OSD, and the submarine community, and now that program is taking shape.

 The SSGN program is transformational.  It provides stealth, access, and as the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole reminds us, lack of need for force protection for close in platforms.  It takes a perfectly good Cold War platform and uses it for new missions. With the SSGN, deterrence is no longer a nuclear decision alone.  We have a stealthy, nuclear-powered platform with up to 154 cruise missiles on board that will work as a campaign opener, like events around 20 March 2003.

 Naturally the price has gone up as it has become a real program and the design has matured.  The technical issues that were assumed in the late 1990s are now being worked out--like really putting seven Tomahawks in a ballistic missile tube--and they were trickier than expected.  The latest price tag for the four boats being converted is $3.8 billion. They are fully funded in President Bush's budget.  The USS Ohio is in the Puget Sound naval yard for refueling and conversion, and the USS Florida will head to Norfolk in August for conversion. Ohio will be in the water and ready to surge in 2007.

 The SSGN  has the potential to reshuffle the calculus for Navy TLAM missions. A rough rule of thumb is 1/3 of Navy Tomahawks are fired from subs, 2/3 from surface ships.  Approximately 270 Tomahawks have been fired from subs since 20 March.  That percentage may increase when the SSGNs are in the water.  America could have done the same number of submarine-based Tomahawk shots in the second Iraq war with two SSGNs, thus freeing up more nimble SSNs for sensitive intel operations, or freeing up surface combatants for missile defense, anti-air, ASW and other more traditional battle group missions.

 The submarine and her missile tubes have so much volume that Special Operations Command has enough equipment and people to run a campaign with multiple sorties for weeks off one boat.  The Giant Shadow exercise conducted by the Florida this year in the Bahamas used a P-3 with an APY-6 radar acting as a Global Hawk, a Seahorse UUV, and a Scan Eagle UAV, all networked together with excellent situational awareness.  SEALs from the boat were able to successfully find, confirm, and destroy a WMD site from a single platform. The success of Giant Shadow indicates why future Navy plans have SSGNs operating as their own strike group.

 Paul Wolfowitz views American undersea dominance as an asymmetrical advantage in future wars.  The SSGN program may prove his insights correct on yet another front.