Command and Control

All of these military computer networks are far more technologically advanced than the gold telephone that used to connect General LeMay to the White House. But sometimes they experience a glitch. In October 2010 a computer failure at F. E. Warren Air Force Base knocked fifty Minuteman III missiles offline. For almost an hour, launch crews could not communicate with their missiles. One third of the Minuteman IIIs at the base had been rendered inoperable. The Air Force denied that the system had been hacked and later found the cause of the problem: a circuit card was improperly installed in one of the computers during routine maintenance. But the hacking of America’s nuclear command-and-control system remains a serious threat. In January 2013, a report by the Defense Science Board warned that the system’s vulnerability to a large-scale cyber attack had never been fully assessed. Testifying before Congress, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, General C. Robert Kehler, expressed confidence that no “significant vulnerability” existed. Nevertheless, he said that an “end-to-end comprehensive review” still needed to be done, that “we don’t know what we don’t know,” and that the age of the command-and-control system might inadvertently offer some protection against the latest hacking techniques. Asked whether Russia and China had the ability to prevent a cyber attack from launching one of their nuclear missiles, Kehler replied, “Senator, I don’t know.”

Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, was an extraordinarily complex military operation, and much of its success can be attributed to the Global Command and Control System. Personnel belonging to the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the CIA, as well as unmanned drones, secretly communicated with one another in real time. And details of the raid in Pakistan were simultaneously shared with President Barack Obama at the White House; CIA director Leon Panetta at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia; and Admiral William H. McRaven at a special operations base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The effectiveness of a command-and-control system in launching an attack, however, reveals little about how it will perform when under attack.

The 9/11 Commission Report offers a sobering account of the confusion, miscommunication, and parallel decision making that occurred at the highest levels of the government during an attack on the United States that lasted about seventy-eight minutes. President George W. Bush did not board Air Force One until almost an hour after the first hijacked airliner struck the World Trade Center. His calls to the Pentagon and the White House underground bunker were constantly dropped. Continuity of government measures weren’t implemented until more than an hour after the initial attack. Vice President Cheney ordered Air Force fighter planes to shoot down any hijacked airliners over Washington, D.C., and New York City, but the order was never received. The only fighter planes that got an authorization to fire their weapons belonged to the District of Columbia Air National Guard — and they were ordered into the air by a Secret Service agent, acting outside the chain of command, without Cheney’s knowledge. A command-and-control system designed to operate during a surprise attack that could involve thousands of nuclear weapons — and would require urgent presidential decisions within minutes — proved incapable of handling an attack by four hijacked airplanes.

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As of this writing, the United States has approximately 4,650 nuclear weapons. About 300 are assigned to long-range bombers, 500 are deployed atop Minuteman III missiles, and 1,150 are carried by Trident submarines. An additional 200 or so hydrogen bombs are stored in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for use by NATO aircraft. About 2,500 nuclear weapons are held in reserve, mainly at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex near Albuquerque, New Mexico. America’s current nuclear war plan, now known as the Operations Plan (OPLAN) 8010, has two official aims: “Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike.” Both seek to prevent an attack with weapons of mass destruction against the United States — one, with an implied threat; the other with an American first strike. While the attack options of the SIOP focused primarily on targets in the Soviet Union, the OPLAN enables the president to use nuclear weapons against Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, and Iran. “Adaptive planning” allows targets in other countries to be chosen at the last minute.