The genie is out of the bottle

This story has been making the rounds through the defense/national security field. Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation has a round-up of commentary on the point over at The Foundry.

A Russian company is marketing a devastating new cruise missile system which can be hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier.

Potential customers for the formidable Club-K system include Kremlin allies Iran and Venezuela, say defense experts. They worry that countries could pass on the satellite-guided missiles, which are very hard to detect, to terrorist groups.

"At a stroke, the Club-K gives a long-range precision strike capability to ordinary vehicles that can be moved to almost any place on earth without attracting attention," said Robert Hewson of Jane's Defense Weekly, who first disclosed its existence...

"The idea that you can hide a missile system in a box and drive it around without anyone knowing is pretty new," said Hewson, who is editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons.

"Nobody's ever done that before."

Hewson estimated the cost of the Club-K system, which packs four ground or sea-launched cruise missiles into a standard 40-foot shipping container, at $10-20 million.

"Unless sales are very tightly controlled, there is a danger that it could end up in the wrong hands," he said.

The threats to our security and that of our allies are abundantly clear. Russia is already the world's single largest proliferator of nukes and missiles. What this represents is the next stage in this trickling-down of proliferation: the potential acquisition of these systems to terrorists or other non-state actors that are hostile to the United States or our allies.

For $20 million, you can sink a carrier. You can punch a hole into a very big building, and bring it down. You can destroy any number of things that cost many times more money to make for very little cost.

$20 million (on the outside) is still a lot of money, certainly. It's probably even beyond the reach of al-Qaeda's operating budget. But, a terrorist group that is financed by a state could make swift work of this. Hezbollah severely damaged an Israeli warship in their 2006 conflict, and they may be receiving Scuds from Iran via Syria. Is it really so hard to imagine that these things could make its way to them? Is it so hard to imagine the PRC surreptitiously arming its mercantile navy, and using them as pocket-guided missile destroyers? What would that do to the balance of power in the Pacific and Indian oceans? Could other rogue states like Venezuela and Syria acquire a few of these, and suddenly find their regional position vis-a-vis our allies (and their adversaries) in the region bolstered by a wide margain? Could the Scud-in-a-Bucket scenario be realized, and freighters armed with these things could hold entire countries hostage with WMD-tipped cruise missiles?

I wouldn't begin to hazard a guess at the solution to this nightmare. The missile non-proliferation regime is completely gone, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation regime looks like it's going, too. I will, however, provide a few points to help establish a framework for how we should approach this:

First, Bush was right: there is an axis of evil out there, and proliferation is one of its key characteristics. I would define it as an extended patron-client system that runs from Russia and China down to the mid-level rogue states, and then to terrorists and the broader transnational threat. Weaponry, know-how, money, and political heat goes down the chain; while money, political cover and achievement go back up. There does also seem to be some cooperative support along the different tiers as they help advance what their own level of technical achievement is, and spread that knowledge to their peers. Tier One, I would define as Russia and China; Tier Two, the rogue states; and Tiers Three and Four terrorists and the transnational threat, though there's likely some overlap, here.

Second, missile defense must be viewed as a unified entity. There should be no distinction between a Brilliant Pebbles or some other space-based system; the GBI; the SM-3s; ABL, KEI, or any other boost-phase system; THAAD; or a Phalanx system for our ships. Rather, they must be viewed as a singular, integrated whole that protects and defends our home territory, our bases and platforms abroad, and our forces in the field. Ditto those three points for that of our allies. We may not necessarily have to expressly pay for their protection, but we should at least have the cooperation and cost-sharing that we have with Israel and its missile defense system. The strength of our alliance system, and the bedrock of the liberal democratic international order, is predicated on our ability to protect our allies from attack (or, at the very least, promise such an overwhelming response to an aggressor that they would be dissuaded from an attack). Without that bedrock, our partnerships break-up, and we're all put back to the pre-WWI realist sandbox.

In a world in which multiple actors with motives and thinking that we can't even begin to guess at can threaten the world with catastrophic damage for a few bucks and with no warning, then the US must err on the side of caution and develop and deploy sufficient defenses to protect us and our allies against attack. I would recommend something sufficient to handle China's arsenal all the way down to this threat - keep Schelling's dichotomy in place with Russia for the time being (until we get below 1,000 deployed strategic warheads), but definitely make sure that we can defend against everything else.

Will that be ever be done? No. But, I would however, like to restress my first point to policy makers: the connections up and down this ladder are very real. And while these groups may be played off against each other, they are natural allies against the American-led liberal international order. Our foreign policy must be crafted towards breaking this coalition up, guiding states wherever possible into the free world, and destroying those who will remain hostile to the US and our allies. Let's make it happen.


- Evan Moore graduated from DSS in the Fall of 2009. His thesis topic was on the prospects for future Middle East democratizaion.