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A former partner
in a top-10 global management consulting firm,
Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional
writer on national security and defense preparedness.
He is also a novelist of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners and
Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and
best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on
future submarine technology and tactics, which
appeared in The Submarine Review, received
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League.
His recent novel Crush
Depth made the Military Book Club's
Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected
as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late
2002. Tidal
Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in
hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made
the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller
List (paperback edition due in October, 2004).
Joe's next book, Straits
of Power, is scheduled for hardcover
publication in November, '04.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis,
a non-partisan international scholarly body
headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life
Member of the following organizations: U.S.
Naval Institute, the Navy League of the
United States, the Fellows of the Naval War
College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation,
and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father
was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in
the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951,
and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the
North Atlantic convoys late in World War II,
before being drafted into the U.S. Army to
serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In
August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life
Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans
of America, partly in recognition of his pro
bono work for Operation
Seabees Knowledge.
Joe
Buff Article & Column Archive
Joe Buff Contact Info:
readermail@joebuff.com
http://www.JoeBuff.com
Joe Buff Books:
Straits
of Power
Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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October 22, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
Columnist and author Peter Brookes, a regular contributor to Military.com, recently had an essay titled "Bunker-Buster Brouhaha." His October 18, 2004 piece discussed the importance of continuing engineering feasibility studies for a new type of weapon to destroy deep, hardened enemy underground bunkers -- the proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator bomb (RNEP). Allow me to begin by quoting the concluding paragraph of that essay: "In light of the WMD-proliferation threat and the increased use of underground facilities to conceal it, looking at adding RNEPs to our arsenal only makes sense. The safety and security of our nation may depend upon it." I agree wholeheartedly with this statement and the reasoning behind it. Here, I would like to address (and attempt to refute) a counterargument I've seen in print elsewhere: that conventional high-tech munitions and tactics are able to defeat the deepest and hardest bunkers without any need to go nuclear -- even when the bunkers themselves are way beyond the reach of those munitions.
The core of this particular "no nukes" argument is that a bunker does not need to be collapsed upon itself, or blown to smithereens, for it to be rendered militarily ineffective over a lengthy (or permanent) timeframe. That, in and of itself, is certainly true. The problem lies in the details of implementation. Opponents of the RNEP concept suggest, in part, that the internationally-legal and ecologically-friendly way to snuff a bunker, while minimizing civilian casualties and other collateral damage, is to isolate the bunker from its sources of power and air, and eliminate its ability to communicate with the outside world. This would be achieved by destroying or blocking, from above the surface, a) electrical feeds into the buried facility, b) its atmospheric intakes and exhausts, c) its external antennas and phone/fiber-optic lines, and d) its personnel and freight entrances-exits.
If these goals could be achieved, equipment inside the bunker would cease operating, personnel would suffocate, intelligence and orders could neither get in nor get out electronically, and messengers or rescuers could not reach the deep installation's vital heart with its possible WMD stocks.
Sounds great, doesn't it? But alas, I think it just won't work.
Ever hear of fuel cells? Of course you have. Pioneered by NASA several decades ago, these clean-running sources of electricity are one possible solution to America's dependency on foreign natural gas and oil.
Fuel cells run on nothing more than oxygen and hydrogen, usually liquefied in advance and held in insulated cryogenic (very cold) storage tanks. This technology is available commercially around the globe. Besides the electricity produced, the only other products of fuel-cell operation are pure water, and heat. A bunker designed with fuel cells as a backup source of power, and provided in advance of anticipated military hostilities with a good supply of liquefied oxygen and hydrogen, would a) need no external sources of electricity, b) need no exhausts to the surface to eliminate poisonous wastes, and c) help keep the bunker, which like a coal or gold mine at depth would tend to be chilly, from being too cold for the occupants' comfort.
Yes, the occupants do need to breathe. A very large underground tunnel complex, with few humans inside due to automation of the bunker's main purposes, could hold out for weeks on the air contained within its own enclosed volume. More to the point, consider another context in which people must work for long periods with no access to outside air: a latest-generation non-nuclear submarine equipped with air purification equipment. Devices for releasing oxygen, for removing (toxic) carbon dioxide, and for filtering out airborne particulates that result from the things that people and machinery do, are all available on the international market in compact, easily transportable, ready-to-use form. Some of these tools of underground survival are complicated and need electricity; others, equally effective, are simple and draw no voltage at all. If we think of a deep enemy bunker as a modern U-boat that doesn't move, we begin to better understand the difficulties -- especially during a fast-paced national or expeditionary emergency -- of achieving a timely mission kill against said target with weapons whose penetration depth and explosive force combined can't reach down far enough.
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Enemy bunkers, whether used by state-level adversaries or fourth-generation terrorist groups, and whether purpose-built in cities or carved from living rock in mountainous frontiers, exist to serve specific goals: In the worst case scenario, their raison d'être is to support and direct larger scale attack and defense objectives, leading up to and during active hostilities. They are underground warrens within which are performed tasks that include Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I), protection for top despots or key ideological leaders and strategists, logistical support sites, or factories and depots for the manufacture and storage of WMDs and other deadly ordnance. C4I functions can range from air-defense coordination to ground-warfare major headquarters to higher-level or supreme command posts. To carry out these functions and tasks does require access, both bulk-physical and electronic, back and forth to the arena of battle outside the bunker itself.
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect
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