Retiring the TLAM-N

Galrahn beat me to Jeffrey Lewis' piece on the TLAM-N, but I think there's still justification for giving it some more attention. Lewis' argument on the retirement of the TLAM-N goes roughly as follows:

1. The TLAM-N finds its target by terrain contour mapping, rather than by GPS.
2. Because of problems with spoofing or jamming, the US is reluctant to use GPS to guide nuclear armed ordnance.
3. Because we're more familiar with the terrain of friendly countries, the likely TLAM targeting paths run across Japan and South Korea, rather than across North Korea, China, or Russia.
4. TLAMs of all varieties tend to suffer a failure rate somewhere north of 1%.
5. This presents the unacceptable risk that a TLAM-N could fail over the territory of a friendly country.

This argument seems sound to me, although I'm curious what other people think. One reason I find this case compelling is that I'm not convinced that the TLAM-N provides a capability that can't be replaced by alternative weapon systems. The precision and lethality of conventional weapons has increased since the development of the TLAM-N, and in any case the USAF and USN have alternative delivery systems for nuclear weapons, were such a need to arise.

I was also interested in this bit from Lewis' article, drawn from Rick Atkinson's Crusade:

For shooters from the Red Sea, the high desert of western Iraq was sufficiently rugged. But for Wisconsin and other ships firing from the Persian Gulf, most of southeastern Iraq and Kuwait was hopelessly flat. After weeks of study, only one suitable route was found for Tomahawks from the gulf: up the rugged mountains of western Iran, followed by a left turn across the border and into the Iraqi capital. Navy missile planners in Hawaii and Virginia mapped the routes and programmed the weapons. They also seeded the missiles’ software with a “friendly virus” that scrambled much of the sensitive computer coding during flight in case a clobbered Tomahawk fell into unfriendly hands. A third set of Tomahawks, carried aboard ships in the Mediterranean, were assigned routes across the mountains of Turkey and eastern Syria.

Not until a few days before the war was to begin, however, had the White House and National Security Council suddenly realized that war plans called for dozens and perhaps hundreds of missiles to fly over Turkey, Syria, and Iran, the last a nation chronically hostile to the United States. President Bush’s advisers had been flabbergasted. (“Look,” Powell declared during one White House meeting, “I’ve been showing you the flight lines for weeks. We didn’t have them going over white paper!”) After contemplating the alternative-scrubbing the Tomahawks and attacking their well-guarded targets with piloted aircraft — Bush assented to the Iranian overflight. Tehran would not be told of the intrusion. But on Sunday night, January 13, Bush prohibited Tomahawk launches from the eastern Mediterranean; neither the Turks nor the Syrians had agreed to American overflights, and the president considered Turkey in particular too vital an ally to risk offending.

This strikes me as a classic case of organizational procedure having high politics effect, reminiscent of Graham Allison's description of the naval blockade decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Put simply, organizations wrestling with tactical and operational problems often come to conclusions that are at odds with (and surprising to) political authorities wrestling with strategic and political problems. Because the Cuban Missile Crisis is kind of stale, I may use the above the next time I try to explain this concept in class.