COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - A study of a follow-on ICBM will begin in 2003 or 2004 and all basing modes will be considered, according to Brig. Gen. William L. Shelton, director of plans and programs for Air Force Space Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base here.
"We will begin an analysis of alternatives within the next year or two to determine what the follow-on ICBM should look like," Shelton told The DAILY.
The formal name, he said, is "'follow-on land-based nuclear deterrent' because we want to open the aperture and consider all possibilities, all basing modes. The mission really is deterrence, so ... we're looking at the optimum way to accomplish that mission."
Air Force Space Command's recently completed "Strategic Master Plan for for FY '04 and Beyond," for which Shelton is responsible, calls for deactivation of Peacekeeper ICBMs in the near term and sustainment of the Minuteman III through 2020. The Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review of a year ago says the Air Force also must begin "the requirements process for the next-generation ICBM."
Overall, Shelton said, "we're in pretty good shape in ICBMs. The things that really make us scratch our head are more in the space area."
Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, indicated as much in his introduction to the master plan. "We may not be able to do everything we want to do in space," he wrote, not mentioning ICBMS. "Technology, budgets and other challenges will limit us, but we will strive to overcome these challenges and limitations."
One of the biggest challenges in the space field, Shelton said, is achieving relatively inexpensive, on-demand space lift. "That's kind of the holy grail we've been chasing for quite a while," he said. "We'd like to reduce the cost of lift, and we'd like for it to be operationally responsive. [But] trying to attain that ... in a resource-constrained environment [is] very difficult."
Less challenging but still revolutionary, Shelton said, is space-based tracking of terrestrial moving targets, another goal of the master plan.
"I'm going to revert to a personal opinion here, but I think there are a lot of us who believe that that is truly a revolutionary capability, perhaps on the order of GPS," he said. "When we first got into GPS, we had no idea exactly how pervasive that would become, not only for military operations but in our normal day-to-day lives. We believe that a space-based radar capability has that same kind of potential.
"We're making good progress in that technology," he continued. Joint STARS, "for example, does that now" from the air. "So you take that technology ... to space, and yes, you have to develop some electronically steerable arrays that are space qualified, and work the power problems ... and [develop] the computing capability, but we think we're making good progress in that." The master plan calls for introduction of at least one transformational capability in each of Air Force Space Command's five basic mission areas (DAILY, Dec. 12).
Shelton said it also emphasizes sustainment and modernization, and demonstrates linkages to the Air Force's new task force concepts of operation. These "conops" stress "capabilities-based planning and programming," Shelton said. He listed the seven conops as: global strike; homeland security; global response; global mobility; C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance); nuclear response; and air and space expeditionary.
"Our capabilities across the Air Force are bucketed, if you will, into these seven conops, and everything that we do then is judged against those," he said.
Shelton, who assumed his position as director of plans and programs in June, said his inputs to the master plan delayed it somewhat.
"To be brutally honest with you," he said, "I changed a lot of things after I came into the job. I wanted a different kind of document. If you look at the '02 document, it's pretty thick and intimidating. I wanted the plan to be readable in one sitting with appendices so that people could really read the thing and get an idea of where we were going from a broad brush, and then the details that you needed to really drive the program you could get out of appendices."
Work on the next master plan, for fiscal 2006 and beyond, already has begun and should be completed by Oct. 1, 2003, Shelton said. He said this will be timely because efforts on the FY '06 Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, will begin in December 2003 and run through April 2004. One purpose of the master plan, published at regular intervals, is to help structure the POM.
