Book review: Assured Destruction

Assured Destruction: Building the Ballistic Missile Culture of the U.S. Air Force   

by David Bath (2020: Naval Institute Press, 238pp.)    

DISCLAIMER: As with all my posts, these are solely the personal opinion of a freelance writer and do not represent the views or policies of any agency or company.

I spent four years in the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) culture involved here, so I was eager to read this when I saw it.  This is an academic study, so there’s a bit of dry reading in spots, but Bath has poured a wealth of information and insight into this book. This is the first book to analyze the missile culture from the beginning through the 1960s. It’s a short book as well, since the notes and index take up 87 pages. Despite that, and despite my being a missile officer and something of a historian myself, there’s plenty here I didn’t know.  

The section on building the first missiles and getting them into units is the most fascinating. There was no consensus in the 1950s about whether ICBMs would work or how long it would take to make them useful. The Air Force’s General Curtis LeMay, though not quite the irrational missile-hater of legend, was one of many officers who thought it folly to divert significant resources to what they saw as an unproven, inaccurate weapon that would never have the flexibility of airpower. (To be fair, it still doesn’t.) Despite sentiments like these, by mid-decade the nation was on course to deploy long-range ballistic missiles, and the Army, Navy, and Air Force all wanted to field them.

Considering the author’s extensive background, it’s really odd to read here that Vanguard, strictly a satellite launch vehicle, was a “missile,” and that the first military satellite launch was the Atlas-based Project SCORE in December 1958: in fact, the Army had already orbited three Explorers with modified Redstone missiles. (I can’t help noting that, to get these right, he could have just read my book The First Space Race.)

With the Army limited to shorter-range missiles and the Navy pursuing its own Polaris, the Air Force’s rush to get the first Atlas declared operational (done on 31 October 1959) resulted in shortcuts, confusion about command relationships, and constant changes and fixes. All this eventually led to the logistical nightmare of having three variants in use simultaneously. The system was commanded by pilots pulled from the bomber force as a rotational tour, not a career.  The Atlas force never quite erased the effects of its various birth pains before it was retired in 1965.    

Air Force ICBM forces as of January 1962 had a mere 23 missiles on alert. During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, that was increased to 132 with superhuman efforts to make even training and test missiles ready by any means, including bypassing tests and safety features. After the crisis, though, missileers found they had not changed many minds in Air Force leadership about their value. 

The 1960s were as tumultuous for missiles as they were for the rest of the military. As pilots were pulled from everywhere to go to Vietnam, the experience and rank of crewmembers plummeted until second lieutenants did what had been thought the jobs of majors.  As Bath documents, the dominance of aviation in the Air Force’s command structure grew even stronger, leaving missile officers with few career options and an extremely small chance of being promoted past colonel. There was no consideration to publicly, organizationally, or financially recognizing missile crews for arduous duty or to give them the status of “rated officers” like pilots. (We all felt when I was on crew that that this second-class status existed, so it's nice to know Bath agrees.)  I expected a bit more discussion about how the culture was shaped by the responsibilities of handling nuclear weapons. My experience was that no two people dealth with this exactly the same way, but we knew what we were doing: by the time I went through training in 1982, at least, they showed us graphic images of the victims of nuclear destruction in Japan.   

Bath’s account of the missile force, oddly, almost entirely ignores the Titan II system I served in. All the post-Atlas discussions of morale, training, and operations are about Minuteman units.  The Titan II was a very different system, with its complex liquid-fuel missiles and its mixed crews (two officers, two enlisted) and it provided the nation’s hard-target kill force until retired in the 1980s. Every day in the history he traces, there were 216 crewmembers on duty in Titan, 200 in Minuteman.  It’s a puzzling oversight as well as a personal annoyance. 

Bath concludes the Air Force erred enormously by leaving the missile field essentially static and definitely secondary to airpower for essentially the entire history of ICBMs.  He notes some UAV/RPA pilots have the same feeling today, despite the fame of weapons like Predator. ICBMs will be on duty until 2050 and probably longer. Bath’s book will hopefully be widely read and will help leaders understand better the uniqueness of  the ICBM force.