Strategy in the New Missile Age

Abstract

Technological improvements have placed the world on the verge of a new missile age in which precision intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with conventional warheads will become useful and cost-effective weapons against many targets. Among great powers, this development will eliminate the sanctuary from conventional attack that distance from an enemy has historically provided. Using Monte Carlo simulations of conventional ICBM raids on bomber bases in the continental United States, I illustrate the damage these weapons could inflict on US power-projection capabilities and identify cost-exchange ratios that substantially favor the attacker. While these weapons will have limited effectiveness in nuclear counterforce, they will shift the conventional offense-defense balance in favor of offensive missile tactics, with important operational and strategic implications, including heightening the importance of the reconnaissance competition between hiders and finders, more complicated conventional-nuclear interactions, and potentially undermining the military foundations of US hegemony.

Enabled by improved long-range precision, the world is entering a new missile age. Missiles featured conspicuously in the three most prominent conflicts or potential conflicts of 2024–25. Iran and Israel directly attacked each other with conventional ballistic missiles.Footnote¹ Conventional ballistic missiles enabled Russian attacks on Ukraine’s interior, and Ukraine clamored for permission to use Western ballistic missiles to attack Russia.Footnote² China has created missiles for an Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy to counter US intervention in East Asia.Footnote³ No longer encumbered by Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the United States is fielding previously banned missile systems.Footnote⁴ The range at which states want to use precise conventional missiles is growing. The Department of Defense reported China may be pursuing conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).Footnote⁵ Russia fired an ICBM with multiple conventional warheads at Ukraine.Footnote⁶

The advent of precise, conventional ICBMs has the potential to upend high-end warfare and, therefore, geopolitics between great powers. The nuclear-armed ICBM—with its firepower, difficulty to defeat through defense, and effective elimination of geography—revolutionized warfare. Bernard Brodie foretold of these changes in “Strategy in The Missile Age.”Footnote⁷ For many targets, precise conventional ICBMs will similarly eliminate the physical sanctuary from attack that distance from an enemy historically provided, but without using nuclear weapons—removing the restraint nuclear weapons’ massive destructive power induces.

Strategists and scholars long dismissed the military utility of long-range ballistic missiles carrying conventional munitions. These missiles lacked the precision to reliably destroy targets. The world viewed conventional missiles as a terror weapon and either dismissed or valued for the political effects the terror generated.Footnote⁸

New developments should change that assessment. Within a decade, technological advances will enable great powers to build conventional ICBMs with sufficient precision at a cost low enough to be militarily relevant—at least against unhardened fixed targets and, if near-real-time reconnaissance remains available, relocatable targets. Between great powers, this development will eliminate the physical sanctuary that distance from an enemy alone provides these targets from conventional attack.

The vulnerability of targets to conventional ICBMs/elimination of sanctuary provided by distance will have profound strategic repercussions. First, conventional ICBMs create a first-strike advantage. The hider-finder balance will further affect this first-strike advantage because using conventional ICBMs against relocatable targets requires gathering targeting information at very-long distances. Second, conventional ICBMs will change inadvertent escalation dynamics; they will increase the riskiness of nuclear launch under attack postures even as they may also create pressure to abandon them. Third, they could threaten American military dominance and therefore American hegemony by providing states with a means of attacking the bases from which the United States generates combat power without first building an expensive American-style power projection force.

The article proceeds in five sections. First, after reviewing the relevant scholarship, the theory section explains the importance of physical sanctuary, introduces the precision-mass framework to explain why conventional ICBMs have not yet removed physical sanctuary from conventional attack, and analyzes the types of targets that precision makes vulnerable to conventional ICBM attack. The second section provides empirics in two parts. First, assessing the independent variable, it shows that technology exists to sufficiently improve ICBM precision to make attacks with conventional warheads effective. Second, a campaign analysis assesses the effect of precise conventional ICBMs on the dependent variable—target vulnerability/sanctuary—by examining the operational impact of conventional ICBM raids on the United States’ ability to project power in a Taiwan campaign. I run Monte Carlo simulations of preemptive raids on the US bomber force. These raids substantially reduce US capability. Hardened targets, namely, US ICBM silos, would likely withstand an attack. Because target sanctuary/vulnerability is an independent variable in prominent security studies debates, the third section analyzes the strategic impact of these weapons on three such debates: first-strike advantage, inadvertent escalation, and American military hegemony. The fourth section assesses potential barriers to adoption, including the cost-effectiveness of using missiles for these types of attacks and organizational resistance. The cost-exchange ratios substantially favor the attacker. The last section discusses ways states can unilaterally reduce their vulnerability to conventional ICBMs.

Debate Over Sanctuary and Missiles

While some have noted sanctuary’s decline, the potential impact of conventional ICBMs has received minimal attention. Analysts have claimed new technologies portend “the end of sanctuary” in the continental United States but have focused on non-kinetic attacks.Footnote⁹ Others have identified that conventional missiles will undermine sanctuary for forward bases.Footnote¹⁰ The debate has not yet discussed the implications of a global loss of sanctuary from conventional weapons.

The debate over the strategic value of missiles is mostly about sanctuary. It originates with the debate about nuclear-armed missile strategy. Core to nuclear strategy is coping with vulnerability, which is a consequence of the loss of physical sanctuary. Scholars still debate the “nuclear revolution,” which was a combination of technologies and doctrine that proponents claim fundamentally changed geopolitics between nuclear-armed states.Footnote¹¹ Nonetheless, all sides of the debate agree nuclear weapons are a technology with historically distinct attributes. However, the bundle of technologies that creates that distinctness comes from combining nuclear weapons and missiles.

Despite the importance of this combination, scholars long dismissed the value of conventionally armed missiles because of their limited payload and accuracy. Thomas Schelling called the V-2, the first ballistic missile, a weapon of intimidation rather than military utility because it lacked “a punitive pay load worth carrying.”Footnote¹² Steve Fetter argued similarly, focusing on conventional warheads’ lack of explosive power and inaccuracy.Footnote¹³

Nonetheless, as technology has improved, debate developed over the potential utility and strategic consequences of conventional missiles. Much debate questioned whether the United States should build long-range conventional missiles and how to deploy them.Footnote¹⁴ This debate noted the potential improvements in missile accuracy and highlighted the strategic risks and benefits of such systems. Because it focused on whether the United States should build these weapons and the consequences of the United States possessing them, it did less to consider the systemic implications of multiple states possessing them or the potential consequences of other states possessing them for the United States.

A second debate considered conventional missiles through a nuclear lens, primarily examining their implications for nuclear stability. This literature examines the potential for long-range conventional weapons to preemptively destroy nuclear forces and generate inadvertent escalation.Footnote¹⁵ Conventional ICBMs could drive inadvertent escalation either because of ambiguity about whether the missiles carried nuclear weapons or because of uncertainty about intended targets.

Some scholars have begun assessing how conventionally armed ballistic missiles might be useful outside the nuclear lens. Ayson and Leah conduct a thought experiment examining whether conventional missiles could substitute for nuclear missiles in generating deterrence in a world without nuclear weapons. They identify that missiles and nuclear weapons make independent contributions to deterrence but do not decompose those contributions or assess the operational use of conventional ICBMs.Footnote¹⁶

Jaganarth Sankaran accepts that inaccuracy prevents conventional ballistic missiles from being militarily useful but argues that scholars have overlooked their political value.Footnote¹⁷ Instead, missiles enable weaker states to force stronger states to divert resources or accept less favorable outcomes.Footnote¹⁸ By focusing on historical cases, however, Sankaran overlooks coming improvements in accuracy. It remains unclear if more accurate missiles could be more effective as military weapons.

Other scholars have applied the precision revolution to missiles, but do not address the implications of intercontinental-range conventional missiles. John Mauer and Fabian Hoffman have both analyzed the proliferation of precision strike, but mostly ignore ICBMs.Footnote¹⁹ Hoffman develops a framework of four ways in which precision missiles can have strategic effects, including attacks on conventional military forces that would upset the military balance. He calls for further research on what types of attacks might be most effective.

In summary, substantial uncertainty remains about the military utility of conventional ballistic missiles. Though nuclear strategy is a starting place for understanding the strategic value of conventional ICBMs, the scholarship has remained too focused on that lens. Scholars who have moved beyond that lens have built frameworks but have not analyzed the operational implications of conventional ICBMs. This omission is significant. States have only had to consider their worldwide vulnerability in the context of nuclear attacks. Precise conventional ICBMs will enable global attacks without first building a conventional power projection military. If conventional ICBMs eliminate physical sanctuary, they will have profound geopolitical effects.

Military and Strategic Value of Sanctuary

Technological improvements will soon enable conventional ICBMs to achieve sufficient precision, increasing the vulnerability of many targets and effectively eliminating physical sanctuary, with significant strategic repercussions. I present a theory that explains the operational value of sanctuary and use a mass-precision framework to explain why distance from an enemy has historically provided sanctuary. I apply this framework to create target categories and predict which targets will be vulnerable to precision conventional ICBMs. Although I focus on intercontinental-range conventional missiles, my argument has implications for shorter-range ballistic missiles, too.

Sanctuary is critical for generating power-projection forces. In a physical sanctuary, the defender has substantial advantages over an attacker because distance, geography, or defenses limit the military effects the attacker can deliver. Sanctuary is not immunity from attack. Bases and units with sanctuary operate without undue impact from enemy attacks. Although the United States successfully launched the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942, the attack had negligible military effects on its targets, and the United States could not repeat an air raid on Japan for years. Japan remained a sanctuary. A sanctuary may exist in the same physical space for some targets but not others. For example, a building may be vulnerable when a bunker beneath it is not.

Sanctuary is valuable because armed forces require bases from which they can generate forces (i.e., train, equip, stage, and repair). The larger and more undisturbed these bases, the more easily they can generate forces. As scholarship on World War II has demonstrated, without sanctuary, an economy can struggle to support a war, and armed forces struggle to train and repair.Footnote²⁰

Both defenses and distance from an enemy can provide sanctuary, but in the twentieth century distance became more important. For most of history, properly defended fortifications provided sanctuary. Armies could not attack inside the defended area without first overcoming the fortifications. Indirect fire artillery, airplanes, and self-propelled missiles elevated the importance of distance from the enemy as a source of sanctuary because airborne weapons could fly over front lines without first breaking-through them. This development increased the importance of distance from an enemy in providing sanctuary.

Distance provides physical sanctuary because military effect is more difficult to create at a distance.Footnote²¹ For projectiles, military effect is more difficult at a distance because the characteristics that create military effect—firepower, volume, and precision—become more difficult with distance. Firepower is the damage a single use of a weapon inflicts. Volume is how much of a weapon a military uses against an enemy. Precision is how close, on average, a weapon comes to its intended target. Many less-powerful weapons or a few more-powerful weapons can generate similar levels of destruction, so together, firepower and volume create military mass, which proxies physical destruction.Footnote²² Precision reduces the military mass required to generate a military effect by concentrating physical force at the desired point. Military mass can compensate for reduced precision. If an individual weapon produces a larger explosion, it can land further from its target and still damage it. If a military uses more weapons, the chance is greater that one of them will destroy the target.

Mass and precision are both difficult to create at a distance. Military mass is more difficult to generate at greater distances because it takes more energy to propel objects further. Generating and capturing energy safely to propel weapons has been a military engineering challenge for centuries. Available technology limits the projected physical mass, which limits firepower for a given explosive technology. The effect of distance on accuracy is similar. Without terminal guidance, the further a projectile must travel, the more difficult accuracy becomes, as anyone who has played catch can attest.

While ICBMs can attack targets at almost any range with little chance for effective defense, for most of their existence they could only produce military effect when armed with nuclear weapons, which constrained their military usefulness. ICBMs provide incredible reach. About 65% of the earth’s surface lies inside the US Minuteman III’s 13,000 nautical mile maximum range.Footnote²³ Defense against ICBMs after launch is very difficult because of the small size of their warheads, the speed and altitude at which they travel, and their use of countermeasures.Footnote²⁴ Because ICBMs can originate deep within the launching state, pre-launch preemption is difficult. ICBMs’ speed means attacks occur so quickly that leaders on the receiving side would have a minimal amount of time to respond.

Despite these strengths, for most of ICBMs’ existence, they have had two key weaknesses: limited payload and inaccuracy. Payload mass is a key factor in missile design and becomes more constraining as the missile’s range grows. Limited payload means limited firepower. Limited firepower together with inaccuracy limited ICBMs’ military effectiveness when armed with conventional weapons.

Nuclear weapons compensated for these two weaknesses. Nuclear warheads pack enormous destructive power into a small physical mass and volume. That destructive power compensated for ICBMs’ inaccuracy. Nuclear blast radii are large enough that inaccurate missiles could get sufficiently close to targets to destroy them, especially countervalue targets like cities.Footnote²⁵ Improvements in accuracy eventually made distant hardened targets vulnerable to nuclear attack.Footnote²⁶

Nuclear-armed ICBMs eliminated absolute physical sanctuary for all but the hardest targets. An attack became possible if a target’s location were known. Successful defense was virtually impossible. States could protect some valuable targets through mobility or hardening, but they relied on passive defensive measures rather than distance.

Paradoxically, nuclear weapons’ extraordinary destructive power limited their military usefulness. Extensive debate exists over the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. While scholars posit many reasons including a nuclear taboo, a tradition of non-use, the military inappropriateness of the weapon in specific situations, and the effectiveness of deterrence, almost all these arguments begin from an understanding that the speed and scale of destruction of a nuclear blast makes it different from other weapons.Footnote²⁷ These characteristics have led international lawyers to question the legality of nuclear weapons because of the disproportionate destruction they cause.Footnote²⁸ ICBMs could only generate military effect when paired with nuclear weapons, so while distance ceased to provide physical sanctuary, it still provided political sanctuary. A country could not use ICBMs to achieve military effect unless it were willing to risk international opprobrium, all-out war, and potential annihilation. Sufficiently precise conventional ICBMs would be militarily effective without requiring the overkill inherent in nuclear weapons. This difference makes them more usable and threats to use them more credible.

Precise conventional ICBMs would remove the absolute physical sanctuary that distance provides, but not all targets would be equally vulnerable. Assuming ICBMs employ coordinate-seeking guidance systems, three factors will determine which targets will lose physical sanctuary: target mobility, target hardness, and the attacker’s access to time-critical intelligence. Target mobility determines the importance of the other variables.

Consider three target categories differentiated by their mobility: mobile, fixed, and relocatable. Coordinate-seeking weapons cannot attack mobile targets. Mobile targets (i.e., ships at sea and transporter-erector-launchers [TELs]) are moving or can move on short notice. Defending militaries cannot generally harden mobile targets because the weight of hardening reduces mobility, but attacking militaries need time-critical intelligence to locate mobile targets for strike. Coordinate seeking weapons are of little use against mobile targets. Weapons for use against mobile targets require a seeker that can locate and track the target. Because striking mobile targets requires solving a different guidance problem, testing their vulnerability is outside the scope of this article.

Fixed targets will be vulnerable unless hardened. Fixed targets (i.e., buildings) cannot move without significant effort. Striking them requires little time-critical intelligence because attackers can locate them pre-conflict. Coordinate-seeking missiles with sufficient precision can hit them. Therefore, hardness will determine their survivability against conventional ICBMs. Conventional explosives are heavier per unit energy released than nuclear warheads. Because of missiles’ payload/cost limitations, physical constraints limit the damage individual conventional warheads can inflict. Since engineers have already hardened some infrastructure against nuclear attack, it is likely that similar hardening will protect against conventional attack. Additionally, the high speed of ICBM warheads’ reentry limits their ability to serve as penetrators; therefore, buried infrastructure is likely safe.Footnote²⁹ Sufficiently hardened fixed targets will be able to withstand conventional missile attack. Unhardened targets will be vulnerable.

Relocatable targets will be vulnerable if found and in unhardened locations. Relocatable targets combine aspects of fixed and mobile targets. They can move but spend most of their time in one location. Examples include aircraft, ships in port, and senior leaders (who spend substantial time in their headquarters). Because relocatable targets are usually stationary, coordinate-seeking weapons can attack them. Like mobile targets determining relocatable targets’ locations requires time-critical intelligence. Relocatable targets’ vulnerability is determined by the attacker’s ability to find them, and, once found, by the hardness of the locations where they sit. provides examples of relatively vulnerable and safe fixed and relocatable targets.

To assess these claims, I provide evidence for the shift in my independent variable, ICBM precision. I use the precision-mass framework to challenge the conventional wisdom and show that coordinate-seeking ICBMs with sufficient precision to make conventional warheads militarily useful are likely within the next decade. Second, I assess how increased precision affects my dependent variable, target vulnerability/sanctuary, and the potential operational impacts of that vulnerability. Although states could attack many types of targets with conventional ICBMs, I focus on military targets because scholars have seen ICBMs as least relevant to them. Moreover, conventional ICBMs are unlikely to substantially change the political effectiveness of targeting civilians.Footnote³⁰ I am assessing a near-future technology; as a result, no “real” data exists. Therefore, I employ a synthetic data-generating process, campaign analysis, to test my claims. Campaign analysis is appropriate because my hypotheses require assessing how conventionally armed ICBMs might affect the military and naval balance in a scenario of key political importance.Footnote³¹

The campaign analysis has two sections. The first evaluates the vulnerability of unhardened fixed and relocatable targets. It assesses the use of conventional ICBMs to attack US bombers in the continental United States. Currently, bombers at bases in the continental United States are unhardened, relocatable targets. Using bombers as targets allows evaluating the effects on fixed targets as well as on relocatable targets with limited target location uncertainty. Bombers are substantively important because they are key to American power projection. I vary the number of attacking missiles and reconnaissance conditions to evaluate the importance of ISR against relocatable targets. I illustrate the operational implications of such an attack by evaluating how estimated bomber losses would affect Taiwan’s defense.

The second section evaluates the vulnerability of hardened targets. I evaluate the survivability of nuclear ICBM silos under conventional ICBM attack. Designed to withstand most nuclear attacks, these silos are an example of achievable hardness for which public information is available. Substantively, these silos’ survivability has important strategic implications.

Precision ICBMs

Technological advances will enable sufficient precision that conventional ICBMs will be able to eliminate sanctuary. I focus on ballistic-trajectory missiles rather than hypersonic-glide vehicles (HGVs) because HGVs cost more and have longer flight times than ballistic missiles with depressed trajectories at intercontinental ranges.Footnote³² To eliminate sanctuary provided by distance, missiles must be precise enough that their warheads will likely detonate close enough to their targets for their blast to cause the desired effect. Two factors affect this requirement: (1) the level of damage required to achieve the desired effect and (2) the size of the area around the impact point that will suffer the required damage. The harder the target, the greater the blast needed to damage it. The larger the blast, the further a warhead can land from a target while still damaging it.Footnote³³

Effect of Conventional ICBMs on US Power Projection

Because the United States is far from other great powers and regions of interest, power projection has been central to its grand strategy since the 1940s. While all its armed services contribute to power projection, the US Air Force bombers are particularly flexible and powerful. Bombers played a key role in almost every US power projection campaign since World War II. They can rapidly attack anywhere on the planet from the continental United States. In 1991, the United States launched B-52 raids on Iraq from Louisiana.Footnote⁵⁵ Bombers also carry an outsized volume of firepower. In the 2003 Iraq War’s first month, the 43 bombers assigned to the operation flew only 505 of 20,733 (∼2.5%) strike sorties but struck a third of all aimpoints targeted.Footnote⁵⁶ While sometimes rotated forward, bombers’ range allows the Air Force to base them in the continental United States, ensuring it can generate combat power without risking conventional attack. Conventional ICBMs would remove this sanctuary.

To understand how ICBM raids would affect US bombers, I investigate hypothetical Chinese attacks on US bomber bases in the continental United States and assess their implications for the defense of Taiwan. This test is appropriate. The Department of Defense assesses China as its pacing threat and the defense of Taiwan as the pacing scenario. Moreover, China seeks to use precision conventional missiles for coercive leverage, and its military doctrine discusses conventional ICBM strikes against enemy homelands.Footnote⁵⁷ The Defense Department believes China may be pursuing conventional ICBMs.

I evaluate two raid sizes under different reconnaissance conditions using Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the damage to the bomber force.Footnote⁵⁸ I make assumptions favorable to bomber survivability, which biases the model against my argument. In all scenarios, the raids significantly degrade US capability.

In the simulations, China attacks with an improved DF-41 ICBM carrying conventional warheads on MaRVs with increased accuracy (CEP <30 m similar to the 1980s Pershing II). The DF-41 can carry 10 independently targetable reentry vehicles with a total payload of 2500 kg.Footnote⁵⁹ I assume submunition warheads like the American DPICM, which weighs 156.2 kg and covers a 100 × 200 m area with submunitions that both fragment and pierce armor. These warheads would leave a substantial weight margin for a guidance and maneuver package.Footnote⁶⁰

In the baseline scenario (Scenario A), China launches 11 DF-41s, the minimum number required to aim at least one warhead at each targeted bomber. I assume China has effective satellite reconnaissance, and, therefore, it knows the exact locations of individual aircraft. Bombers are relocatable, so pre-strike reconnaissance partially determines their vulnerability. In Scenario B, I assume degraded reconnaissance in which China knows a substantial number of aircraft are on each base but not their exact locations. China fires 26 DF-41s, the minimum number to blanket all potential parking areas and hangers on the bomber bases with cluster munitions if every warhead fired were to reach its aimpoint. Scenario C is a comparison in which China fires 26 DF-41s but has effective satellite reconnaissance and precisely targets each aircraft with multiple warheads. For each scenario, I conduct 100,000 simulations.

Strategy in a World without Sanctuary Due to Distance

Sanctuary/target vulnerability is an independent variable for at least three major security studies debates: first strike advantage; conventional-nuclear interactions; and US military hegemony. The shift in target vulnerability that conventional ICBMs will engender has implications for all. I discuss each in turn.

Barriers to Adoption

The forgoing analysis shows that a relatively small number of precise conventional ICBMs with multiple warheads could have outsize effects on the United States’s power projection capability, but ICBMs are incredibly expensive. Historically, cost—including both development and unit cost—have limited the success of otherwise game-changing innovations.Footnote⁸⁶ Artillery only spread quickly after iron replaced bronze, cutting the cost of guns by a factor of 12.Footnote⁸⁷ The dreadnought-era ended, in part, because they became so expensive that navies hesitated to risk them in battle.Footnote⁸⁸ Nuclear weapons spread less than expected in the 1950s, in part, because states found it more effective to find nuclear-armed allies than to develop and maintain nuclear weapons themselves.Footnote⁸⁹

The development and procurement costs of conventional ICBMs will likely limit their use to great powers. The research and development costs for precise ICBMs are astronomical. The development of the first US ICBM, the Atlas, took over four years from start to initial deployment and cost more than $21 Billion (2022 dollars)—almost as much as the cost of all the Atlas missiles ever purchased. The Peacekeeper, arguably the most advanced ICBM yet fielded, took 12 years and cost more than $31 Billion to develop (2022 dollars).Footnote⁹⁰ Only great powers can afford such costs. Moreover, since most great powers have already invested in ICBMs to deliver nuclear weapons, they can use this work to produce more accurate conventional ICBMs. States desiring to use conventional ICBMs will require robust, likely space-based, intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities to find targets for their missiles. Although commercial satellite reconnaissance capabilities continue to improve, maintaining effective space-based reconnaissance in conflict will likely remain limited to great powers for some time.Footnote⁹¹

While the unit costs of conventional ICBMs will be high, the investment will likely provide a substantial return, especially for states that do not already possess the infrastructure to project power at great distances. To show why, I assess the cost-exchange ratios of the simulated ICBM raids. In conflicts between great powers, cost-exchange ratios provide a key means of assessing the strategic balance. Cost-exchange ratios measure the relative resource intensity between two sides’ styles of fighting. Between similarly sized economies, the side winning the cost-exchange ratio has an advantage because it turns its resources into combat results more efficiently.

I assess the cost-exchange ratios of conventional ICBMs in two ways. First, I consider the cost of ICBM warheads versus potential defenses. Second, I consider the cost of warheads versus their targets. Assessing cost-exchange ratios requires an estimated cost for the scenario’s improved DF-41. The prices of Chinese weapons are notoriously opaque. Forecast International estimates the per-unit cost of the current DF-41 at $27 million, but because the Chinese state controls the entire missile sector, this price is a floor.Footnote⁹² I approximate an upper bound for the hypothetical improved DF-41 using the US Peacekeeper missile’s cost. After adjusting for inflation and adding a margin for increased accuracy, I estimate the per-unit cost of this article’s improved DF-41 at 354.31 million 2022 dollars.Footnote⁹³ This missile carries 10 warheads, so a warhead’s average procurement cost is $35.43 million (2022 dollars). This approach almost certainly overestimates the cost, but an overestimate is a harder test for the argument that missiles have favorable cost-exchange ratios.Footnote⁹⁴

This cost compares favorably to the cost of US active missile defenses against ICBMs. Many systems have a role in defending against missile attack, but with near future technology, only two have a real chance of blunting a conventional ICBM raid: passive defenses and long-range anti-ballistic missile missiles (ABMs).Footnote⁹⁵ Passive defenses encompass multiple approaches and many of those options have highly variable costs: construction costs for hardening depend on scale, location, and degree; the costs of dispersal depend on degree and number of bases, among other things. Costing them is beyond this article. For ABMs, however, a rough shot-for-shot estimate is possible. In the cost estimates that follow, I use 2022 dollars unless otherwise noted.

The United States has successfully tested two systems against ICBMs: GBIs and the Standard Missile (SM) 3 Block IIA. I assume ABMs must intercept each warhead individually. Discussions of MIRVed missiles’ advantage over ABM systems reference the “saturation of the defense system through high arrival rate of threat objects,” which implies MIRVs create more targets than single warhead missiles and that ABMs must engage each warhead separately.Footnote⁹⁶ Each GBI costs $70 million. Their next generation replacements cost $110 million.Footnote⁹⁷ SM3 Block IIAs cost $36.4 million.Footnote⁹⁸ These estimates come from the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. Since this organization advocates for missile defense, any bias should under-estimate the cost of the interceptors, which is unfavorable to my argument. All these interceptors cost more than an incoming warhead. If these defenses had perfect interception performance, they would be on the wrong side of the cost-exchange.

The interceptors, however, do not have perfect interception records. States classify missile intercept success estimates; therefore, I proxy ABM kill probabilities using their success rate in tests. This approach likely favors the missiles’ success. Test scenarios have been less demanding than actual combat. Also, for SM3 Block IIA, most tests were against less demanding medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles. Additionally, US ABMs are not designed to defeat Chinese and Russian ballistic missiles, which have more advanced countermeasures.Footnote⁹⁹ GBIs have a lifetime test success rate of 55.6%. SM3 Block IIA has a lifetime test success rate of 57.1%.Footnote¹⁰⁰ Assuming an effective defense requires an imperfect 90% overall probability of kill against an incoming warhead, it would, on average, take three interceptors to mount an effective defense against a warhead. A strong, but imperfect, chance of intercepting an incoming warhead would cost about $210 million using GBIs and about $109 million using SM3 Block IIA. An effective defense is almost four to eight times the cost of the incoming warhead.

The cost-exchange ratios become worse if we consider the systems these warheads target. The simulated attacks targeted B-1s and B-52s. A B-1 costs $317 million and a B-52 $104 million or roughly 9 and 2.9 times the cost of a warhead.Footnote¹⁰¹ The B-1B cost has no year, so the cost is uninflated, which underrates the cost in 2022 dollars. However, no manufacturers have produced either of these aircraft for decades. The Air Force plans to replace most of them with the new B-21. Unless the Air Force recreated a dead production line, it would replace lost aircraft with B-21s. The Air Force estimates the cost of the B-21 at $692 million, which is 19.5 times the cost of an incoming warhead.Footnote¹⁰² compares the cost of the attacking missiles to the cost of the GBIs expended in defense and the average number of aircraft destroyed in the simulated scenarios. The defender “loses” five to ten times the cost of the attacking missiles.

While technical advances, cost, and ability to achieve otherwise difficult military tasks favor the operational deployment of conventional ICBMs in the next decade, some states with the technical and financial resources to build them may not do so. Two barriers may prevent states from developing conventional ICBMs. First, the absolute cost of building such system is still high. Depending on a state’s level of military spending and other commitments, the high absolute cost of such weapons may mean they have a significant opportunity cost. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower Administration drove the initial American development of ICBMs. However, by 1957, that same administration proposed significant cuts to ICBM funding as part of its “Poor Man’s Approach” to defense.Footnote¹⁰³ Today, the US Navy has stated that building Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines has crowded out other investments.Footnote¹⁰⁴ Building a sizable long-range conventional missile force could require similar tradeoffs.

The second barrier, which high opportunity costs will exacerbate, is organizational politics. The degree an organization must change to implement an innovation is often a barrier to innovation.Footnote¹⁰⁵ Armed services are frequently averse to innovations that counter their “organizational essence.” The US Air Force’s resistance to ballistic missiles in the 1950s was an original example of this argument.Footnote¹⁰⁶ A missileer in an underground control center had less appeal than a dashing bomber pilot. Even today, missileers have less prestige and fewer promotions.Footnote¹⁰⁷ Little reason exists to believe that conventional ICBMs would be different. Both China and Russia have separate armed services for their ballistic missiles. This separation may help explain why China has such advanced conventional ballistic missiles.

Mitigating the Risks

States will have offensive, defensive, and political options to mitigate the risk of conventional ICBM attack. Offensive options will include preemptive strikes against conventional ICBMs, finding systems, and command and control nodes. Preemptive counterforce strikes using conventional ICBMs against conventional ICBM launchers will face the difficulties of nuclear counterforce strikes with the added challenge of less powerful conventional warheads with one key difference. Surviving conventional ICBMs will cause less damage in a retaliatory strike than equivalent nuclear ICBMs. Therefore, the immediate consequences of failure will be less; however, if such strikes start a great power war, the ultimate consequences may not be. Relying on offensive options will likely increase first-strike instability.

Defensive options can help reduce the attractiveness of conventional ICBM strikes. Without major unexpected increases in effectiveness (without similar increases in cost), active missiles defense seems unlikely to be cost effective. Passive defensives like hardening, dispersing, and hiding may be more effective. Hardening fixed targets and building hardened or buried shelters for relocatable targets like aircraft and ships in port may reduce their vulnerability. Increasing the dispersion and alert posture of garrison forces will also reduce their attractiveness as targets. The airbase attack previously presented assumed maximum on-base aircraft dispersion and a round-the-clock Cold War-style ground alert. Neither of these policies exists today, and without them simulated losses would have been significantly worse. Dispersing forces across additional bases will provide value in a degraded reconnaissance environment. Decoys and signature reduction (camouflage, emissions control training, etc.) will make relocatable targets harder to find.

Such measures have their own costs. Because the area a missile can reach increases with the square of its range, a small increase in range substantially increases the area a missile threatens. Forces must individually harden potential targets, and, therefore, requirements for hardening grow quickly. Some platforms cannot be hardened, a Bay of Biscay-style mega sub-pen to hold a Ford class carrier is unlikely. Dispersion and hiding increase costs and create organizational inefficiencies, so states try to avoid them.

Building cheaper ships and aircraft is another option. Cheaper targets could shift the cost-exchange calculus against missiles. Less expensive weapons could yield other advantages. If weapons systems were cheaper because they were smaller, it might be easier to hide them. Lower weapon costs could enable building larger quantities, enabling dispersion. These options will reduce a conventional ICBM strike’s attractiveness thereby reducing its first-strike advantage.

While these options will help armed forces fight more effectively in a world with conventional ICBMs, they will not remove missiles’ effects. The “modern system” re-enabled offensive operations against the immense firepower of the twentieth century battlefield, but it did not return the cavalry charge to primacy.Footnote¹⁰⁸ As with other major technological developments, a new equilibrium will develop as states invest in missiles and countermeasures. Countermeasures will reduce conventional ICBM’s impact for states that adapt them.

States can also attempt to replace physical sanctuary with political sanctuary. Political sanctuary—created through deterrence, norms, or other inducements—uses politics to create spaces adversaries do not believe are worth attacking. The inescapable vulnerability to nuclear weapons that characterized the first missile age spawned modern deterrence theory in pursuit of political sanctuary. However, political sanctuary is almost always inferior to physical sanctuary. Physical sanctuary places some geography out of an adversary’s military reach. It simply cannot be directly attacked.

Political sanctuary is subject to political calculation. Without physical sanctuary, whether to strike vulnerable targets becomes a function of their operational and strategic value and the political consequences of striking them. Conventional ICBMs will shift the protection of many targets from being a (solved) military problem to being a political problem. Creating political sanctuary will require additional political effort and costs. Because precise conventional ICBMs will create less collateral damage and avoid the normative costs of nuclear weapons, the political costs of using them will likely be lower and political sanctuary more difficult to create. States that do not adopt defensive military measures will be disadvantaged in these political efforts.

Conclusion

Improvements in precision will make conventional ICBMs practical weapons. For many targets, these missiles will eliminate the sanctuary from conventional attack provided by distance from an enemy, with profound strategic effects. Assuming these missiles have coordinate seeking guidance, mobile targets will remain relatively safe. Fixed targets will become vulnerable unless hardened. Relocatable targets will be vulnerable if near real-time ISR is available. While the cost of these missiles and their enabling systems will remain high, for great powers these missiles will be able to generate operationally relevant effects under wartime conditions at favorable cost-exchange ratios.

The operational impact of these weapons will have significant strategic implications. Major power projection weapons systems will become vulnerable to attack in their home bases. As the simulations of bomber base raids illustrated, conventional ICBMs could shift the military balance in a Taiwan scenario in outcome effecting ways. Such vulnerabilities are not limited to bombers but also apply to other power-projecting weapons systems, such as transport aircraft, tankers, and ships in port.

Some countermeasures may reduce the effects of missiles, but these measures will change the way armed forces train, equip, and organize. Hiding, deception, and decoys may make it more difficult to find targets and therefore attack them. Building cheaper weapons may shift cost exchange ratios against conventional ICBMs. Hardening will likely remain effective against conventional ICBMs. Without significant cost and performance improvements, active defenses seem unlikely to provide a solution. Regardless of which countermeasures prove most effective, it will be necessary to prepare areas beyond current missile ranges for attack.

The strategic effects will be significant. Because of their attack speed, conventional ICBMs are a weapon with first strike advantage. Because of their almost unlimited reach, the hider-finder balance will become an important determinant of survival, especially for mobile and relocatable targets. If ISR systmes are not survivable or resilient, the first-strike advantage will be significantly accentuated. Conventional ICBMs may also affect the risks of escalation because of their potential ambiguity with nuclear weapons and their disaggregation of nuclear and geographic thresholds. More research is needed to confirm the direction of these effects. Finally, conventional ICBMs will provide a way to bombard targets at great distances without first building a power-projection infrastructure similar to that of the United States. This development has the potential to undermine the United States’s global military hegemony.

The decline of physical sanctuary from conventional attack will expand the space requiring political action to for protection. The ability to use military power to create areas physical sanctuary essentially removes the ability of an adversary to use military force effectively in that space. Those spaces were secure without politics. Conventional ICBMs will shift the challenge of creating security for newly vulnerable spaces from being a principally military problem to a principally political problem. States will need to rewrite policies, strategies, and plans that rely on sanctuary. States and militaries facing great powers must learn to operate under the threat of conventional missile attack anywhere in the world. Those that do not will pay a steep price.

Acknowledgments

Particular thanks for helpful comments on earlier versions to Nick Anderson, Matt Cancian, Jon Caverley, Jim Fitzsimonds, Eric Higginbotham, Craig Koerner, Rachel Metz, Bill Murray, Daryl Press; participants in workshops at the International Studies Association annual meetings in 2023 and 2024, the MIT Security Studies Working Group, and the Military Force Analysis Seminar; and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

2 Paula Bronstein, “Putin’s Power Play,” CNN.Com, 24 February 2023, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/02/europe/putin-ukraine-energy-infrastructure-attack/index.html; Adam Entous, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes, “Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia with Long-Range U.S. Missiles,” The New York Times, 17 November 2024, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-atacms-missiles.html.

3 John Tirpak, “B-1s Can Make It to Finish Line, But Big Repairs Will Be Common Along the Way,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, January 3, 2021, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/b-1s-can-make-it-to-finish-line-but-big-repairs-will-be-common-along-the-way/; Shelley Mesch, “Boeing Leads Two Programs Overhauling Air Force’s Oldest Operational Bomber,” Inside Defense, June 1, 2023, https://insidedefense.com/share/218157; David Axe, “The U.S. Air Force Is Gradually Rebuilding Its B-52 Bombers From The Rivets Out,” Forbes, September 27, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/09/27/the-us-air-force-is-gradually-rebuilding-its-b-52-bombers-from-the-rivets-out/.

16 Missile Defense Project, “JASSM / JASSM ER,” Missile Threat, Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 30, 2021, https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/jassm/. T.J May and Mike Pietrucha, “We Already Have an Arsenal Plane: It’s Called the B-52,” War on the Rocks, June 22, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/we-already-have-an-arsenal-plane-its-called-the-b-52/.