The Sensor Gap and Open Skies

Aaron Stein 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk website, as well as an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a PhD candidate at King's College.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com. And I am a scholar at the Monterey Institute, or at least I think I am. I can't see anything, Aaron. We're fogged in.

Aaron 0:28

I wanted to point out that how does it feel to be at a very small institute? It sounds grandiose when you say it on the podcast, but our last podcast, you seem to work for a small institution.

Jeffrey 0:41

If you're listening, in our last podcast, we discussed some of the articles I and some colleagues have been writing about Burma and the Burmese government. When asked about them, before moving on to other attacks, said they don't respond to claims of small organizations.

Aaron 1:01

It's nice.

Jeffrey 1:01

I like to think we're nimble.

Aaron 1:03

Maybe quaint.

Jeffrey 1:06

There's a quaint quality here. Yeah. Yeah, Monterey is like the 1970s, which is kind of nice.

Aaron 1:12

Yeah.

Jeffrey 1:13

Yeah.

Aaron 1:13

Maybe like Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, where I'm from. But anyways, moving on again to... Yeah, we're not here to talk about Burma today. No, we're here to talk about open skies and aircraft and sensors. And all that fun stuff.

Jeffrey 1:28

Hey, you know what you have to clarify? You have to clarify, which I discovered Googling. We're talking about the arms control open skies, not the civil aviation open skies.

Aaron 1:40

I discovered that today, too, for my research for this podcast today. There's a couple. So we're the arms control side of open skies. And there's a narrow problem emerging within... The aircraft or the sensor suite used to conduct these missions. And it seems like the Russians, we may have a sensor gap emerging in terms of this treaty.

Jeffrey 2:05

We must not allow a sensor gap.

Aaron 2:07

Nope. So I think you have a better sense of what's going on behind the scenes about this looming sensor gap in terms of this verification or the verification arm of the treaty and what we should do about it in the United States.

Jeffrey 2:21

Right. Well, I should say, so there is a treaty. And the treaty provides for the – it's a treaty that dates to the end of the Cold War. But it provides for the U.S. and our allies. And the Russians, who are more or less out of allies now, to fly surveillance flights over one another to do things like monitor military buildups.

So it's a confidence-building measure. And the treaty, like all treaties, has these really complicated provisions describing the sensors that you can have on aircraft. And the Russians have a new aircraft with a brand new sensor suite. And the Obama administration has to decide whether or not to approve the use of that Russian aircraft. And that's a sticky, sticky question right now.

Aaron 3:14

Yeah, no. I mean, there are a couple issues that come up with that. I mean, A, how did the Russians get the drop on us? Or did they even get the drop on us? And two, why are we lagging behind in terms of having our own sensors to basically go after or just do these treaty-allowed open flights over Russian territory to take pictures of military bases, etc., etc.

? What's going on?

Jeffrey 3:46

Well, so that's the problem. The problem is that... Well, I should say, if you read the press, and this is mostly getting picked up in the conservative press, the president's political opponents are saying he must not allow this new Russian spy plane to fly over the United States. And it nicely dovetails with some of the kind of black helicopter rhetoric and that kind of stuff.

But the real problem is that the Russians have a new plane and we don't. Right. So the Russians have been working on this plane. There's actually a really nice briefing that they gave at one of the Open Skies meetings in 2010. So this is like a surprise to no one. But we just now have started to invest in our own new aircraft, which means if the Obama administration approves this aircraft, then the Russians will have a better sensor set until our new sensor set comes online.

And ours is not scheduled to reach initial operational capability until 2017 and not supposed to be fully ready until 2018. Knowing how defense programs work, the real answer is it'll be ready sometime after that. So we're spotting them five years, six years, seven years of having better open skies aircraft. And I think that's a hard thing for an administration to swallow, even if the Russians got the advantage fair and squared by just being more clever than we are.

Aaron 5:21

Right. I mean, but the administration has not done itself any favors. I mean, granted, open skies is not a very sexy topic, even, I would say, for us arms control people. But clearly they haven't pushed for... Oh, speak for yourself, Aaron. Well, it's a very important aspect.

Jeffrey 5:38

I've got a big poster of a... No, I don't.

Aaron 5:42

Well, you know, what happened? I mean, the Obama administration, what was the... The events that led up to just to not build a new sensor suite for aircraft.

Jeffrey 5:55

So this makes me crazy because I saw in early 2012 the Obama administration signed a presidential policy directive. These are the big policy decisions that the president signs on implementation of the Open Skies Agreement. And so presumably that policy Document contains some plan forward to catch up to where the Russians are. I have been asking the administration, including on Twitter of all places, to please release an unclassified fact sheet.

And they won't do it. You know, they basically give you the thank you for your interest in national security. And so at this very moment when they're getting kicked around for having been asleep at the switch, the document that presumably, and you can sort of see in some of the government, some of the budget documents, the PPD that presumably suggests no, they've been seized of this issue for a couple of years and they're trying to work on it, they won't even issue an unclassified fact sheet.

So, you know, Even their friends can't defend them.

Aaron 7:04

I'm curious. I mean, obviously we've fallen a little bit behind in the sensor capabilities. And that suggests that either, A, the administration, I mean, I guess wasn't asleep at the wheel but didn't push for it very hard. But there are other ways in which this aircraft could have been pushed forward, either from the Department of Defense or the Department of State.

I think it speaks to, A, why do we even care if the Russians have a little bit better sensor capabilities than we do for the next five years? And I think a more broader question of, and I think it's one of the questions that has followed this treaty for a while, is why does it even matter with satellite capabilities and all of the intelligence capabilities that are out there right now?

Jeffrey 7:50

Right. So the historical reason for open skies is beautifully summed up in this kind of crusty language of this 1950s Iran document, where the person who wrote it was pointing out that the Soviets were much better at keeping secrets than we were. And so his argument was we needed open skies over the Soviet Union to counteract our open mouth policy.

Right. You know, which is famously parodied in Dr. Strangelove, where the Soviet ambassador tells some sort of classified information, which causes a little bit of a ruckus. And he says, I read it in the New York Times.

Aaron 8:30

So.

Jeffrey 8:34

You know, it is absolutely, I think, the case that the Open Skies Agreement is far more in our interest than it is in the Russian interest, just because it's, like, way easier for them to get information about us and have people roam around with cameras and things. So, you know, at least from my perspective, I would think the agreement is so far tilted in our favor, at least in terms of the broad fundamental interest, that I can't imagine...

The marginal difference of them having a slightly better censor suite for a few years is worth handing the Russians an excuse to kill the treaty.

Aaron 9:19

Well, I mean, you've slightly foreshadowed where we're going with this. A, the timing of the request, even though they put the... The plane schematics out or they briefed DITRA on it in, what, 2010?

Jeffrey 9:32

Oh, they briefed an open skies meeting. You can actually go. We'll put the link on the blog. There's a lot, pictures of the aircraft, them building it, diagrams. Yeah, they gave a whole briefing on it in 2010.

Aaron 9:44

Yeah. It's not exactly as if this was a clandestine project and all of a sudden was thrust upon and we're left with a diplomatic fait accompli. It's been years in the making.

Jeffrey 9:53

Yeah. So before we get to the foreshadowing, let's pause on this for a second. Right. Like how is it that they give this briefing in June of 2010 and we don't get presidential guidance saying, hey, we got to get ourselves one of those until like March 2012. Right. And then we don't see significant money in the budget until this year, FY 2015.

There was a little bit of money last year, like a million bucks, but there's actual money now in the budget. How does that take five years?

Aaron 10:30

I don't know. I have an answer. No, to me it suggests that maybe they aren't all that concerned about it, but maybe I'm just being naive. If you have the answer, I'm all ears.

Jeffrey 10:42

Well, I have a worry. So whenever we talk about the decisions of governments, we imagine that they are like a person and that that person is reasonable and farsighted and possessed of all of the relevant information so that the government makes decisions like it's in a textbook. But I don't know about you, Aaron, but my experience with the actual government is – The federal government works about the same way that your local DMV does and works about it as well.

Aaron 11:17

They're pretty good, my local DMV.

Jeffrey 11:19

Their online system is good. For listeners in the United States, different experience. Well, growing up, you must have had a terrible DMV.

Aaron 11:28

Yeah.

Jeffrey 11:29

So the Clinton administration, as it was seeking to secure the, seeking to secure, when the Clinton administration submitted the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty to the Senate for ratification, at the same time, the defense budget led by the Air Force Planned for the retirement of the constant Phoenix aircraft that would have verified the treaty, which is crazy to imagine retiring this incredibly useful system at the very moment that you're trying to get this treaty ratified.

And that suggested to me that there isn't really a... There isn't an advocate in the US government for verification issues. And there was supposed to be, right? The Bush administration reorganized the State Department's arms control functions. And I was not crazy about reorganization, as I am often not crazy about many things the Bush administration did. But one good thing they did on a bipartisan basis was they created something called the Bureau of Verification, Compliance, and Implementation, VCI.

And it was supposed to be primarily concerned with verification. It was supposed to be the advocate within the system for verification. But they also killed off any arms control function. And so when the Obama administration came on, they quite sensibly restored the arms control function, but they did it by adding it to VCI. So VCI became, sadly, AVC.

It's actually Arms Control Verification and Compliance, so it should be ACVC, which would be awesome. But it's AVC. But by adding in the arms control function, you no longer have a... People who are negotiating and then people who are advocating for verification. You have a single entity that does both. And so I think at the moment there isn't a strong advocate for verification in the system.

Aaron 13:38

It doesn't mean that individual people in the system aren't strong advocates.

Jeffrey 13:42

They probably are pushing super hard. And I don't know whether this is state didn't push or DOD didn't push or state and DOD did push but the White House didn't listen. But it's not a system, I think, that's designed for a strong advocate of verification.

Aaron 13:56

Sorry, a little VCI pitch. No, and I think it speaks to what you were saying earlier and something we've talked about before in the podcast. The administration is also not doing itself any favors. By not declassifying the PPD and at least giving people who like the treaty and who say, well, hey, we can live with the five-year gap.

We should keep the treaty going. They have no ammunition. Right.

Jeffrey 14:22

There's no capacity to say this administration has a plan because they are desperate to keep their plan classified. And the only hint we have comes from the budget documents where somebody at DOD wrote in, PPD 15 calls for us to invest in this new sensor package. But that's the only reason we know anything.

Aaron 14:41

Yeah. I don't think the Russians are as smart to think that they could – or had this grand master strategy because, again, they put out the – I guess they first briefed about it in 2010. But the timing now comes at a time of increased tensions between our two countries.

Jeffrey 14:58

It's awkward.

Aaron 14:59

It's awkward. It's sort of a it's not you, it's me, but we need to talk about this thing going on right now.

Jeffrey 15:04

It's in the middle of the greatest crisis between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War. Yeah. They're asking to fly a new spy plane.

Aaron 15:14

And on top of all that, we have a sensor gap.

Jeffrey 15:16

Yeah, right.

Aaron 15:17

You know.

Jeffrey 15:18

Better spy plane. Yeah.

Aaron 15:20

I mean, that's just, one, that's embarrassing. I mean, as an American, we should always have the best. And two, like, we shouldn't let these things just fall through the cracks. But I'll leave that for another podcast. Do you think there was anything to this timing in the request? Do you think it was, you know, there's something more to it?

Jeffrey 15:42

Well, I'll tell you this. They could have held off, right? I mean, they could well, if they wanted things to blow over, have said, hey, we'll fly the old aircraft for a little bit longer, right? But they are really... Forcing Obama to either take the political hit of letting them fly this new, better aircraft, which just sounds terrible, right?

Because your average person is going to hear the Obama administration is letting the Russians fly new spy planes all over our allies, right? Which is like, that just sounds awful. Or hand the Russians a gold-plated invitation to leave the treaty. And as we discussed off mic, I am very concerned. I mean, we've seen the Russians have basically stopped complying with the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.

I think they are in, should I say, serious violation of the INF Treaty. They certainly are doing things that call into question the viability of the INF Treaty. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. They won a new START arms control agreement that eliminated many of the most important verification measures that were in the old START treaty. So they've pretty systematically reduced The restrictions imposed through arms control on the two sides.

So it wouldn't surprise me if the Russians, who don't have the world's greatest compliance record with the Open Skies Treaty, aren't looking for a way out.

Aaron 17:34

Yeah, and it raises these compliance issues that we've talked about as well. I mean, there are I guess, talks on these concerns on the Russian side that they are perhaps using the treaty, even if they're not trying to get out of it, maybe using the treaty as a method to get, at least in the eyes of the treaty, recognition to some of their, let's say, new territory they've acquired in recent, I don't know, controversially acquired territories.

Jeffrey 18:07

Before we go there, because that's totally where we should end, we should talk about the other two. So there are three ways that they've been posing compliance challenges in open skies. So one is they have a corridor over central Moscow, and they won't let us fly over it, which I think is very Russian. Because basically they don't want the aircraft flying over the Kremlin.

Which goes right to that kind of special paranoia that Russian leaders have about the sanctity of their top leadership. And so they impose all of these restrictions. It used to be called, I think, UUP-33, but now it's been redesignated UUP-53. It's a section of Moscow. And then the second one is they won't let us fly over Chechnya.

Aaron 19:05

That's a peachy place. I'm sure there's something to see there.

Jeffrey 19:08

Right. But then there is the one you mentioned, which is the interesting one, which is Georgia. So the Russians... The treaty, for obvious reasons, doesn't allow you to fly missions within, I think it's 10 kilometers of the border of a state that's not party to the treaty, which makes sense, right? You shouldn't be able to use the treaty to like, oh, I don't know, you know, I'm going to fly over Russia, but I'm actually looking at China, right?

And so the problem that that raises is what happens when we want to fly over the... Border between Georgia and Russia, which, you know, we're interested in because the Russians have a tendency to build up forces and attack the Georgians. The Russians say, oh, go ahead. No, no, I wouldn't call it attack. They're protecting, they're protecting their own kin. Yes, that's right. It's preemptive. It's responsibility to protect. Jeffrey, it's a concept that's been around since 1994. Can you, is there, can you say R2P in Russian?

Aaron 20:20

I don't speak Russian, but I'm sure there's a way.

Jeffrey 20:24

So this is the problem. The Russians claim that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are an independent country, which nobody else recognizes, so they won't let anybody fly within 10 kilometers of those areas, which drives the Georgians crazy. So the Georgians now just don't let the Russians fly any flights over Georgia. Yeah. They use the treaty to reinforce their claims that these countries are somehow independent, which could be very interesting.

Aaron 21:01

Which brings us to the elephant in the room, I guess.

Jeffrey 21:04

Yeah, right. Our friends in Donetsk with the balaclavas and the cigarettes and the ice cream cones who say they're an independent country.

Aaron 21:13

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 21:16

Are the Russians – if instead of annexing those, they simply say they're independent and then they deny flights, where are we? What do we do?

Aaron 21:35

No, I mean it raises a lot of issues here. And you know what I always found funny? Because I lived in Turkey for three and a half years. Open skies is a really big deal for the Turks. It was always widely reported in the news when they would conduct an overflight.

Jeffrey 21:51

Why?

Aaron 21:52

I don't know. It was always something that was baffling to me. It was always in the news. Turkish spy plane takes off for Russia. So my point is that I do think a lot of the allies, the NATO allies, still value this treaty. I think we should, A, admit that we dropped the ball. The Russians have put us in this difficult spot, but I think we should still allow for the overflights of our territory.

So with the condition that, A, we continue to upgrade our own center suite so that we don't, A, give the Russians a way out if they want, and B, understand that maybe they beat us on this one, but we'll try to catch up. And that it's in our long-term interest for all the allies, all the signatories to keep it in place.

Jeffrey 22:41

So I absolutely agree with you, but I have a nightmare scenario.

Aaron 22:46

Oh, what's the nightmare scenario?

Jeffrey 22:47

So what if... We approve. So the president approves the new aircraft, takes the political beating for doing so. The Russians fly the new aircraft and the normal delays happen. And so we finally get our new sensor package, say, around 2020, right? The two year delay. So they get a full six years of flying this aircraft. And then we present to them our new aircraft with our new sensor package.

And they turn around and say, you know, we never really liked this treaty anyway. No.

Aaron 23:28

That's true, which raises something that, again, during my studying up on this, and we talked about a little bit, it's this – Taxi provision in the treaty.

Jeffrey 23:38

Yeah, I love this that you explained and I can't believe it's true, but go for it.

Aaron 23:43

You know, again, I was looking in an old Rand report about open skies. And according to this report, and if I'm wrong, I mean, please tell me in the comments because it raised some questions in my mind, the state there's a taxi option whereby the inspected nation can insist on providing the aircraft. I'm not sure if that's true.

Maybe I'm not reading it right. But I think if we wanted to play a little hardball, maybe we insist on the taxi provision for a little while and ask the Russians to use our own aircraft.

Jeffrey 24:18

So I actually, after you pointed this out to me, because I had no idea, I looked up the provision. And it turns out it is a delicious irony. So I will read you what the State Department says about this.

Aaron 24:33

Okay.

Jeffrey 24:34

At the insistence of the Soviets, who were concerned that observation aircraft of other nations might contain clandestine sensors, the host nation was given the right to require that its own state aircraft, flight crew, and sensors be used for the overflights. This came to be known among the treaty's negotiators as the taxi option.

Aaron 24:53

There you go.

Jeffrey 24:54

We have a way out. And it was their idea.

Aaron 24:58

So this is my policy proposal to the Obama administration. We say no. But we invoke the taxi option and we make them fly our own aircraft until we get our sensors caught up with them. And that way we force their hand about whether they want to accept it or not.

Jeffrey 25:16

I'm not prepared to endorse the idea after having only thought about it for five minutes, but it does have a certain charm, I will admit.

Aaron 25:23

I'm happy to be proven wrong, again, because I was reading it over and I couldn't believe it's true. Maybe it does provide a way out, and maybe it provides a way to play a little diplomatic hardball with the Russians.

Jeffrey 25:36

Pick the least appealing aircraft we could possibly find.

Aaron 25:40

They could fly the same one we fly over them, but... Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's a really viable option. I think, all joking aside, I still think we should test them. And your nightmare scenario aside, I'm not sure how much we lose if they have a slightly better sensor package than we do for five years.

Even if in five years from now they say, oh, we don't want to be in this treaty anyways because your new sensor package is too good or... We're just not going to do this anymore. I just think we have an obligation to try and see it forward for a little while longer, at least. Maybe I'm being naive or just being naive and not thinking it through.

Jeffrey 26:25

No, look, I don't think that you are the least bit naive about this. I go back to the original notion that The fundamental value of the treaty is that we live in an open and democratic society. And even though it is no longer the Soviet Union, Russia still doesn't qualify as that. And that just means it's much harder to gather intelligence.

And so even if their sensor packages are a little better for a little period of time, the fundamental value of being able to fly surveillance flights over Russia is Seems to me to be incredibly valuable. I said the fundamental valuable is incredibly valuable. But there's such a disparity in our ability to get information on them versus their ability to get information on us, even now, that I can't imagine taking my ball and going home.

Aaron 27:25

No, I agree. And I think maybe that's the place to leave it. It's... Let's not play the game and let's just uphold our end of the treaty obligations. And we lost this round, but it's a long fight.

Jeffrey 27:38

Well, let's keep Travis Bickle in mind.

Aaron 27:39

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 27:41

Okay.

Aaron 27:42

Anyways, thanks for talking today. It's been a pleasure.

Jeffrey 27:46

All right. Yeah, it's been fun. I'm hoping some of this fog is going to burn off.

Aaron 27:50

Yeah. And have a good day and enjoy a 1970s era Monterey.

Jeffrey 27:55

Will do.

Aaron 27:56

All right. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye.

Jeffrey 27:58

Thanks for