The Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee admitted Monday that liberals bent on curtailing nuclear modernization will fall short, signaling that America’s $13 billion effort to upgrade its 50-year-old nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles will move forward.
“Any effort to change, that is running into very strong political headwinds, which is a very sort of fancy way of saying, ‘We don’t have the votes,’” Washington Democrat Adam Smith told defense reporters on a press call.
“If you don’t have the votes, you’re not gonna be able to get anything done,” he added.
The skeptic of America’s current nuclear strategy has called for reconsidering the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal, and delaying the modernization effort.
Meanwhile, nuclear commanders say more life extensions of the 1950s technology to the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent are not possible.
“The shot clock is over,” the 20th Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Mike Lutton, told the Washington Examiner via Zoom from F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming Friday.
“We need to modernize this deterrent force. It’s as simple as that,” said the commander, who oversees some 400 ICBMs spread across six Midwestern states.
F.E. Warren would be the first of three bases upgraded over the next decade in a phasing out of the Minuteman III missiles, which first came online in 1970.
Brig. Gen. Anthony Genatempo, commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, told the Washington Examiner in a Zoom interview from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico that while the silo-based system would stay, every aspect from boosters to propellants to guidance systems and payload configurations would be updated as part of the GBSD.
“Northrup Grumman started off the [engineering, manufacturing, and development] phase with no less than 13 different iterations of system designs that we’ve already been analyzing and trying to refine,” he said of the contractor chosen by the Air Force in September.
“This is going to be one of the largest military movements in history,” he added.
One ICBM facility will be transitioned every week for nine years as part of the modernization effort.
Maintenance will also be simplified, said Lutton, allowing fewer professionals to access ICBM components that need repair more quickly.
The system will also be designed to last decades longer and use 21st-century technology.
“It basically came down to spend the same amount of money to keep a 1950s capability in the field longer, or put that money towards a 21st-century capability that is going to be more adaptable to what our adversaries are putting in the field today,” explained Genatempo.
Once the upgrades are complete in 2036, the new GBSD system will have 30 to 40 years of life, he added.
But facing trillion-dollar deficits, a struggling economy, and a persistent pandemic, liberals are looking for big-ticket items to cut.
Smith grudgingly still wants Congress to consider trimming nuclear modernization.
“I think we can meet our deterrence needs for less, and currently, I’m losing that argument,” he said. “So we need to build the political support so that we get to the point where we start winning that argument.”
Brookings Institution nuclear security expert Frank Rose told the Washington Examiner that the budget reality will be a major challenge for the Biden administration when it comes to defense programs.
“There are a lot of programs that strategically makes sense, but they have to deal with budget realities,” he said.
“That’s the big challenge that the Biden administration will face in the nuclear area,” said Rose, who believes the strategic rationale for the triad still makes sense. “How do they modernize the strategic deterrent, recapitalize our conventional forces, and invest in new technologies at a time when the defense budget is highly likely to remain flat?”
Tom Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said the land-based deterrent is still the most reliable leg of the triad.
“It would be extraordinarily difficult for an adversary to knock out that capability,” he said of the ICBMs that stand on alert at all times.
“The United States has kicked the can down this road now for years,” he said. “We’re at the point where the GBSD program has to deliver on schedule in order to start replacing these Minuteman IIIs.”
Genatempo said the program is still on schedule, on budget, and necessary to regain America’s competitive advantage.
“Both Russia and China, their deployment of their assets are not 50-year-old technologies,” he said.
“We have to now be looking to field the force that is able to counter the capabilities that are being fielded by our adversaries,” he said. “That’s what GBSD brings to the table.”
