Liberal members of Congress are seeking big-ticket items to slash from the Pentagon’s budget, but conservative hawks warn some of their targets could put the Defense Department’s nuclear deterrence strategy at risk and give an edge to adversaries such as China and Russia.
Influential Democratic members such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith have again zeroed in on long-overdue nuclear modernization efforts, despite China and Russia possessing new weapons.
This time, military leaders and nuclear security experts warn there is no more room for delay if the United States is to maintain all three legs of its nuclear triad and catch up to the investments made by peer adversaries. Those countries spent on their nuclear fleets while the U.S. was embroiled in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. The case for pro-nuclear members to avoid cuts that would delay needed modernization work is particularly strong for the 50-year-old Minutemen III ICBMs, which are the backbone of the land-based leg of the country’s nuclear triad.
Still, Smith continues to raise the possibility of delaying or scaling back the modernization effort, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. The Washington state Democrat has even proposed the U.S. follow China’s lead and simply reduce the number of ICBMs in the force, which would put the defense of U.S. allies at risk and amount to a unilateral reduction in the START Treaty with Russia, experts say.
“I think we can meet our deterrence needs for less,” Smith said shortly after President Joe Biden was elected. At the time, the chairman made the case to build political support so that “we start winning that argument.”
Smith’s position is that keeping the full 400 ICBM force, and the $494 billion required to maintain it through 2028, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is “insane.”
But the Defense Department holds as its top priority the integrity of the nuclear triad.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has stated his support for the triad but hedged in congressional testimony on whether cuts could be made to pricey modernization efforts. However, nuclear commanders managing the day-to-day operations of the aging force say time has run out, and if modernization efforts do not remain on schedule, the U.S. will face a gap in its deterrence capability.
“Let me be very clear: You cannot life-extend Minuteman III,” Adm. Charles Richard, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, recently told the Defense Writers Group. “Basically, it’s going to drive you to have to reexamine your strategy.”
On the rising threat posed by the warheads fielded by China and Russia, he said: “This nation has never before had to face the prospect of two peer, nuclear-capable adversaries who have to be deterred differently.”
Life extending Minuteman III
Two principal options for reducing the defense budget with a targeted cut to ground-based warheads have been proposed by skeptics of nuclear modernization. One is another life extension, keeping the same 1970 technology in place a bit longer in order to kick the can down the road. Military leaders have said that such a life extension would actually cost more than replacing the entire missile with 21st-century technology, command-and-control, and silos.
“The modernization schedule has no room for delay,” Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer said at a Heritage Foundation event this week. U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees America’s strategic nuclear forces, is headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha.
“These nuclear systems, they take a long time to develop, and previous decisions to delay and defer modernization have taken all the slack out of schedule,” she said. “Nothing lasts forever. Ultimately, these systems will age out, and replacements must be ready before this happens, or we’ll have a gap in our deterrent capabilities.”
Heritage nuclear policy analyst Patty-Jane Geller told the Washington Examiner that cutting funding to a top DOD priority does not make sense.
“Our nuclear deterrent has helped prevent a war for the past 75 years,” she said. “Cutting our nuclear modernization is kind of backwards because the last five secretary of defenses, including Secretary Austin, have said that the nuclear deterrence mission is the No. 1 mission for the DOD.”
A gap in the land-based leg of the triad, experts point out, immediately gives China an advantage.
“The world is more dangerous than ever before,” Geller noted, pointing to the congressional testimony this week of the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Navy Adm. John C. Aquilino. In testimony, the nominee to head U.S. Pacific Command said China could attempt to take Taiwan in the next six years.
Warren told lawmakers China’s nuclear warheads in the low 200s are still far fewer than the approximately 3,800 in the U.S. active stockpile. She instead argued for investing in conventional deterrence over nuclear deterrence.
“Would you agree that credible conventional deterrents are still the best way of protecting U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region and avoiding a conflict with China?” she asked.
Aquilino responded: “Yes, senator. That conventional deterrence to avoid crisis or conflict is certainly the main effort, as I would see it, if confirmed.”
‘Cancel the GBSD’
Former George W. Bush National Security Council official Frank Miller told the Washington Examiner that removing the land-based leg of the triad, or creating a gap in its capabilities, is not a risk worth taking.
“Would getting rid of the ICBM force save us money? Well, of course, it would,” he said in a discussion forum sponsored by the Mitchell Institute. “Would it dramatically increase the risks, the safety, and security of the United States and of our allies? Absolutely. It would.”
Miller, who has testified before Smith in the past, took the question head-on, describing the fundamentally different roles the U.S. and China have in the world. Principally, the often-cited advantage the U.S. has, which is the number of allies it can rely on in the event of conflict.
“You can’t just go across from what the Chinese believed they need and what the United States has or what the United States requires in our broader context,” he explained.
The U.S. “extended deterrent force” has to deter Russia, China, North Korea — as well as attacks on U.S. allies.
“We don’t have a minimum deterrent,” he said. “We have a much broader role for our forces, and we have a role that requires them to be survivable and to be able to provide for the defense of the United States and our allies.”
Should the U.S. decide that a reduced number is sufficient to protect allies, that may raise doubts among allies, who may then increase their stockpile of nuclear weapons or pursue them if they do not yet have one, Miller said.
“If you really want proliferation, make the United States deterrent a minimum deterrent force, and tell the allies they’re on their own, you’ll see proliferation there,” he said.
In September, the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman the $13.3 billion GBSD contract, a move critics say was a race to make a big award before former President Donald Trump left office.
“If you cancel the GBSD, you save all that money because that program isn’t going to be built,” Director of Policy for the anti-nuclear Ploughshares Fund Tom Collina told the Washington Examiner. “So, to me, that’s a great spot to look for cost savings.”
Collina said former Obama administration officials have told him the Minuteman III missiles can be life-extended.
“It’s all a question of, are you willing to make any adjustments to your nuclear posture?” he said.
The longtime arms-control advocate called for an independent assessment to evaluate if life extension is possible. Collina also said the number of ICBMs in the ground is arbitrary and can easily be reduced while maintaining deterrence.
“There’s nothing magical about 400. Are you willing to give up a little bit of reliability as they age further?” he said. “Do we need a new modern, fancy, shiny Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent for $264 billion?”
Liberal members of Congress have also called for a new Nuclear Posture Review, a lengthy process that would delay modernization efforts and effectively reduce the president’s options.
Fisher makes the case that it is too late for that now.
“Because of the past decisions to delay these programs, hitting pause now, it would break the modernization schedule and result in systems aging out before their replacements are delivered,” she said.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Still, Collina argues that nuclear deterrence can be achieved for less.
“It’s the job of the Pentagon to meet our deterrence requirements for less,” he said. “We have to maintain nuclear deterrence, but the program of record is in excess of what we need to do that. So we’re wasting money.”
