The Pentagon is asking for $350 billion to upgrade its nuclear deterrent capability to handle growing aggression from Russia.
“Russia and U.S. cooperation has ground to a halt,” retired Navy Admiral William Fallon told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. Updating aged nuclear deterrent capabilities, he said, “should be a top consideration.”
Fallon, who retired in 2008 after commanding U.S. Central Command, is part of a week-long visit by defense leaders to Congress to push funding for the Pentagon before the federal budget is released next week. With both wars winding down, defense officials are seeking funding for initiatives that have been pushed back.
For the Air Force and the Navy, moving nuclear modernization higher up the funding chain is a priority after more than a decade of deferred spending to afford the nation’s two wars.
Fallon’s testimony came on the heels of the commander of U.S. Global Strike Command, Gen. Stephen Wilson, telling reporters Tuesday that none of the elements of what is known as the nuclear triad — the air, land and sea-based ballistic warheads that deter aggressors from launching a first strike — can afford to wait to be modernized.
But the same can be said for the command, which has patched and sustained and deferred for years as other war spending took priority. Now, even as sequestration has come to a head, the triad has come to a point where if it is not modernized, it will fall behind, Wilson said.
“If you look around the world, you see lots of people modernizing their force. We see the Russians, specifically, modernizing all of their legs,” their submarines, their missiles and their mobile missiles, Wilson said. China is a concern too, with a rapid development of its own missile and submarine capabilities.
The Minuteman ICBMs under Wilson’s command were built between 1965 and 1973. The B-52s currently in the command’s wing have 1960-61 tail numbers. The almost two dozen B-2 stealth bombers are younger, fielded in the 1980s and ’90s but are not as easily mobilized due to their operations and maintenance needs.
The Navy is no better off. It has asked Congress to find a way to fund its Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines for years — because the 30-year-old submarines, which would be retiring from the fleet except for a refueling that extended their lives for about another decade — will meet the end of their serviceable lives in the next 12 years. To field a new fleet in time to replace the now 40-year old subs, shipbuilding must start now.
The Air Force is pursuing a new ICBM and later this year is expected to select the designs to pursue in a new long-range bomber. The Navy is pushing hard to get funding for the Ohio-class replacement.
The projected price tag of all this, from the Congressional Budget Office: $350 billion.
Even with sequestration, Wilson did not flinch to say there’s not a part of the triad that can wait, or prioritize one over the other. The Air Force and Navy are in close communication on sending that message to the Hill. Nuclear capabilities need to be a top priority, to the point that the two services are working toward pitching that the whole enterprise be funded by the national deterrence fund — something that does not take the money needed for the upgrades from the services’ bottom lines.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said he wants to hold a committee hearing to address all of the challenges facing strategic nuclear defense.
“From the missiles to the submarines to the bombers to the warheads, we have very old, aging machines. But upon those machines, the rest of our defense efforts depend. “
Thornberry did not say whether he would support a separate fund to pay for all of the modernization, so that it wouldn’t come directly form the Navy’s and Air Force’s accounts, but that the method of accounting for the money was not as critical to him as the fact that each part of the triad needs significant spending.
“The bills to update and modernize all of these systems are all coming due at once, and we don’t have a choice for that. I am concerned about that.”
The needed renovations, on the Air Force’s side at least, go literally all the way down to the drapes, where it spent $7 million last year beginning to renovate the interiors, telephones and systems inside silos that had been largely untouched since they were dug in more than 50 years ago.
And then there are the helicopters that guard the missile fields in Montana which President John F. Kennedy once called his “ace in the hole” to defend the nation. Those fields are guarded by helicopters found more often these days in military museums: The UH-1 Huey.
The 1969-era Huey “served us real well” in the past, said Gen. Wilson. Unfortunately, today, he said, “they don’t meet any of our speed, range, payload or survivability requirements. So we’re looking for options for a new one.”
This article was originally published at 1:07 p.m. and has been updated.
