The Department of Defense would get at least close to its requested funding for most strategic nuclear weapons programs in fiscal 2021, under a spending bill approved on a party-line vote Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee.
The bill passed 30-21 with no Republican support. Nobody offered amendments that would affect nuclear weapons funding during the four-hour markup, which this year was dominated by partisan debate about abortion, the southern border wall, and other hot-button issues that provided lawmakers in an election year with opportunities to update their voting records.
As with the energy and water appropriations bill the committee approved Monday, the roughly $700 billion legislation would block the Pentagon from spending funds on a yield-producing nuclear weapons test. No lawmaker attempted to strike that language from the bill, which now awaits a vote on the House floor, with debate expected during the week of July 27. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not released its proposed Defense Department for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
The House bill would provide:
- Nearly $2.9 billion, just $30 million shy of the request, to begin building the first of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines: the eventual replacement for the Ohio-class boats in service now, and which are supposed to go on patrol in the early 2030s. The committee said DOD wanted to rush some electronic warfare, photonics, and other systems for the boat, and so withheld a sliver of the requested funding. With the program entering development and shipbuilding about to start, the budget is set to rise by more than $1 billion from the 2020 appropriation.
- About $2.9 billion for further development of the planned B-21 Raider stealth bomber Northrop Grumman is developing: even with the request and some $135 million below the 2020 appropriation for the aircraft that eventually will be able to carry both nuclear gravity bombs and cruise missiles. The B-52H, for now, carries cruise missiles only. The F-35 will be certified for gravity bombs only, in the near term.
- Some $1.45 billion for the initial batch of Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) silo-based, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are slated to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030. That clips the request by roughly $60 million, which House appropriators tagged as excess to need. However, it is better than half again as much as in 2020, when Boeing and Northrop Grumman were still developing competing concepts for the next-generation missile. In 2021, the Air Force is expected to award Northrop, the sole remaining competitor, a 12-year, $25 billion engineering and manufacturing development contract to build the first GBSD missiles. The system will use a mixture of W87-0 and W87-1 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The Air Force plans to acquire more than 650 GBSD missiles, of which 400 will go into existing silos. The W87-0 currently tips the Minuteman III fleet that GBSD will replace on a one-for-one basis. The W87-1 is a planned refurbishment of that model, to be fitted with a new fissile core called a plutonium pit. The NNSA plans to start casting new war-ready pits, the first made in the U.S. in decades, in 2024. The Air Force plans to acquire more than 650 GBSD missiles, of which 400 will go into existing silos.
- Almost $305 million for the Long-Range Standoff cruise missile, the planned replacement for the nuclear-tipped AGM-86b air-launched cruise missile now carried by B52-H bombers. The House committee provided $170 million less than the request, writing in the bill report that the Air Force does not need all the funding it requested in fiscal 2021 for the final year of the program’s technology maturation phase. This year, the service picked Raytheon over Lockheed to develop the weapon, ending a three-year competitive design phase for the next-generation cruise missile. The program has a roughly $710 billion budget for 2020, which Congress approved when the Pentagon was still carrying two contractors. Starting around 2030, the Air Force plans to buy about 1,000 Long-Range Standoff weapon missiles, which will use W80-4 missiles provided the NNSA.
- $132 million, as requested, for F-35 squadrons. Within this account are the Block IV software upgrades, and accompanying hardware upgrades, that by the middle of this decade are supposed to allow the fifth-generation fighter to externally carry a pair of B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs. The squadrons budget would be about $32 million above than the 2020 appropriation. B61-12, slated to go into production at NNSA after fiscal 2022, will homogenize four previous versions of the longest-deployed U.S. nuclear weapon, including one version with a modest earth-penetrating capability.
