Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
2/13/2015
In a four-team think tank exercise simulating defense budget planning in a tight fiscal environment, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) maintained the nuclear triad even as the prospect of a tight fiscal environment has surfaced, a CSBA budget analyst told the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on Feb. 11. Jim Thomas, CSBA Vice President and Director of Studies, was one of five defense budget analysts from four Washington think tanks who testified to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday about possible approaches that lawmakers might take in upcoming discussions on the Defense Department’s $534 billion Fiscal Year 2016 budget request, which exceeds the Budget Control Act-established discretionary defense spending cap by about $35 billion. Thomas was joined by Todd Harrison, CSBA Senior Fellow of Defense Budget Studies; Dr. Nora Bensahel, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University’s School of International Service; Ryan Crotty, Fellow and Deputy Director for Defense Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program; and Thomas Donnelly, Resident Fellow and Co-Director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Deterrence Goals Not Ready to Undergo Wide-Scale Changes
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who cited the National Defense Panel Review of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review which stated that recapitalization of the nuclear triad under current budget constraints is unaffordable, asked whether the U.S. should reevaluate deterrence objectives before modernizing nuclear forces. Harrison responded that the triad is “not yet ripe” for a decision, and said that nuclear modernization occupies a small portion of the overall defense budget. “As a budget analyst, I always cringe at term ‘affordability,’ because the things that we’re talking about here today, some of them are very expensive, no doubt,” he said. “But affordability’s a choice, right? It’s a matter of whether or not we’re willing to make the resources available. I think, when I look at the nuclear triad, my conclusion is that it’s not yet ripe for a decision.”
Nuclear Modernization ‘Small Part’ of Total
Speier highlighted that nuclear modernization is estimated to cost $1 trillion, and Harrison, in response, emphasized that the projection—outlined in a report by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in January 2014—was spread over a 30-year period. The U.S. will likely spend $15-$20 trillion on defense during the same period, and many nuclear modernization programs involve technologies that double as conventional support platforms—including communication networks and tanker aircraft, Harrison said. “It is a rather small part of our overall force expenditures,” he said. “Many of these things we would fund anyway if we had no nuclear weapons in our arsenal.”
Changed Nuclear Force Structure in 2020?
Harrison also said the U.S. should rethink nuclear capabilities and modernization processes before the end of the decade, and expressed concern about problems created by the delayed acquisitions. “The one thing that concerns me most about the recapitalization of the nuclear triad is we have put off some of these recapitalization efforts,” Harrison said. Nuclear and conventional funding peaks will likely coincide, as the F-35A, the Long-Range Strike Bomber, the KC-46A tanker aircraft, and a prospective new trainer aircraft are all slated to either be in or ramp up to full-rate production in the 2020s, Harrison noted.
Maj. Gen. James Martin, Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget, said during a Pentagon Fiscal Year 2016 budget briefing last week that the service might be required to cut the Minuteman 3 command and control modernization program if the 2011 Budget Control Act caps return. “After starting FY14 in a government shutdown and planning for a second year of sequestration, we are certainly grateful for the modest short-term budget relief that Congress provided for FY 14 and 15. It started the process of readiness recovery. It was a great start, but it wasn’t enough,” Martin said. “Under the Bipartisan Budget Act, we still had to make choices, choices that were necessary to save billions needed to live within budget limitations….We accepted risk in facility repairs and delayed important construction projects, which pushed the bow wave of unfunded projects to over $12 billion. These effects are being felt across the total force. For these reasons, we believe sequestration needs to be repealed so we can start the recovery from reduced funding levels.”
Return of BCA Caps Could Affect Personnel
The analysts told the committee that, during the simulation, each of their think tanks chose to cut personnel while investing in new capabilities. “We chose first to cut the number of civilians employed by the Department of Defense, and the military services by one-third, which is the maximum we were allowed to do for the exercise,” Bensahel said. HASC Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) noted that politicians usually argue against reducing personnel costs because of political implications, but said committee members should adopt a more big-picture view. “If you’ve got the budget you’ve got, you’ve got to make some kind of choice, and I would submit for those of us who serve this committee that it is not our primary job to protect everything in our own districts.” he said. “It is our primary job to protect the country.”
While officials fear the potential impacts of rushed budget decisions such as those made during FY 2013, when sequestration entailed across-the-board service cuts, it remains unclear how much time lawmakers would have to decide cuts if the BCA is not repealed by Oct. 1. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, said during a November speech at the Brookings Institution that if sequestration hits quickly like it did in FY 2013, it could cause the Navy to scramble to reprogram money and make last-minute hires for positions such as engineers to work on the Navy’s No. 1 acquisition priority, the $100 billion Ohio-Class Replacement. “You lose months of work, months of hiring, perhaps,” Greenert said. “So it’s very destructive, and that adds up if you do that year after year. That is worse than just going to a long-term Budget Control Act. And it doesn’t help with your people, who are the most important aspect of it.”
