House Democrats failed to slow procurement of next-generation, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles via the 2020 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA), the final version of which almost fully supports the Trump administration’s funding request and approves the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to build warheads for the missile.
However, the bill is loaded with legally binding language requiring several new unclassified reports about the Pentagon’s effort to replace 400 aging, silo-based Minuteman III missiles with Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) missiles that would go into service beginning in 2030 and stay in service into the 2080s.
The House voted 377-48 on Wednesday in favor of the NDAA for the federal fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The “no” votes came from 41 Democrats, six Republicans, and independent Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who left the Republican Party this year. The Senate is set to vote on the bill Monday. President Donald Trump said this week he would sign the measure, which sets policy and spending limits for defense programs.
The latest NDAA would authorize a little more than $550 million for GBSD: some $20 million less than the Air Force requested for fiscal 2020. That includes a $40 million program reduction — details of which were not part of the 2020 NDAA’s bill report — partially offset by some $20 million in nuclear command and control funding that Congress shuffled into the GBSD program within the Air Force’s Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation account.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman, under three-year contracts awarded in 2017, were maturing competing GBSD designs until this year, when Boeing dropped out of the competition for the follow-on contract to build and deploy the missiles. In a July letter to the Air Force, the company cited an insurmountable competitive advantage for Northrop Grumman, which owns its own business for production of solid-rocket motors – a key component of the new ICBM. The service in October responded by cutting off funding for Boeing’s GBSD Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction contract.
That has drawn the ire of many, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), resulting in bill language that would force the Pentagon to provide an unclassified report on the risks of building GBSD under a sole-source award. The report would be due 60 days after Trump signs the NDAA into law.
The deadline for bids for the production contract is today, with an award set for summer 2020.
Whatever happens with the GBSD bidding — Boeing has tacitly reserved the right to protest either the competition or the actual contract — the Defense Department will be on the hook under the NDAA to write annual, unclassified progress reports about GBSD and its planned W87-1 warhead, beginning on Feb. 15, 2020.
These documents would be due on Feb. 15 for each year until the GBSD program hits Milestone C: the point in the Pentagon’s project system that directly precedes deployment of new weapon systems. Each of the progress reports would, among other things, have to estimate how long it would take to get GBSD to its planned initial operational capability, and explain program delays.
That encompasses both delays with the solid-fueled missile itself, its W87-1 nuclear warhead, or even the civilian-owned Department of Energy infrastructure that produces the warhead’s plutonium core, or pit. The Pentagon would write the report with the cooperation of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The National Nuclear Security Administration itself was also saddled with new reporting requirements in the NDAA, which if onerous to the agency are at least not the funding reductions that Smith and other House Democrats sought for the pit program in the version of the NDAA that passed the House this summer.
The compromise NDAA would authorize around $710 million for the Energy Department branch to design and build a two-state pit complex at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and require those factories to produce not fewer than 80 pits a year by 2030. The House NDAA would have provided only $410 million and limited the pit complex to Los Alamos, for now. The Senate, which wanted to authorize the request, won out.
Under the NNSA’s current plans, Los Alamos will start making 10 pits per year in 2024, then ramp up to 30 annually by 2030, at which time the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will begin making another 50 pits annually.
Yet a pair of 2018 reports paid for by the NNSA have found that the civilian agency is unlikely to hit the 80-pits-a-year target by 2030, and that the South Carolina facility, which is not specifically authorized in the 2020 NDAA, probably could not cast 50 pits a year until 2035 or so. Senior NNSA officials have said publicly they can pull the schedule to the left, but Congress is looking for more specifics.
To that end, the new NDAA would require the NNSA’s Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation office, which is independent from individual agency program offices, to analyze the agency’s decision to put W87-1 warheads on GBSD, rather than using W78 warheads that now tip Minuteman III missiles. The two weapons use different pit designs.
In a double-whammy for the agency, the NDAA would also require the NNSA to hire the JASON group of scientists employed by the MITRE Corp. to do a parallel study on the decision to replace W78 with the more complicated W87. The Pentagon has moved to phase JASON out, but Congress, keen on keeping the group alive, keeps finding work for the civilian scientists.
The Air Force expects the GBSD to cost about $100 billion over its lifetime. The NNSA’s two-state pit production complex is forecast to cost some $30 billion over its lifetime.
As always, congressional appropriations committees will have to produce Pentagon and DOE spending bills to fund the missile at the authorized level before the agencies can proceed with their plans to reinforce the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad.
At deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, media reported that congressional appropriations leaders were close to a final 2020 budget that would fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, without passing another stopgap spending measure. The second and latest continuing resolution runs through Dec. 20.
Congress had not published the details of the compromise budget bill at deadline. The House’s version of the DOE-funding Energy and Water Appropriations Act called for the same below-the-request funding levels that were ultimately stripped from the 2020 NDAA.
Senate appropriators proposed even more DOE funding than what the compromise NDAA would authorize, meaning Senators will effectively be negotiating for the request, if the NDAA becomes law.
