Nuclear hawks lit into Colin Kahl, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Pentagon’s top policy post, after Kahl declined to offer unconditional support for key missile modernization programs during a Thursday hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) all tried, but all they got from Kahl, the under secretary for defense for policy-designate, was a pledge of support for a three-legged U.S. nuclear triad, and a promise to review the ongoing replacement and refurbishment of its nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
“I support modernization to keep the triad viable,” Kahl said, resisting — as nominees often do to avoid running afoul of parochial interests or getting ahead of the President — attempts to pin him down on whether he will advocate for the status quo not only for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), but the air-launched Long Range Standoff weapon cruise missile the Pentagon is procuring in parallel with the silo-based launcher.
Kahl was Biden’s national security adviser when Biden was vice president in the Barack Obama administration.
In the final minutes of Thursday’s two-and-a-half-hour hearing, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member, said Kahl’s careful answers on GBSD were not “complete enough” and turned to his colleague, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for the final Republican word on the matter.
Cotton, reliably more blunt than Inhofe, though no less iron-willed in his support for U.S. nuclear primacy, tried again to pin Kahl down, yes or no, on whether he would if confirmed urge the administration to stay the course on GBSD, which will cost some $95 billion to acquire and nearly $265 billion to maintain over its life.
But Kahl dodged again, following the example of now-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Austin’s deputy Kathlee Hicks, saying again that he supported the triad but would get back to the committee with specifics after he was confirmed.
“All three legs of the triad need to be viable,” Kahl said, but “[T]here are [nuclear weapons] issues that are highly classified and details that I am simply not privy to. So if confirmed I will dig into those details and I would be happy to come back to talk to you or anybody else on this committee.”
Cotton didn’t like that.
“I will take that unwillingness to give a straight answer as that you probably don’t think we should continue to fund the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent,” Cotton said. “I suspect many members of this committee will, too.”
Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed’s (D-R.I.) takeaway was that Kahl was “in favor” of “the ground based triad,” but that the nominee hedged in case there were classified facts that might indicate “a serious issue with the platform that might cause changes in the deployment schedule.”
Some Republicans who don’t hail from nuclear weapon states appeared as concerned about Kahl’s criticisms of the GOP and the Donald Trump administration on twitter as their colleagues were about the nominees cautious answers on GBSD and the Long Range Standoff weapon.
Kahl will need bipartisan support to get out of the evenly divided Armed Services Committee, which has 13 Democrats and 13 Republicans among its members and had not scheduled a vote at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
