Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Vol. 23 No. 11
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Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor
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March 15, 2019

HASC Chair Floats Cuts for GBSD, Extension for Minuteman III

By Dan Leone

WASHINGTON — To give the Pentagon more money to spend in the future, the United States could buy fewer new intercontinental ballistic missiles and again extend its aging fleet of nuclear-tipped Minuteman III missiles, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said at a conference here Wednesday.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) has said nuclear weapons are only useful for deterring a nuclear-armed adversary from using its own arsenal. To that end, the Armed Services chair believes the U.S. does not need “as many warheads and as many delivery systems” as it plans to maintain and modernize over the course of a 30-year, $1-trillion arsenal overhaul the Obama administration started in 2016.

“The rational place to start is to say we’ll do fewer ICBMs,” Smith said in response to a question from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily during the 10th annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “We will perhaps do life extension on some of the existing systems instead of building all new ones.”

The U.S. Air Force now deploys 400 solid-fueled Minuteman III missiles in three states. It plans to replace those starting in the late 2020s with new ICBMs to be developed under the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program. Northrop Grumman and Boeing, the latter of which built the Minuteman III fleet, are maturing competing GBSD designs under three-year contracts awarded in 2017 and worth about $330 million and $350 million, respectively. The Pentagon plans to procure some 640 GBSD missiles, the Congressional Budget Office stated in December, but would deploy only 400.

The nonpartisan budget office estimated cancelling GBSD and modernizing the Minuteman III fleet would save some $30 billion over the decade ending in 2029.

The Pentagon in 2015 finished modernizing the existing Minuteman III fleet, first deployed in 1970 to replace Minuteman II, to stay on the job until 2030. Boeing has argued that fielding its GBSD design would be cheaper than refurbishing Minuteman III again.

The silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile fleet is the most vulnerable part of the U.S. arsenal, Smith said, so “that makes sense to cut.”

The White House on Monday requested $570 million for GBSD in fiscal 2020: $155 million, or about 35 percent, above the 2019 appropriation of roughly $415 million.

Costs of the the 30-year nuclear modernization and maintenance plan are expected to peak in the late 2020s, consuming an estimated 7 percent of the total defense budget. That will create “fiscal pressure” elsewhere at the Pentagon, Allan Shaffer, deputy defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said on the McAleese stage before Smith arrived.

The Defense Department seeks just under $720 billion for fiscal 2020.

The bilateral New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits the U.S. and Russia limits each to 1,500 deployed long-range nuclear warheads through at least 2021. The U.S. deploys its warheads on: Minuteman missiles; gravity bombs and cruise missiles that could be carried by 46 B52-H bombers, 20 B2-A stealth bombers, and some NATO aircraft; and submarine-launched launched ballistic missiles carried by a fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, around 10 of which are at sea at once.

That is according to the U.S. 2018 Nuclear Posture Review and estimates compiled by the Washington-based nongovernmental Federation of American Scientists.

Aside from replacing Minuteman III missiles with the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the ongoing nuclear modernization and maintenance program aims to replace the Ohio-class boats with 12 Columbia-class submarines, and eventually phase out the B-52H with a combination of dual-capable F35 aircraft and the planned B-21 Raider bomber.

As the White House rolled out its 2020 budget request this week, Smith has been on tour around Washington crystallizing his nuclear policy positions as the House Armed Services Committee prepares to draft this year’s version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act: the must-pass bill that sets spending limits and policy for defense programs.

On Tuesday at the 2019 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, Smith reiterated his desire to “kill” the new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead the Department of Energy plans to deliver to the Navy starting this fiscal year. The Trump administration says it needs the weapon to deter Russia from using a similarly powerful missile to win a war it starts, but cannot finish, with conventional weapons.

Smith does not accept that the U.S. needs such a weapon to deter a limited nuclear strike by Russia. He said Tuesday that any U.S. adversary that uses any sort of nuclear weapon against the United States “will cease to exist” after a retaliatory nuclear strike.

While he has proposed trimming the arsenal, Smith does not advocate for nuclear disarmament and does advocate for modernizing nuclear forces whether the U.S. and Russia have arms control agreements in place or not. At Carnegie, Smith said conditioning modernization on arms control agreements is “like giving foreign powers veto control over your national security.”

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