HASC vice chair says nuclear sea-launched cruise missile ‘incredibly important’

The House version of the 2024 defense authorization act includes funding to develop a nuclear-tipped seal-launched cruise missile, and the program will make it into law despite the White House’s desire to kill it, according to Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.).

Wittman, who is vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, chair of the tactical air and land forces subcommittee and sits on the seapower and projection forces subcommittee, said on Monday that a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) carrying a lower-yield warhead is “incredibly important” for the U.S. to deter Russia and China. 

“[R]ight now the scenario we face is this: If our adversaries use a low-yield nuclear weapon, we don’t have anything of like kind to be able to answer that,” Wittman said during an online discussion hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. 

The House defense authorization bill includes $70 million for development of a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 warhead in its version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That warhead would be carried by a sea-launched cruise missile that the Navy will develop separately. The House Appropriations Committee’s spending bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 also includes $70 million for the warhead. 

The Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the NDAA includes $75 million for development of a version of the W80-4 warhead that would ride on a SLCM-N. The missile itself received another $190 million plus-up in the Senate committee’s bill through the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons Development Program. 

The Biden administration, which wants to cancel the SLCM-N, zeroed out funding in its 2024 budget request for the weapon, which it considers redundant to the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. It is the second year the White House has proposed blanking the cruise missile development program.

Wittman said he has had productive conversations with his House Appropriations Committee colleagues, including that panel’s Defense Subcommittee Chair Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) on shepherding the controversial weapon development program into law. 

“Appropriators and authorizers are for the most part on the same page, so I think we’ll end up in the right place,” Wittman said.

As fellow proponents of the SLCM-N have said in previous congressional hearings and public appearances, Wittman said the U.S. needs a lower-yield, cruise missile-delivered nuclear weapon to discourage Russia or China from using a similar weapon with impunity. 

The U.S. military has access to dial-a-yield weapons like the W76-2 warhead that rides on the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile, but the need for a cruise-missile-delivered weapon with a yield about the magnitude of the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains, Wittman said. 

SLCM supporters in Congress and the military say that W76-2, owing to its ballistic flight trajectory, is a complement to and not a replacement for a cruise missile, which can fly lower and evade radar.

“The only way that you’re going to deter a weapon of like kind is to have one of your own, where somebody doesn’t think ‘I can deliver a low yield nuclear weapon and the only response that the United States has is a high-yield nuclear weapon and they’re not going to do that because of the damage that it provides.’”