Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
1/23/2015
The Air Force official who oversees the U.S. nuclear bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile fleets on Jan. 20 said “nothing is off the table” in ongoing industry-government discussions to build a “faster, better, smarter” intercontinental ballistic missile system to follow the Minuteman 3. The Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center is hosting an Industry Day Feb. 18-20 at Hill AFB as part of a process to develop a concept for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, which is planned to extend the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad beyond 2030. Speaking at the Air Force Association monthly breakfast in Arlington, Va., Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, Air Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration (A10), said his service intends to leverage all Minuteman 3 investments into the GBSD, in hopes of making the new weapon system as affordable as possible. “Everything that we’re going to put into this Minuteman 3 we hope to leverage in the follow-on system,” he said.
Spokespeople from Boeing and Lockheed Martin told NS&D Monitor last week that their companies are working with the Air Force on follow-on weapon’s guidance set, known as the Concept Design and Architecture Guidance (CDAG), to explore concept formulation, technology evaluations, and risk mitigation for the technology. The two defense giants are also contractors under the main structure currently governing Minuteman 3 contracting, the Future ICBM Sustainment and Acquisition Concept (FISAC), with Lockheed heading up the Reentry Subsystem team and Boeing leading the Guidance Subsystem team.
Basing Preference Undetermined
While summer media reports indicated the Air Force had wanted a built-in capability to make the GBSD mobile, Harencak said he didn’t think the service has settled on any one preference for the weapon’s basing mode. He said the GBSD’s basing system would look “familiar” to Americans, and also underscored that the concept could have other flexibilities. “I don’t think you’re going to have anything that is exotic, if you will, anything that changes the fundamental nature of the ICBM force,” he said. An Analysis of Alternatives completed last summer considered several options for maintaining the ICBM leg of the triad through 2075, and looked at a new ICBM, as well as rail-mobile ICBMs and placing the new ICBM in a super-hardened silo, NS&D Monitor reported in June.
During a September speech in Washington, U.S. Strategic Command Vice Commander Lt. Gen. James Kowalski pointed to the importance of existing silos while emphasizing the security that the quantity and spread of them offer. “We really don’t have the fear today that we had in the Cold War of a bolt-out-of-the-blue first strike; one reason is because of that robust force out there,” he said. “That, in turn, requires an adversary to commit most of their … arsenal, and that would leave them very vulnerable to our submarines and bomber forces.”
NC3 System to Be Prioritized Alongside GBSD
In addition to updating the ground-based leg of the triad, Harencak also underscored the need to revamp the nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) system alongside the GBSD. “Certainly, we’re going to upgrade,” he said. “We can’t use those 5 ½-inch floppy disks anymore, although those have been great as far as protecting against the cyber threat because no one else uses them in the world. … How [the GBSD] is commanded and how it’s controlled and how the [Concept of Operations] go is going to obviously be something that makes sense for 2030, and not for how it was done in the 1960s.” Kowalski in September said upgrades to aging NC3 equipment are “clearly necessary.”
Harencak Fires Shots at Modernization Critics
During Tuesday’s speech, Harencak jabbed at critics of the service’s nuclear modernization plans for the air- and land-based legs of the triad, while echoing previous official statements emphasizing the urgency of upgrades to an aging arsenal. “You could be against us spending money on a capability that we desperately need to protect America. Fine. Fine, you have that right. And maybe somebody gets through one of these days,” he said. “But then, I want you to stand up with me and say, ‘We won’t make that investment, but don’t worry, I will send my grandchild into combat with yours in an 80-year-old airplane.’”
Air Leg of Triad Based on ‘Old’ Bombers
Harencak expressed sentiments similar to those of Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh, who in separate speeches last week underscored the high priority the service has given for the long-range strike bomber (LRSB) to help replace an aging fleet of B-2s and B-52s. “There are a lot of hard decisions we have to make out there,” Harencak said. “This is not one of them.” While he lauded the deterrent capability of existing nuclear-armed aircraft to hold any target at risk, Harencak said the air-based leg of the triad is based on “old” bombers. “Our youngest bomber is a B-2 at Whiteman [Air Force Base] that’s old enough to rent a car because it’s approaching 26,” he said.
Critics have asserted that the U.S. does not need the LRSB despite not knowing unpublished details of the restricted program, he said. “Why don’t you wait until you actually know something about it before you criticize it?” he said. “I know that’s asking a lot, but it would be great if we could actually talk about this in a rational way and actually deal in facts as opposed to emotion, and then I think we could bring it to the American people and we could say, ‘This is what you get for this price,’ and in our unemotional, rational view, I’m confident we as a nation will make the right choice.” The Air Force plans to produce 80 to 100 LRSBs at a total cost of $45 to $55 billion, with the first plane slated to debut in the mid-2020s.
Modernization Critics Return Fire
Harencak during his speech called for attendees to engage critics of nuclear modernization about how essential the modernization plans are to provide deterrence. Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, in a Jan. 21 article directly challenged Harencak’s statements, specifically focusing on the general’s assertion that over the last 20-25 years, the U.S. has neglected modernization and taken a “procurement holiday.” “I think people realize that over the last 20, 25 years, we took a procurement holiday in getting some of this stuff done,” Harencak said. “Other countries have not. They did not take that procurement holiday. And so what we’re doing is, I think when it comes to nuclear policy and nuclear weapons, certainly you have to worry about what others are doing, because that’s how you can craft the best deterrence you have.”
Kristensen pointed to procurements of gravity bombs, Ohio-class submarines, Trident 2s, Minuteman 3s and B-2s, and warhead modifications during the last two decades. “If ‘holiday’ generally refers to ‘a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done,’ then it’s been a bad holiday,” Kristensen said. He added: “Whether or not one believes that nuclear weapons are relevant and needed (or to what extent) in today’s world, to suggest that they are as relevant and as needed today as during the nail-biting and gong-ho conditions that characterized the Cold War demonstrates a surprising lack of understanding and perspective. Remember: the Cold War that held the world hostage at gunpoint with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed around the world only minutes from global annihilation?”
Force Improvement Program
Harencak touted the benefits of the Force Improvement Program, which has brought everything from increased pay to better vehicles for airmen, he said. As of this month, missile launch control officers are receiving bonuses and are the highest-paid lieutenants in the Air Force until aviation pay kicks in after six years, Harencak added. “We’ve made significant changes to how they schedule—given them a little bit better life,” he said. “We’re doing things—even deep-cleaning the launch control facilities. … I’m told … you go down there and before you started your 24 hours, you’d bring some Windex and maybe some Clorox spray, and you’d bring a little bit of paper towels and you go down and you’d clean the best you can. That’s great, but we’ve never really, really deep-cleaned the launch [facility]. And it seems like a minor issue, it really does—unless, of course, you need to sit down there for 20 hours.” One recent sign of success within the Air Force legs of the Nuclear Enterprise has been a “huge increase” in the percentage of ROTC and military academy graduates who have volunteered for the missileer field during the past year, Harencak said.
Air Force Agrees with 112 of 114 Recommendations
The Air Force agreed with 112 of the 114 recommendations laid out in recently completed reviews of the nuclear enterprise, Harencak said, and placing less emphasis on inspections was one area of agreement. Harencak said the Air Force and Defense Department got “carried away” with implementing inspections, adding that when he was commander of Whiteman AFB in 2008, his base had 161 inspections. “We lost our way,” he said. “We got crazy about the importance of inspections. So of course, that developed a culture where people said, ‘The only thing that really matters is me getting by my next inspection.’ That was wrong. Good people thought it was what needed to be done, but it turned out it wasn’t.” He said the inspection process is now more logical and focuses more on mission accomplishment rather than merely checking boxes.
Harencak also underscored a changed Personnel Reliability Program (PRP), which he says has shifted from a bureaucratic process of medical recordkeeping to a more personal evaluation method of nuclear weapons handlers. “Thanks to these reports, it gave everybody the incentive to really look at this, and it really helped us,” Harencak said. “Yes, yes, some of the recommendations were critical. Most of them were spot-on. Some stung a bit, some left a mark, but in the end, it was vitally important for us to get that out into the light of day and because they did it, they were able to accomplish things that I said a year ago, I never even dreamed that we were going to be able to, within the span of one year, to be able to fix PRP.”
