Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
12/5/2014
The United States must upgrade its nuclear deterrent and the $600 billion-$1 trillion 30-year price tag to modernize all three legs of the triad included in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review should be manageable, National Defense Panel member and former Congressman Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) told NS&D Monitor this week on the sidelines of a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the QDR. “I don’t think we can afford not to do it,” he said. “If we’re at the point where we cannot afford that, we’re in big trouble. That is not that much money by federal budget standards, given what’s at stake.”
Released July 31, the written assessment of the 2014 QDR identified the Ohio-class replacement and long-range strike capability as the two planned programs most in need of modernization, and underscored that modernization of all three triad legs could cost $600 billion-$1 trillion. “We used some numbers in the report,” National Defense Panel Member Eric Edelman, a former Under Secretary of Defense, told NS&D Monitor on the sidelines of the hearing. “I think those numbers should be subjected to some scrutiny and one of the things we said in the report was that there should be a panel commission chartered like the Strategic Posture Commission that Congress created back in 2009, that was co-chaired by [former Defense Secretary] Bill Perry and the late Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, to look at the modernization of the triad as a whole, to look at the future needs of the deterrent and what might be done about the costs that are currently being quoted as being the costs of modernization.”
Preventing Political ‘Whiplash’
The written assessment of the 2014 QDR also cited the need for a consistent authorization and appropriation “horizon” to prevent the “political whiplash” the nuclear arsenal has endured since the end of the Cold War, and called for the Administration and Congress to “urgently and jointly” examine the intellectual foundation behind U.S. deterrence policy. “We strongly believe that any future nuclear deterrent posture should continue to provide credible, effective deterrence and reassurance, including in the context of extended deterrence,” the assessment states.
‘It’s Going to Need Some Recapitalization’
Edelman told NS&D Monitor that the United States should pay the “small price” of modernization to shore up the under-resourced nuclear enterprise, as strategic forces play a central, ultimate role in warding off potential attacks and provide the U.S. an assured fallback should conventional deterrence fail. “Look, we’ve neglected the nuclear enterprise, not just in the Department of Defense, but nationally in the Department of Energy for some time, and it’s going to need some recapitalization,” Edelman said. “If you’re going to, as we say in the report, decisively deter someone, the way you decisively deter someone is by saying there is a risk that, at some level, this conflict could go nuclear if you don’t step back, and I think that’s the important part.”
The written QDR assessment states that while the United States has strayed from its reliance on nuclear weapons, strategic forces still play an “essential role” in deterrence and in buoying U.S. allies. The assessment reaffirmed the QDR’s emphasis on the importance of a “safe, secure and effective” nuclear force and a powerful counter-proliferation regime. “We toiled under the language,” Marshall said. “[W]e wanted to size the force to deal with these problems, but we recognized at some point, we’d want to fall back on strategic forces, and if our strategic forces aren’t modernized, it’s a lot more difficult to [provide that] fallback.
Pitfalls of Sequestration
Testifying alongside Edelman, fellow National Defense Panel member Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and currently CEO of the Center for a New American Security, and lawmakers took turns bashing sequestration. Flournoy bemoaned the measure’s counterproductive effects, and urged Congress to lift it. She spoke generally about how sequestration has forced military-wide slashing of modernization plans and an inefficient dedication of funding. “Each of the services has had to gouge their modernization plans, upsetting investment programs, timelines, and the truth is, at some point, we’re going to have to pay more to make those programs well and invest in the future,” she said. “It’s very critical that we invest now in research and development, the prototyping and the procurement that we’re going to need for several presidents on.”
