Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/18/2014
CRANE NAVAL SURFACE WARFARE CENTER, Ind.—With the defense budget continuing to tighten, the Navy and Air Force must expand their cooperation on the nation’s fleet of delivery vehicles, senior officials at a Strategic Deterrence Conference here said this week, with Navy Vice Adm. Terry Benedict advocating an “intelligent commonality” approach that takes full advantage of opportunities for common components among the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. In 2012, the Navy and Air Force signed a memorandum of understanding to increase cooperation and established eight working groups to explore areas of commonality, but Benedict suggested they could—and perhaps should—go much further in exploring areas of interoperability on long-term follow-ons to the Navy’s Trident II D5 and the Air Force’s Minuteman III strategic weapons systems. “Maybe the triad moves to a point where we need to think about a joint ballistic missile program office,” said Benedict, the director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs. “And instead of ICBMs and SLBMs we think strategic missiles. Maybe instead of Navy warheads and Air Force warheads we think national nuclear capability.”
‘Full … Spectrum Must be Explored’
While common missiles may not be likely and represent a “revolution” on a spectrum of options presented by Benedict, he emphasized that it was important to investigate all possibilities. “The full option of the spectrum must be explored, in my opinion, from a national perspective,” he said. “As taxpayers you should demand it from us and as services we should be obligated to explore that space.” He said this was the perfect time to begin thinking about more commonality, as both the Navy and the Air Force are contemplating follow-ons to current strategic systems. “We’re seeing the same problem,” Benedict said. “We can continue the way that we’ve continued, the Air Force in ICBMs, the Navy in SLBMs, and never the two shall talk or interact or collaborate. Or we can see this problem for exactly what it is: an opportunity. I believe we’re on a path to look at it as an opportunity.”
The Navy and Air Force have already been cooperating, and have had success developing a fuze for the Navy’s Mk-5 reentry vehicle that has features that can be used by the Air Force in a follow-on effort. Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, the Air Force’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, said the services had no choice but to ramp up cooperation in the future. “It’s my best military advice, to my superiors and to all of you. We have no choice,” he said. “The real question is not should we continue to do this but it’s how fast can we get better at it, how much more we can do, how quickly can we get it done.” He said the cooperation between the services, through the memorandum of understanding, is “already very, very robust, but it’s not enough. Because the more money we save, the more money we need to save. There is no finish line in this thing. There is absolutely no finish line so we need to continue to keep doing it.”
‘We Need Intelligent Commonality’
The idea also drew the support of Rep. Larry Buschon (R-Ind.), who represents Indiana’s Eighth District and the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center. “I’m committed to our nation’s strategic deterrence,” he said. “We want to avoid being shortsighted on the Hill as it relates to the budget. … The concept of the Navy and the Air Force working together to drive affordability is something that’s absolutely necessary in today’s budgetary climate. It makes total sense.”
Benedict cautioned that exploration of commonality should be completely driven by a search for cost savings. “Commonality for simply cost savings’ stake is commonality that will most likely be improperly applied,” he said, adding that such an approach could “introduce risks that today we don’t have in disparate system. If we go to common systems, my term is we need intelligent commonality.” That means ensuring that some components remain different to preserve certain features and reduce the risk of single-point failures. “There are areas where we’re going to want to be different, for supply chain, for redundancy, for architecture,” Benedict said. “Otherwise one single problem takes down two legs [of the triad].”
Benedict: Cost Savings Unclear
Benedict also said the services remained far off from anticipating how much money could be saved. “I don’t think we’ve come to an easy way to address how much cost could be saved,” he said. “We’re going to have to do a lot of exploration, plus are we really talking or are we communicating? Until we get to the communication stage, I’m not sure our aperture is as wide as it should be.”
He suggested that the exploration of commonality could also invigorate the workforce. “It’s got to be real work, exciting work, and most importantly it has to be work that attracts and sustains and maintains the workforce for tomorrow,” Benedict said. “The young engineers that want to stay and do what we do because it is exciting, they’re not going to be attracted to modernization programs or sustainment programs—not enough to get the U.S. Navy through 2080.”
Industry Voices Support
Industry officials at the conference also voiced support for expanding cooperation and commonality among systems. Scott Lehr, Vice President and General Manager of ATK Aerospace’s Strategic and Commercial Division, said that currently about less than 1 percent of the designs of the Minuteman III and the Trident II D5 are common, and there is about 25 percent commonality among suppliers. He said “stretch goals” could involve moving to 60-80 percent common designs, 70-80 percent common suppliers, and overall savings of 25-30 percent. “This is probably I hope where the strategic programs will go,” he said. “I think there is some real pay dirt here. … We are seeing real interest. The customer needs this, the customer wants this. I think we as an industry really need to provide it.”
Tory Bruno, the President of Strategic and Missile Defense at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, emphasized that the “entire pantheon” of what supports the ICBM and SLBM legs of the triad needs to be considered when evaluating commonality. That includes the logistics tail, supply chain concerns, as well as sustainability of the systems, he said. “If you don’t do that when you conduct these trades making sure you satisfy these mission needs, we’re in grave danger of sub-optimizing around some piece of this thinking we’ve done a good thing and helped the problem when it’s possible we made it worse.”
Benedict suggested that an approach of developing disparate systems might not be sustainable into the future. “I’m not certain that given the Administration as well as the national desire to reduce the triad, keep the triad but reduce the triad, that we can sustain core competency within the government as an intelligent customer and industry and as partners if we don’t think of a different way to do this line of business,” he said. “My goal as a director is to force that thought and we’ll see how successful I am in implementing it.”
