The Chief of Naval Operations on Tuesday said the U.S. must move faster on new capabilities to support its nuclear deterrent, such as finding a “cost-effective, credible” replacement for the Trident II ballistic missile, adding the Navy can no longer rely on a readiness advantage in the strategic weapon space.
Adm. John Richardson told attendees at a Mitchell Institute event the Navy will continue to face increasing “grey-zone activity” from adversaries and called for exploring capabilities such as low-yield nuclear weapons to account for new asymmetric threats.
“We need new programs. We need to move capability into the fleet faster. Our inability to do that, despite what we might describe as a good old college try, is going to be a strategic Achilles’ heel,” Richardson said. “We need to restore our technical agility, our ability to move technology into our people’s hands faster.”
Richardson noted adversaries push to build up their own strategic weapons capacity, seamlessly moving between low and high-end threats.
“If we ignore that trend, we are going to find ourselves catching up,” Richardson said. “It’s different thinking than always trying to go to the high-end spectrum of conflict and making sure you’ve got that down. It’s costly there, and it’s kind of a finite game when you get up there. It seems to our competitors are onto that strategy and are making an awful lot of progress on the lower end of that spectrum.”
Low-yield nuclear weapons, such as the W76-2 submarine-launched, ballistic missile warhead, have been proposed as an option to fill a deterrence capability gap after Russia developed such a capability.
“That tries to address some of these asymmetries that have emerged since we last really did some research on this,” Richardson said.
