The Air Force will not be affected in fiscal 2021 if Congress approves the White House’s plan to short the Pentagon budget by $2.5 billion to increase spending at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) by 25%, the service’s chief of staff said Wednesday.
“The $2.5 [billion] didn’t have an impact on the Air Force, ” Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, told House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) during a Wednesday hearing on the service’s budget.
Pressed by Smith, Goldfein said he didn’t have an opinion about the decision to plus-up the NNSA at the Navy’s expense — a decision the Air Force staff chief said was made “at the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] level.”
“That’s about as much detail as I understand on that,” Goldfein said.
Normally an agency that toils in relative secrecy and obscurity, the NNSA is under the Armed Services Committee’s spotlight this year, leaking into hearings that ostensibly have nothing to do with civilian nuclear weapons programs.
That is because President Donald Trump in January decided the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency should receive $19.8 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, well above its enacted funding of $16.7 billion. To help make that happen, the Pentagon subsequently decided the Navy would get funding to start building only one Virginia-class attack submarine in 2021, instead of two as previously planned.
The Air Force was excused from the belt-tightening, Goldstein said. Funding trades between the Pentagon and the NNSA is “always a balancing act,” he added.
The service’s own nuclear modernization programs are ahead of the Navy’s in the strategic forces pipeline, with planned replacements for two of the three legs of the nuclear triad — silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles — slated for deployment starting around 2030.
As previously planned, the Air Force for fiscal 2021 seeks $1.5 billion for procurement of Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) ICBMs; $474 million for the Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile; and $2.8 billion for the Northrop Grumman-built B-21 Raider, which eventually will carry all air-based nuclear weapons.
The GBSD budget is the only one rising sharply — the request is three times the 2020 appropriation of just over $555 million — but that reflects the program’s expected transition from technology development to a roughly $25 billion engineering and manufacturing development contract that Northrop Grumman looks like a lock to win.
