The Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday approved Gen. John Hyten to become vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, following a hearing in which the Air Force four-star and current commander of U.S. nuclear forces fielded questions about his alleged sexual assault of a subordinate officer.
The committee voted 20-7 to report the U.S. Strategic Command commander’s nomination to the Senate for a floor vote. Hyten’s accuser, Army Col. Kathryn Spletstoser, was in the front row of the committee room for the nomination hearing Tuesday.
Six Democrat committee members and one Republican voted against advancing his nomination. The Democrats were: Sens. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), and Gary Peters (Mich.), plus presidential candidates Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who reportedly voted by proxy while participating in the Democratic presidential primary debates in Detroit this week.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) also voted no.
The full Senate was not slated to vote on Hyten’s confirmation at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. That could leave the vice chair-designate in limbo until after the Senate’s August recess. If confirmed, Hyten will remain on the joint Pentagon-Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Council: the group in charge of the government’s strategy for nuclear weapons procurement.
As the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten has already been on the council for more than three years. He assumed his current command in 2016 and previously ran Air Force Space Command.
While several senators at the hearing pressed Hyten about his alleged sexual assault of Spletstoser, and his subsequent handling of what he called Spletstoser’s toxic leadership under his command, one key lawmaker focused her remarks exclusively on nuclear weapons.
It turned into a preamble to yet-unscheduled conference negotiations between the House and Senate over their dueling National Defense Authorization Acts for the upcoming fiscal 2020. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), chair of the SASC’s strategic forces subcommittee, enlisted Hyten’s help shooting down arguments House Democrats used to support proposed cuts to nuclear modernization programs.
Fischer told Hyten she wanted to correct what she called “misleading arguments” House Democrats made as they debated their version of the annual military policy bill, which passed the lower chamber on July 12.
At Fischer’s prompting, Hyten said he did not believe that placing a low-yield nuclear warhead on submarine-launched ballistic missiles made the submarine fleet less safe. He also repeated a Pentagon talking point that the current arsenal of low-yield bombs and air-launched cruise missiles are no substitute for a faster-traveling, low-yield, sub-launched nuclear ballistic-missile.
Hyten even told Fischer and the Committee that he came up with the idea for the weapon that eventually became the W76-2 low-yield warhead. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) began making the warhead in 2019 by modifying what the agency says is a “small number” of high-yield W76-1 warheads.
While helping draft the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, Hyten “made a recommendation” to place “a very small number of low-yield nuclear weapons on our submarines,” the commander told Fischer.
The Trump administration says the United States needs a low-yield nuclear weapon for a prompt strike to check an adversary from using its own low-yield weapon to quickly escalate and win a conventional conflict.
House Democrats reject that argument. Led by Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the lower chamber’s National Defense Authorization Act would ban the Navy from deploying the W76-2, which the NNSA planned to start delivering to the service by Sept. 30.
Smith and his allies say a low-yield weapon lowers the threshold for nuclear war and would, if used, expose the submarine that launched it to a counterattack that could destroy many high-yield nuclear missiles the U.S. relies on to deter a potentially devastating nuclear first-strike on American territory.
Fischer also pressed Hyten for support on the NNSA’s plan to produce nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits in two states. There, Hyten again obliged.
The NNSA aims to upgrade a pit plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and build a new factory from the remains of a canceled plutonium disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The agency wants these sites to produce a combined 80 pits per year by 2030, beginning with 30 annually at Los Alamos in 2026. However, its own internal studies have put long odds on hitting the target throughput on schedule.
“I think the Department of Energy has put together the best plan we have to get to 30 by 2026 at Los Alamos, and 80 by 2030 across the entire enterprise,” Hyten said, without mentioning the planned Savannah River facility by name.
Responding to questions from strategic forces subcommittee Ranking Member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Hyten said it would be “difficult” to keep all future pit production at Los Alamos — something Heinrich has supported. The NNSA has said Los Alamos’ pit facilities would be smaller than those proposed for Savannah River, able to accommodate fewer workers, and needed for work other than casting pits.
Hyten also said his staff at Strategic Command have often visited Los Alamos to check in on the pit mission, which “I’m sure that bugs the DOE folks a little bit.”
House Democrats, in their National Defense Authorization Act and an accompanying defense appropriations bill, proposed funding in 2020 only the upgrades required to produce 30 pits a year by 2026 at Los Alamos.
The Senate, in the 2020 NDAA it passed in June, approved full funding for all Department of Energy and Department of Defense nuclear weapons modernization programs. The Senate has not yet released any appropriations bills for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
Vivienne Machi, staff reporter for NS&D Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this report from Washington.
