The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense did not have advanced warnings about the acting secretary of the Navy’s memo last week that urged the service to cancel a planned nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile.
“I am not familiar with the memo nor was I consulted, but as soon as we’re done here I’ll go find that memo and get consulted,” Army Gen. Mark Milley told Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) Thursday in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also said in the hearing that he had not been consulted about the acting Navy secretary’s memo.
Austin said that this was likely an “internal department memo,” reiterating that the Pentagon still supports the SLCM funding requested in the budget.
“That memo has to be pre-decisional because of where we are in the process. And so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on his memo,” Austin said.
Media this week widely reported on a June 4 memo that Thomas Harker, the acting secretary of the Navy, sent to the undersecretary of the navy, the commandant of the marine corps, the chief of naval operations, the service’s general counsel, and its chief information office.
The U.S. Naval Institute posted a copy of the Program Objective Memorandum online. In it Harker called for cancelling the sea-launched cruise missile.
That guidance follows Navy’s 2022 budget request, in which it requested some $5 million to develop the nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile that the Donald Trump administration recommended building as part of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. President Joe Biden’s administration is not expected to finish its own Nuclear Posture Review until the fall, at the earliest.
Some people in government, and outside of it, view the Biden posture review, not the budget request, as the spark plug for whatever changes the new administration will attempt to make to U.S. nuclear forces.
Similar to the Navy, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has also asked for funding for the proposed sea-launched cruise missile for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The missile’s nuclear tip would notionally be a variant of the W80-4: an upgraded version of the warhead intended to ride on the Air Force’s planned Long Range Standoff weapon, an air-launched delivery system set to deploy in 2030 or so.
The NNSA seeks a little more than $1 billion for the W80-4 program for fiscal year 2022, about an 8% increase from the 2021 appropriation of roughly $1 billion. That would include work to support the sea-launched variant of the warhead. The first production unit for the air-launched version of the weapon is scheduled for 2025, NNSA has said.
The House Armed Services Committee was scheduled to hear testimony Thursday about the 2022 budget requests for the NNSA and the Navy, among others.
