When Elizabeth Warren is the only one looking out for taxpayers, it’s an odd hearing.
But such oddness occurred just recently, when the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services sat down with the boss of Strategic Command. General Anthony J. Cotton appeared before the solons to discuss “the #1 priority mission of the Department of Defense” — how to forestall a nuclear attack, and respond with fire-and-brimstone ferocity should deterrence fail.
D.C. is conducting a massive, decades-long modernization of the triad. For the entire lives of most breathing Americans, bombers, silo-based missiles, and submarine-launched missiles have ensured that any foreign power conducting a catastrophic assault on America would regret its aggression, bigly. But the architecture erected to meet the challenge is rusty. Few disagree that an update is in order.
How are replacement efforts going? Please. Schedule slippage and cost overruns are piling up. But scant criticism was offered at the committee’s hearing:
• Tim Kaine (D-VA) swooned over “submarine industrial base investments.” Surely it’s a coincidence that Newport News Shipbuilding is “a major shipbuilding partner in the Columbia-class program.”
• Deb Fischer (R-NE) expressed concern about “nuclear command, control, and communications,” what she considers “the fourth leg” of the triad. Her interest probably had nothing to do with the fact that Strategic Command is headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base.
• Gary Peters (D-MI) stressed the importance of refueling tankers. No mention of the role he played, earlier this year, in successfully leading “a bipartisan, bicameral group” to secure “a new squadron of … next-generation tankers” at “Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County.”
• Mark Kelly (D-AZ) went full-frontal, mentioning that the Long Range Stand Off Weapon (LRSO), a warhead-tipped, air-launched cruise missile, is being manufactured in Tucson. Arizona’s junior senator called the weapon “a critical feature of our future deterrence.”
• Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) tried the direct approach as well, bragging that his state is “very, very proud” to have been picked to perform maintenance on the B-21 fleet.
Amidst the lovefest, it was up to Warren to raise the pesky matter of money. The celebrated Native American noted that the feds are “planning to spend $2 trillion to modernize and maintain [nuclear] weapons over the next 30 years.” And in this early phase of the campaign, there are problems aplenty. Exhibit A: the Sentinel, intended to succeed the Minuteman III. It’s treading a familiar path for large DOD acquisitions. Warren:
We initially thought the price for Sentinel would be about $95 billion. Now, the Air Force reports it will be $132 billion — nearly 40% more. By law, that kind of increase triggers a mandatory review of the program’s viability.
Rubbing it in, the “progressive” populist continued:
Even before this latest cost breach, there were bright, blinking warnings that this program was not on track.
The Air Force’s aggressive schedule meant they were relying on immature technology, which the [U.S. Government Accountability Office] warned at the time created additional risks of cost increases and schedule delays. Now best practices for budgeting these types of complex programs is to develop what is called an integrated master schedule — analysis that is going to break down the project into steps, resources, and budget needed to complete it — sort of budgeting 101. Sentinel did not have that.
If anything, Warren was too kind. It’s time to reexamine not only the Sentinel, but the entirety of the triad’s upgrade. Long before the mega-modernization commenced, dissident voices from across the ideological spectrum warned that new thinking was needed for the nation’s strategic deterrent.
For example, former Reagan Pentagon official Lawrence Korb called Kelly’s beloved LRSO “a slower and riskier way of threatening targets that can be struck by ballistic missiles.” Elliott Negin, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, makes a compelling case against any heir to the Minuteman III:
Land-based ICBMs may have made sense years ago, when they were more accurate and powerful than submarine-launched ballistic missiles … and communications links with subs were unreliable. But sub-launched missiles are now as accurate as ICBMs — if not more so — and the Navy has secure submarine communication links. Moreover, ICBMs are sitting ducks, while nuclear-armed submarines — each of which could destroy two dozen cities — are virtually invulnerable when they are at sea.
Reformers and skeptics and innovators were ignored, of course. Votes, jobs, pensions, contracts, consulting work, campaign contributions, praise from threat-inflating “journalists” and policy shops — in the U.S. Senate, they’re all valued more than a smart nuclear deterrent.
When Elizabeth Warren is making sense, maybe Armageddon isn’t far off.
And multibillion dollar aircraft carriers are rendered obsolete by swarming drones. How much else is US military thinking is obsolete?
The government needs to do zero -based budgeting in all areas. I'm tired of reading about budgets that are "only increasing at the same rate as the previouys FY. The government sees that as no growth. Also, a budget may be set up and then requirements or oversight is altered which grossly increases costs.