Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
2/28/2014
The nuclear triad will survive the proposed Pentagon spending cuts in President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said this week. Offering a preview of the President’s budget request to reporters at the Pentagon Feb. 24, Hagel outlined a series of spending cuts across the Department of Defense, but singled out the nuclear triad—consisting of nuclear-capable bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles—for protection in the budget. “Our recommendations favor a smaller and more capable force, putting a premium on rapidly deployable, self-sustaining platforms that can defeat more technologically advanced adversaries,” Hagel said. “We also preserve all three legs of the nuclear triad and will make important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable and effective nuclear force.”
Some arms control experts have called for the Obama Administration to make cuts to the nuclear triad with implantation of the New START Treaty ongoing and it planning to pursue another round of arms control negotiations with Russia. Hagel’s comments, however, appear to reflect the importance placed by the Administration on the triad. “The forces we prioritize can project power over great distances and carry out a variety of missions more relevant to the President’s defense strategy, such as homeland defense, strategic deterrence, building partnership capacity and defeating asymmetric threats. They’re also well-suited to the strategy’s rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region, to sustaining security commitments in the Middle East and Europe and our engagement in other regions.”
Pentagon Moving Forward With ICBM Study
At the same time, the Pentagon recently confirmed that it is moving forward with an environmental study on trimming the size of the ICBM force as part of implementing the New START Treaty—going against language in the FY 2014 omnibus appropriations act prohibiting such a study from taking place. “The [environmental assessment] will collect information from all three missile bases on the effects of eliminating no more than 50 ICBM silos,” Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said in a statement Feb. 21. “While we don’t know what the final force structure will be at this time, the administration remains committed to maintaining safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrence capabilities that include the ICBM leg of the nation’s nuclear triad.”
The Pentagon’s push forward on the study has angered lawmakers in states that house the country’s ICBMs, including Montana Sens. Jon Tester (D) and John Walsh (D). They outlined their concerns in a letter to Hagel last week. “We write to make very clear our strenuous opposition to any attempt by the Department of Defense to circumvent existing law to proceed with an Environmental Impact Study or an Environmental Assessment on the elimination of Minuteman III silos,” they wrote. “If the Defense Department is in fact pursuing such a course, we demand the legal justification for how it could so directly contradict recently enacted law and the repeatedly stated will of Congress.”
The Senators added: “In addition to compromising the most stabilizing and visible constant in our nuclear posture, it would directly represent a breach of faith. And any attempts to move forward with such an environmental study would greatly undermine the historically constructive and cooperative nature of our working relationship.”
