The Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee was scheduled to hold a hearing Wednesday evening on the budget needs and posture of U.S. nuclear forces.
Vice Adm. Johnny Wolf, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, and Gen. Timothy Ray, commander of Air Force global strike command, are the scheduled headline witnesses.
The hearing will also be a reunion of sorts of a pair of long-time House Armed Services Staffers who, after working together in the lower chamber for around a decade, jumped over to the Pentagon within about a year of one another.
Leonor Tomero, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, will testify alongside Andrew Walter, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters.
Tomero is the former lead Democratic staffer in charge of the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces portfolio. She left that role in January to join the Pentagon. Walter is her former Republican counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee. He’s been with the Department of Defense since late 2019.
The Joe Biden administration is in the middle of a closed-door review of U.S. nuclear modernization plans. Tomero figures to have a prominent role in the development rollout of whatever policies the White House decides on.
Tomero also recently raised eyebrows by telling Japan’s Asahi Shimbun that the Biden administration was trying “to find ways to reduce the role of nuclear weapons” in U.S. strategy.
