Congress is reluctant to boost U.S. strategic capabilities to face the potential nuclear threat posed by Russia, two nuclear experts said yesterday during a breakfast event. “I’m not very confident that we will see the spending increases that we need to do something about beefing up the U.S. deterrent capability,” Dr. Mark Schneider, Senior Analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy, said yesterday at the Peter Huessy Breakfast Series on Capitol Hill. “I just don’t see that as very likely. Small steps may be taken, but I don’t see really big ones, and there are a lot of very big problems that have become the result of 20 years of underfunding the nuclear deterrent forces, and they can’t be solved overnight, even if we had an unlimited amount of money.”
While Schneider said Russian nuclear rhetoric and modernization should have "some effect" on Congressional funding for U.S. nuclear capabilities, both he and Dr. Steve Blank, Senior Fellow for Russia at the American Foreign Policy Council, cited ongoing Russian nuclear modernization, ranging from rail-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles to nuclear-capable bombers to ballistic missile submarines. Blank juxtaposed ongoing Russian nuclear modernization with the aging U.S. nuclear triad, which Defense Department reviews found was neglected for decades. “The American nuclear enterprise is in a very sad shape,” he said. “Despite the fact that the [Obama] Administration plans on funding it, the fact of the matter is that modernization is not taking place at anywhere near the pace it needs to.” The Air Force has programmed an additional $5.6 billion over the Future Years’ Defense Program to invest in the ICBM and bomber legs of the nuclear triad, while the Navy has programmed $5 billion in research and development and $5 billion in advanced procurement for the Ohio-class Replacement over the FYDP. The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces begins markup of the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act on April 23.
Pending appropriation, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent would be a new start program in FY 2016, while the Ohio-class Replacement has been in its Milestone A (Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction) phase since January 2011. While unclassified budget numbers suggest the long-range strike-bomber is in R&D, analysts have said the program’s funding profile indicate that it’s undergoing development.