The Heritage Foundation yesterday released its “2015 Index of U.S. Military Strength,” which assesses the
overall military power of U.S. nuclear forces as “marginal.” Warhead modernization, delivery systems modernization, the weapons complex and nuclear test readiness were ranked as “weak”; warhead surety, national labs talent and force readiness were dubbed “marginal”; and only delivery platform reliability and allied assurance were classified as “strong.” The report noted the age of capabilities, lack of publicly available reliability data, and the diverse portfolio of bombers and national labs, which perform certain missions outside of nuclear weapons. “Thus, assessing the extent to which any one piece of the nuclear enterprise is sufficiently funded, focused, and effective with regard to the nuclear mission is problematic,” the report notes.
Negative trends could undercut U.S. deterrence if existing issues—including an aging nuclear weapons infrastructure and workforce, the necessity to recapitalize all three legs of the triad, the need to do life extension programs while maintaining a nuclear test moratorium, limiting the spread of nuclear knowledge and how to deliver weapons and adversaries’ modernization—are not addressed, the report states. “Due to the complex interplay between policy, actions that states take in international relations, and other actors’ perceptions of the world around them, it is quite possible that one might never know precisely when deterrence became less credible,” the report states. The report describes an improved score trend from Fiscal Year 2008 to FY 2013, as percentages rose from 71 to 91.7 percent over those five years, peaking in FY 2012 at 100 percent. But the paper questions the reasoning behind counting the number of meetings without an assessment of the efficiency of the deterrent. The report states: “It is…not clear how the number of meetings contributes to affirming the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence absent evaluation of capabilities and requirements that allies consider necessary for assurance.”
