Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
4/17/2015
The Defense Department can’t afford to build the Ohio-class Replacement (OR), the long range strike-bomber, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the long-range standoff weapon, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer said this week. Frank Kendall, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics said the nuclear triad modernization will cost about $10-$12 billion over the President’s Budget level, and the situation gets “severe” starting in 2021, when OR development starts. “We don’t have a solution to that problem right now,” Kendall told attendees of the Sea-Air-Space Expo. He said Defense Secretary Ash Carter has commissioned the Strategic Portfolio Review, which is reviewing all legs of the nuclear triad. “I frankly think the only way we can…keep the force structure of the Department of Defense that we would like to have is higher budgets,” he said. “I really don’t right now see any management solutions that will help us. It’s quite clear you can’t pay for all of those things just out of the strategic deterrence account.”
The budget might force a strategy change. “There are radical policy changes you could talk about, like changing the nature of the triad, that would help significantly,” Kendall said. Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, talking to reporters this week, described the issue simply, saying the DoD is underfunded, and if the Air Force doesn’t get funding above the President’s Budget level, the service won’t be able to meet its commitments. Harencak said Kendall was “absolutely right,” adding that the Air Force has to innovate to make nuclear modernization as affordable as possible. “The first cell phone in the mid-‘90s was $500 and it was big, and it sometimes made calls and sometimes [didn’t make calls],” he said. “What do you get now? You get a cell phone for free as long as you sign up, and it has the same computing capacity as a B-52 does. The fact of the matter is, we can, in America, do stuff like that, and we’re going to have to think of innovative ways to deliver a nuclear deterrent affordably.”
