The refurbishment of the cruise missile warhead for the Air Force’s new Long-Range Standoff weapon is expected to be the recipient of a significant increase in requested funding when President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget is unveiled today, bucking a request made last week by a group of nonproliferation and arms control experts to cancel the program. Thirteen experts wrote to National Security Advisor Susan Rice Jan. 26 to request the “unneeded and expensive” program be scrapped. “The proposed LRSO weapon will be far more capable than the existing Air-Launched Cruise Missile, the weapon it would replace. It will fly faster, have a longer range and increased accuracy, and be designed for stealth. Those are all attributes intended to increase war-fighting capability, but are unneeded for deterrence,” the experts wrote. Former U.S. Strategic Command deputy chief Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson and former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official Phil Coyle were among the experts that signed the letter.
The Administration is expected to request an increase in funding for the cruise missile warhead refurbishment and announce an acceleration of the program by two years—completing a First Production Unit for the refurbished warhead by FY 2025 rather than FY 2027, a date established by the Administration last year. Congress required the acceleration in the FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. The experts that want the program cancelled, however, say it won’t aid the nation’s nuclear deterrent, which already includes air-dropped bombs. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States needs to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent,” the experts wrote. “However, a new nuclear-armed cruise missile with enhanced capabilities is not required for that mission. Instead, it will undermine meaningful pledges made by President Obama to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, send the rest of the world the counterproductive message that the United States seeks not just to maintain but to improve its nuclear arsenal, and add nothing to the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”
