The United States must upgrade its nuclear deterrent and the $60-$100 billion pricetag to modernize all three legs of the triad included in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review should be manageable, former Congressman Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) and National Defense Panel member told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on the sidelines of a Dec. 2 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on the QDR. “I don’t think we can afford not to do it,” he said. “If we’re at the point where we cannot afford that, we’re in big trouble. That is not that much money by federal budget standards, given what’s at stake.”
Released July 31, the written assessment of the 2014 QDR identified the Ohio-class replacement and long-range strike capability as the two planned programs most in need of modernization, and underscored that modernization of all three triad legs could cost $60-100 billion. “We used some numbers in the report,” National Defense Panel Member Eric Edelman, a former Under Secretary of Defense, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on the sidelines of the hearing following his testimony. “I think those numbers should be subjected to some scrutiny and one of the things we said in the report was that there should be a panel commission chartered like the Strategic Posture Commission that Congress created back in 2008 and 2009, that was co-chaired by [former Defense Secretary] Bill Perry and the late Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, to look at the modernization of the triad as a whole, to look at the future needs of the deterrent and what might be done about the costs that are currently being quoted as being the costs of modernization.”
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