Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
2/27/2015
A top Defense Department official last week identified a point of bilateral contention in the New START Treaty as a factor in U.S. deployment plans for the Long Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO). “We did make an effort to address nuclear-armed cruise missiles in New START, and we didn’t have a partner that was willing to, so we expect that we will have LRSO in the force in the future,” Greg Weaver, Principal Director for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said Feb. 20 during the annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
New START caps the number of warheads on ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers at 1,550, but counts each bomber as only one warhead toward this limit, regardless of how many actual missiles and gravity bombs are carried. To be sure, Weaver said DoD would deploy LRSOs if the bomber counting rule didn’t exist, noting their centrality in U.S. defense plans. In that case, Weaver said, the warheads “simply would’ve counted.” Without a nuclear cruise missile counting rule, U.S. and Russia nuclear cruise missile numbers are uncapped. The U.S. actively maintains 528 air-launched cruise missiles, the LRSO’s in-service predecessor.
The First Production Unit for the LRSO is expected in 2025, after President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request proposed to accelerate the program by two years. DoD is requesting $36.6 million in FY 2016 for research and development of the system, which is expected to cost $1.8 billion over the Future Years’ Defense Program (FYDP). The Administration requested another $195 million in the National Nuclear Security Administration budget for work on the W80-4 warhead that will be used on the LRSO.
Carter to Lead NDERG Meeting Soon
According to Weaver, Defense Secretary Ash Carter will soon lead his first meeting of the Nuclear Deterrent Enterprise Review Group (NDERG), after former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel held two NDERG meetings following the completion of one internal and one external review that both uncovered morale and equipment flaws within the nuclear enterprise. Hagel initiated the reviews in January 2014 in parallel with an ongoing drug investigation involving multiple Air Force bases and an investigation at Malmstrom AFB that uncovered cheating by missileers on monthly proficiency tests.
In November, Hagel announced the creation of the NDERG, whose purpose is to evaluate implementation of more than 100 recommendations the reviews prescribed to reinvigorate the nuclear enterprise. Weaver on Feb. 20 told attendees of the Nuclear Deterrence Summit that he expected Carter to lead an NDERG meeting “fairly quickly,” emphasizing that the approach of this group would probe force culture more deeply than previous task forces aimed at improving the nuclear enterprise. Chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, the NDERG meets once a month and reports to the Defense Secretary once a quarter.
Weaver Clarifies President’s Nuke Policy
Weaver also clarified President Barack Obama’s nuclear policy, noting that DoD personnel visited young airmen and sailors who interpreted Obama’s stated goals of working toward a peaceful and stable world without nuclear weapons as meaning nuclear weapons “are going away sometime in the near term,” Weaver said. “The President never said that. The President acknowledged the difficulties in getting to a world without nuclear weapons. We could’ve probably done a better job of identifying that it was being misperceived earlier.”
DoD is working to clarify pursuit of policy goals and the underlying geopolitical setting, according to Weaver. “Sometimes the enemy has a vote on the extent to which you pursue certain things,” he said. “As a lifelong analyst, I’m a little frustrated that the policy documents weren’t read with more attention and more careful parsing, but that’s pretty naïve when you’re talking about young captains and lieutenants in the Air Force and the impressions that they would get from the way things were talked about, and so we’re working hard to rectify that.”
‘No Sugarcoating’
Weaver said he and other DoD officials were working to quickly address morale and equipment shortcomings in the nuclear enterprise. “One of the most troubling, I think, findings, and I’ll tell you why [DoD] should worry about it, is the problems addressed in past reviews have not been addressed and are worsening across the enterprise,” he said. “There’s no sugarcoating what these reviews told us, and they’re sobering. The good news is that we identified these problems across the board in time to fix them before we incur unacceptable risk.”
The last nuclear force mishap occurred in 2007, when a B-52 mistakenly carried six unaccounted for nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB. To engender lasting culture change and reliability within the nuclear enterprise this time, the office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) within the Office of the Secretary of Defense has developed assessment methodologies and is looking at whether the “root causes” of enterprise problems are being addressed. Weaver said CAPE begins every NDERG session with a report to Work “on where we are and where we aren’t making the force healthy.”
Weaver added that while the reviews found that legacy nuclear systems would get more expensive to maintain as DoD moves to a fully modernized nuclear force, further “systemic” neglect could deplete the safety, security and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. “Both reviews found that these problems took decades to develop, and that it’ll take years of committed and prioritized action to fix them,” he said. “There’s no quick fix.”
