Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
5/15/2015
The Department of Defense plans to fund the more than 50-year-old U.S. ICBM command and control structure, even if the military’s budget is limited by sequestration, a top Air Force nuclear official said this week. “The good news is significant investment in the President’s Budget to get at this, and even at the BCA [Budget Control Act] level, we’re going to make significant investment in it,” said Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, Air Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, during a Peter Huessy Breakfast Series event on Capitol Hill. “I’m excited about it, because it’s overdue. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as cool as bombers and missiles and all that stuff, but of course, it’s vitally, vitally important, and we’ve just got to get more agile faster, but the main thing is we’ve just got to make the investment. The decision has been made to make those investments.”
The White House requested $287 million for nuclear command and control (NC2) in Fiscal Year 2016, which would be about $147 million more than the FY 2015-enacted amount. Last week, the Senate passed a budget framework that would establish a topline of $523 billion for defense activities in FY 2016, adhering to the Budget Control Act’s discretionary defense cap. The framework also would authorize about $90 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations in FY 2016.
NC3 Costs to Trend Downward
After peaking in FY 2016, Air Force budgeting for NC2 is expected to trend downward, as the Future Years’ Defense Program shows the amount tumbling to $80.1 million in FY 2017, $37.8 million in FY 2018, $14.8 million in FY 2019, and $14.9 million in FY 2020. Harencak pledged to improve upon previous efforts to modernize command and control that fell short because of obsolescence of pursued technology. “We went down some rabbit holes, and the good people did it in the last 20 years, and some of that stuff didn’t pan out, or by the time we finally got it, technology and everything had long passed it over, and we have to get better, we have to get more agile,” he said.
Built in the 1960s, the nationwide nuclear command and control network includes buried HICS cables, and certain other NC2 elements operate based on 20th century technology, including floppy disks, as 60 Minutes captured last year. Northrop Grumman in January won a $963.5 million contract to sustain the ICBM Ground Subsystem until Jan. 31, 2020. Air Force officials have repeatedly said that they intend to leverage Minuteman 3 technology into the ICBM’s follow-on, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, whose debut is expected in 2027. Investments over the FYDP will likely support that weapon system. Currently, there is one launch control assigned to operate every 10 Minuteman 3 launch facilities, all stationed at Malmstrom, Minot and F.E. Warren AFBs.