The following interview with Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, Air Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration (A10), and Michael Shoults, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration, was conducted at the Pentagon by NS&D Monitor reporter Brian Bradley. Before the interview, Maj. Gen. Harencak told NS&D Monitor that he expects to receive notice of his next assignment in the coming months, after 20th Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein was nominated in March for promotion to the rank of lieutenant general and for the A10 position currently held by Harencak.
Below, Harencak’s comments are set off by an "H," while Shoults’ comments are set off by an "S." Bradley’s questions are bolded.
I noted in a couple of recent congressional hearings, I think it was you and/or [commander of Global Strike Command] General [Stephen] Wilson stating that the Force Improvement Program had actually started before the results of the internal and external investigations on the nuclear enterprise came out last year. Now, I didn’t really know that and I thought it was common knowledge that the investigations came out and then the Force Improvement Program was initiated after that. So that was kind of news to me. I was wondering when that program was initiated.
H: Of course Global Strike Command has always been focused on this particular mission. But in mission set and improving the force, it’s a continuous improvement. We have realized this for many, many years that a nuclear enterprise at the Air Force, it is a continuous improvement. That’s what we are always stretching. We are never really satisfied with where we are. We want to make sure that our people get the resources that they need, they get the training they need and that they are clear to accomplish the mission in the best manner possible. So there has always been that.
Where this actual Force Improvement Program started though, it was after we had some disappointments, as you know, at Malmstrom and the cheating scandal that the Air Force states. And immediately, to address that, General [Stephen] Wilson, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command] and Global Strike Command began a Force Improvement Program, that actually was running concurrent with the gathering of data, the talking to people to see what we could do while these reports were also gathering data and before they’re written. So you are absolutely right, the Force Improvement Program was well under way before the actual reports came out.
The good thing was that when the report came out and we had all these recommendations, essentially the three reports that you talked about, we were able to already say and truth—be absolutely—show the proof that we have already addressed a number of those already in the Force Improvement Program that the United States Air Force started even before these reports were published.
So you visited the Missile Wings a couple of times since Force Improvement Program started, right?
H: Many times, yes.
How many times have you visited? Which ones have you visited? And does life on the Missile Wings feel different to you?
H: Well, I think what you see is when you go visit the Missile Wings now and you talk to the officers, the NCOs, the airmen, I think what you see is you see the benefit of the Force Improvement Program. What you see is that the people are energized, they understand that they are getting a lot of attention not just in senior leader attention, Secretary [of the Air Force Deborah Lee James] and Chief [of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh] and Global Strike, but you also see a recognition throughout DoD, not just the Air Force, but DoD, of perceiving—and rightly so—that everyone now is focused and understands the importance of their mission and is giving them resources and the attention for them as they seek to accomplish the mission.
So what you see is they are energized about it, they are excited. There are incentive pays, as you know.
S: Special duty assignment pay for the enlisted.
H: It’s incentive pay, but which actually makes young missileer officers for the first six years of their career the highest paid officers in the Air Force. So they are seeing that. That’s just one example of us understanding the difficulty of their mission. And we’ve reworked their schedule so they have better scheduling, we are working manning issues, the security forces have gotten uniforms, you know, a host of, host of reasons, things that the Force Improvement Program has already delivered to them. So what you see is they sense, and rightly so, they sense that the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense now values what they are doing and are making concrete steps to show that we want to improve their quality of life in the missile fields.
And that has had an already immediate effect, I think, to the positive, on how they perceive themselves, how they perceive the mission set. And also it’s made some needed improvements in the Missile Wings.
S: I think it is a two-phased approach: One, as General Harencak talked about, is the immediate inflow of new resources—trucks, radios, uniforms.
Work cages for ICBM repairs at Malmstrom?
S: Right.
H: Right.
S: And the second piece is going to be the longer term sustainment resources of new test equipment, modernizing the weapons system. But I think General Harencak hit on it, that if you go out to the field, they see that immediate influx of resources, and for citizen attention, and I think within the Department, the third floor, is a recognition of how important the mission is. And that carries a lot of importance, too, because you want to think that your question has value. And so there have been a lot of discussions lately with testimony about the importance of the triad and how it serves our country, that resonates with the airmen out in the field doing the mission.
There was some concern cited by some folks after former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the reforms and the increased investments and such in November when the reviews were released. And then later that month he announced his resignation. I recall some rumblings of concern about how smoothly those initiatives would transition from the leadership of the former defense secretary to the current defense secretary, Ash Carter. What has that transition been like? And do you think that the same level of attention is being put on nuclear forces?
H: Absolutely, it has been seamless. If anything, it is possible that it’s even gotten more so. Deputy [Defense] Secretary [Bob Work] has been very, very clear about it. The new secretary of defense, Secretary Carter, has not only reiterated but in a lot of ways has re-emphasized that this is going to be a point of emphasis and very important.
You are not paying attention in this building if you don’t sense it. And I would say even so much in the city now if you don’t sense that there has been a complete change in the view of the value and the need to reinvest and re-capitalize our nuclear deterrent. It is apparent everywhere. This building certainly has been leading the way. But I also sense, even on The Hill, a new realized recognition that, “Hey, we just got to get after this,” that this has been neglected for too long and we need a sustained commitment to giving our airmen and sailors involved in the nuclear enterprise the tools they need to accomplish the turn.
Also I think that’s also benefiting NNSA. They also have a renewed determination and a renewed commitment to deliver those things that they do so well all the time, to us. And you see it in the B-61 program which is funded, fully funded. It’s on schedule; it’s on cost. And as you saw, we’re meeting the milestones, and this program is an extremely well-run program that’s delivering results and as I said on schedule, on cost. So it goes beyond.
That top-level focus and leadership has filtered down, and going to your first question is if you don’t think the lieutenants are paying attention, if you don’t think that tech sergeants are paying attention and waiting for that type of commitment, you are mistaken. And they are paying attention and they do see it. So from the very top to the people doing the important, the real work in the field they all sense that this time there is a commitment to it, this time there is a sustained focus and it is making all the difference in the world.
I wanted to bounce back to Force Improvement for one second. There is a question, it’s a simple question but I think it is an important question that I wanted to ask you. Going back to last month, [20th Air Force Commander Major] General [Jack] Weinstein in Congressional testimony responding to a question by [Democratic] Representative [Jackie] Speier of California, he said he didn’t think that there was a morale problem anymore in nuclear forces. Do you share that assessment?
H: I think I agree. I think that morale has improved tremendously due to all the things we talked about in the first few questions. I believe, though, that morale is one issue. It’s a very hard issue to gauge. It’s much like gaining air superiority: You gain air superiority over an area, and then you have to maintain it over that area. And if you don’t have the proper focus, if you don’t have the proper emphasis, if you don’t have the airplanes to do it, if you had air superiority, it could go away in a moment’s notice.
So in order to maintain air superiority you must maintain the focus, you must do it. In order to maintain the morale, if you will, and when you talk about morale there are so many issues associated with that. It is not just the mission set. It is where you are living. Do you have the facilities? Are there jobs for your spouses? How is the school going? The weather? There are a million different issues in there and you can’t address the morale issue as a specific one thing.
That being said, I agree with General Weinstein, somebody who has been extremely close to this mission set for 8 1/2 years now. I think we are at a high point for the morale of the nuclear forces because they truly have always been listening. They have been waiting for senior people to say, hey, what you are doing is important, and we are going to show you how important it is. It is finally happening now. That though however is not something to say, okay, job is done, let’s move on to something else, because if we are not careful those gains could be lost really quickly.
So while I agree with him—he is absolutely right—it is my assessment also that there is no longer a morale problem. That in itself, though, must lead you to the fact that we must constantly keep the focus on it. We need to monitor and we need to make sure because, like I said, like air superiority, it could disappear in a moment’s notice if you don’t put the needed focus and resources into it.
And I know that OSD CAPE is tracking the implementation of the recommendations found in the internal and external reviews. And you mentioned that morale is kind of a tough thing to track.
H: It is.
Have you encountered any kind of difficulties in trying to evaluate the recommendations, many of which are morale-related, using an empirical method?
H: Well, it is hard. And I will let Mike maybe answer part of this too. But first of all, if you are going to say, “Hey, fund this as one of the recommendations,” then you must fully fund it. “Well, what is fully funded?” “X amount of dollars.” “Well, have you gotten X amount of dollars yet?” “Well, no.” OK, so you are X minus 10. “Well, all right, we are not there yet,” if you will. Morale, though, how do you ever really know you are there? You don’t really know you are there. So what you have to do is you have to rely on commanders in the field; you have to rely on senior NCOs in the field to give you their gut assessment of how people, the people who are actually out there are doing.
You also have some other tools like, for example, not all of our young missileers could stay in missiles simply because of the way that career progression goes. We need a lot of lieutenants; we need a lot of captains; we need less majors and lieutenant colonels. So there comes a time at about the six-year point where missileers have an option to leave missiles. We do it by performance and preference. If you perform well, the highest performers which we spend the time doing, and we rank order these officers who are coming up on that decision point and then we rank order them, one to N, and then we ask every single one of them their preferences as to whether they want to, do something anywhere from staying in missiles or going to a number of other career fields in the Air Force.
How do I know that morale is better in the nuclear end of things? Well, how can I really tell that? Well, one of the ways that I can tell it is to look at how many of the top missileers, as we rank order, want to stay in missiles. And what we just did—out of the top 10 ranked missileers in the last time we did this—nine out of 10 said their number-one choice was to stay in missiles.
So, I totally agree it is hard to get your arms around this, “How is morale?” question. There are certain things we can use besides our gut. Besides 32 years of experience of working with airmen and being amongst airmen, I could go to a unit and just tell if these people are truly happy and focused and working. I could do that. But it is hard for me to tell somebody in CAPE or somebody on The Hill to express why I think that. But there are things we can use and one of the things is just that. Given the option to leave, our top people would rather not leave. That tells me we are on a good track.
So there are things that we can point to empirically that, say, bring us to the point that perhaps morale truly is getting better.
S: The whole concept of morale is a very soft and fuzzy thing. And you really can’t measure it.
An important thing though, right?
S: Oh, very important, because I have been in units that were under-resourced, they had a high op[erational] tempo but the morale was great because we had great leadership and everybody embraced the mission. I have been on the other side where I had all the resources I need, I had great ops tempo but morale was horrible because maybe we didn’t have the right leadership. So I think if you stay a step back and you look at what some of the key indicators were, that we had some issues in the missile community, the Air Force has addressed those, which is, you know, focusing our testing on what it needs to emphasize, which is the training aspect, not what your score is, that we are giving you the resources to do your job, that we are giving you the stability in your schedule so that you can have that proper balance between work and family.
And then finally a recognition from senior leadership in the Air Force and the Defense Department that your mission’s valued. And the Air Force has taken very positive actions in all those areas. And at the end of the day if you have a missileer who never wanted to be a missileer, is he going to have a morale problem? Probably, because he just doesn’t want to be a missileer. But as General Harencak talked about, there are people who didn’t want to be missileers initially when they got into the missile community, and the camaraderie that’s taking place right now when they get to that transition point and they have the option to leave the community, more people want to stay in the missile community than we have slots available for.
So I completely agree with General Weinstein that prior to the Force Improvement Program and in the bottom-up review we were, for all the right reasons, focused on the wrong things. And now that we have done that bottom-up review and we have taken a step back, we are focused on the right things and we are putting energies in the right areas, and I think it is having a very positive effect out there on the field.
I wanted to kind of turn the attention over toward the NNSA, if I might. The NNSA recently sent to Congress its response to the Congressional Advisory Panel’s recommendations for that agency. And in that response, there was an interagency section talking about collaboration with DOD, and it stated the notion of DoD being a customer to NNSA is actually the source of some derision within the NNSA among some workers.
Can you tell me from your standpoint how the collaboration has been with NNSA and your assessment of working together with that agency?
H: I think we have an incredibly good relationship right now. And a lot of it is based on the fact that we are having success, we are having success with the B-61 where we are on the same sheet of page, paper or other. So we have a lot of great work we are doing on the common adaptable areas with the Navy and NNSA and us. There is always that perception out there, there is always the chatter, the chaff, the whatever, the radio chatter if you will, as aviators we talk about it that you hear out there. But I don’t see it. I mean our team here in A10 deal with our two legs of the triad and NNSA on a daily basis. And I think our relationship is as strong now as it has probably been ever. Certainly in my time, you know, I spent time in NNSA for two years, so I saw the other side. I always thought that those people chirping from the sidelines who were no longer still doing the work were probably not as informed as they should be, for every disagreement for every concern I could give you 20 or 30 areas where we are making great work together and we are saving taxpayers’ money and we are getting the job done.
So that was always suspect, anyway, but I will tell you now I think we have the best relationship we’ve had in a very, very, very long time. But most of that, like I said, comes from when you have success, when you have a program like the B-61 which is on schedule, on cost and is meeting and exceeding its milestones. People tend to not have the friction areas that we might have had in the past.
But overall, this is a really good time to be in the nuclear enterprise. I think the NNSA people are excited about the challenges that they have to face too, for us. Fact of the matter is we are NNSA’s essentially only customers on the really big projects, on the really big important things. Certainly the labs and other things are, will do work for other—incredibly important work—for other agencies. But for what we do each and every day, this is a great relationship that right now is really running on all cylinders.
If I might turn attention toward the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, there have been a number of stories that have come out recently. It’s been getting more and more attention lately. Obviously the AoA has not received the stamp of approval from OSD yet. When you look at the GBSD effort, what capabilities do you think it should include, how should it be similar to the current Minuteman III and how do you think it should improve upon or differ from it?
H: First off, I will answer the last part of your question there. First is that it needs to be affordable, sustainable, leverages as much existing technologies as we can that, to allow us to do this incredibly important mission in a manner that is affordable, not just to replace the Minuteman 3, not just to have that, but also to go forward in a sustainable, affordable manner.
As the A10, I know it is going to be highly effective at doing its primary mission. It will be safe, secure. It will be effective; it will be credible; and it will allow the very important fundamental ICBM mission, which is the foundation for our entire deterrent. This capability that we have across five states and 31,000 square miles that just says absolutely nobody out there has any possibility of achieving any of their nefarious goals because of the ICBM force that we have there. It is fundamental to what we do.
We know that this GBSD is going to be able to do that. We could debate about, “Well, should this missile have ‘this’ capability or ‘that’ capability.” I know at the end of the day it is going to meet the requirements; it is going to be safe, secure and effective instead.
What I am focused on, though, is making sure we put into place those things that make it a weapons system—that as we move forward into the ‘30s into ‘40s is affordable, is sustainable. And that’s what I think the true thing is. NNSA, our contractors, this Department of Defense, our AQ people are going to make sure it is a highly effective incredible deterrent. We know that.
What we have to make sure though is that we build into this weapons system and we treat it as a weapons system in totality, not just the missile but the command and control for it, how we are going to monitor it, how we are going to maintain it, how we are going to sustain it, that we build into those things that I know we can do, that actually makes this thing not only a great weapon for a deterrent but an affordable and sustainable weapon out into the future.
So I think that’s really the challenge. I mean what does GBSD look like not as a missile? We got to go beyond that. What does the weapon system look like? How are we going to command and control this thing? How are we going to secure it? How are we going to make sure that hopefully in the future we are not doing hundreds of convoys across things, maybe we go down to a score of convoys meaning that we have to pull these missiles less to do maintenance and sustainability, and all those things. That’s the really challenging aspect, but it is vitally important.
And I think that’s what the exciting aspect for our ICBM SPO at Hill [AFB] is going to be for the people who in the future long after I am gone who are going to be putting this GBSD out in the field is: How do we get at that? How do we get at the command and control aspect, the security aspect, the maintenance and sustainability aspect to make sure that it is truly the GBSD that we want it to be?
S: Well, I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
I think it is fascinating for sure. It seems like discussions are still ongoing and there are some concepts that haven’t been hammered out yet maybe.
H: Well, I think that’s healthy and that’s what we want, I mean we want this to be a process that meets STRATCOM’s requirements, that meets our nation’s requirements but also thinks outside the box. Also one aspect we didn’t talk about was the cooperation between United States Navy and us on joint comm and adaptable things.
The fuze, right?
H: The fuze, but even more; maybe all fuel motors. There are many ways where we are going to be able to leverage the Navy’s program, what they have to do for their Trident and the Ohio-class replacement to what we have to do. And there is a spectrum of that. And to the maximum extent that we could do that we have leveraged that in the B61 to great advantage to us. The Navy has taken great advantage of some of our work we have been doing, and so we need to continue to do that. But I think, fundamentally, we have to be focused on what is the best way to make this thing affordable and sustainable and to have a concept of operations that allows us to leverage the technology that we have, and that we will be able to develop to make this thing safe, secure and effective inside. And that’s what I think is exciting about this, is that certainly I would expect that a missileer who sat alert in the ’60s, in the ’70s, in the ’80s, will in the 2030s see similarities and go, “I’ve got to feel at home here.” I understand. But I also hope that they will also go, “Wow, I never thought of doing it that way; wow, that’s a much better way of doing it.” That’s really what we’re going for is this ability. People tell me all the time, Brian, “General Harencak, how can you afford—,“ “You can’t,” or they say you can’t afford everything you need. And here’s how I answer that. You’re absolutely right, if we do it the same way we’ve always done it. But we have no intention of doing it the same way we’ve always done it.
We actually intend to make it sustainable, affordable, and we will be able to do all the things we need to get done, to recapitalize it, modernize our deterrent, but we have to think of new ways of doing it. And we have to break paradigms. And we have to decide that we’re not going to do it the same way we did it in 1985 or 1995, and that’s the true GBSD challenge out there is not just delivering a missile that is a follow-on to the Minuteman 3, it’s delivering a capability, delivering a total weapon system that moves beyond what we have been doing the last 40 years in the missile fields.
When you talk about doing things differently, what sort of things do you think that entails?
H: Well, how do we sustain a missile? How do we maintain it? How do we sustain it? What is the concept of operations? Do we send officers out to the field in the same manner at the same amount of time to do the same condition—monitoring checks, to do the same thing? What does the command and control look like? How is it done? Are we still going to use HICS cables? Maybe we will.
So there’s a chance you will.
H: We don’t know yet, that’s what we want. What we want is new thinking to make this thing, as I said, affordable, capable and sustainable. And so in order to do that, we’re going to look at everything. We’re going to look at everything. Their debut is 15 years away. So we have the time to rethink how we want to do this. And there are some great ideas out there. And some of them will be doable; some will not for a host of reasons. But again, that’s the exciting challenge. That’s going to be the truly fun part of bringing this system onboard is not the rocket science, and it will be rocket science, obviously, for the missile, but it’s how we’re going to as an Air Force own and operate the system that’s really going to be fun.
When you look at the current Minuteman III, it was put into service round 1970. I’m just curious from an industrial base perspective —
H: Were you born in 1970?
No.
H: No, so there you go.
Born in 1988.
H: There you go. Oh my God, I have shoes older than you. But that’s OK, still good shoes. But, you know, it’s just important to think when I give talks, people say, well, why do you even need to replace this thing? I ask how many people were even alive in 1970? This is a classic case of a need to recapitalize and modernize, when you consider the extreme environments these missiles are in and in the silos and all the stuff. So is a 1970 system. How many people do you know were driving on I-395 in a car built in 1970?
H: So all I’m saying is that’s an important aspect, the point I just wanted to point out that when people say, “Well, I don’t see the need,” I can’t believe you could actually believe there would not be a need to replace a weapon of such extreme importance to our nation that was built in 1970.
I was just wondering taking into account the age and the last time the the complete ICBM industrial base was active, how do you not only ramp back up production for that, but how do you incentivize industry to get back in the factories and to design?
H: We in A10 meet with industry. We met with people from that particular industry yesterday right here at this roundtable right here. There is lots of interest, commitment from that particular part of the industrial base. There is no shortage of that. We don’t have to convince anybody to be interested in this. There are a number of companies that are not only interested, but they are investing their own capital, their own money, into working these things. The point I will add, though, is having been to this particular industrial base and visited their companies, their plans, to talk to them, they are, besides being patriotic, great Americans who understand the value of a nuclear deterrent. They were excited about getting back into this in a big way.
And here is the key point. The capacity exists. There is, in this particular career, this particular industrial area, tremendous capacity. We’re not going to have to build new facilities, new mixing bowls, all of the stuff. It exists. They have the capacity; they have the experience level. I guess the bottom line is I don’t worry at all in this mission set, specifically the ICBM, that there is not significant and knowledgeable and capacity-based capabilities out there to accomplish what we need to do in GBSD. And I think any fair observer of that, the go-to the companies that are already involved in helping us sustain the Minuteman 3 would agree with me that that’s not a concern. There’s certainly the interest there; there’s certainly the capability, and there is the capacity. So that’s not a concern in my view.
There’ve been some reports saying for the GBSD we could expect a draft RFP this summer, or the final RFP this fall. Do you have any timeline on that?
H: I don’t know. Mike, do we have a timeline on that?
S: No, I think we’d have to get with AQ and get you the specifics on what that timeline is.
What would be your advice to industry right now, not that you don’t talk to them, but as far as ways they could help the Air Force modernize its ICBM force at this point?
H: Well, as I talk to everybody about this system, it needs to be affordable, it needs to be sustainable, and we need to think new ways of doing things. We cannot be tied to the old ways: “Well, we’ve done it this way, and we’re going to keep doing it this way.” So those are the three things I talk about. As I said, I know we are going to deliver to the deterrent and to the American people a safe, secure, and effective weapons system. I know that. We have leveraged enormous capabilities that industry has, are, and [continue] to be tied closely to what we at Global Strike, here in A10, in the United States Air Force and DoD are doing to make sure that we look at all avenues to make sure that this is affordable, sustainable, and it’s the type of weapon that allows us to procure it in the numbers we need to procure it. And that means we can do it. People tell me about this all the time, “How are you going to deliver this thing in an affordable manner and still increase its capabilities and all this other stuff?”
And the fact of the matter is, and you’ve probably heard me use the cell phone analogy, you know, the early cell phones, how expensive were they? They weren’t that good. Look where we are now. What has gotten that? That’s innovation; that’s technology; that’s people thinking outside the box and saying, “You know, I could deliver that. I could make it better, faster, cheaper.” That type of thinking must be in everything we do in the nuclear enterprise as we go through this very, very important, but also very large recapitalization and modernization as we move forward.
So it’s not just the GBSD, it’s everything else. We’ve proven we could do it and keep a program on schedule, on cost in the B61. Why? Because we did just that. We are focused on leveraging technology, on doing things faster, smarter, better. And it’s paid off in something that many people said, “Well, you can’t do that in the nuclear enterprise.” Of course you can. Of course you can if that’s what you’re going to focus on. That’s what I would tell them and that’s what I do tell them, is that’s focus. You know how to do things faster, better, cheaper. Well, we’ve just got to take that and we have to take that model on how to do things faster, better, cheaper, and we need to overlay it on GBSD, we need to overlay it on LRSB. That, to me, is important all along knowing you’re going to meet the objective requirements, you’re going to do all those things. We know that.
And so that’s why I tell them and I tell you they’re all on this; they understand it, and they’re excited as an industry to begin this long overdue process of recapitalizing and modernizing the Minuteman 3 weapon system.
Now, some folks say, and I’m sure you hear this quite often, why not simply recapitalize the Minuteman or go so far as to say get rid of the ground-based leg of the triad altogether.
H: Yeah. You know how I feel about that. I think that would be incredibly irresponsible. The ground-based leg of the triad, as I said, is fundamental to deterrence. We cannot do deterrence as we know deterrence without having the ground-based deterrent.
Recapitalizing it is, you know, in a lot of ways, what does that really mean when people say that you recapitalize it? Well, that’s what we’re doing. I don’t disagree with people who say, “Well, why don’t you just recapitalize?” What we’re doing is we’re recapitalizing and modernizing the weapons system that is the Minuteman 3. And that will be GBSD. We’re not going to something totally fundamentally different.
Now, I will say maybe a few years ago there were some other options we were looking at that would have fundamentally changed the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. We’ve decided that that’s not plausible; that’s not the way we want to go, so we are going to go toward a Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent that will leverage all the really good things about the Minuteman 3, but improve it in significant ways, specifically on how we command and control it, how we operate it, how we sustain it and how we maintain.
No hypersonics?
H: Hypersonics? Well —
Hypersonic. Russia and China are working on those capabilities.
H: We’ll leave to what everything will look like to once we’re all out there.
S: I think you’d have to go to Congress. I mean, Congress is very clear that we as a service and the department are going to develop a new capability. And so hypersonics would certainly be perceived, I think, as a new capability. Back to General Harencak’s point. The missile itself is the flight system. The launch control centers and the launch facilities make up the weapons system. We really haven’t done any modernization to those systems for a long time and that’s what General Harencak talks about as a weapons system. It’s not just a missile. We have to get after—people talk about the big floppy disk or—how they go down in the launch control centers and they go look at all those computers. Well, you just can’t change one computer because then it affects the rest of the system. If you’re going to update the system, you’ve got to do everything. And so that’s kind why of GSBD is looking at it as a flight system, the missile, and that supporting command and control infrastructure that it sits on.
Gotcha. So on the long-range strike bomber, obviously we are closing in on an award date later this summer, or early in the fall, I think, officials have said recently. Are you still involved in that planning process as of right now, and I guess what T’s do you have to cross on that?
H: What we’re involved in is the engagement and accuracy for the need for the long-range strike, specifically as how it relates to the nuclear deterrent mission. And so that’s what we’re involved in. As far as the acquisition or anything else like that, we are not.
As you’ve heard many, many times from me, if the happy day where all nuclear weapons left the face of the earth tomorrow, we would still award a contract for a long-range strike bomber because it’s fundamental to what the United States Air Force does; it’s a long-range strike. It is the capability to allow no target on the face of the earth to be in sanctuary from. So it is incredibly important to the Air Force, to our defense, for our nation. As part of the nuclear facet, it has a key aspect in it will be nuclear capable. We believe we, and rightly so, we know that having an air-delivered capability of deterrent allows a president to have options that are vitally important to have a credible deterrent.
It is important for our nation to have the capability with a long-range strike bomber to be nuclear-capable, but the bomber itself is necessary in and of itself that we must have it as an Air Force; we must have it as a nation because long-range strike is fundamental to what the Air Force does, and it will allow that there are no sanctuaries anywhere in the world.
Just to be clear, a couple of different reports reported that the B-52 was expected to be retired in the 2040s, and the B2 out in I think it was 2070s, 2060s, somewhere around that time. Is that still the plan?
H: Right. That’s about right. B-52, 2040 for sure, and the B2 into the 2050s, and 2060s, and 2070s, or so.
But after that the long-range strike bomber is going to be the bomber, right?
H: Right. The specifics of the aging out of the other bombers, the long-range strike bomber will come online, it will become fully operational capable before, obviously, the legacy bombers age out. But that’s why it’s vitally important we build 100 of them because as time goes on, it will be the bomber that will still be standing, if you will, many decades from now.
S: Those dates are service life dates. It’s not like the Air Force is committed to keeping the B52 to 2040, or the B2 to 2060. But it’s important to understand what that date represents.
That’s like the maximum?
S: Well, it’s the current engineering analysis on what the service life of the airplane is.
H: And those are adjusted. You know, I mean, we come up with a new way to replace a wing spar and all of a sudden, hey, you know, then we will get a few more years out of this plane. The problem is, as you’ve heard me talk about, all of our, with a few exceptions, the F-22 and the F-35, all of our fleet can get antique license plates in any state in the Union.
So we have an aging fleet in the United States Air Force and we have to address it. That’s why we need F-35s. That’s why we needed more F-22s because these newer airplanes are going to be the force that eventually will have to replace our aging system. The reason I’m telling you this is because we absolutely cannot do what we did with the B-2, which we planned on buying 150 of them, and then it’d go down to 100, ended up with us only buying 21 of them. And now you have a micro-fleet.
The B-2 is an incredibly great buy for the United States and for our people and for our defense, but we should have built more. And we absolutely not only must build the LRSB, but we must build it in the numbers that we need to build it in. And so 80 to 100 is the number. I’m telling you that we should build 100.
If you had your druthers, would you buy more than 100?
S: Stop it. Stop.
H: Yeah, I don’t want to go there. Mike has said no. The number is 100, and that’s the number that we need to build.
What’s going to be the bomber after LRSB?
H: I don’t know.
Too early?
H: We’ll have to leave that up to the young’ins. Mike and I will be in Air Force Village when that happens. You can visit us there.
Thanks, Brian.
Thank you.
