The Obama Administration’s decision to slow work on the W76 refurbishment erased any margin for error in the key life extension program, but a senior Navy official said late last week that the service was comfortable with the change and signed off on the decision. Faced with tightening budgets, the NNSA said in February that it was stretching the W76 refurbishment program until 2021, three years after it had previously expected to complete the program, by choosing to meet operational requirements by 2018 and moving the completion of reserve warheads to the latter part of the schedule. “Within the Navy, we had our opportunities to express concerns, pros and cons, for the various options that we looked at, and we were in the end comfortable with the decisions that were made and fully understood and ensured that leadership fully understood the ramifications of that slowdown,” Rear Adm. Terry Benedict, the director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, said at a Capitol Hill Club breakfast event Friday. “And so I felt that the system worked in a transparent manner to ensure that everyone who was involved and everyone who was about to make that decision fully understood the ramifications.”
Benedict also said that he was on board with looking into a proposal by National Nuclear Security Administration Defense Programs chief Don Cook to shift the agency to more frequent life extension programs that would help keep the weapons complex workforce engaged on warhead refurbishments and potentially allow for the additional of more frequent technological advances and possibly save money. “There is a dialogue going on about that,” Benedict told NW&M Monitor after his speech. “As in any program there are pros and cons. You have to also look at the end user and the impact to the end user and as you think from the NNSA to the Navy to the operators you try to optimize that chain and each part of that chain sort of has competing optimization points so what’s maybe good at one end of the chain may not be optimal at the other. So in the end game you try to optimize the entire process.”