Even in a tight budgetary environment, the United States can “ill afford” not modernizing its nuclear deterrent, the head of United States Strategic Command told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday. Adm. Cecil Haney made his first appearance before the panel after taking over as StratCom commander late last year, and argued that spending on modernizing the nation’s nuclear delivery vehicles, weapons complex and nuclear stockpile should double in the future as modernization efforts go into full swing. He noted that nuclear weapons spending is currently about 2.5 percent of the Defense budget, but he suggested that it will need to double to make for needed work to maintain the nuclear deterrent. “It’s an investment, for my opinion, that we as a country can ill afford not to make, given the modernization that we see going on in other countries in the strategic environment today,” Haney said.
Haney was pressed by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the committee, on the impact sequestration might have on nuclear weapons budgets should it return in FY 2016. “If we continue on the journey of sequestration and have to make those kinds of choices, that would be detrimental to our national defense structure and I would make that my point first and foremost,” he said, later adding: “We will have to look at all things that cross our national-security apparatus in that view. And there will be, as we have already made and will continue to have to make, very hard choices going forward in that regard.” Smith was less diplomatic in his assessment of the potential impact of sequestration. “I think it would be devastating,” he said, noting that sequestration would make the Administration’s current modernization plans impossible. “It would require choices,” he added. “It would require us to go in a different direction. There may be a way out of it, a logical way, but I just want to make sure everyone understands that sequestration basically blows up that nuclear-deterrent strategy, based on the triad, given all of the things that have to happen over the course of the next couple of decades to fund it.”
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