Trump May Keep Our Nukes Antiquated

Trump May Be About To Derail The Pentagon's Nuclear Plans

Loren Thompson , CONTRIBUTOR

Our nation’s capital is such a Byzantine place that politicians often find themselves doing things they could not have imagined before being elected.

Consider nuclear weapons. Barack Obama began his presidential tenure advocating a world free of nuclear weapons — he gave a big speech on the subject during his first year in office — and the nuclear posture review the administration completed in 2010 proposed “a multilateral effort to limit, reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide.” Six years later, Obama has begun an effort to modernize all three legs of the nuclear “triad” — ballistic-missile submarines, land-based missiles, and long-range bombers.

Clearly, Washington has changed the way Obama views nuclear weapons.

Now consider president-elect Donald Trump. When he launched his campaign for the presidency in June of 2015, he told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that the nation’s nuclear arsenal had grown too old to be reliable, and made it clear he intended to fix that. In his most important foreign-policy speech of the campaign on April 27 of this year, Trump stated, “our nuclear arsenal, our ultimate deterrent, has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal.” The need to replace aging nuclear weapons has been a consistent theme of Trump’s campaign.

Most of the nuclear-capable bomber fleet consists of Boeing B-52 bombers that are over 50 years old. The planes are rugged and continuously modernized, but trying to penetrate heavily-defended air space would be a suicide mission. The Air Force needs both a new bomber and a new air-launched cruise missile to preserve the bomber component of the nuclear "triad." (Retrieved from Wikimedia)
And yet, because of the baroque way in which Washington operates, Trump’s election is already shaping up to be a setback for nuclear modernization. In fact, it could result in a nuclear arsenal less able to deter aggression a dozen years from now. Here’s why.

Republicans and Democrats have been at loggerheads for so long that Congress hasn’t managed to approve a complete budget in time for the new fiscal year since 1997. The government is kept running with what’s called a “continuing resolution,” which funds federal programs at the previous year’s level until Congress passes a real budget. When the government is operating under a continuing resolution, as it has been since the new fiscal year began October 1, new programs can’t be started and existing programs can’t spend more money than they were allotted in the prior year.

Last week, the Trump transition team signaled that it would like to see the current continuing resolution extended through March 31, so that it has time to shape spending priorities for the year. That means Washington will be functioning under what is known as a stop-gap funding mechanism for at least half of the fiscal year.

Such measures tend to waste money and distort decisions, but it’s understandable a new administration wouldn’t want to be stuck with the priorities of its predecessors. In the case of nuclear modernization, though, even a six-month delay could have serious repercussions because the Obama Administration waited too long to begin replacement of what Trump has correctly characterized as a decrepit strategic arsenal. There simply isn’t any slack in the modernization plan Trump will inherit before aging weapons need to be retired, or become unreliable.

Take the Navy’s Ohio-class submarines, which carry long-range ballistic missiles capable of destroying distant targets after a surprise attack. Ballistic-missile subs are the most survivable part of the nuclear force because enemies can’t find them when they are on undersea patrols. Survivability is crucial to deterrence since it’s the ability to retaliate after an attack that deters an enemy from attacking in the first place.

But the Ohio-class boats in the fleet today were built decades ago, and then their service lives were extended from a planned 30 years to 42 to delay paying the price of replacement. Further life extensions won’t be feasible when they start wearing out ten years from now — they will have to retire. To make matters worse, the Obama Administration delayed construction of the first replacement submarine from 2019 to 2021 so there is no margin of error in the schedule to cope with any problems that might crop up in development.

The existing subs will have to begin retiring in 2029 whether the new ones are available or not. Jason Sherman of InsideDefense.com explained in a November 22 analysis why extending the continuing resolution to March 31 is dangerous:

In September, the Navy’s top officer warned that delaying FY-17 funding beyond January could imperil the schedule for the service’s top modernization priority — the new ballistic missile submarine program — which needs funding to begin procuring long-lead items for the first boat during the first month of the new year.

In other words, it takes so long to design, develop, produce, commission, test and man a new ballistic missile sub that the Navy can’t tolerate any delays. And delay is precisely what extending the continuing resolution entails.

A similar situation prevails in the case of the land-based Minuteman III missiles sitting in underground silos in the upper Midwest. General Robin Rand, head of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, warned Congress on July 14 that “the Minuteman III flight system experiences propellant/component age out and subsystem attrition issues in the 2030 timeframe.” The Air Force hasn’t even picked a contractor to develop a successor missile, and time is running out to develop, test and deploy hundreds of replacements before the existing missiles become unreliable.

And then there are the long-range bombers. Most of the nuclear-capable bombers in the current fleet are B-52s based on an airframe first conceived in the 1940s that ceased production over 50 years ago. They are rugged planes, but long past the point when they could safely penetrate defended air space. The Air Force recently awarded a contract to develop a successor plane, but past experience suggests that program will encounter delays before being fielded late in the next decade.

Meanwhile, existing bombers must have a new cruise missile to remain credible contributors to nuclear deterrence, because the missiles they carry today are decades past their originally intended retirement date. Unfortunately, the new bombers, the new missiles, and the aerial-refueling tankers that will allow them to reach remote targets will all be delayed by extension of the continuing resolution. Each program required funding increases in the new fiscal year to stay on track that aren’t normally allowed under a stop-gap funding measure.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter captured how far gone the nation’s nuclear arsenal is in September remarks at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota:

The fact is, most of our nuclear weapon delivery systems have already been extended decades beyond their original expected service lives… It’s really a choice between replacing them or losing them.

President-elect Trump deserves credit for highlighting this problem from the earliest days of his presidential campaign. Nothing matters more to national security than maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent. But for precisely that reason, Trump should urge the Congress to make an exception from the usual rules governing stop-gap funding measures to keep nuclear modernization programs on track. If funding is delayed by even a few months, the U.S. could be saddled with a deficient nuclear deterrent in the near future because new weapons aren’t available and old ones must retire.