Running with the anti-nuclear-spending momentum generated by the New York Times article, Angela Canterbury and Kingston Reif teamed up to weigh in on the debate. Their published article in Defense One echoes united calls from the community for profound spending cuts, but they also assess the issue through the Council’s unique perspective as a political action committee: namely, how Congress can andmust pull the purse strings tighter on nuclear weapons spending. [9/25]
Panel says thanks but no thanks to extra F-35s, Apaches
Last week House Defense Appropriations rejected part of a reprogramming request from the Pentagon that would have funded, among other things, 8 additional F-35s and 21 Apache helicopters using money from the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account.
In a letter to Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord, Panel chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen cites policy guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that expressly excludes non-war-related funding from the acceptable uses of OCO funds.
The Committee is concerned that OCO appropriations, which are provided by Congress specifically for ongoing combat operations and related efforts,” says Frelinghuysen, “are being utilized in this reprogramming to backfill budgetary shortfalls in acquisition programs that have only tenuous links to the fight in Afghanistan and other current operations.”
The letter specifically cites reprogramming requests for the F-35 and Apache helicopter, which amount to ~$1.5 billion, 80 percent of the Pentagon’s requested increase, as problematic.
Of course, budget watchdogs have lamented the unrelated use of OCO funds for years, but this is the first time a congressional committee has rejected such a high profile proposal. And the rejection is significant, since reprogramming requests must be approved by all 4 congressional defense authorizing and appropriating panels.
And hey, since the Pentagon is essentially recognizing that it has some extra money lying around by requesting the funding shift at all, one would think that the rejection would result in some savings, right? Not so much.
Barring congressional action to the contrary, the funds will return to their original allocations awaiting what is likely to be a new request.
A Pentagon spokesperson said Monday that officials will continue “to work with Congress to finalize our reprogramming request.”
Because surely the Pentagon can find something to spend all that money on.
Kendall: Money doesn’t grow on trees, even at the Pentagon
The Pentagon is making the case for an overhaul of its fleet, and according to Undersecretary of Defense Frank Kendall, the nuclear enterprise is at the front of the line. That is, if they can just figure out how to pay for it.
At the Air Force Association’s annual conference this week, Kendall delivered remarks that had been prepared by the Secretary of Defense, who had been pulled away at the last minute. The speech referred to the nuclear enterprise as, “the very foundation of U.S. national security.”
Driving the point home, Kendall repeated twice, “No capability we maintain is more important than our nuclear deterrent.”
Of course, Kendall and Hagel have reason to want to reassure the Air Force that nukes are a top priority, but Kendall’s speech leaves little room for interpretation.
Know that what you do every day is foundational to America’s national security and the top priority of the Department of Defense – the top priority of the Department of Defense.
Secretary Hagel wants you and our entire military to know that comes from him personally.
But paying for those upgrades will take more than reassurance. And there’s the rub. The Pentagon simply does not have enough resources to pay for its entire wish list of upgrades, both nuclear and conventional. And, perhaps surprisingly, Kendall acknowledges that fact, telling reporters that:
There’s been some conversation about that, but at the end of the day we have to find money to pay for these things one way or another, right? So changing the accounting system doesn’t really change that fundamental requirement. We still need the money and it has to come from somewhere.
Kendall’s bout of honesty comes on the heels of some speculation that world events might allow for some wiggle room in the DOD’s budget – or at least OCO. But the acknowledgement of the budget challenges to come is significant nonetheless.
At a time when the Air Force is in need of a multitude of updates more relevant to the current threat environment, the issue is likely much greater than Kendall lets on. The true cost of focusing myopically on the nuclear enterprise is that it will leave other programs to starve in its wake.
Report Illuminates Potential Spending Catastrophe; Nukes Part of Problem
The original version of this post erroneously stated that Todd Harrison’s report states that nuclear weapons are unaffordable. The post has been updated to correct the error.
The U.S. Defense Department is careening towards a seemingly inevitable budgetary catastrophe. On September 4, Todd Harrison, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s well-respected defense budget extraordinaire, released an eye-opening assessment of this year’s defense budget request. Harrison’s report highlights the many ways in which the Pentagon’s current spending plans over the next decade assume the availability of billions of dollars that are unlikely to be available. In other words, these plans are a fantasy.
What the report also shows is that nuclear weapons and missile defense make up a significant portion of this planned spending – contrary to those who argue that nuclear weapons “don’t actually cost that much.” In fact, so staggering are the expected costs of existing plans to build new ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-capable long-range bombers that military planners won’t be able to afford them without gutting conventional forces.
Fortunately, the United States can scale back its current nuclear spending plans while still maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent – and save billions of dollars too.
Assumptions and underestimations = Simply not enough dough
According to Harrison, the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 “budget appears insufficient to support the defense program and strategy articulated in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)”.
The Pentagon’s five-year spending plan, known as The Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), exceeds the Congressionally mandated budget caps contained in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 by $116 billion over the next five years and $168 billion over the next ten.
Imagine the defense department were planning to build a giant, nay, the MOST giant pizza ever made. While during the prep stage, there may be enough scraps to begin the process, in the end there just won’t be enough dough. That’s the situation the Pentagon finds itself in.
Harrison identifies a litany of unsupportable or unsustainable assumptions built into the budget request. For example:
1) The budget request does not fund Army and Marine Corps end strength and Navy aircraft carriers to the levels outlined by the QDR as necessary – roughly $20 billion short over the FYDP;
2) The budget assumes that some programs and activities typically funded by the base budget, can be moved to the Oversees Contingency Operations (OCO) account, which funds U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and is not restricted by the Congressional budget caps. Based on recent trends, the Pentagon may be expecting $10-$20 billion annually in OCO funding for non-Afghanistan related activities that belong in the base budget, totaling $50-$100 billion over the FYDP;
3) Historically, large acquisition programs are 20 to 50 percent over their planned budget estimates. Harrison approximates that the “acquisition funding included in the budget is likely to be insufficient to execute all of the currently planned acquisition programs”.
4) The biggest assumption in the budget is that Congress will allow the Pentagon to exceed the Congressional budget caps by $116 billion over the next five years. While the caps were raised modestly by Congress for FY 2014 and FY 2015, no relief appears on the horizon for FY2016 and beyond.
Nuclear weapons and missile defense spending atop the spending charts
In what might come as a surprise to many, the four most expensive Pentagon acquisition programs over the next decade and beyond are all exclusively or partly nuclear weapons related:
a) The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (some later versions of which will be endowed with a capability to deliver B61 nuclear bombs); estimated cost: $351 billion;
b) The Ohio Class Replacement submarine (exclusively nuclear); estimated cost $90 billion;
c) The Long-Range Strikes bomber (LRS-B) (the Air Force is pursuing a new long-range penetrating bomber primarily for conventional reasons, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates 25% of the costs as nuclear-related); estimated cost: $73 billion; and
d) The Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) (key aspects of which are designed to defend against nuclear attacks); estimated cost: over $151 billion.
While some modernization of our nuclear weapons is necessary, the current U.S. nuclear arsenal of approximately 4,800 nuclear weapons greatly exceeds U.S. security requirements. Moreover, both former and current military leaders agree that planned spending on nuclear weapons, which could top $1 trillion over the next thirty years, is unaffordable. Harrison concurs, notes that, given current budget constraints, the Pentagon will not be able to afford its currently proposed buys for the Ohio replacement and Long-Range Strike bomber without making cuts elsewhere.
Ultimately, Harrison concludes that “[i]f the budget caps are not raised by Congress, DoD will be forced to fund this shortfall by making additional cuts to force structure, personnel, acquisitions and readiness beyond what is proposed in the request”, meaning greater risk in implementing the defense strategy. Not only would scaling back current spending plans save billions that could be better spent on more urgent national security priorities, but doing so would not jeopardize our safety or deterrent capability.
Time to Change U.S. Missile Defense Culture
By Philip Coyle
As a taxpayer, you might be disappointed to learn that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and its contractors haven’t been following standard and essential quality control procedures when it comes to the design, development, and production of a key missile defense system. If not, you should be.
The September 8, 2014, report of the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG), “Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle [EKV] Quality Assurance and Reliability Assessment, Part A,” criticizes the sloppy work finding 48 “nonconformances” with good practice. Twenty-two of those are “major,” meaning “nonfulfillment of a requirement that is likely to result in the failure of the quality management system or reduce its ability to ensure controlled processes or compliant products/services.”
For those of you who don’t speak wonk, this means the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system deployed in Alaska and California and designed to protect the U.S. homeland against a potential North Korean or Iranian missile attack isn’t dependable. The EKV, which is intended to collide with and destroy an incoming missile high above the Earth’s atmosphere, is a small but very critical part of the GMD system. If the EKV doesn’t work, neither will the GMD system. To date, GMD has cost taxpayers roughly $40 billion.
Part B of the DoD IG report analyzes the reliability of the EKVs now deployed in the field in Alaska and California, but that report will be classified so taxpayers won’t see the bottom line.
Of course, we already know that the GMD system is defective from the poor record of performance of the EKV in past flight intercept tests. The DoD IG reports that “Three of these intercept tests resulted in failures attributable to the EKV.” A fourth failure in a test a year ago last July is still being studied by MDA. But the IG truncated its analysis. If it had included all of the failures attributable to the EKV going back to January 2000, it would have reported six failures attributable to the EKV, not three. And once the analysis of last year’ test are in, the count likely will be seven failures attributable to the EKV, not three. What’s more, given MDA’s problems with quality control, even a successful test of the system, such as the one that occurred in June, doesn’t demonstrate system reliability.
The complexity of the EKV effort is apparent from this summary in the DoD IG report: “With more than 1,800 unique parts, 10,000 pages of work instructions, and 130,000 process steps for the current configuration, EKV repairs and refurbishments are considered by the program to be costly and problematic and make the EKV susceptible to quality assurance failures.”
At the heart of these problems is a culture at MDA and its contractors with roots that go back to January 2, 2002, when the Secretary of Defense exempted MDA from following the Pentagon’s normal rules for acquiring a weapons system. Little wonder, then, that the DoD IG found that MDA and its contractors didn’t follow the rules; they think they don’t have to!
According to the DOD IG, “Therefore, the EKV did not go through the milestone decision review process and the product development phase (Engineering and Manufacturing Development).” Why is this important? The DoD IG explains: “The purpose of the milestone decision review is to carefully assess a program’s readiness to proceed to the next acquisition phase and to make a sound investment decision committing the DoD’s financial resources. For the product development phase, the program is assessed to ensure that the product design is stable, manufacturing processes are controlled, and the product can perform in the intended operational environment.”
As a result, The DoD IG concludes, “the EKV prototype was forced into operational capability” before it was ready. “A combination of cost constraints and failure-driven program restructures has kept the program in a state of change. Schedule and cost priorities drove a culture of ‘use-as-is’ leaving the EKV as a manufacturing challenge,”
This history would be troubling enough if it were only history. Unfortunately MDA and its contractors have never recovered from the culture that resulted when they first were exempted from the rules. They see those rules as not applying to them. They see themselves as not having to answer to those rules, and this drives program interactions at all levels where oversight is concerned in the Pentagon and the Congress.
This has implications for future missile defense development efforts. For example, MDA is in the early stages of designing a new EKV to replace the current fleet. Without a change in the default culture, the nation is unlikely to have a more dependable product than the existing, flawed, kill vehicles. Ominously, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has already begun to raise concerns about the acquisition plan for the new EKV.
Can the Director of the MDA, Admiral James D. Syring, put us on a more responsible path? Indications are the Admiral Syring cares deeply about not repeating past mistakes. And he certainly knows the best culture of the U.S. Navy. For example, the Navy’s offensive strategic missile systems have a long history of quality, distinction, and excellence. The people who work in those programs maintain the highest standards and hold themselves accountable to them. When it comes to defending the United States, our missile defense programs deserve no less.
Philip Coyle is the Senior Science Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. In 2010 and 2011 Mr. Coyle served as the Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs (NSIA) in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
