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Hagel Is Out; Big Spending Is In

The President announced Monday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has resigned, just days after announcing his commitment to increase spending for the U.S. nuclear enterprise by $7.5 billion dollars over the next five years. For a top Pentagon official with a habitually good record on nuclear non-proliferation, this was a pretty bad last move. And it could be a sign of things to come.

William Hartung, the Director of Arms and Security Project at Center for International Policy, posed an important question in an article for Huffington Post this week: what if Hagel had resigned for a reason? Hartung posits that Hagel’s resignation was “a missed opportunity to put our security policy on a sounder footing at a time of increasing uncertainty.”  Hagel certainly could have resigned ‘on principle,’ in protest of the administration’s drift toward a more hawkish foreign policy. But it doesn’t look like he did.

Helene Cooper of the New York Times posits that Obama was too close with U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Secretary of State John Kerry to give them the axe; Hagel was the easy pick. In times of trouble, the sad truth is that a scapegoat sometimes has to take the blame. But regardless of the reason for Hagel’s dismissal, a firmer truth remains: a shift is taking place in Washington that’s likely to lead to higher spending.

Hagel assumed office in February 2013 at a time of projected peace. He was brought on to oversee the end of the war in Afghanistan and help trim down the Pentagon budget. Now, whether we like it or not, the U.S. is headed back into war in the Middle East and has revised its exit plan for Afghanistan.  

Glen Thrush of POLITICO writes that Hagel didn’t see himself as “the kind of gung-ho, wartime consigliere Obama needed as he recalibrates his national security strategy to deal with a new round of conflict in the Middle East.” It follows that a new leader in the Pentagon would be part of a larger strategic pivot towards ramped up military engagement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

With an increased wartime spending request and a larger base budget request on the way, the Obama administration seems primed to amp up the pressure on Congress to increase Pentagon spending, a move that could ultimately bust the budget caps.

While there is no obvious front-runner to replace Hagel, Michéle Flournoy and Sen. Jack Reed have already pulled their hats out of the ring.  That leaves current and former Deputy Defense Secretaries Robert Work and Ashton Carter. Both men are considered technocrats with experience maneuvering the Pentagon’s bureaucracy. But their mission at the helm of the Pentagon, should they accept, will largely be dictated by a strategy already set in motion by the White House.  

So far, that strategy looks like spend, spend, spend.

Front and Center: 11/22

FRONT & CENTER

An update on arms control, national security & politics from the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

November 8 – November 22 WHAT’S NEW:

The Disillusioned Babysitters of America’s Nuclear Weapons
Last Friday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave a lengthy press conference in which he pledged to invest billions to repair a U.S. nuclear enterprise that’s falling apart at the seams. Hagel’s comments were made seemingly in response to in-depth assessments of the nuclear silos and personnel from Mother Jones and New York Magazine, both of which offered the same conclusions: the U.S. nuclear fleet is out of date, and so is its mission. Angela Canterbury, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, articulates it well in the Wall Street Journal, “They’re going to throw billions of dollars at this problem, which is like saying they’re going to throw billions of dollars at dial-up Internet.”

Closing in on a Deal
With just a few days until the November 24 deadline to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, Policy Director Laicie Heeley has been busy keeping the media fully apprised of the latest on the negotiations, and of course her expert analysis. Watch her interview on Voice of America, and read her quotes in the International Business Times and Bloomberg News.

Recognizing Our Allies on Capitol Hill
On the evening of November 18th, the nuclear security community gathered to recognize our Congressional allies in support of more sensible nuclear weapons policies. On behalf of the Center and the Council, executive director Angela Canterbury presented the award to Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), who co-founded and chairs Congress’s Nuclear Security Working Group. Other award recipients included Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

WATCH:

The Highest Priority Mission?
Watch Senior Fellow John Isaacs give his analysis of Hagel’s press conference and the Pentagon’s plans to overhaul the nuclear weapons enterprise on HuffPost Live. [11/18]

Panel

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Slush Fund
Laws are made for a reason–but then sometimes the government finds a way to circumvent them: the Overseas Contingency Operations account is a poster child. Angela Canterbury and Sarah Tully take to the blog to show that, with Obama’s recent request, the Pentagon and Congress are poised to use this off-budget account as a slush fund and to evade the budget caps yet again. Is this necessary? Read more here. [11/21]

Making Good on Prague Promises
This year, Obama has gone under fire for continuing to stumble in the wrong direction over U.S. nuclear weapons policies. Last week, however, the Obama Administration finally made some forward progress by announcing the U.S. will attend the 2014 Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in early December. Read our press release and learn more on our blog. [11/10]

Thawing the Ice
Ever since Putin’s hasty seizure of the Crimea last spring, nearly two decades of U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation has deteriorated to an icy standstill, with diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic folding their arms and turning their backs on nuclear security teamwork. Scoville Fellow Greg Terryn provides analysis from various experts who all agree that new approaches are needed to bridge the impasse. [11/17]

Thawing the Ice
Along the same vein, this week marked the twenty-year anniversary of Project Sapphire, a major diplomatic success in removing and down-blending loose nuclear material from the former Soviet Union in 1994. Programs intern Sarah Tully writes, “Fissile material across the country was stored in rooms and warehouses easy for an amateur burglar to crack…with a Civil War padlock…The threat of nuclear war isn’t our greatest danger, loose nuclear material and weapons are.” The point bears repeating: diplomacy with Russia is our best chance of keeping the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the wrong hands. [11/21

The Pentagon’s Slush Fund Continues to Raise Eyebrows

By Angela Canterbury and Sarah Tully

It was a strong start earlier this year, when President Obama made a budget request for the Pentagon that was finally in line with the law of the land—the Budget Control Act (BCA). But that’s ancient history.

The President’s original request came in just under the BCA budget caps for Pentagon spending at $496 billion for Fiscal Year 2015. But that didn’t include the other Pentagon spending request that was to follow. There was an additional $59 billion requested for the Overseas Contingency Operations (known as OCO). Taken together, this $555 billion would appear to bust the budget caps set by the BCA, but not really. That’s because OCO doesn’t count against the caps.

Now the administration has announced it would will submit a request to add another $5.6 billion dollars to their OCO request to Congress for “activities to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL.” This adds up to $65.6 billion dollars in extra spending for the Pentagon. Many experts say there is plenty of funding in the base budget to cover the current military engagement in Iraq and Syria, and we agree.

As you can see below, while the Pentagon budget has decreased and leveled out over the course of Obama’s term, OCO spending has remained relatively high. In fact, when adjusted for inflation, the amount is higher than what President Bush spent in each of his first five years in office, from FY 2002 to FY 2006. If you take OCO out of the equation, Obama’s Pentagon is still spending more than all but the final year of the Bush administration.

Panel

But put aside how much we are spending on overseas contingencies, the Overseas Contingency Operations account isn’t used for that alone.

OCO was established under President Obama in 2009 to replace the emergency supplemental appropriations that had previously been used to fund the wars. OCO was intended to institutionalize this funding and force the Pentagon to be more transparent about what was actually being funded by the war request.

In recent years, however, OCO has been treated more as a slush fund for projects sometimes only tangentially related to overseas operations. Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the projected FY 2015 OCO budget includes over $30 billion in DoD base budget funds that have been shifted to the OCO budget.

To give a recent example, as part of the DoD portion of the FY 2014 omnibus, $9.3 billion dollars for operations and maintenance was transferred directly from the base budget to OCO. OCO is not subject to budget caps or sequestration, thus the Pentagon, thanks to Congress, is able to use OCO to soften the blow of the budget caps, effectively defeating the purpose of the Budget Control Act.

Even advocates of higher defense spending have a problem with this abuse of the system. Incoming Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain, speaking on the Senate floor about the FY 2011 Defense Appropriations bill said, “…billions in the war-funding accounts – my staff has estimated close to $8 billion – have been allocated by the Appropriations Committees for new spending not requested by the Administration, or transferred to pay items that were originally requested in the base budget for non-war related expenses.”

In September, 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 OCO. This was a request to move $1.3 billion from OCO account back to the base budget.

In USA Today, Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted with interest some fuzzy math. The new OCO request includes an additional “$464 million in Defense-wide operations and maintenance and an additional $779.6 million in those accounts for the Army.” Alexander quips:

Now, I don’t have access to any of the fancy calculators they have at the Pentagon, but the one on my smart phone tells me if you add those two numbers together you come up with $1.243 billion, which is pretty close to the $1.3 billion the Pentagon said it didn’t need and could transfer to the F-35.

So is the OCO request for ISIL or the F-35?

In any case, the OCO account itself has become a budget gimmick. Further, it is simply irresponsible budgeting: All military spending should be subject to the oversight of the actual military budget. Meanwhile, we hope Congress will continue to question OCO being used as a slush fund.

Defense Secretary Hagel Needs to Consult Senator Hagel More Often

In a press conference last Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his commitment to revamping America’s nuclear weapons program after findings from two separate reviews revealed institutional failures such as weak leadership, antiquated and sparse equipment and exceptionally low morale.

“The internal and external reviews I ordered show that consistent lack of investment and support for nuclear forces of far too many years has left us with too little margin to cope with mounting stresses,” said Hagel. He also pointed to the existence of systematic problems such as a culture of over and inadequate inspection, poor communication and disconnect between DoD and service leadership.

An example of the derelict state of the nuclear program is a lack of what the Department of Defense Report calls “mission ownership.” There appears to be a disparity in passion and dedication to the nuclear deterrent mission among the service men and women performing the day-to-day mission and the higher-ups in the Department of Defense. According to the report, “[they] are well aware of the public declarations by former (and, occasionally, current) senior national security leaders and others who question or deny the continuing relevance of the nuclear forces or segments of the nuclear forces.”

Even the men and women running the show are unenthused about the triad.

Hagel’s vision for an improved U.S. nuclear program includes a 10 percent increase in Pentagon nuclear spending over the next five years. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, the Pentagon spends between $15 billion and $16 billion dollars on nuclear programs each year; 10% over five years is at least an increase of $7.5 billion dollars.

Hagel also highlighted the Defense Department’s commitment to the President’s policy to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons on our nation’s security strategy.”

Hagel, however, went beyond his brief in saying that America’s nuclear weapons program is the “DoD’s highest priority mission.” In actuality, nuclear weapons serve one purpose only: to deter a nuclear attack on the U.S. and our allies.

Nuclear weapons are irrelevant to top U.S. security issues. Are nuclear weapons relevant to the ISIL threat in Iraq and Syria? Nope. How about in winding down our military involvement in Afghanistan? Nuclear weapons play no role in that either. The Russians absorbed Crimea and are intervening in Ukraine. Again, U.S. nuclear weapons did not stop the aggression.

Our nuclear weapons are irrelevant even in security dilemmas with nuclear-armed countries! For instance, in the increasing competition between U.S. and China for dominance in Asia, nuclear weapons play no role.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of Hagel’s proposed reforms; the dichotomy of increasing funding for a program whose purpose the DoD hopes to diminish is a bit contradictory.  Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, for example, feels that “Throwing money after problems may fix some technical issues but it is unlikely to resolve the dissolution that must come from sitting in a silo home in the Midwest with missiles on high alert to respond to a nuclear attack that is unlikely to ever come.”

Clearly there are administrative and organizational steps needed to be taken to deal with declining morale among the service men and women dealing with our nuclear force, especially considering the recent missileer cheating scandal and reported neglect among senior leadership of the decaying forces.

But neither Hagel nor the two reviews address the top unspoken question: why should the United States spend up to a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to build new nuclear submarines, land-based ICBM missiles, long-range bombers and modernized nuclear weapons?

The United States requires a well-maintained nuclear force. But it can do so with a much smaller number of nuclear weapons and even without the land-based leg of the triad.

Who says? Why, that same Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel who, as co-author of a 2012 nuclear policy commission report, wrote:

“No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face – threats posed by rogue states, failed states, proliferation, regional conflicts, terrorism, cyber warfare, organized crime, drug trafficking, conflict- driven mass migration of refugees, epidemics or climate change… In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.”

Too bad the new Hagel did not consult the old Hagel.

The Disillusioned Babysitters of America’s Nuclear Weapons

Ever wonder what it would be like to hold the key to America’s most lethal weapons in your hand? According to a recent expose by Mother Jones, the job is less exciting than one might think.

The U.S. currently maintains some 4,800 nuclear warheads and 454 Intercontinental ballistic missile silos across the country. Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones recently visited the 10th Missile Squadron, Alpha Missile Alert Facility in central Montana to catch a glimpse of the life of the men in charge of the nuclear launch keys.

For a job with such gravity, the day-to-day grind is exceptionally boring. Harkinson writes, “[the] worst part of the gig, the guys agreed, might be the stultifying tedium of being stuck in a tiny room all day and night waiting for an order you knew would never come.” Obsolescence and low morale run rampant among missileers.

This is why Secretary Hagel’s announcement today is welcome, but not a fix for the more important problem at hand. Yes much of the U.S. nuclear fleet is out of date, but so is its cause.

While the ICBM program ostensibly exists to deter our nuclear-armed adversaries abroad, according to Lt. General James Kowalski, the real nuclear threat for America today is not Russia or North Korea, but “an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.”

According to Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control, “you can’t screw up once—and that’s the unique danger of these machines.” Having a flawless safety record is imperative; but “nuclear bases that were once the military’s crown jewels are now ‘little orphanages that get scraps for dinner”’.

Harkinson sheds light on the fact that the dangers of maintaining the ICBM program outweigh its purpose as a viable deterrent–not to mention how expensive it is: “ditching the ICBMs would save taxpayers $14 billion over the next 10 years.”

Ultimately, the fewer nuclear weapons we maintain, the less risk for nuclear disaster. Scrapping the ICBM program would be a good start.