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In the Shadow of the Nuclear Modernization Mountain, Nuclear Weapons Budget Ripe for Savings

I’ve published a new piece on the Center homepage on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s preview of the FY 2015 Pentagon budget request last week and the implications for nuclear weapons. Here’s the intro:

Last week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey previewed the Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 Pentagon budget request. Additional details are not scheduled to be released until Tuesday (March 4), but the broad outlines of the request are already clear.

And despite cuts to many Pentagon programs, Hagel stated that the budget had “preserved all three legs of the nuclear triad and will make important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable, and effective nuclear force.”

Hagel announced a number of cost saving measures driven by the Congressional mandate to reduce military spending as part of an overall deficit reduction effort, including reducing the size of the Army, retiring the A-10 fleet of aircraft, reducing the planned buy of the Littoral Combat Ship, and modest reforms to the escalating and unsustainable growth in personnel compensation costs.

Yet the Pentagon either couldn’t find, or, more accurately, was unwilling to find, additional savings and thus proposed an unrealistic budget blueprint through FY 2019 that exceeds the Budget Control Act caps by $115 billion. The Pentagon also invited Congress to further inflate its coffers by proposing an additional $26 billion in spending for FY 2015 that didn’t make it into the formal budget submission. Without this additional funding, Hagel argued, “the military will still face significant readiness and modernization challenges next year.”

Given the requirement to find budget savings beyond current plans and also maintain the world’s finest military, the Pentagon should be prioritizing military programs that are the most critical to combatting the current threats we face, since every dollar spent on lower priority programs is a dollar that can’t be spent on more important needs.

It would therefore be puzzling if the Pentagon shields nuclear weapons from the chopping block in its budget request (which it largely appears to have done) – especially since our military leaders have already determined that we have more nuclear weapons than we need for our security. But just as the administration’s FY 2015 budget is divorced from reality, so too are its nuclear weapons spending plans.

Read the whole thing here. I’ll have more to say about the budget, particularly on the NNSA side, when the full details are released tomorrow.

Proposed Pentagon cuts could lead to bigger budgets in future years

As we approach the release of the Pentagon’s budget request, many questions remain, but one thing is certain – the request will be controversial, it will scare a lot of folks, and all of the hoopla might just work to the Pentagon’s advantage in future years.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Hagel delivered a major speech outlining his upcoming $496 billion budget request. This number excludes tens of billions in funding for the war in Afghanistan, as well as a $26 billion “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” that the President plans to ask Congress to make a little additional room for this year. The budget will be released in two pieces, with most major details on Tuesday, March 4 and supporting documents and details on March 11.

It has become clear in the week since Hagel’s speech that the Pentagon will also be preparing a separate, sequestration-level budget, in the event that Congress rejects the higher spending plan, but that’s not the budget the Defense Department plans to push. Rather, the plan that will be released on Tuesday will stick to the budget caps outlined in the Budget Control Act this year, then rise steadily over the next five years to include an additional $115 billion.

Hagel emphasized in his speech his view that while the cuts proposed for fiscal 2015 look difficult to implement, they would be far worse if the department was required to reduce spending in the outyears.

But that assumes the cuts the Pentagon has proposed for this year are allowed to take place. The $115 billion figure factors in savings from a theoretical Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round in 2017 that Congress will never permit, thereby understating the amount which the proposal exceeds sequestration limits. And that’s not the only Pentagon proposal that Congress is almost certain not to allow. Proposals to eliminate the Air Force’s fleet of A-10 Warthogs, cap pay raises for troops at 1 percent and freeze pay for general officers, and shrink the U.S. Army to pre-World War Two levels will all run up against steep opposition from Members of Congress who have opposed similar changes in the past.

The Pentagon’s proposal to cut the Army National Guard, which has a presence in every state and territory, has already incited fierce opposition among those members who intend to fight to ensure the cuts don’t go through.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, co-chairman of the Senate National Guard Caucus, argued this week that, “the Senate should not and cannot support a long-term plan that guts our citizen-soldier force.” Leahy was among a bipartisan group of 13 senators that has already written a letter to Hagel raising concerns about the proposed cuts.

While few would argue that sequestration is a useful mechanism (it was only put in place as a scare tactic to pressure lawmakers into making some tough choices about federal budget cuts) the Pentagon seems to be sticking to the same scare tactics they’ve used in the past, assuming that eventually they convince Congress to return to full funding levels.

So what does all of this mean? As the Pentagon raises the specter of the sequestration bogeyman once again, ideally, they’re hoping to kill the whole idea off once and for all. And given the unhappy alternative, Congress may just choose to go along, paving the way for a larger Pentagon budget in future years.

Military Experts Respond to Sec. Hagel’s FY15 Budget Preview

“Dollars spent is not the measure of merit for our security any more than it is for our health care system,” said Col. (USAF ret.) Richard Klass. “The measure of merit is whether our spending matches our strategy and the current and future threats. Clearly there are reductions, such as outmoded nuclear systems and unneeded bases, whose reduction would increase our security by strengthening our fiscal integrity.”

Fact Sheet: FY 2014 Budget Request and Appropriations for Replacement Nuclear Delivery Systems and Warhead Life Extension Programs

by Kingston Reif On January 17 the President signed the Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 Omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 3457 or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014). The charts below outline the FY 2014 budget request and Congressional appropriations for the Obama administration’s current plans to rebuild the nuclear triad and its associated warheads and their supporting […]

The Defense That Does not Defend: More problems for national missile defense

I have a new article up over a the mothership on the latest setback for the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. Here’s how it starts:

America’s troubled national ballistic missile defense system just found more trouble.

For the first time, the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, Dr. Michael Gilmore, has determined that this system, known as Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), may be too flawed to save.

In his Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 report to Congress, Dr. Gilmore states that the design of the two types of “kill vehicles” that sit atop our 30 long-range interceptors in Alaska and California are of questionable “robustness” and that the Pentagon should consider redesigning them. Translation: the system as currently configured – which has cost the American taxpayer roughly $40 billion – can’t be relied upon to perform its intended mission of protecting the U.S. homeland against even rudimentary long-range missiles launched from North Korea or Iran.

Dr. Gilmore’s report is but the latest in a long list of setbacks for the GMD system, all of which cast serious doubts over the wisdom of the Pentagon’s plan to spend $1 billion to deploy 14 additional ground based interceptors in Alaska with the existing flawed kill vehicles – to say nothing about building a third site for the system in the eastern half of the country, as proposed by some Republicans in Congress.

Click here to read the whole piece.