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The Air Force Push to “Upgrade” Nuclear Missiles and US Budget

August 17, 2016 By The Colorado Coalition

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/air-force-ballistic-missile-upgrade-said-to-be-stalled-over-cost
 
By

Anthony Capaccio
August 16, 2016, 3:00 AM MDT

The U.S. Air Force’s program to develop and field a new intercontinental ballistic missile to replace aging Minuteman III weapons is stalled over Pentagon concerns the service underestimated the cost by billions of dollars, according to a defense official familiar with the program.

The service is grappling with a substantial gap between the cost estimate its officials prepared for an Aug. 3 meeting of the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board and one crafted by the department’s office of independent cost assessment, said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the internal debate.

The Air Force last year estimated that the new ICBM program would cost $62.3 billion for research, development and production of as many as 400 missiles as well as command and control systems and infrastructure. Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. are all competing to build the new ICBMs.

The uncertainty over costs stems from the fact that the U.S. has not built new ICBMs, which are designed to carry nuclear warheads, for decades. The funding dilemma will likely add to debate over whether coming administrations can afford a “bow wave” of surging nuclear and non-nuclear weapons spending after 2021. Nuclear spending alone could surpass $1 trillion over 30 years if operations, support and construction are included.

‘Level of Complexity’

Air Force Secretary Deborah James last week signaled during a “State of the Air Force” news conference that more work needed to be done to prepare the program for Pentagon approval, without giving additional details.

“If there was something that we learned” from the Defense Acquisition Board meeting it is “the magnitude of this type of ICBM work,” James said. “There is a level of complexity that has to be worked through.”

The latest debate is largely about which data is used to estimate the total cost of the program — older data which includes information based on programs from the 1960s or only the latest estimates compiled by the Pentagon’s cost analysts, the official said. The Pentagon’s separate assessments are mandated in order to prevent a military service from starting a program with insufficient funds that have to be later shifted from other programs or appropriated by Congress over the Pentagon’s objections.

Reconciling Differences

The Pentagon is prepared to go forward with the missile program but the Air Force needs to reconcile the differences between the independent estimate and what the service thinks it will cost in 2020 and 2021 to develop and procure the program, the official said.

The Air Force and Pentagon are working “to try to ensure that we all have a common understanding of the assumptions” behind the service’s cost position, James said. “We’re working that through.”

There are a number of variables in the Pentagon’s estimate, such as different inflation assumptions that make estimating the program’s cost difficult, the official said. Still, the Air Force estimate is more optimistic in its methodology than the Pentagon’s when it comes to future costs, the official said.

Complicating the issue, a new procurement law requires that at this point in a weapons program — a so-called Milestone A decision — the military service chief and secretary must concur with Pentagon acquisition officials on cost, schedule, technical feasibility and performance tradeoffs that have been made to keep it affordable.

The Air Force is currently weighing whether to accept the direction to fund the ICBM program at the higher estimate and where to find the extra money, the official said. The service must agree to the higher forecast or it won’t move forward — unless the Pentagon allows the Air Force to underfund it, which is unlikely.

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Disarmament Quotes

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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