President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee backed the F-35 during his Senate nomination hearing Thursday, but was noncommittal toward the Air Force’s next-generation nuclear cruise missile, one of the service’s major modernization efforts moving forward.
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis also defended Trump’s use of Twitter to criticize the F-35 program, saying Trump has the right intentions.
“He has, in no way, shown a lack of support for the program,” Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) during his nomination hearing. “He just wants the best bang for his buck.”
SASC approved the waiver for Mattis, sending the bill to the Senate, which also approved the bill 81-17. The SASC members who voted against the waiver were Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Mattis was to testify to the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) afterward, but the appearance was canceled late Wednesday. HASC was marking up its waiver bill at press time.
Trump has criticized the F-35 program and Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization (PAR) programs for being too expensive. Though the F-35 program has been under fire, prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT] said late Wednesday that it delivered the 200th operational F-35, a delivery to Japan.
Mattis said not only is the F-35 important to the United States, it is equally, if not more important, to its allies because they bet their air superiority on the program.
“This will be the total fighter strength of their air (forces),” Mattis said. “To them, it’s an all-in sort of situation.”
Mattis endorsed the Pentagon’s upcoming nuclear modernization efforts, a major endeavor that will dominate the military’s budget over the next couple decades. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates it will cost $1 trillion over 30 years to modernize all three legs of the military’s nuclear triad–ICBMs, submarines and bombers (Defense Daily, Dec. 8).
Though Mattis supported the new nuclear submarine, ICBM and nuclear bomber programs, he did not commit to the Long Range Standoff (LRSO), the Air Force’s new long range nuclear cruise missile. While Mattis said his going-in position would be it makes sense, he added that he needed to look at it in terms of capability.
The Air Force plans to award a contract in fiscal 2018 for the LRSO, which will replace the service’s aging Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) and is expected to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion for approximately 1,000 missiles (Defense Daily, July 22). The Navy’s new nuclear submarine program is called the Columbia-class submarine, formerly known as the Ohio-class replacement program and SSBN(X). The new ICBM program is called Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD).
Mattis said he supported ending the Pentagon’s use of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) wartime spending fund to compensate for sequestration budget cuts to the base budget. Though Mattis said he didn’t have his own personal solution to ending sequestration, he said he’s much more comfortable with Congress exercising appropriations discretion than the automatic “salami style” cuts of sequestration.
Mattis, in his opening statement, said two of his priorities would be readiness and business reform.