Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced an effort to improve the entire nuclear enterprise, from modernizing support infrastructure to hiring more maintenance workers to attempting to change the culture of the workforce – all with a several-billion-dollar price tag in a time when sequestration may strike again and nuclear modernization efforts are already draining Navy and Air Force budgets.
Hagel ordered an internal review and an independent external review last February in the wake of several scandals in the nuclear deterrent force. The two reports offered more than 100 recommendations to deal with all facets of the problems facing the force, and they paint a picture of a force attempting to find creative work-arounds to maintain the nation’s collection of nuclear weapons without sufficient funding, equipment, personnel and training.
“DoD senior leaders and I are in full agreement: we’re in full agreement that today America’s nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective,” Hagel told reporters Friday morning. “That is thanks to the heroic efforts of the airmen, sailors and Marines who, despite sometimes insufficient resources and manpower, stretch themselves to maintain and guard and protect and operate the nuclear enterprise every day. However, the internal and external reviews I ordered show that a consistent lack of investment and support for our nuclear forces over far too many years has left us with too little margin to cope with mounting stresses.”
Hagel said the Pentagon has already taken several actions to address these issues. He created a Nuclear Deterrent Enterprise Review Group that will report to him quarterly. The Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office will follow up on the 100-plus recommendations, developing metrics to measures the success of the recommendations’ implementation and ensure that no new problems are created as a result of these changes. The Air Force Global Strike Command will now be led by a four-star general instead of a three-star, and a three-star will head the Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration office so that “they will no longer be outranked by their non-nuclear counterparts.”
The Air Force has already tried to throw some money at the problems in its nuclear force, with Global Strike Command creating a Force Improvement Program that reallocated more than $160 million in fiscal year 2014 and $150 million this fiscal year to address shortfalls in equipment, manning and infrastructure.
But more is needed, Hagel said. He wants to see a 10-percent annual increase in the nuclear enterprise budget over the next five years to help address some of the gaps.
“The Navy is reducing administrative distractions and is planning to both hire more than 2,500 workers and overhaul aging infrastructure at public shipyards, strategic weapons facilities and reactor training systems,” he said of some of the planned projects. “Meanwhile, the Air Force is planning construction to improve weapons storage facilities, will replace helicopters for its ballistic missile security forces and is in the midst of revamping how it trains, evaluates and manages the nuclear force.”
Sequestration, of course, would throw a wrench in those plans. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work said at the same press conference that “if you go to sequestration-level cuts, you will not be able to make what we believe are the prudent investments that you would have to do to make sure that we have a safe, secure and effective deterrent.”
Between recent declining budgets and 13 years of major ground operations, Work said the nuclear force has unintentionally fallen behind while no one was watching.
“When you say, okay, do we do this in the nuclear enterprise or do we do this to support the warfighter, well, when you have to make a hard choice like that you’re going to support the warfighter,” he said, noting that that either-or environment has gone on for too long to support a healthy nuclear enterprise.
“One of the destructive things of last year when we hit sequestration and then the government shutdown, both on the furloughs as well as the hiring freezes on the civilian workforce – we took the fair approach and said we can’t exempt anybody in the force, we have to treat everybody the same because this is an appalling thing to happen,” Work continued. “And we didn’t think that maybe we should have exempted the nuclear shipyards because you can see the cascading effects it has had on the maintenance availability.”
Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michelle Howard emphasized that the hiring had already begun and that properly manning the Navy’s public shipyards would not only benefit the ballistic missile submarine fleet but also the attack sub and the aircraft carrier fleets that go through maintenance availabilities at the same yards and are also experiencing maintenance backlogs.
“As the submarines get older, our maintenance availabilities tend to trend longer as we put more work into them to get them up to the highest operational level,” she explained. “So one of the ways we can reduce that maintenance cycle is to hire more people and put more workers on it.”
Air Force Global Strike Command commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Wilson added that the Air Force desperately needed to modernize – the Minuteman III missiles first came on alert in the 1970s, some of the silos and infrastructure that support them were built in the 1960s, and the UH-1 helicopters that airmen use to get around the missile fields are vintage Hueys from 1969.