2 years ago
Progressives are on the ropes again in the defense budget debate.
A rare victory for arms control advocates in President Joe Biden's nuclear plans will be clawed back if defense hawks on Capitol Hill have their way in the coming months.
A fight is already brewing in Congress over the Biden administration's decision to defund a new nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile authorized by former President Donald Trump. Republicans are opposing the move, arguing Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Mark Milley and other top officers' endorsement of the program shows that Biden is defying the advice of top military commanders on U.S. nuclear deterrence.
"One way or another, we need to overturn that decision," Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado told POLITICO. Lamborn is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces panel, which oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Whether to continue funding for the program or to allow the administration to shutter it is expected to feature prominently in a debate over the size and scope of the nuclear arsenal when the House and Senate Armed Services Committees consider their annual defense policy bills.
If Congress injects funding to keep the nuclear cruise missile alive, it would be yet another blow to advocates who had high hopes for restrained nuclear policy and defense spending with Biden in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2021 that the new cruise missile and its warhead would cost $10 billion through 2030, though the nonpartisan scorekeeper conceded the figure is "highly uncertain."
The administration's Nuclear Posture Review — a still-classified blueprint that outlines the long-term designs for the nuclear arsenal — isn't expected to make major changes to nuclear policy and the inventory of weapons. Progressives once hoped that the president would honor his campaign promises and move U.S. nuclear posture to what’s known as “sole purpose” (i.e., that nukes would only be used to deter or in response to a nuclear attack), but Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s ballooning nuclear arsenal put a quick end to those dreams.
But Biden's defense budget threw a couple bones to the left: It aims to zero out funding for the cruise missile, known as the SLCM-N, and retire the B83 nuclear gravity bomb. Lawmakers clashed over both programs last year.
Republicans have already assailed Biden's $813 billion fiscal 2023 national defense budget as not enough to counter high inflation and meet the needs of military commanders worldwide. Now, GOP lawmakers are capitalizing on the split with military brass, arguing the administration isn't taking the advice of its top commanders when it comes to nuclear weapons.
U.S. Strategic Command head Adm. Charles Richard, whose outfit oversees the nuclear mission, endorsed the cruise missile to address a "deterrence and assurance gap" in a letter to lawmakers. Gen. Tod Wolters, who leads U.S. forces in Europe, concurred with Richard's assessment in a March 30 House hearing.
Then Milley, who backed the cruise missile during his 2019 confirmation process, told lawmakers last week that his views on the weapon haven't changed and that the president "deserves to have multiple options" in the arsenal.
Republicans are counting on that advice to sway the debate.
"That's all we needed," ranking House Armed Services GOP member Mike Rogers said of Milley's testimony. "I think you'll see bipartisan support for putting it back in."
House Armed Services chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who backs canceling the cruise missile, conceded "there's a divide" on the panel over the issue.
"It's something we're going to debate," Smith said. "I don't know how contentious it's going to be."
"Can we make [the Pentagon] make it? I don't know," he added of the developmental cruise missile. "Obviously there are some people that think we can and they're going to try, and I disagree with them."
Biden is also seeking $34.4 billion to overhaul each leg of the nuclear arsenal — including moving forward with a replacement to the aging intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.
But in a minor win for arms control advocates, the administration elected to cancel the Navy cruise missile, which is one of two new weapons the Trump administration's 2018 nuclear plan proposed adding to the inventory. The other was a sub-launched low-yield ballistic missile that has already entered the fleet.
The four-decade-old B83 bomb, meanwhile, was set to be retired until the Trump administration’s posture review revived it.
Canceling the cruise missile and retiring gravity bomb are simply "common sense" moves, according former Rep. John Tierney, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, arguing that Biden's nuclear vision "falls far short" of the changes he should have pursued.
"I think there is an urgency … to have taken this opportunity to change the stale thinking that they have around here about nuclear policy and move forward, which they failed to do," Tierney said.
Some opponents warn that a sea-launched cruise missile — an earlier version of which was removed from the fleet in the early 1990s and finally retired during the Obama administration — is destabilizing and would contribute to an arms race with China and Russia.
Still other lawmakers argue the missile, which would be outfitted on Navy attack submarines, is redundant and harmful to the boats’ mission when low-yield missiles are now deployed on ballistic missile subs.
"We've had arguments before about how many nuclear missiles we need to have an adequate deterrent. This isn't that," Smith said.
"It's not just a matter of, 'Well, isn't more better?'” Smith said. "Putting nuclear missiles on attack submarines will undermine the mission that attack submarines currently engage in."
At a House Armed Services hearing last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin touted the administration's hefty modernization plans while downplaying the decision to slash the cruise missile. He argued the weapon provides "marginal capability" that "is far outweighed by the cost."
Despite splitting with his boss’s recommendation to scrap the cruise missile, Milley emphasized to lawmakers that the U.S. still has ample nuclear power without it.
"We have lots of options and we have a significant nuclear capability," Milley told Senate Armed Services on Thursday. "So I don't want any foreign adversary to misread what I'm saying."
Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), a critic of heightened nuclear spending, said he's "very disappointed" but not shocked by where Biden landed on the issue.
"I understand the circumstances which he's in. He's got a war with Russia," Garamendi told POLITICO. "Do you think anybody in this House and the Senate is going to say we need less of anything? The answer's no."
“It's more of the same,” Garamendi said. “And particularly more bombs, more delivery systems, more threat."
It's not the first time lawmakers have slugged it out over the sub-launched cruise missile. Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee pushed to defund the administration's $15 million fiscal 2022 request for research and development efforts for the program, but a compromise funding package ultimately forked over the money.
Biden's previous nuclear weapons budget, submitted last spring before the Nuclear Posture Review was complete, was largely seen as a placeholder.
But "continuity" appears to be the name of the game headed into the fiscal 2023 budget debate. And division among lawmakers over the future of the sea-launched cruise missile is "a very manageable problem" for Congress, said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.).
"Trump wanted to look tougher on defense so he threw in a couple things that looked a little tougher. Not really much," Cooper, who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces panel, said in an interview. "And then Biden wants to look a little bit gentler on defense so he has to be a little bit gentler. But only a little bit. The real story is continuity."
"No one is talking about cutting off a leg of the triad. That would be a problem," Cooper said.
Bryan Bender contributed to this report.
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