Part 1 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1)
Rob Soofer served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy since the early part of the Trump administration. Looking at the programmatic level of U.S. nuclear defense projects, he said that administration planners have to decide what to include in and what to exclude from the FY22 budget request for nuclear weapons spending.
One specific decision that must be made in the near future is whether or not to approve Milestone B on the Department of Defense’s replacement for the nuclear cruise missile known as the Long-Range Standoff weapon or LRSO. This decision must be made by May of this year.
The LRSO has received mixed reactions among Democrats in Congress. In 2015 and 2016, there were efforts to just cancel the program. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. She expressed skepticism about the LRSO program and there were predictions that if she had been elected, the program might have been cancelled.
Soofer emphasized that the policy questions surrounding the LRSO are something that the new Biden administration will have to wrestle with. He urged decisions makers not to let that discussion delay the Milestone B decision. If that were to occur, there could be major ramifications for the ability of the DoE to successfully execute that program.
Soofer said, “If they wait until they’re done thinking about this in a formal [Nuclear Posture Review] construct, which could take a year, they will not be able to make that [engineering and manufacturing development] EMD decision. So I would hope that there’s enough information amongst senior leadership to at least make an EMD decision.”
With respect to missile defense, the largest near-term question facing the new Biden administration is exactly how to carry out the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program. In the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress commanded the Pentagon to build an interim homeland intercontinental ballistic missile defense interceptor. This interim interceptor was to be delivered by 2026 which is just a few years before the NGI is scheduled to go into operation.
Congress allowed the Pentagon a waiver to skip that interim capability if the DoE decided that it was unrealistic.
That decision will have to come early in the new Biden administration’s term.
More generally, Soofer said that he considered the “key question” on missile defense for the Biden administration is the question of whether or not to move ahead with the Trump administration plan to put twenty new Ground-based Interceptors in the ground.
Soofer said, “They’re going have to make the key decision whether they’re going to continue with the 20 GBIs. If they do, then they’ll find out fairly quickly that the difference between an interim capability, maybe like a heavy [life-extension program] — the difference between that and the objective system, in terms of time, is maybe one or two years. And you have to weigh that against a significant enhancement in capability that NGI gets you primarily through the fielding of multiple kill vehicles. All this is going to be very, very politicized. And the strategy and the technology behind it is going to be weighed.”