Government Executive - Authors - Elaine M. Grossman

Frustration Grows Over Stalled Reforms for Air Force Nuclear Personnel

Elaine M. Grossman — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 16:06:31 -0400

OMAHA, Neb. -- Following a series of personnel lapses in the Air Force nuclear missile-launch officer corps over the past 15 months, some defense insiders are growing impatient for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to announce publicly the major steps he plans to take to address the matter.

The Defense Department "is just not coming forward to make the improvements and the changes that are required to get the nuclear business back where we want to see it," says Bob Butterworth, an independent consultant on nuclear issues who in March offered his own recommendations for strengthening the Pentagon commitment to the mission. "The silence is deafening. It seems he is not anxious to do it."

Following Hagel's visit to a Wyoming Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile facility in January, his spokesman said he was "deeply troubled" to learn of test-cheating by missile-launch control officers at a similar base in Montana.

The spokesman, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, the following month said Hagel had directed two separate inquires -- one internal and another external -- to advise how best to address the string of embarrassing incidents. Those also have included a probe into drug possession by Air Force Global Strike Command officers and the dismissal of a general officer in charge of ground-based nuclear missile operations said to have become inebriated and acted inappropriately during an official visit to Russia.

Hagel's 60-day internal review was completed this spring and the independent assessment also has since concluded, according to Pentagon sources. But the defense secretary has remained relatively quiet on the matter.

Speaking to reporters here at a two-day conference on deterring global military threats, U.S Strategic Command chief Adm. Cecil Haney would not say when a formal announcement to lay out the entire get-well plan for the nuclear sector is anticipated.

He did note, though, that "integrity lapses" occurred only among "a very small population" and that "the majority" of launch-control service personnel "woke up every day to do the business right." More than 90 officers initially were pulled off the job under suspicion of test-cheating or facilitating it, but about two-thirds of them have since returned to duty.

Haney also said changes were being introduced as they become ready and are "not a stagnant thing."

As one example, Global Strike Command early last month announced the creation of new mid-level positions aimed at bridging gaps between young operators and their commanders.

"The people that are working on [nuclear operations] are extraordinary," said Haney, whose headquarters is based at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha. "This was an unfortunate event, but I think we have moved and will continue to move forward in improving things across this capability, to ensure we have it for the future."

Some defense officials say a number of new changes will be implemented beginning Oct. 1.

The Associated Press in June reported that the Air Force was getting set to launch major reforms, to include bonus pay for officers pulling alert duty in underground command centers. Military personnel operating the other two "legs" of the nuclear triad -- bomber aircraft and submarines -- have received such extra pay for years. The initiative would also include funds to improve aging infrastructure and other morale-boosters for serving in the Minuteman 3 launch sector, according to the wire service.

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has strongly advocated bolstering her service's nuclear enterprise, to include recommending to Hagel that the United States increase the rank of the Global Strike Command chief -- who oversees nuclear-armed bombers and missiles -- from three to four stars.

"I think James' intentions are good, but it's things I don't think the [senior] military Air Force is interested in doing . . . [Their] top priorities are a new bomber, a new fighter, a new tanker, and a new cruise missile," said one former Minuteman 3 missile squadron commander, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

The Air Force did not respond to questions about the matter.

As the service prepares its fiscal 2016 budget request this summer for Hagel's approval and ultimately submission to Congress early next year, there is some debate among its military leaders over how much bonus pay to award missile-control officers and when to begin the initiative, this defense source and others said.

The bonus pay -- and possibly also reinstatement of an earlier program that allowed missileers to earn free master's degrees as they sat on alert in underground control centers -- could constitute a shot in the arm to a mission specialty that has been humiliated by the repeated lapses, experts say.

A renewed master's degree incentive program is "something they could implement in a matter of weeks," if desired, the former squadron commander said. The service could team with universities located near each of the nation's three Minuteman 3 bases for its 450 ground-based strategic missiles in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

"If they are serious they will implement some of these items, such as the bonus pay and education program and quality-of-life [initiatives] with a greater sense of urgency," this source said. "If they don't, it will make the situation worse than if they had not done anything at all."

Some experts also have proposed consolidating Pentagon oversight of the nuclear mission into a single hierarchy, though that idea appears to be spawning turf battles among different offices that today share parts of the nuclear portfolio.

Butterworth said if Hagel wants to underscore the value of the nuclear-armed missile mission, changes must come where junior and mid-level crews can see them. He and others noted news reports about broken blast doors and leaking sewage making long shifts in the control centers almost unbearable.

"If basic repairs aren't made, you get smart after a while" about where senior-leader priorities lie, he said.

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Nuclear Unit Commander to Step Down Amid Missileer Cheating Scandal

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:37:53 -0400

Air Force Col. Robert Stanley, who commands a scandal-rocked nuclear-missile wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., is stepping down on Thursday, Global Security Newswire has learned.

The news comes just as his service prepares to announce the results of an Air Force Global Strike Command investigation into allegations that nearly 100 nuclear-missile launch officers at the Montana base -- and possibly elsewhere, as well -- engaged in a cheating ring on job-performance exams. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James was expected to be joined by the commander of the Louisiana-based nuclear headquarters -- which oversees nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile and bomber aircraft units -- at an afternoon press briefing.

In an email obtained by GSN, Stanley implored his 341st Missile Wing -- which controls one-third of the nation's 450 Minuteman 3 land-based, nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles -- to hold themselves to higher ethical standards. The colonel has maintained that he was unaware of the test-cheating until a military investigator discovered it. He laments in Thursday's message that not a single airman had called to leadership attention illicit proficiency-exam practices that had apparently become commonplace.

"The lesson? Had just one solitary airman spoken up for integrity, our leadership team would have been able to take action immediately," Stanley wrote. "Tragically, peer pressure and the fear of being an outcast prevailed."

He called the incident "a wake-up call for everyone who has lost their sense of right and wrong, for those who have become cynical, and for those indoctrinated by modern society to acquiesce when faced with bad behavior."

Stanley said he had volunteered his immediate resignation from the wing commander post and his retirement from the military, both of which were accepted.

"I represent this wing to the world, and we let the American people down on my watch," the colonel wrote.

He attributed the errors specifically, though, to "the extraordinarily selfish actions of officers entrusted with the most powerful weapon system ever devised by man.

"As you are now learning," he added, "the ramifications are dire. Many lives will be permanently changed as a result."

Some current and former Air Force officials have suggested that an expectation of 100 percent scores on monthly readiness tests may have contributed to pressure some personnel felt to share answers.

The scandal also included separate revelations about drug possession among a number of Air Force Global Strike Command personnel.

Meanwhile, a two-star Air Force general who the led service's nuclear-missiles operations was fired recently after he allegedly drank heavily and acted inappropriately during an official visit to Russia last July.

The Air Force investigation reportedly contains some 400 findings, and could result in as many as two senior leaders being disciplined, Breaking Defense reported on Thursday. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also has commissioned an independent assessment of ethics across the entire nuclear branch following the various revelations of wrongdoing.

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Pentagon Leaders Put Support Contractors on Notice for Deep Cuts

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:52:26 -0400

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his top budget deputy on Tuesday signaled they intend to make deep cuts in contractor personnel who help manage programs in almost every sector of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The Defense Department today employs an estimated 700,000 service contractors who, in many cases, work side-by-side with the civilian and military workforce at installations across the country and worldwide.

The new shift can be expected to return some clout into the hands of civil service employees who work at half the cost or even less, reversing a decades-old trend of farming out program management increasingly to pricey hired hands in the defense industry.

“We are currently reviewing all contractors, all the contracts we have,” Hagel testified at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing.

To some extent, the secretary said, “we have no choice” about using contractors for functions that the Defense Department cannot perform itself.

“Contractors are part of any institution. We need them [for] certain skills, certain expertise,” Hagel said. “But there's no question that we're going to have to make some rather significant adjustments.”

Hagel told the panel he was recently briefed on the results of the Pentagon’s high-level “Strategic Choices and Management Review,” which he will continue to assess before making some fresh budget decisions.

Among the possible targets for cuts in coming years could be the modernization of nuclear platforms: A new Long-Range Strike bomber aircraft, replacements for today’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, updated ICBMs or cruise missiles. Each of these efforts could also be affected by any move to reduce contractor support personnel.

The “skimmer” review -- so named for its “SCMR” acronym -- was to address how best to apportion $500 billion in congressionally mandated funding reductions over the next decade. If lawmakers repeal the 2011 Budget Control Act, lesser but nonetheless substantial cuts remain expected in 2014 and beyond.

Hagel made the remarks after Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the subcommittee chairman, said he is “concerned about the cost of the contractor workforce.”

“Recent reports have again emphasized that the average contract employee costs two to three times as much as the average DOD civilian employee for performing similar work,” Durbin said.

By way of example, the senator cited news reports that the self-proclaimed leaker of classified documents on government surveillance programs was a well-paid contractor working for the National Security Agency, despite what some critics see as thin credentials. The agency is a component of the Defense Department.

“Edward Snowden, who was an employee of Booz Allen, [was] working for one of our premier national security agencies as a contract employee,” Durbin said. “The story that's told is that he was a high school dropout, that he didn't finish his military obligation -- though he attempted -- and dropped out of community college. And it's also reported that he's being paid in the range of $200,000 a year as a contract employee.”

According to Pentagon data compiled three years ago, “contract employees comprised 22 percent of your department's workforce but accounted for 50 percent of its cost, $254 billion,” he said.

Defense Comptroller Robert Hale, also testifying at the session, said the figures Durbin cited appeared to be accurate.

“But let me say, whether or not a contractor or a civilian is cheaper or better, it really depends on the circumstances,” Hale testified. “There are some cases where we simply don't have the skills in the Department of Defense that we need, or it's a short- term job, [and it] wouldn't make any sense to grow them.”

In fact, he noted, the Pentagon still lacks an indigenous capability to perform financial audits on its own hundreds of billions of dollars in annual spending, despite intense criticism and promised remedies over dozens of years.

“I'm hiring a lot of contractors because they know how to do audits,” Hale said. “We don't yet.”

Noting that the Defense Department has put most new hires on hold and civilians have not received pay raises since 2011, the chairman suggested it is time to consider whether investing more in the department’s own non-uniformed work force might be more cost-effective than using contractors.

“If we're setting out to save money, has the civilian hiring freeze resulted in more or fewer contract employees?” Durbin asked. “And if so, how are you tracking the cost ramifications? Has contractor pay in the Department of Defense increased during the civilian hiring freeze?”

“I don't disagree with any of your general analysis on contractors,” Hagel said, noting that Defense spending has significantly grown across the board over the past decade in which the U.S. military has been involved in two major conflicts.

“The money flowed into different departments and institutions, because we felt they were required for the national security of this country,” he said. However, he added, “there will come a time, and it is now, where we're going to have to make some hard choices in the review of those.”

The Defense leaders promised to provide to Durbin additional data on how many contractor personnel support the department and their average salaries, when available.

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Nuclear Arsenal Subject to Pentagon Cuts, But New Subs May Escape Ax

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:09:56 -0400

The U.S. nuclear arsenal might be subject to cutbacks by a major budget review under way at the Defense Department, despite enjoying relative protection this year from largely across-the-board sequester spending reductions, a senior Defense official said on Thursday.

“Every part of the program, including nuclear weapons, is being addressed,” the official said in an interview, referring to the ongoing Strategic Choices and Management Review led by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

The budget scrub is to advise Chuck Hagel, the defense secretary, by late this month on how best to apportion $500 billion in congressionally mandated funding reductions over the next decade. If President Obama can convince lawmakers to repeal the 2011 Budget Control Act, lesser but still-substantial cuts would likely be taken in 2014 and beyond.

The senior official -- who requested anonymity in this article to address politically and diplomatically sensitive topics -- appeared to suggest, though, that the Pentagon intends to keep ballistic missile-armed submarines relatively safe from the cost-cutting ax.

The big-ticket item coming down the pike for modernizing the Navy’s aging “boomer” submarines and their Trident D-5 ballistic missiles is the estimated $90 billion Ohio-class replacement vessel, also dubbed “SSBN(X).”

“For SSBN(X), I don’t see viable alternatives to going forward with the program,” said the Defense leader, noting the Pentagon had already “made some significant adjustments” to program costs by delaying fielding of the first vessel by two years to 2031. “It’s the most important element -- it’s the central element -- of our triad.”

That could leave the other two legs of the nuclear delivery arsenal -- Air Force bomber aircraft and ICBMs -- on the hot seat for reductions.

The service intends to field 80 to 100 new, conventionally armed Long-Range Strike bombers after 2020 that would later be certified for delivering nuclear weapons – though some pundits wonder if the new aircraft might remain conventional-only forever.

The Air Force insists that the bomber must be made dual-capable to help retain flexibility and redundancy in U.S. atomic forces. However, service Secretary Michael Donley acknowledged early this year that sequestration could endanger the timing or details of plans for the new airplane.

After 2030, the Air Force also plans to field a new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent to replace today’s 450 Minuteman 3 ICBMs. Here, too, the Pentagon is eyeing the potential for cutbacks, in the form of a life-extended or upgraded version of the Minuteman 3 rather than a new-design ballistic missile.

For both the ICBM and bomber legs of the triad, “we’re looking at how do we sustain that capability and how do we do it at a reasonable cost, including both the delivery systems and the associated warheads and bombs,” the senior Defense official told Global Security Newswire.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Donley said plans for the future ICBM could be at greater risk than for the next-generation bomber aircraft.

“I think [the spending review] has a little bit more effect on the ICBM side of the force structure, because on the bomber side we already know that we’re going ahead with the Long-Range Strike,” he told reporters. By contrast, the service is just beginning to weigh how it might replace the Minuteman 3.

Some defense analysts also see the Navy preparing its own “Plan B” for modernizing the nuclear-armed submarines.

The service is developing new strike capacity for its Virginia-class fast attack submarines that could allow the boats to launch ballistic missiles. To date the focus appears to be solely on adding conventionally armed weapons to the submersibles.

However, the “Virginia Payload Module” proposals to modify the current submarine design with a nearly 94-foot center section for ballistic-missile launch tubes appear strikingly similar to an alternative the Navy earlier dismissed for replacing the nuclear-armed Ohio-class submarines.

Some analysts argue the Navy should transition its atomic missiles to a smaller vessel such as the attack submarines at a time when traditional Cold War nuclear threats are receding. The Navy, though, said several years ago that the “humpback” center compartment required for the Virginia-class submarines to carry Trident ballistic missiles would reduce the vessels’ speed, maneuverability and stealth.

No total program cost has been estimated for the proposed Virginia modification, but Navy budget documents show a price tag of nearly $800 million between 2013 and 2018 alone.

In terms of the size of the nuclear force, some Republicans on Capitol Hill have warned Obama against taking unilateral reductions below levels agreed by the Washington and Moscow in the New START accord, which allows each side 1,550 fielded strategic warheads and 700 fielded delivery vehicles.

They have also threatened to block implementation of the 2011 treaty if the administration does not make good on plans to modernize today’s nuclear warheads and delivery systems.

The senior Defense official this week said the Pentagon’s budget review -- nicknamed the “Skimmer” in keeping with its acronym -- would not itself address the policy option of nuclear reductions below New START levels.

However, the new assessment is being carried out in the “context” of “existing and pending policy guidance,” the official said in the Pentagon interview.

“Pending” policy guidance would include a document currently sitting at the Oval Office for approval: The so-called “NPR Implementation Study,” which is believed to recommend changes to nuclear doctrine and targeting that could form the basis for a smaller nuclear arsenal numbering1,100 or fewer warheads.

“The conclusions are with the president,” the senior official said of the implementing study, which was based on findings published in the Pentagon-led 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. “And when he says he has no more questions, and he signs, then we’re done.”

Donley said Obama will make a significant determination in summer 2014 regarding exactly how the New START reductions will be taken.

“The department and the nation’s way forward on this still is dependent on some national-level decisions that the president plans, as I understand, to make next year,” he said at the press briefing.

The bomber, said the outgoing Air Force secretary, “is really independent, in some respects, from the nuclear decisions that are still pending,” because it also has a crucial conventional-attack role.

Meanwhile, plans for a new-design replacement for nuclear-armed submarines appear here to stay.

“As we look at the budgetary and fiscal environment that we’re going to have for the next decade-plus, the department’s going to have to make hard choices,” the senior Defense official said on Thursday. “Sustaining a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent is a critical mission. Sustaining the sea-based element … with the follow-on to Ohio-class is critical for that.”

The official acknowledged there is “still a significant cost” to plans for developing and buying 12 SSBN(X) vessels, despite the planned two-year delay in introducing them into the fleet.

Can the nation afford to build ballistic missile capability into two different families of submarines -- the Virginia class and the Ohio-class replacement -- during a time of fiscal austerity?

The senior official sounded slightly less committed when it came to the possible introduction of big conventionally tipped missiles for the Virginia attack submarines.

“Preserving our capability as a nation to undertake non-nuclear strikes is also critically important, both for operational capabilities and indeed as we think about our strategy over time to sustain advantage” over possible adversaries, the official said. “Sustaining, if not increasing, our non-nuclear strike capacity even in a time of budgetary austerity is something that the Department needs to at least tee up … for this and future secretaries.”

Donley said the ongoing review could result in dusting off some previously jettisoned defense procurement alternatives in the interest of curbing spending.

“There are ways to address different aspects of the nuclear enterprise and how to modernize it and how much and on what schedule,” he said on Friday. “We have lots of options for that. There are many programs involved.”

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Amid Deep Cuts, the Pentagon Labors to Keep Its Forces Ready for Korea

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:43:02 -0400

As tensions escalate on the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. military is striving to maintain peak readiness for forces assigned to the region, Defense Department leaders said on Wednesday. Deep cutbacks in training and preparedness accounts taken this year because of the so-called budget sequester are making the job more difficult.

Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale listed the ability to respond immediately with force in Korea, if necessary, among a short list of Defense priorities the Obama administration seeks to “protect” from the sequestration ax during the current budget year.

Overall, the department will absorb $41 billion in across-the-board cuts in fiscal 2013 under the congressionally mandated initiative, which took effect early this year when lawmakers were unable to agree on how to close the federal budget deficit.

The Pentagon would “limit effects” of cuts “to the extent feasible” in maintaining a U.S. capability to “fight tonight” in Korea, if a conflict were to erupt there, according to a budget slide Hale showed reporters during a briefing on defense spending plans for the upcoming fiscal year.

U.S. military personnel in key regions, including the Korean Peninsula, “are at full ready status,” meaning they could react quickly in the event of hostilities, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Mark Ramsay, the Joint Staff director for force structure, resources and assessment.

Hale was asked how that might change in light of this year’s sequester-driven cuts that the military services are saying will increasingly degrade the pace of training, exercises and preparedness over time.

“I sure don't want to leave the impression in the minds of any of our potential adversaries that this is an opportunity for them. It's not,” Hale said. “I mean, we're going to be there if we have to be.”

In addition, the 2011 Budget Control Act exempts “core” nuclear deterrence forces -- including the submarine, bomber and ICBM legs of the triad -- from sequester cuts, according to the comptroller’s briefing.

These exempted programs -- which also include Afghanistan operations, wounded warrior initiatives and essential travel for senior leaders -- would experience “little or no effects” from budget sequestration, the document states.

Over the past few weeks, North Korea has repeatedly threatened to attack the United States and South Korea in response to the U.N. Security Council’s condemnation of Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test.

Also meeting with reporters, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not say whether he believes North Korea has achieved the technical capacity to deliver a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

Following the Feb. 12 nuclear test -- the North’s third underground explosive trial since October 2006 -- Washington and Seoul have been conducting annual military exercises in the region, much to Pyongyang’s dismay. North Korea has also staged its own defense drills and curtailed a key bilateral economic project with South Korea along their heavily fortified border.

U.S. and South Korean troops in the region on Wednesday went on high alert upon indications that North Korea was poised to launch an intermediate-range ballistic missile from its east coast.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to tone down his nation’s confrontational statements and actions. At the same time, Hagel assured that U.S. forces remain ready to protect the nation and regional allies should violence occur.

With its “bellicose” rhetoric and activities, North Korea has “been skating very close to a dangerous line,” he said at the press conference. The temperature should be “ratcheted down,” he said, “in the interest of all countries.”

That said, if war breaks out, “our country is fully prepared to deal with any contingency, any action that North Korea may take or any provocation that they may instigate,” according to Hagel. “And we have contingencies prepared to do that.”

For fiscal 2014, the Obama administration is proposing a $615 billion Defense budget alternative that would avert a $52 billion cut that sequestration would otherwise impose during the coming fiscal year, Hagel said. The budget year begins on Oct. 1.

To avoid the 2011 budget law’s $500 billion in mandated cuts on military accounts over the next decade, the president’s new deficit-reduction plan calls for $150 billion in savings over 10 years. The biggest chunks are to be taken in later years, mostly after fiscal 2018.

The Pentagon’s pitch in the budget request is for lawmakers to enact into law this more modest blueprint as a replacement for sequestration’s deeper budget cuts. A number of Republicans on Capitol Hill are already rejecting the new bid and many analysts say Congress will likely opt to continue the sequester into the future.

Hagel said he anticipates that a Strategic Choices and Management Review, being led by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, will by the end of May deliver specific recommendations for how best to apportion reductions in 2014 and beyond.

“We are living in a world of complete uncertainty,” the Defense secretary said. The proposed approach offers “the flexibility that we need to manage,” he said.

Representatives of the three military services indicated that even if sequestration is lifted, they would be struggling in 2014 to restore readiness after the training and operations cutbacks they must make this year to stay within sharp budget caps.

For example, the Air Force for the first time in its history is implementing a “tiered” approach to unit preparedness.

Roughly two-thirds of Air Force units will remain ready to undertake their assigned missions, said Maj. Gen. Edward Bolton, the service’s deputy assistant secretary for budget. However, about one-third of the service’s forces that are not deployed or preparing to deploy will be “standing down” and rated unready, he said.

The move will affect a number of nuclear-capable forces, with some B-2 bombers among Air Force aircraft that will be grounded for the remainder of the fiscal year, Defense News reported this week.

If the president succeeds in winning congressional approval for relief from the sequester cuts in the next fiscal year, normal training and operations schedules could resume.

Still, there are no additional funds for a “get-well plan” in the 2014 budget request that would make up for missed 2013 training, Bolton said. That means those forces that are unready as the new fiscal year begins will be playing catch-up to recover. He said it was unclear how long it would take to resume normal readiness.

Hale noted, though, that the strategic “pivot” toward Asia introduced during Obama’s first term in office would continue.

“Despite the budgetary problems, we are working to rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region,” he said. “Our most capable forces [are being deployed] forward.

“We've sent F-22s [fighter jets] to Kadena [air base in] Okinawa,” Hale said. “By 2020, we'll have 60 percent of our Navy forces stationed in the Pacific region. We are working to expand access and cooperation, for example [with] a rotational presence in Australia [and] ships in Singapore.”

Dempsey concluded his and Hagel’s portion of the budget rollout with a note of disdain for the North Korean regime’s spending priorities, seeking to strike a contrast with the U.S. military.

“We're having a press conference today about the Defense Department absorbing hundreds of billions of dollars in reductions for the good of the American people so that the United States of America can get back on a more solid economic foundation,” the JCS chairman said. “And what is Kim Jong Un doing? He's starving his people with a military-first policy. It's pretty hard for us to figure that out.”

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Lab directors urged plutonium facility delay, former Biden aide charges

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:16:57 -0400

WASHINGTON -- A former White House aide on Monday said the directors of the U.S. national laboratories “came forward” during closed-door budget-planning sessions five months ago to propose a delay in building a plutonium research facility, a plan that has since drawn Republican fire (see GSN, May 29).

Lawmakers have taken great interest in what heads of the three main laboratories -- Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia -- think about the ramifications of delaying work on the $6 billion Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant because these institutions play a key role in overseeing the nuclear arsenal.

The so-called CMRR building -- slated for location at Los Alamos, N.M. -- would replace a Cold War-era site that performs analytical chemistry and related research on plutonium cores, or explosive “pits,” for U.S. nuclear arms. The facility would help ensure that new and existing nuclear-weapon pits would function, if needed, despite a decades-long moratorium on underground explosive testing.

As the Obama administration was putting the final touches on its request for fiscal 2013 funds for the nuclear weapons complex, top officials fretted over the roughly $800 million in funding cuts already taken from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2012 budget, says Jon Wolfsthal. Until March, he was special adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden for nuclear security and nonproliferation and served on the National Security Council staff.

The nuclear agency, a semiautonomous arm of the Energy Department, oversees the national laboratories and the rest of the atomic complex. Half of the $800 million reduction for the current budget year comprised cuts to the agency’s nuclear weapons activities.

“It was the lab directors that came forward and said, ‘Because we’re concerned about the ability to fund this program and have it deliver on time, we’ve looked at it and think that there’s a way you can do the necessary sampling of plutonium work to allow us to have a certain pit production rates in the midterm, without having to build CMRR,’” said Wolfsthal, paraphrasing his understanding of the complex leaders’ recommendation.

The Obama administration went on to announce during the February release of its fiscal 2013 budget request that it planned to save $1.8 billion over the next five years via a half-decade postponement in work on the CMRR facility. Many observers interpreted the move as, in fact, spelling doom for ever building the plant (see GSN, Feb. 14). Construction of the site was to have been completed by 2024, but is now delayed indefinitely.

“Like so many DOE endeavors, we started off to 'save' a little money -- now an insignificant amount -- and the original goals got lost in the staggering spending that followed," said Roger Logan, a former head of Directed Stockpile Work at California's Livermore lab, referring to initial plans for streamlining plutonium research and pit production.

The National Nuclear Security Administration said in February that it would weigh alternative methods for meeting warhead requirements in coming years.

At the same time, the administration was reviewing whether it would still need a long-anticipated production capacity of 50 to 80 atomic pits per year -- samples of which would have to pass through the CMRR facility for analysis -- or if instead future reductions in the size of the nuclear arsenal might lessen the demand for facilities on the scale of that planned for the new research site. Currently, Los Alamos produces less than 10 pits annually, according to lab spokesman Kevin Roark.

Today’s U.S. nuclear stockpile, including both fielded and nondeployed weapons, numbers roughly 5,000 warheads. However, additional negotiated U.S.-Russian arms control reductions or Washington’s unilateral weapon retirements could lower that figure significantly in future years.

“NNSA has determined, in consultation with the national laboratories, that the existing infrastructure in the nuclear complex has the inherent capacity to provide adequate support for these missions,” according to a nuclear agency budget document released in February. As a workaround, “NNSA will modify existing facilities, and relocate some nuclear materials,” the agency said.

However, the idea that the laboratory directors were onboard with the decision to delay the CMRR project was quickly thrown into question. In a development first reported that month by the trade news publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, Charles McMillan, who heads Los Alamos, circulated a letter emphasizing the importance of the site to keeping the nation’s nuclear weapons in working order.

“Without CMRR, there is no identified path to meet the nation’s requirement of 50 to 80 pits per year,” McMillan told his lab staff in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by Global Security Newswire. “Assuming further investments in [Los Alamos] facilities, we are confident we can deliver -- but only a portion of that requirement.”

He elaborated in April 18 written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

The CMRR plant “fulfills a critical mission in supporting the analytical chemistry and metallurgy needed to certify that the plutonium used in the stockpile meets basic material requirements,” McMillan stated. He said a 60-day analysis would address potential alternatives for the new building, combined with additional measures such as recycling old pits, but emphasized that no adequate substitute had yet been identified to replace CMRR construction.

Wolfsthal this week suggested that the architects of the plan to put work on the facility on ice were none other than McMillan and his Livermore and Sandia counterparts.

“This was the lab directors coming to NNSA and saying, ‘We think we can save you money’ -- perhaps an unprecedented step – and saying, ‘We think we can do plutonium work without building the CMRR in New Mexico,’” Wolfsthal said at an Arms Control Association panel discussion in Washington.

“What the lab directors are worried about -- rightly -- is that we’re going to build facilities and not be able to fund the people that do the real work in those facilities,” he said. “So they came to us with an alternative plan.”

Wolfsthal, now deputy director of the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, added in a subsequent interview: “What the lab directors are worried about is we’re going to build a temple to plutonium processing and we’re not going to have anybody who’s able to worship in it.”

The 2011 Budget Control Act mandates a roughly $450 billion cut in defense spending over the next decade, some of which could affect Energy Department nuclear-weapons spending. Under a sequester process, the reductions figure might more than double, unless Congress by year’s end reverses the legislation’s demand for $1.2 trillion in additional government-wide reductions.

By Wolfsthal’s account, the administration largely signed off on what McMillan and the others had proposed for the plutonium research facility. His view was first reported last month by Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor.

“It was the lab directors’ recommendation that was then put forward by NNSA and approved by [the White House budget office] and the Nuclear Weapons Council,” a senior oversight panel led by the Defense and Energy departments, Wolfsthal explained in the telephone interview with GSN on Monday.

“The budget requests, from their perspective -- at least as far as I understand it -- are not the problem,” he said. “The problem is the appropriations process. And what they’re worried about is that Congress won’t meet the president’s budget, and therefore they’re trying to make sure there’s some margin for error in the system.”

Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, has led criticism within the chamber of President Obama’s nuclear modernization plans in general and, in this case, has charged that the president “failed to deliver” the promised CMRR facility.

“All of a sudden, Congress is screaming, ‘You broke your promise. I think it’s just partisan gamesmanship,” Wolfsthal said at the Monday event. “I think it’s largely designed to try and detract from the president’s pretty impressive accomplishment in investing in the nuclear complex in a reasonable way.”

Others say, though, that it would be wrong to conclude that McMillan or other laboratory directors initiated work on the proposal for a five-year CMRR delay.

“When we are asked to provide technical alternatives, we do,” McMillan said in a Monday written response to questions following Wolfsthal’s remarks. “We are committed to delivering the best scientific and technical solutions to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.”

He called the decision to defer work on the CMRR building “a painful one for Los Alamos.”

“I continue to maintain that the capabilities of the proposed CMRR facility are vital to national security,” McMillan asserted in the statement provided to GSN.

The internal administration budget deliberations in late December and early January were more of a back-and-forth between NNSA officials and the research sites, according to some. All sides reportedly voiced concerns about how best to fulfill responsibilities for maintaining and safeguarding the nuclear stockpile under growing fiscal constraints.

Josh McConaha, an NNSA spokesman, was among those this week describing the initiative to delay the plutonium facility as evolving out of interagency discussions.

“The decision to defer [CMRR] by at least five years was made by [NNSA] Administrator Tom D'Agostino, Principal Deputy Administrator Neile Miller, and Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Don Cook.,” McConaha said in a written response to questions. “It came after significant consultation with the directors of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories.”

The Budget Control Act forced administration officials “to put our heads together and come up with an alternative that guaranteed the deterrent would remain safe, secure and effective,” the nuclear agency spokesman said. “Our alternate plan is a true team effort, and included the administrator, the lab directors, and staff from across the country.”

Wolfsthal described a more proactive role for the laboratory directors, but also acknowledged a give-and-take quality to the decision-making.

“My understanding is that this was direct communications, if not face-to-face meetings, within the normal budget-planning process, which is Department of Energy, NNSA and the lab directors,” he told GSN. “Nobody takes this as dramatic television drama.”

Spokesmen for the Livermore and Sandia laboratories declined response to questions about the matter.

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U.S. can safely take deeper nuclear arms cuts, senior Defense official says

Elaine M. Grossman, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0500

A top Defense Department official on Wednesday said a fresh round of reductions in strategic nuclear weapons could be done without harming U.S. security, though the Pentagon has not yet offered President Obama a recommendation on the matter.

“I do believe that there are steps that we can take to further strengthen our deterrence posture and assurance of allies, and that I believe we can do so with lower numbers,” said James Miller, acting Defense undersecretary for policy.

These words constituted “a little bit of a hint,” Miller said, about how he anticipates advising Obama to proceed in sizing and shaping Washington’s nuclear arsenal in coming years.

Miller, who the White House last month nominated for the top Defense policy slot after a nearly three-year role as deputy, said Pentagon leaders have not yet concluded a “Nuclear Posture Review Implementation Study” that had previously been expected by late last year.

Begun last August, the Defense Department analysis is to survey options for carrying out policy mandates in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, including “measures that would strengthen deterrence, that would enhance strategic stability [and] assure our allies and partners, and that would define possible limits for future reductions below New START levels,” said Miller, speaking at a three-day symposium on nuclear deterrence in Arlington, Va.

The U.S.-Russian arms control pact entered into force in February 2011 and requires that by 2018 each side cap its deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550. The agreement also limits each nation to no more than 700 fielded long-range nuclear weapon platforms -- bomber aircraft, ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles -- with another 100 permitted in reserve.

Miller would not directly address an Associated Press report published on Tuesday that said the administration was considering at least three options for further nuclear arms reductions that would slash the New START arsenal by as much as 80 percent.

Citing anonymous sources in and outside government, the AP article said that alternatives under deliberation included reductions in deployed strategic nuclear weapons to roughly 1,000 to 1,100, 700 to 800, or 300 to 400.

“We are looking at a number of options,” Miller said on Wednesday without confirming the reported details. “I will say that today’s posture and New START force levels represent one option. The status quo is the default option, and we will see if we can shift from that in a way that will strengthen deterrence, strengthen stability and strengthen assurance at lower numbers.”

The profound reductions reported to be under contemplation have already drawn kudos from some arms control advocates.

While some details of the story could not be confirmed, said Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “the administration is absolutely correct to look at deep cuts like this.

“The United States does not rely on nuclear weapons as a central part of our security,” he told Global Security Newswire this week. Their fundamental role in deterring a nuclear attack against Washington or its allies “can be accomplished with a far smaller stockpile than we presently maintain,” making “reductions on this scale … not only feasible, but sensible,” he said.

The idea that the Obama administration might entertain thoughts of a U.S. strategic nuclear force numbering as few as 300 warheads has also triggered outrage from some Republican lawmakers.

“Obviously this is going to create a huge stir in Congress,” Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said on Thursday in an address to the deterrence symposium. “I think we’re looking at a battle royal in the Congress if the president moves forward with these kinds of plans.”

When Miller and Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, then head of U.S. Strategic Command, briefed Kyl prior to the Senate's December 2010 ratification of the U.S.-Russian accord, “they made the case for the proposition that we could get by with the numbers that the New START treaty called for,” the lawmaker said. “Nobody suggested that there was a scenario under which we could go much deeper.”

In fact, prior to negotiating New START, Obama administration officials determined that the United States could accept reductions to as low as 1,300 warheads without requiring new presidential guidance, according to U.S. sources and documents. Moscow, however, was said to be unprepared to accept that deep a cut.

Reports about the Obama team eyeing more drastic reductions today could similarly prove inconsequential because Russian leaders do not share an interest in taking substantial reductions, according to a former arms control negotiator and head of the Energy Department’s nuclear security arm.

“It probably doesn’t matter because no Russian I’ve ever met has suggested any number lower than 1,000 would have any chance at all,” said Linton Brooks, speaking on Wednesday at the same forum.

He said a more viable format for future nuclear talks might involve the United States trading away some of its potential for uploading additional warheads onto existing missiles, which troubles Moscow, in exchange for limits on Russian tactical nuclear weapons, which worry Washington’s European allies.

Meanwhile, the administration’s post-NPR analysis is also assessing options for the president in case deterrence fails and the United States comes under strategic attack, Miller said. The effort is being led by the Pentagon but carried out in consultation with the Energy Department and the intelligence community, he said. Miller noted that the study has taken longer than anticipated but said it should be completed “soon.”

Some Washington insiders have called the NPR Implementation Study a “90-day” effort, “but I’ve tried to avoid that moniker,” said the Defense policy leader, explaining that he “expected at the outset” it would take longer than three months to conclude.

The 2010 posture review -- a major Pentagon assessment of nuclear strategy, forces and readiness -- cited as one of its central goals “reducing the role of U.S. nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy.”

“Fundamental changes in the international security environment in recent years -- including the growth of unrivaled U.S. conventional military capabilities, major improvements in missile defenses, and the easing of Cold War rivalries -- enable us” to deter potential adversaries and reassure friends and partners “at significantly lower nuclear force levels and with reduced reliance on nuclear weapons,” the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review states.

In broad terms, the strategic guidance issued by the Pentagon last month for planning its fiscal 2013 and out-year budgets echoed the same theme. “It is possible that our deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our inventory as well as their role in U.S. national security strategy,” the planning guidance reads.

Miller’s comments on Wednesday morning took a small step beyond what the guidance said was “possible,” in affirming that additional reductions would indeed be desirable and no harm to strategic deterrence.

The “long-term trend” in U.S. national security strategy has been to improve conventional capabilities to such an extent that the nation now relies less on nuclear weapons than in previous decades, he said.

Under the current administration, “it’s a matter of policy and I think has very broad support in the Department of Defense,” Miller said.

He insisted, though, that Obama has “made no decisions” on seeking deeper reductions in the U.S. nuclear force, and the Pentagon “has made no recommendations” on the matter.

Asked how low he might imagine the administration would be willing to go in negotiated cuts and what might be accomplished unilaterally, Miller cited the president’s 2009 Prague speech on nuclear abolition and nonproliferation. The address in the Czech Republic is widely believed to have been the principal basis for the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama accepted later that year.

“The president has been very clear,” Miller said. “The long-term goal is the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. So how far can we go -- how far we get down that path -- is going to depend not just on the United States but on what other actors do.”

Given that a handful of nations are known or believed to retain relatively small nuclear arsenals -- India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, France and the United Kingdom -- it is “not just Russia and not just China” with whom Washington must engage if Obama’s vision is ever to be realized, he said.

Brooks said he was not holding his breath, though, for multinational negotiations on nuclear arms reductions, even if Obama wins a second term.

“Multilateral arms control will generate some more journal articles, but it is going to require a transformation of the international order that is decades away,” according to the former National Nuclear Security Administration chief. “So what’s going to happen is more U.S.-Russian arms control.”

Ellen Tauscher, a senior arms control adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said last month that any significant movement on bilateral nuclear negotiations would likely await national elections in both the United States and Russia.

“We want to get back to the table with the Russians,” she said at a breakfast session with reporters. “We frankly need these elections to pass in order to have the conditions where both sides can make these kinds of decisions to go to the table.”

With the U.S. and Russian arsenals comprising more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear forces, “we think that the sensible next step after New START is bilateral,” Miller said at Wednesday’s event. The next set of negotiations, in the Obama administration’s view, should “look at total nuclear weapons -- deployed, nondeployed, strategic and nonstrategic,” he said.

Full nuclear disarmament remains quite a distant goal, Brooks said.

“Abolition isn’t going to happen for at least 20 years,” said the 73-year-old former ambassador. “A careful look at actuarial tables suggests I won’t be talking to you about it when it happens.”

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Defense bill seeks new submarine cost assessment

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Clinton moves to inject new urgency into bioweapon concerns at Geneva event

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The U.S. secretary of State's address -- tentatively slated for Dec. 7 -- to the Biological Weapons Convention five-year review conference in Geneva would mark the first time that such a high-level official has represented Washington at a BWC forum, according to Thomas Countryman, assistant secretary of State for international security and nonproliferation.

Speaking at a Thursday press conference, he said Clinton would offer "specific proposals" in three areas: increasing world capacity to detect and respond to disease outbreaks; working with the scientific and industrial communities to ensure that life-science technologies and materials are not misused; and "strengthening the implementation" of the 1975 agreement.

Issue experts said Clinton's brief presence at the Switzerland venue would draw substantial public attention to otherwise relatively modest efforts to counter biological threats. Earlier prognostications were that the 14-day BWC review conference, which begins on Monday, would play out with barely any notice on the world stage.

"It's a shock," Barry Kellman, head of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University's College of Law in Chicago, said after learning of the announcement. "I hope what she puts on the table is worthy of her appearance."

Amy Smithson, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington, sounded a similar note.

Clinton's upcoming appearance "is a most welcome indication of high-level political attention being paid to the bioweapons ban," she said in an e-mail response to questions on Thursday. "But the proof will be in whether she introduces significant new proposals to strengthen the treaty's compliance provisions or continues a regrettable, multiyear trend of more rhetoric about the severity of the bioweapons problem than action to reduce that threat."

The Biological Weapons Convention bans the development, acquisition or stockpiling of biological agents or toxins that lack a peaceful justification, as well as associated delivery systems.

The agreement includes 165 states parties plus 12 signatory states. Fewer than two dozen countries around the world have not signed the agreement, among them Israel, Kazakhstan and a handful of African nations, including Eritrea and Mozambique, according to the BWC's operating organization.

At the Switzerland conference, states parties will "review the operation of the Biological Weapons Convention, consider the intersessional work held since the last review in 2006, address relevant developments in science and technology, and discuss future activities," according to a Thursday statement issued by the U.N. office in Geneva.

Countryman insisted that the United States has done a great deal to "adhere to our [BWC] commitments." Initiatives include assisting other nations with disease detection and response, as well as promoting use of the intersessional process, he said. This meeting framework allows government specialists and technical experts to make progress on selected issues between the major five-year review conferences.

Countryman suggested that Clinton's attendance at the event is intended as a shot in the arm for international cooperation on countering germ threats.

"In addition to the steps that we have taken in favor of greater transparency and confidence-building measures about our own efforts, we'll encourage other nations to do the same, and present ideas on how countries can fulfill their obligation under the convention," Countryman told reporters in Washington.

Clinton is expected to emphasize that member states of the accord must not only refrain from bioweapon activities themselves, but also "take steps to ensure that there are no subnational actors on their territory that can develop these kind of weapons," he said.

A Vexing Conundrum: No Big Attack

Despite the oft-cited specter of biological weapons getting into terrorist hands, a major attack of this sort has yet to materialize, ironically making it challenging for policy specialists and advocates to generate much public interest in addressing and preventing such threats.

A biological weapons strike against a major city somewhere around the globe, perhaps in the form of a man-made epidemic, "could cause as much death and economic and psychological damage as a nuclear attack," Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, asserted two years ago in laying out Obama administration policy.

Apart from the 2001 anthrax attack that killed five people and a handful of reports about disgruntled misfits experimenting with kitchen-made lethal substances such as ricin, the United States and the world to date have been largely spared from serious biological weapon threats.

With politicians typically focused on more urgent domestic or international crises of the day, the rarity of bioattacks has contributed to an amount of public lethargy, according to some issue experts.

"The best news is this is mostly because we have not had an attack," Kellman said. "When something happens," though, affected nations would certainly rue any gaps in preparedness, he said.

Therein lies the rub: The dearth of serious bioweapons incidents has diminished the global sense of urgency to act, but detection of illicit activities and prevention of future attacks could require stepped-up U.S. and international attention. As the 20th century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte once remarked, it would be better to "see the truth clearly before it is too late."

Washington's 2009 strategy for countering biological threats focused on strengthening global health security and developing "a rigorous, comprehensive program" to verify compliance with pact, Tauscher said at the time.

Some experts said this week that since announcing its strategy two years ago, Washington has been sluggish in bolstering BWC-related initiatives to tighten security on pathogenic biological agents and has done little to enhance the "transparency" of the U.S. biological sciences sector, as the policy promised. This type of openness has been touted as a means of helping ensure that no illicit activities are taking place under the guise of research.

Nor have other governments worldwide been very active lately on the matter, according to Smithson.

Absent a strong leadership role by Washington or other powerful capitals at the Geneva event, little further progress in addressing potential biological threats is expected in the immediate future, independentl specialists said.

"So long as certain governments -- including the U.S. government -- are not prepared to move forward into a more proactive stance, I think it would be very difficult for this review conference to put the treaty on a stronger footing," Smithson said in an interview prior to Countryman's announcement.

Based on limited Obama initiatives to date and Countryman's brief remarks this week, it remained difficult to discern how aggressive the administration is now prepared to be in advocating for stronger BWC implementation, she said in a subsequent e-mail.

"Inviting one person to visit the home of the U.S. biodefense program at Fort Detrick, Md. -- a 2009 U.S. 'transparency' proposal -- won't cut it," Smithson said.

A Verification Regime?

Earlier in the year, there were some calls for Washington to help resuscitate moribund international negotiations over creating a verification regime for the biological weapons treaty. However, that idea has since been dashed.

A six-year global dialogue aimed at establishing a protocol for verifying implementation of the convention collapsed in 2001, when the Bush administration withdrew support for a draft agreement and a number of other states parties sought language that could have weakened the regime (see GSN, Nov. 18, 2003). Negotiations over verification of the treaty have not since resumed.

"I don't personally think that the [2011 review conference] is going to serve as a referendum on whether to return to negotiations which were abandoned a decade ago," Laura Kennedy, who will lead the Washington delegation at the Geneva conference, told Global Security Newswire in a July interview.

"The aftershocks from 2001 and 2002, when the negotiations collapsed -- and collapsed with a lot of hard feelings -- are still felt," Smithson said.

Countryman said the Obama approach to BWC verification, like the prior Bush policy, would continue to be that mandatory inspection and monitoring programs used for verifying international compliance with nuclear and chemical arms control agreements are inappropriate in the biological sphere.

"It's understandable that there would be a desire to see the same thing in the Biological Weapons Convention," he said. "And we take seriously the concern of our partners in that regard. However, our concern, which is also shared by a large number of nations, is that what you need are tools that work, tools that effectively enforce the goals of the convention."

The senior official laid out three justifications for the U.S. position.

"Biological sciences is too broad a category, with both knowledge and materials too diffuse, and with materials capable on a very small scale -- unlike nuclear or chemical -- of creating such weapons," Countryman said. "So you can't identify the facilities that would need to be verified."

Secondly, "it's very difficult to identify the activities that are objectionable or potentially proscribed," he continued. "In the very inherent nature of the life sciences, almost everything is dual-use, and to identify techniques that are applicable only to weapons or only to peaceful uses is, in fact, impossible."

Finally, he said, verification is virtually impossible on the scale that would be required.

"The sheer number of places where research is done and the degree of intrusiveness that would have to be undertaken to make it work, I think, precludes an effective verification technique based upon nuclear or chemical [arms control agreements]," said Countryman, a career Foreign Service officer who became head of the State Department's so-called ISN Bureau in late September.

Activities related to the BWC are supported by a three-person Implementation Support Unit based in Geneva, which the U.S. diplomat termed "a model of efficiency."

Washington will continue an emphasis on confidence-building measures and enhancing transparency as a means of encouraging implementation, he said. To date, such measures have involved voluntary public declarations of particular substances used in research settings, specific laboratories involved in permitted biological activities, and disease outbreaks that might raise BWC-related suspicions.

There is currently no enforcement mechanism or verification regime backing up these measures, but the U.S. team nonetheless views this transparency as helpful.

"Not only can these help give states the confidence that the convention is being upheld, but we can -- even if we don't agree on this point -- move forward on the basis of consensus on other steps that will make the convention ever more effective," Countryman told reporters.

Pick Your Threat -- And Find Some Cash

There are lingering disagreements between Washington and its partners over whether BWC implementation should be limited to bans on state-sponsored bioweapons activities, or if instead the treaty could be used to enhance defenses against potential terrorist uses.

"A number of people [in the international community] don't take the threat of bioterrorism very seriously," despite the U.S. view that a bioterror attack is likelier than pathogen use by a nation state, Kellman said.

In either case, a general disinclination to take on a more ambitious agenda for implementing the convention is compounded by tighter resources not only in Washington but worldwide, he said.

"There isn't any money," Kellman said. "Progress is slow. Nobody is taking biological weapons very seriously."

The Obama administration is also battling a widespread global perception that the United States has a covert biological weapons program, despite expert views to the contrary, both Kellman and Smithson observed.

Debate in policy circles tends to devolve into these longstanding differences between member nations, and detailed implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention itself becomes "sort of a sideshow," Kellman said.

"When resources are so short, why fight about spending resources when there is no consensus even about the big picture?" he said.

Doing Nothing Much or Achieving Progress?

"To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual," Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891. By this standard, the Biological Weapons Convention review conference might have its work cut out for it.

The seventh session of its kind, the BWC event is set to begin with general debate on Monday and Tuesday, after which the work of hashing out and drafting a final consensus document begins. A draft schedule indicates the conference is to close on Dec. 22, but Kellman said early expectations for progress have been so low that he "wouldn't be surprised at all if it ends early, on the 16th."

Convention meetings over the past several years have typically focused on issues such as disease tracking, a crucial task yet one that is not central to the convention's objectives, Smithson said.

Clinton and her team should avoid "sidestepping the core security issues of the treaty by focusing on disease surveillance and response, which are of vital importance but more the domain of the World Health Organization than the BWC," the issue expert said following Countryman's remarks.

"I hope that the review conference returns to those hard security issues, particularly strengthening the practices that can help confirm compliance with the treaty's prohibitions," she said a day earlier, in a Wednesday interview.

"Their main task should be how to strengthen the confidence-building measures declarations, which at present are voluntary but should be mandatory, and also strengthening the content of those declarations," Smithson said. It should be made clearer exactly which substances and activities a member nation must divulge, she explained.

Smithson said she also wants to see BWC member nations agree to improve "the transparency and oversight of [biological] defense programs" and return to "a discussion of verification and inspections under this treaty."

Paul van den IJssel, a Dutch disarmament ambassador and president-designate of the new BWC review conference, told GSN earlier this year that he would like to see debate over verification options reopened at the upcoming event (see GSN, July 7).

"For many countries it's difficult to accept we would not have any discussion in the future of compliance and verification," van den IJssel said. "It should not be swept off the table; that's basically what they tell me."

Smithson -- author of a new book on the 1995 success of international watchdogs in Iraq -- said a new BWC verification regime should be "based in no small part on the genuine experience of biological inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, who went into the field and uncovered a covert biological weapons program."

Like Countryman, however, Kellman said he could not imagine a BWC verification regime that is modeled after traditional approaches used for other arms control agreements.

Kellman added that he was skeptical that confidence-building measures, while helpful, could be a sufficient means of ensuring compliance.

Rather, Kellman recommended strengthening controls over pathogens; monitoring research that could lead to weaponization; focusing on the bioterror threat; and, working harder to bolster international preparedness.

"For the first time in over a decade, the Biological Weapons Convention states parties are in a position to take significant steps forward in shaping the future of the convention," van den IJssel said in the statement released on Thursday. "We should -- and we must -- capitalize on this."

Though international diplomats and issue specialists might differ on details, Smithson said, "the RevCon needs to get back to business."

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Senior U.S. official denies talk of putting nuclear waste site in Mongolia

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The assertion -- made by a high-ranking official who asked not to be named in addressing a diplomatically sensitive issue -- directly countered remarks offered last spring by a veteran State Department official who leads U.S. nuclear trade pact negotiations.

The diplomat, Richard Stratford, told a Washington audience in March that Energy Department leaders had made initial contacts with their counterparts in Ulaanbaatar about potential cooperation on a range of nuclear fuel services that Mongolia would like to develop for international buyers.

Among the possible features of a joint project, Stratford said, could be the creation of a repository for U.S.-origin fuel that has been used by Washington's partners in the region, potentially including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

If brought to fruition, the proposal would be "a very positive step forward," he said at the time, because no nation around the globe thus far has successfully built a long-term storage facility for dangerous nuclear waste.

The Obama administration in 2009 shuttered plans for a U.S. storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- which would have been the world's only permanent repository -- after prolonged debate over potential environmental and health hazards.

In an interview this week with Global Security Newswire, the high-level Energy Department official said that discussions have focused on an array of potential nuclear energy market roles for Mongolia, from mining its substantial uranium reserves to fabricating fuel and more.

However, the unofficial talks have not broached the idea of Mongolia becoming a recipient of foreign-origin spent fuel, the senior figure said.

"I never thought about U.S. spent fuel. Never," the Energy official said. "I never even thought about it, much less discussed it."

The Obama administration generally supports the idea of creating international operations for waste storage and other fuel-cycle functions that might help stem global nuclear proliferation, but "what the Mongolian government and the Mongolian people end up deciding they want to do is completely their decision and I would not dream of imposing our views on that," the senior official said.

"There's no discussion of an international spent-fuel repository," added a second Energy Department official who participated in the same interview. "What has been included as part of the comprehensive fuel services discussions are potential long-term storage of Mongolian-origin used fuel that has Mongolian uranium [in it]."

Adding Value

An evolving concept of nuclear fuel "leasing" would have the Mongolians build on their existing uranium ore resources to ultimately provide reactor-ready fuel to foreign nations and, additionally, stand ready to take back used uranium fuel rods once they are depleted, according to reports.

The idea, said the more junior Energy official, is that Mongolia could "potentially add long-term storage as part of the value of that uranium resource to potential buyers."

Even if foreign-origin spent fuel cannot be stored in Mongolia, the nation's talks with its international partners might yet allow for U.S., Japanese or other companies to build facilities in the Central Asian nation to produce Mongolian fuel for sale abroad, which could later be returned to Ulaanbaatar for storage after it is used.

The Mongolian Embassy in Washington on Thursday declined comment.

The senior official chalked up the seeming disconnect between Energy and State to a simple misunderstanding, noting that the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia also initially denied Stratford's assertions about a potential international repository in an April statement.

The Mongolian foreign minister went a step further the following month, denying that talks with the United States and Japan had touched on the disposition of atomic waste of any national origin, according to a report by China's Xinhua News Agency.

As a developing nation, Mongolia might derive substantial economic benefit if it agreed to accept foreign spent fuel. However, the idea has become a political lightning rod, with the opposition Green Party charging that a waste facility could become an environmental and safety nightmare.

A number of quiet steps toward international collaboration, though, have already taken place.

Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman in September 2010 signed a memorandum of understanding with Mongolian Foreign Minister Gombojav Zandanshatar, pledging future cooperation on civil nuclear power. Japan was also a party to the draft agreement, which has not been released but reportedly included a passage referring to Mongolia as a future destination for spent fuel.

In Ulaanbaatar to ink the document, Poneman is said to have participated in a long discussion about Mongolia's nuclear trade aspirations with Undraa Agvaanluvsan, an ambassador-at-large at the nation's Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry.

In that conversation, the notion of Mongolia potentially accepting foreign-origin spent fuel "didn't come up," and "Dick Stratford wasn't there," the senior Energy Department official said in the interview.

The official acknowledged, though, that in the course of these bilateral discussions, the U.S. side raised a number of ideas with the Mongolians, but some were quickly dismissed.

"We were brainstorming these ideas, but they were just ideas that we were brainstorming," the Energy official said. "And it was not anything that, frankly, got beyond that."

A State Department spokeswoman this week directed a reporter to the Energy Department for any comment.

Changing Landscape

"I happen to think the Mongolians are just teasing a very excitable bureaucracy, until the U.S. is too committed to a '123' agreement to back out even without the waste dump," nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis, referring to the possibility of a bilateral nuclear trade pact, wrote in an April blog post.

"Certain people at the Department of Energy do believe Mongolia will agree to host a waste repository and are having relevant discussions," he stated in another post the following month. Lewis directs the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Mongolian officials traveled to Washington for Energy Department meetings in February and again in August, U.S. government sources confirmed. Just prior to arriving in Washington for the August meetings, a group of working-level Mongolian officials visited the Idaho National Laboratory, where the Energy Department maintains wet and dry spent-fuel storage facilities.

"The discussions began a year ago and the whole scene looked a little bit different from [how] it looks now," the senior U.S. Energy official noted.

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan, triggered March 11 by a major earthquake and tsunami, heightened concern about the safety of civil nuclear power facilities worldwide.

The crisis in Japan was mounting just as word began to leak in the news media that Ulaanbaatar was in the midst of closed-door discussions about jumping headlong into the nuclear energy market, a prospect that took many Mongolians by surprise. Revelations that the nation might construct a storage site somewhere in its expansive territory for foreign nuclear fuel further stoked public anxiety there.

In July, Kyodo News reported that the head of Toshiba -- the Japanese parent company to U.S. nuclear energy firm Westinghouse -- had written to Poneman to voice his company's continued support for the largely secret "Comprehensive Fuel Supply" or "CFS" effort in Mongolia, despite industry setbacks posed by the Fukushima disaster.

"We must recognize that the CFS project has now been publicized around the world," Norio Sasaki, Toshiba's president and chief executive officer, wrote in the letter, obtained by GSN. "As anti-CFS opposition can be anticipated, it is essential for the parties to the project to promote closer coordination in order to secure continued progress."

This disclosure and others prompted some in the public to "doubt the integrity of the Mongolian state," Dangaasuren Enkhbat, a Green Party member of parliament, said earlier this month at a government meeting on the matter.

"I think these external talks were no mere talks," he said. "In order to stop these talks, the people who participated in these external talks must be called to responsibility."

"Mongolia is not an awfully democratic state," said one U.S. expert who asked not to be named, citing controversy over the issue. "The ways in which they are engaging in this [discussion] shows how they are not fully democratic."

Growing political outcry and public protests forced the Mongolian president, Tsakhia Elbegdorj, to address in greater detail exactly what Ulaanbaatar was discussing with foreign capitals.

On Sept. 9 he issued a decree prohibiting formal talks about "cooperation on nuclear disposal with any country or international organization," unless such negotiations are authorized by the country's national security council, Kyodo News reported.

Speaking at the government meeting four days later, Elbegdorj said the new presidential order "clearly" dictates that public officials "refrain from participation on behalf of Mongolia in any talks or negotiations held under pressure of a foreign country."

Several issue experts interpreted his released remarks as a signal that Ulaanbaatar was effectively ruling out -- at least for now -- the creation of a repository for foreign spent fuel, regardless of whether the option had been earlier left open in private discussions with his U.S. or Japanese interlocutors.

In Mongolia, there is a search for "political cover and some amount of political consensus" on the issue, Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment's Nuclear Policy Program, said in an interview.

Limits on Mongolia's Nuclear Activities?

Meanwhile, it remains uncertain whether Mongolian leaders plan to develop a capability to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium as part of their fuel-services menu. These capabilities can be useful for either civil atomic energy needs or for the development of nuclear weapons.

"I've heard zero interest expressed by any Mongolian in any fuel-cycle activity like enrichment or reprocessing," the senior Energy official said on Wednesday.

By the same token, though, the official could not offer assurances that Mongolia has ruled out the notion of enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium on its own soil, as its capabilities to handle nuclear materials develop.

"Unless I were with them 24 hours a day, I have never heard them say a thing about it. I've never heard anything about it," the Obama administration official said. "But I don't know what anybody has said to third parties."

A bipartisan bill pending in the House would potentially make it more difficult for the White House to gain congressional approval for any pending nuclear cooperation agreement unless the trading partner has, among other things, relinquished a right to enrich or reprocess nuclear fuel on its territory.

The Obama administration included this so-called "gold standard" provision in a 2009 nuclear trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates, but has not yet said publicly whether or how it might apply the policy to other nations.

A so-called "123" agreement -- a type of trade accord governed by the 1954 Atomic Energy Act -- would be required before Washington could assist Mongolia with nuclear technologies or know-how, even if U.S.-fabricated fuel never enters that nation for storage.

Depending on the level of U.S. assistance permitted by a trade pact, Washington could conceivably exert a great amount of leverage over how Mongolia proceeds in entering the nuclear energy market.

Mongolian-origin fuel could actually become regarded as U.S.-origin material "if it is enriched or fabricated into fuel on U.S. soil," said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Another way it could occur is if the fuel is irradiated in a reactor that has used any U.S. technologies or equipment."

That designation could allow Washington a so-called "right of return" of its atomic materials or equipment if it determines that Ulaanbaatar has exceeded its rights under any future nuclear trade pact -- for example, by opting to domestically enrich or reprocess nuclear fuel contrary to the accord.

Leading up to possible negotiations on a nuclear trade agreement with Mongolia, Hibbs said a future pact could encounter some political opposition in Washington if Ulaanbaatar insists on keeping its enrichment and reprocessing options open.

"Some people in Washington have been a little apprehensive about whether Mongolia would want to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel, especially if the U.S. at some point agreed to support a multilateral fuel-cycle project in that country," he told GSN.

The senior Energy official would not speculate about how the Obama administration would react if Mongolia at some point refuses to renounce this type of nuclear processing, noting that the Asian nation has a long way to go before its atomic energy plans solidify.

"The U.S. holds all the cards really," Lyman said. "A '123' agreement with Mongolia should be seen as a privilege to Mongolia and not something in which they can dictate all the terms."

Calling nuclear trade pacts "one of the most potent tools the U.S. has" in helping restrict global proliferation, he added, "The administration should not lose sight of the original goal, which is to stop the spread of fuel-cycle facilities to countries that don't have them."

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Top general says U.S. needs fresh look at deterrence, nuclear triad

Elaine M. Grossman — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The nation's second-ranking military officer on Thursday called for a broad reassessment of how to deter significant threats to the United States.

A future national military strategy should strike a balance between fielding conventional weapons and nuclear arms, with the latter viewed as less usable against most threats, said Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fresh planning should also account for the emerging roles played by missile defenses and cyber capabilities, he said.

Cartwright suggested, as well, that the future role of each leg of the nuclear triad -- bomber aircraft, ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles -- must be fundamentally re-examined so that desired capabilities and quantities are maintained, rather than determined by budget-cutting drills or political horse-trading.

"I'm advocating a conscious decision on: What is deterrence? How does it work?" the Marine Corps general told reporters at a breakfast Q&A session. A 21st century approach should also account for the role of nonmilitary forms of power and persuasion, such as economic and diplomatic tools, he said.

During the Cold War, the United States sought to balance its fielded atomic weapons against the Soviet arsenal in a standoff dubbed "mutual assured destruction," in which either side that initiated a nuclear war would risk a devastating response.

With the growing possibility today that the first modern detonation of a nuclear weapon could be at the hands of a terrorist rather than a foreign government, the game has changed, said Cartwright, who is slated to retire early next month after a nearly 40-year military career.

"Violent extremist organizations are very real" and have signaled interest in using weapons of mass destruction against the United States and its allies, he said. "It's not a nation-state you're dealing with [but] it's equally threatening. So we have to start to think about this a little more holistically."

Washington in the future might attempt, for example, to head off threats from major nuclear powers in one way, while using a different strategy to deter any smaller nuclear-capable adversary, he said.

"You may actually decide that you're going to stay [with] mutual assured destruction with one country, but the other one is not going to be that," Cartwright said at the event, sponsored by the Center for Media and Security. "You're going to have to have the capability ... to convince them that you are, in fact, capable" of hitting an adversary that contemplates using a nuclear weapon, and that such an adversary is "not going to win," he said.

The general is a longtime advocate of developing conventional "prompt global strike" weapons that could give the United States a capacity to respond to surprise threats without using strategic-range nuclear arms.

Missile defenses might someday become capable of intercepting an adversary's attacks for 24 or 48 hours, but that is still not long enough to deploy ground troops or even aircraft to many parts of the world, he noted.

"What is it that you do, when you get the president up in the middle of the night and you say, 'So-and-so is attacking. The only thing I've got that can get there for the next 24 hours or 48 hours is a nuclear weapon'?" Cartwright said.

"We have to find some way to get a range of action that allows us to be credible in those first few hours if we're not there" with military forces on the ground, and "allows us also to not have to start at the nuclear level," he said.

The Air Force is developing Conventional Strike Missile technology, said to be ready for fielding in roughly 2020, that could hit targets at hypersonic speeds anywhere around the world with just 60 minutes' notice (see GSN, June 24).

Whether the Pentagon can await the Air Force missile's long-promised debut before fielding some form of conventional prompt global strike capability "just depends on how the threat emerges," he said. "If you felt like it was necessary, you'd go sooner and then you could do it."

He hinted that, if needed urgently to address an emerging threat, ICBM rockets could launch simple conventional payloads at high speed against virtually any target.

To date the Pentagon has not fielded such a conventionally armed missile out of concern that foreign nuclear powers like Russia or China might mistake its launch for the onset of an atomic war. The conventionally armed, nuclear-look-alike option remains feasible, though, as a quick fix in a serious crisis, if needed.

"I mean, we use cement to test with today," Cartwright said. "It makes a very big hole."

Although the Defense Department completed a Nuclear Posture Review -- as well as a more sweeping Quadrennial Defense Review -- just last year, in Cartwright's view a full assessment of all U.S. capabilities versus anticipated threats has not yet occurred.

Taking emerging Pentagon capabilities such as long-range conventional strike, cyber warfare and missile defenses into account, "are those all just additive or do we put a balance in here that acknowledges that the number of countries now that we have to deter has gone up from one to more than one?" the general said. "And the deterrence for one is not necessarily the deterrent for the next?"

He added: "We haven't really exercised the mental gymnastics, the intellectual capital, on that yet. It's starting. I'm pleased that it's starting. But I wouldn't be in favor of building too much [more military equipment] until we had that discussion."

In terms of modernizing today's nuclear-weapon platforms, Cartwright acknowledged that he has been skeptical of Air Force arguments that a future bomber aircraft must include a wide array of highly technological capabilities and include a human in the cockpit.

"I'm known as a bomber-hater, I guess," said the general, who went on to explain why he thinks the caricature is not quite accurate.

"I think you have to have a bomber," Cartwright said. "I'm questioning what it is we're building, and what attributes we're putting against it."

The Joint Chiefs vice chairman -- who heads the Pentagon's top-level review panel with authority to determine all of the military's major hardware requirements -- said the nation should buy an affordable bomber to replace its aging fleet of conventional-only B-1s and nuclear-capable B-52s and B-2s.

"What I'm trying to understand is: What is it we're going to build it for? Is it the most exquisite, high-end, penetrating, go-anyplace anytime weapon system?" Cartwright said. "Or is it a truck that has today's state-of-the-art survivability attributes, can incorporate the next-generation attributes in a way that makes sense -- [including] sensors and whatnot -- and carry a reasonable payloads?"

The price tag to develop a new long-range bomber has been estimated at $15 billion or more, and total costs to both design and procure the new aircraft fleet could reach $30 billion to $40 billion.

A cheaper aircraft would allow the Pentagon to build a larger fleet, Cartwright said.

"If we're going to go out and spend billions of dollars to build something less than 20, then I question the investment," Cartwright said.

He also said he would "throw down the gauntlet" by asking whether the bomber truly requires a human pilot, or if instead all of them could be remotely controlled. Air Force leaders have called for a new bomber that could be flown either manned or unmanned.

"Nobody's shown me anything that requires a person in that airplane. Nobody," said Cartwright, noting that "the manned part of this does not necessarily drive the cost."

However, a manned bomber is typically designed to be more survivable and human-friendly, features that could be modified or jettisoned if the aircraft is conceived to be remotely piloted from the start, he said.

While the Pentagon has already started planning how it would modernize the nation's fleet of nuclear-capable bombers and submarines, studies on how to update today's Minuteman 3 ICBMs are only just beginning. The Air Force was said to be completing an initial assessment of its future-ICBM options late last month.

"The land-based deterrent [is] the last one to be recapitalized," Cartwright said. "The challenge here is that we have to recapitalize all three [triad] legs and we don't have the money to do it.

"What I'm worried about is ... that the [funding] trough should not determine which one we have," Cartwright added. "So we ought to make that decision now, and we ought to engender the discussion about what does deterrence look like when we get out to 2020 [or] 2030."

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Minot nukes clear of Midwest flooding, but wrestle with snow melt

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Souris River flood inundating Minot, N.D., has spared the 150 nuclear-armed strategic ballistic missiles on alert in underground silos at a nearby Air Force base, according to a service spokeswoman.

A huge winter snow melt has, in fact, posed a months-long challenge for keeping the buried ICBM launch facilities dry, said Capt. Genieve David. All told, though, each of the 60-foot-high missiles remains functional, she said.

"Our missile launch facilities are not directly threatened by the flooding of the Souris River," she told Global Security Newswire on Thursday in a brief phone interview from Minot Air Force Base, located 8 miles north of the city limits.

The river snakes through the city of Minot west to east.

The North Dakota flood water reportedly has hit record high levels not seen for more than 130 years and has forced more than 11,000 people from their homes. Last week, an estimated 4,100 houses were deluged, including roughly 2,400 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency found to be under at least 6 feet of water, according to reports.

The river overflowed its banks beginning on June 20.

Remarkably, the 91st Missile Wing's Minuteman 3 force spread over 8,500 square miles at the base -- comprising one-third of the nation's ready long-range ICBMs -- has remained unaffected, said David, who heads base public affairs.

However, winter run-off since April has led to some "localized pooling" around a number of underground missile-launch facilities, she said. Soggy ground conditions affect "just a handful of them," said the Air Force captain, who declined to provide specifics on how many blast-hardened ICBM silos are involved.

The service has been able to head off any serious H2O threat to the ground-based deterrent force through a combination of sandbags and pumps, she said. Minot base officials procured portable pumps this spring to drain off collected ground water, allowing maintenance trucks continued access on dirt roads that lead to the launch facilities, officials said.

"The silos remain dry," said a onetime ICBM commander, who asked not to be named in describing nuclear weapon maintenance. When water seeps into the launch facilities, the service typically drains it off using built-in "sump pumps, just like a basement," said the former officer.

The first version of Minuteman ICBM was fielded in the early 1960s. Today's Minuteman 3 variant initially entered the fleet in June 1970 and a total of 450 missiles are maintained at three bases; beyond Minot, missiles are deployed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

Missile silos are geographically dispersed at each base to help protect them from the possibility of a massive attack. Each is connected by hardened cables to underground launch control centers at which two-officer teams serve on around-the-clock alerts.

As of last Saturday, 1,142 Minot airmen and their families had been displaced by the river flooding. With the river crest moving downstream, mandatory evacuations have forced residents as far away as the town of Velva -- 22 miles from Minot -- to leave their homes, Air Force spokesmen said in a June 25 release.

As flood waters this week began to recede, affected military personnel started their recovery effort, base officials said on Wednesday. Officials reportedly have said it could take weeks before the Souris retreats to normal levels.

Thursday brought the news that several water main breaks in the town of Minot had forced the Air Force base -- which reportedly relies on the city system -- to cut its water consumption in half. Residents were advised to drink only boiled or bottled water.

Work crews were unable to locate breaks in the lines because they were under 10 feet of water, base officials said.

"We're well beyond a crisis," Minot Public Works Director Alan Walter was quoted as saying. "We're in very deep. We have a long grind ahead of us."

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House Committee slashes conventional "global strike" funds

Elaine M. Grossman — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday recommended a nearly 50 percent cut in funding for the development of conventionally armed, fast-strike weapons for the upcoming budget year.

If the panel's mark-up of the fiscal 2012 defense spending bill eventually makes its way into law, funds for the so-called "conventional prompt global strike" effort would total $104.8 million, a significant drop from the Obama administration's $204.8 million request.

Under the effort, the Defense Department is developing a number of different attack weapon technologies that could eventually be capable of hitting targets halfway around the world with less than an hour's notice.

Pentagon officials say a small number of these conventional arms are necessary as an alternative to using high-speed nuclear weapons in instances in which a surprise threat emerges thousands of miles away that must be struck rapidly, but where there are no U.S. aircraft or ships stationed nearby. This might include a North Korean ballistic missile being readied for launch or a terrorist leader spotted while on the move, defense officials explain.

The first such system to be fielded could be an Air Force Conventional Strike Missile, which would initially launch like a ballistic missile but then be capable of maneuvering to target at speeds exceeding Mach 5.

An initial flight test of a key component of the missile -- a "hypersonic technology vehicle" -- ended in failure in April 2010. A second airborne trial of the vehicle is slated for this August and a more advanced version is expected to undergo a flight test in fiscal 2012.

House panel members moved to enact the $100 million cutback in the program after searching for savings throughout the defense budget, a committee aide told Global Security Newswire on Wednesday. The funds were reallocated toward ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as to "more important, higher priority programs," the staffer said.

The congressional aide spoke on condition of not being named, lacking authority to address the issue publicly. A House Appropriations report on the new legislation did not offer an explanation for the reduction.

The draft decrease in global strike funds is part of the committee's $530 billion appropriations measure for nonemergency defense spending in the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. The proposed package cuts $9 billion from President Obama's request, but offers a $17 billion increase over 2011 defense budget figures.

The appropriations legislation is expected to go to a House floor vote as early as next week. It follows the chamber's action late last month to authorize 2012 defense expenditures. Typically authorization bills deal with policy and programmatic matters, while appropriations legislation is necessary for the government to spend funds.

The House Armed Services Committee's defense authorization bill, which passed in a 322-96 floor vote on May 26, recommended a small decrease in conventional prompt global strike funds.

Trimming $25 million from the administration's global strike request, this House panel also issued a defense authorization report challenging the Pentagon's development strategy for the weapon systems.

House members lauded the Defense Department for the "innovation and scientific discovery" associated with developing the Conventional Strike Missile, but said they were "also concerned about pursuing a weaponized missile system, or any material development decision, before demonstrating that the technology is feasible."

Defense officials want the Air Force missile effort to undergo a critical design review in 2012, a crucial step toward putting the so-called "boost-glide" weapon through the paces of a full operational demonstration.

Bugs yet to be worked out in the cutting-edge technology effort include finding ways to prevent the weapon system from burning up as it zooms through the upper atmosphere, as well as developing a guidance system that can control the apparatus at such high speeds.

Surmounting such steep technical challenges is not expected to come cheap. Air Force officials have estimated that the cost to conduct two full demonstrations of the first non-nuclear global strike missile could reach $500 million.

The price tag for procuring three Conventional Strike Missiles -- one to put on alert and another two for back-up -- could be as high as $300 million, according to Defense officials. The initial fielding date has slipped from 2015 to possibly as late as 2017, according to service officials.

Lawmakers last month raised the idea of finding cheaper and easier alternatives to the Conventional Strike Missile.

"The committee is concerned about the affordability of [conventional prompt global strike] given the current budgetary environment," the House defense authorization report states. "Based on briefings by the [Defense] Department, the committee is aware of other potential conventional long-range strike capabilities that may be lower cost, carry less technical risk, and provide a capability sooner" than the Conventional Strike Missile, the report reads.

The panel said it "encourages a broader examination" of the alternatives for undertaking the long-range, fast-attack mission.

The Defense Department has already begun to explore other, potentially more cost-effective options for prompt global strike that might be available in the near term, said a second House aide, who also requested anonymity. Debate is simmering inside the Pentagon over how best to pursue the mission, spurred by those "who don't want to put all their eggs in the HTV basket," said the staffer, referring to the futuristic hypersonic technology vehicle.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is marking up its version of the 2012 defense authorization bill this week in closed session. That chamber's Appropriations Committee will take its stab at next year's defense funding bill after that.

Once these two types of defense spending bills have passed in both chambers, lawmakers from the House and Senate will meet in conferences to hash out a single authorization bill and a single appropriations bill. The resulting legislation is then sent to the president for his signature or veto.

During the current fiscal year, the Pentagon has opted to allocate the lion's share of its $239.9 million global strike budget on the Air Force hypersonic glide concept, spending $147 million to develop and demonstrate the technology, according to one Defense report.

The remainder is being spent on an Army effort to develop an alternative delivery vehicle, re-entry system and warhead; the development of a test range; and defense-wide studies on conventional prompt global strike.

The Senate Appropriations Committee last September called on the administration to break down its lump-sum funding request for global strike into these different types of expenditures, beginning with the fiscal 2012 budget, but the Pentagon has not done so.

Defense officials said they have not yet determined how they would split the 2012 funding, because such a decision is to be based on the results of this year's flight experiments.

In its recent report, the House Armed Services Committee mentioned that it anticipates there will be some excess funds left unspent from fiscal 2011 appropriations for prompt global strike, and those could dollars could help make up for 2012 reductions.

Despite Pentagon descriptions of prompt global strike work as focusing on the Air Force and Army efforts, it appears that the Navy continues to hone a submarine-launched concept for the mission that has been repeatedly rejected by Congress.

Navy budget documents for fiscal 2012 submitted to Congress show that the service this year is spending $10 million to study how a conventionally armed missile could be launched from nuclear ballistic-missile submarines.

Lawmakers have moved to terminate Navy work on the so-called Conventional Trident Modification year after year, citing concerns that Russia or China might mistake the launch of a non-nuclear D-5 missile for the start of an atomic war, potentially setting the stage for a dangerous international crisis.

Nonetheless, conceptual work on converting a number of Trident missiles for a conventional mission appears to proceed. Next year "a study on SSBN-based conventional prompt global strike options will be completed to address safety, security and surety issues, along with ambiguity issues as they relate to various sea-based designs," one Navy budget document states.

The service in 2012 hopes to estimate procurement costs for conventional Trident designs and lay out a possible acquisition schedule for the controversial system, according to the budget report.

This information "is required to better understand the capabilities that could be delivered from naval platforms," the service states.

Advocates of exploring alternatives to a conventional version of the submarine-launched missile, such as the Air Force Conventional Strike Missile, argue it would be better to field a weapon whose launch could not be mistaken for the onset of a nuclear war.

The Conventional Strike Missile and similar long-range weapons could be made verifiable by foreign inspectors or spy satellites, and would follow a flight trajectory noticeably distinct from nuclear-tipped sea-launched ballistic missiles or ICBMs, according to advocates.

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House approves bill with nuclear treaty-limiting provisions as veto bait

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation that limits how nuclear arms reductions mandated by a new treaty with Russia can be implemented.

The $690 billion defense authorization bill for fiscal 2012 ties nuclear force reductions to Obama administration reports on how the White House intends to modernize the nuclear arsenal.

So-called "New START Implementation" provisions in the bill also restrict the administration's ability to cut deployed or nondeployed nuclear weapons below levels set by the accord, unless required by a treaty or authorized by Congress.

Washington and Moscow signed New START in April 2010 and, after ratification by both sides, the pact entered into force in February. The agreement dictates reductions in each nation's deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550, down from a ceiling of 2,200 called for by an earlier treaty. It also caps fielded strategic nuclear delivery systems at 700, with an additional 100 platforms allowed in reserve.

Under certain conditions, the House defense authorization measure also prohibits the executive branch from eliminating weapons from the so-called nuclear "hedge force" until a new plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a uranium facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn., are up and running.

The United States maintains a number of warheads in reserve in case a resurgent threat develops or a major technical problem is discovered in deployed weapons. Construction of the two facilities, which will be capable of handling warhead-making materials, is not expected to be complete until the mid-2020s at the earliest.

House and Senate defense authorization bills set policy for Defense Department programs and expenditures for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. The Pentagon cannot spend funds in fiscal 2012, though, until separate appropriations legislation is passed by both chambers and signed into law.

The White House budget office warned on Tuesday that the New START-related provisions -- spearheaded by House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner, R-Ohio -- could trigger a presidential veto.

The legislative initiative "would set onerous conditions on the administration's ability to implement the treaty, as well as to retire, dismantle or eliminate nondeployed nuclear weapons," according to a "Statement of Administration Policy" circulated on Capitol Hill. It could also hamper the capacity "to support the long-term safety, security and reliability of our nuclear deterrent," the Office of Management and Budget statement reads.

To monitor the status of aging warheads in the U.S. stockpile, the Energy Department routinely disassembles a small number of weapons and studies whether they remain safe and effective. Under Turner's initial version of the New START Implementation provisions, even warhead dismantlement for safety reasons would have been prohibited, according to Nickolas Roth and Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Before taking a final 322-96 tally on the authorization bill, though, the House by voice vote on Thursday passed an amendment in which Turner clarified the New START Implementation wording to permit such warhead eliminations, if necessary for safety -- and effectiveness-monitoring of the nuclear arsenal.

Turner's altered language also would allow for "the dismantlement of legacy warheads that are awaiting dismantlement" at such time as the bill provisions become law. This would mean that the administration could eliminate warheads from the hedge force that are already in the queue for destruction.

Even after Turner tweaked the bill language, "the real problem" with the legislation is that it "severely limits the ability of the president and the U.S. military to determine the size and structure of U.S. nuclear forces," nuclear-weapon analysts Roth and Young argued in a second blog post this week.

However, it is far from clear that the New START restrictions will ever find their way to the Oval Office. Limitations on treaty-based reductions are unlikely to make it into the Senate version of the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill, which is slated for a Democratic-controlled committee mark-up beginning the week of June 13.

Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. on Thursday introduced legislation similar to Turner's that would curb the president's latitude on nuclear arsenal policy. A legislative aide on Wednesday attributed a two-week delay in filing the bill to the Senate Republican whip's busy schedule.

Kyl unsuccessfully led Senate opposition to New START ratification late last year. He said earlier this month he hoped his chamber might wrap New START Implementation provisions into its own version of the defense authorization bill, much as the House has done.

Nonetheless, the Senate's Democratic majority -- perhaps joined by some Republicans who broke ranks with their leadership last December to vote in favor of ratifying New START -- is expected to reject such limits on treaty-related matters.

Once the Senate passes its defense authorization bill, a conference committee of House and Senate lawmakers must meet to negotiate compromise language. The resulting conference measure, if passed by both legislative bodies, would then go to the White House for a presidential signature or veto. The entire process is expected to take several more months.

A veto based on New START issues might remain in the offing even if the language on limiting strategic nuclear warhead reductions is eliminated, the administration policy statement warned.

One provision also included in the House bill would hinder the president's ability to change the U.S. nuclear strategy from "counterforce" to "countervalue" targeting -- a shift that Republicans have charged is under consideration by the Obama administration and could result in an "immoral" increase in civilian casualties during a nuclear war.

Counterforce typically refers to military targets, while countervalue suggests that the casualties would be largely civilians.

Democratic lawmakers have argued that U.S. nuclear targeting strategy has long put a potential adversary's cities at risk, regardless of which party has been in the White House. This is because a significant number of military and industrial targets are located near large population centers.

The Obama team went a step further. Although the bill language allows such changes if certain White House reports and certifications are issued, the administration statement asserts that Congress simply does not have the latitude to impose limits on a president's management of the arsenal.

The measure "raises constitutional concerns as it appears to encroach on the president's authority as commander in chief to set nuclear employment policy -- a right exercised by every president in the nuclear age from both parties," the budget office said in its statement. "If the final bill presented to the president includes these provisions, the president's senior advisers would recommend a veto."

The House-passed bill also aims to prevent the president from unilaterally withdrawing U.S. tactical-range nuclear weapons from Europe. Kyl and Turner have warned against this type of move, absent an agreement for reciprocal action by Russia. A U.S. pullback could occur only after certain presidential certifications are made and solely if requested by a European host nation, according to the new House bill.

In its budget office statement this week, the Obama administration said it "strongly objects, including on constitutional grounds," to congressional limitations on "the president's ability to determine military requirements in Europe, conduct diplomacy, and negotiate treaties."

The White House also protested against bill provisions that would make it difficult for Washington to exchange missile-defense technology data with Moscow, and would block the administration from agreeing with Russia to limit a U.S. defensive shield in any way.

The Obama administration is talking with the Kremlin on potentially cooperating on missile defenses in Europe, though it could be years before any integrated system is put in place.

On Tuesday, Turner took to the House floor to challenge the White House veto threat over the New START Implementation provisions.

"By this threat, is the president saying he does not intend to implement the nuclear modernization guarantees that were part of the New START treaty? Does the president intend to unilaterally withdraw nuclear forces from Europe?" the Ohio lawmaker asked. "Does the president want to share sensitive data of missile-defense technology with Russia? And does the president intend to strike deals with Russia to limit our missile-defense capabilities?

"If the answers to these questions is 'no,' then the administration should have no objections to these provisions," Turner continued. "If, on the other hand, the answer to these questions is 'yes,' then it is all the more reason to make these provisions law."

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Cartwright said to be passed over for top military post

Elaine M. Grossman — Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama has decided to pass over Gen. James Cartwright for the U.S. military's highest post as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to defense sources.

Said to be Obama's "favorite general," Cartwright enjoys bipartisan support in the Senate -- which would have been asked to confirm him -- and was believed to be the front-runner to take the post when Adm. Michael Mullen retires this summer.

However, serving as the nation's No. 2 military officer since August 2007, the Marine general has frequently crossed swords with Mullen. It is widely believed this discord jeopardized the 61-year-old officer's hopes of continuing his military career.

Cartwright's spokesman declined comment on the matter.

The Rockford, Ill., native did not actively lobby for the chairman's job but would have been happy to undertake the post, according to a number of military officials.

He is widely regarded as a brainy and enormously capable officer who has established close ties with top Pentagon and White House civilians, but has clashed with a number of his peers over both substantive issues and operating style.

Strains between Cartwright and Mullen became apparent early on, when the two differed over how much authority the general could wield at the Pentagon as Joint Chiefs vice chairman, defense officials have told Global Security Newswire.

Cartwright's prior assignment as head of U.S. Strategic Command -- which has operational control over the nation's nuclear arsenal, among other global responsibilities -- afforded him enormous decision-making power that he largely lost in his promotion to the JCS deputy slot.

As commander of the Omaha, Neb.-based military organization between 2004 and 2007, Cartwright ushered in sweeping changes that encouraged development of conventional "global strike" alternatives to nuclear arms and an innovative management approach that used electronic social media to cultivate the perspectives of lower-ranking military personnel .

Along the way, the one-time fighter pilot is said to have alienated a number of powerful leaders throughout the military services, principally in his role in support of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' initiative to slash Pentagon acquisition programs and make the defense budget more affordable.

Talk of potential reductions in Navy aircraft carrier battle groups and limits on Air Force plans for a future nuclear-capable bomber made Cartwright some serious enemies in the services and on Capitol Hill, as proponents for these and other programs circled the wagons to protect their interests.

During last year's administration debate over the war in Afghanistan, Mullen particularly resented a move by Cartwright to go around the chairman in independently offering the White House options for a smaller troop increase than others in the armed services were discussing, sources said. The vice chairman's role is to be an independent adviser to the president, but Mullen reportedly saw the episode as evidence of Cartwright's disrespect and failure to act as a team player.

The dynamic raises the question of whether a Joint Chiefs vice chairman's independent voice, distinct from the chairman's, should be seen as fidelity to civilian masters or military infighting, according to some defense thinkers. Complicating the situation is that a vice chairman typically substitutes for the chairman in roughly 40 percent of Pentagon and interagency meetings.

One factor some have mentioned as undoing the general's prospects to become chairman has been his lack of combat experience.

From his post at the Pentagon, Cartwright is said to have played a key role in developing a detailed menu of options for the May 2 raid in Pakistan that resulted in the death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. However, the general has served neither in Iraq nor Afghanistan, and some cited this experience deficit as a showstopper, particularly at a time when so many other senior officers have gone to war.

Military insiders, though, said this played little to no actual role in nixing Cartwright for the chairman's job.

Rather, the general's separation from his wife and gossip about personal dalliances -- none of which have been substantiated -- played a far greater role in sending the general into retirement, according to well placed sources. Cartwright was investigated last year by the Pentagon inspector general on reports of an improper relationship with a member of his staff, but was cleared of any wrongdoing.

"The combination" of rumor-mongering and the general's actual marital separation -- which became known in the Pentagon roughly three months ago -- "was [a] perfect [tool] for the people who didn't want him to get the seat," said one source. This and several other officials spoke on condition of not being named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

In the U.S. military -- an institution that remains more socially conservative than the general public -- unmarried officers rarely make it to general officer rank, and a separation or divorce is typically a career-killer. For a prospective chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be undergoing a personal issue of this sort was also unacceptable to a White House reportedly hypersensitive to any allegations of impropriety, some said.

For a time it seemed that Obama and Gates -- who will soon be replaced as Defense secretary by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- were prepared to go forward with the Cartwright nomination, despite the general's marital status, according to defense officials and others.

However, that changed over the past week or so, possibly because of Mullen's continued opposition to the move or because of emerging signs from Capitol Hill that Cartwright's confirmation might be contested, sources said.

The Marine general's last day of active duty is anticipated to be August 3, though he will likely take leave from his post as JCS vice chairman before that. He is not expected to take another job in the Obama administration, at least not in the immediate future, according to defense officials.

One candidate to fill Mullen's shoes being talked about this week is Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. He is said to have indicated little interest in the job, having just become the new Army chief of staff. However, he could still accept the nomination if asked by the president, sources said. The White House is now scrambling to settle on its candidate for chairman, as a public announcement is expected as early as next week.

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GOP leaders aim to enforce Obama's nuclear modernization promises

Elaine M. Grossman — Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, are spearheading legislation aimed at holding the Obama administration accountable for nuclear modernization pledges it made last year.

"We're going to ensure that the administration complies with the commitments that it made," Kyl, the Senate's No. 2 GOP leader, said Monday at a media round table. "Better to have it in writing, understood by both parties exactly what's required, so that we don't have confusion in the future."

Bills drawn up by the two lawmakers for consideration in both chambers also seek to prohibit unilateral U.S. warhead reductions and preserve the nation's missile defense options. Turner introduced his proposal, H.R. 1750, in the House on Friday, while Kyl could file his version in the Senate as early as today.

The White House has promised to spend $85 billion over the next 10 years on updating warheads and modernizing the nuclear weapons complex. Projects include extending the service lives of Air Force and Navy nuclear weapons, including those carried by the B-61 gravity bomb and the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile, as well as building new facilities to research and process warhead uranium and plutonium.

The investment includes a $4.1 billion plus-up that the White House in November promised to spend in the coming decade on nuclear modernization. That came after an initial budget boost last spring of $10 billion over the decade for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous arm of the Energy Department that oversees the atomic arsenal.

Washington is also expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on nuclear delivery platforms such as submarines, missiles and bomber aircraft.

The Obama administration last fall used the unprecedented funding pledges as a sweetener to draw Senate Republican votes for ratifying the U.S.-Russian New START agreement. The pact, signed in April 2010, requires each nation to cap its nuclear warheads at 1,550 and strategic delivery systems at 700. An additional 100 ICBMs, bombers and submarine-launched missiles can remain in reserve.

Following Senate ratification of the treaty in December in a 71-26 vote -- which included the support of 13 Republicans -- New START entered into force in February.

Although Kyl had played a lead role in landing the White House pledges to update nuclear warheads and their delivery systems, he ultimately voted against ratifying New START, saying he would not be rushed into embracing the treaty.

This week the Arizona senator suggested that his decision not to support the pact last year does not weaken his hand today in demanding progress on nuclear weapons updates.

"I made it clear throughout my discussions with the administration that whatever we agreed was necessary for modernization did not bind me to thereafter support the treaty if I concluded that they were either going about it the wrong way or that the terms still weren't satisfactory," Kyl said. "They knew all along that I felt that [ratification] couldn't be done adequately in the time frame that they'd pushed it, and during the lame duck" session after the November election.

The lawmaker's comments differ somewhat from the White House account at the time, when administration officials suggested that Kyl had negotiated in bad faith .

While Turner introduced the "New START Implementation Act" as a stand-alone bill, he is also working to incorporate several of its provisions into the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill, which is making its way through the House Armed Services Committee this week.

"It's really about an agreed to-do list," Turner, who chairs the panel's Strategic Forces Subcommittee, told reporters. "[We seek] an understanding of what are the items that are outstanding [and] how should they be addressed."

He said enacting such legislation now could help avert "the conflict and dissatisfaction that could arise later" if Congress and the executive branch were to differ over modernization expectations.

Kyl said he might similarly push for measures in his bill to be wrapped into the Senate's defense authorization legislation.

A next step in both chambers might be to insert these mandates into appropriations bills, which would legally tie the federal government's financial purse strings to nuclear modernization and related mandates. However, neither lawmaker could say yet whether such a move was likely.

Key features of Turner's bill include:

A limit on funds for the reduction of deployed weapons under the New START agreement pending joint certification by the Energy and Defense secretaries that the nuclear arsenal modernization plan, described last November in the administration's so-called "Section 1251 Report Update," is proceeding as planned.
Funds for arms control reductions would be frozen for six months if modernization progress is impeded, though "the provision is carefully crafted to avoid treaty default," according to a Turner fact sheet;
A ban on unilateral reductions in deployed or nondeployed U.S. nuclear weapons below the levels set by New START. In what might prove to be one of its most controversial provisions, the legislation prohibits the administration from taking any cuts to the so-called nuclear "hedge force" until a new plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a uranium facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn., are up and running.

"The reason is obvious," Kyl said. "Until you have the capability of reproducing the warheads, you don't want to eliminate the hedge that you have."

The Obama administration has, in fact, mulled a faster pace for disassembly of backup warheads, which typically are maintained for possible deployment in the event of a resurgent threat or the discovery of a major malfunction in fielded weapons.

Under the bill, further unilateral reductions to either deployed or nondeployed warheads could be authorized only by a new treaty or an act of Congress;
A requirement to preserve "U.S. freedom of action" in deploying missile defenses, preventing any international agreements from limiting an antimissile system unless authorized by a future treaty or congressional action. This provision comes as Washington and Moscow intensify discussions about potentially collaborating on a joint European antimissile system, an objective that Kyl has sharply criticized; and
A block against the United States or NATO unilaterally cutting Washington's tactical nuclear weapons in Europe unless certain conditions are met, including a host nation or high-level alliance request. The Senate has pressed the administration to seek Russian reductions in its European nonstrategic nuclear weapon deployments, which outnumber similar NATO-fielded weapons 10 to 1.

This, too, could prove politically contentious in the face of growing pressure in Europe for the United States to pull back some or all of its estimated 200 nuclear-armed B-61 gravity bombs from bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

"We want to make certain that the United States doesn't either consolidate, withdraw or reduce its forces in Europe in exchange for no action by Russia or just a geographical concession, where Russia just merely agrees to move its weapons back" from border areas, Turner said.

Asked whether the U.S. president currently has the latitude to take unilateral reductions in tactical weapons deployed in Europe, Kyl said "it depends" on a number of factors.

"As commander in chief, he has certain authority -- for example, within NATO councils -- to deploy forces," said the Senate minority whip. "What we are suggesting is that if he wants our consent to a potential treaty with Russia, for example, relating to tactical weapons or reducing strategic weapons further, he should seek our advice up front."

Three provisions in Turner's stand-alone measure already appear in the House Armed Services Committee chairman's mark-up of the authorization bill.

One feature would direct the Defense secretary to assess whether current and future U.S. nuclear forces meet their deterrence and defense objectives. Another seeks an annual review of the safety, security, reliability and effectiveness of nuclear delivery systems and command over these weapons.

A third Turner measure in the pending authorization legislation codifies fiscal 2010 modernization plans for nuclear warheads, delivery platforms and infrastructure.

Anticipated amendments to the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill include four that would insert additional Turner provisions into the funding legislation, the House subcommittee chairman said.

Those include: a prohibition on adopting a new counter-city nuclear targeting strategy without congressional notification; measures on modernization requirements for weapons; limits on changes to U.S. missile defense plans; and tactical nuclear weapons posture directives.

Kyl said the administration has included its pledged 10-year budget planning figures in the fiscal 2012 budget request, "but we also appreciate that those numbers probably will have to be revised upward as additional revisions to the so-called 1251 plan are made."

The White House, he said, so far has not backed away from its nuclear modernization promises. However, "we have significant issues about the triad," added Kyl, referring to the lawmakers' intent to ensure that modernization of all three legs remains fully funded.

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GOP senator: Obama budget gap shows 'gradual retreat' on nuclear updates

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday that he views a Defense Department misstep in omitting fiscal 2012 funds for a future-ICBM study as a harbinger of the Obama administration's "gradual retreat" from nuclear modernization commitments made last fall.

"It is a sign of things to come," said the South Carolina Republican, speaking at a Washington-area conference on nuclear deterrence. "It is a program that was thought to be valuable ticket-pricewise; it's not that expensive. But it is what I fear the most: a gradual retreat, beginning on the margins, that goes to the heart of the matter."

Pentagon officials said this week that their 2012 budget request, submitted to Congress on Monday, did not include any funds for a study of technology options that could replace today's Minuteman 3 ICBMs.

Leaving the budget details to the Defense Department, the White House remains "committed to modernizing the stockpile," a senior administration official said yesterday in response to Graham's comments.

The administration in November had pledged to spend $26 million per year, including this year and next, on a "Capabilities-Based Assessment" already under way for the ICBM follow-on system. After completing that study, the Pentagon in fiscal 2012 would launch a more detailed "Analysis of Alternatives" for the future ICBM, it said in an updated report for Congress on nuclear modernization plans.

Such analyses are typically precursors to initiating a major research and development effort, followed by the procurement of military hardware.

Defense Comptroller Robert Hale's office confirmed on Wednesday that the Pentagon had not allocated any 2012 funds for these study efforts, as first reported by Global Security Newswire a day earlier.

Air Force spokesman Andre Kok said Thursday the service would spend $26 million on analyses of a future ICBM, but this would be over a three-year period between fiscal 2012 and 2014. Marilyn Thomas, a budget deputy to the Air Force comptroller, said Monday, though, that no funds were allocated for this purpose in 2012.

The Minuteman 3 arsenal, which today numbers 450 missiles deployed at Air Force bases in three Western states, is slated to retire from service in 2030. To help meet limits established by the U.S.-Russian New START agreement, Washington will reduce its ICBM arsenal in coming years to 420 deployed missiles, each with a single warhead.

The White House commitment last fall to fund the future-ICBM studies was part of a high-profile effort to win Senate Republican votes in favor of ratifying the pact, which caps deployed nuclear warheads at 1,550 and strategic delivery systems at 700. An additional 100 ICBMs, bombers and submarine-launched missiles can remain in reserve.

Just before Christmas, the Senate approved the accord in a 71-26 vote that included 13 Republicans.

Graham, who had earlier said he was inclined to back ratification, ultimately voted against the measure. The lawmaker said Moscow intends to use language in the treaty's preamble to block Washington's plans for missile defense installations in Europe, and that was a risk he could not support taking.

The Senate minority whip, Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., had spent months negotiating with the White House for additional spending on replacing aging nuclear bombers and missiles, updating stockpile warheads and improving the Cold War-era facilities that support the arsenal.

Hoping to win what was seen at the time as Kyl's pivotal vote on New START ratification, Obama said the government would spend an additional $4.1 billion on the nuclear complex over the next five years, on top of an earlier promise to increase funds by $10 billion in the coming decade.

Funds for nuclear modernization are now expected to total $85 billion over the next decade.

"The administration said all the right things during the START negotiations about modernization," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who sits on its strategic forces panel.

"If you look at what [President Obama] has said publicly and what this administration has committed to over the next decade, including agreeing to request even more for modernization than key opponents of New START were asking for, $80 billion dollars over the next 10 years is a very solid commitment," said the senior administration official, who was not authorized to address the issue publicly and provided written comment yesterday on condition of anonymity.

Though Kyl pocketed a political success in boosting the modernization budget, the Senate's No. 2 Republican was not persuaded to vote in favor of the pact. He led a quarter of the Senate -- none of them Democrats -- in opposing ratification, but the White House prevailed in getting the chamber's approval.

"Senator Kyl's whole goal was for START to get modernization money," said Graham, speaking at the conference sponsored by the Exchange Monitor Publications and Forums. "I know Jon Kyl and I know Lindsey Graham will not let the Congress get away with cutting these programs without a fight."

The 2012 budget proposal does include a funding boost for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to nearly $12 billion in the next fiscal year. The agency oversees the maintenance of the nuclear warhead stockpile, among other responsibilities.

In addition, the Pentagon's 2012 investment in modernizing nuclear weapon platforms features $197 million for research and development on a new Air Force long-range bomber, the Defense Department said this week. That is an early installment on $3.7 billion to be spent over the next five years or so in developing the nuclear-capable aircraft. A total of 80 to 100 of the aircraft are to be built, with fielding commencing in the mid-2020s, defense officials said.

The 2012 spending blueprint also includes $1.07 billion to develop a new ballistic missile submarine to replace today's Ohio-class vessels. The so-called "SSBN(X)" in December entered an initial developmental phase in which its design specifications will be determined.

These programs are part of an overall $671 billion Pentagon budget package for the new fiscal year, which begins on October 1.

Asked if the missing dollar figures for the ICBM study were significant enough to draw notice on Capitol Hill, Graham said the omission might not be immediately detrimental but could portend a dangerous trend for the long term.

"Twenty-six million dollars? If you do not make that commitment, what ripple effect does that have on other programs that are in the same type of [weapons] category?" Graham said. "That does bother me."

Meanwhile, the Air Force insists it will continue working this year on the Capabilities-Based Assessment for the new ground-based ballistic missile, and intends to complete it by June. The service still plans to initiate the more detailed Analysis of Alternatives in fiscal 2012, as well, said Kok, the Air Force spokesman.

The two studies are expected to explore "new modes of ICBM basing that enhance survivability and further reduce any incentives for prompt launch," according to a Nuclear Posture Review completed by the Pentagon last year. This could include a look at mobile ICBMs that would be less vulnerable to adversary attack than today's silo-based missiles, defense sources said.

However, Kok was unable to explain exactly how the Air Force would pay for either study -- this year or next -- without the $26 million in annual funds pledged by the administration's November report to Congress.

"The Air Force plans to use internal funding in [fiscal 2012] to begin AOA activities," the spokesman told GSN. He said further detail on the total amount and source of these dollars was not immediately available.

"Additional funding requirements for the study activities will be addressed" in the future-year budget beginning in fiscal 2013, Kok said.

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Pentagon budget may omit funds for ballistic missile study

Elaine M. Grossman — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Defense Department budget request for the coming fiscal year omits funds that were to have allowed the Air Force to study the prospects for a new intercontinental ballistic missile to eventually replace today's Minuteman 3 arsenal, according to a senior service official.

"To my knowledge, there's no funding in [fiscal 2012] for a future ICBM," Marilyn Thomas, budget deputy to the Air Force comptroller, said at a Monday news conference as the federal request was delivered to Congress. A lack of budgeted funds to assess how to modernize the ground-based missile leg of the strategic nuclear triad could prove controversial on Capitol Hill, particularly among Republicans. A crucial sweetener for winning Senate GOP votes in favor of ratifying a new U.S.-Russian arms control treaty late last year was the Obama administration's commitment to modernizing nuclear warheads and delivery platforms.

The fiscal 2012 budget includes $197 million for research and development on a new Air Force long-range bomber -- potentially either manned or unmanned -- that would be ready for fielding in the mid-2020s. That is an early installment on $3.7 billion to be spent in developing the nuclear-capable aircraft over the next five to six years. Ultimately, 80 to 100 of the aircraft are to be built, defense officials said.

The funding plan also features $1.07 billion to develop a new ballistic missile submarine to replace today's Ohio-class vessels. The so-called "SSBN(X)" in December entered an initial developmental phase in which its design specifications will be honed.

These items are part of a $671 billion Defense Department budget request for the new fiscal year, which begins on October 1. In an unusual twist, next year's military spending plan is being delivered to Congress before lawmakers have passed defense appropriations for fiscal year 2011, which began last October. The federal government is operating on a continuing budget resolution -- based largely on fiscal 2010 funding levels -- that expires on March 4.

The Defense Department comptroller, Robert Hale, said on Monday that there is ICBM funding in the budget for fiscal 2012 and subsequent years.

"There's ICBM modernization money," Hale said in response to a reporter's question at a news briefing prior to the Air Force session at which Thomas spoke. "I don't have on top of my head the numbers. But there is a fairly aggressive modernization program of our ICBMs, our strategic forces."

Hale's office said Wednesday, though, that he was "referring to funding to sustain and upgrade the current ICBM fleet, rather than suggesting there was funding for new ICBMs."

The comptroller "concurs with what the Air Force spoke to in their briefing," his office said.

The Pentagon last spring declared in its Nuclear Posture Review -- a major assessment of strategy, forces and readiness -- that while "a decision on any follow-on ICBM is not needed for several years, studies to inform that decision are needed now."

The nation today fields 450 Minuteman 3 nuclear-armed missiles at three bases in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Under the New START agreement, which entered into force on February 5, Washington will retain no more than 420 deployed Minuteman 3s, each armed with a single nuclear warhead.

The United States and Russia have seven years to complete reductions in their nuclear forces under the accord, which caps fielded strategic warheads at 1,550 and limits deployed strategic delivery systems to 700.

The Minuteman 3 first entered the force in 1970 and production of the missile ended eight years later. The system has undergone a number of upgrades over the years but must be replaced by 2030, Air Force officials say.

However, neither Thomas nor her uniformed counterpart, Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers, were able to specify a time frame by which the Air Force must launch a formal program to procure a new ICBM or say when such a system would be fielded.

A spokesman for the service also was unable to offer specific dates, but did indicate there is no formal effort for a future ICBM at this time.

"The [Air Force] is executing a service life-extension for the Minuteman 3 program, extending the service life to 2030," said spokesman Andre Kok. "There is currently no program of record to develop a Minuteman 3 follow-on."

The initial study of potential technology alternatives for replacing today's ICBMs was to begin in fiscal 2011 and continue into 2012, according to the Nuclear Posture Review.

"This study will consider a range of possible deployment options, with the objective of defining a cost-effective approach that supports continued reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons while promoting stable deterrence," the review report stated.

The ICBM assessment appears to have at least begun over the past year, but it is unclear whether or how it might continue this year or next without the anticipated funding.

The Obama administration in November submitted to Congress an update of its plans for nuclear force modernization that included projected budget figures for studying options for building an ICBM follow-on system.

"Preparatory analysis" for the new land-based missile program "is in fact now under way," the so-called "Section 1251 Report Update" stated last fall.

The initial ICBM analysis, called a "Capabilities-Based Assessment," was funded at roughly $26 million per year, according to the update report. It echoed the April 2010 posture review's description of the new assessment as exploring a variety of future ICBM deployment options.

To maximize a president's decision-making time during a future crisis, ICBMs could be fielded differently to make them less exposed to potential enemy targeting, the Nuclear Posture Review stated. The idea would be to eliminate any temptation for a hasty nuclear launch out of fear that Washington must either use its weapons or risk losing them.

The Pentagon would explore "new modes of ICBM basing that enhance survivability and further reduce any incentives for prompt launch," according to the posture report.

Potential alternative basing options for the future ICBM could include mobile missiles, according to defense sources. Today's arsenal of Minuteman 3s is fielded in fixed underground silos, though road-mobile missiles were considered briefly in the 1980s as a less vulnerable alternative.

Contrary to statements in the 1251 report update, the $26 million to undertake the initial capabilities assessment was not funded during the current fiscal year, nor is it included in the 2012 request, according to one budget analyst who asked not to be named in discussing the militarily and politically sensitive matter.

"Despite promising to spend $26 million per year [on the] capabilities-based analysis, no Air Force funds were requested in FY 11 and FY 12 for that purpose," the analyst told Global Security Newswire.

While obscure to most Americans, the administration's update report on nuclear modernization played a key role in wooing Senate Republican fence-sitters during last year's debate over New START ratification.

The Obama team used the document to illustrate the aggressive steps it would take in the near term to keep the aging nuclear stockpile viable and update the bombers, ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles that carry atomic warheads.

A key GOP leader in the debate -- Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) -- remained unconvinced. In late November Kyl wrote a memo to fellow Republicans casting doubt on whether the administration intended to launch a new ICBM effort at all, among other concerns.

"We think it important to understand what the administration intends when it suggests that a decision regarding a follow-on ICBM must be guided, in part, by whether it 'supports continued reductions' in U.S. nuclear weapons," Kyl stated in the letter, also signed by Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who later voted in favor of New START. "One logical inference from this criterion is that a follow-on ICBM is no longer needed because the U.S. is moving to drastically lower numbers of nuclear weapons."

Vice President Joseph Biden said last year the administration was so committed to maintaining an up-to-date arsenal that it would fund its plans for nuclear modernization regardless of whether the Senate approved New START. The Senate ultimately ratified the accord in a 71-26 vote that included 13 Republicans.

In its resolution of ratification, the Senate included a requirement that President Obama move forward in updating the nuclear triad, though it did not dictate time lines.

Three days before his secretary of State exchanged ratification documents with her Russian counterpart, Obama assured the U.S. Senate that he would honor his pledge.

"I intend to (a) modernize or replace the triad of strategic nuclear delivery systems: a heavy bomber and air- launched cruise missile, an ICBM, and a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) and SLBM; and (b) maintain the United States rocket motor industrial base," Obama stated.

Rocket motor production is required for building both sea- and ground-based strategic missiles.

According to the 1251 update report, the Pentagon intended to kick off the next preparatory step in the process -- a formal "Analysis of Alternatives" for filling the new ICBM military requirement -- in fiscal 2012. This would build on the Capabilities-Based Assessment by further narrowing the scope of technology options for the future missile.

By fiscal 2014, the analysis was to be complete, at which point the Defense Department would "recommend a specific way-ahead for an ICBM follow-on to the President," the modernization update report said.

The Pentagon last fall was unable to estimate development and procurement costs for the future ICBM because of "the inherent uncertainties about missile configuration and basing prior to completion" of the Analysis of Alternatives, the report stated.

"However, [the Defense Department] expects to be able to include funding for [research and development] for an ICBM follow-on system in the [fiscal] 2013 budget request, based on initial results" from the analysis, the report said.

Clarification: This article was updated to include an explanation of Defense Department Comptroller Robert Hale's remarks that his office provided on Wednesday.

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Pentagon pulls $1B from WMD-defense efforts to fund vaccine initiative

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The Defense Department has shifted more than $1 billion out of its nuclear, biological and chemical defense programs to underwrite a new White House priority on vaccine development and production to combat disease pandemics, according to government and industry officials.

The planned funding reduction "terminates essential CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] defense programs ... required to meet high priority service needs, prevent casualties and protect against CBRN incidents," according to a Pentagon budget document drafted in early August.

Internal deliberations over the budget have been ongoing for months as the government prepares to submit its fiscal 2012 spending request to Congress next February.

"To implement the DoD response to the president's new [vaccine] initiative requires $1.07 billion" between fiscal 2012 and 2016, states the defense memo, obtained by Global Security Newswire.

The money was taken out of a wide variety of programs deemed "essential" for combating weapons of mass destruction, the document states. An additional $442 million was trimmed through efficiency reductions mandated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for a total of $1.5 billion cut from the counter-WMD account over the five-year period, according to the draft memo.

U.S. nuclear, biological and chemical preparedness efforts "cannot absorb the entire reduction without delaying both current and future force readiness by approximately six to nine years," states the memo.

Defense Department projects under the budget-cutting ax include the development and acquisition of biological and chemical detection systems; gear to decontaminate skin and equipment after exposure; systems to coordinate military operations in a chem-bio environment; and protective clothing for military personnel entering toxic areas, the document indicates.

Drafted by Andrew Weber, the Defense Department's senior official responsible for WMD defenses, the early-August appeal was aimed at securing funds from the Pentagon comptroller to replenish the affected programs. A Pentagon spokeswoman said neither Weber nor anyone from his office was available this week for interview.

"By diverting $1 billion from nonmedical [chem-bio] defense programs to this medical vaccine facility on top of the OSD efficiency cuts, Mr. Weber threatens to return the military forces to a state of unpreparedness that we haven't seen since 1996," said one longtime defense analyst, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Lacking permission to discuss internal government debates over budget plans, the source asked not to be named.

The memo reportedly has since been superseded by another, more limited plea, which instead seeks restoration of less than one-third of the eliminated WMD-defense funds.

The subsequent document also omits mention of the high-priority White House vaccine project, sidestepping what might be regarded as implicit internal criticism of the Obama funding priority on the Medical Countermeasures Initiative, the defense expert said. Led by the Health and Human Services Department, the new program aims to expand the U.S. capability to make lifesaving vaccines.

President Barack Obama noted the initiative in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address, saying it would "give us the capacity to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism or an infectious disease -- a plan that will counter threats at home and strengthen public health abroad."

The latest budget memo constituted "an attempt to pretend that [there] wasn't a [funding] trade between [the vaccine initiative] and the nonmedical projects," the defense analyst said. "No matter what [budget] memo gets up to the comptroller ... there still is a $1 billion reduction in nonmedical R&D and a $1 billion increase in [the Medical Countermeasures Initiative]."

Weber's latest budget-request memo left little chance the Pentagon will restore funding for WMD defense efforts outside of the vaccine project, the defense analyst speculated. Amid the myriad competing priorities in the Defense Department budget, "99 percent of the [appeal] memos don't make the cut," the veteran military-watcher said.

The issue could become politically contentious, though, when the Obama budget request moves up to Capitol Hill early next year and industry advocates begin lobbying on the matter.

"At this point, we don't know enough, but we are concerned about the impact on the industrial base," Amoretta Hoeber, a defense consultant and chair emeritus of the NBC Industry Group, said in an interview this week.

The August draft budget document suggests that production capabilities might indeed be affected, saying the reduction "creates gaps in the U.S. industrial base which will prevent timely response to future warfighter needs." Reconstitution of WMD defense production capacity "would require significant cost" and could affect "both schedule and performance," the memo states.

One project at risk of being affected, for example, is a program to procure protective suits for Army troops.

"Failure to fund this [more fully] will result in incomplete personal protective equipment ensembles, resulting in [chem-bio] exposure routes to service men and women," the August defense document states. "The over-garment is [funded]; however, this [sought-after restitution] buys out the remaining boots, gloves, socks and masks to complete the ensemble."

The Defense Department spokeswoman, who declined to be named in this article, said fiscal 2012 budget details were unavailable and "may not be provided until the president's budget is approved and released." The budget year begins Oct. 1, 2011.

Hoeber said that if the funding reductions result in shutting down production lines for any highly specialized WMD defense items, it is unclear how quickly the industry could reconstitute its manufacturing capability in the event that a new threat emerged.

"You don't want the system to willy-nilly impact the industrial base without a thoughtful assessment of whether that's the right thing to do," she said.

Meanwhile, the expansion of medical countermeasures against disease outbreak -- either naturally occurring or the result of a bioterror attack -- is a growing White House priority and apparent beneficiary of the slashed WMD-defense program funds.

Obama administration leaders launched the effort to expand vaccine capacity after last year's H1N1 flu virus scare, when the pharmaceutical industry was producing vaccine at record rates but nonetheless was outpaced by early demand. The flu pandemic ultimately petered out but if a more serious event occurred, casualties could be devastating as the industry struggled to produce sufficient vaccine stocks in short order, U.S. officials worried.

The H1N1 flu "vaccines were not broadly available before the virus had spread widely among the U.S. population," according to an HHS report released last week. It cites the continued use of "old technologies" for producing vaccines that "need to be enhanced or replaced."

The new initiative includes both HHS and Pentagon plans for constructing "Centers for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing," to help small biotechnology companies innovate new vaccines and field them more rapidly.

The modern facilities would also be capable of large-scale production of vaccine stocks during a public health emergency involving "emerging infectious diseases or unknown threats, including pandemic influenza," the HHS report states.

"New approaches to vaccine manufacturing, including the use of recombinant and molecular techniques and the use of new flexible, disposable manufacturing components and multiuse facilities, offer promising ways to meet the demands for efficient, expandable vaccine production capacity while simultaneously meeting needs related to other public health emergency threats," the report reads.

Plans call for Health and Human Services to open "several" vaccine development and manufacturing centers and for the Defense Department to open a single facility, either through new construction or refurbishment of existing buildings, according to Robin Robinson, director of the HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Health and Human Services will spend $478 million on building multiple facilities while the Defense Department will allocate $200 million to construct its lone site, Robinson said in a Wednesday phone interview. Both agencies are likely to release industry solicitations by the end of the year for long-term contracts to build and operate the facilities, he said.

By the end of 2011, 10-year-or-longer contracts should be signed for the HHS and defense facilities, Robinson said. Each center will be owned and operated by its respective contractor -- perhaps a university consortium with a pharmaceutical firm -- and will be located in the United States, he said.

Health and Human Services and the Defense Department have slightly different responsibilities when it comes to protecting the nation from disease outbreaks. The health agency is responsible for vaccines and treatments for the U.S. public, while the Pentagon oversees inoculations and countermeasures for the military.

There is an amount of overlap in the types of vaccines that the two organizations help develop and procure, but some items are of interest just to one agency or the other, Robinson said.

Both of the departments are concerned with protection from either naturally occurring disease or intentional bioterrorism acts, with the Pentagon particularly focused on safeguarding troops deploying to overseas locations where disease is endemic or the threat of attack with anthrax or other agents is heightened.

Though each facility might specialize in certain types of products, Robinson said he anticipated there would be HHS and defense work done at each location, regardless of which agency sponsored the site.

Over the next year, Health and Human Services and Pentagon leaders will sort out how they will split the operating costs for work performed at each of the centers, the health agency official said.

"Both HHS and DoD will share in funding the operating cost ... of all the facilities," Robinson told GSN. "We will be using these facilities for both DoD- and HHS-sponsored products."

He said the two agencies "haven't decided whether it's going to be a 60-40 or 30-70 split. That'll have to be worked out as we go forward."

Some observers think the Obama administration move to have the Pentagon build one of the vaccine centers is misplaced. Once the centers begin operating, pressure could grow on the Pentagon -- with an annual budget reaching $700 billion, by far the biggest spender of federal discretionary dollars -- to help bankroll flu vaccine for the general public, critics say.

"Ideally, the current proposed HHS facilities ought to be more than enough to address the national demands for pandemic flu vaccine," the defense analyst said.

Robinson acknowledged that each of the facilities must be capable of manufacturing flu vaccine, regardless of other countermeasure specialties it might have.

"These facilities needed to be able to produce, for the civilian population, pandemic influenza vaccine to augment our capacity that we had already invested in -- and had already become a reality here in the U.S. -- as a lesson learned from our H1N1 pandemic experience," he said.

Hoeber noted that the industry group she represents includes member companies not only reliant on WMD-defense dollars for a wide array of programs, but also firms involved specifically in the medical countermeasures sector. For that reason, the NBC Industry Group is taking no formal position on how the Defense Department funds should be spent, she said.

"Obviously, the role of government is to make these sorts of choices, but we want them made thoughtfully," said Hoeber, a former Reagan administration defense official.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is left with deep budget cuts in a number of its WMD-defense efforts, and it remains unclear whether funds to backfill those project accounts will be identified, even after the fiscal 2012 budget request is delivered to Congress.

"No one is against a DoD facility to make military [biowarfare] vaccines," said the defense analyst who requested anonymity. "We all see the need, given the reluctance of pharmaceutical firms to invest in this area. However, such a requirement needs to be funded as a new initiative -- not taken at the expense of critically reducing research and development of new suits, masks, detectors, decontamination systems, collective protection shelters and information systems."

The Pentagon spokeswoman declined comment on any shifts in funds or priorities, but did say that the Defense Department "plays a key role in addressing this continuing challenge of bioterrorism and/or infectious disease."

Under the White House initiative, "DoD intends to develop a dedicated reliable, sustainable, and cost-effective capability, based on strategic partnerships with industry, to establish a facility for the advanced development and manufacturing of biological [medical countermeasures] to address national security needs," she said.

The Pentagon-sponsored center would also "provide surge capacity in the event of a national emergency or pandemic," she said.

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Congress chides U.S. Missile Defense management

Elaine M. Grossman — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Lawmakers scolded the Missile Defense Agency for a number of management problems and trimmed its budget in a recently enacted fiscal 2009 appropriations bill.

The appropriations bill criticized several aspects of missile defense operations, including funding priorities in the MDA budget request, flight-test delays and cancellations, and the availability of target missiles for use in testing.

Overall, Congress gave $9.02 billion to the Defense Department's missile defense arm for the new fiscal year, a figure that largely satisfied agency advocates.

"The reduction was only $320.6 million out of a $9.3 billion request," MDA spokesman Rick Lehner told Global Security Newswire last week. While some missile defense projects saw their annual budgets decreased, "the programs all were funded [at some level] ... so we were pleased," he said.

However, others characterized the level of funding as excessive.

"It's too much money for missile defense," said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World. He said that despite billions of dollars in annual funding, long-range defense systems that receive the bulk of MDA money have not yet proven technically feasible at intercepting a complex attack. Such attacks could include decoys or other countermeasures aimed at confusing missile defense sensors.

The Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., "strongly supports the development and deployment of theater and national missile defenses," according to his campaign Web site. His Democratic counterpart, Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., has been more critical, charging last year that President George W. Bush's administration "has in the past exaggerated missile defense capabilities and rushed deployments for political purposes."

In an unusual move, congressional leaders in late September combined the new defense appropriations bill - which contains the missile defense provisions - with other 2009 funding legislation and attached them to a continuing resolution. The measure allows for government spending from Oct. 1 of this year through March 6, 2009.

Congress would have to act again to keep a host of defense, homeland security and other government programs running after that. Presumably the fiscal 2009 program budgets set by the existing appropriations bill would remain largely the same, but any new legislation could open the door to possible alterations.

In the bill passed in September, lawmakers said the agency had shifted money into its more exotic, long-term technology development efforts, partially at the expense of fully funding missile defense systems being deployed today.

"In order to execute a balanced program, the Missile Defense Agency must continue to field the near-term missile defense programs, primarily Ground-Based Missile Defense, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, and Theater High-Altitude Area Defense programs," the appropriations report states. "Funding for fielding these programs, however, is sacrificed each year to pay for the development of futuristic missile defense programs."

The bill sought to remedy the problem by shifting $120 million into the three near-term efforts, financed by reductions to the longer-term Multiple Kill Vehicle, Airborne Laser and Space Test Bed programs. It directed the agency to report to Congress by Dec. 1 on how it would specifically allocate the additional funds.

Lawmakers also called on the agency to set as its "highest priority" providing additional Standard Missile 3 and THAAD interceptors to combatant commanders and to "budget accordingly" in its fiscal 2010 funding request.

Lehner noted that one of the reductions in futuristic efforts that the appropriations bill made - a $70 million cut in the $354.5 million budget request for the Multiple Kill Vehicle - could slow progress that Congress in the past has emphasized as important. The Multiple Kill Vehicle is envisioned as a single-launch intercept system that could destroy incoming clusters of warheads and decoys, a potentially useful tool against adversaries that might seek to overwhelm the U.S. defense architecture.

Given that such a scenario has been "one of Congress' main concerns," Lehner said his agency would strive to offer "better arguments" for the Multiple Kill Vehicle in the fiscal 2010 request. That document is expected for delivery to Capitol Hill early next year.

The appropriations bill also rapped the Missile Defense Agency - one of the Pentagon's largest research and development accounts - for having "established a pattern of cost, schedule and performance problems."

With several tests having been delayed or canceled each year from 2006 to 2008, "it is not unreasonable to assume that some of the tests planned for fiscal year 2009 will likely slip into subsequent fiscal years," legislators complained in the report. "MDA's fiscal year 2009 test schedule reflects 13 flight tests with 77 percent of these tests scheduled for the third and fourth quarters."

The bill directs the agency to report to the congressional defense committees by Jan. 15, 2009, on its test schedule and whether any shortfalls exist that could contribute to further delays.

Postponed and canceled intercept flight tests of the currently fielded system, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, have proved particularly worrisome on Capitol Hill. No such intercept tests were carried out in fiscal 2008, with one scheduled for July scrapped because of faulty test equipment.

"We'd like to get to two [GMD intercept tests] a year," said Lehner, noting that the objective has faced "extenuating circumstances," such as unexpected delays in developing technology or problems with test gear. "We conduct so few tests that we have to get the maximum amount of data … from each test that we do conduct."

When Bush withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty in December 2001, the Missile Defense Agency said a legal barrier had been removed that would allow more GMD flight tests, Isaacs noted. However, he said, MDA officials have not been able to achieve a more ambitious test schedule.

"They said we could test much more now," Isaacs said. "Well, now they've tested less."

In a related issue, lawmakers also cited problems in producing affordable and reliable mock warheads that the agency needs as targets for testing its defense systems.

"The Missile Defense Agency has renewed its focus and commitment to the target program and must continue this momentum in order to achieve optimal production and deliveries," according to the appropriations report.

To help facilitate that effort, the bill added $32 million for a "flexible family of targets to initiate an inventory buildup of critical, long-lead hardware items," and consolidated all target funding into a single program line.

Isaacs said he welcomed growing congressional interest in MDA oversight issues. Leading up to the final conference report, both House and Senate defense appropriators "raised serious questions about management of the Missile Defense Agency," he told GSN last week.

Lehner said his agency remained untroubled by the bill's provisions. "There was really nothing in there that we disliked," he said.

The Missile Defense Agency typically has "more oversight than any program in the Department of Defense," he said, calling the level of monitoring "proper." MDA leaders frequently brief Capitol Hill staffs, the Government Accountability Office and various review commissions, Lehner noted.

"We are striving to ensure we provide the information Congress needs to meet its oversight responsibility," Lehner subsequently added by e-mail. "And we want to do better."

The fiscal 2009 defense authorization conference bill, also concluded in late September, contained a number of missile defense reporting requirements. Among them was a provision that prohibits the expenditure of funds for the deployment of missile defense installations in Europe, until host-nation agreements are ratified.

The appropriations bill funded the overall European missile defense effort at $467.2 million for the fiscal year. A portion of that budget dedicated to long-lead procurement may go forward without limitation, according to the authorization bill.

An interceptor site is to be built in Poland and a midcourse radar element is to be established in the Czech Republic. U.S. officials have said the system would help protect the United States and Europe against a potential missile threat from Iran, though Russian leaders have argued that the proposed deployments threaten their nation.

The authorization bill also requires a report by the Pentagon's test director, certifying through flight demonstrations that the European system has "a high probability of working in an operationally effective manner and the ability to accomplish the mission," before deployment funds can be released.

Isaacs termed the legislative conditions on the European missile defense system "real progress," saying technology performance must be held to a high standard before being funded.

Lehner was unconcerned, though, that the MDA reporting requirement would pose a challenging hurdle for his agency to meet.

"It's not a matter of proving anything," he said. Lehner noted that the proposed long-range interceptors slated for Poland use the same design as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system deployed in California and Alaska, minus one stage of its three-stage rocket motor. "It's [just] a matter of demonstrating that two-stage rocket," he said.

Lehner said upcoming tests of the European-based system would include a booster demonstration next summer or fall, and a first intercept test in fiscal 2010 or 2011. The defense agency aims to deploy the system between 2011 and 2013, he said.

Both presidential candidates have offered measured support for the European missile deployment plan. Obama said the United States should "deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies … but only when the system works." For his part, McCain has said such missile defenses could safeguard "American forces and American allies" from "outlaw states like Iran."

The authorization bill also echoed the appropriators' concerns about lending greater priority to near-term missile defense programs, staying on schedule for flight tests and adequately funding missile-target programs.

Other missile defense-related reports required by the fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill include:

A review by the defense secretary of overall ballistic missile defense policy and strategy, due Jan. 31, 2010;
An independent study on boost-phase missile defense concepts and systems, to include the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor, by the National Academy of Sciences, due 90 days after the bill's enactment;
A separate review by the Pentagon's test director of the Airborne Laser's performance in testing, due Jan. 15, 2010; and a related certification by the defense secretary that the system has proven through demonstrations to be "operationally effective, suitable, survivable and affordable" before funds can be expended for a second ABL aircraft that would carry the weapon; and
A defense secretary report to the House and Senate armed services committees on the deployment of an AN/TPY-2 X-band radar to a classified location - which outside experts speculate could be Israel - before $89 million could be spent on the project.

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HHS limits anthrax vaccine legal liability

Elaine M. Grossman — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt established legal immunity for public and private officials who oversee the production or distribution of the anthrax vaccine by declaring a "public health emergency" due to the risk of a bioterrorism attack. He said the emergency began on Oct. 1 and would run through Dec. 31, 2015.

U.S. law provides protection from lawsuits to individuals responsible for selected countermeasures, including antibiotics, during a declared emergency.

Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, which President Bush signed into law in December 2005, a health and human services secretary's emergency declaration can limit financial risk for government program planners and the manufacturers or distributors of pharmaceutical countermeasures. One exception to this immunity would be willful misconduct on the part of covered individuals.

The ramifications, in this instance, could be to prevent individuals who have received one or more anthrax inoculation from taking grievances to court, based on claims that the vaccine caused severe adverse reactions or did not work.

The anthrax vaccine has proven particularly controversial following reports of serious adverse events, including some deaths, among U.S. recipients. In addition, there are some doubts about the vaccine's efficacy in protecting people from developing anthrax after breathing in spores during a biological attack.

A 2003 lawsuit -- based on lapses in the Food and Drug Administration's drug-approval process for the vaccine -- temporarily shut down the Defense Department's compulsory anthrax shots program. Mandatory inoculations resumed in 2006 for personnel whose assignments are judged to put them at heightened risk of exposure to anthrax.

Leavitt's declaration was published in the Federal Register and quietly heralded at the end of a two-page news release devoted largely to another anthrax-related initiative.

Among the activities now afforded liability protection are those "related to developing, manufacturing, distributing, prescribing, dispensing, administering and using anthrax countermeasures in preparation for, and in response to, a potential anthrax attack," the HHS news release states. "This includes entities, such as large 'big-box' retail stores, retail pharmacies, and other private sector businesses, that help to deliver and distribute medicines."

Health and Human Services argued the legal shield is essential to guarantee that countermeasures are there if U.S. citizens need them.

"Providing liability protection to all involved in such efforts will help ensure their full participation and bolster response efforts," according to the news release.

"Preparedness is a shared responsibility that must involve all sectors of society, including the private sector, community groups, families and individuals," Leavitt stated in the release. "We are using the authorities available to us to do all we can to support preparedness at all levels."

The move comes as a pivotal advisory group convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepares to decide whether state and local health officials should consider giving anthrax vaccines to as many as 3 million civilian first responders nationwide.

Millions of U.S. military personnel have already received the vaccines since the Pentagon's shots program began in 1997, but the law prohibits service members or their families from holding the government liable for injury or death.

Now that the population of vaccine recipients could expand to include millions of civilians -- who normally do have a right to take medical injury claims to court -- federal response planners and government contractors might be growing nervous about their potential legal vulnerability, according to vaccine critics.

"There are people still getting ill from side effects and from the vaccine," John Michels, an attorney in litigation targeting the Pentagon's inoculation program, told Global Security Newswire. "When they expand this vaccine from the military population to a civilian population, they're going to have people who sue."

Emergent BioSolutions of Rockville, Md. -- the nation's only manufacturer of an FDA-approved anthrax vaccine -- recently announced that Health and Human Services had ordered 14.5 million doses of its BioThrax vaccine, worth as much as $404 million. The company is already under a $448 million contract to produce 18.8 million doses of the vaccine.

The vaccine regimen calls for six shots over an 18 month period, plus annual boosters.

Michels said commercial interests appear to be playing a role in the legal immunity issue. He questioned whether there had been any bona fide escalation in the anthrax threat sufficient to justify the declaration of an emergency.

"We have no indications [now] ... that we're much more likely to be attacked by anthrax," Michels said. "But [government officials] see the writing on the wall. They see ... an erosion of [lawsuit] immunity for vaccine manufacturers as a result of widespread civilian use."

Meryl Nass, a bioterrorism expert who has been highly critical of federal handling of anthrax vaccine issues, accused Leavitt of taking more interest in protecting bureaucrats from legal action than in protecting the public from health threats.

"How do you decide there is an emergency when there is no evidence of one?" she asked in e-mailed comments.

Noting the HHS secretary's designation of "governmental program planners" as among those afforded legal immunity by the declaration, Nass asserted that the agency "designates an emergency as a means to protect itself."

Leavitt's declaration, though, states that "targeted liability protections for anthrax countermeasures" are "based on a credible risk that the threat of exposure to [anthrax] and the resulting disease constitutes a public health emergency." The document does not offer additional details on the nature or level of threat.

A request that Health and Human Services elaborate on the basis for the public health emergency declaration went unanswered at press time.

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Science panel backs conventional trident missile

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In a 192-page report, commissioned by lawmakers in 2006, the National Academy of Sciences experts take issue with a Capitol Hill decision to eliminate this year's funding for the Conventional Trident Modification.

"The committee disagrees with the congressional decision not to fund testing of [the] CTM [missile] in 2008, and recommends instead that Congress fund" Conventional Trident Modification research and development "at a level sufficient to achieve early deployment if tests confirm system effectiveness," writes the group, composed of 18 national defense and nuclear weapons experts.

The Navy missile was to be the first weapon developed and deployed for a new mission called "prompt global strike," in which terrorist targets or rogue nations could be attacked within just one hour of a launch command. Currently, nuclear weapons are the only tools in the U.S. military arsenal available to hit urgent targets halfway around the world in such short order.

Lawmakers last year decided that the Navy project would be limited to basic research and development and must share a $100 million budget in fiscal 2008 with an array of other "promising conventional prompt global strike technologies." Critics on Capitol Hill cited concerns that, if launched from the same Ohio-class submarines that carry an identical nuclear weapon, a conventional D-5 ballistic missile might be mistaken for a nuclear salvo and elicit a violent response from other atomic powers like Russia or China.

In its report, the NAS Committee on Conventional Prompt Global Strike Capability argued that virtually any long-range weapon built for the mission might introduce some risk of the nuclear "ambiguity" that Congress seeks to avoid.

Calling nuclear ambiguity "an understandable concern" with the Conventional Trident Modification, the panel said that the risk of a conventional prompt global strike attack "being misinterpreted and leading to a nuclear attack on the United States could be mitigated and managed through readily available mechanisms."

These "cooperative measures" might include "providing information to bilateral partners about the [conventional prompt global strike] system, its operation and the doctrine for its use; immediately notifying of launches against countries; and installing devices (such as continuous monitoring systems) to increase the confidence that conventional warheads had not been replaced by nuclear warheads," according to the report, "U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike: Issues for 2008 and Beyond."

However, some critics of the conventional Trident option contend that land-based missile systems are better suited to reducing ambiguity and building confidence abroad.

"Some conventional prompt global strike systems, like some of the ground-based concepts, have gone out of their way to separate themselves from nuclear systems ... and [we] could open these to [international] inspections," one former military officer with considerable strategic policy experience said Friday. "The Navy submarine is nowhere near as open to inspection as the bomber or the ICBM."

The Army and Air Force have developed concepts for land-based conventional missiles that could be based at installations that house no nuclear weapons. Their launches might appear markedly different from those of current ICBMs, their warheads could be verified through on-site inspections and their activities could be monitored by spy satellites, said the former official, who was not authorized to address the matter publicly and requested anonymity.

The National Academy of Sciences panel found there are a number of "credible scenarios" in which a prompt global strike weapon might be useful, and noted that there are multiple future technologies that might augment or replace a submarine-based ballistic missile for the mission.

Threats might include "a ballistic missile launcher poised to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States or at an ally," a "gathering of terrorist leaders or a shipment of weapons of mass destruction during a brief period of vulnerability," or "an adversary's command-and-control capability as the leading edge of a broader combat operation," the report states.

"In light of the appropriately extreme reluctance to use nuclear weapons, conventional prompt global strike could be of particular value in some important scenarios," according to the science panel, "in that it would eliminate the dilemma of having to choose between responding to a sudden threat either by using nuclear weapons or by not responding at all."

The panel describes seven potential weapon systems that might be capable of undertaking the mission, including a couple of concepts that the committee itself developed:

- Existing systems: These include tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, armed unmanned aerial vehicles and bomber aircraft. Any of these would have to be deployed within range of a surprise threat to be successful at hitting the target within a 60-minute time frame.

- Conventional Trident Modification: The Navy concept involves converting two D-5 missiles on each of the Navy's 12 deployed ballistic missile submarines from nuclear- to conventionally armed. Available as early as 2011, each missile could carry as many as four re-entry vehicles with precision-targeting capability.

- Conventional Trident Modification-2: This committee concept calls for a missile that uses just two of the D-5's current three rocket stages, allowing for a bigger payload and additional options for the kind of munitions delivered. This version, which could be ready by 2013, would still achieve the weapon's objective 4,000-nautical-mile range, according to the report.

- Submarine-Launched Global Strike Missile: The Navy's mid- to long-term concept would be launched from so-called "SSGN" Ohio-class submarines, converted for conventional missions. This intermediate-range weapon, deployable before 2015, could carry a single, heavy warhead for attacking some hard targets or, like the CTM missile, could dispense kinetic-energy projectiles against buildings, vehicles or human targets.

- Conventional Strike Missile-1: This Air Force concept for a boost-glide weapon would launch like a ballistic missile from U.S. land installations and then fly at hypersonic speeds into its targets with considerable range and maneuvering capability. It could carry payloads similar to the Submarine-Launched Global Strike Missile but might not be available until 2016 or later.

- Conventional Strike Missile-2: This committee concept is for a variant with longer glide time than the initial CSM weapon, allowing extended range and increased capability to dispense multiple munitions, the document explains. Such a weapon, potentially available between 2018 and 2024, might also be able to dispense intelligence-gathering modules or offer re-attack capability, among other features.

- Hypersonic Cruise Missiles: Calling these concepts "long-term alternatives," the panel said such fast weapons could be launched from long-range aircraft, or deployed at sea or in foreign nations. Possibly available for fielding between 2020 and 2024, hypersonic cruise missiles might offer "considerable capability" for dispensing smart munitions or surveillance modules, the report states.

The committee addressed additional concerns about the prompt global strike mission, including some critics' view that detailed and reliable intelligence is rarely available to support a short-notice attack. In light of such worries, a fielded weapon should "be employed only on the order of the president," the panel advised.

Committee members also recommended that the U.S. government undertake "a comprehensive study of the military and diplomatic implications" of fielding and potentially using conventional prompt global strike capabilities.

The assessment should consider "factors such as the potential for inappropriate, mistaken, or accidental use; the implications for nuclear deterrence and crisis stability (including ambiguity considerations); the impact of [weapon] overflight and debris [potentially affecting foreign nations]; and the implications for arms control and associated agreements," the panel states.

The publication was preceded by an interim letter report in May 2007. Friday's document is the NAS committee's final report, according to the panel.

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Marine general lays groundwork for unprecedented change

Elaine M. Grossman — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

James Cartwright has a passion for Pop-Tarts. Not the fruity flavors, mind you: no blueberry and no strawberry. But bring this Marine Corps general a brown sugar cinnamon pastry fresh from the toaster and he's yours.

That might be useful advice for the nation's next president. Cartwright is just nine months into what could be a four-year term as the second-highest-ranking officer in the nation. As vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the 58-year-old Rockford, Ill., native has a powerful and unique role in determining how the military invests its vast resources just as a new commander-in-chief will be coming into office.

Whether it is John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, or Barack Obama at the helm, the Pentagon expects to undergo some changes. Yet, to a degree known only by a few Defense Department insiders, Cartwright is already laying the groundwork for unprecedented change at the one federal agency that claims more than half the annual federal discretionary budget and is frequently the central instrument of U.S. policy abroad.

A new president of either party will be scrambling for funds and will likely raid the Defense Department's $600 billion annual budget. The Democratic frontrunner, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, is widely expected to cut expensive weapons-buying plans, although he has pledged repeatedly to expand the number of ground troops and to make sure they maintain high levels of readiness and equipment. An extended commitment in Iraq, where the United States spends an estimated $12.5 billion a month, could similarly force the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, to break a lot of Pentagon china just to make ends meet. And he has never been afraid to break the military's dinnerware before.

President Bush has shown little interest in attempting any significant 11th-hour departures from his policy in Iraq or initiating any newfangled way of doing business at the Pentagon. Yet, just as the 43rd president began daydreaming about an extended stay at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, he may have done his successor a huge favor. In selecting Cartwright last year as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he chose one of the few senior officers in uniform today with a record of conceptualizing vast bureaucratic reforms and, even more important, actually accomplishing them.

Over the past several years, Cartwright has gotten himself ready to catapult into the post-Bush administration yonder, at a time when the U.S. finds itself a weakened superpower amid a growing number of global competitors. This naval fighter pilot has squinted to make out a tiny floating airstrip that might logically become America's next defense strategy. In the face of growing violent extremism, cyberattacks, U.S. satellite vulnerability in space, and maybe even an antagonistic China or a resurgent Russia, the general thinks he has figured out a thing or two about how the mammoth Defense Department should prepare to counter 21st-century threats.

And so, Mr. Next President, meet Gen. James Cartwright, your change-agent-in-waiting at the Pentagon.

Funding Mismatch

To national security insiders, selecting the 36-year military veteran made perfect sense. Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- a pragmatist who replaced the iconoclastic Donald Rumsfeld in late 2006 -- tapped Cartwright following the retirement last July of Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, who was a Rumsfeld acolyte with a similarly outsized ego and unflinchingly abstract ideology.

Last year, the dispassionate and candid Cartwright, having served in three other assignments at the Pentagon since 1993, moved quickly to close ranks with moderates among his fellow brass. The Marine general answers to both Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, 61, another Gates pick, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October. But the vice chairman is quickly fashioning his own reputation in Washington. Pentagon-watchers have seen him sit alongside Gates at nearly as many press conferences as Mullen has. In February, Cartwright became the public face on Bush administration plans to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite. (More on that in a minute.)

Akin to a chief operating officer managing the daily business of a Fortune 500 company, Cartwright also oversees the Pentagon's formal "requirements" process for identifying what equipment the military needs on the battlefield. In that role, he has considerable authority to issue a "go" or "no-go" on service plans for buying billions of dollars' worth of weapons systems and hence will influence the missions of those in uniform, and how they are armed, for years to come.

"The biggest issue facing the Defense Department will be the mismatch between requirements and funds available," former Marine Corps Commandant Charles Krulak told National Journal last month. Cartwright "will be the military's point man in this struggle." And, the retired general said, it "is a battle that must be won."

Cartwright's only direct combat experience was to fly a few sorties in the mid-1990s during the engagement in Bosnia, as a colonel commanding Marine Aircraft Group 31. Nonetheless, he has an influential voice in "the tank," the secret Pentagon boardroom where the Joint Chiefs debate global security issues. According to Defense insiders, Cartwright -- along with several of his fellow chiefs -- has already voiced concern about how sustaining substantial troop levels in Iraq could damage the quality of the force and weaken military readiness to meet new challenges.

Channeling Bonanza

Those who know him say that Cartwright can be expected to serve as a leader even in a tank full of leaders. At 5 feet, 9 inches, and 180 pounds, Cartwright is not an imposing figure, but he possesses a steady intensity that infuses his entire frame. His testimony at an hours-long House hearing last year was illustrative. The general was so singularly focused on responding to lawmakers' questions that he never once moved his black patent leather shoes, tucked toe-tip-to-carpet underneath his witness chair.

But Cartwright is not always so pent up. Like an airline pilot who calmly reassures passengers in a thunderstorm, he seems disarmingly relaxed when others are stressed.

His aviation call sign, "Hoss" -- as in "Hoss Cartwright," the burly, big-hearted, sometimes dim-witted cowboy in the 1960s TV series Bonanza --has stuck with Cartwright for 35 years.

That this trim and brainy officer continues to use such an incongruous nickname reveals an offbeat and self-deprecating sense of humor. He also lacks the arrogance that sometimes typifies four-star generals. In conversation, he swings from earnestly serious to inventively witty in the blink of an eye.

During one of several recent interviews with National Journal, he confesses that he is "paranoid" and therefore weighs "everything I can think of" in terms of the kinds of threats that might emerge against the United States. Then, realizing that this might sound like a fit of hyperbole, the general bursts out laughing.

A moment later, Cartwright becomes deadly serious again as he underscores the importance of normalizing relations with North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang's ending its nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration, he emphasizes, would take a series of small steps toward rapprochement -- "crawl, walk, run" -- rather than set "the expectation that there is some sort of big-bang event" that will magically alter the North Koreans' behavior. Cartwright pauses, then concedes, "That's a bad way to say that" in the context of nuclear weapons, and laughs again.

For all of his levity in the embrace of wonkish security issues, Cartwright also has a serious work ethic and devotion to the troops up and down the command chain. His efforts to support troops at all levels have made him wildly popular among many and vehemently disliked by some.

Trusting People

On July 9, 2004, Cartwright took the helm at U.S. Strategic Command, becoming the first Marine to be put in charge of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. Naming a leatherneck to the post was a bold move even for Rumsfeld, who relished opportunities to defy military tradition. Here the Defense secretary went up against 58 years of strategic nuclear weapons command under the exclusive domain of Air Force generals with broad experience in intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range bombers, and Navy admirals who had spent years undersea in submarines with missiles in their holds. Marine Corps officers such as Cartwright, trained to win battles against enemy ground troops, have little experience thinking through the arcane details of nuclear-deterrence strategy. But Rumsfeld was convinced that Cartwright would shake up things at this Omaha-based bastion of Cold War doctrine. And by all accounts, Cartwright did.

The Defense secretary had been setting the stage for a makeover at Strategic Command for nearly two years. As part of a big Pentagon restructuring after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld folded half a dozen new responsibilities into the command. Called STRATCOM for short, the organization transformed itself from a single-mission command into a central hub that oversees virtually all U.S. military activities that have worldwide scope. That mission includes directing military satellite operations that circle the globe; executing "global strike" -- a rapid attack on a target anywhere in the world; disseminating intelligence to war fighters across many theaters; defending against enemy ballistic missiles; and combating weapons of mass destruction.

The vast expansion in responsibilities without a commensurate boost in manpower would require some creativity, particularly because it involved moving well beyond the command's antiquated-but-comfortable nuclear weapons mission. So, rather than create an entire bureaucracy for the new missions, Rumsfeld allowed Cartwright to use existing organizations within the Defense Department for STRATCOM. It produced a flatter command structure and didn't add new layers of bureaucracy.

The move to decentralize authority away from the four-star headquarters and toward the "grunt in the field" was textbook Marine Corps doctrine. But for many of the Air Force and Navy personnel who made their careers as stewards of STRATCOM's nuclear weapons mission -- now just one of eight STRATCOM responsibilities -- the change hit hard. In fact, many at STRATCOM whispered that they didn't quite grasp what Cartwright was doing.

In response, the general took an unorthodox approach: He did as little as he could to guide them. "If you come in with what many people would like -- 'Here are 15 studies on exactly how to do X' -- the first thing you've done is, for sure, eliminate any discovery," Cartwright said. "If you give them a script, they can't possibly break out and discover something really revolutionary." He bit off changes in six-month increments, allowing the organization to advance, retrench, and advance again.

Central to this strategy was his move to "allow people to own the solutions more, rather than [my] just dictating them," he said. A quick glimpse at Cartwright's spacious Pentagon office underscores the theme. No weighty tomes line the walls, a testament to the general's decision a few years ago to use the Internet to find whatever he needs. Just one small hardback lies alone on the sill of a tall window: A Message to Garcia, by Elbert Hubbard.

At 32 pages in big type, the book is actually an essay readily found in its entirety on the Web. It tells the story of a U.S. Army lieutenant, Andrew S. Rowan, whom President McKinley dispatched in 1898 to hand-deliver a letter of support to Calixto Garcia, a Cuban army general who led the insurrection against Spain. Rowan was never told how to accomplish the mission; he just figured out the best approach and got it done.

The young Army officer "took the letter, sealed it up in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia," Hubbard wrote in 1899, suggesting that Rowan was the true hero of the Spanish-American War.

"The key there is not to forget that ... you can easily overmanage people," Cartwright told National Journal. "It's a book about trusting people to do things."

SKIWEB

In that vein of trusting his troops, at STRATCOM he created a networked information-sharing forum -- an internal website containing threaded discussions, blogs, and news updates -- so that everyone along the chain of command could stay on top of global developments and exchange fresh ideas about how best to accomplish their assigned missions. SKIWEB -- which remains available to anyone with access to STRATCOM's classified network -- has become a window inside the bureaucracy, unvarnished by the military's ubiquitous and stale PowerPoint briefings, its users say.

Like Wikipedia, SKIWEB is meant to be self-correcting, in that reliable information enjoys a long shelf life, but online collaborators can quickly correct any errors. That brand of open-season, anybody-can-contribute method has its risks. "We fully understand that all of the information may not be 100 percent correct all of the time and it may not initially provide us with perfect solutions," Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler said when serving as Cartwright's deputy in 2006. "That's OK. Military commanders are used to dealing with ambiguity.... If we wait for perfect information that plods through the old Napoleonic structure, we risk being irrelevant in today's world."

Despite the admonitions that SKIWEB's open exchange must not be encumbered by too much influence from the chain of command, an old military culture demanding multiple levels of approval before anything is put forward continued to lurk in various corners throughout STRATCOM. This was exactly the kind of death-by-bureaucracy that could kill original thinking.

At first, "nobody would blog except for the very senior people," Cartwright said in a late 2005 speech. "I wondered why not. Well, they had basically ordered their people not to blog. I said, 'Well, your choice is to be fired or get them to blog.' "

Tear Down This Wall

Cartwright sought yet more ways of empowering warriors at increasingly lower levels of command. Although he played no direct command role in the war in Iraq, he did observe how tough it was for soldiers and airmen to gain access to even the most basic intelligence data and images to help them identify and pursue insurgents. Pinpointing a single piece of classified information sometimes required spending hours poring over internal Pentagon websites, each dedicated to a single surveillance aircraft or spy satellite, each walled off from the next and bound by its unique user protocols.

The intelligence "exists, [but] it's a question of how to Google it," Cartwright said in April 2005. So the general in early 2006 energized a moribund panel comprising the nation's top nine combatant commanders called the Senior Warfighter Forum -- known by its Trekkie-like moniker, the SWARF --and gave it an important new purpose. The group sought to standardize software across the military services so that uniformed personnel could exchange battlefield intelligence more quickly and effectively.

Although the changes were still light-years behind the advances in private-sector computing, they have begun to allow combat grunts to "pull" information they need from military networks rather than await its "push" down the command chain, when it almost invariably arrives too late to make a difference.

Cartwright also set out to force the human spies and the computer geeks to interact across a virtual chasm. Reflecting the kind of compartmentalization typical before the 9/11 attacks, the military's own intelligence sector had developed firewalls between those who analyze human-gathered intelligence and those who cull electronic data and images from listening devices, reconnaissance planes, and spy satellites.

Cartwright tells the story of how he teamed up with Maj. Gen. Mark Welsh -- a like-minded Air Force fighter pilot who served as No. 2 at STRATCOM's intelligence organization -- to destroy communications barriers that prevented integrated intelligence from reaching counterinsurgency troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It proved to be anything but a simple task. In periodic visits to an operations center at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cartwright found that a deeply embedded culture of secrecy kept creeping back in.

"Every time I would go, there would be a new wall," Cartwright said at a February 2007 industry conference in Orlando, Fla. "I'd drag General Welsh out onto the floor and say, 'I don't want that wall to be there when I come back.' He'd tear it down, and [soon] it would be someplace else."

Sending Signals

On February 14, Cartwright sat between two Bush administration appointees at a Pentagon press briefing and announced a plan they had hatched to destroy a failing U.S. spy satellite that threatened to fall back to Earth within days. Though the officials denied it, the space shot -- using a modified missile-defense interceptor fired from a Navy ship -- was widely interpreted as a demonstration of U.S. anti-satellite capability. Just over a year before, Cartwright had condemned a similar Chinese anti-satellite test as reckless.

Alongside his civilian counterparts, the general insisted that the sole reason for downing the American space vehicle was to destroy the toxic fuel it carried onboard. Had the hydrazine tank survived re-entry into the atmosphere and landed near a populated area, it could have threatened the health of anyone who happened upon it, Cartwright said.

"There has to be another reason behind this," Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington defense and foreign-policy think tank, told The Washington Post at the time. "In the history of the Space Age, there has not been a single human being who has been harmed by man-made objects falling from space."

Even some of the general's greatest admirers said that his justification for the intercept strained credulity. "I am willing to believe General Cartwright, even though his statement makes no sense to me," said Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative for the New America Foundation. "His personal credibility is so high."

Speculation inside the defense community was that Cartwright either was acting as a loyal foot soldier for his civilian bosses or simply could not fathom that the action might be perceived as anything other than what the Pentagon claimed. A third, perhaps more likely, explanation is that it was just fine with Cartwright if the world interpreted the February 20 intercept as an anti-satellite demonstration if it deterred other space powers from threatening U.S. satellites.

"What could be the worst downside?" Cartwright asked at the press conference, noting this was a question that administration officials pondered carefully. They concluded that the net benefits outweighed any risks.

Yet critics of the shoot-down anticipate reverberations contrary to U.S. interests. "The Chinese are going to use this to excuse their otherwise inexcusable test," Lewis said. "And those other countries who we count on to create a norm against debris-creating [anti-satellite weapons] will be less willing to help us," he said.

Critics say that Cartwright should have anticipated that Russia, China, and other future space powers might invest more in their own anti-satellite weapons in light of the U.S. intercept. The general's next big challenge --revamping the U.S. military posture to effectively counter emerging threats --will require a savvy understanding of geopolitics and how American power is perceived around the globe.

Faster Response

Cartwright's vision for revamping U.S. national security strategy calls for a Pentagon that responds more quickly and with greater agility to emerging threats. Traditionally, the United States has countered threats by relying on its technological sophistication. During the Cold War, defense industry innovations provided us with effective countermeasures in our competition with the Soviet Union, but we typically measured the turnaround times in years. Cartwright says that we no longer have the luxury of that much time.

"Heretofore, everybody looked for [technological] breakout: 'I can invent 'X,' " Cartwright said. "In a global Information Age, the ability to break out in business is really tough. It's down to just a few months that you're going to be able to invent something and not have somebody come along and clone it, and take away your competitive edge. It's true in warfare. It's true in politics."

Insurgents in Iraq, for example, have responded to the billions of dollars the United States has spent on countering homemade roadside bombs with relatively simple alterations to their designs and tactics that have rendered U.S. hardware almost useless, according to Defense officials.

The limits of technology are not lost on Cartwright. "Weapons will remain a part of [national security]," Cartwright said. "But it's got to be broader than that.... We can't just buy our way out with technologically superior weapons. It just won't work. It won't be diverse enough to keep us where we want to be."

Reaching back to his culture-changing experience with SKIWEB, the general has begun telling his Pentagon military staff, "You're probably the barrier, not the technology." He is pushing young officers and enlisted personnel to invent new tools for communicating and fighting more effectively. But he is also telling them they must be willing to let go of their innovations as soon as they become obsolete.

Citing the short innovation cycles in the commercial computing industry, Cartwright wants the military to acquire hardware in a whole new way. "Think about something we're going to throw away in 18 months," he said. "You're going to keep turning it over, turning it over."

Cartwright said that his own view of the post-Industrial Age tracks with what Future Shock author Alvin Toffler has written over the past 40 years. A passage from a 1996 Toffler book seems particularly apt: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Such an approach might well require tossing out decades-old Pentagon procurement practices that have left the services laden with old equipment and lavish plans for new weapons they cannot afford. A fresh look at how the services have allocated their personnel might similarly produce a wholesale revamp so that U.S. forces are more appropriate for countering future threats, Cartwright suggests.

He also wants the defense community to think through the kinds of military tasks that might reasonably be automated as a way of trimming down layers of command and speeding response to new threats. Ultimately, some missions might be so computer-driven that a human intervenes only by exception.

"We are taking very sophisticated, very high-speed systems and slowing them down to put a person at every transaction," Cartwright said. "And we can't do that. It just won't work in the future."

So, he asks, "At the end of the day, what things are appropriate for you to relinquish control over? And what things require the person to still be in the loop?" Consider "how many years we kept the firemen on the railroad, even though we'd gotten away from boilers," he said. "We write rules oftentimes to ensure power centers or jobs."

Don't Lose the Ethos

Yet there remain concerns -- running up to the military's highest ranks --that Cartwright may be prone to rely too much on technology as even a partial substitute for boots on the ground. His faith, for example, that long-range conventional missile strikes might deter bad actors or prevent the escalation of conflicts "smacks of a pilot's wildly optimistic expectation of what high explosives can do from a great height," asserts retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, who led armored cavalry troops during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

At the same time, other Pentagon observers interpret Cartwright's longtime focus on empowering warriors throughout his chain of command as a sign that he is not technology-obsessed. In a 2007 speech at the industry conference in Orlando, Cartwright underscored a need to preserve the esprit de corps of troops in combat, even as the Pentagon attempts to discard obsolete cultural norms. "We have got to figure out how to ... build [new] organizations and integrate them without losing the culture, without losing that part of a service's ethos that makes us -- either in the cockpit or in the foxhole --willing to die for the person that's standing next to us," he said. "That's important, and we could erase that in a heartbeat with some idea of a technical solution for all problems."

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, an infantry officer who served as operations director on the Joint Staff before his 2002 retirement, says that Cartwright has the right approach. "I believe that Hoss Cartwright really gets it," Newbold says. "He appreciates the critical importance of the human factor in all of this."

Regardless of who wins the presidency in November, Cartwright is convinced that a fundamentally new approach to national defense is in the offing. "We're at a time when, because of the election, the opportunity to think about these kinds of things is probably the ripest," he said. "I'm not jumping on the change bandwagon, but the opportunity at the change of administrations is probably the greatest to take a different direction."

And with a new commander-in-chief at the reins, this is one Hoss ready to race in a different direction.

The author is a reporter for Global Security Newswire. She can be reached at egrossman@nationaljournal.com.

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Judge advances anthrax vaccine refusal case

Elaine M. Grossman — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The plaintiffs were among hundreds of service members compelled to leave the military after resisting the inoculations during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many cited qualms about the vaccine's safety and efficacy in protecting against inhaled anthrax, the form of exposure that Pentagon officials anticipated in the event of a biological weapons attack.

The federal courts have since found that the military's mandatory vaccine program was being conducted illegally for more than six years, beginning with its March 1998 inception. Pending Food and Drug Administration approval for using the drug specifically against inhaled anthrax, the Defense Department could not administer the six-shot series without an individual's informed consent, a federal judge said in an October 2004 decision.

The following year, the drug agency issued its long-awaited approval. The question has remained, though, as to whether those service members who refused the vaccine during the previous six-year period might yet be vindicated.

In the latest judgment, U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the two Connecticut pilots might have a basis to demand redress. This potentially could open the door to hundreds more military personnel seeking absolution - and perhaps reinstatement or compensation - for similarly being forced out of the service after refusing orders to take the drug, according to issue experts.

The March 14 court finding said an Air Force board must revisit the plaintiffs' years-old requests to have their military records corrected. Both of the officers, Thomas Rempfer and the late Russell Dingle, also sought compensatory relief for back pay and lost promotions. Rempfer additionally requested reinstatement as a Connecticut Air National Guard pilot.

The case began when the two resisted taking the shots in the late 1990s and left their unit under threat of disciplinary action. The two avoided court martial or administrative discipline by seeking reassignment to the Air Force Reserve. Both were honorably discharged from the Guard in 1999.

Arguing that they had been improperly forced out, the two officers petitioned the Air Force to correct their military records and grant relief. In making their cases to the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records, the pilots contended that the anthrax vaccine program was illegal at the time and thus they had a right to refuse the shots.

However, the Air Force board rejected both officers' applications, claiming that federal plaintiffs in a separate case called Doe v. Rumsfeld had failed to prove that the Pentagon vaccination effort was illegal.

The Doe plaintiffs - six anonymous defense personnel subject to taking the anthrax vaccine - "did not in fact prevail against the secretary of defense," the Air Force review board stated in March 2007 in denying the Rempfer and Dingle claims. Dingle died in September 2005 but his estate represents him in the case.

The two officers challenged the military board's decision with a lawsuit, initially filed in federal court in December 2005 and later amended as the Doe case moved through the justice system.

Imposing a permanent injunction on the Pentagon's compulsory anthrax vaccine effort in October 2004, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said the Food and Drug Administration had never approved the vaccine as safe and effective for preventing inhalational anthrax. The vaccine was initially developed and tested to protect laboratory workers and animal pelt handlers against anthrax contracted through the skin.

Lacking a presidential waiver, the Pentagon could not give anthrax shots without an individual's informed consent, Sullivan wrote in his landmark decision. Sixteen months later, a federal appeals court effectively concluded the case, determining that the FDA certification, issued in December 2005, newly permitted the drug to be administered involuntarily to military personnel.

The outcome of the Doe case gave the "plaintiffs the exact result they sought: revised action by the FDA," Sullivan later wrote.

In this month's decision, Robertson supported Rempfer and Dingle's argument that the Air Force review board had wrongly based its denial of their petitions on a fundamental mischaracterization of the Doe case.

The service board did "not accurately describe the outcome of the Doe litigation," Robertson stated. "Contrary to the board's conclusion, the plaintiffs in the Doe litigation clearly prevailed. To base denial of Rempfer's constructive discharge and compensatory relief claims on the fiction that the Doe plaintiffs lost would be arbitrary and capricious."

The judge advanced the same argument in supporting Dingle's parallel claim.

"Taken as a whole, Judge Sullivan's decisions in Doe v. Rumsfeld conclude that, prior to the FDA's December 2005 rulemaking, it was a violation of federal law for military personnel to be subjected to involuntary [anthrax] inoculation because the vaccine was neither the subject of a presidential waiver nor licensed for use against inhalation anthrax," Robertson wrote.

In what is shaping up to be a split among U.S. judges, Robertson noted that some courts have differed over the question of whether military orders to take the shots prior to FDA approval were illegal. He added that military records-correction boards are not legally bound to grant relief to applicants on the basis of a court case like Doe.

However, Robertson signaled that the courts would not tolerate a military board's misrepresentation of Doe as a win for the Defense Department in denying service personnel claims; rather, any denial would have to be based on other grounds.

The Air Force review board decision, in particular, was so flawed that it must now be reconsidered, the judge said.

Remanding the Rempfer and Dingle cases back to the military panel for another look, Robertson warned the board against substituting its own views about vaccine legality for those of the federal court.

"This is a big opinion," said John Michels, co-counsel on the Doe case. "This opens the door to a bunch of people coming back for relief."

However, a statute of limitations might prevent military personnel from filing lawsuits more than six years after an alleged wrong has occurred. Absent new legislation on Capitol Hill, the passage of time since the Pentagon launched its anthrax vaccine program in 1998 could bar many of those affected from obtaining corrective action today, Michels said in a March 14 interview.

"For a lot of people, it's too late to go to court," he said. "This is a situation that cries out for congressional intervention."

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