US to Change Significant Changes to how it Funds Nuclear Weapons Triad?

It isn’t official but Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work hinted today that the United States will undertake a fundamental reordering of its national security budget by paying for new nuclear submarines, new nuclear bombers and new ICBMs in new accounts set aside just for them.

“This is something we have discussed in the department,” Work told reporters during a briefing on the Pentagon’s response to the string of major scandals involving the Air Force and Navy nuclear forces. This year it was drugs and cheating for the Air Force; the Navy had cheating too. Before that, the Air Force lost track of some nuclear weapons in 2007 and mistakenly flew them across the United States. And, of course, there were the nuclear fuses and other parts mistakenly sent to Taiwan in 2006 that we didn’t notice for a while.

“We think this is going to be a president’s budget ’17 discussion,” Work said. The decision will be driven in part, he seemed to imply, by whether sequestration comes back into effect next year. “f you go to sequestration level cuts, you will not be able to make what we believe are the prudent investments that you would have to do to make sure we have a safe, secure and effective deterrent. We are going to have to address that forthrightly.”

One of the attractions of creating these new accounts is that they would not be part of the regular budget division between the services so the military could not take money from the nuclear force to pay for conventional weapons, as has happened in the past.

Those new accounts, which Work said would not be officially decided until the 2017 budget, would appear to effectively take budget authority for these national nuclear assets away from the Navy and Air Force so that funding for them would not eat up the money for the conventional weapons that they buy. Among the billion dollar questions this raises is, would the services still be able to control the money, or would it become joint money or Office of Secretary of Defense money controlled by those officials.

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