Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist at The Cipher Brief. Pincus spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders (releasing November 2021)
OPINION — Last Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee guaranteed that defense funding in fiscal 2022, which begins 23 days from now, will eventually be roughly $740 billion, some $24 billion more than the amount President Joe Biden requested last May.
Ranking Republican member Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) offered the amendment that added $23.9 billion to the original Biden request.
Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) opposed the Rogers amendment.
Attention should be paid to his reasons, which, he explained, came from his 25 years of experience on the Armed Services panel, nine years as ranking member and the past two as chairman.
“I really believe the most important thing the Defense Department can do is to spend its money wisely. Do a better job of acquisition and procurement. Do a better job of anticipating what the threats are now, not what they were 30 years ago. And if we give them now another $23.9 billion, it takes the pressure off. It makes it easier for them to keep doing what they’ve been doing and that I think, is the largest problem.”
Smith went on, “I certainly agree our national defense budget needs to be strong.
But he warned sarcastically: “If you are trying to measure what is a good, strong, national defense budget, the easiest way to do it is if you spend more money…I think far too often that is the path that we have taken. Whatever it is, we’ve got to spend more on defense than somebody else.”
Smith added, “I don’t think that works. We have had too many programs in the past 20 years that we’ve spent billions on and gotten nothing for the taxpayer out of it. I think what we need is a more rigorous approach toward the money that we have.” He added that there has been “a very numbers focus approach to defense budgets,” and “throwing more money at the problem does not solve it.” He said, “Basically what happens is, people come in here and testify before us and scare us about one problem or another that we are never ready for, all in the pressure cooker that we spend more money, and too often, we have not spent that money wisely.”
For those reasons, Smith said he supported the Biden budget and voted against the Rogers amendment.
Without describing it as a partisan political issue, Smith also noted that the last Trump budget for fiscal 2020, had a $3 billion increase from the previous year and was approved without controversy. However, when the first Biden proposal came along, with a $12 billion increase from the prior year, “all of a sudden it was an issue that we were not spending enough.”
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Rogers, in justifying his amendment, claimed the added money, “fully authorizes combatant commander unfunded priorities,” and contained “over $15 billion to fill unfunded procurement, research, and readiness priorities of the services.” These so-called “unfunded priorities” are programs that the military services have claimed they needed, but were allegedly eliminated by the Office of Management and Budget or the White House, before the budget was sent to Congress.
The Army, Navy and Air Force lists of so-called “unfunded priorities” has always bothered me based on experiences I had more than 40 years ago when I worked for Sen. J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The issue back then, was a congressional plan to reduce the number of American servicemen stationed abroad. The Army, Navy and Air Force were required to provide Congress with a list of units they would remove from Europe to meet the demanded reductions. My job, as a Foreign Relations committee investigator, was to go abroad and interview senior commanders on the impact such reductions would have. What I found was that by design, the military services had proposed reducing combat units that they knew Congress would never approve returning the U.S., knowing that would stymie any reductions, keep things as they were, and the congressional plan would fail—as it did.
Some of the items funded in the Rogers amendment, such as almost $10 billion for research and cyber innovation, were just the type of items that the services knew Congress would readily fund, as against similar costing, less required programs they kept buried in the base budget that never got the attention of Congress. During Wednesday’s discussion, several Democratic committee members pointed out they were voting for the Rogers amendment for that very reason, and even Chairman Smith recognized there were programs that members might like.
In fact, Rogers admitted his amendment also contained “over 200 Member [of Congress] priorities [earmarks] not fully addressed by the Chairman’s mark,” meaning not among Member-requested earmarks contained in Smith’s proposed bill.
These are the games Congress regularly plays.
Because I’m concerned with both spending and nuclear weapons, there is one other action the committee took worth recording.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) offered an amendment to restore in the fiscal 2022 authorization bill, the $52 million that the panel’s Strategic Subcommittee had cut for the life extension program of the B-83 bomb. I wrote extensively last June, about this 40-year-old, nuclear gravity bomb, the last one in the U.S. arsenal that can deliver a 1.2 megaton explosion – that’s the equivalent of 1,200,000 tons of TNT. Cheney said that China, Russia and North Korea are burying their most valuable targets in hardened, underground facilities and that B-83s are “simply the best weapon we have for denying our adversaries such sanctuaries.” She added, “There are no other capabilities in our current force that is a suitable replacement for the B-83 in this capacity.”
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Back in 2014, the Obama administration announced it would retire the B-83 and replace it with the proposed B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb, the first of which was to be produced in 2020, but is now scheduled for 2022. As Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) pointed out last Wednesday, the B-83 as a gravity bomb would have to be delivered directly over the target and “there is no way a B-2 bomber could carry out that mission” against Chinese or Russian new sophisticated air defense systems. That is why, Garamendi said, the new, planned, U.S. B-21 strategic bomber was going to be armed with stand-off, nuclear cruise missiles.
I also must note that Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) spoke of the B-83 causing “massive, indiscriminate destruction,” although he did not go on to estimate what that destruction could look like. The B-83’s explosive power is roughly 80 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb and would have a blast radius of 20 miles. Were it to be exploded at the earth’s surface to destroy underground targets, the radioactive fallout from one such weapon would make human life impossible for up to 50 or 75 miles around, and for 30 or more years. I write that because that is one of the areas I cover in my upcoming book, Blown To Hell. Although more powerful thermonuclear weapons have been tested, most people don’t realize what real, long-lasting damage radioactive fallout from a thermonuclear explosion would cause if its fireball hits the ground, which neither the Hiroshima nor Nagasaki bombs did.
The committee rejected the Cheney amendment 30-to-28. The Senate Armed Services Committee also eliminated funds for the B-83 in its version of the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill, but both bills still have a way to go in Congress.
So, the B-83 is not dead yet. There is also $98 million to extend the life of the B-83 in the Senate version of the fiscal 2022 Appropriations Bill of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency that makes nuclear weapons. However, the Senate Appropriations Committee, in its report, holds up the NNSA Administrator obligating those funds if, after consultation with the Defense Department, it is decided there is no operational requirement to justify the program. There also is a good chance the Biden Nuclear Posture Review, due to be completed by year’s end, will also finish off the B-83 program.
Defense programs, like cats, can have more than nine lives.
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