WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will have to spend billions of dollars over the next five years to make emergency fixes to its nuclear weapons infrastructure, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
will announce on Friday, after two separate Pentagon studies concluded
that there are “systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise,”
according to senior defense officials.
The
reports are a searing indictment of how the Air Force’s and Navy’s
aging nuclear weapons facilities, silos and submarine fleet have been
allowed to decay since the end of the Cold War. A broad review was begun
after academic cheating scandals and the dismissal of top officers for
misbehavior, but it uncovered far more serious problems.
For
example, while inspectors obsessed over whether every checklist and
review of individual medical records was completed, they ignored huge
problems, including aging blast doors over 60-year-old silos that would
not seal shut and, in one case, the discovery that the crews that
maintain the nation’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles had only a
single wrench that could attach the nuclear warheads.
“They
started FedExing the one tool” to three bases spread across the
country, one official familiar with the contents of the reports said
Thursday. No one had checked in years “to see if new tools were being
made,” the official said. This was one of many maintenance problems that
had “been around so long that no one reported them anymore.”
Senior
officials said they were trying to determine how much the emergency
repairs would cost. “It will be billions” over the next five years, one
official said, “but not $20 or $30 billion.”
That
is in addition to tens of billions of dollars that the Obama
administration has already designated to upgrade nuclear laboratories
and extend the lives of aging warheads. The huge investment has been
hard to explain for an administration that came to office talking about a
path to eliminating nuclear weapons around the globe, though President
Obama has also pledged to make the country’s nuclear arsenal as safe and
reliable as possible.
Mr.
Hagel’s call for greater investment will come just 10 days before the
deadline to conclude nuclear negotiations with Iran. It puts the
administration in the position of demanding that the Iranians dismantle
their nuclear infrastructure just as the defense secretary is arguing
for an overhaul and improvement of American submarines, bombers and
missile silos, and the more than 1,600 nuclear weapons they contain.
Mr.
Hagel commissioned two reviews, one by senior Pentagon staff members
and one led by two retired officers. Separately, they visited all
operational nuclear bases and interviewed roughly 1,500 people, from
commanders to enlisted personnel and contractors. While their reports
varied on details, their overall assessments were similar: In the long,
tedious work of nuclear readiness, a culture of micromanagement and
attention to the smallest detail flourished, creating busywork while
huge problems with equipment and readiness, most arising from the age of
the systems, were ignored.
The
“independent” study by the retired officers, Gen. Larry D. Welch of the
Air Force and Adm. John C. Harvey Jr. of the Navy, found particular
shortfalls at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, where both
intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range bombers are based.
Morale was low, turnover high, and that single wrench was impossible to
find — symptomatic of custom-built systems that date to the 1950s and
’60s. Mr. Hagel will fly to Minot on Friday to visit the crews and
promise changes.
That
report also found major problems at submarine bases, where staffing was
so short and parts so scarce that nuclear-armed submarines were kept
away from patrols for far longer than planned, undercutting the
country’s best-hidden nuclear deterrent force.
The
billions Mr. Hagel will promise are for short-term fixes; some will be
shifted from other projects. But even before the reports were completed,
the Obama administration had told the Pentagon to plan for 12 new
missile submarines, up to 100 new bombers and 400 land-based missiles,
either new or refurbished. Recently, the Monterey Institute of
International Studies estimated the total cost of the country’s nuclear
enterprise over the next three decades at up to $1.1 trillion.
But
the retired officers’ report noted that promises of new infrastructure
had been made for so long that crews did not believe the new equipment
would arrive during their careers.
Officials
said the report gave special attention to remedies for the recent
cheating scandals that have rocked the Navy’s nuclear propulsion
programs and the Air Force crews that maintain intercontinental
ballistic missiles and stand ready to launch them on a moment’s notice.
In
March, the Air Force fired nine officers and accepted the resignation
of the commander at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana for failing to
provide adequate oversight of the 100 or so launch officers implicated
in the scandal there.
Officials
said the report by General Welch and Admiral Harvey had found that a
culture of extreme testing undermined the integrity needed for the
demanding nuclear posts. It concluded that the larger problem lay not
with the missile combat or Navy propulsion crews that cheated, but with
“mispurposed testing.” The goal became scoring a near-perfect grade
average on the exams that could be reported up the chain of command,
rather than making sure that systems worked and that sailors and missile
crews, often young and inexperienced, were ready to operate under
combat conditions.
Among
the report’s suggestions, officials said, were more recognition and
special pay for highly responsible nuclear jobs. The advice for
bolstering morale got as specific as restoring “select crew” patches and
creating a pin or patch for successfully completing 200 missile alerts.
Officials
said the external reviewers had leveled some of their harshest
criticism at personnel reliability programs, which seek to determine the
mental fitness of those charged with firing the nation’s nuclear arms.
They said the programs, as currently managed, often conveyed distrust of
atomic personnel and actually reduced fitness.
The
recommended fixes, senior officials said, included testing, reviewing
medical records and putting more responsibility for assessing mental
fitness on commanders than on inspectors.
Correction: November 13, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated when Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel will travel to Minot Air Force Base. It is Friday,
not Saturday.