Removing Arbitrary Deployment Quotas for Nuclear Force Posture
Every year since Fiscal Year 2017, Congress has passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that prohibits reducing the quantity of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) below 400. This amendment inhibits progress on adapting the U.S. ICBM force to meet the demands of the new geostrategic environment and restricts military planners to a force structure based on status quo rather than strategic requirements. Congress should ensure that no amendments dictating the size of the ICBM force are included in future NDAAs; this will allow the size of the ICBM force to be determined by strategic military requirements, rather than arbitrary quotas set by Congress.
Challenge and Opportunity
Congressional offices that represent the districts where ICBMs are located work together on a bipartisan basis to advocate for the indefinite sustainment of their ICBM bases. This group of lawmakers, known as the “Senate ICBM Coalition,” consists of senators from the three ICBM host states – Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota – plus Utah, where ICBM sustainment and replacement activities are headquartered at Hill Air Force Base. Occasionally, senators from Louisiana – the home state of Air Force Global Strike Command – have also participated in the Coalition’s activities.
Over the past two decades, the members of the coalition have played an outsized role in dictating U.S. nuclear force posture for primarily parochial reasons – occasionally even overriding the guidelines set by U.S. military leaders – in order to prevent any significant ICBM force reductions from taking place.
In 2006, for example, this congressional coalition successfully reduced the mandated life expectancy for the Minuteman III ICBM from 2040 to 2030, thus accelerating the deployment of a costly new ICBM by effectively shortening the ICBM’s modernization timeline by a decade. As U.S. Air Force historian David N. Spires describes in On Alert: An Operational History of the United States Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Program, 1945-2011, “Although Air Force leaders had asserted that incremental upgrades, as prescribed in the analysis of land-based strategic deterrent alternatives, could extend the Minuteman’s life span to 2040, the congressionally mandated target year of 2030 became the new standard.”
In another notable example, during the Fiscal Year 2014 NDAA negotiations, senators from the ICBM coalition inserted amendments into the bill that explicitly blocked the Obama administration from conducting the environmental assessment that would be legally necessary in order to reduce the number of ICBM silos. In a subsequent statement, coalition members specifically boasted about how they had overruled the Pentagon on the ICBM issue: “the Defense Department tried to find a way around the Hoeven-Tester language, but pressure from the coalition forced the department to back off.”
By inserting these types of amendments into successive NDAAs, the ICBM coalition has been highly successful in preventing the Department of Defense from fully determining its own nuclear force posture.
The force posture of the United States’ ICBMs, however, is not – and has never been – sacred or immutable. The current force level of 400 deployed ICBMs is not a magic number; the number of deployed U.S. ICBMs has shifted dramatically since the end of the Cold War, and it could be reduced even further for a variety of reasons, including those related to national security, financial obligations, the United States’ modernization capacity, or a good faith effort to reduce deployed U.S. nuclear forces.
When the Bush administration deactivated the “Odd Squad” at Malmstrom Air Force Base in the mid-2000s, for example – bringing the ICBM force down from 500 to 450 – the main driver was economics, not security: the 564th Missile Squadron used completely different and more expensive communications and launch control systems from the rest of the Minuteman III force. (See: David N. Spires, On Alert: An Operational History of the United States Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Program, 1945-2011, 88 2nd ed., pp. 185.)
By legislating an arbitrary quota for the number of ICBMs that the United States must deploy at all times, Congress is leaving successive presidential administrations and Departments of Defense hamstrung with regards to shaping future force posture.
Plan of Action
In order to ensure that the Department of Defense is no longer held to arbitrary force posture requirements that have little basis in military strategy, Congress should ensure that no amendments dictating the size of the ICBM force are included in future NDAAs. If such amendments are included, however, they should be based on strategic needs established by presidential and Defense Department guidance documents.
Conclusion
The stakes of inaction on this front are significant, particularly from a cost perspective, as the maintenance of this arbitrary 400-ICBM quota has served to heavily bias procurement outcomes towards significantly more expensive options. For example, in part due to this arbitrary 400-ICBM quota, the Pentagon’s procurement process for the next-generation ICBM yielded a preference for producing a brand-new missile – the Sentinel – rather than life-extending the current Minuteman III, deploying a smaller number, and cannibalizing the retired missiles for parts that would facilitate the life-extension process.
While this adapted life-extension could have likely been accomplished at a fraction of the cost of building a completely new missile, the Sentinel acquisition program, in contrast, is now approximately 81 percent over-budget and more than two years behind schedule relative to Pentagon estimates from 2020. This constituted an overrun in “critical” breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act.
To that end, it is imperative that Congress take action to ensure that ICBM force posture is shaped by security requirements, rather than parochial and arbitrary metrics that limit the financial and military flexibility of both the Pentagon and the President.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
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