Benedict 'concerned' where overall triad commonality effort is going
June 24, 2016
A senior uniformed Navy official is "concerned" where the overall commonality effort is going in replacing the nuclear triad.
Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, strategic systems program director, said his team sent information to the bidder's library this past winter, which the Air Force can use as it conducts the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent competition. The information gives specific examples of how the Air Force can leverage commonality candidates from the Navy's Trident II D5 life-extension program.
Benedict spoke with reporters after a June 24 breakfast organized by Peter Huessy in Washington.
The Air Force is replacing its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile through the GBSD program, which aims to field a new missile in 2030. The Navy plans to replace the D5 LE sub-launched ballistic missile about 10 years later.
Benedict said he has recommended the Air Force take advantage of Navy program products and processes that were developed as part of the D5 LE program.
The solutions were identified during a commonality study the Navy and Air Force conducted. The acquisition executives from both services and the U.S. Strategic Command chief directed the study.
"A joint assessment team was stood up comprised of Navy and Air Force technical and programmatic experts as well as key external stakeholders," Benedict said. "The team assessed potential benefits, risks and cost implications while considering requirements and [concept-of-operations] system flexibility and adaptability acquisition strategy and life cycle cost.”
Both the House and Senate marks of the fiscal year 2017 defense policy bill include language on triad commonality.
The House version "recognizes the substantial cumulative cost to accomplish this modernization and continues to seek opportunities to find efficiencies and cost savings when possible, without reducing capability or delaying modernization plans. Therefore, the committee continues to support efforts to pursue appropriate commonality between components and subsystems for the Air Force's and the Navy's strategic missile systems."
However, the House notes that this commonality comes with risks. Specifically, "a technical failure in a common component or subsystem [could] lead to widespread impacts to two legs of the triad," the committee writes.
The committee points to a report provided by the office of Defense Department acquisition chief Frank Kendall in December 2015, which, the lawmakers note, laid out "promising areas for pursuing commonality" in Air Force and Navy programs. However, the committee "is concerned that the report lacked detail about the systems, subsystems and components that are being considered," according to the bill.
The report also failed to lay out "decisions on the specific common systems, subsystems or components that would be pursued or time lines for making decisions on commonality," according to the bill.
"The committee is concerned that decisions on commonality may not be completed in time to inform acquisition cycles, and that without sufficient oversight and encouragement from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Congress, the services will revert to historical stovepipes and miss the opportunity to inform acquisition strategies," the report accompanying the bill states.
Therefore, the committee is calling for the defense secretary to submit a report by Sept. 30 that contains the date on which a "decision on incorporating common components and technologies must be made." The defense secretary is instructed to coordinate with the Air Force and Navy secretaries and the head of U.S. Strategic Command on the report, which should also include the Pentagon's plan for incorporating these components and technologies.
Despite the consensus inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to pursue nuclear triad commonality, challenges remain, according to Benedict.
"We have different cultures and both have long histories in success working largely independently," he said.
