The Pentagon plans anew to head off an old worry

Beyond the carnage the Ukraine war has produced on the ground, it has forced military planners to think anew about the risks of nuclear war.

For the Pentagon, that means extra urgency in developing a new generation of doomsday weapons that could maintain deterrence.

The Pentagon budget request for fiscal 2023, framed in the shadow of the Ukraine confrontation, has a stronger strategic-weapons emphasis, including a new generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the “Sentinel,” a new B-21 manned bomber, and an exotic mix of drones and manned fighters known as “Next Generation Air Dominance,” or NGAD.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall discussed the deterrence problem in an interview with me in late March. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a month old, but Kendall noted the danger of escalation. “We’re dealing with a nuclear armed state; you cannot ignore that as you make decisions about how to respond.”

Russian scaremongering about nuclear weapons has continued through the Ukraine crisis. “The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week of the danger of nuclear conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday of a “lightning fast” retaliation against any strategic threats to Russia.

Kendall said that his thinking about deterrence has been focused for more than a decade on China, rather than Russia. “The scenario that I was really worried about was one in which China would commit an act of either coercion or aggression, and the U.S. would have two options: Back down or lose. And neither one of those was very attractive.”

Rather than back down or lose in Ukraine, the Biden administration has adopted a third approach: working with NATO allies to pump weapons to a Ukrainian military that has proven surprisingly adept in matching Russia in conventional warfare. U.S. officials have seemed confident that Russia won’t take the risk of challenging NATO by using tactical nuclear weapons, but recent Russian statements have underlined the importance of firm deterrence.

The new weapons on the Pentagon’s budget roster aren’t as flashy as Russia’s much-touted hypersonic missiles, but they will modernize the United States’ strategic arsenal after what some claim has been years of neglect. “We’re going to invest in the planned recapitalization of the nuclear triad,” Kendall told me, referring to the combination of land-based ICBMs, bombers and missile-carrying submarines that are designed to provide a deterrent capable of surviving a first strike.

The Air Force says it plans to increase spending for the new Sentinel ICBM by $1.1 billion in fiscal 2023 to $3.6 billion, with a goal of installing operational missiles by 2029.

The Air Force wants to spend about $5 billion in the next fiscal year on the B-21 bomber, known as the “Raider,” according to a recent article in Breaking Defense. Through fiscal 2027, spending will total nearly $20 billion on the advanced bomber, according to Air Force Magazine.

Kendall is also pushing the initiative to mix human and machine pilots in the Next Generation Air Dominance program. A plane flown by a human — a “play caller,” says Kendall — would be accompanied by up to five unmanned combat aircraft. The Air

Force will spend nearly $1.7 billion for this innovative program in fiscal 2023, a $133 million increase. When I asked about dogfight simulations that measure human pilots against robots, Kendall remarked that autonomous systems will one day surpass human capabilities. “There is no question in my mind that machines are going to be better at this than people,” Kendall told me. “They’re going to be faster. They’re not going to get tired, and they’ll push the envelope further to the limits of the aircraft.”

Kendall, like all senior Pentagon officials, insists that the United States won’t get involved in a direct military confrontation with Russia unless NATO is attacked. But the Ukraine war has intensified the strategic modernization effort already underway at the Pentagon — and has pushed military planners, as in the depths of the Cold War, to think more about the unthinkable.