Biden May Cut $265 Billion Program To Replace America’s 50 Year Old Strategic Missile Arsenal

Following increases to the U.S. defence budget under the Donald Trump administration, and in the wake of a serious economic criss in 2020, the Joe Biden administration is expected to make cuts to military expenditures which could impact the Pentagon’s costly program to update the country’s strategic nuclear arsenal. The American arsenal of Minuteman III intercontinental range ballistic missiles - the only ground based missile in the Western world with such a long range - is expected to be replaced under the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program. This has an estimated $264 billion cost, and a widely perceived lack of urgency for the program relative to other weapons systems means it is expected to be among the first programs to suffer from potential budget cuts. Cuts to major weapons programs under a new Democratic Party administration are far from unprecedented, with the most notable prior example having been the Barak Obama administration’s termination of the F-22 Raptor program in 2009 which resulted in just 25% of the fighters originally planned leaving proaction lines.   

In response to reports of possible cancellation of the GBSD program, Commander of the United States Strategic Command Charles A Richard stressed regarding the importance of funding: “You cannot life-extend Minuteman III… It is getting past the point of [where] it’s not cost-effective to life-extend Minuteman III. You’re quickly getting to the point [where] you can’t do it at all.” The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles are based on the original Minuteman I design from 1962 and have been in service since 1970. Richard warned that the missiles were so obsolete that their original designers are dead and engineers no longer even have some of the necessary technical documentation. “That thing is so old that in some cases the [technical] drawings don’t exist anymore, or where we do have drawings, they’re like six generations behind the industry standard. And there’s not only [no one] working that can understand them – they’re not alive anymore.” A possible alternative to the GBSD could be for the U.S. to follow the precedent set by Britain and France, and abandon a land based strategic ICBM deterrent entirely in favour of a purely submarine based ICBM force. The Minuteman III is by far the oldest missile of its kind in service in the world today.