Opening Statement (As Prepared)

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Thank you, Chairman DesJarlais, and welcome to our panel of distinguished witnesses.

Over the past decade, the global strategic landscape has continued to deteriorate. The CCP is dramatically expanding their nuclear arsenal, they are ahead of us with new and de-stabilizing delivery systems like hypersonics, and China has few established nuclear norms of safe behavior. Meanwhile, just this past weekend, war criminal Vladimir Putin threatened to bring his criminal war to a “logical conclusion with the outcome Russia requires” using nuclear weapons. Recent escalation between India and Pakistan raises concern about either side employing its nuclear arsenal. All of this calls into question decades of nuclear stability, which makes the work of our witnesses and this subcommittee all the more important.

Nuclear deterrence is the bedrock, the most important priority of the Pentagon, so how are we doing? We’ve got problems, and here are four major ones.

First, I believe, as does a bi-partisan majority of Congress, that we must maintain and modernize our nuclear triad, but these programs are dangerously behind and over-budget.

Second, NNSA and DOD have lost key personnel due to Musk and DOGE, before they reversed course and they tried to get people back. Morale is terrible, and this only makes the work that is already behind even more difficult.
Third, even if we get our efforts back on track, all of our modernization plans are based on one major nuclear adversary, not two, so not only are we behind, we don’t even know if what we’re building will be sufficient for deterrence.

Fourth, the President’s Golden Dome threatens to throw all of this out the window along with the theory of deterrence that has kept us safe since 1945. There is a direct tie between our nuclear deterrence posture and what is being proposed for Golden Dome by President Trump. When President Bush pulled us out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a new arms race, both conventional and nuclear, began. While we developed modest missile defenses to defend against rogue nations, Russia and China, never believing that was our intent, developed capabilities to evade our systems, including destabilizing weapons like the nuclear-tipped torpedo that could take out any coastal city, a space-based nuclear weapon that could wipe out all of low-earth orbit—including Golden Dome—not to mention hypersonics, where we are playing catch-up.

Last week, the majority quoted the bi-partisan Strategic Posture Commission as rationale for supporting Golden Dome. I would like to highlight a major caveat within the recommendation that was omitted in their remarks – everything they said was contingent on the capabilities being determined “feasible,” but you have to go to the footnotes to understand what they mean by that, because even I have never questioned if the concept is “technically” feasible. On page 134 of the report – it says “By “feasible,” the Commission means technically and financially sound, as well as based on sound policy deliberations.” This is where my argument lies - we have not seen any of the work to determine if this concept is even feasible as defined by the commission, yet we are throwing billions of dollars at it already.

The Congressional Budget Office, in response to our colleagues on the Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee’s bi-partisan request, just released its updated cost estimate for deploying space-based interceptors – the 20-year cost ranged from $160 to $542 billion. We all know which end of that range will be right, and that hardly seems fiscally sound. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—a conservative think tank—recently said “While the costs have come down and the technology has matured, the physics of space-based interceptors has not changed.” This also questions the technical soundness of a system that the Russians could eliminate with the push of one button. Most importantly, multiple witnesses to this subcommittee have admitted that there have been no significant policy deliberations on what the impact of Golden Dome would have on strategic stability.

It’s dangerous when you have a President who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and a Congress unwilling to question him. And the stakes are so, so much higher with nuclear weapons. There are only two possible explanations for what’s going on. One is that everyone in America has had deterrence all wrong, and a guy who’s most experienced at bankrupting casinos is so brilliant with deterrence theory that he corrected something that every nuclear theorist, every Pentagon planner, and every administration (including his first) had gotten wrong. Or, perhaps, that Donald Trump decided he wanted the gold-plated version of something his friend has, so here we are. Which do we think is more likely?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.