Updating the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal will be the most hotly disputed issue when the House Armed Services Committee considers its defense policy bill in the coming months, the panel’s top Republican says.

 

HOUSE NDAA MARKUP SET: The House Armed Services Committee plans to mark up the National Defense Authorization Act on April 30, Connor and Lara report, citing four sources familiar with the plans.

“No schedule has been formally announced, but the six House Armed Services subcommittees typically approve their portions of the NDAA the week before the full committee,” they write. “The Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, plans to mark up its version of the bill during the week of May 18. The full Senate is tentatively slated to take up the NDAA in June.”

 

“This will be, I predict, the probably most contentious issue in this year’s defense authorization bill — about modernizing the stockpile,” Rep. Mac Thornberry said today at the Brookings Institution.

 

“It’s never more than 7 percent of the defense budget in any year to modernize not only the weapons, but all three legs of the triad and nuclear command and control,” the Texas Republican added. “But still it’s a fair amount of money. And you’re seeing it this year, a whole lot of people saying, ‘I could use that money for this or that or the other thing.’”

 

Pentagon brass have called the revitalization of the nuclear force — including procurement of new intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range bombers and ballistic missile submarines — one of the military’s most pressing needs.

 

House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), meanwhile, has been a skeptic of a wholesale modernization of the triad, calling the venture costly and unnecessary.

 

Nuclear weapons policy and spending broke out into a partisan brawl last year, as Democrats sought to curb some programs. House Democrats voted to block money to deploy a new low-yield nuclear warhead aboard submarines and to repeal aggressive requirements for annual plutonium pit production. Those and other proposals were dropped from a final defense bill amid Republican opposition.

 

The administration has already drawn the ire of some lawmakers with its budget choices. The blueprint sacrificed a second Virginia-class attack submarine for nuclear modernization programs under the National Nuclear Security Administration. The service included $2.8 billion for another sub in its list of unfunded priorities.