The head of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. James Cartwright, anticipates Congress will consider releasing additional funds for a new, conventionally armed Trident D-5 missile next year, once studies are done that show the weapon can be used with little risk of provoking nuclear retaliation.

His comments, offered in an interview last week, come in the wake of congressional action that may leave the Navy's proposed Conventional Trident Modification (CTM) effort with just a fraction of the $127 million the Defense Department requested for fiscal year 2007. The Senate this week is debating a defense appropriations bill that provides no FY-07 funds to develop CTM but offers $5 million to conduct a study on potential land- or air-based alternatives to the submarine-launched missile.

For its part, the House passed a bill that would appropriate $30 million for CTM for the coming fiscal year, or less than one-quarter of the funds sought. The two chambers' bills are expected to be reconciled in conference committee in the coming months.

All four key defense committees on Capitol Hill have expressed concern that the launch of a conventionally armed D-5 from a submarine that also carries the nuclear-tipped version of the same missile could prompt international misinterpretation that some experts say might lead to hasty retaliation against the United States.

Despite the fact that even the House appropriations language cuts the FY-07 CTM budget by more than half, Cartwright sees a glass “half full,” he told ITP.

“The language says, ‘Here's your first quarter-worth of money, so you can start working. Report back to us, you at DOD and State, on how you're going to handle the following questions,' and they go through the questions that are associated with the ambiguity issue,” Cartwright said at the July 27 Pentagon interview. The committees said, “‘Report back,' not ‘Stop, don't do anything,'” said the strategic commander.

Cartwright said he welcomes a lively debate over the wisdom of proceeding with a modified Trident as the quickest and most effective way to get a long-range conventional ballistic missile into the nation's arsenal.

“An appropriate oversight function on the part of the Congress is to say, ‘OK, come back to us and tell us how you're going to approach these questions,'” he said.

The Marine general recognizes, though, that public skepticism about the missile modification concept may result in the effort getting canceled at some point.

“We've been pretty darn open about it -- good, bad or indifferent,” Cartwright said of the Trident modification plan, which he noted the Pentagon alternatively might have kept classified. “If that's what kills it, to me that's OK.”

The need for a conventionally armed weapon that could strike terrorists or rogue nations anywhere around the globe with just one hour's notice “is something that ought to be discussed,” Cartwright said. “[The weapon] is something I believe the nation probably should have. It is something that STRATCOM is advocating for, as a capability to increase the choices available to the National Command Authority of the country from a broader array of scenarios than we had in mutual assured destruction.”

“Mutual assured destruction” refers to the nuclear weapons standoff between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The general told Congress this spring the only long-range weapons the United States has in its arsenal that could respond to fleeting threats so quickly are nuclear armed, making them less likely to be used than a conventional missile might be.

Lawmakers appear to generally support the idea of a conventional weapon for the mission, which the Pentagon dubs “prompt global strike,” but do not appear to be in as much of a hurry in fielding CTM.

World events would seem to underscore Cartwright's sense of urgency in getting a conventionally armed Trident in hand, some say.

“Kim Jong Il made the best case for CTM, and Hezbollah is just steps behind him,” said one industry source this week, referring to last month's missile test launches in North Korea and the radical Shiite Muslim group's attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon.

Two former defense secretaries, Harold Brown and James Schlesinger, agree the weapon is needed rapidly, writing in a May 22 Washington Post op-ed that “a small reprogramming action in the current fiscal year could accelerate the [CTM] missiles' initial deployments.”

The same column addresses a number of congressional concerns about the dangerous ambiguity a CTM launch may create, and asserts in response, “The new weapon would probably not be effective against most hardened targets, say, missile silos, or deeply buried targets such as command posts.” As such, CTM would pose little threat to other nuclear powers such as Russia or China, the two former officials suggest.

Critics of the CTM concept note, though, that the FY-07 Navy request for CTM includes $77 million for research and development under a line item titled, “Hard and Deeply Buried Target Defeat System Program.”

If the precision-guidance tail kit planned for CTM is retrofitted onto the nuclear version of the D-5 missile, the weapon could indeed prove more threatening against potential targets in Russia or China, some analysts say.

Cartwright said he was uncertain whether the Navy would seek such an upgrade to the nuclear-armed D-5. He noted that, in the past, “adding precision into the nuclear ballistic missiles is something that has been discussed, both with the Congress and within the administration.”

Technical and policy aspects of the CTM idea already have been the focus of studies by a number of panels, including the Pentagon's Defense Science Board and Defense Policy Board, STRATCOM's Senior Advisory Group, and even the secretive JASONs independent science advisory organization, according to Cartwright.

Although lawmakers are privy to these groups' reports, they are seeking greater depth on the question of whether the conventionally armed Trident might prove to be provocative internationally, the strategic commander noted.

“I think there is an analytic underpinning to this” CTM concept, Cartwright told ITP. “Is there a specific question that hasn't been answered up until now that more analysis should be done on? The only one that I'm aware of is to get a more thorough discussion on the ambiguity question.”

If Congress denies CTM virtually all the requested funding for FY-07, the program may be delayed up to a year, according to Cartwright. But he said a clearer picture of how an appropriations cut might affect the effort has yet to be determined.

The congressionally requested studies may convince lawmakers CTM is not the optimal, near-term choice for prompt global strike, and that could result in “shutting it off completely,” Cartwright acknowledged.

On the international level, mitigating any ambiguity raised by CTM could be a long-term process, he said.

If the United States sets up a notification procedure whereby the administration notifies Russia, for example, of any test or operational launch of CTM, some Russian uncertainty about U.S. intentions may yet linger, he said.

“We would say to them, ‘Gee, we're going to launch something out of the southern Pacific,' as an example,” Cartwright told ITP. “If they saw a launch coming from the southern Pacific, that's not a guarantee of our intent. But at least they can start to match up, ‘OK, they told us to look here. Something happened in that spot. They told us it would look something like this. It does.' So you start to build a confidence that the intent is as advertised.”

Russia would begin to see “a pattern over time of performance that you, in fact, do notify; that they can, in fact, detect and can see the assurance you laid out between the two of you,” he said. “That's going to take time.”

In the future, additional nuclear weapons nations might be brought into such a confidence-building regime. But various nations may require their own protocols, Cartwright said.

“Different countries see intent in different ways. Different cultures see it in different ways,” he said. Measures like launch notifications and weapons inspections the United States and the former Soviet Union devised during the Cold War may not be “a good answer for maybe the Indians or the Chinese or the Pakistanis,” Cartwright said. “They may want to see it in a different way. So you've got to work your way through that.”

Onsite inspections of conventionally armed D-5 missiles aboard Trident subs might figure into a confidence-building effort, Cartwright said. Historically the Navy has banned international inspectors from seeing ballistic missile warheads on ships, according to experts. Whether emerging concerns about transparency might trump the longstanding worries about missile technology security is yet to be determined, the general said.

“You get to a level here where [inspection] gets so intrusive you start to compromise your capability,” Cartwright said. “But you want to make sure that it is transparent enough that intent and doctrine and the actual practice of using the things is consistent and verifiable. . . . That's what these studies are to tell us.”

Even as the studies get under way, Cartwright is determined to keep his eye on the ball. In his view, that means getting some prompt global strike capability in the near term, even if it is imperfect. For the longer term, Air Force Space Command is undertaking an analysis of alternatives to determine which technologies to pursue that could be better suited for the same role down the road.

But in assessing a need for CTM, “remember,” says Cartwright, “part of the calculus is: What's the quickest [weapons acquisition] path with the lowest risk, lowest cost, to get to a capability? Are you convinced the capability is important now vs. 10 years in the future?”