Critics of modernizing the U.S. nuclear triad have called to delay or even terminate the GBSD. Their arguments do not make strategic, technical or economic sense.

The US could develop more than a dozen different land-based weapons for $7 to $12 billion, thinktank CSBA estimates.

What happens when the Pentagon’s new ballistic missile defeat program doesn’t work? They keep using the old one, which has a spotty track record.

The Pentagon has almost completed a study of how to shoot down hypersonic missiles. It’s also developing new offensive weapons — conventional, not nuclear — whose deployment will become legal with the end of the INF Treaty.

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity,” a statement from the White House said. Moscow has refused to admit that it has for years been “covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”

By 2021, plans call for Japan to have eight Aegis destroyers, four of them capable of launching the SM-3 Block IIA missiles, whose second successful test in a row comes as a vindication after two previous failures.

Rep. Adam Smith called into question the decades-old backbone of US nuclear policy, while calling for a “total redo” of the Nuclear Posture Review the Pentagon released earlier this year.

“Long-range precision fires… would provide us the capability (to) either, for example, support the Air Force by suppressing enemy air defenses at hundreds upon hundreds of miles or support the Navy by engaging enemy surface ships at great distances as well,” said Army Secretary Mark Esper. But those examples are two distinctly different missions, each most relevant to a different theater of war.

The 12-hull, $128 billion Columbia class program is the Navy’s cornerstone project not only for a new class of submarines, but also for the United States’ nuclear triad, which relies on a mix of air, land, and sea-launched nuclear missiles.

INF proponents emphasize the risk of nuclear weapons. But, despite its name, the treaty bans a wide range of conventional weapons as well — and it’s non-nuclear, precision-guided missiles that have changed how war is actually waged.