By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON - A top U.S. general is pressing Congress to accelerate plans for a study he said is crucial to the effort to field a new nuclear warhead (see GSN, Feb. 5).

Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, told Global Security Newswire that without results from an as-yet incomplete design study of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), he would be ill-prepared to advise the incoming president next year on how best to modernize the atomic arsenal.

The assessment is widely seen as a key step toward ultimately building the controversial warhead because it would flesh out details of what it would take to produce the new design.

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Two insiders of the “military reform movement” of the 1970s and ’80s have written what amounts to a tell-all: Who was in the movement, who supported it, and who claimed to support it but in the end betrayed it. The military reform movement, for those unfamiliar with the term, was a bi-partisan effort to try to get the Pentagon to buy weapon systems that worked, adopt doctrines that had proven to win, and create personnel and training programs to support the new doctrines, weapons, and tactics. All of these were opposed by the senior leadership of the Pentagon, with few exceptions, and after an initial wave of enthusiasm, by the key leaders of Congress.

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