The U.S. Nuclear Deterrent Triad. Can the U.S. Afford to Modernize it? (Source southfront.org) The defense budget of the United States stands at roughly ten times the amount of its closest rival in real terms. With more than seven hundred military facilities around the globe, and direct and indirect armed interventions in a number of countries in the Middle East and Africa the armed forces of the United States are consuming vast amounts of money. When one adds in the significant amounts of waste inherent in the military industrial complex, the grand scale of the Department of Defense budget for 2016 in the amount of $521.7 billion has still left military planners and defense industry lobbyists bemoaning it as insufficient. It has recently been argued that the advancements and achievements by both Russia and China in modernizing their military capabilities over the past decade have caught the U.S. military establishment off guard. This is up to debate; however, the fact remains that the only real potential adversaries of the U.S. have exponentially improved their military forces, mainly in the area of missile and aircraft capabilities, but also in the area of naval power projection and nuclear submarine deterrence over the past decade. The conventional military forces of both nations have been greatly improved in all respects. In light of the United States losing its edge conventionally, many would assume that the U.S. could always fall back on its nuclear deterrence capability. This is also proving; however, not to be a suitable strategy as the U.S. has invested very little in this area of defense over the past half century. China has fielded indigenously designed and manufactured SSBNs to add a viable third leg to its nuclear triad in only the past five years, while Russia has greatly modernized its silo and mobile ICBMs, as well as fielding advanced electronic warfare systems over the past decade. The United States has apparently decided to utterly neglect its own nuclear capabilities since the dissolving of the Soviet Union. The U.S. defense establishment is now faced with not only the  major challenge of modernizing its nuclear deterrence capabilities, but also where to find the vast sums of money required to accomplish this feat.