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WASHINGTON -- With an eye toward making good on U.S. President Barack Obama's nearly year-old pledge to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security, some of his top lieutenants have begun asserting that technological advances now allow greater reliance on conventional arms for strategic deterrence (see GSN, March 15).
(Mar. 19) -
U.S. Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio). At a hearing this week, the lawmaker questioned assertions that the United States could increasingly rely on the deterrent capabilities of non-nuclear weapons (U.S. Representative Michael Turner photo).
However, the contention is already running into resistance on Capitol Hill and, to some extent, in the U.S. military.
"I'm very concerned [about] the trade-off between conventional and strategic weapons that do not play the same role as a deterrent," Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said this week at a House subcommittee hearing.
Testifying before the panel, the top U.S. combatant commander for nuclear weapons said the nation's formidable Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps play a significant role in deterring attacks on the United States and its allies, but signaled it would be wrong to overemphasize the conventional military's potential to prevent wars.
Gen. Kevin Chilton noted that a strong conventional posture can continue to serve as a deterrent to conflict in hot spots such as the Korean Peninsula. Also, he said, he supports taking U.S. nuclear arms reductions in concert with Russia.
"However, we have to be careful when we start talking about one-for-one substitutions of conventional weapons for nuclear weapons," the Air Force general said. "The nuclear weapon has a deterrent factor that far exceeds a conventional threat."
The Defense Department-led Nuclear Posture Review is expected to address the relationship between nuclear and conventional deterrence, but has been repeatedly delayed. It is now anticipated within the next month (see GSN, March 18).
A central review issue under debate behind the scenes has been whether and how to change the nation's nuclear "declaratory posture," potentially moving to a position in which Washington states that the "sole" or "primary" purpose of its atomic arsenal is to deter nuclear war.
The intended implication would be that, going forward, U.S. conventional forces are sufficient to deter -- or use in response to -- virtually any non-nuclear attack against the nation or its allies.
If embraced, a declaration about the "sole" purpose of nuclear weapons could be seen as a step toward the eventual global elimination of nuclear weapons that Obama discussed in Prague last year. The president might opt, though, for a more modest alternative, namely that countering enemy nuclear threats is the main -- but not only -- purpose of the U.S. atomic arsenal, according to executive branch insiders.
Pending the posture review's release, Obama administration officials appear to be testing out the viability of an argument that conventional deterrence can assume a growing utility relative to nuclear deterrence.
"While nuclear weapons have a clear role, our deterrent extends beyond nuclear weapons," Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher said at a conference last month. "Our improving conventional capabilities make it possible to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons for some targets and missions. As our conventional weapons have become more precise, we do not have to cling to nuclear weapons to accomplish our objectives."
The idea of a military stance that increasingly favors conventional capabilities is nothing new. Over the past two decades, defense technologists have found that smaller amounts of firepower very accurately delivered can effectively substitute for big-but-dumb unguided munitions, to some extent limiting unintended casualties.
Similar logic is now being applied to selected, time-urgent threats that might be regarded as potential nuclear targets, such as al-Qaeda leadership pinpointed along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or a North Korean nuclear missile being readied on a launch pad.
For such scenarios, Obama officials theorize that tailored conventional strikes might be useful alternatives to Cold War-era strategic nuclear deterrence.
At the same time, remarks by Tauscher and others hint that the circumstances under which conventional arms could prove as useful as -- or perhaps more usable than -- nuclear weapons might expand in the coming years, as the atomic arsenal's role gradually fades.
Gen. James Cartwright, Chilton's predecessor as head of U.S. Strategic Command, presaged the new thinking back in 2005, arguing that advanced conventional-weapon technologies could allow the nation to "drastically" reduce its nuclear arsenal. One military authority subsequently estimated that conventional munitions were capable of destroying up to 30 percent of targets in the nuclear combat plan (see GSN, May 28, 2008).
Today, nuclear strategy expert Jeffrey Lewis goes even further.
"The target set of things that we cannot hold at risk with conventional weapons is very small and maybe empty," Lewis, who heads the New America Foundation's Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, told Global Security Newswire this week. "The unique value provided by nuclear weapons is largely psychological at this point and hardly one of military utility."
Now that this view appears to have gained steam in the White House, Obama is hearing some pushback from the right.
"The wrong way to think about nuclear weapons is target-by-target," Linton Brooks, who oversaw nuclear security during President George W. Bush's administration, said in an interview last month. "Yes, if you take any given target, there are many of them that can be held at risk by conventional weapons. But I think that that does not imply that conventional weapons have the same kind of deterrent effect that nuclear weapons do."
Turner, ranking member of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, sounded a similar alarm.
"We know that the threat of nuclear weapons is actually increasing by the number of countries that are both seeking and-or possessing nuclear weapons technology. That threat does not appear to be decreasing," Turner said this week. "So I'm very concerned as we try to translate what perhaps should be a stated dream into an actual goal or policy that affects both the role and numbers of our strategic deterrent."
Republicans argue that Washington's "extended deterrence" guarantees to its allies in Europe and Northeast Asia continue to require an underlying but unwavering U.S. nuclear threat.
"Will allies who benefit from U.S.-extended deterrence commitments feel equally assured when the U.S. reduces its nuclear deterrent and offers conventional forces as a substitute?" Turner asked at the House panel's hearing on Tuesday.
GOP lawmakers are also raising even more fundamental questions about whether the long-term objective is worth pursuing. A world without nuclear weapons invites more -- not less -- conventional warfare, the argument goes.
"In the nuclear-free world that ended in 1945 there was neither peace nor security," Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration official, wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary last year. "Since then there have indeed been many wars but none has come close to the carnage that occurred regularly before the development of nuclear weapons, and none has pitted nuclear powers against each other."
Global nuclear disarmament is not a realistic objective, Turner suggested this week.
"What is the strategic rationale behind this [Obama] policy?" he asked. "Do we expect others -- like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China -- to give up their nuclear arms once the U.S. reduces theirs?"
Those skeptical about conventional deterrence include some who quibble less with Obama's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons than his emerging investment in futuristic conventional "prompt global strike" arms. Several lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, have argued that these weapons could prove destabilizing in a crisis (see GSN, May 21, 2009).
The anticipated first such weapon, the Air Force Conventional Strike Missile, could slam into a target halfway around the world within an hour of launch. Its high speed and long range -- unprecedented for a conventional munition -- are raising worries about the potential for its hasty use based on inadequate intelligence.
Some also are concerned about the technology's possible application in a disabling strike by Washington against small nuclear forces such as Beijing's, a risk that might trigger dangerous "use or lose" dynamics during a crisis.
"I'm an advocate for having a prompt global strike capability as an additional weapon set," one that could give the president "options in time of crisis today, in which he maybe only has a nuclear option for a timely response," Chilton testified on Tuesday. "But the connective tissue between that [capability] and the one-for-one exchange for a nuclear deterrent, I'm not quite there."
If prompt global strike weapons remain a niche capability -- Chilton envisions only a single missile put on alert, plus two spares -- they also come at a time when Washington is reducing its broader conventional capability to fight major wars against any future "near peer" militaries.
The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review -- an assessment of conventional forces and strategy released Feb. 1 -- reflects Defense Secretary Robert Gates' emphasis on honing U.S. counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to combat current threats, deferring fuller military preparedness for larger and more traditional threats out into the future.
Long-standing expectations are for a U.S. conventional military force structure that is, on the whole, smaller and older than any time in recent history.
Some national security thinkers are beginning to ask whether reduced reliance on nuclear deterrence, coupled with diminished conventional-force readiness for major warfare -- such as tank battles and fights over control of air space -- inadvertently invite the rise of near-peer challenges to Washington.
Could ratcheting back on both the nuclear and conventional strategies also increase the incentives for would-be nuclear powers to develop their own arsenals?
"To be walking both [postures] back simultaneously is alarming," Christopher Ford, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in a March 3 interview. "I would have expected that an administration that came to pare back the nuclear aspects of extended deterrence would be committed to a corresponding strengthening of conventional military alliance relationships around the world."
Lewis sees much more potential for nuclear-to-conventional trade-offs, but emphasized that additional groundwork must be laid on an international level.
The substantial U.S. superiority in conventional armaments makes it difficult to imagine that potential nuclear adversaries would be as inclined as Washington to reduce their own reliance on atomic weapons, he said.
"The growth in our conventional capability makes it easier to give up our nuclear weapons but makes it much harder for the Russians and the Chinese," Lewis said in a phone interview yesterday. "It's not that I think we should restrict the growth in some of these capabilities, but we are probably going to need new concepts of strategic stability in an era of advanced conventional weaponry."