Ready, aim, fired: Can Biden rescue the Nuclear Posture Review?

When Leonor Tomero, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 5, 2021, she aroused the ire of Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), by explaining that her job was to coordinate the review process, consider the risks and benefits of current declaratory policy, assess alternative options, and not impose any personal views she might have. Cotton said he was 'now troubled by the direction' of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).The response of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was: "What kind of a 'robust' nuclear posture can supposedly deter World War III but not withstand some hard questions about whether all 3,800 nuclear bombs and warheads in the US stockpile (as well as as the 400 ICBMs, 280 SLBMs, 66 strategic bombers, and 14 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines that carry them) are vital to that mission, to say nothing of affordable?"

"The writing was on the wall back in January 2021, when Adm. Charles Richard, commander of US Strategic Command, told the Defense Writers Group that the objective of the NPR should be 'validation, that we like the strategy we have. ... [T]nation has had basically the same strategy dating back to the Kennedy administration. It's been repeatedly validated through multiple administrations. It would be useful to do that again. And then to be satisfied that the capabilities we have are able to accomplish that again.' For Richard, the most senior military officer with operational responsibility over the nuclear arsenal , undertaking any kind of serious, thorough evaluation of nuclear requirements, let alone exploring any potentially beneficial alternatives to a strategy that, in his words, hasn't changed for 60 years, was wholly unnecessary. The question now [for Biden] is whether he will accept an NPR that is likely to do far, far less or find a way to ensure he receives actual policy options to pursue, rather than a nuclear fait accompli that changes little or nothing."

"Back to basics. What would an honest and productive NPR look like? Rather than starting with the unquestioned assumption that all the weapons we have and everything we're already doing to upgrade them is essential and effective, it would go back to first principles to identify the fundamental national security and foreign policy objectives of the United States 'before' proposing a strategy for how nuclear weapons can help to achieve some of them. Next the review would identify specific military targets to support that strategy, targets to support that strategy, assess the best weapons for those targets, and determine the precise force posture and deployment numbers to hold those targets at risk. Finally, it would quantify the amount of money required to accomplish all of this -- including designing, building, testing, and maintaining the warheads and all the supporting infrastructure -- both today and well into the future. It would also be managed not just by the Defense Department but jointly with the State Department (to fully assess diplomatic and arms reduction concerns) and the Energy Department (to better include the perspectives of those charged with actually maintaining the nuclear warheads and the facilities that sustain them). And it would allow academics and non-governmental experts (including retired governmental and military officials) opportunities to contribute their knowledge and experience before any drafts are written.  

Failing to do that will continue to perpetuate the so-called nuclear triad based on the longstanding but unsubstantiated (and unprovable) belief it is absolutely necessary to our deterrent posture.

  

Reducing Pentagon Spending

 William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, "Will the Biden Administration Dare Cut Military Spending?" Scheerpost, November 30, 2020.

"Pentagon spending could easily be reduced substantially even as the world was made a safer place. For that to happen, however, its budget would have to begin to deal with the actual challenges this country faces rather than letting billions of dollars more be squandered on outmoded military priorities and artificially inflated threats supposedly posed by our biggest adversaries.

One blueprint for doing just that has been put together by the Center for International Policy's Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of former White House, Pentagon, congressional budget officials, retired military officers, and think-tank experts from across the political spectrum. They have crafted a plan to save $1.25 trillion from proposed Pentagon spending over the next decade.

As that task force notes, for durable reductions in such spending to become feasible, this country's leadership would have to take a more realistic view of the military challenges posed by both China and Russia.

In recent years, the regime in Beijing has indeed been increasing its military spending, but when it comes to an armed presence in the Pacific region and the ability to make war there, the United States remains staggeringly stronger. As a start, it has an arsenal of nuclear weapons five to six times as large as China's (though, of course, it would mean a planetary Armageddon). And while Beijing's influence is primarily focused on its own region, the U.S. military has a historically unprecedented global reach, deploying nearly 200,000 troops overseas garrisoned on at least 800 military bases scattered across continents, and maintaining 11 aircraft carrier task forces to patrol the global seas. In reality, the sort of 'arms race' with China now being considered will be costly and unnecessary, while only increasing the risk of war between  those two nuclear-armed powers, an outcome to be avoided at all costs.

China's real twenty-first-century challenge to this country isn't military at all, but political and economic in nature. Its leadership has focused on increasing that country's power and influence through investment programs like its ever more global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Despite many problems, such efforts are clearly giving Beijing the sort of growing global clout, especially in the America First era of Donald Trump, that a hopeless attempt to match U.S. military power never could. Add to this one factor: if there's to be any hope of preventing future pandemics from ravaging the planet, curbing the growing impact of climate change, or reviving a global economy that's distinctly in the dumps, increased cooperation and transparency between the two greatest powers on the planet, not confrontation, will be a necessity.

As for Russia, a relatively shaky petro-state, its primary tools of influence in recent years have been propaganda, cyber-threats, and 'hybrid warfare' on its peripheries (as in its use of local allies to destabilize Ukraine). Despite its still vast nuclear arsenal, Russia does not represent a traditional military challenge to the United States and so shouldn't be used to justify another pointless Pentagon spending boost. To the extent that there is a military challenge from Russia, it can be more than adequately addressed by various European nations with the United States in a limited supporting role. After all, European members of NATO cumulatively spend more than three times what Russia            does on their militaries and far outpace it economically. Keep in mind that this isn't the Cold War era of the previous century. In reality, Russia's economy is now smaller than Italy's and Moscow is in no position to engage in an arms race even with the nations of Western Europe, no less Washington.

Despite its disastrous forever wars in distant lands, if the institution still often referred to as the 'Department of Defense' were to refocus on actual national defense rather than global military domination, it could, as a start, instantly forgo a number of ill-conceived and staggeringly expensive new weapons systems. Those would range from plans to 'modernize' the country's already vast nuclear arsenal by buying a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines at a cost of up to $2 trillion, to the fantasy of building up from current levels to a 500-ship Navy.

High on any list of programs to be instantly eliminated would be a proposed new International Ballistic Missile (ICBM). As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has pointed out, ICBMs are among 'the most dangerous weapons in the world' for a simple reason: a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch such missiles upon being warned of another power using similar weaponry to attack the U.S. Since, in the past, such warnings have proven anything but accurate, new weaponry of this sort will only increase the chances of an accidental nuclear war being started. The Pentagon has, however, already given the giant arms maker Northrop Grumman a  sole-source contract and $13.3 billion to develop just such a new weapon, a down payment on a program that could ultimately cost $264 billion to build and operate. Funds like those could go far to meet other genuinely pressing national needs.