Today Pincus reports:
The Pentagon may be having second thoughts about proposed revisions to its nuclear weapons doctrine that would allow commanders to seek presidential approval for using atomic arms against nations or terrorists who intend to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against the United States, its troops or allies.
The draft document, disclosure of which has caused a stir among some members of Congress and arms control advocates, would update rules and procedures for using nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy announced by the Bush administration in 2002. Previous versions of the unclassified doctrine have not included scenarios for using nuclear weapons preemptively or specifically against WMD threats.
Before Pincus published his first article, he was told by a Joint Staff spokesman that the draft was in the final stages of review and a few weeks away from being signed. Since the article's publication, the official tune has changed significantly -- Pincus has been told that changes have already been made to the document and lots more internal discussions are yet to come. Congress is also apparently getting reassurances that the revised doctrine is not fait accompli.
Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), who called the draft "disturbing" and "representing old, Cold War thinking," said Defense Department officials told him last week that negotiations and discussions on the draft were still underway.
Hobson, who is chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said: "I'm hopeful more rational minds will look at this. It is a very provocative proposal."
[...]
Arms control specialists and others have criticized the draft. Some say formally planning to use nuclear weapons preemptively increases the likelihood they will be used. Others said endorsement of preemptive strikes will make it tougher to persuade nonnuclear nations to forgo building an atomic arsenal.
Hobson said such negotiations would be difficult "with these kinds of policies out in public." [ed. especially sensitive timing given the failure to agree on a non-proliferation agenda at the US Summit and the current brouhaha over Iran at the IAEA]
Jeffrey Lewis (armscontrolwonk) has been all over this story for months, since he first came across the draft on the web. His disclosure in May 2005 prompted DOD to take down temporarily the entire Joint Electronic Library! His recent walk down memory lane provides links to relevant docs and discussions of the proposed revisions, including some items that are no longer on any official sites.
Pincus seems to have picked up on the story after Hans Kristensen provided an analysis of the draft in Arms Control Today. Kristensen covers a number of issues in his analysis of the draft, including implications for the strategic/theater distinction, strategic use of conventional weapons and missile defense.
For our purposes, however, I'll just focus on one section, where Kristensen questions the underlying assumptions of the proposed doctrinal changes. These changes are driven by the notion that the possible preemptive use of nuclear weapons is an effective deterrent against a WMD threat from enemies other than those with large standing nuclear arsenals. Or as Kristensen says, "For the nuclear planners, it seems so simple: deterrence must be credible, and the way to make it more credible is to increase the capabilities and number of strike options against any conceivable scenario."
The result of a focus on asymmetrical threats is a lowering of the bar on nuclear use. Kristensen explains:
The signs of [a break from old doctrine] are evident throughout the new nuclear doctrine in its description of the need for responsive nuclear forces that can “rapidly respond” to threats anywhere. It even defines a new category of nuclear planning, Crisis Action Planning, as “the time-sensitive development of joint operations plans and orders in response to an imminent crisis.” It is different from highly structured Deliberate Planning and flexible Adaptive Planning:
[...]
The basis for this drive for speed and responsiveness is the perception of the threat that faces the United States and its allies in the 21st century. It has become almost a mantra in national security discussions and analysis to portray today’s multipolar security environment as more unpredictable and dangerous than even the Soviet threat during the Cold War. The new nuclear doctrine enshrines that hype into nuclear doctrine.
Although today’s threats from “rogue” states and terrorists are serious indeed, it is healthy to keep in mind, especially when discussing nuclear weapons policy, that they are on a completely different scale than the global nuclear standoff that characterized the Cold War. Then, the human race and life on the planet was held at nuclear gunpoint for four decades, only 30 minutes away from global annihilation. Today’s nuclear strategy often operates on a far different scale: incorporating the far more limited threat from hostile states and even terrorists.
Yet, the new doctrine ignores this distinction and instead lowers the crisis intensity level needed to potentially trigger use of U.S. nuclear weapons by replacing “war” with “conflict.” The change may seem trivial, but its implication is important and deliberate. The change was proposed by STRATCOM, which explained that “[r]eplacing the word ‘war’ with ‘conflict involving the use of’ emphasizes the nature of most conflicts resulting in use of a nuclear weapon. Nuclear war implies the mutual exchange of nuclear weapons between warring parties—not fully representative of the facts.”
[...]
To be sure, some parts of this approach are not new: the 1995 doctrine also considered a role for nuclear weapons against terrorists despite serious questions about the credibility of such a role. Put together, however, the rhetoric in the new doctrine indicates that military planners anticipate that U.S. nuclear weapons might be used in much less intense crises than envisioned previously.
In the wake of Katrina, the high priority placed on a nuclear response to terrorist WMD threats has eerie echoes with what we've been discovering about the new Department of Homeland Security. As has become increasingly evident, the widely-criticized focus on terrorist incidents in the DHS list of potential disaster response scenarios -- to the almost complete exclusion of natural disasters -- has had real world consequences that were never intended by those in who orignally proposed creating DHS. The priorites of both DOD or DHS do not, however, necessarily reflect the judgments of even a Republican-controlled Congress. As Walter Pincus points out:
The first example for potential nuclear weapon use listed in the draft is against an enemy that is using "or intending to use WMD" against U.S. or allied, multinational military forces or civilian populations.
Another scenario for a possible nuclear preemptive strike is in case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."
That and other provisions in the document appear to refer to nuclear initiatives proposed by the administration that Congress has thus far declined to fully support.
Last year, for example, Congress refused to fund research toward development of nuclear weapons that could destroy biological or chemical weapons materials without dispersing them into the atmosphere.
The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."
But Congress last year halted funding of a study to determine the viability of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead (RNEP) -- commonly called the bunker buster -- that the Pentagon has said is needed to attack hardened, deeply buried weapons sites.
In highlighting the draft doctrine's emphasis on rogues and terrorists, Kristensen points to a significant discrepancy between how the Bush Administration portrays its policies -- to the public and Congress -- and the actual policies being pursued by the executive branch.
Although there has been extensive public debate on whether to build new or modified nuclear weapons, there has been essentially no debate about the doctrine that guides the use of nuclear weapons and influences future requirements.
[...]
Still, the doctrine and editing documents reveal a significant contradiction between the Bush administration’s public rhetoric about reducing the role of nuclear weapons and the guidance issued to the nuclear planners. Although the overall number of warheads is being reduced, the new doctrine guiding planning for the remaining arsenal reaffirms an aggressive posture with nuclear forces on high alert, ready to be used in an increasing number of limited-strike scenarios against adversaries anywhere, even pre-emptively.
[...]
Instead of drastically reducing the role of nuclear weapons, as the Bush administration told the public it would do, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism seem to have spooked the administration into continuing and deepening a commitment to some of the most troubling aspects of the nuclear war-fighting mentality that symbolized the Cold War.
This last comment -- that the Bush Administration seems spooked -- reminded me of an interesting observation Jim Hoagland made a few days ago in the context of the feeble federal response to Katrina.
It is impossible to understand the driving ethos of the Bush presidency -- including the decision to go to war in Iraq and perhaps Bush's seeming disengagement from a mere hurricane -- without understanding the president's burning determination to be able to say that he did everything he could to avoid a second major terrorist attack on the United States, agree with his measures or not.
Bush's informal minister of war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, perhaps best captures this spirit. Think constantly and urgently about 10/12, he reportedly tells Pentagon staffers in private meetings -- and what you will wish you had done to prevent it. He adds when displeased with suggestions: "It won't be this [stuff]."
The 10/12 reference is Rumsfeld's epigrammatic way not of predicting the date of a new terror attack but of emphasizing that the horror of 9/11 is likely to be repeated and augmented. It is a chilling symbol of the broad challenge that Bush must confront.
Hoagland was pleading for a two-fold change in the Administration's approach. First, the Administration has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Although it's understandable that addressing terrorist threats is of critical concern, it can't be allowed to overwhelm the rest of the government's domestic security and national defense functions and policies. And second, it's time to halt the Administration's extreme penchant for secrecy, finally define its strategy for dealing with terrorism, and share that strategy with the public.
I would take Hoagland's argument one step further -- without public discussions of key elements of the US strategy, there can be no correctives to internal executive branch incentives to over-emphasize terrorist threats to the detriment of other policy priorities. Katrina has highlighted a number of ways that the GWOT has distorted policy: questionable reallocations of bureaucratic roles driven by counterterrorism concerns; misguided personnel decisions; and budget processes that have shortchanged critical government functions. The GWOT has become the excuse for bureaucrats to justify their positions and increased budgets, for members of Congress to bring home bacon to their district, and rent-seeking beltway bandits and entrepreneurs to hitch a ride on the gravy train. Without some transparency -- via more vigorous Congressional oversight and the media -- the federal government is not going to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The problem is not exclusive to DHS. We've seen a similar story in DOD. Every service has been busy repackaging its current and dreamed-for capacities and weapons platforms as mission critical to the GWOT. Not surprisingly, a lot of this has simply been old wine in new bottles in preparation for budget battles and Rumsfeld's current QDR. Reassignment of roles within the military's bureaucracy, driven by a concern with undifferentiated "WMD" threats (now reacronymed an even less specific "WME" to the chagrin of the Armchair Generalist), raise suspicions that DOD may be repeating the same sorts of mistakes DHS has made in its reorganization. And now we see proposed changes in nuclear doctrine -- changes that are highly debatable and unlikely to receive Congressional endorsement -- being driven by the GWOT mindset.
Unfortunately, the lessons learned by DOD from this most recent incident of unwanted media attention may not be those advocated by Mr Hoagland. Walter Pincus concludes his article on the Pentagon being forced to rethink some of its doctrinal innovations:
One former senior combatant commander said that planning for preemptive use of nuclear and conventional weapons was included in past doctrinal statements, but never in unclassified versions. "This is just a draft, but represents the lack of expertise on the part of some Pentagon staff members" for including it in an unclassified document, he said.
[...]
When the draft doctrine was first submitted earlier this year for comment to the military services, Jeffrey Lewis, research fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said he discovered this Navy response on a Pentagon Web site: "There is repeated reference to how critical it is that nuclear and conventional forces be integrated, but there is no explanation of how to do this."
Lewis said the Joint Staff responded: "Many things remain under development in classified fora, like the integration discussion."
Shorter Pincus: We still don't know what else is part of the proposed revisions, and nobody's going to be foolish enough to not classify a draft again.
Shorter lessons for the rest of us: Gee, what a little sunshine can do!
Addenedum: Forgot to include a link to this interesting discussion of the broader nuclear doctrine debate by Daniel Nexon at Duck of Minerva. He points out some things that are not "new" in the proposed approach. Preemption, per se, is certainly not new -- in the nuclear arena specifically, the US has always refused to adopt a "no first use" policy. But, as Daniel argues, there are times when ambiguity has its virtues, especially in making deterrents credible.
UPDATE: If you can't get enough discussion of North Korea, Iran, nuclear doctrine and the NPT, further discussion in the post and comments over at ZenPundit.
cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism
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