Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 34th IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security Strategy and Policy:
Security Planning and Military Transformation

December 2-3, 2003
U.S. Chamber of
Commerce Building
Lafayette Square, 1615 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C.

Address by Dr. Keith B. Payne, President, National Institute for Public Policy, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Policy

Introduction by Dr. Stephen M. Younger, Director, Defense Threat Reduction Agency

Dr. Younger: Our final panelist is Dr. Keith Payne, who is president and director of research at the National Institute for Public Policy, and an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University. He recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Policy, has written a number of books on deterrence, including Comparative Strategy: Fallacies of the Cold War Deterrence and A New Direction: Peacekeeping in the Nuclear Age, and others. Dr. Payne.

Dr. Payne: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be on this panel with a group of individuals who have done so much to move us forward in thinking about deterrence, and how to practice deterrence. And let me add my congratulations to those of Dr. Crouch to Professor Pfaltzgraff, and all the folks who have put on this obviously marvelous conference. I know how difficult it is to put on a very large, multifaceted conference, and you are indeed to be congratulated.

When I was asked to think about how we might reconsider deterrence from the past to the present, I thought back to the early 1990s where, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the evil empire, it seemed, at least to some, that the need for deterrence, particularly nuclear deterrence, was a thing of the past. A number of retired senior officers and civilian officials made highly visible speeches about the absence of any need for nuclear deterrence in the emerging new world order. Since then, the rise of hostile rogue states, armed with weapons of mass destruction, has eliminated most of the talk about a new world order, and highlighted our continuing need for a capability to deter attacks. Indeed, in this emerging environment, a single deterrence failure involving weapons of mass destruction could inflict casualties 1,000 times greater than those we suffered on 9/11.

So, the need for deterrence, once again, is obvious. But the fundamental question for this second nuclear age is, how can we deter these new threats? Some suggest that our Cold War understanding of deterrence worked well during the Cold War, and remains valid today. The essentials remain unchanged, they say, so don't fix what ain't broke. And indeed, the basic mechanism of deterrence remains the same. It's about making threats to control others' behavior, without fighting. That much, as Admiral Ellis pointed out earlier, goes back to Sun Su. But to put it simply, compared to the Cold War era, our deterrence goals are now very different. What we want to deter is different. Those we want to deter are different. How we're able to deter is different. And the contexts within which our deterrent much operate is are different. In this new environment, it shouldn't come as a surprise that much of our Cold War derived thinking about deterrence now needs to be reconsidered.

An important starting point in any rethinking and reconsideration is to recognize that our Cold War notions about deterrence were a reflection of that specific condition, those specific conditions of the Cold War. They were not timeless truths. Unfortunately perhaps, what we believed about deterrence in the Cold War is of questionable value now, because the specific details of time, place, culture, politics, leadership decision making, and even leadership personality, what I call the local conditions, can be decisive in determining if and how deterrence operates. Because these local conditions typically differ so dramatically over time and place, an approach to deterrence that was effective against an old foe in the past may be wholly ineffective for future foes. During the Cold War, we tended to assume that local conditions would favor the predictable functioning of deterrence, and that the lethality of our nuclear deterrent threat would wash out the significance of any local conditions that might otherwise work against deterrence. Our confidence in nuclear deterrence was so high that many in the civilian leadership called it "existential deterrence." Short of insanity, that is, the balance of terror, it was said, couldn't fail to deter.

Let me offer a conclusion up front. The Cold War conditions that gave rise to such confident notions about deterrence have changed dramatically, and as a result of these changes, much of what we believed was timeless truth about deterrence is now an anachronism. What were the basic principles of our Cold War approach to deterrence, and why are they now anachronisms? First, we defined strategic deterrence largely in terms of the interaction between US and Soviet nuclear forces. That is, we believed that the way to ensure a stable strategic deterrent relationship was to choreograph US and Soviet retaliatory nuclear capabilities to insure mutual vulnerability, i.e. a secure balance of terror. This became the working definition of what constituted a stable US strategic deterrence relationship.

And because we came to define strategic deterrence and stability largely in terms of nuclear forces, we generally debated which nuclear forces would insure deterrence, not whether the nuclear force posture really determined stability, and how deterrence might function. Some advocated more nuclear capability, others less. But most shared the belief that deterrence could be managed with great confidence by adjusting nuclear force postures. This comforting belief was made possible only by a simplifying assumption, and that simplifying assumption was that the local conditions in the Soviet Union would be conducive to deterrence working reliably, or simply would be overshadowed by the lethality of our threat.

Now, these local conditions, again, have to do with time, place, culture, politics, and leadership decision making. Let me just remind you that for deterrence to work predictably and reliably, it requires the presence of, one, leaders who understand the US deterrent threat, and will choose to subordinate whatever else might motivate them to that threat; two, leaders who are capable of taking in and assessing information about the external world in a function that is sufficiently accurate to support reasonable cost/benefit calculations; three, leaders who are capable of linking means to ends in their decision making; that is, they do cost/benefit calculations, and understand when tradeoffs have to be made; four, leaders who are attentive to and understanding of the intentions, interests, commitments, and values of the opponent, and can communicate with each other; five, leaders whose cost/benefit calculations can be dominated by the type of deterrent threats that we can make; and six, leaders who operate in a political system that allows individually rational cost/benefit calculations to establish corresponding state policies that in turn determine their actual behavior.

In our Cold War approach to deterrence, we generally just assumed that these six local conditions were present. But to risk understatement here, let me note that these conditions, necessary for deterrence to function predictably, are hardly universal. Indeed, several of them frequently are absent in international crises. Now, that absence doesn't mean that deterrence can't work. What it means is that deterrence cannot function predictably or reliably, as we assumed largely in the Cold War. And that in fact is our historical experience. Our optimistic Cold War assumption about local conditions and Soviet decision making may have been appropriate during the Cold War, but we have no basis for assuming the presence of these necessary conditions in our attempt to deter various contemporary rogue states, nor can we be confident that the lethality of our deterrent threat will be universally decisive in the decision making of the willing martyr, the desperate gambler, the incommunicado, the ignorant, the self-destructive, the foolish, or those rogue leaders who are motivated by absolute goals and immaterial goals. We simply are insufficiently familiar with the myriad of pertinent local conditions to make such simplifying assumptions now with any confidence.

Consequently, the typical confident Cold War assertions about how deterrence will operate are now little more than guesses against contemporary foes. Nevertheless, highly confident generalizations about deterrence remain par for the course, including with respect to rogue states. Those who oppose US deployment of ballistic missile defense, for example, typically insist that there is no need for missile defense because deterrence will work. Others offer equally confident claims that our nuclear deterrent is no longer credible, and therefore we should step back from nuclear deterrence altogether. Such confident generalizations, in the absence of a close examination of local conditions, reflect no more than intuitive guesses, whether the assertion is that nuclear deterrence surely will work, or that it surely will not.

These assertions are based on that old Cold War simplifying assumption that we can make confident predictions about deterrence based simply on the character of the military threats involved. We cannot. The problem is that those local conditions I've described can be decisive in the functioning of deterrence, and unfortunately, we probably will not know in advance when those local conditions will be decisive, or how they may affect the functioning of deterrence. In the emerging security environment, there is an irreducible level of uncertainty that will attend deterrence, not because rogue leaders are irrational, as is sometimes suggested, but because we don't know and won't know when or how local conditions are going to shape the functioning of deterrence.

The most vivid historical illustration of this problem was captured by the exchange between Cuban and Soviet leaders during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We now know what we did not even suspect at the time. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara encouraged the Soviet leadership to start a nuclear war using the missiles stationed in Cuba. Castro and Che demanded that the Soviets use their nuclear weapons against the United States, with an apparent willingness to accept Cuban national martyrdom as an acceptable price for destroying capitalism. Soviet Vice Premier Mikoyan, his response to these Cuban demands offers an important lesson for thinking about deterrence in the post-Cold War period. Mikoyan's response to Che Guevara was, and I quote, "We see your willingness to die beautifully, but we do not think it's worth dying beautifully." Shown here are the different, the very different types of calculations of a relatively cautious Soviet leadership, and Cuban ideological zealots. Both were rational, but they had different priorities, and only one was deterrable. In 1962, the deterrable Soviet leadership was in control of the networks. In the future, however, the zealots willing to die beautifully may be in control of the weapons of mass destruction.

Now, where does this discussion lead for the second nuclear age? One, our view about deterrence should be very different than it was in the Cold War. Deterrence remains important, but as J.D. said, its functioning now is uncertain to a degree that may not be predictable. Now, this conclusion carries a number of very significant implications about how we think and prepare to deter. Let me just highlight a few. First, we should immediately challenge any force posture recommendations that come from a highly confident assertion about how deterrence will work. Confident assertions that nuclear weapons no longer are credible for deterrence are as hollow as assertions that nuclear weapons can insure deterrence. We need to recognize that opponents will evaluate the credibility of our deterrent threats differently than we do, and in the prevalent practice of asserting what an opponent must believe in this regard. Perceptions of what is and isn't credible, what is and is not a credible deterrent, are driven by culture, and they're driven by context, i.e. those local conditions I mentioned. During the first Gulf War, for example, we attributed little credibility to our nuclear deterrent, but it was highly credible to Saddam Hussein, and it worked.

Second, we should stop defining the concept of deterrent stability in the narrow Cold War terms of mutual societal vulnerability, i.e. the balance of terror. In some cases, that Cold War approach may be stable. In other cases, it will be irrelevant. And in some cases, it may actually engender conflict. There are alternative approaches to deterrence, and deterrent stability that may now serve US and allied security interests far better, including vis-à-vis China, I believe.

Third, we no longer have the past luxury of calculating deterrence requirements by reference to a single opponent, because we may need to deter across a wide spectrum of local conditions and contingencies. Keys to making US deterrence policy all it can be will be flexibility, adaptability, and a wide spectrum of deterrent threat options. In some cases, nonmilitary approaches to deterrence may work. In other cases, conventional force options may be adequate. In still other cases, nuclear deterrence may be necessary to deter. Having such a spectrum of capabilities and threat options will not ensure deterrence. Nothing can do that. But it may help to insure that we will have the capability to tailor our deterrent threat to the extent possible across a very diverse range of foes and contexts.

Fourth, because we can no longer assume that deterrence will operate reliably, we no longer have the past luxury of focusing so exclusively on deterrence as the determinant of our force requirements. For example, in recognition of the potential for deterrence failure or irrelevance, we must not only seek to deter, but we must also prepare seriously to limit damage to our civil society, our forces, and our allies, in the event deterrence fails. This point may seem prosaic, but it's a dramatic departure from the US Cold War approach to deterrence, where we sought to codify the condition of mutual vulnerability.

Finally, to make deterrence all it can be will require that we understand the local conditions for each opponent to the extent possible, before we address the secondary question of, how should we attempt to deter them? In the absence of examining local conditions, little confidence can be attributed to any assertion that a particular threat option will or will not deter, or that a particular condition will or will not be stable.

The Bush administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review was a significant initial effort to take into account these various changes in the strategic environment. This may be most obvious by the subsequent presidential decision to integrate a broader range of deterrent threat options, including nuclear and non-nuclear options, and to deploy missile defense. Each of these initiatives is critical when deterrence is important, but also uncertain. And our capabilities for deterrence will need to adapt over time, as circumstances and local conditions change. The NPR was a major step forward in this regard. It heralded a much needed and overdue paradigm shift away from our Cold War model and toward a much more adaptive approach to deterrence. Now, it is true that all the details of this paradigm shift have not been spelled out. But recall that our Cold War deterrence paradigm matured over about a 25-year period of intense debate. Much work remains to be done to develop approaches to deterrence and new threat options that are better suited to the emerging security environment than that which we inherited from the Cold War. We are indeed still in the early stages of shaking off the debris of Cold War thought, and identifying the outlines of a new deterrence paradigm. The NPR was a very good start, but I fear that we don't have 25 years to get it right this time. We need to move forward as fast and as thoughtfully as we can. Thank you.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Younger: We have time for questions, if the people with questions would identify themselves, and please wait for the microphones.

Audience: Thank you. It seems that the idea of deterrence by—

Dr. Younger: Could you identify yourself, please?

Audience: I'm Carey Mullis (?). And I don't really belong here, but I got invited, and I've been really enjoying it. But I'm involved in trying to solve the bioterrorist kind of problems from the biological side. But the thing that occurs to me, the idea of deterrence by blowing up the whole country, or setting up a really large bomb in a country, that worked fine when we were talking about a country that we were going to perhaps go to war with. But it seems like a lot of times in the present, we're really just mad at the guy who's running the place, right? And we've sort of gotten over this notion that it's illegal to assassinate somebody, right? But if we had a way to irritate him worse and worse every day until he did what we wanted him to do, it would be better, in my opinion, than saying, "If you don't do this, we're finally going to have to run out of patience with you and blow you up."

For instance, if we could have heated up Baghdad by one degree centigrade every day, by having mirrors like the kind that Gerard O'Neill (?) proposed that we build years ago in space that would focus light on little generators and make—I mean, this might sound crazy, but we have the capacity to do that. We could focus light from space on some palace, and say, "It's never going to get dark there until you do this, until you let us do our inspections. Every night, you're going to have a sun, what's going to look like a sun, and your place is going to get hotter and hotter. Your place, not the whole city, but your place, or some other place. We've decided we don't like this building. We want to see what's inside of it. We're eventually going to burn it up." I mean, I think we should think in terms of, some of the time, we're not really against the whole country.

Dr. Younger: I'm wondering if you can get to a question, please.

Audience: Oh, the question? The question I had, I guess, was, why, instead of just concentrating on what sort of nuclear deterrence we could have, is, how can we exert powerful influence on people, decision makers, in various countries that we're having problems with? I guess that would be the question. I'm just suggesting a few.

Dr. Younger: Who would like to address that. Keith?

Dr. Payne: Without commenting on the specific proposal about heating up Baghdad, let me just suggest that your basic question was, why, instead of concentrating on nuclear weapons, should we not be concentrating on a broader array of approaches to deterrence, to influence behavior? What you have just described, in this latter part of your question, is exactly what one of the points that the NPR recommends, and is widely recognized as a new approach to thinking about deterrence in this post-Cold War period. As I said earlier, as Dr. Crouch pointed out earlier, one of the recommendation of the NPR was to put together and integrate a much broader array of threat options, conventional and nuclear, so that whatever the local conditions require with regard to deterrence, we're more likely to have the type of threat option that's most effective for deterrence on that occasion. So, the heart of your point is, why don't you look at broader approaches than just nuclear? All I can say is, in fact, we are, and that's at the heart of the NPR.

Audience: John Kayes (?), National Defense University. Al-Qaeda with a nuclear weapon is viewed by many people as a nightmare scenario, mainly because, as many believe, it's not deterrable. If they get it, they'll attempt to use it. You can try to prevent them from using it, but to persuade them not to attempt to do it, many consider not doable. Admiral Ellis, you expressed a lot of confidence that deterrence works, as a general statement, including against non-state actors. Do you think in fact there are ways to deter this type of scenario? And if you have any specific ideas in that regard, I'd be very interested in them.

Admiral Ellis: Well, with apologies to my fellow panelists, the point to be made here is that, as I talked in general terms about IO and the real opportunity we have to bring together all elements of national influence, the idea that the act that you described could occur in complete and total isolation I think probably is not one that most of us would believe possible. In other words, there's got to be some element of support. There's got to be monies transferred. There's got to be at least a sanctuary of some type identified and supported, either openly or tacitly, by leadership and the like.

My point is not to make a blanket pronouncement that deterrence will always work. I just think it's inappropriate to write it off. I kind of follow the Keith Payne school here, that it may work, and it may not, and we need to have an understanding of that. I think there are broader elements to it, and that's the point I would raise. And so, the idea that we would influence and shape those who support this on a nation-state basis, those who offer sanctuary, those who fund and resource—But it's even broader than that. I mean, when you think about it, there are societal and cultural issues that are in play as well, that people who subscribe to suicidal efforts and the like have some image of rewards that await them, if not in this world, certainly the next. And how do you disabuse them of that through mechanisms that address on a more reasoned scale what the world's religions are really all about?

Those types of things that build a part of a more complete and comprehensive campaign are the elements that I was alluding to when I said, "Let's not be too quick to write off deterrence." It is broader than just the narrow focus that I would argue we have pursued, as Dr. Payne described, during the Cold War. And while the tools are not all in place to do that, nor are the mechanisms to coordinate it, I think it has tremendous potential. And it's that effort that needs to be aggressively pursued.

Audience: Alex Ellerman (?) from Systems Planning and Analysis over in Alexandria. This is the second time this week I've heard somebody talk about putting a conventional warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile. And I have a question about that, which is, how do you fire a conventional intercontinental ballistic missile at Pyongyang without having the Russians thinking that it's a nuclear weapon headed for Vladivostok, or the Chinese thinking that it's a nuclear weapon headed for, say, Dayang (?)?

__: There's a number of ways that you can do that. The most obviously, of course, is to communicate with the Russians so that they know what they are doing. I mean, you can imagine using, say, a D-5 missile with, say, a 25,000-pound front end of high explosive. It won't have a long range, but it may turn out to be an excellent bunker buster that would be useful against hard and deeply buried targets, and it would have a much different trajectory than an ICBM that was flying at ICBM distances. So, there's a number of ways in which that problem can be managed. But the nature of the relationship with Russia is now drastically different, and that I think makes it more practical to have a force that will more seamlessly mix advanced conventional and nuclear capabilities, so that they can be used depending on the requirements of the circumstances.

Audience: Thanks. David Roof (?) with Global Security News Wire. This is for the panel, but in particularly Admiral Ellis. Do you believe, as J.D. Crouch has suggested, that in the future the US is going to increasingly be the initiator of conflicts, and that our strategic forces that we're developing now, including missile defense and whatever, will better enable us to do that?

__: I'm no better at predicting the future than anyone else, and so I certainly wouldn't go down that path. As we talk about capabilities, as we talk about the options, and the flexibility, and the broader spectrum of tools that we can provide the nation's leadership, I think that's the direction we're going. Given that we can't predict the future, just as we cannot predict accurately the success or lack thereof with regard to deterrent concepts in and of themselves, I think it would behoove us to hedge our bets against an alternative future which may not be the one that we anticipate.

The other thing I tell the War College is, we will plan for 100 contingencies, and fate will deal you the 101st. And it is how you reassemble the elements and the preparation that you've gone through in satisfying the needs of that first 100 that allow you to respond appropriately, adequately, proportionally, and in a timely manner to that 101st contingency. And so that's what we're talking about here. A broader range of options, more non-nuclear and even non-kinetic options, a more pervasive ability to know what's going on, and to act appropriately and precisely, those are the types of capabilities that we're looking for for future systems across the full range. And the future in which we see them serving is as much your guess as it is mine.

Audience: Bill Jones from Executive Intelligence Review. A related question. There was much discussion about a year ago with regard to the introduction to the so-called mini-nukes as bunker busters. This is an idea that has been around for at least a decade, but has gained some momentum with the Nuclear Policy Review, and raised a lot of questions with people. Particularly, I'd like—Dr. Younger had mentioned the fact that battlefield nuclear weapons do not exist. We don't have them today. It's a good thing we don't. But by introducing the mini-nukes into the active armory, does this not set a bad precedent in terms of the many other nuclear powers that now exist today, not all of which are rogue states? They also have to make decisions: At what point do we use our nuclear weaponry if the United States sets kind of a precedent, saying "We can do this with these smaller nuclear weapons—"

END OF SIDE 2, TAPE 3

TAPE 4

Audience: —form of a nuclear weapon in a conflict situation. Does that represent a problem or not?

Dr. Younger: No, I don't think so. What I said was, I don't believe in the concept of usable battlefield nuclear weapons. I think any nuclear weapon is strategic by its very nature. I don't believe that the introduction of lower yield systems would reduce the nuclear threshold. Indeed, as I said at the beginning, I think if anything the nuclear threshold for the United States and all countries should be going up for the simple, practical reason that the United States will prevail in any conventional conflict. So it's in our best interest to keep nuclear weapons off the table. So I don't see the introduction of lower yield systems making nuclear weapons more usable. And I find it curious that people will object to the introduction of less destructive systems, and insist that we maintain high yield systems that were developed for quite a different time. I'm missing that logic. We should apply the appropriate force in terms of achieve the objective, always recognizing that crossing the nuclear threshold is an enormous step.

Audience: Eric McVaden (?) with IFPA. Dr. Payne, you painted a very complex picture of deterrence. It dawned on me that the picture may even be more complicated than you suggested, because what I'm thinking of are—We have now certainly put deterrence into the minds of, maybe in a more serious way, of many, many other countries who are now looking to deter us. And I wonder if that complexity—I'm thinking all the way from China to North Korea to Iran and so forth. Is that truly, as it has just struck me, an added dimension to this, or am I making something of nothing?

Dr. Payne: No, it's a good point. And what it means is that that deterrence function that you just described may be more of a challenge than the deterrence functions we hope to fulfill during the Cold War. In fact, Dr. Crouch touched on this earlier. In fact, one of the questioners said that Dr. Crouch was proposing that we will be the initiators of conflict, and that wasn't the point at all. It fits right in with this particular question. The notion is that, in the past, the United States was in the guardian role of deterring attacks on allies and deterring attacks on ourselves. In the future, it may well be that the United States is compelled to deter escalation by a regional aggressor as the United States is confronting that aggressor in its own territory. That's not initiating conflict. That's trying to deter an aggressor from escalating while we are in that area possibly defending our allies and defending our interests.

Does that make deterrence more of a challenge? You bet it does. Because what it means is that, instead of in the past our threatening escalation as we did to the Soviet Union under flexible response, we may be in a regional contingency where our goal is to protect an ally or protect our interests. And that may cause us to have to be in a confrontation or a war with a regional aggressor, and actually deter that regional aggressor's escalation simultaneously while we are combating them conventionally. That's a very tough deterrence challenge, and it's a new challenge for this post-Cold War period.

Audience: Admiral Ellis, in the not-too-distant past, there was some discussion on deconfliction of authorities between the Combatant Commanders with regard to theater, regional, as well as global missile attack. Does your new mission as the global missile defense czar, so to speak, resolve that problem?

Admiral Ellis: I think to a large degree, it has. The role that we fulfill is one of creation of the architecture, the integration, the assessment, and the provision of those capabilities to the regional Combatant Commanders, so that they in turn can execute their statutory responsibilities for the defense of their area of responsibility. It's that simple. We are charged with operationalizing this. MDA is doing a magnificent job, but it's called Missile Defense Agency, but it might as well stand for Missile Development and Acquisition Agency, because that's what they're doing. How we operationalize that, I think, is going to be critically important. And somebody needs to do that so that it's consistent from one AOR to another, that there aren't operational concepts and plans and communication architectures and procedures that differ from one AOR to another.

There's a logical global element to this, and indeed, the Secretary of Defense has noted that there is no such thing as theater missile defense anymore. There's only missile defense on a global scale, and with various elements and layers of that. So our role is relieving Ron Kadish (?) of that burden of operationalization, and providing those capabilities in a timely manner to the regional Combatant Commanders, and they welcome that level of support. But I certainly would defer to other panelists who have had considerable experience in that discussion as well.

__: One quick thing I'd add to that. I agree that I think it has resolved a lot of those problems. But we are about, let's say, a year from now to have the first missile defense capability to defend the United States since, I think, what, 1975. So I would expect that while it has resolved problems, we're going to learn a lot between now and then, and indeed, that capability is going to evolve. And when it evolves, as we add to it and change it, we're going to have to change the relationships. For example, how does space-based ISR fit into that architecture, and who controls it, things like that. So I think a lot of those things are being worked out, but this will be a work in progress for many years.

Audience: Thank you. Sharon Weinberger (?) from Defense Daily. My question would be mostly for Dr. Younger. Returning to the question of low yield nuclear weapons, could you address for a minute how low yield nuclear weapons would fit into deterrent value? How would it provide more of a deterrent, for instance, in the current nuclear arsenal, and what would be the basket of targets that a low yield nuclear weapon would be aimed at, for example.

Dr. Younger: First let me say that I believe that nuclear weapons are weapons of to be used only in extremis. That is, if you have no other solution to a problem, and the problem is imminent, and the consequences of that problem are unacceptable, that's when a nuclear weapon can be considered. If you were in that situation, you would still like to use the least amount of force possible. And that is the driver for looking at lower yield systems. There is a concept that's been bandied of self-deterrence. That is, our weapons are of sufficiently high yield that he adversary believes that we would never use them. It is an implicit part of deterrence that the adversary believes that we might use them if we are pushed too far. So, does that make them more usable in a battlefield sense? No. Because you want to keep that threshold high. But at the same time— and unfortunately in human affairs, contradictions often reign, and this is a case where that happens—it is also true, where you want the adversary to believe that if he did drive you into a corner, that you would have a weapon suitable to remove the threat.

Audience: Kurt Canelli (?), National Defense Fellow at Harvard. In light of where our world's headed, much more global, does the concept of combatant command divided by regions make sense, in light of global strike and ISR, for Admiral Ellis?

Admiral Ellis: I think it does. There are clearly some tremendous benefits from a regional perspective that can't be replicated any other way. I mean, the presence there, the relationships, the exercises, the regional planning, even for contingencies and the like, the long-term efforts such as recently were undertaken in Iraq and elsewhere, all of those are appropriate for regional addressal (?). So in no way is it an either/or proposition. And we talk very candidly at STRATCOM that it's not about ownership. It's about providing a capability to the nation's leadership that it needs for scenarios that are likely to confront us in the future. And whether we are supported or supporting is immaterial, as long as we've got mechanisms that clearly enable us to do both. So, that's the important thing. What kind of capabilities do we need to address for this new world?

Because quite frankly, there are things that are global in character. We have capabilities as a nation that are global in character, and they lend themselves to oversight in a global manner, even as they are provided and applied with a regional focus when that's appropriate.

Audience: My name's Bryce Harris (?). I'm with OSD Seed Sue Policy (?). My question is for Admiral Ellis. You mentioned earlier that as we approach success in warfare that it's important that we certainly not only achieve success, but that we be perceived as winning in war. How do you reconcile that in an age where we are increasingly employing precision munitions, short of doing a demonstration with a larger munition such as a daisy cutter, MOAB, or certainly a nuclear weapon.

Admiral Ellis: Well, I don't think we ever would want to get into a situation, much as Dr. Younger was addressing on the nuclear side, and certainly applicable on the conventional side, where we fail to understand and appreciate the need for proportionality in the efforts that ultimately we might be called upon to undertake in the nation's defense. So, again, you don't want to colloquially blow a bigger hole just so it's more visible to everyone. My remarks were more linked to the realities of today's environment. I mean, the proof is in recent conflicts, whether it's in my experience in Kosovo, or the recent experience in Iraq. Very little goes on that is not known very quickly on a global scale. Very little, if it's of sufficient interest, remains tactical for very long. It quickly becomes operational, and sometimes strategic and political. My point is, in this networked environment in which we operate, it's not just us that are operating, our forces that are operating in a network-centric environment. Indeed, the world is. It's one of the consequences of globalization, and the omnipresence of the communication nodes and the like. So, I don't think that it would be necessary to shape the weapons on a general scale for visibility rather than effectiveness and proportionality.

Audience: My name's Eric Kerr (?). I'm a Brookings as a National Defense Fellow. Admiral Ellis, General Everhart (?) defends the air, and he pretty much works with FAA, has his own radars, pretty clear lines. Information operations with FCC, Commerce, Treasury, Justice, where does that stand? Are you the guy who has the button to defend our communications infrastructure?

Admiral Ellis: Well, my lane in the road is pretty broad, but it's not that broad. Remember, I characterized it fairly carefully as Department of Defense information operations, is the portfolio that we were handed by the president on the 10th of January this year. For those of you that are not aware, that's very precisely defined in Department of Defense documents. It includes computer network attack and defense. It includes psychological operations. It includes electronic warfare. It includes operational security. And it includes military deception. Those are the pillars, if you will, of Department of Defense IO. I believe personally, as I think I said in my remarks, that IO is obviously much broader than that. In fact, I joke with, again, the War College classes, no matter how you define it, it's not broad enough. It ought to involve everything that we can bring to bear as a nation.

Someday, I believe, as IO tools mature, and those capabilities and coordination mechanisms mature, we will reverse the way we do business today. Today, we write IO annexes to military war plans. I believe that someday we may write military annexes to IO plans, which may put things in perspective.

Dr. Younger: Other questions? Okay. If there are no other questions, then we will declare victory. I thank the panelists, and I thank the audience for your attention.