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36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Session 1 - An Integrated Deterrence Strategy

Address by Mr. Brian Green, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Forces Policy, International Security Policy, U.S. Department of Defense

Mr. Green: First, thanks to IFPA and Dr. Pfaltzgraff for the invitation to speak here, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. As was just noted, I was asked to spend my time with you this morning building on the foundation that Ryan built for you and providing some of the basic ideas and concepts behind the New Triad. Are my slides going to appear here?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We have the slides here for the next presentation, but we don't have the slides for Brian Green’s presentation. Is there some way of making sure they’re loaded, ready for us? Unless you want to talk about the EMP threat?
[Laughter]

Mr. Green: Dr. Graham just offered me the opportunity, in fact.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: I mean, we could switch topics. Here we are.
[Laughter]

Mr. Green: Okay, I will start with a rather profoundly obvious point, that the global security environment has changed rather dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Although nuclear weapons remain an important part of U.S. strategic capabilities, there's a clear need and indeed Presidential guidance to adapt U.S. strategic forces to the new security environment.

The President’s direction noted on the slide here in 2001 was premised on the fact that Russia is not the old Soviet Union, is not an adversary of the United States; and indeed, in this new environment, reductions to nuclear weapons were possible without the terribly cumbersome arms control process to actually determine our force levels. While we signed the Moscow Treaty with Russia, we had already announced unilaterally determined force levels that we thought were appropriate, given the new circumstances.

Equally obvious that there have been changes in the environment is the point that serious challenges remain that we’re going to have to deal with. Russia is no longer an adversary, but it is certainly not a traditional ally. We have been attempting to develop a cooperative relationship with Russia, but progress in that respect has been uneven at best and more difficult than we had anticipated. Future role of China is unclear at this point, and there are obvious potential flash points that we have to attend to in that relationship. Rogue states potentially armed with WMD and means of delivery are another serious concern, particularly in light of the fact that deterrence of these rogue states is not completely understood and we have to describe that as more uncertain than we are used to facing.

And finally, we have to deal with violent extremists, many of which are trying to acquire WMD. Now, this is obviously a different environment than one than was dominated by the Soviet Union, one super power, a nuclear peer in which deterrence was the principle goal that we had to focus on. The results of deterrence failure were catastrophic enough that we focused almost all of our efforts on nuclear deterrence. In this environment, broader range of adversaries, a broader range of potential conflicts, we pay attention, much more attention, to a broader range of goals. As Ryan pointed out, the broader range of goals included assuring allies, dissuading potential competitors, deterring immediate threats, and finally we have to pay more attention in some respects to actually defeating an adversary if deterrence has failed.

So in this new security environment, the United States needs a broad range of strategic capabilities including a mix of nuclear capabilities, non-nuclear strike capabilities and defenses to meet this diverse set of adversaries and diverse set of potential conflicts, and to meet a more diverse set of goals. And it was in this changed context that the 2001 NPR considered the need to transform U.S. strategic capabilities to support the defense policy goals of assure, dissuade, deter, and defend.

The NPR, as many of you know and has already been described here, recommended profound changes in our strategic posture. As many of you know, the NPR results were approved in the National Security Presidential Directive 10, NSPD 10, and that directed that U.S. strategic nuclear forces be pegged at the level between 1700 and 2200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by the end of 2012. Those reductions, as I mentioned already, were codified in the Moscow Treaty that was signed in 2002. Nuclear posture review also established this New Triad that we’ve talked about already and defined the roles and interrelationships among the elements of that New Triad.

The New Triad is intended to provide a broad range of capabilities and the flexibility to meet this broader range of adversaries, of conflicts and goals, in a very dynamic security environment. One key here to note is that fielding all of the elements of the New Triad will help mitigate some of the risks associated with very deep reductions that we are now making in our nuclear forces while providing a broader range of options to the President.

This next slide is really intended just to show you the transition from the old triad to the new triad. The old triad certainly represented a robust set of diverse capabilities, the supporting rationale here was that if any one leg went down or was vulnerable, the other two legs of the triad would be able to fulfill the mission. The new triad, all three legs have to work together to get the desired effect. I’ll go into a little bit more detail on these later, but in terms of strike, there's really a triad of triads here. We’re looking at advanced conventional, we’re looking at non-kinetic and we’re looking at sustaining the nuclear strike capabilities, and within the nuclear strike capabilities, there's the traditional triad of SLBM, bombers and ICBMs.

Defenses, we have active and passive defenses. The active defenses that we’re all most familiar with are missile defenses that we’re trying to develop and we eventually may have to expand and increase missile defense. In terms of infrastructure, we have DOD infrastructure that’s critical to sustaining strategic weapons capabilities, and we have a DOE infrastructure that we need to sustain or perhaps to restore a capability to design, develop and produce new nuclear weapons. All this is supported then by some core capabilities related to ISR, command and control communications, and planning systems.

This next slide is really just intended to show the relationship between each of the legs of the new triad to each of the goals that we’ve laid out. And each of them is relevant to all of the goals. It’s a little bit of an eye chart and I won't spend too much time on it, but we do think of such things, and they are all related.

In terms of integrated and strike capabilities, the NPR calls for integrating nuclear and non-nuclear strike capabilities, both kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities into one leg of the new triad. This will result in a deterrence posture that's more appropriate to the 21st century threats that we’ve talked about. We intend to retain and modernize the nuclear arsenal to deter some adversaries, dissuade some challengers and assure our allies. We’re also going to seek to transform a portion of the force to exploit potential capabilities of advanced non-nuclear strike systems, as the capabilities of existing conventional weapons are improved.

And finally, non-kinetic capabilities that we’re going to pay attention to include things like information operations, electronic warfare, psychological operations, cyber operations, directed energy weapons, and even special operations forces can get involved in this mix.

These integrated strike capabilities will result in a broader range of operational capabilities so the U.S. is not limited just to threatening nuclear retaliation. And in fact, in many contingencies, these non-nuclear capabilities should be sufficient to meet our deterrent requirements. But in light of known or suspected threats from other countries related to nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, or in the face of some other surprising military developments, we will continue to rely on U.S. nuclear capabilities to deter adversaries and to assure our allies.

In terms of integrated defenses, most of you in this room know much of the history of this. The goal has been to field modest missile defense capabilities in the 2004 and ’05 time frame. There's been heavy emphasis early on in this, on the ground base midcourse defense system. But in addition to that, we focused on improving our sea based interceptor capability and improving our Aegis cruiser fleet. There's a forward based sensor aspect to this that we’re paying attention to and we’re continuing to develop and deploy the PAC 3 and we are going to try to improve this in a spiral capability over time and we’re going to try to extend our cooperation and missile defense area with our allies and friends.

In addition to protecting the U.S. homeland, when integrated with our strike capabilities, we should have a broad array of capabilities and options to deny our adversaries their objectives and to protect U.S. forces and allies, and to help minimize collateral damage. The combination of integrated strike capabilities and integrated defenses offer more credible and capable forces that will help deter aggression and help deny and adversary the achievement of his goals and will help assure that we are not prone to or vulnerable to coercion and thus help assure our allies and dissuade our adversaries.

It’s important to realize that offense and defense do not operate in a vacuum, that their effect is integrated as opposed to separate, and they're integrated both conceptually and operationally. Offense and defense is going to have to be integrated on the battlefield, and there will be aspects of this that relate to command and control battle management and communications. Intelligence, preparation of a battlefield aspect to it, and certainly an assessment part of this equation that relates to both before, during and after the battle.

Both offense and defense will enhance the effectiveness of the other, and thus enhance the ability to assure our allies and deter and dissuade and defend. And probably the bottom line on this is it will provide a broad range of options for our national leadership.

Finally, we get to responsive infrastructure. The NPR also calls for the integration of the responsive R&D and industrial infrastructure with the offensive and defensive elements of the triad. Responsive capability includes a flexible infrastructure, non-deployed assets, preparations that enable the U.S. to respond to potential contingencies, and to respond to adverse political, military and technological changes. The U.S. has to be capable of readily responding to political, military and technological changes in the security environment, and for this reason, the U.S. will have to retain that responsive industrial capability to complement the deployed force. In particular, a modern and responsive nuclear infrastructure is going to be key, especially as we reduce the size of the operation of deployed force.

I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes, couple of brief remarks in terms of how we’re going to implement all this, or operationalize it. United command plan changes starting in 2002 assigned almost all of these missions to the U.S. strategic command. This obviously makes for a very large meal for strategic command with many, many courses and largely strategic command is trying to leverage existing capabilities by establishing formal command relationships with other organizations such as DIAA, NSA and so on, rather than reinvent every wheel in this set of capabilities.

And this slide, finally, is designed just to show you this is a long journey. This is not a short or easy task to transition from traditional nuclear triad to the new triad. We obviously have to manage the nuclear drawdown and we have a long task in front of us trying to develop and then deploy new triad capabilities; all the while, we need to monitor the strategic environment for those surprises and changes that might make the challenge even greater than we face today.

Just in brief summary, we’ve gone over the very basics of the new triad and the NPR. The NPR capabilities, the new triad capabilities once deployed will provide that robust range of operational capabilities and policy options that we're after and that we’ll need to respond in the new security environment. When fully implemented, it will not only result in that broad array of capabilities, but it has the potential, anyway we believe, to raise the nuclear threshold and to further reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. But that said, nuclear weapons we anticipate will continue to hold a unique and important place in our capabilities. And with that, I will conclude.

Questions and Answers

Audience: Dr. Thomas Shepherd from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Is it possible to introduce precision low yield nuclear weapons into our stockpile without reducing or lowering the nuclear threshold?

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: That's for Brian Green, I assume?

Audience: Yes.

Mr. Green: I’ll tackle the one that was directed to me directly. In terms of whether or not it’s possible to introduce precision, low yield nuclear weapons without lowering the nuclear threshold, I would start by noting that the United States currently has no plans for introducing precision low yield nuclear weapons into its arsenal, so take that as a starting point. But the short answer to your question is yes, I think it is possible. The idea of precision low yield nuclear weapons is not new, we had low yield nuclear weapons in very large numbers in our arsenal in the past. We never used those weapons, for the obvious reason that the threshold for any nuclear use remains very, very high. It’s always going to be a Presidential decision, there's no potential I see anywhere on the horizon for being anything less than a Presidential decision. Short answer to your question is I think yes, but there are no plans to do so.