Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

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 3 - Nuclear/Non-Nuclear Forces and Deterring Escalation in 21 st-Century Crises

Address by the Honorable Ronald F. Lehman II, Director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Mr. Lehman: I knew that Fred and Paula would be hard acts to follow, but I didn't know I was going to have to compete with photographs of a missile performing an unnatural act. [laughter] But nevertheless, that is impressive technology.

Jim, thank you for your kind introduction. I actually am both honored and pleased to be here. I look around the room and I see so many people with whom I’ve worked over the years on things nuclear, WMD, non-proliferation, arms control, and of course the panel members have been an important part of my life, both past and present.

But Jim’s introduction reminds me a little bit of an introduction I got from my mother when I had been a particularly naughty boy. She introduced me as her husband’s son from his first marriage. It’s true, but it can be misleading without some additional information. In this case, my mother was the only wife. [laughter] But in the case of my career, I actually began very far away from things nuclear and WMD. I began in Vietnam in counterinsurgency, I was in special ops., then I matriculated to electronic warfare. By the time I came to Washington, I was working NATO issues, but primarily conventional armor and anti-armor and issues of that nature. It was only when I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff that I picked up the nuclear accounts and began to delve into things nuclear and other WMD in such depth, even though I’ve had at least a smattering of nuclear theology in graduate school.

When I began to work the nuclear issues, it became very clear to me that we had a problem of two cultures. And I came from a non-nuclear culture. In fact, I came from a fundamentalist, extreme form of the non-nuclear culture. Those who believe as I did, believe there was the Air Force, there was the Navy, and then there was the military. And I did military things. The nuclear was somehow another realm. And the two culture’s division was not just C. P. Snow’s division between those who were technology oriented and those who weren’t – the policy world and others. There was also a real schism between the nuclear and the conventional, and it wasn’t that efforts hadn't been made to integrate them, it’s just that when you looked at career patterns, when you looked at how budget decisions were made, there were a lot of pressures to keep them separate, and not a lot of efforts to optimize the integration of the policy and the programs, even though there was a lot of them.

And there was a third schism that over the years has become even more clearly a problem, and that's between the regional experts and the functional experts, the people who know East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, terrorists on the one hand, and those who focus on national security issues, military operations, logistics, countermeasures on the other.

Now, we like to say that we got through the Cold War successfully, we developed at great expenditure of money, a cadre of people who could be quasi sociologists, quasi technologists, quasi military operators, and national security people. And maybe we did well enough, although in retrospect, those of us who were there remember it as being a lot harder and not always as successful as one would like. And I think that means that for the future, these splits between the technical and non-technical and the nuclear and non-nuclear, and the regional and the functional specialists are going to create serious problems in the years ahead unless we find some way to bring those communities together. It can be done, but it’s a challenge. And partly it’s a challenge because we face some new changed circumstances and we have to address the items that I would put on what I’ll call the learning curve.

But we have another problem, and that's what I will call the forgetting curve issues. There are a lot of things we used to think we knew how to do that we’re forgetting how to do. The people who used to do them are leaving, and we’re moving into this brave new world where we need the kind of creative thinking that Dr. Iklé has talked about. And so we need fresh blood and young blood, but at the same time we’re going to do a lot of reinventing the wheel. And so is there some way to bring the generations together and optimize? So I want to compliment Bob Pfaltzgraff for this conference.

I didn't prepare view graphs, even though I'm in a DOE lab because Jim wanted me to wrap up and it’s hard to wrap up in advance until you've heard what the others have said. But what I would like to do is make some points about the learning curve and the forgetting curve. And I will try to take into account some of the things that were said this morning, some of the things that my colleagues here on the panel have just said.

Dr. Iklé as always has elevated this, so let me try to spar with him and plagiarize Abraham Lincoln. Our nation has never had a good definition of capability based planning. It’s a problem. There's a tension because on the one hand, what you're trying to do is develop a certain general capability that you can apply in an uncertain world. On the other hand, your doctrine and guidance and goal is to be more tailored and precise and specific with respect to the scenarios and the application of these capabilities. So there's a tension there. And even on just the issue of sizing your forces and determining the composition, there's confusion. For some people, capability based planning means the world’s uncertain, therefore you need everything. For others, capability based planning means the world’s uncertain, therefore you can’t commit to anything.

Well, somewhere between those two extremes, we’ve got to have a standard and a way to decide what is it we’re going to do. And at the risk of bringing back old ideas, I think the key is that we’ve got to have the capability based planning, linked to a focus. What's the problem? If we're going to have tailored strategies that are, as I somewhat jokingly say, context specific and culturally sensitive, in short, if you're going to do that kind of tailored effect, then you really have to do more planning, not less planning. And if you're going to have a general capability then rather than dedicated forces for very specific scenarios, and I think by the way, that is the right answer, you really do have to start thinking in terms of what I will call Boolean algebra. You know, how do I repackage things constantly to insure that I’ve got the right capabilities for the scenarios?

And General Obering had some very interesting scenarios up there, and there are some others that I think need to be dealt with very directly. But again, the notion of ad hoc planning, meaning something happens, it’s a surprise, we pull a group together and we figure out what we’re going to do, won’t work. You have to have done most of the work in advance and then you can do agile planning based on the fact that most of the pieces are available, now you've got to tailor them to the surprise.

There is an issue here that I think in this integration of nuclear and non-nuclear including information ops, network ops, other unconventional, there's a dynamism here in dealing with this in a regional context. It is going to be very difficult, I think, for the national security community to integrate. Again, it’s not that we haven't tried in the past, but it is going to be very, very hard. I was asked whether I believed it was possible and I said, “Do I believe in this integrated approach?” It’s a little bit like the sociologist who goes up to the Kentucky backwoodsman and says, “Do you believe in baptism?” And the old moonshiner looks him in the eye and says, “Believe in baptism? Hell, I’ve seen it done.” [laughter]

We have integrated, we know how to do the pieces together, but Dr. Iklé is exactly right, we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t substitute abstract labels for what are, in fact, going to have to be very meaningful, specific, operational actions. And let me give you an example. Everybody’s in favor of effects based planning and targeting, good idea. Okay, now explain to me what the measure of merit is that's common to nuclear, conventional, information ops, network warfare, and different other functional effects? In fact, it’s not only the problem that you have this apples and oranges issue of incommensurates that you have to make commensurate in some way, but for example, a lot of these depend on what is called functional defeat. Ask an armor officer about functional defeat on the battlefield because when you put a tank round into an enemy tank, if you don't get what they like to call catastrophic destruction, i.e., a big explosion, you don't know it’s dead. So what is your reaction since it may shoot back at you? The answer is you shoot again, then you shoot again, and you keep shooting. You go out to any tank battlefield in history, starting World War I but primarily World War II and the Middle East, and what do you find? Tank hulks with lots of holes in them because people kept trying to kill them because they couldn't tell whether it was dead or not.

Functional defeat is an important part of this more sophisticated, integrated approach. But what's the measure of merit? Intellectually, that's going to be a very big challenge, and that's only one of them. And now let me make it even more complex by saying that assure, dissuade, deter, defend, defeat are not new concepts. But clearly, the NPR and the national strategy are right, that we need a better optimal integration of these more complex interactions. But what's the measure of merit? How do you compare how much assurance, how much dissuasion, compares with how much deterrence and how much defeat? These are going to be challenges.

Another item on the learning curve that I’d like to highlight is this whole issue of asymmetrical threats. And we all talk about somebody else’s asymmetrical threat to us, and it’s a real issue and I'm going to come back to it in another context. But I want to ask the other side of the question. Isn’t one of the most important things on our learning curve, the question of what are our asymmetrical threats to whatever they are in these scenarios? Where's the leverage? I mean, shouldn’t that be one of the major items on our learning curve, find us some leverage? I could go on about the learning curve, but the basic pitch about the learning curve is there are changes and there are uncertainties, and we need a new generation of more diverse, multidisciplinary people to think about it.

Now, let me talk about forgetting curve. There what I want to talk about first is that we forget that nuclear and conventional has always been related somewhat and in some cases very intensely related. Now, it’s true that there are some scenarios in the world for which, for example, nuclear weapons are not a very immediate part of any kind of deterrent, maybe not even player in assurance or dissuasion. And certainly are not the weapons we’re going to use for defeat. And likewise, there are some scenarios during the Cold War where nuclear weapons were right at the core, in the center, and everybody understood.

I was asked once in Hiroshima what the purpose or role of nuclear weapons have been, and how well have they done that. And I said, “Well, you know, there have been—“ I think at that time, some “150 or so” small wars around the world, but there's been no third world war, so I think we can take credit for preventing the third world war.” I should tell you throughout Asia, the next day, there were headlines, “Lehman says nuclear weapons exist to prevent wars in the third world.” [laughter] Well, sometimes your message doesn’t come across. But what I do want to say is that for many of the most important scenarios in which you would even remotely consider the use of nuclear weapons, they are tightly linked to the conventional.

You know, it’s hard to imagine nuclear weapon use begins because somebody woke up and started a nuclear war. It’s almost going to be because something else bad was happening and vital interests were involved. And Bob McNamara is here, Fred Ikle is here, and many of the people who remember the great debate over “” Today, there's a tendency to think of flexible response as the policy of dealing with various types of nuclear weapons in different scenarios. People forget that the fundamental driver for flexible response was really the relationship between the nuclear and the conventional. And indeed, the whole debate over no first use throughout the Cold War was really about the question of the synergism between the nuclear and the conventional deterrents. So to talk about the nuclear threshold without talking about the conventional threshold, was seen as childish. In fact, in many ways what determines the nuclear threshold are the conventional circumstances.

And even today, in more recent years, this theme has continued. You know, a number of years ago, we issued this great statement etched in marble at NATO, “nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort.” Well, just as our policy was flexible response really that before we ever gave it that name, and has been flexible response long after we got rid of that name, so nuclear weapons were weapons of last resort always. Now, by weapons of last resort, we never meant that after all was lost, we only use these in retribution. By last resort, we meant the time had come that they were necessary.

And, why would you consider using nuclear weapons? Well, it had to have been circumstances that were vital for which they were warranted, and you didn't have an alternative. Now the truth is, in many cases, throughout the years we got rid of a lot of nuclear weapons because we found conventional alternatives. But for those vital scenarios where something of tremendous importance to the United States and its allies are involved, it is very likely that there is some kind of relationship between nuclear and conventional and unconventional and the offense/defense that really needs to be a part of the new calculation.

In fact, I think what we’re going to discover is that some of the themes from earlier years are going to reemerge and are going to have to be discussed. And let me give you an example. I think most people would argue that we don’t need the large nuclear forces that we had in the Cold War, and that at least the circumstances were the United States would feel compelled to use nuclear weapons may be fairly remote. Most believe nevertheless, that we will need to retain a significant nuclear capability for some time. But at the same time, we quite well recognize we need to enhance our conventional capability. Now, platforms are not cheap, and you have in the strategic nuclear forces of the United States very valuable and useful platforms. And in the case of the bombers, they have predominantly become conventional with the nuclear mission for the bombers being a hedge. And we’ve already begun to convert some of our ballistic missile submarines to cruise missile submarines.

And so there is a sense in which in the years ahead, I suspect we’re going to see that we have two valuable levers for dealing with geo-strategic and regional circumstances. One is the lever of the conventional nuclear mix and that's the simple form. The more complex form, which I think STRATCOM would emphasize is the offense, the defense, information ops, and as I think several people have said today, pre=conflict, trans conflict, and post conflict. How do you think through optimizing the assure, dissuade, deter, defend, defeat by integrating those things? But two levers that you have in the strategic forces of the United States under STRATCOM are the nuclear/conventional mix, and also the readiness tempo and operations tempo of your forces. How many forces do you put, subs at sea? Are the bombers primarily conventional or do you reload them with nuclear bombs?

In short, in the future we're going to have to spend more time revisiting the issue of what's the proper and best way to deal with the dual use question. Because in the future, dual use is probably going to be a more central theme in the nuclear, conventional and unconventional and even maybe information ops.

Risk assessments, again you’ve got this problem of how. We used to have these complex studies on high consequence, low probability events versus high probability, low consequence events. And of course, the problem in this age of WMD latency with the access to destructive technology spreading is that destructiveness of high probability events is going up, and this is related to the whole issue of how do we take our security concepts and apply them to non-state actors like some of the terrorists or rogue states? There I would like to just make a plea, which is—And I think several people have said this correctly—It’s an oversimplification to have boxes in which we say this is the non-state actor and this is the rogue state and here's the near peer for several reasons. The first thing is there are a lot more synergies and interactions among those groups that you have to keep an eye on, some of it deliberate, some of it exploitative. The second thing is if you get this kind of destructive capability in almost anyone’s hands, the issue of a peer starts to be less important and the real issue is how do you deal with that particular threat?

I could go on, I’ve got a number of other items. But what I want to do is return to my original theme, which is that the nuclear and non-nuclear camps need to find better ways to integrate in a more optimal way rather than what has typically happened in the past. For example, SAC in the ‘50s basically went out of the conventional business, it became a nuclear organization. Many of the services have basically become conventional organizations. And getting the communities with different career paths to integrate is going to be a challenge. But we have several things going for us now. I think the national security strategy and the NPR give you good umbrella guidance for how to proceed, and I think integration at STRATCOM of many of these complex functions gives us a vehicle to try to resolve these issues and bring these different cultures together. And I think that integrating some of these issues in a QDR type of process can be done well.

The risk is that we will end up not integrating the various perspectives and ideas, and that if we fall back to business as usual, I think you could actually end up with some very bad outcomes. So with that, I will stop.
[Applause]