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 2 - The New Triad and its Assumptions: A Critique

Address by the Honorable R. James Woolsey, Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton; co-chairman, Committee on the Present Danger; and former Director of the CIA

Well, thank you. I was, of course, extremely honored to be asked to be here today. I haven't been spending a great time on these issues for the last few years, but to tell you the truth, since I spent 22 years as a Washington lawyer before I went straight and went to Booz Allen three years ago, and then I spent some time at the CIA in the Clinton Administration, I'm actually pretty well honored to be invited into any polite company for any purposes whatsoever. [laughter] Those of you who are here, have been in the government or are in the government, may be in the government, know the reason that I and a lot of other people interrupted other careers to work for the government, is two things. First of all, it’s the big bucks, of course. [laughter] And then secondly, it’s the public appreciation. [laughter] That's right at the heart of it. My own best experience with that was when I’d been in the CIA job for about nine months, my wife and I had an opportunity to go to California, we were classmates in college, and go to our 30th college reunion. And I figured cash in the frequent flyer miles, go out first class, see old friends, have a good time for several days, take a few days off for the first time in nine months.

First my chief of security said, “No, we want your wife to go on a separate plane because we don’t want anybody named Woolsey on the plane.” And I said, “But my name’s Woolsey.” And they said, “No, you need to fly in alias.” And my first thought was, “Uh-oh, there go the frequent flyer miles.” So my two security guys and I go out to Dulles, just the three of us, and we get on a plane and we walk back to where we’re seated in the very back row of coach, the three seats in the middle, you know, the one where you can’t even lean back? The two burly guys on either side. They’d stopped by the cockpit and had shown the chief flight attendant and pilot in those simpler times that they were carrying weapons and authorized to do so, and so the three of us sat there, rode out to California.

So we get off the plane, we're going down the jet way, the flight attendant comes over and whispers something to one of my security men, and he just cracks up. I said, “Murph, what's so funny?” He said, “Did you hear what she said? She said, “you know, I’ve been on these flights now for 20 years and that is the politest and best behaved prisoner that we have had on one of these.” [laughter] So like I say, it is the public appreciation, that's why you do it.

Just a few thoughts on three aspects of our overall strategic posture, including particularly now, as part of the New Triad. First of all, I think Keith Payne has had the argument exactly right with respect to what he has written about the importance of modernizing and updating the strategic nuclear offensive side of our strategic forces. The world in which some of us lived in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, which gave rise to the ABM Treaty on the one hand and the notion, as my boss in systems analysis in the Pentagon put it in the late ‘60s with his tongue only a little bit in his cheek, “Jim, just keep it straight. Offense is defense, defense is offense, weapons that kill people are good, weapons that kill other weapons are bad. Once you get that straight, everything will be fine.”

Well, that world, a bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet assured destruction, was long ago in another galaxy far away. We, some of us, and I count myself among them, at the beginning of the ‘70s, thought that on balance an ABM treaty was not such a bad idea. Most of us who worked on these programs continued to work for more and more accuracy for our ballistic missiles because we thought the counterforce mission, again for whatever residual Soviet forces might exist, if we were attacked, was still an important one. But we more or less acquiesced to, a number of us, the notion of having an ABM treaty in this context because Congress showed it was not going to approve even the scaled back version of ballistic missile defense that the Nixon Administration came up with after the Sentinel program.

And we were worried about Soviet nationwide air defenses, some of them with capable radars, and a nationwide Soviet ABM defense, if unconstrained. The possibility of a first strike against our own ICBMs and some share of our bomber force, together with a widespread ballistic missile defense inside the Soviet Union, and this is pre-Trident deployments now, so we’re talking about Polaris and Poseidon retaliation, could have put us into a situation where certainly we would have been able to have destroyed portions of the Soviet Union. But nonetheless we could have been in a situation in a crisis in Europe in which our allies, looking at a large scale Soviet offensive and defensive deployment, could feel that our deterrent was not credible.

Mutual assured destruction was a description, not a prescription. We would have been quite happy to have been able to hold the Soviet Union at risk and their not hold us at risk. But on balance, an ABM treaty, a capable offensive force, accuracy both increasingly in a sea based force as well as a land based force, bombers, some on airborne alert, seemed to us to give us a reasonably stable situation in the world we were in. The world we were in back then in the ‘70s also was a world in which most any state that was seriously engaged in wanting to look toward nuclear capability, or potentially had the wherewithal to do it, such as, say, Japan, would either have been an ally of the United States or a Soviet client state. And so the two super powers, and sometimes we talked about this with them, would do their best to keep a handle on proliferation of nuclear weapons.

That world is gone with the wind. There are several huge differences, of course, between today and then. First of all, the role of intelligence. We got to be pretty good during the Cold War at understanding the Soviet’s strategic plans and even their tactical mobilizations. I would say most American think tanks and historians were not as good even as the intelligence community on the big issue of how long the Soviets were going to be around, or whether they would collapse or not. The CIA was sort of C- to D+ on that, but most other parts of American intellectual society’s grades were below that except for a few wonderful individuals, Charlie Wolfe, Harry Rowan, others at Rand. But the two most outstanding and famous individuals who got that megacept about the Soviet Union right were, of course, Ronald Reagan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both of whom around the end of the ‘70s were saying the Soviet Union won’t last for about another decade.

Now, I guess what I think about that is sometimes the Irish just hear voices the rest of us don’t hear. [laughter] But one thing we were good at was sitting up there in our various platforms watching, say, Sary Shagan, seeing the Soviets developing a new ABM radar and taking it all in and saying, “Well, let’s see. We’ve stolen the template for their R&D,” which we had, “They're not testing the war-time mode yet, that means they're at least 2 ½ to 3 years away from initial operating capability, so we can slip our jammer on that for a year and save $25 million in this year’s FYDP.” Or, we would watch the group of Soviet forces in Germany, its 25 divisions, watch what ammunition they uploaded when they went on maneuvers. As it almost always was, the training ammunition, so we knew we didn’t need to go to a higher level of Def Con. We did things like that all the time, all the time.

The world we’re in now will not permit that kind of role for intelligence. There are important intelligence uses against rogue states like North Korea and Iran, but we're not going to get anybody, no matter how good we are, into let’s say a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan where Osama bin-Laden and Zawahiri are sitting, and have them understand that when Osama says we’re going after the American electricity grid in 2008 instead of 2007, that all they have to do is get down and get that back to their case officer and the United States will be plugged into their plans. No, that's fiction. We’re not going to have the same type of understanding of our opponents’ strategy or tactics or hardware development, EMP devices and the lot that we had during the Cold War.

The other thing that is, of course, different is that the bipolarity and the degree of control over potential rogue states or proliferators that went with it is gone. We operate under a treaty regime and an international institution, the IAEA, is grounded really in Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program of the 1950s. So there is no effective constraint within the treaty regime against countries moving into the fuel cycle, either enrichment or reprocessing. And once you're well into the fuel cycle, you are a small step away from being able to build a nuclear weapon, particularly if what you have is highly enriched uranium and you can have a simple shotgun design of the sort that we used on Hiroshima in World War II. Keep in mind that while we tested the more complex plutonium bomb before we dropped it on Nagasaki, we dropped the weapon on Hiroshima, highly enriched uranium, simple shotgun design bomb, without one ever having been detonated in the history of the world before. We were that confident 60 years in our ability to design and use that weapon. And unfortunately, the relative simplicity of that still exists, now much more widely publicized, sadly. And it is therefore available to the likes of Iran or North Korea and so on. So that set of controls of how one might develop and use nuclear weapons is also gone with the wind.

I think that under those circumstances, there are three things that we need really to emphasize. First and foremost are the steps towards modernizing. And by this, I mean not just a reliable deterrent, but moving toward the ability to do deep penetration, bunker buster, whatever you want to call it, with very low yield so that at least we have the capability to deter some of the types of things that a North Korea or an Iran might want to do. Keith has pointed out in one of his articles, and Congressman Curt Weldon and a group of congressmen spoke not too long ago with the North Koreans in some detail on these points. The only thing that really got their interest was the fact that the Americans might be moving towards having something that could effectively, without high yield and without much fallout at all, destroy deep underground facilities.

Secondly, we need to move toward ballistic missile defense far more capable than a few dozen launchers in the Pacific pointed both literally and figuratively toward a primitive North Korean threat without decoys and without sophistication. When ballistic missile warheads, what is coming at you, are small, cold and fast, namely after they are well up into space and after separation, is not the time to try to shoot them down. The time to try to shoot them down is when they’re still on boosters and the target is large, hot and slow, as would be an ICBM for the first approximately 500 miles or so of its downrange trajectory, say 300 miles into space. We need to move toward boost phase intercept, I would think initially from sea based forces and upgraded versions of the Aegis, perhaps using some of the types of technology that people were working on very hard at the beginning of the ‘90s, such as Brilliant Pebbles as warheads. And then we need to move into space-based capabilities. I would think, just from my own reading, principally at first kinetic intercept, but perhaps in time more demanding and capable systems.

And third, we need to realize that our own infrastructure is now in need, badly, of modification and resilience for strategic reasons. Two and a half years ago, the electricity grid for the U.S. east coast north of Delaware and eastern Canada, went down for a substantial period of time because a tree branch fell in Ohio. And modern networks, we know from chaos theory and network theory, demonstrate the butterfly effect. A small disturbance can create a tornado on the other side of the world. This seems sort of hypothetical until you realize what happened two years ago August with the electricity grid.

The heart of the problem is that terrorists are a great deal smarter than tree branches. They know that in order to take the grid down, as the National Academy of Sciences report in 2002 that I served on reported, and as our National Energy Policy Commission has reported within the last year, is to go after the transformers and the SCADA systems, the supervisory control and data acquisition systems. The transformers, many of them, sit out there in empty fields surrounded by at most a cyclone fence with signs, in case the terrorist with his armor piercing bullet in his rifle a quarter of a mile away has a hard time seeing it, pointing to “Transformers.” [laughter] Our infrastructure has been built for openness, ease of access, ease of maintenance, transparency, and in recent years has been slimmed down so a lot of the resilience and redundancy has been gotten out of it. There were two hospital beds, shock trauma beds, available in Washington D.C. on 9/11. We’ve done a great job of getting all the surplus and resilience out of everything from the electricity grid to our medical care system.

We have to turn to understanding that another type of strategic attack against us may be even more debilitating than what was done in 9/11, but similarly may use our infrastructure as a weapon. We have not had to worry about our infrastructure that way on the North American continent against a foreign enemy since the British burned Washington in 1814, nearly two centuries ago. That set of concerns — that our infrastructure itself can be turned into a weapon as our civil air transport infrastructure was turned into a weapon because the terrorists understood the importance of the flimsy cockpit doors that were on our airliners on 9/11 — those types of vulnerabilities suffuse our infrastructure. In addition to having strongly capable conventional forces, to being able to fight in every case from a Chinese assault on Taiwan to the streets of Fallujah, in addition to ballistic missile defense, and in addition to a nuclear capability that can in fact deter and hold at risk the things that are most cherished by the rogue nations of the world such as North Korea and Iran, we also need essentially a fourth one. We need to build into our infrastructure ways in which we can keep the system from collapsing in whole or in part as a result of attack by terrorists or rogue states such as Iran’s. There might be a combination as a result of, say, Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah.

Just to let you know that this is on their minds as well, President Ahmadinejad, right after he held his conference in Tehran not long ago calling for the destruction of Israel and the United States, mentioned at one point that name of his chief advisor for strategy. That man, Abassi, made a speech in Tehran pointing out that there were just under 30 critical nodes in the United States and western Europe which if they were attacked would effectively take down European-American civilization, that those nodes had already been, as he put it, spied out by those friendly to Iran, possibly Hezbollah, and that they were ready to be attacked.

So we need to pull together ourselves and our thinking about this new very troubling strategic world that we're in. We need to be candid with one another about what it will take to fix the deficiencies which now exist, and we need to get moving.

One final point: can we afford all this? I had lunch with a group of former officials and the Secretary of Defense yesterday. We were looking at defense budgets. There's a great deal of concern in the country and the Congress about a few billion dollars more going here or less going there. By going up, when you add in the supplementals, to the neighborhood of $500 billion, you are, in our $13-plus trillion economy, at nearly 4 percent of GDP. Wow. Secretary McNamara was in the luncheon, and I recalled with him that although he was able to bring the budget down later when he first took over, as a result of the fact that we had changed from massive retaliation to flexible response and had a large bill to pay for increased conventional forces, we were spending over 9 percent of GDP on defense. Admittedly, that was a time before Medicare, Medicaid, before there were other draws of those sorts on our overall federal budget. But as a share of GDP, the burden on our economy, the burden on our people in the middle of a war in Iraq, in the middle of all these strategic challenges, is approximately one-third what it was in the early 1960s. If we had a defense budget today that is comparable in terms of share of GDP for what we had in the early 1960s, we’d be in the range of $1.5 trillion in the defense budget.

So one thing we should not listen to, except to figure out ways to refute it as far as I'm concerned, in these prosperous times for the United States, when our economy bestrides the world like a colossus, is the argument that whatever we need to do in any of these areas that are being discussed here, we can’t afford it. Of course, we can afford it. Thank you.
[Applause]

Questions and Answers

Audience: A quick comment, quick question. Steven Young with the Union of Concerned Scientists. First, Ambassador Woolsey, you talked about the need for low yield bunker busting type weapons. Just to make sure you know this fact, that the weapon the U.S. had been looking at, the buster ... (inaudible) penetrator, is a very high yield bunker buster, 1.2 megatons, so we’re not talking about low yield, low casualty, we’re talking about a big yield, big casualty weapon. That's what we’re looking at now, is the option on the table for the U.S. military, not a low yield weapon at all.

Mr. Woolsey: The United States has not been just looking at one type of earth penetrator.

Audience: That's been the main focus of debate of late in Congress and other places. The big question I want to ask, though, is simply in this new world we live in, please explain to me in very simple terms, and this is a question primarily based on ... (inaudible) last comment, please give me a scenario in which we need nuclear weapons. I mean, given our enormous ... [inaudible] advantage in the entire world, go back to Les Aspin’s question of if we didn't have nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t invent them. Wouldn’t the world be better off if we didn't have them? And what is the scenario in which we have to have a nuclear weapon that we can’t address with conventional weapons? I mean, they were needed, they’re not dissuading Iran now, they didn't dissuade Libya, they didn't dissuade—

Mr. Woolsey: The question is several decades early. In 1945, 60 years ago at the end of World War II, there were 20 democracies in the world. Today, there are 89 that operate under the rule of law and another nearly 30 that are electoral democracies like Indonesia with problems regarding the rule of law, but still democracies. That's nearly 120 countries, that's over 60 percent of the world’s population, over 60 percent of the world’s governments. From 1945 until last year, in other words 60 years, there were 29 major international wars having a thousand casualties or more, zero of them between democracies. Between the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815 and the end of the Cold War in 1990, 175 years, there were about 350 major international wars, almost two a year. Maybe two or three of those had democracies on opposite sides. Basically, democracies don’t fight one another, they fight dictatorships, but they don’t fight one another. They choose up sides and argue about agricultural subsidies and such. [laughter]

So you’ve got about 45 dictatorships left in the world, according to Freedom House. The President’s moving to get rid of one more, to take that number down. If the changes in the Middle East are positive ones over the course of the next few years, you may see fewer and fewer dictatorships. Once you have a world of democracies, your question makes some sense. Until then, I think any American President who would assume that the United States could get rid of nuclear weapons in a world of Ahmadinejads, and Khameneis and Kim Jong-ils, would be criminally negligent or worse.