DOD Releases National Defense Strategy, Missile Defense, Nuclear Posture Reviews

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Starry Night

An Army Stryker parks at a remote location of the National Training Center during a moonless, open sky where the milky way was visible near Ft. Irwin, Calif., May 24, 2022.

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Spotlight: Support for Ukraine

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Producing the documents together, said Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, ensured tight linkages between DOD strategy and resources.

"By weaving these documents together, we help ensure that the entire department is moving forward together, matching our resources to our goals," Austin said. "The strength and combat credibility of the joint force remains central to integrated deterrence."

The 2022 National Defense Strategy, or NDS, places a primary focus on the need to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence against China. It also advances a focus on collaboration with a growing network of U.S. allies and partners on shared objectives.

In addition to addressing both China and an increase in the importance of partnerships, the NDS also takes into account the challenges posed by Russian — especially considering its invasion of Ukraine — along with threats posed by North Korea, Iran and violent extremist organizations. The NDS also includes a focus on challenges to security, such as pandemics and climate change.

The NDS lays out four top-level defense priorities the department must pursue. They include:

1Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by China

2Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, allies, and partners

3Deterring aggression while being prepared to prevail in conflict, when necessary; prioritizing the challenge posed by China in the Indo-Pacific region the Russia challenge in Europe

4Building a resilient joint force and defense ecosystem

The NDS provides three ways to advance those priorities, Austin said. These include integrated deterrence, campaigning, and the building of an enduring advantage.

"We're seamlessly integrating our deterrence efforts to make a basic truth crystal clear to any potential foe," Austin said. "That truth is that the cost of aggression against the United States or our allies and partners far outweigh any conceivable games."

23:07

To do that, the secretary said, the department is aligning its activities and investments across all theaters, across the full spectrum of conflict, and across all domains. This includes also space and cyberspace, he said.

With the U.S. nuclear capability remaining the "ultimate backstop" for strategic deterrence, the secretary said the department plans to continue modernization efforts on the nuclear triad. The fiscal 2023 budget request, for instance, includes some $34 billion to sustain and modernize nuclear forces, he said.

The budget request also includes more than $56 billion for air- power platforms and systems, more than $40 billion to maintain U.S. dominance at sea, and nearly $13 billion to support and modernize land forces.

Exercise Hedgehog

Marines practice a reconnaissance patrol during Exercise Hedgehog 22 in Saaremaa, Estonia, May 20, 2022.

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"Integrated deterrence isn't just about steps that we take on our own," he said. "It also means working even more closely with our unparalleled network of allies and partners to deter aggression in region after region," he said.Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific

In the Indo-Pacific region, he said, that's evident with the Australia, U.K., U.S., or AUKUS agreement, and in the trilateral cooperation agreement with Japan and Korea. Across the Atlantic, he said, partnerships that support integrated deterrence efforts include NATO and the recently created Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which helps support Ukraine's self-defense goals.

Spotlight: NATO

Campaigning, Austin said, means conducting and sequencing the military activities which over time shift the security environment in favor of the United States.

"It means working to limit and disrupt malign activities by our competitors," he said. "We're building and exercising the forces that we'll need in a crisis or a conflict, including requesting $135 billion dollars in last year's budget to further invest in our readiness."

To build an enduring advantage for the United States, Austin said, the department is working to further strengthen the foundations of the defense enterprise.

Press Briefing

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III conducts a press briefing at the Pentagon, Oct. 27, 2022.

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Spotlight: Taking Care of Our People

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"Innovation is central here," he said. "Last year, for instance, we established the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, which funds different parts of the department to work together to fill critical joint warfighting gaps. And our fiscal year 2023 budget request included more than $130 billion for research, development, testing and evaluation — that's the largest R&D budget number in DOD history."

The department is also working with industry partners to strengthen supply chains within the defense industrial base, and tackling the dangers of climate change, including ensuring that the military can continue to operate in both hotter and harsher environments.

"Above all, the NDS demands even deeper investments in our people," Austin said. "They will always be this department's most valuable resource and the bedrock of American security. And that's why the president's budget includes a 4.6% pay raise for service members starting January 1, 2023."

The secretary announced in the Sept. 22 memorandum "Taking Care of Our Service Members and Families", departmental efforts to better take care of both service members and their families, including efforts to make it easier to secure housing, to move to new duty stations, to find childcare, and help military spouses find work.

"Our outstanding service members and their families do everything that we ask of them and more," Austin said. "Doing right by them is a national security imperative, and it's a sacred trust. So, we're looking forward to working with Congress to secure on-time appropriations to finalize this year's National Defense Authorization Act, and to continue to implement this strategy."

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Two Air National Guard F-15C Eagles fly during Operation Noble Defender over the Caribbean Sea near Puerto Rico, June 29, 2022.

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House GOP lawmakers push permanent tax cuts amid soaring inflation Cracks in US support for Ukraine risk helping Putin

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The classified versions of the NDS, NPR, and MDR were transmitted alongside the FY 2023 budget submission to Congress. The unclassified versions of the three documents are also available on DOD's website.Spotlight: National Defense Strategy Spotlight: National Defense Strategy: https://www.defense.gov/National-Defense-Strategy/

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

2. That’s it? Biden’s Overdue Pentagon Strategy Underwhelms

The critics come out with their knives. I do love this quote from the first two sentences below.

Excerpts:

Look, a strategy is not a detailed budget with operational plans. It’s a think-tank Ph.D.’s dream assignment. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called the NDS “our department’s North Star.” But the world is changing before our eyes and two years into the Biden era, after four years of the Trump administration’s hodgepodge Pentagon teams of amateurs and empty desks, today’s national security experts have been eagerly expecting more. They anticipated from this administration’s team of well-groomed rising scholars a strategy document that reflects a bold new vision for a new world of threats, but also one that comes with some major action items or directions to reorient the entire defense apparatus

...

So while it is encouraging that Biden’s NDS at least promises to favor the quick, it’s hard to see how this strategy would have been much different had it been released in January, or sooner. Perhaps it would have overestimated Russia’s capabilities or China’s resolve. If anything, Biden’s team has lost valuable time because while they were undergoing this academic exercise, important as it may be, they have been reacting to a threat landscape that has been arguably shaped more by Valdimir Putin and Xi Jinping than their own hand. They will need to be as nimble and quick as they profess in this document. By waiting until now to issue these guiding strategies at the White House and Pentagon, President Joe Biden’s team has given the United States less than three months to do anything about them before he likely faces a hostile Congress run by extreme-right Republicans. Biden has just two years left in this administration to change the world. Putin and Xi have far longer.

That’s it? Biden’s Overdue Pentagon Strategy Underwhelms

After nearly two years, experts were hoping for more.

defenseone.com · by Kevin Baron

Delayed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration’s Pentagon policy team finally released their first National Defense Strategy. It arrives just two weeks after the White House’s broader National Security Strategy, and in conjunction with the nearly-as-important nuclear and missile defense strategies—one PDF to rule them all.

The result is that we can now see on paper the administration’s thinking behind what was already largely in practice at the Pentagon anyway: China is a “pacing challenge,” Russia is an “acute threat,” and the United States will keep building and improving its nuclear umbrella and missile defenses.

But not there’s not much more than that in this NDS, and that’s troublesome.

Look, a strategy is not a detailed budget with operational plans. It’s a think-tank Ph.D.’s dream assignment. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called the NDS “our department’s North Star.” But the world is changing before our eyes and two years into the Biden era, after four years of the Trump administration’s hodgepodge Pentagon teams of amateurs and empty desks, today’s national security experts have been eagerly expecting more. They anticipated from this administration’s team of well-groomed rising scholars a strategy document that reflects a bold new vision for a new world of threats, but also one that comes with some major action items or directions to reorient the entire defense apparatus.

Instead, the Pentagon’s arguably most important document outside of the budget request is little more than a boiled-down reduction of every speech and press conference that Biden administration officials have given in nearly two years since taking office. In it, Biden officials note the threats and broad challenges that any security leader working in this field already knows. And they declare that the U.S. defense “ecosystem,” from industry to academics, must evolve to meet new threats and keep ahead of the latest adversaries, which is a noble but very stale pronouncement for any president’s Pentagon team.

Biden critics will likely to be pleased to see China and Russia listed first among strategic threats, followed by threats to the homeland—although they mean missiles, not migrants—North Korea, Iran, terrorists groups, and grey-zone challenges. Climate change comes last.

“The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and increasingly the power to do so. Now, my team and I have been laser-focused on this from day one,” Austin said, reminding us of what we knew. The secretary read through the threat list, declared the Pentagon would realign its efforts—more than it already is, presumably—and address them with “a military ready to tackle the full range of threats out there, harnessing the American spirit of innovation to meet the complexities of today’s world.” He took a few questions and disappeared after about 20 minutes.

In all, while the Biden NDS paints a broad picture of the Pentagon of the future, what’s missing is a clear view of how the administration plans to get from here to there. Instead, we got an academic word salad that put so much lipstick on this pig it’s unnecessarily masking the good bacon waiting inside.

For instance, the NDS says it will advance its goals—something is “advancing” 19 times in this slog—through oddly worded phrases like the administration’s preferred “integrated deterrence,” which appears to mean the same thing as “whole of government.” To clarify what integrated deterrence means, they write: “Tailored to specific circumstances, it applies a coordinated, multifaceted approach to reducing competitors’ perceptions of the net benefits of aggression relative to restraint.” Eat your heart out, Shakespeare.

They then promise to do the NDS-ing via some “campaigning,” which from my reading means just doing the work, but across the whole of government.

Where the NDS writers finally show some leg is the third and final passage: “we will act urgently to build enduring advantages across the defense ecosystem.”

If only they’d just said so. This is perhaps the part that matters most. “Our current system is too slow and too focused on acquiring systems not designed to address the most critical challenges we now face. This orientation leaves little incentive to design open systems that can rapidly incorporate cutting-edge technologies, creating longer-term challenges with obsolescence, interoperability, and cost effectiveness. The Department will instead reward rapid experimentation, acquisition, and fielding.”

That’s music to the defense industry’s ears, but it is also not new. It’s sadly ironic that this promise comes two days after the death of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who made those same declarations years ago. While it reflects his legacy, it left outside experts shaking their heads and wanting more.

Seth Jones, senior vice president at Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its International Security Program, said there is “a gap between what the National Defense Strategy says and what the U.S. is prepared for. This really is an industrial base that, at least in my judgment, is in no way fully prepared to fight, let alone deter, the Chinese.” Jones said the document describes the China threat well enough. “What’s left, though, is what are we going to do about it?”

Also missing from the NDS is an admission or acknowledgement of what many experts insist the Ukraine war has exposed: that the United States—especially the American defense industrial base—is not ready, positioned, or stocked well enough to win large wars.

“The war in Ukraine, I think as all of us are aware, exposed deficiencies in the U.S. defense industrial base [and] did the same thing with our European partners and allies,” Jones said.

“If we look at the roughly two dozen iterations of a war game in the Taiwan Strait…the U.S. expended all of its joint air-to-surface standoff missiles and long-range precision guided anti-ship missiles within the first week of the conflict. And we’ve seen similar war games done by government agencies,” he said.

It’s unclear from the NDS just how much the Ukraine war, and Russia’s weaker-than-expected military performance, changed the Biden administration’s plans for the Pentagon.

One senior defense official who worked on the strategies but was not allowed to speak on the record told reporters in a Pentagon-arranged briefing that NDS planners knew that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine in early autumn 2021, so that assumption was already “baked into” their thinking as they crafted the new strategy.

But a second senior defense official, also not allowed to show their face or be named, said of Russia’s persistent nuclear threats: “I wouldn’t say it changes our calculus, but it does focus the mind.”

That’s not good enough for some experts looking out for their own areas of interest. Tom Karako, senior fellow at CSIS’s International Security Program and director of its Missile Defense Project, had mixed feelings about the administration’s updated missile defense review within the NDS. “We’ve got these really great new mission areas that I applaud—defense of Guam, counter-UAS, homeland cruise missile defense, hypersonic defense, space sensors. But there’s no specificity for when they will arrive, which, I have to say, is a little bit peculiar because the first sentence of the National Defense Strategy is—and repeatedly you see reference to—the ‘decisive decade.’ Well, the question is, will these great capabilities—be it missile defense, be it something else—will they arrive during this decisive decade, or will they be pushed off to the next decade?”

Karako also bemoaned the lack of strategic guidance about producing more key capabilities like air defenses. “It deserves policy guidance and direction, which is the aim of the NDS.”

Of course, every team of Pentagon leaders has to make choices some won’t like. A string of Pentagon teams over the past decade has been criticized for their unwillingness to take risks that prioritize immediate threats over less likely ones in the distant future. That was harder when the future was less certain after Iraq and Afghanistan. Today the future seems a bit clearer, with easily identifiable threats emanating from Moscow and Beijing. What no NDS can prepare for, however, is that other Pentagon cliché: the enemy gets a vote.

So while it is encouraging that Biden’s NDS at least promises to favor the quick, it’s hard to see how this strategy would have been much different had it been released in January, or sooner. Perhaps it would have overestimated Russia’s capabilities or China’s resolve. If anything, Biden’s team has lost valuable time because while they were undergoing this academic exercise, important as it may be, they have been reacting to a threat landscape that has been arguably shaped more by Valdimir Putin and Xi Jinping than their own hand. They will need to be as nimble and quick as they profess in this document. By waiting until now to issue these guiding strategies at the White House and Pentagon, President Joe Biden’s team has given the United States less than three months to do anything about them before he likely faces a hostile Congress run by extreme-right Republicans. Biden has just two years left in this administration to change the world. Putin and Xi have far longer.

defenseone.com · by Kevin Baron

3. China, Russia biggest challenges under Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy

Excerpts:

Speaking to reporters after the strategy’s release, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that while Russia “can’t systemically challenge the United States over the long term,” unlike China, it “does pose an immediate and sharp threat to our interest and values.”

The strategy also focuses on North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities, Iran’s nuclear program, violent extremist organizations included the Islamic State, al Qaeda and al-Shabaab, and transboundary challenges such as climate change and pandemics.

The document does not include specifics as to how the Pentagon will work with allies and partners or how it will alter its procedures, weapons procurements or personnel to tackle the stated threats, though Austin described the strategy as the Pentagon’s “north star.”

Instead, the NDS ranks the biggest threats to the United States, broadly outlines how the military would respond and drives future defense spending requests and Pentagon policy, including what weapons to put money toward and how to spread its service members around the globe.

China, Russia biggest challenges under Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy

BY ELLEN MITCHELL - 10/27/22 8:07 PM ET

The Hill · by Colin Meyn · October 28, 2022

The Pentagon on Thursday released a new set of documents outlining a sweeping strategy for U.S. security, seeking more deterrence for a list of threats topped by Russia and China.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS), released alongside the Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review, comes eight months after Russia invaded Ukraine and follows recent threats from China to bring Taiwan under its control.

First given to Congress in classified form in March, the document is the first in nearly five years — since early 2018, when the Trump administration released its version. That national defense strategy was the first in decades to focus U.S. defenses on China and Russia instead of violent extremist organizations.

President Biden’s version continues with that line of thinking, though it labels China as a “consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades,” while calling Russia an “acute threat,” demonstrated most recently by its unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

“[China] and Russia now pose more dangerous challenges to safety and security at home, even as terrorist threats persist,” the document states, noting that both countries have deployed space capabilities that could target America’s GPS and other “space-based capabilities that support military power and daily civilian life.”

And both Moscow and Beijing “could use a wide array of tools in an attempt to hinder U.S. military preparation and response in a conflict, including actions aimed at undermining the will of the U.S. public, and to target our critical infrastructure and other systems,” according to the strategy.

Speaking to reporters after the strategy’s release, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that while Russia “can’t systemically challenge the United States over the long term,” unlike China, it “does pose an immediate and sharp threat to our interest and values.”

The strategy also focuses on North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities, Iran’s nuclear program, violent extremist organizations included the Islamic State, al Qaeda and al-Shabaab, and transboundary challenges such as climate change and pandemics.

The document does not include specifics as to how the Pentagon will work with allies and partners or how it will alter its procedures, weapons procurements or personnel to tackle the stated threats, though Austin described the strategy as the Pentagon’s “north star.”

Instead, the NDS ranks the biggest threats to the United States, broadly outlines how the military would respond and drives future defense spending requests and Pentagon policy, including what weapons to put money toward and how to spread its service members around the globe.

The biggest concern in the document appears to be growing nuclear arsenals owned by Russia and China, with the U.S. government betting that its own nuclear capabilities “remain the ultimate backstop for our strategic deterrence.”

The Pentagon is “fully committed to modernizing all three legs of our nuclear triad,” Austin said, referring to the ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, bomber aircraft and submarine-launched weapons that all carry nuclear payloads.

Russia, with its stockpile of roughly 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, raises “the possibility it would use these forces to try to win a war on its periphery or avoid defeat if it was in danger of losing a conventional war.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened such an outcome in Ukraine, though on Thursday he insisted that Moscow does not intend to use nuclear weapons in the war.

U.S. officials have said they’ve seen no change in Russia’s nuclear posture that would indicate it is moving to use such a weapon.

China, meanwhile, plans to increase its nuclear arsenal to about 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade, according to the strategy. The document also criticizes the country for its “increasingly provocative rhetoric and coercive activity towards Taiwan.”

“The most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security is [China’s] coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavor to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences,” the NDS states.

The Hill · by Colin Meyn · October 28, 2022

4. Army’s New Training Center Keeps Forces Available in Indo-Pacific

PACOM and the Asia Pacific region suffers from the tyranny of distance.

Excerpt:

The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center will have two physical campuses, in Hawaii and Alaska, and a third mobile campus to be an “exportable capability that can deploy throughout the Indo-Pacific.” The exportable campus has already operated in Indonesia and is heading to Australia next.

Army’s New Training Center Keeps Forces Available in Indo-Pacific

Service leaders say the first regional center in 50 years will improve training and save time and effort.

defenseone.com · by Elizabeth Howe

The U.S. Army’s first new regional training complex in a half century is intended to better replicate the Pacific region’s potential battlefields and to reduce the time needed to send troops and gear for training in the continental United States.

The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center will have two physical campuses, in Hawaii and Alaska, and a third mobile campus to be an “exportable capability that can deploy throughout the Indo-Pacific.” The exportable campus has already operated in Indonesia and is heading to Australia next.

“This allows us to keep trained and ready forces available and forward in the region,” U.S. Army Pacific Commanding General Charles Flynn told reporters Thursday. “It allows us to generate readiness in environments and in conditions that we're most likely to operate in.”

The Alaska campus replicates the Himalayan mountains where U.S. troops might expect to operate, while the Hawaiian archipelago resembles the “austere jungles” of southeast Asia, Flynn said.

“The Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana does not look like Southeast Asia, but these eight Hawaiian Islands certainly do,” he said.

As well, Flynn said, training in theater will save months every year spent sending troops and gear to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and other locations.

“We were taking brigades, tactical units out of Alaska, and tactical units out of Hawaii, and we were sending them back through the Panama Canal to Texas to go to Louisiana to train,” Flynn said.

Now, troops can conduct that training in Hawaii, Alaska, or wherever the mobile campus is.

On Monday, a ten-day rotation will kick off across four islands in Hawaii. More than 6,000 troops will exercise “in the box” while an even larger force provides support. Units from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines will also participate.

“This is intended to be the most immersive training environment we can create, the most realistic training environment,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. VanAntwerp, 25th Infantry Division’s deputy commanding general for operations.

The Army declined to identify which units are taking part in the exercises, or to say exactly what scenarios are being rehearsed. But China is clearly the most important potential adversary. The People’s Republic of China and its “coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavor to refashion the Indo-Pacific region in the international system to suit its interest and authoritarian preferences” are “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security,” a senior defense official said during a briefing on the NDS Thursday.

Flynn said, “These are scenarios that are left without designated names. But we look at all the threats that we have in the region here, and we create a scenario that challenges our leaders, soldiers, commanders, and organizations to operate against any adversary and any threat that might emerge here”

But he added that Alaska and Hawaii are “exactly the type of conditions and environment that we need to be able to train in and operate in.”

“If called upon to fight in that region we are prepared…These campuses, if you will, in Hawaii and Alaska, are exactly the kind of conditions we need to put our formations in,” Flynn said.

defenseone.com · by Elizabeth Howe

5. Drones, Cruise Missiles Are Rising Threats to US Troops and Territory, Pentagon Says

Will Guam become both the most dangerous strategic location and the most protected US territory?

Drones, Cruise Missiles Are Rising Threats to US Troops and Territory, Pentagon Says

The Missile Defense Review also calls for building a missile shield to protect Guam.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

Drones and cruise missiles increasingly threaten the United States and its allies, the Biden administration said in its new assessment of global missile threats.

Released on Thursday, the Missile Defense Review arrives as kamikaze drones are being increasingly used in the conflict in Ukraine.

Drone “usage will likely expand and continue to pose a threat to U.S. personnel overseas, Allies and partners, and potentially to the U.S. homeland,” the report states.

Missile defense assessments conducted by the Trump administration in 2019 and the Obama administration in 2010 did not single out drones, also called uncrewed aircraft systems.

Drones “are an inexpensive, accessible, flexible, expendable, and plausibly deniable way to carry out armed attacks and project outsized power over a variety of domains,” the report states. “Accelerating technology trends continue to transform applications of UAS, making them increasingly capable platforms in the hands of both state and non-state actors.”

Russia has used Iranian drones to attack Ukrainian infrastructure. Meanwhile the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with Switchblade kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions. Drones have also been used to attack Saudi oil refineries.

Drones “can have similar lethality to cruise missiles and can launch from a wide array of locations, virtually undetected,” the report states. They “are generally not perceived by adversaries as having the same destabilizing geostrategic implications as larger missile forces, making them an increasingly preferred method to carry out tactical-level strikes.”

The Pentagon will “commit to examining technical solutions” to defeat drones and cruise missiles, a senior defense official said Thursday before the review’s public release.

Numerous defense companies showed off counter-drone technology during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting and exposition in Washington earlier this month.

“Russia has been indiscriminately using thousands of offensive missiles in Ukraine, and mainly not for precision military effects, but instead has broad area terror weapons to inflict terrible hardships on innocent civilians,” the senior defense official said. “Their use of missiles in Ukraine shows we should expect these weapons to become a common feature of 21st Century conflict.”

The Missile Defense Review also noted the threat posed to the U.S. mainland from cruise missile attacks and called for developing “active and passive defenses against regional hypersonic missile threats.” Hypersonic weapons can fly faster than five times the speed of sound and maneuver, much like a cruise missile. The Pentagon will “pursue a persistent and resilient sensor network to characterize and track all hypersonic threats, improve attribution, and enable engagement,” the report states.

The review also endorses building an elaborate defensive shield to protect Guam, a major logistical hub and base for U.S. military aircraft and ships, from a Chinese missile attack. The report also declares that an attack on Guam would be met with the same response to an attack on the U.S. mainland.

The Missile Defense Review can be seen as “a step forward from past reviews in several respects,” said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It corrects several inadequacies of the 2019 review, including insufficient attention to integration, air defense layering for cruise missile and [drone] threats, and survivability,” he said. “Although the public version of the review leaves some things to be desired, it advances several critical mission areas: a comprehensive approach to missile defeat, homeland cruise missile defense, the defense of Guam, and distributed operations.”

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

6. China’s Nuclear Arsenal Will Become an Existential Threat to US, Biden Administration Declares

Excerpt:

“The United States and its Allies and partners will increasingly face the challenge of deterring two major powers with modern and diverse nuclear capabilities — the PRC and Russia — creating new stresses on strategic stability,” the Nuclear Posture Review states.

China’s Nuclear Arsenal Will Become an Existential Threat to US, Biden Administration Declares

New nuclear strategy deletes one new U.S. weapon, keeps the rest.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

For seven decades, U.S. nuclear weapons policy has largely focused on one nation whose arsenal posed an existential threat: Russia. On Thursday, the Biden administration added China to that list.

The new Nuclear Posture Review reflects Bejing’s efforts to expand and improve its arsenal, a senior defense official said Thursday morning.

“China's nuclear modernization and its rapid expansion presents us with new risks and uncertainties,” the official said, speaking anonymously ahead of the review’s public release. “In the coming years…for the first time, we will have to deter two major nuclear armed competitors, both Russia and China. This presents new dilemmas for both strategic deterrence and for regional warfighting.”

The Congressionally mandated review describes the nation’s nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture.

“The range of nuclear options available to the PRC leadership will expand in the years ahead, allowing it potentially to adopt a broader range of strategies to achieve its objectives, to include nuclear coercion and limited nuclear first use,” the new version says.

Last year, the Pentagon’s most recent public assessment of China’s weapon programs noted the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles “that will significantly improve its nuclear-capable missile forces.” Beijing is also improving its nuclear bombers and building “at least three solid-fueled ICBM silo fields, which will cumulatively contain hundreds of new ICBM silos.”

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in its eight-month-old invasion of Ukraine.

“The United States and its Allies and partners will increasingly face the challenge of deterring two major powers with modern and diverse nuclear capabilities — the PRC and Russia — creating new stresses on strategic stability,” the Nuclear Posture Review states.

On Thursday, the Biden administration also released new versions of the National Defense Strategy and Missile Defense Review. The three are typically the most consequential military policy documents released by an administration because they guide strategy and spending priorities for years, if not decades. For example, the Obama administration called for a military rebalance to the Pacific region in 2011. More commonly known as the “pivot to the Pacific,” the strategy was the beginning of an increased focus by defense leaders on countering China’s regional military aspirations and technological weapons advancements.

All three of the documents reiterate previous Biden administration depictions of China as the top concern for U.S. policymakers.

One of them echoes previous invitations to Beijing to enter arms-control talks. As a nuclear power, China “has a responsibility…to engage in talks that will reduce the risks of miscalculation and address destabilizing military dynamics,” the Nuclear Posture Review states.

As for U.S. nuclear weapons, the review calls for retiring the B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb “due to increasing limitations on its capabilities and rising maintenance costs” and canceling a ship-lauch cruise missile, which was added in the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The Biden administration will keep the W76-2 low-yield submarine-launched nuclear weapon, another Trump addition.

The review endorses the ongoing effort to develop a new ballistic missile submarine and new ICBM and to upgrade the B-52 bomber at a projected total cost of more than $600 billion.

Critics say the existing stockpile provides adequate deterrence.

"[T]he document says the United States has no choice but to build all-new nuclear weapons, despite science-based findings that the current warheads in the arsenal will be reliable for decades to come with only modest maintenance efforts,” wrote Stephen Young, senior Washington representative for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It abandons the pledge Biden made on the campaign trail to declare that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks on the United States and its allies.”

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

7. 6 key takeaways from the Pentagon’s new defense, nuclear policies

The six:

And I would add irregular warfare remains an intellectual orphan.

6 key takeaways from the Pentagon’s new defense, nuclear policies

Even as the Defense Department shelves two nuclear weapons programs, an arms race is brewing with China and Russia

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/27/6-highlights-pentagon-nuclear-china/

By Karoun Demirjian

October 27, 2022 at 6:22 p.m. EDT

A “Yars” intercontinental ballistic missile launches during training in Plesetsk, Russia, on Wednesday. (Russian Defence Ministry Press Service/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

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The Pentagon released a trio of documents Thursday outlining the United States’ national defense strategy, its nuclear posture and its policy regarding missile defense — a much-anticipated public accounting of how the Biden administration plans to counter threats from adversary nations at a time when war and the threat of compound conflicts are escalating.

The documents — which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin referred to as “the department’s North Star” — reflect an outlook he has long been voicing: that China is the main, “pacing” challenge for the United States.

Russia, the documents acknowledge, presents a more “acute” threat, particularly because its president, Vladimir Putin, is actively waging a war in Ukraine and threatening to employ nuclear weapons in combat. But as Austin put it, Moscow still “can’t systemically challenge the United States over the long term.”

While the assessments are largely in keeping with positions the Defense Department has previously outlined, there are nonetheless a few items that are likely to inspire controversy — in part because of global developments that aren’t directly addressed in the 80 unclassified pages.

The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review offers a notable assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It puts some hotly debated weapons systems on the chopping block — including a nuclear gravity bomb and a submarine-launched nuclear missile with staunch defenders in Congress.

Perhaps most strikingly, the authors acknowledge that the documents were not updated since March — when the classified versions of them were shared with Congress — despite a war in Ukraine that was in its infancy when they penned their assessments.

WHAT TO KNOW

Russia’s nuclear threat

The Pentagon flags Moscow’s Ukraine invasion as the example that “underscores that nuclear dangers persist, and could grow, in an increasingly competitive and volatile geopolitical landscape.” It notes that Russia has brandished the threat of nuclear weapons “as a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors.”

But while the documents are explicit in stating the Pentagon’s objectives, its prescriptions for tamping down the crescendo of the nuclear drumbeat emanating from the Kremlin are general in nature. The document speaks about the need for “integrated deterrence” and ensuring that the United States and its allies continue to “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment,” to reduce the risk of escalation. It acknowledges that “changes in U.S. strategy and force posture may be required” to achieve deterrence — but does not contemplate the specifics of what that would look like.

Part of that may be due to the fact that the documents released Thursday are only the unclassified version of the Pentagon’s reviews. But while the Russian threat is “acute,” the Pentagon does not seem to believe that a game-changing move from the Kremlin is imminent. Austin threw cold water Thursday on the idea that nuclear or other radioactive weapons will be used in the Ukraine conflict anytime soon.

“We have not seen anything to indicate that Putin has made a decision to use a dirty bomb,” he said.

China on the horizon

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unlocked the Pentagon coffers, China’s long-term nuclear ambitions have spooked the Defense Department to the greatest degree. The National Defense Strategy calls China the “most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security,” while the Nuclear Posture Review states that “by the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”

Or as Austin put it to reporters Thursday, China remains the one adversary “both with the intent to reshape the international order and increasingly the power to do so.”

But the Pentagon acknowledges that it is still looking for answers about how to address the challenge posed by Beijing and ensure it does not lead to war.

The documents note that China and Russia, despite sometimes diverging objectives, maintain a troubling alliance — particularly given the “sophistication” of China’s missile technology and its demonstrated ability to try to “close the gap” with the United States. When it comes to nuclear warheads, the Nuclear Posture Review notes, China is on pace to have at least 1,000 by the end of this decade.

The writers of the document are frank in their acknowledgments of where Beijing has eluded Washington’s best efforts to rein things in. The United States “has made little progress” with China when it comes to arms-control frameworks, the document notes — a problem exacerbated by Beijing’s resistance to participating in international negotiations. And while the Missile Defense Review stresses that the Pentagon “will continue to rely on strategic deterrence,” the Pentagon admits a few paragraphs later that is difficult, given China’s “efforts and activities to contest the rules-based international order.”

Iran’s atomic ambitions

When it comes to Iran, the Defense Department’s new policy-setting documents and the Pentagon’s leaders are occasionally in conflict.

“Iran is moving ahead on its nuclear program, supporting dangerous armed proxies and even exporting drones that Russia has used to terrorize Ukrainian civilians,” Austin told reporters Thursday, in touting the newly released reports.

That’s not precisely the sentiment expressed in the reports’ pages.

Though the Pentagon writes that Iranian nuclear activities “are of great concern” and that it remains Defense Department policy “to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” the Nuclear Posture Review also states plainly that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.”

That’s not just an aberrant phrasing, either. The National Defense Strategy is careful to distinguish between Iran’s capacities and its intentions, stating that “Iran is taking actions that would improve its ability to produce a nuclear weapon should it make the decision to do so.”

That decision, though, by the Pentagon’s own assessments, has not been taken.

North Korea tough talk

Unlike Iran, the documents paint North Korea’s ventures as menacing in nature. The Missile Defense Review states that the hermit kingdom “continues to improve, expand, and diversity its conventional nuclear missile capabilities, posing an increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces in theater, as well as regional Allies and partners.” The report notes recent missile tests, including some weapons Pyongyang claims have hypersonic capabilities, and reminds that “most of North Korea’s ballistic missiles have an assessed capability to carry nuclear payloads.”

The Nuclear Posture Review also sounds an alarm, stating that while North Korea is not a threat on the level of Russia and China, “it poses a persistent threat and growing danger to the U.S. homeland and the Indo-Pacific region as it expands, diversifies and improves” its nuclear, ballistic missile and military capabilities.

The response is all tough talk. “Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partner is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime,” the Nuclear Posture Review states, in one of the most unequivocal throw-downs in the document. “There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive.”

Shelving unnecessary nukes

The military is retiring two models of nuclear weapon, despite protests from members of Congress who have tried to save them from the chopping block. The first, the B83-1 gravity bomb, has over a megaton of capacity — a punch that makes it a potentially useful tool for obliterating hard, underground targets. But the bombs, which have been in the arsenal since the 1980s, are becoming expensive to maintain — and, the Pentagon says, simply aren’t as versatile or uniquely equipped to command privileged status anymore.

The other is a submarine-launched cruise missile known as the SLCM-N (the “N” stands for “nuclear”), approved during Donald Trump’s presidency — and which was the subject of fierce controversy on Capitol Hill after the Biden administration indicated in its budget proposals this year that it planned to ax funding for the program.

The SLCM-N comes in on the opposite end of the nuclear spectrum from the B83-1 — with its lower yield, it is considered a “tactical” nuclear weapon. Supporters of the SLCM-N have questioned why the administration would decommission it mid-development at a time when concern is growing that Russia could use its vast arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But administration officials insist it is an unnecessary, duplicative weapon and are determined to scrap it, no matter the blowback.

“It has zero value,” for Russia and Ukraine, a senior defense official said Thursday on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive program decisions, noting that even if the SLCM-N were fully funded, “it would not arrive until 2035.”

Strategic ambiguity