Strategic Forces Needed to Deter Escalation of Conflicts Started by U.S., Ex-Bush Official Says

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Citing this year’s invasion of Iraq, a recently retired Bush administration official said yesterday the United States could increasingly be the “initiator” of military conflict in the future and that current efforts to revise U.S. strategic forces should help make that possible.

Strategic forces could be used to discourage other countries from using weapons of mass destruction in defense against the United States, said J.D. Crouch, who last month left his job as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, in which he was a leading advocate of the war on Iraq and of developing new nuclear weapons capabilities for new roles.

Crouch was speaking at an Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis conference here along with other former and current Bush administration officials.

Reverse Extended Deterrence

Crouch said the United States in the future may need to apply a concept he called “reverse extended deterrence,” which he said could involve discouraging a country attacked by the United States from using a weapon of mass destruction in defense.

He contrasted that to a Cold War-era “responsive deterrence” approach, which threatened nuclear escalation to discourage Soviet aggression.

“We are going to be in the position increasingly in the future where we are having to deter while we are defeating a country,” he said.

He cited the Iraq case, “where we were the one to take the initiative.”

“We are the one who may well be threatening the survival of a particular regime, and it seems to me that is a very different situation than the one we had during the Cold War … where the most difficult step in a way was the one that would have to be taken by the initiator. The future world may be one in which we are the initiator,” he said.

Crouch, who has returned to his teaching post at Southwest Missouri State University, said the administration’s definition of strategic capabilities includes nuclear, conventional, space, information and missile defense forces, and added that new nuclear capabilities are “probably” needed.

Logical Extension

Joseph Cirincione, a prominent critic of the Bush administration policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Bush administration’s emphasis on threatening or using U.S. force to accomplish its aims appears to be taking the country in the direction Crouch described.

“The logical extension of this unilateralist policy that relies on military force as its chief instrument is a vision of the world where the U.S. is going around starting wars in the name of peace,” he said.

He called the approach unrealistic and unnecessary.

“The absurdity of this theory becomes apparent when you ask this simple question: Who are the principle targets of this policy? Are we going to attack North Korea first, Iran, who else is there? African nations?  Are we talking about China?” he said.

“States are still deterred by the overwhelming military power of the United States,” he said.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, addressing the conference earlier, restated a U.S. warning to alleged WMD proliferators.

Speaking just prior to Crouch, the man in charge of U.S. strategic forces, Navy Admiral James Ellis, appeared to offer a different vision for the role of U.S. strategic forces than that expressed by Crouch. Ellis said they were intended, and could be effective, as deterrent forces.

“I do not subscribe to the theory that new threats cannot be deterred. … We must also arm ourselves with a complete set of tools more suited to the task of deterrence in the challenging world of this new millennium,” he said.

“The old SAC [Strategic Air Command] motto still hangs over the door of my headquarters, “Peace is our profession,” he said.

“As our command has evolved, we have certainly retained that as our goal,” he said. 

Ellis said strategic forces were being adapted to provide capabilities necessary for deterring the types of threats the United States may face in the future.

Asked to comment on Crouch’s remarks, though, Ellis said the military must prepare for every contingency.

“Given that we can’t predict the future, just as we cannot predict accurately the success or lack thereof with regard to deterrence concepts in and of themselves, I think it would behoove us to hedge our bets against an alternative future which may not be the one we anticipate,” he said.

Keith Payne, who also recently left his administration position as deputy assistant secretary of defense for force policy, gave the conference an alternative scenario to the one presented by Crouch.

“In the future, it may well be that the United States is compelled to deter escalation by a regional aggressor as the United States is confronting that aggressor on its own territory. That’s not initiating conflict, that’s trying to deter an aggressor from escalating while we are possibly protecting our allies and our interests.”

Crouch said the United States could require a broader range of nuclear capabilities to deter potential adversaries in the future, saying the deterrence challenge will likely be more complex than it was against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“We need to question whether or not the kinds of things we might need for nuclear capabilities to deter in the future are really dealt with, with the arsenal that we have today,” he said.

He said the administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review of which he was a principal architect, concluded that “deterrence is not the only goal.”

He said other purposes for strategic weapons, namely for assuring strategic allies, dissuading potential competitors and defeating adversaries if deterrence fails, should more greatly drive the strategic force composition.

Crouch pointed to increased emphasis on lower-yield nuclear weapons, the destructive power of which might be tailored.

The strategic community needs to consider establishing “some metrics beyond what we saw for strategic capability” during the Cold War, he said.

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