After 10-Year Effort, U.S. Has Much to Do to Improve WMD Defense, Conferees Say

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military still has a great deal to do to prevent and defend against WMD attacks from terrorists or foreign governments, according to a gathering of officials and experts marking the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Defense Department’s Defense Counterproliferation Initiative.

The initiative, an effort to better organize and increase military capabilities to deal with weapons of mass destruction, was created in December 1993 by then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin following the discovery of large Iraqi WMD programs after the 1991 Gulf War.

Today, the military still faces numerous technological challenges, such as rapid detection of a biological attack, vaccine development for preventing a variety of possible biological attacks, and a capability for detecting shielded nuclear materials.

“There’s a question about whether we’ve made enough progress to keep pace with the adversary threat,” said Stephen Younger, who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which oversees numerous counterproliferation activities.

“We’ve had a lot of success, but we’ve got a long way to go,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs Dale Klein.

“I think our glass is half full, not empty,” he added, “because if we read the news every morning and only look at the bad side that does cause us to be depressed and demoralized.”

Shortcomings have resulted from insufficient congressional funding and executive attention, in addition to the many technical and technological difficulties and numerous potential adversaries, according to various experts.

“We don’t have enough money, so we need to use our money more wisely,” Klein said.

Ashton Carter, who was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy during the Clinton administration, critiqued the Bush administration’s efforts.

“President [George W.] Bush has said that the worst weapons in the hands of the worst people is the security threat of the 21^st Century, [and that it is] his most solemn duty to confront that threat,” he said.

“We’ve done a lot since 9/11 about the worst people, but I also want to suggest that we haven’t done nearly enough about the worst weapons,” said Carter, the keynote speaker yesterday.

The administration has done “one thing, pre-emption, in one place, Iraq,” he said.

“As we sit here today, North Korea and Iran are way out of the box, and essentially unimpeded effectively so far by our policies,” he said.

The administration should have overhauled U.S. counterproliferation activities, including creating an international campaign to combat unconventional weapons proliferation, Carter said.

He called the creation of DTRA in the late 1990s a success for bringing better managerial focus, but added, the “counterproliferation [effort] is still scattered and managerially inchoate” in the Pentagon.

Klein said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had listed counterproliferation as one of the administration’s top 10 defense priorities.

“We’ve got to bring better science and technology to the warfighter,” Younger said.

“Success in this difficult endeavor is going to require a national effort, we’re going to have to bring the smartest people in the country to bring bear on a really challenging program,” he said.

Counterproliferation is distinguished from nonproliferation in that it emphasizes military rather than diplomatic approaches to addressing WMD threats. It includes pure military deterrence, efforts to discourage foreign governments from acquiring unconventional weapons, and using pre-emptive military force to strike weapons, but also includes cooperative threat reduction, troop defense and incident management.

Technology is not the only answer for countering weapons of mass destruction, Younger said, nor necessarily the best, stressing also the importance of troop operations and tactics and intelligence.

“Perhaps maybe the single most important thing for winning the battle against weapons of mass destruction is intelligence. If you know where a target is, if you know where a weapon of mass destruction is, we can develop a weapon to go and take that facility and weapon out. I have no doubt about that,” he said.

“The problem is, we don’t know where they are. … We may think they’re some places where they’re not. DTRA spent a lot of time in Iraq going to school yards, building sites, a lot of places where not only were there not weapons of mass destruction, but we don’t think there ever were,” he said.

“We got a lot of stuff wrong. We can’t afford to do that in the future,” he said.

Younger said his greatest concern from a military perspective is nuclear weapons.

“Our forces are trained to fight and win in a chemical and biological environment. …There’s not a lot you can do to protect yourself against a nuclear explosion except move away from it or move underground to some sort of hardened configuration,” he said.

Chemical and biological terrorism pose more of a concern for domestic security, he said.

“It’s hard to make a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The technology to make and deliver chemical and biological weapons, however, is “widespread and relatively simple,” he said.

“It may not be possible to keep the tools of weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of potential adversaries or irresponsible groups,” he said.

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.