WAR 12-17-2016-to-12-23-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

Trump Calls For Expansion Of US Nuke Capability, Hours After Putin Urges Russia To Do Same
Started by Possible Impact‎, Today 09:57 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ity-Hours-After-Putin-Urges-Russia-To-Do-Same

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https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/...-u-s-nuclear-arsenal-must-be-greatly-expanded

Trump Says U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Must Be ‘Greatly’ Expanded

by Alex Wayne
December 22, 2016, 9:05 AM PST December 22, 2016, 1:46 PM PST

-Russian president said his arsenal also should be strengthened
-Obama has sought to both modernize and reduce U.S. weapons

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday the U.S. should increase its nuclear arsenal, an apparent reversal of a decades-long reduction of the nation’s atomic weaponry that came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated calls for his country’s arsenal to be reinforced.

"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes," Trump said in a Twitter post.

Putin said in a speech earlier on Thursday that his country should also bolster its nuclear forces: "We need to enhance the combat capability of strategic nuclear forces, primarily by strengthening missile complexes that will be guaranteed to penetrate existing and future missile defense systems," he said.

Global X Uranium ETF rose to a session high after Trump’s comments while Uranium Resources Inc., a Colorado-based mining company, climbed as much as 35 percent before trimming gains.

President Barack Obama has both reduced the U.S. nuclear arsenal, in an agreement early in his presidency with Russia, and sought to modernize it to replace thousands of bombs and missiles. His modernization plan -- which the Arms Control Association said would cost as much as $1 trillion over 30 years -- has come under criticism from proponents of denuclearization, who warn it may prompt a new arms race with Russia and China.

"Unnecessary, unwise, and unaffordable," Kelsey Davenport, the director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said of Trump’s comments in a post on Twitter.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iCYpJrYvzuD4/v1/-1x-1.png

More broadly, Trump has said he will seek to enlarge the U.S. military, including by building dozens of new ships for the Navy, while controlling costs.

‘Confusing Tapestry’

A Trump spokesman later attempted to walk back the remark, saying that the president-elect intended to make a point entirely different from the plain meaning of his tweet.

"President-elect Trump was referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it -- particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes," the spokesman, Jason Miller, said in an e-mailed statement. "He has also emphasized the need to improve and modernize our deterrent capability as a vital way to pursue peace through strength.”

Tom Barrack, the founder of Colony Capital who is also chairman of Trump’s inauguration committee, defended the president-elect’s tweet on Bloomberg Television.

"The fear is, when you talk about tweeting and a spontaneous act by the man who is president-elect, and you attach that to nuclear, everybody freaks out," Barrack said. "I would look at it another way. The world is a confusing tapestry. I think you’ll see this president-elect start to bring normalcy, actually, and quietness back to that fabric. But it starts from strength."

Barrack said Trump uses Twitter as "a new method of communication" but added: "What he’s saying on Twitter should not be viewed as action."

Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. are already competing to build a next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Air Force, a project expected to cost at least $85 billion. That is just one part of a modernization plan which will contribute to what defense analysts call a gathering “bow wave” of spending in the coming decade on major weapons that future presidents will face.

Defense companies stand to benefit from a resurgence in military spending promised by Trump and already underway in Western Europe and Asia as global tensions rise. Trump met Wednesday with executives from both Lockheed Martin and Boeing in Florida, along with a bevy of top Pentagon officials, to discuss military spending. Among the participants was Vice Admiral James Syring, who heads the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.

“We’re trying to get costs down, costs,” Trump told reporters in brief remarks outside the resort after the officers departed.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/12/23/syria_after_aleppo_110538.html

Syria After Aleppo

By Daniel DePetris
December 23, 2016

The pictures and footage coming out of Eastern Aleppo are absolutely horrifying. In fact, horrifying may be too tepid a word; genocidal or apocalyptic is more like it.

Four years of some of the most intense combat in what has been an unforgiving war on civilians has culminated in the destruction of a once proud, bustling, cosmopolitan, and historic city. As for Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the crisis said, “t took 4,000 years to build Aleppo; one generation managed to tear it down.”

Bashar al-Assad has never been one for negotiating with his opponents. The regime that his father helped create and led for thirty years before passing control to his children is built on fear and brute force. And that is exactly how Assad the son has chosen to fight the war; anyone in Syria, however, young or old, is an enemy of the state and a terrorist sympathizer if they even live in areas controlled by opposition fighters. Indeed, Assad’s no-holds-barred approach to the war is a major reason why the United Nations and the humanitarian community are downright frightened as to what will happen to the young men who are eventually forced to transit into regime-controlled territory.

As tens of thousands of East Aleppo residents prepare to save themselves and what is left of their families by hopping on to government buses away from the carnage, one thing is abundantly clear: Assad has won the most critical battle of the entire war. But there is something else that is also clear; the war itself will not end. Indeed, the Syrian conflict post-Aleppo will not only continue, but could evolve in a myriad of ways that even the most knowledgeable Syria analyst will find difficult to predict.

Next Stop for Assad: Idlib

If there is any area of the country where the Syrian government’s presence is minimal, it is Idlib province. Northwestern Syria is home to a medley of militant groups, from the most extreme in Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to some of the more mainstream. Idlib also happens to be an area where tens of thousands of civilians from other areas of the country have been transported in government-initiated “amnesty deals,” which are essentially surrender agreements for opposition fighters and civilians to move north in exchange for their lives. Idlib has become a semi-refugee camp where Syrians from as far south as Daraya to as far north as Aleppo are squatting with friends or relatives.

Assad, therefore, looks at Idlib as a threat to his own power and authority. Any section of Syria that is outside of his regime’s grasp is a potential threat to his legitimacy. With his bombard, starve, and siege strategy having worked so well in Aleppo, there is nothing holding Assad back from using the same tactics in towns across Idlb. Unfortunately for the Syrian people, the most likely scenario is an increased pace of Russian and Syrian air operations in Idlib province as a prelude to a pro-governnment ground incursion.

Russia asks Assad to negotiate seriously

Vladimir Putin has been Bashar al-Assad’s saving grace throughout the entire war. Absent Russia’s military operations in the air, Russia’s diplomatic cover at the U.N. Security Council, and Russia’s advisers on the ground, Assad would have been strung up by a noose or forced into exile years ago. Yet just because the Russians have been solidly behind Assad’s campaign so far doesn’t necessarily mean they buy into the dictator’s strategy of retaking all areas of the country.

Lest we forget, Moscow is not really fighting for Assad at all, but rather for the existence of a central governing authority that it views as the only alternative to the establishment of a state dominated by terrorists or anarchy (think Libya, Yemen, Iraq post-Saddam). When Syrian officials spoke about extinguishing their enemies militarily earlier in the year, Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin sternly rebuked the comments, saying that “f they [the Syrian regime] proceed on the basis that no ceasefire is necessary and they need to fight to a victorious end, then this conflict will last a very long time, and that is terrifying to imagine.”

There is no use covering for the Russians; they have been an unconstructive enabler of Assad’s war machine for nearly six years now. However, Russia’s national security interests do not perfectly correlate to Assad’s personal interests either; Moscow, for instance, co-authored a Security Council resolution that demanded an all-inclusive, Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political resolution to the war. Now that Assad forces have recaptured Aleppo, the Russians could conceivably make a renewed push on their Syrian proxies to embrace the U.N.-led negotiations with the opposition and press the government’s demands diplomatically rather than through continued, indiscriminate bombardment in the field. Assad is in his strongest position he has ever been in since the war began, so the Russians may very well argue to their Syrian colleagues that now is the ideal time to start being cooperative.

Syria holds its fire, looks to Trump

There is no question that the Syrian army, for all intents and purposes, is a shell of its former self. Thankfully for the Assad regime, the attrition within government forces has been partly addressed through the importation of foreign Shia militias funded by Iran who have served as front-line, pro-government shock troops. Suspending any further ground operations into rebel-controlled territory, preserving his gains in Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus, and waiting to see what the next U.S. administration will do on the Syria issue would, therefore, be Assad’s safest option.

Assad has spoken about President-Elect Donald Trump is positive terms. On Russian television, he described Trump as “a natural ally” if he truly is intent on working closer with Russia. And in an interview with RT less than a month later, Assad hinted that if Trump is politically courageous enough to defy the foreign policy establishment in Washington, his government would be a partner of the United States in the counterterrorism effort.

The regime, of course, doesn’t particularly care whether Trump reaches out or not. What they are cautiously optimistic about is that the new administration in Washington will decrease what is already minimal military assistance to the moderate opposition in favor of closer ties with the Kremlin against the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. Waiting it out and assessing how the Trump administration will behave — not being overly provocative or brutal in the meantime — is certainly an option.

---Whichever path Bashar al-Assad travels, a war that has killed over 500,000 people, displaced half of Syria’s population, resulted in an influx of refugees into Europe and destabilized the Middle East will continue into the foreseeable future. It just depends on how bloody that continued war will be.

Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and The Diplomat.

 

[Housecarl]

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https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop/dead-drop-december-23

Dead Drop: December 23

DECEMBER 23, 2016| ANONYMOUS

GREAT NEWS! TEAM TRUMP TAKING INTELLIGENCE BRIEFINGS: Unfortunately for the U.S. Intelligence Community, however, the briefings are coming from foreign outfits. YNetNews.com reported recently that the Director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, “clandestinely visited the United States to meet with President-elect Trump’s staff and brief them on pressing security matters.” The Dead Drop is reliably informed that the Israelis are not the only foreign intelligence service bragging that, like Kanye West, they have made pilgrimages to Trump Tower to share their world views.

BEST PLACES TO WORK: For more than a dozen years, the Partnership for Public Service has conducted surveys to find out how happy Feds are at the various agencies. The latest list just came out. NASA gets sky high rankings – landing at #1 among large agencies. The Intelligence Community comes in at #3 (although, it should be pointed out that the poll was conducted before the president-elect started taking shots at them). Over at the Pentagon (and beyond), the Navy came in #12, OSD/JCS et al #13, Air Force #14, and Army #16. Homeland Security came in dead last. But DHS’s positive rating of 45.8% was way ahead of the loser in the small agency category, where the Federal Election Commission had a favorable rating of only 28.4% .

ARMY STRONG: The Dead Drop’s Army buddies are pretty pumped about President-elect Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Army. Billionaire Vinny Viola has a lot going for him. A West Point grad, son of a military family who made a fortune on Wall Street, Viola owns the Florida Panthers hockey team and donated $2 million to establish the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point. Even Democrats on the Hill are singing his praises, with Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) tweeting that Viola’s dedication to the Army is “second to none” and opining that he is “up for the job.” And, according to Breitbart News, he knows Kung Fu.

GENERALLY SPEAKING: With retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn running the NSC, two retired Marines, Generals James Mattis and John Kelley at Defense and Homeland Security, and West Point grads Mike Pompeo for CIA and Vinny Viola for Army, critics like Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth (herself an Army veteran) warn that there is a “real danger” of the U.S. traveling down a path toward a “military junta.” The Dead Drop too is worried about the lack of diversity in the President-elect’s picks and believes that something should be done – to address the noticeable lack of Navy admirals and Air Force generals in the mix.

BELAY MY LAST: Back in October, we told you of a controversial decision made by Navy leadership to eliminate enlisted job titles. “No more boatswain’s mates, torpedomen, and yeomen” the Navy Secretary, CNO, and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy decreed. And sailors reacted negatively. “Respectfully, this is the stupidest decision ever,” said one. Well, this week, the sea service’s leadership announced that they were making a “course correction” – which apparently is Navy lingo for retreat. The plan to scrap the job titles has been scrapped. (For those unfamiliar with nautical usage – “belay my last” is Navy for, “never mind.”

THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE: Some folks spotted The Cipher Brief article this week about General David Petraeus’s comments at Harvard last Friday, in which he heaped praise on Trump nominees/appointees Michael Flynn, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo and others and wondered: is he running for DNI? It would be a strange twist of fate for Petraeus to succeed James Clapper – who asked him to resign as CIA director in November 2012.

CRASH PROGRAM: About a week ago, Donald Trump tweeted that “the F-35 program and cost is out of control.” Unsurprisingly, the guy in charge of the program, Air Force LT Gen Chris Bogdan disagrees. Apparently he needs to attend remedial media training, however, because he committed the sin of repeating the negative allegation, saying: “This program is not out of control.” That’s like saying, “I am not a crook.” Oh, and Bogdan added that he will need another half billion dollars to finish the flight testing program.

POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting/weird stuff we stumbled across:

THANKS FOR THE ADVICE: CIA alumni and convicted felon John Kiriakou has a book coming out in April called, “Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive In Prison.” Kiriakou, who claims to be a whistleblower, despite protestations otherwise from the judge who sent him to prison for 23 months, is penning this self-help book about “twenty life skills he learned in CIA operational training” that allowed him to “keep himself safe and at the top of the prison social heap.” Maybe it is just us – but we’d rather hear how to stay OUT of prison.
ACCOUNTANTS AND SPIES: CNBC’s website has a story which purports to be “the secret history of Deloitte’s espionage practice.” It tells of a Deloitte unit made up of former CIA officers and others whose job was “…to spy on Ernst & Young, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and some of the consulting competitors." Oddly, one member of the Deloitte team was John Kiriakou (see above.) Expect this book soon, “Doing Time Like an Accountant: What Deloitte Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison.”
BLOND BOMBSHELL? The usually reputable website Ozy has an article asking, “Was this blond bombshell the CIA’s secret weapon?” Near as we can tell, the answer is: NO. The very confusing article is about a radio DJ who is convinced his wife was part of CIA mind control experiments many years ago. He says she had been taught to kill with her bare hands and resist pain.
NETWORK NEWS: Not a day goes by when members of The Cipher Brief Network aren’t making news. Here are just a few examples from this week:

Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, tells FCW regarding accounts of how the FBI alerted the DNC that they were being hacked by the Russians, “Honestly, when I read that they just left a message, my jaw dropped.”
The ubiquitous Admiral James Stavridis was on NBC Nightly News, Morning Joe and Andrea Mitchell Reports talking about Russian hacks, German terrorist attacks, and the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey.
WHAT’S ON THEIR NIGHTSTAND? (Our contributors tell us about what they’re currently reading)

Steve Hall, former member of the Senior Intelligence Service at the CIA:

I'm currently reading "Disinformation" by former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Pacepa, which provides his insights into Soviet era propaganda activities. After the multi-faceted influence operation Russia ran against the United States during the presidential election, I wanted to deepen my understanding of this Chekist art form. We're going to see more of it in the future.

SECURITY QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Directed energy is an inevitability; the question is not if it will be, but if it will be for us or for our adversaries. We are fighting tomorrow’s wars today, in our labs and on our test sites, and our present-day investment in directed energy will determine our ability to maintain military superiority in the future.”

-Henry “Trey” Obering III, Executive Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton

DON’T BE SHY: If you know any tidbits, just pass them along to us at: thedeaddrop@thecipherbrief.com. And don’t worry, who you are will remain a tightly held secret.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-nuclear-arms-race-russia-232944

Trump threatens to upend U.S. nuclear weapons policy
'We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,' Trump says.

By MADELINE CONWAY
12/23/16 07:39 AM EST
Comments 136

In a series of impromptu statements about nuclear weapons, Donald Trump is threatening to upend longstanding U.S. nonproliferation policy, even as his advisers contradict him and muddy his intentions.

The president-elect had alarmed and perplexed some experts and others in Washington when he pronounced, without offering more details, via Twitter on Thursday that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

He further escalated his call on Friday, telling the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” that he is fine with the country taking part in an “arms race” if it puts the U.S. in a stronger position against foreign adversaries.

“Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said in an off-air conversation on Friday.

After the remark was reported on MSNBC, though, incoming Trump press secretary Sean Spicer pushed back and insisted that the remarks came from a “private conversation” with “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski. While he told the “Today” Show’s Matt Lauer that “there is not going to be” an arms race, he told CNN that Trump is not going to “take anything off the table,” either.

It remains unclear where the president-elect stands, but given longstanding bipartisan support for preventing nuclear escalation, if followed through Trump’s statements would represent an extraordinary shift in how the U.S. approaches the role of weapons of mass destruction in its own defenses and throughout the world. President Barack Obama has advanced a vision of “America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

At first, after his Thursday tweet, Trump’s own supporters had tried to downplay what it meant. It was unclear, for example, whether Trump was advocating the U.S. increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal, which would be a major change, or if he was speaking of modernizing it. Such a suggestion would be in line with ongoing efforts and not necessarily controversial.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager who was recently named incoming counselor to the president, told an irate Rachel Maddow on Thursday night that Trump may have meant the latter. Regardless, Conway insisted during the heated exchange on MSNBC, the tweet did not necessarily represent a policy change, but Trump “talking about keeping us safe and secure.”

“There are a lot of people hiding under the bed right now because it doesn’t seem like he knows what he’s talking about on this issue,” Maddow said.

“That’s not fair,” Conway responded, later adding, “He’s not making policy on Twitter. … Again, perhaps he is also echoing what President Obama himself has tried to do here, which is get upgrades to our nuclear systems.”

Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, had also said on Thursday that the president-elect was talking about expanding nonproliferation efforts, not stoking an arms race.

"President-elect Trump was referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it — particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes," Miller said in a statement. "He has also emphasized the need to improve and modernize our deterrent capability as a vital way to pursue peace through strength.”

Trump’s comments Friday, of course, seemed to directly contradict that.

The controversy started after Russian President Vladimir Putin called on his country to “strengthen” its nuclear forces. “We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems,” he said earlier this week, according to multiple news reports.

But Putin at an annual news conference on Friday said Russia has no interest in a nuclear arms race and seemed to normalize Trump’s statements, calling his tweet unsurprising.

“Of course the U.S. has more missiles, submarines and aircraft carriers, but what we say is that we are stronger than any aggressor, and this is the case,” Putin said, adding, “As for Donald Trump, there is nothing new about it, during his elections campaign he said the U.S. needs to bolster its nuclear capabilities and its armed forces in general.”

During the election season, Trump made contradictory statements about nuclear proliferation. He suggested that some countries — including Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia — should be allowed to develop them, despite efforts to prevent more countries from doing so. But he also told The New York Times in March that “it’s a very scary nuclear world.”

“Biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation,” Trump said at the time.

Trump’s more recent comments about expanding America’s nuclear capability go against decades of policy to reduce the stockpile of nuclear warheads and could potentially violate an arms control treaty with Russia. The U.S. has a stockpile of roughly 4,500 nuclear warheads and nearly 1,500 deployed warheads (Russia’s armaments are nearly identical, as both nations account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads).

The U.S. and Russia are due to meet nuclear reduction targets by February 2018 under the New START Treaty, which can be extended for another five years in 2021.

Experts remain confused and in some cases unnerved by the nature of Trump’s foray into the nuclear weapons discussion. On Thursday, John Tierney, a former Democratic congressman and current executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, presented Trump’s tweet as perilous.

“It is dangerous for the President-elect to use just 140 characters and announce a major change in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, which is nuanced, complex, and affects every single person on this planet,” he said in a statement, warning that an expansion threatens a nuclear arms race.

“The potential consequences of changing U.S. nuclear weapons policy so drastically are simply unimaginable,” he warned. “Current plans already call for spending $1 trillion over the next three decades to modernize and maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which the Pentagon has expressed concern about being able to afford. The President-elect will have to explain why any increase is necessary both financially and strategically.”

Joseph Cirincione, the president of the global security foundation Ploughshares Fund and a nuclear weapons expert, called Trump's actions “bizarre, unprecedented and completely out of bounds behavior for a president-elect.”

Incoming presidents usually wait until they take office to make pronouncements on a topic like nuclear policy, Cirincione said. Beyond that, he said he is alarmed by the cavalier attitude Trump seems to have toward as enormously sensitive an issue as weapons of mass destruction. While Trump might see Twitter as a means to convey strength to his constituents at home, Cirincione said, “the rest of the world is watching,” and other countries could respond with actions of their own.

“You can’t use Twitter to make nuclear policy,” Cirincione said. “Look, you should at least wait until you’re president. But this is why — this kind of view that he’s breaking with convention, he wants to shake things up, I understand that, but not on nuclear policy. There are reasons why people spend days crafting the language of nuclear policy.”

“These things can be very complicated,” he continued, “and every word matters.”

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Hummm......

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...hould-expand-nuclear-weapons-hes-right-214546

WASHINGTON AND THE WORLD

Trump Said the U.S. Should Expand Nuclear Weapons. He’s Right.

America needs to bolster its deterrence not to start a war, but to prevent one.

By MATTHEW KROENIG
December 23, 2016
Comments 4

On Thursday, Donald Trump created controversy when he tweeted, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” In case anyone was confused, he followed up Friday morning with an off-air remark to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that clarified his intentions: “Let it be an arms race,” he said. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

The backlash was swift and unanimous. Critics charged that there is no plausible reason to expand U.S. nuclear weapons, that Trump’s comments contradicted a decades-old bipartisan consensus on the need to reduce nuclear stockpiles, and that such reckless statements risk provoking a new nuclear arms race with Russia and China.

On this matter, however, Trump is right.

U.S. nuclear strategy cannot be static, but must take into account the nuclear strategy and capabilities of its adversaries. For decades, the United States was able to reduce its nuclear arsenal from Cold War highs because it did not face any plausible nuclear challengers. But great power political competition has returned and it has brought nuclear weapons, the ultimate instrument of military force, along for the ride.

In recent years, North Korea has continued to grow its nuclear arsenal and means of delivery and has issued chilling nuclear threats against the United States and its Asian allies. As recently as Thursday -- before Trump’s offending tweet -- Rodong Sinmum, the Pyongyang regime’s official newspaper, published an opinion article calling for bolstering North Korea’s “nuclear deterrence.”

The potential threats are everywhere. Washington faces an increasing risk of conflict with a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China in the South China Sea. Beijing is expanding its nuclear forces and it is estimated that the number of Chinese warheads capable of reaching the U.S. homeland has more than trebled in the past decade and continues to grow. And Russia has become more aggressive in Europe and the Middle East and has engaged in explicit nuclear saber rattling the likes of which we have not seen since the 1980s. At the height of the crisis over Crimea in 2014, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin ominously declared, “It's best not to mess with us … I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” And on Tuesday, he vowed to “enhance the combat capability of strategic nuclear forces, primarily by strengthening missile complexes that will be guaranteed to penetrate existing and future missile defense systems.” As former Defense Secretary William Perry correctly notes, “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War.”

The United States needs a robust nuclear force, therefore, not because anyone wants to fight a nuclear war, but rather, the opposite: to deter potential adversaries from attacking or coercing the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons of their own.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States mindlessly reduced its nuclear arsenal even as other nuclear powers went in the opposite direction, expanding and modernizing their nuclear forces. Such a path was unsustainable and Trump is correct to recognize that America’s aging nuclear arsenal is in need of some long overdue upgrades.

So, what would expanding and strengthening the nuclear arsenal look like?

First, the United States must modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad (submarines; long-range bombers, including a new cruise missile; and intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs). The Obama administration announced plans to modernize the triad under Republican pressure, but critics are already trying to kill off the ICBM and the cruise missile, and production timelines for these weapon systems keep slipping into the future. The Trump administration must make the timely modernization of all three legs of the triad a top priority.

Second, the United States should increase its deployment of nuclear warheads, consistent with its international obligations. According to New START, the treaty signed with Russia in 2011, each state will deploy no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, but those restrictions don’t kick in until February 2018. At present, according to the State Department, the United States is roughly 200 warheads below the limit while Russia is almost 250 warheads above it. Accordingly, Russia currently possesses a nuclear superiority of more than 400 warheads, which is worrisome in and of itself and also raises serious questions about whether Moscow intends to comply with this treaty at all. The United States, therefore, should expand its deployed arsenal up to the treaty limits and be fully prepared for further expansion should Russia break out — as Moscow has done with several other legacy arms control agreements.

Third, and finally, the United States and NATO need more flexible nuclear options in Europe. In the event of a losing war with NATO, Russian strategy calls for limited nuclear “de-escalation” strikes against European civilian and military targets. At present, NATO lacks an adequate response to this threat. As I explain in a new report, the United States must develop enhanced nuclear capabilities, including a tactical, air-to-surface cruise missile, in order to disabuse Putin of the notion that he can use nuclear weapons in Europe and get away with it.

These stubborn facts lay bare the ignorance or naivety of those fretting that Trump’s tweets risk starting a new nuclear arms race. It is U.S. adversaries, not Trump, who are moving first. It is a failure to respond that would be most reckless, signaling continued American weakness and only incentivizing further nuclear aggression.

The past eight years have been demoralizing for many in the defense policy community as Obama has consistently placed ideology over reality in the setting of U.S. nuclear policy. The results, an increasingly disordered world filled with intensifying nuclear dangers, speak for themselves.

Rather than express outrage over Trump’s tweet, therefore, we should take heart that we once again have a president who may be willing to do what it takes to defend the country against real, growing and truly existential threats.


Matthew Kroenig is associate professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council. He is a former strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and is currently writing a book on U.S. nuclear strategy.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://warontherocks.com/2016/12/everything-you-think-you-know-about-limited-war-is-wrong/

EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT LIMITED WAR IS WRONG

DONALD STOKER
DECEMBER 22, 2016
Comments 5

One of the critical problems with much of the writing on strategic subjects is a failure to define the terms being used in a clear and universally applicable manner. When we fail to explain what we mean when we use terms such as “limited war” or “total war,” we build in a potentially fatal underpinning for the formulation of policy and strategy. This error also robs the discussion of any firm ground for critical analysis. Moreover, if we don’t understand what we mean by “limited war,” we don’t understand what we mean when we describe any war. Shoddy thinking lays a foundation for defeat.

The fuzziness of our approach to defining limited war can be seen even in classic texts on the subject. In 1981, John Garnett, one of the founders of modern strategic studies, wrote: “Only conflicts which contain the potentiality for becoming total can be described as limited.” Diplomat Robert McClintock wrote in 1967: “Limited war is a conflict short of general war to achieve specific political objectives, using limited forces and limited force.” Both of these typical definitions explain limited war in relation to other types of conflict (“total war” and “general war”) that also lack clear, generally agreed upon definitions. In his classic 1957 work, the best-known theorist of limited war, political scientist Robert Osgood, defined this kind of conflict in terms of the objective sought and (among other things) by the fact that the combatants “do not demand the utmost military effort of which the belligerents are capable.” This description is nebulous at best and fails to offer a firm and usable explanation of “effort,” or what some would term the means used. The definitions haven’t improved with the passing decades. A 2010 book noted:

The term limited war implies regular military operations by one nation-state against the regular military force of another nation-state and excludes irregular operations by terrorist organisations against state or by other non-state actors like warlords against a state or against other warlords.

This is merely another variation of a definition based upon means with the addition of the opponent’s doctrinal warfighting methods.

Unfortunately, this type of conceptual weakness is typical in the theoretical and historical literature. The given definitions of limited war generally imply that the level of means used by the combatants determines whether or not a conflict is a limited war. Yet defining a war by the means used fails to provide a clear, consistently applicable basis for critical analysis. War, as Carl von Clausewitz wrote in On War, is a political tool, and when nations go to war they do so to either overthrow the enemy regime, or for something less than this. The political objective sought explains the war, not the means employed in an effort to achieve it. The British maritime theorist Sir Julian Corbett expanded upon Clausewitz’s foundation in Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. Here, Corbett used the term “unlimited war” to describe a conflict waged to overthrow the enemy government, and “limited war” for a war fought for something less. This creates a stable underpinning for all subsequent clarifying analysis. Examining a war based upon the political objective sought provides an anchor for analyzing any war. The means applied to reach those objectives certainly help to determine the nature of the war being fought — as does the political objective of the opponent — but defining a war based upon the means used (or not) lacks universality because it is not concrete. These help determine how the war is fought, but not what the war is about — the political aim — and this is what matters most because it is from here that all the other elements contributing to the war’s nature derive their value.

As noted above, “limited war” is often defined in relation to the term “total war” and its various dysfunctional brethren such as “general war” and “major war.” As I wrote recently at The Strategy Bridge, when writers use the term “total war,” their definitions are inevitably dominated by discussions of the means used by the combatants. One of the more influential and famous uses of the term “total war” occurs in Clausewitz’s On War, where he uses it in a theoretical sense as an unobtainable “ideal type.” I deal with this in detail in the current issue of Infinity Journal.

Why does how we define limited war matter? First, all of the wars in which the United States has been involved since the Japanese surrender in 1945 have been branded limited wars — regardless of whether or not the term accurately depicts the nature of the conflict. The term probably reentered the modern lexicon thanks to an innocent remark by then Secretary of Defense George Marshall. In May 1951, when asked during the Senate hearings on Korea how he would describe this struggle he remarked: “I would characterize it as a limited war which I hope will remain limited.” Since then, “limited war” has become a descriptor of choice for every American conflict. Korea became the archetype “limited war” in books such as the well-known 1964 work by journalist David Rees. This is despite the fact that the Truman administration changed the political objective to an unlimited one on September 9, 1951 (and back to a limited political objective in May 1951).

In Vietnam, the United States fought for a limited political objective, but the North Vietnamese pursued an unlimited political objective against South Vietnam. In the Gulf War, the United States pursued a limited objective, but wavered on this at the end with calls for regime change. In Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 the United States pursued regime change and thus unlimited political objectives. But once new governments were formed, the United States fought to preserve these and thus its political objectives became limited in these respective nations. To brand these conflicts as “limited wars” is simplistic.

Some authors have carried the mistake beyond American wars and tried to brand almost every conflict “limited.” Seymour Deitchman, in his 1964 Limited War and American Defense Policy, provides a list of 32 wars fought between 1945 and 1962 that include such different conflicts as the Chinese Civil War (1927 to 1949), the Philippine Hukbalahap Rebellion (1946 to 1954), and the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He classifies all of these as limited wars. He also offers a list of 59 conflicts that occurred — or almost did — during this same period and breaks down all of these into three types: conventional wars, unconventional wars, and deterred wars. He does all this without clearly defining limited war. Such blind throwing of the “limited war” blanket over any conflict, especially if it is not “big” (whatever that means), is a flawed method of attempting to analyze, understand, and fight these wars. It is also a blatant manifestation of the current conceptual problem Americans have in regard to defining all wars.

Second, the problem of not understanding the nature of the war is directly related to how we currently define — or more accurately — fail to define limited war. For example, in a 2014 article, journalist David Ignatius described what the United States began doing in Iraq in June 2014 as a limited war. He gave no clear definition of limited war and seems to believe that the most recent Iraq war is limited because the United States is using very little of its military means. This simply explains the means being used. It does not in any way describe what the United States hopes to achieve, and the political objective being sought is the keystone for what is being done — or at least it should be. As the stated U.S. political objective seems to be the destruction of the de facto ISIL state, it would be more accurate to define the American political objective as an unlimited one.

Ignatius is hardly alone in his approach. Indeed, one could argue that he is firmly aligned with current as well as past U.S. strategic and analytical thought. A better but still problematic example appeared in a 2015 issue of The National Interest, and another in a 2013 Breaking Defense article. One can easily find other recent examples from academics journalists, and policymakers. Too often works about limited war (which are all rooted in Cold War publications and concepts, Bernard Brodie being a key early convert) cloud rather than clarify our understanding of conflicts.

Third, writers on limited war, as well as the experience of the Cold War itself, helped teach many in modern liberal states that victory should not be pursued because its achievement was actually bad. Again, we turn to John Garnett: “In limited war ‘winning’ is an inappropriate and dangerous goal, and a state which finds itself close to it should immediately begin to practise restraint.” Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired general Colin Powell once noted:

As soon as they tell me it [war] is limited, it means that they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me “surgical,” I head for the bunker.

We find another example in an article by a veteran of more than two decades in the U.S. foreign service. He criticized examinations of American wars as being too “victory centric,” faulted them for using a “victory-tinted lens,” and insisted that searching for a reason for not winning a war “treats victory as the norm and military frustration as an aberration, an attitude that distorts our understanding of conflict and its unpredictable results.” Instead, the focus should be upon cutting one’s losses to avoid a protracted conflict. In other words, we should learn to lose at a lower cost. Such thinking has helped undermine the U.S. and Western ability to clearly identify the political objective or objectives for which it is fighting any war (the ends), create intelligent strategy for achieving this (the ways), and harnessing national power — especially military power (the means) — sufficient to achieve the desired end.

Bad limited war theory has helped rob the United States and other Western nations of the awareness that wars should be waged decisively. If leaders cannot clearly define what they want, how can the military hope to deliver it? And if sufficient means for getting the job done are not provided merely because the war has illogically been branded “limited,” how can one win? The result is that “victory” — both in battle and in war itself — has generally disappeared from the statements of analysts and policymakers. As strategist Edward Luttwak has pointed out, many of these same figures view the term itself with suspicion. Why does this matter? Refusing to pursue victory can produce an endless war. Indeed, though Ignatius’ discussion of limited war leaves much to be desired, he makes the interesting argument that one of the problems with fighting limited wars is that they don’t resolve problems, which is certainly a conversation worth having. Also, your enemy is trying to win. Only Western liberal democracies in the post-World War II era go to war without the expectation of victory. Fortunately, the political leaders who fought against the Nazis understood the necessity of victory. Winning (or losing) a war matters, particularly to the people who live directly with the results.

The refusal to define or value victory in warfare, as well as the refusal to seek it, is a political problem that affects the ability of the military to wage the conflict effectively and deliver victory. Since the time of the Korean War, U.S. political leaders have too often sacrificed the lives of American men and women in wars without having a clear idea of what they mean by victory, and sometimes without a desire to even achieve it. These political leaders don’t often phrase things this way, but that is the reality of the result of their decisions. If the war is not important enough to win, is it important enough to even fight? A recent example of the devaluing of victory in Western intellectual circles is Dominic Tierney’s The Right Way to Lose a War. This work largely concerns itself with learning to lose wars better. Why? Because “[w]e live in an age of unwinnable wars.” In the author’s defense, he insists that his work will help the U.S. reverse its “military fortunes and start winning again,” but the task of military and political leaders is not to lose wars more efficiently. Their job is to win wars. Dutch political scientist Rob de Wijk insists that when fighting “to be successful, liberal democracies must use force decisively.” This seems a statement of the obvious, but it is no longer so obvious to many American political leaders, journalists, and academics.

All of this demonstrates a Western world intellectually at sea in a strategic sense. Consistently, its leaders don’t know how to set clear political goals, don’t understand how to conceptualize the wars they launch in pursuit of often fuzzy political objectives, and don’t value victory — or tell the people what this means. Waging war in this manner is either an expression of ignorance or an example of dishonesty — intentional or not — on the part of political leaders for short term political purposes that have long term effects on U.S. public opinion and the men and women who are being sent to fight wars their leaders don’t call wars and have no interest in winning. To purposefully fight a war one must — at a minimum — know why one is fighting, what they hope to achieve, understand the enemy, know what victory looks like, and chart a sensible path for getting there.



Donald Stoker is Professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College’s program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on strategic subjects and is currently writing a book on limited war. His most recent book is Clausewitz: His Life and Work. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not represent the views of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

 

[Doomer Doug]

2017 looks to be complete lunacy!

Sheesh, Housecarl, are you trying to ruin my Christmas season?

This litany of disaster, near total chaos and decay indicates to me 2017 is going to be a real mother#%^^^ of a year.

I wonder how much damage Obama can do before January 20th?

Well Merry Christmas anyway!