OPINION — Last Wednesday, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), STRATCOM Commander Admiral Charles A. Richard began with what he described as “a really profound thought,” which “really should grab your attention.”
It got mine.
He said, “Let me start with this assertion, that we have not seriously considered the possibility of engaging in competition through crisis or possible direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable armed adversary in over 25 years.”
He continued by saying, “Given Russia and China’s expanding capabilities and increasingly aggressive behavior and those posed by a nuclear North Korea and possibly Iran, we must reinvigorate the national conversation on the importance of strategic deterrence.”
He spoke at a time when President Trump was trying for a last minute, pre-election “win” that would extend the strategic New START treaty for a year and freeze non-strategic nuclear weapons at current levels, although no serious verification measures for the latter seem to have been agreed to.
But Admiral Richard’s statement brought into focus that “strategic deterrence” no longer only involves nuclear warheads and their delivery systems. “I’m committed to investing and modernizing our NC3 systems to be more robust and survivable against physical, electromagnetic, and cyberattacks,” he said.
Threats from cyber and space weaponry were on Richard’s mind when he added, “I’m convinced that we can better integrate our space-sensor layer with our land-based radar and do it with better protection with our NC3 next-generation architecture.”
He pointed out that China has continued “to invest heavily in a comprehensive and a robust array of counter-space, C4ISR, and precision navigation and timing capabilities as they pursue space parity with us.”
These new technologies that threaten strategic deterrence were also under discussion elsewhere last week.
Last Tuesday, Christopher Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, released a paper on reducing risk in cyberspace. He spelled out that the Trump administration declaratory policy includes potential nuclear use in response to cyberattacks on “U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities."
At the Brookings Institute last Thursday, during a discussion of Chinese perspectives on arms control and strategic stability, the Beijing participants showed some interest in future discussions on new technologies involving cyber and space. At the same time, they doubted that President Xi Jinping’s regime would change its position and accept the Trump administration’s desire for future trilateral nuclear weapons negotiations involving Moscow, Beijing and Washington that cover both strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons.
Dr. Yao Yunzhu, a former major general in the People’s Liberation Army and Director Emeritus of the Center on China-American Defense Relations, said any future U.S.-China dialogue on strategic stability should be expanded “to include the new factors, the new technologies.”
She said, “We should build upon the traditional strategic stability concepts, that is crisis control and arms race stability…We have grown out of the Cold War, last century, arms control environment so that we need some new things.”
Brookings Senior Fellow Frank Rose, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance during the Obama administration, agreed that the current arms control framework was under stress and that anti-satellite and cyber weapons were new issues that had to be dealt with.
Rose suggested that while he hoped the U.S. and Russia would extend New START, broader strategic stability discussions should begin among the so-called P-5, the U.S., United Kingdom, Russia, China and France, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. All have nuclear weapons, and all see the need for strategic stability as new war-fighting technologies emerge.
Another Brookings participant, Professor Li Bin of Tsinghua University and a member of the 1996 Chinese delegation to the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations, said he agreed that P-5 talks would be useful, but he was not optimistic given current U.S.-China relations. He did say if you allow countries to have missile defense, you cannot stop anti-satellite weapons. “Anti-satellite is a byproduct of missile defense. If we allow missile defense, we cannot stop the anti-satellite community. So, if you are really serious about a ban on anti-satellite, we should think of a ban on missile defense.”
Rose said he didn’t believe there was any chance for the U.S. and China to reach the kind of “Grand Bargain” that the Trump plan seemed to contemplate, limiting both strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons. He said he did believe smaller steps could be taken like limiting debris in outer space and establishing a link between the U.S. nuclear risk reduction center and a similar organization in China.
With cyber and space weapons increasingly impacting strategic nuclear calculations, and with artificial intelligence coming online, Rose said reconsideration of strategic stability could become a role for the P-5. He repeated his call for initiation of discussions on the impact of these new technologies. His hope was that such talks could come up with some risk reduction remedies to prevent miscalculations.
Ironically, Assistant Secretary Ford during his CSIS talk one day earlier, described how difficult he and U.S. officials see such multilateral talks coming to any firm agreements.
He pointed out that “cyberspace tools [are] rather difficult to define or to control,” and “like outer space is a domain in which technologies are evolving so quickly, private and governmental actors are so intertwined, and definitions of what can be a weapon are so vague, that it is hard to see how traditional rules-based and legally binding prohibitory approaches common to traditional arms control really could work in this arena.”
Ford added, “So, it’s for those reasons that the U.S. has long rejected efforts to impose traditional arms control on…offensive cyber capabilities.” Citing “Moscow’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. elections,” Ford said the U.S. learned “to more explicitly incorporate elements of deterrence in our cyberspace security.”
The U.S. 2018 National Cyber Strategy promoted seeking “consensus on what constitutes responsible state behavior in cyberspace,” Ford said. That strategy also threatened that the U.S. “will launch an international cyber deterrence initiative, to build a coalition of states and develop tailored strategies to ensure adversaries understand the consequences of their own malicious cyber behavior.”
As examples, Ford said in February 2020, 28 individual states and the European Union joined together in condemning the October 2019, cyberattack against Georgia by the Russian GRU military intelligence service. In April 2020, warnings by the U.S. and several other countries that there would be consequences if a threatened cyberattack against Czech Republic health services took place did have an effect and “despite preparatory work by the would-be perpetrators, no major cyberattacks ultimately occurred in that case.”
Despite all this talk, cyberattacks continue, vital space assets remain vulnerable and innovative technologies are being developed to both defend and attack them. It’s a new battlefield for the arms race and strategic stability again hangs in the balance.
Read more expert-driven national security insight, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
