Pentagon faulted on its nuclear mission

After firing the two top Air Force leaders last year for a series of embarrassing nuclear weapons mishaps, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was told Thursday that the same problems of inexperience, poor training and splintered authority over nuclear arms affect the entire Pentagon, including its top leadership.

A task force headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger painted a dismal picture of a Pentagon that has drifted from the mission of nuclear deterrence during the nearly two decades since the Cold War ended. Among the Pentagon’s senior military and civilian leaders, the panel found “a distressing degree of inattention” to the role of nuclear weapons in deterring attacks on the United States.

Education in nuclear deterrence theory and practice at the nation’s top military schools has largely ended, senior-level exercises have stopped and the number of senior officials familiar with deterrence is rapidly dwindling and will soon become an “acute” problem, Schlesinger reported.

Many senior leaders “lack the foundation for understanding nuclear deterrence, its psychological content, its political nature and its military role -- which is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons,” the report concluded.

Among Schlesinger’s recommendations: Send senior leaders back to school, ramp up training, consolidate responsibility for nuclear missions within the Pentagon bureaucracy and encourage the new administration to construct a new strategic framework to define the role that nuclear weapons should play.

The report also urged creation of a position of assistant secretary of Defense for deterrence to oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons programs.

Gates issued a short statement Thursday saying the nation’s force of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers and submarine-launched missiles “remains safe, secure and reliable.”

“No one should doubt our capabilities or our resolve to defend U.S. and allied interests by deterring aggression,” Gates said.

Schlesinger said Gates had reviewed all of his panel’s recommendations, and told reporters that “so far we have gotten no push-back” on them.

Underlying the Pentagon’s loss of focus on the nuclear mission, officials said, is uncertainty and confusion over how deterrence -- the prospect of certain nuclear retaliation -- works in an age when many of the potential U.S. adversaries are not states but terrorists who hold no territory and are clearly willing to engage in suicide attacks.

Within senior military and civilian circles, there have been ongoing debates about whether the leadership of Al Qaeda, for instance, would buy into the kind of mutual strategic deterrent rationale that governed the U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the Cold War.

Without a clear answer, many officials have simply turned to other issues, Schlesinger indicated.

The report said that the Navy had maintained its commitment to safeguarding nuclear weapons but that there had been “fraying at the edges,” and it urged Navy officials to conduct more frequent reviews of how it handles weapons programs.

The Schlesinger report released by the Pentagon is the second commissioned last year by Gates after he abruptly fired the Air Force secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and its chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley, in June.

Gates took that unprecedented step after receiving a classified Pentagon briefing on two incidents in which the Air Force lost track of nuclear weapons and components.

In one case, the Air Force mistakenly loaded live nuclear missiles onto a B-52 bomber and unwittingly flew it from North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, a major violation of strict weapons accountability procedures. In the other incident, the Air Force shipped nuclear bomb fuses, or triggers, to Taiwan in boxes labeled “helicopter parts.” The error wasn’t discovered for two years.

Those may have been sensational examples but were evidence of a “serious erosion” of training, expertise and accountability within the Air Force missile and bomber force and the bureaucracy that oversees it, Schlesinger concluded in his first report, published in September.

The Air Force has moved to fix those problems, officials say.

--

david.wood@baltsun.com