Grading the NPR

By Chris Jones

The NPR received some considerable press attention in the past week, for nuclear issues anyway. Laura Rozen discussed the NPR in the context of Vice President Biden’s speech at NDU while Josh Rogin reported the further delay to late March/early April which appears to be due in large part to figuring out the fundamental role of nuclear weapons. These pieces were followed up by a Sunday NYT article by David Sanger and Thom Shanker that provided some of the most in-depth previews to date about where the NPR will come down on a number of issues. What to make of all this? Depends who you ask. As Plutonium Pages notes, “the pundits, wonks, and national security reporters are all trying to read the tea leaves regarding these delays.” While the final grade for the NPR can’t be given until the document is actually released, criticisms about what a failure the NPR is shaping up to be should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, consider Jeffrey Lewis’ take on the NPR. Despite this skepticism about what a disappointment the NPR will be, there a few things to keep in mind.

1. The “whole of government” emphasis in the NPR process makes resolving disputes even tougher

As the administration continues to battle about what is rumored to be disagreements about the role of nuclear weapons, parts of the interagency are staking out where the stand on the issues. Rogin notes in his article:

Several sources said that the debate pits the office of Vice President Joseph Biden against the Office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, with the State Department somewhere in between. Biden is said to be advocating for a policy that minimizes the scenarios under which nukes could be used while Gates wants to preserve as much flexibility as possible.

Dating back to the RR(W)umble back in August, reports about this clash are far from new, though if the infamous principals meeting is any indicator there are often exaggerations about the people, subjects, and degrees of disagreement. Needless to say, it is not a total shocker that the VP big on nonproliferation disagrees, at some level, with DoD. That said, these disagreements also highlight the interagency battle occuring on the issues. The fact that NSC, State, OVP, OSD Policy, the Joint Staff, and others are engaged in this Battle Royale speaks to the NPR’s effort to take a “whole of government approach” as outlined in the NPR Fact Sheets last summer.  Agreements may be tough to hammer out but they involve everyone trying to plug their position. Jeffrey Lewis at ACW argues that Gates “has been boxing in Obama for about a year now” but this may not paint the full picture. There’s no doubt the SECDEF, whose coverage as a power player in the Cabinet is far from new, may be on the more conservative end of the NRR spectrum on most issues but he appears to have received endorsements from other key voices, both in the building and throughout the interagency. For example, Mark Ambidner’s piece on the NPR delay documents pushback from the regional bureaus at State from making big moves on declaratory policy:

Rogin is right. The State Department's nonproliferation shop, headed by Undersecretary Ellen Tauscher is in sync with the Vice President, while the regional bureaus, in particular the European and Eurasian affairs shop led by Assistant Secretary Phil Gordon and the East Asian/Pacific desk led by Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell, are siding with the Defense Department, which wants little change to the declaratory policy. Ironically, senior officials in the governments of countries like Japan and Germany have, in public and private, called for the U.S. to reduce the role that nuclear weapons play in providing threat deterrence for their countries. But they face internal opposition from their defense establishments, and the U.S. State Department's regional desks are worried that changing the language would lead to a rapid deterioration in U.S. alliances with the countries.

These divisions also get at a more basic point: policy differences sometimes originate in general ideological differences on how to advance U.S. and global security. They may fall along military/civilian lines, they may not. Even within the building, there have been difficulties about how best to strike the NPR balance. Despite the perception the DoD is largely behind slow rolling a more progressive NPR, it was interesting that Rozen’s article said:

Disarmament hands say the review draft originally headed by the Defense Department’s Brad Roberts was too status quo on the policy issues from the administration’s perspective, and is being reworked at the senior inter-agency level by Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Jim Miller, officials from the office of State’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher, and White House and OVP nonproliferation advisors before heading to the president’s desk

A senior-level DoD reworking is still probably insufficient for those advocating a transformative NPR but these DoD efforts should not go unnoticed.

2. The NPR will make some substantial changes

If press reports on the NPR are approximately correct, it seems like the NPR will make progress supported by disarmament advocates on a number of fronts. Examples include:

TLAM/N
As reported by Kyodo News and the Daily Yomiuri, it appears the Nuclear Posture Review will not perform an “exegesis” on the Strategic Posture Commission’s recommendation to keep the TLAM/N. This has been a key issue for ACW for quite some time.

NSNF’s in Europe
NSNF’s in Europe, which seemed to be a don’t ask, don’t tell issue for NATO capitals not long ago, has catapulted to the forefront of the press in the past few months. The Guardian reports that 5 European countries will be calling for removal while Frank Miller, George Robertson and Kori Schake penned a piece arguing against these efforts. The New York Times article suggests:

Other officials, not officially allowed to speak on the issue, say that in back-channel discussions with allies, the administration has also been quietly broaching the question of whether to withdraw American tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, where they provide more political reassurance than actual defense.

TNW removal can’t occur overnight but beginning the process of making this option politically feasible, particularly in Europe, is a good start.

Deeper reductions

For quite some time, it has been clear that the short-term numbers advocated by the NPR will be (not so) eerily similar to those agreed upon in the Joint Statement for the new START treaty. Numerically speaking, these reductions are significant to some and too small to others. Either way, the new START treaty will be relatively modest by many accounts but nonetheless a return to the formal arms control process the administration finds valuable. The real question: what’s next? The NYT article gave some indication:

“It will be clear in the document that there will be very dramatic reductions — in the thousands — as relates to the stockpile,” according to one senior administration official whom the White House authorized to discuss the issue this weekend. Much of that would come from the retirement of large numbers of weapons now kept in storage.

In addition to increasing dismantlement, another part of the reductions equation will be where to go after the new START agreements concludes. Bryan Bender noted in January the NPR “could recommend going even further, to 1,000 warheads or fewer” and it would not be surprising if, at the very least, the NPR contains language about laying the groundwork for another bilateral round of reductions with Russia that would probably have a 1,000 ballpark, whether or not that is explicitly mentioned.

Each of the moves may not be a game changer in and of themselves, although it would not be hard to find people to argue strongly against each decision, but all add up to a number of steps the NPR will probably take to begin reducing the role of nuclear weapons.

3. Declaratory Policy and Options: Determining the Bandwidths

The grand daddy issue on which the NPR is almost certainly going to disappoint the left is the statement about the purpose of nuclear weapons. According to Julian Borger, the decisions that will be presented to Obama will be whether the “primary purpose” or the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack. The article notes that Jeffrey Lewis “compares this to a choice between "plague and cholera" for advocates of disarmament.” At the same time, Lewis argues elsewhere that the U.S. should state:

The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, to respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies.

The difference between this statement and a “sole purpose” declaration is not readily apparent. Either way, the frustration with declaratory policy in the NPR gets at what has been termed an options problem. Lewis explains:

The danger from a Nuclear Posture Review has always been, and continues to be, that the President will not get real options. Guess who is to blame for that? You may recall this sign on Harry Truman’s desk. In form, the NPR will contain nominal options for the President to choose among. Yet the question continues to be whether those options will reflect real differences in policy, or just three articulations of the same Cold War dogma on the role of nuclear weapons.

The President should indeed have options but the net for those options can only be cast so wide. For a point of reference, take the Afghanistan decision. Reports on the classified choices provided to the President argued that the choices were approximately 20,000, 40,000, and 60,000 troops. The decision left the President to determine the degree of the troop surge but crystallized the general direction of the decision. This direction did not include Vice President Biden’s plan to keep troop levels about the same or Armed Services Chairman Levin’s plan to expand and accelerate training of the Afghan security force before sending troops. The ultimate plan developed by a number of key players produced strategies that increased troop levels in varying degrees and gave the POTUS the ball for the final shot. The same, roughly speaking, should happen with the NPR. There should, and appears to be, a heated debate within the administration about how best to tackle the administration’s various nuclear priorities. The result of these deliberations should carve out a range of possible answers within which the President has options. The fairly precise range of recommendations will be the result of a year-long effort involving buy-in from DoD, the interagency, our allies, and more. The danger with trying to create new options that are “real” so as to end the “Cold War dogma” is that they are unsupported and potentially unsound options for the President. Reducing the role of nuclear weapons does not occur in a vacuum and likewise the recommendations provided by the NPR cannot just be summarily dismissed by those who emphasize that section of the Prague speech. 

4. What does a Gold Medal NPR look like?

As documented above, the NPR will make some solid progress on a number of fronts and probably disappoint the disarmament crowd on others. My question for those already declaring the NPR a disaster: what does a gold medal NPR look like? Specifically. It has been well documented that the NPR must thorougly satisfy the oft cited “reduce Cold War thinking” requirement but this line has almost become a red herring to toss out against any decision not deemed radical enough.  “Cold War thinking” on nuclear issues probably involves a large emphasis on things like numbers and doctrines like Mutually Assured Destruction. On these fronts, the administration and the NPR are making strong strides, albeit at a pace sure to disappoint some. The issues still at play in the NPR, like whether nukes should be left on the table to deter CBW attack, have much less to do with the Cold War and much more to do with the complications of deterrence in the 21st century.

The NPR cannot be graded purely based on how well it reduces “Cold War thinking.” Instead, the NPR should be graded based on how well it balances reducing reliance on nuclear weapons and maintaining a safe, secure, and effective arsenal. The Prague speech has to be taken in its entirety, caveats and all. When viewing through this lens, the NPR probably won’t be half bad. As I noted in January, there should be reasonable expectations about what the NPR can achieve. Some will chalk tempered results up to the bureaucracy, others to substantive concerns about moving too fast. Both could be right. Writing about the new QDR, Mike O’Hanlon argued:

The newly released Pentagon strategy paper, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, is a solid document, but also one that reminds us of the limits of such planning papers at this point in American security policy . . . [I]t's not a huge surprise to the specialist, and probably not exciting or Earth-shattering enough to be of great interest to the generalist. But all that said, I like this quadrennial review. Sometimes change works best in small,  incremental doses.

Something similar can probably be argued for the NPR. It may take some strong steps in areas noted earlier and some baby steps in areas like declaratory policy. That does not mean the NPR should be considered dead on arrival. It is important not to throw the NPR baby out with the primary purpose bathwater. Declaratory policy should not be the litmus test by which the NPR is adjudicated. It is important insofar as it does answer the “why do we have these” question but it is also just a statement. A lot of people don’t believe China’s. Many didn’t believe Russia’s. Even from the view of NAM countries, I heard a NAM diplomat argue last week that some actually think a No First Use declaration is not helpful because it just solidifies that nuclear weapons will be here for the indefinite future. That is not to say calculated ambiguity is the way to go in their mind but rather to suggest that the NPR grade should not be determined by 90% declaratory policy, 10% everything else.

It is easy to be outside of government and CTRL+C “too status quo” every few months when analyzing the NPR’s efforts to try to meet all of its competing demands. It’s a lot harder to have to run this devilishly complicated process with a million moving parts from inside government. People will inevitably be disappointed with the NPR. It will do too much for some and not enough for others. Regardless of one’s views, NPR graders should work from a reasonable set of expectations and give the NPR a fair hearing on all the issues it has to tackle, not just the ones with which people are most disappointed.

Update (March 4): Deleted part of the NFU section upon clarification about the options reportedly being given on declaratory policy.  See the explanation here.