The Pentagon’s inability to win America’s recent wars in any convincing
way may be about to become a much bigger problem than anyone realized,
as experts express major concerns about a new policy doctrine adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
US struggles with conventional warfare, despite massively outspending
everyone else, and they are hoping to turn that around by using nuclear
weapons in America’s assorted conflicts, seeing nuclear war as creating
“conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic
stability.”
This Nuclear Operations document was published online by the Pentagon
briefly last week, but was subsequently removed, and approved by the
Joint Chiefs, with officials saying it is “for official use only” now.
Experts see it as a substantial change in US military policy, and
particularly nuclear war policy. They say in particular this document
does not focus on nuclear deterrence, but rather on US nuclear
first-strikes as a war-fighting doctrine. That they see nuclear strikes
as a potential cure-all is particularly troubling.
It is not clear if it is directly related to the low-yield nuclear weapons whose funding
is a topic of major debate in Congress. Some in Congress were concerned
that creating more low-yield nuclear arms would make their use a
lower-threshold issue.
Though more usable nukes would clearly fit nicely with the Pentagon’s
doctrine of using nukes more, it’s not clear that the doctrine is
dependent on having lower-yield options, or if the US will just nuke
with whatever they’ve got.
Experts Alarmed as Pentagon’s New War-Fight Doctrine Involves Using Nukes
Doctrine envisions nuclear attacks creating 'decisive results' for the US
Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
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