With suprisingly little fanfare, the Defense Department has released what they are calling the "National Military Strategy for Combating WMD" or NMS-CWMD. While it's an interesting read and it's long overdue, the document is burdened with excessive and flowery wording that appears forced into the strategy rather than thought out. Before diving into the document, let me note a few historical points. Many people may know about the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative started in 1993 by SecDef Les Aspin, but that effort was a difficult start. The services didn't want to cooperate necessarily in a "joint" counterproliferation strategy that would result in some combatant command ordering them around. So during the 1990s, the Joint Staff wrestled with this, and OSD created a Threat Reduction Advisory Committee and a Counterproliferation Review Committee to talk about the issue.
This 2000 GAO report criticized the DoD for having a counterproliferation policy, but no "comprehensive strategy for countering the proliferation of [WMD] and a military strategy for integrating offensive and defensive capabilities." It was one of the GAO's better products, and in fact the Joint Staff's J-5 directorate was working with STRATCOM and SOCOM on creating a workable CP strategy. It wasn't a very heavily funded effort, but there was a draft report and it probably would have been completed in 2001 had the Pentagon not been hit by a plane. This CP strategy had four main areas: counterstrike (offensive) operations, active defense, passive defense, and consequence management. Nonproliferation was discussed, but that was more State Department's work with some J-5 support.
Following the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001 and the formation of a Homeland Security directorate, the National Security Council decided that consequence management needed to be split out from CP, and that the whole CP strategy needed to address terrorist "WMD" threats as well as nation state threats. This turned the CP strategy into NSPD-17 and then into the "National Strategy to Combat WMD" that the Bush administration released in December 2002. Then of course we had the whole Operation Iraqi Freedom hunt for WMDs - you know how that turned out. Finally - more than three years later - this document emerges. Long overdue.
The meat of this document is really the eight mission areas - two for NP, five for CP, and CoM as its own mission area/pillar. Everything else is nice, flowery language that really doesn't say much other than "gee, isn't this strategy complex?" The new boys on the block are WMD interdiction and WMD elimination - the former from the Proliferation Security Initiative, and the latter from the clumsy "exploitation" operations in Iraq. Figures 1 and 2 could have been a whole lot simpler - from what I've heard, there were some very pushy and limited thinkers in OSD policy (counterproliferation) who had an agenda and were very insistent upon using certain terms and having their way.
I already noted the NSC's decision to get involved in rewickering this strategy. The definitions of the key mission areas differ from any other military definition in the joint pubs (note the strange disclaimer in some of the glossary terms - "This term and its definition are applicable only in the context of this publication and cannot be referenced outside this publication"). Interestingly enough, this NMS-CWMD says very little about how we're going to stop terrorists from using WMD, and instead focuses on the nation-state ownership/threat. That shows the traditional train of thought - where it ought to be - that the real focus is and needs to be on nations using NBC weapons, not on terrorists with ideas and dreams (but no real capability). I think the idea by some in the administration is that if you stop nations from building WMDs, then you stop the terrorist threat, but that's just stupid. Aum Shinrikyo, al Qaeda, and others out there do just fine making CBRN hazards all by their lonesome.
I could go on about the "great minds" in OSD policy (because the Joint Staff and services have no good thinkers, you know - too short sighted), but I digress. You can read the document. It's good but could have been better. Maybe the next administration can smooth over the obvious faults and make this what it should have been, when the Joint Staff was completing this strategy in 2001.
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