Global stability requires that the United States and its Allies and Partners look at strategic deterrence through different lenses, said military and security leaders gathered at the 2024 U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium. Effective approaches to deterrence include using tools beyond the traditional nuclear triad — land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers — to include nontraditional and emerging tools and technologies that can be deployed in multiple domains and against a growing number of threats.
These new tools are intended to augment the traditional triad, not replace it, leaders said at the August Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska, which drew more than 800 military personnel, academics and security professionals representing 15 countries.
“The fundamental tenets of strategic deterrence are still valid. The mission to deter strategic attack is as important as ever, as is our mandate to prevail in conflict when directed,” said Gen. Anthony Cotton, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command. “It is imperative to recognize the change in strategic environment that we face. The world atmosphere has transitioned from a competitive to a contested one, and now, as we see from the war in Ukraine, the attacks on Israel, it is increasingly combative. The challenges we and our Allies face today are unlike any we’ve ever encountered.”
In a series of talks, attendees discussed a broad range of deterrence issues, including incorporation of cyber technology and artificial intelligence (AI) into new weapons systems, to counter increasing threats from Iran, North Korea, People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia.
“China and Russia do not want war, let alone nuclear war, but they see the U.S. and our Allies and Partners as existential threats to the world that they would like to create,” said Dr. Jim Miller, assistant director for policy and analysis at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “They would like to create a world safe for autocratic governments. They’d like to create a world in which they can dominate their neighbors and not just undermine but reshape the rules-based order that the United States and our Allies and Partners have worked on since the end of World War II.”
In addition to kinetic weapons buildup, the PRC, Russia and other adversaries use cyberattacks and AI-enabled disinformation campaigns to undermine the international rules-based order, Miller said.
“We are beset every day by cyber intrusions and increasingly by disinformation.” Threats range from theft of intellectual property to penetration of critical infrastructure and military systems, he said.
While new cyber and AI tools present a threat, they also offer “real possibilities to strengthen our conventional deterrent,” Miller said.
“The U.S. and our Allies and Partners have the resources, we have the human capital, and we better have the will to leverage these technologies to boost our cyber, space, missile defense, long-range strike and autonomous capabilities,” he said. “All of these can contribute to bolstering our nonnuclear strategic posture. We can, and we must, bolster our conventional deterrence posture at the same time that we bolster the cyber and space resilience and penetration capabilities of our nuclear deterrence systems.”
Military systems have applied some of these newer capabilities for some time, including predictive tools for logistics and maintenance, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and kinetic applications said Dr. Andrew Reddie, associate research professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Such technology can eliminate barriers to sharing information that often exist among agencies and departments. “What’s a little bit new is the various ways in which we’re thinking about decision support applications, where we’ve got human-machine teaming … improving the speed and efficiency of decision-making,” Reddie said.
Directed energy weapons, which use nonsolid projectiles such as lasers or microwaves could protect U.S. assets in space, Reddie said, “to address an asymmetrical vulnerability that we have given (U.S.) reliance on space systems that our adversaries do not share.”
To combat disinformation campaigns waged by other countries, the U.S., Allies and Partners must more effectively engage in information operations (IO), said Raul Harnasch, assistant group leader for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, a research laboratory focused on developing technologies to meet critical national security needs.
Iran, the PRC and Russia spend more money in information operations than the U.S. does, he said.
“If we are not bringing the message to the audience, the only message that they’ll hear is that of our adversaries. Soft power does have a place in the deterrence realm, or at the deterrence table, and we should probably think about that long and hard and what that might look like,” he said.
“If we’re proliferating truth, transparency and common values, those are the types of messages that we want to get out, first and foremost. If we think about the employment of AI to also propagate these types of messages at scale, just as the adversaries are doing this with disinformation, I think that also gives us some sort of tactical advantage, especially in dealing with foreign influence,” he said.
IO isn’t limited to websites and social media. “Everything that the United States does on the global stage is influence, if it’s humanitarian aid, if it’s disaster relief, if it’s a community relations project with somebody with boots on the ground, painting a school,” Harnasch said. “Those are all influence, to try to win the hearts and minds of others. Involvement of Allies and Partners is crucial to promote global norms. If Allies and Partners also believe that they are actively contributing to the stability of the world as well, that also is a powerful message of unity. It makes the world more resilient to these types of disinformation attacks or erosion of social norms.”