From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or EMSO. I'm your host Ken Miller, Director of advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening.
Ken Miller (00:21):
In today's episode, we are going to discuss nuclear deterrence in this age of great power competition. I am pleased to have with me as my guest today, Dr. Adam Lowther, he is the Director of Multi-Domain Operations at the Army Management Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is also the founding director of the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies at Kirtland Air Force Base. He is also an author and editor of numerous articles.
Ken Miller (00:48):
Before I introduce Adam though, I do want to highlight that AOC 2022 is just around the corner and is now open for registration. AOC 2022 is going to take place on October 25th to 27th. And the theme of this year's annual symposium and convention is The EMSO Playbook: Maneuvering to Win in a New Era. You can learn more and to register at fiftynine.crows.org.
Ken Miller (01:12):
All right, with that, I'd like to introduce my guest, Dr. Adam Lowther. Adam, thanks for joining me here on From The Crows' Nest. Dr. Lowther, it's great to have you on From The Crows' Nest, thanks for joining me this morning.
Dr. Adam Lowther (01:22):
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.
Ken Miller (01:24):
Over the last few months, we've been talking a lot about what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, and a lot of the articles that were coming out were talking about sort of this emerging threat of the use of nuclear weapons. And I started reading up on some of the concepts behind nuclear deterrence, and I thought it would be a good episode or a good topic to discuss on the show and you were highly recommended. So I thank you for joining me. And I wanted to kind of talk about this issue and break it down a little bit for our listeners about how to think about this really kind important concept of nuclear deterrence in this age of great power competition, which seems to be almost a catchall phrase to explain a security environment that no one really understands fully.
Ken Miller (02:00):
So to start off, could you share a little bit about what are the principles of nuclear deterrence as it relates to this notion of great power competition and maybe how has it changed over the recent months?
Dr. Adam Lowther (02:12):
Yeah, so deterrence is a concept that... it reaches really back to the post-Cold War period in which we had nuclear weapons. And then the Soviets, it took a few years and then they had nuclear weapons, and then we came to the conclusion that a war between two great powers, as you know we had in World War II and World War I, where you had the great powers fighting and you had these devastating wars that cost tens of millions of lives.
Dr. Adam Lowther (02:43):
Well, with nuclear weapons that was going to be a heck of a lot worse. And so the idea was that we can't fight wars anymore, we have to deter them. And so the principles of deterrence got fleshed out over time in the late 40s, early 50s, and into the 60s, and the idea is that, in the mind of an adversary, you have to convince that adversary that it is far more costly to act on their desire to change the status quo than it is to maintain the status quo.
Dr. Adam Lowther (03:19):
And so the idea is that nuclear weapons could lead to the total devastation of humanity, and so, therefore, maintaining the status quo and keeping sort of any conflict at a minimum is far more beneficial and far more desirable than to go to war like we did in World War I and World War II. And so, largely, for the better part of 70 years, U.S. National Security strategy has always begun with the idea that we will seek to deter. And if deterrence fails, we will fight and win our nation's wars. And so that's our principle.
Ken Miller (04:01):
And when you talk about the deterrence, there has to be an element then that if you're going to possess nuclear weapons, that you are willing to use them, otherwise I would imagine deterrence wouldn't work because it just becomes hollow words at that point, and then maybe doesn't keep the conflict away. So how does this... obviously, we've had instances throughout our history...
Dr. Adam Lowther (04:24):
Sure.
Ken Miller (04:25):
... missile crisis and things of that nature, where it's always been this present threat, but talk a little bit about this idea of like the will to use them and how that takes shape depending on various threats.
Dr. Adam Lowther (04:36):
Yeah. So you got to think about deterrence if deterrence credibility equals capability times will. And so to be credible, you have to have capability and then you have to have will. And of course, you have to be able to communicate that you have both capability and will. And so I often ask people, "What's more important, capability or will?" and you'll usually get the majority of people say, "Hmm, I think it's will." And that's absolutely right because you can have lots of capability, but if you're not willing to use it, it doesn't matter. Or you can have less capability, but if people know that you will absolutely fight to the bitter end, then you can have less capability but more will.
Dr. Adam Lowther (05:23):
So with nukes, it really is important that you have the will to use them, and you have to be able to communicate that. And so if you go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, one of the things that we did is we put our nuclear forces on alert. So you can move up alert levels. And of course, the Russians, they know what we're doing. We also moved, one of the big things we did is we took... because we were primarily, at that time in 1962, we were a bomber force. So we took nuclear loaded bombers and moved them to bases in Florida and the deep south and put them wingtip to wingtip so that the Soviets could, using their intelligence capabilities, see that the U.S. had lots and lots of bombers ready to go to Cuba. And nowadays, we generate forces, we signal to our adversaries, "Hey, we're getting serious."
Dr. Adam Lowther (06:21):
There was a operation called Chrome Dome where we put B-52s with nuclear weapons on them in the air and flew them around 24/7, and that was a clear indication to the Russians that we were very, very serious. And so there's lots of things that you can do.
Dr. Adam Lowther (06:38):
And usually, when we think about the nuclear triad, we think about the fact that the ICBMs are on alert 24/7, they're never off alert, they can respond in a very, very short period if something happens. So there are already ready leg.
Dr. Adam Lowther (07:00):
And then we think about the bombers and the bombers, that's the leg that we can use to signal to an adversary because if you put nuclear bombers in the air and start flying them somewhere, it takes time to get there, they can be picked up on radar, so you can signal with your adversary and there's time to say, "Oh, wait a second, this conflict isn't worth that." And then you have the submarines, which if, hypothetically, an adversary were to strike our ICBM fields and take them out and then strike our bomber bases and wipe out the bomber force, we would still have submarines at sea that ostensibly our adversary did not know where they were and that they could then strike the adversary. And that's your sort of your force that is your most resilient. And so you've got that triad, it all serves a purpose and there's redundant capabilities that show an adversary just how serious you are.
Dr. Adam Lowther (08:02):
And then like ICBMs, like you could, hypothetically, you could destroy the bomber force and the submarine force with purely conventional torpedo or conventional air-to-air missile, or a strike against the bomber base, but the ICBMs, you have to use a nuclear missile against the United States homeland, which... that elevates your risk and your commitment.
Dr. Adam Lowther (08:32):
And so that's sort of how all that interplays together to show our resolve and then to be able to signal our intent and signal, "Hey, this is getting serious," as we move up that escalation ladder.
Ken Miller (08:53):
And there's been a lot of talk, obviously, for years and years about disarming or reducing the stockpiles and nuclear weapons zone. As I was reading some of the articles, you just don't typically think about it. When you talk about nuclear weapons, you tend to think of it kind of monolithically, like there's one type of nuclear weapon out there and...
Dr. Adam Lowther (09:10):
Mm-hmm.
Ken Miller (09:10):
... times a thousand and it does X, but there's different yields, there's just different uses. You mentioned, the nuclear triad, there's different types of delivery systems. How does all of that kind of make it even more complicated to kind of get a handle on deterrence and another nation's capacity and will for nuclear war or use of nuclear weapons based on what they have and what they're developing?
Dr. Adam Lowther (09:37):
Yeah. So we generally think in terms of... Most Americans are familiar with strategic deterrence, and you conceptualize ICBMs flying across the poles and there's just thousands of them, and then all of a sudden in Russia and the United States, you start having these detonations, and society is wiped out. And so that's largely strategic deterrence. And then B-52s and B-2s are going to come in waves and drop bombs on targets that you can't hit with an ICBM. And submarine launch ballistic missiles have their own targets that are going to be launching because about half the nuclear force is on a submarine.
Dr. Adam Lowther (10:24):
And so there's a very complex way that we actually target our nuclear missiles, and that's largely strategic deterrence and STRATCOM, and at Offutt Airforce Base in Omaha, that's their responsibility. But you also have what some people will say, they'll call it tactical, which some people hate the word tactical, they say, "There's no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon." Or they'll call it a theater. I like to use the term low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons, and these are the ones that are not on the unclassified level, most of the weapons in the U.S. arsenal are the strategic nuclear weapons are somewhere below 200 kiloton, which is about 10 times more than the weapon that destroyed Nagasaki, it's about 10 times larger.
Dr. Adam Lowther (11:19):
Now we've had megaton class weapons that were much, much, much bigger, but we don't anymore so as we get more accurate, the yields go down, so the warheads, they have a smaller detonation the more accurate you get, and the numbers go down because there's less fewer targets, but then there's also what I fear and what some of us fear is that, hypothetically, the Russians invade the Baltic State.
Dr. Adam Lowther (11:48):
So Lithuania recently closed, there's a land corridor, if you look at a map, from Belarus to Kaliningrad, the Kaliningrad Oblast, which used to be part of Germany and part of Poland, and then the Russians kept it when the Soviet Union fell. And so there's a land corridor across Lithuania that allows the Russians to move material and stuff in there.
Dr. Adam Lowther (12:14):
Well, the Lithuanians closed it a couple of weeks ago. And so you could imagine a scenario where the Russians say, "That's not acceptable," and then they invade the Baltic states. And then NATO, you trigger an Article 5 defense requirement, and then you could imagine land NATO maneuver land forces come, are going to come to the aid of the Baltic states. So as they're moving, there's this little town in Northeast Poland called Suwa?ki, and there's a little gap between Kaliningrad and Belarus, and there's a main road that the Americans would have to go through.
Dr. Adam Lowther (12:51):
And so what I envision is that, as those NATO troops are coming to relieve the Baltic states, that there is the Russians in advance of those troops, not on top, but in advance, there is a low-yield airburst detonation that... it doesn't hit the ground so, therefore, it doesn't cause a bunch of fallout and stuff, it's a airburst. And basically, it's a nuclear sun created and it's a signal because it's far enough in advance of the Americans that it doesn't destroy them but it's close enough that you can't help but know exactly what it is.
Dr. Adam Lowther (13:30):
And the Russians say, "Hey, we're willing to escalate." And I envision this is a 10-kiloton, so it's a little smaller than Hiroshima and, but it's big enough to really send the signal. And the Russians say, "Hey, listen, we're escalating. We want you to turn around now or else this could go to all-out nuclear war," and they would do it in the hope that the United States would really go, "Hmm, are we willing to start trading Tallinn, Estonia for Washington or Berlin or Paris or you name it. And that the Russians can achieve a fait accompli by using a nuclear weapon, not causing mass devastation, but very clearly signaling, and then NATO backs down. And so I personally think those are the most likely scenarios.
Ken Miller (14:28):
And those scenarios seem to have a lot more credibility today because of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, and maybe even using that in a Ukraine scenario because of NATO involvement now, where we may not have thought that's very realistic six months ago.
Dr. Adam Lowther (14:44):
Yeah. I mean, you could envision a scenario where maybe Russia detonates a low-yield nuclear weapon on Ukrainian soil to try to get the Ukrainians to capitulate to try to warn off NATO from increasing its support for the Ukraine. And they would do that. And we're not a hundred percent sure about the Chinese because they don't say all that much. But the Russians, they clearly don't see that nuclear weapons equal Armageddon and global annihilation. There's a lot of in-between for the Russians, whereas in the United States and, particularly, sort of in the U.S. arms control community, there is this mantra that any nuclear weapons use leads to Armageddon. And the Russians don't think that way. The Russians think about the discreet use of nuclear weapons to achieve political ends or military objectives. And they see that it's not all or nothing, they see a huge ladder of escalation with lots and lots of possibilities and potential.
Ken Miller (15:52):
To that difference, is it a matter of what you're trying to accomplish from a sense of your own power as a country, global power, hegemonic power, whatever, like Russia or a global power in the United States' perspective? Obviously, the arms control community is vocal everywhere. So what's going into that element of thinking that makes their approach different or gives them a wider kind of menu of options when it comes to this where we don't?
Dr. Adam Lowther (16:23):
Yeah. So it's a couple of things. So in an authoritarian regime, you largely don't have an arms control community. And then in a free Western democracy like the United States, you have basically sort of two world views that are in conflict here. And so you have what I would call the humanist worldview, which I think, largely, the arms control community holds that says that man is inherently good and that man is perfectible and that if we create the right society, the right institutions, we'll get rid of war and crime and all of these sort of ills that we have. And so it's a very optimistic view of human perfection. And so it's ideological and optimistic.
Dr. Adam Lowther (17:14):
And then you have sort of what I would call the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview that says, "Man is a fallen creature and he's fundamentally wicked and untrustworthy." So by and large, your pro-nuke folks would fall into that community. And so they're saying, "Hey, listen, it would be great if everybody were good and we could end all these things, but we don't think that's possible so therefore we need to build a strong defense."
Dr. Adam Lowther (17:46):
And so for your Russians, where they don't have to have these kinds of debates and you don't have to win public opinion, they can create menu options for using nuclear weapons that to a largely free and prosperous American public, they say, "Eh, geez, I don't really ever want to have to go down that road where we use a onesies and twosies of nuclear weapons and then we have to worry about escalation." They say, "Let's build an arsenal that keeps the Russians at bay or the Chinese at bay, and then let's really not think about how we would use them discreetly." It's a difficult thing for two types of societies.
Ken Miller (18:29):
And we talk a lot about this from an electromagnetic spectrum warfare community where, as a free society, we have a lot more self-imposed constraints on how we think, and then we act than various other peer competitors out there. There seems to be a very similar conversation that these communities have. In your estimation, from the U.S. perspective and kind of the competing views that determine how we approach this, what are some of the assumptions at play either true or false arguments, false assumptions on the either side, that we need to kind of do a better job of communicating or working through in order to come to a diplomatic solution to some of these conflict?
Dr. Adam Lowther (19:13):
Well, so I think a lot of American politicians and sort of folks within the beltway have this view that they mirror image the Russians or the Chinese. And they say, "Well, geez, they may be Russian, they may be Chinese, but in the end, they're like me. They just want to make money, they want a nicer house, a better car, they want to go out to the nice restaurants, they want the same basic things I do. They're materialists just like we're materialists. And so therefore we can speak to their material needs and we can sort of move away from this kind of threat of nuclear war."
Dr. Adam Lowther (19:56):
And what I don't think they understand is that there are... I'm drawing a blank, the great Greek Thucydides, the great Greek Philosopher of War, said that there are three things that motivate humans and that's fear, honor, and interest. And we sort of forget that honor is a big motivating factor for a lot of societies, particularly societies that don't have a strong materialist bent, then honors plays a much greater role. And so, therefore, we sort of dismiss it and we focus on the things that we value.
Dr. Adam Lowther (20:38):
And so that mirror imaging, I think does us a disservice. And so if we thought about more of what creates honor for Russia and China, highly honor-based societies, we would do better off in understanding ways that we can help reach sort of a stable, peaceful international system.
Dr. Adam Lowther (20:59):
And don't assume they're like us because they're not, we just can't assume that. And that was probably one of like George W. Bush sort of assumed that everybody wanted to be free and democratic, and so, therefore, we had this effort to impose democracy all over the world. And it didn't really work because it didn't give credence to those deep cultural and other differences that countries and societies may have that are different from ours.
Ken Miller (21:31):
So, taking a look at the world today, obviously, we have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have a lot of attention being turned to China and there's a lot of posturing right now, particularly with Taiwan, as we knew there would be, and there has been for a long time, but obviously, peer competitors around the world are using the current global situation to their own benefits to kind of continue to advance some of their goals, North Korea and Iran and so forth. From a nuclear deterrence standpoint, looking forward, what are you looking for in terms of steps or reforms or actions from the U.S. That really kind of put us in the best position possible to maintain a strong position in the global security discussion?
Dr. Adam Lowther (22:18):
I would submit that we need to have capabilities that are similar to all of our adversaries. So we can't just have just high-end capabilities like strategic ICBMs when our adversaries like the Russians have somewhere between 3 and 6,000 low-yield sort of tactical short, medium, intermediate-range, nuclear weapons, they can be airborne, they can be ballistic missiles, they can be all sorts of different types of delivered cruise missiles. And so we're creating a gap. What we know is that the Russians look at that gap and say, "Hmm, how can we take advantage?" So I want to close that gap by creating similar capabilities so that the Russians know whatever we have, the Americans have some sort of equivalent. That would be one thing.
Dr. Adam Lowther (23:13):
And then if you take the Chinese, the Chinese are looking to engage in what they call informatized warfare. This goes back to the existence of the Old Crows where both the Russians are really good at electronic warfare, and then the Chinese are getting good at electronic warfare, cyber, the Russians are very good at disinformation, so things that sort of revolve around what the Old Crows are good at and exist for. Those are going to play an important part in our nuclear future because, like nuclear command and control, NC3, that is going to be... whether as we move from an analog system to a digital system, we have to worry about hacking, we have to worry about how do we effectively communicate? Like when we have to communicate on RF bands or if we're trying to talk to satellites and we have to worry about, "Are the Russians or the Chinese trying to jam or are they trying to use directed energy to disrupt or destroy?" Because of the cyber and space domains and how they're integrated into the integrated tactical warning and attack assessment capability, and its limited capabilities, we have to be very, very careful.
Dr. Adam Lowther (24:38):
And then we have to think about how do we mitigate our adversaries? Because they're not going to just launch nuclear weapons, they're going to try to hack us, jam us, lase us, blind us, they're going to try to create noise, they're going to do all these things first so that if they do use weapons, that we don't see it coming.
Ken Miller (24:58):
That's a great insight, and I think it gets to this point where a lot of these communities and leaders, whether it's AOC or outside organizations like AOC or internal agencies in DOD need to keep this conversation going to make sure that our communities are talking and understanding the complexity of the threats and capabilities out there because adversaries are going to always go after where we're weak or where we're not paying attention to accomplish. And so I think that's great insight so I appreciate that.
Dr. Adam Lowther (25:29):
Yeah. For sure.
Ken Miller (25:30):
Well, that is all the time we have for this episode of From The Crows' Nest. Dr. Lowther, I greatly appreciate you taking time to come on the show. I would love to have you back on to go a little bit more in-depth later in the year, but I do appreciate you taking time to join me here. Thank you.
Dr. Adam Lowther (25:43):
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Ken Miller (25:46):
That will conclude this episode of From The Crows' Nest. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Adam Lowther for joining me for this important discussion. I also want to reiterate that AOC 2022 is now open for registration and you can learn more fiftynine.crows.org. As always, we'd like to hear from our listeners so please visit crows.org or rate and subscribe to our podcast wherever you download. We'd like to hear your thoughts, feedback, and recommendations on how to improve the show. Thanks for listening.

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