Hairy Trigger
“North Korean officers are trained to press their [retaliatory strike] button without any further instructions from the general command if anything happens on their side. We have to remember that tens of millions of South Korean population are living 70 to 80 kilometers away from this military demarcation line.”
—North Korean defector Thae Yong Ho, former deputy chief of mission in London, House Foreign Affairs Committee Committee, Nov. 1.
Where’s the Nation?
“The Air Force as currently constituted is too small to do what the nation expects of it. In 1991, when the US went to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the Air Force had 134 fighter squadrons, which typically have 18 to 24 aircraft each. Today, the Air Force has only 55 fighter squadrons, and 1,500 fewer pilots than it needs. We have been doing too much, with too little, for too long. … We worry … about the effect on our airmen. … They are the best our nation has and are committed to its defense. The nation must commit to them.”
—Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson and Gen. David L. Goldfein, USAF Chief of Staff, op-ed in Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11.
Deterrence 101
“I’ve questioned the [US strategic nuclear] triad. I cannot solve the deterrent problem reducing it from a triad [to a dyad or monad]. If I want to send the most compelling message, I have been persuaded that the triad in its framework is the right way to go. You want the enemy to look at it and say, ‘This is impossible to take out in a first strike, and the retaliation is such that we don’t want to do it.’ That’s how a deterrent works.”
—Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, remarks on visit to Minot AFB, N.D., Sept. 13.
Refighting the War
“For those who avoided the [Vietnam-era] draft and the danger, there is often a quiet guilt. I have witnessed it many times. They dodge the inevitable question: How did you manage to get out of it? Hasty marriage? Graduate school? A trick knee? Men in this category do not invite conversation about that time in their lives, any more than combat veterans discuss the horrendous things they witnessed in the war zone. Only those who came of age after the draft turned into a lottery, the ones with high, untouchable numbers, or those who arrived after the Army went voluntary escaped the moral dilemma of serving or resisting or malingering.”
—James Reston Jr., author and former Army officer (who did not serve in Vietnam) op-ed in Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3.
We’ll Show You ‘Tactical’
“I think the term [tactical nuclear weapon] … is actually a very dangerous term to use, because I think every nuclear weapon that is employed is strategic. … To call it a tactical weapon brings the possibility that there could be a nuclear weapon employed on a battlefield for a tactical effect. It’s not a tactical effect, and if somebody deploys what is a nonstrategic nuclear weapon or a tactical nuclear weapon, the United States will respond strategically, not tactically, because they have now crossed a line—a line that hasn’t been crossed since 1945.”
—USAF Gen. John E. Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, remarks to reporters on Sept. 14.
Earth to Pandora
“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s Box is opened, it will be hard to close.”
—Open letter from heads of robotics and artificial intelligence enterprises, Aug. 21.
Outside the Lines
“We are going to have to figure out a way to produce [military] pilots that is outside the resource capacity of the United States Air Force. … We are asking for … a comprehensive approach by the nation to get at how to produce the number of pilots we need for our country. That could be a national pilot training academy that is partially funded by airlines and industry and the military. … We have to build a construct, as a nation, on how we’re going to get at producing the number of pilots we need long-term.”
—USAF Lt. Gen. Daryl L. Roberson, Air Education and Training Command, airforcetimes.com, Sept. 20.
Throwing It All Away
“Force or the credible threat of force are best used the instant a threat is detected. Civilized people, however, tend to place actual force far down the list—after engagement, negotiations, incentives, embargoes, etc., which do not work when a country is genuinely on the warpath. … North Korea could have been stopped in 1994 by military threats or even strike operations against their nuclear facilities. Instead, we wasted time heedlessly and profligately. We weren’t even serious. … Now the new situation has ratcheted into place. South Korea and Japan will likely become full nuclear powers. The existing East Asian arms race will pass through India to the western borders of Russia, thus menacing Europe. No solution exists any more, except a balance of terror.”
—Arthur Waldron, foreign affairs expert, University of Pennsylvania, FPRI.org, Sept. 18.
Of Time and the Mustang
“To manage the risks associated with emerging ‘cyber-contested environments’ the US will face in the future, we must radically transform a litany of decades-old policies, processes, and business practices. … While a P-51 [Mustang fighter] would have been impossible to stop through cyber attack, a vastly more capable F-35 is so dependent upon software and IT-enabled support equipment that it could prove less effective in certain scenarios than the Mustang.”
—Retired Lt. Gen. William J. Bender, former USAF chief information officer, Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies paper, Aug. 30.
Baltic Exposure
“I wish to be as clear and direct as our findings allow me to be: NATO is not postured or prepared to defend its most exposed and vulnerable member states—the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—against a Russian attack.”
—David Shlapak, co-author of a 2016 RAND study on deterring Russia in eastern Europe, quoted in militarytimes.com, Sept. 13.