"WMD" is no longer a useful concept
It's always been a political term, shifting with the political winds
I meant to use this topic as a starting point for my Substack newsletter, but the topical issues of tactical nuclear weapons, military biodefense programs, and Russian tear gas use were so convenient to address. Having hit on the nuclear, biological, and chemical topics of the day, I want to back up and address this term “weapons of mass destruction” and how the Department of Defense in particular has used and abused it. Now this may seem odd since the title of my Substack is “Nuclear weapons (and other WMD),” but that’s in reference to how the national security community refers to this particular issue (e.g., JOE 2008, pg 45). It’s my attempt at humor, to point out their high priority on nuclear weapons and the half-hearted nod to those “other WMD,” biological and chemical weapons.
As I’ve mentioned before, our WMD community does a shit job in engaging in the necessary task of self-examination and constructive criticism for the purposes of remaining relevant in security discussions. Absent an immediate crisis relating to a nation other than a superpower using chemical or biological weapons, the national security community has largely excluded critical reviews of WMD issues. Why is this important, other than exposing the obvious self-induced vulnerability to military forces and critical infrastructure? The national security community lives in the Beltway and plays by certain rules. One of the primary rules is “the budget is policy.” If your defense program isn’t getting money, it’s because the leadership no longer believes that it is a priority. There is no budget for counter-WMD capabilities, and CBRN defense modernization funds have been flat for decades. It’s not a priority.
Michelle Bentley wrote a wonderful book exploring the concept of WMD from a political perspective, in which she examines how government leaders have, over time, created different versions of what “WMD” means in order to support aspects of foreign policy. “WMD is not a fixed notion; meaning is not set or self-evident. Instead, it is the dynamic product of strategic political actors.” Every administration defines WMD to stress some particular short-term agenda. The problem with this action is that it becomes difficult to develop a bedrock of defense capabilities to protect against WMD if the top policy makers keep changing the definition and/or priorities relative to this issue. This has adversely impacted the Department of Defense to the point that no one can honestly assess how the U.S. armed forces would come out faced with an adversary using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.
I’ve mentioned before that CBRN defense certainly exists as a technical and tactically-focused concept. Lots of updated field manuals, lots of defense industry meetings, lots of stories about CBRN training, but no real growth in the past twenty years despite concerns that Russia and China might be expanding in this area. In the industry, we refer to CBRN defense as an “insurance investment” but not a growth area. We’ve known that “WMD” has varied political and legal definitions - Dr. Seth Carus wrote the best assessment of this condition. I’ve talked frequently about the need to improve our counter-WMD capabilities for major combat operations, homeland security, and irregular warfare. Zack Kallenborn has this excellent article evaluating WMD terminology in reference to drone swarms. None of these insights have penetrated the national security community, so I ask the question, why do we need the term “WMD”?
I don’t want to get bogged down with defining the concept and policy, I wrote a book for that purpose. I have a short list of qualifying characteristics for WMD: 1) it has to be a weapon (not natural diseases, accidents, or disasters), 2) it has to be defined as unconventional by the United Nations (for arms control purposes), and 3) it has to be able of causing mass casualties (e.g., 1000 or more) in a single instance. Not everyone agrees with this, but it’s my frame of reference. I’m more interested in showing why DoD needs a better term (and better leadership) if it is to shape policy that adequately addresses adversarial use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
During the Cold War, there were no “WMD,” there was no counter-WMD strategy. There was deterrence to stop Russia from using these weapons, diplomacy to reduce the likelihood of their use, and defense capabilities for U.S. military forces. Saddam Hussein shook up U.S. policy makers who thought U.S. troops were in peril because Hussein might use chemical weapons, ignoring arms control treaties and not believing U.S. threats of massive (nuclear) retaliation. This, combined with poor CBRN defense capabilities, led to the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative. This construct used conventional military capabilities to employ special operations forces against WMD-related facilities, air and missile defense to counter WMD delivery systems, and CBRN defense to protect U.S. forces. When Aum Shinrikyo used nerve agent in Tokyo’s subway (1995), consequence management was added.
The State Department hated the counterproliferation concept because it directly competed (in the budget) with their nonproliferation activities. This is all the more interesting as State appropriated the term for their own uses. The armed services didn’t like counterproliferation because it was an additional bill that they didn’t want to fund during post-Cold War defense budget cuts, especially as JTAMDO and BMDO stood up to address the theater air and missile threat. The Joint Staff dutifully worked on counterproliferation strategies for a scenario featuring a non-nuclear adversary able to use chemical or biological weapons on U.S. forces. DoD’s focus was always on counterproliferation, which included interdiction (including counterforce), deterrence, active defense, passive defense, and mitigation of incidents. It was about protecting U.S. forces with existing military capabilities, enabling them to win a contested battle in a contaminated CBRN environment.
The 2002 National Strategy to Combat WMD took DoD’s counterproliferation concept and broadened it to address combating terrorism and homeland security, which complicated things for DoD. Good times. All of a sudden, WMD was CBRNE and we had four years of arguing what WMD terrorism meant to homeland security and what DoD’s roles were.1
The DoD created a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) position to manage counterproliferation policy issues. This position has shifted several times.
1993-1997, DASD for Counterproliferation Policy under the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy2
1998-2000, DASD for Requirements, Plans, and Counterproliferation Policy under ASD Strategy and Threat Reduction3
2001-2005, DUSD for Technology Security Policy and Counterproliferation Policy, under the ASD for International Security Policy4
2006-2009, DASD for Counternarcotics, Counterproliferation, and Global Threats under ASD ISP (2006-07) and ASD Global Strategic Affairs (2008-09)5
2009-2015, DASD for Countering WMD under ASD Global Strategic Affairs (the first to have the WMD acronym)6
2015-2021, DASD for Countering WMD under ASD Homeland Defense (three people in this position over this timeframe)7
2021-2024, DASD for Nuclear and Countering WMD Policy under ASD Space Policy8
A cynic might point out that DoD shuffling seats around the Pentagon is just normal operations for this organization. And while that may be true, I suggest it demonstrates a deeper problem in that, after 1998, the role to coordinate WMD policy issues was increasingly devalued to the lowest political appointee and punted to different organizations as a matter of convenience to the DoD leadership. Often, counter-WMD policy was a secondary concern of the DASD office that was overseeing it. This policy office did not address all WMD issues - it focused on DoD equities in arms control and nonproliferation activities, CBRN defense (when OSD acquisition officials let them), and WMD interdiction and elimination. Other OSD offices had the counter-WMD missions of offensive operations/counterforce, WMD terrorism, active defense, and domestic and foreign consequence management.
National and DoD guidance on countering WMD has dropped considerably since 2006. For instance, we can examine the 2022 National Security Strategy for the U.S. government’s policy objectives here. It does not use the acronym “WMD.”
"Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons proliferation is a vitally important and enduring global challenge, requiring sustained collaboration to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and fissile material, their means of delivery, and enabling technologies. The United States will work with allies and partners, civil society, and international organizations to strengthen arms control and nonproliferation mechanisms, especially during times of conflict when escalation risks are greater. We will address the existential threat posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons through renewed arms control and nonproliferation leadership."
The 2022 National Defense Strategy uses the acronym three times, once in reference to Russia’s false narratives relating to Ukraine, and twice in reference to WMD terrorism. That’s it. We used to get a lot more direction from these top-level documents. In response to national guidance since 2006, the DoD released a DoD Strategy for Countering WMD in 2014 and 2023. I’m not going to go into detail here other than to say the 2014 strategy was a generic word-salad that didn’t move counter-WMD issues, and that the 2023 version was passable. Meanwhile, we have no replacement for the 2002 National Strategy to Combat WMD (and please don’t mention the Obama PPD-42, that was just a shamefully ridiculous document). If countering WMD is just deterrence, diplomacy, and defense, then just say so and stop wasting time on overly wordy defense strategies that don’t impact funding decisions.
So where is all of this going? I’m going to pivot from venting about past slights and move on to constructive criticism. We’ve seen the major change from the Cold War emphasis from protecting U.S. forces from the Soviet Union’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to a broader emphasis on protecting the nation from state adversaries with WMD programs and terrorists with CBRN hazards. If we were to replace the politically-charged and no longer relevant term WMD with “unconventional weapons,” it would allow us to discuss this challenge in much more unemotional terms that actually matched current defense concepts.
The term “unconventional weapons” has a long history in both the U.S. government and academia, but not so much in DoD. It keeps getting confused with “unconventional warfare,” which is a very different concept. I had this debate with senior Air Force nuclear officers about whether nuclear weapons were unconventional weapons or not. They were firmly insistent that nuclear weapons were special, but not unconventional. I (foolishly) tried to demonstrate that they were wrong, relying on the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs “Conventional arms are weapons other than weapons of mass destruction.” Ergo, nuclear weapons are unconventional. I also referenced these other sources.
2003, Eric Schmitt, NY Times: “But the fact that Mr. Rumsfeld even raised the possibility that Iraq might have destroyed unconventional weapons before the war prompts new questions about the intelligence that President Bush and his senior advisers relied on to go to war, and about the credibility of the United States, defense analysts said yesterday.”
2004, Jonathan Tucker, book review: “Another flaw of the book is that it employs throughout the popular but misleading term “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which conflates into a single category three types of arms – nuclear, biological, and chemical – that have very different technical characteristics, physical effects, and degrees of lethality. For example, WMD can refer to a thermonuclear warhead capable of destroying an entire city or to a chemical artillery shell that could kill a few dozen people. Accordingly, a growing number of policy analysts and scholars in the nonproliferation field prefer the terms “unconventional weapons” or “NBC weapons.” ”
2004, George Tenet on Iraq: “And we couldn’t forget that in the early 1990s, we saw that Iraq was just a few years way from a nuclear weapon—this was no theoretical program. It turned out that we and the other intelligence services of the world had significantly underestimated his progress. And, finally, we could not forget that Iraq lied repeatedly about its unconventional weapons.”
2004, State Dept Strategic Plan: “The spread of unconventional weapon technology risks giving tyrants and terrorists unprecedented power to harm the United States, our allies, and our friends.”
2008, Eric Schmidt, NY Times: “An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that.
2009, White House amends EO 12938: “Executive Order 12938 has been amended twice—once in 1998 (E.O. 13094) and again in 2005 (E.O. 13382)—with the goal of making it more effective in combating the spread of unconventional weapons. President Obama in November 2011 extended the order that established the spread of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons as a national emergency.”
2013, Ben Rhodes, White House: “Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest, and must advance our objectives, which include achieving a negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions; protecting the rights of all Syrians; securing unconventional and advanced conventional weapons; and countering terrorist activity.”
2013, James Holmes: “One weird thing about this brand of warfare was the inconsistent vocabulary used to describe it. Various armed services, government agencies, and international bodies applied a variety of nomenclatures to unconventional arms. There was CBR, and CBRN, and NBC, you name it.”
2015, Farnaz Alimehri, Georgetown University: “While conventional weapons have historically inflicted many more casualties than unconventional weapons, ISIL’s acquisition and use of chemical weapons nonetheless requires a deeper look at WMD.”
2018, Gary Ackerman, Univ of Albany: “ISIL and other groups invite individuals to become “walk-on terrorists,” and provide them with the blueprints for conventional and unconventional weapon attacks.”
A quick review of DTIC shows a number of studies that discuss “unconventional weapons,” often as a synonym for WMD. My point being, the Bush 43 administration turned the WMD acronym into a worthless, meaningless definition. It’s never recovered since 2008. We could use “unconventional weapons” to talk about military NBC weapons or terrorist CBRN hazards without getting dramatic about the topic. On the other hand, changing the term for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons might not increase the focus on this area at all within the national security community.
I don’t have a solution to fix DoD’s lack of attention on counterproliferation, countering WMD, addressing unconventional weapons, whatever we call it. I just know it’s not a serious topic inside the Pentagon, and I know we could do better. In the meantime, the DoD writes strategy documents and joint publications on these issues and we pretend that they actually demonstrate serious military concepts. The CRS and GAO don’t look at this topic anymore, and neither do the Beltway think tanks, because countering WMD is not a priority. We should do better.
Not exaggerating. One of the main reasons why the National Military Strategy to Combat WMD was signed in 2006, four years after the National Strategy to Combat WMD was released, was because OSD and the Joint Staff were arguing as to what the newly formed ASD for Homeland Defense was supposed to do with regards to DoD’s role in responding to a domestic WMD incident. Rumsfeld was keenly aware that there was an active combat operation going on and didn’t want to have resources tied up in a homeland security role.
Mitchel Wallerstein was the DASD, who said in 1998, “The Gulf War of 1990-91 focused attention on the increasing threat posed by the proliferation of unconventional weapons.” Remember this line.
James N. Miller filled this position, years before he became USD Policy in 2012. Ironically, his office sat on the draft (completed) DoD Strategy for Countering WMD for a year while the Syrian chemical weapons crisis played out.
Lisa Bronson, the DASD here, pushed for an ASD for Counter-WMD to elevate and focus policy decisions within the Department. Her office drafted the NMS to Combat WMD.
Richard Douglas served here. Counterproliferation got thrown in with counternarcotics because of a desire to focus on interdiction of WMD-related materials and potential supply lines to terrorist groups similar to how counternarcotics was done.
Rebecca Hersman, now director of DTRA. Key figure in the DoD response to Fukushima, Syrian chemical demil response, and 2014 DoD Strategy for Countering WMD.
Dr. Wendin Smith, Derek (Dirk) Maurer, and David Lasseter. ASD GSA was disestablished by Chuck Hagel (a bad move IMHO) and counter-WMD, space, and cyber policy got moved under homeland defense. The national security emphasis was on WMD terrorism rather than nation-state WMD programs.
Richard Johnson was initially hired as the DASD for CWMD but got saddled with nuclear weapons policy when the Biden administration fired Leonor Tomero.
And this all dovetails nicely into the USG agency budget requirement of statistics “Show me investigation and arrest stats” many say. We are left with organizational rice bowls and silos of mediocrity. This pursuit requires integral thinking among peer agencies. And beyond. Too many see a better pursuit as a threat to paper tigers in the government jungle.
I think we disagree about some things, but this is a serious, well-argued, factually-based argument that deserves more attention. And one thing we agree on is that WMD is a pretty useless term. If for no other reason than that two of the classic WMD weapons -- chemical and biological weapons -- don't create destruction at all. They kill people but leave the structures standing. Which makes it hard for them to qualify as weapons of mass _destruction_. So the term has never made any sense.
Question: Wouldn't it make sense to call chemical or biological weapons that were aimed at civilians "weapons of mass terrorism" [WMT]? It's both politically more powerful and more descriptive than "unconventional weapons." Or are you looking for a term that covers both attacks on military and civilian targets? I would argue that separating civilian attacks from military attacks makes sense because wars are never won by killing civilians. It seems to me that wars are about killing soldiers, persuading them to surrender, or incapacitating them by taking away the tools they need to fight. (Although as the Iraqis showed, people can get pretty inventive with even very limited means if they're really motivated to fight.)
Interesting and useful argument. Thanks.