By BG (Ret.) William King
The U.S. Special Operations Command, as the mission lead for countering weapons of mass destruction (CWMD), is adopting a coordinated, trans-regional approach to address today’s dynamic and multi-dimensional threat. Aligning all critical dimensions of the CWMD mission (policy, people, operations, engineering, and management) into an integrated whole-of-government strategy and empowering them with a comprehensive view of the mission landscape will best position the United States and its mission partners and allies for maximum effectiveness.
WMD Challenges Today and Beyond
The U.S. military’s enduring mission to counter threats posed by weapons of mass destruction has taken on renewed urgency due to troubling developments in recent years that have contributed to a more volatile and complex threat landscape. As the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) warns: “There now exists an unprecedented range and mix of threats, including major conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear, space, and cyber threats, and violent non-state actors. These developments have produced increased uncertainty and risk.”
Russia and China are acquiring new advanced types of nuclear capabilities and giving those nuclear forces increased prominence in their plans and strategies. North Korea, in defiance of international laws and condemnation, is developing and testing nuclear weapons and missiles that can deliver those weapons across continents. North Korea also continues to pursue chemical and biological weapons that could also be delivered by a missile. Meanwhile, Iran is emboldened via its proxies and is believed to possess the capacity necessary to develop a nuclear weapon within one year should it decide to resume its nuclear ambitions.
Perhaps more troubling is a rising WMD threat from non-state actors, such as violent extremist organizations. The potential threat of non-state actors getting their hands on a nuclear weapon remains at the front of all our minds. Nuclear terrorism is still a major threat in this century, and one we must work to mitigate at every opportunity. A particularly vexing challenge today is the fact that threats from non-state actors often include single individuals who are inspired by violent extremist organizations and can be more difficult to detect in advance. The Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) CWMD Office captured the issue well at a recent conference:
“The change, the dynamic that I’ve seen in my career is the shift from state actors being primarily who you’re concerned with when it comes to WMD to non-state actors and the proliferation of information through the internet. Now you really have to worry about a microbiologist that has access to a laboratory in a community college, which, 10-15 years ago, that wasn’t something that we were dealing with like we are today.”
The evolving tactics and operations employed by terrorist organizations have compressed the time and space needed to plot and carry out attacks, further challenging traditional U.S. counter-terrorism approaches. Now they have become highly networked online, allowing them to spread propaganda worldwide, recruit online, evade detection by plotting in virtual safe havens, and crowd-source attacks.
The result is that our interagency partners and allies have tracked a record number of terrorism cases, said the Homeland Security Secretary. As DHS officials recently told lawmakers, certain WMDs, once viewed as out-of-reach for all but nation states, are now closer to being attained by non-state actors. Unfortunately, the WMD threat today is not strictly academic — chemical weapons have been employed repeatedly with devastating consequences by both state and non-state actors.
Further complicating the threat landscape is the fact that the know-how and materials needed to produce WMD continue to proliferate and commercial technologies that enable threat actors to obtain and deploy these weapons continue advancing.
Modern CWMD Presents Significant Coordination and Information-Sharing Challenges
These troubling developments challenge traditional CWMD paradigms and test the ability of U.S. government organizations to keep pace. As the DHS noted:
“We are rethinking homeland security for a new age. We sometimes speak of the ‘home game’ and ‘away game’ in protecting our country, with DHS especially focused on the former. But the line is now blurred. The dangers we face are becoming more dispersed, and threat networks are proliferating across borders. The shifting landscape is challenging our security, so we need to move past traditional defense and non-defense thinking.”
In response, the U.S. government is recalibrating its CWMD posture with agency reorganizations and reformulated strategies. Strategies and plans to address WMD threats are being overhauled with new or updated versions of the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, Combined Arms CWMD doctrine, and National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan.
These are positive steps that constitute a tipping point in the nation’s mobilization around the WMD challenge. But these steps, by themselves, cannot sufficiently address the myriad challenges that come with countering today’s emerging WMD threats. These include:
- A lack of coordination at the national level to ensure that centers of CWMD activity, authority, policy, planning, and expertise are operating cohesively, effectively, and efficiently. There are several relevant national CWMD strategies with no implementation plan and no one designated as the lead.
- Limited situational awareness across the CBRNe communities concerning threats and CWMD activities.
- A new lead agency must rapidly develop the infrastructure, partnerships, expertise, strategy, and tactics needed to address this mission successfully.
- The inherent complexity of the CWMD mission in which each CBRNe pillar consists of different stakeholders, required skillsets, strategies, and tactics.
- Threat actors that continue to evolve their resilience, adaptability, strategies, tactics, and organizations, often by employing digital innovations.
In addition, each of the five CBRNe domains within CWMD consists of different stakeholder communities, required skillsets, strategies, and tactics. Moreover, the CWMD mission embodies non-proliferation, counter-proliferation, and consequence management responsibilities within each of those domains. Likewise, each of those mission responsibilities consists of different stakeholder communities, skillsets, strategies, and tactics.
To be sure, U.S. Special Operations Command’s experience in counterterrorism brings critical advantages, including the know-how needed to establish, coordinate, and leverage needed relationships and partnerships; develop agile operational models and tactics; and employ innovative technologies and capabilities in pursuit of mission goals. But the sheer scale and relative complexity of the WMD threat, the support needed to sustain a “unity of effort” approach to the mission, and the extreme stakes intrinsic to CWMD that demand zero tolerance for failure all require a more deliberate approach to the intelligence and coordination challenges needed to keep the command and its mission partners on the front foot. Furthermore, these coordination challenges extend not only to U.S. Special Operations Command’s many mission partners, but also to the fundamental components of the CWMD mission itself. People, policies, operations, management, and technology need to be optimally integrated to deliver assured mission success, even as the threat intensifies.
Going Forward, Think Holistically
U.S. Special Operations Command is ideally suited to take on a coordinated, trans-regional approach to address today’s increasingly dynamic and multi-dimensional WMD threat. I believe that my suggested framework above for aligning all critical dimensions of the CWMD mission into an integrated “whole-of-government” approach and empowering them with a comprehensive view of the mission landscape will best position the U.S. Federal Government and its mission partners for maximum effectiveness.
BG (Ret.) William King has served in a wide variety of command, leadership, and staff positions across numerous levels of the U.S. Army, Joint Task Forces, Regional Commands, and most recently as the Commanding General of 20th CBRNE Command before retiring on July 19, 2017, with 30+ years of active-duty U.S. Army service. Today he is a Principal/Director at Booz Allen Hamilton, responsible for developing the market for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction.
