Project Atom 2024 - CSIS PONI keynote

MS. HEATHER WILLIAMS: I'm really excited about this keynote. We asked Rear Admiral Buchanan to speak about interwar deterrence challenges in a two-peer environment. Before turning the stage over to him and reading his bio, though, I did want to just briefly provide a little bit of context for the focus of his remarks and why we asked him.

As I think everyone heard and knows, the US faces an unprecedented challenge, which is the potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts by multiple peers simultaneously. Elaine had a really great quote, I think, in the previous panel where she said, nuclear weapons use is no longer not imaginable. And Carrie picked up on that theme in her chairing as well.

And the Project Atom study definitely has forced us within PONI and the authors and the reviewers to talk about a really hard topic and to confront some really challenging questions. And so that is the context that we're coming to this discussion with. Some specific challenges include the potential use of nuclear weapons that I mentioned, Russia's escalate to de-escalate concept, China's expanding nuclear arsenal, North Korea's nuclear threats that have created a deterrence landscape that demands fresh thinking and really fresh approaches.

And when I first saw Admiral Buchanan this morning, the first thing he said to me was, the timing of this is pretty fortuitous. I don't think you said fortuitous. It was a good timing, just because of news, obviously, yesterday about Russia's nuclear doctrine.

And so the shifting landscape is really complicated as well by the balances of regional and strategic deterrence requirements for allies and adversaries alike. As Director of Plans and Policy, the J5 at US Strategic Command, Admiral Buchanan is closely familiar with all of these evolving challenges and leads STRATCOM's efforts to mitigate them. Admiral Thomas R. 'TR' Buchanan currently serves as Director for the Plans and Policy Directorate at USSTRATCOM and started in June of 2024. He has a long and distinguished Navy resume, including stints as Commander of Submarine Group 10, Submarine Squadron 20 in Kings Bay, Georgia, and USS Albany in Norfolk, Virginia, and staff assignments as Commandant of Midshipmen at the US Naval Academy, Executive Assistant to the Director of the Joint Staff Lead Shipbuilding Program Analyst. He is a native of Vallejo, California, and a 1992 graduate at the US Naval Academy and holds a Master's of Science in Infotechnology Management from George Washington University.

Please join me in welcoming Admiral Buchanan.

REAR ADM. THOMAS 'TR' BUCHANAN: Thank you. Well, it's great to be with you here in Northwest Washington and with our assembled crowd online. And I do have some prepared remarks. I think the real richness of this conversation will be in your questions, so I look forward to those.

But to Heather's point, really, the timing is impeccable. Not only am I the sidecar show to General Cotton, who was here yesterday, I will hopefully paint an unclassified landscape for you that we can chat about in a realistic way. But both the threats and the challenges that we face as a nation are very real and present and, to some degree, not uniformly understood throughout our country.

And so this is part of that conversation. There will be certainly others and more of this conversation moving forward, I think. So thanks, Heather, for the kind invitation to speak today about interwar deterrence in the two-peer environment, and that's two nuclear peers.

Certainly always good to get back to the DC area. My mom lives here locally, so since I'm living in Omaha now, the opportunity to see her is very important as she ages. And I am privileged to represent General Cotton in the United States Strategic Command in this forum.

As I previously said, I look forward to the conversation, but I also want to acknowledge the fact that this Russia doctrine proclamation, which we've been tracking for some time, I figured that President Putin decided he was going to release it when General Cotton and I came back to the DC area. So it was really perfect timing in that regard. But STRATCOM's mission remains core and essential to the Department of Defense, at our headquarters and, more importantly, down to our service components.

And think of those as the Air Force service component, which is Air Force Global Strike Command and US Fleet Forces Command on the Navy side. We aim to deter strategic attack through maintaining a safe, secure, effective, and credible global combat capability if and when directed by the president. We are ready to prevail in conflict.

And make no bones about it, that's what our forces, your forces, the Air Force, Navy forces that make up the three legs of the triad do every day, prepare for that potential eventuality. But we know that that's not what we would like to do on a day-in-a-day basis, but we have to be ready. General Cotton has designated 2024 as the year of action.

And 2025 now becomes the year of acceleration. And we are moving out to that end. His vision remains that STRATCOM is this global warfighting command, committed as a part of a team of allies and partners to maintain strategic deterrence across the spectrum of competition and conflict.

And he has set some specific tasks for our team, some of which are to recruit exceptional talent to the mission, take care of our people, increase the readiness of our forces, improve our capabilities, and enhance nuclear command and control and communications. Above all else, the command is charged to continue to provide strategic deterrence to the United States, our allies, and our partners. But if deterrence fails, with our resilient, trained, and properly equipped combat-ready force, our forces and the commanders who lead those forces are ready and prepared to respond decisively every minute of every day and effectively to win our nation's wars.

That's why our armed forces exist. And that's why our nuclear force exists. There is an imperative, however, to maintain strategic deterrence, especially as the strategic environment becomes more complicated, more dangerous, and dare I say, more challenging.

And Secretary of Defense Austin outlined the threat we're facing when he said, these next few years will set the terms of our competition with the People's Republic of China, and they will shape the future of security in Europe. And I think we've seen that played out since he made those remarks. And they will determine whether our children and grandchildren inherit an open world of rules and rights or whether they face emboldened autocrats who seek to dominate by force and fear.

And preserving a stable and open international system is key to this effort. But we in the military know that we are just one of the many instruments of power. Where you place us in terms of the priority amongst those other diplomatic and economic information, we understand that that's a decision for our civilian leadership.

But we know that we can't go it alone. And as President Biden has said, we have entered a decisive decade. And for the first time in our history, we're facing two nuclear peers who are actively refusing to comply with international law.

And our challenge is compounded by being at least a generation removed from experiencing great power competition with merely a single peer, let alone two. The 2022 National Defense Strategy identified the PRC as the department's pacing challenge. The PRC continues a substantial and startling expansion of its strategic and nuclear forces, resulting in a large, diverse force that appears to be counter to its longstanding self-proclaimed minimum deterrence nuclear doctrine.

Indeed, they are expanding every leg of their force, including the addition of about 1,000 medium and intermediate-range dual-capable conventional nuclear ballistic missiles, adding a layer of uncertainty and potential for miscalculation. Furthermore, as General Cotton reported in his testimony last spring, the PRC's arsenal of land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launchers currently exceeds that of the United States. This includes three new ICBM fields with at least 300 missile silos and a number of transporter erector launchers.

The pace of PRC's nuclear expansion is really unprecedented. If it continues as we expect it will, they could have more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of the decade. And while the pace of China's expansion is concerning, the statement from their leadership that goes with this expansion is equally alarming.

Last month during a speech to the PLA rocket force, the branch of the PLA that operates its nuclear deterrent, President Xi Jinping urged them to comprehensively strengthen training and preparation for war, while also stating the soldiers must enhance their strategic deterrent and combat capability. Xi's statements, combined with its nuclear modernization program and continued advances in its conventional capabilities, will, quote, pose a complex but not insurmountable challenge to US strategic deterrence. And while the PRC is the pacing challenge, the NDS also identifies Russia as an acute threat.

Russia's unprovoked war with Ukraine is well into its third year. I think two days ago reached the day 1,000. This is the largest conflict on the European continent since World War II.

And as our previous panel members talked about the importance of that continent in their eyes, this was brought into sharp relief as we commemorated the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy earlier this year. In the last few years, President Putin has demonstrated growing willingness to employ nuclear rhetoric to coerce the United States and our NATO allies to accept his attempt to change borders and rewrite history. This week, notwithstanding, was another one of those efforts.

Putin has validated and updated his doctrine such that Russia has revised it to include the provision that nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear states would be considered if the state that supported it was supported by a nuclear state. This has serious implications for Ukraine and our NATO allies. Russia has modernized all aspects of their nuclear triad, but they're also investing in new and novel nuclear capabilities, including hypersonics that complement over 2,000 theater nuclear weapons that are not accountable under New START treaty central limits.

And DPRK, in lockstep with PRC and Russian advances, continues to develop its nuclear arsenal as a means to ensure its regime survival. It is fielding a diverse range of ballistic missiles that can place regional allies and our partners at risk and directly threaten the US homeland. As DPRK fields this capability, it continues to act in a provocative manner.

North Korea fired more missiles in 2022 than any other year on record, advancing its capabilities to threaten the US, our allies, and our partners. And while we cannot clearly discount North Korea or even Iran from seeing an opportunity to escalate and achieve their arms while the US is potentially distracted with the other two nuclear peers, taken individually, these developments are concerning. But with the real and increased cooperation between Russia, the PRC, and the DPRK, there is a growing threat of simultaneous crises with the potential that our adversaries are coordinating their actions.

And we can no longer compartmentalize the threats individually, but we must be prepared to deter and confront them in chorus across the spectrum of conflict. And during STRATCOM's change of command ceremony 19 months ago, Secretary Austin stated, nuclear powers have a profound responsibility to avoid provocative behavior and to lower the risk of proliferation and to prevent escalation into nuclear war. Those words said then are still present today.

Our adversaries are not meeting the standard. These challenges are why we need to advance our integrated deterrence strategy. And Secretary Austin describes integrated deterrence as simply integrating our efforts across domains and across the spectrum of conflict to ensure that the U.S. military, in close cooperation with the rest of the U.S. government and our allies and partners, makes the folly and costs of aggression very clear. This is important because deterrence is about influencing perceptions of adversary leaders so that when an adversary faces an escalation decision, they choose restraint over aggression. But doing so successfully requires more than threats of force or threats of defeat where the military dominates. Deterrence requires using all levers of national power.

This is integrated deterrence. This framework seeks to enable shared deterrence approaches for the interagency to combine diplomatic, economic, information and military actions to comprehensively influence adversary decision-making. Integrating deterrence also enhances, sorry, requires enhancing our collaboration with our allies and partners, especially those under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Our allies face the increasing threat of our adversaries in their backyards. And as the threat increases, our allies look to the U.S. to enhance assurances that our extended deterrent commitments remain solid. Our extended deterrence commitments have served us and them as a cornerstone for preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons for decades, but that is no guarantee.

We must continue to work with them, to assure them and assure them of our commitment to our extended deterrence guarantees, but also to continue to strengthen the alliances. The bedrock of extended and integrated deterrence continues to be our nuclear deterrent. While this current deterrent remains more than sound, we must ensure its future viability through robust modernization efforts.

Earlier this year, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Cotton said the United States is undertaking a multi-generational, decades-long modernization of our entire nuclear deterrent, including all three legs of the triad, as well as command, control, and communications capabilities. To put this in perspective, we have not undertaken such a comprehensive modernization program since the 1980s, and then we didn't do it at all three legs at a time. The current program of record was established over a decade ago under a much different security environment.

This begs the question, is it sufficient? Secretary Austin addressed this in testimony before Congress this year, stating the program of record is necessary but may not be sufficient. He advocated that our modernization program be agile to not only keep pace, but maintain a competitive edge.

In the next decade, Sentinel ICBM, Columbia-class SSBN, and B-21 Raider will enter service to the force. But this modernization program will continue through the 2040s and beyond, which is why General Cotton refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration and our service partners as essential partners for integrated deterrence. Now, PONI invited me here to talk about intra-war deterrence in the two-peer environment.

And you may be asking why I've spent so much time discussing integrated deterrence. Because foundationally, deterrence does not fail all at once, it fails in stages. Integrated deterrence will not be suddenly set aside in the intra-war period, but rather becomes progressively more important due to the increased pressure on deterrence during the conflict.

Why is deterrence in the intra-war period so difficult? Because you're trying to achieve two separate and often conflicting objectives. First, we are trying to deter that next adversary decision to escalate, potentially to the strategic level.

Simultaneous with that, we are trying to compel the cessation of a conflict, in short, to win. But the very actions we take to win could potentially undermine our deterrence. We could restrain ourselves or fight differently to ensure that deterrence holds, but that could undermine our ability to compel the end of the conflict.

This is a tightrope that we must walk in what will be a period of high stress and high consequence with incomplete information and the presence of a thick fog bank of war. This is a difficult challenge with just one adversary. Adding a second peer adversary can and likely will complicate this challenge exponentially.

Understanding the relationship between both adversaries becomes essential. And the concept of opportunistic aggression has been discussed at length over the past few years. The idea of one adversary taking advantage of a conflict to achieve their own objectives.

But how do our deterrence strategies adapt to collaboration between adversaries to achieve each nation's objectives? Or cooperation between adversaries to achieve an advantage on a shared objective? Our strategies need to account for the many ways our adversaries may work with each other and flexible to change as the circumstances change.

Further, the role of our allies and partners has never been more important. We do not address these challenges alone, but with many like-minded nations. And we have entered a period of transformation.

Our national intellectual capacity has been focused necessarily on the insurgence fight of the last two decades. But this environment has changed rather dramatically. It is now time to bring that capacity to bear on addressing the deterrent challenges of facing two nuclear peers.

Not only in the joint force, but across the national security enterprise. Which is why PONI's continued effort to grow the cadre of strategic thinkers over the years is so tremendously important. And we need this continued effort to raise the nuclear IQ of not only our military leaders, but our policy makers, our leadership, Capitol Hill, and the public.

We need the debate. Dissenting opinions are absolutely necessary. They help us refine our thinking.

They clarify and help us understand risk. They make our strategy better. They make the arguments more persuasive.

General Cotton established his analytic agenda research questions as part of U.S. STRATCOM's academic alliance to help further advocate for deterrence research and contribute to this stimulation of this intellectual debate. The series of focus areas and questions posted on our public-facing website encourages researchers such as many in this room to help us tackle these tough questions. And PONI's Project Atom has been leaning forward to aggressively attack these issues.

Honestly, PONI helped keep the lights on for nuclear deterrent strategy and thinking since you were first established in 2003 when few were focused on this issue. Thank you for continuing to lead in this space as we exit the wilderness in deterrence thinking and continue to address these new challenges. So in closing, strategic deterrence for the next decade will be obviously challenging.

We're facing a strategic environment changing in ways we cannot prevent, so we must equip ourselves to confront it. But this transformational challenge also presents us with new opportunities to expand our strategic thinking, grow our partnerships, enhance our alliances, and build the connectivity within our government that is necessary to achieve integrated deterrence. I expect that we will continue to discuss strategic deterrence for the next decade at STRATCOM's annual deterrence symposium, which I hope you can join us this next year scheduled for three to four September in Omaha at the Chai Center.

September is, I'll confess, September is a wonderful month in Omaha. Come join us to continue the conversation, but we are not gonna wait until September to have the conversation that needs to be had each day. So thank you for the work that you do within this community.

It really does never stop, and every day our force is ready to execute the tasking of the U.S. military and our government. And as I wrap up today, I'd like to leave you with this one quote from President Reagan. We desire peace, but peace is not a goal.

I'm sorry, peace is a goal, not a policy. Lasting peace is what we hope for at the end of our journey. It doesn't describe the steps we must take, nor the paths we should follow to reach that goal.

I look forward to your questions, and thank you very much for listening.

WILLIAMS: Thank you very much for the remarks. Thank you for the very nice things you said about PONI. Last year, PONI had its 20th anniversary, so it's been 21 years now since Dr. Hamre stood it up, along with some other giants in the field. As I've talked to some of the folks who've been involved in PONI much longer than I have, and who were involved in its establishment, a few of them said, you know, there were some periods when nuclear weapons just really weren't, they weren't in the news, they weren't in the public consciousness, and now that they're back, quite a few people have said, you know, I'm really glad that PONI is still there and can provide this, so thank you very much for that. I have a couple questions to get us started. I would just encourage everyone, please use the QR code or submit your questions online.

We have about 30 minutes for a bit of discussion. I, this might be a little controversial, I wanna start with the election. I'm not gonna ask for your views on politics, fear not.

But it's really hard not to talk about the election, especially in this town, and you talked a lot about the enterprise, the program of record, STRATCOM's role in all of this, and this might seem obvious to a lot of us in this room, and people who work on these issues, I actually think it would be helpful to just kind of spell out how the program of record continues, nuclear modernization continues, STRATCOM's mission continues, despite political change. And so if you could maybe just say a little bit about that and the endurance of the deterrence mission.

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so in terms of being ready every day, that doesn't change with an election cycle. So we are, the forces are ready to execute the orders through a normal transition of power that will be held by commanders in the field. Submarines continue to get underway.

ICBMs continue to remain alert. Bombers continue to do their maintenance. So the nuclear force is ready on January 19th, just like it will be ready on January 20th.

And so we look forward to the transition because it just means that some of the other things that go along with transition are able to be, so we get some additional direction and we move out in a purposeful way. And so from that perspective, US STRATCOM remains ready to work with our newly inducted leaders and those that are assigned to the Defense Department to have civilian control of the military, just like every day since our nation was founded. So, and the nuclear deterrent is a ready force.

It's always ready. And we have, whether it's the submarines, which I'm most familiar with, our op tempo is very high. The platform is exceptional.

And we have people that care about maintaining that platform ad infinitum. And so how that modernization goes between, as we move from Ohio into Columbia, as Minuteman III into Sentinel, we're managing very carefully the ages of those weapon systems to make sure they remain ready to go. Very resilient force.

WILLIAMS: Thank you for that. I wanted to pick up on a couple of your points. One was your remarks about the importance of leveraging all or all levers of national power as part of deterrence.

And this might feed in nicely to our next panel, in which we'll have Alex Bell from the State Department, Richard Johnson from DOD, and Grant Schneider from the Joint Staff. But I'm always really impressed and a little surprised that it's usually the folks at STRATCOM who say the State Department has a really essential role to play in deterrence and in integrated deterrence. And oftentimes it seems STRATCOM is more reluctant than everyone else to say, oh, well, here's the military component to it.

And I'm just always really impressed by that and really trying to highlight the role that other parts of the interagency and government play. I mean, so I was hoping you could expand on that just a little bit and say, what do you see as the role of diplomacy of state commerce, treasury, all the rest of it in that integrated whole of government approach that we are really trying to get after? Yes.

BUCHANAN: So I think there's two basic, well there's probably more. Our government is a complex organization. It is, you know, we have a military, we obviously have a very strong defense department that's resourced in some people's eyes very well.

We still have gaps even in the great resourcing that we do get. The State Department plays an essential role in terms of their ability to be interlocutors with our allies to gain an appreciation of where the world is sitting. So they have a sensing component associated with their, so to better understand the geostrategic environment, the State Department plays an absolutely huge role to understand where the winds are blowing and shifting.

And so understanding the problem is, I think Einstein said once that if you had an hour to solve a problem, right, he'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem and then five minutes solving it. And the issue with that is I see the State Department as a really good sensing agency to be able to, but they also have to be effective communicators. And so this idea of deterrence, particularly in the nuclear realm, is really about, there's a lot of messaging associated with it.

But in order to back up messaging, you have to have a credible force. And so you can't say something that isn't credible. And so the integration of the message with the credibility of our force, so STRATCOM is very interested in the credibility of the force and making sure it's a professional force that does the right things and does those things right.

And so we take a very hard line on making sure we adhere to a high standard of performance. And so that goes to the credibility piece. And then those and other, I'm less familiar with the levers of Treasury, of course we saw with respect to the Ukraine event, many of the economic levers that were used to help shape the environment.

But commerce and where that all nests is at every embassy that we have in the world. So you have representatives from Treasury, Commerce, certainly the State Department runs the embassies. We have a military arm in those embassies that engage with our allies and partners.

So it's really important. STRATCOM is one of many in that space. And we can provide a lot of insight to what we're thinking about the nuclear deterrent force and where we think that has, where that plugs into the broader levers of instruments of power.

WILLIAMS: That's great. Thank you. And I wanted to tease out a little bit more about your framing of the interwar deterrence problem.

I really like this, where you said we're facing two different and conflicting objectives, deterring the next adversary attack while also compelling a cessation of hostilities to win. And one thing from the Project Atom study that the authors debated quite a bit is how are we defining winning here. And on an earlier panel today, somebody said, let's be clear, there is no winning here.

Nobody wins. You know, the U.S. is signed up to that language. Nuclear war cannot be won, must never be fought, et cetera.

And so how do you think about winning? I want to put air quotes around it because I do think that's right. If we're in a scenario where nuclear weapons have been used in theater against allies, that it's really hard to reconcile that with an idea of winning.

So how do you think about that?

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so it's certainly complex because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that's a place we'd like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don't want to have an exchange, right?

I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it's terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader.

And do we lead the world in an area where we've considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient - we'd have to have sufficient capability.

We'd have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn't expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.

So very complex problem, of course. And as I think many people understand, nuclear weapons are political weapons. I think Susan Rice said that at one point.

WILLIAMS: Your response is hitting on a lot of the other debates within Project ATOM with regards to does the U.S. want to maintain global leadership in these types of scenarios? If so, how can it - what does that look like? Does it involve bringing the allies along?

But I think that was a really helpful response. We do have quite a few questions coming in from the audience, so I'm going to turn to one here. The first one comes from Raja Yunus, who is a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins SAIS and also an associate fellow here with PONI. And Raja's question was, beyond the study of interwar deterrence, what research areas would provide the most valuable insights for advancing the mission of STRATCOM? So this kind of gets to the policy, academia, think tank space where what are the studies that you wish that you - the studies that you wish existed that you could pull on in your work?

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so I think that one that would be how do we make things quicker, right? I mean this idea of how do we accelerate foundationally solutions on how to accelerate the ability for the U.S. to move quicker in its defense industrial base. And so why do I say that with STRATCOM?

Well, every aspect of the modernization, every aspect of - and that's a really hard one, right? You have to go back and study our run-up to World War II in terms of what was the industrial capacity like that. And if you just did a broad-based comparison to what it is today and what it is in the run-up to World War II, you'll find that there are stark differences between the two elements or the two time periods.

And so there are a lot of folks that are thinking about the - so that's one piece of it I think that I would be - if there's some really good thought in that. Lots of folks are really working hard to try to hire sufficient blue car workers, right? All sorts of recruiting campaigns to get more welders, pipe fitters, artisans that do aircraft work.

So that's one piece of it. Another piece of it is - on the nuclear IQ piece is how do - what are the types of things that resonate with the American people to help us understand more broadly the problem that we face? And why is there - and is there an element of - that we're missing in terms of capturing the nation's attention in this space?

Is it because it's - the talk of nuclear weapons is verboten? Is it because we don't want to consider the possible outcomes? Is it because - so I would say is it not worthy of the conversation because it's - because we don't want to think about it?

Because it's either the elephant in the room or maybe that dust bunny in the corner of your closet that you don't want to go clean. So I think those are two pieces. And then just this idea of collaboration and coordination between adversaries in broader terms and the impact that that could or - and what kind of things should we be considering given those types of relationships.

WILLIAMS: If you can - if I can follow up on that a bit on this adversary collaboration. Is there any particular angle of that that you think is most worthy of - the thread that you most want to see pulled and where outside research might be able to help?

BUCHANAN: Where the - probably in terms of where the cultural differences between the countries in question would or would not - and where the cultural differences, the sort of outcomes, the potential outcomes they seek, how are the cultural differences going to either impede those outcomes or make them even more frictionless I guess you could say. Does that make sense?

WILLIAMS: It does because it is actually worth remembering those are four very different cultures. And historically some of those cultures and countries have not gotten along with each other particularly well.

BUCHANAN: Right. And so is it - is the relationship between each of those countries to some degree what aspects would potentially ease their coordination and what are the pitfalls that we should be looking for?

WILLIAMS: That's great. Another question from online. The Strategic Posture Commission recommended more and or different nuclear options.

NNSA is now working towards modernizing the stockpile with seven-time and multi-use weapons programs. As you lead on STRATCOM's planning, do you have the options that you need? I'm going to pivot on this a little bit because I'm guessing you're going to say right now you have the options that you need but looking ahead.

BUCHANAN: So I'll answer the question with maybe not a direct answer. So STRATCOM is responsible for operational war plans and we developed those plans in concert with a broad range of stakeholders within the department and in the White House. And those are worked as a result of both planning guidance we get from the President and for employment guidance we also get from the President.

And so our plans are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to and we are in a study of sufficiency. I mentioned in my remarks about the Secretary talking about the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future. That's not the exact quote.

And so that study is underway now and will work well into the next administration and we look forward to continuing that work and articulating how the future program could help provide the President additional options should he need them.

WILLIAMS: Great, thank you. Next question comes from Zoe Young who is one of our interns at PONI, a real rising star in the field. How do we balance addressing China as an adversary while also trying to encourage open communication and moving towards diplomacy to better address some of their aggressive behavior and to address challenges like Russia and North Korea?

BUCHANAN: Yes, that's a good question. I think we all should breathe through our nose, certainly. And I think that the State Department and others and the whole government approach should continue to engage our competitors in real and substantive dialogue.

And they shouldn't stop until, right, we shouldn't just give up hope and say but we should always be ready to have a conversation because in large measure conversations, bringing people to a table to talk about common values, nobody wants a nuclear war, right? And so these common values, common frames of reference, these opportunities to have discussion about humanity I think is important.

WILLIAMS: It would seem like that would be a good starting point for the discussion. Another question that we have from Chase Harward which I think is a good follow-up to Raj's question about research and what research would be most useful. And this is about how you and folks at STRATCOM consume research, I think.

So can you say a bit about what it looks like for new research to have an impact on your work? I'm going to have a slightly cheekier follow-up to that, which is what makes a really- when an article comes in, what makes it be something really good that you take around with you or that you share with your staff and the ideas really land with you?

BUCHANAN: Yeah, I think there's-I think first and foremost the arguments that are presented in papers have to start with a common frame of reference. So when we're-so if we're-so the more things that we can sense tangibly in the moment will have greater impact on the near-term stuff that we're doing, of course. But we cover the breadth of requirements today, future requirements we cover.

And so the ability for kind of us to think deeply about some research that we've gotten really is the substantive depth of the particular research. So the sources that you've drawn from that make it compelling, tying together some things that we don't necessarily- part of the research projects that are so effective are the ones that we ourselves may not have the time. I do have lots of folks that have the intellectual capacity, but we may not have the time to do the in-depth research to tie together some thoughts across the spectrum of intellectual thinkers in this space.

So being able to distill that, so using plain language, using the abilities for us to comprehensive- simplify a very complex problem, which it's not easy to do, right? So I think those are the ones that we gravitate towards. But I know that all research isn't created equal, right?

And so leveraging some of the depth of the understanding of the luminaries in this field and pulling out where we might make connections that we haven't made before or if we're retooling the same stuff over again. I think the geostrategic environment has changed substantially where new thoughts in this space are needed.

WILLIAMS: Your response to an earlier question about the need to go faster has solicited a lot of follow-on questions, and so I'm going to pull one of them. Ben Poole from the Stimson Center asks, do we need to look at a tradeoff in capability versus capacity, but not at the cost of mission success in order to go faster in acquisition?

BUCHANAN: Could you rephrase it, restate the question?

WILLIAMS: Do we need to look at a tradeoff in capability versus capacity?

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so I would say that depends. So there are certain capabilities when executed quickly can give us outsized impact, and so I think it requires absolute further study, but I know the DepSecDef has been working hard to accelerate inside the department on some conventional capability that provides the adversary with some additional challenges. I'll leave it at that.

And so I think from the standpoint of the industrial base, it really is about getting more people in positions to be able to do the work that's required, and in a space where I'm most comfortable is the idea of building submarines faster. Certainly we all have an appreciation for the limitations of that because of the number, and I know the broader submarine team, submarine industrial base team, is working exceptionally hard and looking at different ways to attack that problem. And so there may come a time where you have to dial back.

I mean, sometimes we're our own worst enemy in that regard when it comes to additional requirements, and we levy additional requirements or we haven't fully scoped the initial plan, and so that causes delays in the way in which and manner we head out in a productive direction to build certain capabilities for the-and so that was a nonspecific answer to the specifics. So I think there are some tradeoffs, and I think capability and capacity are some of the trade space that actually is part of the solution, right? And if you just go back to World War II and our ability to build things then as opposed to now, I mean, there's a lot of-there's a tremendous amount of differences, so.

WILLIAMS: A follow-on to that that we also got from online is that you did get a SLCM-N question. This comes from Colby Baudoir at the Defense Archives Media who asked, if the new administration puts a priority on SLCM-N, how soon could that be fielded as the Navy is currently asking for prototypes within three years? Can that not be expedited by modifying existing TLAMs?

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so I would say that I don't have-that's not my space to comment on, and the acquisition authorities, the acquisition executives will work diligently to produce a program to fulfill the required milestones inside of the program of record. To say that the commander of USTRATCOM or others want a different trajectory weapon faster, sooner, better, probably I think we need to be able to build faster in whatever capability we're talking about, not the least of which is SLCM-N is part of that effort for sure. And, yeah, so I'll kind of leave it at that.

WILLIAMS: Last question is on something General Cotton said yesterday that a few of us have been quoting and thinking about a lot in his remarks here, and that event was on NC3 modernization, but he went a bit broader in some remarks, and one thing he said was we can't think about this as another version of the Cold War. This is not Cold War 2.0. This is different, and these are a different set of challenges. So I wanted to ask you to reflect a bit on what do you think is, in the current security environment, and you spend a good amount of time giving us that picture and getting into some detail, for addressing the current challenges, what do you think is one lesson that we can take from the Cold War that would be useful right now, but also what is one lesson that you think we're still learning and that would be useful in this environment?

BUCHANAN: Yes, I think one lesson from the Cold War that would be useful to remember is that we don't see the nation at war right now. And so I'm not right because we have said that we're not at war. Technically, we're not at war.

Congress hasn't declared war, nor did we declare war when we were in the Cold War. And so I think not to be alarmist, but I would think that it's really under the auspices of just having an appreciation that we are in a different strategic environment. So that would just be kind of the blank.

And I agree wholeheartedly with General Cotton's characterization that we're not in a 2.0. We tend to ascribe 2.0 to another version, like just an advanced version of it, and it's much different. And so war on the European continent is certainly concerning. The reports of Ukraine power supplies down to somewhere between 50 and 30 percent, as reported in the open press, those are concerning.

And thinking of humanity in terms of what the Ukrainians are going through is something that we in the United States have the luxury of thinking about because we have an exceptional geography to our benefit.

WILLIAMS: And so the second part of it was how would - What lessons should we be learning now to address the security challenges going forward?

BUCHANAN: I just think that we need to be ready. And by ready, I mean our services need to be ready, our ability for - we're seeing an uptick in natural disasters. So just being more ready for something bad to happen.

And I'm not saying it's going to happen, right? And I'm not saying that we need to strike fear in the minds and hearts of Americans nationwide, not even a little bit. But thinking about just how do you be ready in an environment that is not - it's not the environment that we've lived in over the last 30 years.

So hopefully that's helpful.

WILLIAMS: It is, and I also think it nicely ties back to Project Atom's study and the interwar deterrence question. Earlier today, Chris Ford had said deterrence failure is a cumulative problem, and that resonates, I think, with some of your remarks about how deterrence failure isn't something that just happens. There are steps leading up to it.

And so readiness, readiness now, not just waiting for the crisis is an important lesson to take away from that. So with that, we are at time. Admiral Buchanan, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for these really helpful remarks. And thank you, everyone, for being part of the discussion.

BUCHANAN: Thank you.

(NOTE: this is a machine-transcribed product)

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