Counterproliferation

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When US Secretary of Defense Les Aspin launched the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative (DCI) on 7 December 1993, he drew attention to the need to learn lessons from the Gulf War and apply them to armed forces that were being significantly reduced and restructured in light of the “Bottom-up Review”. He indicated that the United States had to improve its intelligence on the proliferation of NBC weapons and ballistic missile capabilities, to enhance its ability to detect weapons of mass destruction, locate mobile missiles, penetrate underground installations, destroy stocks of chemical and biological weapons without causing collateral damage, and improve defences, particularly against biological weapons.1 As Dr Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counterproliferation Policy, added, these requirements assumed a further significance for armed forces required to fight and win two Major Regional Conflicts (now known as Major Regional Wars). In such conflicts there was still a high probability that US and allied forces could encounter the use or the threat of using weapons of mass destruction. Wallerstein prudently observed that this was an evolving problem, and that it could not be addressed by ‘a single acquisition-oriented program within the Department’. Looking forward to 2010, the Pentagon had to develop plans to cope with various WMD threats, improve operational intelligence on the WMD stocks, facilities, deployment plans and capabilities of proliferant states, and provide a focus for its own research, development and procurement programmes. It had to infuse the military leadership with a greater understanding of the political and military implications of WMD threats and correlate these efforts with potential allies, especially in NATO.2 To gauge the effectiveness of this programme will require an understanding of how strategic thinking has developed since the early 1990s, includingnotions of deterrence and operational planning (with Operation Desert Fox being a test case of the latter), and of how NBC-related research, development, procurement and training is faring amidst the reductions of defence expenditure during most of the 1990s.