[A top-level Pentagon official has reportedly been dismissed for
the crime of being skeptical about our nuclear weapons policies.]
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BIDEN BENDS TO THE NUCLEAR BUREAUCRACY  
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Joe Cirincione
September 23, 2021
Responsible Statecraft
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_ A top-level Pentagon official has reportedly been dismissed for the
crime of being skeptical about our nuclear weapons policies. _

The Honorable Joe Biden, and The Honorable Lloyd J. Austin III,
participate in the 153rd National Memorial Day Presidential Armed
Forces Full Honor Wreath Ceremony to honor America’s fallen
military. , DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase

 

Joe Biden as candidate campaigned
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pulling us back from the nuclear brink, reforming our Cold War
policies and cancelling dangerous new weapons begun by Donald Trump.
Joe Biden as president has completely abandoned these pledges. At this
point, all we should expect from the Biden administration on nuclear
policy are more weapons contracts.

The latest indicator of this backtracking is the sad story of Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense Leonor Tomero. She came to the job with
fresh but experienced eyes. Her only mistake was believing that Biden
meant what he said. She apparently lost her job for that belief.
She reportedly
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been removed from her post in charge of nuclear policy and missile
defense (including next year’s Nuclear Posture Review that will set
out nuclear policy for the Biden administration).

“People wonder why we don’t learn from failures like Vietnam, Iraq
and Afghanistan,” Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on national security
policy at the Middlebury Institute for International Policy, told
[[link removed]] The Washington Post. “The reason is
simple: People who point out alternatives to current national security
policies are systematically driven out of positions of authority.”

Full disclosure: I know and respect Leanor Tomero and her former boss,
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who sent
an excellent nuclear policy letter
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Biden just last month. I did not talk to them or to anyone at the
Pentagon about what happened. Ever loyal, Tomero likely does not want
to embarrass anyone in the administration.

But they should be embarrassed. What they did was awful.

The key point to understand is that when an appointee, like Tomero,
comes into the Pentagon, they are put in charge of a vast, entrenched
bureaucracy dedicated to keeping the system operating as it has been.
There are zero incentives for these bureaucrats to cancel existing
programs or to change existing policy. They resented Tomero’s
questioning of these programs. They saw her as their problem, not as
their leader.

According to knowledgeable sources, the Pentagon staff complained to
Republican staff on the Senate Armed Services Committee that Tomero
wasn’t sufficiently supportive of “nuclear modernization” —
 the euphemism given to the $634 billion in contracts 
[[link removed]]the government will award this
decade to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, planes,
and subs. The SASC staff then threatened Tomero’s bosses, including
Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Melissa Dalton, Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, and Deputy Secretary of Defense
Kathleen Hicks, who then removed Tomero, using an
existing reorganization
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the department as cover. 

In some ways, it is hard to argue with their calculation. Nuclear
policy is a low priority for a Biden administration wrestling with
ending the war in Afghanistan, pivoting to confrontation with China,
combatting climate change and a raging pandemic, and struggling to
enact sweeping domestic programs and policies. They are trying to get
top officials confirmed through the SASC, including Dalton.

Blocking new weapons threatens this agenda. Senior administration
officials seem to have made the cynical calculation that increased
Pentagon spending is good Keynesian economics. The Congress is
hopelessly addicted to more military spending, so why fight it? Adding
tens of billions to the Pentagon budget is lousy policy
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but, they believe, it will further stimulate the economy. Why expend
political capital trying to cancel nuclear weapons candidate Biden
said we didn’t need
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Let it all roll, the thinking goes, and maybe we will get to it in the
following years, after we’ve done the heavy lifting on our other,
more pressing issues.

In the most positive interpretation of Biden’s plans, he believes
that we must reimagine national security to deliver a “foreign
policy for the middle class
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of the past 20 years have been a huge mistake, have cost too much,
have diverted our attention, and that we are in a struggle now that
has almost nothing to do with Afghanistan or Iraq or, for that matter,
the Middle East.

Biden believes that we are in a struggle between democracies and
autocracies. And we must show that democracy can deliver for the
people. That means shoring up democratic institutions, most
importantly, through a $3.5 billion infrastructure bill. It is his way
of retooling the American economy and the role of government in
American life. To keep his party together for these big lifts, he must
minimize conflicts on other issues, like defense policy. At least for
now.

The depressing conclusion is that we can expect little in the way of
nuclear policy reform from this administration. Joe Biden has not
changed his views. If asked, he will certainly say, as he has already
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that we can have a strong defense “while reducing our reliance and
excessive expenditures on nuclear weapons.” He just won’t do
anything about it.

The Nuclear Policy Review, now firmly under the control of the
Pentagon bureaucracy, will change little. The contracts will flow. At
best, he will allow the State Department to pursue agreements with
Iran — perhaps even with North Korea and Russia — to slow their
programs or arrive at some vague “strategic stability” measures.
But nothing that threatens business as usual at the Pentagon.

Administration officials appear to have concluded that changing the
Pentagon is just too hard. Even if that means sacrificing smart, good
people in the pursuit of larger objectives.

_JOSEPH CIRINCIONE is a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute
and a national security analyst and author with over 35 years of
experience working these issues in Washington, D.C. He is the author
or editor of seven books, including Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the
World before It Is Too Late and Bomb Scare:  The History and Future
of Nuclear Weapons. He served previously as president of Ploughshares
Fund, a global security foundation, vice president for national
security at the Center for American Progress and director for
nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
among other positions.  He worked for over nine years on the
professional staff of the Armed Services Committee and the Government
Operations Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is
adjunct faculty at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He appears
frequently on television, radio and in the media and is the author of
over eight hundred articles and reports on defense and national
security. He tweets @Cirincione [[link removed]]._

_RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT is a publication of the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft. It provides analysis, opinion, and news to
promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility,
diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the
ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have
mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made
the world less secure._

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