By Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A congressional commission takes a fresh look at the grim future of nuclear deterrence and the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Israel continues mulling an invasion of Gaza, Chinese jets try to rattle U.S. jets in the Asia-Pacific with close flybys, and more.
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You may have missed it in the deluge of grim international news, but a congressional commission just released a major new report on the state of the United States’ nuclear arsenal and the threats Washington faces that will shape the future of U.S. nuclear posture—to the tune of billions of dollars—in the decades to come.
The report, “America’s Strategic Posture,” is 160 pages of grim warnings, doom and gloom, and a bevy of recommendations on how to modernize and revamp the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Twelve seasoned foreign-policy experts—six Republican and six Democratic experts—penned the report that concluded the United States was, for the first time in its history, facing “two nuclear peer adversaries for the first time.” (Spoiler alert: They’re Russia and China.)
Doom and gloom. There was an overarching sense of urgency threaded throughout the report, which concluded that the United States wasn’t investing enough in its nuclear arsenal, letting legacy systems go underfunded and neglected, and it needed to consider building and deploying more nuclear weapons.
The United States is in the midst of a “fundamentally different global setting for which we did not plan and we are not well prepared,” Madelyn Creedon, the chair of the commission, said at an event presenting the report’s findings at the Hudson Institute think tank this week.
Creedon warned that the industrial base supporting the U.S. nuclear arsenal “is out of date, unusable, or in some cases, literally falling down.” She said that neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Energy—which plays a key role in managing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile—“have enough capacity to meet future requirements.”
The findings. Among other findings, the commission urged the United States to increase the production of nuclear-capable bombers and submarines, undertake plans to put a portion of the future bomber fleet on continuous alert status, and retain nuclear delivery systems that can be forward-deployed to the European and Asia-Pacific theaters.
The commission also urged the United States to bulk up the rest of the U.S. military forces in a bid to further deter Russia and China well before any potential showdown with the U.S. adversaries starts to take on a nuclear angle.
The findings could also be viewed as something of a rebuttal to the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the executive branch’s own assessment of how it views its nuclear arsenal and future investments. Some powerful Republican lawmakers criticized it for justifying cuts to nuclear modernization programs and not being clear-minded enough about the long-term threats from Russia and China.
Sinking feelings on submarines. Marshall Billingslea, another expert on the commission and former arms control envoy during the Trump administration, focused on the submarine arm of the United States’“nuclear triad”: a nuclear force deployable from the land, air, and sea. Billingslea at the Hudson Institute event said the U.S. submarine force is “not in a good place right now” and the current planned number of new Columbia-class submarines is “insufficient” for the new era of nuclear rivalry against both Russia and China.
The commission also stressed the importance of the United States strengthening its alliances worldwide as a major foundation of its nuclear and conventional deterrent. “We literally cannot win a long cold war against the Chinese without our allies,” said Rebeccah Heinrichs, an expert at the Hudson Institute on the commission.
Blast from the past. The last time such a major report was commissioned was 2009. Comparing the 2009 and the 2023 documents provides a jarring snapshot of how much the world has changed, and with what a grim face most of Washington views the current international security landscape, particularly on China.
The 181-page 2009 Strategic Posture report waxed poetic about the “opportunities” to engage Russia and, to a lesser extent, China in further arms control talks. The 2023 version said: “The vision of a world without nuclear weapons, aspirational even in 2009, is more improbable now than ever.”
The 2009 version mentions Russia 215 times, China 73 times, Iran 26 times, and North Korea 31 times. The 2023 Strategic Posture Review mentions Russia 347 times, China 270 times, Iran 58 times, and North Korea 66 times.
Room for dissent. Of course, just because a commission is bipartisan doesn’t mean everyone in Washington agrees.
The report’s findings “are likely to exacerbate the arms race, further constrict the window for engaging with Russia and China on arms control, and redirect funding away from more proximate priorities,” the Federation of American Scientists, a policy and advocacy organization, concluded in its analysis of the review. William Hartung of the Quincy Institute think tank lambasted the report as reminiscent of the classic 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, which is about the absurdity of nuclear weapons and nuclear doctrine.
“[N]uclear hawks—and even moderates who should know better—will brandish the report in their efforts to promote a nuclear buildup that is both enormously risky and immensely expensive,” he wrote. “We survived the Cold War nuclear arms race in part by sheer luck—we shouldn’t take that risk again.”
Still, this commission report will have enormous sway over how Congress views and funds investments in the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the coming years, and after all, it is Congress—not President Joe Biden or arms control advocates—that has the power of the purse. The debate over where to take the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the coming decades is far from over.
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Capitol Hill can finally pass the gavel. The House of Representatives elected Rep. Mike Johnson as its speaker on Wednesday, after 22 chaotic days of the lower chamber having no one at the helm. Johnson, who is a supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump and rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election, is likely to move the U.S. House into even greater alignment with the twice-impeached former president.
Notably, Johnson voted against a $40 billion tranche of aid that Congress sent to Ukraine at Biden’s request in May 2022 (Johnson now says he supports U.S. military aid to Ukraine, with conditions, though he hasn’t specified what those conditions are.).
The drama isn’t over yet, though. Congress has just 22 days—yes, the same amount of time it took to elect a speaker after a far-right faction ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the job—to hammer out a new deal to fund the government.
Biden has tapped Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir to be the next U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and John W. McIntyre to serve as the top American diplomat to the tiny landlocked African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. Both are career U.S. diplomats. Over 40 U.S. ambassador posts—including these two—are still vacant, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Up for review. The United States and Qatar are set to review the energy-rich Gulf nation’s ties to Hamas as the Palestinian group that’s considered a terror organization by Washington and the European Union holds more than 220 hostages of multiple nationalities. The Washington Post reports that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, reached an agreement to talk about the group’s future during a recent meeting in Qatar, which hosts a Hamas office in its capital of Doha. It’s not yet clear whether the deal struck between Blinken and Thani could result in Hamas’s expulsion from Qatar, which also hosts more than 11,000 U.S. and coalition troops at Al-Udeid Air Base.
Meanwhile, Israel has reportedly agreed to a delay of its planned ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Hamas’s main base from where it launched the deadly Oct. 7 cross-border attacks on Israel that have so far killed more than 1,400 people.
Blast injuries. The U.S. Defense Department has diagnosed 19 U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Syria with traumatic brain injuries after Iran-backed militias launched rocket and drone attacks on installations housing American service members in the past week, Politico reports. The Pentagon had previously announced that attacks on Oct. 17 and 18 had injured 21 U.S. troops. Iranian militias have continued to saber-rattle on social media, threatening to take strikes against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is trying to move around a dozen air defense systems to strategic locations ahead of Israel’s anticipated ground offensive in Gaza.
China, China, China. America’s strategic posture is facing a need for retrofitting at a time when China is deploying more aggressive tactics against the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. Defense Department said in a report released last week that it had documented more than 180 “coercive and risky” air intercepts of U.S. aircraft in the past two years by Chinese jets, and more than 100 instances of dangerous air operations against U.S. allies.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (C) has lunch together with German and U.S. soldiers during his visit to the military part of the airport in Cologne, Germany, on Oct. 23. Kay Nietfeld/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Ukraine aid. The Biden administration today sent its 49th package of military aid to Ukraine since August 2021, worth $150 million, which includes air defense munitions, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems ammo, artillery ammo, and Javelin anti-tank missiles.
The U.S. has now sent over $46 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Economics. The U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 4.9 percent annual clip from July to September 2023, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today. It’s the highest rate of U.S. economic growth since 2021.
The U.S. economy also created 214,000 new jobs during that three-month stretch, which our friends on the business side also call “Q3.” China’s growth during that period is a little tougher to track based solely on official stats, but early indicators showed the economy improving, with spending at shopping malls going up.
Thursday, Oct. 26: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi begins a high-profile visit to Washington, which includes meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Thursday, Oct. 26: A Hamas delegation is reportedly in Moscow to meet with Mikhail Bogdanov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister.
Sunday: Oct. 29: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz begins three days of visits to Nigeria and Ghana.
Tuesday, Oct. 31: Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testify before the U.S. Senate on the Biden administration’s $106 billion national security supplemental funding request for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, border security, and restocking U.S. arms.
Wednesday, Nov. 1: China assumes the presidency of the United Nations Security Council for the month of November.
“Israel’s security chiefs know the goal of destroying Hamas is probably beyond their reach. Hamas has a political base and extensive external support from Iran. Urban warfare is tough.”
—John Sawers, the former chief of the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6) and onetime U.K. ambassador to the U.N., writes in the Financial Times that he’s skeptical of Israel’s plan to destroy Hamas.