WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON -
After firing the two top Air Force leaders last year for a series of embarrassing nuclear weapons mishaps, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was told yesterday that the same problems of inexperience, poor training and splintered authority over the nuclear mission affect the entire Pentagon, including its top leadership.
A task force headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger painted a dismal picture of a Pentagon that has drifted away from the mission of nuclear deterrence during the nearly two decades since the Cold War ended. Among the Pentagon's senior military and civilian leaders, the panel found "a distressing degree of inattention" to the role nuclear weapons play in deterring attacks on the United States.
Education in nuclear deterrence theory and practice at the nation's top military schools has largely ended, senior-level exercises have stopped and the number of senior officials familiar with deterrence is rapidly dwindling and will soon become an "acute" problem, Schlesinger reported.
Many senior leaders "lack the foundation for understanding nuclear deterrence, its psychological content, its political nature and its military role - which is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons," the report concluded.
Among his recommendations: Send senior leaders back to school, ramp up training, consolidate responsibility for nuclear missions within the Pentagon bureaucracy, and encourage the incoming administration to construct a new strategic framework to define the role that nuclear weapons should play.
Gates issued a short statement yesterday insisting that the nation's force of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers and submarine-launched missiles "remains safe, secure and reliable. No one should doubt our capabilities or our resolve to defend U.S. and allied interests by deterring aggression."
Schlesinger said Gates had reviewed all his panel's recommendations and told reporters that "so far we have gotten no push-back" on any of them.
Underlying the Pentagon's loss of focus on the nuclear mission, officials said, is uncertainty and confusion over how deterrence - the threat of certain nuclear retaliation - works in an age when many of the potential U.S. adversaries are not states but terrorists who hold no territory and are clearly willing to engage in suicide attacks.
