Preventive Defense

Twice before in this century America has had similar opportunities to prevent the conditions for conflict. After World War I the United States had the opportunity to help prevent conflict by engaging in the world. Instead we chose to isolate ourselves from the world, refusing even to join the League of Nations. That strategy of isolationism, coupled with the European strategy of reparations and revenge, utterly failed to prevent the conditions for future conflict. Indeed, it helped create them. Over 300,000 Americans paid with their lives in the Second World War.

After the Second World War, America was determined to learn from that costly lesson and this time we chose the path of engagement. We sought to prevent conflict through engagement in the United Nations, and by our leadership as we promoted a post-war program of reconciliation and reconstruction in sharp contrast to the revenge and reparations practiced after World War I.

Of course our most dramatic national effort was the Marshall Plan. George C. Marshall acted at a pivotal moment in history. Like Emerson, Marshall saw America in a world standing between two eras, a period that Marshall described as “between a war that is over and a peace that is not yet secure.” The soldier in Marshall wanted desperately to prevent war from returning. The statesman in Marshall found a way. His vision was of a Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, united in peace, freedom and democracy. His tool for realizing this vision was a plan for rebuilding a European continent that had been physically, economically and spiritually shattered by war. The Marshall Plan rested on three premises: first, that what happens in Europe affects America; second, that economic reconstruction in Europe was critical to preventing another war; and third, that this economic reconstruction would not happen without American leadership. Acting on these premises, Marshall and his generation rebuilt Europe. They led America to assume the mantle of world leadership and their preventive defense program, where applied, was successful in creating the conditions of peace and stability.

In the end, however, Marshall’s vision was only half realized, because Joseph Stalin slammed the door on Marshall’s offer of assistance. So within a matter of years, the world was divided into two armed camps, and deterrence, not prevention, became the overarching security strategy of the Cold War. Now after more than 40 dangerous years of the nuclear balance of terror, the Cold War is over. And so today, we are at another pivotal moment in history, a point between two centuries, a point between a Cold War threat that is over and a peace that is not yet secure.

Today the world does not need another Marshall Plan, but we do need to build on Marshall’s core belief that the world needs America’s engagement, and that our best security policy is one that prevents conflict. Just as the Marshall Plan was based on its own set of premises, so today our program of preventive defense rests on its own set of premises: first, that fewer weapons of mass destruction in fewer hands makes America and the world safer; second, that more democracies means less chance of conflict around the world; and third, that defense establishments have a uniquely important role to play in building democracy, trust and understanding in and among nations.

From these three premises follows the conclusion that, for the post-Cold War era to be one of peace and not of conflict, America must lead the world in preventing the conditions for conflict and in creating the conditions for peace. In short, we must lead with a policy of preventive defense. So we have created an innovative set of programs in the Defense Department to do just that. Let me describe to you today the progress in these programs and how they are in fact creating conditions which prevent conflict.

Countering the Spread of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons
Nowhere is preventive defense more important than in countering the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons—the so-called weapons of mass destruction.

During the Cold War, the world lived with the nightmare prospect of a nuclear holocaust, and the United States and the Soviet Union relied on deterrence—a balance of terror known as “mutual assured destruction,” popularly known as MAD. Today the threat of global nuclear holocaust is vastly reduced. But we face a new danger that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue nations. The threat of retaliation may not matter much to a terrorist or a rogue nation, so deterrence may not work for them. They may be madder than MAD.

The aspiration of these rogue nations to obtain weapons of mass destruction is set against the backdrop of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. This disintegration meant that instead of one nuclear empire, we were left with four states, each with nuclear weapons on its soil: Russia, Kazakstan, Belarus and Ukraine. The depressed economies of these nations created a buyers’ market for weapons of mass destruction—not only the weapons themselves, but the materials, the infrastructure and the workforce. The unsettled political conditions in those countries made it potentially harder to protect these weapons and materials. So along with the increase in demand for nuclear weapons, there is a potential increase in supply of weapons, materials and know-how.

This has required us to augment our Cold War strategy of deterrence with a post-Cold War strategy of prevention. We prevent through non-proliferation treaties, sanctions, and sometimes coercive actions—such as when we used a combination of diplomacy and defensive measures to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

But the most effective way to prevent proliferation is to dismantle the arsenals that already exist. Fortunately, through our Cooperative Threat Reduction program, originally created by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, we have such a vehicle. We have been able to have Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakstan dismantle literally thousands of nuclear warheads in the last two years and destroy hundreds of missiles, bombers and silos.

I have personally had no more satisfying experience than to participate in the dismantlement of these weapons. Almost as my first act after becoming Secretary, I went to Pervomaysk, the jewel of the former Soviet Union’s missile sites. It had the most modern ICBMs (SS-19s and SS-24s), 80 of them in heavy-duty silos with 700 nuclear warheads, all aimed at targets in the United States. We had reached an agreement to dismantle that whole facility; and two years ago last March I made my first visit there. The Minister of Defense took me to the site. He opened the silos and showed me that the warheads had been removed, which is the first step. I went back again a year later to the same site and we took a missile out—an SS-19 missile, on its way to dismemberment. Last January—this year—I went back again and stood in the cold and the freezing rain. I and the Defense Minister of Russia and the Defense Minister of Ukraine each had a key—these had been launch-control keys—wired so that as the three of us turned these keys, the silo blew up. We had the satisfaction of walking over and seeing this huge hole in the ground where Silo 110 had formerly sat. Three weeks from now I’m going back to Pervomaysk, probably my last visit there. We will go out to the site, and by that time, what was a missile field will have become a sunflower field—they will have planted that whole field with sunflower seeds. That is progress of a very important dimension.

I might also say parenthetically that after we see those sunflowers growing in Pervomaysk, we’re going into the city of Pervomaysk and seeing an effort that the United States has undertaken to help make that happen. In Pervomaysk we have built 240 houses for the people who were formerly the missile officers in that site. Part of the deal to get Ukraine to dismantle that site was finding a place to live for the officers at that former missile site. This is “defense by other means.”

So, by the end of this month that missile field will be a sunflower field. By the end of this year, Kazakstan, Ukraine, and Belarus will be nuclear-free.

This Nunn-Lugar program also helps these nations safeguard and secure materials to keep them out of the global marketplace. A little over a year ago we completed Project Sapphire. We bought 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Kazakstan, because they were fearful they could not maintain control of it and we were fearful that nuclear smugglers were going to get it. That’s enough to make perhaps 20 nuclear bombs. We bought it. It’s now sitting in our storage facilities in Oak Ridge.

Engaging Military and Defense Establishments to Further Democracy
These efforts to prevent threats from weapons of mass destruction have been dramatic, direct and tangible. But the story of preventive defense also involves engaging military and defense establishments around the world to further the spread of democracy. I had a very interesting meeting with the Defense Ministers of Kazakstan, Belarus and Ukraine as we were agreeing to this program for them to remove nuclear weapons out of their countries. One of them said to me in a plaintive tone of voice, “Nuclear weapons are what make our country great.” And I said, “No, that’s not right. Nuclear weapons make you powerful; becoming a democracy will make you great.” And that is what they are now aspiring to become. They have got a hard road ahead of them, but they are aspiring in that direction and we are helping them.

We have long understood that the spread of democracy to more nations is good for our national security. And it has been heartening this past decade to see so many nations around the world come to agree with us that democracy is the best system of government. But as the nations of the world attempt to act on this consensus, we see that there are important steps between a world-wide consensus and a worldwide reality. Democracy is learned behavior. Many nations today have democracies on paper which in fact are extremely fragile. Elections are a necessary but an insufficient condition for a free society. It is also necessary to embed democratic values in the key institutions of the nation. And that is what is dramatically lacking in the nations of the former Soviet Union and in some of the former Warsaw Pact nations.

I believe that our Defense Department has a key role to play in this effort, in virtually every new democracy—in Russia, in the newly free states of the former Soviet Union, in Central and Eastern Europe, in South America, in the Asian “Tigers.” In all of those countries, the military represents a major force. In many cases, it is the most cohesive institution. It often contains a large percentage of the educated elite, and it always controls key resources. In short, it is an institution that can either support democracy or subvert it. We must recognize that each society moving from totalitarianism to democracy will be tested at some point by a crisis. It could be an economic crisis, it could be a backslide on human rights and freedom, a border or ethnic dispute. When such a crisis occurs, we want the military to play a positive role in resolving the crisis—not a negative role by fanning the flames of the crisis, or even using the crisis as a pretext for a military coup. In these new democracies, we can choose to ignore this important institution or we can try to exert a positive influence. We have chosen the latter. And believe me we do have an amazing ability to influence, if we’re only willing to use it. Every military in the world looks to the U.S. armed forces as a model to be emulated. That is a valuable bit of leverage and we can put it to use creatively in our preventive defense strategies. In addition, if we can build trust and understanding between the militaries of two neighboring nations, we build trust and understanding between the two nations themselves.

I do not want to digress long, but I can tell you that one of the most serious problems in Europe five years ago was a potential dispute between Hungary and Romania over the ethnic Hungarians in Romania. I thought at the time there was a better-than-even chance of a military conflict emerging there. At my first meeting with the Romanian Defense Minister and the Hungarian Defense Minister, I urged the two of them to come together and meet and talk. They now meet on a quarterly basis. They exchange Christmas presents with each other. They are talking freely and frequently. And that crisis is just dying down, first, I think, because of the influence of the two militaries, and second, because both of them want to join NATO. They recognize that we are watching their behavior very, very carefully.

In the effort to build this trust and understanding, preventive defense uses a variety of tools. We have created in Garmisch, Germany, a school—a university in a sense—for teaching the military officers of the former Warsaw Pact countries and the nations of the former Soviet Union. Every six months, 60-70 senior officers from these countries come to Garmisch and for six months they're in school and learning how the military performs in a democracy. How do you create budgets that you present to parliaments? How do you deal with parliaments? How does a military work in a democracy? When they go home from that school, they have a much, much better appreciation than when they came.

We have also such tools as joint training exercises, peacekeeping, disaster relief and search-and-rescue operations. Last July, for example, we had a joint peacekeeping exercise in Louisiana involving the troops of 14 nations with whom we have never had security relations. I stood there on the reviewing stand at the beginning of the exercises and watched the troops of 14 nations march by, each of them carrying their national flag, marching along side by side. There was Slovenia and Slovakia, Albania and Romania, Kazakstan and Uzbekistan, each of them proud of being there in this exercise, each of them proud of participating in the United States, and each of them learning a little bit more about how a military works in a democracy.

Two weeks from now I’m going to L’viv in Ukraine, which is where their military training ground is. I’ll meet there with the Ministers of Defense from Ukraine and Russia, and we will open the ceremonies of another peacekeeping exercise involving Russian troops, Ukrainian troops, American troops, Polish troops, all training together in a peacekeeping exercise on Ukrainian soil.

In Europe and Central Asia, these tools of preventive defense all come together in the NATO program know as the Partnership for Peace. This is, I believe, the most significant single institutional step that has been taken since the creation of NATO. Through the Partnership for Peace, NATO is reaching out to the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and the Newly Independent States, and truly integrating them into the security architecture of Europe. And just as the Marshall Plan had an impact well beyond the economies of Western Europe, the Partnership for Peace is echoing beyond the security realm into the political and economic realms. The partners are working to uphold democracy, tolerate diversity, and respect the rights of minorities and freedom of expression. They are working to build market economies. They are working to develop democratic control of their military forces, and to respect the sovereign rights of bordering countries. By forging networks of people and institutions, working together to preserve freedom, promote democracy and build free markets, the Partnership today is a catalyst for transforming Central and Eastern Europe, much as the Marshall Plan transformed Western Europe in the ’50s. In short, the Partnership for Peace is not just “defense by other means,” it is “democracy by other means.” It is helping prevent the realization of our fears for the post-Cold War era and taking us closer to realizing our hopes.

Russia and the New Security Architecture in Europe: IFOR
One of these hopes is that Russia will participate in a positive way in the new security architecture of Europe. Russia, of course, has been a key part of the European security picture for over 300 years, and it will remain a key player in the coming decades, for better or for worse. The job for the United States and NATO and Russia is to make this for the better. Unlike with the Marshall Plan 50 years ago, Russia today has chosen to participate in the Partnership for Peace.

The immediate payoff from our joint training with the Partnership nations and our efforts to build a cooperative relationship with Russia has come, ironically, in Bosnia. Up until late last year, to say that the future history of Europe is being written in Bosnia would have been a profoundly pessimistic statement. However, today, that statement qualifies as guarded optimism, because of the way IFOR has been put together and because of the way it is performing. IFOR (the NATO force in Bosnia) is not a peacekeeping exercise; it is the real thing. 15 Partner nations have joined 15 NATO nations in shouldering the responsibility in IFOR. A Russian brigade is operating as part of the American division in IFOR. I visited that division just a few weeks ago—I met not only with the division commander but with the American brigade commanders and with the Russian brigade commander—and I can report to you that that operation is going very smoothly, and there is great cooperation between the Russian brigade commander and his American counterparts. NATO itself has a renewed sense of purpose, and a sense of its own ability to put together a force for a post-Cold War military mission. This is all positive history and it shows why I believe that Bosnia is turning out to be the crucible for the creation of Marshall’s Europe.

<Working with Latin American Defense Ministers
Our hopes for democracy and regional understanding—and our opportunity to support them through the tools of preventive defense—are not simply confined to Europe, although all of the examples I’ve given you so far are from Europe. We have these same hopes and opportunities here in our own hemisphere. Ten years ago, Latin America was made up mostly of dictatorships; but today, 34 nations in our hemisphere—all save one—are democracies. I have tried to seize this opportunity by opening relationships with the Defense Ministers of these nations. Our efforts came to a climax last summer when I invited the Defense Ministers from the other 33 hemispheric democracies to join me at Williamsburg, Virginia, to discuss confidence-building measures and defense cooperation, designed to minimize the risk of conflict in this hemisphere. This conference was a resounding success and the second hemispheric ministerial meeting has already been scheduled to be held in Argentina this fall.

Engaging China’s Military
Preventive defense also has a role in our relationship with China. We’re using some of these same tools to build cooperative security ties between the United States and China. We do not do this because China is a new democracy. Obviously it is not. Rather we do it because China is a major world power with whom we share important interests and with whom we have strong disagreements. It has a powerful military that has significant influence on the policies that China follows. We do it ultimately because we believe that when it comes to strategic intentions, engagement is almost always better than ignorance. That is why we have sent senior military leaders to China to present our strategic thinking, and have invited the Chinese to reciprocate. In the best case, engaging China’s military will allow us to have a positive influence on this important player in Chinese politics. At the very least, engagement between our two military establishments will improve our understanding of each other and thus lower the chances of a conflict arising from misunderstanding.

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What makes preventive defense work is American leadership. There is no other country in the world with the ability to reach out to so many different corners of the globe. There is no other country in the world whose efforts to do so are so respected. At the same time, no one should ever think that preventive defense is a philanthropic venture. It is not. Preventive defense involves hard work and ingenuity today so that we do not have to expend blood and treasure tomorrow.

While preventive defense holds great promise for preventing conflict, we must appreciate that it is a strategy for influencing the world, not compelling the world to our will. We must frankly and soberly acknowledge that preventive defense will not always work. That is why, as the Secretary of Defense, my top priority has to be maintaining strong and ready forces to deter and defeat threats to our security interests.

So we continue to maintain a smaller but still highly effective nuclear arsenal. We are building robust, threat-based ballistic missile defenses. We have the best conventional forces in the world, and maintain them at a high state of combat readiness. We have unique airlift and sealift, capable of quickly projecting these powerful forces anywhere they are needed. 100,000 of these forces are fully deployed in Europe and another 100,000 in the Western Pacific. And we continue to maximize our technological advantage over any potential foe, to give us dominance on any battlefield in the world.

These forces and capabilities, coupled with the political will to use them, allow the United States to be effective at deterring conflict around the world. These same capabilities and forces mean that if we cannot prevent or deter conflict, we will be able to defeat an aggressor quickly and with a minimum of casualties. But the converse is also true. If we can prevent the conditions for conflict, we reduce the risk of having to send our forces into combat to defeat aggression. So, preventive defense plays a crucial role for the United States as we go to the end of this century.

Convincing the American Public that Preventive Defense Programs are Critical to National Security
This pivotal role of preventive defense is not widely known to the public. Indeed, it is not even well-understood by national security experts. The same was true, of course, about the Marshall Plan in its early days. The Marshall Plan, after all, did not arise full-grown, like Venus from the shell. George Marshall did not simply offer his proposal at Harvard and then go back to Washington. Marshall the statesman was a visionary man, but Marshall the soldier was also a practical man who knew how to plan a campaign. As a practical man, he recognized that in a democracy no national proposal, especially one involving U.S. engagement in the world, becomes a reality unless you can win public support. The Marshall proposal became the Marshall Plan because George Marshall spent the year after his Harvard speech going directly to the public and seeking its support.

Today I am presenting not only a proposal for preventive defense, but also a report on how it is already shaping our world in a positive way. But in order for preventive defense to achieve its full potential as a critical component of our national security strategy, we will need the support of the American people. Americans by nature are impatient and look for quick fixes to our problems. Sir Michael Howard wisely observed that the last, best lesson we have to learn from the Cold War is patience. There are no quick fixes in international politics, no slick military solutions to our political problems. We need to convince the American public that, at this pivotal moment in history, our engagement with the world and the programs supporting preventive defense are critical to our national security. I am embarked on such an effort and I ask your help in that effort.

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I want to conclude by paraphrasing Graham Greene: There always comes a moment in time when a door opens and lets the future in. The ending of the Cold War has opened such a door. The future is out there waiting to come in. And by our actions—your actions, my actions—we can shape the future to make a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren.