Richard warned that the extent to which China and Russia have “aggressively” challenged international norms in recent years is “unprecedented” since the Cold War. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense website
President Joe Biden recently declared that the United States will stand up for democracy wherever it is attacked. However, one month after taking office, China and Russia have already stepped out of line, with the Chinese Communist Party repeatedly sending military aircraft to disturb Taiwan and Russia sentencing opposition leader Navalny to prison. Charles Richard, the commander of USSTRATCOM, has written an article warning that China and Russia have been “aggressively” challenging international norms in recent years to a degree “not seen since the Cold War. He called on the U.S. government and military leaders to rethink the threat posed by China and Russia and to rethink “ways to deter aggressive behavior by ‘enemies’ such as the Chinese Communist Party and Russia,” including the need to shift from the principle assumption that “the use of nuclear weapons is impossible” to the “very real possibility that nuclear weapons could be used.
Writing in the February issue of the Naval Academy journal Proceedings, Richard noted that while the U.S. military was focusing on counterterrorism, China and Russia began actively challenging current international principles in ways not seen since the height of the Cold War, including cyber attacks and space threats that did not exist during the Cold War. Given the actions of China and Russia in recent years, if the United States continues to let it, it will increase the crisis or conflict between major powers. Therefore, he suggested that the U.S. military should enhance its level of preparedness to maintain the U.S. military’s strategic advantage, such as developing an integrated set of forces to deal with strategic adversaries, thinking about ways to respond “when military deterrence is not effective,” and strengthening the review of weapons system sales.
Richard mentioned that Russia has invested heavily in advanced weapons such as nuclear weapons in recent years and is actively modernizing its nuclear forces. The Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand, is on track to become a strategic adversary of the United States. Richard highlighted the inconsistency of the Chinese Communist Party’s rhetoric, claiming “no first use of nuclear weapons and no use or threat of use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states,” but the PLA’s pursuit of (nuclear) capabilities and methods of action runs counter to the minimum deterrence strategy, and the PLA’s options include “limited use of nuclear weapons and pre-emptive nuclear strikes. Richard, who heads Strategic Command, the unit responsible for commanding and managing U.S. nuclear forces, emphasized that Strategic Command’s assessment of the likelihood of nuclear use is “low” rather than “impossible.
Richard warned that there is a “real possibility” that if the Chinese Communist Party or Russia suffers setbacks in a regional crisis and believes that the loss of these conventional forces would threaten the regime, it could quickly escalate the situation into a conflict involving nuclear weapons. Therefore, the U.S. military must change the current assumption that “nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used” to “nuclear weapons are likely to be deployed now” to ensure that the military is capable of and can respond in a timely manner to the new realities of the day. We can no longer approach nuclear deterrence in the same way we do now; it must be tailored to the dynamic environment and must evolve,” he said. The U.S. military must change its doctrinal assumptions from ‘the use of nuclear weapons is impossible’ to ‘there is a very real possibility that nuclear weapons will be used,'” he said.
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