A new article from three Air Force strategists and scholars, including a Colonel who is part of the staff working directly for the head of the Air Force, argues that the US should unilaterally cut its nuclear arsenal by more than 90 percent – going down to 311 nuclear weapons from the current 5000. The bold proposal comes as the Administration is finalizing their Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and a new START Treaty, which hill watchers expect to encounter loud conservative opposition. This new proposal should serve as a major boon to arms control advocates in the coming debates and should embolden the White House to push for a bolder NPR.

The article in Strategic Studies Quarterly is not an isolated ivory tower scholarly piece divorced from the actual strategic thinking taking place inside the Air Force. Two of the authors – James Forsyth and Gary Schaub – are professors at war colleges at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The Air Force war colleges are not known for their independence and free-thinking, as they are generally seen as much less free wheeling than other services war colleges. But more surprising is the third author, Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, who is the chief of the Strategic Plans and Policy Division at Headquarters Air Force. Saltzman is therefore an integral figure in determining Air Force strategy and works closely with General Norton Schwartz the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. In short, this article is not by some Air Force outsiders, but from very influential insiders.

Noting that during the Cold War “the actual marginal utility of additional forces was quite small,” the authors conclude that a significantly smaller arsenal of nuclear weapons will be more than enough to maintain an effective deterrence and to assure allies without any cost to our security. The article backs the far reaching report from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, which called for reductions of US forces to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025. Forsyth, Saltzman, and Schaub argue that it is possible to go even further.

This [the commission report] represents a 90-percent reduction in the nuclear arsenal but offers more than enough deterrent capability while providing flexibility to pragmatically implement the force structure cuts. In fact, the United States could address military utility concerns with only 311 nuclear weapons in its nuclear force structure while maintaining a stable deterrence… it does not matter if Russia, who is America’s biggest competitor in this arena, follows suit. The relative advantage the Russians might gain in theory does not exist in reality. Even if one were to assume the worst—a bolt from the blue that took out all of America’s ICBMs—the Russians would leave their cities at risk and therefore remain deterred from undertaking the first move.

In other words, even if we could only obliterate Moscow that would be more than enough of a nuclear capability to deter Russia from starting a nuclear war or from seeking to adopt an aggressive posture that could lead to escalating hostilities. As a result, if we cut our nuclear arsenal nothing would change, especially since, as the authors also note, the US would still maintain a vast conventional capability that would further deter adversaries and assure allies.

This article has not come out of nowhere. It follows a similarly bold report from the Institute for Air Power Studies – an organization closely associated with the Air Force – that surprisingly this past December called for eliminating the nuclear bomber leg of the US nuclear triad. These two reports led Kingston Reif to ask “What’s gotten into the Air Force lately?” It is a good question, one that the Administration, despite being in the final stages of its Nuclear Posture Review, would do well to explore. It would be a shame to put out an NPR that’s behind the strategic curve before it’s even released.

The Congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) will be a crucial test of President Obama’s commitment to reducing nuclear weapons. The NPR will lay out a new US nuclear strategy and should set the stage for future budgetary decisions regarding the nuclear force. In other words, there is a lot of money on the line in this document, which means there will be a ton of resistance to change, especially from inside the Pentagon.

The LA Times lays out the state of play in the on going bureaucratic fight between the White House and the Pentagon:

Officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere have pushed back against Obama administration proposals to cut the number of weapons and narrow their mission, according to U.S. officials and outsiders who have been briefed on the process. In turn, White House officials, unhappy with early Pentagon-led drafts of the blueprint known as the Nuclear Posture Review, have stepped up their involvement in the deliberations and ordered that the document reflect Obama’s preference for sweeping change.

The stakes are high. An NPR that fails to put in place the steps for future reductions in US nuclear forces, will greatly undermine Obama’s credibility and therefore the global nuclear non-proliferation agenda. To put it bluntly, if you can’t even get your own government which you control to follow your lead, you won’t be able to lead globally.

It is no surprise that initial drafts out of the Pentagon were anything but ambitious and that the White House is having to get directly involved in pushing back. The Pentagon’s bureaucracy instinctively opposes anything that would force it to change and a far reaching NPR could require significant modifications in force structure, such as to the Air Force’s nuclear bomber force. In the opening of his piece on the NPR, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe colorfully captured how stuck in its ways the Pentagon remains, despite tectonic shifts in the global landscape.

After an hour-long ride down a nearly deserted highway covered in ice and snow, the two young officers arrive for their shift at this highly secure outpost deep in the northern Rockies. Air Force Captain Chris Ferrer and Lieutenant Moses George, carrying a bulky orange briefcase of secret codes, descend some 75 feet underground to a capsule protected by a 4-foot-thick door of steel and concrete. They will spend the next 24 hours ready to receive a presidential command to launch dozens of nuclear missiles from silos buried across north-central Montana. It is a routine that is virtually unchanged from the 1960s. The targets, most of them in Russia, also remain largely unchanged from the Cold War.

What a gigantic waste of time and money. Nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, we spend billions of dollars and divert the energies of numerous military personnel to the task of preparing for a nuclear war against an adversary that no longer exists. Yet no matter how asinine and outdated the Pentagon’s approach is, getting them to move beyond the Cold War and into the 21st century is the first big hurdle Obama will confront in his efforts to combat nuclear proliferation.