"Adm. Richard: Thanks John for that very kind introduction, and it's great to be here with everybody today as John indicated having to do this one in a different format. COVID restrictions. Do miss seeing everybody come out to Omaha when we do these in person there's a lot of advantages to doing that, but there are also advantages to doing it this way. Very pleased to see 800 people joining in on this, and I do think, overall or most fundamentally, it's important that we keep these conversations going. I want to acknowledge and applaud the work that's done here. Hey, they're not only very important incubators, if you will, to foster broader strategic deterrence thought. I mean I can walk these things back in history and show some of the work that went on here then inspired work here at STRATCOM that has led to better strategic deterrence and better defense of our nation and our allies, right. That we are looking to operationalize the work that we do here and then bring it into our day-to-day operations.
I also want to applaud where Secretary Austin and the leadership and the Department of Defense are taking us in the effort to re-think how the joint force in the nation should execute globally integrated deterrence. I think that it is a vital concept going forward in terms of acknowledging what has changed in the way that we can no longer look at our nation's security threats solely through a regional focus. These challenges are global they spread across many domains to include space and cyber and for us to maintain the standard of deterrence that we have historically, we are going to have to improve on our ability to globally integrate all instruments of national power, all elements inside the Department of Defense. Recognizing that there is this larger whole of all of the nation's capabilities that we're going to have to have to be successful in maintaining strategic deterrence and to address the chain situation and the great power competition that we're in.
And that's probably, you know – kicking this thing off some points I'd like to make to sort of help frame up and shape how we think, at least give you an idea of what I'm thinking. One is the national security environment has changed, and it has changed profoundly in my opinion. So, not only the Department of Defense doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing the threats that we're going to defend against. We have an obligation to defend our nation and our allies against all the threats that we face. So not only do we have to maintain deterrence and defense against terror threats – we have had some recent events that have reminded us the importance of doing that – but we also are now faced with a situation where we have to deter two peer nuclear-capable competitors at the same time who have to be deterred differently, and we have never faced this situation in our nation's history before.
When you start to unpack the actual implications of what I just said they are very profound and a lot of them get after the very core of our academic understanding of how we accomplish that mission. The threat that we're doing this against that causes me to make that statement is changing rapidly. You may have heard me before say, just recently, that we are witnessing a strategic breakout by China. Business as usual will not work given the rapid pace of change that China is doing with its forces. I've used the term breathtaking before to describe it and I'm not sure that that fully captures the magnitude of what we're witnessing. I'm only going to talk about the strategic nuclear aspects of this, but I think we're all well familiar with their explosive growth in conventional, space, cyber, and other asymmetric capabilities.
Keep those in the back of your mind and then add in the piece that I'm going to talk about here in a second. It's a pretty impressive laundry list: rapid expansion and solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile silo numbers, road mobile intercontinental ballistic and regional ranged missiles, Jin Class submarines, ballistic missile submarines, capable of continuous at sea deterrence, bringing in a new missile capable of ranging continental United States from protected bastion in the South China Sea. Completion of a true triad with the addition of an air leg, they're H-6N bombers with air launch ballistic missiles, intermediate range capability – impressive work in hypersonics, and that's that just gets after the laundry list of stuff. Much higher readiness conditions headed to very soon a launch under warning, a launch under attack capability. High readiness in forces that we haven't seen before, developing what I would describe as true nuclear command and control capability. Skip echelon rethinking their whole approach to how they command and control their forces. And then there's pieces that I don't think get discussed enough: infrastructure support, the industrial base of their weapons development and weapons production capability, their ballistic missile defenses. I found it very interesting saw an open press report of one of their businesses over there that's involved in the nuclear work that China does talking about a four-fold increase in business in just one year as another indicator of just how fast and just how big this is.
Look, I have said before that it doesn't matter why China is doing this. That tends to be the first "Hey why is China doing all this?" And I've said it doesn't matter why they're expanding it. And of course it does, and I'll tell you in a second why. But in some respects it doesn't. The idea that once you have the capability what matters is what they can do with it. That’s what an operator is going to think about first and that's what STRATCOM is responsible for. And fundamentally what it enables, now, is China to execute any plausible nuclear employment strategy.
If you go back in their history they truly were no first use minimum deterrent of strategy posture forces size to accomplish that, that's just no longer true. And they now have the capability to do any plausible nuclear employment strategy, and that's part of why I say this is a strategic breakout. The moving from minimum deterrent to anything that they want to do constitutes in my mind part of the justification for why I say that. But maybe it is important to go back a little bit and go, “Well, why are they doing that?” In my opinion, although I think I can back it up, is I think of this as the final brick in the wall of a military designed to confront a peer nuclear-capable opponent, in other words us, the United States, and be able to coerce them.
And coercion is something that nuclear forces have been used for throughout history. We don't do that, but others have done it to us, and I think this is the final they have – China has correctly figured out that you cannot coerce a peer nuclear capable opponent from a minimum deterrent posture it simply does not have the flexibility to allow you to do that and if you were to try to attempt it the person you're trying to coerce has much more flexibility has much finer degrees of risk that they can take and they will ultimately prevail."
