Military Reporters and Editors Assn., Gen John Hyten
Military Reporters and Editors Association Conference - Keynote Speech
By Gen. John E. Hyten | U.S. Strategic Command | March 31, 2017
ARLINGTON, Va. —
(As Delivered)
Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command: Good morning, everybody.
This is not one of my favorite things to do, to be honest with you, but it is one of the most important things I do because it is an opportunity for me to stand up and tell the story of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and the civilians that work in U.S. Strategic Command. When you look at that portfolio it is roughly 184,000 Americans that do that job, and that doesn’t count our allies that are partnered with us in many ways and areas. That is 184,000 Americans standing watch today.
So I very much appreciate the invite, and the invite came from a very, hopefully, recognized person to you guys, Jenn Rowell from the Great Falls Tribune. The neat thing about Jenn Rowell, not only that she invited me to speak here today, but she has been writing the story of our missileers at Malmstrom Air Force Base for a long time. In fact, she was telling their story when the rest of the world was not paying attention.
One of the biggest problems we’ve had in the nuclear business, maybe since we started working with nuclear weapons was our nation taking our eye off the nuclear enterprise for a significant period of time starting a little over a decade ago and continuing to just a few years ago. And when that happened, we had a number of significant things. We had a nuclear weapon transported from Minot to Barksdale. We had parts go from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan. We had bad things happen in the enterprise, and bad things happen in any enterprise where you don’t pay attention. But Jenn, and a number of other people were paying attention, and they are paying attention to the airmen who are standing watch today.
If you think about the STRATCOM enterprise, the enterprise goes from 600 miles from the North Pole at Thule, Greenland, where we have a number of airmen standing watch for incoming missiles over the poles today, to 600 miles from the North Pole. We have sailors under the sea that have been under the sea for days, weeks, months, standing watch ready for that worst day in the history of the country.
We have amazing people. We have a lot of people that have been deployed multiple times into the theater in Afghanistan. I’ve been deployed, I think pretty much everybody in uniform has probably been deployed a few times. I’ve met folks who have been deployed 15 times. But if you look at our enterprise, there’s a certain element of our enterprise that people don’t think about, they don’t realize.
My deputy commander, a very impressive officer, Vice Adm. Chas Richard, he grew up fifteen miles from me in northern Alabama. One year after me in high school. He went to a rival school. It’s a pretty amazing story when you think about two young people growing up in northern Alabama in public high schools, 15 miles apart, and then growing up and being the commander and deputy commander of the most powerful warfighting command in our nation, that’s bizarre.
But one of the interesting things about Admiral Richard, he’s spent seven years of his life under water. Think about that, seven years of his life under water, standing the watch, ready for that worst day in our country’s history. And because of that, we’ve never experienced the worst day in our country’s history.
So when I stand up I get to tell the story, and I get to tell the story to people like you. But the thing I always have to remember is I actually don’t tell the story, I transmit but you tell the story. So I want to say first of all, thank you for telling that story because if you don’t tell that story people don’t hear. And I’ve noticed, I always wonder why after all this time, because I’m coming on 36 years in uniform now, why after all the time do I get so nervous when I speak in front of people? And I’ve noticed an interesting thing in recent times and that is when I stand up on front of soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines and I talk to them, I’m not nervous anymore. I’m kind of talking to my family, but when I’m talking to folks like you, when I’m talking to the Congress next week when I testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I get nervous. And I always wonder if I get nervous because my dad is not very good at the computer but what he’s figured out how to do is google John Hyten, and so whatever you guys write, he’s going to read. But there’s an important message in that, is that what you guys write, people read.
So I’m standing in front of 50-100 people here, I don’t know how many people watching on camera, but actually my ability to touch people through this medium is small, but your ability to touch people is huge. So thanks for doing that.
Thanks again, Amy.
The first thing I want to talk about this morning, I think, is the recent United Nations proposal on nuclear disarmament. It’s been in the press a lot the last week. You probably saw Ambassador Haley talk about it as naïve. Gen. Scaparrotti, the commander of European Command, talked about it this week, and he called it unrealistic. Naïve and unrealistic, those are good terms. Those are probably accurate, so I’ll just address it a different way.
One of the questions I get asked sometimes is can I imagine a world without nuclear weapons, and the answer is yes I can imagine a world without, in fact I know what a world without nuclear weapons looks like. Because we had a world without nuclear weapons until 1945, so I ask you to think about your history and think about the six years prior to the deployment of a nuclear weapon.
From 1939 to 1945, in those six years the world in conflict killed somewhere between 60 and 80 million people. If you do the math, that’s about 33,000 people a day, a million people a month are being killed in that conflict for six entire years. And as horrible as the world is today and it is nasty, it is not anywhere near like that. As horrible as the world has been for the last 70 years, and we’ve had challenges. We’ve been through the Cold War, we’ve been through Korea, Vietnam, and we’ve been through Desert Strom, Allied Force, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom. We’ve been through all of those pieces, and as horrible as they are, and they are horrible, they don’t even come close to the death and destruction that happened between 1939 and 1945.
So what changed in 1945? Some people will say the world became better at communicating and resolving conflict. I would say, if I look at the world today, we’re not any better at resolving conflict, we’re really not. That’s why we have a military and that’s why our military has been so engaged in the world, really at war almost as long as I’ve been in the Air Force, and that’s pretty frightening. So the world hasn’t figured out how to deal with conflict.
But what nuclear weapons did is they prevented that major power conflict from ever going horrible, they prevented the kind of war and destruction that you saw in World War II. And somehow, the world has stayed that way.
What does it take to build a nuclear weapon? You need a pile of fissile material about this big, and guess what? I could store that in my freezer, refrigerator at home. So how do we get rid of that? It is just physics, it really is. You can look it up on the internet, it’s not that hard.
So a world without nuclear weapons what does that really mean? Does that mean all the major powers get rid of their nuclear weapons? But they’ve maintained all their fissile material so that they can go out and if something really bad happens in the world and somebody like Kim Jong-Un in North Korea decides they’re going to deploy a nuclear weapon, we’ll run out and grab the fissile material and it will be a race to see who can build the bomb back the fastest because you can build it actually pretty rapidly. Is that a world without nuclear weapons? I would say no, that’s just a world where the nuclear weapons are somehow below the surface, and that’s actually a more dangerous world because then it becomes a race to see who can get the nuclear weapon back the fastest, because it’s just physics. It is not complicated.
You ought to go to the national laboratories in the Department of Energy and talk to the folks that actually build our nuclear weapons. Charlie McMillan, the director of Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, he can stand up and explain to you in five minutes how a nuclear bomb works, and he’ll explain it in language that you’ll understand. You think it’s complicated, but it’s not. It is just science. It’s high explosives and fissile material, that’s what a nuclear bomb is.
So can I imagine a world without nuclear weapons? Yes, I can. And it’s a world I didn’t like. It’s a world that my father-in-law fought in with Patton’s 3rd Army across Europe and he never liked to talk about it until his last days, and then for some reason he wanted to talk about it. And the things he saw and the things he experienced as he went across France into Germany were horrible. Some of the worst things humanity can possibly do to each other and he got to see them, which is why he never wanted to talk about it.
Somehow, nuclear weapons have kept that conflict down in the past, and our job at U.S. Strategic Command is to make sure that we keep that down now and into the future.
So one of the things I’ll ask you as reporters and editors is to think about how you tell that story. Because if you pull up Ngram, the Google tool that kind of looks at trending terms, and you type in nuclear or nuclear deterrence, what you’ll find is it starts on a rise in the ‘60s, very very active in the ‘70s, peaks in the ‘80s, and then starts to disappear, and it’s been on a downward trend ever since then and to this day.
So if you remember, actually some of you are old enough here to remember, some of you have no clue. But if you look at the history books and you think back to the ‘60s, there are a couple of areas of interesting debate that started. The interesting thing about that debate is it did not start in the United States Navy, the United States Air Force, it did not start in the Pentagon. It came out of universities and think tanks.
There was Herman Kahn at the Rand Corporation who wrote a book on thermonuclear war in 1960. He became caricatured as Dr. Strangelove, but he started a debate in our country about the role of nuclear weapons.
Thomas Schelling at Yale and Harvard has written I think some of the most amazing books on the role of nuclear weapons in the world, and he’s written much more since the ‘60s, but created a debate that enlightened Kissinger and enlightened a lot of those people. And because of that, the media was very very active in discussing the role of nuclear weapons in our country, the role of nuclear weapons in the world.
It was a very healthy debate, and it was a debate back and forth. What is the role of nuclear weapons? What is the role of deterrence? How do we create a world where we have peace and the nuclear weapons are a big part of that peace? That debate was healthy, vigorous and was engaged in our media. And today, when do you see nuclear weapons show up in the media? When the United Nations proposes banning a weapon that can’t be banned. When you see a global zero argument that comes out that says, we should get to zero across the world in nuclear weapons, a weapon that can’t be eliminated. That’s the only time you see it show up, and it shows up and it’s a blip on the screen for a few days, and then it disappears again and we’re back into everything.
But is there anything really more important in our military infrastructure than our nuclear arsenal? I don’t think there is. And you’ve heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense of this administration, of the previous administration. You’ve heard the President of the United States say that the nuclear capabilities are the bedrock of our national security. And it is, and it is the most dangerous weapons we have in our arsenal.
And since I’ve taken command I’ve walked in and I’ve looked at those weapons. I‘ve gone aboard a nuclear submarine, the USS Tennessee, and I’ve watched them do their job. I’ve been to F.E. Warren, I’ve watched that business. I’ve been to Barksdale and I’ve watched the B-52s. I’ve watched the nuclear mission in every element of the triad, and I can honestly say that we’re as ready as we’ve ever been to execute the mission that we have to do, but it’s essentially important that we maintain that readiness as we look into the future.
That readiness will require modernization. So the other thing you see show up in the media from time to time is a debate about modernization of the nuclear triad. Do we actually need a triad? I can’t imagine a world where somehow we say we can have a deterrent capability without the three legs of the triad. The submarines are the most survivable element of it. The ICBMs are the most ready. The bombers are the most flexible. And when you put those pieces together it gives our nation the ability to withstand any attack and respond if we’re attacked, which means we won’t be attacked.
So one of the things that never really went away but I’ve raised back up in U.S. Strategic Command is the original motto of Strategic Air Command. And if you come into Strategic Command today you’ll see that motto everywhere we go. That motto was coined by Curtis LeMay. Curtis LeMay coined the motto “peace is our profession…” for Strategic Air Command. And for Strategic Command, peace is our profession. That applies to the nuclear enterprise, the global strike enterprise, the space enterprise, the cyber enterprise, the missile defense enterprise and the electronic warfare enterprise. It applies to every element of U.S. Strategic Command. So peace is our profession, but when Curtis LeMay coined that term he always liked to say there was a dot, dot, dot at the end. Peace is our profession... and the dot, dot, dot said we’ll be ready if the world doubts that we’re ready to fight that war.
So I published my vision and intent recently, my vision and intent has gone out to my entire command, all 184,000 people, unclassified. You can pull it up on the web and read it if you want. What I tell my command is, this is what I expect us to do, and if you’re doing what’s in this guide and intent, you have the full authority to execute the mission that you need to. If you’re going to go outside that, you have to come and talk to me.
But there’s only three priorities.
Priority one: Above all else we will maintain a strategic deterrent capability.
Now the strategic deterrent capability I talk about, though, is much different than it was in the last century, and it’s something that we need to talk about as a nation because strategic deterrence in the 21st century is completely different than strategic deterrence in the last century. Strategic deterrence in the last century was really focused just on nuclear weapons, and that’s the bedrock, that’s the starting point of the deterrent argument. It has to be. It has to be the number one priority ̶ is the nuclear deterrent capability.
Brad Robertson in his book, Nuclear Weapons of the 21st Century, talks about nuclear weapons being the queen on the chess board. The most powerful piece on the chess board that stands ready to respond to any threat wherever that threat is, and that’s the nuclear capability of the United States. But you always have to remember that the queen is not invulnerable. You have to protect the queen as well. So we have to protect our nuclear weapons. We have to be ready to employ the nuclear weapons.
But 21st century deterrence also requires space capabilities, cyber capabilities, conventional capabilities, capabilities that integrate to deny an adversary. Because we’re not trying to deter space, which as the former commander of Space Command somehow I get quoted as saying we’re trying to deter space or deter war in space or deter cyberspace, but we’re trying to basically explain what deterrence means across all the domains at the same time.
The interesting piece is there’s no such thing as war in space. There’s no such thing as war in cyberspace. There’s just war, unfortunately. And if you’re in a war and it extends into space, then you have to be able to fight that war.
So how do you deter a war extending into space is you develop a capability that if an adversary decides to attack you in space either the penalty on them for attacking in space will be so severe that they don’t want to do that; or if they try, our capabilities are so significant that they will fail, and it’s a combination of both of those things that build deterrence in space.
But you’re not trying to deter space. You’re trying to deter China or Russia or North Korea or Iran. And if you just think about nuclear weapons and having nuclear weapons as your deterrent capability, then you’re fundamentally missing how to deter an adversary. In fact, if you only have a nuclear capability and that’s all you think about, you actually don’t deter your adversary. In many cases, you watch what North Korea’s doing and North Korea’s building a nuclear capability in response to our nuclear capability because they believe that that will give them standing in the world and threaten the United States of America, South Korea, Japan, that part of the world.
So you have to look at it in its entirety. And oh by the way, that’s just not only STRATCOM’s job, that’s our nation’s job because deterrence in totality is a whole of government requirement. It is our nation’s responsibility. I think back to Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn, and I think back to the world of Kissinger and detente and all of those pieces that came out of that amazing debate, and I look for that debate in our country today and I don’t see that debate, and that concerns me.
So I’m willing to stand up and have a debate on nuclear weapons, on space, on conflict in space, on cyber, with anybody that wants to talk. I’ll be glad to stand up and answer any questions, and I don’t like to do that because I’m an introvert by nature, and if you’re an introvert by nature you don’t like to talk in front of people, so I don’t like to talk in front of people. In fact me and my wife, that’s about my comfort level, but it is so important that we tell this story. And it is so important that the nation embrace what we have to do in this area.
It is so important that we understand that nuclear weapons are going to be here and they’re going to be here for our lifetime, and we have to figure out how to do that.
It is so important that we modernize the triad.
It is so important that we prepare for conflict that extends into space.
It is so important that we have the right authorities in space and cyberspace to respond to a threat in a timely manner.
It is so important that we go fast enough to keep pace with our adversaries who are going unbelievably fast in terms of developing new capabilities.
And we have built a bureaucracy in our country that is very slow to react. We can’t be slow to react to the world that we’re in today.
And one of the best ways to engage the American people is if you engage in a debate and it becomes a public debate, and then the American people demand from their elected leadership, action. The American people are still the most powerful force in this country. And you, as reporters and editors, you that tell the story, have the ability to reach out and touch those American people, more than I do.
I speak in small towns and big towns. I speak in front of large audiences and small audiences. I speak in front of 50 people or a thousand people. But just this place we’re in, Politico now touches orders of magnitude more people than that every day. Each one of you, from the smallest periodical to the largest journal touch more people than I can every day.
So I ask you to help tell that story. And I want you to know that it is an important story.
So one of the things I wanted to do today was make sure I didn’t take all the time just standing up here and talking, but I save time for questions and answers at the end. And I know that Amy is going to moderate those pieces, so right now I’ll end my prepared remarks and I’ll turn it over to questions and answers. So thanks very much for your time and attention.
