By Sarah Salem

WASHINGTON — The head of the U.S. Strategic Command told the Exchange Monitor here Tuesday he could have public conversations in the spring on the nuclear employment guidance.

The report, which the Pentagon said it submitted to Congress Nov. 14, describes the U.S. nuclear employment strategy in an unclassified format.

“I’ll probably have conversations in my posture hearings in the March timeframe if that stays in line with what it has in the past,” Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of United States Strategic Command, said in a fireside chat here hosted by the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

March is nominally the time that appropriations and authorization committees start holding hearings for that fiscal year’s spending bills and the National Defense Authorization Act.

Cotton added that the report is “pretty much in alignment with the strategic posture commission’s reports and the reality that we’re going to have to seriously look to see if we have the sufficiencies with our current forces to be able to hold two adversaries plus third parties at risk.”

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees did not immediately reply to queries about whether they would hold hearings to discuss the unclassified guidance during what remains of the 118th Congress, which ends Jan. 3. A spokesperson for the House declined to comment.

Cotton said earlier in the moderated discussion that the Strategic Command is watching to see not just what Russia and China are doing, but what North Korea, Iran, and any “third parties” are doing as well. 

Meanwhile, the “nuclear employment guidance,” which President Joe Biden reportedly approved in March, directs the United States to “plan to deter multiple nuclear-armed adversaries simultaneously,” a shift from the previous guidance, according to the DoD’s press release on the report. The report itself mentions China, North Korea, Iran and Russia all by name.

“I hate the term Cold war 2.0,” Cotton said, adding that it “oversimplifies” the current environment, the actors involved, and the “scattering of influence” from “third parties.”

The Guidance, which builds on the 2022 National Defense Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review, requires that the U.S. plan to modernize and increase diversity of its own arsenal to account for “adversaries’ nuclear arsenals.”

“We have to maintain the program of record,” Cotton said. “We have to modernize. I’m sorry.”