July 2025
Issue brief A five-pillar plan to deter strategic attacks Mark J. Massa and Alyxandra Marine As its highest priority, the Department of Defense must deter strategic attacks on the United States. A fivepillar strategy could guide efforts to prevent nuclear and nonnuclear threats while ensuring resilience and readiness against large-scale nuclear attacks on the US homeland.
Bottom lines up front •
The Department of Defense (DoD) must deter strategic attacks against the United States as its highest-priority mission. Failure to do so would severely undermine every other national security objective.
•
Deterring strategic attacks requires more than preventing a large-scale nuclear strike on the US homeland. The Pentagon must also be prepared to prevent limited nuclear escalation elsewhere in the world and to deter non-nuclear threats, such as cyberattacks or bioweapons, that could have catastrophic consequences on the United States.
•
DoD investments and war plans must strike a balance between the goal of winning conventional wars quickly and with minimal losses and recognizing that adversaries’ robust and growing nuclear arsenals demand strategies that deter and manage escalation risks.
Introduction To achieve the likely objectives of the National Defense Strategy (NDS)—defending the US homeland and deterring China— the United States must address the risk of strategic attacks on the homeland. This imperative includes both preventing such attacks and ensuring that the Department of Defense (DoD) has both the strategy and capabilities to restore deterrence at the
1.
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
lowest possible level of damage if prevention fails.1 Doing so is essential because a strategic attack by an adversary could potentially coerce the United States into ceasing its support for allies and partners, or inflict military disruption severe enough to prevent such support altogether, thus frustrating the objective of deterring China. Moreover, US adversaries can inflict a level of damage to US society that far exceeds the
According to public reporting, these goals have been spelled out in a classified interim strategic guidance on national defense. Alex Horton and Hannah Natanson, “Secret Pentagon Memo on China, Homeland Has Heritage Fingerprints,” Washington Post, March 29, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/29/secret-pentagon-memo-hegseth-heritage-foundation-china/.
1