Although two successive presidents have determined that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — particularly nuclear weapons in the hands of violent extremists — pose the greatest threat to the American people, and have decided that countering their proliferation is a top strategic priority, neither administration has made countering WMD a priority when it comes to allocating budgetary resources to that overarching national mission. In the public domain, little analysis exists that assesses the capacity and capabilities required by military forces to conduct WMD elimination (WMD-E) operations. As a result, public discussion of what capabilities the military requires for such operations generally omits or gives short shrift to requirements for the WMD-E mission. The purpose of this report is to address and analyze those requirements, namely, the ground force capacity (force size) and capabilities (force structure) needed to accomplish WMD-E missions and tasks. These analyses provide an informed description of the types and size of U.S. Army forces required to conduct WMD-E operations in a wide range of situations. The authors explore in depth two particularly salient cases: operations to secure loose WMD in the event that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) collapses and a counterfactual scenario in which U.S. operations were ordered to eliminate the Syrian chemical weapons program in the wake of a Syrian regime collapse.

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