The Warfighter's View study was published in December 1996, only a few months after completion of the Post-START II Arms Control study. The political context was the upcoming Helsinki meeting during which the U.S. and Russia would agree to a START III framework for reducing strategic nuclear forces to 2,000-2,500 warheads.

As with many of the previous studies of the 1990s, the study emphasized STRATCOM's nuclear warfighting philosophy. Up front the study stated that the guidance for employment of nuclear weapons remained "unchanged." This meant that the White House guidance that provided the military with the broad lines for how to plan the nation's nuclear forces were the same as those used at the height of the Cold War: President Ronald Reagan's National Security Decision Directive from October 1981.

As with several of the previous force structure studies, the Warfighter's Assessment concluded that as the overall number of weapons continued to decline in the future, the characteristics of the force mix would become increasingly important both for deterrence and warfighting. The implication was that the flexibility of the remaining forces had to be maintained under future arms control treaties in order to cover all potential targets.

The study concluded that, "credible, effective deterrence is a package deal" which involves many of the traditional warfighting principles from the Cold War, including:

• Force modernization

• Stockpile stewardship

• Survivable forces

• Robust planning capability

• Survivable C2 connectivity

• Timely threat warning

In this study STRATCOM began arguing that force structure planning did not simply involve reducing nuclear forces and maintaining what was left, but required modernizing the weapons and providing an industrial infrastructure capable of supporting the arsenal. America would soon need to invest significant resources in the next generation of the nuclear forces needed for an enduring nuclear posture. The political background for this was the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Plan drawn up by the Clinton administration as a means to ensure a continued capability to certify the reliability of nuclear weapons without live nuclear testing well beyond their designed service life. Not surprisingly, this plan was also much more and soon ballooned into an unprecedented spending spree for new under-budgeted and delayed hardware for the nuclear laboratories (see NRDC's Weaponeers of Waste, April 2004).

The Warfighter's Assessment study also reiterated the national security objective of maintaining a nuclear posture that would "make outcome of conflict uncertain and dangerous" for an opponent. This uncertainty objective echoed one of the main conclusions of a deterrence study conducted for CINCSTRAT General Habiger by the Strategic Advisory Group in 1995, a study that National Security Council official Robert Bell upon disclosure in 1998 assured the press did not reflect official national policy. One year later, in 1999, this objective was used repeatedly when the Clinton administration rejected German and Canadian calls for a change in the NATO's nuclear first-use-policy.