10 FOREIGN POLICY, MILITARY

Not until statesmen had at last perceived the nature of the forces that had emerged in France, and had grasped that new political conditions now obtained in Europe, could they foresee the broad effect all this would have on war; and only in that way could they appreciate the scale of the means that would have to be employed, and how best to apply them.

—Clausewitz, on the military consequences of the French Revolution

The effort to evolve a sound theory of military strategy and to relate it to the other concerns of the national state has been, I believe, a difficult problem for most great countries; but it is hard to believe that any country has ever been farther from finding satisfactory solutions to it than our own. This is a field in which we have no established and authoritative doctrine to guide us. Our own experience, where it might have held lessons, had seldom been thoughtfully studied; nor would it, even when carefully looked at, have had more than a limited relevance to the problems that face us today. The American Civil War, though as great an encounter in terms of the manpower and firepower involved as had ever taken place to that time, was, after all, a civil conflict, many aspects of which would not have been characteristic for great international wars. The various writings of Admiral Alfred T. Mahan deeply influenced American thinking, particularly professional naval thinking, about the uses of sea power, as these presented themselves at the outset of this century; but they had relatively little to tell us about land power—how it was to be used in war, how to be maintained in peacetime, and how to be fitted into national policy in times of both peace and war. There were available to us, of course, the works of the great European thinkers on military theory and strategy, particularly Clausewitz and Jomini;1 and scraps of their writings have no doubt long been studied at the various American armed-forces colleges; but it would be too much to say that those writings made any significant impression on the political establishment in Washington from which so many of the decisions affecting such matters had to flow. Beyond all of which, it is a question how much of this earlier thinking, even if carefully studied, would be relevant to the situation that now lies before us. Military theory, after all, has always had to reflect the technological and political realities of the time; and these have changed tremendously with the effects of the two great European wars of this century. A reservation, to be sure, must be noted here in the case of Clausewitz, many of whose observations on the dynamics of conflict and on the interactions of political and military interests in war have retained their relevance and validity over the entire 160-odd years since they were written; but if they have entered perceptibly into American thinking on the relationship between military and political policy, this has been, as a rule, only in a highly simplified form.

The Nuclear Fixation

Before we can look usefully at the challenges with which this present situation confronts us, we must dispose of, or at least relegate to its proper place, the hugely confusing and misleading factor that has dominated American strategic thinking ever since the Second World War—namely, the nuclear weapon, with its companions in the other weapons of mass destruction. For so bizarre and distorted has been, from the beginning, the structure of thought addressed to the place of the nuclear weapon in American theory and strategy that only with it out of the way can we turn in any rational manner to the situation we now have before us.

Actually, it did not take the advent of Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War to discredit most of that body of thought. It was evident as early as 1950 (and this writer tried in vain at that time to persuade his superiors in government to recognize this) that any American policy based on the first use of this form of weaponry—any policy, that is, that envisaged its uses for purposes other than deterrence and built our entire defense establishment around it—would lead to much confusion and would have suicidal implications. The nuclear weapon was, in fact, from the start an essentially useless weapon, useless at least for any rational purpose. And if there was ever any doubt of this, the development of what McGeorge Bundy has called “the tradition of the non-use of these weapons since 1945,” a tradition to which we were brought by relentless confrontation with reality over the years, has disposed of it. But none of this sufficed to dull the obdurate enthusiasm of British, French, and American strategists for the weapon itself. And thus we had arrived, by the first year of the 1990s, at the nightmarish situation where more than fifty thousand nuclear warheads were in world arsenals, and 97 percent of them in the arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States. Obviously, it would never have been possible to use more than a very small fraction of these weapons in combat without creating, in addition to the millions of directly caused casualties, a worldwide environmental catastrophe. The mere existence in human hands of those huge accumulations of nuclear explosives, incapable as they were of serving any coherent military purpose, was thus a danger to civilization in general, and an unnecessary one.

It had become apparent, even before the Gorbachev era, that the motives for this great buildup on the NATO side, while formally given as the necessity of deterring the Russians from launching some sort of an attack on the West, were in actuality largely subjective. If there was any doubt about this in the earlier years, the development of NATO doctrine during the years of Gorbachev’s predominance disposed of it. For it was only grudgingly and slowly that the military establishments of the NATO nuclear powers showed themselves willing to take account of the new situation that had obviously been created by the drastic changes in Russia.

Plainly, to the immense relief of many of us, President Bush’s initiative of September 1991 and the response it produced from the Soviet side, constituted a first great step in the liquidation of this dreadful situation.2 There is reason to hope that the process thus hopefully begun will not stop at that point. But the addiction in question—the unreal hopes and expectations attached to nuclear weaponry—dies hard. There is still no withdrawal on the American side from the pernicious adherence to the principle of first use. There is still no readiness to contemplate a complete and comprehensive test ban. One still hears talk about “modernizing” (that dreadful euphemism) our strategic weapons.

Our objective for the coming period ought obviously to be: first, the halting of the proliferation of nuclear weaponry; second, reduction of both Soviet and American arsenals to the minimum necessary to balance the greatest of the other arsenals; then heavy pressure for the further reduction of all these arsenals, with a view to the ultimate total elimination of this form of weaponry worldwide. Only when all that has occurred will we, and the rest of the world, be able to design defense policies directed to the realities of a postnuclear world. But a prerequisite for any real advance in those directions will be, of course, the abandonment by the U.S. government of the principle of first use, as well as any idea that it could expect the smaller powers to part with such of the weapons as they have while the United States and its European nuclear allies retain indefinitely their own.

The War of Annihilation

It is not too early to consider what, in the case of the United States, defense policies for a nonnuclear world might be. But precisely because the world with which we would then be dealing would be a nonnuclear one, it will not be useless effort to take account of certain of the great misconceptions that prevailed in American strategic thinking in the period immediately preceding the nuclear era, a period that included the two great wars of this century. These were distortions prevalent primarily in the military mind, always given to extremism when it came to the relation between military and political objectives; but they were readily appropriated into militaristic civilian thinking as well.

The first of these misconceptions related to twin concepts of total war—war of annihilation, that is—and unconditional surrender. It is not unnatural that military leaders, once involved in leading forces in combat, should make it their aim to achieve the complete destruction of the enemy’s forces, and should be reluctant to entertain any ideas, such as political objectives, that might run counter to this purpose. There is, in military thinking, a certain absolutist quality that strongly resists anything that tends to obscure or to impair this purity of motive and action. This rests on the outwardly plausible thesis that the first and only thing to be thought of so long as the war is in progress is the desirability of reducing to zero the recalcitrance of the enemy—of making him entirely subservient to one’s own will—the theory being that when this has been accomplished all political objectives can be easily attained. (“Let us begin by beating them; after that it will be easy,” said the French general de Boisdeffre to his Russian counterpart, in negotiating the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894.)

This thesis was accepted, in both wars, by civilian as well as military leaders. It obviously commended itself to Franklin Roosevelt, in whose mind it was no doubt supported by the reflection that any preoccupation with political objectives, as distinct from the purely military ones, during the war would be controversial and divisive in the domestic-political sense. But it was a view that pervaded all official thinking in Washington during the Second World War. How many times were those of us who pressed for a clarification of our political objectives in those years put in our place by the refrain “In wartime, my boy, we don’t take our eye off the ball”—the ball, being, of course, the undeviating pursuit of total military victory.

There were, however, two flaws in this so clear and outwardly persuasive way of looking at things. First, the experience of many previous wars made it evident that the manner in which one conducted a war, and the unfolding of events on the battlefield, affected the political situation in ways that had not been foreseen when the war was undertaken. Every day of the fighting produced changes—in the relations among allies, in the attitudes of populations affected by the war, in geographical and economic realities—that affected political objectives. Among other things, it became evident in the two world wars that the very costs of the struggle might begin to exceed all that the war had been meant to achieve. A particularly striking example of this was the First World War, where either side could have terminated the hostilities in 1916 by accepting the maximum stated peace terms of the other side, and still have been better off than they were by continuing the war, as they did, for another two years. The costs of the continuation of the struggle in blood and in resources, in other words, could begin to exceed all that one could hope to achieve by even the greatest formal military victory.

It also became apparent, in that as in other wars, that the continuation of the fighting might be serving the purposes of others, be they allies or neutrals, the achievement of whose purposes would be scarcely better, if at all, than the objectives which the enemy was pursuing. An example of this could be seen in the final months of the Second World War, when it became evident, to some of us at least, that what our Soviet allies were setting out to do in the areas of Eastern Europe they were in process of conquering would not be greatly preferable to what would have occurred had these regions been left in custody of the Germans.

Unconditional Surrender

A logical concomitant of the concept of the war of annihilation, and a concept that greatly commended itself to the American leadership in both world wars, was that of “unconditional surrender.” With this device, the enemy, now deprived of his ability to resist, was also to be deprived of any part in the shaping of the postwar situation. The victor, in addition to being now all-powerful, was also considered to be both all-virtuous and all-wise. He, it was inferred, would know exactly what to do with the conquered country and with all other post-hostilities problems. He would need no help from the defeated enemy in making this determination. That enemy, supposedly hopelessly benighted and wrong-minded, was to be totally excluded from participation in the fashioning of the regime of peace under which he, and his people, would now be obliged to live.

This was the concept under which the British and the French (not, fortunately, the Americans) brought the First World War to an end. In World War II Roosevelt (much to Churchill’s unhappiness) unilaterally proclaimed it as an Allied principle at the close of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. It had, of course, and particularly in Franklin Roosevelt’s eyes, the advantage of avoiding, so long as hostilities were in progress, all necessity of coming to terms with one’s own allies on the question of what it was that one was fighting for and what the peace was supposed to look like, and thus of preserving at least the outward façade of solidarity in the Allied camp while the guns were still speaking.

Obviously, this way of ending a war was closely connected with the question as to whether it was the regime or the people of the enemy country against which one conceived oneself to be fighting. If it was primarily the regime that was viewed as the enemy, then it was at least logical that one should be reluctant to negotiate a compromise peace with a regime the unseating of which was one’s principal war aim. During the Second World War no one in any of the Allied countries (and this, quite understandably) wanted to conclude a compromise peace that would leave Adolf Hitler at the helm in a defeated Germany. This was in itself no reason why one should not have been willing to discuss the prospective postwar situation with anti-Nazi Germans whose aim was to overthrow Hitler and who had plausible prospects for replacing him if they succeeded. But here, too, Western statesmen found themselves paralyzed by confusion and lack of agreement about who it was that they would like to see at the head of things in a defeated Germany in place of the Nazis. Yet the ban on discussion of political objectives while the war was on precluded any discussion of these matters among the Allies until after the final surrender of the enemy. And this brings up another of the questions about the suitability of unconditional surrender as a way of ending wars; for if one had not come to complete agreement with allies, before the war ended, about what it was that one was fighting for, an unconditional surrender was bound to raise all these awkward and divisive questions abruptly and in the most acute manner when hostilities ceased.

By and large, it must be said, there are many drawbacks to unconditional surrender as a way of ending a war. In excluding the regime of the defeated country from any significant participation in the drawing up of the post-hostilities regime, it also absolves them of all responsibility, while saddling the victors with total responsibility, for what is to come. But it also assumes that it is both desirable and possible to exclude an entire population from participation in the designing of its own future. While this can perhaps be done for a short time, it cannot be done for very long. And the results of these two great wars, ostensibly ended by unconditional surrender, afford a startling demonstration of this reality. In less than two decades after the end of World War I, Germany, nominally the defeated party, was again the greatest military power in Europe. Within two or three decades after the ending of the Second World War, Germany and Japan, the two defeated powers, were the most prosperous and economically powerful countries in their respective regions. All these reflections stand as a warning against moving into future wars without taking into account the experiences of the two great European wars of this century and of their consequences.

Destruction for Its Own Sake

Another serious misconception that has influenced American military policy in the past, particularly but not exclusively in connection with nuclear weaponry, has been the belief that the value of a weapon was directly proportionate to its destructive power. This had much to do with the attractiveness of the idea of bombing targets, particularly urban targets, from the air—a predilection which has fascinated military strategists ever since the zeppelin raids of World War I, which enjoyed its heyday in World War II, and which dominated military thinking in the subsequent nuclear period. The military mind has tended to be obsessed with the concept of destruction—sheer destruction, destruction for its own sake—as the central aim of warfare. This has been understandable. You “destroy” the enemy’s positions, his lines of communication and supply, and the military industry from which he obtains his weapons. You also destroy as many of his military personnel as you can. And you do all this, if possible, from the air—but in any case, with the least possible destruction of your own military resources. What better? Is not the “body count” the really decisive count? And does this not all contribute to your sole wartime objective, which is the destruction of your enemy’s entire military capability and the subjection of his will to your own? I can recall more than one instance of military men saying during the war that their task was simply to “kill Germans.”

All this is understandable. It is all a part of the concept of la guerre a outrance—the “war of annihilation.” But there is something about it that gives me the deepest uneasiness. It is not only that the factor of discrimination—the capacity of individual types of weaponry to be used in a discriminating way—is underestimated. But it is also related to the question of the purpose of warfare. The purpose should be, it seems to me, not just to work maximum destruction on the chosen enemy but rather to produce a useful effect on his understanding and his disposition—to convert him, if there seems to be no other way of doing it, to a more useful and more acceptable frame of mind than that which forced you to resort to arms against him in the first place, and to do this with the minimum, not the maximum, of destruction. (It was Clausewitz, after all, who maintained that the amount of the military effort put forward should be determined by the political, not the purely military, goals to be achieved.)

We all live in the same world; and if the aim of warfare is not to be genocide (and who, in the Western world, would conceive it to be that?), then it must be the purpose, in any military conflict, not so much to “destroy” the enemy militarily as to change his frame of mind—to convert that frame of mind, the one that led you to fight him, into one more useful to the cause of world peace and more compatible with the ideal of human progress. That it should have required, in the given case, military effort to produce this effect on the enemy is sad and regrettable; but the fact that it has required it is no reason for regarding him as lost to this world for all time and for resorting to methods of warfare which, while perhaps reducing him to a total desperation, seem irrelevant to, or perhaps even subversive of, the task of changing his mind. It is this, I suppose, that I had in mind when I wrote in my diary, upon once contemplating the vast areas of civilian destruction in Hamburg, where, in the Second World War, seventy thousand civilians had been killed by Allied bombings in three days, that

if the Western world was really going to make valid the pretense of a higher moral departure point—of greater sympathy and understanding for the human being as God made him, as expressed not only in himself but in the things he had wrought and cared about—then it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all; for moral principles were a part of its strength. Shorn of this strength, it was no longer itself; its victories were not real victories. . . . The military would stamp this as naive; they would say that war is war, that when you’re in it, you fight with everything you have or go down in defeat. But if that is the case, then there rests upon western civilization, bitter as this may be, the obligation to be militarily stronger than its adversaries by a margin sufficient to enable it to dispense with those means which can stave off defeat only at the cost of undermining victory.3

Well, these are just some of the thoughts, rising out of our earlier military experiences, which, as it seemed to me, might usefully be borne in mind as we move to the question of what our national theory and strategy of warfare might best be in what we must hope will be the nonnuclear age of the near future.

Alliances and Special Relations

The first thing to bear in mind, as we contemplate our military future, is the sort of war we do not have to plan for; and that is a great war among great powers. The experiences of this past century have made that plain. In the light of modern military technology, no all-out war among great industrial powers (and that means all the great powers of this day) can now be other than suicidal, regardless of the formal theoretical outcome in terms of what are called victory and defeat. If war of this sort cannot be ruled out, civilization will be. And what, then, could be the purpose of such a war, or the purpose of preparing for it?

Does this mean that now, in the apparent absence of any great-power adversary, this country has no need to maintain any significant military establishment—any establishment, that is, appropriate to its size and its weight in world affairs? The answer is obvious: not at all. And this, for several reasons.

First of all, there are the existing commitments, primarily those that relate to the United Nations and to the other parties of the alliances of which we are a member. These commitments all imply the maintenance of some sort of a military establishment on our part. What sort of an establishment is another question; but the answer to that question is certainly not no establishment at all.

We have, in the first place, our formal alliances with Japan and with the other members of the NATO community. Mention was made in the last chapter of some of the political aspects of these engagements. But their military aspects were the primary reasons for their conclusion in the first place, and, diminished as those military aspects now are, they are by no means trivial.

Insofar as concerns the security arrangement with Japan, it is worth remembering that while such threat to Japanese security as may have been seen to be coming from the Russian side has been largely removed, now and for the foreseeable future, uncertain situations still prevail in Korea and in China. Until there is greater clarity about both these situations, it would be premature to attempt to define the future military relationship of Japan to the United States. For this reason no hasty decisions—and, above all, no unilateral ones—should be taken with relation to the existing military arrangements.

With respect to NATO a somewhat different situation prevails. In 1948, and over the entire subsequent period, this writer had a view of the most desirable long-term relationship of the United States to European defense that was different from the one that found acceptance on either side of the water. It was his view that the United States, while cordially accepting the status of a great and good friend of European security, should not itself be a member of any organization set up by European governments to promote and assure that security. There would seem, in his view, to be even more reason for this restriction in the coming period than there was in 1948. For this reason he would hope that in the search for a new European security structure designed to meet the changed situation prevailing in the light of the Soviet breakdown, the accent would be put on a European organization of which the United States was not a member. These thoughts lead in the direction of the Western European Union, an organization set up in 1948 to include only the Low Countries, France, and England, but now expanded to include Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. This organization bears a recognized but still somewhat cloudy status as an arrangement contributory to the purposes of NATO; but it differs from the latter outstandingly in its failure to include Canada and the United States. It appears to the writer that the development of this organization into the nucleus of a future European security structure would be more responsive to the realities of the future American relationship to European defense than would be the retention of NATO for that purpose. But it is not to be expected that the opposition to this view will be much less intense today than it was in 1948; and in any case the situation in Europe, with the emergence of new countries along its eastern borders, is still too uncertain to provide a basis for a final and long-term decision.

It is also the view of the writer (and in this he is likely to find more support than in the position just described) that the time for the stationing of American forces on European soil has passed, and that the ones now stationed there should be withdrawn, by agreement with the European countries affected, as soon as this can conveniently be done. Such a move, we should note, would not mean the end of the NATO Treaty, or even any significant adjustment of its present language. It would therefore not prejudice the study and eventual solution of the long-term problem discussed above.

If, however, NATO should be retained as a military pact, and if this country were to continue to be an active member of it, I would hope that ways might be found to give to it much less the aspect of an alliance aimed against any single other country, and more that of an expression of enduring interest in the security and prosperity of all European countries than is now the case.

The Third World

A third source of the requirement for American armed forces in the coming period is the state of affairs in regions other than the European and East Asian ones. Here, we are confronted with many uncertainties, and not a few dangers. There are several countries (Iran, Iraq, and Libya are presumably only the most conspicuous of them) where we are regarded, at least by the prevailing regimes, with outright, sometimes burning, in any case unconcealed hostility. There are other places where we encounter the envy and jealousy of people of whom the least we can say is that they are unaware of having any stake in our prosperity or security. What forms this hostility will take in the future, we cannot know; but we certainly cannot exclude the possibility that problems may arise in those parts of the world that will engage our interests and our security and will demand from us, whether unilaterally or in league with other powers, some sort of a military response.

Just what this will mean in terms of the kinds and quantities of the forces we will require is something that no individual in the position of this writer could possibly estimate in any detail. In early 1947, at a time when the nuclear weapon was not yet fully installed in the position of preeminence that it was destined soon thereafter to assume, I, in speaking before the National Defense Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, attempted to face up to what seemed to me then to be the prospect of a world (and a nonnuclear world) without any great external enemy; and gave my best estimate of the sort of armed establishment I thought we might require. Conceding the need for the maintenance at all times of adequate mobilization facilities for hostilities on a larger scale, I thought that what we needed to maintain in normal times, and maintain in a state of reasonable readiness, was “a certain minimum number and balance of ground force divisions of full fighting strength, modern, well-trained, well-equipped, and prepared for action on extremely short notice.” Similarly, in the case of the Navy, while again stressing the reserve facilities necessary for its expansion in times of more serious crisis, I urged the regular maintenance of a naval force “which could support in the combat sense and logistically any emergency armed effort this country might be called upon to put forward, and which could show the flag creditably on the high seas and in the ports of the world.” I expressed the view that it was more important that these forces in being should be alert and modern than that they be large. Similar sentiments were expressed with regard to the Air Force.

Some of this, it seems to me, might still have some relevance to the situation we must expect to face in the postnuclear era. Much of what I had in mind, particularly in regard to the land forces, could be supplied by the Marine Corps (an entity which I personally regard, and not just from the military standpoint, as one of America’s finest institutions). The Army would have to come up with the remainder. And so far as the backup reserve forces and facilities are concerned, I still feel, as I did and said on the occasion just referred to, that we have every reason, and even reasons going far beyond those usually cited in just this connection, to create and maintain a comprehensive national service corps for all young people in this country, one of the varieties of participation being, on a voluntary basis, service in one or the other of the armed forces.

Military Planning

All of the above has been put forward on the hypothesis that the views presented in the foregoing chapter, about the sort of foreign policy the United States might now wish to have, would be acceptable as a basis for the design of our military posture. This would mean, as the reader will recall, an essentially defensive policy, designed to give this country the time and the peace to address itself intensively to the solution of some of its great domestic problems.

There is, however, one note of caution, relating to the military aspects of this policy, which ought to be sounded before this discussion is complete. This relates to military planning and preparations.

This writer, in his study of the diplomatic history of the final years of the nineteenth century, was struck by the realization of how extensively the outbreak of the First World War was determined by the military planning and preparations that had long preceded it. This was true even where this planning and these preparations were not initiated with any idea that the war they envisaged was inevitable—simply with the idea that it was possible. Yet it was the planning and preparation themselves that advanced very materially the inevitability of the conflict in question.

Of these two activities—planning and preparation—it is, of course, the latter that is of the greater importance in heightening the tensions that lead to war. But the planning is important, too. When, in a given military establishment, the idea of a possible war with a specific power is laid down as a basic framework for military planning, the months and years that follow see the emergence of many thousands of documents, and the holding of a comparable number of planning conferences, in which the presumed adversary figures as “the enemy.” Gradually but inevitably, as this long planning process runs its course, what was first considered a hypothesis insensibly becomes a probability, and finally attains, in the minds of those who conduct it, the status of an inevitability. When this happens, people find that they are planning and preparing not for a possible conflict but for one which they regard as unavoidable and inevitable, the occurrence of which is now only a matter of time. From that point on, their behavior, and the behavior of the whole governmental apparatus in which they are embraced, attains the quality of an airplane which, in its takeoff, has passed the point of no return. From that point on, any diplomatic effort to avoid the war becomes inexcusable in military eyes, because it throws doubt and confusion over preparations for what they regard as an inevitable encounter.

In the early 1890s the Russian military command for the entire southern portion of the empire became convinced that war with England over the control of the Turkish Straits was inevitable (which, as the future was to show, it was not). In the light of that persuasion, the officers of that command made, on their own initiative, elaborate plans for a military-naval descent on the Turkish coast near the Bosporus. So completely were they persuaded of the inevitability of such a conflict that they came within a hair’s breath of proceeding with the implementation of these plans before soberer heads in Petersburg found out about it and managed to stop them. Had they gone ahead with this implementation, they would almost certainly have provoked a wholly unnecessary war with England. Such were the dangers unleashed by the impression, which had been allowed to implant itself in many Russian military minds (and in not a few civilian ones), that war with England was an inevitability.

In 1913, not long after he had assumed the presidential office, Woodrow Wilson was alarmed and at first indignant to learn of various sorts of military planning then being conducted, under the auspices of the General Staff, at the War College. His apprehensions were later allayed, and the planning was allowed to continue, albeit (to use the words of the historian who related the episode) in a form “camouflaged and . . . handicapped by the President’s attitude.”4

The president’s anxieties were no doubt exaggerated. But there was a grain of reality in them. Pursued far enough and long enough, this planning process, like many others, might well have engendered attitudes that would have given it the quality of an important determinant of events, rather than just a precaution in the face of certain possibilities, as which it was no doubt originally conceived.

These are my reasons for considering that in the designing of a new military posture to replace the one that has endured for some forty years, our government would do well to avoid any sort of planning based on hypothetical conflict with a specific country. To many excellent military minds this may seem strange. The writer recalls spending an entire long evening with one of the most distinguished of the country’s military figures, discussing the question as to whether it was possible, even theoretically, to shape, train, and equip any great military establishment without, as a basis for this process, naming some other power as the most likely adversary, to the hypothetical conflict with which all planning should be directed.

It remains my view that to do this last is not only possible but desirable and that, in designing America’s military posture for the future, one should avoid designating any particular country as the one to which plans are directed. One can, of course, have his imagination in this respect; and military planners will not be able to avoid its urgings. But it will be better if plans can be held to the envisaging of a variety of possible conflicts without identifying any specific country as the specific target. We may expect to have troubles enough in this world even in the best of circumstances without putting flesh on the creations of our own imagination.

Ulterior Considerations

Let me revert to the thoughts put forward at the beginning of this chapter. It is small wonder that a democratic political system, where government consists of the dynamic interaction of thousands of rapidly changing civil servants and elected officials, should have difficulty in evolving a consistent and coherent doctrine to guide it in a governmental function so full of ironies, dilemmas, and apparent contradictions as is the maintenance in peacetime of a national defense establishment. How is one to rationalize the training of men for military combat when the professed hope is that the skills for which they are trained will never be put to the ultimate test of combat itself, and when the theory is that the better they are trained the less likelihood there will be that what they were trained for will ever actually take place? How does one maintain morale in a form of training that one hopes will never be put to serious use? And, as if all this were not enough, how does one accomplish this when advances in military technology are making it evident that the use of modern weapons in warfare among highly industrialized and technologically developed states can never be other than suicidal, and when the destructive power of certain of these weapons, notably the nuclear ones, has become so appalling that they have suicidal aspects for the user even when used against a helpless victim and are met with no retaliation? The dilemmas introduced by the cultivation of such weapons have alone sufficed to sow an almost hopeless confusion in all traditional doctrines of military strategy and the forms of training they call for.

But still, there can be and will no doubt continue to be, in addition to the great and nuclear wars that have become senseless, smaller and nonnuclear ones that have not lost, or at least will not be seen to have lost, all rationale. And for the possibility that one or another of these should touch in some serious way the vital interests of the United States, the maintenance of some armed forces, and well trained and equipped ones at that, cannot be avoided. One must also bear in mind, as this writer sees it, the advantages of military discipline and training as formative influences on character. Whoever has never learned to accept orders without the loss of his own dignity, or to give them without impairing the dignity of the one to whom they are given, is unlikely to be very successful in the control of himself. And where such qualities can be better inculcated than in military training at its best, this writer does not know. In addition to which there is, in the best sense, the truly useful democratizing effect of men and women being thrown, at least for a time, into the company of others of their own age group, drawn from all ranks of society and all stages of education. Beyond that there is the fact that in this age of sophisticated military technology many forms of training for men and women in uniform are ones that can be turned to useful employment in civilian life. For all these reasons, proper military training, and the development of a suitable military establishment generally, is not only a political necessity but can play a useful and constructive role in the development of a society.

One could wish that ways could be found for the employment of armed services for purposes more constructive and inspiring than just training for the combat they must hope never to have to conduct. It has been suggested, for example, that the Navy could lend its help in peacetime to civilian efforts, national or international, to restore and preserve the healthfulness and productive abundance of the world oceans. Other possibilities, too, will present themselves. But there are also dangers in the employment of armed personnel, particularly of the ground forces, for purposes (other than emergency actions) foreign to their main dedication. Here, too, doctrines and traditions, more helpful than any yet established, will have to be created.

It is among the various uncertainties and contradictions mentioned above that American policymakers will have to wend their way in the years ahead. It will be helpful if the various war colleges, and particularly the National Defense University, will give such problems their serious attention. But there will also be the necessity of educating the political establishment, the public, and the media in whatever, in the way of doctrine, is worked out. Here, too, rapid progress must not be expected. Much time will have to pass, and a great deal will have to be achieved in constructive thinking and public debate, before the United States will have anything in the way of a thoughtful and nationally accepted defense doctrine.

1. Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, (1780–1831), the well-known Prussian general, writer on military subjects, and military theoretician. Antoine Henri, baron de Jomini, (1779–1869), the prominent military figure and writer, of Swiss origin, founder of the Imperial Russian Military Academy.

2. President Bush, in this initiative, announced several important unilateral cuts in American weaponry and proposed negotiations for mutual reductions of multiple warheads on certain types of nuclear weapons.

3. Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 437.

4. Richard D. Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 365.