The purpose of a defense policy staff would be to assist the Secretary of Defense in integrating the conflicting interests of economy and security and the conflicting interests of the three services into a comprehensive military program. It would serve no useful function if it did not rise above all other interests in the Department and serve only the Secretary. With its assistance he could establish for the Joint Chiefs the maximum level of defense expenditures permissible from the viewpoint of the national economy and then insist that they produce the best military plan within this economic limitation. The Secretary could also establish for the Comptroller the minimum military forces essential for the nation’s security and then insist that he produce a budget which would provide in the most economic fashion possible for those military forces. In this manner the Joint Chiefs would be removed from economics and politics, and the Comptroller would no longer determine key issues of strategy. Economics and strategy would be tied together in the hands of the Secretary with the policy staff as his agent. To fulfill this function the staff would have to be small, consisting perhaps of no more than a score of officials. Its membership might be drawn from three sources. High-level civil servants would contribute experience and continuity. The most promising graduates of the war colleges of field and general officer rank would bring military expertise and, assuming a three-year detail, a certain element of continuity. Civilian experts and consultants from outside the government would furnish a fresh approach, specialized knowledge, and would be a link between the staff and business, science, and the universities. The head of the staff would be a civilian, possessing the confidence of the Secretary, but so far as possible a permanent official divorced from politics. The ranking military officer on the staff, a major general or lieutenant general or his equivalent, would be the deputy director. He would be the link between the staff and the Joint Chiefs and would normally attend meetings of the latter.
THE CALIBER OF THE MAN. The final essential to the proper functioning of the Department of Defense is the appointment as Secretary of individuals qualified for the office. In a Cold War the Secretary of Defense is by any standard one of the two or three most important men in the government. As the head of a defense government within a government, he has responsibilities significantly different from and greater than those of other departmental chiefs. His office, however, is still young as government offices go. Its powers and prerogatives have not been defined and frozen into a fixed pattern. It is still primarily the man who shapes the office rather than the office which shapes the man. Personality and tradition are more important than statutes. The Secretary of State acquired a primacy among cabinet officers, not because of his legal power or the importance of his functions. For a hundred years, from 1815 to 1917, these were relatively minor. The stature of the office was determined by the stature of its secretaries: Jefferson, Madison, John Quincy Adams, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Seward, Hay, Root, Hughes, Stimson, Hull. The Defense Secretaryship deserves men of no less caliber.
What are the desirable characteristics of a Secretary of Defense? First, he should be a man of experience, possessing some familiarity with the problems with which he will be dealing. This is probably best achieved by service in one of the subordinate secretaryships within the Department. Marshall’s prior experience as Army Chief of Staff, 1939–1945, and Secretary of State, 1947–1949, although not of this sort was no less valuable. On the other hand, Forrestal had been Under Secretary of the Navy in World War II and Secretary of the Navy from 1944 to 1947. Lovett had been Assistant Secretary of War for Air during World War II, Under Secretary of State in 1947 and 1948, and Deputy Secretary of Defense for a year before moving up to the top position. Louis Johnson had been Assistant Secretary of War from 1937 to 1940. An awareness of the complexity of defense issues, the relations among the services, the problems of phasing, procurement, intelligence, and an appreciation of the multiplicity of interests and functions can only be achieved through this type of prior service.
Second, the Secretary should be a man of respect, commanding the admiration of informed public opinion. He must be publicly recognized as a man of stature, integrity, responsibility, and respectability. His ability and honesty must inspire confidence if not consensus. He must, in short, have some of the makings of a statesman. This is essential for the public image of the office. The American people will permit many individuals to be Attorney General or Postmaster General whom they would never permit to be Secretary of State. We demand statesmen in the latter case; we accept, if we do not prefer, machine politicians, special-interest representatives, or personal cronies in the other. The public image of the Secretary of Defense should be similar to that of the Secretary of State.
Third, he should be a man of dedication, acting and thinking purely in terms of the needs of the office. He must concentrate on those alone and be free of external influences, interests, and ambitions. Forrestal at one point indicated that the Secretary of Defense should be nonpolitical in the partisan sense. Whether he has been a partisan figure at the time of his appointment to office really matters little except insofar as it may affect the respect in which he is held. But it is still possible for men to be partisan leaders and to command bipartisan respect. What is essential, however, is that he cease to act and think as a partisan when he takes office. The Secretaryship of Defense was the end of their public career for its first four incumbents. With Forrestal this was a matter of necessity; with Johnson a matter of circumstance; and with Marshall and Lovett a matter of choice. Nonetheless, the precedent has been established. The office of Secretary of Defense should be the end point not a stepping stone in a public career. Only if this tradition is maintained will it be possible for the Secretary to dedicate himself to his job with the single-minded concern which is essential for success.
Finally, the Secretary must be a man of policy. His greatest needs are breadth, wisdom, insight, and, above all, judgment. He is neither operator, administrator, nor commander. But he is policy maker. He must accept this arduous role with good cheer, and neither try to escape its duties nor abdicate its responsibilities. He does not need the dynamic drive, the organizing flair, the energetic ruthlessness of the forceful manager whether civilian or military. He does need the capacity to analyze, to discriminate, to evaluate, and to reconcile conflicting claims and interests. He should have his own ideas on policy, and he needs initiative. But he also requires patience and humility. Men who combine these characteristics are rare, but experience indicates that America is not without them.
* At the military service level, the Navy continued to maintain its balanced system of organization. The Army initially returned to the vertical general staff system, but the impact of the Cold War and particularly of the Korean War subsequently forced it to begin the high level segregation of the professional military and administrative-fiscal functions. The need, in the words of the Secretary of the Army, to “distinguish between activity which is primarily military . . . and activity which, although it is in support of military activity, partakes more of the industrial or commercial” characteristics led to the creation of a Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics with authority over all seven technical services. The Air Force, less involved in immediate Cold War military operations and more concerned with planning for total war, was organized along more strictly vertical lines. See Navy Organization Act of 1948, 62 Stat. 66; Robert H. Connery, The Navy and Industrial Mobilization in World War II (Princeton, 1951), chs. 19, 20; Dept, of the Navy, Office of the Management Engineer, The United States Navy: A Description of its Functional Organization(Washington, 1952); Reportof the Committee on Organization of the Department of the Navy, April 16, 1954 (Washington, 1954); Organization of the Army, Report of the Advisory Committee on Army Organization, December 18, 1953; Army Navy Air Force Journal, XCI (June 26, 1954), 1298, (July 3, 1954), 1335; Air Force Organization Act of 1951, 65 Stat. 326; H. Rept. 9, 82d Cong., 1st Sess. (1951); S. Rept. 426, 82d Cong., 1st Sess. (1951).
* The appropriate
role for the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force presents a major problem. Theoretically, they should be policy-strategists at a lower level than the Secretary of Defense. In actual practice, they have difficulty functioning in this capacity because they have no place in the central defense organization, while their military chiefs do have such a role through the JCS. The obvious solutions are either to divorce the Joint Chiefs from the services (suggested by Forrestal and Lovett) or to provide some means for the secretaries to participate in the central organization. Efforts to achieve the latter through the Joint Secretaries have not been particularly successful: the grounds for unity and the specificity of function which existed for the military chiefs were absent from the civilian side. The most satisfactory role for the service secretaries is probably to represent the principle of decentralization by serving as spokesmen for the military and civilian needs of their services.
* Legally, the Office of the Comptroller, the Joint Chiefs, the assistant secretaries of defense, and certain other units are all within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Since the significant issues, however, concern the relations among the components of the OSD, when I speak of the Secretary of Defense or the office of the Secretary I mean only the individual and his immediate staff.
* In Great Britain the Prime Minister was until 1946 ex officio chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Since then the Minister of Defense may, if he so desires, act as chairman. The system worked best, however, when the civilians stayed away from the Chiefs of Staff meetings. Churchill declared that it was his practice to leave the Chiefs “alone to do their own work, subject to my general supervision, suggestion and guidance.” He presided at only 44 of 462 meetings of the Chiefs in 1940 and 1941. Maurice Hankey, Government Control in War (Cambridge, 1945), pp. 55–56; H.C. Debates (5th Series), CCCLXXVIII (Feb. 24, 1942), 41–42; Central Organisation for Defence, Cmd. 6923, pp. 6, 9 (1946).
† It could be argued that the adjective “military” might describe either the persons of the advisers or the nature of their advice. Common usage has accepted the latter interpretation. Other provisions of the Act require the Chiefs to be military men, and the canons of statutory interpretation require that Congress never be considered guilty of redundancy if it can be avoided.
* It was reported that during the last two years of the Truman Administration the Joint Chiefs made 600 decisions relating to strategic planning; 500 on purely administrative matters; and 500 on issues combining administrative and military considerations. New York Times, Feb. 8, 1953, p. E5.
* During his four years as Chairman, General Bradley made 272 visits to the White House and attended 68 NSC meetings. In the first year of the Eisenhower Administration, the Chairman briefed the President weekly on the military situation. New York Times, Aug. 14, 1953, p. 2; Charles J. V. Murphy, “Eisenhower’s White House,” Fortune, XLVIII (July 1953), 176.
* Forrestal at times turned to ad hoc military groups such as the Advisory Committee on the 1950 budget and the Spaatz-Towers committee. He also consulted frequently with General Eisenhower after the latter went on inactive service and brought him back to Washington at the beginning of 1949 to serve as temporary chairman of the JCS. In the spring of 1948, the Army had blocked his efforts to get General Bradley made his principal military adviser. Forrestal’s use of General Gruenther in this capacity made difficult Gruenther’s relations with Admiral Leahy, presiding officer of the JCS.
* The Chief Staff Officer was the principal military assistant to the Minister and his link with the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The post was at various times filled by a lieutenant general, an Air Marshal, and a retired major general. The staff included twelve to twenty officers. On the civil side, the Permanent Secretary was aided by a deputy secretary, two under secretaries, and seven assistant secretaries. This staff enabled the Minister to play an independent and constructive role in the formulation of defense policy and the defense budget.
In the United States, Admiral Sherman, one of the drafters of the National Security Act, thought the Secretary should have a staff of fifteen to twenty-five military and civilian “$10,000 a year men.” Hearingsbefore Senate Committee on Armed Services on S. 758, 80th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 155 (1947). Lovett and Vannevar Bush urged a mixed civil-military staff. Generals Bradley and Collins and the 1949 Hoover Commission Task Force stressed the Secretary’s need for military advisers. New York Times, Jan. 10, 1953, p. 4, Apr. 21, 1953, p. 20; Commission on Organization, Task Force Report on National Security Organization (Appendix G, 1949), pp. 12–14, 56–57. Former Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter suggested a permanent under secretary of defense. Power and Policy (New York, 1954), pp. 281–283. The 1955 Hoover Commission proposed the creation in the OSD of “a civilian position invested with sufficient stature and authority to insure the establishment and maintenance of effective planning and review of military requirements.” Commission on Organization, Business Organization of the Department of Defense (June 1955), p. 19.
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Toward a New Equilibrium
THE REQUISITE FOR SECURITY
The tension between the demands of military security and the values of American liberalism can, in the long run, be relieved only by the weakening of the security threat or the weakening of liberalism. During the decade after World War II the immediate dangers to American security varied in intensity. At times, the United States moved close to total war, became involved in limited war, or lagged dangerously behind in the armaments race. At other times, the threats seemed to recede, the Soviets and their allies acquiesced in peaceful coexistence and apparently surrendered, at least temporarily, their ambitions to extend their sway. The United States oscillated between the December spirit of the Yalu and the July spirit of Geneva. Whatever the fluctuations in the international temperature, however, American involvement as a major participant in world politics remained an undeniable fact, and the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet states appeared a relatively permanent aspect of the international scene. Under these circumstances, the United States necessarily had to maintain military forces on a level far higher than that to which it was accustomed prior to 1940. Military considerations remained important in American foreign policy. Military men and institutions continued to wield significant influence and authority. These imperatives rendered impossible the restoration of the old balance of civil-military relations which had prevailed until World War II. On the other hand, the furtherance of national security required the maximizing of civilian control and military professionalism. The achievement of these ends was hampered by institutional and ideological obstacles. The institutional hindrances, however, were relatively secondary. The constitutional separation of powers was the only really significant institution complicating the achievement of civilian control and military professionalism. Aside from that, professional military institutions could be fitted without undue difficulty into the American political, economic, and social structure. Civilian institutions were preëminently liberal in character, but no necessary conflict existed between them and professional military institutions, so long as each was kept within its proper sphere. The real problem was the ideological one, the American attitude of mind which sought to impose liberal solutions in military affairs as well as in civil life. This tendency constituted the gravest domestic threat to American military security. So long as the Cold War continued, that security would depend upon the ability of the United States to evolve an intellectual climate more favorable to the existence of military professionalism and the achievement of objective civilian control.
CHANGES IN THE IDEOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT
While liberalism continued to dominate the American approach to civil-military relations in the postwar decade, some evidence also existed of the beginnings of a fundamental change which might herald the emergence of a new, more sympathetically conservative environment for military institutions. These beginnings by no means constituted a major revolution in the American intellectual cl
imate. But, if continued and enlarged upon, they would facilitate the establishment of a new equilibrium in civil-military relations compatible with the security demands of the Cold War. This undercurrent, after all, was not to be unexpected. The revolution in the American security position since the 1930’s could hardly fail to leave some imprint on the varied patterns of American thought.
The New Conservatism. The “new conservatives” were in some respects less conservative than they claimed to be. The views expressed in much of their writing came closer to a more sophisticated version of business liberalism than to a true conservatism. Nonetheless, the appearance of a reasonably articulate group of American intellectuals and writers eager to assume the title of “conservative” and to expound the virtues of Burke and Calhoun was in itself a noteworthy event in American intellectual history. Some of the publicists appeared to be rather self-consciously conservative, thereby giving the movement many of the characteristics of a passing intellectual fad. Other thinkers and authors, however, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, and Eric Voegelin, were, without embracing the conservative label, expressing fundamentally conservative values. No one, furthermore, could question Eliot’s popular literary preëminence in the postwar decade, and Niebuhr seemed to have some chance of being looked back upon by subsequent generations as the most significant American social thinker of the mid-century. The currents of the new conservatism, moreover, if they did not cut deep into the liberal waters, at least spread wide across the cultural surface. In education a mounting reaction developed against John Dewey’s progressivism. In religion, neo-orthodoxy, sparked by Niebuhr, represented the most vigorous element in American Protestantism; and significant conservative currents existed in Catholicism and Judaism. The revival of popular interest in religion was itself possibly a sign of changing times. In the social sciences, economists and political scientists abandoned the mood of the 1930’s and early 1940’s which had been highly critical of American political and economic institutions. New virtues were discovered in the old facts of American capitalism and the American Constitution. Writers such as Boorstin and Hartz analyzed the inherently conservative tone of American institutions and the fundamentally liberal character of American thought. Positing the need for an absolute moral code, Walter Lippmann expressed grave doubts as to the ability of unguided popular democracy to conduct public affairs. All these disparate developments hardly made up a coherent intellectual movement. Nonetheless, they were signs of a reexamination of American society and American values from a more conservative viewpoint. Their significance for civil-military relations was that in due course they might result in the widespread acceptance by Americans of values more like those of the military ethic. Present in virtually all the strands of the new conservatism were a stress on the limitations of man, an acceptance of institutions as they were, a critique of utopianism and “solutionism,” and a new respect for history and society as against progress and the individual. While having, perhaps, little immediate relevance to the achievement of objective civilian control and military professionalism, the broad currents of the new conservatism offered the greatest hope that these goals might be more fully realizable in the future.1
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