The secretary of defense could now establish new departmentwide agencies. The new agencies to a large degree replaced a host of interservice boards, abolished since the 1953 reform. The first order of reorganization—or “extended horizontal confederation”—stemmed the competition between strategic programs, an arena of intense interservice interest. The 1958 amendment of the National Security Act created a director of defense research and engineering, whose principal mission was to guide high-technology programs. The incumbent secretary, Thomas S. Gates, also established a new office, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to assume the lead in research on space-based missile defense and other futuristic projects. As intended, the reforms drove the service departments deeper into the slough of subordination, but the reorganization did not save money, either by dampening service budget requests or bringing greater rigor to weapons procurement and material management.
In the absence of ruthless secretarial action, the reforms did not produce greater consensus because there were too many defense problems and too little money. In 1960 Secretary Gates began to meet with the JCS on a weekly basis to give it more immediate guidance. The greater personal rapport helped dampen disagreements, but the JCS still produced split recommendations, which forced the secretary and the president to make decisions they sometimes would rather have avoided. In statistical terms the chiefs showed great harmony, since they agreed on 99 percent of their recommendations in 1955–1959, but the 1 percent they disagreed upon included every major functional question they faced. Reorganization could not mask the fact that the JCS—with the exception of its Air Force members—did not think the New Look answered the nation’s military problems.
The reform of defense decision-making did not, for example, simplify the dilemmas of matching forward, collective defense with the nuclearization of America’s armed forces. Nowhere were the problems more perplexing than in NATO. When the Eisenhower administration took office, it inherited the negotiations to rearm West Germany within the existing alliance system. French intransigence upon the issue of a German national military force killed the first formula, the European Defense Community. The negotiations did secure approval for an eventual German army of twelve divisions and 500,000 men. In late 1954 another change in French governments improved the chances for rearming West Germany, and in December 1954 the French National Assembly approved a revised plan that would allow the Germans a national military establishment within the existing NATO system. The Federal Republic of Germany received full control over its internal and external affairs, softening its new status by promising not to arm itself with nuclear weapons unless so ordered by NATO.
In 1955 West Germany began to organize the Bundeswehr. At the politico-strategic level, the Christian Democrat governments of the 1950s, dominated by Konrad Adenauer, wanted to ensure that rearmament did not endanger economic recovery, divide West Germany, or weaken NATO’s tie to the American nuclear deterrent. Adenauer had no desire to go beyond a twelve-division army, a position that made the conventional force goals of the Lisbon Agreement even less obtainable. The West Germans also insisted that Bundeswehr divisions occupy positions along the entire border so that no Russian attack could strike only German troops.
West Germany’s NATO debut coincided with the New Look’s new emphasis on substituting nuclear weapons for conventional ground forces, a policy accepted by NATO in late 1954. Directed by the NATO Council to plan for the early and first use of nuclear weapons against a Soviet invasion, NATO military planners found that the concept of nuclear war fighting carried heavy liabilities. A full-scale NATO war game in 1955 discovered that West Germany could not be saved without being destroyed. During Operation CARTE BLANCHE the war gamers “used” 335 nuclear weapons, 268 of which “landed” on Soviet forces in West Germany. While the nuclear counter-blitzkrieg stopped the Russians, it also caused more than 5 million civilian casualties. Nevertheless, NATO’s political leaders adopted a European version of the New Look in 1957 when they approved a military planning document (MC 14/2) that committed NATO to using nuclear weapons to meet any threat. They planned to make the NATO standing force of thirty divisions nuclear-capable. The same principle applied to NATO’s tactical aircraft. The NATO Council agreed to stockpile nuclear warheads in Europe (many of the delivery systems were already there), and before the end of the decade SACEUR had probably 7,000 nuclear weapons at his disposal.
The NATO New Look had the advantage of clearly extending American nuclear deterrence to Europe, since the United States would presumably bear the risks of escalation equally with its allies. The lowered level of NATO’s conventional forces, however, might invite attack, and they appeared more as “plate glass” and “tripwire” hostage forces than usable fighting units. In fact, the planned use of tactical nuclear weapons enhanced their initial vulnerability, since NATO planners accepted the West German border with East Germany as the principal line of defense despite its geographic liabilities. Such forward defense ensured that the tactical nuclear weapons would land on Soviet forces in East Germany but made it unlikely that NATO’s divisions in Germany could fight a prolonged conventional war, which required inspired maneuvering between the inner German border and the Rhine River.
The dilemmas of NATO strategy did not pass unnoticed in the United States and Europe, since a series of crises made it impossible not to examine NATO’s military options. In 1956 the East Germans and Hungarians staged abortive revolts against their Soviet occupiers and native Communist governments; in Hungary the fighting threatened to spill over the Austrian border. In 1958 the Russians again challenged the Allies’ right to occupy part of Berlin. Two SACEURs, Generals Alfred M. Gruenther and Lauris Norstad, raised the issue of NATO’s conventional readiness, which had been further limited by the reduction of the British army and the deployment of French divisions to Algeria. Influential West German politicians questioned the wisdom of relying upon tactical nuclear weapons. In the United States NATO’s nuclear strategy came under determined attack from academics like Henry Kissinger and Robert E. Osgood, two gurus of limited war theory, and from Army leaders like Generals James M. Gavin and Maxwell D. Taylor. After Secretary Dulles’s death in 1959, the State Department turned restive about massive retaliation and NATO policy. Instead of strengthening the alliance, the adoption of theater nuclear weapons created new political problems.
The difficulty of reconciling strategic nuclear deterrence with forward, collective defense did not ease when the New Look came to Asia. To contain Russia and Communist China, the Eisenhower administration created a network of alliances that would presumably protect America’s base system in the western Pacific and strengthen the conventional forces of its Asian allies. The administration quickly concluded bilateral treaties with two natural collaborators: The authoritarian, anti-Communist governments of South Korea (1953) and Taiwan (1955). Both agreements stated that each party recognized “that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties . . . would be dangerous to its own peace and safety” and pledged each party to act in common to meet the danger. Rearming Japan proved more difficult. Although the Japanese allowed their national police to become the Self-Defense Force, they would not assume the economic and political burden of providing anything but minimal air, naval, and ground forces of 231,000 men. Even more important, the Japanese government refused to assume any regional military leadership, and before it signed a comprehensive security treaty in 1960, it extracted a promise from the United States not to introduce nuclear weapons into Japan.
The broadened commitment to north Asia carried substantial risks, since both South Korea and Taiwan had no reluctance to host American nuclear forces or to do battle with their Communist neighbors. The wisdom of the treaties with South Korea and Taiwan came under criticism from outside the Eisenhower administration when the Chinese Communists and Nationalists conducted a small war against each other along the Chinese coast. Working from bases on the islands of Quemoy, Matsu, and the Pescadores, the Nationalist
s in 1953–1954 conducted naval raids against the mainland and infiltrated agents there. The Communists retaliated with threats of invasion and long-range artillery bombardments. While persuading Chiang Kai-shek to abandon his most indefensible islands and to curb his operations, the administration paid for its influence by increasing aid to Chiang and deploying part of the 7th Fleet in the Formosa Strait. It also placed aircraft and artillery with nuclear capability on Taiwan. Another Quemoy-Matsu crisis in 1958 produced a similar commitment. With border incident piling upon border incident along the DMZ, the defense of South Korea did not appear risk-free, even with the presence of American troops and tactical nuclear weapons. As with the Chinese Nationalists, the alliance with South Korea committed the United States to a situation in which either its enemies or its allies could force the political action, including military escalation.
The Eisenhower administration understood the risks in Asia, for it had faced its worst crisis in 1954 when the French military effort in Indochina collapsed. Examining his military options, including a nuclear strike against the Viet Minh army investing Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower found little taste for massive retaliation among his civilian and military advisers or NATO allies. Although Admiral Radford urged military action, Army Chief of Staff Matthew B. Ridgway feared that only a ground force commitment would halt the Viet Minh. Uncertain that air strikes alone would reverse the French defeat, Eisenhower encouraged the French to accept a negotiated settlement. At Geneva in July 1954, the French and the Vietnamese Communists agreed to the temporary partition of Vietnam and the independence of Laos and Cambodia. With the future of Vietnam still at stake, the administration hurried to repair the non-Communist position in Southeast Asia. While it extended assistance to South Vietnam and conducted covert action against the Communists, the administration patched together the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954). The only new allies were Pakistan and Thailand, for the United States already had treaties with Great Britain, France, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. The organization did not provide the same binding guarantees of collective military action that characterized NATO. A protocol to the treaty in September 1954 extended SEATO’s protection to Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, a provision in effect when the Senate approved the treaty (82 to 1) the following February.
The Middle East also received Dulles’s pact-making attention. Under American pressure and the promise of increased military assistance, the traditional regimes of Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan joined Turkey and Great Britain in the Baghdad Pact (1955). The principal rationale for the agreement was to deter Soviet military pressure against the unstable, oil-rich Middle East, where British influence was on the wane. The Eisenhower administration thought it could use surrogates, including Israel, to curb Russian influence and Arab nationalism, but it learned the following year that nuclear weapons, alliance politics, and oil did not mix well. When the radical president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized control of the Suez Canal, the British, French, and Israelis conspired to invade Egypt and retake the canal. Although the Israeli army and air force dealt the Egyptians a crushing defeat in the Sinai, the United States pressured its NATO allies to give up the expedition against the canal, even moving the 6th Fleet into position for military action. Part of Eisenhower’s concern came from indistinct noises from Moscow suggesting that the Russians would enter the Middle East cauldron, which raised the specter of a nuclear confrontation.
Dissatisfied with the role of the Baghdad Pact, Eisenhower and Dulles announced a new American commitment in 1957 to assist any Middle Eastern state threatened by aggression from any other state “controlled by international communism.” The President received sanction for the “Eisenhower Doctrine” from Congress, which approved his $200 million aid request. Outside the Baghdad Pact nations, only Lebanon and Israel approved the statement. In 1957–1958 the administration found its Middle East version of containment sorely tested. A group of radical army officers destroyed the Iraqi monarchy, and other pan-Arabist radicals with Syrian and Egyptian assistance menaced the Jordanian monarchy and the fragile communal government in Lebanon. The Eisenhower administration saw the Soviets’ fine hand in the upheaval, since the Russians had extended military assistance to Egypt and Syria. Although American financial aid and British troops stabilized King Hussein’s regime in Jordan, the situation in Lebanon deteriorated into civil war. In order to prevent a coup and arrange a negotiated settlement, Eisenhower occupied Beirut with 15,000 American troops in July 1958. Once again nuclear deterrence had proved largely irrelevant to regional rivalries and American interests. And military assistance alone ($4.3 billion to the Middle East in 1950–1963) did not fully substitute for an American military presence.
The anti-Communist situation in Latin America in the 1950s deteriorated despite American nuclear power. When military dictatorships collapsed in Colombia and Venezuela, the Communists did not immediately profit, but they joined other radicals to keep rural insurrection and terrorism alive. In Cuba the adherents of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara orchestrated their rhetorical and military attacks with an urban guerrilla movement not under their control. The combined internal pressure, coupled with the suspension of American military assistance, sent Fulgencio Batista into exile in January 1959. During the next year Castro turned his revolutionary government toward the Soviet Union, thus galvanizing the Eisenhower administration to impose economic sanctions and to order the CIA to mount an invasion by anti-Castro exiles. Castro’s success on America’s doorstep made massive retaliation appear bankrupt as a deterrent to Communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere.
Its foreign policy crises did not force the Eisenhower administration to change the New Look, for the president held fast to his de facto ceiling on defense spending. In the face of an economic recession, cascading foreign problems, unbalanced budgets, a restive Congress, uncontrollable increases in domestic spending, and upward pressures upon the defense budget, Eisenhower increased his pressure on the services’ priority programs during his second administration. The Navy lost the money for its second nuclear carrier, and its new shipbuilding program met only two-thirds of its estimates. The favored Air Force saved its 137-wing program—the force goals of the 1950s—but received funding only by reducing its manpower. The emphasis on SAC reduced the number of wings in the Tactical Air Command, Air Defense Command, and Military Air Transport Command. The Army and the Marine Corps lost manpower and programs for increased firepower and mobility.
The Eisenhower administration argued that a robust reserve program would meet any likely conventional war contingency and at a more bearable cost, since ten reservists cost roughly the same as one full-time serviceman. Quite properly, the Defense Department focused on the readiness of reserve units and found them undermanned. Although the legislation of 1952 provided a reserve force of 2.5 million, only 700,000 reservists trained with units. The administration proposed a reserve draft and the involuntary assignment of veterans to the National Guard, but Congress instead tried its hand at reserve reform. In the Reserve Forces Act of 1955 Congress raised the reserve ceiling to 2.9 million and liberalized the road into the reserves. Men could enlist directly into the services’ reserve components provided they then spent two years on active duty and returned to a reserve unit for three years’ training. Others could enlist directly into a unit, spend three to six months on active duty, and then serve out the rest of an eight-year obligation in a unit. The Army extended the requirement for initial active-duty training to the National Guard in 1957. Although the draft had limited influence, the new program worked, for by 1960 the number of drill-pay reservists had climbed to nearly a million.
Depending upon reserves did not give the Army a “New Look,” for the Army and the Marine Corps sought greater battlefield mobility and firepower for their reduced numbers of fighting men. The anticipated demands of the nuclear battlefield made dispersion and mobility essential. By modernizing its armored divisions and mounting its infantry in armored personnel carri
ers, the Army found one solution. Another came from adopting troop-carrying helicopters. Within the Army and Marine Corps aviation establishments, fixed-wing pilots held sway, so the helo pioneers fought against the weight of institutional inertia. Using helos to ferry troops did not cause any great controversy except in the battles for developmental money. The Marine Corps reorganized its infantry battalions for helo transportability after 1956, and the Army had twelve helo battalions by 1960.
The helo advocates also saw the helicopter’s potential as a close fire support weapon, especially as a tank killer. In the Marine Corps fixed-wing aviators saw no reason to substitute helos for the close air support planes already available and halted gunship development. In the Army, however, the helo enthusiasts convinced their patrons that the Air Force would not give the transport helos adequate support, and by the mid-1950s the Army’s infantry and aviation training centers had created “sky cavalry” helo units. Reassured by a 1956 decision by the office of the secretary of defense that the Army would not develop fixed-wing transports and attack aircraft, the Air Force did not press the doctrinal issue. In 1960 the Army Staff convened a high-level board to review aviation doctrine and organization, and the board reported that the Army should make a major test of the concept of helicopter vertical assaults, complete with gunships. Both the Marine Corps and Army pressed their budget requests for helo development with growing certainty that air-mobile units would be the spearhead of the nation’s conventional forces.
The foreign policy crises of the 1950s and the armed services’ internal development produced a wave of intellectual interest in the concept of limited war. At first the analysts’ concern centered on the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but by the end of the decade the central policy proposals, exemplified by General Maxwell D. Taylor’s The Uncertain Trumpet (1960) and Robert Osgood’s Limited War (1957), addressed the problem of conventional combat readiness. In theory the United States could best avoid any level of nuclear confrontation only by improving its ability to employ nonnuclear air-ground combat forces whenever the Communists invaded an allied country. Adopted with escalating enthusiasm by journalists and political pundits, the strategic rage of 1960 became “flexible response.”
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