“Flexible Response”
Safely in the White House, John F. Kennedy argued that he would junk the New Look and bring new rationality and efficiency to American defense policy. Military reform had been a major theme of Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign against Richard M. Nixon, for he insisted that containment needed more vigorous, innovative application. The new administration adopted the concept of flexible response as the foundation of its defense policy, which meant that the United States would meet Communist military threats with an appropriate level of matching force. Victory would be a return to geopolitical stability without an escalation to nuclear war. Obscured by his personal charm, ironic humor, and intellectual curiosity, Kennedy’s character had a strong streak of romantic liberalism that focused his interest on the nonwhite developing nations. His missionary impulse strengthened the administration’s belief that nuclear deterrence and the complementary balance of power between NATO and the Warsaw Pact had driven the military competition to different techniques and different places. The most likely challenge would be a “people’s war” or rural-based leftist revolution. Such Communist insurgencies would probably occur in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Kennedy did not undervalue NATO, but he thought the great conflicts of the future, stimulated by the growing Russian-Chinese schism, would come outside Europe.
The president’s personal and political liabilities also shaped flexible response. Republican attacks upon his inexperience, his inherited wealth, his Catholicism, and his opportunism did not end with the 1960 election. Rather than risk the charge that he was inclined to appease Communism, which he did indeed see in less alarmist terms than Nixon, Kennedy embraced containment with zeal. Kennedy’s optimistic assessment of the American economy reinforced his commitment to flexible response. Kennedy’s economic advisers believed the nation could safely spend $50 billion for defense without spurring inflation or producing other economic ills. In fact, the administration believed that increased defense spending, matched with a tax cut, would spur a sluggish economy by placing government funds in the one activity where some public consensus existed: national defense. Increased defense spending might also legitimize the “New Frontier” among domestic conservatives.
The Kennedy administration concluded that it could sell accelerated military modernization by bringing more centralization and civilianization to defense decision-making. A Senate investigation of national security decision-making, led by Henry M. Jackson, urged greater curbs on interservice rivalry. A postelection study by another Democratic expert on defense, Senator Stuart Symington, also urged more centralized defense management. Tutored by retired generals James M. Gavin and Maxwell D. Taylor, the president believed the service departments, abetted by the JCS, had become the major barrier to efficient defense program development. The civilians who staffed the national security agencies of the New Frontier shared similar views. Drawn from eastern universities, foundations, banks, and law offices or recruited from western laboratories and the RAND Corporation, the “defense intellectuals” believed they could engineer an organizational revolution within the executive branch.
The Department of Defense became both the target and instrument of reform. Encouraged by his advisers to bring new dynamism to the Pentagon, Kennedy recruited the maverick president of the Ford Motor Company, Robert S. McNamara, to be secretary of defense. A self-made millionaire and moderate on domestic issues, McNamara did not fit the same mold as his New Look predecessors, for he had developed an interest in world affairs uncommon in corporation executives. His team in the office of the secretary of defense (OSD) reflected his high confidence in civilianized, centralized defense decision-making. Roswell Gilpatric, Cyrus Vance, William Bundy, and Paul Nitze represented the tradition of policy activism and internationalism established by their patrons, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett; Harold Brown, recruited from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, headed a team of scientist-engineers critical of service research and development; Charles J. Hitch, William W. Kaufmann, and Alain C. Enthoven came from the RAND Corporation, prepared to apply their skills as economic analysts. Drawing upon his experiences as an Army Air Forces management expert in World War II, honed by fifteen years with Ford, McNamara forged a formidable OSD team, admired by their champions as true “defense intellectuals” and disparaged by their critics as “whiz kids.” Forceful, articulate, and persuasive, McNamara quickly became a favorite adviser at the White House and the principal designer of flexible response.
Assured of Kennedy’s full support, McNamara applied a range of decision-making reforms. He changed the budget process by demanding that the services adopt the planning-programming-budgeting system (PPBS), newly popularized by eastern business management schools. McNamara demanded that defense budgets be organized by functions like strategic deterrence rather than “inputs” like manpower procurement. With costs estimated over five years rather than one, he developed a Five Year Defense Plan that linked defense spending with missions—strategic forces, general-purpose forces, strategic air and sea mobility forces, and lesser categories that spanned service lines. By recasting the budget process, McNamara made it far easier for his analysts to apply systems analysis, a highly quantified technique of investigating “cost effectiveness,” or the predicted increase in military capability for different levels of investment.
Systems analysis allowed Hitch, Brown, Enthoven, and their colleagues to compare (at least on a cost basis) the relative value of weapons programs that performed the same or similar missions. Moreover, the process forced the services to investigate the full financial implications of their programs by stressing systemwide costs (manning, maintenance, modification, basing) over a weapon’s full lifetime, which might reach twenty years into the future. Applied with messianic energy by a new office, the assistant secretary of defense (systems analysis), the new technique found many applications. It became a marvelous tool for dismissing service requests and nonquantifiable professional military judgments. It supported the application of “commonality” as an efficiency tool, which justified the creation of new agencies like the Defense Intelligence Agency (1961) and the Defense Supply Agency (1961); the development of a fighter plane like the TFX for both Air Force and Navy use; and the adoption of all-service field uniforms and combat boots. Matching systems analysis with other social science techniques like game theory, OSD could even sortie into the arena of strategic doctrine.
McNamara’s “revolution” in the Pentagon gave flexible response a life that outlived Kennedy, for it brought such disarray to the armed forces and Congress that it took another war and a decade of learning and political infighting to devalue its assumptions. The very success of PPBS and systems analysis as defense management techniques—a success dependent on presidential support and congressional confusion—extended the power of its practitioners from the development of military forces to the employment of those forces. In practice, OSD, in collaboration with the NSC staff, challenged the State Department as the primary agency in determining American policy whenever that policy appeared to have military significance. For almost a decade, the most powerful knights of “Camelot” were the civilians and military officers who marched under McNamara’s banner.
McNamara focused on improving the nation’s strategic nuclear forces, which meant maintaining a survivable second-strike capability. The secretary quickly learned the facts of life about nuclear strategy, but he found no easy way to bring either strategic or economic rationality to force planning. Between 1961 and 1966, OSD conducted a series of sophisticated, highly quantified studies of strategic deterrence, including gaming the nuclear wars that might occur should deterrence fail. Presented with service programs on one hand and esoteric calculations on the other, McNamara tried to find a solution to force planning that satisfied his thirst for reason. He found none. At first he thought that the United States should stress its ability to attack Soviet strategic forces and other military targets. As the secretary explained in his Ann A
rbor speech of June 1962, a “no cities” doctrine ensured deterrence and provided damage limitation and escalation control if war came. Once the secretary examined the implications of his counterforce strategy, he retreated from it. The numbers did not provide economic or strategic reassurance: If the United States planned to retaliate against remaining Soviet forces after the Soviets had struck first at U.S. strategic forces, the requirements for delivery vehicles became astronomical—and potentially threatening to the U.S.S.R. as an American first-strike force. As McNamara pointed out to the Air Force, “Damn it, if you keep talking about ten thousand missiles, you are talking about preemptive attack.” If the United States developed such a force, it might frighten the Soviets into beginning the very war both sides sought to avoid.
McNamara moved back toward finite deterrence targeting of the New Look era, a movement that irritated military planners and carried with it the political risk of admitting massive retaliation was not so silly after all. McNamara understood that maintaining a survivable deterrent was a more complicated matter than it had been before the Soviets began to deploy ICBMs. He tried to find an acceptable force structure that would provide “assured destruction” under the worst possible assumptions and include a limited counterforce capability. For planning purposes he directed that American forces be capable of destroying 25 percent of the Soviet population and 50 percent of Soviet industry; he later admitted that U.S. forces could have destroyed 50 percent of the Russian population and 80 percent of Soviet industry in the late 1960s. But who knew what level of threatened destruction deterred the Russians or whether it influenced them at all?
With such questions unanswered, McNamara accepted a force three times larger in delivery vehicles than the Eisenhower program projected for the 1960s. Nevertheless his program did not meet military requests, which remained wedded to the war-fighting assumptions of the SIOP. By the end of 1963, the McNamara strategic program was largely in place. The ICBM force would increase to around 1,000, a happy medium between the New Look’s 600 and the 1,450 to 2,000 missiles the Air Force wanted. The heart of the force would be the solid-fueled Minuteman in two new models. The submarine force would jump from twenty-nine to forty-one boats, carrying 656 missiles. The manned bomber force could be reduced from its high of 1,500 toward a more capable force half as large.
McNamara’s analysis of assured destruction requirements, measured in part against predictions of Soviet ICBM programs through the 1960s, reinforced the secretary’s conviction that the Russians would someday reach nuclear parity. It was not a conclusion that made force planning easier or that enhanced Kennedy’s political future. McNamara redirected strategic force planning by checking the Air Force’s bomber program; he canceled both the B-70 supersonic, high-altitude bomber and the “Skybolt” bomber-carried missile. By increasing warhead accuracy, the United States might reduce warhead yield, a development that would allow more warheads to be placed on the future generations of missiles installed in silos and submarines. Shortly after McNamara capped the growth of delivery vehicles (1963–1964), he approved the development of multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) as the next hedge against a Soviet first strike. McNamara favored the strategic triad of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers, for his studies suggested that such a mixed force defied a disarming first strike and assured the ultimate deterrent of counter-city retaliation. Despite his critics’ argument that “assured destruction” was only “massive retaliation” repackaged, the McNamara program, which now included substantial counterforce potential, surged forward to completion by 1967.
McNamara rejected the options of active and passive defense against Soviet missile attack, for the secretary believed that strategy, economics, and public ignorance made defense pointless. Although OSD improved the bomber defense system and supported major improvements in satellite and ground radar surveillance, McNamara beat back service-sponsored antiballistic missile (ABM) programs until Congress and President Lyndon Johnson forced him to accept a minimal commitment to ABM in 1967. McNamara never argued that the Army could not hit an incoming warhead, only that the Russians could overwhelm either a point defense or area defense system with a minimal increase of warhead numbers. McNamara applied similar logic to the protection of urban Americans from the effects of nuclear weapons. In the technical sense the availability of fallout shelters would no doubt save lives if war came. Such public shelters, however, would cost around $40 billion, the same loose estimate as for the ABM system. McNamara’s strategic advisers also feared that civil defense systems might lead the Russians to conclude that the Americans believed they could wage nuclear war and survive. When public hysteria greeted a minimal government shelter program in 1961–1962, McNamara found an additional excuse to rely on assured destruction.
The Kennedy administration also had to face the unpleasant reality that no easy technical solution would eliminate the risk of nuclear war. Kennedy adopted Eisenhower’s negotiations for arms control, especially to limit nuclear testing, for the medical effects of radioactivity in the atmosphere had created a public constituency for a test ban. At the same time the United States and Soviet Union shared the conclusion that limiting nuclear testing would impede other nations from going nuclear. In October 1963 the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to conduct nuclear tests only underground. The signatories of the Limited Test Ban Treaty then extended it to other nations to sign. For the first time in the nuclear age, arms control had become an important element in American national security policy.
The puzzles of nuclear deterrence reinforced Kennedy’s commitment to improve the nation’s general-purpose forces. At the center of flexible response theory was the assumption that deterring and fighting with non-nuclear forces would reduce the likelihood of nuclear escalation. Accepting these arguments with enthusiasm, McNamara argued that the United States needed a “two and a half war” conventional force capability that would allow it to mount a successful defense of north Asia, Europe, and any insurgency-threatened state within its alliance system. Although the United States did not reach this level of readiness, the administration increased the size of the armed forces by 250,000 men and spent 80 percent of its added defense funds (around $10 billion a year) on conventional forces.
Flexible response came to NATO with mixed results because it represented mixed goals. First, McNamara’s experts scrutinized the Soviet armed forces with economic analysis as well as traditional order-of-battle studies and concluded that the real Soviet threat was forty-six divisions, not the force double that size estimated by New Look planners. Conventional defense appeared to be a real option. Under American initiative NATO forces in central Europe increased from twenty-one to twenty-seven divisions and from 3,000 to 3,500 aircraft; weapons modernization continued apace to give the alliance more fighting power. In 1963 NATO’s annual exercises included troops flown to Germany from the United States; the Army then accelerated a plan to preposition weapons, vehicles, and supplies in Europe for the reinforcing troops. The issue of NATO nuclear weapons and the larger question of the reliability of American strategic deterrence, however, brought disarray to the alliance. The flexible response strategy, officially approved in memorandum MC 14/3 by NATO’s defense planners in 1967, suggested that the United States might not risk nuclear war for Western Europe. Ironically, at the very time NATO developed both the forces and strategy that might have reduced its dependence on tactical nuclear weapons, another major change in the alliance resurrected the prospect of early nuclear escalation.
Even before the adoption of MC 14/3 the Kennedy administration did all it could to reassure NATO’s leaders that flexible response did not mean abandonment, but it sent other conflicting signals. In 1962 the United States canceled an expensive air-launched missile program that would have modernized Britain’s strategic bomber force. The United States also held fast to its decision not to assist the French nuclear weapons program. President de Gaulle had domestic reasons for going forward with the
force de frappe, but his grand design to reduce Anglo-American influence in Europe and to complicate Russian calculations shaped French policy. French nuclear theorists disagreed with McNamara that a French nuclear capability threatened the stability of deterrence. The French insisted instead that their force filled a credibility gap created by flexible response. To reinforce French military independence, de Gaulle announced in 1966 that France would leave NATO’s integrated military organization. This decision deprived the alliance of geographic depth for its logistical system and closed French air bases to NATO aircraft. The French partial defection from NATO showed the Soviet Union that the alliance might have internal defects that could be exploited by clever diplomacy, and it also made West Germany the critical continental member of the alliance, binding NATO to Germany’s demands for forward defense and the early introduction of nuclear weapons.
The essence of flexible response strategy appeared in McNamara’s drive to improve the armed forces’ ability to move and fight without nuclear weapons. Although he doubted the wisdom of building nuclear-powered carriers, he allowed the Navy to modernize naval aviation and maintain a twenty-four carrier force. He approved an amphibious force building program that would allow the Marine Corps to deploy two full division-wing teams. The secretary pressed the Army to develop field forces with greater firepower and mobility. Although the Army added two divisions, its major reforms were structural. In one developmental path, the Army reorganized its armored and mechanized infantry divisions to resemble the German Panzer forces of World War II in flexible structure and tactical concepts. The other developmental path brought Army aviation programs to the highest priority. In 1962 McNamara made two important decisions that opened the air mobility age. He created Strike Command, a joint Army–Air Force organization that joined the Army’s most mobile forces (the two airborne divisions) with the Tactical Air Command and Military Airlift Command. The secretary approved major expansions in TAC and MAC, especially the procurement of large strategic transports. He also threw his weight behind an internal Army study of tactical air mobility that recommended the formation of an entire air assault division. This division would not only carry infantrymen into battle, but include “air cavalry” forces of armed helicopters that could attack the enemy independent of ground action. In addition, the Army extended greater helicopter capability to all its divisions. At the same time, it curbed its fixed-wing programs in order to dampen Air Force concern that the Army would soon provide all its own close air support.
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