For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  The SALT II negotiations proceeded alongside an internal review of American nuclear strategy that produced force structure changes that were controversial but eventually strengthened the American negotiating position. Barely in office, Carter ordered a study that produced Presidential Review Memorandum 10 (June 1977), which then took on another half-life in studies of targeting and strategy that ended with the president’s endorsement of Presidential Directive 59 two years later. PD 59 found America’s strategic forces adequate but ripe for improvement. The concept of a countervalue, minimal deterrent position seemed less acceptable, since the Soviets might soon put at risk the American ICBM force and all land-based command and control installations. Carter wanted more emphasis on a “countervailing strategy” that would allow the United States to fight a nuclear war at various levels of intensity with greater flexibility in adding and omitting targets from the SIOP. Eventually, SIOP 6, the actual nuclear war plan, contained major, selective, limited, and regional targeting options; from 4,100 targets in 1960 the possible target list climbed to over 50,000. The nuclear planners (hardly a unified community) tended to believe that such a robust posture would strengthen deterrence in a crisis and encourage the Soviets to negotiate. Others thought force improvements served less peaceful purposes. In any event, PD 59 suggested that the United States desperately needed more deliverable warheads: MIRVs on ICBMs, MIRVs on SLBMs, cruise missiles launched from air, sea, and ground platforms, and bomber-carried short-range attack missiles and bombs.

  The burden of the counterforce role fell upon the Air Force’s MX ICBM, a 95-ton missile capable of carrying ten MIRVed warheads. ICBM vulnerability and SALT II dictated that the Air Force design a mobile system whose numbers could be verified by the Soviets but whose location could not be determined for targeting. The result was a plan to shuttle 200 MXs among 4,600 different launching positions built on public lands in the western United States. Technically the solution had merit, but its cost and political liabilities made it vulnerable. In the meantime, the Navy pressed ahead with the Ohio-class submarine capable of firing twenty-four MIRVed Trident missiles, while the Air Force worked on an air-launched cruise missile for its aging B-52 bomber force. Neither of the latter programs, however, promised to enlarge counterforce capability until late in the 1990s.

  The Carter administration also embraced its predecessors’ emphasis on NATO, but its own internal confusions and the influences of recession, inflation, and budget deficits restricted its initiatives. Carter’s first efforts at alliance leadership produced a significant victory, for in 1978 the NATO leaders pledged their nations to a Long Term Defense Program that would increase each ally’s real defense spending by 3 percent a year. For the United States the emphasis upon NATO drove conventional force modernization and provided some advantage to Army programs like the M-1 tank, the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, a new family of mechanized air-defense vehicles, new attack and transport helicopters, and advanced artillery and rocket systems capable of using precision-guided munitions. The administration also showed considerable energy in pursuing integrated interallied efforts for the interoperability, standardization, and rationalization of NATO’s forces and defense investments, but it accepted a concept of NATO defense that assumed a European war would last no longer than thirty days. Therefore it emphasized stockpiling munitions and equipment for only the six active Army divisions that it thought might fight in Europe in a crisis.

  The Soviet deployment of a new mobile, MIRVed theater nuclear missile, the SS-20, forced the alliance to assess its own nuclear posture in Europe. The Carter administration’s first sortie into tactical and theater nuclear matters did not go well. In 1978 the administration approved the final development and deployment of a reduced-blast, enhanced-radiation warhead for American artillery. The “neutron bomb,” which was designed to cripple Russian tank formations while limiting blast-caused civilian casualties in West Germany, produced a political controversy that convinced Carter to defer the program just as the Allies accepted it. Embarrassed by its mishandling of the neutron bomb affair, the administration responded enthusiastically to the suggestion of West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt that NATO meet the challenge of the SS-20 by deploying its own new theater nuclear weapons. After complicated negotiations, the alliance in December 1979 agreed to a “two-track” policy to pursue a European nuclear-weapons pact with Russia while deploying two new mobile theater nuclear weapons, the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile and the ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM). The 108 Pershing IIs would go into positions in West Germany, while the 464 GLCMs would be emplaced in Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The two-track decision concerned the Russians; it also provided a new sense of purpose and alarm within the European peace movement, an alliance of people frightened of a nuclear Europe, religious pacifists, antinuclear romantics, and anti-American appeasers. Although the peace movement did not force abandonment of the plan, it did nothing to encourage the Soviets to negotiate a regional arms control agreement.

  Carter’s conversion in 1979 to a more ambitious defense policy stemmed from developments outside Europe. Initially Carter believed that his policy of regional accommodation, human rights advocacy, and military restraint had improved America’s relations with the developing world. In the Western Hemisphere the administration signed a treaty with Panama that promised to end American domination of the Canal Zone and the canal itself by the end of the century, allowed the Sandinista rebels to topple the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and applied sanctions against the authoritarian regimes of Brazil and Argentina. Finding the regime of South Korean President Park Chung-hee politically distasteful, the administration began to withdraw the one American division in South Korea. It ended the thirty-year-old U.S. alliance with Taiwan and formally recognized the People’s Republic of China. In Africa it sympathized with a negotiated settlement that brought black rule to Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) and pressured South Africa to end its support for a white regime in South-West Africa (now Namibia). Along the southern rim of Eurasia the administration either did not act or moved with indecision and tardiness. Smarting from sanctions against its nuclear program, Pakistan flatly rejected offers of conventional military assistance. A revolution in Iran moved toward Islamic extremism in 1979 when the Carter administration first withdrew its support from the Shah and then failed to find a moderate alternative to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The seizure of American embassy personnel in Tehran and the abortive attempt to rescue them in April 1980 only dramatized the apparent American impotence.

  In response to these setbacks the Carter administration first asserted that it would continue its minimalist defense policy and noninterventionism, but as early as 1978 the president began to make statements implying that his benign view of the world might be flawed. He first slowed and then canceled the troop withdrawal from Korea after both Japan and China questioned the wisdom of the plan. He then committed American troops to police the Sinai peninsula when the Camp David Accords of 1978 brought a separate peace between Egypt and Israel; to support the continuation of the peace process, Carter approved massive military and economic aid programs to both nations as well as tacit American military support. The administration, appalled by the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran (November 1979) and the Russian intervention in Afghanistan (December 1979), announced that it now viewed the Russians as perfidious betrayers of détente. In fact, the administration was overtaken by public opinion, which had shifted to a more hostile view of Soviet intentions and a more positive view of increased defense spending. At the end of 1979 Carter finally submitted budget requests that represented real increases in military spending. Most of the increases were targeted at a specific problem, the increased American commitment to the Persian Gulf region.

  In its last year in office, the Carter administration initiated a crash program to improve its search for two Middle Eastern goals: An end to the Israeli-Arab wars and a remedy for Iran’s collapse as the p
oliceman of the Persian Gulf. Both goals had a common theme: To prevent an increase of Russian influence in the region. As the “Carter Doctrine” announced in January 1980, the United States would not accept Soviet-supported revolutionary change in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. Arms assistance to Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia increased, but the administration did not depend upon surrogates alone. Instead it announced the creation of a new headquarters, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), which had authority to call upon more than 200,000 troops from all the services for Persian Gulf contingencies. Obtaining rights to the Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean, it developed the base into a major air installation and anchorage for seventeen preloaded merchant ships designed to support the initial commitment of RDJTF units. In addition, the administration sought additional base access in Egypt, Kenya, Somalia, and Oman. Equally symbolic of its new attitude toward the Soviet Union and its late response to public opinion, the administration withdrew the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration, but it pledged to respect the treaty’s limitations as long as the Russians did too. Nevertheless, the eleventh-hour return of the Carter presidency to traditional pre-Vietnam defense concerns did not save it from a stunning rejection by the voters in November 1980.

  The Reagan Rearmament

  Although he had served in the Army Air Forces of World War II, for which he made training films, Ronald Reagan, former governor of California and the darling of Republican conservatives, had no special insight into America’s defense problems. Instead, he had a deep intuition that the world respected military force and that the American people wanted an assertive foreign policy. His sweeping electoral victory over an incumbent Democratic president gave him—at least as he saw it—a mandate to rearm the armed forces. He entrusted this task to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, a World War II veteran from the staff of Douglas MacArthur and an experienced government manager from service in Washington and Sacramento. Weinberger became the Pentagon’s chief cheerleader, a foreign-policy activist who rivaled Reagan’s two secretaries of state, and a dogged foe of any congressional attempt to challenge the administration’s defense budgets. His principal allies (although not always consensual ones) for defense spending were Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy) Richard Perle. Weinberger’s influence grew in part because he faced no dominating national security adviser in the White House, where Reagan used five men of modest talents and political skill until he appointed his sixth, General Colin L. Powell.

  The Reagan administration based its defense planning on the most demanding criterion: Preparedness for a sustained nuclear or nonnuclear war with the Soviet Union and its allies. Since the Russians could exercise military power on a global scale, the United States must be prepared to be equally capable, with a special emphasis on naval and air forces. At a minimum, as Weinberger stated, the United States had to defend its interests in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, and north Asia, and “ . . . our long-range aim is to be capable of defending all theaters simultaneously.” As stated in National Security Decision Document (NSDD) 238 (1981), the United States needed far more military capability outside of the NATO central front. As refined in NSDD 32 (1981), the strategic approach included greater reliance on Allied participation and military assistance, more conventional-force investments and forward deployments, and the addition of Latin America as a crisis region. The president also called for active support of anti-Communist insurgencies wherever they could be found. For example, the “Reagan Doctrine” declared support for the anti-Sandinista guerrillas (contras) waging war in and around Nicaragua; for the Afghan mujahideen tribesmen then killing Russians and Afghan Communist troops; and for four other insurgencies. Reagan had nothing less in mind than a fusion of Ike’s rollback and New Look with JFK’s flexible response.

  Reagan understood that his strategic grand design required grand budgets. Communicating his proposals with a relaxed, jocular militancy that soothed his constituents and frightened the rest of the world, the president proposed and Congress accepted—without major alteration—six years (fiscal years 1980–1985) of increased defense spending, the longest sustained peacetime investment in the armed forces in the twentieth century. The annual increases averaged 7.8 percent. The authorizations in this honeymoon represented a 56 percent increase over Carter’s last defense budget, itself an increase over the previous year. Although computations of defense spending are often exercises in creative accounting, the Reagan administration probably spent about $2.4 trillion on the armed forces, of which an estimated $536 billion represented its own increases over the previously projected or estimated budget trends of the decade. Its largest single-year budget (1985) was $296 billion.16 In investment terms, the largest increases went into force modernization, improved readiness through maintenance and training, and increased military pay and allowances. The structure and personnel levels of the armed forces changed little. Most of the seventy-four ships added to the fleet by 1987 came from keels laid under earlier authorizations, but John Lehman launched them with claims that they were the first addition to his 600-ship navy. Not until 1986 did Congress force a cut in Reagan’s string of growth budgets, and even then the outlays of previous defense budgets keep annual defense spending close to $300 billion a year.

  The Reagan administration placed the military competition with the Soviet Union at the center of its strategic vision and as the rationale for its defense buildup. The administration benefited by signs of the impending fall of the Soviet Union, forecast by a succession crisis when Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982. Two more Soviet presidents died in office before Mikhail Gorbachev took power in March 1985. Another sign of the times was the declaration of a martial-law government under General Wojciech Jaruzelski in rebellious Poland in December 1981. Under the “Brezhnev Doctrine” the Red Army itself should have cowed the Poles, but Moscow, stunned by protests from the United States, Western Europe, and Pope John Paul II, stayed its hand. The lesson did not go unnoticed throughout the Warsaw Pact. Nevertheless, on the surface the Soviet Union, whose own defense budget appeared to be growing each year, had not surrendered its momentum in the arms-modernization competition. The Reagan administration believed that only military strength and the will to use it would prove the crucial instruments of global and regional efforts to stop Soviet expansionism. To stabilize strategic deterrence—its short-term goal—the administration accelerated the SSBN and cruise missile programs and revived the B-l bomber. The MX ICBM was a knottier problem. The new administration wanted the new missile, but the Carter basing plan was strongly opposed by Reagan’s political allies. Advised by a presidential commission, Reagan eventually decided to deploy 100 MX ICBMs in existing fixed silos, thereby acknowledging congressional dismay at all the mobile basing schemes being investigated by the Air Force. Reagan’s cautious approach to arms control negotiations with the Soviets suggested that the anti-Communist hardliners in the Defense Department had control of strategic policy; yet the administration also extended the commitment to live within the SALT II restrictions.

  The issue of strategic defense proved to be the linkage between accelerated nuclear deterrent programs and continued arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. Reagan himself found the idea of protecting American cities emotionally appealing and politically congenial, but his advisers thought in more limited terms, using strategic defense either as a SALT bargaining chip or as a more limited point defense system for American missile, submarine, and bomber bases. Although the ABM Treaty seemed to outlaw strategic defense in the name of mutual assured destruction, Reagan ordered the Joint Chiefs to give the matter more attention. He embraced a phrase from a JCS briefing: “Wouldn’t it be better to protect the American people than avenge them?” In a major speech in March 1983 he announced his “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or SDI, a major program for defense against Soviet ballistic missiles. Reflecting a popular movie of the time, the program bec
ame “Star Wars,” even though its space-based elements were far from intergalactic. Nevertheless, the Pentagon established a Strategic Defense Initiative Office with its own budget, tripled to $3.1 billion by 1986, and authority over the separate ABM military programs then in existence. These programs investigated the application of nuclear, laser, and kinetic energy systems against missiles as well as the requirements for acquiring targets in the various stages of missile flight.

  Although it gave the rhetorical “back of the hand” to its domestic critics, who favored a nuclear freeze, the Reagan administration continued strategic weapons negotiations with the Russians and labeled its own program the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). Its first proposals clearly showed just who would be reducing—the Soviet Union. A “deep cuts” initiative in 1982 proposed that each side settle for 850 ICBMs and SLBMs limited to 5,000 warheads, a formula that would have eliminated 3,670 Russian ICBM warheads but not one American warhead. The Russians wanted something in return, of course, and that “something” was a limitation on cruise missiles and SDI. The United States then focused on another program, Soviet vehicle and rail-based mobile missiles. The Russians argued that American SLBMs in the Ohio-class submarine and D-5 missile programs would soon give the United States an invulnerable first-strike option, an overoptimistic estimate. Despite the jockeying, Reagan and Gorbachev brought some temporary hope when they agreed at a summit meeting in Iceland (October 1986) to a formula cap of 1,600 strategic nuclear delivery systems of all kinds and a ceiling of 6,000 warheads. The negotiating then focused on SDI, on which the administration held fast. Gorbachev rejected any arms control agreement that excluded SDI, and the talks collapsed. As a result, strategic nuclear programs remained a political issue that Reagan could not ignore.