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A Thousand Days

Page 38

by Arthur M. Schlesinger


  But once the Soviet Union achieved its first nuclear explosion in 1949, the United States had to face a world where its adversary had the terrible new weapons too. This event accelerated a re-examination of strategy already under way within the Truman administration. Led by Paul Nitze, who was then head of policy planning in the State Department, this process resulted in the adoption by the National Security Council in 1950 of a paper known familiarly thereafter as NSC 68. This paper predicted that by 1954 the Soviet Union would have the capacity to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, that this would sufficiently offset American nuclear power to free the Communists for a variety of types of aggression, and that to discourage sub-nuclear forms of aggression the United States must not only continue to build its nuclear strength but must greatly expand its ability to fight non-nuclear wars.

  Through the same winter of 1949–50, a number of members of the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculties had been independently discussing the same issues in regular Sunday-morning meetings. The sessions had taken place at the initiative of two MIT scientists, Jerrold R. Zacharias and Jerome B. Wiesner, who had been involved in weapons problems since the Second World War. What made this more than an academic exercise eleven years later was the fact that, among the members, Wiesner was now Science Adviser to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy was now Special Assistant on National Security Affairs and Carl Kaysen was Bundy’s deputy for military and strategic matters. Kenneth Galbraith, Seymour Harris and I were also in the group, though this mattered less for the defense policy of the Kennedy administration.

  In 1950, it was a dark and fascinating education for the nonscientists; and it resulted in a statement which appeared in the New York Times on May 1 of that year. “We believe,” the eighteen signers wrote, “that our present strategic position is founded on a misplaced faith in atomic weapons and strategic bombing.” This strategy, the statement said, provided the United States with no effective answer to limited aggression except the wholly disproportionate answer of atomic war. As a result, it invited Moscow to use the weapons of “guerrilla warfare and internal revolt in marginal areas in the confidence that such local activity would incur only local risks.” In addition, continuing reliance on the bomb indicated to the world that American strategy was based on “the principle of mass destruction of human life,” an idea which would lead to a misconstruction of American motives and resentment of American power. And, to the extent that the United States placed reliance on the bomb, an agreement restricting the use of atomic weapons would, in effect, constitute unilateral disarmament; only as we liberated our strategy from its bondage to atomic weapons could we press for international controls. In place of the atom-oriented, all-or-nothing strategy, the signers urged the strengthening of the ground Army, tactical air, air transport, and various specialized forces. “The United States,” the statement concluded, “can ill afford a strategy . . . which might doom it to the fearful choice between worldwide mass destruction, on the one hand, and outright military defeat, on the other.”

  The point became grimly evident with the outbreak of the Korean War a few weeks later; it seemed almost as if the Soviet leaders had reached the same conclusion as the drafters of NSC 68 and the Harvard-MIT group. Our unbalanced defense quite possibly persuaded the Kremlin that it could risk countenancing (or inciting) satellite aggression in an area like Korea, where the assault would be too serious for the conventional forces of the United States and not serious enough for nuclear war. This calculation only omitted Harry S. Truman. Under Truman’s leadership the United States rose to the occasion, fought a limited war in Korea and led the west in a great rebuilding of military strength.

  Then the end of the Korean War produced another spasm of reappraisal—this time by an administration dedicated to the thesis that the foundation of military strength was economic strength and the foundation of economic strength a balanced budget. “A bankrupt America,” President Eisenhower once observed, “is more the Soviet goal than an America conquered on the field of battle.” With Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey zealous to enforce this dictum, something in the defense budget had to go. Since preparation for conventional war cost more than nuclear arms and, if a choice had to be made, contributed less to the nation’s security, the Eisenhower administration reverted to the thesis of the Truman administration in the carefree days of the American atomic monopoly and decided to place predominant reliance once again on nuclear weapons. “We can’t afford to fight limited wars,” said Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. “We can only afford to fight a big war, and if there is one, that is the kind it will be.” The Air Force backed this thesis; indeed, the Air Force had invented it, and, with a vast industry scattered through a number of states dependent on expenditures for air power, it was the most powerful of the services in Congress. Even the Navy, dominated by Admiral Arthur Radford, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, exchanged its ancient belief in limited war for an expanded role in nuclear war.

  John Foster Dulles summed up the new policy when he propounded the doctrine of massive retaliation, declaring that the United States had abandoned the “traditional” policy of “meeting aggression by direct and local opposition” and would depend in the future “primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.” This seemed to mean that the United States intended to counter local aggression, not by limited war, but by nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union or China. “We have adopted a new principle,” exulted Vice-President Nixon. “Rather than let the communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars, we will rely in the future on massive mobile retaliatory powers.” In 1961 Franz Joseph Strauss, the Defense Minister of West Germany, told officials of the Kennedy administration of assurances from Radford that, if a single communist soldier stepped over the frontier into the west, the United States would respond immediately with all-out nuclear war against the communist bloc. One cannot know to what extent this interesting thought deterred Soviet troops from stepping over the frontier; it is hard to suppose that by 1954 even the most hopeful communists regarded the invasion of western Europe as a likely prospect. In any case, where the communists did go boldly on the offensive, as in Vietnam, massive retaliation turned out to be an empty threat. President Eisenhower could never find the case of local aggression to which nuclear warfare seemed a sensible response. By 1957 Dulles himself began to back away from the idea of strategic nuclear retaliation in favor of what proved in practice another phantom—the resort to tactical nuclear weapons.* But nuclear destruction, in one form or another, remained the center of the Eisenhower strategy; and the massive retaliation thesis continued to govern the Eisenhower defense budget.

  The threat of massive retaliation, like Wellington’s new recruits, may not have terrified the Russians and Chinese, but it did terrify a good many Americans. For the United States no longer enjoyed its atomic monopoly; this was not the world of 1948. Either massive retaliation would expose American cities to nuclear attack; or else, as Soviet missile strength and retaliatory power grew, it would no longer, in view of a vulnerable America, seem a believable response. As our strategy, in Pentagonese, ‘lost credibility,’ it might well embolden the communists to new experiments in piecemeal aggression. This was the strong view taken by the service whose mission, money and traditions were most threatened by the new doctrine—the Army. Within the Pentagon, two successive Army Chiefs of Staff, Matthew B. Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor, and the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Research, James M. Gavin, tried to rehabilitate the idea of limited war. “If we are to assure that the disastrous big war never occurs,” as Taylor put it, “we must have the means to deter or to win the small wars.” They were grave and responsible men and brave soldiers—all three had been combat paratroopers—but they could never overcome George Humphrey’s budgetary taboos. In the end, all three resigned to carry their fight to the public—Ridgway in his memoirs of 1956, Soldier; Gavin in
War and Peace in the Space Age in 1958; and Taylor most directly in The Uncertain Trumpet in 1960.

  In the meantime critics outside the government were also emphasizing the dangers of the all-or-nothing policy. As early as 1954, John F. Kennedy, leading the fight in the Senate to preserve the Army after the Korean War, said, “Our reduction of strength for resistance in so-called brushfire wars, while threatening atomic retaliation, has in effect invited expansion by the Communists in areas such as Indochina through those techniques which they deem not sufficiently offensive to induce us to risk the atomic warfare for which we are so ill prepared defensively.” Within the Democratic Advisory Council Nitze and Acheson revived the thesis of NSC 68. Strategic theorists—Bernard Brodie, Henry Kissinger, W. W. Kaufmann, R. E. Osgood—joined the attack.

  In 1958 Kennedy summed up the case in the Senate. The commitment to massive retaliation, he said, was producing a Maginot-line mentality—a “dependence upon a strategy which may collapse or may never be used, but which meanwhile prevents the consideration of any alternative.” The most likely threat, he said, was, not nuclear attack, but “Sputnik diplomacy, limited brushfire wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, internal revolution . . . a thrust more difficult to interpret and oppose, yet inevitably ending in our isolation, submission, or destruction.” Though the capacity for massive retaliation, he declared a year later, provided the only answer to the threat of nuclear war, “it is not the only answer to all threats of Communist aggression.” It had not availed in Korea, Indochina, Hungary, Suez, Lebanon, Quemoy, Tibet or Laos; it could not be employed against guerrilla forces or in peripheral wars; it could not stop the erosion of our security by encroachments “too small to justify massive retaliation with all its risks.” “We have been driving ourselves into a corner,” Kennedy said, “where the only choice is all or nothing at all, world devastation or submission.” The way out was to enlarge the range of choice by strengthening and modernizing the nation’s ability to wage non-nuclear war.

  There developed during the fifties two distinctive approaches to national strategy, which Samuel P. Huntington appropriately termed “strategic monism” and “strategic pluralism.” Each was rooted in attitudes toward the domestic economy and toward foreign affairs, and each was associated with a political party. The Republicans, with their traditional dedication to a balanced budget and a unilateral foreign policy, tended to favor the more economical course of strategic monism and rested American security predominantly on American nuclear weapons. The Democrats, with their traditional tolerance of government spending and concern for collective international action, tended to be strategic pluralists and sought a military establishment capable of helping other nations meet a diversity of military threats.*

  McNamara, as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration, thus inherited a clear-cut strategic perspective—one which, it should be added, he firmly embraced on its merits—when he turned his appraising eye on the state of the national defenses.

  3. THE OCCUPATION OF THE PENTAGON

  McNamara brought striking gifts to his new responsibility—an inquiring and incisive mind, a limitless capacity for work and a personality which lacked pretense and detested it in others. But, more than this, he brought new techniques of large-scale management. American social prophets—Bellamy, Veblen, Howard Scott, Adolf Berle, James Burnham—had long tried to prepare the nation for the coming of the managers. But none had predicted anything quite like this tough, courteous and humane technocrat, for whom scientific management was not an end in itself but a means to the rationality of democratic government.

  McNamara appeared at a moment of intellectual and administrative crisis in defense affairs. The military establishment had now grown into a small empire. A third of the states in the United Nations had smaller populations than the American Department of Defense, and only a few had larger budgets. Defense operated enormous complexes of transport, communications, procurement, maintenance and distribution as well as of tanks, ships, planes and men. It made a multiplicity of fateful choices in the determination of strategy, the selection of weapons systems, the design of forces and the level of expenditure. Its decisions affected everything from the economy of San Diego to the destiny of mankind.

  It had been, however, an empire without an emperor. Generals, admirals, scientists, administrators and Secretaries of Defense all had tried in vain to catch hold of the defense process as it hurtled along. By now it had acquired a dreadful momentum of its own; its direction, such as it was, was determined by a bewildering mixture of internal intrigues and extraneous pressures; and it was producing a set of unanticipated side effects on domestic and foreign policy. After eight years in the White House, even Eisen hower came to feel that something was wrong and issued his un expected warning against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Still, the military-industrial complex was more a consequence than a cause of the problem. The cause lay in the feebleness of civilian control of the military establishment; and this feebleness was the result in great part of the absence of rational understanding and hence of rational direction.

  While technology and science were creating the problem, they were also creating a hope for its solution, or at least for its mitigation. The Second World War had made the scientist a partner, if for a time a suspect and scorned partner, in the enterprise of defense; the nuclear age made the association irrevocable. But, even though the military came to accept the validity of the scientific role and the scientists the validity of the military mission, it was not a particularly happy partnership; indeed, as the military professionals sensed a decline in status and power, their resentment grew. Eisenhower, again feeling that something was wrong, warned that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Yet, for better or worse, a new generation of military intellectuals was revolutionizing what had once been the art of strategy.

  The essence of their effort was the application of systematic quantitative analysis to strategic decisions. Operations research, as it was called, had begun during the Second World War, and its first practitioners were mostly physicists, mathematicians, biologists and engineers. After the war, an invasion of economists gave operations research new scope and vitality. Where the scientists tended to accept the terms of the problem as presented to them, the economists, schooled in the search for the most efficient use of resources, accustomed to the ‘substitution’ effect and trained in such concepts as ‘marginal utility’ and ‘opportunity cost,’ were more audacious in the pursuit of alternatives. In this new phase, operations research was quick to demonstrate that there could be a variety of ways to achieve a desired end, and this both speeded the pace of innovation and left the military even further behind.

  The Rand (“research and development”) Corporation, established by the Air Force in California after the war, provided the model of the new military-intellectual establishment. Scientists and economists invented new techniques of systems analysis, linear and dynamic programming and game theory, devising ingenious tools by which to formulate problems, break them down, distinguish alternatives, establish their quantitative equivalents, compare the effects of different decisions and seek the most favorable results in situations characterized by a great mass of variables. The electronic computer became an indispensable part of the machinery of national strategy.

  The strategy intellectuals did not claim infallibility for their black arts. As the economist Charles J. Hitch put it after leaving Rand for McNamara’s Pentagon, “There will always be considerations which bear on the very fundamentals of national defense which are simply not subject to any sort of rigorous, quantitative analysis.” He added, breaking into the patois which was the new elite’s lesser contribution to civilization, “The fact that we cannot quantize such things . . . does not mean that they have no effect on the outcome of a military endeavor—it simply means that our analytical techniqu
es cannot answer every question.” Yet these techniques gave civil government the means of subjecting the anarchy of defense to a measure of order.

  McNamara had been fascinated by the intellectual problem of administering large organizations since his days as a student and teacher of statistical control in the Harvard Business School and his experience as a junior officer in the Pentagon during the war. In the fifties he had confronted a similar challenge, if on a smaller scale, at the Ford Motor Company. His belief was that “the techniques used to administer these affairs of a large organization are very similar whether that organization be a business enterprise or a Government institution or an educational institution or any other large aggregation of human individuals working to a common end.” In spite of his critics, he was no believer in the omnipotence of the slide rule. He knew that abstractions were different from realities and that the tolerances of calculation on the great computers were refined far beyond the precision of the assumptions. But the quest for control required in his judgment two things: the use of analysis to force alternative programs to the surface and the definition of the ‘options’ in quantitative terms in order to facilitate choice.

  He had no illusions about the difficulties of his quest. The Department had already balked, thwarted, exposed and broken a succession of able men imprudent enough to accept appointment as Secretary. “This place is a jungle—a jungle,” McNamara himself cried in his first weeks. But nothing had ever defeated him yet; and he believed that the only way the Secretary could achieve control was through a new theory of the job—conceiving his responsibility not as that of a judge, reviewing and reconciling recommendations made to him by the services, but of an executive, aggressively questioning, goading, demanding and leading. The emergence during the fifties of the scientific-technological elite now gave him the men with whom to begin the reconquest of the Pentagon. The computer was his ally in making options precise. The Times Literary Supplement provided an apt parallel: “The military intellectuals move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna three centuries ago.”

 

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