Accent the Conventional

For a dozen years U.S. military strategy has been based on the doctrine that nuclear strike power is the chief deterrent to Soviet adventures into war in Europe and elsewhere. But practice has been far from theory. In Quemoy and Matsu, in Lebanon and Korea, the applied weapon was a show of conventional force or the boom of conventional guns. In Washington last week, the Kennedy Administration began moving toward closing the doctrinal gap by placing new emphasis on the U.S.'s conventional-war capability.

The new doctrine implied no downgrading of nuclear strike power, no doubts that the defense of the continental U.S. against its principal enemy still rests on the ability to hit back massively. Rather, it acknowledged that the missile standoff makes it less and less realistic to threaten "massive retaliation at places of our choosing" in response to lesser Communist attacks that could be better met by conventional forces or even guerrilla warfare (see box). The U.S.'s ability to wage all-out nuclear war and yet do little against border incursions has come to hamper the diplomat as well as the general. Last week Secretary of State Dean Rusk was revealed as the author of a memo to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, advocating the new doctrine.

What to Wage? The push for strengthened conventional capability has been on for some time, particularly in the Pentagon, where the Army and Air Force have been leaking cascades of "papers," "memos" and rumors in an attempt to outpoint each other. Army conventional-war strategists scored high points last May, when Major General Charles H. Bonesteel III. now special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared a memo that is the backbone of the new doctrine. Wrote Bonesteel: "Continued primary reliance on massive nuclear retaliation to deter all forms of aggression will limit the United States' strategy to a choice between retreat or acceptance of the probability of mutual destruction of the United States and the U.S.S.R." Because of the nuclear impasse, wrote Bonesteel, the U.S. non-nuclear forces must be made stronger to allow for the "probability that future Communist military aggressions will involve armed conflict designed to seize control of, rather than destroy, land areas and their populations."

Air Force partisans warn direly that the U.S. had better mobilize if it is going to scale down the threat of nuclear retaliation. In an attempt to bring the matter to a head, the Air Force leaked the Rusk memo, and it got twisted to make it sound as though Rusk favored abandoning nuclear strike power. Braced with the leak at his news conference. President Kennedy denied any lessening of emphasis on nuclear weapons ("When-if we do reach a change in our reliance on new weapons, we will make it very clear''), but affirmed that he wanted to "see conventional forces strengthened, not only in Western Europe, but throughout the world."

The Cost. The Army is making the most of the new atmosphere. The Army, admittedly under strength (it now has eleven divisions-of a total of 14-capable of immediate action), is plumping for 55,000 men to add to its U.S.-based Strategic Army Corps (STRAC) and other forces, and a speedup in delivery of new weapons. (Kennedy has already ordered a boost in STRAC's airlift capacity.) It would like to see NATO forces built from 20 thin divisions to 30, equipped for either conventional or nuclear warfare. Such a NATO force, Army men believe, would be enough to deter a Soviet force equivalent to 60 divisions.

Getting it all is another question. Defense Secretary McNamara's reports to the President recommend an additional $2.1 billion to the $41.8 billion already set up in the Eisenhower defense budget, but it is more likely that the Defense Department will have to be happy with considerably less. Whatever amount it gets, the Army has already won, in principle, its long battle to redress the U.S. retaliatory imbalance with a new conventional-war capability. For the U.S. in the cold war, it will mean the capacity to deal on new fronts from new strength.

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