THE MILITARY: SERVANT OR MASTER OF POLICY?
Only a year ago, Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson said in a moment of frustration: "We all know that the two biggest words in the English language are 'national defense.' If you just shout them loud enough, you are in the clear. It is just plain unpatriotic to question any appropriation for national defense. Defense against what? It does not matter. Just utter the magic words." Nelson's complaint was not considered much of an exaggeration --only a year ago. Now, suddenly, the words seem to have lost their magic. Now another Senator notes that wherever he goes, "one sure applause line is a condemnation of the growing influence of the military."
At no time since pre-Pearl Harbor days has the vast organism created to protect the nation against foreign enemies been under such furious homefront attack. No segment is immune: the uniformed professionals, their civilian colleagues and superiors at the Pentagon, their supporters in Congress, their suppliers among big business and big labor--all feel the criticism and distrust from several directions at once. Students, intellectuals, pacifists and the New Left have long been opponents. Now they are being joined by more influential voices from the center and even the right. Congress, until recently amenable to almost any proposal from the military, suddenly bristles with skepticism. The Senate may not approve the antiballistic missile program. Unfriendly investigations have been pointing out flaws in the ABM and other weapons programs. Still another committee is scrutinizing overseas military deployment and commitments. Once friendly Senators, such as Democrats Stuart Symington of Missouri and Allen Allender of Louisiana, have emerged as critics. "Some of us in Congress," El-lender said last week, "have become captives of the military."
No less an authority than General David Shoup, retired Marine Corps Commandant and Medal of Honor winner, accuses the armed services of relishing war for the sake of self-aggrandizement, of making the U.S. "a militaristic and aggressive nation." Physicist Herbert York, former Pentagon chief of research, development and engineering, warns that Americans will face a "Frankenstein monster that could destroy us." Not only are military motives questioned, but military competence as well. The defense complex is indicted for being unable to develop weapons that work well enough, wasting money needed for civilian purposes, giving bad and dangerous advice to the Commander in Chief, poor planning and worse execution in Viet Nam. Does the military, many people wonder, exaggerate the threats to U.S. security and grossly overestimate its own needs to retain--or even enhance--its own power?
The accused are not without counsel. Many Congressmen, academics and ordinary citizens retain confidence in the nation's military leadership. Some, like Political Science Professor Morton Kaplan of the University of Chicago and Politics Professor John Roche of Brandeis, depict the military as scapegoats for a frustrated, roiled nation. If blame must be placed, it is argued, civilian policymakers deserve a goodly portion. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington bemoans the fact that the military has become the protagonist in the "latest version of the devil theory of history."
As the U.S. confronts specific decisions on new weapons, on foreign commitments, on the general shape and size of the defense structure after Viet Nam, the debate promises to become one of the most significant of the generation. It could also become one of the most useful, particularly if it brings about more thorough, dispassionate and knowledgeable reviews of defense programs by Congress and the executive. A clear-eyed reappraisal of military deployment in relation to foreign policy is long overdue. Yet should the debate result in a polarization of the nation into military and antimilitary factions, the consequences could be grave. Blind antimilitarism could reduce the armed services to impotence. Or, isolated in society, the fighting forces could develop a sort of "everybody-hates-us" psychosis and see themselves as the sole guardians of national virtue; this, in turn, could make them a potentially troublesome political force, something that has never happened in the U.S. but is certainly not uncommon elsewhere.
Devil Theory 7
American soldiers do not suffer from coup d'etat fever or a Versailles complex. TIME correspondents, interviewing scores of military men at home and overseas, report that men in uniform are almost as diverse in outlook toward the controversy as civilians. Some are indifferent, some philosophical, some resentful. Says Major General Melvin Zais. commander of the 101st Airborne in Viet Nam: "The country is looking for a scapegoat. First it was the draft, then recruiters, then Dow Chemical, and now it's the bloody generals."
Lieut. Colonel Wallen Summers, a West Pointer now advising a Vietnamese Ranger group, views the professional as a "chivalrous romantic" who is caught in a crossfire between the "calculated materialism" of many Americans and the "hedonistic romanticism" of much of today's protest movement. Colonel George S. Patton III, a tank commander in Viet Nam, says his men are "too busy killing Charlie and staying alive" to worry about academic disputes. But Patton, who succeeds in sounding like his famous father (the son's motto in Viet Nam: "Find the bastards--then pile on"), has a thought of his own: The public is "too interested in the pursuit of the buck, not in the future of the country." Many career men think of themselves as dedicated public servants who put their lives in forfeit for the country's sake and are no less idealistic than the most zealous pacifist--in fact, far more so. Few are elitists; they honor the nation's tradition of the citizen-soldier. The Army men in particular oppose, with a surprising degree of near-unanimity, Richard Nixon's proposed all-volunteer force. Many career soldiers argue that this would cut the military off from civilian society.
Men in the field, even senior officers, feel the criticism perhaps less keenly than their comrades in Washington. From the Pentagon, TIME Correspondent John Mulliken reports the mood among officers: "With quivering confidence they wonder what they are supposed to do, and what is expected of them. They certainly are bewildered and, if they had been trained to admit it, just a bit frightened."
Who Is the Enemy?
The bewilderment is understandable. When it was possible to distinguish between war and peace, it was possible for professional soldiers to discern their role and function with some degree of comfort. For most of the years since World War II, the U.S. and its fighting men have been suspended in a murky, twilit world, where neither war nor peace prevails. World War I, World War II and even Korea were what Colonel Samuel Hayes, head of West Point's Psychology and Leadership Department, calls "Manichaean" conflicts, ringing clashes between good and evil, with no doubt about the identity or nature of the aggressors.
Even until 1965, the military received relatively clear missions and the means to accomplish them. It also enjoyed more public respect and fatter appropriations than in any previous generation. It had defeated Germany and Japan, saved West Berlin, held South Korea, helped contain the Russians at the Iron Curtain, constructed an awesome nuclear arsenal, and performed numerous lesser chores successfully.
Viet Nam was different. The war of misty beginnings seems to lack an end. Meanwhile, the East-West confrontation is losing its sharpest edges. Who is the enemy, anyway? The Russians, with whom Washington has been signing treaties and exchanging musicians? The Chinese, who have been shooting Russians lately? Those scrawny North Vietnamese, visited often by American journalists? Assorted revolutionaries in distant and backward countries, who might be influenced by Communists? At home, social needs became more pressing than ever. Did the nation really need all those billions for defense?
Between Passivity and Pugnacity
To some extent, the military is also a victim of the general concern over powerlessness in the face of huge, impersonal, Kafkaesque institutions. At a time when more and more citizens are questioning the degree to which they control their own destinies, the military, with its rigid hierarchy, its demand for total obedience, and above all, its tropistic reaching-out for ever more armaments, is an obvious--and perhaps valid--target. An increasing number of officers, to be sure, are getting broad educations and display considerable political and social sensitivity. Still, the military as a whole, with its tendency toward stiffness and even narrowness, rarely copes well with the challenge of dissent. Thus, a military court meted out what seemed unconscionably harsh treatment to the "mutineers" at the Presidio in San Francisco, one of whom was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor for refusing to stop singing (the Army judge advocate in Washington later reduced the term to two years). Equally revealing of the military mentality was an episode that occurred recently at the naval base in Long Beach, Calif. Fed up with the hippies, peaceniks and other irritating agents, base officials barred any cars bearing the stylized love daisy, the ensign popular with antiwarriors, from the installation. One day an officer who was driving a daisy-festooned car was detained at the gate for 15 minutes. He turned out to be the new base commander, en route to his own welcome-aboard ceremonies in his son's auto. Daisies have since become legal again.
All too often, the military seems to be its own worst enemy. Interservice rivalry may be acceptable on football fields, but when the Army and Marines squabble in Viet Nam, they are hardly serving the public interests. The release of the Pueblo crew loosed the full story of incompetence in the command structure that had led to the unprotected ship's capture. The strange case of Lieut. Commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, accused of waging his own private skirmishes in Viet Nam, also attracted scorn. The shifting justifications offered for the proposed ABM project, and its questionable efficacy, persuaded many Americans that the Defense Department was misleading the public.
Poised as it must be in today's world between passivity and pugnacity, the military is confused. It is .condemned for wanting to win in Viet Nam in the traditional sense and criticized for not being able to win in any sense. Commander Lloyd Bucher gives up the ship without a fight, and the U.S. lets North Korea get away with it. Is Bucher a hero or a failure? The public leans toward the hero label; the Navy, which had put Pueblo in a scandalously vulnerable position, seems undecided. What is the lesson for the Annapolis class of 1969?
Pueblo was a relatively isolated incident, the kind of blunder endemic in large organizations. Far more serious from the military's viewpoint--and the country's--are the broader controversies now in progress. The most profound is the central accusation lodged by General Shoup. In an Atlantic article, Shoup insists that the profession of arms, to which he devoted his career, has achieved an unduly large measure of control over American society, including U.S. foreign policy. He charges that the officer corps' view of war as "an exciting adventure, a competitive game, and an escape from the dull routines of peacetime," together with the economic and political power wielded by the larger defense community, has led to foreign involvements, including Viet Nam. Harvard's George Wald, a Nobel prizewinning biologist, contends that the very existence of a large military establishment has distorted society, and makes future conflict almost inevitable, even "if the Viet Nam war were stopped tomorrow."
The first question posed by these attacks is whether a large military structure is still necessary. Wald, taking a giant step beyond Shoup, says that "the thought that we are in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial." Thus nuclear weapons, for instance, can be dispensed with. Marcus Raskin, a former White House aide now prominent in the anti-Viet Nam movement, goes even further. He suggests dismantling the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency over the next decade. It is obvious that neither the nation as a whole nor any particular U.S. Administration in the foreseeable future could--or should--subscribe to such ideas. The realities of power in the nuclear age may be ugly and dangerous, but they remain realities.
Quite apart from the smaller nations that depend on American protection, it is in the U.S. interest to help maintain some degree of balance and stability in the world. That is a goal quite different from acting as "the policeman of the world," as the current cliche has it. Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese have displayed so much altruism that their good behavior could be relied on in the absence of U.S. power; Moscow's behavior in Czechoslovakia and Peking's border skirmishes with both the Russians and the Indians are ample proof of that. Moreover, many less powerful nations--often sentimentalized as truly "peace-loving" in contrast to the superpowers--have acted with complete lack of responsibility, being constantly at each other's throats in various nationalistic, tribal or racial quarrels.
Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that U.S. power has distinct limits, which must be better recognized than in the past. That power, often with absurd reliance on technology, is badly suited to guerrilla warfare, as in Viet Nam. It cannot be used to keep balky allies in line, as Russia did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, because American values and politics would not permit it. It is unsuitable for ready use against mischiefmakers, whether in North Korea or Peru, because heavy ripostes to such irritations usually entail intolerable military or political risks.
While U.S. strength cannot enforce a universal Pax Americana, however, the nation's muscle has done a reasonably effective job of protecting the balance in areas crucial to world stability, such as Western Europe and the Far East. For the time being, a strong military machine is essential--although not necessarily at its present size, or guided by its present axioms.
A vexing question is whether the military has become the master of political policy rather than its instrument. Historically, the U.S. military as an institution has kept out of politics to a remarkable degree. One reason perhaps is that until the late '40s Americans never tolerated a peacetime military force large enough to be influential. That has changed radically. What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex* constitutes an enormous power bloc that now embraces manufacturers, organized labor, local business interests, many scientists and nonprofit organizations that get defense contracts (see box opposite). Yet it is difficult to show a precise cause-and-effect relationship between the defense complex and the generation of a specific conflict.
Never Again Club
Certainly neither the U.S. military nor U.S. militarism could be blamed for Korea, which was a clear case of Communist attack. The Truman Administration had been in the process of reducing military forces before the war started. After Korea, most high-ranking U.S. officers, including Douglas Mac-Arthur, opposed any future involvement in an Asian land war. The philosophy of the "Never Again Club" dominated planning through the Kennedy years.
Though Shoup maintains that many U.S. officers saw the Viet Nam war as a chance to field-test new weapons and season a generation of career soldiers, the experience seems more an example of military--and political--misjudgment than of calculated aggressiveness. The military, which oversold Lyndon Johnson on the efficiency of air power against North Viet Nam, can be faulted; so can the State Department, which insisted that Ho Chi Minh, despite his Soviet training and his country's history of resistance to Chinese influence, was little more than Peking's puppet. But the final decisions lay with the Chief Executive. When it came to the point of choosing between certain defeat of the South Vietnamese armies and the introduction of U.S. ground combat units, Johnson chose to fight. Except for such critics as General James Gavin, the never-again club was disbanded. As Professor Hans Morgenthau puts it: "No general was going to admit that the U.S. couldn't win this lousy little war against a couple of hundred thousand peasants in pajamas."
When it comes to the precise application of military means to political ends and to assessing the likely moves of an adversary, the U.S. record in recent years has been less than brilliant. Douglas Mac Arthur based his strategy on the false conviction that the Chinese would not intervene in Korea. Historians of the Kennedy years say that the new President went along with the Bay of Pigs attack partly because the Joint Chiefs of Staff acquiesced in the CIA operation--but that they did so without thoroughly scrutinizing it. Had Kennedy heeded JCS advice during the Cuban missile crisis, he would have bombed and invaded Cuba before Nikita Khrushchev had had an opportunity to comply with U.S. demands. When the Dominican crisis erupted, the Chiefs urged that 20,000 U.S. troops be sent in, when far fewer would have sufficed.
No Concrete Plan
That Kennedy and McNamara prevailed over their professional military advisers during the tense days of October 1962, to the point of instructing the brass on the smallest details of how the blockade was to be run, tends to rebut the Shoup argument. It was Harry Truman's policy, not MacArthur's, that dominated in Korea. The U.S. did not join with the British and French in the 1956 Suez incident. And last year Clark Clifford, the putative hawk, became convinced that the bombing of North Viet Nam "had been a bust," and won Lyndon Johnson to that view, despite military advice to the contrary.
On becoming Defense Secretary, Clifford was also dismayed to learn that the military had no concrete plan for ending the war within the tactical limitations imposed by the Administration. For its part, the military has consistently complained that restrictions on the size and use of American forces have given the other side a decisive advantage. This will be argued for years, but there seems to be little doubt that a big-war approach was unsuited to Viet Nam. Some local commanders, for instance, had been shelling fields at random to harass the enemy, though often the effect was to harass innocent peasants instead. Even so, they could not be talked out of the tactic until a tactful--and influential--general from Washington, Andrew Goodpaster, onetime military aide to Dwight Eisenhower, made the case in such military terms as precision targeting and economic use of ammunition.
If the judgment of military professionals has frequently been disappointing, civilian leaders generally must share the blame, and sometimes deserve the larger share. Hans Morgenthau observes that the home warrior is often more militant than the general in the field. Certainly men in mufti such as McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, exerted considerable influence on Viet Nam deliberations.
The Preparedness Problem
Keeping the nation prepared for a war that might never come is in many ways more difficult than actually fighting one. The questions of how much is enough, which weapon to buy and which to junk, the relationship between one nation's technical advances and the incentives they give the adversary for his own buildup--all have yet to be solved in the third decade of the nuclear age. The military proceeds from a relatively simple assumption. Its mission is to protect the nation from every conceivable type of attack and to be able to fight in any kind of situation.
The same applies to force levels. To a commander, an extra division or a new aircraft carrier, another wing of planes or missiles can never hurt. For justification, the military merely points to history. In 1945, General George Marshall wrote: "We finish each bloody war with a feeling of acute revulsion against the savage form of human behavior, and yet on each occasion we confuse military preparedness with the causes of war and then drift almost deliberately into another catastrophe." In the nuclear age, there would be no time for the luxury of mobilization, which the U.S. has enjoyed in previous wars. Thus, presumably the only way to discourage attack is to prove to the potential enemy that an attack would be answered with an overwhelming counterblow. As McNamara put it: "Security depends upon taking a 'worst plausible case' and having the ability to cope with that eventuality."
This has proved a difficult theory to carry out with discrimination and economy, and the U.S. from time to time has suffered from illusory fears. In the early '50s, there was "the bomber gap." Fearful that the Russians would produce fleets of intercontinental bombers that would leave the U.S. exposed to attack, the nation began shelling out billions for new bomber series and an extensive air defense system. The Russians never fulfilled their bomber potential. Later came "the missile gap" again based on an appraisal of Moscow's ability to produce a weapon. The Kennedy Administration embarked upon an extensive missile-making program, and again the Russians failed to fulfill their potential. In 1967, McNamara admitted that he had bought too many missiles out of ignorance of what Moscow was going to do. In 1967, the Russians began to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles in quantity, but whether they were responding to the U.S. deployment or would have gone ahead on their own is impossible to tell. In any event, the sudden burst of activity is cited by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird as reason enough for the Administration to go ahead with its Safeguard ABM program. The Russians, Laird says, are striving to achieve the power to hit the U.S. so hard that it could not retaliate. Having been financially ambushed at the gap twice before, it is no surprise that the public has greeted ABM with some degree of skepticism.
The Plea from Great Falls
If considerations of strategy involve built-in waste, so do two other sets of factors that enter into the preparedness problem: the political-economic and the technical-administrative. Defense became big business in World War II, and has remained so. For most communities, military spending means prosperity. Members of the Congress may like economy for the nation, but they like prosperity for their own states and districts even more. One sign of the changing times, however, was Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's rebuke to a group of constituents who last week urged him to approve the Safeguard system. Great Falls, Mont., would be the site of one base. "The ABM," said Mansfield, "is not just another public works project. It is not some trivial boondoggle, a minor item out of the military pork barrel. It touches questions which go to the structure of a free society, and to the civilized survival of this nation and the Soviet Union, and perhaps of all nations."
But in general, the spending process that has grown up in the past 20 years has all but got out of control. Though the Budget Bureau is supposed to run an independent check of all proposed expenditures by Government agencies, it has accorded the Defense Department, the biggest spender of them all, special treatment that results in considerable freedom from stringent review. Congress, with its key military and appropriations committees headed by promilitary Southerners, has occasionally voted more money than the Pentagon requested. When McNamara announced the closing of 80 installations in 1964, he received 169 protests from Congressmen that same day.
The technical-administrative problems can be equally galling. Defense contractors frequently bid low to get a contract, then considerably overrun the original estimate. When Laird took office, he found some $1.8 billion in so-called "overruns" in this year's budget, and he fears there will be more. Lockheed's giant C-5A transport, for example, may cost $1 billion to $2 billion more than its original price tag. Technical delays can add millions, too, because inflation raises the price.
Most mystifying of all in the era of flawless space shots is the fact that the military often seems unable to develop new weapons on schedule and in working order. Some projects turn out well, of course, such as the SR-71 reconnaissance plane (see SCIENCE). But the new tank program is a mess, with three separate projects years behind schedule and far in the red. The M-16 rifle now in use in Viet Nam is a sound weapon, but it went into full production inexcusably late. For a time the Communists, with their new Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifles, had better personal weapons than the forces of the most advanced nation in the world.
The Air Force's B70 was virtually a bust. The Government spent $1.4 billion to build two test models before it was abandoned as obsolete. The F-111 was an attempt to save money while modernizing. McNamara thought he could save $1 billion by developing one plane for three services: Air Force, Navy and Marines. Eventually, the Marines dropped out, and the Navy, after investing $200 million, abandoned the carrier version in favor of its own new plane, the F-14A. The Air Force is reasonably satisfied with its F-111, except that a dozen have crashed so far, and the plane is costing $6 billion, more than twice the original estimate.
Research Chief's Nightmare
Lieut. General Austin Betts, the Army's chief of research and development, points to a central problem: "It is the constant fight between progress and being sure you never make a mistake." When to go into production and when to continue research is a problem that constantly bedevils Betts and his counterparts elsewhere in the Pentagon. "Make it, and you're a hero," he says. "Wrong, and you are up on the Hill." Men like Betts and John Foster, the research chief for the Defense Department, suffer nightmares that the other side may achieve some technological breakthrough that will leave the U.S. far behind in some crucial area and thereby subject it to blackmail by an enemy with an unbeatable hand.
At some point, however, the threat must be weighed against other national needs, and priorities must be assigned. If McNamara's doctrine of the "worst plausible case" were applied in every case, the nation would soon be broke or all its citizens would be huddling in a continent-wide bomb shelter--or both. With defense spending running at $80 billion, and with the services requesting enough in new weapons to offset most of the savings that would be achieved by peace in Viet Nam, there must obviously be some hard thinking about where to draw the line.
Weapons systems aside, the same is true in the equally uncertain area of foreign commitments and the deployment of forces. The approach to these essentially political problems has been essentially unchanged for 22 years. "If one should characterize American foreign policy in a sentence," Morgenthau observes in A New Foreign Policy for the United States, "one could say that it has lived during the last decade or so on the intellectual capital which was accumulated in the famous 15 weeks of the spring of 1947 when the policy of containment, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, fashioned a new American foreign policy, and that this capital has now been nearly exhausted." Not only does the use of raw military power have distinct limitations, but another paradox of the atomic age is that the possessor of overwhelming strength is often no stronger for it in dealing with other nations. Russia tolerates abuse from Rumania, Albania and China, and independence on the part of Yugoslavia. The U.S. has learned to live with Castro's Cuba and lesser annoyances in Latin America. While this lesson has been acknowledged for years in the abstract, it has not yet resulted in the development of sufficiently sophisticated policies in which economic, social and political factors are employed with the same skill as military ones.
The sheer size of the military is one indication. In addition to the forces in and around Viet Nam, the U.S. has some 900,000 servicemen stationed elsewhere abroad. It has defense agreements of varying nature with 48 nations. It maintains some 400 major installations abroad, in addition to the 476 at home. Altogether, there are 3,400,000 Americans in uniform, plus nearly 1,000,000 paid reservists. Few responsible critics argue that this force should be instantly reduced. But once the war in Viet Nam is ended, selective and gradual reductions at home and in such places as Korea, Okinawa and Germany would probably be both possible and prudent.
Two Valid Admonitions
What the military needs most of all is clear guidance from civilian supervisors--both on Capitol Hill and in the White House--as to its role in the '70s. It has not always been forthcoming. If there is uncertainty about U.S. interests and intentions in Asia or Europe or the Middle East, if there is coasting on old assumptions that may no longer be valid, the military could occupy the vacuum by fashioning its own, probably parochial policy. Ironically, a retreat from its world responsibilities could be as dangerous for American society as an excess of interventionist zeal. As the Rand Corporation's Arnold Horelick points out, indifference to or isolation from the rest of the world could prompt the U.S. to "build walls, and then you'd get social reorganizations conducive to a garrison state."
In considering how much of the nation's wealth and brainpower to allocate to defense needs, two Eisenhower admonitions remain valid. In 1965, he warned in Waging Peace that "every addition to defense expenditures does not automatically increase military security. Because security is based upon moral and economic, as well as purely military strength, a point can be reached at which additional funds for arms, far from bolstering security, weaken it." In his farewell address in 1961, he argued : "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and libertv may prosper together."
Vigilance is a term usually applied to armies on the lookout for enemies. As Eisenhower's caveat and the raging debate in the U.S. on the role of the military indicate, vigilance is similarly required on the part of Congress, the Executive and the public. It is required not to render the military powerless or to deny its courage and dedication or to thrust it beyond the pale. Such alertness is necessary, rather, to ensure that the military does not, by design or accident, irreparably impair the health of the society it is pledged to protect.
* The phrase was coined by Malcolm Moos, then a White House speechwriter and now president of the University of Minnesota. Eisenhower had asked for ideas for a farewell address on significant issues, and Moos, mindful of Ike's growing concern about a "garrison state," submitted this one.
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