Needed: A Grand Strategy

By Hugh Sidey

Admirals and generals do not win wars. Presidents do. Consider: Washington (the nearest thing we had to a President during the Revolution), Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

Admirals and generals do not lose wars. Presidents do, or at least they fail to win them. Consider: Truman in Korea and Lyndon Johnson in Viet Nam.

In conflict, everything rests on grand strategy, a President's concept of how the threats, purposes and realities of power should be used. No vision, no victory. Washington wisely employed young America's guerrilla instincts, honed in skirmishes on the frontier, to beat the massed British armies. Lincoln, whose first commanders were bested by field tacticians of the Confederacy, turned to big armies, superior firepower and generals like Grant, who knew how to use them. Wilson and Roosevelt marshaled American industrial capacity to win World Wars. Johnson and Truman never figured out what they wanted, so they never made up their minds how to fight.

The nation faces a defense dilemma. In both the Pentagon and the Capitol, there is growing conviction that we are basing our security on false equations of strength, outdated war experiences and unrealistic assessments of what the U.S. can and will support. In short, these critics charge, to the extent that Ronald Reagan has any grand strategy, it is a relic of wars not won. Reagan's instinct, that the U.S. must be strong, is good; his grasp of the shifting global ingredients of economic health, national will and military capability is not.

Perhaps that is why the military reform group in Congress now includes nearly 70 members of Senate and House, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative. And that is why Democratic Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, one of the original reformers, spent seven years studying and speaking on global strife and war. If Hart ever becomes President--and he surely wants to be--he has a grand strategy, which he has painstakingly assembled and polished and finally put down on paper in the past few days. It bears study right now.

That strategy would first be maritime in nature, rooted in the understanding that as a coastal nation, the U.S. must protect the sea lanes. "We cannot defend ourselves without a greater naval capability," says Hart. "That may require taking money away from other services." Hart downgrades the idea of preparing for a massive conventional war with the Soviet Union, which is a standing assignment for U.S. and NATO armies. "Our land forces must shift from the Maginot Line mentality to maneuver warfare," he argues. "Our Army should be more like the Marines." Hart would try to change military thinking by rewarding and advancing officers who are expert in tactics and innovation, not program managers. "We've got to outsmart the enemy," says the Senator, who was shocked to discover that the academies have virtually squeezed out the required study of military history and tactics in favor of the social and political sciences.

Hart would increase the readiness of all our forces and seek nuclear-arms limitations in order to be able to afford a survivable reserve of nuclear missiles that would keep Soviet armies at home. Hart points out that there is no way the U.S. can arm itself for superiority in every possible conflict. "Sheer military power is no longer enough for either the U.S. or the Soviets," says Hart, who believes that the U.S.S.R. has lost the ideological struggle, and that its great arsenal can be neutralized if the U.S. wisely brings its diverse strengths to bear.

Hart does not feel it is coincidence that Washington, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt waged successful wars. All were strategists, students of their times and places, calculating with rare skill the human and industrial capacities of the nation, the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. One of Hart's heroes is General Mikhail Kutuzov, whose patient strategy in turning back Napoleon's invasion of Russia is immortalized in Tolstoy's War and Peace. The old general used time, weather, distance, maneuver and surprise to defeat the mightiest army ever assembled in Europe. "General Kutuzov outfought Napoleon, he didn't just overwhelm him with weapons," says Hart. "We must learn to do the same."

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