UPDATING THE WORLD S BIGGEST MILITARY MACHINE Changes in the Theory & Technology of U.S. Might
POWER and its uses demand constant reexamination. As possessor of the world's most powerful military machine, the U.S. has more reason than usual right now to review its military posture.
In Europe, Charles de Gaulle is doing his best to torpedo NATO, the basic framework of the American military position on the Continent. One reason he can afford to do so, of course, is that the threat of Russian aggression has subsided, largely because the U.S. presence has made Europe too risky and unrewarding a field for Russian adventure. As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara points out: "The focus of the U.S. defense problem has shifted perceptibly toward the Far East." There, the U.S. not only has committed some 330,000 men in and around South Viet Nam, but also faces the threat of indefinite Red Chinese intransigence and of fresh guerrilla wars. While a few Americans, particularly on the left, are urging the U.S. to pull out of Viet Nam, others, including Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and 15 of his colleagues, suggest that U.S. ground forces in Europe ought to be cut substantially.
The historic pattern of warfare has changed drastically, and is continuing to change. Though there has been no formal declaration of war anywhere since World War II, the Pentagon counts 164 "internationally significant outbreaks of violence" in the past eight years alone. The U.S. has had to rush troops to Thailand and Lebanon to relieve external pressures, to Panama and the Dominican Republic to counter insurrection from within. It has confronted mortal challenge in Cuba and Berlin. Where the choice once seemed to be between peace and universal conflagration, the world is now experiencing a series of bloodletting skirmishes instead.
In seeking to adapt to these changes, the U.S. must skillfully manipulate its continually growing military machine. Because of the Vietnamese war, the armed forces have increased from 2,644,632 in April 1965 to 3,005,000--the largest contingent the U.S. has mustered since the Korean War. The Army, now with 1,150,000 men, will grow to 1,206,000 by June of 1967. The Navy has increased its fleet from 781 combat ships to 912. The Air Force has just about finished an expansion of its tactical fighter wings from 16 to 21. The U.S. already has an advantage over the Soviet Union of better than 4 to 1 in intercontinental missiles: 1,376 Minuteman, Polaris and Titan II "birds" v. Russia's estimated arsenal of 300. The price of this military might for the coming fiscal year will be about $60 billion--or some 55-c- out of every tax dollar.
A Peculiar Horse Race
The U.S. owes its present diversified strength to a basic change of policy that was begun in 1961. Traditionally disposed to regard the military with a mixture of suspicion and stinginess, the nation has slashed its forces drastically after every war. Crash mobilization was necessary for the U.S. to fight in Korea and, even after that lesson, another large reduction took place when the Eisenhower Administration enunciated the doctrine of massive retaliation. This strategy assumed that any war would quickly become a major nuclear exchange of short duration, and thus assigned big money to nuclear weaponry to the detriment of conventional forces. The threat of nuclear death would prevent overt Communist aggression, went the theory, and the rest would not matter. But it has been the rest--in Viet Nam and elsewhere--that has caused much of the trouble in the past decade. Nuclear weapons not only failed to deter mischief, but could not, in sanity, be used to quash it. Moved partly by Nikita Khrushchev's famous "wars of national liberation" speech, in which he indicated that Russia regarded guerrilla warfare as the Communist strategy of the future, the Kennedy Administration abandoned massive retaliation in favor of a strategy of flexible response. This concept dictated that the U.S. must possess the means to respond with appropriate degrees of force to any level of provocation. It remains the nation's basic military policy.
The problem is to translate the concept into hard decisions, to anticipate what military challenges will be forthcoming and what American response should meet them. Just how difficult this task can be was pointed out by Edward S. Quade, head of the Rand Corp.'s mathematics department, in a discomforting but only slightly exaggerated observation. "A long-range military problem," he said, "is comparable to the problems of the owner of a racing stable who wants to win a horse race to be run many years hence, on a track not yet built, between horses not yet born. To make matters worse, the possibility exists that when the race is finally run, the rules may have been changed, the track length altered and the horses replaced by greyhounds."
A Guide for Action
Until everyone agrees to hitch his charger to a plow, the U.S. has no choice but to keep its horses--and its hounds--the acknowledged champions on any track. In doing this, it will be guided in the '60s and '70s by several major military conclusions about which most experts agree.
P: The threat of direct nuclear clash between the U.S. and Russia has all but vanished for the foreseeable future. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 taught Moscow how easy it is to slide from cold war gamesmanship toward white-hot holocaust, and the knowledge was profoundly sobering. The possibility of a sneak nuclear attack, while not entirely discounted, is pretty well ruled out by military men; the attacker could not himself escape destruction. Says Herman Kahn, the physicist and Government consultant who popularized the term "escalation": "Barring a blowup in Eastern Europe, there will be no confrontation with the Soviets for years. The steam has gone out of their world revolution."
P:Though the center of international trouble will continue to be in Asia, the Soviet Union remains the chief threat to U.S. security. Russia, regardless of present intentions, is the only country capable of destroying the U.S. with nuclear weapons. It is also the only potentially hostile power able to wage a major offensive war far from its own borders. Red China can cause plenty of trouble in Asia in the years ahead, forcing the U.S. to concentrate much of its military might there, but it poses no immediate threat to U.S. territory. Says Air Force Secretary Harold Brown: "I think it would take a decade before the Chinese could develop a nuclear capability that would severely threaten the U.S."
P:The U.S. cannot pull its ground forces out of Europe--at least not entirely or soon. There is a delicate balance of military power in Europe right now that would be upset by any substantial U.S. withdrawal. A major U.S. retrenchment would not only encourage Russian adventure, but would almost inevitably cause a scramble among the relatively weak European nations for a detente with Russia.
P:At no time soon will the U.S. be able to reduce substantially its military establishment. In fact, the danger for the duration of the Vietnamese war will be the possibility of spreading American forces too thin, largely because of the shortage of specialized units and combat cadres. The Administration is taking a calculated risk in not using the reserves; never before in this century has the U.S. gone to war without its militia. Even if the Vietnamese war ends soon, the U.S. faces too many commitments to reduce its forces on the scale that it did after previous wars.
P:The wars of the future will be mostly of the brush-fire variety. Small, backward countries will be the typical locales, subversion and insurgency the ubiquitous scenario, Communism the frequent heavy. For this reason, and because nuclear warfare is only an ultimate resort, conventional forces will remain highly important, perhaps even grow in importance. No matter how much nuclear power the U.S. has, it cannot be applied in the overwhelming majority of clashes.
A Free Ride
In assuming its military posture on these hypotheses, the U.S. must keep its friends as well as its enemies in mind. The U.S. is now a party to eight alliances that embrace 42 countries from Australia to Turkey. The most bothersome at the moment is certainly NATO. Not all of Charles de Gaulle's objections to NATO can be attributed to narrow nationalistic ambitions. Says Konrad Adenauer, who championed NATO while he was Chancellor of West Germany: "NATO policy, NATO organization and NATO armaments are completely antiquated." NATO's structure has grown creaky with age, partially because the need for a highly alert, tense NATO has been considerably lessened by the U.S.-Soviet detente. While flexible response makes eminent sense in Washington, De Gaulle believes that it might more easily make Europe a battleground. De Gaulle also realizes, of course, that in any war the U.S. would have to defend all of Europe; he is, in short, getting a free ride.
The U.S. will have to make do with NATO as best as it can, but it certainly can strengthen what is left of it. It ought to untangle the twisted chains of command, solidify the bifurcated military and political committees and modernize the World War II-style deployment of its forces. Some experts believe that, in the long run, NATO may come to resemble the structure of the Holy Roman Empire, rich in form and legal ties but sparse in substance. Henry Kissinger of Harvard's Center for International Affairs reflects the views of many Americans when he says: "It is historically unreasonable to expect that the defense of an area as rich, as populous, as industrially advanced as Europe should forever be in the hands of a country 3,000 miles away."
While U.S. forces may eventually be able to leave Europe, that day is not imminent simply because the Seventh Army is there, quite aside from NATO, to face and help offset Russia's 20 divisions in East Germany. To preserve equilibrium, any drastic diminution of American strength would have to be balanced by a corresponding increase in European strength. But prosperous Europe shows few signs of wanting to shoulder the burden; West Germany, for example, considers any further expansion of the Bundeswehr out of the question. Still, the Seventh Army is a political tool as well as a military one, and few observers outside of the Army are convinced that it has to stay at its present strength of 210,000 men in order to be effective. Under pressures from the Viet Nam war, the Pentagon has already ordered a "drawdown" of 30,000 officers and specialists from Europe', may yet have to withdraw whole combat contingents. But no pull-out is in sight that would bring into question the U.S. commitment to defend Europe--unless the Russians agree to pull their forces out of East Germany.
By the early 1970s, the U.S. may be able to keep its far-flung commitments without having large permanent deployments of troops far from home. Reason: technological progress will give the armed forces such mobility as to permit retrenchment to locations in or close to the U.S., from which they can jump off for trouble spots on short notice. Mobility will get its biggest boost with the introduction in about three years of the C-5A, a transport capable of carrying 700 troops at 550 m.p.h. One hundred C-5A sorties would enable the Pentagon to throw 70,000 troops into any trouble spot in a few days. Soldiers will take only light equipment, will "marry up" with prepositioned heavy materiel stockpiled near the scene of the action.
Once they get there, the G.I.s of the future will use many techniques and devices developed from the military's experience in Viet Nam. The Army's Limited War Laboratory has already shipped 22 projects to Viet Nam for evaluation--from leech repellent to treetop landing pads--and is currently working on 85 more. More important, the U.S. will need to put into practice the sad lessons of Viet Nam. To stop trouble before it reaches the big shooting stage, it will have to learn the art of pacification better than it has. The U.S. will need to immunize countries against subversion by such means as roadbuilding and health programs, agricultural and educational assistance. Effective pacification also requires strong local police organizations, an intelligent amnesty policy to encourage enemy defection and military action by small, highly trained units capable of harassing the enemy night and day.
Many other changes in military posture are on the way. Mobility will allow the Army and Marine Corps to keep at least nine of their projected 31 combat divisions on a high-alert reserve status. The Army will go air-mobile: instead of the present one company of 25 helicopters to an infantry division, it will soon have six helicopter companies for each division. The Air Force will continue to lose its long-range manned bombers, which will be reduced from 680 to 465 by the early 1970s, but the Tactical Air Force will add three wings to bring its total to 24. So far, Secretary McNamara has turned a deaf ear to Air Force requests to develop an Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft. The Navy, strengthened by three additional nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the next few years, will have no powerful adversary on the surface of any ocean, but it faces a growing undersea threat from Russia's fleet of 430 submarines. It will concentrate much of its effort on learning to take on and eliminate this threat, partly by perfecting sensing devices and new weapons for anti-submarine warfare. It will also seek to increase its nuclear-powered force of attack submarines, now numbering more than 50, to something nearer to 100.
The U.S. will increase its strategic-missile force by 1968 to a projected ceiling of 1,710, including 656 submarine-based Polaris projectiles. The Pentagon is now installing 200 late-model Minuteman II missiles, is developing a Minuteman III with improved range, explosive power and targeting flexibility. Although the big missile force is largely in place and paid for, there is some apprehension among the experts that the improving power and accuracy of Soviet missiles may some day make the land-based birds obsolete. If that occurred, the U.S. might have to switch--at vast expense--to the water, placing ICBMs in stationary undersea silos or on movable underwater barges moored to the continental shelf. The Army has been pressing for a Nike X anti-missile system, but McNamara believes that it is too expensive ($30 billion or more) and imperfect, and that it could be thwarted by a considerably less costly increase in the opponent's offensive power.
Human Nature's Intrinsic Limits
All of this might, impressive as it is, does not in itself constitute an American military posture. The U.S. has learned many lessons from Viet Nam, but probably the most important is that military means, no matter how strong or skillful, are no longer enough to prevent or even to win wars. "The most important part of our military posture," says Harlan Cleveland, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, "is the political framework within which we use our power." Secretary McNamara, in his already famous Montreal speech, forcefully pointed out that, in a world of haves and havenots, military power alone cannot purchase security. "Without internal development of at least a minimal degree," McNamara said of the havenots, "order and stability are simply not possible. They are not possible because human nature cannot be frustrated beyond intrinsic limits. It reacts--because it must." So it must--and so it will, frequently erupting in crises that will deeply involve the U.S. in the years to come. Americans can do much, and are doing much, to help the have-nots through whom Communism hopes to make its advances. But, despite these efforts and despite all the talk about disarmament--to which the American spirit is basically receptive--the hard facts of international life require the U.S. to prepare to sustain indefinitely a large and powerful military machine, and to re-examine it constantly.
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