)dern U.S 

2ivil - Military 

Relations: 

Wielding the Terrible 

Swift Sword 

David E. Johnson 
The InstiCute for National Strategic Studies provides 

str,~eglc a~'~a!ysis to senior Department of Defense 

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Opera~ions and Operations Other Than War. 
Relations'. 

Wielding the Terrible 

Swift Sword 

David E. Johnson 

McNair Paper 57 

July 1997 

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ISSN 1071-7552 
. FORGING ]HE PARADIGMS ................... 1 

The Army Paradigm .......................... 1 

The Navy Paradigm .......................... 3 

The Air Power Paradigm ...................... 5 

Paradigms Triumphant: World War II ............ 8 

. FROM TRIUMPH TO CRISIS: 

WORLD WAR II TO VIETNAM ............. ] 3 

Service Roles and Missions ................... ] 4 

Testing the Paradigms: The Korean War .......... 17 

Limited War: A New Paradigm? ................ 20 

To the Brink of Crisis ........................ 28 

. LIMITS OF AMERICAN POWER ................ 51 

The Years in the Wilderness ................... 51 

]-he Armed Forces .......................... 54 

The Air Force .............................. 59 

The Navy ................................. 61 

The Marine Corps .......................... 63 

The Army ................................. 64 

. RESURGENCE ............................. 81 

Years of Plenty and the Emergence 

of the Joint Paradigm ..................... 81 

The Joint Paradigm Triumphant: 

Panama and the Gulf War ................. 86 

A Challenge to the Paradigm: Somalia ........... 91 

lii 

, , y 

Perry testified before the House International Relations and 

National Security committees on the commitment of U.S. 

ground forces to the Former Yugoslavia. The commitment, 

crafted in Dayton, Ohio, had been avoided for some 4 years. 

Perry carefully discussed the mission, rules of engagement, 

and exit strategy for U.S. forces. ~ 

Perry explained the rationale for the deployment--an 

opportunity to end the bloody conflict, further American 

interests in the region, and prevent the spread of the war to 

neighboring nations. He clearly defined the mission of the 

Implementation Force (IFOR) as "to oversee and enforce 

implementation of the military aspects of the peace 

agreement. "~ He pointedly stressed the strictly military nature 

of IFOR's mission, and noted that IFOR would not be 

involved in "civilian programs rebuilding the 

infrastructure, revitalizing the economy, bringing refugees 

back for resettlement and providing for free elections. "3 Perry 

also discussed the military capabilities of IFOR: 

We are going in with a well-armed and well-trained force 

and with robust rules of engagement. The U.S. ground 

contingent is built around the 1st Armored Division. 

Nobody should doubt that the 1st Armored Division is 

capable of taking care of itself. The 1 st AD's Abrams tanks, 

Bradley fighting vehicles, artillery and Apache helicopters 

will be sufficient to take on any opposition in the region. 4 

Author's note: A shorter version of this paper was prepared as part of the 

post-Cold War U.S. Civil-Military Relations project of the John M. Olin 

Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. The concept for the 

paper, and much of the research conducted for it, evolved when I was a 

Research Fellow at the Industrial College of the Armed I-orces, 1994. 

V 
examined the huge say U.S. military leaders had had in 

crafting the provisions of the Dayton agreement. It quoted 

several anonymous administration officials as believing that 

the agreement "was carefully crafted to reflect demands from 

the military .... Rather than be ignored.., the military, as a 

price for its support, has basically gotten anything it wanted. "6 

The article also speculated that the administration had 

listened so intently to its military leaders for reasons that were 

"part political cover, part lessons learned from the Somalia 

debacle and Haiti, part reflection of the mission in BosniaHerzegovina. "7 

This essay will argue that the demands placed by military 

officers on the provisions of the Dayton agreement reflect a 

steady increase in the influence of military officers in crafting 

defense policy, rather than the recognition of any lessons 

learned in Somalia or Haiti. Furthermore, this increased 

authority of the military--and the resultant deterioration in 

civil-military relations--is largely the result of the lessons 

drawn by the military from the American experience in 

Vietnam. In effect, Somalia and Haiti serve only to reinforce 

in the minds of military officers the validity of the Vietnam 

lessons, rather than provide new insights. And the essential 

lesson of Vietnam was that only professional military officers 

can formulate the fundamental principles governing the 

application of American military power, or military doctrine. 

In the United States, military doctrine can be thought of as 

a paradigm, similar to the paradigms employed by scientific 

communities described by Thomas Kuhn in his classic study 

The Structure of Scientific Revolution~. Kuhn described 

scientific paradigms in two ways. First, in a sociological 

sense, paradigms defined "the entire constellation of beliefs, 

w" 
y y pp

against which they are applied. These conditions of failure, 

or anomalies, can result in two responses. First, the 

community can "devise numerous articulations and ad hoc 

modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any 

apparent conflict. "1° Thus, the anomaly remains such and is 

not the basis for a fundarnental rethinking of the validity of the 

paradigm. Second, if the discontinuities are clearly not 

solvable within the existing paradigm (a situation Kuhn calls 

a crisis), a new paradigm will emerge. In the latter case, Kuhn 

asserts that a paradigmatic revolution has occurred. ~ 

Kuhn's logic resonates in the comprehensive definition of 

U.S. military doctrine contained in Joint Pub 1: Joint Warfare 

of the US Armed Forces, in that doctrine "offers a common 

perspective from which to plan and operate, and 

fundamentally shapes the way we think about and train for 

war. <: While the services are not unsophisticated, 

monolithic entities marching blindly to the beat of a rigid set 

of rules, their "institutional essence" is defined by their 

doctrine. 13 In short, doctrine is the frame of reference that 

fundamentally defines the activities of each of the Armed 

Forces by: 

• Prescribing the shared worldview and values as well 

as the "proper" methods, tools, techniques, and 

approaches to problem solving within and among the 

Services. 

• Providing a way in which the Services view 

themselves. 

• Governing how the Services deal with each other and 

with other governmental and nongovernmental agencies. 

vii 
py y y 

of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger during a November 1984 

speech before the National Press Club, "The Uses of Military 

Power." Mr. Weinberger enunciated "six major tests to be 

applied when we are weighing the use of U.S. combat forces 

abroad. ''14 They were quite explicit: 

(1) First, the United States should not commit forces to 

combat overseas unless the particular engagement or 

occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of 

our allies .... 

(2) Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat 

troops into a given situation, we should do so 

wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If 

we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources 

necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit 

them at all. Of course if the particular situation requires 

only limited force to win our objectives, then we should not 

hesitate to commit forces sized accordingly .... 

(3) Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat 

overseas, we should have clearly defined political and 

military objectives. And we should know precisely how our 

forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. 

And we should have and send the forces needed to do just 

that .... 

(4) Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the 

forces we have committed--their size, composition and 

disposition---must be continually reassessed and adjusted as 

necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change 

during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then 

so must our combat requirements. We must continuously 

vif'f 
the support of the American people and their elected 

representatives in Congress. This support cannot be 

achieved unless we are candid in making clear the threats 

we face; the support cannot be sustained without 

continuing and close consultation. We cannot fight a battle 

with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win 

a war overseas or, as in the case of Vietnam, in effect asking 

our troops not to win, but just to be there. 

(6) Sixth, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should 

be a last resort, is 

The Weinberger Doctrine, inherently restrictive in its 

criteria, became further constrained in application by the 

so-called Powell Doctrine. This corollary to the Weinberger 

Doctrine, crafted by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 

General Colin Powell, demands the use of overwhelming 

force when American military power is committed: 

to operate with overwhelming force, based not only on the 

quantity of forces and materiel committed, but on the 

quality of their planning and skillfulness of their 

employment. Properly trained and motivated forces with 

superior technology, executing innovative, flexible, and 

well-coordinated plans, provide a decisive qualitative edge. 

Careful selection of strategic and operation priorities aids 

concentration at the decisive point and time. Action to 

affect the enemy's dispositions and readiness prior to battle 

and to prevent enemy reinforcement of the battle by land, 

sea, or air also promotes concentration. The purpose of 

these and related measures is to achieve strategic advantage 

and exploit that advantage to win quickly, with as few 

casualties and as little damage as possible. TM 

ix 
doctrines, however, are products of an American military 

paradigm that was fully defined in World War II and that 

faced its only potential crisis in Vietnam. 

Notes 

1. William I. Perry, "The Deployment of U.S. Troops to Bosnia, 

Prepared Statement of Secretary of Defense William J. Perry to the 

House International Relations and National Security Committees, 

Nov. 30, 1995," Defense Issues 10, no. 102. 

2. Ibid. 

3. Ibid. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Ibid. 

6. Warren P. Strobel, "This Time Clinton Is Set to Heed Advice 

from Military," Washington Times, December 1, 1995, 1. 

7. Ibid. 

8. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d 

ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 175. 

9. Ibid. 

10. Ibid., 78. 

11. Ibid., 66-91. 

12. Joint Pub 1: Joint Warfare of the US Armed Forces 

(Washington: National Defense University Press, 1991 ), 6; emphasis 

in the original. 

13. Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy 

(Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1974), 28. I rely on 

Halperin's definition of "organizational essence" when I refer to 

"institutional essence." Halperin notes that: "Organizations have 

considerable freedom in defining their missions and the capabilities 

they need to pursue these missions. The organization's essence is 

the view held by the dominant group in the organization of what the 

missions and capabilities should be. Related to this are convictions 

about what kinds of people with what expertise, experience, and 

knowledge should be members of tile organization." 

X 
xi 
Civil-Military 

Relations'. 

Wielding the Terrible 

Swift Sword 

lo 

Forging the Paradigms 

World War I was the catalyst for a fundamental 

reconstruction of the American military paradigm. For the first 

time in its history, the United States participated with an 

alliance in a war against a first class enemy that posed no 

direct threat to the American homeland. During the 

subsequent interwar period, the Army and the Navy focused 

on developing the doctrines and technologies that would 

support the lessons they learned from World War I. 

The Army Paradigm 

When the United States entered World War l in April 1917, 

its Army, still largely a frontier constabulary, was clearly 

unprepared. The Army traditionally relied on mobilizing 

militia and volunteers to swell the ranks of its small Regular 

1 
Army counted 3,685,458 soldiers in its ranks, compared to a 

1 914 strength of 98,544.1 Further complicating mobilization 

was the fact that the United States did not have an industrial 

base that could arm its Army. Consequently, the American 

Army had to rely on its allies for virtually all of its war 

materiel. 

The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was not ready for 

even modest offensive operations until May 1 91 8. Its major 

campaign of the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, started 

on 26 September and ended with the Armistice in November. 

This campaign was against a German Army exhausted and 

demoralized by a series of abortive offensives. Nevertheless, 

the campaign provided the Americans with the practical battle 

experience from which they would assess their performance 

and the adequacy of their doctrine. 

The Army's limited, but highly favorable, experience in 

World War I seemed to reinforce the conviction that its 

doctrine, based on the importance of the transition from 

trench combat to offensive "open warfare," was essentially 

correct. Fire superiority was deemed essential, as was the 

efficient operation of the combined arms. Other major 

lessons involved increasing the number of modern weapons 

in the Army and the importance of managing the vast 

logistical requirements of mass armies and modern warfare. 2 

The Army captured the doctrinal lessons of World War I 

in its 1923 revision of the Field Service Regulations. Key 

points included: 

The ultimate objective of all military operations is the 

destruction of the enemy's armed forces by battle. Decisive 

defeat in battle breaks the enemy's will to war and forces 

him to sue for peace. ~ 

2 
Army counted 3,685,458 soldiers in its ranks, compared to a 

1 914 strength of 98,544. I Further complicating mobilization 

was the fact that the United States did not have an industrial 

base that could arm its Army. Consequently, the American 

Army had to rely on its allies for virtually all of its war 

materiel. 

The American Expeditionary Force ~AEF) was not ready for 

even modest offensive operations until May 1 918. Its major 

campaign of the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, started 

on 26 September and ended with the Armistice in November. 

This campaign was against a German Arrny exhausted and 

demoralized by a series of abortive offensives. Nevertheless, 

the campaign provided the Americans with the practical battle 

experience from which they would assess their performance 

and the adequacy of their doctrine. 

The Army's limited, but highly favorable, experience in 

World War I seemed to reinforce the conviction that its 

doctrine, based on the importance of the transition from 

trench combat to offensive "open warfare," was essentially 

correct. Fire superiority was deemed essential, as was the 

efficient operation of the combined arms. Other major 

lessons involved increasing the number of modern weapons 

in the Army and the importance of managing the vast 

logistical requirements of mass armies and modern warfare? 

The Army captured the doctrinal lessons of World War I 

in its 1923 revision of the Field Service Regulations. Key 

points included: 

The ultimate objective of all military operations is the 

destruction of the enemy's armed forces by battle. Decisive 

defeat in battle breaks the enemy's will to war and forces 

him to sue for peace. ~ 

2 

............................................. ........................................... 
pp

Decisive results are obtained only by the offensive. 

Only by means of a relentless pursuit of the beaten enemy 

can the full fruits of victory be obtained .... The object of 

the pursuit is the annihilation of the hostile forces, s 

Superior fire constitutes the best protection against loss as 

well as the most effective means of destruction. ° 

The Army also made a decision about the type of enemy that 

it would prepare to fight that fundamentally influenced both 

its warfighting doctrine and organizational structure. In the 

future the Army focused exclusively on preparing to fight: 

an opponent organized for war on modern principles and 

equipped with all the means of modern warfare" since "An 

army capable of waging successful war under these 

conditions will prove adequate to any less grave emergency 

with which it may be confronted. "7 

These principles, implemented by a mass army created 

around the nucleus of a small Regular Army and rapidly 

expanded by mobilized reserves and conscripts and armed by 

American industry, formed the basis of the doctrinal paradigm 

for the Army during the interwar period. 

The Navy Paradigm 

In the years before World War I, the U.S. Navy embraced a 

new doctrine: 

establish a command of the sea that would assure security 

to one's own coast and shipping, and destruction of the 

enemy's commerce "root and branch." The battleship was 

3 
g 

Accordingly, once the president and Congress reached a 

consensus on these points, it naturally followed that the 

United States would join in the naval arms race that began in 

earnest in the early 20th century with the commissioning of 

the "all big gun" battleship HMS Dreadnought. Between 

1 899 and 1916, the Navy increased its number of combatant 

vessels from 36 to 74 and its personnel from 16,354 to 

60,376. The Navy also concentrated its battleships in the 

Atlantic to create its "fighting fleet." Consequently, by 1907 

the traditional squadrons on distant stations had largely 

disappeared. 9 

The naval lessons of World War I were mixed. Some 

believed that the ascendance of the submarine and airplane 

"sounded the death knell of the battleship. ''1° This view was 

strengthened in 1921 when Army bombers, under the 

command of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, sank the 

"unsinkable" German battleship Ostfreisland. ~1 The Joint 

Board that examined the bombing tests did not agree: 

The battleship is still the backbone of the fleet and the 

bulwark of the Nation's sea defense, and will so remain so 

long as safe navigation of the sea for purposes of trade or 

transportation is vital to success in war. 

The airplane, like the submarine, destroyer, and mine 

has added to the dangers to which battleships are exposed, 

but has not made the battleship obsolete. The battleship 

still remains the greatest factor of naval strength. 12 

This view of the primacy of the battleship was the essence 

of the paradigm the Navy developed after World War I. 

Although it devoted significant effort to developing 

submarines and naval shore and carrier aviation before World 

War II, these weapons were clearly ancillary to the big-gun 

4 
where another naval power was on the riseJapan. Its 

strategy for a conflict with Japan, War Plan Orange, defined 

its strategic planning between the wars. Orange envisioned 

a war in the Pacific in which the United States Navy would 

drive across the Pacific to relieve the Philippines and 

eventually defeat Japan through blockade. 

Naval planners realized that the successful execution of 

Orange required ground forces to wrest bases from the 

Japanese and to establish and defend facilities to support its 

operations. ~4 In the Marine Corps, the Navy had its own 

organic force for this mission. In January 1920, Admiral 

Robert E. Cooney, Chief of Naval Operations, informed Major 

General George Barnett, Commandant of the Marine Corps, 

that "ORANGE would henceforth determine all the Navy's 

plans and programs." He also recommended that the Marine 

Corps develop an expeditionary force to support ORANGE. is 

Thus began a process that slowly transformed the Marine 

Corps during the interwar years into an amphibious assault 

force. 

The Air Power Paradigm 

The potential of aviation as a weapon had become clear in 

World War I, and the major American military doctrinal 

innovation between the two World Wars was in aerial 

warfare. How this potential could best be realized was open 

for debate, however. In the Navy, airplanes and the aircraft 

carriers designed to allow their operation with the fleet clearly 

took second place to the battleship. The role of naval 

aviation was to support a navy still committed to seizing 

command of the seas with a battleship fleet. Most naval 

aviators accepted this complementary and subordinate role 

and worked to further naval aviation within these 

constraints. 16 The attitudes of Marine Corps aviators are 

5 
is its usefulness in assisting the troops on the ground to 

successfully carry out their operations. "~7 

Perhaps the one area in which a real revolution in military 

affairs occurred in the United States during the interwar era 

was in the birth of air power doctrine within the Army. The 

Army was the only service where there was outright 

contention over the future of aviation. The National Defense 

Act of 1920 created an Army Air Service more or less 

equivalent to the other Army branches like the Infantry. For 

many air officers (Brigadier General Billy Mitchell was the 

most vocal), the true possibilities of military aviation, 

particularly bombardment aviation, could be realized only 

with the creation of an independent air force. 

Even those Army aviators of a less radical bent than 

Mitchell were frustrated by the limited vision of a conservative 

War Department fixed on the primacy of the infantry in 

warfare. The 1 923 Field Service Regulations, published after 

the sinking of the Osffreisland, still envisioned bombardment 

aviation as a kind of aerial artillery. Operating "beyond the 

effective range of artillery," it attacked the "enemy's line of 

communications and supply"; however, "During decisive 

combat, its effort is concentrated to render the greatest 

assistance possible to the main attack. "1~ 

During the interwar years, the War Department gradually 

began to recognize the growing importance of aviation. In 

1926, the War Department published Training Regulations 

No. 440-1.5: Fundamental Principles for the Employment of 

Air Service. This manual finally recognized a strategic, 

independent mission for bombardment aviation with "the 

object of destroying military supply, main lines of 

communications, mobilization, concentration, and military 

industrial centers," that did "not involve direct cooperation 

with ground troops on the field of battle." Still, control over 

even strategic bombardment was implicit in the statement that 

6 
doctrine between the wars. It had antecedents in the theories 

of a number of air power theorists: Giulio Douhet of Italy; 

Hugh Trenchard of Great Britain; and Billy Mitchell. The real 

work of crafting the American air power doctrine, however, 

was done at the Air Corps Tactical School. At that institution, 

beginning in the mid-1920s, some of the best minds in the Air 

Corps worked to develop a doctrine that would capitalize on 

the what they believed were the inherent strengths of 

bombardment aviation. 

In 1931, the Air Corps Tactical School stated explicitly the 

central assumption that governed doctrinal development in 

the Army air arm: "Bombardment aviation, under the 

circumstances anticipated in a major war, is the basic arm of 

the Air Force. ''2° The most radical notion developed by the 

school, however, was the nature of the targets bombers would 

attack. Unlike the ground Army and the Navy, which both 

focused on the opposing military forces, air power advocates 

saw the enemy's industrial capacity to wage war as the 

decisive target. Furthermore, these industries, susceptible to 

attack only by bombers at the start of a war, could be disabled 

by attacking their "critical nodes." 

Control of the air weapon, however, was the central issue 

in the insurgency conducted by Army air power advocates 

throughout the interwar era. Although the War Department 

made concessions that progressively yielded greater autonomy 

for the air component of the Army, it did not relinquish 

control. Finally, in February 1942, in the early uncertain days 

after Pearl Harbor, an accommodation was reached when 

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9082 reorganizing 

the War Department per Army Chief of Staff George C. 

Marshall's plan. Marshall, fed up with the bureaucratic inertia 

of the War Department, restructured it into three separate and 

autonomous commands: the Army Air Forces, the Army 

Ground Forces and the Services of Supply. 21 The restructuring 

7 
ground forces; the Army Air Forces focused on a strategic air 

war dominated by its own unique doctrinal 

vision--destroying the enemy's means of making war. 

Paradigms Tritmaphant: World War II 

In World War II, the United States held a dominant position. 

The mobilization, production, and deployment issues that had 

hanlstrurlg American efforts in World War I had been studied 

between the wars, so when the United States began rearming, 

it did so with vengeance. American efforts, particularly when 

coupled with the production of the Allies, yielded an 

immense quantitative advantage over Axis powers. 

During the war, each of the American Armed Forces 

adhered to the doctrinal paradigm it had developed between 

the World Wars, using ever increasing material resources. 

This is not to say that there was no adaptation to wartime 

experience, only that the essence of each service's doctrine 

prevailed. Furthermore, each service concentrated on fighting 

the war for which it had planned and prepared. 

In accord with the "Europe first" policy of the Allies, the 

Army focused on Europe. After bloodying its newly formed 

units in Africa and Italy, it finally made the long awaited 

invasion of France in June 1944. The underlying premise of 

the invasion, from the American perspective, was the "belief 

that the destruction of the enemy's armed forces ought to be 

the first object of strategy and that northern Europe was the 

best place to confront and destroy the German army. ''2~ 

The period from the invasion to the collapse of the Third 

Reich was a long and brutal campaign. General Dwight D. 

Eisenhower advanced on a broad front, using overwhelming 

firepower, constant pressure, and direct assaults to annihilate 

the German Army. The chief lessons the Army learned in the 

war were ways in which existing doctrine could be enhanced. 

8 
The development of tactics and procedures for the 

employment of air power by ground units had, however, been 

largely an ad hoc effort by units in the combat theaters. As an 

institution, the Army Air Forces had little interest in this role. 

Consequently, "Because of the hesitancy on the part of the 

War Department to publish a Field Manual or Training 

Circular .... The splendid cooperation between the Tactical 

Air Commands and the Armies was developed during 

operations. "24 

The lack of emphasis on air-ground operations stemmed 

from the fact that the attention of the Army Air Forces was 

riveted on its strategic bombing campaign against Germany 

and from its different conception of the utility of tactical 

aviation. In July 1943, the War Department published FM 

1 00-20, Command and Employment of Air Power. The new 

manual was published without the concurrence of the 

commander of Army Ground Forces, and was "viewed with 

dismay by the Ground Forces--as the Army Air Forces' 

'Declaration of Independence'. "25 The issue of autonomy was 

addressed head-on with the statement, in capital letters, 

LAND POWER AND AIR POWER ARE CO-EQUAL AND 

INTERDEPENDENT FORCES; NEITHER IS AN AUXILIARY 

OF THE OTHER. 2~ 

Furthermore, the thorny issue of control was resolved: 

CONTROL OF AVAILABLE AIR POWER MUST BE 

CENTRALIZED AND COMMAND MUST BE EXERCISED 

THROUGH THE AIR FORCE COMMANDER IF I-HIS 

INHERENT FLEXIBILITY AND ABILITY TO DELIVER A 

DECISIVE BLOW ARE TO BE FULLY EXPLOITED. 27 

9 
action is vital and decisive would they be diverted to tactical 

air force missions. The roles of tactical air forces, in priority, 

were gaining air superiority, isolation of the battlefield, and 

battlefield support of ground units. Furthermore, ground 

support missions against enemy units or "contact zone 

missions" were downplayed as "expensive" and "only at 

critical times" were they deemed "profitable. "~8 

For General Henry H. Arnold and a generation of air 

power advocates, the stakes were extraordinarily high to 

prove that "our way of making war" was in fact decisive. 29 

The outcome of the strategic bombing campaign was the 

determining issue for an independent air force. The American 

air campaign against Germany began in August 1942 and 

eventually extended to Japan. Although strategic bombing 

did not end the war independently, its effects were judged by 

some to be decisive to the outcome. 3° The model that defined 

the views of Air Force officers about the employment of air 

power was also settled in the critical areas of independence, 

control, and strategic and tactical missions. Finally, any 

criticisms of the decisiveness of strategic bombing became 

seemingly irrelevant in the blinding flash of the atomic bombs 

used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The Navy, and its supporting Marine Corps, focused on 

the Pacific Theater. The only fundamental assault to its model 

came on December 7, 1941, with the destruction of its 

battleships at Pearl Harbor. Billy Mitchell's prophecy had 

come true. Nevertheless, the accommodation was rather 

simple: the aircraft carrier became the Navy's new capital 

ship. Although American submarines ravaged Japanese 

commercial shipping, the Navy's main effort was fixed on the 

goal of destroying the Japanese fleet and strangling the island 

nation's economy by blockade. To this end, the Navy and 

Marine Corps executed a strategy that largely mirrored its 

prewar Orange plan and that was derived from its doctrine. 31 

10 
2. Ibid., 393; and "Report of Superior Board on Organization 

and Tactics," July 1, 1919, Records of the Chiefs of Arms, Office of 

the Chief of Cavalry, Correspondence, 1921-1942, Box 13, Record 

Group 177, National Archives, Washington, DC, 18-62, 132-184. 

3. U.S. War Depamnent, Field Service Regulations 

(Washington, 1924), 77. 

4. Ibid., 77. 

5. Ibid., 100. 

6. Ibid., 84. 

7. Ibid., III. 

8. Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American 

Naval Power, 1776-1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1939; reprint, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 292. 

9. Allan R. Millet and Peter Maslowski, For the Common 

Defense: A Military History of the Llnited States of America (New 

York: The Free Press, 1984), 302-305. 

10. Ibid., 420. 

11. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War, 2d ed. 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 228. 

12. U.S. Navy Department, Report of the Joint Board on Results 

of Aviation and Ordnance Tests Held During June and July, 1921 

and Conclusions Reached (Washington, 1921 ), 7. 

13. Weigley, The American Way of War, 253. 

14. Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United 

States Marine Corps, new and rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 

1991 ), 320. 

15. Ibid., 320. 

16. Ibid., 242-53. 

17. Alfred A. Cunningham, "Value of Aviation to the Marine 

Corps," Marine Corps Gazette 5 (September ] 920), 222. 

18. Field Service Regulations, 1923. 

19. U.S. War Department, Training Regulations No. 440-13: 

Fundamental Principles for the Employment of Air Service 

(Washington, 1926), 11. 

20. Air Corps Tactical School, Bombardment Aviation (Fort 

Monroe: 1931 ), 69; emphasis in the original. 

11 
23. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 47475. 

24. United States Forces, European Theater. General Board. 

Air Section. The Tactical Air Force in the European Theater of 

Operations. Study Number 54 (n.p., n.d. [1946]), Foreword. 

25. Kent Roberts Greenfield, Army Ground Forces and the 

Air-Ground Battle Team Including Light Aviation, Historical Section, 

Army Ground Forces, Study No. 35 (Fort Monroe: Historical 

Section, Army Ground Forces), 47. 

26. U.S. War Department, FM 100-20, Field Service 

Regulations: Command and Employment of Air Power (Washington, 

1943), 1. 

27. Ibid., 2. 

28. Ibid., 8-12. 

29. Letter, General H.H. Arnold to Major General Ira C. Eaker, 

29 June 1943 in Arnold Papers, Box 149, Library of Congress; 

emphasis in the original. 

30. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. The United States Strategic 

Bombing Surveys (European War) (Pacific War) (Washington, 

1945-1946; reprint, Maxwell AFB: Air University Press, 1987), 37. 

31. Weigley, The American Way of War, 269-311. 

12 
It is difficult to overstate the influence World War II had on 

the United States. With its entry into World War II, the 

United States began a course that marked a fundamental shift 

from the key tenet that had defined its political and military 

policies since President George Washington had warned the 

nation in his 1796 farewell address to "steer clear of 

permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world. "~ 

For the first time in its history, the United States was 

committed to the concept of collective security it had avoided 

following World War I, when it refused to join the League of 

Nations. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States 

became a player on the world stage and committed itself to 

further alliances guaranteed by its military might, defined for 

the services by their experiences in World War II. 

In the main, each service had executed, with some 

adaptation, its prewar doctrine and had triumphed. The 

success of these doctrines in practice, at the head of a 

wartime alliance that had won the greatest conflict in human 

history, seemed to fulfill the services' prewar assumptions. In 

the aftermath of war, the tested paradigms formed the frames 

of reference for the generation of military leaders who led the 

Armed Forces of the United States into a future fundamentally 

different than the past. 

The anchor of the alliances made by the United States was 

the imperative to contain Communism, viewed largely as a 

monolithic Soviet-led threat, until the waning years of the 

Vietnam War. l-he world had seemingly become bipolar and 

13 
was caused by the attempts of the Western democracies to 

appease, rather than confront, Hitler's aggression. Thus, 

Munich became a powerful symbol for a generation of 

statesmen and soldiers who argued for preparedness and the 

willingness to take a stand against aggression. 2 Soviet 

expansion into Eastern Europe seemed ominously familiar and 

clearly threatening. 

The new American policy of containment was a radical 

departure from the traditional American military policy of 

defending the nation. In the aftermath of World War II, the 

military forces of the United States demobilized as they had 

after every war; it was, however, a temporary demobilization. 

For the first time in its history, the United States resolved to 

maintain a large peacetime military establishment to counter 

the "threat by the monolithic mass of Communistic 

Imperialism. ''3 Thus, the new centerpiece of American 

military strategy, enunciated in 1948 by the State Department, 

was a new reality that recognized: 

while war "is always a possibility," the main purpose in 

maintaining armed forces was to provide "support for our 

political position"; other purposes were to act "as a 

deterrent," to encourage other nations attempting to resist 

Soviet aggression, and to %rage war successfully if war 

should develop. "4 

The passage in 1948 of a peacetime selective service law 

enabled the United States to maintain the active duty military 

posture necessary to support containment. A large National 

Guard and Reserve force undergirded the active component) 

Service Roles and Missions 

The implications of a continual East-West confrontation, in 

the presence of nuclear weapons, had significant ram ifications 

14 
lesson from World War II, it was that air, sea, and land forces 

had to operate jointly. The highly decentralized and 

simplistic prewar conception, with the Army responsible for 

land operations and the Navy focused on command of the 

sea, was clearly inadequate. Still, plans to unify the armed 

services met stiff opposition, particularly from naval officers 

who believed their service would suffer in the postwar 

competition for resources with the Army and the Air Force/~ 

The initial efforts--the National Security Act of 1947 and 

Executive Order 9877-- began a process that by 1949 

resulted in the establishment of the Department of Defense 

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nevertheless, the services still 

retained a great deal of power because the Chairman of the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff did not "command" the chiefs of the 

services. 7 

Power was retained by each service through their roles 

and missions. In March 1948, Secretary of Defense James 

Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs crafted the Key West Agreement, 

later sanctioned by Executive Order 9950, that delineated the 

primary and collateral functions of each service. What is 

particularly striking about the Key West Agreement is that it 

essentially assured the retention by each service of its 

traditional tuff, thereby virtually guaranteeing, at best, 

duplication of effort and, at worst, incompatibility. The 

services were virtually autonomous because each retained its 

authority to "organize, train, and equip forces for joint 

operations" and "conduct research, to develop tactics, 

techniques and organization, and to develop and procure 

weapons, equipment, and supplies each service 

coordinating with the others in all matters of joint concern. ''8 

Although the April 21, 1948 "Functions of the Armed 

Forces and the Joint Chiefs of Staff" document that resulted 

from the Key West conference provided extensive lists of 

functions, the key missions assigned each service endorsed 

15 
assertions about the decisiveness of air power: 

Air combat and supporting operations designed to effect, 

through the systematic application of force to a selected 

series of vital targets, the progressive destruction and 

disintegration of the enemy's war-making capacity to a 

point where he no longer retains the ability or the will to 

wage war. Vital targets may included key manufacturing 

systems, sources of raw material, critical material, stock 

piles, power systems, transportation systems, 

communications facilities, concentrations of uncommitted 

elements of enemy armed forces, key agricultural areas, and 

other such target systems. 9 

Still, intense interservice rivalry remained the norm, 

occasionally punctuated by extreme episodes like the 1949 

"revolt of the admirals. "1° In 1 950, Dwight Eisenhower, then 

serving as the president of Columbia University, noted in a 

letter to Carl Vinson, Chairman of the House Armed Services 

Committee, the source of this tension: 

Manifestly, each service will attempt to secure the greatest 

possible portion of the aggregate sum [of the budget] in any 

year in order that it may find itself in a position to meet, 

with some degree of effectiveness, its own assigned and 

traditional responsibilities. Much of the heat in recent 

inter-service controversy has sprung directly from this 

process of attempting to distribute deficits among the three, 

with the consequent jealousy with which each has viewed 

every allocation made to other services. When civilian 

authority is forced to iutervene and make decisions in this 

delicate matter, it is easy to see where one of the services 

can quickly convince itself that it is the victim of special 

considerations or special lobbying ability on the part of 

others. It then seeks relief from any possible source, 

including the Congress. 11 

16 
the experiences of World War II for historical example--for 

illustrations to prove the soundness of their own a rgu ments." ~ 

For the Air Force, strategic bombing of the Soviet Union's 

industrial capacity seemed the war winning strategy. For the 

Navy, command of the seas and the ability to attack Soviet 

land targets with carrier based aviation was the focus. The 

Army concentrated on a land war in Europe against the Red 

Army. 13 

Testing the Paradigms: The Korean War 

On June 25, 1950, the armies of North Korea invaded South 

Korea, a complete surprise to the United States; in July 1953, 

an armistice was declared sanctioning the 38th parallel as the 

border between the two Koreas. America had fought its first 

limited war of the post-World War II era. In the process, a 

strong tradition that had been sacrosanct in American 

politico-military relations was seriously undermined. 

Civil-military relations before Korea had met a time-honored 

standard--political considerations defined the goals of a war 

at its inception, but civilian leaders then largely stepped aside 

and let military officers prosecute the war with broad 

operational autonomy. There were no sanctuaries for the 

enemy and military strategy was paramount. The object of 

American military strategy was decisive victory in the field, 

rather than the attainment of any nebulous political goal. 

The wars America engaged in were total, and its enemies 

surrendered unconditionally after defeat on the battlefield. 

Only then did the politicians and diplomats regain control. 

Indeed, "War was seen as a failure--not a continuation--of 

diplomacy and politics. It was up to the military to put things 

right again--without interference from the diplomats or 

politicians. ''14 

17 
winning the war and put off until later the settling of political 

issues. ''~5 President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Harry 

S. Truman resisted "making political commitments to either of 

their Allies until victory had been achieved" and "consistently 

gave the green light to their military chiefs, and these 

consistently rejected decisions on grounds other than military 

effect. "16 Therefore, the American way of war in many ways 

perverted the Clausewitzian dictum: "The political object is 

the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never 

be considered in isolation from their purpose. "~7 

Seen from this perspective, the near crisis in civil-military 

relations caused by MacArthur's challenging the restrictions 

of a limited war were in consonance with past American 

practices when theater commanders were largely autonomous 

in their prosecution of the nation's wars. This had been 

MacArthur's experience in World War II, when his major 

source of friction with the War Department was over the issue 

of getting more resources to prosecute the war in the Pacific, 

not over how to fight the campaigns in his theater. 

While there was widespread support in military circles of 

the MacArthur relief on the grounds that he had openly 

opposed the President, many officers shared his frustration 

over the limitations on military action. General George E. 

Stratemeyer, Commanding General, Far Eastern Far East Air 

Forces, believed that the American military policies in Korea 

were against the national military tradition, stating: 

It [the American military objective] is contrary to everything 

that every military commander that I have been associated 

with or from all of our history--he has never been in a 

position where he could not win the war he started to win. 

That is not American... I know that General MacArthur's 

hands were tied, I am sure, not by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 

but by the... State Department. 1~ 

18 
policy foredoomed American negotiating efforts prior to the 

spring of 1953. "1~ Finally, General Otto P. Weyland, 

Stratemeyer's successor as Commanding General, Far East Air 

Forces, although understanding the war was limited, wrote 

that there had been "chafing at the political limitations on the 

employment of air power. "2° In short, "In Korea, for perhaps 

the first time in modern American experience, military 

objectives were tempered and shaped by political 

considerations, and the American military became very 

frustrated with this new intrusion and limitation upon their 

traditional quest for military victory. "~ 

The object of American military strategy had always been 

decisive victory, rather than the attainment of any nebulous 

political goal. The wars America engaged in were total and 

its enemies surrendered unconditionally after defeat on the 

battlefield. Only then did the politicians and diplomats regain 

control. In Korea, MacArthur's military strategy of 

annihilating the enemy was clearly in this tradition. It also 

came into conflict with the administration's political 

imperative of limiting the conflict in the broader context of 

containment and the avoidance of global conflict. 

Indeed, the Korean War seemingly challenged the utility 

of ground forces in war. President Dwight Eisenhower 

entered office promising to bring the war to a conclusion. He 

soon made it clear that he had no compunction about 

resorting to nuclear weapons to end the conflict. In a meeting 

with the National Security Council on May 6, 1953, 

Eisenhower stressed that "we have to consider the atomic 

bomb as simply another weapon in our arsenal. "22 He also let 

the Chinese know that he was willing to widen the war and 

attack Manchuria to get the communists to agree to an 

armistice. ~3 In such an attack the President noted that "it was 

clear that we would have to use atomic weapons. ''24 

19 
first vindication of the Massive Retaliation theory that would 

be the centerpiece of the administration's national security 

policies. ~6 Indeed, the belief in the bomb was reaffirmed by 

Eisenhower when he stated at a October 13 meeting of the 

National Security Council that "we should use the bomb in 

Korea if the aggression is renewed. ''~7 

Secretary of State Dulles announced the administration's 

new national security policy, dubbed "massive retaliation," 

before the Council of Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954. 

Dulles stressed that the new strategy was designed for a 

protracted solution to the Soviet threat, but one that did not 

cause the nation "to become permanently committed to 

military expenditures that they lead to 'practical bankruptcy'." 

Dulles posited that what the administration wanted was "a 

maximum deterrent at a bearable cost." Thus, the new policy 

would "depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, 

instantly, by means and at places of our choosing. "28 Dulles 

further amplified on the intent of the "New Look" during a 

Senate hearing, explaining that "the new policy clearly 

provided political guidance to the military to emphasize air 

and naval power and to deemphasize land power. "~ 

Limited War: A New Paradigm? 

The inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President marked a 

shift by the United States toward a more activist role in the 

Cold War. Kennedy had castigated the Eisenhower strategy of 

massive retaliation throughout tile presidential campaign 

because, in the words of a member of the new administration, 

it seemingly offered only "the alternatives of either national 

humiliation or all-out war. "3° The failures were patently 

manifest: in 1954 France had been forced out of Indochina 

by the Communist Vietminh; in 1 956 the Soviets had brutally 

repressed an anti-Communist revolution in Hungary; and, 

20 
the all or nothing policy of massive retaliation had failed 

miserably in containing Communist expansion. 

Kennedy viewed the Third World "as the decisive arena of 

competition between the free world and international 

communism "31 and was committed to forging "a credible 

deterrent to Communist expansionism. ''32 The strategy the 

Kennedy administration embraced in the place of massive 

retaliation was termed flexible response. 

Flexible response had its origins in the debates of the 

1950s over what capabilities and doctrines were necessary to 

address local or limited wars stemming from Communist 

expansion. Critics of massive retaliation, such as Bernard 

Brodie, Edward L. Katzenbach, Hans J. Morgenthau, and 

Chester Bowles,challenged the notion that nuclear threats 

could deter limited wars, "suggesting that the enemy would 

find it hard to believe that the United States could mean it 

when it threatened massive retaliation for limited 

provocation. ''33 

Two widely read books by Robert E. Osgood and Henry 

A. Kissinger offered further critiques of massive retaliation and 

posited arguments for an American capability to fight limited 

wars. In IJmited War: The Challenge to American Security, 

Osgood posed the question that he believed was the central 

challenge facing the nation's foreign policy: "How can the 

United States utilize its military power as a rational and 

effective instrument of national policy? "34 Answering his own 

question, Osgood asserted that "the only rational course is to 

develop a strategy capable of limiting warfare and fighting 

limited wars successfully. ''3s 

Kissinger, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, 

asserted that massive retaliation had its basis in an American 

penchant for "a theory of war based on the necessity of total 

victory. "~ 14e believed that "we added the atomic bomb to 

our arsenal without integrating the implications into our 

21 
narrow view created local conditions wherein which the 

Communists could expand without triggering American 

nuclear response. 38 He advocated "flexible, graduated 

deterrence and flexible, graduated military action if deterrence 

failed or if there arose initiatives to be seized. ''3~ The 

challenge, in Kissinger's view, was for the United States "to 

find intermediate applications for our military strength . . . 

which brings power into balance with the willingness to use 

it. 4° 

The most widely read articulation of the need for an 

American limited war capability written by a military officer 

was retired Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell D. Taylor's 

The Uncertain Trumpet. Throughout his tenure as Chief of 

Staff, Taylor was a critic of massive retaliation and the 

Eisenhower administration's New Look cuts of conventional 

military capabilities. Taylor's critique of the Eisenhower 

strategy was similar, if less academic, than that of the civilian 

strategists: "It offers no alternative other than reciprocal 

suicide or retreat. "4~ 

To replace the strategy of massive retaliation, Taylor 

advocated flexible response because of its three basic 

objectives: 

To deter nuclear attack on the United States, to deter or 

defeat limited aggression anywhere (including a Communist 

attack on NATO with conventional forces), and to make 

provision for essential survival measures in the unhappy 

event that general war is not deterred or comes through 

m iscalcu lati on .42 

The strategy also called for a commitment by the United States 

to symmetrical containment and a conventional arms buildup 

because it required the nation to "prepare itself to respond 

22 
, y ygy 

address to Congress on his administration's defense policies: 

"Our defense posture must be both flexible and determined. 

Any aggressor contemplating an attack on any part of the Free 

World with any kind of weapons, conventional or nuclear, 

must know that our response will be suitable, selective, swift, 

and effective. "44 The President also warned of an insidious 

threat posed to the security of the Free World by its "being 

slowly nibbled away at the periphery, regardless of our 

strategic power, by forces of subversion, infiltration, 

intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal 

revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare, or a series 

of limited wars. "4~ To counter "this area of local wars" he 

proposed a revamped Military Assistance Program. 

Additionally, he was interested in "the need for a wider range 

of usable military power, "46 stating: "Diplomacy and defense 

are no longer distinct alternatives, one to be used where the 

other fails--both must complement each other. ''47 In a 

departure from the Eisenhower policy of stressing economic 

security, Kennedy noted: "Our arms must be adequate to 

meet our commitments and insure our security, without being 

bound by arbitrary budget ceilings. "48 

The Kennedy defense buildup focused on both nuclear 

and conventional forces. Early in the administration, 

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara imposed a new 

rationality on the defense budget process by introducing the 

Planning Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS). 

McNamara further postulated the view that the basis for 

defense planning would be preparation "to fight two and one 

half wars simultaneously--that is, a major war in Europe, a 

major war in Asia, and a lesser struggle elsewhere. "~9 He also 

laid the foundation for what would become the "strategic 

nuclear triad" of nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic 

missiles (iCBMs), and manned bombers. The debate over the 

strategic nuclear deterrent would continue within the context 

23 
appropriate in general war situations, and that Limited, local 

war should be fought with conventional weapons, or the 

danger would become too great that the war would not 

remain limited and local. "sl 

This new emphasis on conventional capability was 

welcomed by the Armed Forces, with the possible exception 

of the Air Force's Strategic Air Command. s: The Army was 

clearly the greatest beneficiary after its years of New Look 

neglect and Army Chief of Staff George H. Decker noted: "It 

is gratifying to the Army that the new administration is 

pursuing a policy stressing nonnuclear weapons and 

conventional forces... We feel that as we make our ideas and 

objectives better understood, we will see the Army in a better 

position than it has been for some time. ''s3 The Army also 

restructured its divisions, abandoning the nuclear-battlefieldfocused Pentomic organization for a new, more flexible 

ROAD (Reorganization Objectives Army Division), geared to 

functioning on conventional battlefields, s4 

Still, even in the face of what appeared to be a new era of 

military expansion there were signs of growing tension 

between the civilian and military members of the Department 

of Defense. A September 1961 article in Army magazine, 

titled "McNamara and His Band," noted: 

If his military advisers respond with clear and cogent ideas, 

well and good. If they don't, then McNamara turns to his 

eager, articulate "whiz kids'--young civilian 

mathematicians, economists, physicists and logicians who 

make up for their lack of battlefield experience and military 

knowledge by the impressive application of scientific 

analysis and mathematical logic couched in a jargon that 

sometimes makes old and simple ideas appear brilliantly 

new and complicated, ss 

24 
foreign policy challenges. The Bay of Pigs, Communist forays 

into Laos, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Berlin Crisis all 

tested the administration's resolve and, in the case of the 

Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the nation to the brink of 

nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Each of these events was, 

however, short lived--the real test case for the tenets of 

flexible response in a limited war occurred in Vietnam. 

When President Kennedy entered office he believed that 

the Communist insurgency was the threat to the Diem regime, 

not a conventional invasion from the North. This view 

coincided with Kennedy's conviction that "sublimited or 

guerrilla warfare have since 1 945 constituted the most active 

and constant threat to free world security. "56 Kennedy also 

believed that the United States military was poorly equipped 

to deal with the problem. Consequently, he tried to force a 

doctrinal change on the Armed Forces from the top down. 

Kennedy began his reform effort by directing Secretary of 

Defense McNamara to examine American "counter-guerrilla 

resources." The President took extraordinary steps in his 

efforts to get the military to embrace his views about the 

centrality of counterinsurgency in the strategy to thwart 

communist expansion. He confronted the Joint Chiefs early 

in his tenure and directed that they develop the necessary 

capabilities to meet the unconventional challenge, s7 Kennedy 

also took a keen interest in the Army's Special Forces, because 

he was convinced that they "had great potential as a 

counterinsurgency force. "s8 Up until this point, the focus of 

the Army's Special Forces had been assisting conventional 

operations through "guerrilla warfare against conventional 

forces in enemy territory. ''s9 Over the objections of the Army 

leadership, Kennedy ordered significant increases in Special 

Forces strength. 6° 

Despite Kennedy's personal emphasis, the military, 

particularly the Army, was slow to respond to the President's 

25 
know that the Army is not going to develop in this 

counterinsurgency field and do the things that I think must be 

done unless the Army itself wants to do it. "62 

The President had ample reason to feel the military was 

not in step with his views. It soon became patently clear to 

an increasingly frustrated Kennedy that the military, although 

ebullient over the defense buildup, did not share his vision of 

what constituted usable military force. General Decker had 

reportedly "shrugged off preparation for counter-guerrilla 

warfare as something it [the Army] can take in stride," telling 

the President that "any good soldier can handle guerrillas. "63 

It was also obvious that Decker viewed counterinsurgency as 

a distraction from the real threat, Soviet conventional military 

power in Europe. 64 

Surely more distressing to the President were the views of 

the supposedly enlightened General Taylor, who stated, "We 

good soldiers are trained for all kinds of things. We don't 

have to worry about special situations. ''65 Indeed, Taylor's 

flexible response doctrine had been designed to enhance the 

Army's ability to fight midintensity conventional wars, not to 

prepare it to fight against guerrillas in "sublimited wars. "66 

The views of the ArroyOs senior leadership mitigated the 

effects of the President's prodding and scrutiny of the Army's 

efforts in counterinsurgency, the service he clearly viewed as 

having the lead in the field. The Army made only marginal 

accommodations of the President's views in the doctrine they 

promulgated to deal with limited wars. 

The Army issued two manuals that dealt specifically with 

counterinsurgency. The May 1961 version of FM 31-1 5, 

Operations Against Irregular Forces, discussed the need for 

civil-military cooperation, intelligence, propaganda, and civic 

action, but its clear emphasis was on offensive combat 

operations: "The ultimate objective of operations against an 

irregular force is to eliminate the irregular force and prevent 

26 
organizations were adequate to the task of fighting irregulars 

was also stated: "Infantry, armored cavalry, and airborne 

units are the TOE units best suited for combat against 

guerrillas. "°9 FM 31-22, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Forces, 

issued in November 1 963, had little impact across the Army 

as a whole since it "was written by the Special Warfare Center 

and directed at Special Forces troops, not the Army as a 

whole. "7° 

The February 1962 version of FM 100-5, Field Service 

Regulations--Operations, was much more sophisticated than 

its predecessors. It discussed national objectives, the 

character of conflict, limited war, unconventional warfare, 

military operations against irregular forces, and situations 

short of war. 71 Nevertheless, although the doctrine 

recognized the inherent linkage between national policies and 

military objectives, and stressed that "Military objectives 

selected must be compatible with the limitations which 

national policies impose upon the area of conflict, weapons, 

participants, or other factors," the military strategy focused on 

the central tenet that: 

military objectives are pursued energetically, and military 

power is applied forcefully and decisively in accord with 

the chosen strategy .... Subordination to broad national 

interests does not diminish the force and vigor with which 

military operations are executed .72 

In short, the time honored principles of war still applied, 

particularly the "Principle of the Objective" and the "Principle 

of the Offensive." The "ultimate objective of war" remained 

"the destruction of the enemy's armed forces and his will to 

fight"; accordingly, "each operation must contribute to this 

ultimate objective. "73 

27 
formulation of national security policy," the Army was "acting 

out its convictions that its first priority was in Europe and that 

if you could win a big war, you could certainly win a little 

one. "74 The efforts were also clearly in response to Kennedy's 

pressure; consequently, there was little hope of them enduring 

past his tenure in the best of circumstances. As one officer 

noted, "'we were rather mechanistic about the whole thing' 

and that the doctrinal effort was perceived to be in response 

to a 'fad' originating during the Kennedy administration. "Ts 

Nevertheless, throughout Kennedy's tenure, the military was 

becoming increasingly involved in the struggle in Vietnam, a 

struggle that was markedly different in its character from the 

wars the Armed Forces were preparing to fight. 

To the Brink of Crisis 

President Lyndon Johnson's administration was the first faced 

with the clear choice of losing South Vietnam or becoming 

deeply engaged. For Johnson, the consummate politician 

who had declared, "1 am not going to be the President who 

saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," the choice was 

clear. 76 

President Johnson, however, wanted a limited war. He 

did not want the scope of the American commitment to 

detract from his Great Society programs nor did he want to 

place an undue strain on the national economy. Therefore, 

the President placed strict geographic restrictions on military 

operations to ensure the Chinese and the Soviets would not 

interveneF In 1 965 the conventional wisdom perceived the 

North Vietnamese as surrogates for an expansionist 

Communist monolith, much as the North Koreans had been 

viewed in 1950. Consequently, there was justifiable concern 

that the Chinese, who shared a border with North Vietnam, 

might enter the war if the United States invaded North 

28 
The Chinese would intervene only If U.S. ground forces 

invaded North Vietnam in such strength as to control the 

country," and "almost certainly if U.S. forces approached 

the Chinese frontier." It is significant the CIA did not 

believe the Chinese would intervene militarily with ground 

forces "if the U.S./GVN were winning the war in South 

Vietnam," or "if U.S. air attacks began to damage the 

industrial and military sector of North Vietnam. "7~ 

The Johnson administration crafted a strategy that assumed 

the leadership of North Vietnam would respond to American 

military pressures in a rational manner/9 and the conditions 

were set to enable the North Vietnamese to make the right 

choice: it was made clear to the North Vietnamese that the 

United States would not invade nor threaten the existence of 

their country if they ceased their activities in the South. 

Beginning in February 1965, the "American strategies for 

success in Vietnam were based on the central assumption that 

if the Communists sustained enough military punishment they 

would finally relent, forsaking (at [east temporarily) their war 

effort. "8° The central premise was the belief that "there was 

some ~breaking point' for the North Vietnamese--some level 

of punishment at which their morale and resolve would 

crumble, at which their 'will' would be 'broken. ''81 In short, 

the Communists "merely had to give up the fight in the south 

and they would be permitted to retreat to an independent 

existence in the north. ''82 

There was also a degree of arrogance in the decision to 

escalate the war: "How could a tiny, backward Asian country 

not have a breaking point, not have a price when opposed by 

the might of the United States? "83 George Ball, Deputy Under 

Secretary of State during the Johnson administration, later 

recalled that there was a "feeling of overwhelming 

confidence--almost of omnipotence--many took it for 

29 
intervention." Ball further noted that a penchant for 

quantification by key members of the administration led to a 

seemingly rational presumption that because the United States 

"had x times the resources of men, wealth, and material as the 

North Vietnamese, all we needed to prevail was to find an 

effective means to apply them." Unfortunately, this 

"Concentration on quantitative measurements meant that all 

unquantifiable elements were omitted from the equation of 

decision. TM Clark Clifford, McNamara's replacement as 

Secretary of Defense, noted the general views of military 

officers about the difficulty of the task in Vietnam: 

When the military was told that we were going in there and 

save South Vietnam, I think it felt that it was not going to be 

a particularly difficult task. Here were a lot of little people 

running around in black pajamas in North Vietnam, and 

here we came in, the greatest nation in the world, with the 

most enormous firepower and with bombing that could 

wipe them out. 8s 

And the military instrument was awesome. Since the 

beginning of the military buildup in 1961, America's 

conventional capabilities had been significantly improved, as 

Secretary McNamara noted during testimony before the 

Senate Appropriations Committee in 1965: 

Fortunately, we have greatly increased the strength and 

readiness of our military establishment since 1961, 

particularly in the kinds of forces which we now require in 

Southeast Asia. The active Army has been expanded from 

11 to 16 combat-ready divisions. Twenty thousand men 

have been added to the Marine Corps to allow them to fill 

out their combat structure and at the same time facilitate 

the mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve. The tactical 

fighter squadrons of the Air Force have been increased by 

30 
conversion has doubled. . . In brief, the military 

establishment of the United States, today, is in far better 

shape than it ever has been in peacetime to face whatever 

tasks may lie ahead. 86 

The greatest flaw in the administration's strategy proved to 

be its lack of comprehension about the character of the war 

taking place in Vietnam. To the Communists, the war was 

largely a political contest, although it clearly had significant 

military dimensions. The Americans, as had the French, dealt 

with the conflict in almost a purely military context. 

Furthermore, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, 

although embracing a Marxist ideology and pursuing a 

modified strategy of Maoist People's War, were not 

instruments of the Chinese or the Russians, and this was an 

unacceptable view in the administration: "Any suggestion 

that Hanoi's forces and the Viet Cong might be something 

other than mere instruments of Moscow and Peking, that 

nationalism, anticolonialism, and Tonkinese imperial 

ambitions were major driving forces, was dismissed as 

reflecting a softheaded attitude toward the Communist 

menace. ''g7 Indeed, "the North Vietnamese viewed their fight 

against the United States as a continuation of the struggle for 

independence and unity in progress for two thousand years, 

initially against the Chinese and later against the French. "88 

As the United States became more deeply embroiled in 

the war in Vietnam, its military forces increasingly gravitated 

to conventional military options. As with World War II and 

Korea, there were in effect two wars, a ground war and an air 

war. The focus of the ground war, beginning with General 

William C. Westmoreland's tenure as Commander, Military 

Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), shifted to the 

destruction of enemy forces. All other efforts were displaced 

as resources were organized to contribute to the effort to 

31 
they would not fall to the Communists, shifted to an 

offensive role of destroying the Viet Cong29 Additionally, the 

"best people" started avoiding advisory duty, seeking the more 

career enhancing assignments in conventional American 

combat units. 9° 

Westmoreland also put pressure on his subordinate 

Marine commander in Vietnam, Lieutenant General Lewis W. 

Walt, to support his strategy and "go after the enemy in the 

hinterland. "91 Although the Marines continued to place more 

emphasis on pacification than the Army, they also became 

heavily involved in the war against main force units. ~2 Still, 

the Marines clung to their doctrine by conducting some 62 

amphibious landings between 1965 and 1969, with mixed 

success. 93 Thus, these "landings not only kept the amphibious 

art alive, but also actually advanced it by providing testing 

and training in a combat environment. TM 

Unfortunately, search and destroy operations were in 

many ways counterproductive to efforts to pacify and secure 

rural areas. Aside from pulling resources away from such 

efforts, the operations themselves were highly destructive and 

created civilian casualties and refugees. As one brigade 

commander in the 1st Cavalry division noted: "The awesome 

firepower--artillery, air strikes, and ARA [aerial rocket artillery 

from helicopter gunships]--that had saved our lives in the 

unpopulated la Drang Valley now, despite our best efforts, 

began taking a toll of innocent civilians killed and maimed, 

villages destroyed, and farm animals slain. "9~ Typically, 

American units employed heavy firepower, in an effort to 

close with and kill as many enemy as possible. In many 

instances the Americans would "liberate" an area after 

inflicting heavy damage and then move on to the next area 

where the enemy might be engaged. Shortly after their 

departure, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Communists 

would resume control of the area. ~6 

32 
enemy locations" as large as 8 square kilometers. ~7 Indeed, as 

Westmoreland proclaimed, "Prisoners and defectors list the 

B-52 as the most feared of all weapons arrayed against 

them. "98 One of the best descriptions of the American way of 

war in Vietnam was given by Israeli Major General Moshe 

Dayan: 

The Americans carry out their counterattacks and pursuits 

in the jungles not with infantry but with firepower... The 

problem faced by an American infantry unit engaging the 

Vietcong is not how to storm the enemy positions but how 

to discover where they are. The storming and assault will 

be done by the 155s [artilleryl and aerial bombs. These are 

not restricted to jungle paths and are not vulnerable to 

ambush. 

The most effective weapons the Americans have for this 

function are their heavy bombers and they can operate no 

matter what the weather or visibility. ~9 

Robert Komer reported to the President in August 1 966 that 

the results of this massive application of resources were 

seemingly effective: "Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless 

indisputably, we are winning the war in the South. Few of 

our programs---civil or military--are very efficient, but we are 

grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass. "m° 

The air war mirrored the ground war in its 

conventionality. President Kennedy's views about 

counterinsurgency and flexible response had made few, if 

any, inroads within a U.S. Air Force dominated by Strategic 

Air Command generals. They were committed to the 

decisiveness of air power, as proven, in their minds, in World 

War II and Korea. General Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force Chief 

of Staff from 1961 to 1965, noted, "The administration 

spouted new phrases and things of that sort, but as far as the 

Air Force was concerned, we had no radical change in 

33 
The air power advocates focused primarily on the air war 

against the North as the "war winning strategy," a Ithough they 

ensured that ample resources fully supported the tactical war 

in the South. 

Although belief in the efficacy of bombing was not 

universal among the service chiefs, they approached the 

civilians in the administration with a "united front." In 

general, the "foremost airpower exponents, unwavering in 

their beliefs, were the Air Force and the Marine Corps. "~°2 

General LeMay proposed, and believed, that the Air Force 

could "bomb North Vietnam 'back to the Stone Age'. "1°3 

LeMay's faith in the decisiveness of air power pervaded his 

service. The optimistic views of one general visiting Vietnam 

before the large-scale American intervention were probably 

widely held: "But just wait till we get a squadron or two of 

F-100s over here .... We'll clean this thing up in a month! "~°4 

The principal doubters about the decisiveness of strategic 

bombing were the Army and, to some degree, the Navy. 

Army officers in particular drew different conclusions from 

World War II and Korea. They questioned the utility of a 

doctrine designed to destroy the capacity of industrial nations 

to conduct war being applied to North Vietnam. Clearly, 

North Vietnam was an agrarian nation and the majority of its 

war materiel came from China and Russia. As for resupply 

and infiltration, the transportation infrastructure (if one was 

inclined to call dirt roads infrastructure) was easy to repair, 

while the Navy believed it would be extremely difficult to 

interdict the "thousands of small junks and water craft" 

available to the Communists for infiltration by the sea. Still, 

the Joint Chiefs "persuaded themselves that they should 

pursue the air war solution on the grounds that all could agree 

at least that it was worth the effort and that there was no harm 

in trying it. "l°s 

34 
administration on Rolling Thunder, the air campaign they 

believed would end the war. The Joint Chiefs had gone on 

record with Secretary McNamara in November 1964, saying 

that they advocated an intense and "systematic bombings of 

ninety-four strategic targets in North Vietnam. "1°6 The plan 

"embodied the essence of American strategic bombing 

doctrine. Air Force planners designed it to destroy North 

Vietnam's ability to wage modern war. After that capacity 

was eliminated Hanoi would have to stop its 

aggression. ''1°7 

The administration refused the advice of its professional 

military officers for a rapid and heavy bombing campaign, 

before the North Vietnamese could disperse their resources 

and construct an air defense system. Rather, the President 

endorsed a graduated response plan of using bombing as 

political signaling, and he personally retained strict control 

over the bombing) °a The President and his civilian advisers 

were concerned that an "all-out bombing campaign might 

widen the war and would 'transmit a signal of strength out of 

all proportion to the limited objectives of the United States in 

South-East Asia,' thus ending the possibility "of achieving 

American goals at a 'relatively low level of violence. '''1°~ This 

caused enormous resentment among military officers. They 

were not even included as regular members at the President's 

weekly "Tuesday lunch group" sessions, during which targets 

were approved, until October 1967, when Joint Chiefs of Staff 

Chairman Earle G. Wheeler became a regular attendee. ~1° 

Some 25 years later, LeMay maintained, "We could have 

ended it [the war] in any ten-day period you wanted to, but 

they never would bomb the target list we had. "~11 

Initially, Rolling Thunder was limited mainly to military 

installations and lines of communication. President Johnson 

predicted that the "air effort.., would take twelve weeks to 

produce results. "~1: The desired "result" was a realization by 

35 
On 10 May 1965 the President ordered a temporary 

suspension of the bombing "on the remote chance that Hanoi 

might respond" and to demonstrate to international and 

domestic critics that the administration was reasonable. 114 

Johnson cabled Taylor in Saigon that "my purpose in this plan 

is to clear a path either toward restoration of peace or toward 

increased military action, depending upon the reaction of the 

Communists. "l~s When the North Vietnamese refused to offer 

the necessary response--stopping their support of the Viet 

Cong--the administration had a clear rationale for military 

escalation. Indeed, the North responded by stepping up its 

activities in the South after the pause. 1~' Thus, a pattern was 

established that ended only with the termination of Rolling 

Thunder operations north of the 20th parallel on March 31, 

1968, and the cessation of all attacks against North Vietnam 

on 1 November. 1~7 The pattern was disarmingly simple. The 

administration, following a pause to allow the North 

Vietnamese the opportunity to submit to its goals, would 

resume the attacks on the North. Furthermore, these attacks 

would escalate in intensity and in allowable targets for attack 

since the previous program had not been a sufficient 

inducement for the North Vietnamese to modify their 

behavior. 

By the end of 1967, all but 5 of the 94 targets 

recommended for attack by the Joint Chiefs had been 

authorized for bombing by the President, but Rolling Thunder 

had not been successful by the single meaningful measure of 

its effectiveness--North Vietnamese support of the fighting in 

the South had not stopped. ~8 Indeed, "Between 1965 and 

1968, U.S. attack sorties against North Vietnam increased 

fourfold. Over this same period communist main force 

strength increased about 75 percent, enemy attacks fivefold 

and overall activity levels ninefold. "~9 This is not to say that 

the effort had not been substantial. Over the course of Rolling 

36 
all ammunition depots, 65 percent of all POL storage, 59 

percent of the power plants, 55 percent of the major bridges 

• . . 39 percent of the railroad shops .... 12,521 vessels, 

9,821 vehicles and 1,966 railroad cars and engines and 

damaged thousands of others. "121 Unfortunately for the 

American effort, the North Vietnamese received $2 billion in 

foreign aid, while the bombing campaign cost the United 

States some "$6 billion in destroyed aircraft alone. "~n 

Eventually, the majority of the civilians in the Johnson 

administration, including the President and McNamara, 

became disillusioned with the claims that air power could win 

the war, and this disillusionment became the ultimate 

rationale for abandoning the expensive Rolling Thunder 

campaign. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke 

summed up the civilian perspective when he noted in 1969, 

"The trouble with our policy in Vietnam has been that we 

guessed wrong with respect to what the North Vietnamese 

reaction would be. We anticipated that they would respond 

like reasonable people. ''~3 

The Navy and the Air Force, however, "were loathe to 

recognize the failure... Recognition would imply that 

bombing had little military value and would have serious and 

pervasive implications for the organizations themselves and 

their tasks. "~:4 Since strategic air power was "the essence of 

the air force and part of the essence of the navy," proving its 

efficacy was an institutional imperative of the first order. ~s 

Therefore, proponents of air power maintained that the 

gradual escalation approach of Rolling Thunder and its 

limitations had enabled the North Vietnamese to adapt to the 

pressures of bombing. They still advocated an unrestricted air 

campaign against the North. General William C. Momyer, 

commander of the Seventh Air Force in Vietnam, captured the 

frustrations military officers generally shared with the political 

restrictions on Roiling Thunder: 

37 
pp

If there is one lesson to come out of this war, it must be a 

reaffirmation of the axiom--don't get in a fight unless you 

are prepared to do whatever is necessary to win. 12~ 

The Tet Offensive in early 1 968 was the turning point for 

the United States commitment to a military solution in 

Vietnam. Henry Kissinger noted: 

The Tet offensive marked the watershed of the American 

effort. Henceforth, no matter how effective our actions, the 

prevalent strategy could no longer achieve its objectives 

within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to 

the American people .... This made inevitable an eventual 

commitment to a political solution and marked the 

beginning of the quest for a negotiated settlement. ~27 

In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland 

departed MACV and became Chief of Staff of the Army. He 

was replaced by General Creighton Abrams. Abrams began 

the task of implementing the Johnson administration's new 

Vietnam policy that embraced negotiations, reliance on an 

improved South Vietnamese Army, and a decreased American 

combat role. ~8 

As the combat role--and consequently, any sense of 

purpose for being in the war--vanished, the morale and 

discipline of the American forces in South Vietnam, 

particularly in the Army, also plummeted. An Army report 

noted that lack of purpose resulted in the "'last man' 

syndrome," or an attitude of "We're getting out anyway. So 

why should I be the last man killed in this no-good war." 

Incidents of drug use, attacks on officers and 

noncommissioned officers, racial incidents, and combat 

refusals skyrocketed. 1~-9 In short, the Army had massive 

internal problems. 

38 
air. "~3° American firepower, particularly airpower, was surely 

the key factor in saving the South Vietnamese from defeat 

during the North Vietnamese "Easter Invasion," begun in late 

March 1972. Interestingly, during the invasion from the 

North, American ground troops in Vietnam were ordered "not 

to engage the enemy" since Nixon "intended the withdrawal 

of ground forces to proceed on schedule regardless of the 

invasion. ''~31 

The Easter Invasion also provided a rationale for stepping 

up the air effort against North Vietnam and gave the 

advocates of "victory through air power" another chance to 

validate their doctrinal paradigm. 

In April 1972, Nixon met with the General John W. Vogt, 

Jr., the officer designated to take command of the Seventh Air 

Force in Vietnam. During the meeting Nixon gave his views 

about the Communist offensive and outlined Vogt's mission: 

I made a promise to the American public to disengage our 

ground forces and the enemy has seized upon this as an 

opportunity to gain military advantage, but I am determined 

that we will not let South Vietnam fall. I'm equally 

determined to carry out my pledge to the American people 

and I will continue to withdraw ground forces. Now you, 

General, will have to get in there with air power and naval 

support and turn this thing around. I want you to crush the 

invasion and cause the North to get back to the negotiating 

table. Now you tell me what you need to do this. in 

Vogt responded: 

I ask one thing Mr. President--that you revise the 

procedures for air targeting in Vietnam so that I'm the man 

authorized to decide when we're going to attack and what 

we're going to attack. You tell me those things that you 

39 
As Vogt recalled, Nixon responded "without hesitation," 

saying, "You've got it. ''134 

Clearly, Nixon viewed airpower as a means to both 

interdict external support to the North Vietnamese and a 

means of leveraging diplomacy. He also faced a far different 

international political environment than had his predecessors. 

With the Sino-Soviet rift, American-Chinese rapprochement, 

and d(~tente with the Soviets, he believed that his ability to 

broaden and increase air attacks against the North was not 

constrained by an overriding fear of broadening the war. 

Nixon was correct: "The Communist powers limited their 

reaction to verbal denunciations of the American activities. "13s 

Linebacker, as the renewed bombing offensive was 

dubbed, finally removed the vast majority of the limitations 

that air power advocates had riled against since the days of 

Rolling Thunder. Additionally, the President authorized the 

mining of North Vietnamese harbors and a blockade of the 

coast) 36 Even the limitations against striking Hanoi and 

Haiphong eventually disappeared and attacks were made 

within 15 miles of the Chinese border. Precision-guided 

munitions--laser and television-guided "smart bombs"--made 

the attack of previously sensitive targets near civilian areas or 

close to the Chinese border possible because of their 

accuracy. 1:~7 On 23 October, Nixon suspended attacks north 

of the 20th parallel when the North Vietnamese returned to 

the peace negotiations. 1-~ 

A breakdown in the peace negotiations in late November 

convinced Nixon to launch LINEBACKERII. This bombing 

campaign, focused on the Hanoi and Haiphong areas, began 

on 19 December and was devastating. On 30 December 

Nixon announced that the bombing above the 20th parallel 

had again been suspended, because "it was clear.., that 

serious negotiations could be resumed. "13° On 23 January 

40 
obvious, and probably best stated by Chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff Thomas H. Moorer: 

I am convinced that Linebacker II served as a catalyst for 

the negotiations which resulted in the ceasefire .... 

Airpower, given its day in court after almost a decade of 

frustration, confirmed its effectiveness as an instrument of 

national power--in just 91/2 flying days. ~41 

Finally unleashed, air power had won the war just as its 

proponents always knew it could if not fettered by amateurish 

civilian interference. Little notice was taken of the fact that 

the targets attacked in 1972 were largely against a 

conventional North Vietnamese military machine, one that 

had not existed during the days of Rolling Thunder. The 

tough questions about whether air power could defeat an 

externally supported insurgency or halt the infiltration of 

North Vietnamese infiltrators into the South went largely 

unanswered. 14~ Nor was much made of the fact that 

Linebacker II achieved "a limited objective: forcing the North 

Vietnamese to sign the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 

(which they had already agreed to in principle in October 

1972). "143 

The cease-fire provided the United States with a "decent 

interval" to disengage from Vietnam, 144 but on April 30, 1 975 

the Republic of Vietnam finally collapsed when the North 

Vietnamese accepted its unconditional surrender. ~45 The war 

was over. 

Notes 

1. Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early 

American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1961; reprint, Princeton Paperback, 1970), 145. 

41 
3. Eisenhower Mss., Diaries, January 27, 1949; in Louis 

Galambos, ed., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 10, 

Columbia University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1984), 449. 

4. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War, 2d. ed. 

(Blommington, Indiana University Press, 1977), 379. 

5. Ibid., 369-70; C. Joseph Bernardo and Eugene H. Bacon, 

American Military Policy: Its Development Since 1775 (Harrisburg: 

The Military service Publishing Company, 1955), 445-52. 

6. Bernardo and Bacon, 454. 

7. Richard I. Wolf, The United States Air Force: Basic 

Documents on Roles and Missions, Air Staff Historical Study 

(Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1987), 61-200. 

8. Wolf, 156. 

9. Ibid., 165-66. 

10. Weigley, The American Way of War, 377-78. 

11. Letter, Dwight D. Eisenhower to Carl Vinson, January 3, 

1950; in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol 11, Columbia 

University, ed. Louis Galambos, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 1984), 902; emphasis in the original. 

12. Ibid., 892. 

13. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common 

Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New 

York: The Free Press, 1977), 478-79. 

14. Herbert Y. Schandler, "The Political Conduct of the Vietnam 

War," Speech prepared for delivery at the American Political 

Science Association, September 1, 1989, 1. 

15. D. Clayton James, with Anne Sharp Wells, Refighting the 

Last War: Command and Crisis in Korea (New York: The Free Press, 

1993), 6. 

16. Kent Roberts Greenfield, American Strategy in World War 

I1: A Reconsideration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1963; reprint, Malabar: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 

1982), 19. 

17. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael 

Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1976; reprint, 1984), 87. 

42 
the Judiciary, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955, 10; quoted in Mark 

Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of 

North Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 25. 

19. Clodfelter, 25; emphasis in the original. 

20. Otto P. Weyland, "The Air Campaign in Korea," The United 

States Air Force Air University Quarterly Review 6 (Fall 1953): 28. 

21. Schandler, 1. 

22. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United 

States, 1952-54, vol. xv, pt. 1,977; quoted in Clodfelter, 215. 

23. Clodfelter, 14. 

24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, vol. 1, 

Mandate for Change (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 179-80; 

quoted in Clodfelter, 14. 

25. James, 237. See also Weigley, The American Way of War, 

399; and David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (New York: St. 

Martin's Press, 1964), 418. 

26. Rees, 41 8-20. 

27. Memorandum of Discussion at the 166th Meeting of the 

National Security Council, Tuesday, October 13, 1953, in FRUS, 

1952-1954,11, pt. 1: 546. 

28. John Foster Dulles, "The Evolution of Foreign Policy," 

Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, January 12, 

1954, in U.S. Nuclear Strategy: A Reader, eds. Philip Bobbit, 

Lawrence Freedman, and Gregory F. Treverton (New York: New 

York University Press, 1989), 123-5. 

29. Douglas Kinnard, President Eisenhower and Strategy 

Management: A Study in Defense Politics (Lexington: University of 

Kentucky Press, 1977; reprint, Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's, 

1989), 33. 

30. Paul H. Nitze, "A Key Moment of Crisis," Army 12 

(October 1961): 29. 

31. Robert E. Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder: 

Westview Press, 1979), 7. 

32. Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986; Johns Hopkins paperback 

edition, 1988), 28. 
Number 3 (Cambridge: Center for International Affairs, Harvard 

University, 1962), 3. 

34. Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American 

Security (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), ix, 1; quoted 

in Weigley, The American Way of War, 412. 

35. Ibid. 

36. Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy 

(New York: Harper and Row, for the Council on Foreign Relations, 

1957), 11 ; quoted in Weigley, The American Way of War, 414. 

37. Kissinger, 12; quoted in Weigley, The American Way of 

War, 414. 

38. Weigley, The American Way of War, 413. 

Ibid., 416. 

Kissinger; quoted in Weigley, The American Way of War, 

39. 

40. 

416. 

41. 

42. 

43. 

44. 

Ibid., 137. 

Ibid., 145. 

Ibid., 146. 

John F. Kennedy, "Special Message to Congress on Defense 

Policies and Principles," March 28, 1961, in Theodore C. Sorensen, 

"Let the Word Go Forth:" The Speeches, Statements, and Writings 

of John F. Kennedy, 1947-196-~ (New York: Delacorte Press, 1988), 

239. 

45. Ibid., 240. 

46. Weigley, The American Way of War, 445; emphasis in the 

original. 

47. Ibid., 236. 

48. Ibid., 237. 

49. Weigley, The American Way of War, 448. 

50. Ibid., 443-48. See also Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear 

Strategy, Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Gregg Herken, 

Counsels of War, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1987), and Lawrence Freedman, "The First Two Generations of 

Nuclear Strategists," in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 735-778, for 

discussions of nuclear strategy. 

51. Ibid., 445. 

44 
53. Lloyd Norman, McNamara and His Band, Army 12 

(September 1961): 42. 

54. Robert A. Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical 

Doctrine, 1946-1976, Leavenworth Papers No.1 (Fort Leavenworth: 

U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1979), 22. 

55. Ibid., 38. 

56. Lloyd Norman and John B. Spore, "Big Push in Guerrilla 

Warfare," Army 12 (March 1962): 32. 

57. Krepinevich, 30. 

58. Francis J. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1961-1971, 

Vietnam Studies (Washington: Department of the Army, 1973), 5. 

59. Ibid., 10. 

60. Norman and Spore, "Big Push in Guerrilla Warfare," 32-33; 

and Kelly, 5-6. 

61. Interview with Elvis J. Stahr by Robert H. Farrell, U.S. Army 

Center of Military History, 18 August 1964, 33; quoted in 

Krepinevich, 31. 

62. Stahr interview, quoted in Krepinevich, 31. 

63. Norman and Spore, "Big Push in Guerrilla Warfare," 34. 

64. Ibid., 34-3,5. 

65. Interview with General Maxwell D. Taylor, U.S. Army War 

College Senior Officer Debriefing Program, by Colonel Richard A. 

Manor, 16-1 7 February 1973, Military History Institute; quoted in 

Krepi nevich, 30. 

66. Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: Doctrine 

and Performance, 1950 to Present (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 

207. 

67. Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 31-15, 

Operations Against Irregular Forces (Washington, 1961), 4. 

68. Ibid., 33. 

69. Ibid., 34. 

70. Krepinevich, 40; emphasis in the original. 

71. Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 100-5, Field 

service Regulations--Operations (Washington, 1962), 1-2. 

72. Ibid., 8. 

73. Ibid., 46. 

74. Krepinevich, 33. 

45 
76. Herbert Y. Schandler, America and Vietnam: The Failure 

of Strategy, 1965-67," in Vietnam as History, ed. Peter Braestrup 

(Washington: University Press of America, 1984), 23. 

77. Ibid., 23. 

78. Larry Berman, "Waiting for Smoking Guns: Presidential 

Decision-making and the Vietnam War, 1965-67," in Braestrup, 1 8.; 

emphasis in the original. 

79. See Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the 

Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), 

14. By "rational manner" I rely on the definition given by Allison of 

a Rational Actor in: "an attempt to understand the behavior of 

governments by analogy with the behavior of individuals making 

calculated, rational choices." 

80. John E. Mueller, "The Search for the 'Breaking Point' in 

Vietnam: The Statistics of a Deadly Quarrel," International Studies 

Quarterly 24 (December 1980): 499. 

81. Ibid. 

82. Ibid. 

83. Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: 

The System Worked (Washington: Brookings, 1979), 343. 

84. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Lessons 

of Vietnam: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific 

Affairs, 99th Cong., 1st sess., 29 April 1985, 21. 

85. Ibid., 37. 

86. Statement Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara before 

the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, 

August 4, 1965, in Why Vietnam (Washington: 1965), 23. 

87. Ibid., 22. 

88. Frederick Z. Brown, "Comment on Mueller: American 

Misconceptions," International Studies Quarterly 24 (December 

1980): 526. 

89. Kelly, 77-78. 

90. Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation 

and the Modern Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 

103-5. 

91. Victor H. Krulak, First to Fight." An Inside View of the U.S. 

Marine Corps (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 198. 

46 
94. Edwin H. Simmons, Marine Corps Operations in Vietnam, 

1969-1972," Naval Review 19Z3, 207; quoted in Lewy, 98. 

95. Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and 

Young--la Dran~ The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam (New 

York: Random House, 1992), 342. 

96. Ibid., 342-43; Lewy, 86-90. 

97. Robert M. Kipp, "Counterinsurgency from 30,000 Feet--The 

B-52 in Vietnam," Air University Review 19 (January-February 1967): 

13. 

98. Ibid., 17. 

99. Ibid., 17-18. 

100. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History 

of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, ed. Senator Gravel 

(Beacon Press, 1971 ), vol. 3, 179; quoted in Getb and Betts, 257. 

101. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air 

Warfare (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1988), 112. 

102. Bruce Palmer, The 25-Year War: America's Role in 

Vietnam (New York: Touchstone, 1985), 34. 

103. Ibid., 29. 

104. David Maclssac, "The Evolution of Air Power since 1945: 

The American Experience," War in the Third Dimension: Essays in 

Contemporary Air Power, ed. R.A. Mason (London: Brassey's Fence 

Publishers, 1986), 21. 

105. Palmer, 34-35. See also Lewy, 395. 

106. Ibid., 123. 

107. Clodfelter, 77. 

108. Gelb and Betts, 137; Clodfelter, 111 ; Lewy, 378. 

109. A.L. Gropman, "The Air War in Vietnam, 1961-73," in 

War in the Third Dimension: Essays in Contemporary Air Power, ed. 

R.A. Mason (London: Brassey's Defence Publishers, 1986). 

110. Gelb and Betts, 137; Clodfelter, 111; Lewy, 378. 

111. Kohnand Harahan, 125. 

112. Ibid., 64. 

113. Ibid. 

114. Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives 

of the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and 

Winston, 1971 ), 136-37. 

47 
1971 ), 446. 

116. Clodfelter, 67. 

117. Lewy, 387-88. 

118. Ibid., 385. 

119. Ibid., 391. 

120. Ibid., 395. 

121. Ibid., 390. 

122. Ibid., 395. 

123. Paul C. Warnke, Oral History Interview; quoted in Gelb 

and Betts, 139. 

124. James Clay Thompson, Rolling Thunder: Understanding 

Policy and Program Failure (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1980), 82. See also pages 80-81. 

125. Ibid., 75-76. 

126. Momyer, letter to McConnell, 3 July 1969; quoted in 

Clodfelter, 145. 

127. Kissinger, "The Viet Nam Negotiations," 216; quoted in 

Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and 

Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 350. 

128. Clodfelter, 147. 

129. W.B. Rosson, "Assessment of Influence Exerted on Military 

Operations by Other than Military Considerations," 1970; reprint, 

Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1993), V111-25. 

130. Ibid., V111-22. 

131. Clodfelter, 153. See also Richard P. Hallion, Storm Over 

Iraq: Air Power and the Guff War (Washington: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1992), 57. 

132. John W. Vogt, Jr., "A Commander's View of the Vietnam 

War," in The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look at the Arguments, ed. 

John N. Moore (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990), 185. 

133. Ibid. 

134. Ibid. 

135. Lewy, 410. 

1 36. Ibid. 

137. Clodfelter, 1 63-64; Lewy, 410. 

138. l ewy, 412. 

1 39. Lewy, 414. 

48 
1973): 9; quoted in Lewy, 414. 

142. Andrew Krepinevich, "The U.S. Experience in Vietnam 

and the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Lessons to be Learned," 

in Recent Conflicts and the Current Crisis, ed. Jonathan Dworken, 

Christine Fox, Sarah Stom, and Lauren Van Metre (Alexandria: 

Center for Naval Analyses, 1992), 156. 

143. Ibid. 

144. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of 

Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in 

Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1977; reprint, New York: 

Vintage Books, 1978). 

145. Lewy, 21 0-215; Timothy J. Lomperis, The War Everyone 

Lost--and Won: America's Intervention in Vietnam's Twin Struggles 

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 98-99. 

49 
In the aftermath of the American failure in Vietnam--if one 

accepts the word "failure" as an appropriate description for 

the fact that the long maintained goal of preventing the fall of 

South Vietnam to Communism was not accomplished. --the 

legacy of the war loomed large in the American 

consciousness. The effects of the war, although permeating 

the entire society, were perhaps most strongly felt in the 

government's foreign policy apparatus and in its military 

forces. Indeed, these effects were felt well before the end of 

the war in 1975. 

The Years in the Wilderness 

The most significant change from tile strategic assumptions of 

the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, embodied in their 

"two and one half war strategy," was the enunciation of a 

"one and a half war" strategy. The realization that there was 

a significant rift between the Chinese and the Soviets, in 

Henry Kissinger's view, required that the United States "give 

up the obsession with a Communist monolith. "1 

The second departure from the Kennedy/Johnson era that 

affected the Armed Forces was the announcement of the 

Nixon Doctrine that replaced the Kennedy policy of 

confronting Communist expansion wherever it occurred. The 

basis for this abandonment of symmetrical containment was, 

as Kissinger noted, the realization of the limits of national 

power: "No country can act wisely simultaneously in every 

part of the globe at every moment of time. "~ Nixon first 

publicly announced the new limits on American foreign 

51 
In the aftermath of Watergate, Nixon resigned. His 

successor, President Gerald Ford, retained Kissinger as his 

Secretary of State. Ford, however, was severely constrained 

in exercising executive authority in foreign policy by a 

Congress asserting its power in the wake of Watergate. 

Symbolic of this new congressional role in foreign policy was 

the March 11, 1975, refusal by the House of Representatives 

of a Presidential request for $300 million in military aid for a 

rapidly disintegrating South Vietnam# Still, Ford recognized 

the political hazards lurking in the Third World, and 

reemphasized in 1975 the tenets of the Nixon Doctrine, 

particularly the fact that "we cannot, however, fight their 

battles for them. "~ 

And the battles raged. During Ford's tenure, Laos, 

Cambodia, Mozambique, and Angola all succumbed to 

Communist insurgencies that enjoyed external support, while 

American covert aid to Angola was prohibited by the 1976 

Clark Amendment2 Nixon later wrote that tile "new 

isolationists chanted 'No more Vietnams' as the dominoes fell 

one by one. "7 Nevertheless, in the Eisenhower sense of the 

cliche, the domino principle proved fallacious. After the two 

other countries of old Indochina, Laos and Cambodia, 

collapsed, no other Southeast Asian nations succumbed to 

communism2 

In 1976, Ford was beaten at the polls by the new 

American Populist, Jimmy Carter. For Carter, the lessons of 

Vietnam were clear: 

For too many years, we've been willing to adopt the flawed 

and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, 

sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We've 

fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better 

quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam 

the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But 

52 
Carter continued, noting, "We can no longer separate the 

traditional issues of war and peace from the new global 

questions of justice, equity, and human rights." The new 

foreign policy course he proposed to steer for the nation was 

one "based on constant decency in its values and on 

optimism in our historical vision. ''9 Carter also believed that 

it was time for the United States to move beyond its obsession 

with the notion "that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable 

but that it must be contained. ''~° 

Initially, Carter pursued a foreign policy characterized by 

a "minimalist defense policy and noninterventionism. "11 In 

the wake of Vietnam, Carter's approach was largely supported 

by the American people and Congress. Public opinion polls 

showed "Americans thought that defense spending was 

adequate, that the armed forces could perform their missions, 

and that Russia might have increased its military capability 

but did not intend to use its military for coercive purposes." 

Furthermore, the "public thought that only nuclear deterrence 

and the defense of NATO justified military spending. "12 

Carter emphasized this point to the Joint Chiefs in 1978: 

"Our near-term objective is to assure that NATO could not be 

overwhelmed in the first few weeks of a blitzkrieg war, and 

we will spend our resources to that end. '''~ 

The key element in Carter's defense policies was a belief 

that American and Soviet relations had entered an era of 

d~tente, rather than competition and confrontation. Indeed, 

Carter even attempted to apply his human rights standards to 

the Soviet Union by championing the cause of Russian 

dissidents. In so doing, he effectively drove a moral wedge 

between his administration and the regime of Leonid 

Brezhnev that in many ways heightened antagonism between 

the L/nited States and the Soviet Union) 4 The final rift came, 

however, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 

53 
embassy in Teheran in November. 

In the wake of these twin disasters, Carter revised his 

foreign policy and increased defense spending. The collapse 

of the pro-American regime in Iran and the assertiveness of 

the Soviet Union in the region also led the President to issue 

what became known as the Carter Doctrine. In his January 

23, 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter spelled out the 

essence of this new foreign policy: 

Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the 

Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the 

vital interests of the United States of America and such an 

assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including 

military force, is 

In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National 

Security Adviser, the Carter Doctrine "represented a formal 

recognition of a centrally important reality: that America's 

security had become interdependent with the security of the 

three central and interrelated strategic zones consisting of 

Western Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East-Persian 

Gulf area. "16 The military instrument supporting the doctrine 

was the new Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF). ~7 

Carter's one major attempt to use military force, however, was 

an abject failure. An April 1980 operation to rescue the 

American hostages in Iran, dubbed Desert One, failed 

miserably, and in the minds of many marked the nadir of 

American military power in the post-Vietnam era. 1~ 

The Armed Forces 

For America's Armed Forces, the years between the decision 

to withdraw from Vietnam and their resurgence during the 

Reagan administration were a nightmare. All the services 

shared a number of problems, both social and institutional. 

54 
qy, y py 

on the Selective Service System to furnish the manpower they 

needed. Therefore, the announcement in October 1970 that 

the draft would end by July 1973 portended to many immense 

problems in fielding adequate forces, both in terms of 

numbers and quality. 19 

As the war ground on, particularly after Nixon's 

announcement that his policy was withdrawal, the Armed 

Forces became increasingly less disciplined. Again, the 

problem was most prominent in the Army and the Marines, 

because these services suffered most of the casualties and 

faced the greatest risks. In the latter years of the war, racial 

clashes, combat refusals, drug usage, desertions, and incidents 

of violence against officers and noncommissioned officers 

increased significantly2 ° After the war the incidents of 

indiscipline continued and morale remained low. For the 

leadership of the Armed Forces--whose very effectiveness 

was inextricably tied to discipline, morale, and a shared sense 

of purpose--the situation was alarming. 

Nor were the prospects for the future particularly 

promising. A report prepared for Army Chief of Staff 

Westmoreland, titled Army Tasks for the Seventies, was likely 

representative of the views held by the leadership of the other 

services. It noted, "American society is undergoing rapid 

social, economic, and political change, the result of 

technological developments, demographic shifts, and social 

and political change at home and abroad." The implications 

of these changes were significant. Domestic spending in 

support of improved social programs would compete with 

defense spending in an environment characterized by "lack of 

concern and general indifference . . towards defense 

problems," attitudes that would be worsened by doubts 

concerning "the legitimacy and credibility of public 

institutions. ''2~ 

55 
hence, the prospect arose that the nation may well adopt a 

deliberate policy of 'no more Vietnams. ''~2 Calls for 

reductions in overseas commitments, particularly in Europe, 

gained momentum, and the entire concept of flexible 

response was delegitimized because of Vietnam. 23 In short, 

a return to isolationism loomed as a distinct possibility. 

Finally, the services all shared structural problems to 

varying degrees. With the adoption of a strategy of fighting 

one and a half wars and the end of the existing "half war" in 

Vietnam, the size of the services was bound to go down from 

what they were under the two and one half war rationale. 

Budgets tightened and the emphasis on deterring war in 

NATO resulted in the strategic and theater nuclear forces 

receiving greater emphasis during the Nixon and Carter 

administrations, thus making less money available for 

conventional force modernization. 24 

Vietnam also had a number of significant "lessons" for the 

leadership of the Armed Forces that influenced their thinking 

about the future employment of America's military power. 

Most shared a central conviction: fuzzy political objectives 

and limitations had constrained them frorn fighting the war as 

it should have been fought. In the minds of many officers, 

"limited war" as practiced in Vietnam connoted "gradualism," 

a concept they believed synonymous with failure. As one 

journalist wrote, "The generals and admirals have learned 

and overlearned the lesson of Vietnam. They instinctively 

recoil from applying small doses of force in messy wars for 

obscure political purposes. ''25 Furthermore, in the aftermath 

of the war, the temporary political appointees moved on, 

while military officers stayed to rebuild their services. An 

Army general officer told an Army War College class, 

"Remember one lesson from the Vietnam era: Those who 

ordered the meal were not there when the waiter brought the 

check. ''26 

56 
to avoid not just another Vietnam, but the erosion of public 

support that would accompany military failure in virtually any 

endeavor." The same author suggested that "contemporary 

military leaders seem far more inclined to avoid any 

involvement overseas that cou I d become another Vietnam. "~° 

There was also a growing consensus for the positions 

espoused by Army Chief of Staff General Edward C. Meyer, 

who, in January 1981, delineated "three criteria" for the use 

of military force: 

First, there must exist the military capacity for engagement. 

We possessed this in Vietnam. 

Second, we must share a clear idea of what constitutes 

the essential national interests. 

Third, there must be a willingness on the part of the 

nation to sacrifice in order to ensure maintenance of those 

interests which we declare essential. There are no 

"cost-free options. 29 

In lune 1982, Meyer refined his views by adding a fourth 

criterion: "We need to decide what the mission is, what our 

goals and objectives ought to be so we have a clear campaign 

plan capable of achieving the national objective. ''3° As early 

as 1 979, Robert E. Osgood, one of the principal intellectual 

forces behind limited war concepts, observed: 

On the basis of the Vietnam experience one is tempted to 

conclude, as many military men do, that the United States 

•.. should not intervene in any kind of local war unless it 

can defeat the enemy and restore the status quo within a 

year or two by applying maximum military force within the 

geographical boundaries of the nation attacked. Some 

would add that U.S. armed forces should also refrain from 

intervening if the adversary is going to be permitted to enjoy 

adjacent sanctuaries outside the nation attacked. By 

57 
with Soviet forces. ~1 

Immediately following the war, military writers about the 

war almost invariably castigated civilian leadership, the 

media's interpretation of the war, the antiwar movement, the 

political limits placed on military operations, and the need to 

go "all out" in any future conflict. Some, like Colonel Harry 

G. Summers, Jr., in his Army-sponsored study On Strategy: 

The Vietnam War in Context, posited that the war was a 

conventional conflict and should have been treated as such. 

Summers also stressed the necessity of gaining and 

maintaining national approval for any future military actions. 

He advocated declaring war and mobilizing the reserves to 

ensure Congressional and public support for future wars. 3~ 

Summer's work, sent by General Meyer to all Army general 

officers and the White House, "became widely adopted as a 

text in military educational institutions of each of the armed 

services. "33 

Although each of the services' senior officers surely 

ascribed to the emerging "Vietnam lessons" about the use of 

force, each had a different view of the implications of the war 

for their individual service. All the services, however, 

embraced the rediscovered Soviet "threat." There was 

consensus that the Soviets had made great strides in 

expanding and modernizing their military forces, while the 

United States had lagged behind in its modernization efforts 

because of the requirement to fight, and finance, the war in 

Vietnam. Additionally, the 1973 Arab-lsraeli War had shown 

the "lethality" of the "modern battlefield" in what "constituted 

a microcosm of the kinds of issues that might be involved in 

a high-technology war of movement in Europe. "34 This was 

particularly important, because all the services had gravitated 

to a war with the Soviet Union as their principal focus with 

the enunciation of the Nixon Doctrine, and the Israelis had 

58 
The Air Force 

For the Air Force, the lessons from the war in Vietnam were 

abundantly clear: the decisive application of air power is a 

war-winning strategy. Unfettered air power had proven, in 

the minds of most air power advocates, an inexorable force. 

In their opinion, unrestrained air power had stopped the 

Easter Offensive and forced the North Vietnamese to the 

peace table, because "The country had been laid open for 

terminal destruction, and the North Vietnamese had to do 

something to avoid that eventuality. "3s General Momyer 

confidently noted the historical validity of air power doctrine: 

The development of air strategy in World War II, Korea, and 

Vietnam was a repetitious process. In each case, planners 

first perceived airpower as a subordinate part of a joint 

strategy that would employ an extensive ground campaign 

to end the war on favorable terms. On the other hand, 

airmen came increasingly to believe that airpower, in its 

own right, cuuld produce decisive results. The validity of 

such a view was suggested by results of the Allies' 

combined bomber offensive in Europe and by the surrender 

of Japan in the 1940s. Additional evidence came from the 

skies over Hanoi in December 1972. In a concentrated 

l 1-day test, our air strategy persuaded a determined 

adversary with a remarkably elaborate air defense system 

that overt aggression could not be sustained in the presence 

of unrestricted U.S. airpower. 36 

Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, commander of the 8th Air 

Force during the early days of the strategic bombing campaign 

in Europe during World War II, perhaps captured the absolute 

faith of the most ardent advocates that air power could 

independently win wars when he commented on Vietnam: 

59 
Indeed, in the aftermath of Linebacker II, many believed 

that if the onerous restrictions had not been imposed by 

politicians, air power could have won the war in 1965. 38 

Therefore, as one historian has noted, 

Post-Vietnam air commanders have advocated no sweeping 

doctrinal changes. They parade Linebacker II as proof that 

bombing will work in limited war, and they dismiss the 

notion that too much force could trigger nuclear 

devastation. 39 

In the absence of any perceived need to reassess its way 

of making war in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Air 

Force turned to the process of modernization to make up for 

ground lost during the prosecution of the war. The leadership 

of the Air Force assessed the growing Soviet conventional and 

nuclear threat and the tactical and operational lessons of the 

1 973 Arab-Israeli War within the framework of their existing 

doctrine. Consequently, a new air superiority fighter, 

improved electronic countermeasures to thwart air defense 

systems, "high technology weapons like laser and 

electro-optically guided bombs, "4° a more survivable ICBM, 

and a bomber to replace the aging B-52 were the Air Force's 

preoccupations after the Vietnam War--all technological 

enhancements of a proven, valid doctrine. Therefore, "for the 

air force, the early 1970s were less a time of trauma and soul 

searching than they were of seeking to maintain and upgrade 

the organization's capacity to play a vital role in the nation's 

defenses. "4~ 

For the leadership of the Air Force the most difficult 

eventualities were nuclear or conventional war in NATO, and 

that is where they focused their attention. The Air Force kept 

"its eyes fixed.., on grand strategic warfare against enemies 

with similar industrial and military institutions. "42 Any lesser 

60 
you can lick the cat, you can lick the kitten. "43 

The Navy 

The Navy had deep-seated internal problems. The 

unpopularity of the war, coupled with long and frequent 

deployments, exacerbated existing problems that eventually 

erupted in serious racial incidents on the carrier Kitty Hawk, 

the oiler Hassayampa, and the carrier Constellation. The 

Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral EImo R. Zumwalt, Jr., 

initiated widespread reforms, considered by many 

traditionalists as "permissiveness," to correct the problems. 44 

Zumwalt's programs addressed institutional and cultural 

issues in the Navy, issues he believed needed immediate 

action. These problems did not, however, involve an assault 

upon fundamental American naval doctrine. Like the Air 

Force, the Navy was exuberant over the results of Linebacker 

II as a justification of the decisive role of carrier aviation. 

Admiral Sharp, Commander in Chief, Pacific, for much of the 

war, later wrote: 

Whatever else may be argued, the fact is that the 

eleven-day air campaign of December 1972 will go down 

in history as a testimonial to the efficiency of air power. 

"Linebacker I1," as it was called, combined air force and 

navy air power in a skillfully coordinated effort, 

exemplifying the way air power should be used# s 

The Navy was also likely pleased with the effectiveness of its 

mining and blockading of North Vietnam. Nevertheless, these 

efforts were all peripheral to the Navy's essence: command 

of the seas. 

The Navy's leadership, although often opposed to 

Zumwalt's social reforms, fully backed his assessment of the 

implications of the Nixon Doctrine: "The credibility of the 

61 
powerful Soviet Navy. After Vietnam, the Navys ability to 

confront the Soviets was at a low point. The Navy, like the 

other services, had deferred modernization efforts while it 

prosecuted the war. As a result, in "1 977 there were only 464 

ships of all types in the U.S. Navy, the lowest number in the 

active fleet since 1939. "4z 

Carter viewed NATO as the principal American interest. 

Accordingly, he envisioned a limited role for the Navy. 

Harold Brown, Carter's Secretary of Defense, emphasized to 

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III that 

the Navy's "prime wartime.., mission was to protect the sea 

lines of communications between Europe and America. "48 

This was in stark contrast to the two "basic functions" 

Holloway envisioned for the Navy--sea control and power 

projection. Both functions relied on a powerful Navy capable 

of the "destruction of enemy naval forces at their home bases 

or enroute to those ocean areas which the United States 

desires to protect, destroying their logistic support, or 

preventing the approach of enemy forces within range from 

which their weapons can be employed against U.S. forces. 4~ 

The implications of this new strategy, if not already clear, 

were made abundantly so to Holloway when he "was ordered 

by Brown's staff to drop the use of the term 'maritime 

superiority. ''S° 

After the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine, the Navy's 

role was expanded without a corresponding increase in the 

size of the fleet. Consequently, long deployments became the 

norm, affecting morale and reenlistment rates, which 

subsequently caused "critical shortages in ships' crews that, 

in some instances, prevented the ships from getting 

underway. "~1 In 1979 Chief of Naval Operations Admiral 

Thomas Hayward testified that the United States had "a 

one-and-a-half-ocean navy for a three-ocean commitment. "~2 

Senator John Tower's comments about the deterioration of 

d2 
Jimmy Carter has presided over the most ominous shift in the 

balance of power in modern history,. "s3 

The Marine Corps 

For the Marines, Vietnam had mixed signals. They shared the 

Army's frustrations over political limitations that afforded the 

enemy sanctuary and inhibited his destruction• Nevertheless, 

they could hold up their enclave pacification strategy as a 

plan that could have worked. The Corps, however, was 

determined to put the war behind it and move on. 

The Corps also shared the Army's enormous problems 

with discipline, desertion, race, and drugs• The ending of the 

draft worsened matters, because Department of Defense 

guidelines "stressed quantity recruitment of marginal youths 

and the rapid release of Vietnam veterans in order to avoid 

political criticism. "s4 The result was immense turbulence: "In 

FY (fiscal year) 1972 alone nearly 78 percent of the entire 

Marine Corps either joined or left the service. "ss 

The Marine Corps had a doctrine that it could fall back on 

to rebuild itself. The leadership of the Corps believed the 

Nixon Doctrine was a "maritime strategy of limited 

commitment outside of NATO, a strategy that suggested an 

increased need for a force in readiness like the FMF (Fleet 

Marine Force). "s6 As early as 1969, Marine Corps 

Commandant General Leonard F. Chapman, Jr., realized that 

it had become "apparent, that we were going to abandon ship 

• . . [in Vietnam] and resume our force and amphibious 

readiness posture. "sT The Corps voluntarily began reducing 

its numbers. ~8 It returned to its amphibious roots and 

structured itself to support "a high-intensity war in Europe and 

• . . a low-intensity war in Asia. ''~9 It went back to basics, 

working to build a Corps that was "highly skilled, highly 

disciplined, smaller, uncivilianized, naval in character, 

63 
"]~_e Army 

The Army, of all the services, had the greatest difficulty 

recovering from the Vietnam War. Not only was the Army 

racked with internal social and manpower problems (similar 

to the other services, but generally to a higher degree), it also 

had disturbing problems within its officer corps. 

A 1970 Chief of Staff directed study on Army 

professionalism asserted that the Army was rife with careerists 

and ticket-punchers who could be generally characterized as 

an ambitious, transitory commander--marginally skilled in 

the complexities of his duties--engulfed in producing 

statistical results, fearful of personal failure, too busy to talk 

with or listen to his subordinates, and determined to submit 

acceptably optimistic reports which reflect faultless 

completion of a variety of tasks at the expense of the sweat 

and frustration of his subordinates. ~1 

A 1972 Military Review article revealed the depths and 

origins of the crisis many believed the Army faced: 

It is a crisis of confidence, born of an "unwon" war, of 

charges of mismanagement and incompetence attendant to 

that war, of increasing manifestations of public 

antimilitarism, and of doubts about the role of ground forces 

in the era of the Nixon doctrine. 6"~ 

Turbulence in the Army after the war was immense, 

caused by a massive reduction "from 1.6 million men to 

800,000 in four years. ''~ Nevertheless, with the end of the 

draft, the Army could not man the force. In 1974, the Army 

was 20,000 soldiers short of what it required and only four of 

the thirteen active divisions were considered ready for 

combat. Of particular concern was the "strategic posture of 

64 
The larger institutional question the Army had to answer 

in the aftermath of Vietnam and the advent of the Nixon 

Doctrine was, "Why an Army?" In 1973, Chief of Staff 

Creighton Abrams had asked that question and formed a 

Strategic Assessment Group, headed by Colonel Edward F. 

Astarita to "determine if there was a legitimate role for 

conventional strategy and for the Army in the post-Vietnam 

world. "6S The report of the "Astarita Group" argued that the 

United States needed a "sufficient conventional capability to 

deter limited Soviet or Chinese conventional attacks, and to 

control such attacks without resorting to nuclear weapons. "66 

It further recommended limiting forward deployments to 

Western Europe and Korea. Finally, careful to avoid a 

repetition of Vietnam, the report stressed avoiding the Third 

World: "Military assistance groups, advisory teams, exchange 

programs, ship visits, disaster relief, and other low key 

options, tailored to specific American interest in each country, 

should be the extent of American military involvement. "67 

The Army dealt with the Vietnam war by largely ignoring 

the experience. There were many sound reasons for so doing, 

but three are perhaps the most important. First, the national 

strategy embodied in the Nixon Doctrine eschewed 

intervention by ground combat forces in the Third World 

against insurgencies. Therefore, any concerted effort to learn 

from the war could be pragmatically argued away as 

irrelevant. Second, the leadership of the Army in the main 

viewed the war as an aberration, one that should be moved 

past as quickly as possible so that the Army could return to 

the more important issue of defending the nation from its 

principal threat--the Soviet Union. As James Fallows noted, 

The military, like the rest of the country, has declared 

Vietnam not a real war. Because military men can argue 

that it was not military factors, but rather political 

65 
A more conventional view was offered by an Army general 

officer: "There was the strong feeling that, after every war, 

armies always set out to figure out how they might have 

fought the last war better. There was an even stronger 

determination to avoid that pitfall, and this time to look 

ahead, not back. "6~ Perhaps the best analysis is provided by 

historian Russell Weigley: "Military men, we have so often 

been told, are forever preparing to refight the last war. It 

would be more accurate to charge them with preparing to 

refight the last satisfactory war. "7° Finally, on a more visceral 

level, "There were several compelling reasons . . . why 

post-mortems on Vietnam were to be avoided" because, as 

one general officer noted, such introspection "would have 

given the appearance of 'revisionism, alibis, self 

justification, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, 

opening old wounds, [orl severe mental retardation, given 

public attitudes.'"71 

Tile focus of the Army shifted to Europe. Turning to 

NATO was attractive to the Army on a number of levels. 

Clearly, the reorientation served internal needs, because "it 

was an absolute intent to give the Army a mission that 

everybody understood and to focus on the basics and to get 

the Army healthy again. "7~ Furthermore, it served the Army's 

external needs since it provided an argument for structureDor 

"Why an Army"--in terms of men, equipment, and budgets: 

We decided that NATO was the centerpiece of what we 

were going to do... and that the Soviet Union was the evil 

empire and that was the basis upon which we were going 

to get force structure... I think the people that did that 

really believed that there might be a war. 73 

Furthermore, the Army leadership saw little impact of the shift 

to NATO on other possible contingencies. Following the 

66 
could fight the little wars. 74 

These initiatives all came at a time when many in the 

Army were disillusioned with the war in Vietnam and were 

questioning if the Army even had a role in unconventional 

conflicts. In their 1973 book The United States Army in 

Transition, Lieutenant Colonels Zeb B. Bradford, Jr. and 

Frederic J. Brown questioned "the appropriateness of 

counter-insurgency as a major mission for the American 

Army. "z~ They believed that conventional warfare was more 

appropriate because: 

highly mechanized and technical warfare reinforces our 

tendencies and talents and serves as a vehicle for 

evolutionary advance; counter-insurgency goes against the 

grain. We are a rich, industrial, urban country. Highly 

technical forces are compatible with our characteristics and 

resou rces 76 

The "challenge" of the Vietnam experience for the Army was 

to find "what is transferable to a conventional-type 

environment rather than to determine how we would do 

better next time in a future Vietnam-type situation. "77 The 

authors recommended focusing on conventional forces, since 

they were "most easily adaptable for general and rapid 

employment in an advanced conflict. "7~ 

The individual who would provide the doctrinal 

underpinnings for the revitalization of the post-Vietnam Army 

was General William E. DePuy, commander of the Army's 

new Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). The 

pivotal document DePuy relied upon to launch the 

"substantial renaissance in tactical theory and practice 

throughout the Army" was I-M 100-5, Operations. DePuy 

later recalled that the authors of the manual "were driven by 

certain events and forces then at work," particularly: 

67 
Soviet armored forces once again became the Army's 

main, almost exclusive, mission. 

• The Arab-Israeli War vividly illustrated the lethality of 

modern weapons and the high value of crew proficiency 

and the skill of tactical commanders. 7~' 

FM 100-5 was so important because DePuy had decided 

to rewrite all of the Army's field manuals over an 18-month 

period--and all would conform with the tactical principles 

enunciated in the capstone FM 100-5. 8° Indeed, the manual 

stated on its first page that it "sets forth the basic concepts of 

US Army doctrine" and as such the "concepts form the 

foundation for what is taught in our service schools, and the 

guide for training and combat developments throughout the 

Army. "~ The Army's "primary objective" was also clearly 

defined: "to win the land battle--to fight and win in battles, 

large or small, against whatever foe, wherever we may be sent 

to war. "8~ The manual stated that the "primary mission of the 

U.S. Army is to prepare for the defense of NATO, "83 because: 

Battle in Central Europe against forces of the Warsaw Pact 

is the most demanding mission the US Army could be 

assigned. Because the US Army is structured primarily for 

that contingency and has large forces deployed in that area, 

this manual is designed mainly to deal with the realities of 

such operations. 84 

FM 100-5 also stated confidently that this focus on 

conventional war in Europe was appropriate elsewhere: "The 

principles set forth in this manual.., apply also to military 

operations anywhere in the world. "85 These areas outside 

NATO were addressed as environmental 

concerns-~operations in mountains, jungles, deserts, northern 

regions, and built-up areas; fighting would still be 

conventional with tactical adaptations and a heavy reliance 

68 
Coupled with the doctrinal reorientation to combat in 

Central Europe was a revolution in the way the Army 

approached training at both the individual and collective 

levels. In the words of General DePuy, the revision of Army 

fighting doctrine around the principles contained in FM 1 00-5 

"would tell everyone in the combat and combat support arms 

how the Army would fight on the modern battlefield at every 

echelon from the weapons crew up through the division," 

hence the dubbing of the new doctrinal literature spawned by 

FM 1 00-5 as "How to Fight" manuals. 8~ The ultimate test of 

individual and unit performance would be at the National 

Training Center (NTC), opened at Fort Irwin, CA, in October 

1 980. At the NTC, visiting Army units fought an opposing 

force that was structured like a Soviet mechanized regiment 

and that used Soviet tactics. The exercise was highly 

instrumented and provided a rigorous assessment of 

performance against a highly skilled opponent. 89 

FM 100-5 also served as the basis for force design and 

force modernization. Various studies--Army Restructuring, 

Army 86, and Army of Excellence--sought to redesign Army 

units for combat in the lethal European environment and, 

eventually, provide contingency and light organizations. 9° 

Weapons procurement also focused on developing systems 

that would even the odds in Europe, and "doctrine... was an 

important persuasive tool in the weapons acquisition 

process. "91 Eventually, the Army procured the M-1 Abrams 

tank, the M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the UH-60 Blackhawk 

and AH-64 helicopters, the Multiple Launch Rocket System, 

Stinger air defense missile, and the Patriot air defense missile 

system. 92 

One remaining component of the Army's post-Vietnam 

reformation was of signal importance: Army Chief of Staff 

Abrams decided to heavily integrate the Reserve Components 

into the active force structure. Although part of this decision 

69 
ReservesY In his biography of Abrams, Lewis Sorley posed 

the question: "Was part of the thinking in integrating the 

reserves so deeply into the active force structure that we were 

making it very difficult, if not impossible, for the President to 

deploy any significant force without calling up the reserves? TM 

General John Vessey, future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff, recalled: "That's it, with malice aforethought." He also 

remembered hearing Abrams often comment, "They're not 

taking us to war again without calling up the reserves. ''95 

Many senior officers believed that not mobilizing the Reserves 

had been a critical reason for the loss of public support for the 

war in Vietnam as well as the need to adopt the ruinous 

1-year rotation policy. Abrams actions ensured that "the 

Army could not go to war again without the involvement and 

tacit approval of the American people. A call-up of the 

Reserves would bring home to Americans from the beginning 

that they had a personal stake in the conflict. "9° Thus, the 

Army took a critical step in usurping its traditional role of 

subservience to civilian authority in structuring itself to make 

it politically difficult for a president to involve it in another 

Vietnam. 

Although there was an intense internal debate over FM 

100-5, the dialogue focused almost exclusively on how to 

fight conventional war in Europe, or conventional wars 

elsewhere, not on attempting to understand the political 

dimensions of conflict or the bases for revolutionary warfare 

and insurgency as experienced in Vietnam. The debate was 

about how to fight a conventional war. As Major John Oseth 

noted, the assumptions that undergirded FM 100-5 were 

based on the fact that the Army "found the Soviets, and the 

European battleground, in large measure because we knew 

we were deployed in Europe, and we knew we were 

structured to fight against that kind of enemy. We surveyed 

the world for an enemy and found, literally, ourselves. "97 

7O 
faculty at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. 

Vought argued that the Army had turned its back on 

low-intensity conflict, even though that was the most likely 

kind of war it would face, in its fixation on Europe. He 

admitted that one explanation for the return to 

conventionalism were the "'mind-sets'... [that] contribute to 

a threat analysis wherein the enemy is the Soviets, and, if we 

share the force levels and weaponry to deter them, the same 

will suffice for any other use. "~ Vought allowed that he 

could not "'prove' that low-intensity conflict has been 

disavowed by the Army as a legitimate form of conflict in 

which the Armed Forces could be called upon to pursue 

national objectives. "~ Nevertheless, he believed that his 

reading of the evidence justified the question: 

Is it possible that the trauma of having been found fighting 

the wrong kind of war [in Vietnam] so deeply disturbed the 

Army's leadership that they (who, after all, are men who 

made their careers in that military aberration) actually have 

"erased the tapes," expunged the unpleasant memory and 

are resuming the conventional deterrent role they played in 

the late 1950s? ~°° 

Vought's qualified conclusion was that the premises 

undergirding the Army's post-Vietnam doctrine were based 

more on the "removal of an option from the policymakers 

than on rational threat analysis--that is, if we do not have the 

capability to engage in subconventional war, that option 

simply is not available to the government. "~°~ To support his 

case, Vought quoted a newspaper interview with Lieutenant 

General Donn A. Starry, the commander of the V Corps in 

Germany and DePuy's eventual successor as TRADOC 

commander: After getting out of Vietnam, the Army looked 

71 
conflict in Europe would also be sufficient for lesser conflicts 

prevailed. It was buttressed by the widely accepted views 

contained in Bruce Palmer's The 25-Year War: America's Role 

in Vietnam and Harry Summers's On Strategy: A Critical 

Analysis of the Vietnam War that the war in Vietnam was 

largely conventional and that the United States did not win 

because, as Palmer believed, "We lacked a clear objective 

and an attainable strategy of a decisive nature, and we 

relinquished the advantages of the strategic offensive to 

Hanoi. The best of initiatives, resources, exemplary conduct 

and fighting spirit cannot make up for these deficiencies. "~°3 

Summers stressed that the doctrinal essence of the Army, 

which had always been "the defeat of an enemy," had been 

perverted during the Vietnam War to "the fundamental 

purpose of the U.S. military forces is to preserve, restore, or 

create an environment of order or stability within which the 

instrumentalities of government can function effectively under 

a code of law" in the 1968 version of FM 1 00-5. He held that 

"our own doctrine contributed to the subsequent failure of 

U.S. national policy in Vietnam. "~°4 In essence, Summers 

argued, the Army was called upon to perform 

"nation-building" in Vietnam, while simultaneously being 

restricted from using a winning military strategy. ~°s The 

post-Vietnam Army doctrine, however, was fully in accord 

with the views of Palmer and Summers and had a comforting 

historical continuity, because it focused on fighting and 

destroying the enemy through vigorous offensive action 

centered on maneuver warfare. 

For the Armed Forces as a whole, Vietnam created no 

crisis to the doctrinal paradigms of the services. Instead, the 

crisis was to the paradigm of civil-military relatiorls. Military 

officers emerged from the conflict, and the extremely difficult 

years of rebuilding their institutions, with a clear sense that 

their civilian counterparts did not understand the use of 

72 
foredoomed victory and damaged the services. Thus, the 

fundamental lesson for the military that emerged from the 

Vietnam war was crystal clear--"no more Vietnams." 

Notes 

1. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown 

and Company, 1979), 221. 

2. Henry Kissinger, "Central Issues American Foreign Policy," 

in Agenda for the Nation, ed. Kermit Gordon (Washington: 1969), 

74; quoted in John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical 

appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1982), 279. 

3. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States 

Marine Corps, new and rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 

596. 

4. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford, 

1978), 212. 

5. "Gerald R. Ford on the Lessons of Vietnam," in Major 

Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, ed. Robert J. McMahon 

(Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1990), 600. 

6. Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor 

House, 1985), 212. 

7. Ibid., 212. 

8. George C. Herring, "Legacy and Lessons of the War," in 

McMahon, 608. 

9. "Jimmy Carter Sees a 'Profound Moral Crisis," 1971, in 

McMahon, 600-1. 

10. Speech at the University of Notre Dame, May 22, 1977, 

Public Papers of the Presidents: Jimmy Carter, 956-57; quoted in 

Gaddis. 

11. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common 

Defense: A History fo the United States of America (New York: The 

Free Press, 1977), 582. 

12. Ibid., 579. 

13. Robert W. Love, Jr. History of the U.S. Navy, vol. 2, 

1942-1991 (Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1992), 674. 
Giroux, 1985), 426. 

16. Ibid., 443. 

17. Jeffrey Record, The Rapid Deployment Force and US. 

Military Intervention in the Persian Guff (Cambridge: Institute for 

Foreign Policy Analysis, 1983) for an analysis of the evolution and 

inability of the RDJTF to intervene effectively in the Persian Gulf. 

18. Robert Scales, Jr., Terry L. Johnson, and Thomas P. Odom, 

Certain Victory: The U.S. Army in the Guff War (Washington: Office 

of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1993)16-1 7, 29. 

19. Westmoreland, Report of the Chief of Staff of the United 

States Army, 1 July 1968 to 30 June 1972 (Washington: 1977), 

77-78. 

20. W. B. Rosson, "Assessment of Influence Exerted on Military 

Operations by Other than Military Considerations," 1970; reprint, 

Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1993), 

VlII-23--VlII-29; Millett, Semper Fidelis, 596-604. 

21. Donald F. Bletz, Charles A. Debelius, Francis A. Nerone, 

and Donald D. Penner, Army Tasks for the Seventies (Carlisle 

Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 1972; reprint, 1974), 30-31. See 

also Westmoreland, Report of the Chief of Staff, 48-74. 

Westmoreland's report contained a twenty-six page chapter titled 

"Social Problems." The subchapter headings give an indication of 

the breadth of the problems facing the Army: Dissent, Drug Abuse 

and Alcoholism, Absenteeism, Corrupt Behavior, War Crimes, Race 

Relations, Crime, Military Justice, Correctional Matters, and Public 

A ttitudes. 

22. Ibid., 138. 

23. Ibid., 127, 139; John P. Lovell, "Vietnam and the U.S. Army: 

Learning to Cope with Failure," in Democracy, Strategy, and 

Vietnam: Implications for Policymaking, eds. George K. Osborn, Asa 

A. Clark, IV, Daniel J. Kaufman, and Douglas E. Lute (Lexington: 

Lexington Books, 1987), 131. 

24. William W. Kaufmann, "Force Planning and Vietnam," in 

Osborn, Clark, Kaufman, and Lute, 237; Richard P. Hallion, Air War 

Over Iraq: Air Power and the Guff War (Washington: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1992), 66. 

74 
Command and General Staff College, 1990), 151. 

26. William A. Knowlton, "Ethics and Decision-Making," 

address delivered at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, 

PA, 22 October 1984, 28; quoted in Petraeus, 45. 

27. Halloran, "Vietnam Consequences," quoted in Petraeus, 

"The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of 

Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era" 

(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1987), 136; quoted in Brady, 152. 

28. Petraeus, 152. 

29. Edward C. Meyer, "Address to the Greater Gulf Coast 

Chapter, AUSA," Mobile, Alabama, 17 January 1980, in E.C. Meyer, 

General, United States Army Chief of Staff, June 1979-June 1~8.~ 

(Washington: 1983), 42-43. 

30. Edward C. Meyer, "Address to the Army Senior 

Conference," West Point New York, 4 June 1982, in E.C. Meyer, 

306. 

31. Robert E. Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder: 

Westview Press, 1979), 50. 

32. Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of 

the Vietnam War (Novato: Presidio Press, 1982), 13, 29. 

33. Lovell, 136. 

34. Richard P. Hallion, Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf 

War (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), $9. 

35. A. L. Gropman, "The Air War in Vietnam, 1961-73," in War 

in the Third Dimension: Essays in Contemporary Air Power, ed. R. 

A. Mason (London:Brassey's Defence Publishers, 1986),56-57; 

Lovell, 124; Hallion, 19. 

36. William W. Momyer, Jr., Air Power in Three Wars 

(Washington, 1978), 34. 

37. Ira C. Eaker, "Some Observations on Air Power," in Air 

Power and Warfare: Proceedings of the Eighth Military History 

Symposium, ed. Alfred F. Hurley and Robert C. Earhart (Washington: 

Office of Air Force History, 1978), 358. 

38. Gropman, 57. See also Kohn and Harrahan, 119-130; 

Lovell, 124; Hallion, 19. 

39. Mark CIodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American 

Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 

75 
328. 

41. Lovell, 124. 

42. Tilford, "Air Power in Vietnam: The Hubris of Power," in 

The American War In Vietnam: Lessons, Legacies, and implications 

for Future Conflicts, eds., Iawrence E. Grinter and Peter M. Dunn 

(Westport: Greenwood, 1987), 81. 

43. Kaufman, "Force Planning in Vietnam," 242; quoted in 

Petraeus, "Lessons of History and Lessons of Vietnam," 52. 

44. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 

1976), 217-72. 

45. U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in 

Retrospect (San Rafael: Presidio Press, 1978), 252. 

46. Zumwalt, 330. 

47. Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr., "From SLOC Protection to a National 

Maritime Strategy: The U.S. Navy under Carter and Reagan, 

1977-1984." in In Peace and War: Interpretations of American 

Naval History, 1775-1984, 2d ed., ed. Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport: 

Greenwood Press, 1984), 347. 

48. Love, 674. 

49. NWP-1 (Rev. A), Strategic Concepts of the U.S. Navy, 

quoted in Roger W. Barnett and Jeffrey G. Barlow, "The Maritime 

Strategy of the U.S. Navy: Reading Excerpts," in Seapower and 

Strategy, eds. Colin S. Gray and Roger W. Barnett (Annapolis: 

Naval Institute Press, 1989), 338-39. 

50. John F. Lehman, Jr., Command of the Seas: Building the 

600 Ship Navy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), 118. 

51. Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr., "From SLOC Protection to National 

Maritime Strategy: The U.S. Navy Under Carter and Reagan, 1977- 

1984," in Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 

1775-1984, 2 nd ed., ed. Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport: Green wood 

Press, 1984), 353. 

52. Lehman, 99. 

53. "Carter fights $3.05 Billion in House Armed services 

Add-Ons," Aerospace Daily, May 22, 1980, 121; quoted in Floyd 

Kennedy, 352. 

54. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 597. 

55. Ibid., 597-98. 

76 
y pgy , 

1860-1980," (Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 

1984), 287. 

58. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 596-97. 

59. Ibid., 597. 

60. Ibid. 

61. U.S. Department of the Army, U.S. Army War College, 

Study on Military Professionalism (Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War 

College, 1970), iv. 

62. William L. Hauser, "Armies and Societies: Three Case 

Studies," Military Review 52 (July 1972): 4; quoted in Lovell, 125. 

63. Romie L. Brownlee and William J. Mullen, III, Changing an 

Army: An Oral History of General William E. DePuy, USA Retired 

(Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 1 74. 

64. John Schlight, ed., Second Indochina War Symposium: 

Papers and Commentary (Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military 

History, 1986), 266. 

65. Harry G. Summers, Jr., The As~arita Report: A Military 

Strategy for the Multipolar World (Carlisle Barracks: Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1981 ), v. 

66. Ibid., 43. 

67. Ibid., 44. 

68. James Fallows, "Residual Effects of the Vietnam War on the 

Military," in Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War, ed. 

Harrison E. Salisbury (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 293. 

69. Donn A. Starry, "A Tactical Evolution--FM 100-5," Military 

Review 58 (August 1978): 3. 

70. Peter Braestrup, ed., Vietnam as History (Washington: 

University Press of America, 1984), 115; emphasis in the original. 

71. Lovell, 130. 

72. Interview with General Edward C. Meyer, USA (Ret), 23 

February 1994. 

73. Ibid. During my interview with General Meyer I asked him 

why, if the Soviets enjoyed such an enormous conventional 

advantage in the post-Vietnam era before the Reagan buildup, had 

the Warsaw Pact not attacked NATO? His response was that the 

ever- present nuclear deterrent had protected NATO. Arguably the 

77 
75. Zeb B. Bradford and Frederic J. Brown, The United States 

Army in Transition (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973), 66. 

76. Ibid. 

77. Ibid., 64. 

78. Ibid., 66. 

79. William F. DePuy, "FM 100-5 Revisited," Army 30 

(November 1980): 12. 

80. Paul H. Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General 

William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations 

(Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1988), 37. 

81. U.S. Department of the Army, FM 100-5, Operations 

(Washington: 1976), i. 

82. Ibid., 1-1; emphasis in the original. 

83. Ibid., 14-1; emphasis in the original. 

84. Ibid.,I-2. 

85. Ibid. 

86. Ibid., 14-1--14-26. 

87. This focus on the conventional should not be surprising 

given DePuy's views about the Vietnam War. See William E. 

DePuy, review of The Army and Vietnam, by Andrew F. 

Krepinevich, Ir. In Army 36 (September 1986): 77-78. DePuy noted 

in this review that: "U.S. combat forces were not and are not the 

preferred or proper instrument for counterinsurgency operations 

amongst the people. Short of genocide or relocation, as in 

Afghanistan, foreign armies have a record of failure in such 

operations for the most obvious political reasons." Furthermore, 

"The instinct of the U.S. Army in Vietnam to go after the Vietcong 

main forces and the North Vietnamese in the back country was 

correct. It was not that some abstract doctrine was in error; it was 

rather the failure to isolate the battlefield operationally." 

88. Romie L. Brownlee and William J. Mullen, III, Changingan 

Army: An Oral History of General William E. DePuy, USA Retired 

(Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 1 88. 

89. James F. Dunnigan and Raymond M. Macedonia, Getting It 

Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam to the Gulf War and 

Beyond (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993), 1 75-85. 

78 
91. Herbert, 1 02. 

92. Romjue, 4-5. 

93. Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and 

the Army of His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 

363-64. 

94. Sorley, 364. 

95. Ibid. 

96. Scales, Johnson, and Odom, 1 8. 

97. John M. Oseth, "FM 100-5 Revisited: A Need for Better 

"Foundation Concepts?" Military Review 60 (March 1980): 1 8. 

98. Donald B. Vought, "Preparing for the Wrong War?" Military 

Review 57 (May 1977): 32. 

99. Ibid., 30. 

100. Ibid., 32. 

1 01. Ibid. 

102. Ibid., 32; emphasis in the original. 

103. Bruce Palmer, The 25-Year War- America's Role in 

Vietnam (New York: Touchstone, 1985), 193. 

104. Summers, 71. 

105. Ibid., 71-72. 

79 
The 1981 election of Ronald Reagan as President marked 

a turning point in the fortunes of the Armed Forces. As the 

Reagan defense buildup poured money into the Armed 

Forces, the services became well equipped and, with high 

quality recruits attracted to military service by higher pay and 

enlistment incentives, an exceptionally competent and 

professional force. In fact, the Armed Forces, particularly the 

Army, made a remarkable transformation from "a mass 

conscripted force to one of long-service professionals. "1 The 

danger, however, remained that the rebuilt Armed Forces 

might again be damaged if committed by politicians to 

another Vietnam-like conflict. The true resurgence of the 

Armed Forces began when they took control of their own 

destinies. 

Years of Plenty and the Emergence 

of the Joint Paradim~ 

When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, his agenda 

was a matter of public record: "Less government, lower taxes, 

more defense, global anti-Communism. "~ The new 

administration's views about Carter's foreign policy were also 

clear: "D~tente was disastrous . . . because it ignored the 

realities of Soviet expansionism and failed to stop the shift in 

the balance of strategic nuclear power in favor of Moscow. "3 

Consequently, the Reagan administration's foreign policy 

replaced d~tente with competition and confrontation, views 

clearly expressed by Secretary of Defense Weinberger in a 

speech in April 1982 to the Council on Foreign Relations. 

81 
of global expansionism to new dimensions. ''4 Weinberger 

favored a policy that would "not only resist Soviet incursions 

in the Third World but begin to roll them back. ''s He stated 

that: "We must be prepared to halt and seek to reverse the 

geographic expansion of Soviet control and presence, 

particularly when it threatens a vital interest or further erodes 

the geostrategic position of the United States and its allies. ''6 

Reagan's personal views of the Soviet Union were clearly 

enunciated in his March 1983 speech to the National 

Association of Evangelicals where he described the Soviet 

Union as an "evil empire" that was "the focus of evil in the 

modern world. "7 

In the specific area of "more defense," Reagan soon made 

a commitment to Weinberger, that his "top priority" was to 

reverse the low state of America's military capabilities. 8 In 

Weinberger's view, a view fully supported by the President, 

"it was vital that we regain an effective and credible deterrent 

strength quickly. "9 

The Reagan defense buildup, one which resulted in real 

growth after inflation of some fifty-two percent between fiscal 

years 1980 and 1985 was obviously welcomed by the 

Department of Defense. 1° Indeed, one journalist noted that 

the "JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] would finally get the kind of 

president they had always wanted" and that "the vast majority 

of JCS officers looked forward to his administration with keen 

anticipation .... they would be getting the first peacetime, 

pro-defense president in their history. "1; Nevertheless, there 

were aspects of the new presidency that clearly alarmed 

military officers. 

In some ways, the policies of the Reagan administration 

during its first term were reminiscent of the early days of the 

Kennedy administration. A very popular president had made 

a commitment to increase the conventional military capability 

of the nation, after it had undergone a period of significant 

82 
revitalized military in pursuit of American foreign policy 

goals. In what became an intense bureaucratic battle over the 

control of the employment of conventional or "usable" 

military power, the administration split. 

In the early months of the administration, the most 

vociferous advocate for using military power was Secretary of 

State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. Haig was intent on confronting 

the Soviets, particularly in Central America. Soon he was 

talking about a possible naval quarantine against Cuba, and 

"House Speaker Tip O'Neill quoted Haig as saying U.S. 

troops would have to be used in Nicaragua. ''~2 Weinberger 

later recalled, "AI . . . said that it was quite clear we would 

have to invade Cuba and, one way or another, put an end to 

the Castro regime. ''13 Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 

who did not always agree among themselves on the Defense 

Department agenda, particularly strategic weapons, could 

agree on what they felt was a dangerous use of American 

military power and opposed Haig. TM This opposition 

prompted Haig to respond: 

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, chastened by Vietnam, in which 

our troops performed with admirable success but were 

declared to have been defeated, and by the steady decline 

of respect for the military--and the decline of military 

budgets--resisted a major commitment in Central 

America. ~s 

By 1 983, however, Weinberger had "reluctantly" sent 

American military trainers to El Salvador. Nevertheless, the 

Department of Defense steadily resisted sending American 

ground combat troops to Central America. Its offer, as 

expressed by General Paul Gorman, Commander, United 

States Southern Command, was markedly similar to that made 

earlier by Kennedy and Nixon, which included military 
American forces conducted ground and naval exercises in the 

region, but the threshold of active combat was never 

crossed. ~7 The military remained steadfastly opposed to a 

combat role to the point that: "There was one report in 1 983 

that the Joint Chiefs of Staff even 'resisted drawing up 

contingency plans for sending U.S. troops to fight in Central 

America, partly for fear that civilian leaders in a crisis 

atmosphere would order the plans implemented before they 

are assessed adequately. '''~ One "senior officer" even went 

so far as to tell a reporter from The New York Times, "We're 

the ones pulling back on the reins on [Central America]. "~ 

Clearly, there was a difference in opinion in the Reagan 

administration over the criteria that governed the employment 

of military force. Haig's replacement, George P. Shultz, held 

that, "The use of force, and the credible threat of the use of 

force are legitimate instruments of national policy and should 

be viewed as such. ":° His views were shared by Robert 

McFarlane, the President's National Security Adviser. In 

August 1982, Schultz and McFarlane prevailed over the 

objections of Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 

Reagan ordered Marines to Lebanon in a peacekeeping role. 

On October 23, 1983 a truck loaded with explosives crashed 

into headquarters of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in 

Beirut, killing 241 Marines and confirming the worst fears of 

those opposed to the deployment to Lebanon. 21 Weinberger 

later commented that the penchant of: 

some theorists .... [for] employing our forces almost 

indiscriminately and as a regular and customary part of our 

diplomatic efforts--would surely plunge us headlong into 

the sort of domestic turmoil we experienced during the 

Vietnam War, without accomplishing the goal for which we 

committed our forces. 22 

84 
military from its experience in Vietnam. 

On October 24, 1983, U.S. forces invaded the island of 

Grenada. Although Operation Urgent Fury revealed 

significant problems in interservice cooperation, it was a clear 

success in one crucial aspect for military officers--President 

Reagan gave complete authority to the military for the 

operational aspects of the invasion. ~3 American civil-military 

relations had returned to their World War II model in that 

once the decision to employ force was made by the 

politicians, military officers had control of the operational 

aspects of conflict until "victory" was attained. 

The operations in Beirut and Grenada were a watershed 

for the American military. Beirut proved the hazards of 

undertaking military operations without a clearly defined 

mission and for the sake of nebulous political aims. Grenada 

showed that military operations, when entrusted to the 

capable hands of military officers--with clearly defined 

objectives and the clear intention of "winning"--would be 

successful in achieving political aims. 24 

Beirut and Grenada also made it axiomatic in the military 

that "the best wars are those you cannot lose. "2s Secretary of 

Defense Weinberger understood this, and in November 1 984 

he publicly proclaimed his six tests for the use of American 

military force. Weinberger insisted that he personally crafted 

the doctrine, but it resonated with the post-Vietnam 

perspectives on the use of military force advanced by General 

Abrams, General Meyer, General Palmer, General Momyer, 

Colonel Summers, and others. ~6 In the opinion of General 

Powell, Weinberger's military assistant at the time, the 

doctrine had a flawless logic: "In short, is the national interest 

at stake? If the answer is yes, go in, and go in to win. 

Otherwise, stay out. "~7 

What was also becoming clear was the fact that in an 

increasingly complex and professional military establishment, 

85 
ggp

cooperation, the push for defense reform took on new life. In 

October 1986, Congress passed the Department of Defense 

Reorganization Act, commonly referred to as the 

Goldwater-Nichols Act. This law greatly strengthened the 

power of the Joint Staff and the regional commanders-in-chief 

and made the Chairman, JCS, the principal military adviser to 

the President and the Secretary of Defense. 28 

Following the passage of Goldwater-Nichols, the 

influence of military officers came increasingly to resemble 

that held by the "technical specialists" in "large-scale 

administration" described by Max Weber. Weber argued that 

these possessors of special knowledge controlled the 

bureaucratic machinery, since only they understood its 

operation in a meaningful way. 29 Furthermore, the 

interservice rivalry inherent in the Department of Defense was 

greatly mollified after the passage of the law, particularly with 

the appointment of the popular General Powell as Chairman 

of the JCS in October 1989. 3o 

The Joint Paradigm Triumphant: 

Panama and the Gulf War 

The first major operational test of the post-Goldwater-Nichols 

defense establishment came in December 1989, with the 

invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause. The military 

leaders who executed Just Cause enjoyed the same 

operational latitude experienced during Urgent Fury--once 

the political decision to execute the invasion was made, the 

military controlled the campaign. This was fully in accord 

with General Powell's view of war: "Political leaders must set 

a war's objectives, while armies achieve them. "3~ 

Just Cause was a resounding operational success, one that 

convinced military leaders of "the imperative that victory must 

be won quickly with overwhelming force to ensure minimum 

86 
g gg

"postconflict headaches" and "would require a great deal 

more effort than generals ever imagined. "33 Still, Just Cause 

demonstrated that the American military had largely 

resurrected itself from its post-Vietnam funk and had corrected 

many of the joint operations problems that had plagued 

Urgent Fury. 

The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General 

Colin Powell, likely captured the views of many of his peers 

when he noted that Just Cause "confirmed all my convictions 

over the preceding twenty years, since the days of doubt over 

Vietnam. ''34 To the Chairman, JCS, the lessons of Just Cause 

were patently clear: "Have a clear political objective and 

stick to it. '~~ The military means of attaining the political 

objective were also clear to General Powell: "Use all the 

force necessary, and do not apologize for going in big if that 

is what it takes. Decisive force ends wars quickly and in the 

long run save lives. "3° Powell later recalled that: "Whatever 

threats we faced in the future, I intended to make these rules 

the bedrock of my military counsel. ''~7 

The greatest post-Vietnam challenge to the capability of 

the U.S. military came in the summer of ] 990, when the Iraqis 

invaded Kuwait. The Iraqi aggression came when the Cold 

War was clearly coming to a close and the American military 

was in the midst of reducing its size in response to the waning 

Soviet threat. In the months that followed, the United States 

deployed a massive military force, which served as the heart 

of the larger coalition, to confront the Iraqis. The force was 

perhaps the most competent and best equipped ever fielded 

by the United States; it was a force designed to fight the Soviet 

Union. 

Powell played a crucial role in both defining the response 

to the Iraqi aggression and the criteria for ending the war. 

There would be no half-measures: 

87 
would there be any diplomatic pauses to let enemy forces 

catch their breath. It would be the generals, not civilian 

targeteers in Washington, who would pick the targets. A 

decisive victory would be achieved and American forces 

would be quickly withdrawn so as not to become entangled 

in the war's messy aftermath .... The doctrine was applied 

in the invasions of Panama and Grenada with good results. 

Powell and Schwarzkopf made sure it was applied to the 

gulf as well. 3~ 

Powell assembled the massive military instrument necessary 

to apply overwhelming force against the Iraqis. Powell's 

military strategy was supported by President George Bush who 

had stressed, "This will not be another Vietnam .... Our 

troops will have the best possible support in the entire world 

and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind 

their back. ''39 Still, the Persian Gulf War resembled past 

conflicts in that there were both an air war and a ground war. 

The massive air campaign pulverized the Iraqi infrastructure 

and its armed forces, and a 100-hour ground campaign forced 

the Iraqis out of Kuwait--all at a remarkably low cost in allied 

casualties. 4° 

President Bush declared at the end of the war, "Kuwait is 

liberated. Iraq's army is defeated. Our military objectives 

have been met, TM However, nagging questions about the 

"premature" termination of the war arose. Interestingly, 

President Bush did not refer to "political objectives" in his 

speech. Some thought that the military advice given by 

General Powell to President Bush and Secretary of Defense 

Dick Cheney to end the war created a situation that "left 

Washington without a means of influencing events in postwar 

Iraq. "4~ Thesecharges were deftly fended off by the military. 

Powell defended his advice to avoid prolonging the war in his 

memoirs from an emotional perspective: "1 am relieved that 

I don't have to say to many more parents, 'I'm sorry your son 

88 
damage as possible. ''44 General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the 

theater commander during Desert Storm, echoed Powell's 

aversion to a protracted conflict, writing in his memoirs, "1 am 

certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like 

the dinosaur in the tar pit--we would still be there. "4s Even 

the limited aim of supporting the Shiite insurgency in Iraq was 

opposed by Powell and Schwarzkopf because it might lead to 

a protracted American military involvement. 46 

Clearly, the Bush administration had relied on the "expert 

advice" of the military on when to end the war, but there was 

little consideration of the long-term consequences of the 

decision. From the perspective of officers who had made the 

long trip from the protracted Vietnam War to the "brilliant and 

unqualified success" of the Persian Gulf War, there was little 

debate. 47 The U.N. mandate of freeing Kuwait had been met; 

it was time to declare victory and go home. 

It is clear, however, that "Whatever the success of the 

campaign, there has been far less evidence of careful 

preparation for war termination. The first lesson after the 

shooting stopped was that there was considerable ambiguity 

about objectives. "48 Indeed, Gordon Brown, Schwarzkopf's 

foreign policy adviser, recalled: "We never did have a plan 

to terminate the war. "49 In the final analysis, Saddam Hussein 

remained in power, and the United States military remains 

today committed to operations to protect the Kurds of 

northern Iraq and enforce the U.N. sanctions regime, s° 

Despite any lingering doubt about the political outcome 

of the Persian Gulf War, there was wide consensus that the 

Ameican military had triumphed. American troops returned 

home to receptions that brought to mind the triumphal 

celebrations at the end of World War II. President Bush 

reflected the euphoria of many when he proclaimed, "By God 

• . . we've licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. "sl 

Indeed, a report by the House Armed Services Committee 

89 
micromanagement from Washington--were scrupulously 

avoided. ~ Furthermore, "the fresh memory of Operation Just 

Cause validated the use of overwhelming force to achieve 

lilmited military objectives" and "was central to the approach 

taken in deploying the massive 550,000-man force used to 

defeat Iraq. "~3 The report also presciently predicted: 

Operation Desert Storm will now be the yardstick against 

which the most significant military hardware and policy 

questions for the future will be measured. The instinctive 

question will no longer be "What did the failures of 

Vietnam teach us about this or that?" but rather "How well 

did we do against Iraq with this technology or with that 

doctrine? "s4 

The military soon moved to inculcate the larger 

institutional lessons of the war. The singular importance of 

clear political objectives as the underpinning of military 

operations made itself into the joint doctrinal debate. A May 

1 991 "Proposed Final" Joint Pub 0-1: Basic National Defense 

Doctrine proclaimed that, although "the ultimate 

responsibility for selecting objectives for war or military 

operations short of war falls upon the President," the military 

had a threefold interest in the selection of military objectives: 

First, that it be done. Absence of clear national objectives 

risks military action without a politically useful conclusion, 

confounds efforts to develop popular support, and hinders 

development of negotiation goals associated with conflict 

termination. Second, the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 

normally in consultation with the other members of the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the affected combatant 

commanders are expected to recommend possible national 

military objectives and assess their military adequacy, 

feasibility and acceptability. Third, these objectives provide 

90 
y 

strategic advice to, and decision by, the National Command 

authorities, s~ 

General Powell also formalized his doctrine of 

overwhelming military force in Joint Pub 1: Joint Warfare of 

the US Armed Forces in November 1 991.56 The document 

carefully stressed that the "Defense of our nation and its 

interests defines our reason for being" and that this defense 

"rests first on the concept of deterrence." Nevertheless, "If 

deterrence fails, then our single objective is winning the 

nation's wars. When we fight, we fight to win. ''sT Throughout 

this publication, the Gulf War was held up as the model of 

joint operations, along with historical examples of campaigns 

from other "good wars"--the American Civil War and World 

War II. As for lessons from America's limited wars, 

Macarthur's landing at Inchon during the Korean War 

received brief mention, while no operational lessons from 

Vietnam were cited. 

A Challenge to the Paradigm: Somalia 

In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the breakup of 

the Soviet Union, new international crises arose that would 

further solidify the thinking of military officers on the 

appropriate use of force. Perhaps the most important of these 

was the American involvement in Somalia. The United States 

became engaged in Somalia in August 1992 in support of 

UNOSOM I (U.N. Operation in Somalia), "whose mission was 

to provide humanitarian aid and facilitate the end of hostilities 

in Somalia. ''58 President Bush ordered the support of 

Operation Provide Relief and directed that U.S. forces 

"provide military assistance in support of emergency 

humanitarian relief to Kenya and Somalia. "59 The intent of the 

operation was the provision of food and medical supplies to 

91 
authorized by Provide Relief changed during the waning 

weeks of the Bush administration. In November, a ship 

carrying relief supplies was fired upon in Mogadishu, forcing 

it to leave before delivering its cargo. Clearly, the security 

environment in Somalia was constraining humanitarian 

efforts. Consequently, on 4 December, President Bush 

ordered the initiation of Operation Restore Hope. °° U.N. 

Resolution 794 provided a mandate for the operation: "to 

provide humanitarian assistance to the Somali people, and to 

restore order in southern Somalia. "6~ To execute the mandate, 

a combined military organization, UNITAF (United Task 

Force), was created. Once a secure environment was created 

to ensure uninterrupted relief operations, UNITAF disbanded 

and transferred operations to U.N. peacekeeping forces. 

UNITAF was led and largely manned by the United 

States--28,000 of the 38,000 coalition forces from the 21 

contributing nations were Americans. 6~ 

In March 1993, the mission in Somalia underwent another 

evolution. UNOSOM II was formed to execute U.N. Security 

Resolution 814, which established the requirements to 

perform peacekeeping operations, including the disarming of 

the Somali clans, rehabilitate Somali political and economic 

institutions and establish a secure environment throughout 

Somalia. 63 The role envisioned for the 4,500 American troops 

committed to the mission was the provision of logistical 

support and a "Quick Reaction Force--some 1,1 50 soldiers 

from the US Army's 10th Mountain Division--that would 

operate under the tactical control of the Commander, U.S. 

Forces, Somalia. "64 

Americans soon discovered the difficulties of fighting an 

urban guerrilla war, a war for which they were neither trained 

nor equipped: 

92 
American forces as it was intimately familiar to Aidids 

supporters. The technology that had given rise to 

speculation about a revolution in military affairs proved 

ineffective, if not counterproductive, for close-in urban 

warfare. By the time Americans resorted to the use of 

anti-tank guided missiles to root out snipers, it had become 

apparent that the firepower which had demolished the Iraqi 

republican Guards was ill-suited to the streets of 

Mogad ishu.6S 

The situation in Somalia steadily deteriorated, and in June 

1 993, members of the Somali clan under Mohammed Aidid 

killed 24 Pakistani members of UNOSOM II in an ambush. 

The U.N. Security Council called for the "immediate 

apprehension of those responsible. ''r~" As a consequence, the 

United States deployed members of Delta Force and Army 

Rangers to assist in the capture of Aidid. 67 On 3 October, 

U.S. forces became engaged in a bloody battle with Somali 

militia in the aftermath of a raid to capture Aidid. American 

casualties numbered 18 dead and 84 wounded; estimates 

placed Somali casualties at 312 dead and 814 wounded. 68 In 

the aftermath of the battle, President Clinton directed a policy 

review that eventually resulted in a plan to withdraw 

American forces from Somalia by 31 March 1 994. 69 

The Somalia experience was extremely important for the 

American military--it seemingly showed the hazards of 

becoming involved in a protracted conflict with an unclear 

exit strategy and fuzzy military objectives, as well as the 

hazards of "mission creep." In a statement reminiscent of 

Vietnam, Powell recalled the situation in Somalia "was the 

quicksand that the U.N. 'nation-building' mission had sucked 

us into. "7° Indeed, an analysis published by the National 

Defense University posits that Somalia "teaches us that there 

must be limits to the commitment of American military 
policy makers. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin was deeply 

resented by military officers for not honoring the request of 

the American commander in Somalia, Major General Tom 

Montgomery for tanks and armored vehicles to protect his 

force, although Aspin had earlier sent helicopter gunships and 

AC-1 30 strike planes to Somalia. There was speculation that 

the armor would have prevented many of the U.S. casualties 

during the ill-fated raid. 72 What is rarely discussed is the fact 

that General Montgomery must not have believed the armor 

critical to his mission or for the raids to capture Aidid. U.S. 

forces executed their missions without the armor and, in the 

case of the final raid, did not coordinate for UNOSOM II 

armor until after the mission went bad. 73 

Notes 

1. Scales, Odom, and Johnson, 31-32. 

2. Ibid. 

3. William P. Snyder and James Brown, ed., Defense Policy in 

the Reagan Administration (Washington: National Defense 

University Press, 1988), xv. 

4. Michael T. Klare, "The Reagan Doctrine: Grenada: 2," New 

Statesman (4 November 1983): 9. 

5. Ibid., 9-1 O; emphasis in the original. 

6. Ibid., 10. 

7. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New 

York: Simon and Schuster, 1991; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 

1992), 316-17. 

8. Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years 

in the Pentagon, rev. ed. (New York: Warner, 1991), 34. 

9. Ibid., 35. 

10. Snyder and Brown, xxv. 

11. Mark Perry, Four Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 989), 

277. 

12. Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works 

(New York: Random House, 1988), 350. 

94 
Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff see Perry, 287304. 

15. Alexander M. Haig, Caveat (New York: MacMillan, 1984), 

128-29; quoted in William J. Taylor, Jr. and David H. Petraeus, "The 

Legacy of Vietnam for the U.S. Military," in Democracy, Strategy, 

and Vietnam: Implications for Policymaking, eds. George K. Osborn, 

Asa A. Clark IV, Daniel J. Kaufman, and Douglas E. Lute, (Lexington: 

Lexington Books, 1987), 258. 

16. Taylor and Petraeus, 258-59. 

17. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common 

Defense: A Military history of the United States of America (New 

York: The Free Press, 1977), 584. 

18. George C. Wilson, "U.S. Urged to Meet Honduran 

Requests," Washington Post, June 20, 1983, A-4; quoted in Millett 

and Maslowski, 260. 

19. Richard Halloran, "Vietnam Consequences: Quiet From 

the Military," 2 May 1983, A16; quoted in David H. Petraeus, 

"Lessons of History and Lessons of Vietnam." Parameters 16 

(Autumn 1986): 52. 

20. George P. Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as 

Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), 345. 

21. Perry, 305-12. 

22. Weinberger, 448-49. 

23. Richard A. Gabriel, Military Incompetence: Why the 

American Military Doesn't Win (New York: The Noonday Press, 

1985), 150. 

24. Ibid., 150-51; Weinberger, 162-67. 

25. Gabriel, 173. 

26. Weinberger interview. Some, however, maintain that Colin 

Powell wrote the speech that enunciated the Weinberger Doctrine; 

see Peter D. Feaver, "Civil-Military Conflict and the Use of Force," 

in U.S. Civil-Military Relations: In Crisis or Transition? ed. Don M. 

Snider and Miranda A. Carlton (Washington: The Center for 

Strategic and International Studies, 1995), 130. 

27. Colin Powell, with Joe E. Persico, My American Journey 

(New York: Random House, 1995), 303. 

28. Perry, 337-8; and Christopher Allan Yuknis, "The 

Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act of 1986: An Interim 

95 
Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and Alcott Parsons (New York: 

Free Press, 1964), 337-38. 

30. Yuknis, 85. 

31. Powell, 207. 

32. Scales, Johnson, and Odom, 34. 

33. Ibid., 35. 

34. Powell, 434. 

35. Ibid. 

36. Powell, 434. 

37. Ibid. 

38. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The General's 

War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Guff (Boston: Little, 

Brown, and Company, 1995), 465-69. 

39. George Bush, "The Liberation of Kuwait Has Begun (speech 

of January 1 6, 1991 ), in The Guff War Reader, eds. Michah L. Sifry 

and Christopher Cerf(New York: Times Books, 1991), 313. 

40. Powell, 459-524. 

41. George Bush, "Kuwait is Liberated" (speech of February 27, 

1991 ), in Sifry and Cerf, 449. 

42. Gordon and Trainor, 469; Powell, 522-28. 

43. Powell, 527. 

44. Joint Pub 1, 23. 

45. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn't Take a Hero (New 

York: Linda Grey Bantam Books, 1992), 498. 

46. Gordon and Trainor, 456. 

47. Gordon and Trainor, 452. 

48. Bobby R. Inman, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., William J. Perry, and 

Roger K. Smith, "Lessons from the Gulf War," The Washington 

Quarterly 15 (Winter 1992): 70. 

49. Gordon and Trainor, 461. 

50. Gordon and Trainor, 461. 

51. Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian 

Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 493. 

52. Congress, House, Committee on Armed Services, Defense 

for a New Era: Lessons of the Persian Gulf War, report prepared by 

Les Aspin and Willian Dickenson (Washington, 1992), 4. 

53. Ibid., 5. 

96 
57. Ibid., 1; emphasis in the original. 

58. Kenneth Allard, Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned 

(Washington: National Defense University Press, 1995), 14. 

59. Ibid. 

60. Powell, 564-65; and Allard, 15-16. 

61. Allard, 16. 

62. Ibid., 16-17. 

63. Ibid., 18. 

64. Ibid., 19. 

65. A.J. Bacevich, "Learning from Aidid," Commentary 96 

(December 1993): 32. 

66. Allard, 20. 

67. Powell, 583-84. 

68. Rick Atkinson, "Night of a Thousand Casualties," The 

Washinglon Post, January 1994, A1, 10-11. Malaysian members of 

UNOSOM II had 1 dead and seven wounded. 

69. Powell, 588; Allard, 20. 

70. Powell, 586. 

71. Allard, 89. 

72. Powell, 584-88. 

73. Atkinson, "Night of a Thousand Casualties." 

97 
If knowledge is indeed experiential, then the Gulf War and 

Somalia weigh heavily on the minds of American military 

officers. Quite simply, the "good" lessons of Desert Storm are 

paraded by military officers, as are the "bad" lessons of 

Somalia--and they are both supportive of the existing military 

paradigm. This ruling model has its historical origins in an 

"American way of waft' that embraces technology and 

massive firepower to annihilate enemies and preserve the lives 

of American fighting men. Military professionals control 

operations, and the enemy is given neither respite nor 

sanctuary. The one conflict in which this paradigm seemingly 

did not work--Vietnam--was largely treated by military 

officers as a painful anomaly in which political constraints 

inhibited the application of overwhelming force and ceded 

the initiative to the enemy. In their minds, the military was 

denied an achievable victory; it did not lose the war. The 

recent revelations in Robert McNamara's memoirs only serve 

to reinforce this sense of betrayal. 1 

The Vietnam "aberration" also created immense turmoil 

within the services for a generation of military officers who 

worked hard to resurrect the Armed Forces from their 

post-Vietnam depths. The military believed that it was 

wrongly abandoned by the American people because 

politicians had not taken the steps necessary to guarantee 

public support for the war. lhus, the apparent vindication of 

the ruling paradigm by Desert Storm was all the more sweet 

because, as the Army's official history of the war noted: 

"Desert Storm represented the resurgence of an institution 

99 
its unclear military and political objectives and limits on the 

application of force was, for military officers, hauntingly 

similar to Vietnam. Haiti, on the other hand, was a "success" 

in the judgment of the military because the paradigm was 

finally allowed to operate. General Powell was convinced 

that the Haitians gave up power without violence because of 

the overwhelming military force arrayed against them. 3 

But is the ruling paradigm adequate for the future? Failure 

in Somalia and the fact that Saddam Hussein remains in 

power in Iraq would suggest that a doctrine of overwhelming 

force may not be the answer in all cases. Yet, these 

operations create an institutional dilemma for the Armed 

Forces of the United States. If their core value is being 

prepared "to fight and win the nation's wars," then a new 

international environment characterized by "operations other 

than war" creates a perplexing problem. Other types of 

challenges to the nation--international drug cartels, illegal 

immigration, etc.--are even more problematic because they 

do not offer clear military opponents and are troubling in their 

legal implications. 

To date, this discontinuity between institutional 

preparation and operational reality has been largely resolved 

by clinging to the notion of inherent versatility. Major 

General S.L. Arnold, one of the commanders of the Army 

Forces in Somalia, reiterated the primacy of forces trained and 

ready for combat. By virtue of their excellence they would 

"remain versatile enough to adapt to any situation" and would 

therefore be equal to any challenge. Thus, Arnold was able 

to state confidently: "Our doctrine is about 

right "4 essentially, the same argument that was advanced 70 

years earlier in the Army's Field Service Regulations: an Army 

prepared for great wars could readily adapt to lesser conflicts. 

This perspective, however, is not limited to the Army. The 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Joint Vision 2010 states: 

100 
adversaries. Direct combat against an enemys armed 

forces is the most demanding and complex set of 

requirements we have faced. Other operations from 

humanitarian assistance in peacetime through peace 

operations in a near hostile environment, have proved to be 

possible using forces optimized for wartime effectiveness, s 

Why such an apparent inability to change? Part of the 

answer is that paradigms create power bases that derive their 

relevance from the mastery of the existing paradigm. Few, if 

any, military officers rose to prominence in tile aftermath of 

the Vietnam War by arguing the necessity of adopting an 

institutional doctrine that could better address the 

complexities of limited wars. Instead, the stars fell on those 

who treated Vietnam as an anomaly and who took the 

existing paradigm and refocused it on a relevant enemy--the 

Soviet Union. 

In the absence of the Soviet Union, the American military 

has developed a two-major-regional-conflict threat that 

continues to justify the ruling paradigm and its attendant 

weapons and organizations) Thus, the American military has 

been "downsizing" from what it was before the demise of the 

Soviet Union, rather than fundamentally analyzing what kind 

of forces should exist in the future. There has been no 

"radical restructuring of the military but rather a moderate 

shrinkage and consolidation. "7 The major opportunity to 

review the relevance of the paradigm, the 1 995 Commission 

on Roles and Missions, generally affirmed the existing model 

and dwelt in the main on issues of managerial and fiscal 

efficiency. Thus, the U.S. military is, for all intents and 

purposes, merely a smaller version of what it was at the end 

of the Cold War. 

Forestalling any rush to change American military doctrine 

is the fact that the U.S. military is uniquely situated at present 

101 
victory in Desert Storm--is almost unquestioningly embraced. 

Given the hubris of being the "sole superpower" and the 

victors of Desert Storm, it is highly likely that the approach 

the U.S. Armed Forces will take in the future will be one in 

which the existing doctrines prevail and evolve. Few officers 

endowed with power by the existing military paradigm will be 

willing to acknowledge, much less to embrace, radical shifts. 

What will likely occur in the Armed Forces will be a situation 

where military forces will continue to attempt to force their 

operational environment to adapt to their doctrine, rather than 

adapting the doctrine to the environment, much less changing 

the doctrine. In a larger sense there will probably be an 

evolution, ratherthan a revolution, in military affairs. During 

this evolution the central weapon systems, doctrines, and 

hierarchical command and control systems that have their 

origins in the period before and during World War II will 

continue to be refined and improved, but they will all remain 

wedded to the essence of the ruling paradigm. 

What does all of this mean for U.S. post-Cold War 

military-cvil relations? In the historic sense, the military will 

use its special knowledge to shape defense policy to ensure 

that American forces are not committed to operations by their 

civilian superiors if they face the same constraints to winning 

that existed in Vietnam, and then Somalia, or if they pose a 

risk to the institutional well-being of the military. These 

institutional imperatives are grounded in a belief that only 

military professionals are competent to make decisions about 

the deployment of the Armed Forces and that they must 

exercise operational control during any military commitment. 

To cede these prerogatives to less competent civilians carries 

with it the inherent risk of exposing the military to failure in 

the field, a failure whose consequences would be heavily 

borne by the military itself. 

102 
any decision to commit ground forces to an operation for an 

extended period of time. Thus, the service most reluctant to 

repeat Vietnam will likely have the deciding vote in any 

deployment debate. 

Edward Lutwak commented on what he views as "an 

erosion of civilian authority, manifest in the effective veto 

power acquired by the military leadership over intervention 

decisions:" 

Constitutionally, it is the civilian authorities alone who 

should decide whether, when, where, and how to 

intervene, albeit with such military advice as they care to 

solicit. There has been no coup d'~tat, and the Constitution 

has not been rewritten to place the chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff above the President and his Secretary of 

Defense, but in real-live American politics a situation has 

been created in which those two civilians feel that they 

must defer to military preferences, because of the very real 

risk that they would otherwise be undermined politically by 

their nominal military servants. 8 

Given the political liabilities inherent in overriding a military 

recommendation not to intervene, or to be as seen 

micromanaging what are clearly "military matters," civilian 

leaders are more prone than ever to accept the advice offered 

them by their military subordinates. 

The current state of affairs is one in which civilians have 

clearly ceded many of their prerogatives--they have become 

too deferential to the point of view of military officers. 

Therefore, Perry's careful adherence to the catechism of the 

American military paradigm in outlining the mission in 

Bosnia, noted at the beginning of this essay, is not surprising. 

That an armored division, with its enormous firepower, was 

the unit selected for service in Bosnia, and that the unit has 

broad authority to exert overwhelming force against any threat 

103 
despite all the assurances, but given the American militarys 

reliance on its doctrine of overwhelming force, it is not 

surprising that "U.S. commanders are unsettled by 

seat-of-the-pants, untraditional operations" such as those in 

Bosnia. As one Army lieutenant colonel in Bosnia recently 

noted, "There's almost no comfort level for any of this .... 

You don't have an array of manuals that take you from corps 

down to company level, providing you doctrine that contains 

sound, time-proven guidance. "9 Thus Bosnia, in the final 

analysis, does look like Vietnam in a singularly important 

way: the American military paradigm may be largely 

inappropriate given the central nature of the conflict. 

The current state of military-civil relations in the United 

States should not, however, be linked to the Clinton 

administration. One should bear in mind that the Weinberger 

and Powell doctrines were crafted during the tenure of 

Republican administrations. Indeed, any administration will 

face the same challenges so long as the American military 

clings to its existing paradigm. This construct sanctions, in 

the minds of military officers, the duty to decide not only how 

to fight but also when to fight. Thus, in a bureaucratically 

significant way, military officers are dictating defense policy. 

If, as asserted, there is an improper ascendancy of the 

military perspective in American post-Cold War civil-military 

relations, the obvious question is what should be done to 

correct this imbalance? This question defies any prescriptive 

answer. Nevertheless, there are insights that have emerged 

from this study that may help. 

What is clear is that the military will not solve what has 

been argued is a significant military-civil relations problem, 

even if it could recognize it as such, for a number of 

important structural and institutional reasons. Quite simply, 

it is not in the interests of the military to do so, and the lessons 

of Vietnam, reinforced by Somalia, only serve to strengthen 

104 
officers will continue to try to control the important decisions 

about when and how to deploy military forces. Furthermore, 

they will argue that "good warriors"--conventional forces, 

authorized to use overwhelming force are appropriate in any 

environment, thus avoiding the tough issues about alternative 

force structures and organizations. Although the military may 

"do windows" in the future, it will likely do them largely with 

existing sledgehammers. This reluctance to shift the paradigm 

and its supporting structures will only stiffen as downsizing 

continues and the focus becomes riveted on the retention of 

existing capabilities. Finally, military officers will press for 

operational autonomy, clear military objectives, and certain 

victory, with political objectives a secondary consideration. 

Therefore, much of the onus for correcting the existing 

imbalance in civil-military relations rests on the civilian side 

of the scales. Civilians, particularly short-term political 

appointees, must come to grips with the fact that they do not 

possess the requisite bureaucratic competence to challenge 

military recommendations. This is not to say that they should 

continue to defer to military officers. Rather, a more viable 

course would be to emphasize civilian competencies by 

making political considerations paramount in the 

decisionmaking process--and to insist that military options 

are tailored explicitly to meet them. In short, the political 

bureaucratic process must assert itself over the military 

bureaucratic process. 

Notes 

1. Powell, 577. 

2. Scales, Johnson, and Odom, 383. 

3. Ibid., 600. 

4. S.L. Arnold and David T. Stahl, "A Power Projection Army in 

Operations Other Than War," Parameters 23 (Winter 1993-94): 25. 

105 
(Washington: 1994), 1516. 

7. Eliot A. Cohen, "Playing Powell Politics: The General's Zest 

for Power," Foreign Affair~ 74 (Nowmber/December 1995): 108. 

8. Edward N. Luttwak, "If Bosnians Were Dolphins . . ." 

Commentary 96 (October 1993): 29. 

9. Rick Atkinson, "Warriors Without a War," The Washington 

Post 12 April 1996, A22. 

106 
Dr. David E. Iohnson (Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.), was the 

Director of Academic Affairs at the National Defense 

University when he wrote this essay. He also taught at the 

National War College and the Information Resources 

Management Col lege. 

Dr. Johnson is the author of Fast Tanks and Heavy 

Bombers: The United States Army and the Development of 

Armor and Aviation Doctrines and Technologies, 1917 to 

1945, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, and "From 

Frontier Constabulary, to Modern Army: The United States 

Army between the World Wars," in The Challenge of ChanGe: 

Armed Forces and New Realities, 1919-1941. 

Dr. Johnson received a B.A. from Trinity University, a 

M.M.A.S. from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff 

College, a M.S. from the Industrial College of the Armed 

Forces, and a M.S. and a Ph.D. form Duke University. 

107 
name in 1948 in honor of Lieutenant General Lesley James McNair. 

General McNair, known as "Educator of the Army" and trainer of 

some three million troops, was about to take command of Allied 

ground forces in Europe under Eisenhower, when he was killed in 

combat in Normandy, 25 July 1944. 

The following is a complete listing of published McNair Papers. 

For information on availability of specific titles, contact the 

Distribution Manager, Publications Directorate & NDU Press, Fort 

McNair, Washington, DC 20319-5066 (telephone: commercial 

202/685-4379; DSN 325-4379). 

1. Joseph P. Lorenz, Egypt and the New Arab Coalition, February 

1989. 

2. Iohn E. Endicott, Grand Strategy and the Pacific Region, May 

1989. 

3. Eugene V. Rostow, President, Prime Minister, or Constitutional 

Monarch? October 1989. 

4. Howard G. DeWolf, SDI and Arms Control, November 1989. 

5. Martin C. Libicki, What Makes Industries Strategic, November 

1989. 

6. Melvin A. Goodman, Gorbachev and Soviet Policy in the Third 

World, February 1990. 

7. John Van Oudenaren, "The Tradition of Change in Soviet 

Foreign Policy," and Francis Conte, "Two Schools of Soviet 

D i pl omacy," in Understanding Soviet Foreign Policy, April 1990. 

8. Max G. Manwaring and Court Prisk, A Strategic View of 

Insurgencies: Insights from El Salvador, May 1990. 

9. Steven R. Linke, Managing Crises in Defense Industry: The 

PEPCON and Avtex Cases, June 1990. 

10. Christine M. Helms, Arabism and Islam: Stateless Nations and 

Nationless States, September 1990. 

11. Ralph A. Cossa, Iran: Soviet Interests, US Concerns, July 1 990. 

12. Ewan Jamieson, Friend or Ally? A Question for New Zealand, 

May 1991. 

13. Richard I. Dunn III, From Gettysburg to the Gulf and Beyond: 

Coping with Revolutionary Technological Change in Land 

Warfare, March 1992. 

14. Ted Greenwood, U.S. and NATO Force Structure and Military 

Operations in the Mediterranean, June 1993. 
(), y p

Peacekeeping Operations, June 1993. 

18. Sterling D. Sessions and Carl R. Jones, Interoperability: A Desert 

Storm Case Study, July 1993. 

19. Eugene V. Rostow, Should Article 43 of the United Nations 

Charter Be Raised From the Dead? July 1993 

20. William T. Johnsen and Thomas DurelI-Young; Jeffrey Simon; 

Daniel N. Nelson; William C. Bodie, and James McCarthy, 

European Security Toward the Year 200(), August 1993. 

21. Edwin R. Carlisle, ed., Developing Battlefield Technologies in 

the 1990s, August 1993. 

22. Patrick Clawson, How Has Saddam Hussein Survived? 

Economic Sanctions, 1990-93, August 1993. 

23. Jeffrey Simon, Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Divorce," Visegrad 

Cohesion, and European Fault Lines, October 1993. 

24. Eugene V. Rostow, The Future of Palestine, November 1993. 

25. William H. Lewis, John Mackinlay, John G. Ruggie, and Sir 

Brian Urquhart, Peacekeeping: The Way Ahead? November 

1993. 

26. Edward Marks and William Lewis, Triage for Failing States, 

January 1994. 

27. Gregory D. Foster, In Search of a Post-Cold War Security 

Structure, February 1994. 

28. Martin C. Libicki, The Mesh and the Net: Speculations on 

Armed Conflict in a Time of Free Silicon, March 1994. 

29. Patrick Clawson, ed., Iran's Strategic Intentions and Capabilities, 

April 1994. 

30. James W. Morrison, Vladimir Zhirinovskiy: An Assessment of a 

Russian Ultra-Nationalist, April 1994. 

31. Patrick M. Cronin and Michael J. Green, Redefining the I JS.- 

Japan Alliance: Tokyo's National Defense Program, November 

1994. 

32. Scott W. Conrad, Moving the Force: Desert Storm and Beyond, 

December 1994. 

33. John N. Petrie, American Neutrality in the 20th Century: The 

Impossible Dream, January 1995. 

34. James H. Brusstar and Ellen Jones, The Russian Military's Role in 

Politics, January 1995. 

35. S. Nelson Drew, NATO from Berlin to Bosnia: Trans-Atlantic 

Security in Transition, January 1995. 
1995. 

38. Robbin Laird, French Security Policy in Transition: Dynamics of 

Continuity and Change, March 1995. 

39. Jeffrey Simon, Central European Civil-Military Relations and 

NATO Expansion, April 1995. 

40. James W. Morrison, NA TO Expansion and Alternative Future 

Security Alil~nments in Europe, April 1995. 

41. Barry R. Schneider, Radical Responses to Radical Regimes: 

Evaluating Preemptive Counter-Proliferation, May 1995. 

42. John Jaworsky, Ukraine: Stability and Instability, July 1995. 

43. Ronald Tiersky, The Mitterrand Legacy and the Future of French 

Security Policy, August 1995. 

44. John A. Cope, International Military Education and Training: An 

Assessment, October 1995. 

45. El li Lieberman, Deterrence Theory Success or Failure in ArabIsraeli Wars? October 1995. 

46. Stanley R. Sloan, NATO's Future: Beyond Collective Defense, 

December 1995. 

47. M. E. Ahrari, The New Great Game in Muslim Central Asia, 

January 1996. 

48. Mark J. Roberts, Khomeini's Incorporation of the Iranian 

Miilitary, January 1996. 

49. Steven Philip Kramer and Irene Kyriakopoulos, Trouble in 

Paradise? Europe in the 21st Century, March 1996. 

50. Alan L. Gropman, Mobilizing U.S. Industry in World War I1: 

Myth and Reality, August 1996. 

51. Ralph A. Cossa, The Major Powers in Northeast Asian Security, 

September 1996. 

52. Barry D. Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, October 

1996. 

53. Donna Lee Van Cott, Defiant Again: Indigenous Peoples and 

Latin American Security, October 1996. 

54. Ivelaw L. Griffith, Caribbean Security on the Eve of the 21st 

Century, September 1996. 

55. Roman Popadiuk, American-Ukrainian Nuclear Relations, 

October 1996. 

56. Simon V. Mayall, Turkey: Thwarted Ambition, January 1997. 

57. David E. Johnson, Modem U.S. Civil-Military Relations: Wielding? 

the Terrible Swift Sword, July 1997. 
The Institute for 

National Strategic Studies 

is pleased to announce 

a new program of 

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Pu~/ication~ available not~ inc/uae 

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http://www.ndu.edu 
larger vessel - and concludes that U.S. actions likely will determine their future. Dr

Ivelaw Griffith is Associate Professor of Political Science, Florida International University

No.55 American-bTera#~ian Nuclear Relations. An historical study of U.S.-Ukraine nuclear 

rclations since the Cold War. Provides an accurate basis for evaluating future U.S. policy 

for Ukraine, particularS" the possibility of broadening relations beyond the heavy emphasi

on nuclear issues. Ambassador Roman Popadiuk is Internatio'nal Affairs Adviser to the 

Commandant, Industrial College of the ,~med Forces and formerly U.S. Ambassador to 

Ukraine. 

So,56 Turk.o,: Thu,arted Ambition, Assesses Turkey's security polio' as both strengthened 

and threatened by Ataturk's original commitments to align with the West and to create 

a pluralistic, secular nationalism in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and concludes 

that the West cannot afford to "lose" so valuable a country in so important a region at so 

critical a time. Lieutenant Colonel Simon Mayall is Commanding Officer of the 

Queen's Dragoon Guards of the British Army, a veteran of the Gulf War. and a former 

Defence Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford 

L,,;7" 

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NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSrl-'Y 

INSTIq-7~TE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES