Draft Chapter VI - Overall Report

December 2, 1957

# CHAPTER VI
## THE NATURE OF THE MILITARY CHALLENGE

### I

The most terrible aspect of contemporary history lies in the fact that mankind has achieved the power to destroy itself. Nothing could have demonstrated better the finiteness of the human scale than the enormity of the technology which is now unfolding before us. For centuries humanity has sought to ease its condition of life by tapping the powers of nature. But at the moment of its greatest technological triumph, humanity finds itself appalled by the immensity of its achievement. Henceforth human conduct on a national scale must take place in the fearful knowledge that miscalculation may involve the end of civilized existence.

The terror of modern weapons is best described not be adjectives but by facts. The largest conventional bomb of World War II had an explosive power of 20 tons of TNT. The atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima represented a thousandfold increase over this "blockbuster": its explosive equivalent was 20 thousand tons (20 kilotons). By 1953 thermonuclear weapons had been developed which increased the destructiveness of weapons another thousandfold to 20 million tons (20 megatons). Moreover, there are no upper limits: nuclear or thermonuclear devices can be constructed of almost any desired power. And as the weapons have become more powerful it has also become possible to make them more discriminating. As a result, the spectrum of nuclear weapons ranges

["THE NATURE OF THE MILITARY CHALLENGE\n\nCHAPTER VI", "December 5, 1934", "Draft Chapter VI - Overall Report", "I", "The most terrible aspect of contemporary history lies in the fact that the most terrible weapons are used not to destroy the enemy, but to kill the enemy. The most terrible weapons are used not to destroy the enemy, but to kill the enemy. The greatest technological triumph, humanity finds itself abashed by the force of its condition of life by tapping the powers of nature. But at the moment which is now underlying before us, for centuries humanity has sought to annul the finiteness of the human scale, than the enormity of the technology which is now underlying before us. But the moment which is now underlying before us, for centuries humanity has sought to annul the finiteness of the human scale, than the enormity of the technology which is now underlying before us. The moment which is now underlying before us, for centuries humanity has sought to annul the finiteness of the human scale, than the enormity of the technology which is now underlying before us. But the moment which is now underlying before us, for centuries humanity has sought to annul

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from those of only 100 tons TNT equivalent to others capable of eradicating a
city.

The explosive power of a weapon is not very meaningful unless it is
translated into some comparative magnitudes. The Hiroshima bomb had a radius
of total destruction of 1 1/2 miles. Within this area the fatality rate was 75 per
cent. The blast and heat effects destroyed or set fire to buildings within an area
of 4.4 square miles. The explosions killed 70 thousand in Hiroshima and 35
thousand in Nagasaki. In addition there were 100 to 180 thousand casualties in
Hiroshima and between 50 and 100 thousand in Nagasaki. The effects of radi-
ation may not become fully apparent for several decades.

For all their horror the weapons exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were "small-yield" by current standards. A 20-megaton weapon would have a
lethal radius of 8 miles; its area of total destruction would be 48 square miles.
Detonated over Manhattan, such a weapon would produce at least 4 million
deaths and maybe two million injured from heat and blast alone; it would level
all of Manhattan south of 96th Street and would seriously damage the remainder.
Moreover, if the fireball of a megaton weapon touches the ground it sucks up
particles of earth and rubble and deposits them downwind as radioactive material.
The ellipse of the fall-out of the Eniwetok test in 1953 covered an area of 10
thousand square miles, or a territory larger than the state of New Jersey. A
successful attack on 50 of the most important metropolitan areas of the United
States -- and this will soon be well within Soviet capabilities, if it is not

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already -- would bring under fire 40 per cent of our population, 50 per cent of our key facilities and 60 per cent of our industry.

This is the ominous background against which policy must be framed in the nuclear age. There is no doubt that all-out war in the nuclear age would be and extreme disaster. In these circumstances it is not surprising that there has grown up the notion that war is no longer a proper instrument of policy and that the maintenance of peace overrides all other concerns.

But if the attainment of a stable peace reflects the deep aspirations of the American people and the hopes of the world-at-large, still the attainment of peace is not as easy as the desire for it. In the face of a power or group of powers prepared to exert overt or covert pressure, peace can only be guaranteed by surrender. For in the unstable setting of many parts of the globe, an inability or unwillingness to intervene with force is tantamount to a passive acceptance of whatever changes the strength of the opponent may enforce. This could lead to the demoralization or subversion of the international order. It would represent the achievement of peace, but at the default of all our values. Hence the issue is not the desirability of peace but the price we should pay for it.

We may be certain that international developments will cause us to decide again and again what the price of peace shall be. We are confronted by two powers, the USSR and Communist China, which have based their domestic control apparatus on the myth of a permanently hostile outside world, and which view protestations of peaceful intentions unsupported by resolve and strength

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as either hypocrisy or stupidity. To be sure, the Soviet Union and Communist
China have alternated periods of intransigence with conciliation. But the
slogan "peaceful coexistence" has never in the past had more than a tactical
significance. After World War II, it did not stand in the way of Soviet domin-
ation of the satellite orbit and the breaking of the most solemn wartime pledges.
After the Geneva Summit conference it did not restrain the Soviet Union from
selling arms to Egypt, thereby inviting an upheaval that has not ended to this
day. In 1957 it did not keep the Soviet Union from threatening nuclear attacks
on Norway, Denmark and Turkey. Both their doctrine and their internal dynamism
will impel the Soviet Union and Communist China to fill every vacuum and to
exploit every dissatisfaction. The unwillingness to resort to force in the face
of such a challenge will lead to a series of withdrawals and eventually either
to surrender or to a cataclysmic war.

Moreover the possibility of war does not have to assume deliberate
intents on the part of the Soviet bloc. There are tensions around the Soviet
periphery and indeed within the Soviet orbit which might flare up into violence
even without outside encouragement. The leaders of many new states may find
foreign adventures an outlet for domestic frustrations. Rabid nationalism may
make impossible the peaceful solution of other disputes. In such circumstances
the two great power centers may be involved even against their will and the
fate of the world may depend on their willingness to run risks. Paradoxically
the prospects of peace depend to an important extent on the firmness and

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ability of the United States and the non-communist world to elaborate the principles and interests they are willing to defend by force if necessary.

Equally important is the ability to develop the appropriate degree of force to resist encroachments. For the decision of peace and war depends as much on psychological as on physical factors. It is all very well to assert that we are opposed to peace at any price. But the price of peace cannot be determined in the abstract. If there is lack of clarity about our purpose in the world, we shall have difficulty in deciding whether a given issue is "worth" contending for. If our military doctrine poses alternatives which policy makers are unwilling to confront, or if our military strength cannot be applied to the situation most likely to arise, we shall find ourselves paralyzed no matter how powerful our over-all military establishment.

The dilemma of the nuclear age can therefore be summed up as follows:

The horrors of modern war cause statesmen to recoil -- and properly -- before its consequences. But the unwillingness to run any risks amounts to giving the Soviet leaders a blank check. This alternative has been described as the choice between Armageddon and defeat without war. We can escape the paralysis presented by such prospects only be developing a high degree of flexibility both in our diplomacy and in our strategy, by placing a maximum number of steps between doing nothing and doing everything, by learning to choose among limited objectives in order to avoid the supreme choice between surrender or suicide.

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II

Thus the ultimate aim is to harmonize our power and our policy. But we
are handicapped in this task by many factors, including not least the nature of
our historical experience. Our tradition leads us to believe that peace is the
"normal" relation among states. As a result we have conceived the purpose of
our military policy to be the assembling of an overwhelming power to "punish"
the disturber of the peace: the aggressor. Meanwhile we have never had to
define aggression itself, other than as an unambiguous military act or as some-
thing as vague as the quest for world domination. In either case we have been
so geographically remote from the scene of aggressive action that we have been
able to rely on relatively small forces-in-being and on the mobilization of our
resources only *after* a war had started. Because many other powers would be
threatened before the danger to our security became explicit, we could count on
allies to hold a line while we rallied both our physical and psychological resour-
ces. And finally, because wars were fought with conventional technology we
could identify strategy with a superior offensive effort, confident that the side
able to inflict more damage than its opponent would generally retain sufficient
resources at the end of a war to impose its will.

All these preconceptions have been overthrown by political and techno-
logical developments since World War II. In the face of the Soviet strategy of
ambiguity, carefully calculated so that the risks of resisting any given encroach-
ment always seem out of proportion to the objective or designed to appeal to

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what the Free World has come to consider "legitimate," it has become clear that the recognition of aggression may prove as difficult as finding the means to resist it. At the same time that the forms of aggression have multiplied and become more ambiguous, we have lost the safety-indicators of a more secure past. Unlike World Wars I and II, we can no longer think of our military effort as being designed for a conflict which we enter after the issues have become clear beyond peradventure, in order to tip the scales of victory. The smaller powers having lost either the strength or the willingness to resist alone, the international equilibrium will depend on our ability, psychological and military, to engage our forces in the *early* stages of a conflict.

This importance of forces-in-being is magnified by the altered significance of industrial potential. As long as there prevailed a certain balance between the destructiveness of weapons and the complexity of their means of manufacture, victory in war could be achieved only through a quantity of equipment too large to stockpile. Then, an attack on productive facilities was a highly effective strategy. But with modern technology industrial potential must be used *before* a war breaks out. Each major power is able to destroy the production facilities of its opponents in a matter of hours after the "outbreak" of war. And long before attrition can set in, the social structure is likely to have collapsed. Modern war, if it is all-out war, will have to be fought with the forces-in-being available at the outset.

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The destructiveness of the new weapons technology has also fundamentally affected the concept of the margin of superiority required for victory. In the past victory could be equated with a superior offensive effort because the margin of destructiveness reflected a real difference in strength. Even then an insistence on total victory often produced a degree of exhaustion which undermined the position of *all* the contenders relative to other powers, as happened to Europe in World War I. The destructiveness of modern weapons has removed any doubt on this score. It deprives victory in an all-out war of its historical meaning because even the side which inflicts greater devastation that its opponent will very likely not retain sufficient resources to impose its will.

Thus our military problem begins with the new conception that actual power-in-being, once it passes a given threshold, is more important than potential power, no matter how large. But the *effectiveness* of actual power is measured not by its size alone, but by its relevance to the uses for which it may be called upon. Unless we assume that every conflict will be all-out, we cannot confine our armory to nuclear weapons. There is still a need for "conventional" weapons. And this imposes on policy makers an unparalleled problem of choice brought about by the explosive rapidity with which modern weapons technology is developing. Almost up to the outbreak of World War II a weapons system would be good for almost a generation; the equipment of a U. S. rifle company hardly changed between 1919 and 1940. Today a weapons system begins to be obsolescent when it has barely gone into production. The B-17 "Flying Fortress"

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remained in operational use for a decade; the B-36 intercontinental bomber was obsolescent in less than seven years; and the B-52 jet bomber is beginning to be outdated even before all wings of our Strategic Air Command are fully equipped with it.

This technological race places an extraordinary premium on the ability to assess developing trends correctly and to back decisions firmly over a period of time. It also places the side which is on the defensive at special disadvantage. The aggressor needs to prepare only for the war he proposes to fight. But the side which concedes the first blow must place its planning and procurement over an indefinite period and in such a manner that no strategic weakness is created at any given point.

Moreover, it is impossible to achieve security by attempting to purchase all possible weapons systems, because with proliferating technology such a course would invite financial disaster. The F-51, a late World War II fighter plane, required 151,000 engineering man-hours and cost $21,000. The F-100, its 1957 equivalent, requires 404,000 engineering man-hours and costs $486,000. Even if it were possible to procure every weapon that can be developed, it would not solve our strategic problem. It would merely shift the issue from procurement to utilization; it would overwhelm policy makers with a multiplicity of possible courses which because of their very number would paralyze action.

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The basic problem of American strategy then is twofold. It must abandon its reliance on industrial "potential" in favor of actual force-in-being. And it must choose its forces-in-being to suit the demands to be placed on them.

Thus nothing is more vital than an assessment of what those demands are likely to be. It is to this critical evaluation of possibilities that we now turn.

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III

Among the possible challenges we may confront, three stand out
most starkly: all-out war, limited war and a kind of war new to the
twentieth century: the disguised or obscure war concealed as internal
take-over or as civil war. Of these threats to our security, all-out war
is the most overwhelming. It can be defined as an attack of such magnitude
that our survival would be directly and immediately at stake. It is
therefore the ultimate war, in which no inhibitions would apply and in
which both sides would resort to every weapon in their arsenal.

With modern weapons such a war would involve catastrophic
casualties. It is doubtful that civilized life as we know it could withstand
the carnage. Even the nominal victor would have suffered losses which
would shake its social fabric. This is particularly true for the side which
concedes the first blow. Whatever the hope of success of the aggressor,
the victim will have suffered a devastating blow at the outset. In an all-
out war, the side which is on the defensive can use its military power only
to stave off defeat, not to impose its will.

For this reason the purpose of our capability for all-out war is above
all to prevent war from breaking out; it is effective to the extent that it
deters sudden onslaught. At the same time, our capability for all-out war
is the essential requisite for all other measures. For as will be seen below,