out war capacity would be so formidable and the benefits relatively so trivial that an inspection system may actually have pernicious consequences. It may give a misleading impression of security and therefore tempt us into relaxing our preparedness. More likely, given the prevailing distrust, it will induce both sides to place their striking forces into an even greater state of readiness in order to compensate by the demonstration of its power for the loss of secrecy. Nor would inspection materially reduce the chances of local aggression. The Soviets would find it difficult even under present condition to stage a significant build-up in any threatened area without it becoming known. To overemphasize the role of inspection as a bar to local war is to underrate the intelligence information already available. There is no major area in which the Soviets could launch a major blow without our learning of the build-up. Yet it is not knowledge of an impending attack which deters or defeats it but the known capability and the willingness to resist. In the face of the strategy of ambiguity employed by the Kremlin, knowledge of troop concentrations has in the past not always given a clear indication of Soviet intentions, a difficulty compounded by the reluctance of the non-Soviet world of coming to grips with the dangers facing it. Thus during the week while Soviet troops were pouring into Hungary there was a great deal of speculation in the West that these movements were in fact a prelude to a Soviet withdrawal in order to save face or to guard the Soviet lines of communication. Moreover, as the armies of the major powers are being reorganized

XI-20

clearly bore little relationship to the actual performance of strategic missions, it was changed in 1950 to an accounting procedure which was thought to reflect programs and goals more accurately. The classifications for the 1950 budget and the 1955 budget are as follows:

1950 Budget

Office of the Secretary of the Army

General Staff Corps

Finance Department

Quartermaster Corps

Transportation Corps

Signal Corps

Medical Department

Corps of Engineers

Ordnance Department

Chemical Corps

Army Field Forces

Departmental Salaries & Expenses

1955 Budget

Military Personnel

Maintenance & Operations

Military Construction

Research & Development

Procurement & Production

While the new budgetary categories are in terms of functions rather than of technical services, it is doubtful whether they afford a better opportunity for estimating the over-all effectiveness of the defense program. It will be difficult for even a well-informed Congressman to relate a fluctuation in the Maintenance and Operations item to the effectiveness of the Strategic Air Command, for example. Undoubtedly the Committees service send briefings about the planned composition of forces; the point is that the classifications of the Budget do not show the relationship of the budget to the level of defense effort they will produce. A Congressman looking through the Airforce Budget would search in vain for even a description of its major commands and their composition. And the same is true of the other services. As a result, Congressmen will concentrate on individual items of waste, such as the use of official planes for pleasure trips or the supply of

XI-25

produces. Since the services are on the defensive and since the budgetary cycle is practically unending, fiscal considerations inevitably become predominant, particularly in an economy-minded Administration. The test of the validity of a doctrine is in part the impetus that produced it. In our military establishment the impetus almost invariably comes from the budgetary cycles; as a result doctrine is geared to the battle for appropriations. While this does not necessarily preclude profound conception, the direction of the pressures is indicated by the speeches of General Bradley defending Secretary Johnson's $14.6 billion defense budget on fiscal grounds and also by Admiral Radford's concern with fiscal policy before the Symington Committee.

Any attempt to channel military thought towards doctrine might therefore begin by relieving the pressure inherent in the almost incessant effort of either preparing, negotiating or justifying budgets. The yearly budget review encourages irresponsibility because the review must almost inevitably concentrate on items which are peripheral to the basic strategic problem and because it causes the justification of the budget to be in terms which flatter prevailing predilections. No large corporation could operate if it were forced to justify its entire program every year, and if every expenditure were considered only as a cost and not as an investment. Considerable relief would therefore be afforded if the budget cycle could be extended. Other constitutions which had a yearly review of the budget by Parliament have made exceptions in the case of the military budget -- in Imperial Germany for example the military budget was fixed for seven years, although the remainder of the Budget had to be approved each year. Seven years is of course far too long a period. But it would be a great advance if the military budget cycle could be extended over a two-year period. Thus the military budget would coincide with the term of the House of Representatives.

XI-33

making the Army Air Corps independent it would have been sounder to mix the
two organizations more thoroughly and to develop a single service neither
focussed on exclusive ground nor on exclusive air strategy. Instead, the
separation of the two services was achieved to the detriment of both; different
service academies, training schools and war colleges inevitably emphasize a
particular aspect instead of a total strategy in which traditional distinctions
should be disappearing, in which the army should begin to approach the mobility
of the Airforce and the Airforce to develop the relative discrimination of
ground warfare.

It would still be the wisest course to move in the direction of a single
service initially by amalgamating the Army and the Airforce; the strategic
problems of the Navy in an intermediary period may still remain sufficiently
distinct not to require integration and in any case resistance to complete
unification in the Navy would be so bitter as to obviate its advantages. A
unified service with a single system of service schools would force officers at
a formative stage of their careers into a framework less narrowly addressed to
the concerns of a particular service. The loyalty to the organization which is
one of the most attractive traits of the military and which now necessarily pro-
duces a rigid adherence to a service point-of-view would in this manner be
utilized to help produce an over-all strategic doctrine. It may be argued that
the officers of all services attend each other's war colleges even
now. But it is one thing to attend a service school as an outsider
to learn the point of view of another service, at a stage of the
officer's career when his general attitude in matters of strategy is
well settled; it is quite another that there exist incentives from
the earliest stages of an officer's career to consider problems of

XI-37

doctrinal split -- it is tempted to hoard as many capabilities as possible; or
else it leads to endless disputes about the nature, indeed the feasibility, of
limited war; about airlift, about the right of the army to its own airforces
and about the role of naval aviation in the strategic air battle. The proposed
organization would create in peace-time the structure which is inevitable in
war in any case.

The change of organization of the services should be supplemented by
strengthening the organization for strategic decisions of the civilian side of
the Department of Defense. At present the Secretary of Defense is at best an
arbiter of doctrinal disputes. He possesses neither the staff nor the organiza-
tion to guide them. This reflects the notion implicit in the present organization
that strategic doctrine reflects "purely" military considerations embodied in
the organization of the Joint Chiefs whose Chairman reports directly to the
President and attends meetings of the National Security Council. But separation
of strategy and policy cause both to become increasingly abstract. The emphasis
on purely military solutions has as its counterpart a predilection with pure
diplomacy and an overconcern with finesse. The difficult problems of national
policy are in the area where political, economic, psychological and military
factors meet, however. The Secretary of Defense would therefore gain greatly
from instituting some form of Strategic Advisory Council either composed of the
service secretaries or preferably a group of eminent individuals from private
life or by strengthening the functions now exercised by the Assistant Secretary
of Defense for National Security Affairs, perhaps by raising him to the level
of Under Secretary, and by relating him more closely to the deliberations of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.

XI-39

Foremost among the attitudes affecting the making of our policy is American empiricism and its quest for certainty: nothing is "true" unless it is "objective" and it is not "objective" unless it is part of experience. This makes for the absence of dogmatism and for the ease of social relations on the domestic scene. But in the conduct of policy it has pernicious consequences. Policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities. To attempt to conduct it as a science must lead to rigidity. For only the risks are certain; the opportunities are conjectural. One cannot be "sure" about the implications of events until they have happened and when they have occurred it is too late to do anything about them. Empiricism in foreign policy leads to a penchant for *ad hoc* solutions; the rejection of dogmatism inclines our policy-makers to postpone committing themselves until all facts are in; but by the time the facts are in, a crisis has usually developed or an opportunity has passed. Our policy is therefore geared to dealing with emergencies; it finds difficulty in developing the long-range program that might forestall them.

A symptom of our need for certainty is the vast number of committees charged with examining and developing policy. The very multiplicity of committees makes it difficult to arrive at decisions in time. It tends to give a disproportionate influence to subordinate officials who prepare the initial memoranda and it overwelms our higher officials with trivia. Because of our cult of specialization, sovereign departments negotiate national policy among each other with no single authority able to take an over-all view or to apply decisions over a period of time. This results in the hiatus previously noted between grand strategy and particular tactics, between the definition of general objectives so vague as to be truistic and the concern with immediate problems. The gap is bridged only

XI-40

when a crisis forces the bureaucratic machinery into accelerated action, and
then the top leadership has little choice but to concur in the administrative
proposals. In short, we are trying to cope with political problems by adminis-
trative means.

Our inward doubt makes for vulnerability to Soviet maneuvers in two ways:
on the one hand, every Soviet change of line is taken at least in part at face
value, for we cannot be certain that the Soviets may not "mean" it this time
until they have proved they do not; and they will try their best not to prove
it until the tactic has served its purpose. On the other hand, we have found
it difficult to adjust our tactics to new situations, so that we always tend
to speak in the categories of the most recent threat but one. Moreover, we
hesitate not only in the face of Soviet blandishments but also before Soviet
intransigence. Every Soviet aggressive move finds us debating its implications
and creates pressures for deferring a show-down for the "clear" case of aggres-
sion the Soviets are trying very hard not to present. The paradoxical result is
that we, the empiricists, appear to the world as rigid, unimaginative and even
somewhat cynical, while the dogmatic Bolsheviks exhibit flexibility, daring and
subtlety. This is because our empiricism dooms us to an essentially reactive
policy that improvises a counter to every Soviet move, while the Soviet emphasis
on theory gives them the certainty to act, to maneuver and to run risks. The
very fact of action forces us to assume the risks of countermoves and absorbs
our energies in essentially defensive measures.

The willingness to act need not derive from theory, of course, Indeed, an
overemphasis on theory can lead to a loss of touch with reality. In many soci-
eties -- in Great Britain, for example -- policy developed from a firmly held
tradition of a national strategy. Throughout the nineteenth century it was a

XI-41

tenet of British policy that Antwerp should not fall into the hands of a major power. This was not backed by an elaborate metaphysics but simply by a tradition of British sea power whose requirements were so generally understood that they were never debated. It is the absence of a tradition of foreign policy which exaggerates the biases of our empiricism and makes it difficult to conduct our policy with a proper regard for the timing of measures. It causes us to overlook the fact that policy exists in time as well as in space, that a measure is correct only if it can be carried out at the proper moment. To be sure, our cumbersome administrative mechanism adds immeasurably to the problem. But in addition, our deliberations are conducted as if a course of action were eternally valid, as if a measure which might meet exactly the needs of a given moment could not back-fire if adopted a year later. For this reason our policy lacks a feeling for nuance, the ability to come up with variations on the same theme, as the Soviets have done so effectively. We consider policy-making concluded when the National Security Council has come to a decision. And in fact, the process of arriving at a decision is so arduous and a reappraisal is necessarily so "agonizing" that we are reluctant to reexamine policies after they have outlived their usefulness.

But a written statement of policy is likely to amount to a truism; the real difficulty arises in applying it to concrete situations. And while we have often come up with proper measures we have not found it easy to adapt our approach to the requirements of the situation over a period of time. The different uses made by the Soviets of the time interval between the "summit conference" and the Geneva conference of foreign ministers illustrates this point. The Soviets established diplomatic relations with the German Federal Republic and thus placed themselves in position to deal directly with both German governments; they used the peace offensive to undermine the cohesiveness of NATO and concluded the arms

XI-42

deal with Egypt. By the time we returned to Geneva, we found ourselves confron-
ted by a series of faits accomplis and the conference foredoomed.

Another factor shaping our attitude toward foreign affairs is our lack of
tragic experience. Though we have known severe hardships, our history has been
notably free of disaster. Indeed, the American domestic experience exhibits an
unparalleled success, of great daring rewarded and of great obstacles overcome.
It is no wonder, therefore, that to many of our most responsible men, particularly
in the business community, the warnings of impending peril or of imminent disas-
ter sound like the Cassandra cries of abstracted "egg-heads". For is not the
attribute of the "egg-head" his lack of touch with reality, and does not American
reality show an unparalleled wealth coupled with an unparalleled growth?

There has been much criticism of Secretaries Humphrey and Wilson for their
defense economies. But in fairness the psychological background of their
decisions should be understood; despite all the information at their disposal,
they simply cannot believe that in the nuclear age the penalty for miscalculation
may be national catastrophe. They may know in their heads, but they cannot
accept in their hearts, that the society they helped to build could disappear as
did Rome or Carthage or Byzantium, which probably seemed as eternal to their
citizens. These characteristics make for an absence of a sense of urgency, a
tendency to believe that everything can be tried once and that the worst con-
sequence mistakes can have is that we may be forced to redouble our efforts later
on. The irrevocable error is not yet part of the American experience.

Related to this problem is our reluctance to think in terms of power. To
be sure, American expansion both economic and geographical was not accomplished
without a judicious application of power. But our Calvinist heritage has re-
quired success to display the attribute of justice. Even our great fortunes,

XI-43

however accumulated, were almost invariably held to impose a social obligation;
the great foundation is after all a peculiarly American phenomenon. As a nation,
we have used power almost shamefacedly as if it were inherently wicked. We have
wanted to be liked for our own sakes and we have wished to succeed because of
the persuasiveness of our principles rather than through our strength. Our
feeling of guilt with respect to power has caused us to transform all wars into
crusades, and then to apply our power in the most absolute terms. We have
rarely found intermediary ways to apply our power and in those cases we have
done so reluctantly.

But international relations cannot be conducted without an awareness of
power relationships. To be sure, the contemporary revolution cannot be managed
merely by an exercise of force. An imaginative diplomacy and bold programs are
required if we are to identify ourselves with the aspirations of humanity. But
unless we maintain at least an equilibrium of power between us and the Soviet
bloc we will have no chance to undertake any positive measures. And maintaining
this equilibrium may confront us with some very difficult choices. We are cer-
tain to be confronted with situations of extraordinary ambiguity such as civil
wars or domestic coups. Every successful Soviet move makes our moral position
that much more difficult: Indochina was more ambiguous than Korea; the Soviet
arms deal with Egypt more ambiguous than Indochina; the Suez crisis more am-
biguous than the arms deal with Egypt. There can be no doubt that we should
seek to forestall such occurrences. But once they have occurred, we must find the
will to act and to run risks in a situation which permits only a choice among
evils. While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that
we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

XI-44

The reverse side of our reluctance to think in terms of power has been our notion of the nature of peace. We assume that peace is the "normal" pattern of relations among states, that it is equivalent to a consciousness of harmony, that it can be aimed at directly as a goal of policy. These are truisms rarely challenged in our political debate. Both major political parties maintain that they work for a lasting peace, even if they differ about the best means of attaining it. Both make statements which imply that on a certain magic day, perhaps after a four-power conference, "peace will break out".

No idea could be more dangerous. To begin with, the polarization of power in the world would give international relations a degree of instability even if there were no ideological disagreement, and the present volatile state of technology is likely to compound this sense of insecurity. Whenever peace -- conceived as the avoidance of war -- has become the direct objective of a Power or a group of Powers, international relations have been at the mercy of the state willing to forego peace. No statesman can entrust the fate of his country entirely to the continued good will of another sovereign state, if only because the best guarantee for the will remaining good is not to tempt it by too great a disproportion of power. Peace, therefore, cannot be aimed at directly; it is the expression of certain conditions and power relationships. It is to these relationships -- not to peace -- that diplomacy must address itself.

A Power can survive only if it is willing to fight for its interpretation of justice and its conception of vital interests. Its test comes in its awareness of where to draw the line and for what issue to contend; its adequacy to meet the challenges it faces depends on the alternatives it poses for itself. Are we opposed merely to the forcible expansion of Communism or is the existence of a Communist regime in some areas a threat to our security however the regime is established? Can we afford to lose the Middle East or Southeast Asia to a quasi-legitimate revolution? It may be objected that neither of these areas is ours to/lose and that force has

XI-45

proved a weak tool in stemming a revolutionary tide. But the problem is not
susceptible of such abstract treatment. Measures to restore a situation must
be preceded by an attitude and a set of concepts which define our interest in
the world. Do we resist Communist expansion because it is illegal or because
the domination of Russia by Communism would upset the strategic balance against
us? If the former we would resist only the *manner* of Communist expansion; if
the latter, we would resist the *fact* of Communist expansion. It may happen, of
course, that in either case we may find ourselves unable to arrest developments.
To the extent that this is the case we still suffer a defeat. If we are clear
about our purpose, the form of resistance and indeed whether we resist at all is
a technical question. Without such concepts, our actions will lack relationship
no matter how carefully planned.

Therefore, it is important for the United States to become clear about the
nature of our strategic interest in the world. It would be comforting if we
could always act where our moral, legal and military positions are completely
in harmony and where legitimacy is most in accord with the requirements of
survival. It is highly desirable that we forestall situations in which recourse
to force is the only remedy by an imaginative attempt to identify ourselves with
the aspirations of humanity. But as the strongest Power in the world we will
probably never again be afforded the simple moral choices on which we could
insist in our more secure past. The thrust of Soviet aggression will always be
directed at the weak points in our armor and on issues where our psychological
inhibitions to either are at a maximum. To deal with circumstances of such
ambiguity presupposes above all a moral act: a willingness to run risks on
partial knowledge and for less than perfect application of one's principles. To
insist on purity either of motive or of provocation is a prescription for inaction.

XI-40

To be sure,

/to unleash nuclear war without a prayerful awareness of its consequences is to open the box of Pandora. But to permit the Soviets to overturn the strategic balance because it has been placed in jeopardy by our own lack of imagination or by the absence of spiritual elan is to compound shortsightedness by dogmatism. The price we will have to pay for failure to take action in time may be the kind of measure which does no more than gain us a breathing spell for more positive steps. The refusal to do so will ensure that the next contest will be fought on even more difficult ground.

In the process of defining our strategic interest we cannot avoid facing another fact of the nuclear age little in accord with our predilections: the difficulty if not impossibility, of holding a perimeter of twenty thousand miles entirely on the defensive either politically, militarily or spiritually. A major part of the perimeter covers countries whose traditional situations are in rapid flux. Even if we were omniscient and were not propelled into a situation more complicated and more confused than anything for which our national experience prepares us, it would seem inevitable that in some countries forces hostile to our interests will gain power. To be sure, Communism has never come to power anywhere by peaceful means. But the line between peace and war is steadily being eroded; and Communism may well have a different meaning for the newly independent nations of Asia and the Middle East than for the countries of Western Europe. If then every addition to the Soviet orbit becomes immune to overt United States pressure while the Soviet bloc remains free to exacerbate all tensions of the non-Soviet world the result will be almost mathematically our expulsion from Eurasia or at least from Asia and the Middle East. This does not mean preventive war. It does mean that we should be as ready to profit from opportunities in the Soviet orbit as the Soviet bloc feels free to exploit all the difficulties of the non-Soviet world. If the occasion demands we should be prepared to run similar risks within the Soviet orbit as the Soviets have been in the Middle East.

XI-47

Such a course presupposes a more dynamic conception of world affairs. A great historical movement which is represented by the coming together of Communism and the anti-colonial revolution cannot be mastered only by negative motives. A policy impelled primarily by a desire to prevent an expansion of the Soviet sphere ensures that we will be foreed always to fight at the point of our greatest weakness; that diplomatically we shall always contest issues of maximum embarrassment to us; that spiritually we convey an impression of uncertainty. In any conflict the side which is animated by a desire for victory will have a decided advantage over an opponent who wishes above all to preserve the status quo; it will be prepared to even greater risks because its purpose will be stronger. The argument that the Soviet orbit will disintegrate of itself if contained long enough reveals a dangerous penchant for easy solutions. No more explicit form of disintegration than the Hungarian revolution is likely to occur; and it found the Free World without the concepts and without the will to exploit it. History can only present opportunities; resolution and insight are indispensible for exploiting them. In foreign policy courage and success stand in a causal relationship.

We thus return to the problem raised earlier: the adequacy of our leadership groups for dealing with the challenges to our society. And here our sudden emergence as the major Power in the free world presents particular difficulties. The qualities of our leadership groups were formed during the period when our primary concerns were domestic. Politics was considered a necessary evil and the primary function of the state was the exercise of police powers. Neither education nor incentives existed for our leadership groups to think in political or strategic terms. This was compounded by our empiricism with its cult of the expert and its premium on specialization. The two groups which are most dominant

XI-48

in the higher levels of government, industry, and the law, can serve as an illustration. The rewards in industry, particularly large-scale industry, are for administrative competence; they therefore produce a tendency to deal with conceptual problems by administrative means, by turning them over to committees of experts. And the legal profession, trained to think in terms of discrete individual cases, produces a penchant for ad hoc decisions and a resistance to the "hypothetical cases" inherent in long-range planning. Our leadership groups are therefore better prepared to deal with technical than with conceptual problems, with economic than with political issues. Projected on the Washington scene, they often lack the background to cope with a developing political and strategic situation: each problem is dealt with "on its merits", a procedure which emphasizes the particular at the expense of the general and bogs down planning in a mass of detail. The absence of a conceptual framework makes it difficult for them even to identify our problems or to choose effectively among the proposals and interpretations with which our governmental machinery is overloaded.

This explains many postwar Soviet successes. Whatever the qualities of Soviet leadership, its training is eminently political and conceptual. Reading Lenin or Mao or Stalin, one is struck by the emphasis on the relationship between political, military, psychological and economic factors, the insistence on finding a conceptual basis for political action and on the need for dominating a situation by flexible tactics and inflexible purpose. And the internal struggles in the Kremlin ensure that only the most iron-nerved reach the top. Against the Politbureau, trained to think in general terms and freed of problems of day-to-day administration, we have pitted leaders overwhelmed with departmental duties and trained to think that it was a cardinal sin to transgress on

XI-49

another's field of specialization. To our leaders, policy is as a series of
discrete problems; to the Soviet leaders it is an aspect of a continuing
political process. As a result, the contest between us and the Soviets has had
many of the attributes of any contest between a professional and an amateur;
even a mediocre professional will usually defeat an excellent amateur, not
because the amateur does not know what to do, but because he cannot react
sufficiently quickly or consistently. Our leaders have not lacked ability,
but they have had to learn while doing and this has imposed too great a handi-
cap.

To be sure, many of the shortcomings of our leadership groups reflect the
very qualities which have made for the ease of relationships in American society.
The condition for our limited government has been the absence of basic social
schisms, the regulation of many concerns not by government fiat but by "what
is taken for granted". A society can operate in this fashion only if disputes
are not pushed to their logical conclusions, and if disagreements are blunted
by the absence of dogmatism. And in fact the fear of seeming dogmatic permeates
our social scene. Most opinions are introduced with a disclaimer which indicates
that the proponent is aware of their contingency and also that he claims no
superior validity for his own conclusions. This produces a preference for
decisions by committee, because the process of conversation permits disagreements
to be discovered most easily and adjustments made before positions have hardened.
Our decision-making process is therefore geared to the pace of conversation;
even departmental memoranda on which policy decisions are ultimately based are
written with an eye to eventual compromise and not with the expectation that any
of them will be accepted in its entirety.

XI-50

It would be wrong to be too pessimistic. No one would have believed when World War II ended that the United States would assume commitments on such a world-wide scale. Our shortcomings are imposing only because of the magnitude of the threat confronting us. Moreover, the performance of the United States, for all its failings, compares favorably with that of the other nations of the non-Soviet world. Our difficulties are therefore only a symptom -- and by no means the most obvious -- of an inward uncertainty in the free world. To be sure, democracies by the nature of their institutions cannot conduct policy as deviously, change course as rapidly or prepare their moves as secretly as dictatorships. But the crisis of the non-Soviet world is deeper. The tragic element in foreign policy is the impossibility of escaping conjecture; after the "objective" analysis of fact there remains a residue of uncertainty about the meaning of events or the opportunities they offer. A statesman can often escape his dilemmas by lowering his sights; he always has the option to ignore the other side's capabilities by assuming it has peaceful intentions. Many of the difficulties of the non-Soviet world have been the result of an attempt to use the element of uncertainty as an excuse for inaction. But certainty in foreign policy at least as much by philosophy as by fact; it derives from the imposition of purpose on events.

This is not to say that we should imitate Soviet dogmatism. A society can survive only by the genius that made it great. But we should be able to leaven our empiricism with a sense of urgency. And while our history may leave us not well enough prepared to deal with tragedy, it can teach us that great achievement does not result from a quest for safety. Even so, our task will remain psychologically more complex than that of the soviets. As the strongest and perhaps

[y]

XI-51

the most vital power of the free world we face the challenge of demonstrating
that democracy is able to find the moral certainty to act without the support
of fanat icism and to run risks without a guarantee of success.