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Draft Chapter VI - Overall Report

December 2, 1957

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makers with conflicting advice. It fosters a tendency to create doctrine
as a tool in the interservice battle for appropriations; the incentive it
provides is for the theoretical elaboration of a service view and not of an
overall-all approach to strategy.

The setting of force levels on the basis of each service's primary
mission, when this mission represents no clearly distinguishable strategic
task, inhibits the development of over-all doctrine and leads to an enormously
wasteful duplication of effort. The primary missions of the services become
ends in themselves; new weapons are placed into the strait jacket of
obsolescent missions instead of fitting missions to revolutionary departures
in technology. Given the range and power of modern weapons the attempt
by each service to hoard all weapons that can affect its own primary
mission must lead to a tendency for each service to develop a capability
for winning a war by itself. Its efforts will be directed toward reducing
its reliance on other services. And mastering the primary mission of each
service is becoming so difficult that it almost inevitably inhibits a con-
sideration of its relationship to an over-all mission; or, more accurately,
it leads to a psychological distortion in which over-all strategy tends to
be equated with a service's primary mission.

As a result our Joint Chiefs of Staff have become, with the best will
in the world, essentially advocates of a service point of view. The Joint
Chiefs have risen to their position through a lifetime of dedication to one

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service. They are a product of its problems, its training schools, its environment. Maintaining the morale of their service can never be far from their minds. The test of an organization is how naturally and spontaneously it enables its leadership to address itself to its most severe challenges. There is little in the organization of our national defense establishment that impels the service chiefs in a spontaneous fashion to consider over-all strategic doctrine.

The difficulty of over-all planning by the military has its counterpart in the office of the Secretary of Defense. At present, the Secretary of Defense is at best an arbiter of doctrinal disputes. He possesses neither the staff nor the organization to shape them. Because of the primary tasks of the Office of the Secretary as now constituted are the adjudication of inter-service rivalries, very few of the civilian assistants of the Secretary of Defense have duties actually relevant to the conduct of a war. In the event of large-scale hostilities, the bulk of the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense could serve only by abdicating.

To be sure, a violent shift of mission of our military headquarters when a war starts is part of our national history. But the speed and destructiveness of modern weapons may cause our survival as a nation to depend on a degree of instantaneous efficiency in our military commands beyond the capacity of an organization in the process of changing gears.

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VI

What is the implication of these trends for United States strategy?

No more momentous question faces the non-communist world, for its security and freedom are inextricably bound up with U.S. strength and determination.

Without U.S. assistance, Greece and the Republic of Korea would have succumbed to communist aggression. Our firm resolve to defend Western Europe may have prevented a Soviet onslaught on our NATO allies. Our programs of economic and military aid have been a stabilizing factor in many other regions. To a world threatened by aggression and infiltration, American strength is a guarantee of security.

To be sure, this may not always be apparent in public declarations. To many countries primarily concerned with domestic development, foreign aggression may seem unreal and the measures required to resist it may appear as irritating interruptions of more primary tasks. But while we should have full understanding for the psychology which produces these reactions, we would be wrong to gear our policy to it. Force will not solve the problems of this period but the willingness to use it may afford the breathing spell in which nations can work out their own destiny without foreign interference. We must not forget that the neutrality, or the development of many regions is possible only as long as we are strong. Many of our most vocal critics would be deeply troubled were our military protection suddenly withdrawn.

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On the face of it, our overall strength has never been greater. We have assumed the burden of an annual military expenditure in the neighborhood of $40 billions and we have maintained almost three million men under arms.

And yet as we have seen, our strength cannot be measured by aggregate power alone. Even more critically it hinges on our willingness to use power--not as a massive and retaliation-provoking blow, but in measured amounts and in effective kind. The test is not one of our total strength. It is more a test of our flexibility, our imagination, and most important, of our conviction.

Heretofore our strength has tended to be nullified by the lack of a clear conception of how it could be put to use. Our strategic striking power, on which we have relied as the major element of our security, implies an all-or-nothing kind of war which is the one conflict we must seek at all odds to avoid. Meanwhile even the prima facie deterrence of our strategic striking force is imperiled by Soviet missiles, and by an inadequate dispersal of our own forces. Furthermore, as the Soviet capability to attack American cities increases, it will raise the threshold of provocation which would unleash our retaliatory force. Thus the Soviet Union will be enabled to use its strategic striking force as a shield behind which to expand by more limited methods.

The reliance on all-out war as the sole deterrent to Soviet aggression

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is pernicious not only for our own resolution but for that of our allies as well. Our allies realize that in an all-out conflict their major contribution will be to furnish bases; they therefore have little incentive to make a contribution of their own. They will either feel themselves already protected by our strategic striking force, or else they will be so appalled by the prospects of all-out war that they may seek peace almost at any price. A reliance on all-out strategy is ultimately demoralizing both for ourselves and for our allies.

The effectiveness of our power thus depends on our unmistakable ability and willingness to oppose force with force at whatever level of intensity may be required. The greatest point of concern about the U.S. strategic position is that our distaste for limited risks may ultimately lead us into the ultimate risk at a rate determined not by us but by communist policy.

The fundamental problem is as old as history but new to us as a nation. We have been on the small, though victorious, end of limited wars in 1776 and 1812 and on the controlling end of others in 1848 and 1898. But never before Korea has the U.S. been obliged to fight a war on the tacit admission that it was limited by other than logistic considerations. It is this conception which must change. The range and power of modern weapons have made it unrealistic to meet any but the most dire threat by all-out war. Hence, unless we are unwilling to become reconciled to piecemeal defeat

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of the non-communist world, we must face up to the consequences implicit in
the possibility that the U.S. may have to fight limited wars.

Thus the challenge to American national security comes at a double
level. At one level, it is a technical problem. We must seek the
technological impetus, the economic strength, the organizational flexibility
to enable us to adapt our overall might to the specific tasks of preserving
the international order against disruption. In turn this requires the
evolution of a strategic doctrine which will give point and effectiveness to
the diffuse and ineffective strength we now possess.

These will be major problems. And yet they are perhaps overshadowed
by another difficulty--a difficulty which, paradoxically enough, reflects
some of the most attractive qualities of American society. This is our
attitude to power itself. We like to believe that reasonable men can settle
all disputes through goodwill and compromise and that power should be
invoked only as a last resort. We therefore tend to think of diplomacy and
force as successive and discrete phases of national policy. Unfortunately
the position in which we find ourselves does not permit such absolute
distinctions. In a revolutionary period the ability and willingness to use force
is in itself a factor of stability.

Our power is a fact. Its existence cannot be undone by a refusal to
recognize it. The dilemmas which it imposes will not solve themselves by
shutting our eyes. The moral quandary which power brings is the manner

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in which it will be used, and the degree of responsibility which will
accompany its use. The moral problem will not vanish if we refrain from
applying our power. Abdication is a course involving responsibility just
as much as action. We will better show our national stature by our
willingness to expose our morality in the selection of the ends which we
avow, and in the constraint and wisdom with which our power will be applied
to achieve them.