AIRLIFT INFORMATION

1. **QUESTION** - What would be the airlift capability of 10½ wings of C-130's (or their equivalent in C-132's) over a 30-45 day period, assuming deployments to points in the Middle East and Far East?

**ANSWER** -

a. A fleet of 10½ wings or 504 C-130 aircraft operating at a utilization rate of 8 hours per day could produce 263.8 million ton miles (outbound) in a 30-day period, or 395.8 million ton miles in a 45-day period. To translate ton miles into tons delivered overseas, divide the theoretical ton mile capability by the distance from the United States to an overseas destination. Based on the assumption that all of this capability was available on the East Coast, 50,216 short tons could be delivered to Cairo in a 30-day period.

b. Approximately 200 C-133 aircraft or 86 C-132 aircraft operating over the same route and at an 8 hour daily utilization rate would be required to perform the same tasks.

c. The lift capability of the aircraft in paragraphs a and b above were based on a critical leg of 2,150 nautical miles. If the critical leg is extended to 3,500 nautical miles, 319 C-133 aircraft or 120 C-132 aircraft would be required to perform the same mission. The C-130 aircraft does not have the capability of flying 3,5000 nautical miles with an acceptable payload.

2. **QUESTION** - What would be the estimated cost in terms of both numbers of planes and dollars of airlifting one of the new type Army divisions assuming it would involve half the tonnage of a present division?

**ANSWER** -

a. The U. S. Army has advised that the assault echelon of a lightweight Army division will weigh approximately 5,000 short tons. To simultaneously lift this division (5,000 short tons) to Cairo with C-133's, it would require approximately 200 sorties or aircraft. To deploy this division to Cairo over a period of 10 days would require 95 C-133's. The initial investment cost (total cost of a new base, aircraft, spares, etc.) for a fleet of 200 C-133's would be 1,900 million dollars; a fleet of 95 C-133's would cost 902.5 million dollars. The direct operating cost (POL, maintenance, crews, etc.) to deliver a 5,000 short ton division with C-133 aircraft would be approximately 3.96 million dollars.

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b. **Additional Explanatory Remarks -**

(1) An infantry or airborne division weighs approximately 28,000 short tons. The combat echelon of such a division with a limited amount of supplies and equipment weighs 7,000 short tons. The Army is thinking in terms of a division force (division plus supporting units) weighing approximately 14,300 short tons. It would require a fleet of 272 C-133 aircraft to move such a force (14,300 short tons) to Cairo in 10 days. The initial cost for such a fleet would be 2,584 million dollars; the direct operating cost of such a move would be 11.3 million dollars. This division force would depend on a surface LOC. To supply a unit of this size by air alone would require 9,438 short tons being airlifted of a 30-day period at an operating cost of 7.5 million dollars.

(2) A 5,000 short ton Army division possesses a very limited combat potential unless it is provided with logistics support at the rate of 44 lbs. per man per day. The airlift required to deploy the combat echelon of an Army division can be misleading if considered out of context with the logistics support required to maintain its combat effectiveness. Therefore, in the event an Army division is deployed to an area where its required support is not prepositioned, the total aircraft requirements for an Army division must include both the airlift needed for its strategic move from the ZI to its overseas destination and the lift required to provide logistics support at the rate of 44 lbs. per day. When these two requirements are considered together, they present a more accurate computation of the airlift required to deploy an Army division in the event of local aggression. Further, when these two requirements are totalled, they represent a questionable amount of military resources when compared with the effectiveness of combating local aggression, by other means.

3.

3. QUESTION - If the Air Force budget were increased by $2 - 3 billion over the level of the FY 57 budget request, how would the increments be applied, i.e., to which budget categories and in what amounts (aircraft and related procurement, other major procurement including electronics and guided missiles, research and development, personnel, maintenance and operations, and construction)?

ANSWER -

a. The Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force in their recent appearances before the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, stated that the FY 57 budget was sound and that it will support 137 wing force structure; will permit the Air Force to proceed with its modernization program; will afford a sound level program of research and development; and will enable the Air Force to maintain its facilities on a minimum essential basis. However, if we are to continue to support an Air Force program of this magnitude, there is no escape from a larger budget in FY 58 than the one submitted for this year.

b. In view of the position taken by the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force on the FY 57 budget, a determination has not been made as to how an increase by 2 - 3 billion dollars over the level of the FY 57 budget request would be applied.

c. The budget categories to which additional funds would probably be applied are as follows:

- Aircraft and related procurement

- Procurement other than aircraft

- Operations and Maintenance

- Military personnel

- Research and development

- Reserve personnel

- National Guard

- Military Construction.

d. Because a detailed breakdown of funds by budget category has not been made, I cannot furnish you this information at the present time. In general, however, additional funds made available by the Congress would probably be apportioned at approximately the same percentage among the budget categories listed above as contained in the FY 57 budget request.

# ADDENDUM TO THE STATISTICS ON U.S. AND USSR SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER

## Observations on Soviet training of scientists and engineers*;

A Soviet science major spends at least 1/3 more time on sciences than an American student.

The most promising students in the Soviet Union are selected for scientific research careers.

Soviet students have more than twice the usual number of instruction hours per academic year than American university students.

It is estimated that Soviet engineering students have about the same preparation in scientific and technical subjects as do our students. There is, however, a great deal more technological specialization in the Soviet Union in engineering.

One feature of the Russian educational system which needs additional emphasis is the technical institute which is an extremely significant part of the training effort in the USSR. There is no counterpart to it in the U.S., excepting for a small number of technical schools, some independent and some set up by large industrial establishments and the junior colleges of the U. S. which emphasize technical training. There were in the USSR 3,500 of these institutes with an enrollment of 1,200,000 students in 1952, with about 350,000 graduates per year. About 50,000 seem to be in fields related to engineering.

*Based on the study by the National Science Foundation on Soviet Professional Manpower.

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

Agenda for the Sub-Committee on the Military Equation
of the Study Group on Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy

1. Examination of the argument that an atomic or thermo-nuclear stalemate exists in a condition of parity or approximate parity, or at least in a condition in which each side has the capability of devastating the other. Does a nuclear stalemate (if it exists) extend only to the strategic exchange of thermo-nuclear weapons or does it include even low yield atomic weapons?

Assumptions to be examined

a. That such a condition (if it exists) is indefinitely stable and continuing.

b. That if hostilities should break out on a limited or local war basis, the side which is losing will accept defeat and will not resort to every effective weapon at its command.

That military planning, at least on our side, is largely pre-
dicated on the employment of atomic weapons. E.G., plans
for the defense of the NATO area.

2. Since the decision to engage in a war (total or otherwise) always reflects a calculus of risks, our willingness to engage in them depends to a considerable extent on our assessment of their consequences. This involves a consideration of these two questions:

a. Will the employment of low-yield atomic weapons in a local war inevitably lead to a thermo-nuclear war?

b. Does a thermo-nuclear war necessarily involve the thermo-nuclear bombardment of cities? If not, is any change in our training or weapons system or doctrine called for?

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3. Granted there is some practical upper limit on what can be spent each year for national defense on a long-term basis, what are the priorities of spending if we are to achieve maximum security and value?

a. SAC

b. Air defense of the United States

c. Air defense of the NATO area

d. Removal of SAC bases and other highly strategic U. S. targets from dense population centers

e. Carrier-based air (including carriers).

f. Other naval forces

g. Ground forces

h. Military aid

4. What is a significant technological breakthrough? Specifically, what is the significance of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to the arms equation? What is the significance of intermediate range missiles? Will the side that achieves them first have a decisive edge or will other forms of retaliation still have to be eliminated?

5. What is the purpose of alliances when many countries will, for all practical purposes be priced out of the market? With particular reference to NATO we should examine:

a. The military significance of the NATO contribution to the over-all strategy

b. The adequacy of the planned forces in terms of envisaged strategies

c. West Germany's contribution

d. The problems of air-defense of NATO.

6. What would be the effect on the arms equation if some of the smaller powers developed an atomic capability? Would it be significant in the absence of an effective base structure? How would the widespread possession of low-yield atomic weapons affect the strategic balance?

7. Is there general agreement that our main reliance both diplomatically and militarily must be on our air-atomic capability? What, if any, are the available alternatives, including alternative weapon systems?

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8. The problem of local wars:

a. Can we have a single policy for non-NATO areas or must we have policies which are tailored to particular geographical areas, e.g., Middle East, Japan, Formosa, Southeast Asia, etc.

b. Is the doctrine of graduated employment of tactical weapons designed to deal with the problem of local wars? Does the doctrine of graduated employment mean deliberate effort to limit the war to a defined geographical area and only to employ atomic weapons in that area? Is this feasible as a proper matter of the effective use of air power?

c. Can we deal with this problem of local wars unilaterally or must we attempt to work out solutions under NATO or with the major powers of Western Europe (e.g., failure to attract the support of our NATO allies in connection with our actions in relation to Indo-China and Formosa?)

d. The place of the mobile force: Cost, including purchase and maintenance of requisite fleet of C-132s, and value of a combat ready, highly trained, mobile, elite force of five or six divisions.

9. Are we staying ahead of the Russians in our air-atomic capability?

a. Is our delivery capability adequate? Should we be exerting maximum effort to improve it constantly?

b. Is our base structure adequate or should we be pushing ahead for additional bases and, if so, where?

c. What will be the impact of ICBMs on our present base structure and on the need for bases in general?

10. Measures to speed up the research-development-production cycle to reduce the long lead time between conception and getting equipment into operational use. Are we spending enough?

11. The significance of the mobilization base:

a. Is there need for greater readiness?

b. Greater flexibility?

c. What can be done to prepare this country to fact a thermo-nuclear attack: civil defense measures, use of troops, etc.?

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# CHAPTER X

## THE KOREAN WAR

1. The Reasons for Communist Aggression and American Intervention

The Korean War is the single most significant event in the development of American postwar strategy. When the full history of the cold war is written, it may loom as one of the truly decisive events that shaped the patterns of war and politics in our era. However, we cannot wait that long to discern the lessons of limited war which it holds. For the urgent purposes of contemporary American strategy it is none too soon to make our own imperfect appraisal of the war in Korea. The logical place to start is at the beginning: Why did the Communists attack, and why did the United States intervene?

In retrospect, as we observed in the preceding chapter, nothing seems more logical than the shift of the main thrust of Communist expansion from an area of relative Western strength, where expansion entailed large risks of total war, to an area of great vulnerability and weakness, where the West had scarcely applied the strategy of containment, where the risks of total war were minimized, and where neither local resistance nor massive retaliation was an effective deterrent. But why did the Communists choose a direct invasion of South Korea to test the vulnerability of the gray areas? And exactly what was the role and the motive of the Kremlin in this move? We may never know. The full answer, but it seems reasonable to suppose that whatever intentions the Communist leaders responsible for the invasion may have had, they could not have been anything but encouraged in this course by American actions and pronouncements concerning Korea.

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In September 1947, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reached the conclusion that, in the light of the severe shortage of American armed manpower, the two American divisions stationed in South Korea could be better used elsewhere, since from a military standpoint the United States had little strategic interest in trying to defend the area.¹ It is significant that this strategic estimate, like the government's estimates of the strategic importance of other areas, was based upon the military importance of Korea in a total war. The Joint Chiefs calculated that in a total war Korea would clearly be a liability if American troops tried to hold it. They made no assumptions about the military or political significance of Korea in a limited war.

On the basis of this estimate, and in the light of the establishment of the UN-sponsored Republic of Korea and the Russians' announcement of the withdrawal of their troops from North Korea, President Truman, on the advice of the National Security Council, decided in the spring of 1949 to withdraw American troops from South Korea and to base the protection of this new country instead upon the development of indigenous security forces. American troops were withdrawn all right; but, despite intelligence reports of the build-up of a formidable North Korean army, the U. S. limited itself to creating little more than a police force in South Korea--partly for fear that a larger army would march northward in an attempt to unify Korea.

The American government's low estimate of the strategic importance of Korea was reflected in the words of military and political authorities as well as in its disposition of military forces. In the spring of 1949, before the National Security Council had reviewed the situation in Korea, General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, outlined in a newspaper interview an American "line of defense" in the Far East,

1. This conclusion was set forth in a memorandum of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated September 25, 1947, which is reproduced in Harry S. Truman, *Memoirs* (New York: Doubleday, 1956), II, 325-26.

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which omitted the Korean peninsula.² On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson, in a speech before the National Press Club, delineated the same American "defensive perimeter," from which he also omitted Korea.³

However, it did not even take the withdrawal of American troops or the statements of MacArthur and Acheson to assure the Communists that they might safely attack South Korea. The severe shortage of American ground troops, combined with America's repeated stress upon preparing to meet the Russians in a total war in Europe, ought to have been enough to convince them that the United States would not divert precious troops from major strategic areas for the defense of Korea. As General Marshall recalled during the MacArthur hearings in 1951, America's military establishment in the years before the Korean War was so inadequate that there was only one full Army division in the United States, and the Chiefs of Staff were concerned about obtaining enough men to guard air strips at Fairbanks, Alaska.

"We had literally almost no military forces outside of our Navy and outside

2. Contrasting America's current defensive position with its former position, MacArthur told a reporter in March 1949, "Now the Pacific ahs become an Anglo-Saxon lake and our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its broad main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska." He further expressed the view that, although the Red Armies of China were on the flank of this position, "this does not alter the fact that our only possible adversary on the Asiatic continent does not possess an industrial base near enough to supply an amphibious attacking force"; and here he was speaking of the Soviet Union and its base in the Urals. *New York Times*, March 2, 1949, p. 22.

3. Acheson's "defensive perimeter" included only America's direct security commitments. "So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned," Acheson said, "the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations."

*Department of State Bulletin*, XXII (January 23, 1950), 115-16.

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of an effective but not too large Air Force, except the occupation garrisons, and...even in Japan they were only at about sixty per cent strength." 4

Therefore, Communist strategists had ample evidence that the American government would not consider it worthwhile to defend South Korea; and if they interpreted America's conduct of foreign policy in terms of their own standards, they could hardly have reached any other conclusion than that the U. S. would acquiesce in a limited move of a satellite army into a minor strategic position, just as a chess player must accept the maneuver of a pawn when he is in no position to prevent it. And yet, when the North Korean army poured across the thirty-eighth parallel in June 1950, the U. S. found compelling reasons for intervening to stop it. Why did the United States adopt this apparent shift of strategy?

From the standpoint of pure power politics it is easier to explain the Communist invasion than American intervention. But, as one familiar with the sources of American conduct might have predicted, it was not purely on the grounds of power politics that the U. S. intervened. Despite the fact that President Truman and his advisers had ruled out American defense of South Korea on military strategic grounds, when aggression actually occurred, they unanimously agreed that larger considerations made this defense unavoidable. What were these considerations?

Countless private and public statements of American policy-makers make it clear that at the time of American intervention and throughout the war the dominant motive in their minds for fighting the Korean War was the fear that if this aggression went unchecked it would be the first

4. Hearings, *Military Situation in the Far East*, Joint Senate Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, p. 382. Cited hereafter as *MacArthur Hearings*.

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of a chain of aggressions, which would destroy the foundations of international security and eventually cause a third world war. This reasoning was based on an analogy with the events of the 1930's. It reflected the common assumption, heavily tinged with guilt feelings, that World War II had resulted from the democracies' failure to check the chain of totalitarian aggression, which began with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931.⁵ If now the Communists should be allowed to undertake aggression with impunity, the administration reasoned, they would be encouraged to think that no obstacle lay in their path to world domination; and eventually the free world would be forced to meet the Soviet Union in a total war, just as they had had to meet the Fascist powers.

This line of reasoning reflected more than a long-term view of American interests. It reflected a typical combination of national self-interest and supranational idealism. As self-interest, this reasoning anticipated deterring more serious threats to American security in the future by checking a limited threat in the present. Here the administration was unconsciously following the imperatives of the strategy of containment. But from the idealistic standpoint the compelling consideration in American minds was the image of the United States leading the civilized world in preventing a chain of aggression, which violated the universal principles of law and order Americans had always championed. Although the decision to intervene in the Korean war did not depend on UN sanction, that sanction nevertheless gave American intervention the color of a crusade which would have been much less convincing

5. See, for example, President Truman's explanation of the decision for intervention, in his *Memoirs*, II, 333-34.

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otherwise.⁶ For as the leader of the United Nations forces, Americans could envision themselves as missionaries for the principle of collective security. In this role they would be above power politics. As upholders of the integrity of the United Nations they would be fighting for the peace and welfare of all mankind, not for their purely selfish national interest.

Because this combination of egoistic and idealistic motives is a recurrent feature of America's conduct of foreign policy, it is important to examine its effects upon our strategic thinking in this instance more closely. The trouble with America's action in Korea was not that we intervened in the war--which was necessary from the standpoint of containment--or that we intervened under the aegis of the United Nations--which probably facilitated, more than it hampered, the achievement of our objectives--but, rather, that our eagerness to represent American intervention as an altruistic act of pure collective security tended to obscure the underlying basis of *Realpolitik*, without which intervention with or without UN sanction would have been un-justified. It is natural that nations should justify their actions on the highest possible grounds, especially when they must endure the sacrifices

6. On June 25, 1950, the UN Security Council, minus the boycotting Soviet delegate, passed a resolution calling for an immediate end to the fighting and for the assistance of all members in restoring the peace. On June 27, after the Communists had defied this cease-fire resolution, the Council recommended that member-nations give aid to the Republic of Korea and help restore peace to the area. On June 25, President Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Formosa Strait to repel any attack on Formosa and prevent the Nationalists from invading the mainland and instructed MacArthur to evacuate Americans from Korea and to supply the Korean army, while using American air and naval cover. On June 26, the President instructed MacArthur to use air and naval forces to support the South Koreans. On June 30, he found it necessary to authorize MacArthur to use the ground forces under his command. All these moves were made, independently of the UN resolutions, in response to the worsening military situation.

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of war; but the danger in this is that they may lose sight of the peculiar circumstances of self-interest which enable them to claim those grounds, and that, consequently, they will lack a consistent basis of action under circumstances in which the same happy coincidence of idealism and self-interest does not exist. Clearly, there were some quite special circumstances which enabled the United States to fight the Korean War in the name of the United Nations.

In the first place, the Republic of Korea had been established by free elections held under United Nations supervision and had been recognized by the United Nations as the lawful government in the area south of the thirty-eighth parallel. Therefore, the Communist attack constituted open aggression, directly contravening the United Nations' special obligations as well as the Charter itself. In the second place, soon after the North Korean attack the Security Council had passed a resolution calling for an immediate end to the fighting and for the assistance of all members in restoring peace; and this resolution itself had been the product of the peculiar circumstance arising from the Soviet delegate's absence from the Security Council, which Russia was boycotting.

Thus in the Korean War, as in the Greek civil war, the problem of containment was obscured by broader and more palatable motives for intervention, which happened to correspond to the dictates of American security. In our urge to envision American resistance to Communists' aggression on the highest moral plane, it was easy to overlook the power-political basis of our action and to overgeneralize its determining objectives. In this way we somewhat misled ourselves as to the true basis of our interests. One

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might have concluded from the announcement of the Truman Doctrine that the United States had adopted a policy of helping free peoples to resist totalitarian aggression, but Secretary Acheson had had to explain that it all depended on how the circumstances affected American interests. Similarly, one might have inferred from official explanations of American intervention in the Korean War that the United States would henceforth resist all Communist aggression according to the collective will of peace-loving nations, as manifested in the councils of the UN. But a moment's reflection would indicate that neither resistance to aggression nor the collective will of peace-loving nations would always correspond with America's security interests in containing the Communist sphere; so it would be folly to suppose that the United States would always resist aggression, regardless of the consequences. Would we have intervened in Korea if, as the government had feared, the South Koreans, instead of the North Koreans, had struck across the 38th parallel? If we had intervened, it certainly would not have been under the auspices of the United Nations.

And, aside from the special circumstances that permitted the United States to obtain UN sanction for its intervention, one must suppose that, despite their desire to check a chain of aggression in the interests of international peace, America's military and political leaders would have foregone intervention if intervention had not been practicable from the standpoint of American interests. One circumstance that made intervention practicable in Korea was the existence of a clear-cut act of direct military aggression. Another was the fact that a large part of the American ground and air forces in the Pacific area were stationed near the scene of action, in Japan. But these fortunate circumstances would probably not recur in future Communist aggressions.

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The Korean War raised grave problems concerning the methods of containing lesser aggressions by limited war. These problems could not be resolved in terms of the general goals of defeating aggression and upholding collective security. They were strategic problems—the problems of managing national power according to an overall plan for achieving security objectives. They would have to be appraised in the light of concrete military and political circumstances bearing upon America's power position. But the strategic lessons of the Korean War were partially concealed by the nation's instinctive depreciation of containment and its attempt to reconcile intervention in a limited war with the traditional image of the United States as/crusader above power politics. At the same time, the disparity between the dictates of containment and America's traditional approach to war made this whole venture a traumatic experience from which the nation would not soon recover. Something of the accompanying strain and confusion erupted in the intense controversy over the conduct of the war that followed President Truman's recall of General MacArthur in April, 1951.

## 2. The Administration's Conduct of the War

Of all the foreign policy debates that have characterized the evolution of America's postwar strategy, the debate over the conduct of the Korean War has been the most profound and revealing. Therefore, the lessons of the Korean War lie not only in its military and political events, for what they show of the objective requirements of a strategy of limited war, but, equally, in the controversy surrounding those events, for what it shows of America's adjustment to these requirements. In order to appraise these lessons we must reconstruct from the substance of this controversy the methods and conceptions which governed the Truman administration's conduct of the war, on the one hand, and General MacArthur's on the other hand.

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The administration's position was from first to last dedicated to keeping the war in Korea limited. Whether or not it conducted the war in the most effective manner, there can be no doubt that it was impressed with the need for limiting the ends and means of warfare and that it succeeded in this endeavor.

The overriding consideration that led the administration to limit the war in Korea was the fear of provoking Russian intervention and bringing on a third world war. As President Truman has written, "Every decision I made in connection with the Korean conflict had this one aim in mind: to prevent a third world war and the terrible destruction it would bring to the civilized world. This meant that we should not do anything that would provide the excuse to the Soviets and plunge the free nations into full-scale all-out war." 7 From the beginning of the war the Truman administration believed that the North Korean invasion was a Russian maneuver, and it operated largely on the prevailing assumption among its counsels that the Kremlin was probing the West's positions on the Communist periphery in order to discover and exploit weak points. However, at the same time, it could never abandon the fear, which was especially strong at the outset of the war, that the invasion might really be part of a Russian plan to distract the United States, preliminary to a general assault on the non-Communist world. So it was determined not to fall into this trap by offering the Russians the slightest pretext for direct intervention.

A second decisive consideration was the fear of overcommitment, of allowing the war in Korea to expand to such an extent as to render the United States incapable of meeting aggression in any of a half dozen other potential

7. Ibid., p. 345; see also pp. x, 346, 416.

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trouble-spots. The administration was not only keenly conscious of the danger of depleting the defense of western Europe and thereby encouraging major aggression in that vital area; it was also apprehensive of a Russian attack on Japan and of pressure of a more limited nature on Berlin, Yugoslavia, Iran, and Indochina.⁸

President Truman assumed from the first that, whether or not the Korean War was the immediate prelude to a general assault, the Kremlin aimed to destroy America's capacity to meet her principal adversary by drawing her into military conflicts with a satellite in Asia. Therefore, he believed that "we could not afford to squander our reawakening strength as long as that enemy was not committed in the field but only pulling the strings behind the scenes." ⁹

This reasoning was in accord with the Central Intelligence Agency's estimate that "the Russians were not themselves willing to go to war but that they wanted to involve us as heavily as possible in Asia so that they might gain a free hand in Europe." ¹⁰ It also reflected the assumption, which the President and his advisers had made from the outbreak of the war, that the Russians might be merely probing the West's defenses, as in Iran, Greece, and Berlin, but did not intend the action in Korea as a prelude to total war. ¹¹

Beyond these two determining considerations in limiting the war, the administration was also restrained by its relations with other nations. It was particularly anxious to maintain unity with America's European allies; and it believed that unity required a certain deference to their wishes--as in the case of forbidding air pursuit over the Yalu--in order to allay their fear of a total war. However, the decisive limitations which the American government placed upon the conduct of the war seem to have arisen from considerations affecting the United States directly, rather than from

8. *Ibid.*, pp. 331, 341, 343, 346, 420, 432.

9. *Ibid.*, pp. 437, 456.

10. *Ibid.*, pp. 420.

11. *Ibid.*, pp. 335, 337, 464.

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solicitude for allied sensibilities.

In order to avoid precipitating a third world war or overcommitting American resources in Korea the administration explicitly limited its political objectives and endeavored to keep military means and political objectives in proportion by confining both air and ground action to the Korean peninsula, withholding the employment of Chinese Nationalist troops, and rejecting a variety of other measures, like the blockade of the Chinese mainland, which in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff carried a risk of expanding the war that was disproportionate to the possible military advantages.

Tracing this process of limitation through the various stages of the war, we see that in the first stages of the war, when the American-led forces were on the defensive, the United Nations command confined its political objective to restoring peace, and recovering the border at the 38th parallel--an objective which was announced in the UN resolutions of June 25 and June 27. Correspondingly, it took the position that military operations above the border should be designed only to destroy military supplies. The Air Force was not restricted by the 38th parallel, but precautions were taken to avoid carrying air action beyond the boundaries of Korea. But in the next stage of the war, when it became possible to take the offensive in Korea, the political limitations were reappraised. As a result of this reappraisal the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the basis of recommendations of the National Security Council, sent a new directive to General MacArthur on September 15, 1950, the day of his assault on Inchon. This directive authorized ground operations north of the 38th parallel, but only if there were no indication of Soviet or Chinese Communist intervention in force. After the brilliant success of the Inchon landing, the government authorized MacArthur

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to destroy the North Korean Armed Forces within Korea, on the same contingency but specifically prohibited him from employing non-Korean ground forces in the provinces along the northern border and from employing air or naval action against Manchuria. 12 Now, in response to the brightening military prospect formally and explicitly the government altered the political objective of the war. Since there seemed to be nothing to stop the UN forces from achieving the long-standing goal, embodied originally in the Cairo agreement of 1943, of a free, independent and united Korea, the General Assembly on October 7 was persuaded to pass a resolution which, in effect, authorized General MacArthur to employ the forces under his command for this larger purpose. By that time units of the Republic of Korea had already crossed the 38th parallel.

From the beginning of the war the American government had been aware of the possibility of Chinese intervention. Now, as UN forces crossed into North Korea, it received reports from several sources that the Chinese Communists would send troops to help the North Koreans if the "imperialists" advanced north of the 38th parallel. The Communist regime even delivered direct warnings to this effect on the radio and through the Indian Ambassador in Peiping. However, neither President Truman nor most of his advisers regarded the Chinese threat of intervention serious enough to warrant imposing military or political limitations beyond the existing ones. General MacArthur, at his Wake Island meeting with President Truman on October 15, discounted the chances of Chinese intervention. Nevertheless, the government took pains to make public its intention to confine the war to Korea and to limit its political objective to creating a free, independent, and united Korea; and at the same time, it left no doubt that it would consider Chinese intervention an act of aggression.

12. *Ibid.*, pp. 359-60. As MacArthur approached the border he found it impossible to comply with the directive concerning the use of R.O.K. forces, because, as he replied to the Joint Chief's anxious inquiry, this was not military feasible.

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Actually, Chinese units had crossed the Yalu at least as early
as October 16, one day after the Wake Island conference; but it was not until
the end of the first week in November that General MacArthur and the CIA
reported, independently of each other, that the Chinese had intervened in
strength. On the basis of these reports the State Department was prompted
to explore the possibility of negotiating with the Chinese for the establishment
of a demilitarized zone ten miles on each side of the Yalu. General MacArthur's
directives were not changed; but on November 24, the Joint Chiefs, becoming
increasingly concerned over the danger of Chinese intervention, advised the
General to hold his forces in terrain dominating the approaches to the valley
of the Yalu. However, on that same day MacArthur announced "a general offensive"
to "win the war" and instructed one of his commanders to tell the troops they
would be home by Christmas. Four days later it was clear that the Tenth
Corps had run up against vastly larger forces, and as the UN forces fell back
in retreat MacArthur announced that "we face an entirely new war." ¹³

In the face of a massive Chinese attack the UN forces retreated below
the 38th parallel once again, but the retreat was checked. Under General
Ridgway's direction UN forces mounted a limited offensive in January 1951, and
succeeded in establishing a line near the 38th parallel. With the war turned
into a stalemate, the administration once more altered its operational poli-
tical objective in the light of military circumstances, because it believed
that to attain the objective announced by the UN on October 7, 1950, would
entail an extension of the war effort and a risk of total war out of proportion
to the objective's importance. Accordingly, in June 1951, Secretary of State,
Acheson, testifying before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, let it
be known that, whereas the ultimate objective of unifying Korea remained in force,

13. Ibid., pp. 373-82.

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the United States no longer favored pursuing that objective by military means, but would be satisfied to revert to the original UN objective of repelling the aggression and restoring South Korea. 14 On the basis of this political adjustment the administration began cease-fire negotiations in July 1951.

Thus, by limiting the ends and means of war and by balancing military and political objectives in the light of their effect on the scale of war and on the risk of total war the United States, with the help of small foreign contingents, succeeded in containing Communist aggression by limited war. This was a most significant and praiseworthy achievement, especially for a nation disposed to fight its wars by all means available until the enemy's capacity to resist was destroyed. Yet the achievement in itself leaves unanswered the question of whether the government waged the war in the most effective manner, consistent with the avoidance of total war, whether the particular limitations it imposed upon the ends and means of war were the wisest ones, compatible with the objectives at stake. This question was raised by the public dispute between the Truman administration and General MacArthur over the conduct of the war. At the same time, the deeper significance of that dispute is that it went beyond questions of method and execution, to the very idea of limited war.

### 3. MacArthur's Conduct of the War

On April 10, 1951, President Truman finally relieved General MacArthur of his commands in Korea and Japan, after repeated evidence of the General's unwillingness to accept the administration's policies for conducting the war and after a series of public moves by which the General sought to promote his own policies, contrary to instructions. Instantaneously a furious controversy convulsed the nation. It culminated in the Senate investigation of

14. Statement on June 26, 1951, Hearings, *Mutual Security Program*, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, pp. 24-25.

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MacArthur's recall and the Far Eastern situation during May and June 1951. Yet a striking feature of this controversy was that the adherents of MacArthur's position, as well as the supporters of the administration, advocated, not the kind of war the United States had undertaken in 1917 and 1941, but a limited war.

In his Senate testimony MacArthur repeatedly asserted that the objective he favored was confined to stopping the aggression in Korea, securing a ceasefire agreement, and negotiating a settlement consistent with the stated UN objective of an independent and United Korea.¹⁵ Nor did he favor unlimited military measures to achieve this objective. He expressed the strongest opposition to engaging Chinese ground forces on the mainland beyond the Korean peninsula. He did not propose to strike with airpower at the purported center of aggression in Russia, in fact, he disclaimed any knowledge of where the center of aggression was. He was not even in favor of bombing the Chinese supply lines leading to Russia. What he proposed was bombing Manchuria airfields, blockading the coast of China, and employing Chinese Nationalist troops in Korea and South China; but he proposed these measures only on the ground that they would achieve the UN's original limited political objective more quickly, with fewer casualties, and with more chance of avoiding a third world war. And, if these measures were not taken, he advocated two other means of limiting the war as alternatives to contain defeat: in the first stage of the war, he advocated the negotiation of an armistice on the basis of the 38th parallel; in the last stage of the war, he proposed a complete withdrawal from Korea.¹⁶

The decisive difference between MacArthur and the administration

15. See, for example, *MacArthur Hearings*, pp. 146, 167-88.

16. Truman, *Memoirs*, II, 415, 433-34.

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concerning the three principal measures he advocated arose from divergent estimates of their military advantage and of the risk of total war and overcommitment which they entailed. MacArthur declared that the course he recommended would quickly bring the war to a victorious close. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, while not directly disputing the military efficacy of these measures, maintained that they would expand the war and increase the risk of total war without giving any commensurate assurance of a quicker, less costly military decision. As long as the UN command could preserve a foothold in Korea while observing its self-imposed restrictions, the administration did not believe that it would be either militarily or politically worthwhile to abandon those restrictions--although in the early stages of Chinese intervention the Joint Chiefs tentatively approved the measures MacArthur advocated, should the UN forces be compelled to evacuate the peninsula. 17

MacArthur insited that the risk of Chinese and Russian intervention was inherent in the decision to intervene in the first place and implied that this risk could not be increased by anything the UN forces did. After the Chinese intervened, he believed that there was no sense in restraining ourselves for fear of provoking them to take further measures, since they were already fighting the war to the limit of their capacity. As for the Russians, he was not sure that they would not intervene, but he thought that this was unlikely since, if it was not to their advantage and that, in any case, they would intervene according to their own designs, regardless of what the United States did.

17. This portion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum to the Secretary of Defense, dated January 12, 1951, was cited in the MacArthur hearings, Secretary of Defense Marshall explained that the improved military situation had made it unnecessary and inadvisable to put most of the memorandum into effect. MacArthur Hearings, p. 324.

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The administration, on the other hand, believed that the intro-
duction of Nationalist troops into South China or the bombing of Manchurian
bases would lead China to move into full-scale war with Russian help. MacArthur
could view this contingency with equanimity because he believed that communism--
not any particular Communist power--was the main enemy and that the central
objective of American counterforce should be to crush communism wherever it
strikes. But the administration was conscious of America's limited military
power and of a definite scale of priorities among the threats to American
security upon which that power could be wisely expanded and in its scale of
priorities a war with China was certainly not at the top. As General Bradley
put it, "So long as we regarded the Soviet Union as the main antagonist and
Western Europe as the main prize," the measures MacArthur advocated "would
involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with
the wrong enemy." 18

18. *Ibid.*, pp. 731-32.

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Furthermore, the administration feared that MacArthur's course would involve us in the wrong war with the "right enemy" by provoking Russian intervention; and, as Acheson observed in his opening statement before the MacArthur hearings, the Russians had a variety of courses of intervention they might take, ranging from the use of "volunteer" air crews and ground troops to the launching of an all-out war.⁹ Administration spokesmen have not publicly explained in any detail exactly how they arrived at their estimate of the risk of Russian intervention--if, indeed, they based it upon any systematic analysis at all. In the MacArthur hearings they pointed in general terms to Russia's self-interest, to her prestige, and to her obligations under the Sino-Soviet treaty; but, equally important, they revealed that, although the administration operated chiefly on the assumption that the Russians were merely probing for soft spots and testing America's will and capacity for resistance, it was never sure that the Korean venture was not the prelude to a general offensive and that the Russians had not laid a trap for us in order to tie us down in Korea while they struck somewhere else. The administration may have based its speculations about Russia's specific intentions in Korea on nothing more than hunches, but MacArthur was inclined to exclude these speculations altogether, as being out of the sphere of his competence as an area commander.

Aside from these decisive differences concerning the military and political consequences of a more vigorous prosecution of the war in Korea, MacArthur and the administration were also split over the importance of allied unity. The administration, having based American intervention so

⁹MacArthur Hearings, pp. 1718-19.

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strongly upon the ideal of collective security, felt bound to preserve at
least the appearance of unanimity in the conduct of the war; and they knew
that the bare hint of MacArthur's measures sent chills down the spines of
America's UN allies. Thus the Truman administration was unwilling to in-
crease American risks and commitments in the Far East by measures which
threatened to disrupt America's coalition in the NATO area. But where
American interests and American troops were so deeply involved, MacArthur
was quite willing to "go it alone", if our allies would not support the
measures which he believed were the only alternative to national disaster.

Yet, as important as these differences of policy were, they were
only the surface indication of a much more profound difference concerning
the very conception of war. Despite the General's affirmations of limited
ends and limited means, he was, in fact, motivated by a conception of war
that was antithetical to all such limits. Whereas the administration,
implicitly operating upon the basis of Clausewitz's conception of war,
imposed definite restraints upon the military effort in the light of superior
political considerations, MacArthur was temperamentally incapable of tolerat-
ing these restraints if they conflicted with his single-minded determination
to meet force with "maximum counterforce" in order to secure a clear-cut
military victory. The administration entered, fought, and ended the Korean
War for political objectives, which took precedence, in its mind, over the
conduct of battle; but MacArthur, from first to last, regarded the whole
purpose of war as "destroying the enemy's military power and bringing the
conflict to a decisive close in the minimum of time and with a minimum of
loss."²⁰ Any deviation from that indispensable military objective for

²⁰ *Ibid.*, pp. 39-40

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political reasons constituted "appeasement" in his mind. Far from accepting the primacy of politics, he fervently believed, as he stated in his testimony, that "The minute you reach the killing stage", politics has failed, "and the military takes over". Otherwise, he declared, you would have the Soviet system of the political commissar. "I do unquestionably state that when men become locked in battle.....there should be no artifice under the name of politics, which should handicap your own men, decrease their chances for winning, and increase their losses".²¹

Motivated by this one-sided conception of the relation between force and politics, MacArthur was willing to accept the limitations that the administration placed upon the political objectives and military operations of the war only so long as they were compatible with the achievement of victory through complete destruction of the Communist capacity to fight. When these limitations interfered with the attainment of total military victory, his only thought was to get rid of them; and he naturally disparaged any argument that would preserve them. All of MacArthur's statements leave the distinct impression that his opposition to the administration's policies and his advocacy of his own measures stemmed less from a reasoned weighing of the consequences and risks involved in various alternative courses of action than from a profoundly emotional conviction that all such considerations were of minor importance compared to the overriding necessity of defeating the enemy.

In a sense, MacArthur's preoccupation with military victory made him a truer exponent of the guiding ideals which the administration adduced for fighting the war than was the administration itself, simply because he

²¹ *Ibid.*, p. 45

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was more emotionally and single-mindedly committed to putting them into practice. Thus he could not have been in more complete agreement with the administration's thesis that aggression had to be halted in order to prevent further aggression; but, whereas the administration felt compelled, in practice, to qualify its thesis by considering strategic priorities and the relation between power and commitments, MacArthur simply refused to admit that Communist aggression could not be stopped everywhere in the world.²² Similarly, MacArthur was ardently convinced that the principles of justice and democracy required a free, independent, and unified Korea, as the administration itself avowed; but whereas the administration found it necessary to settle for something less in order to keep political objectives within range of military measures that were compatible with limited war, MacArthur brushed aside all the perplexing problems of balancing the ends and means of war in an inflexible determination to unite Korea by crushing the enemy. Although he reconciled his view with limited war, to his own satisfaction, by staunchly maintaining that the measures he proposed would achieve the UN objective without expanding the conflict or precipitating unlimited war, there is a strong presumption, on the basis of his basic conception of war, that if his measures had not resulted in the victory he anticipated, he would not have been restrained by political considerations from resorting to even more ambitious measures, and that if a general war had resulted, he would have regarded it merely as the inevitable unfolding of Russia's original intentions. But the administration, acutely conscious of its global commitments and the exorbitant costs of unlimited war, could afford no such indifference to the effect of American actions

²² Ibid., pp. 83, 120

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upon the Communist conduct of the war. No matter how pure its principles
might be, it was compelled to limit and qualify its resistance to aggression
by the inescapable logic of its practical unwillingness to follow any other
strategy than containment.

4. The Lessons of Korea

One can hardly overestimate the importance of the United States'
achievement in containing the Communist attack on South Korea without pre-
cipitating total war. By this achievement the nation went a long way
toward demonstrating that it could successfully resist direct military
aggression locally, by limited war, in the secondary strategic areas, where
a demonstrated capacity for local resistance was the only effective deterrent
to Communist military expansion. As a result, the country placed itself
in a much stronger position to contain the Communist sphere of control
than if it had stood passively aside and fretfully watched the Communists
swallow Korea. If it had stood aside, one can scarcely doubt that the
Kremlin would have been encouraged to engineer other attacks at vulnerable
points along the Sino-Soviet periphery; and, in any case, this blow to
America's prestige might have fatally weakened the NATO coalition, greatly
encouraged neutralism in Japan and Germany, and precipitated a massive swing
to the Communist bloc throughout the defenseless areas of Asia. It is true
that by fighting a limited war in Korea the government created serious
schisms in the nation and caused a psychological trauma, which may have
weakened the national will to fight future limited wars. Yet these penalties
are incidental to the main achievement, and are probably mild compared to
the turmoil and confusion, the cross purposes and the extremism, that would
have attended a passive acquiescence in a blatant Communist aggression,
which we might have halted.

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However, granting our achievement in Korea, we must still wonder whether it was sufficient, whether we could have achieved much more at a reasonable cost. By repelling the Communist aggression through limited war we struck an effective blow for containment; but by leaving the Communists in control of North Korea we incurred some serious liabilities. We permitted the Chinese to gain great prestige throughout the vulnerable populations and wavering governments of Asia, while we raised serious doubts in the minds of those peoples about our ability to defend them. At the same time, we committed ourselves to defend a strategically profitless area under difficult circumstances, and we left a thorn in our Pacific flank, which our adversaries can manipulate to great political advantage, for at any time the Communists, who have flagrantly disregarded the truce restrictions in Korea, could force us to live up to our commitment.²³ In addition, we incurred the vexing liability of restraining an impetuous South Korean government, led by an ageing patriot whose whole life has revolved about the consuming ambition to unify Korea.

Strategically, politically, and in terms of our prestige in Asia and throughout the world we would be in a much better position now if we had soundly defeated the Chinese Communists and made a generous settlement on the basis of the United Nations objective of unification. So the real question is whether we could have achieved this larger objective by a scale of military action and with a risk of total war that would not have been incommensurate with the potential political advantages to be gained. The answer to this question is obscured by our inability to read the minds of

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This same disadvantage would exist if we had succeeded in gaining a unified and independent Korea, since Communist forces beyond the border would still hold a sword over the peninsula. Nevertheless, the problem of creating local defensive strength would be considerably easier.

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the Communists or to gauge the consequences of alternative methods of conducting the war, which were never tried. Nevertheless, if we are to read the lessons of Korea correctly, we must speculate about these incalculable matters, must as the government did. Our speculations fall naturally into several key questions about the administration's conduct of the war and the thinking that lay behind it.

**Did the government overestimate the danger of total war, resulting from Russian intervention?** The Truman administration was never sure that the Korean War was not a premeditated prelude to a general Soviet attack on the West, leading to a third world war. This fear was the major consideration inducing the American government to place the restrictions upon its conduct of the war which were contrary to MacArthur's entreaties.

Therefore, it is important to determine whether the administration estimated the risk of general war correctly or not.

In retrospect, it seems extremely doubtful that the Russians-- especially at a time before they had acquired great air-atomic capabilities-- would have taken anything less than a direct attack upon their immediate sphere of control as the occasion for deliberately precipitating a total war. Total war would have meant the devastation of their homeland and the forfeiting of many less risky and more profitable opportunities for gaining their objectives. It seems much more likely that the Russians--assuming that they bore the major responsibility for the North Korean invasion-- regarded the Korean venture as a limited testing or probing action, which they were ready to write off as a loss if necessary, but which they would not have found worth pursuing at the cost of an all-out nuclear war under

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any circumstances, as long as American objectives were confined to the
Korean peninsula. This hypothesis is in accord with the American govern-
ment's own interpretation of Soviet conduct in general, with the prevailing
official analysis of Russia's specific motive for intervening in the Korean
War, and with the intelligence reports the government received throughout
the war. Therefore, it seems quite improbable that the Kremlin would have
deliberately intervened in such a way as to cause total war, merely for the
sake of upholding China's position in Korea, as long as it believed that
the United Nations command had no territorial objectives beyond Korea.²⁴
It is almost certain that the Russians would not have chosen to attack in
the NATO area in retaliation against bombing raids on Manchuria or against
any other measure that MacArthur advocated.

But might not a third world war have resulted accidentally from
limited Russian intervention? The Russians did not have to launch an
immediate full-scale intervention in order to precipitate all-out war. It
seems likely that the Soviet Union would have undertaken measures of limited
and covert intervention--such as the sending of additional personnel, equip-
ment, and aircraft to Korea and the resort to submarine and air attacks
against American naval units, ostensibly conducted by the Chinese--rather
than acquiesce in China's defeat by the measures MacArthur advocated. China
was too valuable an ally for the Kremlin to have acted otherwise. Starting

²⁴ Admiral C. Turner Joy, Commander of Naval Forces in the Far East and Senior Delegate and Chief of the United Nations Command delegation to the Korean armistice conference, has written, "I know of not a single senior military commander of United States forces in the Far East--Army, Navy, or Air Force--who believed that the U.S.S.R. would enter war with the United States because of any action we might have taken relative to Red China." *How Communists Negotiate* (N.Y.:MacMillan, 1955), p. 176.

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with such limited measure of indirect intervention, the war might have got out of hand by successive steps of retaliation and counter-retaliation--especially if the United States discovered, as seems likely, that the bombing of Manchurian bases was not sufficient to defeat the Chinese troops and that the Soviet Union constituted a more formidable privileged sanctuary than Manchuria. Certainly, this contingency was more probable than deliberate all-out Soviet intervention. Nevertheless, considering the compelling reasons which both the Soviet Union and the United States had for avoiding total war, it seems quite unlikely that either would have made the decision to destroy major targets so vital to the other as to lead to total war; and, moreover, this is the kind of decision that is not likely to be made by accident or miscalculation.

However, in reappraising the administration's fear of Russian intervention and total war, we must reckon with the element of uncertainty in all calculations concerning war. No sane and cautious person could have been <u>sure</u> of Russian intentions or of Russian reactions to various American measures. Many of our assumptions about Soviet conduct are still highly conjectural. Moreover, strategists cannot properly consider the dimensions of the risks involved apart from the importance and feasibility of obtaining the objectives for which the risks are to be taken. Therefore, the question confronting American strategists was not, simply, whether certain measures carried a certain risk of precipitating total war but whether the risk was tolerable or intolerable in terms of the political stakes and the potential military advantage that might have accrued. In calculating this more complex equation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff not only believed that the risk of total war was much greater than MacArthur calculated; they also believed that the

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military efficacy of the measures he advocated would have been considerably less than he estimated. The resulting conclusion that these measures carried an inordinate risk of total war was fortified by the willingness of the political leadership of the nation to settle for something less than the maximum UN objective.

It is difficult to disagree with this conclusion if the measures MacArthur advocated would only have succeeded in expanding the war without advancing our ability to achieve the unification of Korea. But if, on the other hand, bombing the targets north of the Yalu would really have been as effective in defeating the Chinese in Korea as a number of commanders in Korea have maintained, then the resulting boon to containment would have been worth the relatively small risk of total war this measure would have entailed. The layman is not in a position to gauge the military consequences of MacArthur's recommendations; but whatever these consequences might have been, it is difficult to deny, in retrospect, that the General was correct in his view that the administration overrated the risk of Russia's precipitating a total war as a result of them. It overrated the risk because it was unreasonably preoccupied with the fear of a third world war springing from direct Russian aggression--actually, the least likely military threat--and, at the same time, because it was inadequately prepared to fight anything short of total war. If the administration had been more attuned to the actual international developments underlying the postwar period of cold-and-limited war, and if it had been less dependent upon strategic airpower and the atomic bomb, perhaps it would have been inclined to give more weight to the military efficacy of MacArthur's recommendations in comparison to their risk of causing total war. It may well be that, by

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concentrating upon the problem of retaliating against a major Russian aggression to the exclusion of the problem of meeting lesser Communist aggressions by limited war, American policy-makers and military planners incurred a kind of paralysis of reason and will, which led them to magnify the risk of measures short of massive retaliation beyond the objective indications of existing military and political conditions.

Did the government overestimate the danger of over-committing itself in Korea? Regardless of the threat of total war, the administration was restrained in its conduct of the Korean War by its fear of committing such a great part of its military resources there as to leave the United States dangerously exposed in other parts of the world, including parts of considerably greater strategic importance. Certainly, this was a legitimate fear, considering the low state of America's military establishment. As it was, the United States committed about eighty per cent of its effective armed forces to the war in Korea and was forced to conduct its operations on a dangerously thin logistical margin. If the administration had expanded the war by bombing the Manchurian bases, the Russians and the Chinese with Russian help had a number of ways of retaliating, by means short of total war, which would probably have increased the scale and scope of warfare beyond America's ability to sustain the fight at a reasonable cost in men, equipment, and money.

But if we concede that the government wisely estimated the danger of overcommitment, which was inherent in more extensive military measures under the existing physical limitations upon America's available military power, this only points up the baneful effect of America's lack of preparedness for conducting limited warfare. There can be no doubt that the United

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States would have been in a far better position to achieve its objectives in Korea if it had had a military establishment capable of handling an expanded war without rendering itself defenseless in every other part of the world. With another four divisions to expend the United Nations forces might even have succeeded in unifying Korea without bombing Manchurian bases; for the Chinese were soon committed to their full capacity, and in the summer of 1951, when they finally agreed to armistice negotiations, they were near the end of their reservoir of trained manpower.

In the light of Communist China's intervention, should the United States have crossed north of the 38th parallel and enlarged its objective to the unification of Korea? In terms of American prestige and the future containment of communism the United States would have gained considerably more from the Korean War if it had succeeded in soundly defeating the Chinese forces and negotiating a settlement recognizing the unification of Korea. On the other hand, since we had to settle for the 38th parallel eventually anyway, it can be argued that we might better have stopped there in the first place instead of pushing northward after the Inchon landing. On the assumption that our crossing into North Korea would needlessly expand the war by provoking Chinese intervention, a few Americans, such as George Kennan, and a great many foreign observers held, at the time, that it was a mistake not to stabilize a line at the 38th parallel or, at least, at the "narrow waist" running from Pyongyang to Wonsan.

If the UN forces had stopped at the 38th parallel, would the Chinese Communists not have intervened, or were the Chinese determined to intervene anyway, once we entered the Korean War and neutralized Formosa? Assuming that the Chinese had not intervened, could we have negotiated any more stable and satisfactory a peace, with the Chinese still uncommitted and

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capable of occupying North Korea at will? We do not know enough about Chinese and Russian intentions in Korea to give positive answers to these questions. The only thing that is clear is that we badly misjudged Chinese intentions and Chinese strength and were poorly prepared to achieve the unification of Korea under the consequences.

Could we have reasonably avoided the miscalculation of Red China's intentions to intervene? This question goes beyond the technical competence of our intelligence service. It asks whether we fully understood the significance of the objectives of limited warfare and the proportionate relationship between the objectives and the scale of war. The original restriction of military operations below the 38th parallel was concrete evidence that our political objective in the war was limited to repelling the North Korean aggression and restoring the independence of South Korea. I do not know whether the Chinese would have been content to see the United Nations restore the *status quo ante bellum* without intervening; but it seems obvious that the achievement of this objective threatened Chinese interests far less, and, therefore, called for a much lower order of resistance, than the unification of Korea. Similarly, when UN forces crossed the parallel, and their objective was extended to the unification of Korea, it is evident that this enlargement of the war constituted a great magnification of the threat to Chinese interests and, logically, called for an entirely different scale of resistance. For with that enlargement of the war the objective at stake became the entire Korean peninsula. From the Communists' standpoint this meant that, instead of merely giving up South Korea, which they did not have in the first place, they were faced with the prospect of seeing all of Korea pass into hostile hands. This prospect was

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an even more serious threat to Chinese interests than the unification of Korea under Communist control would have been to American interests, for it entailed the elimination of the buffer zone protecting the center of Chinese industry in Manchuria. It is not surprising that China was unwilling to acquiesce in this loss when it had the means of preventing it. What is surprising is that we so badly depreciated the risk of Chinese intervention under these circumstances. Yet this depreciation is understandable in terms of our unfamiliarity with the conduct of limited war, for it does seem that the mistake sprang as much from our lack of appreciation of the significance of political objectives as from a deficiency in secret information.

After the Chinese had intervened, should we have been content to recover the 38th parallel, or should we have continued to fight for a larger objective? When the Chinese intervened, the objective of both belligerents became the control of the entire Korean peninsula. However, because neither side was willing or able to expend the effort necessary to obtain this objective, both were eventually willing to settle for a cease-fire agreement at the 38th parallel. General Van Fleet and other military commanders in Korea have criticized the government for entering into truce negotiations when, in their view, we could have defeated the Communists with a little more effort and, at least, restored our prestige and obtained better truce terms.²⁵ On the other hand, General Ridgway, while conceding

²⁵ When General Van Fleet relinquished his command of the UN ground forces, he said that the Communists were defeated in the spring of 1951 and implied that the UN forces then in Korea could have overwhelmed the Chinese forces if the United States had not agreed to an armistice. *New York Times*, February 10, 1953, p.2. However, General Clark, who took over command of the UN forces in May, 1952, has made more moderate claims, asserting that during his period of command in 1952 we could have "obtained better truce terms quicker, shortened the war and saved lives," but only if there had been more trained divisions and more supporting air and naval forces available, if the ban on attacks north of the Yalu and on the use

cont'd.

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that we could have marched to the Yalu if we had been willing to pay the price in dead and wounded, has written that from the purely military standpoint the effort would not have been worth the cost.

A drive to the line of the Yalu and the Tumen would have cleared Korea of the Chinese enemy. But he would have still been facing us in great strength beyond those rivers. The seizure of the land between the truce line and the Yalu would have merely meant the seizure of more real estate. It would have greatly shortened the enemy's supply lines by pushing him right up against his main supply bases in Manchuria. It would have greatly lengthened our own supply routes, and widened our battlefront from 110 miles to 420. Would the American people have been willing to support the great army that would have been required to hold that line?²⁶

The political leaders of both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations decided that the political advantages to be gained by defeating the Chinese in Korea were not worth the military cost. Under the circumstances, they were content to have repelled the aggression upon South Korea.

It is difficult to appraise the wisdom of the government's decision to agree to a truce on the basis of the 38th parallel without knowing the military cost and consequences of the effort to achieve more favorable terms. If we could have soundly defeated the Chinese without greatly expanding our effort and without bringing about indirect Russian intervention, then the achievement of the unification of Korea or even of more limited objectives would have been well worth the extra effort. On the other hand,

25 cont'd
of the Formosa Chinese had been lifted, and if, "in the event of a decision by my government really to win the war," the employment of the atomic bomb had been authorized. Mark W. Clark, *From the Danube to the Yalu* (N.Y.: Harper, 1954), pp. 2-3. Admiral C. Turner Joy, who was in charge of the UN's armistice negotiations, has written that the elimination of the "artificial restraints" imposed upon UN forces, coupled with the imposition of an effective blockade against China "probably would have resulted in military victory in less time than was expended in truce talks" and at less cost in men. And he adds, "This is the considered judgment of senior military commanders of the United Nations Command." Joy, op. cit., pp. 166, 176, 177.

²⁶Matthew B. Ridgway, *Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway* (N.Y.: Harper, 1956), pp. 219-20.

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the government's decision was clearly the least objectionable alternative if the effort to achieve more favorable terms would have required such a drain upon our military capacity as to leave us impotent to contain the Communist sphere in other, more vital areas. Perhaps the light of history will show that the government, in its anxiety to end an unpopular war, underestimated the political advantages of obtaining more favorable terms of settlement; but we shall never know whether the military cost of pursuing these advantages would have been as reasonable as the government's critics have assumed. In any case, it is easy to perceive that we would have been in a much better position to make a wise political decision if we had possessed a military capacity more nearly commensurate with the requirement of limited war.

**Did the administration in its concern for "collective security" place too much weight on the need for deferring to other members of the United Nations?** Despite the administration's public stress upon its deference to the other members of the United Nations, there is no evidence that it refrained from taking any measure that would have substantially affected the course of the war because of the views of foreign governments. Nevertheless, in considering the lessons of the Korean War, it is important to ask whether the American government took the proper view of its relations with allies. Here it does seem that in stressing the need for unanimity among the free-world nations resisting aggression, American spokesmen exaggerated the moral justification for making allied approval a condition of American action. It also exaggerated the moral basis of its own actions. After all, the United States intervened unilaterally in Korea to promote what it regarded as a vital national interest. It sought UN support of this

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action as a sanction, not as a precondition. Since the United States would not have intervened, and could not have legitimately intervened, if the administration had not believed that a compelling national interest was at stake, there could have been no virtue in sacrificing this interest, once the decision had been made, in order to satisfy nations the government had not consulted in the first place. Moreover, the United States, together with the ROK army, bore over ninety per cent of the burden of the fighting. On grounds of national sacrifice, as well as national interest, there was far less moral justification for deferring to the fifteen UN members who sent troops--much less to the fifty-three who endorsed the UN position--than to South Korea, whose very survival was at stake and who contributed much more than all the UN nations put together.²⁷

The political justification for deferring to our allies is another matter. But the political consideration would have existed whether or not we had fought the war under UN auspices. How important was it, in terms of holding a coalition together and maintaining fruitful political relations with UN members outside the coalition, to conduct the war in a manner agreeable to America's allies? One may concede that this was very important indeed and still not agree that it was so vital as to warrant sacrificing military and political objectives of primary and immediate importance to the United States. Of course, the answer to such a question can only be determined on the basis of a careful weighing of one kind of consideration

²⁷While the United States maintained a force of several hundred thousand combat ground troops in Korea, and the South Koreans eventually had sixteen combat infantry divisions in the battle, the maximum contribution of the other UN members at any one time was 33,000 ground soldiers.

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against another in the light of the particular circumstances. But in weighing these considerations it is essential that the political question should not be confused with either the moral or the military question. The administration, in striving to give the color of altruism to an action which could not have been justified except primarily on grounds of national self-interest, tended to mix all these questions together and thereby obscure the legitimate basis of its decisions; and this was a process that, in some measure, misled foreign governments, the American public, and the administration itself.

Such questions as these are not much easier to answer in retrospect than they were at the time. But even if we could now be sure of the wisest way to have conducted the Korean War, this would provide no clear lesson concerning our resistance to future aggressions. For example, granting the contribution to containment of the decision to intervene in Korea, it certainly did not prove that the nation should try to resist aggression everywhere, as General MacArthur maintained and as the administration's blanket endorsement of the ideal of collective security implied. If the United States had been twice as powerful, it still could not have afforded to check every possible aggression, regardless of the importance of the strategic stakes or the military and political feasibility of intervention. And there are few places around the Sino-Soviet periphery in which intervention would be as feasible as it was in Korea.

Nor did the halting of aggression in Korea provide any assurance that the Communists, having been taught a lesson, would renounce all further aggression. According to the common interpretation of the events leading

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to World War II, the chain of aggression would have been broken as soon
as the democracies stood up to the aggressors; but whether or not this
hypothesis applied to the chain of Fascist aggression, it is inapplicable
to the persistent pressure of international communism. The strategy of
containment is, in fact, based on the contrary assumption that Communist
power, in Kennan's words, "is a fluid stream which moves constantly,
wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal." It follows that
if you succeed in damming it up in one place, it flows into another,
whenever the opportunity occurs.

In its persistent but flexible pursuit of expansion the Communist
bloc had many opportunities for aggression by means and at places which
would avoid the circumstances that made American resistance feasible in
Korea. Even while the Korean War was in progress this fact was demonstrated
when the Chinese openly appropriated Tibet, and Communist guerillas con-
tinued to wage irregular warfare in Indochina, Burma and Malaya. In Korea,
as in Europe, one major reason that containment was feasible was the fact
that the inhabitants perceived its necessity and were willing to sacrifice
their lives for it, if necessary. But throughout most of the rest of the
gray areas the people and their governments are inclined to look upon con-
tainment as the exclusive concern of Western powers, who are trying to
preserve the remnants of colonialism. They do not share our sense of urgency
about the external threat of communism. They regard our strategy of meeting
Communist force with counterforce as dangerous "militarism," which could
only entangle them in a struggle for power among foreign governments.

If the United States, confronted with these difficulties, did
nothing to check future Communist aggressions, then the deterrent effect

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of the Korean War would be largely nullified. But if the United States intervened and failed, or if it wasted away its resources in a series of inconclusive contests, it might suffer a greater loss of prestige and security than if it had remained aloof. This dilemma was, from the first, inherent in the effort to confront the Communist powers with unalterable counterforce at a series of shifting points by means short of total war, but it took the Korean War to make the dilemma unmistakably explicit.

## 5. The Psychological Aftermath

Perhaps the clearest lessons of the Korean War were these: that America's capacity to retaliate directly upon the Soviet Union could not deter Communist aggression in the gray areas but that the United States was inadequately prepared to contain Communist aggression by any other means. However, this lesson of physical preparedness should not be separated from the lesson of psychological preparedness. For containment, like any strategy, is not only a matter of physical capacity; it is also a matter of will. If the nation as a whole is unwilling to expend its lives and resources upon limited military engagements, which promise no clear-cut resolution of the struggle for power, then no military establishment will be adequate to sustain a successful strategy of containment.

The Korean War, like previous American wars, showed that the American people will adjust to novel and adverse circumstances when there appears to be no less objectionable alternative; but the psychological aftermath, like the aftermath of other wars, raised serious doubts about their willingness to prepare for future contingencies. This aftermath, in turn, reflected the way in which the government presented the war to the American people in order to elicit a united national effort.

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The United States has never fought a more unpopular war than the Korean War. The American people rose admirably to meet the Communist challenge, while rejecting unlimited force or unconditional surrender; nevertheless, the experience was an exceedingly frustrating and bewildering one, which left the nation in a querulous mood. The United States had suffered over 130,000 casualties in a war that brought no decisive victory. With one hand tied behind its back it had been forced to acquiesce in a stalemate, when many voices said it could have readily won the war if the hand had been released. This was the first war that Americans had failed to win since the War of 1812, and that war could at least be considered a political victory. What was more galling still, it had been fought against the very power that had shattered America's old and cherished dream of a strong, democratic, Christian China. Yet throughout this whole inconclusive struggle America's principal adversary, the Soviet Union, remained uncommitted and inviolate, while the United States spent its precious manpower killing hordes of Chinese. And throughout the war the United States bore the major burden of the fighting, while it deferred to allies who regarded American lives as less important than their fears of total war. No wonder that the end of hostilities brought contention, dissatisfaction, and anxiety instead of the uninhibited relief and exhilaration of previous armistices.

The Korean War, with brutal clarity, brought home to the nation as a whole the disparity between America's traditional image of her role in the world and the actual requirements of containment in a period of cold-and-limited war. No one grasped this fact more keenly than John Foster Dulles, who, in these years, was a consultant to the Department of State.

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To an audience in June, 1951, he explained that the world was in the situa-
tion which Trotsky had described as "not war, not peace." This was a novel
and trying situation for the American people, he said.

Heretofore, we have either had peace or we have had war. When
we have had peace we have had a large degree of individual free-
dom and an absence of regimentation and militarism. When we have
had war there has been an enemy to conquer, by all possible vio-
lence, and a considerable surrender of individual choice in order
better to marshal our strength for a victory which would restore
peace and freedom. There was an end that was in sight and a sure
knowledge of how to reach that end.

Then in an appeal for patience and perseverance Dulles concluded,

To sum it up, we are engaged in a gigantic sacrificial effort,
of a kind which, in the past, we have made only in the face of
obvious and dire peril and only to force an early decision which
would end the necessity for such sacrifices. Today, the peril to
our homeland seems to many to be somewhat speculative, while con-
tinuance of our present measures could impair the very foundations
of our American way of life without forcing an abandonment of
Soviet strategy.²⁸

Dulles' own growing dissatisfaction with containment suggested that
Americans would not readily persevere in a strategy which promised no more
than "a gigantic sacrificial effort." The Korean War showed once more that,
although the nation might be unwilling to follow any alternative to contain-
ment, it was also deeply reluctant to adhere to a strategy so antithetical
to its traditional outlook. The strains attending this contradictory state
of affairs took many forms--from demands for withdrawal to "fortress America"
to advocacy of "preventive" atomic war. They appeared in the bitter attacks
upon Secretary Acheson and in the phenomenon of McCarthyism. They erupted
in an astounding display of national passion upon the return of General
MacArthur. In the end, reason and moderation triumphed, and the strategy
of containment remained intact; but in the process psychological scars were

²⁸Address delivered on May 30, 1951, *Department of State Bulletin*,
*XXIV* (June 4, 1951), 936.

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created, to the serious detriment of America's will to meet the problem of
limited war.

The psychological aftermath of the Korean War was, perhaps, an inevitable incident of America's adaptation to unprecedented circumstances; but it certainly was not mitigated by the administration's reluctance to acknowledge, candidly and explicitly, its adherence, and the full implications of its adherence, to the strategy of containment—a reluctance which sprang as much from inner doubts as from a sensitivity to public opinion. The administration, like Americans in general, sensed the unprecedented nature of the nation's course in world politics and it was disturbed by its inability to reconcile this course with America's traditional image of itself as a bold and idealistic nation, untrammelled by the moral ambiguities, the restraints and frustrations, of controlling, balancing, and moderating national power. Its response to this contradiction between realities and predispositions was to try to maintain a rhetorical bridge between them by invoking the inspirational phrases of "collective security," while deprecating the strategy that actually created an unbridgeable gulf. This placed it at the double disadvantage of raising expectations that did not correspond with the facts and then defending the facts by casting cold water on the expectations. The effect was not to build a bridge between realities and predispositions but, rather, to create the illusion of a bridge, which only compounded public frustration and bewilderment.

It is true that Dean Acheson, one of the most articulate Secretaries of State of modern times, publicly elucidated all the elements of American strategy, at one time or another and in one form or another, with uncommon eloquence and sagacity. Yet the import of Acheson's elucidations was

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clouded by his failure to place the separate elements within the whole by acknowledging the government's adherence to the strategy which all the world knew as containment. Instead, Acheson, like all administration spokesmen, was apologetic and defensive about containment, and he seemed to go out of his way to present American policy in other terms, as though containment were indecent. What came through to the general public was not the carefully-formulated elements of a comprehensible national strategy but the weary generalities of collective security.

The chief trouble with the administration's rationalizations of American policy was not that they were out of line with popular aspirations and predispositions but that they were too much in line with public opinion to enable the public to accommodate itself to contradictory facts. The principle of collective security—the image of a nation impartially executing the will of the peace-loving, democratic community of nations by punishing aggression in behalf of the United Nations—simply did not fit the facts of a nation up to its neck in power politics, aligned with undemocratic and democratic powers alike, and forced to pick and choose its resistance to aggression according to the configurations of power and the dictates of its own national self-interest. The only way the actual course of American foreign policy could have been rationally explained was in terms of a national strategy, whether one called it "containment" or by any other name. In the long run, the attempt to escape this fact only deepened public confusion and anxiety, as it led the administration to overgeneralize its policies, only to have to explain them away; and to raise unrealistic expectations, only to have events refute them.

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Not until the MacArthur hearings forced the government to justify its actions in concrete terms and in the context of an overall plan did the nation begin to receive a clear exposition of the true nature of American strategy; but, even then, administration spokesmen were excessively vague about it. Their only strong card seemed to be their determination to avoid a third world war; but so far as providing a positive rationalization for the Korean action, they relied chiefly upon analogies to the chain of aggression in the 1930's and upon general affirmations of the need for supporting the United Nations and the principle of collective security.

Only once did an official spokesman briefly venture to associate the administration's actions with containment.²⁹ To be sure, for students of international relations the administration's testimony contains a full and able exposition of the central assumptions underlying American strategy, but for the ordinary informed citizen the essence of that strategy was blurred by the administration's own ambivalent attitude toward it—on the one hand, implicitly defending containment in terms of concrete actions but, on the other hand, half apologizing for it as a general strategy and almost pretending that it did not exist. Under these circumstances, the government's case was bound to be vulnerable to MacArthur's ringing charge that "There is no policy—there is nothing, I tell you, no plan, or anything."³⁰

²⁹Answering the complaint that American policy in Korea was a policy of stalemate, Secretary of Defense Marshall said, "For the last five years our supreme policy has been to curb Communist aggression and, if possible, to avoid another world war in doing so." After citing America's actions in Iran, Greece, Turkey, Trieste, Berlin, Indochina, and Korea, he said, "It is therefore our policy to contain Communist aggression in different fashions in different areas without resorting to total war, if that be possible to avoid." *MacArthur Hearings*, p. 366.

³⁰*Ibid.*, p. 68.

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Perhaps a candid, explicit defense of containment would have been
too great a shock for a nation just feeling its way through the adversities
of power politics. On the other hand, how long can a nation be expected
to pursue a strategy which its leaders are ashamed to acknowledge, even to
themselves?