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indeed misleading, to insist that our total strength has never
been greater. Our task is not to compare present capabilities
against those of a generation or even a decade ago. Military
power is always measured relative to that of any possible opponent.
Only self-delusion can make us doubt that we are falling behind.

To avoid this problem by defining every war with the
Soviet Union or Communist China as all-out is to seek to deal
with a national crisis through verbal legerdemain. According
to this definition even our present limited war forces are
excessive for they are clearly larger than what is required for
police actions like Lebanon. Unfortunately the dilemmas described
in this chapter cannot be solved so easily. No more urgent
task confronts the free world than to separate itself from
nostalgia for the period of its invulnerability, and to face
the stark realities of a revolutionary period.

As worrisome as the imbalance of our military establishment

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establishing limits in concert with an enemy.

As for our diplomacy, it is all very well to say that our goal is to prevent war. But protecting ourselves against the worst contingency is not a disreputable task. And in a revolutionary world no one can say that war is impossible. If it occurs, it should be kept to the smallest possible limits and it should be conducted in a manner that permits a settlement before a holocaust. But whether a war can be limited depends importantly on the expectations formed in advance of hostilities.

The price we may have to pay for our confusion may be that an aggressor misunderstands our intentions and that he launches a pre-emptive blow in response to what we intended as limited resistance. The penalty for combining a nuclear military establishment with a diplomacy striving for nuclear disarmament may be that an aggressor underrates our willingness to resist with the sole weapon we have available and that as a result deterrence

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fails. While it is not the task of our diplomacy to convey a
precise description of our reaction to every conceivable crisis,
it should contribute to defining the range of the American
response and to harmonizing our strategic planning and our
foreign policy.

The task of restoring cohesion and responsibility to
our policy is not eased by the tendency of too many to assign
any concern with questions of national security to an era of
the Cold War which they believe is ending. Some fear that to
debate issues of preparedness may deflect attention from the
urgency of the quest for peace. Others insist that an obsession
with Communist military capabilities blinds us to our real
challenges in the field of economic competition and in the
development of our society. At any rate, they claim that military
expansion is contrary to the image of themselves of the Communist
leaders and the least likely form of the Soviet menace. The
obsession with military security is alleged to be at the root

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the vision or the willingness to carry through a sustained program
of world economic development.

But granting all these criticisms, the fact remains that even in the military field we are inadequately prepared. We are falling behind in the over-all strategic equation, We have insufficient strength for limited war. Our conventional forces are constantly shrinking. The answer to our political problems is not to be found in reducing our defenses -- for even here more effort and imagination are required -- but in injecting a greater sense of purpose into our over-all performance.

As a nation of specialists we like to believe that a problem is either political _or_ economic _or_ military. The challenge we face, however, is that contemporary problems involve a combination of these factors. In this task, our choice is not between working for the things in which we believe or attending to our necessities. If we cannot do both, we will not be able to do either.

###

...As an individual, I hope they will never call on the Strategic Air Command to drop conventional bombs, because we have so much capability in tactical airplanes, and there are other people who should be able to drop a few conventional bombs. I think if we get into a war which is not a little tiny police action, I do not want to see us use conventional bombs, because I have a deep moral sense as it applies to Americans. I get a little indignant with people who become very lofty in their thinking and do not want to kill a few of the enemy but would gladly risk additional American lives. My crews are more important to me than the enemy. If I can send only one airplane over and do the job of a thousand, that is what I want to do.

"So I maintain, in a certain type of small war, we should use nuclear weapons."

General Power in "Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, "House of Representatives, Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session, Part 2, p. 388.