Document created: 04 May 2004
Air University Review, July-August 1971

The Civilian Analysts, 
in Their Pride and Their Fall

Twelve years ago the Institute for Strategic Studies was founded in London, and just two years ago the annual conference of its members heard some remarkable papers on the progress of strategic studies during the life of the Institute. Now a small volume has appeared containing nine of these commentaries on what has happened to strategy during a decade that began with misplaced enthusiasm and has ended with exaggerated disillusionment.*  

The star contributors to the volume are Raymond Aron, the most respected French observer of world political and military affairs; Michael Howard, who follows the late Liddell Hart as the leading military commentator in Britain; Robert Osgood, the eminent professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins, who has specialized in limited war; and finally Bernard Brodie, the acknowledged dean of all nuclear analysts (nonstatistical). Five other contributors, all eminent in their more specialized fields, will be cited later.

The essays vary in style, content, and value, but there is surprising agreement on two points: First, that the analytical techniques used in developing a nuclear strategy or posture in the 1950s were successful in creating a delicate balance of terror, but these statistical techniques failed disastrously in the following decade when they were used to justify limited conventional wars. Second, because this misapplication of method violated political and social principles that are dominant in all grand strategy, we have reached a dead end in military policy as well as in diplomatic policy.

In international politics and international affairs, an era has ended with few clues as to what the next will be like. In Robert Osgood’s words: “. . . strategic imagination seems to have reached a rather flat plateau surrounded by a bland atmosphere in which all military concerns tend to dissolve into the background.” (p. 104) What has brought things to such a pass? In two words: overconfidence and failure.

Quoting Bernard Brodie, “. . . if pride goeth before a fall, members of the American strategic fraternity have had both their pride and their fall” (p. 174) Raymond Aron, in the first essay of the book, begins the story of how it came about: “In 1961 the analysts arrived at the White House with President Kennedy; there and then they worked out the various deterrent schemes and discussed with great passion the strategic or diplomatic doctrines that one can arrive at as a result of theoretical elaboration. . . . The analysts are living their ‘finest hour,’ and most of them approve, in essence, of the McNamara doctrine.” (p. 16) Aron speaks further of “the rise and decline of nuclear strategy, or rather of the civilian analysts. If they lived their ‘finest hour’ with Kennedy, the Vietnam war—for which they are not responsible—represents their epitaph.” (p. 20)

The term “epitaph” is much too final. The civilian analysts have become indispensable, though in the future they may be “on tap but not on top” as military leaders once described the position of specialists. But Aron’s charitable absolution of the analysts from responsibility for the Vietnam war is not in accord with his more detailed judgment or with that of his colleagues.

Aron maintains that all the useful thinking was done before the analysts were installed in positions of power: “. . . towards the end of the 1950s all the main ideas had been worked out, all the theories constructed, all the doctrines put forward.” (p. 17)

Michael Howard agrees that with the advent of Kennedy and McNamara “not entirely coincidentally, the great period of American intellectual strategic speculation came to an end, after five astonishingly fruitful years. The military intellectuals were either drawn, like Kaufmann and Hilsman, into government, or returned to more orthodox studies on university campuses.” (p. 67) He says “The principles established by the thinkers of the 1950s were to guide Mr McNamara in his work of remoulding American defence 
policy . . . ‘The McNamara Strategy’ had a logical coherence—almost an elegance—which may have commanded rather more admiration among academics than it did in the world of affairs. . . . European allies flatly refused McNamara’s requests that they should increase their conventional forces to provide the necessary spectrum of deterrence’. . . . Several of Mr McNamara’s emissaries received, in consequence, a somewhat gruelling introduction to the refractory world of international affairs.” (pp. 67-69)

In turn, Robert Osgood, who once stressed “the need to provide the appropriate forces for the fighting of limited wars” (p. 60), now admits that “although the logic of flexible and controlled response prevailed on paper and in strategic pronouncements, the means to withstand anything more than the most limited attack for longer than a week were not forthcoming.” (p.102) Osgood does not mention what veterans of military or diplomatic service in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had known throughout the 1950s: that the pretense of possible conventional parity with Red forces across the European peninsula was just an academic exercise all along.

Now, says Osgood, after “the inroads of time upon novel plans . . . limited-war thinking is left somewhere between the initial Kennedy-McNamara views and the approach of the Eisenhower-Dulles administration.” (p 104) Unfortunately, after two more years of indecision in Vietnam, the Eisenhower-Dulles administration may be recalled as positively enthusiastic about limited war when compared with the mood of the nation today.

In Aron’s view the second Cuban crisis (certainly not the first) “marks the triumph of the analyst” while “the Vietnam war points to his decline and compromises his prestige.” (p. 32) Over Cuba the threat of escalation that we posed by mobilizing was persuasive, but over North Vietnam the practice of escalation has been ineffective. Aron does not examine the reasons why the threat over Cuba was unhesitant and apparently unlimited while that over Hanoi was apologetic and vacillating, and this is unfortunate, for the reasons have to do more with the personal role of the Secretary of Defense than with his analysts. Yet Aron is far less severe in his judgment of the analysts than is Osgood in his chapter, entitled “The Reappraisal of Limited War.”

Osgood agrees with Urs Schwarz (the Swiss author of an excellent little book, American Strategy—A New Perspective), whose brief chapter, “Great Power Intervention in the Modern World,” makes the point historically that unilateral intervention such as we essayed in Vietnam is an out-of-date gamble against impossible odds, regardless of the techniques employed. Osgood accuses his more pontifical colleagues in the study of limited war of being entranced with strategies at the expense of showing proper consideration for feasible objectives and political realities. He says bluntly that one cause of the neglect for political factors was “the propensity of American civilian strategists to propound their ideas, often with brilliant ingenuity, as revelations of an esoteric body of learning (which to some extent they were) that would rescue military thinking from conventional wisdom and put it on a rational basis. In this respect, however, the deference of the uninitiated, overawed by the secrets and rituals of the strategic priesthood, has been more important than the pretensions of the priests.” (p. 97)

Osgood apparently agrees with Aron that conceptual elaborations of strategies are basically so simple that “unlike economic models of the same type, they do not even demand a subtlety of intellect in any way out of the ordinary,” and with Aron’s quotation from Napoleon: “ ‘Strategy is a simple art, it’s just a matter of execution’.” (p. 21) He is not content with this blast at the “priesthood” but goes on to more serious accusations. He remembers that “in the Kennedy Administration limited war became official doctrine and achieved something approaching popularity.” (p. 93)

As an insider of the now quiescent fraternity of “limited warriors,” Osgood is in a position to strike below the intellect in reaching the heart of the problem “Why Vietnam?” : 
“. . .there was no inducement to question the premises about the wisdom and efficacy of intervention that underlay the prevailing American approach to limited war. The tendency was, rather, to complete the confirmation of a decade of limited-war thinking by proving the latest and most sophisticated concepts in action.” (p. 99) This is a rather startling admission: that proponents of strategic doctrines may sometimes seek to have their conclusions tested in combat, just as developers of weapons are accused of doing. I am reminded of a platform encounter with an enthusiastic advocate of passive resistance who impatiently urged the unilateral disarmament and consequent occupation of his own country so that the efficacy of nonviolent revolt could be demonstrated. Fortunately most men whose professions deal with disaster—and this includes military men—are not too anxious to test their skills in un-necessary action.

Why were the “limited warriors” among the intellectuals so highly motivated in their crusade? Osgood explains that they sought “to save American military policies from the thralldom of misguided budgetary restrictions . . . they rejected the thesis of the Eisenhower-Dulles Administration that the United States would spend itself into bankruptcy if it prepared to fight local aggression locally at places and with weapons of the enemy’s choosing.

With the advent of the Kennedy Administration the revisionists came into office. Responding to a dominant theme in Kennedy’s campaign, they were determined to fill the military gaps in containment. . . . The only remaining gap in military containment might be closed if the United States could demonstrate in Vietnam that wars of national liberation must fail.” (pp. 98-99)

But why were “gaps” in defense the dominant theme in Kennedy’s campaign? Michael Howard is most helpful here. He points out that “the first western government to adopt the concept of ‘deterrence’ as the basis of its military policy was that of the United Kingdom in 1952; very largely thanks to the thinking of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir John Slessor, the then Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff.” (p. 53) Howard does not say so, but it is known that the concept was officially rejected in the United States by General Omar Bradley, of the United States Army, who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet nuclear deterrence was even then, at the height of the Korean War, the de facto policy of the United States, as it had been ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the whirlwind demobilization of United States ground, sea, and air forces at the end of World War II. Other means of containing massive Red ground and air forces on the central Eurasian land mass simply did not exist.

The cost—in both casualties and resources—of trying to contain the new Chinese army on one small peninsula most favorable for defense had caused, in Howard’s words, “American weariness with the Korean War, and the desire of the Republican Party to return to financial ‘normalcy’ ” through the open avowal, at last, of “massive retaliation” as policy. Howard continues, “It should perhaps be judged, not as a coherent strategic doctrine, but as a political expedient—or even as a diplomatic communication, itself a manoeuvre in a politico-military strategy of  ‘deterrence’. By these criteria the policy must be pronounced not ineffective. But its logical fallacies were too glaring to be overlooked.” (p. 58)

Logical fallacies, both Howard and Aron are at pains to emphasize, are inherent in the concept of “deterrence,” which, as Howard says, “takes us out of the familiar field of military strategy into the unmapped if not unfamiliar territory of political bargaining, where total rationality does not invariably reign supreme.” (p. 56) Moreover, while the conventional forces of the West were stalled in Korea and defeated in Vietnam, nuclear weapons were not used at all, and the influence of the threat of their use was difficult to measure.

Howard continues: “These, and other points, were rapidly made with force and relish by Democrat politicians and sympathizers out of office, by academic specialists, and by members of the armed services which were being cut back to provide greater resources for the Strategic Air Command.

There has perhaps never been a strategic controversy which has not been fuelled by political passions and service interests. It is entirely understandable, and for our purposes quite unimportant, that the US Air Force should have sought every argument to justify the doctrine of massive retaliation while the US Army powerfully supported its opponents. What is significant, however, is that the latter included every strategic thinker of any consequence in the United States. . . .” (p. 59)

One may quarrel with Howard’s statement for several reasons, especially for his term “strategic thinker of any consequence.” Obviously, there were a number of people in the Department of Defense and even a few in the Department of State who thought rather hard about these matters. Since their thinking became policy, it can scarcely be dismissed as of no consequence, any more than that of the academic thinkers whose influence came—and  went—a few years later. The fact that they were too busy to write books and monographs at the moment was in itself consequential—just as it was consequential under a new regime, as the authors of this volume generally agree, that the “thinkers” in power were too busy with doctrine, formulae, graphs, and pronouncements to implement an effective policy in Vietnam. Howard himself, in another context, displays a rare insight into what is often the low-level (military) source of high-level (academic) elaboration.

The academic strategist need not, in Howard’s view, remain at the commander’s elbow, for there his advice may appear “either platitudinous or impracticable.”  (p. 49) Strategy is not a science but is rather, as Voltaire described it, “murderous and conjectural.” (p. 48 n) Systems analysis may simplify problems (or complicate them), but it cannot eliminate them. The academic role is to widen the commander’s range of thought, to educate his guesses.

Yet even where great commanders have followed specific principles, it is difficult to prove that these were derived from specific theorists. What, then, might be their derivation? Howard admits a truth too little known: “The most eminent thinkers sometimes do no more than codify and clarify conclusions which arise so naturally from the circumstances of the time that they occur simultaneously to those obscurer, but more influential figures who write training manuals and teach in service colleges. And sometimes strategic doctrines may be widely held which cannot be attributed to any specific thinkers, but represent simply the consensus of opinion among a large number of professionals who had undergone a formative common experience.” (p. 49)

“The name of Douhet,” for example, “was virtually unknown in the Royal Air Force. . .” (p. 49) To American airmen that name, even if they heard it, sounded more like an admiral at Manila Bay than an untranslated Italian. They did not even bother to read the tirades of their naval colleagues that told them whose disciple they were. In fact, they read little of anything, and they wrote even less, for such was their tradition. The reasons for this are too numerous to cite here, other than to mention that although they listened in classes to scholars with glasses, airmen never wore them.

Howard has, after all, a valid point in his observation that the few well-known academic strategists who were writing in the late 1950s represented what was considered an Army viewpoint and were outside the establishment, while in the 1960s they tended to become a part of it. As Aron expressed it: “The analysts of nuclear problems [or of global strategy in the nuclear age] have become the diplomatic counsellors of the Prince, for the evil or the glory of Princes and analysts.” (p. 16)

With the defense of the West in its most deflated state since 1949 and with American military affairs the most demoralized since Woodrow Wilson’s occupation of Vera Cruz, “princes and analysts” are now more troubled by evil than dazzled by glory. Complaints against the analysts are not merely that they were “too much” but that they were too much of a kind. Brodie regrets that the recent “impressive development of systems analysis and of related techniques . . . has fostered the notion that selection of future weapons systems for appropriate development and deployment represents most of what there is to modern military strategy. I suspect that the former American Secretary of Defense, Mr Robert S. McNamara, tended automatically to think in such terms. Military history, which used to be the main acknowledged source of strategic insight—Clausewitz and Mahan are examples—has been enormously down-graded in favour of the new analytical techniques.” (p. 160)

Neither Brodie nor the other contributors question the usefulness of analytical techniques, but they deplore the notion that statistics can substitute for understanding the human elements and value judgments involved in every major decision. Brodie suggests that “under the seven critical years of the regime of Mr McNamara” this notion prevailed so that “what should have been supplementary talent tended in fact to become pre-emptive of the field of strategic study.” (p. 170) Disciplined thinking at “the mostly tactical levels at which systems analysis is applicable” did not prevent “sloppy thinking” in areas of inquiry where the best practitioners of the art, such as Charles J. Hitch, agreed that systems analysis “has no real applicability.” Brodie refers to Amrom Katz, a RAND expert with a talent for humility, in his comment that charts are a temptation because “one can present only data on them, usually in the form of numbers” (Amrom H. Katz, “The Short Run and the Long Walk,” Air Force, June 1967) and that the proliferation of charts leads to listing whatever data are available and pretending they are relevant.

In Vietnam, for example, with no front lines whose movement might be an indication of gain or loss, “our ‘winning’ is demonstrated by the use of charts containing data” that may be neither accurate nor relevant while the enemy is probably using a very different method of measurement. (p. 171) Few of the frustrations encountered in Vietnam, Brodie recalls, were “taken into account in the kinds of war games, scenarios and cost-effectiveness analyses done at places like RAND over the past twenty years.” (pp. 171-72) He con­cedes that the restraint we have imposed upon ourselves by not invading North Vietnam was, surely, a correct one; what was incorrect was our failing to appreciate the military burden it entailed.” (p. 173)

Osgood agrees that “probably no American leader would have considered the eventual scale of war worth the costs if he had known the costs in advance”; and he adds that perhaps the strategy which “has come closest to a clear-cut failure is controlled escalation, as applied by means of selective bombing in North Vietnam.”  (pp. 108-9)  (Unlike Brodie, Osgood ignores our failure to invade.) Nevertheless, Osgood warns against sweeping conclusions, since the purpose of our bombing was ambiguous. Was it for strategic bargaining or for purely tactical military reasons? Perhaps it is too difficult to bomb an underdeveloped country for bargaining purposes, perhaps our aims and methods in comparison to theirs were too limited and hesitant, and, most significantly, “Perhaps controlled escalation exerts the desired political effect only when there is a convincing prospect of nuclear war at the top of the ladder.” (p. 110)

According to Aron, it is the nuclear threat, rather than any conventional balance, that has inhibited “limited wars between the states which hold the supreme weapons.” (p. 21; Aron’s italics) In a chapter which reviews the status of arms control, Hedley Bull is sufficiently undistracted by Vietnam to keep watch on “the field of Soviet-American competition in strategic nuclear armaments. It is this field which is the most sensitive of all areas of military activity at the present time, because on it the whole structure of power in the world depends.” (p 155) Brodie is understandably concerned about the degeneration of debate on competitive nuclear systems into epithet-terms such as “overkill,” “assured destruction,” and other “unappetizing word figures” which indicate “much dogmatism but little searching inquiry.” There is agreement that nuclear weapons are effectively sealed from use, “but should it mean effectively a promise of non-use under almost any circumstances? If so, the utility of these systems-in-being will inevitably be much diminished, and that utility is presently high. They make major war between the super­powers and between their respective alliance systems certainly much less likely than without them and perhaps critically so.” (p. 168) (This problem was explored in greater detail in an article by this reviewer entitled, “Effective Aerospace Power—1. Deterrence: The Hard Questions,” in Air University Quarterly Review, XII, 3 and 4 [Winter-Spring, l960- 61], 148-52.)

Here again, as often in past years, Brodie issues a timely warning against the recurrent notion that nuclear warfare is already a solved equation. The smug assumption that nuclear weapons “automatically cancelled each other”—or that at least competition in nuclear weapons would become stabilized as soon as the Russians became satisfied with happy parity—was characteristic of the “newthink” of the early 1960s. Such an assumption helped to divert attention to new projects in conventional armaments, counterinsurgency, and the like. Now, against a rising tide of obscurantism, Brodie’s informed colleagues again express views similar to his. Only Hedley Bull, in far-off Australia, seems inclined to postpone concern about ballistic missile defense, multiple re-entry vehicles, and improvement of submarine detection, because “experts do not now expect that trends such as these will undermine the situation of mutual deterrence within the foreseeable future.” (p. 145) The other writers have talked to more anxious experts or remembered the history of visions of stability in the past. Bull himself recognizes that “mutual deterrence remains ‘delicate’ or unstable in principle . . . .” (p. 145)

“The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Albert Wohlstetter’s famous article in Foreign Affairs (January 1959), has driven its thesis and its inspired but uninspiring title into modern consciousness as perhaps no other magazine article has done. Howard and Aron both cite it as the classic climax of Russo-American thought and progress in deterrence and counterdeterrence, not only for the fifties but to this day. Aron recognizes there is no certainty as to the result “if one of the two super-powers was to try, by a sudden act of aggression carried out with all the resources at its disposal, to disarm and force the capitulation of the other. And it remains still more true that technical research continues to improve both the shell and the armour, the bombs and the means of delivery: the equilibrium of terror is then never completely stable.” (p. 17) Howard cites the view that the maintenance of stability will require continued thought and effort plus “a certain reciprocity from the Soviet Union.” (p. 64)

The same view, though much broader in its scope, is expressed by a German philosopher-scientist with the formidable name of Carl-Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsaecker in a truly remarkable chapter, “The Ethical Problem of Modern Strategy.” Von Weizsaecker is a pacifist in the finest sense of the term, for he seeks to understand and solve rather than to assume and pontificate. Once Professor of Physics, now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, von Weizsaecker says his participation in church committees on atomic weapons has proved fruitless except for studies showing that “effective ethical verdicts were confined to those weapons whose use would not turn the scales of war.” He believes the atomic weapon will be used when “not using it would no longer mean to refrain from one possible means to an end, but to renounce the very end, e.g., the freedom of one’s own country.” At present, we have a “lucky technological situation” in which the use of the weapon does not seem vital to any power. “Technology, however, may change. . . . The technology of war does not stabilize itself automatically—peace must rest on a political stabilization.” (pp. 123-26) In the same vein, Aron asserts that to prefer death to surrender “is by no means irrational, since wise men have never suggested that one should prefer life to the reasons for living.” (p. 44)

Yet, von Weizsaecker says, “the average man cannot induce himself to think of his own death as a quantity in a probability game, and he is right in that. He may be unable to express himself consistently, but he feels that what we protect by this sort of deterrence is not yet peace but a delicate, haphazard truce.” Mathematical estimates of probabilities are useful as “the most rational way of expressing the ideas of our strategy of deterrence,” but they are at “a level of abstraction which is not common in mankind” and they display an ethical weakness. Yet von Weizsaecker sees our delicate balance of terror as an approximate temporary solution whose inventors “deserve respect on ethical grounds.” He offers no easy solutions, for “to think of a better solution of the problem than the World State is a challenge to our political inventiveness.” He understands that “disarmament is a consequence of a détente rather than its start.” (pp. 129-33)

Equally sensible comments on developments in disarmament over a critical decade are made by Hedley Bull, formerly director of the British Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit  (1964-67). During this period arms control has replaced disarmament as a method for peace, for it recognizes the “possibility of reciprocation and co-operation even between potential enemies . . . .” (p. 141, quoting Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control, p.2) Because of the inescapable logic and the unique success of arms control measures, the formerly troublesome advocates of general and complete disarmament (GCD) are no longer influential. The attention of radical groups, especially of violently radical groups, is now focused on other matters.

There are difficulties, of course, even with nonexistent disarmament. There is danger of disillusionment over logic or mathematics as a solution for disarmament just as previous generations hoped in vain for “the moral transformation of mankind.” Bull also recognizes the difficulties of “translating the uncertain and constantly changing balance of power into the precision and fixity of a treaty.” He warns that “in the accumulation of merely symbolic or hortatory treaties there is a risk that we shall repeat the errors of the 1920s and become the victims of our own illusion making.” (pp.154 and 156)

In the strangest of all the chapters, Kenneth Boulding, an economics and behavioral science professor and a director of research in conflict resolution,” maintains that practically everything is an illusion. He quotes British philosopher David Hume to the effect that reality and mental images are incomparable. But Boulding states that “the whole organization of the international system is designed, not only to create false images in the minds of the decision-maker,” etc. (p. 82)

More disturbing are Boulding’s perverse declarations that all historians are “deterministic” and assertions such as “The major human conflict is seen as between the world war industry and the civilian population and enterprise which supports it, rather than between national states.” (p. 88) A more typical example of the kind of language that captivates disturbed and bewildered collegians at the moment is this sentence: “In these days there is not much glorification of war as an end in itself, though what might be called the martial virtues of courage, fortitude, gallantry and so on, continue to be somewhat covertly admired even though the martial style is somewhat alien to the academic and reflective life.” 
(p. 88) That was Boulding’s most interesting sentence. The remainder of his essay can be overlooked with profit.

It would be wrong to conclude this review without a few words in explanation or defense of the strategic analysts who have been rather severely taken to task by their colleagues in some of the passages I have quoted, as well as in others not mentioned. Howard concludes with a fair judgment of these strategic thinkers: “Like Clausewitz and Mahan they are children of their time, and their views are formed by historical and technological conditions whose transformation may well render them out of date.” (p. 67) Well, Clausewitz and Mahan are not yet entirely out of date, especially Clausewitz.

Howard and Aron, not unlike many others, are a bit severe with Herman Kahn, who is, after all, a large target. Howard admits the claims of Kahn’s critics do not stand up to  “dispassionate analysis” but says he made only two new contributions to the nuclear debate: first, that substantial survival is possible; second, that nuclear war must be controlled, through an effort to coerce the enemy, rather than to engage him in mutual destruction. Two more-important contributions could hardly be made, and after all, as Brodie observes, “The opportunities for concocting fresh generalizations in this area are not what they once were.” (p. 159)

Howard is not alone in deploring Kahn’s “grim jocularity” of style throughout his “huge and baroque study On Thermonuclear War.” Who can decree that the great Kahn, a vast pleasure dome himself, sometimes called the great smiling Buddha, should be other than jocular even if it causes people like James R. Newman to become “hysterically vitriolic”? Few give Kahn the credit he deserves for bringing a lethal problem out of windowless rooms and into relatively unpolluted air.

Aron takes both Kahn and Schelling to task at considerable length over their construction of “models” to represent strategic situations. He thinks that this practice, while useful, causes analysts to slight their study of each true situation. Aron does not recognize the ingenuity these men had to exercise to pierce the wall of security classification that enclosed them. It was once this reviewer’s strange duty to examine all RAND writings to determine whether any of them had to do with circumstances such as might cause the United States to surrender. The Congress, in the marathon “silly surrender” debate that was a part of the post-Sputnik hysteria, had decreed that no government-supported researcher should ever consider the possibility of surrender. Thomas Schelling’s algebraic elaborations on what might happen to “Country A” or “Country B” made tedious reading, but they passed inspection.

Finally, it is unfair to blame the analysts for what Brodie once entitled “The McNamara Phenomenon.” Only a few came to power in the famous anterooms of the Secretary, and such power is well diluted. Further, while Mr. McNamara brought no strategic ideas from his motor company, he did bring some attitudes which his advisers were powerless to change. As a former lieutenant colonel of statistics in the Air Force, he knew how to use statistics to a purpose—often a purpose that met the needs or desires of his commander or himself and not exclusively a purpose logically derived from the figures themselves. As lawyers learn to become their own clients and so get elected to office, as public relations practitioners learn to sell themselves along with their sponsor’s assets, so are statisticians often expected to produce for their employers figures to support whatever needs to be supported.

What military man has not heard commanders, in their occupational blindness, demand legal officers who “can tell me how to do what I want to do and not why I can’t” or statistical officers who can “angle that progress chart somehow so as to make that line slant up instead of down”? When analysts who may be thorough and exact despite dedication to doctrine are caught in this situation, compromise is the only solution, and compromises can become cumulative.

Mr. McNamara was long aware of such criticisms as have been quoted here and of others which have not. He showed himself especially sensitive to those which accused him of neglecting human factors and qualities such as those revealed in the lessons of history. Also he was aware of some of the doctrines of classic military theorists, particularly those who would “save humanity from nuclear arms by saving war”—even at the expense of endless war. (p. 28)

It is only fair to note that Mr. McNamara signaled his intentions in this respect and also to note that even the most outspoken hawks, before their wounding, were relatively free from attacks by doves. Osgood duly attributes to Douglas Kiker a now almost incredible public statement by McNamara, one which was little noted at the time: “If you read Toynbee, you realize the importance of a democracy learning to cope with a limited war. The greatest contribution Vietnam is making—right or wrong is beside the point—is that it is developing in the United States an ability to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire. . . . this is the kind of war we’ll most likely be facing for the next fifty years.” (pp. 99 n-100)

The reference to Toynbee is interesting, not so much because that overworked historian often serves as the busy man’s claim to intellectuality, or because Toynbee himself was even then nonviolently opposed to the war, as because of the Secretary’s desire to bring a historian’s perspective into the “esoteric priest-hood” advocating a war—a war that could properly be endless as long as it was otherwise limited. Most historians, Toynbee and a few others excluded, do not wish to cast themselves in the role of prophets or seers in support of specific theories or doctrines. They prefer to ask questions, such as Aron’s at the end of his essay: “To guarantee that wars remain limited, is it not to accept permanent war? Will not limitation in means have as its corollary absence of limitation in time?” (p. 46)

Military men, unlike thinkers, must provide not questions but answers. General George C. Marshall provided a long-forgotten answer during the hearings on MacArthur in the Korean War. He said, “A democracy can­not fight a Seven Years War.” The advocacy of endless limited war, or fifty years of it, may comfort some of us who are older and fear a too-violent termination of the war, but it can be infuriating to the young, who see it as their eternity.

Brodie, “as both a parent and a teacher,” speaks of the young: “It does not depreciate them to surmise that most of their moral indignation over our Vietnamese adventure has been connected with the draft.” (p. 172) Other moral problems involved in having planned a war without the will to finish it are the cumulative effect of the war on the people and the area where it is fought; the fatalism, either passive or desperate, induced by repeated rotation of the military professionals; and escalating costs without an advantage gained or a disadvantage avoided.

No one, in Brodie’s recollection, “ever took into account what frustration from denial of victory or at least of clearly visible progress might mean with respect to the attitudes of the American people in supporting such a war, and also the attitudes of other peoples . . .” (p. 172) Here Brodie speaks for those who favored such a war regardless of interminable restraints; but there were many others—both in uniform and out, in Vietnam, in Europe, in the Pentagon and other headquarters—whose experiences on active and inactive fronts caused them to take all these considerations into account. These men were mostly members of the establishment at the beginning of the sixties, and they probably could be constrained to ride with feigned enthusiasm on the new wave.

Unlike the doctrinaire advocates of unilateral withdrawal, the contributors to this volume display no illusions as to the consequences of our failures in Vietnam. Osgood thinks the total experience will “preclude, at least for a while, . . . any renewed effort to strengthen military deterrence and resistance in the Third World by actively developing and projecting the United States’ capacity to fight local wars.” (p. 116) The development of such a resistance and such a capacity was said in the beginning to be the principal purpose of the Vietnam war.

“A more realistic appraisal of our true capabilities is always to the good,” in Brodie’s opinion, “but we have probably experienced a real constriction of those capabilities rather than merely a clarification of them. The political disunity within the United States which is so largely attributable to the war in Vietnam, and the disaster which has overtaken President Johnson as a result of his personal commitment and involvement, will not soon be forgotten by his successors.” (p. 171) No one could have predicted, at the time Brodie wrote, the determined salvage operation now being attempted in the face of sabotage efforts by those who capitalize on political disunity and insist that nothing more, save honor, need be sacrificed.

A more specific but no more encouraging prediction is made in the final essay by foreign correspondent Brian Crozier: “If the Americans are forced, whether for military or for political reasons, to pull out of Vietnam, their defeat, however disguised, will be hailed by revolutionaries everywhere as the final vindication of the theory . . . that even a super-power can be defeated by a peasant army. In that event, the efforts now being made to launch such insurrections, or sustain them, in Africa, and Latin America, would be redoubled. Even the Russians, who do not appear to share the faith of the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Cubans in the efficacy of the technique, will feel bound to improve on their commitment to insurgents.” (p. 218)

The fact that some gains have been made, regardless of the Vietnam war, is best expressed in Osgood’s conclusion: “If counterparts of the stylized limited warfare of the eighteenth century are unrealistic, counterparts of the total wars of the following centuries would be catastrophic.  The nuclear age has . . . inculcated a novel respect for the deliberate control and limitation of warfare. That respect is a more significant and enduring achievement of limited-war strategists than any of their strategies.” (p. 120)

Fortunately, there remain talented and capable men, sobered if not inspired by recent history, who are now trying to adapt a wide choice of military techniques to the political and social realities of our time. That is the challenge of today.

San Antonio, Texas

*Problems of Modern Strategy, Foreword by Alastair Buchan, The Institute for Strategic Studies, Studies in International Security: 14 (New York: Praeger, 1970, $7.50), 219 pp.

Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish, USAF (Ret), (Ph.D., Rice University) is assistant professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio. Commissioned from flight training in 1932, from 1938 to 1946 he served as flying instructor and supervisor and as Commander, Tuskegee Army Flying School. Other assignments were as Special Assistant to the Vice Chief of Staff, Hq USAF; Air Deputy, NATO Defense College, and Deputy Director, Military Assistance Division, Europe: Assistant for Coordination, DCS/Plans and Programs; and Director, Aerospace Studies Institute, 1961-64, when he retired.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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