Document created: 11 December 03
Air University Review, March-April
1973
Lieutenant
Colonel Richard D. Besley
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by speaking words without
knowledge?
—Job 38:2
Since World War II, there has evolved a body of civilian intelligentsia that has flourished through thinking, writing, and counseling our national leaders on military strategic theory. During a renaissance of military strategic thought which began in the 1950s, civilian scholar-thinkers—militarists in mufti—have built an edifice of strategic theory that still exerts a profound influence on all important aspects of United States defense policy.
The advent of thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems brought American strategists face to face with a task of unforeseen difficulty. The traditional concepts of war and peace, which had allowed the United States to sally forth from its continental fortress to engage in peace-restoring crusades and then return home, were rendered invalid.
International conflict used to be viewed as clearly defined periods of
violence which began when diplomacy failed and statesmen handed the burden of
achieving victory over to the military. This mutual exclusion of political and
military considerations in strategic planning was illustrated a few days before
Pearl Harbor in Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s comment on the U.S.—Japanese
diplomatic situation: “I have washed my hands of it, and it is now in the hands
of . . . the Army and the Navy.”1 The corollary philosophy was
reflected in General George C. Marshall’s remark during World War II concerning
a British proposal to modify Allied strategy: “I would be loath to hazard
American lives for purely political purposes.”2
World War II in Europe was hardly over when the grim realization finally
struck that, while Germany was being defeated, a new and growing political
threat was introduced by the half ally, Soviet Russia. The United States found
itself confronting an expansive power whose conflicting postwar aims had been
cloaked by the common Allied military strategy framed during the war.3 Even
though the threat of Communist expansionism was worrisome, the U.S. strategists
theorized that a containment policy, backed by the still exclusive American
atomic arsenal, would discourage Soviet incursions beyond the periphery of
existing boundaries.4
The atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented the air power
strategists a new and presumably ultimate weapon. It heralded the massive
retaliation era and the accompanying drawdown of conventional, or general
purpose, forces. Those explosions were blinding to more than the unfortunate
Japanese. The apparent economy of mass destruction weapons gave rise to the
slogan “More bang per buck,” but sole reliance on atomic bombs ignored the fact
that they might soon be bought with rubles as well as dollars.5
The Eisenhower administration took office in 1953 committed to ending the Korean War and taking a new look at U.S. military strategy. The New Look strategy embodied a long-haul concept with an attendant need for economy.6 It discarded the Truman administration’s notion of planning toward a crisis year and formalized a dominant role for the Air Force as the practitioner of deterrence through the threat of “massive retaliation.”
The massive retaliation strategy was announced officially to the world by
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954, and the Communists were warned
that further aggression in Korea might lead to a United Nations response which
would “not necessarily be confined to Korea.”7 The massive
retaliation concept established the basic orientation for future defense policy
for many years to come.8
The storm of criticism over Secretary Dulles’s 1954 pronouncement was widespread. It came not only from Democrat leaders, the political opposition, but from the scholars of national security policy, such as Henry Kissinger, William W. Kaufmann, and others.
The fact that a Republican administration espoused the philosophy of massive retaliation gave considerable political flavor to the criticism of that philosophy, so that the scholar-strategists paid court to, and were heard by, the Democratic hopefuls. This courtship of strategic thinking and politics culminated, circa 1961, in the marriage of a number of strategy critics to the Kennedy administration. A large part of the 1960 presidential campaign battle between Kennedy and Nixon was waged over defense strategy issues. As Nixon felt duty-bound to defend the Eisenhower administration, he was thereby linked to the massive retaliation idea. Kennedy, on the other hand, was free to pursue new thinking that favored a more flexible posture, and he carried a host of the civilian neostrategists along to victory and to Washington.
After Kennedy’s inauguration, Alain Enthoven and Henry Rowen, former RAND
analysts, were installed in high-level Pentagon positions. They had both
collaborated with Albert Wohlstetter in the early 1950s on a RAND project to
study alternatives for basing the strategic bomber force overseas.9 Wohlstetter
and William Kaufmann became actively involved as consultants to the Office of
the Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger, of course, has served both the
Kennedy and Nixon administrations, demonstrating a remarkably durable and apolitical brand of stewardship. Herman Kahn, a RAND product, served both as an
adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and as a consultant to the Department
of Defense. Thomas C. Schelling was a senior staff member at RAND and joined
the Kennedy camp as an adviser to the United States Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency. He was probably recruited to the position on the basis of
his 1961 book (with Morton Halperin), Strategy and Arms Control.10
These civilian scholars, drawn from the varying disciplines of the physical sciences, economics, and international relations, are representative of the relatively small group of neostrategists upon whom a great burden was placed.11 Beginning at the RAND Corporation, they assumed the task of determining how to think about nuclear weapons under rapidly changing technological and political circumstances.
Why have the military professionals been so ineffective in this area? The answer appears to lie in a paradoxical pair, discipline and disunity: the discipline of the military in faithfully carrying out administration policy and the disunity born of interservice rivalry.
The President is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Once he has set the course in American relations with other nations (e.g., the massive retaliation concept), it behooves the uniformed military strategist/planner to steer that course. As General Maxwell Taylor pointed out in The Uncertain Trumpet (1959), when President Eisenhower implemented the New Look military policy in 1953 all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were summarily replaced.12 This action made clear the position of the JCS as workers for the administration team. They were expected to accept public responsibility for the decisions and actions of their civilian superiors concerning military policy, regardless of their own views and recommendations.
The more immediate results of the puppet-JCS syndrome were that most military strategy planners marched resolutely forward under the banner of massive retaliation while the civilian thinkers raised a hue and cry against it. By the time the political opposition stormed the White House in 1960, the civilian strategists had established themselves as creative and innovative, and the military were viewed as unimaginative, with little promise of developing any forward-looking strategy.
It was not until after the Kennedy administration emphasized the concepts of flexible response and counterinsurgency that objectives other than total victory and means other than head-on conflict became accepted in principle by the military establishment.13 Henceforth, the JCS and military planners would think through such concepts because the President, the Commander in Chief, had given them direction. To have pursued the development of such strategy earlier, during the Eisenhower years, would have been unwise from a military professional’s viewpoint.
Probably of significance equal to the disciplinary or bureaucratic factor that enhanced the rise of civilian scholar-thinkers was the lack of agreement between the armed services. Although the separate services had fought through World War II more or less in harness, it was seemingly impossible for them to agree on strategic plans for the postwar era.14 They soon came to realize that the selection of strategy would hinge largely on the budget.
As the military budget was sharply reduced after the war, the most economical strategy appeared to favor the Air Force because the massive retaliation concept rested largely on the Air Force capability to deliver intercontinental nuclear weapons. Hence the Air Force could expect the largest share from annual defense budgets. The Army flatly opposed massive retaliation, partly because it meant a drastic cutback in ground forces and therefore less money to develop its desired force structure.
Service rivalries became so intense and enduring that, even with a strong
chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not develop a set of coherent
strategic plans. Indeed, President Kennedy in June 1961 was so frustrated by
JCS disunity that he gave them a direct order by written memorandum asking for
their “help in fitting military requirements into the overall context of any
situation . . . .” He wanted to consider them as “more than military men” for the purpose
of strategic thinking and planning.15
The overall result of the service rivalries and the attempts by the JCS to tell the boss what they thought he wanted to hear concerning strategy was that nothing new or thought-provoking issued from them.16 In urgent need of fresh new approaches to the problems of a world in political flux, the Kennedy administration installed the civilian neostrategists as the primary thinkers on national security matters.
In assessing the past performance of the civilian strategists, Colin S. Gray, writing in the Fall 1971 issue of Foreign Policy, observed: “In 1961 the promise was high. Yet in 1971 it is fair to say that their performance has not lived up to their promise.”17 Another critic commented that the philosophy which evolved from “thinking about the unthinkable” had caused a widespread tendency to “unthink the thinkable.”18 To paraphrase, we have spent so much time gaming and analyzing scenarios of nuclear confrontation between superpowers that we have failed to consider adequately the more likely encounters.
Other writers have given the civilians better marks. Writing in World
Politics in July 1968, Hedley Bull, Professor of International Relations at
the Australian National University, observed that the doctrine evolved by the
scholar-strategists, while not the “last word on strategy in the nuclear age,”
should be viewed as at least a clear definition of the problems we faced.
Professor Bull gave them credit for charting “some reasoned course” when
otherwise we might have been adrift; he said that even though history may
reject the “intellectual fare” which they provided, it should certainly applaud
the efforts of the scholarly strategists to frame and dissect the issues.19
The methodologies of the scholar-strategists, such as economic models, game theory, and escalation ladders, comprise the basic reason for the difficulty in transferring answers from model-building to prescriptions for action. Although the sincere and vital interest of the scholars in the survival of their country cannot be denied, it can nevertheless be deduced that their thinking and writing were often as much a bid for recognition from their peers as they were an accurate reflection on military and political realities. The shower of articles, books, and other publications by the civilian scholars demonstrated their compulsion to publish the great American strategic volume. Publication of an acceptable book is a significant and much-sought-after career milestone in the scholarly disciplines. According to reliable estimates, over 100,000 pieces of “literature” were written on the subject of warfare in the years just prior to 1967.20 Herman Kahn probably won the strategy publication race with his efforts, On Thermonuclear War (1960), Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), and Limited Strategic War (1962).
It is fact that the most influential of the civilian strategists have been the most prolific publishers.21 It is also factual that the strategy writers’ tenure with RAND and similar agencies has given them access to classified information, which puts the stamp of authenticity on their works. While it may be beneficial to communicate to other nations exactly how we are approaching the study of war in the nuclear age, it could be of more value to cloak our innermost thoughts with a semblance of security and thereby deny potential enemies a check list of our probable responses. Anyone familiar with the Pentagon Papers incident, in which a RAND employee revealed highly classified national security documents to the world, will appreciate the dangers inherent in the scholar’s tendency toward dual loyalties: to his country and to mankind.
Because they are essentially men of ideas, the civilian scholar-strategists tend to be overly optimistic about the transferability of their theories to the real world. The aspects of speculation and abstractness, characteristic of the study of nuclear conflict, are the very sirens that lured the scholars to the study of military strategy. Since there has never been a nuclear war per se and as time passes that possibility seems less likely to rational men, the mere speculation about how nations might react as such an event unfolded becomes even more of a fantasy.22 A few of the scholars, on introspection, have admitted that, even though speculation on nuclear conflict was a useful development, its direct application to diplomacy suffered from a fatal defect, and that least of all the academics had any idea how a nuclear war would be fought or even whether it would favor the offense or defense.
This is not to suggest that to qualify for strategic thought one must first
enjoy a reputation as a great field general. On the contrary, most of
the world’s recognized military strategists in uniform never attained the rank
of general or its equivalent. For that matter, few were even considered good
soldiers. Nevertheless, a historical assumption has been that strategy is
essentially a practical consideration and that some experience in the
management of forces and weapons, while not a guarantee of strategic expertise,
should certainly be a prerequisite to entering the field.23
An assumption basic to most of the theories advanced by the scholar-strategists, notably Thomas Schelling and Oskar Morgenstern, is that contemporary international conflict can be analyzed in terms of rational “strategic men.” This assumption is necessary in order to fit the study of strategy problems into the economic models and gaming scenarios that characterize the scientific systems-analysis approach. According to Colin Gray:
Apart from natural pride in theoretical
accomplishment, the predisposition of American strategists to discern a Western
tutelage of Soviet strategic doctrine derives in part from the academic
backgrounds of many theoreticians and the economic orientation of the
strategists of the RAND Corporation. [As a result] . . . a good number of the
leading civilian strategists created a mirror image opponent.24
In a purely theoretical exercise, the assumed symmetry of opponents is harmless, but the games of strategy played out in the scholarly literature of the past two decades were not intended exclusively for an academic audience. The simulated “American” nature of the opponent was transferred to the thinking of advisers to the government and to the policy-makers themselves. The result has been that United States strategic theory is highly ethnocentric and diverges from the military professional’s cautious axiom, “Know your enemy.”
By minimizing the personal or psychological element in the pursuit of gaming
models and simulation, the scholars accept as fixed the goals and interests of
the players. They tend to disregard the interdependence of goals, means,
personalities, and group arrangements of the opponents.25
An indictment of method may seem harsh or unfair, given that the analytical
gaming methodologists promise nothing more than a reduction of uncertainty. But
such an evaluation seems necessary to offset the claims that the
scholar-strategists presided over the birth of a new science which will eliminate
outdated methods and replace them with technically superior and sophisticated
systems analysis techniques. The tools of the scholar are helpful in
considering alternative solutions to critical problems; but as Bernard Brodie,
an eminent civilian strategist in his own right, has admitted, the systems
analysis technique “is not coterminous with strategy, as Mr. McNamara, among
others, thought it was.” Brodie pointed out that Secretary McNamara, a
statistician by training, was “plainly in love with it [systems analysis]” and
rejected the “poetry” of those around him who tried to introduce some political
intuition.26
The neostrategists comprised a highly like-minded school which absorbed most of the appropriate and available talent. Any dissident spokesmen from outside were few and easily stifled. Given this enviable position, it is to their credit and that of the very methods they employed that objectivity and reason have prevailed through the years of their dominance in the field of national strategic thought.
During those years when thinking about the unthinkable was in vogue, the face of the strategic enemy was blurred behind satellites, computers, and ICBM launchers. He was perceived to be a single-minded, rational, American-like strategic analyst. Fortunately for the Free World, the neostrategists apparently convinced the Soviet of his “genius” and thereby lessened the chances of irrational behavior. Certainly we should give the civilian strategist-writers credit for inculcating in the Soviets, as well as our own leadership, an appreciation of world stability and a desire to limit and control warfare.
The unfortunate result is that our national military leadership entered the
seventies with twenty-five years of experience during which they were seldom
afforded opportunity or encouragement to think in broad strategic terms.27
Since 1970, it has appeared that President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger want to consider a grand new strategic design and have invited the military to participate. Concurrently, it is apparent that the game-theory syndrome of the sixties, which emphasized the symmetrical structure of possible conflict between mutually perceptive strategic players, is at an end.
Much of the change can be attributed to the decreasing preoccupation with a strictly bipolar U.S.—U.S.S.R. relationship and a growing appreciation of more complex and multipolar scenarios that reject nuclear war as a viable instrument of national policy.
As a result, the diplomatic situation between the two superpowers has changed in recent years. There is an implied nuclear standoff and tacit recognition of each other’s zones of influence and vital interests.28 A situation of this sort, with inherent ambiguity and implied relationships, does not lend itself to sterile gaming analysis.
Morton Halperin, in his Defense Strategies for the Seventies, interpreted the changing scene by saying that as we have passed from the massive retaliation stratagem of the fifties, and as thermonuclear war has become unthinkable as an alternative, the relevancy of civilian strategists has diminished. He observed that, in the shadow of nuclear stalemate, we are returning to a conventional concept of military power, where military thinkers are best.
Since the advent of the Nixon administration, the door has been opened to
military professional advice and counsel on national security matters. Whereas
Secretary McNamara exercised virtual autonomy over Defense policy decisions,
even those with large foreign policy impact, Secretary Laird returned the
military to a substantial role in policy-making. A senior State Department
official has noted that instead of dealing largely with civilian analysts, as
during the Kennedy-Johnson years, the Foreign Service offices deal increasingly
with both the Joint Staff and the separate services.29
Secretary Laird seemed to be granting the military more autonomy and reducing the role of the civilian staffers. At the same time the highly structured National Security Council staff and the new Defense Policy Review Committee suggest that President Nixon means to substitute rigorous institutional procedure for the systems analyses of his predecessors as the means of assuring civilian control.30 The administration has offered the military profession an opportunity to become involved in developing national security policy.
The military leadership can no longer complain before congressional committees that all their troubles stem from the “whiz kid” civilians in OSD Systems Analysis. The challenge to the military is obvious: be creative, imaginative, innovative, and responsive. The related challenge is to avoid renewal of the harsh interservice arguments that have detracted from military counsel so often in the past.
The military services must provide an institutional capability to understand
political objectives and to suggest appropriate applications of the armed
forces to achieve them. Military leaders must comprehend more fully the
relationship of means to ends and appreciate the moral principles that play a
vital role in the success and acceptability of military operations. Deterrence
of war and the attainment of political objectives must be recognized as “victory,”
even at the lower levels of conflict.31
It is difficult to generate a body of competent strategic thought at high levels within the services as they are presently structured. In fact, the misconception that a military chief of staff is also a strategist may be responsible for many of our past problems. Often, when civilians did defer to the military chiefs on national security questions, they were disappointed.
Our armed forces are commanded by intelligent, competent, and dedicated leaders. But that does not say that they are strategists.32 There are numerous strategists and potential strategists in our armed forces, but that does not say that they are in positions of command. Leadership of the forces is not and cannot be reserved for strategists. Good strategists are not always good leaders. But certain key positions at high level should be filled by strategic thinkers.
One thing needed to insure military strategic expertise at the proper levels is a reasonable prospect of promotion for those officers who demonstrate talent in strategy matters yet may not necessarily aspire to command troops.
An example of the type of program we need is the Air Force Research Associate Program. This program selects promising Air Force lieutenant colonels and colonels for one-year tours with civilian organizations engaged in studies of national security policy. The places of assignment vary from year to year and include such organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations, New York; Center for International Studies, Harvard University; the Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University; the Washington Center for Foreign Policy Research, Johns Hopkins University; and the Institute for Strategic Studies, London. Before reporting to their one-year assignments for study, these officers are given a two-week orientation program, consisting of several briefings in the Pentagon, three days at the RAND Corporation, and sometimes visits to major command headquarters.
This type of program allows the selected military professional to step outside the military establishment for a time, look back on it, and view it in relationship to the other elements of national security. Armed with this perspective and educated to the ideas and logic of the civilian strategists and their institutions, the military officer is better equipped to contribute to the development of a body of coherent strategic thought within the military. Moreover, the very presence of intellectually oriented officers in the civilian institutions should contribute to a mutual respect between the disciplines and could influence the direction of strategic thought generated among civilian scholars.
An expansion of programs such as this can satisfy the requirement to select and train military strategic thinkers; their placement, promotion, and recognition will take more time and effort on the part of all the armed services, separately and jointly.
If the Military Profession is to regain its rightful position in the design of national strategy, then the level of interservice bickering over parochial interests must be depressed. By the time strategic issues are laid before the National Security Council or the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff owe their leader a semblance of unity. Neither he nor the National Security Council nor the Defense Policy Review Committee should be put in the position of arbitrating an interservice squabble. Differences in service outlook are certain to arise, but they should be resolved in the JCS arena. That is why we need military strategic thinkers at all levels down to major command, to think through the doctrinal differences which impede service unity and thereby reduce damaging arguments at higher levels.
Our civilian chiefs have offered us a meaningful role in the formulation of national security strategy. We should answer the call by expanding, in a joint services effort, programs like the Air Force Research Associates. Our personnel assignment and promotion policies should be tailored to encourage and reward career-minded strategists, but the most telling impetus will simply be top-level service interest.
We must identify those with particular genius and place them in key positions in or near the policy power centers such as the Defense Policy Review Committee, Net Assessment Group, and National Security Council.
It behooves the military hierarchy to seize the opportunity and meet the challenge which the current scene affords, lest we once again abdicate our role in national security affairs.
Norfolk, Virginia
Colonel Besley adapted this article from a study prepared as part of his academic work while a student in the 1972 class of Air War College.
Notes
1. Robert S. Gard, “The Military and American Society,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 49, No. 4, July 1971, p. 699.
2. Ibid. It is quite possible that this remark by General Marshall demonstrated not so much an aversion to politics in general as a distaste for using American troops to help restore portions of the British colonial empire.
3. Maurice Matloff, “The Evolution of Strategic Thought,” The National War College Forum, Spring 1971, 12th Issue, p. 79.
4. Martin Lichterman, Korea: Problems in Limited War,” in Gordon B. Turner and Richard D. Challener, eds., National Security in the Nuclear Age (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1960), p. 31.
5. General Maxwell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 13.
6. Morton H. Halperin, Defense Strategies for the Seventies (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 41.
7. Secretary Dulles was quoted in Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 249.
8. Ibid. A book by Brigadier General Dale O. Smith, U. S. Military Doctrine (New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1955), provides one of the few comprehensive treatments of massive retaliation given by a military writer at that time.
9. Ernest R. May, “The Influence of Ideas on American Foreign Policy: Ideas about Military Strategy,” a paper presented at the 67th Annual Meeting, American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, 10 September 1971, p. 9.
10. Raymond J. Wilson, Jr., The Eggheads and the Pentagon: The Influence of Civilian Intellectuals on National Security Policy, Air War College Thesis No. 2379, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, 1963, pp. 13-15. Colonel Wilson’s thesis, written nine years ago, is accurate in its implied prophecy that Dr. Kissinger’s influence on strategic policy-making was durable.
11. Bernard Brodie, “Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?” Foreign Policy, No. 5, Winter 1971-72, p. 153.
12. Taylor, p. 18.
13. Gard, pp. 701-2.
14. William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 19.
15. President Kennedy quoted in Gard, p. 702.
16. Brodie, p. 153.
17. Colin S. Gray, “What Hath RAND Wrought,” Foreign Policy, No. 4, Fall 1971, p. 111.
18. A. H. S. Candlin, “Unthinking the Thinkable,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, Vol. CXIV, No. 653, March 1969, p. 41.
19. Hedley Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics,” World Politics, Vol. XX, July 1968, p. 605.
20. Raymond G. O’Connor, “Current Concepts and Philosophy of Warfare,” Lecture, Naval War College, 12 September 1967. Reprinted in Military Strategy and Aerospace Power, Vol. IV, Chapter 10, Air War College Associate Program, 1969, p. 27.
21.Wilson, pp. 8-16.
22. James King, “Nuclear Plenty and Limited War,” Foreign Affairs, January 1957, p. 239.
23. Bull, p. 594.
24. Gray, p. 111.
25. Karl W. Deutsch, Introduction to Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. x.
26. Brodie, p. 156.
27. Vincent Davis, “American Military Policy: Decisionmaking in the Executive Branch,” lecture, Naval War College, 7 January 1970. Printed in Naval War College Review, Vol. XXII, May 1970, p. 16.
28. Raymond Aaron, “The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought,” Adelphi Papers, Problems of Modern Strategy, Part I, February 1969, Institute for Strategic Studies, London, p. 16.
29. William Beecher, “Foreign Policy: Pentagon Also Encounters Rebuffs,” New York Times, January 21, 1971, p. 1.
30. Adam Yarmolinsky, The Military Establishment: Its Impacts on American Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 33.
31. Gard, p. 704.
32. Stefan T. Possony and J. E. Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology (New York: Dunellen Company, Inc., 1970), p. 80.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard D. Besley (M.S., George Washington University) is a Faculty Adviser at the Armed Forces Staff College, Norfolk, Virginia. His experience includes six years in MATS, flying the C-124. Later he flew the C-47, C-54, C-118, and the C-7 in Vietnam. He worked in Range Operations at the Air Force Eastern Test Range, 1960-65, and four years on the Air Staff, dealing with rated officer requirements for the Director, Manpower and Organization. Colonel Besley is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and Air War College.
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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