The U. S. Navy may be doomed to disappointment in a recruiting program that calls for volunteers to continue a proud heritage—the defense of freedom. For who, among today’s youth, wants to volunteer to fight and perhaps die for a cause as nebulous as “containment of Communism?”
Containment of Communist expansion has been the basis of U. S. foreign policy since 1946. For the second time within a decade, fear of widespread aggression gripped the country and the international climate that produced the Truman Doctrine brought about a national anxiety over the global designs of a monolithic Communism. The restless quest for national security within the crises of the Cold War is the child of this anxiety.
The policy of containment began as a simple defensive strategy designed to preserve the status quo against aggressive Communist subversion in a world ripe for legitimate wars of independence. On 12 January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered perhaps the clearest demarcation of the boundaries of containment in his famous speech before the National Press Club. Six months later, the United States expanded the containment philosophy by responding to Communist aggression in Korea—outside the proclaimed perimeter. This action demonstrated that America would forcibly counter Communist expansion, even in those areas declared not vital to its national security. Thus, over the years, the greater the number of regional alliances contracted to define U. S. foreign interests, the more vague these interests have become. This trend culminated in the Johnson Administration’s White Paper on Vietnam proclaiming the emergence of a Communist government anywhere as a threat to national security. Such vague generalizations force equally deceptive responses from the opposition and alienate those popular revolutionary governments having any trace of Communist participation. Thus, what began as a simple defensive strategy against a well-defined threat gradually escalated into a crusading political religion that not only failed to provide the promised degree of national security, but also led to an alarming militarization of U. S. foreign policy.
National security may be defined as that irreducible minimum which diplomacy must defend without compromise; it is essentially the integrity of the national territory and its institutions.
Obviously, the policy of containment practiced by the Johnson Administration vastly overstepped this simple definition. The execution of this policy as expressed in treaties of collective security has forced the United States to extend military aid to internally unstable governments, tainting the whole effort with a reactionary flavor against many legitimate grievances within those states. This further confuses national with international conflicts and politics with ideology. Such a strategy puts American prestige and military power at the disposal of any regime as long as it is anti-Communist, and further overestimates the degree of political change forced by superior military power.
One concludes that the more emphasis placed upon military considerations in the execution of U. S. foreign policy, the more these considerations will prevail and the more fuzzy will become the line between political and military objectives. Further, it is obvious that the continued pursuit of such policy requires large and costly (though, as we shall see, not necessarily cost-effective) armed forces.
It would seem, then, that the United States has failed to adapt her foreign policy to a changing international climate. By her heavy dependence upon the threat or actual use of military power to effect political solutions she has lost the flexibility she sought through collective security. Flexibility is achieved only when foreign policy is an integral, balanced mix of economics, trade, foreign aid, international law, and military power, cemented together with adroit diplomacy. Unfortunately, the art of diplomacy has waned in the intense ideological struggle of the Cold War. In the words of Hans J. Morgenthau:
Given the nature of the power relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and given the state of mind these two superpowers bring to bear upon their mutual relations, diplomacy has little with which to operate and tends to become obsolete. Under such moral and political conditions, it is not the sensitive, flexible, and versatile mind of the diplomat, but the rigid, relentless, and one-track mind of the crusader that guides the destiny of nations. The crusading mind knows nothing of persuasion and compromise. It knows only of victory and of defeat.
The attempts to circumvent traditional diplomacy and conduct the affairs of nations publicly and by majority vote in the United Nations have failed to decide the principal issues. The ideal concept, “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” has failed as miserably at the Paris Peace Talks as it did at Versailles a half-century earlier, and the Allies have resorted to traditional private negotiations with Hanoi’s representatives. Occasional attempts at finding partial solutions of these issues fail because of the deep political problems involved in the overall relations between the two superpowers.
All major American foreign policy defeats in the postwar decades have been self-inflicted by being direct violations of the following basic rules as formulated by Morgenthau:
► Never put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat without losing face and from which you cannot advance without grave risks;
► Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you;
► The armed forces are the instrument of foreign policy, not its master;
► The government is the leader of public opinion, not its slave.
The failure of American policy in Southeast Asia is self-evident when judged within this context.
Given our present foreign commitments and the present defense strategy to support them, we cannot reduce our armed forces without sizeable risks to these commitments. However, the success of the volunteer concept depends upon (1) a thorough reassessment of the utility of conventional military power in the Nuclear Age, (2) the competing roles and costs of technology versus manpower, and (3) whether massive conventional forces are essential to support our NATO and SEATO commitments, or whether a restructured force dependent upon strategic mobility and the judicious use of tactical nuclear weapons would provide a more credible deterrent. While it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze in detail the above conclusions, a brief summary demonstrates that a thorough study of their implications upon the composition and mission of the armed forces is mandatory.
First, the utility of military power in the Nuclear Age has declined since an uncontrolled military confrontation increases the risks of a strategic nuclear exchange whose liabilities far outweigh any objective achieved by military power alone. In fact, the principal value of military power today is its latent usability; that is, the mere possession of military force is a positive weight in the power balance during any international crisis. Nevertheless, it appears that the strategic nuclear balance between the superpowers and the possession of various types of tactical nuclear weapons severely limit the utility of large conventional forces. More detailed analysis of present international trends shows that the probability of large land/sea engagements which increase the likelihood of a strategic nuclear confrontation between the superpowers has greatly diminished. Consequently, “sub-limited war” and contingency operations emerge as the only “safe” means of exerting military power; thus they become the most probable operational roles of the military forces in the foreseeable future.
Further analysis of past and present Soviet intentions in Europe, combined with the acceptance of a preemptive tactical nuclear response to deliberate conventional escalation, would seem to argue for smaller, more effective NATO forces in Europe. Moreover, a massive buildup of conventional forces to match those of the Soviets reduces the credibility of a tactical nuclear response to invasion from the East. NATO forces must be prepared to escalate any conflict to a point beyond which the aggressor feels the risks outweigh the prospective gains. Given the present trends, the use of “demonstration” tactical nuclear weapons would limit the conflict prior to commitment of large conventional forces, thereby reducing the probability of escalation to massive nuclear proportions, and convince both ally and aggressor of our resolve. Further, it appears unlikely under these conditions that the Soviets would risk using tactical weapons in response.
Finally, by exploiting our strength in technology and our pre-eminence in strategic mobility—by becoming NATO’s arsenal rather than its manpower pool—the United States could provide NATO with a more credible, more efficient European defense force based not upon massive nuclear retaliation or a protracted effort to achieve massive conventional parity, but upon strategic mobility anchored to the judicious use of pre-emptive tactical nuclear weapons.
Certain basic changes have occurred in the traditional concepts of armed forces employment. The organization of these forces must reflect such changes in order to provide effective forces for the least cost. A further stipulation demands that those factors necessary for the success of the volunteer system be emphasized. There have been many suggestions for immediate steps that would “guarantee” the success of the volunteer system. Most of these proposals concern themselves with pay and fringe benefits and disregard the impact of technology upon manpower requirements and the type of organization that must exist to perform the required military tasks most efficiently.
A mere 14% of the more-than-three-million men in the armed forces fire weapons as their primary duty, and a full 50% are involved in technical support roles. Army organization began to reflect this fact with its Specialist ratings. Similarly, officers and men of the Air Force and Navy are essentially technicians, maintaining and operating sophisticated equipments.
Thus, a complete reorganization of the armed forces into “line” and “technical” branches seems essential. These two branches are related, but realistically, the technical branch exists merely to support the line branch in accomplishment of the respective service’s mission. The line branch consists of those people performing essentially nontechnical, combat-oriented tasks. This branch must absorb the most revolutionary concepts of warfare to become the professional, elite units—of which more will be said later—that would most likely attract volunteers in sufficient numbers.
These changes, of course, would be gradual, but the end result would be a completely air-mobile field army, with a primary capability in the areas of counterinsurgency, psychological-political confrontation, and contingency operations.
In the discussion that follows, we will be discussing enlisted men, but the concepts can be extended to the officer corps.
Promotion and retention in the line branch would depend upon frequent examinations, in the field, based upon physical, professional, and leadership skills, as well as standard evaluation reports. At each stage of the selection process, the rejectees would be allowed a specified length of remaining time in grade. At the end of this time, the individual would be given the option of separation with the benefits of a modified “Project Transition”—wherein, after a period of enlisted service, a soldier will be retrained for a civilian trade at government expense—and the accrued retirement credits he had earned, or he would remain in the Ready Reserve on general instructor duty for an additional period.
A reorganization of the Ready Reserves is essential to provide the depth required for rapid, worldwide deployment. Gradually, the Selective Service should be able to reduce the draft calls to zero, while continuing to register all qualified young men in the exponentially expanding 18- to-20-year-old manpower pool and process them through their induction physicals. Using modern centralized data processing techniques, these administrative details could be programmed well in advance, creating a minimum interruption in the lives of the young men involved.
The basic mission of the Ready Reserves would encompass not only an emergency manpower-base for line units, but would also serve as a realistic basic summer training unit for potential draftees, should they become necessary. The key is to integrate a line unit on refresher training with a basic training unit “under instruction.”
The technical branch would exist to perform, not military functions, but primarily technical ones, even though both branches would undergo basic military training. Within the technical branch, high, long-term retention would be vital, and to promote this, a more technically professional branch, which rewards technical competence and minimizes strictly military roles, must exist. Such a system must divorce the individual’s rate or rank from the pay scale and include, for pay purposes, specific weights for educational background, performance evaluations, developed skills, and responsibilities discharged. This proposal minimizes seniority but accounts for years of service in a sliding retirement credit system.
Obviously, circumstances within a military organization dictate some chain of command structure such as the supervisor system used in industry. In fact, the majority of training should be accomplished in industrial, rather than service schools, with a possibility for the individual to earn college scholarships. The end result would be the development of a technical esprit de corps and a technical environment attractive to those having a technical bent who are contemplating a service career.
For the Navy, the separation of line and technical branches becomes essential. Present philosophy emphasizes the need for the naval officer aspiring to command at sea to have experience in all departments so that, as commanding officer, knowledge tempers his decisions which, in turn, reflect his experience. Unfortunately for the present system, the complexity of modern ships and weapons systems, along with the shortages of qualified personnel, does not permit such training experience. The surface Navy admits as much by providing a U. S. Naval Destroyer School to ensure that all future destroyer department heads are basically familiar with each departmental function. But, obviously, only a small number of officers can benefit from such training. What of officers in other surface branches?
There should be specialists in communications, operations, weapons, engineering, and the deck areas. In destroyer types, these specialists would be department heads and would remain in their specialities throughout their careers. The junior deck officer on the other hand, would be free to serve an administrative apprenticeship in each department while fulfilling his primary role as shiphandler and deck watchstander. Only deck officers would be eligible for command at sea, and in a command capacity would function as an executive administrator and decisionmaker. Paradoxically, by replacing the present system and instituting a system of specialists, the Navy comes closer to its original goal of the versatile and experienced commanding officer.
How can the Navy procure such specialists? Basic training facilities and programs already exist. The outstanding civilian universities and technical schools are designed to produce the specialists the Navy needs, provided of course, that they receive some basic military training. Moreover, the Naval Academy is the natural source for deck officers, and in this capacity, should be gradually expanded to produce the naval specialist.
If the nation is to make efficient use of its manpower resources, the service academies must expand their roles as teachers of the basic military skills and leave the detailed study of technology to civilian institutions specifically designed for that purpose. Further, it should be possible under the new system for a technically motivated deck officer to become a specialist through examinations and postgraduate training, just as he does at present.
The country should assess the service academies’ roles as strictly undergraduate institutions. It seems proper that all young men motivated toward a deck specialty should benefit from the expanded naval professionalism of the Naval Academy, even if they are already college graduates. Too often, instead of the respect due the true professional seaman, the naval specialist suffers an anti-intellectual stigma when compared with civilian graduates.
And, while we are on the subject of “respect,” can we agree that the prestige of a military career and its effects upon job satisfaction are crucial in any discussion of a volunteer military service?
There can be no doubt that a decline in the prestige of the military career has forced the services into desperate competition for talent within the nation’s manpower resources.
The United States has never had a “military aristocracy” in the European sense, and this fact, combined with the “melting pot” effect, has prevented the development of any political or social power base as a source of prestige. Moreover, the existence of strong civilian control over the military and the principle of military allegiance to a form of government rather than to a particular individual, has likewise prevented the formation of such a social caste.
The declining legitimacy of war as a tool of foreign policy and the demands of domestic social injustice have diminished the privilege and increased the moral burden of military service. Rapid growth of communications has focused the concern of America’s youth upon the ravages and miseries of war throughout the world. Belief in the basic rights of man transcends national borders; hence, some of our youth regard service to purely national interests as selfishly imperialistic. Concurrently, the industrialized societies of the West tend to be politically highly mobilized and the national leadership more responsive to the national will than was the case before the advent of instantaneous worldwide communications.
Unfortunately, a lack of familiarity with military life has created resentment rather than appreciation among the general public. Inequities in the draft, inept attempts at “democratizing” the armed forces, and even some of the attitudes of the military itself, have all combined to create a significant loss of prestige for the military career.
The changing role of the military establishment reflects the fact that a stable domestic environment is the first prerequisite of national security.
Certainly the nation’s involvement in civil rights issues, with the resulting racial strife, has fostered a concurrent antimilitary sentiment. Black servicemen still suffer from discrimination in housing in certain areas of the country as well as from split loyalties between racial pride and the demands of military service to the country. The armed services have suffered an additional stigma of repressiveness through their use by local authorities to quell civil disturbances.
Perhaps the basic tenet of military service is submergence of self in a common effort to achieve common objectives. Today’s youth, products of the humanism and international idealism of their academic and social training, question the traditional goals of the military as well as the relevance of these goals to the solution of pressing social and environmental problems. Moreover, military men of the past have taken the spirit of wartime sacrifice as an integral part of military life. The present controversy stirred by the necessity for such sacrifices during peacetime as opposed to their inevitable ill effects on personnel retention, prompted the Secretary of the Navy, John H. Chafee, to state,
We have, for 25 years, expected wartime sacrifices from our personnel under less than wartime conditions . . . personnel considerations must become more of a part of our defense planning . . .
Small, professionally elite units of the armed services still draw many more volunteers than all the remaining units combined. Without exception, these units are substantially more authoritarian and less “democratic” than regular units, but they are also more professional, and place great emphasis upon individual competence.
There is, then, this apparent paradox: military prestige is likely to increase with the demilitarization of U. S. foreign policy and be sustained by an increased professionalism and esprit de corps of a smaller, elite armed force.
An immediate issue before the nation is the concept of universal military training and the role of peacetime conscription within a democracy. Many believe that service to the country is a debt to be paid only through discharging a military obligation. However, in this era of grave problems that require total national involvement, there has been a decrease in the importance of “strategic” raw materials for defense purposes and a greater emphasis upon scientific, technological, managerial, and other human resources. Therefore, “service to the country” has expanded to include contributions from all segments of the civilian community. The nation must now decide whether it shall continue its present manpower procurement and national service policies in the strict military sense, or accept other means of service.
It is clear that the citizen soldier is expensive in terms of training costs, personnel turnover, and the lower overall combat readiness and morale that results from individual rather than unit replacement; it remains unclear whether or not the citizen soldier is a uniquely American psychological and moral necessity. In the spirit of democracy, Congress should amend the Military Selective Service Act to proclaim that the government will attempt to meet all necessary manpower requirements by volunteers, except in case of a national emergency. Such a step requires a well-trained Reserve and a “standby” draft in which all young men between the ages of 18 and 20 have already been registered, have been physically examined, and those qualified programmed for summer training at expanded facilities already being used for Reserve and Regular training.
Further, and given a solution to the Vietnam conflict, Congress should replace the now-repealed Tonkin Gulf Resolution, with a similar resolution which reaffirms the exclusive Constitutional power of the Congress to declare war and put a limit on the number of combat troops the President can commit to a contingency (combat) situation without a Congressional resolution or declaration of war. There should be, however, no restrictions on the President’s prerogative to commit air and naval support (including the embarked Fleet Marine Force), or a limited number of military advisers in such circumstances.
The United States must determine its goals and establish its priorities so that the necessary resources are available to solve the fundamental human and environmental problems of the 1970s. In fact, Thomas J. Watson, reflecting upon the results of his study of national goals commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1959, observed in a speech in January 1970 that the nation has no specific goals set down—and no means to implement them. He further argues that:
Our call to stop communism anywhere—despite the price—drifted us into an unattainable goal in Vietnam (original italics). Since we have no formal mechanism to study, adjust, and reset our national priorities in an integrated fashion, we pursued the Vietnam goal to a costly point.
Perhaps the nation’s highest priority goal should be the abandonment of the policy of containment and the recognition of national interests instead of ideology as the departure point for negotiating an East-West detente. Successively important tasks are the integration and restoration of a balanced U. S. foreign policy and the reorganization of the armed forces into technical and line branches, to support the national interest cost-effectively. These concepts, of course, require careful study of true conventional force requirements based upon a surging technology and a national military strategy stressing the proper mix of land, sea, air, and special-purpose forces all geared for rapid deployment in contingency and politico-military confrontations. The size—and therefore the success—of the volunteer military service hinges on the results of such studies and policy decisions.
__________
A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy with the Class of 1964, Lieutenant Brooks did a year’s research in the field of radiation effects on transistors as one of the original Trident Scholars. Selected for immediate postgraduate education, he attended the Graduate School of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University (1964-1968), earning his MSEE and the degree of Electrical Engineer in the area of high frequency solid state devices and systems. Subsequent assignment to the Richard L. Page (DEG-5) as Electronics Officer and later, as Communications Officer, gave him the experience of two deployments in European waters and the deck qualifications necessary to achieve selection for Naval Destroyer School. He taught basic Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1967 and contributed a chapter presenting a non-mathematical introduction to electronics systems techniques for clinical physicians in Techniques In Clinical Physiology.