The job of maintaining national preparedness in peacetime, which is of vital concern now that hostilities arc over, is not entirely a matter of deciding upon specific tonnages for our peacetime fleets, or division strengths for our standing Army. These things must, of course, be done. But there is a further matter—even more important—of insuring, during the coming years of peace, an attitude on the part of the general public that will back up these peacetime forces and make them effective; an attitude, in other words, that understands the proper function of armed force in the relationships between nations, and is ready and willing to make use of it, should the occasion demand. Without such an attitude, no array of military or naval strength, however impressive, can prove to be more than another Maginot Line in the defense of a nation’s honor and interests. The advent of peace has not relieved us of the obligation of thinking about war. On the contrary, our chances of building and maintaining peace depend directly upon our success, as a nation, in achieving a mature and realistic understanding—already long overdue—of just what war is, and what part it has played and is still likely to play, over the long term, in the life of nations.
It has always been difficult for us, as a democratic and freedom-loving people, to give any more thought or time to the business of war than has been absolutely necessary. The minute the job of fighting is over, we hasten to forget the whole messy affair as quickly and completely as possible. Our natural loathing for the suffering and tragedy and terrific cost of war kept us, during the years of peace, from undertaking, except on the most limited scale, any serious study of the nature and technique of war. In spite of our proved ability as fighters, and in spite of our rather impressive military history, our interest, as a people, in things military has never managed to extend more than slightly and feebly beyond the actual period of hostilities itself. Not until the fighting has begun do most of us realize that war is a science—or an art—every bit as important to the existence of our nation as, say, maintaining favorable trade balances or providing full employment. Indeed, it is well-nigh miraculous, when we stop to think of it, that we have managed to come off as well as we have, considering our casual and often contemptuous regard for the business of national defense, and for those few who have persisted in concerning themselves with it.
Plainly speaking, war is simply the ultimate instrument of national policy, the last resort, when others have failed, of protecting a nation’s interests, integrity, and honor. All power rests ultimately on force, though if we are clever and civilized, the occasions when it is actually necessary to resort to force may be considerably reduced. Nevertheless, without force, power, and with it the ability to carry out desires and purposes, vanishes, as surely in the case of nations as individuals. So long as the world is peopled with separate nations with interests and desires of their own, we must assume that there is always the possibility that these interests and purposes may some day come into conflict—and that these conflicts may prove to be so fundamental to the nations concerned that no means of resolving them, except the resort to force, remains. Without the ability to bring superior force to bear on such occasions, a nation sacrifices its capacity to carry out its own wishes, and thus in effect sacrifices its integrity and individuality.
As Clauswitz pointed out, war is only an extension of politics, that is, the pursuit of the same political ends by different means. A state that is deficient in the means or the skills of war is thus really deficient in her statecraft. And by the same token, a state that sets great and broad goals for herself— as America, for example, set when she took the Philippines—must be just as adequately and ambitiously equipped to defend those goals by war. War, like other things, has its cost—heavy and burdensome, indeed, as we have found out. But when the life or the freedom of a nation is at stake, great ends must be expected to demand great sacrifices. Clemenceau once said that war is too important to leave to the generals. What he should have said is that war is too important for a nation to regard it merely as an unpleasant business to be ignored except on those few occasions when a fight has already been forced upon us, and the rest of the time left only to those few who have made a profession of it. And we might also say, for the generals and the admirals, that war is also too important to expect that those whose particular business it is to wage war should be regarded with any less respect and honor during the years of peace than the years of war.
To acknowledge that war is an instrument of national policy is not, on the other hand, to maintain that war is “inevitable.” That is a metaphysical question, without practical significance, and we can safely leave it to the philosophers of human nature to settle. All we need to admit, to be perfectly honest, is that nations being what they are, war is still, within the foreseeable future, a possible political instrument, and hence something to be definitely reckoned with in any complete and realistic appraisal of international affairs. Not even solemn declarations “outlawing” war can erase that fact. Indeed, one very excellent way of courting another total war within the next 25 years would be to delude ourselves again that we have banished war forever from the world, and need no longer concern ourselves with its harsh details. War, in fact, is a good deal like disease. We should make scant progress in preventing and curing disease by the assumption that it did not exist. Likewise, so long as we persist in ignoring the possibility of war we have no way of learning how to avoid it, or, if it comes, of limiting the damages it must cause. An honest and intelligent understanding of the nature of war is thus the first step in insuring peace. With peace, as with health, neither self-delusion nor magical incantations are any substitute for intelligence and skill.
Since war is only an extreme means of pursuing political ends, the chance of avoiding war obviously depends directly upon the success with which a nation can foster its fundamental national interests by peaceful means. Naturally we stand a much better chance of doing this if the country as a whole is perfectly clear about what it wants, both for itself and with regard to other nations. One of the easiest ways to be forced into a costly and protracted war is to be so confused about what we want and what we are prepared to fight for that our interests have already been seriously compromised even before we have awakened to what is going on. On this score, the record of the United States has not been overly impressive. We have frequently refused to concern ourselves, as a nation, with conditions and situations arising outside our immediate borders that nevertheless have had a serious effect upon us, until it was too late to do anything about them except to go to war in an all-out, knock-down-and-drag-out battle. As a result, we have, on more than one occasion, sacrificed the opportunity of safeguarding our national interests early in the game, and with limited cost and effort, instead of by an exhaustive and total war. Total war may be all very modern and fashionable. But it is certainly more costly, in terms of lives and time and dollars, than a war fought with limited means for definite and limited objectives. Not all war can be of this limited variety. But at the same time, there is no reason why a nation or group of nations, greatly superior in power to any of their neighbors, such as America and Britain and the Soviet Union, let us say, will be after this war, should not be able to preserve the peace without always resorting to total war. But in order to be able to fight a war of “limited liability” we must, as a nation, be sensitive to any threat to our national security, and ready and willing to use force to nip it in the bud. No one can say how the course of modern history might have been altered, for example, had Britain and France been prepared—with a vigorous and aroused public opinion—to resist Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland in 1936 by the swift and judicious use of force. But it is certainly an interesting and instructive speculation in the history and anatomy of wars.
In the light of these considerations, the folly of the peace-at-any-price philosophy, so fashionable in some circles after the last war, becomes apparent. It had been thought that the surest way to preserve the peace was simply to make the avoidance of war the first and chief tenet of a nation’s policy. Then, whatever else happened, at least there would be no war. But peace, like happiness, has an elusive way of disappearing when directly and specifically sought after. To base a national policy simply upon the avoidance of war is, in point of fact, to base that policy upon nothing at all; for war, as we have seen, is in turn only the result of other specific desires and interests. The ship of state is stripped of a rudder in the foolish hope that as long as she has nowhere especially to go, at least she will not collide with anything else. There was something of this attitude afoot in the democracies until after Munich. Rather than keeping us out of war it only served to get us all the more deeply into it, because it blinded us to the fact that, after all, a state does and must have certain fundamental interests which cannot be forsaken if it is to continue to live and function effectively. Deluded by the false philosophy of peace, we never really bothered to find out what those interests were and so we failed to recognize the persistent and insidious ways in which the dictators were steadily undermining them.
The real value of preparedness is not, as some of its enthusiasts have claimed, that it prevents war. It may, of course, do even that, as when a possible aggressor is persuaded to think twice before attacking well-trained and well-disposed forces. But it cannot insure against the foolhardiness or determination of our enemies. Nevertheless, a nation that is prepared for war, psychologically as well as materially, has at hand the means of striking quickly and effectively, and can thus often repel aggression before it has had a chance to ensconce itself where it cannot be dislodged except after a long and costly siege. Like effective medical treatment, where it fails to prevent a disease, at least it may be able to limit the harm it causes. The phenomenal recovery of the United States after the Pearl Harbor disaster will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the greatest military achievements of all time. But we can hardly count on always being able to play it so close to the line. And even then, though we did succeed in staving off defeat, we still found ourselves involved in the costliest and perhaps the longest war in our history. There is a sense, of course, in which a democratic country can never achieve the same degree of military preparedness as a fascist and aggressor-minded nation, and thus will always be at a certain disadvantage at the start against countries like Germany and Japan. This is one of the prices that democracy has to pay for its way of life. But at the same time, that should be no excuse for our exaggerating our disadvantage, through apathy and neglect in matters concerning the national defense. The responsibility of a sound national policy should be to insure that our natural desire for peace does not end up by betraying us into war. And in that task discipline and vigilance are the price we must pay for peace—as well as for liberty.
It will not be an easy job. For us in uniform especially, the temptation will be very great, now that the fighting is over, to hurry home and forget about the war and anything even remotely connected with it, just as quickly and completely as possible. “It’s been a hard and nasty fight. We’ve done our job. Let somebody else worry about where we go from here.” If we are serious about trying to preserve the peace, however, we shall have to resist this temptation. It is not a matter, of course, of keeping us all in uniform after the war. That would be neither feasible nor necessary. There must be demobilization of both personnel and equipment, though, at the same time, we should be foolish to go as far in that regard as we did after the last war. But the important thing is that we who have fought the war should not lose our concern or our say in such matters the moment the immediate danger is past.
The big problem in preparing a country like ours for war is always to bridge the gap between the civilian and the military. It is the civilians, in the end, who have to fight a war, and in a country like ours, at any rate, the civilian must know what he is fighting about as well as how to fight. There are two ways, very briefly, in which we can insure this during the years of peace to come. In the first place, by maintaining large and active reserve forces, composed, like our armed forces today, of civilian soldiers, men with a finger, as it were, in both pies. And in order to keep this reservoir of military and naval strength going and make provisions for the future, there must also be a system of compulsory military training for all able-bodied young men, as they come of military age. Together these two devices will give us a civilian population sufficiently trained in the business of war to know how to handle themselves and with a lively and continuing interest in military matters.
At the same time, of course, even a well- trained and eager civilian population cannot solve all our military problems. War, after all, is a highly technical business (something we, in contrast to the European countries, have not always sufficiently appreciated) and it cannot be thoroughly learned on week-ends or with two-week summer cruises once a year. We still need a strong and able professional army and navy, led by an able professional officer corps. Nevertheless, the existence of a public opinion that is informed and interested in military matters will prove of benefit even with regard to this professional military force. There is the matter, for instance, of getting adequate appropriations through Congress for research, training, procurement of adequate material, building of adequate defense establishments, etc. The apathy and ignorance of our people regarding military and naval matters, mirrored in their representatives in Congress, was a major stumbling block to our professional military men in the years after World War I in keeping our military establishment up to date, and contributed in large part to our state of unpreparedness at Pearl Harbor. There is also the matter of making the profession of arms sufficiently stimulating and attractive —in terms of financial rewards, general prestige, and the satisfaction of an important job well done—to attract the attention, in competition with ranking civilian jobs, of some of our best and ablest men. It is really amazing, in view of the apathy and even contempt on the part of the civilian towards the military after World War I, that we were still able to keep many first-rate brains in the military profession, against the day when we would have to entrust them completely with the safety and future of our nation. Once the civilian population begins to appreciate the importance of a properly functioning military machine, the barrier of distrust and misunderstanding that hindered so much of the development of our military and naval power after the first World War will disappear. The civilian stops looking for a cleverly disguised, sinister attempt on the part of the military to instigate a coup d’état in every new request for an army or navy appropriation. And the professional soldier or sailor begins to realize the support and strength his profession stands to gain from an interested and well-informed public opinion.
In the last analysis the real support of everything in a democracy is the people. The key to a successful national defense thus lies in making the important business of war the concern not of the few but of the many. A people versed in the ways of war as well as the ways of peace, a people neither so naive as not to know the terrific cost of war—and thus determined to avoid unnecessary wars —nor so timid or sentimental as to shrink from going to war when it has to—in such a people lies our best and healthiest safeguard of peace in the years to come.
Peace, like freedom, is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards, or of those too feeble or loo shortsighted to deserve it; and we ask to be given the means to insure that honorable peace which alone is worth having.—Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Creed.