Since the first of July, this year, the Congress has voted, with the spirited approval of virtually everyone in the republic, approximately forty-five billions of dollars in direct military appropriations, which is half what we could manage to spend in the peak year of our last war and several times what any of us ever thought it possible for our economy to stand even as recently as a year ago. And beyond this original outlay, we are told with a good deal of certainty that there is much more to follow, and that it might be in order to look in the future to a continuing Federal budget of from sixty-five to eighty billions of dollars annually. Thus in 1950 did we at last check the steady decline in our armed strength, and begin the slow, hard climb upward toward what, in these perilous times, constitutes a reasonable level of military strength.
Only one thing could have brought about this fundamental volte face in our national attitude toward military preparedness: the conviction, virtually crammed down our throats by the actions of the North Korean Army, that our National Security was in imminent danger, and that the military threat transcended all others. Since July our urgent preoccupation has been to get ourselves and our allies into the best possible military posture as quickly as possible, to be ready for whatever might come in the way of raw, physical military aggression. No one talks at length any more about the “crushing burden of a fifteen billion dollar military budget,” and, indeed, any talk at all of cutbacks in military appropriations is an invitation to political suicide. The possibility of economic collapse from deficit spending, which used to scare even military men two years ago, has paled into insignificance before the more ominous and much more apparent possibility of outright military destruction.
And yet the strange thing about this swift change of direction is that during the past year neither the enemy’s fundamental capabilities, which we knew, nor his fundamental intentions, which we knew even better, have changed at all. The only thing which has changed in the meantime has been our own attitude in the case—for which the North Koreans deserve a good deal more credit than do our own wisdom and foresight. We are now attempting to make good our past deficiencies by mountainous appropriations to the military departments in addition to an expansive industrial mobilization program, and in our actions one can read the inference that we consider the reduced state in which we kept our military establishment during recent years to be the principal cause of the troubles of the day. If only the events of the past five years are used as a frame of reference, this supposition might well be true. But it shall be the burden of this paper to show that the inadequate forces with which we entered the Korean conflict were but the symptoms of a disturbance which lies much deeper than the momentary weaknesses of a ten-division army and an eight- carrier Navy, and can perhaps best be described as a historically disoriented military policy growing out of a general lack of appreciation of the nature of our National Security and the elements which make it viable. It is this general misunderstanding of the very purpose of our efforts in diplomatic and military fields which has cost us so heavily in the past and which has led us to the bleak and bitter realization that we have lost, at least temporarily, the very thing we have expended thousands of lives and billions of dollars to bring about.
Now, as we round out the first year of this half-century, we are again gathering our strength to restore what we have lost. New faces appear in positions of responsibility. Billions of dollars are voted to military projects. Thousands of men are again leaving their families for a period whose duration even the most optimistic do not attempt to foretell. And yet one may ask whether we are doing anything much differently from what we did in the last war, and in the war before that. It is perhaps too early to tell. But whatever our decisions, and whatever we do to carry them out, our actions will set the pattern for things that happen two years from now, five years from now, fifty years from now, and that will determine the kind of life we bequeath to generations of Americans not yet born.
What follows is one appraisal of the happy combination of circumstances that we may justifiably call National Security, and of the factors which contribute to making it a reality, as well as an analysis of some of the more important elements which it is felt must characterize our military policy and strategy. It is one of many thousands of such appraisals, or estimates, made consciously or unconsciously by Americans whose great hope is that we will avoid past mistakes and whose great fear is that we will not. It is presented for what it is: one man’s earnest conclusion as to the direction we must take and the things we must do if we are not, in our preoccupation with the immediate catastrophe, to pull down about us all that remains of what is decent and fine and worthy in the heritage that has brought us so many of the world’s good things.
The term National Security is a new word- symbol for an old reality. It was an expression created for popular use during the Unification proceedings of 1945-47 because of the understandable need for a term of reference which would at least signify the end objective which the military establishment was supposed to help uphold. The reality of National Security is an infinitely complex abstraction, and as such is not subject to conventional dictionary definition. It can hardly be described, except subjectively, in terms of what its continued existence means to the people of a nation. It is something they sense, intuitively, without being required to go through the pattern of rational thought about its nature. What will be done here will amount to a description of National Security in terms of some of its more important and readily observable characteristics, and of the rather specific factors which distinguish it from other and more narrow objectives of national activity.
First of all, National Security is a social condition. It is not a state of military readiness, a series of political alignments, or an economic accommodation. It is something a nation believes about itself; something its leadership is convinced is necessary to the nation’s continued well-being. It is, for the United States with our particular ideological orientation, a state of affairs in which the individual citizens of the society are maximally free to make the most of their lives and opportunities. It means, in certain specifics, such things as the continuance of our sovereign independence; our system of representative government; an economy that is basically free but regulated to such an extent as we consider necessary in the public interest; and above all the continuance of the historic guarantees of personal freedom and independence to the individual citizen which were written into our Constitution a century and a half ago. When we have conducted our affairs, both internally and externally, so that these things in their essence are reasonably well assured, then we may say we are maintaining a tolerable degree of national security.
Conversely, when the continuance of any of these values becomes seriously threatened, we are not maintaining a satisfactory degree of national security. A recognizable threat of outright physical attack upon our national sovereignty is an obvious threat to our national security, and over the past two hundred years such attack has become the classic way for sovereign states to lose their national security. There are other ways. An economic collapse, with the misery and restiveness it would surely bring, would constitute a major threat to our national security. The penetration of our schools, universities, churches, labor unions, minority racial and national groups by an ideology that would have us voluntarily relinquish our sovereignty, our rights, and our system of government to a foreign and insidiously evil government is a continuing, increasing, and extremely serious long-term threat to our national security. What should be remembered is that the continuance of our National Security means a satisfactory arrangement not only of certain military factors, but of political, economic, and sociological elements as well. A threat to our National Security may come from any one of a number of directions, may involve any one of a number of its essential elements, and the loss or subversion of any one of them signals the ultimate loss of the others.
Secondly, the maintenance of National Security is a continuous and unceasing process. It is not something to be achieved, or arrived at, but something to be maintained. The problem is a permanent one and the process goes on, in peace and in war, in times of stress and in times of tranquility. It may be easy or difficult, may meet with great or little success, but it goes on—must go on—as long as we continue to exist as a cultural group. As long as we walk the earth as free men there will be enemies who will threaten our sovereignty and our freedom, circumstances that will challenge our economy, and heresies that will try our faith in our institutions. Wars come and are fought and settled, and peace intervenes. But the process goes on, as difficult and elusive in the peace as it was in the war that preceded it. Indeed, the surprising thing about our experience in the past two wars was not our belated discovery that victory failed to provide a lasting solution to our national security problem, but that we could have ever been so gullible as to believe it could.
How could we! Our action in going to war could in no possible way have provided a guarantee of continued peace and stability in the years that followed. War was a specific negative action which we found it necessary to take in order to remove a specific—and transient—threat to our national security. The prosecution of War had nothing whatever to do with the maintenance of our National Security after the War had been won, when a new set of factors would intervene and new threats would inevitably arise. In 1917-18 and again in 1941-45 we simply found it impossible to look beyond the end of the war into the possibilities and arrangements that might exist upon and after its conclusion. In our frantic efforts to win at all costs—but to win!—we mistook the winning of the war as the principal objective of our efforts. It was, of course, never anything of the kind. Our principal objective remained, in peace and in war, the maintenance of our National Security. The winning of the war was an important but subordinate task we assumed in order to further our long-term continuing objective.
Third, National Security is the product of a successful National Policy. National policy, in its turn, should be thought of as a complex of political, military, and economic policies, both foreign and domestic, which taken together form the guide for the conduct of a nation’s affairs in the world and for the specific actions it takes in the maintenance of its National Security. And in the process of maintaining its national security, the national policy of a nation toward other countries may take one or more of four basic attitudes: Domination, Collective Security, Balance of Power, or Isolation.
It is the interplay of these attitudes, with varying emphasis upon different elements, which produces on balance the general orientation of a given national policy. Thus our historic policy from Monroe to Wilson was almost purely isolationist in character, and it served us brilliantly, for two fundamental reasons: geography and the British national policy of maintaining the balance of power in Europe. With the coming of World War I, however, there occurred some profound changes in the balance that had meant security for us. The Continental balance of power, upon which Britain herself depended for the maintenance of her national security, came unhinged, and there followed a murderous war, one which drove Britain to the wall in a desperate last-ditch stand against the powerful Central Power alliance. Britain’s control of the Atlantic faltered, and almost immediately as it did so we began to be borne, steadily and irrevocably, into the vortex of the European contest. The record of our entry into the First World War is one of ship sinkings, of protests, of apologies, more sinkings, more protests, more apologies, and finally a specific declaration of war. But beneath these superficialities we were propelled toward the war by the logic that if the Atlantic were no longer secure, if Britain were no longer secure, then we were no longer secure. And inferentially, from our support of Britain’s position, there followed this codicil: we had gone to war, in the last analysis, simply because the possibility of a singlepower domination in Europe menaced the national security both of Great Britain and of our own country. Thus did we accomplish almost intuitively, it seems, an evolution in our national policy from an attitude of Isolation to one of Balance of Power in the three years that preceded our entry into the First World War.
Then, having done so, we moved abruptly back into our policy of Isolation. Even before the war’s end, in an election held almost at the flood tide of victory, with the German surrender expected hourly, Mr. Wilson’s administration lost its majority in the Senate. Before another year was out it was made clear that we were going to reject not only the Balance of Power policy but Mr. Wilson’s notions about Collective Security as well. We wanted no part of “entangling alliances,” even in such an innocuous form as the League of Nations.
The year following, the last pretense of our continued participation in European affairs was swept out of the door by Mr. Harding’s vigorously wielded new broom, and the nation settled comfortably back into “normalcy.” The reversion to Isolation was utterly complete.
It was in this strangely provincial mood that we conducted our affairs during the ensuing two decades. Only once in the long period between the end of the war and Mr. Roosevelt’s “Quarantine” speech of 1937, did our policy and actions depart from a consistently isolationist pattern. The occasion was furnished by the Japanese attack upon Manchuria in 1932. The tenor of our diplomatic representations in the matter was the conventional one of outraged justice. But it is also clear that Mr. Stimson’s protests to Japan over the Manchurian incident were less a registration of moral indignation than they were a clear-headed acknowledgment that it was essential to our National Security that an effective counterpoise to Japan be maintained in East Asia. And it is here that we should note another fundamental: It is the Function of Military Policy to Support National Policy.
We were in the position of whistling for the breeze in our relations with Japan in 1932. At the very moment that we were talking threateningly about punitive action we had an Army of only 135,000, a Marine Corps considerably smaller than the New York City police force, and an Asiatic Naval Squadron consisting of a cruiser, a squadron of destroyers, and a squadron of submarines. Looking over this sandlot array of forces, the Japanese must have found our straight- faced protestations of “non-recognition” uproariously funny. We failed, miserably and abjectly, to achieve anything more than the contempt of the Shoguns and the despair of their victims. We had, diplomatically, stepped out of character. We had, on this one occasion, essayed a vigorous, dynamic policy, asserting our interest in the affairs of Asia in a manner that left no doubt that we were vitally concerned with the balance of power there. But while we erected our diplomatic frontier in Asia, our military frontier lay just a few miles west of Hawaii. And the Japanese, recognizing this bit of trumpery for what it was, immediately called the bluff. The lesson was clear enough, yet ten years were to pass before our two-ocean Navy became a reality. Meanwhile, the same forces which drew us into the first European conflict were again set in motion. Our reaction was much the same. Even with our Lend- Lease aid and our policy of “All Aid Short of War,” our inching, furtive, hesitant approach to World War II resembled nothing so much as our inching, furtive, hesitant approach to World War I. Finally, and probably without fully realizing the real basis of our compulsion, we again went to war to redress a balance of power both in Europe and in Asia which we considered essential to our National Security. Such a statement is probably familiar to no one, least of all to the average American, whose response to a popular poll as late as April, 1941, epitomized the snag-toothed uncertainty with which we slowly picked our way toward the grim responsibilities which lay ahead:
(Question) Would you favor entering the war if there were no other way of defeating Germany and Japan? (Answer) Yes, 80%.
(Question) Do you think the United States will sooner or later enter the war? (Answer) Yes, 80%.
(Question) Do you favor immediate entry into the war? (Answer) No, 80%.
We may in some respects be grateful to General Tojo and his cabinet for summarily making up our minds in the matter, but the fact remains that even had there been no Pearl Harbor, we must sooner or later have entered the war simply because we could no more tolerate the prospect of East Asia under the one-power domination of Japan, than we could tolerate the prospect of Europe under the one-power domination of Germany.
Our National Policy in this appraisal was correct. It was in the Military Policy which was supposed to implement the National Policy that we swung violently from the error of “too little” into the even more pathetic one of “too much.” For, in our Military Policy we set out to redress the balance of power, not by reducing the power of the Germans and the Japanese, but by utterly annihilating it. Not content with destroying the military power of our enemies, we went on to destroy largely the very implements by which the vanquished peoples might expect to feed themselves in the years following the war, and then presided over the systematic looting of what the bombers and artillery had spared. And in our frenetic battering of our hopelessly beaten enemies of World War II, we failed to note that in the very act of doing so we had kicked in not one door, but both doors, between us and a third enemy more powerful, more relentless, and just as evil as the two we had just struck down.
Bitter victory indeed! We had gone to war to prevent Europe and East Asia from coming under the dominance of a single power. And in the struggle we had not only failed to prevent this evil thing from happening, but we actually contributed heavily toward making it a reality. Because our Military Policy did not support our national policy, because it reflected our sole preoccupation with an immediate problem, because it took no note of the essential nature of our National Security, we ourselves became the agents through which the very condition we had gone to war to prevent was brought about.
It was in this curious way that we laid the foundation for the events which have plagued us since the close of hostilities in 1945. We had, in a soul-wracking two years, managed to change our national policy from one of Isolation into one of Balance of Power. We then simple-mindedly set about to destroy both in Europe and in Asia the only basis upon which a balance of power could be expected to exist—a vital, self- sufficient Germany and a vital, self-sufficient Japan. Thereupon in a grandiose, all-or- nothing plunge, we proceed to bet our chances for National Security on “Collective Security” without considering whether or not anyone was ready for it. And finally, in what must be described as a moment of spiritual collapse, we destroyed all but a vestige of our armed strength and thus removed our own artificial balance from the world power equation.
The long record of our humiliations and defeats which began almost immediately upon the unbalancing of the power complexes of Europe and Asia needs no recount- ting here. What does appear to need reemphasis is the too-easily forgotten fact that the only political and military arrangement that holds out any promise of peace for us now and in the foreseeable future is one contemplating a balance of power. And to the extent that that balance can not be made up by nations whose interests are complementary to ours, the deficit must be made good from our own resources.
The sober warning of General Malin Craig in his last public appearance as Army Chief of Staff highlights the most important issue of our present re-armament program:
. . . What transpires on prospective battlefields is influenced vitally years before in the councils of the Staff and in the legislative halls of Congress. Time is the only thing that may be irrevocably lost, and it is the first thing lost sight of in the seductive false security of peaceful times. The sums this year will not be fully transferred into military power for two years. Persons who state that they see no threat to the peace of the United States would hesitate to make that forecast through a two-year period.
Now, eleven years later, we have again become victims of the same fearful time-lag between promise and performance. What we were able to do in Korea last fall was all but decided by our timidity, our short sightedness, and our penuriousness in early 1949. The billions which we are feverishly heaping into the laps of the Armed Forces will scarcely begin to make any real contribution to our military power much before a year and a half from this date.
And out of this experience we should perceive this crucially important truth: That we are face to face now with the issue of our military policy and military strategy of 1953. What we shall be able to do or not to do then will be all but irrevocably determined by what we see fit to do, or not to do, now and in the next few months. For when war comes, we shall have to fit the pattern to the cloth. We are nearing the point of no return.
Fortunately, the principles to be followed to obtain a correct military policy for the future have been with us all the time, so old and so obvious that they have been overlooked in our infatuation with the false promises of gadget warfare. There are a goodly number of these hoary truths, and a few which seem to have particular application to our present problems are discussed in the pages which follow.
The principal military objective is the defeat of the enemy armed forces. There are a number of reasons to support this contention, the most important of which is that the threat posed by the enemy armed forces is here and now in relation to the territory, the installations, and the population which we must defend with our very lives as a prerequisite of our continued survival. It is not the enemy steel mills that send our vessels to the bottom; it is the submarines whose construction they make possible. It is not the enemy aircraft factories which rain death and destruction upon our cities, but the aircraft produced by them. Nor is it the enemy farmer and factory worker who will over-run the lands and sack and pillage the countryside of our allies, but the uniformed hordes that sit on their borders.
The final index of the physical power of a nation is the power of its armed forces. And when those forces are already mobilized and in place, it is nothing less than foolhardy to expend any great proportion of one’s limited resources upon the hinterland from whence they came. No modern, powerful nation whose resources are in any way adequate to prosecute a war is going to be bombed into surrendering as long as its armed forces remain intact and able to strike back at the enemy. It was not until the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht had been utterly destroyed that the German government abandoned the struggle. Even Japan, an economic pygmy starved and straitened by blockade, fought us until her Navy and Air Force had ceased to exist. In any future war we shall have to beat the enemy armed forces, just as victor nations have always had to do in the countless centuries that have gone before us.
Further, the payment for an attack upon the enemy armed forces is immediate and direct: the enemy soldiers we kill today are those who would kill our soldiers tomorrow; the submarines we sink (or bottle up) one week are those who would send precious tonnage to the bottom the next; the aircraft we shoot down and the tanks we destroy in a week’s operations may represent the margin of victory or defeat in the first onslaught of battle. The payment for raids (and they can be nothing more) on the enemy production centers is highly uncertain, indeterminable, and is months in the process of collection. And these raids contribute not one iota to the issue of the operations which may be proceeding concurrently on the military front. It is very well for us to talk bravely of “carrying the fight to the enemy,” as we surely must, eventually, if we are to win, but one must question the wisdom of attempting to do so prematurely and inconclusively at the risk of losing the very base from which we hope to mount the attack. However we may will otherwise, we shall be on the strategic defensive for a good many months following the outbreak of hostilities; and our success during that defensive and the succeeding phases of the war will be determined not by the power of our striking forces, but by the effectiveness of our security measures. The destruction of an enemy power is not to be sought at the cost of one’s own country.
Quality is the critical factor, not quantity. This is even more true of personnel than it is of materiel. The number of first line personnel that any country can put into action is a severely limited one. Japan’s first line pilots were all but gone by the mid-point of the war; what remained were hastily trained, substandard youths—mere sitting ducks for our Navy and Marine squadrons, who became accustomed to expect a score of ten for one in their aerial combat operations. The exhaustion of the supply of competent submarine personnel in the German Undersea Fleet was a powerful factor in the collapse of the submarine threat in 1943. While we may acknowledge an enemy’s numerical superiority in cannon-fodder, there is plenty of reason to consider, in this Machine Age of precision equipment, that his supply of really first rate, technically adept, trained military manpower may be considerably less than our own. In directing our efforts against the armed forces of the enemy we not only destroy the end items of equipment which represent an extensive investment in material, labor, factory, and transportation capacity, but what is more important, we destroy the personnel trained to operate them.
If the defeat of the enemy armed forces is the principal military objective, it should be obvious that the destruction of his production centers is not; neither is the mass extinction of civilian non-combatants. In view of the capabilities we possess for intensifying human misery (but not necessarily for influencing decisions) we ought to think long and hard on this matter before we go marching off to Armageddon in another glorious burst of self-righteousness, with our eyes closed tight and our faces turned up to the sky.
Is it really our objective to destroy as much of the enemy’s wealth and population as we can? What has been the gain? Wherein have we profited? In what way, by so doing, have we supported our national policy and contributed to the continued maintenance of our national security? Machines en masse and people en masse are impersonal things. The same people and the same machines which make swords also make plowshares. Wars come and go, and our enemies of one war become our allies of the next and we are only too glad for the old enemy to produce goods to help us to fight the new one. And so engrossed do we become in our struggles with one another that we quite overlook the fact that humanity’s real battle is against the elements; against hunger, against poverty and want and human wretchedness. The starved and rickety bodies of a billion of the world’s people who have never known what it is to have enough to eat, are the forlorn exhibits of how poorly we have done, and of how desperately thin is the margin between survival and extinction. Those who have accustomed themselves to living in our own fabulous oasis of plenty may have some difficulty in accepting the fact that capital (or wealth producing) assets, even in the hands of an enemy, should be looked upon as weapons on our side in mankind’s larger battle for survival against a basically hostile environment. We should remember that most of the people of a defeated nation will survive the war, and will remain to be dealt with by the victor. If we destroy the means upon which they depend to feed and clothe themselves, we may be sure that we shall have to feed and clothe them out of our own production. War potential and peace potential are two sides of the same coin.
The Strategy Chooses the Weapon. Our national predilection for gimmicks, gadgets, and cure-alls has had its unfortunate effect upon our military policy, a circumstance which should earn for military men the heartfelt sympathy of another patient group of fellow-sufferers, the medical profession. For the past twenty years we have witnessed the appearance of a succession of “miracle” drugs, good for anything from septicemia to athlete’s foot, the first of which miracle drugs, if it had lived up to the performance claimed for it by the irresponsible magazine articles written about it and consequently demanded of it by the public, would have obviated the necessity for any of the others. In each case, after the furor had died away, what remained was one more entry in the already large catalogue of useful drugs available for the treatment of diseases.
In something of the same manner we have in the recent past been guilty of letting our obsession with the physical characteristics of a weapon determine our strategy, our strategy determine our military policy, and our military policy determine our national policy. The hypothesis which produced this upside-down order of things was based upon two assumptions: (1) that the weapon was capable of doing everything that was promised for it—which remains to be proved—and (2) that the enemy would conduct himself in a manner so as to provide both the moral pretext and the physical objectives for its use. Sooner or later, it was expected, the enemy would commit himself to an unmistakable course of overt, easily identified aggression, whereupon we would proceed to deal him a death blow by the atomic bombardment of his heartland. What was overlooked was the multi-dimensional nature of the present struggle, wherein an assault by political and ideological forces might secure the objective without resort to military action. The enemy has so far pursued a strategy of conquest from within, of civil war waged by the ideological captives already inside a country, thus presenting us with a choice between (1) doing nothing; (2) embarking upon a preventive war, to which we would have the utmost difficulty in assigning moral justification; (3) presenting the world with the spectacle of American troops participating as partisans in a series of wasting “little wars” in theaters of secondary military importance.
In Korea we were to learn that there are important political restraints that attach to the use of the atomic bomb; that its use requires a suitable target; that amphibious warfare is still very much with us; that even air supremacy cannot of itself halt the march of an enemy army; that there is no substitute for the foot soldier on the ground; and that we were able to fight at all only because of the uninterrupted flow of troops and supplies which our control of the seas insured.
So, beginning with a single weapon, which was the only one we were willing to pay the price of, we rationalized an entire strategy around it. We determined our military and national policy on the basis of what we thought we could do or would prefer to do— not what the enemy might require us to do. We have not only been guilty of failing to consider enemy capabilities but we have compounded the error by not even considering our own.
The strategy of a great power in peace and in war consists of doing those things which must be done to insure the effectiveness of its national policy. It does not consist of doing only those things which the weapons at hand or the forces at hand permit as of a given moment. The pursuit of a strategy is measured in years and decades, and if the weapons or the forces of the times do not suit the strategy, they must be obtained. If a war strategy requires the control of sea areas, a Navy must be built, with its integrated air and subsurface components, and equipped to control them; if it requires the capture of island positions, amphibious forces must be trained, equipped and mounted against them; if it requires the holding or taking of large land areas and the destruction of large land forces, an army, together with its supporting tactical aviation, must be formed which is equal to the task. At the time our decision was taken to invade Europe (early 1942) we could no more have carried out our plan than our soldiers could have waded from Dover to Calais. Nevertheless, the re-entry of Europe and the conquest of Germany was determined to be our strategy in that theater, and two and a half years later we were able to do precisely that, with forces, equipment, and weapons which did not even exist at the time the strategic decision was made. The time is long since past when we should have learned to regard weapons for what they are: specialized tools of the trade which are invented, designed, and developed to achieve specific results which contribute to the execution of the strategy.
Unity is our strength. The Communist concept of war, permanent, total, and all- pervasive, sets such a premium upon unity as never before existed. In almost every direction we are confronted by the ominous clanking and rumbling of a huge military machine which supplies the force and flavor to the Communist efforts on the political, economic, and ideological fronts. We are embarrassed politically again and again because of the prestige attaching to this immense display of power in being. We are required to run heavily into debt, and to strain our economy to the breaking point, to devote millions of man-hours and millions of tons of precious resources to totally unproductive use, in order to buy the forces necessary to meet this threat. And throughout the length and breadth of the entire non-communist world there seeps the rot of Communist ideology, like a sticky, corrosive ooze, etching out the ugly patterns of treason, defeatism, hysteria, and confusion.
The implication is clear. We are the intended victims of what might very appropriately be called the strategy of counter-containment. We are being clamped in a great sociological press, with enormous force being applied upon it from all directions—military, psychological, economic, political—in the expectancy that the stresses produced will be so great that the social structure will break and crumble, leaving the shards and fragments to be picked up at leisure by the Communist peoples.
We thus face the prospect of a protracted, bitter, and difficult contest between the Communist and non-communist world which will engage every group of every nation. It will be fought at every spiritual, moral, and physical level. It will affect every social class, every occupational group, and every political party. There will be not only war between nations but war within them. And in the last resort, the luxury of survival will go to the group which can best maintain its spiritual, cultural, and material solidarity throughout the long and bitter struggle.
The principal objective of the enemy is easily discerned, and has been for several years. It is to destroy the unity that exists between the New World and Western Europe. It contemplates the political, military, economic, and ideological isolation of Western Europe, and upon the achievement of that isolation, the methodical capture, group by group and nation by nation, of its forlorn and despairing inhabitants. And with the transfer of Western Europe to the Communist sphere the balance of power would be all but irrevocably tipped against us, and we shall be alone and surrounded by a completely hostile world.
It is the interplay of these economic, political, psychological, and military forces within the structure of our Western civilization that is of such critical importance to the outcome of our present predicament. Less than three years ago the fate of the Mediterranean World pivoted dizzily upon the issue of a single election in Italy. No military forces were involved. Yet had this political- economic-ideological decision gone against us we should very soon have been confronted with several hostile and very real divisions of the army of the People’s Republic of Italy standing ominously on the borders of France and Austria; thereafter it would have been but a step to the neutralization of Turkey and Greece, and the conversion of the Mediterranean into a Mare Nostrum under a new Caesar more arrogant than any of his predecessors. Thus may the political defeat of one year establish the basis for a military defeat the next; an economic defeat may beckon a political disaster; and one by one, the exhausted and war-weary countries of Europe may go under without a single shot being fired in anger. In the delicate balance of world affairs, all elements, be they ideological, economic, political, or military, are freely transmutable into one another.
That all this means a great deal to us is evidenced by the billions of dollars which we have poured into Europe, and by our expressed solicitude over its defense posture. But if we are impatient at the slowness of some European countries to arm themselves, we must concede that there has not been much about our own military policy for the past few years to give them cause for encouragement in what must necessarily be a joint venture. Up until recently the extent of our contribution to the joint defense effort was to have been the strategic bombardment of the homeland of an aggressor. The Europeans, whose unenviable geographic position compelled them to take a much more critical view of the matter, reckoned that even the complete destruction of the enemy’s production centers could not possibly prevent his over-running Western Europe.
With the foregoing in mind, it becomes rather easy to see the urgent necessity for our regarding Western Europe as a citadel to be held rather than a prospective battleground, to be fought over and lost and fought over and regained. If we can deny the barbarian his prize—if we can hold the fortress of Western Europe—then our possession of the atomic bomb has some significance, both as a deterrent to the enemy’s use of it, or, if we are forced to do so by his action, as a means of waging war against him. But the requirement for the territorial security of Western Europe remains supreme—militarily, politically, and morally. Men will fight bravely and well as long as there is a scintilla of hope to exchange for their suffering and sacrifices. But there are few indeed who will fight on when all hope is gone, when the only reward for valor is hunger and pain and death, and where one’s chances of extermination are equally good at the hands of friend and foe alike. If we would have our allies take heart and find the will to defend themselves, we must so order our military policy that there can be no doubt that we not only intend to give them real assistance, but, much more significantly, that we will have the capability of doing so. We must be able to live up to whatever commitments we make, and our allies must know it.
Thus we enter logically upon the consideration of the forces we must have to insure the effectiveness of a sound military policy. More particularly we are concerned here with the naval forces required, and the conditions which must obtain in order for those naval forces to carry out their many and complex responsibilities. We are concerned, and we should not for one moment relax our efforts to seek the understanding and support we must have to insure that we are given the tools adequate for the job at hand. For, though the currency of our negotiations may have changed from dollars to materials and facilities, our struggle for adequate representation, for adequate forces and strength, will go on as urgently and necessitously as it ever did before.
We must insure that the Navy is adequately manned, equipped, and trained to accomplish its full responsibilities in connection with the defeat of the enemy armed forces. In the nature of the circumstances which exist today, this means a great many different things. It means, first of all, the decisive defeat of the enemy naval forces— subsurface, air, and surface—in order to insure our control of the seas. This is the very first thing we must do, and it is of such importance that unless it is done, and done well, only a corporal’s guard of troops will ever get to Europe, while our vulnerable coastal cities may be blasted and ruined by air or submarine-borne atomic attack, and our industries grind to a halt for the lack of essential strategic materials. Hostilities of the next war may well begin with ten times the number of enemy submarines on station in the Atlantic as there were in the early days of the last one, each of them swifter, deadlier, harder to find and harder to kill than their predecessors of ten years ago. The Navy must be ready to meet this threat the day armed hostilities break out—not three months later, six months later, or two years later. It must be ready, and waiting.
Our readiness in this matter is vitally important because the prosecution of a naval anti-submarine campaign will be one of the few opportunities we shall have for offensive action early in the war. As anyone knows, the process of slugging it out on the high seas with individual enemy submarines is the most difficult, most expensive, most inefficient way of waging anti-submarine warfare. This is particularly true in the case of an enemy whose territorial configuration in every direction requires that his U-boats pass through a series of narrow bottlenecks, most of which are mineable and all of which can be controlled by the air-sea power of our carrier task forces. A hard-hitting offensive anti-submarine campaign which would pin down the enemy to his own coast, and would entrap and destroy his forces at their own bases and yards and in the narrow waters they must transit on their way to and from the open seas, should be the keystone of our effort directed against enemy naval forces. There will of course be other tasks, all difficult and all important. We shall still have to protect the plodding convoys with escort and search missions. We shall have to seize and defend the many island positions we shall need for our operating bases which support and sustain our combatant forces. We shall have to seek out and destroy with hunter- killer groups the prowlers which menace our shipping in the open seas.
Moreover, we shall be required to aid our sister services in their tasks of destroying their enemy counterparts. Carrier air strength may be needed to intercept hostile bombers, or to provide fighter cover for our own. The effectiveness and practicability of close air support of ground operations by carrier aircraft for considerable distances inland has been extensively proven in Korea. Troops will have to be landed on and evacuated from hostile shores, to the accompaniment of fire support that only a Navy can give. Our stunningly successful evacuation of the 105,000 heroic Army and Marine troops who had fought their way out to Hungnam, together with their equipment, plus a hundred thousand non-combatants, is enough to summon a lump of pride to every Navy man’s throat. And underscoring every other effort must be the assurance that the millions of tons of supplies and the thousands of troops required to be moved monthly to the far-flung theaters of operations will continue to flow uninterruptedly, guaranteed by our control of the seas. Only the Navy—our Navy—can provide that assurance. Only the Navy can forge the firm link that will insure that we and our allies fight as one, giving life and meaning to the unity so essential to our survival.
These, then, are some of the tasks which the Navy has traditionally accepted in wars of the past and which it must be prepared to accept in those of the future. And the acceptance of those tasks leads to some rather definite conclusions about the Navy’s right to develop its own forces in its own way. This all-important right, which it has not always been our good fortune to exercise, may be summarized in the expression propriety of interest. It suggests that the decision as to the type and number of tools required for the job belongs properly to the workman, not to the well-intentioned efficiency expert who cannot tell a saw from a hammer. What the Navy needs in terms of ships, aircraft, guns, and men, must be decided by the Navy, which alone bears the responsibility to the Nation for the proper discharge of its functions and the execution of its tasks.
The vital future must leave us free and unhampered by restraints which may have the effect of fundamental decisions directly affecting the technical performance of our materiel and the combat readiness of our forces. We must be free to train our men and to develop and procure our weapons in a manner which will insure to our satisfaction the proper discharge of our duties. Our integrated Navy, in blue, green, and olive-drab, must be equal to its task and worthy of the trust placed in it. For when the chips are down we may with good reason commit to memory the laconic postscript of Marshal Joffre, the French commander in the Battle of the Marne:
“I do not really know to whom should go the credit for our victory; I only know who would have been responsible if we had failed.”