The views of strategists in Washington and Moscow on Korea as a theater of operations immediately after the opening of hostilities are only too well known. The testimony before the Congressional committee in the MacArthur hearings brought to light not only the divergent opinions among President Truman’s advisers, but also the shifts in his own policy. On the other hand, it is not necessary to consult the archives of the Politburo to discover the very simple reasons for the Soviet choice.
Successive reversals of Communist enterprises in Greece and Berlin were turning Moscow’s attention toward Asia. Of the three possible objectives, Iran, Indo-China, and Korea, the first and most tempting was rejected by the clearly stated American intention of intervening militarily in its defense. As far as we can judge from the French reverses in the fall of 1950, Tonkin would not have withstood an early summer operation in force from the Chinese frontier. However, it was felt that the moment was hardly propitious for a new demonstration of Mao Tse-tung’s military genius in a sector where he alone could intervene, while Stalin was being slapped down in the West.
This left Korea, a docile satellite, where the Chinese were scarcely more popular than the Japanese. The North Korean Army, reorganized by the Soviet mission, numerically superior to the adversary, outclassing him in both weapons and training, was available to carry out Moscow’s plans. The choice of Korea eliminated the risk of American intervention, since Washington had expressly eliminated the Asian continent from its commitments in the Far East. A campaign of a few weeks would demonstrate to the world American inability to equip their proteges militarily or to give them any important aid on the field of battle. At the same time, the balance of Soviet and Chinese forces on the Asian continent could be reestablished. Moscow’s success would wipe out the memory of Peking’s triumph.
American views coincided with those of the Soviets. Since General Marshall’s mission to China, the abandonment of continental positions had been the directing principle of American policy in the Far East. The collapse of Chiang Kai-shek made Washington cling all the more firmly to this policy of non-intervention, whose extension to Formosa seemed more and more probable. In the midst of the military reorganization of the Atlantic nations, the immobilization of the land forces of the most powerful of them in a little Asian peninsula would have seemed the height of folly.
On this point the policy of the principal partners of the United States in the Atlantic Pact were in complete agreement with Washington. From the moment it was learned that the thirty-eighth parallel had been crossed by the North Koreans, the French and British ministers of foreign affairs made repeated appeals for caution, wherein they left no doubt as to the nature of the support they intended to give the South Korean army.
The rest is history. Mr. Acheson’s reaction, which led his military colleagues and President Truman to change a policy of abandonment unanimously agreed upon, was crowned with success. The expeditionary force committed by the United States in the Korean peninsula contained, and then pushed back, an invader supported by the armies or the materiel of the two principal land powers.
How is such a general misjudgment as to the respective chances of land power and sea power to be explained, when they met in a theater of operations which seemed so favorable to the designs of the former? The answer lies above all, and precisely, in the choice of this theater of operations.
From Mahan to Mackinder
Two pictures, in complete contrast one with the other, have been painted of these vast conflicts which periodically bring to grips the continental “trouble maker” and the maritime adversary who refuses to submit to his domination.
The first of these chronologically was presented at the end of the nineteenth century by Admiral Mahan, a student of the “influence of sea power,” as we note from the title of his principal work.
If we may believe the American strategist and his disciples, the initial advance of the land power conquering directly or through an interposed state the territories on which it has designs meets few difficulties. The invader has the advantage of the central position, which enables him to strike successive blows at his adversaries, who are isolated with backs to the sea and receive only tardy aid from their finally aroused allies.
However, as the conquests of the land power multiply, they cost more and more. The most distant of the invaded peninsulas will resist with increasing success. And, in any event, the islands remain free. In these redoubts, abetted by a sea power which is safe from attack, the counteroffensives are organized.
The more the land power is extended, the more vulnerable it becomes. First of all, it will have to defend the fronts not yet completely subjugated, where a reconstituted adversary may appear, equipped with men and munitions from zones outside the continental influence. In addition, there will be raiding-expeditions from the sea either on the flanks or the rear of the land power. It must be prepared to repulse coastal attacks at points occupied either recently or long ago, but whose vulnerability has increased in proportion to their development.
Certainly it will take time for the sea power to get the upper hand. It will have to be satisfied for a long time with flying raids which will not always turn out well. Its most important combined operations will often be blocked. But it will learn from these reversals. The time for overthrowing the land forces will come when debarked armies will oblige the adversary to shorten its fronts while new ones will be created continually on the most distant and sensitive fronts. The land power will finally fold up, beaten on the very ground where it had formerly won its most brilliant victories.
Such was Mahan’s theory.
As far back as 1904, the Scottish geographer Mackinder, followed in 1913 by Haushofer, who became the undisputed authority on geopolitics in Nazi Germany, saw the unfolding of history from a completely opposite angle, which called for the final triumph of the land power.
Mackinder summed up his thesis thus:
“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
Eastern Europe, according to Mackinden stretches from the Denmark-Istria line to the Volga, and takes in Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow. The “Heartland,” the “pivot country,” includes, from the Urals to China, not only what is commonly called Central Asia, but also Siberia, the Urals, and their western slopes, the Iranian and Tibetan plateaus; it extends over five-ninths of Asia. The “World- Island” destined to rule, the universe is Eurasia.
Mackinder’s views are the concept of a geographer, and even of a meteorologist, who discovers the link between the defensive power of the “Heartland” and its protection against maritime influence by the mountain ranges that border it to the south, the deserts that limit it to the east, and the frozen tundra that covers it to the north. Inaccessible on three sides to sea power as well as to the sea winds, the “Heartland” can be approached only from the west. It falls under the natural control of the power which has acquired the mastery of Eastern Europe. It then becomes the offensive base for the conquest of the rest of Eurasia, and later of the rest of the world with its remaining one-fourth of the world’s population.
History, which can readily be made to prove the most diametrically opposite theses, has been called upon by the adherents of sea power as well as those of land power to prove their respective arguments.
If we begin our naval history with the reign of Elizabeth, the ultimate defeat of each of the continental disturbers is undebatable. But how can we forget the share of the ally out of the east who forced the two- front struggle, which brought about the downfall of the contender for the domination of Europe? Can we ignore the arrival of the Turks under the walls of Vienna, the role of the Hapsburgs of Austria in the resistance to Louis XIV’s hegemony, or that of Russia in the fight against Napoleon, William II, and Hitler? And which was the true land power? At Saint Helena, Napoleon saw the light: “If, one day, Russia has a Tsar with guts”—he used a somewhat more military expression—“he will become master of the world.”
This man who, in explaining his own misfortunes foreshadowed Mackinder, was in 1812 only the latest victim of these masters of the “Heartland” who repulsed attacks against their inaccessible fortress or subjugated their neighbors. Mackinder bases his statements on the historic period—much earlier than that considered by Mahan—of the great monarchies of China, India, and Persia, founded by Tartar and Mongol hordes.
But we find that the concept of the peripheral conquests of Eurasia from the “Heartland” is sometimes disputed. We shall not deny the most celebrated of these empire builders, Genghis Khan, the credit for an invasion of China—which to be sure was no innovation, since the Mongol invader had been doing it periodically for thousands of years. But the sequel to the operation is debatable. Was the later Mongol advance toward Persia and Europe a continuation of this impulse of the Mongol nomad, or did it become a Chinese enterprise supported by all the resources of the Celestial Empire? The armies of the Han dynasty had reached the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf as early as the beginning of the Christian era, which leaves some doubt as to the inaccessibility of the “Heartland” from the east.
Nor does the central position of the “Heartland” guarantee to its master success in peripheral offensive enterprises. In the past, access to warm seas was denied the tsars, in the Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf, and in the Yellow Sea; and the setback of their successors in Korea is only the last in a series of mounting resistances after Iran, Greece, and Jugoslavia.
History then does not admit of a clear cut pronouncement between the opposing theses of Mahan and Mackinder. Perhaps we should congratulate ourselves, for the result seems to depend on a series of factors whose importance and effect have just been upset by the evolution of recent military art.
The Central Position and the Peripheral Position
We concede too easily the superiority of the central position over the peripheral position, of interior lines over exterior lines; and we agree too readily with those who assert the privileged situation of the master of the “Heartland” in his fight for the domination of Eurasia. Thus we transpose to a world plane, and to the domain of the most general combined operations, conclusions which have only been verified on the smaller scale, in an exclusively terrestrial or maritime theater, and which, even in these cases, are often to be explained by very different reasons.
Placing himself in a central position from which he could deal successive blows against each of his adversaries was certainly the typical Napoleonic maneuver in a situation of inferiority. He applied it in his campaigns from 1796 in Italy until those of 1814 and 1815. William II adopted the same maneuver in the first World War, trying to smash successively France and Russia. So did Hitler in the second. Why should it not work equally well for Stalin, switching the locus of his military effort from western Europe to the Far East, from Berlin to Korea?
Its success depends almost always on the poor coordination of armies on the peripheral position, and not on the respective rapidity of movements on exterior and interior lines. If the Communist attempt failed in Korea, despite careful preparation, airtight intelligence security, and complete surprise, it is because the decision to reply was made almost immediately by the United Nations. The maneuver succeeded when the Western command sat idly by while Hitler crushed Poland, and similarly six months later when the Soviet masters watched the Blitzkrieg unleashed in the West. If Mr. Truman had listened to the appeals for caution from the foreign ministers of France and Great Britain at the moment he was making his rapid decisions of the last days of June, 1950, the list of Soviet satellites would today be longer by one—South Korea.
Having rid ourselves of this misapprehension, by which success is explained by the advantage of the central position, we must consider this question: Can one gain in speed by a maneuver on interior lines over an adversary confined to exterior lines?
Certainly, in theory. But here, again, one must not attribute to a reduction of the road covered a result which is due to an increase in speed. If the most famous of conquerors out of the “Heartland,” Genghis Khan, made so many lightning conquests from China to Europe, it was due more to the mobility of his armies than to his central position. When Napoleon, on the other hand, enjoyed numerical equality or superiority, he substituted for the maneuver on central position the maneuver on the rear and flanks, which gave the adversary the benefit of the central position without preventing the latter’s defeat.
With this additional limitation on our debate, could not Stalin equal and even outclass the West by means of a less heavy organization of his armies in order to regain the advantages of the central position? To decide for the affirmative would be to neglect the profound transformation that has taken place in weapons. The successes of Genghis Khan, like those of the Arabs, were gained in an epoch when the horse and the camel of the nomad gave him the advantage over a sedentary population. But the Mongol horses and the Bactrian camels used by the Chinese in Korea did not stand up to the planes from America.
In the present state of armaments and the respective capacity and fragility of long distance land and sea transport, we must give full approval to the views presented by General MacArthur before Congress on excluding the probability of Soviet intervention in Korea. The capacity of the Trans- Siberian Railway, even doubled or tripled, cannot compete with that of the ships supporting, from America or Europe, an increasing number of Western armies committed in Korea. Communist imperialism in this region meets the same obstacles as did tsarist imperialism. The aerial threat directed against land transport by an adversary whose control of the air insures his marine transport against reprisal adds to the peripheral enterprises of the supposed master of Eurasia a further difficulty which might well eliminate those peripheral enterprises altogether.
The Korean war confirms the inability of the master of the “Heartland” to dominate Eurasia. To give him back the advantage of the central position, it would be necessary to find once more the autonomy and mobility of the horde, reducing means of transport to the minimum, and even making them identical with the means of combat. Aviation lends itself much better to this than rail or highway. But its intervention in the depths of Eurasia brings other factors into play which are not always to the advantage of the sedentary occupier, and these we shall study later on.
Distance
The defensive strength of central Eurasian positions is much less debatable than the offensive power -of enterprises departing from it.
No theater of operations justifies better the Clausewitzian doctrine of the dead “point of the offensive” and the weakening of the invader as his successes increase and he sinks deeper into his conquest. “Sire,” said Rostopchin to Alexander I, “Your Majesty will be formidable at Moscow, terrible at Kazan, invincible at Tobolsk.” Hitler tried it out, as did Napoleon, who hoped not to repeat the errors of Charles XII.
Fortunately for Russia’s adversaries, her offensives peter out at distances close to her frontiers; and there has long been a contrast between the weakness of her foreign undertakings and the power she could muster in blows dealt within her own borders.
Exhaustion by distance is therefore not a phenomenon peculiar to the invader of the countries whose master is supposed to rule Eurasia; it opposes by the same token expeditions in which the latter engages to back up its claims. Nor is it limited to Eurasia; the two adversaries contending in the Libyan desert from 1940 to 1943 encountered the same difficulties. It affects maritime theaters of operations as well as land theaters. Japan felt it when she had to maintain in the Solomons a campaign which had met no important obstacle before much greater forces in less distant sectors.
The laws controlling such a general phenomenon explain why it turned on this occasion in favor of the United Nations.
The braking effect of distance exerts a very different effect on sea power and land power. As long as the first of these really deserves its name and dominates its element by its navy and aviation, distance plays practically no part in its preoccupations. Whether the American army fights in western Europe, 3,000 miles from its bases, or in Korea, 6,000 miles distant, the difficulty remains the same. Direct transports to the theater of operations affect only a small fraction of its total maritime transports. If the Japs found the struggle in the Solomons in 1942-3 much more difficult than that in the Philippines in 1941-2, it was because they were no longer the sea power of the western Pacific; their convoys were not getting through.
Sea power, if it chooses its land objectives judiciously, will attain them much more easily than land power. The United Nations kept Pusan because, in a sense, Pusan was closer to San Francisco than to Vladivostok or the Yalu. The weakening of the invader by his own advance was never felt so keenly as in the repeated attempts of the Communists to advance toward the south of Korea. For the first time, in fact, aviation was able to exercise on lines of communication a pressure which proved intolerable. If at Ordzhonikidze and Stalingrad Hitler was able to send his armies 1,500 miles from Berlin, it was because their maintenance was not complicated by the amplification of distance via air strikes.
In judging the distance factor, aviation today holds first place. Control of the air, a necessary and sufficient condition for the domination of its element by the sea power, assures it a trouble-free existence, if it does not allow itself to be drawn into enterprises from which the state of its land forces happily preserves it today. The same control of the air imposes on the land power, over puny distances compared to the extent of its domains, a handicap which it did not know heretofore.
Great Land Spaces and Island Theaters
After these skirmishes in the peninsulas, the decision of a world war is prompted by more serious blows dealt in the centers of the opposing power, which is as hard to reach in the interior of its continental domain as in its redoubts beyond the sea. Let us consider whether or not this necessity can be avoided.
Reproaches have been heaped on the conquerors who were mad enough to plunge into the Russian depths without realizing that they were going to their ruin. Could they have done otherwise, given the state of the military art of their times? The judgment of Clausewitz on Napoleon is valid for Charles XII as well as for Hitler: “This campaign did not fail because the Emperor advanced too far and too fast, as is commonly believed. . . . It is possible that he made an error in undertaking it; at least the result indicates that he was mistaken in his calculations. But we maintain, if we admit the necessity of the undertaking, that in general it could not have been handled otherwise to attain its goal.”
The land power allows itself to be drawn toward the same impossible conquests when it wants to strike an unattainable adversary at the sources of its power. In a war where Japan, master of Korea, Manchuria, and half of China, had toward the West the role of a land power, it has often been pointed out that the army tended to conserve and exploit the continental domain, while the navy, on the contrary, directed its effort toward the seas of the South. But such was the indispensable condition to the tranquil possession of Manchuria. In putting on the boots of their predecessors, the Soviet generals will inescapably be drawn into the same naval undertakings to protect their continental domain.
The Korean war has proved once more the weakness of the land power before those insular retreats where there is built up the counter-blow to his enterprises of domination. This is as well understood by the U.S.S.R. and China as it was formerly by Japan. The protestations of the U.S.S.R. against the maintenance of American bases on Okinawa and in Japan, as well as the insistence of China that she extend to Formosa the control which she lacked for half a century, prove that the seriousness of the threat is as completely understood by the Communist imperialists as it was by their predecessors.
The disadvantage of the land power in its struggle with the sea power for the domination of these elements essential to its security lies in the fact that it must have all of them, whereas its adversary requires only a few of them. The occupation by the Axis of all the Mediterranean islands but one was not enough for the African ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini if, from this last island, Britain could control their communications.
The matter is complicated in the Far East by the succession of archipelagoes, all within Hying distance of each other, which draw out to sea the land power concerned with its own security. One is not truly the master of the Maritime Provinces as long as he does not occupy Japan. But how can one hold Japan without controlling Okinawa and Iwo Jima? Step by step we end up by exhausting in the Solomons the strength of an empire of four hundred million subjects.
The sound strategic formula for the defense of these bastions would be that of the single island, like Malta, or of one island in each archipelago, like Guam yesterday in the Marianas and today Okinawa in the Ryukyus. But it lends itself solely to the offensive against the continent and not to the defensive plans of the one who wants to preserve it against expeditions coming from the sea.
If Moscow has not always understood, notably in Korea, the difficulties of peninsular operations, it has carefully avoided anything that could draw it into the insular operations of its predecessor. No attack has been launched against those bases of Okinawa and Japan from which came the daily aerial expeditions which blocked the land effort in the peninsula. What is more, all the actions halfway between cold war and hot war in which the Communist bosses excel have been carefully worked so as to give the United Nations no pretext for a maritime extension of the operations.
The caution exercised in Korea regarding naval operations which might be disastrous for maritime communications and Communist ports in the Far East is an indication of the concern felt toward the sea by Moscow and the satellites. They accept the risk of the destruction of Manchurian industrial centers. They may even desire it to draw the adversary ever deeper into the continent. But they are careful not to be drawn to sea in turn. The ship is as inviolable a sanctuary for the military forces of the United Nations as Manchuria is for Communist planes.
The United Nations have resisted being drawn into the continent as energetically as their adversaries have refused to venture out to sea. General MacArthur, suspected of not seeing the danger, had to give way to a more cooperative command.
In the refusal of the partners of the United States to extend operations to China, it is not always easy to see the strictly military reasons for their caution. France and Great Britain were lavish with counsels of moderation both in the first days of the intervention and at the crossing of the thirty-eighth parallel or in the march toward the Yalu. The attitude of President Truman, who could hardly be suspected of pusillanimity, states much better the limits of wisdom in the conduct of the campaign. The probable line of armistice, on one of the shortest transversals —leaving a threat hanging over the great centers of northern Korea which has been appreciated by the adversary—defines exactly enough the position of balance between sea and land power in the peninsula.
Must one conclude that the more distant expeditions in which General MacArthur might have become involved were destined to the same fate as his march on the Yalu? Within the vast semi-desert stretches, frozen to torrid, of its continental domain, does the land power enjoy the same immunity as the sea power does in the shelter of its numerous archipelagoes and thousands of miles of oceans?
No reply can make an abstraction of the means applied. As long as expeditions into the interior of the continent are conducted, as was that of General MacArthur toward the Yalu, according to principles which have varied but little since Hitler, Napoleon, and Charles XII, the same familiar failure awaits them. In the continental theater, despite the addition of a few planes that accompany or precede land forces inseparable from their traditional armament, the sea power’s means of action are as poorly adapted as are those of a land power unable to exploit the advantages of central position and distance.
Hitler and Stalin applied to invasion and liberation of European Russia the same method of frontal driveback followed by occupation. General MacArthur, whose conduct of operations is praiseworthy up to his last offensive, felt he should imitate them in order to finish the conquest of northern Korea. Even more, he expected to establish himself with only a dozen divisions on a border frontier of nearly seven hundred miles when his predecessors had at their command from two hundred to four hundred divisions for fronts scarcely more extended. The conclusion drawn by Clausewitz from the 1812 campaign is valid for all the territories now under the Communist domination: “The Russian empire is not a country that can be conquered according to the rules, that is, by occupying it. The forces of any of the present-day states of Europe are as incapable of doing it as were the 500,000 men Napoleon sent into that undertaking.”
Purely aerial action, that of the strategic aviation that had such success over Germany and Japan, has never been seriously applied to lighten the burden of the land forces thrown into the depths of the continent. The Japanese command, fighting under ideal conditions against an adversary lacking both fighter planes and anti-aircraft guns, preferred to drive into China until the day when, conscious of their own impotence, they decided to commit suicide by entering World War II. Hitler exhausted the Luftwaffe on the eastern front in tactical support of his armies instead of giving it strategic missions on Baku or in the Urals.
In the former state of Russian economy, an aerial attack against the interior of the Eurasian continent would only have affected transports. In the present state of the Soviet economy, the effects would reach an important part of industrial production. The population of the “Heartland,” which today numbers a hundred million, has tripled since Mackinder began to study it. For the U.S.S.R. alone, 51% of the industrial production since the end of the Five-Year Plan of 1946-1950 comes from Soviet territory in the “Heartland.” Legitimate bombing objectives are increasing in number as the economy progresses.
But, some will say, their global vulnerability, reduced by distance, diminishes in proportion as interior objectives are substituted for peripheral ones. But this is losing sight of the essential character of these artificial creations. What the hand of one man creates, the hand of another can destroy even more easily. The thirteen hundred miles of Siberian railway over which the ores of Magnitogorsk and the coal of Stalinsk travel in opposite directions are much more sensitive to bombing than the more varied means of transport in western Europe. The gigantic plan of diverting the waters of the Ob and the Yenisei toward the Aral and the Caspian would enable the deserts of Asia to produce enough food for a hundred million men and at the same time double the present electric power, both thermal and hydraulic, of the U.S.S.R. The Atlantic nations should pray for the quick realization of such a peaceful project, which is carefully designed to put under their control half the agricultural and power production of their eventual adversary. Two ordinary bombs, in the neighborhood of the tundra, would be enough. For if the great American dams are giants in height and thickness, and to be knocked out only by the atom bomb, the Soviet dams are giants in length only.
The “Heartland” has been spared airborne expeditions as well as aerial destruction. Their possibilities are known, but it is only in the realm of fiction that the special number of Collier's magazine attributes the destruction of the Soviet stock of atom bombs to a commando raid over the Urals in a decisive action of the war of 1952-1955. Neither the Red Army, which went in for mass releases of parachutists in the period 1935-1939, nor the Wehrmacht, which applied these lessons in Norway and Crete, had recourse to these methods of combat on the eastern front.
In the interior expanses of Eurasia, the airborne expedition takes the place of weakening land forces, for it does not require the occupation in which Clausewitz saw the first weakness of the invader. To support the most advanced tip of Von Paulus’ 250,000 men fighting in Stalingrad, nearly four million others were guarding the flanks; four million more were to operate transports and fight guerrillas in the territories conquered already. The airborne division that will come to importune or to liberate the gold miners of the Lena, the fishermen of Baikal, or the textile workers of Samarkand does not require thirty others to protect and serve it. It will have completed its mission and evacuated the region before the adversary can gather the necessary forces for the counterattack.
The difficulties of the land power in this type of struggle are due not only to the protection of its flanks, which were formerly the only sensitive areas, but also to the immensity of the territories now menaced by airborne landings. The structure of the theater of operations is added to its extent to favor the offense and annoy the defense. Airborne troops landed in the Altai Mountains or in the Siberian forests would be able to find refuge. It would be difficult to find them when the only evidence of their presence would be a guided missile knocking out an intercepting plane or exploding over the exit of some Soviet plant fifty or a hundred miles distant.
Since World War II, the materiel suited to these operations has improved considerably. The helicopter, which has been tried out in Korea for landings on a tactical scale, and the transport assault plane, developed to land or take off with heavier loads at longer distances on comparatively rough terrain, are coming off the assembly lines today. The one-man jet helicopter, weighing about one hundred and fifty pounds, is being tried out on American fields. The convertible plane, which would combine the advantages of both of these, is under construction.
The progress of weapons that are light, accurate, powerful, and adapted to air transport is keeping pace with aerial developments. The one-man rocket takes the place of the heavy, cumbersome anti-tank gun with its crew. Its hollow-charge projectile perforates the concrete of a pillbox as well as the armor of a tank. The flat trajectory of the recoilless cannon complements that of mortar fire at ranges exceeding those expected of field artillery at the beginning of the century.
To renovate the conduct of operations in the interior of Eurasia, all that remains to be done is to generalize a tactic that has been tried out on a small scale, to make the airborne landing the normal mode of combat for an army of some hundred thousand men. Matériel, as always, has long since outstripped tactics. The indispensable helicopter and transport assault plane are scarcely different from the Sikorski XR-4 and the Junkers JU-52 that were flying ten or twenty years ago. The possibilities of hollow-charge missiles in piercing concrete were apparent from the first trials. At the same time that Wehrmacht ordnance men turned them down for anti-tank purposes, in 1938, their pioneers accepted them against fortifications and used them in 1940 in the attack on Eben Emael. The first recoilless cannon for airborne troops was a German model of 1939. The first anti-tank rocket was a Russian plane weapon of about the same age, since it was used in 1941.
The upheaval that the combination of these land and air advancements is about to cause is not a matter of technical progress. It is only necessary to conquer the usual repugnance of military organizations to change. Paradoxically enough, it is the unlimited possibilities of aviation that raise the most serious obstacles to airborne warfare. In ten years there have been made available to parachutists the forty-ton plane and then the forty-five-ton plane which carries the medium tank as well as the 155- mm. cannon. Tomorrow they will demand the heavy tank and the artillery for tactical atomic weapons.
The Continental Asymmetry
The Korean war will give the disciples of Mackinder and Mahan some details on the limits of the real strength of their favorite powers, to be sure. Judging by the difficulties encountered by the land power and the sea in applying in Korea the military effort of the two halves of the world they are supposed to dominate, the rule of the whole by either one of them seems to be a fairly remote eventuality.
The choice of the Korean theater of operations by Moscow, and then by Peking, will have confirmed the weakness of the land power in those peninsulas where it has so frequently exhausted itself. The most dazzling proof of this was given by the two hundred million Russians and the four hundred million Chinese who had to give up the expulsion from Korea of the ten or so divisions the United Nations had sent there. Invincible on the Yalu, the masters of Moscow and of Peking are just passable at Seoul, and very mediocre before Pusan.
The alternate successes and failures of the United Nations surprised their command almost as much as public opinion. From the anxieties of August, 1950, when the South Koreans kept folding at each attack, to the optimism that prevailed between the Inchon landing and the first contacts with the Yalu, and then to the uneasiness that came with the rapid retreat before the Chinese “volunteers,” we can discern an average which gives the sea power an intervention capacity which it does not always suspect, without giving any grounds for belief that this capacity extends to a costly frontal drive into the interior.
Perhaps we can bring to agreement the protagonists of land and sea power by noting that the advantages and disadvantages of each of them are today derived chiefly from the third element, the air above them. If the sea power lost its control of the air over the peninsulas, the resistance in a fastness like Pusan would soon turn into a re-embarkation as catastrophic as that at Dunkirk. If, to consider an even greater degree of weakness, its planes stopped presenting over Japan, Okinawa, or Formosa the barrier that has discouraged even attempts to intervene, these isles would soon meet the fate of Crete in World War II. But if the land power increased the progress of its aviation industry further, could it penetrate to the very heart of its adversary’s domain?
America is fortunately protected by a geographic situation entirely different from that which faces its adversary. The old continent, from Spitzbergen to the Kuriles, is surrounded by a chain of islands and archipelagoes which the master of Eurasia cannot think of conquering in toto. The new continent is bereft of this belt, which disappears in the Pacific and the South Atlantic, and in the North Atlantic is reduced to Newfoundland, the Bahamas, and the Antilles, small enough in number and extent to be held if one wishes to pay the price. The difference is less in the Arctic, which justifies the interest manifested by both the United States and the U.S.S.R. However, Arctic distance from the demographic, industrial, or agricultural centers of the two continents lessens their interest.
Thus, the resource of occupying a few island bases, springboards for aerial offensives to deny the tranquil exploitation of the continent by its master, is lacking for the one who would turn against America the methods of warfare at the latter’s disposal against Eurasia. Those who delight in finalistic explanations thought they saw, after Mahan tied the salvation of the white race with the domination of the seas, this providential favor preserving civilization from the threats of barbarism. The asymmetry of the continents is one of those no less providential factors, thanks to which a new Byzantium can erect beyond the Atlantic a refuge which can repel Asiatic attacks for ten more centuries.