In the last few seconds of every bull fight, there comes a critical point known as The Moment of Truth. The Matador, having gone through his hazardous but colorful routine, has at last prepared the bull for the kill. At this point he “profiles,” addressing the bull side-on. If the Matador has done his work well, the beast’s head will be lowered and his front feet together, or nearly so. In this position, there is a tiny opening between the bones of his shoulder blades, and it is at this point that the Matador aims his sword. If he is skillful—and lucky—a quick thrust will send the point of the sword through the small opening and down to pierce the heart, and the bull drops dead at his feet.
But there is always the chance that the sword may not find the opening, or that it may strike a nerve, causing the bull to raise its head, in which case the Matador is almost certain to be caught in the chest by one of its horns. When this happens, the man dies—needlessly, perhaps to those who deprecate bull fighting, but nevertheless with full honor and credit to his profession. For the Matador could have avoided the Moment of Truth and gone round the bull’s shoulder to inflict the finishing blow and so avoided the hazard to his life. But he would have done so at the cost of his honor and reputation, for the ethics of his profession demand that he honestly and openly accept the risks that focus upon that instant when he stands, arms crossed and sword raised, with a sharp and lethal horn a few inches from his ribs. It is this instant, when the man must either embrace or renounce his principles in a situation where either he or the bull may be killed, that is known in homage and in justice as The Moment of Truth.
Now it is perfectly true that any analogy serves rhetoric better than logic, and that such an illustration transferred from the milieu of the bull ring to that of international politics loses its applicability in many respects. There is certainly not the gross inequality between us and our adversaries that normally exists between the Matador and the bull, nor must we think of our own situation as requiring a duel to the death, or that our choice must lie inevitably between our lives and our honor. Indeed, it should be a basic object of our policy to avoid a situation in which we are compelled to make such a choice. Nevertheless, I think that in its essence the analogy of The Moment of Truth quite fittingly describes the period in history upon which we are now entering: the period in which we, or our enemy, or more probably both, can be destroyed by the other, and one in which though sorely tempted to do otherwise, we must remain faithful and honest to our ethics and traditions and to ourselves as the inheritors of the only body of beliefs that gives any promise at all for the ultimate redemption of mankind. It is indeed a moment for soul searching by all free peoples, but because this article is written about America, to be read primarily by Americans, it seems appropriate that it be labeled, in this restricted context, America’s Moment of Truth.
The overwhelming military fact of this era which we may have already entered is the capacity of two powerful nations to destroy each other utterly. There may be some basis for belief that this moment has not yet arrived, but there is no basis whatever for the belief that it will not some day arrive, rather sooner than later, or that there is really very much we can do to forestall its coming. Its advance is paced by Soviet weapons technology and production rather than by our own, and it appears that nothing we shall be able to achieve in the way of defense meantime will in and of itself be sufficient to prevent, in the words of President Eisenhower, the “most hideous kind of damage,” in the event we are attacked. Within the context of our total military posture, an effective continental defense can do its part to render the cost of attack unacceptable to the Soviet Union; for this reason it should be pressed forward with all haste. But it must be remembered as a cardinal point of our military policy that the day will surely come when no power on earth will be sufficient to prevent our complete and utter destruction as a nation, provided the enemy is willing to pay the price and suffer the consequences of such an act. It is of small comfort indeed to know that those consequences would undoubtedly leave the enemy’s land as desolate as our own.
This is the fundamental military fact that we and those who come after us will have to learn to live with until such time as men have learned to conduct their affairs on the basis of rapport rather than reprisal. The techniques are irrelevant. It matters little whether New York is consumed by a thermonuclear weapon lobbed in by a submarine, dropped from a T-37, or rocketed over in a 5,000-mile intercontinental missile. The menace will remain, continuous and total, until the world has succeeded in establishing a genuinely effective control over atomic weapons for war. Nothing else can remove it.
The controlling factor in today’s atomic power balance is not superiority, but mere sufficiency. In wars of times gone by there still existed a tolerable relationship between the capability of a weapon to inflict damage and the capacity of its target to absorb punishment, so that it was usually not possible for a belligerent to annihilate an enemy’s fighting potential and end a war in one or two massive strokes. The pattern of war, particularly as it developed over the past few hundred years, was one of piecemeal destruction and cumulative attrition—the inflicting of losses through a series of battles and campaigns which, when taken altogether, eventually rendered one side incapable or undesirous of continuing the war. Where generalship and technology were fairly evenly matched, victory ordinarily went to the side which could summon up the greatest numbers of men and the greatest quantity of weapons (usually to the sea power, with its power of blockade and its access to the world’s resources). It was essentially this fact that lent efficacy to the concept of “superiority.” But we must now face a situation in which it is possible even for the weaker side to deny victory to the stronger simply by delivering a sufficient number of nuclear weapons (usually to the sea power, with its capacity. In these circumstances the controlling relationship is that which exists between each belligerent’s strategic air capability on the one hand and the enemy cities and installations and their defenses on the other. A nation need not have “superiority” in atomic air power. It needs only to have enough.
Such briefly is the reach of the capabilities which will shortly belong both to us and to the Soviet Union. Ultimately, these capabilities may belong to a half dozen other nations as well, which would undoubtedly complicate the situation but could probably make it no worse for us. But no matter how many their number, or what the techniques of the weapons employment, the unalterable fact is that we Americans must now be prepared, militarily, economically, politically, and above all spiritually, to live on the very edge of danger for decades, perhaps generations. This is indeed, our Moment of Truth.
II
It shall be the business of this paper to discuss some of the problems and issues which flow from this unprecedented situation, to formulate a few judgments as to the possible course of future events, and to suggest certain things which it appears that we should and should not do if we are to preserve the values of our society which alone are worth the risks and sacrifices which we may be required to accept. In this sense, it is a problem paper, and for this it may be criticized by those in search of solutions. To this criticism it might be replied that the first step in reaching a solution is to understand the problem, and it is to a better understanding of the distinctive features of this novel period as they relate to the problem of maintaining our national security that the following pages are addressed.
To begin with, there has developed over recent years a deep and irreparable breach between the separate concepts for the active employment of our air and surface forces, to the point where they are now incompatible within the same strategic situation. Part of this split is doctrinal in its origins and represents the philosophical legacy of Douhet, Mitchell, and Seversky. But just as importantly, it should be noted that the technology of atomic weaponry and military aviation over the past ten years has developed in such a way that air doctrine could have taken almost no course other than the one along which it has actually proceeded.
The heart and soul of air doctrine lies in the employment of strategic air power. In its purest form it admits of no need of help from surface forces, which it considers superfluous. Its immediate objective in war is to secure command of the air through the destruction of enemy air bases and their associated industrial and atomic weapons complexes. Its ultimate objective, having established command of the air, is to assert control over the enemy government either by the destruction or the threatened destruction of its economic base. It operates in a climate of total destruction and unlimited force, which it justifies by the promise of decision within a very few days or weeks.
This was at least the substance, if not the form of the original Douhetan concept, and it is the substance, if not the form, of air doctrine as it exists today. But it is not the concept which in practice governed our air operations in World War II, or even those of Korea, insofar as certain air operations of that conflict could correctly be termed “strategic.” As recently as five years ago, strategic air warfare was still part of the general pattern of attrition, and because of this, it could be successfully worked in harness with a surface strategy which also followed that pattern. It tried to be, and to some extent was, selective in its effects. It possessed a flexibility which permitted a selection of a half dozen ratings on the scale of violence, to suit the needs of specialized targets.
As for the future, however, we have to reckon with three fundamental, and very recent developments. As Dr. Bernard Brodie has pointed out,
“We have every reason to suspect that even with jet bombers attrition rates in deep penetration sorties will be materially higher than they were in World War II. And in view of the very much longer ranges over which strategic bombing against the Soviet Union would have to be carried on, the H.E. bomb load per unit of sortie cost would fall absurdly low. Even if we could make every bomb dropped count for more than it did in World War II because of better target and aiming point selection, it is hardly feasible that we could win a war against the Soviet Union predominantly, let alone exclusively, by strategic bombing with H.E. and incendiary bombs. The same would be even more true of guided missiles if they lacked atomic warheads.”
To this must be added the very meaningful fact that long-range aircraft now cost from ten to twenty times what they did during World War II, whether that cost be reckoned in money or in substance and effort, and they will not be available to us now or in the future in anything like the numbers we could turn out in 1944. Our strategic air potential thus comes to be based upon a rather small number of high performance aircraft, which must be husbanded carefully if they are to be effective.
All this must be considered against the backdrop of a large and growing Soviet atomic capability, which urgently impells us to the necessity for keeping our own long-range offensive air potential intact and instantly ready for action.
Put another way, we simply cannot afford to send any portion of our limited number of medium and heavy bombardment aircraft 5,000 miles to inflict a few pin pricks with high explosive bombs on Soviet targets. Still less could we afford to waste these precious craft on conventional bombing operations in limited, peripheral wars of the Korean type, lest the reduced air strength occasioned by the attrition put us at a fatal disadvantage in an atomic war which the Soviet might for this very reason be tempted to undertake. The fact that our Korean operations resembled those of World War II may be attributed to two non-recurring factors: the Soviet’s limited nuclear capability, and the war stocks of B-29’s and B-50’s which, while obsolescent, still met the requirements for that theatre. Time will rapidly remove both these relevant factors.
Thus it is that quite as much by accident as by design, strategic air has largely lost its qualities of flexibility and selectivity. It can no longer be integrated with a surface strategy because its very nature has so telescoped its destructive capability in point of time that it has in fact become a strategy of annihilation rather than attrition. It is solitary and exclusive. It finds no application outside the context of a total, global war.
Now such a capability, to have value to the United States in war operations, depends for its usefulness upon certain assumptions about the mission of establishing command of the air: namely, that our operations will succeed and the enemy’s will fail and fail so abjectly that we shall retain enough substance and vitality to have the ability and the will to carry the fight through to some meaningful conclusion.
This may or may not be true, but the constantly increasing offensive capability of both piloted and pilotless delivery vehicles argues for the latter case. Command of the air, like command of the sea, is never absolute, and it is further complicated by the fact that in air warfare, both sides can wage a strategic offensive in the same area and at the same lime—something unheard of in surface operations. Listen to Douhet:
“Viewed in its true light, aerial warfare admits of no defense, only offense. We must therefore resign ourselves to the offensives the enemy inflicts upon us, while striving to put all our resources to work to inflict even heavier losses upon him. This is the basic principle which must govern the development of aerial warfare.”
This is the middle of the Twentieth Century. With a fourth of our population living in 70 cities we are talking insouciantly about a war in which the biggest and the smallest go at a uniform exchange rate of 1 in the currency of nuclear weapons. With such a prospect, it seems doubtful indeed that command of the air, on a global strategic level, can be obtained by either side before it has been injured beyond its capacity to survive as an organized social entity.
Whatever else may be said of it, this kind of thing is not war, but mutual suicide on a national scale. It lies completely outside the concept of force as an instrument of national policy, of organized violence used to gain political objectives. Victory is not in it. It can secure only the dubious comfort of having one’s enemy reduced to the same level of prostration as one’s self. It may be the kind of war we are forced to fight, and if that is so, we must of course do the best we can. But it certainly is not the pattern of war that we should consciously seek to establish, or make inevitable through our inability to fight any other.
This means, ironically, that our air strategy, unreservedly total in its nature, can have no meaningful application in a total war, which brings not decision but the utter collapse of both belligerents. And since it has the faculty of making any war in which it is engaged a total one, this amounts to saying that its purpose is best served when it is not used at all. By accepting a passive rôle in a limited war situation, it can add enormously to the meaning and potency of our limited war operations not by the actual or threatened intervention in local situations—which would rob them of all meaning—but by furnishing the assurance that the enemy will not intervene either. The chief value of our strategic air power lies in the unparalleled opportunity it now has to keep limited wars limited, and this it can do by concerning itself exclusively with the enemy air intentions, capabilities, and dispositions. In peace, war, or in every condition that lies between the two, the abiding, pre-emptive objective of an air force is to neutralize the air power of the enemy. In a state of total war this is undertaken mainly by destruction. In circumstances less than total war, it is accomplished by the threat and promise of destruction (deterrent effect). But the objective (neutralization) remains the same regardless of the means employed, and in view of the cost and uncertainty of neutralizing by destruction, it makes sense to do it by deterrent action wherever possible. But the real point is that the respective air forces of the belligerents are bound to concern themselves solely and exclusively with the task of neutralizing each other, and until one becomes ineffective, the other is simply not available for the side purposes of running diplomatic bluffs or influencing decisions in lesser areas of conflict. “Massive retaliation” has one legitimate application: as a deterrent against the enemy’s strategic use of atomic weapons. To suggest that its meaning extends beyond this point is to propound a heresy upon the doctrine of air power.
So in order to have tenable relationship to national objectives or to the other means for pursuing them, our strategic air power has to be forced into the framework of a limited war strategy, and this is done by assigning it the status of an uncommitted reserve. In this rôle its major purpose is not the waging of a total war, but the prevention of its outbreak. This is one base of our national security program. The other base comprises the mission of dealing successfully with the limited military operations which may from time to time feature our present relationships with the Communist world. And the cruel dilemma in which our policy makers are now caught stems from the fact that the means for carrying out these two basic undertakings reflect, in lesser degree, the incompatibility of the concepts under which they were developed. Our presently constituted Army and Marine divisions, Navy fleets and task forces, and Air Force tactical units can do double duty both in preventing the outbreak of an unlimited war and in countering the thrusts of a limited one. But this is scarcely true of the forces allocated to the continental defense or of the medium and heavy bombardment wings of the strategic air command, for reasons already discussed.
Be that as it may, there is no denying that our most important undertaking in the area of applied military power is to dissuade and deter the Soviets from exercising their strategic air capability. This poses a requirement for the counterweight of our own long-range strategic air power, the land based component of which is not designed for the needs of a limited war strategy with which we must also deal. Hence, a very substantial claim on our manpower, money, and material rightfully belongs to the task of developing a military force related almost exclusively to the requirements of preventing an atomic war. Yet the requirement for means to deal with limited war operations is scarcely less essential, since if we do not have these means we shall lose the cold war by default. It follows, then, that there is a point beyond which expenditures must be balanced between preventing total war and dealing successfully with the possible outbreaks of local violence which are the military characteristics of a limited war, and most of the sound and fury of the public debate which has gone on about our military policy hinges upon the matter of precisely where in the scale of military expenditures this point of diminishing returns is truly to be found.
There is another point. It is represented by the sum of expenditures and resources required to maintain the irreducible minimum of strength in both categories. In a climate of economy there will be the greatest temptation to go below this point at the expense of the surface components, meanwhile salving the nation’s conscience by crediting the air components with capabilities for dealing with situations which can only be handled by local and limited employment of surface forces.
There is nothing academic about this problem. It costs a nation heavily to carry all the paraphernalia for two complete and largely separate war strategies around on its back, and there will be the understandable desire to try and see if one can be made to serve the purpose of both. It is about the only area where any really substantial amount of money can be saved in the Defense establishment—if saving money comes around to pre-empting national security as a policy objective. It is good for military people to have the discipline of a cost-conscious administration scrutinizing their affairs, and no doubt some appreciable savings have been and will be made in the routine operations of the departments. But it must not be forgotten that the major determinant of military expenditures is the strategic concept adopted as essential to the security of the nation—which suggests that insofar as this is affected by curtailed expenditures, what is really gotten for less money is less security, not more.
Both politically and militarily we shall be up against the quite novel problems which grow out of a prolonged situation in which both sides have the capacity to ruin one another in an unrestricted exchange of atomic weapons. Since each side thus has the power to deny victory to the other, this may well mean that military victory, insofar as it represents the full and undisputed triumph of one side over the other, is an obsolete concept.
Minor victories in remote areas and over side issues may be possible, but it must be remembered that in each case the “victor” can establish his victory only by the consent of the “vanquished,” since each has the power to enlarge the conflict beyond the immediate issue. A great power will put up with limited losses if it has to and when the alternative is an all-out war, it may put up with quite a lot. But there is always a point at which it will fight for keeps in a showdown over its vital interests, and if it considers itself totally menaced, it will fight with everything it has, including thermonuclear weapons. The situation is somewhat like a two-man poker game in which the players, perfectly content to play nickel-dime-quarter on a three raise limit at the beginning are likely to throw down their cards and start shooting when the game goes to table stakes. To this it must be added that in very extensive areas both sides are committed to the point where it would be very difficult to withdraw, even if they desired to do so, and that these areas are conterminous throughout the better part of Europe and, if one includes water boundaries, a good part of Asia as well. This puts the two sides—the Communist and the Free World—into a broad relationship that mathematicians might term a zero-sum game; that is, the loss of one is inevitably the gain of the other. But this is not strictly a zero-sum game, for there exists for each strategic area a differential relationship between what its gain means to the winner and what its loss means to the loser. If the extent of these differential relationships could be accurately measured and made known both to Washington and Moscow, it might be the best insurance against war that we could have. In the very nature of things, however, it can never be known, any more than it could have been predicted on June 25, 1950, that the United Nations would fight for the territorial integrity of South Korea. Strategic assessments depend on the moods of people, which are notoriously unsusceptible to objective analysis.
While these relationships vary with the areas involved, we are, generally speaking, reaching the point where the loss of any area means considerably more to the loser than its gain means to the winner. In theory this suggests an increasing tendency for the defending side, especially if it is losing the point, to consider exercising its option of enlarging the conflict, and a decreasing tendency for the “aggressor”* to employ any means which could be used to furnish a casus belli. In a highly sensitive area such as Europe where ground elements in substantial force confront one another on each side of the Iron Curtain, and where each side’s vital interest in the area is unmistakably clear to the other, the contest has simmered down to a cold and watchful stalemate. The war in this theater is primarily political, economic, and psychological, with military measures held in abeyance by the common consent of both sides. On the face of it, this would seem to argue for the restraining effect of a retaliatory air force. But it will be seen on further examination that Europe is a special problem, unlike any other in the world. It is the beleaguered citadel of our civilization, of unquestioned and unmatched importance to our own country. Most of our people acknowledge to a greater or lesser degree the proposition that it must not fall into Communist hands. And even with all this the influences which operated in a period of atomic superiority may no longer be effective in a period of atomic sufficiency.
In practice, for any given situation there are a number of chance factors which could easily combine to produce either a big war or a catastrophic surrender of a vital point in our defenses. The enemy might again embark upon a limited military venture, perhaps in an area where the navigational hazards are not so well marked as they are in Europe. If it worked out that we were unable to interpose enough conventional military force in time to save the area from subjugation, we should all have to ask ourselves as Senator Knowland has suggested, whether or not we want to “risk all-out war for Iran, Sweden, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, India, Finland, Burma, and so forth.” Most of the people of New York have never even seen an Iranian, but they have a very substantial idea of what a ten megaton bomb would do to New York. Moreover, while the people of our own major cities were thus agonizing through their own reappraisal, the British, French, Spaniards, and Italians, implicated in the plot through our air bases on their territory, might rather abruptly decide that co-existence is better than no existence, and forthwith hand us our eviction notices.
These are very real problems, and they are inevitably features of any situation in which the elements of a strategy of terror are present. For democracies are constitutionally unable and unwilling to undertake risks and run bluffs in the manner in which autocrats are free to do, and in any such showdown the democracies are likely to lose. It is like a man trying to play poker with a kibitzer continually tipping his hand to his opponents. Most important, however, is the fact that the minute the concept of total war is introduced, the whole basis of collective security goes right out the window. Aside from the superior strength which past coalitions made available to their member nations there was the important added incentive of joint risk-bearing which in another sphere has made both life and casualty insurance attractive to so many millions of people. Thus, A might be able to do serious injury to B, C, or D if he attacked them singly, but if they stuck together, there would be a good chance that A might be discouraged from attacking, and the further chance that even if he did attack, the coalition would keep him so well occupied that he would probably be able to injure any one of the members only slightly, if at all.
But there is nothing about the present situation that could give any cheer to a small nation, totally vulnerable to atomic weapons and lacking them for either offense or defense, which found itself caught in an allout war between two colossi plentifully supplied with them. The effect of a coalition in these circumstances is not to reduce the individual risk of the smaller participating nations, but to increase it enormously, since it exposes them all to the eminent risk of annihilation as the consequence of their participation in it. Further, their collective strength in conventional armaments, which might otherwise amount to something very considerable, and which might be of very great significance in local conflicts, would have virtually no weight in an all-out war or in any situation which looked as though it might immediately become an all-out war. And it is here that we should take note of the fact that the incubus of their own helplessness and vulnerability in the event of allout war is bound to affect the policy of these small nations, urging them toward neutralism and indifference, and away from the unity which it is so very important for the Western Coalition to maintain. It is doing so now and its effect will tend to increase in the measure that it appears likely that American policy permits of no course of action other than surrender or a big war.
We can, it is to be devoutly hoped, avoid, or indefinitely forestall an unrestricted hydrogen-bomb war. But it is asking too much of this world of “emergent hopes and rising expectations” to suppose that the intense and persistent conflicts in human affairs which have so often found their end in war are by some miracle going to dissolve into a flood of brotherhood and good will. These conflicts will continue, magnified and exacerbated by the vast dislocations of our times, and they will remain to be dealt with by the instruments which society has developed for the settlement of its differences, including the element of physical armed force.
This means paradoxically that the more successful we are in avoiding an all-out war, the more likely it is that we shall have to deal with the thrusts of a limited war. The operations involved may be anything from raider and guerrilla tactics to the fully integrated effort of a regular field army. They may be conducted under, above, and on the sea, on the land, on the littoral between the two, or in the air above. They may be conducted in the jungle, in the mountains, on the desert and steppe. We shall be contesting a vast heartland power for the control of the all important rimlands of the Eurasian continent.
This is a maritime strategy, conducted by a concert of allies almost all of whom look upon the sea and who are joined, rather than separated, by it. For a great number of reasons, political, military, and economic, it is essential that the strategic areas around this great periphery be garrisoned with sufficient strength to discourage attack or to withstand it until help can be received. The substantial portion of these defending elements must be indigenous to the area concerned, and to this purpose we have concluded 7 regional security pacts with 24 nations, advanced very great amounts of money and material to these and other countries in the form of military and economic aid, and dispatched military missions to promote a better understanding of our aims, purposes, and military doctrine among those countries, who may at some future time find themselves fighting with us in a common cause.
Having vigorously pursued this program for the past eight years, we have succeeded in creating a very respectable amount of strength on a regional basis, for the common purpose of defending the member nations against the menace of Soviet imperialism. This collective strength, exclusive of our own contributions, amounts to something like one hundred divisions in ground forces alone, and it continues to increase, both in size and in readiness. It is both articulated and validated by a command of the sea which insures that no matter where the enemy may choose to strike, support may be rapidly concentrated from all over the world to defend the beleaguered area. In June of 1950 when the Communist armies broke over their frontier, they had scarcely 200 miles to go to reach Pusan and overrun the Korean peninsula. Our nearest divisions were in Japan—600 miles away, and we had to supplement them with men, ships, and planes from places as far away as the Mediterranean and the East Coast of the United States. Yet we beat the enemy to Pusan. And this is no remarkable occurrence. It has happened time and time again, demonstrating as nothing else could the mobility of sea-borne forces, and the power of the nation which commands the sea. With our great power upon the sea, the alliances which we have put together at such great pains and cost have a very practical meaning both to us and to our enemies in the context of a limited-war strategy which has for its immediate objective the containment of Soviet power. But, as we have seen, this great source of strength is immediately vitiated by any circumstance which acts to convert a limited war into a total one.
It may be argued that we cannot keep the Soviets out of Europe with anything short of atomic weapons, tactically used. This appears to be the view of a great many esteemed officers including Field Marshal Montgomery, who have had to grapple with the problem as a part of their official responsibilities. It is probably true. But it is no less true that the tactical use of such weapons in Europe even of nominal size, is charged with the great danger that it will prove impossible to restrict their employment once it has begun. Even if this could be assured, the likely prospect is for a stalemate at the cost of staggering casualties on both sides. The atomic weapon, let it be remembered, is a weapon of annihilation whether it is used strategically or tactically, and its principal effect when used in numbers is to eliminate the strength factors of each side. The same agent which cancelled the Soviet manpower superiority would also cancel our own superiority in matériel, with the result that the fighting might well degenerate into years of indecisive guerrilla tactics carried on by the better indoctrinated remnants of the regular forces.
This may be a better alternative than letting Western Europe be drawn into the orbit of Soviet power. If so, then we have no choice but "to accept the risk of all-out war, the great casualties, and the stalemate. But let us not be smug about it, and let us not think that because we have these weapons of such fearful capabilities we have in any way lessened the burdens of our defense. A nation develops and employs a weapon which it believes and hopes is better than anything its enemy possesses, in the expectation that its use will give it a material advantage over the enemy. But when both sides have the same weapon yielding substantially the same order of power, then neither has any real advantage, and its use only serves to make the war more terrible and costly. Mere destruction is not decision, no matter how it may be calculated.
III
Whatever else their disagreements might be about the character of the present struggle, most people will agree that this odd and unwelcome moment in history is not peace in the classic sense in which most of us were reared up to understand it. It is, in fact, war in a limited degree, and it is a war which in its military aspects is not fully winnable by either side. In this regard we are in a situation not unlike that which formerly existed between Islam and Christendom where two missionary faiths, each of them claiming to be universal, had finally to recognize the inconvenient fact that, neither being able to extirpate the other, they had to find some basis for living together in the same world. Today the same compulsion for a modus vivendi between the Free World and the Soviet Bloc exists, but for exactly the opposite reason. The two earlier belligerents lacked the capacity and the power to destroy one another; the two protagonists of the Twentieth Century do have the power to destroy one another, and to do it mutually and completely. In these circumstances neither side has the power to achieve victory; it has only the power to deny it to its enemy.
This means that for the future, any outlook other than that of total war must take note of the fact that we must discover some basis for living on the same planet with 500 million Chinese and 200 million Russians, and for the time being this means coming to terms of a sort with the leadership under which those unhappy people now find themselves. This is co-existence, and it will probably be much the same kind of co-existence we have had for these past eight years. It will be a period of threat and bluff, protracted negotiations, political and economic warfare, and perhaps a small gain here and there. It may mean hostilities running all the way from insults across the conference table to limited military operations. But the world will remain for the most part divided substantially along the present lines of demarcation under conditions which will in the broad view substantially amount to military stalemate.
Such is the nature of co-existence. It will not be peaceful; neither will it be surrender. It will be expensive, frustrating and indecisive, and if there is any comfort to be drawn from this, it is from the fact that World War II was vastly more expensive, and just as frustrating and indecisive in terms of the larger purpose which it was supposed to serve —that of bringing security and peace.
The great danger, which Senator Knowland has pointed out, is that in a period of atomic stalemate, any Communist aggression would be likely to put before us the impossible alternatives of surrender or total war. And this will be profoundly true, should we neglect to provide the concomitants of a viable surface strategy capable of dealing with these aggressive acts at an appropriate level of violence. There never was a more insistent need for strong and loyal allies, long-range, mobile air power capable of something less than atomic attack, combat-ready amphibious forces, and a powerful central reserve of ground strength, with the air elements necessary to its tactical support. If we have these forces in strength adequate to meet these local situations, we may yet preserve the non-communist world from further nibbling aggression, and in so doing avoid the evil necessity of choosing the method by which we might bring our civilization to an untimely end.
Victory is out. Real peace in the foreseeable future is a remote possibility. At present the best that can reasonably be hoped for from our military efforts will be a tolerable assurance against the outbreak of total war and the stabilization of the existing frontiers which now divide the world in the general vicinity where they now are. These conditions will be extraordinarily hard for many of us to accept. Americans are constitutionally averse to messing around. We are the great pragmatists, the perennial pursuers of quick answers and decisive results. Yet in the prosecution of a nation’s foreign and military policy there are no quick and easy answers, no courses of action which promise decisive results, no way of ever cleaning up the loose threads and tag ends of humanity’s misadventures into international politics. In reality the events of the past few years have not materially changed the character of war as an instrument of national policy; they have only shown up more vividly and clearly than ever before how inadequate it is as a mechanism for attaining the positive goals of a liberal society.
“All well and good,” people may say. “But is this all? Is there nothing more? Are we to look forward to nothing more hopeful than the prospect of living in an armed camp with the threat of catastrophe hanging daily over our heads?”
Those who would answer these questions, I think, have to argue from two premises. One of these is demonstrably true, at least as a general proposition; the other admittedly has to be taken on faith.
The first of these is that all things, including the policies of totalitarian regimes and messianic movements, tend to change in response to the influences which impinge upon them. The passage of time tends to take some of the steam out of messianic movements. Conditions change, and with them the ideas of men. The Soviet regime is young—thirty-seven years is in reality a very short time in which to render judgments about the permanency and nature of such a philosophy and system of government. If one cares to go into the matter, he can find many examples of where substantial changes have occurred as the seat of power rotated from one set of conspirators to another. To be sure, none of them has as yet produced any marked shift in the fundamental Soviet attitude toward the non-communist world, but the very fact that changes can and do take place keeps open the possibility that such a re-orientation may appear in the future, especially if the Free World presents a consistent picture of strength, unity, and resolution.
Secondly, there is the assumption that a society of free men is more enduring than a slave state. This is indeed a profession of faith, for if we do not believe, deeply and earnestly, that our way of life represents a goal to which men naturally aspire and to which they will naturally respond—if we do not believe our democratic society to be the most vital and enduring yet devised, then all else we are doing loses its significance. Our long-term bet is that, in the world marketplace of ideas, democracy will greatly outsell totalitarianism. We must be willing to believe that our free society—with all its inconsistencies, its divisions, and its apparent indecisiveness—is capable of thriving in today’s jungle world, capable in the long run of winning the battle for the minds of men.
It has been the burden of this paper to point up some of the military features of the period of history on which we are entering, and to indicate their limits and possibilities under the new dispensation of power in the world. It is to be hoped that one of the things which has become obvious to those who have read this far is that the fundamental issue is political and moral, rather than physical. This is of great importance, for from time out of mind, men have attempted the settlement of moral issues on the plane of the physical, and in every case they have failed to gain the objective of their efforts. For the things that stir the masses of humanity are the ideas and impulses which—for good or evil—spring from the hearts and minds and spirits of men. These are the realities that shape our destiny, and armaments and weapons remain forever subservient to the ideas which give them purpose.
And this brings us back full circle to our beginning thesis—to our own Moment of Truth, and the abiding necessity for our conducting ourselves and our affairs according to our basic principles and beliefs as Americans. This notably does not include the prosecution of a preventive war, or a petulant retreat to a “Festung Amerika” concept. It means particularly that we must somehow find the mean to lessen the suspicion and distrust and bad faith which divide our people and stultify our efforts. It means, despite what our military objectives might tend to imply, that we must quit identifying America with some stagnant status quo which, however well it might have served the Western community in the past century, has nothing to offer it in this one. For the truth is that in a world electrified with revolutionary concepts we are the most revolutionary people on earth. The real revolution of our time is the revolution of freedom and justice and plenty against oppression and privilege and poverty. Tyranny and dictatorships are as old as the pyramids. The pages of history blush with the cruelties of its Neros, its Ivans, its Hitlers, and its Stalins. What is really new in the world is the basic American belief that a great community of plain, ordinary people can manage its affairs in a dynamic, cohesive society in which justice, freedom, and opportunity for individual fulfillment will prevail.
The message of America—the real America—is a message of hope for all mankind. Let us keep our armor bright, but let us remember that the real issue of our time will be fought out on a frontier forever beyond our bullets and bombs and napalm, where we shall be obliged to prove that good is stronger than evil, that humanity is more logical than hate, that freedom is more enduring than slavery.
*In this context, an artificial term used to designate any power which seeks to change the territorial status quo. It may apply alike to UN and to Communist blocs.