National security policy must comprise a broad spectrum of political, economic, scientific, social, psychological, and other factors—which collectively are mutually supporting, and, in totality, provide the broad highway toward national progress.
Military considerations are not necessarily paramount in the formulation of policy. One must first ask: What are we trying to do? What over-all policy are we trying to support?
The long-range objective—not just the immediate aim of military victory or military security—must be kept in mind. The trail of history is littered with the bleached bones of national aspirations, killed by a failure to define adequately their political or economic goals, or to support those goals with adequate military power.
The unconditional surrender policy of World War II; our postwar failure to use our then unrivalled military power to enforce access routes to Berlin, or to secure a unified Germany and a free Poland; our astigmatic tendency during the war to seek military victory without sufficient thought of the postwar political consequences, led to the complete upset of the past balance of power, the elimination of Germany and Japan as a counterpoise to Soviet Russia; and the substitution, in 1962, of the Communist Empire as a far greater menace to the United States than Hitler’s Reich ever was.
A phrase now sometimes used contemptuously, “gunboat diplomacy,” is illustrative. It poses the proper use of power. Diplomats of the last century and the beginning of this century who occasionally used the gunboats of the Navy or the battalions of the Army to back what they considered to be important American interests understood the use of military power to back up diplomacy. Somewhere between World War I and World War II we commenced to lose this understanding in our Foreign Service.
Today engaged in a struggle for the world, it is vital that our planners identify, understand, and properly employ all kinds of power. Military factors in the formulation of policy have no meaning in a vacuum; unless they support sound political, economic, and other objectives, they represent merely an insensate use of force.
There have been many examples of mistaken application of military power without sufficient consideration of political or economic costs. Let us note only two:
Mr. Winston Churchill said during the course of World War II that he was not the King’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, but in effect, this is exactly what he did. Yet, in reality, the dissolution of the British Empire started in World War I, largely because Britain adopted a mistaken strategy in that conflict. She abandoned her traditional maritime strategy of the past and embarked upon a continental strategy. For the first time in her history Britain used mass conscription and the best generations of British youth died, as Mr. Churchill put it, “chewing barbed wire in Flanders.”
Churchill, Lord Fisher, and a few other exponents of what was called then and in World War II “eccentric strategy,” attempted the Gallipoli campaign in an effort to find a way around the strategic flank of the trench stalemate in France. The conception was certainly sound; the execution was deplorable.
In World War II, Churchill, influenced by his World War I experiences, preferred an attack through the “soft underbelly” of Europe. In retrospect it can be argued that Churchill was right in World War II, as he was in World War I; that we might have done better had we paid more attention to the “soft underbelly” of Europe and to countering Russian postwar aspirations in the Balkans. The continental strategy of Britain in World War I was adopted without sufficient examination of the social, political or economic consequences to postwar Britain.
A second illustration, pointed toward the failure to include economic factors in strategic planning is the British and French attack on the Suez Canal in 1956.
The British had maintained about 80,000 men along the banks of the Suez Canal until about a year before the attack upon Port Said. These troops had been withdrawn deliberately after Cabinet level consideration in Britain of the costs as measured against the strategic advantages. Britain simply could not afford to maintain this force in Egypt. Yet, emotionally affected and upset by Nasser’s tweaking of the nose of the British raj, just a year after these 80,000 men had been withdrawn and Britain had solemnly and deliberately closed her bases in the Canal zone, she went back into Port Said with a far larger army than she had originally maintained there and with no clear objective as to what she was going to do. Britain might, of course, have taken the Canal. What then? Would Britain maintain 80,000 troops in Egypt indefinitely? Just a year before she had determined that she could not do this; it was not economically possible.
There was inadequate consideration in the Port Said attack of the eventual economic cost of the 'operation to Britain. The planning was deficient and the military were required to support a vague objective which had no clear-cut political or economic goal.
What is essential, then, in the formulation of national security policy is the broadest possible consideration of all factors—political, economic, psychological, demographic, geographic, social, and scientific. The consequences—immediate and ultimate—of any contemplated policy must be most carefully weighed, lest our country’s future suffer by an ill-considered action.
Many relatively junior members of that vast hierarchy of bureaucracy which presides over American destinies may well wonder how a lowly colonel or captain could influence the course of history. Yet, the diligence, the judgment, the skill, the devotion, the moral courage of a captain or a colonel can indeed affect for better or for worse the lives of many of us.
It was a commander in the British Navy, Commander Reginald Henderson, who was a key instrument in changing the course of history in World War I. His forceful and persuasive advocacy in the Admiralty of the convoy system helped to lead to the defeat of a deadly menace—the German submarine campaign.
Thus, to recapitulate, in the formulation of national policy, we should establish sound short-term and long-term political, economic, and social, as well as military, objectives and measure them against the continuing yardstick—the preservation of a more stable nation in a more stable world. We should consider all factors, weighing the military considerations against the political results we are trying to achieve.
It is difficult to list with precision factors in policy formulation that are exclusively military, since many—which are not ordinarily defined as military in character—appear to have major military implications.
The nature, for instance, of our own political system and the nature of the enemy’s, the characteristics of our people as compared to the peoples of the potential enemy—these factors, and others like them, have tremendous pertinence to the battlefield, and particularly to prewar planning.
A century ago De Tocqueville wrote about the American democracy that:
I do not hesitate to say that it is especially in the conduct of their foreign relations that democracies appear to me decidedly inferior to other governments. Experience, instruction, and habit almost always succeed in creating in a democracy a homely species of practical wisdom and that science of the petty occurrences of life which is called good sense. Good sense may suffice to direct the ordinary course of society and amongst a people whose education is completed the advantages of democratic liberty in the internal affairs of the country may more than compensate for the evils inherent in a democratic government. But it is not always so in the relations with foreign nations.
Words like these should be assessed and weighed to try to correlate in planning the advantages and disadvantages of democracy.
We must take into consideration as military factors the profound effects of the “winds of change” in our changing world and especially in our changing nation.
The United States was once primarily an agrarian economy, and its population— largely Anglo-Saxon—was an homogeneous one. Today, we are largely an urbanized, industrial economy, with a diverse population of little homogeneity; large minorities of it do not even command the common tongue —English. What this can mean in terms of added difficulties on the battlefield does not need stressing to those who commanded in Korea. Homogeneity of peoples, of outlook, of race and religion, and social background has always been a military factor of major importance. Probably the Confederate armies of the Civil War were the most homogeneous American armies ever fielded; this homogeneity certainly accounted in part for their battlefield effectiveness.
In the most recent of the Army’s Official Military History series, Martin Blumenson’s Breakout and Pursuit, there are many tributes to the amazing discipline and continued combat effectiveness of the German soldiers in Normandy, even in the ruck of disaster. Their battlefield effectiveness has always been in part the result of the homogeneity of the German people and of their disciplined character.
Other military factors to be considered are the educational levels and the natural skills of a people, their familiarity or unfamiliarity with machines, their technical inventiveness, and so on.
Another factor of importance, when we compare our potential with that of the prospective enemy is the character of our American political system. Like our society, this, too, has changed.
It is important to note that the checks and balances established by the founding fathers of this country between the Legislative, the Judicial, and the Executive Branches have gradually been reduced, that more and more power has concentrated in the Executive Branch, and that there has tended to be at the same time a concentration of power within segments of that Branch. At the Pentagon this trend toward centralization is pronounced, and in Washington the trend toward centralization in the Presidency is pronounced. This is true in the economic as well as in the political fields. Countless examples can be cited; among them, the events following the recent increase in steel prices, quickly rescinded after the power of the Presidency was invoked. The office of the Presidency has expanded its power enormously at the expense of the Legislative and to some extent of the Judicial Branches.
Another factor is the global decline of the influence of Christianity. (Spengler and others have emphasized this in their books.) Santayana said:
Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. A flood of barbarism from below may soon level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood two thousand years ago levelled those of the ancients. Romantic Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode—may be coming to an end.
There are pronounced social trends in the United States of importance to military planning—among them the reduction of standards of the past. There has been a leveling out process in many fields including education; mass education has too often meant in the oversimplified terms of the cliche that “education for all is education for none.”
And there has been the development of the “work-less-and-make-more” mania; one union in New York already has achieved a basic five-hour work day.
We face an enemy who knows no hours in the day.
There are trends, too, toward moral astigmatism, in part a factor of the decline of the influence of Christianity. The “it’s-all-right- if-you-can-get-away-with-it” philosophy has marred our whole social fabric over recent years. One need remember only the TV scandals, where some of our best brains, our most highly educated people—people whom one would think would have a sense of moral obligation of noblesse oblige—really showed that they were hollow shells.
We have experienced, too, in the United States a decline of the importance of incentives, a frightening substitution of security for opportunity.
On the other hand, the Soviet system seems to have stressed incentives, and we must reckon with the fact that there is a dynamism in our foes.
Russia, however, still suffers from the handicaps of dictatorship even though the iron rule has been eased and the mailed fist partly hidden. We have no such problem in this country as Russia faced after Stalin and will face soon again after Khrushchev—the problem of the transference of power from one head of state to his successor—the problem of the succession. And while we are slow to anger, slow to action, we may be more flexible and enduring in response.
In addition to the comparative natures of the opposing peoples, their social systems and their governments, one must consider with care the geographic factors that are bound, even in the space age, to play major military roles in policy planning.
These geographic factors need to be dealt with at some length, lest they be—at our peril—unduly minimized.
Look at Russia—Heartland of Eurasia, greatest single national land mass in the world, relatively sparsely populated, but with large areas inhospitable to man, with built-in agricultural deficiencies, and subject to droughts and floods—deficiencies, which, with population increases, may even become worse instead of better. This great land mass, its generals and admirals oriented by centuries of tradition to ground power, its gaze in the past introspective and inverted, has been hemmed in for centuries by what geopoliticians call the “rimlands” or coastal regions and nations of Europe and Asia and by harsh climates and the Arctic armor of ice.
Russia has few warm water ports, and its narrow seas are closed by natural bottlenecks —the Black Sea by the Dardanelles; the Baltic by the Skagerrack and Kattegat; the Arctic by the ice and the narrow exits into the Atlantic between Iceland and the Faeroes and Iceland and Greenland; the sea of Okhotsk by the Japanese Islands, Kamchatka, and the Kuriles. Of all Russia’s ports, only Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, significantly enough a major submarine base, fronts on the open Pacific and even this must be kept open in winter by icebreakers.
The United States has, therefore, certain major geographic advantages which must be weighed against the Soviet geographical assets. In relation to the United States and its allies, Russia occupies the interior position, with theoretically shorter lines of communication to its strategic periphery than the external lines of its adversaries. Yet, as the Russo-Japanese War and the Korean War showed, this advantage, unless coupled with excellent communications and transportation systems, is illusory. The United States was able, over far greater distances, to pour more supplies by ship and by plane into Korea than Russia and China were able to do over tenuous land, road, and rail nets.
The factor of logistics favored us; it is still important today, just as it was when the Duke of Wellington wrote a long time ago:
It is very necessary to attend to all this detail and to trace a biscuit from Lisbon into a man’s mouth on the frontier and to provide for its removal from place to place by land or by water, or no military operations can be carried out.
Again—a factor of importance in nuclear war—Russia has more open space; less of an urban economy, more “cushion” of land for her population than the United States does. But this is offset, at least in part, by two other factors that favor us. Because of the narrow seas and natural ocean bottlenecks that fence her in, Russian shipping and Russian submarines might have a hard time in gaining the open oceans in actual war. For the United States, all the wide waters from the coasts of North America to the portals of Russia’s narrow seas are friendly; they are under our aegis, within our windswept fief. The Russian submariner on the other hand, must transit the narrow bottlenecks of sea easily closed or dominated by an enemy, and cruise across great distances of ocean, where every man’s hand is against him, until he is able to stalk a convoy or reach his missile-firing position.
Another major geographic factor to our advantage is our bases overseas, our friends and allies on the coast lands of Asia and Europe. Russia has no such comparable positions in the Western Hemisphere (Cuba excepted). Her strategic problem is, therefore, magnified by geography. Those artillerymen who have fired a Time-on-Target (TOT) bombardment will understand particularly the complexity introduced into the Soviet nuclear delivery equation simply by this factor of geography.
To achieve surprise and to escape as far as possible devastating retaliation, every Soviet missile or bomb should hit our widely scattered global bases from Alaska to Florida, from the Philippines to Turkey at a specific time and at the same given moment. This requires a missile and bomber reliability, a precision in planning and execution, that is almost certainly beyond the capability of the U.S.S.R. today. Some missiles, some bombs would fall ahead of time and, hence, announce the coming of others; others would be late. This factor applies particularly in a first- strike situation when an enemy hopes to reap the maximum advantages of surprise. Obviously, the dispersion and number of our bases complicate his task.
The overseas bases also tend to provide early warning areas, a girdle of defended zones, a rimland belt which intervenes between the open seas and open skies of our world and the heartland of Russia.
In addition to geographic factors, there are a host of other military considerations that must be cranked into the equation of policy formulation. Let us identify a few and briefly comment about them.
Secondary enemies—their strengths and weaknesses and their relationships with the primary enemy must obviously be considered. In this connection obviously the most important secondary enemy from our point of view is Red China. It is important from every angle—military, political, and economic—- and its relationship with Moscow certainly should influence any policy formulation in this country. There has been a long heritage of friction between China and Russia which is not new to the age of Communism—a long heritage of friction, both geographic, economic, and ideological, in Manchuria and Central Asia. This friction still continues; it is now primarily centered in the ideological field, secondarily in the economic. But behind the scenes there are also some technical frictions, some difficulties about supplying nuclear aid to Red China. The withdrawal of Soviet technicians from China recently— even if only temporary—is an indication of the limited help given by Moscow to China. Certainly Moscow is not anxious to see a teeming nation of many hundred of millions of people become also a highly developed industrial and nuclear power.
We must also look at the Eastern European satellites. Enemies? Or opportunity? Certainly when we investigate the stubborn Poles, the most homogeneous of peoples, people who have always clung to their national characteristics through the centuries, regardless of what power might have conquered them. We shall see that she and other such satellites may represent as much of a headache for Russia as an asset to them.
One must also examine the role of the equivocal nations—Yugoslavia, for instance, which has been playing both sides against the middle. Are these nations for or against us? Are they threat or opportunity? Politically, certainly an opportunity. Yet in time of war, it appears to be a foregone conclusion that Yugoslavia would not participate, if possible, on either side. If actually invaded by either side, the stubborn Serbs would fight for their country as they have done in the past.
We must, of course, also consider the so- called neutral nations and volatile Africa as factors which must enter into any consideration of national security policy.
In passing, one might note that our emphatic attempts to win the undeveloped nations of the world, particularly some of the Black nations, to our side have perhaps gone too far. One must give due weight to the arguments of Senator Jackson, who feels that we must give greater influence to our NATO alliance and to our natural and important allies, France and Britain and others, than we have done in the past. Our policies have been too much circumscribed by the United Nations and by undue regard for the so-called undeveloped nations.
Still another factor, and a major one, is the comparative military capabilities of the United States and the U.S.S.R., of the Western alliance and the Communist empire.
One of our great military advantages is still our industrial superiority. Despite the dismal predictions of many economists, there is no likelihood that Russia will overtake us industrially across the board within the foreseeable future. Our economy is still more flexible and our lead is still pronounced.
When one adds our allies’ industrial power to our own and satellite output to Russia’s, our lead is even more overwhelming. Our economy is one of surpluses; the Russian one of strain. We can make progress across the board. Russia must be selective.
In addition to this advantage, we have a clear-cut advantage at sea—a naval superiority which it is absolutely vital to retain if our present system of alliances is to remain viable. If we cannot maintain lifelines for the transport of heavy cargo—manganese, wheat, and all the things that keep an alliance together—across the seas, then indeed the whole political fabric falls apart. We have today this requisite naval advantage.
In passing reference to the Soviet submarine menace, it should be noted that, though Russia has the largest submarine fleet in the world today, she had the largest submarine fleet at the start of World War II and did absolutely nothing with it during that war. She had something like 167 submarines at the start of World War II, as compared to 57 in Nazi Germany, and she sank in the whole war about 250,000 tons—a quarter million tons— of enemy shipping. The Germans alone sank some 14 million tons, and U. S. submarines in the Pacific sank between five and five-and- a-half million tons of Japanese shipping. So there is an experience factor involved in the Soviet submarine fleet which is hard to assess. Certainly the Russian “submariners” have improved since World War II. It is probable that today the Russian submarine effectiveness is perhaps about on a par with our submarine effectiveness as of the beginning of World War II. The Russians are still far behind us, but they have progressed greatly since the war.
The United States enjoys a very definite advantage in piloted air power. The two tests history has provided of U. S. aircraft versus Soviet aircraft, in Korea and the Taiwan Strait, indicate that our weapons systems, if not our flying machines as such, are superior. Pilot training and pilot experience had a lot to do with the disproportionate kill rate in both of these instances. Nevertheless in several important categories the United States has a qualitative “edge.” In all-weather fighters (as a weapons system) the Russians for instance do not yet have in operation in any numbers planes that are really comparable to our own. Our Strategic Air Command is supreme in the field of long-range strategic bombing. The experience factor, the know-how, navigational capabilities, air refueling—in addition to superiority in numbers and in quality generally—represent an over-all advantage for us. The Russians have more planes than we do, particularly of those types designed to support ground armies, and of fighter-interceptors. But over-all piloted air power is a definite factor of advantage on our side.
The Russians have a clear-cut superiority on land—150 Soviet divisions to 16 Army and three Marine divisions. When allied strengths are added to our strength and the Soviet satellite strengths to their forces, our advantage at sea and in the air becomes even more pronounced, whereas the Communist advantage on land becomes even larger.
Churchill likened this equation to the struggle between the Land Beast and the Sea Beast, the Elephant versus the Whale.
In another military factor of major importance—nuclear weapons—we are still ahead of Russia in quality, variety and quantity.
But our lead is no longer comforting. In some ways and in some weapons the Russians may equal or exceed us.
In missiles of all types the United States probably has an over-all qualitative advantage. The Russians are ahead of us in medium range land-based missiles, but we are ahead of the U.S.S.R. in submarine and ship-based missiles and in ICBM’s.
In summation, we are still the world’s strongest military power, chiefly because of our superior nuclear delivery capability, our naval superiority, our great industry. We have weaknesses; perhaps the most important is the inferiority of the West in total manpower. There are, too, some question marks about our hardihood, our will, and our spirit, as compared to the primitive masses of the Communists. We face in some ways the old, old formula of the civilized and the prosperous versus the barbarians.
What about the trends in the military power equation and the influence of new weapons?
First and perhaps most important as a continuing trend is the increasing industrial power of Soviet Russia. Although it is doubtful that Russia’s total output will overtake ours in the foreseeable future, her capital goods industries nevertheless are still increasing relative to our own. This is partially offset and may in the future be more than offset by the trend toward the economic and political integration of Western Europe—obviously a factor of tremendous importance because Western Europe is a center second only to that of the United States and Soviet Russia. If the collective strength of Western Europe can be really mobilized and unified, this is a tremendous plus factor in the power equation for tomorrow.
But we must of course, anticipate the growth of new centers of world power—Red China, eventually India, and, conceivably, parts of Africa.
The development of new weapons will have tremendous influence politically and economically, as well as militarily. The costs of nuclear delivery systems are so huge—even though second and third generation weapons have lesser unit costs—and the costs of “keeping up with the Joneses” in technological developments are so great that military power centers are being polarized; poor nations cannot afford the price. Today, and for the immediate future, there are only two really great military powers—the United States and the U.S.S.R.
The second trend—the growing invulnerability of our nuclear deterrent and, conversely, of Russia’s—will introduce an era, perhaps temporary, of a more balanced and more stable nuclear stalemate, at least as far as the larger weapons are concerned. Any nuclear balance or nuclear stalemate might be temporary—it is liable to be disrupted by a technological breakthrough—and it would certainly be uneasy. For it might provide a logical reason why each side should not attack the other, but it can take no account of the illogical or the irrational, or of the accidental. Moreover, a technological breakthrough—a Buck Rogers’ death ray, for instance, which could sweep aircraft and missiles out of the skies—would upset overnight any precariously established balance. Nevertheless, in the immediately foreseeable future, the hardened Minuteman, the skybolt missile, the Polaris submarine, and other relatively invulnerable nuclear delivery devices will tend to discourage either side from nuclear adventures, and will be a stabilizing, rather than an unsettling, factor.
On the other hand, accompanying this trend—and to some extent balancing its advantages—will be the proliferation of nuclear weapons, their wider distribution, and the advent on the world’s stage of new nuclear powers—Red China and France, for instance; perhaps Israel in time.
There will be a consequent greater danger of irrational and accidental actions.
There also, of course, is bound to be the continued danger, and one which we must emphasize as some nuclear stabilization occurs, of what Mr. Khrushchev calls “wars of liberation,” the kind of thing that is going on in South Vietnam now, upon which so much emphasis has been laid recently. Counterinsurgency is here to stay.
The development of new weapons is certain to have a major influence upon Soviet strategic concepts; in fact, it is already having such an effect. In the past, Russia’s strategic concepts were introverted; Russian strategists looked inward toward “mother” Russia; their concepts tied to land power. Navies and air forces were viewed as shields to defend their narrow seas.
The Russians, even in the days of the Tsars, were great sea-mining people. They used sea mines to defend their narrow coasts and their shallow seas. Their naval concepts were essentially defensive. They believed that danger, as in Napoleon’s and in Hitler’s times, could come only by land.
Until now, despite Moscow’s great military power, Russian strategic concepts have been essentially defensive, though these Russian concepts have been tremendously influenced by Communist ideological and political concepts which are of an offensive character. However, war is the last string to the Marxian bow. Communist expansion, backed by Russian power, has utilized the traditional tactics of subversion, economic and political and ideological penetration.
But it is a striking fact that, despite the extension of Communism since World War II, Russian military power as such has always been cautiously used. Now, with missiles and space satellites and nuclear-powered submarines, it is interesting to speculate how Russian strategic concepts are changing. They are certain to change; in fact, they already are changing. But the effects this change will have are less easy to identify. It could take two forms: The Russian strategic concept of tomorrow (that is, the military part of it) could become offensive in character, thus matching the offensive ideological doctrine of Communism. On the other hand, as always has been true, in the past at least, of all those nations who have looked beyond their own heartlands- towards wider horizons—the high seas and the high skies of space, might—just might—provide an ameliorating influence upon the hard-case Russian mind.
It is conceivable that in the pursuit of trade and the conquest of space, Moscow might become over a long period liberalized. But these are speculations, and for the foreseeable future, we face world conflict (using the term in its broadest sense).
We must, then, in considering the military factors that go into policy formulation, consider, too, the nature of the attack with which we are faced—the “mission” of the enemy.
We must, for quite a few years, continue to put considerable emphasis—very great emphasis—upon the threat of nuclear attack. But we must not overemphasize this danger. There is now a corollary danger that we may be overemphasizing counter-insurgency operations or guerrilla warfare.
In reality, the threat is total and, as has been said so often, we must be prepared for the entire spectrum of conflict from all-out megaton war and duels in space to snipers on the ground and frogmen on the beaches.
Thus, the role of military forces in the formulation of national security policy is broad indeed. To formulate sound policy, one must consider a tremendous number of factors, military and paramilitary; the military factors and the political, economic, social, and psychological are intermeshed, and, in any sound policy, must be self-supporting. Military factors cannot and must not dominate, but they must be properly weighed and never ignored or downgraded.
There is a common denominator to the role of military forces in the formulation of national security policy. It is Man. Not long ago Scott Crossfield, a North American test pilot, paid a tribute to Major Robert M. White of the Air Force, who had piloted many of the flights of the X-15. Scott Crossfield, in paying tribute to Man, to the pilot, said: “Where else would you get a nonlineal computer weighing only 160 pounds having a million precision elements that can be mass produced by unskilled labor?”
The gun, the missile, the ship, the plane, the spaceship is no better than the Man who operates it. The nation’s combat potential is no stronger than the will of its people. We are apt now in this mechanistic age to forget the simple truths of military history, that Man and not machines dominates the battlefields of the world. One cannot chart the frenetic fever of human emotions on a graph; one cannot plumb the depths of the human soul with a calculating machine. Nor can one estimate with certainty how men react in mass and under stress. It is Man, in his infinite variety—stubborn, brave, cowardly, ignorant, brilliant Man—who provides the forever new, as well as the old, frontiers of our world.
Here, then, is the human challenge to the Navy’s—and the Nation’s—leadership of the critical tomorrows.
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
President John F. Kennedy
Not by rambling operations, or naval duels, are wars decided, but by force massed and handled in skillful combination.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
The responsibilities of our nation are our responsibilities as individuals.
Rear Admiral R. L. Shifley, U. S. Navy