In the decade 1963-1973, the author foresees an “emergence from frustration, a seizing and exploitation of Western initiatives rather than constant reaction after the event to Communist initiatives.” “We may be entering an era,” he says, “in which the Soviet leadership must learn to live with the established fact of widely acknowledged Western military superiority."
The basic purpose of U. S. world policy has been summed up by Dean Acheson in these words:
“To maintain and strengthen an environment in which free societies can survive and flourish.”
The pursuit of that purpose by the American people, with increasing determination and consistency, may be confidently forecast as being the most significant single influence on the events of the next ten years, events which will shape the political and strategic environment of 1973.
The international climate of the decade 1963-1973 will be governed largely by two pivotal developments on which this U. S. purpose will have great influence. The character of these two developments is already taking tangible form.
The first of these developments is the politico-economic expansion of the Atlantic Community into a global association of free nations, with increasing world trade and the gradual elimination of tariff barriers as its economic guide lines.
Centered on an Atlantic association of the United States, Canada, and an integrating Western Europe, this “Grand Design” will in one way or another come to include the nations of Latin America, and such transpacific states as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It will provide a sound economic base for the defense of material interests and for the growth of the economies of Asian and African peoples.
The second development, strategic in nature, follows naturally and inevitably upon the first. It involves the application by the United States and its principal allies of control of the seaways and the above-sea air spaces of the world for the protection of the common interests of all peaceful users of these thoroughfares, and the denial of their use for those Communist aims which have been described by Ambassador Alexis Johnson as being designed “to disrupt and destroy, and seek profit among the ruins.”
Both these developments are positive and dynamic in character rather than defensive. This is a fact of immense significance. It forecasts an emergence from frustration, a seizing and exploitation of Western initiatives rather than constant reaction after the event to Communist initiatives. The new dynamism of American policy was emphasized in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech of last May, supporting the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which has now become law.
In pursuing “our design for a world of free choice, said the Secretary, “we seek a close partnership with the industrial democracies, an alliance sharing the burdens and responsibilities of building and defending the Free World. We seek to forge strong bonds with the developed nations and the developing nations.” Our support for the latter “must include not only direct economic assistance, but also a determination to provide markets for their products, so that they may earn the foreign exchange necessary to generate their own dynamism for development.”
Stressing that “we are in a period of transition, of fluidity,” the Secretary of State warned that “in this period of revolutionary change and attendant instability, Communist coercion threatens to subvert the fundamental concept of a world community of free and independent peoples.” The United States, Secretary Rusk, concluded, must assume continued leadership of the formative years of a great alliance of free nations. We are not given the choice of sustaining the status quo. Either we accept leadership or lay aside our mantle and retreat to a perilous isolation. To meet the challenge demands total commitment on the part of the American people and total engagement of America’s resources.”
Such an alliance as Secretary Rusk foresees is essentially a maritime alliance. The expanding trade which is its life essence must move chiefly by sea, in the case of bulk cargoes, and by the transoceanic air lanes in the case of fast passenger and high-priority freight movement. These thoroughfares must also be used for such military movements as are necessary for mutual support and security. For these reasons alone, full freedom of action at sea—surface, above-surface, sub-surface— is a fundamental strategic requirement of the emerging alliance.
Nor can it be forgotten that in the military sense, freedom of action is best assured by a capability to deny freedom of action to the opponent. The Soviet Union must use airlift and sealift to support its disruptive enterprises in areas with which direct physical contact cannot be maintained from adjacent Soviet-controlled territory. The U.S.S.R. is deficient in long-range airlift, but a principal employment of the growing Soviet merchant marine has been to transport weapons and military equipment to such places as Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, and Yemen. In each case, these shipments have supported conditions which are actively or potentially hostile to Western interests. In addition, the areas in question are adjacent to narrow sea passages which control interoceanic movements of shipping.
In the strategic environment of the 1963— 1973 decade, a new and imperative circumstance must also be considered. Today, virtually no land area of the world is beyond the reach of weapons launched from or under the surface of the sea. Rear Admiral John S. McCain, U. S. Navy, believes this to be “the most profound change in all the history of warfare”—because 71 per cent of the earth’s surface is available for the deployment of military forces to a nation or alliance which is so armed and situated as to be capable of exercising control of the sea according to the classic definition: the ability to use the sea for its own purposes, military and economic, and to deny the use of the sea to its enemies.
The nuclear deterrent power of the United States, which is the cornerstone of Free-World military security, is increasingly dependent on sea-based weapons mounted in our fleet ballistic missile submarines, and to some extent in our attack carriers. The Free-World’s capability to deal effectively with local and limited Communist threats is dependent upon global mobility by sea and air, with the shield of nuclear deterrence covering the long arm which wields the sword of amphibious striking power.
The logic of these facts is inexorable. Soviet freedom of action to use the seas and the above-sea air lanes at will, either for the deployment of nuclear weapons—as in Cuba —or to threaten interoceanic defiles such as the Windward Passage, the Suez Canal, or the Strait of Malacca, or for local disruptive enterprises of any other sort, can no longer be tolerated. In the 19th century it was unacceptable to the British that control of strategic waterways should be allowed to remain in potentially hostile or even doubtful hands. This instinctively self-protective policy will be revived and applied by the Western maritime alliance in the years immediately ahead. Superiority in naval armaments and in experience in oceanic warfare, reinforced by the advantages of geography, which give free access to the oceans of the world to the United States and her allies, and at the same time deny the Communists this access, will be exploited to give new meaning to an old concept —the concept of freedom of the seas.
The resurrection of this concept will amount to nothing less than the drastic revision of international law by those who seek a world ruled by law, rather than by men. International law today reflects the experience of the pre-atomic age, when man had not begun to explore the mysteries of space, or threaten his fellow man with thermonuclear extinction. Neither through the agencies of the United Nations nor through the World Court can international law take effective action today to restrain either of the two great power- groups, which between them control virtually all the military power on this planet.
Historically, international law has been enforceable only when there existed a body of uninvolved states sufficiently formidable to command the respect of either disputant. Even such weight as modern-day neutralism has possessed has now been reduced nearly to nullity by the vicious assault of the Communist Chinese on India, hitherto the moral, if not the military, leader of the neutral nations.
Under these conditions, those who seek a world of law and order find themselves compelled to adopt expedients similar to those forced upon our ancestors of the old American West: to begin by the forcible restoration of order by whatever means is available for the purpose, to the end that a rule of law may have a chance to develop. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson has recently observed that the United Nations "was founded to maintain a peace which has never been made." That peace will never be made as long as those who desire only a peace in which they are masters and the rest of mankind are slaves are allowed to pervert to their own advantage concepts of law which have been overtaken by events.
The necessary change in our attitudes and conduct will be no easy one. Again, to quote Dean Acheson, "We can expect that an enforcement of our rights in the only way they can be enforced in this dual world, by arms, will find many of our own citizens joining in the Soviet-inspired clamor before the United Nations for a cease fire. In other worlds, we shall be urged in the name of law to cease enforcing our rights which cannot otherwise be rights." It is precisely this doctrine, Mr. Acheson points out, which "has led to the general breakdown of whatever respect for international law survived the nineteenth century." Fortunately, there are now very clear indications that an increasing number of Americans are thoroughly fed up with the frustrations of the past ten years, and eager for a more vigorous policy. This trend showed up strongly in nationwide reactions to President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban crisis in the fall of 1962.
Against the general background of the pivotal developments described, we may now examine three assumptions as to the decade 1963-1973.
These assumptions are as follows:
- There will be no general nuclear war during the decade.
- Communist China will not acquire a nuclear military capability.
- There will be no one-sided Soviet weapons breakthrough, in space systems or otherwise, which will confer a decisive military advantage on the Kremlin.
The supporting reasons for these assumptions may each be examined individually.
(1) There will be no general nuclear war.
The military power of the United States and her allies, relative to that of the Soviet system, will grow steadily stronger.
The factors which may affect this development include:
(a) The increasing credibility and dependability of U. S. nuclear deterrent capabilities, already tacitly acknowledged by the Soviet Union in its missile retreat from Cuba after direct confrontation. This trend will be further emphasized by the expanding deployment of our Polaris submarine forces.
(b) Development of U. S. and Allied sea-based capabilities to deal effectively with local Soviet or Soviet-inspired threats to the peace. As such gambits become less attractive, the likelihood of escalation into nuclear war diminishes.
(c) The over-all restraining effect of sea encirclement on the land-oriented Communist powers, as the sea becomes recognized as an area which the Western alliance can use for military purposes and deny to the Communists. Western capabilities for such denial will be underlined by steps taken to establish or re-establish control of interoceanic and other strategic waterways, and by the development during the next four or five years of U. S. and Allied antisubmarine capabilities to neutralize any submarine threat which the Soviet Union—having regard to its geographical disadvantages—is capable of mounting.
(d) Widening of Soviet-Chinese divergences of policy and purpose, inherent in the differing stages of political and economic development of these two major Communist states. The Soviet leadership will be increasingly reluctant to risk a war with the Western Alliance, which could leave China the paramount power on the Eurasian continent. Moscow will be increasingly unwilling to support the manifestations of Chinese actions.
These considerations suggest that we may be entering an era in which the Soviet leadership must learn to live with the established fact of widely acknowledged Western military superiority. This superiority already exists in nuclear weapons systems and delivery capabilities, and in global mobile striking power capable of dealing with local disturbances. The burgeoning economy of Western Europe will—within the framework of wider Allied world co-operation—presently develop the economic base for integrated West European ground and tactical air forces capable of dealing with any possible Soviet offensive.
Under these circumstances, Soviet policy may, during the 1963-1973 decade, begin to take a somewhat less doctrinaire view of the desirability of arms control measures under acceptable international safeguards, especially the control of nuclear weapons. The latter consideration may be affected by a desire on the part of the Russians to limit the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, especially with respect to East Germany and Communist China.
The possibility cannot be excluded that the Soviet Union may—perhaps under the influence of personalities less imbued with revolutionary fervor than with considerations of Russian security and development—become rather more a Eurasian and rather less a global power, though it would be unwise to base any glowing anticipations on this prospect. In such an event, Soviet strategic considerations might be oriented toward defense of their frontiers in Asia, with a gradual lessening of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Progress toward this end may well come to be included in the political objectives of the Western alliance.
Assumptions based on such possibilities are, however, outside the proper scope of this study. The assumption that there will be no general nuclear war in the decade 1963—1973 is squarely based on the power factors already discussed.
(2) Communist China will not acquire a nuclear military capability.
Present anticipations—most recently voiced by India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru —are that Red China may be able to detonate a nuclear “device” within a year or so, but cannot expect to have even a minimal number of nuclear weapons for three or four years.
It may well be questioned, however, whether it would be any real advantage to the Peiping government to acquire a small-scale nuclear weapon capability during the next ten years. Certainly there is no reason to assume that Red China’s internal economic problems, either in agriculture or industrial production, will be satisfactorily solved during that time.
To seek foreign diversions in such circumstances has long been standard operating procedure for totalitarian governments, but in the presence of overwhelming American nuclear superiority, there appears little sound motivation for incurring the risk of nuclear reprisals against Chinese home territory by using or threatening to use a few nuclear weapons offensively. The obvious target for such an offensive is Formosa, which the United States is bound by treaty to defend. Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Vietnam are all associated with the American alliance system. The Red Chinese leadership must assume that a nuclear attack against an ally of the United States would be likely to incur a nuclear response of much more devastating proportions.
These considerations, however, are complicated by the existing fact of Chinese invasion of India’s borderlands. The immediate result has been to cause Mr. Nehru to seek outside help, and he has so far found it more readily available from the United States and Britain than from the U.S.S.R. If the Chinese offensive continues, India will need more help; Britain in particular may become involved, with troops as well as hardware. In such circumstances, the prospect of the acquisition by Red China of a nuclear weapons capability would certainly bring up, for consideration by the leadership of the Western Alliance, the question of their taking timely and drastic measures for the elimination of the threat.
Thus it may well be assumed either that the Red Chinese will see no advantage in seeking a nuclear weapons capability, or that if they do take tangible steps in that direction, the Western Alliance will take appropriate counter-action in self-defense.
(3) There will be no revolutionary, one-sided weapons breakthrough.
Experience suggests that technological progress tends to follow similar lines in countries of advanced technology, with major advances in one area cancelled out by corresponding advances in another.
From the military viewpoint, the development of offensive weapons programs in one country is likely to be offset by defensive and/or counter-offensive programs in opposing countries. It has been the Soviet’s practice to discontinue programs rendered unpromising by U. S. counter-developments.
Their long-range bomber program, which received so much publicity in the mid-1950’s, was cut back before large numbers of planes were produced because progress in U. S. air defense made it of doubtful value. Soviet output of intercontinental ballistic missiles has not, at the close of 1962, corresponded with the known Soviet production capabilities. In anti-missile defense, there is no reason to suppose that the Soviets are likely to confront the United States with the accomplished fact of a reliable defensive capability which will add up to a relative Soviet military advantage of decisive proportions.
As to the deployment and use of offensive armament in and from outer space, such a development cannot be disassociated from the earthbound environment from which space penetration originates. Space weaponry which could endanger targets on the earth’s surface more effectively than existing weapons mounted on that surface is not in distant view, much less in being. This is not to minimize the danger of future developments in this field of weaponry; but rather to suggest that the next decade—a period of rising U. S.-Allied military superiority on the earth’s surface and in the earth’s atmosphere—may well be utilized to examine the possibilities of finding a way to bring man’s exploration of the space environment within the restraints of a fully safeguarded agreement to demilitarize these efforts for the common advantage of all.
In an able paper entitled Oceanic Control and Community, Gerard C. Smith suggests that Soviet leaders, “in devoting great technological effort and psychological commitment to space, may consciously or unconsciously be striving to break out of the geographical encirclement by the seas . . . which is a traditional geographic fact of Russian historical life.” Mr. Smith appends a warning: “The era in which man’s power is being projected out into space is likely to be the time when totalitarian or free political systems take over control of the world—when earth is no longer large enough or safe enough for both.”
Since man’s projection of power into space is dependent on control of an adequate share of the resources of the earth to support the enormous effort required for such a purpose, it remains essential for free societies to establish and retain surface controls of such dimensions as to assure their own space capabilities and to safeguard themselves against any space- developing threat of totalitarian origin. Sea control provides for this as for other free- world objectives a commanding advantage, and in this field of effort as in others, there seems reason to assume that the free world is not likely to be over-matched either in technology or imagination.
In the political and strategic environment of 1973, certain factors will remain unchanged. Geography, so favorable to the West, will not change. The proportion of land to water surface will not change. The oceans and the atmosphere will certainly retain their eternal characteristics.
In the political field, however, that there will be change is the one positive certainty. Human affairs do not stand still. The fortunes of one side or the other in human conflict do not remain static. We have only to reflect on the single question of personal leadership, projected over the next ten years, to realize with something of a shock how few of the great and influential personalities of today will still be holding positions of authority in 1973. In January of that year, for example, a President of the United States who was elected the preceding November will be inaugurated. We cannot possibly guess who he will be. We can be constitutionally sure that he will not be the President now in office. Actuarial experts would doubtless offer odds that the leaders of both the major Communist powers in 1973 will be personalities other than those now in power; the same may be said of several of the leaders of Western states. These changes will have widespread repercussions, not all of them necessarily favorable from the viewpoint of the nations of the Free World.
There may be other adverse developments. The struggle of the peoples of Africa toward political and economic independence seems likely to include violent aspects. Disorders of major proportions are possible in some parts of Latin America. In areas of the world adjacent to the borders of the major Communist states—especially China—continued pressures and infiltrations are probable, perhaps even successful conquests of territory. The West has yet to find an adequate counter to the techniques of “revolutionary warfare” in difficult terrain, as exemplified in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, despite all the effort and attention devoted to counter-guerrilla training and associated tactical developments. The problem of the “active sanctuary” from which such efforts are supported may have to be dealt with more directly and drastically.
There is little to suggest that any relief for the heavy economic burden of armaments is in sight during the next ten years. The United States may be able to turn over to Western Europe an increased share of the local defense °f that area, but an expanded antisubmarine Program, the need to establish a continuous U. S. naval presence in the Indian Ocean, military requirements in space, antimissile defense, the rejuvenation of the aging fleet, and the need for larger ground and tactical air forces capable of swift response to distant emergencies and supported by a truly ready reserve establishment with readiness echeloned in depth are only a few of the charges against our annual budgets that must be anticipated.
Yet there is also to be considered the rising tide of economic well-being which is one of the major results to be expected from global cooperative efforts and from growing understanding of the mutual benefits—to developed and developing nations alike—of the rule of law in the affairs of nations.
The next ten years will see errors and disappointments, even occasional setbacks approaching the disastrous. Yet there may well be favorable surprises too. In summation, it is assumed with confidence, even with assurance, that the political and strategic environment of the year 1973 will be dominated by a maritime coalition of industrial democracies under the leadership of the United States, in association with an integrated Western Europe, and that the global dominance of the alliance will be based on control
Mr. Eliot, a graduate of Melbourne University, is well known nationally for his newspaper and magazine contributions. During World War II, he was military and naval correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and war commentator for CBS. He is the author of a number of books on national defense and has lectured extensively at the different war colleges in the United States and Canada. Reserve Forces and the Kennedy Strategy, his latest book, was published this year by the Stackpole Company. In May 1962, he was awarded the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service by the University of Missouri, which cited him for “emphasizing the verities of our military situation in peace and war.”