In many respects the defense policies of the Kennedy Administration have paralleled the first two years of the Eisenhower Administration. The “bad old chiefs” have been removed and replaced by a new and more “trustworthy” set; a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been appointed, who, like Admiral Radford, has the President’s fullest confidence; a revised strategy of deterrence has been promulgated and promptly modified; an industrialist Secretary of Defense has torn into that “nest of eels,” the Pentagon; Imperialist Communism has continued probing the West’s frontiers (and backyard) with renewed vigor; and increasing tension has caused policy makers to re-examine the usable military forces available to the United States that can serve our foreign policy goals.
The current flashpoints—Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Berlin—demand a wide spectrum of military capability to prevent these “local” situations from either escalating into World War III or being absorbed behind the Iron, Bamboo, or Sugar Curtains. Thus, it is not surprising that the defense policies of the Kennedy Administration, like those of its predecessor, have been subjected to constant scrutiny at home and abroad. The key questions to be asked are: Are the strategic “guidelines” of the Kennedy Administration fully capable of coping with the total challenge of the 1960s, or, in strictly military terms, does the United States have the doctrine and properly equipped military forces to cope with the challenges facing us?
Throughout the Eisenhower Administration, a strategic conflict raged between the demands of balanced forces and the needs of massive retaliation with the more glamorous nuclear aspect receiving the greatest support. The United States, in effect, had adopted and acted upon a “nuclear-directed” foreign policy. When Admiral Radford became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he, along with the Service Chiefs, hammered out a military policy called the “new look.” The “new look,” announced in late 1953, stressed national “air atomic power.” On 12 January 1954, John Foster Dulles promulgated a deterrent strategy to accompany the new look: his famous policy of massive retaliation, a doctrine rooted in our massive nuclear superiority. It implied that we had erected a protective wall around the frontiers of the Free World; if the Communists overstepped that boundary, we would respond “instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing.” This was widely interpreted to mean that nuclear firepower would be directed against the urban and industrial complexes of Russia and China instead of meeting Communist incursions with democratic manpower.
As could have been predicted, the Communist world promptly challenged the Dulles doctrine in Indochina and the south Chinese coast, and we failed to carry out our nuclear threat. Moreover, the Russians created a technological challenge to it by exploding an H-bomb and unveiling the Bison long-range jet bomber. Thus, for the first time in her history, America was vulnerable, and she was vulnerable to the threat of a Russian version of massive retaliation.
John Foster Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration quickly modified their massive retaliation strategy. In early April 1954, almost eight weeks after the Dulles doctrine had been announced, President Eisenhower, over riding all but one of his Joint Chiefs, made the decision not to launch an atomic strike in an attempt to save the besieged Dien Bien Phu. Early the next year the Tachens were evacuated, and the doctrine of massive retaliation continued to be modified, until by 1960 it was an unrecognizable shell of the grandiose dreams of its early proponents.
The strategic struggle has continued between balanced forces and “massive retaliation up-dated,” or counterforce. In its first year the Kennedy Administration succeeded in accomplishing two top priority tasks: It made the deterrent more invulnerable and increased our “conventional options.” Late in 1961, however, in response to the third Berlin crisis, civilian strategists and theoreticians were faced with an almost unresolvable problem. Berlin had been saved, temporarily at least, but calling up 160,000 reserve forces, although saving the day in Europe, had created a delicate political situation at home. Furthermore, the cost of “conventional options” (especially our 400,000 troops in Europe) was having a highly adverse effect on the balance of payments. Was it possible to arrive at a new, less costly, and even more effective strategic solution?
In addition, since the infamous bomber and missile gaps were now, surprisingly, a Russian worry, we had an enormous nuclear superiority of about four to one. Our nuclear arsenal included roughly 1,700 intercontinental bombers, 300 carrier-based bombers, 80 ICBMs, 100 IRBMs, and 96 Polarises. Soviet Russia, on the other hand, was believed to have operational only about 150 intercontinental bombers (in addition to 450-600 medium-range bombers, which, in a pinch, could make one-way trips to the United States), 50-75 ICBMs, and a handful of submarines with short-range, surface-fired, nuclear missiles.
In view of this tremendous superiority, the argument ran, why not squeeze political-military advantage out of the strategic forces before they went to seed? This argument, well documented with thick and scholarly supporting technical studies and buttressed with war-gamed statistics, was remarkably similar to the Radford-Dulles reasoning of 1953-54. It had great influence in high places and evidently, for a while at least, carried the day. During the eight-month period from October 1961 to June 1962, high defense officials, engaging in a massive psychological campaign, issued a series of declaratory statements aimed at educating the Communists (and our Allies) to the strategic implications of our nuclear superiority. In February and again in late March 1962, journalistic enthusiasts for the counterforce strategy asserted that the President and the United States had adopted a new strategy by which, at times and places of our own choosing, we could “exercise the initiative,” a pleasant euphemism for waging preventive, or pre-emptive, war.
This global “education” program culminated in the famous McNamara doctrine of counterforce, which the Defense Secretary enunciated at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on 16 June 1962. Like Dulles’ doctrine of massive retaliation, its blood brother, the McNamara doctrine of counterforce hoped to harvest a political “spill-over bonus” from our nuclear superiority. The deterrent effect of nuclear weapons could, he hoped, protect Berlin and other critical areas of the Free World.
The Russians responded to the new deterrent theory in 1962 as they had in 1954: by immediately challenging our doctrine and forcing us “to put up or shut up.” They manufactured the fourth Berlin crisis, resumed thermonuclear multi-megaton weapon testing, turned Cuba into an armed Communist camp, and accused the United States of preparing for preventive war. McNamara, like Dulles, quickly modified his doctrine. But here the similarity between the Kennedy and Eisenhower defense policies ends. During the Eisenhower Administration, conventional and unconventional forces were cut in half by implementing the new look (1954-1957), and the official atmosphere was definitely hostile to the thought of “any more Koreas” or limited wars anywhere.
Throughout 1961-1962, the Kennedy Administration had accorded the alternative doctrine of balanced forces equal status with counterforce. Thus, balanced forces flourished in coexistence, albeit an uneasy coexistence, with the more technocratic and glamorous counterforce. In its quest for alternatives to “humiliation or holocaust,” the Kennedy Administration has fostered two strategic concepts within the defense establishment. Actually, the United States, or any nation for that matter, can never make a clear choice between strategies; it is, rather, a question of emphasis. However, three of the “pure counterforce” implications—massive civil defense, including blast shelters; unlimited and accelerated thermonuclear arms race; and greatly increased danger of pre-emptive war—are filled with danger to our democratic society. It is apparent, therefore, that if our security and worldwide national interests can be protected or forwarded by another grand strategy then that strategy certainly should be adopted —hence the case for balanced forces and spectrum deterrence.
A high point in the evolution of balanced forces was General Taylor’s 15 January 1962 speech to the New York Printers Association, in which he sketched the concept of a four-part spectrum deterrence as follows:
(1) Total war (either a first strike Russian thermonuclear attack or a massive conventional Russian thrust in Europe) is deterred by invulnerable second strike deterrent forces configured for retaliatory counterforce.
(2) Limited war (Korea) is deterred by adequate available mobile forces equipped with both nuclear and conventional weapons.
(3) “ Wars of liberation” (Vietnam and Cuba) are deterred by proper prognosis before the situation goes critical and, if deterrence is unsuccessful, are fought by “special and unconventional forces.”
(4) Political-economic challenge is countered by imaginative and “good policies,” such as the highly publicized Peace Corps, civic action, interdependence, the Trade Expansion Act, and Project Apollo.
Three days after General Taylor’s speech, President Kennedy apparently ratified this strategy by eloquently setting forth his famous “strategic guidelines” to an expanded National Security Council which was gathered at the White House.
But whatever the President may propose, the vast bureaucracy still disposes, and where such a vital concept as our national defense strategy is concerned, the entire federal bureaucracy is involved. Civilian members of the Defense Department throughout the first half of 1962 hinted that what the President really advocated in his January “guidelines” was counterforce.
Sympathetic journalists, too, tried to convince the public that counterforce was indeed what the President had had in mind. Phrases like “exercise of the initiative,” attributed to the President, received quick, heated denials. But the proponents of “no- win” were unappeased, and, as the year wore on, demands for total victory over world Communism, even if it meant nuclear war, were heard in the land. Old-fashioned diplomacy, backed by traditional military tools, was not sufficient for these modern war hawks, who seemed to demand an atomic showdown— and the sooner the better.
Denials or no, the famous Ann Arbor speech by Secretary McNamara appeared to confirm the view that henceforth balanced forces, although useful, were of secondary importance, and thermonuclear counterforce would be used to solve our outstanding political- military problems. To sophisticated and unsophisticated alike, it seemed that the United States, for the first time in her history, had officially adopted an aggressive first-strike strategy. For there was no doubt about it, a counterforce strategy had triumphed. This strategy, which had been fighting for acceptance since the first primitive atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, was now official doctrine of the United States of America. In Secretary McNamara’s words:
The U. S. has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his civilian population.
A few sentences later, the Secretary of Defense offered the so-called Marquis of Queensberry rules to the Russians. “In other words,” McNamara stated, “we are giving a possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities.” According to Time's “Whiz Kids” story on 3 August, “Henry S. Rowen . . . originated major elements in the ‘no-city’ strategy outlined by Secretary McNamara in Ann Arbor.”
Thus the United States announced to the world that we were going to preserve the option of fighting a controlled thermonuclear war, and from this capability it was calculated by some of the Pentagon “Whiz Kids” that the United States would reap the same political benefits that the Soviets allegedly receive from Khrushchev’s “rocket rattling.” Americans, like Communists, under this theory would use the threat of a thermonuclear war as an instrument of foreign policy. The inherent difference, which some technocrats and hard-liners find difficult to understand, is that the United States is a Western democracy operating under representative principles and backed by 4,000 years of Christian-Humanist tradition; she cannot brandish the threat of thermonuclear Armageddon with as much facility or credibility as can a Communist nation.
In a sense, the leaders of the Western democracies are captives of the many-millenniums-long process that Walter Lippmann calls our “heritage of civility.” Paradoxically, this heritage is, as far as waging controlled thermonuclear war is concerned, the West’s greatest weakness. But when it comes to creating a consensus within the Western world and influencing the behavior of the “third world,” civility is perhaps the West’s greatest strength.
McNamara’s advisors, high priests of the new deterrence theology, had not taken into consideration these deep traditions or international political realities. The price America would have to pay to preserve her heritage would be almost instantaneous modification of the McNamara doctrine of counterforce and its replacement by a new grand strategy which would be backed by balanced forces and spectrum deterrence.
Sharp and totally unexpected European reaction to his speech caused Mr. McNamara to make the first of many modifications to it. Quickest to protest were the British, who pointed out that Mr. McNamara’s “scathing” denunciation that “relatively weak national nuclear forces . . . operating independently are dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent” did not apply to their Bomber Command. The London Sunday Times on 24 June 1962 remarked:
It was surprising that Mr. MacNamara [sic] should have been quite so outspoken about independent nuclear deterrent, just when his colleague, Mr. Rusk, was landing at Paris on his European mission . . . Everyone assumed that this was an open criticism of French policy and only less of British.
That same day Secretary McNamara further clarified the intent of his counterforce speech by explaining:
What I said at Ann Arbor was . . . separate nuclear capabilities operating independently were dangerous.
But Britain’s bomber command aircraft with their nuclear weapons have long been organized as part of a thoroughly coordinated Anglo-American striking force and are targeted as such. . . .
I was, therefore, not referring to Britain.
Harold Watkinson, Britain’s Defense Minister, confronted by the opposition swirling in on all sides, reaffirmed that Britain had the unchallenged right to use its nuclear force independently if it wished.
French reaction was slow in coming and took the irreversible form of a de Gaullean victory for the French independent deterrent, the force de frappe, during the July legislative debates. Like John Foster Dulles’ “agonizing reappraisal,” occasioned by too-obvious American pressure that effectively killed the European Defense Community, Secretary McNamara’s attempt to go over the head of the French government was a resounding failure. As Raymond Aron observed, Frenchmen find it hard to understand why it is safe for the independent deterrent to cross the Atlantic but “dangerous” and “inimical” for it to cross the English Channel. Aron also maintained that the French independent deterrent was conceived before de Gaulle came to power and would be continued after his departure. The French said, in effect, that the force de frappe exists, and they intend to make the most of it.
President Kennedy quickly sized up the political realities better than Mr. McNamara’s “young technocrats,” who, in the words of the French writer, A. Delcroix, “have a tendency to underestimate the purely political because of the contempt in which they hold things political.” On the Fourth of July at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the President made his revolutionary offer of “partnership” and “interdependence” within the Atlantic Alliance. If this concept means anything at all, however, it presupposes a realization of the truth which the London Times has stated as follows:
Western Europe as a whole has the resources for a nuclear armament no less economical, up-to-date or convincing than America’s.
As European unity grows, these technical resources will surely be matched by power ambitions. The time has already come to consider the pattern of nuclear arms within an Atlantic Alliance in which, so Mr. E. R. G. Heath has foretold, there will be two great partners, the continents of North America and Europe. Nothing less than equal status for these two could meet the need in this supreme defensive sphere.
This observation was similar to President Kennedy’s splendid vision: “We see in such a Europe a partner with whom we can deal on a basis of full equality in all the great and burdensome tasks of building and defending a community of free nations.” He also noted that “building the Atlantic partnership now will not be easily or cheaply finished.”
James Reston hinted, and the President later confirmed the fact, that the United States would be willing to consider a uniquely European nuclear solution, providing it were integrated with our deterrent and were something more than a collection of independent national deterrents.
On 6 July, Secretary McNamara took another backward step away from “pure” counterforce, when he told a press conference that the Ann Arbor speech, far from being a primer on Marquis of Queensberry rules of nuclear warfare, was instead an outline of a “flexible strategy” because “we can’t be certain how a nuclear war would develop.” Therefore, the United States might spare Soviet cities or she might not.
The New York Herald Tribune on 9 July editorialized on “Mr. McNamara’s Modified War,” and knowledgeable counterforce strategists were greatly dismayed that the pure counterforce doctrine had been scrapped so soon. Indeed, C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times on 9 July categorically reported from London that “the nuclear defense theory, based on counter-force rather than counter-city strategy, and first enunciated by Secretary McNamara, produced confused reactions in Europe. It is now dead.” The reasons were simple. Partnership, which implies equality with our allies, would be impossible if America retained control of strategic nuclear weapons and, more importantly, if the Russians announced they would not play our game. Finally, such a strategy, in Henry Kissinger’s analysis (Foreign Affairs, July 1962) is technologically infeasible, since your adversary can make his deterrent invulnerable, thereby depriving your counterforce of any targets to counter.
Radio Moscow in early July spelled out Russian reaction:
Mr. McNamara . . . dropped the hint that nuclear war might be conducted along gentlemen’s lines and might, as a result, be almost a civilized one . . . Mr. McNamara attempts to draw a line between local wars fought with tactical nuclear weapons and the world wars, when no such line can be drawn.
Further proof that the Russians were buying neither counterforce nor its concomitant, controlled thermonuclear war, was supplied by Premier Khrushchev in an address on 10 July to the World Conference on General Disarmament and Peace. Khrushchev declared that “the league of war-industrial monopolies, the ‘death merchants,’ and the zealot militarists—this military-industrial complex as ex-President Eisenhower described it—is heating up the arms race to a frenzy.” Khrushchev directly answered the Ann Arbor doctrine by stating:
Lately, the militarists talk more and more about thermonuclear war. Take Defense Secretary McNamara’s speech of June 16. He says in it that an understanding may be reached to use nuclear weapons solely for striking at the armed forces, and not at the big cities. The U. S. press says that McNamara’s statement had the approval of the White House, and interprets it as a sort of proposal to the Soviet Union on “rules” of conducting a nuclear war. It is a monstrous proposal filled from beginning to end with a misanthropic disdain for men, for mankind, because it seeks to legalize nuclear war and thereby the murder of millions upon millions of people.
During the course of his speech, the Soviet Prime Minister also spoke of a “global rocket” with a multi-megaton warhead “practically impervious to defense” and, for good measure, he accused the United States of planning to wage preventive war when the American press talked of taking the “initiative.”
Further clarification of the Ann Arbor doctrine was not long in coming. Marquis Childs, after an interview with the Secretary of Defense, reported that McNamara was “surprised” that anyone would conclude from his Ann Arbor speech that the United States was preparing a pre-emptive strike, and to support his position he quoted President Kennedy’s mid-February press conference:
Now if someone thinks we should have a nuclear war in order to win, I can inform them that there will not be winners of the next nuclear war, if there is one, and this country and other countries would suffer very heavy blows . . .
McNamara reiterated to Mr. Childs that he does not believe that a “nuclear war can be won” and that although we keep our deterrent guard strong and invulnerable, we will never initiate a nuclear attack. The Defense Secretary now had changed significantly his original 16 June position with its overtones of a counterforce fast strike strategy to a much more sensible and traditional doctrine (since 1945) of retaliatory counterforce.
Under this concept the United States would maintain a substantial superiority over the Russians in invulnerable “strike-second” delivery systems. We would use this superiority in only two instances: a direct thermonuclear attack on the United States or a massive conventional drive threatening to overrun Europe. And in both cases the initial American response would be a controlled retaliatory strike directed against enemy nuclear forces.
In case of accidental war or “miscalculation,” the United States would have sufficient forces to engage in limited or unlimited nuclear reprisal, if necessary.
On 19 July, Secretary McNamara modified counterforce even further. This modification coincided curiously with Hanson Baldwin’s famous “leak” in the New York Times on 26 July, which stated that the “Soviets were building shields at missile sites.” This “hardening” was by aboveground “concrete coffins.” The significance of the announcement was clear to the New York Times military analyst, who reported that the Soviets are building two types of missile forces —one consisting of:
a few of their huge, ponderous and expensive first-generation missiles, but [they] are deliberately fitting the largest possible warheads to them in order to achieve maximum political and psychological effect and, in case of war, widespread damage and destruction by means of pattern bombardment.
Secondly, Baldwin interpreted the invulnerable missiles this way:
The advent of Russian missile-firing submarines and hardened land-based missile sites indicates to many in Washington that Soviet strategic thinking is roughly along the same lines as our own. Moscow, like Washington, is trying to make its nuclear deterrent and retaliatory power less and less vulnerable to surprise attack.
As the invulnerability of missile launching sites increases and each side finds it impossible to knock out the other’s nuclear capability by a surprise first strike, the stability of the deterrent is expected to increase, . . .
According to Newsweek, Mr. Baldwin’s story resulted in an FBI investigation and an order that Joint Chiefs of Staff officers must, in the future, “turn in detailed reports on all interviews—and even chance meetings—with newsmen.”
Shortly after its appearance, Mr. McNamara “confirmed” the Baldwin story and, ironically, took credit for the Russian missile “hardening.” Warren Rogers, Jr., of the New York Herald Tribune, after a chat with Mr. McNamara, reported that
paradoxical as it may seem, the United States is hopeful that Russia will go underground or otherwise “harden” its missile launchers. . . . For with an invulnerable deterrent, the Russians, in the event of a serious international crisis, would feel more secure and less ready to launch a pre-emptive strike.
Mr. Thomas B. Ross of the Chicago Sun- Times speculated in the same vein: “Now, the Russians apparently realize they must follow the U. S. lead and shield their weapons—a development which, in the ironic logic of the cold war, does not at all displease McNamara.” The Defense Secretary had thus confirmed that the U. S. policy that since 1945 had rejected any possibility of an aggressive war against the Soviet Union remained the official doctrine of the United States.
Even Jules Feiffer, the political cartoonist, caught the “counterforce madness” heavily hanging over both sides of the Potomac during the summer of 1962 when he depicted not Pentagon generals but two civilian intellectuals glibly discussing the advantages of counterforce. One scholar remarked: “The proper move would be to convince the U. S. S. R. that we will ignore their population centers if they ignore ours. If we can restrict nuclear war to each other’s missile bases it may prove to be quite a civilized affair.” To which the other scholar, barely restraining his enthusiasm, added: “Much neater than rival forms of war, really.” And the two lay militarists smilingly drank a toast to “happy wars.”
But one need not be a Jules Feiffer or even a Henry Kissinger to understand that once the Russian deterrent is invulnerable, a counterforce strategy is a technological impossibility (and this state, Henry Kissinger maintains, is rapidly approaching).
Thus, by 1 August 1962, the Ann Arbor doctrine had been so modified and utterly confused, first by the President (in offering nuclear partnership to Europe) and second by McNamara (by reassuring the English and Russians) that a clarifying statement was needed.
General Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Designate, made such a statement in Minneapolis, in which he returned to the same theme he expressed in his New York speech of 15 January and the views set forth in his The Uncertain Trumpet. In mid-August, General Taylor told the National Convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars: “We must be prepared to cope with general atomic war, with conventional war with or without the support of nuclear weapons, and unconventional war of the Vietnam type.” The incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that if the Communists acted boldly in the days when America had an atomic monopoly,
We can expect even less restraint now that their atomic strength grows. 11 seems reasonable to expect that the provocations with which we will be faced will be more varied and at higher levels than in the past.
To meet this possibility we must be able to offer a wide choice of response to our leaders, not merely the alternatives of giving way or resorting to general atomic war.
This was the voice of a truly professional military officer, and it implied that under his regime the Joint Chiefs of Staff would play a much greater role in the formulation of strategy, heretofore abdicated to the bright, young “Whiz Kids,” who, for the most part, have never known war or diplomacy and tend to be suspicious of anything that cannot be reduced to mathematical formulae or models. The abortive counterforce strategy was just such an end product. Fortunately, there are simply too many unknowns, too many imponderables in a nation’s foreign and defense policy, or in war itself, to make them susceptible to such a rational deterrent strategy as were implied by counterforce and controlled thermonuclear war. U. S. policy makers had to formulate a much more politically realistic strategy better able to reconcile the new world to the new Europe.
This was done at Copenhagen on 27 September 1962, when McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, told the delegates to the General Assembly of the Atlantic Treaty Association that the United States was no longer opposed to an independent European nuclear deterrent. Bundy promised that “if it should turn out that a genuinely multilateral European deterrent, integrated with ours in NATO, is what is needed and wanted, it will not be a veto from the Administration in the United States which stands in the way.” In other words, carrying out President Kennedy’s 4 July offer of partnership and interdependence, the United States would not veto and would undoubtedly aid an independent European deterrent on two conditions: that it be the deterrent force of a united Europe, and that it be integrated or co-ordinated with our own deterrent.
Pure counterforce’s final coup de grâce was delivered by Secretary McNamara in a series of ironic remarks delivered, fittingly, at a memorial dinner to America’s greatest professional soldier, George Catlett Marshall. Before the Army Association, the Secretary of Defense apparently completely disengaged himself from the Ann Arbor concept of counterforce. McNamara expressed his now traditional philosophy of deterrence with these definitive words of deterrent art:
We deter the Soviets from using their growing nuclear force by maintaining a nuclear force strong enough and survivable enough to ride out any conceivable nuclear attack, and to survive with sufficient power to cause unacceptable damage to the attacker. (Emphasis added.)
By referring to Khrushchev’s “much quoted speech of 6 January 1961,” in which he had remarked that “the problem of preventing a global thermonuclear war is the most burning and vital problem for mankind,” McNamara acknowledged that both Russia and the United States desired to “prevent” thermonuclear wars, not “win” them. Like General Taylor, McNamara was sure that Khrushchev was still an “enthusiastic advocate” of wars of liberation and that America must have the proper forms of usable force in order to cope with the changing but relentless challenge.
Furthermore, Secretary McNamara revealed himself to be an enthusiastic advocate of balanced forces. “ . . . the role of the Army,” he remarked to the long-suffering Army Association, “and even the role of the individual combat soldier, becomes not less but more important.” In language that might have been borrowed from General Taylor’s The Uncertain Trumpet, Secretary McNamara continued:
We require increasing capability to deter forms of political and military aggression against which the application of nuclear weapons may not be a credible response.
It is essential, in order to protect our own national security, as well as to meet our responsibilities as the leader of the free world, that we develop and maintain the forces to deter Communist aggression across the entire spectrum of military and para-military aggression—and, if deterrence should be unsuccessful, to stop that aggression dead in its tracks.
American strategic doctrine has travelled a long and difficult road these past two years. The competing strategies, counterforce and balanced forces, have been alternately in and out of favor. One can safely state that the 10,000-plus American troops committed to saving Vietnam, the Second Fleet and Strike Force standing watch over Cuba, the Sixth Fleet protecting Europe’s soft underbelly, the Seventh Fleet insuring stability in the Formosa Strait and Southeast Asia, the 400,000 American troops guarding Europe, the 6,000 combat-ready soldiers in Berlin, the 150,000 reservists standing by at home, and the Peace Corps volunteers working in far corners of the world are as vital to American deterrent power as are the Strategic Air Command’s B-47s, B-52s, Atlases, and Titans, and the Navy’s Polarises, A3Ds, and A3Js.
This is what Secretary McNamara, General Taylor, and other strategists mean by balanced forces and the stabilized, spectrum deterrence such forces help bring about. It is why, as Secretary McNamara reminded his Army Association audience, “countering Communist aggression requires the organized efforts not only of all the four military services but of all the agencies of government.” Then and only then will America be able to achieve her key foreign policy goal of bringing about, in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s words, a “peaceful world community” in which “nations are free to choose their own future and political system—so long as they threaten no one else’s freedom.” Balanced forces rather than counterforce will help make this goal a reality in this century.