Under the pressure of a global Cold War against Communism, the United States has been forced to modify, blur, and almost eliminate the once-fixed distinction between military strategy and foreign policy. Today, everyone professionally involved in U. S. relations with foreign countries is preoccupied with something called “national security policy,” a multisided enterprise of great complexity but of unified and consistent purpose—the fulfillment of the vital interests of the United States in a hostile world.
All members of the professional armed forces are thoroughly aware of and—to be frank—quite disturbed about one aspect of this simultaneous fusion of mission and confusion of role. Civilians—some of them theorists and some of them politicians—have intruded themselves and their peculiar concerns into the special and technical areas once reserved for the uniformed professional. Weapon systems, force tabulations, Research and Development programming, and even doctrines of command and principles of tactics have become grist for the civilian mill. So pronounced has this tendency become, and so outspoken have the charges on both sides been, that some easily unnerved observers fear that a real civilian-military crisis may be in the making.
It is not the intention of this essay, however, to undertake a probably futile—and certainly indiscreet—inquiry into the “proper” place of civilian judgment and direction in matters usually considered to be “purely military.” There is, however, another side to the argument about the evolving place of the military service in American life and government, one that has not received in recent years the attention it deserves and yet one that might be considered as offsetting to some degree the alleged inroads of civilians into military concerns. This is, of course, the major place now being occupied by professional officers in the more purely “political” side of national security policy. It is certainly true that civilian politicians are making a larger share of military decisions than was heretofore the case, but it is also true that uniformed military personnel are making more and more decisions in the area of “foreign policy” per se.
The extent of military penetration of the foreign-policy apparatus in Washington is not generally appreciated, even within the active officer corps itself. Only when an officer receives an assignment to one of the units within the service departments that deal with “politico-military affairs”—or some equivalent title—does he begin to grasp the complexity and the size of the military establishment for foreign-policy making and the degree to which day-by-day decisions are influenced, affected, and often controlled by decisions made by military personnel. The military has long professed a profound scorn for “politics” and “politicians.” This is still a popular pose among officers today, but in reality it is as passe as the bustle or the mustache cup. Whether they like it or not, the armed services are in international politics (to say nothing—for obvious reasons—of their involvement in domestic politics) to stay.
From the great significance accorded military views at the highest level in the National Security Council, down to military participation on the most routine interdepartmental committee, the advice and recommendations of the armed forces are sought on all kinds of policy decisions. There are still those traditionalists in the armed forces who regret this degree of military involvement in such concerns and the frustrations and contradictions of political decision and action, but the Pentagon and its auxiliary agencies are prisoners of the inexorable march of history. The stakes of the game are too high and the problems of survival too large and complex to permit any major sector of the government to escape its responsibilities. Foreign policy making at the highest level is and will continue to be a major —perhaps in time the major—preoccupation of the armed forces.
An interesting evolution in the nature of the military role can be identified. Prior to World War II—as all very senior officers can recall—the armed forces lived in the sort of policy and social limbo immortalized by Kipling in “Tommy Atkins”: ignored in time of peace, the saviors of the country in time of war, but never asked to share in making the decisions. The military establishment and the nation as a whole emerged from the war determined that this condition would never be permitted to reappear. From the beginning of the postwar era, virtually everyone on either side of the military-civilian dichotomy has agreed that the armed forces must have a permanent voice in basic national security policy.
But the nature of that voice has changed over the years. Originally the involvement of the military in foreign policy consisted almost entirely in the giving of “military” advice, and then only when asked. Judgments as to the possible military consequences of a policy step or the military feasibility of certain moves were given only on the request of civilian authorities but, in the 1940s, only rarely were military personnel—at least on an organized basis—given the opportunity to help shape general themes of national policy. The maturation and institutionalization of the Cold War and the growing awareness that the struggle against the Soviet would demand a long-range and many-faceted effort, however, led both civilian policymakers and the military establishment itself to reformulate the military role. Today, military personnel participate in foreign policy decisions not as representatives of a special interest or as those expressing as exotic point of view, but as full- fledged members of an interagency team.
This raises, in a new and especially acute form, the old and thorny question of the “military mind” as applied to foreign policy questions. What, on balance, is the impact of military training and experience upon foreign policy matters—at least as compared with the civilian backgrounds of the other decision-makers? How accurate today are the familiar stereotypes? What distinctive traits can be found in the approach of the professional officer—especially the naval officer— as he comes to grips with the tricky and ambivalent problems of diplomacy? Here we come to the heart of the inquiry: is the professional officer “just another policy-maker,” or is he in any good or bad sense distinctive?
What does a member of the general public —that is, the civilian portion of the population—think of when he hears the phrase, “the military mind?” Here the professional officer encounters a fixed stereotype, a measure of agreement on essentials that is compounded partially of the historic antimilitary bias of American culture but to a disconcerting extent also of less-than-sophisticated public statements by military leaders themselves. The “military mind” is generally accepted by Americans to be technically proficient, dedicated, patriotic, tenacious, and courageous. These are the positive virtues that popular culture grants the officer corps. Negative impressions, however, far outweigh the positive, and to be marked as possessing a “military mind” is to be the victim of a predominantly critical verdict.
What does the nation find to criticize about military habits of thought? All officers with even a modicum of sensitivity know the major charges: military mentality suffers, according to the most popular thesis, from narrowness, authoritarianism, inflexibility, chauvinism, impatience, and a lack of faith in democracy. Even the virtues of the officer’s code become vices: dedication becomes fanaticism; courage becomes belligerence; a devotion to duty becomes parochialism, insensitivity, and (when military appropriations are under consideration) even greed. Truly, the picture American society often paints of the professional soldier is a dreary one indeed.
Were this stereotype a reality, the consequences of military consideration of foreign policy issues inevitably would be disastrous. No questions of public policy demand less of narrowness, authoritarianism, inflexibility, and all the other anathemas with which civilian critics are so free than do those of national security policy. In a world of rapid change and ambiguous challenges, Colonel Blimps are both useless and dangerous. Even the technical issues of defense policy during an era of technological and doctrinal revolution are far too evanescent in their particular effect at any moment to permit being dealt with in the heavy-handed manner so beloved by the manipulators of the military caricature.
Candor forces the admission that the military corps itself share some of the responsibility for its historic low state of prestige. A long tradition of “professionalism” has had the effect of separating officers of all services from the mainstream of American political life and of creating a psychic ghetto within which they expect (and are expected) to spend their lives. From this elite community, military spokesmen historically have only rarely emerged into the center of the arena, at least with relation to anything other than narrow and technical problems. Even their inclusion in the policy-making process, has taken place with remarkably little public notice and—even more disturbing—a considerable measure of resistance and even opposition from some sectors of the military itself. “Our business is defense, not politics,” says one school of Pentagon thought; the impression that too much connection with foreign policy—like too much education—is fatal to a career still is quite widely held.
Yet, the process of the incorporation of the judgment and the opinion of military personnel into the total of American foreign and security policy continues at an unabated rate. Today it may be fairly claimed that military inputs into major decisions are at least equal to those flowing from civilian and admittedly “political” sources in the government. How the military functions in making policy is a matter of great concern not only to the officers themselves but to the nation at large.
One basic proposition should be made at the outset: there is a generic difference between the way military personnel approach and solve foreign policy problems and the way their civilian opposite numbers do the same thing—and it is in this difference and the extent to which it is discernible in day-by- day decisions that the extent of the military impact can be measured.
Probably the most significant single characteristic of the military’s approach to foreign policy is a strong belief in “can do.” There is a great temptation among orthodox policymakers, when complex and ambiguous situations are faced, to delay commitment and action until only one course becomes feasible. This has the organizational advantage of avoiding the personal consequences of a wrong decision, because who can be blamed for the inevitable? To this tendency military spokesmen generally find themselves opposed; the American military tradition strongly emphasizes the necessity of solving problems rather than merely enduring their consequences. As a result, the impact of military judgment is normally on the side of prompt action in implementation of a positive decision. Probably the most realistic and, therefore, the most telling criticisms of the “reactive” orientation of American policy have come from military policy-makers.
A second great positive contribution of military ways of problem solving to the total of American policy has been an insistence that decisions be always operational. Civilian bureaucrats tend to feel that a decision is itself an action, and that making up their minds and stating a position for the United States is all that is necessary to establish a policy. Military personnel know better: their training and experience—as well as simple logic—teach them that no decision is meaningful until it is translated into action. Here, too, the effect of military influence on decision is generally toward making the inevitably tenuous nexus between decision and action somewhat more tangible. Empty posture and rhetorical fustian, as far as professional officers are concerned, contribute nothing to the security or the prestige of the United States; only effective action in a real context can be a relevant factor in a world of sovereign states.
Finally, the military component of the American foreign-policy apparatus is distinctive in its relatively greater immunity to the ubiquitous digressions of domestic affairs and politics. Charged professionally with a conscious devotion to the United States as a national state, officers have fewer inhibitions in their way when they seek to place national interests above personal, group, regional, or party concerns. This is not, be it noted, to suggest that military personnel are more “patriotic” or more “sincere” in their commitment to the welfare of the United States than are their civilian associates; their profession and the nature of their careers are such, however, as to give them greater freedom from pull of other demands. In any discussion of national policy, the military are more likely to follow a direct and single line focusing on the national interest than any other identifiable group.
So much for the positive side. Has the military shown any observable weaknesses as it grapples with larger questions of national security policy? Has the effect of the officer corps been an unalloyed boon to the nation; can civilian policy-makers learn all the lessons they need merely from observing and emulating the military?
Obviously, the entry of the professional officer into foreign policy decision-making has not brought Utopia into being. Military habits of thought and analysis undoubtedly demonstrate the plus values cited above, but they also incorporate certain minus factors as well. The full picture demands that these be mentioned. Each favorable judgment listed above has its unfavorable aspects; a virtue can indeed become a vice.
At the top of the list of negative factors in the way military personnel attack foreign policy problems must be placed what might be called a strategic deficiency coupled with an overdose of tactical doctrine. This is to say that professional officers are capable of turning their natural bent and intensive training to immediate use in devising methods of reaching an already stipulated objective, but they are less than facile at the related but less operational tasks of goal selection and the definition of objectives. Most military problem solving goes on within a context of goals and operational conditions imposed from outside the decisional system itself; the commander is given his mission by higher headquarters and left to work out the tactical details himself.
This leads military personnel to be at best perfunctory in their consideration of the goals and objectives of policy and at worst supremely unconcerned about them. By and large, they prefer ringing phrases substantially empty of operational content as a necessary but peripheral (and often distasteful) preliminary to the real business of moving men and material across the landscape. In practice, this tends to deny military personnel the capability of participating meaningfully in the most important decisions of all, those in which the real objectives of the nation are formulated.
The operational bias of the military tends in the second place to reduce complex situations to one-dimensional “problems” in which single-unknown equations tend to induce an illusory specificity and exactness into decisions. There is a search for something called “doctrine” by means of which to formulate a standard response to a broad variety of stimuli. One of the most telling examples of this yearning for a problem-solving formula is the contemporary interest in the mystical business of “counter-insurgency.” It is undeniably true that many civilian experts tend needlessly to complicate the decisional process, but one may be permitted to wonder if oversimplification is an adequate remedy for overcomplication.
A third area of relative shortcoming in the military approach to foreign policy is the result of the officer’s yet incomplete identification with the mainstreams of American life. Far too many—but by no means all, or even most—officers harbor left-over resentment against civilians in general, and against “politicians” and “businessmen” in particular. It is right and just and fitting that professional officers consider themselves especially called to the service of the nation and to share in the pride and comradeship that such a dedication creates among those who serve. But no useful service is performed by orgies of self-pity or by ill-tempered strictures on the alleged “selfishness” or “laziness” or “profiteering” of whatever slice of civilian society may be under the lash at the moment. The military is a part of a complex social organism, and the effective performance of the entire structure depends upon each part performing its own role. Particularly in foreign policy, a subject of literally life-or-death relevance to all Americans in or out of uniform, it does not seem inappropriate to argue that the military can best serve the nation by providing a continuing example of selfless service rather than by being drawn into any peevish quarrel with other groups.
When all is said and done, however, the professional officer as a special type of public servant has acquitted himself well in his new foreign policy mission. Thrust by fate into a relativist world in which both the span of alternatives open and the criteria of desirability were alike alien to his own professional code, he has been forced to demonstrate in this strange area the versatility that has long been such a point of pride in the military service of the United States. If it is true that “war is too important to be trusted to the generals,” it is also true that “diplomacy is too important to be trusted only to the Department of State.” The armed forces have been called into the picture and have performed nobly.
Military men educate the civilians with whom they work and are in turn educated by them. The generic concept of “strategy,” so central in planning long-range and broad lines of national effort, is taken almost verbatim from the textbooks of the military academies and the war colleges and incorporated into the daily conversation and routine decisions of civilian policy makers. An entire range of subsidiary concepts—notions such as “cost,” “risk,” “adequacy,” and the like—have also been taken over and made part of the normal evaluative and decisional apparatus of the government at large. At the same time, the distinctively “political” aspects of national security and foreign policy—that is, those dealing with the ticklish and slippery areas of “values” and “choices”—have been exposed to the military policy makers themselves and have both illuminated and complicated their own mental exercises.
Today, very few officers with any foreign- policy experience will even admit the existence of, let alone attempt to concentrate upon, “purely military” considerations. There are none. At one staff college there is a series of lectures on the “elements” of national strategy, identified successively in consecutive lectures as the military, the economic, the political, and the psychological. The student officers delightedly conclude after the lectures are over that all four outside speakers have in reality been talking about the identical problem, and that none can discuss his own special subject without simultaneously bringing in the others. National strategy and national security are concepts of unity and integration. Every type of public servant plays a critical part and each comes to know more about the others. In learning, each contributes more effectively to the common cause.
The modern “military mind” is a creation of the requirements of military service in a revolutionary age, an era in which the traditional responsibilities of command now compete with the new demands of helping to make the policies which others execute. For most officers, this is a new development that comes fairly late in their careers, but it is a form of service which most may legitimately anticipate in one way or another at some point. The continued survival of the nation depends no less upon the professional officer’s skill as a policymaker than it does upon his prowess as an active defender of its security. Each line of effort deserves the utmost dedication of which any officer is capable.