On 8 December 1969, as part of the U. S. Naval Institute’s continuing Distinguished Visitor Program, one of the U. S. Naval Academy’s most eminent alumni spoke to a new generation of midshipmen. Presented here is a condensation of the address by this distinguished member of the Class of 1934 whose last command embraced all Marines serving in the Pacific Ocean area and whose 54 trips to the Vietnam theater of combat operations gives a special currency to his words.
There is in our land a growing dissatisfaction with that group of our citizens who feel that there is some short cut or bargain basement route to national security, who somehow find strength in weakness, who condemn and demean those dedicated to our defense, who indict what they call the “military/industrial complex” as being dishonorable or capricious.
Before condemning those who criticize our security efforts, it will be well to clarify the general state of our defenses—how big they are and what they cost.
First, as to people. There are 3.5 million assorted people serving within the Department of Defense today. A half-million are deployed overseas in Vietnam, another quarter-million are deployed overseas in other critical places around the world.
To support the varied activities of these 3.5 million men—to supply, train and sustain them—the current defense budget aggregates 79 billion dollars. That is 79 stacks of thousand dollar bills, each stack as high as the Washington Monument.
About a third of this total—perhaps 26 billion—is intended to support our overseas operations.
Here is the key point right at the outset. If those who clamor for our abandonment of Vietnam were successful in causing us completely to turn our backs and quit, perhaps a third of this large sum might be diverted to other purposes. But the bulk of it—fully two-thirds—would still be needed to sustain the same forces deployed in the United States or to replenish the material reserves—ammunition, aircraft and weapons—that have been so depleted by our war in Southeast Asia.
If experience is worth anything, it must tell us also that our summary withdrawal from Southeast Asia would just fertilize trouble elsewhere; trouble that could well demand a far greater expenditure.
And no matter how courageous or pusillanimous we are in Vietnam, we still have no license to repeat the post-World War II Louis Johnson era where we so weakened ourselves as to invite the Communists to launch the Korean invasion.
Another eight billion of the 79-billion-dollar budget request is intended to support our minimum essential defense against nuclear attack—our nuclear submarines, our strategic bombers, nuclear weapons, detection systems, missiles. Ultimately, the ABM will be part of this, too.
In light of what our potential enemies are doing, there is doubt as to the adequacy of this sum. A good case could be made to increase it. In today’s world there can be little question as to what would result if the Soviet Union ever found us in a position where we could not retaliate decisively to their first strike nuclear attack.
Our enemies know what nuclear blackmail means. And the very day we make ourselves vulnerable to nuclear blackmail, we can expect to feel it. That was the guts of the ABM issue.
But, let’s get back to our 79 billion dollars. When we take away the cost of Vietnam and nuclear defense, we still have something over 43 billion left.
Of this we have to take three billion for obligatory payments to retired military personnel; pensions to the disabled, to the widows, to the soldiers going all the way back to the Spanish-American War. This is a legal obligation. It cannot be escaped.
Six billion more are committed to military research and development. Here is an area that is under tremendous pressure—even attack, by those grown-up flower children who contend that, if you don’t develop the means to make war, you won’t be found making war. It’s all so simple. We hear this frequently now, from a vocal few in the Congress, from the anarchistic Students for a Democratic Society, and from an array of Marxist professors whose object seems to be the erosion of the minds of our young people.
Second to the attack on our expenditures for nuclear retaliatory power, I believe that the attack on this sum of money could be the most deadly of all.
Military research is costly. Some of it has been inefficient. Poor planning and cost over-runs have eroded people’s confidence—mine included.
But these inefficiencies don’t diminish at all the need for aggressive technologic research to evolve better and more efficient weapons.
Moreover, our own research is pretty much open. We know—indeed, the world knows—what we are doing.
Not so with the Soviet Union. Their research is done—to the extent that they can do it—in secret. Nobody knows what they are achieving.
We simply don’t dare to underestimate them. Our survival is at stake and we need to go forward at top speed, just to be safe.
We all remember Sputnik. The Russians beat us into space by a large margin because of the secret Soviet program of research in one limited area—large rocket motors. Their superiority has since been overcome by our own successful research in other areas of space technology. But, it took us eight years to do it.
Just suppose that their secret research had not been related just to getting a peaceful object into space, but had been devoted to developing a means to detect and destroy America’s nuclear weapons.
And suppose they had succeeded, and were able to catch us unawares, just as they did with Sputnik.
What might have happened if research had put us at the nuclear mercy of the Soviets for eight long years? This is something we simply cannot risk. We need to maintain a clear superiority in technology for our own survival. And, that kind of superiority docs not come cheap.
The Russians know the stakes involved, and they are prepared to pay for it. For the past few years the Soviets have increased their research and development spending continually while ours has grown only very slowly. In 1970, if these trends continue, the Soviet Union will for the first time be putting more money into research and development than we are.
This is no time to lag behind. But, unless there is some dramatic change in the attitudes in Congress, we are headed for second place in a scientific race where nothing but first place counts.
But, back to our arithmetic and our 79 billion. We still have something on the order of 35 billion dollars left.
Out of this we take some 15 billion for support functions—supply, maintenance, repair and modernization of valuable equipment, training of hundreds of thousands of men in the whole gamut of technical skills, military travel, hospitalization—in short, everything involved in making this whole complex mechanism work, day in and day out.
There can be some improved efficiency in this. But, basically, these support functions are going to have to be accomplished at 1970 prices. This 15 billion dollars is not just all mysterious military outgo. What price tag, for example, is reasonable for all the young men to whom the military teaches a useful skill that will make them better citizens? What price tag is reasonable for the medical care given to 10 million Americans of all types and ages—the active and retired and their dependents—in some 250 hospitals? Where would they go otherwise? And how much would it cost?
What price tag is reasonable for the benefits realized by all sectors of business and industry from the day-to-day military purchases—whether it be socks or beans or ten-penny nails? There probably can be something wrung out of the budget in this area, but it just can’t be much, or the basic machinery won’t work.
The only area remaining is our conventional fighting forces—the fleets with their carriers, amphibious forces, ASW forces, Air Force tactical units, the Army and Marine combat forces—all of which, put together, form the basis of our capability to go where American strength is needed. This sum also provides for our Reserves and the National Guard and the other elements of our military staying power.
All told, this package is something on the order of 22 billion dollars worth, and, together, we may all simultaneously shudder to think what would happen to us if these bread-and-butter elements of our national security were to be eroded.
If this erosion were to occur, our enemies would present us with choice after bitter choice where our use of nuclear weapons would not appear justified but where some important political, military, or economic position would have to be sacrificed because we simply did not have the alternative conventional tools to do anything about it. If we want to see Western Europe or Southeast Asia or both go down the drain, weakening our conventional forces is the surest way to accomplish it.
Nevertheless, unless some Congressmen are obliged to face up to the problem, there is a major budget cut coming in this critical area because, along with all the military, large and small, it’s under drumfire attack today.
This discussion has outlined what our country would do with the money originally requested to underwrite our security for next year. But really, it doesn’t mean much to talk about military budgets if they exceed our ability to pay. This question has to be faced up squarely.
In this case, and in spite of the very large sums involved, there is no question whatever but that we can foot the bill. No responsible person in this country has ever declared that the United States cannot afford to defend itself. And 1970 is no exception.
This 79-billion-dollar expenditure, for example, would only be seven per cent of our gross national product. The Soviet Union, is now expending about twice as much on defense forces as we are.
We can afford it.
Last year, our Federal spending went up about six billion dollars. But only half a billion went for the military.
No, we’re not over-balanced in our defense spending.
In the past five years, the Federal Government alone has put 30 billion dollars into welfare. And this is on top of all the state and county and city and private funds that have been piped into the welfare sector. The total welfare expenditure has probably exceeded 10 billion dollars a year—this is far more than we are investing in protection against the doomsday weapon in the hands of our potential enemies, the Russians and the Chinese.
Last year, we spent over four billion dollars in this country to collect garbage. We spent over three-and-a-half billion dollars on our pets.
No, we are not over-spending on defense.
Last year we spent 24 billion dollars to fix our automobiles. That’s about what Vietnam costs. And then we spent 26 billion more to buy new ones.
That’s more than Vietnam costs.
There is no evidence to suggest that we have ever over-spent on defense. In war, it’s results that count and our military forces have won every war we’ve ever entered—at least up to the time that the politics took charge.
Our military forces have defended our country, they have protected our shores, they have enhanced our overseas commerce, they have fulfilled our international obligations and have earned for us vastly more respect than some of the aimless and disorganized giveaway programs that have bruised our treasury to the tune of over a third of a trillion dollars since 1945.
Critics of our national security mechanism say that our military power, on occasion, has been excessive; that we actually have been too strong. Maybe so, but these critics’ free-time might be spent more profitably contemplating what might have happened if ever our strength had been just not quite enough.
The same critics, and others, say that our military power has been used for the wrong things. And this may also be true. But if it is true, we cannot, in all fairness, overlook the fact that the military does nothing on its own.
Wherever we go, whatever we do, military acts are invariably products of political decisions.
Our soldiers went to France in 1917 to carry out a political decision. We entered World War II only after a careful political appraisal by the Federal administration. We went to Korea as a direct result of President Truman’s own political judgment.
And—let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind—we sent our forces to Vietnam not because of any capricious chicanery that had to do with Tonkin Gulf, but as a result of 12 months of painful deliberation by the Federal administration.
Heaven knows, we have fought that war not as soldiers would fight it, but as the political leadership of our nation has directed—even to the extent of the selection of bombing targets and the prescription of military tactics by the politicians.
Whatever they do, wherever they go in the future, their countrymen may be sure of this—our military forces will be following the dictates of our civilian leaders. This is the way it always has been. This is the way it has to be.
The current condemnation, then, of our military for being off the reservation, or irresponsible, or unjustifiably costly, is just dead wrong.
But, in a broader sense, we have to acknowledge that the condemnation is understandable in today’s world climate. It’s almost to be expected. Because it is just a symptom of what is wrong with America as a whole.
What is wrong with the United States of America?
It has to do with that region of our body down around the midsection—we are suffering a shortage of that four-letter commodity called “guts.” There is a passive unwillingness on the part of the vast bulk of our people to stand up and be counted; to fight what is wrong.
Walter Lippman expressed this thought more elegantly when he said, “The critical weakness of our society is that, for the time being, our people do not have great purposes which they are united in wanting to achieve.”
I agree. Today we see an extraordinary lack of purpose and an even greater lack of resolution in our people. While the majority of Americans remain silent, we find vocal minorities of our people exerting inordinate—and often dangerous—influence on our country’s affairs.
With no visible frontiers to conquer, they grope about for emotional causes. They find satisfaction in deprecating America’s progress, ignoring America’s strength, attacking America’s institutions, while giving undeserved respect to the philosophy and the conduct of our potential enemies. And they are being allowed to get away with it by a passive majority.
The fact is, this is a great country. Our system is a good system. It’s the success story of the modem age. Nowhere, in all the nooks and crannies of history, is there a record of anything better.
Certainly the system with which we are in competition around the world can’t even compare with it. Karl Marx designed what he reckoned was a foolproof scheme for defeating capitalism.
It’s been tried in a score of places, in a hundred ways around the world for the better part of a century. But, it has never been able to meet the challenge of freedom, where man has the opportunity to succeed and the right to fail, where there is equity in government, participation by little people in important affairs, and where the events of the market place govern the economy.
Marxism and its totalitarian trappings have failed. Certainly the cold aggression in Budapest, where Soviet tanks confronted Hungarian flesh and blood, was not a manifestation of success.
The brutal aggression by the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia—seen on millions of television screens—was by no means a mark of triumph.
The erection of the Berlin wall—living monument to frustration—was not an example of Communist progress.
The cold murder of thousands, perhaps millions, of Chinese, the raging of the Red Guards, the forcible seizure of peasants’ crops by the People’s Liberation Army are no evidence that Marxism is succeeding in China.
The ejection of the Communists from Indonesia, the largest Moslem nation in the world, was a major setback.
Nor is the propaganda drumfire regarding Vietnam that we hear coming from every Communist source around the world—a drumfire that seeks to shake our own convictions in the ability of our nation to solve its problems—a manifestation of strength.
All of these symptoms, plain for every one of us to see and analyze on his own, sound a note which should resound from one end of our country to the other.
It is this: While the American system has made tremendous strides, our enemy is in trouble all over the world and what he is doing, by every means possible, is to try and divert our attention from his plight, to create doubts, apprehensions and cynicism in our minds so that we will not make capital of his weakness.
What is needed desperately today is for the mass of silent America to come out of their shells—to acknowledge publicly and openly what they all know—that ours is a great, a dynamic, and successful country, that the ragings of those who condemn our system are false.
Now, above all, is no time for people whose work has brought our country to greatness to be silent or uncertain.
Over a generation ago, Calvin Coolidge said, “Doubters do not achieve, skeptics do not contribute, cynics do not create.”
The 20th century is certainly a battlefield. Of this there can be no doubt. And, to win the battle of the 20th century, our country can afford no doubters, no skeptics, and no cynics.
If the American people will show the guts to face the issues as they really are and to make themselves heard over the din of those who would destroy our society, the future has to be bright. This particularly has to do with the military, with the preservation its image, with the damping of the downward tilt of the curve of our popularity with the protection our strength, of our right to fight, of our opportunity to defend our land.
Each of you midshipmen with the broad education that is coming your way here, certainly see the magnitude of the stakes involved in today’s battle for military survival. We face shortages—shortages, of course, of money, of men, of information, of organization, of leadership, of time.
And the shortest of all is time.