The Swinging Debate

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During the latter days of 1979, an exceedingly di­visive debate—heretofore conducted exclusively within the confines of U. S. Government offices— erupted into public print. The central issue, which was first broached in a syndicated newspaper column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (Washington Post, 8 October 1979, p. 21) and subsequently ex­panded by widespread comment in much of the na­tion’s press, encompassed a fundamental tenet of ex­isting U. S. national strategy. This debate addressed a long-held U. S. plan to shift substantial American military forces from the Pacific Ocean area to the At­lantic theater in the event of a war between countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and those of the Warsaw Pact.

Significant differences of opinion surrounding this so-called “swing strategy” center on the fact that it involves basic considerations of U. S. national secu­rity: a continuing Soviet military buildup; the posi­tion of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) in the international power equation; assured Western access to indispensable raw materials; the political alignment of vital U. S. friends and allies in the Western Pacific; the likely course any NATO-Warsaw Pact war would take; and the structure of the U. S. Navy.

Some of the reports appearing in the press date the origin of the concept to the early 1970s, suggesting that it derives from the reorientation of U. S. na­tional strategy undertaken during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. To be sure, the swing concept fit nicely with the shift from a “two- and-a-half war” strategy—the ability to handle si­multaneously a major war in Europe, another in the Pacific region, and an acute crisis somewhere else in the world—to the “one-and-a-half war” posture which emerged under Nixon’s leadership. Despite this coincidence, the swing strategy genesis lies much further back in time.

When Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNart¹³^ laid hands on the reins of the Pentagon, he ^irn mediately set his newly organized systems analyst ^t0 work seeking means to make the American arm^e forces “cost-effective,” thereby identifying opp^ortU nities to effect economies in the nation’s defe⁰^ budget. These bright young men quickly theon^ze< that wherever military elements could be postured °^f positioned to serve a dual purpose, the sought-af^ter savings would necessarily manifest themselves. ^^ne of the first targets they trained their sights on ^ amphibious lift for the Marine Corps. They reason^e that with two marine divisions based on each of ^{c e} American coasts, the United States required only ^sU ficient amphibious shipping to transport half of ^ force (either the East or West Coast divisions) some international hot spot where it might needed. Thus, should a crisis develop, half ^c ^ shipping—normally split between the Atlantic ^an the Pacific—could be “swung” through the Pa^nl1 Canal to the appropriate coast where it would h^e' lift those two divisions to the objective area. Ha^v'ⁿ^ done that, the combined group of ships could t*¹ be returned, via the canal if necessary, to the ^ot coast, where it would be ready to move the balnⁿ of the Marine Corps to some second critical reg‘^o(> Being the capital-intensive investments which ^c assuredly are, amphibious warfare ships would th^efe fore provide significant savings if their nuifP could be reduced and their future construction P^f<^ grams cut back. To those analysts, the marine ^ mula clearly held great promise for bringing ^ j similar economies in other branches of the afl¹^ forces as well.

At that time, for example, Senator Mike Mans ^ was exerting heavy and continual pressure in ^°^t'_i gress to reduce the number of American ^tr°°j stationed in Europe. Extension of a similar tasking” concept to these combat units offered eⁿ

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_f ⁶ ‘swing strategy”—shifting substantial military forces from the Pacific £ ^t^^>e Atlantic in the event of a war between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces- ^^ltls to look very much like a prescription for disaster.

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forces from Korea. The political scar tissue generate by that initiative, even though the plan was ul⁰' mately placed in limbo, would be abruptly wrench? loose by any open U. S. admission that as much ^ilS half of all its military strength in the Pacific—whi? is primarily naval—would head for the Atlantic >ⁿ the event of an active Soviet threat to NATO. It ^^eS little imagination to perceive the political uphea^v3 such action would create among America’s allies ¹⁽¹ the Far East.

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There is, of course, another side to the coin:

tional security in this power-political world, th?^

is a course of action that ought to be pursued, testimony of at least one major commander,

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Atlantic—a prospect inherent in the ^svVl strategy—he would be compelled to ignore Am can commitments in the Western Pacifc and ad°P wholly defensive posture if his remaining forces

ing prospects of like reductions in the cost of main­taining America’s commitment in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that the next major initiative in these years featured “dual basing” of some U. S. military forces earmarked for assignment to NATO.

The idea was surfaced in NATO councils, then im­plemented by extracting two brigades of the 24th Division (two thirds of its strength) from Europe and “redeploying” them to the continental United States. Along with this shift came a concurrent withdrawal of several U. S. Air Force squadrons in what was also advertised as a redeployment. The notion herein was that these forces—“dual based” in the United States and Germany—would be instantly ready to return to Europe in the event of any crisis which threatened to escalate into a NATO-Warsaw Pact war. An unstated, but nevertheless important, U< S. consideration was the fact that they would also strengthen America’^ much diminished strategic reserve^As a guarantee of their commitment to \ATO_vhowever, the brigades left their heavy equipment and combat supplies stored in Germany, and the aircraft squadrons stocked fuel and ammunition at their bases to ensure their readiness to receive aircraft in the event they had to return. To demonstrate the feasibility of the plan, periodic exercises were to be conducted in which the dual-based forces would be flown to Europe and reunited with their prepositioned equip­ment and supplies.

Despite the euphemisms "redeployment” and “dual based,” most NATO allies viewed the scheme

for what it actually was. a reduction of American military strength in Europe. Their initial unhappi­ness was compounded when the Soviet Union in­vaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It was then suddenly discovered that the U. S. Army units re­turned to the United States had been drawn dowrTio fill requirements in Vietnam and were no longer at full strength. Further, NATO learned that similar re­ductions had taken place within the Air Force units. The dual basing of American military forces was thus exposed as something of a fraud, deceiving neither the Europeans nor our prospective enemies. Nonethe­less, the rationale remains which underlies dual task­ing as well as the swing strategy. Moreover, today it is being applied to other segments of American mili­tary power. For amphibious lift, aircraft carriers, Air Force squadrons, Army divisions, or whatever, the siren song of those early, cost-effective days persists.

As a matter of fact, the dual tasking concept was most recently reconfirmed by Consolidated Guidance Study No. 8 of 14 May 1979, conducted by the Of­fice of the Secretary of Defense. This study, which was surfaced by the Evans-Novak column, recom­mended retention of the swing strategy and sug' gested that its existence should continue to be with' held from America’s Asian allies. The reasons for the latter suggestion are relatively easy to understand Even though Asian leaders have probably been p^rl' vately (and painfully) aware of the plans, there can be little doubt that Washington’s public acknowledg' ment of them would convince Japan, China, d’^c Philippines, Indonesia, and others that the Unite¹ States has indeed decided to withdraw from the Western Pacific—militarily and politically as well- These Far Eastern countries are still acutely ^c°ⁿ” scious of the unwelcome reality that one of the prim^e thrusts of the Carter administration’s policies up⁰'’ entering office was the removal of American grout¹

judgment of the military leadership in the llnitfi States. It is fair to assert that those who are pled?^e to shoulder a gun and march off to put right dip^ matic debacles—American military leaders and ^r men they command—have always looked with som^e thing less than enthusiasm on such esoteric sche⁰¹^ when they began to permeate national security P icy. Today’s uniformed leaders still do. They re?⁰" nize that the real world is quite different from ^f neat, quantifiable environment upon which pol'^c are all too often predicated.

if the swing concept is indeed viable, and if ^{0 c}‘ be impler^ented without further degrading U. 6- ⁿ‘

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ever, suggests that it cannot. The Command?^1, . Chief, Pacific—under whose control rests all An¹

can military strength allocated to the Pacific an dian Oceans—is reported to have informed

ington that his assigned forces are only “margin³

capable of carrying out the tasks for which he <^s _

sponsible. Further, he stated that should a subs¹ ^

tial fraction of that power be shifted to „

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⁰ that the status quo in the Far East be main-

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^t0 survive. Presumably, this would mean drawing a tensive line from Alaska to Hawaii and then, from ^c'hind that line, striving to maintain essential com­munications between those two states and the rest of ^f^^e nation. In light of this grim assessment, it would ^aPpear prudent to examine some aspects of the pres­^eat global power balance and the imperatives affect- ^lng them in these early days of the 1980s.

^n ominous shift in that balance is apparent in the ^c°ntinued expansion of overall Soviet military prow- ^^Ss- One salutary feature of the bitter struggle in the ⁿ>ted States over ratification of the SALT (Stra­^tegic Arms Limitation Talks) II treaty has been Public airing of the magnitude and pace of that ex­tension. Of special significance is the attention that ^as been centered on Moscow’s conventional army, ^naval, and air forces. Since a sizeable share of Soviet Military power is directed at Western Europe, the ^0 nations have quite naturally watched the jj^r°*th with increasing alarm. Their fears, however, ^ave not motivated them to undertake the necessary measures to strengthen their own armed forces. To °^Se who have labored with NATO defense issues, it ^Seerns apparent that many Europeans long ago came ^rbe conclusion that if they expended additional ^^ational funding on their military establishments, ^e United States would immediately take this as an ^e)tcuse to reduce its own commitment to the com- m°n defense. It is for future historians to decide if ^ls is an accurate assessment or if the Europeans are m^dy hiding behind that rationale in order to jus- y devoting disproportionate funds to social issues ^ather than properly guarding their frontiers.

"E° some extent, the shift in the balance of power putable to Soviet military expansion has been ^Set by the reorientation of the political and mili- ^^rV outlook of the P.R.C. A significant segment of .^e U.S.S.R.’s conventional military power has been Phoned off by the Sino-Soviet dispute. Troops and ^^Craft which otherwise would be available for de- j yinent along the European front are now stationed I ^astern Siberia; some 50 Soviet divisions and a j^r§^e number of aircraft squadrons are currently tied there by Moscow’s perception of the Chinese _Qj.^reat- Moreover, some of the most modern elements _t ^cbe Soviet fleet have also been moved to the Soviet _s ^fiast in recent years. In the eyes of many Western jj ^ategists, these developments have transformed the into an honorary 16th member of the North Viatic Alliance. From a purely pragmatic point of it is extremely important to the defense of

hed.

^et another development affecting the in­ternational scene, poorly perceived in the United States yet nonetheless inexorable, has been the grow­ing dependence of the industrial nations of the West on overseas sources of critical raw materials, oil in particular. Here again, crucial shifts in the balance of power have occurred, this time as a result of Soviet initiatives aided by the cooperative efforts of Mos­cow’s Cuban and East German surrogates. The focus has been on Third World nations, where many vital raw materials are to be found.

Guaranteed access to these sources unquestionably lies at the heart of Western security. This is espe­cially true of Japan and NATO Europe, and it is be­coming increasingly true of the United States. The disruption in global petroleum supplies, caused by the 1978 revolution in Iran, highlighted the precari­ous balance which exists in the availability of this indispensable commodity. The myriad ways in which that flow can be interrupted have to be a foremost worry of every military planner on both sides of the Atlantic. It would do NATO little good, for example, to match the Warsaw Pact military buildup if West­ern troops had to push their tanks into battle and if their aircraft could not get off the ground for lack of fuel. The seriousness of this specific danger, df course, depends on the nature of any war with the Warsaw Pact nations.

Then there is the question of the political align­ment of U. S. allies and friends in the Far East. One need only contemplate the startling changes which have taken place in the northwest quadrant of the Indian Ocean region in the past few years and what they portend for American security to perceive the latent dangers in the Western Pacific. Regional per­ceptions of American ambivalence and impotence in the face of the fall of Ethiopia to Marxists, the bloody coup and subsequent murder of the U. S. ambassador in Afghanistan, and the revolution in Iran clearly produced shifts in the foreign policies of other area nations—Pakistan, for instance—as the reliability of American pledges was called into ques­tion. The possibility that disenchantment with the constancy of the U. S. commitment will precipitate similar changes in the Far East is equally if not more perturbing.

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No assessment of the swing strategy would be valid without an examination of the probable course a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations would take. Ever since the formation of NATO, this subject has been a matter of considerable debate. In the early days of the alliance, overwhelming Ameri­can superiority in strategic nuclear weapons seemed to guarantee that there would be no such war. Mos­cow appeared to be prudent enough to avoid risking

of

of

the

of

an American withdrawal from the Western P^aCI

also would trigger the reunification of Korea on ^ North’s terms, as well as certain establishment^- Soviet hegemony over all of Southeast Asia- perhaps even greater importance, it would jeopat the entire U. S. position in the Indian Ocean ana crucial arm, the Persian Gulf. Rather than incal^cU ble, as Admiral Hayward described them, the co ^ quences would be better characterized as ^ca trophic. The Joint Chiefs of Staff clearly belie^ve ^ and have apparently made it clear to the Secret®^ Defense that, in their collective opinion, the only

destruction of the U.S.S.R. on the tenuous assump­tion that the United States would refrain from using these cataclysmic weapons. As a Soviet nuclear capa­bility emerged and delivery systems matured, that comforting premise came increasingly into question. The American response was to deploy so-called “tac­tical” nuclear weapons to Europe. The reasoning be­hind this move held that these battlefield versions could decimate the numerically superior Soviet con­ventional forces long before they could overrun Western Europe. In both cases, the name of the game was deterrence. For more than three decades, it has worked.

As the Soviets steadily eroded American nuclear predominance and simultaneously expanded their own general purpose forces to their present levels, however, it gradually became evident in the West that extant strategic assumptions had lost their valid­ity. Furthermore, increasing dependence of Western nations on overseas resources raised the specter that NATO, denied access to those raw materials, might very well face defeat without a shot ever being fired in Europe. In the wake of these developments, some observers began to question earlier assertions that a NATO-Warsaw Pact war would automatically escalate to full nuclear dimensions; that it would, therefore, be of extremely short duration; and, more impor­tantly, that it would be confined to the European and North American regions. Consequently, the prospect of a far wider war began to materialize.

Evidence to support the “short war” theory has never been altogether persuasive. For one thing, the idea of uncontrolled escalation has not really been put to the test. It can be asserted, for instance, that the Cuban Missile Crisis constituted a realistic and hair-raising preview of national decision-making when governments reach the edge of the nuclear abyss. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that one of the most demented rulers in history, Adolf Hitler, did not resort to gas warfare—despite the abundant stockpile at his disposal—even when confronted with a national and personal Gotterdammerung. Is it so inconceivable that the same sort of reluctance will perhaps come to pervade nuclear decision-making— that major powers just might stumble into a global war and ultimately settle their differences without triggering the universally feared strategic nuclear holocaust? Under such circumstances, the possibility of widespread conventional war assumes some meas­ure of plausibility.

Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, the Chief of Naval Operations, has argued eloquently before Congress that any war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations inevitably will be worldwide in scope. He maintains that such an eventuality is consistent with Soviet doctrine, and, given latter-day international geopolitical realities, Soviet and Western vital inter­ests would inescapably clash at a number of poin^ts around the Eurasian periphery. In this context, would seem wise to examine possible ramifications the swing strategy. The first consideration, of course is the strategy’s likely effect on the direct defense the United States. As has already been noted, ^ nation’s top commander in the Pacific believes thnr any significant shift in U. S. forces from his thea'^er of operations would force him to abandon the Wes¹ ern Pacific, thus leaving the entire region to ^tlie mercy of the Soviet Navy and the sizeable land fore^eS

Moscow has stationed in Siberia. In addition to

patent loss of allies and access to important sources

raw materials which the United States would suffer

such a move would place both Alaska and Hawaii ⁱⁿ

the forefront of the combat zone.

Admiral Hayward has described the consequent

of such a wartime posture as incalculable. One of ^

prime additional results would be the stark expos^ufe

of Japan, a nation governed by a U. S.-dictated ^c°ⁿ

stitution. That document has compelled Japan/⁰

rely mainly on the United States for its protect'⁰⁰

over the past 35 years, since it forbids Tokyo ¹

military strength needed to do the job alone. ^ ^

United States were to abandon the Western Pad'^[1] ’

it is not too difficult to envision a relatively defe"^[2]^

less Japan quickly adopting a neutralist stance

even seeking some sort of accommodation with

Soviet Union.                                                                       ,

. ...                                                                                           rh^e

Ol critical importance would be the effect on

P.R.C. Bolstered only by a militarily imp°^tej

Japan—or worse, flanked by a Japan newly al'g^ne

with the U.S.S.R.—it is not beyond belief

something long feared in the West would

rialize: rapprochement between Peking and Mos^c0 ’

with all the global power balance implications ¹

would entail . . . especially with respect to the

fense of NATO Europe.                                                       _

If these possibilities are not sufficiently harrow'¹¹^.

the

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