Too late to avert the predicament of weakness now upon us, the great debate over the facts of the military balance is finally over. At the outset of the Carter Presidency, we were still being told that there was room for cuts in the defense budget, and that America was and would remain “number one.” And as late as last year, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Jones—a man finely attuned to the prevailing political currents—endorsed the claim of military primacy by saying that he would not exchange our forces for those of the Soviet Union. Now, by contrast, it is only the grossly ill-informed, the self-deceived, and the willfully deceiving who will still argue the point. Otherwise the great majority of the voices in our public life have come to agree that the armed strength’ of the United States has been allowed to decline well beyond the limits of tolerable risk, and certainly to a level of net inferiority vis-à-vis Soviet military power in its totality.

Since the United States remains superior by far over the Soviet Union in both economic capacity and technical advancement, one might presume that the diagnosis having been agreed upon, the remedy would follow automatically by common agreement also, in the form of a broad and most energetic rearmament. The effort would have to be broad, since it is no longer merely one or two categories of military power that we have to worry about, but rather the whole spectrum of capabilities with only a few exceptions. And, characteristically, even the last remaining areas of American military advantage are greatly affected by the general impoverishment of the armed forces.

Thus, for example, the very wide theoretical advantage of the United States in the air power of the Navy, provided by the globally maneuverable aircraft carriers, is greatly undermined by a lack of spare parts and by a crippling shortage of technicians, now driven by low wages to seek civil employment (the comparison between their earnings and those of “baggers at supermarket checkout counters” threatens to become proverbial).

Similarly, the one remaining strategic nuclear advantage we retain, in the number of bomber-delivered weapons, while itself quite inadequate to offset the Soviet superiority in missile weapons, is also devalued by the venerable age of the vast majority of those bombers, B-52’s, designed thirty years ago and last produced in 1962.

More generally, the widespread presumption that the quality of American equipment is significantly higher than that of its Soviet counterparts is no longer justified in most cases. There are two major exceptions: tactical aircraft; and a variety of highly technical ancillary capabilities, such as night-vision devices and various kinds of guidance electronics. Once again, however, shortages of spare parts and even more of modern ordnance (very few of those fancy precision weapons are actually deployed) greatly diminish the true combat value of our superior combat aircraft. As for the ancillaries, the situation is even worse. We are supposed to rely on these fruits of our scientific and technical superiority to mitigate in some degree the Soviet advantage in major weapons and gross numbers overall. Unfortunately, a military establishment starved for funds sacrifices the present for the future, and tends to buy only sample numbers of those devices to save funds for yet more research and development. As a result, the fact that, for example, we have a much better night-vision technology than the Soviet Union possesses does not mean much, since only a few of our troops are actually issued with the equipment.

A net majority in Congress, belatedly reflecting mass opinion, has come to terms with the magnitude of the effort now required, and also appreciates the urgency of action; there has even been some talk of “mobilization.” But so far not much has been done. Certainly President Carter and his administration are resisting anything more than merely cosmetic increases in overall spending—increases that are quite easily nullified by slight fluctuations in the inflation rate—and doing so with the powerful support of a significant slice of elite opinion, as well as that of the entire left wing of the Democratic party at large.

Since even those who oppose anything more than small percentage increases in the defense budget now mostly agree with the rest of us on the facts of military weakness, how is it that they reject what would seem to be the only logical conclusion?

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It appears that two major arguments now stand in the way of translating the consensus on the military balance into a consensus on rearmament. The first begins by making two highly significant admissions: that the Soviet Union has indeed become the world’s strongest military power (a thing vehemently denied until quite recently); and that this is indeed a dangerous development (another thing categorically denied in the past, on the grounds that military power itself was of diminishing consequence in the modern world). But what follows then is not a call for action, to confront the danger belatedly recognized. Instead, quite contrary advice is offered: to reject all congressional attempts to achieve major increases in defense spending, to revive the arms-limitation efforts now in abeyance, and above all to ratify the SALT treaty still now before the Senate.

Thus the remedy for a weakness caused by too much emphasis on arms control and too little spending is more of the same. The paradox is explained by the central contention of this school of thought: that the people of the United States will not in fact sustain the prolonged sacrifice that a serious rearmament effort would require.

While it acknowledges that it is precisely mass opinion that is now inducing Congress to allocate more for defense, this school of thought argues that what we are witnessing is merely a transitory exasperation which will soon pass, and would do so all the sooner if there were serious spending increases and if conscription were to be introduced to make the effort count.

The Soviet Union, we are told, is by contrast in a wholly different position. Its policies, unaffected by the vagaries of public opinion, will maintain a steady course, most especially in the relentless accumulation of military power. If we provoke the Soviet leaders by increasing our military outlays, our own resolve to keep up the effort would soon evaporate, while the Soviet reaction would be long-lasting. In other words, the consequence of a one-time increase on our part might be to push up the Soviet effort to a permanently higher plateau, thus causing a further deterioration in the long-run military balance.

Hence we should instead hasten to ratify SALT II (if the Soviet leaders will still accept it) and then try to obtain any other arms limitations we can. Even if the actual constraint on Soviet armaments thus obtained must be feeble, it would still be better than nothing, while the attempt actually to compete would be downright self-defeating.

Presented in the form of analysis rather than advocacy, often in tones that are calculated to suggest that its exponents would dearly like to see the restoration of our power, if only the fickle American public would allow it, the argument attains respectability. But is it valid?

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Certainly it is all too evidently true that the Soviet leadership has long pursued a fixed course of military accumulation, increasing its expenditures steadily year by year and from decade to decade regardless of whether the United States was also spending more (the Vietnam years), cutting back sharply (the early 1970’s), or maintaining a level course through minor ups and downs (the last five years). But the undeniable fact of Soviet relentlessness only validates one half of the argument, while being the very source of the entire problem. The other half—the claim that the American public lacks the resolve to correct the balance and reverse the unfavorable drift—is unproven, and the record of thirty years would suggest that it is false.

To be sure, a graph of American defense outlays in real terms would show a number of high peaks, each short-lived and followed by valleys correspondingly deep. But once the matter is examined in terms of the results of these oscillations, it is not evidence of weakness in American resolve that we discover but rather evidence of the great potential strength of the country. The peak efforts of the Korean war rearmament (1951-53) and the lesser increases of the missile-gap period (1959-63) were not kept up, but that was because the results were so massive that there was no need to keep them up.

At the beginning of the Korean war, the arsenal of American military power consisted of a mass of leftovers from World War II, of some prototypes whose further development could not be funded, and of several hundred atomic weapons. With a budget of $13.5 billion in 1950 (even General Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been induced to declare that anything more would “bankrupt” the nation), there was no question of innovation. Indeed, there was not even enough money to keep the inherited World War II equipment in good repair: the first U.S. troops sent to resist the North Korean invasion of the South went into action with broken-down radios, worn-out trucks, and weapons already obsolete in some cases (such as anti-tank rockets that could not pierce the armor of North Korean tanks).

This dismal picture was utterly transformed by a few years of $50-billion defense budgets, which provided funding not only for the war but for a comprehensive rearmament. The Navy was endowed with a fleet of carriers (still the core of what we have), the nuclear submarine and other critical development programs were launched, and the fleets were reequipped with new warships and aircraft across the board. During that same brief surge, the Air Force was given the means to develop the “century” series of fighters, on which we relied until quite recently, and also the B-52 bomber, which is to serve into the 1990’s if the administration continues to block innovation in the form of a B-l or similar new aircraft. As for the Army, which entered the Korean war as little more than an occupation constabulary for Germany and Japan, with scarcely a handful of combat formations, it very quickly acquired fourteen well-armed divisions—the kind of strength that might have served to deter that war in the first place had it been available in time. (Korea was at first excluded from our strategic perimeter precisely because there were no forces for its defense.)

It is true that the effort was not kept up. Nevertheless, the one great surge had sufficed to change the military balance quite drastically, capturing a general superiority over the Soviet Union that was to last through the rest of the 1950’s—and which no doubt played a role in bringing the sequence of Soviet postwar adventures to an end.

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The pattern was repeated a decade later. The Soviet Union had capitalized on the shock of the Sputnik launch to support a great strategic deception—the famous “missile gap” still cited by the ill-informed as evidence of the Pentagon’s deceit. On the basis of some real ICBM firings and the false claim that a vast force of those weapons was being built—a claim that could not be checked in those pre-satellite days—the Soviet Union attempted to extract real political advantage from nonexistent forces, using the status of Berlin as its pretext. As in our own days, it was Congress that pressed for a rapid rearmament, in the face of a reluctant Eisenhower administration whose greater concern was to balance the budget.

By the time the Kennedy administration took over in 1961, a large effort was under way to develop workable ICBM’s (American boosters had a distressing tendency to explode on their launching pads), to build nuclear-powered submarines for what was to become the Polaris force, and to deploy continental air defenses. Simultaneously, in the heated atmosphere of the Berlin ultimata periodically issued by Moscow, there were increased expenditures for the conventional forces also.

This time, too, the surge did not last long; by the end of 1963, when Kennedy died, his administration had lost all enthusiasm for accumulating more strategic-nuclear weapons, and was pursuing economy in general. But once again the brief but intense effort had sufficed to correct the balance of power, and more. In fact, the 1959-63 surge was sufficient to gain for the United States a position of very wide advantage in strategic-nuclear capabilities, manifest in the Minuteman force of ICBM’s (1,000 having been built), in the Polaris submarine-missile force (41 boats and 656 missiles), and in the formidable force of 600 B-52 heavy bombers. The Soviet Union thus found itself swiftly overtaken by ratios of ten-to-one or more, in a devastating response to the empty boasts of strategic-nuclear superiority issued by its leaders.

Simultaneously, much was also done for the non-nuclear forces until the new economy wave set in. By 1965, the Army had received many new tanks, guns, and troop carriers, while the Navy obtained modern escorts and the Air Force a new generation of combat aircraft and tactical missiles. To this day, we are still living off the capital of military power accumulated in those few years of special effort; and indeed, in the strategic-nuclear arena it took a full fifteen years of unilateral arms control to lose the superiority so rapidly gained, and first revealed, in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

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In both the Korean and the “missile-gap” surges, the ultimate secret of our ability to transform the balance of power so quickly was the very low level of antecedent effort. Today, we are relatively much worse off than in either 1950 or 1960, for the Soviet build-up has proceeded for well over a decade without a corresponding American response, and the sheer volume of Soviet resources allocated to military purposes is very much larger in absolute terms.

Once again, however, the level of the pre-surge effort is very low. We are now spending roughly 5 percent of our gross national product on military power—and wasting much of that because low-grade manpower is being asked to operate and maintain equipment of high sophistication. The Soviet Union, by contrast, is spending much more than 10 percent of its gross national product for military purposes (figures ranging from 11 to 15 percent are variously quoted), and the Soviet forces obtain the bulk of their manpower by conscription. Both in the Korean and the “missile-gap” surges, the draft was an indispensable part of the overall American response. So it must be again, preferably in the form of a system of general rather than selective conscription. Once that is achieved, and once the level of spending reverts to 10 percent or so of the GNP, the Soviet advantage could once again be overcome—and rather quickly.

There is, admittedly, a real problem of supply, caused by the erosion of the industrial base in the military segments of production. While clichés about the “fat profits” of defense contractors continue in circulation, those directly involved—the “vested interests” of today’s rhetoric—know better. Private industry has been doing its level best to find civilian alternatives to military business, being driven out of military contracting by small profit margins as well as by an erratic pattern of contracting. Particularly damaging has been the flight of the subcontractors, whose specialized production is much more difficult to replace than the integration and assembly work done by the large companies of familiar name.

But in spite of these difficulties, which in some cases are indeed severe, a sharp increase in military purchasing would soon enough elicit a corresponding industrial response, and would in particular reverse the vicious cycle which is now giving us fewer and fewer weapons for higher and higher unit costs. At present, low budgets result in a pattern of contracting in which such things as combat aircraft are being bought in no more than sample numbers. This in turn naturally drives unit costs upward, and often enough the remedy is to cut further the number of items bought, thus once again increasing the overhead burden on each unit.

The ultimate impact of this self-defeating mechanism is manifest most strikingly in the case of naval fighters, where we are now buying fewer replacement aircraft than are being lost in training accidents, and doing so at exceedingly high prices. If more money were available to buy more aircraft each year, we would soon see the end of the $30-million fighters, whose high prices in fact reflect the total costs of research, development, administration, and factory overhead that are now being charged to the handful of aircraft purchased within each fiscal year.

From the viewpoint of economics one may deplore the inefficiency of sharp oscillations in our military outlays, which cause a wasteful industrial instability. But even so, it remains true that the United States could once again overcome the steady Soviet effort by an enhanced effort of its own, even if short-lived.

Defense outlays set at, say, 10 percent of the gross national product (still much less than the Soviet fraction and entirely tolerable),¹ even if kept up for only three years, would amount to roughly $700 billion. To visualize what such a sum could achieve, assume that only a third could be spent on actual equipment, and then compare that $200 billion or so with the unit cost of an aircraft carrier fully equipped with aircraft ($4 billion); with the cost of a 200-aircraft B-l bomber force ($30 billion or so); and with a division’s worth of XM-1 battle tanks (roughly $500 million).

These costs are, of course, high, and yet what a surge effort could achieve is still most impressive. Certainly once the economies of series production are counted in, and once the higher quality of a conscript-sustained force is obtained, it becomes clear that even if the limits of sacrifice are set at 10 percent of the GNP and even if the surge lasts only three years, we could still go a long way toward that rehabilitation of our military power that has now become necessary.

Of course this does not mean that the military balance could be restored so quickly. Given the long intervals between the purchase of weapons and their actual combat-ready deployment, it would take a good deal longer than three years to reestablish a tolerable balance of forces. But that is not the point. What the argument being considered here maintains is that we are unfit to compete with the Soviet Union because we are unable to maintain a steady level of effort. That argument stands disproved, even if several years must intervene before the surge of expenditure yields its full result in increased military power.

We may now contemplate more dispassionately the moral status of this school of thought. Without apology and without retraction, the very people who did everything they could to discourage the upkeep of our defenses now emerge to denounce the unwillingness of the American people to do that very thing. The same people who relentlessly argued that the Soviet Union was only seeking “parity,” that military power was in any case of little use in our days, and that arms-control negotiations would dispose of our major security problems, now accuse the people of this country of being too willing to accept their opinions.

More simply, we may also reflect on the sheer defeatism of this school of thought, which has such great respect for totalitarian continuity, and which overlooks the superior productive energies and greater inventive talents of a democratic America.

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A second objection to increased military appropriations is not so easily dismissed. Expressed in more or less identical terms by all manner of people from Ambassador Andrew Young to any number of retired colonels, this argument questions the professional capacity of the armed forces to make worthwhile use of the weapons and the manpower that a rearmament effort would provide. It is the military conduct of the Indochina war that is cited as evidence, as well as the lesser episodes thereafter—and most recently, the Iran rescue debacle.

There is little doubt that in retrospect the American record in Vietnam has been largely vindicated, both in its political and humanitarian aspects. It is now a commonplace that Hanoi’s policies were those of regional imperialism rather than nationalist unification; and it is equally evident that the totalitarian order which has descended on Vietnam is indeed very much more sinister than Saigon’s authoritarianism ever was. As for Cambodia, those who held that a suspension of war would self-evidently improve the circumstances of the Cambodian people have now had full opportunity to appreciate the oceanic depth of their error. Even the corrupt logic and false evidence of a William Shawcross can only serve to attribute blame to some Americans for a genocide that undeniably followed upon the suspension of American intervention rather than its continuation.

But the return to reason that allows all but the outer fringe to see the nature of the antagonists as it always was, does nothing to redeem the character of our own military conduct of the war. Standing back from the details of single operations, discounting those lesser phenomena of error and evil that must attend all armed conflict (and which the critics of course wildly magnified), making full allowance for the persistent misdirection of war operations emanating from the White House, American warfare in Indochina still emerges in broad perspective as an essentially bureaucratic phenomenon, scarcely responsive to the real modalities of that conflict.

The artillery fired its ammunition, even if the enemy consistently refused to assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations; the armor maneuvered, even if there were no linear defenses to pierce and no flanks to turn; the Air Force bombed in close support, in interdiction and in retaliation against North Vietnamese cities and infrastructures, even if only the last of these missions could find stable and worthwhile targets. Otherwise much of the air war was simply futile for reasons entirely fundamental: the tactical logic of close air support is to combine air strikes with ground combat against enemy forces that will not or cannot disperse, and this was a condition rarely satisfied in Vietnam; the strategic logic of interdiction is to diminish the flow of supply to an enemy who requires absolutely a certain quantum of supplies to sustain operations which cannot be deferred and this too was a condititon mostly absent. Nevertheless, thousands and thousands of missions were flown month after month, year after year.

As the war progressed, almost every component of the American armed forces—Coast Guard included—found a satisfactory role for itself in the war, a role, that is, which allowed funds to be claimed for expansion, without changes of structure or function disturbing to the hierarchical or organizational order of things.

Thus the Army retained its preferred style of warfare, based much more on the systematic application of firepower than on maneuver; it retained a structure of forces based on extra-large and logistically very heavy divisions; and it retained elaborate headquarters at battalion, brigade, and divisional echelons, these last under the command of officers of general rank—even if there were very few targets for the mass application of firepower, little need for the elaborate logistics, and hardly any valid operational functions for all those headquarters in a war of squad and platoon skirmishes. (It is notable that the one clear American victory, the utter defeat of the Vietcong in the Tet offensive, was won largely by scattered groups of men fighting with little central direction against an enemy that at last came out in force, thus presenting a stable target.)

The Navy similarly could have taken care of all opposition afloat with a small destroyer flotilla and a few shore-based patrol aircraft, but instead found full employment for its aircraft carriers in flying attack missions of all kinds by day and by night. Only the submariners were left out in the cold.

As for the Air Force, every single type of squadron was seemingly needed: fighters; light and heavy bombers; tactical and strategic reconnaissance, both photographic and electronic; as well as transport squadrons, light, medium, and heavy.

In their hundreds of thousands, servicemen worked hard and a good many lost life or limb to operate all those forces. But unfortunately much of all this activity had little to do with the true phenomena of the war through most of its stages: the terrorism and propaganda that subverted the authority of the government in each small locality to extract recruits, food, and intelligence; the guerrilla that was thus manned, fed, and informed and whose own opportunistic attacks served to maintain the insecurity in which subversion could progress still further; and then the worldwide propaganda assault on American confidence and morale.

Even when, after Tet 1968, North Vietnamese regular forces largely took over the fighting, the fit between the combat actions performed by the American forces and the nature of the enemy was only very slightly improved. For North Vietnamese regulars still fought as irregulars, that is elusively. It was only late in the war that the fighting assumed the conventional form of large-scale European-style warfare, complete with sustained artillery barrages and tank assaults by the North Vietnamese. But by then almost all the American forces—structured precisely to prevail in that kind of fighting—had been withdrawn (and, of course, the North Vietnamese only went over to conventional war operations precisely because the American troops had been withdrawn).

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Hence the peculiar nature of the American defeat. The United States was undone in a protracted political struggle waged all around the world, but most importantly in the United States itself, for the very soul of the policy and media elites, while all the action of the American armed forces themselves remained mostly quite tangential to the real phenomena of the war.

This absurd and tragic irrelevance was dictated by the simple fact that American military organizations structured, equipped, and trained for warfare on a large scale against regular forces did not adapt to entirely different circumstances by evolving appropriate small-unit structures. Nor did they develop operational methods related to the context, or tactics responsive to those of the enemy, of necessity radically different from traditional structured methods and tactics.

Those in charge at all levels can claim with full justification that there was continuous interference from Washington in the conduct of the war at the most detailed level, inevitably much of it ill-informed. They can claim with equal justification that the media were systematically ill-disposed, and indeed functionally structured to denigrate all that the South Vietnamese did and to criticize all that the Americans were trying to do. But responsibility for the utter failure to adapt structures, methods, and tactics to the terrain and to the nature of the enemy must rest squarely and exclusively upon the American officer corps. It was as if there were no body of staff and command officers willing and able to learn the facts of the conflict as it evolved and who could then tailor force-structures to suit combat needs, evolve relevant methods, and develop suitable tactics.

And indeed there was no such body of officers ready to perform the purely professional function of studying the war itself. All the hard work, all the undoubted technical and managerial expertise, were fully absorbed by operation of the military organizations themselves, which were shipped en bloc from the United States to Vietnam. Once there, all the highly complex weapons and ancillary equipment needed much maintenance, elaborate logistic systems had to be operated, and the whole intricate structure had to be supervised at each level, with a great deal of paper work being involved.

With so many different branches and sub-branches all engaged in war operations in circumstances of luxuriant bureaucratic growth, just the coordination of the different organizational bits and pieces absorbed the work of thousands of officers, especially senior officers. With so much inner-regarding activity, it was all the easier to ignore the phenomena of the war, which were in any case elusive, given the evanescent nature of the guerrilla element and the natural secrecy of subversion.

But for the tactical and operational realities of war to be so largely ignored by tens of thousands of military officers supposedly educated and trained to understand war and fight it, there had to be further and deeper causes of inadvertence, and indeed there were.

First, officers posted to Vietnam commands were rotated in and out of the country at short intervals, of one year or less. This meant that officers arrived in the country and then left it again before being able to come to grips with its complex situation. Characteristically, the first few months of a posting were a period of acclimatization and adjustment. Then the newly arrived officer could start to gather in the reins of command, and could begin work to rectify the deficiencies he uncovered within his unit. Often he would find that his predecessor had swept problems under the rug in the last phase of his posting, since by then he was already preoccupied with his next assignment. And then, by the time the officer was finally ready to look beyond the limits of his unit and its routines to focus on the tactical and operational problems of the war itself, the moment would be at hand to prepare for the next posting, almost invariably a desk job back in the United States.

This fatal lack of continuity (which also did great damage inwardly, since fighting units had no opportunity to develop their esprit de corps under the impulse of sustained leadership) denied to the United States all the benefits of a cumulative learning experience in the overall conduct of the war. As the saying went among the cognoscenti, the United States was not in Vietnam for ten years but rather for only one year, ten times over. Of the Romans it has been said that they made all manner of mistakes but never made the same mistake twice. In Vietnam, by contrast, the same tactical mistakes were repeated over and over again. Since officers were promptly sent off outside the country as soon as they began to acquire some experience of war leadership and combat operations, the American forces in Vietnam had no collective memory and the systematic repetition of error was inevitable.

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Why was such a devastatingly harmful bureaucratic procedure tolerated? Certainly this was not one of the malpractices imposed by the interference of civilian policy officials but entirely willed by the military services themselves. The motive, once again, was inner-regarding and exquisitely bureaucratic. Since the leadership of combat operations and indeed any service at all in a war zone would confer a great career advantage, it would not have been “fair” to allow some officers to remain in Vietnam year after year, thus depriving others of critical career-enhancing opportunities.

That people who run bureaucracies are apt to use them in a self-serving fashion to some extent is a thing inevitable, understandable, and even reasonable within limits. But in the case of officer rotation as practiced in Vietnam, we encounter a gross deviation from efficacy, with enormously damaging consequences.

How could it be that the desiderata of career management were allowed to prevail over the most essential requirements of effective warfare? Though it is true that reserving troop command and staff posts for the few would have caused much resentment, it would also have resulted in a much better conduct of the war. After all, it is no secret that troops cannot coalesce into cohesive fighting units under leaders constantly changing; and it is only slightly less obvious that the cumulative learning yielded by trial and error can scarcely be achieved by staff officers and commanders coming and going on short duty tours. Since we must assume the good intentions of those involved, it is ignorance of the basics of the military art that we must look for, rather than a conscious, collective selfishness.

But the hypothesis of ignorance encounters an immediate and formidable objection. How is ignorance compatible with the high standards of the contemporary American officer corps? It is after all full of Ph.D.’s and officers with M.A.’s are quite common. The officer corps also contains many highly competent engineers and even scientists, not to speak of very large numbers of skilled managers of all kinds, and in all specialties.

As the list of qualifications lengthens, we begin to glimpse the answer to the riddle, and the source of the problem: only one subject of expertise is missing and it is warfare itself. There are plenty of engineers, economists, and political scientists in the officer corps—but where are the tacticians? There are the many skilled personnel managers, logistical managers, and technical managers—but where are the students of the operational art of war? And at the top, there are many competent (and politically sensitive) bureaucrats—but where are the strategists?

And where would these tacticans and strategists come from? Certainly not from the military schools which teach all manner of subjects—except those essentially military. At West Point, at Annapolis, and at the Air Force Academy, future officers receive a fairly good all-around education, but they do not study the specifically military subjects. Military history—the only possible “data base” for those who would understand war—is treated in a perfunctory manner as one subject among many.

At the opposite end of the hierarchy of military schools—at the war colleges of each branch and the National Defense University, which are meant to prepare mid-career officers for the most senior ranks—there too management, politics, and foreign policy are taught, but no tactics and little strategy. And in between, at the staff and command colleges, there also military history is treated as if it were a marginal embellishment instead of being recognized as the very core of military education, the record of trial and error on which today’s methods can be based.

No wonder that the distinguishing characteristic of American officers is their lack of interest in the art of war. No wonder that “military strategy” is a phrase that refers only to budgets and foreign policy in the discourse of senior officers—men who think that Clausewitz was a German who died a long time ago.

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The proximate causes of this extraordinary drift from military professionalism into so many other professions are obvious. The low quality of many of the recruits absorbs a great effort of personnel management, and stimulates the promotion of officers who know how to recruit and retain scarce manpower, rather than officers seriously interested in warfare as such. Similarly, the development and absorption of a mass of highly complex and very advanced equipment creates a great demand for officers who understand science and engineering. Equally, the need to coexist with civilian defense officials who impose economic criteria of efficiency, and who use mathematical techniques of “systems analysis,” creates a demand for officers who understand fancy bookkeeping, and who can beat the mathematical models of civilian budget-cutters with models of their own. And so the list goes on and on.

From all these different streams of specialized expertise, officers are promoted stage by stage by way of “ticket punching” assignments to staff or command positions. But since duty tours are so short, the experience counts for little. In the present atmosphere of the officer corps, it is the desk jobs in the Pentagon, the assignments to high-prestige outside agencies (the National Security Council is a well-known launching pad to high rank), and high-visibility managerial positions that are most attractive. Staff posts, where war operations are planned, and unit commands, where there is no better company than more junior officers, are seen largely as obligatory stages to better things.

If the ambitious officer becomes too interested in the essential military functions of studying the enemy, of inventing suitable tactics, of developing war plans, and of inspiring and commanding men, a glance at the official biographies of the service chiefs will soon show him the error of his ways. It was not by allowing themselves to become bogged down in such things that those men reached the top, but rather by being good managers and smooth bureaucrats.

And what of the deeper causes of this state of affairs? Was the “civilianization” of the officer corps driven by the desire to avoid accusations of militarism? Did education in civil subjects displace the study of war because science and corporate business have had more prestige in America than the military profession? Or is it perhaps that the “up or out” rule (where those not promoted are forced out of the career) induces officers to focus on expertise which is of value on the civilian marketplace? Quite other causes also suggest themselves, notably the great shift in the balance of control, which nowadays places civilian defense officials in charge of essentially military decisions.

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When the objection is thus made to a serious rearmament effort that, the need notwithstanding, more resources should still be denied since they would be ill-used in any case, one cannot simply dismiss the argument on its merits. And if the more general facts and broader assessments are disputed, then a close scrutiny of the details of the Iran rescue debacle certainly reveals the workings of a managerial-bureaucratic approach to the planning and execution of a commando operation, with disastrous consequences.

Commando operations are like all other infantry operations, only more so. They do, however, have their own rules, which the rescue attempt seems to have violated in every respect. No doubt the planners involved were good managers, economists, engineers, or whatever. But they must also have been quite ignorant of the military history of forty years of British, German, French, and Israeli commando operations. Otherwise they would not have sent such a small force into action. Here the rule is: “a man’s force for a boy’s job.” Deep in enemy territory, in conditions of gross numerical inferiority, there must be a decisive superiority at the actual point of contact, since any opposition must be crushed before others can intervene, eventually submerging the commando force; there is no time for a fair fight. The 90 commandos were too few to do the job by this criterion.

If they had not been ignorant of the history of commando operations, they would not have had three co-equal commanders on the spot, and then a “task force” commander back in Egypt, not to speak of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, and the President—all connected by satellite. Here the rule is that there must be unity of command, under one man only, since in high-tempo commando operations there is no time to consult anyway, while any attempt at remote control is bound to be highly dangerous given the impossibility of knowing the true facts of the situation deep within the enemy’s territory.

If they had not been ignorant of the history of commando operations, they would not have relied on a few inherently fragile helicopters. Here the rule is that since the combat risks are, by definition, very high, all technical risk must be avoided. If helicopters must be used, let there be twenty or thirty to carry the payload of six.

If they had not been ignorant of the history of commando operations, they would not have assembled a raid force drawn from different formations and even different services. Here the rule is that commando operations, being by definition exceptionally demanding of morale, must be carried out by cohesive units, and not by ad hoc groups of specialists. That indeed is why standing units of commandos were established in the first place. If the suspicion is justified that the fatal accident was caused by a misunderstanding or worse between Marine helicopter pilots and Air Force C-130 pilots—and procedures, technical jargon, etc., are different—those involved carry a terrible responsibility. For there is much reason to believe that all four services were involved in the raid precisely because each wanted to insure a share of any eventual glory for its own bureaucracy.

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Having gone so far to justify the second objection to rearmament, does one leave it at that? Surely not, since there can be no satisfactory equilibrium of power in world politics without strong American military forces placed in the balance. But how can American military strength be restored if the resources devoted to the national defense are apt to be misused?

In the first place, we must recognize the limits of the argument of military incompetence: it does not apply to the whole realm of ballistic-missile forces, where tactics and the operational art of war are very simple, and where the problems of force have a stable and known character, by now well understood. This is of course a very important exception, essential to the highest level of deterrence. It is also one of the several areas where the engineering, scientific, and managerial expertise of the American officer corps is highly useful, while its lack of specifically military competence is of little consequence.

Secondly, there are healthy components within the military machine, even if its ailments are indeed systemic. At the tactical level, at least, the Marines are still reportedly pretty good, and so are a good many of the fighter forces of Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. In the surface and submarine Navy also, high competence is still found in several components. As for the Army, there too some exceptions survive.

But the real answer to the objection is not a list of exceptions. It is, rather, the recognition that we do indeed need fundamental military reforms. The most important of the congressional advocates of stronger defenses (notably Senator Sam Nunn) have explicitly recognized the need for basic reforms of the military institutions, along with the major increases in funding which they advocate. Some who hold a middle position on the defense budget, most importantly Senator Gary Hart, have also become persuasive advocates of reform.

These reforms would range from measures of long-term effect, such as drastic changes in the curricula of the military academies and the war colleges (with lesser changes in the schools and courses in the middle) to immediate moves designed to change career incentives to encourage the selection of officers for the top positions who are fighters, leaders, tacticians, or strategists rather than engineers, managers, bureaucrats, or office politicians. The hope would be to encourage a general takeover of the key positions by those many middle-ranking officers now in the services who already have the qualities needed but who are systematically being excluded from the most senior positions precisely because of the ascendancy of the wrong type of officer.

It must always be the human factor that is most important, for war after all is decided to a far greater extent by the moral and intangible factors than the material. Nevertheless, the reform of education and of officer selection would be undertaken in the presumption that the reformed military institutions would then move energetically to change a great deal of the material element as well. After all, officers whose minds are on the tactics, operations, and strategies of war are scarcely likely to be seduced by the unguided engineering and scientific ambition that yields the hyper-complex, very expensive, and often fragile major weapons that are being developed and fielded nowadays. And officers so inclined would also reject the mechanistic, heavy, and heavy-handed attrition tactics so greatly favored by our manageriallyminded officer corps.

In the present climate of the armed forces, marked by acute financial stringency and pervasive shortages, one can neither innovate nor reform. On the other hand, if the nation does finally give the armed forces the better men and the additional money that they so badly need, then there will be both the opportunity and the obligation to carry out major reforms aimed at refocusing the military profession upon the military arts it has for so long now neglected.

¹ See Herbert Stein's article, “How to Pay for Survival,” in the August COMMENTARY.