Call war an extension of diplomacy, condemn it as a plague, thrill to its so-called glories, as you will. The fact remains that it is not just a phenomenon, something monstrously foreign to our civilization, but—whether we like it or not—it has been a fundamental element of man’s struggle for existence. Therefore, until man’s nature changes, war is likely always to be with us, in one form or another. Nor is war an act of God, comparable, for instance, to elemental cataclysms such as earthquakes or hurricanes. Rather, it arises from international relationships, from the aspirations, ambitions, successes, failures, and trickeries of the men and the governments directing the nations of the world.”
These words come from the first page of the Dupuys’ long and detailed military history of the United States, a book designed, one gathers, for use in college ROTC courses. Thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, it would have been safe to predict that this passage—with its expressed belief in the permanence of instability and the inevitability of war—would, in any university where the book was considered for adoption, be criticized as an overt attack on the principles of American liberalism or a subtle attempt to insinuate militaristic thinking into American education. Most Americans of the recent past were fully convinced that war was “something monstrously foreign to our civilization.” They regarded it as an aberration from the main concerns of mankind, a wasteful and willful denial of progress, a destructive pastime in which less enlightened nations might indulge but which must be avoided by the United States. And, since they believed firmly that they controlled their own destinies, most Americans still believed that war could be avoided, by wise statesmanship and, among other things, by keeping the soldiers under the firmest political and financial control, lest the kind of thinking illustrated above become too influential in the land.
How much strength is left today in the anti-military tradition which was characteristic of 19th and early 20th century America? According to Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., not very much. Mr. Ekirch’s book is a history of that tradition and its varied expressions. By anti-militarism, the author means opposition both to a large military establishment and to the extension of military influence and modes of action and decision into the civilian sphere; and he traces it from the 1760’s (when Samuel Adams, in the pages of the Boston Gazette, was describing as “a very improbable supposition” the idea “that any people can long remain free with a strong military power in the very heart of their country”) until the end of the Second World War.
To Mr. Ekirch, who identifies himself completely with the cause he describes, the story he tells is one with a sad ending. For, he writes, “under the impact of World War II, the American people largely discarded the anti-militarist convictions of the past”; and, since the war, we have been moving, with giant steps and with few signs of popular resistance, toward the garrison state. The country has been saddled with a gigantic military establishment and a military budget that grows bigger every year. Military men have moved into key positions in Federal agencies; military thinking has permeated our foreign policy to such an extent that we rarely do anything in foreign affairs that is not based on some real or fancied strategical calculation and justified by elaborate military arguments; military spending threatens to win a determining role in our economy; military research and the subventions that support it are already exercising an unwholesome influence in American education; and all these developments have subverted the anti-militarist tradition which, throughout our history, has been the main support of peace and democracy.
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It is unlikely that Samuel P. Huntington would agree with much of this. One gathers, indeed, from reading his brilliant assay on the theory and politics of civil-military relations in the United States, that he would be inclined to argue not only that the anti-military tradition is much healthier than Mr. Ekirch seems to believe but that, if anything threatens the security and the institutions of this country, it is the influence which this tradition continues to exert.
At the risk of overemphasizing certain aspects of Mr. Huntington’s long and carefully constructed book, one may guess that his response to Mr. Ekirch’s complaints might run something like this: The United States has been, and remains, a liberal country, and liberalism as a philosophy does not furnish the means which enable one to think realistically about war or military institutions. Liberal military policy varies between the attempt to eliminate all institutions of violence (“the policy of extirpation,” in Mr. Huntington’s phrase) and the insistence that, if there must be military institutions, they must be refashioned along liberal lines (the “policy of transmutation”). The policy of extirpation has become unfashionable with the passage of the years because it flies so obviously in the face of the realities of international existence; but those realities have not prevented the inveterate liberals from pursuing the policy of transmutation. In the 19th century, this generally took the form of an unrealistic belief that amateur soldiers were better than trained ones and popular militias safer and more effective than standing armies—a prejudice which delayed the development of a true military profession in the United States for a century. More recently, Mr. Huntington implies, transmutation has expressed itself in an inability to leave the military alone, in an unceasing attempt to assert control over them by persuading, or forcing, them to become less military. (The American liberal, he suggests, does not like the really professional soldier, the Ridgway who steers clear of politics; but he dotes on the soldier who forswears professional modes of thought—like Eisenhower, perhaps, who, when he entered polities, embraced the principles of business liberalism and began criticizing military budgets.) Generally speaking, the liberal attitude toward military affairs has had deplorable results.
Those persons who, like Mr. Ekirch, are worried by the increased involvement of the military in politics have good reason for their concern, for such involvement threatens to weaken the professional competence of the military and thus jeopardize national security. But are not the liberals themselves responsible for this? Mr. Huntington believes that the military are drawn into politics by the very eagerness of liberal-minded civilian groups to control or “civilianize” them. This process is, of course, encouraged by the lack of any clear definition, in our Constitution, of the authority and limitations of the military establishment or of its relationship to civilian agencies of government. The Commander-in-Chief clause, the militia clause, and the separation of powers interject politics into military affairs and military affairs into politics. But, even if this were not so, the liberal antipathy to the very idea of an independent military sphere would be enough to drag the soldiers into the political arena, making even strategical questions matters of political controversy and constantly threatening to riddle the military establishment with faction and dissension.
As for military performance of policy functions once reserved to civilians, it may be pointed out that this stems from the traditional liberal repugnance for matters having anything to do with the actual business of war. In the 1930’s, to cite an example, it was lack of interest in the non-military aspects of war on the part of civilian branches of the government, and the absence of civilian institutions equipped to perform them, that led the War Department to assume the job of mobilization planning. Here “the civilians imposed a civilian war function on a military agency.” Nor was this the last time this sort of thing happened. The increase in the number of policy functions performed by soldiers since the end of World War II has certainly been due in part to civilian defection. In Germany, for instance, it was primarily the reluctance of the State Department to assume responsibility for occupation rule that prolonged military control until 1949.
Mr. Huntington is not unconcerned over the expanding functions of the military in our society, as he demonstrates in his thoughtful discussion of the political role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in his intelligent suggestions for the improvement of the administrative structure of the Department of Defense. But he is less worried by this than by the kind of doctrinaire liberalism that is so suspicious of military encroachment that it is blind to the more serious dangers in our world situation. After all, we are involved in a desperate rivalry with the Soviet Union which threatens to go on for a long time, and during it we shall depend upon the skills of our soldiers, whether they are performing military or policy functions. Since we have reasonable institutional protection against any serious military domination of our society, we should be well advised to focus our attention on the problems of our international situation and, while doing so, to try to overcome “the American attitude of mind which [seeks] to impose liberal solutions in military affairs as well as in civil life.”
There is much sense in all this, and it is more convincing than Mr. Ekirch’s sovereign disregard for the international causes of some of the tendencies he deplores. Mr. Huntington is persuasive also when he argues that it is high time Americans learned to regard the military profession as being at least as respectable as the bar or the clergy. Unfortunately, he pushes his point too far and, in his very last pages, advances the startling suggestion that the best way for American society to ease the tension existing between its traditional liberal values and the needs of national security is to abandon its liberal past completely. “The requisite for military security,” he writes, “is a shift in basic American values from liberalism to conservatism. Only an environment which is sympathetically conservative will permit American military leaders to combine the political power which society thrusts upon them with the military professionalism without which society cannot endure.”
What this means is never made quite clear, and perhaps it should not be taken too seriously, for there seems to be more rhetoric than logic in Mr. Huntington’s last few pages. “Is it possible to deny,” he asks, “that the military values—loyalty, duty, restraint, dedication—are the ones America most needs today? That the disciplined order of West Point has more to offer than the garish individualism of Main Street?” Surely the answer to this double-barreled question is “Yes!” Surely individualism, initiative, intelligence, and imagination are just as important to America in its present situation as any of the more passive virtues mentioned by Mr. Huntington.
This is all the more true when one reflects on another problem. In his personal campaign against stereotyped liberal thinking, Mr. Huntington would have us, at long last, begin to think more realistically about war as an institution. But just how does one go about doing this? Is there any correspondence between war in our time and the kind of thing described in the Dupuys’ big book? Throughout most of the period covered by that comprehensive and colorful account of the exploits of American arms, war was still something that could be controlled and managed; it could be used as an instrument of policy to achieve national ends; and its political uses could be studied profitably by students or practitioners of foreign policy. This is hardly true today.
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In Arms and Men, Walter Millis has written a concise and lively commentary on the military history of the United States in which—after discussing the evolution of the art of war through successive stages which he has entitled “The Democratization of War,” “The Industrial Revolution,” “The Managerial Revolution,” “The Mechanization of War,” “The Scientific Revolution,” and “The Hypertrophy of War”—he addresses himself to the question of the “future of war.” Mr. Millis isn’t sure that war has any future, at least as an instrument of national policy. Polk or McKinley, he writes, could use war as an instrument of policy, but, even by Wilson’s time, war was bursting out of the restraints imposed by statecraft and, by the time of Franklin Roosevelt, “war had been magnified to a point at which it could neither serve a policy nor be justified by one; it had become a naked instrument of defense, of defense alone and of defense only in an extremity of crisis.” And, after the introduction of nuclear weapons, its utility even for this purpose became questionable, since even defense seemed to imply total destruction.
We seem, in other words, to have reached a stage in history in which even Mr. Huntington’s professionals know rather less about the management of violence than they always care to admit, and in which military maneuvers—like the Carte Blanche air exercises in Europe in June 1955 or Operation Sage Brush at Camp Polk, Louisiana, in December of the same year—leave observers with only one firm conclusion: namely, that in any future war it will be impossible to tell the victors from the vanquished and that, consequently, war makes no sense any more. The thought of nuclear conflict is so insupportable that, while we continue to strike attitudes and to talk as if we were prepared to resort to force in order to attain our objectives, neither we nor anyone else believe that we mean what we say. We are, in consequence—as the current muddle in the Middle East demonstrates—confronted by a set of problems quite new to statecraft: the difficulties caused by the necessity of adjusting international power issues without recourse to the arbitrament of war.
It may be easier to solve those difficulties if we learn not to worry too much about the garrison state and power-hungry brass hats, and if we cultivate a more realistic attitude toward military affairs. It will not be easier to solve them if we go to the extreme of becoming conservative converts in order to make our professional soldiers feel happy or if we start, at this late date in our history, to give precedence in our scale of values to the exclusively military virtues.
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1A review of Military Heritage of America, by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, McGraw-Hill, 794 pp., $10.00; The Civilian and the Military, by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Oxford, 340 pp., $6.50; The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, by Samuel P. Huntington, Belknap Press, Harvard, 539 pp., $7.50; and Arms and Men: Study in American Military History, by Walter Millis, Putnam, 382 pp., $5.75.
