Military Defense and Civil Concern1
A colleague of mine who has had some interest in military affairs confessed recently that he was completely bewildered by the discussion of these matters in Washington, and that the Senate hearings on our defense capabilities seemed to him to bear a closer resemblance to farce or musical comedy than to serious politics. At any moment, he said, he expected a quartet of presidential candidates to burst forth with a ballad entitled, perhaps, “The missile gap is no deterrent to my love for you.”
It takes a considerable amount of effort to derive even mild amusement from the hearings in Washington. If the issues were not so important, there would be something richly comic about the spectacle of the Army Chief of Staff saying stoutly on Tuesday that the United States has “a considerable capacity to fight limited wars,” but admitting lamely on Wednesday that we have no adequate facilities for getting our forces quickly to danger points where they may be needed; of the Vice President, in a patently political speech designed to prove that the United States need have no fear about its military strength, blandly informing his well-fed auditors that it is cheap politics for Democratic presidential aspirants to inject the defense issue into the campaign; and of the administration’s attempt to make people forget the missile gap by revealing the existence of a new super-weapon (the Minuteman) which has only two drawbacks: namely, that it has not yet been successfully tested and that, even when and if it passes examination, it cannot be put into actual production for another three years.
When one remembers, however, that what is at stake in this muddled free-for-all is the security and ultimately the independence of the United States of America, none of this is very funny. Only the Russians can really have enjoyed watching the Joint Chiefs contradicting each other and speaking obvious half-truths with equally obvious reluctance, the Secretary of Defense expressing his willingness to determine our military requirements on the basis of guesses about Soviet intentions rather than informed estimates of Soviet capabilities, and the Chief of State reacting to all suggestions of American weakness with bursts of irritation, fretful references to “parochial” generals, and petulant appeals for faith in his own military omniscience. Even the venerable Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri seems to have been dismayed by these things. At the height of last year’s debate on unification of the services, he insisted, on the floor of the House, that “when it comes to military affairs, he [the President] is a general, and I take off my hat to him with heartfelt alacrity.” This year, the Congressman has decided that the administration’s statements about our military strength are “specious” and has said so at some length.
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To read Oskar Morgenstern’s book in the course of all this is a disquieting experience. A scholar of international reputation with a long record of distinguished service to his country and with wide experience in the field about which he writes, Mr. Morgenstern says clearly and emphatically, and without the embarrassed reluctance of some of the witnesses in the Senate hearings, exactly what the “parochial” critics of the administration’s program have been saying: namely, that our military capabilities are dangerously inferior to those of the Soviet Union and that the gap between the two countries is widening instead of closing. And Mr. Morgenstern does not confine himself to those aspects of the Soviet-Western conflict that engrossed most of the Senators’ attention. The scope of his criticism is considerably wider than that of Senator Symington, for instance, and his view of the future is even gloomier than that of Joseph Alsop.
With respect to the possibility of the United States being destroyed by nuclear attack, Mr. Morgenstern is completely uncompromising in his views. Security depends not only, as some people still appear to believe, upon the size of our retaliatory force but also upon its ability to escape the first enemy blow; and on this point Mr. Morgenstern is very much of General Thomas S. Power’s opinion, that in the very near future the Soviets will have the ability to destroy our retaliatory force completely and in a trice if war comes. This is partly the result of our habit of publishing to the world the most intimate details concerning the location and strength of our bases and other installations, but more perhaps of the fact that our retaliatory force is not varied enough in nature or in disposition.
It is because of this last point that we cannot hope to increase our deterrent capacity by belated vows of silence or by the often made proposal to “harden” our existing bases in the United States. We are too addicted to the belief that we can hearten our allies and frighten our enemies by boasting publicly and circumstantially of our strength to change our ways at this late date, and the Russians, in any case, probably have agents capable of ferreting out all the information they need about our bases. To “harden” our installations, on the other hand, would simply mean that if war came the enemy would employ heavier attacks against them in order to render them inoperative, and this in turn would inflict greatly increased damage upon the population centers of the country, which would, of course, continue to be “soft” and would be exposed to blast, fire, and radiation hazards no matter what bombing pattern was used against the SAC bases. Given the virtual nonexistence of shelters against either blast or fall-out (one of Mr. Morgenstern’s most scathing chapters is devoted to the deplorable state of civil defense in this country), the probable results are fearful to contemplate.
Our only assurance against this sort of thing, the author believes, is a continual airborne alert, involving at least half of our Strategic Air Command, until such time as we can vary our retaliatory capacities in a significant way. This will best be done by the creation of a fleet of Polaris submarines and by the development of nuclear-powered seaplanes—a force that would not be susceptible to enemy discovery and destruction and would be capable of striking deep into the territory of our most likely opponents at a moment’s notice. If we could accomplish this, we would have gained a real measure of security, even if the Russians duplicated our effort. For, in the last analysis, “in order to preserve a nuclear stalemate under conditions of nuclear plenty, it is necessary for both sides to possess invulnerable retaliatory forces.”
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Even if we reached that point, we should not, of course, be free of military danger. It is unfortunate that the emphasis placed in the recent Senate hearings upon the production of ICBM’s obscured the fact that we suffer from other military weaknesses that may, in certain circumstances, be crucially important. There is no doubt that the present administration’s love affair with the idea of the balanced budget has seriously impaired our capacity to fight limited wars; and the persistence with which our ground forces have been reduced at a time when international crises have been increasing in number is frightening. A limited enemy attack in the SEATO area—a border incursion carried out with conventional weapons, for example—may soon, if present tendencies are continued, leave us the nasty choice between acquiescence in aggression or a raising of the ante in the form of a response with the only weapons at our disposal, strategical nuclear ones. It is for this reason that, as Mr. Morgenstern writes, “the lack of a limited war capability that matches that of the opponent increases the danger of all-out war.” The only way we can insure ourselves against the multiplication of military threats in areas of vital interest to us, and also against the expansion of limited conflicts, is to acquire military capabilities as varied as those of our major rival. This will necessitate the accumulation of the kind of forces and weapons, both conventional and nuclear, that are best suited to create a limited war stalemate as well as a nuclear one.
To raise such a force and to meet our other defense requirements is going to impose a burden on the nation’s economy which some people believe will be too heavy for us to bear. Mr. Morgenstern sees no reason for this fear and is inclined to argue, as Hans Morgenthau has argued very persuasively, that it is always the politicians rather than the economists who doubt our abilities in this respect. It may require the elimination of tail-fins and other consumer luxuries, but there is little doubt that we can afford to defend ourselves if we are prepared to subordinate our love of creature comforts to our awareness of the nation’s danger. “Those who maintain that an inflation is the worst fate that can ever happen to a country,” Mr. Morgenstern writes, “. . . have certainly not tried to imagine what war with Russia would mean, or peaceful surrender.” If we are willing to put first things first, we will not suffer economic disaster, and our other gains will be great. By matching and neutralizing the Soviet bloc’s wide range of military capabilities, we can restrict the East-West conflict to the diplomatic, economic, and ideological sphere, where mistakes of omission or commission are not immediately catastrophic and may even be made good.
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Whether we are in fact prepared to make such an effort is, in Mr. Morgenstern’s eyes, doubtful. In every area of national life he sees slackness, distortion of values, lack of persistence, and general fecklessness. “Such is our schizophrenic behavior,” he says at one point, “that, though we are in various degrees aware of the tremendous danger to the country, one can safely predict that nothing decisive will be done. There will be much comforting talk from high places and the usual little stabs in this or that direction . . .”; but nothing more.
Few readers of this challenging and forthright book will find themselves in complete agreement with the author’s criticisms of American policies and institutions. One has the impression that, once he began to lay about him, he had difficulty in restraining himself; and his violence seems at times disproportionate or misdirected. It is, for instance, doubtless true that American universities have not responded, and are not responding adequately to the emergency that confronts the nation, but it is hard to see exactly what Mr. Morgenstern’s criticisms of boards of trustees, university deans, and the American method of selecting college presidents have to do with this. Similarly, the author’s attacks upon American diplomacy seem excessive and his suggestions for improving our negotiating techniques gratuitous. American negotiators have not been as naive—at least not always—as Mr. Morgenstern seems to think. To take an example that he himself has chosen, it is hardly fair to say that, in our objections to the attempts of certain countries to extend the old three-mile limit to their sovereignty to a larger figure, our diplomats are acting “in the unthinking fashion of a lawyer who sees no farther than across the small print of a dusty piece of paper.” Our position is to be explained rather by the fact that, whereas to concur in an extension of territorial waters would involve us in political embarrassments, and might even hamper our military operations in a number of places of strategical importance to us, we cannot simply override the requests of others and must argue on the basis of law. One may be permitted, finally, to doubt that our economic diplomacy would gain much from a policy of giving priority in our aid programs in underdeveloped countries to “conspicuous installations” which will impress the common man, rather than to basic reforms designed to make the economy strong enough to resist the appeals of Communism.
But these are points somewhat removed from Mr. Morgenstern’s main line of argument, which is as convincing as it is disturbing. Despite the recent obfuscations in Washington, it is undeniable that the threat to the country is great and that popular determination to do anything about it is sporadic. If George Jean Nathan were compiling a new edition of his American Credo today, he would probably substitute for the simple beliefs of an earlier age (“That all criminals get caught sooner or later,” “That all Swedes are stupid fellows and have very thick skulls,” and the like) some of the current American illusions which Mr. Morgenstern cites at the end of his book. These include such beliefs as that we are going to “win” because we are free and moral, that the Russians are dissatisfied with their regime, that a planned economy like Russia’s won’t work anyway, that we make up in quality what we lack in quantity, and that Russian scientific advances are due entirely to spies and defectors and won’t continue. It is this credo that discourages sacrifice and effort; and one puts down Mr. Morgenstern’s book with the uncomfortable feeling that many of those who have the greatest influence in molding American public opinion have made it their own.
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1 A review of The Question of National Defense, by Oskar Morgenstern (Random House. 307 pp. $3.95).