Vietnam | The Global 1960s

This essay appeared in the April 1957 edition of Foreign Relations.

Within the Department of Defense these problems are compounded by the obsolescent division of functions among the services and the predominant rôle played by fiscal considerations in setting force levels. The Key West agreement of 1948 confirmed the traditional division: each service was to continue with its primary mission of defeating its enemy counterpart; the mission of the Air Force is to dominate the sky, of the Navy to control the sea and of the Army to defeat the enemy’s ground forces.

Until the end of World War II, this assignment of rôles represented distinguishable strategic options: the Army was in fact powerless on the sea beyond the range of its coastal artillery and the Navy could not project itself far inland. The Air Force was not yet independent and the range of planes was sufficiently short to permit the division of functions among naval and army air forces to follow roughly the division among the senior services.

But with modern weapons, the traditional definition of primary missions amounts to giving each service a claim to develop a capability for total war. For the sky cannot be dominated short of a scale of attack on the opposing retaliatory force which will unleash an all-out conflict; control of the seas implies the destruction of industrial facilities and supply depots deep in enemy territory, as Admiral Burke testified before the Symington Committee; and the Army has declared a 1,500-mile missile essential for the performance of its mission. A division of functions among the services makes sense only if the functions in fact represent distinguishable strategic missions. If each service in the performance of its primary mission must carry out tasks inseparable from the primary mission of a sister service, energies will be increasingly absorbed in jurisdictional disputes. Nor can this problem be avoided by administrative fiat as has repeatedly been attempted. The inter-service rivalries are inherent in the definition of missions; they result inevitably from a division of rôles on the basis of means of locomotion in the face of a technology which makes a mockery of such distinctions.

As a consequence of the lack of doctrinal agreement, none of the services can be certain that a sister service’s interpretation of what constitutes an essential target accords with its own. It is therefore convinced that it cannot relinquish control over any weapon which it believes important to the achievement of its mission…

2…

Whatever the reason, every administration since World War II has at some time held the view that this country could not afford more than a certain sum for military appropriations, overriding the question of whether we could afford to be without an adequate military establishment. Now the imposition of a budgetary ceiling is not inevitably pernicious; a removal of all budgetary restrictions would inhibit doctrine even more, because it would lead each service to hoard weapons for every eventuality–as occurred to some extent during the Korean War. And the proliferation of weapons systems unrelated to doctrine will cause strategic decisions–which always involve choices–to be made in the confusion of battle. The difficulty with our present budgetary process is that by giving priority to cost over requirement it subordinates doctrine to technology. Budgetary requests are not formulated in the light of strategic doctrine; rather doctrine is tailored and if necessary invented to fit budgetary requests.

The predominance of fiscal considerations makes for doctrinal rigidity because it causes each service to be afraid that a change in doctrine will lead to a cut in appropriations. This is illustrated by a violent dispute in 1950 between advocates of strategic air power and a group of scientists at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who were accused of advocating a cut in our retaliatory force in order to build up air defense. The remarkable thing about this dispute was that the M.I.T. group explicitly denied underrating the importance of strategic air power; they insisted that their recommendations had been solely concerned with building up our air defense. Yet the partisans of strategic air power had psychology, if not logic, on their side. With a fixed ceiling on defense expenditures it was clear that any new appropriation was bound to lead to the reduction of existing forces; a new capability could in practice be developed only at the expense of an existing one.

As a result, budgetary pressures compound the inherent conservatism of the military and end in subordinating doctrine to the battle for appropriations. Each service pushes weapons development in every category without sufficient regard for the program of other services, and each service seeks to obtain control over as many different weapons as possible as a form of insurance against drastic budgetary cuts in the future. The predominance of fiscal considerations in our defense planning actually encourages a subtle form of waste: in the absence of an agreed strategic doctrine, it leads to the proliferation of partially overlapping, partially inconsistent weapons systems. Because to relinquish a weapons system may mean to relinquish the appropriations that go with it, every service has a powerful incentive to hold on to every weapon even after it has outlived its usefulness….

Thus the budgetary process places a premium on the weapons systems which fit best with the traditional preconceptions of American strategic thought. It is not that the belief in the importance of strategic striking forces is wrong in itself; indeed, the Strategic Air Command must continue to have the first claim on our defense budget. It is simply that the overemphasis on total solutions reinforces the already powerful tendency against supplementing our retaliatory force with subtler military capabilities that address themselves to the likelier dangers and involve a less destructive strategy. A vicious circle is thereby set up: the more terrible we paint Soviet capabilities, the more we confirm our predilection for an all-out strategy. But the more fearful the consequences of our strategy, the more reluctant will the political leadership be to invoke it. In every crisis, we are obliged to gear our measures to the availability of forces instead of having in advance geared our forces to the most likely danger. And even with respect to the forces which we have available our hesitations are multiplied because the services do not agree among themselves about strategy either for limited or for total war, but particularly for the former.

III

The temptation in planning strategy is to substitute power for conception, to identify doctrine with the maximum development of strength. But a basic change in the nuclear age is that victory in an all-out war has lost its traditional meaning. With conventional technology, the side which could mount a superior offensive effort would generally retain a sufficient margin to impose its will. In a thermonuclear war, on the other hand, a superior offensive effort may prove strategically insignificant because even the weaker side may be able to inflict a degree of destruction which no society can support. The doctrinal challenge of the nuclear age is therefore the ability to use force with discrimination and to establish political goals in which the question of national survival is not involved in every issue. Strategic doctrine can no longer confine itself to the problem of providing the weapons for war; it must also relate them to the purpose of war.

Against the ominous background of thermonuclear devastation, the goal of war can no longer be military victory as we have known it. Rather it should be the attainment of certain specific political conditions which are fully understood by the opponent. The purpose of limited war is to inflict losses or to pose risks for the enemy out of proportion to the objectives under dispute. The more moderate the objective, the less violent the war is likely to be. This does not mean that military operations cannot extend beyond the territory or objective in dispute; indeed, one way of increasing the enemy’s willingness to come to terms is to take away from him something which he can regain only by making peace. But it does mean that the conduct of a limited war cannot depend on military considerations alone; it must reflect an ability to harmonize political and military objectives. A “purely” military decision in a limited war is therefore a contradiction in terms.

A war between major Powers can remain limited only if at some point one of the protagonists prefers a limited defeat to an additional commitment of resources or if both sides are willing to settle for a stalemate in preference to an assumption of continued risk. In either case, however, the protagonists retain the physical ability to increase their commitment. To the extent that both sides do increase their commitment the war will gradually expand until one or both Powers reach the limit of their physical resources–until the war has become total. To the extent that only one side is willing to run greater risks it gains an advantage. The ability to conduct a limited war depends therefore on an understanding of the psychology by which the opponent calculates his risks and on the ability to present him at every point with an opportunity for a settlement that appears more favorable than would result if the war were continued.

With a doctrine of limited war, many of the long cherished notions of warfare will have to be modified or abandoned. One of the cardinal principles of air strategy is that wars can be won only by dominating the air space completely. But any attempt to deprive an enemy of his retaliatory force would inevitably bring on all-out war. Confronted by the prospect that it will be completely impotent once its retaliatory force has been destroyed, a Power will almost certainly decide to use it to deprive its opponent of the means to impose his will. Thus the minimum condition for limiting war will be the immunity of the enemy’s retaliatory forces.

Limited war cannot be conceived as a small all-out war characterized by a series of uninterrupted blows mounting in intensity until the opponent’s will is broken. On the contrary, it is important to develop a concept of military operations conducted in phases which permit an assessment of the possibilities for settlement at each stage before recourse is had to the next phase of operations. Paradoxical as it may seem in the jet age, strategic doctrine should address itself to the problem of slowing down, if not the pace of military operations, at least the rapidity with which they succeed each other. We must never forget that henceforth the purpose of strategy must be to affect the will of the enemy, not to destroy him, and that war can be limited only by presenting the enemy with an unfavorable calculus of risks. This requires pauses for calculation. Every campaign should be conceived as a series of self-contained phases, each of which implies a particular political objective, and with a sufficient interval between them to permit the application of political and psychological pressures.

Therefore, it will also be necessary to give up the notion that direct diplomatic contact ceases when military operations begin. Rather, direct contact is essential to ensure that both sides possess as much information as possible about the consequences of expanding a war and are able to present political formulas for a settlement. To the degree that diplomacy produces alternatives to expanding a conflict it will inhibit the decision to run greater risks. To the extent that military operations can be conducted in stages, it will give an opportunity for an evaluation of the circumstances which make a settlement advisable. Not the least of the paradoxes of the nuclear age may be that lack of secrecy may actually assist in the conduct of military operations, and that in a period of the most advanced technology battles will approach the stylized contests of the feudal period which were as much a test of will as a trial in strength.

Such a change in traditional notions of warfare will not be simple to bring about. On closer examination it may even prove technically impossible. But the discouraging aspect of so much of our thinking about strategy is its refusal to admit that the new technology requires a new order of tactics. Instead we tend to add nuclear weapons to existing strategy as merely a more efficient explosive. This will not only produce appalling casualities; it also may not be adequate to the challenges we will confront. Any progress in our manner of conducting war must therefore be preceded by a doctrinal revolution. We must recognize the new strategy conceptually before we can explore its technical feasibility. It is, to be sure, a tremendous task, but history will not excuse the inadequacy of the response by the vastness of the challenge.

{Kissinger’s proposals]

* It would still be the wisest course to move in the direction of a single service initially by amalgamating the Army and the Air Force. The strategic problems of the Navy may remain sufficiently distinct not to require integration and in any case resistance to complete unification in the Navy would be so bitter as to obviate its advantages. A unified service with a single system of service schools would force officers at a formative stage of their careers into a framework less narrowly addressed to the concerns of a particular service.

* The Army, Navy and Air Force would continue as administrative and training units, much as the training commands within the various services function today. But for all other purposes two basic organizations would be created: the Strategic Force and the Tactical Force. The Strategic Force would be the units required for all-out war; it would include the Strategic Air Command; the Air Defense Command; those units of the Army required to protect overseas bases; and the units of the Navy which are to participate in the retaliatory attack. The Tactical Forces would be the Army, Air Force and Navy units required for limited war. The Strategic Forces would probably be under Air Force command, the Tactical Forces under an Army officer.

* Limited wars require units of high mobility and considerable firepower which can be quickly moved to trouble spots and which can bring their power to bear with discrimination. The capability for rapid deployment is crucial. For given the power of modern weapons and the speed of movement of military units everything depends on seizing a position as rapidly as possible because it will be very difficult to dislodge an enemy once he has become established. Since aggression is unlikely to occur unless the aggressor doubts either the capability or the willingness of its opponent to intervene, the ability to get into position rapidly even with relatively small forces can serve as a gauge of the determination to resist and contribute to the reestablishment of an equilibrium before either side becomes too heavily committed.

Many of our problems in the postwar period have been produced by our failure to accept the doctrinal challenge. We have tended to ascribe our standards of reasonable behavior to the Soviet leaders; we have had difficulty in defining our purposes in relation to the revolutionary forces loose in the world. Above all, we have had a penchant for considering our problems as primarily technical and to confuse strategy with the maximum development of power.

One of the paradoxical lessons of the nuclear age is that at the moment when we are acquiring an unparalleled command over nature, we are forced to realize as never before that the problems of survival will have to be solved above all in the minds of men. In this task the fate of the mammoth and the dinosaur may serve as a warning that brute strength does not always supply the mechanism in the struggle for survival.

The Global 1960s

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