The Strength to Win

by THOMAS K. FINLETTER

1

IN AN article in the September Atlantic I pointed out that we are about to enter a new phase in the air-atomic race with Russia when the Soviets will have the airplanes and the fission and hydrogen bombs with which to destroy the cities and the industry of the United States in a sneak attack; that the United States therefore must have a military force-in-being, centered on a fleet of atom bombers so powerful that the Russians will not dare incur its counterattack. I expressed the opinion that the United States will not have such a military force and such a fleet of atom bombers unless it revises radically its present military planning. It is therefore a critical fact that we will not be able to make this revision in our military planning under the present procedures of the Department of Defense as established by Acts of Congress and by custom. For these procedures make it impossible to calculate the size and composition of our Armed Forces in accordance with a system of priorities; and without priorities we cannot have the kind of military force-in-being which will make the Russians fear to attack us.

The failure to use priorities in deciding the size and composition of our military establishment is not the result of any disagreement about the basic purpose of our foreign policy or the role of our military forces in supporting it. Nor is it caused by any particular differences of military opinion except those which come from normal and desirable interservice competition. The failure comes from the fact that under the present structure of the United States government the force-level decision (the size and composition of our military forces) is made by what we may call the Division-by-Services System. Under this system 1) the decision as to the total amount of money to be appropriated for our Armed Forces in any year is affected far too much by fiscal considerations and by the immediate, and perhaps passing, mood of the international scene; and 2) the money which is made available to the Armed Forces is allocated by compromises among the Army, Navy, and Air Force rather than in strict accordance with the priority needs of the country’s security.

The actual figures are instructive. The following are the total appropriations for the Armed Services from fiscal year 1950 (pre-Korea) through fiscal year 1955 (in billions of dollars):

Truman Actual Est.

1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1954 1955

14.2 47.3 59.9 48.4 40.1 33.7 28.8

The low pre-Korean figure was the result of our post-war hopes for peace, plus our then overwhelmingly superior air-atomic position. But the fiscal year 1950 budget was prepared in 1948 and early 1949 and became effective June 30, 1949, a few months before the Russians exploded their first fission device. Many Americans were then saying that Russia could not get the atom bomb for a long while. The atmosphere was one of U.S. monopoly of atomic power. The fiscal experts in government dominated the size of the military budget.

The log jam was broken in 1951. Korea was the stimulus. The increase in appropriations went far beyond the needs of the Korean War. They were for an over-all build-up in American military power intended only in small part for Korea and mainly to counter and nullify the rising Russian threat. Part of the increase was in U.S. air-atomic power. The theory was not at all that there was some one date of maximum danger of war with Russia toward which all this planning was pointed. The theory was that a new plateau of danger, a rising plateau, was ahead; that this plateau would be upon us sooner than our technicians had thought; that to get the best insurance we could to prevent war we should increase our military power as soon as possible to a level which would nullify the Russian air-atomic threat and keep it nullified.

The lower figures of $33.7 billion for fiscal year 1954 and $28.8 billion estimated for 1955 reflect a renewed emphasis on fiscal considerations. With, however, an increasing realization of the seriousness of the Russian possession of the hydrogen bomb and the knowledge that Russia has now turned to building long-range jet bombers, there is a new stimulus from the outside which should reduce the influence of fiscal considerations and should produce an increase in the appropriations for military purposes in fiscal years 1956 and later. And of course this stimulus may be sharper if international tensions increase, and sharper yet if there is local fighting with U.S. troops involved.

This is not the best way of fixing the over-all size of our military establishment. Our military power should respond to rationally calculated estimates of the international situation. In theory the National Security Council is supposed to provide just that. In practice it cannot. It lacks one indispensable component: an appraisal of the military situation as authoritative and influential as the Secretary of State can bring with respect to our foreign relations and as definitive as the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Budget can bring with respect to the fiscal problems of the government. The reason for the weakness of the presentation of the military position in the National Security Council lies in the organization of the Department of Defense.

The steady pull of the present organization of the Department of Defense is toward a condition which will divide up the Defense Dollar into three quotas of 33 cents each. We should not be deceived by the occasional deviations from the norm. They happen, and then the next fiscal year they are undone. The system is stubborn.

There may prove to be one exception to this. It may be that the obviously supreme importance of air-atomic power will be a constant force pulling at the pendulum and keeping it steadily, fiscal year after fiscal year, somewhat off dead center. This has not yet taken place. And desirable though it would be if it were to happen, it would be only a part-way solution. There is no avoiding the fact that we will not have the right kind of military force-in-being we so urgently need unless we decide that it is more important to have such a force than to preserve the traditions and methods of the past. That means a system of priorities, strictly applied without consideration of the effect the system would have on the relative importance and roles of the various Services.

Here an important point must be understood. The present system has a double effect. It wastes the taxpayer’s money, and it gets us a military force which is inadequate for our needs. But we cannot expect the priority system to save much money, for a while. The savings we would make from not having to pay for forces of low priority which are relatively unnecessary would nearly all be used up, for a few years, by the additional expense of building the top-priority forces which we are not now building, and also, probably, for increased Mutual Security aid to our NATO allies. After a few years, when the proper force-in-being has been built, a level-off would be reached and then the priority system would show a saving to the taxpayer — provided, of course, that war or a serious increase in international tensions does not take place. In the meantime the advantages of putting a priority system into effect are that we would be building the right kind of force to serve our national and foreign policy; that the chances of war would be reduced because Russia would be less likely to seek general war; and that the country would be much safer.

We do not get and we will never be able to get the kind of force-in-being we need under the Divisionby-Services method; the only way we can get it is by a priority system rigorously applied. The reason is that there is, in peacetime, a dollar ceiling through which Defense expenditures cannot go; that therefore if we try to build two kinds of force at once, the A-Day force-in-being to strike the day a war begins, and also a force for the long war, the dollar ceiling will make it impossible for us to have either kind of force at proper strength.

This dollar ceiling in peacetime is very real. It does not come through legislation or openly avowed policy. It comes from the political inability or unwillingness, when there is not the stimulus of war or a crisis, of any Administration to ask for (in the case of the Executive Branch) or to enact (in the case of Congress) a level of Defense appropriations which would seriously increase taxes or affect the balance of the budget.

2

BEFORE and after World War II there were two Services only —the Army and the Navy. Forcelevel planning therefore was simple administratively. This has changed. There are now three Services instead of two, and a new and growing Department of Defense over the three Service Departments in addition—a very complicated administrative arrangement.

The force-level decision is the most important decision which this complicated organization has to make in peacetime. It is the method of arriving at this decision which makes it impossible for us to have the kind of military establishment we need.

In theory the decision is made this way: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, composed of the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force and the Chief of Naval Operations, presided over by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who has no vote), make a recommendation as to the number of divisions, warships, and air wings the Army, Navy (including the Marines), and Air Force should have. This decision is supposed to be free of any consideration of economic policy or of foreign policy.

This force-level recommendation then goes to the Secretary of Defense or directly to the President. The National Security Act of 1947 which created the Defense Establishment states that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are the principal military advisers to the Secretary of Defense and the President, thus authorizing, by implication, the Chiefs to deal directly with the President without going through the Secretary of Defense. Then the recommendation is studied by the Secretary of Defense or the President in the light of economic and foreign policies of the United States, is again studied with the same over-all viewpoint by the National Security Council (a top-ranking kind of War Cabinet presided over by the President), and either is approved or is modified.

The National Security Council is intended to be the melting pot where the military policies are fused with, and modified by, domestic policies (of which the cost of the military establishment is the most important) and foreign policies. The membership of the National Security Council includes the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of Mutual Security, and other officials invited by the President. These last include always the Secretary of the Treasury and sometimes the Director of the Budget.

The theory thus is that the military experts in the Defense Department — the Joint Chiefs of Staff— arrive at a purely military decision: namely, how much military strength and what kind are needed for the military protection of the country. This purely military decision then goes to the President directly or through the Secretary of Defense — it is unimportant which, since the theory is that the matter is a purely military one. The President then, after listening to his foreign policy adviser, the Secretary of State, decides whether 1) the Joint Chiefs’ purely military decision coincides with the foreign policy of the United States; and 2) the country can afford the cost of the military forces which the Joint Chiefs say are necessary for the safety of the country.

The practice is different from the theory. It could not be otherwise since the theory is based on two fallacies. One is that the force-level decision is a purely military matter. The second is that a unanimous decision can he reached among the three Services which will objectively reflect the military needs of the country.

The first point is important. If the theory were carried out and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were allowed to make recommendations as to the force level the country should have, without being told that their recommendations had to come within a fixed dollar limit, the recommendations they would make would have a heavy content of economic and foreign policy in addition to their military component. It is impossible to make a purely military recommendation on force levels. Inevitably, the decision as to the forces to be recommended would be made only after preliminary judgments concerning the amount of appropriations which are politically possible with the existing temper of public opinion and the attitude of the Administration. And also inevitably, the decision about the forces to be recommended could be reached only after certain assumptions were made as to what our foreign policy was or should be. Military policy must be the servant of foreign policy. But when the military men recommend that the military strength of the country should consist of so many divisions, warships, and air wings, they necessarily have in mind the use to which these military units will be put, where they will be deployed, and thus the foreign policy which they will serve.

On a few occasions this is the way the force-level decision in fact has been made. There have been times when the Joint Chiefs of Staff have made the recommendation as to the size and composition of our Defense Force with no dollar limit imposed on them in advance, and when this recommendation has gone through the whole Executive Branch and the Congress, exactly as the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it forward. The theory, that is, on occasion has been applied, But not often.

The civilian officials of the government know that for all the current opinions to the contrary the force-level decision is in large measure a foreign policy decision. They know also that the cost of the military establishment is the single most important fact in the country’s fiscal policy. The high fiscal officials of the government therefore step in and ask that a dollar limit be imposed on Defense appropriations in advance of any final action by the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the National Security Council.

They are usually listened to; the dollar limit is almost always imposed, not perhaps at exactly the point the fiscal advisers would like, but usually, if the international tensions of the moment do not interfere, at close to the figure they ask for.

The economic officials thus come close to deciding the size of the country’s Defense Force. Sometimes this dollar limit is given openly in advance; sometimes it is given to the Joint Chiefs of Staff unofficially as a “target figure” or as a “bench mark.” Sometimes it comes with a rejection by the National Security Council of the proposed Defense Department budget. Sometimes these formalities are disregarded entirely, and so much money is lopped off budgets of the individual Services without any advice from the military experts as to the effect the cuts will have on the national security.

The normal practice thus is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff get into the decision on force levels only after the over-all size of the military establishment is decided upon. Their function is to determine the composition of the three Services within the limit in dollars given to them.

Nor does the Secretary of Defense have a proper influence on the decision as to the over-all size of the military establishment. Because of the fiction that the force-level decision is a strictly military matter, the Secretary of Defense takes very little if any part in the deliberation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is therefore not equipped to present the military case to the National Security Council and is not recognized as the final authority within the government on the military policy of the country. The Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Budget are, on the contrary, fully equipped to present the fiscal case.

The effect of the false assumption that the forcelevel decision is a purely military matter thus is paradoxically to take the most important part of this decision — how big a Defense Force the country will have — largely out of the hands not only of the military experts but also out of the hands of the civilian head of the Department of Defense and to give the fiscal experts in government the right to make the most authoritative recommendations to the President on the subject.

This, however, is not as important as the second false premise about the force-level decision: the idea that an objective judgment, regarding only the national interest, can be made under a system by which the force composition of the three Services must be unanimously agreed to by the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Of course the heads of the three Services, acting as the Joint Chiefs, do their best to put the national interest first, ahead even of the interests of their own Services. No criticism of the way individual heads of Service have handled the force-level decision is justified. It is not the men but the system that is at fault. The heads of Service would be superhuman if each did not believe that his Service was especially necessary to the defense of the country. Others than Joint Chiefs have been known to identify their loyalties with the higher good. And the three Chiefs of Service would be doubly supermen if each of them did not respond somewhat to the pressure of his Service that it be given a proper position in relation to the other two.

The system is too strong for any individual. It compels compromise. It can even be argued that such was the intention of Congress when the National Security Act was passed, for in 1947 the idea of balanced forces was popular. During World War II balanced forces were necessary — that is, forces in which ground, sea, and air, and various kinds of each, were fused in the proper quantities to make up an integrated fighting force. The National Security Act intended to codify this kind of balance. It did not succeed. It codified the equality of the Service Departments.

3

THE first step on the way to getting a priority system and thereby the kind of Defense Force we need is to recognize the change in the stakes for which we are playing. If we know that the safety of the country depends on it, we will insist that toppriority forces be built. To be able to do this we will need some changes in the Act of Congress under which the Department of Defense is organized. The compromise system within the Joint Chiefs of Staff can be cured by giving the Secretary of Defense the responsibility for making the forcelevel recommendation. If this were done the recommendation would be the result of an objective decision of a judicial nature instead of a compromise agreement among three equal participants, each of whom has the right to refuse to accept the result unless his claims are recognized.

The burden on the Secretary of Defense, if he were to take on this task, would be heavy. He would probably assemble a panel of himself, the Deputy Secretary, possibly the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), and the three Service Secretaries. The last could not qualify as wholly objective. But they should take part in the deliberations of the panel to be sure that the views of their respective Services were fully considered. They would, however, have no voice in the final decision as to the force levels to be recommended to the President. That decision would be made by the Secretary of Defense alone.

During the deliberations of the panel, the Secretary of Defense would consult with his colleagues, with the Secretaries of State and the Treasury, and with the Director of the Budget. He might ask them to present their views to the panel. The Secretary of Defense could not escape the fact that his recommendations would necessarily have a great effect on the foreign and fiscal policies of the government. They would determine in large part the effectiveness of our foreign policy. They would be the single most important fact affecting our fiscal and monetary policies. They would, if possible, be composite recommendations of the Secretary of Defense and of the Secretaries of State and Treasury. If agreement among the three Cabinet officers is not possible, the area of their differences would be identified and put to the President, acting within the National Security Council, for decision.

If this were done certain important results would follow. We have mentioned the first: the substitution of an objective quasi-judicial judgment for a compromise. Next, the views of the responsible Cabinet officers in charge of foreign policy and economic and monetary matters would have been taken into proper consideration, after a full and detailed debate of the issues involved. And finally, the excessive influence of fiscal considerations and current emotion resulting from the immediate happenings of the international scene would be much reduced.

It does not follow at all that the military budget would necessarily be higher because the influence of the fiscal officials of the government on the force-level decision would be reduced. An objective study of this kind might reduce the military budget.

4

IT HAS been argued that a Secretary of Defense is not qualified to make a decision which has so high a military content. The argument is invalid. It comes from the mistaken notion that there is something unique about military questions which makes them, alone of all subjects with which government has to deal, a matter to be abandoned to the experts. Nowhere in government do we find a selfdenial of jurisdiction which in any way corresponds to this abdication of authority by the civilian heads of the Defense Department over the force-level recommendation. The problems of a Secretary of State are more difficult than those of a Secretary of Defense, yet no Secretary of State would abandon his right to make recommendations to the President on every phase of foreign policy. Nor would any other head of department admit that there were matters within the jurisdiction of his department with which he should not deal freely, subject to the overriding authority of the President and Congress. The present practice within the Department of Defense does not carry out properly the principle of civilian control in government.

One exception must be made to this statement that Secretaries of Defense are qualified to make these difficult decisions. This is that the civilian officials of the Defense Department change often. They usually come in with little previous experience in military matters and for a good part of their tenure are learning their business.

This could be remedied by having permanent Under Secretaries in ihe Defense Department and in the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, By permanent we mean an official designated for, say, five years, with the right of reappointment and with a policy declaration in the Act of Congress creating the post that it is to be regarded as nonpolitical. We have a similar practice in various other posts in the United States government, notably in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its Chairman, who are named for a fixed number of years, are nonpolitical, and by custom are supposed not to be affected by changes in the Secretaryship of Defense or in the Presidency.

With the knowledge and experience of a permanent Under Secretary available to him, any Secretary of Defense would be able to listen to the arguments of the three Services and to make a proper decision on this question of force levels. Also, the experience of a permanent Under Secretary would help the Secretary in making the other decisions he now has to make, most of which are complicated and need the knowledge which comes from experience. The Under Secretary, for example, would see to it that the Secretary of Defense had available to him the results of objective studies of competing weapons systems — the lack of which now causes such overlapping of functions and much of the lack of emphasis on the top-priority missions.

There would be not much point in changing the present system so as to have the Secretary of Defense make the recommendation as to force levels unless there were a permanent Under Secretary of Defense. The system will not work without a continuity of knowledge on the part of a highranking civilian assistant to the Secretary.

Amendments to the National Security Act to establish the practice of having the Secretary of Defense make the force-level recommendation could consist of as little as 1) a legislative direction that such was to be the practice; 2) the creation of permanent Under Secretaries in the Department of Defense and in the three Service Departments; and 3) a revamping of the Armed Forces Policy Council (the top-ranking policy board of the Defense Department), which now consists of the Secretaries of the four Departments and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, into a review panel of only the Secretaries of the four Departments and the permanent Under Secretary of Defense.

The amending process itself has been made easy. It is now possible to amend the Act by a reorganization plan which becomes law unless it is rejected by the Congress. This comes close to giving the Executive the power to make amendments in procedure of the kind we are describing. The 1953 amendments to the National Security Act were made in this way.

There is nothing in the National Security Act which requires the force-level recommendation to be made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or decrees that it shall not be made by the Secretary of Defense. On the contrary, the Act clearly puts on the Secretary the responsibility for making all the major decisions of his Department. The force-level recommendation is the most important of all. As it goes, so will go the power and cost of our Defense Force.

Two factors hinder our planning system from creating the drastic changes in military concepts which are necessary for our safety. One is the drag of the past which makes it normal to continue with the weapons and tactics of former years; the other is the fast-moving future which is immediately ahead of us. The one makes for a tendency to stick by the tried and proved weapons of past wars. The other makes it almost impossible to grasp the conditions for which our planning should be done.

There is always the drag of the past in the plans of a defensive-minded nation. The aggressor planning revenge is not bound by any respect for the weapons and tactics that brought about his defeat. And he can plan for a day certain in the future of his own choosing. It is normal for an aggressor to look forward.

The opposite is true for a country like the United States that was on the winning side in the latest war. We have no day certain in the future toward which we may plan. We have only the dismal prospect of keeping ready for the indefinite future for a war we do not want.

One of the most dangerous examples of this thinking is the idea that the industrial potential of the United States is its strongest military asset. This idea is widespread in U.S. military thinking. It is understandable that it should be. United States industrial power did swing the balance in World Wars I and II. But this was under conditions that have gone forever.

The danger of the industrial-potential idea is that it accepts the inevitability of war, concentrates our military planning on the long fighting after a war will have started, and thereby takes the emphasis away from the forces that should be available the day a war begins — the forces which, if they are strong enough, may stop the war from happening.

Air-atomic power has changed one of the fundamental premises of pre-atomic warfare, and we must adapt our military planning to meet this change. The new premise must be that when opponents are equal, each side can strike at the vital sources of strength of the enemy at the start of a war. Thus a war can he decided in its opening weeks or days.

This change should be revolutionary in its effect on strategy, tactics, and military planning. Heretofore the ground troops could get at the sources of power of the enemy — its industry and its governmental and communicat ions centers — only after the enemy army had been utterly defeated. Back of the fighting lines all the resources of the nation could work to supply the fighting forces at the front. Terrible stalemates like the trench warfare of World War I and the long, murderous campaigns of World War II were the result.

In World War II air power came of age, by-passed the ground defenses, and battered at the basic sources of power of the enemy. The damage it did was terrible; and it shortened the war in the Pacific and in Europe. But until those last moments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Air was using only TNT and incendiaries; and the damage it did was trivial compared with what an air-atomic blitz of the future in the time of the atomic absolute would do.

TNT and incendiaries could not quickly destroy the warmaking power of the enemy. Atom bombs can. The German Army was driven back into the heart of Berlin and Hitler had killed himself before the Reich broke up. Two cities had been wiped out by atom bombs before the Japanese sued for peace. But if anyone thinks those are precedents for what would happen in an atomic war, he has failed to understand what atomic bombs are. There would not be anything left to fight for or with after an atomic attack of the violence that soon will be possible. The two bombs on Japan were not even an indication, they were so relatively small, of what could happen on a colossal scale in the first days of an atomic war.

The United States or any other country may not be able to build up its military forces and rely on its industrial potential after the war has begun. This nostalgic idea that our industrial power is our greatest military asset can ruin our military planning. Our industrial potential may be smashed at ihe outset, and the war be over before we can recover. We must build our military force on the exact opposite of this industrial-potential notion. We must have a force-in-being ready to fight at peak power the day a war starts. We need such a force because the overriding purpose of our national policy must be to prevent war.

The stakes have never been so high. It was not particularly important, it was certainly not vital, how we planned our forces when we were protected by the oceans, provided only that we and our allies kept control of the seas. Our politico-military policy then was uncomplicated. It was to concentrate on close relations with Britain, with its naval power in the Atlantic, and to have a strong Navy of our own to counter the Japanese fleet in the Pacific. Even after air-atomic power came on the scene in 1945, as long as the United States had the monopoly of atomic weapons, we could still count on our industrial potential to save us if we became involved in war. The oceans and naval power guaranteed us the time within which to arm.

This phase has now passed. The fact that Russia’s air-atomic power is now well under way and is approaching the absolute point must make us intolerant of the uncritical planning of the kind which was usual, and permissible, when no enemy could get at us. Now the danger is too great and too immediate for us to allow anything — attachments to past methods, respect for Service traditions, or anything else — to interfere with our having the kind of military force-in-being which may prevent World War III.