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Civilians, Soldiers, and American Military Policy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

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Intensive study of factors affecting the relative power position of states “in the long run”—location, human and material resources, level of economic development and rate of capital formation, national solidarity, etc.—is no substitute for consideration of certain other factors which operate in the short run and determine the extent to which a state's power potential is utilized to achieve specific foreign policy objectives. Wars are fought or threatened and diplomatic settlements or impasses reached in the short run. So are decisions affecting all these grave matters, and sometimes with long-range consequences.

The main link between a state's long-run power potential and its government's achievement of present-day policy objectives are decisions taken regarding the level and character of military preparedness. Power potential is not a complete substitute for fighting capacity, especially when wars may begin with thermonuclear attacks which destroy the potential or prevent its being mobilized in time to influence the outcome of the war. Nor is it a substitute for the particular kinds of fighting capacity most efficient in deterring and localizing war.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1955

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References

1 See, however, Macmahon, Arthur W., Administration in Foreign Affairs, University, Ala., 1953, ch. 1Google Scholar, “The Concert of Judgment,” pp. 1–56.

2 See my research note, “Civil-Military Relations Research: The SSRC Committee and Its Research Survey,” World Politics, VI, No. 2 (January 1954), pp. 278–88, for a discussion of recently developing research interest in this area, and for an inventory of research currently under way which was prepared by Bryce Wood. So many political scientists have gained practical insight into these problems by their work in the Bureau of the Budget, in the Legislative Reference Bureau, and on the staffs of Congressional committees, as well as in agencies of defense and foreign affairs, that this research interest is likely to grow.

Literature on civil-military relations in the United States is listed in two bibliographies: Herring, Pendleton, ed., Civil-Military Relations: Bibliographical Notes of Administrative Problems of Civilian Mobilization, Chicago, Public Administration Service, 1940Google Scholar; and Civil-Military Relations: An Annotated Bibliography, 1040–1952, prepared under the direction of the Committee on Civil-Military Relations Research of the Social Science Research Council, New York, 1954. The more recent of these bibliographies lists some five hundred items, but few of the items are concerned with the correlation of diplomatic, military, and industrial mobilization policy or with the problem of Executive-Congressional relations in this area.

3 It was in these terms that the authors of the Federalist papers viewed the problem. See, e.g., Nos. 8, 26–29.

4 Not even the isolationists today doubt the necessity of preventing any single hostile power from dominating the whole of Eurasia. What divides the isolationists and the internationalists is disagreement over the efficacy of various kinds of politico-military action in forestalling that eventuality. The isolationist tends to rely more heavily on strategic air power and less heavily on coalition military action. How the development of tactical atomic weapons and of thermonuclear weapons affects this debate is not yet clear.

5 The annihilation of distance as a benign buffer between the New World and the intermittent general wars of the Old World will be completed before the 1950's have run their course if John J. McCloy's prediction is borne out that “both we and the Russians … in, say, five years … will have developed guided missiles to such a degree that they will be able to reach from continent to continent” (“Ten Years from Now,” Atlantic Monthly, CXCIII, No. 6 [June 1954], p. 27).

6 Even before World War II, the United States Army Chief of Staff declared: “What transpires on prospective battlefields is influenced vitally years before in the Councils of the Staff and in the legislative halls of Congress. Time is the only thing that may be irrevocably lost, … The sums appropriated this year will not be fully transformed into military power for two years” (General Malin Craig, United States Army Chief of Staff, June 30, 1939, quoted in Watson, Mark S., Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, Washington, D.C., Historical Division, Department of the Army, 1950, p. 30).Google Scholar

One “weapon” for deterring an atomic blitz, for maintaining the recuperative capacity for ultimate victory if the blitz should occur and if the retaliatory strike of strategic air power should not prove decisive, and for mitigating the human consequences of such war is the reconstruction of our great cities to make them less attractive targets. While the other weapons in the weapons system of continental defense take several years to develop and produce, decades may be required for urban reconstruction. Berkner, Lloyd V. believes that “the gradual redesign and rearrangement of our cities in recognition of this new atomic environment can so reduce their vulnerability over a half-century or so that the need for excessive perfection in our military defenses can be substantially relaxed” (“Continental Defense,” Current History, XXVI. No. 153 [May 1954], p. 262).Google Scholar

7 Cf. Hull, Cordell, Memoirs, New York, 1948, 1, pp. 195Google Scholar, 200; 11, pp. 1109–11.

8 The wartime informal meetings at the Secretary or Undersecretary level of top officials of the State, War, and Navy Departments and the creation at a lower level of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, with a more restricted field of activity, represent earlier efforts to coordinate foreign and military policy. A comparable effort to reconcile military and naval (and air) policy resulted in the creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1942 and a federated Department of Defense in 1947.

9 Cf. Price, Don K., Government and Science, New York, 1954Google Scholar; he comments, in connection with his discussion of the use of scientific advisory boards in defense matters, that “in British constitutional history the right to advise was gradually transformed into the right to make binding decisions” (p. 158).

10 “The essence of structure is the arrangement of the minds of individual men in terms of the influence that each should have upon the others. The pattern depends upon identifying the types of relevant factors and discriminating among them as to the weight each deserves, the time or times in the movement toward ultimate decision when it may most usefully be injected, and in what degree of detail it should be considered” (Macmahon, , op.cit., p. 1Google Scholar), Reorganization then can modify perspectives at top policy levels. Reforms in general education, in pre- and post-entry training, and in career planning may be necessary if it is desired to alter the perspectives of those whose advice and analysis at lower and intermediate levels are channeled up to the ultimate arbiters of policy. Thus, they may further contribute, although indirectly, to an alteration in the range or weighting of considerations at the decision-making level.

11 The sensitivity of the armed services to Congressional efforts to drive a wedge between the civilian executive and his senior military advisers is shown by the quotations from and comment on the testimony of GeneralLawton Collins, J. in a hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the alleged ammunition shortage in Korea (“Who's Pushing?”, United States Army Combat Forces Journal, VI, No. 3 [May 1953]).Google Scholar

12 The Navy was much more generously supported in peacetime than the Army from about 1900 to World War II. For the period after 1933, see Huzar, Elias, The Purse and the Sword, Ithaca, N.Y., 1950.Google Scholar Small as the defense budget was, its effectiveness was further diminished by legislative restrictions on the spending of money.

13 Cf. Macmahon, , op.cit., p. 3Google Scholar: “The potential of drastic choice must exist … and be constantly felt in all its parts.”

14 Fleet Admiral Leahy, William D., I Was There, New York, 1950, pp. 268–69.Google Scholar

15 This concept is developed by Dr. Vagts in his forthcoming study, “Defense and Diplomacy,” an analysis of the soldier's role in the conduct of foreign relations. It is significant that Leahy opposed the creation of a single Chief of Staff to replace the Joint Chiefs, on the ground that his wartime experience had shown him the danger implicit in his own somewhat similar position (Millis, Walter, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York, 1951, pp. 160–61Google Scholar). However, in this context, his concern was to preserve a proper balance not so much between the President's civilian and military advisers as between the President's Army, Navy, and Air Force advisers. This position was in line with the general Navy position in the unification discussion of 1946 (ibid., pp. 159–70).

16 Stimson, Henry L. and Bundy, McGeorge, On Active Service in Peace and War, New York, 1947, p. 415.Google Scholar

17 Berkner, , loc.cit., p. 260.Google Scholar Cf. Price, , op.cit., ch. VGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the Department of Defense's use of external advisers, a procedure which may greatly hasten the discovery and the closing of gaps in the assignment of missions. Examples are drawn largely from the field of continental defense problems.

18 Two “out of Washington” meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, as well as their respective aides, the Key West and Newport Conferences of 1948, were called to settle interservice differences as to roles and missions. The respective tasks of naval aviation and the Air Force and those of the Marine Corps and the Army were formally delimited in agreements reached at these Conferences. As reported in The Forrestal Diaries, pp. 389–96 and 476–77, the conferees were concerned to avoid duplication, while preserving each service's “property rights.” There does not seem to have been a comparable effort to make sure that there were no gaps in the assignment of missions.

19 General Omar N. Bradley has written concerning bis testimony in support of the 1950 defense budget as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “In relation to that budget of $13,000,000,000, as I now look back on it, I can see that I made one serious mistake, even though I acted in good faith. In my testimony before congressional committees I stated: ‘We (the Joint Chiefs of Staff) realize that there are certain parts of our defense that are more vulnerable than others. This fiscal year ‘51 budget does not pretend to fill all the holes. But we hope that this budget and succeeding ones will give sufficient emphasis to these points of vulnerability so that the effectiveness of our forces is maximum and the risk to our security is minimum within a few years. If we did not take this view and make this assumption, the appropriation request which we would have to recommend would be out of all proportion to that which we believe this country could afford at this time.’ It was that last sentence which I now regard as outside the responsibility of the nation's military advisers. We have no way of knowing what this country will afford or its economy can afford. Only the economic advisers and the civilian advisers, including Congress, can make the estimate and that decision, and certainly our military recommendations on forces we need should not be curbed in any way by economic assumptions. The President and his economic advisers and the Congress must be presumed to have better knowledge on this subject than the Chiefs of Staff.”—“A Soldier's Farewell,” Saturday Evening Post, CCXXVI, No. 8 (August 22, 1953). pp. 63–64.