Document created: 15 September 03
Air University Review, November-December
1975
adjustment or transformation?
Lieutenant Colonel
Laurel A. Mayer
Dr. Ronald J. Stupak
THE expanding military defense budgets since 1950 have caused increasing concern about the formulation and implementation of U.S. strategic doctrine. Civilian scholars, as well as government officials, have intensified their study of military and defense strategies. Particularly noteworthy has been the application of economics models, scientific management techniques, and social-psychological concepts.
In addition, the United States Congress and the American public have shown increasing interest in questioning the how and why of military spending. In this era of rapidly expanding technology and arms-race complications with the Soviet Union, the high monetary cost of the defense budget is probably the main reason for all this attention, especially during the current economic inflation. Yet the questions being asked include the desire to know how requirements are formulated, how and when forces will be deployed, and what strategic alternatives are available to the United States in the post-Vietnam environment.
These increased concerns appear to have been major factors in the development of national security policies. “Massive retaliation,” “flexible response,” and other phrases have become the jargon of the discussion of national defense planning and strategy formulation.
Obviously one basis for national defense strategy has to be the nation’s perceived potential threats to the pursuit of its national objectives. These threat perceptions will be subjective and may vary within a nation’s leadership, and yet they do become one of the primary bases of defense planning. As one writer on the subject notes:
Threats to the security of a
state make their impact on doctrine in the form that they are perceived by the
leaders who control the state’s destiny. Threat perceptions will vary from
group to group and from individual to individual, but a viable state
presupposes a consensus, or at least an effective accommodation of individual
and group perceptions of national threat.1
To meet the threat, a nation will formulate a strategic doctrine as a basis for military structure, weapons deployment, and resource allocation. The doctrine provides guidelines for the military, at least in broad terms, so that they can in turn inform the civilian leadership responsible for committing resources of their requirements. Although the political processes, institutional trade-offs, and bureaucratic deliberations are generally very complicated and often confusing, the overall strategic doctrine (with its concomitant parameters) does significantly shape the military posture.
Yet there are other factors that affect military posture and strategic
planning. Any attempts to meet all the perceived threats to national security
must take into account the resources (or lack of them) available for defense
spending. It has been noted that U.S. policy is committed to the somewhat
ambivalent (though not necessarily inconsistent) policies of safety through
military superiority while trying to decrease armaments significantly.2
The government planners are also restrained by multifarious U.S. foreign
commitments. And finally, institutional interests of the military services that
affect their morale, efficiency, and power cannot be completely ignored. As
James Schlesinger stated in discussing strategic doctrine and defense planning
back in 1965: “National security is too broad a problem to be solved by any
single professional insight. . . . After all, organizationally speaking, what
is more irrational than a Marine Corps, yet what is more useful?”3
In the end, a good deal of military planning is subjective and relative, sometimes lacking firm criteria. When policy is formulated, it must consider other national objectives and priorities in the division of national resources. Primarily on the basis of total national objectives, perceived threats, and institutional considerations, national strategic doctrines are theoretically formulated and operationally implemented.
As President Eisenhower assumed office in 1953, he was committed to reducing defense expenditures with the conclusion of the Korean War. Despite a significant buildup of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the defense budget fell by no less than $16.5 billion (27 percent) in the two years immediately following General Eisenhower’s assumption of office.4 Because the military posture was primarily based upon nuclear weapons and retaliation at places and times of our choosing, it removed many of the requirements for large-scale conventional capabilities and sophisticated counterinsurgency forces.
On 12 January 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a policy speech in which he stated that the United States would respond to future challenges “at places and with means of its own choosing.”5 He argued that the United States must rely more heavily on its “massive retaliatory power.” The doctrine of “massive retaliation,” already put into practice, then became the strategic doctrine of the Eisenhower administration.
The massive retaliation strategy assumed that sufficient nuclear forces in-being could deter any adversary from launching a direct nuclear attack on the United States and that additionally they could deter any lesser aggression against U.S. interests throughout the world. It was based on the maintenance of a large nuclear force capable of destroying most of the enemy’s residual strategic forces and industry with a single massive strike. It was directed primarily toward the Soviet Union, in what was defined as a bipolar, zero-sum international system.
The U.S. military services carried on a conspicuous debate concerning strategy and force posture throughout the fifties. Reliance on massive retaliation gave strong emphasis to the mission of the Air Force (particularly SAC) and the Navy at the expense of the Army. It is generally predictable that proposals for national force postures will reflect interservice rivalries and mission competitions.
Such rivalry can become parochial and confusing, but it does give government policy-makers an awareness of available military options. “Early in 1956 General Maxwell D. Taylor, then Chief of Staff of the Army, formally urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to endorse a strategy of flexible response rather than massive retaliation.”6 The Air Force and Navy (led by Admiral Arthur Radford) continued to favor reliance on strategic nuclear weaponry.
Civilian scholars, strategic intellectuals, and the “whiz kids” also began to articulate criticism of the reliance on massive retaliation doctrine as announced by Dulles. One of the more important early attacks was that written by William Kaufmann in a 1956 book entitled The Requirements of Deterrence. The basis of his criticism was that general nuclear war could benefit nobody (in later parlance, the first-strike advantage was alleged to be close to zero).7 He perceived a Russian-American nuclear war as suicide (literally the negation of policy), giving massive retaliation the semblance of credibility only under the most dire circumstances.
As time went on, more and more strategists called for additional alternatives and options. In his conclusions to a RAND study in 1957, N. C. Peterson noted: “The pursuit of these goals [Communist conquests] seems likely to take the form of local war in many situations. We should not create situations of military weakness which are an invitation for the enemy to move.”8 There was growing advocacy for increasing our tactical capabilities in a framework of multiple, flexible strategic design.
Although primary doctrine in the 1950s continued to emphasize massive
retaliation, there was some modification in the later Eisenhower years. In 1957
Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson told Congress that American defense
policy “is based on the use of atomic weapons in a major war and is based on
the use of such atomic weapons as would be militarily feasible and usable in a
smaller war, if such a war should be forced upon us. In other words, the
smaller atomic weapons, the tactical weapons, in a sense have now become the
conventional weapons.”9 Still, even this modification emphasized
nuclear weapons, rather than “conventional” conventional. It is interesting to
note that Henry Kissinger, after advocating tactical nuclear weapons in his
1957 book, changed his emphasis and argued that a massive effort had to be made
to keep conflict “below the nuclear threshold.”10
The argument continued throughout this period. The critics’ chief rallying point was that unlimited nuclear warfare should not be treated as the sole possible outcome of a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. As early as November 1954 Secretary Dulles reportedly explained that “no such single course had been implied by the positions he and Admiral Radford had earlier taken.”11 Yet most of the critics felt alternatives would not be available until additional resources were devoted to nonnuclear conventional forces.
General Maxwell Taylor, discussing his years as Army Chief of Staff, explained: “. . . we had a division over massive retaliation versus what we now call a strategy of flexible response. By 1958 it was a clean split right in the middle of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, crying for a decision.”12 He further noted that, although it was never formally brought before the National Security Council, it implicitly appeared before them twice annually, at both national policy and budget reviews.
With President Kennedy’s administration, the concept of greater and more diverse capabilities for a “flexible response” became the cornerstone of defense policy in the sixties, as General Taylor and most of the earlier strategic intellectuals had been advocating. While continuing to strengthen and increase the protection of strategic forces, Kennedy also initiated programs to enlarge and manipulate nonnuclear forces.
Brush-fire wars and/or “wars of national liberation” were now becoming a primary Communist strategy. Such aggression was now perceived as the most serious threat in the cold war. It was therefore announced that the U.S. intended to have “a wider choice than humiliation or an all-out nuclear action.”13 Capabilities to deter Communist aggression with conventional forces and counterinsurgency tactics became a part of U.S. strategic doctrine as the Kennedy people saw more and more of the Communist threats emanating from the areas of the third world.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara became the primary architect and director of this new flexible response strategy. It called for a balance of forces that would enable the U.S. to be highly selective as to the type and intensity of forces and weapons it could deploy under different circumstances and in diverse situations. President Kennedy, in a special message to Congress in March 1961, described the policy:
Our defense posture must be both
flexible and determined. Any potential aggressor contemplating an attack on any
part of the free world with any kind of weapons. . . must know that our
response will be suitable, selective, swift, and effective. . . We must be able
to make deliberate choices in weapons and strategy, shift the tempo of our
productions, and alter the direction of our forces to meet rapidly changing
conditions or objectives at very short notice and under any circumstances.14
Thus, Secretary McNamara quickly implemented force conversions to accommodate the required options of flexible response. This new emphasis on building up truly conventional forces included a de-emphasis of tactical nuclear weapons. In emphasizing the separation between nuclear warfare and “other kinds of wars,” he later noted:
Careful analysis revealed two
important facts on this point: One was that strategic nuclear forces in
themselves no longer constituted a credible deterrent to the broad range of
aggression, if indeed they ever had in the past. The other was that we could
not substitute tactical nuclear weapons for conventional forces in the types of
conflicts that were most likely to involve us in the period of the 1960’s.15
Flexible response also became a part of the Air Force’s strategic nuclear planning. William Kaufmann, in discussing the McNamara years, states:
Accordingly, the proponents of
the strategy of flexible response, led by General Thomas D. White, Air Force Chief
of Staff, recommended a posture which would be so designed and controlled that
it could attack enemy bomber and missile sites, retaliate with reserve forces
against enemy cities, if that should prove necessary, and exert pressure on the
enemy to end the war on terms acceptable to the United States.16
As such, this new doctrine specifically called for retaliatory strikes. The new policy, with its constraints and options, became known as “controlled (nuclear) response.”
There is evidence that there was not unanimous agreement on the application of controlled response by all the military leaders in the 1960s. It seems reasonable to assume that at least some of the top military leaders perceived the difficulty of introducing flexibility into plans for general nuclear war. General Earle G. Wheeler, when questioned in 1968 about Secretary McNamara’s famous 1962 Ann Arbor declaration about military objectives in the event of nuclear war, succinctly replied: “That is McNamara speaking. Speaking for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we still have adhered to our concept.”17 Yet, from 1961 on, flexible response remained the dominant concept for allocating military resources and formulating U.S. defense policy.
The Berlin Crisis provided the Kennedy administration with a preliminary application of flexible response deterrence. Although McNamara felt that the outcome of this crisis had provided early justification for the capabilities of flexible response, there was still criticism. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, from the floor of the Senate, charged that the administration had practically told Nikita Khrushchev: “We do not have the will to use that one power with which we can stop him; in short, we have the nuclear capability but not the credibility.”18 What kind of results might have been achieved by a different response is speculative, but in this case the capability for selective flexible response to Communist aggression seemed to work as a deterrent.
The 1961 new look of increased forces to implement the concepts of flexible response (with multiple options) called for increased military expenditures, yet high expenditures for nonnuclear forces did not dominate the military budget. Commenting on this phenomenon, Malcolm Hoag says: “The seemingly budgetary austerity of the McNamara era reflects a capitalization upon some multiple-option capabilities that, despite professed Eisenhower doctrine, had been preserved.”19 He notes that restoring conventional bomb racks to existing airplanes was cheaper than re-creating a tactical air force. Additionally, the hardening and mobilizing of strategic missiles had already begun and only needed to be speeded up.
The introduction of new concepts and forces to fight guerrilla wars
(“counterinsurgency” and “nation-building”) also brought in new training
requirements. New training courses and additional ground troops were required.
Yet in the initial planning, prior to the large deployments to Southeast Asia,
the programmed increase in manpower was relatively small.20
The doctrine of flexible response during the McNamara era is well summarized by Morton Halperin as “. . . the creation of a military force which would remain under tight civilian control at all times and which could be used in a variety of different ways to meet a variety of different threats.”21 In effect, flexible response was seen as a strategic doctrine for deterrence and defense and also as a technique for controlling the military and military instrumentalities within a civilian-dominated, political-oriented diplomacy of coercion.
The U.S. military experience in Vietnam has caused many people to question the fundamental assumptions and operational techniques of the flexible response doctrine. Probably the essential questioning has been aimed at the application of the doctrine.
The Southeast Asian situation was debated at the highest levels in the
Kennedy administration in 1961. Within the context of flexible response it can
be demonstrated that “President Kennedy and his brother Robert were ardent
advocates of coping with ‘wars of national liberation’ by imaginative C-I
techniques, . . . One of the new President’s first acts was to approve the CIP
and allocate $42 million more in U.S. aid for ARVN and the civil guard.”22
In his book The Essence of Security, McNamara noted that the U.S. force structure under the doctrine of flexible response allowed for the deployment of more troops to Vietnam:
I should emphasize that we have
considerable flexibility in meeting other possible contingencies which require
smaller forces, or those requiring so rapid a build up. For example, in the
Vietnam conflict we used the forces earmarked for a major Asian contingency to
meet the immediate needs in the summer of 1965 and then activated temporary
forces to meet the longer range needs. The very stability of our own NATO
contribution during that period is a significant example of the flexibility we
developed.23
Was it possible we had too much flexibility, too many capabilities, and too many options?
Some strategists say we should have concentrated more on localized security in specific areas with dense local populations. This was tried at various times and places throughout the conflict, but it can be demonstrated that in an objective assessment it was not found to be very effective or successful. Strategic hamlets, search and destroy, supply interdiction, selective bombing in the North, and many other tactics were employed, but all generated very limited results in the long run in thwarting the insurgents in Vietnam.
Some critics seem to say that our application of flexible response was not flexible enough. Bernard Jenkins of the RAND Corporation made this assessment: “The Army’s doctrine, its tactics, its organization, its weapons—its entire repertoire of warfare was designed for conventional war in Europe. In Vietnam, the Army simply performed its repertoire even though it was frequently irrelevant to the situation.”24 Although this argument has merit, it is not an adequate comprehensive explanation. Certainly the Special Forces camps and strategic hamlets were not designed for war in Europe. Similar tactics might be included in fighting conventional war in Europe, but these were certainly designed for SEA counterinsurgency. Jenkins goes on to suggest that Vietnamization is not the solution, as it simply transfers our organization and our mistakes to the Vietnamese.
Still one RAND analyst, R. W. Komer, does make a fairly strong case that the often emphasized “pacification” program was never fully carried out. “There was an immense gap between this policy emphasis and what was actually done in Vietnam. Counterinsurgency (or pacification) did not fail in Vietnam. Whatever policy called for, it simply was never tried on any major scale until 1967-1971.”25 He feels that 1967 was too late, but it is hypothetical whether it would have worked earlier.
The use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam was another possible
alternative in deterring North Vietnam. Some might argue that such weapons
could have destroyed key targets more precisely with less loss of human life
and civilian property. Yet there is not sufficient evidence that this is true;
and to take a giant (qualitative) step in escalation without any strong
probability of military gain seems strategically foolish. As George Reinhardt of
RAND states: “Such logic ignores reality, [and] Washington’s intense fear of
triggering nuclear war, . . .”26
State Department Adviser Raymond J. Barrett largely attributes the “graduated response” portion of flexible response to our failures in Vietnam. The general theme of his assessment is that controlled “gradualism” will not work in a counterinsurgency situation in an underdeveloped society, utilizing primitive logistics and guerrilla war tactics.27 He, like some others, feels that the tactics utilized were more suitable to a European type of conflict or to a conflict of protagonists with similar power bases.
General Victor Krulak, USMC (Retired), feels that allowing U.S. combat troops to become directly involved in combat roles in Vietnam was the mistake.28 He notes that in 1965, when we started sending combat troops into the countryside, the Vietnamese leaders warned us that we did not understand the complexity of the war. He feels that we could have established the same puppet-puppeteer relationship that worked for the Communists; in fact, he quotes Sun Tzu: “The battle of the puppets is for the puppets to fight. A puppeteer enters the active conflict only at his peril.”
It is interesting to note that General Matthew Ridgway, Army Chief of Staff in 1954, warned President Eisenhower about military involvement in Southeast Asia. As he later noted in his Memoirs, upon reviewing the possible use of U.S. air and naval power to help the French in Indochina:
In Korea we had learned that air and naval power alone cannot win a war and that inadequate ground forces cannot win one either. I lost no time in having (such a report) pass up the chain of command. It reached President Eisenhower. To a man of his military experience, its implications were clear. The idea of intervening was abandoned.29
Flexible response as a doctrine included not only the maintenance of large
conventional forces so that the U.S. could deter any large-scale Sino-Soviet
aggression but also tactical readiness in order to deter insurgency and limited
wars all around the world. As Arthur Waskow put it: “For the presence of the
fleet showing the flag all across the globe, the availability of airlifted
infantrymen, and the existence of powerful indigenous armies, all were thought
to work against the possibility of internal Communist Revolutions.”30
Under the concept of flexible response, such forces came into being in the
19608. They, of course, had their major test in Vietnam; and though we
apparently won many battles, we never could deter or defeat the enemy. As
Reinhardt stated (in 1967): “Our arms, at peak efficiency in 1965, undefeated
in land, sea, or air battle, are still mixed in an attrition war with no
discernible end.”31
There is growing agreement that the major problem in trying to fight a
counterinsurgency war in Vietnam was that we did not ever fully understand the
more significant political dimensions of the conflict. As Bernard Brodie put
it: “Classical systems analysis, despite the yeoman’s work done by Alain
Enthoven’s office, has had just about zero relevance to everything concerned
with Vietnam. Our failures there have been at least 95% due to our
incomprehension and inability to cope with the political dimensions of the
problem.”32
Again, “flexible response” as a concept is logical, sound, and reasonable,
but it may not be able to dictate how, when, and where to deploy forces.
Obviously we learned from Vietnam that we cannot send U.S. conventional forces
to fight every insurgency and automatically achieve rapid success with more
firepower. As Brodie says: “When we recall how we discussed methods for
demonstrating our superior resolve’ without even questioning whether we would
indeed have or deserve to have superiority in that commodity, we realize how
puerile was our whole approach to our art.”33
In sum, the lessons to be learned from our flexible response experience in Vietnam can be summarized within several major categories:
(1) The “implementation of flexible response” was generally imprecise. We had developed extensive military capabilities, and there was often difficulty in choosing means of escalation to deter the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. We may have let our broad flexible response capabilities dictate our strategy and tactics in what might be called “capability overload.”
(2) There was a failure to understand the political situation in this limited war. We repeatedly underestimated the resolve and motivations of the VC/NVA versus the South Vietnamese nation. While our strategic planning called for graduated responses under a limited-war concept, North Vietnam was engaged in a total war right from the very beginnings of the conflict.
(3) There was some ambiguity as to our overarching objectives. Were we denying SEA to the U.S.S.R. and/or China or North Vietnam; or were we nation-building in South Vietnam; or were we fighting Communism; or was it a combination of these? As time went on, this ambiguity caused decreasing domestic support for our military efforts in SEA, as well as confusion among military men who had to effect the doctrine in a shifting, ambiguous goal-framework.
(4) There existed considerable “management overload.” Even as additional “combat” units were added, the headquarters/support forces often grew by even greater numbers. Moreover, the best combat troops were often rotated into headquarters areas. This rotation pattern often led to subsidized inexperience, ticket punching, and revolving amateurism among both enlisted men and officers.
(5) We opted for “scientific” measures to determine how the war was going. Numbers of hamlets pacified, body counts, and kill ratios became measures of how we were doing, without adequate evidence as to whether they were valid (or in some cases reliable) indicators of the “success” of our endeavors.
(6) Finally, many of the strategic intellectuals who championed and structured the concept of flexible response in the halls of academe blamed much of the failure of the doctrine on the military’s implementing of the strategy. Hence, it may mean that strategic doctrine should never again be formulated without the direct involvement of military professionals in the initials stages of theoretical designing and cognitive mapping—theory and practice, it seems, cannot be separated in the formulation of strategic doctrine.34
It is, of course, much easier to cite these problems in retrospect, but this is no reason for us to dismiss the lessons as hindsight. The military and other strategic planners must attack and adjust the problems of national defense and not the critics themselves.
We think it is reasonable to assume that our current strategic and military planning continues to be based on the Nixon Doctrine:
First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments…Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security. Third, in cases involving other types of aggression we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower of providing the manpower for defense.35
Obviously, the third statement was specifically adopted for Vietnam and any
similar future conflicts. Such a statement is basically consistent with the
concept of flexible response and no doubt was one of the options the early
advocates envisioned. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the U.S. will be much
concerned with providing “assistance” incrementally, for fear that it might
mushroom into primary combat responsibility for U.S. combat troops.36
The second tenet refers to a “shield if a nuclear power threatens,” but this
does not meant that there has been a return to massive retaliation; rather, it
is a statement of restraint and rethinking in the use of tactical forces. In
fact, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger has been trying to put more
flexibility into our strategic nuclear policy, as stated in Air Force
Magazine: “Schlesinger [re] introduced the concept of nuclear
flexibility.”37 Unlike the U.S. concept of assured destruction,
which emphasizes the capability to inflict damage on major Soviet urban-industrial-population
areas, this new flexible strategy aims to maintain the ability to selectively
destroy an enemy’s essential military targets and/or industrial “choke points.”38
The apparent reluctance of the United States to become directly involved in counterinsurgency fighting does not mean we cannot fulfill treaty commitments. Military force can be deployed utilizing options that are favorable to our interests. Support can be given to allies who are firmly committed to their defense. We have continued to support NATO, as well as provide military supplies to Israel, Latin American, etc. However, it is clear that we will no longer do other people’s fighting for them, unless they demonstrate some signs of being able and willing to fend for themselves.
During the last two decades U.S. strategic doctrine lent itself to such conceptual aspects as deterrence, massive retaliation, limited war, arms control, flexible response, nation-building/counterinsurgency, controlled response, and escalation. Although the 1950s were dominated by massive retaliation and the 1960s by flexible response, most of the other interrelated concepts were significant in the evolution of and debates over U.S. strategic doctrine.
We have not developed a new all-encompassing “strategic phase” for the 1970s
but we must continue to pursue policies that will eliminate the horrors of
general nuclear war while allowing ourselves to pursue our national interests
in a world of nation-states. Since World War II, the United States and the Soviet
Union have together spent more than $2 trillion,39 with the static
result that “neither side can expect to attack the other without receiving a
retaliatory strike that would destroy the attacker as a modern nation-state.”40
Morton Halperin, in his book Contemporary Military Strategy, made a statement in 1967 that we believe is still an accurate assessment in the 1970s:
Whatever we may choose to call
it, we are doomed to peaceful coexistence with our enemies because we live in a
world in which war cannot be abolished, because there is no other means to
settle issues that men feel are worth fighting for. But war—at least war in the
sense of general nuclear war—can only lead to such complete destruction that in
the final analysis, the war could not have been worth fighting. It is this
central paradox which provides the challenge and the setting for discussion of
the role of military strategy in the current era.41
Whatever strategic adjustments, transformations, and/or revolutions occur in the 1970s and beyond will require an awareness of past successes and failures. We must continue to be in a position to protect our national interests while avoiding nuclear confrontation, and we must protect ourselves against the overextension of our resources. All policies and strategies must be analyzed in terms of our objectives. Miscalculations and errors must be recognized; but successful programs must also be identified, analyzed, and continued.
Additionally, we must remember not to allow capabilities to dictate policy. We must not accept every conflict on the adversaries’ terms. And it is essential that we understand our adversaries’ terms. And it is essential that we understand our adversaries’ motivations and objectives. In Vietnam, under the concept of flexible response, we fought a “limited war” with “graduated responses” to deter the adversary. It now appears that the adversary, North Vietnam, was not using parallel concepts in its calculations. One might say that North Vietnam was fighting a general total war right from the start.
In essence, despite all the dialogue devoted to a re-evaluation of strategic theory, especially massive retaliation and the literature dealing with limited war and coercive diplomacy, we believe that American strategic thinking must come to realize the uniqueness, complexities, and dangers of engaging in limited conflicts. Much of strategic thinking has failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing international situation. Whereas independent and indigenous revolutionary forces were rising to challenge what were many times corrupt, illegitimate, and ineffective governments, strategic thinking seemed unable to accept an opponent that was not the Soviet Union or Communist China, or at least controlled by these Communist superpowers.
For these and other reasons, strategic theory—and theories more specifically of limited war and coercive diplomacy—focused too exclusively on situations of superpower confrontation. The United States has been too prone to apply these scenarios formulated for superpower conflict to situations where they may not be applicable. This gap between perceptions and reality has resulted in the problems cited in our analysis. Therefore, a fundamental re-evaluation of strategic doctrine in general, and flexible response and limited war in particular, seems essential as we move beyond the Vietnam experience.
Miami University, Ohio
Notes
1. A. L. Horelick, Perspective on the Study of Comparative Military Doctrines (Santa Monica: RAND, 1973), p. 9.
2. For a good assessment see Roswell L. Gilpatric, “Our Defense Needs: The Long View,” in Henry Kissinger, editor, Problems of National Strategy (New York; Praeger,1965) p.136.
3. James R. Schlesinger, “Quantitative Analysis and National Security,” in Kissinger, Problems of National Strategy, p. 104.
4. Malcolm W. Hoag, What New Look in Defense? (Santa Monica: RAND, 1969), p. 1.
5. Quoted in Alvin J. Cottrell, “The Eisenhower Era in Asia,” Current History, August 1969, p. 86.
6. Robert L. Perry, The Ballistic Missile Decision (Santa Monica: RAND, 1967), p. 27.
7. Colin S. Gray, “What RAND Hath Wrought,” Military Review, May 1972, p. 24.
8. N. C. Peterson, Remarks on Future Wars (Santa Monica: RAND, 1957), p. 27.
9. Quoted in William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 25.
10. Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 81.
11. Perry, p. 20.
12. Quoted in Kaufmann, p. 24.
13. Theodore Bauer and Harry Yoshpe, “Defense Organization and Management, (Washington, D.C.: Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1970), p. 54.
14. Quoted in Edward A. Kolodziej, The Uncommon Defense and Congress (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 328.
15. Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of Security (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 69.
16. Kaufmann, p. 51.
17. Quoted in Hoag, p. 19
18. Quoted in Trewhitt, pp. 103-4.
19. Hoag, p. 3.
20. For a summary of 1961, 1963, and estimated 1965 force structures, see Kolodziej, pp. 406-7.
21. Morton H. Halperin, Contemporary Military Strategy (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967), p. 81.
22. R. W. Komer, Institutional Constraints on U.S.—GVN Performance in Vietnam (Santa Monica: RAND, 1972), p. 131.
23. McNamara, p. 80.
24. Bernard Jenkins, The Unchangeable War (Santa Monica: RAND, 1970), passim.
25. Komer, p. xi.
26. George C. Reinhardt, America’s Crossroads—Vietnam (Santa Monica: RAND, 1967) p. 20
27. Raymond J. Barrett, “Graduated Response and the Lessons of Vietnam,” Military Review, May 1972, p. 80.
28. Victor H. Krulak, “The Strategic Limits of Proxy War,” Strategic Review, vol. II, no. 1 (Winter 1974), p. 84.
29. Quoted in Contrell, p. 84.
30. Arthur I. Waskow, The Limits of Defense (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962), p. 36.
31. Reinhardt, p.19.
32. Bernard Brodie, “Why Were We So Wrong?” Military Review, June 1972, p. 44.
33. Ibid., p. 46.
34. For elaboration of this idea, see Ronald J. Stupak and Richard K. Herrmann, “The American Military Hero: A Contextual Transformation, “ a paper presented at the Section on Military Studies Conference, The International Studies Association, held at the Army War college, November 1974.
35. Richard M. Nixon, “U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 12-14.
36. See Ronald J. Stupak, American Foreign Policy Assumptions, Processes and Projections (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), Chapter 7.
37. Mark B. Schneider, “Nuclear Flexibility and Parity,” Air Force Magazine, September 1974, p. 77.
38. See John A. Lauder, “Lessons of the Strategic Bombing Survey for Contemporary Defense Policy,” Orbis, Fall 1974, passim.
39. Edd D. Wheeler, “U.S. Military Strategy: Paradoxes in Perspective,” Air University Review, July-August 1973, p. 10.
40. Ibid.
41. Halperin, p. 12.
Lieutenant Colonel Laurel A. Mayer (M.A., University of Maryland) is a doctoral student at Miami University. He is a career intelligence officer, having served in staff positions with SAC, PACAF, AFSC, and DIA, and most recently as Chief of the Data Input Branch of Foreign Technology Division (AFSC). He is a graduate of the Defense Intelligence School (DIA), the Navy’s Defense Systems Management School, and Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Colonel Mayer has been an instructor in international relations with the University of Maryland.
Dr. Ronald J. Stupak (Ph.D., Ohio State University) is Professor of
Political Science at Miami University, Ohio, but has accepted a position as
Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Affairs at The Federal
Executive Institute for the next two years. He was a post-doctoral fellow of
the Mershon Center for National Security. He is author of The Shaping of
Foreign Policy (1969) and American Foreign Policy (1975) and has
published articles in Orbis, Society, The American Psychologist, and The
Christian Century.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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