U.S. Defense Policy in the 1980s, Daedalus

...Instead, we find that most of the U.S...

...The composition and arguments of Daedalus 1980 show more political realism and certainly less self-confidence than those of Daedalus 1960: There is but one plaintive, old-fashioned plea for the primacy of arms control, and it is more than matched by the sober warnings of Richard Pipes and others...

...and Shiva Naipaul), the prospect of generally unsettled international relations, and intensified U.S.-Soviet hostility are likely, to lead to conflicts, in some of which we will have to intervene...

...Their refusal to deal with politico-military issues in detail is symptomatic of the failure of American intellectuals generally to do so...

...The nuclear strategists and arms control experts tend to deprecate the value of the study of pre-1945 history because (they claim) nuclear weapons have utterly transformed warfare...

...The recent test deployment to Egypt of one battalion (Operation Bright Star) demonstrated the validity of one of the main lessons of the North African campaigns in World War II, namely, that troops require special equipment, training, and tactics for desert warfare...

...Both types of reserve, now vastly undcrstrength, should draw their men from a universal or near universal draft of all young men...

...Army trains for all-out conventional war in Europe...

...Js it stands now, the United States deploys a full-scale army in Europe, even as it keeps substantial forces in Asia and prepares to fight in the Persian Gulf...

...None of the Daedalus articles discusses the Rapid Deployment Force in depth, yet this awkward assemblage of units is the most likely of all major American forces to see action in the next decade...

...Defense Policy in the 1980s, put out by Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...

...Both services allow us to transport our land forces to where they are needed and to inflict controlled damage-by punitive bombardment or blockade-on the various states that may oppose us...

...Professors will not take the time or do not think it intellectually respectable to explore the intricate links between technology, tactics, operations, strategy, society, and politics: Like the authors of these articles they feel most comfortable at the last of these levels, daring only to dip into the abstractions of grand strategy...

...Moreover, a draft into the reserves would meet pressing military needs and make military service respectable by making it a rite of passage for all young men...

...To be sure, measures should be taken to protect and improve those forces, but beyond a certain point, we tend to overestimate the significance of the central nuclear balance...

...We should completely divorce the National Guard from state control: Reservists cannot serve well as part-time soldiers and part-time policemen...

...Yet the lassitude induced by the past two decades lingers...

...Army Chief of Staff) have had the courage to admit that we are preparing the armed forces for the wrong war in the wrong place...

...Currently, our European commitment distorts our conventional forces, causing them to lose the versatility that they will need: We train and equip disproportionate numbers of men for the peculiar conditions of all-out war in central Europe, paving the way, perhaps, for reverses in those parts of the world where we are actually likely to fight...

...In addition (and this the editor of these Daedalus issues acknowledges), nuclear arms control has failed for the same political and military reasons that naval arms control failed in the 1920s and 1930s-which suggests that larger forces than fission or ballistic missile technology are at work...

...But we need statesmanship backed by informed public opinion for these and other, even larger measures: to impose the financial burdens required by rearmament, to reverse the pernicious experiment of putting large numbers of women into almost all branches of the armed forces, to animate the officer corps with the spirit of professional warriors rather than the ethos of blue- or greensuited bureaucrats...

...Defense Policy in the 1980s attempts to cover a number of topics and tap a variety of views...

...There are, in addition,, moral arguments against forcing a small percentage of our young men to fight in limited wars of this kind, which professional soldiers are better at winning in any event...

...What should the first questions about U.S...

...we particularly need more logistical craft and additional heavy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers which enable us to control distant seas and littorals...

...Our standing army need not be larger than it is now, and perhaps could even be reduced, but it must be skilled at adapting to a variety of theaters of war...

...It is only recently that an effort has been made to integrate our reserve with the standing forces and there remains a lot to be done-for example, to create units possessing a sizable cadre of regulars which can be fleshed outswiftly in time of emergency (as both the Israelis and the Russians do...

...Worse yet, as Gabriel and Savage have shown in their Crisis in Command, the same stultifying mentality dominates the armed forces...

...Our experts write so cautiously that few of the Eliot Cohen is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University...

...In a sense, of course, they are right, but the real effect of nuclear weaponry has been to make the superpowers more cautious-and to force them to rely as much as ever on traditional instruments of power...

...Unlike our NATO partners, we have major global responsibilities...

...As we learned in Vietnam and as the British and French knew before us, it is a political and military mistake to fight small wars in distant lands with short-service conscripts...

...Why do these volumes which purport to discuss defense policy fail to deal with problems of conventional war- the effects that new technology and tactics will have on battle, the changing nature of seapower, the problems attendant upon limited war in non-European climes...

...We should remember that it was a Republican administration (retrospectively admired for its prudent toughness) that justified abolition of the draft on the dubious grounds of economic rationality and libertarian principles...

...The Daedalus volumes offer little help in these fields-unfortunately, we know of few sources that do...

...pieces are worth reading...

...Now, as then, historians and political scientists leave detailed treatment of military problems to antiquarians or technologists who, for obvious reasons, have narrow interests and limited perspectives...

...These standing forces should, for practical and philosophical reasons, consist of long-service volunteers...

...Why do they include not a single evaluation of the domestic politics of defense, the question of conscription, for example, or the organization of the defense industries...

...because strategies are seemingly set in advance, human interaction seems banished from the battlefields and war can be imagined in equations...

...In the Department of Defense and the network of consulting agencies that live off its bounty, the systems analysis approach, rooted in the antiseptic laws of economic theory, shapes the minds of bureaucrats and their aides...

...At our war colleges senior officers learn far more about "decision analysis" and game theory than they do about, let us say, the difficulties of coalition warfare revealed by the North African campaigns of 1942-1943...

...This is so in large part because the cataclysmic conse-ouences nuclear war would have create a morbid fascination in some and a frantic sense of urgency in others...

...Accidental war is unlikely as well-both sides know full well the consequences of an exchange of nuclear broadsides...

...Of war as a dirty and unpredictable business dominated by such emotions of fear and comradeship one hears little...

...and it should be ready to expand swiftly...

...The appointment by the incoming administration of a technocrat without national security experience to run the Department of Defense, and its disproportionate interest in strategic nuclear weapons, is hardly encouraging...

...Most of our academic and other experts have yet to study war, and because they do not, their articles suggest nothing so much as a sort of sclerosis of defense thinking...

...We must thus prepare for a multiplicity of small wars in foreign countries...

...defense policy be...

...Instead, we should create regular reserves trained for war, and state police reserves trained for riot control, disaster relief, and the other functions that the National Guard now serves...

...This is a post-post-Vietnam collection, and readers should take note of this return to reasonableness...

...Perhaps most important, such a scheme would embody the notion of militia service, which has long been recognized in England and the United States as a legitimate obligation, unlike simple conscription into the armed forces or proposals for a corvee misnamed "national service.'' To implement these changes, and above all to break ourselves of our Eurocentric military orientation, we might need to reduce the land forces that we station in Europe...

...Unlike Daedalus'% first major effort in this field-its 1960 volume on arms control-U.S...

...The editor assures us that: It would be wrong to imagine that those who wrote in 1960 were naive, that their optimism clouded their vision, or that their pride confused them about the limits of all human design...

...the officer corps conceives this to be its primary mission...

...We must improve our capacity to mobilize...

...The best essay on the European Alliance, for example, offers the following prescription: Rather than add military strength without improving the chances for West European survival, or reduce strength without improving the stability of political relations inside Europe, current processes need to be redirected to create structural conditions in Europe that produce a continental modus vivendi that is capable of containing Soviet power without foreclosing increasing interactions with the Soviet Union...

...They tell their students that the North won the Civil War because it was industrialized and socially "modern," ignoring the strategic and statesmanlike skills of Lee and Davis on the one side and Grant and Lincoln on the other...

...It is this arrangement that is so troubling...

...There are two articles on the Soviet Union, six on regional problems, four on Europe, three on nuclear strategy, three on arms control, and two on technology (primarily strategic technology...

...The Soviet pieces are good, and the regional pieces sound if not novel- with the exception of Paul Jabber's biased discussion of the Middle East...

...We could compensate for this by planning larger reinforcements (drawn from our reserves) to Europe in the event of war, by assigning increased air, tactical nuclear, and naval forces to NATO, and by retaining a sizable force in Europe (two full divisions, say, or five cadre divisions...

...surely, it is not unreasonable to ask that they bear the brunt of first-line defense in the opening stages-and only the opening stages-of an invasion of their territory...

...Why is there no discussion of the lessons-technical, tactical, and political-of Vietnam...

...Most of these essayists equivocate terribly, obscuring both their fears and their proposals in a verbal fog that suggests confusion rather than prudence...

...The Soviets have no intention of launching a first strike-why should they, when they can achieve many of their goals without such a risky course...

...These failings have far less to do with the differences between Democrats and Republicans than with fundamental flaws in the ways that we analyze national security problems...

...This repugnance, which dooms most discussions of the kind that we read in Daedalus to dreary superficiality, seems to follow from the nature of a liberal, prosperous, and insular country-in some ways it was as true of England in the nineteenth century as America in the twentieth...

...Only a few senior officers (notably General Edward C. Meyer, U.S...

...Why do the authors of the regional studies fail, for the most part, to include military detail such as the physiognomy and psychology of foreign armed forces in their analyses...

...If students of military history receive little encouragement or training in the universities, the situation elsewhere is not much better...

...Fall 1980 Winter 1981 / $4.00 each Eliot Cohen JL hose who regularly read a major newspaper and have a reasonable knowledge of postwar history will learn no new facts from the articles in the two volumes of U.S...

...This is folly: We could straddle the globe this way when fully mobilized, as in World War II, but not in peacetime or at least not with anything less than massive increases in spending and the introduction of large-scale conscription...

...Our primary concern, of course, must be the Persian Gulf, and the development of forces capable of dominating that region...

...Natural and social scientists find the issues pleasantly technical and quantifiable...

...Our forces are far more likely to engage Soviet proxies and Third World-ers of various stripes than they are Russians, and even if they do fight Russians it is entirely possible, in fact likely, that the nuclear balance will keep the conflict conventional...

...Because no hypothesis has yet been tested in practice, no theory can be exposed as foolish...

...They betray thereby what the English military historian Cyril Falls once described as a perverse desire to prove that wars are won by anything but that most obvious and truly decisive factor-fighting...

...Nuclear strategy and arms control is the major exception to the above indictment: In fact, the literature on nuclear strategy grossly exceeds the topic's merits...

...They were not simply men and women inexperienced in politics, who imagine that all would be easy...

...Above all, we need knowledge of how armed forces operate, what form war is likely to take, what political ends military action can and ought to serve...

...Almost none of the authors wander into the dreamlands of conclusive detente, or of a negotiated world order based on new international economic arrangements...

...There is, however, a lesson in the structure if not the substance of these two volumes...

...Alarge part of the problem begins at the university, where most of the contributors to these volumes hail from...

...We should increase sharply the size of our Air Force and Navy...

...The introduction concedes that the earlier volume contained analyses and recommendations that the next two decades exposed as impractical, if not ridiculous...

...Then again, that is not why we should inspect this publication: Rather, we read these issues of Daedalus to discover how a substantial chunk of this country's foreign policy elite thinks about our national security problems and what it thinks the solutions to them are...

...One would assume that American troops would be trained to be as adaptable as possible and be prepared for deployment in a number of geographical areas, particularly the Persian Gulf...

...This complete failure to raise, let alone grapple with such vital questions leads one to believe that our problems are intellectual rather than political...

...These articles aside, we see that the foreign policy elite remains preoccupied with two sets of problems: squabbling between the United States and Europe on one hand, nuclear strategy, arms control, and technology on the other...

...At our best schools professors do not include military history in their courses: If they cannot skip over a military episode, they explain the outcome in the vaguest of social or political terms...

...The chaos latent in postcolonial societies (so well described by V.S...

...defense planners structure forces to deal with this contingency above all others...

...To begin with, they should focus on problems of conventional defense, which are far more complicated and delicate than those of strategic nuclear policy...

...Most of us, perhaps even some of those men and women, would disagree, arguing that the differences between the two issues of Daedalus show a considerable advance in thought...