American Wehrpolitik and the Military Elite

...Daniel Leaner, an Army officer in World War II, wrote Sykewar...

...The State Department also was reduced to a choral posture...

...This account of the decisions and revisions affecting BOLERO, SUPER-GYMNAST, SLEDGE-HAMMER, ROUNDUP and TORCH is a fascinating narrative of tensions in a four-way decision-sequence involving the two chief executives and their respective military staffs...

...The rise of the military elites to their present eminence is illuminated by the histories and memoirs of World War II, and particularly by the Army's official subseries, The War Department, of which a sample is at hand...

...In the end, it is clear, the effective power of decision was held by the military men acting through their common channel, the CCS (Combined Chiefs of Staff...

...But in this country, without a stable conception of the "proper place" of military leaders, such episodes passed with little notice...

...The present volumes illustrate the enhanced policy position of the military elite not only by their sponsorship, but also by their contents...

...Naturally, Churchill took a dim view of this sort of uninhibited action on high policy questions by American theater commanders, which amazed alike our friends and foes...

...It is certain, for example, that large numbers of military men will study carefully the three volumes at hand...

...This is so because the military corps has known what it wanted and how to get it...

...certainly, do our legislators and bureaucrats...

...Our diplomats receive no such discipline...

...The third volume, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, by R. S. Cline, traces the evolution of the agency through which decisions of coalition strategy were activated on this side of the oceans...

...Among current military leaders, competence has been enhanced by experience: No other homogeneous group of Americans has had the sustained practice in shaping and administering national policy that has been shared by Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, Clay, Smith, Clark...

...According to Churchill, the General decided to revise the "emphasis" of an earlier CCS agreement that maximum movement eastward was desirable and, apparently on his own initiative, announced his view in a direct wire to Stalin...

...To perceive the new role of the military elites in our time, we must unload traditional stereotypes of "the military mind," along with other conceptual baggage carried along from a time when war-peace was a useful dichotomy...

...It is less cheerful that our political spokesmen and particularly our elected legislators show, by contrast, an abysmal ineptitude on issues of Wehrpolitik, and that our civilian public exhibits an abysmal disinterest...

...We note first of all that the entire series, while sponsored by the Office of the Chief of Military History, is produced under an Advisory Committee comprising our top civilian historians, and the individual volumes are written by other civilians of professional standing...

...and this pervasive threat of violence??neither war nor peace??makes military thinking a major component of all political strategy...

...Today, the foreboding of atomic catastrophe weights all factors in the calculus of international politics...

...Their augmented impact on supreme decision relocates the soldiery also in the social landscape...

...Superior information is a potent instrument of military influence and, wedded to the product of its own intelligence services and its contract research agencies (ORO, HumRRO, HRRI, RAND, etc...

...As General Orlando Ward, Chief of Military History, says in a foreword: "The viewpoint is from within...

...this method of "internalizing" civilian skills has its value...

...While the President and Prime Minister participated and "decided," it was among alternatives presented by the military that they chose and their choices were subject (in fact) to military approval...

...Around much of the globe, military men now chart the course of human apprehension and aspiration...

...That the wartime Congress barely figured in the shaping of war effort and direction is shown by the second volume, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-42, by M. Matloff and E. M. Snell...

...The ODD, as "the general headquarters within the General Staff with which General Marshall exercised his overall Army command," focused the immense powers lodged at the apex of the military elite??where policy and operations were joined...

...And our picture is clarified further when we note that the specific "question" Churchill is discussing??what he calls "Western strategic divergences" ??is nothing less than his disagreement with General Eisenhower over the desirability of moving beyond Berlin and Prague from the West...

...Since there is no reason to assume higher IQs among soldiers, we attribute their superiority to superior organization and information...

...Our traditional faith in civilian supremacy is already compromised in fact, however devoutly the rituals may be cherished, by the sheer superiority of the military corps qua corps...

...It puts these skills to use, by and large, on problems selected by the military in perspectives defined by the military...

...This shows itself in little things, like attention to historical detail...

...The lead roles in coalition strategy were enacted by the Allied Chiefs of Staff...

...There is great need for spreading enlightenment on the political meaning of military strategy today, for in a global arena all strategy is geopolitical...

...They likely mislead us nowadays to deprecate the soldiery when they need civil support (e.g., against an "economy" legislature) and to celebrate them when they might better be chastened (e.g., for contriving spurious "war scares...

...I wonder how many civilians will look at them...

...In some directions (e.g., the location of our global "perimeter" of air bases), the boundaries have already been fixed and our national policy is, in fact, contained by "purely military" preferences...

...The simple conventions of an isolate past??idealizing the Military Hero in wartime and thumping the Brass Hat in peacetime??become simple-minded under conditions of global leadership in hot-and-cold belligerence...

...The bare start made by the Foreign Service Institute has already been aborted for "reasons of economy...

...Younger members of the military corps are being prepared for future leadership by training: Any teacher examining the curriculum at West Point and the War Colleges will see here the only programs that coordinate all instruments of policy??military, economic, political, psychological??for training men to think naturally in terms of a global arena of national action...

...These soporific effects of old bromides can be avoided by recognizing that the military mind is now an indispensable engine of national action...

...Indeed, they give us a trace of the path whereby the military rose to their present eminence...

...This means that military decisions, unless shaped by clear political goals, will cumulatively determine the boundaries within which our political choices must be contained...

...The issues of Wehrpolitik are still with us, indeed are likely to continue as the shaping influence on our future history...

...He frequently lectures on psychological warfare...

...Hence it is well that the soldiers have taken their responsibilities seriously and are, by training and by organizational technique, developing a corps of competent participants in the shaping of supreme policy...

...Ridgway, Gruenther, Radford, etc...

...and further, that the military elite is probably the most competent corps of officials concerned with national policy in the American Government today...

...Where military prescriptions for national security and political requirements for global leadership have not precisely coincided, the political spokesmen and their constituencies have usually presented the weaker case (if any...

...This relationship illustrates one of the ways whereby the military elite has established its predominance in the domain of current research...

...Among these issues are the place of military thinking in our national policy and of military men in our social structure...

...After reading these volumes, we perceive better the meaning of Churchill's report that, during the final year of the war, "the President's health was now so feeble that it was General Marshall who had to deal with these grave questions...

...It is in the cards that our military elite must play an augmented role in national leadership...

...Thereafter: "Both in what it did and in what it refused to do, the wartime Congress cooperated consistently and almost unquestioningly with the suggestions and requests from the Chief of Staff...

...The first volume, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, by M. S. Watson (a Pulitzer Prize journalist), shows the transformation of traditional Congressional hostility toward the military elite into a pathetic subservience during the years 1939-41, when the chronic insecurity generated by the Nazi "war of nerves" brought our legislators to eat humble pie before the military Big Brothers...

...Nor...