US Military Strategy and the Cold War Endgame

Stephen J. Cimbala

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135202378
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia militar y marítima

At the end of the Cold War security concerns are more about regional and civil conflicts than nuclear or Eurasian global wars. Stephen Cimbala argues that deterrence characteristics of the pre-Cold War period will in the 21st century again become normative.

1

The Cold War Armed Forces of the United States: Atypical Past and Uncertain Future

The issue of military legal and political subordination to duly constituted civil political authority has long been a decided issue in American politics.¹ Nevertheless, the Cold War presented to US policy-makers and military planners some unexpected and unprecedented challenges.² The Cold War US military was qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from its predecessor.³ The following discussion identifies some of the most important attributes of the Cold War US armed forces and their political setting in terms of their implications for civil–military relations.⁴ These are: bipolarity and US–Soviet hostility; nuclear weapons and mutual deterrence; defense reorganization and developments in command-control technology; the experience of Vietnam and other cases of low-intensity conflict; and, finally, the development of an all-volunteer armed force. Some comments will also anticipate the future international environment and its implications for civil–military relations.

BIPOLARITY AND US–SOVIET CONFLICT

The international system of the Cold War was an unexpected outcome of an unexpected war. The US had hoped prior to the outbreak of the Second World War to withdraw to its stance of splendid isolationism which had supposedly characterized its foreign policy before the First World War. However, this effort at inter-war military self-effacement was already compromised by several factors. First, the US imperialist experience in the aftermath of the Spanish–American war gave to Americans a heady sense of world engagement, however selective that engagement might be. Second, European security concerns would not go away from American national interests. To the contrary, during the 1930s the two became inextricably linked. The major significance of Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the Presidency was not apparent at first blush; lauded by his partisans as an economic savior, his actual innovation was to guide brilliantly an isolationist Congress and polity toward European engagement.

A third force driving the US away from its inter-war isolationist reverie was the development of well-armed imperial dictatorships in Germany and Japan with world-class political ambitions. Given the size and competency of its military establishment during the 1930s, the US could not extend deterrence on behalf of the status quo in Europe and Asia against rising hegemons in Berlin and Tokyo. The League of Nations proved to be feckless. The power vacuum that resulted when Britain and France only belatedly grasped the ring of anti-fascist resistance had to be filled from outside of Europe. Russia was a possible source of rescue, but Hitler’s initial diplomatic moves had neutralized Stalin as an opponent until Germany was ready to deal with Russia. As France crumbled and Britain scrambled to evacuate Dunkirk, American political leaders were forced to confront their responsibility for global political order. The Japanese attack in December 1941 influenced the timing of US national awakening, but the content of that awakening had already been settled.

Forced to re-arm on a scale unprecedented before or since, Americans divided in their assumptions about the probable shape of the postwar world and of US civil–military relations within that world. Some maintained that wars were caused by renegade states and perverse ideologies. Once these states and ideologies had been defeated and discredited, a return to normalcy in US overseas commitments and in the size of the US military establishment could be expected. Others who saw the causes for the Second World War as more complicated doubted that the US could extricate itself from postwar responsibility for world peace. President Roosevelt and his advisors, clearly in sympathy with the internationalist viewpoint of postwar global engagement, expected that the US and other great powers, including the Soviet Union, could cooperate through the United Nations to deter irruptions of world peace.

This expectation was to be disappointed, and bitterly so. There are various explanations for why events turned out so much against the optimism of US wartime leaders. Most important for the discussion here was the immediate postwar distribution of global military power. The bipolar international system which followed the collapse of Axis military power left the US and the Soviet Union in a position of uniquely global reach. US and Soviet Cold War leaders began to perceive that world politics was a constant sum game in which the winnings of one side would have to take place as a consequence of the other’s losses.⁵ As suspicion hardened into hostility during crises over Greece and Turkey, Iran, Czechoslovakia and Berlin, President Truman was persuaded that only diplomatic firmness and military preparedness would deter further Soviet adventurism. The Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan declared US universal and regional interests in keeping friendly regimes outside of the Soviet political orbit. But Truman was not prepared to pay the defense costs for these expanded commitments until the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950.

The US postwar military establishment was not returned to a status similar to that awaiting the US armed forces after the First World War. Although more than ten million men were demobilized as rapidly as possible, the Truman administration did not foresee the peacetime period ahead as one of pacific deterrence through international organization and US disengagement, as had been the expectation of President Woodrow Wilson following the First World War. Instead, the US committed itself to oversee the postwar reconstruction of Japan and Germany, the former as a political democracy and the latter according to the four-power division of the pie agreed to during wartime conferences. In the event, Germany was permanently divided and rearmed, but not before the US confronted the need for the rearmament of Europe along with the economic construction of it.

The rearmament of free Europe had to be undertaken with some sensitivity to US and European sensitivities: US body politic neuroses about overseas commitments in peacetime, and European sensitivities about being dominated by American guns and capitalism. The solution for incorporating Western Europe within an American strategic protectorate was NATO, a voluntary alliance of unprecedented scope and inclusiveness in peacetime Europe. NATO grew up along with the maturing of the US nuclear arsenal and the hardening of Cold War lines between the Soviet sphere of interest and the Western one. Eventually the Soviet side copied NATO’s approach and organized the Warsaw Pact as a belated answer to NATO’s European rearmament, although decisions were not taken by democratic consent within the Pact as in NATO.

The extension of US peacetime defense commitments to Western Europe, followed by the stationing of permanent American garrisons there, was a politico-military strategy for Cold War competition. But it was also a strategy for freezing the status quo in the center of Europe, thereby reducing the risk of inadvertent war between the US and the Soviets. NATO was to contain the independent proclivities of the British, French and Germans to fight with one another as a by-product of its importance for deterring Soviet attack. Although not fully appreciated even now, NATO’s political role was as important as its military one. Most US foreign policy influentials did not anticipate an actual shooting war in Europe during the latter 1940s or early 1950s. As George F. Kennan had anticipated, what was more probable was the slow squeeze of Kremlin pressure against American and allied interests both directly, as in the Berlin crisis of 1948, and through surrogates, as in Korea in 1950.

Before the outbreak of the Korean war, the Truman administration had a hard sell for military buildup, including a rapid expansion of the US nuclear arsenal. NSC-68, a high level policy study calling for major US rearmament in view of an imminent Soviet military threat to Europe and Asia, had been completed shortly before the eruption of North Korea’s forces across the 38th parallel in June 1950.⁶ US defense spending shot across the previous ceilings imposed by the Truman administration and the Chinese entry into the war only convinced many Americans that a Sino-Soviet bloc now threatened US global interests. However, Korea was an improbable war for which American strategic planners had scarcely prepared. Expecting a global war against the Soviet Union begun in Europe, planners had given little consideration to the possibility of US involvement in limited wars supported by the Soviet leadership but fought by other governments and forces.

Korea posed strategic and policy-making dilemmas in Washington. The Truman administration’s decision to fight a limited war was controversial on several grounds. Field commander Douglas MacArthur chafed at political restrictions on military operations. Truman neglected to ask for a formal declaration of war against North Korea or against China after Chinese troops later entered the fighting on the Korean peninsula. The war was fought under the auspices of a United Nations collective security operation. Since the precedent had been set for commitment of US forces to limited war without a Congressional declaration of war, the precedent would be repeated to disastrous effect in Vietnam.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND MUTUAL DETERRENCE

The paradox of nuclear weapons was that they made the United States homeland vulnerable to destruction for the first time in more than a century. In addition, this destruction could be accomplished without first destroying US military power or occupying the country. At the same time, nuclear weapons gave to the United States the retaliatory power to strike back at any aggressor, inflicting unacceptable damage. Therefore, a perceived sense of imminent vulnerability to possibly devastating surprise attack went hand in hand with a conviction on the part of leaders that mutual deterrence would guarantee strategic stasis. This vulnerability–invulnerability paradox left some persons confident in US security based on the threat of nuclear retaliation. Other persons were equally confident that nuclear weapons would cancel themselves out, and that meaningful military competition between the US and the Soviet Union would occur below the nuclear threshold.⁷

The US nuclear stockpile was relatively small when Truman left office, and control of nuclear weapons in peacetime remained with the Atomic Energy Commission. This situation became unacceptable to the armed forces once the Eisenhower admininistration had embarked on its preferred strategy of massive retaliation, emphasizing the employment of nuclear weapons instead of conventional forces even in contingencies other than total war. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by US military commanders was a strategic necessity even as it posed problems of civil–military relations and problems for the relationship between the President and Congress.

The Korean war had seen the US commit combat forces overseas without a Congressional declaration of war. The judgment of the Truman administration had been that a formal declaration of war was neither necessary nor desirable. Nuclear weapons posed another kind of challenge to established civil–military relations. The National Security Act of 1947 had established a national military establishment headed by a Secretary of Defense and responsible for the administration and combat performance of all US arms of service, including the newly independent Air Force. Amendments to NSA in 1949 created the Office of the Secretary of Defense and removed service secretaries from cabinet rank. Defense reorganization is considered at greater length below, but the preceding points about the initial unification of DOD and the assumptions on which that unification was built are pertinent for the present discussion.

For reasons well understood by the framers of the US Constitution and accepted by most nineteenth and twentieth century Presidents, the US could not have a Presidential military force. The armed forces belonged to the people, and to this end were subdivided into active duty forces, reserve forces (trained service reserves and individual ready reserve pools) and unorganized militia (potential draftees). The US Congress had rejected Universal Military Training prior to the Korean war despite President Truman’s strong support for UMT. The US Constitution lodged the power to declare war in the Congress because the authors of that document distrusted executive power acting without legislative oversight. But the framers also required a Congressional declaration of war for another reason: it would empower the President to conduct a war on behalf of the entire aroused nation in arms. Public opinion was thought to be the bedrock on which effective commitment of US forces had to be based, and Congressional assent to war was deemed improbable unless broad public support was available.⁸

Nuclear weapons called into question this carefully circumscribed relationship created by the Constitution between the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. They did so in two ways. First, they made necessary the avoidance of total war. Since it was easier for the public to perceive that total war was more threatening than limited war, Presidents found it harder to make the case for those kinds of wars which the nuclear constraint would permit. Second, nuclear weapons promised unprecedented destructiveness in a short time. Especially once the Soviet Union had acquired a strategic nuclear retaliatory force capable of destroying many targets in the continental United States, the US had to devise warning and assessment systems and to create a nuclear decision-making process which by implication circumvented the Constitutional luxury of a declaration of war. In case of Soviet nuclear attack against targets in the continental United States with ballistic missiles launched from land or sea, the US effective warning would be measured in minutes rather than hours.

The Constitutional bypass created to deal with this situation of unprecedented danger was that the President was recognized as commander-in-chief and that this status permitted him to retaliate against surprise attack without immediate Congressional authorization. The Congress had other ways of reviewing and controlling the development of US nuclear weapons programs and military budgets too. Therefore, the legislative branch was not frozen out of the process of force acquisition and general military–strategic planning. But the arcana of nuclear weapons target planning and the packaging of strategic and other nuclear options remained largely within the compass of the executive branch during the Cold War years.

By itself this might have been regarded as an unavoidable necessity, but the nuclear habit of Presidential initiative unencumbered by legislative oversight spilled over into Cold War Presidential approaches to other security and defense issues. It was no surprise that maintaining a state of permanent military preparedness raised the status of the Pentagon relative to other cabinet departments, which themselves grew in stature on the coat-tails of Cold War Presidential power. In addition, the play of power within the national security community in response to activist Presidents, to the visibility of Cold War crises, and to the possibility of prompt nuclear surprise attack was important in its own right. As discussed in the next section, the implications of instant readiness for deterrence and for total war were far-reaching for defense reorganization. This section emphasizes the implications of the strategic paradigm shift from mobilization to deterrence for military strategy.

Nuclear weapons affected the means of defense preparedness and the expectation of surprise attack. But they did not provide usable forces in battle. Therefore, Cold War Presidents and their advisors confronted the problem of what to do if deterrence failed. This problem was partly diverted by the expectation of ‘extended’ deterrence: nuclear weapons would deter any Soviet conventional attack against NATO Europe or other vital American inter...