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Poised as it must be in today's world between passivity and pugnacity, the military is confused. It is .condemned for wanting to win in Viet Nam in the traditional sense and criticized for not being able to win in any sense. Commander Lloyd Bucher gives up the ship without a fight, and the U.S. lets North Korea get away with it. Is Bucher a hero or a failure? The public leans toward the hero label; the Navy, which had put Pueblo in a scandalously vulnerable position, seems undecided. What is the lesson for the Annapolis class of 1969?
Pueblo was a relatively isolated incident, the kind of blunder endemic in large organizations. Far more serious from the military's viewpoint—and the country's—are the broader controversies now in progress. The most profound is the central accusation lodged by General Shoup. In an Atlantic article, Shoup insists that the profession of arms, to which he devoted his career, has achieved an unduly large measure of control over American society, including U.S. foreign policy. He charges that the officer corps' view of war as "an exciting adventure, a competitive game, and an escape from the dull routines of peacetime," together with the economic and political power wielded by the larger defense community, has led to foreign involvements, including Viet Nam. Harvard's George Wald, a Nobel prizewinning biologist, contends that the very existence of a large military establishment has distorted society, and makes future conflict almost inevitable, even "if the Viet Nam war were stopped tomorrow."
The first question posed by these attacks is whether a large military structure is still necessary. Wald, taking a giant step beyond Shoup, says that "the thought that we are in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial." Thus nuclear weapons, for instance, can be dispensed with. Marcus Raskin, a former White House aide now prominent in the anti-Viet Nam movement, goes even further. He suggests dismantling the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency over the next decade. It is obvious that neither the nation as a whole nor any particular U.S. Administration in the foreseeable future could—or should—subscribe to such ideas. The realities of power in the nuclear age may be ugly and dangerous, but they remain realities.
Quite apart from the smaller nations that depend on American protection, it is in the U.S. interest to help maintain some degree of balance and stability in the world. That is a goal quite different from acting as "the policeman of the world," as the current cliché has it. Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese have displayed so much altruism that their good behavior could be relied on in the absence of U.S. power; Moscow's behavior in Czechoslovakia and Peking's border skirmishes with both the Russians and the Indians are ample proof of that. Moreover, many less