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When it comes to the precise application of military means to political ends and to assessing the likely moves of an adversary, the U.S. record in recent years has been less than brilliant. Douglas Mac Arthur based his strategy on the false conviction that the Chinese would not intervene in Korea. Historians of the Kennedy years say that the new President went along with the Bay of Pigs attack partly because the Joint Chiefs of Staff acquiesced in the CIA operation—but that they did so without thoroughly scrutinizing it. Had Kennedy heeded JCS advice during the Cuban missile crisis, he would have bombed and invaded Cuba before Nikita Khrushchev had had an opportunity to comply with U.S. demands. When the Dominican crisis erupted, the Chiefs urged that 20,000 U.S. troops be sent in, when far fewer would have sufficed.
No Concrete Plan
That Kennedy and McNamara prevailed over their professional military advisers during the tense days of October 1962, to the point of instructing the brass on the smallest details of how the blockade was to be run, tends to rebut the Shoup argument. It was Harry Truman's policy, not MacArthur's, that dominated in Korea. The U.S. did not join with the British and French in the 1956 Suez incident. And last year Clark Clifford, the putative hawk, became convinced that the bombing of North Viet Nam "had been a bust," and won Lyndon Johnson to that view, despite military advice to the contrary.
On becoming Defense Secretary, Clifford was also dismayed to learn that the military had no concrete plan for ending the war within the tactical limitations imposed by the Administration. For its part, the military has consistently complained that restrictions on the size and use of American forces have given the other side a decisive advantage. This will be argued for years, but there seems to be little doubt that a big-war approach was unsuited to Viet Nam. Some local commanders, for instance, had been shelling fields at random to harass the enemy, though often the effect was to harass innocent peasants instead. Even so, they could not be talked out of the tactic until a tactful—and influential—general from Washington, Andrew Goodpaster, onetime military aide to Dwight Eisenhower, made the case in such military terms as precision targeting and economic use of ammunition.
If the judgment of military professionals has frequently been disappointing, civilian leaders generally must share the blame, and sometimes deserve the larger share. Hans Morgenthau observes that the home warrior is often more militant than the general in the field. Certainly men in mufti such as McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, exerted considerable influence on Viet Nam deliberations.
The Preparedness Problem
Keeping the nation prepared for a war that might never come is in many ways more difficult than actually fighting one. The questions of how much is enough, which weapon to buy and which to junk, the relationship between one nation's technical advances and the incentives they give the adversary for his own buildup—all have yet to be solved in the third decade of the nuclear age. The military proceeds from a relatively simple assumption.