Nation: THE MILITARY: SERVANT OR MASTER OF POLICY?

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against other national needs, and priorities must be assigned. If McNamara's doctrine of the "worst plausible case" were applied in every case, the nation would soon be broke or all its citizens would be huddling in a continent-wide bomb shelter—or both. With defense spending running at $80 billion, and with the services requesting enough in new weapons to offset most of the savings that would be achieved by peace in Viet Nam, there must obviously be some hard thinking about where to draw the line.

Weapons systems aside, the same is true in the equally uncertain area of foreign commitments and the deployment of forces. The approach to these essentially political problems has been essentially unchanged for 22 years. "If one should characterize American foreign policy in a sentence," Morgenthau observes in A New Foreign Policy for the United States, "one could say that it has lived during the last decade or so on the intellectual capital which was accumulated in the famous 15 weeks of the spring of 1947 when the policy of containment, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, fashioned a new American foreign policy, and that this capital has now been nearly exhausted." Not only does the use of raw military power have distinct limitations, but another paradox of the atomic age is that the possessor of overwhelming strength is often no stronger for it in dealing with other nations. Russia tolerates abuse from Rumania, Albania and China, and independence on the part of Yugoslavia. The U.S. has learned to live with Castro's Cuba and lesser annoyances in Latin America. While this lesson has been acknowledged for years in the abstract, it has not yet resulted in the development of sufficiently sophisticated policies in which economic, social and political factors are employed with the same skill as military ones.

The sheer size of the military is one indication. In addition to the forces in and around Viet Nam, the U.S. has some 900,000 servicemen stationed elsewhere abroad. It has defense agreements of varying nature with 48 nations. It maintains some 400 major installations abroad, in addition to the 476 at home. Altogether, there are 3,400,000 Americans in uniform, plus nearly 1,000,000 paid reservists. Few responsible critics argue that this force should be instantly reduced. But once the war in Viet Nam is ended, selective and gradual reductions at home and in such places as Korea, Okinawa and Germany would probably be both possible and prudent.

Two Valid Admonitions

What the military needs most of all is clear guidance from civilian supervisors—both on Capitol Hill and in the White House—as to its role in the '70s. It has not always been forthcoming. If there is uncertainty about U.S. interests and intentions in Asia or Europe or the Middle East, if there is coasting on old assumptions that may no longer be valid, the military could occupy the vacuum by fashioning its own, probably parochial policy. Ironically, a retreat from its world responsibilities could be as dangerous for American society as an excess of interventionist zeal. As the Rand Corporation's Arnold Horelick points out, indifference to or isolation from the rest of the world could prompt the U.S. to "build walls, and then you'd get social reorganizations conducive to a garrison state."

In considering how