Suchergebnisse

Recalling the abrupt changes in American national security policy in 1953 and 1961, we may well ask: What New Look should we expect now? What should we want? Changes will probably emerge more temperately and slowly than they did in those years. To our friends abroad, over-sensitized as they have become to policy modifications, this prospect should be reassuring. Much as they tend to sympathize with dissent within the United States over Vietnam, they realize that our domestic furor over this tragic war threatens to induce a generalized neo-isolationism. Arguments for neo-isolationism have a powerful appeal, but tend to cloud debate about the real issues for long-term security policy choice: what doctrine, military force structure, budgets, and plans?

Dialectics about NATO strategy have become tiresomely repetitious. One wishes they were unnecessary, ideally because a military threat had assuredly disappeared, or because a strategic nearconsensus had emerged. At least the strategic debate should have become more specific. But doctrine in the end is paramount, however unfortunate the consequences of trying to settle upon itex cathedra. Quantitative analyses that are not systematically related to possible doctrines can lose critical issues in a welter of data, while analyses confined to ways to implement a single doctrine are too constricted. If within NATO one or more nations insist that the mid-1950 doctrine fits the logo's, official alliance planners can be stifled.

In modern strategy no distinction has been labored more than that between deterrence and defense. Everyone now knows that to avert war is not the same as to protect the nation or win if war occurs. But what everyone knows vaguely, few may know well, and what the distinction implies for the mixture of military forces the nation should buy, still fewer may perceive. For deterrence and defense as military objectives overlap as well as diverge, complement each other as well as compete, so that a simple distinction can become complicated. Of special contemporary relevance, moreover, what is alleged to strengthen deterrence in the short run may jeopardize it in the long. About our military preparations, few queries are more important than "How will they influence the nature and intensity of the arms race, and therefore the prospects for arms control?"

"January 1961. Revised September 1961." ; "P-2188-1." ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

In NATO's early days statesmen spoke glowingly about subordinating national military interests to a truly international "balanced collective force," a goal similar to classic free trade in its promise of mutual gain secured at the cost of dependence upon foreigners. Naturally, in so nationalistic a field as defense, achievement fell far short of this sweeping aspiration. But we are ill-placed now to belittle either the slogan or the degree to which we realized an international division of military labor. Nowadays the slogan is "interdependence," but in practice this seems to mean performance deviating still more widely from the goal of integrated defense.

Several reasons for the welcome growth in serious public discussion of military affairs are apparent. Americans are increasingly realizing that we are terribly vulnerable. Military preparations can no longer be deferred until after the onset of hostilities, making it more important that we analyze carefully in peacetime what our preparations should be. The magnitude of our defense effort has so increased that it naturally draws more critical scrutiny. Above all, what we do in defense interacts crucially with our foreign policy. To these considerations that obviously stimulate discussion, we must add another that weakens an inhibition against it. Critics need defer far less than formerly to military expertise.