WORLDWIDE CHALLENGES TO A FORWARD STRATEGY
I have found that too many Americans, even those well educated in military affairs, fail to fully appreciate the massive challenges our country faced in responding to the Communist initiatives in the Cold War. All were impediments that had to be resolved — for our survival and, ultimately, our victory.
During the Cold War, the complexity of the tasks faced by our military leadership was awesome. In Korea and Vietnam we fought major conflicts in combat theaters that, in terms of geography, were almost as far away from the Pentagon as it is possible to be and still remain on the surface of the globe. In the Far East, we not only provided major combat forces but also constructed virtually all of the logistical infrastructure to support the coalition forces. Americans fought alongside indigenous allies, and the latter provided much of the manpower, but it was the United States that organized, armed, and trained these allies. In Korea we were able to end the war under a cease-fire that delineated national boundaries generally conforming to the antebellum artificial lines of demarcation, which had been violated by the Communist invasions from the North.
While U.S. military forces were fighting in the Pacific, U.S. soldiers and sailors in the Atlantic and Europe were deployed on the front lines to deter the Soviet armies and those of the Warsaw Pact satellites from attacking across the East German plains and rolling on to the Channel ports and to the North Sea in one massive offensive. While our conventional forces were defending and fighting in the western Pacific, the U.S. Strategic Command maintained a second-by-second, around-the-clock readiness for nuclear retaliatory strikes as an effective deterrent to any Soviet adventuring with their nuclear forces.
THE STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF LIMITED WARS
Although the wars in Korea and Vietnam may not have appeared, at the time, to be decisive in clear terms of winning or losing, our commitment in those theaters was critical to the prosecution of the broader conflict of the Cold War. Both were strategically essential for the defense of our allies, the containment of communism, and the ultimate national objective of deflecting the threat of the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal.
By the commitment of U.S. citizens to the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, the United States demonstrated its resolve throughout the world and established a level of credibility for our foreign policy. There could be no more convincing demonstration that the United States would fight if its vital national interests were threatened. The Kremlin was well persuaded that the United States would go to war if the Soviets attacked our allies. There is little doubt but that without the deterrent presence of U.S. troops in NATO, what has been called the “tripwire strategy,” the Russians would have moved against Western Europe. But the Soviet leadership was convinced, by the example of Korea, that the United States would honor its commitments to its allies and that Americans would fight in support of those obligations. Most of all, the Soviets were made to realize that the United States was absolutely determined not to lose to the Soviets, even if it meant resorting to nuclear weapons.
THE ANNUAL POSTURE STATEMENT
The Goldwater-Nichols legislation, passed in 1986, was intended to promote jointness among the services by strengthening the authority of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among other measures, it created a vice chairman of the JCS. Prior to this, the service chiefs were viewed by the NCA as the professional experts in their respective services, responsible for the capabilities as well as the readiness of their commands. In those days, each chief of service, along with the SecDef, annually prepared a posture statement, a document setting forth the disposition, capabilities, and readiness of the forces for which he was responsible. My first posture statement in 1974 was sheer boilerplate. The deadline for its submission was only weeks after my installation as CNO. I was not prepared to launch any operational initiatives when so new to the job, and I was very busy responding to Congress, answering their questions regarding discipline and readiness problems in the fleet. So I just played it safe and stuck with the conventional template.
My first posture statement began with the roles and missions of the Navy as legislated by Congress in Title 10 of the U.S. Code and then laid out the national strategy of the United States as assembled from the various guidance papers and posture statements of the secretary of defense. Following this, I described the current force structure of the U.S. Navy and how it implemented the national strategy. The wrap up, and the most important part, was a summary of the Navy’s budget for that year and how each line item was related directly to the Navy’s requirements as derived from the national strategy and derivative guidance of the SecDef. In simplest terms, it was a case of establishing an audit trail from each item in the Navy’s budget to the nation’s security requirements — translating policy into substance.
My second posture statement, in 1975, represented my views and philosophy. Again I began with a statement of the Navy’s roles and missions from Title 10 and again I related each line item in the Navy’s budget, showing how it supported the Navy’s roles and missions. To assist in the process of justifying the Navy’s budget request, I had a version of the posture statement produced in the form of a five-by-eight-inch pamphlet — very modest, duplicated without color or slick paper, and about half an inch thick. It would fit easily in the coat pocket of a civilian suit or a blue service uniform. Many copies were made and widely distributed to our officers, Pentagon civilians, and congressional staffers. John Lehman, later secretary of the navy (SecNav), tells of attending a hearing on the Navy budget during his days on the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) where virtually all present, observers as well as staff and participants, pulled out their CNO posture statement booklets almost in unison. Lehman referred to the booklet as “Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.”
In those days, there was not a concise statement of the national strategy. For the posture statement, I had to synthesize a strategy from what I knew of our war plans as a member of the JCS and the general thrust of the annual SecDef “draft” presidential memorandum. By my second year in the CNO’s office, I had evolved a set of simple strategic principles for the Navy, statements and concepts based upon the various documents available to me and justified by the facts of the world’s geography; the nature of the high seas; the disposition of the military forces, both friendly and hostile; the threat they represented; and the probabilities of various courses of actions. These became the Navy’s interpretation of the national strategy, and they were repeated as often as possible in posture statements, in congressional testimony, and in my public speeches and writings. They are, in the aggregate, and as modified over time by my own experiences, the basis of my formal articulation of the strategy for the Cold War.