Thus, said Dulles, “in the face of this strategy, measures cannot be judged adequate merely because they ward off an emergency danger. It is essential to do this, but it is also essential to do so without exhausting ourselves.”
More specifically, it is neither sound foreign policy nor sound economics “to commit U.S. land forces in Asia to a degree that leaves us no strategic reserves… [or] to support permanently other countries… [or] to become permanently committed to military expenditures so vast that they lead to ‘practical bankruptcy.’” In short, the Truman policy had to be changed “to assure the stamina needed for permanent security.”
Permanent security, Dulles continued, requires above all a complete change in the attitude toward local, non-nuclear defenses. There “is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty landpower of the Communist world.” Therefore, if the U.S. continued to go about the world, committing ground troops here and there to stave off piecemeal Communist aggression, as it had in Korea, then we would soon be exhausted to the point of bankruptcy, leading ultimately to the decay of our true security. In fact, such a policy might tempt an aggressor such as the Soviet Union, which is “glutted with manpower,” to “attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower”—in short, “to attack in places where his superiority was decisive.”
Rather, Dulles maintained, in a passage that would be frequently quoted, “the way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.” And that meant reinforcing local defenses with “the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power,” the power of America’s strategic nuclear arsenal.
“If an enemy could pick his time and place and method of warfare—and if our policy was to remain the traditional one of meeting aggression by direct and local opposition—then we needed to be ready to fight in the Arctic and in the Tropics; in Asia, the Near East, and in Europe; by sea, by land and by air; with old weapons and with new weapons.” But now, with the new policy—what Eisenhower called the “New Look”—“the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff can shape our military establishment to fit what is our policy, instead of having to try to be ready to meet the enemy’s many choices. That permits a selection of military means instead of a multiplication of means,” a reliance on the terror of our atomic arsenal instead of on millions of soldiers and weapons deployed all around the globe. “As a result, it is now possible to get, and share, more basic security at less cost.”
Relying chiefly on the bomb would keep the economy from collapsing under the weight of excessive conventional arms and soldiers, hold off Communist aggression where it counts, and thus, due to the combination of those efforts, be sufficient, indeed ideal, for maintaining the peace and protecting freedom’s security. So thought John Foster Dulles.
Dulles was the chief articulator of the New Look, but he was by no means its sole architect. Sharing his views entirely, and contributing to the formulation of the policy, were Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Budget Director Joseph Dodge and, above all, President Dwight David Eisenhower.
Although a former Army general—and, therefore, a man who might be expected to support extravagant defense budgets—Eisenhower was a penny pincher, perhaps especially when it came to overseeing the military establishment that he knew so well. As early as 1946, he frequently lectured fellow officers on the need to pay close attention to what “the economy can stand.” During the 1952 Presidential campaign, he declared that “the foundation of military strength is economic strength” and that a “bankrupt America is more the Soviet goal than an America conquered on the field of battle.”
Eisenhower had an almost mystical attachment to the unfettered free market and a loathing toward any tampering with it. Like most Republicans, he despised taxation, debt and inflation, feeling that if they were allowed to spiral out of control, the free economy, and with it, the free society, would collapse.
On May 4, not quite four months after taking office, Eisenhower wrote a confidential letter to his good friend General Alfred Gruenther, Chief of Staff of SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. “As you know,” he began, “we are trying to bring the total expenditures of the American Government within reasonable limits. This is not because of any belief that we can afford relaxation of the combined effort to combat Soviet communism. On the contrary, it grows out of a belief that our organized, effective resistance must be maintained over a long period of years and that this is possible only with a healthy American economy. If we should proceed recklessly and habitually to create budget deficits year after year, we have with us an inflationary influence that can scarcely be successfully combatted. Our particular form of economy could not endure.”
Two and a half months earlier, Eisenhower’s Budget Director, Joe Dodge, had produced a report that must have disturbed Eisenhower greatly. The size of the federal debt, Dodge noted, was $267.5 billion, more than five and a half times the debt held just before World War II. If the spending policies of the Truman Administration were continued, the debt would reach $307 billion by 1958, $33 billion beyond the statutory limit. Thirty percent of national income was currently being snatched by government; more than two-thirds of that revenue was being taken by the federal government, and two-thirds of that went toward foreign aid and military spending. Foreign aid had the full support of Eisenhower; he considered it the program in which “the United States is getting more for its money than in any other.” Therefore, given the statistics and given Eisenhower’s economic philosophy, holding the line on military spending seemed mandatory. And since a huge conventional force of troops, tanks, ships, fighter planes, artillery and so forth needed for large-scale combat was most expensive of all, Eisenhower was determined to cut back on this non-nuclear side of the military.
There was something else besides economic concerns that drove Eisenhower to this position, however, and that was Korea. The Korean War had been trudging along for nearly two and a half years when Eisenhower took office, and it seemed to be heading nowhere, toward neither victory nor defeat. By the following July, when an armistice would finally be signed, more than 33,000 Americans would have died in the war, and for a purpose that few back home could figure out. “No More Koreas” became a popular slogan, especially among politicians who liked to boost the Air Force, whose philosophy of Air Power saw no need to slug things out in a messy ground conflict, at the expense of the Army, whose mission involved precisely that. Retired Army General Eisenhower certainly had no favoritism toward the Air Force, but, perhaps with convictions more sincere than most, he joined in with the “No More Koreas” cry.
Eisenhower’s hesitation to get involved in small, distant battles, especially battles fought in Asia, antedated Korea by many years. In the early-to-mid-1920s, Eisenhower was an Army major assigned as chief aide to General Fox Conner, commander of U.S. forces in Panama. Conner taught him how to think about military decisions systematically, according to the logic of the standard five-paragraph field order—assessing Mission, Situation, Enemy Troops, Our Troops, Plans, Logistic Support and Communications, in that order.