Indeed, Kaufmann maintained, a policy of massive retaliation encourages the Soviets to engage in this sort of piecemeal aggression. As long as each side has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other, the threat of massive retaliation to small-scale conventional aggression lacks credibility. Thus, the side with overwhelming conventional forces can go about making incursions and disrupting stability as it pleases, as the Communists appeared to be doing, at the time of the Dulles speech, in Indochina.
It was on the ground that Communism was making its advances in the “gray areas.” It was without nuclear weapons that the United States had been establishing its most successful containment policies—the Berlin Airlift, the founding of NATO, intervention in Korea. All have “suggested rather strongly that the United States is willing—and, it should be added, able—to meet [Soviet] moves successfully on the ground and according to the rules set by the opponent,” to “limit and contain Communist thrusts by means of local applications of counterforce.” It was this “credit… that we have at our disposal in making credible any policy of deterrence, and as such it will have much to do with the effectiveness of our program,” Kaufmann noted. The Dulles policy of massive retaliation, utterly at odds with this record and lacking in credibility on other grounds as well, will thus be an ineffective—indeed, counterproductive—deterrent in the face of most types of Communist aggression. Dulles was attempting to build a deterrent “on the cheap” and yet it could only lead to “despair… futility and… recklessness….”
The proper deterrent would be one that tries “to fit the punishment to the crime,” that prevents—and if that fails, defeats—aggression at all levels. “If we show a willingness and ability to intervene with great conventional power in the peripheral areas, after the manner of Korea,” Kaufmann would write, “we will have a reasonable chance of forestalling enemy military action there.” This would mean competing with the Communists on their own terms, which is exactly what Dulles was trying to avoid. But Kaufmann wondered whether those terms were so favorable to the enemy after alclass="underline" “Our effort in Korea was smaller in size and probably less costly in terms of human and material resources than the Communist commitment. And it was the Communists who finally became eager to terminate the conflict.” In any event, a policy of credible deterrence was the main goal. And to Kaufmann’s mind, the “outbreak of World War II, Pearl Harbor, the loss of Eastern Europe, and the Korean War itself resulted in part from a failure by the United States to institute adequate policies of deterrence.”
In the summer of 1954, Kaufmann completed a paper outlining his thoughts on this matter, and sent it off to RAND for possible publication. The review committee at RAND did not care for it at all and sent it back to Kaufmann, telling him that if he wanted to publish it on his own it was all right with them. RAND, after all, was financed almost entirely by the Air Force. And 1954 was still a time when, especially among the Air Force and its minions, the idea that the next major war might not be a “total war”—the notion of a “limited war” waged directly between the United States and the Soviet Union—was considered a bit of lunacy almost beneath consideration. The Korean War was commonly judged a failure to be avoided in the future, the “wrong war fought at the wrong place at the wrong time”—not the politico-military success story, the exemplary case of limited warfare matched to limited objective, that Kaufmann wished the nation to emulate.
So it happened that on November 15, 1954, the Princeton Center of International Studies published a monograph called “The Requirements of Deterrence” by Professor William W. Kaufmann. That same week, Bernard Brodie published an article in The Reporter called “Unlimited Weapons and Limited War,” which made essentially the same point as Kaufmann’s “Requirements of Deterrence.” Evidently, in the few months since his Foreign Affairs article, Brodie, like Kaufmann, was coming to the conclusion that even battlefield nuclear weapons were perhaps too dangerous, that “conventional” defenses better fit the threat. And, like Kaufmann, Brodie invoked the success of Korea as proof of his point’s plausibility.
One year later, when Kaufmann was compiling a collection of essays by himself and some colleagues at Princeton, which included his “Requirements of Deterrence,” he sent a draft to his old mentor Brodie for comment. Brodie exploded. Either he had never read Kaufmann’s original version of “Requirements,” or he had forgotten about it, for he accused Kaufmann of stealing him blind, of plagiarizing his “Unlimited Weapons and Limited War.” Brodie was very well liked and admired by former students and academic colleagues, but they also knew that he occasionally displayed a savage temper and a bristling ego, especially if he thought others were robbing his ideas. Rather than point out that the essay in question originally appeared at almost exactly the same time as Brodie’s article, Kaufmann wrote him a very humble note, asking if he could “intrude upon you simply to offer an apology for having failed to document adequately my great dependence upon your work in the papers which I sent you. The failure was inexcusable and I shall not even attempt to explain it away. Let me say only that it will be rectified immediately…. I shall always want it to be known how indebted I am to you for friendship, knowledge, and advice.” Kaufmann slapped three footnotes referring to the Brodie article onto the book version of “Requirements of Deterrence,” fifteen more references to other Brodie articles in the two other essays that Kaufmann wrote for the anthology, and hoped the matter would be forgotten.
But the incident would mark the beginning of a decline in the Brodie-Kaufmann friendship. Even though Kaufmann would move out to RAND in 1956 and work in the social science division, where Brodie also resided, the two did not talk very much and only rarely socialized. The falling-out was ironic, for it only reflected how close the two men were to each other. It was only natural that Kaufmann, an intelligent student and colleague of Brodie’s, who had been taught in the same tradition of international relations and who had been instilled with the same Clausewitzian principles by which Brodie abided, would formulate a highly similar critique.
When Kaufmann’s Princeton monograph was released in November 1954, its most avid readers were a group of high-ranking Army officers in the Pentagon. The Army was particularly despairing over massive retaliation. Admiral Radford, Chairman of the JCS, was ordering substantial cuts in ground forces, the instruments of warfare on which the Army depended and which many Army officers sincerely believed were vital for defense.
An aide to General Matthew Ridgway, Army Chief of Staff, was the first to come across Kaufmann’s booklet, and was overjoyed with it. These were the arguments and ideas that Army officers had been trying to articulate at JCS meetings and inside their own councils. The idea of large conventional forces certainly wasn’t new. The Army had been arguing its case for years on more traditional, strictly military terms: you can blow up huge chunks of territory with the big bomb, but you need ground forces to occupy that territory. Nor was the Army the only advocate of conventional defense. As early as 1950, a group of eleven Harvard and MIT faculty members—including McGeorge Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jerome Wiesner and Jerrold Zacharias—had written a long letter to The New York Times, criticizing on moral and strategic grounds the military establishment’s predominant reliance on atomic warfare. Then there were the papers written by George Kennan and Paul Nitze in the State Department, during the Truman Administration, arguing along similar lines. But those days were over. And this unclassified essay by this unknown Ivy League professor seemed more powerfuclass="underline" not only had he spelled out the arguments concisely and dramatically, he fused them with broader issues of foreign policy and of preventing—not just fighting—wars. And he had done all this as a direct rebuttal to the Dulles/Radford/Eisenhower policy which was at that moment placing the Army in serious shackles.