Defense preparedness

Does anyone remember george w bush accusing the Clinton/Gore administration of falling down on military preparedness during the debates? He claimed that several divisions of the army would have to report "not ready for duty" if called on by the commander in chief. It really showed the extent to which the end of the cold war and peace opened conservatives to make cheap partisan attacks in formerly sacrosanct areas of government. For example, during the reagan administration, despite the unprecedented peacetime defense spending spree the army depended on "roundout brigades" from the reserves and National Guard to fully equip several divisions. So, on the eve of Desert Storm several divisions of the ready deployment force sent to the gulf were fully one third understrength and the Marine Corps had to borrow modern M1A1 tanks from the army to equip its armored units. But president bush I didn't call reagan's patriotism into question, and secdef cheney even praised the former commander-in-chief for bequeathing such a powerful force to the new administration. How far the empire has fallen that the opposition now feels cheap political points can be scored by attacking incumbents on defense.

Not that he ever would have, but Gore could have used an example from a past transition to make bush's party look awful. Those divisions were not ready for duty according to a cold war Pentagon doctrine that required army units to fight a conventional war like that envisioned between the US and USSR across central Europe and immediately extricate itself and deploy to a brushfire type of conflict, the two war doctrine. To say nothing of the Clinton DoD developing the satellite-guided JDAM and unmanned drones that gave the military an integrated cyber capability to project power in a conventional and unconventional sense not true before. Of course, new technologies made this possible but like so many things that went right during the '90s the Clinton administration got credit for these advances mostly by staying out of the way.

The Eisenhower administration depended on a tripwire doctrine or "strategic monism" which held that aggression anywhere could be met with only one response, overwhelming nuclear annihilation. The only alternative was clandestine black ops by the CIA, which were used to overthrow disobedient regimes in Central America and Iran, but not appropriate for say, counterinsurgency campaigns. Putting aside the morality of overthrowing regimes that, while not communist, were not overly friendly to Washington, the US did face an existential threat during the cold war that required defending allies and interests overseas. Eisenhower as president was actually interested in the conservative idea of balanced budgets and as former supreme allied commander during an actual war, he also understood that war isn't fun and shouldn't be pursued for national aggrandizement or adventurism. So in a way, Eisenhower's stripping of military preparedness could be seen as a way to make war an all-or-nothing option to prevent interventions just for the heck of it. In other words, Eisenhower would have been a much better president than gwb or obama.

However, when the Kennedy administration came in Robert McNamara assumed the job of secdef and was aghast at the inadequacy of the armed forces to meet new forms of communist aggression and subversion. According to Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days the special assistant to JFK the new administration inherited a military in which only three of ten army divisions were stationed in the US and only a portion of that ready to deploy, obsolete airlift capacity, and shortages of ammunition and other logistics. However, the 82nd Airborne had many times as many 105 mm cartridges (I have to assume for recoilless rifles, they didn't have any tanks) and heavy mortar shells, weird. Tactical air support from the air force, probably one of the decisive elements of victory in WWII and vital in Korea, was atrophied and what assets they had were obsolete as well. (pp. 306-19)

I'm not attacking the Eisenhower administration for this, and neither were the New Frontiersmen, it was simply their theoretical doctrine at the time. That didn't stop candidate Kennedy from rhetorical attacks about the "missile gap" with the Soviets however, and that was simply a prediction made by Eisenhower's own military intelligence and later shown to be fantasy. An interesting though experiment is to ask what might have happened were WWII or Korean levels of tactical firepower available to the conventional forces of the US. Eisenhower avoided committing American troops to Suez, Algeria, Indochina, Hungary, and Cuba; all hot spots during the 1950s that could have flared into larger conflicts had the US intervened. There were plenty of hotheads gunning for a fight with the communists during Eisenhower's presidency, simply eliminating the option of conventional intervention may have avoided World War III.

Kennedy's commitment to building these tactical forces and expanding asymmetric capabilities such as the special forces made it easier to send troops to Vietnam. Not inevitable of course, but having new toys around makes the temptation harder to resist. Maybe I am projecting contemporary attitudes onto history, an easily made fallacy, it is difficult to imagine a time when American power was used more responsibly than today. At least until LBJ was dragged into Vietnam by Goldwater, his own advisors, and military leaders after JFK put our foot in there. Schlesinger wrote those many years ago that it would have been difficult for JFK to send American troops in to rescue the Bay of Pigs operation because they just weren't available. This seems like a contradiction though because he repeatedly referenced demands that the administration "send in the Marines" to overthrow Castro.

In the end history doesn't give a hard and fast answer to whether preparing for war prevents war or encourages it. But politicians out of power can posture any way they please because they have no responsibility to actually use the power. Once in power, politicians hopefully can gain that responsibility but there is no guarentee.