For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  Approximately 260,000 South Vietnamese military personnel died and many hundreds of thousands more were wounded during the war. Hanoi stated that 1,100,000 VC/NVA were KIA or died of wounds; precisely how many were WIA or missing in action is unknown, but the numbers were substantial. An estimated 500,000 Vietnamese civilians, North and South, lost their lives, and perhaps three times that many were wounded. By comparison, U.S. losses were modest: 47,434 battle deaths, 10,786 nonbattle deaths, and 313,616 WIA, about half of whom required hospitalization.

  Not the least of the war’s legacies was an array of haunting questions that have no definitive answers: How and why did the U.S. lose the war? Could it have been won at an acceptable cost? If so, how? Was Southeast Asia worth the prolonged ordeal? After all, although South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ended up in the Communist camp and endured decades of postwar misery and privation, no other dominoes toppled—not Thailand, not Malaysia, not the Philippines, not Indonesia.

  The Reckoning

  The Vietnam War mortgaged America’s global containment and forward, collective defense for a decade. European leaders of NATO wondered about the wisdom of a government that squandered lives and resources to fight a determined Asian enemy in an inconsequential corner of the world. And the war’s fiscal implications were severe. Between 1965 and 1974 the defense budget rose from $47 billion to $74 billion, but the increase was illusory. Fueled by domestic social spending and war expenditures, inflation reduced the purchasing power of defense dollars by one-third. The decline in defense spending reflected widespread discontent with the conduct of national security affairs, the erosion of support for the war, and a declining faith in the government.

  The reduced commitment to defense did not reflect a diminished Soviet threat. During the Vietnam era the Russian armed forces embarked on a modernization program that dwarfed the comparable American effort. Soviet armed forces increased in size and fielded a sophisticated family of ground and air weapons in numbers that made “Flexible Response” less attractive as a NATO strategy. Russia also increased its nuclear warheads, improved their accuracy and warhead weight-to-yield ratios, and adopted solid fuels that decreased launch time, all of which made a disarming first strike a greater technical possibility. Two new missiles, the SS-9 and the SS-11, were especially worrisome, as was the prospect of the Soviets developing MIRVs—multiple, independently targeted reentry vehicles—which might give them superiority over America’s forces. Soviet advances in anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense based on ultra-high-speed missiles and phased-array radars worried SAC’s planners, though the U.S. ABM program was actually making better progress. A fleet of nuclear attack submarines, heavily armed surface attack groups, and land-based naval aviation gave the Soviets the capability to contest NATO’s control of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Thus, although the U.S. did not scrap all its modernization programs, the decade of deferral brought an erosion of America’s relative superiority. When the Vietnam War ended, U.S. officials spoke in morose terms of “sufficiency” and “rough parity” in nuclear forces, and the situation in conventional forces appeared equally dismaying.

  The Nixon administration tried to cap the nuclear arms competition with the Soviet Union with two treaties signed in May 1972, the ABM Treaty and the Interim Agreement on intercontinental nuclear delivery vehicles. After complex negotiations, the U.S. and Russia agreed to curb their ABM programs and set a ceiling on their most threatening offensive programs. The ABM Treaty, which had no time limit, restricted both nations to two ABM sites of no more than 100 missiles, which basically made antimissile defense futile; the U.S. eventually stopped work on its only site. The Interim Agreement, which was to run five years, set limits on the number of missiles each side could deploy as ICBMs and SLBMs. The U.S. held its ICBM force at 1,054 and its SLBM ceiling at 710 mounted in forty-four submarines, while the Soviets set their ICBMs at 1,618 and their SLBM ceiling at 950 in sixty-two subs. U.S. technological advantages offset the Soviets’ larger numbers.

  The treaties—labeled “SALT I” in diplomatic shorthand—did no more than modify the arms competition, since both sides continued with programs that escaped treaty limitations: Long-range bombers and MIRVs. They eventually tackled the MIRV problem in negotiations that resulted in the Vladivostok Accords (1974), which set a mutual ceiling of 2,400 on all delivery vehicles (including bombers) and of 1,320 MIRVed delivery vehicles, which included bombers armed with cruise missiles. While Vladivostok established equality in the number of offensive systems, it did not address the possibility that Russia’s large missiles could bear so many MIRVs that they might constitute a first-strike threat.

  Meanwhile, U.S. conventional forces underwent dramatic reductions, from 3.5 million men (1968) to 2.1 million (1975). By 1974 the armed services had 46 percent fewer aviation squadrons, 47 percent fewer ships, and 16 percent fewer divisions than they had a decade earlier. One explanation for the decline was a change in manpower policy. To help defuse the antiwar movement, in 1971 the Nixon administration announced it would end the draft, and in 1973 an All Volunteer Force replaced conscription. But volunteers were scarce, notwithstanding florid rhetoric about the patriotism of American youth. The cost of a volunteer versus a conscript either doubled or tripled, depending on what costs one counted, and the quality of enlistees dropped, whether measured by their possession of high-school diplomas or intelligence testing. Compounding the cost and quality problems, the increased number of black and female recruits created difficulties that resisted easy solutions, and career officers and NCOs left the service in droves. The Department of Defense thought it could compensate for the chaos in the active forces by stressing a “Total Force” policy that improved reserve units, but the draft’s end also worked havoc on reserve enlistments. Inflation, soaring costs, mismanagement, and technological risk-taking hampered the modernization of equipment and munitions. To replace each old tank, ship, and aircraft generally cost double the original investment. The solution—not a good one—was to buy fewer units and spend less on operations and maintenance. The accepted efficiency measurements all declined as the armed forces flew less, steamed at sea less, shot fewer munitions less often, and held fewer exercises.

  Congress exploited the public disillusionment with Vietnam to assert its influence on national security policy. It not only approved a decline in military spending but also limited executive branch flexibility through a combination of the legislative veto and new laws. The most significant of the latter included a July 1973 law that prohibited direct or indirect combat activities over, on, or even near Laos, Cambodia, and both Vietnams after August 15; the War Powers Act (1973), which required congressional approval of troop deployments abroad in combat situations within sixty days of commitment; and the Budget and Impoundment Control Act (1974), which weakened presidential authority to manage federal spending. Congress also placed legislative limits on future covert operations. Nixon’s Watergate scandal emboldened Congress to attack what some of its members characterized as an “imperial presidency” dedicated to supporting “militarism.”

  In 1975 it seemed almost impossible to conceive of it, but fifteen years later the U.S. would win the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States as the world’s sole remaining superpower.

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  NINETEEN

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  The Common Defense and the End of the Cold War, 1976–1993

  When the American people celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of their national independence in 1976, they still bore the wounds of the Vietnam War. Alienated from both their political leadership and their armed forces, they charged them with collusion in wasting lives and money against falsely exaggerated threats. Fifteen years later, the nation emerged the acknowledged victor in the strategic part of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, the United States lost the only direct military threat to its own existence and that of its major allies: The members of NATO, Korea, and Japan. Three successo
r republics—Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan—still controlled the divided Soviet nuclear force, but they wanted to trade disarmament for economic assistance. The end of the strategic arms confrontation—a kind of nuclear Russian roulette—did not, however, solve the issue of nuclear proliferation by regional powers such as Pakistan and North Korea. Nor did it have any special relevance to the forty-some conflicts—most of them insurgencies or civil wars—that plagued a world whose national borders had been torn asunder by the two world wars and the end of European colonialism. The end of the Cold War did not provide easy answers to the traditional questions of American defense: “How much is enough?” and “Enough for what?”

  Borrowing from the ancients, John F. Kennedy once observed that victory had a thousand fathers, but defeat was an orphan. The end of the Cold War represented the efforts of millions of fathers in the United States and its allied nations, but the Constitution and American tradition focus the paternity of international security policy on the presidency. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush and their advisers all supported the armed forces that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress, especially such key members as Henry Jackson, John Stennis, John Warner, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and Sam Nunn, shared the victory. But in the end the exhaustion of the Russian people, the patriotic endurance of the national minorities in the Soviet Union, the rebelliousness of the member states of the Warsaw Pact, and the greed and moral poverty of the Communist party brought the Soviet Union down. Although the United States could find some comfort in its role in the demise of Soviet Communism, it could not claim that military strength alone had provided a new measure of national security. Nevertheless, its military renaissance in the 1980s provided a final, unanswerable challenge to the Soviet Union and essential reassurance to its allies that it would bear—the Vietnam War notwithstanding—the major share of the military burden for the defense of Western Europe, the Western Hemisphere, parts of the Middle East, and north Asia.

  Talk about a “new world order” produced more unsettling questions about the use of military force than it answered. By 1993, in fact, the United States had not altered its fundamental strategy of nuclear deterrence and collective forward defense, only the level of forces required to sustain the strategy. Although the threat of Soviet intervention in regional conflicts had disappeared, the conflicts themselves had not diminished. The end of mutually canceling American and Soviet intervention indeed may have contributed to regional conflict by removing the threat of foreign action. The emerging threats stemmed from problems that stood outside the East-West confrontation, problems like the fusion of narcotics insurgency and Maoism in Latin America, Black nationalism in Africa, Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, and the economic and military resurgence of China and Japan. The approach to the twenty-first century did not look like the road to nuclear Armageddon, but it did not look like a smooth path to global peace either.

  Coping with New Challenges

  Making an electoral virtue of his foreign-policy innocence, President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 convinced that he had a historic opportunity to curb the spread of nuclear weapons, prevent the loss of American lives in war, pursue détente with the Soviet Union, reduce defense spending, shift the burden of collective defense to America’s allies, and expand the power of moral suasion by applying a “human rights” test to diplomacy. When he left office four years later, Carter had abandoned the policies of the “peace phase” of his presidency. Buffeted by world events and the divided interpretations of those events by his advisers, Carter admitted that the Cold War had not ended and in so doing legitimized Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1980 and even cast serious doubts upon his own competence.

  Carter’s management of national-security policy never reached the level of disaster his critics claimed, but it was most notable for its vacillation and moralistic amateurism. The Carter administration, reflecting the personal style of the president, managed to irritate and perplex in equal measure the American people, Congress, America’s allies abroad, and the Soviet Union—a sure formula for frustration. To be sure, the Soviet Union showed no willingness to defuse the global competition. Deterred in Europe, the Soviet Union actually pursued a policy of “horizontal escalation” preached by Communist radicals like Lin Biao and Che Guevara. In 1975–1976 the Soviets sponsored a Cuban military force for Angola, divided by civil war and already influenced by Congolese and South African intervention. Two years later the Cubans sent another army to Ethiopia to secure a Communist victory and to wage war with Somalia, an apostate socialist dictatorship. In the Horn of Africa alone the Russians dumped $11 billion worth of arms. The Soviets staged a coup against a Communist regime in Afghanistan in December 1979 and inherited a vicious guerrilla war waged by the Islamic tribes, who had refused to modernize according to the Leninist prescriptions decreed by the politicians in Kabul. Not a part of the pattern of socialist upheaval, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought Islamic fundamentalists to power, added another dimension of complexity to the world scene. So did the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia the same year, which seemed designed to not only displace the crazed regime of Pol Pot but also supplant Chinese influence with Russian sponsorship of the new, unified Communist Vietnam. The Carter administration proved to be singularly unlucky in the crises it faced, but it also managed to be the author of its own difficulties.

  The Carter administration compounded its problems by launching a purge of the American covert operations groups and military Special Forces. Reflecting his Wilsonian assumptions about the innate evil of nations and governments, Carter wanted to reduce his own potential for sin by reducing his capability to sin. By depriving the CIA’s operations directorate of skilled personnel in the “Halloween Massacre” of 1977 and accepting a reduction of the Army Special Forces, Carter denied himself anything but a conventional military response to the knotty problems of terrorism and hostage rescue. Since the requirement for special operations and counterinsurgency did not go away, the Carter administration, whether by design or inattention, allowed such activities to be subcontracted to other nations, principally Israel and Argentina.

  The first Carter defense policy reflected both post-Vietnam public opinion and the noninterventionism of the president, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and Vice President Walter F. Mondale rather than the confrontationist bent of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, the most experienced and least ideological of Carter’s advisers, coped with both camps and tried to fashion programs that satisfied the divided counsel at the White House. When Carter took office, public opinion polls showed that Americans thought that defense spending was adequate, that the armed forces could perform their missions, and that Russia might have increased its military capability but did not intend to use its military for coercive purposes. The public thought that only nuclear deterrence and the defense of NATO justified military spending. Carter’s first two defense budgets reduced Ford’s projections for real growth in military spending; when modified by inflation, Carter’s proposed spending levels resulted in a slight decline in real authorizations and outlays. The administration managed its economies in a number of ways: Canceling the B-l bomber program, cutting the Navy’s shipbuilding plans, stretching out the costs of expensive programs like MX ICBM and tactical aircraft procurement, slowing the growth of military pay, and reducing operations and maintenance spending.

  The administration based its initial strategic arms programs upon the assumptions of mutual assured destruction, for Carter was convinced he could use the SALT II negotiations to accomplish sharp reductions in the levels of nuclear weapons. This optimism was short-lived

  In 1977, abandoning the Vladivostok Accords, the Carter administration proposed to the U.S.S.R. that each side make deep cuts in its MIRVed ICBM force. Since most of the Soviet strategic forces were ICBMs, this reduction would have borne most heavily on the U.S.S.R. Not surprisingly, the Soviets sharply rejected the Car
ter plan. Thereafter the administration returned to more traditional and modest plans to reduce the Russian counterforce first-strike potential. In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed a second set of strategic arms control agreements, the SALT II treaty. Focused upon curbing the growth of warheads on MIRVed ICBMs, the “basic agreement” of seven years’ duration established tiered caps on all strategic systems: 2,250 on the total number of missile launchers and heavy bombers; a subceiling of 1,320 on all MIRVed missiles and bombers armed with air-launched cruise missiles; a subceiling of 1,200 on all sea-based or land-based MIRVed missiles; and a final limit of 820 on all MIRVed land-based ICBMs. A three-year protocol put temporary restraints on mobile ICBM and cruise missile development. SALT II’s parameters allowed the United States to complete its existing strategic modernization programs and placed a cap on the Soviets’ most menacing program, the deployment of heavy ICBMs with MIRVs in numbers and accuracy that might create a disabling first-strike capability.