Kaufmann’s monograph was circulated widely in the Pentagon. Top Air Force officers heard about the report and obtained copies too. From their point of view, Kaufmann didn’t understand what they liked to refer to as the “flexibility of Air Power.” But they were worried. As one colonel, a special assistant to Vice Chief of Staff General Tommy White, said in a memo to his boss, “Kaufmann’s contentions are well written and will be persuasive to readers who, like him, are only partially informed on this important security question.”
From 1955 on, in JCS meetings and in public relations campaigns, the Army took a much more aggressive stance against the Air Force-Navy position. Nuclear war, Army generals began to say publicly, was becoming “increasingly impossible,” given the “stalemate” in strategic forces between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. This condition gives the enemy every incentive to concentrate its efforts in small, local, limited wars; and, unlike the Air Force, which only wants to make “the biggest bang or the biggest hole in the ground,” the Army is interested in having “the means to apply the exact amount of force required, and at the exact spot, to accomplish a specific task.”
However, throughout the decade, the Air Force consistently won the interservice contests on this issue: not only did the Navy side with the Air Force, but so did the JCS Chairman, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and the President. When in 1956, Admiral Radford found out that the proposed JCS war plan for that year—the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, or J-Scap—contained compromise language suggesting that nuclear weapons might not be used in conflicts short of “general war,” he fired off a memo to all the Chiefs, telling them that this was “a radical departure from the present approved policy,” which “clearly states that atomic weapons can and will be used in military operations short of general war as authorized by the President”; that “our national policy regarding use of atomic weapons has been recently reaffirmed, and this policy does provide that atomic weapons will be used not only in general war but in local war if the situation so dictates.”
Each year, from 1956 till the end of the Eisenhower Administration, Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor—Matthew Ridgway had resigned in protest in 1955—would insist on meeting in the Oval Office with the President and the rest of the Chiefs to make his case against the predominance of Air Power and big bombs in the war plan. And each year, Eisenhower would insist to Taylor, over and again, with growing impatience, that those war plans reflected national policy approved by him, the President. Once, to Taylor’s astonishment, Eisenhower told him, “The Army will be truly vital to keeping order inside the United States. The Army will be the stabilizing thing after the big war, the force that pulls the nation together again.”
In the last few years of the decade, some of the Army’s arguments began to take hold—inside the National Security Council, the President’s Science Advisory Committee, more far-flung quarters of the Pentagon, and especially within the Democratic Party. As the Soviet Union began to acquire its own nuclear arsenal, and as tensions began to mount in various “hot spots” around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia, the Army’s arguments grew increasingly compelling. And they were compelling largely because of what the Army took from the writings of the most articulate of the civilian strategists—Bernard Brodie, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and, perhaps most directly, William Weed Kaufmann.
Behind Kaufmann’s own arguments for a large conventional-force buildup, however, was an intellectual edifice that military men of all stripes found utterly foreign, but that would have profound influence on the civilian community of defense intellectuals for the next decade and beyond. It was a philosophy not only of using limited weapons, but of limiting, controlling, rationally calculating the very process of making war. The tenets of this new philosophy were spelled out at great length in two other essays that Kaufmann wrote for a symposium that he edited in 1955–1956 at Princeton called Military Policy and National Security.
The basic problem, as Kaufmann saw it, was not only that the United States would have to build the means for fighting limited wars, but that in these wars, we would somehow have to compel the Soviets to keep their efforts confined to fighting a limited war, to refrain from expanding it into a nuclear war as well. Imposing such mutual restraints would require altering the very nature and purpose of warfare. Kaufmann saw the future of Soviet-American relations as one of “continuing competition… as full of hairpin curves, of sudden rises and declines, of agreeable prospects and impending catastrophes, as the classic Alpine roads.” We must, therefore, view all Soviet efforts at infiltration and aggression in the “gray areas” in terms of their effect on this grand competition. “Whatever the nature of the particular situation, we will therefore want to ensure our ability to go on playing the game.”
Fighting wars becomes, in an almost too Clausewitzian sense, an extension of Cold War politics by other means. Such wars “perform a function midway between the abstractness of a show of force and the terrible concreteness of annihilative conflict,” Kaufmann noted. “They become partial or token tests of strength” or represent “indices of relative power” in the competition.
It was an unorthodox conception of strategy, Kaufmann readily acknowledged, but “it must be remembered that the type of war envisaged is quite unorthodox, too.” Traditional strategy, along with its weapons and axioms, held that the idea of war was to destroy the enemy’s will to fight, essentially his capabilities, which therefore must be smashed. In an era when both combatants have long-range multimegaton nuclear weapons in their arsenals, however, the traditional military objectives could not be gained without committing national suicide in the process, thus nullifying whatever Pyrrhic victory might have been achieved.
Nobody desires self-annihilation, so both sides have an incentive to keep the war limited. It is important, therefore, to keep the terms of battle confined, from the outset, to conventional weapons and within a circumscribed area. For “the scope and method of the initial attack will tend to define the minimum limits of the ensuing conflict and the possibilities of controlling it.” Limited wars should be fought, or rather “managed,” in such a way as to send “messages” to “the other belligerent,” which would “have a good chance of inducing him to accept limitations of geography, weapons and possibly time.” Indeed, the role of force under these circumstances lies in its “great value as a counter in the bargaining process” that shapes the “continuing competition.” Thus, one reason for building up conventional forces is that they are the weapons that the Soviets will be using, and, “as in poker, the game will be far easier to play when everyone is using the same kind of chips.”