In public congressional hearings held in 1949, Ofstie condemned Air Force-style strategic bombing as “ruthless and barbaric… random mass slaughter of men, women and children… militarily unsound… morally wrong… contrary to our fundamental ideals….” Admiral Arthur Radford, then Vice Chief of Naval Operations, backed up Ofstie’s testimony, adding that attack aircraft flying off Navy carriers could more readily and precisely strike the enemy’s military targets than could the B-36 bombers.
The Navy attacked the A-bomb, then sole property of the U.S. Air Force, not only as immoral but also as ineffective. One unfortunate Navy commander told Congress that if an A-bomb exploded at one end of Washington’s National Airport and you stood at the other end with nothing more protecting you than the clothes on your back, you would not be hurt.
The Air Force won the great battle between the B-36 and the supercarrier. Support for SAC Air Power within Congress was too strong to be crumbled.
Then in 1951, the Navy started to assemble its own atomic arsenal. Suddenly, only a few years after the Admirals’ Revolt, the atomic bomb was no longer so “barbaric.” Some naval officers began to argue, along Air Force lines, that atomic bombs should be used at the outset of a conflict. Admiral Radford, as Eisenhower’s JCS Chairman, suddenly became the most vociferous proponent of “massive retaliation.” Most of the Navy, however, distinguished itself from the Air Force by officially advocating the “tactical” bombing of military targets, as opposed to SAC’s strategic bombing, which the Navy now decried as “rigidly preplanned.”
The typical Navy officer continued to believe that the most important function of his service was to engage in tactical strikes supporting limited, not atomic, wars. But A-bombs were where the money was in the early 1950s, and so the Navy dived into the atomic competition.
Through the 1950s, the Navy tried to prove the superiority of attack-aircraft carriers to Air Force bombers by pointing out the vulnerability of fixed SAC bases and, conversely, the mobility of carriers on the high seas. This tactic proved less than totally successful, as the Air Force could usually well argue that, with electronic intelligence and other devices, airplanes could locate and track ships with little difficulty.
But then in the mid-1950s, the Navy began work on a project that truly would prove threatening to the Air Force—the Polaris submarine. Each Polaris could hold sixteen nuclear missiles. Not only could the subs move continuously, but they could do so underwater, making them virtually impossible to detect or track. And by this time, due in no small part to Wohlstetter’s and Hoffman’s RAND studies, the Air Force was coming to recognize the vulnerability of its SAC bases. The Polaris was something the Navy could stab at the very heart of Air Force operations and budgets.
By 1958, the Polaris project looked technically feasible: a solid-fuel missile had been developed; an underwater missile-launch system had been demonstrated. One Navy captain told an Air Force friend, Colonel Richard Yudkin, Assistant Director of Air Force Plans, “We’ve got something that’s going to put you guys out of business.”
On January 15, 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations and the driving force behind the Polaris program, approved a study composed by the Naval Warfare Analysis Group (NAVWAG), an organization that had grown out of the Navy’s World War II operations-research panels. The study was called NAVWAG Study #1, Introduction of the Fleet Ballistic Missile. In the approving cover memorandum to NAVWAG-1, Burke wrote that the mission of this new Navy missile, to be loaded onto the Polaris submarine, was to be “expressed as a deterrent capability” with strategic targets, thus placing the Navy, for the first time, in direct competition with the Air Force. The aircraft carriers had also been placed in the role of striking strategically, but their primary mission was still “control of the seas.”
One year later, the Navy went further in its attack on the Air Force, attempting to formulate a new strategic doctrine that would denigrate the value of land-based missiles and bombers in favor of submarines. This new view was articulated in NAVWAG Study #5, National Policy Implications of Atomic Parity. The NAVWAG analysts, led by a civilian named John Coyle, took the RAND R-290 and Gaither Committee reports as a premise, but then twisted their conclusions into quite a different shape. Drawing attention, as the two earlier studies had, to the emerging vulnerability of the U.S. strategic force, NAVWAG-5 predicted that, with continued SAC dominance, “we shall soon find ourselves in the new uncomfortable position of relying largely on the size of our striking forces to offset their vulnerability.” This could only be seen as “a prescription for an arms race, and also an invitation to the enemy for preventive-war adventurism.”
The R-290/Gaither solution of hardening missiles into shelters and surrounding them with anti-missile batteries similarly “promotes an arms race.” According to NAVWAG, it “challenges the enemy in an area (endless mass production of higher-yield, more accurate missiles) where he is ready and able to respond impressively.” Thus, this “fortress concept to achieve security against surprise” commits us only “to an eternal, strength-sapping race in which the Soviets have a head start.”
NAVWAG’s answer for “get[ting] off the arms-race treadmill” was to secure the strategic force through “mobility and concealment” in submarines, rather than in the “hardening and active defense” of bombers, missiles and anti-missile missiles. And, to avoid “the provocative over-inflation of our strategic forces, their size should be set by an objective of generous adequacy for deterrence alone (i.e., for an ability to destroy major urban areas), not by the false goal of adequacy for ‘winning.’”
There was nothing really new about this doctrine. It was a return to Bernard Brodie’s earliest conception of deterrence as expressed in his 1946 The Absolute Weapon—the concept of deterring the enemy by threatening to destroy his society, the corollary notion that this can be accomplished with a relatively small number of weapons, that as the number of major targets run out, so too do “diminishing marginal returns” begin to set in on the effectiveness of each additional weapon.
The Navy, in its new official line, had come full circle: from an abhorrence of city destruction in 1950 to its doctrinal glorification in 1958. The one consistent element in this 180-degree shift, and that ultimately underlay all the phases of strategic rhetoric, was opposition to whatever the Air Force happened to be plugging at the time. In the early 1950s, the Air Force had the bomb, and the Navy did not, so the Navy made a moral case against the mass destructiveness of these evil weapons. In the late 1950s, both sides had the bomb, but the Air Force had far more, and the Navy had the new Polaris, with which the admirals now wanted to supplant the Air Force from the strategic arena altogether. Moreover, submarine-launched missiles would lack the accuracy to hit anything but enemy cities. So a case was made for keeping the necessary number of strategic weapons to a minimum, restricting targets to major enemy cities (of which there were only a couple of hundred) and thereby making a strong case for putting all the strategic weapons underwater.
NAVWAG-5 also pointed out that with the money saved from not having to build an “excessive” number of nuclear weapons, the U.S. conventional force could be built up, so that in the age of “atomic parity,” Soviet aggression at “lower levels of conflict” would not result in the free world’s getting “nibbled to death.”