It was this sort of argument that frightened Air Force officers to distraction. There was a genuine logic to the Navy case and it was just the sort of thing that could do the Air Force in.
Meanwhile, the Navy was promulgating the message of NAVWAG-5 through all available channels. Admiral Burke delivered speeches on the virtues of a mobile deterrent geared to the threat to destroy enemy cities (“mutual deterrence”) and the dangers of relying on the current vulnerable land-based force. An unclassified version of NAVWAG-5 was sent out in a letter to all retired naval officers with instructions to speak out on these issues in public as much as they could. General Tommy Power, Commander of SAC (Curtis LeMay had been moved up to the Pentagon as Vice Chief of Staff), obtained a copy of this letter and sent it on to General Tommy White, Air Force Chief, adding that “we would be well advised to match this action in concept and to exceed it in distribution.”
“There is an all-out battle going on right now,” the director of Air Force Plans and Policy, General Hewitt Wheless, wrote to his SAC counterpart, General Charles “Westy” Westover, in May 1959. Wheless, like most of his colleagues, saw the Army and Navy aiming to reduce Air Force—especially SAC-related—programs, so that more money could be spent on Army and Navy programs. “Because of SAC’s public acceptance as the deterrent,” Wheless continued, “they must have an acceptable rationale, and to this end, they’re leaning awfully hard on this new targeting concept, i.e., ‘city’ destruction, to prove that SAC is excessive.”
More disturbing to the Air Force Staff, including the Chief of Staff, Tommy White, was that the Air Force, especially SAC, in the construction of its own targeting plans and philosophy, was setting itself up for this Navy onslaught. The Air Force war plan involved destroying an “optimal mix” of urban and military targets. The report of an April 1959 “Coordination Conference” between SAC and Britain’s Bomber Command referred to city destruction as the “Primary Undertaking” and destruction of military targets as the “Alternative Undertaking.”
The labeling of city bombing as the “Primary Undertaking,” General Wheless noted in his letter to General Westover of SAC, “will be pointed out to us as an example of SAC (and Bomber Command) agreement with the Army and Navy concept.” Tommy White conveyed the same concern to Tommy Power: “This would lead to the conclusion… that attacking ‘cities’ constitutes the most important segment of the strategic effort. This conclusion would not only be used as further justification of Polaris but… would be used as a strong position (which is already emerging) to eliminate virtually any strategic requirement other than Polaris, i.e., SAC.”
Back at the RAND Corporation, things were in flux. The enormous Strategic Offensive Forces project was falling apart. Disagreements were breaking out among the team’s leaders; some of the systems analyses were producing results clearly displeasing to the Air Force (for example, that the newly proposed B-70 bomber was a failure); disorganization was rampant. Several individual memorandums and papers came of the project, but no overall report. And amid the fray, several in the strategic community were finding an opportune moment to take leaves of absence.
Still, RAND did work for the Air Force and this was the sponsor’s time of need. Several RAND analysts came up with ideas to help out in the great battle with the Navy and its much loathed Polaris. Bruno Augenstein, the engineer who in 1953 helped solve the problem of designing a quickly feasible ICBM, came up with the notion of a 1,000-megaton, or “gigaton,” bomb: if SAC was vulnerable, just having twenty or so of these weapons surviving would be more than enough to deter and defeat.
Albert Wohlstetter, on leave at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, called one of his assistants, Dave McGarvey, and, in response to the Navy’s claim that land-based missiles attract the enemy’s fire and thus needlessly kill millions of American civilians as well, had McGarvey calculate how many Americans would die from the fallout produced by a nuclear attack on Navy installations in the continental U.S., including on the Navy shipyard in Brooklyn.
Herman Kahn’s marathon lectures and his book, which had just been published, with their discussions of Types II and III Deterrence and Credible-First-Strike Capability, were providing useful ammunition in the great battle, even if many officers were slightly put off by Kahn’s tone and by his infatuation with civil defense.
But a small group of Air Force officers found most helpful of all William Kaufmann and his newly emerging ideas on counterforce. On February 1, 1960, as a visiting professor at Yale, on leave for a term from RAND, Kaufmann sent a brief memo to George Tanham, vice-president of RAND and head of RAND’s Washington office. The memo, entitled “The Puzzle of Polaris,” argued that, while the Polaris might “constitute a valuable supplement to our land-based strategic force,” it could never serve as the backbone of the deterrent. The main reason for its limitations was that, unlike the land-based forces, the Polaris would lack the explosive yield and accuracy to allow the U.S. “to pursue meaningful counterforce and damage-limiting strategies.”
Tanham, who was also RAND’s liaison with the Air Staffs plans office, sent copies of Kaufmann’s memo to various generals and colonels whom he had befriended. The memo circulated all the way up to General Tommy White, who was much impressed. (Clearly, by this time, White must have forgotten that this same W. W. Kaufmann had six years earlier composed an essay called “The Requirements of Deterrence” that he, White, had disliked and that the Army had latched on to in its raging mid-fifties battle against the Air Force.) White had Kaufmann write a letter expressing his views in language suitable for publication, private distribution on Capitol Hill and possible excerption for congressional testimony.
On February 18, Kaufmann, in the capacity of a recently elected member to the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, wrote in a more polished, seven-page letter to White:
“A strategic force primarily or totally dependent on Polaris would increase the difficulty of defending allied areas, particularly Western Europe…. In fact, placing our bets essentially on Polaris would appear almost to invite the Soviets to engage in limited aggression. Certainly the risks would look far less against a submerged, city-busting system than against a widely dispersed, protected, land-based system which appeared capable of conducting a counterforce campaign.” The “Minimum Deterrence” strategy favored by the Navy, in short, “would hardly be a winning one.”
The letter was a synthesis of Kaufmann’s old views on limited war, the counterforce legacy passed on by Andrew Marshall and Joseph Loftus, and Herman Kahn’s conception of Type II Deterrence. It fit very nicely into the framework of what General Tommy White and others in the Air Staff had loosely and sporadically been thinking about. The memo and its eager reception marked the first steps in Kaufmann’s move toward the center stage of RAND’s strategic community and, in some Air Staff quarters, toward the official adoption of a pure-counterforce strategy.
The next big step came in June when Kaufmann got a call from George Tanham, asking him to stop in Washington before returning to Santa Monica. Tanham had been talking with an Air Force general named Noel Parrish, who was worried that the Air Force was about to take a beating from the Navy. Tanham had told Parrish that Kaufmann had some reassuring ideas.
Noel Parrish was an Ichabod Crane sort of figure, with a wiry physique, long head, pointed nose. He was thoughtful, more genuinely interested in ideas than many of his fellow officers. In 1946, he had been a member of the first graduating class of the Air Command Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base, and wrote a dissertation promoting integration of blacks into the Air Corps, which was considered quite provocative in its day. At the Air War College, he listened to some of the earliest lectures and discussions on the implications of the new atomic bomb, including those by Robert Oppenheimer and Bernard Brodie.