Planning for Peace
by Adam Yarmolinsky
The job ahead of the new Secretary is a simple one. All he has to do, after he finds a satisfactory solution for the war in Vietnam, is to maintain a military establishment that can meet America’s commitments around the globe without contributing to the balance of payments deficit, and manage the largest organization in the world without attracting adverse comment on either side of the aisle.
If he is looking for an additional challenge, however, may I suggest that there are at least two, one immediate, the other in the middle distance.
Robert McNamara demonstrated that the Secretary of Defense can indeed have “direction, authority, and control over the Department of Defense.” It is up to the new Secretary to demonstrate that the changes McNamara wrought have been sufficiently embedded in the institution so that another man in that office can also have “direction, authority, and control.” This latter demonstration calls for a somewhat different but no less eminent set of qualities.
By and large, the people who work in the Pentagon, military and civilian, are at least as responsive to policy guidance as the people who work on the other side of the Potomac. In my own experience, they are more so. But there are some who will probe immediately to discover whether they can return to the old ways, whether the counsels of experience must still be explained in the voice of reason, whether the hard questions that the Secretary’s staff has learned to ask can be turned aside with a soft and imprecise answer.
The Secretary will have very little time to convince these people that things have not changed, that he intends to continue to take full advantage of the new tools and techniques of analysis, and that his own office — the Office of the Secretary of Defense is still the keystone in the arch of his authority. But once he has made the point. I don’t believe he will have to make it again.
The second challenge will come later. The time will arrive although some despair of its ever arriving — when the Defense Secretary will preside over the termination of U.S. military operations in Vietnam. The men will be brought home. The size of the military establishment will be cut back. The military budget will be reduced. Whatever force may remain to help monitor a settlement will not affect the fact that for the first time since Korea, the lines on the chart will be going sharply down. Secretary McNamara was fortunate that in his first two years in office he was able to introduce his major reforms in a period of rising defense budgets. Before he left office, he had already begun to plan for the time when the rising curve of Vietnam would begin to turn down. But the new Secretary will have to manage that downturn.
The effectiveness of his management will depend first on the quality and extent of the planning that is done from now on. But it will depend also on his willingness to make hard choices, some of which his predecessor never had to face. Joe Alsop has described the U.S. Army as a desert plant that can survive for years without nourishment and then take full advantage of the briefest rainfall. If the limited war forces of the United States are to come out of the current rainy season as resilient and ready for other crises as they were in 1964, they must have desert training, and the Secretary will need to be extraordinarily vigilant and tough.
There is a further reason, it seems to me, why this kind of planning for eventual force reductions is important now. Americans are very much of two minds about U.S. overseas commitments and operations. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of our present engagement in Vietnam, if we are to continue to function in the world, we must demonstrate to our own people — and to our friends and allies — that we understand the limits on the use of force, and that we have the patience to go down as well as the will to go up.