Military Policy and Defense of the "Grey Areas"

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IT is surprising how little affected American strategic thinking has been by the fact that within just a few years the U.S.S.R. will have the capacity to deliver a powerful attack with nuclear weapons on the United States. To be sure, advocates of radical solutions propose to cut the Gordian knot by a policy of preventive war. But there has always been an air of unreality about a program so contrary to the sense of the country and the constitutional limits within which American foreign policy must be conducted. For the rest, there seems to be such general agreement about the main lines of American strategy that some of the recent transformations in our strategic position are rarely publicly debated.

Whether these postulates of American strategic thought are interpreted in Secretary Dulles' "massive retaliation" speech and subsequent article,^[i] in Vice-President Nixon's reply to Adlai Stevenson of March 13, 1954, or in Mr. Finletter's lucid book, "Power and Policy,"^[ii] they amount to the assertion that the chief deterrent to Soviet aggression resides in United States nuclear superiority. The corollary is that the United States must not exhaust itself in a "war of attrition" in peripheral areas or keep in being a force so large as to drain our economy without adding to our effective strength on A-Day (the hypothetical date of the outbreak of nuclear war).^[iii] Since only the threat of "massive retaliation" can deter Soviet aggression, major reliance must be placed on the development of our Strategic Air Force and on increasing the power of our nuclear arsenal. Since the Sino-Soviet bloc possesses interior lines of communication and is therefore able to choose the point of attack, we must not let them lure us into areas where we would be strategically at a disadvantage. Instead, we should inhibit aggression at its source by the threat of a general war. To be sure, there are some areas where we shall resist aggression on the ground, the NATO region for example, and for the defense of these it is considered that conventional forces perhaps backed by nuclear weapons are essential. But in the remainder of the world, the part which Mr. Finletter calls the "grey areas," Sino-Soviet moves can be prevented only by the threat of a general war. This in substance seems to be the rationale for our present military policy...