The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II

603 Pages·2007·3.26 MB·English

by  Andrew J. Bacevich

The Long War:
A New History of U.S.
National Security Policy
Since World War II
Andrew J. Bacevich
Editor
Columbia University Press
Image only available in print edition
Image only available in print edition
Image only available in print edition

Andrew J. Bacevich, Editor
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The long war : a new history of U.S. national security policy since World War II / Andrew J.
Bacevich, editor.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–231–13158–2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–231–50586–4 (e-book)
1. National security—United States. 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United
States—Politics and government—1945–1989 4. United States—Politics and government—
1989– I. Bacevich, A. J. II. Title.
UA23.L685 2007
355'.033573—dc22 2006037804
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ConTenTS
vii introduction
1 1. LIberaTIon or DomInanCe?
The Ideology of U.S. national Security Policy
Arnold A. Offner
53 2. VarIaTIonS on The amerICan Way of War
James Kurth
99 3. The PoLITICS of ConVenTIonaL Warfare In
an UnConVenTIonaL age
George H. Quester
137 4. ShIeLD anD SWorD
U.S. Strategic forces and Doctrine Since 1945
Tami Davis Biddle
207 5. eLUSIVe bargaIn
The Pattern of U.S. Civil-military relations Since World War II
Andrew J. Bacevich
265 6. The eVoLUTIon of The naTIonaL SeCUrITy STaTe
Ubiquitous and endless
Anna Kasten Nelson
302 7. InTeLLIgenCe for emPIre
John Prados
vi ConTenTS
335 8. The mILITary-InDUSTrIaL ComPLex
Lobby and Trope
Alex Roland
371 9. PayIng for gLobaL PoWer
Costs and benefits of Postwar U.S. military Spending
Benjamin O. Fordham
405 10. The ChangIng moraL ConTraCT for mILITary SerVICe
James Burk
456 11. amerICan InSeCUrITy
Dissent from the “Long War”
Charles Chatfield
517 12. The “gooD” War
national Security and american Culture
William L. O’Neill
551 list of contributors
555 index
InTroDUCTIon
Andrew J. Bacevich
Growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s and early 1960s, I
came to understand the narrative of contemporary history and the narrative
of the Cold War as one and the same. That the Cold War provided the orga-
nizing principle of the age was self-evident, even to a young boy. Catch the
headlines on WGN, read the Chicago Tribune, flip through an occasional is-
sue of Time or Life, and the rest was easy: the era’s great antagonisms—the
United States vs. the Soviet Union, West vs. East, Free World vs. Communist
bloc—told you pretty much everything you needed to know.
In this sense, if the Cold War was not without its anxious moments, it
also served to impart order and clarity to American life. The anti-Commu-
nist crusade provided an authoritative template, equally useful for inter-
preting events abroad and developments at home. View the world through
the Cold War prism, and discriminating between friend and foe, good and
evil, important priorities and marginal ones became child’s play.
Further enhancing the Cold War’s standing was the disparity between
what we knew about the way it began and what we were able to project
about its likely course and conclusion. Whereas observers fixed the origins
of the conflict with reassuring specificity, its scope and duration appeared
ominously indefinite. We knew (or thought we knew) exactly when and
how the Cold War had come about; we were clueless about when and how
it was going to end.
As one consequence, the past became largely irrelevant. When World
War II ended, history had (apparently) begun anew, thereby endowing the
Cold War with an aura of remarkable singularity: Americans were living
in a time the like of which humankind had never before encountered.
Although events that had occurred prior to 1946 or 1947 might retain a
viii InTroDUCTIon
certain quaint interest, few of them had much to say about the daunting
challenges now facing the nation. Munich, Pearl Harbor, Yalta, and Hi-
roshima were the exceptions that proved the rule: events shorn of histor-
ical context and pressed into service as dark parables teaching universal
truths.
As a second consequence, crisis became a permanent condition. In
Cold War America, urgency, danger, and uncertainty permeated public
discourse. Presidents competed with one another in proclaiming states of
national emergency that seemingly never got revoked. All of this had a
powerful disciplining effect. In 1917, an acerbic Randolph Bourne had ob-
served that “In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of in-
sults.”1 Americans in the decades after World War II embraced an
especially compelling faith; for the great majority of citizens, skepticism
became not simply intolerable but unimaginable.
The essence of that faith, to which all but a handful of marginalized
contrarians devotedly adhered, was contained in twin convictions. Ac-
cording to the first, the United States was a nation under siege, beset by
dire threats, its very survival at risk. According to the second, only the ca-
pacity and willingness to assert all of the instruments of hard power, in-
stantly and without hesitation, could keep America’s enemies at bay.
These two notions describe the essence of the national security para-
digm that has shaped U.S. policy for well over a half-century. From the
late 1940s through the 1980s, responding to the threat posed by interna-
tional communism meant placing a premium on maintaining, threaten-
ing, and at times using force. From this imperative there evolved the
various components of the national security state: a large standing mili-
tary establishment scattered around the world; a vast arsenal of strategic
weapons kept ready for instant employment; intelligence agencies operat-
ing beyond public scrutiny in a “black world”—the entire conglomera-
tion tended by an army of devoted bureaucrats planning, managing,
budgeting, and elevating group-think to a fine art. To lend a veneer of ra-
tionality to the activities of this sprawling apparatus, successive adminis-
trations devised “doctrines” with imposing names. For Harry Truman
there was Containment; for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Massive Retaliation;
for John F. Kennedy, Flexible Response. With anxious citizens looking to
the commander-in-chief to keep them safe, presidents accrued—and
exercised—an ever-expanding array of prerogatives. In the process, the
legislative branch by-and-large functioned as an enabler and drifted to-
ward irrelevance.
InTroDUCTIon ix
With the Congress deferential if not altogether supine on matters re-
lated to national security, politics centered increasingly on the question of
who controlled the Oval Office. More often than not, the key to winning
the White House lay in scare-mongering, successful candidates from
Eisenhower onward letting it be known that in a “dangerous world” elect-
ing their opponent was to invite the barbarians through the gates or risk
the cataclysm of World War III.
Although the social and cultural upheaval associated with the 1960s,
reinforced by the disaster of Vietnam, briefly opened up a window for
skepticism, the overriding requirements of national security soon slammed
that window shut. Americans today remember the Sixties as an era of pro-
found and enduring change. When it came to national security policy,
however, the impact proved to be ephemeral and insignificant.
Within a half-decade after the fall of Saigon, orthodoxy had reasserted it-
self: with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, America was once
again “standing tall.” In the context of domestic politics, the phrase “Jimmy
Carter” took its place alongside “Munich” and “Yalta,” warning of the fate
certain to befall any politician insufficiently alive to the imperative of basing
U.S. policy on vigilance, assertiveness, and unassailable military superiority.
The Cold War did eventually end. As far as the cult of national security
was concerned, this ostensibly monumental development hardly mattered:
our security preoccupations survived the passing of the Soviet Union intact.
The symbiotic relationship between the national security state and the im-
perial presidency endured into the 1990s. As the various alarms of that de-
cade demonstrated, even after the collapse of communism—even when
history itself had “ended”—the drumbeat of ongoing crisis continued.
The aura of insecurity that had enveloped Cold War America per-
sisted—as did the habits, routines, and practices that had evolved over the
previous half-century. In Panama and the Persian Gulf, in Somalia and
Haiti, in the Balkans and the Taiwan Straits, George H. W. Bush and Bill
Clinton acted in accordance with the dictates of the established national
security paradigm. In doing so, and by no means incidentally, they sus-
tained the freedom of presidential action that had evolved during the
postwar era. If Truman could order U.S. forces into Korea, Eisenhower
could overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala, and Kennedy
could decide for or against nuclear war in October 1962, then surely
there could be no objection to Clinton bombing Belgrade or Baghdad.
In this sense, George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 did not mark some radi-
cal departure from the past. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors,