The task of thinking through the implications of national security objectives
for military force structure is a tremendously complex and necessarily a
continuing one. This review of the current budget has been able to deal with
only the most urgent and obvious problems. Existing analyses on some of the
central issues of general nuclear war made it possible to penetrate most
deeply into this area. However, here, as with limited war, much more study
is required, and will be undertaken as a matter of urgency before the FY 1963 budget is presented.
My recommendations relating to the expansion or contraction of our domestic
and foreign bases and installations are not included in this paper. A
separate report on this subject will be submitted approximately March
1.3 I believe
the report will indicate that such action as might be taken in FY 1962 to terminate operations at unneeded
facilities will have little effect on FY 1962
expenditures, although the savings which would result in future years may be
substantial.
Attachment5
MEMORANDUM ON REVIEW OF FY
1961 AND FY 1962 MILITARY PROGRAMS AND
BUDGETS
Summary of Proposed Changes
The proposed changes in the FY 1961 and
FY 1962 military budgets are
summarized below in the conventional budget categories.
The Eisenhower FY 1961 and
FY 1962 Budgets
and the Proposed
Changes
(New Obligational Authority in Millions of Dollars)
|
Present
FY 1961 |
FY
1962 |
Proposed Changes
FY 1961 |
FY
1962 |
| Personnel |
11,855 |
12,266 |
— |
+66 |
| O&M |
10,714 |
10,842 |
— |
+270 |
| Procurement |
13,453 |
13,378 |
— |
+1,186 |
| RDT&E |
4,261 |
4,349 |
— |
+433 |
| Construction |
995 |
985 |
— |
+53 |
| Revolving Funds |
30 |
20 |
— |
— |
| Total |
41,308 |
41,840 |
— |
+2,008 |
We estimate that these changes alone, without taking into account action
already taken to accelerate expenditures within the limits of existing
obligational authority, would increase defense expenditures during
FY 1961 by $60 million and during
FY 1962 by $740 million.
The proposed net additions to the budgets can be restated in the three
major categories reflecting the task force studies:
- (1)
- Resources going into forces whose mission is primarily
associated with general nuclear war;
- (2)
- Resources going into forces whose mission would primarily be
limited war; and,
- (3)
- Resources going to research and development not included in
(1) and (2) above.
Proposed Net Changes
|
Proposed Net Changes |
|
|
FY
1961 |
FY
1962 |
| Strategic and Continental Air Defense |
— |
1,088 |
| Limited War |
— |
806 |
| Research & Development, not included above |
— |
114 |
| Total |
— |
2,008 |
[Page 37]
Detailed proposals are explained in the attachments under these three
headings.
National Security Objectives
Our review of the defense budget has focused on the adequacy of our
present and planned military forces to accomplish major national
security objectives. Task Forces were appointed in the areas of
Strategic and Continental Air Defense, Limited War, and Research and
Development to carry out this review and to examine the need for
additional forces in each of these areas.
The following are the national security objectives in terms of which we
believe the adequacy of our defenses should be examined:
Deter Deliberate Attack
We must deter deliberate nuclear attack on the United States and our
major allies by making it clear to potential enemies that, in all
circumstances, such an attack would result in unacceptable losses to the
attacker. This deterrence depends critically upon our ability to strike
back after a direct Soviet attack designed to destroy our retaliatory
forces. It does not depend upon a pre-attack comparison of numbers of
missiles, or of forces in general, except in a most indirect way. We
must have survivable retaliatory power.
The reality of our power to strike back must be clear to the Communists,
to our allies, and to ourselves. The success of our deterrent should not
depend merely upon enemy caution in the face of uncertainties about our
retaliatory power. Such a dependence upon uncertainties could undermine
our resolve in time of crisis, and is dangerous because enemy leaders
may not be cautious.
Stability and Safety
Also of great concern, and perhaps more likely, is the chance that war
could come in an irrational or unpremeditated fashion—possibly by the
mistaken triggering of alert forces, by miscalculation by one side of
the opponent’s intentions, by irrational or pathological actions by
individuals, by spread and escalation of local wars, or by nuclear
attack by a minor power.
Our posture should be designed to avoid these dangers. This can be done
(1) by reducing the probability that individual triggering incidents can
occur, and (2) even more important, by reducing the probability that
such incidents would lead to war. Decisions, not incidents, cause war.
For this reason also we must avoid exposed strategic systems that depend
for their survival on quick decisions that might have to be made in
ambiguous circumstances.
We are therefore taking steps to reduce the dependence of our retaliatory
power on quick decisions. We want to reassure our allies and our
[Page 38]
enemies that we do not need to
act hastily or preemptively in order to be able to retaliate. We must
not be forced in a crisis to take “crash” actions for the protection of
our forces that might be interpreted as evidence of impending
attack.
Improved War Outcome
The conduct and outcome of a big nuclear war is worth caring about, more
than any war in history. The success of deterrence cannot be guaranteed.
If nuclear war comes and is unlimited and uncontrolled, it would be
suicidal. We must do what we can to prevent this disaster, to improve
the war’s outcome, to terminate it under favorable military conditions,
and to limit damage to our allies and ourselves.
One of the most effective ways of limiting damage to this country if
nuclear war comes, although admittedly we cannot place great confidence
in it, is for us to use our nuclear force in a careful and
discriminating way. This may be a necessary condition for inducing the
enemy not to attack our civil society in wholesale fashion.
But for this strategy to be feasible, our forces must be well protected
not only against a sudden attack, but also against re-attack. A long
wartime endurance capability is necessary if we are to use our forces
with deliberation and discrimination. In short, our nuclear forces must
be controllable not only in peacetime, but in war. This means making the
command and control of our forces so well protected that we can maintain
responsiveness to Presidential authority.
Beyond this, we require a combination of active air defense, civil
defense, and the ability to attack vulnerable parts of the enemy’s
military forces. The best balance among these at any particular time
will of course depend on the costs and effectiveness of each in the
light of choices made by the Sino-Soviet Bloc. We should maintain broad
flexibility to shift the emphasis of our strategy as conditions
change.
Reassure and Protect Major
Allies
If we provide strategic capabilities that meet all the above objectives,
we shall satisfy an essential prerequisite for successful local defense
and diplomacy elsewhere in the world. In the case of our NATO allies, we must have a strategy for
their protection in which they can have confidence. Our common strategy
must be one which is clearly in their interest as well as ours. The U.S.
must maintain substantial forces in Europe; we must also persuade our
allies of their responsibility to increase their own forces. Moreover,
an increased emphasis should be placed on non-nuclear capabilities.
Reassure and Protect the Rest of the
Free World
In most other areas of the world, the main burden of local defense
against overt attack must be borne by indigenous forces, reinforced by
[Page 39]
strong highly mobile U.S.
forces, some of which must be deployed in forward areas. This means
having a substantial airlift and sealift capacity and prestocked
overseas bases. The main responsibility against subversion and guerrilla
warfare must rest on indigenous populations and forces, but given the
great likelihood and seriousness of this threat, we must be prepared to
make a substantial contribution in the form of forces trained in this
type of warfare.
A Broadly Flexible Posture
While it is implicit in the above objectives, a broadly flexible posture
that can serve us well in a wide range of contingencies deserves so much
emphasis as to be listed as a separate objective. We are not required to
make many decisions in the face of major uncertainties about future
enemy objectives and capabilities and about our own. These factors
interact to compound the uncertainty. In these circumstances, it is
essential that we adopt an insurance philosophy and hedge against
uncertainty by buying alternative future options for our military
capabilities. We must procure “lead time” reduction, making decisions
now to buy particular kinds of productive capability that we may never
use. We must start development programs in the full realization that,
because of changed and unforeseen circumstances, some may not be needed
by the time they are completed. We must try to design our posture so
that its effectiveness will not be seriously degraded by changes in
objectives or circumstances. Our recommended changes in the budget
reflect this philosophy.
Major Weaknesses in Existing Posture
(1) Strategic and Continental Air
Defense
In our review of the currently planned posture for general war, we have
found major vulnerabilities or deficiencies in the following areas:
Command and Control of Forces
The chain of command from the President down to our strategic offensive
and defensive weapon systems is highly vulnerable in almost every link.
The destruction of about a dozen sites, most of which are soft, none of
which is adequately hardened, would deprive U.S. forces of all
high-level command and control. Moreover, the communications connecting
the various headquarters with each other and with the forces are soft,
concentrated, and highly vulnerable to missile attack.
Without the survival of at least some of these sites (including the one
containing the President, his successor, or designated replacement) with
their communications, there can be no authorized response in the event
of a nuclear attack on the U.S. Moreover, destruction of these sites
would deprive our forces of essential orders for self-protection and for
subsequent
[Page 40]
conduct of the war,
as well as the order to execute retaliatory action. We should not count
on the enemy being deterred by the belief that some of our forces may
attack without authorization in the event our control is knocked out.
Moreover, the vulnerability of the U.S. high-level command undermines
the positive control system, making our forces both more accident prone
and less likely to respond when they should.
The programs we propose now are intended to provide simultaneously for
engineering development and an interim capability for survivable command
and control of forces. We intend in the future to emphasize the
development of command and control systems with greater endurance and
flexibility under conditions of thermonuclear attack.
However, these programs do not provide a high-confidence solution to the
problem of the survival of the President (or his successor or designated
replacement) in the face of a surprise missile attack. This problem
requires the urgent attention of the President and the National Security
Council.
The Bomber Force
Today our strategic deterrence is almost totally dependent on our bomber
force. This force is soft and concentrated on about 60 bases. Its
current mode of protection is warning and alert response. About
one-third of the bomber force is kept on a 15-minute ground alert. The
two-thirds of the bombers which are not on alert are completely
unprotected, except in periods of tension, or after strategic warning
has been received. However, both the programmed warning systems and the
decision-making part of the alert response are unreliable. Moreover,
this posture contributes to the kind of instability which it is one of
our objectives to avoid.
Active Bomber and Missile
Defenses
The U.S. anti-bomber defense system is highly vulnerable to ballistic
missile attack. Its control is centralized in a few soft vulnerable
SAGE centers, without which the
operation of the system would be seriously degraded. The BOMARC missile is completely, and the
interceptors are almost completely, dependent on SAGE. The destruction of the SAGE centers would give enemy bombers
essentially a free ride over the U.S. to the hardened ICBM sites. This would make it possible
for the enemy to destroy U.S. hardened ICBM’s with bombers when it cannot do so with missiles (if
the bombers arrive prior to the launching of the U.S. missiles).
Over the next few years we intend to reorient the anti-bomber component
of the air defense system. Changing circumstances will make the massive
bomber attack a less likely and less important threat than before.
Nevertheless, we do believe that we must continue to possess a defense
against attack by small numbers of bombers.
[Page 41]
We do not now have, nor can we have until the late 1960’s, if then, an
effective active defense against ballistic missiles. This is a serious
and undesirable deficiency. Moreover, the cost of the Nike-Zeus system,
the only system we can now expect to be able to deploy before 1970,
appears to be very high. A 70 battery program, which would protect about
40% of our population, would cost, all told, about $14 billion, possibly
more. Further, it is far from clear that the system would be effective
during the period when it could be operational, the late 1960’s.
Therefore, we are recommending only a small expenditure on long lead
time production items in order to buy about a year during which to
reconsider this difficult problem.
However, our civil society does not need to be completely defenseless
against missile attack. In some circumstances we could drastically
reduce the casualties we would suffer in a thermonuclear war by a civil
defense program. Although protecting people in cities from the direct
blast, thermal and radiation effects would be extremely expensive and
uncertain in outcome, it may be neither in our interest nor the enemy’s
to engage in wholesale city attack. And protection against fallout,
which could cause most of the casualties, does appear feasible. While
civil defense is not a Defense Department responsibility, the success of
many of our programs depends on some expansion in civil defense.
Missile Reliability
The reliability of the U.S. strategic missile systems under operational
conditions is uncertain and may be less than anticipated. There has been
no systematic approach to a determination of missile reliability.
Additional test firings are required for both the determination and
improvement of missile system operational reliability.
Protected Missiles
The retaliatory power of the United States is now very dependent on soft
or poorly protected bombers and missiles and will remain so for the next
year or two. It is very important that we bring this period to an end as
soon as possible. Therefore, we are recommending acceleration of the
Polaris program and authorization of construction of the industrial base
required to double Minuteman production should this later appear
necessary.
Inflexibility
Perhaps our most fundamental weakness in the strategic area is the lack
of flexibility in our ability to respond. With a vulnerable strategic
force, with the expectation that the tempo of actions in nuclear war
would be incredibly fast, we have been forced into a single strategy for
retaliation. At the present time we have little ability to make
decisions in the event of an attack. Our forces might have to be
committed at a point when little is known of the extent of damage to our
military forces or civil society or the size of force the enemy has
left. The possibilities of a catastrophic
[Page 42]
mistake loom large. Our response would be a reflex
action varying in scale only as determined by the size of our surviving
force. We must move as rapidly as possible not only to create the
survivable forces and control systems necessary to give us a range of
choice, but also to develop strategies at the highest level for a wide
range of general war contingencies.
(2) Forces for Limited War
The analysis of our capabilities for limited war reveals weaknesses in
the following areas:
Over-emphasis on General War in
Tactical Forces
Our forces designed to fight overseas, those we would call on to fight in
limited conflict, are, in fact, strongly oriented in their war plans,
current capabilities, materiel procurement, and research and
development, towards general nuclear war. This is at the expense of
their ability to wage limited and especially non-nuclear war. Yet
because of their vulnerability these forces make only a modest
contribution to the deterrence of general nuclear war. And survival
abroad depends even more on fast and therefore risky decisions than
survival of forces in the U.S. The problems of stability with our
strategic forces discussed above are even more acute with nuclear forces
overseas. This is not to say that these forces have no contribution to
make to a big nuclear war. They can help. And because some ability to
deliver nuclear weapons from within a local theater could have important
tactical advantages (e.g., timeliness of delivery, choice of targets,
warhead yield) the ability to deliver nuclear weapons with limited war
forces should be retained. However, their major job lies elsewhere and
we should make sharper division of labor between long-range nuclear and
shorter range non-nuclear capabilities.
In concentrating on nuclear war, we have in recent years neglected our
ability to wage non-nuclear war and have severely limited our range of
policy choices. We cannot hope successfully to meet local Communist
aggression at all conceivable points. But we can raise the threshold of
our local non-nuclear defense capability, and reduce our dependence on
nuclear war, a type of warfare which it will increasingly be in our
interest to avoid. In sum, the primary mission of our overseas forces
should be made non-nuclear warfare.
Sub-limited War Capabilities
The free world is faced in some parts of the world with a
political-military threat that our military forces and those we support
are not well designed to combat. We have too little ability to deal with
guerrilla forces, insurrections, subversion. Much of our past effort to
create guerrilla and anti-guerrilla capabilities, and it is a useful
effort, has been aimed at general war. A greater effort in sub-limited
war capabilities oriented
[Page 43]
towards Southeast Asia, the Mid-East, Africa and Latin America is
needed.
Research and Development
We are doing too little research and development on non-nuclear weapons.
The favored subjects: strategic systems, air defense, space, have
received an overwhelming proportion of our research effort. However,
technology promises great improvements in non-nuclear armaments as well,
and it is important to be in the forefront of these developments.
Accordingly, a substantial increase in this kind of research and
development is recommended.
Transporting and Supporting Forces
Abroad
Our capacity to move forces in sizeable numbers on short notice and to be
able to support them is too small. The timely arrival of a modest U.S.
and Allied force to crisis areas could avoid the need for a much larger
commitment later. More sea and air transport is needed, but transport is
not enough. The prestocking of heavy matériel and fuel and the
availability of bases abroad is equally important and a greater effort
is recommended. Although some of the bases used by our strategic force
have lost most of their former value for general war, we and our Allies
will remain critically dependent on overseas bases for limited war, and
in some regions (Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa), more may be
needed.
Training and Readiness
Many of our limited war forces are inadequately trained for non-nuclear
war. We need more large scale deployment exercises for all Services, but
especially joint Army-Air Force training in limited war operations.
Matériel
Our principal deficiencies in materiel for limited war also stem from
focusing on nuclear capabilities. Most of the equipment is nominally
designed for dual nuclear and non-nuclear war but in many instances the
non-nuclear capabilities are small. This is notably true with our
tactical aircraft. In addition, some important new advances in
ammunition and bombs need much more vigorous development and
procurement. Here we can make a sizeable qualitative jump in our limited
war capabilities.
In general our recommendations are directed toward removal of current
dangerous inflexibilities and vulnerabilities in our posture. It is
imperative that adequate strategic retaliatory power be made secure.
Beyond this indispensable requirement, we seek a responsible, controlled
power of selective response that can appropriately meet a wide range of
possible threats. The recommended improvements will permit us to lessen
greatly our dangerous dependence upon blunt and indiscriminate
[Page 44]
nuclear responses to attacks
directed either against the United States or our Allies.
