Undeterred generals
Christopher Hitchens
Washington The United States is a country with very few taboos. You can telephone the Pentagon, on a Sunday morning, with a request for information and a courteous of- ficer will call you back. I once asked quite a senior general, for the record, to define for me the word 'prevail'. That year's annual Defence Department report had stated that America would prevail in a nuclear conflict, and this stated intention seemed to sit badly with the view that there can be no winners, and the view that nuclear weapons are for deterrent purposes alone. 'Well,' said the general after we had gone at this from several angles and preserved a wholesome spirit of give and take, 'I guess you could say that we deter by prevailing. But I'd rather say that we prevailed by deterring.' Of course he would and of course the point here is that the term 'deterrence' has become void of meaning. But behind all the frank and candid talk that to the surprise of visiting British observers you can get from military men, there is another problem altogether. It is not exactly a taboo but it is very seldom discussed. The problem is the increasing politicisation of the American military.
Ever since Harry Truman bluntly remind- ed General Douglas MacArthur that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, it has been assumed that the brass more or less know their place. There were a few cases in Vietnam where com- manders exceeded their orders, but these examples usually turned out to involve col- lusion with the civil power and thus raised no direct constitutional issue. In the last few weeks, however, senior officers have been talking more and more like legislators, and have forced even Caspar Weinberger to issue some new orders of the day.
On 21 June, Lieutenant-General Bernard E. Trainor, Deputy Chief of Staff in the United States Marines, addressed a forum at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He expressed himself forcefully if illogically by saying that a limited war with the Soviet Union in this generation is 'an almost inevitable prob- ability'. The general added that 'the world better get the perception that we bested them, because the fight will be on our turf.' By 'our turf' Trainor meant the high seas, which have increasingly been infested with Russians. The United States, which he described as 'an island power', could not be expected to stand idly by, and so forth.
A day or so later, Vice-Admiral James ('Ace') Lyons, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, took the argument a step fur- ther. He denounced the War Powers Act, which gives Congress a certain authority over the military, as 'insidious' and as an 'impediment' in need of removal. Like many officers of his type, the admiral warn- ed against 'intellectual corruption'. He went on to express the view that the Shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua should not have been abandoned to their respective fates.
At the same forum, one senior Marines officer (this one too modest to give his name) said that he hoped the Cubans would soon offer a pretext for American military intervention. And the Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman, ended a very fluent speech with the statement, both obvious and ominous, that 'who gets to shoot first will have more to do with who wins than any other factor.'
So sulphurous was the talk at this gather- ing that Ronald Reagan was forced to disown at least some of it. Of General Trainor's prediction he said: 'I think one of the most dangerous things in this world is for anyone to get in their — fixed in their mind — the inevitability theory. Because then that very thing being on their minds can bring about that.' A few days later Caspar Weinberger issued a letter to the Joint Chiefs, in which he took a more feline position. Intemperate public statements, he said, especially statements from soldiers about the legislative process, would under- mine the goodwill needed to vote the in- crease in the defence budget. This hardly counted as a rebuke on principle and did not really meet the objections of Senator Robert Byrd of Virginia, the Senate minori- ty leader, who described the speeches of 'Ace' Lyons and others as outrageous and recommended that he and his co-thinkers should doff their uniforms 'and run for office as politicians'.
Weinberger's cautious advice seems to have made very little difference. It was followed almost immediately by a grape- shot speech from General Paul F. Gorman, Commander of United States Forces in Latin America. In an address to the American Chamber of Commerce in El Salvador, the general denounced those Americans who would not see the threat posed by Nicaragua, quoted freely from Alexander Solzhenitsyn about the menace of communism, and called upon Salvado-
'I've become a Rastafarian.'
reans to raise 'a wall of resolve' against Bolshevism. His comments came in the week when Washington was convulsed with embarrassment by the visit of Roberto D'Aubuisson, who has succeeded in raising a wall of quite another type.
After all this, it came as no surprise when Newsweek published the results of a poll of American generals. Of the nearly 300 who were questioned, 97 per cent expressed enthusiastic support for Ronald Reagan, and 70 per cent made strongly disparaging noises about Walter Mondale. This isn't necessarily to be dismissed as mere bluster in the mess — in 1980 the Reagan campaign team was approached by General Richard Ellis, head of the Strategic Air Command, who said that he desired 'to blow Jimmy Carter out of the water'. The fact that so many of his fellow Americans felt the same way doesn't alter the fact that General Ellis takes his oath of allegiance, to the constitu- tion and the President.
There isn't much mystery about the mood of the American officer corps. It believes, in a slightly tepid version of the old 'stab in the back' theory, that it could have won the war in Vietnam if politicians and the media had not tied its hands. It would like to wipe out the humiliation of the failed desert mission in Iran. It would in short like to win one soon. The hysterical self-congratulation which accompanied the invasion of Grenada would have been more appropriate to a serious triumph. It was revealed recently that no fewer than 9,754 medals were awarded by the army for action on the island (compared to 679 awarded by the British in the Falklands campaign). The Pentagon defended this largesse by saying that it was necessary for morale and for building up the 'can do' spirit so necessary for the revival of American power.
Sabre-rattling is not a new thing among American soldiers, but the Cold War, and America's recent reverses in the course of it, have made the rattling more explicitly ideological. Given also that modern war re- quires extremely swift reaction times, and gives very little opportunity for cabinet- level reflection, the mentality of the soldiery is more important than it was at the time of Pearl Harbour. In this reply to Edward Thompson at the Oxford Union, Caspar Weinberger argued, correctly, that the American system allowed the citizens to end a war if they no longer felt it justified. The Secretary would have been on weaker ground if he had claimed that there was any popular say in whether wars got started. As Reagan himself put it, a first strike mentali- ty can, in today's conditions, actually lead to a first strike. He went on to spoil his argument by saying that, if America had possessed a deterrent force, Pearl Harbour would never have happened. As most peo- ple remember it, Pearl Harbour was a pre- emptive strike on the Pacific Fleet — the American deterrent force. 'Prevailing' and 'deterring' involve fine distinctions at the best of times: it would be relaxing to think that the Joint Chiefs of Staff understood that there was any distinction at all.
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