McGoverning
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John Farson
Banned
Oh god, and Ted is his Robin... holy nattering nabobs.
That's the thing: even if McGovern succeeds in 1976, there's still 1980 after that, and who knows what sorts of events foreign and domestic will occur that will affect that race and the eventual Democratic nominee. Even if McGovern himself happens to have approval ratings of 50+% at that time, that does not necessarily transfer to his would-be successor, as real-life has shown.
It's a two-party system, to quote Kang and Kodos, and for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction, to quote Newton. We have already seen the backlash to the civil rights legislation of the 50s and 60s, and Nixon's conviction threatens to become a cause célèbre - among several others, like Roe v. Wade - for the American right and far right that may very well expedite the process of political polarization that we have witnessed these past decades, so that the 80s may come to resemble OTL's 90s, which itself was a harbinger for things to come. It all depends on how long the Democrats can continue to hold Congress, especially the House.
True, but it does depend on the level of appeal. OTL, I would say that the Overton Window going to the right as it did was because of the economic situation. Thatcher and Reagan had been given undeserved credit for the economic recovery of the 1980s. This attribution of success to them gave them alot of validation for other socio-economic aspects that would be seen over in the culture wars.
I imagine the differing economic situations and so on would put a big wrench in that, especially since the 1980s are a very prominent pivot point. Where alot of the old guard begins to die out or retire and the boomers begin ascending to power with whatever beliefs and thoughts they come to accept as valid.
I like several of the allusions here, and want to draw attention to the "trial of the old regime" element. There's definitely a direct element of that to the prosecution of the Nixon crew, and I'd say that it's more true that McGovernment's supporters and followers - the political interests in the broader American national community who were most excited about a McGovern candidacy and McGovern presidency - who are most likely to embrace the notion that this puts a bad system on trial.
For a number of key McGoverners themselves - who include George Himself - they prefer to understand the legal-political process of bringing Nixon to book as a reassertion of first principles and old virtues. It's been true probably since Hammurabi that systemic reformers often like to dress those systemic reforms in forms and language that suggests that change is instead a restoration of historic values and ideals. Before the French come along and really go wild with the concept, in 18th century English "revolution" - the term the colonists in British North America use for their revolt - referred to a reset back to the original operating system, if you will, a triumph of recovered virtue over authoritarian decay. (Also that was shifty and self-congratulatory as all hell for the well-read profiteers of plantation slavery - New England very much included - who launched the revolt, but that's another discussion for another time.)
That's part of how, as well as why, the McGoverners get hung up on the possibilities tied to the obstruction charge. Nixon broke not only the law but the rule of law itself, and here we got him to admit his guilt in court! It seems, to those McGoverners, like a vindication of the ideals they want to uphold, that they want to take in new directions (like for example, "maybe our historic embrace of government by the people should include women and people of color, on a really good day perhaps even queer folk?")
It's hard now, fifty years out, and with realities like the Red Scare and the bloody-handed ideological warfare of the Sixties involved, either to recall or to understand that some folks involved at high levels in American politics and administrative governance genuinely had a soft spot for an idealized understanding of the "official version" that the US had a dented-but-unbowed history of constitutional liberalism that leaned over time towards the left hand of that liberalism. But some did, and there was a high - or at least highly strategic - concentration of them around the McGovern movement and the "McGovern moment," turned up to eleven here by the fact that they actually won in '72.
It's their blind spot, of course. It would indeed make more of an impression if you dragged the evidence of every sorry RICO misdeed by the Nixon crew through the courts, much as the encyclopedically detailed transcriptions of the Oval Office tapes IOTL wore away at Nixon's carefully crafted public image. But the McGoverners are fueled by the principle of the thing - sometimes principles obscure the contours of reality, something McGovernment has ample opportunity to learn.
I'm sure he'll slither out from under a rotting tree trunk at some point; though he was lower on the Nixonian food chain in those days he is ever on the make.
What you did there. It was seen. (And some of us saw that in the theatre, btw.)
McGoverning Bonus Content: The McGovern Defense, People and Process
President George McGovern briefed by the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer, during the withdrawal
of US forces from South Vietnam in early February 1973
This post starts a limited-run Bonus Content series on a topic that's not necessarily the first we'd think of when it comes to McGovernment: defense and national-security policy. (Hopeful that, along the way in coming months without compromising the Drive For Narrative, there will also be Another Big Damn Health Care Explainer, perhaps also a couple of entries on energy policy at some point down the line. For my own personal joy, when we get to the end-of-December holidays, there might be a single Bonus Content post conjointly aimed at avgeeks and railfans. But we'll start here because there's a backlog of useful stuff in the Scrivener files and Google Docs.)
On one hand, defense/natsec issues definitely were not a field of policy where George Himself, along with some other senior McGoverners, even more so the demographics among the American public who cheered wildly when George won the day in November 1972, wanted to focus their efforts and time. But one of George's very, very first orders of business after he takes the oath of office is the physical extrication of American servicemen (and a small but growing number of servicewomen) from the least popular and most controversial American war of the 20th century up to that point. Also McGovernment (1) sees root and branch reform of both American geostrategy and the military-industrial complex as a key part of remaking the post-1945 American project and (2) hopes that significant cuts in defense spending will free up budget dollars for the sort of public policies with which McGovernment seeks to rebuild the nation at home - national health care, what I've already termed a total-employment policy, urban rejuvenation, pollution abatement etc.
So what we can reasonably call McGovernment's left wing (even its pragmatic middle) sees the task to reform and resituate the mighty High Cold War national security state as a necessary part of transforming the American state more broadly. Then there are also major geostrategic and policy implementation issues that any presidential administration would face in 1973 with the ink on the Paris Agreements not yet dry. Here we'll do something we haven't yet (commonplace though it is in many a TL) and draw on a Watsonian source (indicated by its different typeface), the McGNU's own version of the handy volume The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1973-76:
Any administration that entered office in 1973 would have faced a host of major national security issues and challenges: about the United States’ global presence and strategy after withdrawal from Southeast Asia; about the scope and future of detente; transitioning to a volunteer military; budgetary issues tied to the debate over whether to expand or constrain force levels and modernization after Vietnam; how many and what sort of wars the military should be equipped to fight; the growing strategic importance of the Middle East; and so on.
The McGovern administration entered office attached to political desires and concrete policy goals that marked a sharp, even divisively dramatic, break with American Cold War conventional wisdom up to that point. Distrustful of the military-industrial complex and of geopolitical overstretch, “McGovernment” sought fiscal constraints that would sharply reduce defense spending, programmatic and structural reforms for a leaner and more efficient military, dramatic forward progress on arms control, lessened foreign military sales, and force drawdowns on America’s overseas military establishments in Europe and the Pacific Rim. On one hand, the administration sought to mobilize Congressional retrenchment against expensive overseas power projection, along with public suspicion of military and intelligence overreach. On the other hand, the unexpected electoral success of “McGovernment” was politically tenuous, a vocal minority in its own political party, dependent on relations with a political system that sought on many fronts to constrain its ambitions.
That's a fair summing up. Note especially that last sentence which we could stress more often in even more fields of politics and policy: Our Brave Heroes have to deal with the fact that, although they control the Executive Branch as a faction within the party that's held the presidency (up through 1976) all but twelve years since 1933, within the bigger ideological/factional ecosystem of The Beltway they're a minority force, who have to figure out how to govern anyway.
We can, though, discern three processes/characteristics to do with policy development and implementation here, on these issues, that are entirely in common with McGovernment policymaking on pretty much any and every issues. They are
- McGoverners have to haggle out the granular details of the policy they intend to pursue
- That often involves debates between McGoverners who follow competing logic chains about best process/outcomes (remember that economic compare/contrast on Jim Gavin and Les Thurow, for example), also between Reformers fully committed to the McGovernite project and Regulars brought into the administration for their political/administrative experience
- There's a surprisingly wide range of policy possibilities in the tumultuous, unsettled early-to-mid Seventies (true of many different fields of policy) a lot of fascinating concepts that got an airing - they largely died on the vine IOTL as grimly small-c conservative presidential administrations trudged through the Era of Limits, but here in the McGNU with an activist left-liberal/social democratic administration determined to Change Things, there's much more opportunity for those options to get a more detailed airing, and for the pursuit of some of them
- Then there's what happens when the policy plan makes contact with (1) institutional Executive Branch interests, (2) Congress, plus (3) the very populations and institutions the policy/ies affect
All righty. Seated comfortably? Let's light this candle.
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Two parts to this post (well, three really, but two from here on out.) Just as the threadmark says. Ya got yer people - can't tell the players without a scorecard - ya got yer processes/structures, at least a few of the really key ones. Some - many - of the working bits key to the larger story. We'll start at the top and work our way towards a very specific subset of Permanent Washington, aka the uniforms.
First Principals: George and the Big Four
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
This starts at the top, as one does with any administration especially after the False Sun rose at Trinity and ushered in the nuclear age. Any given president, per the various provisions in Article II of the Constitution, is both the Commander in Chief of all US federalized military and military-adjacent forces, and the Chief Executive with direct oversight and ultimate managerial control over the biggest baddest department-of-departments in the whole DC bureaucracy, the Department of Defense. Let's dip back into that "primary source" for a bit more (NB: the Watsonian voice of this specific source tends to favor the institution involved, and its caretakers, relative to johnny-come-lately politicians of all descriptions, though you get between-the-lines plaudits if you feed and tend the institution in the manner to which it's become accustomed.)
The scope and scale of change ushered in by President George McGovern’s inauguration started with the chief executive himself. McGovern had won his party’s nomination for the presidency as its most consistent, dogged, and often strident opponent of the war in Southeast Asia, the politician most determined to end America’s role in that conflict by any means necessary. President McGovern’s relationships with both the uniformed services and the broader national-security community thus began on pointed terms that accentuated, rather than muted, existing internal divides. Yet, by an irony of timing, McGovern inherited the freshly-inked Paris Accords as a means to his end in Southeast Asia. In the longer term, national security policy during his tenure was shaped more by the broader, more enduring elements of McGovern’s ideology and character.
A professional historian by training, McGovern was a well-read, engaged, and frequently iconoclastic student of foreign policy, with a natural facility to think in terms of grand strategy. By the time he reached the presidency, McGovern’s views were a blend of his perspective on what he saw as conventional Cold War policy’s indicative failure – America’s intervention in Southeast Asia – attention to the ideas of other reformist critics in the public conversation about foreign policy, and a mixture of older Progressive and Wilsonian influences from his youth.
President McGovern’s role in his administration’s defense policy, and his relationship with defense policy’s principal actors, could be described as dialectical – a process of understanding the tensions and ties between contrasts. Even among career uniformed and civilian officials who might dislike or distrust McGovern’s policy objectives, he was noted for his calm modesty, his personal decency, and his thoughtful personal relationships with key figures. Even McGovern’s frequent policy opponent, his first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Tom Moorer, believed that McGovern had the most courteous and respectful personal relations with chiefs of the uniformed services of any president since Eisenhower. Though McGovern devoted much – most – of his time, with the exception of arms control, to non-military foreign policy and domestic issues, he was a quick and intensive study when given specific subjects to manage and reliably gave all his contrasting advisers a hearing.
McGovern’s personality and methods came with complexities and complications, too. His habit of listening carefully to all principal sources of advice sometimes left those principals confused as to what position McGovern himself supported. When not personally invested in a subject or situation, McGovern tended to let his principals get on with their work, which avoided micromanagement but sometimes left his deputies at sea as to how intra- or interdepartmental conflict would be resolved. On rare occasions, McGovern took quite the opposite approach and seized the reins of the policy process directly, a jarring contrast to the more frequent laissez-faire. Some quite granular matters, including the fate of specific serving officers involved in hot-button matters, rested ultimately on McGovern’s moral compass, more than on a considered view of the situation’s role in a broader strategic or policy landscape.
To be fair, given the Watsonian pov, that's not an unfair assessment. Especially the last paragraph, which is one to keep in mind across the whole ambit of foreign/natsec and also domestic policy. It's a natural Watsonian extension of the Doylist data we have from OTL's 1972 presidential campaign, among other things. In the interest of time we'll move on to the "Big Four" of McGovern's relatively small, relatively tight-knit natsec/defense policy leadership. Or, at least, three of them - we'll come around to the fourth when we get "inside the Building" over at the Pentagon.
The linchpin
The central figure in the whole foreign/natsec/geostrategic policy sphere for the McGovern administration is Paul Warnke. He'd been George's senior adviser on such issues during the campaign; they have a strong personal relationship, plus for George that essential trust in Warnke's loyalty, that makes an especially tight and also untypical bond for the notoriously private, inward-facing President McGovern. Really George wanted to make Warnke Secretary of Defense, an idea for which Warnke's law-firm partner and political patron Clark Clifford had a sentimental fondness also. But George's powerhouse transition team (FRANK! Mankiewicz, Clifford, Larry O'Brien, and Ted Sorensen) believed the GREAT GOD STROMs and Scoop Jacksons and such would eat Warnke alive in confirmation, so Warnke became George's National Security Adviser instead purely by presidential appointment. Is that a relationship not totally removed from The Dick and Henry Show? Not totally removed, but also it's different because of - just no other way to say it - the specific character of the people involved. Warnke's a bulldog, sure of himself just to the envelope's edge of arrogance, and relishes a good debate. But he also knows how to get on with people and values a collegial model of decision-making, in line with George's desire to hear from all of his folks as he (George) weighs the choices. No kitchen-cabinet diplomacy here. On the other hand, George and Paul Warnke share a great many perspectives and opinions, and George values Warnke's knowledge and judgment on natsec issues much as Warnke does likewise with George on "soft power" diplomacy and geostrategy. It's a central and largely productive partnership, but also one where Warnke has that extra bit of pull with George over and above other players in the process. Also Warnke has a small but vibrant "shop" in the West Wing: his National Security Council staff who are an extraordinarily distinguished and talented bunch from among the possible hires who'd share at least a broadly McGovernite or McGovern-adjacent view of policy.
The lover
SARGE!! Everybody loves Sarge; it's his superpower. You simply should not accept a substitute when it comes to someone who can sit right down with the world's leaders like he's known them from boyhood, gab for hours, and slowly charm them in a direction of idealism and human decency. One of the great Doylist (also Watsonian, really) pleasures of the McGNU is that here Sarge isn't just stuck with the bucket of warm piss, here he gets to do what he's really really good at. That's a net plus for the administration in several ways, not least because Kennedy-fam Sarge is the kind of media magnet that the media yearn for and feel they've been short-changed with since "Mister Magoo," aka President George Stanley McGovern, bushwhacked Nixon. Everyone wants to see Sarge and Eunice at Stade Roland Garros in Paris while Sarge checks in on the Rambouillet Talks, wants to see him pop on a beaver hat and tramp around Red Square with rosy winter-touched cheeks, etc., etc. It can even - and Sarge himself is quite good at this part - be good cover, that distracts the press from whatever serious foreign-policy work is actually going on. Through the magnitude of his sheer effervescent Sargeness, he's able to make himself a very significant wise-man figure in the administration's debates about defense and national-security policy. He has a boldness about him too - when he sees what he thinks is a way forward he'll preach it and lean in to make it happen. Also he carries a vigorous and robust brief for Foggy Bottom in shaping those debates, that process of integrating what are often military or at least intelligence issues into an actual broader geostrategic framework (more on that in a bit.)
The fighter
The third of these three, Director of Central Intelligence Pete McCloskey, is a little farther outside the inner sanctum where Paul Warnke has a comfortable chair and Secretary of State Shriver at least a Sarge-sized foot in the door. Nevertheless, McCloskey is a central figure for a few reasons. First, because he has a remarkably important job in his own right (to which good chunks of a coming chapter will be devoted), namely cleaning the stables in the US intelligence community at the end of a quarter-century of ever-increasing excess and not-infrequent criminality, without either being torched by bitter-enders or collapsing the institutions entirely. That would be enough to occupy anyone's time, but on top of it he's a central figure in the intelligence-gathering entwined with the arms control process, and with a growing US intelligence footprint in the Middle East. As pugnacious as he is thoughtful (and the ex-boxer is both), McCloskey's tough enough for the stable-cleaning job, question is whether anything might get in the way of that. McCloskey also belongs to a very interesting subset of McGoverners: like others of this specific subset, McCloskey doesn't object to the use of military force as a tool of American grand strategy - but it needs to be a tool of an actual grand strategy, a means to a well-conceived end, not a substitute for such strategy as it so often is in the American policy experience, because that (per McCloskey) is the kind of bullshit that's done such grievous damage both to the actual US military and to the American national fabric through the rotten imperial war in Southeast Asia.
On Seeing the Elephant
One of the crowning ironies of the McGovern administration, pilloried by its enemies as a bunch of weak-kneed pinko pacifists, is that the McGovern administration's senior leadership, especially on natsec matters, has more collective combat experience than any OTL administration of the 20th century, even OTL!Reagan's. George Himself of course flew a few dozen combat missions as a B-24 pilot. Vice President Phil Hart (WE LOVE YOU SO DAMN MUCH PHIL) nearly lost the use of an arm to a German sniper fighting on the Normandy beaches, then recovered and returned to the fight in the spring of 1945. Sarge Shriver was wounded aboard the battleship South Dakota off Guadalcanal. Cy Vance saw action as a gunnery officer aboard a destroyer. Vance's deputy at DoD, Townsend Hoopes, was a young Marine lieutenant on Okinawa and then the junior military aide to the first three Secretaries of Defense. Paul Warnke served in the oceangoing Coast Guard, hunted by U-boats in the North Atlantic and dive bombed by the Japanese in the Pacific. George's personal consigliere Frank Mankiewicz fought in the Battle of the Bulge as an enlisted infantryman. Pete McCloskey won the Navy Cross and other medals in Korea as a young Marine officer, and at the time of his appointment as DCI was still a military-intelligence colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. It matters both to how they consider these issues, and to their relative levels of credibility with the Permanent Washington natsec bureaucrats and career uniformed military, that so many of them have seen the elephant.
Inside the Building: East(ern Establishment) at the Top
The most dutiful man in DC?: Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance
Cy Vance is not the most exciting star in McGovernment's galaxy of policymakers. Never gonna light up the stage at a McGovernite tent revival, for example. He is, though, one of the most crucial McGoverners, and some of the most crucial parts of what he does on the job, in McGovernment's case, are as luck would have it the things he does best. It is very likely - indeed for Yr. Hmbl. Author & C. it's canonical - that he just doesn't get enough credit for that. But he's Cy Vance - he does it anyway because it's His Duty and also The Right Thing to Do. That's just how Cy's motherboard is wired. We'll consider that for a moment. Back to our "source" !
A man of the Eastern establishment (tapped for Scroll & Key at Yale, followed by Yale Law School, naval combat service in World War II, and “white shoe” law in New York City with ties to Averell Harriman's political and business machinery), Vance rose through the DoD during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as Secretary of the Army, Deputy Secretary of Defense and, after his resignation from that position, as a key envoy at the Paris Talks. Liberal by temperament, Vance became an opponent of escalation in Vietnam and a quiet but genuine supporter of President McGovern’s campaign in 1972. Vance was perhaps ideally positioned for his role in the incoming administration. He agreed with, or at least had empathy for, President McGovern's broad goals. At the same time this was mixed with extensive experience at DoD, a level of both comfort and capability working with Pentagon bureaucracy and with senior uniformed personnel, and a deeply ingrained ethic of duty and public service.
An able administrator with a breadth of skills, Vance’s special knack at DoD was as a facilitator, mediator, and most of all an honest broker trusted and respected by all the major players in defense policy formation. Even when those parties might disagree bitterly with one another, they trusted Vance as an arbiter. Figures as divergent as John Holum and Gen. Alexander Haig respected Vance as their boss and valued him both as a patron and a personal friend. A wide range of internal and external observers believed Vance held together the policy process at DoD and prevented much greater, more damaging, disagreements than those that existed during the administration. Vance was also able, patiently and thoughtfully, to educate wary service chiefs about the strategic logic of “McGovernment” goals on one hand, and McGovernite reformers about the realities of Pentagon management or defense industrial policy on the other.
That really says a lot of it right there, both who Vance is and why he matters. (The part about Al Haig is quite true, we'll get on to that given time.) McGovernment not-even-fucking-around-here desperately needs exactly what Cy Vance brings to the table as SecDef, else management of national security issues and civil-military relations could be a galloping dumpster fire from day one and - still the Cold War here, folks - doom the administration's credibility with Congress before any of the cool domestic/geostrategic stuff could even get out the door. Vance does a quite staggering amount of Watsonian load-bearing here and that makes a very serious difference. We can be pretty sure things would not actually have gone that well with Warnke's personal approach and nakedly McGovernite agenda. If we want to go full Cultural Revolution here we could call Vance a "Left-Regular With Reformist Characteristics" which is a truly essential straddle.
Go on, go full Whiffenpoof
If you thought we were done with the Eastern Establishment's soft-left wing so readily drawn to the McGovern flame, not hardly. Tim Hoopes, Vance's DepSec, is as much if not more of the breed than Vance himself: Hoopes was a Philips Exeter lad, then Yale Skull & Bones, and captain of one of Yale's last really competitive football squads. Hoopes was then a young Marine Corps officer on Okinawa and in the early occupation of Japan, then a military aide to all three of Harry Truman's Secretaries of Defense. After more of the same sort of white-shoe law Vance did, Hoopes became one of Paul Warnke's senior aides when Warnke was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and went on to be Assistant Secretary of the Air Force. Hoopes was also a keen and accomplished writer and amateur historian: his book about the turn from LINEBACKER bombing to the Paris Talks on the Johnson administration's part, The Limits of Intervention, sold well and, as IOTL, Hoopes wins the Bancroft Prize for American history for his magisterial The Devil and John Foster Dulles just as, IMyTL, he (Hoopes) takes the job as DepSec at the Pentagon. Hoopes also has a lot of gritty practical work to do under the McGovernment schema for DoD but we'll come back around to that in a bit.
Les Enfants Terribles: the Policy Shop
One of the things that McGovernment does with DoD - this came up with the org charts post a few months back - is create a series of "horizontal Undersecretariats" one layer below Tim Hoopes, for subject matter dealt with by all the services. Four, in fact: Reserve Affairs, Intelligence, Resources & Procurement, and Policy.
We'll take just a moment to mention Reserve Affairs' boss, a pleasantly competent career Beltway guy by the name of Norman Paul. Paul had been in admin with both the CIA and one of the predecessor entities for USAID during the Fifties, then served in several key DoD gigs during the Kennedy-Johnson years, notably Assistant Secretary of defense for Legislative Affairs, ie the guy who deals directly with Congress on the granular details. Very safe pair of hands.
Now on to the interesting stuff. There are several places inside the McGovern administration - notably the West Wing itself - where small clusters of ambitious, high-achieving thirtysomethings have surged forward to make both a name for themselves and a substantive role in McGovernment policy. At DoD in McGovernment days that would be the Undersecretariat for Policy.
There are four key jobs in the Policy undersecretariat. They are
- The Undersecretary themselves, who runs the whole policy shop and coordinates/provides editorial control over the activities of his main subordinates
- The Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, responsible for international defense policy, coordinating security cooperation through alliances and other organizations, foreign military sales programs, and at this stage also participation in arms control negotiations
- The Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Plans, whose job is exactly as enormous as that sounds for the combined military forces of a superpower, and also
- The Assistant Secretary for Doctrine, who has an especially significant granular job working with each service to develop and disseminate doctrine - which, in practical terms for the US military, means the "how-to" manuals for the various aspects of what each service does, or does jointly
- Undersecretary for Policy: John Holum (turned 33 in 1973), was in the years immediately prior to his presidency, one of George Himself's key kitchen cabinet members out of the McGovern Senate office. With a BA in physics and a law degree from Georgetown, Holum was George's policy maven on several fronts but especially the thorny issues of defense policy. Holum was also the principal author of the McGovern campaign's provocative Alternate Defense Posture of January 1972, which we'll come back around to in the next post. A dogged policy guy with a penetrating intelligence - also, culturally, very much a High Plains Midwesterner like POTUS and in his (Holum's) spare time an accomplished bluegrass banjo player - Holum takes the job both as a reward for his indispensable work for George and as the official McGovernite devil's advocate/"murder board" inside the Building, there to pick apart official justifications for force postures, weapons programs, etc. and see if they actually stand up to scrutiny.
- Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs: Leslie Gelb (turned 36 in 1973) gets treated as a combination of the grownup in the room and "gramps" by his slightly younger Policy colleagues. Gelb was Paul Warnke's deputy for arms control, among other matters, when Warnke held what's now Gelb's job, but by far Gelb's biggest task at DoD then was to lead the 36-member team that compiled the forty-seven volumes and over 7000 pages of what we know as the Pentagon Papers. Here in MyTL!1972-73 during the presidential transition, Gelb is headhunted from his cushy gig with - you don't even have to guess do you - Brookings for this job, someone who brings a combination of sympathy for McGovernment goals and familiarity with both the system and the permanent staff at DoD.
- Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Plans: Jeffrey Record (turned 30 in 1973) is the youngest of these four young guns, but possibly the most thorough, well read, and meticulous thinker out of all of them - or at least it's a footrace. At this point Record's served as a civilian in South Vietnam on a provincial reconstruction team, then sailed through his Johns Hopkins PhD with accolades to a high-flyer's position at - yup, again - Brookings. We'll see a lot of his, and John Holum's, views and work when we get to the next post in this series. (IOTL he went on to decades of distinguished work with several think tanks and also on Sam Nunn's staff - Record's probably to Nunn's left in general, but not quite so much so as Holum; more to the point defense-reformer Nunn thought Record was the brightest guy in town on such subjects.)
- Assistant Secretary for Doctrine: Here's where we meet the Reformers-and-Regulars dynamic at the Policy shop. R. James Woolsey (turned 32 in 1973) is yet another high flyer, a lower-middle-class kid from Tulsa who shot up through distinguished collegiate and law school work to serving on the early SALT negotiations staff during a brief stint in the military and then, where he's headhunted by the transition team, as the general counsel for Senate Armed Services. Already by this stage Woolsey's more of the Scoop Jackson wing of the party (probably even on the left of the Jackson wing in matters of domestic and macroeconomic policy, so those parts of McGovernment aren't a turnoff), but he's ambitious and ready to take a flyer on getting experience inside the Building with a Democratic administration that's hard-up for filling a lot of these mid-level policy formation jobs. Incoming Secretary Vance thinks Woolsey will get on with the serving flag officers in charge of their respective services' doctrine shops, and that's enough to get the gig.
Spooks and Boffins - Intelligence and R&P
A rare photo of Ted van Dyk in the Seventies, to
the big guy's left
The Intelligence undersecretariat at DoD is, in fact, a pretty big deal. For one thing, administratively it "owns" the biggest chunk of the US intelligence community that's not run out of Langley: you have, below the Undersec for Intelligence, each of the National Security Agency (NSA's already well on its way to being the entity we know and are silently freaked out by), the National Reconnaissance Office (in charge of much of US spy satellite infrastructure) , and the Defense Intelligence Agency, among others. Collectively those entities have a crucial role understanding Soviet capabilities, both current and in the R&D phase, those of other potential adversaries around the world, and sometimes even of US allies. In a McGovern administration DoD, the Intelligence bailiwick is also a resource in the reform-vs-regular debates because if you want to cite sources and data in support of your arguments, whichever side in a given debate you're on you go to Intel for the crunchy crunchy info.
Unlike the policy shop, Intel is run by one of the most significant Regulars in the McGovern constellation. Ted van Dyk grew up a smart working-class kid in Washington state and worked his way up the Democratic Party machinery to become a senior aide to Hubert Humphrey with a side line in military intelligence analysis. Ted was a significant Humphrey advisor during the '68 campaign but, because of his deep personal opposition to the Vietnam War, sided with George in '72 and served as a senior policy consultant for the shoestring early campaign on a variety of issues. Here - though some members of George's transition team hoped to find Ted a job in the West Wing itself - he gets a significant policy gig as reward. Very much a Regular, skeptical of what he sees as some of McGovernment's more idealistic or aspirational views, Ted's poised to get along pretty well with the career intelligence hands both civilian and uniformed. He's also a respectful sparring partner on policy with John Holum - we should emphasize this because it's important, the "respectful" part that is. Ted and Holum like each other well enough personally, and respect the work each other did for the presidential campaign, so while they're more-than-sometimes given to disagree or at least debate, that has a collegial, professional tone.
Bright ambition
"Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics" - on that basis, the Undersecretariat for Resources & Procurement is maybe the driving engine of the whole DoD. Here, in McGovernment's version of that organization, certainly it includes both those very logistical streams and operations which allow a Cold War superpower's military to function with all the necessary beans, bullets, motor oil, tent flaps, ship propellers, etc., required in the effort, and the in-house industrial management process of research & development, program management, cost accounting, on and on, for the most coordinated part (we'll leave aside the debate over value judgments here for now) of American industrial policy. It's a big job - and, potentially, a very useful apprenticeship.
Certainly that's how Harold Brown sees it. From a secular Jewish family in lower-middle-class Brooklyn, Brown was a one-man meteor: a child prodigy who'd earned a PhD by twenty-one, and by thirty ran the Livermore Laboratories, where he played a key role in the development of nuclear warheads small enough to fit to the Navy's Polaris missiles. The Kennedy administration put him in charge of R&D at the Pentagon and Brown again worked his way up to spend the last couple years of the Johnson administration as Secretary of the Air Force. Brown's a meticulous, driven guy, not afraid to give flag officers a dressing down if he feels they're doing the job wrong, one of the most accomplished technocrats in the business, and he has plenty of ambition. Running the working engine of the Pentagon is for Brown a job with a larger purpose. Brown had been Tim Hoopes' boss with the Air Force, but Hoopes had more personal connections with the McGovern camp - more to Brown's point, however, Tim Hoopes has no real ambitions to be Secretary, which means that whenever Cy Vance wearies of the job at the top, after this stint running R&P Brown genuinely would be the most-qualified man in the country to become a Democratic president's SecDef. Least that's what Brown hopes.
Serving the Services, Watching the Watchers - Service Secretaries and the Inspectorate General
Yankee sailor, line one
It is still true - perhaps more so through McGovernment's institutional/process reforms at DoD - that the service secretaries play a very substantial part in the ordinary running of the specific uniformed services, especially things like baseline procurement, daily maintenance and running, training and career development of personnel, service equipment wish lists, and the rest. The McGovern team's Secretary of the Navy, Otis Pike, is a well-known and fairly senior Long Island congressman, Marine Corps pilot during World War II, and accomplished lawyer. Pike was a moderate on Vietnam and a foe of intelligence community overreach, but otherwise got on reasonably well with the armed services through his committee work. He is, however, one of those flinty Yankee taskmasters with an instinctive dislike of fraud and waste; there are some major naval defense contractors who might be in for a bumpy ride.
Spark the trailblazer
One of my favorite retcons - Secretary of the Army Spark Masuyaki Matsunaga is a trailblazer of the first order. Born Nisei (American-born second generation son of Japanese immigrants) on Kauai in Hawaii, Matsunaga was interned together with his family after the heinous decrees of December 1941, and was one of the interned Japanese Americans who collaborated to help create the famed all-Nisei 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team, with which Matsunaga fought and was wounded in action in Europe. After the war Matsunaga was a public prosecutor, member of the Hawaii state lege in the transition from territory to state, then a member of the House of Representatives (at-large to start, then HI-1 after Hawaii gained a second district). He's a tireless and ongoing advocate for declarative and financial reparations for Japanese internment, an adept policy guy on his congressional committees, known for his gentle, dry sense of humor. The Army could probably use a methodical healer who knows life as a poor bloody infantryman - so now they've got one.
Big corporate get, or especially dapper
fox in the henhouse?
If Otis Pike was a moderately generic choice for a Democratic administration to make and Spark Matsunaga - first AAPI executive branch department secretary - was McGovernment leaning in to its ideals, then Secretary of the Air Force David S. Lewis is one of those places where McGovernment confounds its own supporters with a deep reach from the bench of corporate America. A dapper Southerner from up-country South Carolina, Lewis was a Georgia Tech-trained aerospace engineer who found his way from the Martin to the McDonnell aircraft companies. Lewis climbed the full greasy pole at McDonnell - he managed (and contributed too at an engineering level) the project that became the famed McDonnell F-4 Phantom II, then carried on to become president of McDonnell Douglas Aerospace after the two companies merged in the late Sixties. That was in time for Lewis to oversee the final move into production with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and much of the crucial early work on what would become the F-15. Success can breed enemies, though - Lewis was then promptly frozen out at MacAir by McDonnell heirs who wanted more control. He promptly jumped ship to General Dynamics as CEO, where he involved himself in development of GD's entry to the prospective Light Weight Fighter competition around the time that, in the McGNU, he's head-hunted to administer the Air Force. On one hand he has immense professional qualifications for the role; on the other it lets a very large military-industrial complex fox inside the military's own chicken coop. McGoverners at the top prefer to see the first clause in the previous sentence, though plenty of folk who otherwise would like to root for the new administration see the second clause as well.
That raises the not insignificant question of who watches out to make sure there's not waste, fraud, abuse of resources or privilege, or other malfeasance in DoD. There we reach a guy who is surely the closest thing in the world Cy Vance has to an actual crony. David McGiffert was a Boston scriver who scrapped his way up through Harvard Law (after a tour in the Navy late in the war) with such success that he landed at no less than Covington & Burling, aka Dean Acheson's law firm - yes that Dean Acheson - where McGiffert worked alongside the likes of Paul Warnke and Warren Christopher. McGiffert was enough of a success that he got work with DoD under Kennedy, rising to replace Norm Paul as Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs. Then, in 1965, McGiffert became Undersecretary of the Army, partly on Cy Vance's say-so (this is when Vance moved from ArmySec to DepSec) and in support of one of Cy Vance's besties, the then-new Secretary of the Army Stanley Rogers Resor (another Eastern Establishment man to his fingertips - when Resor married a Pillsbury heiress straight out of college, Cy Vance was Resor's best man.) Among other things in that gig, McGiffert was part of a special task force with Vance, Warren Christopher (by then Deputy AG), and a few others - after the shambles of National Guardsmen responding to the 1967 riots in Detroit and Newark - to see how they could, legally and in the most limited fashion, use federal troops in such emergencies thereafter. McGiffert's a dead clever lawyer and deeply loyal to Vance; it would be hard for Cy to pick someone more useful as Inspector General of the department.
Restless Natives - A Word About the Uniforms
We'll really get to meet the relevant players in the Armed Forces in the ensuing posts. But it is worth note that this is one of the rare places in Beltway bureaucracy where McGovernment (or really any administration) encounters a rich, deep, broad, fully-formed culture of long-service nation-state servants who believe they follow a specific, notionally-apolitical (we'll come back to that too) calling, a profession that serves the greater good for the longue durée no matter when politicians and ideologies come and go. With the sometime and rather limited exception of the Foreign Service, the truest analogue to, say, Sir Humphrey Appleby you're likely to find in the American federal state would be wearing a uniform. Indeed that's an actual complaint of a strain or two in the McGovern contingent - that, rather than following the profession of arms, a lot of Pentagon flag officers are essentially technocratic bureaucrats waiting to cash in on their subject-matter expertise aboard various corporate boards post-retirement. But the remaining warriors among them, too, are just as like to give a long sideways glance at change agents of all sorts in the political contingent, and the McGoverners are nothing if not agents of change.
Methods and Charts - Tools and Systems of Policy Formation
Let's take a moment to refresh our view of the McGovernment-adjusted org chart for the DoD. Have a gander.
We'll make it nice and big to enhance readability. You've got a variety of features/dynamics here.
- The DepSec handles management of the day-to-day with the services themselves, whose chiefs handle personnel, training, the economics of supply and logistics, basing, and so forth for the peacetime existence of the services
- Authority passes through the National Command Authority (POTUS aided by the SecDef) to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on to the "Sicks" (supreme commanders, a bureaucratic nicety as McGovernment reserves "commander-in-chief" for the constitutionally-mandated one, i.e. POTUS) of the half-dozen unified commands after the work of the Hoopes Board (about which more in the second post)
- Then you also have the horizontally-integrated Undersecretariats who handle subject matter in common to all the services in order both to reduce duplication (if the services did that themselves) and support SecDef at a high enough administrative level to make the work "joint" in the Pentagonese meaning of the term
At the National Security Council level, where all the natsec interests come together and where Paul Warnke's prolific little shop does their thing, you have four kinds of meetings and three principal kinds of memos.
- Actual, fully-attended National Security Council meetings, which are relatively rare (McGovernment's average of once every 3-6 months is actually higher than many administrations') and generally to make sure that each of the various entities that get to attend the NSC are up to date on a few key matters
- Special Policy Group (SPG) meetings (under Nixon this was WSAG, the Washington Special Actions Group) which attend to specific emergent topics or crises on an as-needed basis
- Policy Review Committee (PRC) meetings that develop forward-looking policy on (1) broader issues or (2) larger specific topics
- Deputies meetings, essentially a subspecies of PRC meetings, where the number-twos of various entities hash out policy and procedural details intended to smooth the running for principals to make decisions and implement policy at PRC level
Warnke also played a pivotal role in policy formation for the administration. At President McGovern’s insistence – unless the president took on the role personally – Warnke chaired the Special Policy Group (SPG) meetings of National Security Council members that dealt with specific, emergent topics or crises, and also the Policy Review Committee (PRC) meetings that developed forward-looking policy on broader issues or thematic subjects like arms control, global food security, treaty alliances, relations with the Global South, or human rights policy. In terms of paperwork flows and administrative methods, the McGovern administration made the National Security Decision Memo (NSDM) system its central method to express presidential views and directives. Paul Warnke acted as chief manager of the NSDM formulation process – inputs from the key departments (State, Defense, Peace, Treasury, and the intelligence community) were received and glossed by National Security Council staff – and interlocutor with President McGovern for the draft process of final NSDMs. Such means and measures as these put Warnke at the heart of policy processes.
The NSDM system was buttressed by two streams of supporting documents: National Security Study Memoranda (NSSM) generated largely out of the National Security Council staff and commented on by other principal agencies or partners, and Policy Review Memoranda (PRM) introduced by the McGovern administration as working documents for the Policy Review Committee’s deliberation process. Taken together they made the NSC system the principal factory of joint policy discussion for the administration, thanks especially to the prolific work habits of Paul Warnke’s staff. This kept the White House itself at the center of the policy process, even when President McGovern was often only personally concerned with some specific elements of foreign and national security issues, often occupied instead with domestic policy concerns.
As to how the Pentagon puts together its largest collective planning efforts, this also
The McGovern administration inherited a complex – many administration civilians said needlessly byzantine – overlaid defense planning process. After administrative discussions begun the day before President McGovern’s inaugural, within seven weeks the processes and procedures were boiled down to three large planning documents, each with their own structure and planning process.
- The first major planning task taken on during a presidential administration would be a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), designed to be completed in time for the administration’s first budget cycle, covering all four budget cycles of that term. Developed collaboratively with the planning entities internal to DoD, especially the Joint Staff, the QDR would act as an administration’s first considered statement of intent, one that laid out strategic assumptions, policy goals, structural plans, and procurement requirements – in broad terms – as a baseline for plans and action during the actual four years of the presidential term.
- The primary short-term planning document would be the Joint Annual Strategic Plan (JASP), again produced during the planning phase of the fiscal cycle. Some administration reformers initially wanted the plan to be biennial, in order to encourage further fiscal discipline with expenditure plans made over a two-year span, but Secretary Vance ultimately sided with the argument that this was insufficiently responsive to major changes in circumstance. The JASP was divided into four Titles, all collected as a single document. Title One (Objectives) would lay out the desired strategic objectives of the plan. Title Two (Capabilities), often referred to as “the shopping list,” would cover the submitted capabilities requests from all relevant sources, tailored to the objectives under Title One, with supporting arguments. Title Three (Fiscal & Forces) would lay out that year’s current Four-Year Fiscal Plan (FYFP) for the next four budget cycles, and a series of five “cases” that represented different models for mixing desired capabilities within the constraints of the FYFP. Title Four (Planning) would lay out the chosen case, the rationale for that choice, and its expression in the form of that year’s Four-Year Defense Plan (FYDP, shortened from the older five-year model).
- The long-term planning system was the Joint Decennial Strategic Survey (JDSS), conducted early in the third year of a presidential term, at the start of its second Congress. The JDSS was designed to address, and project, global trends, issues, and objectives ten years forward from its date of release (to cover the remainder of that presidential term and the two presidential terms immediately thereafter.) The JDSS would close with three cases: the two likeliest courses for future developments over those ten years extrapolated from available information, and the “likeliest unlikely” course of development. Among their many other uses, each available JDSS would be an important resource in the development of QDRs at the start of each presidential term.
If that seems a lot to chew on, well, it is. But it'll make stuff that follows flow smoother. Roll it around the next couple or three days until the ensuing installment kicks off actual direct policy stuff, debates and politics and implementation and such.
And what will those parts look like? There are a few, in the manner of the bonus content from the late spring. (Like I say there'll be more on more subjects as we go, but right now I'm trying to just dual-track this little project and Sweet, Sweet Narrative Goodness, so other Bonus Content will have to come come along in the order of the number it pulled from that machine at the DMV. Also note that this post is likely to be the longest of the set because it introduces a substantial cast of characters and materials.)
Ahead we have
- The McGovern Defense, A Strategy of Arms: The debates and process of situating defense matters within a broader global strategy, and some of the sausage-making about how you get to the nuclear strategy/force structure baked into CART
- The McGovern Defense, Alliance or Institution?: Here we get to Curious George and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, if you will. Some ins and outs around the central front of the Cold War.
- The McGovern Defense, A Few Good Men?: Through a curious relationship between Reformers and Regulars, a military service in the throes of existential crisis (as indeed they were in the Seventies IOTL) - the United States Marine Corps - leans into change
- The McGovern Defense, All You Can Be?: Looks at the other service, besides USMC, most affected by Seventies tumult - the US Army (inclusive of its reserve components) - especially because Big Green has its own quite complex and highly dynamic Reformers-vs-Regulars phenomenon afoot inside the service itself (some of which is even touchy-feely self actualization...)
- The McGovern Defense, Military Keynesianism?: About "America's real industrial policy," ie the military-industrial complex, seen through the lens of high-dollar natsec aerospace/naval shipbuilding, plus foreign military sales. (Also a little to do with Air Force and Navy stuff directly but, when it is, very much through a defense-industrial lens, which frankly is pretty representative with those services.) And, a bit to do with those sweet summer children the McGoverner's hopes for "defense reconversion," physically changing from manufacture of swords to plowshares or the equivalent...
Fair question — currently at work trying to whip the next two (in narrative order) into publishable shape.
McGoverning Bonus Content: The McGovern Defense, A Strategy of Arms
A Strategy of Arms I: Thinking Big
Let's come back at it, shall we?
In the interest of not overburdening the forum's posting capacity - or the Careful Readers' stamina for single entries - I've decided to split this first post into its two distinct segments. The first deals with issues of strategy and outlook, plus the big-picture issues our McGoverners must address when they take office and go about the business of policy. That should make it somewhat the shorter of the two parts, but only by a bit. The second part deals directly with the sausage-making that goes into McGovernment policy on the employment and development of nuclear weapons, and how that fits together with the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART). So we'll start broad and winnow down from there into crunchy crunchy granularity.
Doesn't start much more broad than strategy - there's a centuries-old cottage industry built around defining what it even is (to include a school of thought among some analysts of strategy that "strategy" in its pure form doesn't actually exist in practice, but we'll leave that alone. No need to get dizzy hiking at altitude to start out.) In this instance, strategy has something directly to do with military action, or the deterrent threat thereof. There we could do worse than borrow Sir Basil Liddell Hart's line that strategy as it relates to warmaking and military affairs is "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy."
That last bit carries the whole load, really - "to fulfill the ends of policy." Very often, in an American cultural and historical context, when Americans make war or threaten to make it they separate out their understanding and experience of that phenomenon from ideas about conventional politics, policy, or strategy. Then we do it over and over because, in the aggregate, Americans right up to their top-level political/policy leadership often are deeply ahistorical about military action and how it fits into a wider world of activities and experience. In the interest of a positive long term, military action - or the threat of, or capacity for - should serve strategic ends: fight now to prevent a much worse situation later, wrongfoot an adversary whose own goals might disrupt regional or world systems advantageous to you, or fight to achieve a better quality and dynamic of peace after than the one you had before. Failure to think and plan in such terms - to, instead, use war as a slugging match for will or dominance, or like a tool to fix a mechanism without a sense of cultural/political context or historical time - causes bad outcomes.
It matters, then, to define big strategic issues, possibilities, and conundrums. And sometimes different strategic visions collide - that gets us into the politics of policy. We'll see that at work here.
Let's take a moment to identify some of the issues - to do with US national security and defense policy - that any administration inaugurated in January 1973, whether that's a President Nixon or a President McGovern or, hell, even a President George Corley Wallace, would have to contend with.
Mindful that strategy is not just something you have - in order to serve its purpose strategy is also something you do - let me add another quote from McGovernment's own Jeffrey Record about how to "do" strategy, from his OTL 1988 monograph Beyond Military Reform: American Defense Dilemmas. There, Record describes strategic competence as "a willingness to make hard choices and an ability to distinguish between the desirable and the possible and between the essential and the expendable." (178)
(For those of you out there who, like me, always wonder about the pronunciation of a word I've only seen on paper/screen, Jeff Record pronounces his last name as in "record player" or "off the record." Just to clear that up. Onwards!)
Sweet Summer Children? Heroes of Reform? Both?: Roots of McGovernment Policy Culture on National Security
While the McGovern movement, and the McGovern Moment, had distinctive qualities that made it a specific thing, it grew - like its practitioners from George Himself on down - from the left-hand side of the Congressional (and mainstream American political) spectrum in the era of its birth. George personally, and many of the key figures in his administration, were a part of caucuses, informal think tanks/talking shops, webs of interpersonal relationships - within Congress, with key long-term figures of their ideological persuasion (like all those dinners at Ken Galbraith's place with other left-liberal worthies in and out of politics), in the Beltway world of think tanks and lobby outfits and revolving doors between government service and the American establishment of that era - where we can (1) situate the broad contours of how key McGoverners see the world and (2) pick out (a) things distinctive about McGovernism and (b) points of complexity and contention inside McGovernment, whether that's between different breeds/flavors of reformers or Reformers-vs-Regulars stuff, or even more complex.
Now, we can't reduce all of that to any one thing. But let's take one of the more instructive examples of that cultural/ideological/organizational context in which, and from which, McGovernite views on natsec policy and geostrategy emerged. That would be a distinctive caucus on Capitol Hill called the Members of Congress for Peace through Law.
MCPL's first life was as a bold but doomed act of egghead resistance against the political currents of the mid-Fifties, an inhospitable time when the group failed to really take root. A second pass, started in 1966 as Big Muddy over there in Southeast Asia got, well, muddier and muddier, was much more verdant and fruitful. MCPL cohered around its core outlook, issues of interest, and a smattering of institutional structure during the late Sixties, in company with Congressional criticism of the war specifically and Cold War policy more generally. But the group's real heyday was the first half of the Seventies (and a little beyond.) At that point, MCPL counted as members a little over a third of the Senate and nearly a third of the House of Representatives. Nearly all the liberals of both parties you'd expect to see in the Senate (though Cliff Case is strangely absent), with an emphasis on the Upper Midwestern liberal-to-social-democratic sorts (The Hump, Fritz, George Himself, James Abourezk, WE LOVE YOU SO DAMN MUCH PHIL, GAYLORD!, and many others) while in the House MCPL membership skewed more openly Democratic (though there were a few magnificent GOP actual-liberals like Milicent Fenwick) that also included a lot of leadership figures like Tip O'Neil, and others who you wouldn't now expect at first blush like Hale Boggs (then later his wife Lindy IOTL) and Jim Wright. By the 94th-95th Congresses IOTL MCPL had a working majority on House International Affairs, and key roles on other significant committees. It's a significant force when George decides to run for president, and if anything more so by around the Bicentennial.
What's MCPL about when it's at home? Its small educational office captures a number of the key elements in a mission statement from the period that we'll view in a different font for clarity
Substituting law for war in human society. Improving and developing institutions for just and peaceful settlement of international disputes. Strengthening the United Nations and other international institutions. Reducing world armaments. Advancing human rights and equal justice under law for all peoples. Developing a global economy where every person enjoys the material necessities of life and a reasonable opportunity for the pursuit of happiness.
There you go. Much of that explains itself in the left-liberal traditions of fighting for vibrant and functional international law, inquisitive and creative diplomacy, conflict mitigation, global equality, economic and cultural rather than military means of relationship building in North-South relations (to use a very Seventies phrase), etc. It's the broadly agreed worldview and precepts of a very active, significant caucus on the Hill at that point, one that doesn't win all its battles but that does win some, and always ensures that its interests are heard.
There are other sources to which we can look for indicative data, too. With many things McGovernment, especially at the point of first intentions, it's a good idea to look over the place where they said a lot of it first, the 1972 Democratic Party Platform that came out of the convention where George was nominated to run. Issues of geopolitics, national security, and what IR/poli sci folk call IPE (international political economy) don't show up until near the end of the document, but one gets there eventually. And what does one find once there? We'll bullet key points
This is all very much of the political/analytical milieu of MCPL and related organizations/schools of thought on the left hand of American liberalism in the early Seventies. Emphasis on coordinated, well-considered diplomacy, the centrality of the Washington-Moscow dynamic (plus the "world's largest democracy/heroic nonaligned people who invented modern non-violent protest" Indophilia that likewise affects relations with then-Peking), the friendly hand up for democratization and social justice in the Americas, the single-minded determination to end the immoral war in Southeast Asia and also the immoral regimes in Southern Africa, the growing primacy of North-South relations and an enlightened partnership with the Global South as the future of US global influence - all that stuff's baked in there. Like any platform it's aspirational, but it's also a pretty solid picture of significant policy positions, strategic interests, and matters of sheer moral determination, like an end to apartheid or getting the hell out of Big Muddy.
We can dial the focus in closer, also, to a very specifically McGovernite source document - we could really call it ur-McGovernite because it's a product of George's in-house policy wonk from his Senate office, John Holum - which is the Alternate Defense Posture read into the Congressional record by George in late January 1972. It has really strongly McGovernite qualities - by "McGovernite" here, rather than "McGovernment" I mean an ideologically and characterologically pure strain of the phenomenon close to its focal point with George Himself. I'd highlight the following characteristics though they're not the only ones of note
So, to take a very broad brush, we can suggest some significant elements of McGovernment geostrategy, or at least foreign/natsec policy outlook.
It's important to remember, however, that there may be differences over details on these points among even the most committed McGovernites, while in the rest of McGovernment there are significant actors whose views diverge on some of the specific bulleted items above.
No Plan Survives First Contact: McGovernment and Strategy Once in Office
The old saw that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy/reality" goes two ways when the McGoverners find themselves swept unexpectedly into office. They have a raft of plans and ambitions and cognitive priors/biases, sometimes with internal disagreements between specific McGoverners, that get brought to the work. At the same time, the Permanent Pentagon - especially the uniformed flag and staff officers who make the place run year in and year out - have their own perspectives on what they see as the ambitious but often naive idealism of the new crowd, and on what plans and priorities need to be laid down and followed. Both of the broadly construed sides in that relationship discover that they'll have to adapt to working together - or at least working in one another's company.
Let's take a moment before we get into all of that, to introduce two specific "uniforms" who - until their scheduled retirement in the summer of 1974 - will play quite significant roles in this early stage of grand strategizing and debate. We'll get to others too but we'll lead with these guys because of their significance to this specific thematic matter of big-picture strategy.
Keep an eye on that "bless your heart" smile
Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer was a dentist's son from Eufaula, Alabama - though the Moorers had been a landlubbing family both Tom and his younger brother Joseph became admirals. A combat pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, Moorer worked his way up naval aviation to command aircraft carriers and in turn both the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets - the first naval flag officer to run both. He then spent the late Sixties as Chief of Naval Operations - the uniformed head of the service - until in 1970 he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Moorer was a conservative in his marrow, both in the ideological and simple human dispositional sense - he was no Edwin Walker crypto-fascist, but he was an instinctual conservative, disinclined to ambiguity even though he was pretty good at institutional politics, and of the "Nixon and Kissinger have some pinko tendencies we should keep an eye on" sort (we'll get back to that in a minute.) A granular detail of note: Moorer was CNO, had just taken the job in fact, at the time of the USS Liberty incident during the Six Day War, when a US Navy listening ship was attacked methodically over a matter of hours by Israeli air and naval forces and several dozen Navy men were killed, with many more wounded. Moorer believed it was a deliberate act signed off on at a high level, not a fog-of-war incident, was incensed at the Johnson and Nixon administrations sweeping it under the rug, and IOTL remained committed to getting to the bottom of the matter for the rest of his life.
About that "pinko tendencies" thing ... Tom Moorer finds himself in a bit of a hard spot as McGovernment comes into office. Between 1969 and 1971 a Navy signals/communications guy in the White House military office, one Yeoman Charles Radford, assiduously got his hands on high-level documents that The Dick and Henry Show did not intend to share with the military establishment, either the Joint Chiefs or service-specific flag officers, and then Radford passed them on to a select group of admirals headed up by Moorer. In among the many White House tapes, Nixon - whose "Plumbers" found the leak and fingered Radford as the guilty party - called it a spy scandal outright, and decided not to go after Moorer and the other admirals publicly (1) so that it wouldn't bring the services further into disrepute and (2) for the classically Nixonian reason that he'd have kompromat, leverage, over Moorer. By 1973 rumors of the case began to reach Capitol Hill - in the McGNU as in OTL, investigative reporting will bring out more. That creates a ... complex situation for the guy most central to the uniforms' general plan to stand athwart McGovernism shouting "stop".
Eyebrows like those don't just grow themselves: Adm. Zumwalt
seen after renouncing his claim to the goblin throne in favor of David Bowie
If you want someone to do the stand-athwart-and-shout-stop stuff, though, it would be hard to find someone with more vibrant and determined energy than this guy: Adm. Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt, Moorer's successor as CNO. A surface-warfare guy who'd been a command prodigy (youngest full admiral, youngest CNO, a few other things likewise) and among other things had run the Navy's riverine "swift boat" forces in Vietnam (where his one son among a raft of daughters, who helmed a swift boat, was tragically, and in the long term fatally, poisoned by Agent Orange), on one hand Zumwalt seems like exactly the kind of senior officer McGovernment would hope for and seek to work with. And that's true so far as it goes: a liberal-minded and socially progressive guy, Zumwalt fought tenaciously against racism and sexism in the Navy, and on behalf of ordinary sailors against the service's tradition of rules and systems that were mostly designed to haze, demean, and exercise dominance over lower enlisteds. (He had a system of "Z-grams", messages to the fleets about major policy changes; the one getting rid of "the Navy way" hazing was titled "Mickey Mouse, Elimination of".) He was also an operational and technological innovator, with ideas about cheaper and from his perspective more efficient ship designs and tactics as part of the Navy's post-Vietnam renewal and modernization. A vibrant and rather charming guy, Bud grows close with George's impressionable, sweet-baby-Jesus-I-want-to-be-a-man-of-ideas Chief of Staff Gary Hart, for whom tales of low-cost hydrofoil attack boats and mini-carrier Sea Control Ships are a one-way defense reform ticket to Bonertown(TM). (Someone notify the secretarial pool ... Gare-Gare's happy to schedule Zumwalt in to talk George's ear off on occasion, which is in fact a little bewildering for a congenital Midwesterner like George.)
Remember Frank Mankiewicz's nostrum to ignore everything a politician says before the word "but"? But. In the manner of the Chiefs, Bud Zumwalt sees his role in military/natsec policy as a responsibility to fulfill a certain set of missions that he's been directed to fulfill. In his case that means, as he frames it, the need to counter and overcome growing Soviet naval power around the world, as the Red Fleet pushes its way out into blue water from that northerly Eurasian base with an ever-larger world's largest submarine force, naval-aviation bombers bristling with nuclear-tipped antiship cruise missiles, and a new generation of surface combatants. No one of such flag rank as Bud Zumwalt is as big a pessimist as Bud Zumwalt about the 1973 US Navy's ability to fulfill that geostrategic mission, one he rated in policy confabs with about a 15% chance of success. He wants more resources for the Navy, quite a bit more - specifically a "hi-low mix" fleet with a smaller critical mass of expensive, complex vessels for key roles plus a lot more cheap-but-useful ships not yet built to hunt subs and control both the high seas and naval chokepoints. Indeed Bud's quite willing to mix it up testily with the chiefs of the Army and Air Force about the distribution of total defense-budget resources being skewed towards those two services which - per Bud - shortchanges the crucial Navy role. (So much so, in fact, that fellow Navy man Tom Moorer told Zumwalt to tone it down and told Zumwalt's successor to make peace with the other services in the interests of the comity of the Chiefs.)
So in this dynamic you have
This is just by way of local flavor and dynamics for the whole of the thing. Let's get on to making some policy sausage.
The Work Starts: The Everything Review vs. The Slow Walk
Like many a newly minted presidential administration, McGovernment walks into the civilian-administered offices at DoD and launches a systemic review of organization, operational and bureaucratic practices, the all-important budgeting system/process, and of course strategy as it (strategy) governs the drawing up of force structures (that then have to be budgeted/paid for) and mission statements. This is common practice for new administrations - both the Kennedy and Nixon administrations sure did it - especially when those administrations (like Kennedy's and Nixon's) had Views about what DoD should do and how it should operate.
Of course, the uniforms have Views too, especially about the haste and naivete of the new civilian crowd, though really they'll respond in a way calculated to defend their institution and its habitual ways of doing business in the face of any and all initiatives on the part of fly-by-night political types. This is common to nearly all entrenched bureaucracies, of which DoD is an outstanding example - despite its roots in the profession of arms, the post-1945 DoD is a deeply and intrinsically bureaucratic institution with a patina of technocracy too, given the fondness for solving problems with "systems", i.e. tech and engineering of one sort or another. So all the usual weapons of bureaucratic self-defense are on the table, but the one at which DoD was truly Olympic-level was the Slow Walk, i.e. draw out processes and decision making over a long enough period of time that would-be reformers can't really get anything done during the time that they have, while your bureaucrats in question get on with incrementally doing things the way they damned well please inch by inch each day while the reformers wait on whatever Big Process to finally schlep its way to a conclusion. Other than outright ignoring reformers' plans, the Permanent Pentagon's typical answer to the lightning bolt of the Everything Review is the morass of the Slow Walk.
But let's come along to some of those large, fundamental strategic questions that the McGoverners and the uniforms confront together as of 1973. They're not in order of importance here - indeed that would be hard to rate and dependent very much on an individual's point of view - but jumbled around to suggest breadth and complexity.
Speaking of the Chiefs, still very much under Tom Moorer's leadership, they come to the table with the new administration with a relatively succinct programmatic argument that is, well, kind of the opposite of everything the John Holums of the world would like to achieve
With contact made between suits and uniforms, let's look at some of the dynamics that affect the review process in specific ways.
The Timing of It Both the McGovernment suits of various flavors and the Permanent Pentagon uniforms can read a calendar; both know that McGovernment's efforts to lay out and then enact dramatic changes in defense policy are (given the uncertain prospect of the 1976 presidential election) bound to a single presidential term. Already, in the joint (inter-service) environment of the Joint Staff and its various regulations - layered on top of internal, intra-service regulations of each branch of the military - that are designed to move through things like comprehensive policy reviews at a "deliberate" pace to make sure everyone's views get aired, which has the convenient side effect of Slow Walking damn near everything as a matter of course, the military hopes to run yet another set of reformers to ground, fending off through pacing what they (the uniforms) don't want to deal with or submit to. (They also have a good sense of those things to which they will submit, like structural reorganization up to a few key red lines, in the interests of not creating a purely adversarial relationship with the political appointees; for the rest they'd prefer just to drag things out until action's no longer feasible then shrug their epaulettes and move on.) The suits get that, of course - they're prepared to plow ahead even if the uniforms can't get in replies, assessments, and such in a timely fashion, though when that situation crops up both sides go to work their respective supporters in Congress and the media about how the other side's been problematic. The McGoverners made a point up front of hitting the uniforms from inter-agency angles, plus the think tank hired guns, before the uniforms could subsume the review in the pacing and complexity of an internal DoD process (where there's strong personal incentive, beyond the collective bureaucratic incentive, for staff officers on two-year assignments with the DoD staff apparatus to drag things out for their entire tour in return for favorable personnel evaluations from their superiors.)
The Internals of It The review's a collective, collaborative process, where individual actors or institutional interests can, through a combo of prolific paper generation, persuasive argument, and what amounts to old-fashioned Weberian charisma, amplify their own role(s) within that collective process. There are several, sometimes conflicting, elements in play there as the review goes along, among them (1) Jeff Record's work ethic and meticulously thorough lines of argument, (2) the debate carried over between Policy (John Holum) and Intelligence (Ted Van Dyk) about just how aggressive, and in what ways aggressive, Soviet intentions really are, plus (3) the discreet appeal of RAND's systemic net-assessment approach to big picture issues. There are other complexities and filigrees, like the degree to which David Aaron's hawkishness sometimes makes him a one-man minority report counterpoint to the official Sarge Shriver/George Ball State Department position. In the long run of the assessment's life cycle, those participants who can articulate concrete plans laid out in strategic terms - what Record likes to call "a harmony between means and ends" - tend to get their versions of language into the final report, especially as DepSec Hoopes navigates compromises between the Policy and Intelligence positions (this is, at least, helped considerably by the fact that Holum and Van Dyk largely get along well personally, which is to say that in Barry Goldwater's words they know how to disagree without being disagreeable.)
The Innenpolitik of It In the study of institutional/bureaucratic sociology and institutional/bureaucratic politics, the lovely German term Innenpolitik describes factors that drive both the mechanisms and outcomes of that politicking that are internal to either or both the institutions themselves and their domestic-national setting. You have a variety, maybe even a menagerie, of those involved in McGovernment's efforts to craft a new and different defense strategy. There's the powerful influence and outlook/disposition of the MCPL caucus, who see George as one of their own inside the machinery, who has both an opportunity and an obligation to help turn the Cold War military-industrial machinery in a new direction. There is, for another example, the surprisingly bipartisan post-Vietnam support for significant overseas troop/basing cutbacks, plus skepticism even among some relatively conservative members of both parties about uniformed expert opinion. (That's also linked to Congressional willingness to support lower end-state personnel levels - the cap on the total population of each service who Congress will pay for out of the budget.) Certainly there are factions and public-interest lobbies within the McGovern movement who would love to see big dramatic changes towards world peace and demilitarization. At the same time you have a rapidly mobilizing, agile, and aggressive lobby of defense hawks, from folks like Scoop Jackson and Barry Goldwater (also in a more moderate, conciliatory way John Stennis) in Congress, or various think tanks and news columnists, plus things like the recreation of the Committee on the Present Danger, who mean to harry McGovernment at every step of the way, promote detailed counter-arguments, and attack every iota of whatever looks like weakness on national security. This may have been a sector of overall federal government policy where McGovernment wanted to just get on with the job and focus attention on other realms, but both McGovernment's opponents and even some of its closest friends are prepared to make defense/natsec policy a big deal.
The Außenpolitik of It If innenpolitik covers those internal constituencies and issue pressures and dynamics that determine institutional policy outcomes, Außenpolitik covers the external factors that also shape those outcomes. We'll look at just three here that give you much of the flavor of the thing.
So it takes into the very early autumn just to get the principal strategy/policy review done up, pushed along towards the end because the civilians know implementation has everything to do with buying enough time to outlast the Slow Walk. Plus it takes time to get the final push out from under that earlier reorganization of the DoD's operational structure and the unified/specified commands (the latter set to kick in during 1974.) What does that roll out? Well, this:
As they pull together the resources to produce this strategic reassessment, the McGoverners take some inspiration from a perhaps unexpected source. In November of 1970, Dick Nixon's SecDef, Melvin Laird, produced a trailblazing document for a fundamental redefinition of US strategy and reshaping of US defense plans and force structures for life after Vietnamization ran its course. Laird titled the report to Nixon A Strategy for Peace: A National Security Strategy of Realistic Deterrence. The plan put deterrence front and center - not just MAD deterrence, but a nesting-doll model of deterrence that covered strategic nuclear deterrence, deterring large-scale conventional war (like war in Europe, or against China), deterring more localized conflicts, even deterring guerrilla insurgencies. It programmed qualitatively different kinds of American military forces/resources for each category of deterrence, and relied on a strategy where "free world allies" would do a lot more of the work and, in the non-nuclear realms, US military force would integrate plans and efforts with those allies in appropriate ways (with more where the locals took the lead), and also - a tune McGoverners can hum - where military approaches and resources were integrated into a larger strategy that included economic, diplomatic, and other resources that would buttress the stability of overseas partners and prevent conflict or nip it in the bud. Laird's approach was more activist than really double-dyed McGovernites like John Holum would prefer, but the McGoverners are happy to plagiarize a good outline where deterrence is key, allies need to step up, and military means/methods should be integrated with other resources to serve a larger strategy than "beat the other guy in a straight fight, but everywhere."
In outline
So it's September 1973, and our McGoverners have plunked this top-secret report on various E-Ring desks (that's the floor level/region of "the Building" where the service chiefs and the Joint apparatus live) while Cy Vance works to promote peaceful and constructive discourse about it. No sooner was that accomplished though, when Stuff Happens ...
October Surprise: The Process/Debates After the Tishrin War
"Events, dear boy, events"
- Harold Macmillan
Boy, just when you start to think you know where things are going ... the Middle East happens (this has been a theme since approximately the Bronze Age.)
For the great McGovernment debates about strategy, policy, mission statements, force structure, et al. on the south shore of the Potomac, the McGNU's Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 has two large-amplitude effects
This of course affects the big conversations inside the five-sided megastructure.
The other major thing the McGNU's Tishrin War does is provoke energetic study and debate about the nature of potential near-to-medium-term conflicts for which the US should prepare - either to prevent them from happening like in central Europe, or to prevail if necessary wherever they might come up.
On that basis, what the latest Arab-Israeli conflict demonstrated was
What about that big-picture strategic item of Soviet intentions? Really there's something for everyone in the October War. Soviet naval activity in the Mediterranean, resupply efforts for Syria especially, the closely guarded knowledge that the Soviets moved battlefield nuclear weapons into the theater to provide if necessary retaliatory capability if Israel used nukes against its opponents, and the readiness to use VDV forces (Soviet airborne troops) to prevent the collapse of either Egyptian or Syrian forces points to Moscow's ability to intervene in the Middle East and its capacity to project power in new directions from the Soviet Eurasian bastion. On the other hand the largely defensive nature of Soviet participation in the conflict - propping up its clients just as the US did - and the readiness at the end to work with the US on a Suez disengagement zone point to some pragmatic flexibility. There's room for the Bud Zumwalts to say you need a lot more forces in a lot more places and room for the John Holums and Jeff Records to say in differing but somewhat complementary ways that instead what you really need to do is play it smart.
Rather like the first big post, this sets out a stage for the posts upcoming:
Let's come back at it, shall we?
In the interest of not overburdening the forum's posting capacity - or the Careful Readers' stamina for single entries - I've decided to split this first post into its two distinct segments. The first deals with issues of strategy and outlook, plus the big-picture issues our McGoverners must address when they take office and go about the business of policy. That should make it somewhat the shorter of the two parts, but only by a bit. The second part deals directly with the sausage-making that goes into McGovernment policy on the employment and development of nuclear weapons, and how that fits together with the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART). So we'll start broad and winnow down from there into crunchy crunchy granularity.
Doesn't start much more broad than strategy - there's a centuries-old cottage industry built around defining what it even is (to include a school of thought among some analysts of strategy that "strategy" in its pure form doesn't actually exist in practice, but we'll leave that alone. No need to get dizzy hiking at altitude to start out.) In this instance, strategy has something directly to do with military action, or the deterrent threat thereof. There we could do worse than borrow Sir Basil Liddell Hart's line that strategy as it relates to warmaking and military affairs is "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy."
That last bit carries the whole load, really - "to fulfill the ends of policy." Very often, in an American cultural and historical context, when Americans make war or threaten to make it they separate out their understanding and experience of that phenomenon from ideas about conventional politics, policy, or strategy. Then we do it over and over because, in the aggregate, Americans right up to their top-level political/policy leadership often are deeply ahistorical about military action and how it fits into a wider world of activities and experience. In the interest of a positive long term, military action - or the threat of, or capacity for - should serve strategic ends: fight now to prevent a much worse situation later, wrongfoot an adversary whose own goals might disrupt regional or world systems advantageous to you, or fight to achieve a better quality and dynamic of peace after than the one you had before. Failure to think and plan in such terms - to, instead, use war as a slugging match for will or dominance, or like a tool to fix a mechanism without a sense of cultural/political context or historical time - causes bad outcomes.
It matters, then, to define big strategic issues, possibilities, and conundrums. And sometimes different strategic visions collide - that gets us into the politics of policy. We'll see that at work here.
Let's take a moment to identify some of the issues - to do with US national security and defense policy - that any administration inaugurated in January 1973, whether that's a President Nixon or a President McGovern or, hell, even a President George Corley Wallace, would have to contend with.
- The United States' global presence and forward-looking strategy after the quagmire war in Southeast Asia
- The potential scope and future of detente
- The transition to a volunteer military
- Strategy, budget, and policy issues to do with whether you expand or constrain military force levels and modernization after Vietnam
- How many and what sort of wars the military should be equipped to fight
- The growing strategic importance of other parts of the world (for example the Middle East)
Mindful that strategy is not just something you have - in order to serve its purpose strategy is also something you do - let me add another quote from McGovernment's own Jeffrey Record about how to "do" strategy, from his OTL 1988 monograph Beyond Military Reform: American Defense Dilemmas. There, Record describes strategic competence as "a willingness to make hard choices and an ability to distinguish between the desirable and the possible and between the essential and the expendable." (178)
(For those of you out there who, like me, always wonder about the pronunciation of a word I've only seen on paper/screen, Jeff Record pronounces his last name as in "record player" or "off the record." Just to clear that up. Onwards!)
Sweet Summer Children? Heroes of Reform? Both?: Roots of McGovernment Policy Culture on National Security
While the McGovern movement, and the McGovern Moment, had distinctive qualities that made it a specific thing, it grew - like its practitioners from George Himself on down - from the left-hand side of the Congressional (and mainstream American political) spectrum in the era of its birth. George personally, and many of the key figures in his administration, were a part of caucuses, informal think tanks/talking shops, webs of interpersonal relationships - within Congress, with key long-term figures of their ideological persuasion (like all those dinners at Ken Galbraith's place with other left-liberal worthies in and out of politics), in the Beltway world of think tanks and lobby outfits and revolving doors between government service and the American establishment of that era - where we can (1) situate the broad contours of how key McGoverners see the world and (2) pick out (a) things distinctive about McGovernism and (b) points of complexity and contention inside McGovernment, whether that's between different breeds/flavors of reformers or Reformers-vs-Regulars stuff, or even more complex.
Now, we can't reduce all of that to any one thing. But let's take one of the more instructive examples of that cultural/ideological/organizational context in which, and from which, McGovernite views on natsec policy and geostrategy emerged. That would be a distinctive caucus on Capitol Hill called the Members of Congress for Peace through Law.
MCPL's first life was as a bold but doomed act of egghead resistance against the political currents of the mid-Fifties, an inhospitable time when the group failed to really take root. A second pass, started in 1966 as Big Muddy over there in Southeast Asia got, well, muddier and muddier, was much more verdant and fruitful. MCPL cohered around its core outlook, issues of interest, and a smattering of institutional structure during the late Sixties, in company with Congressional criticism of the war specifically and Cold War policy more generally. But the group's real heyday was the first half of the Seventies (and a little beyond.) At that point, MCPL counted as members a little over a third of the Senate and nearly a third of the House of Representatives. Nearly all the liberals of both parties you'd expect to see in the Senate (though Cliff Case is strangely absent), with an emphasis on the Upper Midwestern liberal-to-social-democratic sorts (The Hump, Fritz, George Himself, James Abourezk, WE LOVE YOU SO DAMN MUCH PHIL, GAYLORD!, and many others) while in the House MCPL membership skewed more openly Democratic (though there were a few magnificent GOP actual-liberals like Milicent Fenwick) that also included a lot of leadership figures like Tip O'Neil, and others who you wouldn't now expect at first blush like Hale Boggs (then later his wife Lindy IOTL) and Jim Wright. By the 94th-95th Congresses IOTL MCPL had a working majority on House International Affairs, and key roles on other significant committees. It's a significant force when George decides to run for president, and if anything more so by around the Bicentennial.
What's MCPL about when it's at home? Its small educational office captures a number of the key elements in a mission statement from the period that we'll view in a different font for clarity
Substituting law for war in human society. Improving and developing institutions for just and peaceful settlement of international disputes. Strengthening the United Nations and other international institutions. Reducing world armaments. Advancing human rights and equal justice under law for all peoples. Developing a global economy where every person enjoys the material necessities of life and a reasonable opportunity for the pursuit of happiness.
There you go. Much of that explains itself in the left-liberal traditions of fighting for vibrant and functional international law, inquisitive and creative diplomacy, conflict mitigation, global equality, economic and cultural rather than military means of relationship building in North-South relations (to use a very Seventies phrase), etc. It's the broadly agreed worldview and precepts of a very active, significant caucus on the Hill at that point, one that doesn't win all its battles but that does win some, and always ensures that its interests are heard.
There are other sources to which we can look for indicative data, too. With many things McGovernment, especially at the point of first intentions, it's a good idea to look over the place where they said a lot of it first, the 1972 Democratic Party Platform that came out of the convention where George was nominated to run. Issues of geopolitics, national security, and what IR/poli sci folk call IPE (international political economy) don't show up until near the end of the document, but one gets there eventually. And what does one find once there? We'll bullet key points
- Vietnam: out, out, out (ed. they were still some months out from the Paris Accords at that point)
- End military aid to SE Asia, instead economic/humanitarian aid, plus limited support for a full negotiated settlement of Vietnam’s status
- Amnesty after POWs return
- Defense spending reform, avoidance of “gold plated” solutions (ed. aerospace and big-deck carriers, looking at you...)
- “Creative programs to combat drug abuse, racial tensions and eroded pride in service” (ed. Hold that space, we'll be back to this when we get to the Army)
- Reconversion for defense-related industries where needed (ed. oh you sweet summer children…)
- Abolish the draft
- Arrest the qualitative arms race (ed. in 1972 that's really about MIRVing) and negotiate reductions
- End nuclear testing
- Press for global acceptance of Non-Proliferation Treaty and development of nuclear-free regions (ed. I refer you back to summer children, the sweet thereof)
- Pursue MBFR (ed. that's conventional-force military reductions in Europe)
- New kinds of arms control: on arms sales, naval deployments, other limits on conventional forces
- Haggle out mutually beneficial trade w/ European Communities
- Improve detente but also open up emigration for Soviet Jews
- Protect Israel with arms sales and force backup but also promote direct negotiation with neighbors
- African policy focused on an end to racist minority regimes in Southern Africa (NB: in the summer of '72 that still includes Portuguese regimes in Angola and Mozambique, besides Rhodesia and South Africa)
- More sensitive relationship w Japan based on mutual benefits (ed. this is a shot at Big John Connally's stint as Treasury Secretary)
- Delhi Tilt (ed. a reminder about "the most Indophilic American administration of the 20th century," aka McGovernment)
- Pursue China diplomacy but Nixon methods “have produced unnecessary complications in our relationship with our allies and friends in Asia and with the USSR” (ed. we'll keep coming back to the part here where McGovernment believes it fundamentally more important to reach a working relationship with Moscow than to pressure Moscow via a tilt to China or by playing Moscow and Beijing off each other Nixon-style)
- Diplomatic relations with PRC and talks on “trade, travel exchanges and more basic issues”
- Cooperation w Canada on environmental protection and social policies
- Support “political liberty, social justice and economic progress” in Latin America
- Reexamine relations w Cuba and de-escalate tensions
- Finance and support the UN properly (ed. note the seamless inclusion of a big MCPL platform plank)
- Nudge free trade towards fair trade esp on foreign labor standards
- Support “reform of the international monetary system… Increased international reserves, provision for large margins in foreign exchange fluctuations and strengthened institutions for coordination of national economic policies can free our government and others to pursue full employment” (Narrator voice: Special factor inflation had other ideas...)
- Coordinate pollution controls throughout the industrialized world
- Improved Special Drawing Rights for underdeveloped nations and fair shares in seabed resources (ed. these are actually quite big things to which we will come back in time, here and in narrative and in other Bonus Content - remember the SDRs from the Big Economics Explainer)
- Proper constitutional sharing of foreign/natsec decision making with Congress (ed. hi, War Powers Amendments!)
This is all very much of the political/analytical milieu of MCPL and related organizations/schools of thought on the left hand of American liberalism in the early Seventies. Emphasis on coordinated, well-considered diplomacy, the centrality of the Washington-Moscow dynamic (plus the "world's largest democracy/heroic nonaligned people who invented modern non-violent protest" Indophilia that likewise affects relations with then-Peking), the friendly hand up for democratization and social justice in the Americas, the single-minded determination to end the immoral war in Southeast Asia and also the immoral regimes in Southern Africa, the growing primacy of North-South relations and an enlightened partnership with the Global South as the future of US global influence - all that stuff's baked in there. Like any platform it's aspirational, but it's also a pretty solid picture of significant policy positions, strategic interests, and matters of sheer moral determination, like an end to apartheid or getting the hell out of Big Muddy.
We can dial the focus in closer, also, to a very specifically McGovernite source document - we could really call it ur-McGovernite because it's a product of George's in-house policy wonk from his Senate office, John Holum - which is the Alternate Defense Posture read into the Congressional record by George in late January 1972. It has really strongly McGovernite qualities - by "McGovernite" here, rather than "McGovernment" I mean an ideologically and characterologically pure strain of the phenomenon close to its focal point with George Himself. I'd highlight the following characteristics though they're not the only ones of note
- Progressive in two senses: the 1900s-1910s sense of well-educated expert-culture technocratic reform and whipping government inefficiencies into shape, and in the 1940s sense of a broadly left-leaning outlook suspicious of the notion that the Soviets are (1) aggressively expansionist and (2) masterminds, while also, though not isolationist, disinclined to look overseas for monsters to destroy per the OG George (Washington)
- A combination of thoughtful and incisive strategic iconoclasm with some really breezy untethered assumptions that could turn out testably false with consequences
- An assertive approach to policies that enact what their authors believe, many of which - that penchant for the strategic level again - take a "go big or go home" approach
- Other elements that are very of the early-1970s moment among liberal defense reformers: inveighing against the qualitative arms race (MIRVs and ABM), deep antipathy to high-tech/high-dollar projects on the grounds that they'll always fail (there were at that time two perceived examples of signal failure, the TFX aircraft project that yielded the F-111 and the MBT-70 tank joint venture with West Germany) - it's a healthy skepticism but (1) high-tech/high-dollar doesn't always fail it's just bloody expensive and (2) sometimes it takes a few iterations to get it right (ex. the -E and -F series of F-111s were great aircraft, it took development and some failing forwards to get there), the question is what you perceive risk-reward/ROI to be
- A strongly Progressive opening volley: “The nation’s security does not demand, and is not served, by contests which are based less on strategy and power than on a willingness to waste public resources” (ed. that's going to win you a lot of friends walking in to your first day at DoD, John ...)
- Don't waste an opportunity: phased budgeting approach starting 1973 to reach full effect by 1975, so inside of a presidential term
- Under-credits Soviet forces notably SLBMs , though ICBM and bomber numbers are in the general range
- “Number of targets worth attacking” as a commonsense upper limit on deterrence (Holum calculates this on a “postwar recovery limitation” basis as the strategists say though Holum doesn't use the term, which is the euphemism for destroying the other side as a civilized society beyond the point of reliable repair) at which he finds if you hit around 400 of the right targets in the USSR and around 200 in China you've created maximal achievable MAD damage before you hit rapidly diminishing returns
- Views deterrence very much in MAD terms, what the nuclear-strategy priesthood would call "postwar recovery limitation", i.e. a nice way to say that you're going to blow up the other side's civilization beyond reliable repair
- Considers counterforce philosophy (ed. that means hit the other guy's nukes before he can use them) “[a] possibly futile attempt to retain ICBMs and manned bombers as viable independent deterrent forces” and also something that will inflict surprisingly large civilian losses even if you target enemy launch sites exclusively
- Holum's a supporter of EXPO (EXtended-range POseidon, aka UGM-96, which has that C4 designation precisely because it was really an upgraded Poseidon missile which second-term Nixon called Trident I instead for "optics" reasons) – and determination that the long-term picture heads towards SLBMs, plus possibly a few B-52s with long-range standoff cruise missiles, as the basis for US deterrence which is in line with liberal opinion since the "sufficient deterrence" debates in the late Fifties where Arleigh Burke proposed that sort of seaborne, largely crisis-invulnerable deterrent
- Notes how ABM and MIRV can be provocative and arms race-inducing
- Goes into how the enemy always gets a vote on counterforce strategy which can render it moot
- Concentrate on ASW (anti-submarine warfare) research because it’s useful in both conventional and nuclear scenarios, and shows you what can be done to stalk your own SSBNs (ballistic-missile subs), to help preserve their security
- “[T]he number of United States forces committed to NATO and stationed on European soil is not, within limits, a major factor in NATO’s ability to deter or fight a war on European soil, so long as sufficient numbers are present to convince the Warsaw Pact that the United States remains committed to European security, and so long as lift capacity can provide speedy reinforcement”
- Finds carriers vulnerable and expensive, skeptical that it’s not possible to get basing ashore (ed. an especially breezy assumption in practice), also doesn't like that they're principal tools of gunboat diplomacy in the Global South, for those reasons wants big cutbacks in number of carriers and CAGs as a savings - down to six in service
- The carriers thing and also some related cutbacks for other services intended to legislate by force structure (which achieve lower budget levels) to reduce actual capacity for wars in Asia
- Wants a big shift towards SSNs (ed. for the non-milspec those are nuclear-powered attack submarines) as principal naval combatants, and lead ASW role, against the Soviets – set a sub to kill a sub – the 688s (Los Angeles-class submarines) are one of those systems of which Holum actually approves
- Lays into various systems
- Doubtful of the F-14/AIM-54 combo, doesn't think it can do what it wants to achieve keeping Soviet bombers w/ cruise missiles off US/allied naval and merchant convoys, wants F-4 Phantom improvements instead
- Doesn’t see why you should buy S-3A (carrier-borne anti-submarine jets, though really they're quite a utility-tool aircraft) when you have the P-3C in quantity with longer range - Holum likes land-based P-3s too, effective cheap and plentiful in his view
- Wants to kill the F-15 in favor of LWF (ed. a Light Weight Fighter alternative, for which by Jan. '72 a Pentagon RFP was already underway), an idee fixe of liberal defense reformers
- Does however, tacitly in the background, seem to be on board with AWACS, unlike Bill Proxmire...
- Very much in favor, however, of A-X (ed. what IOTL would become the A-10) as a model of how to design an effective, low-cost system that'll do what it's supposed to in combat, and indeed wants the services to play nice and have USAF do CAS (close air support) for everybody – oh, sweet summer child…
- Big, if not total, cuts in naval construction on grounds that a smaller surface fleet (c. 140 surface combatants) can preserve newer vessels and retire older ones
- That hammer blow to the American shipbuilding industry is tossed in a late-stage paragraph because the core McGoverners are convinced that if the US could manage massive "defense reconversion" - setting wartime factories to civilian-economy work - after World War II surely they can do it again in the vastly changed global economy of the Seventies...
- As for ground forces
- Cut USMC to two divisions (the Marine Corps Reserve division to count towards Corps' statutory three divisions), Pacific-facing one equipped for amphibious ops, Atlantic-facing really concentrated on defending NATO flanks not amphibious warfare (and Reserve division likely to do that too)
- Cut Army to 10 regular-service (down from 13) plus 9 reserve (probably National Guard) divisions, 14 (7+7) committed to defense of NATO/central Europe, 4 (2+2) as strategic reserve, and 1 to cover Mesoamerica/Pacific emergencies
- Desire to cut fat from all services – excessive numbers of officers, troops “doing nothing” in transit between posts or working at arsenals or other locales of little to no real military value (ed. another major complaint of defense reformers both left and right, and very true of the end-stage draftee military)
So, to take a very broad brush, we can suggest some significant elements of McGovernment geostrategy, or at least foreign/natsec policy outlook.
- Detente - not just in terms of a general, marginal thaw in relations but a complex of negotiations and strategies and sometimes institutions created to develop a stable working global relationship between Washington and Moscow at a lowered threat level - takes center stage for the McGoverners, inclusive of things like arms control talks and the nascent Helsinki Accords and trade negotiations, etc.
- Also a new relationship with the Global South centered around a refigured global political economy, a different approach (or approaches) to development in post-colonial nations, sharing of American natural resources and technical know-how, plus a new and emphatic emphasis on the democratic and human rights of all peoples in their home countries
- Efforts to establish a less quietly-adversarial and more coordinated relationship with Western Europe and Japan in the interests of collective economic stability
- That includes on the European side a continued commitment to NATO, partly to create a deliberate impasse in Europe for the Soviets, so Moscow can be induced to pursue de-escalatory policies and relationships
- A commitment to make defense policy and military spending/power projection one tool among many in the realm of global policy, with a reform-by-budget approach to creating what committed McGoverners believe will be a leaner, more effective military, good at what it does but also mindful of its place among a range of policy approaches and outlooks
It's important to remember, however, that there may be differences over details on these points among even the most committed McGovernites, while in the rest of McGovernment there are significant actors whose views diverge on some of the specific bulleted items above.
No Plan Survives First Contact: McGovernment and Strategy Once in Office
The old saw that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy/reality" goes two ways when the McGoverners find themselves swept unexpectedly into office. They have a raft of plans and ambitions and cognitive priors/biases, sometimes with internal disagreements between specific McGoverners, that get brought to the work. At the same time, the Permanent Pentagon - especially the uniformed flag and staff officers who make the place run year in and year out - have their own perspectives on what they see as the ambitious but often naive idealism of the new crowd, and on what plans and priorities need to be laid down and followed. Both of the broadly construed sides in that relationship discover that they'll have to adapt to working together - or at least working in one another's company.
Let's take a moment before we get into all of that, to introduce two specific "uniforms" who - until their scheduled retirement in the summer of 1974 - will play quite significant roles in this early stage of grand strategizing and debate. We'll get to others too but we'll lead with these guys because of their significance to this specific thematic matter of big-picture strategy.
Keep an eye on that "bless your heart" smile
Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer was a dentist's son from Eufaula, Alabama - though the Moorers had been a landlubbing family both Tom and his younger brother Joseph became admirals. A combat pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, Moorer worked his way up naval aviation to command aircraft carriers and in turn both the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets - the first naval flag officer to run both. He then spent the late Sixties as Chief of Naval Operations - the uniformed head of the service - until in 1970 he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Moorer was a conservative in his marrow, both in the ideological and simple human dispositional sense - he was no Edwin Walker crypto-fascist, but he was an instinctual conservative, disinclined to ambiguity even though he was pretty good at institutional politics, and of the "Nixon and Kissinger have some pinko tendencies we should keep an eye on" sort (we'll get back to that in a minute.) A granular detail of note: Moorer was CNO, had just taken the job in fact, at the time of the USS Liberty incident during the Six Day War, when a US Navy listening ship was attacked methodically over a matter of hours by Israeli air and naval forces and several dozen Navy men were killed, with many more wounded. Moorer believed it was a deliberate act signed off on at a high level, not a fog-of-war incident, was incensed at the Johnson and Nixon administrations sweeping it under the rug, and IOTL remained committed to getting to the bottom of the matter for the rest of his life.
About that "pinko tendencies" thing ... Tom Moorer finds himself in a bit of a hard spot as McGovernment comes into office. Between 1969 and 1971 a Navy signals/communications guy in the White House military office, one Yeoman Charles Radford, assiduously got his hands on high-level documents that The Dick and Henry Show did not intend to share with the military establishment, either the Joint Chiefs or service-specific flag officers, and then Radford passed them on to a select group of admirals headed up by Moorer. In among the many White House tapes, Nixon - whose "Plumbers" found the leak and fingered Radford as the guilty party - called it a spy scandal outright, and decided not to go after Moorer and the other admirals publicly (1) so that it wouldn't bring the services further into disrepute and (2) for the classically Nixonian reason that he'd have kompromat, leverage, over Moorer. By 1973 rumors of the case began to reach Capitol Hill - in the McGNU as in OTL, investigative reporting will bring out more. That creates a ... complex situation for the guy most central to the uniforms' general plan to stand athwart McGovernism shouting "stop".
Eyebrows like those don't just grow themselves: Adm. Zumwalt
seen after renouncing his claim to the goblin throne in favor of David Bowie
If you want someone to do the stand-athwart-and-shout-stop stuff, though, it would be hard to find someone with more vibrant and determined energy than this guy: Adm. Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt, Moorer's successor as CNO. A surface-warfare guy who'd been a command prodigy (youngest full admiral, youngest CNO, a few other things likewise) and among other things had run the Navy's riverine "swift boat" forces in Vietnam (where his one son among a raft of daughters, who helmed a swift boat, was tragically, and in the long term fatally, poisoned by Agent Orange), on one hand Zumwalt seems like exactly the kind of senior officer McGovernment would hope for and seek to work with. And that's true so far as it goes: a liberal-minded and socially progressive guy, Zumwalt fought tenaciously against racism and sexism in the Navy, and on behalf of ordinary sailors against the service's tradition of rules and systems that were mostly designed to haze, demean, and exercise dominance over lower enlisteds. (He had a system of "Z-grams", messages to the fleets about major policy changes; the one getting rid of "the Navy way" hazing was titled "Mickey Mouse, Elimination of".) He was also an operational and technological innovator, with ideas about cheaper and from his perspective more efficient ship designs and tactics as part of the Navy's post-Vietnam renewal and modernization. A vibrant and rather charming guy, Bud grows close with George's impressionable, sweet-baby-Jesus-I-want-to-be-a-man-of-ideas Chief of Staff Gary Hart, for whom tales of low-cost hydrofoil attack boats and mini-carrier Sea Control Ships are a one-way defense reform ticket to Bonertown(TM). (Someone notify the secretarial pool ... Gare-Gare's happy to schedule Zumwalt in to talk George's ear off on occasion, which is in fact a little bewildering for a congenital Midwesterner like George.)
Remember Frank Mankiewicz's nostrum to ignore everything a politician says before the word "but"? But. In the manner of the Chiefs, Bud Zumwalt sees his role in military/natsec policy as a responsibility to fulfill a certain set of missions that he's been directed to fulfill. In his case that means, as he frames it, the need to counter and overcome growing Soviet naval power around the world, as the Red Fleet pushes its way out into blue water from that northerly Eurasian base with an ever-larger world's largest submarine force, naval-aviation bombers bristling with nuclear-tipped antiship cruise missiles, and a new generation of surface combatants. No one of such flag rank as Bud Zumwalt is as big a pessimist as Bud Zumwalt about the 1973 US Navy's ability to fulfill that geostrategic mission, one he rated in policy confabs with about a 15% chance of success. He wants more resources for the Navy, quite a bit more - specifically a "hi-low mix" fleet with a smaller critical mass of expensive, complex vessels for key roles plus a lot more cheap-but-useful ships not yet built to hunt subs and control both the high seas and naval chokepoints. Indeed Bud's quite willing to mix it up testily with the chiefs of the Army and Air Force about the distribution of total defense-budget resources being skewed towards those two services which - per Bud - shortchanges the crucial Navy role. (So much so, in fact, that fellow Navy man Tom Moorer told Zumwalt to tone it down and told Zumwalt's successor to make peace with the other services in the interests of the comity of the Chiefs.)
So in this dynamic you have
- The service Chiefs and other key figures in the Joint Staff, who believe the war in Southeast Asia withered the resources they need in order to fulfill the other global missions they've been assigned, and that a new generation of weapons systems is needed to cope with breakneck Soviet modernization, confronted by the Cold-War-contrarian strategic views, plans for fiscal discipline, and carefully-argued programmatic skepticism of the most enthusiastic McGoverners
- The McGoverners, who believe in an opportunity to refigure American geostrategy inclusive of root-and-branch defense reform, confronted by the Chiefs' argument that they're dangerously under-resourced, by dire intelligence data about Moscow's quantitative and qualitative military buildup, and by some of the colder realities of defense industrial policy (of the "you want to sacrifice how many jobs in places where Democrats need to win elections when conversion to peacetime industry doesn't work in a rapidly globalizing economy?" sort)
This is just by way of local flavor and dynamics for the whole of the thing. Let's get on to making some policy sausage.
The Work Starts: The Everything Review vs. The Slow Walk
Like many a newly minted presidential administration, McGovernment walks into the civilian-administered offices at DoD and launches a systemic review of organization, operational and bureaucratic practices, the all-important budgeting system/process, and of course strategy as it (strategy) governs the drawing up of force structures (that then have to be budgeted/paid for) and mission statements. This is common practice for new administrations - both the Kennedy and Nixon administrations sure did it - especially when those administrations (like Kennedy's and Nixon's) had Views about what DoD should do and how it should operate.
Of course, the uniforms have Views too, especially about the haste and naivete of the new civilian crowd, though really they'll respond in a way calculated to defend their institution and its habitual ways of doing business in the face of any and all initiatives on the part of fly-by-night political types. This is common to nearly all entrenched bureaucracies, of which DoD is an outstanding example - despite its roots in the profession of arms, the post-1945 DoD is a deeply and intrinsically bureaucratic institution with a patina of technocracy too, given the fondness for solving problems with "systems", i.e. tech and engineering of one sort or another. So all the usual weapons of bureaucratic self-defense are on the table, but the one at which DoD was truly Olympic-level was the Slow Walk, i.e. draw out processes and decision making over a long enough period of time that would-be reformers can't really get anything done during the time that they have, while your bureaucrats in question get on with incrementally doing things the way they damned well please inch by inch each day while the reformers wait on whatever Big Process to finally schlep its way to a conclusion. Other than outright ignoring reformers' plans, the Permanent Pentagon's typical answer to the lightning bolt of the Everything Review is the morass of the Slow Walk.
But let's come along to some of those large, fundamental strategic questions that the McGoverners and the uniforms confront together as of 1973. They're not in order of importance here - indeed that would be hard to rate and dependent very much on an individual's point of view - but jumbled around to suggest breadth and complexity.
- Navalism or No? Is the US, separated from major regions of strategic interest (also from plausible physical invasion) by thousands of miles of open water, fundamentally a maritime power, or not? Despite the NATO question - defense against/deterrence of attacks on NATO territory - does growing Soviet ability to challenge/disrupt US interests and stratagems around the world (poking out from Moscow's continent-spanning Eurasian base) require greater concentration on naval issues and capabilities in order to knit together a worldwide response - or not so much?
- Density or Mobility? Should the United States concentrate its military resources on a densely-reinforced, relatively long term defense of the central NATO front - because that would be the most disastrous fight to lose in case of war - or should the US push for the European allies to own that task and make American military resources more mobile to operate against potential problems/adversaries around the world?
- How Many and How Long? Richard Nixon's Guam Speech of 1969, which set out the "Nixon doctrine," assumed a "one-and-a-half war" model for the American military - which amounted to a capacity to fight one big war at a time either in Europe or against Chinese aggression in Asia, plus a small unilateral fight somewhere else, plus secondary military aid to Asian allies not facing Chinese aggression - as the general rule of thumb for force sizes/structures, so is that still valid? As for that big war, Nixon's crew also set a metric that the US should be able to defend NATO Europe with conventional weapons for up to 90 days - does that hold up either? If not, in either case, what should a model look like for where, how many, and how long future American wars should be?
- Fundamentals or Eventualities? How should the US balance strategy - choices about what's necessary and what's not, what's essential versus what's desirable but disposable - and resources between the most fundamental sorts of tasks (deter nuclear war, deter or at least win a conflict in Europe, etc.) and eventualities that one might not foresee, or even like having to deal with, but that crop up anyway? (We'll deal with the effects of a big one of those a bit farther down in this post)
- When Do You Swing The Hammer?: As McGovernment works to refigure how military policy fits into a changed system of national security and geostrategy, where is military deterrence a key element of that refigured system, and when do you use, or at least suggestively display, military force? What role does that play in the new system, and have you planned for how such force can support the ends of strategy, or do you view the very resort to force as a form of system failure?
- DepSec Tim Hoopes as coordinating chair
- John Holum, voice of McGovernism, as UnderSec for Policy
- Ted Van Dyk, the regular's regular, as UnderSec for Intelligence, with his various agencies' resources
- Jeffrey Record as AsstSec for Strategy & Plans
- Lt. Gen. George Seignious (Army), the Director of the Joint Staff, aided by the Joint Staff's J-5 (Strategy, Plans, and Policy) office (Secretary Vance is pleased it's Seignious because they - Vance and Seignious - worked together during the LBJ period of the Paris Talks)
- From the new Department of Peace, the Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), Jeremy Stone
- From the State Department, AsstSec for Politico-Military Affairs the rather hawkish young David Aaron
- A small team of Brookings Institution analysts headed by Alton Quanbeck (Brookings' in-house strategic forces guy)
- A small team from the RAND Corporation (because every wing of the Cold War American establishment has ties to RAND) headed by none other than Andrew Sullivan (nowhere near DoD proper at the time because there's no Jim Schlesinger inviting him there, but still the most important American defense strategist you've never heard of and still net-assessing his butt off)
Speaking of the Chiefs, still very much under Tom Moorer's leadership, they come to the table with the new administration with a relatively succinct programmatic argument that is, well, kind of the opposite of everything the John Holums of the world would like to achieve
- The long quagmire war in Southeast Asia drained resources and postponed essential modernization programs for the services
- In the meanwhile, the Soviets have been on a nearly-breakneck push for qualitative improvement in their nuclear and conventional forces, to the point where they present new threats like a blue-water challenge to US naval dominance on the high seas, plus potential forms of conventional and nuclear overmatch against Western forces by the mid-to-late Seventies
- As a result the US needs both a new generation of nuclear and a new generation of conventional weapons to counter Soviet progress and continue to deter all-out war
- Also, given the task to defend NATO territory for up to ninety days (really the Chiefs didn't like that metric because they thought the time window was too short) plus the North Atlantic sea lanes to resupply Europe, plus any other strategic tasks around the world, US forces may not be sized large enough to meet such demands
With contact made between suits and uniforms, let's look at some of the dynamics that affect the review process in specific ways.
The Timing of It Both the McGovernment suits of various flavors and the Permanent Pentagon uniforms can read a calendar; both know that McGovernment's efforts to lay out and then enact dramatic changes in defense policy are (given the uncertain prospect of the 1976 presidential election) bound to a single presidential term. Already, in the joint (inter-service) environment of the Joint Staff and its various regulations - layered on top of internal, intra-service regulations of each branch of the military - that are designed to move through things like comprehensive policy reviews at a "deliberate" pace to make sure everyone's views get aired, which has the convenient side effect of Slow Walking damn near everything as a matter of course, the military hopes to run yet another set of reformers to ground, fending off through pacing what they (the uniforms) don't want to deal with or submit to. (They also have a good sense of those things to which they will submit, like structural reorganization up to a few key red lines, in the interests of not creating a purely adversarial relationship with the political appointees; for the rest they'd prefer just to drag things out until action's no longer feasible then shrug their epaulettes and move on.) The suits get that, of course - they're prepared to plow ahead even if the uniforms can't get in replies, assessments, and such in a timely fashion, though when that situation crops up both sides go to work their respective supporters in Congress and the media about how the other side's been problematic. The McGoverners made a point up front of hitting the uniforms from inter-agency angles, plus the think tank hired guns, before the uniforms could subsume the review in the pacing and complexity of an internal DoD process (where there's strong personal incentive, beyond the collective bureaucratic incentive, for staff officers on two-year assignments with the DoD staff apparatus to drag things out for their entire tour in return for favorable personnel evaluations from their superiors.)
The Internals of It The review's a collective, collaborative process, where individual actors or institutional interests can, through a combo of prolific paper generation, persuasive argument, and what amounts to old-fashioned Weberian charisma, amplify their own role(s) within that collective process. There are several, sometimes conflicting, elements in play there as the review goes along, among them (1) Jeff Record's work ethic and meticulously thorough lines of argument, (2) the debate carried over between Policy (John Holum) and Intelligence (Ted Van Dyk) about just how aggressive, and in what ways aggressive, Soviet intentions really are, plus (3) the discreet appeal of RAND's systemic net-assessment approach to big picture issues. There are other complexities and filigrees, like the degree to which David Aaron's hawkishness sometimes makes him a one-man minority report counterpoint to the official Sarge Shriver/George Ball State Department position. In the long run of the assessment's life cycle, those participants who can articulate concrete plans laid out in strategic terms - what Record likes to call "a harmony between means and ends" - tend to get their versions of language into the final report, especially as DepSec Hoopes navigates compromises between the Policy and Intelligence positions (this is, at least, helped considerably by the fact that Holum and Van Dyk largely get along well personally, which is to say that in Barry Goldwater's words they know how to disagree without being disagreeable.)
The Innenpolitik of It In the study of institutional/bureaucratic sociology and institutional/bureaucratic politics, the lovely German term Innenpolitik describes factors that drive both the mechanisms and outcomes of that politicking that are internal to either or both the institutions themselves and their domestic-national setting. You have a variety, maybe even a menagerie, of those involved in McGovernment's efforts to craft a new and different defense strategy. There's the powerful influence and outlook/disposition of the MCPL caucus, who see George as one of their own inside the machinery, who has both an opportunity and an obligation to help turn the Cold War military-industrial machinery in a new direction. There is, for another example, the surprisingly bipartisan post-Vietnam support for significant overseas troop/basing cutbacks, plus skepticism even among some relatively conservative members of both parties about uniformed expert opinion. (That's also linked to Congressional willingness to support lower end-state personnel levels - the cap on the total population of each service who Congress will pay for out of the budget.) Certainly there are factions and public-interest lobbies within the McGovern movement who would love to see big dramatic changes towards world peace and demilitarization. At the same time you have a rapidly mobilizing, agile, and aggressive lobby of defense hawks, from folks like Scoop Jackson and Barry Goldwater (also in a more moderate, conciliatory way John Stennis) in Congress, or various think tanks and news columnists, plus things like the recreation of the Committee on the Present Danger, who mean to harry McGovernment at every step of the way, promote detailed counter-arguments, and attack every iota of whatever looks like weakness on national security. This may have been a sector of overall federal government policy where McGovernment wanted to just get on with the job and focus attention on other realms, but both McGovernment's opponents and even some of its closest friends are prepared to make defense/natsec policy a big deal.
The Außenpolitik of It If innenpolitik covers those internal constituencies and issue pressures and dynamics that determine institutional policy outcomes, Außenpolitik covers the external factors that also shape those outcomes. We'll look at just three here that give you much of the flavor of the thing.
- South Korean strongman Park Chung Hee - whose political base lies in a specific provincial clique within South Korea's large military, plus a very Korean version of Nixon's "silent majority" in the general public - is not in the least bit pleased that McGovernment views the Nixon Doctrine as the one good thing about the Nixon administration, and so wants to continue the withdrawal of US forces from the Korean peninsula. Park takes a three-pronged approach to navigate favorable outcomes for his regime in the face of McGovernment plans. The first prong is an extensive, and really pretty sophisticated, influence campaign through South Korean allies in Congress and the American press, plus senior US Army officers who don't think well of the idea, that it will destabilize the peninsula and lead to another round of intra-Korean warfare. Second, both as a companion and - for McGovernment - an alternative to the first pressure campaign against withdrawals in the first place, Park makes clear that if McGovernment can't be dissuaded then the US will need to step up substantially, over current levels, in terms of both the quantity and the technological quality of military aid to the ROK. In other words Park says, "want to get out of Korea? Then you'll need to give me a candy-store spree through the Arsenal of Democracy." The third prong - really stomping on the most acute pressure point in order to get (1) a stop to withdrawals or (2) loads of military-industrial goodies or (3) frankly both - is that Park sets his blessing on a more aggressive South Korean effort to aggregate the resources for a nuclear weapons program. President Park didn't get this far in life by fucking around, and he has no plans to start now.
- As IOTL, Japan's untypically larger-than-life premier Kakuei Tanaka takes the summer of 1973 to visit foreign climes - the US, Europe, and even Moscow, starting with America. McGovernment really needs the cooperation of the still-dynamic Japanese economy and the strategically undervalued yen in order to pursue the global macroeconomic plans for a new monetary and economic order that Ken Galbraith and the gang want. They also want regional stability in Northeast Asia while the US winds down at least a significant portion of its standing military presence in the region because Land Wars in Asia Are Bad. As it happens, when it comes to these sorts of subjects, there are three things worth knowing about Tanaka. First, he's an unrepentant Japanese economic nationalist - he wants broadly-based domestic prosperity (linked to his "construction state" of mid-sized metropolitan economic nodes all linked to Tokyo by a cat's cradle of shinkansen lines), and it's the kind of global power Japan's still allowed to wield, and he's into both of those things from a position of strength. Second, he's the driving force behind Sino-Japanese reconciliation, which is viewed quite warily by American Cold War conservatives (hi, Henry Luce!) Third, he's the only Japanese premier you're likely to run into who would ever seriously consider the idea - if the United States shrank away from its security footprint in Japan's home region - of pursuing an indigenous Japanese nuclear deterrent, through the nation's robust nuclear-energy and satellite-launch industries. Tanaka's also smart enough to know that, given McGovernment's factionally tenuous position relative to Congress (Tanaka climbed to the top of the LDP; few politicians on earth know more about parliamentary factionalism than he does), plus the sheer range of foreign and domestic policy McGovernment wants to get done, they can afford few to no big hitches in their get-along. So Tanaka would like to discuss, in a congenial way, the quid for which an absence of Japanese hitches can quo.
- McGovernment also can't do without a supportive, close-knit, and productive relationship with the United States' most important NATO partner, at the time the second-largest economy in the world (soon to be overtaken by Japan), West Germany. And in his early presidential going George finds it's largely lovely to hang out with and discuss social-democratic economics or detente with Willy Brandt. But also, during a major state visit, Brandt's charming, polylingual, polymath defense minister and likely successor Helmut Schmidt asks if he could have a short meeting with President McGovern. In that meeting Schmidt brings up two things. The first is the American mutual defense treaty with Spain that McGovernment wants to abrogate Because Franco. Schmidt understands George's motives there, but wants to point out a key point about McGovernment's relationship with NATO that may not yet have been explained to POTUS in detail. The agreement with Spain does involve US Air Force aircraft at Torrejon Air Base near the Mediterranean, yes, but the real jewel of the setup is the naval base at Rota, hard by Cadiz. From there, American Polaris ballistic-missile submarines stage patrols into the Mediterranean (Polaris was really more an intermediate-range than an intercontinental missile so you had to use forward basing to put the Soviets in range.) The continental NATO allies regard the Mediterranean patrols as crucial for two reasons: first they're reckoned as part of the force of American nuclear weapons that deter regional conflict with the Warsaw Pact right there in Europe, and second they're considered a part of the US strategic deterrent as well, which provides that crucial symbol of linkage - that the US would be ready to use strategic weapons that put American cities at risk of Soviet retaliation in order to defend Europe, what the Europeans in NATO view as proof that Washington really means it about defending Europe. You get out of Rota, Mr. President, says Schmidt-Schnauze, there will need to be some form of substitutive principle or there will be trouble: the Benelux countries might mutiny about paying their way for NATO defense or start seeking accommodations with Moscow that would undermine German security, while any future left-leaning French government might do likewise. And that would do nothing at all for McGovernment's domestic political position. Likewise there's the matter of the Soviets' RSD-10 missile (NATO designation SS-20) awaiting deployment. It will allow the Soviets, from deep in their own territory, to target NATO's military establishment in Europe, especially NATO nuclear weapons bases/stockpiles, plus major European cities, with a weapon that cannot however reach US shores. Europeans are sorely concerned that will test American resolve about going all the way for NATO's defense. Plus the Soviets look ready to MIRV the RSD-10, which means an even greater hail of warheads that could beat down NATO Europe without threatening America. If a post-Vietnam America far more cautious about global military ventures doesn't do some concrete things to preserve European confidence in the face of such developments, NATO might fray apart.
- All of which, of course, is a lot for George and his merry band to be getting on with, especially given that George is nearly equally likely (dependent on the specific individual issue and the inputs of inner-circle advice he gets) to (1) stubbornly hold his ground against all comers, (2) instead acquiesce in order to avoid trouble with stuff he cares more about, or (3) figure out - because his government background is legislative - how to logroll the situation like a sonofagun (for The Youth, logrolling is one of politics' panoply of terms for trading favors)
So it takes into the very early autumn just to get the principal strategy/policy review done up, pushed along towards the end because the civilians know implementation has everything to do with buying enough time to outlast the Slow Walk. Plus it takes time to get the final push out from under that earlier reorganization of the DoD's operational structure and the unified/specified commands (the latter set to kick in during 1974.) What does that roll out? Well, this:
As they pull together the resources to produce this strategic reassessment, the McGoverners take some inspiration from a perhaps unexpected source. In November of 1970, Dick Nixon's SecDef, Melvin Laird, produced a trailblazing document for a fundamental redefinition of US strategy and reshaping of US defense plans and force structures for life after Vietnamization ran its course. Laird titled the report to Nixon A Strategy for Peace: A National Security Strategy of Realistic Deterrence. The plan put deterrence front and center - not just MAD deterrence, but a nesting-doll model of deterrence that covered strategic nuclear deterrence, deterring large-scale conventional war (like war in Europe, or against China), deterring more localized conflicts, even deterring guerrilla insurgencies. It programmed qualitatively different kinds of American military forces/resources for each category of deterrence, and relied on a strategy where "free world allies" would do a lot more of the work and, in the non-nuclear realms, US military force would integrate plans and efforts with those allies in appropriate ways (with more where the locals took the lead), and also - a tune McGoverners can hum - where military approaches and resources were integrated into a larger strategy that included economic, diplomatic, and other resources that would buttress the stability of overseas partners and prevent conflict or nip it in the bud. Laird's approach was more activist than really double-dyed McGovernites like John Holum would prefer, but the McGoverners are happy to plagiarize a good outline where deterrence is key, allies need to step up, and military means/methods should be integrated with other resources to serve a larger strategy than "beat the other guy in a straight fight, but everywhere."
In outline
- US defense policy - integrated into a broader global strategy that relies heavily on economic, diplomatic, humanitarian, and other resources and methods - will focus on deterrence at all levels of conflict
- Deterrence of strategic nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union (or, say the McGoverners, with the People's Republic of China within the following 10-15 years if then-Peking picks up the pace developing its arsenal) with a survivable deterrent that "can inflict unacceptable and effectively unrecoverable damage on the enemy" (the McGoverners, collectively, view Moscow's wily commissars as fundamentally haunted by the devastation of World War II and fearful of societal collapse that would end those commissars' central control over their Eurasian Marxist-Leninist empire)
- Deterrence of major war - classified here, for the timeframe of McGovernment, as "a general war, begun with conventional weapons, against the Soviet Union centered on the NATO area of operations but with potentially global elements and aspects" - or, if deterrence fails, "the ability to terminate the conflict in a manner acceptable to the fundamental interests of the United States and its allies, without escalation to a strategic nuclear exchange"
- Deterrence of smaller regional wars or the ability - in cooperation with and often relying on regional partners - to terminate them successfully at minimum cost to those partners and the United States
- Deterrence through conflict prevention with regard to inter- and intrastate "political ferment" in the developing world, pursued chiefly through non-military methods but where appropriate integrated support from American military resources may play a case-by-case role
- It lays out a model for force structures/missions that, if you just gave a quick elevator pitch, might come across like a "1 1/2 war plan" but it's not yer Nixon's 1 1/2 war approach
- The bulk of US military resources to be shaped around the role to deter or prosecute a large, relatively short war, centered on Europe but potentially conflict fronts could open up in various parts of the world, against the Soviets and their allies/proxies
- When you get into the weeds this has various planning consequences, among them two that affect the Navy especially: (1) a move from a model of seeking out major engagements with the enemy to a model of "flexible global sea control", and (2) with that a shift away from the "swing strategy" by which a bunch of naval assets from the Pacific were supposed to head for the Atlantic at best speed to join a big battle defending convoys bound for Europe
- There are other consequences, too, for all the services, in a model for the big Europe-centered war conceived in terms of a 30ish-day conflict rather than a 90-day or 180-day or what have you (NB: we'll come back around to those in successive posts)
- When you get into the weeds this has various planning consequences, among them two that affect the Navy especially: (1) a move from a model of seeking out major engagements with the enemy to a model of "flexible global sea control", and (2) with that a shift away from the "swing strategy" by which a bunch of naval assets from the Pacific were supposed to head for the Atlantic at best speed to join a big battle defending convoys bound for Europe
- Certain specific elements of the force structure will be geared specifically to a smaller, regional conflict, with resources from military-assistance and training structures that support friendly foreign militaries to intervention forces for those regional conflicts
- The "smaller war" force structure would be available to complement the "big war" force structure in some global breakout zone or other during a big war, but the "big war" and "smaller war" forces would be structured in fundamentally different ways for different roles, and except in special circumstances "big war" resources would not be committed to "smaller war" roles or vice versa
- The bulk of US military resources to be shaped around the role to deter or prosecute a large, relatively short war, centered on Europe but potentially conflict fronts could open up in various parts of the world, against the Soviets and their allies/proxies
- Back to the realm of proper strategy, not just into some operational-art weeds: the US will seek to bolster its own advantages and long-term global goals, while it also deters Soviet (or local/regional) malfeasance by threatening them with the worst possible outcomes for them, by an offsetting - some report authors (hi, David Aaron!) already want to use the term asymmetrical - approach to the confrontation with Moscow, which involves these observations/stratagems among others
- Leverage the fact that the US has friends - and could have even more with a geostrategy based on collaboration and development rather than Murka being the world's big swinging stick - while Moscow generally just has vassals and clients, sometimes unreliable ones
- Change defense/geostrategy divisions of labor with those friends and allies, while seeking out more, to maximize what friends/allies can do for themselves while
- Concentrating US contributions on what the US does best/is the only one who can do certain things, and on US abilities to provide the right sorts of resources that support friendly strengths and discourage Soviet adventurism, directly or through proxies
- Change defense/geostrategy divisions of labor with those friends and allies, while seeking out more, to maximize what friends/allies can do for themselves while
- In "big war" planning set up a discriminating, sequential model that works to deter or turn back Soviet aggressiveness in an order of strategic priority, i.e. figure out the most vital US interests and protect those most first, with a willingness to be clinical/cold blooded about it (also to see where nonmilitary US contributions may better contribute to conflict-free regions)
- Make a much larger investment in strategic mobility, even giving some key mobility systems/methods (cargo aircraft military and civil, new classes of faster shallow-draught cargo ships, prepositioned equipment ashore or afloat, etc.) budget priority over some weapons systems if tradeoffs must be made
- Offset Soviet advantages of sheer scale/quantity in their military forces by closer integration of US regular-service and reserve forces, big improvements in reserve training, and new models for integrating regular and reserve forces especially for the "big war" setup
- Capitalize on Soviet weaknesses/disadvantages
- Keep theater and strategic nuclear forces (and some non-nuclear theater strike resources) concentrated on spiking Soviet fears of social collapse and the loss of the ideologically/obsessively centralized control at the heart of how the Soviet system works, with targeting designed to decapitate different kinds of central control (but not at the very top - you need someone to negotiate a ceasefire with) and to collapse already rickety centralized systems, such that the Soviets never want to face such consequences
- Use specific kinds of naval and air resources - not only US but "free world friends" - to hem in the Soviet naval effort to break out into the world's oceans and prevent localized Soviet/proxy operations around world naval chokepoints (Johor Strait, Panama Canal, Bab-el-Mandeb/Suez Canal, etc.)
- Plan resources and methods to jeopardize the long, also somewhat rickety Soviet lines of communication/supply that link the USSR's western (NATO-facing) and eastern (China-facing) fronts (for example, sneaking subs into the Barents and Kara Seas to fire cruise missiles with conventional munitions that could collapse key railway bridges or dams on navigable waterways in a "big war" scenario)
- Plan political/psychological/diplomatic stratagems that would encourage restive Warsaw Pact nations' desires to stay out of Soviet aggression in Europe
- Continue to use the West's relative (though narrower, by the Seventies) technological superiority to threaten bogging down any Soviet blitz into Western Europe with heavy losses
- Also use specific kinds of military spending and offset capabilities to put pressure on the Soviet Union's deceptively shaky economy and industrial base
- Here for example Andrew Sullivan makes his pitch to "stay in the bomber business" not just because the US is good at strategic bombing and its a "second-strike" capability that could mostly survive a blitz of Soviet ICBMs, but because forcing Moscow to defend its whole vast continental perimeter with costly advanced air defenses (1) means the resources that go into that can't do other military things, (2) it might overheat the shaky Soviet industrial base, and (3) that military spending can't instead buoy the civilian economy
- Under McGovernment, also, a carrot-and-stick approach there, where the US waits for such spending cycles (ex. US has bombers, USSR must build better air defenses) to take effect then suggests ways to deescalate them and related points of military confrontation, so the Soviet consumer economy can benefit
- Here for example Andrew Sullivan makes his pitch to "stay in the bomber business" not just because the US is good at strategic bombing and its a "second-strike" capability that could mostly survive a blitz of Soviet ICBMs, but because forcing Moscow to defend its whole vast continental perimeter with costly advanced air defenses (1) means the resources that go into that can't do other military things, (2) it might overheat the shaky Soviet industrial base, and (3) that military spending can't instead buoy the civilian economy
- Leverage the fact that the US has friends - and could have even more with a geostrategy based on collaboration and development rather than Murka being the world's big swinging stick - while Moscow generally just has vassals and clients, sometimes unreliable ones
So it's September 1973, and our McGoverners have plunked this top-secret report on various E-Ring desks (that's the floor level/region of "the Building" where the service chiefs and the Joint apparatus live) while Cy Vance works to promote peaceful and constructive discourse about it. No sooner was that accomplished though, when Stuff Happens ...
October Surprise: The Process/Debates After the Tishrin War
"Events, dear boy, events"
- Harold Macmillan
Boy, just when you start to think you know where things are going ... the Middle East happens (this has been a theme since approximately the Bronze Age.)
For the great McGovernment debates about strategy, policy, mission statements, force structure, et al. on the south shore of the Potomac, the McGNU's Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 has two large-amplitude effects
- On the debates about strategic priorities that entwine with debates about global force structure/posture, and also
- Eminently presentist ("the near and medium-term future will be exactly like what just happened!") transformations in the discussion of what sort of wars the US military may face, and how to fight them
- The even-dicier-than-OTL Syrian breakthrough on the Golan Heights, plus Israeli advertisement of a purported nuclear weapons alert, gets the instinctively pro-Israel McGovern administration much closer even than OTL to committing US military force against the Syrians (... Tom Moorer is not a fan.)
- Much as IOTL, the McGovern administration starts an air bridge (crucially tethered to Lajes Air Force Base in the Azores, that McGovernment ostensibly wanted rid of Because Portuguese Falangists) to resupply Israel with key military supplies (... Tom Moorer is not a fan.)
- Then a contingent of US troops join in coordinated action with Soviet forces to occupy different zones along the Suez Canal in order to disengage the Israeli and Egyptian armies until UN peacekeepers can deploy (... if you already guessed that Tom Moorer Is Not a Fan, you're not wrong.)
This of course affects the big conversations inside the five-sided megastructure.
- Among other things, you've just gained a laundry list of potential "half-war" scenarios
- Conventional defense of Israel from overwhelming outside attack
- Securing the Suez Canal against further disruption (as IOTL the US Navy sets straight to work on peacefully de-mining and reopening the Canal, with international support, after the initial October War ceasefire)
- Interposition in Lebanon in the case of a potential conflict there, either sectarian fragmentation or Syria and Israel picking sides in Lebanon's internal disputes and trying to turn the western flank on each other (Israel and Syria, that is)
- Conflict in Libya (1) to protect foreign oil workers there (this nearly happened both during OTL's Yom Kippur War and during the McGNU's own October War) or (2) in support of Egypt if attacked by Libya for talking peace with Israel
- Work like nobody's business to draw Syria into a Levantine peace process (with help from Moscow if necessary, since Brezhnev considers Levantine instability a danger to superpower equilibrium)
- Build up Iran, like it or not (linked, you'll remember, to the efforts to peel apart OPEC unity on oil prices)
- Encourage multifaceted security support (economic and infrastructural, for internal social stability, as much or more than military) for the Gulf sheikhdoms now that the Brits have withdrawn as policemen of the Gulf, with attention to the strategic geography of Oman (Oman's a way to access the region without getting in too deep)
- Take either of two approaches to the Indian Ocean region generally, pursued in parallel
- Either try to "neutralize" it - superpowers largely stay out, and encourage restraint from troublemaking on the part of regional clients - or
- The US pursues over-the-horizon security assurance/deterrence by stationing a carrier group and/or Marine battalion landing team (BLT) afloat in the wider Indian Ocean, with a generally maritime/sea-based approach to responding to SW Asian security challenges (or carrot-and-sticking Iran to a responsible security role not just Pahlavi grandiosity)
- All of which comes with an intrinsic and, really, kind of prescient McGovernment suspicion of Saudi Arabia's zealous religious conservatism and (at that point) hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which makes the McGoverners more inclined to concentrate on the Gulf region and Iran, plus containment of the Soviet clients in South Yemen hard by the Bab-el-Mandeb, rather than wooing the Saudis intensively
- McGovernment wants a fair few sticks in the mix with some carrots dealing with KSA (all of which, as we'll see, may result in Views on the part of Frederick of Arabia, aka Kennedy-family maven and major McGovern '72 campaign adviser Fred Dutton, now Ambassador to Saudi Arabia because it was one of his dream jobs, who doesn't think they put all that effort into making George the Kennedy family stalking horse just for him to gallivant off in such financially inconvenient directions ...)
The other major thing the McGNU's Tishrin War does is provoke energetic study and debate about the nature of potential near-to-medium-term conflicts for which the US should prepare - either to prevent them from happening like in central Europe, or to prevail if necessary wherever they might come up.
On that basis, what the latest Arab-Israeli conflict demonstrated was
- a fast-moving war, where even the immense destructive power of the weapons involved didn't prevent or stalemate decisively rapid operational movements
- where new kinds of weapons - especially missile-based air defense and even more so lightweight guided anti-tank missiles that even infantry could use - inflicted brutal losses on an opponent's armored vehicles and aircraft, and
- the ability to withstand, outnumbered, an opening onslaught by the enemy then marshal forces to counterattack and win was the key to Israel's survival at the end of the day
- This sort of conflict leverages a narrow time window that precludes the classical American way of war: methodical mobilization of mass national resources - during which time American forces would often lose some of a conflict's early engagements - where the American continent-as-nation would then churn out resources and firepower at a massive industrial scale to overwhelm and grind down an opponent (except, Record notes tartly, in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese enemy wisely preferred not to give US massed conventional firepower that sort of chance and had a level of strategic commitment to the long-term outcome that the US lacked)
- It suggests things (that we'll get back to in later posts of the series) about how you'd need to organize, train, and equip US forces to succeed up front - and not just, Record's kafeeklatsch goes on, in a localized "first battle" somewhere region but at the global, strategic, post-conflict-success level
- It also suggests that there are even better odds than the McGovernment/McGovernment-adjacent suits had argued already that the "one big war" in Europe that must be deterred at all costs could in fact be a fast war, both because of the likely characteristics of that conflict, and because if it went badly for NATO that would lead to rapid and (per McGovernment views) likely uncontrollable nuclear escalation, so best to prevent that through success if deterrence fails
- It's also not lost on Record and the suits that twice in the conflict - early on when Israel was nearly overwhelmed, and again at the end when it looked like Syria and Egypt in turn might collapse - there was nearly superpower intervention, for which in a direct superpower conflict as a form of escalation/conflict termination one might substitute a choice to use nuclear weapons wherever that might lead, so it's important to figure out how not to end up at that pass if possible
What about that big-picture strategic item of Soviet intentions? Really there's something for everyone in the October War. Soviet naval activity in the Mediterranean, resupply efforts for Syria especially, the closely guarded knowledge that the Soviets moved battlefield nuclear weapons into the theater to provide if necessary retaliatory capability if Israel used nukes against its opponents, and the readiness to use VDV forces (Soviet airborne troops) to prevent the collapse of either Egyptian or Syrian forces points to Moscow's ability to intervene in the Middle East and its capacity to project power in new directions from the Soviet Eurasian bastion. On the other hand the largely defensive nature of Soviet participation in the conflict - propping up its clients just as the US did - and the readiness at the end to work with the US on a Suez disengagement zone point to some pragmatic flexibility. There's room for the Bud Zumwalts to say you need a lot more forces in a lot more places and room for the John Holums and Jeff Records to say in differing but somewhat complementary ways that instead what you really need to do is play it smart.
Rather like the first big post, this sets out a stage for the posts upcoming:
- How and why McGovernment makes certain choices about the nuclear arsenal, entwined with creating and "selling" CART (the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty)
- NATO reform and how the military/security side of relations with Western Europe entwine with the Cambridge Group et al. and McGovernment global economics
- How the two armed services most battered by the Vietnam experience - the Marine Corps and the Army - set off in very new directions out of the ferment of ideas in the first half of the Seventies
- George and the Military-Industrial Complex, or how weapons system planning/defense contracting/ethics reform/foreign military sales all stew together in a gumbo of interesting institutional, Congressional, and international politics
Well no, not as it turned out. The second one is in fact shorter (by a good bit I think, will have to check word count on that.) This one as they say grew in the telling.
McGoverning Bonus Content: Moment of Historiographical and Thematic Clarity
Like it says in the threadmark - this is a brief entry, but it condenses a key framework for understanding the McGovern administration's circumstances, the context of McGovernment's plot arc if you will. We've seen intimations in narrative chapters, we'll see more of it related to defense/natsec stuff, we saw it in the Big Damn McGovernomics Explainer, we've seen it too as the Nixon crew's criminality erupts into actual legal actions, from the explainer on that subject as well.
IOTL, more than one person associated with the McGovern campaign, George included, described the effort as a late-Sixties campaign that came along past its time. To some degree the "past its time" thing is less true in the McGNU, as the underlying corrupt criminality of the Nixon administration blows up while electoral consequences are still possible, likewise the Chennault Affair. So that late-Sixties bit still holds - in a lot of ways one can describe the whole period 1968-72 as essentially the end of the late Sixties up to the start of something different - and the result of the POD here, George McGovern's narrow victory in a three-way race, brings an administration deeply infused with and by what we could call the Kennedy Left into office. That's a deep-cut Sixties influence yet again.
But. Nearly as soon as the new administration arrives - within a few months at most, dependent on what topic you want to explore - McGovernment gets dropped right in the Seventies soup. Both the most committed McGoverners and their most committed supporters during the presidential campaign hoped for a new world ahead. In the words of Oscar Wilde, be careful what you wish for, for you may get it.
IOTL, more than one person associated with the McGovern campaign, George included, described the effort as a late-Sixties campaign that came along past its time. To some degree the "past its time" thing is less true in the McGNU, as the underlying corrupt criminality of the Nixon administration blows up while electoral consequences are still possible, likewise the Chennault Affair. So that late-Sixties bit still holds - in a lot of ways one can describe the whole period 1968-72 as essentially the end of the late Sixties up to the start of something different - and the result of the POD here, George McGovern's narrow victory in a three-way race, brings an administration deeply infused with and by what we could call the Kennedy Left into office. That's a deep-cut Sixties influence yet again.
But. Nearly as soon as the new administration arrives - within a few months at most, dependent on what topic you want to explore - McGovernment gets dropped right in the Seventies soup. Both the most committed McGoverners and their most committed supporters during the presidential campaign hoped for a new world ahead. In the words of Oscar Wilde, be careful what you wish for, for you may get it.
Just discovered this yes and I have to say, simply fantastic work. Dense, certainly dense, boy have you packed this with depth, but enjoyably so.