What Kind of War?

by HANSON W. BALDWIN

1

THE prophets of doom — of a new Armageddon of atomic bombs and hurtling bombers — are loud in the land these days. The issue seems to be settled; most Americans take it for granted that a war with Russia is likely and that the atomic bomb will certainly be used; the only unknown is the date. Even the President who believes that his policies will restore stability to the world, and who cherishes the hope that history may know him as the peacemaker, brandished an atomic bomb a few weeks ago. If war comes, we would not hesitate — he said — to use it.

There is, I think, a basic fallacy in this thinking — a fallacy so major that unless corrected it might well undermine our hopes for a quick victory if war should come, and our aspirations for a more stable peace after victory. The nation’s dangerous war psychosis, which has a good bit of the chip-on-theshoulder attitude of the belligerent but frightened small boy, is delivering us into the hands of the political demagogues and bomb-rattling Douhets; we think war; we talk war and the bomb, but we never pause to figure out what the objective of a war with Russia should be.

Yet it is very clear that in a war with Russia, in any war, the kind of war we should fight should depend upon the objectives of the war—the kind of peace we want. We are putting the cart before the horse; we are following the same policies that we did in World War II—the goal victory, unconditional surrender, blitzkrieg—with no eye to the long grim road that lies ahead after the bombs are dropped and t he radioactive ruins have shrouded the dead. If we fight a war with victory as the only objective; if we fight a war without first spelling out the political aims of the conflict, we can lose the peace again — as we have done twice in the last thirty years. The kind of peace we want dictates the manner of war we fight.

This is so self-evident that it should require no great emphasis, yet Americans always have been wishful thinkers and politically credulous people who have fought wars without knowing what they were fighting for. Wistful aspirations have too often been substituted for hard-headed political aims; we have seldom seen beyond victory. If we are to avoid the mistakes of the past, therefore, we must formulate first the things we want to fight for; only then can we determine the way we want to fight. In other words, sound military strategy stems from national policy, not vice versa.

If a war with Russia should come, what should be the objective of victory; what are our national aims? Do we want a Carthaginian peace? We might judge so from the delenda est Carthago threats of our Douhets and the incendiary words of some of our Congressmen. Is our objective to make Russia a desert, to tumble down the walls of the Kremlin, of Moscow, of Leningrad, of Rostov, of a score of cities, into the shards and dust of destruction, to plow the ruins and salt the fields? Is the aim of war against Russia annihilation of as much of the enemy population as possible and unbridled devastation and destruction?

These questions surely answer themselves. No war of attempted annihilation in history — save, perhaps, the destruction of Carthage by Rome — has resulted in a more stable peace, and Carthage was a compact city-state; Russia is a vast “heartland” of 200 million people. We professed in the Wilsonian days, and in the recent trials, that our enemies were not peoples but the tyrants who ruled over them and the totalitarian ideologies they espoused; it would be hard by any amount of rationalization and on any basis of expediency to justify a war whose objective was primarily destruction, devastation, and slaughter.

There is no moral or ethical aim to a war of annihilation, nor could such a conflict be said to have aught but a negative political objective; certainly no such war could lead to a just peace or to a stable peace.

A war of annihilation, with the crushing consequences such a conflict would have upon the economy of the world and the world’s political structure, could not help creating problems equal to, or worse than, those we now face. The wanton slaughter of millions — even if in the name of righteousness — would scarcely contribute to stability, much less to the triumph of ethics or justice; nor could we expect that political moderation - that antipathy for extremes which is the strength of the Anglo-Saxon democracies — would be fostered by such an aim. A war of annihilation is politically a senseless war, morally a reprehensible one.

What of the alternative aim of Balkanization? If Russia is not to be devastated as the Mongols once devastated Europe, should we not aim to split her into pieces, to amputate her provinces, to truncate her territory? But we do not want territory, and Balkanization always has led in past history to irredentism, to chauvinism and friction and future trouble. The greater part of the Soviet states proper have been Russian for centuries; it would be unjust ethnically and historically and politically to carve the Russian state into small bits. It would be, moreover, a most difficult and most impractical undertaking which would require the occupation of Russia — the largest land mass in the world — for years, and the constant policing of troubled artificial borders. Balkanization could provide the tinder for a fourth great war; it certainly would not lead to a more stable peace.

What, then, should be our peace aims? Are we out to loot Russia’s treasures, to put an ikon in every fourth living room in America? Do we want the oil of the Caucasus, ihe minerals of the Donbas, the wealth of the Urals? The somewhat impatient answer is obvious: we do not covet any of these.

Our national aim in a war with Russia is — or should be — clear. The fangs of Russia should be drawn; that is, the power of the Soviet states to expand at the expense of their neighbors should be hobbled, and the aggressive expansionist philosophy of the Soviet Union eliminated. In practical political terms this means, I think, at least, two things: —

1. The monopoly of the Communist Party upon the governmental structure of Russia and her satellites must be broken, and the false appeal of Communist dogma refuted.

2. All territories and all nations that Russia has enslaved or occupied must be freed and Russia must return to her traditional frontiers.

The practical definition of these aims in terms of frontiers and peoples would not be easy; peace aims are never easy. The Baltic states and the Polish frontier would be but two of the problems, and the Ukrainian separatist movement, always strong throughout the centuries, might present another major issue. There might well be added, moreover, a third requirement — the disarmament of Russia. This, however, should surely be a condition of military victory, not per se a peace aim, or we have forgotten the lessons of the past; for no victorious cabal, remaining armed itself, can ever force permanent disarmament upon the vanquished and hope for a more stable peace.

The essence of our peace objectives if a war with Russia occurs should be to eliminate the threat of aggression which, by virtue of the marriage of Communist ideology with Russian power, now casts a long shadow across the world. We can, I think, carry the argument one step further; these should not only be the national objectives if a hot war — a shooting war — starts, but they should be the national objectives of the existing cold war.

2

THESE objectives are not easily attained, but we can make the ultimate goal harder and more difficult to achieve, or easier to reach, by the methods we use.

Two principles can guide us in the determination of these methods: (1) You do not defeat ideas with a sword. (2) Unbridled devastation leads to economic misery and political extremism.

These principles suggest that in cold or hot war we should emphasize political and psychological and economic methods. The old principle of war — concent ration upon the object ive — demands the focusing of our efforts upon totalitarian Communism and upon Russian military power the threat of Russia to the world — not the dispersion of our effort by an attack upon the Russian people.

There are, obviously, many weaknesses in the seemingly monolithic façade of Communism; the fissures of Titoism are widening in many of the Iron Curtain countries, and even in the Kremlin itself the death of Stalin, almost certain to occur within the next five to ten years, will exacerbate the differences that already exist in the Politburo and may produce, in the subsequent palace struggle for power, another Trotsky-like split and perhaps numerous defections. The peoples of the Soviet Union are not without their own differences; there are racial, religious, and nationalist minorities in Russia and dissidents such as the Ukrainians and the Don Cossacks who object to the rule of the Russians as much as to the rule of Communism. There are, after all, only about 6 million members of the Communist Party in Russia, a nation of perhaps 200 million and only about 120 million Russians; the rest are a medley of races with their own cullures, traditions, and histories, their own nationalist aspirations.

The above facts, which are not subject to sueeessful challenge, suggest that in cold or hot war we should try to drive a political, moral, and psychological wedge between the government and the peoples; that we should particularly encourage the oppositionism — underground but definite — in the Iron Curtain countries, and the separatism and nationalism of the Ukrainians and other minorities within Russia.

Lest such measures seem to be a weak reed for us to lean upon — and it is not suggested, of course, that these should be the only measures we should take — it might be well to remember that failure to exploit these Soviet weaknesses probably cost Germany the war, and that Ukrainian guerrillas, bearing arms against the Soviet government, still are fighting — though in small numbers — in the forests of this vast region.

Records produced at Nuremberg demonstrate that in the fall of 1941 the Nazi Party, disregarding objections by the German Army, transformed the invasion of Russia into brutal war against the whole Soviet people. The party, instead of the Army, took over the military government of conquered areas, ruled with a rigid hand, and tried to crush the slightest spark of opposition with more and more repression. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers surrendered with little fighting, and scores of thousands — including the Soviet, general Vlasov — deserted to the German side in the first months of war; but instead of encouraging this spontaneous revulsion against Communist totalitarianism, instead of actively fostering by all possible means a Ukrainian separatism, instead of acting as liberators, not conquerors, the Nazi Party, by its war of annihilation and its cruelty to Soviet prisoners and to the conquered areas of Russia, consolidated the opposition of all Soviet peoples and kindled the flame of hate, which later devoured the Reich.

The foregoing indicates, at the very least, the great importance of the political, the psychological, and the moral in any conflict with Russia. Yet it is precisely these factors which our present concentration upon the atomic bomb — first as the primary means of deterring Russia from aggression; second as a weapon of victory in war — tends to subordinate. The bomb has become the cure-all, the white hope of American foreign and military policy.

Perhaps it justifies this reputation. It is a terrific weapon; certainly it is more than just another bomb, though it is not the “absolute” weapon. Given enough atomic bombs and assuming they could be delivered to their targets — both major assumptions — there is no doubt they could create a desert of rubble out of a modern city civilization, even in a large country.

But it might well be that wholesale atomic assault upon the Russian people, rather than upon the Kremlin and the Politburo, would tend to consolidate the Soviet peoples instead of splitting them. Certainly we could not much hope to profit from the fissures in the Russian political structure if on the one hand we proclaimed we came to liberate, and on the other we slaughtered promiscuously millions of Soviet citizens — men, women, and children — regardless of their political beliefs or ethnic backgrounds or aspirations for freedom. In other words, the military weapon — if that weapon were unlimited atomic attack — might not complement our political and psychological warfare; as a matter of fact, even now in the cold war, there are strong evidences that the threat of the atomic bomb has been used by the Kremlin to unify the Soviet masses.

It is quite clear that atomic warfare — unless most sparingly used and unless the targets were most carefully selected — would fit into that category of senseless slaughter which so many authorities have rightfully condemned. If the aim of war be a more stable and just peace, promiscuous atomic bombardment cannot possibly contribute to that end. Even today, only four years after the war, the seeds of a new neo-Fascism are sprouting in the bomb-ruined cities of Germany, and economically impoverished Japan is turning slowly toward extremism of left and right.

3

THE primary question of atomic strategy is always the same: Will the atomic bomb stop the Red Army? If it will not, if—despite our devastation and destruction of scores of Russian cities — the Red Army marches into Western Europe, then certainly we are undone. Gone are the hopes of a quick-and-easy victory, of a “three weeks war”; gone, too, are the objectives of victory, the very objectives we are working for today — the preservation of Western Europe’s free political traditions, large economic resources, and cultural and historical and spiritual institutions from the clutching hand of extremism.

There is pretty general military agreement that the Red Army can move into Western Europe, despite our possession of the atomic bomb. The bomb is not a good weapon against dispersed land armies; land armies can best be immobilized and their forward movement stopped by opposing land forces with great firepower and high mobility, supported by tactical air power — fighters, fighter bombers, and light bombers, blasting with conventional bombs at bridges, railroad choke points, roads, and the enemy’s supply lines and advancing spearheads. The sort of interdiction used in Normandy is a classic example of the use of tactical air power to slow down and immobilize a ground army, yet even with the overwhelming air superiority we enjoyed there, the stoutness and duration of the German defense and the successful retreat of the Germans to the Westwall attest the difficulty of interdicting an army by air power.

The advocates of the atomic bombardment of Russia do not contemplate the tactical use of atomic bombs against advancing Soviet forces; the atomic bomb is too precious and there are too few of them to warrant their attempted use against the well-nigh innumerable tactical targets. A bomb dropped in the Rhine at a key point might spread radioactivity over a fairly wide adjacent area and might contaminate the lower portions of that river for some time, but anyone who has seen the Russians clear mine fields — with their men as the human detonators — knows that this would not stop the Red Army; they would take their losses and keep moving.

The use of atomic bombs against the Russian home front, against Soviet cities, supply centers, oil supplies, factories, and nodal communication points in Russia, such as Moscow, would, however — some observers hold — hamstring the Red Army. The destruction of the factories in the rear would turn off the sluice valve of supplies; oil supplies would dry up; the destruction of railroad centers would cripple transportation. So the theory goes. Yet even the most hopeful theorists do not believe that this will halt the Red Army; while Soviet cities are being destroyed the Soviet armies will be taking over Western Europe’s cities.

But once in possession of Western Europe, it is held, these armies would be helpless; they would become more of a loosely organized rabble than an army; they would “wither on the vine" as did the beleaguered Japanese garrisons on the by-passed islands of the Central Pacific.

There are several fallacies in this assumption. In the first place, the effects of strategic bombing are those of attrition; the strength of an opponent is gradually worn down; the bombardment of rear area installations is not immediately felt in the field. In other words, there would be a time-lag between the destruction of Russian factories and the drying-up of Russian front-line supplies-perhaps a long time-lag.

Destruction of home-front supply bases would have less effect on the Soviet Army than on a Western Army. For the Soviet Army, unlike conventional Western armies, lives to a large extent off the country; it utilizes captured supplies and does not depend solely or primarily on conventional systems of transportation. The advance of the Soviet Army is like the advance of a horde of locusts; its men move on foot, by horseback, clinging to tanks or buses, flatcars, trucks, in carriages, on mules, and in farm carts driving herds of cattle before them. The Soviet Army is much less motorized, and except for its heaviest equipment depends less upon railroads, than the Western armies; its mobility is built upon human and animal musclepower.

These facts are not comforting, therefore, to those who believe that atomic bombing would bring about a quick Russian collapse and would isolate the Red armies in Western Europe and force them to “wither on the vine” quickly. But even if the atomic bombardment of Russia should produce fairly rapid deterioration in the fighting power of the Red Army, that would be of small comfort to Paris and Brussels and The Hague, overrun by the Mongol and the Tartar and the loosely disciplined fierce men from the plains of Central Asia. Would such soldiers, knowing that the cities of their homelands were being destroyed behind them, be prone to offer mercy to the inhabitants of the West, or would there be sack and pillage and rapine unparalleled for centuries? Moreover, once taken, are not Paris and Western Europe hostages for Moscow and Leningrad? Would we bomb Paris with atomic bombs?

I think not, and I think that the Russian occupation of Western Europe would mean, inevitably, not a short quick war, but a long and arduous one. The outcome would be certain; the United States and its allies with their greatly superior industry would eventually win, but at what cost! The reconquest of Western Europe by invasion, by land armies, would probably be necessary, and the red tide of war would tend inevitably to lap over three continents. It is precisely this — invasion — which Western Europe fears, and it would be precisely this — invasion—that would bring down into dust and ashes all we have been working to prevent since World War II, and all our aspirations for a better and more stable peace.

4

IF the atomic bomb cannot stop the Red Army, what can?

The answer is not simple, but compound. The bomb cannot halt the Red Army short of Western Europe once that army has started to move, but as Winston Churchill says, it has been of persuasive value in influencing the men of the Kremlin not to order the Red Army’s advance. Yet it is immediately clear that the deterrent value of the atomic bomb will progressively have less and less importance as Russia stockpiles bombs. She has none today, and the chances are that the United States will retain its atomic energy lead — quantitatively and qualitatively — for years to come. And even if Russia should produce her first bomb by 1952 the “deadline” usually mentioned—one bomb of hors against several hundred bombs of ours would have little strategic meaning.

As both sides stockpile bombs, the strategic advantage of the larger stockpile steadily diminishes. It would be small comfort to us to have 1000 atomic bombs if Russia had 100. The deterrent value of the bomb, under such circumstances, would be considerably less than it is now, for we would be certain to face retaliation in kind if we used it to halt Russian aggression; whereas Russia would probably not employ it against us—thus provoking our retaliation — so long as our numerical superiority was pronounced.

It is because in time we shall lose our atomic advantage, and because the atomic bomb will not halt the Red Army today, that the measures we have undertaken to restore some balance of power in Europe are of such pressing importance. That balance of power must be restored before Russia acquires a sizable stockpile of atomic bombs.

Any policy we follow must be a policy of calculated risk. The great danger is that we might try to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of absolute security— to disaster. The bones of nations that have tried to be too strong litter the graveyards of history. For a time in 1948, there was some danger that we might make this mistake; the military programs then outlined and for a time supported by Congress almost led to military expenditures of 20 to 30 billion dollars a year. This danger — the danger of trying to erect “impregnable” Maginot Lines whether of dollars, planes, or tanks still exists but not in the acute form of a year ago.

The measures that will stop the Red Army, that will contain and perhaps in time destroy—Communism, that will contribute to our national objectives, that will lead to a more stable peace, are not only, and not primarily, military in nature, but political, economic, psychological, and moral. We are trying to fill in the great political vacuums left by the war, to rehabilitate war-torn and warravaged nations, to give them some national selfrespect by helping them to be self-supporting and self-protecting. Until these things are done, there will be no peace.

The first pillar in this program was the ECA, with emphasis on the ERP of it — not a program to be recommended to widows and orphans, but one without which Western Europe would have had no chance of resisting the onslaughts of Communism. The second pillar was the Atlantic Pact, political backing for Western Europe. The third and fourth pillars are military: lend-lease arms aid to Europe, and U.S. rearmament. The fifth pillar is moral and psychological: a reaffirmation of faith in the American ideal and assurance of U.S. support for all free institutions.

Obviously there must be balance in the development of this structure or it cannot develop into an edifice of peace. If the military phases are overweighted, they may promote what we are trying to avoid — war. If the economic is underweighted there could be disaster. Without psychological and political backing there is no meaning to the whole program.

The Atlantic Pact, the lend-lease arms program, and a strong United States are essential elements of this structure. Europe cries for security. No economic measures can succeed unless European capital has faith in Europe’s future; the continual fear of sudden invasion would force the continued flight of capital from the continent. The Atlantic Pact gives some measure of political security to Europe; it means, in effect, that the United States will enter any war brought about by Russian aggression. The arms-aid program and our own rearmament give military backing to this political “guarantee.”

Neither, of course, provides absolute security for the United States or for Western Europe; there is no such thing. But the Atlantic Pact, our own rearmament, and the arms-aid program—if properly implemented—can provide some relief from the insecurity which has pervaded Europe these past two years.

5

SINCE 1945 the real deterrent to the Red Army has been the presence of American troops in Germany, Austria, and Trieste, and the certainly that Soviet aggression in Europe would implicate the U.S.S.R. in a war against the most powerful industrial nation on earth, the United States.

Today Russia could probably start an invasion of the West (without any additional mobilization) with some fifty divisions and considerable tactical air superiority. Western Europe might be able to oppose this aggression with ten to fifteen divisions (including the equivalent of two U.S. divisions in Germany) and tactical air power grossly inadequate to the task of interdicting any army. It is these weaknesses in ground and close-support air power that our own rearmament plus European rearmament should remedy. Twenty-five to forty highly trained, mobile, excellently equipped divisions, plus considerable tactical air superiority, could stop the initial rush of the Red Army at the line of the Rhine — stop it at least long enough to permit mobilizalion and the dispatch of U.S. reinforcements. Forty divisions are impossible now — will not be possible for some time to come—but this is not an impossible eventual goal and we must provide a steady increment of military strength for Western Europe. As the years pass, ground and air power, armed with the new weapons, organized for the new tactics of tomorrow, must be prepared to substitute for the atomic bomb — in Western Europe— as a major military deterrent to war.

This does not mean, of course, that the Navy is unimportant. Control of the seas must be the basis of all our strategy; without it we cannot defend America. The United States and its Western allies have tremendous sea superiority today — an advantage we must be careful to maintain — but we have no such advantage on land or in closerange tactical air power. Yet until an adequate ground and air force is built up in Europe, a balance of power cannot really be restored.

We have taken the first slow, painful steps toward the development of such a force today, but there are many who feel that the emphasis is insufficient, the plans too limited. The arms-aid program, it is true, stresses land power and tactical air power. But the scope of the latter development in particular is set in too modest a frame — all the more so since the U.S. tactical air strength is largely a shell, and present plans do not indicate the likelihood of quick improvement.

The overriding emphasis upon the atomic bomb and upon strategic air power is tending to subordinate tactical air power, close-support air power — the kind of air power that prohibits surface movement. and stops ground armies. Our tactical air power today is the neglected stepchild of the Air Force; only the Navy, for its specialized purposes, has an efficient but small surface support arm.

The plain truth is that the United States today, on the eve of a crucial five years which may determine peace or war, has not formulated adequately our national objectives, nor have we even seriously considered any strategy that is not atomic strategy. The assumption that we will use the bomb to defeat Russia is the basic assumption underlying the dominant strategic concept that, with the advent of Louis Johnson as Defense Secretary, has now gained ascendancy, and it is the basic assumption underlying much of our political thinking.

It is in my opinion a dangerously oversimplified assumption; certainly neither our military nor our political planning ought to be based purely on one assumption. We must have alternative strategies. It may be, unhappily, that we shall be forced to use the bomb, but perhaps it can be avoided; as time passes and Russia acquires an atomic stockpile, we shall almost certainly find it to our advantage to avoid it. But even if we do use it, how we use it and against what targets deserve far more careful consideration than they have yet received. Our strategical thinking and our political thinking must not be imprisoned within an atomic concept.

It is clear that the military effectiveness of any atomic strategy depends first upon the number of bombs available, and second upon the number of bombs the enemy has — and also upon a great many other space, distance, and defense factors. Today our political planners — and even many of our key military planners — not only have to guess at Russia’s atomic potential, but they do not know how many bombs the United States possesses. A powerful argument can be made, as Senator McMahon has suggested, for stating that the secret has been too well kept; it is difficult to formulate sound military or political strategy without knowing the numbers of bombs available. This is the second lesson; we must not only plan alternative strategies, but at least our top political and military planners — and perhaps sooner or later the world — ought to know the numbers of bombs on hand.

The inevitable conclusion of such thinking and such planning and of a proper consideration of numbers of bombs as well as of the power of a bomb may well lead us to policies which may tend to limit war, if not to prevent it.

But above all, if we do put the horse where it belongs: before the cart; if we formulate national objectives and peace policies before we determine war strategy, we shall surely emphasize those factors now too often neglected which, if emphasized, could avert war. Political, economic, and psychological weapons, properly used, are more potent persuasion than the threat of an atom bomb.

For the past, three years we have been engaged in a cold war with Russia. The threat of the atom bomb and the long shadow of military force always have loomed in the background, but the principal factors in this cold war have been political, economic, and psychological, and it is precisely where we have used these weapons wisely (Western Europe) that we have succeeded in containing the menace of Communism, and it is precisely where we have neglected them and have overemphasized military force that we have met checkmate or defeat (Greece and China). Russia and her satellites have great political weaknesses and we possess enormous economic strength. Let us lead trom strength to weakness. If we do so, if we win the political, economic, and psychological war already joined, there need be no shooting war.