Serving the People: The Need for Military Power

This December 1976 Military Review article was published in the wake of Vietnam and congressional passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and examines the relationship between the American people and their military. Retired Army Chief of Staff General Fred C. Weyand and then Lieutenant Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. emphasize the importance of the nation's military honestly and openly communicating its needs and the rationale for those needs to the American people the state the military serves. WE BEGAN our Bicentennial Year in a predicament that our Revolutionary War predecessors would understand-the necessity to convince the American people and the Congress of the need for adequate funds for the national defense. While this has happened before in American history, for most of us it is a new experience. Our careers have coincided with the era of strong presidents and a powerful executive branch. Since at least World War II, the American people and the Congress had been content to permit the president to determine foreign policy and the military policy required to support that foreign policy. We in the military had to convince one man-the president-to obtain the men, money and material we believed necessary for the national defense. Often during this period, the Congress had to be restrained from giving too much, not too little. But now we have, in a sense, come full circle. Like General Washington, we now have to convince the entire Congress of the needs-and explaining the need for military force, even in wartime, has never been an easy task. General George Washington observed in 1778 that many governments feared a standing army in peacetime, but only that of the United States had such a concern in time of war. That must not be, he wrote. "We all should be considered-Congress, Army, etc.,-as one people, embarked on one cause, one interest; acting on the same principle and to the same end." And that objective is as valid today as it was 200 years ago. Military Policy and Foreign Policy Our military establishment exists solely to serve the political ends of the state-political primarily in the sense of serving as a foundation of foreign affairs and foreign policy. If that foreign policy dictates making war on another country, the task of the military is to win that war. If the foreign policy dictates carrying on a "peaceful" competition, the task of the military is to support that competition. As General Matthew Ridgway put it, "The soldier is the statesman's junior partner." I am certain that you are familiar with the observations Alexis de Tocqueville made in 1840 when he wrote: "It is especially in the conduct of their foreign relations that democracies appear decidedly inferior to other governments." The reason, he went on to say, was that aristocracies (today, we could substitute totalitarian governments) "work for themselves and not for the people." This "defect" was not so pronounced in the l9th and early 20th Centuries when we were still secure behind our great ocean barriers, or so relevant during the past 40 years when the conduct of foreign affairs was left almost completely to the president. From FDR through the beginning of the Nixon administration, the president determined foreign policy and, most important for our case, the military policy necessary to support that foreign policy. But the state of affairs has now changed. Witness the congressional limitations on involvement in Indochina, on aid to Turkey, on aid to Angola. This change has brought with it the very problem that De Tocqueville anticipated: "A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of severe obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience." The truth of De Tocqueville's observation is supported by the fact that, in times of great national peril-the Civil War, World War I and World War II-the imposition of presidential war powers made the United States somewhat less of a democracy, whereas, during the Korean War and most especially the Vietnam War, the lack of such restrictions and the free reign of democracy enormously complicated the conduct of the war. …