 Good day. I'm Colonel Jerry Morlock, the Director of the Combat Studies Institute. You're about to use a video series which our instructors have prepared for the sole purpose of improving your presentation of M610, the Evolution of Modern Warfare. We've taken care to make the course that you teach as similar to the one taught at Fort Leavenworth as possible and choose to add these tapes to your libraries in order to give you every advantage as you prepare to teach this new course. These tapes are similar to the weekly train-up sessions which we utilize to prepare our instructors here at Fort Leavenworth. My intent for the tape sessions was to provide you insights and tips on ways to approach the lessons of M610 that were not available in the instructor notes. I've drawn various instructors, military and civilian into the sessions based upon their specific expertise and historical background. They were asked to just talk to the lesson structure and content, giving you some additional information on the historical context and differing views on how to approach the lessons. These tapes will provide you a wealth of knowledge and direction that will significantly improve your readiness to teach our new history course. One word of caution regarding how to use these training tapes, they are not designed to be substituted for your instruction during the individual lessons of the course. As instructor preparation tapes train the training material, if you will, they are inappropriate for direct instruction to students and are not intended for that purpose. Our intent with these tapes is to improve your ability to lead the students' seminars by sharing tips and advice from some highly qualified experts. The Combat Studies Institute stands ready to provide whatever additional expertise or assistance that you may require, and we've included the Institute's phone, mail, and email contact information on the tape if you should need it. Good luck with the Evolution of Modern Warfare course. Have a good time. My name is Larry Yates, and this is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Bassett. We're both from the Combat Studies Institute, and this is the lesson on the Cold War. Our purpose here is, one, to provide you some information that's not in the readings, thus to give you a little more depth than the students will have in doing the readings, and also provide you with some perspectives you can use in teaching the class, and some tips on how to go about teaching this particular lesson. It's not an easy lesson because it's mainly providing context. There's no war to look at. There are no battles to analyze. Mainly, it's how did the Cold War come about? How did it develop? And what role did the military play in that, both in terms of nuclear strategy and in terms of the military services themselves? So that's what we'll be looking at, and I'll probably take the lead on the first part of that, the origins and development of the Cold War, then turn it over to Lieutenant Colonel Bassett for nuclear strategy, and then we'll both fight for the last one, the role of the military. So the Cold War, one thing that you probably know yourself, whatever, assuming let's say I'm talking to someone in their mid-thirties, you miss most of it, and your students definitely will have missed most of it. Many of them will have been born what, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, or right about that time, maybe a little before. They're not going to remember it. And given the fact that the Cold War started around, some say 1947, that's a fairly good stretch of history that's simply not in their memory bank. They became aware probably of the Cold War sometime in the 70s or toward its last phases in the 80s. But there's a long history there, and the Cold War goes through a number of permutations and phases, and I just want to go over those briefly. But before I do, I might just suggest to you to get the discussion started, you might ask the students what they think of when the term Cold War is used, and just see what sort of answers you get, not only in terms of their own personal experience, but just what was their concept of the Cold War. Generally it boils down to something about the free world versus communism, and that's fine, but it's a good general description, but it's somewhat simplistic. And what I hope to do here in a few minutes is to give you a little more detail than that, and also a little more detail, a little more interpretation than you get from your reading. So to look at the traditional school of thought about it, the Cold War was the U.S. response to communist expansion, initially Soviet expansion at the end of World War II and in the months and years following that conflict. We weren't sure what motivated Soviet expansion. There were a number of studies done at the time, one by Secretary of the Navy James Forstall, which indicated that it was Russian, or excuse me, communist ideology, World Revolution. The Soviet Union was out to take over the world in the name of international communism. Others argued it was more Russian imperialism. It was a continuation of expansionism that the Czars themselves had pursued from the 18th and 19th century on, or even 18th and 19th century, perhaps before. But the continual expansion of Russia into an empire and now perhaps throughout Europe, et cetera. That was another issue, what are the limits of this expansion? Well, if it's ideology, it's worldwide. If it's traditional Russian expansionism, it probably will be satisfied with a good chunk of Europe and the Middle East and perhaps part of Asia. But these points were being debated. A third point of view was put forth by what was then one of our foremost Russian experts, George F. Kennan, what was at first called a long telegram. A telegram he sent at Charger d'affaires in Moscow to Washington in 1946, describing what he saw as the Soviet threat. It was later put in condensed form into an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947. It's called the X article because he didn't put his name to it as a government official. But it was called the conduct, oh boy. Never mind. We'll edit that part out if that's all right. But anyway, Kennan's article on Soviet expansion. Why are the Soviets expansionistic? And his answer was, ideology does play a role but only in the sense that communist ideology portrays a very threatening world to those countries that are communist. It sees the capitalist world as in extricably hostile and out to take over or to destroy communism. And so ideology plays a part not in the sense of world revolution but in the sense of portraying the world as hostile, a world in which there are two contending forces, the capitalist forces and the forces of socialism slash communism. And it's a battle to the death. So that's the role of ideology. It's not a blueprint for taking over the world. It simply says the world is one of conflict. Kennan's argument is that the source of Soviet conduct, and that's the title of the article, the source of Soviet conduct is the political system. It's totalitarian. And to maintain their totalitarian system at home, they need to expand abroad because the main threat to the totalitarian system will be the ideas of freedom, et cetera, seeping into the country and infecting the people and undermining the system. And the way you can prevent that is to continuously push out your borders to where there aren't any ideas that run counter to your own culture and own system that can infect the population. So by that standard, the expansion is unlimited. But Kennan would argue it's limited in the sense that no country can take over the world. Logistically, it's impossible. So there are certain areas the Soviet Union will focus upon and where those areas overlap with our interests, we need to stand up to them. And that leads to the issue of what is the U.S. response to communist expansion. Kennan came up with the word containment. And that is we will stop them from expanding wherever it's in our interest to do so, hold the line, and then wait for their system to change because if the system of totalitarianism is at the root of expansion or the ideology, if you want to argue that, if changes take place within the Soviet Union that will change that system and doom that ideology, then perhaps their expansion will stop. So we'll hold the line and wait for changes in the Soviet Union. Now it turns out Kennan's peace proved prophetic. That's pretty much what happened. But it took 40 years to do it and nobody was contemplating that. Maybe Kennan was, but most people wanted a quicker end to the Cold War and critics of containment argued this policy of holding the line gave to the other side the initiative of where to hit along that line. And do we really have the resources to defend the line all the way around the Soviet Union and then after the fall of China in Asia and ultimately around the world, can we really hold the line? Do we have the resources? And some argued no, that we should seize the initiative and pursue a policy of rollback and liberation, take areas that have been taken over by the Russians or later the Chinese, whatever, and push them back, push the Russians out of Eastern Europe, push them out of the Baltic states, etc. So there are contending schools, number one, of what motivates Soviet expansion, two, whether the limits of Soviet expansion, and three, what should the U.S. do about it? Of these contending schools, they pretty much win out. Why are they expansionistic? World revolution. Most of us grew up believing it was world revolution that motivated the Soviet Union. I don't believe it anymore, but at the time it seemed a compelling argument. What's the response? We were happy with containment because we realized in the 50s that to pursue liberation risked World War III and once the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons after 1949, that was too high a risk to run for a policy of liberation. It also made our allies very, very nervous. We started talking about liberating Eastern Europe, Western Europe got very nervous. This came out during the 1952 presidential campaign when Eisenhower put forward the idea of liberation as a trial balloon. The uproar caused him to pull back from it and you heard very little about it after that. Ideologically motivated expansion, again a simplistic idea, but one that took hold containment as our response to it. Then the Cold War would go through a number of phases in terms of how we applied the strategies of containment to use a phrase that John Lewis Gattis has and I'll get to that in just a bit. That's the traditional Orthodox school. There's one other, it needs to be mentioned, the revisionist school that existed before the Vietnam War but came into its own during Vietnam and has persisted since because it did raise some good points, although many of its more extreme points have been shot down. The revisionist would argue that the U.S. is responsible for the Cold War, that the Soviet Union may have a universal ideology but so does the United States. We think of freedom and democracy as applicable throughout the world and we've done our part to extend it just as we have our economic system of capitalism. So who's universalistic? Both sides were. We were in a position to be more aggressive, however, after World War II and as a result we caused great concern within the Soviet Union where Stalin was looking out for Soviet security concerns vis-a-vis Western Europe. In other words, a revived Germany could come and do what Germany had done twice already in the 20th century. They could march across an open plane right into Russia and also Napoleon had done it in the 19th century. There's no natural barrier there to stop them. So some revisionist would argue Stalin's main concern was to get that barrier. If there's not a natural barrier he'd create a political one by satelliteizing or at least establishing a spheres of influence the Baltic states, Poland, Eastern Europe, the Balkans. And that would be his buffer. And friendly governments there and then as time goes by the satelliteization of those countries and the presence in all that Yugoslavia and Albania of the Red Army. So the revisionist version is we're the ones that are aggressive and the Soviet Union is more defensive oriented and we provoke them. They have to respond and thus the Cold War. With the end of the Cold War Soviet archives have opened up and we see that the revisionists have some points. The United States certainly had a universal ideology. We were certainly aggressive in pursuing it but the Soviet Union bears much of the responsibility for the Cold War. Stalin was looking for opportunities to expand and did. So those are the certain interpretations that give a little more depth and perspective to the lesson than what you would get out of Addington and Wigley alone. The Cold Wars I said developed through certain phases. We can look at this in a number of ways and I'll do this very quickly or as quickly as I can. One would be to look at how containment was applied. And this relies on to some extent on John Lewis Gattis's strategies of containment which is out in book form. There's an article he wrote with that title for National Security Journal and there's also a short version that we use for one of our supplemental readings. If you would like that give us a call and we will mail you copies. I think I can say that. Somebody's going to have to do it, not me. But give Sam Lewis or Jim Martin a call they'll be happy to mail you a copy of John Gattis's article Strategies of Containment. I'll go over it very briefly here in some respects, but looking at U.S.-Soviet relations before World War II generally they were hostile. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution the United States did intervene militarily in Russia during their Civil War. We, the British the French other countries were intervened in that conflict which we ended up we pulled our troops out the Bolsheviks won the intervention left a lasting animosity. We refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933 during the Great Depression when we were looking for markets prior to that time we kept the Soviet Union at arms length we treated it as a pariah. Not every European country did the Soviet Union did join the League of Nations whereas of course we did not but we did not recognize them between 1917 1933 we did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union In the 30s with the rise of Hitler the Soviet Union ultimately allies itself with with Hitler you have the invasion of Poland and then with the invasion of the Soviet Union we become friends with Stalin the dictator Stalin becomes Uncle Joe and we're going to give him the support any support we can mainly in the form of Len Lise to keep the Russian war effort going and then after Pearl Harbor we're informal allies there's not a formal alliance but a coalition during the war President Roosevelt hoped that once the war was over the Soviet Union and the United States would cooperate for world peace and he believed that this was possible because his argument was what motivated Stalin was the way we had treated Russia in the past Russia was a maligned giant and if Roosevelt could convince Stalin that relations with the West could be good that Stalin would come around and cooperate and work with us for world peace Roosevelt died in April 1945 at the time the Soviet Union has overrun Poland Eastern Europe and the question is what kind of governments will these countries have will Stalin impose communist-led governments there are indications that he will he's not allowing free elections in most of these countries and when Harry Truman becomes president on Roosevelt's death there are many advisors who go to him and say Roosevelt had it wrong Russia is not a maligned giant it's a world bully it will strike out and expand wherever it can unless you stop it and if you stand up to it however the Soviet Union will cooperate first you have to stand firm and Truman does throughout 45-46 are a number of issues on which the United States takes a tough stand but it doesn't stop the Soviets they continue to push their advantage in Eastern Europe and try to go into the Near East and this leads to a reevaluation with the studies I mentioned previously what are they after a debate over that but the bottom line was they're not going to cooperate they're our rival, they're our opponent maybe even our enemy and containment was a response to that initially containment from 47-49 is implemented in Europe with the Truman Doctrine of 47 aid to Greece and Turkey where we saw a communist threat there was a civil war in Greece the communists being on one side we will help the other side in Turkey there was pressure on Turkey and to share the control of the straits into the Black Sea and the Mediterranean this are into the Mediterranean we gave support to Turkey to stave off the Soviet pressure then the Marshall Plan in 1948 which is economic assistance to Western Europe in general to get it on its feet and then NATO which originates in 48 and the treaty is signed in 49 we're committed to the military defense of Western Europe so by 1949 containment has been extended to Western Europe the line is fairly clearly drawn one exception Berlin which is on their side of the line we have an enclave there aside from that the line is fairly clearly drawn and 50 to 53 54 containment is expanded or extended to Asia after the fall of China the war in Korea and the process already at that point of getting a treaty with Japan by the end of the war in Korea and the following year 1954 we have alliances actual alliances now with South Korea Taiwan previously Formosa Taiwan the Philippines Australia New Zealand Japan that I mentioned Japan was the first to become controversial in Vietnam so containment has extended to the Far East and then in the mid 50s with the rise of NASA and Egypt and Pan Arabism and Arab radicalism and the attempt of the Soviet Union to take advantage of that containment has extended to the Middle East as well and what you see is the gradual extension of containment into a global policy and so you can look at the cold war in terms of the phases of containment you can look at it in terms of the arenas being fought over from 47 to 53 it's the Eurasian landmass and after that it's the third world in the mid 50s the communist states or the communist leaders mainly the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China begin to try to gain influence if not dictatorial control of at least influence in many of the underdeveloped and anti-colonial countries of the emerging third world and this causes us great concern you can't stop that militarily it's an economic and ideological approach military barriers won't help so from 55 earlier in the mid 50s and into the 80s to the end of the cold war that's really the arena of the cold war the third world, the periphery not the Eurasian landmass that's pretty well taken care of there are a few Berlin crises but that's wrapped up under Nixon we reach an agreement and a court over Berlin so the fighting is going to be or the struggle rather will be on the periphery you can look at it in that way the intensity of the cold war is another way to divide it from 48 to 62 every year you've got a war scare beginning with the Berlin blockade ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis every year there was a threat of a nuclear confrontation that's a heck of a way to grow up after the Cuban Missile Crisis that drops off precipitously there's more negotiation, there's certainly conflict but we start dealing more and more with the Soviet Union, Daytont begins under Johnson Nixon really accelerates it becomes a dirty word under Ford because of what the Soviets are doing in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan but we are working with the Soviet Union on the recognition of the People's Republic of China the Cold War is maturi the rhetoric of the 50s and early 60s is going by the boards the view of the communist world is monolithic and that's passing by the boards so in terms of intensity another is simply the changing perspective from Soviet expansion to international communist expansion and that Vietnam is the watershed and for much of the Cold War it is going into Vietnam we have the view of communism is largely monolithic not entirely we don't see it that simplistically but it's fairly close coming out of Vietnam our view of the enemy is much more sophisticated and much more complex it took Vietnam to change that but also the bipartisanship that backed up much of our Cold War policy prior to Vietnam evaporates with Vietnam after Vietnam our foreign policy is based more upon ad hoc support for any given issue which you may or may not get in Central America you don't get it but you do it anyway in other cases of myogas some incidents you do get bipartisan support and then strategies of containment as I mentioned John Gaddis I'll let you get the article for that it talks about the changes between symmetrical and asymmetrical containment but these are different ways again it's an ongoing process it's an evolutionary process one of development not a static us versus them commie revolutionaries versus freedom fighters in the west that's all good rhetoric and it was used up into the Reagan administration but then take a look at what Reagan ends up doing coming to terms with the Soviet Union as it's entering its death rows as the Soviet Union but the rhetoric has been toned down so that's a very very brief overview of the cold war there are a lot of issues here that we don't have time to get into but again for the purpose of your students it's mainly to provide context for the military issues that will come out of it the first of which is the cold war coincides with the advent of the atomic age and what role will the bomb play and for that Colonel Bassett will take over before addressing nuclear strategy just possibly suggesting a question or a way to move the student discussion into origin and characteristics of the cold war Larry offered one when you when we say or hear the word or the characterization cold war what does it mean another one I use with my students is World War II to implacable foes locked in a 45 year cold war how do we arrive at that change a way of getting into it and then emphasizing to the students during this discussion that what you're doing and what should probably be no more than the first 30 minutes of a two hour lesson as Larry has said you're setting the political economic diplomatic and social context of the military strategy policy and strategic decisions that are being made and not only the next lesson on Korea but really through the remainder of the course to the second to last lesson so I just I just offer that to you the section on American military strategy in the nuclear ages I find very difficult I'm a 19th century American military guy my focus is on the Civil War I find much of this material to be confusing almost surreal in the logic being employed and the whole evolution of nuclear strategy I don't think that the reading I think the reading by Lawrence Friedman in Makers of Modern Strategy is one of the more difficult readings to in the evolution of modern war but having said that I might suggest to you maybe four major points that you want to explore with your students as you talk about the nuclear strategy the first is to look at the whole notion of revolutionary change in American strategy and along these lines I think a good way to do that a good technique to use not just in this lesson but others is to pull a quote from one of the student readings in this case Russell Wigley's American way of war and just read it say Wigley asserts in American way of war that the atomic bomb represented a strategic revolution a strategy would have to be redefined that's really the thesis of this essay that the students read restate it and then ask the students what they think of it do they agree with Wigley that the advent of nuclear weapons in the context of this growing Cold War with the Soviet Union fundamentally redefines U.S. strategic U.S. strategy making and strategic calculations that's good for a good five to ten minutes of discussion I think the other thing you might want to do in this block is look at the inherent difficulties and maybe some of the general characteristics of framing military strategy in the nuclear age and along these lines another technique maybe a pedagogical technique that I'd suggest to you one in addition to using an author's quotation a quotation from an author a slide on the screen behind you with a nice pithy quote from a contemporary participant and then ask them what they think this means or use that as a means of generating discussion and I think there are three that I've identified and used in my lesson here in the college the first being a quote from Harry Truman in 1949 where he asks can the Russians do it? and the response is yes they can so Truman responds in that case we have no choice I think what that speaks to is the escalation or the tendency toward escalation in the development of nuclear weaponry and the strategic formulation the whole idea of achieving superiority in numbers of capabilities or and or the flexible application of capabilities developed another great quote one from Bernard Brody one of the foremost strategic thinkers in the late 1950s and early 60s he says and I quote it should be obvious that what counts in basic deterrence is not so much the size and efficiency of one striking force before it is hit as the size and condition to which the enemy thinks he can reduce it by a surprise attack as well as his confidence in the correctness of his predictions great quote it gets at many different issues associated with nuclear strategy Thomas Schelling writes about the reciprocal fear of a surprise attack and Friedman talks about this in his essay how that is destabilizing and that it is this fear of a surprise attack that must be overcome if you are to achieve deterrence based on stability I think it is also a way to explore the distinction between Brody's quote is a way of exploring the distinction between first and second strike capabilities what the difference between the two is and how second strike and the perceived possession of a second strike capability is crucial to a nation's confidence in its strategic well being finally I think it gets to the absolutely crucial point that enemy perception is important what you are doing in much of your strategic development capabilities development is attempting to influence the thinking the perceptions of your enemy the classic term perception is reality your enemy will operate on perceptions and you may possess a capability and that is a good thing but it is crucial that your enemy perceive it in a way that you think is necessary to attain the deterrence effect and then finally a slide we get a lot of mileage out of it has an Alice looking through the looking glass quality to it so representative of some of this strategic thinking and writing during this period and I quote he thinks we think he'll attack so he thinks we shall so we must trying to sort through that and the logic inherent in that is a good way to get it some of the thinking associated with nuclear strategy during this period a number of different strategies developed by the United States one of the things I will do is place on the CSI homepage a five page document called evolution of U.S. deterrence strategies and you'll find that under either my name, Lieutenant Colonel Bassett or under a special section devoted exclusively to this course and that will take you through the evolution of proposed and actually implemented U.S. nuclear deterrence strategies it's they change and that's an important point to make during this period that there's an evolution in U.S. nuclear strategy it is a these are strategies based on a desire to exploit a perceived advantage in technology and two great cases in that would be of that would be the years immediately after World War II where the United States possesses nuclear weaponry atomic weaponry and the Soviets don't another good case would be the 1980s and the strategic defense initiative Reagan's plan another source of change would be a desire to achieve more bang for the buck central to the massive retaliation new look strategy adopted by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s a also driving change is the desire to overcome a perceived relative in a particular capability the growing fear in the late 1950s something that the Democrats exploit politically that the Soviets are developing a nuclear capability in excess of ours there's a missile gap that is causing a change in influencing our nuclear strategy and also we see from time to time a desire to re-seize the initiative and to become less reactive to Soviet capabilities to afford us more options which I think gets to another of the four central points you might want to explore in this section of the lesson and that is that there is an inherent tension between nuclear strategy and conventional war fighting strategy the notion that early on this belief that having nukes is going to render conventional warfare unnecessary or even obsolete that is going to become increasingly attacked it's one of the bases behind massive retaliation Korea is going to show that there will continue to be conventional warfare in the nuclear age and we will see American strategists continuing to grapple with this whole idea of how best to fight in a world that possesses nuclear weapons one of the readings we have in 610 that you don't have in this course it's at some of the early limited war theories and theorists that can still be discussed in this context and probably should what is possible in the way of conventional warfare what the use of conventional war fighting to send a message and to attain a political result the idea that you can apply conventional forces in a measured way keep it limited to trigger a political response on the part of your enemy something that will have disastrous consequences in Vietnam and I would argue is relative and relevant to our strategy making even today so I think those are four major items that you can explore with students during this particular portion of the lesson using the thesis posed by one of the lesson authors or using a slide that encapsulates or conveys an idea very prominent at that particular time Larry do you have anything to add to just a couple of things I'll let you know some inside secrets here we're doing these out of sequence so we've already done the Korean War video I was a part of that and we do discuss it to a certain extent there and the fact there was no limited war theory before Korea it comes out as a result of Korea and then we'll take us right into Vietnam so if you want some help if you want to use limited war in this lesson you might skip ahead and look at the Korean War video just for what little we offer on it there secondly in terms of making material available and I've talked sort of jokingly about Gaddas you'll write in and somebody else will send you a copy I'm speaking from an outline which has a little more detail and I gave you as fast as I tried to talk about the development origins and development of the Cold War be happy to put that on the homepage as well and anybody who wants to call in or write to discuss these things in more detail be happy to do that but bottom line I would suggest not only looking at this outline but the Gaddas article I mentioned getting that as an overview for the Cold War and the Ken and Ex article which is in I think it's June or July issue of Foreign Affairs 1947 famous article we have copies of it here too we can send it to you along with Gaddas but those materials will be available and I think would be helpful in drawing together some of the points I made earlier on and you as well the point about the perception I think is critical we find it in the case of the Korean War we talk about it in great detail during the video there how we misperceived or they misperceived our view of Korea to the point where they thought they could intervene without any U.S. response they found out they were wrong we misperceived how sensitive they were about us crossing the 38th parallel and that's just at the conventional war level you escalate up to nuclear strategy perceptions have a very dire consequences and what you are getting at with a statement about we think they will they shall etc if you want to see this on video go rent World War 3 with Rock Hudson and Brian Keith because that's exactly the way the world would go it isn't that a mad man would push the button it's that one side thinks the other has to attack and therefore we have to push the button the other side knowing they are about to do that they have to push it even though neither side wants to figure the logic out the logic is there it's very logical fortunately we never got to that point we came close to the Cuban Missile Crisis a book I looked at last night indicated Khrushchev was ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Cuba if we invaded we came two days within two days of invading Cuba we came close but this whole idea of perception is reality it's not what the other side actually thinks is what you think they think is critical many of the history lessons we give we are assuming we know what the other person thought etc etc that's generally not the case often times we didn't have a clue anymore than they had a clue about what we were thinking and that makes for a very dangerous world the final section here there are a few topics following again the origins and development of the Cold War nuclear strategy last section or last piece of material you might want to look at is simply the role of the military in the nuclear age in an age when it looks more and more as we get into it we won't be using atomic weapons World War 3 may not probably will not come about what then are we going to do that has to be determined and not only that the role of each service but also just simply how they are going to be organized how they are going to operate there are all sorts of issues that come out of World War 2 that have to be dealt with not just the atomic bomb but also the organization functioning of the military just briefly one issue is unification the idea is to get the services together what today we call purple the services will vanish as individual services you will have an amalgamation except secretary of navy James says no that isn't the way it's going to be we will surrender some of our sovereignty to an overall organization but it will be more federal we will retain our distinct identities as services and he wins that debate the 1947 law sets up the national military establishment not the department of defense but the national military establishment the NME and it's a federal organization you get a new department department of the air force to go with the department of the army and department of the navy and you get a secretary of defense who has very little power vis-a-vis these other departments has very little power over the budget or in terms of coordinating the military strategy and approach Truman realizing that decided well it's payback time the first secretary of defense will be James forestel let him deal with the monster he created and the result of that is forestel by in 49 has a nervous breakdown and commit suicide the next secretary of defense will be Louis Johnson who's more or less a non-entity except for the navy's point of view when he cuts a supercarrier and then George Marshall becomes secretary of defense which wasn't supposed to happen a military man is secretary but congress passes the necessary legislation and so forth but in 1949 the national military's establishment is given the name the department of defense the secretary of defense is given a little more power than he had under the NME but still it's federal the separate services will retain their identity they will not be amalgamated another issue dealt with at the time in the legislation of 47 you have the CIA established to collect intelligence a central intelligence agency that's the idea to make it centralized the national security council which will coordinate foreign policy the statutory members well I'm in trouble here but essentially the president will oversee it but you'll have the secretary of state secretary of defense director of the CIA I believe the statutory member but don't quote me on it the point is you have the key foreign policy figures in one group and their purpose is to coordinate among themselves the problem is it doesn't always work that way but that's the idea of the national security council the joint chiefs of staff which had been put into existence during world war two is a means to have some counter to the British chiefs of staff in what turned out to be the combined chiefs of staff the joint chiefs never had any legal basis the president just set them up but in 47 you get the statutory basis for the joint chiefs they are now a legal I shouldn't say that because it implies they were illegal before but they now have laws that creates them and the chairman of the joint chiefs over time the chairman will assume more power but he doesn't have it necessarily at the beginning and we said already Air Force has a separate service later in the decade you get by executive order the integration of the armed services and this is a major issue but it's not when we go into great detail here and it's done as I said by executive order civil rights integration all of that is a very hot political issue in the 1940s and into the 50s and as it pertains to the military integration could be imposed by the president he didn't have to have congress to integrate the military so he did so Truman signed the executive order for the integration of the military the main obstacle among the services was the army more than the Air Force and Navy in terms of integration but they accepted it and moved ahead and finally looking at the army in the nuclear age the question was what would it do we deal with this a little bit in the Korean war video but if the atomic bomb if the next war is going to involve atomic bombs what role will the army play they can't deliver atomic bombs that's a question for the Air Force or the Navy who duke it out and the Air Force wins when the supercarrier is canceled so the Air Force will deliver the nuclear weapons the Air Force is getting most of the bucks in a very constrained environment physically and the army it's assumed will not have much of a role to play to go in and clean up afterwards Korea comes along and that changes you have a limited war we're not going to fight World War 3 over Korea we're not going to allow nuclear weapons to be used it's but on the other hand we will have to fight for it and that's the job the army has to do we use air power and naval power to begin with it's not enough so the army is sent in and the money funnel opens up and not only does the army get well everybody else does and the defense budget hits around 50 billion dollars going from 14 to 50 during the Korean War but as soon as the war is over during the presidency of Eisenhower five star general he cuts the military to the quick arguing that to continue to spend 50 billion a year will cause inflation and we can lose the cold war through the economic demise of the United States as easily as through the military demise so he cuts back the military you have the spectacle of a five star general as president cutting, gutting the military and especially the army which is former colleagues Galvin Ridgeway Taylor especially cannot understand and they begin to challenge this quote new look putting most of your eggs in the nuclear basket as a deterrent and arguing that what if another Korea comes along we have no way to meet it if we don't have the army it will be another task force Smith and this debate goes on into the late fifties at which point Eisenhower begins to open it up a little and then with Kennedy you get flexible response and the money goes you spend much more on defense the defense budget goes up and the army is modernized etc in the meantime however the army was trying to keep its hand in during the fifties during Eisenhower the way they chose to do it was through what was called the pentomic division and the reading by Doty gets into that in terms of how it was organized how it was set up what it was designed to do which was to fight on a nuclear battlefield five battle groups to a division spread out in a checkerboard fashion so if a tactical nuke took out one you'd still have four left but what it did of course was create an unwieldy span of control there were all sorts of other problems inherent with it not the least of which was the tactical nukes you had the Davy Crockett which was an individually launched nuclear projectile the problem was the radius of the blast was greater than the distance you could lob it so the joke was the Davy Crockett kit was the missile and a pair of tennis shoes the pentomic division didn't work and by the early sixties they're getting back to triangular divisions rowad I'd like to in my comments on this note and that is we've given you a lot of material for this lesson I would argue if you can get through the development of the cold war up to Vietnam nuclear strategy up to Vietnam and these changes in organization and force structure and the service roles up to Vietnam that would probably be enough for this lesson the next lesson you'd start with specific examples Korea the following following that you do get Vietnam and then you can bring in more of the context after that for this lesson if you're pressed for time I would shoot for getting it up to Vietnam and that can be easily done in all three of these categories the origins development of the cold war nuclear strategy and simply the role of the military I guess the last the last couple things I'd say would be many of us find it useful where possible throughout the course to ask a question or develop discussion that asks students to compare and contrast or what we're looking at in that particular period with challenges we face today and in the future maybe ask the question is anything we're looking at in this lesson useful to us as we negotiate our way through force 21 and take the army into the 21st century I think a couple of ways that can be done in this particular lesson and in the third portion of the lesson the post war defense structure a couple of questions I ask students in the course are several historians have noted what the US military went through immediately after world war two and what we are going through now following the cold war with the end of the cold war do you see similarities and what are the similar trends and I think you could you could talk about things like following victory in two major wars there's been a significant reassessment of the US role in foreign affairs and that will have consequences for the military US with a significant technological advantage if maybe momentary in the case of post world war two the nuke today all the talk about information age technologies and the advantages that will afford us forces then as now a reassessment and service roles and missions a number of purple initiatives to make us more joint and more interoperable we're going through force reductions and limited fiscal resources just like the services were in the late 40s and then maybe less so today but nevertheless there there continues to be interservice rivalry for resources and that's playing as well so those are some things that maybe can be developed in discussion and the same thing can be done with the pentomic division ask the question does the pentomic experiment in the late 1950s offer any insights relevant to our force 21 experience today such as there are problems associated with exploring capabilities and basing doctrine and capabilities on equipment and technologies identified but not yet fielded in numbers continued questions about adequacy of strategic left lift the point Dodie makes in his article about intellectual adaptation getting officers to buy into the new doctrine and the new system for fighting a problem in the late 1950s arguably a problem for us today and in the future as we implement and continue to move forward in force 21 and then what Dodie might suggest the danger to near term preparedness in implementing a new doctrine and organization do students see any problems associated with that so I think these are a couple things you can do and it does get student interest to try and see relevance to what we face today and in the future with what we're looking at a particular lesson right without the search for relevance it all becomes rather academic and uninteresting except from a storytelling standpoint so second that and thank you very much again if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me Larry Yates or Lieutenant Colonel Bill Bassett regarding these lessons hope you found this useful