Walter McDougall on Maritime Strategy
Walter A. McDougall
Historian Walter McDougall somehow fell between the chairs:
Cass Canfield, Jr., and Hugh Van Dusen of HarperCollins hatched the idea of a narrative history that would avoid the extremes of condemnation and celebration of the American past characterizing the Howard Zinn and Paul Johnson titles already on their list.
The respective flavors of Howard Zinn’s and Paul Johnson’s histories are captured in the opening passages of their books.
Neighbor of Howard Zinn while growing up
Zinn:
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.
A story of the decline of humans from the primordial innocence of a Golden Age to a new Age of Iron, midwifed by white men with swords.
Paul Johnson
Johnson:
The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind. It now spans four centuries and, as we enter the new millennium, we need to retell it, for if we can learn these lessons and build upon them, the whole of humanity will benefit in the new age which is now opening. American history raises three fundamental questions. First, can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of a indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness. Has the United States done this? Has it expiated its organic sins? The second question provides the key to the first. In the process of nation-building, can ideals and altruism-the desire to build the perfect community-be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all? Have the Americans got the mixture right? Have they forged a nation where righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest? Thirdly, the Americans originally aimed to build an other-worldly ‘City on a Hill,’ but found themselves designing a republic of the people, to be a model for the entire planet. Have they made good their audacious claims? Have they indeed proved exemplars for humanity? And will they continue to be so in the new millennium?
The golden age is in the future, brought to you by the irreversible march of human endeavors.
HarperCollins imagined McDougall as the happy medium:
They imagined a cool, objective book telling Americans candidly “who and why we are what we are.” Steve Fraser suggested my name to them and Gerry McCauley urged me to take up their offer. I thought it all over during a solo automobile trip to New Hampshire and back. Did I have some new notion of what made Americans exceptional, some additional insight into the American character?
McDougall, unlike Zinn, who saw the United States as an evil Sith lord like Darth Vader, or Johnson, who saw the United States as a virtuous Jedi like Ben Kenobi, McDougall saw the United States as Han Solo (the one who shot Greedo first, not the ungritty rebooted Solo), flawed but ultimately heroic:
America the Beautiful
…existing U.S. histories, whatever their slant, display little appreciation (much less forgiveness) of the flawed human nature that make Americans unexceptional. Perhaps that is why our great national narratives contain so little humor: whether they extol or condemn the American experience, they take it terribly seriously. I also realized while driving through upper New England how much I love the fifty United States (all of which I have lived, worked, or traveled in save North Dakota and Oregon). At length, I decided to learn the history of my country whether or not I had much to teach.
I also imagined special features that might justify a new U.S. history. I wanted to pay more attention to all regions and states so that Kansas, for instance, would not exist only when it was “bleeding.” The Midwest, in particular, has received far less attention than it deserves in synthetic histories, while the “new Western history” demands a correction of traditional interpretations of the frontier. I hoped to be genuinely inclusive by making room not only for African, Asian, and Hispanic Americans, but for European ethnic groups such as the Germans, Irish, Italians (indeed, Catholics generally), Slavs, Scandinavians, and Jews. I meant to treat all these as people rather than icons, recognizing that no American is “just” a member of a group, but a person with loyalties to kinfolk, region, occupation, religion, and political party as well as ethnicity. Next, it seemed imperative to stress how the United States, despite its reputation for xenophobia and isolationism, grew on the strength of immigrant labor, foreign capital, and imported technology. Last but not least, I wanted to study the unique experiment in religious liberty. As Bob Dylan wrote, in a striking poetic inversion: I heard the Sermon on the Mount and knew it was too complex / It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.” Of course, the Sermon on the Mount is not complex, but terrifying in its simplicity. Rather, the effects of Biblical religion, filtered through the lenses of American consciences and projected on to law, society, and politics, are what seem kaleidoscopic.
A good plan, or so it seemed to me then. But the moment I dove into the research, much less writing, I realized the plan was madly ambitious. Given how much exciting new scholarship in American history appears every month, trying to synthesize it all is like trying to dam the Mississippi River. What levees might I build just to channel the flood? Shall I portray Americans as individualists or community builders, pragmatists or dreamers, materialists or idealists, bigots or champions of tolerance, lovers of liberty and justice for all, or history’s most brazen hypocrites? Did succeeding waves of immigrants make the United States what it is, or did the land make Americans of immigrants? Are words such as capitalism, republicanism, and democracy abstractions best not used at all, or can the lexicon of social and political science help us to shrink our own heads? Some of the answers emerged from the telling. But it quickly dawned on me that one of the book’s major themes would be none of the above. It is the American people’s penchant for hustling — in both the positive and negative senses. It emboldens me to call this book candid. It is novel enough to require a whole chapter of explanation…
The result was Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828, the first volume in the greatest general history of the United States ever written. McDougall’s “gritty reboot” of American history opens with a passage that’s every bit as ringing as Paul Johnson’s:
The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years. If some ghostly ship, some Flying Dutchman, were transported in time from the year 1600 into the present, the crew would be amazed by our technology and the sheer numbers of people on the globe, but the array of civilizations would be recognizable. There is today, as there was then: a huge Chinese Empire run by an authoritarian but beleaguered bureaucracy; a homogeneous, anxious, suspicious Japan; a teeming crazy-quilt of Hindus and Muslims in India attempting to make a state of themselves; an amorphous Russian empire pulsing outward or inward in proportion to Muscovy’s projection of force; a vast Islamic crescent hostile to infidels but beset by rival centers of power; a dynamic, more-or-less Christian civilization in Europe aspiring to unity but vexed by its dense congeries of nations and tongues; and finally an Iberian/Amerindian culture in South America marked by relative poverty and strategic impotence. The only continent that would astound the Renaissance time-travelers would be North America, which was primitive and nearly vacant as late as 1607, but which today hosts the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth—a civilization, moreover, that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.
McDougall followed up Freedom with a second volume: Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Unfortunately, it seems there will not be a third volume:
5. Throes of Democracy ends in 1877. Are you currently writing the projected third volume of the trilogy?
No, I am not, much to the dismay of my small but very loyal fan base. HarperCollins did not even want to publish the second volume, much less a third, because Freedom was not a bestseller. As for me, I think the history down to 1877 taught me what I needed to learn about the fantasies, fears, and foibles that made the USA the sort of world power it became.
Gritty Reboot?
Americans, it seems, will tolerate a “gritty reboot” of Batman and even My Little Pony but not of their own history. However, McDougall’s work goes on and he has now returned to earlier themes he first explored in Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, his take on American foreign policy.
This October 2011 McDougall piece for FPRI is another reminder that McDougall is one of America’s clearest strategic thinkers as well as one of its most eminent historians: History And Strategies: Grand, Maritime, And American:
Karl Haushoffer
A classic treatise on grand strategy specifically addressed the geopolitics of the Pacific Rim in the aftermath of the First World War. Its cautionary conclusion warned that great powers drawn to compete for commerce and empire in the vast vacuum of the North Pacific invariably over-reached. Bids for hegemony by Spain and Portugal, then Britain and Russia, had already been thwarted and the likelihood in the 20th century was that Japan would be tempted to overreach followed, perhaps, by the United States. The author of that prescient analysis was none other than Karl Haushofer, whose reputation is that of a leading proponent of continental geopolitics fixated on the quest for hegemony over the Heartland of Eurasia, which his English counterpart Halford Mackinder dubbed the World Island…
Haushofer’s very first book, in fact, was an analysis of the geography driving Japanese expansion and his second book was the grand geopolitics of the Pacific. Moreover, he never imagined in his land-power studies to follow that a single empire could impose a hegemony on the World Island. Rather, he suggested Germany seek an alliance with Russia to control the heartland and alliances with Italy and Japan to secure its maritime flanks.
Haushofer’s closet navalism proves how ubiquitous was the sway of the American Naval War College Professor A. T. Mahan. His The Influence of Sea Power Upon History “went viral” after 1890 and helped to persuade the leaders of almost all the great powers to join the global race for blue water navies, global markets, and colonies.
Alfred Thayer Mahan: "It's a trap!"
Unfortunately, Mahan was a clever American trap for the unwary: not everyone can be a Mahanian naval power:
But the very fact that the Mahanian thesis about the decisiveness of sea-power stoked a nearly universal navalism really testifies to the folly and pride of the leaders in those Great Powers that lacked the endowments Mahan identified as the bases of sea power. They included: “I. Geographical Position. II. Physical Conformation, including, as connected therewith, natural productions and climate. III. Extent of Territory. IV. Number of Population. V. Character of the People. VI. Character of the Government, including therein the national institutions.” To the extent that a nation scored high in those categories (and Mahan’s America certainly did) it might confidently venture forth on the high seas. Yet a nation, no matter how large, populous, rich, or industrial, that lacked one or more of these features—for instance, access to open seas from defensible ports—must content itself with a maritime strategy limited to coastal defense. That pride-wounding caveat was lost on Russia, Italy, and Germany, among others.
Profile of Thassalocracy
The very configuration of the United States favored maritime strategy:
Americans’ bias toward maritime strategy is in fact over-determined. The geographical location, expanse, topography, and resources of North America make it the real World Island and thus by far the best suited to nurture a maritime supremacy. Indeed, the United States ranks first or close to it in all six of Mahan’s fundamentals for sea power. But the fact that the United States is history’s largest and most successful thallasocracy (Greek for “rule by the sea”) is attributable to cultural traits inherited from Great Britain as well as innate material and spatial endowments. Thus did the classic naval historian Clark Reynolds define the purpose of thallasocracy as “control of the sea lanes and islands by one state to insure its economic prosperity and thus its political integrity.” But the manner of control, commerce, and polity most conducive to maritime supremacy just happens to foster more independent (he calls it “national privacy”), liberal, entrepreneurial, individualistic, representative, curious, diverse, cosmopolitan, and creative people and institutions than do rigidly hierarchical extractive land empires. (“Isn’t it funny,” he cites John Marin, “that Dictators never never never live by the sea?”) Moreover, navies cannot occupy or plunder provinces in the manner of armies and so pose little threat to civil liberties. Navies are expensive and take a long time to build, but can quickly decay or be lost, hence they tend to be conservative. Yet they venture forth on a chessboard claiming 71 percent of the earth’s surface and serving as highways to all civilizations of mankind, hence navies tend to be cosmopolitan. Thus, whereas armies and their historians tend toward a narrow, national perspective, naval historians tend to be universal in their perspective, stressing and generally (if guardedly) optimistic about the progress that seafaring peoples have bestowed upon civilization.
It’s even deeply embedded in the U.S. Constitution:
But the original U.S. strategy was also maritime for reasons of political culture. Consider Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. It grants to Congress the power “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years,” and the power “To provide and maintain a Navy”—period, no restrictions. That very conscious distinction derived from the knowledge that a standing army posed a potential threat to the liberties of people at home whereas a navy was by definition offshore and a threat only to foreigners. Hence the John Adams administration and Congress created a cabinet-rank Department of the Navy (1798), whereas Washington had founded a Department of War rather than Army on the assumption that there would be no sizeable army except during war! That dispensation reflected the experience of the English Civil War during which both Crown and Parliament fielded armies to wrest political power from each other. So it was, in the wake of that conflict, that King Charles II christened Britain’s maritime forces the Royal Navy with the blessing of Parliament, whereas no monarch dared speak of a Royal Army, because it is understood that the British army belong to Parliament.
Those distinctions are now lost on us, first because American armies never have threatened civil supremacy, and second because the Cold War arms race obliged the United States to go on a war-footing even in peacetime. But in our early national era it was understood that all the United States needed for a long term grand strategy was a respected naval force plus militias, because its strategy was maritime.
McDougall enumerates the “grand” strategies the U.S. has employed throughout its history.
Alexander Hamilton before he was beheaded for the first $10 bill
First up: the Hamiltonian:
America’s true policy ["to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign World"], as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton phrased it, was to preserve the incomparable blessing of her insulation from Europe’s broils through a foreign policy of neutrality and a naval strategy of coastal and commercial defense. So long as Americans did not throw away their geographical advantages, then their natural growth born of liberty and prosperity would surely make them in time a continental empire greater than any in history…
[This] first grand strategy was the Federalist vision promoted by Hamilton through the Constitution, Federalist Paper #11, Washington’s Farewell Address which he mostly drafted, and the naval construction program that produced our nation’s first fleet of sturdy frigates. President John Adams employed them to good account in the Quasi-War against the French Republic and Jefferson against the Barbary corsairs. Indeed, what made this grand strategy permanent was the fact that it outlasted the Federalist era and won over Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, who against all expectation proved to be a naval enthusiast. The four great traditions of 19th century U.S. diplomacy which I described in my book Promised Land, Crusader State, all depended upon and in turn supported the maritime strategy of “separate spheres” between the Old World and New first expressed in Tom Paine’s Common Sense and made explicit in the Monroe Doctrine drafted by John Quincy Adams. Those principles included Exceptionalism, which meant civil and religious Liberty, Independence, and Unity at home so as to unleash the creative powers of the people to grow the nation; next, Unilateralism or Neutralism which was anything but Isolationism, because Washington’s maritime strategy insisted that the United States would seek friendship and commerce with all nations while shunning alliances except in emergencies; next, the American System of post-colonial republics envisioned in the Monroe Doctrine; and finally the fruit of it all: Expansionism or Manifest Destiny that no power on earth could prevent (at least after the Louisiana Purchase held up) except the American people themselves. Hence the greatest crisis of our first grand strategy was the Civil War in which the Union was saved and Europe narrowly kept from intervening, by General Scott’sAnaconda Plan, a maritime strategy for victory based on coastal and riverine blockades to strangle the Confederacy.
No More Valprasios
The second was a slight update of the original:
The second American maritime strategy, which was initially devised to reinforce the nation’s original grand strategy under new circumstances, flourished from roughly 1880 to the aftermath of the Great War around 1920. It was anchored, literally and figuratively, on the vision of a two-ocean, blue water, steel, coal- and then oil-fired navy whose missions were to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and shelter America’s growing foreign trade during the dangerous heyday of industrialism, the so-called New Imperialism, naval arms races. This grand strategy was, needless to say, explicitly and overwhelmingly maritime as it was conceived and promoted by Secretary of Navy Benjamin Tracy, Naval War College founder Stephen B. Luce, Navy Captain and author A. T. Mahan, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. The Republican Party midwived the new strategy, but Progressives in both parties nurtured it, not least Woodrow Wilson, who pledged to build a United States Navy “second to none.” The Great White Fleet, Panama Canal, overseas naval bases and colonies, and first big military-industrial complex were themselves only the naval expression of a self-conscious grand strategy for the United States that included promotion of exports, assimilation of immigrants, regulation of interstate and overseas commerce, national standards, public education, and big government mediation between big business and labor. These were the Progressive Era’s responses to the novel challenges of globalization, industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, and navalism.
Haiti's James Madison
The third was created by the second most powerful Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy and the Father of the Haitian Constitution of 1915:
The third American grand strategy emerged during World War II and mutated into its final form during the early Cold War. It was a strategy aimed at global—truly global—power projection but not, repeat not, territorial occupations in Europe or Asia. It was conceived by that “former naval person” Franklin Roosevelt and his Congressional paladin Carl Vinson. FDR imagined a postwar United Nations keeping the peace, but really run by his Four Policemen each with its own “beat” or implicit sphere of influence. He also imagined a truly global and open economic system bankrolled and managed by the United States. America’s modes of enforcement in this New World Order were to be sea, air, and financial power, which is why Roosevelt spoke at Yalta of pulling American troops home from Europe within eighteen months of a German surrender. Instead, the Truman administration sharply reinforced U.S. ground forces in Europe and Asia in response to the Berlin Blockade and Korean War. But President Eisenhower devised a Cold War Containment strategy “for the long haul” by stressing nuclear deterrence plus air and naval supremacy. And, just as FDR had envisioned, that maritime supremacy based on sea and air power also patrolled the global commons in the interest of an open and prosperous economy.
Gratuitous Gipper Portrait
The Fourth was downright Gipperish:
The fourth American maritime strategy (but still within the grand strategy of Containment) was the 1980s response to the rapid Soviet naval buildup dramatized in the early Tom Clancy novels. But it really ought to be dated to 1969 when the Nixon Administration began the long withdrawal of American ground forces from South Vietnam. In a speech at the very apt location of the island of Guam (following the splashdown of the Apollo 11 astronauts), the president proclaimed the Nixon Doctrine to the effect that henceforth the United States would assist peoples threatened by aggression with all manner of military and economic support except ground combat units. “Asian boys must fight Asian wars,” he said. The doctrine was made explicit and operational in the post-Vietnam era by the ancillary doctrine promulgated by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and elaborated by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, which specified stringent conditions under which U.S. ground forces should or should not be deployed in combat. Taken together these doctrines signaled a very strong bias toward an offshore balancing strategy that came to define America’s posture during the third and last stage of the Cold War. Its most perfect expression was the New Maritime Strategy launched in 1981 by Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman. In it, America found her way partially back to Washington’s “true policy” or at least what Washington’s rule implied in an era of global Cold War and nuclear deterrence. The U.S. Navy was tasked with defending the whole world’s sea lanes and choke points against any Red Navy breakout, securing the U.S. Navy’s submarine-based portion of the nuclear triad, and guaranteeing logistical and fire support for the Air/Land Battle operations plan in case of a NATO/Warsaw Pact war in Europe. All that added up to the ambitious goal of a 600 ship Navy. It was never achieved due to the collapse of the Soviet Union…
Lame Sequel
Then there was the lame sequel:
…the New Maritime Strategy survived as a template for post-Cold War planning.
The first efforts at such, including the 1992 plan “From the Sea…..” and 1994 plan “Forward… From the Sea” were tentative and sterile due to the defense budget cuts and general complacency following the 1991Gulf War. Thus, American strategy was most adrift during the very years when the United States enjoyed maximal freedom of action. The Global War on Terror after 2001 brought a host of new distractions born of protracted counter-insurgency warfare that violated American grand strategic doctrine and conjured more budgetary woes born, this time, of profligacy rather than penury.
But no one expects Admiral Mike Mullen!:
Deus ex Machina
By mid-decade visionary officers, most prominently Admiral Mike Mullen, seized the initiative to educate the Pentagon, politicians, pundits, and public about the new or magnified maritime challenges in the 21st century and measures to meet them. At the International Sea Forum in December 2006 Admiral Mullen floated the bold idea of a Thousand Ship Navy to be deployed by an alliance of nations devoted to securing the global commons, not only from state aggression, but piracy, smuggling, human trafficking, illegal immigration, terrorism, and transport of WMD. Then, in October 2007 the Marine Corps and Coast Guard joined the Navy in sponsoring A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (“CS 21”) similar in some respects to 1980s plan, but focused on today’s geography, enemies, and weaponry. Like the Lehman conception the Cooperative Strategy must be “forward, global, allied, and joint … must also fit the nation’s grand strategy, must be multilateral, must be effective in peacetime and limited wars, must be affordable, and must be public.” The latter is a subtle point. If the purpose of a strategy is to deter and keep the peace, then not surprise but publicity is mandatory.
Panda With Issues
Then there’s the looming shadow of an angry panda:
Finally, the rise of China, a potential peer competitor in the western Pacific, has inspired an elaborate and sophisticated operational concept called “Air-Sea Battle: A Point of Departure,” itself echoing NATO’s “Air-Land Battle” plan of the 1980s. Drafted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, the document’s scenarios assume that China seeks the capability and may someday reveal the intention to deny the U.S. Navy access to air and sea out to the first island chain off the Chinese coast and perhaps even the second chain. The document urges the Navy and Air Force to collaborate on the planning and execution needed to ensure that U.S. and allied forces can deny China the ability to deny access to its seas (what James Kurth coded as D and D2 and the document codes as A2/AD). But the authors insist repeatedly that the purpose of the “Air-Sea Battle Point of Departure” is not to coerce or provoke or win a war against China, but simply to deter aggressive behavior and “sustain a stable, favorable, conventional military balance throughout the Western Pacific region.”
But there’s always the persistant question: can the United States do “grand” strategy?:
Can the United States devise and execute wise grand strategy in the present era of geopolitical flux and financial constraint? The answer is a highly conditional Yes…if the factions within each armed service can make common cause; if the services as a whole can rally behind a grand strategy, if the Joint Chiefs can market the strategy to the Administration and Congress that will take office in 2013, and if the economy and public opinion can support any new strategic initiatives during an era of penury.
Winner gets the cigar
The United States is a country that fought two wars in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945 because of alliance politics: making both the Empire of MacArthur and the Emirate of Mahan happy involved giving the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy two different wars. The Pacific was barely large enough to contain both Douglas MacArthur and the Navy. Fortunately, before the war the Navy had been built up to satisfy a “two-power” standard: by law the fleet had to be able to fight a major naval power and Douglas MacArthur at the same time and win. This war continued after Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945 until this even more intractable conflict finally wound down when the Navy and Army were forced to work together to counter the USSR and the more serious threat of a new emerging peer competitor: the new U.S. Air Force. The Army and Navy made an opening to the U.S. Air Force. Together, the three powers negotiated the most consequential peace treaty of the twentieth century: the Treaty of Key West. The Navy was allowed to keep its aviation wing but the Army was forced to disarm its airpower and hand it over to the U.S. Air Force. These accommodations, plus a tacit understanding to divide the biannual tribute paid to them by the United States taxpayer equally between them, allowed the Army, Navy, and Air Force to gang up and form a triple entente that eventually destroyed the USSR, the fourth major world power.
Cliche
McDougall hopes that this alliance will endure in the twenty-first century:
From my perspective on world history and American political culture, the New Maritime Cooperative Strategy and the Air-Sea Battle operational concept meet the nation’s needs perfectly and should be especially appealing in the wake of the Iraqi and Afghan ordeals. But even a vigorous and intelligent maritime strategy cannot be assured of success. In past conflicts the United States prevailed thanks to its strategic depth, productive power, and capacity to adapt in the fog of war, not because its prewar strategy proved right. War Plan Orange never was executed. World War I at sea had no use for the Great White Fleet. Likewise, World War II turned on carriers, submarines, and strategic bombing rather than fleet actions, while the enemy targeted by the 1980s maritime strategy just imploded. All one can do today is make educated guesses about the threat matrix of the next twenty years, the future intentions of the Chinese regime or for that matter its very survival, while the complex alliance diplomacy on which the Cooperative Strategy would depend, injects an additional range of (if you’ll pardon the expression) Unknown Unknowns into the equation.
Farewells are so complex
In the end, we resort to quoting Dwight David Eisenhower instead of Donald Henry Rumsfeld:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction…
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
McDougall is no exception:
Still, it is far better to think about future strategic contingencies than not to think about them. As Ike famously said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”; and “failing to plan is planning to fail.”
