Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [25]
Flexible response, General Taylor’s brainchild, grew out of the army’s determination to reclaim a greater role in implementing the sacred trinity. Jockeying by have-nots to improve their position has long figured as a commonplace expression of bureaucratic politics, those with an ax to grind typically attributing to their parochial concerns cosmic significance. As Taylor saw it, by putting the army on half-rations, the Eisenhower administration was endangering the country. A minimally adequate national security posture meant not just being able to wage nuclear war and conduct covert operations, but standing ready to do everything else in between—“everything else,” of course, encompassing tasks typically falling under the army’s purview.
During his tenure as army chief of staff from 1955 to 1959, Taylor’s efforts to win greater respect (and budget share) for his service met with little sympathy within the confines of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or at the Eisenhower White House. On leaving active duty, the frustrated Taylor wasted no time in repackaging his argument as a short book, which in the spring of 1960 appeared to considerable acclaim. A stinging critique of Eisenhower-era policies as well as a blueprint for reform, The Uncertain Trumpet enjoyed a seven-week run on the New York Times bestseller list and found particular favor among Democrats, delighted to have a highly decorated and reputedly cerebral four-star general publicly lambasting a Republican administration headed by a highly decorated and exceedingly popular five-star general.
Taylor’s message was nothing if not straightforward. A perception that the nation was “faced with declining military strength at a time of increasing political tension” compelled him to go public. Counting on nuclear weapons to avert war, he wrote, was a “Great Fallacy.” Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation, which offered “only two choices, the initiation of general nuclear war or compromise and retreat,” had “reached a dead end” and needed to be scrapped. True security demanded that the United States acquire the means “to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge.” A new, more diverse mix of capabilities that would enable the United States “to respond anywhere, any time, with weapons and forces appropriate to the situation” defined the essence of flexible response. Diversifying U.S. military capabilities would inter alia boost the army’s claim on resources, a point that Taylor did not bother to make explicitly, but one not lost on even the casual student of interservice politics.2
The contest to choose Eisenhower’s successor transformed Taylor’s critique from an unhappy general’s complaint into a full-fledged Idea Whose Time Had Come. While campaigning for the presidency Senator Kennedy echoed the notes sounded by Taylor’s Trumpet, depicting Eisenhower-era national security policy as stodgy, stale, complacent, and completely inadequate. His language was unsparing. “[N]o amount of oratory,” he told the American Legion,
no extravagant claims or vociferous braggadocio, no unjustified charges, can hide the harsh fact that behind the rhetoric, behind the soothing words and the confusing figures, American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world.3
If elected, Kennedy vowed to reverse this “decline” and make the United States “first in military power across the board.” This implied, among other things, “expanding and modernizing our conventional forces,