Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [26]
Kennedy took power amid expectations that he would vanquish the uncertainties that had so worried Taylor. In his inaugural address, the new president announced that “the trumpet summons us again” and made plain his eagerness to answer that summons with unflinching resolve. Soon thereafter Kennedy appropriated the phrase Taylor had coined and flexible response became the official label attached to the new administration’s program for military reform.
Yet the purposes animating Kennedy’s defense initiative extended well beyond the narrow aims that had inspired Taylor to speak out. This was no simple attempt to restore the army’s relevance. The president and his advisers intended to devise new and creative ways of making force useful. Keen to reinvigorate U.S. global leadership, they wanted to expand the range of options available to policy makers. Whereas Eisenhower had counted on the prospect of nuclear cataclysm to forestall the actual event, Kennedy’s “action intellectuals” believed that keeping World War III at bay required a forward-leaning posture: The United States needed to demonstrate its willingness to fight non-nuclear wars. With all the certainty of men unacquainted with the actual use of power, they did not doubt their ability to compel war to do their bidding. Not for the last time, an enthusiasm for limited war served chiefly to open the door to unlimited military expenditures.
That flexible response was going to cost money was never a concern. So the lid Eisenhower had struggled to impose on Pentagon spending now came off. During Kennedy’s first year in office, military outlays rose 15 percent.5 To close a nonexistent “missile gap” that had figured as a prominent campaign issue, the administration doubled the production rate of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles from thirty to sixty per month and boosted the planned fleet of Polaris nuclear submarines—each of which carried sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles—from twenty-nine to forty-one. The effect of this urgently promoted buildup was to increase the actual “missile gap” that already favored the United States by a considerable margin. In this sense, although spooking the Kremlin, Kennedy gave the air force and navy little cause for complaint.
Much as Taylor had intended, however, the primary beneficiary of flexible response was the army. Between 1961 and 1962, its budget shot up, as the service added 207,000 more soldiers to its rolls. The number of active-duty divisions increased from eleven to sixteen. To bolster the U.S. commitment to NATO, Kennedy dispatched additional ground troops to West Germany. He also more than doubled the army’s Special Forces and expressed intense personal interest in the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and techniques—these, Kennedy believed, held the key to rolling back the Red tide threatening to inundate the Third World.6 Readiness, mobility, and deployability became the new watchwords: Kennedy’s army existed not to serve as a nuclear tripwire, but to engage the enemy—with particular attention to applying force on a limited scale for limited aims while minimizing the risk of events mushrooming out of control.
An editorial published in Life on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration conveyed the spirit of the moment. Along the “long frontier between the Communist and free worlds,” it claimed, the United States and its allies were likely to face “the necessity of resisting aggression” in any number of places. Existing capabilities did not suffice for what Life called the “brush-fire wars” now looming on the horizon. In fighting such wars, the overriding aim was to put out the fire, not blow up the world.