long-range bombers, the highest standard of living in the world, and a million new rifles.
Admittedly, somewhere you have to cut and choose.
But guns are hardware, and man, not hardware, is the ultimate weapon. In 1950 there were not enough men, either—less than 600,000 to carry worldwide responsibilities, including recruiting; for service in the ranks has never been on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's preferred list of occupations.
And in these 600,000 men themselves the trouble lay.
There was a reason.
Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.
When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained the civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course—but they did it the Army's way.
In 1861 millions of volunteers donned blue or gray. Millions of words have been written on American valor, but few books dwell on the fact that of the sixty important battles, fifty-five were commanded on both sides by West Pointers, and on one side in the remaining five.
In 1917 four million men were mustered in. Few of them liked it, but again they did things the way the professionals wanted them done.
The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.
But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society.
In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.
There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around—the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.
Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the
But acquiesence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.
Soldiers are rarely fit to rule—but they must be fit to fight.
The military is in essence a tool, to be used by its society. If its society is good, it may hope to be used honorably, even if badly. If its society is criminal, it may be, like the
But when the
Some men, of kind intention, are always dubious because the generals of the
Why not? German plumbers, Americans plumbers, use the same manuals, and look into the same kind of water.
In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened. Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the Public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals.
And here it ruined them.
They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What's the matter, Colonel; can't you make it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.
Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.
It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.
In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.
The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did—but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn't do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.
And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient—and popular—to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges—but officers, after all, had no place in the liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.
The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations. The so-called 'caste system' of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.'s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from their N.C.O.'s.
A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless—but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.
One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army—they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded—and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn't the kind of shaping they needed.
Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn't look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. 'Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company
