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Rationalizing NATO Strategy
Review products
AlastairBuchan and PhilipWindsor, Arms and Stability in Europe, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1963, 236 pp. $5.00.
RonaldSteel, The End of Alliance, New York, The Viking Press, 1964, 148 PP. $3.75.
RobertStrausz-Hupé, James E.Dougherty, and William R.Kintner, Building the Atlantic World, New York, Harper and Row, 1963, 400 pp. $6.00.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
Dialectics about NATO strategy have become tiresomely repetitious. One wishes they were unnecessary, ideally because a military threat had assuredly disappeared, or because a strategic nearconsensus had emerged. At least the strategic debate should have become more specific. But doctrine in the end is paramount, however unfortunate the consequences of trying to settle upon it ex cathedra. Quantitative analyses that are not systematically related to possible doctrines can lose critical issues in a welter of data, while analyses confined to ways to implement a single doctrine are too constricted. If within NATO one or more nations insist that the mid-1950 doctrine fits the logo's, official alliance planners can be stifled.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1964
References
1 Secretary of Defense McNamara, , Speech to the Economic Club of New York, November 18, 1962 (DOD Office of Public Affairs No. 1486–63), 16Google Scholar.
2 Schelling, T. C., “Nuclear Strategy in Europe,” World Politics, XIV (April 1962), 421–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Teller, Edward (with Allen Brown), The Legacy of Hiroshima (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 281–82Google Scholar.
4 McNamara speech, 12. Contrast Strausz-Hupé et al., 72.
5 Lemnitzer, General, excerpts from address to Western European Assembly, NATO Letter (July-August 1963), 20Google Scholar.
6 U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual 100–5, Field Service Regulations: Operations, 1962, 75.
7 Miksche, F. O., The Failure of Atomic Strategy (New York 1959)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 6, “How to Make Armies More Efficient.”
8 Ibid., 181.
9 Colonel Miksche was too negative in thinking that “the limitation of atomic war appears to be impossible” (p. 166).
10 MacDonald, C. B., The Siegfried Line Campaign, in Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army in World War II: European Theater of Operations (Washington 1963), 35, 616–17Google Scholar.
11 See references in Speier, Hans, German Rearmament and Atomic War (White Plains, N.Y., 1957), esp. 75–82, 243Google Scholar.
12 “The forces envisioned in NATO plans for the end of 1966, fully manned, trained, equipped, and properly positioned, could hold an initial Soviet attack on the Central Front using non-nuclear means alone.” Secretary of Defense McNamara, Robert S., Statement Before the House Armed Services Committee, on the Fiscal Year 1965–1969 Defense Program and 1965 Defense Budget, January 27, 1964, 58Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 23.
14 In choosing to concentrate upon alternatives posed for NATO tactical forces, this review fails to do justice to critiques of the multilateral force. All these authors are critical of the MLF, but for various reasons advance no collective force alternative in comparably specific terms. My views are given in “Nuclear Strategic Options and European Force Participation,” Rosecrance, R. N., ed., The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons (New York 1964)Google Scholar.
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