Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Cram
It was my impression that Reagan had to spend more to rebuild the military... If my three years had been with Reagan rather than Carter, I may have stayed in and navigated down your path. Such is life.
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Chris--
With respect, it remains to be seen if Reagan "had to spend more to rebuild the military." While I believe that re-armament during his administration was a prudent course of action, the type of archival evidence needed to prove this point will remain unavailable during our lifetimes.
Also, the Republican Party has gotten a lot of mileage from the interpretation that there was a clear break between the Carter and Reagan administrations in matters of national security policy and military affairs. My own research has lead me to the surprising, but provisional, conclusion that this interpretation may not be sustainable.
A powerful concept in the historiography of the American army is the concept of a professional "renaissance" taking place after an interval of civilian "neglect". This concept was advanced during the Gilded Age and the Progressive era. It was articulated by proponents of military reforms that were not feasible given the configuration of domestic politics and the absence of a credible external threat.
Unfortunately, rather than changing their approach and getting what they could, these reformers scorched the earth by arguing that civilians, not soldiers, were solely responsible for America's martial backwardness.*
In the intervening decades, this argument has gained political currency, especially with the GOP, yesteryear's Jackson Democrats, and those inaccurately labeled "neo-conservatives."
But does it bear up to historical scrutiny? In President Carter's case, maybe not. The man's many miscues have greatly obscured the
positive role he played in setting the stage for the "renaissance" of the 1980s. For example, he appointed GEN David C. Jones as CJCS. During his tenure in the Joint Chiefs, GEN Jones played a pivotal role in the ongoing debates over defense reorganization and unification.
Perhaps more significantly, it was Carter, and not Reagan, who began the
public debate over the utility of war as an instrument of policy in the post-Vietnam era. Many individuals and groups in American political and strategic culture did not care for Carter's preferences and have pilloried him for those preferences ever since. Nevertheless, he did advance the discourse. In this light, Carter behaved very much like a typical navalist, as all naval officers--if not all naval historians--should. That is to say he sought the informed consent of the American public for his defense policies. (Arguably, he has proved prophetic in his conceptualization of the navy's force structure in a world in which the Cold War has receded to tertiary importance.)
By way of contrast, President Reagan was disinterested (
not uninterested, disinterested) in having this type of dialog with the American people. He left the discussion of matters of defense policy and national military strategy to Caspar Weinberger while issues revolving around naval affairs fell to John Lehman as well as civilian navalists and to the navy itself.
The consequences of this choice are many. One is civilians' contemporaneous understanding of the American armed services. We often celebrate the many upsides of Reagan's presidential leadership, not the least the reassertion of America's naval pre-eminence, the codification of escalation dominance across the spectrum of warfare (that is the intentions and capability to win wars), and the restoration of a sense of national self confidence.
However, an unintended consequence of his approach was that over the course of Reagan's presidency, the public's intellectual understanding of the American armed services did not correspond to its appreciation for the armed services. This paradox undermined the public's grasp that the armed forces, especially the navy, had accomplished a feat rare for contemporary military organizations--modernizing for tomorrow's battlefield while simultaneously increasing the readiness to fight today.
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* See, for example, Frederic Louis Huidekoper,
The Military Unpreparedness of the United States: A History of American Land Forces from Colonial Times Until June 1, 1915. It is truly amazing what one can find by looking at every book on every shelf on certain floors of a library.
