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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 45, 7 November 1949, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the ETOL.
To the Editor:
The article by Stewart Pitt on the dispute within the Department of Defense, and the rejoinder by Henry Judd, have at least this virtue – that they make an attempt to analyze a concrete aspect of the military establishment in the United States.
The military is a dominant fact in current history. It is not accidental that a quip inverting Clausewitz’s most famous dictum is making the rounds: “Politics is war carried on by other means.” It corresponds to the reality.
Unfortunately, sections of the ISL which are afflicted with a combination of cultural lag, pacifism, and pure-and-simple philistinism commonly adopt a rather patronizing attitude toward articles such as those of Comrades Pitt and Judd. Yet it is very difficult to form an estimate of the probable evolution of domestic and world politics in the coming period without understanding the military factors involved on the part of both Russia and the United States.
The defect of the two articles in question, despite many good incidental insights, is that neither one correctly establishes what IS in dispute among the military. The difficulty is not inherent in the material. It lies, rather, in an inadequate acquaintance with the field in comparison with others where we are more at home.
Pitt sums up the differences within the Department of Defense as follows: “The army and air force here stand as conservative American-defensists-first. The B-36 is the symbol of an insular conception which bypasses actual commitment to European war except by lend-lease, advice, etc.” The navy, however, “proposes the fullest utilization and integration of all means of destruction from advanced bases.”
A reading of the army service journals will show that the army does not at all subscribe to the beliefs imputed to it by Pitt. The exact contrary is true. While planning to utilize the atomic bomb, it orients all its strategy around an invasion of Russia – or the continent. What else is the meaning of the Atlantic Pact?
That SECTIONS of the air corps fiddle with the concept of an atomic blitz is unquestionably true. The current formal position of the air corps, however, largely is identical with that of the army. That there will be an eventual blowup over the allocation and strategic aircraft I have indicated elsewhere. But that is not the situation at the moment.
The navy’s arguments were largely, though not exclusively, demagogic. But basically its reactions are those of a bureaucracy whose prerogatives are being encroached upon.
Judd’s criticisms of the Pitt position were generally correct, but his conclusion is equally erroneous. The army, says Judd, recognizes that conditions of war have changed. It believes “that atomic weapons, guided missiles, bacteriological bombardment, rockets and jet planes, etc., will be the technical means, NOT large mass armies convoyed by a navy, for carrying out its objective.
There is not the slightest evidence for this conclusion. There is a mountain of evidence to support the opposite one: that the army chiefs are planning on a mass army highly technically equipped. Hence, as has been indicated elsewhere, the initial steps taken to abolish Jim Crow in the services. It is no secret that the United States has its eyes on French, German and Spanish manpower – not to speak of Japanese manpower as well. Immense Russian armies deployed in the field are recognized as unprofitable targets for atomic weapons. All of this should be platitudinous, however; it has been stated many times in the service and in the public press, most recently by the chief of staff himself in a Saturday Evening Post article of October 15.
The estimate we make of the character of the next war will condition our over-all prognosis and our response to the anticipated economic, political and social events. This, I believe, the Pitt and Judd explanations fail to do.
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