Eisenhower was Right (August 19th, 2024)

(About more than the Military Industrial Complex)       

During World War II, US defense spending peaked at $83 billion per year (1945), which doesn’t seem like a lot these days but in 1940 the US GDP was $101 billion and total spending of the Army and Navy for 1940 was about $2 billion.

To put it in current terms, the US GDP (per the Federal Reserve) stood at $28.6 Trillion for 2023. If we were to similarly surge defense spending, defense spending would reach to a bit more than $23 trillion by 2029, a 2700% increase.

After WWII ended, recognizing that there was simply no way the nation could keep functioning with that much of the economy committed to the Navy and War departments (36.5% of GDP), the services began massive cutbacks in forces, even as more money was sunk into the new - and expensive - technology of jet aircraft and atomic (and later nuclear) bombs. Conventional forces shrank in size.

Then, in June of 1950, the North Koreans, supported (prodded) by the Soviet Union and Communist China (acting on Dean Acheson’s ceding of hegemony), attacked across the DMZ and almost managed to seize South Korea. The US found that much of the conventional force was hollow. Some truly fierce fighting followed, but the possibility of a ceasefire (the only hope to end the war) seemed to be getting nowhere until President-elect Eisenhower hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons.

While there has been recent writing that suggests the Chinese were not convinced Eisenhower would use the weapons, they did, in fact, agree to a ceasefire and it remains in place 71 years later. Of note, other recent analysis suggests that not only was Eisenhower willing to use nuclear weapons to end the war, but he viewed nuclear weapons as both deterrence and war-fighting weapons. But there was more to it than that.

A quick trip through any of the hundreds of defense journals that report on US and global military spending will yield commentary on the need to expand US conventional forces, of the need to improve readiness, the need to fix our ship construction, ship repair and overall ship maintenance programs, the need to expand weapons inventories, etc., etc.

The guiding principle in all this is that these steps are necessary to deter China, specifically to deter China from taking Taiwan and from establishing hegemony over the South China Sea.

At the tactical and operational level conventional forces perform day-to-day operations “keeping the peace,” providing strategic presence, and conducting raids to suppress recalcitrant countries - like Yemen - sometimes not so well.

But there’s a need to look at what Eisenhower was saying. Reducing it to the basics, a Great Power cannot be deterred in its own back yard with the conventional forces that we can afford, and perhaps not at all, once they have a capable nuclear force. Eisenhower saw that building a conventional force that alone could deter Russia or China was, and is, simply unaffordable.

In 1950 total US defense spending, which peaked in 1945 at $83 billion, had been trimmed back to just under $16 billion, 4.3% of GDP. After the attack in Korea, defense spending surged and by 1953 defense spending peaked at $52.8 billion, 13.5% of GDP (which was then at $390 billion).

Eisenhower, who knew a thing or two about planning, readily saw that the conventional slice of the forces that came with 13.5% of GDP (there were already significant nuclear elements), was still not adequate to deter the Soviets or China, and that in any case, with the Soviets (and later with the Chinese), if they were forced into a situation in which they were losing badly in conventional combat, there was every reason to believe they would use nuclear weapons to salvage the situation.

Eisenhower recognized that any escalation of a great power war past a certain point - a point we could not then and cannot now accurately define - would result in a nuclear engagement. Accordingly, Eisenhower saw that building and maintaining forces capable of fighting and winning a conventional war with a great power, as some sort of Great Power deterrent force, was both cost prohibitive and of little real value as such forces would never win the war they were built to fight because of nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, it was possible to reduce economic strain among our allies, still rebuilding after WWII, with the allies keeping relatively small defense forces, and  strategic security guaranteed by the US “nuclear umbrella.”

That meant defense spending could be cut; it was, and by 1955 US defense spending fell below 10% of GDP and kept falling until into the 60s and has cycled up and down since (it now stands at 3.6%)

What then were conventional forces for? For strategic presence and for “keeping the peace.” That would still require a substantive investment, perhaps 4% of GDP, as long as additional funds were spent on maintaining both a strategic and theater nuclear force, with high readiness.

As for great power conflict: USSR / Russia v the US, or China v the US (or now,  China and Russia v the US), Eisenhower recognized that it was going to escalate into a nuclear exchange when one side or the other starts losing badly (China was at the time working on it’s first nuclear weapons).

What that really means is this: despite Russia’s poor at times (though at times fairly good) performance on the ground in Ukraine, Russia’s nuclear force must be respected. China’s nuclear force must be respected. And the US theater and strategic nuclear forces must be respected. 

Further, if we wish to deter China in the South China Sea or around Taiwan, we need to make it clear that this is a theater nuclear exchange waiting to happen. And to do that we need to introduce theater nuclear weapons to the Western Pacific. 

To reiterate: a great power Navy keeps the peace. It maintains open sea lanes and it makes certain no one gets too far out of control. The current situation with the Houthis and the Red Sea - Gulf of Aden - Bab al Manded is a glaring failure that the USN will have to live with for years to come.

And great powers - Russia and China - nuclear powers, cannot be fully deterred with conventional forces alone. More specifically, China will not be deterred in the long run if the US simply has a large conventional force.

The US still needs a more robust conventional force. But that larger, more capable Navy we need won’t, in the end, deter China from going after Taiwan or seizing de facto control of the South China Sea; a Navy with a forward theater nuclear capability will. 

And while we’re putting theater nuclear weapons to sea, the US needs to take the rest of the problem more seriously: harden our infrastructures, work on missile defense, and fix the intel community.

But we need to introduce theater numeral weapons into this problem if we wish to contain it.