Long before he assumed the presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower had been giving serious and sustained thought to questions of strategy. As a West Point cadet, he had imbibed the fundamental precepts of Carl von Clausewitz’s classic nineteenth-century treatise on warfare. Later, of course, he gained invaluable practical experience in the formulation and implementation of strategic plans as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. One of Eisenhower’s deepest core beliefs held that national security encompassed much more than the physical defense of the homeland; it meant to him, in the broadest sense, protecting the nation’s basic values, its economic system, and its domestic institutions. In that respect, Eisenhower was firmly convinced that the greatest threat to national security emanated less from the potential for military defeat than from excessive government spending; striking an appropriate balance between the cost of an adequate
Defense and the need to maintain a healthy, solvent economy constituted, accordingly, a crucial aspect of strategy.
Eisenhower expressed that viewpoint with great consistency, both publicly and privately, during his pre-White House years. In a private diary entry of January 1952, for example, he wrote that "it is necessary to recognize that the purpose of America is to defend a way of life rather than merely to defend property, territory, homes, or lives. As a consequence of this purpose, everything done to develop a defense against external threat, except under conditions readily recognizable as emergency, must be weighed and gauged in the light of probable long-term, internal, effect."396 This "Great Equation," as Eisenhower sometimes called it, found expression in several of his public addresses during the 1952 presidential campaign. In one, he criticized the steady rise in the Truman administration’s defense budget over the previous two years, and questioned whether the nation could afford to sustain this elevated level of government spending. "We must achieve both security and solvency," he insisted. "In fact, the foundation of military strength is economic strength. A bankrupt America is more the Soviet goal than an America conquered on the field of battle."397
Eisenhower accepted many of the central premises of Truman’s national security policy. Like top-level decisionmakers in that administration, Eisenhower believed that US security in the Cold War required the establishment of a preponderance of American power across the Eurasian heartland. He, too, accepted that the US stake in postwar Western Europe remained vital, and that an integrated Western defense effort, one that utilized and harnessed West Germany’s latent economic and military power, formed an essential component of any such effort. As well, Eisenhower appraised the Soviet threat as exceedingly grave and recognized as imperative the containment of further Soviet territorial expansion. He also appreciated the corresponding need to maintain both a powerful American nuclear arsenal and adequate conventional forces so as to deter Soviet adventurism.
Eisenhower dissented, however, from the view of Truman administration policy planners that an escalating US military buildup was needed to meet a time of maximum danger. That time had been pinpointed in NSC 68 and other policy documents as arriving in 1954, when the Soviet Union would presumably attain sufficient nuclear capability to menace the United States and its
Western allies. Instead, he visualized US-Soviet competition as more of a long-term proposition, rejecting the time-of-maximum-danger hypothesis. Eisenhower considered it highly unlikely that Soviet leaders would court a conflict that would surely bring ruin on their country and likely break their own hold on power. He reasoned that the preservation of the regime would temper the behavior of Kremlin policymakers, whom he saw as essentially rational men intent on self-preservation. Accordingly, Eisenhower believed that greater efficiency and economy in defense spending could, and must, be achieved.
Immediately following his electoral triumph of November 1952, Eisenhower initiated the complex process of translating that vision into a concrete and cohesive national security strategy. After assembling an advisory team that mixed experienced foreign-policy and defense experts, such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, with staunch fiscal conservatives, such as Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, he encouraged a remarkably wide-ranging series of intra-administration debates about Cold War grand strategy. At the first meeting of Eisenhower’s reconstituted National Security Council (NSC), which became the key sounding board and policymaking instrument of his administration, the new chief executive remarked that the "great problem" facing the council was to decide upon an appropriate defense posture "without bankrupting the nation." To that end, he authorized a broad-based reconsideration of the national security priorities established by the Truman administration. NSC 141, approved by Truman during his final weeks in office, had recommended substantial, though unspecified, increases in defense spending. Eisenhower called for a reexamination of the threat perceptions that lay behind those valedictory recommendations as well as a careful assessment of the suitability, and affordability, of current programs.398
What ensued was the first of many debates throughout the Eisenhower presidency about the appropriate balance between national security needs and fiscal solvency. During the course of the meeting, the president revealed his intent to cut several billion dollars from Truman’s projected defense expenditures, stoutly resisting the military’s pressure for increased defense spending. He achieved that goal by overturning the Joint Chiefs’ focus on a so-called D-Day in 1954-55 and replacing it for planning purposes with an indeterminate, or "floating," D-Day; that allowed a reduction in the force objectives of
22. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) and Secretary of State John Foster DuUes meet to discuss foreign affairs.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Along with the elimination of some waste and overhead and other cost-saving steps, Eisenhower thus demonstrated from the outset of his presidency his utter seriousness about reversing the trend toward upwardly spiraling defense expenditures.399
Although those initial budget-cutting moves laid down an important marker regarding Eisenhower’s intentions, the task of defining and forging a consensus behind a new, integrated national security strategy remained. Eisenhower’s core beliefs derived partly from an optimistic view about the ability over time of the freedom, openness, and pluralism of the American system to prevail over what he invariably disparaged as the tyrannical, freedom-denying depravities of Communism. At the same time, they
Emanated from a deeply pessimistic view about the civilization-destroying horrors of a general, nuclear war. Others, including chief foreign-policy adviser John Foster Dulles, at first took a more dire view of Soviet strength and harbored a less restrained view about the feasibility of nuclear war as an instrument of national policy.
During an informal meeting among senior policymakers on May 8, 1953, some of those differences in perspective surfaced. "It is difficult to conclude that time is working in our favor," Dulles observed. Insisting that "the Reds" held "the better position" throughout the world at the present moment and that the European allies remained irresolute and undependable, he advocated a more assertive, active, and risk-tolerant US policy. Otherwise, Dulles cautioned, "we will lose bit by bit the free world, and practically break ourselves financially." While agreeing that "present policy was leading to disaster" and hence needed to be changed, Eisenhower disagreed that time favored the United States’ adversaries. He had long believed that the overall assets of the West - military, economic, political, psychological, even spiritual - were far superior to those of the Soviet bloc. Time, consequently, was the United States’ friend, not its enemy. Displaying characteristic confidence about the inherent strengths of the West, he insisted that the momentum in the Cold War would eventually shift to the United States as people on both sides of the East-West divide came to "see freedom and communism in their true lights.” In other words, a patient, long-term strategy was the one best designed to win the Cold War.400
"Operation Solarium," a unique exercise in the annals of American Cold War planning, grew out of that Eisenhower-Dulles colloquy and set the stage for the formulation of the administration’s basic statement of national security policy, NSC 162/2. The president proposed that three separate teams of foreign-policy experts examine, refine, and present to the NSC for consideration three quite distinct strategic options for prosecuting the Cold War. Task Force A was charged with making the case for continuation of the Truman containment strategy; Task Force B with making the case for a more assertive policy that would precisely specify, and make clear to the Soviets, those areas that the United States would automatically defend in case of attack; and Task Force C with developing an aggressive plan for "rolling back" Communism. The completed task force reports, delivered and debated at a lively NSC meeting on July 30, succeeded in laying out some stark alternatives. While Task Force A, headed by former policy planning chief George F. Kennan,
Contended that the prospects of a general war with the Soviet Union were highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, Task Force C identified a steadily growing Soviet threat that made the outbreak of general war a clear and present danger. The latter report rather ominously stated that the United States and the Soviet Union could no longer peacefully coexist and that the Soviet Union therefore "must and can be shaken apart" through the adoption of "a forward and aggressive political strategy in all fields and by all means." Despite those, and other, fundamental differences in outlook, Eisenhower insisted that the three task forces combine their various analyses and recommendations around areas of common agreement.401
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