Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Montreal Speech
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| S-75 Dvina missiles on parade in Moscow's Red Square, November 7th, 1957 (Sovfoto - source) |
SECURITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense
before the American Society of Newspaper Editors
Montreal, Canada, May 18th, 1966
Any American would be fortunate to visit this lovely island city, in this
hospitable land. But there is a special satisfaction for a Secretary of
Defense to cross the longest border in the world and realize that it is
also the least armed border in the world. It prompts one to reflect how
negative and narrow a notion of defense still clouds our century.
There is still among us an almost eradicable tendency to think of our
security problem as being exclusively a military problem—and to think of
the military problem as being exclusively a weapons-system or hardware
problem.
The plain, blunt truth is that contemporary man still conceives of war and
peace in much the same stereotyped terms that his ancestors did.
The fact that these ancestors, both recent and remote, were conspicuously
unsuccessful at avoiding war, and enlarging peace, doesn't seem to dampen
our capacity for cliches.
We still tend to conceive of national security almost solely as a state of
armed readiness: a vast, awesome arsenal of weaponry.
We still tend to assume that it is primarily this purely military
ingredient that creates security.
We are still haunted by this concept of military hardware. But how limited
a concept this actually is becomes apparent when one ponders the kind of
peace that exists between the United States and Canada.
It is a very cogent example. Here we are, two modern nations, highly
developed technologically, each with immense territory, both enriched with
great reserves of natural resources, each militarily sophisticated; and
yet we sit across from one another, divided by an unguarded frontier of
thousands of miles, and there is not a remotest set of circumstances, in
any imaginable time frame of the future, in which our two nations would
wage war on one another.
It is so unthinkable an idea as to be totally absurd. But why is that so?
Is it because we are both ready in an instant to hurl our military
hardware at one another? Is it because we are both zeroed in on one
another's vital targets? Is it because we are both armed to our
technological teeth that we do not go to war? The whole notion, as
applied to our two countries, is ludicrous.
Canada and the United States are at peace for reasons that have nothing
whatever to do with our mutual military readiness. We are at peace—truly
at peace—because of the vast fund of compatible beliefs, common
principles, and shared ideals. We have our differences and our diversity
and let us hope for the sake of a mutually rewarding relationship we never
become sterile carbon copies of one another. But the whole point is that
our basis of mutual peace has nothing whatever to do with our military
hardware.
Now this is not to say, obviously enough, that the concept of military
deterrence is no longer relevant in the contemporary world. Unhappily, it
still is critically relevant with respect to our potential adversaries.
But it has no relevance what ever between the United States and Canada.
We are not adversaries. We are not going to become adversaries. And it is
not mutual military deterrence that keeps us from becoming adversaries.
It is mutual respect for common principles. Now I mention this—as obvious
as it all is—simply as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the concept that
military hardware is the exclusive or even the primary ingredient of
permanent peace in the mid 20th century.
In the United States over the past 5 years, we have achieved a
considerably improved balance in our total military posture. That was the
mandate I received from Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; and with their
support, and that of the Congress, we have been able to create a
strengthened force structure of land, sea, and air components with a vast
increase in mobility and materiel and with a massive superiority in
nuclear retaliatory power over any combination of potential adversaries.
Our capabilities for nuclear, conventional, and countersubversive war have
all been broadened and improved; and we have accomplished this through
military budgets that were in fact lesser percentages of our gross
national product than in the past.
From the point of view of combat readiness, the United States has never
been militarily stronger. We intend to maintain that readiness. But if we
think profoundly about the matter, it is clear that this purely military
posture is not the central element in our security. A nation can reach
the point at which it does not buy more security for itself simply by
buying more military hardware. We are at that point. The decisive factor
for a powerful nation already adequately armed is the character of its
relationships with the world.
In this respect, there are three broad groups of nations: first, those
that are struggling to develop; secondly, those free nations that have
reached a level of strength and prosperity that enables them to contribute
to the peace of the world; and finally, those nations who might tempted to
make themselves our adversaries. For each of these groups, the United
States, to preserve its intrinsic security, has to have distinctive sets
of relationships. First, we have to help protect those developing
countries which genuinely need and request our help and which, as an
essential precondition, are willing and able to help themselves.
Second, we have to encourage and achieve a more effective partnership with
those nations who can and should share international peacekeeping
responsibilities.
Third, we must do all we realistically can to reduce the risk of conflict
with those who might be tempted to take up arms against us.
Let us examine these three sets of relationships in detail.
The Developing Nations
First, the developing nations. Roughly 100 countries today are caught up
in the difficult transition from traditional to modern societies. There
is no uniform rate of progress among them, and they range from primitive
mosaic societies fractured by tribalism and held feebly together by the
slenderest of political sinews to relatively sophisticated countries well
on the road to agricultural sufficiency and industrial competence.
This sweeping surge of development, particularly across the whole southern
half of the globe, has no parallel in history. It has turned
traditionally listless areas of the world into seething cauldrons of
change.
On the whole, it has not been a very peaceful process.
In the last 8 years alone there have been no less than 164 internationally
significant outbreaks of violence, each of them specifically designed as
a serious challenge to the authority, or the very existence, of the
government in question. Eighty two different governments have been
directly involved.
What is striking is that only 15 of these 164 significant resorts to
violence have been military conflicts between two states. And not a
single one of the 164 conflicts has been a formally declared war.
Indeed, there has not been a formal declaration of war anywhere in the
world since World War II.
The planet is becoming a more dangerous place to live on, not merely
because of a potential nuclear holocaust but also because of the large
number of de facto conflicts and because the trend of such conflicts is
growing rather than diminishing. At the beginning of 1958, there were 23
prolonged insurgencies going on about the world. As of February 1, 1966,
there were 40. Further, the total number of outbreaks of violence has
increased each year: In 1958, there were 34; in 1965, there were 58.
The Relationship of Violence and Economic Status
But what is most significant of all is that there is a direct and constant
relationship between the incidence of violence and the economic status of
the countries afflicted. The World Bank divides nations on the basis of
per capita income into four categories: rich, middle income, poor, and
very poor.
The rich nations are those with a per capita income of $750 per year or
more.
The current U.S. level is more than $2,700. There are 27 of these rich
nations. They possess 75 percent of the world's wealth, though roughly
only 25 percent of the world's population.
Since 1958, only one of these 27 nations has suffered a major internal
upheaval on its own territory. But observe what happens at the other end
of the economic scale.
Among the 38 very poor nations those with a per capita income of under
$100 a year not less than 32 have suffered significant conflicts.
Indeed, they have suffered an average of two major outbreaks of violence
per country in the 8 year period. That is a great deal of conflict.
What is worse, it has been predominantly conflict of a prolonged nature.
The trend holds predictably constant in the case of the two other
categories: the poor and the middle income nations. Since 1958, 87
percent of the very poor nations, 69 percent of the poor nations, and 48
percent of the middle income nations have suffered serious violence.
There can, then, be no question but that there is an irrefutable
relationship between violence and economic backwardness. And the trend of
such violence is up, not down.
Now, it would perhaps be somewhat reassuring if the gap between the rich
nations and the poor nations were closing and economic backwardness were
significantly receding. But it is not. The economic gap is widening.
By the year 1970 over one half of the world's total population will live
in the independent nations sweeping across the southern half of the
planet. But this hungering half of the human race will by then command
only one sixth of the world's total of goods and services. By the year
1975 the dependent children of these nations alone children under 15 years
of age will equal the total population of the developed nations to the
north.
Even in our own abundant societies, we have reason enough to worry over
the tensions that coil and tighten among underprivileged young people and
finally flail out in delinquency and crime. What are we to expect from a
whole hemisphere of youth where mounting frustrations are likely to fester
into eruptions of violence and extremism?
Annual per capita income in roughly half of the 80 underdeveloped nations
that are members of the World Bank is rising by a paltry 1 percent a year
or less. By the end of the century these nations, at their present rates
of growth, will reach a per capita income of barely $170 a year. The
United States, by the same criterion, will attain a per capita income of
$4,500.
The conclusion to all of this is blunt and inescapable: Given the certain
connection between economic stagnation and the incidence of violence, the
years that lie ahead for the nations in the southern half of the globe are
pregnant with violence.
U.S. Security and the Newly Developing World
This would be true even if no threat of Communist subversion existed is it
clearly does. Both Moscow and Peking, however harsh their internal
differences, regard the whole modernization process as an ideal
environment for the growth of communism. Their experience with subversive
internal war is extensive, and they have developed a considerable array of
both doctrine and practical measures in the art of political violence.
What is often misunderstood is that Communists are capable of subverting,
manipulating, and finally directing for their own ends the wholly
legitimate grievances of a developing society.
But it would be a gross oversimplification to regard communism as the
central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped world. Of
the 149 serious internal insurgencies in the past 8 years, Communists have
been involved in only 58 of them—8 percent of the total—and this
includes seven instances in which a Communist regime itself was the target
of the uprising.
Whether Communists are involved or not, violence anywhere in a taut world
transmits sharp signals through the complex gangli of international
relations; and the security of the United States is related to the
security and stability of nations half a glob away.
But neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States
is, should or could be the global gendarme. Quite the contrary. Experience
confirms what human nature suggests: that in most instances of internal
violence the local people themselves are best able to deal directly with
the situation within the framework of their own traditions.
The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no
inclination to do so. There have been classic case in which our
deliberate non-action was the wisest action of all. Where our help is not
sought, it is seldom prudent to volunteer. Certainly we have no charter to
rescue floundering regimes who have brought violence on themselves by
deliberately refusing to meet the legitimate expectations of their
citizenry.
Further, throughout the next decade advancing technology will reduce the
requirements for bases and staging rights at particular locations abroad,
and the whole pattern of forward deployment will gradually change.
But, though all these caveats are clear enough, the irreducible fact
remains that our security is related directly to the security of the newly
developing world. And our role must be precisely this: to help provide
security to those developing nations which genuinely need and request our
help and which demonstrably are willing and able to help themselves.
Security and Development
The rub comes in this: We do not always grasp the meaning of the word
"security" in this context. In a modernizing society, security means
development.
Security is not military hardware, though it may include it. Security is
not military force, though it may involve it. Security is not traditional
military activity, though it may encompass it. Security is development.
Without development, there can be no security. A developing nation that
does not in fact develop simply cannot remain "secure." It cannot remain
secure for the intractable reason that its own citizenry cannot shed its
human nature.
If security implies anything, it implies a minimal measure of order and
stability. Without internal development of at least a minimal degree,
order and stability are simply not possible. They are not possible
because human nature cannot be frustrated beyond intrinsic limits. It
reacts because it must.
Now, that is what we do not always understand, and that is also what
governments of modernizing nations do not always understand. But by
emphasizing that security arises from development, I do not say that an
underdeveloped nation cannot be subverted from within, or be aggressed
upon from without, or be the victim of a combination of the two. It can.
And to prevent any or all of these conditions, a nation does require
appropriate military capabilities to deal with the specific problem. But
the specific military problem is only a narrow facet of the broader
security problem.
Military force can help provide law and order but only to the degree that
a basis for law and order already exists in the developing society: a
basic willingness on the part of the people to cooperate. The law and
order is a shield, behind which the central fact of security—development—can be achieved.
Now we are not playing a semantic game with these words. The trouble is
that we have been lost in a semantic jungle for too long. We have come to
identify "security" with exclusively military phenomena, and most
particularly with military hardware. But it just isn't so. And we need
to accommodate to the facts of the matter if we want to see security
survive and grow in the southern half of the globe.
Development means economic, social, and political progress. It means a
reasonable standard of living, and the word "reasonable" in this context
requires continual redefinition. What is "reasonable" in an earlier stage
of development will become "unreasonable" in a later stage.
As development progresses, security progresses. And when the people of a
nation have organized their own human and natural resources to provide
themselves with what they need and expect out of life and have learned to
compromise peacefully among competing demands in the larger national
interest then their resistance to disorder and violence will be enormously
increased.
Conversely, the tragic need of desperate men to resort to force to achieve
the inner imperatives of human decency will diminish.
Military and Economic Spheres of U.S. Aid
Now, I have said that the role of the United States is to help provide
security to these modernizing nations, providing they need and request our
help and are clearly willing and able to help themselves. But what should
our help be? Clearly, it should be help toward development. In the
military sphere, that involves two broad categories of assistance.
We should help the developing nation with such training and equipment as
is necessary to maintain the protective shield behind which development
can go forward.
The dimensions of that shield vary from country to country, but what is
essential is that it should be a shield and not a capacity for external
aggression.
The second, and perhaps less understood category of military assistance in
a modernizing nation, is training in civic action. Civic action is another
one of those semantic puzzles. Too few Americans and too few officials in
developing nations really comprehend what military civic action means.
Essentially, it means using indigenous military forces for nontraditional
military projects, projects that are useful to the local population in
fields such as education, public works, health, sanitation, agriculture—indeed, anything connected with economic or social progress.
It has had some impressive results. In the past 4 years the U.S. assisted
civic action program, worldwide, has constructed or repaired more than
10,000 miles of roads, built over 1,000 schools, hundreds of hospitals and
clinics, and has provided medical and dental care to approximately 4
million people.
What is important is that all this was done by indigenous men in uniform.
Quite apart from the developmental projects themselves, the program
powerfully alters the negative image of the military man as the oppressive
preserver of the stagnant status quo.
But assistance in the purely military sphere is not enough. Economic assistance is also essential. The President is determined that our aid
should be hardheaded and rigorously realistic, that it should deal
directly with the roots of underdevelopment and not merely attempt to
alleviate the symptoms. His bedrock principle is that U.S. economic aid—no matter what its magnitude—is futile unless the country in question is
resolute in making the primary effort itself. That will be the criterion,
and that will be the crucial condition for all our future assistance.
Only the developing nations themselves can take the fundamental measures
that make outside assistance meaningful. These measures are often
unpalatable and frequently call for political courage and decisiveness.
But to fail to undertake painful, but essential, reform inevitably leads
to far more painful revolutionary violence. Our economic assistance is
designed to offer a reasonable alternative to that violence. It is
designed to help substitute peaceful progress for tragic internal
conflict.
The United States intends to be compassionate and generous in this effort,
but it is not an effort it can carry exclusively by itself. And thus it
looks to those nations who have reached the point of self-sustaining
prosperity to increase their contribution to the development and, thus, to
the security of the modernizing world.
Sharing Peacekeeping Responsibilities
And that brings me to the second set of relationships that I underscored
at the outset; it is the policy of the United States to encourage and
achieve a more effective partnership with those nations who can, and
should, share international peacekeeping responsibilities.
America has devoted a higher proportion of its gross national product to
its military establishment than any other major free-world nation. This
was true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia. We
have had, over the last few years, as many men in uniform as all the
nations of Western Europe combined, even though they have a population
half again greater than our own.
Now, the American people are not going to shirk their obligations in any
part of the world, but they clearly cannot be expected to bear a
disproportionate share of the common burden indefinitely. If, for
example, other nations genuinely believe—as they say they do—that it
is in the common interest to deter the expansion of Red China's economic
and political control beyond its national boundaries, then they must take
a more active role in guarding the defense perimeter. Let me be perfectly
clear. This is not to question the policy of neutralism or nonalignment
of any particular nation. But it is to emphasize that the independence of
such nations can, in the end, be fully safeguarded only by collective
agreements among themselves and their neighbors.
The plain truth is the day is coming when no single nation, however
powerful, can undertake by itself to keep the peace outside its own
borders. Regional and international organizations for peacekeeping
purposes are as yet rudimentary, but they must grow in experience and be
strengthened by deliberate and practical cooperative action.
In this matter, the example of Canada is a model for nations everywhere.
As Prime Minister Pearson pointed out eloquently in New York just last
week: Canada "is as deeply involved in the world's affairs as any country
of its size. We accept this because we have learned over 50 years that
isolation from the policies that determine war does not give us immunity
from the bloody, sacrificial consequences of their failure. We learned
that in 1914 and again in 1939. . . . That is why we have been proud to
send our men to take part in every peacekeeping operation of the United
Nations in Korea, and Kashmir, and the Suez, and the Congo, and Cyprus."
The Organization of American States in the Dominican Republic, the more
than 30 nations contributing troops or supplies to assist the Government
of South Vietnam, indeed even the parallel efforts of the United States
and the Soviet Union in the Pakistan-India conflict these efforts,
together with those of the U.N., are the first attempts to substitute
multinational for unilateral policing of violence. They point to the
peacekeeping patterns of the future.
We must not merely applaud the idea. We must dedicate talent, resources,
and hard practical thinking to its implementation. In Western Europe, an
area whose burgeoning economic vitality stands as a monument to the wisdom
of the Marshall Plan, the problems of security are neither static nor
wholly new. Fundamental changes are under way, though certain inescapable
realities remain. The conventional forces of NATO, for example, still
require a nuclear backdrop far beyond the capability of any Western
European nation to supply, and the United States is fully committed to
provide that major nuclear deterrent.
However, the European members of the alliance have a natural desire to
participate more actively in nuclear planning. A central task of the
alliance today is, therefore, to work out the relationships and
institutions through which shared nuclear planning can be effective. We
have made a practical and promising start in the Special Committee of NATO
Defense Ministers.
Common planning and consultation are essential aspects of any sensible
substitute to the unworkable and dangerous alternative of independent
national nuclear forces within the alliance. And even beyond the alliance
we must find the means to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
That is a clear imperative.
There are, of course, risks in nonproliferation arrangements, but they
cannot be compared with the infinitely greater risks that would arise out
of the increase in national nuclear stockpiles. In the calculus of risk,
to proliferate independent national nuclear forces is not a mere
arithmetical addition of danger. We would not be merely adding up risks.
We would be insanely multiplying them.
If we seriously intend to pass on a world to our children that is not
threatened by nuclear holocaust, we must come to grips with the problem of
proliferation. A reasonable nonproliferation agreement is feasible. For
there is no adversary with whom we do not share a common interest in
avoiding mutual destruction triggered by an irresponsible nth power.
Dealing With Potential Adversaries
That brings me to the third and last set of relationships the United
States must deal with: those with nations who might be tempted to take up
arms against us.
These relationships call for realism. But realism is not a hardened,
inflexible, unimaginative attitude. The realistic mind is a restlessly
creative mind, free of naive delusions but full of practical alternatives.
There are practical alternatives to our current relationships with both
the Soviet Union and Communist China.
A vast ideological chasm separates us from them and to a degree separates
them from one another. There is nothing to be gained from our seeking an
ideological rapproachment; but breaching the isolation of great nations
like Red China, even when that isolation is largely of its own making
reduces the danger of potentially catastrophic misunderstandings and
increase the incentive on both sides to resolve disputes by reason rather
than by force.
There are many ways in which we can build bridges toward nations who would
cut themselves off from meaningful contact with us. We can do so with
properly balanced trade relations, diplomatic contacts and in some cases
even by exchanges of military observers. We have to know when it is we
want to place this bridge, what sort of traffic we want to travel over it,
an on what mutual foundations the whole structure can be designed.
There are no one cliff bridges. If you are going to span a chasm, you
have to rest the structure on both cliffs. Now cliffs, generally
speaking, are rather hazardous places. Some people are afraid even to
look over the edge. But in a thermonuclear world, we cannot afford any
political acrophobia.
President Johnson has put the matter squarely: By building bridges to
those who make themselves our adversaries, "we can help gradually to
create a community of interest, a community of trust, and a community of
effort."
With respect to a "community of effort" let me suggest a concrete proposal
for our own present young generation in the United States. It is a
committed and dedicated generation. It has proven that in its enormously
impressive performance in the Peace Corps overseas and in its willingness
to volunteer for a final assault on such poverty and lack of opportunity
that still remain in our own country.
As matters stand, our present Selective Service System draws on only a
minority of eligible young men. That is an inequity. It seems to me that
we could move toward remedying that inequity by asking every young person
in the United States to give 2 years of service to his country whether in
one of the military services, in the Peace Corps, or in some other
volunteer developmental work at home or abroad.
We could encourage other countries to do the same, and we could work out
exchange programs much as the Peace Corps is already planning to do.
While this is not an altogether new suggestion, it has been criticized as
inappropriate while we are engaged in a shooting war. But I believe
precisely the opposite is the case. It is more appropriate now than ever.
For it would underscore what our whole purpose is in Vietnam and indeed
anywhere in the world where coercion, or injustice, or lack of decent
opportunity still holds sway. It would make meaningful the central
concept of security a world of decency and development where every man can
feel that his personal horizon is rimmed with hope. Mutual interest,
mutual trust, mutual effort those are the goals. Can we achieve those
goals with the Soviet Union, and with Communist China? Can they achieve
them with one another?
The answer to these questions lies in the answer to an even more
fundamental question. Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is,
then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is
little point in making the effort.
All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal
but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a
halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality.
He draws blueprints for utopia. But never quite gets it built. In the
end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever
at hand his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious
nature.
I, for one, would not count a global free society out. Coercion, after
all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
