There is a wonderful book by Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, where he states:
Although a former Army general—and, therefore, a man might
be expected to support extravagant defense budgets—Eisenhower was a penny
pincher, perhaps especially when it earns? to overseeing the military
establishment that he knew so well early as 1946, he frequently lectured fellow
officers on the need to pay close attention to what “the economy can stand.”
During the 1952 Presidential campaign, he declared that “the foundation x
military strength is economic strength” and that a “bankrupt America is more
the Soviet goal than an America conquered on the field of battle.”
Eisenhower had an almost mystical attachment to the unfettered
free market and a loathing toward any tampering with Like most Republicans, he
despised taxation, debt and inflation feeling that if they were allowed to
spiral out of control, the free economy, and with it, the free society, would
collapse.
On May 4, not quite four months after taking office, Eisenhower
wrote a confidential letter to his good friend General Alfred Gruenther, Chief
of Staff of SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. “As you
know,” he began, “we are trying * bring the total expenditures of the American
Government wither reasonable limits. This is not because of any belief that we
can afford relaxation of the combined effort to combat Soviet communism. On the
contrary, it grows out of a belief that our organizer effective resistance must
be maintained over a long period of years and that this is possible only with a
healthy American economy 1 we should proceed recklessly and habitually to
create budget deceits year after year, we have with us an inflationary
influence that can scarcely be successfully combatted. Our particular form of
economy could not endure.”
Two and a half months earlier, Eisenhower’s Budget Director,
Joe Dodge, had produced a report that must have disturbs: Eisenhower greatly.
The size of the federal debt, Dodge noted, was $267.5 billion, more than five
and a half times the debt held just before World War II. If the spending
policies of the Truman Ac- ministration were continued, the debt would reach
$307 billion by 1958, $33 billion beyond the statutory limit. Thirty percent of
national income was currently being snatched by government; more than
two-thirds of that revenue was being taken by the federal government, and
two-thirds of that went toward foreign aid and military spending. Foreign aid
had the full support of Eisenhower; he considered it the program in which “the
United States is getting more for its money than in any other.” Therefore,
given the statistics and given Eisenhower’s economic philosophy, holding the
line on military spending seemed mandatory. And since a huge conventional force
of troops, tanks, ships, fighter planes, artillery and so forth needed for
large-scale combat was most expensive of all, Eisenhower was determined to cut
back on this nonnuclear side of the military.
There was something else besides economic concerns that
drove Eisenhower to this position, however, and that was Korea. The Korean War
had been trudging along for nearly two and a half years when Eisenhower took
office, and it seemed to be heading nowhere, toward neither victory nor defeat.
By the following July, when an armistice would finally be signed, more than
33,000 Americans would have died in the war, and for a purpose that few back
home could figure out. "No More Koreas” became a popular slogan,
especially among politicians who liked to boost the Air Force, whose philosophy
of Air Power saw no need to slug things out in a messy ground conflict, at the
expense of the Army, whose mission involved precisely that. Retired Army
General Eisenhower certainly had no favoritism toward the Air Force, but,
perhaps with convictions more sincere than most, he joined in with the “No More
Koreas” cry.
Eisenhower’s hesitation to get involved in small, distant
battles, especially battles fought in Asia, antedated Korea by many years. In
the early-to-mid-1920s, Eisenhower was an Army major assigned as chief aide to
General Fox Conner, commander of U.S. forces in Panama. Conner taught him how
to think about military decisions systematically, according to the logic of the
standard five-paragraph field order—assessing Mission, Situation, Enemy Troops,
Our Troops, Plans, Logistic Support and Communications, in that order.
It is worth reading this again in the context of today.
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