"While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness,
and the Threat to Peace Today"
JIM: It’s time to introduce our expert of the day. Joining me on the program is Professor Donald Kagan. He’s one of America’s most eminent historians. He is the Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics at Yale University. He is also the author or co-author of many books, including The Western Heritage, On The Origins of War, The Preservation of Peace, and a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. He has published dozens of articles and commentary for the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. His co-author of his new book, While America Sleeps, is his son, Frederick Kagan, who is a Professor of Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Professor, welcome to the program.
DONALD: Thank you very much.
JIM: I want to talk about an opening statement that you made in your new book, While America Sleeps, “America is in danger.” What do you mean by that?
DONALD: I mean that since America’s chief interest, I would say, in the world, and taken so much for granted that people don’t notice it, is the preservation of peace, which requires the holding up of a reasonable and decent world order, which, in turn, depends chiefly on America’s military strength to sustain it. We are allowing our military strength to run down and our capacity to preserve the peace by deterring aggression and it has diminished very significantly.
JIM: Except for the American Revolution and the Civil War, wars involving America have always been fought on foreign soil. You state that there is a risk that the next war could bring attacks on American soil.
DONALD: I think the threat of assaults from overseas to be serious in a world where there are intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can carry nuclear weapons, biological weapons, or even conventional weapons of enormous power. We are no longer immune from that kind of attack on the homeland as we fundamentally were up until that situation. So, should we ever get into any kind of a serious shooting war with any serious opponent, I think we can expect, if we don’t have a system that will ward off such attacks, that we can be hit at home, yes.
JIM: The end of the Cold War did not usher in the period of peace that everybody was hoping for. What we’ve seen since that period of time is that conflicts have multiplied and America has more troops dispersed all over the globe today.
DONALD: Yes, that’s right.
JIM: I guess a lot of the thinking, and I want to start getting into your book in more detail, but there was this general feeling that when we won the Cold War, when we won the Gulf War with such superiority, that we would not go unchallenged because of our military might. But as you talk about, in your book, While America Sleeps, today’s U.S. Military is not the same military that won the Gulf War.
DONALD: Not at all. The most striking diminution of our capacity is in the Army, which has been sharply reduced in terms of the number of divisions that would be available if we had to replay the Gulf War. It would be much more difficult for us to do it and we would have to use almost everything we have in order to produce that which would create vulnerabilities elsewhere. People are not aware of how much weaker our military in general is and particularly the Army. And I’m alarmed by the fact that new administration, to my disappointment, seems to be on a course that would weaken our military and our Army further.
JIM: American troops were inadequate before the War of 1812, before WWI, WWII, and the Korean War. We seem to have a tradition in this country of losing the first battle. In an age of nuclear missiles and weapons of mass destruction, where the oceans, as you have pointed out, no longer protect us, isn’t that a dangerous strategy? In other words, if somebody hits us with a weapon of mass destruction, we’re not in the same shape as we were, let’s say, before WWII when they struck at us at Pearl Harbor?
DONALD: No, we’d better not lose the first one next time. In fact, you see this is one of the things I think people have been focused on. Very often we complain about the state of our military and it’s capacity to do this or that, people respond “yes, but we would defeat anybody who attacked us”. Maybe so, but that’s not good enough in the 21st century. We have got to deter war. Because the next war, if anything resembling Pearl Harbor happens, it won’t be at Pearl Harbor, it’ll be New York or L.A. or someplace like that and it will be some kind of a devastating weapon. So, we do need, in fact, stronger defenses than in the past.
JIM: You know I recall a line in the movie Crimson Tide, where one of the officers on the ship made a comment, “In a nuclear missile age, the real enemy is war itself.”
DONALD: Exactly. And if you look at the question of how do you prevent war, all the pacifist answers have been tried in the past and have failed. The only success that one can point to, and it’s an amazing success, was the success in not having a war with the Soviet Union, which everybody in the 50’s thought was inevitable. It was due largely to the fact that we did what we had to do to deter it.
JIM: You once wrote, in your previous work called The Origins of War, “In the past two centuries, the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself.”
DONALD: I’m afraid that’s a fact.
JIM: Why is it, Professor? Certainly you teach history. So you have students that study underneath you. Other people that are working in government today certainly have taken history courses. Why do we not understand that in Washington today?
DONALD: Well, to begin with, there are not many history teachers who are pointing that out. That point of view is a very unpopular view that is not widely shared and is not widely communicated. So that’s one thing. But, even those people who you might think ought to know it have a tendency not to look at the past, which is astonishing, unless they’re just looking at the past yesterday or five years ago. It seems to be contrary to our character really to assimilate, evaluate, and take seriously the best evidence we have, which is what human beings have done in the past. So, I’d say that a combination of ignorance of history and ignoring history, which is typical. It’s not unusual.
JIM: You wrote in your book, “History teaches us when states interested in preserving the peace are weakened, then dissatisfied, states willing to use war to achieve their cause, the result is war itself.”
DONALD: That’s right. That’s the typical way that countries like Great Britain, when they were the number one liberal state in the world, and the United States typically get into a war. I’ve spoken about it as kind of the trap that we set for enemies and ourselves. We weaken ourselves and most of all, we seem to be weakened in our resolve. So that those states, and there are always states who aren’t happy with the pecking order in the world for one reason or another, and when they think we won’t do anything about it or even sometimes we can’t do anything about it, those states who are very discontented sometimes turn to force. Then it turns out we care very much, we react very strongly, and we’re at war. That’s the trap.
JIM: The purpose of your book, While America Sleeps, is to challenge these assumptions that the U.S. and its allies face no serious threats. Professor, you know with modern history. If we just take a look at the last century itself, which began with WWI, then we had WWII, we had the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam Conflict, we had the Cold War, we had the Gulf War, and we’ve had the Kosovo War. Why, with so much history of bloody conflict, would we think we are in an age of peace?
DONALD: It’s just the kind of people we are. States like ours which are liberal, democratic, commercial, and very, very prosperous, don’t think about foreign affairs and most particularly about military questions as being a natural thing. They tend to think that the natural thing is peace and wars happen because people are bad or stupid. The track record of the human race, however, is that war is at least as common as peace. You have to work at preserving peace just as hard. You have to spend money for it and you have to take chances for it, just as you have to do that to win wars. That’s what I was trying to demonstrate in my previous book, as a general thing, by looking at all of history and finding that pattern. Most people don’t see it that way. After the first World War most particularly, all the opposite messages are the ones that people chose to learn, and in my judgment, they had to distort history to conclude what they did. Essentially, it is that the best way to stay out of war, is to stay out of other people’s business and don’t have any arms. Didn’t quite work.
JIM: Now, in the beginning of your book, you describe England after WWI. They were a great power, but there was a mismatch after the war between England’s foreign policy and the state of England’s military after WWI. They downsized too rapidly. Tell us a little bit about that and then bring us to what we have done after winning the Cold War.
DONALD: Yes. That I think was very instructive. When my collaborator and I did this, we were astonished ourselves by how similar the situations look. Britain was the number one nation in the world at the end of the first World War. Now, they were not as relatively strong economically and in other ways as we are today after the Cold War, but nonetheless, they were number one. They were the only true world power that existed at the time. But that was an artificial situation caused by the temporary weakness of Germany, which was going to be cured by time, and the temporary weakness of Russia, which was going to be cured by time. But the British, instead of taking advantage of this extremely favorable situation and seeing to it that the situation was maintained, just turned away from foreign affairs. Even though their world interests were greater than they were before, they decided that they didn’t want to spend the money and make the effort to maintain their power in the world. They turned toward internal things like welfare and tax cutting and allowed, deliberately made the decision, to cut their military back to a point where it couldn’t possible defend all that the British had acquired or had maintained. They continued to run a foreign policy as though they had that power. It took about a decade for people to figure out that they didn’t have the power or the will, and you know what happened in the 30’s.
JIM: Professor Kagan, as England turned toward itself internally, they downsized their military rapidly, much as we have done after the Gulf War. How did this begin to present problems immediately for the British in foreign affairs, and specifically, in the Middle East and with the Turks?
DONALD: Yes, that was quite an amazing story. Turkey was absolutely flat on it’s back after the first World War. It was an old-fashioned, outworn regime. Who would have imagined that the Turks could present the problem? But, in the years immediately after the war, the old, inefficient, backward regime was overthrown by a vigorous new movement with Kamal Ata Turk taking over and invigorating the country. The next thing you know, here was a Turkish army marching on very small, inadequate British forces and threatening to undo the consequences of the first World War. The victory of the allies in terms the Straights were so very important, the Dardinels and the Bosforous, that the British had always insisted on having access to. They were about to be totally humiliated because their forces had so suddenly been inadequate. As it turned out, a small group of leaders of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and Winston Churchill, were determined to stand firm and to call Ata Turk’s bluff, if that’s what it was. In fact, they were able to get out of that without total humiliation, even though they had to make significant concessions to him. So that the thing was papered over. But for anybody that wanted to look, the fact was clear that the British no longer had what it took to get what they wanted in a place that was important to them. The lesson wasn’t learned immediately, but it was learned pretty soon afterwards.
JIM: Now, there was a disagreement between England's Prime Minister, Lloyd George, at the time who viewed the military more as policing the empire and his Chief of Air Staff, Frederick Sikes. The RAF (British Air Force) at the time, was really on the cutting edge of warfare. Would you explain that story and some of the problems it later presented?
DONALD: Well, it was so interestingly analogous to what I think is happening today, that it is a good story. You see, the British immediately found themselves without the military forces necessary to even maintain their empire, but they weren’t about to do what they had to do to solve that problem. So they fixed upon a fact that warfare was in the process of changing and that what was changing it were technological progress, particularly, tanks on the ground and airplanes were the new thing and the new element. Britain was in front in both of those things at that moment, at the end of the first World War. So they said, O.K., we don’t need to have an army of the size that would be necessary to do what we need because these mechanical contrivances, as Lloyd George called them, would save fantastic amounts of money, wouldn’t require so many men. So, basically, what he said is we’ll count on what we would now call a revolution in military affairs to substitute for the sacrifices or the use of men and money that would have take place. Well, what happened was this: that justified in their minds the cutback in the army and in the expensive forces, but then they didn’t go ahead and build the new stuff either. So that by the time the second World War came, for instance, Britain did not have a tank that they could use in the second World War. They actually had to use the American Sherman tank. That’s how they had allowed the so-called military revolution not to go forward. And, although they talked about the fact that bombing planes were going to solve everything in the future, when the war began they had no bomber that could reach Berlin. That’s what one has to fear. Putting off defense for some future revolution with new stuff that we don’t have and allowing what we do have to run down is a wonderful way to kid yourself into disaster.
JIM: And we’re doing that very same thing today.
DONALD: Absolutely. The new administration is not making clear what they want publicly yet. Public statements by Rumsfeld and others suggest that they’re going to put whatever little money they’re going to put into defense that’s additional to what we’re doing now, these wonderful new things in the future. Meanwhile, they’re cutting down what we have now and we’re not building anything for the future, yet. I’ll believe it when I see it. Frankly, they’re not projecting spending the kind of money that would be necessary for that.
JIM: Getting back to England, how did this prevent them from effectively dealing with Hitler? Because there was, at one point, I think Hitler was worried. He had a sleepless night because he was worried that the British and French might respond.
DONALD: Actually, the really interesting case comes just before Hitler takes his first action. It comes when Mussolini decides to invade Ethiopia. That was so interesting because, of course, Hitler was watching how the British would deal with this situation. Now the British fleet could have blown the Italian fleet out of the water and there’s no question about that. But the Admirals and everybody else were telling the politicians, who were perfectly glad to hear it, we can’t take any military action. Why? Because we’re afraid of the Italians? No, we’re afraid of the Japanese. That is to say the fact that British armed forces had no chance of being able to fight on two fronts at the same time. This actually paralyzed them to where they were afraid that we’ll fight Mussolini. Sure we’ll beat them, but while we’re doing that, the Japanese will take advantage of the fact that we have nothing in the Far East and hit us there. And that prevented the British from doing anything. Now we know what Hitler expected. There’s this wonderful quotation that you may have run into in the book in which he told one of his own people, he said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. Mussolini will take his fleet to the Suez Canal and the British fleet will be there in front of them and they will say 'Where are you going?' and Mussolini will say 'I’m going South' and the British will say 'No you’re not, you’re going North,' and North they will go.” said Hitler. “I know the British. They have tough guys. I saw them in the trenches in the last war.” Well, what do you suppose he thought when the British didn’t stop Mussolini from sailing through the Suez Canal and allowed him to beat up on Ethiopia? What happened was, while the crisis was still going on, Hitler moved into the Rhineland and totally tore up the strategic situation in Europe.
JIM: And are we not admitting the same thing to our enemies today, when we announce we are no longer going to maintain a two front war strategy?
DONALD: Absolutely. It’s a terrible mistake. The truth is that a one major theater war capacity is a no major war theater capacity. Because nobody is going to believe you if you even have to throw all your forces into meeting something and if you still have all these other obligations around the world. We are announcing that we are ready to be taken.
JIM: Didn’t we run into the same problem during the Kosovo War? I think there was, at one time, a situation where we had to bring in all our carrier battle groups to fight that conflict and there was nothing covering the Pacific and Asian region.
DONALD: Absolutely. But of course we did even worse things there in which we said, in advance, that we would not put ground troops into Kosovo when, even the possibility that we might, might well have had really serious deterrent effect on what Milosavich actually did. It’s that kind of evidence of lack of resolve which is the most dangerous thing for us.
JIM: Going forward in your book, talking about the U.S. after the Cold War, we went through a down-sizing of our military, much too rapidly. I wonder if you’d just speak briefly on the views at that time: The Aspen Plan and the Cheney Plan. The reason I want to bring that up is because Cheney is now in the White House with the President.
DONALD: That plan was worked on also by Secretary of State Powell, at the time he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Both he and Cheney were on the same side of that.
JIM: But at the same time that we were going to adopt this base force plan trying to deal with threats that we would face in the next decade, that did not turn out the case. Bush lost the election. Clinton came in. The Aspen Plan came in. At the same time that Clinton was down-sizing the military, we also increased our commitments.
DONALD: That’s right. That was very much like what happened to Great Britain. Because, as Britain desperately cut back its forces, much more seriously than we have, they were also, because of the mandate system that the League of Nations instituted, a much larger area of the world was turned over to them for which they were responsible. And, indeed as we’ve seen, they had to do something about Turkey. They found they had troubles in Iraq. They had troubles in Egypt. They had troubles in Palestine. In all those places they had to have troops on the ground. They had cut their forces but their commitments had grown. Similarly, even as Bill Clinton was cutting our forces so very sharply, everybody knows he was committing forces in Haiti, increasing in Somalia, and, of course, in the Balkans. So there we were. Perhaps you remember that during the Kosovo campaign, we ran out of certain kinds of weapons? Cruise Missiles. We were short of Cruise Missiles. Even against such a petty opponent as that. So I think that the analogies have some value.
JIM: I recently had the privilege of going on a 688 Submarine which has missile hatches. When they go out to sea, they have no missiles.
DONALD: Yes. You know there’s an interesting thing about that. When the Gulf War broke out, before we became engaged and President Bush decided that he wanted to get Saddam out of Kuwait, what he had to do was to get Saudi Arabia to cooperate with him. But it’s very, very hard because Saudi Arabia didn’t trust us to actually carry something through. There was an incident that they pointed to that was a beautiful example of that. President Carter had also wanted to make a show of force when there was a menace in the Middle East. He sent American war planes, but without any ammunition. This was seen by the people in the area, Saudi’s no less than anybody else, as being evidence of complete lack of resolve. I promise you, we won’t do that.
JIM: I had a guest on yesterday from the Brookings Institute and basically their viewpoint is all we need is just a little bit more economic efficiency and we can fix the military. I don’t agree as I see and talk to military people here locally.
DONALD: That’s disgraceful nonsense. That’s always the answer. There’s always more inefficiency to be squeezed out the military. Look, of course there’s inefficiency in the military, as there is in any other very large operation. The fact of the matter is if it could’ve been squeezed, it would’ve been squeezed. There’s no sense complaining about that. If you want an adequate military, you’re going to have to pay more money for it. And all these explanations that we don’t need a lot more money for it are either uninformed or simply not correct.
JIM: I want to talk about our soft underbelly. Are our forces evenly matched for the type of war or the enemies that we’re likely to face in the future? Because, I think it was, that after the Gulf War, I don’t know if it was an Indian General or Admiral, after they watched the way we fought that war, they said any country that wants to go to war against the U.S. in the future must have nuclear weapons.
DONALD: Sure. The fact of the matter is that our Army, for instance, is nowhere near in the shape that it was when it fought that Gulf War. It was a great Army that fought that Gulf War. It’s not that kind of an Army any longer because of the cut-backs and various other elements. So that’s one part of the story. But here’s the other thing that we’re not really ready for. The United States in the next war like in the past, if we have one, will require that we project power some place beyond continental United States. That is getting harder and harder to do because of the capacity of fire power of various kinds to hit an invading army. It’s mainly missiles that we have to be worried about. So we must develop a shield against missiles. Not merely to defend the continental United States against a missile attack, but fear missiles that would make it possible for us to project power. When that isn’t true, we’re not going to be able to have the world continue in the way it is. We won’t be able to protect our allies or our interests around the world. So that’s why I feel that we have to go forward at the same time as we do the other things we have to do. The Administration is right in pushing for a missile defense program. It’s just pushing for a far too modest missile defense program. We’ve got to be able to do better than what they say they’re claiming to be able to do, namely to shoot down one or two missiles shot by some terrorist. That’s not good enough.
JIM: What I don’t understand in the popular press, the networks, the media, is why they are so opposed to us developing a defensive system when we’re not talking about offensive weapons here. We’re talking about literally defending ourselves when we know that there are rogue nations, other countries, today that are developing missiles with the idea of mischief.
DONALD: This is in part a carryover from the long history of the Cold War, in which the American Left has always held a view that the real danger to the World is not from our enemies, but from us. It’s part of the notion that if we have the kind of immunity that might be made available by missile defense, heaven knows what terrible things we would do to the rest of the world. Nobody admits to that. They used to say it flat out during the years of the 1960’s. But I think the Democratic party, particularly, is still sort of infiltrated with this kind of thinking and the liberals, in general, have that in the back of their mind. Because, if you put that aside, what reason in the world could there be for not defending yourself against such a thing? I also think it’s a legacy of fighting against Reagan’s attempt to achieve the same thing. It’s just kind of a mindless holding to it. The argument then used to be, “Look, the world is safe because nobody can defend anybody. We and the Russian’s would destroy each other. That’s what’s keeping us in line.” Even if that was a defensible position, it’s over. Our threat is not going to come from Russian missiles. The treat is going to come from wild men out there, or one of these days from the Chinese or the Koreans. So, how could it make the world more stable for us not to be able to defend ourselves against that? It’s entirely irrational. There’s no defense for that point of view.
JIM: What about new tactics? There’s a debate going on, for example, of a new weapon type system, the arsenal ship. It seems to me where we are not welcomed in many countries today, we’re losing some of our overseas bases. The vulnerability, for example, of the U.S.S. Cole. It would seem to me that building new submarines that have greater stealth or a new battleship that takes less sailors, could be very, very effective in firepower, and yet we’re not considering these kinds of things.
DONALD: It’s very hard for me to comment on that, because you need to know far more about it than maybe anybody does, certainly than I do. That cuts to the question of what’s the best way to defend ourselves and I can’t come up with that answer. To tell you the truth, I think our best military minds can’t know that now. And that’s another reason why we have to spend more money on defense and it’s very poorly understood. It’s this, when there’s a revolution in military affairs going on in the world, nobody knows what direction it’s going to go. Nobody knows what’s going to work and what’s not going to work until you try. So, when you’re dealing with such a revolution, you have to be prepared actually to build stuff, try it out, see what works, see what doesn’t work, then spend more money afterwards when you know what the answer is. That’s the hard fact of it and people aren’t facing it.
JIM: Let me bring you to the conclusion of your book. Will we ever get to the point, or have we down-sized and cut-back so far, that we are now in danger of putting ourselves at risk of war?
DONALD: Sure. Here’s what my studies have taught me. There are, right now, out there in the world, people who can be identified that, in certain circumstances, we can have a war with. The easiest example, of course, is China. If ever they come to the conclusion that we won’t do anything about it, they may very well decide to attack Taiwan, in some way or another. That’s one of those traps. No American president will be permitted to let that happen, and we will be in a shooting war with the Chinese somehow if they do that. There’s no guarantee that they will, but it could happen. One could make up scenarios that would lead to war that wouldn’t be absolutely crazy in other places like Korea or in Iraq. But here’s what history has taught us: very often the enemy that comes at you is none of the above. When the British military was trying to figure out where the danger was coming from in the 1920’s, one of their theories was that it would be France. That was a high ranking possibility. Another somehow, in the minds of some of them, was the Soviet Union. Now both of those were absolutely absurd, but they were taken seriously. What they didn’t have lined up was Japan or Germany, because at the moment, they were so flat on their back, it was inconceivable. It didn’t take more than five or six or seven years for that to change. And that’s what I think we have to remember. It’s impossible for us to know where the trouble may come from. If our interests are so bound up, as I’m convinced they are, in preventing war, we have to be so blatantly strong and so blatantly willing to use our strength to put down aggression, that nobody will dare try. I always like to put it this way, American’s must be familiar, especially if you live in a big city, there’ll be a sign somewhere that says “Don’t even think of parking here”. That’s my foreign policy -- to be so strong and committed that the message should be “Don’t even think of using force as a way of solving your problems.”
JIM: Professor, we’ve run out of time. But, I’ll tell you, I just hope that your book is read by every member of Congress, because it’s really up to them and the President who are going to make these kind of decisions. I think your book is a great wake-up call for this nation.
DONALD: Well, you’re very kind, thank you.
JIM: I want to thank you for joining us on the program. The name of the book is While America Sleeps by Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan. I want to wish you a good evening, sir.