711.5/11–248
The Acting Secretary of State to the Secretary of State in Paris
eyes only
Dear General Marshall: I attach to this letter two documents, the first, marked (A), being a memorandum of conversation with Secretary Forrestal,1 and the second, marked (B), being a letter from Forrestal to you received yesterday.2 The memorandum I wrote you was based on two conversations I had with Forrestal at his request and which were, apparently in the nature of a prologue to his letter mentioned above.
Because of the nature of Forrestal’s letter, I discussed the matter [Page 649] with Kennan and we decided that it might be of some use to you in preparing your reply if we passed on a composite of our recollections of the genesis of this matter with a few comments which might have a bearing on our exodus.
Forrestal states that when you and he and Secretary Snyder3 talked over the matter covered by his letter with the President,4 you stated that “our plans should be predicated on the assumption that we were not preparing for a state of war”. This, it seems to us, must be a considerable over-simplification of what you actually said. Kennan’s group prepared on June 23 a paper designed to clarify the relation of U.S. defense preparations to the political situation which lay before us.5 The conclusion of that paper was that
“… a U.S. defense policy based on the maintenance of a permanent state of adequate military preparation meets better the requirements of the situation, insofar as these arise out of Soviet policies and attitudes, than a defense effort pointed toward a given estimated peak of war danger.”
I have a faint recollection that in one of these conversations the question came up as to whether the maximum military strength should be aimed at the year ’51, ’52, ’53, etc. These dates apparently had some relation to the guesses being made as to the earliest time at which the Soviets might reasonably be expected to have an effective atomic bomb.
It has occurred to Kennan and myself that possibly it was the thought expressed in the above quotation, against the background of an attempt to select a particular year for ultimate defense readiness, that you were expressing and which Forrestal has quoted so summarily. If our guess is right this might be brought out in the reply.
The specific questions (a, b, and c) which Forrestal asks of you seem to reflect two assumptions which we think-may be open to question. The first of these is that there is such a thing as an objective world situation, independent of our own policies, to which our defense preparations are only a reaction.
The second is that the Secretary of State has the special and exclusive facilities for analyzing this world situation and the sole responsibility for describing and interpreting it as a basis for our defense policy.
The first of these assumptions appears to be wrong because the question as to whether or not we will need to use our armed forces, in an international sense, at any given time lies to a large extent with ourselves. [Page 650] If, therefore, Forrestal wants to know whether the world situation is developing in a way which means that there is an increasing likelihood of war, the answer would seem to be that that depends in considerable part on the decision of the President, acting on the advice of the National Security Council, of which Mr. Forrestal is a member.
To the extent that events outside of our control or influence do alter the international background against which our defense policies must be formed, we do not think that the military establishment is entitled to place, by implication, the entire onus of analyzing and interpreting this situation on the Secretary of State. The intelligence which the Secretary of State has at his disposal concerning world events is substantially the same as that which is available to the President and to the other members of the National Security Council, and his voice is only one of those whose advice the President would wish to hear in making the decisions which involve an estimate of future developments affecting national security.
We have attempted to frame answers to Forrestal’s specific questions in the light of the background given above. For what little they may be worth, I set them out below:
Q. (a) Has there been an improvement in the international picture which would warrant a substantial reduction in the military forces we had planned to have in being by the end of the current fiscal year?
A. Obviously there has been no such improvement in the international picture.
Q. (b) Has the situation worsened since last spring and should we, therefore, be considering an augmentation of the forces that we were planning at that time?
A. There is no sign that the basic Soviet policies have undergone any change since last spring. However, we must recognize that the Berlin conflict has produced a worsening of the situation, since it has placed us in an awkward position from which we may not be able to extricate ourselves except by a strong show, or use, of armed strength. This increased danger relates, of course, to our immediate needs for the coming winter and spring. Needs for fiscal 1950 cannot now be accurately estimated. They will depend to an important extent on what happens between now and next July. In these circumstances, we should prepare for the least favorable of possible developments. This would certainly call for no planned diminution of the strength we are now aiming at for the end of this year, and probably for an actual increase.
Q. (c) Is the situation about the same—that is, neither better nor worse?
A. See answer to (b) above.
I hope our thinking is not too far off the beam and that these hasty comments may be of some use in saving your already over-crowded time.
With best regards always, I am
Very sincerely yours,