Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume I, Foundations of Foreign Policy

51. Memorandum From Carnes Lord of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Allen)¹

Washington, June 8, 1981

SUBJECT

• Education for National Security (U)

It is not too soon to begin thinking about a problem which goes to the heart of many of the difficulties we face in the national security area: the ignorance and misinformation on this subject so common even (indeed, especially) among our best educated, and the steady deterioration in the availability and quality of training in a variety of fields essential to the effective implementation of national security policy. I offer some preliminary analysis in the hope of stimulating thought on how best to pursue this difficult and politically sensitive issue.

At the root of the problem is the marginal role of war and strategy in American political culture. Ours is a commercial society which relegates military affairs to the periphery of its consciousness, and which looks on politics as an arena of peaceful competition where the adjudication of conflicting interests is decided by bargaining and the application of highly developed legal rules. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, politics is merely an extension of armed struggle, and is governed by highly developed strategic/tactical concepts incorporating military, economic, psychological and ideological factors.

We are thus at a substantial disadvantage from the very beginning in our dealings with the Soviets. But this margin has been greatly widened in the course of the last fifteen years by the outburst of anti-military sentiment connected with the Vietnam War and the hardening of this sentiment into a powerful stratum of opinion which continues dominant (as the reaction to El Salvador should be sufficient to show) in the elite universities and media, and through them, in educated opinion in the country as a whole. This development—which must not be underestimated in spite of recent evidence of greater public receptivity to increased defense spending—has done incalculable damage to our national security position, and will continue to constrain options for improvement in that position in the foreseeable future.

Other problems have been created by developments with American higher education over this same period. The student upheavals of the 1960s led to sweeping reforms in the universities whose effects are only now being fully felt. ROTC was driven off many college campuses, particularly the elite campuses of the Northeast, thus further accelerating the isolation of the military (whose officer class has always been drawn disproportionately from the South and West) from the opinion-forming sectors of American society. Scientific research for military purposes was drastically curtailed by university authorities. The general decline in high school and university standards, the drift toward “soft” subjects such as sociology and psychology and toward pre-professional training for law school, and the virtual abolition of distributional requirements in many universities have had a devastating effect on achievement levels in scientific and technical subjects and in languages. The sharp decline in the teaching even of basic science and mathematics is alarming. We face critical shortages of skilled personnel in many technical fields of direct relevance for national security, such as computers and advanced electronics. As far as foreign languages are concerned, many of the area studies programs initiated with much fanfare and money in the 1960s are moribund. Competence in critical major languages such as Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic is increasingly difficult to come by; expertise in more exotic but potentially important languages and cultures (those of Soviet minority areas, for example, or of Southeast Asia) is virtually non-existent.

Less well known, but of comparable importance, are developments that have occurred within our military over the last several decades. It is customary in this country to regard the appearance of nuclear weapons as the latest revolution in the conduct of war; yet the invasion of military affairs at all levels by science and technology since the mid-1960s can well be considered—as it is by the Soviets—a second such revolution. A key effect of this revolution has been to blur the distinctive character of the military profession. The demand for scientific/technical skills has caused a basic shift in the focus of military education, and has increased dramatically the role of civilians from the academic and corporate sectors in the formulation of defense policy and the management of our defense establishment. All this has had a number of unfortunate consequences. Military officers have come increasingly to see themselves as technicians or managers rather than as strategists or leaders of men. Military planning has come to be dominated by the cost-accounting techniques of the corporate world and by a fascination with technology rather than by traditional strategy. And to the extent to which strategy has played a role, it has been strategy of an untraditional sort—abstract theory not rooted in an appreciation of military history or of differences in political and military culture.

It is very largely owing to such conceptual deficiencies that we find ourselves in our current difficulties in the strategic nuclear area; and many are convinced that our failure in Vietnam resulted directly from a combination of poor strategy and personnel practices more suited to business corporations than to the military.

In attempting to address this complex of problems, it must be acknowledged at the outset that any effort by this Administration to influence American educational policies or activities is likely to be resisted with greater or lesser vigor not only by its ideological opponents but also by many sympathizers who tend to be sceptical of the federal government’s role in this area. Accordingly, considerable caution will be necessary in deciding whether or how to pursue particular initiatives. Still, certain steps could be taken immediately—particularly with respect to military education—that would be relatively uncontroversial. The following represents a rough attempt to identify the range of measures that could realistically be considered:

— encourage curriculum reform in the service academies and war colleges to shift emphasis away from technical subjects toward the study of political and military history and strategy (this is underway to some extent already);

— strengthen the ROTC program and return it to as many campuses as possible (the drying up of other sources of financial aid should facilitate this);

— review and, as appropriate, strengthen and expand federal programs that provide financial aid for language and area studies;

— review and, as appropriate, strengthen and expand federal programs that provide financial aid for critical scientific and technical studies;

— explore with private industry possible cooperative funding of post-graduate studies in advanced scientific and technical subjects;

— strengthen, domestic public information programs in the national security area, including possible use of public radio and television;

— work with state governments to develop a curriculum or materials on national security for high school civics courses (perhaps in conjunction with a revitalization of civil defense training).

Of these measures, the latter would be the most controversial, but it would approach closest to the root of the problem. At present, the young tend to be ignorant of the most elementary military and political facts of life, and their historical memory barely reaches back to Vietnam, not to speak of the 1930s and World War II. Because they have no exposure to such things in the normal course of their education, young people are highly vulnerable to the various forms of anti-military hysteria which seem on their way to becoming once more a significant factor in the domestic politics of western societies. We have been only slightly less irresponsible than the Europeans in refusing to face up to this problem and the grave threat it poses to the survival of free government. If we do not bite the bullet soon, we may lose our best opportunity.

1. Source: Reagan Library, Carnes Lord Files, Chronological File, Lord Chron 06/06/1981–06/19/1981; NLR–335–1–18–1–4. Confidential; Sensitive. Sent for information. Copies were sent to Pipes, Stearman, Bailey, Schweitzer, Kraemer, and Levine.