Upholding An Honorable Tradition : Despite Hawkish Rhetoric, Weinberger Made Us Think About Our Use of Force

Caspar W. Weinberger is leaving the Pentagon after a seven-year tenure as Secretary of Defense. His departure has provoked screeching by hawks and cooing by doves--the one in pain, the other in relief. Yet both birds in the ideological aviary miss important things about the Weinberger years.

Conservatives took heart when President Reagan and his team came to office in January, 1981, amid charges--unfounded, in fact--that until then, the United States was reducing armaments. Belying a nickname he earned at the Office of Management and Budget, “Cap the Knife” Weinberger thus accelerated the nation’s biggest peacetime military buildup that has now passed the $1.5-trillion mark.

Weinberger has also been popular with the political right for his uncompromising rhetoric on the Soviets and his stalwart support for Reagan. This includes bolstering some of the President’s ill-considered ideas, especially the fantasy that the Strategic Defense Initiative can make nuclear weapons, in Reagan’s words, “impotent and obsolete.”

But observant hawks have some misgivings about Weinberger the self-proclaimed hard-liner. Many conservatives now realize that the massive defense buildup provided the intellectual and political underpinnings for Reagan’s conversion to what used to be a liberal’s agenda.

It is also not clear how much added military strength was bought for all that money. The problem began soon after the inauguration, when the Administration had to show results. Weinberger & Co. threw money at military programs with abandon. Yet big-ticket arms purchases start small and do not reveal their true size until years later. Later budgets and even later Presidents would have to pay the rising costs-- or cut either weapons or the ability to operate them.

From the standpoint of centrists, in spite of his seven years in charge at the Pentagon, Weinberger never developed a comprehensive strategic view of the world to guide planning and purchasing. Not surprisingly, his Pentagon often didn’t buy the right amounts of the right things. In the most widely publicized example, the U.S. Navy fleet is being expanded to 600 ships. This program puts heavy emphasis on carrier battle groups designed to attack the Soviet Union in a global war--an improbable contingency. Yet when low-tech, relatively inexpensive minesweepers were needed in the Persian Gulf, there weren’t any. Even after the increased spending, major restructuring is still needed for U.S. armed forces to meet challenges in both conventional and unconventional warfare.

Liberals also need to pay close heed to what Weinberger has actually done. By reputation, he is Chief Hawk. By deed, however, both he and the Administration have not fulfilled their promise feared by liberals to provide the greater latitude for the use of U.S. military power in a post-Vietnam world.

Rhetoric was tough but action was restrained. The U.S. military presence in Lebanon was poorly conceived, but after the loss of 300 lives, the Administration escaped from that potential quagmire. Grenada was over and done with in a few days. Libya entailed a one-time pounding of a terrorism-supporting country that couldn’t shoot back. Nicaragua is a job left to others, the Contras. Only in the Persian Gulf--largely as a byproduct of bizarre events and White House tomfoolery--have large numbers of U.S. forces been imperiled.

The defense secretary’s vociferous support for the Persian Gulf venture is considered to be uncharacteristic. In fact, in mid-tenure he propounded a set of guidelines for the use of force, sometimes called the Weinberger Doctrine, that conservatives see as more fitting for the dovecote than the Defense Department.

By Weinberger’s lights, the United States should not go to war without compelling reasons that can be understood and supported by the American people.

It should use sufficient force to do the job, it should try to have support from allies, it should seek to end hostilities as rapidly as possible, and it should win.

To many critics, this is a recipe for inaction, for never using military force--clearly an exaggeration. But on reflection, it is a good analysis of the first 175 years of American history--before Korea, Vietnam, and nuclear-age doctrines of “limited” war took victory out of the vocabulary. Indeed, Weinberger may speak to American experience and to attitudes prevailing in the nation more than has most U.S. policy on peace and war during the past quarter of a century. His doctrine may not be for all seasons, but it draws on an honorable tradition.

When Cap Weinberger’s hard-line rhetoric is forgotten, when his high-spending ways have been brought under control, when his overzealous case for the Strategic Defense Initiative has been put in perspective, he is likely to leave a different legacy. It is a Weinberger Doctrine that asks Americans to think clearly about the when, the how and the why of using military force. That is not a bad way to be remembered.