Technical Leg Up Is the Best Defense

“The single dumbest thing I’ve heard so far in this administration.” That was the reaction of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ideas for national missile defense, including a potential space-combat component. “I think Democrats will be universally opposed to doing something as foolish as that,” Daschle predicted.

Daschle seems to hold the same values as well as the same seat as former Sen. George McGovern. But his fellow Democrats might want to reflect on their party’s past success in using military power to protect U.S. Whereas McGovern took Democrats to disastrous defeat in 1972, three other Democratic presidents, each more confident than McGovern in American greatness, fostered the technological breakthroughs that helped Washington win its wars.

Woodrow Wilson used sea power to help win World War I. Franklin D. Roosevelt used air power in World War II. John F. Kennedy used space power to help win the Cold War.

World War I is commonly thought of as a ground war, but the grand strategy of that conflict had more to do with navies than armies. Beginning in 1914, the British blockaded Germany, leaving that land power to be slowly strangled and starved. The only effective ocean weapon the Germans had was the submarine. But the Germans, desperate to break British sea power, attacked everything that moved on the Atlantic, including the shipping of neutral nations such as the U.S. An angry Wilson asked Congress to declare war on April 2, 1917, dooming Germany to defeat the next year.

As Wilson said in his war message, “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” Having defined Germany as a rogue nation because of its ocean atrocities, Wilson made building up U.S. sea power his top priority. Helped by a young assistant Navy secretary named Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. built about 450 destroyers in the next 18 months. Meanwhile, in that bubble of win-the-war enthusiasm, others in the Navy began toying with crazy new ideas such as flying airplanes off ships.

Wilson’s key strategic idea was safe transit for shipping. Twenty years later, FDR, now president himself, had another key idea: that air power as well as sea power would keep war from ever spilling blood directly onto the continental U.S. As early as 1938, when others thought that Hitler could be appeased, FDR convened a White House meeting of top U.S. defense leaders in which he told them that fleets of American airplanes would defend the entire Western Hemisphere. Of course, when war did come, it was the air armadas that FDR envisioned that demolished both Germany and Japan.

Two decades after that, Kennedy led the U.S. during the coldest days of the Cold War. In this new kind of war, Kennedy realized, propaganda was a vital form of power. The Soviet Union had humiliated the U.S. by being the first to orbit a satellite in 1957 and the first to orbit a man four years later, but JFK was determined to prevail in the space race. Leadership in space translated into leadership on Earth, he declared, urging Congress to be mindful of “the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere.” The triumph of American space technology in the 1960s, culminating in the Apollo 11 landing, was, of course, an overture to the overall victory of the American system in the ‘80s.

And so the U.S. won the three world wars of the last century: First, Second and Cold. But now the U.S. faces new threats, especially to its fleet of satellites, which are central to our far-flung communications system, civilian as well as military. As Rumsfeld said Tuesday: “More than any other country, the United States relies on space for its security and well-being.”

History proves that national power comes from technological power. And so Democrats should look past Daschle and back to Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy, leaders who vindicated a confident vision of U.S. greatness.