There was another question posted recently asking why the U.S kept a large standing army after WWII. It looked like a fairly easy thing to answer. To keep the Warsaw Pact in check. It takes too long for armies to ramp up in modern warfare. Prep has to happen many years before a conflict might occur.
But that got me to thinking: during his farewell address, President Eisenhower, 5-star general, commander NATO, famously warned of the Military Industrial Complex. As I recall, his point was that we were setting up a vast and well-funded web of organizations that had a sole purpose of creating more and more tools of modern warfare. Their interests and the nation's interest were not always aligned.
So what did he envision as an alternative? I can't imagine him wanting to downsize the army, and he, more than anybody else, knew the critical role that time and preparation plays in war. What other strategy could the west have adopted?
So I am going to rehash a post of this I did about a month ago, and lead with this quote from the speech.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
So you do mostly have the new dynamic Ike was talking about. But are missing some of the rest. There was no alternative to the new relationship that he envisioned. It was simply a fact of the modern state if it wanted to be able to defend itself. What it DID need though was a strong hand at the top to wrestle with it. To have a President and senior leadership who could create an effective plan for national defense and imprint it on the makers and operators of their tools and not the other way around. That way the ability to build a modern force was retained, but it was kept to a point that the benefits outweighed the ills.
Ike thought he was just such a guy, for many of the reasons you point out. But he wasn't so high on his successor. Kennedy was nothing but a former junior officer, hotshot young Senator, and heir to a family without the cleanest of records. Hence Eisenhower putting him and the nation on blast essentially, putting JFK on the spot almost to prove that he could handle the situation and setting him up for a huge vulnerability politically if he slipped up.
I can't imagine him wanting to downsize the army, and he, more than anybody else, knew the critical role that time and preparation plays in war. What other strategy could the west have adopted?
Well...
That's actually kind of what he did with his "New Look" Policy. It broke with the previous style under Truman, which enshrined in NSC 68, which sought Containment against the USSR, and high levels of conventional spending and force to meet those needs where military aid and support were not enough for allies. Ike went a different route, he cut spending for conventional force and shifted much to strategic units, namely he cut tanks and bought nukes. The idea that he could get by with a smaller budget, less burdensome on the economy, by threatening an overwhelming retaliation should the USSR push him too far.
This had its problems though, mostly that it made it hard to scale responses to events which might require a response but were not worth nuclear war. The Hungarian revolution in 1956 that had been crushed by the Soviets is the traditional example of this. It should be granted though that after this, and combined with the additional experiences of French failures in Vietnam, and emerging MAD with the USSR, changes were recognized as needed. The need for the ability of a flexible response of tailored conventional forces was acknowledged, even if the US was uninterested in being bled to death by the USSR in brush wars, it had to have the option to do so and not just jump to nukes.
JFK would then internalize and see through many of these changes in conjunction with McNamara as SECDEF. Including other signature reforms such as a focus on Special Operations Forces, in that legacy the Army Special Warfare School is actually named for him.
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