Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David Jones has been hustling up to Capitol Hill telling Senators and Representatives how weak our military defenses are, and how we need immediate programs to remedy our critical deficiencies. “In most engagements,” he said, “we would have to fight outnumbered and outgunned, at least initially.”
“In case of conflict with the Soviets,” Jones added, “there would be no way for the West to match the weight of effort that the Soviets could hurl into a conventional battle.” He said the United States would be hard pressed to defend our vital interests in the event of a Soviet thrust into the Persian Gulf.
General Jones has convicted himself by his own testimony. It’s as though a corporation president went before his board of directors and said, “Although I supported every decision under which our company lost money on every product we sell, now I ask you to float a loan and let me try to lift us out of the perilous predicament I helped create.”
It is no argument to say that “civilian control of the military” required Jones to “go along” with Carter’s policies, no matter how self-defeating. To advance his own career as JCS Chairman, Jones became an enthusiastic lobbyist for all Carter’s costly political follies.
Civilian control of the military means that the Commander-in-Chief and Congress can accept or reject the advice of the Joint Chiefs. It does not mean that the Joint Chiefs must prostitute their own conclusions in order to give the Commander-in-Chief the advice he wants to hear. Nor does it mean that the JCS must lace the Commander-in-Chief’s policy decisions with military jargon in order to induce Congress to accept the President’s wrong decisions.
Here are only a few of the military mistakes the Carter Administration made with the active approval of David Jones, all of which reduced the military security of the United States: cancellation of the B-1 bomber, delay of the MX program for at least three years, delay of Trident I and II and the cruise missile for at least two years, termination of Minuteman III production times, cancellation of the neutron bomb, veto of a new nuclear aircraft carrier, cutback of our Navy to half the strength of the Russian navy, giveaway of the Panama Canal, and support of the SALT II Treaty.
Jones was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Carter’s entire Administration. He became Chairman on July 1, 1978 after serving four years as Air Force chief of staff. He should be just as persona non grata to Reagan as former Defense Secretary Harold Brown.
Personnel changes plus policy changes are essential to reordering priorities in the Reagan Administration toward repairing the havoc wrought in our armed services under the SecDef Brown/CJCS Jones stewardship. Here are some guidelines:
1. Appoint to policy-making positions only those who can demonstrate that they are not infected with the disease of “treaty-reliance,” i.e., trusting in treaties rather than in weapons. This criterion would automatica11y exclude all Carter appointees such as David Jones and Frank Carlucci.
2. Appoint to policy-making positions only those whose primary goal is U.S. military superiority rather than arms control. To make arms control an end in itself, as Carter, Cyrus Vance and Harold Brown did, puts us at the mercy of the single-minded strategists in the Kremlin who build their own military arsenal while they play cat and mouse with us.
3. Repudiate Mutual Assured Destruction, the MAD rationale for SALT I and II, which keeps the entire American population undefended against any enemy attack. MAD is the most immoral U.S. strategic theory ever devised because it is based on (1) killing Russians instead of keeping Americans alive, (2) an act of irrational revenge (i.e., capital punishment for millions of innocent Russians), and (3) maximizing (instead of minimizing the casualties on both sides in the event of war.
4. Make a national commitment, with whatever funds are necessary, to be the first nation to produce the high-energy laser and particle beam weapons — truly the ultimate weapons. If the Soviets are the first to put a laser generator in space, they will be able to knock out all U.S. space-based defenses, thereby putting us totally at the mercy of the Kremlin.
5. Make all weapons decisions on criteria of U.S. national security rather than on arms control, cost, accommodation, international politics, or trade pressures.
