US. INTENTIONS WHAT RECENT INQUIRIES REVEALED TO THE WORLD

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26465, 5 July 1951, Page 6

US. INTENTIONS WHAT RECENT INQUIRIES REVEALED TO THE WORLD

(By JOSEPH C. HARSH, in the "Christian Science Monitor.") (Reprinted by Arrangement.)

Since early May, a parade of the top strategy advisers of the United States Government has been passing through the hearing room of the combined Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees of the Senate. In the process of passing through the hearing room the witnesses have made public a detailed picture of the military resources, the military purposes. and the grand strategy of the United States in the power struggle such as no great nation ever before in history has laid bare upon the public record for all who are interested to read and ponder upon. Among those who have read are, of course, the Russians. What have the Russians learned from this reading? “Intelligence” in power matters falls under two main headings: (1) Information about a country’s “capabilities” and (2) information about a country's “intention.”

The committee record has been filled with both kinds of information. But the important thing is what the Russians have learned which they did not presumably know already, and what effect the new knowledge will have upon their own world operations. An Open Book First of all, we probably can assume that the Russians have learned little they didn’t know already about American capabilities. Our actual military strength, past, present, and projected, has long been one of the most open books in the world. Every general staff the world around knows precisely the number of Army divisions and where they are based, the number of new divisions being formed, the number and location of Air Force units, the rate of expansion of the Air Force, the number and condition of our naval vessels. It is no news to the Russians that we have been operating seven combat divisions in Korea and conserving all our other ground strength for home reserve or European defence. What may well be news to the Russians is the firmness of determination in Washington top quarters to avoid expansion of the Korean war and to hew persistently away at the task of making Western Europe defensible. This falls under the category of intelligence about our “intentions.” Moscow knows that our Joint Chiefs of

Staff regard a full-scale United States war with China as "the wrong war. at ' the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.” Moscow knows that the intention to avoid such a war is so firm that the senior general on the United States Army list has been dismissed from the Far East command for disagreeing with that policy. This is something Moscow could not, have known positively in advance of' the dismissal of General MacArthur, and the long hearings which followed. It was something that not even our’ closest Allies, Britain and France, knew for certain. Our "intentions”! were concealed by the very controversy which has persisted in publie. and political quarters regarding high policy toward the Far East ever since,; the so-called "cold war” began. No Guessing Needed In brief, Moscow no longer needs to guess about what we might do in certain circumstances. In place of uncertainty there is complete certainty that, as long as Mr Truman is President and the personnel of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remains what it is to-day. the United States intends to wage a "limited war” against China with minimum resources, conserving its main strength for Europe, which it regards as the decisive theatre of operations in the. present power struggle and in a possible future general war. This knowledge undoubtedly gives the Russians an important advantage which they did not possess before. They are relieved of a necessity of protecting their Siberian frontier against an act of original Initiative on our part in the Far East. They have the init'ative out there, if they care to use it. They know they can concentrate safely against Western Europe or Iran without having to be concerned about their Siberian rear. This does not necessarily increase the chances of war. The top Muscovites should know now that we do not intend to initiate a general war. If they, too, wish to avoid it, then the war will not come out of a Russian miscalculation of our intentions. But it does mean that in the strategy of the power struggle we still must operate in the dark about Russian intentions, whereas they can operate with full and detailed knowledge about our intentions. Probably there was no way of avoiding this. It has happened.