Downtown Harold Brown

There was, of course, nothing downtown about Harold Brown, unless the Bronx High School of Science and Columbia University count. Brown picked up three degrees from Columbia, including a Ph.D. in physics at age 21. Later on, he served as Secretary of the Air Force and president of the California Institute of Technology before taking over as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of defense in 1977. I recently read Brown’s collection of essays, Thinking About National Security, published in 1983, while doing research for a novel that I’m struggling with.

Reading the book some thirty-two years after, one is struck by how much of an unconstructed hawk Brown was, despite being endlessly vilified by the Reagan Right for presiding over the collapse of America’s military might and, not so incidentally, selling us out to the Soviets in the SALT II negotiations. One is also struck by how impossible it is to predict the future. Writing in 1982, Brown never could have guessed, or at least never did guess, that oil prices, after peaking in around 1980 at over $100 a barrel (2014 dollars) would not only continue to decline steadily for six years, to about $60 a barrel, but then would drop off a cliff, falling to just over $20 a barrel, and not so incidentally taking the Soviet Union along with it.

Brown earnestly war games just about every possible contingency, including a Soviet invasion of Japan (hey, it might happen), an attack on U.S. shipping by the Cuban (yes, you read that right) navy in connection with a Soviet “incursion” into Western Europe, and even a Soviet assault on U.S. troops using chemical weapons (this despite the fact that Brown acknowledges that the real downer with chemicals is that they don’t work well). Brown acknowledges that all war gaming of any significant collision of U.S. and Soviet forces leads to an all-out nuclear exchange in a matter of weeks, but in his own analysis he disregards this and insists that, for example, we need to update our existing chemical weapons stocks so that we could respond tit-for-tat with the Soviets, as though such a conflict could be “manageable.”

Perhaps most surprising is that Brown was an unrepentant hawk on Vietnam, though he lacks the courage to say so, stating at one point that the U.S. should have avoided involvement but then remarking later in the obscurity of a footnote and in the manner of a sesquipedalian Rambo that “[t]he Vietnam War showed that technology, along with an enormously superior GNP, larger forces, and more material will not win a war in the absence of an adequate political infrastructure in the nation being defended, a determination comparable to that of the forces on the other side, or a willingness to use those advantages.” Left unsaid, in the classical elitist manner,¹ is exactly what Lyndon “Sissypants” Johnson and Richard “No Balls” Nixon neglected to do.

In the classic “hawk” reasoning, Brown sees “will’ as entirely intrinsic to one’s self. One has as much will as one wishes to have. The fact that Vietnam was literally half way around the world from the U.S., was no threat to the U.S. or to any significant American ally, and was in fact strategically irrelevant was itself irrelevant. The fact that Americans did not line up to die in Vietnam—and few of the Harold Browns of the Vietnam era did line up—was due to “weakness” rather than common sense.

In the front of the book, Brown endorses the “moral risk” argument so beloved of Reagan-era hawks that the U.S. must be capable of achieving a “second strike” slaughter of Soviet citizenry equal the predicted “first-strike” capability of Soviet forces. Sure, says Brown, if the Soviets inflict 100 million deaths on us, it’s no big deal if we can only inflict 90 million on them, but what if we could only inflict 10 million on them. What about that, huh? As though U.S. nuclear forces were ever less than superior to those of the Soviets.

Afterwords
On top his other failings, Brown also insisted on casting himself as a boring old fart, moaning at one point that “There has been a real erosion since World War II in the mechanical experience of military recruits and in their technical education. The decline in the mathematical and technical course work in the high schools and the universities in the past fifteen years, after the brief renaissance engendered by Sputnik, is alarming.” Just as Dr. Brown was penning these banalities, a new generation of supposed slackers was setting to work to invent a new era of technology that is reshaping civilization and positioning the U.S. as trendsetter to the world when many would wish otherwise. Too bad you missed the boat, Dr. Brown.