Reagan Centenary

Command Posts, a group milblog in which a friend, Callie Oettinger, plays an important part, is featuring posts by Michael Reagan, commenting on his father’s 100th birthday.

I figured that if anyone from another blog deserved some space here at this roundtable, it would be Mr. Reagan. Here is a post of his that I particularly liked as it encapsulated his father’s determination as to the “ends” in the strategic trinity of “ends, ways and means”. Reagan was a rarity because as president he was the last to run an administration able to competently synchronize all three elements of strategy:

We Win, They Lose

….I took my father aside in a corner of the suite and asked him, “What are you thinking about, Dad?”
 
“Michael,” he said wistfully, “the thing I’ll miss most by losing this nomination is that I won’t get to say ‘Nyet’ to Mr. Brezhnev. I was really looking forward to arms negotiations with the Soviets. For years, the Soviets have been telling us what we have to give up to get along with the Soviet Union. I was going to let the General Secretary of the Soviet Union choose the place, the room, and the shape of the table, because that’s how they do those things. And I was going to listen to him tell me what we would have to give up to get along with them. Then I was going to get up from the table and whisper in his ear, ‘Nyet.’ It’s been a long time since the Soviets have heard ‘Nyet’ from an American president.”
 
Well, 1976 wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s year—but his time was coming.
 
A few months later, in January 1977, defense analyst Richard V. Allen visited my father at his office in Los Angeles. During their conversation, Dad said, “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”
 
One of the key behind-the-scenes players in Dad’s administration was Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA Director Bill Casey. “Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win,” Meyer once said. “Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It’s different emotionally, it’s different psychologically, and, of course, it’s different practically.” Ronald Reagan’s actions toward the Soviets, Meyer said, “flowed from a decision to play to win.”

This is an aspect about Ronald Reagan that is not very well understood.

I do not mean his attitude toward communism or the USSR. These things are common knowledge and were, then and even now, part of his political appeal. I mean that as a statesman Reagan was a gifted strategist. I have no idea if Reagan ever underlined sayings of Sun Tzu or pages of On War, or as president if he found his military briefings stimulating or tiresome, but if he did not study strategy, President Reagan had an intuitive grasp of its nature. He also understood, far better than the manic micromanagers, the role of a President of the United States in shepherding a strategy from formulation to execution to results.

Reagan knew that in moving policy to reality meant that choices had to be made and that part of his responsibility as Chief Executive was knowing when to get the hell out of the away, even if it meant accepting risks and costs in order to get results. The perfect, cost-free, moment of statesmanship, where all the stars align and the wind is at your back, seldom if ever, comes. Opportunities multiply when they are seized.

The war in Afghanistan might be going better today if our risk-averse rulers considered taking a page out of Reagan’s book.

Ronald Reagan gave one of his most famous speeches in Berlin in June 1987, the famous one where he invited the Soviet leader of the time to “tear down this wall”. I was in the audience of that speech, about five rows back, and close enough to see the man very clearly. I had voted for Ronald Reagan in both 1980 and 1984 and had been present at his first inaugural in Washington DC. Count me as a true believer. At the time in Berlin we thought it a rather significant speech and he was after all not only addressing Berlin, but the whole world. There were indications that big changes were in the works, but no one could have guessed how momentous those changes would in fact be.

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by Kanani Fong

Well, there’s a lot of hullaballoo about what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. I can’t remember a time when Ronald Reagan wasn’t part of the lexicon of California politics, even recollecting the time his face was printed on the DMV handbook. His signature even appeared on my school Report Cards. (Back then the Superintendent, the Principal’s sigs were also included).

Ronald Reagan was the sunny transplant from the midwest, the person who was proof that you could invent yourself here in the land of (then) orange trees, mild weather, and movie stars from Marlene Dietrich to Mae West. He was in radio, then movies, the president of SAG, a democrat, a republican, governor, and president. He even had a beautiful wife, and two children who were the kids he created –free thinkers. They even disagree with many of his viewpoints, but frankly, he would not have minded. Reagan was the kind of self styled rugged individualist that most people are comfortable with, one step removed from the suburbs. It was the Hollywood version of a ranch –horse trails, brush to clear, minus the livestock or orchards other ranchers depended on for their livelihood.

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Tomorrow afternoon (Monday, February 7th, 2011), the first Monday in February, President Obama will deliver his Fiscal Year 2012 Presidential Budget to the Congress. This is the opening act of our annual budgetary tango, with copious debate over the coming months of the necessary trades between programs.

On March 23rd, 1983, a few weeks after President Reagan presented his Fiscal 1984 budget to Congress, he gave his famous “Star Wars Speech” to a national televised audience. Although “Star Wars” was the derisive name opponents used to mock the fantastic nature of the President’s vision, President Reagan’s speech was singularly focused on restoring American military strength and credibility — and to “… pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the [nuclear] weapons themselves.”

Ironically, unlike President Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University that was fully focused on the seemingly-impossible challenge of putting a man on the moon (and Rice defeating Texas in football), Reagan’s “… call [to] the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents … to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” warranted only a couple of sentences in an otherwise lengthy speech.

Rather, this speech was part of “…a careful, long-term plan to make America strong again after too many years of neglect and mistakes,” and (when coupled with President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando just two weeks prior) was a deliberate escalation of Cold War rhetoric.

President Reagan was rightfully concerned that the defense budget had been “trimmed to the limits of safety” by Congress. This decay of U.S. armed forces led Reagan “…to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet – and therefore help deter – a crisis.” But his confidence in the logic of deterrence had limits. The Star Wars Speech presented to the world Reagan’s realization that deterrence based solely on commensurate offensive capabilities was fallacious.

“Over the course of these discussions, I have become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence…. Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are – indeed, we must!”

The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO, precursor to today’s Missile Defense Agency) was founded the following year, 1984. Reagan realized the complexity of the task, noting in his speech that it “… may not be accomplished before the end of this century.” Yet the U.S. Army PATRIOT terminal defense system performed admirably in early 1991 during DESERT STORM, and today’s U.S. Navy Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) has been used to destroy a failing satellite (Operation BURNT FROST, February 2008) as well as form the future foundation of land-based European missile defense and our nation’s “Phased Adaptive Approach”.

The magnitude of the technical challenge caused many to blanche in 1983, and to ridicule the President. Yet today’s successes would never have been possible if President Reagan had not had the faith to “… [launch] an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.”

For that, we have “… a new hope for our children in the 21st century.”

Crossposted to Wizards of Oz

I blame many things.

For one thing, the 1970s were good to my family. Oil prices were high. While a stumbling block for most American families, my father was a geologist specializing in domestic petroleum exploration. Due to the oil shock, his skills were in high demand. He was well paid and our family prospered.  We had all the Star Wars action figures that money could buy.

The 1980s were less kind. The price of oil plunged and soon there was no need for geologists specializing in domestic petroleum exploration. Indeed, an entire generation would pass before that skill set was in demand again. By then it was too late. My father never worked in his field again, subsisting on the occasional odd job or failed business scheme until he was well past retirement age. Things were tight for years afterward.

Another thing: much of my initial self-education came from a 1964 set of Collier’s Encyclopedias my parents had purchased right after they first got married. It was a good investment from my perspective. After I developed an interest in military history, the trusty encyclopedias became a more useful source of knowledge on military history topics than my parents or siblings limited knowledge (or interest) in the subject. As an accidental side effect, I developed a wide range of historical knowledge (for a pre-adolescent). As  Bartholomew  J. Simpson once observed, acquiring facts through study and retaining them in memory is like a whole new way to cheat.

However, there was a vacuüm. My knowledge of history after 1964 was limited to personal experience, what I read in the papers or saw on the TV news, or picked up through anecdotes from family and friends. The second half of the 1960s and the 1970s were a historical black hole. I was completely oblivious to the existence of the Great Society, hippies, Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Shock, malaise, or other events of that period.

Perhaps I was blessed.

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