October 20, 2020—Soldier Down: General Shy Meyer, Rest in Peace

Retired Army General Edward C. Meyer, former Army Chief of Staff (1979-83), died last week in Arlington, Virginia at the age of 91. I understand his prep-school colleagues called him “Shy,” a nickname that stuck; but he was anything but shy.

President Carter skipped over at least 15 more senior generals to name him to be one of the nation’s youngest Army Chiefs. He was combat seasoned, having served in Korea and Viet Nam, and in each he was awarded the Silver Star for heroism. Thus, he well understood the situation when he observed that only six of the Army’s ten Divisions were combat ready — and he memorably then observed that our policies had produced what he called a “hollow Army.”

Click here for Matt Schudel’s enlightening October 13, 2020 Washington Post obituary that reported that in General Meyer’s first year as Chief, more than 20 senior generals retired or were replaced, paving the way for new thinking to create a “vision of where we were going so that we weren’t trapped, as Armies in the past have been, into just being a mirror of the kind of Army we were before.”

According to Schudel’s article, Gen. Meyer was credited with raising the Army’s professionalism and developing a system that would allow for faster, more flexible deployments, as evidenced a decade later in the Desert Storm operation during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And he quoted Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official and now Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, as saying:

“Shy Meyer was a critical figure in the transformation of the Army from the dispirited, troubled post-Vietnam force to the professional and superbly trained and equipped Army of Desert Storm . . . And he was, in addition, a wise, humane and humble leader who served his country honorably and well.”

This was the era in which we were awakening from a long period of inaction in response to the buildup of military, indeed strategically important, capabilities of the Soviet Union. As then Secretary of Defense Harold Brown observed about the U.S. strategic balance with the Soviet Union, “We build, they build. We stop and they continue to build.”

Secretary Brown’s observation actually was a delayed reaction to the situation considered by the STRAT-X study of the late 1960s, when we began to consider seriously what we should be doing in response to the then apparent growing Soviet threat to our strategic forces. The STRAT-X study, chartered by then Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) Johnny Foster — then the third ranking official in Office of the Secretary of Defense, was my first introduction to such considerations.

I led one of the Nuclear Weapons Effects panels that dealt with the growing threat to our Minuteman ICBM system by multiple Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems — and was privy to the strategic issues then being considered. Most if not all components of the strategic modernization program that was ultimately adopted by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan extended STRAT-X assessments and recommendations.

A key intermediate effort was the Nuclear Targeting Policy Review (NTPR) chartered by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Harold Brown and led by Leon Sloss — which in turn led to Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59) in the latter days of the Carter administration, immediately updated to National Security Decision Directive 13 (NSDD-13) of the Reagan administration.

I served on several Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Forces reviewing these activities and became Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, overseeing the Air Force Strategic and Space systems, and worked to help execute what became President Reagan’s top priority efforts to guide a huge build-up of all our military capabilities to counter the Soviet programs that then threatened the United States.

General Meyer — and the other service Chiefs — took advantage of those conditions to lead a major renovation of all our military capabilities, but his “hollow army” label stuck in representing the fact that previous administrations had permitted the erosion of all our military capabilities as we pursued the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. (A lesson for today?)

While those conditions did not directly affect our negotiations with the Soviet Union, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Henry Kissinger, decades later told me that he had led our negotiations with the Soviet Union that produced the 1972 ABM Treaty because, in effect, we could not then compete.

That formal impeding condition remained until 2002, when President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty — but its influence still constrains our efforts to build truly cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems: Those based in space.

A most notable event during General Meyer’s watch was President Reagan’s March 23, 1983 speech that launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Indeed the Chiefs, led by Chairman Army General Jack Vessey, played an important role in supporting President Reagan’s important initiative; one that many later considered to set in motion the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War — freeing many millions throughout the world.

The then Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jim Watkins, reflected on these events in his 1987 recollections on the events that led up to President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983 speech. His reflections were included in a thirteen-part PBS series first broadcast in 1989 (as the Soviet Union was breathing its last breath) on the origins and evolution of Cold War’s nuclear competition. Click here for the 1987 transcript of the Admiral’s personal recounting of these events for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age.

Admiral Watkins had a much greater role at the creation than is widely recognized — and it should be remembered as we anticipate the thirty-eighth anniversary of the speech that launched what many consider was the initiative that “ended the Cold War without firing a shot,” to quote Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

President Reagan’s timeless reasoning should be considered by the current “powers that be” as they consider how best to build the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems to deal with the current growing threats to the American homeland.

Admiral Watkins’ views should still be important to President Trump’s “Art of the Deal!” especially since the Navy’s Aegis BMD system is, in my opinion, the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) system we have deployed today.

Admiral Watkins was an early advocate in persuading the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support President Reagan’s interest in building truly effective BMD systems — before essentially the rest of the National Security bureaucracy knew anything about the President’s interest and plans. And his support was lasting, even after he became President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Energy when I met often with him, while I served as SDI Director.

I share the view that the support from the Chiefs’ 5-to-0 vote in 1983 probably played “the” key role in the President’s decision to act immediately rather than study the potential role further as had been the wish of many of the few who were privy to the President’s planned March 23, 1983 speech. Members shown below were (standing left to right) Admiral Watkins, Army General Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, Marine General Robert H. Barrow, Air Force General Charles A Gabriel and (seated) Chairman Army General John W. (Jack) Vessey. With General Meyer’s passing, none remain with us as we still seek to implement their vision.

In the PBS Special on his impressions of the changing political dynamics during his entire watch, Admiral Watkins discussed his views that influenced the deliberations of the Chiefs, their meeting with President Reagan in which they gave their unanimous support to what became his SDI program, and some of the consequences of their important support that ran counter to many in the political community, including even some among President Reagan’s closest advisors.

He emphasized his February 3, 1983 briefing to the Chiefs, which became the essence of Chairman Vessey’s briefing to President Reagan on February 11, 1983 — and influenced the timing and words of the President’s March 23, 1983 speech. For example, Admiral Watkins reported that the President was taken with the words “to protect our people not avenge them” and directed that these words not be lost in drafting his speech to the American people. Still worthy of consideration by President Trump today!

Admiral Watkins noted that the Chairman, he and only a few others were privy to this important section the President was to include in his overall March 23^rd speech to launch the SDI program. They suggested minor changes that were made, and recommended a little more study to determine the exact focus of the initiative.

Happily, as the Admiral said on PBS, the President did not wait for the bureaucracy to review this critical insert to his previously interagency-reviewed speech, and the rest is history. He emphasized that the President’s rapid turnaround short-circuited the likely bureaucratic stagnation that would have occurred had he not directed the new initiative be presented as a fait accompli. Indeed, there is little doubt that the bureaucracy would have studied it to death.

Admiral Watkins’ notably observed:

“In my opinion, it was a unique presidential act, and probably quite unusual. I’m sure there are other great Presidents in our history that have struck out independently from their own views. Having listened to a lot of people, the President has been thinking about this for a long time. It’s not a hip shot from the President. As I say, there’s a time when confluence of thought comes together and now it takes a leader to say, ‘The timing is right. I’m going to move it. And I feel comfortable with my grounds, I feel comfortable the American people will back this as a basic ideological concept. I feel comfortable that the technology is within grasp in 20 years. I feel comfortable that this gives us new hope.’ What else do you need? That’s what a vision is all about. And he had the guts to step out and do it.”

To which, I say, “Amen!”

Following those days, including when I served as SDI Director during the George H.W. Bush administration, we made great progress particularly in advancing a truly cost-effective space-based BMD system called Brilliant Pebbles — in the context of an overall Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) system concept that I had recommended to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and President Bush and which they approved.

Brilliant Pebbles had been conceived during USAF Lt. General Jim Abrahamson’s watch as SDI Director, and became SDI’s first Defense Acquisition Board (DAB)-approved system to enter the Pentagon’s formal system Demonstration and Validation Phase during USAF Lt. General George Monahan’s watch. I directed modifications, including focusing on the global threat rather than only Russia and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and assuring it could intercept ballistic missiles from anywhere (launched toward anywhere else more than a few hundred miles away) in all their phases of flight, rather than only on “boost-phase intercept of Soviet/Russian ICBMs.”

Regrettably, all SDI-friendly days ended with the arrival of the Clinton administration on January 20, 1993 — and my last day as SDI Director. As I have previously discussed, those who have been consistently against Reagan’s SDI initiative gained sufficient political power to end — at least for the moment — all serious efforts toward Reagan’s vision and objectives, which would demand that we have truly cost-effective space-based BMD systems, such as Brilliant Pebbles. As the former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the new Defense Secretary Les Aspin memorably said, they “took the stars out of Star Wars.”

And nothing has since been done to revive such programs, notwithstanding claims that the BMD programs that have continued haltingly are the legacy of the SDI efforts. They are the bureaucratic legacy, but in name only — since nothing has been done to revive the most cost-effective system concepts from the SDI era (or its supporting technology).

President Trump regrettably has missed the opportunity to return to President Reagan’s original vision — to “go back to the future,” so to speak. If re-elected perhaps he will get it right next time. Such a revival would fit with signs that at least our military leadership is belatedly recognizing that our current BMD systems cannot keep up with the advances of our enemies in threatening our homeland and space systems with ballistic missile attack.

Indeed, we need to return to the concepts that so intrigued President Reagan and led him to walk out of the October 11-12, 1986 Reykjavik Summit because Gorbachev demanded that we kill our space-based defense efforts. Many, including yours truly, believe that was the turning point in our negotiations, which led the Soviets to understand they could not compete with U.S. technology and therefore it was in their interest to meet our demands for offensive nuclear reductions.

As we contemplate the passing of the last of the Joint Chiefs who worked with President Reagan to begin the SDI in 1983, we should remember their vision and seek to honor it.

It is perhaps ironic that General Meyer died almost precisely on the 34^th anniversary of the October 11-12, 1986 Reykjavik Summit when President Reagan walked out because Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev demanded that we abandon our space-based BMD research and development.

It would honor him, those other Chiefs from the “greatest generation” and all who have supported Reagan’s vision, to revive those most important efforts that promise the most cost-effective global BMD capabilities.

For an “insider’s” discussion of the evolving political and bureaucratic scene that led up to and included Admiral Watkins’ important early contribution, I’d recommend Ronald Reagan’s close counselor and Attorney General Edwin Meese’s memoir, With Reagan: The Inside Story, that includes a reference to High Frontier’s founder, Army Retired Lt. Gen. Danny Graham, and his role in 1981 as the new President and a number of his closest advisors were contemplating how to seek an alternative to what the President called the “pell-mell pace” of the nuclear arms race based on the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy, which he hated. He wanted a “Mutual Assured Survival” strategy instead.

Click here for an Amazon listing for Ed Meese’s book. And click here for an audio of President Reagan’s telephone message complimenting Danny Graham and High Frontier on its 10^th anniversary in 1991, when I was SDI Director enjoying the benefits of those with the foresight to begin that important program.

Proud we are, but our job is not done.

Bottom Lines.

We stand on the shoulders of visionaries like Ronald Reagan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his era . . . and General Danny Graham and others who have charted and worked toward ways for us to realize the fruits of their aspiration.

President Trump’s administration has fulfilled much of his 2016 campaign promise in Philadelphia:

“We propose to rebuild the key tools of missile defense, starting with the Navy cruisers that are the foundation of our missile defense capabilities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As we expand our Navy toward the goal of 350 ships, we will also procure additional modern destroyers that are designed to handle the missile defense mission in the coming years.”

President Trump was right to emphasize making Aegis BMD all it can be, but his initiatives have not reinstituted an expedited program to begin deploying a modern Brilliant Pebbles space-based BMD system within five years. On that front, we need a do-over to revive Reagan’s top priority SDI program that promised that cost-effective goal was feasible, an aspiration that ended with the ended with the George H.W. Bush administration and has remained dormant ever since.

Needed associated technology has advanced and is now being exploited by others, including especially China. It’s long past time to revive Reagan’s SDI vision and his commitment to building the most cost-effective ballistic missile defenses — those based in space.

That would also honor the “Chiefs” who stood with “The Gipper.”

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

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