Reprinted with permission from THE NEW AMERICAN magazine, August 11, 1986
The affect of the hidden agenda on our Armed Forces Brigadier General Andrew J. Gatsis, U.S. Army (Ret.), entered the U.S. Army in 1939 as a private. He earned his commission after graduating from West Point. During his 36 years as a professional combat infantryman, he became one of the most decorated officers ever to serve in our nation’s armed forces. An intense student of military strategy and tactics, he completed courses and taught at practically all of the nation’s military schools. Today, he serves as a member of the Council of The John Birch Society under whose auspices he delivers many lectures nationwide.
The late Lyndon Johnson once stated during his presidency: “Those who test our courage will find it strong and those who seek our friendship will find it honorable.” As the echoes of these words have faded, so has the resolve of the United States to confront and repulse its enemies paled, degenerating into a merciless betrayal of our true allies.
U.S. foreign policy clearly enshrines the abandonment of anti-Communist countries friendly to the United States, ostensibly on the grounds that they are “repressive militant right-wing dictatorships.” Such philippics were used against Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Chiang Kai-shek of China, Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Ian Smith of Rhodesia. Today, the countries that were ruled by these so-called dictators are now Communist-controlled — with the exception of Iran and the Philippines, both of which are nevertheless ardently anti-American and ripe for Red domination. And now the controlling authorities of these new regimes not only oppress their own people — far more ruthlessly than their predecessors — but they wish to oppress us as well.
The few loyal allies that America has left — such as South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan — are also being abandoned. The big mistake made by the unfortunate victims of U.S. treachery was that they trusted us. In the early seventies when I, as a senior military officer, visited the Taiwanese government in an official capacity, the senior Chinese officials refused to believe me when I advised them that the U.S. government was planning to abandon Taiwan and recognize Communist China. They remained unconvinced even when they were told that I had been designated as the plans officer to draw up the schedule for pulling U.S. army troops out of their country. In spite of their disbelief that the United States would do anything so dastardly, U.S. troop redeployment out of Taiwan was effected a year later.
Though aware of the Communist goal of world domination, the average U.S. citizen refuses to believe that the Reds are only a peripheral enemy and that the real threat comes from a Western power structure made up of governmental officials and their non-governmental confederates who secretly espouse the same objectives as the openly avowed Communists. These underhanded activists, whom we shall call the Insiders, promote one-world government through a gradual, transition from freedom to International Socialism.
This is their hidden agenda for the United States:
(1) Destroy American nationalism.
(2) Neutralize United States intelligence agencies.
(3) Bankrupt America.
(4) Promote a sense of guilt and shame among the people and urge the relinquishment of national sovereignty and the international redistribution of America’s wealth as atonement for our country’s “sins.”
(5) Convince the American people that all friendly allies who oppose socialism are violators of human rights and should be toppled in the name of “democracy.”
(6) Weaken the nation’s defenses and disarm the United States.
Because the American way of life involves some yielding up of freedom to ensure an orderly society, the United States must have institutional means for forcibly preserving peace. American Citizens can enjoy their liberty only when they are certain that criminals will be punished and invaders repelled. This framework of security, whose construction is the fundamental purpose of government, is provided primarily by the military. Effectively accomplishing the sixth point of the hidden agenda — by reducing the combat effectiveness of the Armed Forces — is the most important of all measures to America’s enemies, for it removes the prop that ensures the private citizen his liberties. A weak military invites compromise and creates a vulnerability to coercive diplomacy.
The attack on the defenses of our nation is part of an integral plan for transforming the status of the U.S. from an independent republic to an interdependent element in a world socialist system; and it targets hard-core values, assaulting discipline, esprit de corps, strategy, doctrine, codes of ethics, command structure, military control and combat readiness in equipment and personnel. The attack has been implemented as follows:
Indoctrinating the Officers
In the late forties, the stage was set to begin brainwashing American military officers to “think liberal” and to promote international socialism. The war colleges that produce future generals began to reorient the thinking of professional military men from fighting to intellectualism. Shortly after 1947, the Air War College announced that the traditional relative isolation of military officers from domestic and international policy matters would be discarded and that the basic approach to academic solutions in the curriculum would revolve around the United Nations and the avoidance of traditionalism. The instruction focused increasingly on compromise, appeasement, and the downgrading of U.S. national interests to a position of secondary importance in relation to world affairs.
As a student in the Air War College in 1963-64, I personally experienced the transformation of the curriculum. I estimate that 90 percent of the guest lecturers (and we had one every day) were extremely liberal and embraced the principles of world government. Some of the main ones — Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Averell Harriman, Norman Cousins, George Ball, Dean Rusk, Elspeth Rostow, and Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. — remain active on today’s scene. All but a very few came from the liberal establishment.
They were Harvard professors, members of left-wing think tanks, liberal journalists, ambassadors, government officials holding high positions in the Kennedy Administration, and the like. The rare conservatives (perhaps ten, among hundreds of speakers) could hardly have been left off the program, for they were mainly high-ranking military men like General Curtis LeMay, who was the Chief of the Air Force at that time. After all, some military philosophy had to be worked into a college designed to train future generals to fight and win wars.
I still remember Dr. Brzezinski’s lecture on the subject of world Communism. His main, theme was the transformation of the role of the U.S. from independence to interdependence. I was completely shocked when he told us that, as military officers, we should first redefine what it means to win.
When I complained to the authorities of the college about the extremely unbalanced liberal curriculum and requested more conservative instruction and guest speakers, I was told that I was out of date and that it was too late to change the guest speakers program. Earlier in the school year, I asked Averell Harriman, then a roving ambassador for the Kennedy Administration, to tell the students why our government was undermining President Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam. Harriman went into a rage, told me to sit down, and denied that the U.S. government was working against Diem. Needless to say, I was thoroughly reprimanded by the senior Army faculty member for confronting Ambassador Harriman with this question. A short time later, Diem was assassinated.
The service academies where career professional military and naval officers are trained have experienced this same “liberalization.” President Carter brought Army General Andrew Goodpaster, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, out of retirement and made him West Point’s superintendent with the express purpose of liberalizing the U.S. Military Academy.
During his tenure, Goodpaster promoted individualism within the system, placing the desires of self over the unit; removed the merit system, thereby eliminating competition among cadets; lowered the physical standards of the academy to accommodate large groups of women in the cadet corps; changed the rules of the honor system to provide greater tolerance for violators; and greatly civilianized the academic faculty with outside personnel who know nothing of the spirit and the traditions of the academy or the interrelationship between the academic program and the military profession.
There are now at West Point women tactical officers supervising cadets, most of whom, upon graduation, will become combat arms officers. One can imagine how much a woman supervisor, with no combat experience, inspires these young cadets, whose mission will be to fight one day. When I asked an old combat sergeant assigned to duty at West Point during his 17th year of service why he had decided to quit, he said: “Sir, I am fed up with these high-ranking prissy military officers who are bent on sissifying the army.” Such “sissification” can play havoc with male-to-male bonding and unit cohesion — vital elements for preventing the disintegration of units in combat.
One example of brainwashing through the academic department occurred in November 1981, when the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. lectured cadets at the United States Military Academy. His themes were “Nuclear Situational Ethics,” “Strategic Nuclear Pacifism,” and “American Unilateral Disarmament,” surprising subjects at the primary training school for America’s future professional soldiers. But he won good will and the blessings of State Department foreign Service officer Gene Preston, then on professorial duty at West Point, who commented: “I wish Coffin had borne down even harder on the mission of total defeat that the Lord promises for a self-deceiving people.”
Coffin, the avid booster of pacifist elements that have given aid and comfort to enemies killing and imprisoning U.S. military men, now found himself an honored guest of the military establishment.
This was quite a change! During the period from 1961-67, he was jailed several times for illegal demonstrations. His long career in pacifism includes leading roles with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and similar leftist groups. In 1978 he called the Pentagon the “Jim Jones” of America’s society; and, during the Iranian hostage crisis, he labeled the united States “the guilty party.” Did West Point care about Coffin’s record? Were the authorities of the academy concerned over his denunciations of the military? Obviously not. One cadet told him after his speech: “Sir, as we would be among the first to get ourselves blown up if the U.S. begins to use tactical nuclear weapons, you are talking to a group of peaceniks.” An unbelievable pronouncement from a professional trained to defend America!
First Earth Battalion
As an example of how confident our enemies are in transforming military thinking and in dismantling America’s combat capability, consider that they have created an army unit in the form of a think tank of more than 200 individuals, who are developing “alternative futures” for military service. The unit is officially designated as the First Earth Battalion.
Lieutenant Colonel Channon, the pioneer of this battalion — better known as the natural (not national) guard — says that “its essence is not physical but spiritual. It’s a way for the army to open itself to new ways of being.” The army financed Channon’s production of a multi-media program about this battalion, which was shown to the First Classmen of the U.S. Military Academy. The concept, Channon said, has “infected the highest ranks of the military.” He and his colleagues inform their fellow officers of alternative concepts through TV tapes, workshops, and a “soft tactics” manual
According to the manual, the primary allegiance of the First Earth Battalion is not to the United States but to the world. Its members are engaged in the ethical evolution of force: They seek mastery as they move up the ethical hierarchy, from force of arms to force of heart. This new breed of soldiers, or “warrior monks,” would be schooled in various non-destructive methods of control. Under the guise of peace, the traditional tactics of combat would be retooled, and the human dimension of the military would be emphasized.
The Battalion’s basic doctrine claims that “a major shift in the criterion for victory has already begun. Since the advent of worldwide television coverage, the judgments for success in battle have changed. Victory will now accrue to the force that executes an action most consistent with evolving world values. Destroying your opponent and his property will, in the long run, equal defeat.” (Emphasis ours.)
In short, the military spirit of the soldier is smothered in an atmosphere of pacifism that saps his will to fight. When projected openly by military authorities, this defeatist philosophy psychologically conditions the American citizenry to call for unilateral disarmament in the name of “peace.”
Civilians Control Operations
One of the greatest deficiencies in our defense system is that civilian planners have assumed control of our military doctrines, strategy, and tactics since World War II. Detailed control is in the hands of so-called defense intellectuals, who have sabotaged our military operations and discredited the professionalism of our Armed Forces.
Civilian control over military operations has promoted consistent failure. The Iranian rescue mission is an excellent example. The authority of the ground commander to determine whether or not to abort the mission was critical to success. One does not have to have detailed knowledge of that operation to realize that, if the President himself gave the order to abort the mission, the military commander closest to the action had no say in the decision and was completely subordinated to the Civilian planners in Washington.
This is not a one-time happenstance. Remember the Cuban Bay of Pigs, the Pueblo, and the Marine disaster in Lebanon? These operations were also Controlled by civilians from the White House and the State Department. The Bay of Pigs operation, aborted when U.S. air support was withheld at the last minute, was a complete disaster. Washington’s failure to direct the American commander of the Pueblo to fight, as it was his duty to do, resulted in the capture of the crew by North Korean gun boats. And the Lebanon tragedy could have been avoided had the military commander not been obliged to risk the security of his troops by pursuing a political rather than a military objective.
Dangerously ineffective doctrines based on objectives short of victory, a preoccupation with defensive concepts, and strategic inferiority weaken our ability to protect America. Worst of all, professional military men trained to plan and execute military campaigns are replaced by charlatans. Their naïveté and arrogance — their accommodation and subterfuge — take many fatal forms. In Vietnam, those forms included the “body-count,” used as a criterion for success; the Hamlet Evaluation System (an administrative pencil exercise), used to determine whether or not an enemy area was pacified by rating 18 factors pertaining to education, health, welfare, economic development, and security; and the on-again, off-again bombing in the North, which permitted the enemy to recover during the interludes.
No Longer Bound by the Code
The principles of war represent a list of how a military unit “ought to fight.” Translating these principles into action gives victory when the soldier’s motivation is “total commitment against the enemy.” No matter how sophisticated the weapons, no matter how brilliant the strategy, the soldier must have a non-compromising mentality. Anything less encourages defeat. This precept calls for the highest standards of conduct in combat and applies to all arenas of military operations.
The Code of Conduct for prisoners of war (POWs) is one of these arenas. A strong code promotes male-to-male bonding, loyalty to cause, and a camaraderie that stirs maximum resistance against the foe. Prior to 1955, the Code dictated that the captured prisoner give only his name, rank, service number, and date of birth to the enemy. The standards were set high in order to obtain the best possible performance. Although not all men could comply with such demanding rules in the literal sense, everyone could abide by them in spirit. Furthermore, the Code provided a defense against a nervous collapse before the eyes of fellow prisoners. The Code helped the POWs keep their self-respect and dignity intact, unified them, and increased their chances of survival. Any violation of the Code was dealt with by a military court-martial.
After the Korean War, in coordination with the agenda to disarm America, another step was taken to dilute America’s military image by lessening the requirements demanded of the POW. The word “bound” was replaced by “required” and the world “only” was deleted in the portion of the Code that read: “I am bound to give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth.” Additionally, the Code was no longer made legally binding.
To supplement these rule changes, Department of Defense policy, at the end of the Vietnam hostilities, was not to press charges or prosecute returning POWs for anything they may have done while in captivity, even if they had broken faith with fellow prisoners or betrayed their country. The psychological effect produced by certain disloyal Americans, who publicly depicted the U.S. soldier in Vietnam as a criminal, was to create a no-prosecution policy for violators of the Code. Such undermining encouraged some of the captives to cooperate without pangs of conscience and reinforced the enemy propaganda effort against us. Modifying the Code is just another phase of the overall effort to weaken America’s Armed Forces.
Substituting Defeat for Victory
The main objective of the hidden agenda for U.S. defense is to habituate the American citizenry to defeat. This theme is advanced by a propaganda drive through the major news media that victory is not worth the price. It parallels the Communist language that peace requires the prior destruction of the very idea of military victory and perpetuates the myth that Communist advances are irreversible.
Two policies reinforce this precept and assure that U.S. military victory is not within the grasp of reality:
(1) the reduction of U.S. Armed Forces’ strength and its transfer to the other side, and
(2) the restriction of military strategy and doctrine to defensive concepts and limited objectives.
One must understand the real meaning of military superiority to understand how U.S. military strength is diminished. Military superiority does not mean that we must have the numerical advantage in weaponry and people, nor does it necessarily mean that we must have the best in quality for all weapon systems, although sufficiency in both are necessary. Superiority is obtained through flexibility — which means having a greater variety of modernized weapons, fighting elements, and support capabilities than the adversary.
Perpetuating this misconception of military superiority, anti-military pundits convey to the American people that, in lacking the manpower and capability to finance a huge military machine larger than that of the Soviet Union, the U.S. can never gain military ascendancy over the Kremlin. This truism predicated on a false definition of real military superiority has three objectives:
(1) to discourage the average American citizen from supporting any effort to build military strength,
(2) to point out the futility of trying to surpass the Soviets in military capability, and
(3) to encourage unilateral disarmament in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Those who pursue the hidden agenda for neutralizing America’s combat readiness do so by developing military requirements to fit the budget rather than by providing a budget to satisfy the military requirements. Missions and requirements should be based on the opponent’s capabilities, not on a dollar figure.
Flexible Armed Forces are well within the bounds of a reasonable defense budget that is insufficient for financing large forces. Flexibility can offset numbers; and, combined with the great advantages of American technology, the U.S. can easily dominate its external enemies. Dominance, however, presupposes the termination of all aid to the Communists and a reversal of the “build-down” of our Armed Forces.
In addition to thwarting the modernization of our military hardware and the adequate training of personnel, the Insiders seek to prohibit military professionals from developing and employing winning strategies. They restrict them within the parameters of defensive doctrine and neutralize their efforts at offensive operations by confining them to limited (shallow) objective attacks.
No matter how good a unit is, it loses if it fights by the wrong principles. It is a well-known military maxim that the best defense is a good offense. Military doctrine, shaped by the realities of battle throughout the ages, dictates that clear-cut military victories can be gained only by continual offensive actions. Defensive operations are an interim measure and are conducted only until an offensive capability can be attained. The sole purpose for a defensive strategy is to develop favorable conditions for launching an attack. No war has been won using defensive tactics alone.
An example that clearly demonstrates the validity of this principle is the War Between the States. Although the South won many battles, almost all were fought for the defensive objective of repelling the advancing Northern Armies.
During World War II, the United States was compelled to fight defensively in the initial stages of the war but had to go on the offense — invading Germany and taking the islands in the Pacific — before victory could be obtained.
One of Napoleon’s distinguished soldiers and scholars, General Baron Antoine de Jomini, an authority on the principles of war, said, “The best thing for an Army standing on the defensive is to know how to take the offensive at a proper time and to take it.” (Emphasis ours.)
The Soviets follow this principle to the letter, as evidenced by their success throughout the world in conducting offensive insurgency operations. On the other hand, the United States has been losing consistently since World War II by using defensive counterinsurgency operations deliberately imposed upon the Armed Forces by the Insiders.
The overriding principle of war is the “objective.” To win, the objective must be either to destroy the enemy or to break his will to resist. The key elements needed to accomplish either end are the seizure of objectives deep in the opponent’s rear and the cutting of his supply lines.
After World War II, the U.S. Armed Forces were compelled to abandon this doctrine. They were pressed to replace deep objectives with shallow ones, which always allowed the enemy to escape and precluded his defeat. Since then U.S. units have suffered a series of military failures — the Korean War, Vietnam, Cambodia. It is notable that America never lost a war so long as we had a Department of War and has never won one since it became the Department of Defense. More than just the name of the department was changed — there was a fundamental change in philosophy as well. (See page 60.)
Victory was turned into stalemate in the Korean War because American commanders were ordered to abandon their original objectives and revert to defensive operations after U.S. forces had broken the back of the Chinese Communist Army in “Operation Killer,” putting them in full retreat.
The Vietnam War was the perfect lever for continuing the transformation of America’s military doctrine into a non-violent one. The Armed Forces were directed to reinforce failure rather than success, and they continued to fight a defensive action in the South after years of such fruitless tactics. Not once was any notable attempt made to change the strategy and redirect the weight of our power at the enemy’s heartland, his warmaking potential, and his willingness to fight.
The U.S. Army was told by government officials that, since the military phraseology “search and destroy” sounded too horrible to the American public and the world, all references to such maneuvers would have to be expressed in the more docile term “search and clear.” Such terminology was hardly a catalyst for motivating the fighting spirit of the American soldier.
Thus, the lost cause was of our own making: We were forced by our own government to violate all standard military doctrine and to fight the war in the most inefficient and costly way possible. The net result of this ludicrous concept of operations was an attrition rate that produced a defeatist attitude among Americans and created the perfect climate for the abandonment of our allies to the Communists under the infamous slogan, “Peace With Honor.”
I well remember the cries of “immoral war” and the detrimental restrictions placed upon our tactics. We could not bomb within a restricted radius of Hanoi, even though the enemy anti-aircraft defenses located in that area were shooting our planes down every day. Occupied civilian villages could not be attacked, even though they contained enemy battalions shooting and killing American soldiers. Plans to bomb and break the dykes in North Vietnam, flooding the rice paddies and destroying the food supply, were ruled out as being “too barbaric.”
A classic example of the sabotage of U.S.-South Vietnamese military operations was the incursion into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The real purpose of that operation was to serve the political objective of pulling U.S. forces out of South Vietnam. Failure against the enemy in Cambodia would signal another American defeat and brand the United States as an aggressor. The excuse given for this cross-over was that the North Vietnamese had to be routed out of their sanctuaries.
As a military advisor and the first American officer to move into Cambodia with the South Vietnamese Army, I was disturbed by the great number of restrictions placed upon our ability to close in On the enemy and destroy him. The Rules of Engagement, written in Washington, assured that the incursion would be a fruitless one, militarily. At the outset there was a 30-mile limit of advance placed upon all friendly units and a requirement to withdraw from Cambodia within 60 days (June 30, 1970). Military commanders were left with few options and little flexibility to maneuver their troops.
The initial attack was successful. We were able to defeat the first enemy elements contacted and to capture a great number of weapons, but we were unable to pursue the defeated units because they had retreated beyond the 30-mile limit.
Guidelines for use of firepower prevented the infliction of maximum damage upon the fleeing North Vietnamese and Communist Khmer Rouge forces. Such prohibitions hampered the intelligence-gathering operations of unit commanders. The result was that friendly troops were Continually wasting billions of ammunition rounds by firing into areas in which there was no intelligence to confirm an enemy presence, a procedure known as “reconnaissance by fire.” There were even such extremes as making air strikes with 500- and 750-pound bombs against a lone sniper hidden in the jungles. It was like killing ants with a hammer. While these fruitless operations were conducted, the main enemy force withdrew deeper into Cambodia and reconstituted its forces safely beyond the 30-mile limit, knowing that they had only to remain in their sanctuaries and avoid the hamstrung U.S.-South Vietnamese forces for 60 days.
The Warrior Spirit
Another form of building down U.S. military might is the effort to weaken the warrior spirit of our military personnel. Current professional soldiery smacks of master’s degrees and Ph.D.s. As a rule, senior rank officers cannot get promoted to general unless they hold a graduate degree. Many generals and admirals are becoming soft-headed liberal intellectuals. In the War Colleges they are indoctrinated with such themes as “What does it mean to win?” and “Theories of compromise.” An atmosphere of weakness also pervades our service academies as manifested by civilian professors, liberal philosophies, and the women’s liberation movement.
The spirit of the warrior is being replaced by a sense of false compassion for our enemy and the promotion of individualism over teamwork. Equal rights and understanding are overshadowing discipline and obedience. It is discipline that is required when a unit fights to the death — not compassion. The fighting man must be committed to team loyalty, not to individual rights. Professional military journals advance this new approach by praising the unqualified. For example, at the height of the feminist movement the Armed Forces Journal described inexperienced feminist Antonia Handler Chayes, Deputy Secretary of the Air Force during the Carter Administration, as follows: “She emerges from behind the stereotypical facades of title and gender as a superbly talented metamorphosis of executive humanity with the hide of a rhino and the grace of a swan.”
Leadership is gradually being replaced by management. You can lose a war for lack of management, but you cannot win one without leadership. The greatest demands on commanders today are equal rights and balancing the books — not leadership. Management runs out of answers when your comrades lie wounded around you, when each moment is suffused by terror, when nothing is definitely known any longer, and when all that is left is the leader’s ability and his will to unite his men. You cannot manage men to their death. It is leadership that spurs the combat soldier to follow his commander through hell.
The Insiders who are responsible for the hidden agenda purposely defuse the intangible spirit that the combat leader must demonstrate to make men fight to win. In the thick of battle soldiers do not fight for patriotism, motherhood, or apple pie. They fight for each other. It is male-to-male bonding that creates pride and the spirit of winning. The combat leader’s job is winning by any means, not statistics, not market trends.
We hear much rhetoric today from President Reagan on the need for a strong defense. From documented information and personal experience, I have drawn for the reader a real mental picture of the threat to America’s combat potential. An objective thinker will conclude that President Reagan is a master at saying what he knows the average American citizen wants to hear about defense while allowing actions that promote the hidden agenda — an agenda that erodes the ability of America’s Armed Forces to fight.
Around 500 BC Sun Tzu, a great Chinese author and general, said in his book The Art of War, “Know the enemy and the battle is half won. Know yourself and the battle is yours.” One of the problems in America is that we know neither.
If we knew the enemy, we would believe Soviet doctrine, which clearly enunciates their intent to communize the world, merging our own country into their system. If we knew ourselves, we would heed the words of Cicero, who once warned Rome just before her collapse, “Beware of the traitor within the gates.”