840.20/6–149
Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Acting Secretary of State
The Acting Secretary: I conferred yesterday with Generals Gruenther and Landon1 on some of the problems which will be involved in any attempt to translate the military implications of the Atlantic Pact into the realities of command organization and collective planning. These problems are bitter ones. We shall have to insist on solutions which preserve the security and effectiveness of major strategic planning and which give recognition to the overwhelming relative importance of the contribution we shall be expected to make to the defense of the Atlantic area. Here, considerations of national pride and prestige are going to enter in, and we are going to have a hard time getting some of the others to accept realistic arrangements in which their own roles, and their own right to be informed on all aspects of strategic planning, must necessarily be limited. Our position in trying to negotiate such arrangements will be very seriously weakened if we find ourselves unable to promise military assistance to the other governments in question. Our whole position in argument must rest largely on the predominance of our contribution and on what we are being asked to do for the others. If we have nothing to give, we can hardly expect the others to accede to our views. If, consequently, there is no arms program this year, it may well be that any real implementation of the Atlantic Pact in the military sense will have to be postponed for at least a year, with serious psychological and political repercussions among the other Pact members.
- Maj. Gen. Truman H. Landon, U.S. Air Force, Member of the Joint Strategic Survey Committee.↩