It is always so. The beleaguerment is foreseen, on paper, and acted out in drills and games of war. The curve of crises, the links of possible catastrophe, are known ahead of time.
They are “possibilities.” Within their limits, a military effort is made to account for every circumstance. Friendly officers play the part of the “enemy” and plan every conceivable attack.
“X-Day” plans are drawn up, studied from every angle, stamped ‘‘Top Secret” and filed away.
To be sure, chains-of-command are notified concerning them; communications and alternate communications are established; and whatever else seems required for every emergency is fashioned and stockpiled, or learned by troops, or kept on hand—or, if the appropriations do not meet the dire extremes of military vision, at least exists on paper.
Surprise assault has rarely found the adversary ready. At Pearl Harbor, the radar worked, the in-flying enemy was seen in ample time to change that masterpiece of ruin, but a weak military link in the chain cut off fact from command. The nation then being attacked, the United States, believed many wrong things: that their planes were far superior; that the Japs had a congenital defect of eyesight which incapacitated them as pilots. Those Americans who thereupon died like flies before the guns of Zeroes had only a moment in which to see how mistaken they and their countrymen had been. The inferiorities then—as in this later case—and the defects, too, were American.
Faced by that ultimate martial calamity, inconceivable and majestic—invasion with atomic arms—most military men reverted (as their long discipline had made sure they should) to conventional means and ends. This was war; this, therefore, was not the affair of civilians. Their duty was to defend and defense spelled attack. Their ideology, their often logical position was this: that it mattered more in the flickering instants to bring down a grievously armed enemy plane than to keep any given city, only potentially menaced, in step-by-step contact with events which occurred so fast in any case that the best-informed staffs were soon far behind.
Much, of course, that was needed now and in a certain place was stored elsewhere, or existed in insufficient quantity, or could not be got ready in time, or it existed only in prototype, or on order—or merely in blueprints, as a dream might exist.
Much was expended in error. The rockets that ringed Detroit went up, after mistaken recognition signals, and destroyed seven American bombers two hours before the single Soviet plane launched its missile onto Detroit from a position far to the north, far beyond the range of the improved Nike, in Canada.
Of all the blunders, the most serious was that which derived not from military judgment (or any lack of it) but from the philosophy of domestic politics. Civil Defense had always been considered a matter for states to organize and administer. The Federal Government had advised, urged, supplied research and data—and left most practical decisions to the states. So the fact that any day, on the briefest notice, every city might go to war had been considered as each city’s own business, or as the business of the state in which it happened to be.
Some states had responded relatively well; others, as might be expected, where politics was the measure, hardly at all. Much had been done in Green Prairie for that reason; little, in its Sister City across the river. What had not been clearly observed in the Pentagon, or by any other branch of authority, was this: that in any “next” war, while the armed forces went forth to fight as one, the states and cities would be obliged to defend themselves as variously as a hundred different medieval principalities besieged by a single adversary.