strategic vulnerability Quotes
This quotation has significance for two reasons. First, Lodge was one of the leaders of the conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party which generally only wanted to provide the military with weapons to defend the mainland. However, the technology of the airplane caused much rethinking. Americans had seen what German bombing had done to Spanish cities and Italian air power in Ethiopia. This followed by Germany bombing city after city throughout Europe. There were huge calls for antiaircraft guns to be placed around all American cities so that Americans might be defended from air attack. However, Lodge supported another strategy that was a first for America: retaliation. From this point forward, America would rely primarily on retaliation rather than massive defense until President Ronald Reagan proposed his ill-fated Star Wars defense scheme. The second significant factor is that the senator suggested preemption—the attack on a military air base is that threatens us. This appears to be another first.
This seemingly prosaic quotation is one of the most significant quotations in history. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the telegraph was rapidly developing as a communications technology. One of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was the appreciation of the new technology and the deployment of it to gain an immense strategic advantage which was a major factor in all warfare thereafter. Lincoln placed ALL telegraphy of the North under the control of the military. He then had a telegraph terminal installed in the War Department right next to the White House. He would spend many hours in the Telegraph Room reading dispatches as they were coming in. To the distress of some of his military commanders, the Commander in Chief actually, for the first time in history, received virtually real time intelligence about a battle, and issued orders to the commanders in the field in real time. The quotation is one of the early examples. Ironically, Lincoln had more real time battlefields information in the Civil War than most of our Presidents did until the Vietnam War when digital, radio communications were exploited for the purpose.
