The Weinberger Doctrine

He lists six cautions or tests for U.S. forces to be sent into combat abroad:

  1. The commitment must be deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies.
  2. It should be made “wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning.”
  3. Political and military objectives and the ways to meet them must be clearly defined.
  4. As conditions change, whether the commitment remains in the national interest must be reassessed.
  5. Before a commitment is made, there must be “some reasonable assurance” of popular and congressional support.
  6. A commitment to arms must be a last resort.

.. Secretary Weinberger, who came of age in the 1930s, is still stirred by the failure of the democracies to respond to Hitler in a timely and forceful way. What is more on his mind now, however, is a Vietnam-type situation in which the United States may succumb to the “danger of (a) gradualist incremental approach which almost always means the use of insufficient force.”

.. In a sense Mr. Weinberger is simply distilling the post-Vietnam consensus — in a way that, strangely, relates to Gary Hart’s minority plank on “the selective, judicious use of American military power”