weeks later, Haislip and his staff responded by publishing a study that outlined different methods of mobilizing foreign manpower, including the enlistment of “displaced persons, defectees and potential defectees from unfriendly countries” into the U.S. Army. The study also suggested the possibility of organizing alien service members into separate units for “unconventional” warfare.84 Its range of ideas prompted further consideration by the National Security Council, which issued its policy paper on the subject in April 1951. NSC 108, as the policy was designated, spelled out the problem with a language similar to that used to justify Universal Military Training: “The United States should seek urgent improvement in the utilization of foreign manpower for military purposes in order to increase the flexibility of employment of our own military forces and to avoid a disproportionate contribution of the United States manpower to the over-all military posture of the free world.” Taking a global view, the policy crunched some remarkable numbers: the availability of “physically fit” 15- to 49-year-old men from countries “favorably disposed toward the United States” stood at 130 million, roughly 17 million more than those in the “Soviet bloc.” The mobilization of this vast pool of foreign manpower would bolster the overall military capability of the “free world” to act as an effective bulwark against “Soviet expansionism.”85
By calculating the ways that foreign manpower could be mobilized, NSC 108 worked as a sort of addendum to the Universal Military Training and Service Act that was enacted two months later. But beyond increasing manpower and improving “military efficiency,” the utilization of foreign soldiers served a broader cultural function. The policy made clear that part of the goal of mobilizing these subjects was “to stimulate a genuine ‘will to fight’ by the winning of men’s minds and the build-up of resistance to communist ideology and propaganda.” The National Security Council insisted cultural diplomacy and military buildup were complementary projects, it was something that Soviet leaders had pursued for some time by recruiting soldiers from the “Soviet bloc,” and Americans needed to catch up and do the same. “We have more to sell, but [the Soviets] have been the better salesmen to date.”86
The dual imperatives of “selling” democracy and mobilizing foreign military labor, however, opened the United States to the charge of employing mercenaries, which threatened to undermine American credibility. As General Haislip and his personnel staff cautioned, the use of mercenaries by the United States would be “repugnant to the ideals of our people, would leave us open to the charge of ‘imperialism,’ and give substance to the charge of our enemies that we intend to hire others to fight for us.” The French Foreign Legion, “composed mostly of aliens” and French colonial subjects, had drawn the indignation of world opinion precisely for this reason. Haislip and staff pointed out that even “our own Philippine Scouts,” America’s most recent experiment with a mercenary force, had responded to their “inferior pay and allowances” with a “minor mutiny” in 1924.87 The times were no longer amenable to such practice. As both the National Security Council and the army personnel staff underscored, the United States must distance itself from “imperialism” and make a clear stance for “freedom.”88
NSC 108 thus concluded the “most effective utilization of foreign manpower” rested on the development of the “armed forces of free nations,” a process already under way through the MDAP. Specifically, this entailed a practice that the Department of Defense (DOD) termed “mirror imaging,” in which U.S. training and doctrine, force structure, and supplies and equipment were exported and imposed on the organization of allied forces. Mirror imaging essentially was “modernization” theory applied through the military, in the sense that it approached the military as a vehicle for transforming “backward” countries into thriving nations oriented toward capitalism.89 Lt. Gen. James Van Fleet, Commander of the Eighth Army who was credited with turning around the lackluster Korean army during the war, understood his role within this framework. In the spring of 1951, he arrived in Korea and found the ROK Army in a shambled state but also saw Koreans “anxious to fight for their freedom.” The “Orientals apply themselves intensely,” he commended, “tell them something once, and they have it,” but all their individual motivation was squandered without the “competent leadership” of Syngman Rhee. In the end it was the leader of the republic, not the leader of the Eighth Army, who could command their allegiance. Once Rhee realized this fact and acted on it, the men of the ROK Army “suddenly were transformed into soldiers.”90
In the end the processes of turning “boys” into soldiers and transforming a colony into a modern nation were one and the same. Both depended on the ability of Asians to defend themselves from communism, the threat to their newfound freedom. Van Fleet was convinced that “Asia can and should be saved by Asians,” and it could be done precisely by teaching Asians how to embody martial citizenship through the mirror imaging of their national armed forces. Doing so would save American manpower and dollars as well as “strip the Communists of their powerful argument that ours is no real war for freedom but only a white man’s ‘imperialist’ war to put Asia in chains.”91 MDAP was, in this sense, an imperial projection of anticolonial self-determination. It produced foot soldiers for the U.S. empire and provided an arsenal for the propaganda war with the Soviet Union.
In 1950, the DOD began to select and send foreign military trainees to U.S. service schools through MDAP, the cream of the crop of allied forces who would take the lead in America’s “real war for freedom.” In the first year, MDAP brought students from 14 countries, with each country committing between 22 and 627 students. Initially, most of the students came from so-called “Title I” countries, the nine European countries receiving the biggest portion of MDAP grants owing to their proximity to the “Iron Curtain.” But by 1959, of the more than 140,000 foreign nationals who passed through the United States, 58,203 came from Asia. South Korea and Taiwan sent 14,445 and 15,552 students, respectively, the highest numbers among the total 54 countries. U.S. officials saw these students as military assets. In 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reflected on the long-term benefits of MDAP: “In all probability the greater return on any portion of our military assistance investment—dollar for dollar—comes from the training of selected officers and key specialists in U.S. schools and installations.”92
U.S. military officials saw these foreign trainees in instrumentalist ways and assessed their value through a cost-benefit analysis. As one KMAG officer put it, MDAP training program amounted to “a package plan to provide maximum instruction at the least possible expense in the least possible time.”93 But aside from serving purely military purposes, these trainees also embodied a story of progress that affirmed the modernizing potential of Asian soldiers and, in turn, the military’s potential as a vehicle of modernization in Asia. Toward this end, in 1951, the State Department and the DOD collaborated on a series of projects highlighting the MDAP trainees as conduits of democracy. Aimed at audiences abroad, they developed “hometown type stories” presumably about the trainees’ immersion in the local communities and produced a motion picture titled Forces of Freedom.94 By the decade’s end, their efforts would maximize the “collateral benefits” of training these foreign students, and hone their potential as “a multi-purpose cold war weapon” that served “political, economic, and social, as well as military” purposes.95 Their efforts cohered in a cultural industry for the military.
Molding these trainees for U.S. cultural diplomacy was a two-way process that involved shaping their experiences in the United States as well. The DOD aimed to do this by producing a “guidebook” to acquaint the trainees with various aspects of American culture and society. The 1959 guidebook began with the preface: “We welcome you to the United States and we welcome the opportunity to share with you not only our professional military skills, but our hospitality and our way of life.” What followed was a fifty-five–page distillation of the “American way of life,” covering topics such as military customs, standard of living, diet, etiquette, and “the American Character” marked by freedoms of the press and religion, and by the “enterprising individual.” The guidebook worked to preempt the visitors from forming their own
