Each military service judged threat by its own single salient dimension

Evidence

In a related manifestation of the same impulse, one reason why the American armed services after World War II were a bit slower to see the Soviet Union as a threat than were the other parts of government was that each branch of the services tended to examine the single dimension that concerned it the most. When they looked into the future, each military service saw its potential enemies as those states that had, or could develop, extensive capabilities that resembled theirs or that could be countered by their service. “Air Force planners eyed a renascent Germany or Japan as the most probable enemies because both possessed the technology to develop strategic air power. Certain that only nations with a strategic bombing capability would dare wage war in the future, they dismissed the Soviet Union as a foe because it failed to develop a strategic force during the war and appeared to lack both technology and doctrine to do so for at least 20 or 30 years. The navy also minimized the Russian threat, since the Soviets demonstrated no more flair for battleships than for bombers” (Sherry, 1977, p. 168; also see Davis, 1966; Smith, 1970). Of course, the Soviet Union had a large army, but because it could not be used to attack the United States, it did not alarm the army’s planners. Bureaucratic politics cannot explain this way of thinking because each service had an interest in detecting Soviet threats; judging the Soviet Union on the most salient military dimension was such a powerful cognitive shortcut that it was employed even though doing so would not maximize the military’s role or budget. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2573

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to cognitive shortcuts and availability heuristics in political psychology; also to Milgram’s private-judge reputation work in that informational shortcuts override rational optimization.