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The US bureaucracy is vast, and although POTUS has the ability to directly appoint many, that ability is neither unilateral (since the Senate must confirm most of the most important appointees) nor wide-ranging. Civil service hiring rules has much more impact on the makeup of a bureaucracy than the President himself does. It's simply not possible to "recolor" the public sector at a whim in the USA.

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And there's the narrative as told in the (much recommended on HN) book "Command and Control": Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations all arrive outraged at the military's nuclear war strategy. And then after much attempt at reform, they leave with virtually the same strategy intact. Partly just due to getting draw into the military's way of thinking, partly due to not being able to present compelling alternatives to the military command. And then when changes do happen, they are driven bottom-up by particular events/catastrophes which make clear that the current strategies are utterly untenable. It's tough to a replace one leaky abstraction with another (potentially leaky) abstraction!

Pretty much. In fairness to Kennedy (and by Kennedy I mean McNamara), he at least did get the train rolling on buffing up U.S. conventional forces so that it was at least theoretically possible to deter Soviet use of armed force without being forced to immediately escalate to nuclear use.

AFAIK it took until Carter to significantly revise nuclear doctrine, and even that was only because Carter got tired of being publically outfoxed by the Soviets.

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