General Matt Ridgway was unyielding in his opposition to the idea of intervention. He was also unalterably opposed to the New Look and the implication that wars could be fought quickly, easily, and antiseptically. He had witnessed the worst fighting in both World War Two and Korea, and in Korea, particularly, he had seen what the Air Force had promised to do with strategic bombing and how limited, in fact, strategic bombing was as an instrument of policy. If we bombed, he argued, we would end up inevitably using ground troops. Ridgway saw air power as a sort of high-tech aspirin; it gave some
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