Clashing Gears

The Navy had been getting away with too much, too long; the Army Air Forces could keep silent no longer. The Navy had been promoting itself as "the strong right arm of the State Department." When the U.S. wanted to make a show of force in the Mediterranean, it used the Navy (TIME, Sept. 30). The volatile, high-octane boys in the Air Forces were sure that a single B-29 sitting on a runway in Europe, with a "mushroom bomb" in its belly, would be a more convincing show of force, at a fraction of the Navy's cost. They wanted to blast the Administration's foreign-policy makers off the Navy's teak decks and make them airborne.

Last week W. Stuart Symington, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, put in the Air Forces' bid for recognition as the chief instrument of U.S. foreign policy in the air-power age. The Air Forces, said he, would send a flight of B-29 around the world "if the State Department approves." The thinly disguised purpose of the trip would be to "work out technical problems." But the real reason was the

Air Forces' concept of its own manifest destiny--either enforcing the peace under the United Nations or keeping the U.S. secure.

Far from strengthening U.S. diplomacy, the Air Forces' trigger-happiness was likely to embarrass it. State would have to be doubly careful now in approving the flight. What the U.S. clearly needed was a machinery for deciding upon a foreign policy and executing it--a well-oiled, smooth-running machine in which no foreign ear could hear the gears clashing.

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