Sunday Punch?

This week, 32,000 U.S. troops will begin dropping in parachutes or landing in troop-carrier planes on the green hills around Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall, N.C. Jet fighters will whisk overhead, giving them air cover. Cargo planes will fly in with all their supplies, for "Operation Swarmer" is designed to prove that a combat area, e.g., an island base for strategic bombers, can be taken and held by airborne troops entirely supplied by air.

Operation Swarmer will also demonstrate something more important: the nation's unpreparedness. The simulated attack on a peaceful section of North Carolina will involve just about all the Sunday punch the U.S. can mobilize in the first critical hours after a cold war becomes hot.

The 32,000 ground troops in Swarmer will be the 82nd Airborne Division (now at 75% strength), the 11th Airborne Division (down to two regiments), and their headquarters, supply and engineer troops. Opposing them will be one regimental combat team of the partially ready 3rd Infantry Division and a tank battalion.

The only other U.S. troops anywhere to be found are all tied up. They are two half-strength combat-ready Marine divisions, one on the East Coast, one on the West; the 2nd Army Division, widely deployed over the U.S. and wholly unready; and five divisions on occupation duty (four in Japan and one in Germany) which could not be counted as available. One armored "command" (the equivalent of a regiment) is ready. The U.S.'s other troops are 27 National Guard divisions, but the best that could be hoped of them is that most could be made ready by a year from the outbreak of war.

For Operation Swarmer the Air Force has assembled virtually all the troop-carrier and cargo planes that would be available if the U.S. were attacked this week. Nevertheless, the Air Force's able, 43-year-old Lieut. General Lauris ("Larry") Norstad, in command, has had to tailor his plans to his restricted fleet of aircraft, dropping one regiment at a time on the North Carolina countryside.

It has taken the Army and Air Force nearly four months to set up Swarmer. The U.S. has no war headquarters to direct such mock warfare, much less run a real war. Norstad had to borrow his headquarters supply command from the New York Port of Embarkation.

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