The Pentagon Jungle

"Colossal . . . terrifying . . . incomprehensible . . . ridiculous," said Senator Harry Byrd during last week's Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearings on the ammunition shortage. He was speaking of the Pentagon system. Continuing the investigation touched off last month (TIME, March 16 et seq.) by former Eighth Army Commander James A. Van Fleet, the subcommittee heard about "the system" from top Defense Department officials and ex-officials. Harry Byrd, who did most of the questioning, kept trying to pin responsibility to individuals, but after a long day's questioning, he growled: "We have not got a single name yet of anybody who has responsibility for this condition."

Ex-Defense Secretary Robert A. Lovett admitted that "from time to time . . . there were shortages [in Korea], and at some points it was critical." He told the subcommittee that he first learned of the shortages through rumors and through informal conversations with officers returning from Korea. That was in the autumn of 1951. A year later, after trying unsuccessfully to get the Army Department and the Army Chief of Staff to speed up production of short items, or even to admit that shortages existed, he finally "took the problem out of [Army] control and vested it in the hands of Mr. Hugh Dean, my special assistant. My patience was completely exhausted in trying to find out what the situation [was]."

Did Lovett think that a lack of funds was to blame for the ammunition short ages? No, said Lovett, "there was no shortage ... of funds for ammunition. [In November 1952 the Army] had over $2 billion unobligated from funds previously appropriated by the Congress."

What or who was to blame, then? Said Lovett, in a sharply phrased indictment of the Pentagon system: "Complicated, obsolete, time-wasting" procurement methods, "inaccurate" accounting methods dating back to "the days shortly following George Washington," and "splintering in the authority within the Army." As a result, he continued, it often took several months--287 days in one actual case--"from the time they [got] the funds until the time they [worked] out the contracts." After that, manufacturing could start.

Assistant Secretary Wilfred J. McNeil, who was Defense Department comptroller under Forrestal, Johnson, Marshall and Lovett and is still on the job under Wilson, agreed that the ammunition shortages were not caused by lack of funds. Schedules for adequate ammunition supplies were "fully financed," he said; the trouble was that the Army failed "to meet financed production schedules."

Byrd: What is the reason that that schedule was not met?

McNeil: ... It is a combination of compartmentation and system procedures and the lack of clear lines of authority.

The trouble, McNeil explained, is "the basic system." To illustrate "the system," he produced charts of the red-tape jungle of contract-placing. "There are people going home tired every night with unfinished work," he said, "yet I feel we have too many [people in the Pentagon]. Why do we have too many? I think those charts tell the story."

McNeil's charts showed bewildering mazes of bureaus and sub-bureaus through which procurement orders had to pass. Kentucky's Senator John Sherman Cooper studied the charts, announced that by his count an ammunition order "would go through 42 different departments and almost 200 operations" before contracts were actually placed. Senator Byrd asked McNeil how far the order would travel in the process. Said McNeil: "The speedometer reading on that is 10,000 miles, I am told."*

Every one of the operations in the mazes was originally set up with some laudable purpose, such as the elimination

*A parallel to Pentagon red tape was the drill for loading, firing and reloading a musket in the British army in the 17th century. The drill was designed to eliminate individual error and to achieve uniform rate of fire. Its 31 orders, as recorded by Robert Graves in Sergeant Lamb's America: "March with your rest in your hand! March, and with your musket carry your rest! Unshoulder your musket! Poise your musket! Join your rest to your musket! Take forth your Match! Blow off your coal! Cock your match! Try your match! Guard, blow, and open your priming-pan! Charge your musket! Draw forth your scouring stick! Shorten your scouring stick! Put in your bullet and ram home! Present! Give fire! Dismount your musket! Uncock your match! Return your match! Clear your pan! Prime your pan! Shut your pan! Cast off your loose powder! Blow off your loose powder! Cast about your musket! Trail your rest! Open your charge! Withdraw your scouring stick! Shorten your scouring stick! Return your scouring stick! Recover your musket!" of graft or waste or human error. But in sum, they add up to inefficiency and delay. After listening to the week's testimony, Senator Byrd summed up the picture as he saw it: "I believe the record shows clearly that there were shortages in Korea. I think it shows that, to meet Korean requirements, we have drained United States stocks dangerously. I think the ammunition investigation will be a big factor in effecting a wholesale reorganization in the Pentagon, especially in the business and administrative functions of the Army Department."

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