The Pentagon Jungle (Cont'd)

When former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett had his say about the ammunition shortage, he leveled an accusing finger at U.S. Army Ordnance and the red-tape jungle in the Pentagon (TIME, April 20). Last week, from the depths of the jungle, Army spokesmen pointed right back. Their fingers were aimed at the Defense Secretary's chair, and the Truman-appointed civilians (including Lovett) who sat in it from the beginning of the Korean war.

The ranking pointer was Lieut. General George H. Decker, the Army's comptroller. On Sept. 27, 1950, said Decker, George Catlett Marshall (who had been Secretary of Defense for just six days) issued an order: "In preparation of budget estimates ... it will be assumed that . . . combat operations in Korea will be concluded by 30 June, 1951 . . ." From then on, the Defense Department always made its plans--for ammunition and everything else--on the assumption that the Korean war would be over within the fiscal year. During his term of office, Lovett reissued the Marshall directive with appropriate changes of dates. Not until Charles E. Wilson took over this year was the policy changed.

All this was too much for Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd, the Armed Services subcommittee's most dogged bird dog. "That is a very remarkable thing," Byrd exploded. "We are going into a war, and we permit somebody to say that that war is going to end on a certain date, and then the procurement department does not prepare for the war and the chiefs of staff are not consulted ... Is that the way the Department of Defense is run, where a vital question of war is to be determined by somebody else other than the chiefs of staff, and we stop getting ammunition or do not try to get it because we think that war is going to end on a certain date?"

General Decker tried to calm Byrd down. Secretary Marshall, he said, was working on certain ground rules laid down by the joint chiefs. And what were the ground rules? The joint chiefs, said General Decker, instead of planning how to win the Korean war, were trying to equalize the positions of the three services--so one would not be mobilized to a greater degree than another. At his winter home in Pinehurst, N.C., tired old (72) George Marshall recalled that his order "was based on the definite recommendations of the Chiefs of Staff, as presented to me by the chairman, General [Omar] Bradley."

Asked Kentucky's Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper: "Is it a fair statement to say these policy directives at the very outset almost inevitably led to the ammunition shortage?" Replied Decker: "I would say that's a fair statement."

This week the subcommittee will start writing its report. Unlike the U.S. military establishment, it has plenty of ammunition to work with, and the mounting frustration and anger of subcommittee members during the hearings indicated that the report would be loud.

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