At Last

At Baltimore on Sept. 25, 1952, Candidate Dwight Eisenhower gave his views on the nation's most pressing problem--defense policy. This was also the problem that five-star General Eisenhower knew most about. He listed "three personal convictions that I hold to be true. First, our defense program has suffered from lack of farsighted direction. Second, real unification of our armed forces is yet to be achieved. Third, our defense program need not and must not push us steadily toward economic collapse."

Last week the three convictions became a specific plan--the first rational defense policy the U.S. has had. The new plan is built around air-atomic power, and it faces up to the strategic prospect actually confronting the U.S., i.e., that the enemy has a choice of forcing either all-out atomic war or limited war upon this nation. The plan will cost less because it follows a principle laid down in Baltimore: "We cannot pretend to do everything in every field all the time."

The Inheritance. When he took office last January, Eisenhower inherited the Truman defense budget. Like previous Truman budgets, it was not shaped by the White House, or by the Secretary of Defense, or even by the Joint Chiefs of Staff acting as a unit. It was a combination of the requirements and goals of individual services--Army, Navy, Air Force--each trying to get as much money as it could. Nobody judged these claims in the light of an overall, supra-service plan based on the total military, political and economic interest of the U.S. Insofar as there was any standard for resolving conflicts and putting the budget together, the Joint Chiefs used what they called "the balanced-forces concept." This was a high-sounding name for the convenient but irrational practice of splitting the money in three roughly equal parts.

The Eisenhower Administration did not have time for a basic revision of the Truman defense budget. It made a few billion in cuts, mostly in the Air Force. These did not conform to any new general political-economic-military plan. Rather they were a result of finding specific soft spots in the Truman budget. Some of these cuts, for instance, were based on the assertion of Secretary Wilson that there was no use budgeting for planes that would not be produced in the budget period.

But housekeeping cuts were not what Eisenhower had in mind in the Baltimore speech. While they were being made, he ordered the Joint Chiefs to get busy on a basically new kind of budget. Last October they produced a "New Look," but it turned out to be the old kind of budget with some novel trimmings. Eisenhower and the National Security Council did not accept the phony New Look, sent it back to the services for further work.

Eisenhower's instruments of pressure on the services were Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Arthur Radford. Last week, with Wilson taking part in the discussions. Admiral Radford and the three service chiefs finished sketching out a defense program for 1956-58. Defense Department officials handed the sketch to the President, along with a draft of the 1955 defense budget.

Details of the new budget are top secret, but the main changes were made public.They are:

P: The Air Force buildup goal, previously set at 127 wings in 1955, will be expanded to 137 wings in 1957--only six fewer than the Truman Administration called for by 1955.

P: Army manpower (now 1,500,000) will be cut to about 1,000,000 by 1958, Marine manpower (now 260,000) to 190,000.

P: Navy manpower (now 780,000) will go down to 620,000. The Navy will take out of commission about 50 combatant ships, leaving some 350 warships.

P: The carving will begin promptly: Defense Secretary Wilson last week ordered the Army, Navy and Marine Corps to slice manpower 10% by the middle of 1956.

P: By 1958, the Air Force will be getting about half the total defense outlay.

Behind the Decisions. Implied in these decisions are some important propositions agreed upon by the chiefs:

P: The West must keep ahead of the Soviet Union in air-atomic power, both as a deterrent to big war and as a powerful weapon if deterrence fails.

P: Over the long run, U.S. ground troops abroad are less useful than their dollar equivalent in U.S. air power, and much more expensive than their military equivalent in European or Asian troops.

P: Since no great naval power menaces the free world,* some of the U.S. Navy's overwhelming preponderance in surface ships is superfluous.

Given these propositions, increased emphasis on air power was overdue. Given the enemy's capability to start small wars, conventional forces are needed to deal with them and to buck up the morale of allies who still think largely in terms of strength on the ground. Long-range Pentagon planners want to replace U.S. garrison troops now overseas with indigenous troops, but until European and Asian arming--and morale--are much further along, the U.S. will have to keep ground forces on the spot for political reasons.

This week, in a speech to the National Press Club, Admiral Radford outlined the new concept. He said:

"Our military task is complicated by the two requirements imposed upon us. We must be ready for tremendous, vast retaliatory and counteroffensive blows in event of a global war, and we must also be ready for lesser military actions short of all-out war . . .

It is obviously impossible for the U.S. to sustain forces which will enable us to station combat-effective units of superior strength every place where aggression might occur. If we tried to do this, we would ensure economic collapse. No, we cannot be strong everywhere simultaneously.

"Accordingly, we plan force levels which provide us mobile, versatile combat forces in readiness, and an adequate mobilization base. These strength levels will be of such magnitude that our allies can recognize both our determination to counter any aggression and our determination to support our national and international policies and commitments. At the same time, these levels will be those which are possible . . . over the long pull."

Nobody could be sure that the plan agreed upon last week was the best one possible. But at least it was a definite plan--not the result of interservice haggling disguised as a plan. Admiral Radford had summarily ended the haggling process.

An End in View. Out of the many reasons that went to elect Eisenhower, perhaps the overriding one was the hope that he could bring unity and rationality to the mingled political, military and economic problems of defense.

He had said in his Baltimore speech: "Such [armed-service] unity as we have achieved is too much form and too little of substance. With three services, in place of the former two, still going their separate ways, and with an overall civilian staff frequently unable to enforce corrective action, the end result has been not to remove duplication but to produce triplication.

"All this must be brought to an end."

The new budget plan puts the end in sight. The President, whose office makes him responsible for the interest of the whole nation, as against the interest of particular services, has imprinted the stamp of unity upon defense policy. From that act, both economy and a much stronger defense can follow.

* Admiral Robert B. Carney, Chief of Naval Operations, outspokenly dissents. In a recent speech, he said that the Soviet Union is "determined to ... challenge our position on the seas."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.