The Power For Now

(See Cover)

In the shifting dynamics of the cold war, the Kremlin, oft-defeated, is turning to a new offensive technique: "missile diplomacy." Every day of every week Moscow rolls out pronouncements about the successes of its experiments with intercontinental ballistic missiles. In the day of the missile, says Russia's Boss Nikita Khrushchev, Europe might become "a veritable cemetery," and the U.S. is "just as vulnerable." His own recurring theme, tossed off at cocktail parties, pounded home by Moscow radio and repeated last week: "Bombers are useless, compared to rockets."

Khrushchev's line, backed by the U.S.S.R.'s scientific triumph with Sputniks I and II, is a bold and daring line indeed, and the spearhead of what may well be modern diplomacy's most brazen propaganda gambit. For if the Communists, whose missilery is a threat of the near future, should succeed by big talk in persuading U.S. allies, and the U.S. itself, that the day of the bomber is over, they could win for Communism a cold-war victory over the most powerful armed force ever assembled--an armed force that in the here and now is the free world's only deterrent to major aggression and, in the familiar words of its weather-beaten air men, a loaded pistol pointed squarely at Khrushchev's head.

The pistol is the thermonuclear strike force of the manned bombers and fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force, backed up by the Navy's far-ranging carrier planes and submarines. Operating out of 270-odd air bases in a score of countries, this thermonuclear strike force is poised all day, every day, to deliver a 360DEG assault (see map) against the 37,500-mile borders of the Soviet Union, each single aircraft capable of unloading on target the mighty equivalent of all the bombs dropped by all nations during World War II. Unlike the Kremlin's-headline-making experimental missiles, the U.S. thermonuclear strike force is lethal in the fighting man's sense of what is operational and what is now.

Says General Thomas Dresser White, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force: "The very real ability of our long-range bomber force is understood by the Kremlin. The Russians' understanding of this primary military truth has caused them to postpone their aggressive plans until such time as they might be able to alter the balance of power in their favor."

A Matter of Batting. In the midst of Russia's dangerous mixture of bluster and acknowledged technological performance, the free world can take considerable satisfaction from the fact that the U.S. Air Force is in command of a brilliant, unobtrusive West Pointer with a flair for understatement. Tommy White, 56, a tall, austere airman with a ramrod-back carriage, well knows the Russian danger, well knows the need to tighten and use the bomber force-in-being to best advantage while the U.S. brings in its missile force-to-be.

He is at one time a thoroughgoing professional and a global intellectual, a military and civilian thinker who, during off-duty hours on overseas tours, studied Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, even Chinese. During a South Pacific tour, his carousing comrades came upon him at night, studying by candlelight a book called Micronesian Languages, When he was an Air Force assistant attache in Moscow, he wrote some of the best air-intelligence reports about the Soviet Union that the U.S. had ever received. As a longtime Pentagon staff officer, he managed to steer clear of cliques and cabals, and win a reputation for sheer performance, for all-out mastery of Air Force doctrine and operations. "White," says a former commander, "has the ability to step back for a long look. He is not a home-run hitter. He's just the league's leading batter."

The Long Rifles. Tommy White's quiet but firm drive for perfection, his professional sense of urgency, are reflected at every level of the Air Force's 25,000-plane command--including 14,000 jets, 12,500 of them strike planes--to the point that his 900,000-man force lives all day, every day, by the doctrine of instant readiness. At Strategic Air Command bases from Okinawa to Limestone, Me. to Morocco, one-third of SAC's force of about 1,500 nuclear 6-47 medium jet bombers. 200 6-52 heavy jet bombers ("the long rifles") and 300 6-36 propjet bombers squat on their ramps on 24-hour alert, with tanks topped with fuel and nuclear weapons preloaded. SAC's new commander, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, has decreed that one-third of SAC's planes must be ready to take off within 15 minutes after an alarm. Nowhere was the 15-minute way of life more in evidence last week than in SAC's "front line," at the B-47 base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco.

In Sidi Slimane's dining hall, in briefing rooms and sleeping huts, the 6-473' three-man alert crews waited, always a few minutes' jeep ride from their aircraft, always together. ("It's like being married to these guys," says one young copilot, "only worse.") As Klaxon horns blared harshly and insistently through the sun-dried air, the combat crews dropped what they were doing and piled into their jeeps. (One coveralled pilot got notice of the alert when the warning light went on over the Catholic chapel altar, where he was at prayer.) Down premarked roadways they headed for their planes, where ground crews were already at work. Methodically they went down their take-off check lists (the long preflight checks had been done hours before, were done anew daily) and got ready to take off with a whine and a roar. Opening padlocked metal containers and black satchels, the combat crews checked the emergency war plans they had learned by heart in daily briefings in the U.S. and in Morocco, photographic and radar pictures of their preassigned targets in Russia, routes of approach and getaway, estimates of enemy defenses and radar capabilities, the latest of the global Strategic Air Command's four-hourly reports on the weather over the Soviet Union (cloudy to overcast more than half the time, necessitating radar bombing). Sidi Slimane's alert force met its deadline.

For Men & Planes. The new 15-minute alert, in force at all SAC bases, is based on Air Force estimates that 15 minutes is all the warning the U.S.--or bases overseas--would be likely to get before a missile strike. It requires a proficiency and efficiency that airmen would have thought fantastic only two years ago. Yet next year, through an ingenious system of shifting and resting planes and crews, SAC intends to have two-thirds of its planes on a constant 15-minute alert. Meanwhile, the vanguard of General O. P. ("Opie") Weyland's Tactical Air Command lighter B66 twin-jet bombers, 6-458 and F-100D supersonic fighter-bombers meets a five-minute deadline.

The ability to get his planes into the air fast is one of Tommy White's methods of exploiting the potentialities of the Air Force to the fullest to meet the new day's threats. There are other ways to make the most of airpower, and the U.S. is aware of all of them. A year ago, when the Russians threatened to send volunteers to exploit the Suez crisis, the U.S. sent Moscow a private hands-off warning --and sufficient SAC bombers took the air to make the warning effective. The Russians quit talking about volunteers. SAC's bombers can be moved to forward bases to make political points (and to be read on enemy radar) just as the Navy's fleets can steam ostentatiously to show the flag. As an instrument of keeping the peace in the cold war, bombers still have advantages--unlike launched missiles, they can be recalled, can be ordered to shift targets in flight. And currently, the Air Force's bombers pack a bigger explosive wallop than programed intercontinental missiles.

Herpetology & St. John's. The man who bosses today's jet and missile Air Force was born in Walker, Minn, in 1901--just two years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. His maternal great-grandfather was Charles Dresser, the Episcopal minister who performed the marriage of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. His father, John Chanler White, an Episcopal minister of Springfield, Ill. and later a bishop, encouraged Tommy to go to church once weekly, to join the Boy Scouts. Tommy's earliest interest was catching snakes at his family's summer cottage at Lake Paw Paw, Mich, and taking them home in a peach basket. ("We always wondered what happened to that snake that got away in the Pullman," says his sister.) His second interest was foreign nations. His third interest was organizing the neighborhood kids for military drill, in which he was always the commanding officer.

At 13, Tommy White moved on to St. John's Military Academy (Episcopal) in Delafield, Wis., made several athletic teams and the presidency of the graduating class, was editor-in-chief of the 1918 St. John's yearbook. The Trumpeter. Barely 17. he was one of the youngest cadets ever admitted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. At the age of 18, graduating 148th out of 270 in one of World War I's speedup classes, he was one of the youngest cadets ever commissioned.

Ichthyology & the Reds. Thanks to an unmilitary, scholarly commanding general named John Palmer, Lieut. White, while stationed in Panama as an infantry subaltern, got interested in both free-soaring thought and the young, free-soaring Air Corps. In 1924 he got an assignment to flight school at Brooks Field, Texas, won his wings.

In 1927 Tommy White packed his silk scarf, leather helmet and spurs (then Air Corps uniform items) and went to Peking as a language officer to study Chinese. This was a puzzling assignment that White still does not quite understand, but he made the most of it. He became proficient at Mandarin, even compiled a Chinese-English dictionary of military terms; he also got to know some White Russian refugees and studied Russian. Duly noted in his record, this helped get him assigned, at the age of 32, as assistant military attache at the U.S. embassy at Moscow.

There he piloted Ambassador William C. Bullitt in anO-38F observation plane for hours over targets that his Air Force was later to lock in--Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea. There he made his first headlines. While White was flying Bullitt into Leningrad one day, the )0-38F engine iced up, whereupon White pancaked into a field, hit a few rough spots, went over on his back. Ambassador Bullitt wired President Roosevelt: "Landed upside down. Got out right side up." Later the Russians gave White a Soviet military pilot's license. ("Tommy," quips a Washington wag, "is the only card-carrying member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.")

As the world moved toward World War II, Tommy White built up more professional qualifications, more professional regard. In the U.S. he graduated from Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, Ala., the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Kans. Abroad he served as an assistant air attache to Italy and Greece, as commander of a military air mission to Brazil (where he spoke Portuguese). Everywhere Tommy White went, from arctic Russia to Brazil, he went out fishing, collecting rare specimens, discoursing to his British wife Constance Millicent Rowe (his second) on the delights of ichthyology. White would catch the fish, getting soaked to the skin; Constance would paint them in watercolors. But when Pearl Harbor struck, said Constance, "I knew our happy days were over."

MacArthur & Morale. During World War II, the Air Corps flew to world glory, but Tommy White, increasingly and reluctantly tabbed as a plans-and-organization type, missed out on most of the cheers. For 21 months in 1942-44 he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations, then Chief of Staff of the Stateside Third Air Force that "staged the flights of U.S. aircraft across the North and South Atlantic to Europe. ("If we don't hit Ascension, my wife gets a pension.") In September 1944 he was assigned as deputy commander of MacArthur's Thirteenth ("Jungle") Air Force in the South Pacific, but MacArthur grounded all personnel with knowledge of U.S. codes and advance strategic plans--and that included Tommy White. In June 1945 he got command of the Seventh Air Force at Okinawa, but his chances of glory were overtaken by the peace.

Airman White, working unobtrusively but brilliantly, won a different kind of war record as a stern, straight officer who thought primarily in terms of teamwork and morale. In the South Pacific he was the first general officer to enforce a longstanding order that enlisted men get flooring for their tents before the officers. Another day he requested a commendation for an Army lieutenant who shooed him away ("You goddam bastard") when he ventured, while out fishing one day, much too close to a Japanese-held area. His friends never have forgotten that he was always willing to trade his liquor rations for powdered ice cream.

Soon after the war Tommy White's reputation as an organizer got to be such that senior officers began to peg him as a future Air Chief of Staff. And when White got command of the Fifth Air Force in Japan to prove himself as a commander, he had time only for one of his two spare-time pursuits. Thus it was that he learned little more than one sentence of Japanese--Kono kawa ka? Sakana imasu ka?--which means roughly, "Are there any fish in this river?"

The Red Pearl Harbor. In late 1948 Tommy White went back to staff duties in the Pentagon and to a changing airpower scene. World War II had given place to cold war, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Sunday-punch doctrine moved on to the doctrine of deterrence. In the Berlin airlift, the Air Force and its allies developed a crucial new political mission of feeding 2,500,000 people, created a starting point for Communism's decay. Although Korea had been a classic misuse (because limited and timid) of combat airpower, the Air Force was able at least to boost its budget from $3.5 billion in 1950 to $15 billion in 1953 to add 58 new wings and build new bases from Iceland to the Persian Gulf. But even as the U.S. airpower ring closed in on the Communists, the U.S.S.R. was developing what the Pentagon knows as thermonuclear capability. As he rose through key staff positions in Air Force headquarters, Tommy White--Air Force Director of Legislation and Liaison (1948-50), Air Force member of the Joint Strategic Survey Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1950), Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (1951-53), Vice Chief of Staff (1953-57)--invariably made it his business to emphasize how the Soviets were catching up.

Last July General Nathan Twining, third Chief of Staff of the USAF, was promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His Vice Chief of Staff, Tommy White--nonprofessionals had hardly heard his name--was appointed in his place. He came in at a bad time. President Eisenhower was talking reduction of forces, Congress was trimming $2.4 billion from the defense budget, the country at large was happily oblivious of the fact that Russian airpower was catching up. In his low-pressure style White rolled with the economy punch and concentrated on sprucing up his organization.

His key move was to send for General Curtis Emerson LeMay, the blue-jawed, battle-tested boss of SAC, to install him as Vice Chief of Staff. Some Pentagon types warned White that tough-fisted Curt LeMay might cause more trouble in the Pentagon china shop than he was worth --"Stay away from Omaha" they warned him--but West Pointer White and Ohio

State's LeMay turned out to be a powerful combination. Today, when White spends most of his time in Joint Chiefs planning and budget sessions, it is Curt LeMay who is often operating head of the Air Force --and, good soldier that he is, he operates in White's way.*

The Force-in-Being. Tommy White's day starts at 7:10 o'clock with pushups in the living room of his duplex quarters in Fort Myer, Va., takes him early (8:25) to work in Suite 4E924 of the Pentagon, where he is soon stirring up memorandums and directives--green for LeMay, pink for able Air Force Secretary James Douglas, white for his staff. Around him hangs the sense of illustrious predecessors: husky, flamboyant "Hap" Arnold; sinewy, battle-tried "Tooey" Spaatz; slim Hoyt Vandenberg, the old flyer with a 50-mission crush in his cap; Nate Twining, the wise old pilot who led the USAF from props to jets. There Tommy White does his broad-gauge best with what he has. But nobody in the Pentagon knows better than he that he has his problems too. Among them:

Dispersal: SAC's and TAC's bases are overconcentrated, present big targets to Soviet air and missile power. Item: SAC's March AFB at Riverside, Calif, has 90 6-475 and 40 KC-97 tankers, and only one usable runway to get them all into the air come an emergency. The USAF needs six more bases right now, another 100 as soon as Tommy White can get them.

Tankers: The Air Force is scandalously short of the jet tankers needed for midair refueling at high altitude and high speed. Today SAC's B-525 must come down from 50,000 ft. to 18,000 ft. and from 650 m.p.h. to a stall-warning 250 m.p.h. to hook on to SAC's prop-driven KC-97 tankers (the equivalent of Boeing's old airline Stratocruisers). Remedy: a speedup of supply of the KC-135 jet tankers now dribbling into the Air Force at the rate of about four a month.

Manpower: The Air Force is suffering an erosion of manpower. World War II pilots are aging, and a dismaying number of bright youngsters are getting out. Between 1953 and 1956 SAC lost 90,175 skilled technicians, mostly to industry, at a replacement and retraining cost of $1.7 billion; many of these experts have since returned to SAC as their companies' "tech-reps" (civilian technical representatives), and they do much the same as their old jobs at about the salary level of SAC Commanding General Power's $16,851 a year.

Airplanes. Present delivery of B-523 is at the rate of 17 a month; SAC, still using some 300 obsolescent B-365, considers this painfully slow.

In the long-range department, Tommy White and staff must find time to work out the problems of phasing in the force-soon-to-be. "We must constantly re-evaluate and update our thinking," says White, and he does a first-rate job of re-evaluating and updating his own. In SAC's underground headquarters at Offutt AFB near Omaha, teams of officers are already hatching war plans and weapons requirements for manned aircraft and ballistic missiles for next year and each successive year up to 1961. Out of its complex of laboratories, flight-test centers and missile firing ranges, Air Research and Development Command has let R. & D. contracts to no fewer than 160 universities and 1,520 industrial companies in the Air Force's traditional emphasis on private enterprise.

Planning translates itself into hardware. This week the first B-52E, an improved version of the B-52, will go to work for SAC; soon will come the B-526, designed to give the alert force 30% more range. The Air Force has contracted for 30 test supersonic delta-wing B58 bombers for phasing in beside the medium B-473. Already SAC has its first operational intercontinental guided missile: Snark, a lumbering air-breather that cannot break the sound barrier but can dump a thermonuclear payload (as it proved in a flight test last week) on a target less than five miles in diameter at a range of 5,000 miles. A really hot Air Force prospect is Rascal, an air-to-ground missile for firing from B-47s that can hit a target at supersonic speed and 100-mile range. One of Tommy White's biggest decisions to come: whether to develop another round of bombers to replace the B-58, or to wait for operational ballistic missiles.

This week, even as the Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile Atlas awaits its third flight test at Cape Canaveral, Fla., a $40 million industry to make Atlas is already in pilot production; the SAC teams that will fire Atlas are already in training at Air Force Missileman Major General Ben A. Schriever's headquarters in California. The Atlas' first field unit was recently activated as the ist ballistic Missile Division, U.S.A.F. The argument between the bomber generals and the missile generals has been overrated. Says Bomber General LeMay: '.'We're not wedded to the bomber in this organization. We're wedded to getting the job done. The better the tool, the better we like it." Says Missile General Ben Schriever: "The operational force will be trained. The force will be ready."

Force for Space. Beyond that, Tommy White must ever look ahead with hard-headed realism to the day when the U.S.'s force-to-be must move operationally into space. "The Air Force," he says, "has been pioneering for many years to project man into space. We airmen see and are exploring an extension of the possibilities and potential." The Air Force needs to get into space, not as an area for headlines but as a vantage point to study such hardheaded items as meteorology, geodesy, radio communications. The Air Force must know how radar waves act in space, how nuclear warheads will explode in space to prepare for future battles in space, i.e., to knock down the enemy's missiles. Also, the Air Force is working beyond ballistic missiles to develop glide missiles--weapons that follow a ballistic trajectory through space, break back into the atmosphere under control, dodge antimissile missiles and put an H-bomb on the target. Then, perhaps, there will be the fantastic reality of manned missiles.

In this new kind of wild blue yonder, Tommy White must constantly remind his officers and himself of the operational and the now. "When a weapon has been proved," he says, "it will be incorporated into the arsenal of the Air Force and trusted with our security, but only then." He also presses the need for the kind of defense organization that the leap into the future will need. "If those trends continue," he says, "the day would come when all three services would have the same capabilities and limitations--and all attempting to do the same jobs. If that happens, we certainly would find it advisable to standardize uniforms and streamline the organization."

The Special Quality. The Air Force has a unique flexibility derived from its transition, in 50 years, from a corps of box-kite aviators and balloonists peering out of wicker baskets, to greying-haired crewcuts in G-suits boning up on targets as a matter of ethics, arming city-killing bombs as a matter of routine ("We know what they can do," says one airman, "so we're peace lovers"), mastering planes experimental one day, obsolescent the next.

The Air Force has a unique built-in enthusiasm derived, perhaps, out of what its jet pilots see, hear and feel as they sweep silently between the curvature of the earth and the glistening stars. "All the gunk is below you," is the way one supersonic fighter pilot puts it.

"The history of America," Teddy Roosevelt once said, "is now the central feature of the history of the world; the world has set its face hopefully toward our democracy; and, O my fellow-citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country, but ... of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind." Says the Air Force's precise General White: "We must hold ready, night and day, for every night and day of every year . . . Deterrence is essentially a state of mind."

* Who escaped from his Pentagon office last week long enough to make record hops in a KC-135 jet tanker from the U.S. to Buenos Aires and return. First record: Westover Air Force Base, Mass, to Buenos Aires over a long-distance 6,350-mile course without refueling. Second record: from Buenos Aires to Washington in the record time of 11 hr. 5 min. 8/10 sec.

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