Backing Away?

The Pentagon was quick to catch the note in the President's press conference last week which indicated that Ike was less enthusiastic about the need for prompt reorganization of the Defense establishment than he had sounded in his State of the Union message (TIME, Jan. 20). "My own convictions are rather fixed," Ike told the newsmen mildly. (General Eisenhower came back from World War II convinced that U.S. defense needed "central planning--the essence of unity in the armed forces.") But when a reporter asked last week whether he was still in that fight, Ike seemed to back away. Furthermore, it was increasingly clear that Defense Secretary Neil McElroy was in no hurry to present to the President a specific reorganization plan. McElroy's big move last week: to call for advice on reorganization from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Nathan Twining, and from ex-J.C.S. Chairmen Admiral Arthur Radford and General Omar Bradley.

In this kind of climate the Defense Department announced a decision as grave as any that Neil McElroy has yet made: the vast, complex job of building a weapons system to intercept and destroy an attacking missile will be split in effect between two hotly competitive services. The Army will expand its Nike series with a contra-missile called Nike Zeus, and the Air Force will develop the missile radar-detection system to go with it. Both will be under McElroy's missile boss, William Holaday, at least until McElroy's pet project, an Advanced Research Projects Agency, gets under way. McElroy did not specify which service would operate the weapons system once it was developed, but the split-up of a development project that was, in fact, a single problem seemed an odd way to get efficiency--unless McElroy could find a way to pool the best brains of the Army and Air Force for the project.

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