Atom-Age Army

"I am not going out to write and raise a rumpus and things," said Lieut. General James M. ("Slim Jim") Gavin, 50, Army Research and Development chief, when he announced his retirement from the service seven months ago, after losing his battle to get a healthy boost in his 1959 budget (TIME, Jan. 13). This week LIFE published the second of two installments on Gavin's quickly written 304-page book, War and Peace in the Space Age (Harper; $5), a rumpus-raising attack on his old enemies and a sharp accusation that the Army is in bad shape technologically because the defense effort has been too concentrated on the Air Force. And this, he says, is doubly tragic, because: 1) limited wars using tactical atomic weapons are still more likely than the massive air-atomic one for which the Strategic Air Command is ready, and 2) SAC's big bombers will be useless in the missile age that is almost upon the world.

The manned atomic bomber, declares Paratrooper Gavin, will be out of business even before the intercontinental ballistic missile is on hand to replace it. Date for the bomber's "early obsolescence": the moment effective Russian "surface-to-air missiles carrying nuclear warheads are on the site in numbers." If such deterrent protection is to be retained, argues Gavin, "we will have to step up missile production so as to have, at an early date, an arsenal of combat-ready, mobile, intermediate and long-range missile systems."

Other targets at which Gavin fires:

EX-DEFENSE SECRETARY CHARLES E. WILSON. Gavin quotes an unnamed service chief on Wilson: "The most uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so." His "deception and duplicity," says Gavin, let him conceal slashes in combat-ready divisions by creating "Wilson" divisions out of paper groups of troops as far apart as Fort Benning, Ga. and the Panama Canal Zone. Wilson made good a foolish assurance to Congress that no additional soldiers were needed for Formosan defense, charges Gavin, by shipping groups over without shoulder patches.*

U.S. INDUSTRY. Industrial pressure, he charges, is partly responsible for "hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on obsolete weapons."

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT. The Defense Department civil servants who, more permanent in the Pentagon than either politically appointed Secretaries or rotated military career officers, pervert the decision-making machinery. Though he does not name Defense Comptroller Wilfred J. McNeil, Gavin bombs the fiscal officer in the Pentagon who often rejects projects without understanding of military needs.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower was "out of touch" with technological advances in weaponry, says Gavin, as far back as SHAPE days.

Such harassing fire, the restless reaction of a hair-trigger combat commander caught in the paper and politics of the peacetime Pentagon, tends to obscure the best of his book and the special brand of Army "wild blue yonder" that is the best of Jim Gavin. After a hard-eyed assessment of a U.S. Army that could be stopped by the "primitive" Red Chinese in Korea, he makes a passionate demand for the money and decisions to provide the West with an atom-armed and airmobile fighting force that can hold down Communist threats, big and little, by being ready to fight anywhere in the world at any moment.

By 1965 he foresees hemisphere-sized battlefields ("Africa is the key to the defense of Europe"), upon which infantrymen, armed with shoulder-fired nuclear guns, will be deployed and supplied by airplane, supported by 1,500-mile missile batteries mobile enough to avoid destruction, provided with observation by robot planes and reconnaissance satellites, screened by "sky cavalry" of well-armed helicopters that can easily hop across any terrain.

Impatient at the tendency of any peacetime armed force to think only of "what it did best in its last war," Gavin compares the Maginot Line, the French elaboration of their World War I trench tactics, with the present-day U.S. preoccupation with bombers and bases. A peace-or-bomb world would be a simpler place to live in, says he, but various Communist aggressions since the Korean war prove that it is not that kind of world. And once his much loved Army has added its potential to the strength of bombers, "we must learn to think of the earth as a tactical entity and of space as the next great strategic challenge."

-"Gavin is just another man who has an exaggerated idea of his own intelligence," cracked Wilson last week, informing Detroit reporters that he does not plan to read the book. "I never had much to do with General Gavin. He just wasn't that far along in the thing."

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