Erasing the Obsolete

The installations that Secretary Mc-Namara is cutting away are a do-the-job mixture of the relatively new and the quite old. An Air Force photographic mission on Lookout Mountain at Los Angeles will be deactivated. Thirteen sites that had been specially constructed to launch early-model Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles, now obsolete and replaced by new Titans plus the solid-fuel Minuteman and Polaris rockets, will be wiped out. Sixteen radar stations that are antiquated in their equipment and cannot feasibly be worked into the integrated, highly sophisticated early-warning system upon which the U.S. and Canada are spending, and will continue to spend, many millions of dollars, are to be closed down. Some sprawling manned-aircraft installations, of diminishing usefulness in the reign of the guided missile, will go. So will four Army training bases (Camp Atterbury, Ind., Fort Custer, Mich., and Camp Parks and Camp San Luis Obispo, both in California) that have, in the absence of full-scale war, been inactive for months, and are now inhabited only by caretakers and cobwebs.

Four of the eleven U.S. Government shipyards are on the list. McNamara's choices were based on a slide-rule cost-performance analysis that indicated that, "in summary, Philadelphia stands out as the single best shipyard to retain under all factors evaluated, while Portsmouth and New York [Brooklyn] rate lowest as the shipyards rating retention." Next to Philadelphia, the analysis showed that Boston ranked as "most desirable to retain because of its proximity to the North Atlantic sailing routes and to ships home-ported in the area; and because [its elimination] produces the smallest savings."

Problem of History. McNamara's greatest public relations problem was in doing away with a fair number of installations that are, if nothing else, steeped in history. One was the Portsmouth, N.H., naval shipyard, which has been making American warships since the days of John Paul Jones. Since Portsmouth (pop. 27,800) depends almost entirely on the economic base provided by the shipyard (7,300 employees, an annual payroll of $61.6 million), McNamara put forth a ten-year phase-out schedule for the installation.

As for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, its lineage goes back to 1637. It was commanded between 1841 and 1843 by none other than Captain Matthew Perry. It fitted out the original Monitor during the Civil War; built the mighty U.S.S. Missouri for service in World War II; at one time employed some 71,000 persons; and even now, as an anachronism, provides jobs for 11,600.

6,600 Left. Also slated to end its life as a military installation is Fort Jay on Governors Island just half a mile off the southern tip of Manhattan. A shrewd Dutch settler purchased the island in 1637 from Indians for--accord ing to legend--two axheads, a string of beads and a few nails. Parts of Fort Jay still bear the marks of British shells from the American Revolution. Since 1946, it has been headquarters for the U.S. First Army, which is to be consolidated with the Second Army at Fort George Meade, Maryland.

Wherever possible, McNamara tried to ease the immediate economic impact on communities affected by shutdowns. He set up a committee, composed of representatives from eleven Government agencies, to study the problems of such communities, work with local officials in making the economic transition. Said he: "There is a social cost, and we plan to meet it." But it was nonetheless true that the social or even the economic cost was well worth paying as against the enormous price of a sprawling, unwieldy and antiquated system of military establishments.

After McNamara's cuts, the U.S. will still have no fewer than 6,600 military installations, and the Defense budget will still amount to $46.7 billion. That's a lot of defense.

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