"Imaginary Weaknesses"

Most defense experts concede that Robert McNamara's Pentagon functions with the smooth efficiency of a computer. On the other hand, his critics point out, even a computer can make a mistake. By miscalculating the full demands of the Viet Nam war, they contend, the Defense Department has weakened the nation's worldwide commitments and run dangerously short of combat-ready troops. At a press conference aimed at answering his critics, most notably the Senate's Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee Chairman John Stennis and the New York Times, McNamara last week countered with a cool, 30-page review of U.S. defense capability and some not-so-cool comments of his own.

"Sick & Tired." By March 1, said McNamara, the U.S. had 215,000 men in South Viet Nam -- 10,000 more than the previously announced total. This force includes 15% of all active Army and Marine Corps personnel, and it could grow to 350,000 "without call-up of reserves, generally extending terms of service, or withdrawal of units from Europe or Korea." If there were another emergency elsewhere in the world, he said, the U.S., by drawing on reserves and active units, could deploy an additional nine divisions (350,000 men) abroad within three months.

When a German newsman seemed to imply that the buildup in Viet Nam had impaired the U.S. Seventh Army's combat capacity in West Germany, McNamara declared: "It is absolutely untrue, and you are the first that ought to know it. I'm sick and tired of having implications made that we have drawn down the forces in Western Europe when we haven't." McNamara lost his temper again when Cowles publications' Washington Correspondent Clark Mollenhoff, a longtime foe, persistently accused him of dodging questions about an adverse report by the Preparedness Subcommittee that the Pentagon has refused to release. The Defense Secretary said bitterly: "I unfortunately haven't been able to dodge all the rocks you have thrown at me for five years."

Nuclear Clout. In his eagerness to depict the nation's true strength, McNamara even made public such previously classified information as the fact that the number of warheads available to the Strategic Alert Force will have increased from 836 in 1961 to 2,600 by next June, with a tripling of megatonnage. His purpose in publishing such figures, he explained, was "simply to insure that none of us, friend or foe, miscalculates this nation's capability to fulfill its treaty commitments. I can't imagine anything more dangerous."

As for his decision not to mobilize the reserves, McNamara admitted that "to carry on as we have does put strain on the department." He argued, nonetheless, that it was preferable to keep the reserves intact (or as Lyndon Johnson puts it, "to keep some chips in the pot") in case of some other emergency. The armed forces are expanding by 30,000 a month through enlistments and the draft. An added argument against mobilization may well be that the Administration is fearful of losing votes thereby in the November elections.

McNamara concluded that the U.S. should be proud because "no other nation in history could have deployed so many forces so fast, so far, with so little strain" and still have "a great reservoir" of strength left over in case of other challenges. "We are a peculiar people," he said. "We seem to take a masochistic pleasure in flailing ourselves with imaginary weaknesses. I have tried to destroy some of these today."

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