Bombs, Bottlenecks & Baloney

On the periphery of the moral and philosophical debate about Viet Nam, a hot little skirmish flared last week over the Administration's practical prosecution of the war.

It began quietly enough when House Republican Leader Gerald Ford gave reporters a run-of-the-mimeograph release charging that the U.S. was "running short of bombs despite all the billions we have voted for defense" and that this clearly showed "shocking mismanagement" by the Defense Department. Ford also accused the Administration of creating a "national scandal" by allowing a shipping backup to slow materiel deliveries to U.S. troops in Viet Nam.

Ford's attack attracted little public attention until newsmen asked Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen what he thought about it. Dirksen, who had been en route to Mexico City with the President when Ford made his charges, made no attempt to hide his Olympian disapproval. "You don't," he said acerbically, "demean the Chief Magistrate of your country at a time like this when the war is on. You stand up to be counted." Dirksen subsequently tried to minimize his differences with Ford.

However, like most fellow Republicans, Dirksen has consistently defended the Administration's conduct of the war-while planning to emphasize as a campaign issue Democratic dissent and disarray over Viet Nam. Resorting to semantics, Dirksen allowed: "He uses the word mismanagement. I thought perhaps 'misjudgment' might be a better term."

Statistical Barrage. "Baloney" was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's word for it. In an adroit appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, McNamara dismissed Ford's charges as "completely misleading." He also refuted a New York Times story quoting unidentified sources in Saigon as saying that U.S. air raids had been curtailed because of a lack of bombs and bomb parts.

Characteristically unleashing a barrage of statistics, McNamara said that the U.S. has an "inventory" of 331,000 tons of conventional bombs, of which 61,000 tons are in Southeast Asia. Last month some 50,000 tons--25% more than originally planned--were dropped in 4,700 sorties. The Pentagon plans to use 638,000 tons of bombs in Viet Nam in 1966 alone, 40% of the amount used against Germany in Africa and Europe from mid-1942 until the end of World War II and 91% of the total dropped in the entire 37-month Korean War. The recent reduction in bombing runs, McNamara pointed out, occurred because "political disorders" in Saigon slowed ground operations throughout South Viet Nam. Nevertheless, he said, there would certainly be "an increase in the extent and intensity of the conflict" in coming weeks.

Fertilizer Deal. In fact, allied air force commanders in South Viet Nam can draw from ample stockpiles of bombs--though some specific categories, notably 750-pounders, which B-52s have used so effectively against Viet Cong entrenchments, are in short supply. Officers in the field concede that the U.S. has recently cut back on some of its "preplanned bombing strikes"--missions that are called on the slightest suspicion of Communist military activity in an area. However, military men in Saigon say they might have curtailed those raids anyway, since they were not causing enough measurable damage to be worthwhile.

Nevertheless the question of bomb supplies was a sensitive issue. The Defense Department had admitted earlier this month that it had to buy back 5,570 bombs sold in 1964 as surplus to a German firm that planned to extract the nitrates for fertilizer. The bombs were sold for $1.70 each and repurchased for $21 apiece--a bargain, by Pentagon reasoning, since they now cost around $400 apiece to make.

"Never in History." As for Ford's criticism of the supply bottleneck, McNamara told the Senate committee: "It is absurd. We are supplying fresh meat and fresh vegetables to feed our troops. We are supplying 9.2 pounds per man per day of PX supplies. How could you talk of a shipping shortage under those conditions?" The Defense Secretary also pointed out that the U.S. had moved 100,000 men 10,000 miles in less than four months--a feat unprecedented in military logistics. There are now 325,000 combat-ready U.S. troops in Southeast Asia, 245,000 of them already committed to the war in Viet Nam, with more than 50,000 others aboard battle vessels offshore. "In history," said McNamara, "never has any other nation--and never has the U.S.--carried such great military strength with so little burden on its society."

President Johnson took the cries of shortage and mismanagement in folksy stride. At his press conference, he drawled comfortably: "We recognize that every day you do not have all you want, where you want it, when you want it in an operation as big as the Government conducts. I ran out of lead pencils last night in my night-reading about 2 o'clock. I wondered why they didn't sharpen some that were there; they had all broken off. But there was nobody around to criticize, so I had to get up and go to my coat pocket and get a new pencil." He admitted that there have been predictable problems of supply in Viet Nam and that they would never be completely solved. Indeed, said Johnson, "it is going to be increasingly difficult as we carry on this effort so far from home."

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