Carrots & Fire Tongs

"Now the cleverest thing I ever did," said the White Knight, "was inventing a new pudding during the meat course . . . [But] I don't believe that pudding ever will be cooked. And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent."

--Through the Looking-Glass.

Everyone hoped that one of the principal results of the armed services merger would be a neat, well-rounded military program. Congress intended it to be that way; when it wrote the merger act, it specifically directed the new Military Establishment to produce such a program. Congress, so most people thought, would merely take the program and fit it into budgetary limits. Everything was going to be in apple-pie order.

Horse-trading. The fact that the program has turned out to be far from neat and entirely different has left some citizens nonplussed. But the explanation is fairly simple. Actually, Congress never had any intention of letting the Military Establishment tell it what to do. Like any other national program, this one, in the end, was going to be put together by the usual method of horse-trading, wrangling and compromise.

Did this method insure getting the best of all possible defense programs? Critics of Congress pointed to the lawmakers' ignorance of a highly specialized business* and to the fact that politics were bound to color their views; e.g., their prejudice against universal military training. Supporters of Congress pointed out that it was simply following the usual democratic method which, in the long run, the U.S. held to be the best method.

Confusion. Whatever the arguments, by last week this method had produced little but confusion on the two major phases of the program--airpower and manpower. Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal had first asked Congress for a "balanced military force" built around a 55-group air force. Then Congress began talking of a 70-group air force, and the House passed a bill appropriating the money to get it going. Last week Secretary Forrestal, hastily inventing a pudding during the meat course, recommended a 66-group program. To his original 55 groups he would add one fighter group and ten heavy bomber groups.

As to manpower, Secretary Forrestal had first proposed both U.M.T. and Selective Service. Most Congressmen shied away from U.M.T., and it was considered dead. Last week the Senate Armed Services Committee proposed a six-month U.M.T. program combined with the regular training program to cut down the need for instructors.

That was where matters stood last week. Congress' job was clear, but not simple: to design, on a budget which would not disrupt the peacetime economy, a Military Establishment which would lay the foundation for a strong, permanent defense force, but was capable of meeting an emergency the day after tomorrow. That was the task. Unless Congress did it, the Military Establishment, which should look like St. George ready for the dragon, would look more like Alice's White Knight, hung with carrots, fire tongs, bellows, beehives and mousetraps.

* In World War II, Congress always gave Soldier George Marshall what he asked for.

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