Aiming While Arming

Sooner would an Air Force general do a loop in a hurricane than reverse himself on a major weapons program--especially after billions have been invested, service prestige put on the line, business and political support generated all along the production line. But last week Air Force Chief of Staff Thomas D. White spelled out for the House Appropriations Committee an Air Force proposal to slash $500 million out of the 1961 budget for air defenses against enemy bombers, apply the money to stepped-up construction of the Atlas and Minuteman ICBMs and the Midas "spy in the sky" satellite missile warning system.

Principal victims of the proposal (still to be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff) are the Boeing-built Bomarc ground-to-air missile and its bomber-spotting SAGE (for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment System) electronics net. Four weeks ago, the new 400-mile Bomarc B failed for the seventh time in seven test flights. The test bugs and other difficulties, White testified, delayed the whole production schedule so that the last of the whole 1,000-missile anti-bomber system would not be in place until 1964, when the threat of Soviet bombers would be long since displaced by Soviet missiles. Similarly the funds requested for building heavily reinforced SAGE control centers made little sense since the "hardening" could not be completed before the bomber threat had become a missile threat. He still had confidence in the Bomarc B, White said, and proposed to activate the first squadron next March, continue to buy until early 1962, when he would have 200 missiles tied into the SAGE net in the industrial Northeast and North Central states. To make up the difference in defenses against manned bombers, he promised to plug gaps in the three-year-old Distant Early Warning net (DEW line), beef up the manned interceptor--the F-104 and F106 -- by better radar and longer-range airborne, atom-armed Falcon missiles.

The first operational models of the Air Force's Minuteman--the solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile that the Pentagon is betting on to close the missile gap in the mid-1960s--should roll off production lines in 1962. By then, the Air Force announced last week, the first Minuteman launching sites, nearly invulnerable underground concrete silos, will be ready at Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base.

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