THE BIG MISS IN MISSILES: Interservice Rivalry Is Costly

A WAR or two ago, the division of missions among the Army, Navy and Air Force was a matter of Biblical simplicity: the Army’s domain was the land, the Navy’s the sea, the Air Force’s the air. Missiles upset this neat and workable pattern. To Army eyes, missiles are essentially artillery. The Air Force considers them unmanned planes. Navymen see them as modifications of carrier planes and battleship guns. Fearing loss of missions, prestige and even existence, the three services have scrambled fiercely for shares of the missile field. Result: three missile programs that duplicate and even triplicate each other’s hardware, compete for scientific brainpower and even keep technological secrets from each other.

Birds of a Feather

With the services competing hotly, the U.S. had upwards of 40 assorted missiles under development by 1950, when Defense Secretary George Catlett Marshall called in Chrysler Corp.’s gruff President K. T. Keller to bring order out of the chaos. Despite service wails and groans, Keller canceled more than half the missile projects. But after he left the Pentagon in 1953, no overall missile boss with equal authority and toughness succeeded him, and the services promptly started backsliding into uncurbed competition.

Today, the U.S. again has 40-odd missiles in operation or under development, and some of them are birds of a feather, e.g., the Navy’s air-to-air Sidewinder and the Air Force’s Falcon. The University of Buffalo’s Chancellor Clifford C. Furnas, onetime (December 1955-February 1957) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development, recalls that it was all but impossible to get the Navy and Air Force to work together on a single 500-mile-range, subsonic, surface-to-surface missile: “As a consequence, we have two such missiles−the Air Force’s Matador and the Navy’s Regulus.” Cost of developing Matador and Regulus, with practically the same range, speed and bang: $200 million apiece.

Thor V. Jupiter

Last November, as a curb on interservice missile rivalry, Defense Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson issued a firm order limiting the Army to ranges of 100 miles for ground-to-air (antiaircraft) missiles and 200 miles for ground-to-ground (artillery) missiles. The Army went on developing an intermediate range (1,500 miles) ballistic missile in hope that the Army’s missile mission would be broadened later on. Result: continued costly rivalry between the Air Force’s Thor and its Army cousin Jupiter.

To settle on an IRBM to go into assembly-line production, Wilson set up a nicely balanced committee made up of Air Force Major General Ben Schriever, Army Major General John Medaris and Wilson’s special missiles assistant, William Holaday. The problem was urgent. With IRBM production soon to be vital for NATO defense, and with Russia apparently well along in IRBM development, the President and the National Security Council had tagged the IRBM program with top priority. But the problem was also agonizingly tough. The Thor-Jupiter committee started meditating last August, but one of the first decisions announced by Defense Secretary Neil McElroy when he took over from Wilson a fortnight ago was a postponement of the final decision. The committee had reported that it needed data from additional test firings of each missile to come up with a sound answer (each has been fired about half a dozen times so far). Cost of an IRBM test firing: $6,000,000.

Third IRBM

Meanwhile, the Navy has gone on developing its own IRBM to be launched from submarines or surface ships. Weighing only one-third as much as Thor or Jupiter, and burning easier-to-handle solid fuel instead of liquid, the Navy’s Polaris promises to be a more efficient all-round IRBM than either of its rivals. If it were as far along in development as Thor and Jupiter, a case could be argued for making it the nation’s production-line IRBM.

Viewed in one light, the Navy’s development of Polaris proves the often-raised point that service rivalry can be a valuable spur to research; viewed in another, it proves that if the best plans of each service were pooled to begin with, the U.S. might have better missiles in production sooner. If supplies of money, scientific and engineering brainpower and research facilities were unlimited, the ideal missile program for the U.S. might indeed be to let all three services go on developing complete missile inventories. But with resources tightly limited, the U.S. cannot afford to let competition sprawl into scatteration and wasteful overlapping. In the post-Sputnik crisis, continuation of interservice rivalry can only be regarded as the easy way out. Some hard decisions must be made, and they must be made in the Pentagon and the White House.