ARMY & NAVY: Short Drum

Assembled at and around Plattsburg, N. Y. last week for quadrennial maneuvers of the U. S. First Army were52,000 Regulars, National Guardsmen, Reservists. On and near the Civil War battlefields at Manassas, Va. were 23,000 more, sweating through the maneuvers of the Third Corps Area. All were under the command of tart, brilliant Lieut. General Hugh Aloysius Drum, who lent his games more than their usual news value with a sound-off about the Army as it is, as he thinks it should be.

Hugh Drum found his First Army (one of the four field armies into which the Regular Army and National Guard are divided) short of combat strength by 246,000 men, 3,063 machine guns, 348 howitzers, 180 field guns. What the U. S. needs, said he, is not its traditional, skeleton Army, to be expanded after war is declared, but “the creation in peacetime of a well-trained, adequately equipped and well-organized fighting force.”

In thus asking the U. S. to abandon its historic Army policy, Hugh Drum shocked his more timorous colleagues. But he did not shock the high command in Washington. When General Malin Craig retired as Chief of Staff, he put the U. S. on notice that the U. S. military now wants its standing Army to be a fighting army, at least to the extent of five fully equipped divisions on constant peacetime call. Also on the military agenda, now that Congress has voted $961,293,102 to expand and equip the present Army, is a request for many more millions to stock complete equipment for a wartime force of 1,000,000 men.