ARMED FORCES: A Real Big Brawl

Into Washington’s Sheraton-Park Hotel last week crowded 2,000 delegates to the third annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army, a private organization made up of Army and ex-Army men and a loud-speaking outlet for top-level Army propaganda. On hand to stir them on were the Army’s senior commanders, striving both by indirection and by extraordinarily blunt talk to overturn Defense Department policy and win for the Army a major place in the missile world. Displayed around the hotel ballroom were Army missiles and parts of missiles; at the entrance a placard blazoned the Army’s basic doctrinal claim to render the Air Force obsolete. “In the missile era,” read the placard, quoting the Army’s Lieut. General James M. Gavin, “the man who controls the land will control the space above it.”

Jupiter & Zeus. Continental Army Command’s General Willard G. Wyman contributed a stinging attack against the Defense Department’s “arbitrary,” “rigid” and “dangerous” ruling that Army missiles must be limited to 200 miles ground to ground and 100 miles ground to air (TIME, Dec. 10). Army Secretary Wilber M. Brucker decorated the Redstone Arsenal’s most famous missile scientist, ex-German Missileman Wernher von Braun, boosted the Army’s claim that its 1,500-mile missile Jupiter is superior to the rival Air Force Thor and is in fact “the most advanced guided missile yet produced in the free world.”

Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor staked Army’s claim to the next but faraway great step in weaponry, the defensive missile system to stop the attacking missile. He plugged hard for an Army project called Nike Zeus—”which already partially exists in the form of research-and-development components”—as the basis for an anti-missile missile program, thus by inference downgrading the rival Air Force Wizard anti-missile project (as well as an Air Force Pentagon-corridor campaign to put the Army out of the defensive antiaircraft missile business altogether).

Most strident Army performance of the week came from Lieut. General Stanley Mickelson, retiring chief of Army’s Air Defense Command. So sharp was Mickelson’s original speech that the Defense Department would not let him deliver all of it; the draft, however, had already been distributed to newsmen. Bitterly, the Mickelson text scorned the Air Force, derided the concept of airpower. Said the Army’s General Mickelson, echoing a favorite line of the Army’s General Gavin: “The Army points the way for America to shed herself of any stigma of the theory of mass destruction of civilian populations.”

“Those Bastards.” Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, the Air Force contingent was under direct orders to keep cool and dignified, to blow off only in private. “Those bastards,” said one high Air Force officer in private, “can’t win in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they ought to take their case, so they went to the public. They’re not going to get away with it. It isn’t going to do them any good. It’s going to be a real big brawl.”

All in all, in a time of national crisis, it was quite a week for interservice rivalry. And quite a warning to the Commander in Chief that appointment of a tough, top boss for the missile program could not be long delayed.