National Affairs: Tightening the Bolts

With only a few weeks to go before he heads into retirement, Defense Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson is wrestling with a tough and bristly problem: keeping defense spending from skittering far ahead of the Administration’s $38 billion estimate for the current fiscal year. Engine Charlie found at the year’s opening (July 1) that, with the increasing complexity of weapons pushing costs upward, money was pouring out at the rate of $40 billion a year. He ordered cuts of 100,000 in military manpower and 53,000 in Defense Department civilian employment. Last week Engine Charlie tightened the budgetary bolts again. With President Eisenhower’s O.K., he ordered an additional cut of 100,000 in uniformed manpower by next June. (An order for a further nick of 30,000 or so in the civilian payroll will probably be issued soon.)

The Army will pare off 50,000 men under Wilson’s new directive, the Air Force 25,000, the Navy 15,000, and the Marines 10,000, bringing total military manpower down to 2,600,000. The Air Force will come down five wings to 123; the Army will probably drop another division to 15 (but will withdraw troops from no overseas area except Japan); the Navy will mothball 35 operating ships. Further cuts may turn out to be necessary, Wilson hinted, when his successor, Procter & Gamble’s President Neil Hosier McElroy, gets to working out the defense budget for fiscal 1959.

Vividly recalling that the Russians recently claimed to have tested a long-range ballistic missile (TIME, Sept. 9), newsmen at Wilson’s press conference last week questioned him skeptically about the latest cuts. Did the service chiefs approve? “Everyone was equally dissatisfied,” Wilson replied, sending laughter rippling across the room. Had there been any easing of cold-war tensions to justify the cuts? No, said the Secretary. Or any change in U.S. strategy? Again, no. What the Administration was trying to do, Wilson explained, was “stabilize the cost” of defense. “This is a problem of our economy,” he said.

To his candid admission that the Eisenhower Administration is tailoring the nation’s defense to budgetary cloth Engine Charlie added a reminder: with military technology speeding ahead (see below), a shrinkage in manpower does not necessarily mean a weakening of military wallop. “Numbers alone don’t tell you the story,” he said, “either for them or for us.”