National Affairs: Defense Mess

In its 43rd report on U.S. mobilization, issued last week, Lyndon Johnson’s Senate subcommittee on preparedness was good & mad about the state of U.S. air power.

First off, it was mad (without naming him) at Harry Truman for stretching the completion date of a 143-wing Air Force into mid-1955. The Joint Chiefs of Staff placed the period of greatest U.S. peril in 1953-54, the report observed, and recommended a minimum 143-wing Air Force by December 1954 at the latest. “The failure to meet initial production schedules … is now being used as an excuse for the stretch-out,” said the report. Moreover, the stretch-out may ultimately raise the cost of a 143-wing Air Force by $3 billion, because it will raise the per unit cost of the planes.

The Johnson committee was mad, too, at the defense bosses, civilian and military. “The blundering and lack of cohesion in the defense effort from Korea to January 1952 (18 months later) were overwhelming,” said the report. “The root cause” of defense difficulties “is a capacity for indecision which at times has reached an amazing level.”

The committee recommended the appointment of an aircraft “czar” with authority to: 1) slap priorities on needed materials; 2) freeze designs and get models coming off the assembly lines; 3) bull through quantity production to build U.S. air power up to full strength.

Said the committee in summing up the Pentagon’s confusion: “Everybody has a different story. The defense effort is a history of stones being thrown from glass houses.”