National Affairs: THE DEFENSE BUDGET-

Vast Funds Are Spread Too Thin

MANY U.S. military men agree that $41 billion a year is enough to buy adequate defense for the nation, but few believe that the $41 billion-plus budget for fiscal 1961 is going to buy the best or even adequate defense. Though drafted over months of round-the-clock work by able planners, the proposed defense budget leaves the U.S. with cause for rising worry over how much security it gets for its tax dollar. Reason: the 1961 budget, like many of its predecessors, represents slow compromise with the fast, uncompromising changes of modern-weapons technology. Result: it spreads too thin over too many half-finished, half-good or plainly outdated programs, perpetuates costly ideas out of past wars, fails to concentrate spending upon the strict necessities of today and the future.

WASTE BY STRETCH-OUT

The new budget makes only token cuts in force levels, proposes to halt no major projects except nuclear power for aircraft carriers. The rising cost of arms is met mainly by the timeworn device of “stretching out” procurement and development schedules on hardware. The stretch-out looks fine on paper; it keeps programs alive at a reduced spending rate, preserves the same high-sounding force goals for the future—but only pushes the future farther into the future. Actually, in the day of inexorable change the stretchout wastes more money than any other budget practice. It postpones operational dates on entire weapons systems beyond the time when they are needed, or are effective, lavishes funds upon them long after obsolescence. Items:

∙The subsonic air-breathing missile was a sound concept before physicists found out how to fit a nuclear warhead into a ballistic missile. Had the Air Force’s air-breathing Snark been pushed to completion on its original schedule three years ago, it could have filled a gap in U.S. air strength. By the time the first (and only) Snark wing was put into operation this year in Maine, Soviet defenses had more than caught up with it. Counting total development costs ($740 million), the Snark is one of the most costly, wings ever formed.

∙The supersonic 6-58 bomber, originally scheduled to begin operation last year, was designed to replace the obsolescent 6-47. But the newly extended stretch-out means that the $2.2 billion spent on the 6-58 may never lead to more than two or three wings, and they may be obsolescent before they are operational even in small numbers.

∙The Army’s Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile, a weapons system that would cost a record $13.5 billion to become effectively operational, drags along on $300 million year-to-year handouts. Promoted by Army as a solution to the near-impossible anti-missile defense role, Nike-Zeus gets neither the funds necessary for speedup nor the kill order recommended by its critics. One factor: the Pentagon, seldom free to make decisions that are purely military, fears the panic and congressional uproar that would be set off by admission that the U.S. owns no hopeful anti-missile missile.

OVERLAP IN WEAPONS

Since a service’s hardware affects the role it wins in strategy and gives it the backing of a powerful segment of industry, no branch willingly gives up a promising weapon in favor of a similar one developed by a competitor. The Army’s attempt to hold a place in space resulted in the Pentagon compromise to manufacture both the Jupiter (Army) and Thor (Air Force) intermediate-range ballistic-missile systems. Today’s snowballing result is a duplication in production facilities, costly ground-handling equipment and training, as Jupiters are being installed in Italy and Turkey while Thors go to Great Britain. In second-generation, solid-pro-pellant missiles, the Navy’s submarine-launched Polaris fits the same general specifications as the Air Force’s land-based Minuteman. By Pentagon estimates, $1.5 billion could be saved over the years by a combined program. Yet the two overlapping development programs continue. Other 1961 specifics:

∙The hard-based Air Force Titan ICBM, originally conceived as a back-up weapon in case of the failure of Atlas, offers little advantage now that Atlas is operational. The Titans programed for U.S. missile defense could be replaced by a beefed-up Atlas production schedule at an immediate saving of $400 million.

∙The anti-bomber Bomarc B missile system, like its predecessor Bomarc A, will likely become obsolete before it is operational (two or three years). It also overlaps the role of manned interceptors (F-102, F-104,F-106). In the light of the Soviet jump over bombers to ICBMs, interceptors seem adequate for nonmissile air-defense needs, but Bomarc’s billion-dollar program keeps right on abuilding.

∙The SAGE (for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment System) electronics net, designed to spot incoming enemy bombers for Bomarc and other antiaircraft weapons, has already cost $1.2 billion, is not yet fully operational. In the 1961 budget, SAGE requests additional funds to harden (encase in concrete) some of its installations, presumably against missile blows, although SAGE itself will be useless in the missile age.

COST OF PROCRASTINATION

The longer a program is kept alive the more costly it gets, and the more money put into it the more difficult it is to kill—thanks to pressure from its partisans, from affected industry, from Congressmen. Items:

∙In the air-atomic age, the pushbutton big wars as well as the brushfire small wars must be fought with forces-in-being, cutting sharply the utility of the civilian reserves that were so effective in World War II and Korea. Active reserves of all three services are in better shape than they have been for generations; e.g., most of the Navy’s 135,000 active reservists are organized in much-needed anti-submarine warfare units, but hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted in keeping books on thousands of inactive reservists whose future use to the nation is highly doubtful.

∙Reserve industrial capacity, important in World War II and Korea, will contribute little to the split-second crises of the future. But all three services, notably the Air Force, subsidize mothballed plants, keep others ticking over on weapons projects that duplicate projects or are obsolescent.

∙As missiles take over larger and larger sectors of defense, the Air Force will need fewer bases for manned aircraft. Air Force planners think that ten U.S. bases could be shut now without any appreciable damage, but they know congressional reaction might damage other sectors of the budget.

There is plenty of justification for increased spending in many areas of the 1961 defense budget. Increased costs alone will boost the bill for personnel and hardware about $2 billion. And there are areas where more money is urgently needed—ranging from replacing of the Army’s obsolescent M-i rifle (years behind the Russian rifle) to a drastic speedup in ICBM production and missile programs. Knowing that they live in a world of compromise, local interest and indecision, the service chiefs figure they will need $43 billion to $44 billion to get the things they really need. Knowing that service chiefs always inflate their budgets, the budget keepers pare them down to $41 billion.

The cut has forced the curtailment of some obsolete programs, but in general the 1961 budget will start again the whole process of stretch-out, overlapping and duplication, and the U.S. will get much less than true value received for its defense dollar.